House of Eratosthenes

One of the reasons I make casual but repeated reference to the “fact” that “nobody ever reads this blog,” is to re-confirm the blog’s primary purpose. Being talked about, is not that purpose. It’s an electronic notebook first-and-foremost. It’s for me.

For example, it is easy to reminisce about that column that Rush read on the air a few months ago, by that guy with the funny name, that was oh so well written, something about how young people today talk in a funny voice because they’re afraid to have a definite opinion about anything. This is a great example of why everyone could use a blog, even if they don’t think they can write well enough to expose their resulting wares to the vagaries of disparate opinion on the “innernets.” You need to bookmark things like this. You have to grab this stuff when it drifts by, or it’s gone forever. A magic text file on your computer desktop, doesn’t work at all over the long run. A palm pilot doesn’t work much better. A blog works well, and it works well all the time…with the one exception, of when a post becomes so long as to be unworkable and thus ends up unsaved. But that’s a user problem.

Regarding the essay referenced above. It requires a fair amount of searching. If you’re interested in repeating said searching, this is your lucky day…the writer’s arcane name is Gerard Van Der Leun. The date that Rush Limbaugh read his essay was January 27, 2006. The inspiration of the essay was Hugh Hewitt’s interview of Joel Stein, the Los Angeles Times columnist who said “I don’t support the troops.” Van Der Leun’s treatise makes reference to, and in fact admonishes the reader to listen to, Hewitt’s interview of Stein which you can find here with a sound file in MP3 format here. And you can read Van Der Leun’s remarks here. My favorite exerpt:

What interestest me is how [Stein] speaks.

If you focus on it, you realize that you hear this voice every day if you bounce around a bit in our larger cities buying this or ordering that, and in general running into young people in the “service” sector — be it coffee shop, video store, department store, boutique, bookstore, or office cube farm. It’s a kind of voice that was seldom heard anywhere but now seems to be everywhere.

It is the voice of the neuter.

I mean that in the grammatical sense:
“a. Neither masculine nor feminine in gender.
“b. Neither active nor passive; intransitive,”

and in the biological sense:
“a. Biology Having undeveloped or imperfectly developed sexual organs: the neuter caste in social insects.
“b. Botany Having no pistils or stamens; asexual.
“c. Zoology Sexually undeveloped.”

You hear this soft, inflected tone everywhere that young people below, roughly, 35 congregate. As flat as the bottles of spring water they carry and affectless as algae, it tends to always trend towards a slight rising question at the end of even simple declarative sentences. It has no timbre to it and no edge of assertion in it.

The voice whisps across your ears as if the speaker is in a state of perpetual uncertainty with every utterance. It is as if, male or female, there is no foundation or soul within the speaker on which the voice can rest and rise. As a result, it has a misty quality to it that denies it any unique character at all.

The clip linked above is about seventeen minutes long. Although I’m well-acquainted with what Van Der Leun is talking about in my everyday, run-around, people-watching life, for the first part of the interview I couldn’t correlate it to what I was hearing. About halfway through, though, Hewitt started to ask some tougher questions and Stein began to accumulate some habits that I found, shall we say, irritating. Specifically, he made a point of asking for specifics, in the course of answering a question that, when asked, was plenty specific enough.

HH: Now let me ask you about the benefits that the president and supporters of the war point to, which is the end of a brutal regime in Afghanistan, and a brutal regime in Iraq? Is Iraq better off today than it was in February of 2003?

JS: I don’t think it’s the U.S.’ job to make countries better than they were, or else we’d be really busy.

HH: Joel, I understand. It’s a perfectly legitimate point of view. But it’s not what I asked, though. Do you think objectively, that Iraq is better off today than it was in February in 2003?

JS: Februrary…um, again, I haven’t been…it’s hard for me to say. It’s not a great place, and I think it’s better than it was under Saddam.

HH: Now, and in your piece, you wrote that, “when you volunteer for the U.S. military, you pretty much know you’re not going to be fending off invasions from Mexico and Canada. So you’re willingly signing up to be a fighting tool of American imperialism, for better or worse. Sometimes, you get lucky and get to fight ethnic genocide in Kosovo, but other times, it’s Vietnam.” Did you support the war in Kosovo?

JS: I had very mixed feelings about the war in Kosovo. Again, I don’t know if the U.S. should be used as a police force.

HH: Well, mixed feelings is…you know, someone…either you’ve got to go or you don’t. Should Clinton have sent them?

JS: At the time, I thought he shouldn’t.

