The brutal & the sweet: Twee culture, the Obama Doctrine, & fractures in Ferguson

What this episode covers

1:50 EVOLUTION’S LATEST: TWEE… I start this week’s call by noting an article in last Sunday’s New York Times style section entitled: The Millennials are Generation Nice, a psychographic snapshot of the 50 million Americans between the ages of 18 and 29. This latest generation of adults, likely mirrored by those in other developed countries, are characterized by a declining interest in materialism and an increased dedication to social purpose, vegetarianism and optimism. The article concludes, “Taken together these habits and tastes look less like narcissism than communalism. And its highest value isn’t self-promotion, but its opposite, empathy — and open-minded and -hearted connection to others.” This view supports the thesis of a book I’ve been reading, Twee, The Gentle Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion and Film, by Mark Spitz. Using the sometimes derogatory word “twee”, which means “excessively sweet or sentimental,” Spitz writes that “Twee can be similarly liberating from the pressure to be cool, swaggering, aggressively macho, and old at heart.” James Parker, in the Atlantic, describes it as “The strangely persistent modern sensibility that fructifies in the props departments of Wes Anderson movies, tapers into the waxed mustache-ends of young Brooklynites on bicycles, and detonates in a yeasty whiff every time someone pops open a microbrewed beer.” Spitz identifies several markers of the Twee aesthetic: * Beauty over ugliness. * A sharp, almost incapacitating awareness of darkness, death, and cruelty, which clashes with a steadfast focus on our essential goodness. * A tether to childhood and its attendant innocence and lack of greed. * The utter dispensing with of “cool” as it’s conventionally known, often in favor of a kind of fetishization of the nerd, the geek, the dork, the virgin. * A healthy suspicion of adulthood. * An interest in sex but a wariness and shyness when it comes to the deed. * A lust for knowledge, whether it’s the sequence of an album, the supporting players in an old Hal Ashby or Robert Altman film, the lesser-known Judy Blume books, or how to grow the perfect purple, Italian, or Chinese eggplant or orange cauliflower. * The cultivation of a passion project, whether it’s a band, a zine, an Indie film, a website, or a food or clothing company. Whatever it is, in the eye of the Twee it is a force of good and something to live for. To me these orientations suggest a consciousness that is differentiating itself from the cynicism, irony and malaise of the post-modern altitude of development. Are we seeing the first signs of a new integral aesthetic? I think so, especially in the emphasis on basic goodness, as well as the impulse to create a personal project that contributes to the world. 12:45 A GOOD WEEK FOR THE OBAMA DOCTRINE Despite pundits left and right decrying Obama’s handling of ISIS extremists in Iraq, we have seen an enormously positive development in the situation as a direct result of what Obama has done and not done. I’m talking about the peaceful and legal replacement of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki by the new Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi. Maliki did not go easily and for a few days it looked as if he may even resort to attempting a military coup to maintain power. But in the end he acquiesced and even stood by the new Prime Minister in a demonstration of a constitutional passing of power that is remarkable in that part of the world. In his disastrous last years in office Maliki presided over a Shiite domination of the country, precipitating a ratcheting down of Iraq from a fledgling modern altitude to a neo-tribal one, and creating rifts that enabled ISIS to gain a foothold in the Sunni sectors of the country. Obama was criticized for “letting this happen”, criticism he pushed back on in his recent <a href="http://www.

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