Congrats to Tony Blair, of all people, for being nominated for the Literary Review’s annual bad sex award.  The award is usually given for nauseatingly written sex scenes in fiction, and in fact Blair’s memoir is the first non-fiction ever nominated. For this, I dedicate today’s Genius Ten to Tony Blair. Leave yours in comments, or a comment about anything you want.  Open thread.

Original song: “Sex and Dying in the High Society” by X

1) “Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing” by The Minutemen
2) “No Values” by Black Flag
3) “Let’s Have A War” by Fear
4) “Lexicon Devil” By The Germs
5) “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” by The X-Ray Spex
6) “Born To Lose” by Johnny Thunders
7) “Earth AD” by The Misfits
8) “Funland at the Beach” by The Dead Kennedys
9) “I Wanted Everything” by The Ramones
10) “Blank Generation” by Richard Hell

Houseguest in town, so blogging will be light. 

Rachel Maddow did this extremely convincing report last night on how the Obama administration is setting themselves up to let DADT go on for years with their current strategy of ruthlessly pushing for enforcement while pleading with the Senate to overturn it.  You know, even though they have the tools at hand---simply not appealing this federal decision---to make DADT go away tomorrow.  What was going through my head the entire time was, “Is the administration being stupid or arrogant?” The facts seem indisputable.  When was the last time the Senate actually passed a bill that explicitly guaranteed equality for a minority group that was being routinely bagged on in public forums?  Maybe you could say Lilly Ledbetter, but that was more of a smaller bill shoring up pre-existing rights---rights that even hard right pundits are often loathe to attack.  (Instead of arguing openly that women should be paid less, they just impugn women’s abilities, and suggest unequal pay reflects that.) But something on this level?  I’d have to say that the closest is the Voting Rights Act of 1965? If I’m wrong, please let me know.  I’m curious. 

Either way, the possibility that the current administration could round up votes, LBJ-style, is fucking laughable.  There’s a couple of reasons. The first being that Republicans in the Senate are obviously not interested in working with the President, and that goes double on this issue.  They have made it clear they’ll kill defense spending before they allow this.  They’re not being reasonable.  Second of all, Obama is no LBJ, for better or for worse.  You’re not particularly afraid that he’s going to break your knees if you don’t play ball with him.  He’s offered no real leadership on this issue, in direct contrast to LBJ.  He’s like the anti-LBJ. 

Which I tend to believe is his choice---he actually seems to buy the Beltway wisdom that you shield yourself from right wing criticism by going through certain channels.  I suspect he actually thinks letting the courts handle this one will put it in a place where Roe v. Wade never got, which is calcified in the common wisdom.  He’s wrong on this.  People don’t hate the courts.  They hate gays.  Hating on the courts is just a cover story for that.  If Congress had legalized abortion, anti-choicers would be just as mean and ugly.  This Beltway common wisdom is for crap. 

So, are they arrogant or stupid in thinking this brilliant “let the Senate do it instead of simply instructing the Justice Department to let it go”?  The one thing they need to understand is the longer they let this question linger, the more option #3 seems possible---that the Obama administration is homophobic and actually supports DADT, despite their protests.

Take, for instance, Valerie Jarrett calling a gay teenager’s orientation a “lifestyle choice”.  (She’s since apologized.) That’s not the sort of thing that’s going to quell suspicions that the administration is doing the wrong thing by gay people because of some procedural bullshit but because they don’t like gay people.  What it’s going to do is ramp up suspicions that they don’t give a shit how this actually affects the fighting men and women in uniform who have to live lies, because they think that all you have to do to avoid DADT is to choose a different “lifestyle”. 

Just remember this, when the administration is making excuses: just because the Justice Department doesn’t pursue this case doesn’t mean the Senate can’t go ahead and codify the federal judge’s decision into law. 

I didn’t post last night, but I thought I’d point you to a couple pieces I have out that I’m really proud of:

For the Guardian’s Comment Is Free America, I wrote about how, if you want to understand the Tea Party craziness, you should look no further than the war over phosphates in dish detergent.

I found Christine O’Donnell’s ad referencing the Antoine Dodson video disturbing on about 15 different levels, including the blatant disregard for how serious a problem rape really is.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this situation where firefighters let a man’s house burn to the ground (killing multiple pets, which was what ended up really upsetting my soft heart at the end of day, since animals don’t know from the weird political loopholes that create situations like this) because he didn’t pay a $75 fee.  What’s fascinating about this is how the blogosphere fell on the story, and also how predictable it was---liberals were outraged and conservatives were smug to downright gleeful.  Everyone rationalized their reaction by treating this like a referendum on the morality of privatizing government.  Right wingers thought it was an awesome display of their moral weight that they’d sooner let a man’s house burn to the ground than let him get a service for free, and liberals pointed out how morally bankrupt that is. 

The one problem with it, which something Marc pointed out to me when we were talking about it? 

This has nothing to do with libertarian “philosophy”, privatization, or any other right wing enthusiasm. In fact, if we’re talking strictly philosophical differences, liberals should be the ones pointing out that if you don’t pay taxes, services will not be rendered.  This man’s house burning to the ground is a stark demonstration of what would happen to everyone if right wingers got their way and taxes became a thing of the past. And in general, liberals could point out that what happened to Gene Craddick and his family is an illustration of the problems that erupt when a bunch of Americans think they’re too good to obey the social contract, and build miles upon miles of exurbs with gated communities, gates that symbolically shield them from either having to rub shoulders with people they don’t consider Real Americans, or pay taxes so that we can all have public goods, like fire departments.  Not that this is exactly what happened in this case---I’m not making any statements about Craddick’s political beliefs or why he lived in a place where you had to pay $75 a year so the fire department would haul so far out to put your house out.  But as exurban, low tax areas grow, the kind of arrangement that led this horrible situation is probably going happen more and more.  (And Obion County does seem to fit the profile.) Liberals could have used this situation to ask ourselves hard questions, like, “If people really are going to go out of their way to avoid paying into the tax base, shouldn’t their access to services be revoked?  If one party opts out of the social contract, do the rest of us still have to take care of them?”