HH: And so, should they come home now?

JS: The troops in Kosovo?

HH: Yeah.

JS: The U.N. peacekeeping force in Kosovo? Or the U.S. part of the peacekeeping force in Kosovo?

HH: All of them. Just, you know, just U.S. Let’s stay focused. Should they come home?

JS: To be honest…I’d like to know more about Kosovo before I said.

As Van Der Leun points out, you have to listen to understand his comment. But I’ve selected the short exchange above, because just by reading it you can gather the gist. There is no certainty, and there seems to be a taboo against any such certainty. No definite statements, except some condemnation against the definite statements of others. Let’s inspect some more of what Van Der Leun has to say about this…

Above all, it is a sexless voice…It is, as I have indicated above, the voice of the neutered. And in this I mean that of the transitive verb: To castrate or spay. The voice and the kids that carry it is the triumphant achievement of our halls of secondary and higher education. These children did not speak this way naturally, they were taught. And like good children seeking only to please their teachers and then their employers, they learned.

This is not to say that the new American Castrati of all genders live sexless lives. On the contrary, if reports are to be credited, they seem to have a good deal of sex, most often without the burden of love or the threat of chlldren, and in this they are condemned to the sex life of children.

No, it is only to say that this new voice that we hear throughout the land from so many of the young betokens a weaker and less certain brand of citizen than we have been used to in our history. Neither male nor female, neither gay nor straight, neither…. well, not anything substantive really. A generation finely tuned to irony and nothingness and tone deaf to duty and soul. If you can write in this tone, and Stein can, you can become a third level columnist for the Los Angeles Times. With a little luck, over time, you might even rise to the level of second string columnist for Vanity Fair. Should the country so lose its mind and elect another Clinton, you could even become a White House speech writer.

Now what am I to gather from the comments about the American Castrati? Only what has become patently obvious to most of us, dare I say, to all of us, whether we choose to lend voice to it or not:

We are in the middle of an undeclared civil war. We have been in such a thing before, and we’ve found the capacity to make comedy out of it. When Archie Bunker fought over petty, meaningless nonsense with “Meathead” on All in the Family, as a society we were supposed to be torn down the middle over some pretty heady stuff: What to do about Vietnam/Korea/Red China, and the spread of communism. Watergate. Feminism. Abortion. But it really came down to lifestyles. People didn’t bring the lifestyles up in arguments, but the lifestyles started the arguments. Archie Bunker wore stiff white shirts, drank beer, and ordered his wife around. Meathead wore patched blue jeans with flared legs, had long hair, and probably smoked opium. Archie had short hair, Meathead had long hair. Archie hung out in a bar, Meathead hung out, well, God-knows-where.

Archie and Meathead represented tribes, going-at-it just like the egg-opening people in Gulliver’s Travels. Who is doing things the “right” way? That was the central question. Pro-war and anti-war was just a derivative, red-herring issue.

The kids who were born when this show came out, have furnished the ranks of this American Castrati movement. The War on Terror is, once again, just a derivative, red-herring issue. Of course they think it’s “wrong”, but what was really wrong was the making of the decision to go to war — it doesn’t fit in their culture. Some of the questions that really agitate people into apoplectic rage, are cultural questions, and some of those questions have nothing to do with the war. ER, or 24? Red meat, or tofu? Shiraz, or Coors Light? Birkenstocks, or hiking boots?

This is really bizarre, because our elections are running kind of close, and yet so much is riding on them. We really do have a decreasing, but all-important, “Undecided Vote” consisting of people who, somehow, are purely up-for-grabs by one side or another, depending on who can present the most compelling argument.

If you’re anti-war, and you want to persuade the undecided to your side, would it not make a great deal more sense to say — “I don’t care if you talk like Joel Stein or not, so long as you join me in opposing the war” — rather than — “I don’t care if you support the war or oppose the war, so long as you avoid any definite statements the way Joel Stein does”? In other words, to keep your arguments issue-specific and culture-neutral? The former of those two, would gather agreement from the American Castrati, at least in letter. But in spirit, judging from their actions and what they say, I notice a lot of them sign up more enthusiastically to the latter. They put down NASCAR, and Wal-Mart, and hunting — fearless of the prospect that someone might say “I was thinking about supporting your position, but I’m a NASCAR fan, I shop at Wal-Mart, and I hunt.” This prospect, which gathers potential as an audience swells, doesn’t seem to intimidate anyone. Against their best interests, they tend to keep cultural items at the nexus of their condemnation.

