Alt-Right fantasy

Alt-Right’s Favorite Meme Is 100 Years Old‘Cultural Marxism’ might sound postmodern but it’s got a long, toxic history.

By Samuel Moyn NY TIMES

Mr. Moyn is a professor of law and history at Yale.
Anders Breivik seen during the audience in court, in Oslo, Norway in 2012.Pool photo by Lise Aserud

At the chilling climax of William S. Lind’s 2014 novel “Victoria,” knights wearing crusader’s crosses and singing Christian hymns brutally slay the politically correct faculty at Dartmouth College, the main character’s (and Mr. Lind’s) alma mater. “The work of slaughter went quickly,” the narrator says. “In less than five minutes of screams, shrieks and howls, it was all over. The floor ran deep with the bowels of cultural Marxism.”

What is “cultural Marxism”? And why does Mr. Lind fantasize about its slaughter?

Nothing of the kind actually exists. But it is increasingly popular to indict cultural Marxism’s baleful effects on society — and to dream of its violent extermination. With a spate of recent violence in the United States and elsewhere, calling out the runaway alt-right imagination is more urgent than ever.

Originally an American contribution to the phantasmagoria of the alt-right, the fear of “cultural Marxism” has been percolating for years through global sewers of hatred. Increasingly, it has burst into the mainstream. Before President Trump’s aide Rich Higgins was fired last year, he invoked the threat of “cultural Marxism” in proposing a new national security strategy. In June, Ron Paul tweeted out a racist meme that employed the phrase. On Twitter, the son of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s newly elected strongman, boasted of meeting Steve Bannon and joining forces to defeat “cultural Marxism.” Jordan Peterson, the self-help guru and best-selling author, has railed against it too in his YouTube ruminations.

“Cultural Marxism” is also a favorite topic on Gab, the social media network where Robert Bowers, the man accused of shooting 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh last month, spent time. Mr. Lind may have only fantasized about mass death as a comeuppance for cultural Marxists, but others have acted on it: In his 1,500-page manifesto, the Norwegian far-rightist Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in 2011, invoked “cultural Marxism” repeatedly. “It wants to change behavior, thought, even the words we use,” he wrote. “To a significant extent, it already has.” 

According to their delirious foes, “cultural Marxists” are an unholy alliance of abortionists, feminists, globalists, homosexuals, intellectuals and socialists who have translated the far left’s old campaign to take away people’s privileges from “class struggle” into “identity politics” and multiculturalism. Before he executes the professors, the protagonist of Mr. Lind’s novel expounds on his theory to their faces: “Classical Marxists, where they obtained power, expropriated the bourgeoisie and gave their property to the state,” he says. “Where you obtained power, you expropriated the rights of white men and gave special privileges to feminists, blacks, gays, and the like.” It is on the basis of this parallel that the novel justifies carnage against the “enemies of Christendom” as an act showing that “Western culture” is “recovering its will.”

Some Marxists, like the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci and his intellectual heirs, tried to understand how the class rule they criticized worked through cultural domination. And today, it’s true that on campus and off, many people are directing their ire at the advantages that white males have historically enjoyed. But neither the defense of the workers nor of other disempowered groups was a conspiracy on its own, and never was there a malignant plot to convert the first into the second — which is what “cultural Marxism” implies. Deployed to avoid claims of injustice, the charge functions to whip up agitated frenzy or inspire visions of revenge.

And while increasingly popular worries about cosmopolitan elites and economic globalization can sometimes transcend the most noxious anti-Semitism, talk of cultural Marxism is inseparable from it. The legend of cultural Marxism recycles old anti-Semitic tropes to give those who feel threatened a scapegoat.

A number of the conspiracy theorists tracing the origins of “cultural Marxism” assign outsize significance to the Frankfurt School, an interwar German — and mostly Jewish — intellectual collective of left-wing social theorists and philosophers. Many members of the Frankfurt School fled Nazism and came to the United States, which is where they supposedly uploaded the virus of cultural Marxism to America. These zany stories of the Frankfurt School’s role in fomenting political correctness would be entertaining, except that they echo the baseless allegations of tiny cabals ruling the world that fed the right’s paranoid imagination in prior eras.

The wider discourse around cultural Marxism today resembles nothing so much as a version of the Judeobolshevik myth updated for a new age. In the years after the Russian Revolution, fantasists took advantage of the fact that many of its instigators were Jewish to suggest that people could save time by equating Judaism and communism — and kill off both with one blow. As the historian Paul Hanebrink recounts in an unnerving new study, according to the Judeobolshevik myth, the instigators of communism were the Jews as a whole, not some tiny band of thinkers, conniving as a people to bring communist irreligion and revolution worldwide.

The results of such beliefs weren’t pretty. According to Professor Hanebrink, many aspects of the Judeobolshevik fantasy survived the Holocaust it helped bring about, just with the role of the Jews implied more euphemistically or replaced by new adversaries. As in Judeobolshevism, cultural Marxism homogenizes vast groups of shadowy enemies and assigns them a secret design to upend society. As in Judeobolshevism, those supposedly under threat are invited to identify themselves with “the Christian West” and surge in self-defense before it is too late.

The defense of the West in the name of “order” and against “chaos,” which really seems to mean unjustifiable privilege against new claimants, is an old affair posing as new insight. It led to grievous harm in the last century. And though today’s critics of “cultural Marxism” purport to be very learned, they proceed seemingly unaware of the heavy baggage involved in alleging that conspiracies have ruined the land.

