Vive la revolution!

I recently read two articles that gave me pause, highlighting as they did my chronic dual-mindedness:

First, a piece in the September 19, 2011 New Yorker — Louis Menand (I heart you, Louis Menand) writing about the critic Dwight Macdonald: “The liberal highbrow…was a wonderful mid-twentieth-century type. I met a lot of people like that growing up, people who managed to combine unequivocal support for principles like equal rights and freedom of speech with flagrant cultural elitism.” [Emphasis is mine.]

Menand goes on to suggest that such people “thought of their cultural preferences in exactly the same way that they thought of their political principles: as positions that, if everyone adopted them, would make for a better world.”

Ugh. This made my stomach hurt —I am already fighting the quaintness of being an early nineties “type.” How alarming to find myself identifying with “a wonderful mid-twentieth-century  type”?!

I haven’t had a television since 1990 —when they killed off my favorite character Gary on Thirty Something. I try to avoid much of the ugly, vacant, redundant crap of mainstream American culture, in spite of my undergraduate critical theory training, which urged me to embrace all manner of tripe and elevate it to the status of art. I hold very firm ideas about beauty, and the value that artistic endeavors do (or don’t, in my opinion) have, and honest to goodness, it pains me to read lousy sentences, watch almost anything on television [with the noted exception of some truly excellent HBO series, and, um, True Blood —Eric the Viking Vampire. Yes, I have a type.]

I don’t think my taste is necessarily elitist—I’d rather attend a metal show than go to the opera —but my deeply held convictions about what’s good, bad, and ugly in an aesthetic sense border on the dogmatic. Truly, if everybody agreed with my cultural preferences, the world would be a better place. I realize this kind of thinking is at the root of far more problematic ideas. But I wasn’t clear on exactly why until I read a second article, in the September 2011 issue of W.

This piece caused me to experience an upsurge of democratic sentiment. Writing on “the demise of fashion criticism,” the author, Troy Patterson, asks: “Will the brave new mediaverse produce any pundits of [Hilary] Alexander’s stature?” (Alexander, for 25 years one of the most discerning critical eyes in the fashion industry, is leaving London’s Daily Telegraph to —God love her— take classes in archaeology.) The International Herald Tribune’s Suzy Menkes, another arbiter of taste in the fashion world, observed that “[Alexander’s] retirement is definitely a sign that the great pillars of 20^th century fashion are coming down.”

Handwringing about the demise of anything except endangered species and etiquette strikes me as pointless melodrama. But that aspect of the piece only irritated me. What inflamed the liberal principles Menand identified as essential to a certain “mid-twentieth century type” was a quote in Patterson’s article from fashion’s most insufferable weenie,  Michael Kors: “Am I interested to hear what people whom I respect have to say? Absolutely” says Michael Kors. “But when it’s a housewife in Peoria?”

I hadn’t made a clear connection between rejecting people’s taste and rejecting their right to have an opinion. (See note about problematic ideas, above.) Is it possible that Michael Kors will drag elistist ol’ me into the twenty-first century? Because my immediate reaction was this: One of the hazards of revolution (and we are undergoing a revolution here, yes?) is that all the gatekeepers lose their posts and HOUSEWIVES IN PEORIA get to have a say in things. Substitute day laborer, taxi driver, teenage girl —everybody can offer their opinion, and that is, from a political point of view, a goddamn good thing. Plus Michael Kors clothes are so boring, he should shut up.

So, there are two of me. Vive la revolution! But don’t let’s take to the streets in our sweatpants.