Since I’ve been away…
Digg 
Stumble Upon 
Newsvine 
Slashdot 
Mixx 
Diigo 
Delicious 
Reddit 
Facebook
I’d like to offer my thoughts since I’ve been away from the TAC blog…..
- The Washington Monthly has good article on the demise of Culture 11.I agree with author Charlie Homan that a conservative website devoted to culture and funded by Bill Bennett simply cannot have musings about Gansta Rap on it and be taken seriously as a cultural critique. Rather, such critiques must come from a counter-cultural perspective and for that, the best place to go for that is Front Porch Republic.
- President Bush II had the good fortune not to face two deteriorating war fronts at the same time, Iraq and Afghanistan, but that is what President Obama could very well face by summer. Getting troops out of Iraq and seeing the war at least be reduced to low-level banditry, was a key part of Obama’s election and if by 2012 the Administration needs more troops and more money to handle a full-scale two-front war, then all of the Administration’s grandiose plans will be wrecked, from foreign policy to the economy. Unfortunately, Republicans wouldn’t be able to benefit too much if their response is to call for more money and more troops for an unpopular war. So long as the GOP acquiesces, Obama holds all the cards when it comes to foreign policy.
- Patrick Deenen has good piece on the large meaning of last week’s Tea Party’s one won’t see anywhere else within the mainstream. As expressions of protest, the Tea Party’s were very helpful. Unfortunately their lack of proper focus meant that anyone could see an anti-Obama sign as say it was nothing more than a GOP rally and get away with it. They would have been better chanting “End the Fed” and many of them did. Hopefully next time such chants will drown out those would-be Somali pirates from Conservative Inc.
- Liberals should admit the DHS’ report on so-called ”right-wing extremism” from veterans and Ron Paul supporters was pretty dumb and, as they say, move on, instead of defending an institution who painted antiwar groups with the same broad brush of smear.
- If there’s no better example of the evils of having a central bank than the criminal way Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson reportedly pressured Bank of America to buyout Merill Lynch, then I don’t know what is.
- Let’s hope the rule of law can somehow prevail when its comes to Bernanke/Paulson, “Torturegate” and Rep. Jane Harman, apparently AIPAC’s woman in Congress,
- There was some good discussion on the League of Ordinary Gentlemen on my TAC article on Carter’s “malaise speech”. I like “Lighthouse’s” comparison of 2009 being the same or at least almost the same as 1981 for Republicans and conservatives.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I must admit that Culture11’s strenuous hipness and scattiness made me feel very … well … old. As if I were, to quote Bertie Wooster, “in the grandfather class and merely waiting for the end.” A feeling confirmed when I read Charlie Homan’s account, cited by Sean Scallon. Did other fortysomethings, I wonder, find themselves deterred by Culture11 for the same reason?
I’m 25 and in college, and I felt mostly deterred by the lack of anything interesting on that site, ever.
I wouldn’t mind if somebody did try to start a conservative version of popmatters.com, but I don’t see any reason to believe that it should be run by someone who doesn’t know the difference between a LOTR character and a sex toy.
MattSwartz’s comment helps reassure me. I must confess to having been unaware of Culture11’s existence until shortly before it ended, so perhaps I was not witnessing it at its, uh, best. Still, once I did witness it, I said to myself, “Thank but no thanks, I’ll stick to TAC, Modern Age, The University Bookman, Intercollegiate Review, and Chronicles if you don’t mind.”
RJ, I’m in my twenties and, as far as I could tell, Culture11 was just an echo chamber for pretentious twenty-something Washington right-of-center journalists, nothing more.
I just turned 61 (God help me) and have seen that each generation creates its own peer culture, filled with common references and understood norms. This is natural and inevitable. The challenge for me is to understand that for the young, the impulse to play with concepts and change the world is also inevitable and not to be attacked reflexively. I came late to Culture11 and instantly recognized that I was a visiting alien from the the land of the Boomers.’
My problem is with the understandable impulse to engage contemporary culture (Pop Culture?) from a conservative point of view. From this conservative’s perspective, pop culture is irredeemably infected with all the anti-intellectual, vulgarian, hedonistic baggage as the rest of the culture. So how do you engage with it without either adopting it or taking on the mantle of the eternal scold?
I clearly remember contemporaries becoming “Rock Critics.” in The Sixties , which seemed a tad ridiculous at the time and remains so to my mind. Pity the poor devils who wrote art criticism only to have art turn to murde on their watch and have to keep writing, if only for a paycheck. In like manner, I have to laugh at NPR’s calcification as the voice of my era. For them, it’s always 1967. Listening to Terry Gross reverentially and cluelessly interview some contemporary barbarian is the funniest thing on radio.
What I dream about, is the emergence of new art forms or movements that are driven by a vision of the eternal and are not part of the modernist illusion. Perhaps we are on the brink of a new era of neoclassicism since the drive to novelty for it’s own sake has been played out. One can only hope. And then, there is always The New Criterion.
I, too, miss C11 terribly. I don’t where else to turn for commentary on Susan Boyle by college Republicans. It’s a hole that not even Townhall.com can fill. What a tragic loss!
‘Liberals should admit the DHS’ report on so-called ”right-wing extremism” from veterans and Ron Paul supporters was pretty dumb and, as they say, move on, instead of defending an institution who painted antiwar groups with the same broad brush of smear.’
What is this? You make up a version of what happened and tell liberals to get over it? Maybe you should take some time to understand the issue better and you’ll see it’s the right that needs to chill out. They tried to say Obama commissioned it and that there was no left wing report. Both of those are lies and liberals shouldn’t just let that go. They’re not defending a report as you say, they’re fighting smears and outright lies. Read some recent Greenwald posts to learn what happens when small lies are left unchallenged and then fester.