Kia and I saw the Dominique Serrand production of Tartuffe at the Harman at a preview on Saturday. The show doesn’t officially open till Monday. I am aware of and appreciate the controversy over reviewing preview performances, so I’ll forbear to judge what may be changed by the opening, and tread lightly regarding the performances, which I will say are all of high professional quality (especially in the handling of verse and comic business). I will discuss the concept, though, which was apparently settled by the time the show was mounted at Berkeley Rep.
We've all seen plenty of productions of established properties that might be deemed Dark Reimaginings. These have ranged from the brilliant, e.g. Throne of Blood, to the asinine — the worst example of which, for me, was an off-off-Broadway Midsummer Night’s Dream long ago which began with Theseus and Hippolyta simulating intercourse and had the actor playing Bottom portraying all the other Mechanicals with finger puppets. (I didn’t stick around to see what he did with Pyramus and Thisbe.)
Serrand is no tyro; he has apparently has had a long, distinguished career of squeezing extra juice of classics, and has clearly studied Tartuffe carefully, as you can tell by his sometimes laborious underlinings.
By now even people who haven’t read Tartuffe know it has something to do with religious hypocrisy and the ease with which it can upend real moral order. If you have read or seen it, you know that Moliere’s great achievement is to make the inversion as believable as it is absurd. From the outset we see that Orgon, the paterfamilias, has been not only been taken in by Tartuffe, but unhinged by him: he describes Tartuffe’s professed asceticism, and the lesson Tartuffe has apparently encouraged him to take from it: “…he weans/ My heart from every friendship, teaches me/ To have no love for anything on earth;/ And I could see my brother, children, mother,/ And wife, all die, and never care — a snap.” (This is from the old Curtis Hidden Page translation; David Ball’s adaptation, used in this show, is smoother.) Meanwhile Tartuffe is sponging off Orgon to beat the band, and has bigger game in mind.
Everyone else knows Orgon’s been had, but he never wavers in his faith until the famous scene in which Orgon’s wife Elmire conceals him so he may hear Tartuffe, who has already indirectly propositioned her, respond to her pretense of interest and fully reveal his hypocrisy (“The public scandal is what brings offense/ And secret sinning is not sin at all”). By then it’s too late, and Tartuffe has already swindled Orgon out of all his possessions. He is restored later, in a scene that Moliere added under what is generally thought to be royal compulsion, though audiences usually appreciate the relief.
This relief Serrand seems to begrudge, and in a big way. He keeps the ending, but makes it clear that Orgon’s family is dispirited and lives even after Tartuffe’s arrest in fear of him — so much so that they pile furniture against the front door of the house and slump dejectedly as the curtain falls.
In fact, though everyone besides Orgon knows Tartuffe is a fraud, throughout the play most of them seem frightened of him — even the typically sensible maid Dorine, even while she is insulting him, shivers like a menaced damsel. As for Orgon’s daughter Mariane, she’s so horrified by the prospect of the forced marriage to Tartuffe her father has arranged that she goes into a kind of Ophelia swoon — with bandaged wrists suggesting a suicide attempt, yet.
Steven Epp plays Tartuffe, rightly and very well, as someone who would give normal people the cold creeps; his blissfully bald-faced lying has an incandescence that suggests an inspired artist of deception — indeed, he really is a mystic of an evil kind, which is a great illumination of the character. But this alone can’t explain the quaking desperation he inculcates in the family.
The idea, insofar as I can guess, is to make Tartuffe represent the entire looming evil of false religion, something bigger than one man. To (I suspect) help put this over, Tartuffe is given servants who wordlessly louche about the stage like runway models on Seconal, sometimes physically accosting characters, sometimes just exuding sybaritic menace. One of them doubles as the process server Loyal, playing him like a Willem Dafoe villain. (Everyone cowers at him, too.) And though he’s doing fine just with the lines, Epp is occasionally directed to do movement-class erotic creeping along the floor, and a little door on his shirt sometimes opens to reveal his nipples. He’s not just a horny fake preacher — he’s the snake in the Garden of Eden.
Maybe I’m dense, but I think the great thing about Tartuffe is that he is a man, and that he can achieve as much mischief as he does, despite having been basically hauled in off the street, by fastening on the willful gullibility of a single bourgeois and playing it for all it's worth. We’ve all known leeches; sometimes they show unexpected resourcefulness in deception, and while it doesn't make us like them it changes our estimation of them. Tartuffe’s resourcefulness is of such a high order than when he manages to get away with his first seduction of Elmire, it’s like Richard III turning the tables at the end of Margaret’s big speech: The surprise is not completely negative. Like all the great comic villains (and some of the ones in tragedies) he’s got enough élan vital to make it interesting. We don’t necessarily have to identify completely with the dupes. In fact that may be why Moliere didn’t put Tartuffe’s comeuppance in the first version: why deprive him or Orgon of their just desserts?
Lest I make the show sound like a bore, be notified that it has great energy, some brilliant stage pictures, and lots of laughs. I wasn’t kidding when I said Serrand knows the play. The scene in which Mariane and her boyfriend Valere exchange insincere professions of unlove, and the one in which Dorine keeps coming up with ways to sass her master without getting socked, are especially successful, demonstrating that everyone involved knows what kind of human beings and human frailties they’re dealing with, at least when Tartuffe and his minions aren’t around.
While alicubi.com undergoes extensive elective surgery, its editors pen somber, Shackletonian missives from their lonely arctic outpost.
Sunday, June 07, 2015
Thursday, June 04, 2015
P.C. B.S.
I keep hearing from conservatives that political correctness is ruining everything. For example, at National Review, which runs stories about PC at about the rate The Federalist runs stories about Caitlin Jenner, Ian Tuttle extrapolates from an advice column at a site you never heard of that the peecee people "would do much to crack down on the number of Fitzgeralds or Faulkners or Cormac McCarthys" and supplant their brilliance with "the Afro-Cuban lesbian experience," har har; also,
Anyway, a lot of prominent liberals (including Amanda Marcotte, conservatives' favorite feminist voodoo doll) are saying Laura Kipnis got a bad rap from hypersensitive apparatchiks-in-training at Northwestern, and good for them (the liberals, not the apparatchiks). The other day Edward Schlosser had a long piece at Vox, of all places, complaining about student noodges. You'd think that if PC were as much of a menace as it's been portrayed, conservatives would be happy to at last have bipartisan support in fighting it. Well, here's James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal:
Sympathetic as I am toward Kipnis, I never thought so myself -- if some dumbasses want to play thought policeman in select programs at elite colleges, I figure, let them waste their parents' money and God help them when they graduate. And let those other dumbasses turn their tattered propaganda equity now this way, now that, trying to catch the wind. (Good luck explaining the menace of "social justice warriors" to downsized factory workers!) We who have free souls, it touches us not.
UPDATE. Comments are all glorious, but special thanks to commenter atheist for invoking La Rochefoucauld: "Our hatred of favorites is but a love of favor, and our scorn of those who enjoy it is only a balm to our vexation at being deprived thereof." Conservatives had their way exclusively for several centuries before the Enlightenment, and have been sore ever since they lost the franchise.
UPDATE 2. What causes political correctness on campus? Joseph Bottum at the Weekly Standard:
No doubt over the next several years book clubs across America will pore over many a bestseller fitted to Gabbert’s advice, in the process sacrificing better authors — e.g., Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton.If Ian Tuttle knows where the next Shakespeare is, he should tell his editor, so they can use him to replace Kevin D. Williamson, Dennis Prager, or one of National Review's many other shitty writers. (For perspective: previously Tuttle told his readers "If you’re looking for a genuinely open-minded academic experience, Brooklyn College may not be the place for you" because the school refused to take money from the Koch brothers.)
Anyway, a lot of prominent liberals (including Amanda Marcotte, conservatives' favorite feminist voodoo doll) are saying Laura Kipnis got a bad rap from hypersensitive apparatchiks-in-training at Northwestern, and good for them (the liberals, not the apparatchiks). The other day Edward Schlosser had a long piece at Vox, of all places, complaining about student noodges. You'd think that if PC were as much of a menace as it's been portrayed, conservatives would be happy to at last have bipartisan support in fighting it. Well, here's James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal:
As we read the Schlosser piece, we felt more Schadenfreude than sympathy, and we wondered if that reflected poorly on us. (Spoiler: Nah.)Instead Taranto complains that liberals like Schlosser are only upset because they're getting it in the neck, and are fundamentally incapable of understanding the pain of censored "outgroup" conservative academics like Glenn Reynolds, Ann Althouse, Harvey Mansfield, William A. Jacobson, et alia. Taranto explains:
Social systems have existed—think of the American South under slavery and Jim Crow—in which a dominant ingroup governed itself in accord with liberal principles while subjecting the outgroup to a combination of oppressive rules and often-cruel whims.Time for a Poor Wingnuts' Campaign! Back at National Review Charles C.W. Cooke says
Of course Jonathan Chait is turning against political correctness and campus self-indulgence. Of course Vox’s editor, Ezra Klein, is now peddling lefty academics who are willing to stand up to the mob. Of course the good denizens of Jezebel are beginning to wonder aloud whether a feminism that eats the likes of Laura Kipnis is useful. If neo-McCarthyism “becomes a salient part of liberal politics,” Schlosser writes in his conclusion, then “liberals are going to suffer tremendous electoral defeat.” The American Left has started to rebel at the exact moment that its own interests are being hurt? Naturally. This isn’t about standards; it’s about power.Cooke's essay is called "Is the Tide Turning against PC?" but it's not clear that he wants it turned if it means linking arms with those people. So I guess PC must not be such a big deal after all.
Sympathetic as I am toward Kipnis, I never thought so myself -- if some dumbasses want to play thought policeman in select programs at elite colleges, I figure, let them waste their parents' money and God help them when they graduate. And let those other dumbasses turn their tattered propaganda equity now this way, now that, trying to catch the wind. (Good luck explaining the menace of "social justice warriors" to downsized factory workers!) We who have free souls, it touches us not.
UPDATE. Comments are all glorious, but special thanks to commenter atheist for invoking La Rochefoucauld: "Our hatred of favorites is but a love of favor, and our scorn of those who enjoy it is only a balm to our vexation at being deprived thereof." Conservatives had their way exclusively for several centuries before the Enlightenment, and have been sore ever since they lost the franchise.
UPDATE 2. What causes political correctness on campus? Joseph Bottum at the Weekly Standard:
It’s possible to ascribe the situation to the presidential elections of 2008 and 2012.Ain't even kidding.
