This is another in a series of my discussion with Feodor. If you're out there, read on.
A few year back, conservative columnist David Brooks wrote a book entitled Bourgeois Bohemians, which did little more than earn him the sobriquet "Bobo". It was nothing more than an updated version of the term "limousine liberal". The latter term emerged in the 1960's, after the New York literati flirted with the radicalism of serious militants, including the Black Panthers.
A common complaint among some political radicals is that the bohemian tradition in America is actually an elite revolt against itself. Ronald Steele's biography of Walter Lippmann has snippets of this same phenomenon in pre-WWI America. What could be more ridiculous than the thought that students at Harvard University in the years of Teddy Roosevelt's and William Howard Taft's Presidencies were actually communists? Well, in fact, John Reed would die and be buried a hero in the Soviet Union, and Lippmann was a member of Reed's circle, celebrated by Reed for his embrace of socialism. Lippmann's one foray in to practical politics was a stint as an assistant to the socialist mayor of Schenectady, NY. Lippmann was also a regular at various bohemian salons in New York.
Harold Bloom wrote a book in the 1990's, The American Religion, in which he argued, by way of examples from American history, that gnosticism lies at the heart of the American pursuit of spiritual enlightenment. While I disagree with some of what Bloom has to say, there is no doubt that this trend extends far beyond the various religious traditions he traces. An examination of the radical tradition in the United States, at least its aestheticized, bohemian tradition, has more than a little of the gnostic about it. I also think the criticism that it is an elite revolt is both fair and also inconsequential. When are revolts not led by an elite against certain elements of whatever reigns as elite practice and opinion? What could have been more elite than the group gathered in Philadelphia, first in 1776, then eleven years later to rewrite the American Constitution? Who could have been more elite than the son of middle-level Russian nobility who led the Russian Revolution, having already written several theoretical works putting Marx's theories in a Russian context?
Who could be more elite than a blogger writing about this stuff?
The Grateful Dead has been on my mind as I have been contemplating my discussion with Feodor. They epitomize a strand of aetheticized American radical thought, apolitical yet socially radical nonetheless, gnostic in their appreciation for the mind-expanding possibilities of art and rejection of the then-reigning values embodied in post-WWII America. Dirty, frightening in their unruly looks and embrace of everything from Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters to the Hell's Angels, the Dead embraced all of life - the positive and the negative - in a way that is both almost touchingly naive and deeply American. They were not blind to the threat they embodied, but insouciant to the political dimension of their refusal to play by society's rules. Their entire ethos centered on the personally transformative potential of music. They lived it out night after night, trying to play something new, and to have the audience be a part both of the playing and the newness. On their first trip to New York, they received a pretty typical (for them) dismissal by rock critics as part of some supposed California elite, ignorant of and apathetic to the real issues facing the country. On the contrary, they were coming at those issues from a different angle, one that should have been familiar to New York radicals who only a few years before had hyped the folk revival embodied by purists like Pete Seeger and newcomers like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. The problem for the Dead was these three, in particular, were overtly and self-consciously politically radical as well as typifying a kind of bohemian aesthetic and lifestyle.
The quote that is the title of this post comes from an early-1980's interview with Jerry Garcia, in which he criticizes then-President Ronald Reagan. This sums up not just Garcia's views on Reagan, but a general approach to life that, I believe, is embodied in the best of the American pragmatist tradition, and embodied in the folk art tradition as well, including the folk music tradition, in which I put the Dead. After all, "Wharf Rat", "Franklin's Tower", and "Eyes of the World" from Garcia/Hunter, and "Me and My Uncle", "Mexicali Blues", and "Weather Report Suite" from Bob Weir are nothing more than folk songs played really loud. The American folk song tradition tells the stories of outsiders - criminals, the down-and-out - and does not so much celebrate those outside elite and polite society as it does simply portray the reality of that life (which is why, say, Snoop Dogg and NWA, Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. are also in this tradition moreso than, say, MC Hammer; they are just reporting from a different context and history).
The political dimension - and I daresay the philosophical dimension as well - of this tradition is both the rawness of and openness to all that life has to offer. It neither accepts nor rejects what comes, it simply faces it squarely. Part of my own embrace for this openness, which includes a refusal to get down and dirty and settle moral issues once and for all, comes (ironically enough) from reading a German theologian. Dietrich Bonhoefer's Ethics fragments, includes a discussion in which he turns Nietzsche's post-morality on its head. For Nietzsche, morality was a playground for infants; true humanity only emerged once one rejects good and evil. Bonhoeffer does one better than the anti-Christ from Basel, however, and says, "Yes, indeed. But moving on past notions of good and evil is only possible in a Christian context." Bonhoeffer specifically states that a Christian ethic that centers on the question of good and evil, on morality versus amorality, is a sign of human fallenness and sin. Christian ethics, properly owning that name, concerns itself only with doing God's will. Getting in to questions of "good" versus "evil" is a sign that we are not centered on God's will, but still under the spell of the serpent and the apple.
The willingness to be open to all that life has to offer - the good and the bad, the Puckish and the Violent, the dark and the light - takes courage. It also takes a certain sense of humor. Finally, it has to be taken with the understanding that none of this - not even death - is the final answer. This is the way the Dead approached their art and their lives, collectively and individually. There is something deeply familiar, deeply attractive for me, in this approach. It may not satisfy all sorts of tests of intellectual rigor, or political correctness, but it does have the virtue of being honest, even in its naivete.
Virtual Tin Cup
