Rock as Torture

From Fox News: Rock musicians are upset that the military is using their music to break terrorists. I'm going to suspend my attempt at making what I write in this blog less opinionated and abrasive than what I write at RWST, only because these lame musicians are proving a few points for me all while showing just how self-absorbed they are. For your information, rock-dudes, the reasons the military blast terrorists with rock and roll and teenagers listen to rock and roll are the same:

"It sort of removes you from you. You can no longer formulate your own thoughts when you're in an environment like that."

Kids blast their eardrums out to rock and roll in order to disengage from reality and immerse themselves in a world utterly different from and indifferent to the workaday parents-teachers-homework-rules-clique life they feel forced to live. Rock and roll separates the kids from everything they feel oppresses them. That's the fun and rebellious side of it that fools like Tom Morello want everyone to focus on. They don't want people to realize that what they produce is well suited to oppression itself, and their unwillingness to accept the strong correlation between ripping kids away from reality and breaking the wills of prisoners of war just betrays their cataclysmic self-absorption. Don't they know that all kids want to do is crowd their heads with Tom Morello's ideas about reality? Can he be so self-righteous as to pretend he isn't taking advantage of that desire?

Rock musicians live inside a fantasy world of their own creation from which they perpetually curl their forefingers towards the young and uninitiated. I'm okay with that; let them. Like anything else in life, it is the individual's job to gird himself against cloying worldly influences. Parents have to understand this and give their children the intellectual and spiritual tools to pick through reality's trash heap. Morello doesn’t believe those tools should exist; or rather, he believes his trash is the same as Brahms’, Mozart’s, or Frank Sinatra’s, and should be guarded from enterprising military interrogators.

Levels of ignorance and self-regard like this are the result of a life lived within the amplified, overdriven world of popular rock culture. It amazes me to no end that a guy who made his living standing in front of twenty-foot high walls of amplifiers, blasting thousands of people into deafness with emissions from his inflamed ego, would never consider those emissions liable to be used for torture. Does it upset him artistically? Is that it?

How To Read A Book

I’ve decided to renovate, re-energize and realign my writing. Style, structural coherence, usage, the whole shebang. To that end I followed the suggestion made by Jerry Pournelle of Chaos Manor to aspiring writers: purchase Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and Adler and Van Doren’s How to Read a Book and read them over and over again. Well, that wasn’t his suggestion exactly, but it’s the gist of it: Pournelle reads The Elements once a year.

My renovations won’t keep me from spouting off; my hope is that they will refine my prose enough so that I can abandon the stylistic tics of a precocious and outclassed teenager and find my own, clear voice--so that I can spout off with improved accuracy and vigor, as it were.

Isn’t finding one’s own, clear voice the eternal quest though? I sure hope it is; looking at it that way takes the edge off of the intense inadequacy and futility I feel each time I write.

Anyhoo—here’s a passage from How to Read a Book that just got me to “thinkin’ sumpin’ fierce”:

“The plot of Tom Jones for instance, can be reduced to the familiar formula: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. That, indeed, is the plot of every romance. To recognize this is to learn what it means to say that there are only a small number of plots in the world.”

Now, if you’re reading this, you understand that what comes next from me is an amateurish gloss on how what I read fits into what Allan Bloom wrote. So here it is:

The modern romantic psychology of teenagers and twenty-somethings has replaced the romantic plot arc with the tragic one: the last third, boy gets girl, has been amputated by the 20th century ego growth-spurt. Modern youth live in tragedy and depression not because they think losing the girl inevitable but because they think getting the girl never was, or that doing so somehow betrays their martyr’s purity. They prefer lounging in lovelorn purgatory to fighting the mundane battles necessary to winning, and keeping, the girl. They enjoy this luxury because in modern life there is so much else to sustain them besides the love and fidelity of a life partner; they can live life sustained by remorse and regret for however long it takes them to realize their sustenance temporary and vaporous. How long it takes them to mature, to discover the gains of society fragile, to see that love and fidelity as rare and precious safeguards against social disintegration, and thus the preserves of their own tenuous sanity, is a measure of the degree to which they have been coddled and spoiled and kept from touching the thorns of life.

