TV Eye: Fall 2011

I got as far as at least watching the pilots of most of the new series premiering this fall, and do have a few thoughts on some of the shows that nobody has paid me to write about:

UP ALL NIGHT: I actually have written about this at The A. V. Club, but there is something I'm curious about that I didn't mention there: why do the people who make this assume it's always a show-saving laugh riot to have one of the leads burst into an a cappella rendition of an '80s-'90s power ballad? Spontaneous a cappella renditions of '80s-'90s power ballads are to this show what overhearing someone talking about puppies or baking cupcakes and thinking they were talking about sex was to Three's Company/

WHITNEY: I do have weird little gaps in my store of cultural knowledge, and I confess that when I sat down to watch this for the first time, I had never heard of Whitney Cummings and had no idea that she's some kind of culture hero. If I had known, this might not be the only pilot I couldn't force myself to watch all the way though, but since I'd never seen her before, after ten minutes I just thought that she was a lazy non-actress with an arch manner whose TV show was unfunny as hell. Since then, I've learned that she's so beloved in some quarters as a bad-girl comic that someone who works at New York magazine felt the need to express bewilderment over the "backlash" to the show because, hey, aren't most TV sitcoms godawful? (That's a hell of a defense.) Apparently one of the big points of contention over Cummins is her looks; it seems that while I was out weeding the lawn, everyone else in America was arguing over whether she's good-looking, and one debating point is that she's the kind of women who makes other women confused and angry when they hear guys say she's attractive. I actually read that someplace, and though I have no idea what it means, if Cummings does, she ought to explore it in her work. It's got to be better than having a guy compliment a woman on her breasts and be told that it's actually "armpit fat."

2 BROKE GIRLS also bears a creator-producer credit to Cummings. Unlike Cummings' own show, it does have actual actresses--Kat Dennings and Beth Behrs--in the leads. It also has a comical-talking Chinaman, a Ukranian slob who makes comically inappropriate remarks, and Garrett Morris sitting in a corner of the set, wearing sporty colored shirts and waiting patiently for whatever mercy that death can provide. It is a CBS show that wants very, very much to be hip, and by trying so hard, it succeeds in looking like Disco Sally to How I Met My Mother's John Travolta. In the last year or so, network TV has discovered "hipsters"--usually depicted as snarky douchebags in funny headgear who hang out in cafes and celebrate things they think suck in the name of "irony"--in a big way, making this the hipster equivalent to whatever year it was that hippies bugged Joe Friday and Captain Kirk but tried to make up for it by teaching Gomer Pyle the words to "Blowin' in the Wind". 2 Broke Girls mainly tries to show how hip it is by having Kat Dennings, whose clued-in, saucy boredom would by some definitions qualify as the very media definition of hipsterdom, constantly being bothered by and expressing her contempt for hipsters. The nicest thing I can possibly say about 2 Broke Girls is that, if the smug, charmless, with-it characters from Whitney were to wander onto this show, Dennings' character would douse them in gasoline and light them on fire.

TERRA NOVA: To be honest, I didn't get why adding dinosaurs to boring shit was supposed to render the boring shit awesome back in 1993, either.

ONCE UPON A TIME: ABC's "What if fairy tale characters were exiled to the real world?" series does a pretty respectable job with a silly-ass premise, though not as good a job as the decade-old comic-book series Fables, which ABC executives really don't want to talk about in interviews. Here's what got my attention in the pilot, though: in the pilot, the most dangerous fairy tale character is Rumpelstiltskin (played by Robert Carlye), who is a bad enough guy that the heroes, Snow White and her prince, see the need to keep him imprisoned under heavy guard. When everyone is transposed to our world, he becomes the town's richest and most powerful man, who owns a pawn shop and goes by the name "Mister Gold." Is there any way this doesn't sound like an anti-Semitic caricature? Take it away, Leon Wieseltier!

BOSS: This Starz series, starring Kelsey Grammar as a Chicago mayor with a degenerative condition that he's keeping secret, and with a pilot directed by Gus Van Sant, sure does have impressive credentials, but the fact remains that in the pilot, the show's level of rip-the-lid-off sophistication about the nature of big-city corruption and power plays is established by having some guys who need to make it up to the Boss after a screw-up cut the ears off one of their associates and, after bandaging his head up like Bugs Bunny with a toothache, sending him to deliver them, in a little box, to the Boss in front of the all the people at a big dinner where he's just given a speech. The Boss goes home, goes into the kitchen, opens the box, sees the ears, and sticks them down the garbage disposal; a few seconds later, he's asking his wife for the number of a good plumber. I was sort of hoping that every week, somebody he's pissed at would try to make it up to him by forking over somebody's eyeballs, teeth, pinkie toes, etc., and he'd feed them all into the garbage disposal, and, by the end of the season, we'd at least know which body parts can and can't be smoothly gotten rid of in this manner. Sadly, in the second episode, nobody sent him shit, but it's not too late: maybe in the third episode, he can get pissed off at two different groups of people, and catch up.

Brief Movie Reviews from Someone Who Doesn't Get Out to the Movies Like He Used To and Is Learning to Love Video On Demand

J. C. Chandor's MARGIN CALL is an intense, compelling little movie that uses some forty-eight hours in the life of a New York investment bank as a microcosm for what's happened to the economy in the last several years. The movie, which is mostly set inside the offices of the bank, with occasional field trips when characters pile into the back seat of a limo and rush off in search of someone who has left the premises, begins with Stanley Tucci getting fired as part of a bloody round of layoffs. Tucci hands a set of numbers he's been working on to Zachary Qunito, the smart new kid in the office, tells him to see if he can finish it, and after awhile, Quito, who has stayed at his computer after almost everyone else has left at the end of the day, starts telling people, "You need to look at this." What is "this"? Since it's a safe assumption that nobody in the theater would understand him if he explained what "this" is in detail, he just keeps showing the numbers to smart people near the bottom of the totem pole, and after they make faces as if their ties were choking them, they turn to higher-up people and tell them, "You need to look at this." Since the people in the theater haven't gotten any smarter than they were when the movie started, the higher-ups all say that they can't really understand the numbers that have made them all millionaires, so just explain it to them, slowly, in syllable words of two or fewer syllables.

What it boils down to is that the firm is holding too much bad paper, in the form of mortgage-based securities, and is on the verge of going bust--or to be more precise, the firm, in terms of its actual value versus how deeply it's in over its head, has already as good as gone bust, but there may still be a few days, or hours, before everybody else notices. This leads to a lot of scrambling and the ultimate decision by the ultimate high muck-a-muck--one "John Tuld", played by Jeremy Irons, whose devotion to this project appears to have been great enough for him to arrange to have his nose broken and reset to make it look more Nixonian--to have the traders get on the phones first thing in the morning and have them start selling toxic assets as fast as they can at whatever prices they can get, before the Street wises up and word spreads that the bank is tip-toeing back from the abyss by disseminating cancerous spores through the rest of the market.

The movie is impressive largely because of what it doesn't do. Quntio's character, a genuine "rocket scientist" who packed up his brains and moved over to this field because the money's better, is shaken by what he discovers about the nature of the business, but he doesn't throw up in his hands in horror, and when, at the end, he's heading towards a promotion, the movie doesn't throw up its hands in horror that he's been "corrupted." Kevin Spacey, who might be playing the Jack Lemmon character in Glengarry Glen Ross if that guy had thought big, warns Irons that he's not thinking long-term--that he'll be scorned as a crook if he carries through with his plan, and will pay a price for it, because no one will ever trust him again--but Irons assures him that he's being naive, and based on the events of recent years, the audience knows that Irons is right. The thing is, Spacey goes right ahead and gives his traders the Knute Rockne speech about how he wants them to get out there and sell, sell, sell. At the end of the day, he tells Irons he's quitting, but that's just so he can live with himself, and by the end of their conversation, he's conceding that he can't quit; he needs the money. If the movie has a mission in mind, it's to make the actions of the people who killed the economy seem understandable, if not defensible, and it does this partly be wriggling into the mindset of people who will never be able to have enough money, thanks in part to their role in creating a society where the good life, which may just defined as just owning a good house in a good neighborhood and looking forward to retirement knowing that you can cover whatever medical bills might be waiting for you around the bend, costs so damn much. Paul Bettany, the senior trader working under Spacey, has a speech where he manages to make his annual two million-plus salary sound like chump change, even if he does get to write off his hookers as entertainment expenses. Bettany has the ambiguous line of the movie, when one of the bosses, Simon Baker, tells him that he's concerned about Spacey's ability to do what has to be done--about whether he can see that dumping the assets is the right thing. Rather than take advantage of the opportunity to shaft his boss, Bettany tells Baker that he and Spacey have always had the same understanding of what constitutes the right thing. He comes across as rather noble, especially if you don't immediately recognize that what he's really saying is that Spacey's moral values are as adaptable as everyone else's.

