Weimar notes

Militants of the Communist Spartacist Uprising in Berlin, January 1919

When I finished Frank McDonough’s book The Weimar Years last month I had hoped to write a full review, but time, sickness, and a host of other complications meant I had to be content with a long paragraph in my non-fiction reading year-in-review. Unfortunately, the single-paragraph summation I hold myself to for those posts meant I could only raise a few issues that I had a lot of thoughts about, gesture toward them, and move on.

Here are two—both more or less about terminology or rhetoric—that I’ve been mulling anew under the influence of McDonough’s book and a few unrelated factors.

Right and left

After finishing The Weimar Years and celebrating Christmas, I caught up on some club episode of The Rest is History. The one I was most excited for was a live show Holland and Sandbrook presented at Royal Albert Hall last spring. The subject: Wagner.

Holland and Sandbrook begin their discussion by asking the audience to reconsider what they think they know about Wagner—a smart move. But this problem of terminology popped up immediately. You have heard it said, they essentially say, that Wagner is a right-wing figure, but I say unto you… he’s more of a left-winger. In their actual words, “a hippie.” But Wagner had “some right-wing opinions,” namely anti-Semitism. So: a leftie who is right-wing à la carte?

There’s an argument to be made for Wagner’s place on the left, given his role in the 1848 revolutions and his support for the overthrow of the Saxon monarchy as well as his generally bohemian lifestyle. But what precisely makes his anti-Semitism right-wing? And, from a certain kind of chest-thumping American view, supporting the overthrow of monarchies and seeking to create an all-encompassing national artform out of national myth could be spun as right-wing.

This was a great episode—and I especially appreciated Holland’s argument that Wagner’s music is not in itself anti-Semitic—but that left-right business neatly encapsulated much of my problem with this political frame.

Back to McDonough’s book. McDonough uses the language of left and right throughout but also, importantly, makes it clear what each of the dozen or so major German political parties of the 1920s wanted and stood for. Focusing on 1) goals, 2) methods, and 3) how these changed depending on circumstances explains much more, especially when it comes to the elephant in the room: the National Socialists—and yes, the Socialist part absolutely matters—who were themselves starkly divided along several political axes throughout the Weimar period. This is also considerably more helpful than a simple left-right spectrum when one reads of instances in which supposed opposites like the Nazis and the German Communist Party collaborated against the national government.

The terminology of right and left is rooted in a specific historical moment and the specific problems parties in that place and time argued and fought over. Unmoored from those specifics, I find it unserious. It’s a time-honored way to argue about vibes. I avoid it as much as possible when I teach modern history, invoking it only to give the point of view of people within the narrative I’m telling but not as neutral description.

“Democracy” vs this democracy

I didn’t get into the left-right thing in my paragraph on The Weimar Years but I did raise this question. Here’s what I wrote there:

But the epilogue, in which McDonough specifically blames Paul von Hindenburg for the death of “Weimar democracy,” is a bit of a fumble, as it is abundantly clear from McDonough’s own narrative—and even the earlier parts of the epilogue—that the Weimar Constitution had built-in weaknesses that were bound to weaken and undermine it. McDonough essentially faults Hindenburg for not believing in democracy hard enough. But if “democracy” in the abstract gave Germany this democracy in concrete, stubborn reality, it deserved to go.

Since finishing McDonough’s book I’ve browsed two new histories of Weimar from German historians: Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany, by Harald Jähner and Fateful Hours: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic, by Volker Ullrich. (In the course of writing this I’ve also learned of a history of Weimar by Katja Hoyer, due out this summer.)

All of these (minus Hoyer’s book, for obvious reasons) do a bit of two-step around the concept of democracy: when the authors write about “democracy,” they sometimes mean the specific constitutional arrangements of the Weimar Republic—who voted, how, under what circumstances, how the Reichstag was constituted, who became chancellor and what authority they had, etc—and sometimes the concept of Democracy, in the abstract. The defeat and destruction of Weimar democracy is a tragedy for them because it means a defeat of Democracy.

But to paraphrase Burke, abstract democracy is not to be found; it inheres in sensible objects. It is useless to talk about Democracy without talking about the specifics of a given democracy, and a given democracy is only as valuable as its institutions and—one ought to add—the people who are using it. And as I wrote above, Weimar democracy was flawed from its inception because of the specifics of how it was designed and functioned and what options it made possible. Unstable, ineffective, hamstrung both by the outcome of a war it wasn’t responsible for and diplomatic agreements to which it consented, and—in the hands of feckless and corrupt politicians of all parties including the supposedly egalitarian socialists—unable to represent the people, it was a failure as a democracy long before Hitler seized power.

As I finished reading McDonough’s account and looked through those two other books—one more obviously leftist-oriented but both moaning and lamenting for Democracy throughout—I had a strange realization. The effect of switching from the collapse of actual Weimar democracy to a lament or apologia for Democracy in the abstract is suspiciously similar to “Real socialism has never been tried.” Democracy attracts the same mulish defensiveness as socialism. Both are the object of unwarranted faith. Neither can be blamed when they fail.

A confession

I started The Weimar Years shortly after the Charlie Kirk murder. Political violence openly celebrated by one side of the culture seemed like a good reason to familiarize myself with the broader narrative of Weimar.

