The Phil Nugent Experience

Drinking It All In

2012-01-13T08:18:00.002-05:00

I really do intend to get the shop open again on semi-regular hours sometime soon, and I hate to pop in again just long enough to leave the impression that all I do now is write about Pauline Kael and those whose ships crossed hers in the night. But this--Sarah Weinman's Slate article about Penelope Gilliatt, which the site is touting with the let's-insult-tjhe-intelligence-of-any-six-year-olds-reading-this teaser headline "Did You Know Pauline Kael Had a Co-Critic? You'll Never Guess What Happened to Her."--is too good to leave alone. As I'm betting anyone who could conceivably give a rat's ass already knows quite well, Gilliatt, who also wrote fiction and the screenplay for John Schlesinger's Sunday, Bloody Sunday, covered movies for The New Yorker six months out of every year from 1968 to 1979, the same period of time that Kael was covering them during the other six. Gilliatt was also one of the wives of the playwright John Osborne, which means that she is fated to be best remembered as a supporting player in the biographies and memoirs of two writers who were justly more famous than herself. Her early talent, which was indeed considerable, came to a full stop in the mid-1970s, when she began dealing with this situation by self-medicating with a bottle, and there's a touching story in Brian Kellow's recent book about Kael describing how a bunch of film critics attending a press screening found themselves in an Exterminating Angel situation when Gilliatt showed up late and passed just before entering the room, so that her fallen body was blocking the door.

Shortly after Kael took her notoriously ill-fated sabbatical to the West Coast, Gilliatt was let go after it came out that she had plagiarized the shit out of another writer in an otherwise inaccuracy-laden profile of Graham Greene. (Greene himself had written in to William Shawn to complain about it, even before the writer whose work she'd pilfered spoke up.) Shawn, who clearly thought that the ordinary rules of basic morality didn't have to apply to his pets, actually tried to guilt-trip the victim into keeping quiet about it, but the story got out, and he was forced to get rid of her. Weinman writes that he "mishandled" the affair--true enough, but I get the feeling that she thinks that he left Gilliatt unprotected by accepting her copy and not assuming that he had a word thief on the payroll, and that she thinks he would have also mishandled things if he had done the only correct thing he could have done, i.e,. spit in her face, kick her down the stairs, and leave orders with the security guards that she was to be shot on sight if she was ever seen skulking around the building again. She does know that what Gilliatt did was not just indefensible but automatically revoked her right to ever appear in print again, right? I never thought I'd say this, but I almost have to wonder if there might have been a downside to Slate's having fired Jack Shafer.

Leaving aside her perhaps too tender feelings towards those who, by their transgresses, make it clear that they have nothing but loathing for their subjects and anyone stupid enough to pay them for their writing or to read it, Weinman thinks that Gilliatt's early, good work deserves to be remembered, which is certainly fair. She also thinks that Kael's work suffered when she returned to the magazine, full-time, without a counterexample, which, you know, to each his own. But she also claims that the drunken, thieving hulk that was all that was left of Gilliatt in her later years had some retrievable writing left in her. The proof? She wrote of Richard Pryor that “his sharpest comedy is based on his certainty that blacks are the only group that any observer could believe to exist." Ho-kay, fine. Now, here's what Pauline Kael wrote about Pryor years earlier: "Pryor's comedy isn't based on suspiciousness about whites, or on anger, either; he's gone way beyond that. Whites are unbelievable to him." I love that Weinman's argument for the valued of Gilliatt's post-plagiarism work is that she was able to take an observation by Pauline Kael and reword it so that it sounds like it came from Queen Victoria.

What I Also Did on My Christmas Break

2012-01-03T11:09:00.002-05:00

I got married the day before Thanksgiving, and between that, this, and the other thing, I've been letting stuff pile up around here, even the little things like stray links. My apologies. Anyway, one thing I forgot to do is alert you to the appearance of Burning Ambulance #5, which features an awesome cover package on the awesome Burnt Sugar, Also included is my essay on Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop,, which was adapted from this. It is different from my other writing, in that I kind of like it. Please read it and like it and then submit it to Let's Get Critical, which is my current favorite time-wasting mechanism until the return of Portlandia. If you're pressed for time, you can just skip the part where you read it and like it.

Pretty Much the Tail End of 2011 at The A.V. Club

2012-01-03T10:16:00.005-05:00

Hell on Wheels: "Pride, Pomp, and Curcumstance"

Leverage: "The Girls' Night Out Job"

Fear Factor

Raising Hope: "It's a Hopeful Life"

Fear and Desire

Cheers: "Coach Returns to Action"/ "Endless Slumper"

I Learned It at the Movies: How to Celebrate the Holidays [ The Thin Man; The Shop Around the Corner; On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Frozen River ]

Jimmy Kimmel Live

Hell on Wheels: "Revelations"

Leverage: "The Boys' Night Out Job"

Inventory: Every Time a Bell Rings... [ Raising Hope; Married... with Children; Saturday Night Live; The Simpsons; Dallas ]

Lidia Celebrates America

Best TV of 2011 [Enlightened]

Beyond the Top 30: Other 2011 TV Highlights

The TV Club Awards 2011 [ Connie Britton; Downton Abbey; Upstairs, Downstairs; The Playboy Club ]

Cheers: "One for the Book"/ "The Spy Who Came in for a Cold One"

Leverage: "The Lonely Hearts Job"

The 34th Annual Kennedy Center Honors

Best of the Best-Ofs

Leverage: "The Gold Job"

Hell on Wheels: "Derailed"

Too Soon

2011-12-16T13:40:00.002-05:00
If you're the kind of person who'd ever felt, for so much as a second, that your lifetime would be the poorer for it without a big, morally clear-cut, global battle between good and evil to decide the fate of the planet, and you were able to convince yourself that invading Iraq as part of the reaction to 9/11 was that conflict, that I can totally see how you'd be the kind of person who thinks that Christopher Hitchens was a great writer and thinker and one of the moral compasses of his generation.

Of Fairly Recent Vintage at The A.V. Club

2011-12-10T19:04:00.005-05:00

Leverage: "The Experimental Job"

Hell on Wheels: "Jemais Je Ne T'oublierai"

Pure Sabacc Wins Again [Rollerball and Quintet]

Raising Hope: "Bro-gurt"

Cheers: "Coach's Daughter"/"Any Friend of Diane's"

Starving Secrets with Tracey Gold

Northern Exposure: "Seoul Mates"

Leverage: "The Office Job"

Hell on Wheels: "Bread and Circuses"

Castle: "Cuffed"

Raising Hope: "The Men of New Natesville"

Cheers: "Friends, Romans, Accountants/ Truce or Consequences"

Two Saturday Night Live Christmases: 1975 and 1976

Hoovering It Up

2011-11-20T08:31:00.005-05:00

If your idea of a good time is finding reasons to be interested in Clint Eastwood movies, J. Edgar is sort of interesting as the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of Clint's efforts to come to terms with the fact of homosexuality. Back in the '70s, the early Dirty Harry movies had a homophobic subtext--Scorpio. the extortionist hippie serial killer of the first one, paid Harry a leering compliment on the size of his gun, and the secret police death squad in motorcycle gear of Magnum Force looked as if they'd stepped out of Scorpio Rising--that went surface text at the end of the third film in the series, The Enforcer, the one where Harry adds insult to injury by calling the chief bad guy a "fucking fruit" as he blows him away. That was back when Eastwood was regarded as an action caveman by most critics. Now that he's a serious auteur in the winter of his career, he has to be more thoughtful about these things, or at least more solemn. Previously, his biggest attempt to reach out came in 1997's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, arguably his worst movie as a director, or at least the most migraine-inducing. Eager to use the story of a man who murders his male lover as a chance to show that he and the gays could just get along, Eastwood cast the drag queen Lady Chablis, who had a minor real-life connection to the events depicted, as herself, then just kept handing her more and more "screen time", a term that, in this context, is synonymous with "rope."

J. Edgar is a long, uninspired slog of a movie built around the recurring image of J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) standing on the balcony of his office, acknowledging the inaugural procession of one new President after another, as the years slip by and he remains solidly in place as the head of the FBI. The movie is very impressed with its idea that Hoover was a man trapped inside his own paranoid head, running old newsreels between his ears, while history was moving on somewhere outside his diminishing reach. (He's right to keep his distance; whenever he gets to close to history itself, performances as bad as Jeffrey Donovan's Robert Kennedy, and a cussing Nixon who would embarrass the one in the movie version of Watchmen, keep invading his and the viewers' space. Donovan plays Kennedy the way anyone who's watched him struggle with accents on Burn Notice would expect him to, and the movie's Nixon looks like Norm Macdonald with his hair colored with a black magic marker.) The core emotional relationship in the movie is the one between Hoover and Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), the FBI agent who was Hoover's closest friend and associate throughout his whole working life and who is commonly assumed to have been, in some way or other, the love of his life.

In photos, Tolson looks like the presentably bland Joe Friday prototype of Hoover's dreams, and it's a good joke to imagine them spending their lives together looking like the straightest guys in the world, the perfect products of the closet. But while DiCaprio gives a perfectly creditable performance, Hammer has been encouraged to act like... well, not a screaming queen, exactly, but a beautiful, fluttery Tim Gunn type who teaches J. Edgar how to dress in all the best shops and complains that one female entertainer is "too camp for me." Speculation about Hoover's sexuality didn't really take off until after Hoover and Tolson were both dead. If this guy were at Hoover's side for five minutes, let alone his whole life, people never would have stopped speculating about them. (Hammer's performance gets worse at it goes along, because he has no idea how to act like an old person. The Crypt Keeper makeup job doesn't help.) Maybe this is Eastwood's only idea of how a gay man who's comfortable with who he is might act. If it is, then the movie is of a piece: a portrait of a man whose mind never left the Victorian era, from one who's more of his soul mate than he knows.

Creamed Kael

2011-11-19T20:17:00.006-05:00
I was all revved up to check out Brian Kellow's Pauline Kael: A life in the Dark after reading Manhola Dargis and A. O. Scott "discuss" Kael's legacy in The New York Times. (I put the word "discuss" in quotes because it actually reads like Dargis standing on her desk yelling into a bullhorn while Scott wanders around the room trying to find his glasses, occasionally looking up from the sofa cushions to mutter, "Yeah, sure, whatever. The seventies, death of film!") Dargis, who says that Kael's work doesn't do anything for her anymore, joins a long line of people who have detected flaws in Kael's writing and immediately proceeded to the dual insight that her whole career was shit and she was also a very bad person. "Given how badly she comes across in the biography — palling around with filmmakers she reviewed is merely the beginning — she doesn’t set a good example," Dargis writes, before going on to say that whatever influence Kael's name still holds has little to do with her "ideas, pugilistic writing style, ethical lapses and cruelties (and not merely in her reviews." I got the impression that this was going to be one of those books, such as Ian Hamilton's Robert Lowell or Albert Goldman's Elvis, that reels all around the vomitorium, full of disgust for its own subject, who is revealed to have committed a bevy of gaudy sins against taste and decency. I like Kael, but I like gossip, too. I couldn't wait to get my hands on the thing.

With all due respect to one of the leading critics for the cultural section of our most important national newspaper after USA Today, Dargis needs to trade in her crack dealer. Where's the goods? Kael had a weird relationship with her daughter, who Kellow describes as practically being her mother's indentured servant. (Later, her grandson had her wrapped around his little finger. I confess to recognizing a not-altogether-unfamiliar pattern from families I have known firsthand.) Some of Kael's "cruelties" sound pretty funny from a distance, such as the scene where she greets the announcement that her daughter is getting married with a loud, "Oh, shit!" Others I don't really buy, such as the description of her torturing an ailing and over-the-hill Nicholas Ray by enumerating his films' failings over lunch, until the broken old maverick can barely stand to hold his head. (That story comes from a memoir-essay from reformed "Paulette" David Denby, which itself must be one of the strangest documents that has ever been used to space out the perfume ads in The New Yorker. It begins with Denby going on about how he was encouraged in his career as a movie critic by Kael, but that her malign influence was so great on the sensitive, impressionable writer he was then that he found himself crippled, writing in plain imitation of her voice. Then, he says, she sat him down over lunch--why did people keep accepting her invitations to restaurants?--and told him that she didn't think his movie criticism was cutting it and he should try something else. Denby presents this as both a traumatic moment for him and a gross violation of the proper decencies by Kael, even though, if he means the stuff he'd shoveled at the start of the essay, she was agreeing with him about his own estimation of his work, assuring him that he was right to be concerned about it, and suggesting an alternate route. Instead, Kael's telling him what he claims to have already known apparently strengthened his resolve to become the lamest and most undeservedly successful film critic of his generation, a goal that he has since made good on. In fact, he made it look easy.)

Kael is also said to have had unethical dealings with a fellow from whom she pinched much of the research that went into her book-length essay on Citizen Kane, stealing even the staggering insight that, when the dying Charles Foster Kane says "Rosebud" on his deathbed, there isn't anybody in the room to hear him. That essay, which remains a delight as a piece of writing and as an argument for Kane's place in the line of screwball-comedy newspaper movies, will always be a thorn bush, especially for those who think that it was an attempt to shaft Orson Welles out of his proper due, a broad fraternity that I do not happen to belong to. (It also contains maybe the single weirdest slip of Kael's career, when she insisted that a scene in which Kane has been eating in the newspaper office,a scene which looks carefully prepared and acted and appears in the script, was "clearly" just caught by the camera, and that Welles had to include it in the finished film to show what a sport he was. John Gregory Dunne would use that as proof that, for all the smarty-pants airs Kael put on in print, she didn't know jack shit about how movies were made. Reasons for Kael's worthlessness as a critic and as a human being--she was too "pop", she had a potty mouth, she was a homophobe, she was a self-hating anti-Semite-- kept coming in shifts, disappearing, and then re-emerging--and the "she didn't understand the technical process of moviemaking" one has recently made a comeback, with Clive James citing it in a recent article about the latest edition of David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film to explain why he had once been a Paulette but now wouldn't cross the street to piss on her grave. As someone who has dared to review records even though I can't read music, I am not the best candidate to share James's scorn on this point.

Dargis refers to the big, big thing Kael is supposed to have done wrong (besides write all that stuff, of course) when she mentions that all that "palling around with filmmakers she reviewed", much as the young Barack Obama was bad to pal around with terrorists. Although Kael crossed paths with a number of filmmakers, and was lured out to Hollywood by one of them, Warren Beatty, for a brief and unfruitful stint trying to work as a Hollywood player, the most social contact with a director that Kellow describes is with James Toback, who she scarcely elevated to major status in any way. Dargis isn't the only woman who had problems, in a big way, with Kael's work: Renata Adler wrote probably the best-known attempt to turn her "legacy" to ashes in The New York Review of Books, and the former Village Voice critic Georgia Brown once committed to print a deranged piece, complaining about the witch had sent forth her winged monkeys to taint the results of the 1989 New York Film Critics Circle Awards. (Probably the definitive Kael-haters' unintentional self-parody, it proceeded from the assumption that only racism could cause someone to prefer any movie released that year to Do the Right Thing and fully blasted off when Brown marveled that anyone could be so blind to true artistic greatness to think that Tom Cruise and his prosthetic balding pattern in Born on the Fourth of July had not soundly bested that sorry hack, Daniel Day-Lewis.)

