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Popular Culture Review
“stuff,” and it takes a lot of courage to write as candidly and openly as he does,
but as Dewey might say, it has stuff to it—not in it. Yet the only stuff (or thing)
that’s missing is the voice of the pedant (the antiquarian, as Nietzsche called us)
who says “we’ve heard it all before,” and supplies all the scholarly details,
whether we asked for them or not. That’s where 1 come in—I’m happy to play
that part in our tragi-comedy. And it’s a good thing (for me) that 1 can make
some contribution to the drama—for after reading Steeves’s book, 1 felt more
than the usual envy mixed with awe. My anxiety of influence was such that I
didn’t know what to say, or whether there was anything left to do. No doubt 1
should have quit while I was behind, but something impelled or inspired me to
prove 1 wasn’t entirely superfluous, or utterly “de tropp,” as Cole Porter has it.
So if baby I’m the bottom, you’re the top. But the last shall be first—or that’s
my line. Borrowed, but then my whole point is that nothing is new under the
sun. Which may be my sole claim to originality, in the shadows of the
overpopulated cave.
Records were meant to be broken—and by the same logic, preserved
and even dusted off every now and then for posterity. It doesn’t matter if we lift
a finger to acknowledge our debt to history, so long as we don’t deny it.
Standing on the shoulders of giants, yet squinting to see further afield. To those
who invent the wheel, or reinvent it after a lapse of collective memory, priority
claims don’t matter, nor does learning from the past (in order to avoid repeating
it, or better still, to add to it in some way). We are a cyclical, if not a Sisyphean
species: we have to keep relearning the same lessons, just to get back to
whatever heights we once scaled or reached. We might have listened to our
ancestors, like Hamlet heeding a ghost or two. Or we might pool our collective
memory (aka history) and distill it in a Proustian moment of nostalgia and
regret, if not one of Platonic reawakening. It was Emerson who warned us not to
court (much less wed) the courtly muses of Europe or to succumb to sirens of
long-decadent cultures, thus sacrificing ourselves at the altar of imitation and
losing any chance to be ourselves.T hat’s a strange thing to say, given where
most of us Yankees come from, but then we’re a strange people—and
philosophers are the strangest breed of all.
Of course, cultural chauvinism is both narrow and obnoxious; we’ve
seen too much of it, especially in the last century, to be deceived by claims
rooted in the rhetoric of blood and soil, or the fanaticism of avocation,
misplaced zeal, and theocratic absolutes. But claims that aren’t rooted in our
experience, not just as individuals but as a people, are su spect, even (or
especially) when they become popular—“the thing,” but not the “real thing.”
(Camille Paglia has made much of this point, and in this respect she is quite
right). We have enough home-grown alienation to go around, which is why we
are so obsessed with aliens—both local, who are indeed strangers in their own
house, and extra-terrestrial, voices from beyond the grave of our own
disillusions. Yet there’s a cure, a remedy for what ails us, and we can find it in
our science,*’ our philosophy (pragmatism, idealism, transcendentalism, all of