Bill Maher. Why does that guy have a TV show? He’s not that funny nor insightful, and he’s racist and sexist to boot. Just because folks agree with his politics is not reason enough to give him a pass on that bullshit.

I’m going to risk the ire of fanboys everywhere - Niel Gaiman is a terrible novelist. Well, I suppose that he’s a competent novelist in that he can put enough words on the page to fill a novel.

Wish I could edit that to fanpersons.

Probably me, if i think about it.
Does it help if I use my privilege for good and not for evil?

@Sarah: But he’s a good comic/graphic novel writer. At least he has one real talent.

Find a list of the Republicans in Congress, take out the women, and just start scrolling down.

Maybe I’m stupid - but I don’t know who a lot of those are by theif picture - someone should put captions…

I kind of think this is looking at the wrong problem. How about “Underrated and Different” instead?

I was going to advance the controversial position that George Lucas was once pretty damn cool but now I have to defend Neil Gaiman? Not worth getting into massive nerd fight.

But germane to the topic, George Lucas’s wife Marcia is supposed to be the great unsung hero of Star Wars because she was not a white dude. She was the editor of the original film and did most of the actual directing as far as the actors were concerned while George worked on the special effects stuff.

(And by “Underrated and Different” I mean people who are denied a fair shake because of their minority/social status. B.D. Huang and Nancy Pelosi come to mind off the top of my head.)

And is the last guy Joseph Heller? Maybe a one trick pony but that’s one hell of a trick. As for Kerouac. Fuck Kerouac.

I am definitely an over-rated white dude. Also, who is that last guy?

It looks like Wallace Shawn in a wig and a utilikilt.

Someone’s been reading my erotic fiction again….

I could defend several dudes on that list, if I wanted to, but that’s not the point.

Ronald Reagan.

fuzzbone, they are Jack Kerouac, George Lucas, Billy Corrigan(whom Amanda despises with the blazing fury of a thousand supernovas), George Lucas, and Ralph Laurent, or, if you go by what’s on the birth certificate, Ralph Lifshitz.

Andrew Clay Dice

Brent Bozell

Grover Norquist

Bill O’Reilly

According to the file name, the last guy is either Ralph Lauren or some guy named Lauren.

I totally agree that they should label these folks with their names. They might be overrated but they’re not immediately identifiable.

While I like Elvis and the Beastie Boys, I think they made it big as being white where others who were black were doing much the same and not making it as big.

Hemingway.
David Foster Wallace
That Donohoe guy from the Catholic League
James Dobson/Pat Robertson(why is anything they say EVER news?)

Declaring obviously amazing musicians “overrated” in an attempt to shore up your coolness factor is so 1995, dude.  Get with the times.

Hmm…

That trick only works on people who are insecure about something

Brian, because it’s exponentially less fun writing captions for people who are awesome but underrated.

the last guy is Ralph Lauren.

Overrated doesn’t mean someone is talentless, just that they get rated out of proportion to their talent.

While I like Elvis and the Beastie Boys, I think they made it big as being white where others who were black were doing much the same and not making it as big.
Comment #18: nihilix on 09/15 at 04:47 PM

That’s a special kind of affirmative action, verging on the “dancing bear” territory.  It also points to the normalization of whiteness: it’s not so much that Elvis got more credit than the black artists from whom he drew inspiration, it’s that he got more credit among white audiences.

I was going to mention Rick Rubin in the same vein, except that I think Rubin really is pretty damned talented at what he does.

conversely, eminem (however objectionable his content may be) had to prove himself to black audiences for years before he got recognition as a real talent. at least that is how i perceived as a white guy.

Well, clearly you would know, elpathos. Excellent choice in a name, by the way—-few who are pathetic are so willing to own it.

John Elway

Kenny G

Certain touring bands:  Grateful Dead, Rush, Phish

Certain guys who can shred but can’t *play*:  Steve Vai being a good example for me

John Riggins

John Paul II (Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli is a very underrated white dude)

Stephen Hawking

Richard Dawkins (as a scientist, too)

John Travolta

JJ Abrams

Napoleon

Robert E Lee

Schwarzkopf

Robert L Forward (egads!)

Henry George

Jackson Pollock (not really so bad, but overrated)

dang, I got quite the long list.  Stopping now…

oh, did I forget Jerry Seinfield?

Ben Affleck

Peyton Manning

Neil Bush

JD Salinger although it’s probably not his fault that he’s overrated and was mitigated by him becoming a hermit. I can’t see that he set out to write a book that would become mandatory reading in high school, and how the first time teenage boys read the word Fuck in their assigned reading it made them feel like they were getting away with something and assigned deeper meaning to a novel about a self-centered little shit.

The Beasties and Eminem are both legitimately too innovative to really deserve to be shit on like this.  The Beastie Boys may not be the best rappers ever or anything, but the way they get around their limitations is actually really great—-like Meg White in the White Stripes.  It’s a peculiar kind of genius.

@shah8: i get pretty sick of the jackson pollock hate.

and i don’t really see the point of many people on your list. stephen hawking? napoleon?

i do feel like white quarterbacks and basketball players get automatic love from lots of white fans. i swear whenever i go to a basketball game at my alma mater i’m sitting by some fan whose favorite player is whoever the best white guy on our team is at that point.

white college football quarterbacks

Thomas Pynchon

We are talking about overrated, not bad, per se.

Also, white running backs.

Dr. Phil

Justice Frankfurter

F. Scott Fitzgerald (at least after writing the Great Gatsby)

Richard Posner

John Locke

Russell Crowe

Bill Maher (which someone mentioned above).

Billy Joel (FOR SURE)

On the other hand, I would defend the following that previous people mentioned:

Richard Dawkins (as a scientist only)

Stephen Hawking (what?)

Jackson Pollock

In fairness to the beastie boys, they made it big in rap before gangsta rap took over hip hop. While they’d never gain traction today, I don’t think it’s fair to judge them by contemporary standards. They staked out their own niche when that was still possible.

Matthew McCaunagheyIcan’tSpellYourNameand Don’tCaretoLookitUp

Elvis

The Grateful Dead

Quentin Tarantino (sorry, but yeah)

This may be mean given hsi health problems, but I always thought Steve Jobs was overrated.

the last guy is Ralph Lauren

Thanks for making my humiliation complete, Amanda.

How could I possibly forget Howard Stern?

Also Hugh Hefner

shah8, some good ones (oh man, Travolta), but others that make no sense. Hawking? Asshole, but overrated? Not really. Dawkins!? The guy has been one of the most influential popular science writers of the last forty years. And no, not “as a scientist, too.”

They’ve got privilege, but at least they’ve done legitimately great work.

And Napoleon? I just plain don’t understand where you’re coming from. I’ve got mostly negative things to say about the guy, but I’m having a really hard time understanding how he’s overrated.

It just seems like your list is “white guys I dislike,” which I think is a reasonable list to have, but not really to the point.

Come on, Dawkins got his ass handed to him by Gould, long-term.  More than that, most of the scientific ideas that I’m aware of (which he did in the 70s, btw) don’t wear well in the present day.

Stephen Hawking’s body of work, while impressive, is fundamentally evolutionary.  While it might be unfair to him to cite the marginality of the advances in what is a mature field, there are effin’ far too many brilliant minds who don’t get nearly enough credit.  I mean, hello?  Murray Gell-mann?  Then there are the revolutionary biologists pretty much since the early 1980s like Barbara McClintock!

It’s just easier to say Stephen Hawking, and much more important to say Hawking, even when there are even easier targets like Stephen Pinker.

Jackson Pollock, well, I suppose you can love him or hate him, but I think of him per his genre roughly as I would William Gibson to cyberpunk.  Important, sure, but the quality of the work itself isn’t *that* high…

Seth Rogen
Judd Apatow

Donald Trump.  I seriously still run into people who think he’s a business genius and a great contributor to society.

This may be mean given hsi health problems, but I always thought Steve Jobs was overrated.

I don’t think health problems makes it mean to say he’s overrated. I would argue against that, but wouldn’t suggest it wasn’t nice to say so.

Um, I think I should name a few.

Dane Cook.

The Pope. ANY Pope.

Jonathan Safran Foer.

AC/DC.

DAVE. FUCKING. MATTHEWS.

Gotta be Ronald Reagan.  Adobedragon @ #15 had it right.

Kevin Costner.  Seriously, who decided he could act?

Jim Jeffries.

Rivers Cuomo, definitely
and let the thunder cry “Seth McFarlane”, his whole career on Fox

Coppola, the Cohen brothers, Tarantino, Scorsese and a whole bunch of other directors who are completely reliant on spectacular violence in their movies.

Steve Jobs. I don’t know much about him, but he can’t be the God that the annoying apple fanboys make him out to be.

Robin Williams, least funny man alive.

Rogen, Apatow et al. Dude humor at it’s worst.

I was thinking of Napoleon as a general, and Napoleon generally was not very good at being a general once a certain size of force is reached.  Keep it smaller, and you can have Austerlitz, which was, of course, fucking awesome.  Do the huge-ass army into Russia?  Kinda sucks.  I also think it’s important to realize that there were other generals who were roughly as good as Napoleon, like Wellington.  That there were also roughly similarly innovative and unstoppable generals like Gustavus Adolphus not too far to Napoleon’s past.  Also, the majority of Napoleon’s victories were much like Mike Tyson’s early victories—against not-the-greatest-competition.

Ah, add General Patton to the overrated list

Well, I know that Gould and Dawkins disagreed on almost everything (except opposition to creationism), but I didn’t realize the consensus that Gould won? I found Dawkins pretty convincing (not necessarily in his micro-theories about particular evolutionary aspects of human beings and other species) but in the idea that the gene is the more useful unit to begin looking at evolution from, rather than the organism or, especially, the species.  Maybe I need to read some more Gould.

Holy shit, it’s like the “Hater’s Ball” of old rich white dudes.

Even the author doesn’t take himself seriously.  “Yeah, but what have you done for me lately?” over Bill Gates.  And ‘eff you all for hating on Christian Bale.  That guy is awesome, I don’t care what anyone says.

Jackson Pollock, well, I suppose you can love him or hate him, but I think of him per his genre roughly as I would William Gibson to cyberpunk.  Important, sure, but the quality of the work itself isn’t *that* high…

And now you people are going after Gibson?  Haters!  All of you!  Pack of freak’n haters!

Come on, Dawkins got his ass handed to him by Gould, long-term.

Horseshit. Gould had his own serious weak spots, like a tendency towards grandiosity and over-stating and over-selling his own ideas (and promoting them as revolutionary when they were not). He was a great scientific communicator, but often misrepresented the state of evolutionary theory as held by most workers in the field - such as his promotion of group selection as a major force in evolution, a view that most evolutionary biologists no longer have. Come to think of it, Gould might be much more of an overrated white guy than Dawkins is.

More than that, most of the scientific ideas that I’m aware of (which he did in the 70s, btw) don’t wear well in the present day.

This is simply wrong. Modern evolutionary biologists largely subscribe to the gene-centric view of natural selection. Many might not agree that the gene is the principal unit of selection, but the central importance of gene-level selection is broadly accepted. Likewise, Dawkins’ role as a critic of group selection in the 1960’s and 1970’s (the passage of time in no way invalidates his accomplishments as a scientist, by the way) was on the correct side of history, as group selection is considered to be important in only very limited circumstances by most evolutionary biologists working today.

Dawkins was far from the only person to have these ideas, and I don’t think he would claim otherwise. There’s lots of room to disagree with him (I have a dimmer view of adaptationism than he does), but history has largely born out the arguments he made in the 1970’s. The Selfish Gene remains a relevant, informative book.

Stephen Hawking’s body of work, while impressive, is fundamentally evolutionary.  While it might be unfair to him to cite the marginality of the advances in what is a mature field, there are effin’ far too many brilliant minds who don’t get nearly enough credit.

Fair argument, especially the last sentence; I don’t know much about what goes on in theoretical physics.

Then there are the revolutionary biologists pretty much since the early 1980s like Barbara McClintock!

I certainly won’t argue that there are a lot of great scientists who have been overlooked. Though you’ve got the decade wrong with McClintock - she discovered transposons in the 1950s. There’s no doubt that white male privilege helps people like Gould and Dawkins succeed and impedes people like McClintock, that doesn’t mean that they are overrated if they’ve made genuine contributions, and I think that Gould and Dawkins have; certainly, if Dawkins is overrated than Gould must be, since Dawkins’ views on evolution hold up better, in my humble opinion. The problem is when McClintock or Rosalind Frank or more modern women and/or non-white people in science are underrated because of their race or sex.

It’s perfectly logical

a)  Read William Gibson Mona Lisa Overdrive

b)  Read Pat Cadigan Dervish is Digital

Which one do you think will smash your head open and use it for a sauce pan?

Every white Republican male in a political office where he adversely affects the lives of others.  I don’t know their names, but I don’t have to.

Bono.

Bono bono bono bono bono bono bono bono bono.

Ricky Gervais and Russell Brand as well. Along with most other white British dudes who are popular in the states. I promise we have some that aren’t shit.

“Hawking? Asshole, but overrated? Not really.”

I’m behind the times on Hawking’s assholishness, would someone care to enlighten me?

Well, I know that Gould and Dawkins disagreed on almost everything (except opposition to creationism), but I didn’t realize the consensus that Gould won?

It’s not. There’s some give-and-take there, but reading a Dawkins book will give you a better idea of what evolutionary biologists think now; as you mentioned, there are ideas to criticize from him, too, but Dawkins is the more “modern” thinker in several ways.

Oh, shah8, I’m bummed that you left out Stephen Pinker - reason being that he acts as though he’s an expert in fucking everything, and people buy into it. Reading his pontifications about human evolution sets my teeth on edge. He’s an easy target, but isn’t that the point?

How can Steve Jobs not be overrated? He gets all the credit for what his team comes up with. He just vetoes it at the end. Steve Wozniak built the computer, and Xerox PARC pioneered the mouse.

Hmm, definitely an error about McClintock, but I strongly contest grolby‘s interpretation that evolutionary biologists favor the gene centered perspective in the sense made by Dawkin’s paradigm.  Modern evolutionary biology, especially if developmental biology is at all involved, has moved away from conflict narrative gene concept.  The very biggest reason is that phenotypes are usually collections of genes.  Expression is regulated by contingency rather than other genes, ultimately (contingency being moderated by DNA, RNA, Histo-crap, and various proteins).  In a sense, yes, it’s still gene centered, but in ways that are radically different from Dawkin’s conception of selfish replicators.  Materially, Dawkin’s rather reductionist approach, in my awareness, has been decisively rejected.