Still, anyone who thinks that Kael's personal connections to filmmakers and time spent away from her writing desk count that much against her, and who would argue that this has nothing to do with her being a woman, had better have a solid explanation for why there's never been much of a movement for driving Edmund Wilson's reputation underground after he rewarded Anais Nin for some time in the sack with an insincerely flattering review, or why it doesn't matter so much that James Agee, who was the first film critic to get his own volume in the Library of America, wrote film scripts, including one for a director, John Huston, he'd praised as practically the only real director in Hollywood, or why nobody much minds Roger Ebert having written scripts for Russ Meyer. Or is it less of a conflict of interest in their cases because they actually got something on the screen, and the credits to go with them? In a crowd of reviewers, an actual credit on a major theatrical release, whether it's The African Queen or Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, might do as much to legitimize one's status as possession of a penis.

For those who've read the most overheated denunciations of Kael and her social set, or just who've been impressed by the hedonistic thrust of her writing, the biggest news to come out of the biography is that Kael's sex life seems to have just stopped around the time she had her daughter, when she was about thirty. Not a hundred pages into the book, Kellow has so little to report about her personal life that the prose dries up and the biography turns into an annotated series of capsule descriptions of her reviews of the biggest pictures of the day. This is all right for what it is, though Kellow might have done a better job of keeping his bewilderment towards her admiration of Brian De Palma to himself--he writes that she "inexplicably" included Dressed to Kill as one her NYFCC nominees for Best Picture of 1980--considering that it's almost as if as a biographer of Clement Greenberg just didn't get what his subject ever saw in Jackson Pollack. He also commits a few slips himself--inexplicably, as he might say, considering how far it must be from real work to accurately synopsize movie reviews-- and at one point, whether through sloppy writing or an astonishing act of misreading, makes it seem as if he's reporting that Kael had something approving to say about Love Story. ("This thing is so instinctively, plus manipulatively, engineered to leave 'em crying that it could hardly fail commercially even if the actors were programmed by Terry Southern to make obscene gestures at the audience at ten-second intervals.") I am glad I read it, though, partly because, especially if you read between the lines, it casts Kael's palling around, especially with younger critics, in a much sweeter, less sinister light than we're used to seeing. Kael was in her late forties when she finally got The New Yorker gig and started making a modest living wage from her writing, and most of the years that preceded that lucky break were grimmer and lonelier than anyone reading her high-wattage, laugh-a-minute prose would likely have guessed. Some people will always see her as some combination of Circe and the Wicked Witch of the West, drawing a crowd of shapable young minds around her to corrupt them with her love of Harry Ritz, but she sounds to me like someone who'd waited a long time for the chance to have spending money, and an audience, and some people to hang out with.

A lot of people who'll leave a bigger carbon footprint on the art of writing about film than Manohla Dargis, let alone Georgia Brown, have regarded Kael as a pure menace. (Andrew Sarris, who Kael seems not to have ever mentioned in print again after the legendary takedown "Circles and Squares", often dropped her name in his writing, in a way that implied that he saw her as serving the role in his life and career that Lex Luthor served for Superman.) The arrival of a selection of her work, edited by the art critic Sanford Schwartz, and published as part of the Library of America, is designed to turn people who used to be on the fence into hardcore, frothing haters, and make long-term haters' heads explode. Personally, I think that David Ansen summed up the real reason that Kael pissed off so many people in ways they find unforgivable when he said that she had the unique gift of making you "feel like an asshole" for disagreeing with her." Another critic, Richard T. Jameson, once wrote that Kael "demonstrated the viability of a kick-him-in-the-nuts style of argumentation that continues to pass as the bottom line in truth telling, for many readers and not a few emulators," and the concept of a "truth teller" is based on the idea that a lot of people are wolfing down bullshit and asking for seconds. Some of the standard knocks against Kael as something other than an honest critic--her reputation as someone who based her reviews on a single viewing of a movie and wasn't constantly rushing in with freshly "revised" opinions used to be two big ones--amount to disapproval that a critic might have enough confidence in her own way of seeing to reject received opinion and not even pretend to feel apologetic about it. (Maybe the closest Kael ever came to apologizing for her opinion was with the preface to her pan of Shoah, a plea for the readers' forbearance which William Shawn demanded as a precondition for even running the review. Kellow performs a long-overdue public service by printing the dry-edged judgment of The New Yorker's crack European correspondent Jane Kramer--"[Claude] Lanzmann was such a sanctimonious presence--kind of like the Elie Wisel of filmmakers. He sure as hell wasn't the Primo Levi"--alongside the objections of a raft of critics, most of whom can't seem to offer up anything more thoughtful than the embarrassing notion that, if someone spends years of his life making an epic-length documentary about the Holocaust, then it's just basic math that the resulting work cannot be criticized.)

If Kael was a polarizing writer, that's partly because she was so passionate about the arts that she was inspiring. The strangest crack in the Dargis/Scott piece is Dargis's remark that she didn't seem to care much about life outside the movies. One of the biggest things that sets Kael's work apart from most of what passes for film criticism now is that Kael was interested in so much besides movies and brought her insights about painting, music, opera, theater, and books to bear on movies, whereas most movie writers today really don't have demonstrate much of a reference field outside movies, and maybe TV. (When A. O. Scott was first hired by the Times as a movie critic, Roger Ebert complained that Scott wasn't qualified to write about movies, because he'd mostly worked published literary criticism.) It was precisely because Kael knew of traditions and developments in the arts outside the multiplex that she often failed to be impressed by ideas and attitudes that seemed dazzling to people who'd just seen them, for the first time in their lives, in a movie. Maybe it was because she had other things to do that she concentrated on what was on the screen and was never one for indulging a conceptual experiment or misfire that seemed "interesting" if you held it up the light and read something into it. In one of their previous thought-experiment duets with Scott, their defense of the "boring" qualities of work produced by, say, Kelly Reichardt, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Jia Zhangke, and A. O. Scott and Manohla Dargis, Dargis wrote that "[Andy] Warhol’s own films are almost always called boring, usually by people who have never seen or sampled one, including minimalist epics like Empire, eight hours of the Empire State Building that subverts the definition of what a film is (entertaining, for one)." My definition of someone who needs to get more of a life outside movies would begin with anyone who would sit through all eight hours of Empire and then emerge with the news that the experience was worthwhile because not being entertained for eight hours served to challenge the notion that art should be entertaining. (I tend to agree with the idea, promulgated by Dwight Macdonald, who called Warhol's movies "boring mystifications", that art is entertaining or it's nothing. Of course, some people--for all I know, Dargis might be one of them--are silly enough to associate the word "entertaining" only with shallow pleasures. A Monet's water lilies occupy the mind and eye in a pleasurable and interesting way, and so are entertaining. A Transformers movie does not, and so isn't. A J. Hoberman dissertation of a Clint Eastwood movie like Heartbreak Ridge is entertaining, though it doesn't make the movie any better. A Manohla Dargis explication of a dull but ambitious Eastwood movie such as Gran Torino or J. Edgar achieves an exquisite match between the value of the thing itself and its subject matter, but you still can't get back the five minutes you wasted while reading it.)

The Library of America book doesn't include either "Circles or Squares" or the review of Love Story. Like For Keeps, the best-of anthology that Kael helped assemble in the '90s, it focuses on raves, and seriously limits the number of pans. This is nice in theory, but regrettable in action, because even though Kael was one of the few movie critics who was as much fun to read when she was breaking out the champagne as she was when she had her cutlas at the ready, many of her most vicious reviews contain her clearest statements of aesthetic preference. Kael scattered a lot of opinions over the years, and some of them, God help us, may have been "wrong". (Manny Farber, the other critic who preceded Kael to his own volume in the Library of America, was "wrong" at least as often, and was a fair match for it when it came to brazenly telling people they, and their favorite films, were full of shit. Maybe he never inspired anything remotely like as much vitriol as Kael because he never had as respectable a perch as The New Yorker. Then again, I'm betting that the fact that he had a penis made him seem more reasonable to a great many people.) What can her writing, or Farber's, mean to people who are perfectly comfortable with the state of film criticism these days, when a strong writer with an unusual point of view (and, to be fair, a habit of praising movies I find atrocious and dumping on others that I think are the berries) like Armond White is regularly dismissed as a deliberate troublemaker who's just pretending to deviate from the pack to "call attention to himself"? One of the comic high points of the Dargis/Scott exchange comes when Dargis writes that Kael thought that movies and movie criticism had lost something in the early 1980s and, rolling her eyes in print, notes that at the same time Kael was expressing this opinion, Siskel and Ebert had become a very hot act on TV! (Another comes when she rejects the idea that there's anything wrong with movie criticism these days, when "there’s an astonishing amount of exciting work coming out of academia.") Roger Ebert has become a universally beloved nice guy, but he and his late co-host also defined a colorless, juiceless alternative to real criticism where any film that sets out to satisfy certain predigested requirements for "entertainment", based on one's expectations set by previous films and promises made in the advertising, is objectively "good" and gets a thumbs-up, and any film that wanders into unfamiliar terrain, whether it's a Blue Velvet or The Brood, stands accused of being too smarty-pants big for its britches and gets a thumbs-down. Even if you don't mind the good or great films that get the short end of the stick by this method, that still makes up for a hell of a lot of pointless, unnecessary, hacky-ass movies that are automatically given their thumbs-up. It's helped land us in a world where people are less interested in reading a review by someone who's seen a movie and gotten something different out of it than they might have than in making sure all the ducks are in a row when their latest favorite is assigned its rating at Rotten Tomatoes.

Ebert was always predictable, and he helped midwife a safely predictable media landscape where everybody knew what everyone else was going to think and the crazies like Armond White are not only denigrated for being out of step with received opinion but scolded for being "wrong" in bad faith; how can anybody hate a Pixar movie and mean it? In that Times piece, Scott does bestir himself at the end when he wonders why Sarris and Kael ever had a feud. After all, Sarris was advocating the "auteur" theory, which proposed that movie directors are artists, and Kael thought they were artists too, so what's the beef? His confusion here is based on an increasingly common problem among people who, I guess, haven't actually read either "Circles and Squares" or the Sarris essay that Kael was responding to. Sarris, in his less-than-proudest moments, seemed to be trying to sell the idea that if a given director was worthy of consideration as an artist, then that meant that all his work, even the hackiest stuff that he did on his off days, was worthy of deep consideration, and that seemingly lesser films by someone like Otto Preminger or Raoul Walsh gained in interest if you could detect thematic "links" between them and, say, Laura or High Sierra. In retrospect, he seems to have been trying to elevate movies to the status of literature by showing that you could make the same mistakes in studying them that had traditionally been made by the dullest and most bone-headed literary critics of their day. Kael wasn't having this, partly because she didn't think that the secret to finding art in movies lay in talking as if you were talking about something more culturally respectable, and partly because she insisted on taking every new encounter with a movie as its own unique experience. This meant that, for all her reputation for playing favorites, Kael panned a lot of movies that happened to be the work of directors she officially championed--movies by Altman, Peckinpah, De Palma, even Jean Renoir--and praised many movies by directors who she had most often derided (Alan Parker's Shoot the Moon, James Bridges's Mike's Murder, Herbert Ross's Pennies from Heaven). Meanwhile, Sarris was stuck, having once detected some trace of artistry in the work of Blake Edwards, with having to re-watch Darling Lili over and over until he could finally report to his breathless readers that it didn't look that bad on the thirty-second go.

The conventional image of a writer who loves Pauline Kael is someone who, well, grew up wanting to be Pauline Kael. Me, I grew up wanting to be James Wolcott. It was Wolcott I first discovered, when I was still an obnoxious little blot on the Mississippi landscape, reading his TV column in The Village Voice in the early '80s. I had gotten the subscription through the mail, thanks to one of those little cardboard flyers that used to littler the hallways of public schools, and as I first perused the confusing jumble of that paper, I zeroed in on Wolcott partly because, writing about TV, he was the critic who was most likely to be writing about something I'd actually seen. He was effortlessly sharp and funny in those days, and seemed to know everything about everything, and I pictured him as looking like Sami Frey in The Little Drummer Girl, a world-weary, sardonic grin in black leather. I finally got to see him when he appeared on The Dick Cavett Show, and it was a rude shock to see that he looked pudgy and pasty, with limp hair that was too long for the shape of his head--that is to say, an older version of myself. Reading his own new memoir, Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York,a good chunk of which is devoted to his relationship with Kael, iI got a sick rush from discovering how shambling and unsure of himself Wolcott really was at the time that my pimply-faced ignorant ass was venerating his image, back in the sticks.

Of all these books, I did get my biggest laugh out of Wolcott's, when he describes hanging out at Kael's office at The New Yorker, doing an impression of Redd Foxx staggering around clutching his chest whenever William Shawn tried using his legendary heart condition to try to talk Kael out of threatening to review Deep Throat or saying mean things about li'l Terry Malick. (Wolcott assures us that he was careful not to do it when there were other people around.) I can't say I enjoyed his memoir as much as I would a collection of his old Voice columns--is there really no market in the publishing industry for thirty-year-old thoughts on The Good Neighbors?--but it does convey a melancholy sense of a lost New York world where people could care about punk rock and the ballet and even find other mad dreamers to hang out with and shoot the shit about said obsessions. How much of that world is really lost, even with Ballanchine dead and CBGB's shuttered, and how much of it was simply pissed away by Wolcott is another thing: Given how important Kael's role is in his book, there's no getting around the fact that Wolcott dynamited their friendship in 1997, when he wrote a Vanity Fair piece about the Paulettes and the torch he felt that they'd taken to film criticism. Now he says that he never meant any of the shrapnel from that piece to hit Kael herself, but I wonder.

I suspect that the best way to drive a shiv into Kael's heart would have been for a friend to unexpectedly start bad-mouthing her favorite movies, and Wolcott kick-started his article with the announcement that neither The Godfather, Part II nor Mean Streets (which, seen today, seems to be "all attitude") had held up for shit! Bewilderingly, in his memoir, Wolcott tells a story about Kael meeting another critic leaving a screening as she was going in. The critic told Kael that the movie he'd just seen was nothing much and probably not worth bothering with, and Kael, saying, Oh, well, as long as I'm here, went in anyway. That movie, Wolcott then reveals triumphantly, was Mean Streets! I waited for the punch line, for Wolcott to write something to the effect that the other critic was right, since Wolcott is on record as thinking that Mean Streets is a piece of crap, but the point seems to be that Kael never took anyone's word for anything, and was right to do so. Is there any chance at all that, having once claimed to like Mean Streets when he was a Paulette-in-good-standing, and then turned against it when he tore up his membership card, he's changed his fucking mind again, and now thinks it's brilliant again? Maybe not constantly revising your opinions about movies isn't the terrible thing that Kael-haters think it is. After awhile, your head might be in danger of coming unscrewed.

Incidentally, in Kellow's book, the critic Charles Taylor describes Wolcott as "a careerist creep." One of the funny details in Kellow's book is that Kael, whose biggest career breakthrough, being hired by The New Yorker, looks like a classic fluke--a case of the exact right editor discovering the exact right writer to cover the exact right subject at the exact right time--apparently always thought that it was proof that good work would be rewarded. One of her younger writer friends, Ray Sawhill, reports that Kael was always bugging him to write long critical pieces and send them to magazines on spec, and that when nothing ever came of it, she bugged him even harder; she couldn't believe that he was really beavering away and nothing was coming of it. Wolcott, by contrast, dropped out of college to hit New York after he'd sent Norman Mailer something he'd written --something about Norman Mailer--and Mailer offered to put in a good word for him with Dan Wolf, then the editor of the Voice. Wolcott proceeded to lay siege to the Voice until Wolf gave him a job, and within half a dozen years, he had worked, or was doing work, for The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, Creem, Esquire, The Texas Monthly and other high-profile venues. Whatever sweat and politicking must have gone into his success, Wolcott, true to his book's title, sticks to his story that it was all luck, just dumb luck, that led to every break he got. I can't help thinking there's a comedy in there somewhere, and that in its ideal form it would be written by Preston Sturges and star Thelma Ritter and the young Robert Morse.

