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Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition

The Graduates

I'm going to be in Colorado for a few days, so if World War III breaks out over the Memorial Day weekend, you'll just have to wait to find out what I think about it. I have spent much of the past few days preparing the trip the best way I know how, monkeying compulsively with the iPod feature on my phone, trying to make sure I have just the right mixture of sounds necessary to keep me holding it together while strapped into a space approximately two-thirds my size while riding in a machine that is meant to stay aloft many miles above the ground for reasons that will never make sense to me, even if Orville Wright, Albert Einstein, and Chuck Yeager tag-team me on it. Here are the first thirty-five titles to come up after I hit "Shuffle", in case you want something to study and quiz me on when I get back. Why thirty-five? Simple: I decided I wanted to see how long it would take to get to the first selection by Hal Russell, after which I figured I'd round it off. Took a little longer than I'd anticipated.

Fever Ray, "Seven"
Black Box Recorder, "Sex Life"
Living Things, "Shake Your Skinny"
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Shame and Fortune"
that dog, "She Doesn't Know How"
Hayes Carll, "She Left Me for Jesus"
The Reputation, "She Turned Your Head..."
No Age, "Shed and Transcend"
The xx, "Shelter"
Jens Lekman, "Shirin"
Yuck, "Shook Down"
Carolina Chocolate Drops/Luminescent Orchestrii, "Short Dress Gal"
TV on the Radio, "Shout Me Out"
Girl Talk, "Shut the Club Down"
Ass Ponys, "Sidewinder"
The Knife, "Silent Shout"
Joe Lovano, "Sippin' at Bells"
The Rapture, "Sister Saviour"
Ponytail, "Sky Drool"
Art Brut, "Stand Down"
The Avett Brothers, "Slight Figure of Speech"
Laurie Anderson, "So Happy Birthday"
The National, "So Far Around the Bend"
The Handsome Family, "So Much Wine"
The Dead Weather, "So Far from Your Weapon"
Thalia Zedek, "Somebody Else"
Middle Brother, "Someday"
Tegan & Sara, "Someone Great"
Raphael Saadiq, "Sometimes"
Love Is All, "Spinning and Scratching"
The Thermals, "St. Rosa and the Swallows"
Primal Scream, "Star"
Hal Russell NRG Ensemble, "Steve's Freedom Principle"
Against Me!, "Stop"
Lupe Fiasco, "Streets on Fire"

Know Your Candidates: Tim Pawlenty

Tim Pawlenty was first touted as a presidential candidate for the 2008 race, and after it became clear that he wasn't going to run, he was frequently mentioned as an A-list candidate for the slot of John McCain's running mate. McCain seems to have not ever seriously considered him, because he wasn't mavericky enough. But Pawlenty also went out of his way to discourage people from mentioning his name in connection with the job, falling back on the handy sound bite that if he ran in a presidential race, it would be "for president, not vice-president." (For a while that line was to Pawlenty as "Ayyyyyy!" was to Fonzie.) One suspects that the talk of Pawlenty's supposed attractiveness as a vice-presidential candidate may have touched a nerve. Pawlenty seems more like a vice-presidential type because, in a field composed of spinning dervishes and self-immolating human fireworks displays, he seems a little boring. In comparison with the likes of Gingrich, Palin, and John Bolton, that's kind of a plus. The downside is that when he tries to be just a little bit exciting, inadvertent self-parody is instantly achieved.

Those who think that Pawlenty's boringness makes him seem like the responsible, grown-up candidate are gambling that he's boring enough to take the curse off his most unpopular, reactionary ideas. Like a great many evil people and no good ones to speak of, he is a broad-based antigay bigot, who both opposes granting equal marriage rights to gays and supports the reinstitution of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. By comparison, his position on abortion is fairly nuanced: he thinks it should be outlawed, of course, but would allow for exceptions in the case of rape and incest. But he is so open to new thinking on the issue that, when he was Governor of Minnesota, his state's health department's website featured the suggestion that abortion might cause breast cancer.

More nuanced still is his take on labor unions. Last fall, when Republicans were beginning to roll out their meme that public sector unions ought to be destroyed since government workers are inherently evil, Pawlenty composed an ope-ed for the Wall Street Journal in which he confessed that he himself became "a union member when I worked at a grocery store to help put myself through school" and argued that "The rise of the labor movement in the early 20th century was a triumph for America's working class. In an era of deep economic anxiety, unions stood up for hard-working but vulnerable families, protecting them from physical and economic exploitation." Having gone far off the Republican reservation with this Guthriesque tribute to the workin' man, he then noted that "Much has changed" and reminded his readers that anyone drawing a gummint check is the scum of the earth. "The moral case for unions—protecting working families from exploitation—does not apply to public employment," he wrote. "Unionized public employees are making more money, receiving more generous benefits, and enjoying greater job security than the working families forced to pay for it with ever-higher taxes, deficits and debt." I do not know if public employees would suddenly acquire the moral right to union protections if Pawlenty and his brothers succeed in their efforts to see to it that they make less money, receive less generous benefits, and enjoy shakier job security, but somehow I suspect not. But at least he had stepped away from the Republican fold who agree with SCTV owner and president Guy Caballero that all "unions are the work of the devil." Pawlenty believes that the only unions that retain a measure of strength should be abolished and driven into the dirt, but he has great affection and respect for the unions that have been effectively powerless for the past thirty years or so.

By announcing his candidacy when he did. Pawlenty offers aid and comfort to the supporters of Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, who also looks a little like Toby from The Office and who was the dream candidate for many who pine for a Republican who no one can imagine having ever inquired about doing a celebrity cameo on Miami Vice. The key difference between Daniels and Pawlenty in terms of appeal to pundits and wonks is precisely that Daniels wasn't running, and still isn't. Like other dream candidates of past years, such as Colin Powell, Mario Cuomo, and Bill Bradley, the fantasy candidate's appeal is precisley that he isn't running, and probably doesn't have what it takes to win a presidential election; as Bill Clinton found out the hard way, there is no surer and faster way to earn displeasure in the eyes of wonks and be judged as greasy, twisted, corrupt, and skeevy--in short, a politician, ewwww!!--than to turn out to want high office enough to actually grow the stones and acquire the skills necessary to attain it. (Conversely, there is no surer sign of an essential lack of seriousness at one's core than to fall in love with one of these perennial dream non-candidates, unless it's to feel a sliver of respect for one of the perennial spoilers, like Nader.) The best way to utterly destroy one's reputation and forever lose all of that magical appeal is to make the mistake of actually running for president just once, as Bill Bradley found out, also the hard way. (The second best way is to let people catch you enjoying the attention by publicly overplaying your Hamlet act, as Cuomo had done by 1992.) What is Tim Pawlenty about to find out the hard way? Stay tuned.

New Orleans, January 2007

I've been meaning to say something about the latest episode of Treme, which used the murder of my friend Helen Hill as a plot point. I've decided not to be deterred by the fact that I'm not sure just what I want to say about it. Helen's death became a rallying point for people who'd grown angry about the post-Katrina anarchy in the city, and when the new season of Treme picked up and I recognized that crime seemed to be a key thread and recognized that the time frame started in late 2006, I became anxious, wondering if the writers intended to include a fictionalized version of what had happened to her. As it happened, it wasn't fictionalized at all; and the treatment was, well, tasteful; Helen, her husband Paul, and their baby were never shown, the only suggestion of the horror that had befallen them being a small pool of blood in the doorway of their home, and, of course, the small army of cops gathered around and inside the house. I didn't fully grasp that the show was treating them as historical figures who were part of a key event in the city's recent history until the sensitive cop played by David Morse listed their professions, referring to her as a filmmaker and to Paul as a doctor. I mentioned this to the girlfriend, and she pointed out that, in fact, a few lines of dialogue earlier, Morse had referred to Helen by her full name. I had to call the episode back up via On Demand to confirm that this was so; when he'd said her name, it had gone right past me. I wonder if part of my brain had deliberately blinked, for fear that I couldn't handle it.