Okay…got that out of my system.

I couldn’t resist this, from Pournelle:

“The biggest mistake new writers make is carrying around copies of unfinished work to inflict on their friends.”

How accurately that describes me, and what I do here!

Giving It Up

I

I've neglected this blog long enough. Time to dust it off and start again. My intentions were to use it as a sounding board for ideas separate from the more overtly political and economic ones I'd write about at the Stink Tank. I wanted to focus more on literature and philosophy here, using The Closing of the American Mind as a starting point. It's such a good starting point, and I started, but then "You Decide 2008" happened, and I diverted almost all of my attention to the bright, flashy paraphernalia brandished by the political class to exorcise the proletariat's flabby demons long enough to get them to vote. The Closing is such a good starting point too. It’s another one of those books that make you feel bad if you read it: you feel bad because at first you don’t understand it, and then when you start to understand it, you feel worse because you realize there is so much you don’t know. You realize there are so many overlapping and interconnected layers to the crusty cocoon you’ve been wrapped in your entire life, and a strong sense of the futility of cutting through them pervades you once you put the book down. What could motivate one enough to start cutting through the calcified strata of pop culture and ignorance?

I very much doubt the creators of the Matrix Trilogy read The Closing, but there is a distinct connection between the two works. The Matrix offers up a Buddhist-Christian-Cartesian Demon scenario in which reality is merely a distraction concocted by vampiric robots feeding on human metabolic energy. To produce this energy, the humans are kept in giant goo-filled seed pods in a fetal, vegetative state; a version of reality circa the late 1990s is fed directly into their cerebella while they digest pabulum made from puréed human flesh, every bodily system monitored and regulated. They occupy cocoons, albeit K-Y jelly filled rather than crusty baklava cocoons, completely oblivious to their real circumstances, distracted to contentment by their cybernetic slave masters’ fiction. They are ignorant of the true nature of things. Very few have the power to overcome this evil lullaby; the movie leads us to believe it is society’s malcontents and misfits who are most likely to see the cracks and inconsistencies of “reality.”

This scenario isn’t so different from the one in which the contemporary American Mind finds itself, the scenario Bloom describes in The Closing. Pop-culture is no longer ascendant, as it was in the Baby Boomer’s youth. It has assumed a place of primacy in the American mind, insulating us from the realities of life and living. Pop culture is no longer a diversion from the rough and tumble debate and approximate consensus that is reality; it is debate itself. Pop culture is no longer a pleasing, ephemeral antidote to staid conservative reality; it is reality. Conversations among family members and friends are no longer about what should be done, how life should be lived, but about how closely life resembles the funny sitcom or witty comebacks and cynical plot manipulations of television and movies. We live within popular culture; it has ascended from the lowly status of a mere tool used to cope with the stinging barbs of subsistence and starvation, to the ambrosia of life itself. We live inside the sexual norms of pop stars and rock bands now; we surf atop waves of rock and roll emotion within a spectrum of color defined by Peter Max at one end and Starbucks’ earth tones at the other. It is everything to us, just as jelly-filled cocoons and artificial cortex stimulation are everything to the human batteries of the Matrix. Admitting to any ignorance of pop culture’s force and value invites scorn or ostracism. The classics are old and wrong, bleached of color. The now is vibrant, unrelenting, fresh, and constantly updated to provide maximum distraction from the task of living well.

Barack Obama’s election is as much proof of this primacy as anything else; his campaign depended heavily on the perception of him generated by media entities such as Oprah and the tabloid magazine Us Weekly and its televised counterparts, Entertainment Tonight and Extra! Pop culture shaped the electorate’s perception of Obama, and he deftly manipulated pop-cultural cues and symbols, taking advantage of a public entranced by the fonts and warmth of Starbucks advertising. He even crafted a Matrix-style play book: Obama campaigned as a Seer, as the only One capable of piercing the oppressive shell of the Bush years, the lonely fringe savior fighting the good fight, wanting to free us all.