How can Steve Jobs not be overrated? He gets all the credit for what his team comes up with. He just vetoes it at the end. Steve Wozniak built the computer, and Xerox PARC pioneered the mouse.

Because leadership and vision matter. Woz wouldn’t have started a personal computer company, he just wanted to tinker. Xerox didn’t realize that they were sitting on a gold mine. Love him, hate him or indifferent, the guy has an uncanny ability to realize what people want in computers (before they know what they want) and what they can do for the world.

Sadly, Maow’s excellent diss track, “Very Missionary”, isn’t on YouTube, but I’m gonna throw in Eric Clapton as an overrated white dude. Technically capable? Absolutely. But his rockin’ is so very missionary, and that ain’t nearly good.

Alan Greenspan.

Bernie Madoff.

Ronald Reagan.

Con men benefit from white dudeliness more than anyone else.  It’s what allows them to con the white dudes who benefit in slightly smaller ways from their white dudeliness.

Definitely more a list of “White Dudes I Don’t Particularly Care For”

I mean yes, Seth Myers is pretty meh. Is they some great Seth Myers lobby I’m not aware of? As far as I knew the opinion on him was that there was no opinion. I’m pretty sure you have to be rated to be overrated.

Then you have Paul Simon and Chevy Chase, who, not only have I never heard anything good about them but I’ve never even heard anything neutral. It’s all bad, all the time.

I’ll second Gaiman, who I’ll defend as a competent writer, but he’s become something of the 800 lb gorilla of mythic urban fantasy.

And George R. R. Martin who’s not a hack but probably won’t lead to greater recognition for the dozens of women working in the same genre.

While we’re at it, H. P. Lovecraft who I can’t finish because he’s 10% awesome, 20% racism, and 70% tedium. (And why is Disney making a movie of the ur these guys need honky fantasy??)

J-Franz.

Hitchens.

Harold Bloom.

Wordsworth, IMO. I don’t get the harshing on Blake though; I’ve seen that on a couple of blogs now, and have to wonder how much Blake the haters have read.

Winston Churchill.  His only virtues were a knack for oratory, and being stubborn in a good cause.  The rest of his life was pretty much a series of disasters.

  I think that Jews should be excluded from the overrated white dude list simply because of the thousands of years of hatred exhibited towards the Jewish people. So even if a Jewish man, like Neil Gaiman or David Brooks, is undeservingly famous, you can’t really say that the world handed his fame to him on a silver platter. That doesn’t happen to Jews anymore than it happens to other minorities. This is a really big pet peeve of mine and a lot of people who know better make this mistake.

  My list would include much of the conservative commentariat like George Will and company. They aren’t very good writers, their opinions suck, and they give intellectual sophistication to bad ideas.

Treefinger:  yes on Bono, for sure.  U2 is probably the worst world famous band of all time.

Someone mentioned Dane Cook.  Dmitri Martin got old really quick too.  Also George Carlin and Sam Kennison come to mind.  ALL of the popular black comedians of their time were better.

God, yes, Harold Bloom.  You know why the man publishes mainstream?  Because nobody in the profession would believe his shit for one minute.

John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald.  A bunch of 3rd-rate hacks whom nobody would pay any attention to at all if we lived in a culture that properly valued the work of female and nonwhite writers.

C.S. Lewis.  Overrated proselytizing with a plot that makes no sense.  Also, “Don’t have dreams.  Have children instead”?  Go fuck yourself. 

Woody Allen.  I get it, NYC consists of wealthy white whiny Jewish men who want to fuck 20-something-year-old shiksas.  Fascinating.

Al Gore.  Oh, now you’re going to go all eco-liberal on us?  Where was that shit before?  And why did you concede so easily?

Steven Spielberg.  Jaws was amazing.  Is there a reason you haven’t made anything half as good, since?

My vote goes to Chuck Norris. Even before he got a meme all for himself, he was overrated as an action hero when people should have appreciated many others - Bruce Lee for example.

Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, and every other dudely actor from the 60’s and 70’s that has made a career out of pleying themselves with quotation marks around it.

</blockquote>I’m gonna throw in Eric Clapton as an overrated white dude. Technically capable? Absolutely. But his rockin’ is so very missionary, and that ain’t nearly good.</blockquote>

Seriously. It was years before I discovered that “slowhand” was meant as an ironic tribute. Boooooooorrrrrrring.

How can Steve Jobs not be overrated?

The blog is about overrated white people.  Steve Jobs is not white.

(He’s Syrian-American.)

I think sometimes the measure of a man is in his enemies:

The success of the novel was not free of controversy. Steinbeck’s New Deal political views, negative portrayal of aspects of capitalism, and sympathy for the plight of workers, led to a backlash against the author, especially close to home.[15] Claiming the book was both obscene and misrepresented conditions in the county, the Kern County Board of Supervisors banned the book from the county’s publicly funded schools and libraries in August 1939. This ban lasted until January 1941.[16]

Of the controversy, Steinbeck wrote, “The vilification of me out here from the large landowners and bankers is pretty bad. The latest is a rumor started by them that the Okies hate me and have threatened to kill me for lying about them. I’m frightened at the rolling might of this damned thing. It is completely out of hand; I mean a kind of hysteria about the book is growing that is not healthy.”

The film versions of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men (by two different movie studios) were in production simultaneously, allowing Steinbeck to spend a full day on the set of The Grapes of Wrath and the next day on the set of Of Mice and Men.

He might be thought of as a Gene Stratton Porter, a best-seller of his time only kept alive by assigning his work to adolescents, but there are other things to Steinbeck than his talent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_steinbeck

OTOT, if he had graduated from Stanford, I’m sure that would’ve led him to turn out overrated stuff.

Wallace Stegner, I think, is more apt.  I read one novel that he’d written in the mid-Sixties and it was a fucking soap opera compared to Steinbeck.

I have to agree with everyone about Steve Jobs.  I’m still surprised that he’s so completely oblivious that he named a product iPad.  This tells me one of two things: either there isn’t a single woman working for him or near him, or he’s such a tool that any woman working for him couldn’t even politely suggest that he google that word.  I mean, I know that “pad” can also be a stack of paper, but I have always heard the term “notepad” or “pad of paper” and never just “pad” to refer to that.

I also think Dave Matthews is completely overrated, and not just because I don’t personally enjoy his music.

Pretty much everybody on my high-school reading list.

I would rather be chewed to death by rats spouting libertarian catch-phrases than read Dickens again.

And Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles can choke to death on Martin Chuzzlefuck’s lambchops.

Frankly, any english novelist from the 17 and 1800’s. If every wiry, grease-stained hair on the walrus-maned faces of all the urchin-buggering gruel-merchants that trolled the streets of London for tuberculous prostitutes and stray crumbs was miraculously transubstantiated into random words found hidden in the crevices of the Oxford English Dictionary’s ball-sack, it would still be a more enticing read than any of the canonical literature from this period. I’ve been more entertained and delighted by piles of dandruff.

If we’re talking about Steinbeck being overrated as a novelist, then his talent and skill count for much more with me than his politics.  Much as I appreciate Steinbeck’s politics, his writings are tedious, poorly plotted, badly paced, melodramatic crap, and he was constitutionally incapable of writing a female character with more than two dimensions, or even character traits, if that many.  And I was forced to read several of those damn books.  It takes more than decent politics to make a worthwhile artist.

If we’re judging him as a political being, sure, I like him better, but come the 1960s, he was very publicly pro-Vietnam War, so it’s not even as though I feel good about his politics as a whole.

How could I possibly forget Howard Stern?

Hey now! I’m not a fan of his but I have friends who are and he had been a very pointed advocate for some pretty fierce liberal causes, if you can believe it. He’s super-in-the-corner of abortion rights, and recently, he had the Fox “psychologist” on, the one who claimed that Chaz Bono couldn’t be on dancing with the stars because he was going to infect all the little children watching it with his dirty trans germs, and Howard Stern ripped him a new asshole.

I don’t know that I would particularly have a lot to talk about with the guy, I’m not tuning into his show, but when someone in his position actually pushes back at the bullies when it would be the easiest fucking thing in the world to make shemale jokes (esp. with his audience), I gotta give respect to that.

I was going to say Pynchon as well, and saw someone else beat me to it - I assume he’s a white dude, but no one has ever seen him have they?

As for Kerouac and Pollock, depends on who’s rating them - it seems like they’re both either loved or hated depending on who you talk to.

  And I would like to thank EG01 at 73 for making my point for me: Come on, I was born in 1980 and during my life time millions of Jews were being persecuted in the Soviet Union for being Jewish. The other Eastern European countries were also persecuting what remained of their Jewish populations. My great-grandparents were driven from their homes because of riots and states-spsonsored hatred from the Russian and Ottoman Empire. Their children, my grandparents, couldn’t get into a lot of universities and were excluded from many other institutions and jobs because they were Jewish. My parents were the first Jewish generation not to face such overt discrimination. Yet, here we have people who should know better ignore thousands of years of violence and hatred towards and place us with white people in terms of privilege even though Jews never really had any privilege in America, in Europe, or in North Africa and Middle East.

  I’m really serious, Jews should not be put with White Christian people when it comes to underserved privilege. We’ve endured too much shit over the millennia for this to make any sense. We have been barred from owning land, restricted from most jobs, prevented from entering universities, restricted in where we can live (guess where the word ghetto comes from) and denied participation in the political process in Christian and Muslim societies for thousands of years. There have been riots and numerous attempts of mass murder against us. Yet because we do not have a distinct, easily identifiable appearance all of this doesn’t matter and we are treated as white by people who should know better. Will you stop ignoring the thousands of years of violence and hatred against and stop pretending its a thing of the past because its not and I can find numerous examples of Jew-hatred in modern times.

Much as I appreciate Steinbeck’s politics, his writings are tedious, poorly plotted, badly paced, melodramatic crap, and he was constitutionally incapable of writing a female character with more than two dimensions, or even character traits, if that many.

As I stated earlier, a latter-day Gene Stratton Porter, a best-seller whose time has come and gone.

And I was forced to read several of those damn books.  It takes more than decent politics to make a worthwhile artist.

Never said it did, or did you think my GSP reference was suppose to be complimentary?

If we’re judging him as a political being, sure, I like him better, but come the 1960s, he was very publicly pro-Vietnam War, so it’s not even as though I feel good about his politics as a whole

I didn’t say you had to.

Engu, you’d probably enjoy “The Beggars’ Opera”:

Gay wrote the work more as an anti-opera than an opera, one of its attractions to its 18th-century London public being its lampooning of the Italian opera style and the English public’s fascination with it.”[5][6] Instead of the grand music and themes of opera, the work uses familiar tunes and characters that were ordinary people. Some of the songs were by opera composers like Handel, but only the most popular of these were used. The audience could hum along with the music and identify with the characters. The story satirised politics, poverty and injustice, focusing on the theme of corruption at all levels of society. Lavinia Fenton, the first Polly Peachum, became an overnight success. Her pictures were in great demand, verses were written to her and books published about her. After appearing in several comedies, and then in numerous repetitions of The Beggars Opera, she ran away with her married lover, Charles Paulet, 3rd Duke of Bolton.[3]

Jasper Johns

I’m sure I could come up with many other white, male artists, but he sprang to mind.

  I realize that there are going to be some people reading my posts and thinking “yeah, well that is all in the past and now the Jews are rich and successful and no longer count as minorities.” To this I preemptively reply, “yeah just because we have rich and successful African-Americans and women doesn’t mean that we can ignore the millennia of persecution they endured.” This issue really gets to me.

Jesus

Mohammed

Osama bin Laden

Richard Wagner

Richard the Lionheart

And I would like to thank EG01 at 73 for making my point for me: Come on, I was born in 1980 and during my life time millions of Jews were being persecuted in the Soviet Union for being Jewish. The other Eastern European countries were also persecuting what remained of their Jewish populations. My great-grandparents were driven from their homes because of riots and states-spsonsored hatred from the Russian and Ottoman Empire. Their children, my grandparents, couldn’t get into a lot of universities and were excluded from many other institutions and jobs because they were Jewish. My parents were the first Jewish generation not to face such overt discrimination. Yet, here we have people who should know better ignore thousands of years of violence and hatred towards and place us with white people in terms of privilege even though Jews never really had any privilege in America, in Europe, or in North Africa and Middle East.

Well, I’m Jewish and I was born in 1976, so all that shit happened in my lifetime, too.  Doesn’t mean that I have to agree with you.  Doesn’t mean that I’m going to pretend that in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States, most Jews don’t have white privilege.  I look fairly overtly Jewish, but do you know what the average landlord sees when I go to rent an apartment?  A nice white woman, and I know this because I used to do tests for compliance with open housing laws, as did my mother when she was young.  The only time I ever had trouble getting a taxi cab in my home town?  When my then-boyfriend, a black man, was trying to hail it for me.  Jews have been persecuted for millennia, it’s true, but quite frankly, I think that comparing the sufferings endured by nice middle-class Jews in the US in the second half of the 20th century with what the Soviet Jews went through, or what my great-grandparents or even grandparents went through is absurd, not to say insulting.  My life chances were never abrogated by the fact of my being Jewish.  My parents’ life chances were never abrogated by the fact of them being Jewish.  Nor have the life chances of my Jewish friends or their Jewish friends. 

I’ve encountered some anti-semitism over the years—I think I can count the incidents on one hand, actually—and every single time, it has been about some random individual saying or doing something dickish that has no impact on my life at all, besides making me angry in the moment.  My parents have encountered some anti-semitism over the years—more than I have.  They’ve never encountered what, for instance, black people have to put up with day in, day out.

As for Woody Allen, he’s one in a long line of male Jewish comedians who buy mainstream acceptance by selling out Jewish women, so as far as I’m concerned, I owe him no loyalty for any reason whatsoever, and he can go fuck himself several times over.

Harold Bloom no doubt encountered quite a bit of anti-semitism in his younger days.  In the past few decades?  No.  In the past few decades he’s made his name by a) blathering unsupported dreck about how Shakespeare invented humanity (by which he means white men, of course—Hamlet and Falstaff, definitely not Othello and Mistress Page) and b) bitching about how all these dark people and women have ruined academia and the study of literature.  Not only is being Jewish not hindering him at all, but he is actually trading on his status as a white man in order to denigrate the rest of us.  So, you know, fuck him.

Steven Spielberg?  Let me check.  He’s in my parents’ generation, born in a city.  Spent some time in a New Jersey town that didn’t allow Jews prior to WW2.  That was probably difficult.  Says he got beat up a few times in high school.  Also sounds lousy.  And was one of the targets of a white supremacist terrorist plot.  All right.  Plus, while reading about him is more interesting than watching most of his movies, I kind of like him more having read more about his life.  So, if it will make you happy, Lee, I will take back Steven Spielberg, especially because Jaws is one of my favorite movies of all time, so I guess it’s OK with me if he coasts on that.

