"This kind of stuff is nauseating to me on both sides," Booker said. "It's nauseating to the American public. Enough is enough. Stop attacking private equity."
He was immediately and rightly denounced for false equivalence. His insistence that entire sectors of the American economy are off-limits for discourse in American politics led reporters to find out exactly how much money Booker had received from Bain. Booker ate some crow, but did so ineptly, embodying the slippery politician on "Maddow" and basically saying out loud that Obama had silenced him. So, a C level shit storm, in other words. But oh so indicative of the most tiresome part of our politics these days, the constant refereeing that's almost completely eclipsed any actual discussion of the issues.
I mean, I've done it, I'm sure. It's hard not to get caught up in it. And it is true that some people, in their eagerness to score political points, say stuff that's genuinely offensive. But by and large, the issue of "what you're allowed to say" and trawling around, looking for offense at every little thing in hopes of silencing people, has become the dominant form of political discourse. What makes it tiresome is the vast majority of it is disingenuous. Booker was just the most obvious example of this, because claiming that a presidential candidate's actual resume was irrelevant to the campaign was so nakedly greedy that even the most Beltway-intoxicated could see what was going on.
But can you blame him? The process of feigning outrage that someone might bring up all sorts of issues has been successfully deployed to silence a diverse array of important but uncomfortable questions. Consider, for instance, how Mitt Romney has been touting his wife as his actual advisor on the vague category of "women's concerns". Since she's an advisor, her resume is relevant, of course, but actually pointing that out created a five alarm fire, because suddenly there was a new rule saying if you're a married mother, that should shield you from any examination of how your work experience affects your supposed expertise. That's just the most recent example, but by and large, taking umbrage that anyone would dare mention X is most of what goes on in politics now. Take, for instance, the way that any investigation into a religious ideology that a candidate openly claims influences him is now being treated like it's dirty politics. And we wonder why voter turnout is so low. If campaigns were being conducted in a court, the only word you'd hear would be "Objection!" That's exhausting.
What's interesting in all this is that it seems that people attacking Booker seem to believe that his comments about Jeremiah Wright were just fine, in other words, they agree that the problem with Republicans making a fuss over Wright was that Wright was "off-limits", no doubt on some vague belief that religion is off-limits. Of course they'd think that, since pretty much all political discourse now is about what is and isn't off-limits. In reality, the problem with the Republican attacks was that they were pure race-baiting. If we look at it from that angle and not from trawling around, looking for what's off-limits, then the response is more interesting and actually gets discourse going about stuff that matters. If you'll recall correctly, that's exactly what Obama wisely did. He could have run around clutching his pearls and demanding that religious faith be put in the ever-growing box labeled Off Limits. Instead, he actually decided to talk about the issues being raised, about being black and about the role of racism in this country. It caused a wave of awe in the political press, in no small part because a candidate actually talking about the issues instead of running around taking umbrage is a rare thing indeed. Needless to say, it was a more effective response than umbrage-taking as well, because it worked as a reminder that people who race bait do it because they're fucking racist. They've been spending the years since in a state of umbrage over this perception, of course, trying to make it off-limits to observe that someone's obviously in a racist snit.
The most irritating thing about umbrage-trawling is that people who do it invariably say, "We should be talking about the issues instead!", with "the issues" always being something other than the discourse they're trying to silence. Booker was again a comically outrageous version of that, suggesting as he did that a presidential candidate's resume was irrelevant to the campaign.
Personally, I think we'd all be better off erring on the side of "go ahead and say it". It seems to me that actually dealing with the issues works out pretty well, especially if you're in the right. Ceding territory to the Umbrage Police is far more beneficial to Republicans, because they don't want to talk about things like their fundamentalist faith, their ugly political histories, their devotion to outdated gender norms. Meanwhile, having someone say something vile and dishonest often says more about them than about you, especially if your response---as Obama has demonstrated before---is to actually deal with the content of the political attacks, instead of crying foul. A little more fearlessness would, I believe, make politics more attractive to more citizens, and help increase turnout at the polls. Which again is something we know helps the Democrats.
*Marc and I shotgunned all five episodes of "Veep" last night, making this sort of shit even funnier.
Reading Twitter reactions to Mad Men last night, I got the impression that a lot of people thought it was a strange episode that just crammed a lot of storylines together in order to ramp up for the next few episodes that close this season down. I agree that there was certainly table-setting going on, but somehow the episode also managed to be a meditation on the theme of desire. In this video, we explore all the ways that people convince themselves that they can truly be satisfied, and how each fails us in the end. I don't spare my criticisms for faith, which is just as bad---if not worse---in offering itself as the solution to your internal hunger than even the material goods that marketers peddle.
Whilst out having drinks with a friend the other night, I found myself launching a theory of Mad Men, which he hadn't yet seen, returning to form. (He waits until the end of each season, so he can devour the whole thing like a book.) My friend complained about the way the show had drifted away from really interrogating advertising as a concept and cultural phenomenon. I argued that while the past couple of seasons were immersed in the interpersonal drama, this season is really getting back to a fundamental investigation of advertising not just as a cultural phenomenon, but as a symbol of the inchoate yearnings of humanity. The Don/Megan relationship has returned us to the essential drama of Don Draper, which is that he is full of want, and that scares him.The reason he's such a good ad man is because he really gets, in his core, what makes people buy stuff, and it's these kind of never-fulfilled desires. Intellectually, he knows that lipstick and baked beans aren't actually going to silence the yearnings, but his ad campaigns have resonance, because on an emotional level, he truly believes that satisfaction is attainable. Because he believes, he can sell that illusion. That's why he gets the staff to buy into his Jaguar-will-save-us pitch, enough so that they don't seem miffed about having to miss Christmas to work.