That “cultural Marxism” is a crude slander, referring to something that does not exist, unfortunately does not mean actual people are not being set up to pay the price, as scapegoats to appease a rising sense of anger and anxiety. And for that reason, “cultural Marxism” is not only a sad diversion from framing legitimate grievances but also a dangerous lure in an increasingly unhinged moment.

Samuel Moyn (@samuelmoyn) is a professor of law and history at Yale 

Note:

When I grew up in Miami Florida in the 1960's many adults harbored weird fantasies that the Cubans coming from Castro's Cuba were actually part of a plot to take over Florida. White men believed Martin Luther King was a marxist and sought to strip white culture of every value and defeat Christianity. It seems very generation of white men hold weird and fantastic theories about their  enemies and sometimes act out. What is happening now with the Alt Right is just a new generation of crazies.

David A Fairbanks

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia: It’s Time for a New Map of the Gender World

Claire Lechman Quillette

I discovered Camille Paglia’s work when I was pursuing my undergraduate arts education at The University of Adelaide, South Australia, in the early 2000s. I was deeply disillusioned with the courses in my arts degree and their monomaniacal focus on social constructionism, and was looking for criticism of Michel Foucault on the internet. I stumbled across a 1991 op-ed written by Paglia for The New York Times, in which she described the followers of Lacan, Derrida and Foucault, as “fossilized reactionaries,” and “the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality.” I was hooked.

It wasn’t long before I discovered that my university’s library contained each of her books, including the essay collections Vamps and Tramps and Sex, Art and American Culture. For the final year of my arts degree, (before pursuing my studies in psychology) I spent the bulk of my time at the university reading Paglia in the library. She was like a revelation. Her work was subversive but erudite, and she synthesized insights made in the realm of the arts, ancient history and folk biology—something that no other scholar of the humanities had attempted to do. Thirteen years later, it is an honour to be able to interview Camille Paglia for Quillette. 

Paglia is an essayist, author, and professor of humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she has taught since 1984. She completed her PhD at Yale under the supervision of Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon. Her first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence, from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, was listed by David Bowie as one of “100 books we should all read.” 

Her other books include Break, Blow, Burn, a close-reading of 43 classic poems, and Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars. In recent years, her essays have been collected and published in new editions, including Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender and Feminism (February 2018) and Provocations: Collected Essays on Art, Feminism, Politics, Sex and Education, which was released by Pantheon in October 2018. 

I interviewed Paglia over email for Quillette. What follows is an unedited reproduction of that interview.

* * *

Claire Lehmann: You seem to be one of the only scholars of the humanities who are willing to challenge the post-structuralist status quo. Why have other humanities academics been so spineless in preserving the integrity of their fields?

Camille Paglia: The silence of the academic establishment about the corruption of Western universities by postmodernism and post-structuralism has been an absolute disgrace. First of all, the older generation of true scholars who still ruled the roost when I arrived at the Yale Graduate School in 1968 were not fighters, to begin with. American professors, unlike their British counterparts, had not been schooled in ferocious and satirical debate. They were courtly and genteel, a High Protestant middlebrow style. Voices were hushed, and propriety ruled at the Yale department of English: I once described it as “walking on eggs at the funeral home.”

An ossified New Criticism was then still ascendant. I had been trained in college in that technique of microscopic close analysis of the text, and it remains a marvelous tool for cultural criticism: I have applied it to everything from painting to pop songs. However, my strong view at the time (from my early grounding in archaeology) was that literary criticism had to recover authentic historical consciousness and also to expand toward psychology, which was still considered vulgar. Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman (whose Yale careers had begun amid tinges of anti-Semitism) were moving in a different, more conceptual direction, heavy on European philosophy.

By the early 1970s, when I was writing my doctoral dissertation (Sexual Personae, directed by Bloom), change suddenly arrived from outside: deconstruction was the hot new thing, hastened along by J. Hillis Miller, who left Johns Hopkins for Yale. I thought Derrida and DeMan and the rest of that crew were arrant nonsense from the start, a pedantic diversion from direct engagement with art. About the obsequious Yale welcome given to the pratlings of one continental “star” visitor, I acidly remarked to a fellow grad student sitting next to me, “They’re like high priests murmuring to each other.”

The New Criticism desperately needed supplementation, but that opaque hash (so divorced from genuine art appreciation) was certainly not it. I was disgusted at the rapid spread of deconstruction and post-structuralism throughout elite U.S. universities in the 1970s, when I was teaching at my first job at Bennington College. The reason it happened is really quite prosaic: a recession hit in the 1970s, and the job market in academe collapsed. Fancy-pants post-structuralism was the ticket to ride for ambitious, beady-eyed young careerists on the make. Its coy, showy gestures and clotted lingo were insiders’ badges of claimed intellectual superiority. But the whole lot of them were mediocrities from the start. It is doubtful that much if any of their work will have long-term traction.

As I argued in my long attack on post-structuralism, “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf” (Arion, Spring 1991; reprinted in my first essay collection, Sex, Art, and American Culture), Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault were already outmoded thinkers even in France, where their prominence had been relatively brief. There was nothing genuinely leftist in their elitist, monotonously language-based analysis. On the contrary, post-structuralism was abjectly reactionary, resisting and reversing the true revolution of the 1960s American counterculture, which liberated the senses and reconnected the body and personal identity to nature, in the Romantic manner. It is very telling that Foucault’s principal inspiration, by his own admission, was Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which I loathed as a college student for its postwar passivity and nihilism. (As a teacher, I admire Godot as a play but still reject its parochial and at times juvenile world-view.)