Margin Call has a remarkable group of actors for such a small movie, but one casting choice sticks out, and not just because of the talent gap factor. Demi Moore plays the work-suit cobra who saw to it that Tucci's paperwork got buried for so long and arranged for him be canned, and who, for good measure, shut off his phone as soon as he was gone form the building. (This piece of symbolic hardball doesn't look so smart after Quinto finishes crunching Tucci's numbers and then no one can get ahold of him.) Moore never could act a lick, and she's especially vapid now that she's lost the husky voice she had when she was younger, which used to at least make her sound potentially interesting. Because she's playing with a group of people who are so far over her head, and because her career isn't what it was in the days before The Scarlet Letter and Striptease, you naturally wonder why she's in the movie at all, and I confess to finding it hard not to wonder of it's because the moviemakers wanted to show The Bitch getting it, when her character is made the sacrificial victim for the board of directors. In the overheated, ballsy atmosphere of the bank's boardroom, it would make all the ugly sense in the world if the characters zeroed in on the one powerful woman among them, but Moore's scenes would need to have been directed with more perspective, and more sympathy for her character, for them to come across that way. (It doesn't help that, aside from Mary McCormick's appearance as Spacey's ex-wife in a brief coda, there are scarcely any other women in the movie, except for the baby-face who fires Tucci and a silent cleaning woman who shares a late-night elevator ride with Baker and Moore, for purposes of ironic counterpoint.) It's enough to make you wonder if one of Chandor's formative movie experiences was Disclosure. Maybe it's just me, though: I saw this with the Missus, and she thoroughly enjoyed seeing Moore get hung out to dry.

WEEKEND: A modest but very enjoyable little movie, directed and written by Andrew Haigh, about a one-night stand (between two men, played by Tom Cullen and Chris New) that turns into a two-or-three-day stand. Considering how much of it is shot in close quarters in the one guy's apartment, it's remarkable that Haigh was able to keep it feeling fresh and unclaustrophobic. It helps that he knows how to make vibrant, eye-pleasing compositions using bright Pop colors without overwhelming the natural look of things. This also makes the title that much ballsier, since it makes me think that he's not only heard of Godard's movie of the same name, but may have even seen it.

THE BLACK POWER MIXTAPE 1967-1975: A collection of documentary footage shot by Swedes and assembled by Göran Olsson, offered, an introduction says, not as any kind of definitive journalistic history of its times or subject, but as a record of how those times and that subject looked to one group of flmmakers from a different culture. As a documentary, it's about as shapeless as you'd expect, but the footage itself gives off a lot of heat, and as a time capsule, it's intermittently fascinating. For context, the soundtrack includes recent interviews with various interested parties. I had no idea that Questlove was such a dingbat. (At one point, he says that he doesn't think that the fact that the end of legal racial segregation constitutes any kind of progress, which would seem to indicate that he has no idea what the word "progress" means, and that it also doesn't erase thousands of years' worth of injustice, as if he thought that anyone whose head isn't up his ass is likely to give him an argument about that.)



THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE II (FULL SEQUENCE): Tom Six's 2009 Human Centipede sure did succeed in getting a lot of people up on their high horses. I read a lot of declarations about what it said about the current state of moral corrosion, though my big problem with it was that it seemed to be a feature length movie made for the sake of a single transgressive image, and then I didn't think the image was all that hot. The sequel is, just to end the suspense, a piece of shit, but I'll give it credit for being potent shit, much more likely than the original to either hold your attention or send you rushing to the nearest vomit receptacle. It's set in our world--the one where The Human Centipede the Elder exists--and the central character is a buglike fellow who watches it compulsively and keeps a scrapbook devoted to its wonders, a scrapbook of which he appears to practically have carnal knowledge. Inspired, he sets out to recreate the film's title creature, though whereas the mad doctor of the first film used anesthesia and the famously "accurate" surgical procedures, the unschooled Larva Boy hero konks people in the head before sawing away at them with a knife and then connecting them to each other with duct tape and a staple gun. To better mate form and content, Six has also dropped the slick, icy color photography of the first movie and shot this in security-camera black-and-white, so that the plentiful gore looks like black molasses oozing everywhere. The most interesting thing about it, aside from the "EWWWWW!!" factor, is that, having rolled his eyes at the people who denounced its predecessor as a form of social disease, Six has made a follow-up that appears to endorse the idea that violent movies can indeed inspire violent acts in the real world. Unless he's joking--or arguing that violent movies, at worst, can take root in the minds of potential sickos and give them some brain candy that may help them stay contented and docile, since the ending can perhaps be taken to mean that it was all a fantasy. Guess maybe we'll find out for sure when the promised Human Centipede III (Final Sequence) comes out, I can't wait.

This Week at The A.V. Club

Castle: "Demons"

Top Chef: Just Desserts

QVQ&A: Scariest Movie Scenes

Jack The Ripper in the 23rd century: 21-plus unexpectedly scary episodes of not-so-scary TV shows : Alfred Hitchcock Hour: "The Jar"

Castle: "Cops & Robbers"

We're an American Band

Those who, like me, voted for Al Gore in 2000 and still haven't thought of a reason to feel embarrassed about it may have experienced a shudder of deja vu when they saw this article at The Daily Beast. Warren, who painted a bull's-eye on her back when she was seen on YouTube saying sensible things about people's responsibilities to the society they live and have prospered in, is quoted in the piece as saying other honest and sensible things, and makes it clear that she parted ways with the Republican Party over its fiscal policies around the time that anyone not hell-bent on creating a cruel and irrational plutocracy or simply stupid would have had to have parted company with them. One of the least spectacular things she said was, ""I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do. I support what they do." The Daily Beast used this modest declaration of solidarity with the people upset about the state of the economy, and the politicians' ineffectuality or worse in the face of it, as an excuse to run a headline that makes her sound as if she's nominating herself as the creator of a grass roots movement that claims to have no single founder or official leadership.

It's very reminiscent of the time that Gore had the audacity to remind people that he had been one of the leaders--during the Clinton administration, probably the single most important political leader--in the creation of the legislation that led to the birth of the Internet, and in putting the government's weight behind turning it into what it's become. In an election year when a lot of people thought it was important to make up lies about Gore in order to get across the necessary information to voters that he was a liar, Gore's public acknowledgment of his own remarkable achievement got turned into the meme, "Al Gore says he invented the Internet." Gore could have taken credit for the invention of the Internet more directly than he did, and it would have had more truth to it than, say, George W. Bush's image as a combat fighter pilot or Sarah Palin's claim to have "said 'No thanks!'" to "the bridge to nowhere." Part of what was incredible about Gore's being pilloried on the basis of an exaggeration of something he'd said was that no one seemed to think that his genuine, far-seeing role in the creation of what's become one of the key positive factors in all our lives was something he deserved any credit for, let alone something that might have been seen as strengthening the idea that he was qualified for the presidency. If anything, it was a demerit, compared to the fact that his rival had the same name as somebody who'd already been president, and could drop his g's in a pinch. George Bush, Jr. was the perfect candidate in the eyes of a press corp that thinks the true job of a media-age president is to somehow satisfy their snob appeal while at the same time giving the little people out there beyond the Beltway--the Joads and the Waltons--someone they can relate to. Certainly no one was going to catch Bush claiming to have any accomplishments impressive enough to apologize for, unless it was maybe loving his country so much that the beatniks and ivy league professors found it unseemly. By punishing Gore for having a mighty accomplishment to his name--by using it to make him seem like a delusional egomaniac--the media made it clear that the kind of things that once qualified someone to lead a nation now just made you seem insufficiently folksy, too much of a poindexter.

The thing about the Warren headline is that, in the minds of someone working from a contemporary media-savvy template, it spanks her coming and going. On the one hand, she's supposed to be making bold, insupportable claims about how the Occupy Wall Street protesters are her zombies, but at the same time, if anyone actually reads the article, they're presumably meant to be troubled by the fact that Warren, even if she doesn't really describe the OWS crowd as her loyal constituency, is simpatico with them. The media--and not just the conservative media, because The Daily Beast is not exactly NRO--continues to regard OWS much more warily than it regarded the Tea Party during its formation, and to signal that it finds the whole thing kind of frightening. Worse, it seems convinced that the "American public" shares its concerns, even though polls always tended to show that most people were less enthusiastic about the Tea Party than the media told them to be, just as they now tend to show that most people feel more in sync with OWS than the media is. This time two and a half years ago, the media was pushing the idea that the Tea Party was composed of average Americans who were frightened and confused in the wake of a terrible economic collapse, and it was supposed to be snobbish and unfeeling not to at least respect their concerns and feel excited that they had been moved to share their voices. (You were also supposed to discount any nuts you saw in the crowd, waving guns and placards with racist images or comparing government health care to Nazism; OWS, on the other hand, is, the media tells us, defined by its visible nuts.) I can't help feeling that the people you see at OWS, explaining their concerns, fit that description of ordinary citizens worried about where the country's going a lot better than all those folks who felt stirred to action by the thought that people who were defaulting on their mortgages were getting some help and that--horror of Socialist horrors--people might not continue to be drained bloodless by hospital bills and denied insurance for their "pre-existing conditions." But these are the people--the people whose concerns about the economy are based on actually being hurt or endangered by it, not on the off chance that they might have to pay a little more in taxes to keep the whole boat afloat--clearly strike the people who are paid to "report" on them as the hippie rabble, whose concerns about living in a world, and bequeathing to their children a world, where the income gap is a fact of life and the social safety net a quaint anachronism, amount to fodder for a thousand editorials concluding that the OWS protestors are dealers in "class warfare" who have "no coherent message."

