politics

I Miss Evil

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I started out a little scared of Dick Cheney. And of Karl Rove. Further back, even of Newt Gingrich.

I was scared of them because it felt like they were working the levers of a system that I couldn’t perceive.

Even as a teenager it seemed so transparent that Mr. Gingrich was a thundering hypocrite, about both economics and personal morality, that he had to be playing a deeper game within American politics. That some hidden power was pulling the strings and trying to nudge America into a particular shape.

The early days of the Bush administration felt the same way. That there were hidden agendas that may have been kleptocratic, but that still required a basic societal stability from which to profit.

For a Progressive, the opposition felt evil, in the way that a Bond villain is. Or Doctor Doom.

Man, I miss those days.

Now when I look at the politics of the right, there doesn’t seem to be any hidden agendas. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of comforting, comic-book, evil, just inchoate rage from some (Ms. Angle, Mr. DeMint) and the desire to stay one step ahead of that rage for others (Mr. Boehner, Mr. McCain).

Now, not only do the ideas not make sense, but it doesn’t matter that they don’t make sense. There seems to be no fear of ruling over ashes.

I’d like my comic-book bad guys back.

I Miss Evil

The Most 2008 Movie of 2009, or, Economic Uncertainty and Ennui Explained through Prostitution!

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It might be a consequence of living in New York (where it takes place, albeit in a very different New York than mine), but Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience unsettled me as much as any movie I saw last year.

Not bad for a barely plotted, mostly improvised, movie about a high-priced escort.

It’s no secret that most movies about prostitution aren’t really about sex, but it is interesting to come across one that isn’t really about intimacy, or even relationships. Instead, it’s about economics. And what’s scarier right now than economics?

Filmed and set during a few days in late October of 2008, The Girlfriend Experience captures the feeling settled over the city in the time just after the financial crisis well and truly blossomed, when we all realized, regardless of our professional proximity to Wall Street, that we were in long-term trouble. More than that, it nails the way in which New York (or most cities, I’d imagine) runs on a combination of money and dreams, and how a disruption in the former messes with the latter.

In The Girlfriend Experience, every character who isn’t rich is chasing self-sufficiency, and are circling those who have the money to make that happen. The characters with money, meanwhile, seem willfully ignorant of the effect they have on the people around them. They’re focused on their own emotional needs.

When the financial crisis starts mucking up the equilibrium of this system, people’s dreams are even more effected than their lives. What’s chilling is the sense that, in the absence of the hope for either upward mobility or “having it all,” there’s very little left except the sense that at some point most of us got sold a bill of goods about what it means to be successful or to be happy. Once those possibilities start disappearing from the table, the question “What now?” seems to echo through the movie.

And “What now?” was a scary question in 2008 that’s only gotten scarier.

The Most 2008 Movie of 2009, or, Economic Uncertainty and Ennui Explained through Prostitution!

Sarah Palin is being Exploited [media]

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Oprah exploited Sarah Palin.

Sarah Palin knew this, of course. She signed up for it. It’s all part of the deal that people opt in to when they’ve when got a platform that’s larger than their employment prospects.

It’s a bad deal, though. And one that tells us some things about our deeply flawed media.

The deal is supposed to work like this: A notable figure writes a book. They spend the better part of a month giving interviews to as many venues as they can in hopes that the attention will get people to purchase the book. Then they take the money earned by the book out of the bank in singles, cover their bed it in, and roll around happily.

This quid pro quo is a much better deal for broadcasters than it is for authors (as loosely defined as the term may be in this case), and it diminishes both mediums. It turns book publishing into a de facto money laundering operation. Is there any doubt that everything Sarah Palin wished to express and accomplish with “Going Rogue” could have been done just as well with a series of interviews? Or 20 pages of bullet-points?

Worse, the arrangement gives an enormous free pass to a “news” culture that’s become to celebrity newsmakers what the NCAA is to athletes. In a time when the book business is ever more troubled, and the ability to draw an audience together for anything longer than a youtube clip is ever more valuable, how does it make sense for books to serve as the near exclusive means of monetizing interest, while television newscasters get paid millions upon millions for asking softball questions in service of  news broadcasts that serve as profit centers for multinational corporations?