Post-structuralism, along with identity politics, made huge gains in the 1970s, as the old guard professors proved helpless against a rising tide of rapid add-on programs and departments like women’s studies and African-American studies. The tenured professoriate seemed not to realize that change of some kind was necessary, and thus they failed to provide an alternative vision of a remodeled university of the future. I myself was lobbying for interdisciplinary innovation in the humanities—something that remained highly controversial right through the 1980s, when there were fierce battles over it where I was then teaching (during the merger of the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts with the Philadelphia College of Art to form the present University of the Arts). Another persistent proposal of mine has been for comparative religion to become the undergraduate core curriculum, an authentically global multiculturalism

Most established professors in the 1970s probably believed that the new theory trend was a fad that would blow away like autumn leaves. The greatness of the complex and continuous Western tradition seemed self-evident: the canon would surely stand, even if supplemented by new names. Well, guess what? Helped along by a swelling horde of officious, overpaid administrators, North American universities became, decade by decade, political correctness camps. Out went half the classics, as well as pedagogically useful survey courses demonstrating sequential patterns in history (now dismissed as a “false narrative” by callow theorists). Bookish, introverted old-school professors were not prepared for guerrilla warfare to defend basic scholarly principles or to withstand waves of defamation and harassment.

However, it is indeed difficult to understand why major professors already in safe, powerful positions avoided direct combat. For example, although he had made passing dismissive remarks about post-structuralism (“Foucault and soda water”), Harold Bloom never systematically engaged or critiqued the subject or used his access to the general media to endorse debate, which was left instead to self-identified conservatives. The latter situation was clearly counterproductive, insofar as it enabled the bourgeois faux leftists of academe to define themselves and their reflex gobbledygook as boldly progressive.

In October 1990, I sat with my longtime mentor Bloom at a presidential dinner preceding his Shakespeare lecture at Bryn Mawr College in the Philadelphia suburbs. I told him about the exposé of post-structuralism that I was writing for Arion (and that took six months to do). He flatly replied, “You’re wasting your time.” I must suppose there was simply a generational divide: as a product of the 1960s, I still passionately believe in reform as an ethical imperative. Furthermore, most of my teaching career has been spent at small art schools, which have always spurned the conformist formulas and protocols of traditional universities.

Nevertheless, the poisons of post-structuralism have now spread throughout academe and have done enormous damage to basic scholarly standards and disastrously undermined belief even in the possibility of knowledge. I suspect history will not be kind to the leading professors who appear to have put loyalty to friends and colleagues above defending scholarly values during a chaotic era of overt vandalism that has deprived several generations of students of a profound education in the humanities. The steady decline in humanities majors is an unmistakable signal that this once noble field has become a wasteland.

Do you believe that politics and in particular social justice (i.e., anti-racism and feminism) are becoming cults or pseudo-religions? Is politics filling the void left by the receding influence of organized religion?

Paglia: This has certainly been my view for many years now. I said in the introduction to my art book, Glittering Images (2012), that secular humanism has failed. As an atheist, I have argued that if religion is erased, something must be put in its place. Belief systems are intrinsic to human intelligence and survival. They “frame” the flux of primary experience, which would otherwise flood the mind.

But politics cannot fill the gap. Society, with which Marxism is obsessed, is only a fragment of the totality of life. As I have written, Marxism has no metaphysics: it cannot even detect, much less comprehend, the enormity of the universe and the operations of nature. Those who invest all of their spiritual energies in politics will reap the whirlwind. The evidence is all around us—the paroxysms of inchoate, infantile rage suffered by those who have turned fallible politicians into saviors and devils, godlike avatars of Good versus Evil.

My substitute for religion is art, which I have expanded to include all of popular culture. But when art is reduced to politics, as has been programmatically done in academe for 40 years, its spiritual dimension is gone. It is coarsely reductive to claim that value in the history of art is always determined by the power plays of a self-referential social elite. I take Marxist social analysis seriously: Arnold Hauser’s Marxist, multi-volume A Social History of Art (1951) was a major influence on me in graduate school. However, Hauser honored art and never condescended to it. A society that respects neither religion nor art cannot be called a civilization.

The #MeToo movement seems to have many features of a moral panic, for example, there are exhortations to “believe all women” without relying on due process, and a great deal of weight is being placed on weak evidence, such as eyewitness testimony, and so forth. Would you agree that we are seeing a moral panic, the type of which has been depicted in Miller’s The Crucible, or Huxley’s The Devils of Loudon?

Paglia: The headlong rush to judgment by so many well-educated, middle-class women in the #MeToo movement has been startling and dismaying. Their elevation of emotion and group solidarity over fact and logic has resurrected damaging stereotypes of women’s irrationality that were once used to deny us the vote. I found the blanket credulity given to women accusers during the recent U.S. Senate confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh positively unnerving: it was the first time since college that I truly understood the sexist design of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, whose mob of vengeful Furies is superseded by formal courts of law, where evidence is weighed. 

I’m not sure that I would find “moral panic” in our recent glut of accusations and public histrionics. It is obviously a positive development that sexual abuse is no longer hidden or tolerated. In 1986, I developed moderate sexual harassment guidelines in my “Women and Sex Roles” class and presented them to the college administration for adoption. I am wholeheartedly in favor of women students or employees knowing their rights and speaking up to defend them. However, the #MeToo movement has gone seriously off track in encouraging uncorroborated accusations dating from ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. No democracy can survive in such a paranoid climate of ambush and summary execution. This is Stalinism, a nadir of politics.

