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Mr. Pitiful and the Reader

I can't remember another presidential candidate who has descended as quickly as Rick Perry has from being the big noise in town who's going to blow everyone out of the water to being the guy most likely to be described by a reporter or opinion writer as someone he watched in a debate and just felt sorry for. It's one thing when a reporter says he felt sorry for someone like George H. W. Bush or Walter Mondale, guys who were clearly a little uncomfortable with the compromises and showboating required of a political campaigner. It's just weird when it's a self-styled big swinging dick like Perry. When Perry announced he was running, all anyone could talk about was how brilliant he is at campaigning. It was a line based on the idea that campaigning amounts to raising money and judging chili contests at county fairs, which, for Perry, it pretty much has up to now. But because the presidential race also requires the candidate to not embarrass himself in pre-primary season debates, Perry has now forced the media and the Republican establishment to openly confront the question of whether it's a problem if a candidate for the presidency is, in the judgment of all who care, rock-stupid from the bottom up. It's something that's been seen as a problem before in my lifetime, but Perry, like the perennial non-candidate Sarah Palin, redefines stupid to a remarkable degree.

Palin's stupidity doesn't matter that much to her fans, on the not unreasonable grounds that they know she's never going to run for anything again. Everyone knows this, except maybe for some of the media folk who wasted their summer following her tour bus; you don't resign from your job as governor, explaining that it would be the weak, quitter's way to finish out your term when you could be cashing in on book and TV deals and making speeches in front of cheering crowds, if you're interested in having a real job, let alone running a country. And Perry's stupidity might not matter as much, at least to potential voters, if he were more consistent about it. Perry immediately shot to the head of the line when he got into the race, because of the lust among Republicans for someone who embodies the kind of image he strains to project: the grinning, straight-shooting cowboy lout alpha male with no patience for science and DNA tests on death row and other forms of what he'd call political correctness. It helped that he had been attracting the attention, and love, of the Tea Party, for the better part of two years with so many off-the-wall policy positions, such as the instantly legendary one about Social Security being "a monstrous lie", stated positions that he famously pointed to as proof that he couldn't possibly have national political aspirations. Then he announced his national political aspirations, and when he had to defend his stated positions in debates, he started hemming and hawing and "what I really meant to say"-ing. I suspect that Perry is genuinely puzzled and maybe even a little hurt that he can't start just lying about what he really thinks, like any other politician, and it must be especially smarting to be bitch-slapped by Mitt Romney on the grounds that you have no center. But as John McCain found out after he kissed Jerry Falwell's ring and "modified" his views on torture, once the maverick truth teller reinvents himself as just another mealy-mouthed politician, he can't simply revert back to his former identity whenever he wants to, and neither McCain nor Perry has enough game as a normal mealy-mouthed politician to play that role as well as Romney.

I'm not sure how much it's to Perry's credit that some of his biggest missteps can actually be traced back to the compassionate conservative inside his two-fisted exterior, and that they reveal how much overlap there is, especially for someone with his special problem, between thinking with your heart and not using your brain. Having lived in Texas for a year, I'd already heard plenty about Perry's executive order mandating that teenage girls be vaccinated against the virus that causes cervical cancer; it was just about the only thing Texas conservatives have ever had against him, mostly on the grounds that using nasty old science to protect girls from getting a terrible disease that is transmitted sexually amounts to using taxpayer dollars to give them each a box of condoms and directions to Tony Romo's house. Now that the story has gone national, it's turned into a political horror yarn about how he signed the order because he'd received a campaign contribution from the drug company, which had hired his former chief of staff. (Perry has since made things stink worse for himself by trying to make the story go away by lying about how much money he got from Merck and also about when he met a cervical cancer victim whose story touched his heart; last night, he claimed that knowing her had influenced his decision to sign the order, but it turns out that he didn't really meet her until afterwards. One of the big hazards of not believing that facts matter as much as what's in your heart is that you're likely not to realize that people who do think that facts are important have ways of verifying what they are.)

As it happens, I believe that, for whatever reasons--summed up, as best as he can sum up anything, by his bold claim that "I hate cancer!"--Perry did sign that order because he just thought it was the obvious right thing to do. The problem with that is, there's no way in hell he can square that with what he's been saying about Obamacare and Romney's Massachusetts health care plan, which is based on his no doubt sincere belief that the government has no business being in the medical business on any level. Part of the problem of doing what your heart tells you without consulting your brain is that you're going to end up believing contradictory things, depending on what your heart was feeling just before that last big choice was placed in front if you. As a rule, the subject of government health care heart makes Perry's heart feel bitterness and rancor at the thought of all those lazy bums out there who expect him to pay for the diabetes medication they need because of all those hours they spend stuffing their faces with Ring Dings they bought with their food stamps, but on the day he had to decide whether to support the vaccination mandate, he just happened to be thinking of sixteen-year-old girls who weren't sufficiently aware of the threat of cervical cancer, and good for him. If he'd known someone whose son was executed for a crime he hadn't committed, his answer to the question about Texas and the death penalty a debate or two back might well have been, "I hate the idea of the state putting innocent people to death!" instead of "We believe in justice!" Right now, he's in the doghouse because of his remark last night that people who want to deny an education to the children of illegal immigrants must not have a heart. I'm not sure I disagree, but I'm not running for president, and I'm sure not soliciting the votes of people who have been made to understand that I'm prepared to make the tough choices that will keep little moochers from getting a free lunch at my trough.

Perry is widely recognized as the "authentic" version of George Bush, Jr. In 2000, Bush (and his cheerleaders in the media, which included a lot of people who didn't think of themselves as political conservatives, but who seemed to have it in for Al Gore and thought it was important that the country repudiate dirty, dirty Bill Clinton) did everything possible to put across the idea that he was a bit simple, not at all a sniffy smarty pants kind of know-it-all. Since Bush left office, one of the cornerstones of his rehabilitation campaign has been the idea that he was a misunderestimated smart guy, well-read, even a bit of an intellectual. I do wonder if the animosity that old Bush hands express about Perry has to do with their horror at seeing their guy bracketed with this idiot, which may mean it's important to them to see Perry go down, hard, rather than lend credence, by his example, that a successful candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. A new interview with Bush in Parade magazine--no, wait, it's The American Scholar, and I should have known better than to confuse it with the publication that just ran that searing, no-holds-barred interview with Brad Pitt--really breaks a sweat trying to remind America why it once wanted to play catch with this guy, and to establish, once and for all, how smart he really is.

Walt Harrington, who wrote the article, tries to establish Bush's braininess in the stupidest way imaginable, though. He doesn't try to make a case for the intelligence of shifting the focus of America's security apparatus towards Iraq and away from al-Qaeda in the months before 9/11, or of seeing the attacks by al-Qaeda a great excuse for invading Iraq, or of starting two wars while steadfastly refusing to do anything to pay for them, or of being the last person in America to learn that the hurricane about to strike New Orleans would be catastrophic in scale and impact, or of responding to that catastrophe by saying that he didn't think anyone knew that levees could fail, or of encouraging the policies that led to the mortgage meltdown and the economic crisis. He just thinks that Bush must be smart as a whip because the little fella reads. "I had just read Bush’s 2010 memoir Decision Points," he writes, "and I was struck by his many references to history. In the back of my mind was an article that Karl Rove had written for The Wall Street Journal in 2008, which revealed (much to the consternation of the president’s derisive critics) that Bush had read 186 books for pleasure in the preceding three years, consisting mostly of serious historical nonfiction." Examination of the reading lists that were released to the public confirmed that these tended to be books that could be seen as confirming Bush in the rightness of his actions and, as his approval numbers sank, in his seeing himself as a prophet without honor in his own time. Like every other president who was less popular when he left the White House than when he entered it, Bush can't shut up about Harry Truman, and as Garry Wills once pointed out, Truman's admirers also seemed to expect the former president's detractors to fall to their knees sobbing with remorse when they were told, not just that he read, but how much he'd read. "[Plain Speaking author Merle Miller celebrates that fact as if reading were truman's private discovery. he is even awed when Truman tells him he read three thousand books as a boy. (Come to think of it, that is a strange thing--not reading the books, if he did, but counting them.)"

