Modern life

Although some have claimed that the “cancel culture” doesn’t really exist, a nationwide Zogby Analytics poll of likely voters recently found that a narrow plurality (37 percent) supported cancel culture, with 32 percent opposed and 30 percent “not sure.” Some of the poll details are interesting: support was stronger among men than among women, and stronger in the East than in the Midwest; the strongest support was among younger voters, 18-29 and 30-49, whereas the strongest opposition was among voters over 65; and also—surprisingly, at least to me—opposition was strong among the youngest group, 18-24. Self-styled conservative voters were equally split between support and opposition to the cancel culture,

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Museum directors, college deans, and newspaper editors take note.

A few weeks ago a petition spearheaded by a San Francisco Bay Area high school senior was submitted to the Trader Joe’s supermarket company that included the following claim. “The Trader Joe’s branding is racist because it exoticizes [sic] other cultures — it presents ‘Joe’, as the default ‘normal’ and the other characters falling outside of it … The common thread between all of these transgressions is the perpetuation of exoticism, the goal of which is not to appreciate other cultures, but to further other and distance them from the perceived ‘normal.’” These days such statements are followed by steely-eyed demands,

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I am a latecomer to the Jordan Peterson phenomenon. I haven’t read any of his books but I have listened to numerous lectures and interviews. A 2018 interview with NYU professor Jonathan Hardt, founder of the Heterodox Academy,  about the causes for the unravelling of the contemporary university touched me close to home. Peterson appeared on the social media battlefield after involving himself in a free speech controversy with the University of Toronto, his employer. Peterson’s views have made him a lightning rod for radical left-wing critics who have trotted out the usual accusations: hate-speech mongerer,

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It was the great Cole Porter’s birthday on June 9. In 1934 he wrote the musical Anything Goes. 

The world has gone mad today
And good’s bad today
And black’s white today
And day’s night today . . .
And though I’m not a great romancer
I know that you’re bound to answer
When I propose
Anything goes

Seems about right.

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I note that Christo Javacheff passed away recently. I was not a fan of his work. On the occasion of his and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates project in Central Park I wrote in 2005 in Slate: “Jeanne-Claude has been quoted as saying that she thinks that Olmsted would be “very happy” with the installation. My guess is that he would have hated it.”

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In 1973, my friend Martin Pawley published The Private Future: Causes and Consequences of Community Collapse in the West. According to his  Guardian obituary (he died in 2008) the book “foresaw a society with ever greater technical means of communication becoming paradoxically more insular and dysfunctional.” Here is an extract (which appeared in full on the jacket of the original hardcover): “Alone in a centrally heated, air-conditioned capsule, drugged, fed with music and erotic imagery, the parts of his consciousness separated into components that reach everywhere and nowhere, the private citizen of the future will become one with the end of effort and the triumph of sensation divorced from action.

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