The Castle of Privilege

Beware the aggressive "I'm just telling it like it is" tone: It always hides an agenda. There is a repugnant lit-blogger/professor, D.G. Myers, who compiles "canons" of contemporary fiction that pointedly and deliberately exclude almost all works by women, blacks, Hispanics, any "minorities," gays and lesbians. Some white Jewish males make it into the lists, since Myers is Jewish himself, but that is quite consistent with the neo-con flavor of the enterprise. (I don't know if Myers has published in Commentary, but he should; he'd be right at home.)

In thinking about Myers (which I try not to do), I'm reminded of my two favorite whipping boys here at PMD, Joseph Epstein and Mike D'Angelo. They can stand in for others whose work I also dislike, but whom I don't want to waste time writing about. The commonalities in this group interest me, though. Epstein is an easy match for Myers: he boasts in his essay "I'm History," about his being fired from his 20+ years editorship of The American Scholar, that during his tenure the quarterly published virtually nothing on black history, feminism, or gay and lesbian studies. Also like Myers, Epstein for reasons of personal antecedents has a sharp eye for anti-Semitism and a very reasonable sensitivity to the oppression of Jews; this has not, however, increased his sensitivity to anyone else's oppression.

D'Angelo is a more subtle case. As a hipster, he can't possibly wear exclusionary politics on his sleeve. But the fact is that his critical sensibility is very largely attuned to movies about what it's like to be a white guy, and to the white guy directors that make them. (The one Spike Lee film that Mike and the "Little Mikeys" hold in high regard is, natch, 25th Hour.) Mike has no time for African cinema, or minority directors in general, or gay and lesbian themes, or feminist themes (although, to be fair, a few women directors sneak onto his Top Ten lists): That stuff is all just tiresome to him. One of my fellow Confabulators noted the irony of Mike's traveling 6,000 miles to Cannes 2009 in order to (so far) like Pixar's Up better than anything else on display -- a film that is about to open on 2,000 screens across North America. This bent is not new for him: Toy Story 2, which was Number One of his Top Ten in 1999, drove him to ecstasies that the notably parsimonious D'Angelo seldom allows himself ("1999's sole flat-out masterpiece -- part rollicking adventure, part knockabout comedy, part eloquent disquisition on the inevitably ephemeral state that is happiness"). He has a big soft spot for the decidedly guy-ish David Mamet (don't get him started on State and Main; actually, his irrational enthusiasm for that OK but nowise special picture is as close as D'Angelo gets to being charming). For someone who sees so much international cinema, and likes some of it, his bedrock tastes are pretty conventional (Spider-Man, Gladiator) and getting more so as time goes on.

I don't want to overdo this and go all Academic Feminist on D'Angelo's ass. For one thing, I have little taste for the excesses of "political correctness" myself, and have defended sinners against the "new commandments" on historical and other grounds. But that's not really what we're talking about here. D'Angelo is entitled to his taste, and although he is snarky with it, I don't think he's truly evil with it (as Myers and Epstein are, in my book). But it is difficult not to conclude, in this multicultural age (actually, all ages are multicultural), that D'Angelo's well-turned prose constructs a Castle of White Male Heterosexual Privilege for him and his buddies to gaze out at the world from. Most of these fellows can write; they construct those castles skillfully from the ground up, but the foundations are rotten.

Someone like Norman Mailer could be said to share certain of these tendencies; there was lots of boy's clubbism in Mailer's generation. But Mailer, in my view, does something much more interesting with those tendencies, probing them every which way. Myers, Epstein, and D'Angelo are not noticeably self-enquiring writers; quite the opposite. (D'Angelo: "Admitting I was wrong gives me ulcers.") Since we all have our less than noble aspects, I do think that owning them, exploring them, possibly in the process modifying them, is the smart way to go.

The aggressive "I'm just telling it like it is" tone is, of course, available to women writers (Pauline Kael, Camille Paglia), gay writers (Larry Kramer, Michelangelo Signorile), and black writers (any number of rappers "keeping it real"). But given the historical use of preserving the status quo to which it has typically been and still is put, we might want to take a pass.