After all, the fire department in this case isn’t actually a privatized fire department.  It’s a public one.  For the areas it traditionally serves, the South Fulton Fire Department doesn’t require a $75 fee from residents, because they’re paid for out of taxes.  The reason they serve anyone in the outlying Obion County areas is because South Fulton is actually being generous in allowing people to opt in for a fee.  They do this even though the county actually looked at the possibility of creating a tax-funded fire department, and chose not to do so.

The county has declined to provide fire services for a long time, it’s been a lively issue for a long time, and they know perfectly well that local cities won’t always respond to their fires. Courtesy of the world wide web, for example, here’s “A Presentation Regarding The Establishment And Implementation of a County-Wide Fire Department,” dated March 18, 2008, describing exactly how fire services work in the County of Obion. Also included in this document: a plan to create an Obion County Fire Department by merging the services of the various municipal fire departments in the county along with a plan to raise about half a million dollars to fund it. Revenue would come from either a 0.13 cent property tax increase, a fee on electric meters, or a flat subscription fee.

The county commissioners of Obion County apparently decided against this plan. Didn’t want to increase taxes, I suppose. As a result, Gene Cranick’s house burned down.

The reason that refusing to raise your own fire department and instead relying on the generosity of your neighbors who do pay taxes is not a “libertarian” solution is because you’re basically leeching off people who do take responsibility as good citizens and kick in.  The $75 annual fee is all good and well, but it relies on someone else actually putting the cash up front to have a fire department.  So the complaints from right wingers about how people who actually pay taxes are “jerks, freeloaders, and ingrates” are exactly ass-backward.  Right wingers who create massive tax shelters for themselves and then expect to opt in to what the taxpayers have built for a nominal fee that they can pretend is “libertarian”?  They’re the ones not pulling their weight.  I’m guessing in an area where a .13% property tax increase (that’s .13%, not 13%) is considered too onerous of a burden for the John Galts of Tennessee to pay, you have a lot of people who also think they’re too good to pay the $75 annual fee, expecting the fire department paid by non-Galt non-freeloaders (turned by the magic of Glenn Beck into the bad guys with their hands out) would help them anyway.  No wonder the firefighters of South Fulton got fed up and decided to make an example out of someone.  Gene Craddick appears to have been the perfect target for their ire, since he had already had one fire that they put out, even though he hadn’t paid his fee.

If we’re talking strictly philosophy, then this should be a situation where liberals are---like I’m basically doing---decrying the freeloading of those who basically claim they’re too good for taxes, but throw a shit fit when services aren’t provided.  This situation is the ugly result of the attitude that leads a bunch of Medicare recipients to claim they oppose socialized welfare.  Or how red states that have voted themselves low taxes get away with it because they get more than their fair share of the federal piggy.  A bunch of wingnuts priding themselves on how “John Galt” they are requires a lot of financial indulgence from those of us who pay our taxes without complaint, because we actually remember that fire fighters, construction workers, and cops need to get paid.

Right wingers like to pretend that this is a good example of some perfect Ayn Rand utopia where even the fire department is privatized, but in reality, it would be costing WAY more than $75 a year to the white flighters to get in on a private fire department.  This pittance fee is a yet another example of how the people who think they’re so self-sufficient are being subsidized by the people they hate and who they won’t help back.  Sprawling exurbs that allow people to engage in both white flight and flight from higher taxes are only possible because they build on the infrastructure built up by the federal taxes that wingnuts protest and the city taxes that the white flighters think they’re too good to pay. 

Despite the fact that this is a pitch-perfect example of why liberals are right, though, you find liberals are the ones who are upset about this and conservatives are far more likely to be basking in the pain of the Craddick family.  Why is this?

My theory: because libertarianism is, as it always has been, nothing more but a pseudo-intellectual gloss painted on straight up assholery to make it seem shinier than it is. 

I’ll add that if Gene Craddick had come out all full wingnut about this, indignant that the “liberal elite” refused to help him, conservatives probably would have defended him to the death.  Instead, he chalked this up to an innocent mistake (the kind that actually having a more traditional tax structure would have made impossible), and so they felt good about being vicious assholes about his monumental loss.  I just hope the county takes this as a lesson, passes their teeny-weeny tax raise, and gets some firefighters so this doesn’t happen to anyone else. 

There’s a tendency on the left to praise hard line anti-choicers for their “consistency” when they oppose abortion even in the case of rape or incest.  “At least,” people say, “they’re being consistent with their claim that an embryo is a real person.” It’s not like all folks who say this disagree that said anti-choicers oppose abortion because of deep-set fears about human sexuality and misogyny, but they are trying to be fair and award some sort of karma points to people whose rationalizations are more coherent.

I’ve long maintained that opposition to abortion rights even in the case of rape or incest is indeed consistent, but with overt misogyny.  It’s an expression of belief that what goes on in a woman’s head never matters, not even in cases where more tender-hearted people might give women a break.  It’s consistent in the way that arguing that you should get to sexually abuse animals because you can eat them is consistent.  It just makes you an even uglier person.  It also is, irrevocably, mixed up with a general unwillingness to take rape seriously as a crime.  For example, Christine O’Donnell is running a new ad that exploits an already ugly situation---where a man’s fear and anger after he fought a rapist off his sister is turned into an internet joke---to compare being taxed to being raped, but in a jokey way that makes it clear they don’t think the original attempted rape is a real problem.* Or, to make a long story short, I think a lot of people who say “no exceptions” for rape or incest say so because they don’t think rape is a real problem, and they believe most victims brought it on themselves.

Which brings me to the Ken Buck situation.  As new details emerge about the rape case he refused to prosecute, we’re beginning to get a firm picture of his attitudes towards women and about rape, and how they inform his stance against abortion rights, even for rape victims.  And that picture is of a man who believes that once a woman has ceased to be a virgin, she loses all rights to bodily autonomy: she can and should be forced to partner with a man against her will, have sex with a man against her will, and bear children against her will. 