The ends of trilogy and election intersect, too. The trilogy ends with the superman most capable of perceiving and manipulating the cracks in reality (and thus best equipped to fight and destroy the robot oppressors) offering himself up to maintain the status quo, becoming one with the oppressors and infecting their circuitry. Instead of a savior leading humanity to a new life, oppressors and oppressed enter into a bargain: the sham reality is maintained, but with upgrades and tweaks introduced by the savior. Obama met a similar end. His electoral victory was built upon promises starkly different from political reality: ending the Iraq War, creating an accomodationist foreign policy, raising taxes to fund an expanded government mandate. His cabinet selections thus far have disappointed his ardent supporters and those believing him capable of radical change and governance. His approach to the transition period resembles in no way the outline he presented to a gathering of community activists. He has glided past the timetable for troop removal agreed upon by the Iraqi government that extends our commitment to them by three years. His globe-straddling stature has been overshadowed by the financial crisis and the crowd of tin-cup wielding CEOs gathered on Capitol Hill. The narrative of the One that began by forecasting conquest of oppressive neo-conservative reality has culminated in a draw: the realities of geopolitics and global finance have eclipsed the One and forced him to make deals with opponents and members of the economic establishment.


II

Reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations creates friction between one’s psyche and the pop-culture cocoon. Modern rock and roll life is not conducive to appreciating commandments like this:

“Waste not the remainder of your life in thoughts about others, except when you are concerned with some unselfish purpose. For you are losing an opportunity to do something else, when you have such thoughts as: 'What is such a person doing, and why, and what is he saying, and what is he contriving?'…”

How can the same mind be amenable to instruction like this while giving over to the obsessions of rock music? If anything, rock and roll teaches us to be concerned with what other people think, say, and do. Those other people are usually unfaithful women, domineering parents and teachers, power mad police, the oppressive establishment. Rock is all about other people, and the rash their deeds and words give the rebel cortex. Rock and pop culture are fashion; they are mating dance peacockery.

I found myself confronted with this fact when driving home. Lacking an audio book, I began to listen to a Judas Priest compilation. But it didn’t work; it didn’t distract me and lift me up out of the boredom of the work world—the music’s sheen was gone, worn away by Aurelius. Aurelius, the Stoic Emperor, reminds himself to live wisely, and not be swayed by the gaudy artifice of human politics; to act with purpose, to live in wonder and appreciation of the nature of all things. Aurelius’ is a philosophy of action and achievement tempered by philosophy and humility:

“In a word, everything which belongs to the body is a flowing stream, and what belongs to the soul a dream and a vapor, and life is a warfare and a stranger’s sojourn, and future fame is oblivion. What then is there which can guide a man? One thing and only one, philosophy. Now this consists in keeping the divinity within us free from violence and unharmed, superior to pain and pleasure, doing nothing without a purpose, nor yet falsely and with hypocrisy, not feeling the need of another man’s doing or not doing something…

“Hasten then to the goal which you have before you. Throw away vain hopes and come to your own aid, while yet you may, if you care at all for yourself…

“Short then is the time which any man lives; and short too the longest posthumous fame, and even this is handed on by a succession of poor human beings who will very soon die, and who know not even themselves much less one who died long ago.”

How can pop culture withstand this? It can’t-- but it doesn’t have to. It ignores the existence of Aurelius completely; it sneers at Judeo-Christian anything.

Against Aurelius, the overdriven guitars of Judas Priest don’t stand a chance, and as I was listening, with some of the Meditations still fresh in my mind, I imagined the mighty band on stage, gyrating and swaying amidst laser beams and dry ice fog, without amplification of any kind. I imagined the driving rhythms of the electric guitars and bass emasculated of their electric potency and the shattering solo guitar melodies reduced to barely audible rodent scratchings; I heard Rob Halford’s scream devoid of metallic reverb, and echo as weakly as a child’s voice through empty stadium corridors (if you lack amplification, you will lose the crowd). I imagined the drums, overpowering the tiny insect-like strumming of the guitars, but barely loud enough to reach across the infield. The rapid breathing of the musicians was loud enough to compete with the guitars. They moved and perspired to the shadow of a nothing, their creation robbed of its power to attract attention.

