UniBrow

Part of me doesn’t like to take issue with the reader comments posted here at UniBrow. This is not from any excess of politeness or an aversion to confrontation; it’s just that commentators are so few and infrequent hereabouts that I have to fight back an impulse to organize a parade in the honor of anyone who bothers. And yet I can’t be expected to let a defense of Jane Smiley, even a qualified one, go unremarked.

Some time back, in response to our post concerning Jane’s determination never to help a homeless person who voted for Bush, a reader wrote:

Well, I think the intended shape of Ms. Smiley’s parable about stepping on the homeless Bush-voter implies that the Bush-voter “became” homeless as an indirect consequence of said vote (and a direct consequence of the Bush junta’s inept, semi-autistic stewardship) and therefore deserves no shekels.

Possibly, my friend, possibly–but I don’t think so. The main lines of opposition to Bush–and certainly Jane’s brief against the Dubya administration–arise from the Iraq War rather than from domestic economic dislocation. Had this been 25 years ago, as the Reagan administration was deploying supply-side economics and visiting economic hardship on those least able to cope with it, a “parable” about the recent voting history of homeless people would at least have been apposite. But to this point at least, Jane’s case against Bush has not been that he’s flooding the streets with destitute souls. If she had instead imagined asking, say, a maimed Iraq War veteran in need of alms which candidate he voted for in 2000 or 2004, and then proudly intoned that any who said he voted for Bush would as a result never see a dime of the proceeds of Moo, her anecdote would have been more coherent, though no less cruel or petty. No, I think Jane is saying that a vote for Bush puts you–whoever you are–beyond the reach of human compassion as she defines it. 

Finally, as a general thing, I think there’s much less chance of my missing a subtlety than of Jane Smiley’s actually having one.  

I haven’t commented on Jane Smiley’s last few pieces at The Huffington Post because they’ve been unremarkable; a couple have even appeared to flirt with reason. But that’s over. Here’s how she begins her latest post:

Back in 2004, when Bush seemed to win the Presidential election for the first time, I made a vow. It was that in future years, if I happened to see an elderly homeless person holding out his hat, I would lean down and ask him who he voted for in 2004. If he said “Bush”, I planned to step over him and walk on.

You can just see her doing it, too. Jane doesn’t say whether she’ll unbelt any shekels if the destitute old soul says he didn’t vote–because of course he didn’t; being homeless means among other things being precinctless–or that he voted for Wendell Willkie or Otto von Bismarck.

It’s vintage Jane, by which I mean you can agree with her conclusion–the article, occasioned by last week’s clash in a Senate committee hearing between Al Gore and Oklahoma’s spluttering, buffoonish Senator James Inhofe, is about global warming–and still despise the crude, us-them bigotry that gets her there. She’s a gorgon. Read the whole post here.

Blogging for Dummies says I’m supposed to keep my entries short. (“Your readers have lives, too.”) I am doing the very best I can. And I think I can oblige pretty well with Jane Smiley’s Nov. 4, 2004, inspection of John Kerry’s defeat in that year’s presidential election; UniBrow has followed her into these pits before. Jane was asked by Slate in the days immediately following Dubya’s victory to tell its readers ”why Americans don’t vote for Democrats,” and we find her at no loss for words. One of a small number of “wise liberals” (Slate’s phrase) recruited for this purpose, Jane has plenty to tell us. Well, not to tell us, as it turns out. She certainly thinks she’s telling us why Democrats lose, but that’s not what she’s really doing–because she clearly has no idea. What she’s really doing is showing us why people don’t vote for Democrats, and she does that with a signature display of petty scorn, preening self-admiration, and bankrupt reasoning. She does it, as ever, with bigotry, to call it by its right name–the precise kind of bigotry that many voters impute to liberal Democrats. 