O Stuporman!

2011-11-19T12:29:00.002-05:00
Abraham Lincoln was ugly. He had other qualities, but he was ugly. That's part of what's come to define him--in a good way, since his homeliness serves his image as a man of suffering integrity, who must have been deep, since nobody was going to hand him the keys to the car based on his looks. (One of the more durable political wisecracks of the nineteenth century is Lincoln's response to being called "two-faced": "If I had another face, do you think I'd wear this one?") George W. Bush is stupid. When Bush was president, a lot of people on the "reasonable" left or in the middle used to scold people who complained that he was stupid that they were failing to appreciate a mind that must have had something going for it for its possessor to be so successful, and in the process, cutting themselves off from the greater public that would see no point in working with people making such hurtful personal assumptions, which reflected badly on Bush's supporters. And now that the important thing about Bush, for his diehard supporters, is not that he win re-election but that his "legacy" be a good one, many have started being very abusive about all the people who have been proven "wrong" about the former once-elected two-term president's smarts. But Bush sold himself as stupid, while maligning his opponents, especially Al Gore and John Kerry, as being so smart that they must be pretty lame, the boring good kids who actually went to college to get a dumb ol' education, and his most literate supporters were on board with this, and the media professed to love it, presumably because they believed that the great unwashed loved it. Forget all that; the man's a genius, write it down. People have every right to think that stupidity is linked to solid, simple values and moral rectitude, just as people have a right to think that physical homeliness is linked to rectitude and depth of character. But the day after Lincoln died, nobody was going around getting up in people's faces and insisting that he'd looked like Zac Efron.

The case that Bush is brilliant boils down to the charge that it's mean to say he isn't, plus, he reads history books. The case that he's stupid can perhaps best be made by means of a thought experiment. Imagine it's 2000, and at one of the presidential debates, someone asks Bush the following question: "Sir, imagine that it's the first year of your first term, and you've told your intelligence agencies to stop focusing on al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, because, you've said, Bill Clinton told you they were a real danger and you'd already decided that the secret to a successful presidency would be to do the opposite of anything that Bill Clinton thought was a good idea, and your economic policies have already turned the surplus you inherited into a black hole that, because of your tax plan, is only going to get deeper and blacker. At this moment, al-Qaeda strikes on American soil. Is there any chance that part of your response would be to wage a war of choice against a country with no connection to al-Qaeda, based on arguments that make a joke of your father and your vice-president's claims to have effectively isolated and neutered that country, while maintaining your tax cuts, so that there's no way to pay for your war?" The next morning, the headlines would read, "ELITIST MEDIA INSULTS REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE WITH TRICK QUESTION DESIGNED TO GET HIM TO SAY THAT HE MIGHT CONSIDER POLICY THAT ONLY BE CONCEIVED BY A DROOLING IMBECILE!" Certainly no one would have voted for Bush, before 9/11, if they thought he had the capacity to think of something like that. But once he was President, the fact that he did think like that had to be taken as proof that he, well, he had a certain swagger, God love him. Rick Perry's supporters were very angry with Politico a while back, because the site had the audacity wonder if he was "dumb." At the same time, Perry's every word and gesture were designed to woo the "We like 'em big and stupid" crowd, and when Perry's unmistakable, undeniable stupidity did get him in serious trouble, it was because he came across as stupid in the wrong way, less Fred Flinstone with nukes than sad, senile old thing. (Earlier, Perry had fought off complaints about his debate performance by saying that the alternative to not being able to string three words together is being articulate, and he'd hate to be that, because then he'd be like Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. Incidentally, is there any clearer evidence of Republican mass stupidity than their conviction, as a group, that however things were under George Bush, things were obviously just terrible as could be when Clinton was president?)

Right now, Herman Cain's belligerent pride in his own stupidity may be the only thing helping his career stay afloat; lots of people clearly love it, especially since they see it as a way of telling the media they can take their concerns about not electing a complete moron to the highest office in the land and stick them where the sun don't shine.Daniel Drezner recently wrote a post in which, following Cain's performance before the editorial board of the Milwaukee Sentinel-Journal, which in turn came after Cain's mocking the idea that he should know anything at all about who's running things in the part of the world where we have two wars going, he wouldn't be writing anything more about Cain, because it's just too fucking awful. (Of course, make no mistake, just because Cain has never made a public utterance that wasn't proudly butt-ignorant, Drezner wants you to know that " I don't think Herman Cain is stupid.") But, as David Weigel points out, "Cain hasn't changed. His position when he got into the race was that advisers would be called on to guide his foreign policy. His position now is that he's not a foreign policy guy, and in a Cain White House, he'd call on his advisers to guide foreign policy. Cain was doing perfectly fine in the polls for a very long time with exactly this position. He's fading now not because of his flubs, but because a sexual harassment scandal makes voters doubt his morals. Foreign policy isn't a driving issue in 2012. The deal Cain was always making with voters was that he didn't sweat details. This is the businessman theory of politics: People who succeed at business are, naturally, prone to succeed at anything else. Give them a government to run and they'll do it better than the bureaucrat class." This is a stupid attitude Weigel is describing, but it's no stupider than the idea that Bush, who was also going to farm out his decisions to a gang of wise motherfuckers, ought to be president because his daddy used to have the job and he already knew where the light switches were in the bathrooms. For Republicans, at this stage of the game, picking a candidate is all about the personalities involved, and what they most want is somebody whose personality is calculated to piss off or appall the people they hate. Whatever motivates Cain's solid history of dumbass pronouncements, they weld him closer and closer to the hearts of many Republicans because he's so angry about being called on them, asked about them, and just being held to any standard at all. He came down from the CEO's penthouse office with a ghosted advice manual under each arm; why shouldn't he just be given the presidency? He says he'd be great; where does some elitist fact checker get off, calling a job provider a liar!?

In related news, Daniel B. Klein, the "libertarian economist" who made news last year with an op-ed piece that, based on "a set of survey questions that tested people’s real-world understanding of basic economic principles," argued that "he American left was unenlightened, by and large, as to economic matters," or to put it in the blunter terms favored by Fox News stories on the piece, that liberals are stupid. Fox News will not be doing any stories on his follow-up piece in The Atlantic, in which he points out the flaws in his own methodology and concedes that, based on a later surbey, "under the right circumstances, conservatives and libertarians were as likely as anyone on the left to give wrong answers to economic questions. The proper inference from our work is not that one group is more enlightened, or less. It’s that 'myside bias'—the tendency to judge a statement according to how conveniently it fits with one’s settled position—is pervasive among all of America’s political groups." In other words, although many liberals are indeed pretty stupid, in terms of their tendency to think past the assumptions they base on their preconceptions and biases, this is something they share with a more or less equal number of non-liberals. I didn't do any surveys myself, but I could have told Klein this was the case and saved him some work, because I already knew it as a result of not having spent the last forty years of my life trapped at the bottom of a coal mine.

But to say that most people, whatever their political persuasion, thinks with their glands and not the evidence of their eyes and ears as filtered through their brains, still cannot fully account for the Republican party's embrace of stupidity as a precondition for leadership. For a start, it is wrong to classify the contemporary Republican party as "conservative". because true conservatism, whatever its lapses, is a reality-based school of thought that respects learning, scorns flattering appeals to the stupid, and seeks to actually conserve some things besides low tax rates for millionaires and the right to call anyone who doesn't agree with you a "class warrior" if your opponent is wearing a tie and a "smelly hippie" if he is not. Towards the end of his life, William F. Buckley appeared genuinely troubled by the fact that the party claiming to represent his ideology had, out of political expediency, turned itself into the anti-brain contingent; onetime pretenders to the throne of the Smart Conservative, such as George Will, don't seem, to have a problem with it. I guess they know their audience. In the meantime, the man seen as the most rational and in-touch of the Republican presidential candidates, Jon Huntsman, is seen as unelectable within his own party because he's not stupid, while the other one who has been known to claim to believe sensible things is regarded as a contender because he's now willing to claim to have repudiated all those sensible beliefs. Mitt Romney is supposed to be the responsible Republican front-runner, because he says enough crazy, stupid things to be acceptable to voters within his party, and also because the media and the party professionals believe he's actually a smart guy who's just pretending to be stupid until he has his hand on the Bible and is reciting the oath of office. They're openly signaling to people on the fence that it's okay to vote for Romney, because everything he says between now and Election Day is a bald-faced lie: he really knows better! This can't be good for the children.

Knock on Wood

2011-11-18T18:34:00.005-05:00
I'm not sure what to make of the fact that this happened to appear so quickly on the heels of this. It's interesting to compare the two articles, in part because they're about equally clueless, but in different ways. Franklin's apparent inability to see a difference between a witty article, written for a political magazine, "that analyzed the Starr Report as if it were a nineteenth-century novel", and the kind of hollow, overblown academic writing that "James" was making fun of, at the same time she was participating in it, that (in the view of someone who was reading some of it at the time) tended to flow less from a genuine desire to extend the parameters of academic inquiry that a reluctance to do anything so tired and uncool as actually engage with a meaningful text--this is a fair match for Letham's whining about how Wood wasn't so much judging the merits of his work, on its own terms, as punishing him for not being a nineteenth-century gentleman novelist. The upshot of both pieces is that Wood is an anal old poopy-head who's too busy being the George Will of literary criticism (with one key difference--Wood can write) to get down where the cool cats are today.

One problem both pieces share in this regard is that neither of them is written from the vantage point of where the cool cats are today; Franklin is complaining about having been made cruel sport of back in the '90s, and Lethem has needed eight years to get himself together enough to respond to the book review in question. One way this serves their purposes may be that, if Wood were to respond to such belated protests against the harsh sentences he handed down way the hell back in the day, he might look even sillier than they do. If they'd lodged their grievances back when the grievances themselves were fresh, some good old literary feudin' might have ensued, and we could have at least applauded them (Franklin especially) for their courage. You also have to wonder just how delighted Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic's famously prickly literary editor, was to have this screed come across his desk. Back when Wood wrote the offending piece for TNR, he was the magazine's star critic, but four years ago, he decamped to The New Yorker. At the time, Wieseltier made some comments to the effect that he hoped that the change of venue wouldn't cause Wood to become infected with soft uptown values, so that he lost his edge and started liking stuff, and Wieseltier is the kind of guy who can't say that he hopes you don't catch cold without making it sound like he's predicting the sad inevitable. Is Wieseltier still made that Wood left, or has he been paying attention enough to know that he has indeed been saying kind things about some novels that are almost as hip 'n' happening as Lethem's? Then again, maybe James Wood just has a cold. All the ocelots wait until the lion is doped up on Nyquil and half-conscious before tiptoeing up to his head and whispering in his ear all the things they've been thinking about him for eight to fifteen years.

This Week at The A. V. Club

2011-11-17T19:12:00.003-05:00

The Wavy Gravy Movie: Saint Misbehavin'

Cheers: "The Tortelli Tort"/ "Sam at Eleven"

Come Back, Mark Harmon, All Is Forgiven!

2011-11-16T20:02:00.000-05:00
I hate to even pretend that I have a dog in this race, but... seriously? You know who Bradley Cooper is to me? Bradley Cooper is the guy who used to play the investigative reporter on Alias. You know what that character was? That was one of the first instances I know of where an actor on a TV series had the rug pulled out from under him thanks to the instant feedback that the Internet had made possible. Cooper's character was this friend of Sydney Bristow who had no idea what she was up to but sort of knew there was this secret-spy stuff going on somewhere and was determined to get to the bottom of it, dammit! I've read that the producers thought he'd be a fan-favorite character, and that it was only after discovering, from sampling Internet buzz, that everyone who watched the show thought he was a lame-ass, clueless joke of a human being that they started reveling in how out of the loop his character was and started using him as the show's punching bag. After two seasons and change, they wrote him out of the show by putting his character into witness protection, just because it had gotten more sad than funny. I know women who still lament the fact that Lena Olin wasn't permitted to paint a wall with his brains.

George Clooney used to have bad parts on TV shows before getting dropped down the chute that deposited him back on the unemployment line. It's kind of funny now, because you come across those shows while channel surfing and go, "Whoa, that guy went on to become George Clooney!" You see Bradley Cooper in the trailer for Limitless or The A-Team and go, "Whoa, that guy from Alias who couldn't investigative report his ass out of a paper bag got hired to be in a movie! That's gonna suck." As far as I know, his big success was The Hangover, where he was the guy pictured at the back of the poster who got to feed straight lines to Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis, and maybe People decided he's a really sexy movie star because hit movies have sexy movie stars in them, and a lot of people would hesitate to hang that designation on Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis. Whatever, I don't get it, but maybe getting things like this isn't in my job description. I do know that with this to throw up over, Kissinger is finally going to get some heat taken off him over winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

Live Death

2011-11-16T18:18:00.003-05:00

Bill Wyman has a piece about live rock albums, a species that I didn't realize had died out until Wyman pointed it out. I grew up in the golden age of sludgy-sounding two-LP sets, or at least the golden age of listening to them after you'd inherited them from your older brother, so this does feel like the end of an era.

It's a great piece, though I have to admit that one area where I part company with Wyman is his contempt for "the rise of the boutique live DVD, in which an antiseptic, camera-friendly "show" is set up to film. I hate these; the insular feel is the antithesis of a real concert. (It's why I've never warmed to Stop Making Sense, the bee's knees to some folks.)" I had a religious experience at Stop Making Sense, which I remember seeing four times in one week, in those last five minutes when "seeing" meant "at a movie theater, having paid money to get in." (If I remember right, I was alone in the theater except for the first time, and two of the three other people in the room that time left once they figured out that no car chase would be forthcoming. Small town.) I'd seen a bunch of "classic" rock-concert movies from the '70s by then, and could never figure out why they kept cutting to crowd reaction shots, as my desire to see, say, Led Zeppelin do their thing could in any way be served by seeing some other people getting to see Led Zeppelin do their thing. What Wyman describes as "antiseptic" and "insular", I would describe as "actually getting to see the performance promised by the name on the label, shaped to the demands of the medium." But then, on reflection, I'm not sure that I've ever had as good a time at an actual rock concert as I have at Stop Making Sense or The Last Waltz or Jonathan Demme's films with Neil Young, or for that matter Richard Pryor Live in Concert. Sometimes I think I'd be a really good living brain in a jar.

Arsenic and Old Letters

2011-11-16T17:35:00.004-05:00
A crime novelist whose name is new to me has conjectured that Jane Austen was murdered:

Author Lindsay Ashford moved to Austen's village of Chawton three years ago, and began writing her new crime novel in the library of the novelist's brother Edward's former home, Chawton House. She soon became engrossed in old volumes of Austen's letters, and one morning spotted a sentence Austen wrote just a few months before she died: "I am considerably better now and am recovering my looks a little, which have been bad enough, black and white and every wrong colour."

Having researched modern forensic techniques and poisons for her crime novels, Ashford immediately realised the symptoms could be ascribed to arsenic poisoning, which can cause "raindrop" pigmentation, where patches of skin go brown or black, and other areas go white.

Shortly afterwards she met the former president of the Jane Austen Society of North America, who told her that the lock of Austen's hair on display at a nearby museum had been tested for arsenic by the now deceased American couple who bought it an auction in 1948, coming up positive.

