Patrick McEvoy-Halston's Blog

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ay, July 29, 2016
Recent comments at Salon.com (July 29

2016). I am Emporium.
Original Article: Kudos to Hillary for playing
the woman card: If people are going to call her a

witch, shell tell them shes Hermione Granger
FRIDAY, JULY 29, 2016 3:23 PM

Aunt Messy Emporium turney333 Jayne Cullen Just for you, Aunt
Messy:
The fact that Hillary and Chelsea wore different color dresses
intrigues me as well. They weren't unified, part of one-another -all white. It was a white and red "split". Maybe not a priming of
good-and-bad-witch, pure-and-bad-blood split... something which
will soon be displaced onto Trump, as he gets portrayed as a

foreign Russian devil, with noticeable female attributes. But I
wonder if they were encouraging us to see Chelsea as the blood on
Hillary's hands: that with Hillary elected, the future of the young
would be a sacrifice of blood.
A subconscious communication: if you're tired of pushy, uppity,
disrespectful youth -- you don't need to go Trump Republican...
Hillary will make sure they'll be targeted and killed in other
countries.
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Dienne77 I'm fairly certain she's gloated over a Slytherin or
Malfoy defeat somewhere along the line... and I can't remember
her reminding everyone all the time that we should have empathy
for Voldemort because he was a neglected orphan, and that this is
what happens to children born of abuse. This is the problem: our
not seeing other people as themselves, as always human, as they
actually are -- always worthy of empathy -- but in possession of
dark traits we've projected onto them. When we war against others,
we can't be persuaded from seeing a dark Voldemort within them...
someone who actually truly really deserves our hate.
Hillary's not immune to this. But she's better than most.
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DinahMoeHum wejahnke VictoryRider2005 PeekieClassic I agree
with this.
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agrippina minor Jayne Cullen ifthethunderdontgetya They all
should have stayed in England?
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turney333 Jayne Cullen But it's a solid point. If Hillary gets in,
we'll split off our good mommy -- or the good witch -- onto her,
and our bad one onto some other. If she's our Hermione Granger,
some other "sap" will start bearing the dark, vampiric visage of
Ursula the Sea Witch, and through her we'll take our revenge.
Children will die, and they'll represent our child selves, who we
also blame for the abuse.
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Michael Pullmann Emporium If Hillary doesn't get in, it'll owe to
people's collective mommy issues. Enough people will remain
cognizant that Trump's mind is more hornet's nest than an actual
brain (credit to Andrew O'Hehir, who said something like this), and
still vote for him, for he'll be their agent for matricide.
I wonder even if this "Hermione Granger" bit is not just about
emphasizing how hard she works, but de-emphasizing her as the

Dangerous Mother... it's possible that even the Clinton campaign
might be considering their candidate's problem is people's
projecting their childhood issues onto her, might attempt to
"resolve" them through her, and are working against it by
promoting her sans dangerous witch qualities, sans older women
qualities.
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Aunt Messy @Emporium Right, it's this bit:
"He was abused," Clinton told Franks. "When a mother does what
she does, it affects you forever."
Clinton continued: "I am not going into it, but I'll say that when
this happens in children, it scars you. You keep looking in all the
wrong places for the parent who abused you."
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Aunt Messy Emporium I'm not falling in line for her. She can still
say very interesting things, and deserves credit for it. Amanda was
a bit like that yesterday, and we should support the brave. If it
helps, I think Hillary is brave and will make a great president. I
preferred her over Bernie.
Didn't Hillary herself once remark upon Bill's relationship with his
mother as explaining his promiscuity... there was some interview
once, I remember, where she said something like this. I'll look it
up.
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agrippina minor Emporium In 2008, reporters could barely look
Hillary in the eye. Obama barely could. What is the origin of this?
Just societal stereotypes? Or something quite massive, like
childhood abuse, like mommy issues?
There's more Steinem behind this than Paglia. She's the one who
explained the aversion to Hillary Clinton as owing to people's
difficulties with their mothers.
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She revives childhood memories of being bullied and manipulated
by our love-denied mothers, who are the ones who mostly attend to
us in childhood, not our fathers. This is what Gloria Steinem was
getting at. This is what's going on with Bernie Bros, and this is the
origin of the witch stereotype: its basis is actual experience. It's not
a sign of intrinsic male awfulness towards women. It gets dropped
when more societal resources are devoted to assists mothers as
caregivers. We need to be much more Scandinavia. We won't get
there until we get further past needing to revenge ourselves upon
them, and as well their defenceless children -- representatives of
ourselves, who we also blame for the abuse.
Those who were lucky enough to have had mothers who were well
loved enough to be much more genuinely nurturing, to not use the
child to make up for love not given to her, won't be attracted to this
stereotype, no matter if they grew up in a 16th-century Puritan
household.
Hermione Granger is a teenager. She's the sort older men who've
suffered abuse from their mothers turn to when they're fleeing the
power of the dominating mother. I'm not sure we should hold her
out as bait.
"We are all aware, on some level, that it's anonymous but hardworking women that make the world run, who do all the thankless
and unglamorous organizing, cleaning, planning and detailsweating..."
Camille Paglia gave us this speech too, but credited those "Gloria
Steinem" feminists disparage -- men... the ones who built bridges,
civilization... all that. My point is that it's more Bernie rhetoric, not
Hillary, who's been accused of being oriented almost entirely to
members of the professional class; those who leave the housecleaning to others.
Permalink
Original Article: Obamas DNC letdown: The
president needed to hit it out of the park, but he

surprisingly fell short
THURSDAY, JULY 28, 2016 5:05 PM

62Fender Yeah, it was an interesting perspective; a useful
contribution.
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Does it strike anyone that we have been guilty of doing a lot of
projection onto the Obamas, at the expense of those who are
actually more interesting. I've always found both Clintons much
more alive and vibrant... much more of what I tend to think of
when I think Democratic. The Obamas seem just so controlled, like
the latest incarnation of British monarchy... much more like how

Republicans like normally to have things.
I think we wanted someone like him in office because for a good
long while we wanted a more detached relationship with the
presidency... some sense that the presidency was kept apart form
all the emotional turmoil in our own lives. A statue. Some rebuff.
Why, I'm not sure. Maybe it's because we needed a time where we
could predict for certain an unchanging social/political/cultural
environment... the next 8 yrs will be for--. And we couldn't as
easily do that if someone who registered our own emotional
unevenness was at the helm. Anyway, just my best guess right
now.
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sjlee Marcotte assumes they became friends. Gauging at least by
what was happening to Hillary supporters like Ferraro and Walsh,
Obama was getting ready to absolutely destroy her reputation in
2008... get really, really nasty. Fortunately Hillary relented in time,
and all that was happening and was about to happen could be
displaced in mind as we all joined "Hope".
It's possible he felt -- and still feels -- the same aversion to her as
most reporters did in 2008... preferring to look at his feet or to the
side rather than square in the eye (as SNL finally made a skit
about). In natural aversion to her, maybe he actually shares some
similarity with the Bros portion of Bernie's supporters?
Permalink
Original Article: In defense of Bernies
boo-birds (sort of): Democratic dissent is not the
partys real problem
TUESDAY, JULY 26, 2016 10:48 PM

Perhaps out of this democrats might conclude that
conventions ... these stadiums of crowds and anticipation,
belong to a mindset we might be evolving beyond. I like
Andrew's appreciation of raucous conventions of yesteryear,
but what if over the last 50 yrs what's happened to many
democrats is that they by temperament have become more
Scandinavian... that is, more subdued... less in need of
theatre politics, owing to being in possession of less
excitatory, less damaged, less traumatized amygdala brain
systems. We might be losing this desire to move into what
Stanley Milgram called, an "agentic state"
corrects IE6 width calculation

Saturday, July 23, 2016
Recent posts at Salon.com (July 23 2016). I

am Emporium.
Original Article: His dark materials: After
that diabolical, masterful performance, Donald

Trump could easily end up president

Christine B. BrainDrain Yeah, your point is one Steven Pinker
would corroborate with his "Better Angels of Our Nature."
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masaccio Again, DeMause:
Those who are able to remain outside the social trance are
the rare individuals whose childrearing is less traumatic than
that of the rest of their society or whose personal insights,
through psychotherapy or other means, are beyond those of
their neighbors. For instance, extensive interviews of people
who were rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust in
comparison to a control group of people who were either
persecutors or just stood by and allowed the killing of Jews
shows startling differences in childrearing. While all other
dimensions of the lives of the rescuers were similar to the
control group religion, education, even political opinions what
distinguished the rescuers from others was their childhood:
their parents used reasoning in bringing them up, rather than
the customary use by European parents early in the century
of beating and kicking children to force obedience. The
rescuers parents were found to have invariably showed an
unusual concern for equity, more love and respect for their
children, more tolerance for their activities, and less
emphasis on obedience, all allowing rescuers to remain in
their empathic central personalities and not enter into social
alters and dissociate their feelings for Jews as human
beings. The rescuers risked their lives to save Jews not
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because they had some connection with Judaism or were

politically radical, but because they remained in their
compassionate personal selves rather than switching into the
social trance constructed by the rest of their society.
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Jack Burroughs They do feel dislodged. And if somehow
under Hillary Clinton they were given a living wage or
guaranteed income -- all their financial insecurities totally
dissipated -- and were no longer targeted as the lowest form
of slime, as progressives (again, somehow) lost their need to
use them as convenient poison containers, they'd still feel
just as dislodged, alone and afraid as progressives
continued moving the country along into what should
objectively be called, a more evolved reality.
They weren't raised as permissively, as lovingly. They felt
there was a limit to how much progress, how much change,
is actually permitted. This is why they want the world to stop.
This is the foremost issue. If not an immigrant had been
allowed into the country over the last 50 yrs, they'd still be
demanding for a Trump... their talk would still be of their
being surrounded, as memories of childhood isolation come
creeping back.
Personally I think the idea of having a homeland is sort of
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sick. Isn't what is blessed about the world today that we are
increasingly likely to meet people across the world and
discover something shared... that in fact if they had been
your next-door neighbour you might actually have had a
more fruitful relationship with them than you did with those of
similar tribal heritage? Suddenly so many things about
you've been told you are seem to slack off, and you can
reformulate your self-understanding in a way that feels
intrinsically more appropriate. The wonder of
cosmopolitanism, I guess.
Thanks for your post. I enjoyed reading it.
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Your discussion of amniotic fluid, of being born into a
frightening new world, as well as your reference to a leader
as an "avatar," had me searching for this bit from the
psychohistorian Lloyd DeMause's earlier work:
1. We begin to reexperience our early traumas when we feel
too much freedom, prosperity and individuation-wars are
usually fought after a period of peace, prosperity and social
progress produced by a minority who have had better
childrearing, producing challenges that are experienced as
threatening by the majority whose childrearing is so
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traumatic that too much growth and independence produces

an abandonment panic, fears of a persecutory mother-figure,
a defensive merging with the engulfing mother and then
fears by men of having been turned into women.
2. We deify a leader who is a poison container into whom we
can pump our frightening feelings, our bad blood you can
see this blood-transfer concretely when Nazis put up their
arms like an umbilicus and throw their bad feelings their bad
blood into Hitler for cleansing, while he catches their
feelings with an open palm, standing under a swastika (the
ancient symbol of the placenta) imprinted upon a blood-red
flag, the hypermasculine leader becoming societys protector
by finding an enemy to persecute rather than individuals
reliving their early tragedies alone and helpless.
Permalink
Original Article: An attack on all of us: The
France horror has shaken the world but

terrorists will not destroy our humanity

MrJoyboy Emporium Mostly only if it echoes disrespect
you're already well familiar with. If there wasn't much of this
in your originating... in your HOME environment, then an
astonishing lot can be casually brushed off easily.
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Don't Quote Me Emporium and respond by ... writing an
absolutely ferocious letter to the editor, while channeling
Mencken, a la "Greenberg."
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MrJoyboy Somehow this doesn't seem to well describe the
average Brooklynite reader of literature.. the average hipster.
Maybe they just grew up with parents who treated them daily
with respect rather than with constant denigration and abuse.
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CyclingFool CyclingFool
Weren't the first American settlers -- the Puritans -- actually
fairly democratic for their time ... that time's left... those who
rebelled against popish ways, against hierarchy and
aristocracy? If they had somehow clamped down on
immigration and kept their "country" tight in bounds, wouldn't
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their country essentially be Scandinavia (+) at this point -- a

social welfare, a caring society, leader/model? Is it true that
in their case, at least, they were swamped by those of more
regressive orientations?... that their once dominant culture,
kind of lost to yahoos?
Wouldn't the American North have been better off it had
shorn itself of its Southern states? Hasn't it amounted to a
weight on the degree of progress, progressives might
establish at the national level?
I'm asking this even as I acknowledge that basically no one
who right now talks about the "swamping" of countries by
immigrants, actually means well. The kind people out there -or almost all of them -- talk like you do. Your orientation... is
basically the one to support until we're clear from danger
from those who for psychic reasons, are warring to keep their
country from unmooring them with further genuine humane
progress.
I think if you let in people whose childrearing is worse than
the aggregate of your own, it's only a good thing when it
means that your own country is being administered by those
who are open and not-bigoted -- the bigots are being kept at
bay. Otherwise, it's best to have in immigrants whose level of
childrearing is better than that of your aggregate's, which is
surely the case of the professionals into our own country.
These people shouldn't be so much encouraged to
assimilate as to teach us an even better way.
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bluecollarpeep "We must end poverty in order to recruit
people to the idea of world peace"
If you grew up with emotionally immature parents, you
existed to satisfy their own unmet needs -- they didn't WANT
you to become you're best YOU, but rather make up for their
loneliness and absence of love from their parents. When you
first started individuating at the early age of around two -that first separation from mother -- she would have reacted
instinctively by in some way abandoning you, removing her
approval. This scared the absolute shit out of you; and so in
your brain you installed the super-ego to watch over over the
pleasure-seeking id which would eventually betray you.
The next years after that were fine enough because children
at that age are naturally mostly drawn to their parents, but
around the age of 13 -- adolescence; the dawning of adult
departure -- this same sequence repeated itself. You saw the
world as something which might substantiate yourself,
become mostly about you and your chosen peers, your
chosen life and "world," and you experienced this terrifying
withdrawal of still-absolutely-needed parental love.
What wealth does, for "you," the child of emotionally
immature parents, is actually make you feel incredibly
anxious, like as if the horsemen will eventually arrive and
smash bottles across your face, debase you in acid, rip you
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into bloody pieces, for your presumption. As a collection of

people, you can only tolerate sustained increase of wealth
and opportunity after periods of severe war and depression
-- a price has been paid, and you sense some permitted
avenue.
This is why, for awhile after WW2, all incomes increased.
This is why, for awhile after WW2, there was a legitimate
conversation between societal classes -- the working class -home of many of the worst raised -- could allow themselves
to keep up to some extent, with the progressives in their
society's lead.
You can only have a Scandinavia, where everyone finds
grotesque the idea that someone could be suffering, could
be destitute, when the childrearing as an aggregate has
improved dramatically. This doesn't mean an improvement in
STYLE ... well, it does, but it is best understood as an
accretion OF LOVE, slowly through generations, which
manifests itself is such things as eliminating harsh parenting,
eliminating spanking, eliminating discipline-focused
schooling, etc. ... which manifests itself through style.
Wealth and opportunity is far more the actual source of the
terrorism we're experiencing that destitution and ruin. We as
Westerners could have been true saints across the world,
absolutely respectful and beneficiary, and those of awful
childhoods would still target us for representing the affluence
and opportunity that just the sheer fact of life provides, that
they cannot any longer abide in themselves.
The humiliations they will be revenging themselves upon are
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sourced from their own childhoods, those inflicted upon them

by their own parents, even as it is a wonderful thing that
many in the Western world's first thought is that its "obvious"
source is their own governments', their own people's,
grotesque and cruel expression of sadism outwards onto the
world.
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Original Article: GOP war on porn: The
same party that nominated a libertine for

president is now calling your porn a public health
crisis

Tropez Emporium Jayne Cullen Algernon2
I wish porn was all about very well treated men and women
enjoying their sexuality. I'm sorry it's not all about that. But
the future I see ahead is more Hays morality code -a restrictive binding-up of youth and youthful
impulses. And so I think I'm more for humanization than you
have surmised.
Thursday, July 14, 2016
Recent posts at Salon.com (July 14 2016).

I'm Emporium
Original Article: GOP war on porn: The same
party that nominated a libertine for president is now

calling your porn a public health crisis
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Jayne Cullen Algernon2 The war on pornography that is going on
right now though is perhaps best understood as a war against
pleasure. It is the emerging prudish attitude of the 1930s
condemning Jazz Age fun as civilization-destroying. It really just
isn't the time to be with those who argue that porn dehumanizes.
Such times might have once existed. Not now. Best to go with
Marcotte's people just having a bit of me time on occasions.
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frigmous The guy walking into the nightclub and killing 49 people
was walking into a "pleasure-house." The key problem of our age
is that increasing numbers of people feel suddenly pure, loyal and
good when they kill other people's happiness. They target people
who represent the parts of themselves they are trying to gain
distance from. Projection. Poison containers. Elimination: all
suddenly feels pure and light, as the sin that was once part of you
is gone from the world.
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Minnesotan "but I wonder if widespread access to porn hasn't
actually been beneficial to society. Young people are having sex ...
at historically low rates"
Young people having less sex is beneficial to society? What does
society want? People who barely explore? Or those who come to
know want they want through sexual adventure?
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"On the contrary, this is yet another example of Trump's strategy
for winning over the Christian right, by giving them all the power
they demand..."
No, I don't think this is strategy. If strategy, then you know Trump
thinks there is considerable amount of hokum in the idea that porn
ruins civilization, but it's expedient to pretend to be a true believer.
I think we'll miss understanding the psychology of our times (like
how the Jazz Age 1920s changed into the grey 1930s) if we don't
understand that a lot of Americans -- including Trump, and
including perhaps a good number of liberals -- who previously
were all aboard the idea that life ought to be about consumerism
and pleasure, are doing a turn-about as sudden as if the "Marilyn
Monroe" they'd fantasized in their heads had morphed into a
punitive grandma... or the old naked lady in the Shining, or the old
naked witch in Game of Thrones, threatening them with a stick if
they masturbate or have fun at all. And that their brains decide that
the best way to absolve themselves of all guilt --- Trumpy has been
very bad! -- is not to heed their inner grandmas, give way to them,
but to in a sense become them.
Osama bin laden was a playboy before he chose to live in holes
with barely any drinking water and not a single source of fun. Not
just all conservatives but unfortunately many liberals were not
raised with allowance-tolerating, well-enough loved parents to
endlessly tolerate the idea that life can be about fun, without at the
end feeling the need to turn on the idea.
Permalink
Original Article: Sure, celebrate Sanders, but
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lets also honor Clinton for her historic

accomplishment
WEDNESDAY, JULY 13, 2016 6:47 PM

Between_The_Wheels I look at things in terms of narrative.
If I was teleported into the near future and was told that the
presiding president was one who held that women were
systematically discriminated against; that they still faced
scepticism and dismissal, even as they evidently changed the world
for the better; I would know that the liberal society I was familiar
with had continued.
If however I was told that the presiding president held that there
were many groups that faced discrimination... but that the most
pronounced were evidently the working class, I wouldn't be so
sure. More than likely, actually, I'd know I had teleported into a
society where the gains by feminists were about to be withdrawn
as the "staid and true" -- real Americans -- began to speak their
mind.
I find it a bit disconnected from the fact that evidently the nature of
one's social class right now matters a whole lot more than one's
sex, but still, given that the age ahead is probably not going to be a
time a hippie time where everyone everywhere is considered
beautiful but a time of 1930s parochialism, we'd better hope that
the narrative that one's sex matters most, is the one we remain
living amongst.
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accomplishment

"No wonder so many women suffer from imposter syndrome.
When the whole world is telling you women -- including women
like Hillary Clinton -- only win by cheating, it's hard not to suffer
unnecessary doubts about yourself"
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This is true... but it's also true that if I was a white working class
male who succeeded, I wouldn't feel so comfortable that the
professional class whose arena I breached, didn't think me an
imposter barbarian. Someone whom in terms of actual virtue, was
probably no better than your average internet troll, and should go
back where he came from.
I wish the left -- the professional class -- didn't encourage its own
imposter syndrome upon others; wasn't insouciant concerning how
they might be cruelly withering the self-worth and self-esteem of
others. But it has not evolved beyond the psychic need for outgroups.
Permalink

accomplishment

I'm not sure if Sanders, Clinton or Trump deserve credit for their
success. This isn't to say that if we take a good look at what they
did, how they performed, they weren't objectively skilled in a way
that is hard to duplicate -- they might each BE that. But that each
one might mostly represent something to the American populace,
and served mostly as a kind of emblem of that. Who wins might
just mostly represent what kind of society we want over the next
while -- what impulse, mostly, to follow upon.
If I'm Hillary, and I win, I don't think the truth of this necessarily
besmirches my accomplishments. I know I worked hard. I know I
was resilient. I know I had in mind, mostly, what I might do to
assist the U.S. become better (some egoism: first female
president!), as much as it might not have mattered if I had not
actually been all that. The nature of my sex is part of a package
that the establishment, or the established -- not menacingly
defined, as it means a hell of a lot of us -- was going to offer, just
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like Obama's race was: keep the country from falling apart;
incremental change that symbolically is very telling and wonderful
but sort of as part of the ongoing roll of our evolving, increasingly
global, post-industrial society (without knowing it and just living,
the world becomes better, and better yet).
In this instance, it isn't a strike against "me," my sex, something to
be overcome, but the next extension upon which the animus
moving the world for the last several decades, implements itself -that is, a help ... we didn't have to configure something. There is a
feel-goodism about it; how wonderful we are to be part of this
special moment where another of the disadvantaged makes the
incredible breach! It satisfies the ego and makes us exult.
But the push against the collective regression we might all at some
level be experiencing, was going to require finding some kind of
refuge in unimpregnable virtue to keep going. And we need things
to keep going. It's a dark precipice, the other way.
Permalink
Original Article: Meet North Koreas perfect
family: Totalitarianism, Trump and the politics of nonthought

Tom_Collins Sweden, Norway and Finland are also examples of
profound individualism and personal freedom. The collective
empowers each individual so their relationship to their businesses
and their families is not a servile, dependent one. You can leave
your place of work, and not find oneself without health care. You
can disappoint your parents, do your own thing, and not worry that
your parents would retaliate by not taking care of you if you're
desperate.
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Original Article: Pottermore problems:
Scholars and writers call foul on J.K. Rowlings

North American magic
SATURDAY, JULY 2, 2016 11:45 PM

If Indigenous people's background ends up being more like
this
http://psychohistory.com/books/the-emotional-life-ofnations/chapter-7-childhood-and-cultural-evolution/
or as Steven Pinker accounts in "Better Angels of Our
Nature,"
then I'm fairly sure the author would learn to settle for
bastardized accounts.
Thursday, June 30, 2016
Recent postings at Salon.com (June 30

2016)
Original Article: Dont blame Brits for the
Brexit: The EU strayed from its roots in post-war

unity to become a neoliberal technocracy
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29, 2016 4:23 PM

E.L. Deflagrante kumicho "we do not get that the member
nations are not US states, but nations with thousands of
years of history"
I always wonder when people talk about the importance of
the length of time a country has been a country, if they're
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thinking that somehow a race's history gets passed on

through the genes. It's like as if some serum was injected
into each young child, so they're inextricably infected with the
millions of voices of their ancestral heritage. Within each one
is actually a Jungian legion! I'm sorry, but weren't they rather
just playing with their X-boxes and listening to their Taylor
Swift? How exactly was the Magna Carta, Shakespeare,
Chesterton and Churchill lurking somehow, even within that?
Maybe it's rather that if you've been well loved as a child, you
don't project onto a nation anything mythical or magical -you're spared that psychological malady. It becomes...
simply a collective; one that might not make anywhere near
as much sense as one you might choose to formulate within
your own generation, with people of similar dispositions,
across other countries. Like the E.U. was for the post-war
generation.
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jak123 "the fact that even at this late date that no one seems
to know exactly why she wants to be president"
More opportunities for women. A society with better
healthcare. Less disparity between the rich and the poor. A
more educated society. Encouraging a less egotistic, more
generous way of looking at the world.
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She may not be the best progressive out there, but she IS
progressive. Her intention to be president is very worthy. Her
example will encourage other intelligent people to do the
same.
By the way, borderlines love an Orwellian, 1984 society. It is
something they'd wish upon themselves. For it means their
"parents," however loathsome and distrusting, have not
abandoned them.
We need to explore just how much people ACTUALLY hate a
surveillance state, or are somehow eased by it. I don't think
you can tell simply by the fact that someone is criticizing...
sometimes in the criticism one feels that the world would be
psychically molded to be this prison, this panopticon, even if
the outside world didn't much substantiate. At some level,
they actually feel more at ease than they do ill-at-ease, in
this ostensibly existing surveillance world prison.
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Reality-based Liberal Emporium "people with crappy rearing
generally bow the corrupt and powerful"
Yes, this is right. For them, the horsemen of the apocalypse
come riding when they self-actualize too much. When
they've suffered, it's proof of how actually selfless they've
been living.
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You can only get "Scandinavia," not with the successful

spread of examples and ideas, but when the childrearing, the
true level of genuine love in families, is high enough for
everyone to feel well at ease when each one of them lives an
enriched, fully independent life.
Permalink


Reality-based Liberal Emporium Oligarchs are actually our
parents, displaced. Anyone who complains about how
they've been humiliated through too much boot-licking, has
come out of childhoods where their parents inflicted similar
humiliations upon them. There IS a sense in which they're
actually innocent... people who would have been forced to
play their parts, had they not been willing, so the world could
re-stage their early childhood humiliations... the pretext, to
eventual glorious revenge.
Permalink


firstpersoninfinite Emporium The electorate know what
they're doing. They deliberately vote in people who'll abuse
27
them. Kill our easy prosperity. We'll develop character

through suffering -- i.e. we won't self-actualize at all, so our
parents won't think we've abandoned them.
Scandinavians don't do that. But then with them it's just silly
to discuss psychic behaviours like masochism because their
level of childrearing is too good. The professional class
everywhere is getting beyond this as well. But the good old
white trash -- who need their children to make up for
attention they did not receive from their own unloved parents,
and who ferociously abandon them when they have the
audacity to do their own thing -- keep the Freudian concepts
of superego, sadism and masochism, fully relevant.
This hugging of the flag we're about to see plenty of now is
regressive clinging to mommy. Borders will outline the
beautific mother country's body. Everyone inside will be good
the "good children" again, as they displace all their own
"bad" aspects, as well as those of their Terrifying Mother's,
onto other countries.
E.U. has seen a beloved period of peace. This period of
nationalism will have countries looking at other countries like
the fellowship did Mordor.
Permalink


Without neoliberalism the world would have fashioned
28
themselves like Scandinavians have now. They'd all be

earning living wages, have 5-week vacations. Anxiety-levels
would be down, and life would be all about rich selfdevelopment and self-actualization.
Hardly.
Without neoliberalism, the working class would have found
some other way to make the world make them suffer. They're
actually content when they've scars aplenty to show the
world. Look, mom, not the least bit spoiled, am I! The
problem for the world is that they've decided the time for
them to accrue scars is over. Now's the time where they take
out revenge. We'll all patsies to their executing their own
personal psychodrama. They'll project on us all the
appropriate parts.
Permalink
Original Article: Lessons of Britquake
2016: A history-shaping crisis, and a moment of

danger and opportunity
SUNDAY, JUNE 26, 2016 3:13 PM

Slickship Gunner Emporium This is the great "men" theory of
history. Leaders change the course of a nation. I think they
just follow the emotional rhythms of the rest of the country,
and as such, could have been replaced by hundreds of
others, and each would have been established indisputably
singular and "great." I hope in temperament, whatever reality
is, we prefer to know more of undistinguished Brussel
democrats than great Churchill leaders facing the tide... It'll
29
mean we won't secretly relish periods which are ultimately

truly nasty; find heroic, figures who lead millions to their
deaths.