Nonetheless, in the past several decades, I don’t think that we Jews get to wave our hands all “Nothing to do with us, this white privilege thing!  We don’t benefit from racism at all!”  Because we do.  Look at who got the benefits of the GI Bill etc. after WW2 and who was still getting lynched.

Dark Avenger Guardian Chow Mein: All right, my misunderstanding.  I took what you wrote to be an argument for Steinbeck not being overrated.  I guess it was just…color commentary?

Tim Tebow seems obvious.

I’m also gonna say Bruce Springsteen.  Whatever kind of saving Rock and Roll needed in the mid ‘70s, his shit clearly wasn’t it.

It’s too broad, but a lot of Second City/National Lampoon stuff reeks of White Dude unexamined privelege.

Re Reagan:  Based on the snippets I’ve been hearing from Rick Perlstein, Reagan was grossly underestimated as a politician by our side (and continues to be).  When you consider that Nixon’s strategy was to co-opt Reagan’s style, it’s not hard to acknowledge his ability, however revolting its results.

I don’t consider Reagan overrated vis-a-vis his ability as a politician.  I consider him overrated vis-a-vis his status a decent human being who deserves admiration and/or respect.

Eg01:  Thanks for taking the time to write what I wanted to.  I might move the timing to a little more recently (for example, Carl Reiner’s career in the ‘60s would have been radically different if Jews were thought of as the same as any other White people [and yes, I recognize the minor contradiction by using that construction; Reiner’s career trajectory was still materially changed because he’s Jewish]), but certainly by 1980 it’s been like you said.

  EG01, yeah but thats freaking limiting the Jewish experience to America and freaking saying that what we endured doesn’t matter because we had it good America. Yet, overall during the same time, the Arab nations decided to kick out their Jews and the Soviet Union and other Eastern European states were waging really serious culture wars among what remained of their Jewish populations. And even in the United States, while Jews did not face the difficulties that African-Americans did, there were still lingering traces of hatred and discrimination against us. Also re Jews and lynching, see Leo Frank.

  So no, I don’t buy the Jews have white privilege argument. I think the evidence is clearly against this. I believe the attempts to say Jews have white privilege is simply away to hand wave away millennia of Jew hated and pretend it doesn’t matter because anti-Semitism isn’t seen as a sexy enough hatred to fight against. Its an excuse ot ignore Jew-hatred when it comes from sources other than White Christian men. This is something that I really feel passionate about, I am not going to have Jews placed with the persecutors when we ourselves were victims of some of the worst persecutions in history. Not a chance.

Honest question: Should we exclude people of Irish heritage and Catholics (and especially the intersection of the two)? Both groups faced discrimination up through the early part of the 20th century (Kennedy’s presidential win was a BFD in the same way that Obama’s was).

...of course not “the same way” - this isn’t Oppression Olympics.

You’re welcome, and I take your point, NY Expat.  Being a NYer myself (as was my mother and her mother before her and her mother before her), it’s likely that I date US acceptance of Jews as white as happening earlier than it may have happened in other parts of the country.  I mean, I wouldn’t make the argument that being Jewish is just like being a white gentile in this country, even today—I think being Jewish certainly inflects the way one experiences US culture and generates feelings of exclusion.  But being Jewish doesn’t negate white privilege, either. 

Honestly, the rhetoric that rings of anti-semitism most to me, in this day, age, and country, is the anti-abortion rhetoric—all that talk about evil baby-killing doctors, coupled with the killing of Barnett Slepian.  Though they killed George Tiller too, so I’m not necessarily convinced I’m right about that.  It just leaves an unpleasant taste in my mouth.

Honestly, I was expecting to see a sharp rise in anti-semitism with the recession—wicked Jewish bankers, you know—especially with the exposure of Madoff (I was watching news coverage of that with my father, and I remember putting my head in my hands and saying “Really, Madoff?  You had to go with the greedy, dishonest, cheating financier thing?  That’s what you decided would be a good idea?  Was it between that and killing some Christian babies or something?”).  The fact that there does not seem to have been a sharp spike in anti-semitism as a result of the recession and Madoff’s crimes is, I think, a good sign.

EG01, yeah but thats freaking limiting the Jewish experience to America and freaking saying that what we endured doesn’t matter because we had it good America. Yet, overall during the same time, the Arab nations decided to kick out their Jews and the Soviet Union and other Eastern European states were waging really serious culture wars among what remained of their Jewish populations. And even in the United States, while Jews did not face the difficulties that African-Americans did, there were still lingering traces of hatred and discrimination against us. Also re Jews and lynching, see Leo Frank.

Of course it’s limiting the Jewish experience to America (recent America)!  Bloom, Allen, and Spielberg exist in the context of recent America!  They did not have to struggle against the anti-semitic oppression of the Soviet Union or any of the Arab nations!  How would it make any sense at all to say “Woody Allen and Harold Bloom aren’t overrated white men, because if they had been living in the Soviet Union they would have been subject to intense persecution”?  They weren’t living in the Soviet Union, so they weren’t subject to Soviet persecution.  In the past some decades, “lingering traces of hatred and discrimination”?  Non-white people in this country would pay good money for “lingering traces of hatred and discrimination.” 

Frank was lynched in 1915.  What does that have to do with Jewish acceptance post-WW2?  I didn’t say that Jews were never lynched, or that Jews have always been welcomed as white by the US.  I said that in the second half of the twentieth century, Jews in the US have reaped the rewards of whiteness. 

I am not going to have Jews placed with the persecutors when we ourselves were victims of some of the worst persecutions in history.

It’s not an either/or situation.  It’s possible to be persecuted, and then to turn around and take advantage of a different group of people.  Not to mention, that’s not what it means to have white privilege.  It doesn’t mean you’re actively, purposefully, with malice aforethought, taking deliberate advantage of the less powerful.  It means accruing unseen benefits that others don’t get.

Though, quite frankly, Harold Bloom has deliberately allied himself with the persecutors; the fact that he’s Jewish doesn’t make that OK.  And Allen has channeled the worst of his internalized anti-semitism into misogyny directed most vehemently at Jewish women, which allies him with persecutors as well.  Spielberg seems like a decent fellow, all in all, though.

I mean, indeed, see Sarah’s question.  God knows the Irish, especially Irish Catholics have suffered intense persecution and oppression, for hundreds of years, and a significant amount of persecution and oppression took place in the US.  Does that mean that Bill Donohue, here and now, does not have white privilege?

SarahTX, i was just going to make that comment. Italians and Eastern Europeans of all stripes faced discrimination when they came to this country in the 1800’s and early 1900’s. Early Christians faced intense persecution a mere 2000 years ago too, should they be excluded from White privilege? Clearly, the post was framed around a Tumblr about white dudes who are overrated.  Given the medium, I think we can safely say the majority of the men included are still pop culture icons of some sort. And within that time frame? Yes, I think Ashkenazi Jews have some pretty solid White Privilege. If you wanted to do a Tumblr of overrated white dudes of 1900-1970, then I’m with you. But nowadays? No.
In short, I’m Jewish and I call bullshit on the idea that Jews in America don’t benefit from white privilege.

On the other extreme listing William Blake among the overrated constitutes a confession that you have no literary taste whatsoever and never will.

Well, sure, we could all chime in and defend our favorites.  I think Springsteen is amazing, and that Lewis Carroll is, in fact, underrated.  But, what the hell; I can take a joke.

They list off VanGogh, Ingmar Bergman, and Norman Mailer, and Woody snidely interjects “Why don’t you take a pickax to Mozart while you are at it.”

Why am I not surprised that Allen counts Norman Mailer as the equal of Mozart?

I have to disagree with Grover Norquist being overrated. True, he is an avatar of all that is wrong with the world, but he’s actually frighteningly good at his job. Scum, but hardly underrated.

As for Donald Trump, all I can say about him is that he’s good at making money and better at losing it. This is not a good quality for a businessman.

Oh, shah8, I’m bummed that you left out Stephen Pinker - reason being that he acts as though he’s an expert in fucking everything, and people buy into it. Reading his pontifications about human evolution sets my teeth on edge. He’s an easy target, but isn’t that the point?

Oh Pinker. The wife based her thesis on the Sapir-Worf theory of which Pinker is one of the main critics so she had to read Pinker. Every few hours I’d hear an Arrrrg! and the sound of a book hitting the wall.

Over rated pasty dudes… how about Edison?

“Really, Madoff?  You had to go with the greedy, dishonest, cheating financier thing?  That’s what you decided would be a good idea?  Was it between that and killing some Christian babies or something?”

You almost had me cracking up in the middle of the Empty Bottle with that one.

Okay, enough derail.  This topic seems like a pretty rich vein, even if you try to stay within the lines (overrated because of their White Dudeness).  How about: Any White Dude athlete described primarily as “scrappy”.  This allows us to exclude actually talented White Guys (Bird, Ripken, Brady), and keep the ones who should be eminently replaceable, where it not for their Magic White Pee-Pees.

Ricky Gervais again.  Watch “Funny People Talking” on HBO sometime.  Gervais put together Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Louis C K, and just had them talk, but included himself, so 3/4 of the time you’re fascinated, and then Gervais opens his mouth and you’re like “who the fuck is this guy?”

Steve Jobs isn’t overrated. He does have an outsize influence on personal computing. At the moment, his ability to select a technology or aesthetic and have it become an industry standard is almost uncanny. He doesn’t design or build things, but works as a curator or impressario, choosing and promoting things. You sometimes do get people like that: Lorenzo de Medici, Diana Vreeland, and Sergei Diaghilev.

I also wouldn’t underrate Ralph Lauren nee Lifshitz. He did the classic Jewish immigrant thing in the rag trade by selling the great WASP fantasy. A lot of Jews did that in Hollywood, creating a WASP fantasy America both to make money, but also as part of the assimilation process. (In England the Hungarian immigrants who created the screen glory of the British Empire.) I don’t think much of Ralph Lauren’s clothes or the fantasy he peddles, but I’ve always been impressed by his business sense. He’s one of the rag trade leaders and survivors.

A better approach would be to go down the list of the Fortune 500 and look for CEOs and other high level executives, most of whom were chosen for their skin color and sex. Now and then you’ll find someone who actually understands the business and how to make the right things happen, but it’s surprisingly rare, given the salaries and perks offered. The problem is that this wouldn’t get me any household names.

Granted, I’m out of touch with popular culture, so I’ve never understood the fuss about Neil Gaiman or Neal Stephenson. I find them unreadable. I’ve read some Thomas Pynchon, but he’s seriously overrated.  Pablo Picasso is also seriously overrated, and I’ll say that even though I actually like a lot of his stuff.

this isn’t Oppression Olympics.

Lee’s out in front!  He’s gonna win the Gold Medal!  Of course, no one else is running…

Get over yourself, Lee.  It’s called Overrated White Dudes, Not Juden Raus.

And Neil Gaiman is a Scientologist, which makes him double-fair game in my book.

And I can’t believe no one’s mentioned them yet:

Adam Carolla

Jay Leno

To be fair, I think that Gaiman was born into a high-ranking Scientologist family, but that he himself is not involved with the organization.  His dad, who has the same name, is highly placed, though.

You know what, Sour Kraut?  Cool it with the Juden Raus cracks.  The Holocaust happened, Germans and others sold out, tortured, and murdered their Jewish neighbors, it wasn’t that long ago, it was horrific, and it’s not cool to use its catchphrases as punchlines.

It was also a 1936 creepy board game: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/11102/juden-raus

(My favorite part of this entry about it on this board game website is the value given for “User-Suggested # of Players”: “Not best with any number.  Not recommended for any number.”)

In other overrated white men news: Adam Sandler (another Jew—when will my people’s shame be over!), David Spade, Sean Penn, and fucking Michel Foucault, who makes grand philosophical pronouncements based on sweeping generalizations about history that do not hold up to actual scrutiny, counts child molestation as just another kind of sexual quirk, and whose writing, in my opinion, is so dreadful that I have thrown more than one book of his across the room (and I believe he was gay, and therefore also a member of a persecuted group, but it does not make him any less of an Overrated White Dude).

Lee’s out in front!  He’s gonna win the Gold Medal!

Why you gotta talk about Jews being obsessed with gold, Kraut?

James Watson. Non-negotiable.

the guy has an uncanny ability to realize what people want in computers (before they know what they want) and what they can do for the world.

The design concepts he pioneered in the Apple //c and the original Macintosh were so far ahead of their time that they doubled back on themselves and were actually poor design for the era in which they were presented. He manages to hit on great ideas and concepts, but not always at the right time and before they’re fully feasible (NeXT, Lisa, Macintosh)... but sometimes he does hit on the right things at the right time (eg, his first few years at Apple, Pixar, and his second time around at Apple) because the technology is available to fully realize his vision.

I think Ralph Lauren is correctly rated. He’s not considered a fashion genius that everyone is proud to own the latest designs from, like a Tom Ford or an Alexander McQueen. He just managed to market an upscale WASP fantasy to the masses. And his clothes fit me correctly.

I knew this was going to devolve into Oppression Olympics the moment someone took this in any way seriously, including Amanda.

EG01 @113:  That brings to me an entirely new meaning to the phrase “German board game”

I really have to agree about Neil Gaiman. The Sandman series was brilliant, but apart from that… meh. Both his novels and other film projects I found predictable and uninspiring.

It seems like white dudes are for more likely to be given second, third, and fourth chances to come up with something good once they’ve produced ONE good thing. If a woman or a person of color (or other marginalized identity-possessing person) comes up with ONE good thing, then they’d better be able to keep it up forever, because if the next film after the smash runaway hit film is a flop, then that’s it. You’re washed up, no longer worth paying attention to.

All these commenters trying to explain to Lee the basic thesis of The Ghost Writer (“Mother, we were not the victims of that crime!”) reminds me that Philip Roth is possibly the most overrated living white guy. He’s a gifted novelist, but he keeps getting trotted out as The Greatest Living.

Surely if criticizing Woody Allen, who’s a critic of Jewish identity politics, shows that antisemitism (or insensitivity to antisemitism) is alive, criticizing EG01 does the same.

I don’t read French well enough to judge Foucault’s style, but I’d be surprised if he regarded child molestation as just another sexual quirk — I’ve never seen him argue that the fact that “child molestation” is a historically contingent crime means it’s okay. Sure you’re not conflating him with Camille Paglia?

Egnu, Every English novelist from the 17 and 1800s is not an overrated white guy. Fanny Burney, Amy Levy, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell, for example.