The guidelines for Title IX issued by the Obama administration have shifted power to the outraged, and everyone seems to know it.Everybody Joseph Bottum talks to at the Club, anyway. But wait, Bottum allows that the roots of PC do go deeper:
The reaction to Bill Clinton’s sex scandals, leading to his impeachment in 1998, may have been the first hint of a new choosing of sides, followed by an abiding anger over the outcome of Bush v. Gore in 2000. But the fate of the Democrats is not quite the same thing as the fate of radicalism, and to find the real springs of what is now washing over the nation’s schools, you have to go back, I think, to the fall of the Iron Curtain, 26 years ago.Everything Democrat causes everything bad, and the same goes for the Soviet Union! In fact the title of Bottum's column is "I Still Blame the Communists." I expect if you swapped out "political correctness" for "riots in Baltimore," "Ebola," "potrzebie," etc., it wouldn't have to be changed much. Sometimes I think they work from Mad Libs.
Wednesday, June 03, 2015
WHY DO ALL THESE TRANSSEXUALS KEEP SUCKING MY ATTENTION?*
Let's see what's going on at one of our favorite rightwing opinion factories, The Federalist:
(*Titular reference here.)
How The Hypersexual Trans Movement Hurts FeminismHmm. That's --
...These carpet-baggers to womanhood are trying to prove to all of us that what it really means to be a woman is to pose in a playboy bunny outfit and make kissy faces at men. They reinforce this idea to teenage girls: go put on the miniskirt, honey, celebrate Jenner’s beauty, and try to exemplify it in your own life.(Pause.) Let's try another story.
Bruce Jenner’s Transformation Is A Lose-Lose For Liberal IdeologyHuh. How ya figure?
...For years, a major aim of the sexual revolution has been to deconstruct gender differences as being “social constructs"...
This is the ideology that governs liberal sexual philosophy, and it collides head-on with major aspects of the transgender movement. Transgenderism is unavoidably based on a kind of gender essentialism...Hey, look at the time. Let's see what else:
Bruce Jenner: Selfie Culture HeroGreat! I could use some light reading.
....As he adapted, he still was treating his body not as his own, but like a shiny new midlife crisis vehicle that came with a great rack worth flashing to his son...Yikes.
Personally, I don’t care either way, and I wish him well, but I’d prefer we identify actions of bravery with real bravery...Oh, so we're making too much of Caitlin Jenner, huh? The obvious solution is to continue talking about her.
So is the best response to Mother Nature’s cruel visual inequity more surgery for everyone and glam teams ‘til their outsides match their insides? If that is case, Jenner just won another gold medal in the vanity Olympics...Aw snap.
Who knows, and who cares. That’s some silly discussion...Come into the light, Federalist author!
...one that will make “Jezebel rain hellfire down on” you. What matters is how it sounds, how it makes you feel, and if it’s attractive. Silence is easier and more attractive when roving bands of social-justice warriors vociferously silence dissent...Do these guys get bonuses when they work conservative persecution into stories?
Now that we dispensed with critical thinking and an honest debate of ideas, welcome to a world where what matters most is how you look. It’s a brave new superficial world that had no better launching location than the pages of Vanity Fair. We are a society that has fallen in love with its own reflection.Please, no one ever show her a magazine rack from the past fifty years; she'll run into the street screaming like Kevin McCarthy at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Let's move on:
Bruce Jenner is Not BraveOh for --
In a few days, we will celebrate the anniversary of D-Day, when men stormed enemy-filled beaches and died by the thousands...Jesus Christ, aren't there any stories in this conservative magazine that aren't about transsexuals? Okay, one more:
Taylor Swift Flirts With The Feminist Dark SideI'll take it -- oh wait, it's full of Lena Dunham. Have you got a copy of Field & Stream?
(*Titular reference here.)
Tuesday, June 02, 2015
ACADEMIC FREEDOM UP TO A POINT.
Scott Walker and Wisconsin Republicans are getting closer to eliminating tenure at the University of Wisconsin. Here's a column on the matter from David French, formerly an attorney for Christians who complained their colleges were violating their rights, now one of National Review's premier scolds:
As someone who has litigated many, many academic freedom cases, I have profoundly mixed feelings about this move. First, I know and understand that tenure is designed to guarantee freedom, to prevent political pressures from impacting scholarship. It’s designed to preserve academic independence. In fact, tenure has protected a number of outspoken conservative professors (including some of my clients), men and women who would have been fired long ago without tenure protections.But...
At the same time, however, academic independence is a fiction. In the real world, leftist groupthink dominates academic departments, conservatives are easily weeded out before tenure – mostly through the hiring process itself – and even many (if not most) tenured dissenting professors live “in the closet” to avoid the social and professional consequences of public disagreement on key cultural or scientific issues. The result isn’t freedom but instead permanently entrenched ideological conformity.Freedom not only isn't free, it isn't even real if it results in too many liberals. French then offers what may look to the casual observer like a defense of tenure...
Yet this same overwhelming conformity means that the immediate consequence of lifting tenure protections wouldn’t be greater diversity but even worse ideological persecution as the few conservative professors would face hostile departments stripped of the bulk of their legal protections. Ending tenure without simultaneously overhauling departments (including departments’ academic missions and hiring practices) simply won’t contribute to the cause of liberty. Yes, it might make it easier to make financially-motivated cuts, but it’s hard to see any short or medium-term increase in true academic freedom....but his GOP buddies are probably reading that and saying, "You know, he's right -- we ought to stuff the faculties with wingnuts, then make it easy to fire the ones we don't like!" Whether that was French's intention I leave to you, but read his closing before you decide:
Finally, there are downsides to tenure beyond its effect on liberty. Place any group of people outside of the normal boundaries of accountability, and they are likely to abuse that autonomy. Tenured professors are no exception, with their ranks including a host of colleagues who simply coast on their job security. They care little for teaching, behave horribly towards students and colleagues, and even slack off their research efforts. They occupy seats that could be taken by better, more conscientious teachers and scholars, and no one can move them until they retire or die. While preserving true academic freedom is worth tolerating a limited number of deadbeats, the deadbeats become much less tolerable if academic freedom is failing.Jeez, why do we have this stupid old "tenure" in the first place? French is insufferable even when he's on the right side -- for example, you can believe Laura Kipnis got a raw deal from Northwestern and still want to sidle away when French says nuh-uh libtards, you're the real enemies of free speech; for many of us that may be a merely instinctual reaction, but French's post today shows why that instinct is absolutely correct.
Sunday, May 31, 2015
BUCKLEY AND MAILER.
Shortly before announcing his candidacy for Mayor of New York, an esteemed American author proposed a plan for the city: he would give tax breaks to “neighborhoods that developed self-financed patrols”; legalize drugs and gambling; and abolish all commercial vehicle loading between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. Once declared, he advocated charging fees on drivers from out of town, building a “Disneyland East” on Queens’ old World’s Fair grounds, and “cutting down traffic by building a huge aerial bike lane, twenty feet above the ground and twenty feet wide, above Second Avenue from First Street all the way to One Hundred Twenty-Fifth.”
Four years later, another esteemed American author — one who had, out of passion for urban design, built a model city out of Lego blocks so large he couldn’t get it out the front door of his Brooklyn apartment — threw his own hat in the same ring. He ran on a platform of local control — that is, he wanted New York City to secede from the State — and like his predecessor played with ideas from all over the map, from “compulsory free love in those neighborhoods which vote for it, [to] compulsory church attendance on Sunday for those neighborhoods who vote for that…” Also, his brain trust kicked out ideas like “Make Coney Island ‘Las Vegas East.’”
Thus described by Kevin M. Schultz in his new book Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship that Shaped the Sixties, neither the 1965 candidate William F. Buckley nor the 1969 candidate Norman Mailer sounds serious. Neither worked the hustings or brokered with interest groups: both won space in the news by being famous and saying outrageous things. In the present political scene they are most closely resembled by Donald Trump, a famous crackpot on whom only the most disaffected voters could project their disgust.
But in the Sixties there was plenty of disaffection and disgust to go around. Also, each of the two men was serious about something. For all Buckley’s playfulness in this particular endeavor (best evinced by his famous quip that, should the polls return in his favor, he would “demand a recount”), he was, Schultz suggests, building political capital. As editor of conservative flagship National Review, he had not only elevated but also lightened the tone of American conservatism, replacing Bircher brooding with a confident why-not attitude. This made conservatism attractive, even fun, and in this race he vaunted his whimsically reactionary politics in the media capital of the country as a contrast to the seriousness of local social planners whose efforts were visibly failing. During his 1965 campaign, as he shook hands with working-class New Yorkers who were abandoning the major parties to support him, “Buckley,” says Schultz, “saw the future of the Republican Party.” He got 13.4% of the vote on the fringe Conservative Party ticket and may have thrown the election from Abe Beame to John Lindsay. Strengthened by Buckley’s run, the state Conservative Party got his brother Jim elected Senator six years later. Ronald Reagan, or at least his handlers, took notice.
Mailer too was serious, but not about politics as such. True, he’d covered political events in Miami and the Siege of Chicago and The Armies of the Night, and given his qualified support to the anti-war movement. But he had no sensible prescription for change and in his own campaign approached governance as an existential experiment: “I want to see where my own ideas lead,” he told followers. Having successfully changed his literary stock in trade from straight fiction to social criticism, he now took a flyer on retail politics. But though he enlisted blue-collar writers Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin to add proletarian appeal to his egghead campaign, Mailer proved less talented than Buckley at outreach, or more likely just less interested. Asked what he’d have done as Mayor about a recent snowstorm, Mailer said he’d have “pissed all over it,” and his campaign effectively ended in a speech at the Village Gate where he figuratively pissed all over his followers (“he greeted their suggestions with an angry ‘fuck you,’” reports Schultz). His 5% showing in the Democratic primary may have cost Herman Badillo the nomination, but otherwise it had no discernible further impact on city politics, and seemed to begin Mailer’s drift from political subjects in general.
Schultz’ conceit, which is intriguing if not convincing, is that mismatched as they might seem, Buckley and Mailer had something in common besides talent and mayoral campaigns. It’s not so much the subtitular “Friendship,” which mainly consists of a few social meetings and letters full of writerly banter. Their bond, per Schultz, is that they “shared a common complaint about America,” born of a “joint disgust at the central assumptions that dominated postwar America” — that is, the technocratic, welfare-statist, progressive-up-to-a-point consensus that assumed the Goldwater debacle was the end of conservatism, waded America into Vietnam, and didn’t even see the SDS coming. Mailer himself seemed to endorse this reading in his first public debate with Buckley in 1962 — befitting the calculating chutzpah of both men, a heavily-publicized affair at Chicago’s Medinah Temple promoted like a prizefight, and on which oddsmakers and intelligentsia made book — where, Schultz reports, “Mailer insisted he hated the Liberal Establishment just as much as Buckley did.”