“I say forget introspection,” she begins. Introspection–that’s a good one. Appreciate the level-set, Jane, but to tell you the truth soul searching was about the last thing I was expecting from you. I’m surprised she goes to the trouble of mentioning it even in dismissal–but I’m soon over that. There will be no more surprises. Here she comes, in the very next sentence, rounding superbly into form: “It’s time to be honest about our antagonists.” No, we’re not going to waste time talking about ourselves. We have no faults to amend, no new approaches to consider. We’re going to talk about the knuckle-dragging sadists, the salivating vigilantes, the revival-tent zombies–all 58 million of them–who voted for Bush. It’s these ”virtually unteachable” red staters, the morons who simply “do not want to be told what to do,” that we must concentrate on. To that end Jane first consults her personal history.  

I grew up in Missouri and most of my family voted for Bush, so I am going to be the one to say it: The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry. I suppose the good news is that 55 million Americans have evaded the ignorance-inducing machine. But 58 million have not. (Well, almost 58 million–my relatives are not ignorant, they are just greedy and full of classic Republican feelings of superiority.)

Don’t overlook that last parenthetical remark. It’s worth remarking how Jane finds she has to qualify her stark and sweeping indictment the moment she contemplates actual people. But if you think that’s going to slow her down, you must have forgotten that we’ve forgotten introspection. “Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states,” she rebounds, moving from personal history to social history and reducing all of red-state America to the lurid image created by two incidents from the 19th century: Quantrill’s Raid in 1863 and the stealing of the 1856 Kansas territorial election by “red forces from Missouri.” What else do we need to know about the people who voted for Bush?

The rest is all the usual drivel. I would only repeat myself by dwelling on it. But suppose for the moment that there will be no great spike in voter registration or turnout for the 2008 presidential election over the 2004 election, that the universe of voters two years from now will be substantially the same as that of two years ago. That means the Democrats, in order to win in 2008, will have to add a million and a half votes–at least–to their 2004 vote total. And of course this winning margin will have to consist of people who voted for Bush last time. Suppose you’re one of those people: someone who voted for Bush with mixed feelings, someone who isn’t inflexibly opposed to the idea of a Democrat in the White House and who perhaps did vote for Clinton, someone who could go either way–someone, in other words, who doesn’t conform to Jane’s Looney Tunes red-state stereotype. Don’t forget that Jane, co-founder of LitPAC, will be out there in ‘08. You might very well see her on a podium alongside the Democratic candidates she has deemed worthy of her support; she’ll certainly be popping up in print, sad to say, in places like Slate where people in that wavering middle region might read her. Are such voters likely to think better or worse of a candidate favored by someone who sizes up the world like this?

Listen to what the red state citizens say about themselves, the songs they write, and the sermons they flock to. They know who they are–they are full of original sin and they have a taste for violence. The blue state citizens make the Rousseauvian mistake of thinking humans are essentially good, and so they never realize when they are about to be slugged from behind. …

The architects of [the Republican hegemony of recent decades] knew perfectly well that they were exploiting, among other unsavory qualities, a long American habit of virulent racism, but they did it anyway, and we see the outcome now–Cheney is the capitalist arm and Bush is the religious arm. They know no boundaries or rules. They are predatory and resentful, amoral, avaricious, and arrogant. Lots of Americans like and admire them because lots of Americans, even those who don’t share those same qualities, don’t know which end is up. Can the Democrats appeal to such voters? Do they want to? The Republicans have sold their souls for power. Must everyone?

It’s not that you can’t isolate grains of truth, or arguable contentions at any rate, within these diatribes. It’s just that they’re smothered to oblivion by the coarse polemics and paranoia that paint everyone who voted for Bush as either incurably stupid or quivering with hatred. Or (more likely) both. Unless of course you’re a member of Jane’s family, in which case you’re just a greedy snob. Associating with this kind of thing doesn’t seem like a winning formula for the Democrats.