Ashford says that chronic arsenic poisoning gives all the symptoms Austen wrote about in her letters, unlike other possibilities which have been put forward for her death, from Addison's disease, to the cancer Hodgkin's disease and the auto-immune disease lupus. Arsenic was also widely available at the time, handed out in the form of Fowler's Solution as a treatment for everything from rheumatism – something Austen complained of in her letters – to syphilis.

"After all my research I think it's highly likely she was given a medicine containing arsenic. When you look at her list of symptoms and compare them to the list of arsenic symptoms, there is an amazing correlation," Ashford told the Guardian. "I'm quite surprised no one has thought of it before, but I don't think people realise quite how often arsenic was used as a medicine. [But] as a crime writer I've done a lot of research into arsenic, and I think it was just a bit of serendipity, that someone like me came to look at her letters with a very different eye to the eye most people cast on Jane Austen. It's just luck I have this knowledge, which most Austen academics wouldn't."

Although Ashford thinks that, based on her symptoms and on the fact arsenic was so widespread, it is "highly likely" that Austen was suffering from arsenic poisoning after being prescribed it by a doctor for another disease, she explores the possibility that the novelist was murdered with arsenic in her new novel, The Mysterious Death of Miss Austen. "I don't think murder is out of the question," she said. "Having delved into her family background, there was a lot going on that has never been revealed and there could have been a motive for murder. In the early 19th century a lot of people were getting away with murder with arsenic as a weapon, because it wasn't until the Marsh test was developed in 1836 that human remains could be analysed for the presence of arsenic."

It's kind of funny that, given how likely it is that Austen might have innocently poisoned herself by overmedicating, Ashford, given her specialty, was able to make the leap necessary to bring theories of foul play into this. But what I like the most about this is that it confirms my suspicion that a writer will do anything to avoid sitting down and getting to work on the project at hand. Stick one in the home of Jane Austen's brother, and not only will she "soon became engrossed in old volumes of Austen's letters", but it's only a matter of time before she starts picking them apart to find an excuse to devote her energies to something, anything, besides writing what she's supposed to be writing in that house, even if it's writing something else. Maybe the solution to the economic crisis is to stick Lindsay Ashford in a house with a laptop and some dusty volumes of the letters of John Maynard Keynes and see what she comes up with.

Enlighten Up

2011-11-15T12:31:00.001-05:00

Jonathan Demme has served as director on episodes of two TV series this fall. A Gifted Man, which lists him as one of the executive producers, is typical of recent Demme: smooth, glossy, insultingly contrived, and overflowing with good intentions and kind vibes. If you tried eating popcorn with it, it would taste like granola. Enlightened, Mike White's HBO vehicle for Laura Dern, is more like early Demme, the stuff he was doing in the '80s that made me want to take a bullet for him, and Demme's recent episode, "Sandy", was a standout chapter in the series so far. Dern's character, a former drug user and unstable basket case who is now trying not to just to put her life back together but to become a "good person" and useful member of society, got a visit from a friend she made in group therapy while she was in rehab (Robin Wright). Dern's character is also trying to find a place in her life for her ex-husband (Luke Wilson), without directly addressing the fact that she still has feelings for him, and when Wright stays over at Wilson's, all this stuff comes bubbling up that she can't deal with gracefully.

What links this episode, and Mike White's work in general, with Demme films such as Melvin and Howard and Something Wild, is its genuine interest in people who are far outside the mainstream of American life, and its ability to see the comedy in their lives without holding them up to ridicule. (Economically speaking, people like Melvin Dummar are closer to the mainstream of American life than they were when Demme made a movie about Dummar's life, not to mention when Dummar was living it. Dern's character works at a big company, but after her public meltdown, she's been shifted to an underground lair that's basically a holding pen for people the company doesn't want seen on the premises but who it isn't sure it can fire with impunity.) I'm a fan of White's, though I confess that his compassion for the weird, self-serving characters in his scripts for Chuck & Buck (starring White himself) and The Good Girl (both directed by Miguel Arteta) seemed so unusual when I first saw them that I wasn't sure the movies weren't really condescending towards them; it wasn't until White directed his own script for Year of the Dog (starring Molly Shannon, in the performance of her life, as a lonely corporate drone whose life is gradually changed, upended, and finally redeemed by her feeling for animals) that I fully got on his wavelength.

White provides his lead performers (who have mostly been actresses, when they haven't been himself or Jack Black) with tremendous opportunities, and he and Laura Dern are made for each other. But despite some great reviews, Enlightened has apparently turned out to be a hard sell; the crowd at Entertainment Weekly has practically started taking up a collection so it can keep its heat turned on through the winter. It's about my favorite half-hour of TV these days, and I regard it not just as a great show in its own right but as a welcome antidote to all the King of Comedy/Burn After Reading-style sludgefests out there that amount to creating a character or group of characters as stupid and repugnant as possible, for no apparent reason except that they're easy to both create and jeer at, as if the world were so lacking in people you can easily feel superior to that there were an urgent need to make some up. This has not been my experience.

This Week at The A.V. Club

2011-11-14T09:17:00.001-05:00

Castle: "Heartbreak Hotel"

Raising Hope: "Jimmy and the Kid"

AVQ&A: The TV Parents We Want

Cheers: "Give Me a Ring Sometime"/ "Sam's Women"

Supernatural: "Season 7, Time for a Wedding!"

Hell on Wheels" "Immoral Mathematics"

Stockholm swooning: 22 films where women fall in love with their kidnappers: Bandits; Captivity; The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing: The Sheik; Sleeper; Tattoo

Two Cents

2011-11-11T17:33:00.002-05:00
As someone who doesn't follow college football--and I'm sure that, just as people employed by distinguished journals of opinion wrote in 2001 that non-Catholics had no right to an opinion about the pedophile priest cover-ups, I'm sure there have already been plenty of people arguing that people who don't give a shit about football, and maybe people who aren't principally fans of whatever team it is we're talking about, have no right to an opinion on this--I have mixed feelings about all this. I was aware that the higher education system is a disposable minor organ in relation to its reason for being, football and basketball programs, but still, it is hair-raising to learn that one of them is in the business of shaping people whose response to seeing a man rape a child in front of him was to tiptoe down the hall to call his daddy to ask if he thinks he ought to maybe tell his boss, or the people who tried to burn down the campus to protest the fact that Satan himself didn't get to wave at them from the field for the billionth time. (I've also been a little taken aback to hear so many commentators who claimed to be sympathetic to the idea that Mistakes Were Made also express dismay that Joe Paterno was fired over the phone, instead of having a stripper sent over to his house with a bottle of champagne and a box of chocolates, to soften the blow.) On the other hand, having finally been given an image to put to the name "Joe Paterno"--I'd probably heard the name a thousand times but couldn't have told you what he looked like or what he did for a living--it's nice to know who Al Pacino will next be playing on HBO.

Section of Russell Pearce's Wikipedia Entry That Won't Be There Thirty Minutes From Now

2011-11-09T09:26:00.003-05:00

"On November 8, 2011, Pearce was defeated in the recall election by challenger Jerry Lewis. The election result clearly illustrated that Arizona voters would not tolerate Pearce's underhanded tactics and unrealistic stands on immigration and other issues. The voters are looking to move Arizona's economic engine and educational policies forward with a more civilized tone, leaving unproductive, inflammatory political rhetoric behind. "

As Pearce was circling the drain last night, he went on TV and said, “It doesn’t look like the numbers are going in my direction on this, and I’m OK with that.” It's sweet the crushing defeat and public humiliation brought out his Zen side. It's too bad that he didn't adopt this philosophical attitude before trying to cling to his office with the help of such tactics as ginning up a sham rival candidacy and targeting voters from robocalls urging them to sit out the election to protest the fact that both the incumbent, Pearce, and the man who now has his job, Jerry Lewis, are both Republicans. The last decade or so has taught us that Republicans have no problems with winning ugly. If you lose this badly while playing this ugly, maybe pretending to not care about the outcome is a good a way as any to tell yourself that you still have some dignity.

Lust and Cain and the Whole Damn Thing

2011-11-08T18:40:00.005-05:00
I have, from time to time, taken the opportunity to share my views on just what it is that happened twenty years ago when Anita Hill got her late invitation to Clarence Thomas's confirmation hearings for his post on the Supreme Court. I've always believed that Hill was telling the truth, because it seemed too much to ask that she had talked all that shit to friends and counsellors years before, just on the off chance that Thomas would one day be nominated to the highest court in the land and she would then have the chance to dynamite his career, especially since she seemed to not want to dig it all up herself and had to be dragged before the Senators kicking and screaming. By contrast, Thomas, who had spent the first days of the hearings insisting that he had never really formed an opinion about abortion, had already made clear his eagerness to lie under oath whenever necessary in order to get the job. On the other hand, I wasn't sure I thought that the frat-house crap that Hill said that Thomas used to talk around the office constituted sexual harassment. She really did seem to have been traumatized by having been in the same room with him and his filthy mouth, but I regretted the fact that she never told him directly how he was making her feel and gave him the chance to prove himself a decent human being, albeit one that you might not want to bring home to mother. I think that, by denying that anything like what she described had taken place, instead of trying to explain what he'd thought was going on, he'd squandered a chance to initiate a real conversation about sexual harassment, and proven himself a self-righteous, mealy-mouthed scumbag in the process. A number of people have told me that my thinking on this is, to put it softly, naive, and that I just don't understand that, for a woman trapped in an unpleasant work environment, the thought of confronting a male boss who's obtuse or worse about his conduct is like swatting a bear on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper, a bear that might at the slightest provocation stand up on its hind legs and shred her career. I readily concede that this may be true. I miss a lot, not only because I'm a man, but because it's a wonder that I can even spell "career." This is why I was living in a shoebox in the Bronx eating tainted fast food products before I somehow wangled my current position as a kept man.

In any case, in a political culture where almost everyone is not just content but ravenously eager to just label those who disagree with them as liars motivated by nothing more than partisan spite, my opinion on all this is not widely shared or often voiced. Now along comes Martin Peretz, who in the course of appearing to make some obscure point about Herman Cain, makes my point, or one that seems close to mine, about as badly as possible. First, Peretz takes note of the allegations of workplace sexual harassment against Cainand notes that "I have not the slightest idea of whether the accusations are true. But I hope that there will not be a widespread assumption that the complaints are accurate without further proof. The question of proof, moreover, is also often contorted. And paying someone off to be quiet is certainly not evidence of guilt. Sometimes it is just getting rid of a nuisance." Then he writes: "U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas never paid off anyone. So there wasn’t even a simulacrum of hard evidence against him. What there was was a campaign against him. And accounts of his loose talk. He was confirmed by the Senate. But Anita Hill won the case in public opinion. No Supreme Court justice has gone to the court with more rancor against him than Thomas. The clincher in the argument against him was, as Hill, then a professor at the law school of the University of Oklahoma, put it, that Thomas had harassed her with inappropriate discussion—yes, inappropriate discussion, not improper physical deeds—of sexual acts and pornographic films after she had turned him down for a date."

He is charged with sexually abusing women in his employ long, long ago. And, if it’s a habit as these tendencies tend to be, it is likely to come out. However, he has resolutely denied the charges. I have not the slightest idea of whether the accusations are true. But I hope that there will not be a widespread assumption that the complaints are accurate without further proof. The question of proof, moreover, is also often contorted. And paying someone off to be quiet is certainly not evidence of guilt. Sometimes it is just getting rid of a nuisance. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas never paid off anyone. So there wasn’t even a simulacrum of hard evidence against him. What there was was a campaign against him. And accounts of his loose talk. He was confirmed by the Senate. But Anita Hill won the case in public opinion. No Supreme Court justice has gone to the court with more rancor against him than Thomas. The clincher in the argument against him was, as Hill, then a professor at the law school of the University of Oklahoma, put it, that Thomas had harassed her with inappropriate discussion—yes, inappropriate discussion, not improper physical deeds—of sexual acts and pornographic films after she had turned him down for a date."

I confess that, because Peretz seems to be hinting at believing something close to what I've always believed about this, the sense of eye-rolling sarcasm accompanying "yes, inappropriate discussion, not improper physical deeds" makes me feel a little unclean. The second-worst of it is Peretz's claim that, because someone thought that Hill's charges against Thomas were serious enough that he ought to be made to answer to them, there "was a campaign against him." The worst of it is the ludicrous blooper that Hill, the woman who didn't want to go public with her charges in the first place, "won." Here's how what she won: the right to have a self-described right-wing smear artist spin a book, which he has since recanted, around the nifty that Hill was known to be "a little bit nutty, and a little bit slutty", and the chance to turn on her TV at any point since the allegations against Cain broke and hear his defenders dredging up the term Thomas coined to describe his own martyrdom twenty years ago, "a right-wing lynching." One of Cain's accusers has begged to be left alone because, she says, she doesn't want to be another Anita Hill. She doesn't want her life destroyed because she may have dared to relay something done to her by a powerful man with a lot of powerful friends trying to pump up his career.

(And let it be noted here that the worst allegations against Cain are much, much worse than the worst made against Thomas. Let it also be noted that, while Peretz is surely right that it's in the nature of corporations and those who run them to write a check to get rid of an annoyance, the most troubling thing about all the money that got paid out over the years to shut up people who said that Herman Cain hit on them is not that the money got paid, but that Cain has been openly lying about how many checks got written and how much money went out. As with Thomas and Hill, if it comes down to he said-she said, shouldn't the one who's proven himself to lie easily and often be at a disadvantage?) When Peretz confidently asserts that Hill "won", all he means must be that the kind of Georgetown liberal that a radical leftist turned military jingoist like Peretz must feel scornful towards think that Clarence Thomas is kind of a sleaze. Thomas may be bitter all the bedamned about this, but in the meantime, he has a lifetime appointment to an institution that gives him nearly limitless capacity to reshape our country, and there are enough people who profess to love him, if for no better reason than that it pisses off people they loathe, that he will never lack for speaking fees. Andrew Breitbart says that he crucified Anthony Weiner's penis because the vile Weiner had the audacity to say mean things about, and question the ethics of, Thomas and his wife with the funny hats. Nobody really thinks Breitbart needed a reason, so doesn't it say something that that's the reason that he thought would cloak him in the most nobility. It is indeed a shame that two newly prominent black Republicans have been the recipient of these particular kinds of charges, not least because they tap into subterranean feelings about black studs on the loose. But as Peretz might have noticed, it's Cain and his supporters who've done the most to explicitly link Cain's current troubles with those of Thomas in 1991, because they're playing to people who think that Thomas was so badly treated by crazy women and the liberal media that to make the comparison is to resolve Thomas of any suspicions of actual wrongdoing.

You get a sense of where Peretz's head is at--and how much of it has never left 1971--when he veers away from his main theme, whatever that is, to drag in Mitt Romney's father George, who took a lot of ridicule when he said that he'd been "brainwashed" by the U.S. military on the subject of Vietnam. Peretz seems to go there just so that he can add parenthetically, "Of course, we were all brainwashed on Vietnam, the right by the military, the left by the “idealists” who persuaded us that the Viet Cong was an idealistic peasant insurgency rather than a mask for the vicious government in Hanoi. No, Ho Chi Minh was not a good man. He was a butcher." No argument, but does Peretz now really believe that everyone who didn't think the Vietnam war was both necessary to American interests and going swimmingly--which was the brainwashed-by-the-Pentagon position--was against the war because they supported the Vietcong and thought that Ho Chih Minh was Mr. Miyagi? That was the hard-left loony position, and the number of people who held it were always dwarfed by the number of people who had no illusions about the Socialist paradise but didn't think that America had any business there anyway. Saying otherwise is like dividing the American public, circa 2001. between those who were gung-ho for invading Iraq and those who opposed it because they thought Saddam Hussein was a sweet old thing--which may be what Peretz thinks about that, too.