That was a mistake, as looking for a useable, “relevant” past almost always is. Unfortunately historians of Weimar are just as prone to it. In both Jähner’s and Ullrich’s books I did a quick search for “Trump, Donald” in the index and guess what I found? Dumb parallels to the present, mentions of a specific political bugbear that will date their books as badly as a book I have on Mussolini that keeps bringing up George W Bush.

But McDonough doesn’t make this mistake, which is one of the great values of The Weimar Years. Throughout he emphasizes contingency and particularity: that things could have turned out other than how they did, something he makes clear through his detailed political narrative, and that Weimar Germany was a unique time and place offering no easy comparisons to our own. Pretending that Weimar tells us something or gives us insight into our enemies because there was political violence and politicians said mean things about their opponents is glib and misleading—for both the past and the present. The specifics matter.

So I confess to beginning McDonough’s book for the wrong reasons, but am glad I read it and for the sensibility of his approach, which brought me back to my senses. The closer I looked at Weimar, the less I saw of us, now. Which is as it should be. Not that we can’t learn anything from it, but we won’t until we understand it on its own terms.

More to come

I’m still trying to strengthen my grasp of Weimar. Of the two other books I’ve looked at, I may read Ullrich’s on the basis of his two-volume Hitler biography. He intones the ritual laments for Democracy in the portions I’ve read but his treatment of some of the specific topics and people I looked up struck me as more balanced than Jähner’s, which celebrates the hedonism and decay of the time. I may end up holding out for Hoyer this summer, as her book on the German Empire, Blood and Iron, was exceptionally good.

Dispatches from the butt-covering trenches

Earlier this week I received an exciting curiosity: a paperback of The Maltese Falcon in a simulated Armed Services Edition design from Field Notes, my favorite notebook company. Armed Services Editions were pocket-sized paperback books made available for free to GIs during World War II. Over a hundred million ASEs were handed out over the course of the war, and servicemen could enjoy any one of 1300 titles—not including The Maltese Falcon, which Field Notes is belatedly adding to the corpus.

Field Notes’s Maltese Falcon. So cool I can’t stand it.

So this is a cool, fun project at the intersection of several of my interests—history, literature, World War II, and crime fiction—from a company I’ve patronized a long time (my oldest Field Notes are full of sketches and notes for my books, both old and forthcoming). And I’m glad to say the final product is mostly great.

I have no complaints about the quality, the design—which is indistinguishable from a real ASE—and the editorial choices in preparing the text of Hammett’s book, namely the original serialized magazine version. But Field Notes includes an introduction from a novelist who, after explaining the greatness of Hammett’s novel, its place in American crime and mystery fiction, and those editorial choices, drops in the dread one-line paragraph: “It is also a product of its time.”

From two pages of praise he turns to three and a half of apologizing for Sam Spade’s “misogyny,” for Hammett’s “century-old gender stereotypes,” that a villain is portrayed as Middle Eastern and that other characters speculate that he is a homosexual—both aggressions thus “other[ing] him”—and so forth. The novelist tries to muster some feeble goodwill for Hammett by assuring the right-thinking reader that Hammett “was a dedicated anti-fascist* and leftwing activist” and argues that Hammett was actually trying to subvert the benighted standards under which he labored.

It’s tiresome. Like that new edition of The Martian Chronicles I wrote about earlier this year, this is butt-covering on the part of the publisher, a cringing posture of “Don’t be mad at me!” Either introduce a great novel with an argument for its greatness—placing the burden of being a ninny upon the reader, who must decide whether or not to reject it at the first sign of disagreement—or don’t bother at all.

By all means, get yourself a copy of Field Notes’ ASE Maltese Falcon, but skip the introduction. It’s tedious but predictable—a known quantity—and at least the book isn’t censored (as far as I can tell). The other item I noted this week is more sinister.

While picking up some gifts for the kids at Barnes & Noble I stumbled across brand new Vintage editions of James Ellroy’s LA Quartet. Having read The Black Dahlia in college I’ve been meaning to read LA Confidential and the others for years, and considered seizing this opportunity to pick one up. But then I stumbled across this note on the copyright page:

While this book is an outstanding work in the genre, it is also firmly of the time and place—the American 1950s. This book may contain outdated cultural representations and language.

Not only does that first sentence make no grammatical sense—great job, Vintage—it somehow elides Ellroy’s historical fiction with reality, implying that the grungy, lurid world he evokes was the norm.

While this was a fairly standard butt-covering publisher’s note of the kind I’ve looked at here before, it raised my suspicions. After a minute of browsing I spotted a censored slur in an early chapter—rendered with the first letter and a dash—and a few others on adjacent pages. And it was only specific slurs; every other vile word typical of Ellroy’s dialogue was rendered intact.** As it happens, there was an old movie tie-in paperback of LA Confidential on the shelf nearby. I checked the new edition against the old one. Not a word in the original, no matter how offensive, is obscured in this way.

Vintage has censored Ellroy’s books. Further, they have censored them without indicating that they have done so.

