3 Case – you quoted a sentence from the Wiki entry on George Trow. Bit of a traduction. So I thought I’d cut and paste a few other graphs from Wiki on his work at the bottom of his post…

You followed up with the lyrics from “Salt of the Earth.” That’s a complicated song – Listen close and you’ll tell that Jagger is all irony all the time. Despite the rad pose in tune with the times – the song is from 1968 – there’s no i.d. with the “proles” he’s half-celebrating…It’s a pretty
Republican song actually. (Though Hillary hit a few notes like that when she was in Scranton.)

Storm – just to be clear on my end – I’m not with Nietz – Better Angels boy myself. Though every big pol has has got Go. Question is – As the lady said in “Women in Love” – Where does his/her go go? No opinions re Ms. Palin’s familial life – But what’s the motorvation behind her politics? Check her record on the earmarks/bridge/budget etc. What it is? You tell me. She clearly isn’t somebody with a defined set of national/international concerns. (Alaska is a very particular place.) Someone earlier in this thread gave Ms. P. CREDIT for being “Machiavellian.” Think on that one for a moment…and maybe you’ll rethink your invocations of Jefferson. I think he’d roll over in his grave at the spectre of Ms. Palin’s sudden rise.

Bobal – “Well said by Jefferson” – Go out on a limb man!!!!!

Bud/Prog – Hear you…Appreciate your call for a certain measure of tact on my part so I apologize (in advance). But – demos depends on candor. Anti-Elitist is wrong re Palin’s future – she’s a star now. But is that all that matters to you guys? As you know – there are Mac backers – Neolex, Frum, Noonan etc. who don’t believe Palin is worldly enough to reach the C in C threshold…Come back at me with O’s lack of executive experience – I’ll take your point – and then ask you to think about O’s range of personal experience and intellectual achievements. The books (and Harvard Law Review Editorship) are not nothing. No illusions mind trumps all. But I think we all shouldv’e learned after W the uses for a President of consecutive thought, curiosity and worldliness…

One more thing on that front – I was struck by Mac’s formulation of our End in Iraq during his speech tonight. He said the point was to establish “stability” in the Middle East…A term that suggests he’ll carry on with Bush’s ongoing failure to make the case for establishing a democratic state that protects minorities in the M.E. You don’t have to be a neo-con to know that “stability” was/is a problem in the reactionary M.E. Mac was right about the Surge – but one important job of a president is to be able to make an unobvious argument and bring the American people along. I don’t believe Mac is a Mind for our time. Let’s stop diminishing (or overpraising the “oratory’ of O’s speeches. What matters when he speaks now is that he models a Man Thinking through the moment…

Alexis – you’re right of course that it would have been better for O to wait – get more of a record. Ax certainly didn’t expect O would go for it this time. But – what can you do – I saw one of the crowds gathered at O’s book signings for the re-issue of Dreams in 05 – People were hungry for someone who would call out to their better angels…Country First.

HERE’s the Wiki stuff on George Trow…

Throughout his career, Trow analyzed mainstream American cultural institutions to understand how the culture had changed from the newspaper-reading, eastern Establishment-dominated world of his childhood in the 1940s and early ’50s, to the ahistorical, tabloid sensibility born in the Jazz Age and spread by television.

Trow’s reputation rests on his long nonfiction. These works have received mostly positive reviews. Highly literate readers, as well as reviewers in newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post, have been thrilled by Trow’s brilliant and prophetic insights; wide-ranging references to serious and pop culture; and aphoristic, sometimes post-modern literary style. But the appeal and value of Trow’s work can be difficult to communicate, because the style “in its very essence resists summary. Summary, of course, flees from detail, whereas for Trow the details are the notes without which there is no song.” [3] Other critics have found these works impenetrable and elitist; some argue that Trow’s nostalgia for the pre-television era was misplaced, because the subsequent civil rights movements had made American culture more democratic.[4]

Trow’s only novel, The City in the Mist, (1984) did not impress critics. They were put off by its usually minimalist style, and its lack of plot, narrative momentum or involving characters. The book, which moves trom the mid-19th century to the present, tracks the energy in three intertwined families, from the masculine vitality of a thuggish Irish immigrant to the weak flame of his elderly bachelor grandson, who lives on his income in two rooms in New York City, and spends his time socializing and caring for his clothes. The central concerns of the novel, the decline of masculine energy and the replacement of masculine social authority by feminine social authority, are later addressed explicitly in My Pilgrim’s Progress.