I'm not really altogether sure what Peretz's main point is supposed to be in this essay. That's a recurring problem with a man who can't really write. I have a feeling, though, it comes down to what Mickey Kaus used to write about George W. Bush, which was basically that, although he really was kind of destroying the country, by golly, Mickey liked him, because he was fun and hang-loose and not concerned with doubts, and not at all like those high-minded, educated liberals who used to be Mickey's crowd but who now just sort of got on his nerves. Although Peretz has too much pride to want anyone to think he thinks that Cain should be president, he sort of likes him, and this seems to be because he thinks he's all right for a millionaire. Peretz thinks that Ross Perot got an easier ride in 1992 and that "he was taken seriously by the press and credited or debited, as it were, with President Bush and Dan Quayle’s defeat and Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s victory." (The first of these statements is untrue, unless Peretz just means that he was taken seriously as a potential spoiler.) He writes that "Herman Cain is also a rich man, but in dimensions so much lower than Perot that he comes across as a middle class man." That seems to be part of why he finds Cain more likable than Mitt Romney, too. I agree that income inequality in this country has gotten so out of control that a man as untouchably rich as Cain can come across as middle class, but surely this is more an item for an Occupy Wall Street manifesto than cause to join the bewildering throngs who find Herman Cain lovable. If anything, Cain's self-made identity, combined with his sympathy for people even richer than himself, may be what makes him so proudly devoid of sympathy for anyone who's out of work or sick and uninsured, all those losers he councils to "blame yourself." Maybe. having hoped for the revolution in their youth, Peretz and Kaus now look out at the people scraping to get by and also see just rabble and losers. But to look at Bush and Cain and think that what they radiate is something endearing to to make some of us wonder what drugs you took in the '60s that are just now kicking in.

This Week at The A. V. Club

2011-11-03T19:47:00.006-04:00

NCIS: "Devil's Triangle"

Raising Hope: "Killer Hope"

Conan

AVQ&A: Favorite TV Themes

Hell on Wheels

Inventory: More than just a week with Marilyn: 14 variations on Marilyn Monroe

TV Eye: Fall 2011

2011-10-31T18:43:00.005-04:00

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

2011-10-31T05:10:00.000-04:00

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

2011-10-28T08:22:00.003-04:00

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

2011-10-27T18:03:00.001-04:00
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

2011-10-25T10:48:00.002-04:00

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

2011-10-25T02:14:00.003-04:00
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

2011-10-24T16:31:00.004-04:00

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

2011-10-17T12:07:00.007-04:00

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

2011-10-13T10:45:00.006-04:00

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

2011-10-09T22:03:00.001-04:00

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

2011-10-08T22:03:00.005-04:00
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

2011-10-07T11:30:00.000-04:00

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

2011-10-05T06:34:00.002-04:00
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

2011-10-04T12:30:00.002-04:00
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

2011-10-03T08:27:00.001-04:00
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.

New at The A.V. Club

2011-09-28T09:42:00.002-04:00
Raising Hope" "Sabina Has Money"

Frontline: "The Man Behind the Mosque"

Mr. Pitiful and the Reader

2011-09-23T14:40:00.002-04:00
I can't remember another presidential candidate who has descended as quickly as Rick Perry has from being the big noise in town who's going to blow everyone out of the water to being the guy most likely to be described by a reporter or opinion writer as someone he watched in a debate and just felt sorry for. It's one thing when a reporter says he felt sorry for someone like George H. W. Bush or Walter Mondale, guys who were clearly a little uncomfortable with the compromises and showboating required of a political campaigner. It's just weird when it's a self-styled big swinging dick like Perry. When Perry announced he was running, all anyone could talk about was how brilliant he is at campaigning. It was a line based on the idea that campaigning amounts to raising money and judging chili contests at county fairs, which, for Perry, it pretty much has up to now. But because the presidential race also requires the candidate to not embarrass himself in pre-primary season debates, Perry has now forced the media and the Republican establishment to openly confront the question of whether it's a problem if a candidate for the presidency is, in the judgment of all who care, rock-stupid from the bottom up. It's something that's been seen as a problem before in my lifetime, but Perry, like the perennial non-candidate Sarah Palin, redefines stupid to a remarkable degree.

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

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

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

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

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

New at the A.V. Club

2011-09-23T11:30:00.003-04:00

The Mentalist: "Scarlet Ribbons"

AVQ&A: Most Inexplicably Popular Songs

A Gifted Man

New at The A.V. Club

2011-09-21T19:13:00.002-04:00

C.S.I.: "73 Seconds"

Raising Hope: "Prodigy"

New at The A.V. Club

2011-09-19T19:44:00.003-04:00
Castle: "Rise"

The Playboy Club

AVQ&A: Bands That Should Have Been Bigger

Words and Deeds

2011-09-18T11:21:00.000-04:00
If a Tree Falls, a surprisingly uncompelling documentary that recently played on PBS's P.O.V. series, is mainly interesting for what it reveals about the state of honest semantics in post-9/11 America. It tells the story of Daniel McGowan, a bland, baby-faced onetime member of the radical environmentalist organization, the Earth Liberation Front, who was arrested in 2005 for his role in a couple of arson attacks he and other ELF members committed against a timber company and a tree farm, McGowan himself admits that the second arson wasn't the glowing act of revolutionary derring-do that he and his comrades fancied it was going to be at the time: the fire got out of hand and destroyed a library, and it then turned out that the firebugs had gotten bad intel and the tree farm wasn't engaged in the kind of dastardly genetic engineering they'd believed they were. As far as the law is concerned, these and other things that McGowan and the ELF got up to count as "eco=terrorism", and using that logic, the judge at his trial applied a "terrorism enhancement" to his sentence and shipped him off to an especially "restrictive" prison, where he's currently rubbing shoulders with other prisoners convicted of terrorism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These Eyes

2011-09-16T21:18:00.004-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

Book 'Em

2011-09-16T04:40:00.001-04:00
Scott Kenemore's remarkable essay in Slate is nominally based on an emotion that I, perhaps to my personal discredit, cannot imagine ever experiencing: affronted dismay that someone, somewhere, has been insufficiently deferential to my former place of higher learning. Kenemore, who is the author of a whole fucking raft of humorous books about zombies, is a graduate of the creative writing MFA program ay Columbia University, which is not listed at the tip-top of this year's list of such programs as determined by Poets & Writers magazine. "Last year," he bitches, "it plummeted to No. 25 (tied with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). This year, it plunged down to No. 47, and is now presumed to rank behind such august institutions as"--the horror! the horror!-- "Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg and Texas State University in San Marcos." Since there's no way in hell that some boondock shithole could even be fit to be mentioned in the same breath as the place where Scott Kenemore, paid and contracted wisecracker about the living dead, used to pass out drunk on the lawn, there must be a conspiracy afoot. "Columbia has expensive tuition, and Poets & Writers is attempting to shame Columbia into lowering it. Why, you might fairly ask? Why are they doing this? Why is it not OK to charge high tuition if folks seem more than willing to pay it?" I love the use of the understated phrase "Why are they doing this?" It's so popular with people composing withering screeds against animal cruelty and child slave labor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New at the A.V. Club

2011-09-13T08:00:00.000-04:00

Kate Plus 8: Series Finale

Rewrite!

2011-09-12T12:34:00.000-04:00
Here's Paul Krugman's 9/11 post, in its entirety:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New at The A.. Club

2011-09-12T11:32:00.002-04:00
Cupcake Wars

Of 30 Rocks and Studio 60s: 38 TV doppelgänger

Full-Throated Anthem of the Week

2011-09-12T04:05:00.000-04:00
Guillermo del Toro, as transcribed by James Wolcott in his Vanity Fair report from the San Diego Comic-Con:

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

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

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

Heart of Dickness

2011-09-10T18:33:00.002-04:00
If Charles Manson were to publish his autobiography, a lot of media people would find it hard to turn down an invitation to interview him. So it's not surprising that Dick Cheney, who, you may have heard, has a book out, has been all over the TV these past few weeks. It should go without saying that the one question any interviewer should want to lead with is, "Mr. Vice-President, you, alone of all the architects of the invasion of Iraq, have always maintained that there are solid grounds for believing that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda and that the invasion was therefore directly connected to avenging the murders of thousands of Americans on September 11, 2001. You made this claim when you were a sitting vice-president, and continued to make it even as the CIA and the President you swore to serve always insisted that it wasn't so. Since you lied about this, despite the fact that you must have known that no sane person could possibly have believed you, why should anyone believe anything you say in your book?" I haven't seen every second of all the interviews Cheney has given as part of his book tour, but I'm guessing that no one has asked him this, because I'm pretty sure that if someone had, it would have made it onto my Yahoo front page. I'm not even going to ask Google about the only follow-up question I'd like to hear, which would involve reminding Cheney of the vote he cast in Congress against a measure that would have called for Nelson Mandela to be released from prison, and then asking him to make his best case for why Mandela having spent so much of his life in a cell and Cheney not spending a minute in one has, overall, been a good thing for the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New at The A.V. Club

2011-09-09T20:59:00.002-04:00
“Ah, Screw It. Here’s a Bunch of Shows”: The A.V. Club’s 2011 Fall TV Preview, Part One and Part Two

First R-Rated Movie

Beyond Saving

2011-09-08T15:59:00.006-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New at The A.V. Club

2011-09-05T20:20:00.000-04:00
“And No One Will Ever Mention It Again, Under Penalty of Torture”: 21 Forgotten TV Subplots

Funny Ha Ha

2011-09-03T13:49:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dog Days Deep Thoughts: Race--It's On!

2011-09-02T19:11:00.002-04:00
A couple of weeks ago, the left-leaning cable news shows had a ball with the results of a survey that found that people who identified themselves as Tea Party members tended to already be conservative Republicans and also to be white people who, how to put this, did not feel entirely comfortable with the rising numbers, and increasing political power of non-white people in America. The first part of this conclusion tended to match up with everything you would have guessed from seeing so many middle-aged or older white people screaming that they didn't want the government getting involved with health care because they were afraid it would interfere with their Medicare, and the second part sure did match up with all those signs and emails showing Obama with a bone through his nose and the obsessive talk about "taking back our [i.e., 'their'] country" and the numbers showing how much overlap their was with the Tea Party and the birthers. On one show, I saw Dave Weigel, who's been positively tender in much of his writing about the Tea Party, called in to comment. In much of what I've read, Weigel seemed to be dismissive of anyone who questioned the narrative that the Tea Party wasn't a spontaneously generated movement of upset and angry good citizens who had no previous political positions or biases to speak of, but on TV, his response to the study was basically, hey, look at the results of last fall's elections, it turns out that for a bunch of partisan Republicans to pretend to be a spontaneously generated movement of upset and angry good citizens who had no previous political positions or biases to speak of was a hell of a good strategy, huh? The question of how these good citizens feel about non-white people didn't really come up.

I'll just come out and say it: I'm slightly obsessed with Weigel. I can't figure out if I'm reading him right, and if I am, I can't figure out how someone who seems so smart and decent and has such good taste in music can so easily shrug off signs of racism in the people whose goals and motives he writes about. Weigel recently reminded his readers that he once voted for Ron Paul and probably will again, so it's clear that a passionate personal commitment to racism doesn't strike him as reason enough to reject a presidential candidate. Or maybe, inexplicably, he doesn't see Paul that way. In an article that Weigel co-wrote with Julian Sanchez about the racist views that were credited to Paul in his own newsletter, the two reporters passed along the cover story that the comments were actually the work of "paleolibertarian" Lew Rockwell. (I call this a cover story not because it's unlikely that this is true but that it's insane to think that Paul isn't responsible for what his authorized ghostwriter published in Paul's newsletter as a reflection of Paul's beliefs.) "The newsletters' obsession with blacks and gays," Weigel and Sanchez wrote, "was of a piece with a conscious political strategy adopted at that same time by Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard." It's also of a piece with the Southern strategy adopted by the Republicans during the Nixon administration, and also the panic over gay marriage orchestrated by Republican operators in 2004, several years later. I guess this is an example of why libertarians like to think of their guys as being ahead of the curve.

In summing up Paul's responsibility for all this, Weigel and Sanchez came to the same conclusion that polite Beltway folk, when pressed, came to regarding Ronald Reagan's speeches about welfare queens in Cadillacs and his sanctification of the ground beneath the Neshoba County fair where the murders of the three civil rights workers were covered up, and George H. W. Bush's Willie Horton commercial, and on and on: "Ron Paul may not be a racist, but he became complicit in a strategy of pandering to racists." Like Howard Baker's big question about Richard Nixon's culpability in Watergate--"What did the President know, and when did he know it?"--this is a formulation is designed to sound like an indictment while actually serving as a loophole. It separates the politicians from the real monsters. (The danger in treating pandering to racists as just another political tactic became clear in 1988, when David Duke appeared and made it clear that, though there were things in his newsletters that would have made Lew Rockwell blush, he had learned to speak in the same coded language that Reagan and other acceptable establishment Republicans had mastered, and should have been completely acceptable to the mainstream of the party, if only there weren't all those pictures of him conducting protests in his pointy-headed white robes and Nazi armbands.) Maybe it's of a piece with the idea, which I've heard hollered more than once by the thoughtful libertarian philosopher Penn Jillette, that you can't legislate against immorality. (I guess that means libertarians don't believe in laws against theft and murder. Or maybe the idea is that you can only legislate against immorality when the immoral act hurts someone. Of course, allowing people to make decisions about who they'll sell their house to or allow to sit in their restaurant based on the property or business owner's racist preferences, which Ron Paul still sees as a matter where the question of what's right ought to defer to the rights of the property or business owner, clearly hurt someone. It's hard to understand how anyone could do the math on that one for sixty years and not see it that way, unless his math tended to include a special clause about how it doesn't matter as much if it's the nonwhite people who get hurt.)

For some of us, there are problems with granting full immunity from being thought ill of for those who simply pander to racists, with the understanding that they themselves are not racist. On the most superficial level, there is the fact that racists the scum of the earth, people without souls whose brains work very poorly, and to pander to them bespeaks a lack of revulsion towards them that does not speak well of the whole man. There are deeper problems, too. For instance, while recently released recordings show that pandering to racists cam easy to Richard Nixon because black people creeped him out almost as badly as if they were Jews, it is easy to believe that George Bush, Senior is not a racist. It is also easy to believe that he would have rounded up all the black people in America and shipped them to Neptune if it would have won him re-election. He just didn't care that much either way. Bush opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, something that no good person could have opposed based on what he felt in his heart or known in his brain, because being the kind of person he thought his voters wanted him to be made it necessary for him to profess the view of a scumbag on the most important piece of legislation to come up during his time in Congress. Perhaps he told himself that he had to do it so that he could go on to achieve the power to do great things, and so there he was, more than twenty years later, campaigning against Willie Horton. I'm not one of those people who think that everything Kurt Vonnegut ever said should carved on the base of the Lincoln Memorial, but he did hit the nail on the head when he warned that you should be very careful about who you pretend to be,

Weigel also seems to have a soft spot for Andrew Breitbart, the professional shit-stirrer who did his part for voter registration with his role in the ACORN videos and who saw the existence of a video showing Shirley Sherrod talking about how she learned from personal experience that racism is wrong as a great excuse to destroy her, on the grounds that she was an anti-white racist. Brietbart has gone after people who accused Tea Party screamers of racism, viciously denouncing heroes of the civil rights movement like Represntative John Lewis of bigotry and slander, in a tone that strikes some of us as intemporate, given that Lewis is a great man who will be garlanded by history and Breitbart is a braying eyesore whose greatest life accomplishment involved using showing pictures of a winkie to Opie and Anthony. I don't think these guys are racists. (Okay, it's a sin to tell a lie. I don't think Weigel is a racist. But Breitbart? There's no other way that his unapologetic animosity towards Sherrod, for a start, could make any sense.) I do think that they maybe feel that a seismic shift has occurred so that it isn't any big deal any more. Maybe there's a feeling that it was one thing to hold people accountable for their racial prejudices in the days of lynchings and segregated lunch counters, but that by now, the field has leveled enough that people should be allowed to think what they like, because now it's just a harmless quirk. I guess that's what Dr. Laura, the radio banshee who I have only recently discovered is an entirely different life form than the one called Laura Ingraham. meant last year, when she told a black call-in listener that she thought it was "hilarious" that black people still complain about racism when there's a black man in the White House. She said this in the course of torturing the listener by luxuriating in how good the word "nigger" felt when she bounced it off her larynx twenty-something times, which I guess just shows that there's no accounting for what some people think is hilarious.