Honest question: Should we exclude people of Irish heritage and Catholics (and especially the intersection of the two)? Both groups faced discrimination up through the early part of the 20th century (Kennedy’s presidential win was a BFD in the same way that Obama’s was).

I’d argue no because they not only benefited from some White privilege, but also actively participated in many racial atrocities against African-Americans(1863 Draft Riots) and widespread brutalization and murdering of Chinese-Americans in the late 19th century American West (i.e. Dennis Kearney). 

Steven Spielberg.  Jaws was amazing.  Is there a reason you haven’t made anything half as good, since?

So in your mind Schindler’s List isn’t even half as good as Jaws? 

Never mind Close Encounters, Raiders, Last Crusade, ET,  Private Ryan, Jurrassic Park or motherfucking E.T.?

None are even half as good as Jaws?

Peyton Manning

Yup, the Colts sure didn’t miss him on Sunday.

BTW, how can Lucas be overrated?  Isn’t he pretty much universally hated for the prequels and his changes to the originals?  Don’t most people acknowledge that it was a combination of luck and other people’s work which made the originals so good?

How can someone who is disparaged be overrated?

Agg…blasphemed too soon. 

Interestingly, when one high school classmate’s US politics class ended up discussing the draft riots and the Kearney led killings of Chinese-Americans in the context of covering the Nativist political movements in the 19th century, one Irish-American TA made it a point to apologize for the actions of his ancestors to all African-American and Chinese-American students in that class because of the brutality of his ancestors’ conduct.

I knew this was going to devolve into Oppression Olympics the moment someone took this in any way seriously, including Amanda.

It was a fun thread about overrated white dudes until a hypersensitive poster apparently wandered over here from Jezebel or Feministing and started whining “WHAT ABOUT the OPPRESSION of my PEEEEEEEOPLE!!!”

All that’s left is for someone to use the word “lame” and it’ll be off to the races.

Joss Whedon.
Joss Whedon.
Joss Whedon.

Just want to note that Whiteness is not determined solely by skin color or ancestry, and the accepted idea of Whiteness changes with time.  Some books about this: 

How the Irish Became White
How Jews Became White Folks: And What That Says About Race in America
Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs

I don’t read French well enough to judge Foucault’s style, but I’d be surprised if he regarded child molestation as just another sexual quirk — I’ve never seen him argue that the fact that “child molestation” is a historically contingent crime means it’s okay. Sure you’re not conflating him with Camille Paglia?

Well, to be fair, I’m judging the stye in translation, so I shouldn’t, but the books’ styles are similar enough that I’m willing to tar him with the translator’s brush.

And yes, I’m positive it was him.  Hang on a minute, and I’ll see if I still have a copy of History of Sexuality somewhere.  Ok, I seem to have hung on to it, clearly purely out of my librarian heart, because God knows I have no interest in or use for it.  Page 31 of the 1990 Vintage Books edition: “One day in 1867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcourt, who was somewhat simple-minded, employed here and there, depending on the season, living hand-to-mouth from a little charity or in exchange for the worst sort of labor, sleeping in barns and stables, was turned into the authorities [this is what I mean about the style that makes me throw the book—finish the goddamn sentence already, Michel!].  At the border of a field, he had obtained a few caresses from a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the village urchins round about him…[I’m omitting some unnecessary clauses about the tedious village urchins].  So he was pointed out by the girl’s parents to the mayor of the village, reported to the gendarmes, led by the gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only wrote their report but also had it published.  What is the significant thing about this story? [emphasis added by me].  The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration.”

Well, no, Michel, the thing to note is that you’re describing molesting “a little girl” as an “inconsequential bucolic pleasure.”  He then refers to it as “these timeless gestures, these barely furtive pleasures between simple-minded adults and alert children,” and “this village halfwit who would give a few pennies to the little girls for favors the older ones refused him…”  Well, sure.  When those bitches refuse to put out for a mentally retarded fellow, what else can we expect?

Note his complete lack of interest on his part as to how and why, if everything was bucolic and pleasurable, the parents bothered to turn him in.  How did the little girl experience this?  How did the parents find out?  Were they, perhaps, trying to keep this guy from molesting their daughter again?  Foucault is completely uninterested in this girl’s experience because, hey, her experiences don’t count.  She’s only a girl.

It’s part and parcel of how, in The History of Sexuality, Foucault never even considers the sexual experiences of women and/or the history of female sexuality, because, in my opinion, if he did, he’d actually have to acknowledge that major changes in how we consider sexuality did, in fact, take place in the 20th century, and these changes were liberatory, and due to the creation of reliable birth control.

So, go to hell, Foucault.

So in your mind Schindler’s List isn’t even half as good as Jaws?

Never mind Close Encounters, Raiders, Last Crusade, ET,  Private Ryan, Jurrassic Park or motherfucking E.T.?

None are even half as good as Jaws?

Hey, did I stutter?  Did I sound conflicted?

Schindler’s List is the story of a German who did not kill Jews during the Holocaust, but saved them.  Well, that’s nice.  I am very, very glad that, in real life, he existed.  And I feel about the movie just as I feel about Hollywood movies about the Civil Rights Movement that have, as the hero, a Good White Person.  Is it somehow unthinkable to make a Civil Rights movie about, oh, black people?  How about a Holocaust movie with a Jew as a hero?  Not a victim (or not only a victim); not a tortured survivor; a hero?  For instance, a member of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  For Spielberg to win his Oscar and then say it was for the “6 million” just adds another layer of Hollywood narcissism to the whole thing.

Close Encounters is tedious beyond belief (seriously, I think that movie went on for about 6 hours) and weirdly sappy; Raiders is good fun, and I like the heroine, and it has some great moments, but compared to Jaws, it is forgettable; Last Crusade is boring with some creepy Oedipal issues; ET is maudlin—I mean, I liked it a lot when it came out, when I was 6—but no, it doesn’t hold up, and then he took the guns out to make it even more toothless; Private Ryan I didn’t see because I don’t really like war movies of any kind (exception: Aliens); Jurassic Park, you must be fucking kidding me, Jurassic Park was a feeble attempt to recapture the brilliance of Jaws—the special effects were awesome back in the day, I enjoyed seeing living, breathing dinosaurs (so to speak), as much as anybody, but this movie couldn’t even steel itself to kill off anybody the audience had any emotional investment it, and my mother liked it a lot, but she had a crush on Jeff Goldblum, so much as I usually defer to her opinion, here I’m going to call her out. 

The special effects in Jaws are, for the most part, laughable, but Spielberg is smart enough not to let you get a good look at the shark until you’re already fully sucked in (in large part because they could hardly ever get the damn thing to work).  But it is brilliantly, tightly written, brilliantly acted, smart, taut, dealing with issues of class and the construction of masculinity, the horror is creepy, the denouement a masterpiece of cathartic tension-release, funny, and in places, genuinely moving.  It also does that brilliant thing Hitchcock wanted to do (and succeeded in doing) in North by Northwest, where you take a setting that is as far from the typical frightening or ominous setting possible, and make it truly terrifying.

So, yes.  I rarely quote Time Out New York approvingly, but when I was young, they once described Jaws as “evidence that Spielberg, once upon a time, made a movie for adults.”

Indeed.

Another good book about the construction of whiteness: The Wages of Whiteness by…let me check…David Roediger.

  I thought that one dude was John Meyer. Ugh.

  Schindler’s List was, like most of Speilberg’s movies lately, overly sentimental, overly simplified, practically male only (except for bit parts and stereotypes), cartoonish in spots, and not challenging.  It was mawkish.

Dark Avenger Guardian Chow Mein: All right, my misunderstanding.  I took what you wrote to be an argument for Steinbeck not being overrated.  I guess it was just…color commentary?

He might be thought of as a Gene Stratton Porter, a best-seller of his time only kept alive by assigning his work to adolescents, but there are other things to Steinbeck than his talent.

Yes, I really did seem to give him a ringing endorsement, didn’t I?

but a lot of Second City/National Lampoon stuff reeks of White Dude unexamined privelege.

I always liked the I am a woman routine with a pre-SNL Gilda Radner, which demonstrated the hypocrisy of a male-oriented music industry recording a song with a “feminist” POV.

What does that have to do with Jewish acceptance post-WW2?

Yes, the post-WWII movie Gentleman’s Agreement would be more to the point.

Philip Schuyler Green (Gregory Peck) is a widowed journalist who has just moved to New York City with his son Tommy (Dean Stockwell) and mother (Anne Revere). Green meets with magazine publisher John Minify (Albert Dekker), who asks Green, a gentile, to write an article on antisemitism (“some people don’t like other people just because they’re Jews”). He’s not very enthusiastic at first, but after initially struggling with how to approach the topic in a fresh way, Green is inspired to adopt a Jewish identity (“Phil Greenberg”) and write about his own first-hand experiences. Green and Minify agree to keep it secret that Phil is not Jewish; since he and his family are new to New York, it should be easy to hide.

........................................................................................
Production

Zanuck decided to make a film version of Hobson’s novel after being refused membership in the Los Angeles Country Club when it was assumed incorrectly that he was Jewish. Before filming commenced, Samuel Goldwyn and other Jewish film executives approached Darryl Zanuck and asked him not to make the film, fearing that it would “stir up trouble”. They also warned that Hays Code enforcer Joseph Breen might not allow the film to pass the censors, as he had been known to make disparaging remarks about Jews. There was also concern that Dorothy McGuire’s character being divorced would offend the National Legion of Decency. The role of Phillip Green was first offered to Cary Grant, but he turned it down. Peck decided to accept the role, although his agent advised him to refuse, believing he would be endangering his career. Jewish actor John Garfield agreed to play a lesser role in the film in order to be a part of the film.

The film was shot on location in Darien, Connecticut.[1]

Yes, I really did seem to give him a ringing endorsement, didn’t I?

Nah.  You just sounded like you were trying to make excuses for him.

Yes, the post-WWII movie Gentleman’s Agreement would be more to the point.

OK.  So, in 1947, a major Hollywood studio makes a movie about how bad antisemitism is, the movie is a critical success and very popular, earning a shit-ton of money, gets many Oscar nominations and wins three awards, earns its director “Man of the Year” from B’Nai Brith the following year, an honor that is celebrated by a gala evening with politicians and celebrities in attendance, and that’s evidence that Jews aren’t accepted as white post-WW2?

True, the movie upset HUAC, and red-baiting is historically tied up with antisemitism, so you could make that case. 

But to go from Leo Frank to that in 30 years?  To quote my grandma, we should all have such troubles. 

But sure, I’ll concede that all anti-semitism did not magically vanish the moment the soldiers of WW2 set foot back on US soil.  So if I find an example of anti-Irish sentiment from the past 60 years, does that mean they aren’t white, either?

Wait. How has no one mentioned the Jehovah to Reagen’s Jesus, Adam Smith yet?

that’s evidence that Jews aren’t accepted as white post-WW2?

No, this is:

Before filming commenced, Samuel Goldwyn and other Jewish film executives approached Darryl Zanuck and asked him not to make the film, fearing that it would “stir up trouble”

What ‘trouble’ were these studio executives, men of the world, not recent emigres from foreign lands who barely spoke English, afraid of stirring up?

Just a mere few years ago, the topic of interracial relationships was enough to get a novel banned in Boston in 1944.

But, hey, Joseph Brown making anti-semitic remarks and in essence being the gatekeeper for any ‘respectable’ movie being released to the public was probably an overblown concern as well.

So if I find an example of anti-Irish sentiment from the past 60 years, does that mean they aren’t white, either?

They suffered in one area along with the Jews of that period:

Although never officially legislated, between 1918 and the 1950s a number of private universities and medical schools introduced numerus clausus policies limiting admissions of students based on their religion or race to certain percentages within the college population. One of the groups affected by these policies was Jewish applicants, whose admission to some New England and New York City area liberal arts universities fell significantly between the late 1910s and the mid-1930s.[4] For instance, the admission to Harvard University during that period fell from 27.6% to 17.1% and in Columbia University from 32.7% to 14.6%. Corresponding quotas were introduced in the medical and dental schools resulting during the 1930s in the decline of Jewish students: e.g. in Cornell University School of Medicine from 40% in 1918–22 to 3.57% in 1940–41, in Boston University Medical School from 48.4% in 1929–30 to 12.5% in 1934–35. During this period, a notable exception among U. S. medical schools was the medical school of Middlesex University, which had no quotas and many Jewish faculty members and students; school officials believed that antisemitism played a role in the school’s failure to secure AMA accreditation.[5]

In addition to Jewish applicants, Catholics, African-Americans, Eastern/Southern Europeans, and women were also targeted by admission restrictions. African-Americans, in some instances, were outright excluded (numerus null) from admission: e.g., at Columbia University. The most common method, employed by 90% of American universities and colleges at the time to identify the “desirable” (native-born, white, Protestant) applicants, were the application form questions about their religious preference, race, and nationality. Other more subtle methods included restrictions on scholarships, rejection of transfer students, and preferences for alumni sons and daughters.

How is it possible that you were born a Jew, raised as a Jew, and grown to maturity in this country without really knowing the history of your people in this country during the 20th Century?

  Dark Avenger at 137: The American method of applying to college, with its emphasis on extracurricular activities and interviews in addition to grades, was created as a method to keep Jews out of many universities and colleges. Before the late 1910s/early 1920s, American universities used entrance examinations. The problem was that too many Jews got into top universities this way. This turned off a lot of applicants from rich and upper-class WASP families and reduced the amount of donations to the university. To combat this, universities strove to create a admission procedure that emphasize “leadership” qualities rather than academic achievement.

  Read the Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton by Jerome Karabel for the full history.

DH Lawrence
Robert Altman
Renoir
Drew Carey
I’m tempted to name the Coen Brothers. They’re good and I like-to-love some of their movies, but they’re not the giants they’re made out to be. 

Going over some of the comments, it almost seems like this is a trojan horse thread intnded to get people to drag out their lousy taste for all to see. The Coen Brothers? F Scott Fitzgerald? Woody Allen? Picasso? Elvis Presley? The guy was one of the best singers and arrangers of his generation, and basically the first person to mix together rockabilly and rhythm and blues, which in itself was revolutionary. If anything, Elvis has been underrated as a musician over the years.

Having said that, there are plenty of examples. Personally, I think it works best when they’re paragons of respectability and wealth in their fields, despite being mostly average and white bread:

Ian McEwan
JM Coetzee
Paul McCartney
REM (Oh yes, I went there)
Seamus Heaney
Tom Hanks
Dave Grohl (as a singer/songwriter rather than a drummer)
Frank Darabont

@Comment #89: Lee on 09/15 at 08:50 PM

  I realize that there are going to be some people reading my posts and thinking “yeah, well that is all in the past and now the Jews are rich and successful and no longer count as minorities.” To this I preemptively reply, “yeah just because we have rich and successful African-Americans and women doesn’t mean that we can ignore the millennia of persecution they endured.” This issue really gets to me.

