The F Word

George Orwell had this to say about the poetry of W.B. Yeats:

Translated into political terms, Yeats’s tendency is Fascist...the theory that civilisation moves in recurring cycles is one way out for people who hate the concept of human equality. If it is true that “all this”, or something like it, “has happened before”, then science and the modern world are debunked at one stroke and progress becomes for ever impossible. It does not much matter if the lower orders are getting above themselves, for, after all, we shall soon be returning to an age of tyranny.

Orwell was paying particularly close attention to Yeats's poem "The Second Coming", which characterises history's movement as one of 'Turning and turning in the widening gyre'.

If history moves in spirals then progress is impossible: it's an analysis that feels strangely appropriate for one of the most divisive publications on the British market at present: Conor McNicholas's weekly music magazine NME. The cover of the 05/05/09 issue contained a phrase that would rank highly in a hypothetical list of "The Most Glib Statements I Have Ever Encountered in the Media" (along with "Blackberry for Everyone", displayed in the window of a T-Mobile store in Glasgow). The phrase ran as follows:

FLEET FOXES: THIS SUMMER'S MGMT?

Not only does this analysis feel utterly redundant - surely Fleet Foxes were last summer's Fleet Foxes? - but its logic is also deeply dubious. For, like the contemporary culture industry, with its constant reiteration of old themes, styles and crazes under the "Retro" rubric, it subscribes to the selfsame cyclical view of history that Orwell finds so troubling in Yeats's writing. While purportedly celebrating innovation, the NME actually apotheosises the past by figuring it as a pair of shoes that are repeatedly filled, vacated and refilled. The more things change, the more they stay the same - this is the implicit message of the NME's obssession with all things emergent.




It's tempting, then, for those who loathe the NME with a passion - and there are many such individuals, not least among the generation that is the magazine's prime target demographic - to have done with it and label the publication Fascist (this is not a generational instinct - viz. Jennifer Saunders in a December 1982 episode of The Young Ones directing the term at a party-crashing Father Christmas). Mutatis Mutandis: "Translated into political terms, the NME’s tendency is Fascist...the theory that music moves in recurring cycles is one way out for people who hate the concept of real innovation." Tempting, but perhaps not advisable, as such labelling has recently been recognised as deeply problematic. Fallacious even: Mike Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies, known colloquially as Godwin's Law, penalises those who revert to a Reductio ad Hitlerum form in order to win a debate, based on the adage that, 'As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one'. Godwin explains his creation thus:

In discussions about guns and the Second Amendment, for example, gun-control advocates are periodically reminded that Hitler banned personal weapons. And birth-control debates are frequently marked by pro-lifers' insistence that abortionists are engaging in mass murder, worse than that of Nazi death camps. And in any newsgroup in which censorship is discussed, someone inevitably raises the specter of Nazi book-burning...invariably, the comparisons trivialized the horror of the Holocaust and the social pathology of the Nazis. It was a trivialization I found both illogical (Michael Dukakis as a Nazi? Please!) and offensive (the millions of concentration-camp victims did not die to give some net.blowhard a handy trope).

To safeguard against this 'particularly silly and offensive meme...and perhaps to curtail the glib Nazi comparisons', Godwin's law recommends that we consider the use-value of an argument to be nullified once the Reductio ad Hitlerum rears its ugly head. So where does this leave me? Where does it leave my contemporaries that dislike the NME even more strongly than myself? Is my instinctive equation (I came up with the bare bones of this argument in a supermarket queue the instant I had read that headline) of Yeatsian fascism with one of the cornerstones of British music journalism just another contender for the award of my own devising, "The Most Glib Statement I Have Ever Encountered in the Media"? I'll risk it: for the stock it sets in historical reiteration; and for the truly conservative core it retains while paying lip service to innovation, I hereby declare the NME to be - in the Yeatsian mode, and with a small f - fascist.


Sources:

Orwell, George. "W.B. Yeats (1943)", The Occidental Quarterly Online, May 12, 2009. http://www.toqonline.com/2009/05/orwell-on-yeats/ [accessed 25/05/09]

Yeats, W.B. "The Second Coming", The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2, ed. Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton, 2006.

Godwin, Mike. "Meme, Counter-meme", Wired, issue 2.10, Oct 1994. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/godwin.if.html [accessed 25/05/09].