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Sunday, July 31, 2011
Friday, July 29, 2011
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Shooting Off at the Mouth, Part II: Jennifer's Brain
I don't know if Jennifer Rubin is the single stupidest blogger in America, but she has few rivals when it comes to lacking a sense of humor about having been proven wrong, especially considering how much practice she's had at it. A year and a half ago, Rubin wrote a piece for Commentary chiding Jewish voters for not rushing to embrace Sarah Palin, a failing that she saw as being rooted "in misunderstanding and media-induced panic." Rubin continued to write again and again about her crush on Palin ("Like water dumped on the Wicked Witch of the West, Palin’s popularity has melted the façade of professional competence and personal stability which cloaked her opponents’ weaknesses."), right up to the 2010 midterms, when Palin's high-profile endorsements helped sink a couple of candidates while her own popularity numbers sank to toxic levels. It was at that point that Rubin not only backed way, way off, but took Ezra Klein to task having dared to suggest that any conservatives had ever mistaken Palin for a prominent plater in the movement, writing, "who but liberal elites, who pine for a ready made target (in precisely the same way they defined Rush Limbaugh as the leader of the GOP after Obama's election), consider Palin the voice of the right?"
Last Friday, when word reached our shores that something godawful had happened in Norway, Rubin was among those who didn't waste a minute in going online to deplore this latest act of Islamofascist terrorism and ask how many more innocents would have to die before the governments of the western world start doing something about the swarthy turbaned menace. Those patient enough to wait to find out what had happened before extrapolating life lessons about it subsequently learned that the murderer was not a Muslim but an anti-Muslim shithead lunatic, and Rubin is very, very upset that some of you mean people had to notice the discrepancy between her excellent opinion journalism and reality:
The parents of the murdered children should take some comfort in knowing that the threat that wiped out their loved ones far less potent than the jihadists who live in Jennifer Rubin's head.
You have to wonder: when people say that you shouldn't lump all Muslims together or slander Islam as a gutter religion and program for genocide, does Rubin hear them saying that "we can rest easy with regard to the panoply of threats we face"? And though I'm sure that whatever poll results she's citing here are impeccable in their accuracy, does she really think that, because "There are many more jihadists than blond Norwegians out to kill Americans", that means it's okay to jump to tag any murderous outburst as obviously the work of Muslim extremists, or that a white Norwegian's bloodbath is somehow less disturbing than a Muslim's? Is there any way this insipid, self-exculpatory line of blather doesn't count as bigotry? Rubin blogs for the Washington Post. David Weigel used to blog for the Post, but he was made to leave last year after it was discovered that, like everyone else in the country with half a brain and an Internet connection, he had, among friends in a private forum, made comments to the effect that such persons as Newt Gingrich, Pat Buchanan, and Rush Limbaugh were not the most honorable and intelligent political figures in the land, nor the most flattering faces of the conservative movement. Is this really where the standard of decency is at the Post these days? It's unacceptable for a reporter-blogger to have and express the most commonplace opinions imaginable about the most cartoonish fringe political celebrities, but acknowledging--let's not be ludicrous and use the word "apologizing"--for a stroke of misreporting as crude and broad as this by basically shrugging, Hey, it was an atrocity, and who commits those but Muslims? Turns out it wasn't Muslims, so I guess it wasn't that potent a tragedy.
Last Friday, when word reached our shores that something godawful had happened in Norway, Rubin was among those who didn't waste a minute in going online to deplore this latest act of Islamofascist terrorism and ask how many more innocents would have to die before the governments of the western world start doing something about the swarthy turbaned menace. Those patient enough to wait to find out what had happened before extrapolating life lessons about it subsequently learned that the murderer was not a Muslim but an anti-Muslim shithead lunatic, and Rubin is very, very upset that some of you mean people had to notice the discrepancy between her excellent opinion journalism and reality:
As to the horror in Norway, once again we are reminded how vulnerable free and open societies are. We are reminded that the best security system is not airtight. And, we are reminded that the first obligation of government is to protect its citizenry.
That the suspect here is a blond Norwegian does not support the proposition that we can rest easy with regard to the panoply of threats we face or that homeland security, intelligence and traditional military can be pruned back. To the contrary, the world remains very dangerous because very bad people will do horrendous things. There are many more jihadists than blond Norwegians out to kill Americans, and we should keep our eye on the systemic and far more potent threats that stem from an ideological war with the West.
The parents of the murdered children should take some comfort in knowing that the threat that wiped out their loved ones far less potent than the jihadists who live in Jennifer Rubin's head.
You have to wonder: when people say that you shouldn't lump all Muslims together or slander Islam as a gutter religion and program for genocide, does Rubin hear them saying that "we can rest easy with regard to the panoply of threats we face"? And though I'm sure that whatever poll results she's citing here are impeccable in their accuracy, does she really think that, because "There are many more jihadists than blond Norwegians out to kill Americans", that means it's okay to jump to tag any murderous outburst as obviously the work of Muslim extremists, or that a white Norwegian's bloodbath is somehow less disturbing than a Muslim's? Is there any way this insipid, self-exculpatory line of blather doesn't count as bigotry? Rubin blogs for the Washington Post. David Weigel used to blog for the Post, but he was made to leave last year after it was discovered that, like everyone else in the country with half a brain and an Internet connection, he had, among friends in a private forum, made comments to the effect that such persons as Newt Gingrich, Pat Buchanan, and Rush Limbaugh were not the most honorable and intelligent political figures in the land, nor the most flattering faces of the conservative movement. Is this really where the standard of decency is at the Post these days? It's unacceptable for a reporter-blogger to have and express the most commonplace opinions imaginable about the most cartoonish fringe political celebrities, but acknowledging--let's not be ludicrous and use the word "apologizing"--for a stroke of misreporting as crude and broad as this by basically shrugging, Hey, it was an atrocity, and who commits those but Muslims? Turns out it wasn't Muslims, so I guess it wasn't that potent a tragedy.