Orpah and other broadcasters get a definable benefit, in ratings and advertising dollars, from having someone on who brings extra eye to the screen. If Sarah Palin brought one extra viewer to Oprah’s show, or to any of the other venues she’s been on in the last couple of weeks, why shouldn’t she be entitled to payment for the value she added?

Taking the idea a step further, imagine a broadcast where the journalists and their interview subjects shared the profits, in an above-board way.

Perhaps a profit motive might lead to someone like Palin answering questions that journalists typically don’t ask, like about Trig’s birth, or how she really feels about her political future. After all, nothing sells like conflict and revelations.

Most celebrity “news” interviews these days are non-confrontational to the point of propaganda. The news could cease showing their desperation for the ratings that come with a good “get,” and fearing that showing a semblance of spine would torpedo their chances. Instead, the could focus on offering the best financial deal, and preparing a show that would create the most possible interest.

We might even get more truth out of the deal.

(I, for one, would pony up $24.99 to watch Sarah Palin interviewed by Michael Moore on Pay-Per-View. Would the integrity of the news business really suffer in that kind of deal?)

It’s time for a new method of monetizing interest. (And if it only served to save us from all of those dubious books, that would be success enough.)

Sarah Palin is being Exploited [media]

Bill O’Reilly Needs a Hug

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Bill O’Reilly’s recent statement in support of a public insurance option as a part of health care reform, followed as quickly as it was by him decrying being taken out of context and saying “the internet is a safe haven for liars,” reminds me of nothing so much as a baseball player who charges the mound, but does it just slowly enough to make sure his teammates catch up to him before he has to throw a punch. It’s a “Hold me back! Hold me back!” moment.

It’s got to be a bit tough being the Big Giant Head right now. With Glenn Beck’s crazy rise, Bill’s isn’t the cool table in the Fox News cafeteria anymore. When Media Matters does its daily round up of right wing half-truths, O’Reilly can barely even get ink anymore. He’s learning first hand that it’s better to be made fun of than to be ignored.

Why else would he ask that press be barred from his acceptance of a Media Courage Award over the weekend?

It’s a cry for help.

Bill O’Reilly Needs a Hug

What Zombies Can Tell Us about the Aughts

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You can a lot about a culture from the monsters it embraces. Sometimes even things it might not know about itself. (And we’re talking literal monsters, like werewolves and such. While Bernie Madoff certainly counts as a monster under most definitions, say, no child outside of Palm Beach leaves their closet light on just in case he’s in there.)

In the boom times, earlier this decade, the our monster of choice was the zombie. Starting with the film 28 Days Later and continuing with Dawn of the Dead, the reverent spoof Shaun of the Dead, the excellent black and white comic The Walking Dead, and even the Resident Evil franchise of video games and movies, zombies were everywhere.

What we didn’t know at the time was that zombies really were everywhere.

In everyday life we were surrounded by zombie institutions. Banks and brokerages leveraged past the point of viability, and with portfolios of worthless assets, shuffling about their business until being told that they’d actually been dead for years.

A news media that let a war get sold to the public on provably false pretenses while producing the same millions of column inches and hours of talking heads it always had. Reading or watching it, you’d hardly know they missed anything.

A political system that turned against itself. A justice department actively trying to influence elections. A disaster agency designed to prove, at high human cost, its own inadequacy. A Congress content to argue on the margins with constitutional principles at stake. It seemed like it was still mostly doing what it always did while inside it was rotting.

Maybe the zeitgeist was trying to warn us.

If the early and mid- part of this decade belonged to the zombie, what does it mean that now the monster of the moment is the vampire? (Twilight, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries…) I’m not sure, but I suspect things are about to get mean.

(And I’d keep a close eye on one’s precious bodily fluids, just in case.)

