tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-293349512024-03-12T21:54:29.206-04:00Kylopod's BlogCommentary on movies and books, as well as short essays on a variety of topics. I have a particular interest in language, and how it is used in our lives to further change.Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.comBlogger134125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29334951.post-67028401375202335462017-04-24T00:35:00.000-04:002017-04-30T16:49:29.569-04:00The greatest blog post in historyRecently a lawyer for conspiracy theory-loving radio host Alex Jones described Jones' on-air persona as "<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/22/us/alex-jones-smerconish-cnntv/">performance art</a>." I just have to ask: is anyone really surprised?
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On the other hand, I'll tell you something I heard recently that did throw me. According to Jon Meacham's 2015 biography of George H.W. Bush, in 1988 Donald Trump went to Lee Atwater to be asked to be considered for Bush's running mate. Bush thought the request "<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=02MYDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA326&dq=bush+%22strange+and+unbelievable%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj6mOPombzTAhVM-2MKHQzXCrMQ6AEIIzAA#v=onepage&q=bush%20%22strange%20and%20unbelievable%22&f=false">strange and unbelievable</a>."
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This little anecdote should put to rest a belief about Trump that a lot of people (including me) have long held. Trump has been making nods to possible presidential runs for over 30 years. Even now, the conventional wisdom is that all those previous times (and possibly even the 2016 one, initially at least) were intended as publicity stunts. And when he finally became an official candidate in 2015, the <i>Huffington Post</i> decided to run all its articles about him under "<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/a-note-about-our-coverage-of-donald-trumps-campaign_us_55a8fc9ce4b0896514d0fd66?ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000016§ion=politics">entertainment</a>," a move even I found ridiculous at the time.
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But now it turns out that Trump went <i>privately</i> to seek a vp spot from the GOP nominee in 1988. It wasn't a public pronouncement; it was entirely behind the scenes, and the most striking thing about it was that it was in pursuit of a position that's supposed to be one of the most thankless roles in politics, basically the president's lackey. It would seem a most un-Trumpian thing to do unless we assume he <i>really</i> was serious, all those years ago, about wanting to get to the White House.
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Why is it so hard for so many of us to wrap our heads around that fact? It's because Trump, like Alex Jones, always comes off sounding like a performance artist. It's like we've become so jaded over the years, we just assume by default that any celebrity with a bombastic, over-the-top persona must be doing a kind of act. Thus, it comes as a surprise to discover they may be in earnest.
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Trump has been described as a narcissist, and while that is self-evidently true, in a way it misses the point. The fact is that few narcissists behave the way Donald Trump does. It is one thing to believe you are the greatest person alive. It is quite another to believe that the most effective way to convince others you're the greatest person alive is by boldly declaring it to be so at every opportunity. That would be the equivalent of a comedian who laughs at his own jokes.
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In 2011 he <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2011/03/the-donald-gets-roasted-reamed-051384">told an audience</a>, "if I decide to run, you'll have the great pleasure of voting for the man that will easily go down as the greatest president in the history of the United States: Me, Donald John Trump." In 2015, he <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-06-01/donald-trump-i-m-the-most-successful-person-ever-to-run-for-the-presidency-">said</a>, "I'm the most successful person ever to run for the presidency, by far. Nobody's ever been more successful than me." A report allegedly written by Trump's personal physician declared that Trump would be the "<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-doctor-who-said-trump-would-be-the-healthiest-president-ever-wrote-his-glowing-letter-in-5-minutes-2016-8">healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency</a>."
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In December a press release by the Trump team went, "The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history." (It was actually the <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/war-is-peace-freedom-is-slavery-trump-won-in-a-landslide/">11th smallest</a>.) A few weeks ago he said, "I think we’ve had one of the most successful 13 weeks in the history of the presidency." (<a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/04/trump-boasts-historically-successful-13-weeks-of-presidency.html">Spoiler: he didn't.</a>) And to top it off, there was his July 2016 interview on <i><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/18/donald-trump-is-way-more-humble-than-you-could-possibly-understand/?utm_term=.96f67099899b">60 Minutes</a></i>, which featured the following exchange:<blockquote><font size=-1>LESLEY STAHL: You're not known to be a humble man. But I wonder --
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DONALD TRUMP: I think I am, actually humble. I think I'm much more humble than you would understand.</font></blockquote>Well, of course. Since he's the greatest human being ever to walk the face of the earth, by definition he must also be the most modest. A man who has surpassed Lincoln in presidential greatness has surely eclipsed Moses in humility.
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You know what? I think I've finally figured out who Donald Trump really is. It's coming to me...just give me a second. Here it is:
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFvVBXpZlymeIRyGc8-MkDNfdMBssyF42jc6_rX6jTPCTWCMzsIhFnIRd89CIProRJFy3TuiMbr01OmfrUGnBnrFNS-HCoHzmk3KtXM7eTPOs1KGIMU3Gctapkt5zTWnnP54esTA/s1600/e91d7bea804671597fcab3ac36a113e5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFvVBXpZlymeIRyGc8-MkDNfdMBssyF42jc6_rX6jTPCTWCMzsIhFnIRd89CIProRJFy3TuiMbr01OmfrUGnBnrFNS-HCoHzmk3KtXM7eTPOs1KGIMU3Gctapkt5zTWnnP54esTA/s320/e91d7bea804671597fcab3ac36a113e5.jpg" width="213" height="320" /></a></div>
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Yup, Gilderoy Lockhart. The Harry Potter character from <i>Chamber of Secrets</i> who constantly talks about how great a sorcerer he is, who claims to have vanquished numerous dark wizards, who has several books to his name detailing his achievements, who hawks products of questionable quality, who grins and smirks a lot, and who of course is finally exposed as a fraud--a man who takes credit for the achievements of others, as should have been painfully obvious to anyone with a grain of common sense but which somehow escaped the attention of the school administrators who hired him.
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You might think it strange of me to be comparing a US president to a comic relief character from a series of children's books, but that's just the point. Trump isn't a standard vain person. He's a cartoon caricature of a vain person, more like the villain from a Disney flick than someone actually existing in the real world. And perhaps the weirdest thing about the Trump phenomenon isn't that so many people believe in him, it's that he apparently believes in himself.Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29334951.post-58195542737456486432016-08-22T09:15:00.000-04:002016-08-23T00:40:35.960-04:00What do Trump's promises reveal about his motives?If there's one thing I've learned from the rise of Donald Trump, it's to trust my instincts more. I had a <i>dream</i> about a year ago that Trump would be the Republican nominee in 2016; after I woke up, I shrugged it off as a laughable fantasy. In early December (though the scenario had been in my head for a while) I wrote <a href="http://kylopod.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-troll-primary.html">this post</a>, where I mused about the possibility of Trump winning the nomination then suddenly announcing at the convention that it was all a giant practical joke. Even then, I was quick to add that I still saw his nomination as "unlikely."
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A lot has already been written on how Trump managed to win the nomination, less about why pundits and others considered it so unlikely in the first place. Partly it was his lack of experience in political office, partly his extreme positions, partly his bucking of party orthodoxy, and partly his utter lack of support from the GOP establishment. All those are important factors, but there's another that especially had an effect on <i>me</i>. It goes back to my memories of an earlier presidential candidate you have probably never heard of: Mike Gravel.
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjG0mGxhb2sovc0biWt0qDog0IniGbbxHUtRvP5EtwPNT7a-plfKiLc_PfhapB4Gh9gJ5DSJhuZrIsX8r1Y5rRS9vrdp4x_H7HrR3XIc04ocVNgu2jNf8Z-99uLQz9RxwdYPPUUg/s1600/hqdefault.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjG0mGxhb2sovc0biWt0qDog0IniGbbxHUtRvP5EtwPNT7a-plfKiLc_PfhapB4Gh9gJ5DSJhuZrIsX8r1Y5rRS9vrdp4x_H7HrR3XIc04ocVNgu2jNf8Z-99uLQz9RxwdYPPUUg/s320/hqdefault.jpg" width="320" height="240" /></a></div>
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Mike Gravel is a former U.S. Senator from Alaska who unsuccessfully sought both the Democratic and Libertarian Party nominations in 2008, nearly 30 years after the last time he held office. There are two things I remember most about him. One was his involvement in what has got to be the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rZdAB4V_j8">weirdest political ad of all time</a>. The other was an interview he gave with a <a href="http://www.pjvoice.com/v26/26300words.aspx">Jewish publication</a>, where he declared that, if elected president, "I will bring peace between the Israelis and Palestinians and thereby diffuse the entire confrontation between the Islamic world and the West."
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What struck me about this remark was its complete lack of qualification. He didn't say he was going to <i>try</i> to bring peace in the region, he said he was going to do it, full stop. And he assured us that not only would he singlehandedly solve this immensely complicated problem that has eluded generations of past presidents, but that doing so would all by itself diffuse "the entire confrontation between the Islamic world and the West." Did he also say something about giving everyone a pony?
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In other words, it was a proto-Trumpian statement.
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Why would he make a statement like this? At the time my thought was that it reflected his own cynical self-awareness of his marginal status. He could make the boldest and most far-reaching promises of what he'd achieve as president, secure in the knowledge he'd never be held to a single one of them. Candidates with a realistic path to the White House never talk that way. Despite the stereotype of politicians promising the moon before they're actually elected, serious candidates usually exercise at least <i>some</i> caution in their campaign pledges, because they know that when they don't ("Read my lips: no new taxes"), it can actually get them into trouble.
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Donald Trump, alas, has blown that theory out of the water. In 2013, he <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/on-the-record/2013/08/14/trump-republicans-need-perfect-candidate-win-back-white-house">said</a>, "I don't think I'd be cutting Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. I think what I do is make the country so rich, you wouldn't have to bother." He began his 2015 campaign promising not only that he'd build a wall across the US-Mexico border, but that <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/28/donald-trump-mexico-going-to-pay-for-wall.html">Mexico would pay for it</a>. In December one of his spokesman told the press that Trump was going to win 100%--yes, 100%--of <a href="http://www.mediaite.com/online/donald-trump-campaign-plans-to-win-100-percent-of-black-vote/">the black vote</a>. He has more recently <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/donald-trump-african-american-vote-227218">downgraded that goal slightly</a>: "And at the end of four years, I guarantee you that I will get over 95 percent of the African-American vote."
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You'd think a candidate with his eyes set on the White House would avoid the sorts of statements that are very, very, very, very likely never to happen. That was a major reason why I didn't take Trump seriously when he first began running. It all struck me as a game--an exercise in provocation.
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And what would be the purpose of the game? One popular conspiracy theory holds that he's a "Clinton plant," a candidate who got in the race with the secret intention of helping Clinton win. This theory provides a neat explanation for all his past heresies, not the least of which is his apparent <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/donald-trump-donations-democrats-hillary-clinton-119071">support for Bill and Hillary Clinton</a> in the past. In some versions of this theory, his run was part of some private deal he made with the Clintons, though what they could possibly have had to offer him is a deep mystery. In other versions, the Clintons aren't involved and it's just Trump's own personal attempt to screw with the populace. According to one <a href="http://www.snopes.com/1998-trump-people-quote/">Internet hoax</a>, he told People magazine in 1998, "If I were to run, I'd run as a Republican. They're the dumbest group of voters in the country...I could lie and they'd still eat it up."
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I have to admit that my (mostly facetious) post from December was expressing a variant on this theory. I never bought the notion that the Clintons were in on it, but I did at least flirt with the idea that he deliberately wanted to hurt the Republicans. And it's weird, because I'm not the sort of person usually tempted by conspiracy theories of any kind, least of all ones popular on the right. Yet there's just something about Trump that makes me think--makes a lot of people think--that he's somehow putting us all on, that it's all some kind of elaborate gag.
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In the end, I do still believe he didn't enter the race with any intention of getting this far, that it was some kind of publicity stunt aimed at drumming up media attention he could use to funnel into some other venture. But now that he's here, there's no turning back, and whether he actually wants to <i>be</i> president or not, he definitely doesn't like the thought of being a looooooooooooooser. That we don't even need to speculate about.Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29334951.post-3407608605981844802016-05-27T01:28:00.001-04:002016-05-27T01:39:44.508-04:00The gazillion TrumpsHuffPost ran an intriguing article the other day entitled "Trump’s Neo-Nazi And Jewish Backers Are Both Convinced He’s Secretly On Their Side." <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-neo-nazis-jews_us_5747397be4b0dacf7ad4480e">Specifically</a>:<blockquote><font size=-1>Rabbi Bernhard Rosenberg, the founder of the Facebook group Rabbis for Trump, argues that Trump’s daughter’s conversion to Orthodox Judaism is proof enough that he harbors no ill-will toward Jews. “You’ve got two Trumps — The Trump that’s trying to get the vote, and the Trump in real life,” said Rosenberg, who renamed his group “Rabbi for Trump” after failing to attract support from other Jewish clergy members.
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[Neo-Nazi Andrew] Anglin agrees that there are two Trumps, and he isn’t worried that Trump has Jewish supporters and family members. Trump, he said, is too savvy to openly announce his views on Jews, and only allowed his daughter to convert to Judaism to trick Jews into supporting him. “He couldn’t simply say it straight,” Anglin wrote. “That just wouldn’t fly in America.”</font></blockquote>The notion that "there are two Trumps" is one I have seen expressed by a number of supporters. Here, for example, is former rival <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/ben-carson-endorses-donald-trump-n536601">Ben Carson</a> explaining his endorsement of Trump:<blockquote><font size=-1>"There are two different Donald Trumps," Carson said at the billionaire's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. "There's the one you see on the stage and there's the one who is very cerebral, sits there and considers things very carefully. You can have a very good conversation with him. That's the Donald Trump that you're going to start seeing more and more of."</font></blockquote>In a similar vein, Rush Limbaugh describes Trump's heresies as <a href="http://www.mediaite.com/online/limbaugh-suspects-trumps-past-clinton-praise-was-maybe-part-of-brilliant-long-term-plan/">proof of his brilliance</a>:<blockquote><font size=-1>Will we finally now admit how brilliant Trump is? Can we all finally admit that he’s been setting these people up for years? He’s been out there praising the Clintons. He’s been fooling them. He’s been making the Clintons think he loves them, he supports them, he’s in their camp, he’s got them tamed, they’re not even thinking about Trump, even looking about Trump, and Trump is just icing them.</font></blockquote>I could go on with further examples, but you get the idea. In my <a href="http://kylopod.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-troll-primary.html">last post on Trump</a>, written in December, I wrote that I didn't think he was going to win the nomination, but I also imagined that if he did I'd be half-expecting him to suddenly announce it was all one big joke. What I failed to grasp was the extent to which his supporters have embraced his aura of profound unseriousness, to the point that it's become their main rationalization for dismissing any areas of disagreement they have with him. If you like his border wall idea but don't like his past support for the Clintons, you say he wasn't serious about the latter but is serious about the former. If you have doubts about the border wall but like other things about him, you call it a "virtual wall," as <a href="http://politicsnow.buffalonews.com/2016/05/17/trumps-promise-of-wall-is-virtual-and-deportations-are-rhetorical-collins-says-in-news-interview/">Rep. Chris Collins</a> did a couple of weeks ago.
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Politicians have always found ways to attract disparate groups, like FDR being able to garner support from both blacks and segregationists. But I don't know that it's ever been accomplished by having the different groups assuming he's telling boldfaced lies for the things they're against and the unvarnished truth for the things they're for. I'm not sure if that makes his supporters incredibly cynical or incredibly naive--or some bizarre combination of the two.Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29334951.post-12993872862892030332015-12-04T02:38:00.000-05:002015-12-07T02:41:20.996-05:00The troll primaryFor some reason I've been having the following fantasy lately:
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<i>Donald J. Trump sweeps the Republican primaries, easily collecting enough delegates to nab the nomination. The mainstream GOP press starts to panic. After a few stray comments by a couple of pundits and operatives hinting at the idea that the convention should ignore the results and pick a more conventional candidate, the right goes berserk. Erick Erickson accuses the RINO establishment of attempting a coup d'etat, and Michelle Bachmann says they're working in cahoots with ACORN and the IRS. After a few days of this, most mainstream Republicans start to make peace with the idea of a Trump nomination. They note that it's really not so bad: they won't have to worry about turning out "the base," and they're relieved to see that some polls show Trump trailing Hillary by only 10 percentage points, well within striking distance. The convention is set up in Cleveland. A slot of speakers is introduced including Rubio, Kasich, Jindal, and a host of other figures who had once bashed and ridiculed Trump, but who now tout Trump's business acumen and talk about how he's going to bring back greatness and to save America from the horrors of the Obama years and "the Clinton machine." Several days pass until finally Trump is introduced to speak. He walks triumphantly across the aisle, chin set, bird's nest on head, and he steps up to the podium. After a lengthy pause, he opens his mouth and speaks, in front of America and in front of the entire world:
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"Fooled ya! This whole candidacy has been a joke, and you fell for it! I just did this to prove once and for all how dumb Republican voters are, and to destroy their chances of winning. Which I just have, ha ha ha! Of course Mexicans aren't rapists and Muslims didn't cheer on 9/11, but by giving me your support you just proved beyond any doubt you're all a bunch of racist, backwards lunatics who are so moronically predictable you'll believe someone who's totally faking it! What a sad, pathetic bunch of assholes you all are, and don't blame me: you brought this on yourself. And oh, one more thing: God bless America."
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He steps to the side of the podium and makes an up-yours sign straight at the camera. He then turns around and walks back down the aisle, leaving everyone in stunned silence.</i>
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**********
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Is this really as far-fetched as it sounds? Well, for the record, I don't think Trump is going to win the nomination--I don't even think he wants it--and in the unlikely event that he does win it, I doubt he'd have the balls to pull off something like the above scenario. But I do seriously believe there's a decent chance this hypothetical speech represents what he truly thinks about the GOP.
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After all, his public persona as an unreconstructed wingnut basically goes back to 2011, the first time he flirted with a run for the Republican nomination--there's no record of him ever holding such views prior to that year. Some of this has already gotten a lot of press, such as his defense of single-payer health care or his donations to Democrats. Other past statements of his have been surprisingly overlooked, as when he <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/trump-on-obama-in-2009-i-think-hes-doing-a-really-good-jobhe#.cfvJoLaLW5">praised President Obama to high heaven</a> in 2009. Now, I'm well aware there are people who soured on Obama in the course of his first term. Still, it's really hard to reconcile these statements with the birther stuff he got into in 2011. Not only did Trump never sound this right-wing, he simply has no history of embracing lunatic conspiracy theories of any sort, and it's not as if the stuff he complains about now weren't part of Obama's agenda from the start.