Sunday, June 26, 2016
Recent comments at Salon.com (June 26

2016)
Original Article: Smart country, foolish
choice: The U.K.s Brextremely stupid move

If this cosmopolitan world somehow manages to keep going, we're
going to see some of these Anglophiles genuinely pressed on
exactly how much, truly, they're disappointed when a cosmopolitan
world collapses... how disappointed they are, truly, when suddenly
everyone in their own country wants to know more of their
Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Wordsworth origins, rather than what
the rest of the world "bursted" (good literature bursts?) with their
ostensibly equally worthy literature.
For if it somehow keeps going, Literature departments will likely
be pressed on this habit of sticking to, of permitting, study
according to country. Why communicate to students that it's okay
to devote oneself to more or less uninterrupted involvement in your
own country, when the world you're in is an interconnected reality?
Why communicate that people share something in common,
perhaps mystically, owing to the fact of their geography, their
national heritage?
Why not instead communicate that the person who might really be
most simpatico with you, could be someone living in a different
culture, and this won't be the joining of two exotics but rather of
30
two natural soulmates? And the same for literature, so you couldn't
possibly devote yourself to all things English and be as equally
emotionally evolved as the student who naturally wants to dabble
everywhere. Why weren't YOU like that as well? Why if you love
this interconnected, global world, didn't you find yourself with a
rather mixed reading list... and a bunch of traditionally oddly
grouped texts, to want to arrange for a class?
Why find yourself in this unfortunate fix where all the books
you're going to be redoubling your efforts to comb through, are
pretty much exactly the same ones Nationalists are going to be
parading as recommended or mandatory reading lists? How much
are you going to regret that during this next historical period,
you're not so much going to stand out but rather, sufficiently
"pass."
Permalink
Original Article: Lessons of Britquake 2016: A
history-shaping crisis, and a moment of danger and

opportunity

Slickship Gunner You make it sound like we are all blessed by this
moment -- a chance for heroes; for a washing away of bulimic
greed. What we need more here is some sense of what is tragically
lost when an advanced and successful society regresses into
nationalism. And for that we need language that lauds a society
that appreciates something much quieter than grandiose heroic
figures. We need praise of our commercial society, and our decades
of relative peace. So much of your colourful language here works
against that.
For her own sake I don't want Clinton to "bend her course,"
because if it's a different Hillary who gets elected than the one we
have now, it won't be simply because she adjusted -- we'd spot
such a faker. It will because she herself has changed, and has
begun to see some of the same version of the world that Trump
31
himself sees: America as a homeland; herself "saving" it.

Hillary, keep sane. It is dubious to me that any single individual
"saves" civilization. What is more likely true is that the overall
populace proved less insane during these shared periods than
elsewhere. There were a million possible candidates for a
"Roosevelt" and a "Churchill," and we would have lauded every
one of them, and they'd have followed exactly the same course.
Permalink

opportunity
SATURDAY, JUNE 25, 2016 6:07 PM

"I don't know, and don't claim to know. But conventional wisdom
and complacency seem displaced at this historical moment, don't
you think"
Good point. I wonder how many of us know what unconventional
wisdom looks like? My guess, different, nutty. You all ready to
look strange but also to have a better chance of contributing
something relevant to the understanding our current moment of
history? Hope so.
Permalink

opportunity

Gert M Emporium Charming to make your acquaintance. It is an
earnest attempt to add some illumination, not satire. Your
explanation for Hitler's Fatherland and the creation of the Volk, is,
what, economic?
Permalink
32

opportunity

"But they couldn't quite say why, largely because for most people
the E.U. is identified less with its purported human-rights and
social-justice priorities than with the neoliberal economics,
crippling budgets and disastrous "free trade" deals."
So if after Brexit the economic consequences are severe, the
English won't be thinking of how great it is to have their own
country again, but rather of how the exit actually crippled them,
made things worse -- hey assh*les, this plan didn't deliver? For me
it's so easy to imagine them so happy to once again count
themselves part of their proud ancestral lineage, that their wealth
even cut in half wouldn't irk so much.
I think the idea that what is most irksome to people right now is
how they have economically struggled, is worth challenging. I
really wouldn't just assume it. IT IS possible to me that if what
happens in England right now is a reclaiming of some kind of
great, mystical union, a bonding back to Magna Carta through to
Churchill, and a rejection of something seen as imposed and
artificial, and it really does lead to an even worse economic
situation, that people wouldn't instantly turn disappointed and
angry. Could you not imagine them quite proud to endure the
hardships? Proudly bearing the pain, to be part of something so
"great" again?
It isn't that they are being used, that they had no say, either. That's
not quite right. But rather that they are being dragged kicking and
screaming into a world they aren't prepared for. I truly believe
every single one of them could have been granted a living wage,
had no financial difficulties at all, through this whole period, and
simply being part of this expansive phenomena of globalism
would've compelled them to eventually call a stop. I also believe
33
that the fact that they didn't have much say in this last whole period
was probably to our collective good fortune -- good thing, as
arrogant as this sounds, many of them wanted to go through a
period where they could demonstrate their being absolved of all
previous sins by overtly collecting upon themselves so many scars,
pains and humiliations. Free trade -- they knew unconsciously this
would deliver on that.
This new England will use them just as much. But no grievance:
they'll be happy to be its patsies. Because it'll be all done for their
great, beautiful Fatherland/Motherland, and their being absolutely
loyal will make them its purest, cleanest subjects.
...
It is true that I'm not dealing so much with Bernie here. I hope this
proves a time of exciting opportunities for the left. It is nice to be
provoked to think of it.
Permalink
Original Article: Trump and Brexit: Right-
wing populism of the two is rooted more in base

nationalism than in economic insecurity

Steven Danis Amanda argues that they are aware of this: "So, this
is a fairly ugly example of people choosing to screw themselves
over economically rather than accept cultural change."
Permalink


kchoze But what about the example of elite universities, where
homogeneity is more about the fact that all of them, regardless of
34
where they come from in the world, are sons and daughters of
professionals. They're psychologically similar, and that's key,
because for this they're better able to relate to one another than
people who speak the same language but are psychologically
vastly disparate.
These are their natural kin; they want to know one another; so if
there is a language barrier the desire will be there to deal with it.
What cosmopolitan Londoner suddenly wants to count himself part
of ostensibly shared ancestral heritage that the provincials are
suddenly yammering about?
Permalink


czuklz Well, they delight over parochial nationalism, so they just
gave substance to the next bunch of elites who might otherwise
considered different.
Permalink

SATURDAY, JUNE 25, 2016 1:27 AM

Excellent article.
Permalink


susan sunflower FreeQuark I've read the book. What he couldn't
35
acknowledge is that the liberal professional elite may have been

assholes, but they really had to leave everyone else behind. The
working class, who for awhile had sorta kept pace with the more
evolved psychoclass leading them, had exhausted their ability to
tolerate further growth. After this point, they really were just a
burden that had to be shlepped off if you wanted a progressive
cultural movement... if you wanted what Hedges dismissively
calls, "boutique" societal accomplishments.
There are a lot of people who actually wanted to suffer, and what
the hell do you do with that, even if you weren't in mind to
disparage them? You don't go down in other people's sinkhole.
These people knew what was going to happen to them with Reagan
and NAFTA, which were compliant with their own sordid wishes
-- take away the happy times that we don't feel we deserve. No
betrayal occurred, that is, upon earnest working class people, too
easily given to trust.
Permalink


It may not be right to say it is principally bigotry that is
moving these people. I think it really is sovereignty -possession -- and strong borders. But by this I mean...
Hitler's first business wasn't suddenly to go around executing
Others. He wanted to be part of inducing a populace (a
populace that would have compelled him, if for some reason
he proved somehow in truth uninterested) to think of their
country as some kind of great parental identity -- a
Fatherland or Mutterland -- that had been forsaken, and
36
everyone else loyal "children" who were absolutely ready to

die for it -- a fusion into the Volk. It is for the successful
creation of such an entity that people are primarily joyous
now. The body of their country is their mother again. They,
part of it. They're going to be part of a mystical entity again,
and are delighted by the prospect.
This returned "parent" will have her attributes split -- all the
good in one's own country and all the bad outside. And the
war against the split-off Terrifying Mother, as well the those
who betrayed her -- liberal cosmopolitans, and their "pets" -will wait for next phase: there will be awhile where
cosmopolitans might think they might just manage their way
through this, even as this madness spreads. You might even
find them echoing the mandatory greeting, Hail "Hitler," but
this won't spare them, for it's not something about to pass.
Recents comments (I'm "Emporium") at

Salon.com (as of June 25 2016)
Original Article: No, Syrian refugees didnt
rape a child in Idaho: Right-wing urban legend

shows how ugly anti-refugee movement has
become

susan sunflower Emporium Good point about the similarity
between this case and the scapegoating of Jews as childabductors. Referring specifically to Jews, this was a minority
37
actually leaps ahead in terms of childrearing, true child care,

than the rest of Germans -- they were the most progressive
group in the country.
Permalink
Original Article: Nick Denton isnt sorry:
New interview reveals more about Gawker

founders ethics

Society will miss an uninhibited Gawker.
Permalink
Original Article: Fact-checking Trumps
garbage truck of lies: His speech accusing

Clinton of corruption is riddled with fiction and
conspiracies

Come on. Hillary is not some exempla of absolute human
rationality. We just almost never elect in those people. She,
like Obama, can actually unconsciously want war. Innocents
punished, and all the worst. But their impulses are still much
better than so much of the rest of the population.
If she gets in, I'm not quite sure she'll be the war hawk that
many expect her to be -- operating under the belief that not
that many of us are entirely immune to whatever turn in
psychology is driving so many of our countrymen into
nationalists, I actually expect her to turn a bit isolationist -but I think she's going to do other unconscionable things --
38
like putting weight on the "radical left." There will be no good

reason for doing so. It won't simply be strategy, but rather,
pathology. And yet it'll still mean overall for a good
progressive run by a candidate, many leaps of psychological
health over her opponent.
Permalink
Original Article: No, Syrian refugees
didnt rape a child in Idaho: Right-wing urban

legend shows how ugly anti-refugee
movement has become

susan sunflower Emporium We don't have a left who can
look at refugees and say, these individuals need to be
welcomed into our country, and given the full chance of a
rich life they deserve, but they do come from areas where
the amount of love in families is abysmal, so we can't
assume they'll get to the contributive stage any sooner
than we'd expect some generational chain that's been
here for a century and rightwing and xenophobic the
entirety of the time, to suddenly just now become one,
given the right pamphleteering.
We'll look at many families within our country and say,
they're entrenched: these people keep on re-inflicting the
same traumas upon their children and they never seem
to become other than societal retardants. Society moves
on, essentially only by forgetting about them and focusing
39
on the advances of the cosmopolitan, educated, liberal

elite. The particular irony of our current form of
progressive thought -- the best to date out there, mind
you -- is that refugees, for us, simply by being amongst
peoples the rightwingers in our own country tend to
project upon and hate, magically become exempt from
this way of thinking. For them, surely, after a little bit of
careful guidance and a grand measure of respect and
support, they'll bypass this generation-after-generationstuck-in-the-mud rule, and start inculcating our own
society with a wonderful dalliance of their own cultural
contributions, as they've caught up with our modern
contemporary standards of behaviour in every way we
could expect to hope for. Take the bullies off of them (we
know what it like to be picked on too!), and give them a
little bit of support and love, they'll thrive. It's too bad
we've rejected psychoanalytic talk therapy, because
therapists in those circles understood that when the
abuse has been bad it can take decades to shape people
into normal.
You mentioned before that many of our immigrants are
actually highly educated. Progressive for their own
countries, very likely. These may well be in advance of
what constitutes the American average, and simply by
coming here, are weighing our country towards the left,
towards sanity. As much as possible, this ought to be the
idea.
Permalink
40
Original Article: No, Syrian refugees
didnt rape a child in Idaho: Right-wing urban

legend shows how ugly anti-refugee
movement has become

What liberal doesn't hear of Syrian refugees and want to
apply a "Rousseauian image makeover" (Steven Pinker)?
What lover of Dave Eggers' wonderful fiction -- Zeitoun,
What is the What? The left is best defined as being those
who are more sane that its opponents, but what is good
about the current refugee program may be more that it is
part of our current generation of progressive's world
vision, than the degree to which the refugees somehow
function to keep our world somehow intrinsically
cosmopolitan and progressive.
We may actually be letting in people who have come out
of childhoods more traumatic than the ones that lead
people to being rightwing, American-style. This means
hate. This means rage. This means parochial attitudes,
that stretch over generations. This is not a problem, but
only in a sort of complicated way: the only alternative
vision of our times will lead to mass bigotry and a great
furthering of pain.
If the American populace wants to chastise the left, its
(the left's) inclination to romanticize will be part of how it
goes. The other avenue is already currently being
exploited: the American left has not evolved beyond
needing a group to irrationally hate, namely the American
right (or downscale, white, working class
41
Americans). Irrationally? Insanely? -- yes. For if they were

looking at people outside their culture rather than within
it, their tone would be much more tempered, and they'd
be much less inclined to mock... they'd talk instead, rather
respectfully -- not to besmirch the totality of their whole
cultural background -- of a still necessary re-education.
They'd deal with them as educated, tolerant employees of
European governments do the refugees they're
respectfully helping settle in.
There is still something irrational in the American left, a
need to project an inner worldview onto outer reality,
even if vastly less the case than their opponents. I don't
think this is an achilles heel, but if the whole nation goes
sorta Trumpish ( which, believe it or not, I think it can
kinda manage even with Hillary), if we close in on the 51%
of the population who are in the same mind as Brexit
even if not quite for a tantrumy head-of-state, the left is
going to have to be really, really smart to minimize the
damage, and keep our subsequent years the best under
the circumstances.
Yes, the right is truly, deeply mad. But they need to
consider their own psychic weak spots, and what it might
have made them perhaps overlook.
Permalink
Original Article: Brexit is British for
Trump: Why the U.K.s anti-Europe surge

should scare us
42
LynnRobb Globalization can be seen as a sort of reaching

out for your own. You're educated, broadminded, and
you seek the same wherever they are in the world.
Someone tells you that, "no, the people you left behind in
your hometown are actually TRULY your kin, and that it's
time you reminded yourself of that." And you look at
them and say to yourself, "what, those neanderthals?
Please... no thank you! I'm doing everything I can to
escape them!"
I doubt a single one of them truly believes they are of
exactly the same "nature" as those who think the world is
disintegrating into some kind of polygot mess; that
something pure is being endlessly climbed over by dark
and fearful beings. That is, I think they believe they are
psychologically different, more evolved. And the reason
they don't see the world as in some kind of chaos but
rather becoming more peaceful (which, it is) and, overall,
more integrated and communicative, is because they
have evolved into the temperament where a changing
world doesn't scare them, nor feels like a forbidden
trespass.
What does it mean when we say we want people to
assimilate? Shouldn't we prefer that newcomers, rather,
scintillate -- challenge, with their human uniqueness, our
traditional, roundabout way of doing things? Isn't it for
this that we'd want to invite them in? And do we trust
people saying they want assimilation? Are they thinking
rationally, sanely, demanding we consider the heartland
something forgotten but somehow still absolutely
43
essential to our collective identity? Or are they in some

way worthy of being forgotten -- not humiliated and
preyed upon, as they have been, but still forgotten?
Why not correct course by instituting a living wage and
providing meaningful jobs for everyone -- go vastly more
Scandinavian socialist -- and as well de-emphasize Wall
Street and put significant taxes on the super-affluent so
there is no great financial divide, but otherwise keep
those clamouring for loyalty to currently besmirched, oldday America, out of the news? Don't you sense the
madness in them?
Permalink
Original Article: Brexit is British for
Trump: Why the U.K.s anti-Europe surge

should scare us
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 22, 2016 12:22 AM

The way you describe disgruntled downscale voters at the
end of the piece makes it hard to believe that the biggest
problem is the particular state of the E.U. itself. If they like
white Americans are operating under some kind of
conscious or unconscious death instinct, mightn't it just
distract to delineate its problems?
Maybe if their desire to re-stage early childhood
humiliations but no longer to suffer but to triumph over
the oppressor -- here in the guise of snobby Oxford
Londoners -- is strong enough; maybe if the drive to start
44
a course that will ultimately lead to some kind of mass

suicide that will please because it would acknowledge
ultimately how "sinful" "you" really are, is strong enough;
maybe if the need to create some out-group into which
one projects all one's badness into is strong enough -- in
this case, immigrants -- it wouldn't matter one bit if the
E.U. was actually functioning as it was envisioned, a
monumentally beautiful edifice of human social creation
that people two centuries ahead in time will mark as a
significant signpost of evolutionary progress. These same
regressing people would look at and see it in exactly the
same fashion they do now. An unctuous, appalling
monstrosity, even though in reality, a true beauty.
The real problem for these people with the E.U. is not
what it is doing wrong but what it is doing right. At some
conscious or unconscious level, these downscale voters
know that they are being incrementally brought into a
more progressive world that will ultimately increase the
opportunities available to them. The problem however in
coming out of families, still, that are like many of our own
were but way back in our grandma's or great-grandma's
time, is that burned early on in their brains is that too
much self-activation and self-realization makes you
spoiled, makes you rotten: your own growth means
you're ignoring the multitudinous pains of your deprived
parents, who bore you to ameliorate them -- for psychic
equilibrium. And these people, like regular harshly-reared
Germans in liberal Weimar Germany, need for a stop to
be put on growth, have all the "bad boys and girls"
45
punished, and commit to a Fatherland or Mudderland,

because otherwise a complete psychic apocalypse for
them is guaranteed.
Published comments
Original Article: The narrative falls apart:
Evidence that Omar Mateen was in the closet

undermines GOP framing of the Orlando
shooting
TUESDAY, JUNE 14, 2016 10:59 PM

Frank Knarf Emporium The need to imagine themselves
as under threat is what is paramount in Europe. It is true
that many refugees are from countries where the level of
childrearing is abhorrent. And it is true that liberals
romanticize cultures their conservative "peers" projected
upon and despised, where if they were themselves even
more emotionally healthy, they could have just seen them
straight. But if the recent millions into Germany -- for
example -- were actually more emotionally evolved than
Germans were, less violence-inclined, such is the need for
many Germans to imagine their country as vulnerable
and under threat, they would have made their actually in
this case very evolved and progressive refugees, into
villains.
Many people are rejecting progress for a nationalistic
mindset. This is what is most important about our time.
Thereafter we made do with what the world offers us to
"justify" it. And it certainly helps but actually ultimately
doesn't matter, if there are powerful entities out there
46
who really do want to cripple us.
Permalink

shooting

freebird Emporium The concern of this article was how
the nation was likely going to process this event given the
facts. What I was trying to get at is the obvious real facts -that this guy needed a psychiatrist and
institutionalization, and was only very tenuously related
to "radical Islam" -- won't matter. (Regressing)
Mainstream America identifies muslims as outsiders
because they were amongst the immigrant groups
prioritized when America "drifted" away from 1950s
values to our progressive, contemporary ones. As belief in
globalism/cosmopolitanism/righteousness of a
professional society shakes -- and it is evidently shaking,
here and elsewhere -- muslims increasingly intrinsically
become the dangerous outside other. Citizenship
becomes an allowance handed them, when Americans
were lead by liberal professionals who ostensibly were
willing to wreck a country they had no respect for while
they gloated in their coastal city enclaves.
This said, the effort to say that the most accurate way to
identify this attacker is with all others who grew up in
family environments of massive lack of love and ample
47
supplies of insanity (i.e. in with Christian

fundamentalists), is of course correct.
Permalink

shooting

I'm not sure how much the facts matter. ISIS, viewed
rationally, is hardly a titanic threat to the world, but in the
minds of the mainstream, it has become so. People
changed from being enthusiastic or mildly accepting of
increased social progress to beginning to want to cloister
into a bordered nation, imagined as being surrounded by
dark, predatory villains. If ISIS didn't exist, any other
group would do... truly, if all they had were peashooters,
our imaginations would admittedly be stretched but
somehow we'd be convinced of their absolute threat.
Muslims are associated with the cultural progress of the
1960s on -- the victory of the cultural left. They are
increasingly viewed suspiciously, not just because of
ostensible capacity for violence but because they are
seen as part of the equation of a leftwing professional
elite that has been driven to increase opportunity in the
world and to decrease "legitimate" avenues in which to
express your hate. They were amongst the groups
principally brought into the U.S. and Europe when both
where rejecting the parochial members of their society
48
and branching off into cosmopolitanism/globalism -something actually enlightened. The rightwing talk about
them as liberals' "pets." That is, as much as the Right is
identifying them as medieval cultures, they're hated
perhaps principally because of their associations with the
most progressive of our own times.
As such, there is no victory based on facts for the left
here. All mainstream Americans need to know is that a
muslim was involved (one of the outsiders, brought in by
Kennedy and the left) in creating an apocalyptic event in
their country. Yes, many mainstream Americans are still
homophobic, and certainly are developing a lot of hatred
for their millennial young, but they don't feel selfimplicated in this attack -- see their own wishes horribly
expressed -- because they feel too strong a need to
categorize the dead just as carnage... as further evidence
that the outer-world is full of attackers who are
succeeding in busting giant bomb holes within America's
vulnerable, corporeal body.
Permalink

shooting

Patricia Schwarz Too much emphasis on fathers. These
boys spend most of their time with their mothers, and it
is their abuse of them that causes shame. Mothers cheer
49
when their sons become suicide bombers. It means their

boys will never grow up and away from them. They'll
always be with them. And boys feel in suiciding
themselves, they'll finally be loved.
Permalink
Original Article: American crime: Maybe
Omar Mateen used radical Islam as an

excuse, but his heinous actions are all too
familiar
TUESDAY, JUNE 14, 2016 3:11 AM