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Words and Deeds

If a Tree Falls, a surprisingly uncompelling documentary that recently played on PBS's P.O.V. series, is mainly interesting for what it reveals about the state of honest semantics in post-9/11 America. It tells the story of Daniel McGowan, a bland, baby-faced onetime member of the radical environmentalist organization, the Earth Liberation Front, who was arrested in 2005 for his role in a couple of arson attacks he and other ELF members committed against a timber company and a tree farm, McGowan himself admits that the second arson wasn't the glowing act of revolutionary derring-do that he and his comrades fancied it was going to be at the time: the fire got out of hand and destroyed a library, and it then turned out that the firebugs had gotten bad intel and the tree farm wasn't engaged in the kind of dastardly genetic engineering they'd believed they were. As far as the law is concerned, these and other things that McGowan and the ELF got up to count as "eco=terrorism", and using that logic, the judge at his trial applied a "terrorism enhancement" to his sentence and shipped him off to an especially "restrictive" prison, where he's currently rubbing shoulders with other prisoners convicted of terrorism.

By the time McGowan was arrested, he had renounced his connection to the ELF, and he doesn't look especially dangerous in the movie. That's no reason for him to not be punished for what he did, but his situation might provide some food for thought regarding the use of laws designed to stick it to terrorists to treat harmless, faddish douchebags like McGowan--vandals who did what they did when they felt it was trendy and who then grew out of it--as if they were Doctor Doom. But that's not the attitude that McGowan and his defenders in the film take. They're all indignant that the "T"-word is even being applied to him because of what he did, and in order to justify their indignation, they're willing to do things to logic that would horrify Amnesty International and maybe even Dick Cheney. "Being a New Yorker," says McGowan's sister, "and experiencing such serious terrorism first hand, how are you going to call someone who sets fire to an empoty building a terrorist? It's just inappropriate in every way. And it's an insult to me." The scariest person in the film is a member of McGowan's legal team, who presumably has a law degree, yet who thinks and talks like this: "The word 'terrorist', to me, is about killing humans. It's about ending human life. And that is the antithesis of what these people did. Concern for life was a very big part of the plan and implementation of these action, and is why no one was ever harmed or injured in them. 1200 incidents, and not a single injury or death, are being credited to the ELF and the ALF in this country. Those statistics don't happen by accident."

It's always interesting when someone, in a tone of righteous indignation, says something that's obviously the exact opposite of the truth, whether it's "My kid isn't stupid" or "FDR's New Deal programs prolonged the Great Depression." It's not necessarily the case that you're listening to the single dumbest person who's ever lived; often, someone is revealing their most fucked-up personal issues or exposing their tenderest spot. The truth, of course, is that it's always an accident, or maybe a miracle, when someone like McGowan and his Scooby gang set a major fire and nobody is injured or killed. Pyrotechnic wizards in Hollywood, who work in controlled conditions, haven't always been able to avoid that. When the moral certainty that someone has the right to burn down buildings to make his point is combined with the unjustified assurance in his own superhuman confidence that he has the ability to start fires that will never stray beyond the confines he's set for them, you've got a person who is potentially extremely dangerous, even if, unlike McGowan, he's careful to make sure he has his facts straight before he prances off into the woods with his gasoline can. The fact that McGowan hasn't put this together means that, however sweetly he loves nature, it's probably for the best if he spends as many years as possible inside a jail, if not under one. At least the '60s Weathermen who thought they had the ungodly competence to safely set up a bomb-making operation in their New York apartment had the grace to blow themselves up.

By any traditional understanding of the term "terrorist", McGowan is a terrorist, someone who used violent tactics designed to intimidate and scare the people with whom he had a political disagreement. But he and his family and lawyer don't accept the real meaning of the word; ten years after 9/11, they accept the new, emotion-based definition of a terrorist as someone totally evil, who can only be a murderer. (I think it's safe to assume that they would refuse to label McGowan a terrorist even if he had accidentally killed someone, because they know that his heart would still have been in the right place.) This is a sobering reminder that it wasn't that long ago when many Americans did have a romantic attachment to the fantasy of the dashing terrorist as regretfully violent agent of exciting social change. In 1983, in an essay about Orwell's 1984, Robert Christgau went out of his way to identify himself as one of the "principled supporters of revolutionary terrorism", and added a few sentences later that "I still support revolutionary terrorism..." The "still" in that formulation, in something written for The Village Voice at a time when Ronald Reagan was in charge of defining what America was all about, is a tip-off that this support for "revolutionary terrorism" (as opposed to, I guess, bourgeoisie terrorism) was a leftover spark from the ashes of the '60s. Christgau's politics may not have changed much, in general, but as a New Yorker, he was one of the first Village Voice rad-libs to declare himself some kind of "hawk" in response to September 11, 2001. He was lucky that he hadn't published anything in praise of the "T" word the very morning that the planes hit the Twin Towers.

The unrepentant and morally clueless" Bill Ayers, whose interview with the New York Times promoting his memoir Fugitive Days did appear the very morning of the attacks, wasn't as lucky. Ayers, who said at the time that he didn't regret having set bombs to protest the Vietnam war, and who has spent the past ten years telling anyone who would listen that he didn't really say that, or didn't mean what he said, or didn't mean it the way it sounded, or something, had become a proper member of what he would have once scorned as the Establishment, and was simply trying to cash in on a past that a lot of people still thought had a romantic aura; he had no way of knowing that, by the time that interview saw print, Americans, New York leftists among them, would have felt personally threatened by terrorism, and would immediately decide that there was nothing romantic at all about terrorism, that it was in fact the filthiest word in the English language. Ayers, too, can think of nothing more awful that being called that word: "We weren't terrorists," he told another interviewer in 2001. "The reason we weren't terrorists is because we did not commit random acts of terror against people. Terrorism was what was being practiced in the countryside of Vietnam by the United States." By a funny coincidence, McGowan and his friends also think that logging companies and big corporations that pollute the environment are the "real" terrorists. (They also think that the arson they committed doesn't really count as "violence", but the documentary includes footage of the cops breaking up a peaceful sit-in protest by rubbing pepper spray in the protestors' faces, and the protestors react as if the cops were not being merely "violent" but borderline genocidal.)

If you think that "terrorism" is violent protest conducted against powerful ruling forces by people who are so desperate and lacking in power and resources that they have no other way to fight back against their oppressors, then the idea that McGowan and Ayers aren't terrorists and the U.S. government and big corporations are is too insane for words. But of course, what these people really mean is that they are good and the U.S. government and big corporations are the bad, bad villains. That's all terrorists, or people who look like they might be terrorists, or who talk about terrorists as if they were misguided human beings with motives it might be good to understand a little better, are understood to be by people who've been in lockstep with the post-9/11 mindset that the media and the Bush administration tried to set in place, and McGowan, and Ayers, too, and all their supporters are one hundred percent with it; They think they're brave because they set off bombs and set fires, but they have no stomach for the kind of fight that tries to roll back simpleminded propaganda and heightens clarity, and they're definitely not going to take the bullet of saying "Okay, I'm a terrorist, now what does that really mean?" any more than Dick Cheney, for all his supposed indifference to the verdict of history, is ever going to just say, "Screw this shit about 'heightened interrogation techniques', I obviously support torture, T-O-R-T-U-R-E, and I'm not ashamed of it." These men, who, out of the best of motives, appear to have lived utterly worthless and destructive lives, aren't going to miss their chance to do a little more mischief by muddying the waters. They seem to think that history is a contest and that if, every time someone calls them terrorists, they can manage to call the FBI or the Justice Department or Paul Bunyan terrorists twice, they'll win.

It just so happens that I'm talking about people who could mistakenly be labeled "leftist" or "progressive" (instead of "thrill-seeking nihilistic idiots") here, so let's be clear that this has nothing to do with ideology, just self-righteousness and blindness to what you're really doing, and a stubborn refusal to own up to your responsibility for your own actions. There are people on the right who'd be just as quick to explain why people who torch abortion clinics, or even shoot abortion doctors, aren't terrorists, and these people are equally full of shit. (On a higher level, you have people like Cheney and Bush, with their horseshit about how torture isn't torture if you call it something else, and anyway, if we aren't doing it now, it doesn't matter if we ever did it in the past, or someone like Oliver North, who went on TV to demand credit for taking responsibility for breaking the law in the name of running a secret alternate-universe foreign policy out of the Reagan White House, then successfully fought to avoid serving time for anything he'd done. What Bill Ayers and Oliver North have in common is that they both insist on having the glamour of being heroic outlaws without having to deal with any of the consequences. This is bullshit, and as the guy who unwittingly gave Ayers's old group their name once put it, to live outside the law, you must be honest.

I guess one other reason the McGowan story gets up my nose is that I think McGowan and his supporters are pushing the idea that anything that happens out in the country can't adversely affect enough people--people who really matter--to count as terrorism, or get you a prison sentence. This attitude surfaced on the right in the '90s, as part of the campaign to declare people like Randy Weaver martyrs to government (with a Democratic president at the controls) run wild. Weaver was a white supremacist turd stockpiling weapons and selling illegal firearms to people who indicated they wanted to do bad things with them; he and his family stole from their neighbors and terrorized them, and insisted they were immune from the reach of the law, because the government was illegitimate. Yet the same law and order types who had no problems with the Philadelphia Police Department wiping out a city block by dropping a bomb on the headquarters of MOVE, which was about on the same level of public obnoxiousness.

