October 2nd, 2016
10-02-2016Speaking Dangerously
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Arendt in conversation with Günter Gaus for his segment, Zur Person[/caption] A number of years ago amidst the effort in California to eliminate state benefits for immigrants, I became aware of how arguments from constitutional authority can be dangerous. Over and again I heard opponents of the referendum insist the referendum was unconstitutional. They were right. And I heard proponents of the referendum argue why they thought benefits for immigration were a mistake. The referendum won handily. It was later declared unconstitutional. But the non-debate taught me a fundamental political principle. Constitutional arguments belong in the courts. In politics, argue on the merits; don’t retreat to constitutional principle. If we defend something we value, for example free speech, by appealing to its constitutional status and its historical importance, there is a danger that we will forget why free speech matters. To read the rest of this piece, please continue on to Medium here.
Tourism in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Gideon Lewis-Kraus on the aesthetics of travel photography:
"The travel writer, at least, had to sit down and actually bash it all out, which gave him or her some measure of self-respect. The travel photographer had it worse. The right to call itself art rather than mere mechanism had been photography’s struggle since the medium was invented, but now practitioners had to differentiate their efforts from the unstudied shutter-clicks of rank amateurs. The problem grew even more dire as travel photography transitioned from a hobby to perhaps the ultimate signifier of the inauthentic and the conformist. In his 1954 essay “The Loss of the Creature,” Walker Percy imagines a sightseer upon his first approach to the Grand Canyon: “Instead of looking at it, he photographs it. There is no confrontation at all. At the end of forty years of preformulation and with the Grand Canyon yawning at his feet, what does he do? He waives his right of seeing and knowing and records symbols for the next forty years.” In this case, the travel photographer has committed the original sin: His job is to create the ideal image against which the multitudes will inevitably find their own experiences wanting. The travel photographer is thereby caught in a bind. Either he is no better than the desultory tourist, or he is responsible for the fact that our experiences rarely resemble the advertisements or postcards. By now, Percy’s contempt for this cliché — the traveler so busy with documentation that he misses out on some phantom called the “experience itself” — has itself become a cliché. But we are not much closer to resolving the fundamental paradox of travel, which is just one version of the fundamental paradox of late-capitalist life. On the one hand, we have been encouraged to believe that we are no longer the sum of our products (as we were when we were still an industrial economy) but the sum of our experiences. On the other, we lack the ritual structures that once served to organize, integrate and preserve the stream of these experiences, so they inevitably feel both scattershot and evanescent. We worry that photographs or journal entries keep us at a remove from life, but we also worry that without an inventory of these documents — a collection of snow globes for the mantel — we’ll disintegrate. Furthermore, that inventory has to fulfill two slightly different functions: It must define us as at once part of a tribe (“people who go to Paris”) and independent of it (“people who go to Paris and don’t photograph the Eiffel Tower”).Form more information visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/magazine/what-we-see-when-we-look-at-travel-photography.html
"We Have Met The Enemy and He Is Us"
"I came to Waycross because a friend told me that in the 1980s, the town had marketed itself as the home of Pogo Possum, which seemed like an absurd pitch, even to a fan of the strip like myself. By 1987, the year of Waycross’s first Pogofest, Pogo had been defunct for a decade and a half and was long past its pre-Flower-Power-era sell-by date. Fetishism and irony had not yet merged to resurrect every pop-cultural fad of the postwar era, and anyway, we’re talking about southern Georgia, not Brooklyn or Portland. Pogo’s winking political allegories—a parody of the Dixiecrat stance on school desegregation, a plotline about the John Birch Society (renamed “the Jack Acid Society”)—had targeted a political consensus widely held in Waycross at the time, so it was hard to imagine its residents responding with anything more enthusiastic than skepticism. On the second floor of City Hall, a large, attractive Mission Revival building that seems to be the only place open downtown, I find a display of commemorative Pogofest buttons, signs for trash cans (“Pogo’s cleaning up Waycross, ARE YOU?”), pencils, beer koozies, golf shirts— just about anything that could be emblazoned with an image and the name of the town. I learn how Walt Kelly’s widow, Selby (herself an accomplished cartoonist who would helm a short-lived revival of the strip) was flown in for Pogofest’s opening night, which was held in a stadium that once housed a Milwaukee Braves farm team. The wife of a festival committee member sewed a Pogo costume so the event could have a suitable mascot; she added a little shirt to the original design to alleviate concerns about the nudity of Waycross’s most famous resident. Then-governor Zell Miller declared Pogo the official Georgia State ‘Possum. There was a parade. Outside, CSX boxcars rumble past the abandoned railroad depot, pushing swampy heat across the asphalt. The train doesn’t even slow down. Against the clouds, Pogo salutes me with his too-thin, off-colored paw: Hi! Welcome! Come back soon! Wasn’t Pogofest the type of idea barely solvent towns pay marketing consultants millions of dollars to avoid? Who was Pogofest supposed to appeal to, besides—thirty years after the fact—me? I pose the question to Janice Parks, a former city commissioner. “Well, look what a rat did for the wasteland of Central California,” she says."Form more information visit: https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/bigger-than-disneyland/