Whether or not you prosecute a rape case should depend on whether or not you think an actual crime has been committed.  In this case, the victim got her attacker to admit on a recorded phone call that he raped her.  But the facts of this case---whether or not a man forced himself on a woman---were less important, it seems, than whether or not the victim deserved to say no.  Ken Buck was skeptical.  To make it worse, he laid blame for his attitudes on an imaginary journey, suggesting that they’d believe she just had “buyer’s remorse”.  And I guess they probably would, if even the prosecutor is a believer that women are generally evil and suddenly, after having sex with someone repeatedly, they decide that they’d enjoy spending the next year or so of their lives wrapped up in legal proceedings for the hell of it.  But more importantly, Buck was obsessed with the fact that the victim had (gasp!) been sexually active before, and with the accused rapist.  I guess once he’s stuck it in you once, you belong to him forever. 

But this is what’s really weird and telling:

The suspect in this case had claimed that the victim had at one point a year or so before this event become pregnant with his child and had an abortion, which she denies, saying she miscarried. The suspect’s claim, though, is in the police report, and Buck refers to it as a reason she may be motivated to file charges where he thinks none are warranted.

“When he talks about the abortion as the reason she wants charges filed, that has nothing to do with the law or this case,” Forseth says. “That is his personal bias coming into play. He’s bringing his own personal beliefs and judgments to bear on this case, when he should be acting as a victim’s advocate.”

A prior pregnancy and abortion/miscarriage is irrelevant, if you believe that a woman has a right to terminate a relationship with a man and a right to say no to sex, even if she’s not a virgin.  But if you see pregnancy as a symbol of a man’s conquest over a woman, then both abortion and rejecting a relationship or sex with a man who has previously impregnated you are against the rules of the patriarchy. 

But what I really want to draw attention to here is how Buck understood the relationship of abortion and rape. Even though the supposed abortion happened before the rape, Buck seemed really sure there was a relationship between the woman supposedly lying about the rape and having gotten an abortion, that she was somehow trying to justify something.  Or maybe just that she’s an out-of-control rejector of the right of men to control and dominate her.  Either way, you get a clear picture of why he’s opposed to exceptions in an abortion ban for rape and incest, and it really is consistent---consistently misogynist.

*Or maybe her campaign only thinks rape is some big joke if it’s happening to people who live in low income housing. 

I know I probably sound like a broken record on this, but it’s important to cover the growing problem of right wing domestic terrorism. Media Matters has put together a report on the beliefs of Byron Williams, who got into a shootout with California Highway Patrol officers on July 18th.  Luckily, he didn’t kill anyone, but it came out that his intention was to commit acts of terrorism against the Tides Foundation and the ACLU.  Working for Media Matters, journalist John Hamilton interviewed Williams, and surprise surprise, found out that he’s a huge devotee of Glenn Beck.

I have no doubt that Beck will immediately deny any responsibility for filling people’s heads with paranoid lies until someone cracks and decides to do something violent.  But there’s a clear line here:

Observers of this most recent act were mystified by one of Byron Williams’ reported targets: the Tides Foundation, a low-profile charitable organization known for funding environmentalists, community groups, and other organizations.

Beck, it turned out, had attacked Tides 29 times on his Fox News show in the year-and-a-half leading up to the shooting.

Here’s some more reporting on Beck’s obsession with Tides and particularly with George Soros.  There are many other billionaires who spend money on lefty causes, like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, but Soros gets the lion’s share of the attention from the freaked-out right.  And frankly, after seeing the tenor that the freak-out over Journolist took, I’m definitely of the mind that this is anti-Semitic.  With Beck, the unspoken but ever-present anti-Semitic themes of his fear-mongering are probably a result of expedience. Beck has never been one to reinvent the wheel.  If he wants to paint a picture of an international conspiracy to rule the world, of course he’s going to finger Jews as the people behind it.  The sentiment already exists in his audience.  It’s much easier to fan the flames if the embers are already there.  Check out some of the Facebook replies Michael Roston got off Mark Levin’s Facebook page when Levin was feeding his audience bullshit stories about Journolist and the liberal conspiracy to run the media, one listserv where we talk about “The Wire” at a time:

I want to take a moment to point out that Williams was targeting both Tides (which he concluded was the org from which Soros will do all his dirty, world-conquering work) and, yep, the ACLU. 

Yeah, this last one is a head-scratcher.

Obviously, most people who eat Glenn Beck’s shit all the time aren’t going to commit acts of violence.  Most of them are, luckily, too cowardly and comfortable to do something like Williams did, even if they fantasize about it.  But some oddballs here and there are going to do this, because they really do believe what Beck is saying about some grand conspiracy of evil liberals. 

In fact, right as Media Matters was releasing this report, another likely would-be terrorist was arrested.

Richard Scott McLeod of Brighton was arrested Monday in Webberville on weapons charges and is under suspicion for potential threats against President Barack Obama.

On the outside of the 48-year-old’s vehicle were bumper stickers quoting Adolf Hitler. On the inside, police say there was a picture of Obama, a loaded gun, a bullet-proof vest and tips on how to build bombs.

A lot of the time, these extremists consider folks like talk radio show hosts to be weak sauce, not extreme enough.  (Though interestingly, this seems to be less so when it comes to Glenn Beck.  Scary.) But it’s worth remembering that the bar on radical, over-the-top fear-mongering is set by what the more mainstream wingnut pundits will say.  People who want to be more extreme in their conservatism take their cues from what is permissible to be said on Fox News and add 15 points of nutbar.  Beck is impeding on the hardcore types’ “Jewish conspiracy to rule the world” fantasies, and I imagine their reaction will just be to turn the heat on even higher. 

There are a lot of questions after Sunday’s episode of “Mad Men”:  Will Don’s gambit work?  What’s going to happen to SCDP, especially with Bert gone?  What’s going to happen with Faye and Don?  What about Megan and Don?  Is it a little “Forrest Gump” to show Midge again, but this time as a drug addict?  Is Pete going to regret sticking by SCDP?  Will the ACS account amount to much?  What’s Sally going to do now?  What about Betty?