Monday, July 25, 2011
Shooting Off at the Mouth
Last night, Curb Your Enthusiasm used a dispute over whether a Palestinian-owned chicken restaurant had the right to occupy space across from a Jewish deli to parody the outrage over the Cordoba House. I assume that Martin Peretz is working on his rebuttal now.
Given that he works on his own leisurely timetable--one gets the impression that whoever picks up the phone at HBO and gets the word from Davis that a new batch of episodes is ready is always mildly surprised to learn that the show is still officially on the air-- you don't expect topical satire from Larry David. If the episode had aired a week earlier, it would have had the cooled-off surrealistic air of something that made brutal fun of last year's hysterical media light show. But the actions of mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik have put the people responsible for the Cordoba House sideshow back in the news. In his "manifesto", Breivik pillages from anti-Muslim hate blogs such as Pamela Geller's Atlas Rising in order to cobble together a heroic, besieged world view for himself. He pillaged from all over, even "adapting" passages from Ted Kaczynski. But his actions and the words he cites in support of them have a unity that you has to squint hard and turn your head funny to see in the case of Jarod Lee Laughner. In Norway, police were quick to compare Breivak to the other great domestic American nut job of the '90s, Timothy McVeigh, and in the words of Geller and others who would cite the existence of Islamic terrorism as reason enough to regard any Muslim, or anyone who looks to them as if they might be a Muslim, as a public menace who needs to be driven out of sight, Breivik found his Turner Diaries.
Naturally, the people who stoked these fires and earned themselves a shout-out from Breivik for their services to the memory of his Viking heritage don't think there's anything to see here. "We're still waiting for the Department of Defense to speak to the religious motivation in the Fort Hood jihad. And yet here we are with a mass murderer who has been planning this for nine years, long before I ever heard of a blog, and who sought to use us, to use our work as a basis for his maniacal, homicidal rampage -- and we are held responsible," she writes. Turning to the matter of Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, the famous conservative blog that is regarded as the Benedict Arnold of the anti-Muslim movement for its turn away from racist paranoia, she adds, "There is only a single and insignificant reference to me in Breivik's manifesto. The 55 references to Spencer are mostly quotes from Muslim scriptures. But Breivik cites LGF numerous times, in a very different way. He includes a long diatribe against Charles Johnson, whom he clearly admired until he felt betrayed enough to snap. The killer speaks about Charles Johnson obsessively and wrings his hands about Johnson's turn to the left. Could this perhaps have been the provocation? Could this have been what caused him to snap?" In the end, though, Geller figures that "If anyone incited him to violence, it was Islamic supremacists." This is pretty much along the lines of writing that if anyone incited James Earl Ray to violence, it was Martin Luther King, with a little help from those who once supported racial segregation but had come around to opposing it. How lonely and oppressed they must have made that poor man feel!
This is happening at a moment when anti-Muslim specialists have their own presidential candidate: Herman Cain, whose blackness is supposed to insulate him from accusations of racism, and so can blithely go farther than anyone else in making unhinged declarations about how Muslims have to be assumed to be violent extremists and are undeserving of being extended the basic rights and decencies. (It's as if the Fox News crowd has adopted the idiot credo voice by Spike Lee in response to complaints about Do the Right Thing: "Black people can't be racist. White people invented that shit.") The Loughner shooting also happened to occur at an awkward moment for a prominent political celebrity and public embarrassment. The shooting, and the immediate public argument over the rhetoric of people like Sarah Palin and their culpability because of it, happened just when Palin was gearing up for a big media push to redefine her as a serious person, with some philosophical depths.
Now, it soon became clear that Loughner was so completely divorced from reality that it was an unfair stretch to suggest that he'd been dangerously influenced by anyone, but the fact that so many people, conservative mouthpieces and politicians among them, made that connection as soon as they heard about the tragedy should have clued Palin, or whoever's supposed to do her thinking for her, that there was a real concern there that people had grown anxious and uneasy about. A demagogue with any human feeling at all, or even a lick of sense, would have taken the chance to announce that, while she saw no evidence that she bore any responsibility for this weirdo's explosion, the carnage he'd wrought had reminded her that her political opponents are human beings with lives and loved ones, and she would be toning down her own rhetoric in the future, in hopes of setting an example that representatives of all ideologies might follow. Palin being Palin, she didn't see the blood or feel any horror or regret; all she heard, as usual, was the unforgivable sound of people not being sufficiently grateful for the existence of Sarah Palin, and her hideous, egotistical screeching about having been the victim of a "blood libel" probably put a permanent ceiling on her popular appeal.