The election of our first black president was, according to the media, supposed to pull down the curtain on the use of racism, or pandering to racists, in our public life. Instead, it seems to have resulted in the creation of a new set of codes aimed at people--most of them white, but maybe also some non-white people who were plenty comfortable with the pre-Obama status quo--who feel that having a black man in the Oval Office officially makes them part of the de facto minority group, and therefore a threatened species. People like Rush Limbaugh, who would have become apoplectic at the suggestion that white voters have ever clustered around a candidate for reasons of racial solidarity or that it was ever scarier to be black in this country than it is to be white, now think nothing of suggesting that having a black president makes it tougher on the playground or on the school bus for white kids, or saying outright that black people, and not just black people, voted for Obama just because he was black. Even Weigel seems to take it on faith that there were people who cast their ballot for Obama mainly because they wanted to be part of a great historical leap forward in race relations. Now, I'm sure that Obama's skin color has helped him in some areas, just as I know very well that it's made it harder for him in some areas. But I'm pretty sure that nobody in America voted for him mainly because he was black. I suspect that his election had a lot more to do with the fact that the incumbent president had just run the country off a cliff, in every area you could name, and the choice was between Obama and the candidate of the incumbent president's party, who was swearing on a stack of Bibles that he would continue and jack up all the incumbent's policies and, as the cherry on top, promising to place a bug-eyed idiot a heartbeat away from the presidency, just in case his very elderly cancer-survivor ass somehow failed to fulfill his presidential duties for the next four years. I know that nobody around here ever remembers anything, but I can't imagine how you can get so disenchanted with Obama that you could fail to find it amazing, and a little scary, that as many as a hundred people actually voted for John McCain.

Several years ago, I wrote a post about Don Imus that remains the only thing I've ever written here that's gotten enough love from the A-list bloggerati to pump my comments section up into the double digits. Sadly. I lost the comments to that post when I moved, but the one that I remember is from someone who just wrote--I may be over-simplifying it, but not by much--"This is silly. Everybody's racist." This is an observation often made by racist people, and it has the distinction of being completely untrue. But I think it hits close enough to home for some people to make them feel squirmy, because it probably is true that everybody has, at one time or another, experienced a racist thought. It's probably also true that just about everybody who's spent a lot of time around kids has, at one point or another, felt like hitting one, and that anyone who drinks and drives has, at one point, contemplated driving while drunk rather than go to the trouble of calling a taxi. But while it is true that anyone who hits a kid or drives drunk has, like anyone who has experienced a racist thought and decided to run with it. automatically moved closer to being a member of the insect kingdom than a fully accredited human being, we do not think so harshly of everyone who's just thought about it, and who then snapped out of it. Maybe it's easier for racists to make normal people feel complicit in their vileness because it seems harder to draw the line between thinking a racist thought and being a racist. Maybe it's a Potter Stewart kind of thing.

One thing's for sure: the kind of free-spirited wild men who feel secure enough in the goodness of their own hearts to throw racial epithets around also feel that they're experts on when someone else has crossed the line. Last year marked the twentieth anniversary of the release of Do the Right Thing, the landmark movie in which Spike Lee seemed to argue that non-white people are being hip and street smart when they assume the worst about whites and Asians and everyone else who's "different" who crosses their path, and give voice to their assumptions in the most grating way possible, but if a white man who's been pressed eight miles past the customary endurance level lets fly with the word "nigger", then it is the moral imperative of the community to come together and burn down his pizzeria. Though it is still widely regarded as a masterpiece by people who find it an enlightening experience to be shrieked at, I've always thought that movie was part of a cultural moment that also encompassed the Tawana Brawley hoax, the jury nullification movement, the O. J. Simpson murder trial, and a lot of black racist sentiments peddled as hip hop, a moment when, with Martin Luther King not getting any less dead, a highly prominent section of the black community seemed eager to abandon the higher moral ground and find out why the white jurors who acquitted the murderers of the civil rights workers in MIssissippi in the '60s always looked so jolly in photographs.

I wonder how firmly that period still sticks in the craw of people like Andrew Breitbart, who indicated to a New Yorker profiler that the seeds of his political conscience, such as it is, were sewn in the mid=80s, when Jesse Jackson pissed off Jews and other whites by referring to New York City as "Hymietown." For a lot of people, Jackson's continuing to have a career after that incident was proof that there's a double standard in the media regarding racial slurs, and that while people like Earl Butz can be destroyed by one racist joke told years before in private company, blacks like Jackson can get away with murder. Another possible explanation is that the media have a double standard regarding fringe candidates who are thought to bring a "refreshing" sensibility to the party and to utter unconventional truths that go unspoken by the "real" candidates who might actually get elected to something. White libertarians in particular should know this rule well, since it's the one that enables Ron Paul to keep rolling along. In any case, watching Breitbart and others like him--professional denouncers of blacks who like to whine to high heaven about how they're in constant danger of being nullified if they're ever struck with an accusation of "racism", a sure-fire career killer in these United States, just ask Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms--I sometimes get the feeling that, looking at Shirely Sherrod or ACORN or Van Jones, they see Danny Aiello, over and over, standing in front of a pizza oven, just about to say something that will justify calling out the mob to burn down his pizza joint. Last week, Danny Aiello was being played by Andre Carson, whose great crime was to say that “Some of them in Congress are comfortable with where we were 50 or 60 years ago," and that there are people in Tea Party America who'd like to see blacks "hanging on a tree. Weigel labeled these remarks "scary", which seems a little Lewis Carroll, considering that they amount to Andre Carson saying that he'd watched some people behaving as if they wanted to seem scary--that's how they look to me, anyway--and submitted that he, personally, was a little scared of them.

Really, the most unhappy aspect of the Tea Party's racial attitudes isn't the fact that they really do often seem to want to antagonize black people and to feel antagonized by them--I mean, antagonized by the very existence of black people who find themselves in positions of power and by other black people who are so inconsiderate as to vote for them. And it's not the bleating in the media to the effect that it's wrong and unfair to call these people racist. It's the sense that, while they feel that blacks have ceded the moral high ground they had during the days of the civil rights movement and in the years following Dr. King's assassination, these bellowing, selfish rubes want it for themselves. It's not enough that they can go on TV and wail about the evils of the estate tax and the unfairness of having their income tithed to pay for streets and schools used by the common rabble, and then go outside without being pelted with garbage; they also want to be treated tenderly and reverentially, with the kind of respect for their cause that King and his followers had in his time. That's why King himself has been taken up as a hero by the very people who speak of his true ideological heirs as they would speak of King if he were still alive, as a dangerous Socialist nut job, why Glenn Beck once addressed comments by some of King's followers to the effect that he was a big believer in the welfare state and social justice by attacking those who would thus slander the great man. I don't know why the same people who are busy falsifying history to explain that Franklin Roosevelt was a failed president are now falsifying history to make it appear that they're simpatico with MLK, instead of denouncing him. But then, FDR was merely physically handicapped, whereas King was jailed, harassed by the FBI, and murdered, so maybe they wouldn't think of co-opting FDR because he wasn't enough of a victim for them. Nobody can whine like a Tea Partier, so it must pain them to imagine that there are groups of people with more ground to complain about how they've been treated. So people like Michele Bachmann actually refer to people who are expected to pay taxes as "slaves" who are in thrall to an evil dictatorship. Such deranged and disgusting sentiments touch the hearts of even black conseravtives such as Allen West, who was so angry about Andre Carson's remarks that he didn't know whose head he wanted to hold a gun to first.

Thanks in large part to the example of people like Dr. King, white racism has been pretty firmly defined as an unacceptable emotion in this country. That's part of the reason that Andrew Breitbart fears being called "racist" like Superman fears Kryptonite. (He may also fear it for the same reason I fear being called a bad prooofreeder.) In a recent editorial in The Daily, Reihan Salam wrote that conservative "bias against efforts to speed up social change has led to a number of horrible misjudgments, including the opposition of conservatives like Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and, more recently, the almost universal opposition among national", before conclusing that "American conservatives are overwhelmingly white in a country that is increasingly less so. As the number of Latinos and Asian-Americans has increased in coastal states like California, New York and New Jersey, many white Americans from these regions have moved inland or to the South. For at least some whites, particularly those over the age of 50, there is a sense that the country they grew up in is fading away, and that Americans with ancestors from Mexico or, as in my case, Bangladesh don’t share their religious, cultural and economic values. These white voters are looking for champions, for people who are unafraid to fight for the America they remember and love. It’s unfair to call this sentiment racist." Maybe not. Maybe just holding that sentiment in your breast isn't racist. But if you fail to laugh that sentiment off as unworthy of a mature human being, and if you allow it to take the form of voting for people who promise to favor your mush-brained nostalgia and cultural panic over the real needs of the country, and especially if you buy into the notion that actual racism is less venal than calling a white person a racist and find yourself becoming receptive to crackpot theories designed to support your instinctive feeling that a president with black skin and a funny-sounding name is somehow less natural, less truly "American", than a white one with a regular-sounding name--well, if that isn't racist, what the hell is it? Whatever you call it, it's enough evidence of egocentric stupidity to count as a more legitimate "character issue" than anything that's ever going to show up in the XXX-rated stash on Andrew Breitbart's camera phone.

New at The A.V. Club

2011-09-02T11:13:00.002-04:00

Best TV Show, Worst Episode

Dog Days Deep Thoughts: God Must Love People Who Hate Poor People, He Made So Many of Them

2011-08-30T15:39:00.005-04:00

I'm pretty slow on the uptake sometimes--no brag, just fact--but every so often, I do figure something out. For my entire adolescence, I was puzzled about why, out of all the bad political regimes in the world, the one that American politicians were most upset about was the Soviet Union, to the point that some of them supported unspeakably evil regimes in Latin America and South Africa on the basis of the argument that they, too, were really pissed at the Soviet Union. It wasn't until around the time of the original Red Dawn that I put it together that they thought that the Soviet Union wasn't just an evil regime far, far away but some kind of actual military threat bent on subverting, undermining, and ultimately toppling the United States. My only excuse for having taken so long to get that is that it wasn't often spelled out by people who assumed that everybody all knew that, and I showed up on the planet too late to have Joe Stalin or Nikita Kruschev scare the shit out of me.

The Soviet Union I grew up with was a crumbling wreck watched over by a succession of aging party hacks who clearly just wanted to hang onto their shabby privileges and manage to make it to the sweet relief of the grave while staying out of jail. The earliest glimpse I remember getting of what life was like over there was a TV news report in the mid-70s showing the gaping crowds at some kind of detente-era trade show staring in amazement at the refrigerator that didn't look as nice as the one in our kitchen. It was impossible to live in fear of such people unless you really worked at it, which a lot of people were prepared to do, which is why late-inning reports on the Soviet threat leaned heavy on the idea that everything anybody from the West ever saw from over there was part of a Potemkin-village illusion, a phony backdrop of poverty and misery and technological ass-backwardness, behind which a crack team of committed scientists had limitless resources and cutting-edge methods to use in their never-ending campaign to create an army of Dolph Lundgrens. Anyway, believe me when I say that I take no pride in having taken so long to understand that this silly shit was what I was supposed to think. Whether I would have thought it if I'd known sooner that I was supposed to think it is beside the point.

Anyway, a week or so back, I figured something out. I'd spent the past two and a half years confused by those intelligent reporters, such as David Weigel, who seemed protective of the Tea Party, and to take offense at the idea that it was a movement comprised of idiots. The problem I had was that I kept reading that the Tea Party is an 'anti-tax" movement, and I thought this meant that they thought that taxes were too high, and since they were formed during a year when the new president rode into town and made a point of giving everyone a break on their taxes, I thought that this added up to clear instance of some very loud idiots behaving idiotically, very loudly. Surely, I thought, nobody would seriously try to argue that anyone who reacts to having his taxes cut by having a running shit fit about taxes could be anything other than a complete and total fool, right? But now, thanks to Weigel, I know that I had it wrong. "When the Tea Party started rallying in 2009," he wrote last week, "it wasn't protesting higher taxes, because federal income taxes were lower, with more loopholes. It was protesting the perception that productive Americans were shelling out for an ever-expanding class of moochers. "

That makes sense--not that there's anything to the "perception", I mean, but I guess it's a less stupid thing to hang your hat on than what I thought they were upset about. In my very limited defense, I suppose I got it wrong because, again, the people I understood could have been clearer about what they meant. This time, though, I think that, just maybe, some of the people making the argument were a little vague about what they were upset about, because they figured that it might seem a little mean to just start calling other people moochers. In retrospect, though, it sure did slip through. The moment that's supposed to have kicked off the Tea Party movement--"teabagging", we called it, back in those innocent days--was, of course. a TV clown's frothing, apparently nerve-touching rage that some people he didn't know or care about were getting help from the government instead of simply losing their family homes, which they had bought at the urging of the government and its abetters. The town hall meetings that featured anti-health care outbursts left behind some memorable footage of people going from whining at the top of their lungs about how they couldn't afford to subsidize other people's medical bills to mocking other people who stepped up to talk about their own hardships by pretending to weep in their faces. They looked kind of mean.

A couple of years later, and everybody on that side of the aisle looks ready and willing to own their meanness, to the point that the most prominent Republican presidential candidates are openly expressing their scorn for a system that allows for the concept of people who don't have to pay income tax because they don't make enough money to have it to spare. Undisguised, unapologetic bitterness towards the working poor broke wide open nine years ago, in a Wall Street Journal editorial denouncing us "lucky duckies" who are too broke to chip in every April 15. There was a time when I could have described it as "an infamous Wall Street Journal editorial", but now the attitude is officially ingrained in our mainstream politics and embraced by plenty of people who think they're clear-eyed, straight-shooting mavericks. Working poor people are the new welfare queens, having been shoved into the hole that was left in hateful conservative discourse after Bill Clinton "ended welfare as we know it" and took away the Republican party's favorite post-Cold War punching bag. Somehow, our existence is supposed to be a blight that causes hardship and pain to the rich people who do so many truly productive things for this country, like ranting on Fox News, writing Wall Street Journal editorials, closing down plants and shipping jobs overseas, and holding press conferences to boast about all the dynamite stuff their investigators have come up with on the President's true nationality and mediocre performance at Harvard. This is the emotional trigger attached to the WSJ's deeper complaint, that poor people who aren't taxes enough will never come to share the rich people's insight that taxes are the work of the devil.