The whiff of Eastern religion, culture and philosophy has hovered over this season, mostly I think because it became an interest in America, especially in the corridors of the cutting edge like New York City. (Interestingly, there was a nauseating ad for yet another "white people find themselves in the spiritual wholeness of India" movie during this episode, a dream that's set up---rightly---for vicious mockery inside the episode.) "Christmas Waltz" suggests that it was a result of American exposure to Eastern cultures in the most troubling way imaginable: war. Roger gets drunk and sets off on another ignorant rant about Japan on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor (this is when the anniversary's significance started to wane). Megan and Don go see "America Hurrah", which is an anti-Vietnam War play, though it angers Don mostly because he didn't like its criticism of materialism.* This stuff occupies the same episode as a satirical, but surprisingly moving, bit about Hare Krishna. I get the sense that the writers find Eastern exoticism irritating like I do, for roughly all the same reasons: It collapses the divergent cultures into one big mass, it romanticizes and objectifies, and of course, it's inseperable from the imperialist urge that "America Hurrah" critiques.
But it's not like the show is saying, "Eastern philosophy, give me a break," even as it mocks Americans who try to be "interesting" by grabbing at the cultures of the East. The hints of Buddhism that have drifted to the surface have been interesting(previous episodes have hinted at the Tibetean Book of the Dead), because of course, Mad Men struggles with exactly the same themes that dominate Buddhism: desire, suffering, delusion. There's a dialogue there, but my sense so far is that Mad Men rejects the central tenet of Buddhism, which is that it's possible to extract yourself from the cycle of wanting-grabbing-getting-wanting through "enlightenment". In this episode, religion is posited as just another thing we use to delude ourselves into believing we can finally reach bliss, but in the morning, we wake up and the wanting begins again. Enlightenment is a lie; Roger thinks he has it, but it slips away. The Hare Krishnas pretend that they're in a state of bliss while chanting, but Harry is just experiencing the ramp-up of desire.
But perhaps that's okay. I always wondered what it is that we're supposed to do with our time if we ever really do get past wanting, either by having everything we want (the traditional Western answer) or by eliminating desire and reaching nirvana (Buddhist solution). A state past wanting and striving and achieving moments of bliss before wanting again? Always sounded boring to me. To live is to seek. The only real way to cope with this is to accept that the journey is the destination. I'd even argue that Megan's career change is unsettling to the others for just that purpose, since acting by its nature is an endless journey. Not just because there's always the next part to strive for, but because story-telling itself is about desire and striving. People who want for nothing don't make good characters. Acting---creating in general---is giving yourself over to the process, knowing that there will never be that final success that allows you to take a bow and step off the stage forever. And why would you want to, anyway? Death is coming for all of us soon enough, and that's when the wanting will end.**
In this episode, peddlers of religion and capitalists pushing goods are framed in the same way: Telling stories of desires satiated to get you to give them money and power. I don't know about you, but the advertisers come across as the better people, however. At least they don't tell you they can fix your soul.
*Also worth pointing out that he didn't like how blunt it was. A lot of people have complained that Mad Men is losing its subtlety this season, a complaint we can imagine Don approving of. But the show itself suggests that one of the cultural shifts that happened in the 60s was from this kind of soft-and-subtle aesthetic that Don adores to the "sock it to me!" mentality. Don's a fan of doing ads that worm their way into your soul through insinuation---remember him dripping with disdain for Peggy's "sex sells" mentality in an earlier season?---but even he has to admit that throwing snowballs at cops is a more suitable aesthetic for the times. You know, when people were letting it all hang out. I'm not surprised the show is shifting its aesthetic approach in light of this. It's certainly been effective for making it feel more mid-to-late 60s than earlier seasons.
**Of course, if you believe in reincarnation, that throws a wrench into this whole philosophy.
This week's Panda Party, I predict some kind of tribute to Donna Summer. It wasn't just that she was the Queen of Disco, but also that she was part of a larger effort to use disco to push the boundaries of what could be done with pop music. Such as with the notoriously sexy "Love to Love You Baby".
But it was "I Feel Love" that was largely credited as the song that helped push dance music to the next level, inspiring the explosion of genres and genre-bending that led to techno, Hi-NRG, and house, and all the forms that spun out from there. David Bowie tells a story about that song:
One day in Berlin ... Eno came running in and said, 'I have heard the sound of the future.' ... he puts on 'I Feel Love', by Donna Summer ... He said, 'This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years.' Which was more or less right.
He wrote that in 1989,and really, the influence continued further.
Let's celebrate all things pop music in today's Panda Party!
There's a number of reasons that we're experiencing our current bout of right wing extremism taking over the Republican Party, causing them to primary anyone who is seen in public with a Democrat and pushing them to do things like, oh, side with people who think it's just awful that women leave husbands who beat them. Having a Democrat in office who is also the first black President is right at the top of the list, of course, but it's also just the changing face of America in general that is causing the surge of "take our country back!" sentiment. If you ever wonder what that means---specifically "from who?"---well, these statistics that were released today might be illuminating.
After years of speculation, estimates and projections, the Census Bureau has made it official: White births are no longer a majority in the United States.
Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 percent of all births in the 12-month period that ended last July, according to Census Bureau data made public on Thursday, while minorities — including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race — reached 50.4 percent, representing a majority for the first time in the country’s history.
The rational, non-racist reaction to this news is to say, "Huh," and then go about your day. Not that there aren't ramifications for this sort of thing, but mostly they stem from how racist our country continues to be. If we could get our heads straight about this, demographic changes would by and large not be a big deal, but just evidence of the fascinating evolution of American society.
The declining white majority is, I suspect, one of the reasons that conservatives are flipping out, trying to shut down practically all government spending, and even attacking women's rights. The government spending issue---as well as health care reform---is the most direct response to all this. Knowing that the benefits of American citizenship are increasingly being shared with non-white people is causing a massive "shut 'er down!" approach. Privatization of everything may be less efficient and more expensive, but it also makes it easier to shut people out.
Interestingly, I also think the dramatic focus on taking away women's rights is also the result of this, at least in part. The escalating attacks on contraception, for instance, are fed by right wing myth-making about how white women are abandoning their God-given duty to marry young and get to baby-making, instead choosing to have casual sex and pursue careers that put them in competition for jobs that used to be male-only. I think it's hard for liberals to see it, because we're really used to siloing our issues, but that outrageous attacks on Sandra Fluke for speaking out about contraception and the barely-concealed racist fears and furies spring from the same well. This isn't even just an argument that's made through dog whistles and insinuation, even. The favorite way for conservatives to talk about this is to make dark claims that the liberalism and feminism of Europe is going to destroy it because there's so many Muslims now. They expect you're smart enough to see how those arguments translate when it comes to American demographics.