I had been getting self-conscious about all the Jane Smiley posts. Is it too much? Should I stop? You know. So I recently took about a dozen of my most trusted lieutenants away from the UniBrow campus and into a rustic setting–one with nicely appointed meeting rooms, suitable videoconferencing facilities, and a crack dry-cleaning service–that we might give the matter full consideration over a two-day retreat. We crunched the numbers, we analyzed the trends, we worked up projections–but we also brainstormed, blue-skyed, role-played. We profited from a mind-stretching talk by Malcolm Gladwell, after which I saluted our guest speaker not less for his upbeat surname than for his illuminating perspectives. Rank (all except mine) was checked at the door. We learned that breakdowns can lead to breakthroughs, and just about always do if you ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT TOLERATE SISSY-BOY BREAKDOWNS. Ownership was taken. We were fiercely honest. And we developed key learnings, baby. My epiphany came during the trust exercises. I didn’t actually participate in them myself (get serious). But watching my lickspittle senior staff catching each other’s backwards free falls in the blaze of noon on Day One, I was moved to consider: Isn’t this about trust? Isn’t Jane going to extraordinary lengths–just read this article about her letter-a-day hemorrhaging on the editors of The New York Times–to ensure that no living person need be shut out of her stream of consciousness for ten seconds together? Isn’t she putting herself in our hands, closing her eyes and falling backwards? And aren’t we obliged to catch her? Goddam right we are. We came back from the retreat with revised Mission and Vision statements, an iron resolve to continue elucidating Jane’s teachings, and the happy decision to grant her a pasture of her own here at UniBrow. Click on her name over there at the right, and the whole history of UniBrow’s Jane Smiley commentary forms up for inspection. It’s never been easier to stay plugged in to Jane! 

Jane is of interest to us only as a symptom of a larger problem, actually. She’s the kind of liberal that people who don’t like liberals think of when they feel like luxuriating in their dislike of liberals. She’s an illiberal liberal. She’s a bigot. Anyway that’s what I call anyone who brands whole classes of people as moral inferiors (if not bloodthirsty savages) for reasons that are trivial or, to say the most for them, inconclusive–painfully, ragingly inconclusive. We’ve already had the chance, thanks to her Huffington Post article from June, to take Jane’s measure on the subject of “hate-filled and indecent” Americans. And here, in a tirade that appeared just after the last presidential election, we find Jane engaged upon the same theme. The article’s subhead, ”The unteachable ignorance of the red states,” clues you in to her estimation of the mental darkness and moral degeneracy of anyone who voted for W.–as though every vote for Bush amounted to an unreserved affirmation made in a vacuum and not a choice between The Decider and just one other candidate in an election administered by the Yale Skull and Bones Society; as though there’s no difference between the person who considers W. the greatest president ever and the one who, in 2004, simply judged him the lesser embarrassment of two lackluster alternatives.

But this election season Jane will be out there, as one of the founders of LitPAC, placing her draconian verdicts, her invincible smugness, and her blindness to nuance at the service of liberal candidates. They should be trembling at the prospect. What they should do, actually, if bigotry is still frowned upon in liberal counsels, or if anyone to the left of center doesn’t think execrating half the nation is a prescription for success at the polls, is refuse all association with her. It certainly couldn’t hurt, and her support cannot possibly help.

I will examine her 2004 Slate piece in more detail soon. I’m in too light a mood to do it now. I should also mention–because, after all, Jane isn’t just a logorrheic political activist/pundit; she’s also the corporate human resources manager of American literature–that I have located online the full text of her 1996 apology for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which I believe I described in a previous post as one of the most fatuous pieces of writing on literature that I’ve ever read. I’ll say more about it in the coming days.

So then, to Jane Smiley once again: Jane Smiley, who along with fellow writers Dave Eggers and Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket to you and me) has formed LitPAC in order to raise money for liberal candidates; Jane Smiley, whose fantastically inept try at a dressing-down of right-wing firebrand pundit A.C. in The Huffington Post shows you why the word liberal has become an ipso facto slur in American politics, and why any liberal candidate to whom she lends her name–any, that is, who will need votes from more than just dyed-in-the-wool liberals–will have to work that much harder to get elected. It is, in Milton’s phrase, ”a fugitive and cloister’d vertue” that Smiley shows us, a sheltered, cozy, in-group homiletics that will appeal to no one who doesn’t already despise A.C. But it’s not only that Smiley’s clumsy ad hominems will fail to persuade anyone of A.C.’s vileness who isn’t already disposed in that direction: it’s hard to see how they can avoid reinforcing the misgivings that the L-word, and the political party associated with it, still generates for many, many people.