There was a brief period there where there were people who liked Palin, or wanted to like her, because they liked the marketing campaign that cast her as the lovable red hot mama with the Brady Bunch wilderness family, with her feet planted squarely in the earth and a gun in her mitts. If her audience has shrunk down to those who are principally attracted to her sneering tone and unapologetic meanness, she has no one to blame but herself, though she'll probably always think the real villain is whoever plugged in the microphones into which she poured her bile. The Pamela Gellers of this world may not lose any fans over their myopic, self-abnegating reaction to Brevik's shooting spree, because meanness is the only thing they've ever offered the world anyway. You do have to wonder, though, about how these people can say the things they do about Muslims and then lament someone's "maniacal, homicidal rampage."
It inspires the same puzzlement some of us felt sixteen years ago, listening to members of Newt Gingrich's new Republican Congress and talk-radio blowhards--people who'd been going around talking about employees of the federal government as if they were a new, virulent form of venereal disease--express shock over the Oklahoma City bombing (which many of these same people were quick to blame on Arab terrorists, just as Geller's first response to learning that there had been a violent massacre in Norway was to begin denouncing the Islamic jihadists she assumed must be responsible), and then much greater shock and indignation at the suggest that they could have helped create the climate where someone like McVeigh thought that killing as many federal employees as he could would be a crowd-pleasing act that might help set off the violent revolution that the Limbaughs and the Liddys, and even old hacks like Trent Lott and Fred Thompson, seemed to be yearning for. If you take them at their word, people like Geller and Cain don't see any way that Muslims can live among us; they're all suspect all the time, which would appear to mean that anyone who even gives a Muslim a job or rents them living space is being negligently careless. Despite their own insistence that they're not bigots, this simply isn't how you talk or think about those you consider human. I don't know how you can pretend there's a vast gap between regarding Muslims the way Geller and Cain do and thinking that the only real solution is for them all the get off the planet. Like the anti-government extremists, some of whom got themselves elected to government, the professional anti-Islamicists want the fun and excitement of speaking in apocalyptic terms while retaining the right to reach for the smelling salts if anyone takes the next logical step towards violent action, thus proving that they take this rhetoric as seriously as the blowhards are pretending to. This is not the mark of serious people.
Update: Jesus Christ!
Given that he works on his own leisurely timetable--one gets the impression that whoever picks up the phone at HBO and gets the word from Davis that a new batch of episodes is ready is always mildly surprised to learn that the show is still officially on the air-- you don't expect topical satire from Larry David. If the episode had aired a week earlier, it would have had the cooled-off surrealistic air of something that made brutal fun of last year's hysterical media light show. But the actions of mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik have put the people responsible for the Cordoba House sideshow back in the news. In his "manifesto", Breivik pillages from anti-Muslim hate blogs such as Pamela Geller's Atlas Rising in order to cobble together a heroic, besieged world view for himself. He pillaged from all over, even "adapting" passages from Ted Kaczynski. But his actions and the words he cites in support of them have a unity that you has to squint hard and turn your head funny to see in the case of Jarod Lee Laughner. In Norway, police were quick to compare Breivak to the other great domestic American nut job of the '90s, Timothy McVeigh, and in the words of Geller and others who would cite the existence of Islamic terrorism as reason enough to regard any Muslim, or anyone who looks to them as if they might be a Muslim, as a public menace who needs to be driven out of sight, Breivik found his Turner Diaries.
Naturally, the people who stoked these fires and earned themselves a shout-out from Breivik for their services to the memory of his Viking heritage don't think there's anything to see here. "We're still waiting for the Department of Defense to speak to the religious motivation in the Fort Hood jihad. And yet here we are with a mass murderer who has been planning this for nine years, long before I ever heard of a blog, and who sought to use us, to use our work as a basis for his maniacal, homicidal rampage -- and we are held responsible," she writes. Turning to the matter of Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, the famous conservative blog that is regarded as the Benedict Arnold of the anti-Muslim movement for its turn away from racist paranoia, she adds, "There is only a single and insignificant reference to me in Breivik's manifesto. The 55 references to Spencer are mostly quotes from Muslim scriptures. But Breivik cites LGF numerous times, in a very different way. He includes a long diatribe against Charles Johnson, whom he clearly admired until he felt betrayed enough to snap. The killer speaks about Charles Johnson obsessively and wrings his hands about Johnson's turn to the left. Could this perhaps have been the provocation? Could this have been what caused him to snap?" In the end, though, Geller figures that "If anyone incited him to violence, it was Islamic supremacists." This is pretty much along the lines of writing that if anyone incited James Earl Ray to violence, it was Martin Luther King, with a little help from those who once supported racial segregation but had come around to opposing it. How lonely and oppressed they must have made that poor man feel!
This is happening at a moment when anti-Muslim specialists have their own presidential candidate: Herman Cain, whose blackness is supposed to insulate him from accusations of racism, and so can blithely go farther than anyone else in making unhinged declarations about how Muslims have to be assumed to be violent extremists and are undeserving of being extended the basic rights and decencies. (It's as if the Fox News crowd has adopted the idiot credo voice by Spike Lee in response to complaints about Do the Right Thing: "Black people can't be racist. White people invented that shit.") The Loughner shooting also happened to occur at an awkward moment for a prominent political celebrity and public embarrassment. The shooting, and the immediate public argument over the rhetoric of people like Sarah Palin and their culpability because of it, happened just when Palin was gearing up for a big media push to redefine her as a serious person, with some philosophical depths.