This article only came out this morning, so I haven't seen any direct conservative responses yet. But I imagine it's just a matter of time.
The abuser lobby, which ridiculously calls itself the "men's rights movement", was handed a massive victory today by the Republican-controlled House, who passed a watered down version of the Violence Against Women Act. Prior to this year, even Republicans by and large felt that tacitly endorsing moderate levels of wife-beating was a bridge too far, but since their new motto is, "Bitches: Fuck 'Em", I suppose this sort of thing was inevitable. Right Wing Watch has a piece up about the lobbyists who influenced this vote. These lobbyists, led by the anti-victim group Concerned Women for America, is a real cadre of hateful people. The coalition released a letter supporting the watered-down bill, and it was signed by a rather notorious wife-beater who ran for office by claiming his ex-wife endorsed him, which she did not. There's also a group that represents men who purchase mail order brides. They're concerned that the bill would allow women who have been secured through their services to divorce husbands who beat them without being deported. (A favorite tactic of abusers is to marry immigrants, often secured through these services, and then terrorize them with the threat of deportation if they don't take their beatings like good girls.) These are the people that the Republicans are listening to.
The letter itself is some odious shit, the typical vile conservative beliefs tidied up in euphemistic language:
There is no denying the very real problem of violence against women and children. However, the programs promoted in VAWA are harmful for families. VAWA often encourages the demise of the family as a means to eliminate violence.
Emphasis mine. That sentence is a polite expression of the belief that's widespread in MRA circles and the Christian right that domestic violence is primarily the victim's fault, usually for being insufficiently subservient to her husband or partner. The theory is that the solution for domestic violence is to encourage victims to stay with their abusers and just work harder on the marriage, usually by trying to be even more placating. I mean, this sentence is offensive on its face---they take it as a given that there's something wrong with helping women get out of abusive relationships---but if you understand the ideology behind it, it gets uglier. It's reflective, in fact, of what the wife-beater/Republican politician Timothy Johnson told the police when he was arrested for beating his wife in 1996.
Timothy Johnson told the officers, according to their report, “I admit it. I hit her, that's the only way I can get her attention.”
There's a tendency, I think, to believe that the only people who buy the excuses of abusers are the abusers themselves, and some times the victims. In reality, there's a well-organized ideology in play here, as well, and it's promoted by conservative groups and churches across the country.
Then there's this:
Further, this legislation continues to use overly broad definitions of domestic violence. These broad definitions actually squander the resources for victims of actual violence by failing to properly prioritize and assess victims. Victims who can show physical evidence of abuse should be our primary focus.
Which is a euphemistic endorsement of the belief that moderate smacking of a woman around is okay, as long as you don't leave visible marks. This isn't just about law enforcement, where there's a reason to believe that yes, there has to be sufficient evidence to convict someone. This is also about victim resources; they want to cut women off from getting social services to leave abusive husbands unless they're getting abused "enough". Of course, part of the problem here that most abusers escalate over time, and the guy who is "merely" slapping you and pushing you and holding you down today is the one breaking your nose or worse murdering you tomorrow, if you don't get out.
Environmentalists have this image as people who care more about trees and flowers than they do actual people. I remember in the 90s, this stereotype was exploited in a battle to preserve the spotted owl, where environmentalists were portrayed as people willing to destroy jobs and people's livelihoods rather than hurt an endangered species. The reality, however, is much different. In reality, the species that environmentalism is most concerned with is actually homo sapiens, who need a healthy planet in order to keep living.
The NY Timeshas a remarkable article today that shows how true that is. The article is about a town called Treece in Kansas that is basically being erased from the face of the planet because mining operations in the town created so much toxicity that it's unliveable. Town residents were given money by the EPA to leave---though not enough, causing one couple to stay behind because the buyout wasn't enough to help them start a new life---and demollishing crews have come in to level the abandoned buildings so they aren't used to fire up meth labs. The state has basically ended the official status of the town, removing it from maps and taking down the signs. There were vague plans of turning the area into a wildlife refuge of sorts after it was cleaned up, but those have been abandoned because clean-up doesn't seem possible. The details in this story are disturbing:
A local couple, Dennis and Ella Johnston, agreed to give me the pollution tour. In Dennis’s blue Chevy truck, we drove through downtown — a church, trailers, a one-room City Hall with a pair of its windows boarded up — and then went down a dirt road to a pool formed by a caved-in mine. “Local kids used to skinny-dip here all the time,” Dennis said, grinning and pointing at the glassy water. “We’d see kids with sunburns all over their bodies.” But it turns out the kids hadn’t been burned by the sun, he said; they had been chemically burned by all the acids in the water.
There's a strong tendency in people, and it seems especially in Americans, to see ourselves as somehow not part of nature. We forget that we're animals, and believe that our technological prowess has allowed us to escape the basic biological needs that come with our animal nature. But stories like this show how much that delusion traps us and puts us in these horrible situations. Especially with conservatives, there's an ideological commitment to the idea that humans only benefit when we suck all the life out of the earth that we can. Christian conservatives double down on this belief, assuming that the only real problem with careless use of resources is that we'd run out, and they think God is on hand to rapture us before we have to face the consequences. What stories like this show is that bad management of the environment isn't something that we pay for down the road, but something we pay for in the here and now.
Gay marriage opponents often take pains to claim that it's not that they're against gay people---how dare you say that!---but that they just want to protect "traditional marriage". This story is implausible on its surface, of course. They've accepted many changes to marriage law, such as legal divorce. Plus, if "that's the way we've always done it" was a real argument, they should also resist everything from the computer to the automobile, which have changed society in ways that affect them directly far more than gay marriage could.
But even beyond that, you have direct evidence that opposition to gay marriage is part of a larger belief that gay people should face formal discrimination for housing, health care, and employment, to punish them for being different. "Traditional marriage" is being used as a cover to advocate for discrimination against people just because they're gay. See Bob Marshall, a GOP legislator in Virginia who is really, really obsessed with people who aren't having sex with him, and he fears are having too much fun. He's backed legislation to punish those sex-having ladies, and now on the grounds of their sexy, sexy gay relationships.