Really? I would never have guessed.

@92: Tim Tebow is a funny case, it seems he’s mostly overrated by people who know nothing about football - a combination of frustrated Broncos fans and angry Christians finding persecution under their pillows.  Denver’s coaching staff and every analyst who understands football have rated Tebow exactly where he belongs: rock bottom.

And the overrated Manning is clearly Eli, not Peyton.

Shakespeare (Oh yeah, I went there!)
Bob Dylan, obviously
Einstein, never would have been that famous if he wasn’t a white dude
Bill Clinton (Be careful - you might cut yourself on how EDGY this choice is)
Harvey Milk (waaaay overrated)
Alan Turing (okay, had some neat ideas, but “father of computer science,” really?)
Wright Brothers: alright, you got into the air. What did you do since then, except whine about patents?

Pat Buchanan

George Will

Actually, this one should end the discussion: Pat Boone.

Seth MacFarlane.  I’ve watched Family Guy and sat there staring at the screen thinking “jesus fuck americans really are the botton of the barrell” how the fuck can anyone find this stale tripe funny? 

Adam Corolla is just a completely worthless creature.

And I’m gonna say it:  Jon Stewart.  His milquetoast “both side are just as bad” bullshit is embarrassing and Colbert is 11 billion times funnier.

And who volunteers to change UmaroVI’s nappies?  Its clearly time for his nap.

What I’ve learned from this conversation: Once you’ve oppressed another group, you lose your Oppressed Card. White Women, put your bras back on! All your oppression against women of color has invalidated your right to a place in the kyriarchal pyramid!

Seriously, though, of course I don’t think white Catholics should be excluded from this list, but I also don’t think Gaiman should be either. White people especially like to pretend that whiteness is rigidly defined, but there’s been lots of great scholarship on this point recently.

Well I’ve always used the ‘Would the aryan nation count you as white?’ test, but surely most people understand there are degrees of whiteness that runs on a sliding scale rather than a straight yes or no divider.

Yawgmoth @142:  Apparently, Tebow is now the backup, and starter Kyle Orton is receiving boos from the home fans when he’s on the field (I know, right!  Shocking that Christians would do that!)

So have you heard the good news?  He is (almost) risen.

  Athiest at 141: We are all obvious about our passions. Jewish issues are very important to me in the same way that feminism is important to many of the posters to this blog. This isn’t to say that other issues are not important to me but Jewish issues are where my personal stake is the greatest.

  Flora: Why do you think Renoir is overrated? I agree with you on many of your other choices. Most of Robert Altman’s movies are very tedious. DH Lawrence is not a bad read but he flirted with some rather dangerous politics and reading about an author’s sex-obsessions is never my favorite thing.* I’m angry at the Coen Brothers of not working faster on the film version of Chabon’s the Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Drew Carey’s routine is simply not funny but he is amiable enough as a game show host. But Renoir’s paintings really move me, I’ve sat for one or two hours just looking at his paintings and basking in their beauty. He captures life and its swetest and in a good way rather than a kitschy way like say Kincaid.

  *One person I find overrated is Steig Larsson. His Millenial Triology are well-written airport thrillers for people with left-wing politics. They aren’t really that interesting otherwise and I have trouble suspending my disbelief and pretending that Sweden is a dark land of oppression when its really one of the most pleseant countries out there. His novels also are very good examples of why journalists rarely make good novelists, they get to into the little details that many novelists know would bore readers. The worst thing is that the novel’s are filled with middle-aged heterosexual male sex fantasies, which are my least favorite thing to read about in fiction.

I love Neil Gaiman and totally do not think he belongs on a list of Overrated White Dudes, but…

Neil Gaiman doesn’t belong on a list of Overrated White Dudes because he’s *Jewish?* What?

First of all, in comic books, being Jewish is not only not an oppressed minority… Jews actually invented the genre. Spiegel and Schuster (creators of Superman) were Jewish; so was Stan Lee (in fact possibly so was Jack Kirby.) When your claim to fame is that you are a superstar in a particular media genre that was INVENTED BY JEWISH PEOPLE, you do not get to claim Jewish oppression. (This doesn’t prevent anti-Semitism from existing in comics; ask me sometime about the internal war at Marvel Comics over Magneto. But it prevents anti-Semitism from controlling hiring and firing decisions.)

Likewise, no science fiction author could ever be removed from a list of Overrated White Dudes on account of being Jewish, because Isaac Asimov and Harlan Ellison, two of the most influential science fiction writers ever, are Jewish.

You can’t take people out of the category of “overrated white dude Hollywood director” on account of being Jewish because many of the most famous and powerful white dude Hollywood directors are Jewish (Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas… come on.) And in a world where both Leonard Nimoy *and* William Shatner were both Jews, I would argue you can’t make that argument for actors, either.

If you want to tell me that *politicians* get excluded from the category of Overrated White Dudes because they are Jewish, I could go with that. We have not yet had a Jewish president (the first guy to seriously run for VP, Joe Lieberman, is hardly who I’d want representing me if I were culturally Jewish.) I think we probably have only one or two Jewish senators. So okay, I could go with that.

But I don’t think that Jewish people who work in media—writing books, writing comics, producing or directing movies, acting, doing comedy—suffer any lack of privilege whatsoever. I mean, if we are not excluding Overrated White Dudes on the grounds that they might have grown up in poverty, and we are not excluding Overrated White Dudes on the grounds that they might be gay, then we should not exclude them on the grounds that they are Jewish. Evidence suggests it’s a lot harder to break into comic books if you are Italian than if you are Jewish. And just because you are oppressed on one axis does not mean you are not enjoying privilege on a different axis. Men who work in media do not suffer any oppression whatsoever for being Jewish (bigoted criticism, yes, from people with no power over them, but it does not stop them from being able to rise to the top of their fields, so it’s not *oppression*); however, they get a fuck of a lot of privilege for being men and for having pale skin and European hair.

And I had no idea Neil Gaiman was Jewish. Frankly, I think that in his particular genre, Neil Gaiman gets tremendous benefit from being British, and the fact that he is British erases all other aspects of his ethnicity and heritage from the public view. 90% of comic book creators who write dark fantasy/horror/experimental science fiction for the Big Two publishers are British, and Americans, who are the major market (and the home of the Big Two, therefore, in control of hiring decisions), can’t actually tell that British people are Jewish British people unless the Brits in question are, like the majority of American Jews, people with immigrant ancestors from Germany and Russia.

@Comment #150: Lee on 09/16 at 09:26 AM

You might want to consider being less obvious.

I don’t know much about what goes on in theoretical physics.

Nothing does.  Nothing has happened in theoretical physics for more than 50 years.  Which is why it’s real easy for a theoretical physicist to be overrated.  If you know of any theoretical physicists, you should probably just go ahead and guess they’re overrated - it’s a forgone conclusion that they are.

Have we mentioned pretty much everyone in the financial industry?

(I think one of the problems here is that “overrated” doesn’t always mean incompetent. Stephen Hawking is very very smart, but he wouldn’t be known outside the physics and physics-fan community except for the wheelchair thing.)

Lee, your routine, coming from a barely over 30 white guy from the suburbs is more than a little twee. Want to argue that it’s unfair to call any ofthe CCNY generation of Nobel Prize winners overrated? Be my guest. But saying it’s unfair to mock David Brooks, Ralph Lauren, and Tom Friedman as “overrated white dudes” because they’re Jewish? Please.

Remember that character on the Sopranos who styled himself the leaderof the Italian-American Anti-Defamation league? You remind me of that guy, except without the maturity. And how much sense would it make for someone who came in here to argue about Italian American inclusion on this list on the premise that “Italian American issues are where my personal stake is the greatest” ?

Also, Neil Gaiman is overrated as an author, not as a comic book writer. It’s clear now that Terry Pratchett did all the heavy lifting in “Good Omens.”

I’ve never read anything by Neil Gaiman, but I will add that he married Amanda Fucking Palmer in Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon’s living room. Which, to me, is not to be underrated.

Shah8 suggested Stephen Hawking, John Elway and Pope John Paul II?  He’s got to be kidding!

Maybe I could suggest that the white half of Barack Obama is the overrated part?    Maybe he wouldn’t be such a failure if he was all black?

Who knows, maybe y’all could blame the policies of his that you don’t like on his white—obviously Republican!—half.

Wait. How has no one mentioned the Jehovah to Reagen’s Jesus, Adam Smith yet?

Adam Smith is seriously underrated. He was a major philosopher of liberalism. And he was foundational thinker in economics, both left and right—leftish and leftist economists like Marx, Veblen, Keynes, and Galbraith all openly relied on the base work that Adam Smith (and David Ricardo, later) did. His work was also an indirect influence on Charles Darwin. He deserves to be a hero of modernity and should be fondly regarded by the left.

Instead, the right wing regards him as a blank totem they can project their prejudices on, and the left wing rejects him as a right wing totem. It’s a shame.

***And by “Underrated and Different” I mean people who are denied a fair shake because of their minority/social status. B.D. Huang and Nancy Pelosi come to mind off the top of my head.)
Comment #10: BrianX ***

Not really on topic but How do you figure Nancy Pelosi was denied a fair shake?  She became Speaker of the House, and after the 2010 electoral disaster she remained the leader of the democratic caucus.

Normally when a party loses the majority of the house the former speaker is no longer is the leadership.  Hastert lost his spot in the leadership after the 2006 election and Gingrich lost the speakership even though the republicans retained their majority in 1998.  He took the blame among republicans for losing some seats in that election.

Now I think Pelosi achieved her position by merit, but can’t for the life of me see how she didn’t get a fair shake.

Heaventree: personally, I consider “Amanda Fucking Palmer” to be a little overrated in some circles which I travel in, especially when it comes to the huge blinders she wears in regards to her able-bodied privilege. But the topic of this post isn’t “famous people that we dislike.” I’m sure Gaiman is a very nice white person with very nice white friends - that doesn’t change the fact that he’s an overrated fantasy novelist.

Stephen Hawking is overrated: among physicists, he’s considered “pretty good”, but since he wrote a wrote a book that lots of people read in the 1990s, he’s the “brilliant physicist” everyone has heard about.

Also, Dana: go away. You are an unfunny annoying conservative dude that we already have plenty of experience dealing with and find uninteresting.  Nobody likes you.

How has Scott Adams not come up yet?

Also Orson Scott Card. But the list of overrated white authors is extensive, as this thread demonstrates.

Hey, did I stutter?  Did I sound conflicted?

No, you sounded like a stuffy movie snob who would write off a movie without even seeing it.

I rarely quote Time Out New York approvingly, but when I was young, they once described Jaws as “evidence that Spielberg, once upon a time, made a movie for adults.”

Yup, Munich sure was a delightful kiddie romp.

How has Scott Adams not come up yet?

Probably because he’s not really that famous.

Ernest Hemingway

Orson Wells

Michael Chabon.  I started reading Kavalier and Clay after my boyfriend loved it.  A few pages after they meet The One Female Other Than the Mom, I told him my predictions for her character.  He confirmed them and told me precisely how it gets worse.  I always finish the books I start, but I put that one down and never looked back (except to complain from time to time, naturally).  It is apparently just a coming-of-age story template about a couple of dudes (who else?) with some comics and history grafted on.

How can Ayelet Waldman not see that she’s the cool one?  If I were here, I’d prefer my kids because they are only 50% Michael Chabon.  Although, between the four of them I guess that’s two Michael Chabons, versus just one in the person of her irritating husband.  I guess now I see where she’s coming from.

Alan Turing (okay, had some neat ideas, but “father of computer science,” really?)

Hey, lay off Turing. The guy was prosecuted and driven to suicide for the heinous crime of being gay. Any privilege he may have had was more than eradicated by the very basic privilege he was denied.

Oops, never mind, didn’t realize what I was replying to. Please carry on.

Thought of a few more:
FDR: laaaaame
Heath Ledger: hasn’t made a single good movie since The Dark Knight.

How is it possible that you were born a Jew, raised as a Jew, and grown to maturity in this country without really knowing the history of your people in this country during the 20th Century?

It’s not, so you can let go of those pearls now.  Yes, I know about the origin of quotas and suchlike in university admissions—nobody wanted to have to deal with the “Columbia problem.”  But, to repeat myself, citing anti-semitism operating, in your words, from 1918 to the 1950s, is not actually evidence that Jews did not receive white privilege in the USA in the second half of the twentieth century. 

Before filming commenced, Samuel Goldwyn and other Jewish film executives approached Darryl Zanuck and asked him not to make the film, fearing that it would “stir up trouble”

What ‘trouble’ were these studio executives, men of the world, not recent emigres from foreign lands who barely spoke English, afraid of stirring up?

Trouble that did not actually arise.  So these men of the world were, in fact, mistaken.  If they had begged him not to make the movie, and releasing the film had, in fact, resulted in anti-semitic backlash, or even if the movie had tanked and been trashed by the critics due to its Jewish subject matter, that indeed would have been an indication that Zanuck was wrong and Goldwyn was right.  But that’s not what happened. 

But, hey, Joseph Brown making anti-semitic remarks and in essence being the gatekeeper for any ‘respectable’ movie being released to the public was probably an overblown concern as well.

Again…it didn’t happen.  Brown released the movie.  And one of the famous peole discussed by the movie as being particularly egregiously anti-semitic tried to sue, and saw his case thrown out of court.  So, yes, plenty of Jewish people who had grown to adulthood in the first half of the twentieth century were deeply concerned about potential anti-semitic blowback as a result of the film.  And of course they were, given what they had lived through.  But it didn’t actually happen.  The issue is not whether people had concerns.  The issue is whether these concerns were borne out.

What I’ve learned from this conversation: Once you’ve oppressed another group, you lose your Oppressed Card. White Women, put your bras back on! All your oppression against women of color has invalidated your right to a place in the kyriarchal pyramid!

Actually, what I’ve learned is that there seems to be the idea that the opposite is true: once you’ve been oppressed, it becomes constitutionally impossible for you to impress anybody else ever at all.  So, you know, Jewish women dealing with patriarchal Jewish men, too bad for you!  Those Jewish men are part of a group that has been historically oppressed, so they get a get-out-of-jail-free card on any exercise of privilege they make forever after.

if we are not excluding Overrated White Dudes on the grounds that they might have grown up in poverty, and we are not excluding Overrated White Dudes on the grounds that they might be gay, then we should not exclude them on the grounds that they are Jewish.

Word.