I'm a big fan of the use of actual people and events in fiction, and have probably even permitted myself a few callous chuckles at the expense of the people you hear about who complain about how their parents or friends or personal heroes have been "misrepresented" in some movie or novel. (I say "probably" because right now I honestly can't remember, but I wouldn't be surprised if my brain was doing a little selective editing there, too.) And I can't say that, when I sit down to watch HBO, I'm usually thinking, "Boy, I hope this treats ugly material as tastefully as possible", but in this case, I'm grateful for the kid gloves handling. I imagine that the temptation was there to put Helen, or "Helen", into the show as a character; she was an amazing person, and it would have added considerable punch to her fate if the audience had gotten to know her. There may have been a good reason for the choice the show made, though, a reason that goes beyond simple matters of tastefulness. At the end of the episode, the anti-violence march that followed in the wake of the murder was reenacted for the cameras, with Morse standing on the sidelines beaming proudly at the sight of his fellow citizens coming together and saying, enough is enough. The march was shown the way it was depicted in much of the reporting at the time, as a small positive thing that came out of a senseless tragedy. But I've lived in a world without Helen for four years now, and all I've done in that time is move closer every day to the conclusion that the loss of her was as good a reason as any for New Orleans, and anybody else who wants to climb on board, to give up all fucking hope.

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Secret Diary of a Call Girl

Know Your Candidates: Herman Cain

Herman Cain, a 64-year-old Atlanta radio host, columnist, and former CEO of the Godfather's Pizza chain, is this year's presidential candidate in the Ross Perot/Steve Forbes "I've never held elective office and don't know what the hell I'm talking about, but I'm a businessman, dammit, and if more of these smart alecks in Washington had spent more time meeting a payroll instead of running for office and finding out what the hell they were talking about, we wouldn't have these problems rakka-rakka-rakka" mode. It fits him better than it did Forbes, who never managed to transcend him core identity as the privileged son the real businessman father would never have had if he'd only made peace with his sexual orientation. And though Perot's straight-talkin' self-made-man persona was as sturdy as they come, the fact that he appeared to be flamboyantly insane put off a lot of people. (Me, whenever I think of Perot, I just remember that he was nothing but trouble for George H. W. Bush and find myself murmuring, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend.")

Cain became an underground reactionary legend in the spring of 1994, when he confronted Bill Clinton over the health care plan at a town hall meeting, As Newsweek reported at the time, "Cain asked the president what he was supposed to say to the workers he would have to lay off because of the cost of the 'employer mandate.' Clinton responded that there would be plenty of subsidies for small businessmen, but Cain persisted. 'Quite honestly, your calculation is inaccurate,' he told the president. 'In the competitive marketplace it simply doesn't work that way.'" Cain fans have recounted this story many times in the years since, and I've never heard a version in which Cain goes on to explain, in detail, what's wrong with the well-informed President's "calculation". It's like that time that Ronald Reagan shook his head in amused disbelief and said "There you go again", in response to Jimmy Carter accurately describing Reagan's stated positions on Medicare, and Joe Wilson shouting "You lie!" after President Obama had told the truth about one of the provisions of his own health care plan. The fact that these men were either lying or didn't know what they were talking about isn't supposed to matter; what does matter is that these are stirring accounts of straight-talking conservative Republicans bravely speaking truth to power, embodied in some sniveling, weaselly Democrat who had somehow, probably wrongfully, acquired the power of the presidency. People of every political stripe love stories like these, and it would be asking a lot for conservative Republicans to wait until one of their heroes spoke truth to power in a way that was actually truthful.

Self-styled conservative businessmen love to explain, ideally in a patronizing tone that includes the strategic use of such phrases as "quite honestly", that while stupid liberals might think they're doing a good thing by trying to bring racial integration to the workplaces and diners of America, or bring about equal pay for women, or do something to help terminally ill people who can't afford to spring for a new wing in a Swiss clinic get better care, or at least expire without leaving a mountain of hospital debt for their families to deal with, what they (i.e., the conservative businessmen) understand is that any seemingly positive social change will have some kind of ruinous effect on the businessmen's bottom line, which will mean they have to take a meat axe to their employment rolls, which will result in damage to the employment numbers that will make the gains from that seemingly positive social change look like petty stuff indeed. Sure, it's a drag to see all those women leaping in flames from the top windows of the Triangle Shirt Company, and some wussies need child labor laws to help them sleep at night, but the relentless friends of capitalism first who were flushed into office last fall by the Tea Party hordes understand that to make the economy work, there must be sacrifices. A Tea Party favorite, Cain favors a national consumption tax that would replace all federal personal and corporate income tax, elimination of the estate and capital gains taxes, and a return to the gold standard. Dislikes include equal rights for gays, Planned Parenthood, and what he sees as the "creeping attempt... to gradually ease Sharia law and the Muslim faith into our government."

Cain is also black. (He abjures the term "African-American", saying that he prefers to consider himself an "ABC", meaning that he is, first, an American, that he is, second, Black, and that he is Conservative to his bone marrow.) Although there is no reason a man as profit-motive-centric and bigoted against gays and Muslims as Cain has professed to be shouldn't be Republican, the fact is that black Republican candidates are still something of a novelty, and a welcome novelty to a party that hopes to reach out, if not to non-white voters, then, at least to white voters who would feel more comfortable voting for Republicans if doing so didn't make the guilty white liberal buried deep inside them a little bit queasy. Prominent Republicans have scarcely been shy about expressing the idea that white liberals (and non-whites of every persuasion) vote for black candidates just because they're black. A lot of people like Rush Limbaugh has put forward this view as crudely and objectionably as possible; David Weigel recently put it forward fairly elegantly, saying that there are people who'd vote for Barack Obama because they think his election will bring about a less racially polarized America. (Weigel balanced this out by alleging that there are people who'd "vote for George W. Bush because he has a ranch." Speaking as someone who has never been able to think of a reason, even a bad one, why anyone would ever have voted for George Bush, Jr., I have no comment on this. Even the argument that many people who did so thought they were voting for his father raises the question of why anyone would ever have voted for George Bush. Sr.)

I have my doubts that there really is anyone who voted for Obama for that reason, and I certainly don't think there's anyone who voted for him for that reason in spite of believing that he was unqualified for the office, or that John McCain was a more deserving candidate. But for the conservative Republicans who look at Obama and see a dithering nincompoop, it must make sense that his election was the ultimate act of Affirmative Action-based reverse discrimination. If they do think that, then producing a black conservative, any black conservative, must seem like the ultimate mind-fuck fake-out, since they believe that liberals, having elected an unqualified black man president based solely on his skin color, have no credible grounds to criticize an incompetent black conservative except for ideological prejudice. (Michael Streele got a pretty long, sweet ride out of this. And if understand Clarence Thomas's many public statements on this subject, the poor man was so horrified by liberal prejudice that assumed a degree of higher moral standing in black people that he had no choice but to throw their prejudice back in their faces by becoming the world's biggest obstructionist reactionary asshole.) I suspect that Cain's rapid ascension in the polls has to do with this novelty, and with voters' relief that, unlike the previous leading black Republican presidential candidate, Alan Keyes, he does not routinely come across as having gone off his meds, (He has not been reluctant to remind voters of his racial identity, threading a line from Martin Luther King, Jr. into a speech.) Cain isn't going to be president, but his popularity did earn him a seat at a recent Fox News debate that excluded Buddy Roemer, something that reportedly caused Roemer some personal embarrassment and unhappiness. If this is true, Cain can go to bed for the rest of his life knowing that he did provide one small service to the forces of karma.

This Does Not Compute

"The truth is, for all the antics that often appear on his network, there is a seriousness that underlies [Roger] Ailes’s own politics."

--Gabriel Sherman, "The Elephant in the Green Room", New York magazine

"Going back to the 2008 campaign, [David] Axelrod had maintained an off-the- record dialogue with Ailes. He had faced off against Ailes in a U.S. Senate campaign in the early eighties and respected him as a fellow political warrior and shaper of narrative. But early on, Axelrod learned he couldn’t change Ailes’s outlook on Obama. In one meeting in 2008, Ailes told Axelrod that he was concerned that Obama wanted to create a national police force.

'You can’t be serious,' Axelrod replied. 'What makes you think that?'

Ailes responded by e-mailing Axelrod a YouTube clip from a campaign speech Obama had given on national service, in which he called for the creation of a new civilian corps to work alongside the military on projects overseas.

Later, Axelrod related in a conversation that the exchange was the moment he realized Ailes truly believed what he was broadcasting."

--same article

Jeffrey Catherine Jones, 1944-2011

It was with a great deal of regret that I note the passing of the cartoonist and fantasy artist I grew up knowing of as "Jeff Jones". In the late '60s and '70s. Jones became known for his lush, gorgeously kitschy painted work for the covers to paperback editions of such writers as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard, for his contributions to such Warren publications as Eerie, Creepy, and Vampirella, and his own one-shot underground comic. Spasm. His work, which often seemed to be smeared on the page, with the texture of melted ice cream, was sensuous and, applied to genre material, could still come across as trippy as hell. It somehow seemed both very much of its moment and hauntingly timeless.