Virginia state Del. Bob Marshall (R) has launched an effort to block an openly gay judge from being considered for a post on a general district court.
Marshall said he believes that Tracy Thorne-Begland, a Richmond-based prosecutor who lives with his partner and two adopted children, should be removed from the list of potential appointees. Thorne-Begland's sexual orientation would conflict with his ability to hold up the state's constitution, Marshall said.
"Marriage is between one man and one woman, and the the applicant has represented himself in public in a relationship that we don't recognize in Virginia," Marshall said in an interview with WRIC, the ABC affiliate in Richmond.
So there you have it: Banning gay marriage is really about putting gay people into a formal second class that can be barred from certain jobs, and I'm sure if Marshall had his way, pretty much all jobs.
The underlying assumption of this argument is that a minimum requirement for judges is that they can't be in a public relationship that isn't recognized by the state. Marshall would like you to believe this is a criteria that's always been around and is just now being abandoned, but as far as I can tell, the "judges must be in legally recognized public relationships" is a brand-spanking new requirement. It would also mean that any straight judge who is dating someone would also be barred from the bench, since they're in a public relationship that isn't marriage. One also wonders if Marshall would make this a retroactive requirement, meaning that even if a judge is married now, if they dated their spouse prior to the marriage, they should be barred from the bench. He is an anti-sex fanatic---he backed the "personhood" bill that would basically classify all sexually active straight women of reproductive age as "pregnant", barring them from wide swaths of medical care and certain kinds of employment just because they touch penises---so I wouldn't be surprised. Take this train of thought to its logical conclusion, and if you've ever been alone with another person not a relative, we have to assume you've had sex outside of a legallly recognized relationship and shouldn't ever be considered for the bench. This niftily eliminates 100% of candidates, allowing wingnutty legislatures to pass any kind of hateful law they want with no check on it, but I'm sure that benefit is just a bonus for Bob Marshall.
Had some folks asking, and now I can finally say yes, I saw "The Avengers" on Friday night. And yes, I liked it. I like to tweak the noses of fanboys who brook not even the mildest criticism of their heroes, but I'm sure regular readers know I'm a big lover of Sir Whedon, and thought he managed the impossible: A coherent movie based on all these characters from other movies that still had enough action to make big overseas box office. It's a miracle, really, even if personally speaking, I thought "Cabin in the Woods" was a whole lot better.
My biggest complaint with the movie was casting. Not all of it, just I really thought Scarlett Johansson and Mark Ruffalo dragged the whole thing down with their wooden performances. Which is a shame, because the Hulk is fun* and Black Widow, upon reflection, was the best written part in the movie. I know Whedon fought hard to keep that character in the flick, and the reasons he gives for these things are admirably ideological---he hates the sexism of geek culture---but I also can't help but imagine he's thinking like a writer. Which is to say, he knows what he's good at, and in trying something new, he wants to bring his A game. And he's really good at writing female characters. That's not just ideology, but something that he just excels at. Talent is a bit of a mystery that way.
Anyway, point being, the first thing my friends and I talked about as we left was recasting Black Widow with someone who has not just beauty, of which Johansson's is legendary, but charisma and can act. Because it was clear to me that if the right actress had been in that role, the fact that Black Widow is the hero of the movie would have been more obvious. She certainly has the most layers of any character, besides perhaps Tony Stark. I can see why some audience members didn't really grasp her importance as a character because of this. You go to action movies expecting to sit back and be taken for a ride, and calculations like, "This character is well-written but poorly acted" aren't something you get into.
But there's no excuse for movie critics making the same mistake. Which is why I was really sad to see this round-up of male movie critics who downplayed, ignored, or otherwise minimized Black Widow's role in the movie. The character has, from what I recall, more separate individual actions that lead to victory than any other character, with Tony following right behind her, and yet, well, I can't state it better:
Writing in The Guardian, Henry Barnes noticed Black Widow but could not be bothered to isolate just what she did in the film. The New York Post’s Kyle Smith dreamed of a Black Widow who would perform one errand and and then be gone.
The New York Daily News’ Joe Neimaier admitted that Black Widow “kickstarts” things, but by deleting her from the rest of his coverage, implied that was that. Still, that was a lavishment compared with the treatment by A.O. Scott, who in his New York Times review found it beneath himself to even give Black Widow a job description, while The Globe and Mail went with “token sexy female,” clearly hoping only young boys and people who hadn’t seen the film were reading.
Meanwhile, in The Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern claimed Black Widow “spends lots of time looking puzzled or confused,” while Steven Rea's Philadelphia Inquirer review dispensed with Black Widow’s name, suggesting we “watch Scarlett Johansson clench her brow” while in “Ninja garb.” The Miami Herald’s Rene Rodriguez wasn’t as generous—his single sentence also accused Johansson of playing dress-up, but, perhaps mercifully, did not specify what in.
That last one hurts the most, because there's no more blatant sexism than sneering at a woman for playing "dress-up" in a movie where the men around her are dressed in tights and robot costumes. The belief that superhero movies are a No Girls Allowed zone couldn't be more obvious.
It seems to be part of a mini-trend of some men throwing a fit over the very idea that women might have a role in fiction besides decorative objects and damsels in distress. You had Lee Aronsohn treating a small uptick in female roles like it was the beginning of a horrific gynocracy. And of course, there's the over-the-top reaction to "Girls" and Lena Dunham. Outside of reasonable complaints about yet another show lacking in racial diversity when it would have been easy to make it diverse, most of the criticism of Dunham has a strong grasping-at-straws quality to it. Gawker especially has been humping the insinuation that the show only got on air---wait for it---because women's stories are like a freak show to attract lookee-lous. Anything but accept that it could be that the show is good. Apparently, we were supposed to just know that cringe comedy is a man's territory, and Gawker is terribly, terribly offended that women think they get to be in the club. I mean, look at the illustration they came up with:
The implication couldn't be more clear: Merely having to endure a woman's point of view is for men just as unsettling and oppressive as being adrift in a male-dominated world is for women.** Sure, women have to live in a world that values them less, and where that means they get an extra dose of humilation and bullshit just for being female. But man, that's nothing compared to the misery of a hip dude having to think about women's experiences from women's point of view. Ugh, I mean, really, could you stuff a cock in it already?