The pop culture atmosphere cannot compete with the bareness, the rawness of life. There is no way it could: sequins and amplifiers and prosthetic breasts cannot reckon with reality; they are physical manifestations of the real and psychic disposable income generated by progress; they represent how much humanity can afford to ignore nature. Aurelius and the Stoics dealt directly with nature and the mastery of it that comes from knowing oneself and one's place within it.

Aurelius and Priest are mutually exclusive.

Bloom via Nafisi & Morrison

Discussion of rock and roll inevitably involves discussion of adolescence, the time in which one’s deepest connections to music and art are made. The youthful search for identity explodes with posters and t-shirts, stickers and buttons and graffiti. Bands are formed, lines are drawn. Tribes coalesce, carefully chosen sub-genres of rock and roll their sacred totems. Intra-clique animus develops; the tribes regard each other’s motives of dress and taste suspiciously. Tribal differences provide fodder for debate.

I’ve been listening to Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran during my commutes to and from work. I didn’t expect a passage from it to remind me of a fragment of one such debate I had as a teenager. Forgive the punctuation, spelling and paragraph breaks—I’m typing as I listen:

A few weeks ago, while driving down the George Washington Memorial Parkway, my children and I were reminiscing about Iran. I noticed, with a sudden misgiving, the alien tone they had adopted when talking about their own country. They kept repeating “they, they, over there.”

“Over where? Where you buried your dead canary, by a rose bush with your grandfather? Where your grandmother brought you chocolates we had forbidden you to eat?”

They didn’t remember many things. Some memories made them sad and nostalgic. Others, they dismissed. The names of my parents, Bijan’s aunt and uncle, our close friends, they evoked like magic mantras, joyfully taking shape and disappearing with each utterance.

What triggered our reminiscences? Was it the Doors CD that my children were so accustomed to hearing in Iran? They had bought it for me for Mother’s Day, and we were listening to it in the car. Jim Morrison’s seductively nonchalant voice purred from the stereo. I’d like to have another kiss. His voice stretched and curved and twisted while we talked and laughed. She’s a twentieth-century fox, he intoned.

Some memories bore them, some excite them, like when they make fun of their mother dancing all over the place, from the hall to the living room singing Come on baby, light my fire.

They tell me they have already forgotten so much. So many faces have become dim. When I ask them “Do you remember this, or that?” most often, they don’t. Now, Jim Morrison has moved to a song by Brecht. Oh show me the way to the next whiskey bar, he sings, and we accompany him on the next line. Oh, don’t ask why.


My dislike of Jim Morrison and the Doors is a teenage relic. I was revulsed by Morrison’s leathered brutishness and lame poetry. He seemed to have no interest in the mythic, the heroic, themes I was sure guided the efforts of my beloved Led Zeppelin. The Doors’ music seemed banal to me then, as it does now, as most of rock and roll does.

Nafisi’s mention of them brought me back to a flickering memory of a debate with a friend. His mother saw the Doors in abridged form at the height of their powers. The concert was cut short because of Morrison’s drunkenness and lewd gesticulations. I believe we were, in an awkward adolescent way, trying to suss out whether Morrison was or was not a sincere artist. What kind of artist would abuse their audience in such a way? What was his aim? How could he have shortchanged them so? Our innocence was only scraping the tip of the nihilistic iceberg of art and music. Neither of us had yet to fully experience the ennui of bourgeois life, though our rock and roll identities were preparing us for that.

Morrison’s behavior became an entrenched necessity of the rock idiom, the pinnacle of expression worthy of emulation. Rock’s blatant appeal to youthful sexuality chafed against social restraint. Tantrums ensued, on stage and in school. Bloom understood this evolution of spoiled petulance into virtue: “Selfishness thus becomes indignation and then transforms itself into morality.” This is what we have dwelt on in America for decades now—anger at thwarted desire elevated to an art form.