But the main question I have is, what does Don’s choice to “quit” tobacco mean?  And even if we can answer that question, does it matter?

It’s not that these other questions aren’t as important, but they are mostly unanswerable, especially on a show known for its unpredictability. But the real question for me is the question of why Don chose to write that letter to the NY Times.  The assumption shared by the other characters is that Don is purely cynical, that his choice was only a PR move.  He definitely didn’t nothing to dissuade them from seeing it that way, choosing instead to chain smoke while denouncing cigarettes as a deadly addiction.  (Both of course, he’s also an addict and he can’t just put them down.) Even Megan assumed that it was a cynical move, even as she suggested---which I’ll get back to---that it doesn’t matter if it was. 

But was it?

The very thing that rescued the Midge interlude from being a “Forrest Gump” moment was that it not only genuinely rattled both Don and the audience, but it ended up having meaning.  As Heather at Salon noted, Don saw something in Midge’s situation that he also saw in himself, or at least in SCDP.  Midge didn’t care how much money that Don gave her, as long as it got her to the next fix and perhaps kept her from having to sell her body to strangers for a few days or so.  And so SCDP was willing to be with this new cigarette brand, which I’m assuming is Virginia Slims.  He saw desperation, and how deeply ugly it is.  And so he started to hand off those attachments that kept him desperate.

The number one thing is money.  I don’t think it was subtly drawn, but in case it was: Did you notice that Don is giving away the farm?  It’s not just the $150 grand that he put in the company, but he was giving away smaller amounts of cash to Midge and her husband, too, which was mostly symbolic.  With Betty and Henry moving out, he’s probably going to sell the house, too, which is his last attachment to his long stint of building the American dream that was stifling him so much.  Don has severed connections and remade himself before, so this isn’t something he’s unfamiliar with.  It’s his main go-to strategy.  And in case we didn’t get the picture, you also see Faye happy that losing her job that was beginning to weigh on her conscience makes her free to date Don openly.

The other argument for why Don did the right thing because it was the right thing to do is that we’ve already seen Peggy bring up to him the idea that ethics should be a part of business.  He shot her down when she suggested they shouldn’t work with racists, but that he has been wrong in a quarrel with her before was mentioned in this episode, when she joked about how she thought he didn’t go for shenanigans. If Don is becoming more Peggy-like when it comes to shenanigans, then perhaps he’s becoming more Peggy-like when it comes to having a conscience. 

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So, after writing a largely positive review of “The Social Network” this morning, I was quickly and forcefully made to understand that a lot of people really don’t like this movie.  Not because of the acting, script, direction, themes (except maybe some suspicion---mostly from extra-textual sources---that Aaron Sorkin doesn’t like the internet), or anything really in the movie, but what is outside of it.  I’ve had people point out that they have problems with other things Sorkin’s written, or aspects of his biography that make them think he’s a prick.  But the main objection to “The Social Network” has been what I jokingly said was the “nuh-uh” critique. As in “Nuh-uh, it didn’t happen that way,” or, “Nuh-uh, Harvard isn’t really like that.” (This is often aimed at the sequence at the party inside the final club, which I’m now 100% sure was a dream sequence, what the character of Mark Zuckerberg thinks happens at those parties, not how they actually are.) I must admit, I’m more than a little surprised to see so many people object, seemingly out of nowhere, to the concept of poetic license.  I pointed out, repeatedly, that the movie is being compared to “Citizen Kane” because it’s essentially the same story---that of a tycoon who captures the world by excelling like a motherfucker at the dominant media of his era, but who is a tragic figure because he can’t get his personal life in order.  William Randolph Hearst wasn’t particularly happy about “Citizen Kane” when it was released, presumably for many of the same reasons that people who sympathize with Mark Zuckerberg are pissed off about this movie, and also because Hearst was a bad man and a control freak in a way I suspect Zuckerberg (the real person) is not.

But the concept of poetic license when it comes to important historical figures and their place in works of fiction or poetry is nothing new.  No one thinks that Shakespeare’s histories are exact accounts of what went down, and only fundamentalists are silly enough to think Biblical stories about the kings of Israel or the life of Jesus are to be taken as a literal accounting of fact.  Using poetic license to use real people in fiction or fictionalized histories is super common nowadays.  Off the top of my head, the TV shows and movies I can think of that have done it are “Silence of the Lambs”, “Young Guns”, “Deadwood”, “Elizabeth”, “The Tudors”, “Homicide”, “Becoming Jane Austen”, and “The Hours”.  Also, David Bowie, Brian Eno, and Hunter S. Thompson are characters on “The Venture Brothers”.  I’ll bet you could come up with a few dozen more if you put your mind to it.  Sometimes the real life people’s names are changed, and sometimes they portrayed more directly as the real historical figure, but there’s no doubt that they are nonetheless a character in a story, and this isn’t a literal account of the truth.

And frankly, I prefer it that way.  Biopics are notorious for sucking.  Even the ones that are good by biopic standards---like the recent Johnny Cash biopic film “Walk The Line"---aren’t really that good by storytelling standards.  This is due, in no small part, to this need for accuracy.  Oh, biopic makers will roll a few important people into one person or fudge a few details to save time, but on the whole, they try to get the trajectory of a person’s life right.  And in doing so, they end up saying nothing more than, “This person did some important stuff while living the same kind of messed up life as most anyone.” The problem with real people is that they’re not characters in stories.  They’re changeable, arbitrary, and way too multi-faceted, particularly for movies.  Life doesn’t have themes or plots.  It’s just.....life.  Even for important people. 

