Try Acting Normal

Don't let the culture war destroy your brain

The 2000s reached their atmospheric apex for me on a muggy summer day in Oneonta, New York. It was June 10, 2007, the summer before my senior year of high school, and I was on vacation with my parents. We had been to Cooperstown, where I had purchased a fitted Tigers cap to put over my skater-boy helmet of hair. I had just gone for a twilight training run that took me along the edge of a gravel pit and down to a river that was lined with flimsy old houses rotting in a way that couldn’t be accomplished in the dry air back home. When I went back to our motel room, we had the good luck to catch the final episode of The Sopranos.

As it would turn out 15 years or so later, aspirationally highbrow dudes in my generation seem to rewatch The Sopranos more than any piece of media from the 2000s. The only plausible competition comes from Master and Commander.

Just guys being dudes.

I’ve previously written about Master and Commander in this very newsletter. The 2003 movie has had quite the revival over the past few years, so I’ll spare you a summary beyond a reminder that it’s a very good movie about a Royal Navy adventure during the Napoleonic Wars. I’ve also come to value the Patrick O’Brien novels on which it’s based, which are better than you probably suspect.

I was reminded of the hipster (though largely sincere) embrace of Master and Commander among my cultural compatriots by this New York Times trend piece about some sententious right-wingers:

Their rhetoric can sound expansive to the point of opacity. “As the great men of the West bequeathed their deeds to us, so must we leave a legacy for our children,” the group’s website proclaims. “The works raised by our hands to this end will last long after we are buried.”

Their output, so far, looks more modest. Mr. Kressin’s home chapter has hosted an expert in menswear, who exhorted members to dress in a “classical American style,” and a screening and discussion of the 2003 naval adventure film “Master and Commander.” The men socialize outside of meetings and pass each other business.

That’s a very funny pair of paragraphs. You have to hope everyone involved can see the humor. On the one hand, you’re out there Saving the West; on the other, the form salvation takes is tucking in your shirt and watching a movie that is, if anything, even more beloved by the cosmopolitan urban leftists you so despise.

The thrust of the piece is that the right-wing intelligentsia, such as it is, has some prominent members who are moving away from places like DC and California to places like Idaho and Tennessee. Again, there’s something funny about the idea that it’s notable for Republicans to move to red states, but the Times can always be relied on to ogle at the novelty of anyone wanting to live more than an hour’s drive from a Danny Meyer restaurant.

It’s easy to imagine why right-wing intellectuals who are dedicated to developing a high-concept, supposedly revitalized Anglo-American cultural identity might be into a movie that does not strive for critical distance from the British Empire. Master and Commander is about male friendship, adventure, and sacrifice; it was made before it became common to have characters turn to the camera to do disclaimers about how We’re All Aware of the Issues. So sure, nothing in the movie strictly prevents someone who makes a living writing tendentious blog posts about the Orwellian nature of the Child Tax Credit from enjoying themselves.

But I’m tempted to speculate. I can’t prove that these guys are sitting there telling each other that watching a good flick is a transgression against the Woke Cultural Marxist Regime, but that’s the feeling I get when I read that Times piece. It’s hard to imagine them interpreting any movie through a lens more generous than the narrow aperture of a culture war that has, after all, built their careers and now appears to be guiding their wardrobe choices.

One of the saddest side effects of our culture war is that boring people (e.g., Bari Weiss, the intellectual and discursive equivalent of a glass of tap water left out overnight) and mundane ideas get to adorn themselves in the glamor of danger. You can start to talk yourself into thinking that The Wokes don’t want you to do something completely unremarkable—reading Mansfield Park, let’s say, or watching Sunset Boulevard—and that in doing it, you’re making some confusing point about Western Civilization.

Before sitting down to write this, I took a walk around the town in Wyoming where I was raised and where I once again live. I waved at several people who were out and about on a lovely mid-summer day, including an old fella who was sitting on his stoop drinking a beer. If you can believe it, neither of us asked the other about politics. Along the way, I counted yard signs for the campaign of an acquaintance who’s running for county commission. I even managed to swing by downtown to buy a coconut water without being assailed by the woke secret police. I didn’t intentionally touch grass, though I did have to sidestep a few lilac bushes that were reaching out onto the sidewalk.

There’s nothing uniquely American about any of this, except that it represented acting like a human being and a member of a community on a nice summer day that happened to take place in America. My advice to these guys, once they figure out how to tuck in their shirts, is to spend less time online and more time outside the house acting normal. I can promise you Jack Aubrey would approve.

If you would be open to eventually supporting this newsletter as a paid subscriber, please use the button below to make a pledge. I promise to give you lots of advance notice before turning on payments, and if and when I do go paid, there will be extra content for paid readers to make it worth your while. Thank you!

At least one subscriber told me the button didn’t work for them; it’s supposed to show up as a “pledge” button if you’re already subscribed. I couldn’t find a way to troubleshoot this other than trying again, but let me know if there are issues.

Calvin and Hobbes Corner

At this hour?

In Calvin and Hobbes, salvation is either tranquil or ironic. By which I mean, when things really do resolve themselves for Calvin, the resolution is something like rolling on the carpet with Hobbes, alongside a roaring fire, with a comic book. That’s tranquility; a moment of simple peace, rather than a satisfaction of Calvin’s eternally un-satisfiable grandiosity.

Indeed because of his grandiosity, irony is visited on Calvin at every turn. What he frames as a sincere—in fact, intergalactic—effort to do his homework becomes yet another trespass that riles up his dad. If Calvin could just act normal, as per the above, things might go smoothly, but of course his failure to ever do so is what drives the story forward.

A Poem

C.D Wright is feeling painfully beautiful.