Now, I actually quite like Gaiman—I think Coraline (the novel version) is absolutely brilliant.  But indeed, I’m not quite sure how he became the object of mass adoration, go-to genre writer whose name is recognized by people outside the genre.  What people are suggesting is that it wouldn’t have happened if he had been, say, a woman of Pakistani descent.  That sounds about right to me.

Frankly, I think that in his particular genre, Neil Gaiman gets tremendous benefit from being British, and the fact that he is British erases all other aspects of his ethnicity and heritage from the public view.

Inside genre circles, it’s pretty well known that he’s Jewish.  I don’t move in a lot of comic book circles, so I can’t speak to that, though.

But as long as we’re talking about genre writers, didn’t Alara mention Asimov and Ellison as well?  Way overrated.

No, you sounded like a stuffy movie snob who would write off a movie without even seeing it.

A stuffy movie snob!  I’m delighted!  Nobody ever considers me a stuffy movie snob!  If anything, I get told my movie tastes are way too lowbrow to be acceptable!  Hurray!

Yup, Munich sure was a delightful kiddie romp.

I’m not sure you understand what they meant by “movies for adults.”  It wasn’t…literal.  It was a commentary on his sensibilities.

Schindler’s List is the story of a German who did not kill Jews during the Holocaust, but saved them.  Well, that’s nice.  I am very, very glad that, in real life, he existed.  And I feel about the movie just as I feel about Hollywood movies about the Civil Rights Movement that have, as the hero, a Good White Person.  Is it somehow unthinkable to make a Civil Rights movie about, oh, black people?  How about a Holocaust movie with a Jew as a hero?  Not a victim (or not only a victim); not a tortured survivor; a hero?

So a man makes a movie about a real person and real life events which really happened, and you dismiss it because it wasn’t a different movie which you wish would get made.  Because its not some other movie, that means its not even half as good as Jaws.

How has Scott Adams not come up yet?

Probably because he’s not really that famous.

Really? Do you know anyone who doesn’t know what Dilbert is? Because I don’t.

Adam Smith is seriously underrated. He was a major philosopher of liberalism. And he was foundational thinker in economics, both left and right—leftish and leftist economists like Marx, Veblen, Keynes, and Galbraith all openly relied on the base work that Adam Smith (and David Ricardo, later) did. His work was also an indirect influence on Charles Darwin. He deserves to be a hero of modernity and should be fondly regarded by the left.

Instead, the right wing regards him as a blank totem they can project their prejudices on, and the left wing rejects him as a right wing totem. It’s a shame.

A million times this. Smith was a champion of progressive taxation, workers’ rights, government regulation of business. He’s nothing like the libertarian caricature we usually see him as today.

So a man makes a movie about a real person and real life events which really happened, and you dismiss it because it wasn’t a different movie which you wish would get made.  Because its not some other movie, that means its not even half as good as Jaws.

You seem really personally offended on Spielberg’s behalf.  Is there a reason for this?  Why is it so upsetting for you to accept the fact that, as far as I’m concerned, Jaws is far and away the best movie Spielberg has ever made, and he’s never come close to equalling it?  You’re free to disagree, of course.  But this is a post about Overrated White Dudes.  I didn’t see a caveat in Amanda’s post noting that I should be careful not to hurt Sjt’s feelings with my choice.  Again, I disagree with some other people’s choices, but I’m not flipping out all “HOW DARE YOU,” because, and I know this is a difficult concept, tastes differ.  I’m still allowed to think Springsteen is awesome.  You’re still allowed to adore ET, which I suspect you do, seeing as you mentioned it twice in your list of Spielberg movies.

And now my reasons for disliking Schindler’s List aren’t good enough for you?  They don’t have to be.  They have to be good enough for me.

And what does the fact that Schindler’s list was about real people and real events have to do with anything?  Being true doesn’t make something a better story.  That’s why we invented fiction to begin with.

Napoleon wasn’t a “white male” by 18th Century French standards—he was a lowly Corsican.

It’s not, so you can let go of those pearls now.  Yes, I know about the origin of quotas and suchlike in university admissions—nobody wanted to have to deal with the “Columbia problem.”  But, to repeat myself, citing anti-semitism operating, in your words, from 1918 to the 1950s, is not actually evidence that Jews did not receive white privilege in the USA in the second half of the twentieth century. 

Never said it was, I was talking about post-WWII ear, which, as you know was at the end of the first half of the 20th Century.

Trouble that did not actually arise.

That begs the question.  They were wrong, obviously, but their concerns didn’t arise in a vacuum, did they? 

Really? Do you know anyone who doesn’t know what Dilbert is? Because I don’t.

I do.  And even among the people I know who are aware of Dilbert, I’d guess most of them couldn’t name Adams as the writer off the top of their heads.  And I don’t know of anyone who praises Dilbert like the best thing since sliced bread.

Even if everyone did know of Dilbert and Adams, I mean… its Scott Adams.  Compare his name to the rest that have been suggested, he’s not even close to their league, either in fame or praise.

Napoleon wasn’t a “white male” by 18th Century French standards—he was a lowly Corsican.

But, he was born in Corsica, of a family originally from minor Italian nobility from the Lombard area of Italy, a year after the French were given the island under a treaty, so he was technically French, and therefore eligible to join the French Army, which is where the fun began.

Oh, and I forgot to add another name to the list:

Dana.

DAVE EGGERS:

Meta-commenting on the ironic nature of your self-aggrandizing bullshit does not perform some magic trick that makes it not bullshit. Also, you’re a douche; thanks for turning Sendak’s book into a pretentious weepy mess.

NICHOLAS CAGE:

Over-rated white dude who doesn’t go by his nepotism-last name of Coppola, but instead steals the last name of a black Marvel Super-Hero.

GARRISON KEILLOR:

Smugly self-satisfied and not a quarter as clever or funny or entertaining as you think you are. Also, a serial adulterer who makes value-statements about the way things and people used to be.

RYAN REYNOLDS:

Why do they keep giving you movies to be bland in?

TIM RUSSERT:

Overrated white saint who was everything that was wrong with TV journalism and people his age. Now we have his son, who is everything that’s wrong with people his age, surface-only/no deep awareness of any topic people. 

STEVE JOBS:

Fuck him. Closed system profiteer and strong-arm tactic business shark who sells an image of cool while doing uncool stuff.

Never said it was, I was talking about post-WWII ear, which, as you know was at the end of the first half of the 20th Century.

Then you’re grasping at straws.  Were Jews still facing the remnants of discrimination in late 40s and early 50s?  Sure, I’ll buy that.  Is that relevant to their accrual of white privilege since?  No.  Steven Spielberg is not facing institutional antisemitism due to the fact that around the time he was born, universities were hanging on to an antisemitic admissions system that they have long since disposed of.

They were wrong, obviously, but their concerns didn’t arise in a vacuum, did they?

As I noted, their concerns arose from being “men of the world” who came up during the first half of the twentieth century.  The fact that they were wrong indicates that the world—or the country—as they knew it had been significantly altered.

You seem really personally offended on Spielberg’s behalf.

No, I’m just baffled by your claim.

Why is it so upsetting for you to accept the fact that, as far as I’m concerned, Jaws is far and away the best movie Spielberg has ever made, and he’s never come close to equalling it?

Apparently he’s never come within 50.1% of equaling it.  Again, a baffling claim considering he’s made some not too bad in the last 30 years.

I didn’t see a caveat in Amanda’s post noting that I should be careful not to hurt Sjt’s feelings with my choice.

Oh mercy me, my precious feelings… However will I carry on…

Again, The only feeling I have right now is bafflement. 

<blockqoute>And now my reasons for disliking Schindler’s List aren’t good enough for you?  They don’t have to be.  They have to be good enough for me.</blockquote>

Your reasons have nothing to do with the actual movie, or why it isn’t even half as good as Jaws.

And what does the fact that Schindler’s list was about real people and real events have to do with anything?

Because your reasons seemed to imply that he made the story out of whole cloth as a “good gentile saves the jews story”.  Its a bit harder to complain about a story that actually happened.

Spelling is overrated.

Because its not some other movie, that means its not even half as good as Jaws.

Well yeah. How do you think the “as good as” formulation works? The only way for it to be half as good as Jaws would be if it were a movie half as good as Jaws. In other words, A DIFFERENT MOVIE.

The reason it’s not that movie is that it’s mawkish (as someone mentioned above), plays into an offensive trope, and even beyond its politics falls prey to some seriously cliche storytelling.

Because your reasons seemed to imply that he made the story out of whole cloth as a “good gentile saves the jews story”.  Its a bit harder to complain about a story that actually happened

Your problems with reading comprehension are not my fault.  Note that I actually wrote out a sentence saying that I’m glad Schindler existed in real life.  I don’t see how it has any impact on the difficulty of complaining.  Lots of stories happened in real life.  Some play into established tropes/cliches that I find boring at best, and some don’t.  I’m not that interested in movies that do, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many of the stories that find their way onto the screen play into tropes that reinforce dominant assumptions about who gets to be the center of a story and who doesn’t.

Your reasons have nothing to do with the actual movie, or why it isn’t even half as good as Jaws.

As I said, they’re good enough for me, and that’s all they need to be.

Apparently he’s never come within 50.1% of equaling it.  Again, a baffling claim considering he’s made some not too bad in the last 30 years.

And again, none that I feel are half as good as Jaws.  It’s not that I forgot that he’s made lots of movies since, or that I wasn’t aware that lots of people like and admire those movies.  It’s that I think those people are wrong.  That’s what overrated means.  Are you unclear on the concept of the thread or something?

Throwing in a vote for C.S. Lewis. I picked up a copy of the Narnia chronicles a while back—somehow my young brain managed to gloss over all the moralizing in it. And the rest is largely pointless fantasy trash. To say the plot is paper thin is to understate the thickness of paper.

  It’s that I think those people are wrong.

And I think you are (not even about him being overrated, btw, just the claim that none of his later movies even approaches Jaws).  So what’s the problem? 

Are you unclear on the concept of the thread or something?

Well I thought I understood it, until I actually read the thread.  It seems actually be a lot of people complaining about people they don’t particularly like, whether or not those people are actually overrated by society at large.  As I asked before, can George Lucas really be “overrated” if he’s been panned so universally for everything he’s done outside the original trilogy?  It also seems be be a forum for people to complain that certain people aren’t white enough to be included.

And nowhere did I see anyone mention perhaps the most overrated white guy of all time: Teddy Roosevelt.

And

My criticism of Gaiman was less about his whiteness and more about his dudeness.  By his own admission, he’s in a bit of an embarrassingly successful position in being able to hit the bestseller lists, sell dramatization rights, and stay in print. He’s in a spot where he can both price his speaking engagements high to discourage them, and donate the money to charity.

This is dramatically different from the state of the market for the women such as Bull, Hopkinson, and Windling that he’s cited as influences on his own work.

The criticism I’m making here is not about his character because he’s a smart guy and he’s probably aware of this. It’s a little bit about the quality of his work. It’s about his market dominance in a genre (adult urban fantasy) that currently has a ton of brilliant women writing for it.

Then you’re grasping at straws.  Were Jews still facing the remnants of discrimination in late 40s and early 50s?  Sure, I’ll buy that.  Is that relevant to their accrual of white privilege since?  No.

I never said it was, but your assertion that everything was hunky-dory for Jews back then is obviously not in accordance with the historical record.

As I noted, their concerns arose from being “men of the world” who came up during the first half of the twentieth century.  The fact that they were wrong indicates that the world—or the country—as they knew it had been significantly altered.

The fact that a powerful studio head like Zanuck could be mistakenly excluded from a private club on the grounds that he was thought to be Jewish was a reality of the times, and part of the world they lived in.

As late as 1953, there was still discrimination taking place:

Groucho’s(Marx, of course) then 7 year old daughter went with a friend to a restricted country club in Beverly Hills and when the manager found out she was Jewish he ordered her out of the pool. When Groucho found out about it he called the manager and said “My daughter’s only half Jewish, is it OK if she goes in up to her waist?”

The guy who gave us Star Wars is over-rated? And yet there is lots of criticism of George Lucas’ SW prequels even among those who love the first round - how does that make him over-rated?

Marcotte, I love your work, but sometimes…like now… it’s just racist and sexist resentment masquerading as jocularity.

Gaiman’s <a href=“http://sciencefictionworld.com/books/fantasy-books/552-so-neil-gaimans-a-scientologist.html>not a Scientologist</a>. But yeah, by his own admission, he doesn’t deserve the outrageous primariness he’s achieved in his field. Then again, I guess he’s gotten movie deals that have brought prominence to the whole genre, so that’s something.

For “

Fuck that, Billy Corgan rules.  Just because Butch Vig *CO*-produced Siamese Dream doesn’t make it any less awesome.  Billy came up with all the music and lyrics himself.  Any Pumpkins fan knows that he was OCD about every last detail in the music.  And, shocker, Butch Vig was NOT producer on Mellon Collie.  And guess what?  That was their best selling album.  Suck it, glitch blog.

“The band decided to forgo working with Butch Vig, who had produced the group’s previous albums, and selected Flood and Alan Moulder as co-producers. Corgan explained, “To be completely honest, I think it was a situation where we’d become so close to Butch that it started to work to our disadvantage… I just felt we had to force the situation, sonically, and take ourselves out of normal Pumpkin recording mode. I didn’t want to repeat past Pumpkin work.”“

Overrated my ass.  Out of all the overrated white dudes you could have picked.  FFS.

Actually I agree with the Corgan pick. His singing sounds like a muppet, and not in a good way.

The guy who gave us Star Wars is over-rated? And yet there is lots of criticism of George Lucas’ SW prequels even among those who love the first round - how does that make him over-rated?

At least one of the “making of” documentaries reveals that the first cut of Star Wars was badly received, and the film was salvaged by some brilliant work in the editing room, and I have to say the orchestral soundbooth as Williams’s soundtrack does a lot to overcome the choppy narrative and stilted dialogue. Empire Strikes Back, the best of the franchise, was written by Kasdan and directed by Kirschner, both of whom had the good sense to let Fischer and Ford develop the scenes.

The guy who gave us Star Wars is over-rated? And yet there is lots of criticism of George Lucas’ SW prequels even among those who love the first round - how does that make him over-rated?
Comment #193: KingElvis on 09/16 at 02:11 PM

I guess you don’t count the opinion of actual moviegoers who lap it up with a spoon, as opposed to critics who will tend to hit the biggest target, especially when it’s, wait for it, OVERRATED.

Wondering if Hitler should be included.  He’s such an object of fascination, as if his powers were literally supernatural.  He was a natural orator who tirelessly rode a wave of anti-Semitism that he didn’t invent.  He was not a great tactician.

Flood also has an impressive resume. I’d pick Flood to produce my album over Vig.