I’ve been griping about this happening to long-dead authors for a while—Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie, et al—but Ellroy is still alive, still publishing, still giving his manic interviews. And I couldn’t help wondering—is there any other author who would be less cool with this? Part of the point of Ellroy’s fiction, like it or not, is confrontation. His work is in-your-face, gritty and grimy and disturbing to a punishing degree. Softening even part of it for some sensitive suburbanite who picked up an Ellroy novel not knowing what she (and it’s definitely she) is getting into doesn’t just betray Ellroy, it undermines his artistic purpose.

I checked Ellroy’s official website. I don’t know how personally involved he is with it, but he is either fine with the censorship—which seems out of character—or unaware of it. In an announcement for the new Vintage paperbacks, his site declares: “Same great books, great new look inside and out!”

Except that they aren’t the same.

An interesting and frustrating new wrinkle in this story. We’re not out of the woods yet. (Addendum: much like the Fleming estate did with the Bond novels, Ellroy’s audiobooks have been rereleased in censored versions, too.) In the meantime, continue to favor older, unexpurgated editions where you can find them, and always be alert to publisher meddling—even for living authors.

* Indeed, Hammett was such an honest, hardworking anti-fascist that his Stalinist lover Lillian Hellman publicly wished for the Russian conquest of Finland. If we’re worried about an author’s problematic views, why doesn’t that enter the picture?

** This is itself revealing of vast taboos that lie well beyond the scope of a blog post but are worth thinking about.

Betraying that they’ve never had a friend

Everyone once in a while the benighted YouTube algorithm serves up a winner. Here’s an excellent short video essay that was recommended to me this afternoon. I watched it based on the thumbnail alone. The subject: the deep friendships of great literary characters being interpreted as sexual relationships, a terminal cultural cancer that never fails to annoy me.

The host, of the channel Geeky Stoics, a channel I’ve never previously come across, invokes several examples of this internet-fueled trend* but mostly focuses on two: Frog and Toad,** heroes of Arnold Lobel’s warm, gentle, very funny children’s stories, and Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee of Lord of the Rings. These are apposite choices, since both are great favorites in the Poss household and both have been subjected to this perverted eisegesis for some time now.

From there he advances to latter-day male loneliness and the generally sorry state of friendship in the modern West, topics I care deeply about and that he treats with extraordinary concision and care. It’s a solidly presented, thought-provoking little video, and I strongly recommend it.

But what made this video especially good was the use of CS Lewis’s book The Four Loves to frame the discussion. Just last week on Substack I made the case for The Four Loves as an underrated Lewis book, a late work brimming with his mature thought on the different aspects of love—its forms, objects, and enactments as affection, friendship, eros, and the theological virtue of charity. The video essay begins with a line from the chapter on friendship that I’ve thought about many, many, many times, especially when some smug terminally online type starts not so much insinuating as narrating the imaginary deviance of characters like Frodo and Sam:

“Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.”

— CS Lewis

As I said, I have plenty of occasions to remember this line, but never as a gotcha—what it reveals is too sad for that.

The one point where I think the video misses a potentially fruitful nuance relates to class: while Frog and Toad are quite obviously peers, similarly situated in life, Frodo and Sam are a master and servant—Tolkien explicitly compared them to a British officer of the First World War and his batman. This does not preclude deep genuine friendship, something moderns struggle to understand and that the Peter Jackson movies mostly obscure. Just as we moderns have lost much with our condemnation of exclusivity or discrimination in relationships, so our suspicion of rank, hierarchy, or any other form of “inequality” has closed off whole dimensions of human experience to us.

But that’s a relatively minor point. There’s much more to the video, including more of Lewis’s discussion of the distinctions between friendship—a side-by-sideness oriented toward a common interest or mission—and other forms of love. Check out both Geeky Stoics’ video and The Four Loves, which is even available in a shorter, earlier version narrated by Lewis himself.

* Related: See this recent long video by Hilary Layne on the widespread deleterious effects of fanfic, not the least of which is the “shipping” of often inappropriate combinations of characters. Layne has a companion piece on Substack here.

** Often described by people on social media with the strangely specific phrase “canonically gay.” There is no mention of Frog and Toad being anything other than friends in the stories, the first collection of which is called Frog and Toad are Friends, making me wonder what these illiterates think the adverb canonically means.

On “not sucking”

Two things I saw early last week that I thought a lot about even at the time, but that not long afterward took on much greater weight:

First, after a social media algorithm served up an amusing comedy routine about Christian rock, I explored the comedian’s other work. His brand is explicitly “exvangelical,” and in addition to the usual contemptible rants, complaints, and progressive exhibitionism of that demographic, he has an ongoing series of videos called “Christians Who Don’t Suck.” The most recent video at the time profiled Nat Turner.

Turner was a slave preacher in Southampton County, Virginia. Inspired by visions he claimed to have received from God, in the late summer of 1831 he led a slave revolt that killed around sixty people. In his master’s house, where he began the uprising during the night, his men killed a baby sleeping in a crib. At another house they killed a bedridden old woman. At another a three-year old boy recognized the slaves riding into the yard and ran to greet them; they decapitated him. At a farm where a schoolhouse had been built for local children, his men arrived just as the children were being told to flee. Turner’s men—by this time riotously drunk on hard cider—rode them down and dismembered ten of them with axes.