Why is A.C. selling a lot of books, Smiley wonders? Because Americans–excluding, of course, the immaculate remnant who have read Moo–are “hate-filled and indecent.” No kidding. Look:

As she demonstrates with the filth she spews out of her mouth and her pen, Americans aren’t nice or decent people, and conservative, overtly patriotic Americans are even less decent and less nice.

Now of course no serious Democratic candidate for any office would ever say this–one hopes because none of them actually believes it. But it’s undeniable that one of the major problems the Democrats have had for decades now is that many Americans do think their party is controlled by an elitist cabal of liberals who harbor exactly this slanderous belief. It’s only going to be more difficult for liberal candidates to disown this dreary prejudice if they’re visibly supported by public figures like Smiley who gleefully espouse it. So much would seem obvious. 

A timid flirtation with reality follows as Smiley speculates that perhaps the deepest and truest motivation behind A.C.’s nonsense is simply the desire to make money, that she’s less interested in the ideas she ventilates, such as they are, than in the material rewards that flow from her style of provocation. But wait, Jane finds the ground hereabouts much too firm; she snaps back into form and flies away. What’s really going on is that A.C. is psychologically maladjusted. She was “not reared properly,” or she’s heir to some genetic “flaw of temperament”–either of which would make Smiley (were she A.C.’s mother) ”ashamed of myself.” It would overwhelm her with “world-class embarrassment … as a mother.”

She looks crazy and frantic, even in the few pictures I’ve seen of her online. She’s losing weight, as if there’s some kind of underlying pathology going on, as if she’s eating herself up from inside.

Imagine for a second what it would be like to read a full-dress novel by a writer given to two-bit psychologizing like this. I have no idea whether A.C. has psychological problems that account for the garbage she writes and says. I have no idea whether she has an eating disorder–as to that I’m just not as sure as Smiley seems to be that slimness is so invariable an indicator of derangement. But okay: let’s consider whether A.C. is crazy. If a demonstrated grasp on objective reality is an index of sanity, then you’d much sooner conclude that the crazy one of this pairing is Jane Smiley. The outrageous things A.C. says and writes are calculated to produce–and invariably do produce–a specific result in the objective world. A.C. has shown for years by the response she provokes and the product she moves that she has a very firm handle on the world that exists outside the circumference of her own head. LitPAC’s Jane Smiley, meanwhile, thinks she’s going to help the Democrats gain control of Congress and the White House by telling voters that they’re horrible people. So who’s the nutjob? And who, by the way, is the greater enemy of Democratic success at the polls? 

I don’t know–and neither does Jane Smiley–what A.C.’s or anyone’s motivations are for anything. And I don’t care. What I know is that A.C. makes one preposterous, invidious, and logically untenable statement after another. The most recent–the thesis of her new book, according to the blurb on the New York Times bestseller list–is that secularism is a religion. These arguments are silly and specious; they’re just sitting there plump and ripe for refutation, and Smiley might have gotten on with some of that instead of the dime-store psychology. Whether A.C.’s statements and actions are best explained by greed, by psychological dysfunction, or by a sincere concern for the future of American society–honestly I don’t have a clue why anyone cares. Does everything have to be an episode of Oprah!?

Now, as to what A.C.’s sales figures tell us about the decency of our fellow citizens–well, they probably don’t tell us very much. You would think from reading Smiley’s bone-headed sermonette that two out of every three people in America have read A.C.’s current book and subscribe to everything it says. “The number of bucks she’s making,” Smiley writes, “is an index of how hate-filled and indecent Americans are.” This is lunacy. A.C.’s book sales by themselves tell us nothing intelligible about Americans as a whole. Impressive as they are relative to the sales of other books, they’re still far too small for that. Let’s remember that a best-selling book is a best-selling … book. It’s a book that has sold more than other books; it’s not outselling iPods and frappuccinos. A.C.’s new one is making her a pile of money, no doubt about that. But that doesn’t mean it’s a household article. Assume she’s sold a million copies (she hasn’t). Assume further that every copy sold has been read cover-to-cover by three people, each of whom is now a frothing zealot ready to do A.C.’s bidding at a moment’s notice. Undoubtedly we have now vastly overstated the book’s true readership and impact–and yet even at this exaggerated level we’re talking about only a fraction of the more than 122 million votes cast in the last presidential election. (And that figure, just by the way, represents only about 70 percent of registered voters and only about half of all eligible voters in the United States.) Even those who do buy her books can’t all be assumed to have the same motivation for doing so or the same opinions of their contents.