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I'm not saying his candidacy is necessarily some Borat-like social experiment to expose the GOP base's stupidity and bigotry. But I do strongly believe it's an act of some kind. I agree with those (like <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trump-is-the-worlds-greatest-troll/">Nate Silver</a>) who have described Trump as basically an Internet troll. (That's actually one of the reasons I think it's quite likely he <i>will</i> go third party in the end; it will enable him to milk this thing for as long as he can without having to worry about actually winning.)
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Truth be told, I've had similar feelings about other figures on the right--Ann Coulter especially, though it's a style that goes back at least to Rush Limbaugh. I'm not saying any of those people are closet liberals, but they do very often give the impression that they’re engaged in some bizarre type of trolling. When Coulter says that women should be denied the right to vote, does she really mean it? Or is she simply reveling in the reaction this statement provokes among liberals and the media? Whatever the reason, I've never been able to bring myself to be actually outraged by anything Coulter says, because I get the sneaky feeling I'd be reacting exactly the way she wants me to. I'm reminded of something Roger Ebert once wrote about a Monty Python film: "This movie is so far beyond good taste, and so cheerfully beyond, that we almost feel we're being One-Upped if we allow ourselves to be offended." So whenever I hear someone react to a Coulter remark by exclaiming "That's terrible!" I'm almost tempted to roll my eyes and say, "Whatever." Coulter has another thing in common with Trump: she has never publicly apologized for anything, ever. Their consistent response to criticism is to double down on their controversial remarks.
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This places him in a different category from demagogues of the past he's often been compared with, such as Charles Coughlin or George Wallace. If you've ever read any of Coughlin's monologues (I have), he sounds almost intellectual. And while Wallace was somewhat of an opportunist ("I will never be outniggered again"), I wouldn't describe him as trollish. True believers or not, these men were either extremists or pandering to extremists for political gain. People who think that's all what Trump is about are missing something, in my view.
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The point isn't to make excuses for Trump, whose rhetoric is deeply dangerous regardless of his motives for engaging in it. The real lesson of his candidacy is what it says about a large segment of the Republican Party. It's like an experiment I read about years ago in which scientists designed a robotic honeybee that real honeybees ended up accepting as one of their own. The fact that it was fake didn't take away from the fact that it did a good enough impression of the real thing.Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29334951.post-73752516785758026552015-09-25T02:23:00.000-04:002015-09-25T11:09:11.826-04:00More on Trump's "authenticity"Frank Rich is a good columnist who over the weekend engaged in a bit of silly contrarianism entitled "<a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/09/frank-rich-in-praise-of-donald-trump.html">Donald Trump is saving our democracy</a>." And no, he wasn't being sarcastic.<blockquote><font size=-1>...for all the efforts to dismiss Trump as an entertainer, in truth it’s his opponents who are more likely to be playacting, reciting their politically correct and cautious lines by rote. The political market for improvisational candor is as large as it was after Vietnam and Watergate, and right now Trump pretty much has a monopoly on it.</font></blockquote>Steve M. of <a href="http://crooksandliars.com/2015/09/frank-rich-takes-few-sips-trump-kool-aid">Crooks and Liars</a> wrote in response:<blockquote><font size=-1><i>Candor?</i> You can use a lot of words to characterize Trump's rhetoric in this campaign, but the one thing he's not giving us is candor -- certainly not about himself, and certainly not about the vast majority of the issues.... We know he's lying when he says he has a "foolproof plan" to beat ISIS. We know he's lying when he says he'll get Mexico to pay for a border fence. We know he's lying about his own net worth. We know he lied in the last debate about his efforts to establish casinos in Florida.</font></blockquote>In my last post I <a href="http://kylopod.blogspot.com/2015/08/political-correctness-and-sincerity.html">marveled</a> at how quick so many people are to attribute honesty to Trump, but it's especially striking coming from a liberal like Rich. It shows how deeply ingrained this way of thinking is in our culture--this habit of equating sincerity with a willingness to outrage. Commentators like Rich overlook the fact that some celebrities seem to have a pathological need to put themselves in the headlines, and that they achieve that goal by deliberately stoking outrage. It's a tactic that usually works very well, because outrage is to the media what a flame is to moths.
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Why do so many people mistake this tactic for honesty? I think it comes from a sense most people have that if they were placed in front of a TV camera and were to speak aloud every thought that passed through their mind, they'd start offending people before long. I'm reminded of a bit from a Steven Wright routine:<blockquote><font size=-1>"Do you swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?" Yes, you're ugly. See that woman in the jury? I'd really like to sleep with her.</font></blockquote>One thing most people figure out sometime after their 6th birthday is that an essential part of functioning in the world is avoiding saying what you really think about other people. You learn not to tell someone you find them annoying and would like them to leave; you learn not to tell someone your assessment of their sexual attractiveness or how that colors your perception of them; you learn not to say you feel immediate anxiety at the sight of a young black man walking down the street; you learn not to say transgender people make you uncomfortable.
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Since many people avoid saying these sorts of things out of fear of shame, embarrassment, and ostracization, they automatically assume that the only possible explanation for why someone might break these taboos is honesty and courage. They fail to understand the topsy-turvy world celebrities live in, where it can be remarkably easy to lose one's sense of shame when doing so can be the source of a lucrative career. And it's especially seductive to think of such celebrities as <i>bold truth-tellers</i> if the things they're saying happen to agree with your own private beliefs.
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For the record, I do think there are aspects of our culture that have gone too far in trying to suppress feelings of prejudice on such matters as race, religion, and gender. We've made bigotry into such a supreme evil that many ordinary, well-meaning people feel they have to pretend no such feelings exist inside of them when it would probably be healthier if they got it out into the open. You can call this problem "political correctness" if you like. But confronting these feelings is only a good thing if your ultimate purpose is to grow past them. Most attacks on PC, including Trump's, are based on the idea that these feelings should be expressed because they reflect sound judgment and an accurate perception of the world--and, further, that we <i>know</i> that's true simply because they've been suppressed. Their taboo status <i>is</i> their justification.
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The attack on "political correctness" began in the 1980s as a critique--and a largely legitimate one, in my view--of the stifling atmosphere on many college campuses in America. But it has since devolved into a rallying cry in defense of ignorant and reactionary beliefs. When someone says "I'm not politically correct," what they usually mean is that they're refusing to rethink their beliefs in the face of other people's negative reactions to them. It's a way of celebrating a primal and simplistic outlook and treating any challenges to it as censorship.
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What PC originally referred to has hardly any relevance to a figure like Trump. His views aren't being shut down, and he isn't going to starve for having expressed them. And however entertaining his candidacy may be, I can't bring myself to call his taboo-breaking courageous, not when he's getting exactly the kinds of results he craves: he's the center of attention, he's riding high in the polls, he's generating all the headlines. It should be patently obvious that he's saying what he says because he knows what buttons to push. Bashing immigrants in a Republican primary doesn't take courage; <i>defending</i> immigrants would. Now <i>that</i> would be a true example of "political incorrectness"--except nobody uses the term that way. Instead, we use it only to describe the outrageous and offensive, and to wallow in the delusion that it automatically shows authenticity and courage.Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29334951.post-39615520849003272812015-08-09T23:06:00.000-04:002015-08-10T02:17:21.006-04:00Political correctness and sincerityOne thing I found interesting about the recent showdown between Donald Trump and Megyn Kelly is how he brought "political correctness" into the discussion:<blockquote><font size=-1>I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I've been challenged by so many people, and I don't frankly have time for total political correctness.</font></blockquote>What I noticed was that he didn't actually bother to defend the behavior which Kelly complained about, namely his disparaging remarks about women. He wasn't so much making a bad argument as making no argument at all. He simply observed that his behavior is "not politically correct" and claimed that political correctness is a big problem in this country--as if to suggest that his behavior's taboo status was itself proof of its worthiness.
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You could use this reasoning to defend any position at all. Hey, I think a man should beat his wife with a frying pan every night! You offended? Sorry, I'm not PC. I think black people are feeble-minded, Jews are cheap, and only the rich should be allowed to vote. Don't like what I'm saying? That's just because you're too PC.
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It would be a mistake to dismiss this type of thing as simply another Donald Trump absurdity. On the contrary, it lies at the heart of most arguments attacking political correctness, and it's been a feature of these arguments for the last thirty years. Whenever you say something that offends someone, you say you're "not being PC" as if pointing that out automatically absolves you of responsibility for your remarks.
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I mentioned the following anecdote a couple of years ago on this blog, but it bears repeating. I was once reading a blog discussion on a subject that had nothing to do with politics. One commenter referred to the author of some book as an idiot. The blogger said he agreed with the criticism but added that there was no need to engage in ad hominem attacks. The commenter retorted, "Oh, don't be so PC."
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One of the assumptions underlying attacks on PC is that you're being more authentic, more truthful, than the other person. As a result, the anti-PC trend in our society has fostered an idea that civility and common courtesy are nothing more than strategies for hiding what people are really thinking.
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This idea is reflected in the repeated claims I keep hearing--and not just from Trump admirers--that Trump is "speaking his mind" or engaging in "straight talk." This is a patent misunderstanding of Trump's whole public profile. It's obvious to anyone who bothers to pay attention that Trump's antics are pure theater. I literally have no idea what he really thinks about Mexicans or PMS or Obama's birthplace. It doesn't matter. He understands something which shock jocks began capitalizing on more than a generation ago, which is that outrage sells.
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That's part of the whole allure of attacks on PC: they equate sincerity with a willingness to offend. The assumption is based on a fundamental fallacy. It's certainly true that professional politicians typically behave in a canned and artificial manner by avoiding saying anything that will offend their constituents. But it doesn't follow that going to the opposite extreme, acting rude and boorish in an erratic and unpredictable way, automatically implies authenticity.
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Nobody argues that when Andy Kaufman did his Tony Clifton act, he was showing a truer version of himself. Yet that's just the sort of assumption people make whenever celebrities or politicians stray outside the boundaries of what is generally considered decent behavior. Trump may be a walking caricature, but like a lot of caricatures he throws some things about the real world into sharp relief.Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29334951.post-16341364320678600112015-07-17T10:59:00.000-04:002015-07-17T11:02:00.664-04:00The joys of being persecutedIn a piece on separating myth from reality in the history of anti-Irish bigotry, <a href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-07-16/beware-of-evidence-that-you-really-really-wanted-to-find">Megan McArdle writes</a>:<blockquote><font size=-1>As I read about these notices, I wondered: Why was I so glad to read that my ancestors had, in fact, faced nasty discrimination? It's a reaction that needs scrutiny.</font></blockquote>This is something I was thinking about recently in light of all those stories on Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who posed as black and became an NAACP leader. It reminded me of the case of "Binjamin Wilkomirski," a man who published a memoir in the 1990s detailing his experiences as an Auschwitz survivor before it was discovered that the events he described never took place, he wasn't even Jewish, and he had a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binjamin_Wilkomirski">totally different name</a>.
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What fascinates me as a Jew and the grandson of Holocaust survivors is why people would want to engage in this kind of deception. Cases like these are as bizarre as they are uncommon, and surely mental illness is involved. But I also think they stem in part from the same tendency McArdle is alluding to, of taking pride in being the member of a historically persecuted group. Modern society has romanticized persecution to the point that everyone wants part of it, as when a billionaire last year claimed the wealthy in America today were being treated like the <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/01/26/266685819/billionaire-compares-outrage-over-rich-in-s-f-to-kristallnacht">Jews during Kristallnacht</a>. The statement was both silly and offensive, and it's hard to imagine anyone who actually lived in the 1930s making such a comment. Back then, being the victim of anti-Semitism or racism wasn't regarded as cool.
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It brings to mind a Mark Twain quip: "A classic is something everybody wants to have read, but nobody wants to read." Nobody wants to <i>be</i> in a concentration camp or be lynched by the Klan or beaten by cops or harassed or discriminated against--but a lot of people, whether they admit it or not, wouldn't mind having those things on their résumé.Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29334951.post-79757965051055361632015-05-27T14:18:00.000-04:002015-05-27T14:18:03.891-04:00Conservative muggersThe recent story about the South Carolina man who was an avid Tea Partier before discovering <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/05/20/sick-man-whose-obamacare-story-went-viral-could-be-screwed-again-by-supreme-court/">the virtues of Obamacare</a> has gotten me thinking about the old aphorism, "A conservative is a liberal who got mugged." What do we say in cases like this? Maybe "A liberal is a conservative who lost his health insurance."
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That brings me to a general point: the "liberal who got mugged" expression is highly misleading and ought to be retired. It perpetuates the false notion that liberals live in ivory towers and that if they were better attuned to the real-world consequences of their policy preferences, they'd be conservatives. I believe that in many ways the reverse is true.
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Where did this expression come from? A while back I searched newspaper archives for the answer, and with the help of <i>The Atlantic</i>'s Yoni Appelbaum (previously known as Cynic, a commenter on Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog where we hung out), I found it. The line was apparently coined in 1972 by Philadelphia mayor Frank Rizzo when talking to a Newsweek reporter. "You know what a conservative is?" he asked. "That's a liberal who got mugged the night before." According to <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2010/11/the-lost-battalion/65565/#comment-93051713">Appelbaum</a>:<blockquote><font size=-1>The article itself 'Living with Crime, USA' is a famous exploration of the intersection of crime and our fear of crime, written by David Alpern after he himself was mugged. Rizzo, a Democrat who ascended to the mayoralty through the police force, was making a point about the paramount importance of law and order. His point was that stopping muggings was a basic prerequisite for any other initiative. And most conservatives, at the time, were justifiably offended. The quip, after all, implies that liberals win in reasoned, principled debate, but that conservatives are fueled by fear.</font></blockquote>As the expression gained popularity, its original meaning was forgotten, and--perhaps owing partly to Rizzo's own reputation as a law-and-order Democrat who eventually switched parties--it soon evolved into a condescending indictment of liberals. Its new meaning was encapsulated by Irving Kristol in the late '70s when he declared that a neoconservative was a liberal who got "mugged by reality."
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Liberals over the years have struggled to come up with alternative expressions. One I've often heard is "A liberal is a conservative who got arrested." Actually, though, that to me almost sounds like just another diss of liberals, implying they're "soft" on crime if not criminals themselves. (Maybe it would work better if it went "wrongly arrested.") One thing liberals rarely do is question the original expression, probably because they believe it has kernels of truth to it. And so it does. The problem is that it stacks the deck against liberals in a way that just isn't accurate--and that's something we ought to point out more often, instead of searching in vain for our own quips.
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For one thing, it comes with an assumption that the liberal who gets mugged has made a wise choice by turning conservative, rather than having simply given in to base fears that may have little grounding in reality. Let's say a liberal's house gets burglarized, and he goes out and buys a gun to protect himself from future home invasions. He may have become more conservative, but has he become objectively safer? The evidence wouldn't seem to <a
href="http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/12/gun-violence-and-the-irrational-fear-of-home-invasion/266613/">support that conclusion</a>.
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The expression stops making sense altogether once you move beyond the subject of crime. (Even on crime it is questionable and betrays a white perspective since it doesn't account for a fear of police, a big factor in the lives of African Americans.) On issue after issue, from health care to Social Security to unemployment and beyond, it is conservative elites who don't have to deal with the real-world consequences of their policy-making. Kristol's statement in particular looks ironic now, since the Iraq War was essentially a case of neocons getting mugged by reality. And as we can see from the story about the South Carolina man, the GOP's war against Obamacare has opened up new avenues for conservatives to be mugged by reality.
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But let's not kid ourselves that this will create scores of new Democratic voters. What will prevent that from occurring is something that has been a great friend to the GOP over the past several generations: namely, good old-fashioned cognitive dissonance.
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It's what gets people to go to Tea Party rallies <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/get-your-goddamn-governme_b_252326.html">declaring</a>, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare." It's what gets the actor <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/29/glenn-beck-and-craig-t-ne_n_208918.html">Craig T. Nelson</a> to say, "I've been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out? No. No." It's what gets Kentuckyans to like their health-care exchange but <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/first-read/polling-obamacare-label-makes-big-difference-n102861">hate Obamacare</a>. It's what gets some of the reddest states in the nation to have the <a href="http://swampland.time.com/2013/12/04/interactive-republicans-more-likely-to-have-constituents-who-use-food-stamps/">highest rates of food stamp use</a>.
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Getting mugged isn't going to change you when you've been brainwashed into thinking the mugger is your savior.Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29334951.post-38608683133798830912013-09-28T22:31:00.001-04:002013-09-29T01:47:30.389-04:00In (partial) defense of nonliteral literallyGene Weingarten has written a piece <a href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-09-03/lifestyle/41811886_1_nobel-prize-dictionaries-misuse">decrying</a> the Oxford English Dictionary's recent decision to include in its definitions the use of <i>literally</i> for nonliteral expressions (as in "I literally died of laughter"). While I share some of Weingarten's distaste for this usage and find it to be a fun topic, I cannot agree with his complaint. It has to do with what you consider a dictionary's purpose. Weingarten apparently believes it is to serve as an authority on how people <i>ought</i> to speak and write. This school of thought, known as prescriptivism, once dominated lexicography. But over the past century most dictionaries moved toward descriptivism, the idea that their purpose is simply to describe the language as it is currently used by its speakers. According to this view, if enough people use a word in a certain way, it deserves inclusion in a dictionary. Weingarten thinks this is simply "rewarding vapidity."
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Weingarten's harangue is typical of prescriptivists, who in my experience tend to be scarcely aware they're even advocating a philosophy, let alone one widely rejected by lexicographers and linguists. They present their criticisms of the way people speak and write as nothing more than commonsense conclusions that they remember better than others because they stayed awake during third-grade English. Rarely do prescriptivists question any of the traditional rules they were taught in school, many of which do not hold up to scrutiny. They are discussed at length by the linguist John McWhorter in his 2001 book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Word-Street-Debunking-Standard-English/dp/0738204463"><i>Word on the Street</i></a>, which presents a wealth of evidence that many of the so-called "rules," from avoidance of split infinitives to the prohibition on using <i>they</i> with a singular antecedent (as in "everyone returned to their seat"), are rooted in the basically arbitrary decisions of a group of 18th- and 19th-century writers who often had a poor understanding of how English worked. But because these rules have been taught to generations of schoolchildren as ironclad truths, educated people have come to think of them as being on par with the laws of thermodynamics.