This, apparently, is “not sucking.”

Second, a history account that I follow on Instagram shared something related to abolitionist terrorist John Brown. In the comments, when someone mentioned Brown’s Pottawatomie massacre, in which Brown, his sons, and some accomplices hacked five men to death with custom-made broadswords, someone who thought himself very clever indeed replied: “Thus always to slaveholders.”

Here’s the thing: none of Brown’s victims owned slaves. They were family farmers who had a mere difference of opinion with Brown, who settled on them as suitable targets for retaliation following what he perceived to be recent pro-slavery victories in the news. For this, they were roused from bed in the middle of the night, led away from their farms over the wailing and pleading of wives and mothers, and hacked to pieces, with Brown personally administering coups de grâce with his revolver. He would go on to plot a rebellion that, had it been successful, would have killed tens of thousands. It failed, but not before sixteen had been killed.

This is, presumably, also “not sucking.” Indeed, to go by that commenter’s words, it’s apparently a standard to be striven for.

I don’t remember the order in which I saw these two posts, but I ran across them on Monday and Tuesday of last week. I found the gloating tone, the posturing and virtue signaling, and especially the moral blindness of both annoying but not especially surprising. The self-congratulatory upright can talk a lot of smack about the long dead, especially when they’re ignorant of the details.

Then Wednesday happened.

I don’t have anything new to say about last week’s public political murder, but the gloating, posturing, and moral blindness of the responses following the event brought these posts about Brown and Turner back to mind, albeit more sharply and painfully defined.

One of my favorite history professors in college mentioned, as an offhand comment during class one day, that one should always beware of those willing to murder on principle. (He may even have been talking specifically about John Brown.) It took me a long time to grasp fully what he meant. One should also beware of those willing to excuse murder on principle.

This is why one’s perception and interpretation of history matter. One’s understanding of the past inevitably informs the present, and excusing the violence of a Turner or a Brown because they had the correct opinions creates the same incentive structure in the present. The person who can celebrate the long-ago slaughter of ordinary people in the name of high-minded political principle can also—it is abundantly clear—celebrate and excuse murder today. They even get the added joy of revisiting the moment over and over on video.

If only there were a way to describe these people.

I teach both of these events—Nat Turner’s revolt and John Brown’s career of bloodshed in both Kansas and Virginia—in detail as part of US History I. Both stories are well enough documented and complicated enough to rubbish easy celebration. Students will all agree that slavery was bad, but they almost always recoil from what Turner and Brown did about it—a salutary moral challenge offering a moment of genuine openness. I’ve linked to decent online articles about both above, but the books I routinely recommend to students on these topics are The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion, by Stephen Oates, which is sympathetic to Turner’s plight as a slave but doesn’t soften or excuse the violence at all, and Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War, by Tony Horwitz. I’ve written about both here.

Crucially, while both books are about the evil men at the center of these stories, they also offer small points of hope, of people who actually “don’t suck.” During Turner’s revolt, a slave named Nelson saved the life of Lavinia Francis and her unborn child by hiding her from Turner’s men, and on the night of Brown’s Pottawatomie Creek massacre, Mahala Doyle’s stalwart defense of her sixteen-year old son John spared him from Brown and his men’s swords.

May we have more Nelsons and Mahala Doyles, people saving lives amidst slaughter, and fewer self-righteous, self-proclaimed heroes embracing it.

Vastness, might, and self-destruction

Near the end of Count Luna, Alexander Lernet-Holenia’s eerie postwar novella about an Austrian businessman who believes he is being stalked by a man he accidentally sent to a concentration camp, Lernet-Holenia includes a lengthy excursus on Rome, its history and especially its subterranean architecture, in the course of which he breaks out into this apostrophe:

O happy days of long ago when the city was still young! O early, rural Rome! Your sons, a sturdy race of peasant warriors, tilled their own ancestral soil; with their own hands, they yoked the oxen, and when the evening sun cast long shadows from the hills, they bore home on their own shoulders the wood from the forest. Food was simple, clothing plain, and people still honored the gods, the children their parents and the woman the man. Women did not paint their faces, nor did married people break their vows; friend did not betray friend. But when, on the pretext that all this was too rustic, too coarse, too old-fashioned, they strove to make everything bigger and better, their lives at once began to deteriorate. The more the nation’s power grew the more did its inner force diminish. The talons of the legions’ eagles might stretch to the borders of Latium, might hold all of Italy in their grasp, might reach out toward the ends of the earth; the city which had been built of clay and brick might clothe itself in gilded stone; the peaks of the Capitol might bristle with temples and pillars of Pentelic marble, with triumphal arches and bronze chariots with effigies of its own and conquered gods, with statues stolen from Greece, with the captured banners of foreign peoples and with countless trophies; but the moral decency, the strength of mind and of spirit, in short, the very qualities that had enabled the Romans to build up their vast empire, were destroyed by the vastness and the might of their own creation.

The key sentence, the hinge point in the story told here, comes near the middle, when the Romans themselves come to regard their own origins as “too rustic, too coarse, too old-fashioned.” This is the self-loathing oikophobia of new money enticed by old decadence and trendy ideas.* The moment they shift from the pious duty of preservation to a quest for improvement and raw power, their corruption has already begun. Their contempt for their own past means there can be no course correction.