Still, what killed me about it when I first came across it, years after it first appeared, was how sexy I thought it was. Jones loved to draw naked bodies, or bodies just barely adorned with chain mail and other exotic decorations that were half Thunderdome, half Haight-Ashbury. Jones developed his style and put it out there in the pre-Nautilus, Arnold-Schwarzenegger-is-Conan-the-Barbarian days when the human body deemed worth displaying, especially in chain mail, had to be a slab of perfectly toned beef, and his women have bellies and buttocks that seem to shift as they wall and roll around a little on the page. The first thing of his I really encountered was his one-page, black-and-white head trip of a comic strip Idyl, which used to appear in the National Lampoon in its early years. I was collecting back issues of the Lampoon around the time my hormones began to kick up dust, and the best way I have of dating my progress towards manhood is to pinpoint the moment that I went from coming across Idyl as I paged through the magazines, looking at and thinking, "This isn't funny", to actively seeking it out and thinking, "This isn't funny, like I give a shit." It may have been while looking at Jones's work that it first crossed my mind that drawing skills would be a nifty thing to have, so that if you were ever stuck on a desert island with some paper and a pen, at least you'd be able to have something to which you could masturbate.

Jones's fascination with female bodies was, it turns out, more complicated than that: in the '90s, he apparently put some long-standing issues to bed, began hormone replacement therapy, and emerged as Jeffrey Catherine Jones. It would be nice to report that all was peaches and cream after that major step, but from what I've read in the obituaries that have appeared in the last few days, it seems that her last years were not altogether pretty, plagued as she was by matters of both mental and physical health. Someone who left behind so much that was lovely ought to have spent her last several years feasting on sunsets and butterflies.

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Nurse Jackie: "Have You Met Ms. Jones"

Going Up?

Someone named Tiffany Stanley is very upset about all the mean people who've been teasing the believers in this past weekend's scheduled Rapture:

While some news stories have been nuanced and evenhanded, others have opted for smug superiority and cheap laughs. The Daily Beast featured “Your Guide to the End of the World,” with such salient tips as “Where’s the best place to weather this sucker?” (Note: avoid fault lines.) In its “comedy” section, Huffington Post made an exhaustive set of lists, from “9 Ways to Tell the World is Over” to “21 Reasons Why May 21 is NOT the End of the World” (on the latter: “Justin Bieber wouldn’t let it happen”). A blog item on NPR—under the headline, “The Rapture supposedly starts tonight”—invited readers to take a quiz on who is most likely to be left behind. (By an overwhelming majority, politicians will feel the fiery furnace; journalists, surprisingly, are more likely to be spared, at least ahead of bloggers and those who talk on their cell phones.)

Do the end-timers seem ignorant? Yes. Are they insane? Possibly. But should our reaction to them be chuckling glee or something more like sadness? Pay attention to their individual stories—their willingness to sacrifice everything in anticipation that their earthly lives are over—and I dare you not to feel the latter. Ashley Parker of The New York Times writes about a mom who stopped working, and stopped saving for college for her three teenaged children. One of the kids admitted, “I don’t really have motivation to try to figure out what I want to do anymore because my main support line, my parents, don’t care.” At NPR, Barbara Brown Haggerty reports on a young couple, with a toddler and a baby on the way, who are spending the last of the savings. The wife says, “We budgeted everything so that, on May 21, we won’t have anything left.”

Laughing at religious fanatics is nothing new. And, at some level, there’s nothing wrong with it. But this story didn’t just take off in popularity because people wanted a quick laugh or some insight into a quirky subset of our country. There’s a cruelty underlying our desire to laugh at this story—a desire to see people humiliated and to revel in our own superiority and rationality—even though the people in question are pretty tragic characters, who either have serious problems themselves or perhaps are being taken advantage of, or both.

I'm not sure why this reasoned, compassionate argument so gets up my nose. Maybe it's something about the nuances. "Do the end-timers seem ignorant?" Well, yes, that's usually how incredibly stupid people seem. I'm sorry, is there meant to be the suggestion in that wording that, of all the people who got on board this train, there might be a few who aren't idiots? I'm going to have to file that one under "Not Possible, Try Again." "Are they insane?" Ah, that's a little more direct: nothing about how they may or may not "seem". I'd have to interview them each individually, which I wouldn't want to do even if I were assigned a team of helpers to chase them down and sit on them for me, but I'm going to go with a provisional "no." It's also helpful in these situations to nail down a distinction between stupid and crazy. Jared Lee Loughner is crazy. He carried out a plan for political assassination based on a set of ideas that, even if he got them from other sources, had to be pulled together and embraced by perhaps the only man on Earth to whom they made coherent and compelling sense. John Hinckley, Jr. is crazy. A lot of people have seen Taxi Driver, and it means a lot to some of us, but nobody but HInckley saw it as a courtship manual. Insane people go their own way, and if they do terrible things, it's likely they do them for their own, very personal reasons. Deciding that you know when the world is coming to an end because you saw it on a billboard and heard there are lots of other people who think there's something to it is not crazy, any more than it's insane to see the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie on opening weekend, because all the magazines and the TV talk shows told you it's what you're supposed to do.

It's a funny thing about dangerous craziness of the kind typified by Loughner and Hinckley; it would appear to absolve those afflicted with it from being judged on moral grounds. whereas real stupidity is, I think usually a matter of choice. Yes, people decide to believe in alien abduction or climate change denial or Birtherism or that raising taxes is evil and won't reduce the deficit or that the government blew up the World Trade Center for reasons that appeal to them on any number of levels, some of them subconscious, but in the end, they have to make a conscious decision to dismiss that part of their brain that's holding out, saying, Wait a minute, for real--am I really this stupid? Yet people can be very hard on crazy people. The magazine that Stanley works for once ran a cover story denouncing the decision that Hinckley was too crazy to stand trial for the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, with the headline "An Insane Verdict". What other verdict could possibly have been rendered? Hinckley was nuts, and not accountable legally for his actions, and certainly no one has ever taken leave of his own sense long enough to fantasize that he'll ever be a free man again. What difference does it make to society at large if he spends the rest of his life locked up in a mental hospital or in maximum security? The only possible conclusion one can draw is that TNR was angry that a crazy man wasn't going to be given the chance to be murdered in prison, as Jeffrey Dahmer was later. Maybe this is connected to the plight of the mentally ill in this country, who are ignored, shunned, stigmatized, until still-functioning people with real problems are afraid to seek help. Maybe people figure that if they weren't monsters, we'd do better by them.

On the other hand, we do pretty well by stupid people, even erecting shrines to the idea that they're morally superior to people with more complicated thinking processes: these can take the form of a movie like Forrest Gump, or the kind of press coverage that George W. Bush enjoyed until about 2006, and which he will enjoy again now that he's no longer capable of doing the country any actual harm, or a Big Hollywood think piece promoting the idea that it is one's patriotic duty to go see terrible Adam Sandler movies on the Fourth of July. Stupid people have done much worse harm to the world in my lifetime than crazy people have, yet Stanley finds this less appalling than those who'd have a laugh at the idiots' expense, cold comfort when they're doing so much to drag our world down with them. Laughter might be the the kindest response one can offer to some of the people she refers to, especially those who saw the prospect of the end times as a neat change to stop planning for the future and abdicate their parental rights. The "mom who stopped working, and stopped saving for college for her three teenaged children," the "young couple, with a toddler and a baby on the way, who are spending the last of the savings. The wife says, 'We budgeted everything so that, on May 21, we won’t have anything left'"--how much compassion should be reserved for people enjoying a fling from the responsibility of rational thought without any regard for the people for whom they once claimed responsibility? And about that young couple--did the reporter call Child Services, or just hope they listen to All Things Considered? Nobody thinks that the kids should be left in their care, right? Or is thinking that children ought to be taken away from parents who have no plans to take care of them if it interferes with their fantasy lives "smug" of me?

"Smug" is Stanley's trump card. Any thinking person with a shred of decency left to him is supposed to cower and kneel in repentance at the slightest suggestion that they have fallen prey to the temptations of smugness, or of "feeling superior" to people so stupid and irresponsible that you'd damn well better be superior to them. I can't say that I've come across any joshing commentary on the failed Rapture that struck me as half as smug, let alone as arrogant, as the anticipation of the Rapture by the believers. I'm not the first person--I'm more like the 40,000th, counting Zonker Harris--who has remembered that line in the Bible about how no one, not even the angels in Heaven, knows when the big day is set to arrive, which means that the believers weren't just giving the middle finger to smart people but to the authors of the good book itself; their message was that they thought they knew better, and the sad fact for stupidity fetishists is that, at the end of the day, no matter how much you revere simplicity and conviction, this always sounds more offensively smug coming from people who are wrong than it does when the people who are rude enough to side with intelligence and rationality happen to be right. Stanley's right about one thing: it is sad that there are so many people in this country who have gotten to the point where they welcomed the chance to have everything stop and just have the problems of this life taken out of their hands (and, in a lot of cases, welcomed the chance to look down and see all the people who disagreed with them engulfed in flames). No doubt many of them, especially those who maxed out their credit cards, are sad they're still here today, and I feel their pain. But while Stanley feels sorry for them, I'm inclined to think about what they say about the state of the populace and feel sorry for the rest of us who are trapped here on Earth with them. Especially if they vote.