What I see in both the Women’s March and #MeToo is an atavistic rediscovery by Western women of the joy of their own mutually nurturing solidarity—a primary feature of daily life during 10,000 years of the agrarian era that has been lost over the past two centuries of industrialization. As I have often noted, the sexes throughout human history actually had very little to do with each other. There was the world of men and the world of women, each with its own spheres of influence and activity. Women didn’t take men that seriously, and vice versa. I know this because I am the product of an immigrant family (my mother and all four grandparents were born in Italy), and it wasn’t that long ago that we were tilling the stony soil of the earthquake-prone motherland.

I am an equity feminist: that is, I demand equal opportunity for women through the removal of all barriers to their advance in the professional and political realms. However, I oppose special protections for women as inherently paternalistic and regressive. Women have rarely worked side by side with men in the way they now do in the modern workplace, whose competitive operational systems were devised by men for maximum productivity. Despite their general affluence, professional women of the Western world have been chronically unhappy for decades, and I conjecture that it is partly because they have been led to expect happiness from a mechanical work environment that doesn’t make men happy either. 

Second, the nuclear family as a standard unit of social life is a relatively new and isolating phenomenon. Wives returning from work to an apartment or house are expecting their husbands to fulfill all the emotional and conversational needs that were once fulfilled by other women of multiple generations throughout the agrarian workday in the fields or at home (where the burdens of childcare and eldercare were group shared). 

What I see spreading among professional middle-class women is a bitter resentment toward men that is in many cases unjust and misplaced. With divorce so easy since the sexual revolution, women find themselves competing with younger women in new and cruel ways. Agrarian women gained power as they aged: young women were brainless pawns whose marriages, pregnancies, childcare, cooking, and other chores were acerbically supervised and controlled by the dictatorial crones (forces of nature whom I fondly remember from childhood).

In short, #MeToo from a historical perspective is a cri de coeur from women who are realizing that the sexual revolution that many of us had once ecstatically embraced has in key ways devalued women, confused their private relationships, and complicated their smooth functioning in the workplace. It’s time for a new map of the gender world.

Camille Paglia is the University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

The Beatles 'Good Night'

The Beatles’ New White Album: Why ‘Good Night’ Is a Gloriously Weird Revelation

In a previously unheard outtake, John, Paul, George and Ringo harmonize the “good night, sleep tight” refrain together — making it an emotionally direct epiphany

Rob Sheffield Rolling Stone

There’s a moment on the Beatles’ new “Super Deluxe” edition of the White Albumthat sums up all the glories of their 1968 masterpiece. And weirdly, that moment is “Good Night.” There’s always been something mysterious about “Good Night” — the album’s orchestral finale. It’s a tender ballad from John, one he always meant for Ringo Starr to sing, without ever explaining to Ringo (or anyone else) why. Many fans dismissed it as a coy joke. But it nearly steals the show on the new box set, in a previously unheard outtake where all four Beatles sing it together. John, Paul, George and Ringo harmonize the “good night, sleep tight” refrain, over John’s folkie finger-picking. It’s hard to believe this great version sat in the vaults all these years, gathering dust. But after you hear John play “Good Night” on guitar, the song is no joke at all — it feels instead like a cry from the heart, cleverly disguised, waiting for the world to notice 50 years later.

The alternate “Good Night” shows off everything that makes the new “Super Deluxe” edition essential. Even for those of us who’ve loved the White Album our whole lives, the new box reveals there’s more to this music — and to the Beatles — than we even dreamed. It’s crammed with lost treasures: the acoustic Esher demos, the Abbey Road outtakes, the superior new mixes. If you’re a “Julia” fanatic, it can knock you sideways to hear the demo where John’s solitary voice gets joined by Paul. If you love “Long, Long, Long,” you can finally hear George’s heart-tugging acoustic strums, badly muffled in the original mix. Paul/Yoko shippers can enjoy them jamming together on “Revolution 1.” But “Good Night” is the most surprising discovery here, as it evolves through three drastically different versions. In a way, it’s the whole White Album saga in one song.

It’s safe to say “Good Night” has never been anybody’s favorite on the White Album. It always seemed like a lovingly tongue-in-cheek lullaby, with producer George Martin orchestrating the lush Old Hollywood strings, after four sides of chaos and conflict. There’s a harp, even a choir — the Mike Sammes Singers, who also sang the “ooompah ooompah” at the end of “I Am the Walrus.” Structurally, it’s a brilliant way to bring the album in for a landing — Ringo sends us all home with a peace-and-love benediction, whispering, “Good night, everybody. Everybody, everywhere.” Only he could make it sound so sincere, which might be why John never considered singing it himself. Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker did it on the BBC’s Wireless Nights Prom in 2015 — probably the sole rock star on earth besides Ringo who could get the spirit right.

It’s a song that’s easy to overlook — even by the guy who crooned it. It’s one of the few Ringo showcases he doesn’t perform on his long-running tour with the All-Starr Band — a surprising omission, considering he makes room for “What Goes On” and “Act Naturally.” As the box’s producer Giles Martin (son of George) says, with his customary diplomatic tact, “I don’t know how Ringo feels about it. When we did the Love show, I had a track of ‘Good Night’ with Ringo by himself. Ringo came in to hear it and said, ‘Oh God, you’re bloody playing “Good Night” to me.’ I think he loves it now, but he preferred the band stuff — ‘Yer Blues’ and ‘Long, Long, Long’ and things like that.”

But it’s a totally different song with all four Beatles harmonizing. Their voices radiate camaraderie. This is a band, unmistakably together. Ringo hums along with the guitar break. John puzzles at the end: “I think I held a funny note?” As much as you might love the orchestral rendition, this one has to make you at least wonder if these guys blew it by leaving it off the White Album. It’s a more emotionally direct moment — the guitar so wistful and pained, the vocals so warm. (The Beatles weren’t doing too much harmonizing in 1968, in any sense of the word.) Even Giles Martin admits, “I do prefer this version to the record.”