In the end, success proves enervating and self-defeating, not simply by inviting logistical overextension and military defeat—the inadequate material explanations for Rome’s collapse—but for hollowing out the spiritual and moral qualities that had made the Romans successful in the first place.

Lernet-Holenia puts all this quite pithily, and though he is reflecting on the final collapse of the Roman Empire, the way he tells the story is strikingly similar to the argument of Cicero’s final, impromptu speech about the collapse of the Republic in my novella The Last Day of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Decline appears in many ages, but never in disguise.

I wrote Cicero nine years ago, mostly as a way to tell a story I find interesting and inspiring but also because some broad cultural trends were bothering me. A lot has changed since then but the circumstances that somewhat inspired it have only gotten worse. I stand by it.

For more on early Rome’s “sturdy race of peasant warriors,” see the Kenneth Minogue quotation here. And I didn’t post about it at the time, but I reviewed Lernet-Holenia’s haunting novella Baron Bagge at Miller’s Book Review last month. Check that out here.

* Sketch idea: A bunch of Romans from, say, the 2nd century AD protest a statue of Cincinnatus. A reporter interviews a pedagogue, who lays out how problematic the story of Cincinnatus is. His farm stood on land stolen from the Etruscans, and the Senate didn’t even allow women. In the studio, a panel of pundits expand the scope to condemn Scipio Africanus, Augustus, and both ends of the line of Brutus. While they fulminate against the ancients, a band of mustachioed Cherusci from the Praetorian Guard enter the studio and, well…

Adventures in Rebranding

Two seemingly unconnected things from last week that I couldn’t help connecting, however tangentially, both of which have political valence for many people but not necessarily for me:

Item: Cracker Barrel CEO rolls out minimalist update to restaurant chain, is jeered and hooted (and stock marketed) into a reversal.

Item: Dr James Dobson, Christian psychologist and founder of Focus on the Family, dies aged 89.

I’ll start with the latter. Dr Dobson was a staple of my fundamentalist upbringing. My mom listened to him every day in the car on WRAF (along with Tony Evans and Larry Burkett, the Dave Ramsey before Dave Ramsey), we got regular mail from Focus on the Family, and my parents read his books. He held great authority in our circles.

But much more important—to me, as a kid—than anything related to childrearing, Christian psychology, and the political advocacy associated with Dr Dobson was Adventures in Odyssey, the Focus on the Family-produced radio drama that aired every Saturday morning. Briefly, this half-hour show took place in a small middle-American town with a cast of colorful characters, adults and kids. Well-written, richly imagined, moralistic without being preachy, and kid-friendly without being condescending, it was also fun.

An early episode (from 1990!) that has always stuck with me: Mr Phillips, a big-city consultant, swoops into Odyssey offering his services to its small family-owned businesses. What he does, it gradually becomes clear, is strictly rebranding. He takes a local convenience store, gives it a snappy new name, and hands the owner an invoice. Ditto the curmudgeonly window cleaner, whose one-man janitorial services are rebranded as “Hygienic Maintenance and Engineering.” The consultant finally runs aground at Whit’s End, the local ice cream parlor and arcade run by the show’s moral center, WWII vet and inventor John Avery Whittaker, who sees through the charade and won’t buy in.

This story offered a very simple lesson: changing nomenclature doesn’t change substance. Spin, exaggeration, and slick branding live right next door to lying.

This episode also accurately characterized a specific kind of hustler. Mr Phillips is not from Odyssey, doesn’t understand the town or its people, and doesn’t care. This is not just my hillbilly prejudice against outsiders speaking—it is entirely possible for someone to move to a new place and work with the locals and become part of their community—but Mr Phillips’s project is fundamentally dishonest and exploitive. The businesses he solicits are objects to him, to be “improved” according to a formula, with little effort on his part and no actual changes beyond new signage, before extracting payment and moving on.

I’ve thought of this story many times over the years. (It’s probably a key part of my lifelong suspicion of word games.) I thought of it again last week when the Cracker Barrel kerfuffle broke. It’s probably clear why.

Though the story almost instantly took on political spin (succinctly parodied here), I don’t think the Cracker Barrel rebrand and redesign is really about politics. By far the most insightful thing I read during the whole debacle was this piece pointing out the CEO’s long history of hopping from company to company, serving some executive role for sometimes less than a year—a sort of C-suite gig economy. The rebrand and the boring, deracinated, beige redesign of the restaurants isn’t woke, it’s the result of a mercenary executive who, like Adventures in Odyssey’s Mr Phillips, has no history with the company, no understanding of its appeal, no connection with its customer base, and no incentive to ensure its long-term success.

And—more importantly, and the real story as far as I’m concerned—her much ballyhooed update does nothing to change the actual business. Cracker Barrel has actual problems, the kind that sink restaurant chains: declining quality in both service and food. A minimalist logo and a truckload of beige shiplap, a superficial update in the name of “relevance” designed to hypothetically draw in some theoretical new demographic, is a corporate version of the same con Mr Phillips is pulling in Odyssey.