What Zombies Can Tell Us about the Aughts

The Nature of Political Compromise, and Bourbon

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Watching the GOP on cable news fulminating about health care reform makes me think about the nature of compromise.

(Well, actually, first it makes me giggle a bit; then I get very quiet and think about America’s future; then more giggling, only bitter now; then I give the television the finger; then I grab a bottle of bourbon while muttering about John Boehner being an “asshat”; and then I start thinking about the nature of political compromise.)

Near as I can figure, there are three reasons for compromise in our legislative system.

1) To get the votes necessary to pass a bill – With the large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, compromise for votes (at least outside of the Blue Dogs) is not very needed. Also worth noting that when the Republicans were in power their approach towards this flavor of compromise went along the lines of telling the Democrats they were communistic, terrorist loving, troop hating, wusses if they didn’t tow the line, and then calling them that anyway after they did.

2) As an end in itself – The idea that bringing the other side to the table is either an inherent good, or will make generalized aspects of governing easier. Given the clubbiness of Congress, this could also be the “I don’t want anyone to feel awkward at Cokie Roberts’ next dinner party” position. We know from their recent history that the Republican Party doesn’t consider this one much of a value, hence Dick Cheney’s telling a Democratic Senator to “go [expletive deleted] himself.”

3) To make the legislation better – The Easter Bunny of political goals. Besides an impulse towards harmony as opposed to discord, I think this is at the heart of the desire for compromise on important pieces of legislation. Both in the media and Democratic leadership, there’s a tendency towards looking back wistfully at some hazy former day when both parties met, exchanged ideas, and shook hands over the improved bill. That carries over today into an attitude that posits the solution to national problems as being invariably found somewhere in the middle of what each party is advocating. Which is, of course, bunk.

With all there reasons for political compromise being either deeply flawed or fully broken, might it make sense for the Democratic Party to just quietly push away from the table and go about the business of governing mostly on their own?

The Nature of Political Compromise, and Bourbon

The Awesome Usefulness of Kayfabe (“What’s Kayfabe?” you ask…)

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Every Monday evening, for the last couple of months now, I walk over to my 10 year-old nephew’s place to watch professional wrestling with him and bond. Not having paid much attention to the pro wrestling scene since the late 90s, and aware of its tendency towards downright 12th Night levels of plot complexity, I’ve been spending a lot of time on Wikipedia getting up to speed on who’s feuding with who. That research led me to “kayfabe.”

“Kayfabe,” originally a turn of the century carny term, is the rule or code that requires wrestlers to treat their business as real. The idea that the good guy and the bad guy really hate each other, or that they’re really trying to do grievous injury to one another, are examples of kayfabe. In the old days of the business, promotion owners would go so far as to disallow “good” wrestlers from eating out or traveling with “bad” ones, in order to maintain it.

But kayfabe isn’t just useful for thinking about wrestling. It turns out that it’s everywhere, in all sorts of different areas of our culture. In fact, once I started looking around with kayfabe in mind, it began to feel like one of the defining forces of the mainstream media universe.

Take political coverage: I’d wager that most of the right-wing talking heads opining about Sonia Sotomayor don’t really think she’s a “racist.” And they’d be hard pressed to explain at length their contention that somehow growing up Hispanic and poor in the Bronx provides advantages that upper-class white males just can’t compete with, yet on our mainstream news David Gregory or whomever will nod knowingly at their line of agrument and wrap up the segment by telling viewers something like “serious questions have been raised about her qualifications.” That’s kayfabe in action.

Or Hollywood: The idea that, yes, Hugh Jackman is thrilled to be on your mid-market morning show talking about his abs and absolutely the most important thing for him about his new Wolverine movie was the script. Kayfabe.

Sports: When the announcers of a late season NBA game between two teams with no shot at the playoffs say something about how much these players “want it.” You guessed it.

In a media landscape dominated by these little fictions, I like having a name for them.

The Awesome Usefulness of Kayfabe (“What’s Kayfabe?” you ask…)