But even then, before the heterodoxies of New Right and New Left had calcified, the two men had staked out divergent territories. At that debate Buckley denounced what he perceived as liberalism’s capitulation to communism and pleaded for submission to the guidance of “Presidents Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.” That gave no wiggle room for the Left, and one gets the sense that was just how Buckley wanted it: heightening the contradictions was a big part of his act. Mailer, conversely, laid against liberalism a litany of complaints that, if they were technically as cosmic as Buckley’s, appeared to extend into a different cosmos entirely: Modern liberalism, he said, had led to “the deteriorated quality of labor, the insubstantiality of money, the ravishment of nature, the impoverishment of food, the manipulation of emotion, the emptiness of faith, the displacement of sex…” One can imagine Buckley’s supporters starting to follow this but drifting away as the vision exceeded traditional politics, not to mention propriety.
To the extent that the two men may be said to have had, even by proxy, a conversation, Mailer’s arguments were so much more capacious — if also necessarily more diffuse — than Buckley’s that nothing except their mutually glorious verbal skills really seems to unite them. On the Medinah Temple stage, for example, while Buckley was making coy references to Mailer’s personal excesses — which became his nasty habit in debates with and reference to his alleged buddy — Mailer said in apparent exasperation, “I’m trying to talk about the nature of man.” In a Firing Line session six years later, Mailer described to Buckley “greed, bigotry, insensitivity, and general stupidity” as “the disease of the Right,” and “excessive propriety in family life, excessive obedience to all the small laws of daily life, such as crossing at corners” as that of the Left. Schultz describes Buckley as dubious at this, which is understandable; Buckley and his movement saw (or at least were accustomed to profit by portraying) the Left as the home of rioting unwashed youth and blacks, whereas Mailer sincerely sought to diagnose the Left as if it were a character.
Parallels there may be, but there’s no getting around the fact that Mailer was first and last (with detours in the middle) an artist, whereas for all his authorial virtuosity Buckley was a propagandist. When Buckley dabbled in spy fiction, Schultz says, he was “rattling his saber in the most subtle of forms,” a polite way of saying that Buckley was more interested in investing his remarkable energy in a profitable line extension for his brand than in, as Mailer put it, the condition of man. For some reason Schultz seeks to portray late Buckley as a nearly spent force; after the Sixties he, like Mailer, “removed himself from the pitch of battle,” says Schultz. But that isn’t really so; though new jacks like George Will may have started to outsell him, Buckley hung in as the godfather of the scene -- even casual newspaper readers would know who he was and what he represented -- and churned out columns that served the cause. Take this bit from the start of the First Gulf War, 1991:
There are other instances of Schultz trying to nudge his subjects onto convenient tracks. For example, we can see how Buckley's mischievousness fits with the rowdy Sixties, but Schultz goes so far as to insist, “he loved the constant rebukes to the status quo perpetrated by the counterculture.” Really? Like Pigasus, the Yippies’ candidate for President? “He could understand their anger and frustration,” continues Schultz, “and he, most at home as a provocateur, had never been one to toe the party line… he grew his already wavy hair even longer and could be seen darting around New York City on a Honda motorcycle, often with a passenger in tow.” This may have constituted letting one’s freak flag fly in Sharon, Connecticut, but there is nothing in Buckley’s corpus to suggest such an affinity for the Armies of the Night, or if there is Schultz does not include it.
But lily-gilding aside, Schultz does give us a fresh way to look at the two men, and if they interest you this book will, too. There are many anecdotes I hadn’t heard before — I had heard that Mailer challenged McGeorge Bundy to a fistfight, for example, but not that he was called off by Lillian Hellman, nor that Mailer was sore about it (“when the chips were down she’d always go for the guy who had the most clout”) and wouldn’t speak to her for two years. I will add that Buckley and Mailer makes very vivid a time in American letters when literary feuds were perhaps no less picayune than now but a good deal more interesting, perhaps owing to the relative quality of talents involved (I mean, who’d you rather hear bitch — Truman Capote or Jonathan Franzen?).
Four years later, another esteemed American author — one who had, out of passion for urban design, built a model city out of Lego blocks so large he couldn’t get it out the front door of his Brooklyn apartment — threw his own hat in the same ring. He ran on a platform of local control — that is, he wanted New York City to secede from the State — and like his predecessor played with ideas from all over the map, from “compulsory free love in those neighborhoods which vote for it, [to] compulsory church attendance on Sunday for those neighborhoods who vote for that…” Also, his brain trust kicked out ideas like “Make Coney Island ‘Las Vegas East.’”
Thus described by Kevin M. Schultz in his new book Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship that Shaped the Sixties, neither the 1965 candidate William F. Buckley nor the 1969 candidate Norman Mailer sounds serious. Neither worked the hustings or brokered with interest groups: both won space in the news by being famous and saying outrageous things. In the present political scene they are most closely resembled by Donald Trump, a famous crackpot on whom only the most disaffected voters could project their disgust.
But in the Sixties there was plenty of disaffection and disgust to go around. Also, each of the two men was serious about something. For all Buckley’s playfulness in this particular endeavor (best evinced by his famous quip that, should the polls return in his favor, he would “demand a recount”), he was, Schultz suggests, building political capital. As editor of conservative flagship National Review, he had not only elevated but also lightened the tone of American conservatism, replacing Bircher brooding with a confident why-not attitude. This made conservatism attractive, even fun, and in this race he vaunted his whimsically reactionary politics in the media capital of the country as a contrast to the seriousness of local social planners whose efforts were visibly failing. During his 1965 campaign, as he shook hands with working-class New Yorkers who were abandoning the major parties to support him, “Buckley,” says Schultz, “saw the future of the Republican Party.” He got 13.4% of the vote on the fringe Conservative Party ticket and may have thrown the election from Abe Beame to John Lindsay. Strengthened by Buckley’s run, the state Conservative Party got his brother Jim elected Senator six years later. Ronald Reagan, or at least his handlers, took notice.
Mailer too was serious, but not about politics as such. True, he’d covered political events in Miami and the Siege of Chicago and The Armies of the Night, and given his qualified support to the anti-war movement. But he had no sensible prescription for change and in his own campaign approached governance as an existential experiment: “I want to see where my own ideas lead,” he told followers. Having successfully changed his literary stock in trade from straight fiction to social criticism, he now took a flyer on retail politics. But though he enlisted blue-collar writers Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin to add proletarian appeal to his egghead campaign, Mailer proved less talented than Buckley at outreach, or more likely just less interested. Asked what he’d have done as Mayor about a recent snowstorm, Mailer said he’d have “pissed all over it,” and his campaign effectively ended in a speech at the Village Gate where he figuratively pissed all over his followers (“he greeted their suggestions with an angry ‘fuck you,’” reports Schultz). His 5% showing in the Democratic primary may have cost Herman Badillo the nomination, but otherwise it had no discernible further impact on city politics, and seemed to begin Mailer’s drift from political subjects in general.
Schultz’ conceit, which is intriguing if not convincing, is that mismatched as they might seem, Buckley and Mailer had something in common besides talent and mayoral campaigns. It’s not so much the subtitular “Friendship,” which mainly consists of a few social meetings and letters full of writerly banter. Their bond, per Schultz, is that they “shared a common complaint about America,” born of a “joint disgust at the central assumptions that dominated postwar America” — that is, the technocratic, welfare-statist, progressive-up-to-a-point consensus that assumed the Goldwater debacle was the end of conservatism, waded America into Vietnam, and didn’t even see the SDS coming. Mailer himself seemed to endorse this reading in his first public debate with Buckley in 1962 — befitting the calculating chutzpah of both men, a heavily-publicized affair at Chicago’s Medinah Temple promoted like a prizefight, and on which oddsmakers and intelligentsia made book — where, Schultz reports, “Mailer insisted he hated the Liberal Establishment just as much as Buckley did.”
But even then, before the heterodoxies of New Right and New Left had calcified, the two men had staked out divergent territories. At that debate Buckley denounced what he perceived as liberalism’s capitulation to communism and pleaded for submission to the guidance of “Presidents Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.” That gave no wiggle room for the Left, and one gets the sense that was just how Buckley wanted it: heightening the contradictions was a big part of his act. Mailer, conversely, laid against liberalism a litany of complaints that, if they were technically as cosmic as Buckley’s, appeared to extend into a different cosmos entirely: Modern liberalism, he said, had led to “the deteriorated quality of labor, the insubstantiality of money, the ravishment of nature, the impoverishment of food, the manipulation of emotion, the emptiness of faith, the displacement of sex…” One can imagine Buckley’s supporters starting to follow this but drifting away as the vision exceeded traditional politics, not to mention propriety.
To the extent that the two men may be said to have had, even by proxy, a conversation, Mailer’s arguments were so much more capacious — if also necessarily more diffuse — than Buckley’s that nothing except their mutually glorious verbal skills really seems to unite them. On the Medinah Temple stage, for example, while Buckley was making coy references to Mailer’s personal excesses — which became his nasty habit in debates with and reference to his alleged buddy — Mailer said in apparent exasperation, “I’m trying to talk about the nature of man.” In a Firing Line session six years later, Mailer described to Buckley “greed, bigotry, insensitivity, and general stupidity” as “the disease of the Right,” and “excessive propriety in family life, excessive obedience to all the small laws of daily life, such as crossing at corners” as that of the Left. Schultz describes Buckley as dubious at this, which is understandable; Buckley and his movement saw (or at least were accustomed to profit by portraying) the Left as the home of rioting unwashed youth and blacks, whereas Mailer sincerely sought to diagnose the Left as if it were a character.
