Category: Old Dish

Julian wonders whether non-Beltway insiders understand that most prominent people have ghostwriters penning “their” op-eds, books, etc., and whether there should be more outrage over this quasi-dishonesty. For my part, it’s never bothered me that a Times op-ed by, say, a U.S. Senator or the Secretary of Health and Human Services probably wasn’t written by the eminence themself – but I was shocked to find myself, during my first year in D.C., being introduced to a guy who ghostwrote for a syndicated columnist. I’m not sure what the difference is, exactly – I suppose there’s just something about a regular byline that made me assume, foolishly, that the “author” was writing the thing by himself.

This has been a Gregg Easterbrook pet peeve for many years, incidentally – though he tends to focus on praising celebrities and pols who credit their ghostwriters (like John McCain), and pillorying those who don’t (like Hillary Clinton, on both It Takes a Village and Living History).

FOR UNTO US A CHILD IS GIVEN: Unless, that is, you’re in Japan:

Japan’s population declined this year for the first time since the country began keeping demographic records in 1899, according to preliminary figures released by the government this week.

The decrease, which specialists say signals the start of an era of shrinking population, occurred two years earlier than had been expected . . . The number of deaths outnumbered births by 10,000 this year, according to statistics released by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. Excluding wartime figures, the number of births, at 1.067 million, was the lowest since records have been kept; births dropped 44,000 from the previous year.

. . . Japan’s current population of 128 million is expected to fall to 100 million by 2050 and to 64 million by 2100 if current trends continue.

And on that cheery note, Merry Christmas!

– posted by Ross

Unfortunately, I think Matt Yglesias is right, and this Fred Barnes column – on why most Americans aren’t more optimistic about the state of the economy – doesn’t do the work it sets out to do. Maybe there’s plenty of micro-level data showing that things are getting better for the average worker, and the Bush Administration just isn’t talking up the right data, but Barnes’s examples don’t prove that point:

Yet there’s a strong case Bush and his aides can make for impressive economic gains at the individual level. True, rising healthcare costs have cut into the gains, but tax reductions have helped. By citing micro numbers or fleshing out macro numbers, the administration would convey this message: it’s not just you who’s doing well. Most Americans are. The country is.

For instance, there’s the growth in per capita disposable personal income from $26,424 in 2003 to $27,001 in 2004 and $27,365 in 2005. That’s not all. In November, hourly wages were up 3.2 percent. And people are able to spend more. Real personal consumption spending has risen nearly 3 percent in the past year. True, these last two numbers are macro, but they’re ones people can understand.

But if the last two numbers are macro, then we’re left with only the growth in per capita disposable personal income to prove the micro-point – and any “per capita” number is easily skewed by large gains in the upper brackets that don’t necessarily extend to the median worker. Which is exactly what’s been happening of late, so far as I can tell – the well-off are getting better-off, and the median American income is stagnating. This isn’t disastrous news – as Matt notes, we’re a pretty rich country, and even with some stagnation our median income is the envy of most of the world. And the rich-getting-richer phenomenon isn’t necessarily the fault of George W. Bush or the GOP in general, as even Paul Krugman was obliged to admit recently. But it’s still something that Republicans need to grapple with more seriously than they have – because the trend is likely to continue, as globalization drive down wages for blue-collar workers while the premium for a college diploma goes up and up; and because a lot of those median-income Americans with stagnating incomes belong to the GOP’s base.

– posted by Ross

Julian raises an interesting point – is it even meaningful to talk about a “culture war” in the internet age, when the idea of a common mass culture seems as dead as Betamax? This was Terry Teachout’s point, too, in a recent Commentary essay that’s unfortunately in their for-pay archives (bastards!), but that I tried to summarize and respond to here. Essentially, Teachout’s thesis is that “the common culture of widely shared values and knowledge that once helped to unite Americans of all creeds, colors, and classes no longer exists,” and that instead “we now have a ‘balkanized’ group of subcultures whose members pursue their separate, unshared interests in an unprecedented variety of ways.”