The purpose of storytelling is not to reflect life exactly how it is, but to draw out the sort of themes and ideas that disorganized, messy life doesn’t provide.  That, and to entertain you, which is no small thing, either.  If a story is inspired by real world events, the needs for coherence, time, and meaning---as well as for entertainment---require the storytellers to fictionalize events.  “Deadwood”, I think, is a really good example of how overly literal folks let themselves get way confused.  The characters were based on real people and often had their names and shared much of their biography. But they also diverged in dramatic ways, not the least of which was how they spoke in a stream of curse words that were mostly not used back then.  This is because the creators had a larger story to tell, one that couldn’t be shaped out of strict adherence to the literal truth.  But I think they managed to convey something more meaningful than a historical re-enactment soaked in literal truth would have.  Same story with “The Social Network"---a movie about the real events exactly how they happened would end up being a story about nothing in particular.  Maybe about how it’s good to be the lucky bastard who got there first?  Some of the suggestions I’ve seen, particularly around making a movie about the critical importance of user-friendly minimalist design, sound like the most boring things you could ever make a movie about.  My concerns that this movie was going to be that kind of movie is why I was reluctant to see it.  Only the good reviews got me out the door.

Aaron Sorkin has made the fatal mistake of giving his critics ammunition by claiming what is a demonstrably fictional film is non-fiction.  That was stupid, but it doesn’t make this not a fictional story based on real events.  Mark Zuckerberg, of course, is still alive, and this, for some reason, making this whole thing more confusing, particularly if you let “what will the stupid people make of this?” color your perceptions.  The question, then, is why not do what Orson Welles did in “Citizen Kane”, and change the name of his character along with major biographical details?

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Spoilers.

Fun with juxtapositions: Guess what I was doing right before I left the house to go see “The Social Network”?  I was reading about the Duke University woman who gained instant infamy by having a private joke about her sex life leaked onto the internet. I was struck by how overt the double standard was in this case; young men use bragging about conquests (with often way more derogatory commentary about their partners) as a way to score points with friends all the time.  I’m sure many elaborately document it for these purposes.  But they don’t get dragged on TV to apologize.

Then I go to see “The Social Network”, and the opening scene is an apparently true-to-life story of Mark Zuckerberg blogging horrible things about a woman because she dumped him, and his creating of Facemash, which was a “hot or not” kind of site that got him in some trouble with the school board.  Marc and I were annoyed as fuck at the idea that 22,000 hits would crash all of Harvard’s servers, which is a) ridiculous and b) turns out that it never happened.  But that Sorkin and Fincher decided to tack that on points to what I think the movie was trying to say about this incident.  In the movie, unlike real life, the focus in his disciplinary hearings was on the fact that he breached Harvard security and crashed Harvard servers.  He isn’t punished in any way for making misogynist sport out of his fellow students, even though this is objectively the worst thing that he did. 

I was already thinking about double standards, and subsequently I was intrigued by the juxtaposition.  Owen creates an intentionally private joke about her sex life that implicates no one but the direct parties involved, and she’s publicly shamed.  In this scene, we see a man do something much worse---publicly humiliating a woman for dumping him and taking his anger out on basically all women---and he ends up becoming a billionaire. 

There’s all sorts of caveats you can attach to this, of course.  The Zuckerberg thing is fictionalized and his financial success was built on something else entirely.  But it was still one that made obvious to me what I think was subtle to a lot of people in the audience, which is that the filmmakers are pointing you in a direction of being appalled that Zuckerberg got away with treating women so shabbily.

There’s a tendency for smart people to watch TV shows and movies, ignore the thoughts that are inspired in us, and instead focus on what we believe the lowest common denominator is getting from a film.  And then we hold the filmmakers accountable for the way we believe the lowest common denominator would react instead of thinking that perhaps our reactions were the point.  I think “The Social Network” has definitely created this problem, especially when it comes to women’s role in all this.  In the movie, smart, capable women are pushed to the sidelines and the main characters---the various men who created and fought over the ownership of Facebook---surround themselves with bimbos. And this is aggressively portrayed; at one point, two women in the room ask if they can help on a Facebook-related project, and they’re told they have nothing to contribute (insinuation: you are here to provide orgasms and shut up).  This was the contradictory reactions that arose in me:

My honest feeling about this: “This makes these guys look like assholes and nimrods.  They try a little too hard to prove that they’re Real Men, and in doing so, they deliberately use women as props.  There are a lot of men actually like this in the world, and a lot of media aimed at glamorizing a world where genuinely relating to women is treated as emasculating.  But watching these characters, I feel like they’re pathetic because they can’t actually cope with women who do anything but play the bimbo role.”

My attempt at reading what the lowest common denominator thinks: “Cool. I wish hot bitches would just shut up and fuck me, too.”

You often see people who make the mistake of arguing that portraying equals endorsing, which means that they disregard the discomfort they feel when, say, misogyny is portrayed onscreen.  They assume straightaway that their discomfort is wholly theirs, and that the filmmakers didn’t intend to provoke their discomfort. I’ve even made this assumption myself, and have to watch for it. You even see this interpretation when it comes to something like “Mad Men”, where it couldn’t be more obvious that they’re hoping you suck your teeth when the characters do something really sexist or racist.  And when it comes to “The Social Network”, I’m seeing a lot of people assume that the filmmakers had no intention whatsoever of making you question the misogyny they portray onscreen.  The evidence for this is a lack of Strong Female Characters that are central to the story.

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As you can probably tell from my post where I broke up with “Glee”, Marc and I DVR a lot of our shows and watch them some time after air date.  I don’t mention this because I think that’s uncommon or anything, but to note that we have a lot of shows we like and a DVR box with a very small hard drive.  This makes us even more critical than normal of stuff sucking, since we don’t want to waste precious DVR space on shows that aren’t worth our time. Which is why last night we decided to stop taping “The Office”. 