The people who were killed in the 1985 Philadelphia assault were black, and Weaver was white, and that may have something to do with the difference in the eyes of the Grover Norquists and Fred Dalton Thompsons of this world, but it also may have something to do with the fact that those dudes live and work in cities, and the MOVE people were in the city and so might have scarily brushed up against them at some point, whereas Weaver was out in the country, and bothering no one--except for the aforementioned neighbors, and the people his family stole from and who extended credit to him and got screwed, in addition to whoever got shot with the firearms he was peddling to his fellow bottom feeders. I remember seeing Norquist on TV in the '90s, telling a studio audience that he was disturbed and bewildered by their lack of tearful sympathy for Randy Weaver; he wasn't hurting anyone, he was off in the middle of nowhere. News flash, Grover: it's a crowded planet, and even people who live out in the middle of nowhere have neighbors, and I can tell you from experience that it's pretty scary when you're miles and miles away from the nearest police station and it gets to be dark and your neighbors are scary. The conservative call for a national sainthood for the Weavers and the Koreshes seems to be based in part on the idea that everyone in the boonies must feel sorry for these freaks, because everyone in the boonies must be a scary freak; if MOVE had relocated to a bayou swamp, they'd have suddenly become easier to tolerate. In the boonies, this is not the universally endearing attitude that guys in suits who spend their lives trying to rally support among the poor for a repeal of the estate tax seem to think is is.

These Eyes

STAKE LAND: I finally caught up with this a year after it opened in theaters. All I knew about it in advance was that it was a highly praised indie movie that had vampires in it, and you know how I try to keep up with my indie horror. Imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be one more slog through post-apocalyptic terrain, with vampires serving the same purpose that, in other recent films and TV shows, has been served by zombies, extraterrestrials, rampaging cannibals, and Gary Oldman. It's well done for what it is, but I scarcely remember ever having been so sick of anything as I am of this genre; it's all so samey. I remember when I was a kid, catching up with the counterculture post-apocalyptic movies of the late '60s and early '70s (The Bed Sitting Room, Glen and Randa, A Boy and His Dog) before journeying out to see the latest punk-fashion, nuclear-jitters post-apocalyptic movies of the Reagan era (the Mad Max movies, plus a lot of stuff you may have had the mixed fortune to catch on Mystery Science Theater 3000), it seemed as if the end of the world had a little more juice. Maybe not much more, but it didn't all just feel like the masturbation fantasy of some unimaginative guy wearing combat fatigues while sitting in his bunker, eating C-rations and counting his gold coins. Anyway, a few months ago I kicked around the idea that there may be some deep cultural significance to be found in the proliferation of these things, but now I'm starting to wonder if it's just that people making movies and TV shows where the characters have to constantly find themselves in peril just find it easier to set the action after the fall of civilization than try to come up with a simpler explanation for why everybody doesn't just call the cops on their cell phone.

CONTAGION: I remember, sometime between Christmas and New Year's of 2008. I went to see the full-length version of Steven Soderbergh's Che, and during the intermission, I overheard some college-age guy honestly telling his girlfriend that seeing the movie was a great way to inaugurate the new period of radical progressive government that Barack Obama was bring on. I wonder if, in retrospect, he'd saved that line for the end of the movie, after Benecio del Toro got shot in the head. Anyway, John Powers has a piece in the current issue of The American Prospect in which he proposes that Soderbergh's new horror movie about a worldwide pandemic that begins its reign of terror by making Gwyneth Paltrow look fairly unappealing in close-up, "may be the purest expression of Obamaism I’ve seen on-screen." This is not a far-out notion; the movie shows how government, which is staffed by "the experts"--a collection of infinitely rational, well-chosen people working their asses off and keeping cool in a time of crisis--methodically goes about saving the world, while a scumbag blogger (Jude Law) who is the sole representative of non-establishment thinking turns out to be a cynical rabble-rouser who's just trying to make a dishonest buck.(Law's character derides the government and sews distrust in its actions because he's cut a deal with to profit from the sales of a phony rival drug.)

The Obama connection extends to the tone of the movie: it's beautifully made and consistently interesting, but considering the scale of the nightmare that it convincingly brings to life before your eyes, it's not very exciting, which I consider a much graver flaw in a movie than in a president. The perfect execution is impressive, but it's not as if Soderbergh hasn't had some practice at it: this is basically Traffic with a hacking cough. (Soderbergh even clears a space for Jennifer Ehle to stand out a little from the pack of talented actors, the way he cleared a space for del Toro in the earlier movie, as if allowing for one breakout performance by a deserving performer in a sympathetic role where part of the formula, which maybe it is.) I'm glad I saw it, but I'd be gladder to see another movie as surprising and sexy as Out of Sight or as surprising and heart-wrenching as The Limey. Soderbergh's semi-official announcement that he might be retiring from filmmaking after the next three or four projects he's already committed to has set off a fair amount of grinding of teeth and rending of garments in the movie press, but I'm not sure that it would be the worst thing in the world for him to at least take a vacation.



The bonus features on the Howard the Duck DVD, which I got ahold of just because I'd heard that these bonus features would give me a chuckle, and I was not disappointed. There are extensive interviews with the film's director, Willard Hyuck, and his wife and co-writer, Gloria Katz, who are a fully owned subsidiary of George Lucas, Inc. (They worked on the scripts for American Graffiti and its sequel, Lucky Lady, and Radioland Murders, and Willard also directed Messiah of Evil, French Postcards, and Best Defense. Their IMDB smells like Love Canal.) Highlights include the explanation that the film's musical director, Thomas "Tom" Dolby, works in the field of "avant-garde rock"; hearing Hyuck, speaking in the tone of a sensitive artist whose vision was destroyed by the tampering of salarymen, saying that they originally wrote a script about Howard's adventures in Hawaii, "because we thought it would be fun to shoot there"; and the two of them explaining that George convinced them to take on the project because it would be "fun and entertaining and different from our other movies", and if they're waiting for me to correct them and say that their other movies are fun and entertaining, boy, are they barking up the wrong tree. There's also a story about how their little daughter visited the set, saw Jeffrey Jones, who plays a man who is possessed by an evil spirit and mutates into a monster, and started crying uncontrollably. Whether or not you're charmed and amused by the image of a child crying at the sight of Jeffrey Jones may depend on how much you know about Jeffrey Jones's legal history.

Gloria and Willard both conclude their remarks by insisting that the movie is now a much-loved classic and that they never stop running into people who tell them that they always refused to fall into step with the meanies who get together and tell other people which movie they shouldn't like. I guess there's no harm in this. I do find it irksome, though, when Gloria, in particular, whines that this was never meant to be anything but a "fun" movie, and the critics tore it to pieces because they didn't get it and were demanding a heavy, "existential" study of what it meant to be a duck in a human being's world. This is the bad moviemaker's version of the argument that some people point out that Sarah Palin sure does seem stupid and opportunistic because they hate America and motherhood. Howard the Duck is garish, butt-ugly, stupid, shrill, largely consists of people screaming, and prominently features an unfortunate man in a malfunctioning, dead-faced duck costume, and it is more than a stretch to insist that, because this unpleasant object was clearly never intended to be a serious dramatic examination of the alienating effects of non-feathered society, it must therefore be "fun." This is especially galling coming from Hyuck and Katz, because their first success was with American Graffiti, which was, is, and always will be a modest, "fun" little time-killer composed of bits and pieces of old teenage movie comedies and Archie comics, but which immediately established a reputation among many people as something much deeper and more meaningful than that, because nothing that makes that much money in our culture, even John Hughes movies and Star Wars, is allowed to not have Deep Significance. Hyuck and Katz can go around saying that Howard the Duck is Fun as soon as they also agree to kick anyone in the nuts who has ever said that American Graffiti is a classic and moving requiem for a more innocent time.