Although Spielberg is overrated by many, you’re still way off the mark, EG01. Regardless of the subject matter, Schindler’s List is still a fantastically put together and directed film and Munich is the most intelligent high budget political film of the last few years. And Raiders ‘unmemorable’? It has three of the most memorable scenes in Hollywood history.

And then there’s ET, Close Encounters, Jurassic Park, Catch Me If You Can and Saving Private Ryan. As a commercial director, who’s he overrated compared to? Robert Zemeckis? Michael Bay?

He was a natural orator

http://www.suite101.com/content/adolph-hitler-speeches-and-rise-to-power-a102659

Hitler Practiced his Oratorical Skills

There is evidence that Hitler honed his skills as orator. According to Chris Hick of Munich Walk Tours, there are extant photos taken by Hitler’s best friend and official photographer Heinrich Hoffman of Hitler practicing gestures to one of his tape-recorded speech. Hitler had ordered him to destroy them but Hoffman disobeyed. Like many good public speakers, Hitler prepared and practiced his speeches, often in front of a mirror.

Audience Manipulation

The few seconds of seemingly hysterical ranting that are preserved in old newsreels do not convey the full extent of audience manipulation in a Hitler speech. Many of Hitler’s speeches were made in beer halls such as the Hofbrauhaus where he first outlined the party policy to a crowd of 2000. Beer Hall speeches were a long-established tradition in German politics.

Beer would flow freely and the mood of the audience might change considerably over the course of the evening. Hitler would use these conditions cleverly. He would often address a crowd for two hours, commencing in a calm, friendly manner, winning the crowd’s approval with his precise, logical arguments that took his opponents statements and cut them into shreds.

As the audience warmed to him and steadily got drunker, Hitler’s voice became mesmeric. Chris Hicks explains that this was no accident. Hitler was extremely interested in mesmerism (hypnosis) as was Hess, and employed a voice-trainer who had studied mesmerism.

By the time Hitler started to rant and rave, the crowd was ready for it. His listeners had been led through the movements of an oral symphony and this was the final rich crescendo that would inspire them to action.

He was not a great tactician.

In military tactics, that is true.

As a political tactician, he was a genius, and he believed in himself, which as any salesperson will tell you, is necessary if you have something to sell, from candy canes to wars of aggression.

At least one of the “making of” documentaries reveals that the first cut of Star Wars was badly received, and the film was salvaged by some brilliant work in the editing room, and I have to say the orchestral soundbooth as Williams’s soundtrack does a lot to overcome the choppy narrative and stilted dialogue. Empire Strikes Back, the best of the franchise, was written by Kasdan and directed by Kirschner, both of whom had the good sense to let Fischer and Ford develop the scenes.

But that’s just it: we know these things.  We know his limitations as a director and writer.  We know about Empire and how it was made.  I don’t think anyone actually believes he’s a great director anymore.

I guess you don’t count the opinion of actual moviegoers who lap it up with a spoon, as opposed to critics who will tend to hit the biggest target, especially when it’s, wait for it, OVERRATED.

I don’t know a single person who was ultimately happy (or even mildly satisfied) with the prequels.  Ripping into them (and the changes made to the originals) has gone past the point of cliche.

George Lucas.
Mr. Lucas:  There are only 3 Star Wars Films.  No more.  & Han Solo shot first.  Get your revisionist filth away from me.

Mel Gibson.
I expect the MPAA to fuck up a piss-up in a brewery.  If I got paid that much to be wrong 90% of the time, I be the head meteorologist at CNN. But you had the gall to accept the 1995 Best Director award instead of handing it over to Martin S. & falling to your knees & decrying this cosmic mistake.  Your on-set “pranks” are stupid & infantile & say a great deal about you, & it’s not flattering.  You do realize you’re making a complete ass out of yourself, don’t you?  No?  Ah.  Well, never mind.  Carry on.

Charlton Heston.
A brilliant artist in film & a professional asshole for the NRA.  WTF?  Yeah yeah, “...marched with Martin Luther King Jr…” blah-fucking-blah.  Guess what: plenty of other people nowhere near as famous or wealthy as you marched w/ MLK too, & I don’t see them treating MLK’s legacy as a skirt to hide behind when they do something as cringe-inducingly stupid & crushingly insensitive as rolling into post-shooting spree towns to let the survivors know that you think your guns are more important than their kids.  Micheal Moore didn’t “do” anything to you except catch you on camera stuffing both feet into your mouth.  How did it feel lying on your deathbed knowing that Marlyn Manson had more class than you?

Adam fucking Sandler.
I’ve despised you ever since I first saw you on SNL

If we embrace the fun of this, we still have to acknowledge the sort of Newtonian physics of being ‘over-rated’ - which is that the biggest and bossest and most famous, are by definition, ‘over-rated’ - so the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Elvis, Frank Sinatra etc are, almost apriori, ‘over-rated.’

“Under rated” lists are more interesting and fun because of this.

And, I almost hate to mention the elephant in this room, but… through history the ratio of male ‘genius’ and achievement and fame to that of females is sooo lopsided, it’s kind of hard to think of over-rated famous women just because there are so few of them.

That’s for you oldfeminist.

I say that only because I’m white and male and over-rated - and I can’t resist teasing you.

it’s kind of hard to think of over-rated famous women just because there are so few of them.

It’s always nice when you get to rig the game so you can “win.”

I notice as awesome as white males think they are, it really seems to get under their skin when their inferiors stop kissing their asses for a second.

One person I find overrated is Steig Larsson. His Millenial Triology are well-written airport thrillers for people with left-wing politics.

I have trouble suspending my disbelief and pretending that Sweden is a dark land of oppression when its really one of the most pleseant countries out there.

I just started reading the first book and, while I am getting a mass market vibe from the storytelling style, I don’t agree about the theme of corruption (but maybe it gets worse?).  All countries have some degree of corruption and even I’ve heard some real-life stories about pretty nasty behavior perpetrated by Scandinavian businesses.  Did you hear about what IKEA is up to in the States?

I also thought it was interesting, seeing from a Swedish perspective, just how meddling their government is in individual people’s lives.

This was a fun thread to play a drinking game to. I skimmed the whole thing hoping to see someone say Noam Chomsky, Karl Marx, Ludwig van Beethoven, Friedrich Nietzsche, or Arthur Schopenhauer. Damnit, people.

...I’ll go with Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling because their overratedness is most clearly and directly related to their whitemaleness. If we broaden the category to males of all races, I submit V.S. Naipaul, whose work is overrated precisely because its male-egocentricity goes unnoticed by male reviewers. And to play the converse (for the hell of it), for “worst possible choice of white guy to include in a list of overrated white guys” I’ll nominate William Faulkner.

But you had the gall to accept the 1995 Best Director award instead of handing it over to Martin S. & falling to your knees & decrying this cosmic mistake.

Martin Scorsese? For Casino? ...Sure, I probably agree with you about which is the better film, Braveheart was pretty cringe-inducing. But decrying anything-but-Casino winning feels weird… it’s not even his third best film, Sense & Sensibility was superb, and decrying that one white dude got an award instead of another white dude to justify his place on a list of overrated white dudes is odd.

The numerous “yea I went there!” comments are confusing. Isn’t going there the point?

And I nominate every dude who appears in pitchfork

Adam fucking Sandler.
I’ve despised you ever since I first saw you on SNL in 1992.  It was a purely visceral reaction, & you’ve proven my intuition right every time you open your mouth.  Every time you pinch a fresh turd into our collective cultural drinking water release a new film the phrase “Medicore people succeed because they’re not afraid of success” comes glaringly to mind.  Your films are as funny as getting an arrow through the neck with a collections notice attached to it.  Release all the craptacular lowbrow product you like & fleece your herd of mouth-breathing enablers for as much money as you want.  Registered Repuplican, eh?  It shows.  You oughtta sue Sarah Palin for stealing your act.  Janeane Garofalo had you nailed cold, motherfucker.

Roman Polanski.
You asshole.  Like America right after 9/11, I thought you had earned a bottomless well of sympthay & empathy from the rest of us for you & Sharon & the LaBiancas being cast against your wills in the Manson Family ugliness.  WHY DID YOU HAVE TO LET ME DOWN SO BAD?  I’m embarassed & ashamed to admit this, but I was in your camp & defending you/letting you off the hook/downplaying the seriousness of your transgression until Jay Smooth pulled me aside, sat me down & set me straight with a good stern talking to.  Oy.  But if Emma Thompson has enough smarts to come out from under the zap you put on people’s heads, then I’ve enough sense to learn from her example & follow her lead.  Thank God.  I really hate having to play the “separate the person from the Artist & their Art” cognitive-dissonance head-game, but the only way I can continue enjoying your films from now on is to accept the fact that at an artist, you’re a genius.  A genuine Titan.  As a man - a worm.  If you want back in decent people’s good books, you may start by coughing up the money you owe Samantha Geimer from the civil suit she won against you.  You can put it in a Swiss Bank Account & email her the password from your alpine chateau.  If the Swiss Bankers could to the accounting for the more discreet members of the Nazi elite, they can help you scratch this itch too.

I love the smell of Fametracker in the morning.

Johnny Cash
Jeff Bridges
Mozart
Henri Matisse
Jon Stewart

Here’s my problem with this topic.  What do you-all think the odds are that the guys I mentioned are over-rated vs. the odds that I’m am ignorant person.  I thought so.

When I say things like jazz is no good, or abstract art is bunk, or Jim Thompson didn’t know how to write, what I’m really saying is that I haven’t yet learned to appreciate jazz, abstract art or Jim Thompson.

Totally agreed about George Lucas. I can’t stand his bearded floppy face.

And I think you are (not even about him being overrated, btw, just the claim that none of his later movies even approaches Jaws).  So what’s the problem?

The problem is your difficulty in dealing with the fact that my opinion exists.  Do you think that nobody else in this thread thinks that anybody else’s choice is wrong?  Yet you keep pursuing this, demanding that I acknowledge a whole bunch of his other movies by name, claiming that my reasons for disliking them aren’t good enough, repeatedly asking if I really mean that none of those other movies are half as good as Jaws.  What is your investment in rising to Spielberg’s defense?  You really do seem personally offended that I’m maintaining this position instead of deferring to your superior Spielberg-judging skills.  Learn to live with the fact that I find Jaws far and away the best of his work.  Go console yourself by putting ET in the DVD player or something.  Have a drink.  Find some way to relax. 

I never said it was, but your assertion that everything was hunky-dory for Jews back then is obviously not in accordance with the historical record.

Go back and find the place where I said that everything was hunky-dory for the Jews back then.  I believe that what I said is that, in the second half of the twentieth century (which I sometimes used interchangeably with post-WW2) in the US, Jews received white privilege, and that we continue to receive it.

Although Spielberg is overrated by many, you’re still way off the mark, EG01. Regardless of the subject matter, Schindler’s List is still a fantastically put together and directed film and Munich is the most intelligent high budget political film of the last few years.

Well, that last bit about Munich is damning with faint praise if I’ve ever heard it.  “The most intelligent high-budget political film of the last few years”?  That’s not saying much.  And indeed, many, many people find Schindler’s List to be fantastic.  I object to it on a political level, and I believe at least two other people in this thread found it to be, what was the word, “mawkish.” 

And Raiders ‘unmemorable’? It has three of the most memorable scenes in Hollywood history.

Each to his own.  As I say, I enjoy it, but no more than a host of other movies.  It’s fine.  I don’t see any reason to get excited about.

And then there’s ET, Close Encounters, Jurassic Park, Catch Me If You Can and Saving Private Ryan. As a commercial director, who’s he overrated compared to? Robert Zemeckis? Michael Bay?

You can keep listing movies that I find overrated (seriously, Jurassic Park?  It’s a by-the-numbers disaster movie with neither teeth nor, if you’ll excuse the expression, balls.  Utterly predictable and unexciting.  Watching it was like watching someone fit jigsaw puzzle pieces together—it makes a very pretty picture, but it’s all clean and pre-made.).  That’s not going to make them less overrated.  I suppose that Catch Me If You Can could be a great work of genius—given that I dislike both Hanks and DiCaprio (that’s who’s in that one, right?) and didn’t find the premise at all interesting, I decided against seeing it.  But I’m going to play the odds here and guess that I would find it overrated as well.

If you’d like to name Zemeckis and Bay as overrated as well, you have my blessing.  But I’m going to stick with Spielberg.

When I say things like jazz is no good, or abstract art is bunk, or Jim Thompson didn’t know how to write, what I’m really saying is that I haven’t yet learned to appreciate jazz, abstract art or Jim Thompson.

You think?  I think it’s possible to dislike something not out of ignorance but just as a matter of taste.  I dislike jazz.  As you say, that doesn’t mean that jazz is no good, but nor do I think it means that I just haven’t learned to appreciate it.  I think it means that it’s not a genre of music that appeals to me.

And nowhere did I see anyone mention perhaps the most overrated white guy of all time: Teddy Roosevelt.

I’m just gonna cross my fingers and hope an outraged, baffled, offended Teddy Roosevelt fan pops up to hassle Sjt about this one: “The most overrated white guy!  How could you say that?!  Are you saying that he’s more overrated than this list of other overrated white guys that I’m going to produce and demand you speak to?  Huh, well, your reasons for thinking that Teddy is more overrated than those guys aren’t good enough!  They don’t speak to whether or not they’re actually overrated!  You’re just complaining because they aren’t some other white guys you’d think were more overrated!  What makes you think you can swan onto this thread and just start name white guys you think are overrated without justifying your position?!  Are you serious about Teddy?”

When I say things like jazz is no good, or abstract art is bunk, or Jim Thompson didn’t know how to write, what I’m really saying is that I haven’t yet learned to appreciate jazz, abstract art or Jim Thompson.

And when you write a sentence like this, what you’re really saying is that you’re a self-important bore and a drag at parties.

“NICHOLAS CAGE:

Over-rated white dude who doesn’t go by his nepotism-last name of Coppola, but instead steals the last name of a black Marvel Super-Hero. “

But Nick Cage is so highly rated because he’s the king of “so bad it’s good”- surely he transcends this list? Or do we need a “people say its so bad it’s good but really it’s just bad” tumblr?

George R.R. Martin. Just finished the first 4 Song of Ice & Fire books and frankly, I am just unimpressed. You wrote some tremendously unfocused semi-Arthurian political fantasy with plots that stall for entire books, but you put lots of sex and violence and rape in it, so that must mean it’s edgy and intended for intelligent adults. Right.

Quentin Tarantino. Good for you, you make excessively violent films. How edgy.

Chuck Palahniuk. Good for you, you write excessively violent books. How edgy.