In all honesty, it’s been a long time coming.  Every week we watch the show, and every week we ask ourselves, why are we watching this show?  It’s basically out of nostalgia, because “The Office” used to be the funniest thing on TV, back when it was a dark satire of life inside the modern American economy.  Over time, however, it switched genres and is now a rather pointless romantic comedy that valorizes the characters that it used to viciously mock.  The show used to offer up a searing critique of the way that modern corporations are ruining the American dream for ordinary working people, but now that those particular chickens are really coming home to roost in the real world, the economic fortunes on the show have turned inexplicably sunny, with the threat that they are all going to show up and find their jobs have disappeared evaporating. In fact, the company seems to have an unlimited budget for just hiring new people.  They didn’t even put up more of a fight when Pam basically created a whole new job (and salary) for herself.  The actors increasingly seem to be phoning it in, and worst of all, it’s sentimental for no good reason.  Plus, for some reason, they seem to think that the audience should think Pam and Jim are awesome, when, if you look at it objectively, Pam and Jim are assholes.  The pranks they’d play on Dwight used to have meaning and purpose, for instance---Dwight was a suck-up and pointlessly competitive at a job that Jim thought he was too good to do, so he took his frustrations out on Dwight, who had it coming.  Now Dwight seems to just be the weird guy, and Pam and Jim are the cool kids picking on the weird guy because he’s weird.  And we in the audience are supposed to think well of them because of all this, even though they’re actually pretty pathetic.  And the capper of it all is they steal jokes from viral videos on YouTube done by non-professional people that I’ll bet they never give a dime to. 

As Marc noted, it’s the same trajectory as “The Simpsons"---it started off as a vicious satire, but the writers grew fond of the characters and started to change up their motivations and their fates so that we like them more. The most recent episode was a really good example of how the show has lost its way. 

To start off with, Michael Scott.  As usual, Michael got into trouble and embarrassed himself.  But they pulled their punches by having most of the horrible stuff that happened to him be accidental.  Letting go of the balloons and dropping the bottle so it rattled around?  That honestly could have happened to anyone.  Even the booing bit was a pulled punch.  Back in the day, they would have had Michael be horrible to Andy because Andy has a part at all, and he was jealous.  But they want you to like Michael some, so instead they show him being nice to Andy by going to the show, praising his performance, and comforting him when he was down. They don’t even have the heart to put Michael through the romantic horrors he’s lived through in the past.  The last bad girlfriend plot was limp and dispensed with quickly. 

Pam and Jim, as noted before, are now assholes.  But we’re supposed to like them and think they’re awesome because they’re “normal” compared to the weirdos they work with.  In the past, the smallness of their lives and their inabilities to achieve their ambitions gave them depth, but now they’re just smug married people who sneer at people they think are below them, instead of yearning to be more than they are.  In this episode, they sit in their car drinking Irish Cream and orange juice and we’re supposed to be charmed by how cute and in love they are, instead of appalled at what wankers they’re being.  I don’t care about them, their marriage, or their baby.  They should have written them off the show. 

Meanwhile, this last episode made it clear that they’re actually recycling the Pam/Jim arc with Andy and Erin---the salesman loves the receptionist, but he’s too cowardly to tell her, and she’s dating someone else in the company.  We didn’t even get to see Gabe steal Erin from Andy, presumably because they don’t have the courage to make Gabe a real asshole or Erin stupid enough to be dating someone that’s bad for her.  So you’re left with this storyline where you’re expected to feel bad for Andy, but instead you’re thinking, “I don’t know.  She seems happy.  He should just move on.” I fail to see why we should root for them outside of the fact that they’re both characters that we’ve come to know on this show. 

Back in the day, the show did a bang-up job of portraying the awkwardness of working with people that you don’t particularly like that much.  The socializing events outside of the office were awkward and forced, and many of the characters couldn’t wait to get home and live their real lives.  Now, it seems like the people in the office don’t have lives outside of it at all.  They only socialize with each other.  The episode where Jim and Pam got married really epitomized this.  Their office mates reconstruct the viral video wedding aisle dance.  Except in real life, the people that did this were the couple’s actual friends, not their coworkers they have little in common with and feel so superior to.  That’s because this is something that your actual friends do for you, not your coworkers.  Plus, what was the point of doing that?  It was amazing to watch it on YouTube, because it was original and it was awesome to see a bunch of non-professionals pull it off in one shot.  A bunch of professional actors doing it in a situation where they have multiple takes to get it right?  It was like an inverse of everything that made the video they ripped off cool. 

So, we’re also done with “The Office”.  There’s way too much good stuff on TV to waste your time on a show that’s jumped the shark. 

CSA Week #16

Cabbage
Daikon radish
Cauliflower
Eggplant
Acorn squash
Broccoli
Potatoes
Tomatoes
Onions
Hot peppers
Apples

I’ve been dying to read, for a long time now, someone who can sum up my “yes, no, and maybe” feelings about the claims being made around organic food.  Michael Pollan is good in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, but I wanted to read someone break down the complicated pieces of food politics in a way that wasn’t anti-organic but was skeptical of some of the more outrageous claims made---ones I’ve regretfully fallen for in the past (such as “organics are more nutritious”). 

I think I found a really informative piece of work in Michael Specter’s excellent book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives.  He tackles a lot of different subjects in this book, including alternative medicine and what the meaning of the Vioxx recall was, but he also has a great article on food politics.  He avoids the trap of being a mindless cheerleader for organic produce, but also the trap of being a cynic who swears there is no usefulness to eating local, eating organic, etc. 

My feeling about a lot of organic food is that the marketing is cynical and exploitative.  Few people buy organic because they’re concerned about reducing their carbon footprint so much as because they think it’s healthier, and the marketing exploits that.  It’s an opinion that I’ve come to believe is informed by the fact that a lot of people haven’t really done much organic gardening or reading about gardening.  One thing, for instance, I’ve learned about people who don’t garden and their perceptions about organic gardening is they think it’s all about the pesticides, when if you actually do it, you learn that it’s way more about the fertilizer---certain fertilizers grow your plants faster, but that makes them taste less great and those fertilizers use fossil fuels. I’m all for not using pesticides when you can avoid it, because they run off into the water and create collective health and environmental issues. 