Parallels there may be, but there’s no getting around the fact that Mailer was first and last (with detours in the middle) an artist, whereas for all his authorial virtuosity Buckley was a propagandist. When Buckley dabbled in spy fiction, Schultz says, he was “rattling his saber in the most subtle of forms,” a polite way of saying that Buckley was more interested in investing his remarkable energy in a profitable line extension for his brand than in, as Mailer put it, the condition of man. For some reason Schultz seeks to portray late Buckley as a nearly spent force; after the Sixties he, like Mailer, “removed himself from the pitch of battle,” says Schultz. But that isn’t really so; though new jacks like George Will may have started to outsell him, Buckley hung in as the godfather of the scene -- even casual newspaper readers would know who he was and what he represented -- and churned out columns that served the cause. Take this bit from the start of the First Gulf War, 1991:
The anti-war people never really found a doctrine after the argument ran dry that we should continue with the sanctions. Some still hang in there with the cry, “We won’t die for oil!” but that moral-geopolitical analysis is also tending to run dry as the perception widens that “oil” is simply the convenient symbol of the kind of worldwide aggression that Saddam Hussein had in mind where he overran Kuwait and dealt with it in ways that remind old-timers of the Rape of Nanking (we hanged the Japanese general who supervised that operation).Once a hippie-puncher, always a hippie-puncher. As for Mailer, his return to fiction and its hybrids was a return to form; his energy was as great as Buckley’s, but his skill visibly sharpened and his capacity for empathy remained and deepened and stood well his cause -- that is, his talent and literature. Along with some duds he had great artistic successes, most notably The Excecutioner’s Song. Schultz acknowledges that book’s power but, perhaps to brace up the parallel lives structure, insists that the book "was not, as Alfred Kazin had described Mailer's work a decade earlier, a mirror to the nation." Really? The story of a criminal famous for insisting on and getting the death penalty was no kind of national mirror? It might be argued that the best thing about The Excecutioner’s Song was Mailer’s evocation of the hard country that birthed and shaped Gary Gilmore and Nicole Baker.
There are other instances of Schultz trying to nudge his subjects onto convenient tracks. For example, we can see how Buckley's mischievousness fits with the rowdy Sixties, but Schultz goes so far as to insist, “he loved the constant rebukes to the status quo perpetrated by the counterculture.” Really? Like Pigasus, the Yippies’ candidate for President? “He could understand their anger and frustration,” continues Schultz, “and he, most at home as a provocateur, had never been one to toe the party line… he grew his already wavy hair even longer and could be seen darting around New York City on a Honda motorcycle, often with a passenger in tow.” This may have constituted letting one’s freak flag fly in Sharon, Connecticut, but there is nothing in Buckley’s corpus to suggest such an affinity for the Armies of the Night, or if there is Schultz does not include it.
But lily-gilding aside, Schultz does give us a fresh way to look at the two men, and if they interest you this book will, too. There are many anecdotes I hadn’t heard before — I had heard that Mailer challenged McGeorge Bundy to a fistfight, for example, but not that he was called off by Lillian Hellman, nor that Mailer was sore about it (“when the chips were down she’d always go for the guy who had the most clout”) and wouldn’t speak to her for two years. I will add that Buckley and Mailer makes very vivid a time in American letters when literary feuds were perhaps no less picayune than now but a good deal more interesting, perhaps owing to the relative quality of talents involved (I mean, who’d you rather hear bitch — Truman Capote or Jonathan Franzen?).
Friday, May 29, 2015
FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.
I know I've posted this before but I'm in a fuck-everything sort of mood
and nothing but the Pride of Syracuse will do.
• Bernie Sanders wrote this in 1972:
A man goes home and masturbates his typical fantasy. A woman on her knees, a woman tied up, a woman abused.
A woman enjoys intercourse with her man — as she fantasizes being raped by 3 men simultaneously.
The man and woman get dressed up on Sunday — and go to Church, or maybe to their "revolutionary" political meeting.
Have you ever looked at Stag, Man, Hero, Tough magazines on the shelf at your local bookstore? Do you know why newspapers with the articles like "Girl 12 raped by 14 men" sell so well? To what in us are they appealing?
Women, for their own preservation, are trying to pull themselves together. And it's necessary for all of humanity that they do so. Slavishness on one hand breeds pigness on the other hand. Pigness on one hand breeds slavishness on the other. Men and women — both are losers. Women adapt themselves to fill the needs of men, and men adapt themselves to fill the needs of women. In the beginning there were strong men who killed the animals and brought home the food — and the dependent women who cooked it. No More! Only the roles remain — waiting to be shaken off. There are no "human" oppressors. Oppressors have lost their humanity. On one hand "slavishness," on the other hand "pigness." Six of one, half dozen of the other. Who wins?The rest here. The meaning of this admittedly jejune take on learned helplessness and gender roles will be clear enough to anyone with at least an eighth grade reading level. Wingnuts, though, are pretending it's a bombshell because, derr hurr, libtard said rape. Some of the dumber ones pretend Sanders said "All Men Dream Of Tying Up and Sexually Abusing Women, And All Women Fantasize of Being Raped By Three Men." "'Pretend Todd Akin said this': Where’s media outrage over Bernie Sanders’ pervy old essay?" headlines Twitchy. Akin, you may recall, not only professed to believe that women can use stress to stop a rapist's sperm from impregnating them, but reiterated this belief after his comments blew up his campaign, which I'd say is different from discussing the psychosexual effects of inequality. Sanders' spokesman says the 1972 article "was intended to attack gender stereotypes of the '70s, but it looks as stupid today as it was then," and while that seems accurate as far as it goes, I'm sorry he felt the need. I yet hope for a candidate who, confronted with this sort of thing, will hand out vouchers for remedial reading classes, or at least demand that his persecutors conjugate a sentence.
• Hey, Rod Dreher has discovered incivility in an internet comments section! And guess where:
I’m a regular reader of Douthat and Brooks, and am constantly shocked by how hateful so many NYT readers are.Those vicious, foulmouthed Times readers! They're the nastiest slur-merchant that ever sailed the seven million IPs! Doesn't get around much, does he? (Actually he's seen it before: in his own comments section. ["I have always been puzzled by the people who read this blog, and who seem to hate everything I believe in or say, yet who keep coming back to tell me what an SOB I am."] I envy the state of wide-eyed innocence to which Dreher disingenuously pretends.)
• At The Federalist, professional culture-victim Mollie Hemingway explains why the New Yorker cover about the GOP Presidential candidates is not funny you guys:
Anyway, how did The New Yorker pick these seven candidates? It certainly wasn’t which seven had the most popular support thus far, at least based on the Real Clear Politics average. That would have included Ben Carson and not Chris Christie. And the magazine already noted that it wasn’t who had actually announced their candidacy. That includes Carly Fiorina, the only female in the GOP race. They didn’t include people who have actually won primaries before, such as Rick Santorum, who finished in second place for the GOP nomination in 2012...
Maybe they’re just terrified of letting liberal readers know how diversely hued the GOP field is. I don’t know...
But even if the media wish the GOP field weren’t as diverse as it is, particularly relative to the Democratic field, the media shouldn’t do the artistic equivalent of airbrushing photos to get there.I hope you stupid libtards realize that by not including the one black and one female candidate from the 342 prospective GOP Presidential candidates, you prove you're the real racist-war-on-womanist for misrepresenting our party's diversity. Now who's laughing -- wait, it's still you! Reverse prejudism!
Thursday, May 28, 2015
THE DREAM WILL NEVER DIE.
Rich Lowry thinks murders are up in Baltimore because people film the cops. No, really:
The libertarian moment is well and truly over, and Republicans will run in 2016 on a straight authoritarian ticket. As usual.
Why have the police in Baltimore pulled back? Baltimore’s police commissioner, according to the Sun, “has said police are struggling to stop violence in West Baltimore, where officers have been routinely surrounded by dozens of people, video cameras and hostility while performing basic police work.”
If the message is supposed to be that they don’t want the police there, it has been received.I've said it before and I'll say it again: Conservatives always want municipal union workers to be more responsive to the needs of the people unless the union is the cops and the people are black. (Actually I think we can drop the "the union is the cops" part.) Lowry also re-swoons over 2007 Presidential frontrunner Rudolph Giuliani and the District 9 style of community policing.
The libertarian moment is well and truly over, and Republicans will run in 2016 on a straight authoritarian ticket. As usual.
Wednesday, May 27, 2015
...UNTIL GOLDBERG WRITES SOMETHING ELSE.
Jonah Goldberg:
You can catch some of Goldberg's related argumentation in a remarkable Twitter debate with Jamelle Bouie; Goldberg leans heavily on the assertion that he didn't mean anything bad by "ideologue" because it just means somebody who has an ideology -- you know, like when your smartass friend in middle school told that Jewish kid he was anti-Semitic because he didn't like Arafat. Some Goldberg highlights: "Hey, I don't have a huge gripe with you. But the idea you're not a liberal ideologue because you say you're not is...unpersuasive" (this is known to rhetoricians as the argumentum ad ellipsis) and "the term 'ideologue' was largely invented by Napoleon and Marx to do exactly the kind of thing you're trying to do to me."
The column ends with Goldberg saying even though Huckabee is bad because he's a progressive, he's not as bad as those progressive-progressives because he believes in God. If nothing else, it proves the wisdom of this old saw.
Huckabee’s Anachronistic Brand of ProgressivismWe could shorter this "farrt" and call it a day, but let me give you the gist: Because he wants the state to meddle in people's business, as has every Bible-beater since time immemorial, Huckabee is actually a "right-wing populist-progressive." Sure, why not -- Goldberg already told us liberals are fascists so why can't right-wingers be progressive? The explanation is, as usual, that William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson did racist or repressive things, therefore progressives are racist and repressive.
You can catch some of Goldberg's related argumentation in a remarkable Twitter debate with Jamelle Bouie; Goldberg leans heavily on the assertion that he didn't mean anything bad by "ideologue" because it just means somebody who has an ideology -- you know, like when your smartass friend in middle school told that Jewish kid he was anti-Semitic because he didn't like Arafat. Some Goldberg highlights: "Hey, I don't have a huge gripe with you. But the idea you're not a liberal ideologue because you say you're not is...unpersuasive" (this is known to rhetoricians as the argumentum ad ellipsis) and "the term 'ideologue' was largely invented by Napoleon and Marx to do exactly the kind of thing you're trying to do to me."
The column ends with Goldberg saying even though Huckabee is bad because he's a progressive, he's not as bad as those progressive-progressives because he believes in God. If nothing else, it proves the wisdom of this old saw.
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
SLOUGHS OF DESPOND.
'Round rightwing world, there has of late been much lamentation and weeping over the ruin Obama is alleged to have made of America. This is of course just their way of trying to distract the rabble so they might forget who George W. Bush was and let the Republicans get back into power, whereupon they will begin a war with Iran, force paupers to subsist on protein powder (but not the good kind the yuppies get!), institute the Yacht Needs Cleaning Income Tax Credit, and generally complete the neo-feudalization process. But right now they're really gnashing their little teeth out and it's fun to watch.