But here’s what all this adds up to for Jane Smiley:

Americans, true patriotic red, white, and blue Americans like hate. They feel comfortable with it and always have. Over the years, they’ve hated the Irish, the Italians, black people, foreigners of all kinds, Catholics, Chinese workers on the railroad, Jews, Hispanics, gays, fans of the White Sox–the list is as long as your arm. And, of course, it makes any decent American uncomfortable, but “real” Americans are beyond shame–they are so ignorant and poorly brought up and fearful and pandered to by haters in the media that they don’t even hear themselves disgorging sewage from their mouths, they don’t see the ignorant, vicious looks on their faces, they don’t hear the stupidity of their own laughter.

This inane conclusion is a good thousand acres from what the evidence Smiley herself has brought forward will support. And this kind of junk is why Democrats lose.

First, a thousand pardons for a full week of inactivity at UniBrow. I know you’ve missed me terribly, but I been busier’n a one-armed man hangin’ wallpaper. One of my minor occupations in recent weeks–I mean apart from the time I spend sharpening my skills in the spontaneous ventriloquizing of hilarious Appalachian demotic tropes–has been to discipline myself against the morbid urge to comment further on Jane Smiley. But her provocations are unceasing and they are baleful; self-mastery has flown. My undoing was this piece of snuggly hand-wringing about an acid-tongued right-wing pundit (initials A.C.) that’s been drawing flies since early June at The Huffington Post. 

(I’m not using A.C.’s full name only because doing so will generate ads for her books over there to the right. Don’t want that.)

Though it will already be obvious that I don’t think much of Smiley’s critique of A.C., just as previously I didn’t think much of her thoughts on literature, I think for now I’ll withhold more specific comment and just invite you to read it for yourself. Slide right into it. Let its tentacles coil around your mind. Then use UniBrow’s high-tech ”Comment” function to let me and everyone in the UniBrow community know what you think. If that’s quite convenient, I mean. Weblogs are supposed to be such a miraculous dialogic medium–so they say. So everyone tells me. Meanwhile–scroll down and see–I’m frickin’ Spalding Gray over here. 

I guess I should say one other thing, in case anyone has jumped the gun and concluded that I must be defending A.C. if I’m slagging Smiley. Not so. There are at large in the world today many varieties of intellectual vacancy and hostility to mind. Jane Smiley is one, A.C. is another. 

On-the-go Jane is killing me. She won’t let up. She’s pressing my face into a bowl of soup. Bear ye–if ye can–with extracts from today’s New York Times post: 

I’ve been reminded by our discussion of a couple of studies that we’ve read about in the last two years–one said that women are likely to read books written by men and books written by women equally, while men are likely to read only books by men. I think we can extrapolate from this an artifact of the electoral process in this survey–if 69% of the responders were men, then they were most likely to vote for other men. If 31% of the responders were women, they were likely to split their votes, and therefore to skew our picture away from what really happened in these years.

