Random thoughts:
I was prompted to think about the power of storytelling — and the incredible costs of bad, false, deceitful stories late one night when I stumbled onto a post by CHS at FDL. I’d been on the computer for about 16 hours trying to ferret out some godawful problem and I was sick, and exhausted.
I was a fairly new FDL reader, and had no clue that L’Affair Plame represented an attempt to keep the lid on a group of nuclear Mafiosa; I was pretty much a citizen bugged by Plame because it simply did not make sense. None of it made sense, and every time that swine GWB opened his yap, it only became more baffling.

So I clicked to FDL in my exhausted state, and CHS had a post up (I think the image was a “Can of Worms“) and the post was about a woman named Barbara Comstock, whom I’d never heard of. She was somehow linked to Swift Boat, or to the Libby Legal Defense.

And two things set me on fire:
1. That someone that highly paid and ideological was so able to construct the narratives that drive policy, and
2. That the damn, weenie, feckless Dems were such a bunch of pissy whiners they couldn’t stand up to an obvious hack like Barbara Comstock made me so angry I swear my body temperature could have set the roof afire.

I read CHS’s post, and I swear to God smoke started pouring out of my ears. I was absolutely furious.

And I was so righteously p*ssed at the Democrats I probably could have started a house fire with my own breath. I was so angry that a so-called political party (the Dems) were letting such depraved, pathetically lame people call the shots that I swear it’s a wonder my keyboard didn’t melt down.

My comments at FDL were later srcubbed as ‘troll’, so either came off like a total head case, or else someone at FDL was kind enough to save my sorry ass.

But here’s what led me to that moment of foaming wrath:
Having been in villages where the people’s own sense of their own history is completely jumbled, mixed-up, and (in some cases) no longer even coherent, it’s clear to me that stories have some kind of ‘mystic power’ in this world. Those villages where they don’t even remember the stories of their elders also exhibit high suicide rates, high mortality rates, high rates of alcoholism… lots of social pathologies. That suggests to me that there is come connection between healthy humans, healthy communities, and healthy lives.

Like others here, I’ve sat through my share of navel-gazing bullshit in a university setting about ‘deconstruction’. My personal take is kind of summarized thus: new technologies in the late 19th c changed human experience; that showed up as pointiellism, French realism, Cubism, Stravinsky, Gershwin, cinema,… yadda yadda. Deconstruction strikes me as the literary corollary to Cubist art.

That was all the rage during the period when Strauss would have been writing.

But as near as I can tell, Strauss was fundamentally clueless about very significant factors that affect how people read and interpret information.

He didn’t have access to neurological research on reading, and on how it reshapes the brain. He also doesn’t seem to have given enough heft to anthoropology.

He believed that authors were intentional, and ‘hid’ meanings in their texts.
Hmmm… interesting. That notion goes back before 1200 BC, to an era where craft knowledge (particularly metalurgy, which was tightly linked to military power) was protected and ‘hidden’ in hard to read texts that were ideosyncratic, and written by individuals in ways that were — literally — for their eyes ONLY. Because the reason for writing was to be able to cue their own memories later, while ensuring that no one else could figure out their ‘codes’.

It seems quite likely, FWIW, that some early Semites with valuable craft knowledge of metallurgy had a lot of influence on the Jewish ‘Kabbalah’, from which the word ‘cabal’ is said to derive. It was quite common in tribal cultures to have ‘craft knowledge’ shared ONLY with ‘initiates’, and writing would have offered an ideal way to hide the valuable knowledge.

But with that stated, once literacy rates began to rise, the emphasis shifted to writing in forms that EVERYONE could read easily. Writing was MORE valuable if MORE people could read it. (The Bible is a good example.)

Strauss doesn’t seem to have any real grasp (at least, not from my cursory overview of his work) of the fundamental social and psychological shifts that occur as a group moves from oral culture to literate culture. He is missing huge pieces of human experience, and that’s dangerous. So he arrives at wrong conclusions. And that means anyone who is a ‘Straussian’ is going to be functioning with a bogus set of assumptions.

I’m not sure whether fiction or non-fiction is the key divide.
I think the thing that we have to tell stories about is changing.

We have to tell stories about global warming and pollution; if we’d lived in 8,000 BC, we could tell stories about Dangerous Mammoths and Wild Bulls, because those would have been the dangers we faced.

Today, we face dangers related to pollutants and climate change.
Those stories are grounded in reality: pH levels, temperature readings, molecules in ppm. Those stories don’t make any sense when they’re falsified — or even if they did, ‘reality’ will bite you in the ass if you’re not accurately describing its measurements.

I don’t think it’s an issue of fiction or non-fiction.
I suspect that it’s more closely related to the topics that most need storytelling in order to be placed in a context where people feel they can get a handle on the problem(s).

The reason that McSame is floundering is that he’s talking about things that don’t matter. He’s talking about trivia. And people are pissed at being fed trivia when things are in a mess.

That’s why IMHO, Howard Dean is in the same tradition of storytelling as Rachel Carson; I’d be willing to bet that her books are selling at least as well today as they did 40 years ago. She only gets better over time. But people understand that the stories she tells apply to their own lives, their own health. Ditto Dr. Dean.