But the main point is that people are motivated so much by selfishness.  You won’t get as far marketing organics in terms of “reduce your carbon footprint” or “care about the health of the people using the drinking water in the farm area”, as saying, “This food is more wholesome, and so are you for eating it.” Which is why people will happily buy organics trucked in from halfway across the world, sort of defeating the point of not using fossil fuel-based fertilizers.  Or they’ll conflate “organic” with a vague notion of “natural” and fear genetically modified produce because it’s not “natural”, even though all foods we eat were modified by human intervention.

Specter tackles all these issues in a fearless style, arguing both that eating organic for environmental and taste reasons is fine, if you can afford it, but it shouldn’t distract us from the fact that most people don’t have access to enough healthy food, period, no matter whether it’s grown organically or not. (He also lays to rest the claim that organics are filling in some nutritional void in Americans’ lives.  We just need to eat more vegetables, period---the differences between organics and non-organics are slight to non-existent on those terms.) And that eating beef, no matter how “organic”, is still wasteful---you can reduce your carbon footprint more by skipping meat and dairy one day a week than going localvore.  And the post-industrial world’s hostility towards genetic modification is practically criminal, it’s so stupid and hurtful.  A lot of GMOs exude their own pesticides, which would actually reduce the need for expensive and environmentally harmful interventions on large scale crops. 

Anyway, it was a good read and I highly recommend it.  The lesson is that none of this is simple, and policies around food should be based on impact and outcome, not feel-good nonsense.  But also that stuff that feels good isn’t always wrong.  For instance, supporting local farmers feels good, and it does help reduce the amount of trucking around being done to get veggies to you, and it helps those farmers stay afloat.  It also means, as I’ve learned, that you expand your vegetable repertoire and therefore have less need to have your veggies flown in from halfway around the world in order to eat enough of them.

So, on to this week’s cooking.

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So I linked on Facebook this article about how actress Lea Michele has caught Incredible Shrinking Actress Syndrome*, and I was mostly making fun of a commenter who said that we couldn’t blame the patriarchy because it was Michele’s “choice” to diet.  I said, “How do they think it works otherwise? The patriarchy police show up at your house and start slapping food out of your hands? That’s only how it works on David E. Kelley shows.” And then I was alerted to some incredibly disturbing news:

David E. Kelley is working on a Wonder Woman series.

I have very little doubt that it’s going to exhibit the same mean-spirited skepticism that a woman can have power and happiness at the same time that was on full display on “Ally McBeal”.  Maybe not, but I’m really feeling right now that this is, if it comes to fruition, going to be the definitive proof that Kelley thinks misogyny is fucking awesome.  I’m not usually one to really dwell on Wonder Woman as some iconic feminist superhero---in most important ways, Buffy the Vampire Slayer has replaced her as the iconic feminist superhero---but I don’t want to see her get rewritten as someone who gave up having self-esteem and believing herself loveable when she took up having superpowers.

*That another actress that was already quite thin started losing weight rapidly once she got on TV wasn’t surprising, and since she’s not gaunt, it’s not as upsetting as it can be.  But what really pissed me off, and another reason that we stopped watching “Glee”, is that they turned Rachel from a character who was just an overindulged child to a real monster with no empathy for any other human beings.  I now consider her character a nasty, bigoted stereotype of Jewish women and every time she came on screen, I flinched. 

Instead of just tossing up a Friday Genius Ten, I want to make it up to you for not blogging some this week by writing about music and culture with a little more depth.

So there was some fussing when Barack Obama revealed to Jann Wenner that he has dipped his toe into listening to some Jay-Z, with a little Nas and Lil Wayne on the side.  I thought the real story behind that was that it’s another example of the truce that’s being called in the concept of “kids these days”, as more people over 40 are rejecting the pressure to stop listening to new music and more young people are buying records from older, classic artists.  I would say hip hop is the single greatest force in breaking down the idea that your age should define your tastes, since digging through the stacks is such a critical aspect of hip hop. And as a lot people who grew up after the 60s have such an appreciation for music before our time, as we get older, we’re less inclined to think of new music as after our time.  Obama appears to be somewhat of this mindset.  (Interesting, though, Wenner just wanted to talk about music from his time---Bob Dylan.)

Anyway, the fussing is chronicled by Adam Serwer here.  Thomas Chatterton Williams, who wrote a book called Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture, is all over Obama for being a bad influence.  He weighs his arguments up front by flipping out over Lil Wayne, but he tries to put that on Jay-Z, too, because his argument kind of falls apart if you don’t posit that hip hop is a monolithic beast that is universally opposed to books.  My though: 15,000 books and you’ve never seen a single scholarly but highly readable history of hip hop? 

Adam retorts by pointing out that James Earl Jones has performed a monologue from “Othello” at the White House, even though you could apply many of the arguments laid on hip hop on “Othello” for glamorizing domestic violence.  This is an argument that I was first exposed to in the 7th grade, and it’s stuck with me.

When I was a wee youth wearing Keds in rural West Texas, hip hop hadn’t quite reached us yet in its march across the United States, though of course by the mid-90s, it was everywhere, including the CD players of some in Alpine.  Oh, I had MTV by satellite dish and sometimes late at night my friends and I would peep at some Public Enemy videos, but back then, hip hop wasn’t on the radar.  Subsequently, this intellectually bankrupt discussion centered not around hip hop but around rock music, which many churches in the area considered the devil.  The radio station in town only played country western and “oldies”, mostly Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee songs from the 40s and 50s.  These kinds of music weren’t controversial in any way, but seen as responsible, non-devil music. 

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I’ve been fascinated by the It Gets Better Project.  It’s such a simple concept, really, but it’s so profoundly important.  I think it’s gotten a lot of widespread attention not just because gay rights and the rights of young people have been such an issue lately---though that does have a lot to do with it---but also because it reminds us, in the most honest of ways, of the small triumphs over adversity that everyday people achieve every day.  For adults of all stripes that survived youthful bullying to thrive as adults, the narrative of the school scapegoat made good is both a romantic myth of our culture and an established reality.