I hate the aesthetics of the rebrand, but I hate even more the problem it represents. It’s culture-wide, as that Substack piece makes clear. (Another recent example: Goodreads got a new logo but no improvement to its clunky design.) As long as inconstancy and gun-for-hire practices are accepted and our culture continues to value using language to conjure more than the hard work of change and improvement—in short, as long as real life is treated as a marketing project—it will continue.

Moral intelligibility

In “Ship to Tarshish,” a short story in The Runagates Club, a collection by John Buchan published in 1928, a member of the titular club tells the story of Jim, a young man whose father, a wealthy businessman, dies immediately after a collapse of the company stocks. Unprepared for responsibility after a sheltered life of luxury and entertainments, Jim buckles under the pressure to save the family business and flees to Canada to start over on his own.

There he spirals, unable to hold down a job that requires hard work or any specific skill or even consistently showing up, and lands in “a pretty squalid kind of doss-house.” The narrator describes Jim’s ruminations there:

The physical discomfort was bad enough. He tramped the streets ill-clad and half-fed, and saw prosperous people in furs, and cheerful young parties, and fire-lit, book-lined rooms. But the spiritual trouble was worse. Sometimes, when things were very bad, he was fortunate enough to have his thoughts narrowed down to the obtaining of food and warmth. But at other times he would be tormented by a feeling that his misfortunes were deserved, and that Fate with a heavy hand was belabouring him because he was a coward. His trouble was no longer the idiotic sense of guilt about his father’s bankruptcy; it was a much more rational penitence, for he was beginning to realise that I had been right, and that he had behaved badly in running away from a plain duty. At first he choked down the thought, but all that miserable winter it grew upon him. His disasters were a direct visitation of the Almighty on one who had shown the white feather. He came to have an almost mystical feeling about it. He felt that he was branded like Cain, so that everybody knew that he had funked, and yet he realised that a rotten morbid pride ironly prevented him from retracing his steps.

Back at the beginning of the year I wondered how much the values and commitments of the characters in Waltharius, an early medieval Latin epic, would even be intelligible to a modern reader. Waltharius is over a thousand years old, relating a story from almost half a millennium before that. “Ship to Tarshish” is not even a hundred years old and is set in the 1927 world in which it was published. And yet we have the same problem.

The story’s drama grows entirely from the requirements placed upon Jim. Repairing damage from his father’s time proves too much for him. He can’t take it, and is ashamed that he can’t and that everyone knows and that he made it worse by running away. The redemption in the story comes from, as Kate Macdonald puts it in her introduction to The Runagates Club, “facing one’s fears and demonstrating courage and moral strength,” even when one is “shockingly inadequate.”

But, as I wondered about the bonds of loyalty and obligation in Waltharius, how much of this would a modern reader get? The ideas of Fate and retribution from God, or that certain behavior is shameful and that one should listen to critics, or the very concept of duty—Buchan conveys these powerfully but moderns scoff at all of it. Even the cultural allusions that gave the story resonance in 1927—Jonah fleeing to Tarshish, the mark of Cain—cannot be counted on to convey meaning to them. What John Keegan called the “moral atmosphere” of Buchan’s work would be not so much rejected as missed completely.

The modern reader is more likely to sympathize with the “useless” Jim at the beginning of the story: a well-liked, inoffensive, sociable non-entity whose only noteworthy skill is dancing. Rather than tough talk and hard work, they’d recommend therapy. And yet that would leave Jim stranded in his weakness. Worse, it would probably give him a flaw he lacks, a lack that is one of his few saving graces in the story—entitlement.

You can read “Ship of Tarshish” at Project Gutenberg. The Runagates Club is a fine collection of a wide variety of stories and will be one of the first books I write about next week, as this year’s John Buchan June gets underway.

Star Wars as a religious experience

Sunday, for May the Fourth, my in-laws took our family to see The Empire Strikes Back with the score performed live by the Greenville Symphony Orchestra. The best Star Wars movie, the best Star Wars score, live—it was great. The orchestra performed with flawless timing and great power. I didn’t think I could appreciate John Williams’s work more than I already did, but hearing the entire Empire score in concert revealed yet more of his genius.

The main draw, of course, was the movie and the orchestra, but I was also struck by the audience. The event took place not in the concert hall or theatre at the Peace Center in downtown Greenville but in Bon Secours Wellness Arena (still the Bi-Lo Center to me), with a crowd of several thousand. I fully expected wackiness—people chanting lines of dialogue back at the movie, hooting and hollering, loudly snacking, and running around in costumes during the movie.

Instead, it was one of the best filmgoing experiences of my life. The audience interacted—cheering twice, once at “No, do or do not; there is no try” and again at “I am your father”—and laughed appreciatively at some of the humor, but the mood, to a startling degree, was one of reverence.

I can’t think of the last time I saw such a large group of people sitting still, paying attention, alert and undistracted. Few people left or walked around during the movie. I didn’t see people on their phones and didn’t hear ringtones or text alerts. I didn’t even notice people talking or whispering. Even the children, some very young, were well behaved. It could be that they were taking a cue from the grownups—something important is happening, something worth our attention.