Gore lost the presidency thanks in no small part to the efforts of a few thousand people who basically agreed with him on most of the important issues but who thought practical politics beneath them and so, for the good of their souls, gave their votes to that year's icky "protest" candidate who also thought that practical politics was beneath him. One of these assholes provides a sideshow every few years, and while it's usually promoted as an occasion for restarting the conversation so that one party or another can then learn from and respond to the people who couldn't bring themselves to vote for the official candidate, what it usually amounts to in practice is a warm, sudsy ego bath for the Too Good for This World candidate and his voters and a ticket to ride for whichever major party candidate he and his supporters find the most objectionable. (Hey, who's that on TV being sworn in as leader of the free world? Why, it's Richard Nixon! Thanks, Eugene McCarthy, you sanctimonious sack of shit!) It just struck me the other day that, in a lot of ways, the inspiring, new-generation Barack Obama of 2008 was that year's idealistic-protest candidate, except that, in one of the weirdest election cycles on record, he somehow won. I don't regret voting for him--though even at the time, I would have preferred Hillary Clinton, who was inspiring only to people who got a warm and fuzzy feeling from the thought of a Democratic president who's relish the chance to knock Republicans' heads together--and I won't regret voting for him again, but he sure has done a solid job of demonstrating why some of us find it so easy to resist the charms of the whole species of candidates who seem too pure at heart for the rough and tumble of real politics. (In 2008, Clinton couldn't overcome her having voted in support of Bush's Iraq War, any more than Humphrey, in 1968. could overcome his failure to have shot President Johnson over Vietnam. Obama was free to spend the year going around boasting that he, alone of the leading Democratic candidates, had never cast a vote in support of the war. He was not forcibly reminded that he, alone of the leading Democratic candidates, was not a member of the United States Senate in 2003, and so was spared the necessity of deciding how to vote on an issue that then seemed as if it might be a surefire career killer for anyone who stepped in front of the rolling boulder.)

Obama is seen as vulnerable because his popularity is sinking, but the reason he's not as popular as he used to be with a lot of people who had high hopes for him in 2008 is that they think he's had his ass handed to him by a bunch of politicians they hate much more than they'll ever hate him, and without barely putting up a fight. Obama's first term has been a lot less accomplishment-free than you'd guess from watching the news, but he's left a lot of people--the kind of people who are now seeking solace with others at the OWS protests, which is probably healthier for them than looking for a politician to hero-worship anyway--who were looking for a president who'd be in their corner feel that they've been abandoned. It wouldn't take that much for Obama to be that president; just acting pissed off at the people standing in the way or real reform, instead of patiently waiting for them to grow up and demonstrate their previously undetected patriotic, reasonable side, as if he were starring in some goddamn Jimmy Stewart movie, would have gone a long way towards that, even if he didn't always get his way. He's started trying to act that way now, but the moment when it would have seemed as if he were mad on behalf of the people at the bottom, and not just sore that his presidency has been crippled, has passed. But at least he's provided a useful illustration of why you probably shouldn't vote for people who seem too good to be in politics.

Brrrrrr

An article in The Harvard Crimson checks in with the critic Louis Menand. It turns out that Menand has inspired a website that was started by a then-student named Peter Kang out of sheer devotion to Menand's work. I can understand this, because I remember discovering Menand's work in the back pages of The New Republic when I was a student in the late '80s and learning to look forward to his byline. Kang "happened to see a copy of Menand’s collection of essays, American Studies, in the window display of the no longer existent Barnes and Noble in Astor Place on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. 'I thought, "Oh, I’m studying American history; I might want to check out this book",' recalls Kang, who quickly took a liking to Menand’s writing." The thing is, I remember frequenting that very Barnes and Noble, and even remember buying the book there myself. For years, it was the place I used to pop into at least once every couple of months to kill time when I was trudging from one movie theater to the next. Now it's "the no loner existent Barnes and Noble," which makes it sound like a lost city in the jungle, even though the store was still there when I left New York a year and a half ago. This is how the world conspires to make you feel old, people.

American Studies remains a good introduction to Menand's work; I especially recommend his piece on the strangely interwoven careers of Larry Flynt and Jerry Falwell. It showcases two of his virtues: to put it plainly, he's a pleasure to read and he makes startling connections. Reading the profile, though, did make me realize that I don't get quite as excited by the sight of his byline as I used to, and I think I started to understand why when I read this:

Menand himself has always favored writers who display a certain sense of emotional removal from their subject matter, citing Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm as two writers who excel at this approach.

“I’ve always liked very cold writing. I always get attracted to people who can really get very distant emotionally from their subjects. Just to really look at something with a very, very cold eye—it warms my heart when people do that,” remarks Menand with a fleeting, ironic smile.

Although one might think that consciously removing emotions and personal experience from a piece might be troublesome, for Menand, a distanced, objective approach to writing magazine articles is actually more comfortable.

“It’s easier, really. You always have to filter out a lot of personal static when you’re trying to write about an object,” says Menand.

Menand, who was born in 1952, says that he was at first reluctant to teach because, “I didn’t like the idea of being an authority figure—it was sort of a 60s thing." This is a funny comment coming from him, because so many of his earliest long magazine pieces, especially his 1991 New Republic essay on Rolling Stone and the culture of rock criticism, seemed to be driven by a reaction against the overheated, "personal" style of writing embodied by people like Greil Marcus and Hunter Thompson and Ken Kesey, and the tendency of critics like Marcus to look for the deeper meaning in pop cultural artifacts that an earlier generation of intellectuals would have automatically dismissed as cheap, commercial tinsel. Honestly, this sort of thing was the first serious writing--if I can risk scandalizing the ghost of Lionel Trilling by dignifying it with that term-- that I ever burrowed deep into, and it was bracing to discover, in Menand, a strong, engaging critical voice that seemed to define itself as a challenge to the core values of that kind of writing.

On a couple of occasions, Menand has written about Norman Mailer, and while he's had some remarkable things to say about him, particularly with regard to the character of Nicole in The Executioner's Song, you can plainly sense that he's trying to weigh in on someone who he thinks he ought to say something about but who is... not... his kind of writer. For what it's worth, one reason I share Menand's love of Janet Malcolm's work is that she does have that ironic distancing quality as a writer--something I could probably benefit a lot from mastering myself, if that doesn't sound too much like Steven Seagal saying that he'd like to someday be more like John Gielgud--but her work feels more hot than icy to me; reading her on, say, Joe McGinniss or the artists clustered around Ingrid Sischy Artforum in the mid-'80s, it's sure not as if you sit there going, "Man, I wish I knew what she really thinks!" Here's another way the world makes you feel old: The Harvard Crimson describes Menand as looking "like any ordinary, late-middle-aged white man", but it occurs to me that when he wrote those icy, buttoned-down critical pieces in the '80s and early '90s, he was just about as young, or younger than, I am now. I'd sort of like it if, now that he's heading towards the edge of the woods of old age, he might unexpectedly let his writing heat up and spill over the edges a little, get some things off his chest and say them in a loud voice, in no uncertain terms. But the last sentence of the Crimson profile is not encouraging in this regard.

Birtherism Schooled, Worked to Death

James Taranto is angry at reporters who ask Republicans if they think President Obama is an American-born citizen and then record their answers when the answers aren't "Fuck, yeah!" He's also angry at people at left-leaning websites who draw attention to this reporting. He thinks that the people who do this are "obsessed with the question of Barack Obama's birthplace" and chastises them for "keeping birtherism alive". You don't often see this level of argument since Groucho Marx died.

It would be a terrible thing to accuse anyone of being disingenuous on this low a level, so I'll take Taranto at his word and assume that he really is such a gibbering idiot that he sincerely believes that it's the people who are fascinated that so many conservatives have their heads up their asses who are obsessed with the President's birthplace. Still, many conservatives would like to declare the birther phenomenon dead as a story and move on for reasons of political exigency and personal embarrassment. One of the central fallacies of the argument is that the story ought to be considered dead because it's been established that Obama was born in the United States. But there was never any compelling reason to think otherwise, and certainly no one who ever suspected otherwise can be regarded as anything but stupid, soulless, and most likely motivated, wholly or in part, by a deep discomfort with the idea that a black man with a funny name could be elected President. That is why there is a point to determining whether someone is a birther, or ever has been, or, when confronted with the question of how he feels about the birthers' position, has ever replied that he himself doesn't know for sure but thinks there are "unanswered questions" that are worth "looking into."

It's a useful question, because it's a surefire determiner for whether the person you're speaking to is too stupid to be worth listening to. It's like the truthers. A couple of years ago, a fellow named Van Jones was driven from his job with the Obama administration, in part because he had signed a petition for a 9/11 Truth movement organization, indicating that there may have been entire seconds in his life when he flirted with the idea that it was not outrageous to think that George Bush and his A-Team might have had something to do with bringing down the World Trade Center. Since anyone who has ever flirted with this notion is, by definition, too crazy or stupid to be right about anything with any degree of reliability, it is absolutely a good thing that his government career was cut short. Of course, the same has to be said of anyone who has ever flirted with the idea that Obama wasn't born when and where the birth announcement in the newspaper said he was. I don't believe in voter-restriction legislation, what with me being American and all, but it would be a great public service if, on election days, anyone who has ever been any kind of birther or truther were kept from voting by good citizens who sought them out on their way to the polls and kept them distracted with bright, shiny objects and knock knock jokes. Maybe, deep in some inner place, Taranto is really upset about people keeping the birther thing "alive" because there's a great deal of solid evidence to suggest that the birther stupidity is central to the contemporary Republican voter base than the truther thing is to any base outside Bellevue. But that is neither my fault nor the fault of those asking the questions.