One thing the It Gets Better Project hasn’t addressed too much is what is often the most delicious aspect of this very common story: the revenge of living well aspect.  A few of the videos have made a point of noting the pleasure of the bullied discovering, in adulthood, that the bullies learned that they’re not so special the hard way, but it’s been a muted theme in midst of what was mostly a bunch of upbeat stuff.  But hey, a little hope that the fuckers will get theirs is part of the package that keeps many a bullied child looking forward.  Which is why I loved (hat tip) this video:

IT GETS WORSE
Uploaded by FirstLastName. - More video blogs and vloggers.

Hey, not every bullied kid will enjoy thinking about how great it’s going to be to go live exactly how they want while the bullies often get ground down by the very uptight social standards they enforced with violence on gay kids, nerdy kids, and girls whose sexuality seemed a tad hard to control.  Not every kid will smile thinking about how their tormentors will one day strap on their fanny packs, pull some sandals over their socks, and go pay $500 to see Sarah Palin---who makes them feel that at least someone in their little tribe still has a flicker of a libido left---speak about how she wants to take the country back from those kids you used to beat up in high school, but now who wear nice suits, still gaze with love (and even lust!) occasionally at their life partners and have regular bowel movements from their pussy high fiber diets. Some bullied kids are too sweet for that. 

But some of us are catty bitches, and I thank the maker of this video for that.  Just remember, kids.  Facebook is probably here to stay.  So as you take your revenge by living well, you’ll have a steady stream of evidence in your news feed to mark your progress as you leave those fuckheads behind. 

Sorry I didn’t post yesterday; the site’s been screwed up.  It still is, but apparently people are reading it and I can write, so I’m going to throw something up quickly. 

Tuesday night, Marc and I broke up with “Glee”.  The first half of the first season was really an amazing show---funny, strange, campy.  And then they started to get sentimental.  In small doses, this was acceptable, as long as they returned immediately to Sue Sylvester busting someone’s ass.  But the sentimentality got thicker and started to take over entire episodes.  This week’s episode about religion was the final straw. 

Watching “Glee” was like being in a toxic relationship.  Just when you’re about to throw the towel in, they sucked you back in with an episode that reminded you of the glory days.  The Britney Spears episode was nearly perfect.* The fact that they teased the audience some more with the the Brittany/Santana stuff was awesome.  It was hilarious.  They made fun of Will for being a dork.  I was in heaven. 

But this week’s!  This was the final straw; the rock bottom where you realize that this relationship is never going to work out.  It’s not just that the theme of the episode was, “Yeah, yeah, atheists may be logical and actually correct, and believers may be weak people who look the other way when churches oppress people because they need their fairy tales for comfort, but atheists should be the bigger man and take all sorts of shit from believers with a smile.” I can deal with watching a show that has a message that I disagree with.  But it was the way they did it, particularly with the ruthless combination of actual heartlessness combined with over-the-top sentimentality pretending to be heart. 

The main thing that really pissed me off was that Kurt’s friends know that he’s an atheist.  Moreover, the show even went with the annoying “atheists are just mad at god” route, though they did rescue that somewhat by conceding that atheist arguments are nonetheless logical.  (I actually think the writers are atheists who decided to pander because most Americans are believers.  Which is even more annoying.) But by making Kurt angry, they really drove home the point that this is important to him, and especially in a time of crisis. 

So what do his supposedly loving friends do?  They go over his head and pray over his father.  Now, this would have probably been okay if the result was they all realized that in their frenzy of defensiveness about their fairy tale beliefs, they hurt an actual human being, and the moral of this anvilicious show is that religion is evil and compels people to do things that are immoral and inhumane, but no.  That would have taken hormone-secreting glands of a non-gender-specific nature.  No, instead Kurt has to come around to seeing that they were just being nice, blah blah.  No they weren’t.  They were passive-aggressively trying to punish him for rattling their long-standing and unquestioned beliefs. 

To make the cowardice worse, the characters that end up standing in for believers are not the characters that have previously been portrayed as religious before, mainly Quinn.  She has like two lines defending her belief.  The characters who get the most screen time talking about faith are Rachel and Mercedes, who belong to faith groups that are, let’s face it, still oppressed minorities in the U.S.  In case you don’t get that, Rachel makes a comment about faith traditions revolving around escaping slavery.  This is, to say the least, putting your thumb on the scales.  There was no real time given over to the big league churches in the U.S. that dominate the cultural discourse.  Maybe they thought the only way to balance the logic being dished out by Kurt and Sue was to completely ignore Catholicism and the Christian right?  Or maybe it was just pandering.  The number of crocodile tears being squeezed out onscreen, I’d say pandering.

Plus, it’s just factually incorrect that the kids were forbidden to sing faith songs if they want.  It’s just that Will couldn’t assign them.  This seems like a small thing, but the myth that mean old atheists keep believing kids from professing faith in school is widespread, and it’s a lie.  It doesn’t need “Glee” promoting it. 

They need to simply avoid these kinds of topics.  Frankly, they should in the interest of good taste, since that was completely stupid and tasteless and shameful, even if it was more fair-minded. But they couldn’t even be fair-minded, and the pandering made it exponentially worse.  The ruthless attempts to make you cry were off-putting.  Honestly, I think the only reason they did this episode was to give Mercedes a chance to belt out some gospel.  Here’s a better idea: just incorporate the actress more into the show.  She’s got the best voice on it.  Just give her more parts to sing in general. 

But they won’t, and I’m sick of waiting around to see if they will, so I’m done with “Glee”.

*Except for that shit with Artie wanting to be a football player.  First of all, as Marc noted, this is illegal in 15 different ways, mostly because the chance of someone getting maimed or killed is near 100% if you actually put a guy in a wheelchair on the field.  Second of all, it seems like all Artie-based story lines involve his anger at being in a wheelchair.  Give the kid some more dimensions, for fuck’s sake.  He wasn’t disabled yesterday.  Why not show someone who has come to terms with it and is living a full, happy life in a wheelchair?