John plays guitar in the clawhammer style of British folkies like Bert Jansch and Davy Graham — he picked up the technique from Donovan while on retreat in India, while he was on a career-peak roll writing songs for the White Album. “It’s the same double-thumbing guitar pattern in ‘Dear Prudence’ and ‘Julia,’” Martin says. “Donovan taught him this guitar part. John was like ‘great!’ and then in classic Beatle style, went and wrote three songs with the same guitar part — three completely different songs. It wasn’t enough to learn the guitar part.”

The box includes a rehearsal where Ringo plays up the cornball charm, with a spoken intro. “Come along now, put all those toys away — it’s time to jump into bed. Go off into dreamland. Yes, Daddy will sing a song for you. Are you ready?” Judging by the chuckles in the studio, it sounds like a refreshment or two may have been served, until the take breaks up in a fit of laughter. As he quips, “Daddy went a bit crazy.” It shows why Ringo has always been the kiddies’ choice — as Paul put it, “a knockabout uncle.” In Take 22, George Martin plays piano, trying out the harmonic counterpoint he went on to orchestrate, while George Harrison keeps time with a shaker. Martin’s piano playing is distinctively beautiful, as it is on so many Beatle records — most famously, his solo in “In My Life,” which he sped up to resemble a harpsichord. As Giles Martin says, “My dad had huge hands, and he played piano in a very languid style.”

John never let on why he wrote it, or why he felt so strongly Ringo should sing it. Speaking shortly before his death, he claimed it was a lullaby for his five-year-old son Julian, “but given to Ringo and possibly overlush.” Yet it also evokes his own troubled childhood — especially when you hear him play it on guitar, in the style of his bittersweet childhood reveries “Dear Prudence” and “Julia.” He wrote it right when he was leaving his wife and son to begin a new life with Yoko Ono, the abrupt divorce that inspired Paul McCartney to write “Hey Jude” for the same little boy. Like “Hey Jude,” it’s a song written to console a child going through a terrible trauma, the kind of trauma John knew well. You can hear that pain in John’s guitar — which might be the reason he didn’t want his guitar on the album version.

“Good Night” expresses the naked vulnerability John was afraid to show — it was easier for him to hide behind Ringo. Yet it’s a song clearly influenced by Paul, the way Paul’s “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” was influenced by John — these two weren’t finished learning from each other, or straight-up copying each other, though neither would admit it. That might be part of why “Good Night” meant so much to John — a secret tribute to his partner. As Paul says in the bio Many Years From Now, “You could almost be forgiven for thinking ‘Good Night’ was mine, because it’s so soft and melodic and un-John.” He loved complaining about Paul’s “granny music,” but he’s the one who goes full granny here. As Paul recalled, “I think John felt it might not be good for his image for him to sing it but it was fabulous to hear him do it, he sang it great. We heard him sing it in order to reach it to Ringo and he sang it very tenderly. John rarely showed his tender side, but my key memories of John are when he was tender, that’s what has remained with me.”

One of the tired clichés about the White Album is that it’s where the Beatles fragmented into four solo artists, no longer collaborating as a team. But that’s a cliché that will never walk again after the Super Deluxe edition. As it shows, even a song as seemingly simple as “Good Night” came out of restless band experimentation — the lads were hungry to show off for each other, outdo each other, compete with each other. Even Sgt. Pepper was a relatively tidy affair compared to this one. (Hardly any Pepper songs required a dozen takes; hardly any White Album tracks took fewer.) As Ringo says in Anthology, “While we were recording the White Album, we ended up being more of a band again, and that’s what I always love. I love being in a band.”

Giles Martin points out that “Sexy Sadie” and “Cry Baby Cry” are the only tracks on the album with the same four-man line-up. “That’s why you get such variation on the White Album — it changes all the time. There was no intention to play these songs live. They had so many flavors they could choose from, within the four of them. They changed instruments. They were not bound by previous conceptions of themselves. John would play bass. And Paul would try and play everything.”

And that’s also how they ended up closing the album with “Good Night” — a song so delicate, John didn’t even want to let his bandmates hear him sing it, much less the outside world. Ringo is the only Beatle to appear on the finished version — but the song couldn’t have reached that point without all four messing with it. For an album made in five months of grueling all-nighters, as if they were reviving their early Hamburg bar-band days in the studio, “Good Night” is a fitting farewell. (The sessions rarely started before 10 p.m. — as Martin says, “every year was another two hours later in the studio.”) Like the rest of the White Album box, it’s the sound of four lifelong friends tangled up together both musically and emotionally, too obsessive about their art to give each other a moment’s peace, goading each other to keep experimenting, deep in the heart of their wildest creative quest. Listening means joining the Beatles on this grand — and continuing — adventure.

Barbra Streisand Can Hear Herself Again

Barbra Streisand Can Hear Herself Again

Babs talks about writing a memoir, the climb to stardom, and

the politics of her new album, “Walls.”

