I’m not a fan of Jim Goad, mostly because I have no respect for wife beaters, but I have read his columns at Taki from time to time. His latest is here and it starts with this:
Just like menstrual cramps and labor contractions, feminism comes in waves. Apparently we’re at the end of the third wave and on the cusp of the fourth. I don’t know what any of this means, either, so I looked it up.
It’s a pretty typical example of his work. Goad loves the vulgar and the crude. Here’s another example from a previous column:
At least that’s the stock retort lobbed like a Molotov cocktail at anyone who dares to articulate the undeniable mathematical fact that Jewish per-capita income is about twice America’s national average. It’s the term smeared like rat feces across the face of anyone who dispassionately points out that for a group comprising around 2% of the American population, Jews wield academic, cultural, and financial power way beyond their numbers.
Now, I’m no expert on rats or their droppings, but I’m pretty sure it is close to impossible to smear rat feces on anything. The point of the absurd image, of course, is not to illuminate, but to revolt, which is pretty much the point of every Jim Goad column, as far as I can tell. It’s a genre of performance that I call groty realism. The point, it seems to me, is to drag everything into the muck in order to mock it. I could be all wrong on that, but that’s the sense I get.
Goad is not a solo act. Kathy Shaidle and Ann Sterzinger write for Taki and employ groty realism in their columns. They do a lot less of it, but enough to put both in that column. I guess Gavin McInnes should be in that club as well, but he’s more of a television personality to me than a writer. Still, in his Taki columns he likes to dwell on the coarse and the crude.
I’m fond of pointing out that there is no accounting for taste so I can’t say if this style of presentation is better or worse than some other style. I’m not fond of it, but I’m not fond of the quill pen style of writing either. I tend to like a conversational tone and in my daily conversations, people don’t compare things to menstrual cramps or diarrhea, even when talking about menstrual cramps and diarrhea.
I’m a bit torn on the term. I call it “groty realism” because it plays off the term “gritty realism” that has been around for while in literature. The realism movement got going in America in the early 20th century. The subject matter went progressively down the social ladder until we got something called Kmart Realism in the 80’s, where all the characters were poor, white trash losers. The logical leap down is where all the characters are chronic masterbaters and coprophiles.
For whatever reason it reminds me of a few summers ago at Hampton Beach in Massachusetts. Like all public beaches, it is mostly populated by the lower strata of American society. You see lots of white guys with bad tattoos trailing behind pram faced women pushing strollers. Of course, you see loads of caramel colored kids running around. All the preaching about antiracism has actually been applied at the lower levels of society.
But, it’s mostly a celebration of social pathologies. Few of the men work so they carry themselves like men with no purpose. It’s a swagger that tells the you that all they have to offer the world is on their back and it is usually a poorly drawn tattoo. The women chat endlessly into cell phones, stopping to eat and scream at their misbehaving children. The great American underclass is a hodgepodge of Progressive fads adopted by people who can’t afford them.
My grandfather used to remark that when he was a child a century ago that the poor looked up to the middle who looked up to the rich. Then something happened and the rich started taking their cues from the poor and before long every vulgar and base human instinct was held up up as something to be performed in public. He may have had just a seventh grade education, but he was good at noticing things.
I wonder if the “something happened” part of the story is not in some way tied to the ascent of realism in western culture. When artists, writers, singers, poets and so on were looking up, everyone looked up with them. When they started looking down, everyone’s eyes followed to the point where we search the gutter for the right metaphor to describe our existence.
On the other hand, art is a reflection of the culture that produces it so the decline of the west preceded the decline in the arts. 150 years ago there was no audience for talking about your bowel movements whilst smearing yourself with pudding. People had more dignity. They also had a reason to look up, at least they thought they did. Now all they see is nothing so I suppose it makes sense to look down. At least there’s something to look at, even if it just their reflection.
Small correction, Hampton Beach is in New Hampshire. As if it matters.
When I was a child, everyone in the middle class wore a tie. I still remember how to tie a Windsor Knot. We wore suits to church on Sunday.
And nice girls didn’t tattoo their tits.
Black Culture is a worse oxymoron that Military Intelligence.
Yeah, it is. I was just thinking about the drive up 1A from Salisbury.
Military Intelligence was no oxymoron for a period of time after Vietnam. There were some uncannily intuitive and intelligent fellows at the first executive level (Major). That’s all slipping away now of course.