I think it's all about sex, which is why the reaction to "Girls" is the ugliest example of this. Cringe comedy is a "man's" genre because so much of it relies on laughing at bodies. Men laughing at their own bodies and at women's bodies, and especially at the sexual desires emanating from them and the awkward and often futile ways we try to satisfy those bodies. If women adopt this comedy form, then that puts women in a position where we're not only laughing at ourselves, but at men. Turning the tables in this way makes a lot of men deeply uncomfortable. I've often seen that this kind of sexism in pop culture gets its ugliest when a woman is in a position to say that men are only human, and let men know that we look at them in the same way they look at us. That is the great cultural taboo, and "Girls" is breaking it, and reaction is fierce.
I think the same underlying urges are why there's such heavy guarding of the superhero genre from a female presence. It's just coming at it from another direction. If cringe comedy is about looking at human bodies as comically frail, superhero movies are about projecting fantasies of strength. But as long as the fantasy is male-only, fans can sort of convince themselves that it's something more than just a fantasy, because the strength of the male superheroes is seen as just an extrapolation of men's supposed physical superiority over women. If you put a female superhero in the mix and have her body performing the same unreal feats, it's a lot more obvious that it's just a fantasy. In fact, neither men nor women are superbeings. The notion that men are closer and therefore more plausible as superheroes is just ridiculous. We are reminded by the presence of female superheroes that we're all actually just human. Which provokes a lot of men into discomfort, this realization that actually they're just deteriorating sacks of muscle and bone, just like women.
Anyway, it's all very annoying and I wish people would cut it out. Let women have our comedy and our superhero fantasies without demanding that it become an existential crisis for men who have had these things all along.
*In my ideal world, it would be Brad Pitt, who does somber-to-maniacal really well. I realize that's unattainable, but still, a million actors are better the Ruffalo.
**For those who don't know what I'm talking about, "Exile in Guyville" is a seminal album from Liz Phair where all the songs were held together loosely by the common theme of what it's like to be female in a world where men have more social power, which they wield in ways both overt and subtle, leaving women feeling a nervous and a confused, and often angry.
Looking around at reviews, I get the general impression that the feeling about last night's episode is it's a B episode in an A season. Which is okay; there's been so much intensity this season in some episodes that lighter---and dare I say more soapy?---episodes help relieve pressure. But really examining the take Marc and I had versus other critics, I realize this episode was far denser than it initially appears. Most recaps I've seen so far focus on how the episode was tying up loose ends, but Marc and I, as you'll see in the video, mostly focus on the future. This episode was tons of set-up for future payoffs. Some of that set-up, we suspect, was perceived by the audience as mostly background stuff.
As "The Orange Couch" has gone on, one of our goals has been to really explore as many of the allusions and the historical and artistic context the show draws on. Which, in prep for the show, usually means just trying to decipher where the title comes from and learning about that reference. That hasn't been too hard generally; we know who Shirley Temple is and I've read a lot of Sylvia Plath. But in the lead-up to this, I realized I didn't actually know much about "Dark Shadows". The movie looks wretched,* but it turns out that the original series is streaming on Netflix. So I fired it up, figuring I'd start in the second season when things got good (which is actually where Netflix starts the series at all), and that I'd take in a couple of episodes to get a feel for it. What happened instead is a bit of a "Dark Shadows" binge. That show rules. It's like eating candy. Deliciously campy candy, replete with silly vampire stuff and great 60s hair. It also meant we went into this episode with a much different mindset than most people, who were only comparing it to the rest of "Mad Men". Watching a bunch of DUM DUM DUM soapy stuff made the homage to soap operas in this episode so much fun.
I think soap operas tend to be viewed as "women's entertainment", and so their self-awareness and their skill at story-telling is discounted. (As well as their ability to churn out an astounding amount of product with limited resources.) But "Mad Men" actually owes a great debt to soap operas. To write a great soap opera, you have to be able to go a long time onscreen with "nothing" really happening---i.e., lots of relationship-building and table-setting, but no big plot twists---without boring your audience to death. As is suggested in this episode, one way soaps do that is with delightfully hammy acting, which "Mad Men" obviously has to shun. But mostly they do it by making you care about the characters so that their little dramas seem as important to you as they are to the characters. "Mad Men" takes this best part of soap operas and uses it to great effect. Soap operas love the drama of mundane family bullshit, and "Mad Men" smartly sees that's because supposedly mundane domestic concerns are actually the stuff of great drama. I'm glad they played tribute to their soapy elements. I mean, think about it! A mysterious and deceased ex-wife? That's some soap opera shit right there, even if the lesson the characters learn is that our secrets often only have as much power as we give them. The soap opera is a form that's basically dead---they're all getting cancelled in favor of reality TV and game shows---so maybe that's why it's finally okay to pay loving tribute to it.
Using "Dark Shadows" as a frame of reference allowed us to see the Michael storyline differently, as you'll see in the video, as well. Todd VanDerWerff describes Michael as the "villain" of the season, but if he is, he's a soap opera villain like Barnabas Collins. You root for him, because he shakes things up. Plus, Don has it coming, doesn't he? He's been such a genuine villain for so long, and he's never really paid for it. Maybe Michael is here to dispense a little cosmic justice. I have more thoughts on that in the video, plus we speculate about what's going on with Peggy.
Stray thoughts:
*Megan disses "Dark Shadows"! Clearly, she just hasn't seen it.
*When Peggy starts to talk about New Yorker cartoons, I immediately thought of, how a few years ago, there was a meme of recaptioning every New Yorker cartoon with "Christ, what an asshole". Example:
And sure enough, Michael immediately started to act like an asshole. A loveable, vampiric asshole. Coincidence? Is anything on this show?
Thoughts about this episode? About "Dark Shadows", or soap operas in general?