Within the Context of No Context, which was edited by New Yorker editor William Shawn, was published in book form in 1981 accompanied by Trow’s profile of music mogul Ahmet Ertegün. In 1997, “No Context” was reprinted with a new introductory essay, Collapsing Dominant.

In “No Context,” Trow lamented the destruction by television of American public culture and sense of history. “Middle-distance” institutions that had long given Americans’ lives real contexts (such as fraternal organizations, bowling leagues, and women’s clubs), had been abandoned when people stayed home to watch television. Television shows were false contexts designed to be just attractive enough to keep people watching. Without the middle-distance institutions, what remained as real options for people to live in were “the grid of two hundred million” (the U.S. population at the time) and “the grid of intimacy” (the immediate family). Only celebrities, who had a real life in both grids, were now perceived to be complete. People became lonely and, in order to feel complete, wanted to be on television in order to become celebrities themselves.[5]

Because television sells products by pleasing demographically defined groups, viewers learned to think of themselves demographically. In consequence, demography had replaced history as the context for understanding the world. People understood themselves as members of lateral demographic groups rather than as part of a linear flow of people from the past into the future. Things were now valued not on an absolute scale, but by discovering if one was in tune with one’s group. Trow illustrates this point with a reference to Family Feud, where a contestant was asked to guess “what a poll of a hundred people had guessed would be the height of the average American woman. Guess what they guessed. Guess what they guessed the average is.”[6]

“No Context” ends with a narrative memoir of Trow’s experiences working two summers as a guide at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. His take on the Fair: “At the Fair, one could see the world of television impersonating the world of history.”[7]

“No Context” remains a touchstone for many intellectuals, and is taught in university media studies classes. In an obituary for Trow, the novelist and screenwriter Michael Tolkin is quoted as saying that “No Context” is no longer fashionable because “It’s not a polemic for change. It’s just a cold description of where things are going. There aren’t many books that are unafraid to be that negative.”[8]

In his essay The Harvard Black Rock Forest, Trow criticizes another mainstream American institution, Harvard University (which he had attended). The Black Rock Forest, 50 miles north of New York City along the Hudson River, had been donated to Harvard as a nature preserve for scientific studies. Trow writes about the Harvard administration’s indifference to the property except as a profit opportunity, and its eventual rescue and dedication to educational nature studies.

A memoir and a sort of prequel to “No Context,” My Pilgrim’s Progress: Media Studies, 1950-1998 is focused on the cultural world of the Fifties. It is written in a conversational style, sometimes transcribed from audiotapes. Trow “swirls” between pop and mainstream cultural icons, such as Doris Day, Alfred Hitchcock, Elvis Presley, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. The book cover has a photograph of President Eisenhower, whom Trow admired as “the guy of guys”. A major concern of the book is the models of masculine authority that American culture presents to boys. For Trow’s Boomer generation, the models of masculine authority presented to them by mass culture were so unattainable or irrelevant that television (ironic attitude to self) was the only possible option.

Reviewers of Progress have generally found it insightful and worth reading, although a lesser literary achievement than “No Context.” Some reviewers have been put off by what they see as haughtiness or elitism in Trow’s repeated statement of authority, “You’ll have to trust me on that one.”[9]

According to a close friend, Trow was “extremely upset” by the critical reception of Progress.[8] After that, he only published one known article, a critique of television news anchor Dan Rather.[10]