Category: Features

Pop Orwell

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Features

[Splice Today]

On December 21, 1940, George Orwell reviewed Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator for a London newspaper.

“Simply as a film,” Orwell writes, “it has very great faults.” Yet he goes on to predict the film’s future impact: “What is Chaplin’s peculiar gift? It is his power to stand for a sort of concentrated essence of the common man. . . . If our Government had a little more imagination, they would subsidize The Great Dictator heavily and would make every effort to get a few copies into Germany.”

What can we learn from such a review (besides the fact that Orwell had a barely latent crush on Paulette Goddard)? That Orwell consumed precarious amounts of pop culture, a point I try to make in my essay-slash-review of two new volumes of Orwell’s nonfiction (edited by George Packer) over at Splice.

N.B. (updated)

by Craig Fehrman, posted in All History is Local History, Features, Hoosiers, Politics

[Culture11]

I grew up in a tiny Indiana town, where, each political year, we bonded over a latent jealousy toward Ohio for its constant visits and stump speeches and attention; all we got were the commercials, since our TV channels came from Cincinnati.

Of course, this all made sense. Politicians and reporters ignored Indiana because, as a state, it had already cast its ballot. (This year may prove to be an exception, which is why we’re getting covered.) But this doesn’t mean that every county and town mirrored the state’s worldview—Bloomington, I’m looking at you—and I’ve long held the theory that there’s just as much to learn from a man-on-the-street piece on Indiana as from one on Ohio.

A few weeks ago, Culture11 gave me a chance to turn theory into praxis. I don’t live in Indiana now, but the same principles should apply to a true-blue state like Connecticut. Check out my dispatch from North Branford, one of that state’s independent small towns.

UPDATE: If my story inspires you to do some electoral digging of your own, check out this Google map, which includes the results from the last seven presidential elections. Unfortunately, it stops breaking down the results at the county level, so you’ll have to trust me on North Branford. (h/t Marc Ambinder)

Vermont, Ice Cream, and Empire

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Features, Politics

[Culture11]

Vermont’s top tourist attraction is the Ben & Jerry’s factory tour. Now, given the popularity of the tour and the product, why not expand the concept? That is, if each coast can support a Disney-themed park, why can’t we get a second (or third) Ben & Jerry’s factory? But this would miss the appeal of the Ben & Jerry’s factory, which is geographical as much as political. At least, that’s my impression after visiting both factory and state.

Vermont is weird, fascinating, and, most of all, independent. Its amazing alt-weekly, 7 Days, ran an op-ed urging middle-class people to use WIC; one of the main arguments was that it would support local farmers. Then, there’s The Vermont Commons, a “statewide news journal”:

As we have argued in these pages for three years, the United States is no longer a constitutional republic responsible to the will of its citizens, but an aggressive empire acting at the behest of the few at the expense of the many.

And let’s not forget Vermont’s alternative universities like Goddard College, famously the alma mater of Mumia Abu-Jabul. In August, Mumia actually returned to Vermont, via audio recording, to give one of Goddard’s commencement speeches.

If you want to see how this applies to Ben & Jerry’s—and I promise all of it does, even Mumia—check out my new essay at Culture11, “Rage Against the Ice Cream.”