You may have noticed the self-inclusionary note there. I am a poor person, and have been one all my adult life. No doubt this claim would seem rich indeed to the gang at Fox News who, in a clip that I'll admit I'd have missed if it hadn't gotten a lot of play on Comedy Central's fake-news block, reported that many people who are classified as "poor" actually have refrigerators and running water and other impossible luxuries, including cars and computers. I confess that I have always had a refrigerator, on those occasions when I had a place to live. I have usually had a TV, too. I used to work hard to keep my phone bill paid, and, clearly, I have a computer. I have not always had a computer, because the sons of bitches break, but for the past decade, I've seldom been without a job that didn't absolutely require me to have a computer. That means that I have been known, during those periods when whatever second hand computer I owned had broken down and I was able to acquire a new second-hand one, to camp out at Kinko's or someplace where I could pay to use a computer, paying more than I would be paid for the job I was doing, so as not to get dropped by my employer. I'm not sure what the chortling empaths on Fox would have had me do--give up my computer and phone. and losing my jobs in the process, so that I'd better live up to their ideal of a genuine poor person? I never had a car, but I envy the people in my income bracket who managed to acquire one and who didn't have to be more careful about always having set aside enough money to cover the costs of public transportation to and from work. I imagine many people who own cars would have envied me for not having to set aside enough for gas, or for never having to worry that my lifeline to work would break down and saddle me with a massive repairs bill.

I hope it doesn't sound as if I'm whining. I don't think it's society's or anyone else's fault that I've always been poor, and I'm not calling for a massive round of government spending for the specific purpose of making my "DONATE" button ring like the bell at the top of a test-your-strength game at Coney Island. For me and, I'll bet, for a lot of people, it's just how it is. I'm not especially lazy, but I'm also not especially ambitious. I never took my chances trying to make a bundle on Wall Street or Silicon Valley. I got out of school, looked around, and started taking jobs to try to keep my rent paid. Because I have other interests that use up a lot of my brain power, I never knuckled down trying to reinvent the wheel or perfect the next big video game. I'd get a job, do my best at it, go home, and read. There are also certain personal qualities that have never helped me in the job market. I mean little things like shyness, and not being physically attractive--I'm sorry, but studies do show that it makes a difference when it comes to impressing prospective employers--and the fact that I don't come from what anyone would call a "good family", or graduate from a "good school", and I'm not well-plugged in. I've never gotten a job--never, not a single one--unless I knew someone there who could vouch for me and push for me, and I've just never known that many people.

Plus, for most of my life, I've been alone. It was during the '80s. under that great champion of the traditional nuclear family Ronald Reagan, that our society changed in a way that it quietly became conventional wisdom that you needed a two-income household to maintain a real living wage. In the last year, I've been living with someone, and this has made a phenomenal difference in my life, in a lot of ways that definitely includes my standard of material comfort and how stressed-out I am all the time from fear that I'll lose my electricity or go to bed hungry a certain number of nights a week or fall behind in my rent and end up on the street. But for most of my adult life I've been alone, and lonely, largely because most of us need to have money to initiate a romantic relationship, to ask someone out and demonstrate our potential worthiness as a mate, and I didn't have it. All this falls under the general heading, "How it is." It's no one person's fault, and I don't lose a lot of sleep over it.

What's unsettling about the recent barrage of sneering and angry attacks on people like me has been the discovery that there are so many people who do lose sleep over the way I've lived my life, because they see me as a moocher and a leech. I'm not on welfare or food stamps, and haven't been except for a few months in the mid-90s when I was between jobs for over a year, but they see me as a moocher because I'm, well, not rich and yet alive. Technically, I guess, I'm sticking my hand in there pocket every time I ride on publicly maintained roads or collect my mail or check out a book from a public library or, God help us all, use Amtrak. Of course, it's not as if I've never paid taxes. I have in fact paid income taxes many a year--it is in fact possible to make just enough money to be vulnerable to the tax bite and still be broke as a son of a bitch--but the main way that bite has been felt by me, year in and year out, has been in payroll taxes, the good-sized chunk of my paycheck that I may well never live to get my hands on. Payroll taxes are a side issue that don't count as far as the anti-lucky duckies crowd is concerned, which is strange, since things like the estate tax certainly do. Yet so fully does my income bracket disqualify me from full brotherhood in the United States that I am among that select group of people, including college students and government workers, who Fox News commentators have suggested should be prohibited, or at least strongly discouraged, from voting. Our insufficient hatred of the idea of higher taxes for the top ten percent is said to prove that we're ill-informed, overly emotional, and Do Not Get It. To the best of my knowledge, no Fox News commentators have ever suggested that the vote be denied to that segment of the electorate that studies have almost consistently shown to be the most spectacularly ill-informed, Fox News viewers.

The biliousness of the attacks on people like me are enough to make me wonder: do these people really think that being poor is
easy? Maybe they do. I admit that, from where I'm sitting, being Rick Perry or Lou Dobbs looks easy. But I do know that a lot of work goes into it, and who know, maybe even some stress. I used to worry every day about losing my lease and having no place to live; maybe they worry, with just the same degree of intensity, about some unimaginable cataclysm that will cause them to sell the yacht and buy their suits off the rack. And if that happens, maybe it's important to think that it's the fault of people like me, for not getting out there and busting our butts and becoming billionaires so we, too, would see teachers' unions and consumer groups and politicians who want to extend unemployment benefits as practitioners of the most insidious kind of class warfare. That's not a new term from the Fox News candy kitchen, of course; ever since the awesome shift in the size of the income gap that's the single most defining change in American life these last few decades began, the charge of "class warfare" has been thrown at everyone who's even noticed it, from such perches as The New York Times op-ed page as much as its counterpart at the WSJ. (During the 2000 presidential campaign, the Times and other outlets were accusing Al Gore of class warfare, for his "populist" rhetoric against the income gap, at the same time as self-styled "progressives" were accusing him of being a Trojan horse for Montgomery Burns and having three sixes burned into his scalp beneath his hair.)

Ronald Reagan once said that the best and most important and treasurable thing about being an American is that an American can come from anything to become fantastically rich. It's not as quotable as "Tear down this wall," but it looks to be the sentiment most deeply burned into the America he left behind, his truest legacy. Many of our mouthiest citizens see any kind of consumer protections, environment protections, worker protections, and guidelines establishing limits on how much damage you can do in the name of making money as unacceptable, criminal limitations on their ability to do the only thing they were put on earth to do, and they're more than ready to see anyone who has been less successful (and ruthless) at the financial arts than themselves as not just society's failures but morally compromised. We're bad people. I admit it: I was stupid enough to think that the 2008 economic collapse would change things, because it would force people to see that economic hardship can strike anyone, and people's attitudes towards the income gap and the inherent repulsiveness of those with less money would have to soften. Instead, it seems to have exacerbated things, creating a Soylent Green America where those who have still have theirs become increasingly hysterical in their efforts to dissociate themselves from anyone worse off than them, because the needy bastards are presumed to want to drag them down.

Of course, my naive assumptions about how hardship would produce a better America, one where people identified with their neighbors and pulled together, were based on sentimental stories about how America worked under FDR and the New Deal during the Great Depression. It's a measure of how much we've changed that, among many Republicans, including Rick Perry, it's one of their leading priorities to rewrite accepted history and establish that the New Deal was a failure and Roosevelt a bad, bad man. I'm not sure that they know what they're asking America to go back to--a time not just before Social Security and Medicare and school lunch programs, but before child labor laws? The big thing seems to be that they want Ronald Reagan--not the real Reagan, who negotiated and raised taxes and didn't completely junk the social safety net, but the one they've created from his speeches and TV commercials--to be the one true, great modern President, the one who got it right, and they have to tear down Roosevelt because, as they used to say in the Highlander movies, there can be only one.

Amity Shlaes, whose book The Forgotten Man got the ball rolling on the New Deal revisionism scam once said, “This is a time for choosing, and I’m not the first person to say that or to use that term in saying so. Reagan could afford to like FDR because, at the time, it seemed possible to keep our entitlements if we reformed them. It turns out that we can’t afford entitlements. We have to choose between Reagan and Roosevelt. You can’t just say you like both Reagan and Roosevelt.” I'm not sure I'd disagree with that last part, and it's refreshing to hear someone who'd choose Reagan come out with it. The missing part is where she forgot to say that it turns out that we can't afford entitlements if we stop asking the rich to pay their fair share in taxes, on the theory that we all benefit from a country with a guaranteed standard of decent living, rather than a Mad Max hellscape where a few people can, as Greil Marcus recently put it, become so rich that democracy becomes irrelevant. Really, I don't understand why people like Perry and Shales think things were so horrible from the time of the New Deal through the Great Society. Maybe they think the '80s were the best thing ever, but it was the period of entitlements and a strong middle class that we remember as the time of the American Century, the time that Ronald Reagan, at the start of the 1980s, claimed he wanted to bring back. Except for the fact that Social Security didn't get itself privatized, they got a better-than-rough draft of the country they seem to want during the Bush Junior years, and do they really think it turned out so great? Saying that the country we are after a decade of the blinkered, short-sighted cruelty and insularity of the Bush years is proof that we can't have entitlements is like pointing to the position blacks were in the South after years of Jim Crow laws as proof that we never should have ended slavery.

Lady Gaga Update

2011-08-30T14:17:00.003-04:00
I was a little dissatisfied with the job I did live-blogging the MTV Awards Sunday night, even though my partner in the venture, Erik Adams, took on all the technical heavy lifting, leaving me free to just watch and type, unencumbered. If I were Lee Siegel or some asshole, I might try to argue that there's something built into the live blogging form that automatically turns writers into third-rate comedians and prevents them from having, or recording, any thoughts of a deeper nature. Since I am the asshole my mother made, I will instead allow for the possibility that I'd never done that before and just choked, and hope that I will be given the opportunity to get better at it.

My biggest regret was in not taking note of a small but interesting moment towards the end of the evening, when Lady Gaga, in male drag, delivered an elaborate spoken tribute to Britney Spears before asking her up on stage to accept an award. Gaga said something to the effect that she herself was one of many performers who wouldn't be in the business now if not for Britney, and then, once the two of them were standing side by side, she tried to kiss her, in what looked to be an evocation of the famous moment during the VMAs, many years ago, when Britney Spears and Madonna played a little tonsil hockey for the fans. Spears, who looked more like a reasonably wetogether young mother eager to put her wild days behind her--she had what Pauline Kael, in a review of a Jill Clayburgh movie, once called "that post-frazzled look"--pulled away from her and muttered something about how she'd been there, done that; Gaga looked a little embarrassed, and, still in character, tried to recover by muttering something about how the two of them were restraining themselves because "Gaga wouldn't like it." For reasons that I suspect go beyond concern about her career, Spears wants to be seen as a responsible adult now, and even though she was perfectly aware that Gaga was going somewhere pop-referential rather than somewhere steamy-sexy, she decided not to risk losing her dignity. Gaga clearly see Spears as someone who blazed a trail for pop provocateurs such as herself. But where Spears strikes me as a nice girl who just seemed to blunder into provocation as a career strategy, Gaga sees it as something to be planned and executed with a bang.

Gaga seems to want to keep the stage set in place every minute she's before us and never let a glimpse of a "real person" peep out from behind the makeup. Maybe she learned something about that, too, from Spears, who really seemed to be letting the attacks she was getting from the media get to her a few years ago. (The attacks I'm thinking of, which ranged from sneering at her personal appearance to screaming that she was the world's worst mother, tended to be overly personal, unnecessarily mean-spirited, way over-the-top, and to a very great degree just fucking deranged, so I don't blame her for taking them as badly as she liked.) I can mostly take or leave Britney's music--though I wouldn't mind seeing her give movies another try--but I applaud her for getting her act together, because I like to believe that every time she's photographed not looking as if she's on an episode of Cops, an Internet banshee somewhere drowns in its own spite. But Gaga may see her as someone who paid the price for allowing herself to be seen as vulnerable.

The thing is, there are moments--such as that failed kiss, and at the end of her opening number, when she looked beseechingly into the camera for a few seconds and didn't seem completely sure that she was pulling it off--when Gaga shows a little vulnerability herself, and if I admire her for her showmanship and flair and drive, I like her for the moments when something human shows through. It's the closest she comes to letting you see her sweat. It's one thing that sets her apart from Madonna, who made it a point to never appear vulnerable--which is part of what made her so hopeless as an actress--yet who often, especially from around the Truth or Dare tour on, has often made a point of letting you see her sweat, making it impossible to miss the effort of what she was doing. At a certain point fairly early in her career, Madonna stopped being an entertainer, someone who cared about giving pleasure to an audience, and a self-generating adulatory headline machine whose act consisted of telling you in what terms to couch the next round of celebratory media attention that would be directed her way, and looking over the actual artifacts of her thirty-odd-year career, I imagine that some of the articles and papers examining her importance as a feminist gay rights icon and political performance artist would seem even sillier now than they did when they were written, which would be very goddamn silly indeed. Gaga's act is harder to reduce to a bumper sticker, and she seems less dictatorial about demanding that she be taken serious. Which guarantees that she will be taken less seriously by a lot people, at the same time that it makes her a better performer, a richer public presence, and more of an artist.

New at The A.V. Club

2011-08-29T02:14:00.003-04:00

The 2011 MTV Video Music Awards

The Queen's Gambit Job"

Don’t get too close, I have rockin’ pneumonia: 15 songs that make diseases (real and imaginary) rock

New at The A.V. Club

2011-08-26T18:28:00.000-04:00

Homicide: "Bop Gun"

New at The A.V. Club

2011-08-24T19:49:00.000-04:00

Ludo Bites America

New at The A.V. Club

2011-08-23T11:05:00.001-04:00

Top Gear

New at The A.V. Club

2011-08-22T01:05:00.004-04:00

Leverage:"The Cross My Heart Job"

After the deluge: 29 remarkable works inspired by Hurricane Katrina [I did the entry on Treme]

New at The A.V. Club

2011-08-19T16:39:00.004-04:00

Homicide: "A Many Splendored Thing"

Thumbs

New at The A.V. Club

2011-08-17T11:43:00.002-04:00

Most Eligible Dallas

MasterChef: "Top 4 Compete; Top 3 Compete; Winner revealed"

Uh-Oh

2011-08-16T17:40:00.001-04:00
Based on this news, I calculate that I probably died about six years ago.

Insiders, Outsiders. Upside Downers

2011-08-16T14:44:00.002-04:00

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Daily Show did a sharp piece last night on how both Fox News and the mainstream media (I'm working from the assumption that Fox News itself would insist on that particular demarcation line) conspire to pretend that Ron Paul just isn't there. Paul gets invited to the big candidate debates, unlike, say, Buddy Roemer, but when he's there, even the moderators aren't shy about rolling their eyes at him. The there's the coverage of the Iowa straw poll, which is what has really forced this issue. In the aftermath, it was pretty common to hear anchor people say that nobody even came close to the winner, Michelle Bachmann. Well, Paul, who came in second, did rack up numbers very close to hers. That's not supposed to matter, because Rand has a reputation as a fringe candidate who can't possibly win the nomination and certainly couldn't win in a general election, just like... Michelle Bachmann.

