Modern Jes Grew

In class we discussed what Jes Grew is today and while it is rather hard to pin down the exact thing that it is, there is no doubt in my mind that it is going through a renaissance. To put a definition on it I would define Jes Grew as any form of culture the rebels against the standard. This modern resurgence of Jes Grew began in the 1970’s. In the last couple chapters Papa La Bas talks about his experiences sharing the stories of Jes Grew.

People in the 60s said they couldn’t follow him. (In Santa Cruz the students walked out.) What’s your point? they asked in Seattle whose central point, the Space Needle, is invisible from time to time. What are you driving at? they would say in Detroit in the 1950s. In the 40s he haunted the stacks of a ghost library. In the 30s he sought to recover his losses like everybody else. In the 20s they knew. And the 20s were back again.

Papa LaBas’ personal experiences fit the historical context. The 30’s were dominated by the depression and the 40’s World War II and the subsequent celebration, this prevented the spread of Jes Grew. The 50’s would then seem to set the stage for a Jes Grew revival, as people return both to happiness and physically return to the United States having picked up parts of the cultures from the countries that they fought in. However, this revival was stifled by the cold war. In particular, McCarthyism, which in my opinion is quintessential atonist suppression. Luckily, Jes Grew was able to survive this and finally re-emerge in the 70’s, within groups such as the hippies and the entire counterculture movement.

Today, Jes Grew is experiencing a renaissance. The most obvious part of this are things like modern hip-hop and rap. But there are more things that contribute to this. I would say that both the maker and hipster movements are Jes Grew. As both involve a significant move away from large corporations which are most likely the modern bastion of the atonists. All of these things are fueled by modern technology, primarily the internet. Intriguingly this means that those who attempt to control the internet are atonists, which leads to the fascinating question of whether or not the NSA or Verizon or the Republican Party are the modern atonists out to stop Jes Grew.  

A Solution to Postmodern History

Postmodernism seems to destroy the whole concept of history. It does this through one crucial tenet: it is impossible to know if any story is true. The example of this that we have been focusing on is that it is neither possible to prove or disprove the events of Ragtime, as ridiculous as that first sounds. I mean JP Morgan probably didn’t start a secret cult with Ford, but how would we know, it’s a secret cult.

To solve this, I would like to propose for a system that allows for the analysis and study of human history, even if not possible to prove any story. It relies on two key principles the first is that there exists a set of facts in the world that can just be accepted as true e.g. JFK was shot. The next is that people are allowed to create analysis’s based on facts e.g. Oswald was the shooter because he was in the book repository. This is how history works now, what makes my system special is that every analysis has a score, which I will refer to as “K”. This score ranges from 0-1 and serves to assess the validity of the analysis. Therefore, the “K” score is a function of the number and quality of facts that the particular historical analysis contains. Take for example the JFK case and the debate of how many shooters there were. The Warren Commission concluded that there was one shooter and given their immense resources were able to obtain a large number of facts and as a result, their theory has a K > 0.9. On the other hand, take the conclusion of conspiracy theorist who says there were 17 shooters because he heard the friend of a friend of a friend claim that he overheard a rumour that there was a guy who saw that many, this would earn a K < 0.0001.

Now this is an extreme example. But it expresses the power of the K Score to make decisions about what historical theorems are accepted. It would then be possible for later historians to cite theorems of high K scores as almost facts while still leaving in the possibility for them to be wrong. This then leads to the question of what would Ragtime earn on this scale. I would probably give it a K of around 0.2-0.3. As while so many of the characters are deeply rooted in historical fact, Doctorow has managed to “find” stories that are completely uncited, which unfortunately drags down the K score, e.g. while Houdini does exist I’m not sure how Doctorow knows that he went through an existential crisis about mortality. Overall, this is just a quantitative solution to the very philosophical question about how to decide what is history and what is fiction.