The American military was always meritocratic compared to the rest of the world. The lack of an aristocratic class probably explains it. These days, Progressive orthodoxy is chasing away the sorts of talent that used to be unique to the US military.
I remember going to Hampton Beach as a child with my family. It was never any kind of posh place, but back then it wasn’t the low-class honky-tonk freak show it is today. Tattoos disgust me, especially on women. I give a pass to old dudes (65 and up) who got theirs while in the service. Everybody else? Why don’t you stop conforming to the basest of cultures? Once upon a time, tattoos were pretty rare unless you were male, in the Navy, or a member of that Japanese mafia I can never remember the name of. Then it became… Read more »
An entire generation raised on reality TV and hip hop culture (if you can call it that) and this is the inevitable result. I think this quote was posted recently by someone commenting on one of your very good articles. I liked it so much I saved it:
““A society on the incline emulates the upper class, a society on the decline emulates the lower class.” – James LaFond
That says it all.
Or as Yogi Berra put it:
“We’re lost, but we’re making good time.”
“The great American underclass is a hodgepodge of Progressive fads adopted by people who can’t afford them.”
Your conversational style is first rate, but the aphorism is where you really shine.
Very true, Joe. My ever expanding 300 page book of aphorisms has that one between Ben Franklin–
The best way of doing good to the poor is not making them easy in poverty, but in driving them out of it–
and Tacitus–Benefits are acceptable, while the receiver thinks he may return them; but once exceeding that, hatred is given rather than thanks.
I often joke that I plan to write a book titled “The Zman’s Book of Unfamiliar Quotations.”
My grandfather, who I take after, had the same habit. It’s not something I think about at all or even notice in myself, but I like clever turns of phrase so maybe that’s it. The Irish are considered the best in the world at clever phrasing, but Russians have a knack for it as well. It’s just that few Americans speaks Russian.
As someone who went to art college many moons ago, I am reasonably interested in art. When I was a lad we students were excited by pop art. If you aren’t especially aware of this it was the celebration of the ‘instant and simple’ over ‘longevity and crafted.’ I don’t doubt that many of the pop artists could draw the human figure if they so wished, but it was more exciting for them and their mates to reproduce soup cans and comic-book halftones in primary colours. (While not a pop artist Picasso, by the way, could draw: he just chose… Read more »
If it had stopped at ‘Art’ it wouldn’t be as bad, but it spread through society in language, manners, depiction of life in all media (especially TV and magazines) and is still spreading. The schools have changed sides and promote the decline. I was driving past the High School as classes were getting out, two of the girls leaving were walking away from me on the sidewalk. Both had shorts on. One girls shorts were, well, short. The other girls shorts were so short that (As Bob Hope put it) she had two extra cheeks to powder. So No, the… Read more »
I used to check in on Taki’s every other day for new content. Since Derb’s departure I get my fix of he and Pat Buchanan over at VDare. Taki’s gets a visit about twice a month now. Jim Goad’s columns are mostly filler he has smashed out at the last minute on whatever is headlining Yahoo news. When he does have something that he wants to write about however, he can be quite readable. The bodily fluids and carnage get a bit yeah, yeah, yeah sometimes. As for Gavin McInnes, well he is a try-hard and a bullshitter who I… Read more »
There’s not a lot there these days. I’ll read Kathy Shaidle on occasion. I’ll read Sailer’s columns. I’ve never understood the point of Taki’s mag. It feels like a hobby more than real publication.
Taki sound now like it’s been taken over by the Klu Klux Klan…How in heaven can you reconcile libertardism with national-socialism?
Your comments on Joad et al. reminded me of Larry Auster’s comments on Jonah Goldberg: http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/004009.html. I guess Goad doesn’t really consider himself a conservative, but the fact that this is what “the right” sounds like reveals how little of there is left to conserve. (Or how little pretense conservatism makes these days to actually be conserving something.) I myself have to confess that I’m sometimes entertained by this thing, even though I know its a defect in the upbringing I received from my television. The old ideas of standards and propriety are long gone, and I guess if the… Read more »
[…] The Z Man on “realism” as we know and hate it: […]
It’s spelled “grody,” Einstein.
No, it is not.
Oh, yeah it is. A simple search of Merriam-Webster or dictionary.com will prove you’re wrong, wrong, wrong. They define the word on both sites. And guess what? Neither site has an entry for “groty.” You picked a really stupid hill to die on with this one.