Now, it soon became clear that Loughner was so completely divorced from reality that it was an unfair stretch to suggest that he'd been dangerously influenced by anyone, but the fact that so many people, conservative mouthpieces and politicians among them, made that connection as soon as they heard about the tragedy should have clued Palin, or whoever's supposed to do her thinking for her, that there was a real concern there that people had grown anxious and uneasy about. A demagogue with any human feeling at all, or even a lick of sense, would have taken the chance to announce that, while she saw no evidence that she bore any responsibility for this weirdo's explosion, the carnage he'd wrought had reminded her that her political opponents are human beings with lives and loved ones, and she would be toning down her own rhetoric in the future, in hopes of setting an example that representatives of all ideologies might follow. Palin being Palin, she didn't see the blood or feel any horror or regret; all she heard, as usual, was the unforgivable sound of people not being sufficiently grateful for the existence of Sarah Palin, and her hideous, egotistical screeching about having been the victim of a "blood libel" probably put a permanent ceiling on her popular appeal.
There was a brief period there where there were people who liked Palin, or wanted to like her, because they liked the marketing campaign that cast her as the lovable red hot mama with the Brady Bunch wilderness family, with her feet planted squarely in the earth and a gun in her mitts. If her audience has shrunk down to those who are principally attracted to her sneering tone and unapologetic meanness, she has no one to blame but herself, though she'll probably always think the real villain is whoever plugged in the microphones into which she poured her bile. The Pamela Gellers of this world may not lose any fans over their myopic, self-abnegating reaction to Brevik's shooting spree, because meanness is the only thing they've ever offered the world anyway. You do have to wonder, though, about how these people can say the things they do about Muslims and then lament someone's "maniacal, homicidal rampage."
It inspires the same puzzlement some of us felt sixteen years ago, listening to members of Newt Gingrich's new Republican Congress and talk-radio blowhards--people who'd been going around talking about employees of the federal government as if they were a new, virulent form of venereal disease--express shock over the Oklahoma City bombing (which many of these same people were quick to blame on Arab terrorists, just as Geller's first response to learning that there had been a violent massacre in Norway was to begin denouncing the Islamic jihadists she assumed must be responsible), and then much greater shock and indignation at the suggest that they could have helped create the climate where someone like McVeigh thought that killing as many federal employees as he could would be a crowd-pleasing act that might help set off the violent revolution that the Limbaughs and the Liddys, and even old hacks like Trent Lott and Fred Thompson, seemed to be yearning for. If you take them at their word, people like Geller and Cain don't see any way that Muslims can live among us; they're all suspect all the time, which would appear to mean that anyone who even gives a Muslim a job or rents them living space is being negligently careless. Despite their own insistence that they're not bigots, this simply isn't how you talk or think about those you consider human. I don't know how you can pretend there's a vast gap between regarding Muslims the way Geller and Cain do and thinking that the only real solution is for them all the get off the planet. Like the anti-government extremists, some of whom got themselves elected to government, the professional anti-Islamicists want the fun and excitement of speaking in apocalyptic terms while retaining the right to reach for the smelling salts if anyone takes the next logical step towards violent action, thus proving that they take this rhetoric as seriously as the blowhards are pretending to. This is not the mark of serious people.
Update: Jesus Christ!
Friday, July 22, 2011
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Monday, July 18, 2011
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Friday, July 08, 2011
Full Court Press
I don't know how much the phone-hacking scandal at News of the World, will actually damage Rupert Murdoch, but Grandpa Ogre's willingness to put so many blameless people out of work as part of his strategy to hang onto one blamed one, former News editor and Mick Hucknall doppelganger Rebekah Brooks, has only made the planet that much more riveted on his troubles. Whoever's job it is in Hell to keep shoving barbed wire dildos up Robert Maxwell's butt has suffered the indignity these last few days of having to listened to the fat bastard laughing his head off.
Up until now, Brooks's tenure at the News was perhaps best remembered for her 2001 "naming and shaming" campaign, which published the names and photos of convicted pedophiles, with the implication that anyone who saw them or anyone who might pass for one of them in a dim light might want to do something about it. The subsequent vigilante attacks set off by the campaign included the vandalization of the home of a pediatrician, because the mob composed of typical members of Murdoch's core audience didn't really know what that word meant but worked out that it was probably something disgusting. It's a shame that this particular attack happened, especially because it may have left behind the impression that there was something funny about the whole mess. Brooks has said that she is proud of what she did and has never regretted it for a minute.
At a moment like this, it might be worth one's time to reflect on how much Rupert Murduch's influence has shaped western culture during the past forty or so years. In America, Fox News and the New York Post have given Murdoch the image of a conservative, though Jack Shafer is probably right when he says that Murdoch's true politics are nihilistic. That's also become true of the Republican party, and the fact that they began to shift in that direction more and more after acquiring Murdoch as their promoter and the landlord of their public arena may not be entirely coincidental. Murdoch has a considerable interest in maintaining an anti-regulation culture, the growing chasm between the super-rich and everyone else, and the shifting of the tax burden downwards. A situation like that breeds rage, and one way he helps keep us mired in our present reality is by providing an never-ending procession of targets for people to direct their rage towards, as opposed to the bastards who are shaping their lives. One of the easiest ways to stir up and deflect people's rage is by putting a face to the idea of the child destroyer.