Happy 70th

Flatlining

They mispronounced "flaccid" on South Park the other night. At least, a few years ago, it would have been a mispronunciation. When I was learning to speak, the first "c" in "flaccid" was officially spoken with a hard, "K" sound: FLAK-sid. But I don't think I've ever heard a single solitary soul pronounce it that way; it's always pronounced as one soft "S' sound in the middle of the word. Research indicates that, since then, it's become one of those words that has two "accepted" pronunciations, one of which it was born with and carried proudly in its wallet for most of its existence, and one that is now recognized as okay because linguists have basically thrown in the towel.

As it happens, there are any number of things you could describe as flaccid, and I don't think I've ever heard anyone use the word unless they were talking about what the people on South Park were talking about, i.e., limp dicks. The thought has occurred to me that maybe nobody knows how to pronounce the word correctly because they're afraid that any investigation along those lines would leave a paper trail that would establish that they had been in need of the terminology to refer to a limp dick, which might be something nobody much wants to be caught talking about. But, on reflection, maybe it's a vast, unconscious populist uprising based on the idea that words ought to sound like what they mean. I think most of us agree that the hard "K" sound in the middle of "flaccid" toughens it up a little, whereas "flassid" really sounds flaccid. I could do another fifteen minutes on this, but hey, George Carlin already lived and died once.

Somewhere, Harlan Ellison Is Jealous

The Colbert Report
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[video swiped from TPM]

Large and In Charge

Back in 1986, when Maria Shriver married Arnold Schwarzenegger, a (male) writer at The New Republic suggested that this was some kind of great leap forward for women, because a female member of the Kennedy family had married a mimbo. Even that writer took a moment to stipulate that Arnold was clearly "a clever fellow", while adding that it was hard to believe that Shriver had been drawn to him for his brains. Actually, as Schwarzenegger became more famous and more powerful, tributes to his brains started popping up all over. In Schwarzenegger's entry in David Thomson's Biographical History of Film, it is reported that, in 1976, on the set of Stay Hungry, the director Bob Rafelson, one of Hollywood's few self-styled intellectuals, told a friend of Thomson's that Arnold was "the smartest person on the picture." That may say something about just how smart Rafelson really is, or it may say something about how a confident. loutish alpha male can snow even a moviemaker whose priorities are such that he himself hopes to impress other people with his bookishness. Or maybe it just means that, by 1976, among people who worked in the movie business, being smart had been redefined as being capable of snowing the world, a definition that a quarter of a century later had been adopted by politicians and those who cover them. "Smart" means salesmanship. and maybe it would be worth the loss of California if the disaster of Schwarzenegger's term as governor would permanently remind people that successful salesmanship often winds up only benefitting the salesman.

In 1986, the New Republic item was an indirect reference to the fact that, at that stage of the game, Shriver may have been less famous than Schwarzenegger but that her fame had a classier lineage and was more iconic; she was a "Kennedy", sort of, and he was a Hollywood novelty item who may or may not turn out to have a movie career playing something other than sword-swingers in loincloths and killer robots. It was also a way for a liberal writer to get a chuckle out of the Kennedy men's reputation as star cocksmen during the last few minutes when that seemed like something to chuckle about, while giving himself points for transferring it to a woman. Since the news of the end of Schwarzenegger's political career has been topped off with the news of his having fathered a child, some commentators have dragged the Kennedy connection in again, either for ponderous think pieces or in the spirit of the sniggering people on Fox News who've been heard claiming that Arnold has been revealed as the real Kennedy in the relationship. Is this some kind of sympathetic misdirection away from Schwarzenegger, as if the real villain were the woman who couldn't keep him blissed out in bed so that he took to straying? At its most direct and least justifiable, it's taken the form of writers blaming Shriver for not having warned voters not to trust the man to whom she was married.

If there's a real villain here besides Schwarzenegger himself, it has a thousand heads and doesn't necessarily include Shriver. A Kevin Drum sums up what happened in 2002:

Shortly before California's 2003 special election for governor, the Los Angeles Times reported that a number of women had accused Arnold Schwarzenegger of groping and various other sexual advances. Arnold vaguely fessed up to some bad behavior in the past, but said, "I don't remember things that I've done or said 20 years ago. I don't remember things that I've done 30 years ago." The Times series was widely viewed as a thinly veiled hit piece scheduled to run just days before the election in order to ruin Schwarzenegger's chances.

That was never true. The reason the stories ran so late is because the special election was only six weeks long. If it had been any ordinary election, the Times would have spent far more time on its reporting and the story would likely have broken months before election day. In the event, though, the accusations were out there and the Times did heroic work putting together a hugely complex story under tight deadline pressure. As far as I know, the accuracy of their reporting hasn't been seriously challenged to this day.

And what about Arnold? He insisted that this stuff was so far in the dim past that he could barely remember it. But it wasn't. Today we learn that he had cheated on his wife and had a child out of wedlock just a few years before. His megawatt-smile denials were pure pap, and if knowledge of his affair had been public it's almost a dead certainty that the recall would have failed and Gray Davis would have remained governor. The car tax would have stayed in place, no bonds would have been issued to make up for it, and California's deficit problems would have been less than half as bad as they turned out to be under Schwarzenegger.

That's what comes of running a politically motivated snap election with weird rules in six weeks: you don't really know what you're getting. In the end, the Times was right about Schwarzenegger, and his folksy boys-will-be-boys denials were lies. We've paid a pretty high price for that.

Somehow, when the special election was called, the thought of putting the state in the hands of a steroid freak with a movie career just seemed irresistible to many people, to the point that people looked at you as if you were nuts if you suggested that it might be better to not drive from office a duly elected governor who was dull but qualified and capable, and believed in generating state revenue by the increasingly unholy tactic of taxing people who could afford it. But that get-on-board-with-the-parade spirit may not be enough to account for the hostility people had for anyone who might spoil their fun by telling them the truth about Superman. "“Yes," Schwarzenegger said back then when he was finally put in a position of answering for his conduct, "it is true that I was on rowdy movie sets and I have done things that were not right which I thought then was playful but now I recognize that I offended people.” You can hear the eyeballs rolling in his head, and in the heads of his target audience: what did these women think was going to happen to them, if they wandered into someplace rowdy where lusty muscle men were behaving in a way they thought was playful? (Check here if you're wondering how Schwarzenegger's brand of playful rowdiness feels when you're on the receiving end.) You might think that nobody needed coddling less than Arnold Schwarzenegger, but clearly a lot of people feel protective towards him, the same way that George W. Bush's enablers feel protective of him, and the same way the L. A. cops who repeatedly answered the domestic abuse calls at O. J. Simpson's house, even waving bye bye to him as he walked past them and got into his car and drove away, felt towards him. In contemporary America, people trying to get health care or hang onto their houses are dangerous leeches threatening the tax rates of the only people who matter, but predatory alpha male meatheads are an endangered species, to be defended as tenderly as the last unicorn.

Know Your Non-Candidates: Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee has announced that he will not be running for president in 2012. Huckabee made the announcement last Saturday on his TV show on Fox News, and announced beforehand that he would be using the show to make his announcement as to whether or not he'd be running. He announced that he wouldn't be running at the end of the show, after he'd jammed with his guest, Ted Nugent. (Nugent--do I really have to stick a "no relation" in here?--is known for his sexism, gun love, and tendency to profanely wish that harm will come to politicians he dislikes, but unlike Common, he has the correct skin color to make these qualities awesome!! instead of offensive.) Having guaranteed that this episode of his show would have its largest ratings ever, Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister who is perhaps best known for his traditional Christian values, backed up Nugent on the hormonal-confusion classic "Cat Scratch Fever", thus making two things clear: Huckabee did not do this under duress, hoping that as few people as possible would see it, and he thinks that "Cat Scratch Fever" is literally about petting a kitty.

