Saturday, July 23, 2005
DEPRESSING ARTIFACT OF THE DAY: An argument against gay marriage by a gay guy at Opinion Journal. It is long, dissertation long, and has close reasoning, references to Maimonedes and Hayek and Karl Popper and Easter Island and the Shakers etc., and passages like this delivered in an audibly high tone:The visceral code is like the DNA of the community: It tells us what behavior must be passed on through the social emotions of shame, honor and pride. It demands that we behave; it molds us and makes us, just as our parents do, for their doing is always its doing... We cannot ask whether the visceral code is useful to the community when it is in fact constitutive of the community: It is the foundation on which the community is built. It is a necessary precondition of achieving community at all, and hence it is improper to evaluate it in terms of its mere utility. But when it comes time to actually measure the gay marriage case against these exacting standards, what do we get? The usual denigration of self-esteem -- not even self-esteem in extremis, but self-esteem per se ("But our insistence on creating self-esteem in an 8-year-old boy comes with a high price tag -- by refusing to encourage the boy's dissatisfaction with himself as he is.." -- we prevent him from hating himself for failing to come up later, fool; look at the sadly belligerent cases on any city's police blotter, with their Thug Life or Born to Lose tattoos, and ask yourself, are these people really suffering from too much self-esteem?). A comparison of gay marriage to a stranger asking to take "your 8-year-old daughter" for a ride -- the nearest thing to just drawing a picture of the Devil in our modern discourse. And a wide-angle projection of disgust for gay marriage even onto its advocates ("This is why for most people, including many gay men and women, the immediate response to the idea of gay marriage came at the gut level--it somehow felt funny and wrong..."), without a citation or even, so far as I can tell, the possibility of citation outside the author's own self-loathing community.
It's not so depressing that arguments against gay marriage exist -- well, okay, it is. It's not even so depressing that they are so lousy -- actually, that's kind of funny. What's really depressing is that they apparently come gussied up as intellectual arguments, with ten-dollar words and references to ancient philosophers. We have grown used to the alternative realities proposed by conservatives when reality contradicts them, but it is a bit jarring to see some of them in hound's-tooth and mortarboards, sucking briar pipes, playing at professor while talking (in sentences of whatever length, and with howsoever many footnotes) absolute gibberish.
1:02 AM by roy edroso
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Wednesday, July 20, 2005
SHORTER JAMES LILEKS: Stupid liberals, always invoking Rick Santorum! What a predictable, knee-jerk response. Why, I bet they'd vote for... (reaches into bag, pulls out effigy) the Klansman Robert Byrd! Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. And for my encore, some incomprehensible raving about Jackson Pollock, termites, and single mothers.
UPDATE. Fixed link. You can also go here to see Lileks decry rap music, cursing, and anti-social behavior. Alternately, you can get pretty much the same thing here.
10:07 AM by roy edroso
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Tuesday, July 19, 2005
IN WITH THE OUT CROWD. Michael Totten -- reacting, it would seem, to unkind comments made at this very site about the new centrist enterprise, Donklephant, with which he is involved -- denounces the left as an "exclusive bitchy little high school clique" that imagines itself "surrounded by rightwing boogeymen." Conservatives, on the other hand, are "in general... more comfortable with centrists than are liberals in general." The left, Michael concludes, is plagued by a "loathing of heretics."
Well, all in all it's better than being called Fifth Columnists, as we were in the days when Andrew Sullivan was the internet model of sweet reason. But "clique" is an interesting choice of word. How are my readers any more of a clique than the charming folks who fill Michael's comments with denunciations of evil libruldom?
"When Bush mentions democracy," one such commenter says, "liberals friends of mine just roll their eyes because, I'm sad to say, they have ceased believing in it." Many of us would suggest an alternate reason, of course -- and maybe that feeds the perception of cliquishness: There's a lot of eye-rolling at this site, and some people are not comfortable with that sort of dismissive attitude -- especially if they identify themselves so strongly with democracy, freedom, etc., that when they are mocked they imagine those things are being mocked as well, or perhaps exclusively.