What brought it all up again this time is an interview with Rick Perry in Parade, which, between this and Brad Pitt's interview in which he seemed to dis Jenn, is really shaping up as one of America's foremost investigative journals. Parade asked Perry if he believed the President was born in the U. S., and Perry replied, "I have no reason to think otherwise." Parade pointed out that this was "not a definitive," and Perry replied, "Well, I don't have a definitive answer, because he's never seen my birth certificate." He added that he'd "had dinner with Donald Trump the other night," and that Trump thinks the birth certificate that the President released earlier this year is a phony. Taranto, who has never met a philosophical or ethical question that he didn't think could best be addressed by recasting it as a situation out of a forty-year-old Blondie comic, writes that "Loaded questions like the ones Parade asked Perry are the journalistic equivalent of a woman asking a man, "Does this dress make me look fat?" It's a test for which there is no right answer, and for which the best approach is usually an evasive one (though Perry's evasion would have been better had it been witty)."

This is simply wrong. There is a right answer to the question, and it is, "Of course Obama was born in the United States." If some elaboration is needed, it might go like this: "No, I wasn't there in the delivery room, but I also wasn't there in the Oval Office in the days leading up to September 11, 2001, so I can't say that I did not see the President and his advisors rubbing their hands together and talking excitedly about their plans to stage a terrorist act and murder hundreds of people in their quest to extend our empire, but I don't have to have been there to say with absolute certainty, as a known fact, that 9/11 was the work of Al-Qaeda and not some inside job. Like the fact that President Obama was born in Florida*, this is not something that's unknowable and shrouded in mist, and no one who matters thinks otherwise." The question is "loaded" only if the person it's addressed to is incapable of saying that with a straight face. It's like saying that the question "Can you touch your index finger to the tip of your nose?" is loaded when addressed to a drunk driver. Because Parade asked this question, we now know for certain where Rick Perry's intellectual blood alcohol level is at, and also that he has a very strong stomach, because he can simultaneously eat and look at Donald Trump. Maybe, just maybe, on some subatomic level, this revelation is really what Taranto finds so irksome. That and the fact that Perry's answer wasn't witty. It would be nice if Perry had it in him to be witty, but if did, he would be unrecognizable as any form of what we think of as "Rick Perry", in which case he would never have had the chance to be a former Tea Party favorite and would have more interesting things to do with his time than lose in a game of "Gotcha!" with the interviewer from Parade magazine.

[*Correction: I meant to write "Hawaii", I really did, but suffered a grievous brain fart at the crucial moment. Hey, at no point in the above post did I say that I'M not stupid.]

Bork Chops

Yesterday marked the twenty-fourth anniversary of the United States Senate's rejection of President Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the U. S. Supreme Court. In a New York Times column, Joe Nocera (I remember when he signed his name "Joseph"--is he getting all folksy in his old age?) designates this as the point where partisan viciousness began to trump sweet reason. Nocera isn't a right-winger, but he seems to be joining Thomas Friedman and David Brooks as part of the gang in the Times op-ed bullpen who look at mainstream Republicans getting cheered for how many executions they've signed off on, and for how far they're willing to go in blaming the sick and uninsured and the the unemployed for their own plight, and saying it's not their job to correct people who say that President Obama isn't really American, and then come to the conclusion that "hard-liners" on both the right and the left--a hard-line leftist now being defined as anyone who believes the New Deal was good for the country--are equally to blame for what's gone wrong; what we need is mutual trust and respect flowing like clear spring water from "the radical middle." Democrats have no one but themselves to blame for a Republican party dedicated to saying "No!", in one firm voice, to anything a duly elected Democratic president proposes, because they not only voted against Bork but were so impolite as to indicate that they had strong reasons for doing so.

As Dave Weigel points out, this argument would stand up better if the arguments against Bork had been completely trumped up. Bork would have voted against Roe v. Wade; Nocera points out that other justices sitting on the court since that ruling have expressed concerns about whether the court had any business stepping in and making that call instead of the legislative branch, but the fact is that Bork has made it clear that he objects to legalized abortion no matter who's responsible for it. And he objected to the legislation that put an end to legal desegregation, saying that "the principle of such legislation is that if I find your behavior ugly by my standards, moral or aesthetic, and if you prove stubborn about adopting my view of the situation, I am justified in having the state coerce you into more righteous paths." He characterized this as "a principle of unsurpassed ugliness," making it clear that Bork thought that it was less morally defensible to protect non-white citizens' rights to be treated as full human beings in the housing, employment, and service sectors than to assure white bigots that they had every right under the law to be scumbags.

Nocera isn't so stupid that he doesn't think that the policies favored by Bork wouldn't have resulted in more back room abortions and a cease and desist order to the civil rights movement; he merely thinks, as a member of the radical middle, that it's impolite to say so, and that Kennedy was out of line pointing to the likely results of Bork's positions as a reason to deny him a seat on the court. After all, when his image as a responsible adult depended on it, Bork would sheepishly admit that allowing black people to drink from the same water fountain to which he had access had not, in fact, resulted in the end of the world. Never mind the fact that Bork had been completely, utterly wrong, and had gone to Hitchens-like lengths to be wrong in the most abrasive, polarizing language imaginable, about the single most clear-cut moral issue of his time, and certainly forget about the possibility that what he'd thought about legal desegregation when it was an issue to fight over might be the best possible indicator of whether he could be relied on to not be spectacularly wrong about the issues that would come before him if he were to join the court. "Heck," he said, summing up the radical middle position to such things, "it was a long time ago." Here's the deal: in 1987, "a long time ago" was a matter of some thirteen years. Bork has now been the poster boy for getting roughed up by partisan Democrats for more than ten years more than that, and for him and a lot of people, the wound is still raw and bloody.

Nocera's take on the Bork hearings represents a missed opportunity, because Bork's failure to make it onto the Supreme Court does constitute an anniversary worth remembering. It might be that his rejection by the Senate marked the first clear sign that the modern Republican party of Reagan and the post-Reagan conservative era would be the biggest park of whiny-ass crying titty-babies ever to stage a series of collective hissy fits and claim that it was for the good of the country. One gets no sense from Nocera's creaky memory just how uncontrollably hilarious the Bork affair was, but to appreciate that, you have to consider it in its full context. Ronald Reagan was elected President in November 1980, and for the next six years, Republicans gradually adjusted to the idea that victory in the TV communications wars was everything in politics--not just that having an old toastmaster who worked well on television was good for your batting average, but that a high Q rating was the defining mark of a good patriotic American and proof of good, honorable intentions that would be regarded favorably in the course of history. Many of the same people who claimed to be proud to be the party of dull substance instead of two-bit glamour and charisma, back when one was defined by Richard Nixon and the other by the Kennedys, now crowed to the heavens that they had the guys who looked good on the set, and that meant that they were the true voice of America.

(Bork, of course, first because known to the greater public when, as Nixon's Solicitor General, he stepped up and fired the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox after Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus both resigned rather than do it. Defenders of Bork always point out that Richardson himself advised him that he should do it, even as he was packing his own bags, to ensure some appearance of stability in the department. However, Bork has often said that, even though "Cox hadn't done anything wrong," he approved of Nixon's decision to try to save his own ass by firing him, so I don't know why anyone would think Bork needed Richardson's help to make the correct, gutless yes-man decision. Put this together with his support of legal segregation, and Bork's pre-1987 career seems to have mostly been spent trying to help especially mean white men get away with violating the moral and written law for the pettiest and most self-serving reasons possible.)

Anyway, that all started to look shaky in December 1986, when the Iran-Contra story caused Reagan to develop an unexpected aversion to appearing on-camera. So Republicans were overjoyed when, during the summer 1987 Iran-Contra hearings, the puppyish sociopath Oliver North seemed to reaffirm the idea that TV cameras love Republicans, and only Republicans. North's testimony was deranged on several key points and largely consisted of lavish declarations of loyalty to the President even as he was throwing Reagan under the bus, but all that most conservative pundits cared about was the consensus that TV viewers thought North was adorable, while judging such prominent inquisitors as Lawrence Walsh to be charmless meanies with bad hair. So many Republican tipsters were looking forward to seeing a new star born when Bork was scheduled to appear at his televised hearings and prove yet again that Republicans ruled the media universe and, as a result, were the just and deserving kings of the universe. Except that Bork, on TV, looked as if he were pissed off from having been called in from lurking under his bridge, taunting billy goats. He looked and acted like his stated opinions, which is to say, arrogant and out of touch and ugly as sin. Republicans who complain about the Senators who voted against him never make it clear how anyone who voted for him was supposed to explain himself come election time. The vote, which is invariably talked about now as if it came out of the partisan blue, was the only one possible based on the public opinion at the time, and while that public opinion was based on the things that Democrats were saying about Bork, the things they were saying were based on what he'd claimed to believe. But even at the time, it set off hair-tearing seizures among Republicans who were horrified that anyone would use the shallow power of the TV image to turn opinion against a man who might not come across all that well on the air but who should be revered because of the depth he possessed as a thinker, dammit! (Looking back, one might just see a parallel between all those people who thought that showing up at public forums armed the the teeth and red in the face was an inspiring example of grass-roots democracy when the people doing it were furious that other people might get a break on their mortgage defaults from the government but see the Occupy Wall Street crowd as a smelly threat to the republic that lacks "a coherent message.")