Book 'Em

Scott Kenemore's remarkable essay in Slate is nominally based on an emotion that I, perhaps to my personal discredit, cannot imagine ever experiencing: affronted dismay that someone, somewhere, has been insufficiently deferential to my former place of higher learning. Kenemore, who is the author of a whole fucking raft of humorous books about zombies, is a graduate of the creative writing MFA program ay Columbia University, which is not listed at the tip-top of this year's list of such programs as determined by Poets & Writers magazine. "Last year," he bitches, "it plummeted to No. 25 (tied with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). This year, it plunged down to No. 47, and is now presumed to rank behind such august institutions as"--the horror! the horror!-- "Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg and Texas State University in San Marcos." Since there's no way in hell that some boondock shithole could even be fit to be mentioned in the same breath as the place where Scott Kenemore, paid and contracted wisecracker about the living dead, used to pass out drunk on the lawn, there must be a conspiracy afoot. "Columbia has expensive tuition, and Poets & Writers is attempting to shame Columbia into lowering it. Why, you might fairly ask? Why are they doing this? Why is it not OK to charge high tuition if folks seem more than willing to pay it?" I love the use of the understated phrase "Why are they doing this?" It's so popular with people composing withering screeds against animal cruelty and child slave labor.

Though Poets & Writers presents itself as an utterly neutral resource for scriveners of all stripes, the magazine is largely written for and by people focused on the teaching of creative writing as a profession. For this cohort, the Columbia model makes no sense. Why would you take out large student loans if you're just going to publish a few chapbooks (with, say, a print run of 500 copies each), settle into a nice teaching residency at the University of Northern South Dakota making $35,000 a year (less, of course, your subscription to Poets & Writers), and achieve tenure based upon your trenchant stewardship of the student literary magazine?

They're right. It wouldn't make sense.

But—now the unspeakable heresy—what if your goal were … something else? What if your goal were to write a successful book that lots of people read? What if your goal were to become a person of letters whose writing was read and appreciated by those outside of MFA and academic circles? What if you even dreamed of securing thousands of dollars for something you had written?
If the Columbia University MFA program would help you do these things, which—guess what?—it totally does, then, as a proposition, Columbia begins to make complete and total sense.

Columbia is a school for people who actually want to become better writers, get books published, and survive—or even thrive—in the rough-and-tumble world of American letters. It is not a holistic weekend retreat. Columbia is a place for people who want to be the best and study with the best. (Or, OK, the best after Iowa.) It's for people whose genitals still work, dammit. For writers who want to be brave and persevere in the real world where people often fail.

I should get my prejudices out of the way here. I have a good friend who teaches at Columbia University. She is a published author, a published author of good books, though none of them are about zombies. I myself have never been a student at Columbia, though I have been on the campus and it took me a few days to reel my eyeballs back into my head. I swear I have nothing against the place, except that they didn't hire me when I applied for a job with the custodial department. (I'm not saying I would have hired me if I were in their place,) I have been in a creative writing MFA program, but it was one that I wouldn't expect to make the rankings if they went to 400. (I'll admit to having felt a surprising surge of regional pride when I saw that two programs at schools in the same state--LSU in Baton Rouge and McNeese State University in Lake Charles--did make it. If my old alma mater was there, then I'd be the first to call for a Congressional investigation to see if the bribes involved included body organs and human trafficking.)

I did not enjoy my time in the program, and I left it early, after being encouraged to do so. (Wait, that makes me sound like Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited. Short version: it was during the post-Clarence Thomas hearings period of extreme sensitivity regarding inappropriate personal conduct between people of different genders, and one of the most popular and well-connected writers in the program accused me of stalking her. I wasn't, and for what it's worth, she had driven another person underground by making the same accusation against him a year before I showed up, and a year after I left, she made it again, this time against a member of the faculty, which apparently was a harder sell. I'm sure she was completely convinced she was right in all three cases and that we, perhaps unknowingly and unintentionally, did something to chill her to the marrow, but I hope I won't appear insensitive to the fears of women everywhere in an often male-centric and unsympathetic culture when I just say, Christ, she wasn't that pretty.) It was no tragedy, because I had joined the program for the stupidest reason anyone has ever taken out a student loan--I was lonely and thought maybe I'd meet some people with whom I had similar interests and make some friends--and after the scarlet "S" appeared on my T-short, as Herbert West used to say, there was nothing more I could learn there.

I do remember one interesting exchange, though. There was a professor who, I believe, was named James Knudsen, because I'm pretty sure that, for years afterwards. whenever I saw anyone doing something in a way that was especially boring, hopeless, and ineffectual, I would confuse them by asking, "Jesus, who are you now, James Knudsen?" And one night, he got into it with a student who persisted in turning in sci-fi stories and action yarns about samurai instead of sensitive examinations of his own naval lint. Knudsen, if that was his name, got exasperated and demanded to know why the guy was there at all, if he was going to waste everyone's time with this genre crap instead of something in an accepted "literary" form. He was acting as a proper representative of what Ray Sawhill, in a piece that appeared just around the time I was arranging to go into indentured servitude to Sallie Mae, called "the creative-writing industry literature [that] has become just something people with a certain kind of education produce -- an abstract discipline a good college is supposed to give you a taste for." Sawhill added, "The creative-writing classes and schools teach formula -- a matter of fiddling with "voice," "points of view," etc. -- while claiming to encourage the creation of literature. A couple of the hallmarks of writing-school writing: a preoccupation with that mesmerizer of first-year literary students, the unreliable narrator; and in place of story, word patterns, image patterns, theme patterns."

I don't mean to suggest that the sci-fi/samurai guy's work was brilliant. But I did think that one of the viable reasons for the existence of a university writing program might be to help a clod with a genuine appetite for genre fiction and a desire to tell stories and help him get enough of a grip on the technical end of things that maybe we could find out if the next C. M. Kornbluth or Frederick Pohl were in there someplace, napping. (Is it relevant to this story that one of my Mississippi literary heroes, Larry Brown, first started learning to write by penning an unpublished, said-to-be unreadable, epic horror novel in the key of Stephen King?) But the program was understood by its field hands and straw bosses as not being a place where people learned to master techniques they could then apply to the telling of stories, but a homogenizing plant where people who had a vague sense of what felt literary and arty when slapped onto the page could have the rough edges--anything jarringly original or idiosyncratic--beaten out of them. So you might think I'd be receptive to Kenemore's disdain for people who-- how did that go?--"want to be brave and persevere in the real world where people often fail." But I dunno. There's different kinds of bravery, you know. And Kenmore sounds less like Norman Mailer bashing his head against the eternal mysteries than Donald Trump, pinning a medal on his chest for daring to tell TV cameras that he has it on the authority of his own secret, anonymous investigators that when the President of the United States was in charge of the Harvard Law Review, he wasn't really very bright.




That's the kind of counter-intuitive thinking, which you're entitled to assume is born of resentment until the author can come up with something more flattering and equally plausible, that runs through Kenmore's piece. Dude spent two years scrimping and saving before he got his degree, and when the ball and chain were removed from his ankle, he "had about $45,000 in student loan debt," but the thing is, "I studied with some of the greatest living writers, made publishing contacts that will probably serve me for the rest of my natural life, and—in the nine years since graduation—I have published six books." Rocks to be him, for sure, but he does he really mean to hold his success--a success based on piggy-backing on the success of Max Brooks and Robert Kirkman and a whole lot of moviemakers, all of whom have been piggy-backing on George Romero, who's been piggy-picking on his own earlier successes for years now--as proof that graduates of Columbia are not just better-connected but better writers than graduates of your more podunk universities, and have sturdier genitals to boot?

"At heart," writes Kenemore, "I think the people at P & W just want to be 'nice.' They want a nice world where all the writers get along and do their writing—because all of their writing is equally good and equally important—and don't get into too much debt in the process. Creative writing departments should be 'nice' places where artists can grow and develop and do good creative writing, because all creative writing is good. But here is another worldview: Some writing is (looks left, looks right) better than other writing. Some writers suck, and some writers are awesome! And maybe a sign of awesome writing is that people outside of the MFA world—such as book critics, literary theorists, magazine editors, newspapers, book publishers, and the book-buying public—also think it is awesome." Kenemore has an uncanny knack for jumping aboard a germ of an idea that all sensible people can get behind and riding it into a ditch. It is indeed a problem with many literary programs that the instructors may be too soft on the students, and seem "nice" as they do it, though, again, my experience is that once you scratch half an inch through the painted surface, university writing programs are among the least nicest places on Earth. What he really wants to say is that he's a better writer because he's published, count 'em again, bitches, six goddamn books! This is the same line of slime you used to hear decades back from the likes of Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann, except that, instead of finding the last patch of spare skin on a tired but commercially durable commercial sheep dog like the zombie-attack genre and sucking it dry, they piggy-backed on real people like Harold Hughes and Marilyn Monroe (and Norman Mailer! a writer as fit fodder for trashy pulp fantasies! those were the days...). They may not have had MFAs, but they had spunk.