The news of Huckabee's non-candidacy is a source of pain and disappointment to all those who maintain that there is such a thing as good-hearted, rational Republicanism and who believe that it could somehow survive the primaries and go on to kick Obama's ass in November. Huckabee is probably the leading current exemplar of good-hearted, rational Republicanism, a mantle he inherited from John McCain, who had a solid reputation for being a good-hearted, rational guy before the actual process of running for president had roughly the same effect on him that a massive dose of gamma rays had on Bruce Banner. He seems like a nice guy, has shown intermittent interest in the plight of the poor and uninsured and in the environment, and is a strong supporter of education, if only so that children will have the chance to be drilled in the theory of intelligent design and to study the copy of the Ten Commandments that he believes should be posted on the walls of every school. He is a also a bigot, never displaying more passion than when the subject turns to the those who would befall our country and pollute its moral fiber by treating gays as equal citizens under the law. Like many a mealy-mouthed intolerant shithead, Huckabee claims to hate the sin but not the sinners, and wants to be clearly understood that, as he sees it, the question of whether gays should be allowed to marry has nothing to do with the so-called rights of faggots and dykes: it's all about whether the good normal people, like Mike and Mrs. Huckabee, who take such pride in their having at least managed to get somebody to marry them, should have their marriages spoiled by letting dirty, sinful same-sex couples get married, which would make it seem that they're as good as we are.

It's like racial integration: it's easy to look at the sad black family in A Raisin in the Sun and just throw in the towel and say, heck, they seem okay for a bunch of darkies, why not let 'em move in next door, but what you're not considering is the real issue, which why all the white people who already live in the neighborhood should have their property values plummet for the sake of some crazy liberal social engineering. Like many of those who opposed equal protections for blacks and whites back in the 1960s, and for that matter those trying to hang onto slavery a hundred years earlier, Huckabee is quick to offer Bible verse that seems to support his viewpoint, and to prophecy an end to our civilization if he doesn't get his way. Huckabee was at his most candid and eloquent in an interview with The New Yorker last year, when he said that, even if you intellectualize all the other arguments against equal rights for gays, you'll never gat past what he called "the ick factor." (Responding to critcism, he proudly split hairs: "Never once did I say ‘icky,’ as many blogs and less than credible news organizations have reported.") If you want to know how well Huckabee's reputation for basic human decency can be expected to hold up in a few years, just imagine how it would sound if it came out today that, in 1964, a candidate had said that, while he doesn't hate black people per se, he can't support the idea of interracial marriage because it would undermine western civilization, and even if it didn't, there's still the matter of the ick factor.

Know Your Candidates: Newt Gingrich

In discussions of reality TV, I hear a lot about such phenomena as "Russell fatigue" or the desire, which grows more ardent and desperate with every passing second that America's Next Top Idol remains on the air, to feed Tyra Banks and her bright orange sidekick head first into a wood chipper. But what's really funny is that you never can guess who's going to grow on you. The first time I laid eyes on Boston Rob Mariano, nine years and a hundred lifetimes ago, I wanted to sit on his chest and pluck his mustache out hair by hair, but when the dimply weasel finally won Survivor Sunday night on his fourth try for the title, I brushed away a tear with one hand while made a fist with the other and pumped it, softly muttering, "Yes, dammit!" I suspect that many people in the media are that way about Newt Gingrich. Gingrich has gone through many different phases in his public career, and in the course of time he's gone from being celebrated as a master media manipulator to the media's bitch to just one more old hack past his sell-by date trying to keep his name warm enough that he doesn't have to go to trade school and find a real way to support himself late in life. In the last few days, following a calamitous encounter with David Gregory on Meet the Press, Gingrich has begun making crowd-pleasing remarks about how he has an "adversarial relationship" with the media.

Part of what's funny about this is that he sounds as surprised and confused as Donald Trump, getting his first barbed questions at a press conference and wondering why they can't just bring on the crown and the oil for his forehead. This is, after all, the guy who became the public face of the meanness of the 1994 Republican Congress, and who fed his own career into a wood chipper by making it sound as if he'd called for a government shutdown to get Bill Clinton's attention because President Mean Girl wouldn't let him sit with him and the rest of the cool kids on Air Force One on the way back from Yitzhak Rabin's funeral. (At the time, White House staffers cannily exploited Gingrich's comments by making it seem insensitive and tone deaf for him to even think about political horse trading during the flight. Later, rumors emerged that Clinton's aides really had done their best to keep him and Gingrich apart for fear that the irrepressible Clinton would suffer an attack of generosity and triangulate the farm away.) The thing is, on the basis of his ideas and actual power and the political accomplishments of the past umpteen years, Gingrich has the same degree of credibility as Donald Trump. Widely despised and awesomely unelectable, he's a TV celebrity whose prominent place in the roster of overbooked news show guests testifies to the fact that the punditocracy has grown fond of him. There's just no other explanation for it.

Gingrich has been threatening to run for president for decades, but last week marked the first time that he's made it as far as an official announcement that his hat is in the ring. I suspect that this may account for the rough handling he's begun to receive at the hands of the media; their affection for him was probably connected to the assumption that he knew his place and would never threaten to seek actual power again. God knows the events of the last week have cleared up any misunderstanding that Gingrich had a core of popularity at the heart of today's Republican party. I've written before that, in Gingrich's '90s heyday and earlier, when the Southern strategy was being fixed in place, Republican game masters told their voting base who their enemies were and where they had to jump to keep them in their place, but since the emergence of the Tea Party, old Republican hacks have had to jump in whichever direction "the base" tells them too. That certainly seems to be the case with Gingrich. More than fifteen years ago, Gingrich helped compose the Contract with America and had the brainstorm to run it in the one place his core audience would be sure to see it, in the pages of TV Guide. Now, the people who once would have been his core audience are poring over every statement on public policy and the world at large that he's made since 1978, and are screaming like stuck pigs over every deviation from current Republican gospel. It figures there'll be a lot of them, since the needle has moved so far since Gingrich began his career--and not, as it's often said, just to the right, but so far into the red zone of shrill imbecility and general madness. Gingrich was once a forerunner of the idea that the solution to Republicans' failure at the polls was to encourage meaner and stupider people to start thinking with their hearts and asses and go to the polls, and now that the Tea Party has carried that concept to its logical extreme, he, like every other Republican candidate, is being made to answer for that period in his life when, not anticipating just how mean and stupid a viable Republican candidate would be required to be, he favored almost reasonable positions on such issues as environment protections and health care.

Up until the end of last week, most of the coverage and commentary on Gingrich as a presidential candidate tended to center on questions regarding the candidate's messy marital history, his current wife, Callista, and where the hell these two get off trying to tell other people how to live their lives. Gingrich, who was born in 1943, famously married one of his former high school teachers when he was 19 and she was 26, then dumped her in 1980, when he was having an affair with the woman who became his second wife a year later. He was still married to her when he began an affair with Callista, who was a House of Representatives staffer. One of their friends recently told the New York Times that the current Gingriches "would say they wished they had met in a different time in their lives under different circumstances,” though it's easy to imagine that if they had met much later, after he had been deposed from power, he might just possibly have seemed less attractive to her, whereas if they'd met much earlier, any attempt on his part to put the movies on her would have resulted in statutory rape charges.

Part of the legend of Gingrich's special place in the Hypocrites' Hall of Fame is that he was enjoying his extramarital affair with young Callista at the same time that he was enthusiastically presiding over the impeachment hearings against President Clinton. Unlike just about anything else you could think of to say against Gingrich, this may be just the teensiest but unfair. Gingrich did preside over those hearings at the same time he was doing what Clinton was charged with doing, but his attitude at the time seemed anything but enthusiastic. He was uncharacteristically solemn and reticent about the whole mess, in the same way that Ted Kennedy, during Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearings, seemed to feel that he was perhaps not the best person available to denounce someone on television for disrespecting women. (In my recent online reading about the Gingriches, it has come to my attention that there is apparently some federal law stating that any reference to the sexual indiscretions of Republican politicians who have not been shy about trumpeting the central place that family values hold in their lives must be met with a shit storm of comments from readers, to the effect that at least the Republican hypocrite never got behind the wheel of a car while roaring drunk for the specific purpose of deliberating drowning a young woman just to show to the world that he could get away with it. It is indeed true that, in a long lifetime of doing and saying disgusting and reprehensible thing, Newt Gingrich is not known to have ever done that. There. now there's no need for anyone to mention it.) One early sign of just how protective the media felt towards Gingrich is that they never called attention to his domestic situation all during Impeachment Year 1998, even though it is very hard to believe that not one of them knew about it at the time.