After Bork's nomination went down in flames, Reagan nominated Douglas H. Ginsburg, whose name never made it before the Senate; he withdrew from consideration after it came out that he, like pretty much everyone else his age in 1987, who'd been to college, had "experimented" with marijuana. In retrospect, Ginsburg was one of the last victims of an old-fart mentality that, as late as the 1992 presidential election, was still trying to cling to the idea that people had to be driven out of politics for having done things that, as the Boomers replaced the World War II generation, fewer and fewer candidates for office hadn't done. (Now that the children of the Information Age are moving coming in after the Boomers, it'll be harder and harder to find candidates who don't have an embarrassing YouTube video or Facebook post in their pasts.) I think that, today, there are many more people who'd find it ridiculous and draconian that someone was denied a place on the Supreme Court because he'd once smoked a joint than that someone was denied a seat because he was once a fervent opponent of laws guaranteeing equal rights to blacks. But nobody remembers Ginsburg today, partly because he was the victim not of Democrats but of people of his own party who hadn't yet embraced the Gingrinchy idea that hypocrisy is perhaps the most supreme moral virtue. And for another reason: he hasn't constructed a permanent industry around his own image as a martyr, all because his successful career didn't include a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land. Bork has, which is why he's the butt-ugly face of a political party that no longer even considers presidents from any other party--presidents who were elected in landslides--to be legitimate, because they think a legitimate American president has to be a Republican, by definition.

This Week at The A.V. Club

Inventory: Your Mother Can't Be with You Anymore: The Yearling and Bridge to Terabithia

Sing Your Song

Castle: "Eye of the Beholder"

Man Up! (Second Opinion)

Nature: "Radioactive Wolves"

Inventory: Actors We Hate in Movies and TV We Love

This Week at The A.V. Club

Short paths to the canon: 22 influential artists with tiny bodies (of work): John Cazale and Jean Vigo

Free Agents [U.K.]

Six Days to Air: The Making of South Park

Chelsea Settles

The X Factor: "Judges' Homes", Part 1 and Part 2

Hairy Bikers

AVQ&A: Favorite Unhappy Endings

Jobs

I can easily understand the outpouring of feeling in reaction to the death of Steve Jobs, from millions of people who never knew the man. In the smartest of the few contrarian pieces I've seen, Vaclav Smil took exception to comparisons between Jobs and Thomas Edison. Jobs who was one of the most winning public faces of certain technological developments that changed the modern world, but how does making it possible "for millions of people who are incurably addicted to incessantly checking their tiny Apple phones or washing their brains with endless streams of music" compare to harnessing electricity? Leaving aside the fact that reducing the home-computer revolution to the creation of the iPod is kind of like summing Edison up as a guy who made it possible for roadies to wear hats with little flashlights on them, this misses one key point. Jobs was someone who became rich and powerful through his hard work and original thought patterns, and maintained his position (and became surprisingly beloved) because of his special interest in perfecting high-tech gadgets that had a functional beauty. That last bit was a key to the counterculture artist inside him, and also why he did so much to make it easy for people like me, who were not techno-geeks at heart or by inclination, to not only see the appeal of his machines but to learn to use them.

In the days since Jobs died, I've seen some cackling online and in print about how the hippies occupying Wall Street have expressed sorrow for his death, and how these enemies of capitalism don't seem to get it that they're mourning a man who represented everything they hate. I have, at best, mixed feelings about the alternate-universe Tea Party of the Occupiers, partly because they give me a flashback to the thrillingly clueless Battle of Seattle anti-globalization protestors who, in retrospect, seemed to augur the grand national throat-cutting movement of 2000, when just enough "progressives" to do lasting damage decided that the best way to make a statement about the lust for a more progressive political agenda was to do whatever they could to throw the presidential election to Marie Antoinette's little cowgirl sister. But with regard to Jobs, it's the sneering jackals who have it wrong. It's the very qualities that make Jobs a true capitalist hero that also made him, at the start of the new socioeconomic era ushered in during Ronald Reagan's first term, an anomaly. Jobs actually did something, made something, and cared about the quality of his product and the opinions of his customers, at a time when the insane, unregulated spirit of pro-business, screw-everything-else, was settling in, and redefining business success as obscene investor profits snatched out of the ozone with no regard for even making a product and sustaining an employee base, let alone playing a beneficial role in society. Whatever's in the heads of the Occupy Wall Street crowd, it's the bankers and the Wall Street Journal op-ed writers who now seem to hate true capitalism, which is supposed to serve the community it's a part of, and conservatism, which whatever its lapses is supposed to be about preserving something.



Timothy Noah at The New Republic recently posted the above campaign ad for Rick Perry, describing it as part of a series of Perry ads that "practically scream 'I am so much crazier than you think I am!' " What's striking about this one, though, and what makes it feel representative of something, is the way it pushes, to the limit, the idea that anything that costs anyone a job, even a job that would have cost him and others their lives, is the worst thing anyone can do now. Ten years ago, the Republican Party seemed to have found a winning formula that would last them till Judgment Day: just accuse your opponent of not being willing to do absolutely anything in the world in the name of fighting terrorism. Now that Barack Obama has killed Osama bin Laden, brownie points in the war on terrorism are seriously devalued in the eyes of conservative voters, and the new contest is to see who can go the farthest in protecting jobs, and any attempt to get a little money out of anyone with a payroll to meet in order to subsidize a social safety net has been redefined as a callous effort to pick Herman Cain's pocket so that he, sadly, had no choice but to call for a fresh round of layoffs.

George W. Bush was famously the first president in decades to preside over a net loss of jobs in the country, even before the recession that saw the loss of more than two and a half million jobs in his last year in office alone. Given Bush's policies in this area, it's hard to see how things could be any worse if banks and corporations were made to pay their fair share. But damned if, on the same Friday that the New York Times ran a special crossword puzzle tribute to Steve Jobs, the paper managed to run a front-page story that included an interview with some turnip head, a 54-year-old "researcher and writer with a Ph.D in politics, who has been out of work since 2009," who opposes extending unemployment benefits; "Far better to relax some of these outrageous regulations." What outrageous, job-killing regulations did the forgetful Bush somehow forget to weed out during the eight years he had to work all the kinks out of Trickle Down Heaven? The interviewer forgot to ask. But I'm sure the Wall Street Journal not only knows what they are, but would like to assure you that knowing they were out there cost Steve Jobs must of his will to live.

Post-9/111 Pop Culture Detritus

When you think back to a decade ago and remember how people ranging from Susan Sontag to Bill Maher were pilloried for being unacceptably nuanced in their reaction to 9/11 (Bill Maher? Nuanced!?), it seems like a sign of a return to public mental health that a mainstream, high-profile (if diminished) comics company like Image can publish something like THE BIG LIE in time for the tenth anniversary of the toppling of the Twin Towers. The Big Lie is a one-shot Truther book that is clearly the work of people who have fond memories of such "educational" underground comics as Corporate Crime Comics. It is principally the work of Rick Veitch, who has underground roots but whose work I first came across when he was part of the semi-regular art team on my beloved Alan Moore-era Swamp Thing. The work that he and other stalwarts Steve Bissette and John Totleben did for that book was, in a word, hideous, and I long ago convinced myself that it is hideous in a way that perfectly serves the material. If this is a delusion of mine, it is one that I am probably going to carry to my grave.

Since then, Veitch had concentrated on writing his own stuff, which has included the notorious unpublished Swamp Thing story in which Swampy met Jesus and Brat Pack, arguably the single most vomit-worthy of all the post-Dark Knight/Warchmen attempts to tear the @#$%&*!-ing lid off the superhero genre. The Big Lie, which Veitch wrote and pencilled, and which looks hideous in a way that could serve no material that a sane person would want to create, uses a La Jette-style sci-fi hook to draw the reader in before tearing the @#$%&*!-ing lid off 9/11. It begins with a scientist from the present day using her new mastery of time travel to journey back to New York one hour before the planes hit the WTC, so that she can persuade her husband, who died in the explosion, to get the hell out of there. The husband is an engineer who is part of a team that has been hired to brainstorm on behalf of Steven Spielberg, who wants to actually dynamite a skyscraper and bring it down on-camera, without the use of CGI or special effects, for a movie he hopes to shoot on location in Saddam's Iraq. The first thing to say about this is that it takes a special, one might say Veitchian, genius to have to pick an imaginary situation to explain why a character who knows something about structural engineering is in an office of the WTC with other characters who know something about Iraq, and to come up with one that, as the characters themselves freely admit, makes no sense whatsoever. The cherry on the top is that, having decided to make an unseen Steven Spielberg their boss, a choice he presumably made of his own free will with no outside pressure or a gun to his head, Veitch proceeds to firmly establish his qualifications as a clear-eyed truth teller by spending the next twenty-odd pages repeatedly and consistently misspelling Speilberg's first name.

So the scientist crashes their big meeting and identifies herself to her husband, but she's ten years older than she was the last time he saw her, and he doesn't recognize her. Then, to prove that she's telling the truth about what's going to happen, she whips out her iPad to show her news images from that terrible day, but all the assembled geniuses can do is ooh and aah over the mysterious thin plastic-and-glass magic-screen contraption. Finally, they get down to a detailed debate over the fine points of the disaster and its aftermath as she describes them, which is when it becomes fully clear that, when it comes to using his art to argue for his political views, he makes Steve Ditko look like Gillo Pontecorvo. The scientist talks about how there were all these warning signs about what was going to happen but it happened anyway, and the assembled geeks--who've already established that "no administration in its right mind would piss away real resources" trying to topple Saddam because the guy's already "cooked", so "Stephen" has nothing to worry about while he's on location--practically piss themselves laughing at the idea that this could happen--unless, you know, someone in high places wanted it to happen, nudge-nudge, wink-wink.