In this sort of dynamic -- for instance, to take Michael's analogy, high school -- non-joiners, however small and powerless a unit they comprise, are imagined to be committing some sort of offense against the joiners. Given the near-universal contempt in which liberals are held these days, I hardly imagine we are the football team or student government of Michael's high school. Buncha losers smoking cigarettes behind the gym, more like.
I expect we will be further marginalized in the days to come, as there is little doubt that centrism is the coming thing. Hugh Hewitt, for example, lays claim to something called the "center-right blogosphere." According to Hewitt, the "left-wing blogosphere" -- including such wild-eyed Jacobins as Kevin Drum -- are incapable of reasonable analysis because they get their information from "old plumbing" (i.e. newspapers, television, and radio) which, being made of "lead," is "poisoning the information they are distributing, and the consequence is the slow poisoning of the Democratic Party," leaving us with "lousy logic and terrible habits of mind."
Center-rightists, on the other hand, have shiny new pipes made of Internet, and because the information going through those pipes stays Springtime-fresh, the center-right is "much, much more fact specific," "much less prone to vulgarity, profanity or the sort of personal attacks that create barriers to new readership," "simply more professional about its reporting, and more vigorous in its reporting," and in general "simply light years ahead of the left." And "funnier," "more skilled with words," etc. No word yet as to whether they would beat us in a softball game, but I'm guessing he thinks so.
One might argue that Hewitt is just a straight-up conservative sticking a centrist label on his stuff. But really, is there any other qualification for membership? Hewitt's just reaching out, hoping to find consensus.
If you want me, I'll be out behind the gym.
UNHYPHENATED CENTRISM UPDATE! Michael links to some guy who became a centrist because his liberal workmates forced him to watch In Living Color and Martin. A commenter concurs: "That was a really weird time in this country. Even though my school was at least 65% white, people tried to identify witht the black culture to the point of being called 'white' was actually an insult." I musta been taking a nap during this Black Supremacist era -- tell me, is that how O.J. got acquitted?
11:34 PM by roy edroso
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DISORDER AND EARLY SORROW. Saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I can’t speak to its faithfulness to the book, which I haven’t read – my Dahl knowledge is restricted to The Big Friendly Giant and a corking old mystery story called "Man from the South"—but I can say that it is perfectly consistent with Tim Burton.
Burton has great showmanship, and I used to think that his less successful efforts, like Sleepy Hollow and Planet of the Apes, were the ones where it ran away with him. If he had a better artistic track record than Cecil B. DeMille, I figured, it was only because he had a proper arts education, and thus was compelled to channel his Barnumite gusto into whatever style he deduced was appropriate. My favorite of his films, Ed Wood, may be as low-key (relatively) as it is because Burton internalized the real Wood’s club-footed style, which disarmed his usual apparati and left the wonderful story, relationships, and acting to provide the special effects. (In my second favorite, Batman Returns, the script is so absurdly florid that even Burton in full effulgence can do no better than match it.)
Charlie’s style is perhaps Burton’s most egregious hodgepodge since Mars Attacks!. The references range from the Dickensian 19th Century to some Warchowskian future. The property’s big problem -- how to make sense of the parents’ grotesquely underscaled reaction to their children’s disfigurement -- is completely ignored; the grown-ups just stand around looking stupid while their kids are inflated, discarded, extruded, etc. Burton even sticks on a new ending that, while fine in itself, seems to reduce the eventful voyage through the factory to a grisly joke about Willy Wonka's father issues. At one point even the usually game David Kelly ran out of ways to register astonishment at all the marvels, and looked positively wrung out.
I enjoyed it nonetheless. I'm not sure why. It may be that Burton has exceeded Mach Roy, the velocity at which showmanship overrides my objections to -- well, anything. It is an embarrassing admission, but the guy might have just outgunned my intellect. Me like pretty colors and Danny Elfman!
Or it may be that Burton's logic is subtler than it looks. Seen this way, the bad old world really isn't so much different from era to era -- only the art direction changes, if not as capriciously as here. The children's come-uppances are no worse, though more accelerated and fanciful, than what any greedy, over-ambitious, self-centered, or plain depraved kids might experience in the world outside their parents' control; and their parents' reactions only look strange because they're having them on the spot, instead of wondering stupidly at kitchen tables years later where they have failed. And Willy Wonka's psychology may be perfectly sound, given his intolerable burden of pleasing children, and the child he has steadfastly determined to remain, with sensory palliatives that never fill their, or his, bottomless need.