Penn Jillette. Having had some success as an entertainer, he’s decided he is incredibly clever at everything, and that we all need to hear his cleverness.

Seth MacFarlane. Ha ha, pop culture references are the peak of humor.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Ha ha, punching down makes you so cool and superior.

Donald Trump. OMFG, Donald Trump.

Dr. Phil. Kind of a gimme, but still.

Dr. Oz. Okay, okay, he’s Turkish, but he was born in Ohio and he reads as white to me and I am pretty sure that’s why everyone listens to his B.S. on the television.

Ron Paul. Seriously, what is with that?

Jimmy Fallon. He doesn’t suck by any means, but he’s not as great as everyone seems to think he is.

Will Ferrell. Only time I ever laughed at Will Ferrell was when he was doing Bush.

William Faulkner. Maybe this is because I don’t get Faulkner and never have (and I am a person who may not like everything, but I pretty much always get it). But I’ve always felt like, good for you, you write completely incomprehensible Southern gothic stories and always have some Oppressed Black Person (tm) to be a symbol of something, this obviously means everyone should waste entire semesters of high school trying to figure out what the hell you are even saying because you are The Most Important Writer Of The Southern Experience which is obviously all about white people.

I actually like excessively violent films and books*, but for some reason George R. R. is too much. I read the first ASOIAF book and it depressed me. I watched the first episode of Game of Thrones and it made me feel ill. I have no idea why American Psycho, Fight Club, et al don’t have the same effect on me. Maybe George has a uniquely creepy style.

*I find books that use graphic descriptions of violence and oppression to make their supposed leftist point a million times more engaging than heartwarming stories about individuals and communities struggling, which probably says terrible things about me, but whatever works.

Not bad.  “EEEYOOHHHHHH, OHHHHH, OH-OH-OHHHH” and “Yeah, but what have you done for me lately?” were the funniest.

Still, its no Hotchicks with Douche-Bags. I’m not sure if thats a tumblr or a blog but I’m not convinced there’s a difference between facebook and myspace either.

Stuff White People Like is old so this is a good replacement. Still won’t have the legs of HCwDBs tho.

Who over-rates Robin Williams?  It’s not like he doesn’t create flop films for some niche meaning - like Bicentenial Man or Toys - and totally have them be forgotten.

And Stephan Hawking?  What the hell?  He’s been pulling new physics out of his ass for forty years.  I’m not sure how that could be over-rated.

But yeah, Steve Jobs is hugely over-rated.  Same with Bill Gates.  They’ve seriously changed how we deal with things in the world, but their influence isn’t as big as their names and the companies and other people in those companies.  Steve Jobs didn’t choose the ‘Apple Sound’ and Bill Gates didn’t actually code anything ever sold by Microsoft.

I absolutely deplore Fight Club and American Psycho - the dumbest movies I have ever seen.  I don’t see why if you even watched those that you’d have at all a complaint about George R R’s not-at-all as violent as real written history fake historical.

PS - please, please, what Apple fanboy ever treated Steve Jobs as god?  Or is just buying someone’s product and line of patter worth ‘treating as god’?  I hate that argument, and you always hear it from PC-addicts or the ‘pox on both sides’ camp… It’s no different than Obama-as-savior and pox-on-both-parties line.  It’s incurious and insulting.

If you’re going to name someone, give an example of why they’re overrated, and who by, not just, you know, naming random people.

Why is George RR Martin overrated?  I guess because his novel got put into a series last year.  Whatever novelist has a series put to the screen last year seems to qualify, given this definition.  Be more specific.

in the second half of the twentieth century (which I sometimes used interchangeably with post-WW2) in the US, Jews received white privilege, and that we continue to receive it.

Not until the mid-50s in terms of college admissions, and I’m sure that there were islands and archipelagos of “Jews ain’t us” in the American South, the Midwest outside of big cities, to say the least.

snowmentality, read “A Rose for Emily”, which I promise you has no Oppressed Black People in it, and has an ending, that, well, let’s just say, it isn’t faux-Southern Gothic.

“Someone once said, ‘If Asimov’s writings would be compared to a hydrogen atom, his fiction would be but the lowly electron orbiting the mass of his nonfiction.’

Asimov’s writings and influence to hard sci fi is hard to overstate.  If you think he’s over-rated, you’re just skipping his historical impact.  It would be like taking only Carl Sagan’s work and ignoring the impact of his tv show and public works.  Why would you do such a thing?

At least, please, read a wiki page before declaring someone over-rated. *grumble*

I’m just gonna cross my fingers and hope an outraged, baffled, offended Teddy Roosevelt fan pops up to hassle Sjt about this one: “The most overrated white guy!  How could you say that?!  Are you saying that he’s more overrated than this list of other overrated white guys that I’m going to produce and demand you speak to?  Huh, well, your reasons for thinking that Teddy is more overrated than those guys aren’t good enough!  They don’t speak to whether or not they’re actually overrated!  You’re just complaining because they aren’t some other white guys you’d think were more overrated!  What makes you think you can swan onto this thread and just start name white guys you think are overrated without justifying your position?!  Are you serious about Teddy?”

Did I ever dispute your claim that Spielberg was overrated?  Did I ever ask any of those questions?

Nope.  So those questions would apply to my selection of TR… how?

I disputed your claim that he hadn’t made a film half a good as Jaws.  Which I stand by, because frankly your answers weren’t very convincing, especially your roundabout “answer” about SL.  But hey, if you really think a movie about a magical devil shark with laughable special effects which had a whitewashed cliche happy ending and in which women are reduced to helpless crying fish food or helpless crying mothers is at least twice as good as a film with universal acclaim because that film wasn’t a different film that you wished it was… well I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.

I guess I should apologize for calling you out.  You see, I suffer from a rare medical disorder: when I see someone say something that’s crazy, I just have to scratch my head in wonderment.  Questions follow: Did this person really mean to say that crazy thing?  Were they not aware that what they said is crazy?  Do they have some non-crazy rationalization for saying this crazy thing?  And so on. 

By all means, be my guest about TR.  They carved his face into a fucking mountain, for doing… what, exactly? That’s pretty much the definition of “overrated”.

“I absolutely deplore Fight Club and American Psycho - the dumbest movies I have ever seen.  I don’t see why if you even watched those that you’d have at all a complaint about George R R’s not-at-all as violent as real written history fake historical.”

It’s probably because a) Martin’s violence isn’t as simple a metaphor/device, and b) it’s less cartoonish than that of blank generation lit. It just seems less like a representation (the other novels mentioned like to flout their meta-ness, often in a pretentious manner, but still) and more real. If that makes sense. I get why you would detest them, but I like being reminded I’m reading a book or watching a film while doing so, and that completely takes it out of the realm of what personally makes me uncomfortable. Mad Men is the same for me (also the fact that GOF and MM have large online fandoms mean I am more often confronted with the evidence of people getting their jollies on the nasty stuff). Tomayto Tomahto.

As for real history, since I have to read it for my job, I’m inured to it (could help that when I was a kid my intro to history involved cheerful songs about people dying of the plague, etc).

By all means have Palahniuk and Easton-Ellis on this list though, since there are greater novellists who deserve far more recognition. Plus Easton-Ellis is generally a horrible person.

Yes, I’ll say that George R. R. Martin is overrated because:

1) He’s hailed as the writer who broke Tolkien’s(*) death-grip on high fantasy by deconstructing it, ignoring the fact that le Guin, Moorcock, King, Wolfe, and Bujold were already there.

2) The hype over his books and the television series overshadows the multicultural renaissance going on in fantasy fiction right now. The Locus nominees for best novel this year include three women of color, and three novels based on African politics or folklore. Zoo City, an urban fantasy set in South Africa, won the Clarke and was nominated for a BSFA award.

3)  I think his material is getting a bit more respect from television producers than le Guin got in the last round of dramatization she went through for Lathe of Heaven and Earthsea.

4) Between Game of Thrones, Conan, John Carter, and The Hobbit, it seems there’s been a heck of a lot of white male fantasy beefcake going up on the screen. (Spartacus and Tudors can tangentally be thrown onto the pile as well, since they’re certainly not history.) And with Game of Thrones arguably offering the best female characters of the pack, something is off. 

Where women are getting the blockbusters and movie deals apparently is juvenile/young adult: Rowling, Meyer, and Collins. But yes, I do think that white dudeism is likely a factor behind why we’re getting a lot of Martin, Burroughs, Howard, and Tolkien.

(*) And few authors are so deeply hyped within a genre as Tolkien, who wasn’t the first, only, or most innovative. He certainly wasn’t imitated uncritically nearly as much as claimed by fans.

And again, it’s not to say that Lucas, Tolkien, and Gaiman are hacks, just that the nature of marketing, media, and fandom have hyped them beyond their skill and importance to their perspective genres.

Sjt:

So those questions would apply to my selection of TR… how?

Because they’re pretty much exactly what you said in your bizarre attempts to “argue” with my opinion of Spielberg’s non-Jaws movies.  How could you say none of these movies were half as good as Jaws?  What about this list of movies which somehow includes Jurassic Park and ET (I mean, if you want to think that maudlin sentimentality and Drew Barrymore at the height of her cuteness are markers of quality, go ahead, but you can’t possibly expect other people to agree)?  Your reasons for not liking Schindler’s List aren’t good enough for me!  You’re just complaining because it’s not a different movie!  Justify your position to me!

Dude, I love Jaws and have not been particularly impressed by anything else the man has made.  You can keep trotting out ET and Schindler’s List, but it won’t make me any more impressed by them.

I disputed your claim that he hadn’t made a film half a good as Jaws.  Which I stand by, because frankly your answers weren’t very convincing, especially your roundabout “answer” about SL.

This is what I think you don’t understand.  You can stand by what you like—this list is a matter of personal esteem and enjoyment.  You don’t have to like Jaws.  You don’t have to agree with my problems with Schindler’s List.  I’m not actually trying to convince you of anything.  You’re free to shrug your shoulders and think “Hey, that bitch is crazy when it comes to Spielberg movies,” and move on with your life, just as I have with the white men whose work I enjoy on this list.  Your inability to do that is what baffles me, just as my disinterest in the post-Jaws work of Spielberg baffles you.

But hey, if you really think a movie about a magical devil shark with laughable special effects which had a whitewashed cliche happy ending and in which women are reduced to helpless crying fish food or helpless crying mothers is at least twice as good as a film with universal acclaim because that film wasn’t a different film that you wished it was… well I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.

Here goes nothing:
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And now to pray to the HTML Spirits…

Anyway, I really dislike this blog for a number of reasons.

1) No text description for any of the images.  For one, not everyone is a master at remembering faces.  And for some historical figures people have never seen their likeness, having only read their words (or read of their exploits).  Not to mention that it’s basically telling the visually impaired to go fuck themselves.  Accessibility seems to be everywhere on tumblr, except for this blog.

2) The tiny sliver images are just dumb.  Either make them expand when mousing over/focusing on them, or use the “next” and “previous” method to archive ones you’re running out of room for.

3) No way to contact the blog owner and comment on any of this.  What is this, 1996?  Hell, even then most people had an ‘e-mail me’ link.  It was an animated .gif of a dancing cat that looked like shit, but better that than nothing.

Also, I have to object to saying AC/DC are overrated, at least any more than anyone else.  99% of famous musicians are overrated - talented people are everywhere, and it’s just dumb luck that some wind up famous and some have to keep their day job.  It’s very rare that someone famous is doing something original - it just takes the rest of the world years to catch on, and by then the originals aren’t young and hawt enough to be marketable.

PS libertarian ads on this page… guess we don’t have to worry about AI overtaking the human race any time soon =P

Accessibility seems to be everywhere on tumblr, except for this blog.

If you right-click an image in Mozilla Foxfire, you can get View Image Info, which is how I was able to list all the gentlemen, with the exception of adding a t to the end of Ralph’s last name..

I don’t know about other web browsers, but I’m sure similar options exist for them as well.

Hell, even then most people had an ‘e-mail me’ link.

If you look at the upper left-hand corner of this page, you’ll find the following.

Logout(Login)

Your Account

Member List

RSS Feed

Amanda | Contact mailto:amanda.marcotte-at-gmail-dot-com(that’s if you run your mouse over it.)

Auguste | Contact

Jesse | Contact

Pam | Contact

It was an animated .gif of a dancing cat that looked like shit, but better that than nothing.

No shit, Sherlock.

guess we don’t have to worry about AI overtaking the human race any time soon

Or this blog attracting intelligent humans in the foreseeable future

I’m referring to the blog on tumblr, not pandagon.  I said ‘this blog’ because the topic of discussion is the tumblr blog, not pandagon.  You know what happens when you assume…

And come on, I didn’t even get credit for fixing the italics!  For those who don’t know how btw, it’s because the blog uses bbcode, so instead of using <> you use regular brackets (’[’ and ‘]’) around the ‘/i’.

Anyway, I really dislike this blog for a number of reasons.

If you had chosen to use ‘this tumblr blog’, you would’ve eschewed ambiguity for clarity.

Re: Jews and White Privilege

When Archie Bunker needed a Lawyer he made Meathead read aloud names from the Yellow Pages until he heard one that sounded right: “Rabinowitz, Rabinowitz & Rabinowitz.

In this sense, anti-Semites overrate Jews: an all-powerful secretive group running the world via Goldman Sachs, the Fed, and the IMF. Quotas, and the subsequent reliance in soft standards like sports, were institutionalized under the assumption that Jews would dominate on test scores and grades.

So considering a Jewish dude overrated (as opposed to overrating him) could be seen as anti-anti-Semitic, since it bucks the stereotype…unless you do it for an athlete, in which case you are back to treading in stereotype territory.

So you can say Lloyd Blankfein is overrated, without getting in trouble, but not Rex Grossman. I don’t know if RG is in fact Jewish or not but you get the point. I don’t know where creative types fit in this scheme, although I hear Jews run Hollywood as well. Or course, I heard this from some drunk guy named Mel.  So I’ll defer to Bruce Springsteen.

As to whether or not Benny Leonard is over or underrated, I’ll wait until Bernard Hopkins weighs in.

Re: Jews, again

FBI stats suggest something is going on. 2009:

Of the 1,732 victims of anti-religious hate crimes:
66.1 percent were targeted because of an offender’s anti-Jewish bias.

Here is a partial list of incidents for Oppression Olympics sake. Don’t forget to try to control for population and consider that illegal immigrants are likely not to report:

Anti-Black 2,284

Anti-Asian/Pacific Islander 126

Anti-Jewish 931

Anti-Islamic 107

Anti-Hispanic 483

http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/hc2009/data/table_01.html

Using the term “Oppression Olympics” for victims of crime is disgusting, Manju.