I think that what really pisses me off so much is that Kenemore wants to have it both ways, and so takes it back even as he's saying it. It's fine if he wants to say that he's a better writer than, hell, I don't know, Jim Shepard or David Bowman or Mary Robison or Colson Whitehead or Ed Park or Dana Spiotta or anybody else who hasn't published as long a string of books in as short a stretch of time as ol' Johnny Wadd here, because of his production rate and royalty statements, that's fine. But what's he doing muddying the waters by adding this shit about "book critics" and "magazine editors" and, sweet Jesus, "literary theorists", as if any literary theorists care a fig about this dipshit's line of airport joke books, or would stop to piss on him if he were on fire, if they saw, say, Helen DeWitt on the other side of the street. She's barely written half as many books as Kenemore, but so long as he's the one who brought up the subject of genitals, unless he was five when he graduated Columbia, he's long past the point where he ought to know that length matters less than weight and girth. (Thickness I'll grant him, but it isn't such an asset when it's above the necktie.) I'll leave it to the people who actually run the program at Columbia to let him know how grateful they are for making it sound as if he paid them $45,000 borrowed dollars to pimp him his literary contacts. The really unsavory thing about his piece is that the one thing that comes through loud and clear is that it was written by someone who's furious that he wasn't able to buy respect with the same check he used to buy his career.

New at the A.V. Club

Kate Plus 8: Series Finale

Rewrite!

Here's Paul Krugman's 9/11 post, in its entirety:

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

The most remarkable reaction I've seen to this is from Jennifer Rubin, who begins by comparing Krugman to Joseph McCarthy and then wrote, "One cannot begin to imagine what motivates such hatred and contempt for his countrymen, especially on a day when the overriding theme was unity... The jewel of the liberal media is revealed to be an intellectual black hole and a spiritual wasteland. No wonder it is a dying enterprise. Its countrymen have better things to do than be insulted by the likes of Krugman." See what she did there? Paul Krugman is a monster, because he didn't get in line with a national day of unity, and in the process insulted his "countrymen", because anyone who thinks that the administration of George "W. for "Who cares what you think?" Bush botched the response to 9/11 and who--Jesus Christ!--doesn't have an attack of the vapors at shows of disrespect for Bernie Kerik and his big brother doesn't really count as an American. If you don't find Krugman's attitude personally insulting, Europe's that way, grease up and start swimming.

It's very strange to see this kind of seething, self-righteous reaction to someone jotting down a few thoughts that most of the country had come to share by the time of the 2006 mid-terms, especially when it's packaged in this way: Hey, did you hear what that piece of shit Paul Krugman said about you and your mama? Grab your pitchfork and follow me! Keep in mind just what people like Rubin mean when they talk wistfully about national unity. As they demonstrated all through the Bush years, they don't mean a country where nobody has the right to impugn someone's patriotism or humanity just because they disagree with the official platform of the Republican party. They mean they want a country that looks unified because "everyone" is in step behind a Republican president and everyone who isn't keeps his goddamn mouth shut. Ten years ago, it was their fantasy that a cataclysmic event had finally righted things after too many years of tolerance for dissident views and that the country was "united", which in practice meant that guys who'd never served in the military could drive military heroes out of politics by charging them with being soft on defense and Bill Maher could lose his TV show for saying that people willing to die for their cause probably didn't deserve to be called cowards. Right now, a lot of them seem to share the fantasy that the country is becoming united again, and ready to re-evaluate the accomplishments of the Bush administration and the views of its lickspittle toads, because Barack Obama's popularity numbers are dropping. You can't exactly expect people who don't understand that it's possible to be both brave and a worthless murdering son of a bitch to understand that it's possible to be disappointed in Barack Obama and still think George W. Bush was a miserable failure of a president who drove the country into a ditch and skipped off to count up the money from his book and lecture deals. God knows their heads would probably explode if they tried to grasp how many people are disappointed in Barack Obama not because he's not enough like George W. Bush, but because he's been too acquiescent with regard to George W. Bush's way of doing things regarding civil liberties, for a start.

I think the tone of Rubin's post is the giveaway that she knows perfectly well that most people don't regard Krugman's remarks as offensive doggeral from the far left of the lunatic fringe but as something that, however intemperately stated, sums up what's become the conventional wisdom about the official response to 9/11. I suspect that what she's really angry about is that restating the conventional wisdom, in such bald terms, on the very day that people like Rubin would like to see set aside as the official day to be nice to neocons and honor their good intentions rather than remember what their good intentions got us all into, postpones that happy, happy day when everyone forgets and the conventional wisdom mutates into something more favorable to their cause. Apparently, a lot of people who you'd think would have no dog in these races beyond their devotion to the truth agree that it's simply untenable for Americans to think that any citizen who's not in a five-by-four-foot cell ever did anything that posterity might judge to have been "wrong." That's why so many members of the liberal media conspired to transform the post-resignation Richard Nixon into a sage and a statesman, and why, when Gerald Ford died, liberal journalists wrote obituary pieces admitting that they thought he'd been wrong to pardon Nixon back in 1974, but now that they were burned-out old farts who'd gained wisdom and perspective with the years, they were grateful to him for it. The process of officially forgiving the people who treated 9/11 as if it were something they'd won in a political raffle is still ongoing, and if Krugman had written this two years ago, on a different day, I doubt that anyone who felt burned by it would have said a word; they wouldn't have wanted to reopen the debate. Now the rewriting of history has gotten just far enough along that they have to swat it down as an unwelcome setback, and the timing makes it possible for them to change the subject from the truth of Krugman's words to his bad manners at publishing them on National Don't Piss on Donald Rumsfeld's Shoes Day.

Almost three years ago, I was one of many people who were idly kicking around the virtues of something like the South African Truth and Reconciliation hearings, a way for the country to exorcise what it had been through, after a horrendous body blow by terrorist fuckheads, but one that had been exploited and exacerbated by some of the sorriest and most ludicrous excuses for "leaders" that a civilized country has ever had to suffer under. Nobody would have gone to jail, because too many people wouldn't have stood for it, but by forcing people to talk honestly about how we came to be torturing people in a country that hadn't done anything to us because the soldiers who'd been sent to occupy that country were under orders to get answers about how the activities of a different group of fellows who were most unwelcome there under the recently ousted dictator and had a quota to meet, maybe we could evaluate just what had happened and get past it. This idea proved a nonstarter, partly, I suspect, because President Obama thought that even suggesting such a thing would make it harder for him to persuade Republicans to work with him, which they would of course want to do, to get the country out of the hole Bush left it in.

Now that we've all had our good laugh over that one, we can see that the power combine, which includes not just politicians of both major parties but the media as well, is working overtime to establish that the Bush years were normal, maybe not the best time the country's ever had, but normal all the same. The thought that they weren't apparently strikes these people as less horrifying than living in a country where government-sanctioned torture and unnecessary wars and the coffers-emptying endless occupations that go with them, and what the hell, let's throw in elections decided by daddy's friends on the Supreme Court, for kicks, are normal. The main result of this will, of course, be that it'll be that much easier for the next asshole to do it, as some of the encroachments on civil liberties that the Bush administration pioneered have already proven too tempting for the Obama people to do away with them. It may be that the last time anything this bad happened, it was when half the country went to war with the other half over the question of whether it was okay for people to own each other, and a hundred years later, the decision to pretend that there was something romantic about the society that supported slavery and that the people who fought for the Confederacy didn't really die and kill over slavery at all has less a big, unhealed gash in the nation, despite the fact that these lies were contrived to help the losing side hang onto its dignity rather than face what it had done. America is toying with the idea of embracing its decline on a rocket sled right now, with well-groomed people in suits arguing for the repeal of everything that made us a better society over the course of the past seventy or eighty years, and it would be a good thing to see our noisiest citizens speaking as if they were grown-ups, at least, if not representatives of a great nation. It's impossible to think of anything we could be talking about now that matters less than whether Donald Rumsfeld cancels his subscription to the New York Times because of something that hurt Bernie Kerik's feelings.

New at The A.. Club

Cupcake Wars

Of 30 Rocks and Studio 60s: 38 TV doppelgänger

Full-Throated Anthem of the Week

Guillermo del Toro, as transcribed by James Wolcott in his Vanity Fair report from the San Diego Comic-Con:

The first thing you love is monsters. I don't like psycho killers with potato peelers; I'm a monster guy or a creature guy. I love the creature and the creation of that. I love universal monsters*, I love freaks, and I love everything that is deformed because that is beautiful for me. I cultivate my body shape through that principle. Perfection is impossible, imperfection we can aspire to achieve, and I think monsters do that beautifully. Monsters are a living and breathing Fuck you! One of the first duties of a horror movie is to be a Fuck you, I like the unsafe choices, and I think it's a genre that allows you to make powerful images.