Then the husband gets up and plays Veitch's ace in the hold, his explanation of his it's a scientific impossibility for a airliner to bring down a tall building like the WTC. I'm a little foggy on the man points, mainly because whenever someone makes one of these arguments my brain fogs over, in the same way it does whenever someone makes one of those arguments about how it's a scientific impossibility that anyone could get off the number of rifle shots that the Warren Commission said Lee Harvey Oswald managed to get off, in the amount of time he had. (Little tip: when someone makes this argument to you, don't just wait for their lips to stop moving and then point out that a lot of people have subsequently gotten off that same number of shots in that same amount of time, just to show that it can be done. That way, you won't have to wait for their lips to stop moving again as they explain that what they really meant was that, while it's certainly possible, there's no way that Lee Harvey Oswald could have done it, because that loser learned his marksmanship skills in the Marine corps.) Then, the planes crash into the towers, and everyone picks themselves up and dusts themselves off and starts talking about how they're going to get down from this flaming tower that, because it's built so sturdily that no mere airliner could bring it down, isn't going to collapse or anything. Then, in the next-to-last panel, they see the explosives that someone has attached to the beams...

Most of The Big Lie's arguments come down to the Chomskyian syllogism that: [A.] For the terrible thing that we're talking about to have happened under our leaders' noses, they'd have to be complete morons; and [B.} Our leaders--you know, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, those guys--are hyper-competent, super-intelligent beings who couldn't possibly overlook or misinterpret something or be motivated by their own weird issues, such as misguided, personal obsession with Iraq or the belief that anything that the Clinton administration was obsessed with, such as al-Qaeda, can't really be a big deal; so, [C.] The terrible things that happen must all be the result of carefully planned conspiracies. I can only imagine that the appeal of this line of argument is that you can fantasize that the targets of your vitriol will jump up and holler, "No, listen, your logic is incontrovertible, but please believe me--I didn't plan the World Trade Center attacks! I really am a moron, which you've faultlessly proven is the only other option open to me!" The problem is that high-level acolytes of Leo Strauss, unlike me, have more important things to do with their time than read Rick Veitch comics, so they don't even know about the faultless argument, and to everyone else, it's the person claiming, for the purposes of this thought experiment, to believe that George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld are all-knowing brainmasters who sounds like an idiot.




The TV series PERSON OF INTEREST stars Michael Emerson, doing his magentic-soft-spoken-unreadable-mystery-man thing, as an off-the-grid gazillionaire who takes on another lost soul, a my-body-is-a-lethal-weapon dude (Jim Caviezel) with a tormented romantic past, as his agent in a crime-stoppers project. In the wake of 9/11, Emerson helped the government create a massive surveillance system that basically monitors every conversation, interaction, and funny look that occur in the country, looking for patterns that might point the authorities towards something nefarious that's about to go down. Because they're only looking for patterns that point towards something big and terroristy, a lot of patterns that might help the cops prevent something smaller but still awful, such as a murder that has no bearing on domestic security, get swept into the waste bin. Emerson collects the patterns and passes them along to Caviezel, whose job it is to then figure out what bad thing is going to happen, so he can prevent it.

It's a pretty fair comic-book adventure scenario, but having seen the pilot, it wasn't until I looked at the show again the other day and listened to Emerson boil the premise down in an explanatory prologue that it hit me how strange it is, in the way that it addresses concerns about the overgrown security state that's been built up in reaction to the belated discovery that there are mean people out there who do not like us. Person of Interest, which uses frequent security-camera images to spice up its look, may be a little troubled by the thought that Big Brother is watching everything we do, but its real concern is that Big Brother isn't doing enough with the information it collects. Bug Brother is only really interested in the security of the nation as a whole, when what we really want (the show seems to surmise) is somebody who's watching us, as individuals, every second of every day, and can swoop in anytime we need protection, not just from terrorists but from anybody who means us harm. Since Big Brother can't do that, it urges Big Brother to be more generous with what it knows about our personal lives, so that free-lance vigilantes watching over our shoulder can better serve us. Maybe it's not a coincidence that Caviezel's best known movie role was Jesus.

This Week at The A.V. Club

AVQ&A: Favorite Falling-in-Love Stories

China, IL

Castle" "Head Case"

Raising Hope: "Kidnapped"

Raising Hope: “Henderson, Nevada-Adjacent, Baby! Henderson, Nevada-Adjacent!”

Up All Night: "New Car"


AVQ&A: Favorite Falling-out-of-Love Stories

Heart of Dickness 2

Last weekend, I came across something on the car radio. It was a discussion among TV news anchors about how 9/11, and developments in technology and social media that have come along since then, changed the ways news is reported. At one point, an unidentified voice that I think belonged to Brit Hume recalled that, shortly after September 11, 2001, Dick Cheney made a speech in which he said that the "war on terror" the Bush administration was set to embark on would be the first war in America's history in which more of our people were killed at home than overseas. As Hume, if it was him, quickly pointed out, this statement turned out to be totally untrue. (He also mentioned, in an aside, that it wouldn't have been true in any case, because of the Civil War, but then added that this oversight doesn't matter, presumably because it's not as horrifying when Americans are killed by good, patriotic fellow citizens who just want to secede from the union so they can keep their peculiar institution going. Anyway, Hume-if-it-was-him said that he had always thought that what Cheney said was "profound," which might strike some of us as a strange opinion to hold regarding an historically ignorant lie meant to serve as part of the propaganda rhetoric in a push to scare Americans so badly that they'll agree to anything Big Daddy has in mind.

Cheney's comment is chilling to me, in the same way that a lot of big, bombastic pronouncements we heard about how unprecedented 9/11 was in our history, and about how nothing we'd ever been through could prepare us for the unprecedented steps we'd need to take in response. These strike me as the meant-to-be self-fulfilling prophecies of people who are way too comfortable with the idea that the world is much scarier than the man on the street thinks and that they themselves are the rare souls who are tough enough to step up and make the hard choices. I think about the story that George W. Bush was striding manfully around the White House talking about his eagerness to "kick Saddam's ass" at the same time that he was making a big, drawn-out, wholly unconvincing show of not yet being committed to war, if it could be avoided, and I think that these are guys who want credit for the making of "hard choice" that were actually very easy for them to make. And I think that someone who finds this kind of thing "profound" probably wants to give the impression that he thinks such sentiments are profound because they shake him to the core but that what he really means is that he liked hearing that kind of crap, because it pleased his innermost fantasies and emotional needs to feel that we were at some great historical precipice and needed a national daddy, brimming over with tough love. It's an attitude that's as unbecoming in a newsman as Cheney's attitude is disgraceful in someone who aspires to be a national leader.

The same day that I was traipsing down memory lane, Cheney went on CNN and told an interviewer that, in light of the Obama administration's use of a drone strike to kill Anwar al-Awlaki, he was waiting "for the administration to go back and correct something they said two years ago when they criticized us for 'overreacting' to the events of 9/11. They, in effect, said that we had walked away from our ideals, or taken policy contrary to our ideals, when we had enhanced- interrogation techniques. Now they clearly have moved in the direction of taking robust action when they feel it is justified." If this means anything, it must mean that Cheney sees no middle ground between doing nothing to combat terrorism--which is what he seemed to think Obama, and John Kerry before him, were offering to do during their respective presidential campaigns--and having no restraints at all, shredding the Geneva Conventions, and running amok.

This really is pretty much the way Cheney used to sound whenever some outrage committed on his watch was made public: what, you have a problem with invading a country that didn't attack or and posed no threat to us and pulling people off the streets and out of their homes at random so that some of our most dubious enlistment prospects can use them to act out their Penthouse Forum nightmares? Well, excuse me for caring too much about your wife and kids to hand your house keys over to al-Qaeda! I always thought that Cheney just talked that way as a come-on for the stupidest voters out there, but maybe, when you've signed off in your head to the shit he's signed off on, you have to really tell yourself that there's no difference between competent, targeted attacks on actual bad people and rampaging around insensibly like a gorilla with a brain tumor. Obama isn't just huddled in a corner crying while listening to the latest numbers on all the bodies that an unchallenged al-Qaeda is piling up around the globe, so he has no moral superiority to those who would torture around who looks suspiciously Muslim; to fight back at all is to declare your willingness to do any goddamn stupid thing. One proven advantage to the "actually think about what you're doing" strategy is that it's actually effective. As the interviewer pointed out to Cheney, more terrorists have been killed under Obama's watch than under Bushcheney's. Cheney didn't try to argue with those numbers, but he sort of took credit for all the terrorists killed since 2001 by saying that the Bushies "developed the technique and the technology" that Obama was using. Well, not the drone attack: that technology was developed under President Clinton. The Bush administration's big breakthrough innovation, besides finding out how much water-boarding gives you dishpan hands, was the money-saving idea of invading and occupying a country with too small a force. Remember?