<wonkavoice>Well! That sounds kinda creepy, doesn't it? So maybe you wanna just get yourself down to the movies and see for yourself. 'Kay?</wonkavoice>
UPDATE. Corrected name of Dahl story I read as a kid. I found "Man from the South" (which I had previously confused with Bloch's "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper")in one of those Alfred Hitchcock collections popular in my youth. They usually had titles like Stories to Make You Plotz or something like that; mine was called Spellbinders in Suspense (this is what my copy looked like -- without the Hitchock autograph, of course -- though there are apparently alternate versions). Spellbinders had "The Most Dangerous Game," DuMaurier's "The Birds," the Dahl story, stuff by Edgar Wallace, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Agatha Christie, etc. This is what we had instead of Harry Potter, folks, and it was just fine.
1:08 AM by roy edroso
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Monday, July 18, 2005
JUNIOR ANTI-SEX LEAGUE, PART #134,789. "The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it. He did not know why this was so, but it seemed natural that it should be so. And as far as the women were concerned, the Party's efforts were largely successful." George Orwell, guess what book.
Carrie Lukas decries the alleged sexual promiscuity of Washington's female interns. Lukas hails from the Independent Women's Forum, at whose website you can read how The March of the Penguins provides good role-modeling for human families, or at least those human families that live in arctic wastelands and have brains the size of cashews. (Isn't there something weird and hippie-ish about comparing human family dynamics unfavorably to those of wild animals? How did this become a rightwing thing?)
The group does enjoy some laughs that are not clinically hysterical -- for instance, much glee is had over silly podiatrists who try to keep women from their fancy shoes. But on the subject of sex, the peals of girlish laughter subside, and the IWF ladies turn grim as death. Hence this study, which is of interest only to those of us who get a mild thrill hearing about young people in power suits gittin' it awn, and to culture scolds.
If you don't have time to read this whole post, here are some of the key words and phrases found in Lukas' article: thong-snapping seduction, vixen, over-sexed cesspool, casual physical encounter, meaningful relationship, alcohol-fueled hook-up lifestyle. Context doesn't add much to it, believe me, but read on if so inclined:
The meat of Lukas' story is am IWF poll of 200 D.C. interns. 44 percent of them admit to "hooking up" and "40 percent of congressional interns admitted to engaging in 'intimate activities' that they otherwise may not have participated in while under the influence" of alcohol. Only 1 percent admitted to knowing anything about any live, hot legislator-intern action.
Young adults having sex! Stop the presses! But Lukas is concerned. The percentage of interns who have sex has doubled since 2003, she writes. "Why should anyone care that drinking and hooking up are a part of the typical Capitol intern experience — chalk it up to harmless fun and life experience, right?" she asks in a moment of sanity which, alas, passes: "…research shows that many young women experience serious regret after engaging in such encounters."
In other scientific developments, many 21-year-olds fail to plan for retirement, say things they later regret, and find Adam Sandler funny. Regrets, we greybeards know, are part of life. But this is more serious, I guess, because it involves penises and/or vaginas -- so serious Lukas proposes "a running dialogue about the drawbacks of existing traditions and practices so that a healthier culture can develop."
Sister, that dialogue's been running in conservative publications since the days when Malcolm Forbes cruised the West Side on his Harley. Since the primary purpose of this dialogue (or, to be more specific, series of soapbox perorations) is to stimulate outrage among scolds, which can then be transmitted to a gullible public, it will probably never end so long as a few votes can be wrung out of it.
Throughout Lukas speaks of Washington interns as if they were Girl Guides between the ages of 12 and 16. It would be astonishing that a group devoted to the empowerment of women seem to regard sex as some sort of malign force, like terrorism, that persons of the female persuasion can't handle without help from a think tank. Maybe Scaife or somebody should feel them a few mill to produce some TV ads with headlines like "Prayer Meetings: The Anti-Sex."
How stupid do they think we are? Well, they're probably right.
5:18 PM by roy edroso
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