Rachel Syne The New Yorker

Barbra Streisand called me on a Tuesday afternoon. Well, to be more accurate, one of her many publicists did, and then patched me into Streisand’s home in Malibu (well, really, a compound of three houses), where she was sitting in a room with her assistant. To speak to Streisand, who is now seventy-six and just released her thirty-sixth studio album, “Walls,” one must first accept the fame apparatus built up around her, the protective drawbridge that she has erected over almost six decades in show business and on the course to becoming the most successful female recording artist of all time. But once I got her on the line, the conversation flowed like melted butter. Over the course of a long and winding hour, we covered her disdain for Donald Trump, which was the impetus for “Walls,” the closest thing to a political protest record that Streisand has ever made. We also dipped back in time, discussing her experience directing movies at a time when few women were helming film sets, her first apartments in New York, and why it has taken her four years to finish her memoirs. Also: lost “Yentl” rehearsal videos, “A Star Is Born” costumes, and her infamous cloned pooches. Her tone was breezy, wise, and warm, that of a whimsical grande dame reflecting on her many adventures while still very much engaged in the present. She is about to welcome her first grandchild. “A lot of people don’t want to be known as grandma,” Streisand kvelled. “I think it’s a privilege.”

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Hi, Barbra, how are you?

Well, I’m not too good.

Oh, no.

I was reading that article in New York magazine about children, about kids—only a third of people ages eighteen to twenty-nine want to vote.

I read that same article. Some of them said they just don’t want to go to the post office.

That’s so sad. When I dedicated my new album to the young people, I was thinking about the Parkland students, getting out there and speaking up and rallying and singing and just making themselves heard, you know? So today is kind of depressing for me, when I read something like this, and I read Trump’s tweet. What did he tweet today? Something about, if you want the stock market to go down, vote for Democrats?

Yeah.

So I looked up the truth, and it said Obama inherited a near depression, stabilized the economy, and presided over the growth Trump inherited. I mean, that’s the truth. And then there’s the lie.

So that’s what made me make this album.

What was the first song that you knew you wanted on this new album?

I was in a car and I was listening to the news, as usual. And it was something Trump was saying that I knew was a lie, something about climate change or something, and I thought, Oh, my God, I can’t listen to these lies anymore. And I started to just write down, scribble on my pad: “Up is down,” “Wrong is right,” and “The mud is sliding, the heat is rising.”

I had to express myself in some form, and they became songs, you know?

Have you ever felt like you’ve lived through such a confusing political moment before?

Al Gore in 2000. I just remember screaming at the television, “Don’t, stop this recount, oh, please, God.” It was heartbreaking. This is what I want to say to these young ones: Every vote is so important, so crucial, because Al Gore lost by five hundred and thirty-seven votes in Florida, out of millions of votes. Five hundred and thirty-seven votes in Florida changed that election. And that’s the importance of each vote, each person, each voice, each opinion.

Do you remember the first election you ever voted in?

Oh, my God. When I was eighteen I was in New York. I can’t remember.

Did you feel activated, though, at that age, at eighteen? Did you feel political even then?

I was born in 1942, so eighteen was 1960? Who was running in 1960?

Oh, gosh, Kennedy.

I remember watching that debate.

And, oh, my God, I don’t know if I should say this. But when Al Gore was running I remember calling him up before the third debate. He was on his treadmill, and I said, “You must pay attention to the Presidential debate between Kennedy and Nixon because, you know, people say you’re not authentic. But it was so authentic when you kissed your wife. In other words, authenticity reads, truth reads. If people say you’re wooden, be wooden. Don’t put on an act. Be yourself.”

He called me the other day because he liked the video that I put out, “Don’t Lie to Me.” He called to thank me and I said, “My God, how different the world would look today if you had been President.”

The closing song of this record is a new version of “Happy Days.” Does it feel like an echo of when you sang that song for the first time, in the nineteen-sixties?

I’ve sung it for three different Presidents. I sang it with the hope that Hillary Clinton would be our next President. And I thought, My God, it would be wonderful to sing that song in the joyous way that F.D.R. used it, in 1932. That was his campaign song. With an up beat, you know? And then, of course, I had to sing it after the election. It wasn’t very positive.

Is it difficult for you to look back? I know you’re trying to write your memoir right now.

Yes, yes. Four years in. They wanted the book in two years.

How’s that going?

I find it hard to look back. You know, I have to look myself up. I have to have a researcher that looks my life up.

You do?

Oh, yeah. There’s a fabulous archive on me that I never use, because I find that it’s hard to look at yourself. I don’t mean hard as in negative. I mean, it feels egotistic to look at something about yourself. That’s why I never read books on myself, you know?

Do you have your own archive?

I have letters and things that one of my assistants who’s been with me, God, over forty years, started with, maybe, when she was nineteen. She sends me wonderful things that I forgot, wonderful letters praising “Yentl” that I forgot. I tend to forget the good things written about me and remember the bad. That’s a critical flaw I have.

Sounds like you’re up to the “Yentl” chapter, at least.

Well, I’m not doing it in chronological order. I’ve written about my movies, because I like talking about that, and I like to speak in technical terms that a lot of people are not interested in. I did a chapter on Marlon Brando, my relationship with him. I think I want to end with my Harvard speech, 1995.

That was a beautiful speech.

That was a good speech, wasn’t it? Martin Luther King said, “Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.” And that reminded me of something that I said in that speech at Harvard—the artist as citizen. Someone asked me before why Hollywood is so liberal. I said, “An actor has to walk in other people’s shoes and live in other people’s skins. This does tend to make us more sympathetic to politics that are more tolerant.”

There was a crime committed at the synagogue.

Yeah.

The killer was mad at the Jews for helping refugees. But the Jews have always done that. And in this country we vet people. We vet immigrants, you know? The lies against all these people are very disturbing to me. It’s why I love the song “Lady Liberty,” and especially that last line, “The real danger lies in the sound of silence.”

You were going to write a chapter called “The Boys’ Club,” trying to look at women in Hollywood and how you’ve been treated. Obviously, we’ve had a year for that.