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That's why no evidence from history or literature or any other field can possibly sway the fervent prescriptivist. Consider how Weingarten addresses the fact that many classic writers such as Jane Austen adopted the nonliteral <i>literally</i> on occasion: "That no more makes it right or acceptable than it makes it right for you to annihilate 100,000 people with a bomb just because Harry Truman once did it."
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With this statement, Weingarten joins the honorable company of the critic John Simon, who <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Paradigms-Lost-Reflections-John-Simon/dp/0517540347">wrote in 1980</a> that "The English language is being treated nowadays exactly as slave traders once handled the merchandise in their slave ships, or as the inmates of concentration camps were dealt with by their Nazi jailers." Most language scolds I've encountered aren't quite this colorful in their choice of analogies. A professor of mine made the point more simply when confronted by evidence that a usage he disapproved of appeared in the works of great writers: "It's still wrong."
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The real problem with this argument is that it assumes a word's proper definition is some immutable law of nature, like gravity, that can never be shaped by the people who use the language, not even by the people who use it <i>best</i>. This view is positively blinkered. There's no reason why the English of Shakespeare is different from that of Chaucer, or from that of Weingarten, other than that human beings of every generation have spoken and written differently than their predecessors. And if there is one thing linguistic history absolutely makes clear, it is that today's error is tomorrow's rule. For example, <i>nice</i> once meant "<a href="http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=nice&allowed_in_frame=0">foolish</a>." It evolved to its present state because people kept using a "wrong" definition, but it's hard to see how English suffered as a result.
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Of course, <i>literally</i> isn't just any evolving word. Its traditional definition is a useful concept to have a word for, and it would be a shame to see it go obsolete, which may happen if more and more people say things like "He literally puts his money where his mouth is." In that sense I'm with Weingarten that the looser definition should be avoided (though not excluded from dictionaries). What's striking is that he never makes this argument. His point is simply that it's the law, and we must obey. His indifference to judging word usages based on their utility is revealed in his offhand comment, "although I may cringe at 'blogosphere' and 'webinar' and, sigh, 'whatevs,' I do not protest their appearance in dictionaries." Now, why would anyone cringe at a coinage like <i>blogosphere</i>? (Least of all a blogger?!) Only someone who believes that language should remain literally frozen in time, and that all change is bad, would find anything wrong with that type of innovation.
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Weingarten doesn't even accurately explain the loose definition of <i>literally</i>. He claims it is being used to denote its opposite, the word <i>figuratively</i>. It is not. As the OED notes, it is being used as an intensifier. It's basically a synonym for <i>really</i> or <i>actually</i>, except that those words have been blunted from overuse, so when you want to express that you really, truly mean something, <i>literally</i> sometimes gets the point across with more force.
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Hence, "the coach literally hates my guts" is meant to convey that you aren't exaggerating the coach's hatred. In a way this is a form of traditional <i>literally</i>; it's just being applied selectively, to the level of the coach's hatred rather than to the metaphor used to describe it. What this example shows is that a statement can have multiple layers of presumptive nonliteralism, and <i>literally</i> may be intended to unpack one layer while leaving the next alone.
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My point here is not that I approve of the loose definition of <i>literally</i>, but that it isn't necessarily based on ignorance of the traditional definition. Rather, it's a reflection of the fact that our language is littered with dead metaphors that are all but invisible to us. (The mixed metaphor I just used is further evidence of that fact.) This helps explain why the traditional definition hasn't disappeared from the language, despite centuries of being disregarded. Annoying as it is, the loose sense has come to coexist alongside the traditional one instead of replacing it outright. Weingarten misses this point when he quotes Ambrose Bierce's supposedly accurate prediction that "within a few years the word 'literally' will mean 'figuratively.'" In fact most people today use <i>literally</i> in exactly the way it was originally intended. We just pay closer attention to the loose sense because of the way it literally sticks in our craw--suggesting the danger it poses to our ability to communicate may be overstated.
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That's actually true of most gripes about language usage. Some are completely groundless (the most famous being the split-infinitive "rule"), while others, such as this one, at best point to bothersome trends that detract from our language's vitality. In neither case is any large-scale damage on the horizon. As McWhorter explains in his book:<blockquote><font size=-1>What we must realize...is that during these changes, because renewal always complements erosion, all languages are eternally self-sustaining, just as while our present mountains are slowly eroding, new ones are gradually being thrown up by the movement of geological plates. Thus at any given time, a language is coherent and complex, suitable for the expression of all human needs, thoughts, and emotions. Just as linguists have encountered no languages that do not change, they have also not encountered any languages whose changes compromised their basic coherency and complexity. We have encountered no society hampered by a dialect that was slowly simply wearing out like an old car. Anthropologists report no society in which communication is impossible in the dark because the local dialect has become so mush-mouthed and senseless that it can only be spoken with help from hand gestures. In other words, there is no such thing as a language 'going to the dogs'--never in the history of the world has there existed a language that has reached, or even gotten anywhere near, said dogs.</font></blockquote>Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29334951.post-65564023053553554282013-09-11T02:19:00.000-04:002013-09-11T02:24:35.520-04:00Keep your Obamacare off my exchangesAfter reading the recent news story about a man at a Kentucky State Fair who expressed interest in Kentucky's new health-care exchange program, Kynect, by saying he <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/22/kentucky-obamacare_n_3801054.html">hoped it beat Obamacare</a>, apparently not realizing it <i>was</i> Obamacare, I decided to take a look at Kynect's <a href="http://kynect.ky.gov/">website</a>. What I found was that it seems to encourage exactly this sort of ignorance. Nowhere on the website is there a single mention of the words Obama, Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act. The FAQ makes just one fleeting reference to federal law (regarding the requirement to purchase insurance) and then makes it sound like it was the governor, Steve Beshear (a Democrat, for what it's worth), who unilaterally chose to set up the exchanges:<blockquote><font size=-1><b>Why was [Kynect] created?</b><p>Governor Steve Beshear issued an executive order to create a state-based health benefit exchange to best meet the needs of Kentuckians. kynect, like other health benefit exchanges, will provide simple, one-stop shopping for individuals and small businesses to purchase health insurance and receive payment assistance or tax credits.</font></blockquote>In contrast, the website for the exchange program in New York (where I live) says <a href="http://www.nystateofhealth.ny.gov/what-exchange">right upfront</a> that it's a result of the ACA:<blockquote><font size=-1>Under the federal Affordable Care Act, an Exchange will be operating in every state starting in 2014. States have the option to either set up an Exchange themselves or to allow the federal government to set up an Exchange in their state. New York has chosen to set up its own Exchange, called the New York Health Benefit Exchange. On April 12, 2012, Governor Cuomo issued Executive Order #42 to establish it within the NYS Department of Health.</font></blockquote>This made me curious about whether there's some relationship between a state's political composition and how candid its exchange website is about its connection with the ACA. I did a little online research about the different state exchanges that have been set up (<a href="http://kff.org/health-reform/state-indicator/health-insurance-exchanges/#map">this webpage</a> was particularly helpful), and my discovery was a bit anti-climactic: it turns out that almost all of the states that have set up exchanges were ones that voted for Obama in 2012. Kentucky, which Obama lost by 23 percentage points, is the one exception. Maybe not so surprisingly, it also has the only exchange website where the words "Affordable Care Act" are nowhere to be found (though in a few other states such as Minnesota and New Mexico, mention of the law is buried deep within the website, and not, say, in a FAQ or "About Us" section). It will be interesting to watch how the law will be sold in other red states, where ironically the exchanges will be mostly federal-run due to the GOP's dogged unwillingness to cooperate with the law's implementation. Will the feds also adopt the principle that it's better to avoid disclosing the source of this cool new policy in the name of getting more people into the system?Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29334951.post-89203363646688387102013-05-26T18:55:00.001-04:002013-05-26T18:55:14.322-04:00Why liberals became progressives--and why they'll stay that wayOne of the most striking changes in political terminology to happen in my lifetime was the adoption of <i>progressive</i> as a substitute for <i>liberal</i>. What's weird about it is that most of the time people talk as though they've always used the word <i>progressive</i> this way, yet I can't remember hearing it until the 2000s. (Checking the archives for Google News and Google Books seems to confirm my suspicions.) When the topic is brought up, the commonest explanation (which even I have <a href="http://kylopod.blogspot.com/2012/02/americas-liberalism-and-gop-propaganda.html">made</a>) is that it was an attempt to escape the negative connotations of the word <i>liberal</i>, which had suffered from decades of abuse by conservative commentators. But that raises some questions. Since the negative use of <i>liberal</i> goes back at least to the 1970s, what took progressives so long to come up with their new name? Furthermore, why didn't they stick with <i>liberal</i> in a spirit of defiance against those who treat it as a dirty word? Doesn't abandoning it suggest that there really is something wrong with being a liberal, and that so-called progressives are simply doing a linguistic makeover to hide their flaws?
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The answer to these questions lies partly in recent political history, partly in the difficulty in consciously making changes to the language. For several decades liberals did in fact try to wear the word <i>liberal</i> proudly, in spite of those who used it disparagingly. <i>Progressive</i> already existed in political parlance, but it had a broader, vaguer meaning than it does today and didn't necessarily imply an affinity for the left. In the 1980s, for example, the centrist Democratic Leadership Council called its think tank the Progressive Policy Institute. My guess is that the DLC aimed to evoke something along the lines of Teddy Roosevelt's bipartisan, reform-oriented "progressivism."
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The degradation of the word <i>liberal</i> was gradual and, contrary to the oft-heard claim, not entirely due to the right's efforts. I think the process began in the late 1960s in reaction to the disillusionment and shattered dreams of the left. Around that time the term was undergoing a shift in meaning similar to what happened to a word like <i>pious</i>, where a formerly positive adjective comes to be used as a sneering description of those who fall short of the ideals they preach. Look, for instance, how Roger Ebert used it in his 1972 review of <a href="http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/sounder-1972"><i>Sounder</i></a>, a movie he defended against charges of liberalism:<blockquote><font size=-1>It is, I suppose, a "liberal" film, and that has come to be a bad word in these times when liberalism is supposed to stand for compromise--for good intentions but no action. This movie stands for a lot more than that, and we live in such illiberal times that <i>Sounder</i> comes as a reminder of former dreams.</font></blockquote>By the 1970s, <i>liberal</i> was starting to be treated less like a political orientation than like a character type, describing an overzealous do-gooder who may even be a hypocrite and patronizing snob--someone much like the character of Meathead from <i>All in the Family</i>. When the right began using the word pejoratively, they were in part seizing on that stereotype. Of course there is a difference between the trait of "good intentions but no action" and the right's more malevolent view of liberals. But the image of the excessive do-gooder--and above all the connotation of weakness--prevailed.
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For a long time, Democratic politicians were unsure whether to embrace the <i>liberal</i> label or run away from it. In 1988 Dukakis resisted it before finally <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/31/us/dukakis-asserts-he-is-a-liberal-but-in-old-tradition-of-his-party.html">admitting</a>, late in his campaign, that "I'm a liberal in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and John Kennedy." This comment was practically an apology, seeming to imply that liberalism had fallen from its lofty position in the ensuing decades. It was as if he was assuring the public, "I'm a liberal, but one of the good ones."
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Indeed, when it came to presidential elections in the post-Vietnam era, it often seemed that the Democrats' victories rested on how successfully their candidates escaped the <i>liberal</i> label. This perception was probably delusional (Mondale and Dukakis were running against a popular administration, whereas Carter and Clinton were running against unpopular ones, and so their ideological character was probably not the determining factor in the outcome of those races), but it was a lesson the Democratic establishment took to heart.
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The moderate, Third Way politics of the Clinton years disappointed many liberals at the time, but this was overshadowed somewhat by their disgust at the GOP's scandal-mongering against the president. By the end of the decade, when Clinton enjoyed sky-high approval ratings while the GOP ended up defeated and humiliated in its attempts to bring him down, there was a triumphant feeling among Democrats which, I believe, made many of them willing to forget (if not forgive) his policy betrayals.
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This truce ended with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an event that drove a wedge between the Democratic establishment and the left unlike anything seen in over a generation. As the left's antiwar position, dismissed at first as radical, eventually became the consensus not just within the Democratic Party but in the country as a whole, it damaged the establishment's credibility and made the left's early criticisms of the invasion seem prescient. I personally believe (but have rarely seen it expressed) that this factor was a large part of the reason for the DLC's demise. And of course it led to the rise of Obama, whose early opposition to the war may have been singlehandedly responsible for his narrow defeat of Hillary Clinton in the primaries. Despite GOP talking points about how he was the "most liberal Senator," the L-word commanded surprisingly little attention in the 2008 election, when compared with past races. Obama did, however, <a href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/08/obama-addresses-critics-on-centrist-moves/">eagerly identify</a> as "progressive," the first modern Democratic nominee to do so.
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This new use of <i>progressive</i> arose during the boom in Internet political culture that came to be called the "netroots," dominated by activists who now had the tools to make their voice heard in a way that wasn't possible in earlier times. That was the main setting from which today's progressive movement emerged. Though they rarely explained why they preferred the term <i>progressive</i>, I believe there were two primary reasons: they associated <i>liberal</i> with compromise and moderation in the hated establishment, and they wanted to free themselves from the influence of conservative frames they felt had governed mainstream political discourse for too long. Creating a new word for themselves (or, rather, refashioning an old, nearly forgotten one) was a way of achieving that goal.
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Naturally, the new progressives tended to be fairly young--people in their twenties when the millennium rolled around (basically my generation). Older figures who have come to be associated with the movement have had to adapt their language to the times. When I searched Paul Krugman's columns and books for the word <i>progressive</i>, all I found were some references to progressive taxation--until his 2007 book <i>The Conscience of a Liberal</i>, where he explains the difference between liberals and progressives:<blockquote><font size=-1>The real distinction between the terms, at least as I and many others use them, is between philosophy and action. Liberals are those who believe in institutions that limit inequality and injustice. Progressives are those who participate, explicitly or implicitly, in a political coalition that defends and tries to enlarge those institutions. You're a liberal, whether you know it or not, if you believe that the United States should have universal health care. You're a progressive if you participate in the effort to bring universal health care into being. (p. 268)</font></blockquote>Although Krugman isn't defining the two terms as mutually exclusive, there is an echo of Ebert's association of liberalism with "good intentions but no action." Progressives, Krugman maintains, are liberals who put their beliefs into action. While that's an inspiring thought, I'm not sure it fits the way most people use these words. I assume Krugman bases his definition on the activist roots of the progressive movement, but by now (at least in my experience) there are plenty of self-identifying progressives not actively involved in the fight for liberal causes.
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The linguist Geoffrey Nunberg rounds up various pundit theories on the progressive/liberal distinction before <a href="http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/progressives.html">observing</a>, "none of them has much to do with with how the labels are actually used." One problem I have with most of these theories is that they treat the categories as fixed and static. In reality, these words have had greatly varied meanings over time, and even within the same time have meant different things to different people. The fact that TR referred to himself as a Progressive while FDR considered himself a liberal doesn't shed much light on the differences between Clinton and Obama. With these caveats in mind, Nunberg offers his thoughts on what the <i>progressive</i> label is intended to signal today:<blockquote><font size=-1>Far more than liberals, progressives see themselves in the line of the historical left. Not that America has much of a left to speak of anymore, at least by the standards of the leftists of the Vietnam era, who were a lot less eager than most modern-day progressives to identify themselves with the Democratic Party. But if modern progressives haven't inherited the radicalism or ferocity of the movement left of the 60's, they're doing what they can to keep its tone and attitude alive.</font></blockquote>I tend to agree. I just wonder how long this situation will last. As the new progressives grow older and the word <i>progressive</i> becomes more ingrained, its anti-establishment overtones may well fade. Eventually it may come to be a simple descriptor of the average left-leaning Democrat, occupying more or less the same place that <i>liberal</i> used to--before it was turned into an epithet.
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Perhaps sensing this possibility, some conservatives in recent years have been trying to do to <i>progressive</i> what they once did to <i>liberal</i>. Glenn Beck attempted something of the sort in his 2010 speech to CPAC, where he linked today's progressives with the alleged evils of the early-20th century Progressive Movement. I doubt this strategy will work. These conservatives have grown too insulated from the mainstream to reach beyond their narrow audience (somehow I don't think most Americans would share Beck's outrage at TR's support for universal health care or Woodrow Wilson's creation of the Federal Reserve), and in any case the word <i>progressive</i> just doesn't carry the negative connotations that helped the right tarnish <i>liberal</i>. Whether conservatives or older liberals like it or not, <i>progressive</i> as a self-respecting term is here to stay.Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29334951.post-33964634420149352792012-07-17T19:24:00.000-04:002012-07-18T08:44:13.138-04:00The challenge of old moviesWant to know how certifiable a movie fanatic I am? I actually keep an Excel spreadsheet noting every movie I see and the date on which I first see it. About a year ago, realizing I'd been keeping this list for literally half my life (since 1994, just before my 17th birthday), I attempted to identify the movies I'd seen during the first half. I got some help from Wikipedia, which has articles listing the films released <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_in_film">every year</a> (most of the major ones, at any rate). One thing I've determined is that I've seen well over a thousand films in my life--but perhaps three-fourths of them have been ones made within my lifetime, starting in the late 1970s.
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This was a bit of a surprise to me, since I remember watching lots of old movies as a kid. But when I think about it, there are indeed an astonishing number of classics I still have not seen. And when I do get around to seeing them, the experience isn't always as satisfying as it's supposed to be. Part of the problem is a feeling of being intimidated by a movie's reputation. It's tricky trying to sit back and enjoy a Great Movie when I'm conscious of how I'm supposed to be feeling the weight of its Greatness at every moment. This is a big reason why I still have never watched <i>Citizen Kane</i>, and why I had the DVD to <i>Lawrence of Arabia</i> for a long time before I gathered up the courage to stick it in the drive.