I don’t mean to impugn Nafisi’s and her daughters’ preference for the Doors. Though only a prelude to a much darker reminiscence (they then recall a disturbing event in which officers of the Revolutionary Committee pursue a pistol-wielding neighbor into their garden) I find the passage extraordinarily poignant . Morrison wielded his desire like a bludgeon at American middle class mores, values that created him and standards to which Nafisi and her family may have aspired. The Nafisi women treasured the Doors CD because it represented a freedom they could not publicly aspire to in Tehran. Rock and roll is held in such high regard by American youth because it helps them to renounce what they are, and pretend to be what they are not: rebels, murderers, addicts, revolutionaries.

Nafisi and her daughters used rock and roll as a modest life line linking them to a free culture far removed from the one that daily oppressed them. At the same time, in the middle of that free culture, rock and roll was consumed, vomited up and consumed again. A vast and vibrant ego culture paraded itself in front of the mirror, oblivious to those people across the globe putting its image to better use.

Western pop-cultural affinity for overseas revolution makes more sense if thought about this way. Impulses to destruction and copulation denied, American youth turn their gaze towards historical figures whose impulses were sated to great and tragic effect—Castro and Guevara and Lenin. Capitalism’s creative destruction comes at a pace too slow to satisfy the modern mind, but the supposedly creative destruction of the revolutionary is nearly instantaneous; the crowds gather and rage, explosions occur and hostages are taken with a speed suiting the digital age.

David Foster Wallace, RIP

David Foster Wallace hung himself on Friday. His wife found his body. He was 46. A terrible loss.



I was never interested in his writing until reading his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College this spring. It is as good a defense of faith in the face of modern boredom and frustration as any I have yet to find. Reading it buoyed my spirits. It shamed me too, because up until then I considered him supericial, a literary version of a videogame. I was put off by the small passages of Infinite Jest I had read. It was too much for me to take in. Perhaps it still is. After reading the commencement address I read this, a moving portrait of a young couple struggling with the decision to have an abortion.

After reading the commencement address, I sent an email to my father. I'd like to include it in this post because I would like to think that Wallace played a part in opening my closed mind.

Because I wrote it with more than a little emotion, some of the points I try to make may not be so clear. Rereading it, there are a few things I'd like to change (not because of Wallace's death but because I didn't think things through well enough). Here it is:

Sunday, April 27th, 2008

Dad,

I'd like to share with you what I consider wonderful proof that Christian spirituality and real conservatism are alive and well amongst younger intellectuals. I found this proof where I least expected it: I was searching the internet for information on a writer--David Foster Wallace--whom I am not very interested in and whose writing I've found tedious and exemplary of the diffused and over-stimulated mental state of my generation (he employs meandering and exhaustive footnotes in his works of fiction). His debut novel was 1100 pages long, and he seemed to me overly blessed with that blend of precocity, arrogance and self-reverence so many middle-class, middle American people born between 1960 and 1980 exhibit (myself included).

The attached piece is a transcript of a commencement address given by Wallace to Kenyon College's 2005 graduating class. I underlined and highlighted what I consider the most stunning and revelatory passages not only because of their veracity, but because of their source; Wallace is successful at weaving these plain truths into an address aimed at those as precocious and self-absorbed as he once was.

I should add here an important fact about myself, something that has had an enormous impact on my life, and something I never thought I would do or even admit to doing: for the last eight months I have been reciting the Lord's prayer when I wake up each morning. (I try to do this at the end of the day as well, when perhaps the prayer would do the most good; so far that is a touch and go affair, but I am getting there). I don't feel capable of conveying the sense of peace and optimism that descends upon me when I do this; perhaps I will never be able to do so. Right now it is enough to know that doing so has helped me try to be a better person, and to perceive with more clarity the presence and value of the truths to which Wallace refers. Wallace's speech reminded me of three quotes, the first two from Bob Genetski's piece and the last a quote from St Augustine by a Catholic columnist in the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

“My grace is all you need, for my power is greatest when you are weak.”