Instead, the ax fell on my former Representative, Louisiana's own Scumbag Bob Livingston, who succeeded Gingrich as Speaker of the House after the midterm elections of 1998 proved disastrous for Republicans. Scumbag Bob actually resigned his seat before taking hold of the gavel, when Larry Flynt published details of his own extramarital flings; in quitting over his sex life. he called on President Clinton to recognize the nobility of his resignation and to do the same thing, thus making him the only Republican to openly acknowledge that the nonsense about lying under oath and such was indeed nonsense and that the idea was always that the President of the United States should agree to give up his office because he's gotten his knob polished without the sanction of church or the civil courts. It was the only valuable and worthwhile act of his life. (He has since become a lobbyist, striving to protect such clients as the former government of Egypt fro legislation that might have criticized or curtailed its human rights abuses, and helping the Turkish government in its efforts at genocide denial. In a 2000 interview with the New Orleans giveaway paper Gambit, Scumbag Bob bravely admitted to not being perfect, but said that he took pride in knowing that he had never done anything as traitorous and purely evil as Bill Clinton's decision to be one of the college students who took part in a trip to visit Moscow.)

There has also been a surprising generational tilt to some of the commentary on the current Gingrich marriage, with a special emphasis on the fact that Callista, who is in the habit of looking like an underbaked cookie with thick vanilla frosting and scary raisins for eyes, is about the same age as some of us who were whippersnappers in the age of Reagan but that it is impossible to imagine ever having bumped into her while surfing the mosh pit. Surely this approach is misguided. Thinking of all the Boomers, from Kenneth Starr to Karl Rove to George Bush, Jr. to the Swift Boat crew to the Tea Partiers themselves, I can't help but wonder if the politics of the last twenty-something years might not have been saner and less fixated on who did or didn't inhale or march against Vietnam forty years ago, if one vast segment of that blighted generation hadn't worked so hard in the '60s, '70s, and even into the '80s to insist that one set of political and social attitudes and cultural preferences didn't define their whole age group. Maybe it would have mattered less then what kind of person had the fluke luck to be the first Boomer president. I think it's fine that Callista Gingrich, a woman close in age to myself, comes across as the Stepford Winter brother in drag. I would never begrudge people like her full membership in our "generation", especially if making her feel alienated meant that one of the key issues of the 2040 presidential campaign is one's position, forty years earlier, on Elian Gonzalez.

I suspect that the happiest days of Gingrich's life were the 1980s, when he developed a reputation as a bad boy and new-style political provocateur for his use of the then new phenomenon of C-SPAN and for spearheading the destruction of Democratic Speaker of the House Jim Wright. Gingrich accrued a lot more power in the '90s, but he also learned that tearing other people down is a lot more fun a lot easier than avoiding getting torn down yourself, once you've stepped into the spotlight and painted a target on your back. He'd made a lot of enemies by that time, but make no mistake about which party insisted on calling for a wrap party to his career; the Democrats would have offered virgin sacrifices to a volcano god if that would have kept him in office, in the Speaker's chair, and on TV with his mouth running. David Weigel has a post in which he points out how the media and political environments have changed since Gingrich was a real player, and how "[Paul] Ryan, not Gingrich, is the 'idea man' of the GOP circa 2011. He's the one proposing radical change that is focus-grouped but not invulnerable to polling swings." That probably hurts Gingrich a little, but he can probably live with it, because, again, it's not as if he's running with any notion that he might win the presidency. Presumably he's running because, after all these years of rehearsing the dance of the seven veils, he has to actually run just once to keep garnering the contributions that keep the forces of Tiffany's at bay, and maintain the illusion of relevance that keep the book deals and the TV appearances coming. If running for president means that he has to turn in his Fox News pundit card for a year, he must figure that he'll make it up in TV fees and face time after the election. In the meantime, as a presidential candidate, he'll stick get to be on TV plenty, just without getting paid for it--and having his TV time cut off probably would cause him to shrivel up and die sooner than just having his income cut off. Newt Gingrich, once widely taken for a serious political thinker, is really just the Ann Coulter who once actually got elected to something.

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An Urgent Message on Behalf of the Next Generation

We don't officially have "fund-raisers" here at The Phil Nugent Experience, because I don't have the guts, but once a year or so, I do officially remind those of you who enjoy the site and may have recently found a twenty dollar bill that the Donate button does work. I like to wait for something to drive me to this rash act; this year, the fiancee and I are getting ready to take to the roads and the highway in the sky to celebrate with her two youngest daughters as they complete their formal education and enter the workplace, and by God, I'd like to pick up a dinner tab and chip in for gas. I don't guess this is as pressing an emergency as some I've heard about from people clearing their throats and nodding in the direction of the begging bowl, but I do take pride in improving on my excuse from last summer, which was that I was between jobs and in hock to the I.R.S. but still wanted to see Inception.

Chris Cross

Awards committees, old friends, and even TV newsmagazines are in a hurry to pay tribute to Christopher Hitchens while the ailing pamphleteer is still around to enjoy their praise. There are still sometimes reminders of why it might seem like a good thing to have Hitchens around and weighing in on things, such as hiis recent Slate column denouncing Noam Chomsky for Chomsky's ongoing, now posthumous defense of Osama bin Laden, which has now taken the surreal form of claiming to doubt bin Laden's guilt in regards to the 9/11 terror attacks. ("In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that 'we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.' Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden’s 'confession,' but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.") For this, Hitchens gives Chomsky a sound, blunt bashing upside his pointy little head, which is what Chomsky deserves and what Hitchens is good for,

The one problematic thing about the essay is that, when a man goes so far in damning another man as a fool and a churl and a sanctimonious bullshit artist, it seems an odd thing for him to fail to acknowledge that he once strove to identify himself as that very man's greatest defender and ideological ally. "Chomsky," Hitchens writes, "still enjoys some reputation both as a scholar and a public intellectual." Fifteen or more years ago, Hitchens was writing articles in which he had nothing but harsh words for those who failed to recognize what he then saw as Chomsky's towering stature as a public intellectual, and lamented the fact that someone he now regards as on the level with an apocalyptic street crazy wasn't at the head of the rolodex of whoever was booking Nightline. Back in the '80s. he wrote a ferocious defense of Chomsky after his hero was attacked for allowing an essay he'd written in defense of free speech to be used as an introduction to a book by the French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. The situation was complicated, to put it mildly, but Hitchens's approach was characteristic: he held Chomsky up as a hero who could do no wrong while excoriating everyyone who found fault with him as a propagandist stooge. And this was in the days when Chomsky regularly issued political pronouncements that were... well, consistent with what he often says today. It's not as if there's any question of who moved.

There's been a lot of speculation over the surprising path that Hitchens has taken politically in the past ten years or so, from exemplar of radical chic and enemy of western imperialism to the guy with the neocon man-crush on George W. Bush. I don't know anyone who chalks it up to fear of terrorism, and many people even think it must have a basis in some serious moral and political beliefs. Some, pointing out that Hitchens was a stalwart enemy of Bill Clinton and all who dared serve him, refer to his shift to the right. But I don't think it really has that much to do with politics, or with moral beliefs either. I think the common thread running through the decades of Hitchens's political writing is the thrill he gets out of taking the most extreme moralistic (as opposed to moral) position possible, for the chief purpose of then condemning as many people as possible for being too cowardly, weak-kneed, short-sighted, whatever, to go as far as you have. When Hitchens was younger and the thought of international terrorism upending Manhattan a paranoid fantasy, the best way to have fun doing this was to assail the conservative ruling classes, in the manner of Chomsky and Gore Vidal (who Hitchens also once regarded as a master and supreme example of the politically engaged man of letters, and who he has since thrown on the compost heap with Chomsky and Michael Moore.) At his peak of inspired, empty, self-glorifying rhetoric, he was able to spend an entire book painting Mother Teresa as his moral inferior. But around September 2011, Hitchens was at an age, and the world was at a place, where it seemed more promising to start denouncing people who weren't as pro-American or who were too soft on terrorism. It must have helped that, given Hitchens's notion of cool, it must have been a lot easier for him to fall in love with George W. Bush than with a tacky, soft-hearted hillbilly like Bill Clinton--someone who I suspect Hitchens, like a lot of people Clinton's age in politics and the media, could never forgive for having become the first Boomer-Generation President of the United States, when it was so clear that Bubba was not the man these worthies could accept as more deserving than they of the title. Neither Bush nor Hitchens is capable of ever having been wrong about anything, and I imagine that a character trait like that binds you closer to someone than anything else they may or may not have in common.