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The genre I find easiest to appreciate regardless of period is comedy. I was raised on classic comedy--the Marx Bros., Laurel & Hardy, Chaplin (who remains one of my favorite filmmakers to this day), Danny Kaye, the Three Stooges. I believe comedy is essentially timeless as long as it avoids topical humor, as these old movies generally did. Good 21st-century comedies like <i>40-Year-Old Virgin</i> or <i>Borat</i> may be more profane than their predecessors, but the underlying principles of humor haven't changed. I can't say the same for dramas, westerns, romances, or horror films.
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There are four basic challenges to becoming engaged in older movies. One I am <i>not</i> dealing with here is advancement in special effects and other technical matters. Everyone agrees movies have improved over time on that score. Instead, I wish to focus on those areas that pose significant and non-superficial barriers between modern viewers and even the best films of the past:
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<b>1. Changes in decency standards</b>
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While I find many of today's movies overly coarse, those made at the height of the Hays Commission had the opposite problem. They couldn't talk about sex in anything approaching a candid manner and were forced to employ ridiculous euphemisms, which can be hard for a modern viewer to adjust to. When I watched <i>His Girl Friday</i>, I had already seen the 1974 version of <i>The Front Page</i> with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, based on the same play. Being a big Matthau/Lemmon fan, I loved the '74 version, and while I enjoyed the older movie as well, I was conscious of its limited ability to depict certain plot points. This actually led to a couple of good lines, as when Hildy reports that a character got shot in the "classified ads." At other times I felt the movie suffered from the constraints, as when it presented Mollie Malloy as an old maid rather than (as in the original play) a prostitute. And I'm sorry, but I just can't have as much affection for a film that omits the play's hilarious closing line, "The son of a bitch stole my watch!"
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Some old movies have an innocence that looks laughable today. I saw the Oscar-winning 1938 film <i>Boys Town</i> when Newt Gingrich hosted a showing of it on TNT in 1994. Gingrich felt people should watch this movie to learn how to help today's troubled youth. The movie tells the story of Father Flanagan (Spencer Tracy) and his heroic efforts running an orphanage. His motto is that there's "no such thing as a bad boy." And indeed, most of the boys we see in the orphanage behave like perfect angels, except for one played by Mickey Rooney as a juvenile delinquent so terrible he actually smokes, plays cards, and acts sassy toward the grownups. (As a neighbor of mine at the time put it, "Sounds like the typical yeshiva bochur.") Despite these immeasurable crimes, Father Flanagan somehow manages to get through to him in the end and make him into a good kid, a message of great relevance for today's crack babies.
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<b>2. Changes in moral sensibilities</b>
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This category covers a lot of ground, but it's most notable with attitudes about race. Movies from the '30s and '40s are often shockingly racist, and when they are, I'm thrown right out of the picture. <i>Duck Soup</i> is one of my favorite comedies, but when Groucho utters the line--"My father was a little headstrong, my mother was a little armstrong. The Headstrongs married the Armstrongs, and that's why the darkies were born"--the movie for me just stops dead. (Few people today are aware that Groucho was actually referencing a hit song from the time titled "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That%27s_Why_Darkies_Were_Born">That's Why the Darkies Were Born</a>" that was supposedly <i>satirizing</i> racism, but it still sounds pretty offensive to modern ears.) And that's just dialogue. The stereotyping of nonwhite characters in films from this period is so awful it leads to the sadly ironic fact that films from this period tend to be more watchable when they feature all-white casts.
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<b>3. Lack of freshness</b>
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It may not be fair, but movie ideas that were once highly original can come to seem banal if they get imitated enough. Hitchcock went to great lengths to keep the surprise ending to <i>Psycho</i> from getting leaked, but by today's standards it seems almost trite. (As Nicolas Cage declares in <i>Adaptation</i>, "The only idea more overused than serial killers is multiple personalities.") I recently saw <i>Casablanca</i> for the first time, but it feels like I've seen it my whole life. It was like <i>deja vu</i> as I watched, memories from my childhood of stuff I had seen that referenced the film coming to the surface of my mind: an episode of <i>Moonlighting</i>, a scene from one of the <i>Naked Gun</i> films, parts of <i>When Harry Met Sally</i>, you name it. There's also something surpassing strange about hearing lines like "Here's looking at you, kid," "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship," "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here," uttered in earnest. While I did enjoy the movie, it was certainly not the same experience moviegoers in the '40s had. It was like viewing some grand antique.
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<b>4. Differences in filmmaking style</b>
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This section will be much longer than the previous ones because it deals with a characteristic of movies from the '30s and '40s that has always been obvious to me but which, for reasons that escape me, I have rarely seen discussed: they look and sound a great deal like plays. Watching a movie from today doesn't usually feel like seeing a group of actors up on a stage; it's more like looking into a window at a real-life scene. I don't just mean that the sets look more convincing, but even more that when the actors talk, they tend to sound a lot more like real people having a conversation. To show what I'm talking about, let's examine two clips, one from the 1939 version of <i>Of Mice and Men</i>, the other from the same scene in the '92 version:
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Did you notice what I noticed? Not only is the first movie clearly being filmed on a stage, whereas the second is filmed in actual woods (or at least provides the illusion of it), the differences in acting style are striking. In the older movie, the actors deliver their lines loudly and in an almost sing-song manner; in the later film the actors speak practically under their breath, with minimal intonation. The acting in the first clip is more stylized, in the second more naturalistic. In short, the actors in the original film seem to be <i>acting</i>, whereas in the remake they're <i>behaving</i>. The second clip therefore has a more lifelike feel (despite the fact that it's the only one of the two to feature background music, a point to which I'll return shortly).
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I am not cherry-picking here; this is something that has consistently stood out for me whenever I've watched movies from the '30s and '40s and compared them with later films. It is most noticeable in dramas, but it exists to varying degrees in all genres. And of course there are exceptions. Jimmy Stewart was always more naturalistic than Nicolas Cage has ever been, but in any of their films they are surrounded by actors whose style contrasts with theirs.
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None of this should be surprising. When talkies were invented, movie actors naturally adopted the conventions of what had previously been the only dramatic art form involving speech. They imitated the way stage actors spoke because that was all they <i>knew</i>. Over time, as the technology improved and as film came more into its own as a respectable medium, the styles of stage and screen diverged and naturalism gradually became the norm on screen; I believe the transition was complete in American cinema by the early 1970s.
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What do I think of the change? It depends. The two <i>Of Mice and Men</i> adaptations are similar overall, but as an admirer of Steinbeck's novel I always preferred the '92 version. I had an easier time connecting emotionally with characters who sounded like real people when they spoke. This standard of judging movies is surprisingly rare, from what I've seen; people just don't want to admit that the naturalism of modern film has advantages.
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It also has disadvantages. Among other things, I believe it contributed to the disappearance of musicals in the 1970s. The musical is, after all, very much a genre of the stage, and to have today's movie characters burst into song can seem odd and inappropriate in a way that it never did in previous eras. Music is still important in today's movies, but most of it is in the background: the scores (one of the few non-naturalistic aspects of movies to have increased over time) and the video interludes (a form that gradually replaced musical numbers in the '60s and '70s, and which in my opinion is one of the most annoying features of modern cinema). If a modern movie character sings, usually there's a rationale within the story, such as if the character is a professional singer.
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All of this has led to a looser definition of the word "musical," which nowadays often means simply "movie with lots of songs in it," even when there are no numbers. The Golden Globes, for example, have applied the term to films like <i>Walk the Line</i> which are only "musicals" by virtue of concert scenes, video interludes, and the like. When modern movies do feature traditional numbers, the effect is often curiously artificial.
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A lot of people like to ignore this fact and pretend nothing's changed. There's not much acknowledgment that musicals didn't just happen to fall out of fashion (the way, say, westerns did), but that the whole underlying approach to filmmaking changed in a way that made the conventions of musicals seem out of place. In the olden days, making a film as a musical was such a normal and natural choice it could even be fairly peripheral to the film itself. For example, most of the Marx Bros. and Danny Kaye films, remembered primarily as comedies, happened also to be musicals. Today's movies don't have that freedom.
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The resurgence of movie musicals following the success of <i>Chicago</i> happened in part, I think, because the 2002 film found a unique way to reconcile the conflicting conventions. In this film, a woman played by Renee Zelwegger dreams of one day becoming a vaudeville star, and most of the song-and-dance numbers are presented as fantasy sequences where she imagines herself and other people performing on stage. As a result, the distinction in this movie between a <i>musical number</i> and a <i>music video</i> is blurred to the point of irrelevance. One IMDB commenter suggested that the film was "ashamed to be a musical," but I'm not sure it would have been as successful if it had simply ignored the problem.
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Alas, many of the movie musicals since then have done just that. When I first saw <i>Dreamgirls</i>, I noticed it wasn't until about thirty minutes into the film that a character starts singing on the street (as opposed to on a stage or in a studio). Up to that point, the movie had seemed like a low-key, serious drama, and I have to admit I found the sudden break in realism that late in the story rather jarring. I thought to myself, "Wait a second...this is a <i>musical</i>?!" I've had that sort of experience with at least a couple of today's musicals, but I've never had it with the musicals of old. They don't have anything to apologize for.
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<b>Conclusion</b>
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My point here isn't that modern movies are intrinsically "better" than older ones, or vice versa. I just think there needs to be more recognition of the effect that the evolving conventions have on different generations of moviegoers. For sure, younger people who consider older movies boring or incomprehensible are missing out on something. But people who celebrate the old stuff as some kind of gold standard that nothing today could match up to, and imply that anyone who disagrees is simply lacking in culture or taste, aren't exactly helping matters either. Speaking personally, as I continue to enrich my knowledge of films of the past, I've had the best experiences when I've understood the movies in the context of their time and was prepared to adjust as needed. Holding them in godlike esteem doesn't do the trick for me.Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.com230tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29334951.post-81740784509539919972012-02-16T15:00:00.007-05:002012-02-17T13:15:59.760-05:00America's liberalism and GOP propagandaRecently Sen. Marco Rubio repeated a common right-wing talking point: "The majority of Americans are conservative." In response, Politifact noted that only a plurality, not a majority, of the public answers to the term "conservative" on polls, and that slightly more Americans identify as Democrats than as Republicans, while the largest group, independents, are evenly divided in their partisan leanings.<br /><br />Rachel Maddow <a href="http://www.mediaite.com/tv/rachel-maddow-goes-nuclear-on-politifact-%E2%80%98you-are-a-disaster%E2%80%99/">took Politifact to task</a> for rating Rubio's statement Mostly True in light of these facts, but I think she misses the point. She is right to attack the Politifact article, but she attacks it for the wrong reasons. If Rubio had said, "The majority of Americans think of themselves as conservative," Politifact's rating would have been appropriate. The majority/plurality distinction is often ignored in colloquial speech, and partisan identification doesn't always match ideology or even voting tendency. What makes Rubio's statement misleading is that it implies Americans tend to fit his definition of conservatism, when the evidence strongly suggests otherwise.<br /><br />He explains why he thinks Americans are conservative with his ridiculous, incendiary remark, "They believe in things like the Constitution. I know that's weird to some people." Of course few Americans of any political stripe would say they don't believe in the Constitution, but Rubio isn't basing his judgment on what they claim about themselves. President Obama may be a former professor of constitutional law, but according to conservatives like Rubio, his liberal policies prove he doesn't "believe" in his area of specialty, no matter what he says in public.<br /><br />In other words, Rubio's logic implies he doesn't necessarily take people's self-descriptions at face value. I doubt he would accept, for example, the claimed conservatism of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Conservative-Soul-How-Lost-Back/dp/0060188774">Andrew Sullivan</a>, a staunch Obama supporter. How do we know the 40% of Americans who call themselves "conservative" are the Rubio type of conservative, as opposed to the Sullivan type, or some other type entirely?<br /><br />As a matter of fact, Americans tend to prefer the policies of the Democratic Party to those of the GOP. According to polls, Americans overwhelmingly favor an increase in the the <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/20710/public-solidly-supports-increase-minimum-wage.aspx">minimum wage</a>, higher taxes on <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/106813/many-americans-increasing-taxes-rich.aspx">the rich</a>, and leaving Social Security and Medicare <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/145790/americans-oppose-cuts-education-social-security-defense.aspx">alone</a>. The Affordable Care Act remains unpopular, but the public option that was discarded from the bill <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/121997/americans-healthcare-reform-top-takeaways.aspx">polled well</a>.<br /><br />Public opinion on social issues such as abortion is somewhat <a href="http://www.pollingreport.com/abortion.htm">cloudier</a>, though the public becomes increasingly accepting of <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2011/nov/03/news/la-pn-pew-same-sex-marriage-20111103">gay rights</a> with each passing year. If there's one area of liberal thought that is continually unpopular, it is civil liberties. But Democrats know that, which is why they shy away from <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30826649/ns/politics-capitol_hill/t/senate-blocks-transfer-gitmo-detainees/#.TzxyBvkWHCY">implementing such policies</a>. That makes Rubio's statement about the Constitution ironic, because it seems to me that Americans as a whole <i>don't</i> have a great deal of respect for many of the rights outlined in the Constitution, yet that's the one area in which their views are more in line with those of Rubio's party!<br /><br />Given all these facts, why do twice as many Americans identify by the term "conservative" as by the term "liberal"? Partly it's because over the past several decades conservatives have successfully turned "liberal" into a dirty word, so that even people who hold liberal policy positions are reluctant to embrace the term. (That's the main reason the American left started calling itself "progressive.") It's a total flip from the past. Traditionally the word "liberal" had positive connotations, evoking someone open-minded and forward-looking, while "conservative" was often a slightly negative word, suggesting joyless, old-fashioned squareness. (That was presumably the meaning Rush Limbaugh had in mind when he complained about a reporter who allegedly described his neckties as conservative.) The rise of a vigorous conservative movement in the 1970s at a time when liberalism was flailing helped to change these perceptions.<br /><br />I'm not saying the public is, in fact, "liberal." For one thing, the American system is itself to the right of most modern, developed nations, so that even the Democratic Party would look conservative in other countries. "I have no more intention of dismantling the National Health Service than I have of dismantling Britain's defenses." Who said those words? It was that bolshevik <a href="http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105376">Maggie Thatcher</a>.<br /><br />Conservatives point to polls showing that Americans tend to say they favor "limited government." But when you examine their views more closely, you find they oppose just about anything that would actually lead to a smaller government. As a 2010 <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20019244-503544.html"><i>Washington Post</i></a> poll found, "most Americans who would like to see a more limited government also call Medicare and Social Security 'very important' programs...[and] want the federal government to remain involved in education, poverty reduction and health care regulation."<br /><br />The American appetite for shrinking the government in theory but not in practice is a big part of why it's so hard to combat the country's fiscal problems. Serious cuts will almost invariably cause pain to many voters. The only category of federal spending that a majority of Americans wants to see cut is foreign aid, and most Americans are unaware it constitutes a <a href="http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brunitedstatescanadara/670.php?nid=&id=&pnt=670&lb=">minuscule portion</a> of the budget. It's comforting, I suppose, to pretend the source of our problems lies an ocean away.<br /><br />However Americans may describe their political philosophy in the abstract, it's obvious from any serious examination of the polls that the economic policies of the Republican Party are, for the most part, highly unpopular. So why do Republicans continue to win office? For starters, elections tend to be driven by factors other than voter agreement with policy. According to political scientists, the biggest influence on national elections is the state of the <a href="http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2010/07/20/on_writing_about_the_economy_a/">economy</a>. The 2010 Republican sweep demonstrated this to a tee: <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/vote-2010-elections-results-midterm-exit-poll-analysis/story?id=12003775&page=3#.TzyFR_kWHCY">exit polls</a> showed that 52% of the voters wanted to see the Bush tax cuts on the rich ended, and that although 48% wanted to see Obamacare repealed, 47% wanted to see it either left alone or expanded. Thus, the electorate that brought us this "Tea Party revolution" didn't clearly agree with two of the Tea Party's key policy priorities.<br /><br />Of course Republicans don't have to wait till the economy goes south to gain power. They've developed a wealth of propaganda to make their views sound more palatable to the average voter. They'll point out that Democrats want to raise taxes, and once you mention that the proposed tax hikes will only fall on the richest of Americans, a mere 1% of the country, the Republicans then accuse the Democrats of "class warfare" and hostility to "job creators." All these rhetorical devices are attempts to give voters the impression that Republicans are defending the interests of the middle class, a delusion they can only maintain by <i>not</i> describing their policies in plain English.<br /><br />It is when Republican politicians get to entitlement talk that their propaganda descends into complete incoherence. "Keep your government hands off my Medicare" was a line seen and heard at a few <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/get-your-goddamn-governme_b_252326.html">Tea Party rallies</a>, and although these were isolated incidents, they reflected a message that's pervasive in a party that calls Obamacare a "government takeover of the health-care system" while at the same time attacking it for its cuts to America's actual government health-care system.