These words resonate so strongly with me that they practically reunite me with my eleven-year-old self, who could have gotten a lot of mileage out of that line about cultivating his body shape, if only he'd thought of it. And as someone who, when in the doldrums about the point and possibilities of creative expression, has most often been lifted out of it by something that comes on as a Fuck you, I have personal reasons for being grateful to del Toro for making this sound so noble. (I recently invested a new reissue of Ric Meyers's chatty, wide-ranging study of exploitation cinema, For One Week Only. The book first came out in 1983, and I remember reading it and J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum's classic Midnight Movies around the same time and becoming very excited. The real virtue of Meyers's book was that it was the first time I'd found some written evidence for the existence of a whole subterranean world of movies that I used to see ads for in the local paper and sometimes watch when they were broadcast on TV in the middle of the night or on weekend afternoons. I wish I could recommend the reprint edition, but it doesn't have any of the ad art or movie stills and captions that decorated the original, and it turns out that without them, there's not really any book here. Which is only fair, since the ads were almost always so much better than the movies.)

[*I'm curious about that lower-case "u". Did anyone check with del Toro to make sure that he didn't mean "Universal monsters", the stars of the iconic horror movies made by Universal Studios in the 1930s and '40s? I suppose the line works either way. But it did have the effect of making me get up to pull my copy of Gods and Monsters off the shelf.]

Heart of Dickness

If Charles Manson were to publish his autobiography, a lot of media people would find it hard to turn down an invitation to interview him. So it's not surprising that Dick Cheney, who, you may have heard, has a book out, has been all over the TV these past few weeks. It should go without saying that the one question any interviewer should want to lead with is, "Mr. Vice-President, you, alone of all the architects of the invasion of Iraq, have always maintained that there are solid grounds for believing that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda and that the invasion was therefore directly connected to avenging the murders of thousands of Americans on September 11, 2001. You made this claim when you were a sitting vice-president, and continued to make it even as the CIA and the President you swore to serve always insisted that it wasn't so. Since you lied about this, despite the fact that you must have known that no sane person could possibly have believed you, why should anyone believe anything you say in your book?" I haven't seen every second of all the interviews Cheney has given as part of his book tour, but I'm guessing that no one has asked him this, because I'm pretty sure that if someone had, it would have made it onto my Yahoo front page. I'm not even going to ask Google about the only follow-up question I'd like to hear, which would involve reminding Cheney of the vote he cast in Congress against a measure that would have called for Nelson Mandela to be released from prison, and then asking him to make his best case for why Mandela having spent so much of his life in a cell and Cheney not spending a minute in one has, overall, been a good thing for the world.

The chief difference between Manson and Cheney is that the media long ago settled on a consensus opinion about who Manson is. In 2000, after Cheney was put in charge of helping George's kid settle on a running mate and somehow found all the possible candidates save himself irreparably flawed, the official line on Cheney was that he was a flaming moderate wise man and consensus builder who would be a fine steadying influence on rash young Prince Hal. Given Cheney's voting record in Congress and his oft-stated conclusion, particularly in reference to Richard Nixon during Watergate and Ronald Reagan during Iran-Contra, that the office of the presidency was insufficiently powerful and the president himself too accountable to trivial things like the law of the land, there is no good explanation for why anyone would have claimed to think this, except that he looked the part, just as the media has long insisted that George Will must be a serious political philosopher because he has poofy hair, a stern gaze, and dresses like a member of the Nation of Islam. (When somebody mentioned the Mandela vote during the coverage of the 2000 Republican convention, I swear I heard more than one analyst explain that it was just a symbolic measure that wouldn't have actually gotten Mandela out of stir, and when a choice is symbolic, why wouldn't you take the morally indefensible position?) By now, the settled opinion on Cheney is divided between the "crazies" who think he's evil incarnate and the idiots who would rather not think about it, but, if they had to, would probably say that he is a serious statesman with a long, distinguished career who, at a moment of crisis that might have brought out something other than the best in any of us, may have taken certain ideas about executive privilege that, in retrospect, one can see were always present in... his... hoo boy! The one thing everyone seemed to agree on a couple of years back was that Cheney would never write a book about his experience as vice-president, because to do so would make it appear that he cared about the verdict of his history, and it was obvious that he was too majestically, serenely self-assured to give a fig what anyone now or later thought of him. Whoops!

The tenth anniversary of 9/11 provides the country with the opportunity to look back and remember those who lost their lives that day, but it also commemorates a terrible, freakish atrocity that led to a very strange and self-destructive time in America. Many people have started to take into account the scale of the self-destruction, both to the country's moral stature and to its economic health. (When the tax cuts Bush rammed through early in his first year in office--a tax cut package that, before 9/11, seemed to be the only thing he really cared about using his four years in office to accomplish--and the first recession of his administration hit and the budget surplus the previous president had left him to safeguard instantly turned into a massive deficit, Bush conceded that he hadn't foreseen any of the horrors he was having to deal with when he'd insisted, on the campaign trail, that his tax plan wouldn't create any deficits at all. But he never considered raising taxes, or even just not further cutting them, to pay for his wars and his enormous expansion of the federal government to pay for his new security bureaucracy.) But I think it's a sign of just how far we have to go in coming to terms with the response to 9/11 that many people still don't quite accept how strange and illogical it was, at every step.

As Nicholas Lemann wrote earlier this year in a review of Bush's memoir, "Politicians usually pluck their ideas out of the atmosphere, but invading and occupying Iraq was not in the air, even after September 11. The idea that if Saddam Hussein had 'WMD,' the United States should of course unseat him militarily—the only question at hand, therefore, was whether the widespread suspicion that he had the weapons was true—was a Bush creation." Matthew Yglesias recently addressed a study that found that most people don't think the state of the nation would be that different if the Supreme Court had allowed Al Gore to collect his prize back in 2000, and while Yglesias rightly pointed out how insane this is, and how likely rooted it is in the reluctance of people of all political stripes to just want to reject the possibility that a terrible, avoidable mistake was made and then just accepted by the public at large, even Yglesias takes it as a given that 9/11 would have happened if Gore had been president. Of course, we'll never know for sure, but when you take into consideration how focused the Clinton administration's security apparatus was on al-Qaeda, how quickly the Bush administration--citing its official philosophy that anything Clinton believed must have been wrong--abandoned that approach in favor of a mysterious fixation on the successfully isolated and neutralized Iraq, the ignored warnings, and everything else, it seems strange that a culture that loves to kick the big "What If?" questions around considers this one off limits. In the last ten years, you heard more idle speculation about whether FDR had definite foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor than about whether a Gore presidency would have prevented 9/11, just as the people in place before 9/11 foiled the millennium attack plots. Likely the thought that an intellectually corrupt decision made by partisan Supreme Court justices and applauded by the media as the end to a long national nightmare might have led to a lowering of our defenses when we needed them the most is just something nobody wants to even speculate about.

This isn't idle speculation designed to piss off half the country and make the other half whisper, "Don't go there!" (If I wanted to just piss off half the country, I'd ask if anybody really believes that there are any Republicans who wouldn't regard it as an act of treason to out a CIA agent just to get at someone who'd published embarrassing and accurate information in a newspaper op-ed piece, if a Democrat had done it.) It's about what out to be an ongoing debate about how to deal with these things, a debate that ought to take into consideration what experience has shown us, not just what the latest partisan meme states. Rahm Emanuel got in a lot of trouble for saying, with regards to the economic meltdown, that you don't want to let a good crisis go to waste, but he was right. Crises are wake-up calls, and you don't want to just apply a band-aid to them; you want to take the opportunity they provide to use bold strokes and try new ideas. That's what the Bush administration did with the crisis of 9/11, and there's nothing wrong with that in theory. It's just that all their biggest ideas were bad, and based on soft and self-serving ideas about how the world should work that had rough consequences for a lot of people. 9/11 was a crisis that should have been greeted with clear, level-headed thinking about how sustainable our way of life had become and how best the civilized people of the world could come together to deal with the barbarians.

Instead, it fell into the hands of men who wanted to cloak the presidency in unanswerable powers and total secrecy, who saw any call for an inquiry about how things had gone wrong as a vicious insult, who mistook the willingness to torture and engage in wars of choice as shows of strength, and the ability to hire yes-men who would insist that their tortures and wars of choice were legal as a claim to the moral high ground. They were people who saw that events had made foreign people sympathetic to America and eager to extend a hand and told the foreign peoples to go screw, because that made them feel tough. They were people who saw that, after years of rising income inequality and consumerist inanity. the American people were ready to make sacrifices for each other, and told the American people to go shopping and leave everything to daddy. They were people who sneered at the idea of treating punk criminals as punk criminals, fit to be dealt with as such, and instead built them up as super-villains who could not be extended the usual rights of law, because to see them that way made them feel like supermen. They were people who declared themselves to be at war with terrorism itself, setting the terms of the battle in such a way that the battle could never end, so that they would never have to relinquish the extraordinary powers they would need to fight this fearsome foe. They were people who liked the idea of being "a war president" and his cabinet. Somewhere, in a better place than this, Lincoln puked.