Take the ultimate wingnut Memorial Day essay by Town Hall's Slaverin' Kurt Schlichter:
At National Review Victor Davis Maximus Super Hanson brings the back of his wrist to his forehead, flutters his eyelids, and mourns the wreck Obama has made of the Middle East to which C-Plus Augustus once brought order and stability. Also unlike Bush, Obama won't suck up to the Saudi pashas -- and have a care, soothsays Hanson, for "their financial clout and the availability of Pakistani bombs for Sunni petrodollars" (also, they share our values!) -- plus Obama hates Israel, perhaps because "it resembles the United States too closely, and thus earns the reflected hypercriticism that so many leftists cultivate for their own civilization," but he loves his fellow black people, whom he and "the elites" subsidize with "huge, unquestioned redistributionist entitlements for the inner city." You see the problem: Obama gives more attention to America's despised underclass than to Arab sheiks and Israel. Vanitas!
Hanson's colleague Quin Hillyer actually revives the #Benghazi-is-worse-than-Watergate thing ("a few goobers rifling through the office of the opposing political party" etc) and denounces the Clintons in general for "putting all the rest of us at substantially greater risk of annihilation" (hysteritalics his). But it's the American people who seem most to disappoint him. "A goodly number of Americans apparently are aware of the scandal yet still fall at [Hillary Clinton's] feet," he gasps. The punters also "believe quarterback Tom Brady cheated but say in the next breath that he’s a good role model for children." Of course, dummy, you want to say to him, how long have you lived in this country, Brady's rich and butch! But by then Hillyer is on about our "culture" and how it "celebrates depravities" and "we're now told that we can't spank a misbehaving child; that we can't read Huckleberry Finn because it features the 'n' word; that we can’t name sports teams in honor of Indians" etc. and eventually Hillyer is holding his knees to his chest, rocking and reminiscing on Pat Moynihan and the Moody Blues.
The best, however, is Rod Dreher having the expected 100,000-word meltdown over gay marriage in Ireland. Here is, in every sense, the nut graf:
Take the ultimate wingnut Memorial Day essay by Town Hall's Slaverin' Kurt Schlichter:
Like everything about the Community Organizer-In-Chief and his cronies, everything about the carefully choreographed charade we’ll see this Memorial Day is a lie...
It’s a pose, an act, a scam. You can see it in the faces of the liberal politicians as they are forced to stand there onstage each last Monday of May, pretending they wouldn’t rather be anywhere else in the world than in the sun listening to people talk about what, at best, liberals consider suckers, and more often consider outright babykillers.(His readers nod sagely from their Barcaloungers and wash down another burger with another craft beer.)
Look at Obama’s face as he walks behind the floral tribute in front of the cameras at the Tomb of the Unknowns. Tell me he’s thinking about the men who stormed ashore at Normandy and not about getting out of there and teeing up.
He’ll talk a good game – they all will, but it’s all a lie. If he cared, he wouldn’t have squandered the victory in Iraq to satisfy his America-hating pals on the left. ISIS, the JV team? Obama lied, and tens of thousands died – and those were the lucky ones.The whole froth is a delight -- some sections, e.g. "They spit in our warriors’ collective face every time Jenjis Kerrey’s equine mug flashes across the TV screen as he rushes back to the Middle East to tongue kiss the Iranian Islamonazis..." you can easily imagine being read by Patrick Magee in A Clockwork Orange. But "and those were the lucky ones" is sublime -- her heroes spent, America cowers before the coming reign of Hitlery ISIS!
At National Review Victor Davis Maximus Super Hanson brings the back of his wrist to his forehead, flutters his eyelids, and mourns the wreck Obama has made of the Middle East to which C-Plus Augustus once brought order and stability. Also unlike Bush, Obama won't suck up to the Saudi pashas -- and have a care, soothsays Hanson, for "their financial clout and the availability of Pakistani bombs for Sunni petrodollars" (also, they share our values!) -- plus Obama hates Israel, perhaps because "it resembles the United States too closely, and thus earns the reflected hypercriticism that so many leftists cultivate for their own civilization," but he loves his fellow black people, whom he and "the elites" subsidize with "huge, unquestioned redistributionist entitlements for the inner city." You see the problem: Obama gives more attention to America's despised underclass than to Arab sheiks and Israel. Vanitas!
Hanson's colleague Quin Hillyer actually revives the #Benghazi-is-worse-than-Watergate thing ("a few goobers rifling through the office of the opposing political party" etc) and denounces the Clintons in general for "putting all the rest of us at substantially greater risk of annihilation" (hysteritalics his). But it's the American people who seem most to disappoint him. "A goodly number of Americans apparently are aware of the scandal yet still fall at [Hillary Clinton's] feet," he gasps. The punters also "believe quarterback Tom Brady cheated but say in the next breath that he’s a good role model for children." Of course, dummy, you want to say to him, how long have you lived in this country, Brady's rich and butch! But by then Hillyer is on about our "culture" and how it "celebrates depravities" and "we're now told that we can't spank a misbehaving child; that we can't read Huckleberry Finn because it features the 'n' word; that we can’t name sports teams in honor of Indians" etc. and eventually Hillyer is holding his knees to his chest, rocking and reminiscing on Pat Moynihan and the Moody Blues.
The best, however, is Rod Dreher having the expected 100,000-word meltdown over gay marriage in Ireland. Here is, in every sense, the nut graf:
Understand that by “liberalism,” [Matthew B. Crawford] means not the social politics of the Democratic Party and its supporters, but the entire Enlightenment framework of social and political ideas. All of us Americans, whether we call ourselves liberals or conservatives, are liberals in this sense. I am no different. I believe in free speech, freedom of religion, civil rights and the other hallmarks of liberalism. Now that liberalism has evolved into hostility to what I believe to be true about religion, morality, and human nature, I — like all orthodox Christians — have to face the fact that liberalism, which all of us Americans took in with our mother’s milk, may ultimately be alien to our faith, because in the end, it enthrones the choosing Self over God or any conception of external, transcendent Truth.Keep this in mind when they come whining at you about gay wedding cakes -- these guys think that the Enlightenment, whence came the American idea of freedom, is anti-Christian. And you know what the next step would be. I'm beginning to think Dreher's half-hearted praise of the "hallmarks of liberalism" is just so much taqiyya.
Friday, May 22, 2015
FRIDAY 'ROUND THE HORN.
Mama had this record. Whole thing's great, but I particularly like the part
with the Leslie'd organ and what I believe is choked-pick percussion git.
• National Review's John Miller is again pimping Liberty Island, the website whose politically-driven belles-lettres we've examined before, so I figured I'd have a look. Among recent offerings is the winner of its recent Memorial Day writing contest, a story called Bait, in which he-men with Marine training use a sissy Hollywood actor to break up a super-sophisticated dogfighting ring, and then see to it that the sissy gets beat up because he's a sissy. The author demonstrates a great deal of knowledge about armaments, and sympathy for dogs if not Hollywood sissies; if you're going to be cruel at Liberty Island, it pays to be sentimental, too. Fave line: "Hell, there was even the rock god my kid sister had worshipped in high school [at the dogfight]. I guess meat was only murder sometimes." Picture Morrissey crying "ten thousand quid on the pitbull with the faraway eyes." Also in rotation: "WILL YOU SURVIVE IF (WHEN?) THE POWER GRID GOES DOWN?" which I think is sponsored content but with this bunch you never know. Oh, and an announcement for a new Book of the Year contest, sponsored by the Conservative-Libertarian Fiction Alliance, for people who like their art-product vetted by ideologues.
• Elizabeth Warren says "the game is rigged" and she's right, says National Review's Jim Geraghty, "but she’s off-base in her assessment of how it’s rigged" -- it's you liberals and your so-called "education" that rigged it! Geraghty points to an article in The Economist called “America’s new aristocracy: Education and the inheritance of privilege," and tells us,
...the liberal-dominated world of higher education has turned itself into the exorbitantly expensive entry gate to the middle class, setting aside quite a few slots for the offspring of current elites.Wait a minute -- colleges are expensive, and the children of the rich get unfair advantages in them? This is brand new! Thanks, Obama! Wait, it gets worse: Geraghty says the article also tells us
...law firms, investment banks, and consulting firms tend to hire applicants from well-known universities who were already “culturally similar” to the institution. “Employers sought candidates who were not only competent but also culturally similar to themselves in terms of leisure pursuits, experiences, and self-presentation styles. Concerns about shared culture were highly salient to employers and often outweighed concerns about absolute productivity.” In other words, if you don’t remind the elite employer making the hiring decision of himself, you’re less likely to be hired for the big job.It sounds as if Obama has changed human nature itself! In the old days, you could just search the candidate's chest for the right class pin or school tie; now I suppose you have check out his "self-presentation style" -- to see if it's liberal! Next Geraghty will read somewhere and rush back to tell us that under Obama rich people eat fancy food while ordinary Americans eat sammiches. This could break the election wide open for whichever rich theocrat the GOP nominates!
• I'm tired of doing all the hard work around here, so I'll just point out that in this Michael Brendan Dougherty column the job of proving, or even making an argument, that letting all kinds of people (including gays and singles) have babies will lead the disaster is entirely left to the framing device, which talks about an abandoned baby left in a bag -- another thing that never happened before Obama! -- and then shock-cuts to the tale of a child-support suit against a sperm donor and proceeds to other such curiosities, none of which, so far as the column tells, are related to the abandoned baby except in that abandoned babies are bad and these things near it are, in Dougherty's view, also bad. I knew these guys were feeble in the logic department, but couldn't they take a weekend course and learn something about metaphors at least?
Thursday, May 21, 2015
HEY, I READ SOMEPLACE LINCOLN WAS GAY.
Remember Stella Morabito, covered here last year for a magnificent column in which she compared advocates of gay marriage to Symbionese Liberation Army members raping and brainwashing Patty Hearst? Sample passage:
I wonder who's doing more to hurt the anti-gay-marriage campaign: the LCR, or stuff like this? Or maybe Steve Wiles is a double agent. This thing goes deeper than we imagined!
If we step back and take this all in, there should be no question that coercive persuasion can happen on a mass scale in America. Those pushing the [gay marriage] agenda first cultivate a climate that creates social punishment for dissent and social rewards for compliance. Label anyone who disagrees as a bigot or a “hater,” a non-person. Reward those who agree with public accolades. Before you know it, even well-known old conservative pundits who fear becoming irrelevant sign on to it, and thus contribute to the juggernaut.Soon we'll have Pat Buchanan in assless chaps! Well, Morabito is still writing, and still obsessed with guess what and conservative treason to the cause:
LGBT Activists Arm For Further War On Free SpeechApparently Morabito read a story about some folks who are campaigning for "a major federal nondiscrimination bill that protects people from prejudice based on sexuality and gender identity," and has decided this means homosexualists will ban Americans from saying things like "we don't serve your kind here, faggot." The whole thing's a joy -- Morabito's writing style remains fever-pitched and prone to metaphor metastasis ("There’s so much to unpack here, but if pressed to dissect this vat of worms...") -- but this is my favorite part:
The LGBT lobby has always known that it needs to get Republicans, conservatives, and evangelicals on board—through their leaders—because they still command a wide swath of America, and, worse, some people might not be intimidated enough to refrain from saying things not in line with the lobby’s agenda.