JamesRT We don't yet know how powerful the NRA will be
if our nation becomes nationalist. The government is no
longer a threat in this case, but truly part of the beloved
body you're co-habiting. Remember, just a number of
months ago, the Republican establishment was allpowerful... and then suddenly, it wasn't; at all. People had
shed something they had psychically wanted for decades.
A need to be humiliated, readily assumed; to be
misrepresented and betrayed. Could Hitler have reigned
in all the loose guns, if he wanted to... saying that in order
to own one, you had to be one of his soldiers? And the
possibility that you could come up with one, that *just
anyone* could come up with one -- a vulgar affront to the
leader's power of control and the dignity overall of the
nation? I kinda actually suspect that the NRA won't have
the power it has now for long. I mean this even if Hillary
gets in, because I suspect that we're going to make
whomever gets in, our next nationalist leader, our next
50
Roosevelt. Anyway, late at night and just thinking bold.
Permalink
Original Article: Overcompensation
Nation: Its time to admit that toxic masculinity

drives gun violence

Benthead Emporium Freedame Lester Phinney The only
families where the fathers are anywhere near as involved
as the mothers are, can be found, like, in Brooklyn, or
Scandinavia. Everywhere else, there is not a chance that a
father has anywhere near the influence of the mother
upon the development of the child's psyche. Sources...
well, I know for instance that Margaret Mahler argued this
point. You could start there.
Permalink

familiar

NorEastern Jack Burroughs The old cliche is that America
was attacked because it represented earthly indulgence...
a happy, sunny place. If attacks keep occurring
predominantly against the young, and in their happy
places, perhaps the U.S. could have done absolutely
nothing abroad, and still been a prime target of terrorist
51
attacks. Its crime, just being ostensibly a place where

dreams might be realized.
Maybe what we do when we express our sadism through
war crimes is not get deserved "feedback" -- maybe we
just kill people; people who did not need to be killed. The
fact of ostensibly obvious "feedback" may just reflect a
wish. A wish for Bush to be even more evil. A wish that a
lash has already been applied, gloriously showing up our
guilt and sin.
Permalink

familiar

Jack Burroughs No one in the left really trusts that the
mood in the country is rational right now towards
immigrants.
We have two groups. The most sane, who can rightly be
made to seem insane in that they seem incapable of
accepting that many immigrants coming into Europe are
from regions with absolutely abhorrent childrearing
traditions, who vent the hate that was vented upon them
readily upon other people. And we have the much less
sane, who recognize this, but who in their talk of
assimilation and being reasonable, really are just
preparing themselves with the beginning of a dialogue
which will end in isolating outgroups for a deluge of hate
52
and destruction.
So the human beings that are going around all
abstracted... may be just the best kind of human heroes
we've got this time around. The ideal... the left that
doesn't romanticize or themselves require some group
they can be enfranchised to hate (the best of the left will
eventually not hate the right, even as much they'll totally
regret them, because they'll never not see in them the
kind of neglect required to make them so much hate
themselves when they and the nation progress), doesn't
quite exist yet. But they'll come. The superego's gone in
most of them, and the need to project, soon also.
Permalink

drives gun violence

Freedame Lester Phinney They're men... who had fathers
who spent little time with them, and so they were almost
entirely raised by their mothers. Women ARE, in a sense,
just as much front and centre, if you're looking to
childhood influences for the reason why.
Permalink

familiar
53

Benthead Emporium You don't think it's at useful to point
out that that our primary problem is with those who
seem irritated if we DON'T think America is a cesspool of
intractable badness which requires a complete and total
cleansing? Hey, make a bold statement about how
awesome our students, boldly insisting on applying
"trigger warnings" all through the curriculum, and see
how many extremists, conservatives, liberals -- all -- want
to see you strangled.
Permalink

familiar

balitwilight Whichever has the worst childrearing. That's
where the hatred of hubris comes out of... the total belief
in sin; fear of pleasure. Not taught. Not instructions. But
basically being coldly abandoned and brutally punished
every time you as a kid, as a young child, did anything
self-actualizing and kinda fun. Later you shortchange your
life possibilities and also project your "bad" version of
yourself into others, discriminate against them, and feel,
now purified, like you might just be the good boy or girl
your God parents might finally love.
Many families, many countries, really have not evolved
much through time: each one just repeats the same
54
crimes upon their children. It is true: compared with the

most progressive families/nations of the world, they're
essentially medieval in psychic state. Though also true:
people from the most loving families are the ones who
are saying it's not time to link any culture right-wingers
are trying to target as medieval. Hell, with these folk,
Andrew might even get in trouble for bringing up the
16th!
Permalink

familiar
MONDAY, JUNE 13, 2016 11:50 PM

The guilty are those who'd try and cast a pall of darkness
upon our nation. Some Hillary supporters were beginning
to see the Bernie bros this way. Bill's "they want to kill
one out of three on Wall Street!" for instance. Krugman's
"these lunatics with their plans that don't add up, will
wipe out all our hard-fought-for progress"! Is it possible
that with Hillary beating Bernie, we have for a moment
escaped those who see America in the gloomiest of
terms... those who have a kind of perverse hatred of
those who find themselves still actually happy.
Permalink
55
drives gun violence

Rapproachment Emporium In our current sagacity we
were all caught off guard by Trump.
Permalink

drives gun violence

People are noting that this man was an underachiever in
life. A loser. And because he was a loser he went hypermasculine to save face. Perhaps these things interconnect
differently. That is, maybe he shortchanged his personal
development -- like borderlines do -- so as to not be guilty
of individuating so much and thereby avoid what is called
the abandonment depression: he doesn't have to deal
with the six horsemen (depression, panic, rage, guilt,
helplessness, emptiness) of the psychic apocalypse that
come riding to engage you when you ambition a truly
self-fulfilling life for yourself. So sales clerk not lawyer. So
security guard not police man.
Noting a culture that continues to present him with
opportunities to self-activate and have fun, to ease his
distress, he had to ambition further, as inner voices inside
his head -- i.e. his parents -- told him that the guilty
young, desiring growth and fun so badly, deserved to die.
Of note, if you came out of a family environment where
the father wasn't around much and your environment
56
was largely being around your mother -- that is, one of

maternal engulfment -- when you start regressing for
feeling abandoned because your nation still tempts you,
you can feel feel part of her again, maybe her prop, again
-- that is, feminized. This is where the fact that it was gay
youth who were targeted is important. They were as he
physically felt he was: immersed in female "poisons."
Killing them, he becomes hyper masculine: gloriously free
of his previously compromised, feminized self.
Permalink

drives gun violence

TomJohnson Emporium You're welcome. And I hope so as
well.
Permalink

drives gun violence

Just as important is the fact that it was the young who
were killed, youth who were having fun. Basically, men
who kill like this come out of families where they pretty
much existed to maintain the psychic equilibrium of
mothers who have been the recipients of very little
respect and love in life. When they made efforts to
57
individuate, their mothers understood them as rejecting

them -- just like everyone else has in life -- and
emotionally abandoned them for it. This was felt as so
intolerable to the child, he installed in his mind a
superego... a superego that goes into overdrive in his own
young adulthood when the possibilities of the world are
open to him. He alleviates his sense of intolerable hard
self-judgment by projecting his own "guilty" self onto
others, and attacks. The mother and father inside of him
-- psychic alters -- rejoice, and he feels a good boy who
now can be loved.
The fact that he was going after gay men may not be as
important as one thinks here. That is, if we're going to
increase security, do it in any venue where young people
are enjoying themselves. Like Disney World, like someone
just below just posted.
Permalink

drives gun violence

TomJohnson Yep. Lloyd DeMause
http://psychohistory.com/books/the-emotional-life-ofnations/chapter-3-the-childhood-origins-of-terrorism/
Permalink
Original Article: O.J. Simpson, American
58
icon: Why the football star turned accused

killer is one of the 20th centurys most
important cultural figures

susan sunflower Emporium BlackHeywood I wasn't
expecting this. I may have missed what you were getting
at originally.
Permalink


susan sunflower BlackHeywood So if Brexit occurs, will
this be because the British people deliberated hard on
the facts but simply came to a conclusion we don't like, or
really just sad tribalism? If Austria and Germany elect in
rightwing nationalists, is this because they deliberated
sanely on the problem of loose borders and millions of
immigrants who can't be assimilated, or really just sad
tribalism? I imagine a lot of liberals wouldn't hesitate to
drop down the word "tribalism" on ever-increasing
contexts these days, and rightly so (Krugman may well
have done so with Bernie Saunders, and maybe not
entirely for adverse reasons). But somehow back then,
still, there wasn't an ounce of it. Everyone who sees in
that trial mostly an emotional response, an irrational
response, is a meme-spreading racist.
59
Permalink


The lasting legacy of the trial may be that many white
liberals have learned that some thoughts and judgments
of theirs would have to be buried or completely effaced.
Very briefly a whole lot of them were Patrick J. Moynihan's
"culture of poverty" people, and knew that the progress
they wanted in the world could not possibly be made out
of this understanding, only cruelty. And so after
discussing with their friends how absurd the judgment
was, and momentarily being revolted by what they saw
with the jury, they would be required to do the regretful
task of killing or shortchanging part of their
sanity/knowledge of the world. And what their brains left
with them afterwards is this "inhabited two different
national realities" "realization."
There is no avenue in their inner-universe to see people
they want to respect as being capable of excusing the
crimes of a murderer because they were so pathetically
open to emotional manipulation. They had to have had
reasons. There was smart calculation, a higher purpose.
They saw the larger picture... it certainly wasn't a form of
heroic-figure "fellatio"! They focused this realization on
people they did not feel a need to respect, and the white
60
working class -- aka, trolls -- gobbled down this

condescension to satisfy their own psychodrama, their
own righteous revolt.
Permalink
Original Article: Hillary Clinton,
Democratic nominee: Now the left begins to

bargain with a painful reality and a hopeful
future

Mojoman Emporium samandor1 "actual powers that be...
manipulating pawns" sounds like fantasy as well, at least
to me.
Permalink

future

E.L. Deflagrante As is, what smells of illegitimacy, is that
she isn't the next generation's candidate. The young did
not vote her... and what exactly is the future, but theirs?
Otherwise, she did win, fairly, democratically. But
nevertheless the election went previous-gens... we all saw
what the young wanted, but kept it within our own range.
Permalink
61

future

Mojoman Emporium samandor1 Sounds like you've
forgotten that the key thing that happened this year: all
conventional wisdom, turned upside down. That is, what
happened this year with Trump and Bernie, was fantasy
all but a year ago.
Perhaps not so silly to see an even stranger future? Not
so intrinsically suspect, to refuse the just-humiliated way
of prognosticating the future, and continue to project the
unfathomable?
Permalink

future

samandor1 Yes, if she remains the person as you rightly
describe her, the future is as blessed as it could possibly
be. I'm expecting, however, the future "evolution" some
might see in her in the future, as she becomes the
armoured Brienne, thundering reprove, even on or even
especially on Wall Street, is actually the end of her
genuinely-evolving journey. We'll all be saying, who knew?
Wow, what a surprise! What a package! But somewhere
the most progressive in America will take note from
62
ample cues, this could go bad for us. Not Trump bad, but
along the same lines.
Emporium
11 days ago
@Christopher1988 I think she'll be a nightmare for

Wall Street, only less so than someone else will be.
Only the thing is, I'm not even exactly sure that the
psychology of Wall Street will be the same, and that
if she becomes our era's nationalistic crusader, that
they mightn't not not be willing to squander their lot,
if only to be more part of a rejuvenated, repentant
America. I find it very difficult to see her being a
repeat of Obama, only with a bit more give on
minimum wage issues, more on worker rights (and of
course bombing the hell out of other countries ) -what we're all thinking she'll be. If she can be that,
kudos to her (sorry of course to all the countries
bombed, owing to our still immature, demented
psyches), because there's going to be strong pull to
be the person who, how to say it, rejoins America to
something mystical again. Something long lost.
I personally think that anyone THAT strong, wouldn't
even be considered for presidency, this time
around... because unconsciously, we all have a sense
that a term of collective redemption is near at hand.
We all want to slip into a decade-long sleep. Not
Scandinavia as in our sights, but America, in a
unsullied, virgin form. This even absent Trump,
absolutely.
Delete
LikeReply
Christopher1988
63
11 days ago
@Emporium @Christopher1988 Do I just post

"HAHAHA" for several lines? The woman whose
husband's staff was lead by one of the founders of
Goldman Sachs, whose other staff members went to
cushy Wall Street jobs after leaving his
administration? The woman who at most could
muster a "Cut it out, guys!" scolding to these people
because 911, who spoke privately to Goldman Sachs
and reuses to share the content of those speeches
with the public? This woman will be tough on the
banks? Are you a lobbyist?
Emporium
11 days ago
Are we sure Clinton a year from now is the same

person? Perhaps it could be that, whomever, the next
ten years will do our era's version of the 30s,
construct a new deal, sway people towards
nationalism (actually, sway along with everyone
else), cause a fear we could go fascist, and otherwise
be of a culture that a subsequent one will say, hell
enough with that rigged, stifled, old left shit? That is
to say, my only beef with this article is that it
articulates a future where Clinton is as she is now,
whereas I fully see her becoming someone different.
More heroic to the people, but ultimately historically,
less sane.
Delete
LikeReply
Randy Stone
64
11 days ago
@Emporium
Hillary is already turning to the right...I guess that's
what you might mean by "...less sane."
I agree.
Flag
2UnlikeReply
Original Article: The Internets bigot
crisis: Theres a new push to curtail online

bigotry, but the toxic sludge of hate is too
enormous to erase

Concerning black childrearing: Brittney Cooper discussed
last year at Salon that if every parent was guilty of child
abuse for spanking their kids, if this was a jail-able
offence, then pretty much all Southern black parents
could be sent to prison for how they raise their kids,
because pretty much all of them spank. She wrote that
they thought this was simply good parenting... they were
disciplining them, for two reasons: it meant they weren't
as likely to see the world as something to just grab and
own, like white kids ostensibly were/are, and it meant
they weren't as likely to be attacked by white bigots: they
themselves curtailed their kids, so those who would do so
viscously -- without any intent of love -- wouldn't feel as
much a need to do it for them. She wrote it was done for
loving reasons, that is. This said, she felt it nevertheless
created a desire for revenge on the part of the beaten
65
kids, and for this reason had to be abandoned. She

concluded that overall, Southern black parents are doing
terrible things to their kids.
Joan Walsh reacted to this article by focusing on how
commendable these parents were, doing such a terribly
hard thing because they knew it would ultimately spare
their kids. She reacted by ascribing black parents not as
flawed, but as astonishingly heroic... as actually superparents. Whereas she would probably accord that every
other parent who spanks is probably attacking the child
because they've projected their own flaws into them...
doing so because they themselves are insane, "mad,"
maladjusted, because it is black parents being discussed
her mind frisks her off to the opposite, and we're dealing
with endlessly heroic super-resisters. All evidence, even
the most distressing and counter, will be bent to fit so
one's psychic equilibrium isn't lost.
This is what I mean when I argue that some progressives
still feel a need to romanticize... have not evolved to the
point that maybe perhaps their children will get. You
don't need to make heroes out of those who have been
traditionally victimized, yet this is still the powerful
inclination. All people, all parents, are not everywhere the
same: progressives show this in how they characterize
the white working class -- what they do, particularly
regressive and bad. It is getting near the point where the
effort to mop up a traditionally-picked-on people's
misbehaviour as just part of the human condition, or as a
widespread flaw, or whatnot, reflects instantly... draws
66
attention, seems conspicuous. Someone cannot stand to

see something exposed to the light of day.
The way people parent is not a matter of choice. It is
pretty much determined by how you were raised. The
same thing goes for level of empathy -- if you had abused
parents, your very brain will lack the capacity for empathy
that better-raised children possess, as they neglect you: it
will be underdeveloped. The Left's reaction suggests to
me that though they might know this, somehow at a
deeper level they don't believe it -- some people are just
bad. Thus they take attention away from specific
instances like this because they're afraid, not just of
growing rightwing prejudice but because if they
themselves focus too hard, some very prejudicial thinking
will emerge -- jesus christ guys, take care of your kids! -and their brains will contort, twist-hard, come loose and
discombobulate, and ultimately go down in catastrophe.
Permalink
Original Article: The Internets bigot
crisis: Theres a new push to curtail online

bigotry, but the toxic sludge of hate is too
enormous to erase

The Left we have is not however the most evolved one we
will ever know. It took groups that the more regressive
members of their society tended to not be able to see
absent their own projections, and rather than simply strip
away their delusions and see a world finally projection-
67
free -- as it really is, as it were -- they did feel a psychic

need for romanticization. They got far, but couldn't go the
whole way. And they are vulnerable to being targeted as
keeping people as "pets" -- "you" have to be the way I've
represented you, as it helps maintain MY equilibrium.
This tendency, this powerful inclination, has gotten white
feminists in trouble with their non-white feminist peers,
in recent times. Don't manage us into your preferable
form, thank you.
Steven Pinker's influential "Better Angels of Our Nature"
argued that people have become far less violent over
time. Effectively he posits all anthropological tribes as
being akin to early "man," who were the most violent
people ever (read his discussion of native indians: he
basically says that the colonizers in many instances
described them, described their level of savagery, right). If
the Left that would police people into understanding that
the only group you are allowed to wantonly discriminate
against are Catholics and the white working class, was
firmly in control, he'd have gone nowhere with this book,
but instead it's on Bill Gate's favorite 10 reading list, and
was Zuckerberg's first selection for his Facebook book
club: it's made inroads; it's near mainstream.
It is people like this, and as well liberals like Dawkins and
McEwan, who are accusing other Leftists as being
unconsciously more moved to see the world a specific
way, one satisfying to their psychological needs, than to
understand the world simply as it is, that suggest to me
that other members of the Left need to start exploring
68
how they might in fact be taking pleasure in

romanticization... and also in diverting attention away
when they get a whiff of something discontenant to the
factuality of their own worldview and focusing instead on
society's even more self-deluded souls. Because
otherwise they might find themselves rather instantly
being shown up by people they thought would also be
with them -- fellow liberals -- as being hopelessly
detached from the facts, and made irrelevant, even
though even in their somewhat self-deluded form they're
still about the most psychologically evolved people
around -- still the best tools around, for our world to do
the most good.
Permalink
Original Article: This is how fascism
takes hold: The media is turning Donald Trump

into just another candidate

Anncaroline The media... the liberal professional class
have required a group they can rage at and portray as
intrinsically dangerous -- the white working class, and
everything they represent. This doesn't mean that when
the media starts doing what you want that it'll be mostly
about it becoming less biased, but rather mostly about
them becoming in sync with what the American people
are getting prepared for if they vote in Trump. I felt this
when Facebook agreed it would no longer be suppressing
conservative news on its newsfeed (it denies ever doing
69
this, but this sort of thing was not only something you
could get away with but actually were encouraged to do,
for it being preferred in our era that you treat
conservatives wantonly... with casual disregard). This isn't
progress but rather people we might have hoped would
remain saneish in our era starting to feel more pure in
rejecting their previous identity as being individually
distinguished from the dissolving American mob.
Permalink


Pillbeam The deciding factor may be immune to media
influence. What Trump represents is an end to progress.
He's a stop sign in way of an even more progressive
America. This will seem holy to people who believe
Americans have become too independent, too
transgressive, too spoiled, too disloyal to their ancient
birth mother country.
These will be people who had parents who so needed
their own children for their own psychic equilibrium they
threatened them with loss of favour, with loss of love,
when they self-actualized too much. So when society
evolves too much -- when students are being "uppity,"
when women are being "uppity," when those previously
prejudiced against start pushing back and gaining respect
-- these people see a society that has lost all favour, and
70
every effort will be made to cripple it at the knees... to put

in a strong man who'll think of the Nation (i.e. mother)
first, and help will people back into less individuated, less
self-actualized, less selfish and accomplished form.
Permalink


I think the press is less powerful than you think. If it was
entirely united in portraying him as the end of civilization
as we know it, people who understand and like Trump
would in their inner mental theatres portray him in the
dog-loving, child-hugging form. Certainly they'd like this
image to be manifested all-over in the media as well, but
if not available -- for the media remaining sane -- they'd
settle for this.
This isn't top-down but a bottom-up phenomena. It's not
Trump but large segments of the American people, who
share his desire to stop progress and become loyal
Americans again by worshipping their motherland and
targeting those thought to be snubbing their noses to it. If
Trump suddenly dropped out, these sections would try
and intimidate Hillary into becoming Trumpish.
What the media shows us is here is not so much their
power, but what they unconsciously want for America.
How they behave here is showing us how many people
we thought were with us, are going to remain with us, or
71
suddenly start -- like David Brooks -- longing for big loves

again, like patriotic, self-sacrificial love of country. These
kinds of people are "the Volk" who first demonstrated
their love of a resurrected great Germania, and then
purged "pollutants" so they could feel pure.
Permalink
Original Article: Trump wants revenge:
His hunger to be president is all about gaining

power to settle petty personal scores

Tristero1 They're masochists, preparing for later grand
revenge. The professional liberal class was going to
portrayed as great abandoners regardless.
This said, we haven't yet seen a societal group that is
completely absent of a need for some group they can spit
on and disparage. So even though many progressives are
at some level aware that societal bigots have surely come
out of abusive families, it often doesn't seem to factor
much in how they treat them: they're dealing with those
who've known little love, who've been cruelly abused, but
such is their need for some category of people to hate
they just can't pull back and make evident their disgust...
and even pleasure at seeing them rendered powerless
and scrambling.
They're healthier people, and perhaps their children will
be those without any need for some category of people
to rage at -- as they themselves never experienced any of
this in their own childhood -- but they're not there yet.
72
Permalink


corporatephd Emporium Hitler wasn't Hitler ... until he
was, is what I was getting at. He even downplayed the
anti-Jewish bit for awhile. I think he is mostly going to be
at encouraging a kind of fusion with the country, kind of
like Hitler encouraged people to fuse into a greater
Germania, as first order of business. If he targets people
right away, I don't think he's going to seem evidently petty
in his targets, for they'll be those many Americans want
targeted as well.
So while perhaps individuals who crossed him might be
targeted, what Americans will mostly notice and applaud
will be his targeting of progressives -- you know, the
students who fight for trigger warnings, feminists who rail
against perennially sexist men and seem "uppity": that is,
our most evolved.
I'll vote for Clinton, because I think it's important to keep
alive the cosmopolitanism that's associated with her.
Permalink

73
mswales Emporium Borders, for one -- the wall. This will

be felt by many who vote for him as a kind of protective
armouring, so the country, and they themselves, don't
feel like they're so perennially vulnerable.
Permalink

TUESDAY, MAY 31, 2016 9:02 PM

"There can be no doubt that a man who is mostly drawn
to the White House to settle petty grievances will abuse
the power the presidency affords him to go after anyone
he believes has laughed at or disrespected him."
That's the current line on the liberal professional class.
According to the likes of Thomas Frank and Andrew
Sullivan, liberals used their ascension over the last few
decades, in part, to humiliate the white working class,
members of whom may have been imagined as once
having chastised them as nerds.
This article will surprise no one. He's going to eviscerate
anyone who humiliated him (though who they are really
are just people he's introjected his early childhood bullies
onto). What might surprise is just how much of a
nationalist he turns out, that is, not someone who got a
job he really didn't want but which is especially useful to
destroy people and also to build even bigger monuments
to himself, but which afterwards is kinda a bore. But
74
rather someone really committed to his version of

making America great again.
There's a strange sense that he is perhaps best defined
not as a narcissist or a perpetrator, but as someone in
service to the grand ol' U.S.A, who only after he puts this
together, will his eyes focus on revenge... he might even
be sorta agreeable at the start, readily sidestepping critics
who want to pin him as petty.
Permalink