<br /><br />The contradiction is sometimes laughably transparent. In 2010, a Republican Congressional candidate ran an ad blasting the Democratic incumbent for the <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2010/10/15/124416/charlottesville-chamber/">following two sins</a>: "Government run health care. Medicare cuts." In 2011, Michelle Bachmann warned that Obama would try to <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/bachmanns-nonsensical-medicare-obamacare-claim/2011/06/20/AGkqpPdH_blog.html">turn Medicare into Obamacare</a> (which would actually mean <i>privatizing</i> it, but never mind). Then there's <a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/the-internal-contradictions-of-mitt-romney/">Romney's recent statement</a> simultaneously assailing the president for failing to make entitlement cuts and, well, making entitlement cuts: "This week, President Obama will release a budget that won't take any meaningful steps toward solving our entitlement crisis.... The president has failed to offer a single serious idea to save Social Security and is the only president in modern history to cut Medicare benefits for seniors."<br /><br />Republican messaging reached its ultimate absurdity after the passage of Paul Ryan's bill (which Romney has endorsed) that not only includes the <a href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-cohn/86882/republican-medicare-advantage-cut-hypocrisy">same Medicare cuts</a> that Romney and other Republicans have attacked Democrats for implementing, but plans eventually to eliminate Medicare in all but name--whatever <a href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_12/politifact_ought_to_be_ashamed034211.php">Politifact may tell you to the contrary</a>. Ryan's plan <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/most-americans-reject-rep-ryan-medicare-proposal-poll-153943968.html">isn't popular</a>, but that hasn't stopped Republicans from claiming to be saving Medicare while accusing Democrats of trying to destroy it.<br /><br />These obfuscations are necessary because Republicans truly seek reductions in America's safety net but must contend with a public deeply opposed to that project, including one of their core constituencies, the elderly. They have no choice but to lie about their positions, because describing them truthfully would prevent the GOP from getting into power. As Jonathan Chait explained in his 2007 book <i>The Big Con</i>, published before the rise of Obama, the Tea Party, or the mythical death panels:<blockquote><font size=-1>There is also a natural--and, in many ways, commendable--skepticism about one-sided accusations of dishonesty. Those who confine their accusations to one side are usually partisans best taken with a grain of salt. Lying and spinning have always been a part of politics, and it is the rare elected official who prevails by offering the voters an objective and unvarnished assessment of his plans. Moreover, since we tend to think of lying as an idiosyncratic personal trait, there's no reason to think that one side has more liars than the other any more than there's reason to think one side has more drunks or adulterers.<br /><br />Yet, as will become clear, the fact remains that dishonesty has become integral to the Republican economic agenda in a way that it is not to the Democratic agenda. The reason is not that Republicans are individually less honest than Democrats. Far from it. It is simply that the GOP, and the conservative movement, have embraced an economic agenda far out of step with the majority of the voting public. Republicans simply can't win office or get their plans enacted into law, without fundamentally misleading the public. Lying has become a systematic necessity. (pp. 118-9)</font></blockquote>Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29334951.post-33832108943397754732012-02-02T06:45:00.000-05:002012-02-02T06:48:18.433-05:00The film, not the holiday<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSOfk99QI9SNEqcSUoWim24H8aMXZJ_bjEVIjrcY9ZI5JCrpiPbjfJjmK6IGdoh045GFpQbAVKrTqOcvoaYPooGixRo8gHXEIWLVv8WUzjNq8sZzuCZo_Axzz5UuU_3t-g5KoOrg/s1600/GrCam.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 227px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSOfk99QI9SNEqcSUoWim24H8aMXZJ_bjEVIjrcY9ZI5JCrpiPbjfJjmK6IGdoh045GFpQbAVKrTqOcvoaYPooGixRo8gHXEIWLVv8WUzjNq8sZzuCZo_Axzz5UuU_3t-g5KoOrg/s320/GrCam.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5703416158270282754" /></a>From the first time I watched it when it hit the theaters back in '93, <i>Groundhog Day</i> has held a special place in my mind. It isn't that it's based on a clever idea (Bill Murray stuck in a time warp forced to relive one of America's silliest holidays over and over). Lots of movies have clever ideas. It isn't even that it executes this idea flawlessly from start to finish--which is almost unheard of for a high-concept comedy. It's that it does all that, and <i>then</i> manages to tell a smart, perceptive tale about the human condition.<br /><br />It's one of those movies where you're not even sure the filmmakers understood how good it was, because it has the trappings of a more frivolous endeavor. It belongs to a tradition of farces I call Cursed Schlub movies, which revolve around a character who becomes victim to some otherworldly fate with its own bizarre rules. Examples include <i>The Nutty Professor</i>, <i>All of Me</i>, <i>Liar Liar</i>, and <i>Shallow Hal</i>. Typically they're not much more than comic exercises, with plots that function as clotheslines for a string of elaborate gags.<br /><br />While just as funny as the best of those pictures, <i>Groundhog Day</i> transcends the genre, fleshing out the story and supplying character development that doesn't feel the least bit contrived. It was something of a transitional role for Murray, who up to that point had been known merely as a brilliant comedian. His performance, where he uses subtle facial mannerisms to great effect, paved the road for his more serious turn in movies like <i>Rushmore</i> and <i>Lost in Translation</i>.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgU7GSjaQNjsIfTNX4u1gUQzH3tMvwMsihIT16gc7P8C5dB-qxrO3Jec_N-UQuC3ZCAOuqXgiMfVV0537_dbskEmwASDRpqkLXw-nqwPcPGwLyA1OyujV_6dOZWzPmwT9XF_sHaFA/s1600/GrCupRight.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 302px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgU7GSjaQNjsIfTNX4u1gUQzH3tMvwMsihIT16gc7P8C5dB-qxrO3Jec_N-UQuC3ZCAOuqXgiMfVV0537_dbskEmwASDRpqkLXw-nqwPcPGwLyA1OyujV_6dOZWzPmwT9XF_sHaFA/s320/GrCupRight.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5703416307255548578" /></a>Even its style of humor is uncommon for this type of film. It mostly avoids slapstick in favor of witty dialogue that showcases Murray's gift for understatement, as when he laconically remarks, "My years are not advancing as fast as you might think." Not only does his deadpanning make it easier for us to believe in the character of Phil, it enhances the laughs. (Part of the hilarity of the early scenes comes from seeing the mounting panic on a man who keeps his emotions so tightly bottled up.) I have my doubts that a broader approach, like one Jim Carrey might have given, would have worked as well on any level.<br /><br />The film also wisely never reveals the cause of the time loop. It's customary in Cursed Schlub movies to invent some harebrained rationale for the central plot device (the birthday wish in <i>Liar Liar</i>, the hypnotic suggestion in <i>Shallow Hal</i>, the cartoon mysticism in countless body-swap comedies). An early version of the script did just that, explaining Phil's predicament as--I kid you not--a voodoo spell cast by a former lover. Viewers tend to assume it is something more along the lines of a trial from God, and the movie acquires a certain poetic and even spiritual quality normally absent from this sort of material.<br /><br />Its biggest divergence from other movies in the genre lies in its plot construction. Instead of the usual strategy of cobbling together a series of comic sketches and gluing on a formula ending, the plot develops as the step-by-step process by which Phil comes to terms with his strange condition. There's a surprisingly smooth progression to the story that never gets thrown off course by the jokes. In the entire movie only the <i>Jeopardy</i> scene feels like a skit that could have appeared just about anywhere in the proceedings (though its placement in the section where Phil becomes lethargic and depressed makes sense). The rest of the time the events fit together like clockwork, the end flowing naturally from the beginning, all of it focused on Phil's growth as a person. Along the way, it does a splendid job exploring a universal human trait.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4d46pjgCHp8YmF5J1T2FCz3qWCPBSqdUXDno6zBrkNNPOcefgTaqJ1fKaGYvulbVhfCGYBpcH275GVNBr2EpODq80e5OZOkbxlIyLkLvoYfF44eryrAqcj4qWBl9HyhrKOT_VCg/s1600/GrBash.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 116px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4d46pjgCHp8YmF5J1T2FCz3qWCPBSqdUXDno6zBrkNNPOcefgTaqJ1fKaGYvulbVhfCGYBpcH275GVNBr2EpODq80e5OZOkbxlIyLkLvoYfF44eryrAqcj4qWBl9HyhrKOT_VCg/s200/GrBash.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5701073055774021186" /></a>Everyone on the planet, I'm convinced, sometimes imagines redoing past experiences. This can range from thinking up a snappy retort hours after an argument ended to harboring deep regrets over a life decision. Yet if you were somehow given the ability to go back in time and alter past events until you got them exactly as you wanted, you'd eventually go mad, because you'd be depriving yourself of the unpredictability that makes life worthwhile.<br /><br />That's one of the movie's insights. I think of the sequence where Phil uses trial-and-error to determine Rita's likes and dislikes so that after she's forgotten divulging all that information he'll present himself to her as Mr. Right. From his perspective the project could be taking weeks or months or longer (the movie never says), but to her it's <i>always</i> their first date, and he is never able to seduce her on what to him is a day with no end. She always feels he is pushing too hard on their relationship, and even though she doesn't know the supernatural part, she senses he's manipulating the situation and concealing his true self from her.<br /><br />In one crucial bit of dialogue after he thinks he has gotten through with her, she tells him, "It's a perfect day. You couldn't plan a day like this." He replies, "Well, you <i>can</i>. It just takes an awful lot of work"--once again making an honest observation secure in the knowledge she won't possibly take it literally. Yet one of their most romantic moments, where they fall on the snow together, is unplanned. We see that he is unable to repeat that moment in later iterations of Groundhog Day: his words get increasingly stilted, his movements increasingly clumsy. Even for a man given thousands of do-overs, the moment is gone forever, and only he will remember it. Our lives are filled with moments like that, but some of us lose sight of their significance when we're overwhelmed by the things we almost got right.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiX2yT4kpkH-vVBdNDhFJwuBjUK-q0GRURXU8xIHm3qA1jmBnUZhB_jm9LqDj1urpd1GtENLschUlMJiWUyLJ3WUIdsNC1DQpPjtJsm8UWyAhqWKWr-BPtT-H6ddlZQkmZw0PGCg/s1600/GrSnow.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 201px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiX2yT4kpkH-vVBdNDhFJwuBjUK-q0GRURXU8xIHm3qA1jmBnUZhB_jm9LqDj1urpd1GtENLschUlMJiWUyLJ3WUIdsNC1DQpPjtJsm8UWyAhqWKWr-BPtT-H6ddlZQkmZw0PGCg/s320/GrSnow.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5700525317239379650" /></a>Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29334951.post-17803972058769639652012-01-05T12:00:00.008-05:002012-01-05T16:51:12.231-05:00Ivory tower crusadersAccording to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKBlk1Vpeuw">Ron Paul</a>, "Libertarians are incapable of being racist, because racism is a collectivist idea, you see people in groups."<br /><br />That remark reminds me of Pat Buchanan's response to charges of <a href="http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/b/buchanan-pat/buchanan-on-buchanan.html">anti-Semitism</a>: "I am as aware as any other Christian that our Savior was Jewish, His mother was Jewish, the Apostles were Jewish, the first martyrs were Jewish.... So no true Christian, in my judgment, can be an anti-Semite."<br /><br />Not only do these statements both demonstrate the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman">No True Scotsman</a> fallacy, they raise some intriguing points about how the concept of prejudice is commonly misunderstood.<br /><br />Let's start with the claim that a true Christian cannot be an anti-Semite. Somehow I doubt that assertion would much impress the Jewish victims of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the numerous expulsions and pogroms and massacres committed in the name of Christ throughout the centuries. Presumably, Buchanan would respond that none of those attackers were "true" Christians. (I'm being charitable here, because I know there's a distinct possibility that he would <i>defend</i> the Crusades, as some on the right <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Politically-Incorrect-Guide-Islam-Crusades/dp/0895260131">have</a>.) It's a seductive argument because you can't possibly disprove it. Anytime a Christian assaults a Jew, you can either deny that person is a "true Christian" or deny that what that person did was anti-Semitic. It's one of those airtight defenses lawyers love.<br /><br />It also shows a poor understanding of the historical roots of anti-Semitism. The simple fact is that most of the themes of modern-day anti-Semitism first emerged in a medieval Christian context. This happened not in spite of the fact that Christianity began as a rival Jewish sect, but in many ways because of it. Medieval Christians saw the continued existence of Judaism as an insult to their own faith which was supposed to have supplanted it. In theory this was a religious rather than racial prejudice, with the goal of converting Jews rather than killing them. And when it took on a racial character, as in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limpieza_de_sangre">15th-century Spain</a>, pointing out the Jewishness of the early Christians would probably not have swayed the persecutors.<br /><br />Buchanan seems to be implicitly defining anti-Semitism as "the doctrine of hating all Jews who ever walked the face of the earth"--which is not how medieval Christians, even the Spanish, ever framed the issue--and then suggesting that this doctrine is logically incompatible with the theological claims of Christianity. And so it is--but only very mildly. The fact that his religion is founded upon worship of a long-deceased Jewish man does not automatically imply acceptance of the vast majority of Jews. History makes this all too clear. Centuries of persecution and bigotry can't be swept aside by one tiny, possible logical inconsistency.<br /><br />That brings us to Ron Paul and his argument that libertarians can't be racist because racism is a form of collectivism, the opposite of libertarianism. If that's the case, then it's a funny coincidence how closely many of his policy views match those of the people he calls collectivist. As Stormfront founder <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2007-12-20-paul-donation_N.htm">Don Black</a> said after endorsing his 2008 presidential bid, "We know that he's not a white nationalist...but on the issues, there's only one choice." What issues? Black mentions the Iraq War and immigration, but maybe there's just a few other things Paul has said that might appeal to white nationalists--say, his long-standing opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He insists he takes this position not because he harbors any animosity toward blacks (or "the blacks," as he phrases it in the earlier clip) but merely because he values freedom.<blockquote><font size=-1>When you invade and violate the Constitution, you attack the personal liberties of the citizens of California and Maine, as well as the liberties of the people of South Carolina and Virginia. You cannot create new rights for one group by taking them away from another.<br /><br />I am deeply concerned over the efforts of opposing groups to smear our effort with the false trappings of race hatred. We are interested solely in protecting the rights of states to manage their own internal affairs, which is a fundamental guarantee of the Constitution.</font></blockquote>Actually, those aren't the words of Ron Paul. They're the words of Strom Thurmond during his 1948 segregationist campaign. (The first paragraph is from <i>The Washington Post</i>, Oct. 12, 1948, the second from <i>The Baltimore Sun</i>, Jul. 20, 1948--both obtained from my library's archive.) But if you read what Paul has <a href="http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul188.html">actually</a> <a href="http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul68.html">said</a> on the subject, you'll find that the above quote wouldn't sound at all out of place.<br /><br />Of course Thurmond also once <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgH7WgtIU2k">said</a>, "there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches." Admittedly it's hard to imagine a remark like that escaping Paul's lips (though not so hard to imagine it appearing in a newsletter under his name). And Paul does talk favorably, as Thurmond would not have, about creating a "color-blind society."<br /><br />But Paul's argument about collectivism is doubly flawed, first because it conflates a philosophy of government with a philosophy of human differences (a person can, with perfect consistency, believe that blacks and whites should be treated equally under the law while also believing whites will naturally come out on top), second because it's exactly the sort of rationalization that white supremacists have used for centuries to justify keeping racist institutions alive. They also talked about states' rights; they also depicted civil-rights legislation as an assault on freedom; they also claimed their preferred policies would benefit blacks; and they also repudiated certain manifestations of bigotry. (Thurmond, for example, opposed the poll tax and distanced himself from the racist, anti-Semitic preacher Gerald L. K. Smith.) Even if Paul's motives are entirely honorable, rooted only in his fealty to federalist principles and not to prejudice, it doesn't change the fact that racism has a long history of coming cloaked in such principles.<br /><br />Paul and Buchanan both think they can refute charges of bigotry simply by identifying themselves with a favored belief system and defining that belief system in logical opposition to the charges. Their use of this defense reveals a cartoonish understanding of bigotry, and the philosophical basis on which they reject that bigotry is hopelessly feeble. They are men living in ivory towers, too attached to the elegant simplicity of their logic to appreciate its real-world implications.Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29334951.post-62017594868731630362011-07-07T10:00:00.003-04:002011-07-07T10:34:12.076-04:00Anti-smurfite<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXbDwbosRFPZN2QqO5AqyXksKmpZONohZWyRKClZxul_CF02YYTGTibHnAAXgHxp-BSTwUZkJzfuz4V2yfG8UlU0rKiOM9SovtvX5ZZnEBGXRmpViWMP9Hy9XZSypipx0vd-xiYA/s1600/gargamel.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXbDwbosRFPZN2QqO5AqyXksKmpZONohZWyRKClZxul_CF02YYTGTibHnAAXgHxp-BSTwUZkJzfuz4V2yfG8UlU0rKiOM9SovtvX5ZZnEBGXRmpViWMP9Hy9XZSypipx0vd-xiYA/s320/gargamel.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5625472272512032530" /></a>Last month HuffPost ran an article about a newly published book by a French author which argues that the original Smurf cartoons were works of <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/03/the-smurfs-are-racist-ant_n_870758.html">racist, anti-Semitic, and socialist</a> propaganda. A few weeks later, an article in <a href="http://www.forward.com/articles/139107/"><i>The Forward</i></a> elaborated on this theory without mentioning either the HuffPost article or the French book. According to this theory, Gargamel looks like an anti-Semitic caricature of a Jew, down to his hooked nose, and this suspicion is heightened by the fact that the goal of his nefarious plans is money. As the <i>Forward</i> article puts it, "All that Gargamel lacks is a yarmulke."<br /><br />This theory isn't new. Back in 2007, <a href="http://www.jewornotjew.com/profile.jsp?ID=121">JewOrNotJew.com</a> did a half-joking piece on the matter, concluding that "someone out there is really bigoted--the creator of the cartoon or the creator of the theory. Probably a little of both really." I myself never noticed any of this as a kid, apart from wondering why Gargamel's cat, Azrael, had a Hebrew name.<br /><br />I believe it is within the realm of possibility that the Smurfs' creator Peyo could have been an anti-Semite. But I'm hesitant to endorse this theory, not because it will spoil my childhood, but because it's all speculative. I know nothing about Peyo's life, and he isn't around to defend himself against these charges. (A son of his, however, has dismissed the accusations as "between the grotesque and the not serious.") None of the articles I've seen have provided any new information, just interpretations of what I already know.<br /><br />Actually, let me qualify that a little. The HuffPost article did mention one fact that I admit was pretty damning with regard to another prejudice. Apparently the very first Smurf cartoon was called "The Black Smurf" and was about a disease that turns smurfs black, where they become dimwitted and say "nyap nyap." US publishers refused to print this cartoon, and later they made the infected smurfs purple. (I remember reading a strip concerning a green smurf that bites other smurfs to turn them green--but my memory could be failing me as to the exact color. I just assumed it was the smurf equivalent of vampires or zombies.) That <i>does</i> sound racist, and quite similar to things on our side of the pond from Disney and Warner Bros. (many of which, such as the black centaurs in <i>Fantasia</i>, have been censored).