The Ideological Assault on Society

by Kevin Lively

Helpful information leaflets distributed by the Ad Council in their 1976 campaign to educate the average American.

“-isms” are dangerous things. Weighty ideologies with wide sweeping narratives packed into a neat little bundle, whose slogans are repeated ad-nauseam until the word itself becomes the message and any empirical weight the narrative may have had recedes into the background. Capitalism, Marxism, Constitutional Originalism, Fascism, Liberalism, Socialism, Anarchism, Statism or Nihilism. Thinking in such terms, or worse self-identifying with them, is often the death knell of actual thought. Much more ominously: action in defense of the ideology gains a higher moral prerogative than the consequences of the action itself. The only reasonable course in drawing inspiration from such streams of thought is to choose to consciously grapple with the inherent messiness of the fact that no fixed system of beliefs will ever offer permanent solutions in a human society living on an exponential technological slope. Looking at population growth from a Malthusian perspective, an English lord who died almost a hundred years before the discovery of penicillin, seems almost as daft as criticizing labor relations in China for being Communist, where it doesn’t seem like the workers have much control over the means of production.

A striking aspect of very strong “-ism” people is how they tend to consciously or unconsciously mirror their supposed ideological rivals. For example, one of the best sources of quantitative Marxist analysis on wealth and power in society is the leading business newspaper the Financial Times (FT); with the caveat that all the values are reversed. This point is repeatedly brought up by the hosts of the alternative media outlet Novara Media who alternate between self-identifying as either Socialist or Communist, yet whose diverse roster of guests on their Downstream podcast from across the political spectrum almost all concur that FT is the world’s leading source of news. For college students, maybe these “-isms” are not so dangerous, unless they happen to hold green-cards and their “-isms” run afoul of the present US administration. The real danger to society at large is when people wielding inordinate amounts of power and influence and who, crucially, are unaccountable to the public, are true believers in one “-ism” or another. Read more »

Monday, August 1, 2011

The Three Categories of Television Food Show

by Akim Reinhardt

TheCookingChannel Over the last twenty years or so, there has been a proliferation of food shows on television, both here in the U.S. and abroad. In America, The Food Network has been dedicated to that format sincethe 1990s, and a host of other channels also dabble in the genre.

It’s not going out on any kind of limb to say that these shows tend to be somewhat reductionist in their approach to food. Therefor, I feel perfectly justified in being a little reductionist in my approach towards these shows; turnaround’s fair play, after all. And in that vein, it seems to me that all of these many shows can be divided among three basic categories that I’ve come up with to describe them.

Exotica– You’ve never heard of many of the ingredients. If you have, you probably can’t afford most of them, and lord knows where you might even find them. Only the finest kitchen tools and implements are used to prepare dishes with skill and panache, and the result is mouth watering perfection. Viewers are invited to live vicariously through the food. Yes, you want to eat it. You also want to write poetry about it. Something inside says you must paint it. You want to make love to it.

Exotica Some people are wont to refer to this type of programming as Food Porn. I think the term’s a bad fit. Food Romance Novel might be a more accurate, albeit clumsier moniker. With an emphasis on eroticizing foreign food by casting it as an idealized version of The Other, or perfecting domestic food to a generally unattainable degree, the Exotica approach is more about romanticizing with supple caresses, whereas real pornography is about mindlessly cramming random, oversized monstrosities into various orifices. And that’s actually a pretty apt description for our next category.

Dumb Gluttony– For the person who wants it cheap and hot, and served up by the shit load, there’s the Dumb Gluttony approach to television food shows. All you need is a handheld camera and an overweight host in a battle worn shirt, then it’s off to the diner, the taco truck, the hamburger stand, or the place where they serve a steak so large that it’s free if you can eat the whole thing in one sitting and not barf.

Read more »