It was fantastic that I made “Yentl” in England, because they had a queen, and because they had a woman as Prime Minister. They gave me the utmost respect as a woman, and as a first-time director. I mean, it couldn’t have been warmer, more delightful. The people from “Yentl” sent a beautiful thing to newspapers about how quietly I spoke on the set. And I said, “I didn’t have to raise my voice, because everybody was finally listening.”

You felt respected on set?

Totally respected, and I had a wonderful cameraman, Peter MacDonald, who’s still my friend to this day. To visualize this movie I made a lot of little films in America, because I didn’t have the time or the money to have a lot of rehearsal. And so I would dress up in costume and put my friends in costume and make them play the parts, and I would have it filmed with an 8-mm. camera.

Somewhere in the world there are 8-mm. “Yentl” rehearsals.

You can probably find them on YouTube.

You don’t like to watch yourself, right? I hear you don’t really like to look at your movies.

No, no. I never do.

Why is that?

I don’t know. It sounds like Ronald Reagan, who used to run his movies at night. I don’t like doing that.

I like to live in the present, not the past. The only reason I said I’ll do the book now is because I couldn’t get movies that I wanted to make made.

Which movies were those? I know you were working on a film about Catherine the Great, and another about the photographer Margaret Bourke-White.

That’s right, and other scripts that I loved and wanted to direct, not be in, and we couldn’t get them on. And now one of them is being made by Steven Spielberg. Another one still can’t get financing. Da da da da da da. I liked “The Book Thief.” I wanted to make “The Book Thief.” And the woman producer hired a man. I wanted to do “Hidden Figures,” but they put on a man.

Why do you think that is?

I’m not sure. I remember meeting with another woman about Catherine the Great. She was a strong woman. Maybe she didn’t want that sense of competition with me, or thinking I might be too powerful or something. I don’t know. I think that happens with women. Don’t you?

I remember you said once that you felt like the language around men and women, especially in positions of power, is different.

That’s right. A man is “commanding” and a woman is “demanding.” He's called ... “assertive” and she’s called “aggressive.” I have to look up the speech. I think I gave that in 1992, during the Year of the Woman, right? He’s “forceful,” but a woman is “pushy.” The language gives us the insight into the way women are viewed in a male-dominated society.

And you think that’s maybe been why directing has been difficult in America?

I write a lot about this, about doing “The Prince of Tides.” I filmed the other actors before myself, because I never wanted to appear self-serving, so I did their closeups first.

I wanted to ask you a little bit about your upcoming projects. I know that you were working on a show with Ryan Murphy potentially, yes?

No, no, no. We were in talks about it, but I had to do my album. He wanted me to play a part in a very good script called “The Politician,” and when I turned it down he hired Jessica Lange, who’ll be brilliant. And it’s with Gwyneth. But I wanted to make my album. I couldn’t devote the time to that.

You have been trying to direct and star in an adaption of “Gypsy” for many years. I hope you get to play Mama Rose someday.

That was the last piece I wanted to do as an actress, as a bookend to “Funny Girl,” because the music was written by Jule Styne in both cases. And I really understand her because I understand my mother, and jealousy. You know, a mother’s jealousy about her daughter.

What is your process when you sit down to write your memoirs?

I’ve kept journals, especially in the earlier years, when I was directing “Yentl,” producing “Nuts.” So I have lots and lots of stories. And I write in longhand, with a soft pencil. I like to erase, especially if I’m working on a script or something. I can rewrite.

Do you write in the same place?

I write in my bed, mostly.

With your dogs around you?

Sometimes, yes. And with lots of food.

Earlier this year, you revealed that you used a lab service to clone your late dog Samantha, whom you had for fourteen years. Now you have two new dogs who are her genetic clones. When this news came out, it caused such a fervor that you had to write an Op-Ed for the Times about it. Did the attention to the dog-cloning process surprise you?

First I couldn’t understand it, and then I could understand it. But she was like a daughter to me. She looked me in the eyes.

This is Sammie?

This is Samantha, yeah. She knew when I was in distress, and she would just lie next to me and cuddle. I mean, I get tears in my eyes now just thinking about her.

And so when a friend of mine cloned his dog that he was very close to, I thought, I should do that, because then I’ll have her DNA, at least. Each dog has their own personality, and you can’t clone a soul, obviously.

Do the new dogs seem like her at all?

No, but they looked like her—their hair. It was on her deathbed, actually. They just took a few cells from the inside of her cheek and the outside of her tummy, on her skin.

You also have another dog, Fanny, who is not a clone, right?

Yes. In the meantime, the breeder of Sammie called me and said, “I have a dog here, and I’m about to give it to your friend who fell in love with Sammie”—another director friend of mine, Robert Rodriguez. He fell in love with Sammie when he met her, before she died. And she says, “He can have her if you don’t want her. He understands if you want her because her mother’s name is Funny Girl.”

So I said, “How could I turn down a little girl from ‘Funny Girl”?” And so I named her Fanny, after Fanny Brice, and now she’s on the cover of the New York Times.

Yeah, she looks great. I know you use Instagram now. Do you like it?

I really don’t have the time for it. Today’s Instagram people, they document everything. I don’t like to do that—what I’m eating, what I’m seeing, what I’m doing. No, I can’t do that. I don’t have the time or the energy.

One of my favorite posts was the one you did about your nails.

Oh, yeah, because I was in Tahiti, at Marlon Brando’s island, as a matter of fact, and somebody said to me, “Oh, how do you keep your nails? They’re fake, right?” And I said, “What do you mean, they’re fake? Here, look at them. These are my nails. I don’t believe in plastic nails or whatever they do, those terrible chemicals they put on to make nails.” So, I thought, “No, I’m going to take a picture of my nails and post the truth.” That’s when Instagram is terrific to me, when you can reach a lot of people at the same time.