In his 9/11 anniversary piece, Christopher Hitchens writes that "The proper task of the 'public intellectual' might be conceived as the responsibility to introduce complexity into the argument: the reminder that things are very infrequently as simple as they can be made to seem. But what I learned in a highly indelible manner from the events and arguments of September 2001 was this: Never, ever ignore the obvious either." He's referring to the obvious fact that al-Qaeda were bad people who'd done an awful thing that needed to be answered in blood. But for the preceding decades, Hitchens had shown a tremendous ability to at least skirt the obvious, or find more unpredictable things to say about world events than to hammer at it: he wouldn't have become the star he is otherwise. Certainly he never accepted the idea, during the Cold War, that any illegal or horrific act could be defended if it were done in the name of anti-Communism. Now, he wants to make clear, he doesn't excuse illegal or horrific acts committed in the name of anti-terrorism--except for the Iraq war itself, which he will never disown, and which a lot of people will always regard as illegal, horrific, and unnecessary.

"One reason for opposing excesses and stupidities on 'our' side (actually, why do I defensively lob in those quotation marks? Please consider them as optional) was my conviction that the defeat of Bin-Ladenism was ultimately certain. Al-Qaida demands the impossible—worldwide application of the most fanatical interpretation of sharia—and to forward the demand employs the most hysterically irrational means. (This combination, by the way, would make a reasonable definition of "terrorism.") It follows that the resort to panicky or degrading tactics in order to combat terrorism is, as well as immoral, self-defeating." But what turned so many people off about Hitchens's support for the war when it was approaching was his contempt for anyone who had a problem with it, or even those who just voiced concern that George W. Bush might not be the best man to have in charge of a delicate mission to change the world through military adventure. Having lambasted everyone who didn't support the war as dupes of bin Laden, he's now careful in his language just where he shouldn't be. There is, indeed, that one reason he cites for "opposing excesses and stupidities" in the name of anti-terrorism, and that might be the reason you'd lean on if you were afraid of offending your friends who think anything done in anti-terrorism's name is inexcusable.

The rest of us don't need that reason, because the fact that excesses and stupidities are excessive and stupid are the only reason anyone should need to reject them, good and hard. As Dahliah Lithwick recently pointed out, Cheney keeps inviting people to argue with him over whether we should have tortured people because it may have kind of worked in a case or two, which is like arguing that, although we officially don't endorse slavery, and he himself has never owned slaves, during that period a few years ago when his lawyer was able to provide him with language that made it legally acceptable to own human beings, they sure did get the crops in on time. "Only fools," writes Lithwick, "debate whether patently illegal programs 'work'—only fools or those who have been legally implicated in designing the programs in the first place... Most of agree that we should not be a nation of torturers, and that torture has tarnished the reputation of the United States as a beacon of justice. Most of us do not want warrantless surveillance, secret prisons, or war against every dictator who looks at us funny. We may be bloodthirsty, but we aren't morons."

When 9/11 first hit, and for some years afterward, the idea that there was anything you could do to fight terrorism that might not be worth doing got about as much traction with people like Hitchens as the idea that maybe the fact that the worst act of terrorism ever committed on American soil had occurred on George W. Bush's and Dick Cheney's watch might not really be conclusive proof that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were the best people we could count on to keep us safe. I don't think this can all be accounted for by remembering how thoroughly 9/11 scared the crap out of everyone. As Bill Wyman mentioned in that article I linked to the other day, the nineties were not a time for heroic swaggering on the world stage. They were relatively quiet for an era where staggering, world-transforming leaps of technological innovation co-existed alongside the aforementioned income gap that has since accelerated to the point that we may have bypassed the question of how much our decline will resemble Great Britain's and started wondering how long it'll be before parts of this country are dead ringers for New Delhi. This actually nagged at a lot of people. Bill Clinton, for one, was known to mourn a little over the lack of a geopolitical crisis big enough for him to prove his mettle as a historically significant "great" president. Then that goddamn Saving Private Ryan movie and Tom Brokaw's book about "the greatest generation" came out, and every Baby Boomer in the country, especially the millions with access to a microphone or an op-ed page, were begging the fates to send them their very own Hitler to sock on the jaw like Captain America. I'm pretty much convinced that the response to 9/11, or rather the response to Bush and Cheney's response to 9/11, would have been very different if it hadn't been timed to coincide with so many Boomers' midlife crises.

Well, it was a long time ago, if not as long as it sometimes feels, and now the Boomers, having failed to outdo their parents when it comes to healing a threatened continent to a boogie-woogie beat, have turned once again to more personal concerns. The spirit of those who were so sure that they had the answer to stopping terrorism in particular and evil in general has dissipated, as witnessed by Paul Berman's latest reminiscence about all the exciting thinking he did in the wake of the fall of the Twin Towers. The underlying spirit is something like this: once it was 1941 again, and I knew what had to be done, and it was very exciting. Now, I'm not sure I really did know, but I know that everyone else had less of a clue that I did. (He doesn't mention the most thrilling part of his book Terror and Liberalism, which insisted that the war to liberate Iraq was the first war ever declared in defense of feminist principles, and called on liberals to support the effort to democratize the Middle East through military invasion on behalf of women everywhere. I hope the Arab Spring turns out to be a good thing for women in the Middle East; the invasion of Iraq has been a case of maybe not so much.) Berman's essay appears in The New Republic, which, on the occasion of the death of Ronald Reagan, published the notion that, while it turned out to be true that the Soviet Union wasn't much of a threat by the time Reagan was elected, to have not been deluded into thinking they were an incredible threat at the time would have been very irresponsible. No doubt there are times when being wary of threats that don't exist is the responsible thing. But at the risk of sounding obvious myself, not being wrong may not be the most odious thing in the world, even if it seems that way to people who were wrong at the time and would like to remain proud of how right they felt at the time.

And now, in recognition of Bill Wyman's theory about how works of art may comment on events that haven't happened yet but that the artist senses may be coming, a song for Dick Cheney, from everyone in America, perhaps especially those who once thought that he was just what America needed in its time of crisis, but came to think otherwise:

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Beyond Saving

Bill Wyman has an interesting piece at Slate extolling four movies that he thinks have something to say about September 11, 2001, three of which were released just weeks after the attacks, and one of which was released several months earlier:

Each film evocatively creates a heightened sense of reality for its characters that we the audience inhale as well. Each features a shock, a wrenching sideways, whether from that plane engine falling on a suburban house to the revelation that something is very, very wrong with poor Betty. The tragedy that hangs over each story is another similarity: In each case, the dread of loss touches the audience in some fundamental way. That's a key point: None of these four directors is cynical or nihilistic. (An aesthetic position Lynch, for example, is not a stranger to.) In each of these signal works, a sense of humanity, of the great worth of every life—and a shuddering appreciation of the apocalypse that accompanies every individual death—is palpable.

These films speak to me of 9/11. Reality was heightened in the years before it. It's hard to believe we spent months, years, talking about Monica Lewinsky and Survivor. During the dot-com era in San Francisco, we gathered for swanky parties on rooftops and talked about Pets.com. (I was once at a lunch sitting next to the site's "ferrets editor.") Ten years after the fall of the Soviet Empire, the United States was without a substantive enemy we could conceive of. And yet 3,000 Americans got up that morning and went about their business, not even realizing that, like more than one of the characters in the movies I've been talking about, they were already dead.

These movies haunt my own personal and inadequate understanding of the events of that day. Our understanding of the movies, too, is inadequate too; we can't know whether each of these filmmakers, making movies that explicitly don't reference 9/11, intended them as a response to the tragedy. But in this case, we can know. They don't, and can't, because they were all made before 9/11 happened... There are two explanations for this disconnect. The first and simplest is coincidence—that I'm forcing meaning into movies that don't have it, at least in regard to an event that happened after their creation. Accept that one if you wish, and you may be right. But I think it's something different. I think that the sources of inspiration are hard to pin down. It can take almost 25 years, as it did for Kurt Vonnegut, to come to understand an event that happened literally right in front of you. For others, artistic antennae vibrate to other sensations. In what we accepted as a calm and gay time they found something overbright, hyperreal, and ultimately ominous. They couldn't tell us they were making 9/11 movies because they didn't know what they were doing.