<br /><br />As for Gargamel's alleged Jewishness, I have much the same reaction as JewOrNotJew.com: it makes me uncomfortable, but there's no conclusive evidence to prove this theory correct. Gargamel is never identified as a Jew. He doesn't have a Jewish-sounding name or speak any Yiddish. The evidence, such as it is, apparently escaped the notice of American producers of the Saturday morning cartoons (which I watched as a kid through a VCR, an invention of great use to observant Jews in the '80s). It's also possible that the element of anti-Semitic stereotyping was subconscious, rather than part of an agenda, on Peyo's part.<br /><br />I'm reminded of when <i>The Phantom Menace</i> came out and some critics suggested that some of the alien creatures were thinly disguised racial and ethnic stereotypes. What provoked the most ire were the inaptly (or ineptly) named Gungans, especially Jar Jar, a flop-eared, blubbering creature whom <i>Newsweek</i>'s David Ansen described as "a kind of intergalactic Stepin Fetchit." Getting only slightly less attention were the "Asian" Neimodians and the slaveowner Watto, a winged creature with a hooked beak, a strange accent, and more than a dollop of greed. <i>Slate</i>'s Bruce Gottleib reacted indignantly to Richard Corliss's suggestion that Watto's accent was "<a href="http://www.slate.com/id/29394/">Turkish</a>":<blockquote><font size=-1>Turkish? Even without the visual clue of the hooked nose, Watto's accent is clearly Yiddish, not Turkish. Or click "<a href="http://img.slate.com/media/29000/29417/Toy-No_money.asf">No</a>"; listen again; and you tell me: Is Corliss crazy or am I?</font></blockquote>Personally I don't think either writer is crazy, but I didn't pick up what Gottlieb was hearing in Watto's voice, even after downloading that sound clip. I'm no expert on Turkish accents, but Watto's accent did not strike me as Yiddish. And I should know, given that my maternal grandfather had one.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYqAYkVFVZhmt9ExnCytnVE8WK4KkhwW2i_SgFpwZ4k9ARNULiqWZxmRwxaLvV3OV8PRBWBFdF5JXBadV08M4dWt6SeU1HUU-9i1uUuU04_Z_nwNTo-THQ7_p4y_Mo8F_p5_j5NA/s1600/watto.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYqAYkVFVZhmt9ExnCytnVE8WK4KkhwW2i_SgFpwZ4k9ARNULiqWZxmRwxaLvV3OV8PRBWBFdF5JXBadV08M4dWt6SeU1HUU-9i1uUuU04_Z_nwNTo-THQ7_p4y_Mo8F_p5_j5NA/s320/watto.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5626607956742118482" /></a>Part of the problem is that Lucas made a choice in the prequels to have some of his aliens speak English in made-up accents, rather than totally made-up languages like in the original trilogy. This wasn't a bad idea in the abstract. In an intergalactic society, I imagine there <i>would</i> be diverse accents and not just diverse languages. But I think that whenever people hear an accent they can't immediately identify, their instinct is to compare it to accents they know. <a href="http://www.jewornotjew.com/profile.jsp?ID=122">JewOrNotJew.com</a> dismisses the theory about Watto before you can say "smurfin' awesome":<blockquote><font size=-1>If a character is designated as Jewish and is portrayed as loving money, having a big nose, being henpecked by women, whatever, that's a negative Jewish stereotype and the creator should be called to task.<br /><br />But if a character has a big nose and loves money and the anti-defamation league or whoever says that makes him/her Jewish, well, that's not the creator of the character spreading negative stereotypes. That's the Jews themselves.</font></blockquote>But then why did this same site suggest that Gargamel is "probably" the creation of a bigot? He has a big nose and loves money and is no more identified as a Jew than Watto is. Is it because Gargamel is a human on Earth while Watto is an alien in a galaxy far, far away? Or is it because whoever runs this site has a harder time ascribing anti-Semitic motives to George Lucas than to a mid-20th-century Belgian whose life story isn't well-known?<br /><br />That's part of the way I look at it, I admit. I highly doubt Lucas is consciously racist or anti-Semitic. I think it's possible the echo of ethnic stereotypes could find its way into Star Wars, a potpourri of myths, legends, and old movies. There are elements of it in the original trilogy, though mostly too vague to seem offensive: Yoda seems modeled on an Asian master, the ewoks are rather like a stereotypical African or Amazonian tribe, and the Tusken Raiders bear a clear imprint of desert nomads on earth such as Bedouins. I'm sure Lucas would be the first to admit all this. But he has consistently gotten defensive at any suggestion of racial insensitivity on his part. He did so when the 1977 film came out and some critics complained about the all-white cast (except for James Earl Jones as the voice of Vader). He did so when critics of <i>The Phantom Menace</i> complained about Jar Jar and co.<br /><br />While I'm not ready to let Lucas totally off the hook about Jar Jar, I never noticed the stuff about Watto until others pointed it out. And I ought to have enough Jewdar to pick it up, if it was there. I don't hope to convince anyone who did see it, however. There's a heavy amount of subjectivity in these interpretations, and yet you can't totally dismiss the idea of veiled racism in a children's fantasy, because it's a fact that there's a long tradition of it. All I can do is try to distinguish those who have ill intent from those who stumble into these images by accident.Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29334951.post-86516314451888068952011-05-05T07:00:00.005-04:002011-05-05T07:37:33.140-04:00I'm all ersPeople who think Osama Bin Laden's death was a hoax are now being dubbed "<a href="http://opinion.latimes.com/opinionla/2011/05/hey-remember-that-whole-royal-wedding-thing-and-how-about-president-obamas-birth-certificate-or-even-major-league-bas.html">deathers</a>." A couple of years ago, the word "deather" referred to an entirely different conspiracy theory--the one about "<a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/08/11/765121/-Deathers-are-not-afraid-of-Death-Panels">death panels</a>" in the Democratic health-care plan. That theory lives on in wingnuttia, but I guess we'll have to come up with a different name for it now. I suspect the new deatherism will prove more popular and last much longer.<br /><br />In point of fact, conspiracy theories typically don't have names. For example, there's no official name for the JFK theories or the people who believe in them. They aren't called "JFKers" or "Kennedyers." Similarly, people who believe Obama is a secret Muslim aren't called "Muslimmers." These theories don't have names, yet they're as widespread as the ones that do.<br /><br />But in recent years it seems there have to be specific terms for each type of crackpot, and the terms are created by adding -er to a noun associated with the particular theory. There are the truthers, then there are the birthers, then the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenther_movement">tenthers</a>, and now the deathers.<br /><br />I think this practice started with the 9/11 doubters. They referred to their own movement as "9/11 Truth," the idea being that they were trying to get at the real truth behind the attacks. Since other people didn't want to credit it as being a "truth" movement, they began calling its adherents "truthers." By the time people began questioning Obama's birth certificate, the truther movement had been around for several years, and it was natural to dub the new conspiracists "birthers."<br /><br />This way of using the suffix -er actually predates 9/11. Past examples include the terms flat-earther, young-earther, and John Bircher. It doesn't necessarily have to apply to kooks; it could be just a way of saying the person is wrong-headed. If you call someone a pro-lifer or a pro-choicer, chances are you are not one. My guess is that attaching -er to a noun has the effect of trivializing a cause that people within the cause take seriously, and it therefore carries negative connotations. There are exceptions, however. Star Trek fans have always called themselves Trekkers, while being derided by others as Trekkies.<br /><br />According to <a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/-er">dictionaries</a>, the -er suffix is used primarily for comparatives like <i>faster</i>, where the stem is an adjective, and for agent-nouns like <i>reader</i>, where the stem is a verb. There is, however, a class of -er words derived from nouns to denote someone who has to do with something. This includes occupations (hatter), residents of a place or region (villager, Southerner, Icelander), and people associated with a particular characteristic or circumstance (old-timer, six-footer, lifer). I suspect this last usage is what the crackpot -er is based on.<br /><br />One final observation is that this only seems to work when the noun stem has just one syllable, as in truth, birth, death, earth, Birch, choice, or life. When the subject of the conspiracy theory has more than one syllable, as in JFK or Muslim or Roswell, attaching -er to the word just doesn't sound right. We also don't do it if the noun stem could easily be misinterpreted as a verb. Presumably that's why the folks who doubt the moon landings haven't been called "mooners." And a good thing, too.Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29334951.post-34818718726377705102011-02-21T06:00:00.009-05:002011-03-08T02:48:26.547-05:00Changing to DisqusI have changed my commenting system to Disqus. The upgrade required me to change the look of my blog. I tried to pick a layout that looked similar to the one I had before.<br /><br />From personal experience, Disqus can be an aggravating system at times, but it's free, and it's better than the one I was using before, Echo, which is not free. Before I upgraded, I manually saved all the past Echo comments to my computer. I intend to repost them in the Disqus section for old posts, but it will take some time.<br /><br />I also have a few things that got eliminated from the sidebar when I changed the layout. I intend to put them back soon.<br /><br />UPDATE (2/24/2011): I have now successfully exported all the old Echo comments to Disqus. Feel free to add your comments to any post, old or new.<br /><br />UPDATE (3/8/2011): It turns out the comments have not been successfully imported. Only for posts from about a year ago to the present have any of the comments appeared, and even then, it is inconsistent. I'm currently working this out with Disqus through email. But you may still add comments to any post you like, and they won't be affected by the eventual transfer of the old Echo comments.Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29334951.post-58053189396491157892011-02-20T10:00:00.002-05:002011-02-20T13:26:06.875-05:00The headrooming of society<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgakUP9SottHM_QnVCLXyT2WWmsWTvBoZfv08mcQsfVRMZenAUUTiZu0o5HPUuOcyLUWKkI81O6furOuQBrHbsb8BfsECtXTFR-DTMTrY-uVjF1OmMQjDOdXr8O_NaF7fen_UYwEA/s1600/max-headroom-20100302-195648.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 242px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgakUP9SottHM_QnVCLXyT2WWmsWTvBoZfv08mcQsfVRMZenAUUTiZu0o5HPUuOcyLUWKkI81O6furOuQBrHbsb8BfsECtXTFR-DTMTrY-uVjF1OmMQjDOdXr8O_NaF7fen_UYwEA/s320/max-headroom-20100302-195648.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5574879876609685986" /></a><br>From my childhood to the present, I watched the world grow increasingly science fictiony. But it happened differently than most science fiction stories imagined. Intelligent androids and intergalactic space travel are, at the very least, a long way off, regardless of how many <a href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/219900/ibm_watson_wins_jeopardy_humans_rally_back.html">computerized Jeopardy contestants</a> and <a href="http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/111476/20110211/nasa-mars-colonization-red-planet-mission-space-one-way-corporate-sponsorship.htm">Mars colonization plans</a> we encounter. Yet the rise of the Internet and cellphones has made our society much more tech-centered than before. I enjoy looking back at old sci-fi that takes place <i>now</i> and seeing what it got right, what it got wrong, and what it didn't even consider.<br /><br />I kept all this in mind as I viewed the DVD of <i>Max Headroom</i>, the 1987 TV show. Given my vivid memories of the show and its frequent references in popular culture at the time (remember <i>Doonesbury</i>'s Reagan parody, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Headrest">Ron Headrest</a>?), I was surprised to learn it ran for barely two seasons of just 14 episodes. The pilot, based on a 1985 British telefilm I still haven't seen, concerns a muckraking TV journalist named Edison Carter who gets into a motorcycle accident after uncovering a scandal at his own network. A young hacker named Bryce, hoping to find out what Edison knows, unloads Edison's mind into a computer, resulting in an artificial version of the reporter. The program's first words, "max headroom," the last words Edison saw before his head collided with a parking garage barrier, become the program's name.<br /><br />After Edison regains consciousness, Max develops as an independent mind who can travel anywhere on the network at will and can even jump to other networks if given the opportunity. Both he and Edison are played by Matt Frewer, a tall skinny actor with a voice like Kermit the Frog. In his dual role he gives the sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde performance that later made Jim Carrey a star, playing both a withdrawn nerd and a manic, uninhibited personality. Watching the show as an adult, I discovered that I found Max's loud talk-show-host shtick rather grating. As a kid, I think I enjoyed the series mostly for its techno-thriller plots and paid little attention to its not-too-subtle anticorporate satire.<br /><br />What is the show's vision of the early 21st century? (The time frame is never identified directly, but the pilot gives one big clue, when Bryce, played by an actor of about 16, is said to have been born in 1988--suggesting it takes place around 2004 or so.) It depicts a society literally run by TV networks. In place of an apparently absent government, the networks have their own politicians elected through online voting. Money is measured in "creds" rather than dollars. A subculture of "blanks," people who have escaped registration on the central database, has emerged.<br /><br />As a single-minded pursuer of truth in a society buried under propaganda, Edison traverses the city carrying around a large wireless camera connected directly to his network, allowing him two-way conversations with operators who can tell him instantly about the dimensions of whatever building he's in and where people in it are located. When conventional technology fails, his electronic alter-ego pops up on computer screens around the city, ready to help out.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjg62GzQKbNvxS-wV4ZxY8O7sYImtzzLThWXz1gEtZzAD_KESS7n-HIfFSlyB1ybqPDXsfXJTQrjuGScdOfSYdzrlUi84dl5adA6VnpNiGsUNJUgZAeYYLHhM8HFe9I14jqOYXChQ/s1600/MaxFightBr.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 223px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjg62GzQKbNvxS-wV4ZxY8O7sYImtzzLThWXz1gEtZzAD_KESS7n-HIfFSlyB1ybqPDXsfXJTQrjuGScdOfSYdzrlUi84dl5adA6VnpNiGsUNJUgZAeYYLHhM8HFe9I14jqOYXChQ/s320/MaxFightBr.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5575753632872356386" /></a><br>I'm always amused at how futuristic speculations turn out to overestimate technological advancement in certain areas and underestimate it in others. In 1989's <i>Back to the Future Part II</i>, for example, we learn that by 2015 we will have flying cars, hoverboards, self-fitting clothes, convincing holograms, etc., etc.--yet the characters still use fax machines. I've come across two early-'90s novels about advanced VR games--Piers Anthony's <i>Killobyte</i> and Vivian Vande Velde's <i>User Unfriendly</i>--in which the gamers still use telephone modems. There's a tendency for futurists to be overconfident about the most exciting developments while failing to predict the obsolescence of everyday objects.<br /><br /><i>Max Headroom</i> has some of those qualities. The title character is an intelligent, sentient being whose creation depends on advances in A.I. and mind-reading way beyond anything we have today. Yet most of the computer technology on the show looks hopelessly primitive to any real resident of the 21st century. The characters still use floppy disks--no CD-ROMs or flash drives in sight. There are no computer mice and there's no Windows, despite the fact that both existed, if obscurely, in 1987. The hackers communicate with the computers using just a keyboard, hooked to a TV screen displaying block print on a black background. There are lots of vidphones but no cellphones.<br /><br />Looking at the big picture, though, the series was pretty ahead of its time. Without ever using the word "Internet," it envisioned a society that has gone almost entirely online, with signals transported through air rather than just through wires, with instant communication over long distances even while outdoors, and with a total integration of TV, video, and computers. Topics covered on the show include identity theft, cyberterrorism, video editing, and <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/6724245.stm">medically harmful commercials</a>--among other things. Then there is the aforementioned GPS-like navigation tool in buildings, and, perhaps most eerily, bar graphs that get updated in real time.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSCQzw1r6l9M-I4ahpV0nAFz_PXCH3-7AnGwjpdTqxWXa7N-M9B__sc2HtVg7DeE5ko267OX2JUHOFYHKF0cEW86W-rSfOKm3TWX8QXfU5wDFyCSPDuBG5WZAPHPWCFMudp9m87Q/s1600/MaxPhoneBr.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 180px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSCQzw1r6l9M-I4ahpV0nAFz_PXCH3-7AnGwjpdTqxWXa7N-M9B__sc2HtVg7DeE5ko267OX2JUHOFYHKF0cEW86W-rSfOKm3TWX8QXfU5wDFyCSPDuBG5WZAPHPWCFMudp9m87Q/s320/MaxPhoneBr.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5575754473964426114" /></a><br>In its social vision, the show follows the cyberpunk tradition of extreme paranoia about loss of individual rights in a future dominated by big corporations. In one episode, a blank faces execution for a nonlethal computer prank, and he's linked to the crime based on statistical analysis without any direct evidence of his guilt. Another episode has one of the network "politicians" placing blanks in detention camps. Privacy in this universe is almost nonexistent because there are cameras everywhere, even inside people's homes. This all looks a tad less fantastical in today's world of satellite cams, increased surveillance, and "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlawful_combatant#2001_Presidential_military_order">unlawful combatants</a>."<br /><br />For all its hyperbole, <i>Max Headroom</i> is one of the more realistic projections of the future I've seen. Part of its secret, I believe, is that it starts from a base of real knowledge about computing. I had the sense that the writers understood the subject and weren't faking it with meaningless technobabble. Even when the show dips into outlandish territory (as in one episode in which a network is literally stealing people's dreams), it stays grounded in a way that many other sci-fi productions do not. Its most important insight was that the talking-head approach to TV journalism, with its concern for ratings over truth, would naturally worsen as the technology grew more centralized.<br /><br />What the series most failed to anticipate was how the Internet would begin to replace traditional media. The fact that I'm writing all this on a blog, making my thoughts available to just about anyone on the planet, even though I'm not a journalist or politician or celebrity, illustrates how regular citizens today have the power to make their voice heard in ways that weren't possible twenty years ago. While the image of corporate takeover in <i>Max Headroom</i> and similar sci-fi works seems prescient in many ways, what they didn't foresee is the tool we'd have for exerting our personal identity against those who aim to suppress it.Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29334951.post-35699133664954486422011-01-13T10:19:00.015-05:002011-01-14T15:18:59.902-05:00Is "blood libel" a generic expression?<i>linked to at <a href="http://dovbear.blogspot.com/2011/01/kylopods-post.html">DovBear's blog</a></i><br /><br />Sarah Palin's use of the phrase "blood libel" to describe claims that her actions contributed to the recent shootings sparked considerable controversy yesterday. Even conservatives like <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/256946/blood-libel-jonah-goldberg">Jonah Goldberg</a> and <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/right-turn/2011/01/vintage_palin.html">Jennifer Rubin</a> who agreed with the substance of her remarks felt it wasn't the best choice of words. But it earned a defense from an unlikely source: <a href="http://www.theatlanticwire.com/features/view/feature/Alan-Dershowitz-Defends-Palin-on-Blood-Libel-2956">Alan Dershowitz</a>.<blockquote><font size=-1>The term “blood libel” has taken on a broad metaphorical meaning in public discourse. Although its historical origins were in theologically based false accusations against the Jews and the Jewish People, its current usage is far broader. I myself have used it to describe false accusations against the State of Israel by the Goldstone Report. There is nothing improper and certainly nothing anti-Semitic in Sarah Palin using the term to characterize what she reasonably believes are false accusations that her words or images may have caused a mentally disturbed individual to kill and maim. The fact that two of the victims are Jewish is utterly irrelevant to the propriety of using this widely used term.