I've read a lot of Hitchens over the years, and often gotten a happy little buzz from him, thanks more to his high energy level than any of the more lasting intellectual and literary qualities than people more discerning than myself claim to find in all his many acres of words. But I've never really felt comfortable with him, and I think that's because, as stupid as this may sound given his great popular success, I don't think he's ever really gotten the elements of his pose in the right exact balance. In his memoir, he famously dated his beginnings as a public speaker to his discovery that if you can "cut any kind of figure on the podium, then you need never dine or sleep alone." That's a line in keeping with the spirit of Oscar Wilde, an artist whose mastery of verbal filigree concealed a genuine moral sense. And Hitchens's pose links him to such star journalists as Claud Cockburn and Hunter Thompson, who acted as if they were in their profession for the personal anecdotes it could help them generate or the excuse it gave them to vent their spleen. But Hitchens's attempts to present himself as a camp figure, a creature of wisecracks and endearing flings at decadence, keep getting spoiled for me, because I can't shake this feeling that, at the end of the day, he really wants you to "see through" his flashy, louche self-caricature and respect him for his seriousness as a moral thinker, and as he's made it clear over and over, he isn't any kind of serious moral thinker. He's someone who picks his targets for shock value or to align himself with whoever picks the seating arrangements in whatever level he's just ascended to, and who, having declared his allegiance, talks about whoever's on the other side of the issue of the day as if they were ax murderers.

Everything comes down to those he disagrees with not having the passion to hate someone as much as he does; in the early seventies, the point of every complex geopolitical situation came down to using it to demonstrate your loathing of Henry Kissinger, just as, thirty years later, the question of whether you supported a war of choice against a weak and non-threatening country when a major terrorist act of mass murder for which that country bore no responsibility. and which had yet to be fully answered for, came down, in his mind, to: why don't you hate Saddam Hussein? It's a useful point of positioning for him, because, while Hitchens is often blatantly dishonest, devoid of empathy, and views any kind of nuance as a form of intellectual and moral corruption, he can always make a supremely convincing case for why you should hate someone. (His most morally nuanced work, as when he expresses his regrets over water boarding or Abu Ghraib, seems to be inspired by his consternation at his friends for making his work defending them that much harder.) And why, having hated them. you should wish them dead, a charmless quirk that no memento mori of his own can dampen. (A few days ago, he was drawing on everything he'd learned from the Iraq War to proclaim that killing Muammar Gaddafi is not only essential but that it would be a cinch to do, and he never misses the chance to respond to interviewers' questions about his regrets if his life is cut short by saying that he'd hate not having the chance to dance on the graves of Kissinger and other blackguards in print.) Hitchens is a literary cutie and supreme dealer in bile who wants to be acclaimed as an Orwell-style moral example because of how much more delight he takes in the prospect of death coming to the great monsters of our age--like Sidney Blumenthal and Mother Teresa, say, and probably all those self-styled radical dissident writers who he once held so close to his bosom but turned on without a second thought, but certainly not Bush or Richard Perle, who meant well, or Ahmed Chalabi or David Irving, who were so, so misunderstood. It's hard to know where to begin describing what's wrong with the math on that.

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Almighty Thor




And, my unsolicited two cents on the real thing...



I saw Thor yesterday, but it wasn't until I was in the shower this morning that it hit me that, from a filmmaking standpoint, the most interesting thing about the movie is that there's really no way to tell that Kenneth Branagh had anything to do with it, which is in some ways a compliment and in other ways, not so much. There was a good space of time there, something close to twenty-five years, where the DC heroes had an identity in blockbuster movies and Marvel's attempts to catch up were regarded as a joke. And then Sam Raimi hooked up with Spider-man and made a couple of movies whose charm was that they really had some of the feel of the Marvel comics of the mid-sixties.

I enjoyed a lot of Raimi's first Spider-man movie and loved the second one, but I didn't really expect a lot to follow from that, because I figured it was only possible because Raimi himself was a talented director with a strong, oddball personality who, besides wanting the money, could connect enough with the material to want to make such a thing. I figured that attempts to do something similar by hacks would just feel hacky, and that if they hired talented directors who didn't have entire wings of their brains stocked with old comic books, the directors would make make something that the market couldn't relate to, and then the Tom Jane The Punisher movie came along to prove my first point, and Ang Lee was kind enough to prove the other one. But by now, they've actually managed to get an assembly line going that turns out package superhero movies that, no matter the personnel involved, come out as proficiently realized, and as completely devoid of any surprises at all, as the bulk of what Marvel was turning out in comics form for most of the '70s and '80s. If the casting is as good as in Iron Man, the results may seem a little better than that, and if the writing is as lazy as it was in Iron Man 2, there may be some collective feeling of disappointment. But the core audience for these movies will probably like Thor, just because they want to like it and have no reason not to, so long as the actors look right for their characters and the special effects look like they cost a lot of money and the hammer that only Thor is strong enough to wield doesn't look as if it were papier-mache. It'll satisfy the expectations that it's set up for itself and not do anything more, the way some of the most popular and formulaic Marvel comics of their day did. And as with those comics, that's why I came away a little bored, and why other people will feel that they've been to church and got just what they wanted. (Just for what it's worth, these remarks are not addressed at Walt Simonson's run on Thor in the '80s, which was probably my favorite Marvel comic of that time, except for Frank Miller's return to Daredevil.)

I laughed at two jokes that won't translate at all out of context, once when Chris Hemsworth smiles for Kat Denning's camera and once when the faceless drone who plays the representative from SHIELD in all these movies addresses Thor as "Donald". I hope that Hemsworth doesn't become too big to play roles like the one I first saw him in, as the scary, glowering hitchhiker in A Perfect Getaway; he was perfect in that. I really liked Tom Hiddleston as Loki; he doesn't make the mistake a billion actors playing Iago have made, signalling to the rafters, from his first line on, that he's the bad guy, just because everyone in the audience already knows that he's the bad guy. Thanks to his choice to soft-pedal the oily duplicity, there was the totally unanticipated effect of making the people in the movie who didn't know from the start that he was the bad guy not seem like total idiots. (Not that some of them didn't seem like total idiots, but for other reasons.) It is a shame that nobody who worked on this was able to override their programming to do the obvious, boring thing long enough to have Kat Denning and Natalie Portman swap roles. All in all, though, the most spirited discussion the movie inspired in the group I saw it with came when I mentioned that Stellan Skarsgard is the father of the super=hot guy on True Blood.

Tramp Steamer

Jason Eisener's hobo with a Shotgun wins this year's Snakes on a Plane/Truth in Advertising Award for Best Title. Rutger Hauer, whose performance could have been digitally lifted from any of the scores of straight-faced Z-grade action junkpiles he's starred in, plays the nameless loner who hops off a train and lands in the ironically named Hope Town, which is run by a self-glorifying crime lord called the Drake. (The Drake is played by Brian Downey, who, a dozen years ago, starred in the unwatchable cable series Lexx, and who I dearly hoped never to see again in this life.) Right at the start, the combination of the old-school lettering of the opening credits, the elegiac-heroic music, and Hutger's carved-out-of-stone glower let you know that what's to follow is meant to be spoofy but also genuinely affectionate towards the trash cinema of an earlier era. Minutes after his arrival in town, Hauer sees the Drake's leering-idiot sons chase down their uncle, seal him up inside a manhole with the cover fastened around his neck like a collar, slip a noose around his neck and tie the other end of the rope to a car bumper, and pop his top off, so that a scantily clad woman can dance exultantly in the geyser of blood that flows from the stump. Hauer has been trying to get together fifty dollars so he can buy a lawnmower from a pawn shop and start a low-cost lawn care business, but after he's witnessed a few more examples of the reign of terror being waged against the cowed, defenseless citizenry, he spends the money on a shotgun instead, so he can mete out a little justice. Soon we see a newspaper headline: "HOBO STOPS BEGGING, DEMANDS CHANGE." This is the movie's best joke, to be followed by several joke headlines not as good, one of which is later repeated aloud because the director has a special fondness for it.

Hobo started out life as a mock trailer that Eisner made for a contest to promote the movie Grindhouse. Eisner's also made Treevenge, a funny parody horror short that wpuld be even funnier it were about a third as long as it is. Like Black Dynamite and Machete, Hobo with a Shotgun was as perfect as it was ever going to get when it was content to be a trailer for a movie that didn't exist yet. Whatever their flaws, Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds demanded to blossom out into full feature films, because Tarantino, even when he claims to be starting out to pay homage to the scurviest B-pictures in his memory book, inevitably links the cheap thrills to his own special obsessions and personal fantasies, and turns his neo-grindhouse movies into something new; however much the very idea may unhinge David Denby, he's an artist. And before Tarantino showed up, in the days before the arrival of a new generation of directors who use Sleazoid Express as their Cahiers du Cinema, movies like Re-Animator and Near Dark and One False Move combined grindhouse elements with some artistry and moviemaking finesse, an interest in character and the look and feel of the America far from the main roads.