Hence, there are infiltration efforts like “Log Cabin Republicans,” whose sole purpose has been to promote the LGBT lobby while claiming to be conservative.The Log Cabin Republicans! Most of us think of them as charmingly ineffectual, but we're apparently just brainwashed by the liberal media, who cover for their true Mattachine machinations. I like to imagine them back at their founding in 1977, no doubt in some tastefully-appointed sex dungeon, rubbing their hands with glee and telling one another, "yessss, it's a long game, but the rewards will be sooooo-cialistically delicious!"
I wonder who's doing more to hurt the anti-gay-marriage campaign: the LCR, or stuff like this? Or maybe Steve Wiles is a double agent. This thing goes deeper than we imagined!
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
ALSO, WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP TELLING ME TO LOOK UP "LEMONPARTY"?
Pretty much everyone has noticed that violent mass events starring white people get handled differently in the press from violent mass events starring black people, and Waco/Baltimore comparisons seem to fit the pattern. Surely you must have been wondering: what is the libertarian position on this? Take it away, Ed Krayewski of Reason:
UPDATE. Kevin D. Williamson does a version of this at National Review, with arguments on the order of oh, you're against calling black rioters "thugs" well what about Tupac libtards etc. Also, why doesn't "America’s most stridently progressive mayor, Bill de Blasio" shut down the Hell's Angels clubhouse on East Third? I might tell him that the Angels have been keeping that block clean and righteous for decades, as opposed to shooting it up Waco-style, but then I'd be playing Williamson's neither-Holy-nor-Roman-nor-an-Empire dork game with him, and life is too fucking short.
The comparisons to the police reform protests are the more problematic of the two. The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates seemed to make that comparison in a series of tweets Monday night that emulating right-wing reactions to the police protest movement. One curious tweet asks "Why won't America's biker gangs be more like Dr. Martin Luther King?" What is the comparison Coates is trying to draw? If there were violent protesters in Baltimore with legitimate grievances—and they were urged by some to be more peaceful—does Coates believe the bikers, too, had some kind of legitimate grievances at the Twin Peaks restaurant? If he doesn't believe so, does he believe there are white people out there who believe that? I certainly haven't heard or read anything about either the bike gangs allegedly involved or anyone in the press trying to ascribe legitimate grievances to the thugs at the restaurant.In other words, the libertarian position is they don't understand jokes unless they're in Klingon.
UPDATE. Kevin D. Williamson does a version of this at National Review, with arguments on the order of oh, you're against calling black rioters "thugs" well what about Tupac libtards etc. Also, why doesn't "America’s most stridently progressive mayor, Bill de Blasio" shut down the Hell's Angels clubhouse on East Third? I might tell him that the Angels have been keeping that block clean and righteous for decades, as opposed to shooting it up Waco-style, but then I'd be playing Williamson's neither-Holy-nor-Roman-nor-an-Empire dork game with him, and life is too fucking short.
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
A SUREFIRE WAY TO GET CONSERVATIVES TO STICK UP FOR YOU.
A Duke professor wrote comments on a New York Times editorial that got negative attention. Sample:
You know, I'm beginning to think that these guys weren't really into Charlie Hebdo for the free speech part.
So where are the editorials that say racism doomed the Asian-Americans. They didn’t feel sorry for themselves, but worked doubly hard.
I am a professor at Duke University. Every Asian student has a very simple old American first name that symbolizes their desire for integration. Virtually every black has a strange new name that symbolizes their lack of desire for integration. The amount of Asian-white dating is enormous and so surely will be the intermarriage. Black-white dating is almost non-existent because of the ostracism by blacks of anyone who dates a white.
It was appropriate that a Chinese design won the competition for the Martin Luther King state. King helped them overcome. The blacks followed Malcolm X.Never mind that you can see that and worse in the comments of any online article that mentions race -- in fact, look at the comments under this story at WorldNetDaily and elsewhere -- the point is that Hough's an academic and from the left, so needless to say conservatives have a new hero. Ole Perfesser Instapundit:
SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER... Even being an old commie apologist isn’t enough to keep you from being savaged over this badthink."Savaged" means, in this context, some people disagreed publicly with his comments and he wasn't fired. (Hough was on leave working on a book when this thing blew up, though some of the usual suspects have sought to convey the impression that Duke pushed him out after the fact.) Don Surber:
Telling the truth online gets you in trouble in America. Consider Duke University political science professor Jerry Hough made the mistake of pointing out that Asian-Americans are as a race doing better than African-Americans in general. For that people are calling him racist.
Part of the reason is Asian males are not shooting one another up like inner city black males are.Surber knows how it is to be vilified for what folks 'round here jes' natchurly knows. Nicholas Stix at more-mainstream-conservative-by-the-minute VDare:
As a result of the school’s racist hate campaign Hough’s life is in danger on and near the North Carolina school’s campus. During the 2006-2007 Duke Rape Hoax, which was also rabidly promoted by the school’s administration and faculty, racist blacks in Durham exploited the hoax as a pretext to commit violent hate crimes against white students, simply for breathing while white.He's like MLK in Selma except, you know. Maybe Stix can get up a posse from the Bundy Ranch to protect him. The libertarian position is expressed by Robby Soave at Reason:
These are gross, nonsensical statements (Asian names are better geared for integration than black names? What?). But to say that they have “no place in civil discourse” is going too far. Is hearing, contemplating, and rejecting his claims not a worthy exercise for university students?The problem with higher education is that Harvard students are not exposed to the opinions of Professor David Duke, that they may wrestle with them to their intellectual profit. How will they defend their mollycoddle anti-racism when confronted with an argument on the order of "nigras has funny names"? Liberalism has much to answer for.
You know, I'm beginning to think that these guys weren't really into Charlie Hebdo for the free speech part.
Monday, May 18, 2015
SEASON 7, EPISODE 14.
Is the ending a joke?
Actually, the whole thing is. Someone on Twitter said, as if surprised, that she was laughing more at the Mad Men finale than she had at any other episode. Part of that, I assume, was the petit finales for the other principals' stories, which came off fairly breathless, not to say rushed, like the wrap-up of a Sixties sex comedy. The Peggy and Stan resolution in particular seemed like fandering (THE MOMENT YOU'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR), but sure why not, especially with Elizabeth Moss and Jay R. Ferguson so game about the funny romantic stuff. (From her phone takes especially, it would appear Moss has been studying Ross Hunter.)
Surewhynot, too, with Joan bravely going it alone with her wimmyn-owned company and Roger and Mrs. Megan inParis Quebec. As I've said before, these characters were never going to achieve enlightenment: They were just working out career and personal issues, and though the times a-changin' made their challenges and opportunities bigger than they might have been, in the end they're no more fraught with meaning than any other TV officemates, just better written than most. (Betty and Sally are a slightly bigger deal, but that set-up came last week. Nonetheless I appreciated their Don scenes as fine examples of that other type of TV staple, the emotionally purgative phone call.)
The real story has always been Don Draper, and after all that drama, all that identity crisis, and all those harbingers of bardo, it was a shock to find, first of all, people from Don's Old Life not only talking about him ("He's not dead! At least I don't think so") but also chatting with him on the phone, and secondly, after a few rounds of Don doing Don stuff -- fucking a stranger, barking life lessons -- to come to that cynical comedy ending. But the thing that saves it is Leonard. How this Joe Average got to Thinly Disguised Esalen I can't guess, but when he started talking about his dream of being in the refrigerator and Don went to embrace him, you could be forgiven for thinking Don had learned some new kind of empathy that would help make him whole. After all, he had just cut all ties with his Old Life people; he gave Peggy the same spiel on the phone that he'd given her, basically, in "The Suitcase" (she even responded the same way: "That's not true"), and then hung up; even Stephanie, his last link to Anna Draper, took off and left him with hippies. And here he was, not working out his angst with a sexual conquest but in the embrace of Leonard, another desk guy who can't quite believe in love even when it's at the table with him.
But surprise, it's not a new empathy for a new life, it's the same empathy that made Don great at selling cigarettes to potential cancer victims and plastic wheels to sentimental families. Don has always been an empath who, because of his emotional damage, is uniquely attuned to the pain of average citizens, and when he sees a valuable crop of it he gets in there and grabs and holds it close to drain its essence. And then turns it into a commercial. He is what America has instead of artists. And that's why, despite all the historical signifiers that made the show look like the chronicle of a New Day Dawning, nothing much has really changed. Don has not rediscovered Dick Whitman -- he has, after a crisis of confidence, rediscovered Don Draper. And gone back at work.
Actually, the whole thing is. Someone on Twitter said, as if surprised, that she was laughing more at the Mad Men finale than she had at any other episode. Part of that, I assume, was the petit finales for the other principals' stories, which came off fairly breathless, not to say rushed, like the wrap-up of a Sixties sex comedy. The Peggy and Stan resolution in particular seemed like fandering (THE MOMENT YOU'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR), but sure why not, especially with Elizabeth Moss and Jay R. Ferguson so game about the funny romantic stuff. (From her phone takes especially, it would appear Moss has been studying Ross Hunter.)
Surewhynot, too, with Joan bravely going it alone with her wimmyn-owned company and Roger and Mrs. Megan in
The real story has always been Don Draper, and after all that drama, all that identity crisis, and all those harbingers of bardo, it was a shock to find, first of all, people from Don's Old Life not only talking about him ("He's not dead! At least I don't think so") but also chatting with him on the phone, and secondly, after a few rounds of Don doing Don stuff -- fucking a stranger, barking life lessons -- to come to that cynical comedy ending. But the thing that saves it is Leonard. How this Joe Average got to Thinly Disguised Esalen I can't guess, but when he started talking about his dream of being in the refrigerator and Don went to embrace him, you could be forgiven for thinking Don had learned some new kind of empathy that would help make him whole. After all, he had just cut all ties with his Old Life people; he gave Peggy the same spiel on the phone that he'd given her, basically, in "The Suitcase" (she even responded the same way: "That's not true"), and then hung up; even Stephanie, his last link to Anna Draper, took off and left him with hippies. And here he was, not working out his angst with a sexual conquest but in the embrace of Leonard, another desk guy who can't quite believe in love even when it's at the table with him.