*By the way, it can't be a coincidence that this came out the same weekend as the movie released, can it be?
Sam at Skepchick has an AI up that I think is probably one of the most clear-cut examples I've seen in a long time of how framing an issue really suggests the answers. The post is about obesity and nutrition-related diseases like diabetes and heart disease, and he throws out these discussion questions:
Is obesity as big a problem as reported? If so, who should be held responsible for the country’s soaring obesity rates? Food industry? Government officials? Eaters? Which is more of a factor in the obesity trend/epidemic: lacking self-discipline, living in an environment that promotes unhealthy behaviors, video games/Internet? Obesity rates in children have tripled since 1980. How would you reverse this upward trajectory? Would you?
Emphasis mine. It's not just that it invokes an unfortunate either/or framework that makes this question a problem. It's that it introduces the concept of "sin" into a discussion about public health. I realize that Sam surely didn't intend it that way. It's telling that Christianity is so pervasive that its ideas even penetrate atheist circles. "Self-discipline" can't really be extracted meaningfully in this debate from the concept of sin and punishment. Under the sin framework, gluttony is a sin, and the only proper response to sin is punishment. Therefore, if you accept the "self-discipline" framework, there is no problem here. The overeaters are sinners, and their health problems are punishment for their sin. The system works, let's all go home. Indeed, you see this exact argument being trotted out in comments.
But if you reject this notion and instead view negative health effects of overeating as a public health problem to be solved, then the question of "self-discipline" becomes silly. Let's just say for the sake of argument that you accept this assumption, that people don't have self-discipline and that's why they overeat. If you're still interested in solving the problem, the response then becomes, "So what?" There's no real way to fix that problem with traditional finger-wagging, as thousands of years of scolding has so far proven ineffective. Leaving it be is also unacceptable, because real people are suffering and our health care systems are overextended. When you're engaging in problem-solving, it's best to start by looking at things you can control, and leave the discourse of sin and redemption to the wayside.
Incidentally, the sexual health debate suffers from the same problem. Even if you accept (which I don't) the premise that abstinence is inherently good, and that's what people "should" do, I have the same response: So what? You can say "should" until you're blue in the face, and people are still going to fuck. If you actually want to fix the problems of STD transmission and unintended pregnancy, you have to deal with people how they are, not how they "should" be. Same with food consumption and exercise. I guess people "should" exert often-extraordinary levels of self-discipline, but they don't, because they're human. Meet them where they are, not where they "should" be.
We can't fix people's impulse control, but we can fix their environments through collective action. Interestingly, we can fix their environments so that they are better able to exert self-control. Self-control is neither a fixed quality nor completely under (oh irony) our control. Research has shown that pretty much everyone's self-control diminishes when they're mentally exerting themselves or stressed out. Simple fixes that separate mental exertion from eating time could do a lot to reduce over-eating. If that's not possible, reducing temptation is always an option. Self-control is often only as strong as the environment it presents itself in. (Incidentally, I also reject the way that the sin framework around eating treats eating, which should be a source of pleasure. Demonizing eating is not the best approach here.)
What I would like is for public health discourse to simply get over this fetish for "personal responsibility". It's a red herring. First of all, it's not really a static quality you either have or you don't. Second of all, it's not something that's responsive to scolding, which is the only solution people who love to trot out "personal responsibility" will accept. If we actually give a shit about people and their health, then we have to look at what we can do and what we can fix. And that's the environment. Plus, there's piles of evidence that show people are incredibly adaptable to environments. If Americans had an environment that was more conducive to exercise and healthy eating, we'd do more of that. The only other possibility is that we're uniquely gluttonous as a people, and that's a little hard to really believe.
Days are getting warmer (in Texas, they're already hitting the 100s, though NYC still has cold snaps), flowers are coming out, and we're getting way more daylight during the day. And we're finally going to go see The Avengers! I know, I know. But I had to travel last weekend. My friends graciously waited until this weekend to see it with us, and we're all excited. For the occasion, I put together a mix disc of songs by so-called "supergroups". I don't want to give it all away to said loyal friends, but here's one totally unsurprising band on it.
By the way, have you seen this story about a Catholic school that forfeited a championship game rather than have their boys go up against a team with a girl on it? Between that and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops "investigating" the Girl Scouts, I think we can all agree that the ruse that the anti-contraception stuff isn't pure misogyny has been exposed. Unlike the Catholic management in this story, the bears in the above video have no problem with ladies throwing baseballs. I loved this quote from Nancy Hogshead-Makar, the senior director of advocacy for the Women's Sports Foundation:
"In real life, these boys are going to be competing against the girls for jobs, for positions in graduate programs or in trade schools," Hogshead-Makar said. "In every other area of their life, they are going to be competing side by side."
It appears that's exactly what the Catholic church thinks they can stomp out. They're going to fail.
Like music? Like Fridays? Like spring? Don't hate women? Come join us in the Panda Party! Listen to some tunes and maybe even play your own!
When asked by The Barna Group what words or phrases best describe Christianity, the top response among Americans ages 16-29 was “antihomosexual.” For a staggering 91 percent of non-Christians, this was the first word that came to their mind when asked about the Christian faith. The same was true for 80 percent of young churchgoers. (The next most common negative images? : “judgmental,” “hypocritical,” and “too involved in politics.”)
What makes this all the more fascinating is that the Barna Group is a pro-Christian research firm. They exist to provide data with an eye towards growing and strengthening Christianity. These aren't a bunch of rowdy atheists saying, "So there." Neither are, I would add, Jamelle or Rachel. Both are Christians and both are deeply disturbed this information, and by the results:
Later research, documented in Kinnaman’s You Lost Me, reveals that one of the top reasons 59 percent of young adults with a Christian background have left the church is because they perceive the church to be too exclusive, particularly regarding their LGBT friends. Eight million twenty-somethings have left the church, and this is one reason why.