So it’s a cultural issue. It is the recognition of simplicity, and reaction to that simplicity, that really offends the Castrati. That some questions can be resolved easily, with no looking back, and no price to be paid for failing to masticate over the issue endlessly, that really agitates them. In their world, everything is up for perpetual and endless debate, save for the excoriation of those who fail to support perpetual and endless debate. Like a future ex-wife during one of the last, heated, unproductive midnight arguments, everything is subject to a question beginning with those five magic words “what do you mean by…?”

This isn’t about pro-war and anti-war. It’s about two kinds of people, two tribes, each of which would just as soon banish the other to non-existence. People talk around it, but that’s what is really going on.

Update: Since this is “Memo For File” within “The blog that nobody reads,” I labor under no self-imposed obligation to to articulate any pressing need for anybody else to notice such a thing as the swelling ranks of the American Castrati and the undeclared war they wage on the rest of the country. But there may very well be a pressing need to notice. Take a look back at Van Der Leun’s essay again:

The voice and the kids that carry it is the triumphant achievement of our halls of secondary and higher education. These children did not speak this way naturally, they were taught. And like good children seeking only to please their teachers and then their employers, they learned.

Consider the ramifications of this.

Joel Stein did not speak this way naturally, he was taught. Presumably, at Stanford, before he graduated from there in ’93.

If Joel Stein was taught to speak this way at Stanford, or some other factory outlet of higher-education, other kids were taught to speak this way at that facility as well.

If kids are being taught to speak this way at one facility, it stands to reason they are being taught to speak at other factory outlets of higher-education.

These aren’t randomly-selected inductees. These are our future corporate directors and vice-presidents. Dignitaries, esteemed invited speakers, shakers-and-movers, upper-crusters. In short, those who hoist the mantle of authority, and privilege, and obligation, to tell others what to think.

They have been taught to abhore real decision-making. They look at it the way “Meathead” looked at a chunk of read meat disappearing between Archie’s lips. As a bit of deplorable cultural residue appreciated only by an anachronistic generation of old farts, who have the destiny and the duty to wither and die.

In short, tomorrow’s “leaders” nurture an ingrained hostility to the making of decisions. As I said earlier, their opposition to this war, isn’t so much opposition to the war itself or the decision that produced it, but to making of the decision. They chafe at the production of reasoned inferences by the channeling empirically known facts through a logical thinking process. They don’t like doing it, and they hate to see anybody else doing it. And they approve of strategies and commands and rules, only when said strategies, commands and rules are purely arbitrary — produced by something other than those reasoned inferences or empirically known facts. To produce a thing-to-do from an inference, or an inference from a fact, is just a big step backward as far as they’re concerned.

They don’t like doin’ it. They’re offended when anybody else does it. Through the swelling ranks of the Castrati, a devastating assault is being mounted against what we speak of when we use the word “leadership.” There may be reasons to believe leadership will withstand this assault, but I don’t see any.

And in my lifetime, those who hate deciding things, and hate people who decide things, will in fact decide everything that matters.

Something to worry about? Form your own opinion. I’ve formed mine.

Update 5/11/06: Van Der Leun has his own blog, upon which I failed to stumble at the time I was assembling the links for this post. Pretty good stuff, deserving of a direct-link somewhere, so there ya go. I’ll put it in the sidebar when I get a minute.

Thing I Know #30. A lot of people who crusade against absolutes, employ absolutes quite frequently, especially while crusading against absolutes.
Thing I Know #31. He who does a noble, brave, heroic thing, tends to draw a seething hatred from he who could have done the noble, brave, heroic thing — but chose not to.

You can’t hide forever.
- Gerard | 05/11/2006 @ 05:16
He is right, you know. I found your blog through his link. Good stuff! I’ll be back often.

JCC
- RunningRoach | 05/11/2006 @ 10:59
[…] libs are not American Castrati, and all American Castrati are not libs. But this guy’s […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 10/19/2010 @ 06:20
[…] and how he pegged this a few years back with his observations about the American Castrati, which I snapped up just as fast as I could. If you focus on it, you realize that you hear this voice every day if you […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 02/22/2011 @ 21:25
[…] to when I first discovered the wonderful wisdom of blogger friend Gerard: You hear this soft, inflected tone everywhere that […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 10/08/2011 @ 10:16
[…] to it that denies it any unique character at all.” When I heard these words, I knew I was blogging this for […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 10/26/2011 @ 06:40

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Memo For File IIIWednesday, May 10th, 2006

Memo For File III
Wednesday, May 10th, 2006