For those of us who live deep outside the Republican nominating process, this is interesting mainly for what it reveals about the mental gymnastics that beltway media people go through in order to agree on what is and isn't normal and, by extension, what is and isn't important. First, the Iowa straw poll is a publicity stunt that caters to the red meat wing of the Republican party and has no predictive value whatsoever with regard to how things are going to shake out in the primaries. That's why it presumably doesn't make much difference how deeply and accurately its results are studied, and that's what you'll hear from media people who just got through doing blanket coverage of the pointless non-event all weekend long. Then there's the simple fact that Paul, no matter how well he does at stunts like this, can't win because he's a fringe candidate. But again, so is Bachmann, and what's more galling for many people, so are the likes of Rick Santorum, who somehow got a little extra respectful coverage for how well he did--which is to say, way behind both Paul and the now-departed Tim Pawlenty. That kind of thing is perfectly calibrated to piss off Paul voters, who, like a lot of people who'd never vote for him, actually regard their man with great affection. Say what you (or I) like about him, Ron Paul is that rare politician who is personally popular. The only conveivable circumstances iunder which Rick Santorum might be popular would be if he was the only person at the book burning rally who remembered to bring a match.

Back in 2008, when Obama was having problems because of his association with pastor Jeremiah "God damn America!" Wright, some black writers referred to people like Wright--black leaders who did heroic work during the civil rights era, only to survive into the modern era, spouting conspiracy theories and spewing anti-white racism and sounding increasingly unhinged--as the "crazy uncles" of the black community, deserving of respect for what they'd done in the past but embarrassing to have around now. In his own way, Ron Paul is the crazy uncle of the contemporary Republican party in general and Tea Pary America specifically. His ideas aren't any crazier or crueler than those given voice to by Bachmann or Rick Perry; if anything, when they talk about "austerity" carried to the point that it would eradicate the social safety net, they're appropriating the ideas he's been peddling for decades. Which is sort of the problem, because having Paul still around talking about the evils of Social Security and anti-discrimination legislation and anything that favors the rights of citizens over somebody's profit margin may remind people that it wasn't that long ago when these ideas, which some of the current Republican presidential candidates claim to subscribe to and all of them have to at least pretend to believe in, were usually regarded as the mark of cranks grinding out letters to small-time newspapers.

I regret the current popularity of these ideas, and I'm not crazy about Paul for having been their Johnny Appleseed. But the big difference between Paul and someone like Bachmann, and what keeps him relegated to the fringe more than his ideas do, is the fact that he's flesh and blood, ideologically honest, and willing to take his bad ideas to their logical extreme, no matter who might be listening. That's why he's viewed as nutty by the establishment, which can produce some real through-the-looking-glass effects, as in the clip Jon Stewart retrieved from the debate when Santorum and the Fox News moderator seemed to be sharing a get-this-crazy-guy bonding moment when Paul reminded everyone that he'd never supported the invasion of Iraq and that, eight years and no WMDs later, he's able to sleep pretty good over it. In the minds of most of the people in that room, the question wasn't whether it has ever been a mistake to support the war, but what kind of fruitcake would have passed up the chance to ride with the president of his own party on that particular train at the moment when it was the most popular thing in the county? (As Russell Baker once wrote, there are no rewards in Washington for having been right too early.)

Meanwhile, Michelle Bachmann, once regarded, with good reason, as a total nutcase and an ineffective legislator has just been happily redefined by the media establishment, not because her ideas got any saner or her legislating any more effective, but because it turns out that she has it in her to be a hack. She can dial down the fanaticism and work a crowd, turning slippery when needed and adjusting her ideological volume control depending on what kind of audience she's facing. She's a real politician, just the sort of person her Tea Party admirers have been claiming they're sick of, and because of that, the media will never pretend that she just isn't there, or protest that she shouldn't be, no matter bilge comes out of her mouth, even as she leaves Paul looking like a real straight-shooter. It's in a climate like this that someone who sees the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as betrayals of our nation's true values can manage to look heroic.

New at The A.V. Club

2011-08-15T01:04:00.003-04:00
Leverage: "The Grave Danger Job/ The Boiler Room Job"

17 Film Franchises That Took Strange Left Turns (I did the entires on Nick and Nora, Billy Jack, Sherlock Holmes, Lemmy Caution, Godzilla, and Halloween III.)

Knew Your Candidates: Tim Pawlenty

2011-08-14T11:54:00.004-04:00
Tim Pawlenty's presidential campaign, she is, how-a you say, no more! It should tell you everything you need to know about Pawlenty that, when called upon to convey information about him, my hands automatically begin typing in a phony comical Italian accent, just to try to spice things up a little.

Every election season, the road is littered with carcasses of doomed also-rans who stay in the race far too long and will devote the next few years of their political lives doing whatever it takes to pay off their staggering campaign debts. Pawlenty has proven himself not of that stripe, which I guess gives him bragging rights regarding how sincerely devoted he is to fiscal responsibility. Apparently he got into this because of all the rumors that John McCain might select him as his running mate in 2008. He seems to have enjoyed the attention that got him, and may have been powerfully disheartened when it all went away, because of a silly Alaskan governor who embodies everything in Republican politics that Pawlenty must feel superior to. He leaves after a disappointing showing in the empty, geared-to-the-wingnuts publicity stunt known as the Iowa straw poll. There he to beat--he ate their dust, in fact--Michelle Bachmann, recently seen auditioning for a remake of The Song of Bernadette on the cover of Newsweek*, and lovable libertarian pinhead and racist embarrassment Ron Paul, who I recently saw on YouTube asking Ben Bernanke if he thought that gold nuggets were "money", and then getting all smug when Bernanke gave the sane answer. Having been shoved aside in favor of this fast company, Pawlenty issued this statement: "What I brought forward, I thought, was a rational, established, credible, strong record of results, based on experience governing — a two-term governor of a blue state. But I think the audience, so to speak, was looking for something different." No bitterness there!

Pawlenty's fast fade will be regarded as shocking by all those pundits, cast in the mold of the recently-deceased-but-how-could-they-tell David Broder, who have spent the last two years watching Tea Party Republicans waving their guns next to their Bachmann-eyed lobster-red faces and screaming about using Second Amendment remedies to take their country back from the illegally elected socialist Muslims and concluded that what those people desperately wanted was the chance to vote for someone rational, established, and credible. It would be a lot easier to feel Tim Pawlenty's pain if he hadn't worked so hard to get on the good side of the worst people in American by flaunting his eagerness to denounce the few good ideas he'd expressed in his career, in particular what once looked like a genuine interest in confronting the problem of climate change. (He's since decided that the whole disastrous phenomenon is a hoax, a breakthrough insight that he arrived at after consulting some polls.) Having gone that extra mile, he distinguished himself as a man who wanted to whore himself out but needed to keep just enough self-respect to remain ineffective at it. Most notably, he floated an exciting new catch phrase meant to tie Mitt Romney to Barack Obama--"Obamneycare"--before a candidates' debate, then repeatedly turned down the opportunities that the moderator, eager for some mischief to spin news stories about, gave him to use it on the air. Dishonest and uncommitted to his principles, too feckless and half-assed in his political skills to qualify as a menace, and constitutionally incapable of getting a decent haircut, he leaves the field of battle as a man undeserving of respect on any level.

*Like the previous Newsweek cover of Sarah Palin in running shorts, the Bachmann cover has inspired a great deal of loose talk to the effect that it is not only mean and exploitative and "biased" (presumably in favor of non-crazy people) but that it is sexist. The argument is that important male political figures don't get treated like this. Maybe I'm biased myself, but I kind of wonder if the real question these covers don't raise is why. in a country that is increasingly populated by impressive women in politics, the ones who get enough media attention to become household name and magazine-cover faces seem to be the ones that any rational person is going to have a hard time resisting the urge to make fun of?

Know Your Candidates: Rick Perry

2011-08-12T18:52:00.006-04:00
By putting out the word before Thursday night's GOP presidential candidates debate that he was planning to announce his own candidacy the day of the Iowa straw poll, Texas Governor Rick Perry ensured that he would dominate the news cycle over the course of two major campaign events without having to actually participate in either. This feat sums up everything that's impressive about Perry. In any area except political symbolism, he's a moron, and, as they say, all hat and not cattle. But he knows how to sell the sizzle as if it were the steak.

Perry, who looks more like Josh Brolin playing George W. Bush that Brolin did, is the living embodiment of Terry Southern's notion of what a right-wing Texas politician ought to be. Bush, the spoiled preppy rich boy and frat house sadist who remade himself in the image of a born again good ol' boy because it was the easiest and most satisfying way he could find to set himself apart from a father who spent twelve years in the White House defining himself as America's national pantywaist, would have overtaxed the imagination of a satirist as cartoonish as Southern. Perry, who ascended to the Governorship after Junior resigned his commission to move into the Oval Office, Perry, who has wistfully indicated his desire to take the country back to 1912, before what he sees as the ruinous implementation of Social Security, Medicare, and the personal income tax, has made headlines for claiming, both proudly and inaccurately, that Texas could legally secede from the union if it had a mind to, for shooting a coyote with the big-ass gun he wants everyone to know he has on him during his morning jog, and for naming his cowboy boots "Freedom" and "Liberty". He's the real Dubya crossed with the real Chuck Norris.

With a certain kind of voter, a kind that happens to be driving the Republican party right now, this stuff is gold. A big part of its appeal is that it strikes anyone outside the cult as dopey; this makes it that much easier to turn something as trivial as an aged dumbass naming his boots into a vital tool for separating the country into "us" and "them", by indignantly demanding to know what's so funny about loving freedom and liberty so much that you want to pay tribute to these hallowed concepts with your footwear. Don't you love freedom and liberty, mister elitist big shot? Or would you rather name your Birkenstocks "Child Pornography" and "Onerous Federal Regulation"? This segment of the electorate thought it had struck gold a few years ago with Barack Obama, only to grow increasingly unhinged when it became clear that he wasn't going to play. After a brief but intense period when it was considered quite the thing to fake a seizure because Obama was signaling his terrorist sympathies but showing up at speaking engagements not wearing an American flag decal pin, Obama made it clear that his attitude towards this sort of thing was to shrug and basically say, "Shucks, I'll wear a flag decal pin if it means that much to you. Sure am glad we were able to put this to bed forever in such a simple way." It was because of this spoilsport tendency of the President's that symbolic political addicts of a certain ideological fever have had to create a whole alternate reality version of him--the frothing, wild-eyed product of pure rage who will never compromise his socialist principles in negotiations with the tempering forces across the aisle--rather than find something to object to about the real Obama, even though I'm sure that, like the people who voted for him, they could find plenty to object to if they tried. (If the real Barack Obama ever looked out the window and saw the Barack Obama they talk about on Fox News skulking about, he'd be the first one to call the Neighborhood Watch.)

Last week, Perry revved up for today's announcement by hosting a Christian lollapalooza at Houston's Reliant Stadium. The event, which was called The Response, generated some negative attention because of the presence of John Hagee, the founder and senior pastor of San Antonio's Cornerstone Church (19,000 members), who John McCain had to distance himself from in 2008 after some of Hagee's more outre views were publicized by the elitist liberal media. (Hagee has repeatedly said that, although the Catholic church is to blame for making Adolf Hitler anti-Semitic, the Holocaust was a necessary part of God's plan, because how else was he going to get all those Jews clustered together in Israel, where they need to be for the Second Coming. He has also wondered aloud of God hadn't sent Hurricane Katrina as divine retribution for New Orleans having "had a level of sin that was offensive to God.") I myself tend to think that the most ominous thing about The Response was that name, which seems to clearly indicate that Perry sees his religious beliefs, and the rock-ribbed, compassion-free political beliefs that are said to flow from them, as a response to something: the culture at large, perhaps, or the insufficiently God-fearing half of the country that never voted for his predecessor in the Texas Governor's mansion.

As Leon Wiesltier, who even at this late date is still capable of making sense whenever he sense that a great number of Christians are gathered together and may be casting funny looks at non-Christians, has written, "The most repellent aspect of The Response is its hypocritical notion of repentance. What, precisely, is Perry sorry for? He and his lot hardly believe that they are the cause of the moral decline that they deplore. They wish to rid the country of the sins of other people, of the sins of people unlike themselves. The Response is not an exercise in self-examination. It is an exercise in self-congratulation. If it were anything else, then Perry might have pondered, say, the reverence for the rich and the indifference to the poor, the contemporary Republican project of pushing a camel through the eye of a needle, and been rattled in the manner of the penitent. He might have worried, if only for a moment in the Austin night, that he is himself the cankerworm." There is something deeply self-satisfied and exclusionary about the face of Perry's and his followers' moralism, something that George Junior only showed in those special moments when he felt challenged and needed to remind everyone that, however slapdash and ill-informed and scrotum-driven his decision-making might be, his was the only vote that counted. ("Who cares what you think?")

Those of us who were around and sentient in 2000 will remember from the coverage of Bush's first presidential campaign that the Texas governor has so little to do that it's nearly a ceremonial position. That hasn't stopped Perry from running around boasting about his awesome record as a creator of jobs (there are jobs here, but for reasons that have naught to do with Rick Perry, unless we're talking about the hair-dye manufacturing sector), any more than it has caused him to reflect on anything he might have to do with the budgetary hole the state is in. It has often seemed that, besides radiating symbolic meaning, the Texas Governor's main job is to sign off on executions, and at this Perry. like his predecessor, has really gone to town, in a way you might expect from a self-righteously moralistic man with a bullying streak who thinks that God makes sure that only the most deserving people end up poor or on death row.

Anyone who actually pays attention to the criminal justice system will figure that a man who has authorized more than 200 executions will have just naturally authorized a few of people who were wrongly convicted and flat-out innocent, and there's no longer any question at all, outside of Perry's mind, that he blithely sent at least one innocent man, Cameron Todd Whitman, to his doom. Just as President Bush and his enablers fought as hard as they could to resist any investigations into what happened on September 11, 2001, figuring that if anyone has dropped the ball, that was just the kind of intel the terrorists would want us to know and be disheartened by, Perry has reacted to the truth about Whitman by trying to tamp down the lid, firing members of the Texas Forensic Science Comission who'd threatened to further investigate the matter. After all, the only good their report could have done would have been to force Perry to reconsider the way he'd done his job, and a reflective Rick Perry would amount to a violation of natural law.

During the recent budget fight, a number of Democrats and pundits pointed out that Ronald Reagan, sainted father of the modern conservative movement, would have been considered an apostate by current Republican standards because he repeatedly raised taxes to keep the economy afloat, and he still managed to preside over the creation of the modern bloated federal deficit. Such talk only infuriates true blue Republicans, who favor faith over elitist facts, and who know in their hearts that Reagan never raised taxes, whether he did or not. Grover Norquist himself will tell you that Reagan was the perfect President and original walking No-Tax Pledge, and it's like believing that Cameron Todd Whitman really torched his family: do you want to decide what you believe based on the facts, or are you going to show that you have faith? Perry is all faith, as you might expect a man in his position to be. He has said that things have gotten so bad that it's time to just put it all in God's hands; when he wrote, in the "call to prayer" that accompanied his announcement of The Response, that we need to "pray, fast, and believe... for a mighty move of God in our nation again", it sounded as if he really thinks that God will fix the economy and everything else just as soon as He's sure that the right man will be in the White House to take the credit for it. A lot of people probably think that Perry was speaking in metaphors, but those close to the Gov insist that he wouldn't know what a metaphor was if one slithered across his boot and he had to yank out his peacemaker and blow it away. Bush, who is generally thought of as a wise, Machiavellian sage compared to Perry, was also said to be a canny thinker who was only pretending to be Forrest Gump and to believe literally in this God's grace stuff because it went over so well with the rubes out there. That was before the economy tanked and the President's response was to whine that everything would be fine if we'd all just follow his lead and persist in being optimistic like a motherfucker. Bush's faith may have been more Norman Vincent Peale, while Perry's may be more along the lines of whoever's the non-Catholic equivalent of Torquemada. But they both leave you feeling that George Michael has a lot to answer for.