But surprise, it's not a new empathy for a new life, it's the same empathy that made Don great at selling cigarettes to potential cancer victims and plastic wheels to sentimental families. Don has always been an empath who, because of his emotional damage, is uniquely attuned to the pain of average citizens, and when he sees a valuable crop of it he gets in there and grabs and holds it close to drain its essence. And then turns it into a commercial. He is what America has instead of artists. And that's why, despite all the historical signifiers that made the show look like the chronicle of a New Day Dawning, nothing much has really changed. Don has not rediscovered Dick Whitman -- he has, after a crisis of confidence, rediscovered Don Draper. And gone back at work.
Friday, May 15, 2015
FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.
• You may remember him for his later, lush 'n' luxe blues stuff, and that's all very fine. I love B.B. King, now passed, for his slightly cheesy "B.B. 'Blues Boy' King" stompers from the 50s like the one above. Sure sounds like him and the "Orchestra" are having a good time. I expect some of my readers have their own favorites to recommend.
• Many conservatives, even ones who are not Rod "The Get-Ready Man" Dreher, are bitching about that poll showing a slightly smaller percentage of Christians in America than once there was. At National Review David French knows why: "Why Does ‘Organized Religion’ Get a Bad Rap? Because the Elite Lies About It." Evil liberals say Jesus people are obsessed with cultural issues like gay marriage, but the truth is Christians contribute heavily to charity. Yes, it's the old "society claims I'm a pedophile, but I bought twenty tickets to the Policeman's Ball" argument. More interesting to me is this claim:
Sexual politics is simply not a dominant topic compared to scriptural study, discussions of family, or exhortations to serve the poorest and most disadvantaged members of the community. If I were to critique the church, I’d say we need to discuss the sexual revolution issues a bit more — to equip kids and families to face the cultural onslaught.Don't talk about it enough, huh? Let's look at the past few examples of French's own writing at National Review. What picture of Christianity do you get from it? There's not a lot about charity in there -- in fact, I found no David French posts at all promoting alms to the poor. (Come on, it's National Review!) Here's what I did see:
"The Clintons, Tom Brady, and the ‘Scoreboard’ Life" (Shorter: Libtards cheat because they don't have Jesus);Etc. And here are the records from the other times we've caught French's culture-war act. (This one will do if you can't read them all.) All told I'd say the biggest PR problem Christianity has isn't "Elite Lies About It" -- it's people like David French.
"When Crusades Meet Courtrooms" and "Three Recent Lawsuits Challenge the ‘Rape Crisis’ Storyline" (Shorter: Rape is not the fault of the men lying bitches falsely accuse of raping them, it's the fault of the sexual revolution);
"Why a Huckabee Loss Would Be a Win for Religious Conservatives" (Shorter: Because all the other GOP candidates hate gays and fornication as much as Huckabee does. Eat it, libtards!);
"Obama’s Crackdown on Dissent Has Made Conservatives a Little Paranoid — and Rightly So" (Shorter: If Ted Cruz was President libtards would so be just as paranoid about Jade Helm as we are, except we aren't paranoid because Obama really is a monster);
"Comedy, Cowardice, or Both?" (Shorter: SNL libtards didn't draw Muhammed! Sure, it was funny, but what's that got to do with anything?);
"Liberals Peer into Your Heart and See the Darkness Inside" (Shorter: Libtards are mean and hateful. Not like us!)
• OK, here's the advertising portion of the program: A friend of mine in New York is between freelance gigs DON'T RUN AWAY SHE DOESN'T WANT A HANDOUT only another freelance gig. Métier includes branding, marketing, research, strategy, communications, social media, digital product development, content and product creation, etc. Drop me a note if you've got something for her.
• Melissa Langsam Braunstein of The Federalist testifies to "listening to a panel at AEI on Monday night, during which several contributors to The Dadly Virtues: Adventures from the Worst Job You’ll Ever Love discussed their take on fatherhood." Sounds like a corker:
I cannot imagine a similar panel of mothers laughing as they described purposely breaking their child’s leg, as P.J. O’Rourke’s son believed he did, while regaling the audience with the saga of teaching that young son how to ski. The experience taught O’Rourke that he’s better off being the breadwinner who can afford ski lessons.And this:
Tucker Carlson’s presentation may have been the most different from what a panel of mothers might offer. Amidst his lighthearted remarks, Carlson repeatedly mentioned that he’s not reflective about his parenting and takes no responsibility for any of his four children’s failings; he believes any mistakes his children make are strictly their own, and he does never holds his wife or himself liable.And this:
Jonah Goldberg sounded endearingly clueless...Stop to take a breath here.
.... – since we gather his daughter’s alright now – as he described a fall she took during toddlerhood that resulted in a sizable forehead gash. Apparently, Goldberg was still new enough to parenting that he didn’t realize his daughter’s bloody face needed to be stitched up professionally. Luckily, his sister-in-law was able to advise via telephone and pass along the good advice to wait for a plastic surgeon at the hospital.Braunstein's conclusion:
This is all to say: fatherhood sounds rather liberating. Whatever our cultural expectations of men, it seems our standards for fathers are less exacting (and crazy-making) than those for American mothers. Having listened to the fathers on this panel, I dare say that difference is largely driven by the fact that men aren’t critical of one another’s parenting in the same way that women can be...Either than or these guys are just a bunch of fucking idiots.
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
AN ILL WIND THAT BLOWS NO ONE SOME GOOD.
There's been a lot of sputtering among the brethren as Republican Presidential candidates run screaming from W's Iraq War (Washington Times: "As GOP hopefuls flee Iraq War, Rubio to tout hawk credentials"; The Hill: "Rubio: I wouldn't go into Iraq either"). The prize, however, goes to Quin Hillyer at National Review. After some stuff about how Saddam Was a Very Bad Man and there were so WMD (or "weapons of mass murder... WMM — a better term than WMD" -- Hillyer has some marketing skills), he gets to the money shot:
UPDATE. In comments, Jay B shorters this one "I like to think your son died so that Sam Alito can deny you healthcare." (All the comments are good, definitionally.)
Plus I'd like to correct "Iraq and our nation's foreign policy credibility in smoldering ruins"; Iraq's may still be smoldering, but the ruins of our credibility are not; they're cool, have kudzu growing over them, and show little evidence of their former exalted state, besides mass.
Fifth, while this is only a satellite effect of our involvement in Iraq, it actually served as a net-plus politically for George W. Bush in his re-election effort against John Kerry — a net-plus without which Bush probably would not have won. This is from memory, but I think the “for-or-against” Iraq poll questions in that campaign were about a net wash, but the “who do you trust to be strong in defending American interests” question still favored Bush significantly enough to have made the difference — along with high turnout in anti–gay-marriage initiatives — between winning and losing. And if anybody thinks that subsequent Bush performance made that a pyrrhic victory, I have two names for them: Roberts and (especially) Alito. As frustrating as the Supreme Court is, imagine how badly off the country would be if Justices Rehnquist and O’Connor had been replaced by justices Laurence Tribe and Hillary Rodham Clinton. And imagine how much more badly bungled so much other domestic policy would have been under Kerry. Ugh.So, hundreds of thousands dead and Iraq and our nation's foreign policy credibility in smoldering ruins, but at least Bush got reelected and a couple of wingnuts on the Court. Purple fingers all around, not all of them caused by gangrene.
UPDATE. In comments, Jay B shorters this one "I like to think your son died so that Sam Alito can deny you healthcare." (All the comments are good, definitionally.)
Plus I'd like to correct "Iraq and our nation's foreign policy credibility in smoldering ruins"; Iraq's may still be smoldering, but the ruins of our credibility are not; they're cool, have kudzu growing over them, and show little evidence of their former exalted state, besides mass.
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
TWENTY MINUTES WASTED WITH GOLDBERG AND MURRAY.
"Is
it time for civil disobedience? Charles Murray says yes!" So begins Jonah Goldberg's interview of Murray, whose new book about bureaucracy attempts to give a modish civil-rights frisson to the fight against our fascist government's onerous regulations on drinking water, workplace hazards, and other things that should be left to the wisdom of capital. It's in the form of an American Enterprise Institute video, alas, but I have nutshelled it for you:
Goldberg, who increasing resembles Sig Ruman, says he'll start with the riots in Baltimore, which he describes as Murray's
"wheelhouse"; as Murray is best known as the author of a book claiming to scientifically prove that black people are stupid, you can imagine the gooseflesh among the brethren
in attendance. Goldberg's got the
fever and tries to insert as a topic of conversation the alleged "debate
about whether or not it's racist to call people thugs" -- though the
closed caption guy has other ideas:
At
first it seems as if Murray will oblige. "I'm old enough to remember what
Watts was like," he says, and adds that he acknowledged at the time "there was something really different about inner city
neighborhoods," which shows just how far he was willing to go for Those
People, but now after all the years you have the "same litany of
complaints" despite "overwhelmingly Democratic control implementing Democratic solutions," i.e., using whatever money is left over after
the city or state has delivered all its subsidized stadiums, office parks, and
other emoluments for the deserving rich to build an occasional playground or put another bench in the courthouse/cash extraction center. And now, says an indignant Murray,
"I'm supposed to be moved when President Obama says 'we know how to cure
this if only we had the will'?" By God, he acknowledged something really different about Watts, but a man can only do so much!
Goldberg informs Murray that "I monitor a lot of
mainstream media," aka "enemy broadcasting," and he has seen
such hard leftists as Joe Scarborough citing the Kerner Commission, as if race
had anything to do with it, which Goldberg attributes to a "lack of
self-awareness" -- that
is, "they all appreciate the irony but they don't appreciate the depth of
the irony," which is that black people were happy under Giuliani, or at least terrified into silence. "You have solutions that are tried to no effect," sighs Murray,
but "cold-blooded, hard-headed evaluation" shows there's "no
effect" cuz look, a riot.
At
this point someone must have held up a sign saying PIMP BOOK ABOUT BUREAUCRACY
because Goldberg praises Murray for his assertion that "complexity from
the federal government always backfires." "Complexity has a whole
bunch of different aspects," Murray charitably concedes. Then he gets to his signal example of intolerable bureaucracy, and if you guessed
"military" or "housing court" you must be new around here.
