Formal Chaos

My attempt is to give a suitable name to a contradictory tendency. It is contradictory to aim for Virtuous Vice, Dirty Cleanliness, Clear Murky Windshields, or the Still Small Uproar. Our culture, however, is forever trying to achieve this tottering balance. For a long time now I’ve chuckled over the Informal Formality of dress when thirty-something celebs appear on some show in a formal jacket, buttoned white shirt, maybe even wearing a tie—but they’re also sporting artfully cuffed and torn ancient blue jeans and a day’s growth of beard.

                

Order and disorder are clashing. We want both. We believe in artful compromise. We believe that nature knows best, read “free market,” but we also need certain degree of predictability. So we create stock markets with strict opening and closing hours, bells that ring, trading rules, and very tight qualifications for those who may play. Meanwhile these markets are ruled by collective emotions and panics—but the television pictures of trading from up close reveal that it’s a deadly serious business: not a smile anywhere in sight. But sometimes quite conscious collective efforts shape the behavior. Yesterday the markets were quiet. Why? Well, this morning at 8:30 am (it is now 8:26 as I write), the Bureau of Labor Statistics will reveal January employment numbers. And traders stayed inactive yesterday awaiting this news. Institutionalized emotions. Today it will be time to roar and rage. (Indeed I’m writing this to fill the time until 8:30. On the first Friday morning of each month, I post those unemployment numbers on LaMarotte.)

It is true, is it not, that the promises of a presidential candidate are entirely dependent for fulfillment on another body, the Congress. Yet we treat campaign promises as meaningful. If we were serious, we’d institute a parliamentary democracy where the “president” becomes a function of a party’s victory. In our case we have Institutionalized Contradiction. Chance may deliver a president and a Congress of the same party, but then the party may be so interlaced with Blue Dogs or Tea Drinkers that the outcome still remains random.

Well, it’s 8:35. Enough of this. Time to see what Randomness has Wrought on the Employment Front last month.

The Lure of Rebellion

Two headlines in the New York Times. On the front page “China Reins in Entertainment And Bloggers”; leading the Styles page is “To Be Young, Hip and Mormon.” The paper’s general stance on things signals the tone of the presentations by headline alone. The Evildoer in the first case is the Government of China, in the other the Mormon Church. The heroes are the rebels. Moving in a little, I discover that China has a ministry called State Administration of Radio, Film and Television. It is now telling TV stations to limit entertainment shows and to increase news coverage. The Times quotes it as aiming to root out “excessive entertainment and vulgar tendencies.” In the Hip-and-Mormon story, the hero runs a rock band, celebrates drowning one’s sorrows in bourbon and explores “the seedy underbelly of his hometown, Las Vegas.” But the hero also made a short video for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in which he proclaims himself a Mormon. But why did the Chinese ministry countenance the growth of vulgar tendencies in the first place? And why did the Church selected this musician to advertise it? The ambiguous behavior of authority, of course, is itself an indicator of the times. Of interest here is the thrilled fascination with rebellion, its favorable treatment on the one hand, anger at its suppression on the other.

As order gradually shatters, as the seedy underbelly becomes the seedy whole—and while the money lasts and a little bit of order still remains—rock stars shall lead us. But when chaos has come to rule, rebellion will take another form. It will manifest as a ruthless quest for order, sword in hand, and public admiration of those who seek the holy.