Modernism and Its Discontents

Laura Frost argues that, against the increasing laziness of popular entertainments, as seen in the cinema for instance, modernist writers believed that literary works ought to be made more challenging.

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Indeed, modernism has a confrontational edge: Eliot’s insistence that “poets in our civilization as it exists at present, must be difficult,” for example, or Dorothy Richardson’s quip that “Plot, nowadays, save the cosmic plot, is inexcusable. Lollipops for children.”

-- Laura Frost, “The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents”

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The Natural World

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1964 LBJ and the Great Society Program

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Standing on his presidential limousine, Lyndon Johnson, campaigning in Providence, R.I., in September 1964, bellowed through a bullhorn: “We’re in favor of a lot of things and we’re against mighty few.” This was a synopsis of what he had said four months earlier.

Fifty years ago this Thursday, at the University of Michigan, Johnson had proposed legislating into existence a Great Society. It would end poverty and racial injustice, “but that is just the beginning.” It would “rebuild the entire urban United States” while fending off “boredom and restlessness,” slaking “the hunger for community” and enhancing “the meaning of our lives” — all by assembling “the best thought and the broadest knowledge.”

In 1964, 76 percent of Americans trusted government to do the right thing “just about always or most of the time.” Today, 19 percent do. The former number is one reason Johnson did so much; the latter is one consequence of his doing so.

-- George F. Will at The Boston Herald

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As Ronald Reagan said about the war on poverty: poverty won.