Since I'm still somewhat crabby, I thought I'd start the day with a crabby quote from Robert Warshow's "The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture." Warshow was a New York School thinker from the 1950s whose writing was aimed at exposing the failure of his generation to engage with mass culture in anything other than a facile, ironic manner. This escape into irony, Warshow felt, allowed his peers to abdicate any responsibility for understanding the pivotal role of mass culture played in 1950s political life. Warshow thus felt compelled to take on the job of interpretation almost singly, constructing himself a role so onerous that he dropped dead under the weight of it by age 37.
Which is to say, he's a great poster child for a cranky morning. Here he is on the the role of mass culture in promoting the American ideal of generalized happiness:
"America, as a social and political organization, is committed to a cheerful view of life. It could not be otherwise. The sense of tragedy is a luxury of aristocratic societies, where the fate of the individual is not conceived as havin a direct and legitimate political importance, being determined by a fixed and supra-political - that is, non-controversial - moral order or fate. Modern equalitarian societies, however, whether democratic or authoritarian in their political forms, always base themselves on the claim that they are making life happier: the avowed function of the modern state, as least in its ultimate terms, is not only to regulate social relations, but also to determine the quality and possibilities of human life in general. Happieness thus becomes the chief political issue - in a sense, the only political issue - and for that reason it can never be treated as an issue at all. If an American or Russian is unhappy, it implies a certain reprobation of his society, and therefore, by a logic which we can all recognize, it becomes the obligation of citizenship to be cheerful; if the authorities find it necessary, the citizen might even be compelled to make a public display of his cheerfulness on important occasions, just as he may be conscripted into the army in time of war.
Naturally, this civic resposibility rests most strongly upon the organs of mass culture..."
9:27:39 AM 
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