I didn't really follow the Casey Anthony case at all for the two years that it apparently had a lot of other human beings and Nancy Grace riveted, but after the verdict set off all those agonized screams and yells of "worse than O.J.!" and even got some people on Twitter to send up the Dexter-signal, I tuned in, figuring that I was going to hear a lot of details that would establish an ironclad, open and shut case that the dopey jury had, for some reason, ignored. Mostly I saw a lot of pictures of the youthful, pretty Ms. Anthony looking youthful and pretty and enjoying herself instead of standing in the garage trying to fashion a noose. Seriously, if Marcia Clark thinks this case was the slam dunk that the Simpson case wasn't, she's even dumber than we've all thought she was these past twenty-six years. Maybe the irrefutable evidence that clinched the case in her mind and the minds of others has been chewed over in public so many times that the news channels and the print media don't want to bore us with it again. But they should know that, by focusing on what they've been focusing on for the last few days, they've given those of us who came in late the impression that people are up in arms because they were so looking forward to sending a woman to Death Row just because a child was dead and there was something about her mother that just didn't "sit right".
Understand this: I'm not saying that Casey Anthony is innocent, because I have no fucking clue whether she is or she isn't. But what's creepy about the volcanic reaction to the verdict is that so many of the volcanoes don't seem to get it that they don't have a clue either, besides what their guts and the made-for-TV movies playing in their heads are telling them. I've read that Nancy Grace, who flogged the case onto the front pages, lifting her TV ratings out of limbo in the process, had a "visceral reaction" to the death of Anthony's daughter because she herself is the mother of twins. Leaving aside the notion that your visceral reactions give you some special insight into anything that is denied to those who have only their ability to think straight and hang onto their sense of proportion, you have to wonder what kind of world we're living in where people take such pride in their ability to get themselves into a frothing rage over a dead child, as if it were the mark of a superior person to get hysterical over the worst thing in the world. It's actually an easy thing to do, and far from preparing you to bring justice and order to a world gone wrong, it's the first step on the path to running around looking for pediatricians to bash in the kisser. I've actually heard loose talk since the verdict came down. to the effect that the legal system places too much emphasis on the burden of proof and reasonable doubt, and is too concerned about the possibility of locking up innocent people. Maybe it's just because I live in Texas, but I really don't lose a lot of sleep over the possibility that it's too hard to get innocent people sent to prison.
/
Up until now, Brooks's tenure at the News was perhaps best remembered for her 2001 "naming and shaming" campaign, which published the names and photos of convicted pedophiles, with the implication that anyone who saw them or anyone who might pass for one of them in a dim light might want to do something about it. The subsequent vigilante attacks set off by the campaign included the vandalization of the home of a pediatrician, because the mob composed of typical members of Murdoch's core audience didn't really know what that word meant but worked out that it was probably something disgusting. It's a shame that this particular attack happened, especially because it may have left behind the impression that there was something funny about the whole mess. Brooks has said that she is proud of what she did and has never regretted it for a minute.
At a moment like this, it might be worth one's time to reflect on how much Rupert Murduch's influence has shaped western culture during the past forty or so years. In America, Fox News and the New York Post have given Murdoch the image of a conservative, though Jack Shafer is probably right when he says that Murdoch's true politics are nihilistic. That's also become true of the Republican party, and the fact that they began to shift in that direction more and more after acquiring Murdoch as their promoter and the landlord of their public arena may not be entirely coincidental. Murdoch has a considerable interest in maintaining an anti-regulation culture, the growing chasm between the super-rich and everyone else, and the shifting of the tax burden downwards. A situation like that breeds rage, and one way he helps keep us mired in our present reality is by providing an never-ending procession of targets for people to direct their rage towards, as opposed to the bastards who are shaping their lives. One of the easiest ways to stir up and deflect people's rage is by putting a face to the idea of the child destroyer.
I didn't really follow the Casey Anthony case at all for the two years that it apparently had a lot of other human beings and Nancy Grace riveted, but after the verdict set off all those agonized screams and yells of "worse than O.J.!" and even got some people on Twitter to send up the Dexter-signal, I tuned in, figuring that I was going to hear a lot of details that would establish an ironclad, open and shut case that the dopey jury had, for some reason, ignored. Mostly I saw a lot of pictures of the youthful, pretty Ms. Anthony looking youthful and pretty and enjoying herself instead of standing in the garage trying to fashion a noose. Seriously, if Marcia Clark thinks this case was the slam dunk that the Simpson case wasn't, she's even dumber than we've all thought she was these past twenty-six years. Maybe the irrefutable evidence that clinched the case in her mind and the minds of others has been chewed over in public so many times that the news channels and the print media don't want to bore us with it again. But they should know that, by focusing on what they've been focusing on for the last few days, they've given those of us who came in late the impression that people are up in arms because they were so looking forward to sending a woman to Death Row just because a child was dead and there was something about her mother that just didn't "sit right".