You got into furniture when you were very young. I know you were trying to buy furniture when you had a walk-up apartment, antique furniture.How did you develop your eye?

I just went to antique shops, you know? I walked around Second Avenue and University Place, and Ninth Avenue, Eighth Avenue. It’s funny. I was on the bill at the Bon Soir with Renée Taylor, who had an antique shop on Eighth Avenue. I remember I bought an antique captain’s desk made of burled walnut. I bought a dentist’s cabinet that I used to keep upstairs in my apartment. When I moved finally from my railroad ... what do they call that? A railroad apartment?

Yeah, a railroad.

With the bathtub in the kitchen, you know? Then Elliot [Gould] and I got married, found an apartment on Central Park West. My God. You know whose apartment that was?

Whose?

One of the greatest lyricists ever, Lorenz Hart. You know, Rodgers and Hart? Can you imagine that? So I went from sixty-dollar-a-month rent, in my flat, to four-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-month rent, with a duplex, with a terrace, and two wood-burning fireplaces. That was really fun, to furnish that apartment. And so I grew to love antiques. Growing up, we never had a couch until I was eight years old. We only lived with a dining room and an old radio. My grandfather and grandmother, after my father died, we had to move in with them. I guess the dining room became their bedroom, and the other bedroom was for me, my mom, and my brother.

I have your first book, “My Passion for Design,” in which you talk about designing your dream house, in Malibu, which was inspired in part by Monticello and the decorative-arts museum Winterthur, in Delaware.

I love Winterthur, and it must say it in there, I went there to learn about American furniture. I loved it before, but to really go there and study it, and spend two days there, and it inspired that basement of mine, with the shops.

Right, I learned from that book that have your own mini-mall in your basement, with a frozen-yogurt shop, a dress shop filled with your old costumes and Oscars dresses, and a doll shop, called Bee’s, for your antique-doll collection. Do you still keep those going, the shops?

I only walk through them when I’m showing somebody who wants to see them. I couldn’t imagine just storing my stuff. So that’s why, unfortunately, I’ve sold most of my costumes, I’ve given it to charity, or to women’s heart research, or something. But now, when I think about it, I think, Why did I give away all that stuff?

Are you still collecting dolls?

Well, if you saw my house, you’d know I have no more room for anything. I have so many dolls—they’re from the eighteen-nineties, from France and Germany. Mostly France. I haven’t got room for another painting on my wall. But I love Americana, you know? When I got involved in Clinton’s election, in 1992, I just fell in love with American history, and our founders, and George Washington. So I started to collect George Washington memorabilia. I’m leaving a portrait of George Washington to Mount Vernon. It was painted during his lifetime, in 1795.

I want to come back to the record for a minute, and I want to talk about your voice, because it still sounds so phenomenal.

Oh, thank you. See, that’s what I’d love people to talk to me about. But if I talk about politics, that’s all they'll talk about.

My voice was hoarse during my last concert tour. When I sang on the stage, in concert, I couldn’t hear myself. So this time I was pleasantly surprised by how it came out. I thought, My God, it didn’t run away on me. It’s there for me now, when I need it the most. Do you how happy that made me feel, that I could hit the notes that I wanted to hit?

When I first came out, when I was eighteen, I remember somebody asking me, “How do you hold the note so long?” And I said, “Because I want to.” And it was the same thing now.

Do you think you’re going to want to perform the new songs live? I know you have a little stage fright, but these songs are supposed to connect with the people, right?

I want to, on one hand, because I believe so much in these words and this album, this music. But I don’t know quite how. Maybe if I shared a bill with somebody else, so I only had to do my songs. You know, it gets quite boring when you sing the same songs. I like real life, you know? I like being in real life, and I love my garden and my dogs and my husband and my son and my widening family, because my daughter-in-law is going to have a baby. My stepson, you know?

Congratulations.

Yeah, isn’t that great that I can finally be a grandma?

You’ve done these duets with nearly everybody. Is there any artist that you think would mean something to you to share a bill with now, for these songs?

Oh, it could be Adele, it could be Lady Gaga, it could be Beyoncé—women who are in the top of their field. Céline. You know Céline? We did a duet together. She’s lovely. She came to my house for dinner. She’s wonderful. She has a great voice.

Do you remember when you were doing your version of “A Star Is Born” and there were these screen tests where you were trying out the costumes you were going to put on? Somehow, that’s on YouTube.

That’s on YouTube now? Really?

It’s my favorite thing. I love that you did your own costumes. “Costumes from Miss Streisand’s closet”—that’s the best film credit I’ve ever seen.

You know, I was getting a lot of criticism when I was making “A Star Is Born,” because I was in control, that was the deal. The artist had full artistic control, but six million dollars was our budget. Anything over that, the artist had to pay out of his own pocket. So I decided, You know, I have wonderful antique clothes in my closet, and I think this character would look like that. I wanted her to be a liberated—

Yes, the suspenders.

Right?

And ponchos.

That’s right. Ponchos I didn’t wear more than once, on a horse, I think.

Yes, with a turban.

I put on a turban, which I didn’t like looking back at, but I didn’t want my hair to get all knotted. But the point was I gave away my producer credit. I put “executive producer” in the crawl, and I put “Miss Streisand’s clothes from her closet.” I even forgot to put one of the songs I wrote, that I was playing on the piano. A little melody I called Opus 1, or something like that.

I even used, instead of my name, Barwood Films/Jon Peters Production. I didn’t want to have my name too many times. You know, when a man puts his name many times, for writing, creating, directing, producing, nobody says anything.