The hint of Spalding Gray New Age "Perfect Moment" mysticism aside, I find this persuasive. Certainly most of the attempts made by artists during these past ten years to make sense of 9/11 would have benefitted if their creators had spent some more time, maybe years and years, thinking and feeling them through. Last night marked the season finale of basic cable's big attempt to come to terms with the event, Rescue Me, and I tuned in to watch it, in the same spirit that Bette Davis went to Louis B. Mayer's funeral.

The episode began with the hero, Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary), alcoholic misogynistic sex addict homophobic firefighter and spinner of fearless cutting edge jokes about how Britney Spears is a slut, out on a call, where he is horrified to discover that his best friend, Lou the fat load, has been replaced by a mannequin wearing a gooey-looking Halloween mask. At the end, Tommy and Lou's ghost drove off into the sunset, because male bonding is stronger than death. In between, there was an homage to the ashes-everywhere scene from The Big Lebowski, and the usual scenes where a bunch of actors who, unlike Leary, don't have the good fortune of being in charge of the show and who quit trying to sustain the illusion that they're playing characters several seasons back alternately sat or stood around, rattling off lines that, for all they seemed to care, might as well have been in Esparanto. It would have been almost as hard to hold it against them as it would have been to care any more than they did.

In the middle. there was one of those scenes so terrible and extraneous that the only reason it could have gotten filmed and made final cut is that the big wheels on the show think it makes a badly needed point. Tommy takes a baby boy to a playground and sits down on a bench. A man sits down next to him, and after some hilarity involving Tommy's need to keep scooting away. because you never know whether some strange guy who sits next to you in the park might be a homo, Tommy is ostracized and driven away by the castrating bitches and the guy who can't keep his wife in line and so probably is a homo. Tommy is appalled because the rules of the park mean that the baby has to share his toy with the other kids; the other kids have to share their toys, too, but as Tommy points out, the other kids are "girls", which is the politically correct term for castrating bitches of a certain age, and if the little boy even touches their toys, it'll probably turn him queer and ruin him for life. That's probably what happened to the guy on the bench.

This scene is presented as an example of why Tommy isn't fit to function in "the real world." But the way it's written and played, Phil Donahue himself would have trouble putting up with the swishy husband and the C.B.'s. There's also a scene where Tommy rejects his wife's first three suggestions for the name of their newborn baby, because they're all "fag" names, and the last one is "Jew fag." His wife points out that the baby hasn't been alive sixty seconds and has already heard the word "fag" twice. That's the strategy that Rescue Me quickly settled on after its first couple of not altogether horrible seasons: it protected itself by including little acknowledgements that Tommy and his homosexual-panic-crazed beer buddies sounded and acted like assholes, but as the scene in the park makes clear, being an asshole was the show's only conception of how to be a real man; it was either that or accept being pussy-whipped or start carrying a purse.

Sometimes, the show's message seemed to be that if you stopped being an asshole, you'd evolve beyond the level of your buddies and cease to be a true brother in arms, and the brotherly connection to a bunch of assholes is the only honest (male) thing in the world. Maybe, once upon a time, when things were soft, guys could afford to let things slide and not regard women as an alien infestation, but now it was time to face the dangerous new world head on, by regressing back to a more bullying, less enlightened time. (The general dishonesty was exacerbated by the hypocrisy built into the last season, which was timed to run as the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approached, and which, of course, featured scene after scene of Tommy railing against those who sought to profit from the 9/11 anniversary.) As the show dragged on, season after season and year after year, with less and less to say and less control over how it was saying it, a series that set out to address the hole that 9/11 left in the heart of New York City turned into a self-pitying rationale for being the worst person you possibly could in the modern world. Which may mean that, in spite of itself, it said something about many people's response to 9/11 after all.

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Funny Ha Ha

I've been so distracted these last few days of summer that I didn't notice the past week's big Michele Bachmann story, until it had moved on to Phase Two: the part where it turned out that the candidate was joking when she described the earthquake in New York and then the weekend hurricane as God's way of trying to get the politicians' attention. I first heard about it when I saw some folks on an early-morning TV show not only acknowledging that Bachmann was joking, but chuckling about it and insisting that it was a real rib-tickler, maybe the finest work yet by one of America's premiere funny women. So if we've learned nothing else from this, we now have conclusive proof that, when you have to get up that early and get made up to go on TV day after day, your sense of humor is the first thing to go.

We've gotten used to hearing people explain that the horrendous thing they've just said or done is not reflective of the person they really are, a daring neo-existentialist rebuttal to the old-fashioned notion that action is character and we are inevitably the kind of people who do and say the kinds of things that we say and do. (When, late in the 2000 presidential campaign, George Bush, Jr. was confronted with his 1976 DUI arrest, he proudly explained that he'd felt the need to cover it up because he wanted his daughters to respect him as the man he wasn't. Many hearts were touched by this.) The "Shit, I was joking!" excuse is the best of all possible excuses, certifying not only that you really aren't the kind of person who would say what you just said, but that your attackers are too dumb to recognize sparkling repartee when they hear it. The nut missing from the machinery of this is chance that you really do leave a part of yourself exposed when you let people know what you think is funny.

I'm not sure that Bachmann's "joke" is any less unsettling for having been offered with a chuckle. The way I see it, there are one of two basic assumptions you would have to share with your audience for it to be considered funny. One way would be if the joke was intended to be at the expense of people so stupid and delusional that they believe that God really does share their partisan disdain for big government spending and is prepared to issue lethal miracles to make the point. The joke would then be understood as being funny because the person saying it is pretending to be dense. Given Bachmann's religious leanings, this seems unlikely. Just like Rick Perry, who has led Texans in prayers for rain in times of drought--prayers that they must have muffed the wording on, because the rains did not arrive--she is exactly the kind of person who literally believes [A.] in miracles, and [B.] that God is a Republican. This means that she had to meant what she said as a joke of the "It's funny because it's true! variety. Which still means it's kind of creepy, not least because she was so in love with it that she couldn't restrain herself from going with it even before the death toll from the hurricane had been sorted out.

This is not an isolated case, and some people have had more taken out of their hide over it than others. One of the most famous was Ronald Reagan's remark, recorded before one of his radio shows, about "signing legislation that will outlaw Russian forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." The first time you heard it, if you were of a citizen-of-this-world mentality, it was striking to hear this confirmation from the old boy's subconscious that, rather than having a problem with the ideology of an oppressive government, he seemed to view a whole country full of people as something he'd like to wipe from the map, and that the thought made him giddy. That Reagan was one Teflon sumbitch, though, and in 1984, the thought that there might be a single Russian you might want to spare in the clutch actually was seen as outrageous, if not treasonaout, by as many people who today would snort unpleasantly at the idea that there might be a dusky man in a skull cap lurking around the airport who shouldn't be hauled off to Gitmo pronto, just to be on the safe side, and I don't think his little improv did the Gipper any harm.

On the other hand, Hilary Clinton may have put a hole in her boat with her own potential voters when she dared to make fun of the messianic aura then hovering around Obama. Today, her little riff, which got her denounced for being insufficiently idealistic, might get her her own Special Correspondents badge on The Daily Show, or at least her own talk-radio gig. Her husband grossed a lot of people out during his last year in office with his fondness for a joke about a man who asks God why he's having such a hard time; God replies, "I don't know, there's just something about you that bugs me." Everyone agreed that this was awfully petty of ol' Bill, almost as if every president hadn't had to read snippy things written about him by David Broder and Sally Quinn in the Washington Post about how he was a graceless hick who wasn't comporting himself properly in the face of a multi-million dollar federal investigation by his enemies into the activities of his penis.

The all-time champ of unintentionally revealing the murky dankness of his inner life (with a skull to match) through the true miracle of humor was George Bush, Jr., the man who once treated Tucker Carlson to his bang-up impersonation of a woman on Death Row begging for her life. Bush's delight in his own privileged sadism must have started flowering in the days when he was known around the college campus for torturing frat house recruits, and by the time he was appointed President, it was like Audrey II. Bush's post-invasion attitude towards the lack of WMDS in Iraq had three distinct public phases: the early months, when he kept insisting they were there; the long years since, during which he has sometimes been persuaded to dump on the bad intelligence people who had the temerity to do what they'd been made to understand they had to do, if they wanted to keep their jobs, and tell them the WMDs were there; and the night at the White House Correspondents Dinner when he treated the crowd to a hilarious comedy routine that included showing a picture of him looking under a table and saying, "I know those WMDs must be around here someplace." After people started gagging at this, Mickey Kaus indignantly wrote that he'd been there, at a really good table, and as far as he was concerned it was hilarious. I can think of nothing more bone-chilling than the pull quote, "'Hilarious!"--Mickey Kaus." I'd rather hear that Caligula has been telling people that I really know how to throw a party.