This is too much. I would think it hardly needs pointing out that the reading habits of this highly specialized group polled by the Times–and here’s the list, if you’re interested–are likely to differ greatly from those of the general population. And of course we know nothing about the sample criteria of these two unnamed studies. A male writer, critic, or literary scholar is much more likely, I’ll wager, than the average book-reading Joe to know something about what female writers are up to. Maybe not as much as he should, if it comes to that, but more than most, if only out of professional obligation. Anyway, I’m still breathing soup: “One thing I learned from our discussion, is that if I am ever asked to answer this question again, I will ask myself, ‘What would Roth do?’ If I think Roth would vote for himself, then I will vote for myself, also.” Look at the list of poll respondents. Roth’s name doesn’t appear. So either he wasn’t invited to participate (unlikely) or he declined. Which means he voted for no one. So … hmm … I don’t know if she’s got a usable pretext for self-canonization there or … um … or not. “To me,” she goes on, “it’s the women, young and old, who have been doing new and interesting things, both large and small, and that’s who I’ve been reading.” Wait. I thought women read men and women equally. If that’s the case, then it must also be the case that Jane Smiley, one of the gilded custodians of American letters who qualified for the Times survey, doesn’t perfectly conform to what studies indicate are the reading habits of general-population females. Now I wonder if that can be said of any of the male poll respondents. ”And when I suggested this to David Lodge at lunch”–holding his face in the soup–”he agreed.”

There is more still: “Another study in the past year or so indicated that of all the groups that have stopped reading literature, adult men have stopped reading it the most. This does not speak well of the ‘importance’ of the big four guys. Are they central to the lives of their own demographic cohort?” (My lungs are filling with soup.) Let’s not forget, now, that the book that finished on top in this silly poll was written by a woman. If we’re going to talk about this in these terms–demographic cohorts and everything–we should definitely allow that fact to exert its pressure. But the sad fact is that you would have to cut a demographic much more finely than by gender to find one whose members consider any literature ”central” to their lives. But I don’t know. Maybe I’m missing something. Or maybe discursive prose isn’t the ideal medium for Smiley’s case. I’d really love to see this in PowerPoint.  

More eye-popping, self-admiring silliness from Jane Smiley, coming right up. But let me first recur to the statement I quoted, and should have commented on, in my last post. Recall that Smiley is currently reading Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and is favoring us, thanks to the good offices of The New York Times, with her accumulating impressions. Smiley notices that protagonist Swede Levov seems incapable of learning from experience, and she’s not buying it. “This is not my experience of adults,” she declares. “Life long learning is more the norm, as Oprah might say.”

I’m not going to touch the Oprah reference, by the way–but is she kidding? Call me a cynic, but among the adults that I’ve so far met with on life’s journey, I have not observed a commitment to life-long learning in anything like the frequency that justifies calling it the norm. But the larger point is that this is simply irrelevant. Should a fictional character be judged an artistic failure solely because his psychological makeup is different from Jane Smiley’s, or mine, or yours? Does a novel have to play some version of our own experience back to us in order to be seen as plausible and worthwhile? At another point in one of her posts, Smiley says:

… I have arrived at page 213 of “American Pastoral,” and the author has not persuaded me to willingly suspend disbelief. … Zuckerman would have me believe that the Swede is so grandiose in his conception of himself that everything that happens in the world is important only in the way it affects him. By extrapolation, I am supposed to believe that this is the way humans work. But that goes against my own experience, and I don’t accept it.

No. Holy Mother of God, no. As a matter of fact you are not supposed to believe that Swede Levov’s actions and attitudes necessarily reflect “the way humans work.” Give that Sears Craftsman Character Extrapolator a rest, Jane dear. What you are supposed to believe is that this human with this background and these specific problems behaves this way when a particular sequence of events brings him to a specific point. Roth may or may not succeed in bringing this off in the case of Swede Levov, but the reader–even one so eminent as the author of Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel–who consults nothing but his or her own experience is in no position to decide. If a novel never transgresses the boundaries of a reader’s experience, there’s no disbelief to suspend.

Maybe we’ve discovered a 14th way of looking at the novel.

There she goes again–more self-marketing and name-dropping from Jane Smiley. From her May 24 post:

Morris’s entry of Tuesday reminds of something I noticed when I was reading the novels for “Thirteen Ways” …

[N]ow I am off to lunch with David Lodge (I am on a book tour in the UK) …

And a fresh fatuity from today’s entry (Smiley is reading, and not liking, Roth’s American Pastoral):

Zuckerman continues to portray the Swede and a big, thick, victimized guy who learns nothing from his experience, only endures it. And while the Swede endures it, Zuckerman rages for him. This is not my experience of adults. Life long learning is more the norm, as Oprah might say.