Original Bobos

 Douglas Holt's 2004 book on cultural branding—discussed last time—devotes some passages of cultural analysis to David Brooks's famous theory of the "Bobos," or "bourgeois bohemians," which he propounded in his 2000 work of cultural criticism, Bobos in Paradise. Brooks's fundamental thesis, as recapped in Holt and a plenitude of other books and articles, is that the professional elite of the 1990s was distinguished from their predecessors by their appropriation of the iconography of bohemia. Torn between a conventional striving for upper-middle-class success and a fear of selling out, they clung to countercultural paraphernalia as a way to set themselves apart from the supposedly unimaginative, culturally reactionary, and philistine bourgeois classes of prior generations. 

I, in turn, don't think that Brooks was wrong. I just think that the phenomenon he identified was not new to the 1990s. Rather, it relates to a fundamental dilemma at the heart of all countercultural projects that has marked every version of bohemia from the days of Murger on. For evidence, I point to Wyndham Lewis's 1918 novel Tarr (which I read this weekend in its 1928 revised and expanded edition favored by its author and the editors of the Oxford World Classics). Lewis, we discover from the OUP's front matter, in fact originally intended to call his book "The Bourgeois-Bohemians." And most of the novel's satire is directed against precisely this milieu, which Lewis identified with the middle-class poseurs who circulated on the Rive Gauche in the early twentieth century.

Errata and Marginalia 022: Holt

Douglas B. Holt, How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding (Boston, Harvard Business School Press: 2004). 

Every advertising pundit I've read, from Bob Garfield to Rosser Reeves, has united in condemning the sort of "creative" advertisement that could pass muster as a student film project for an MFA thesis, but utterly fails to tell the viewer anything about the actual product it is selling. Now, I read Douglas Holt's 2004 book on "cultural branding," and he tells me with equal confidence that the "artistic" advertisement is the only thing that has ever saved a company's branding. 

No doubt the truth lies between these two extremes. It is in the interests of business writers trying to supplement their income with consulting gigs, after all, to polarize the issues. They say that everyone else who's writing on the subject is doing it exactly wrong, and that their approach is the only correct way to do it. Still, even if we find more value in the old principles of the "unique selling proposition" and "positioning," etc., than Holt is willing to concede, it is refreshing nonetheless to hear his alternative perspective. It is about time that someone spoke up for the much-maligned advertising creative—the liberal arts major who really just wants to tell a story, and is forced to do so through the medium of copy in order to put food on the table. 

Capitalism

There are moments that really make you realize what everyone is complaining about, when it comes to capitalism. Take what happened on the stock market yesterday. Admittedly, the big picture of the plunge in stock values that occurred had to do with ongoing concerns over the Fed's plan for rate hikes. But the precipitating cause appears to have been much more specific. 

As the Wall Street Journal summarizes, Home Depot issued a "disappointing" forecast for the coming year. What was the main concern? The retail giant said that it expected less in overall profit. Why? Were sales and earnings way down? Nope. It's just because it planned to devote an extra $1 billion to raising the wages of its hourly employees. 

This instantly sent the stock price into a tailspin, and ultimately dragged down the entire Dow Jones Industrial Average, and thence the stock market as a whole. 

"Desolation"

 In the Coleridge and Wordsworth section of his lectures on The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, T.S. Eliot introduces his discussion of the former poet's critical writings by portraying the state of Coleridge's mind at the time he composed the Biographia Literaria. Eliot seeks to present a contrast between the youthful rebelliousness of Wordsworth at the time he made his most lasting critical statement—in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads—and the somber mood of late-career desolation with which Coleridge composed his own most famous prose work. At the time he wrote the Biographia, Eliot reminds us, Coleridge "was already a ruined man."

The source of Coleridge's condition at the time, Eliot explains, was a fear that the flash of inspiration he had once experienced would never come again. This may surprise us. We tend, when thinking of the great poets and artists of history, after all, to imagine that their masterworks must have given them lifelong satisfaction—and sufficed them for lifelong occupation. They must have recognized their own most immortal works for the eruptions of genius they were, we think, and been able to spend all of their time in composing similar works or merely basking in the glory of their achievement. What we forget is that in this, as in all domains of achievement, no matter the merits of a single work we may have done, there is still, once it is accomplished, all the rest of life that needs somehow to be filled up.

"Magic and Dread"

 The last few weeks in the news cycle have been slow on the conventional sort of political news; yet despite this—or perhaps because of it—they have been bloated with a sense of supernatural alarm. There was the ecological catastrophe in Ohio stemming from a train derailment, for example, around which various conspiracy theories immediately began to swarm. Of course, there seems to be no substance to any of these claims (when is there ever?), but when I looked at the photos of the disaster, I can see why it would inspire the apocalyptic imagination. There is indeed something appalling and Biblical in the sight of the enormous pillar of black smoke arising from the burn. 

The picture calls to mind a scene from Don DeLillo's 1985 novel White Noise, in which the protagonist and his family are forced to flee their small college town for a government evacuation center, due to the presence of a "black, billowing cloud" caused by some mysterious toxic event. The cloud towers over them—it is so massive it appears to be generating its own internal weather. It is one of the more memorable images from DeLillo's justly-beloved novel, and—of all the book's passages—is perhaps the one that best distills the novel's mood of vague uneasiness and paranoia. 

"Lack of labour"

 Once again it's "good news is bad news" week on Wall Street. First, there was the news at the top of the week that consumer prices fell slightly less than expected last month, due to continued strong demand and a great job market. Then, there was the announcement that retail sales were way up last month, as Americans continue to be gainfully employed, jobless rates are at historic lows, and people feel the confidence in their financial wellbeing to spend, which in turn is the main driver of growth in the U.S. economy. (Oh no! Not a strong economy and labor market!) Finally, there was similar data at the end of the week about producer prices failing to fall at rates economists were expecting. 

With each burst of good news about the rosy state of the American worker, the gloomy headlines followed: "Stocks waver on news of strong labor market"; "Stocks tumble on news of strong retail sales in the first month of 2023"; "investors anxious..." etc. 

"Whelps and Dams"

The ghastly earthquake in Turkey and Syria is reminding the world of the plight of—among many others—the millions of displaced people still living in both countries who had fled Syria's civil war. Amidst the overwhelming catastrophe, some U.S. senators have even spared a thought for the tens of thousands of displaced civilians in the region who are still held in locked detention camps, despite never being charged with or convicted of a crime. These are the families of suspected ISIS fighters (and other civilians with the misfortune of being found in former ISIS territory) who are still being confined at the al-Hol camp in Northwest Syria. 

In truth, the al-Hol facility is far from the earthquake's epicenter and most of its devastation. News reports say they have not yet heard of any damage to these facilities in particular. Nonetheless, the renewed threat to the safety and survival of Syrian refugees in general prompted a bipartisan group of senators to re-introduce legislation seeking—rightly—to protect an even more stigmatized subset of the displaced civilian population: those at al-Hol. The senators are calling for the creation of a special office charged with coordinating the repatriation of the individuals confined in this camp, instituting formal prosecutions where those are actually justified by the evidence, and eventually closing the camps.