Close to 60% of teenagers who go to church drop out after they leave the nest. Obviously, as an atheist, I can't see this as a bad thing. I appreciate that liberal Christians like Rachel and Jamelle find spiritual solace in having faith, but by and large, the historical purpose of religion is not to comfort but to control. Religion's primary function is, if you look at the whole of history, about creating rationales for unjust power hierarchies. Kings have used "god" as their excuse for absolute power, and religion is the primary reason that men in a diverse array of cultures over cite as the reason they should be the lords of their wives and daughters. Even liberal Christians are tied to the long history of power-grabbing through religion, using the language of submission and calling believers a "kingdom". When it comes to fighting against gay rights and feminism, the church is functioning as it was designed to do: Support existing power structures, guilt and shame people considered inferior, and demand the right to ultimate control. This fits in neatly with, oh, all of history.
It's also worth noting that situations like this undermine the religion apologist argument that states that morality comes from religion. It clearly doesn't. Instead, what you see is that people have an existing moral system and they evaluate their religion by it, rejecting the faith if it conflicts with their morality or embracing it if it's conducive to their morality. People whose moraly systems are built around establishing strict power hierarchies, and stomping out sex and other forms of pleasure they see as subversive, well, those folks fucking love religion. It's a self-perpetuating system, but one thing it absolutely demonstrates is moral decision-making isn't something granted us by religious power, but something we do for ourselves, based on input from a variety of sources, including internal ones.
Situations like this demonstrate, however, that while the appeal for many to most ardent believers in a faith is that it gives them power and control, that power is not, in fact, absolute. The church needs people in the pews to survive, and while those people are constantly told their role is to submit and obey, if they just decide they don't want to, the church is shown to be an emperor with no clothes. Thus, religion throughout history has had plenty of takebacks. The churches that used to preach segregation and white supremacy don't do so anymore, at least as openly. A lot of churches, especially more mainstream ones, are giving up on the argument that women are just support staff, and many are even letting them be ministers and priests. Either they get with the times on gay marriage, or they find their ability to exert power diminish. Since churches are about power, most of them will adjust over time. That's why they're freaking out now; they know what's coming.
In the meantime, every time a situation like this arises, where progressive change is demanded and churches resist mightily before giving in, a chunk of believers walks away, never to return. I think that's great. Good to see people realizing that in a fight between morality and faith, morality should win.
In the quick rush of responses to Obama's declaration that he does, in fact, support same-sex marriage, my favorite so far has been E.J. Graff's. She makes two very important points that liberals who want to pick this apart and find reasons to be unhappy with Obama need to consider. First, the notion that Obama isn't supporting his personal beliefs with policy is simply wrong. While he did the political thing and afffirmed the ridiculous claim that this is a state issue, his administration has, in fact, not acted in a way that suggests he really believes that. They support the end of DOMA, they don't enforce it, and they support a law that would end it. They believe, correctly, that it's unconstitutional. Outside of that, this isn't his fight. States either have to decide to legalize it or the courts will have to make them, but that's about it. Second of all, she powerfully puts down the liberal tendency to take statements like this as "just words" that don't mean anything:
There's something very deep about having your government declare you a stranger to its laws, defining your love as outside all respectable recognition. For my president to stand up and say that I should belong fully to my nation, that my wife and I should be considered as fully married as my brother and his wife—well, it reopens and washes out some very deeply incised sense of exclusion, a scar inflicted when, at age 15, I first panicked at the realization that I might be queer.
Words matter. Every action that changes the world started with someone saying or writing words, often lots and lots of words. The President is a moral leader as well as a legal one, and his opinion matters. Not everything in this world is a concrete object to hold on to or a material gain. Symbols matter. Words matter. Obama taking this stance sends the signal that no number of polls could, which is that supporting gay marriage is the mainstream position now. That will help get things moving in a policy way. Not directly, but by helping change the conversation, and making it harder for bigots to plea the moral high ground. In fact, as soon as this was announced, Shep Smith on Fox News straight up said that liberals have the moral high ground on this. Belief precedes policy. Don't ever forget that, even if doing so makes you feel like a rebel and iconoclast.
Gay marriage is always a strange issue for me, because I generally am not into marriage. I have no plans on it, ever, because I think it's a patriarchal institution that can't be rooted enough from its origins in the idea that one person can own another to be salvaged. Obviously, the continued success of egalitarian models of marriage challenges my belief to an extent, but the fact that divorce continues to be harder than it should be and the way that married couples are privileged over everyone else makes me circle back around to the idea that in order for marriage to truly be a good institution, it would have to change so much that it wouldn't look like marriage anymore.
But I also believe in love, and I believe a lot of people get married because they want to express that love, and I don't have a problem with that. I even like weddings! I was just in one! (Which meant getting asked a lot when I'm getting married, but you know, I've gotten better at saying, "I don't believe in marriage" in a cheery voice that makes it hard to argue.) More importantly, shutting a group of people out of a right such as marriage for no other reason than bigotry goes against every value I hold. It really is telling people that they're less-than for no real reason other than they're different from you. Like E.J. said, this sort of thing is fundamentally about hurting people by excluding them, and changing that matters. If I were gay, I don't think I'd want to be married any more than I do now. But I sure as shit wouldn't want to be told that I didn't deserve the right. It's also important to think about what kind of message support for gay marriage sends to gay youth; it lets them know that even if their immediate family or social circles don't accept them, the President does. And so do a lot of people. In fact, supporting them is mainstream. That's going to get a lot of sad kids through tough times. And that's reason enough to celebrate this.
I really enjoyed this article from Mary Elizabeth Williams about how the presence of the moral police who hide behind "the children" in politics makes the ordinary work of being a parent who takes responsibility for your own kids that much harder. Though I do some times wonder that even the well-meaning parental guidance stuff---people who don't want to censor but also try to monitor their own kids' input---is coming from really remembering what it was like to be a kid. I owned Thriller and She's So Unusual as a small kid, and knew all the lyrics by heart, even though both albums would have, if they came out after the PMRC situation, probably gotten stickered. Frankly, I had no clue or no real interest in what it meant to say "Billie Jean was not my lover" or what the pages of "Blue Boy" magazine were. I probably just thought it was a lot of nonsense lyrics, since, you know, rock has a lot of those. I don't imagine kids are any smarter now.