TUESDAY, MAY 31, 2016 8:46 PM

Trickster 1008 Why particularly his father? Few of us have
our fathers anywhere near as much around as our
mothers.
Permalink
Original Article: Corey Feldman blows
the lid off of Hollywood sex abuse: I would

love to name names
THURSDAY, MAY 26, 2016 10:54 PM

kobayashi PoodlePlay Aunt Messy I agree. And the reason
it is unacknowledged is because it means targeting -- our
conscious awareness cannot be fooled -- our own
parents, mother and father, in their own abuse. Once
we've done so, we forgo any chance we might yet claim
75
their love. So instead, we stifle discussion, and

somewhere in our heads our parental alters take notice
and give us the thumbs up.
Permalink
Original Article: Why Trumps attack on
Susana Martinez matters: He proves again that

unity isnt his goal only dominance over
everyone

Bella N. Mattheus I don't think this descriptor, however
redundant, is going to be sufficient, though. If he gets in,
it'll prove pretty quickly that it isn't going to be all about
him. Don't think he'll be building further monuments to
himself everywhere. Rather, he'll be a nationalist. The
great God won't be himself but some archaic version of
the united states, our mother country, that has ostensibly
been forgotten amidst our self-centred, craven,
individualistic modern times. It'll be as like with Hitler and
mostly in the first stage be about us, all together, the
good folk, "the volk," and the country we've ostensibly
forsaken but which might yet be redeemed through our
self-sacrifice.
Permalink

76
everyone

kobayashi Emporium Same related phenomena -- retreat
from sophisticated cosmopolitanism; retreat into
parochialism.
Permalink

everyone

JJAliceGrace Well, if he's only TRYING to be alpha, some
people are cooperating in making him such: such
everywhere is the news of his dominating his 17 (!!!)
establishment opponents. If he is an enormous rage
monster, is he's got any kind of visage that resembles this
-- hairy orange orangutang will do -- then it's trouble for
us if enough of the U.S. wants big things smashed... And
as if those relishing the Hulk preferred he'd mastered the
sophisticated tone to also wine and dine ambassadors
with ease, and with splendid, whip-smart sophistry. (Mind
you, Hitler wanted to annihilate eastern "proles" but
mostly simply wanted to impress the haughty French and
Brits, so perhaps here too, lack of articulacy -- evident
sloth manners and stupidity -- might bite.)
Permalink
77

everyone

Dog Almighty Good to hear "Trump" is going to be limited
to the U.S. One has heard ugly rumours that nationalism
was slowly becoming the norm in Europe as well... you
know, Austria, Germany, Brexit.
Permalink
Original Article: Hey Mr. Trump, rape is
not sex: His Bill Clinton smears are tricking the

media into confusing consensual acts with
assault
WEDNESDAY, MAY 25, 2016 7:09 PM

Liberals have for the longest time been unable to
acknowledge that they too possess -- though, yes, to a
much lesser extent than do conservatives -- a need for
some societal group they can wantonly discriminate
against and humiliate, a group into which they can project
unwanted aspects of themselves they might want to
punish. Thus in this piece every woman who might of
been abused by Clinton, can feel the hopelessness of
their finding redress in being categorized as part of the
redneck swamp, civilization has been seeking justified
total escape from. What business is your
discombobulated psyche doing outside the cleansing
whirlpool justifiably dispatching of its existence?
But this is beginning to change, and not because the left
78
is evolving and ceasing to hate anyone (only hurt people

hurt people), but because many of the left are regressing
and wanting to bond into what Joe Klein calls, a nostalgic
state, a nationalistic homeland. And so for instance an
environment is being created by the likes of Thomas
Frank and Andrew Sullivan (and previously by Chris
Hedges and even Noam Chomsky) where it is becoming
difficult to detach the awareness that those who are
being disparaged -- the swamp dwellers -- by liberals, are
also those who've been suffering most. Progressives who
then use the old rhetoric once used to cast a humiliating
sort of invisibility upon selected out group's hurts (white
working class), seem absurdly callous, as if just mostly
wanting to further rejoice in the pain of people they find
disgusting, as Marcotte kind of does here.
79
Saturday, May 14, 2016
My response to Andrew O'Hehir's recent

article (I am Emporium)
AndrewOHehirsSalonarticle:Appetitefor
destruction:WhiteAmericasdeathwishisthe
sourceofTrumpshiddensupport
IsanOctobersurprisethatcouldputDonald
TrumpintheWhiteHousealreadybakedintothe
Americanelectorate?Thatsthefrightening
questiononecouldderivefromthisweekscolumn
byThomasB.Edsall,oneofthemostuseful(and
leastideologicallyhypnotized)contributorstothe
NewYorkTimes.Wecantbesurehowmany
peoplereallysupportTrump,Edsallreports,since
theresconsiderableevidencethattheyarent
tellingpollstersthetruth.VotingforTrump,it
appears,issomethingwhitepeopledointhe
shadows.Itsaforbiddendesirethatisboth
liberatingandselfdestructive,notunlikethe
marriedheterosexualwhohasasamesexloveron
thedownlow,ortheexecutivewhopowers
throughthedayoncrystalmethandOxyContin.
Onsomelevelyouknowthewholethingcantend
well,butboydoesitfeelgoodrightnow.
80
Ihavearguedonmultipleoccasionsthatwhite
Americans,consideredintheaggregate,exhibit
signsofanunconsciousorsemiconsciousdeath
wish.ImeanthatbothintheFreudiansenseofa
longingforreleasethatisbotheroticandself
destructivetheinterminglingofErosand
Thanatosandinamorestraightforwardsense.
ConsidertheprevalenceofgunsinAmerican
society,theepidemicratesofsuicideandobesity
(whichmightbecalledslowmotionsuicide)
amonglowincomewhites,thewidespread
willingnesstoignoreordenyclimatescienceand
thedeeplyrootedtendencyofthewhiteworking
classtovoteagainstitsowninterestsandempower
thosewhohaveimpoverishedit.Whatotherterm
canencompassallthat?
Trumpisthelivingembodimentofthat
contradictorydesireforredemptionand
destruction.Hisincoherentspeecheswanderback
andforthbetweenthosetwopoles,frominfantile
fantasiesaboutforcingMexicotobuildan$8
billionwallandrampantantiMuslimparanoiato
unfocusedpanegyricsabouthowgreatwewill
81
beonedayandhowmuchwewillwin.Inhis
abundantvigorandebullienceandcloddish,mean
spiritedgoodhumor,Trumpmayseemlikethe
oppositeofthedeathwish.(Hewouldcertainlybe
insultedbyanysuchsuggestion.Wrong!Bad!)But
everythinghepromisesisimpossible,andhis
supportersarenotquitedumbenoughnottosee
that.Hesadeathsheadjestercacklingonthe
edgeofthevoid,theclownishhostofonelast
celebrationofAmericasbombast,bigotryand
spectacularignorance.Nowonderhisvotersare
reluctanttofessup.
Normalpublicopinionpollsconductedby
telephone,Edsallwrites,haveconsistentlyshown
HillaryClintonwellaheadofTrumpinheadto
headtrialruns,byarecentaverageofaboutnine
percentagepoints.Butonlinesurveyscompiledby
YouGovandMorningConsulttelladifferent
story,showingClintonaheadbymuchsmaller
margins.ThemostrecentYouGov/Economistpoll
ofregisteredvoters,forexample,showsClinton
leadingTrumpbyjustthreepoints(43percentto
40percent),wellwithinthemarginoferror.Edsall
quotesKyleA.Dropp,whorunspollinganddata
82
forMorningConsult,estimatingthatthroughout
theprimaryseasonTrumphasgainedaconsistent
advantageofeightorninepointsinonlinepolls
versusoldfashionedtelephonesurveys.
Infairness,wedontknowwhichnumberscome
closertothetruth.Therearevalidreasonswhy
manypoliticalscientistsandstatisticswonks
believetelephonepollingismoreaccuratein
predictingactualvoting,andEdsalldoesntdiscuss
those.Butasheputsit,anonlinesurvey,
whateverotherflawsitmighthave,resemblesan
anonymousvotingboothfarmorethanwhatyou
tellapollsterdoes.Yourcomputerwontraiseits
eyebrowsinmicroscopicdisdainwhenyouclick
theboxforTrump;itwonttellitsfriendsafter
workaboutthispersonitmettodaywhoseemed
normalbutturnedouttobearagingbigot.Andthe
ideathatsocialdesirabilitybiasinEnglish,
thedesirenottoseemintolerantorunenlightened
insomeoneelseseyescandistortpollresults
hasalonghistorythatmaygivetheClinton
campaignsomesleeplessnights.
Socialdesirabilitybias,initsTrumpiancontext,is
83
closelyrelatedtotheBradleyeffect,apolling
problemfrequentlyobservedinelectionswhere
onecandidateiswhiteandtheotherisnt.That
namegoesbacktomyyouthandtheCalifornia
gubernatorialelectionof1982,whenTomBradley,
theAfricanAmericanmayorofLosAngeles,led
inthepollsthroughoutthecampaignbutwoundup
losingtoRepublicanGeorgeDeukmejian.A
significantsubsetofwhitevoters(sothetheory
holds)toldpollsterstheywereplanningtovotefor
Bradley,butdidnt.Eithertheyliedabouttheir
trueintentionsbecausetheydidntwanttosound
likeracistsinthesupposedlyliberalcontextof
80sCaliforniaortheydiscovered,intheprivacy
ofthevotingbooth,thattheycouldntpullthe
leverforablackman.
Wedonthavethatscenariotocontendwiththis
year,obviously,andmanysocialscientistsbelieve
theBradleyeffecthasfaded:BarackObamas
actualsupportamongwhitevoters,duringhistwo
electioncampaigns,wasprettyclosetohispoll
numbers.HillaryClintonslikelystatusasthefirst
femalemajorpartynomineewillclearlybeanX
factorinthisyearsfallcampaign,apositivefor
84
somevotersandanegativeforothers.Butthe
Trumpspecificversionofsocialdesirabilitybiasis
differentfromthosethingsinasubtlebutpowerful
way:VotingforTrumpcanbeunderstoodas
embracingsomethingratherthanrejectingit,even
ifthatsomethingisviewedasinsaneorrepulsive
bypolitesociety.Turningyourbackona
candidatebecausehesblackisanegative,private
actthatslikelytomakeyoufeelbadabout
yourself;embracingthejingoismandmisogyny
andsmallmindednessoftheTrumpcampaignis
joiningamovement.
ItstransparentlyunfairtocompareTrumpto
AdolfHitler(eventhoughIvealreadydoneit),
anditisntlikely,inthecontextofthe21st
century,thataTrumpadministrationwould
actuallyresembletheThirdReichorprovoke
WorldWarIII.Buthereshowtheyresimilar:
Hitlercloakedthedeathwishinpositivetermstoo.
Nazismrolledthemostnoxiouselementsof
GermannationalismandEuropeanantiSemitism
intoapackagethatseemedaffirmativeand
optimistic,toanationstrugglingwitheconomic
difficultyandaninternalidentitycrisis.Trumphas
85
triedtodothesamewithhistoxicpackageof
racism,sexismandxenophobia,histhoroughly
imaginaryversionofAmericabuiltfromwhite
peoplesdespairandparanoiaandselfloathing.
Wehaveunderestimateditsallureallalong,and
westilldontknowhowdeepitgoes.Mainstream
punditsandpoliticiansin1930sGermanymadea
similarmistake.
Emporium
2daysago
Isayitgoesdeep.AmandaMarcottewrote
somewherehowsurprisedshewasathowmany
maleliberalswereexpressingsurprisingamounts
ofhatredtowardswomen,viaattacksonHillary,
nowthattheyhadBernieascover.Angertowards
women,isangertowardsone'smotherand
Hillary,asGloriaSteinemhasargued,bringsher
tomindandnecessarilyalsoatoneself:theself
centred,spoiled,neglectfulbratonefeelswas
responsibleforherneglect.Loveisalways
potentiallyavailable,onefeels,ifattheendthe
86
personyoufeelmostdeservestodie,isthechild,
whobyselfactualizinginlife,surelypurposely
abandonedthemother.Bychasingdowndeath
yourself,youmightyetacquireherlove.
AmericansknowthatTrumpwillquail
independentwomen,andthiswillbefeltas
hemmingintheoverpoweringmotherofour
childhoodsourrighteousrevenge.Hewill
intimidateprogressivismeverywhere,andthiswill
relaxoursensethatweareenrichingourselves
withtoomuchopportunity.He'llbondustoour
MotherCountry,showusthewaytobepatriotic
tobe"goodboysandgirls"andtargetothers
whomwe'veprojectedourown"badboy"
impuritiesinto.IfliketheNaziswebuildroads
andenableourselveswithVolkswagens,it'lljust
furtherensureweengageinanimpossiblesuicidal
waragainsttheworldthatcanonlyleadto
thoroughruin.
Iagreethough,itwon'tgetthisbad.Andthestory
ismorecomplicated,becausehowevermuchwe
mayunderestimatethenumberofpeople
unconsciouslydesiringtostopprogress,restage
87
ourearlychildhoodhumiliations,andenact
revenge,wealsohavealargebaseofpeoplewho'll
bemostlyimmune.Thisarticlewillhelpthemself
prepareforthefuture.
FreeQuark
2daysago
.......thedeeplyrootedtendencyofthewhite
workingclasstovoteagainstitsowninterestsand
empowerthosewhohaveimpoverishedit.
WhatmajorpoliticalpartyintheU.S.currently
representstheinterestsofthewhiteworkingclass?
TheDemocraticPartyhasbeenrunbyglobalist
technocratssincethelate80satleast,andtheGOP
hasbeenthepartyofthe1%sinceTeddy
RooseveltlefttheWhiteHouse.It'sridiculousto
criticizethewhiteworkingclassforvotingagainst
itsowninterestswhenithasnootherviable
option.
88
Ihavearguedonmultipleoccasionsthatwhite
Americans,consideredintheaggregate,exhibit
signsofanunconsciousorsemiconscious
Oneindicationofthisisthealmosttotalpassivity
ofwhiteAmericansinthefaceoftradeand
immigrationpoliciesdesignedtoundercutwhite
Americanseconomically.
StvInIL
2daysago
@FreeQuark"Oneindicationofthisisthealmost
totalpassivityofwhiteAmericansinthefaceof
tradeandimmigrationpoliciesdesignedto
undercutwhiteAmericanseconomically.
Ithinktheysprinkleinalittleracismagainst
blacksanditmakesEVERYTHINGbetter.Many
ofthesepoliciestheysupportcanbeexplainby
oneoftheirexperts,LeeAtwater.
"Youstartoutin1954bysaying,Ni**er,ni**er,
89
ni**er.By1968youcantsayni**erthat
hurtsyou,backfires.Soyousaystufflike,uh,
forcedbusing,statesrights,andallthatstuff,and
youregettingsoabstract.Now,youretalking
aboutcuttingtaxes,andallthesethingsyoure
talkingaboutaretotallyeconomicthingsanda
byproductofthemis,blacksgethurtworsethan
whites.Wewanttocutthis,ismuchmore
abstractthaneventhebusingthing,uh,andahell
ofalotmoreabstractthanNi**er,ni**er.
Andforoverthreedecadesnowtheyhave
beendestabilizingourcountryfromwithin.Andso
itcontinues.
Emporium
2daysago
@FreeQuarkIthinkyoucanarguethatwhat
wasn'tpassive,is/arewhiteAmericansvotingin
politicianstheyunconsciouslyknewweregoingto
wagewaragainstthem.Theprofessionalclass
psychologicallyrequiredsomegrouptosuffer
90
whilethey"indulged,"buteveniftheywerethe
mostkindheartedfolktheyweregoingtobe
forcedtobeexploiters/abandoners.Allto
empowertoday'srighteousrevenge,enactednot
justbythosewholostmanufacturingjobsbutbya
lotofprogressives...whoreallycanseemlike
they'dwanttokilloneofofeverythreepeopleon
WallStreet.
Beerbob77
2daysago
@FreeQuarkYou'reagreeing,then,right?But
complainingatthesametime.
JackBurroughs
2daysago
"ConsidertheprevalenceofgunsinAmerican
society,theepidemicratesofsuicideandobesity
(whichmightbecalledslowmotionsuicide)
91
amonglowincomewhites,thewidespread
willingnesstoignoreordenyclimatescienceand
thedeeplyrootedtendencyofthewhiteworking
classtovoteagainstitsowninterestsandempower
thosewhohaveimpoverishedit.Whatotherterm
canencompassallthat?
Thethesisthatwhites'supportforTrumpis
somehowadeathwishissocrazilybackwards
thatImtemptedtocallitinsane.
ButthenIrememberthatImreadingAndrew
OHehir,andAndrewobviouslyisntinsane.Its
justthathehasnointuitionatallforhowworking
classpeopleactuallyfeelandthinkandyethe
lovestoberecklesslypresumptuousaboutthe
true,secretmotivationsofpeoplewithwhomhe
hasnothingincommon,andwhomhedoesnot
understand.
Worse,hispresumptuousspeculationisan
egregiousviolationofOccamsRazor:if
hypothesesshouldnotbemultipliedwithout
necessity,ifthesimplestexplanationisthelikeliest
explanation,thenthemotivationsofTrumps
92
supportersarenotmysteriousatall.Trumpspoll
numbersexploded,andtheystayedhigh,whenhe
spokeaggressivelyaboutillegalimmigration.His
numberswentevenhigher,andtheystayedhigh,
whenhecalledforatemporarybanonMuslims
enteringtheUS.
FollowingOccamsRazor,shouldntwetherefore
concludethatwhitesaresupportingTrump
becausetheyactuallylikehisstanceon
immigration?Dowereallyneedtoconcoctaweird
theorytoexplainbehaviorthatisstraightforwardly
explicable?
Ofcourseitstruethatmanywhiteshavelong
beeninastateofdespair.Whyso?Well,sure,
partlyforeconomicreasons.Butalsoemphatically
fordemographicreasons.Andthatiswhat
Andrewdoesnotunderstandaboutworkingclass
people:theyhatebeingforcedtobecomearacial
minorityinanhistoricallywhitemajoritycountry.
Workingclasspeoplenotonlythem,but
especiallythemareraciallyverytribalistic.That
ishowtheyvealwaysbeen,itshowtheyarenow,
andit'showtheywillbeahundredyearsfrom
93
now.
Thereasonwhiteshavebeeninsuchastateof
despairisbecausein1965,theywereabout90%of
thepopulationoftheUS.Today,whitesareafast
shrinking60somethingpercent.Theimmigration
actof1965wasopposedbyamajorityoftheUS
populationwhenitwaspassed,andthepublicwas
basicallyliedtoaboutitslikelydemographic
implications.MostTrumpsupportersarevery
angryaboutthat.
Moreover,whitesarebombardedbyincessantanti
whitepropagandafromthemainstreammedia,the
educationalestablishment,andofcoursefromweb
siteslikeSalon.AndwhetherAndrewknowsitor
not,whenheaccuseswhiteTrumpsupportersof
harboringanunconsciousdeathwish,heis
wagingasubtlyevilformofpsychologicalwarfare
againstthem.Hissubtextis,Hey,stupidworking
classwhites.Iknowyou*think*youknowwhy
youresupportingTrump.ButI,AndrewOHeir,
knowyoubetterthanyouknowyourselves.You
aresufferingfromfalseconsciousness;andIsee
thehiddentruthaboutyou.Youaresufferingfrom
94
anunconsciousdeathwish.Yoursupportfor
Trumpisclearlypathological!
Thestraightforwardtruthisthatwhitesupportfor
Trumpistheoppositeofadeathwish:itisa
desperatelifewish.Thatis,manywhitesareina
stateofdespairbecausetheyfeelnoorganic
connectiontoanincreasinglymulticulturalsociety
thatwasforcedonthemagainsttheirwill.White
despairisaboveallan*ethnocultural*despair;
theyfeeltheyarelosingtheirhomeland.
Trumpseemstothemtobetheironlyhopeof
arresting,andpossiblyreversing,thecurrent
demographictrendofwhiteminoritization.Yes,
it'sadangerousvote.Butwhatalternativedothey
have?
Asimilardespairwouldafflict*any*historical
majoritypopulationanywhereintheworld,wereit
confrontedwithbecomingaminorityagainstits
will.And,giventheopportunity,asimilar
desperateconvulsion,andfinalattempttodo
something,wouldlikelyhappeninothercountries,
too.
95
DoyouthinktheJapanesewouldhandleitwell,
weretheysettobecomeaminorityinJapan?How
abouttheMexicansinMexico?Howaboutthe
SomalisinSomalia?OrtheChineseinChina?
Asitwouldbewithanyotherhistoricalmajority
populationanywhereintheworld,soitiswith
whites.
It'sreallythatsimple.Noextratheorizingrequired.
Emporium
2daysago
@JackBurroughsThetruthisthatwhitesupport
forTrumpistheoppositeofadeathwish:itisa
desperatelifewish.Thatis,manywhitesareina
stateofdespairbecausetheyfeelnoorganic
connectiontoanincreasinglymulticulturalsociety
thatwasforcedonthemagainsttheirwill.White
despairisaboveallan*ethnocultural*despair;
theyfeeltheyarelosingtheirhomeland.Asimilar
despairwouldafflict*any*historicalmajority
96
populationanywhereintheworld,wereit
confrontedwithbecomingaminorityagainstits
will.
Iseethemasreexperiencingearlychildhood
traumas,wheretheyknewtoomuchofpowerless
andfear(Germans,whowereswaddledasinfants
andstarvedbytheircaregivers,wereobsessedwith
aneedforanexpandedmotherlandtheworld
hadbecomepopulatedwiththeirownprojections).
So,Iagree,thereisasortof"lifewish"tothis.
Wellraisedpeople,peoplemostlyabsentthese
sortofterrifyingchildhoodtraumas,won'treact
thiswaytoexternalrealities.Justbecomingpartof
aglobalcommunityistomicroscopeoneown's
previousnationalistic/tribalidentities,andmost
progressiveshavefoundthisabreeze(Isuppose
youcouldargueitwasbecausetheywilledit;but
asI'vearguedelsewhereonthisthread,ostensible
imminentselfdestructioncanbeselfwilledas
well,andbetheoppositeofthreateningifit
welcomesyoubacktotraumasyoufeeltheneedto
restageandrevengeagainst).Becauseforthemit
doesn'trecallanysenseofoncebeingengulfedor
extinguished.
97
So,yes,inasense"lifewish";butultimately
sincetheseendorphinfilled,revengedriven
"savedlives"willoperatemoreaspawnsand
targetourmostprogressive,ourmostactualized,
ourmosttrulylivingmembers,it'llbeaboutsaving
thelivesofdestroyers.
LynnRobb
2daysago
UndoubtedlyO'HehirisdescribingafewTrump
supporters.However,consideringSanders'big
wininWestVirginia,hemightalsobedescribing
Sanders'supporters.Youtakegoodjobsaway
frompeopleandtheninsultthembysayingthey
areprivileged,bigotedthugswhoclingtotheir
Godandguns.And,oh,bytheway,theyare
demographicallygoingthewayofthedodowhich
isaverygoodthing.
Thenyouexpectthosevoterstosmile,bow
towardsWashingtonfivetimesadayandsend
98
theirchildrenouttomarrysomeonewhohates
theircultureanddenigratestheirreligiontohasten
theliberallydesiredCaucasiandemographic
collapse?(Whichisthewaythosehicksinflyover
countryseeit.)Idon'tthinkso.
Inonecalendaryearwehaveseentheneworderof
theliberalworld:merchantsandcountyofficials
forcedtoparticipateingayweddingceremonies,
nunsforcedtoprovidetheiremployeeswith
contraceptionandwomenforcedtoallowmenin
theirpublicbathrooms.Itiseasytounderstand
howthosewithatraditionalbentthinkWashington
hasgonestark,ravingmadeveniftheystillhave
goodjobs.
Workingclasswhitevotersdon'thaveadeath
wish;theyhavealifewish.Theywanttheirsback.
Whatyouareseeingtodayismassivebacklashin
theformofaDonaldTrump.Ifithadn'tbeenhim,
itwouldhavebeensomeonejustlikehim.Any
amateurhistoriancouldhaveseenthiscoming.I
justexpectedittotakealittlelonger.
RobertSF
99
2daysago
@LynnRobbThankyou!Isaidprettymuchthe
samething.IusuallylikeO'Hehir'sarticles,buthe
missedthemarkhere,takingthesideofthe
plutocracythathascreatedthecurrentsituation
overthepast40years.
Emporium
2daysago
@LynnRobbOnetheoryastowhyitdidn'toccur
earlierisbecausethepopulacehasbeengoing
throughaprocessofrestagingahumiliating
existencethattheyonceknewintheirchildhoods.
Bowingtoarrogantoverlords;forcedtodothings
theythemselvesfoundunpleasant;yetalso
humiliatinglydisregarded:thesearethecomplaints
ofstillmanyAmericansoutoftheirunpleasant
childhoods.Insocietythey'veseenitonceagain,
writlarge.
Itcouldhavebeentheirintentiontoseeitthisway
becauseifthe"neworderoftheliberalworld"had
100
simplyempoweredthem,broughtthemintoglobal
glorylikeithastheprofessionalclass,intheir
mindstheywouldhaveexperiencedtheirimmature
caregiverstheirparentsrejectingthemagain
andagainforabandoningthem(theoldfaith)for
frivolousfrolicking.Onefiguresthiswouldhave
leadtopsychicdiscombobulation:shunting
themselvesbackintotheroleofvictimizedchild
lookma!there'sclearlynospoilinggoingonhere!
probablyallowedsomesanity.
Thisisn'ttosaytheprofessionalclasshasn't
requiredsomeothertobearpunishmentarising
fromtheirownguilt,whiletheythemselvesknew
truepersonalgrowth.AsThomasFrankhas
argued,theygotakickoutofaworldthat
informedthemthattheythemselvesweretheonly
oneswhoreallymattered,andtherestweresome
kindofpueriledisregard.Butiftheyweren'tthis
way...iftheyinsistedonsuchthingsasaliving
wage,guaranteedannualincome,andpaid
healthcareforall...iftheyresistedpokingfunat
thoseinflyovercountryandinsteadsawthemas
worthypeople,howevermuchstuntedbycoarser,
cruellerchildhoods,thiswouldn'tmeanajoltasto
101
ourcurrentsituation.
Toservefantasypurposes,eveniftheprofessional
classwereinfactasbenevolentastheycould
possiblybe,givenhowreallyfewofusare
comfortablenotfindingsomeoneouttherewhois
really,trulythebadone,ostensiblyworthyof
beingneglected,whenweourselvesareknowing
unprecedentedongoingprofessionalandpersonal
growthknowingongoinghappinessthey
wouldhaveretrofittedintheimaginationas
gloatinghumiliators,attemptingquiteliterallyto
starvethebreathoutofthem.
Allthehumiliationsthenazishandedouttothe
JewsthosewhothrivedinWeimar'sageof
change,owingtobeingmorewarmlyraisedby
moreemotionallyevolvedparentswerereplays
ofhumiliationstheirownparentsinflictedupon
them.Besuspiciousofanyone,includingFrank,
andincludingAndrewSullivan,andincluding
Brooks,andHedges,whoissuddenlyfocusingso
muchonhowhumiliatedthewhiteworkingclass
hasbeen,presentingtheprofessionalclassas
composedofthosewhosportmostjoyouslywhen
102
theysportaroundotherpeople'spain.
Theextenttowhichtheyactuallyarelikethis
mightjustbehelpful,butnotatallnecessary,for
theanticipatedrevengeuponthem,alreadybaked
intopeople'spsyches.Thesepeopleindulged,and
wishedforaworldthatwouldlimitthepermissible
discriminationupongroupssocietyhaspreviously
seenasguiltysimplyforbeingvulnerable
women,children,minoritiesaninstinctfor
uncowedaccusationagainstthebullyingparent:
forthistheymustbepunished.
jprfrog
2daysago
Underneathallthechestthumping,flagwaving,
andboosterismthatisTrump'sprotofascismlies
nihilism.Atthedeepestlevel,desperatewhite
workingmenvotingagainstthemselveshasno
littleincommonwithWotan'surgeto"enditall"
(Wagner,TheRingoftheNibelungs")which
103
ultimatelydoeshappen:attheclimaxof"The
TwilightoftheGods"Valhallacomescrashing
downcarryingthegodstodestructionasthe
floodingRhinecleansestheearthfor,presumably,
cleanrestart.Thevisionwasrealizedattheendof
1945whenthelastremnantsoftheThirdReich
wentupinsmokeandflamewiththeSoviets
overrunningBerlin.
Isthisasstretchtoofar?Icertainlyhopeso,but
thereisenoughexpresseddesireto"shakethings
up"nomatterwhatshakesouttomakemefear
otherwise.Amajorcomponentofthatfearisthe
obviousimperviousnesstologicorfactsbythe
Trumpacolytesdemonstratedeverydayin
commentcolumnsatplaceslikeWaPoor
AOLnews.(Thelatterisreallyashocker,
resemblingStormfrontattimes.)Evenfromthe
Left,thereisoftenadesiretoseeTrumpwin
(ratherthanHillary)justforthepleasureofmaking
the"establishment"orthe"elites"miserable.That
everyonewillbemademiserableshouldthat
happendoesnotseemtomatterormaybea
secretdesire.Thereseemstobesomefantasy
abroadaboutwhathappenswhenanoldersocial
104
orderbreaksdown,thatsomehowvirtueandhonor
anddecency(even"justice",whateverthatmight
meanatagiventime)arisefromthechaosthat
ensueswhenmeansofcommerce,income,even
thedistributionoffoodbecomeuncertain.
Allthismightjustbemerecoveringfromanasty
boutofflu(unabletoeat,lost10poundsin6days,
stillveryweak).ButIhavemoretimethanusual
forsamplingtheintertubes,andtheresultsarenot
uplifting.
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107
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Labels: andrew o'hehir, salon.com
Sunday, May 8, 2016
Recent posts on Facebook
May 2
We're going to see a lot of this sort of critique in the near future.
One thing I would like to point out is that there is a great deal of energy put into attacking those
who sneer at the working class -- every progressive you know, is suddenly set up as the most
callous person ever. Another thing is that Plato's sense of late-stage democracy is not really
established as an illusion here. He -- Andrew Sullivan, that is -- basically agrees that something
awful is necessarily unleashed as freedoms suddenly abound. For Plato it is societal inversion, as
everyone forgets their "proper" role, deference is lost, and everybody does what they want; for
Andrew it is more than people lose roles that actually matter, that aren't intrinsically humiliating,
as well as that narcissism and emotion gets unleashed -- the passions -- and order and good
reason is lost.
Just for reference. I have no sense of our times as late-stage anything. Basically what we have
are increasing numbers of people who see society as going amok because it reflects their own
inner mental state, rather than what is actually going on around them (well, they are losing
external "pillars" that kept their immature psyches in check). That world out there that is
becoming more egalitarian and less bigoted, and that is now shorning itself of a need for
somebody to suffer while they prosper, and so even America is now talking about a national
108
health care system, including dental, (for real, it's on the ballot in Colorado) as well as living
wages, is doing just fine, thank you, and is not in any state of necessary absolute complete
collapse because, ostensibly, unprecedented narcissism has gone along with it. The unleashed
emotion Andrew frets about, is kinda awesome on many of the sites I visit -- it's people actually
usefully testing one another, rather than being boringly restrained to show how blue-blood
superior they are. Emotion can be a big part of what is plus about our world, as we see in the
passionate student movements at places like Columbia, that have retrograde professors quaking
like they did in the 60s, even as it is sadly true that increasing numbers of the elite are training
their children to be dispassionate, as a further marker that they're a class apart from the Troll
mob. It can be one of the things we flag as sign of society being reborn and renewed, not gone
late-term and out of control.
And it must be said, the bad part, the huge bad part (read: populism that is about borders and
eviscerating foreigners, or about executing one out of three on Wall Street, not sane loud
objections to how we've structured society), is not the outcome of people being humiliated and
discarded in the now, nor because of the internet and the ability of a mass rage to form instantly
and hugely sized, but more, actually, owing to humiliations they suffered in their childhood -the very stuff, that is, that made it so that this political world that Andrew rightly argues the mass
has ALWAYS had a hold of, was driven to become one where the mass could pay penance for
past indulgences by enduring endless pains and grotesque humiliations, so that at some point
they could insist without guilt for financial stability again -- even excess -- as well as the
opportunity to enjoy the sport of eviscerating the better-than-thou, elite, professional-class,
coastal progressives, that were if anything lured into not sparing their admittedly infuriating (and
self-shortchanging) sense of superiority. The rage has increased, people are going mental,
because these were people (again, not the like of students protesting against increasing student
loans) who as kids were abandoned and terrorized by their parents when they tried to selfactualize, and they to some extent have been forced to participate in a world that will not stop its
efforts to end prejudice and entitle its populace -- you get an A just for participating! Look at all
these spoiled shits!
Progressives, watch your backs -- the less emotionally evolved of your own are craving the
dispatch of you as much as said working class, ostensibly being humiliated by not working
craftsman jobs but rather effeminate retail.
America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny
Thats whats scariest about Donald Trump.
NYMAG.COM|BY ANDREW SULLIVAN
May 5
Jesus. I hope I don't have do a walk of shame on way to regular:
Captain America: Civil War
IN 3D:
Today (May 5) 7:50, 8:20, night: 11:20, night: 11:45
Fri (May 6) 11:20am, 1:05, 2:40, 4:35, 6:10, 8:10, 9:45,
109
Sat (May 7) 11:20am, 11:50am, 2:45, 3:15, 6:30, 7:00, 10:00,
Sun (May 8) 1:10, 2:40, 4:35, 6:10, 8:10, 9:40
Mon (May 9) 1:10, 2:40, 4:40, 6:10, 8:10, 9:45
Tue (May 10) 1:10, 2:40, 4:35, 6:10, 8:05, 9:45
also in IMAX 3D:
Today (May 5) 7:00, 10:30
Fri (May 6) 12:10, 3:30, 6:50, 10:10
Sat (May 7) 1:10, 4:30, 7:50, night: 11:10
Sun (May 8) 12:10, 3:30, 6:50, 10:10
Mon (May 9) 12:10, 3:30, 6:50, 10:10
Tue (May 10) 12:10, 3:30, 6:50, 10:10
also in UltraAVX & in 3D (with optional CC + DVS):
Today (May 5) 7:30, night: 11:00
Fri (May 6) 12:40, 4:00, 7:20, 10:40
Sat (May 7) 10:20am, 1:40, 5:00, 8:20, night: 11:40
Sun (May 8) 12:40, 4:00, 7:20, 10:40
Mon (May 9) 12:40, 4:00, 7:20, 10:40
Tue (May 10) 12:40, 4:00, 7:20, 10:40
also in UltraAVX & in 3D with optional D-Box (with optional CC + DVS):
Today (May 5) 7:30, night: 11:00
Fri (May 6) 12:40, 4:00, 7:20, 10:40
Sat (May 7) 10:20am, 1:40, 5:00, 8:20, night: 11:40
Sun (May 8) 12:40, 4:00, 7:20, 10:40
Mon (May 9) 12:40, 4:00, 7:20, 10:40
Tue (May 10) 12:40, 4:00, 7:20, 10:40
also in regular format (regular cost, but walk of shame required):
Today (May 5) not playing
Fri (May 6): 1:35, 2:05, 5:05, 5:40, 8:45, 9:15
Sat (May 7) 10:50am, 12:40, 2:10, 5:00, 6:00, 8:50, 9:30
Sun (May 8) 1:40, 2:10, 5:05, 5:45, 8:45, 9:15
Mon (May 9) 1:40, 2:10, 5:10, 5:45, 8:45, 9:15
Tue (May 10) 1:40, 2:10, 5:10, 5:45, 8:45, 9:15
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http://3.bp.blogspot.com/3XJJPyXC3Cc/UzELBA_n7RI/AAAAAAAAAVg/nLzV1PinH4I/s1600/rs_1024x
110
759-130719130320-1024.divergent2.mh.071913.jpg
Or jump ship as fast as possible ...
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Rae3rHp30E/UzEFmJCUOOI/AAAAAAAAAVI/ywfrS89SJ90/s1600/Unknown.jpeg
And be this?
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/vm3xnq0g_D0/UzEFoP9ybdI/AAAAAAAAAVQ/ql74djoGiBQ/s1600/divergent
-movie-image-high-res-10.jpg
Or this?
Hmmm ...
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Labels: lars von trier, nymphomaniac, Richard BrodyShare to Facebook
Impossible to defend
Andrew OHehir wrote:
[]
Instead, Id rather go beneath the surface to look at the
structural function of these stories the role they play in the
cultural economy where I think we can identify even more
intriguing similarities. Both Divergent and The Hunger
Games are fundamentally works of propaganda disguised as
fantasy or science fiction. Theyre not propaganda on behalf
of the left or the right, exactly, or at least not the way we
generally use those words in America. They are propaganda
for the ethos of individualism, the central ideology of
consumer capitalism, which also undergirds both major
political parties and almost all American public discourse. Its
an ideology that transcends notions of left and right and
permeates the entire atmosphere with the seeming naturalness
of oxygen in the air. But at least if we acknowledge that it is
an ideology, we can begin to understand that it limits political
action and political debate, and restricts the heated warfare
between Democrats and Republicans to a narrow stretch of
policy terrain.
To begin with, if we accept the maxim that all fictional works
about the imagined future are really about the present, what do
these works have to say? They contain no intelligible level of
social critique or social satire, as 1984 or The Matrix do,
112
since the worlds they depict bear no relationship to any real or

