Thomas S. Harrington - Livin' la Vida Barroca

LIVIN’ LA VIDA BARROCA

AMERICAN CULTURE

IN AN AGE OF IMPERIAL ORTHODOXIES

Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americans

http://www.uv.es/bibjcoy

Directora

Carme Manuel

LIVIN’ LA VIDA BARROCA

AMERICAN CULTURE

IN AN AGE OF IMPERIAL ORTHODOXIES

Thomas S. Harrington

Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americans

Universitat de València

Livin’ la Vida Barroca:

American Culture in an Age of Imperial Orthodoxies

©Thomas S. Harrington

1ª edición de 2014

Reservados todos los derechos

Prohibida su reproducción total o parcial

ISBN: 978-84-9134-156-7

Imagen de la portada: Sophia de Vera Höltz y Celso Hernández de la Figuera

Diseño de la cubierta: Celso Hernández de la Figuera

Publicacions de la Universitat de València

http://puv.uv.es

publicacions@uv.es

Table of Contents

Preface

Livin’ la Vida Barroca

Who’s Gonna Tell the Kids

Liberal Boomers and Courage

Unequal Charges: When Balanced is Not Fair

Junk by Design

Georges Duhamel on the Writing of Literature (and Life?)

I’m in a Good Place

Netanyahu: the Intellectual Father of the “War on Terror

Necessary Melancholy?

Where We Are: America the Baroque

Dignity: An Idea Gone Missing in the Land

Not So Different After All?

Controversialization: A Key to the Right’s Continuing Domination of Public Debates

Language, “Promontory Views” and American Perceptions of the World

A Liberal Culture “Stuck to the Metaphor” of its Own Virtues

Seeing and Unseeing in Big Media

Sooner or Later Our Children Will Ask: “How Did This Happen?”

Quick! Look Over There!

On Bumper Stickers That Say “Coexist”

If Everyone Has a Price, Who Will Fight for Justice?

The Partisanship Canard

Tribalism is Dead, Long Live the Tribe

Ballots and Democracy: Big Media is Just Not that Into It

Learned Helplessness and the Imperial Condition

The Doctrine of “Reasonable Doubt”: Universal Principle or Perk of the Powerful?

Junk Food for the Mind

Preemptive Strikes of the (Pseudo) Progressive Kind

One Thing You Can’t Hide… Is the Authoritarian Inside

Uniformed Impunity: We’re Probably Closer to the Beginning than to the End

Anger and Angry People

“Keeping US Safe”: From the Task of Engaging and Managing our Own Anxieties

Orthodoxies and Adolescents

Technocrats

More Intellectual Dishonesty at the New York Times

A Better Question Might Be, “How Isn’t it Fascism?”

If the Cords of Culture are Cut, How Will We Access the Potential Sources of Our Renewal?

“Mistakes Were Made”: One-Time Object of Derision Now a Core Template of Our Social Behaviors

Customers or Citizens?

Being (or Not) in the “Place of the Soul”

No, It Has Not “Always Been This Way”

Recognizing the Importance of Goldwater, or Learning to Analyze and Practice Progressive Politics in their Historical Dimension

“Take Responsibility for My Vote and Its Policy Consequences?

Obama’s Dog Whistle Politics (Zelig at the Top of his Game)

The Truth or the Tribe?

Israel Has Been “Singled Out” in the US for a Very Long Time

The “Powell Memo” of 1971: The Foundation of the Right’s Current Domination of US Politics

The Victory of Obama or the Definitive Triumph of the Politics of Illusion and Moral Disengagement in the United States

Is the US of Today Really Spain?

Acknowledgments

Conversation has always been my magic elixir, the substance that brings moments of emotional and conceptual clarity to the otherwise inchoate mass of feelings and thoughts I so often carry inside me. And since writing is, at its core, about trying to capture such epiphanies, this book owes its existence to those friends who, in the spirit of love, companionship, or at times I suspect, mere forbearance, have helped me to “knead the dough” over and again during our many encounters. To all of you (and you know who you are!), I am very, very grateful.

I’d like to give special thanks to a number of people in this group. I am very grateful that Jim Barrett, true friend, incandescent spirit and wordsmith extraordinaire, encouraged me to make my private musings on American culture available to a larger audience and that, further down the road, Carme Manuel was willing and able to help turn Jim’s vision into a reality.

I am indebted to Tom Walsh for demonstrating time and again over many years the immense grace and power of a life and a pen that draws from the head and the heart as opposed to just the former.

Similar gratitude flows to Tim Sciarillo who’s been tenaciously needling me into ever-greater levels of consciousness and critical awareness since the day many years back when fate (and the Dean of Housing) first brought us together.

I feel only mystery and wonder (if there any more sublime expression of gratitude?) before the fact that Itamar Even-Zohar, a true visionary and a polyglot of the type that this world may never see again, decided for some strange reason two decades ago to begin sharing his cosmic levels of knowledge and humor with me.

I would be a very different thinker and writer without my dialogues with Gustavo Remedi who, during our 15 years spent working together, constantly and joyfully challenged me to consider new things in completely new ways.

But I fear I might not have been able to listen to either of these extraordinary people had my Galician “brother” Alberto Sacido, not previously showed me the importance of coming to the table, in good times and bad, to feed the body and renew the mind through shared words.

I cannot imagine my life today without the many gifts bestowed on me by Pau Estrada, Jaume Subirana and Josep Maria Solé Sabaté who, by handing me the keys to so many fascinating rooms and spaces within Catalan life, forever changed my way of looking at the world as well as my place within it.

I would be similarly adrift without my sister Christine, whose fearsomely well-organized intellect is only superseded in power by the ever-mindful love and care she bestows on those lucky enough to form part of her world.

And then there’s Kathy, who counts among her many, many loving gifts the rare ability to combine gracious, open-ended listening with timely, specific and ever-incisive questioning. During these last few years, no one has been more central to the process of turning notions into ideas, and ideas into essays, than she.

But at the root of my gratitude before life is the dialogue—which sometimes takes place in words but even more often, as luck would have it, in other much more powerful and ineffable codes—with my children Sophia, Lily and Luke. It is the need to honor their lives, both their miraculous present and promising future, that keeps the search for clarity and truth, and yes, laughter and joy, at the forefront of my vital concerns.

Preface

Until quite recently, Irish-Americans tended to marry late, a practice that, in turn, created extraordinarily long generations within many families of that ethnic group. I grew up sharing every Sunday dinner, and in the summer a great deal more than that, with three grandparents born in 1890.

Spending time together in our family was mostly about talking, or if you were young, listening and using your imagination to create movies in your mind out of the word-pictures that flowed non-stop from the mouths of Gram, Grammy and Banky, my uncles and aunts, and their never-ending retinue of show-up-at-the-backdoor friends. Their stories became my stories and thus I, like them, came to view all that occurred from 1895 onward as an integral part of my own life experience.