By contrast, Hobo just looks like something made by people whose greatest ambition is to read reviews that accuse them of having perpetrated the grossest movie ever made in Canada. Devotees of grindhouse "classics" like to point to evidence of satire and social criticism in these movies, the idea being that their disreputability and fast, cheap production shedules allowed them to keep their ear to the ground and say things that the makers of big Hollywood product were too comfortably insulated to think of, even if they'd dared include them in their movies. But there's nothing in Hobo that doesn't come from old, bad movies, except for one choice detail: Hauer raises money by performing for a scumbag who makes "bum fight" videos, egging society's unfortunates on to pummel each other and maim themselves for his camera. I think it spoils the grace note a little that, having bought his shotgun, Hauer immediately goes back to righteously abuse this son of bitch; Eisener would have earned some self-knowledge points if he'd allowed for the audience to see this sadistic jackass as his stand-in. Mostly, the only way that Eisener and other neo-grindhouse filmmakers can think of to reignite the genre is to let hambones like Hauer and Downey, not to mention the no-name supporting actors, have too much rope, while jacking up the levels of gore to more and more extreme levels while keeping the presentation squarely in your face. In between the big show-stopping scenes with the manhole covers, Downey uses a baseball bat studded with razor blades to open a man up like a pinata, and the heroine gets her hand ground down to the wrist with a spinning metal wheel, whereupon, she stabs her assailant with her own protruding bone. The thing is, this stuff is in the movie because people thought it would be fun to watch. But, yeah, the photos of Osama bin Laden with his brains blown out are too gruesome to be released.

Bat***t

In his Techland column, Douglas Wolk touches briefly on perhaps the single least important way that Osama bin Laden's death may have impacted our world: what does it mean for Frank Miller's Holy Terror? Miller, whose bracingly direct, sane and angry contribution to the 9/11 Artists Respond anthology comic may have been that book's high point, announced the project in 2006, when it was called Holy Terror, Batman! "It is, not to put too fine a point on it," he told a a piece of propaganda - Batman kicks al-Qa'eda's ass, It just seems silly to chase around the Riddler when you've got al-Qa'eda out there." Miller has continued to mention it in interviews, usually claiming that it's just about finished and will be available "next year", which might lead to speculation that it's the Answered Prayers of superhero comics. Apparently, though, his ideas for it have evolved. In 2007, he told the New York Times that what he was now calling Holy War had "became something that was no longer Batman. It’s somewhere past that, and I decided it’s going to be part of a new series that I’m starting.” However, he contradicted himself, depending on the interviewer, as to whether Batman was still a character in what was still ostensibly a DC comic book. Last June, he cleared things up a little, saying that the comic would appear but that it was no longer a DC book and that instead of Batman, it would feature a new character, the Fixer, "a new hero that I've made up that fights Al Qaeda."

This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Miller's name becoming very well-known outside comics-shop circles, thanks to a remarkable flood of work that appeared in 1986 and early 1987, including the Daredevil story arc ("Born Again") he wrote, with artwork by David Mazzuchelli; Elektra: Assassin, the gonzo miniseries he wrote for the artist Bill Sienkiewicz; Batman: Year One, the reboot he wrote with art by Mazzucchelli; and, of course, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, which he wrote and penciled, in collaboration with the inker Klaus Janson and the colorist Lynn Varley. It was The Dark Knight that inspired enough pieces in the mainstream media about comics' transformation into adult entertainment to turn the phrase "Comics--they're not just for kids anymore!" into a comics geek's inside joke. It also marked the beginning of Miller's political reputation as some kind of crypto-fascist with a hard-on for vigilante displays of law & order. It's true that the book includes some devices so weird that it would be a relief to know that they're code for something, and the signs generally point to them being code for some attitudes that might be classified as, well, unpleasant. The Joker is a screaming queen. Just as the villain in the first of the Dirty Harry movies--a huge, acknowledged influence on Miller--paid a thug to pummel him into a fine paste so he could accuse Harry of having done it and scream police brutality, the Joker kills himself in order to frame Batman for murder. The psychiatrist who stupidly claims to have rehabilitated the Joker and campaigns for his release is an aging hippie in sandals, Jewfro, and, oddly, a Hitler mustache. The new Robin is a teenage girl who runs off to join Batman because she craves an authority figure worthy of the name. her children-of-the-sixties parents being too self-involved (and stoned) to even notice she's missing. The insane, murderous thugs terrorizing Gotham are drawn as white mutants in New Wave drag, but their speech patterns suggest Flavor Flav.

Tidbits such as these, joined to the book's enthusiasm for taking the kid gloves off and showing the punks who's boss, earned Dark Knight some horrified notices in such places as The Village Voice. In truth, Miller's politics, if they can even be dignified with such a word and its implications of a coherent thought process, seem much more complicated, proving once again that "complicated" and "deep" and are not synonyms. Dark Knight is set during the time of Ronald Reagan, who frequently pops up in a TV screen, looking witless and unmanly as he offers the citizenry folksy reassurances during times of apocalyptic crisis. Miller's real ideas about the nature of heroism come to the fore when Superman--the sole legally sanctioned costumed crime fighter in this world, because he works directly for the U.S. government--enters the picture. "These two people," Batman and Superman, "should not be friends," Miller once said. Miller is all for taking the fight to the enemy with no rules or Miranda rights, but only the unlicensed maverick tough guy can be the hero. Those who represent officialdom, whether they're Reagan or Superman, are blinkered or corrupt, and dorks beside. That goes even for those Boy Scouts who are psychotic Boy Scouts. Nuke, the villain who arrives at the climax of Miller and Mazzucchelli's Daredevil story is a musclebound lunatic with an American flag on his face who subsists on a diet of red, white, and blue happy pills; he's happily serving the U.S. military by scorching Latin American villages when the Kingpin, calling in a favor, turns him loose on his nemesis in Hell's Kitchen. The very existence of this freaked-out killing machine is shown to deeply offend Captain America, Marvel Comics' long-standing litmus test for true patriotism versus jingoistic douchebaggery.

If Miller's work was a little confused when he was in his prime, he hasn't been in his prime in many a moon. But that's not really why the Holy Terror project, especially as he first laid it out, was never a good idea. "Superman punched out Hitler," he said back in 2006. "So did Captain America. That's one of the things they're there for." That's what they used to be there for, in a simpler time, in a simpler pop culture landscape. Maybe people as far beyond redemption as Hitler and bin Laden deserve to be turned into cartoon figures of malignancy; that, presumably, was the idea behind the phony story that was circulated, as soon as bin Laden's body was cold, that his last act on Earth was to cower behind his wife and try to use her as a human shield. But can you really deal with them, in the modern world, on the level that the Three Stooges dealt with Hitler in You Nazty Spy? Thanks to Miller and people like him, people don't automatically read superhero comics now with the built-in remove that you'd apply to a children's story, which means that you can get in trouble trying to deal with real-world issues in superhero comics--something that the makers of Action Comics #900 found out recently when they had Superman renounce his U.S. citizenship. (Why did Supes do this? As he explained in the story--which was all the stranger for being written as an explanatory conversation--he'd spent a day in Iran standing in solidarity with those protesting the government, and then he had to listen to the Iranians denounce him as a partisan stooge of the American government.

The problem with writing superhero stories about real-world problems has seldom been made clearer: as other commentators have already pointed out, if Superman is really upset about the state of things in Iran, then why doesn't he fly over there and, instead of spending a day silently protesting the regime, spend a couple of hours pulling government leaders out of their office windows and drop-kicking them into the Phantom Zone?) In the sixties, when politics and pop culture were intwined as never before, Stan Lee made one valiant stab at doing things the old way by casting Iron Man as Marvel's resident hawk on the Vietnam war, and Lee has been begging people to forget about that ever since. The old cartoons where everyone from Supes to Bugs and Daffy got their licks in against Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo were the products of a time when pop culture was quick and dirty and reveled in its topicality, partly as compensation for the fact that nobody working on those things believed their work would last and be seen, let alone appreciated, by future generations. Nowadays, that kind of mindset can just about only be found at South Park. The fact that Miller came up with this idea five years after 9/11, and that if, it were to come out tomorrow, he would have spent five years working on it, tells all you need to know about why "Batman vs. Bin Laden" was never really a workable idea in these times.