For when I am weak, then I am strong. –2 Corinthians 12

"You have created us for Yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee."

Wallace entreats the graduates before him to expand their cast of mind to include sympathy for and understanding of other people and their daily trials; essentially reminding them in coded, 21st century terms that God's presence will be strongest in them during tedious and frustrating moments, and that fulfilling what God asks of us, "to forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors" just might be the highest aim of a true liberal arts education.

I am not sure whether or not Wallace understands how close his exhortations come to preaching the Gospel; something tells me he does because he feels it necessary to remind his audience that "I'm [not] getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues," even though he is clearly doing so, for what is a call to exercise compassion and forgiveness, especially since these acts are not a regular part of our daily lives? He may have considered it necessary to disassociate his advice from scripture so that his audience might not dismiss it outright. Nevertheless, by the end of the speech, Wallace has emboldened himself enough to admit that "in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping"

This is a considerable admission by a member of "Generation X" and Wallace goes on to expound upon what is the essential point of the St Augustine quote: until we rest within God, until we seek the peace of living within Him and following His advice, our hearts remain restless; attached to material possessions and pride, we devour ourselves by seeking what is not really there.

It is not for me to say whether or not Wallace is a closet conservative; I am sure he would howl if accused of being one. Reading his speech, I was compelled to ask the following questions: What is someone who doesn't demand the absolute upheaval and destruction of the status quo? What is the person who prefers to pause and think before issuing blanket condemnations of his fellow men? He is a conservative. Not necessarily of politics or causes, but of social relationships. He wishes to conserve the current system we operate within because he realizes, precisely because of his humanity, that he has no right to demand that that system be radically altered to suit his selfish point of view.

I felt compelled to share this with you because you have always urged me to do the right thing throughout my life, to believe in my gifts and talents and to have compassion and respect for others. I share it with you not as a reminder but as proof that your influence on me has enabled me to perceive these things and to desire a complete life of responsibility and compassion.

Thank you Dad,

Eric


God Bless you, David Foster Wallace!

Music, Emotion and Modern Life

I begin my lonely journey by asking indulgence in my choice to address The Closing of the American Mind out of sequence. I will first write about Bloom’s chapter on music. I do this mainly out of sentimentality; my relationships to music as a child and student bear a startling resemblance to the relationships he describes in that chapter. While persuaded by the force of his arguments in the preceding sections, it was not until reading his take on music that I realized I was merely one victim in the tragedy of thousands Bloom describes. Though possessing an abundance of tragic flaws, I was not the hero of my own story as I had previously believed. Indeed, Bloom clearly identifies the forces within music, popular culture and education that willfully abet such self-regard.


Before any who read this begin picking me (unfairly) and Bloom (unwisely) apart with the jagged tools of rock-criticism, let me be perfectly clear: I am not going to present a taxonomy of bands and genres; I am not going to describe bands or songs in terms of the aesthetics they promote or emotions they evoke. My desire is not to discuss the bric-a-brac of rock music; I have absolutely no interest in picking apart rock minutiae or debating the merits of Dinosaur Jr. versus fIREHOSE. As one who blasted his ear drums out of his own skull with headphones, at live concerts and in amateur bands, I know full well that rock neither demands nor deserves a point-by-point refutation of its positive characteristics. The essence of rock music is its appeal to emotion. This appeal comes first from the mystery of the record collection of an older sibling, parent or friend. It is superficial and partially hidden, as an exotic revolutionary might be hidden within the crowded public square. However, the revolutionary’s specialty is not in the subtle exposition of ideas, nor in carefully considered dialectic. His specialty is guerilla assault. I experienced this emotional assault first hand, much as a kidnap victim experiences a burlap sack over the head before being beaten and thrown into a speeding van. Modern culture, as Bloom notes, does not prepare the victim for assault; children do not carry with them coded instructions for escape. Parents and teachers are powerless in negotiating release; in most cases they believe such negotiation a potentially damaging challenge to the child’s self-esteem, and do nothing. The child becomes an adult in captivity. The kidnap victim works through the stages of the Stockholm syndrome with his abductors, until he joins their ranks and joyfully helps take new abductees.