Understand this: I'm not saying that Casey Anthony is innocent, because I have no fucking clue whether she is or she isn't. But what's creepy about the volcanic reaction to the verdict is that so many of the volcanoes don't seem to get it that they don't have a clue either, besides what their guts and the made-for-TV movies playing in their heads are telling them. I've read that Nancy Grace, who flogged the case onto the front pages, lifting her TV ratings out of limbo in the process, had a "visceral reaction" to the death of Anthony's daughter because she herself is the mother of twins. Leaving aside the notion that your visceral reactions give you some special insight into anything that is denied to those who have only their ability to think straight and hang onto their sense of proportion, you have to wonder what kind of world we're living in where people take such pride in their ability to get themselves into a frothing rage over a dead child, as if it were the mark of a superior person to get hysterical over the worst thing in the world. It's actually an easy thing to do, and far from preparing you to bring justice and order to a world gone wrong, it's the first step on the path to running around looking for pediatricians to bash in the kisser. I've actually heard loose talk since the verdict came down. to the effect that the legal system places too much emphasis on the burden of proof and reasonable doubt, and is too concerned about the possibility of locking up innocent people. Maybe it's just because I live in Texas, but I really don't lose a lot of sleep over the possibility that it's too hard to get innocent people sent to prison.
/
Wednesday, July 06, 2011
There Go the Judge
Sandra Day O'Connor was one of the last conservative Supreme Court justices who didn't just vote according to a knee jerk Republicana formulation (corporations are equivalent to people whose rights need to be protected, human beings with less than $200,000 in the bank, eh, not so much), so say what you like, she is missed. Jeffrey Rosen's interview with the retired justice has its charms, but it also merits a correction, which Jonathan Chait has been good enough to supply. Rosen noted that "O’Connor was prickly and defensive about Bush v.Gore ..: 'It wasn’t the end of the world,' she said impatiently. 'They had recounts of the votes in four counties by the press, and it did not change the outcome at all. So forget it. It’s over!'”Chait points out:
O'Connor's recollection of the media recount is false, though understandably so. The media recount was released shortly after the September 11 attacks, at the height of George W. Bush's popularity and in the midst of massive pressure to affirm his legitimacy. The newspapers spun the recount as an affirmation of Bush's victory. In fact, it proved the opposite. The newspapers assumed that the recount would only focus on "undervotes," or ballots that registered no presidential vote. But the judge overseeing the recount that the Supreme Court halted stated that he would have counted "overvotes," too -- ballots that register more than one vote for president. Many of those ballots registered a clear preference -- usually, the voter both checked the box and wrote in the name of the same candidate. And if those ballots were counted, Gore would have won.
One thing to say about this is that I remember kicking back in my apartment shorting after September 11, 2001, reading the articles about the results of the recounts that appeared in the New York Times and other papers, and I remember re-reading and re-re-reading them, becoming ever more confused, because the headlines were all designed to make it seem as if the results favored Bush, and the actual words in the articles were all arranged in such a way as to suggest that the results favored Gore. It's nice to get some confirmation that I neither imagined this nor was I nuts at the time. (This was not the craziest thing that appeared in the papers at the time. I also remember coming across the argument that the fact that the worst domestic terrorist attack in U.S. history happened on the tough-talking Republican dauphin's watch proved conclusively that only the tough-talking Republican dauphin could keep us safe.)
As Chait also notes, it's intriguing that O'Connor, who is said to have signed on with the red meat Republican bloc on the court over Bush v. Gore only because of her terror that the radical hippie liberal Al Gore would give the vote to eight-year-olds and trees or some such foolishness, echoes the line we've all heard from Antonin Scalia on the decision: it's over and done with, shut up and sit down, nothing to see here. In Scalia's case, this attitude seems to bespeak fuck-you arrogance, but Rosen manages to suggest that, in O'Connor's case, both it and her faulty memory may be seen as the mark of someone who thinks she may have done something terrible (and which, her own words to the contrary, did amount to the end of the world, to one degree or another, for a great many people) and, given that she can't fix it, would rather not be reminded of it. I knew someone in grad school who played a little joke on me that I thought was unnecessarily cruel, after which we stopped talking. I remember walking past her one night and for a second, our eyes met, and she gave me a peculiar, wide-eyed look. After the person I was with walked on a bit, he laughed and said, "Yeah, she knows she fucked up." Who knows, maybe he was right. It didn't help any in that case, either.
Tuesday, July 05, 2011
Hacky Is as Hacky Does
James Wolcott has an intriguing post in which speculates that the new Tom Hanks movie Larry Crowne--which Hanks stars in, directed, co-produced (with Gary Goetzman) and co-wrote (with Nia "Big Fat Greek Wedding" Vardalos) might be a softened, unacknowledged version of Michael Gates Gill's memoir How Starbucks Saved My Life. Like Wolcott, I haven't seen the movie, but I have seen the trailer--God, have I seen that fucking trailer--and I was taken aback when I read a couple of the reviews of the movie, because they seem to imply that Hanks's character is meant to be, how shall I put this, normal. Starting with the first image of him in the trailer, pulling a grotesque self-satisfied grimace and holding up his fingers to proudly show how many times he's made "Employee of the Month" at his shitty big-box store job, I had always assumed that his character, who has to somehow get himself a college degree in order to regain his shitty big-box store job after losing it, was meant to be... a simpleton, Little Lord Not-So-Bright, three bricks shy of a load, whatever the current medical term is. I just watched the trailer again, and, okay, yeah, I can sort of see how you might play someone of standard mental capacity that way, if you were really into slapstick awkwardness and were just learning to use your facial muscles again after recovering from a stroke. But it does look as if Hanks has middle-aged people who skipped college confused with middle-aged people who get assigned time outs when they've been too boisterous. It adds up to a waste of a lot of expressions and gestures that would have come in handy if Hanks ever decided he wanted to play Lenny in Of Mice and Men.