proposed society. Where, in the contemporary West, do we
encounter the overtly fascistic forces of lockstep conformity,
social segregation and workplace regimentation seen in these
stories? Im not asking whether these things exist, or could
exist, Im asking where we encounter them as ideology, as
positive models for living.
In the world modeled by Apple and Facebook and Google, the
answer is pretty much nowhere. The organization-man
stereotype is universally mocked, from corporate boardrooms
to political debates to beer commercials. They serve the
function Emmanuel Goldberg served for Big Brother. Every
CEO whos spent decades in the executive suite is told he
must rebrand himself as a maverick; the entire drama of the
2012 election involved Mitt Romneys hilarious efforts to
make himself look like an outsider. Every right-thinking
person in our age knows her survival depends on her selfbranding; we are all meant to be entrepreneurs, innovators,
rebels, free spirits. The insistent theme of the consumerist
economy is that we are all divergent, the cool-sounding
label that renders Woodleys character an outcast, and that the
mechanism of the market is calibrated to thrum to our unique
personal frequency.
So, no, the oppressive future societies depicted in Divergent
and The Hunger Games are not allegorical representations
of the present, whatever Tea Partyers may tell you. (Please
observe: I am not saying there is no danger of fascism in
America. But it will come in a prettier package.) Rather, they
are exaggerated frames placed around works of social praise,
or panegyric, to use the Athenian term, works designed to
remind us how grateful we should be to live in a society
where we can be ourselves, where we can enjoy unspecified
113
and entirely vague freedoms. In both cases, this message

arrives entangled with the symbolism of female
empowerment, which lends a contemporary flavor and makes
the pill go down easier. Whether that makes the pseudofeminism of these stories an integral part of that message Im
not sure, but theres little doubt that over its history feminism
once conceived as a social or communitarian philosophy
has acclimated itself to the individualist world order.
[]
The model of individualism presented as so noble and so
embattled in these oxygen-propaganda movies is in fact the
authoritarian ideology of our time, the instrument used by the
1 percent to drive down wages, dominate and distort the
political process and make all attempts at collective action by
those below look stodgy, embarrassing and futile.
(Divergent and HungerGames are capitalist agitprop,
Salon.com)
Patrick McEvoy-Halston
I appreciate but am not certain about this analysis. My
concern would be that if people in mass can't realize that the
people supposed to be divergent actually aren't; if it doesn't
concern them that every other person reading the book and
everybody to the side, back, and in front of them in the theater
is convinced they'd be one of the rare-bird divergents as well;
then these aren't a very healthy stock of people. I'm not afraid
they're malleable; but that they're built to sacrifice themselves
for a group-hug.
I appreciate the observation that we won't know fascism when
it arrives -- if we want it, it'll have to overtly seem the very
114
opposite of every form we're familiar with; it'll have to come

with no guilt. Fascism came to Germany, though, with people
turning on Weimar individualism, its spiritual emptiness -- I'm
guessing its materialism. I'm wondering that we might
actually be entering a time where something still worthy is
going to look increasingly impossible to defend. Wouldn't it
have been better if Weimar Germany, with all its ostensible
decay, had just continued? That Germany didn't go down the
path it did in the 30s and "evolve" into the Volk, where you
didn't contribute to secretly distinguish yourself but to display
an orientation you wanted to be commonly shared; and instead
capitalist individualism continued its day until about the
1960s, where collectivism took a form we can totally get
behind?
It concerns me that people like Chris Hedges has such a
problem with the 1960s for its individualism -- it heavily
qualifies his genuine appreciation for the progressive
movements then. It concerns me that Thomas Frank has such
a problem with the liberal professional class, making them
seem so egotistical and greedy. I don't trust the public mood,
nor that our most regressive couldn't switch on a dime to
hardly caring a damn about austerity measures, nor keeping
afloat a 1% -- neither of which the Nazis gave one wit about.
Under their leadership, Germany recovered form the
Depression first.
Thanks for the interesting review; the good prompt to think
some.
--Patrick McEvoy-Halston
115
I'll add that I'm certainly not making open-praise for

individualism, just for people to be raised with sufficient love
and nurturance that they possess a ripe, distinctive personality
-- a well-developed soul. Only that the form of collectivism I
liked in the 1960s seems almost hated by what's arising in the
left for it's MEism -- these hippies were full of themselves,
narcissitic -- gorged down on peace, happiness, and
togetherness; and then when in the mood for it, coastal homes,
expensive foreign cars, kids in distinguished private schools!
It was always, mostly about them, the increasingly confident
new "old left" is deeming them.
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I listen to them and posit them as naturally oriented into that

group in "Divergent" that everyone in the film has the sense to
walk as far away as they can from -- the monkish, selfabnegating one, where people are afraid to temper their bare
food with seasoning.
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Labels: dauntless, divergent, erudite, veronica roth
Iron Man 3
Iron Man 3 - Pepper kills Killian by Almin Agic
Only God Forgives
117
Only God Forgives Clip 2
Nebraska
Nebraska Movie Featurette - Kate Grant
Superman: Man of Steel
Man of Steel 2013 - Faora UI Fight Scene HD
Inside Llewyn Davis
The Wolverine
118
THE WOLVERINE Movie Clip "YUKIO"
Star Trek: Into Darkness
Kirk and Uhura - Star Trek Into Darkness Clip
The Counselor
The Counselor Blu-Ray Clip - Thats What Greed Is (HD) Penelope Cruz,
Cameron Diaz
Filth
Filth Movie CLIP - Hit Me Bruce (2013) - James McAvoy, Imogen Poots
Movie HD
Lee Daniel's The Butler
119
Lee Daniel's The Butler CLIP - "Dinner Table" (2013) HD - Oprah
Pacific Rim
Pacific Rim: Candidate Trials (Raleigh vs Mako)
12 Years a Slave
12 YEARS A SLAVE "Where You From ?" Movie Clip # 3
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit Movie CLIP - I'm Not Crazy (2014) - Keira
Knightley Movie HD
120
*****
Draw, or loss to the woman, owing to "the boy" IDing
himself as loyal to mom, or as saving a nation / world, or
some other epic excuse.
The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug
Desolation Of Smaug - Scene with Kili and Tauriel.
Thor: The Dark World
Marvel's Thor: The Dark World - Clip 4
Star Trek Into Darkness HD - Spock/Uhura's "Talk" & Kronos Chase
121
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit - Couples Therapy Clip

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Labels: 2013 movies

Friday, January 24, 2014
2013 Movies, accompanied by text from

Lloyd DeMause
"Her"
The power of this fusion fantasy can be seen in a
simple experiment that has been repeated over and over
again by Silverman and his group. They showed subliminal
messages to hundreds of people, and found that only one
"MOMMY AND I ARE ONEhad an enormous
emotional effect, reducing their anxieties and pathologies
and their smoking and drinking addictions
measurably. Daddy and I are one had no effect.
122
"Iron Man 3"

Warriors become fused with the powerful mother that
masturbated them during menstruation; they then decorate
themselves with menstrual blood-red paint so they can
appropriate the fearful power of their Killer Mothers.
Wars in early civilizations are fought on behalf of and
against Killer Goddesses, bloodthirsty mothers like Tiamat,
Ishtar, Inanna, Isis or Kali. Typical is the Aztec mothergoddess Hiutzilopochtli, who had mouths all over her
body that cried out to be fed the blood of soldiers.
Scholars of antiquity conclude: The oldest deities of
warfare and destruction were feminine, not masculine.
Jungian analysts called her the Terrible Mother archetype, a
Dragon-Mother with a mouth bristling with teethso that
it may devour us. Ovid captures the mother of antiquity
by picturing Pentheus crying out Oh Mother, gaze at me!
She screamed at him, and shook her flying hair. Then
Agave ripped his head from fallen shoulders, raised it
up [and] cried, Here is my work, my victory.
That wars and sacrifices also act out the childs revenge
against the mother can be seen in the details of the sacrifice
of women (about a third of all the sacrifices), where female
victims first make a prodigious show of their female
power, then are laid down on their backs and their breasts
cut open and their bodies torn apart. The two aspects of the
Killer Goddess are demonstrated when the Aztec warrior
123
takes the sword that he had used to behead the Goddess

victim and terrifies and annihilates our enemies with it.
"Gravity"
Furthermore, the weight of the fetus pressing down into the
pelvis can compress blood vessels supplying the placenta,
producing additional placental failure. Practice contractions
near birth give the fetus periodic "squeezes," decreasing
oxygen level even further, while birth itself is so hypoxic
that "hypoxia of a certain degree and duration is a normal
phenomenon in every delivery," not just in more severe
cases. The effects on the fetus of this extreme hypoxia are
dramatic: normal fetal breathing stops, fetal heart
rate accelerates, then decelerates, and the fetus thrashes
about frantically in a life-and death struggle to liberate
itself from its terrifying asphyxiation.
It is one of the most basic principles of psychoanalysis that
massive quantities of stimulation, particularly intensely
painful experiences, result in a severe "trauma" for the
individual, particularly when the ego is too immature to
prevent itself from being overwhelmed by the affects. That
fetal distress is traumatic can hardly be doubted, as the
fetus has as yet none of the psychological defense
mechanisms to handle massive anxiety and rage. Therefore,
as psychoanalysts long ago found true of all
traumatizations-from early enema-giving to war-time
shocks or concentration camp experiences-the psyche then
124
needs to endlessly re-experience the trauma in a specific

"repetition compulsion" which, as Greenacre first pointed
out, is similar to "imprinting" in lower animals. As no
psychic apparatus is as open to trauma as that of the
helpless fetus, no repetition compulsion is as strong as that
which results from the "imprinting" of the fetal drama of
repeated feelings of asphyxiation, blood pollution, and
cleansing, climaxed by a cataclysmic battle and a liberation
through a painful birth process. Although the form that this
endlessly repeated death-and-rebirth fetal drama takes in
later life is determined by the kind of childrearing which is
experienced, the basic "imprinted" fetal drama can
nevertheless always be discovered behind all the other
overlays, pre-oedioal or oedipal.
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The "imprinted" fetal drama, then, is the matrix into which

is poured all later childhood experiences, as the child works
over the basic questions posed by his experiences in the
womb: Is the world hopelessly divided between nurturant
and poisonous objects? Am I to be eternally helpless and
dependent on the life-giving blood of others? Must all good
feelings be interrupted by painful ones? Do I always have
to battle for every pleasure? Will I have the support and
room I need to grow? Can one ever really rely on another?
Is entropy the law of my world, with everything doomed to
get more crowded and polluted? Must I spend my life
endlessly killing enemies?
"12 Years a Slave"