As it happens, English has a word for giving appropriate attention to something that deserves it—worship, from the Old English worðscip, “the condition of being worthy.” Our idea of worship is severely atrophied. Worship is behaving toward something, especially in the matter of attention and respect, in a manner that demonstrates its worth. The audience Sunday knew that intuitively and acted accordingly, showing, as a group, the esteem in which they hold the movie.

I’m not saying the folks watching The Empire Strikes Back with me Sunday were “worshipping” Star Wars in the narrow way we use the word now; I’m saying I haven’t seen such a truly worshipful attitude toward anything in a long time. That it came along for a popcorn space adventure—which happens to be one of the best movies ever made—is interesting.

In a nice coincidence, this week The Rewatchables dropped a long, long two-part episode on the original 1977 Star Wars. (No, I’m not calling it A New Hope.) Twice during the course of the discussion, Sean, one of the regular guests, makes the point that the Star Wars phenomenon rose during a downturn in religious adherence. He doesn’t make any arguments as to which caused which but my experience Sunday made one thing clear: people are starving for the religious in their lives, and Star Wars meets that need in a way many other overtly religious things are not right now.

Necessary caveats: the sociology of American religiosity is fraught with controversy, rival bodies of statistics, and hairsplitting distinctions, and Star Wars is a relentlessly, cold-bloodedly commercial product—now more than ever. But…

But the audience at Sunday’s concert keeps coming back to me. It was like Easter mass in Notre Dame at the height of the Middle Ages, a congregation of pilgrims and local parishioners turned together in adoration toward the altar, complete with music inspired by and inspiring religious awe. It was clearly, in the manner revealingly described by James KA Smith in You Are What You Love, a liturgy, an act of worship.

It was a marvelous experience on many levels. But I’ve been wondering ever since: what would it take to bring that kind of worshipfulness back to the things that are actually worth it?

Diagnosis of diagnosis

Earlier this week, Alan Jacobs offered up a new taxonomy of (non-fiction) writers: diagnostic, prescriptive, and therapeutic. (This is a riff on a post from a few years ago similarly categorizing thinkers.) Regarding the first category, he writes that

Diagnostic writers are usually also Explainers, and what they’re trying to explain is What Is Wrong. What’s our affliction? Where did it come from? . . . Our moment, it seems to me, is greatly overpopulated by diagnostic writing. As I’ve commented before, most of our diagnostic writers seem unaware that hundreds or thousands of writers before them have made precisely the arguments that they make. (That doesn’t stop readers from treating them as savants, though.)

After describing the other two, he concludes by returning to this observation:

We have so much diagnostic writing because it often tells us something we very much want to know: which of our enemies are to blame. That, I think, is why we can read it endlessly, even when it repeats what we’ve already read.

This makes a lot of sense, especially if you’ve looked through the non-fiction current events books on the tables and endcaps at Barnes & Noble, all of which seem to have been written within echo chambers for the purpose of affirming what is already held as unquestionable fact within those echo chambers. But I also wonder whether the present glut of this kind of “diagnostic” writing, especially when it repeats accepted pieties or tries to turn them into political cudgels, doesn’t have perverse effects.

If you actually read what the people who lionize Darryl Cooper, or who mock Douglas Murray for his rant on Joe Rogan about the necessity of expertise, or who get into flatly wicked things like Holocaust denial say online, you’ll find that they view themselves as fighting back against a false consensus. They reject what they perceive to be a politically imposed misdiagnosis that confers in-group status and prevails through ad nauseum repetition by bad-faith insiders and wish to assert their own diagnosis—one that provides the right enemies to blame. This is, as Jacobs points out, “something we very much want to know.”

That impression of monolithic consensus is reinforced by the kind of thousandfold repetition of old diagnoses that Jacobs mentions, but is almost always false. Any specialist in, say, the history of the Third Reich could immediately point you toward faultlines within the field and legitimate points of debate. Here’s one. That false impression is usually born of ignorance, which is regrettable. But is also preventable. You only have to trust someone to teach you, not strike out on your own with nothing but suspicion to guide you.

To conclude, I feel like I should apologize for adding to the heap of diagnostic writing in the internet landfill, but I’m terrified to be prescriptive and you don’t want to read my therapeutic advice.

Hoopla’s AI problems

Hoopla is a handy multimedia library app. If your local library participates, as ours does, you can sign up for free access to ebooks, audiobooks, movies, and music with a certain limited number of downloads per month. I’ve used it for audiobooks for several years now. It’s got a good selection of Alistair MacLean and other good commute listens, and is especially good for books that are hard to find, like Souls in the Twilight, a handful of short stories by Sir Roger Scruton that I read in 2020. Last year for John Buchan June I couldn’t get ahold of a copy of Salute to Adventurers, and Hoopla stepped into that gap with a good audiobook version.

Recently, with another John Buchan June in mind, I checked to see if Hoopla had any new Buchan. Its inventory changes fairly regularly and you can get good surprises. I certainly got a surprise when I saw this:

What? I thought. And then: Ugh. That’s obviously AI-generated cover art. What’s up with Hannay’s uniform? Are those buttons or badges? What’s wrong with those airplanes? AI can give you a Jamie Dornan lookalike as General Richard Hannay if you ask for it but it’s guaranteed to mess that stuff up.