I figure there are two likely possibilities. One is that Hanks has Forrest Gump flashbacks and now starts doing things that would have worked like gangbusters in that role even when he's playing someone altogether different, in the way that W. C. Fields, when he was playing Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield, is said to have kept bugging the director as to why Micawber couldn't be seen doing a little juggling to let off steam. Or maybe whoever cut the trailer, knowing what had worked for Hanks at the box office in the past, went through all those feet of film looking for any footage where he looked ready to be fitted with a dribble bib, the way that the people who had to assemble the trailers for those "change of pace" Clint Eastwood pictures such as Honkytonk Man used to squeeze in any shot where it looked as if the star might even be thinking of throwing a punch at somebody. I used to really like Tom Hanks, and I mean from way back. I used to watch his old TV series Bosom Buddies faithfully, and sure, I thought it was Peter Scolari who was going to be the movie star, but I thought Hanks was pretty good, too. Back when he was good, he was a matter of fast patter who seemed to enjoy thinking on his feet and the sound of his own voice. He seemed to like the combination of words and jokes and ideas and reckless physical energy; I know I did. Presumably this was what he had to do to get into the business, since only someone who actively despises intelligence and wants to see it eradicated from the earth could have agreed to do Forrest Gump, and certainly most of the movies Hanks has made in the last dozen years or so could only have been made on the assumption that all intelligence had been eradicated from the face of the earth. It's funny, though, that the seductive fast talker of a million years ago has decided to go down in movie history with his image hardened into this bumbling, inarticulate, mush-mouthed doodlehead. It's up there with Jack Lemmon, the buoyant, anarchic hepcat operator of Some Like It Hot and Operation Mad Ball and Bell, Book and Candle deciding that he really wanted to be this guy.
Just Because You're a Lunatic Doesn't Mean You Couldn't Learn to Talk Right
The last episode of Glenn Beck'sl Fox News show ran last week. (Roger Ailes's teary-eyed farewell to his batshit golden boy, delivered to the AP last spring: "Half of the headlines say he’s been canceled,” Ailes told the Associated Press in April. “The other half say he quit. We’re pretty happy with both of them.”) Among the few who still cared enough to notice was Keith Olbermann, who took the time to explain why he calls Beck "Lonesome Rhodes"; as those among us who know our old movies already knew, it's a reference to the 1957 film A Face in the Crowd, directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulberg. The movie, which is sort of the thinking person's Network, stars Andy Griffith as a piece of country white trash who is discovered in the drunk tank of a small Arkansas town by Patricia Neal, who's doing a human interest piece for the local radio. When she sticks her mike in Griffith's face, it turns out that he has not just a voice but the makings of a marketable persona: personable and folksy but with a sly, faintly sadistic undercurrent that people enjoy hearing turned against "powerful" irritants, such as the local sheriff. He ends up rising to national prominence, both as a musician and TV host and pitchman, and then he begins to lend politicians the benefit of his special, intuitive expertise at making contact with people through this strange new medium, television.
As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago when I reviewed the premiere of Olbermann's Current TV show, the problem with Olbermann's comparison is that Lonesome Rhodes is a phony, with nothing but contempt for the dumb yokels at home who slurp up whatever he's shoveling. The movie's big revealing moment--and, for my money, the moment it goes right off the rails--comes about thirty minutes in, when Lonesome Rhodes (as Neal has renamed him) is leaving the little town that's given him his big start, with Neal in tow. Everybody comes out to the station to see him off and wish him well, and as the train is pulling out, he turns to Neal and whispers something about how happy he is to get away from all these stupid hicks. She looks aghast, and he immediately grins and expresses surprise that she doesn't know him well enough by now to know that he's "only fooling." He isn't, of course, and after awhile, Neal is so horrified at what she's created that she destroys the monster by switching on his mike when he thinks he's off the air so that his fans at home can hear him bad-mouthing them.
This is a reductive way to portray a new-media demagogue, and it's an oddly reassuring take on the breed. Bacially, it muddies the waters, by carrying the message that what's awful about someone like Lonesome Rhodes (or Glenn Beck) isn't the buttons he pushes but the fact that he pushes them insincerely. It's as if calling the President a racist and George Soros a former child Nazi collaborator is less acceptable if you don't mean it. This attitude must seem conciliatory to some people, because it lets all the people who respond to the demagogue--the people who, one might think, are the real problem--by not judging the quality of the thoughts they're eager to agree with but merely telling them that those thoughts are being expressed by a con man, who doesn't even like them very much. This way, you can bitch-slap the public loudmouth while pretending that racism and anti-Semitism and all varieties of outright stupidity are just some virus that he's temporarily injected into the bloodstream of those Ma Joad used to call "the people". It's not as if these are natural toxins that are already quietly incubating, waiting for someone to create a climate in which it's acceptable to let fly with them.