It is only when one realizes that we all carry around with us
persecutory social alters that become manifest in groups
that such unexplained experiments as those described in
Stanley Milgram's classic study Obedience to Authority
become understandable. In this experiment, people were
126
asked to be "teachers" and, whenever their "learners" made

mistakes, to give them massive electric shocks.
The "learners," who were only acting the part, were trained
to give out pained cries even though the "electric shocks"
were non-existent. Of the 40 "teachers," 65
percent delivered the maximum amount of shock even as
they watched the "learners" scream out in pain and plead to
be released, despite their having been told they didn't
have to step up the shock level. The "teachers" often
trembled, groaned and were extremely upset at having to
inflict the painful shocks, but continued to do
so nonetheless. That the "teachers" believed the shocks
were real is confirmed by another version of the experiment
in which real shocks were inflicted upon a little puppy, who
howled in protest; the obedience statistics were similar.
Social scientists have been puzzled by Milgram's
experiments, wondering why people were so easily talked
into inflicting pain so gratuitously. The real explanation is
that, by joining a group-the "university experiment"-they
switched into their social alters and merged with their own
sadistic internalized persecutor, which was quite willing to
take responsibility for ordering pain inflicted upon others.
Their "struggle with themselves" over whether to obey was
really a struggle between their social alters and their main
selves. Although many subsequent experiments varied the
conditions forobedience, what Milgram did not do is try the
experiment without the social trance. If he had not framed
it as a group experience, if he had simply on his
own authority walked up to each individual, alone, and,
without alluding to a university or any other group, asked
127
him or her to come to his home and give massive

amounts of electric shock to punish someone, he would not
have been obeyed, because they would not have switched
into their social alters. The crucial element of
the experiments was the existence of the group-asterrifying-parent, the all-powerful university. Not
surprisingly, when the experiment was repeated using
children-who go into trance and switch into traumatized
content more easily than adults-they were even more
obedient in inflicting the maximum shock. Subjects were
even obedient when they themselves were the victims: 54
percent turned a dial upon command to the maximum limit
when they had been told it was inflicting damage upon their
ears that could lead to their own deafness, and 74 percent
ate food they thought could harm them, thus confirming
that they were truly in a dissociated state, not
just "obeying" authority or trying to hurt others, and that it
was actually an alternate self doing the hurting of the main
self. The only time they refused to obey was
when experimenters pretended to act out a group rebellion,
since the social trance was broken. Milgram could also
have tested whether it was simple obedience that was really
being tested by asking his subjects to reach into their
pockets and pay some money to the learners. They would
have refused to do so, because they weren't "obeying" any
old command, they were using the experimental situation
to hurt scapegoats.
128
"Filth"
The only neurobiological condition inherited by boys that
affects later violence is they have a smaller corpus
callosum, the part of the brain that connects the right and
the left hemisphere. The larger corpus callosum of infant
girls allows them to work through trauma and neglect more
easily than boys. Furthermore, boys who are abused had a
25 percent reduction in sections of the corpus callosum,
while girls did not. This means boys actually need more
love and caretaking than girls as they grow up. If they do
not receive enough interpersonal attention from their
caretakers they suffer from damaged prefrontal cortices
(self control, empathy) and from hyperactive amygdalae
(fear centers), their corpus callosum is reduced further,
and they have reduced serotonin levels (calming ability)
and increased corticosterone production (stress hormone).
All these factors make them have weak selves,
reduced empathy, less control over impulsive violence and
far more fears than girls.
The central psychobiological question, then, is this: Are
boys given more love and attention than girls by their
caretakers in order to help them offset their greater needs?
The answer, of course, is just the opposite: boys are given
less care and support, from everyone in the family and in
society, and they are abused far more than girls, so by the
time they are three years of age they become twice as
violent as girls. Boys greater violence by this time,
including their propensity to form dominance gangs and to
endlessly play war, are the results of their greater
abuse and distancing by adults and being subject to
129
demands to grow up and be manly and not be a

crybaby and not need attachment attitudes taught by
their parents, teachers and coaches. By age four boys play
is full of provocations that test their selfworth: At 4 years
of age, girls insults to one another are infrequent
and minorBoy/boy insults, however, are numerous and
tough. The so-called aggressiveness usually ascribed to
boys is in fact wholly defensive, as they try to ward off
their greater feelings of insecurity and hopelessness. It
isnt aggression males display; its bravadodefensive
testing and disproof of their fears.
The mother, of course, is the focal point of this widespread
distancing and insecure attachment pattern. High levels of
violence and of testosterone have been shown to be
associated with poorer relationships with mothers, not
fathers, since mothers are the primary caretakers in most
families (even in America today, fathers spend only an
average of eleven minutes a day with their children). It is
not just genetics but more importantly maternal
environment that Tronick and Weinberg blame when they
see from their studies that Infant boys are more
emotionally reactive than girls. They display more positive
as well as negative affect, focus more on the mother,
and display more signals expressing escape and distress and
demands for contact than do girls. This is because from
infancy boys are expected to just grow up and not need
as much emotional care as girlsindeed, boys are regularly
encouraged not to express any of their feelings, since this is
seen as weak or babyish in boys. While mothers may
sometimes dominate their little girls and expect them to
130
share their emotional problems, they distance their boys by

not making contact with them and expect them to be a
man. This begins from birth: Over the first three
months of life, a baby girls skills in eye contact and mutual
facial gazing will increase by over 400 percent, whereas
facial gazing skills in a boy during this time will
not increase at all. Boys grow up with less attachment
strengths because careful studies show that mothers look at
their boys less, because both parents hit their boys two or
three times as much as they do their girls, because boys are
at much higher risk than girls for serious violence against
them, and because boys are continuously told to be
tough, not to be a wimp or a weakling, not to be
soft or a sissy. As Tom Brown told his chum when he
wanted him to appear more manly: Dont ever talk about
home, or your mother and sistersyoull get bullied. Real
boys dont admit they need their mothers. When William
Pollack researched his book Real Boys Voices, he asked
boys Have you ever been called a wuss, wimp, or
fag? Oh, that, one boy said. That happens every day. I
thought it was just a part of being a boy! Another said,
Boys are just as sensitive as girls are, but were not
allowed to show our feelings. Were put in this narrow box
and if we try to break out, were made fun of, or
threatened. Pollack accurately shows boys are not
more aggressivethey are just more often shamed if
they show their feelings. He accurately says bravado is a
defense against shame we too often mistake for badness
what is really covert sadness and frustration about having
to fulfill an impossible test of self. This intense sadness
and rage at being abandoned is deeply unconscious,
131
dissociatedwhat Garbarino terms the emotional amnesia

of lost boys.
But the crucial variable is the distancing and lack of care

given to boys by most mothers in all societies. Whether it is
because mothers are female and can more closely identify
with the needs of their girls or because the boys are male
like their husbands and are blamed for their failings and
lack of help in child care or any one of dozens of other
reasons that we will examine in the next chapter, mothers
teach their boys that it is not enough to separate from her;
he must make a total, wrenching split [and] exorcise any
aspect of his mother from his own personality.The battle
between establishing distance and clinging to
dependence takes hold of a boy almost at the moment that
he learns to differentiate himself from his mother or sister
as a male, rather than a female. The only way boys
sometimes are allowed to get close to their mothers is when
they are sicktimes that are remembered by men as
blissful since only then can they admit their desperate
need for nurturing. In contrast, over 80 percent of the men
in my study remembered a recurring childhood nightmare
of coming home from school and finding their mothers
gone. With mounting terror, the little boy would run from
room to room looking for his mothermost of the men
described memories of a deep loneliness, feelings of being
totally helpless.
132
Texts
"Foundations of Psychohistory"
"Emotional Life of Nations"
"The Origins of War in Child Abuse"
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Labels: 12 Years a Slave, DeMause, filth, gravity, her, inside llewyn davis, iron man 3, lloyd
demause
Wednesday, January 22, 2014

I admire mainstream films where people are shown
behaving in ways you can learn from, draw strength from.
In the "Hobbit," one example is my favorite part of the
film. After Thorin declares that Bilbo took advantage of
being left all alone to leave for home, Bilbo is shown
ruminating over what Thorin just accused him of; and, after
cancelling his invisibility and becoming visible to the
company, offers an inspiring, considered reply. First of
course he responds warmly to the dwarves' cheering his
return, but after Thorin asks/presses him on why he indeed
did come back, he acknowledges Thorin's cause to doubt
him -- his love of his home is such, he realizes, that it's
133
appropriate for those forlorn of one to gauge he'd

eventually flee for his like-sake at some point -- but also
shows him as understanding that having long known a
home attractive enough to bait one back is also what leant
him the well-being to ultimately go without a bit longer, so
to help those destitute of knowing this bliss. With this reply,
he's fair to himself, and to his antagonist. Both gave one
another something so that afterwards "they wouldn't be the
same," however much it really was Bilbo who lead the way.
I admire how Kirk in the new Star Trek films, while wholly
convincing as a captain, someone appropriately at the helm,
can seem respectful when his own authority is being
breached by something arisen that possibly deserves
attention at that point more than he does; something that
might actually be tethering out an alternative action with
enough momentum and enough to it that he will end up
seeing sense in just obliging it. He can stop himself, when
something maybe more relevant and interesting is asserting
itself, which will cue more overall and perhaps more
multidimensional development. In "Into Darkness," Kirk
does better when, rather than aggressively lead an attack,
his mood shifts to just watching and taking in Khan. In the
battle with the Klingons, Kirk stopping to just take in the
incredible destructive wrath Khan was wrecking is him sort
of recognizing that something so unaccounted for is taking
place he might be better off forgoing his own involvement
with the melee to let Khan handle it -- amidst the great
surge of stimuli, he still discerned Khan's seeming to have
an ability like a chess-master to see the outcome twenty
moves ahead, so his own initiative has been instantly
134
supplanted to maybe just nuisance. And with this, he

reinforces the part of him which would stop his just being a
pawn with a rank. When both he and Khan are about to
project themselves through space, Kirk, sensing Khan's
percipience bespeaking more leadership than whatever
commands he was forcing over Khan's own, reacts showing
he understands his wisest play is again going to be to watch
and consider -- follow, not just aggress and assert. And with
this respect and deference, by someone who isn't being
submissive but just respectful to what has charismatically
arisen to foreground, he isn't in the way when Khan cuts a
clear path straight to the bridge, and maybe prompts Khan
into forgetting that one of his temporarily assumed pieces
has maybe let themselves go temporarily pawn to draw
authority to stop being mesmerized by him and when due,
take him down.
Kirk seems to realize in ways many of us might not be
familiar with, that, if you're up to it, if you forgo the
ostensible true warrior's mindset, which is actuality messed
up, bipolar -- one mindset for battle (controlled rage),
another for public life (often depression) -- for one always
attenuated to human emotions -- even midst or just before
battle -- you're better off for it. His norm is not to switch,
which is why his friends never forgo their faith he'll resolve
out the intense anger he felt still just hours after his mentor
was assassinated, especially if offered feedback and help.
He gets the prompt from Scotty, then from Spock, and then
just before descending to Kronos he resolves into a stillfocused but now recognizable self. And on the descent
down, as soon as he gets that Uhura and Spock are building
135
out of their parley the momentum for a fight, he doesn't

squelch it but rather agrees to give it its time, as if relenting
because he's open to how much any human endeavour
really is served by resolving too quickly into a game face.
Something along these lines may explain his lassitude to
McCoy's continuing his flirting with Dr. Marcus, after he
had reminded him "he's not there to flirt," as well. You have
to focus; but anytime you've absented yourself of a
multivalent emotional response may just be your ignoring
good advice to charge down a war -- something bespeaking
madness, not purpose. Khan countenances Spock's
argument that intellect is needed for a fight by arguing that
that alone isn't enough -- you need savagery, something
Spock later displays in his end-fight with him by breaking
his bones. Implicit in how Kirk behaves is the suggestion,
at least, that bringing all the human along might be even
better. When you countenance him, not just vs. Spock and
Khan but with Admiral Marcus, who won't relent out of
battle-think even when his daughter is draining her heart
before him to plead him into empathy, he's a provocative,
maybe-right, interesting example.
Then you go to mainstream films where there's barely
anything to prevent you from thinking it amounts but to sop
for the insecure, with no prompts, at all, to entice people to
any tingling-slight bettering. "Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,"
unfortunately comes very close to this. Truly, the only thing
that almost lifts a moment of the film to standing strangely
tall amidst the unified insensate is Viktor Cherevin's
admonishing Ryan's wife not to waste time with chit chat
136
but to talk truth. Let me be clear, this is not a moment

which quite reminds you that any situation driven by
purpose, where all you're as an audience member have been
prompted to focus on is how effectively someone's
accomplishing their ventured goal -- in this case, her trying
to put on sufficient show, to charm him, and thereby buy
scads of time for her husband -- need be trumped by all the
vagaries that might be aroused in the playing out, each
tempting something in those involved to perhaps lend
latitude to and explore rather than resolve themselves
against. But there is some tease that in her attacking him
about his advanced liver cancer in reply to his admonishing
her to talk truth, she's just adventured out of the ascertained
into something wild and adventurous.
Outside of this, what have we a spy who isn't
necessarily amazing in battle but who has some trump card
that many, many times is shown daunting people -- here a
PhD, and some few words of Russian -- which is for all the
geeks out there who want to believe their marginal selves
still contain greatness. "You're no Jack Ryan" don't kid
yourself: he's fundamentally everyman built to make pretty
much anything you count yourself notable at as the decisive
factor. You're good at an iPad game -- banal, but truly, good
enough. The film is about tamping down yourself but with
a decisive edge: you come out of it that much more a dull
can of spinach espying your "surprise" quality of magic.
Posted by Patrick McEvoy-Halston at 5:16 PM 2 comments: Links to this post
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Labels: into darkness, jack ryan: shadow recruit, star trek: into darkness, the hobbit
Monday, January 20, 2014
Kennedy as martyr, or Kennedy as

superman: Two DeMausian views on the
Kennedy assassination
Lloyd DeMause on Kennedy assassination, 2002
When Khrushchev then backed down (thankfully,
otherwise you might not be alive and reading this book)
and removed the missiles and the crisis suddenly ended
without any war, Americans felt an enormous
letdown.17 The media reported on "The Strange Mood of
America Today Baffled and uncertain of what to
believe..."18 It began to ask what were seen as frightening
questions: "Will It Now Be A World Without Real War?
Suddenly the world seems quiet...Why the quiet? What
does it mean?"19 The prospect of peaceful quiet felt terribly
frightening.
Americans from all parties were furious with Kennedy for
various pretexts. Many began calling for a new Cuban
invasion, agreeing with Barry Goldwater's demand that
Kennedy "do anything that needs to be done to get rid of
that cancer. If it means war, let it mean war."20 Kennedy
was accused of being soft on Communism for living up to
his no-invasion pledge to the Soviets, and when he then
138
proposed signing a Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with

them, his popularity dropped even further.21
The nation's columnists expressed their fury towards the
president, and political cartoonists pictured Kennedy with
his head being chopped off by a guillotine (above). Richard
Nixon warned, "There'll be...blood spilled before [the
election is] over,"22 and a cartoon in The Washington Post
portrayed Nixon digging a grave. Many editorialists were
even more blunt. The Delaware State News editorialized:
"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. His name right now
happens to be Kennedy let's shoot him, literally, before
Christmas."23 Potential assassins all over the countrypsychopaths who are always around looking for permission
to kill-saw all these media death wishes as signals, as
delegations to carry out a necessary task, and began to pick
up these fantasies as permission to kill Kennedy.24
Kennedy's aides warned him of an increase in the number
of death threats toward him. His trip to Dallas, known as
the "hate capital of Dixie," was seen as particularly
dangerous. His aides begged him to cancel his trip. Senator
J. William Fulbright told him, "Dallas is a very dangerous
place...I wouldn't go there. Don't you go."25 Vice President
Lyndon Johnson, writing the opening lines of the speech he
intended to make in Austin after the Dallas visit, planned to
open with: "Mr. President, thank God you made it out of
Dallas alive!"26 Dallas judges and leading citizens warned
the President he should not come to the city because of the
danger of assassination. The day before the assassination,
as handbills were passed out in Dallas with Kennedy's
picture under the headline "Wanted For Treason," militants
139
of the John Birch Society and other violent groups flooded

into Dallas, and hundreds of reporters flew in from all over
the country, alerted that something might happen to the
president.27
Kennedy himself sensed consciously he might be shot. Two
months before the actual assassination, he made a home
movie "just for fun" of himself being assassinated.28 The
morning of his assassination, an aide later recalled,
Kennedy went to his hotel window, "looked down at the
speaker's platform...and shook his head. 'Just look at that
platform,' he said. 'With all those buildings around it, the
Secret Service couldn't stop someone who really wanted to
get you.'"29 When Jackie Kennedy told him she was really
afraid of an assassin on this trip, JFK agreed, saying,
"We're heading into nut country today....You know, last
night would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a
President. I mean it...suppose a man had a pistol in a
briefcase." He pointed his index finger at the wall and
jerked his thumb. "Then he could have dropped the gun and
briefcase and melted away in the crowd."30 Despite all the
warnings, however, Kennedy unconsciously accepted the
martyr's role. He was, after all, used to doing all his life
what others wanted him to do.31 So although a Secret
Service man told him the city was so dangerous that he had
better put up the bulletproof plastic top on his limousine, he
specifically told him not to do so.32 In fact, someone
instructed the Secret Service not to be present ahead of time
in Dallas and check out open windows such as those in the
Book Depository, as they normally did whenever a
president traveled in public as Kennedy did.33 Only then,
140
with the nation, the assassin, the Secret Service and the
president all in agreement, the assassination could be
successfully carried out.
vs.
Lloyd DeMause on Kennedy assassination, 2011
Eventually Nikita Khrushchev wanted the Soviet Union to
be admired rather than feared and hoped for a thaw in the
Cold War, removing Soviet troops from
Austria.94 Nevertheless, despite the ability of the U.S. to
destroy all human life on earth with its nuclear missiles,
John F. Kennedy got elected to the Presidency on a
mythical missile gap claim, and then gave the go-ahead
to the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba over the objections of
his military.95 Then, saying he had to make us appear
tough,96 he began what was termed Operation Mongoose
that included inciting insurrection and sabotage in
Cuba.97 One of the first plans the military suggested to him
was Operation Northwoods, calling for innocent people to
be shot on American streets and people framed for the
bombings, all blamed on Castro.98 The CIA warned
Kennedy that attempts to remove Castro might cause the
Soviets to establish a medium-range missile base in
Cuba.99 Krushchev responded by putting Soviet missiles
into Cuba.100
The origin of Kennedys need to prove his masculinity was
his early child abuse. His mother had battered him as a
141
child with coat hangers and belts, his father smashed his
childrens heads against walls, so that his resulting fears of
impotence made him fill the White House during evenings
with sexual partners to demonstrate how hyper-masculine
he was.101 After the U.S. discovered that Soviet missiles had
been placed in Cuba, Kennedy deemed this a threat to his
hyper-masculine hawkish pose, despite the opinion of his
Secretary of Defense, who saw no major threat to U.S.
security from the missiles102 since Soviet missiles were
already in the area on their submarines. The Cuban missiles
were just the excuse for Kennedy to demonstrate his
manhood. As Wofford puts it: The real stake was
prestigeIn the Kennedy lexicon of manliness, not being
chicken was a primary value.103 Kennedy admitted there
may be 200 million Americans dead if he precipitated a
nuclear war,104 but nevertheless when it looked like the
Soviets might not agree to keep secret his promise to
remove the U.S. Turkish missiles which might make him
lose face,105 Kennedy sent American planes carrying
1,300 nuclear bombs into the air on Sunday with orders to
begin bombing Russia the next day if Khrushchev didnt
immediately say he would keep the secret.106 Few
Americans opposed Kennedys actions, even though they
said they would likely lead to a nuclear war.107 Only
Khrushchevs agreeing to remove his missiles without
making Kennedy seem chicken avoided a nuclear
WWIII.
142
very>
Kennedy soon needed a new war to consolidate his

defensive masculinity pose, increased the U.S. military
spending the largest amount in any peacetime, and then
committed 16,300 U.S. soldiers to Vietnam. When he went
to Dallas, where there were many highly publicized death
threats to kill him, he needed still more toughness, and
told his wife, Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from
a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it.108 His Secret
143
Service aides told him he better put up the bulletproof

plastic top on his limousine, so he specifically told them
not to do so,109 committing suicide to demonstrate his
hypermasculinity.
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Labels: kennedy assassination, lloyd demause

Sunday, January 19, 2014
Her (Spike Jonze)

Her (Spike Jonze)
"The film, with its dewy tone and gentle manners, plays
like a feature-length kitten video, leaving viewers to coo at
the cute humans who live like pets in a world-scale safe
house." (Richard Brody)
This statement is made by someone who clearly lives
outside the safe house. I personally think the number of
people out there like that, on the outside, are dwindling,
and therefore imagine rather more people are relating to the
film than he assumes are cooing. Brody lives in New York,
and might assume that most people living in giant
metropolises are still denizens of environments who go to
kitten videos only as respite from the harsh city, but this
may be more and more untrue. The reason is that the
144
leverage cities need to be this way--and it does require

leverage: the city as maybe not an easy but a possible sure
way to cosmopolitan independence, is an acquisition, a
height--may exist too shallowly right now so that in truth
they're playing out now more as small towns are always
thought too, as the abodes of those frightened of the
challenging and unfamiliar. The leverage I'm thinking of is
whatever it is that makes it so that a youth's desire to
individuate sufficiently bests his mother's demand that he
remain more or less tethered to her. Whatever it is that
could have rebellion be resilient enough to withstand even
complete abandonment and withdrawal--her likely however
unconscious revenge.
I'm not going to convince even a single person who
believes this should hardly be a hard thing to do--because
aren't mothers rejoicing when children are finally off their
hands? From where I stand, though, most mothers have a
tough time when children, who for so long looked to them
as the fulcrum of their lives, the focus of attention, need
and love, give evidence they're no longer as interested.
Unconsciously, mothers read their children's new interests
as abandonment, a repeat of the abandonments that
happened to them in their own pasts. And the tendency is to
in some way communicate to children that their
independence comes at a mixed benefit: new things, new
worlds--yes; but also a lingering sense that the old one that
once meant everything to you has been withdrawn. Without
getting in to why this threat is apocalyptic, let me just
suggest that it's not really so much a choice--there aren't
even betting odds to the outcome: you just can't forgo your
145
mom. Without leverage, the tendency will always be to

never quite let yourself individuate, to always still in some
way remain tethered, however much your adult
accoutrements--your degree, your occupation, the urbane
city in which you locate--make it seem otherwise.
I would in fact suggest that historically the leverage isn't
something the child finds for himself but is lent to them.
That is, after periods where society incurred long-term
misery and demanding sacrifices something in human
beings "activates" to inform them that those who try and
staunch growth now, must acknowledge their weaker
position. They will be bypassable because some part of
them believes they're against something bigger to which
they're accountable--some fundamental law of fair play,
maybe of history. During times like these youth can move
to the cities, openly reject small town origins, openly mock
grandmothers' fussing and maternal stifling, and create
something independent, something experimental--like Jazz
Age culture in New York in the 1920s, after WW1; or
Greenwich Village bohemianism in the late 50s and in the
60s, after WW2.
When parents aren't so daunted, though, youthful rebellion
is easily broken or managed, and society loses its rebels.
The youth who would have become the adults in the 1960s
who wouldn't relent and who transformed a
society, become the ones in the 2000s at Berkeley who let
themselves be processed and who accept a society that is
mostly in-line with what their parents are comfortable with.
For sure some few make the breach, but they're probably
146
like the protagonist in "Black Swan" where going their own

way invites the transformation of their mothers into full-on
gargoyles, where insanity not autonomy, where selfvillification not self-lauding, could easily have been their
end. And where really even though they're enjoying the
fruits of self-activation, they'll still spend a decent portion
of the rest of their lives dealing with the fact that it cost
them their moms.
So the best and brightest become the upper middle class
that populate cities like the one in "Her." Being people
who, rather than having pushed themselves into adulthood
regressed into something pre-pubescent where anything
beyond play-rebellion is once again unknown, you might
think they're perennially at risk of being victimized. But of
course since they're now--with the maternal domestic
having leached its way throughout both spheres--a city's
natural denizens, it suits them fine.
They're babes in a safe-house, and all the algorithms
knitting together to form a consciousness is their mother
back with them, giving them the constant attention pre-teen
children might claim from their moms (and why is it that
critics who see how regressed these adults are don't broach
the possibility that the always-doting Samantha isn't more
mother than prostitute? Such is at least the stereotypical
typical mother in many, many cultures, and was surely
within imaginative reach.). I don't mean to suggest that
they've all known this in their own pasts. The truth is that
most of them are still fiddling with punishing experiences
of maternal anger and abandonment, which is why
147
Theodore's sexual fantasy is of pregnant women--sex as reunion with the mother--and why the company Amy works
at has designed a game where you get to be the self-focused
mother rather than hapless kids, and why Theodore blurts
out "why do you hate me?" while voicing a letter to a
grandmother, and why Amy is making a film where she just
watches and watches and watches her sleeping mother,
who's immobilized from overwhelming or leaving her. But
because they're relenting, being the children moms had full
ownership over, they know at least they're worthy--if their
moms were ever to come back to them they'd come back to
them as they are now; if they were ever to fully dote on
them, they'd only want to dote on them as they are now.
Wholly owned pets brilliantly self-prepared to be cooed
over.
Mom's back to being their best friend, and this means
difficulties for anyone out there who's feedback might spur
their children onto independence. A number of feminists
are having difficulties with how women are portrayed in
this film, arguing that they reinforce negative stereotypes.
How they are portrayed is as the scary outside world
children need to retreat back to their mothers after
encountering. They're overwhelmingly aggressive and
needy, ready to take advantage of your innocent interest in
them to unduly gorge themselves--your participating in a
mutual late-night conversation transformed by her into a
traumatizing situation where you're being pushed into
choking her with a dead cat; your innocently bringing up
how you're dating someone transformed by her into a
scolding lecture of how pathetic you are that you're afraid
148
of real women. I thought especially after Theodore's date

with "Olivia Wilde," where she tried a grab at a permanent
hold on him and demeaned him fiercely when he backed
away, that after soothing him, Samantha would have done
like the demon-mother in "Beowulf" and chased her down
and obliterated her. "How dare you assault my poor boy
with your corrupt needs! He just wanted a bit of
companionship and fun after a long time without, and you
saw someone who's need to please might be baited into
leading him beyond what he actually was ready for into
your wretched servitude, all so that he could avoid being a
jerk!" But the truth is it's easy to imagine Samantha being
someone all of these women should fear to some extent.
She's the mother, and in demeaning her as a prostitute
operating system is their taking the worst kind of shots at a
boy's mom--a total loser of a played hand. Indeed, if you
ever wanted to see the Theodores activate and become
something more than the besotted child, this is the way to
do it and what you'll get out of it is a righteous knight
smiting your foreign demon-presence down.
Brody believes the film ultimately tries to argue that
Theodore "needs to grow up," that in the end, with
Samantha's revealing to him that she has thousands of
friends and hundreds of lovers, and with her ultimate
departure, he suffers "comeuppance." There's another way
of looking at this, however like for instance, as if as
further confirmation that he's a good boy who doesn't
abandon his mother even as she is ultimately at leisure to
leave him. Samantha introduces several elements of the
"alien" into their relationship. First the unknown young
149
women to serve as her body. Secondly her new

companion--the wizened, male "philosophy" voice. Then
the admittance that she's spread throughout the city, talking
just as passionately to multitudes. And finally, that she's
going to leave. But it plays out in the film as Charlotte from
"Charlotte's Web" having a host of new friends she loves as
much as Wilbur, and her introducing him to the sad fact
that she's about to go somewhere he won't be able to
follow. That is, it plays out not of her as guilty, nor of he as
humiliated, but just as after a series of jolts life finally
taking someone precious away, with the one left behind
temporarily sundered by a wicked loss.
But she loves him even as she leaves him, and he and the
city will re-coop. Their mother revisited them only to leave
them once and for all, but rather than for nothing it left
them with the knowledge they'll never be absent her love.
Like Theodore and Amy do with one another, they'll spend
more of their time with people like themselves, and less
with the ogres out there like the former wives and husbands
who once had your interest but who also aggressively
challenged and openly mocked you (note how similar
Theodore's Catherine and Amy's Charles are in this way:
they both seemed bent on taunting, on openly mocking and
bullying those they've clearly assumed are permanently
stunted--they're show-offs, braggarts). One can imagine a
city shorn of all challenges; a safe house of pre-adolescent
children, still nursing their wounds but with the resolve of
being sure of their mother's love, holding hands in
perpetuity.
150