I think this is true, up a point – nobody who’s wandered through Comcast’s 300-odd channels or wasted a day online would deny that American culture is in certain ways more fragmented than ever before. But I think there’s still something of a common culture, broadly construed – or more accurately, I think there are two cultures, one highbrow and one lowbrow, which interact in various ways but which are increasingly distinct from one another. These two common cultures aren’t necessarily defined in terms of a single television show that everyone watches, but each one has a set of shared values, assumptions, interests and habits – all of which may manifest themselves in a wide variety of shows and books and movies and websites, but which are held in “common” nonetheless. So for instance, one set of highbrow types might spend their spare time reading literary bloggers, while another set spends theirs downloading Arcade Fire or British Sea Power from iTunes. But both of these sets probably consider the New Yorker the last word in highbrow journalism, read the Sunday Times regularly, aspire to send their kids to elite universities, laugh along with Jon Stewart (even if they don’t watch The Daily Show every night) and so on and so forth. They don’t share all the same tastes, in other words, but they speak the same cultural language.

And this is even more true in the lowbrow realm, where people are more likely to have their tastes in music, film and books – and their attitudes and mores – shaped by an increasingly homogenized and consolidated culture industry. The front table at Barnes and Noble narrows the options for readers; the book tables at Wal-Mart even more so. Local radio stations are owned by national behemoths; the movie industry is dependent for its profits on 15 or 20 blockbuster movies every year; and there are 300 channels, sure – but the fact that one person watches “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” while another watches “Trading Spaces” and a third favors “Live with Regis and Kelly” doesn’t mean that they aren’t partaking of a common culture.

WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, REINHOLD NIEBUHR?: So, returning to the original question, what does this mean for Christianity? Simply, this: that America has a lowbrow culture that’s still pretty religious, but whose religiosity tends to be, well, lowbrow – a lowest-common-denominator mix of self-help spirituality and New Age mush. And the highbrow culture, meanwhile, isn’t religious at all: it’s not anti-religion, exactly, but it definitely considers religious belief an oddity and an anachronism, and orthodox Christian belief dangerously close to fanaticism. Which is one of the reasons that most religiosity in America is so lowbrow – because the highly intelligent people who might elevate the level of religious discourse have their faith leeched out of them by their immersion in the highbrow, in its assumptions and its prejudices. And the people who complain about this – about how we don’t have any more Reinhold Niebuhrs, and isn’t it a tragedy? – tend to be exactly the people who in an earlier era would have been the Niebuhrs, but who now partake of what Richard John Neuhaus once called “the pleasures of regretful unbelief.”

What we need, then – and by “we” I mean Christians, though I obviously think there would be benefits to non-Christians as well – is a more highbrow Christianity, and one that doesn’t prostrate itself on the altar of political correctness, as token highbrow Catholics like Garry Wills are wont to do. Perhaps “culture war” is the wrong word to use in this context, since we don’t necessarily need more Christians making the case against same-sex marriage, or pushing all their chips into the battle over courthouse displays in Alabama. We need more Christians writing good novels and essays and doctoral theses, and television shows and movies and music – all of which might inter alia make the case for a Christian understanding of, say, sexuality, but which would be primarily works of art and intellect and not polemics, creating a cultural space rather than just a political movement.

We can’t expect any favors: The doors of highbrow American culture have been closed against that sort of thing for decades now, and you can’t expect the New Yorker or the New York Times to just throw them open – why should they? They’re content with the world they’ve made, in which Philip Pullman is a hero, C.S. Lewis is a sad “prisoner” of his religious belief, science is always under assault from fundamentalism and monotheism is an easy whipping boy for all of history’s ills. Christians keep insisting that this world has it all wrong, of course, but it’s not enough to say it – we need to show them.

But there’s no reason to be discouraged – after all, we’ve done it before . . .

– posted by Ross