I take this approach because I see the net effect of pop-culture on my life as negative. Rock and roll may help one to cope with modern life, but it cannot tell one how to live it. And that is where I found myself before picking up The Closing: I fashioned a grab-bag philosophy based on the spectrum of emotions evoked by rock and roll. I mistook this for real understanding, when it was simply coping. Dealing with spikes of anger or troughs of sadness through rock music is cathartic, but it promotes a type of introspection incapable of finding answers to the whys of anger or sadness. Catharsis is beneficial in alleviating immediate emotional pain but it has nothing to offer once the pain is gone.

Statement of Purpose

Before I get started, a few things about my blog's title and why I chose it:



The title "Closed for Business" was inspired by Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. I read the book two years ago and its impact was profound. It cracked open the papier-mache crust of pop-culture sentiment and rock music aesthetics that insulated my mind, and dissolved the watery mastic of relativism holding those layers together. A criticism of modern higher education, and thus a criticism of most of modern life, The Closing of the American Mind revealed to me how much I didn't know about learning and philosophy, and how much I would never understand if I didn't alter my intellectual trajectory. Reading the book, I knew I wasn't a member of its intended audience, but rather a member of the herd Bloom so deftly criticized, those whose entrenched position in popular culture made the study of Plato, Aristotle and Rousseau seem so foreign and useless.



Having spent more than a decade fashioning a liberal-libertarian persona for myself, Bloom and thinkers like him were completely off my radar. I, like many of my age cohort, cast illusory spells of freedom for myself by chanting "Who am I to judge?" in every possible context. Bloom, and as I found out later, writers like Saul Bellow, asked the far scarier question: "Who are you not to?"



Like most ideas (good or otherwise) I thought of the title while taking a shower. I realized that I had something to say about being a closed American mind, and that attempting to broaden my intellectual life in the directions suggested by Bloom would produce thoughts and experiences worth sharing. I saw that my closed mind was giving me the chance to learn and share with others, putting me "in business" as it were. Thus "Closed for Business." Striking, I know. No need to applaud...



The subtitle comes from the fact that my conversion, while willing, isn't entirely enthusiastic. As I mentioned above, the question "Who are you not to judge?" is intimidating. Who really wants it asked of them? It is much easier and rhetorically gratifying to abdicate judgment of behaviors, decisions and pronouncements, and it saves face. But those who abdicate unwittingly condemn dusty old farts like Aristotle to remain in their graves (or tombs--or did they do those spooky funeral pyres back then?). How is that not passing judgment? Abdication also means avoiding arguments by creating artificial agreement: You see--neither of us really knows anything--who are we to say anything about the matter? Such awkward sleight-of-hand isn't consensus, nor is it even "agreeing to disagree." Whatever it is (and I have come to see it in myself as a manifestation of social cowardice) it confuses and detracts from the level of discourse. It doesn't help people to understand each other, and it mutes their discussion of important issues.



Taking a stand of any kind isn't fun. It's not something one does expecting pats on the back or letters of congratulation. Taking a conservative stand usually gets you the exact opposite of those things. Conservatives are mocked routinely for supposed stodginess and ignorance; they're the guys that form harrumphing choirs like those surrounding the Honorable William J. Le Petomane in Blazing Saddles. So, yeah, I'm not totally enthused about being pigeonholed and ridiculed. But what do you get if you make decisions for yourself using such criteria, anyway?



My intention (audacious? foolhardy?) here is to re-read Bloom and offer a gloss on his assessment of American minds from the standpoint of one that was most definitely closed in the manner he suggests. I operate under no illusions; my interest isn't in changing the world or the mind of anyone who may read what I post. Rather, my goal is to work through a dense tract of philosophy and leave a few crumbs along the trail for anyone else interested in taking it. Once the propeller on my thinking cap burns off, I'll write about other subjects as I read or encounter them.

So welcome! and wish me luck!