"Teaching
kids is a pretty simple thing," says Murray, but teachers for some reason
want to keep disruptive children in their classrooms. No citation, but Murray assures us there are "six different school of education
theories" about "why you should leave that chaotic child in the
classroom." Plus even if you get these monster children out, there are
"25 pages of regulations" about how to get them
out, not like back when Old Man Murray was a boy and you just threw them out a
window. It's about "complexity of rules... a rule for everything"
-- why, Murray chortles, "I bet there's a long list of guidelines about how much physical contact you are allowed in getting that kid out
of the classroom, and if you violate any of those you got a problem." (In their Idaho Barcaloungers, his audience mistily dreams of dishing out some physical contact to young troublemakers.)
Goldberg offers that public schools are "a
reward for the guild and less about students." Murray generously allows
that for teachers "there's always an internal rationalization for doing
what you're doing," but -- look out, "what I'm about to say is not data
driven about their feelings" -- "what it looks like is people
making a pretty good salary relative to what they could make in the private
sector," that magical place where PhDs are forced to work at Starbucks and millionaires only
break a sweat during squash or rough sex; and not only that, these overpaid
child-minders have "pretty good job security" (but not for long under
President Walker!). Oddly, despite all these unfair advantages, teachers are also "demoralized" and "cynical," not because they're trying to
educate children in a country that spits on knowledge and prizes conformity but
because, well, aren't villains always miserable in spite of their ill-gotten
gains? Murray even imagines an interior monologue for these demoralized
public-sector tycoons ("I
have the ability to make trouble for you..."). Ugh, teachers, why were we
ever nice to them?
Someone
hits Goldberg with a spitball, signalling him to announce that while Murray's book is at
odds with "the intellectual Zeitgeist," normal hard-working Americans
sit on girders eating sandwiches out of metal lunch pails and extol his wisdom.
Then Goldberg suddenly claims that there is some overlap between the Tea Party and Elizabeth Warren, and offers
to "characterize" Warren's point of view, which he does thus: the
"bureaucrats and the lawyers and the politicians" are "the
people who are trying to help" while the real culprits are "the one
percent and the billionaires and Wall Street and the fat cats" who are
"pulling all the strings." To be fair, as he said this Goldberg did not roll his eyes
and speak in a grating falsetto.
You
can guess what Fishtown Murray thinks of that! He allows there's a "nugget of
truth" in Fake Elizabeth Warren's argument, in that the "big banks and
big corporations are in bed with the government," case in point
Dodd-Frank (which, in real life, every leftist from here to the Finland Station wants replaced with good ol' Glass-Steagall if not tumbrels and guillotines). The real problem is that corporations are behaving wrongly "with the help
of government," whereas on their own they're great, giving us proles
"ever more reliable cars, ever more powerful computers," and
"Exxon cannot come to my door and say fill up your tank with super or
you're going to jail." (No, says Goldberg -- that's "the Obamacare
model.") In the end, Murray claims he has "as many complaints about
the way capitalism is practiced as Elizabeth Warren does," but this thing
you lefties think is capitalism isn't really capitalism, it's a
"perversion of what capitalism ought to be," and it's the
government's fault. Goldberg, caught up in the intellectual fervor, adds his own gloss on a famous Adam Smith quote: two tradesmen,
or a multitude of them, "can't collude against the customer very long
without the government helping [them]." Look at the ethical utopia that
was the Gilded Age!
Then
it's time for Goldberg to ask Murray if he's an optimist or a pessimist. Had he
any guts, Murray would have said that since he'd been successfully peddling this hooey for
decades and there's no reason why the suckers shouldn't buy this latest bunch of it, of course he's an optimist. But Murray's a salesman to the end, and so tells the
punters that two hundred years from now "we're probably going to be
way wealthier than we are now," allowing his audience to believe that
"we" means them, too, and not just a tiny sliver of neo-feudal
overlords including Charles Murray IV.
Finally
Goldberg has to deliver on the opening pitch, and tells us the book encourages
"civil disobedience," though of course it's not the kind with
"sit-ins and lunch counters" -- he and Murray share a laugh over
that: Imagine us at lunch counters, like some low-IQ you-know-whats! You can
read about this in Murray's WSJ essay, but basically, if all of us few remaining middle-class
white people get together and don't fill out form 47-B, we can take this
motherfucker down! Murray explains this in terms honkies can understand: that is, with speeding tickets and NBA officiating as examples. Then another shared laugh about
putting body cameras on bureaucrats -- ha ha, again with the you-know-whats! -- and we're out. Next week: The people united will never be forced to provide wheelchair access!
Monday, May 11, 2015
SEASON 7, EPISODE 13.
First thought: Is Max Gail the new Brad Dourif?
I understand the necessity of the VFW scenes and even enjoyed the details, like the low-rent strip tease and the Hill's Coffee donation can (though Weiner made the room itself look Overlook Hotel bleak; if he weren't so eager to get cosmic, what would these scenes look like?). It's important for Don's journey that he tell somebody about what happened in Korea when he doesn't have to tell it (just as it was important that he spill his guts about his childhood to the guys from Hershey), and it's important for the cultural mirror people keep telling us Mad Men is that he express it, and the other vets receive it, as a fragging story of a sort that would become familiar after Vietnam. (But forgive me: I've known a few veterans; if one of them tells another vet he doesn't want to talk about the war, doesn't that normally end the conversation?)
Speaking of cosmic, Betty has revealed herself to be kind of Zen, albeit Westchester Zen: "Why was I ever doing it?" is a brilliant insight, and not accidental. (I bet she's a really good psych student.) Have I been mistaking her remoteness for severe emotional damage all along, when it was actually just a different kind of strength than what the Joans and Peggys have been trying to work their liberated selves up into? The matched shots of Betty bravely struggling up the stairs, even giving a gracious greeting through pain as she climbs, with Sally reading her letter seem to say so. I guess both things can be true. Remember all those times Joan gave Peggy frost for what she read as Peggy getting above or at least ahead of herself ("all you did was prove to them I'm a meaningless secretary and you're a humorless bitch")? Joan was insisting that, despite lacking the tools and opportunity Peggy had, she was also entitled to dignity. With these scenes the show does that on Betty's behalf. I wish there could be a Sally spin-off so I could see what she does with this knowledge.
As far as end-tying, this is by far the most elegant of the series, and what I'm guessing is the Pete Campbell resolution is the least. I'm not even a Campbell hater, but there's only one way his Trudy-in-Kansas fantasy makes sense to me: as a pale echo of Don's proposal to Megan -- an attempt to enforce normality and stave off the shadow of death. It may work out better for Pete than for Don because he has a smaller secret. Oh, yeah, that one: We have one more episode for that mantelpiece gun to go off.
I doubt that it will, though: Pete's drama can't be as big as Don's. The night this episode debuted I followed the stunned Twitter reactions to his Oklahoma adventure but when I finally watched the episode, it made perfect sense -- including Don's disposal of the Caddy. Keep in mind that so far Don hasn't really "lost it all" -- he's still very well-off and if he took a bus back to New York he could work his investments, maybe write a book, and wait out the McCann non-compete. All he's done so far is a bit of ritual self-mortification; the phonebook beatdown is a bit severe, but he seems to bounce back pretty good from it. The weirdest part of this journey is that so far the America Don left behind so he could reinvent himself in New York still looks, upon his return, like a hell -- it's much richer than it was in Dick Whitman's childhood, but the people are still vicious and stupid. That's why Don blesses that Li'l-Abner punk. "You're lucky you feel guilty," he tells him, "that's the only difference between you and those animals right now." As far as he can see, that's the only difference between Don and the animals he grew up with, too. Giving the kid the car is a weird way to shine a light, but it was available and it cost him little. We'll see in the finale if he has to give up something that costs more.
I understand the necessity of the VFW scenes and even enjoyed the details, like the low-rent strip tease and the Hill's Coffee donation can (though Weiner made the room itself look Overlook Hotel bleak; if he weren't so eager to get cosmic, what would these scenes look like?). It's important for Don's journey that he tell somebody about what happened in Korea when he doesn't have to tell it (just as it was important that he spill his guts about his childhood to the guys from Hershey), and it's important for the cultural mirror people keep telling us Mad Men is that he express it, and the other vets receive it, as a fragging story of a sort that would become familiar after Vietnam. (But forgive me: I've known a few veterans; if one of them tells another vet he doesn't want to talk about the war, doesn't that normally end the conversation?)
Speaking of cosmic, Betty has revealed herself to be kind of Zen, albeit Westchester Zen: "Why was I ever doing it?" is a brilliant insight, and not accidental. (I bet she's a really good psych student.) Have I been mistaking her remoteness for severe emotional damage all along, when it was actually just a different kind of strength than what the Joans and Peggys have been trying to work their liberated selves up into? The matched shots of Betty bravely struggling up the stairs, even giving a gracious greeting through pain as she climbs, with Sally reading her letter seem to say so. I guess both things can be true. Remember all those times Joan gave Peggy frost for what she read as Peggy getting above or at least ahead of herself ("all you did was prove to them I'm a meaningless secretary and you're a humorless bitch")? Joan was insisting that, despite lacking the tools and opportunity Peggy had, she was also entitled to dignity. With these scenes the show does that on Betty's behalf. I wish there could be a Sally spin-off so I could see what she does with this knowledge.
As far as end-tying, this is by far the most elegant of the series, and what I'm guessing is the Pete Campbell resolution is the least. I'm not even a Campbell hater, but there's only one way his Trudy-in-Kansas fantasy makes sense to me: as a pale echo of Don's proposal to Megan -- an attempt to enforce normality and stave off the shadow of death. It may work out better for Pete than for Don because he has a smaller secret. Oh, yeah, that one: We have one more episode for that mantelpiece gun to go off.
I doubt that it will, though: Pete's drama can't be as big as Don's. The night this episode debuted I followed the stunned Twitter reactions to his Oklahoma adventure but when I finally watched the episode, it made perfect sense -- including Don's disposal of the Caddy. Keep in mind that so far Don hasn't really "lost it all" -- he's still very well-off and if he took a bus back to New York he could work his investments, maybe write a book, and wait out the McCann non-compete. All he's done so far is a bit of ritual self-mortification; the phonebook beatdown is a bit severe, but he seems to bounce back pretty good from it. The weirdest part of this journey is that so far the America Don left behind so he could reinvent himself in New York still looks, upon his return, like a hell -- it's much richer than it was in Dick Whitman's childhood, but the people are still vicious and stupid. That's why Don blesses that Li'l-Abner punk. "You're lucky you feel guilty," he tells him, "that's the only difference between you and those animals right now." As far as he can see, that's the only difference between Don and the animals he grew up with, too. Giving the kid the car is a weird way to shine a light, but it was available and it cost him little. We'll see in the finale if he has to give up something that costs more.
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