The people who tell the best stories win.
But I have a hunch that in order to tell those stories, the people have had to do some soul-searching, and be focused on WHY their stories matter.

Once Al Gore could talk about Global Warming with deep conviction, deep passion, and tell that story in a beautiful way, he started to inspire people in a way that hadn’t seemed possible for him as a political candidate. He has become one of the most important storytellers of our time.

But the biggest surprise to me has been Scott McClellan, and I think it’s because its so surprising to see the changes in him, and his couching his story in terms of ‘political hazing’ — which many people can surely understand — probably resonates with many, many people. Maybe not the ‘political’ part, but surely the ‘hazing’ part. Once they grasp ‘hazing’ the ‘political’ part comes along very easily.

in both cases, the storytellers seem to have a real desire and need to tell those stories FOR THEIR OWN SAKE. It’s not about Al. And it’s not about Scotty. In both cases, they’re trying to change things that they believe are deeply and profoundly dangerous.

When people do that, they create powerful magnets.
And there’s something mysterious and magical about it that I don’t think either the deconstructionists or the Straussians ever fully grasped.

The Left hasn’t been successful enough with the “everything they say is bullshit” narrative. And I guess I am drifting too far into the realm of a “corporate media power and consolidation” discussion.

Reading Balkanization is a trip down memory lane for me. The academic lawyers argue about ideas that are foreign, ideas like originalism, and linguistic jurisprudence. The field has shrunk, all under the influence of the federalist society and the scalia’s of the world, who use the words of our ancestors to create a world our ancestors would understand in the 21st Century. It is painful for me to contemplate.

This change was well underway, and my kids were getting older, so I started reading old philosophy books from College days, starting with Camus, and followed them to newer stuff. I loathed Sartre, but The Rebel seemed completely different to me. Even my underlinings from so many years ago seemed totally wrong.

Eventually I found Achieving Our Country, by Richard Rorty, and then Philosophy and Social Hope. I realize he is iconoclastic, but it completely reshaped my thinking about the nature of truth and the use of the intellect in the real world.

But even so I am stunned by the ability of the conservatives to move the discourse so far from my training and roots. I hope EW is right and we will be able to seize control over the narrative.

Control the narrative, regardless of fact or fancy, and you control today how we envision the past. That informs our choices about how we anticipate or prepare for the future. Which is what creates our future: choosing to take action to reduce the effects of global warming; choosing diplomacy over brute force; or choosing to renew vital infrastructure instead of allowing it to decay.

George Bush may be carelessly selfish and ruthless, but he isn’t stupid. And the people behind him very much know what they want and how to get it. If you’re among the 98% of Americans for whom that doesn’t work out so well, the mismatch that EW highlights over who controls the narrative ought to be of concern.

A useful comparison (one I’ve made) is with Eugene Sue, who was actually more popular face to face with Dumas (his Mysteries of Paris appeared in the same newspaper in the years before Count did, similar kind of book, more lasting politically). Saint Beuve actually said Sue was the par of Balzac (who was a relative failure at serialized form, largely because he didn’t get it).

However, as a result of 48/51, Saint Beuve decided this serialized noval stuff was dangerous and started talking about disciplining the literary sphere (kid you not) which led to new taxes on serialized newspapers and the like. ANd that’s when both Dumas and Sue came to be treated differently than, say, Balzac.

So you need to look at critical analysis during the early 1840s, not the stuff post 1851, to get a sense of critical acceptance.

Which leads me to think of that unnamed member of the administration that said they created reality and the rest of us (on the left) could only study it. Which side of that equation is fiction?

The change in our collective progressive consciousness over the last eight years has been one of resetting and reframing our perception; we are making conscious decisions as to what has really happened, and we hash them out in many forms. Some of us did so in non-fiction media, some of us did so in fiction (i.e. The Dark Knight, as one more recent pop culture example, or Pan’s Labyrinth of a few years ago).

Many of us did so through blogging, trying to sort out truth from non-truth (and finding towards the end of this debacle that are the Bush years that there was little to sort, all swine and no pearls.)

We didn’t abandon fiction; in some ways it abandoned us. We couldn’t imagine this weird, that such monsters would not only steal elections but take over our government and commit such war crimes. As Hunter S. Thompson said, “When things get weird, the weird turn pro,” and we’ve apparently struggled with maintaining our amateur status, writing tome after tome of non-fiction to retain a grasp on lucidity as reality fully merges with a fiction we couldn’t cook up in our worst nightmares.

Perhaps that Chris had to write about this at all is a sign of regret over leaving behind the innocence one must have to appreciate fiction as something separate from nonfiction, innocence broken by the utter collapse of reality in fiction, into seeming insanity, now beyond the immunity from pain that cognitive dissonance once offered us. Fiction not only abandoned us, it got strung out on the meth and crack of neo-conservatism and died a gruesome violent bloody death, and now we are tasked with finding people who can not only help us navigate through these stages of grief and move on, but help us build a safer nonfiction world to follow. Only in a stable, happier, saner nonfiction world can we rebuild even happier fictions, where the nightmarish only happens in our dreams and on the screen and between the covers of books. In this respect, I think Chris is on the money.