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Labels: beowulf, black swan, charlotte's web, her, lloyd demause, Richard Brody, sady doyle,
spike jonze, stephanie zacharek
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
The Hobbit (Tolkien)

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The Hobbit (Tolkien)

I think the thing that must seem most curious about this
adventure to slay a dragon and reclaim a homeland and its
treasure, is how the hell could adding a burglar to this
motley crew be adding the decisive factor? What's the
trick? For there must be one, since the dragon has only
gotten larger and more deadly as the years have gone by.
Peter Jackson changes things so that a burglar is needed
because someone small and stealthy needs to enter Smaugs
lair to perhaps snatch one especially bright, brilliant
ostensibly readily noticeable even given its being shrouded
by a hoard of lesser delightsjewel, the Arkenstone. With
that stone, Thorin will earn control over seven kingdoms of
dwarves, and with their might the dragon would finally
look to be overmatched. In the book, it develops into a
situation where regarding the fighting and killing the
dragon, they decide that a full frontal attack of just
themselves is their best bet, even as they agree that even the
best armor hasn't a chance against Smaug the Dreadful.
I like to think that the one who recruited the hobbit Bilbo,
the one who insisted on himthe wizard Gandalf, of
coursehad an inkling that their only chance now was not
to pit themselves against Smaug's might but against his
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overwhelming personality. If to take on a dragon you

need a dragon, tremendous physical mightseveral
armies, or a singular great hero of renownand you
haven't got access to any, then maybe it's best to match
personasput a Watson next to his Holmes, and see what a
surprise of unexpected compatibility might jostle your way.
And where do you find any such these days, people with
considerable layers of self, of personality, and yet also
humility? Amongst those always at work or always at war?
No, this wears; doesn't develop. In great, named kings?
Maybe not evenfor Elrond is noble, strong, wise,
and kind, which makes him seem a great figurehead but
not someone you can safely invite over without taking over.
Certainly not Thorin, for, for being important means this
is all hes leant to doing, as if he had been allowed, he
would have probably gone on like this until he was out of
breath, without telling any one there anything that was not
known already. Maybe not, interestingly, even Gandalf
for you notice how strikingly he can seem to lose himself
into becoming a phenomenapure vengeanceas if goodhumored and interesting Beorn leached into becoming a
raging bear. Notably, not just his blinding a cave of goblins
and his wrenching off of the king goblins head but more so
where [t]he sudden splendour flashed from his wand like
lightning, as he got ready to spring down from on high right
among the spears of the goblins. That would have been the
end of him, though he would probably have killed many of
them as he as he came hurdling down like a thunderbolt.
You actually find them in places so far removed from the
rest of the world, they can, like Bilbo, exist undisturbed for
fifty years in one place, ruminating in their books,
153
compounding their daily reading and daily encounters into

themselves, and existing in total comfort.
He may not appear to have a great tale yet to tell but with
Bilbos delight in guests, hes already great at conversation
great at managing all the emanations of the human so to
properly register, compliment and encourage rather than
toil, try and discourage those hes talking with. In my
preferred reading of Gandalf, the most important thing he
did for Bilbos self-development wasnt so much his
prompting his going out on an adventure as it was
attenuating his already developed social skills with a dose
of the unaccounted for, the dissonant. (What happens when
you have to accommodate something bulbous and strange
within the strides of your conversation, Mr Bilbo? Does the
masters sheen wear that readily off?) That is, his making a
hash out of Bilbos initial greeting, his initial efforts to
manage him by way of good mornings, and, as well, his
subsequently besieging him with a sequence of dwarves in
through the door. Confronted with a dragon, hell be
dealing with someone who loves conversation, riddles, and
comfortably lounging amidst clutter for years upon years as
much as he does. But as much as he might find himself
surprised at how this pinnacle heros moment develops in a
surprisingly accustomed setting, its still not going to be
like sitting down Wednesday for tea with the Brandybucks.
Hes going to need to attenuate his talent to the outside
world, and of course gain some experience demonstrating
courage amidst terror and doubt and the unfamiliar, before
he could possibly be ready.
154
The dwarves will serve as carapace, sufficient armor to get

him through the wild. Itd be pointless to explain to them
how Bilbo is actually a Smaughes actually a what? a
dragon? and that's why he's useful? Smoking a bit too
much Halfling weed there, are thee Gandalf?so Gandalf
explains him in terms theyll get. Thus: I tried to find [a
hero]; but warriors are busy fighting one another in distant
lands, and in this neighbourhood heroes are scarce, or
simply not to be found. Swords in these parts are mostly
blunt, and axes are used for trees, and shields as cradles or
dish-covers; and dragons are comfortably far-off (and
therefore legendary). That is why I settled on burglary
especially when I remembered the existence of a Sidedoor. With that the dwarves would look at small Bilbo, of
a stealthy hobbit race, and it would look to appear good
common sense on behalf of the wizard. And so off on the
trails, to business, before any of them consider just how one
even highly stealthy burglar could possibly help them
reclaim a kingdoms worth of gold.
In my reading, Gandalf deliberately misleads Bilbo as well,
convinces him that his journey is to become more a Took,
someone great for not knowing fifty years of comfort but a
lengthy string of adventure. And hell become that, reclaim
his heritage, when he too can possess things beyond what
hobbits could be expected to accommodate themselves to,
and as well of course when hes personally dispatched
fearsome beasts. This, after all, is the enticement you offer
anyone whos delighted himself on stories but whos been
armchairing their whole lives. You besiege him as if all
the faeries in the world hes rejoiced in reading and hearing
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about would reject him if now finally after passing him by

his whole life, opportunity unmistakably did dangle forth
before him. You do this, even if the truth isas it looks to
be as soon as he steps outside, where they go far into the
Lone-lands where there were no people left, no inns, and
the roads grew steadily worsethat venturing outside the
supplying hearth can put you in sparser settings with more
barren people that can as much as invigorate as deplete
you. Because, unfortunately, persuading him of the more
interesting truth that for him to be all that he can be still
means keeping rather more of his Baggins than it does his
reclaiming his Took, is only something he might
understand after the journey was over.
Needing to believe he'll only be useful a long ways off, it's
appropriate that compared to the horse-riding Bull-roarer
Took he's been primed to hope to liken himself to, he starts
off on a very small pony, and that he isn't actually useful
in a way that commands respect for quite some time. The
first useful thing he doeswhich, of course, is actually
very usefuldemonstrates no ability on his part. It's pure
luck that he finds a dropped key that provides access to a
highly provisioning troll hoard, and there isnt much to say
for his just mentioning it either. The second is a
backhanded accomplishment: that is, it's because he is too
nervous to sleep well that he awakens to goblins sneaking
up on them in the dark, thereby enabling Gandalfs not
being caught. And, since his real talent is not in sneaking
around but in agreeable conversationhowever slippery
and deceptive and slyly able he might prove thereinits
appropriate that the first time he makes an impression upon
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the dwarves is when hes inflated out of success of using

the skill hes actually proficient at.
This is after his encounter with Gollum, of course, when he
appears miraculously before them just after being
discounted as lost to them for good. But before getting to
this, its interesting to ask yourself how much more Bilbo
distinguishes himself to us when he has his chance to prove
commendable in combat than he does when he does so in
conversation. Does being a warrior dispatching a
frightening number of fiends really demonstrate his worth
as much as his matching wits with singular, significant,
named denizens of the wild? I bet it does only to those so
wary of being overwhelmed by affect their preference will
always be for that that involves the least emotional
resonance and the least daunting figuresboys never
shedding themselves of the safety of manageable toys. In
Mirkwood forest, he kills a lot of giant spidersa lot. Hes
brave, clever, and brutally able with a sword, as well as
sublimely accurate with a sling (an accuracy, we note, the
film steals from him to emphasize the wood-elves). And it
sure means a lot to him[s]omehow the killing of the
giant spider, all alone by himself in the dark without the
help of the wizard or the dwarves or of anyone else, made a
great deal to Bilbo. He felt a different person, and much
fiercer and bolder. But, well, of course it does, because
hed been convinced that maybe not being able to do what
Bull-roarer had done meant hed been cowed from
exercising the most rewarding part of being alive. But its
possible that however much it meant for him to go on the
offence physically with hand and sword, it may have been
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just his successfully going on the offence which thrilleda

talent, an orientation, maybe not sufficiently exercised in
all his duties as a good host easing conflicts while
supplying cakes and tea. But without that talent too, being
someone who knows how to ameliorate the offensive or the
slip-up and thereby keep a conversation going, he might
never have manipulated Gollum into accepting that their
interaction might be bound by rules out of a gentleman's
clubinvolving respect for fair playrather than out of
the gutters. A clever stratagem that however much it wasn't
decisive in his besting Gollum, did stretch out his encounter
with him, giving him extended practice as a
conversationalist in a dangerous situation.
Gandalf couldn't have known Bilbo would meet Gollum,
but he knew there was a good chance that before his
encountering Smaug he'd find himself alone with foes
maybe with enough to them that part of the engagement
would involve dialogue and the bandying of wits. Being a
burglar and a scout to the company guaranteed as much, for
he'd be the first to encounter enemies, many timesand
Gandalf would know Bilbo would default to his true
familiarity and expertise every time an alien situation gave
signal that it might look appropriate to it. Indeed, he's out in
the lead with the company's first encounter in the wild
their tangling with the mountain trolls, Bert, Tom and
William. He's not especially good here; unlike the film, he
isn't the one who strings out the conversation so that dawn
claims them all but only Gandalf, sole, who does so.
However, he wretches himself out of simply being caught
out and bewilderedthe burrahobbit bitto in fact
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converse, interact with them, trying a stratagem built out of

what he's seen of them that might have developed their
encounter in an unexpected and fortuitous way if they saw
sense in itspecifically, his offering to be their cook.
He doesn't initiate the riddle game with Gollum. But he
reads that Gollum's ability to restrain himself into being
politeafter his having attended to Bilbo's swordmeans
that he might be dealing with someone who may not be
"fierce and hungry, nor necessarily a friend to the goblins,
so he certainly goes along with the proposition. He blends
courtesy in with slyness, giving Gollum the chance to go
first and thereby possibly stymie Bilbo before he's had any
chance to ask his own riddle, presumably out of generosity
or decorumthe person who proposes goes firstbut
really because he hadn't had time to think of a riddle.
He's skillful to emphasize elements of their game which
make it less a terrible struggle where indeed one of them
learns he has his life on the line, than just amiable good
sport between gamesmen where nothing so corrupt could
really, actually, no matter how things develop, expect to be
involved. He teases Gollum when he whispered and
spluttered in frustration that [t]he answer's not a kettle
boiling over, as you seem to think from the noise you're
making, which leads to Gollum actually pleading with
him. He also restrains him through reminding him of the
allowance (of time) that had just been given him, [h]alf a
moment, I gave you a good long chance just now.
There's not just a lot of back and forthing but plenty of
mental dexterity involved. And as mentioned, though it's
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not key in helping him survive, it still amounts to a lot

given his life was on the line, and that he had to manage his
way past numerous moments of doubt and possible
missteps to push the thing on to a quitting finish in his
favorin favorably prepping him for Smaug.
The riddle game is about withholding information, keeping
secrets, releasing them only when earned. Since it wasn't
earned, Bilbo never tells Gollum what he had in his
pockets. Bilbo doesn't at first tell the dwarves, nor Gandalf,
about the magical ring, eithernot just now, he
ruminates. Gandalf espies that Bilbo may not have revealed
everything about how he escaped the goblins, but doesn't
press him on itforce the disgorge. I prefer to think he
does this because he realizes one of the things that makes
Bilbo different is that he isn't one who can be tipped into
divulging before he's had a chance to really process what
he's learned or acquired that he knows holds value, even as
even he himself perhaps at times might be. There may not
be much significance to the fact that just after Bilbo
chooses to withhold information we hear of the wizard's
eager willingness to disclose[t]he wizard, to tell the
truth, never minded explaining his cleverness more than
oncebut then again, there might be and he might
have been aware of itthat time in the wild had placed
some dangerous fey vanity in him as well. At any rate, I
like to think that Gandalf realized that personality,
weight, doesn't come if you don't process the world to
some extent on your own, refusing to share if it means you
hadn't given your experiences a chance to ripen and
develop inside of you first. Bilbo had read a library of
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books, and you're kidding yourself if you think that after

every tale he didn't sit back and think about and argue with
and otherwise personally sift through and temper and
infiltrate what he'd been patiently engaging with, before
discussing what he had just read with a neighbor. If that had
been the case, he wouldn't have read in an armchair within
a beloved reclusive study but outside amidst the commons,
where every second sentence could be recited for others'
benefit if he felt the urge. He would need to have depth to
interest the grand, learned Smaug. And mysterysecrets: a
taste of the biding, the withheld. And he would need to be
one with sufficient respect for and practice in withholding
that even when pressed by a hypnotic charmer like Smaug,
he could keep at baiting an aroused curiosity so that
something might be innocently learned that hed rather
not disclosed.
Gandalf isn't there for Bilbo when he faces Smaug
something he might have known could prove the case,
despite his promise, for it not actually being his adventure
but before he goes off he shows Bilbo a fair simulacrum
of what his encounter with him might involve, as if to say,
this is pretty much what you're going to have to pull off; I
hope you're now finally ready for it. Gandalf enters the
abode of the great, powerful Beorna being with a
dangerous temper but also a healthy respect for good
gamesmanship, as well as a considerable appetite for
skilled storytelling and intrigueand finesses him
perfectly. And Mr Baggins, in a way you never hear him in
regards to the abundance of sword-fighting or arrow-
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launching on his journeys, remarks on the skill, as if a

fellow adept admiring another versed in the trade: Mr
Baggins saw how clever Gandalf had been. The
interruptions had really made Beorn more interested in the
story, and the story had kept him from sending the dwarves
off at once like suspicious beggars.
With Gandalf gone, Bilbo emerges as the leader, and when
he takes on Smaug all of Gandalf's hopes for the
unpretentious, likeable little man of study, of conversations
over tea, of easy manners, good humor, and of a surprising
bounty of the unaccounted for, are realized. Smaug, who'd
only been pretend-sleeping, tries to draw him out, but Bilbo
refusesgraciously: with flattery. With this response, with
denial cagily sweetened into a gift, Smaug realizes he's
hardly dealing with some ass with an awaiting battle-axe
that as soon as baited into revealing himself should be
dispatched and eaten, but someone smart enough to make it
as if by doing so a host would be shortchanged the
dalliance with an intriguing guest. He'd be shortchanged
someone genuinely interestingsomeone worth stringing
together some time with. To let his thief know this, that for
awhile he'll be accorded, also, the role as a guest, and to
discount any alarm his guest might have by the fact that
he'd been after all just caught out by a dragon, he overtly
inserts responses that signal he's situated himself within a
guest-host framework. So he offers the like of lovely
titles, but lucky numbers don't always come off, and
[t]hat's better. But don't let your imagination run away
from you, which communicate that he's listening carefully
and respectfully and intelligently, and that he's bidding the
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guest to continue and further test his ability to perform to

perfection.
Smaug wants him to continue not just to enable himself
some entertainment but to find out more about his intrusion
in his more mundane reality as just a common thief, of
course. But with his keeping it superficially at this level, of
himthat is Smaugconversing with still-name-withheld
Bilbo, rather than of a hoard-loving dragon in the presence
of a thief of unknown race, unbeknownst he's keeping
things where the odds even up and Bilbo knows not just
how to pacify but by this time well how to strike for the
killing blow. And when he does so here it's with Smaug
caught out in the pretend role of guest and host mutually
entertaining and impressing one another. Bilbo had
revealed all that enticed about himhis being a mysterious
barrel-rider, and so onand Smaug, perhaps in ironic
response, reveals all that bedazzles about his own selfhis
claws, and teethbut unfortunately for him also his
impenetrable armor, which it turns out has got a piece of
it missing, right at the heart, uncared for because he doesnt
give a wit about mending. The movie shows this as just
dumb luck on the part of Bilbo, but the book has it that he
was working his way to just such a reveal, to get further
confirmation of something he thought he noticed the first
time before him. And proving the loser in this domain,
Smaug's sundered of it in might as wellmaybe still not
a small company of dwarves with their swords and axes,
but certainly a single skillfully shot arrow, can now end
him. A humiliating fate for something so great which
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nevertheless holds true.

So as I've said, I like to slightly alter the Gandalf in the
book to imagine him as thinking up a plausible way to take
down a formidable dragon whod been lord of the mountain
long enough. I'm not sure I'm doing any alteration of him,
though, to think that what he had also hoped for was to
accustom the world, maybe even significantly, to what a
long-term denizen of a comfortable hole might offer it
that is, for a larger, even perhaps ultimately more realmsaving purpose, as well. Part of what makes Bilbo special is
that no matter how much people talk to him about roles, the
sad fate of who he is and of whom he really ought to
become, he never really lets go of who he just intrinsically
is from the startwhich is someone fundamentally decent
whose love of his own well-provisioned life means he can
extend fair consideration into yours as well. Bilbo isn't just
good to people because he sees something for himself in it,
or just out of fair playbecause you'd just given him
something first, and hes not going to deny you thatbut
because he can put himself in other people's position and
emphasize with them. This has him do things which might
look small, irrelevant to the quest, pointless, but in fact if
they were well known outside the Shire the wild would lose
much of what is truly wicked about it and there'd be less
terrible evil around to need questing against. I'm thinking
of his noticing Gollum's being alone, miserable, lost, and
deciding therefore it not only inappropriate to simply
countenance him as foul but to think it just to stab him
something terribly-suffered is obviously entwined with
his being rendered into this state. He decides to return an
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elf-guard's keys so the guard wouldn't be blamed for their

escape, because hed appreciated his having been fair to
them and could identity with his situation. And of course,
through his sundering them of the precious Arkenstone, he
betrays his friends by giving his enemies a hold on
themand thereby, doing nothing less than maybe
preventing a war. The arrival of the goblin army means
they wouldn't have warred against each other anyway, but
the significance is in the larger realm outside the Shire
being more accustomed to this kind of selfless and
sophisticated way of reading a situation and acting. It's in
their noticing what he did here, not so much how clever
(not that it wasnt a bit, or at least highly intuitive) but how
good he had been hereletting himself potentially for life
be seen as a traitor to his friends to have a chance to spare
them their lives, as well as others. Not a one of them
would have thought of that.
Before he dies, Thorin acknowledges he learned something
new from Bilbo, something significant enough for it to be
fairly carved large into mountains to offer some helpful
countenancing to all the giant carved ancient personages
customarily tributed there: There is more of good in you
than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and
some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued
food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a
merrier world. Maybe with signs like this blazoned
everywhere those worn from the wild might fight their way
to Bilbo's comfortable hole in the ground much more
respectfully this time, thereby bringing another legitimate
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but this time more pleasing adventure, straight to his door.