Over the course of a very long public career, Dick Cheney has exhibited exactly one quality that, in a Bizarro World kind of way. might be judged as honorable. He is completely faithful to his terrible ideas and to the half-blind view of the world and moral squalor of which they are the product. There's one small gap, though. Cheney clearly thinks that the use of torture is absolutely necessary to keep us safe, and to hear him talk, you'd think that Barack Obama is the one who took it off the playlist. But it was George W. Bush who did that, after it became a matter of public knowledge. I count two possible ways of interpreting this. One, Bush never really thought that torture was necessary to keep us safe, but he enjoyed the bulge he thought it gave him in his manliness enough that he was prepared to have it happen, so long as nobody knew about it, and so long as canceling it would give him the right to forever address the issue by saying, in a what-aren't-you-getting tone, "We don't torture." (And he's not having sexual relations with that woman, either. Way to bring moral dignity back to the White House, George.) Or, he really did think it was necessary, but couldn't take the heat that came with it being public knowledge that we were doing it. If it's the second, then it's hard to think of a President who showed less interest in the welfare of the country, as opposed to the state of his own reputation, than Bush did when, over Cheney's objections, he called a halt to the water-boarding. Does this gall Cheney as much as it should, if he means anything he says about making tough decisions based on what's best for the country? He really must consider Bush a traitor. Imagine what keeping that locked up inside him is doing to his famously overworked heart. Some kind soul ought to call him up and invite him to unburden himself on camera, pronto, ideally after plying him with drink.

They Do the Po-Lice in Different Voices

Yesterday, I did some musing about whether Herman Cain's criticism of Rick Perry over this "Niggerhead" business might mean that Cain doesn't full understand his role as a Republican culture hero. (Mona Charen has called him "a great American", a designation that she probably doesn't automatically extend to all successful pizza company CEOs, no matter how much she loves the free market.) Seeing Cain walk back his remarks, in roughly the same time frame that I'd been analyzing them, would seem to indicate that, if Cain doesn't get it, it's since been explained to him. Cain and Clarence Thomas have great big heaping gobs of qualities that might make them seem like swell fellows to Republican voters, but what makes them both bulletproof in that crowd is the fact that they happen to be black Americans who lived through the segregationist era and the Civil Rights movement and who never tire of insisting that racism in American politics is solely the province of the Democratic party, and that the Republican party embodies the liberating, equality-friendly message of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the truest way, by trying to see to it that when all black Americans become millionaires, which they surely will just as soon as they tire of being condescended to by racist Democrats with their affirmative action mindsets, they won't have to surrender their riches to the government, to be squandered on school lunches for a bunch of goddam moochers whose parents probably snuck into the country illegally anyway.

I've been listening to Thomas talk this line of guff for decades now, and though I'll concede that I haven't been hanging on his every word and might have missed something, I can't easily imagine him accusing a fellow Republican of racism, no matter what the circumstances. Cain, who strikes me as both more intellectually honest and more obtuse about the company he's been keeping, may have thought that he'd done enough talking about the inherent racism of liberalism and the high-mindedness of all Republicans everywhere that he could be permitted to speak out against a Republican who he clearly dislikes personally and who he sees as, if not out-and-out racist, a little less than spectacularly enlightened. Cain must have thought that he'd spent enough time denouncing Obama, and solemnly nodding along when anyone else on a Fox News show accuses the President of playing footsie with the Black Panthers, that if he criticized a conservative politician over a race-tinged issue, other conservatives would at least recognize that he's not a kneejerk player of "the race card" and treat his views respectfully, whether they agreed with him or not. He was wrong.

The "Niggerhead" dust-up did make me remember that I'd wanted to write something about last week's non-starter of a racially-tinged media non-scandal, but life intervened. I refer to the minor fracas over the Associated Press transcript of the President's address to the Congressional Black Caucus, in which the decision was made to faithfully record the section where Obama began to drop his g's. Some people called "racism" over this; others, including John McWhorter argued that it was necessary to accurate describe the President's slangy delivery to even hint at the flavor of the speech. (And it is a matter of delivery, or pronunciation. A number of reports described the dropped "g's" as a grammar issue, which strikes me, at least, as being as far off as to qualify as a little scary.) What's really interesting to me, though, is the response to the angry conservatives who jumped in to beat back the tide of liberals complaining about racism, even though the tide turned out to be more like a ripple. To a one of them, they all used the same verb. They said that the President had been caught "pandering" to blacks.

I suppose I could do something with the idea that sloppy pronunciation is inherently black, an idea that seems deeply embedded in that charge, given that no Republican on Earth has ever accused George W. Bush or even Sarah Palin of "pandering" to whites when they try to sound like Dean Martin or Daisy Mae. I do think that the resentful overkill of that word, applied here, says something about how white conservatives, and maybe not just them, regard the use of church-inflected black English--what Harry Reid, in a phrase that inspired many sensitive Republicans to reach for the smelling salts once the cameras were turned on them, referred to as "Negro dialect"--in political speech-making with a mixture of awe and wonder and terror that reminds one of, well, the African natives in old movies who thought the white explorers must be gods because of their flashlights and boom sticks. This feeling was mostly unspoken when black leaders on the national stage, especially those who really did come out of the church, restricted themselves to the civil rights arena, which was seen as their place. But when Jesse Jackson ran for president in 1984 and persisted in giving lively speeches, you began to hear murmurings of how his mysterious ability to use words to actually stir a crowd, instead of putting it into the oratory equivalent of a medically induced coma, was weird and scary and Not Presidential, kind of like black people themselves.

I think that some people still feel this way, and that they find Obama's ability to slip in and out of it... well, to use an idiot's word, "inauthentic". I also think they might find it unfair, in a couple of ways. It's unfair because they think that showing spirited verbal agility gives you an undeserved advantage, especially if you might someday be facing Rick Perry, who in this scenario isn't so much threatening to bring a knife to a gun fight as to show up at a laser-sword duel with an unsharpened Popsicle stick. They might not mind it if so much if it were the only idiom Obama knows, but as Harry Reid took so much grief for noting, Obama can also talk in the most boringly acceptable vernacular imaginable, which is why his sudden dive into dropped "g's" seemed worth calling attention to. Jesse Jackson couldn't do that, which is part of why, aside from The Times not yet being right and all that, he could never rise above the level of a symbolic candidate. To put it more bluntly than millions of Americans might like, to millions of Americans, he was perceived as Too Black. Obama can shift back and forth, which to many Republicans must seem like cheating, since it means that he can address the concerns of black America directly (hence the charge of "pandering") without scaring any white folks beyond those most recalcitrant in their belief that an America where whites can't claim full or even majority ownership of the majority culture isn't really America.

The funny thing is, in his remarks about how the AP transcript with the dropped "g's" was the correct take, McWhorter also said that he wished the President would talk this way more often. Presumably he finds it looser and more inspiring, and maybe he's right, and certainly this feeling is shared by many of the people who in 2008 thought that, despite all the evidence of Obama's personality and memoirs and stated positions and goals, they were voting for a radical utopian. Many of the people who've been trying since 2008 to sell an image of Obama as a socialist wild man and secret Muslim terrorist probably also wish he'd talk that way more often, on the theory that white swing voters would then find him more alienating. Back in 1988, a columnist for The New Republic wrote that the coming flood of tell-all memoirs by former Reagan staffers were generating so much ink because of the impossible disconnect between the P.R. image of the Reagan White House that the mainstream media had happily disseminated and the insiders' accounts of what had actually been going on. There's a similarly wide disconnect between the actual Obama and his accomplishments and the image of him that's spread by those who love him, those who loved him and feel disappointed by him, and those who think it's their patriotic duty to make a case for why he's the antichrist.

The other question that the transcript immediately brings to mind is, of course, did the AP always carefully drop George W. Bush's "g's"? The argument that they shouldn't have would probably be that Obama was making a theatrical point and when Bush dropped his "g's", he was being authentic. Come on. George W. Bush is the son of George H. W. Bush. He graduated Phillips Academy, Yale and Harvard Business School. Does anyone really believe that he can't, for the life of him, pronounce "nuclear" properly? It's not as if it's a hard word to say. I have to believe that when he says "nucular", it's a calculated ploy that he thinks makes his sound more down-to-earth, just as I have to believe that anybody who says "miss cheveyous" in my presence is trying to drive me up onto the nearest clock tower with a rifle, because what other reason could they have? As anyone who's read A. J. Liebling's The Earl of Louisiana knows, politics is a performance art, and Bush performed the role of a shitkicker, (Ronald Reagan, Bush's role model, also tried to come across as a cowboy, but he would have never thought of dropping his "g's" in public, because he had grown up poor and hadn't gone to any fine schools, and so wanted to sound like someone who should be taken seriously.) This is only a problem if you'd really rather have a baffled, cretinous shitkicker like Rick Perry in charge because he's more "authentic", just as some poor lost souls would rather listen to Otis Blackwell sing than Elvis Presley. But it is perplexing that some people do think that, because of their conception of what an American president ought to sound like, George W. Bush talking like a country lout sounds more authentic than Barack Obama no matter what he sounds like.