</font></blockquote>I myself am unfamiliar with the use of the term outside a Jewish context, and Dershowitz hardly proves his case by citing his own use of it to describe a report charging the Jewish state with war crimes. But I was curious about whether his larger point holds up to scrutiny. Certainly there are expressions that have acquired a generic quality even though they have the potential to cause offense because of their historical associations. I think of when President Bush dropped his use of the word "crusade" in 2001, fearing it would offend Muslims. It was a good idea, but his usage of the term was at least understandable. To most English speakers, "crusade" is a generic term for fighting for something. Is the phrase "blood libel," similarly, a generic term for being falsely accused of a terrible deed?<br /><br />I checked Google News, with its mammoth historical archive of news articles. The phrase "<a href="http://news.google.com/archivesearch?as_q=%22blood+libel%22&num=10&hl=en&btnG=Search+Archives&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_user_ldate=1950&as_user_hdate=2009&lr=&as_src=&as_price=p0&as_scoring=a">blood libel</a>" gets 1,280 hits for articles between 1950 and 2009. But when I search for articles in this range that don't contain the words "Jew," "Jewish," or "Israel," the hits <a href="http://news.google.com/archivesearch?as_q=&num=10&hl=en&btnG=Search+Archives&as_epq=blood+libel&as_oq=&as_eq=jew+jews+jewish+israel+israeli&as_user_ldate=1950&as_user_hdate=2009&lr=&as_src=&as_price=p0&as_scoring=a">shrink</a> to 76. In other words, as I suspected, it's uncommon for the phrase "blood libel" to be used outside a Jewish (or Israeli) context.<br /><br />Uncommon--but not unheard of. <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/256955/term-blood-libel-more-common-you-might-think">Jim Geraghty</a> has dug up several examples, such as when Peter Deutsch in 2000 said Republicans made a "blood libel" against Al Gore when they accused him of disenfranchising soldiers. What is striking, though, is that most of the other examples Geraghty cites concern attacks on entire groups, such as blacks or homosexuals. Charging that all gay men are pedophiles may not constitute an exact historical parallel with the claim that Jews baked Christian children in their matzo, but it isn't all that different either.<br /><br />Palin is not part of a persecuted minority. She hasn't been legally charged with anything. The criticism that she may have somehow provoked the shooting with violent rhetoric and imagery was directed at her <i>as an individual</i>, not as a member of a group. Her usage of the term "blood libel" in this context is unusual--and certainly inappropriate.Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29334951.post-92140888116305877002010-12-27T07:05:00.037-05:002010-12-28T02:17:49.306-05:00TriangaylationWhen it comes to same-sex marriage, President Obama is almost as transparently cynical as Mitt Romney is on most other issues. Recently he <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAU8ac4Jkjc">admitted</a> that his feelings on the topic were "evolving." If so, they are evolving toward the point where he started. Back in 1996, when Obama was running for the Illinois state senate, he affirmed in a questionnaire, "I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages."<br /><br /><a href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/77120/what-does-obama-really-think-about-gay-marriage-telling-timeline"><i>The New Republic</i></a> has provided a helpful timeline chronicling his gradual move away from this position. He eventually embraced "civil unions," the term for policies that grant gay couples at least some of the benefits that married couples receive without calling the unions "marriages." Explaining his stance in 2004, he framed it as a strategic choice: "What I'm saying is that strategically, I think we can get civil unions passed.... I think that to the extent that we can get the rights, I'm less concerned about the name." But in 2008 he stated, "I believe that marriage is between a man and woman and I am not in favor of gay marriage," though he opposed the Prop 8 ban on gay marriage, calling it "unnecessary."<br /><br />I find it hard to believe he was for gay marriage in '96 and later sincerely changed his mind. That might happen to someone who underwent a religious conversion and became more socially conservative. But Obama's conversion happened in the '80s, and it involved the UCC, one of the more gay-friendly denominations of American Christianity. (The UCC officially endorsed gay marriage in 2005.) The likelier explanation is that he calculated that his original position would hamper his political ambitions.<br /><br />I'm not sure he was wrong. Up to now, no serious presidential contender has openly supported gay marriage, not even the supposedly progressive Howard Dean. In the 2008 election, Obama was already fighting claims that he was outside the mainstream. Open support could have easily sunk his candidacy before it got off the ground, getting him written off as another Kucinich-type flake. But now, with more and more states legalizing the practice, and with <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20100812/pl_yblog_upshot/poll-majority-of-americans-support-gay-marriage">polls</a> showing increasing support for it among the public at large, Obama probably fears being on the wrong side of history at a pivotal moment.<br /><br />Other Democrats face a similar dilemma. Joe Biden recently agreed with Obama on having "evolving" views on the topic (how convenient!) and suggested gay marriage was inevitable. That's about as close to an endorsement as I ever would have imagined. But it makes sense given his history. During the 2008 vice presidential debate, he said, "We do support making sure that committed couples in a same-sex marriage are guaranteed the same constitutional benefits as it relates to their property rights, their rights of visitation, their rights to insurance, their rights of ownership as heterosexual couples do." But when the moderator Gwen Ifill asked him directly "Do you support gay marriage?" he replied, "No. [Neither] Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage," but he added that people of all faiths have the right to define the relationships as they please.<br /><br />Presumably, Biden's statement that he supports benefits for "couples in a same-sex marriage" was a slip of the tongue, and he meant to say simply "same-sex couples." But it's a revealing slip, highlighting the semantic nature of the issue. Throughout the last decade, the phrase "civil unions" has provided cover for politicians who don't want to appear too radical but who also don't want to seem draconian in denying couples things like visitation rights. (SNL's version of the debate has Biden saying he would "absolutely not" support same-sex marriage, but that "they should be allowed to visit one another in the hospital, and in a lot of ways that's just as good if not better.") This balancing act has been especially painful to watch in the case of <a href="http://www.ontheissues.org/Celeb/Dick_Cheney_Civil_Rights.htm">Dick Cheney</a>, whose views have apparently been affected by his having a lesbian daughter. He declined to endorse Bush's Federal Marriage Amendment in 2004, but he avoided saying anything more about his personal views than that the matter should be left to the states and that "Freedom means freedom for everybody."<br /><br />All these capitulations have an unfortunate side effect: they make it easy for people to overlook the difference between pols who nominally oppose gay marriage and pols who crusade against it. Just this year, in response to the uproar over his anti-gay remarks, New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino took a more conciliatory tone, pointing out that "I have the same position on [the marriage] issue as President Barrack [<i>sic</i>] Obama." But somehow I have trouble imagining Obama ever expressing his position the way Paladino did earlier:<blockquote><font size=-1>If you elect me as your next governor, you can depend on me to protect and defend your family from those who seek to tear down our values and bankrupt our citizens. And yes, I will veto all legislation that mocks our sacred institution of marriage and family. I will veto any gay marriage or civil union bill that comes to my desk. Yes I'm angry. Real angry at the way our politically correct elites are mistreating our innocent children, and I want to protect them and give them a real future in America, the greatest country on God's green Earth.</font></blockquote>The fact is, the kind of fiery talk that depicts gay marriage as a threat to our civilization comes mostly from Republicans. Democrats who claim to oppose gay marriage rarely explain their position clearly, much less engage in sky-is-falling rhetoric. Their strategy is basically one of damage control, trying to expand the practical rights of gay people while avoiding turning off too many social conservatives. But as the veil slips, it'll be interesting to watch who comes out on what side in the end.Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29334951.post-38625160098127634102010-11-10T11:00:00.002-05:002010-11-10T11:39:20.193-05:00The story of my political formationThe fact that I came of age during the Clinton years had an important effect on my political outlook. The first presidential election I paid any attention to was 1992, when I was 15, and although I naturally rooted for Clinton because my liberal parents did, my observations were mostly superficial. I actually don't remember the 1994 Republican takeover. It just wasn't on my radar at the time. But a year later, as I was beginning college, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_government_shutdown_of_1995">government shutdown</a> had an immediate impact on my family. My father was a federal employee, as was our next-door neighbor, a single black woman with a teenage son. It didn't help things that one of my brothers had recently passed away.<br /><br />For the first time, I got a very direct glimpse of the effect that politics could have on everyday lives. It was no longer just a funny game I saw on TV, featuring colorful personalities in fancy suits. I also began to have my first informed judgment on a political figure, in this case a Congressional leader by the name of Newt Gingrich, who provided me with my first taste of what it was like to deeply loathe a politician.<br /><br />I also was beginning to discover the phenomenon of Rush Limbaugh, as well as Christian Coalition figures such as Falwell, Robertson, and Reed. I personally encountered people who insisted with a straight face that the president was a rapist, a murderer, and a drug addict. These people, who included a few of my parents' friends, typically spoke of liberals as if describing a distinct species of insect. Arguing with them was usually an exercise in futility, for they had a barrage of "facts" they had picked up from talk radio, which they listened to far more often than I had time to listen to anything.<br /><br />These experiences left a powerful impression on me, because I couldn't help noticing that the contemporary American right was apparently run by complete lunatics and charlatans. The maligned liberals, on the other hand, were mostly represented for me by thoughtful milquetoasts like Michael Kinsley. Maybe it wasn't fair that I got such a terrible first impression of conservatives, who I know include many reasonable individuals. I was well aware that the left had its share of clowns, such as Al Sharpton, but they didn't seem to matter a whole lot. There was a notable imbalance in the political spectrum that belied the cliche evenhandedness so many pundits found seductive.<br /><br />I sometimes got the sense that even the conservative intelligentsia were simply playing the good cop to Limbaugh's bad cop, saying the same stuff in gentler language. A 1995 article I read by William F. Buckley took Clinton to task for his attacks on Limbaugh. Buckley conceded that Limbaugh "induces hatred" and that "if I were a liberal, I would hate him," but he went on to suggest that FDR and Truman did the same sort of thing to the other side. Not a word about Limbaugh's lies or conspiracy theories. This from the 20th century's greatest conservative intellectual.<br /><br />I made these observations long before I gave any serious thought to budgets, taxes, health care, trade, and so on. While certain causes like environmentalism and gay rights were no-brainers to me from the start, I was initially tempted in a more rightward direction on such issues as abortion, affirmative action, and school vouchers. But the disintegration of any sane right-wing establishment was formative for me, and I would watch the problem grow ever worse as the years passed.<br /><br />Everything that's happening now looks to me like the logical end result of what was happening in the '90s. A very moderate Democratic president presiding over an economic boom is clobbered by conservatives as some kind of left-wing hippie and nearly hounded from office for sexual lapses of no consequence to anyone but his own family. A Republican enters the White House under highly questionable circumstances and in the course of eight years leaves the country in two hapless wars one of which he started for no good reason, unprecedented debt, and the worst recession since the Great Depression. The disaster of the Bush years is so breathtaking I almost distrust my own judgment on the matter. Maybe I'm falling prey to the same kind of partisan hatred that characterized Clinton's adversaries. But no matter how I look at it, I can't escape the conclusion that Bush truly is one of the worst presidents in history. And it's amazing to watch the conservative establishment today attempt to make us all forget that just a few short years ago they practically worshiped the man.<br /><br />When it comes to the right, the most visible difference between the 1990s and today is the rise of Fox News. Yes, it did begin in 1996, but it didn't become a force to be reckoned with until the Bush years. The first sign came with the election itself, when a reporter who just happened to be Bush's first cousin called the election for Bush, and all the other news networks--the legitimate ones, that is--followed suit. This set the tone for the Florida post-election fiasco that would follow.<br /><br />Fox has grown steadily worse. Before, it was a right-leaning network that pretended to be fair and balanced. Now it's just a TV version of talk radio, a calculated, large-scale attempt to brainwash its viewers through the use of misleading propaganda, outright lies, and conspiracy-mongering, nonstop 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week. It is nothing more than the right's Pravda. And it still has an astonishing influence on the mainstream networks, the ones we're supposed to believe are "liberal-biased."<br /><br />So it was all set when the godfather of this mode of politics, Rush Limbaugh, said he hopes Obama fails, and not a single Republican in power had the strength to distance himself from Limbaugh, not without <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/03/02/gop.steele.limbaugh/">quickly reversing himself</a> and <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0109/18067.html">groveling at Limbaugh's feet</a> for forgiveness. This is what's truly new about the right wing: there is now no separation at all between the propagandists of right-wing media and the Republicans holding public office.<br /><br />And somehow, the things said against Obama and other Democrats are worse than during the Clinton years. Back then, the attacks were merely nasty. Now, it is absolutely no exaggeration to say that Republican politicians and commentators are stoking insurrection. The tone of conservative hatred today isn't just hysterical, but contains not-very-subtle appeals to violence: talks of <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/08/sharron-angle-addresses-s_n_709518.html">Second Amendment remedies</a>, drawing <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2010/03/25/mccain-palin-crosshairs/">crosshairs</a> on Congressional maps with the slogan "Don't retreat--reload," explicitly defending <a href="http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/10/gop-candidate-violent-overthrow-government-on-table/">violent overthrow of the government</a>. The rhetoric is increasingly apocalyptic, and the very name of the opposition movement--"Tea Party"--deliberately alludes to the events leading up to the American Revolution. What's scariest about all this is that the Clinton years gave us Timothy McVeigh; who knows what's coming up now. And something will, make no mistake, because the tea-partiers will invariably be disappointed when the officials they have elected fail to stop Obama's agenda. And they don't strike me as the sorts of people to take disappointment by packing their bags and walking home.<br /><br />That's why there's a lot more to the current political situation than rooting for teams. I don't mean to suggest that the past was one long Golden Age–I know my parents' generation alone went through Vietnam and Watergate–but I feel in my bones that there's something uniquely disturbing about what's happening now, even under the first president in my life I've had any enthusiasm for.<br /><blockquote><i>This post is based on a comment I wrote on <a href="http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2010/11/03/in-which-i-finally-do-talk-about-the-elections/">Emily Hauser's blog</a> last week. She suggested that I post it to my blog. I expanded on a few sections and edited the wording here and there, but it's more or less the same.</i></blockquote><blockquote><i>Cross-posted to <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/11/10/112727/73?new=true">Daily Kos</a>.</i></blockquote>Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29334951.post-86196072504585445802010-11-01T07:45:00.001-04:002010-11-01T11:51:34.921-04:00With friends like these<i>cross-posted at <a href="http://dovbear.blogspot.com/2010/11/with-friends-like-these.html">DovBear's blog</a></i><br /><br />It appears that John Boehner is planning to campaign for <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/10/john-boehner-to-campaign-with-nazi-reenactor-rich-iott/65304/">Rich Iott</a>, the Nazi-impersonating congressional candidate.<br /><br />It's important to understand how offensive this is: the problem is not that Iott participated in historical reenactments, which are perfectly legitimate, or even that he dressed as a bad guy. The problem is that the whole reenactment is invested with significant historical revisionism that views these SS officers admiringly and makes only the vaguest references to the crimes they committed. The website contains a disclaimer disavowing support for either neo-Nazis or the original Nazis and condemning "the atrocities which made them infamous." What it does not do is make any mention of the Holocaust, Jews, or even genocide.<br /><br />This approach to the war is <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/10/whats-wrong-with-nazi-reenacting/64489/">Holocaust minimization</a>, a soft form of denial that doesn't engage in any outright conspiracy-mongering about a Holocaust "hoax," but nonetheless describes World War II in a way that greatly downplays the crimes of the Nazis in an effort to make the two sides seem somehow equivalent. In an interview with <a href="http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/10/rich-iott-defends-nazis-he-dresses-up-as-they-were-doing-what-they-thought-was-right-video.php">Anderson Cooper</a>, Iott argued that we shouldn't judge these officers because they were doing what they thought was right, that the SS unit he was reenacting had never been charged with war crimes (in fact, one member was recently charged with the murder of 58 Jews), and that "Horrible things...happened on both sides." If you think Iott makes a single mention of the Holocaust during this interview (other than a bare statement that he doesn't deny it), I've got a tea-bag to sell you.<br /><br />After the refreshing disavowal of Iott by Eric Cantor, who is Jewish, I find Boehner's decision to stick by this guy pretty sickening. It brings to mind <a href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/78728/neocons-disprove-dual-loyalty-charge-confirm-partisan-hackery-charge">another story</a> recently about the Emergency Committee for Israel, a lobbying organization that is supposedly devoted to getting pro-Israel candidates elected ("pro-Israel" in the most hawkish, right-wing sense) but in practice seems more interested simply in getting Republicans elected:<blockquote><font size=-1>If ECI genuinely cared about electing pro-Israel members of Congress, it would launch big money campaigns against Tea Party candidates, such as Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), the source said.<br /><br />Toomey, for instance, has twice voted against foreign aid packages, which are widely viewed as principal pro-Israel litmus tests, as they include large amounts of financial assistance for the Jewish state. (According to the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent, Toomey said that he "feels Israel no longer needs economic aid, and should simply receive military assistance.")<br /><br />Pollak, however, defended Toomey, noting that he voted against foreign aid not out of hostility toward Israel, but "as a matter of larger fiscal principles. He has never shown a particular animosity toward Israel -- far from it."</font></blockquote>In short, vote Republican because the Republicans are better for Israel, but vote Republican even when they aren't better for Israel. If that confuses you, don't worry about it, just vote Republican.<br /><br />What we need to understand is that a lot of the Israel talk by Republicans is not done for the sake of Jews. It is for the consumption of Christian Zionists who vastly outnumber their Jewish counterparts and who aren't necessarily even "pro-Jewish," as can be seen from Pat Robertson's <a href="http://thebluevoice.blogspot.com/2005/07/pats-paranoia-and-bigotry.html">bizarre</a> views.<br /><br />Or, to paraphrase James Baker, we don't vote for Republicans anyway, so we might as well go be fruitful and multiply.Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29334951.post-26998285358089390902010-07-21T13:15:00.005-04:002010-07-21T17:45:33.563-04:00A compendium of politically incorrect viewsPeople talk about political correctness so often you'd think there'd be a simple, consistent definition of the concept. All we know for certain is that it's bad for something to be PC, and that individuals who violate PC standards are being unjustly persecuted. Or at least that's what everyone who invokes this phrase seems to think. But what does the phrase mean?<br /><br />That's what I've set out to determine. I'm not looking in any dictionaries or on Wikipedia. Instead, I've collected a sampling of quotes from various sources that use this expression, and from them I've attempted to discern its larger meaning.<br /><br />Let's start with Regnery's <i><a href="http://www.regnery.com/pig.html">Politically Incorrect Guide</a></i> series. Among the many PI truths you will learn from these books is that the Civil War was not about slavery, that the robber barons benefited the U.S. more than any government program ever did, that the medieval Islamic world didn't contribute greatly to science, that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, and that hunters are "America's real environmentalists."<br /><br />Having been written by different people, the guides do not always jibe with one another. In a rare moment of <i>factual</i> correctness, Clint Johnson's <i>Politically Incorrect Guide to the South</i> lists rock 'n' roll as one of the great products of that region. But Jonathan Leaf's <i>Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties</i> (whose author seems to have drifted into the PC debate a few decades too late) describes rock music as an artistic void with little talent.<br /><br />In the view of some conservatives, PC is the cause of all our problems. According to Tea Party Express spokesman <a href="http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/04/15/palin_celebrity_in_chief/">Mark Williams</a>, "Political correctness is going to kill us. Political correctness led to 9/11, political correctness led to Barack Hussein Obama. Political correctness is a societal HIV." No one is immune to infection, not even, apparently, his own supporters. He wrote, in reply to one of several commenters at his <a href="http://www.marktalk.com/blog/?p=10387">site</a> who criticized his controversial <a href="http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/07/tea-party-express-mark-williams-naacps-use-of-colored-makes-it-racist.php">Lincoln letter</a>, "you are crippled--mentally and emotionally--by political correctness."<br /><br />Still, I suspect even Williams would be surprised at how the phrase has been used outside the United States. "It would be sad," wrote British journalist <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=3RdqDNaNan0C&pg=PA1&dq=%22david+irving%22+%22history+on+trial%22&hl=en&ei=IU5DTJm_LYGC8gbS0bHEDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22political%20correctness%22&f=false">Peter Millar</a> on the doomed libel suit of Holocaust "revisionist" David Irving, "if we allowed political correctness to condemn Irving for thinking (or even saying) the unsayable."<br /><br />So now Holocaust denial is merely "not PC." It therefore shouldn't surprise us that other unsavory views have found their way into this category. Consider a notorious moment from Robert Novak's 1995 interview with Sen. Jesse Helms:<blockquote><font size=-1>CALLER: Mr. Helms, I know this might not be politically correct to say these days, but I just think that you should get a Nobel Peace Prize for everything you've done to help keep down the niggers.<br /><br />NOVAK: Oh, dear.<br /><br />HELMS: Whoops. [looks at camera] Well, thank you, I think.<br /><br />[both laugh nervously]<br /><br />NOVAK: That was the bad word. That was politically incorrect. Can you--we really don't condone that kind of language, do we?<br /><br />HELMS: No, no, no.<br /><br />NOVAK: Absolutely.<br /><br />HELMS: No. My father didn't condone it. When I was a little boy, one of the worst spankings I ever got is when I used that word, and I don't think I've used it ever since.<br /><br />NOVAK: And you had--<br /><br />HELMS: Mark Twain used it.<br /><br />NOVAK: And you had--you had--you had African Americans on your staff a long time ago, didn't you? As I remember.<br /><br />HELMS: Oh yes. I hired several.</font></blockquote>Notice that neither Novak nor Helms addressed the caller's stated views. Only his <i>language</i> seemed to put them on edge, his use of a "politically incorrect" word. Somehow I get the sense that young Helms would not have been spanked for wishing to "keep down the blacks."<br /><br />But it isn't just conservatives who talk about PC. In his unflattering review of the live-action version of <i><a href="http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19971225/REVIEWS/712250303/1023">Mr. Magoo</a></i>, Roger Ebert wrote:<blockquote><font size=-1>There is one laugh in the movie. It comes after the action is over, in the form of a foolish, politically correct disclaimer stating that the film "is not intended as an accurate portrayal of blindness or poor eyesight."</font></blockquote>Though I haven't seen the movie, I agree that trying to avoid offending the nearsighted in a Mr. Magoo film is indeed an example of PC run amok. But I wasn't sure I followed Ebert's reasoning in <a href="http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040730/REVIEWS/302/1023">another instance</a> of his use of the phrase:<blockquote><font size=-1>The beat goes on with Ron Howard's <i>The Missing</i>, a clunky Western that tries so hard to be Politically Correct that although young women are kidnapped by Indians to be sold into prostitution in Mexico, they are never molested by their captors.</font></blockquote>This is interesting. In an age of revisionist Westerns like <i>Dances with Wolves</i> that paint a sympathetic portrait of Indians, Ebert thinks one in which they boil white men alive and sell white girls into slavery is PC because they don't behave quite as savagely as we might expect. Got it.<br /><br />Then there is the 1991 <i>New York Times</i> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/27/books/decreasing-our-word-power-the-new-newspeak.html">review</a> of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Dictionary of Cautionary Words and Phrases</span>, a handbook which the reviewer attributes to "the disease of political correctness." While some of the book's advice is arguably a little excessive--it instructs journalists to say <span style="font-style: italic;">homemaker</span> instead of <span style="font-style: italic;">housewife</span>, to avoid the noun <span style="font-style: italic;">Jew</span> in favor of <span style="font-style: italic;">Jewish person</span>, and never to describe a black person as "articulate"--it also includes things we take for granted now, such as the term <span style="font-style: italic;">Asian</span> to replace <span style="font-style: italic;">Oriental</span>. I even once saw a documentary in which a young skinhead was bashing a race he called Asians. When you have neo-Nazis nonchalantly saying <span style="font-style: italic;">Asian</span>, I think it's safe to say it has advanced from PC terminology to common speech.<br /><br />That's actually the case with a lot of the terms that were once derided as PC. Few people today blink at <span style="font-style: italic;">Native American</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Latino</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">diversity</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">homophobia</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">substance abuse</span>, and <span style="font-style: italic;">vegan</span>--all of which appear as entries in 1992's tongue-in-cheek <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Official-Politically-Correct-Dictionary-Handbook/dp/0679749446">Official Politically Correct Dictionary</a></i> alongside such items as <i>sobriety-deprived</i> for "drunk" and <i>terminally inconvenienced</i> for "dead."<br /><br />The most striking use of the phrase "PC" I can remember came in a blog discussion I was reading some years ago. A commenter referred to a particular author as an idiot. The blogger said he agreed with the commenter's criticism but added that there was no need to engage in <i>ad hominem</i> attacks. The commenter retorted, "Oh, don't be so PC." The discussion had nothing to do with politics. To the commenter, "PC" simply meant being polite to avoid offending someone.<br /><br />Based on all these examples, I am forced to draw the following conclusions about the phrase "PC":<br /><br />1. <b>It is absolutely meaningless.</b><br /><br />The amount of things the "PC" label has been mockingly applied to is truly diverse. It can mean the often amusing excesses of the academic left, in particular the weird coinages. Or it can mean perfectly mainstream ideas such as the notion that the Civil War had something to do with slavery or that the Holocaust did in fact occur. It can mean trying to avoid offending the nearsighted, or it can mean neglecting to call someone you disagree with an idiot. Since there's no set standard for when sensitivity goes too far, the phrase is a free-for-all that usually says more about the person using it than it does about whatever the person is talking about.<br /><br />2. <b>It fosters the idea that sensitivity is a sin.</b><br /><br />In practice, the phrase has become an excuse for boorish, inconsiderate behavior. People invoke it as a lazy way of trying to imply that no one has a right to be offended, without having to justify their position. It fosters the idea that words don't matter, that they can't harm anyone, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a joyless schoolmarm out to control everyone's speech.<br /><br />3. <b>It blurs the line between taboo language and taboo opinions.</b><br /><br />Being un-PC sometimes refers to a questionable choice of words, even when no one objects to the point of view being expressed. At other times it refers to just the reverse--a controversial viewpoint expressed without any objectionable language. As a consequence of this ambiguity, the phrase distracts attention from the content of people's speech and makes all offending statements sound like mere violations of decorum. You can see that clearly in Helms and Novak's inadequate response to the racist caller.<br /><br />4. <b>Anyone who uses the phrase is, by definition, a hypocrite.</b><br /><br />When people label a statement PC, they are effectively trying to shut down debate and eject the statement from the conversation by making it sound unworthy of serious discussion. Thus, the term does exactly what it is allegedly fighting against. This becomes particularly noticeable when those who claim to be battling PC propaganda are in fact promoting right-wing propaganda, but it is inherent in the phrase itself.<br /><br />5. <b>It is sometimes hard to resist using.</b><br /><br />I've used it myself on occasion, and I no doubt will use it again. Let's face it, we live in a culture where lots of people take umbrage at things they shouldn't. The pushback against racism, sexism, and all the other isms has had a stifling effect on our discourse, down to the jokes we tell. But I realize that's a biased statement, and I can offer no precise standard for when it is or isn't justified to be offended. I just know it when I see it, whether or not that's okay with any of you cerebrally challenged hunks of processed animal carcasses.Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29334951.post-48847581129292254412010-04-17T21:50:00.009-04:002010-07-14T14:45:44.376-04:00Take me to your leaderIf there is one scientific topic that provokes strong opinions in the absence of any direct knowledge whatsoever, it is life on other planets. Some scientists feel certain Earth is the only place in the universe where life resides; others insist the question is not whether life exists in other places, but where. You will find sane, rational people with full command of the facts coming out on either side of this debate.<br /><br />I lean toward the second possibility. The notion that in the entire universe, the only planet with living things just happens to be the only one we've ever seen up close, seems a stretch to me. But I admit I have no proof. It's just a hunch.<br /><br />"Just a hunch" is the best we can do when it comes to these arguments, which never stand up to logical scrutiny. Some scientists point to evidence that life arose on Earth quite soon after the planet's initial formation (say, only several hundred million years), and if it can happen that quickly, it must have happened in other parts of the universe. The problem with this argument (aside from a rather fluid definition of "quickly") is that we still don't know how life arose here, or even <i>whether</i> it did--one theory holds that it came from Mars via meteorite. If we don't know what happened to cause life to exist, then we have no way of knowing whether it could have happened elsewhere.<br /><br />Other scientists believe the origin of life on Earth was a rare, freakish occurrence in the universe's history, because it depended on a huge number of factors in combination, including Earth's exact composition, temperature, rotation, orbit, and so on. If any one of these factors had been slightly different, so the argument goes, life on Earth either would not have started or would have perished long before it had a chance to evolve into more complex creatures like ourselves.<br /><br />The answer to this objection is twofold. First, extraterrestrial life could differ from Earth life in ways we have trouble imagining. Second, the universe is just really <i>big</i>. What scientists call the observable universe, or the portion we have the capacity to detect because the light has had enough time to reach us since the beginning, is estimated to have over one hundred billion galaxies. Our own galaxy alone, which remains virtually unexplored, contains hundreds of billions of stars. However unlikely the conditions necessary for life may seem, there is a great deal of space out there for those conditions to be repeated.<br /><br />In the movie <i>Contact</i>, a scientist played by Jodie Foster argues that there must be life beyond Earth, for otherwise there would be "an awful waste of space." You could interpret this statement different ways. For religious believers, the question is why God would have created all those countless galaxies when only one planet of one star would be inhabited. Perhaps it is so that people in the future will have places to go after Earth is used up or on the brink of destruction. Still, that's an awful lot of space....<br /><br />A more secular version of the same argument might go something like this: In the vastness of outer space, our solar system is a mere speck in a sea of galaxies that all look more or less like ours. Given the relative uniformity of everything from afar, our default assumption should be that the basic conditions of our vicinity are not unique. This reasoning might not convince those of us who suspect the origin of life was miraculous, but it ought to be good enough for those of a more secular mindset.<br /><br />One comparison is instructive. Most people have long assumed that there are planets beyond our solar system. Yet until the 1990s, with the discovery of a star that wobbled (suggesting it was being orbited by a large object), there was no concrete evidence that any of these so-called extrasolar planets existed. For all scientists knew, our sun could have been the only star in the entire universe that harbored planets. That possibility runs contrary to intuition for much the same reason the idea that we are alone does. It proved to be incorrect, and I suspect the second idea will also.<br /><br />Some people will say, "Okay, maybe there's life in other places. Perhaps things on the level of bacteria or even plants have sprouted elsewhere in the universe. But intelligent life? Advanced civilizations? How likely is that?" Skeptical scientists point to some discouraging facts. Although bacteria appear fairly early in the Earth's fossil record, there was nothing <i>but</i> bacteria for the next three billion years--complex, multicellular life doesn't appear until the last billion. Furthermore, current scientific consensus holds that an asteroid caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, and if not for that fortuitous event, brainy mammals would never have come to dominate the planet.<br /><br />Science fiction movies always assume that alien life must look more or less similar to us. In the real world there are creatures as weird as sea anemones living right here on Earth, but movie aliens invariably have a more standard appearance. Take the recent <i>Avatar</i>. In that film, a crew of Earthlings is investigating the exotic life forms that we're supposed to believe evolved independently in an entirely different solar system. And just <i>how</i> exotic are these creatures? Other than their possessing tails, blue skin, a ten-foot stature, and a few other odd features, they basically look human, sound human, and act human, right down to the mating rituals. The movie's plot is sort of an amped-up <i>Dances with Wolves</i>, only instead of a white man becoming part of a tribe of Lakota Sioux Indians, it has a white man becoming part of a tribe of giant alien smurfs.<br /><br />I shouldn't make fun. The director, James Cameron, has <a href="http://www.etaiwannews.com/etn/news_content.php?id=1141188&lang=eng_news&cate_img=317.jpg&cate_rss=news_Features">said</a> he intended the film as "science fantasy" rather than science fiction, and that they'd first designed the aliens as less human-looking before worrying it would turn off audiences. At least the film is a touch more plausible than a lot of older sci-fi like <i>Star Trek</i>, where aliens are shown as humans with pointy ears or ridged skin. But it's striking that more recent flicks like <i>Independence Day</i> and <i>Signs</i> continue to fall back on the most worn cliches about extraterrestrials, depicting them all as green and warty and malevolent.<br /><br />The most versatile aliens depicted on screen are still probably those in Star Wars. I never fully appreciated that fact until I read Jeanne Cavelos's <i>The Science of Star Wars</i> (1999). Herself an astrophysicist (who also wrote <i>The Science of The X-Files</i>), Cavelos makes a noble effort to find scientific basis for all the major components of the series, including the ships, the weapons, the planets, the aliens, the droids, and even the Force. She doesn't always succeed--but she does explore much of the current research on subjects ranging from A.I. to quantum mechanics. (For a broader discussion about how far along we are toward inventing the technologies of science fiction, I highly recommend the 2008 book <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_of_the_Impossible">Physics of the Impossible</a></i> by Michio Kaku, one of my favorite science writers, and one of the scientists Cavelos interviews.) Her chapter on aliens begins with the following observation about the films: "Almost anywhere you go in 'a galaxy far, far away,' alien life is there. You'll either land in it, step on it, or get eaten by it.... Even in environments as inhospitable as Tatooine, Hoth, or an asteroid, life finds a way to survive."<br /><br />Of course Star Wars has always been one of the more unabashedly unscientific sci-fi franchises. There are serious difficulties in explaining certain things such as how all the creatures breathe comfortably no matter what planet they're on, which seems unlikely unless they're using some sort of technological aid we never see. Cavelos points out that planetary atmospheres may be unique like fingerprints, which would mean that no life form from one planet can breathe naturally on another. <i>Avatar</i> gets this detail right, having the human explorers only able to breathe with gas masks or in air-tight buildings or inside their Avatar bodies.<br /><br />Still, the sheer diversity of the aliens in Star Wars is impressive, especially compared to earlier films. As Dr. Kaku explains, "the aliens don't look like us anymore. They tried to have aliens with different architectures. In that sense, <i>Star Wars</i> is more realistic than some of the stuff I've seen." And yet many of these aliens are simply analogues of Earth animals: dogs (Wookiees), slugs (Hutts), pigs (Gamorreans), bats (mynocks), and buffalo (banthas). Some of the organisms even look identical to what's on Earth, as in Endor's redwoods or Dagobah's snakes. Most of the invented creatures are humanoid, and those that aren't, like Jabba, are still anthropomorphic. How likely is it that aliens would look that similar to what we see around us?<br /><br />The book quotes one scientist who argues that most of the visible features that humans possess, such as five-digit hands, are intrinsically efficient characteristics that evolution would tend to produce even on other planets, similar to the way aquatic mammals like dolphins acquired a fish form. Most scientists disagree. As Dr. Jack Cohen puts it, "Finding another planet with our kind of dinosaurs or people is more unlikely than finding a remote Pacific island on which the natives speak perfect German."<br /><br />Science fiction literature has had the opportunity to envision alien life more broadly than the movies do. Strange life forms appear in hard sci-fi novels such as Robert Forward's <i>Dragon's Egg</i>, which speculates about what the intelligent inhabitants of a neutron star would look like. Part of the reason why movies aren't as daring is budgetary constraints. Commercial films have the most resources for showing aliens. The problem, as James Cameron tells us, is that mass audiences aren't interested in seeing anything truly weird.<br /><br />Life as we understand it can mean different things, from simple bacteria to advanced civilizations. But since our only frame of reference is what we see around us, we have trouble visualizing aliens without comparing them to familiar creatures. If aliens exist, they might be more bizarre than anything we've ever thought of, much less seen. We can't possibly be certain what lies beyond our immediate knowledge.Kylopodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06932528611103718373noreply@blogger.com0