This made me curious. The listed publisher of this audiobook is Interactive Media. No narrator is named on the image above—not exactly a red flag, but not typical for good audiobooks—but Hoopla listed one James Harrington as narrator. I clicked on the narrator to see what else he’s done and got over 250 results: all from Interactive Media, all added to Hoopla in the last year, all public domain books, and all with covers like this:

Who, exactly, are these people? Where are we and when does this take place? Is that supposed to be Father Brown in the middle? Who’s the gent in the background wearing half of two sets of clothes? Look at the visible portions of the red car and try to piece together its outline. Is that a Richard Scarry vehicle? Why is the roof pointing a different direction from the rear fender? Where’s the hood? Did it hit the blonde girl? Is that why she looks cross-eyed?

Or how about this American classic:

Laughable. Again, AI is not going to get uniforms right. Most living breathing flesh-and-blood people can’t. These Union soldiers appear to have a mixture of Mexican War, modern police, and military academy cadet uniforms, and yellow rank insignia mean cavalry, by the way, not infantry. Don’t even get me started on that cannon. Or perhaps I should say those cannon, as the AI seems to have fused three into one with a steampunk’s quota of rivets. Don’t be nearby when they try to fire the trench mortar round in the breech of that cannon out of the small-caliber field gun barrel. Maybe that’s why all the infantry are running?

Enough of that. The point is that if you get into Interactive Media’s or James Harrington’s listings on Hoopla, you can scroll forever and never stop seeing stuff like this:

Again, “James Harrington” has over 250 listings on Hoopla, and he is not Interactive Media’s only narrator. But I put his name in quotation marks because I can’t determine that he actually exists.

Downloading his version of The Thirty-Nine Steps made me almost certain it is AI-generated audio. “Harrington” reads in a flat American accent that comes across as fairly natural for about a minute. After that it sounds distinctly robotic. There is no indication of understanding what “he” is “reading,” no change of pace or volume, and no modulation of tone or inflection to suggest mood or a change of speaker within the story. Idioms trip up his delivery—or rather, don’t trip it up. When Richard Hannay says, in the first chapter, “I woke next morning to hear my man, Paddock, making the deuce of a row at the smoking-room door,” “Harrington” doesn’t indicate that he understands what “my man” means and pronounces “row” like “row-row-row your boat.”

Perhaps a real narrator could make these mistakes, but I doubt it. And if a real narrator made them, I doubt he’d be asked to record 250 of Project Gutenberg’s greatest hits in the span of a year.

It’s pretty clear that Hoopla has taken on a load of slop.

In searching for answers, including information about the supposed “James Harrington” who “narrated” these “audiobooks,” I discovered that this is not Hoopla’s first problem with AI-generated material. Earlier this year Hoopla was called out for hosting AI-generated ebooks and had to make special efforts to “cull” them from their listings.

This led me to wonder what Hoopla’s vetting process is. My books are at our local library but not available on Hoopla in any form. Based on that Lit Hub piece, it seems Hoopla depends on librarians to do the vetting themselves. How can the people at even a well-staffed, well-funded library contend with machines that produce hundreds of low-quality audiobooks at a time? To quote Lit Hub:

What worries me is the scale of bad actors’ new tech-fueled abilities to flood the world with this garbage, which will only bloat and overwhelm already strained systems. Library shelves will never exclusively be filled with AI, but what if the firehouse is so overwhelming that it affects the ability of libraries to function properly? Not to mention the reputational damage to the institution if borrowers can no longer trust a library’s collection, or a librarian’s ability to connect them with information or entertainment that they want.

And while the author of that piece suggests that AI art is “a fad we can wait out,” he’s writing of AI-generated text, which is, to a newsworthy degree, not good: “This tech has not proved that it’s capable of making anything good or interesting: the writing is nonsense and the art looks terrible.” AI-generated audiobooks are a downstream problem but closely related in terms of poor quality and the ethical and philosophical problems of outsourcing art to robots.

But what’s this? I’ve been thinking about Hoopla’s glut of AI slop all week and today I learn that Amazon is experimenting with AI audiobook technology, too. From my inbox:

Whomever Interactive Media and “James Harrington” are, they don’t have the reach or ability to shape and control markets that Amazon does. I hope Hoopla will move against AI slop in audio form the way it did against AI text, but even if they do, Amazon’s rollout of AI audiobooks means this is far from over. And far from “solving itself,” the problem might be prolonged by this explosion, because even if people should care about the quality of the narration in an audiobook, they often don’t.

A final note, and a hint of what’s at stake: I’m not actually a great fan of listening to books. My mind wanders. But I’ve trained myself to pay attention to and enjoy audiobooks if only to make my commute bearable—especially during semesters when I teach on three campuses, which Alistair MacLean, Ian Fleming, and others have helped me get through—and as a result I’ve come to appreciate the art of good audiobook narration.

A few gold standards for me: Derek Perkins’s performance of The Everlasting Man, Bill Nighy’s performance of Moonraker, Norman Dietz’s performance of The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw, the multi-narrator audiobook of Shelby Foote’s Shiloh (hard to find now), and Barrett Whitener’s performance of A Confederacy of Dunces. Check any of these out, and enjoy. No AI bot could do what these narrators did.