Very Bad Things

There's an episode of Miami Vice--I hope you kids will forgive old Gramps for his periodic attacks of '80s nostalgia--featuring Ned Eisenberg as a smarmy, self-satisfied yuppie drug dealer who makes a point of never being anywhere where his product is being traded or enjoyed. He won't even refer to it by name. Frustrating the cops in their attempts to get him to put in an appearance at one of his own coke deals and thus render him arrestable, he smirks and says, "I stay away from the bad thing." In Republican racial politics in the era of Obama and the Tea Party, the word "nigger" is The Bad Thing. Somebody at a rally has a sign calling the President a monkey? Hey, people used to refer to George Bush, Jr. as "Incurious George"! Do Obama's enemies routinely go beyond questioning his patriotism to questioning whether he's even a citizen of this country, and insist that he's also concealing his true religious affiliation? Surely the blame for this must lie with Obama himself, for being such a radical maniac with such anti-American, un-Christian values. Certainly no one who opposes the President on political grounds is uncomfortable with the idea of a black man in the White House, and no one would ever attack him on purely racial grounds--the only grounds that Tea Parties can see anyone would ever have for criticizing Clarence Thomas or Herman Cain. The proof of this is that none of the monkey-sign-waving birther patriots has ever said the word "nigger" in front of a TV camera, or if he has, he was quickly disinvited from any future events and his pocket copy of the Constitution was shredded. Now that George Allen is on the comeback trail, some observers have rushed to the lard-headed former Senator's aid by insisting that the word "macaca" isn't really a racial slur and that Allen was unfairly pilloried for using it while jeering at an Indian-American student who was filming him at his campaign rallies. It's a lot easier to insist that the candidate was just stringing together nonsense syllables than it is to explain away Allen's gleeful, bullying tone as he zeroed in on a native-born Virginian with a darker skin tone than most of the people at the rally and egged the other people in the crowd to "Welcome [him] to America, and the real world of Virginia." It sure sounds (and, on the video, looks) like someone who judges people who look different than him as The Other and enjoys seeing them ganged up on, but as long as he doesn't use that word, how can we know what's really in his heart, right?

The story about Rick Perry's family hunting camp is a priceless example of why so many white Americans-- especially those of a certain age, who grew up a time when the thought that the title "President" might come before a name like "Barack Obama" would have been unthinkable--think that liberal sensitives about race are something that were invented as some kind of entrapment device. As the Washington Post reports, Perry's hunting camp was "known by the name ["Niggerhead"] painted in block letters across a large, flat rock standing upright at its gated entrance... Ranchers who once grazed cattle on the 1,070-acre parcel on the Clear Fork of the Brazos River called ...[the area] by that name well before Perry and his father, Ray, began hunting there in the early 1980s. There is no definitive account of when the rock first appeared on the property. In an earlier time, the name on the rock was often given to mountains and creeks and rock outcroppings across the country. Over the years, civil rights groups and government agencies have had some success changing those and other racially offensive names that dotted the nation’s maps. But the name of this particular parcel did not change for years after it became associated with Rick Perry, first as a private citizen, then as a state official and finally as Texas governor. Some locals still call it that. As recently as this summer, the slablike rock — lying flat, the name still faintly visible beneath a coat of white paint — remained by the gated entrance to the camp." It's not as if Perry gave the place that name, or painted the word on that rock. It would be nice, though, to truly know how he feels about it.

In reference to the term "Niggerhead", Perry has said that it's "an offensive name that has no place in the modern world." Does he think it had a place before the arrival of the modern world? It's an honest thing to be concerned about, especially considering that Perry has said time and time again that this country went off the rails i the 1930s, a core belief that would seem to indicate a feeling that we'd be better off without a lot of things that do have their place in the modern world. Perry, the Post notes, "grew up in a segregated era whose history has defined and complicated the careers of many Southern politicians. Perry has spoken often about how his upbringing in this sparsely populated farming community influenced his conservatism. He has rarely, if ever, discussed what it was like growing up amid segregation in an area where blacks were a tiny fraction of the population." Southern politicians of Perry's generation are boxed in, in a way, because they have to court the votes of people who may have a sentimental attachment to, or at least not feel bad about, things that seem repulsive to those who didn't grow up seeing segregated water fountains and the occasional lynching as "just the way things are." Haley Barbour, governor of my old home state of Mississippi, got in trouble last year when he waxed nostalgic about the Magnolia State of his golden youth, the time of the murders of civil rights leaders and the White Citizens Council, which he seemed to think was some kind of bake-sale operation. Barbour insisted that there was no big deal about race in Mississippi then, despite the fact that the state's hang-ups have left it crippled economically and every other way in the decades since. And Barbour is, at a conservative estimate, about two hundred fifty thousand kajillion times smarter than Rick Perry, the most obvious proof of this being that he had sense enough to ignore the people who were telling him that he'd make one hell of a presidential candidate.

After Barbour's comments hit the wires, some huffy conservative pundits scolded nasty liberals, who demonstrate that they're the only real racists around whenever they're so tacky as detect racism in something or someone, for taking a shot at someone who had only done the natural, good-American thing and stuck up for his home town. Everybody should stick up for his home town, they figure, no matter what happened there, unless his home town is Berkeley or Cambridge, in which case he'd better prove how patriotic he is by needing to be physically restrained from burning it to the ground. You may recall that after Trent Lott allowed as how we wouldn't have had these problems we've been having since the '60s if only we'd elected a good segregationist Dixiecrat president, there were a lonely few who couldn't figure out what was so awful about saying something nice to a harmless old man at his birthday party. Nobody should be judged for the sins of our nation's past, but as a writer whose taste for the grotesque would scarcely have precluded him from making any of these guys up once put it, the past isn't dead; it isn't even past. Politicians like Perry and Barbour don't merely skirt the issue of how they would have voted in the days of segregation, they press the issue (and their luck) by romanticizing that past as a simpler, better time, and by wrapping themselves in the flag of "states' rights", a term that they know perfectly well was once the sole property of those who opposed legally mandated racial equality. By doing so, they're the ones raising the issue of how they really feel about an America that has changed so much since the Jim Crow era that it amounts to a repudiation of it, and how much they have in common with voters who clearly see that repudiation, summed up in the image of a black president--in the image of happily interracial crowds, crowds densely packed with interracial couples, cheering for him--disorienting, deranging, horrifying, and deeply painful.

It would be a great thing if someone could talk straight about this, though that now seems less likely than that we'll have an uncomfortable few decades ahead of us as we wait for the last politicians to have had their values and world view shaped partly in a segregated South to die off. If we ever hear straight talk on this subject or anything else, it won't be from Perry. As with the details of his executive order on the anti-cervical cancer vaccine--how much did he get from Merck in campaign contributions, when did he meet the cancer victim lobbyist who he says shaped his thinking on the issue--Perry has responded to questions about when he did something about that rock by vacillating wildly, lying about what was done by whom and when. In all these cases, he probably doesn't think he's lying. He probably thinks he knows what was in his heart and it's his responsibility to help people understand the "truth" by assembling a story that's best designed to understand what that is. He probably thinks that it's the people who keep coming back with these facts and dates that expose his distortions as the ones who are unnecessarily confusing people by bringing up a bunch of stuff that's not as important as the not-quite-true story that he sees as best reflection of how the real person inside him would have handled things, if only he'd been a little quicker. I doubt that Perry, for all his thickness, is a Neanderthal racist who lurches around his hunting grounds dropping "N"-bombs and thanking God for James Earl Ray. He probably just never saw what was the big deal about some dumb old word painted on a dumb old rock. Perry is definitely not smart enough to ever understand why his relationship to and attitudes about the segregation past might seem troubling to anyone; if he'd been in politics back then, he probably would have battled desegregation and stood in school house doorways, because back then, that's how you flaunted your manly son-of-the-secessionist-soil bona fides. But he's in politics now, and so he affects dismay at the word "Nigger", though it took a while for his dismay to reach the point of wanting to cover it up. If it's true that he invited umpteen people to visit his hunting camp before finally doing something about the rock, then the most revealing thing about this is simply the fact that he didn't think any of them would be so dismayed that they'd turn around and leave, let alone remember it and tell a reporter about it years later. That strikes me as the mark of someone who probably thinks he's not a racist, because he doesn't want to bring back slavery or back-of-the-bus seating or anything, but who doesn't mind hearing a good "nigger joke", provided it's told the right way: i.e., in the company of the right people, who'll understand that it's just a joke and nothing to get pissy about.

The weirdest thing about the story so far is Herman Cain's rush to denounce Perry, and not just because it gives us the chance to savor seeing a Republican front runner getting a racist (or, at least, racially insensitive) by a black conservative who talks about Muslim as if they pieces of human shit and who has already said that he could never support Perry as a candidate because he finds the Texas governor's views on immigration to be unacceptably tolerant and non-bigoted. Cain is beloved by Tea Partiers, in no small part because they think the combination of his skin color and his politics make him the anti-Obama; his recent victory in the Florida straw poll was even seen as the final proof absolving all Tea Party Republicans everywhere of charges of racism. How will these people react to Cain's seizing on the appearance of The Bad Word in a big story about Perry as a chance to take a cudgel to the guy? Will they regard it as cynical and opportunistic, which is certainly how they'd see it if it were Obama speaking out? Or will they agree that Perry has, in a little over a month, gone from potential messiah to sacrificial lamb, a man who needs to be put out of his party's misery, and who can now be used to demonstrate that Tea Party Republicans are so far from racist that they will simply have no truck with a man who once showed insufficient horror in the face of that word?

At this point, Perry's relationship to the truth strikes me as the most objectionable thing about him. In 2000, once the media approved the meme that Al Gore was a pathological liar, it generated reams of incidents to prove the point. All were petty, most were based on serious distortions of what Gore had said, some were outright fabrications. And none added up to anything like the continuous, clumsy, self-destructive pattern of lying about his own past that Perry has shown himself to be into, a pattern that includes his wriggling away from the extreme, unelectable positions that he took in the book and public appearances that were geared towards winning over the Tea Party and that led to a "Draft Perry" movement in the first place. But it's unlikely that the media is about to redefine Perry as, first and foremost, a helpless and egregious liar. It's already defined him as, first and foremost, a yammering idiot, and anyone who reads the papers knows that you can't very well be two things at the same time.