The one thing I wished Williams had emphasized, however, is that the gulf between the One Million Moms effort and individual parents deciding not to let their kids buy raunchy records (do kids even buy CDs anymore, though?) is far vaster than this article would have you believe. One Million Moms doesn't give a shit about "the children". "The children" are just a cover story for a larger agenda of forcing pop culture to be compliant with and propagandistic for a fundamentalist Christian worldview. Their most prominent crusade to date has been trying to get a fully clothed, family-friendly Ellen DeGeneres off the air, because the mere existence of lesbians offends them, and they want them all to go away. That doesn't have squat to do with "the children". Children don't look at a nice lady in a blazer and jeans and think about all the hot-and-dirty lesbian action she gets at home. No, that's their stupid parents whose sexual repression has completely thwarted their brains to the point where they can't think about anything but sex, and how delicious and sinful and tempting and dirty it is. The funny thing about not believing that sex is dirty is that sex ends up being less of an obsession. I mean, you're still an animal, but you get to the point where you're only thinking about it like half the time, instead of it ruling your every thought. I can look at DeGeneres without really giving much mind to what she's like in bed. It's totally possible, if you get over your ridiculous homophobia.
This is really critical, because pushing DeGeneres off the air has absolutely no relationship to the desire for explicit sex on cable TV to air a bit later in the evening, when your kids are in bed. The latter is just a totally different debate. People who are worried about kids stumbling across explicit sex or violence have a real argument. People who just want to use their children as a cover to impose their bigotry on the country are another breed altogether.
I will say that my personal experience, as a voracious reader and a curious kid in general when I was young, that I do find the emphasis on sex over violence when being worried about kids weird and often upsetting. I saw a lot of R-rated movies at ages that many parents would probably think were too young, and I definitely was reading adult books as young as 10 years old, books that had explicit descriptions of sex. Despite all this, I still only had a hazy idea of what sex was, beyond just knowing it's something adults liked to do that didn't appeal to me, like listening to adult contemporary music or wearing muted earth tones. (The 80s: That's all I'm saying.) Sex's main appeal was as a dramatic force; we had Barbie sleeping with Ken, but mainly so that other Barbie would get all jealous and angry. I wouldn't underestimate most kids' internal clocks on this subject is all I'm saying.
Violence, on the other hand, is something that I---and I suspect pretty much all kids---understood immediately and on a visceral level. Violent movies had an immediate and negative effect on me: nightmares. I'd be a lot more worried about kids seeing violence than seeing sex on TV, just for their own mental safety and wellbeing. But nearly all censorship or censorship lite attempts I see, well-meaning or not, focus way more on sex than violence. For the not-well-meaning people, I understand why. They're just assholes. I'm a little unclear why well-meaning parents fall into that trap as well.
I get the feeling that this episode is going to be controversial, but I love it. It's a classic example of how good "Mad Men" is about pulling the rug out from under your expectations, but doing so in a way that works really well. The title of the episode is "Lady Lazarus", which is one of Sylvia Plath's greatest poems, and is known as a suicide poem. But as we point out in the episode, they don't do anything so obvious as make the episode about suicide. No, it's actually smarter than that. It's like they actually bothered to read the piece they're referencing, and noticed that it's about not just death, but rebirth, of dying as part of living. Plath calls dying an "art" and a "calling" in the part we quote in the video, but there's another part of the poem that clearly inspired Megan's storyline here.
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
Is Megan rising? Does she eat men like air? I'm not so sure, but it's intriguing. The more obvious man-eater in this episode is Beth, who has some of Plath's traits: She's depressive and uses evocative imagery to capture her own self-pity. I'm not trying to be mean; I think that there's a place for self-pity, and anyway, bouts of intense self-pity are basically what depression is.
This episode also highlighted another great thing about "Mad Men" that other TV fails at: capturing ambivalence. Having characters suffer ambivalence is often fatal for TV, because viewers want clear roles for the characters: The Ambitious One, the Old-Fashioned One, the Ballsy One, the Sad One. We want to know what they want and see if they get it. But reality isn't like that. Most people carry more ambivalence with them than we're ready to admit. Don is sad this whole episode because he really doesn't know what he wants from Megan. Pete also doesn't know what he wants. Megan's decisiveness is discomforting because it exposes how much others don't have it. The key is to do what John Lennon says and try to go with the flow a bit, let that ambivalence sit and play out, just to see what happens. Don doesn't like that, but Pete is maybe a different story.
If we sound sympathetic to that little weasel Pete in this episode, well, we're aware of that. On the whole, I think he's a dick. And the first time I watched this episode, I was bleating the whole time about what a dick he is. But rewatching it while we wrote out The Orange Couch, it seemed way more ambiguous. It's incredibly telling that he wasn't blowing smoke up Beth's ass when he said he is listening. The bout of self-pity he expresses at Harry is annoying as hell---he's a well-off white guy who has clients coming to him and a wife that loves him!---but my anger was moderated by realizing that Pete is incredibly depressed. Depression makes it nearly impossible to see things clearly. And she is pulling his chain, so he's not entirely wrong about that. He's just wrong about his belief that he has to play along. And yet. And yet..... Well, watch the video. I think maybe he does have to play along, on some level.
Beyond just the riffs on Plath's surprisingly dense themes in "Lady Lazarus", I loved the Beatles stuff in this episode. They got it exactly right, which is why I think Weiner was lucky to pull off the amazing feat of getting the rights to use "Tomorrow Never Knows" in this episode. The behind-the-times people are just getting around to accepting the reality and implications of Beatlemania, but they don't realize that the Beatles have effectively put those days behind them. Don sitting on the couch, expecting to hear some teeny bopper tunes and hearing some psychedelic experimentation instead was just perfect. He already was annoyed that he doesn't get the Beatles, and he was thinking of the first incarnation. This new incarnation of them is beyond even his ability to know that he doesn't know what's going on. But what I really loved was that it wasn't some clunky condemnation of people who couldn't keep up with the changes in the 60s. There's a surprising amount of sympathy there, and I felt like I got a real understanding of how impossible it may have felt to be 40 (which isn't even that old!) and have everything changing on you so incredibly fast.