I've always had a love-hate relationship with Kazan and Schulberg's movie. I remember seeing it for the first time, on TV, back in 1986, and right up to the point that Lonesome Rhodes boards that train, it had me in its pocket. Griffith is exciting in the first quarter or so of the movie in a way he never has been in any other role, and he serves up a classic depiction of a certain kind of cracker spellbinder: magnetic, instantly appealing, sexual, ostensibly self-denigrating, and, at the core, very dangerous. Not just physically dangerous, but with the promise of someone who's never had anything and grown up resentful enough to say anything that comes into his head, without caring at all who gets singed in the process. The movie would have a lot more resonance now if this cracker didn't turn out to be a pasteboard opportunist. Kazan and Schulberg might even have made a movie exploring the possibility that there's something unsettling and potentially rabble-rousing inside the Will Rogers image of the lovable hick who understands the world on a deeper level than the book-learnin' boys. But from a modern vantage point, the movie looks less like a serious examination of something dark in America's political soul than two show business pros--men of the theater and the bestseller list--expressing their horror at the unwashed rubes who were starting to invade their professional world via the twin nightmares of TV and rock and roll.
But I'm getting away from the point, which is that Olbermann, as he made it plain in his "explanation", thinks that Glenn Beck, like Lonesome Rhodes, didn't mean any of it. I think he meant every word, even the ones that contradicted whatever he'd said a minute before. I could be wrong. In his own farewell to Beck, Jack Shafer wrote that, by the show's end, "You never knew whether Beck believed what he was saying or whether he was just doing his best to stir the animals up (to pinch a phrase from Mencken). As Ailes told the AP, it's hard to keep that trick going forever." Shafer's bullshit detector is over-developed if it's anything, so I may have my head up my ass on this. But I can't help thinking that a man like Beck, who knew how to work his act even if he might believe in talking trees and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and who'd spent so many years as a nobody before catching fire and being invited to join the Fox News big tent, wouldn't have misplayed his hand the way he did if all he'd wanted was continued success and time slot tenure. Some people say that Beck's time simply passed; that after two and a half years of a busted economy and a half-black president with a terroristy-sounding name, his audience just got adjusted to the horrors that had once made them receptive to his apocalyptic mindset. (Another supposition is that, whatever else is going on in the world to set the mood, you can only announce the end of the world so many times.) But surely Beck is enough of a pro to have anticipated this, and he could have altered his style to keep his TV audience.
In fact, a lot of people were anticipating that he would do just that, and even went so far as to announce that the change--the "broadening" of his appeal--had gone into effect already. Nobody remembers this now, but Beck got some respectful notices, and even some rave reviews for his big holy roller show at the Lincoln Memorial last August. Most of these set a tone for the widespread recognition of Beck as a once-polarizing figure who was now ennobled and respectable. This sort of thing happens now and then, when someone with nothing praiseworthy, and lot that's appalling and dumbfounding, in their press kit seems to be on the inexorable rise, and the media sees it as its job to explain to everyone why their success is so well-deserved, since the thought that anyone who isn't a liberal with a Southern accent could enjoy undeserved success in our political culture is seen as to morbid a thought to even consider. So David Broder and Bob Woodward write an endless series for the Washington Post, explaining that then-vice president Dan Quayle is a decent fellow who has grown so much in office that his inevitable presidency is something we can all look forward to. Or all the pundits celebrate George W. Bush's appointment to the presidency by explaining that, given the peculiar circumstances of his selection, he will of course bend over backwards to show respect for the views of the majority who didn't vote for him by building the most bipartisan cabinet in history and always governing squarely from the middle. Then there's the one about the post-partisan truth-telling maverick and friend to all children, John McCain...
Just because these rainbow word patterns are complete horse shit doesn't mean that a lot of thought doesn't go into them, most of it thought about what the American public is presumed to want to hear. A year ago, with Beck positioned as one of the heroic faces of a conservative movement that was positioned to deliver a Republican sweep in the upcoming elections, it was widely assumed that the American public wanted to hear about how Beck, like George W. Bush and Henry V, had enjoyed a late growth spurt and turned into some kind of conservative heir to Martin Luther King, Jr. That was the script that people were offering for Beck to follow, and I have to believe that he could have followed it if he'd wanted to be on the air more than anything. Instead, it turned out that what he wanted more than anything, including TV career longevity, was to spew bile about international government-toppling conspiracies headed by evil Jewish gazillionaires and to be the only high profile "conservative" commentator to side with Hosni Mubarak, at a moment when more career-minded conservatives were trying to explain how the ouster of Mubarak was something for which George W. Bush deserved the credit. This was, to my eyes anyway, a man who wanted to speak the truth and, unhampered by the fact that he scarcely knew which end was up, was going to do it with his dying breath as he went down for the last time. To Ailes and Murdoch, it must have looked as if he'd have happily taken the whole network down with him.
Incidentally, Beck himself had a nickname for himself that always irritated the hell out of me, for pedantic reasons far removed from the usual reasons that the things that came out of his satchel mouth always irritated the hell out of me. I refer to Beck's penchant for referring to himself as a "rodeo clown." I think it was part of his self-denigration act, and that the phrase was meant as a concession that he looked pretty goddamn ridiculous a lot of the time. This is bullshit. Rodeo clowns belong to a noble, brave, and heroic tradition. They're not just goofy-dressed guys acting dopey in the ring; their principal task during a rodeo is to protect a fallen rider by putting their bodies in between him and the animal that's laid him low. They put their lives on the line by entering a risky situation and giving others a chance to pull an injured man to safety. In other words, at considerable danger to themselves, they cool things out when they've gotten scary and out of control. It infuriates me no end that, for the sake of a cute one-liner, Glenn Beck likes to compare himself to people who do the exact opposite of what he does.
Monday, July 04, 2011
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