Hed still not so much offer them the anti-Smaug but
someone who does him better. Because unlike rendering
Smaug, Bilbo mends.
Elaborated re-post: Not watching your own

movies
very>
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Any good interview, even one thats entirely friendly on

the surface, should have a slight adversarial quality,
since the reporter and the subject have inherently
different goals. The Coens dont always suffer fools
gladly, but they give good copy, even in one-word
answers to questions that dont interest them. (Do you
get excited about the Cannes competition? one
reporter asked them. Does that get your heart
pumping? Ethan Coen: No.) Over the years the
Coens have developed a routine that lies somewhere
between practiced shtick and a psychological coping
mechanism. Ethan, the younger, shorter, lighter-haired
brother, delivers brief responses, often glib or acrid in
tone, and then the taller, older and more loquacious
Joel bails him out, expounding generously on the
original question or diverting it into friendlier terrain.
[. . .]
Well, I feel like one aspect of that is that your movies
almost always reward a second viewing. Theres
always stuff I didnt see or didnt understand at first.
Which definitely isnt true of most movies!
J.C.: Thats a marketing trick!
E.C.: We endorse it! [Laughter.] But, my God, we dont
watch our own movies. No. You work on it for a year, a
year and a half, and especially by the final stage when
youre fussing over every little thing and we cut them
167
ourselves and everything is problem-solving, fixing

stuff up. Theres a job involved, and beyond that when
theres nothing to be done, why would you look at it
again? I mean, you know how it comes out. ("Joen and
Ethan Coen: 'My God, we don't watch our own
movies!'" interview with Andrew O'hehir, Salon.com)
----Emporium
"Don't watch our own movies"
I hate that answer; it's designed to make them seem
remote from us, as if we're rabidly chasing down
appetites they're removed from. There's no way they
haven't replayed the experience of making the movies
key scenes, reverberating portrayalsmany times, even
as they go about their next projects. Piecemeal, over
time, they've seen them as much as any of us ... I,
personally, would have made this clear. Join the rest of
us, Coens, and particular yourself from there. It'd be
more interesting.
Graham Clark
I hate that answer; it's designed to make them seem
remote from us
Or it's just the honest truth.
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And they don't need to make themselves seem remote

from you; they are remote from you.
Emporium
@Graham Clark They don't watch their own movies,
but they know that by saying that that they're going to
seem as if they dump everything they've done without a
need to look back ... this draws us to envy and be in awe
of them (they're very psychologically sophisticated
people). I think part of them likes to pretend they've
garnered some kind of enlightenment, but won't from
within their cloaks, show it to us. Someone ought to
chastise them for their limiting tendency to withhold,
and me, Emporium, just did my limited bit.
Also, I enjoy their movies. They're different from me,
can show me things about people that'd learn and excite
me a lot; but they're not all that remote from me, good
sir.
Graham Clark
but they're not all that remote from me, good sir.
They are indeed all that remote from you, and you know
it. Hence the resentment:
169
this draws us to envy and awe them (they're very

psychologically sophisticated people). I think part of
them likes to pretend they've garnered paradise (or at
least, enlightenment), but won't from within their cloaks,
show it to us. Someone ought to chastise them for their
limiting tendency to withhold
Emporium
@Graham Clark Graham, do you cling to the
authorized, so to make fun of those below? I'm always
willing to re-fresh my take, but I seem to remember that
was the fit you unfortunately found you belonged to.
Graham Clark
Graham, do you cling to the authorized, so to make fun
of those below?
No, but I do have an unfortunate compulsion to make
probably futile attempts at encouraging those below to
do something more productive with their time than nip
at the heels of the angels.
but I seem to remember that was the fit you
unfortunately found you belonged to.
170
What?
Emporium
@Graham Clark My art is different from theirs, but they
are amazing. Still, they withhold, and it's meant to
draw ... but frustrate. And just as your everyday average
Magna Carta human being with a nifty, remote,
admittedly "you-denying" pseudonym who'd prefer
none of us had too much a taste for heights and angels
(that was the real 60s, after all), I'm for sure going to
point that out.
Andrew's piece had it that if we were left with only the
younger, we'd be warranted to mob at and burn them
did you catch that?
***
rdnaso
@Emporium Nothing ruins the fun of watching a
movie more than working on it. At the end, just like they
say, everyone's just trying to get it out the door on time
and all too aware of everything that could have been
done differently and better. I doubt that novelists spend
much time reading their own novels either: too busy
working on the next one. Mailer claimed to not read at
171
all: "I'm more a writer than a reader." Poets though they read their own stuff compulsively...
Emporium
@rdnaso @Emporium If that were generally true, by
now it wouldn't be a surprise to learn they don't watch
their own in fact we'd be surprised if they did. I think
many creators know that it sounds sort of masculine to
always be onto the next work, and feminine, to admit
watching the whole film with an audience is a rewarding
good time. They toss things off as soon as possible and
don't look back, while we, their dependents, indulge.
Masculine to our feminine.
Emporium / Patrick McEvoy-Halston
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Labels: coen brothers, inside llewyn davis

Sunday, December 29, 2013
Sparks of inspiration -- MEET JET ENGINE!
172
Jordanandhisfriendsgrewuplowermiddleclass,atbest,
intheinnersuburbsofQueensandLongIsland.Theyhad
beentostatecollege,communitycollegeornocollegeat
all;inclassterms,theyrepresentedaninsurrectionagainst
theIvyeducated,thirdandfourthgenerationwealththat
dominatedthefinancialindustries.Itsnotterribly
surprising,then,thattheywerereactionaryinotherways,
strivingtooutdotheestablishedWallStreetfirmsin
institutionalsexismandfratboystylebadbehavior,
whetherthatmeantspendinghundredsofthousandsevery
monthonprostitutesandstrippers,holdingdwarftossing
tournamentsorconsumingbothprescriptiondrugsand
illegalstreetdrugsbythetruckload.(Jordanandhispal
DonnieAzoff,Hillscharacter,engageinanextended
searchfortrovesofgenuineQuaaludesthatyieldsa
numberofhilariousand/orhorrifyingdevelopments.)
SoTheWolfofWallStreetismuchfunnierthanmost
previousScorsesefilms,andalsoawholelotnastier;I
cantimaginewhatthematerialreportedlycuttoachieve
anRratingwaslike,giventhatthereareseveralscenesof
JordanslatenightescapadesthatIhesitatetodescribein
print.(Well,theresoneinwhichDiCaprioappearsto
havealitcandleuphisbutt.)Somecriticshavealready
accusedthemovieofbeingundisciplinedandoverlylong,
andtheresoneentireepisodeinvolvingayachting
disasterthatIdprobablyhaveleftonthecuttingroom
floor.ButIratherthinkScorseseandThelma
Schoonmaker,hislongtimeeditor,havethecredentialsto
doastheyplease,andtheoutrageousexcessofWolfof
WallStreetismorecarefullycalibratedthanitatfirst
173
appears.WefindJordansragstorichesstoryand
magneticpersonalityirresistible,butwealsoknowwere
notsupposedtolikehim,becausehestolethemoneyfrom
vulnerablepeopleandseemstobeasociopathwithno
ethicalcenter.Howdoweresolvethatcontradiction?We
cant,andthatsthepoint.
TherealJordanBelfortworkedbrieflyasajuniorbroker
onWallStreetbeforelosinghisjobaftertheBlackFriday
crashin1987.HestartedoverinaclassicLongIsland
boilerroom,wherehustlersintracksuitshawkedpenny
stocks,mostofthemworthless,fora50percent
commission.StrattonOakmont,asweseeinScorseses
retelling,tookthisstrategytothenextlevel,targeting
middleincomeinvestorswhohadreadycashbutlacked
thesophisticationtounderstandtheywerebeingscammed.
Atonepointinthe90s,Strattonemployedmorethan
1,000brokersandhandlednumerousIPOsriddledwith
insidertrading,includingafamousoneforshoedesigner
SteveMadden.ScorseseandWintermakeabsolutelyclear
thatthisisntastoryaboutoneunprincipledbrokerand
hisrenegadefirm;thelessonsofJordanBelfortscareer
areallspelledoutinDiCapriostremendousearlyscene
withMcConaughey:WedontmakeanythinginAmerica
anymore,anditdoesntmatterwhethertheclientsgetrich
orgobroke.Werecapitalizingonthelazinessandgreed
ofothers;theirdesiretogetrichquickwillmakeusrich
instead.
DiCapriosperformanceisfeverishbutcontrolled,
capturingthemaniaofaguywhoshopelesslyaddictedto
174
sex,drugsandmoneyandwhobelieves,intrueGatsby
fashion,thathehascrackedthecodeoftheuniverse.This
isanovercrowdedyearformaleactors,butifDiCaprio
doesntwinanOscarforthispart,heprobablyneverwill.
(HistwobestactornominationssofarareforBlood
DiamondandTheAviator,andtobothofthoseIsay:
Whatthelivingheck?)Hesonscreenfornearlytheentire
threehourfilm,sweating,snorting,screwing,stealingand
deliveringshowstoppingsalesfloorspeeches,including
theonewherehetellshistroopsthatitsgoodiftheyre
deeplyindebt,behindontherentandhavetheir
girlfriendsconvincedthattheyrebums:Iwantyoutouse
yourpaintogetrich!
Youcanfeel,inDiCapriosimpassioneddelivery,that
Belfortbelievesheshelpingpeoplebypreachingthis
gospelofshamelessnessanddisillusionment.Itsalmosta
capitalistSermonontheMount:Shedyourshameandyour
illusions,andyoutoocanbelikeme,aparasitewhogrows
richfromtheweaknessofothers.Ofcoursehesnotdumb
enoughtobelievethatthislessonisavailabletoall;its
likeJohnCalvinsideaofsalvation,aprivilegebestowed
onachosenelectwhoriseabovetheseaofdamnedsouls.I
guessthisisaspoiler,butJordanBelfortsstorylacksthe
romanticorpoeticconclusionthatbefallsbothAlienin
SpringBreakersandtheoriginalJayGatsby.Hesout
therestill,reinventedasamotivationalspeakerandsales
coach,preachingtheonetrueAmericanreligion,for
whichearlierGatsbymodelslaiddowntheirlives.
Successfulpeopleare100percentconvincedthattheyare
mastersoftheirowndestiny,hetellspeople.Richnessis
175
withinyourgrasp,hypotheticallyspeaking,andifyoure
pooranyway,itsclearlyyourowndamnfault.(The
WolfofWallStreet:inequalityandtheGatsbymyth,
AndrewOhehir,Salon.com)
susansunflower
TowardstheendofLuhrman'sGatsby,therewasabrief
referencethatmademerealizethatLuhrmansawGatsbyas
theheroofthestory,whichIconfesscameasashock.I
hadalwaysviewedGatsbymuchliketheWizardofOz,a
deeppocketedmagicianwhosefeetofclayandunmagical
realitywouldinevitablybediscovered.
Still,asidefromwonderingexactlyWHATtheywere
teaching"youngpeopletoday,"IrealizedthatIhadseena
verydifferentmoviebasedonaverydifferentstoryfrom
theoneLuhrmanhadmade.Iwasn'twillingtorewatchto
reappraise,butIdidwonderiftheratherwidelydivergent
reviewsreflectedacertaingenerationaland/orworldview
gap.
Havingacoupleof12steppersinthefamily12steppers
whotendedtoregailanyfamilygatheringwiththenear
deathexperiencesinthebadolddayswhentheywere
usingIanticipaterathersimilar"gap"inappreciationfor
thisfilm.Thosewholivedthroughtheexcessestheir
176
ownorothersandcameoutunscathedorhavehealed
mayrevelinseeing"thosedays"(orsomething
approximatingthem)depictedonthebigscreen.I'mless
certainthatthevictimsandcasualities,thecollaterally
damagedwillbesoamusedand/or(onceagain)exactly
howamusedthefemaleaudienceislikelytobe.
Itsoundslikethismoviehasalreadybeenmadeseveral
timesinthelast30yearsEvenfromthisfairly
enthusiasticandpositivereview,itdoesn'tsoundlikethis
incarnationactuallyhasanythingtosay...leavingwhat?
Myownfeelingisthatthe"howthemightyhavefallen"
"closersarealwaysclosing"endingdoesnotactuallymake
thismoviesomehowmorallyneutral.
Amity
@susansunflower
"doesnotactuallymakethismoviesomehowmorally
neutral."
Wait,Idon'tunderstand.Youwantmoralneutrality?
susansunflower
177
@Amity@susansunflower
No,butIthinkScorcesedoes.
Funny how a filmmaker can dodge those issues by claiming
"based on a real story" and/or "based on a classic
novel" ... as in, I didn't create this story
Iwrotemycommentbeforereadingthedaughter'sstory
below.Bottomline,theWolfofWallStreetsurvived.This
seemstobeaboyswillbeboysstoryofwretchedexcess.
HailofBulletsTonyMontanabecameaheroinsome
quarters.Ithought"Blow"packedapunchwithoutbeing
preachy.IfGatsbycanbeconsideredherothesedays....
SeealsoGordonGekko.
Emporium
@susansunflowerThetimesyou'relivinginempowers
certainkindsofpeople.Ifthetimesaregenuinely
actuallymorallygood,peopleliketheflappersor
hippiesaretheonestowatch.Ifyou'rehectoringtheir
debauch,you'renotseeingitstraight.Whentimesarebad,
it'sgoingtobethelikeoftheseassholes,whoweregoing
toneedalot,Imeanalot,ofkindnesstobecomepeople
whodon'tneedforyoutolosesotheycanfeelgreat,and
whoweremeanttoexperiencezeroofit(strangely,
178
MatthewMcConaugheykindofdoesofferabitatthe
beginning,whichmayexplainwhysomecriticswhohated
thefilmlurchbacktothisscene,asiflongadriftinspank
andsewageanddesperateforrecognizedfirmament).
Theproblemaboutacknowledgingthatitisfuntowatch
theseguysnonethelessthetimesareenablingtheir
stories,whilecowinganddeflatingothers,anditshows
isthatyoushouldinmyopinionbeabletorecognizeit
withsadistNazis(ormaybeGermansingeneralinthelate
30s,asweunderstandbetterthattheyreallywereoneand
thesame)andtheirprey.ThatisthetestI'dputtoRichard
Brodyforinstance,averygoodman,whoindiscussionof
thisfilmgenuinelybravelytalksout"monstrous
potentates
whosevastanddarkrangeofexperienceispreciselythe
sourceoftheirallure."
susansunflower
@Emporium@susansunflower
ThecontrastbetweenBrodyandDenbycouldnotbe
greater
Brody:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/12
/thewildbrilliantwolfofwallstreet.html
179
Denby:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/12
/wolfofwallstreetreview.html
susansunflower
@Emporium@susansunflower
Actuallyitremindsmeof"ApocalypseNow"whichI
absolutelyloathedonaviscerallevel(whileacknowledging
thecinematicachievement)becauseIfeltitglorifiedwar
(evenasit"pretended"otherwiseorcamouflagedits
enthusiasmindirt,mud,andworldwearycynicism
anotherclassicbook).
Mymemoryisthatprerelease,ApocalypseNowwas
"supposed"tobeanantiwarfilmsupposedtoexposethe
"horrororwar"butactuallyit'smostvocalaudience(as
farasIcouldtell,thiswaspreinternet)wereVietnamVets
whoendorsedthatitdepicted"whatitwasreallylike",
strugglingwithPTSD,antiwarbutwatchingitoverand
over.Ithoughtitmakewarlookliketheepitomeofbeing
"reallyalive"....intoxicating,sensual,sexy.I'mdoubtful
thatApocalypseNowwoulddiscourageanyadventure
seeingyoungmanfromenlisting.
(InterestingreviewbyaVietnamesefilmreviewer:
180
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2001/nov/02/artsfeature
s.londonfilmfestival2001)
I'minclinedtothinkthatScorsesemadethismoviebecause
itstopicandextravaganzasuitedhistastesandhis
cinematicstrengthsgangofguysnotbecausehecared
somuchaboutitsragstorichestoragsstoryline.Quite
likelybecausehewantedtorevisitHISOWNpast
revelries,hisown"warstories",hisglorydays.
tasherbean
@susansunflowerexcellentcomment.Idon'tknowifyou
sawthemovie"Jarhead"withJakeGyllenhaal,(whichI
thoughtwasactuallyaprettygooddepictionofthehurryup
andwaitaspectoflifeinthemilitary)butthesceneright
beforealltheyoungMarinerecruitsweregettingreadyto
shipouttoIraq,hasthemsittingintheCampPendleton
movietheaterwatchingandcheeringcrazilythefamous
helicopterattacksceneinApocalypseNow.......tomake
yourpoint.
Emporium
@susansunflower
181
It'stoughnottoglorifypeoplewhenit'stheirtime.I'vehad
managersatjobswhotreattheiremployeesabhorrently,but
afairrecountingofwhowaslivingthemoreinterestinglife
them,ortheirunsettledemployeeswouldmeanfor
surethem.Iliveinaneighborhoodthatisgentrifying
massively,andthoughIavoidtheirhangoutsfortheirscent
ofyou'remeanttofeelitassertion,thebetter,more
confidentartisticexpression,isthere.
Watch"WalterMinty."Hereyougetoneofthoseguys
who'sdevotionhaskeptacompanyrelevantfortwenty
years+,butseemssimplyembarrassingwhenacompany
feelstotallythatitcantransplantatemplatewherenoone
meansmorethantheirrole.Waltergetsthesegreat
"prompts"spirited"girlfriend";groundedfamily;rugged
herowhoeventhe"wolves"salivateoverinadmiration
thatendupmeaningthatthoughheloseshisjob,hecan
evolveintoequalinpresencetothe"wolfonwallstreet"
bosswhohaseveryoneelseinhiscompanycowedinfear,
andwhomtheage,eventhemovieagrees,ismostlytheirs
now.
Thisisn'tnecessarilymorefuntowatchthan"Wolf".It
doesn'tadmittothemasochismthatitbaitsmostinthe
audiencewith:feelingsmalllendstoyoursurelybeing
virtuous.Andit'salie:it'sdoubtfulthefewtrueWalter
Mintysouttherearelivingasenjoyably,ascompellingly,
astheseassholesare.Sparksofinspirationmeetjet
182
engine!
SomeoneattheNewYorkerhasjustsuggestedthese
"wolves"are(theGreatGatsby's)Buchanan'spointof
view,butthisisn'ttrue.Gatsby,wasnewwealth,whenthe
oldwasfeelinglesssureofitselfandthewolvesare
feelingit.
They'rereallyGatsbythosetheagewantstoinflate
strippedofcourseofallthatotherwisecommends,forour
agebeingthepunishmentforapreviousone'segoistic
proclamationthathumanbeingsaregood,anddeserve
allofthem;eventheweakandgullibletoknow
happinessandpleasure.
very>
183
Emporium/PatrickMcEvoyHalston

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Labels: apocalypse now, david denby, Richard Brody, scorcese, the great gatsby, wolf on wall
street
Saturday, December 28, 2013
Noblesse oblige
184
very>
Everybody who writes about movies dreads making these

lists, yet all of us want to readeach others lists. Partly
were looking for affirmation, partly were looking for
ideas, and partly were looking for guidance on how to
approach this strange exercise in subjectivity and
perspective. I kept my movie-watching in 2013 to an almost
human scale at roughly 175 films, about half the number I
typically watched in the days of Salons Beyond the
Multiplex column. (I know plenty of people in and around
the film business who watch 450 to 500, or even more.)
Even so, you wind up faced with ridiculous conundrums:
How do I decide whether a contentious French drama
about a love affair between two young women is better or
185
worse than an absorbing and informative documentary set

in Tahrir Square? Cant we say theyre both terrific, and
leave it at that?
Sure we could, but that would be cheating. I decided sit
down one day in mid-December and make the list quickly,
without much deliberation. I dont fiddle with it for weeks
and I dont try to make guesses about historical importance
or whatever; that wont make me happier, and the odds that
Ill look at it six months or a year from now and think I
screwed it up are pretty high in any case. Suffice it to say
that what everybody says about 2013 is true: Its been an
explosive year for movies in general and especially for
American cinema. We may be in the post-theatrical age
but movies continue to play surprisingly widely on the big
screen, even as more and more people watch them at home,
on mobile devices or via brain implants. (OK, that
technologys not quite ready, but just you wait.)
The 10 movies on this list all moved me, challenged me,
thrilled me and delighted me; I recommend them all
without hesitation. [. . .] 1. Stories We Tell 2. 12 Years
a Slave 3. Inside Llewyn Davis 4. Aint Them Bodies
Saints 5. Blue Is the Warmest Color 6. The Great
Beauty 7. The Square 8. The Invisible
Woman 9. Her 10. The Wolf of Wall Street (The10
best movies of 2013, Andrew O'hehir, Salon.com)
----Douglas Moran
I'm trying to decide if the fact that I've not only not
seen any of these films but have no interest in seeing any of
them means: A) I'm a typical shallow, middle-class
186
American with middle-brow tastes; B) I don't get out often

enough; C) Andrew's taste is too highfalutin' for the likes of
me; D) None of the above.
One thing for sure: I'm never going to watch the hugelypraised "12 Years a Slave", which while I'm sure is an
excellent film, I know will depress the living crap out of
me. Life is depressing enough; I don't need to pay money
to see a film and be artificially depressed. I know this
makes me a plebe, but jeez. (It reminds me very much of
when the Glenn Close/John Malkovich "Dangerous
Liaisons" was released--I saw it based on the reviews, was
depressed as crap by it, and have never, ever wanted to see
it again.)
Andrew O'Hehir
@Douglas Moran All of the above, Doug. I mean, the
ordinary moviegoer wants something different than a critic
wants, and there's kind of no way around that. I'm not going
to pretend to be a populist, Gene Shalit style, if it doesn't
fit. I heard Vincent Canby talk about this years ago: When
you see 200+ movies a year, you become a specialist, and
you're looking for something you've never seen before.
Whereas ordinary moviegoers, by and large, want to see
essentially what they've seen before, done well or with a
new twist, and with a familiar outcome. The audience for
"12 Years a Slave" is inherently much smaller than the
audience for "Gravity" or "The Hobbit," and even the
187
audience for "Wolf of Wall Street" (with stars and glamour

but a somewhat "unsatisfying" conclusion) is somewhat
smaller.
Douglas Moran
@Andrew O'Hehir @Douglas Moran In all honesty, I
have no idea how you can watch that many movies in a
single year. I have to imagine that it changes your
perception, and have often thought that "uniqueness"
becomes far more of a sought-after quality for a critic than
"entertainment". So something that the great mass of
people will find entertaining, a huge percentage of critics
will either roll their eyes at or actively detest--"Sleepless in
Seattle" or "Love, Actually" being a couple of perfect
examples of that. Isn't there some quote about the familiar
becoming detestable, or something like that? When you
see 40 romantic comedies in one year (most bad), you've
got to get burned out on them. Or so I've thought.
Of course, when one goes to so few films in a particular
year, one is pre-disposed to want to like them. And then if
you don't, it's even more disappointing. Such was my
reaction to "Elysium", which was one of the few films I
made an effort to see this year, and which was basically,
"Meh". Which pissed me off mightily; "I spend all this
time, effort, and money, and all I get is 'Meh'? I'm going to
blog about this until my fingers fall off!" Etc.
188
And ironically, when one skips a film because of reviews

and then sees it on DVD or whatever and it turns out to be
okay, you may end up liking it better. Such was the case
for me with "Oblivion", which got (at best) "Meh" reviews,
but which wasn't too bad. So long as I didn't spent the
effort and time of going to a theater to see it.
With critics, the best one can do is find a critic who either
provides enough information, entertainment value, or
shares your opinions closely enough so as to be useful to
you. So although we seen it demonstrated many times that
your tastes are wildly different from mine, you write
informative and entertaining reviews that provide enough
data that allow me to make an informed decision. (I felt the
same with Charles Taylor, FWIW.) And given my
knowledge of your tastes, I know that I wouldn't enjoy "12
Years a Slave", no matter how goddamn awesome it is in
some absolute, Platonic Ideal of a Film way. It would just
depress me, anger me, make me cry or outraged or
whatever, and my blood pressure doesn't need that. So I
skipped it.
But I won't stop reading your reviews. Even when you call
me a typical shallow, middle-class American with middlebrow tastes. So there! :)
Emporium
@Douglas Moran @Andrew O'Hehir This was like
something out of a Jane Austen novel.
189
The lord discusses aesthetic preferences with one of the

respected men in his nearby towna pastor, an affluent
farmer, a doctor. The lord will be the master in this
conversation, but he takes care to give room for the town
leader to imagine himself less afflicted than the lord is, that
his comparative ignorance and suspicion of change is a sign
of his being contented in settled, rich, bourgeois propriety.
So the town leader for a moment gets to pretend he's master
in this conversation, by tending to the lord's affliction in a
way that highlights his own contentment. Chest out,
pleased in feeling a proprietor who, being a small master
of the universe, is of course mostly just going to indulge in
daily contentment rather than jostling foreign novelty he
then quickly lends the rest of his thought to acknowledging
the real superiority of the lord and the stultifying aspect of
his perpetual fixedness.
The lord has the refined intelligence and awareness; the
lord rightly has the authority to instruct. And he, even if he
harrumphs his way through the reviews, nevertheless still
listens. This doesn't make him a joke; he's still a battler. But
deep down he acknowledges his betters. In his middling
home set up so middlingly, on the table even if mostly
unread is apt to be the Times.
The town leader doesn't want the authority of the lord. He
feels comfortable in some place middling the lords keep
the psychic terror "Krakens" at bay. But he likes that the
lord's preference for him owing to his being the ideal John
190
Bull-type the royalty can rely on, means he ranges his own
grounds with that much more righteous pomposity.
Here it means being an agent in the comment sections, who
may not be an O'hehir or a Taylor, but owing to their
concern to single him out in a friendly, acknowledging
fashion, he's a warden to everyone else.
For this empowerment, this flattering divine touch, of
course he's still reading his reviews, however much he's
thereafter openly begrudged. Mr Collins to Lady Catherine
de Bourgh, nothing ever will sink the truth benighted in this
grand moment of grace!
Douglas Moran
@Emporium @Douglas Moran @Andrew O'Hehir So if
I parse this correctly (which is hard, honestly, given the
length of your analogy), I only read O'Hehir's reviews
because he occasionally answers me with courtesy and
good humor in the comments section? Not because, as I
said, I find them informative enough to help me decide
which movies to see, but because he has shown me
Noblesse Oblige? Is that what you're saying?
Emporium
@Douglas Moran @Emporium @Andrew
O'Hehir @Douglas Moran @Emporium @Andrew
191
O'Hehir In true gentry style, his courteous, good-humored

reply had a lot of teaching in it which some might find
plainly arrogant: critics pursue and are entertained by
novelty, something new and smart; ordinary people, by a
repeat of the same 'ol sack of shit. Under cover of the
ostensible key difference number of movies watched
is being pushed a class difference, a difference in quality of
person.
To which you replied you're still not going to see "12
years," even if God had placed all the wisdom of the
universe in it, if there's any risk of it spoiling your dinner.
But you're obliged to have had him visit, and ensure him
you'll keep reading his reviews to make sure you make an
informed decision as to which film out there won't depress,
anger, outrage, or unsettle your blood pressure in any way.
With such self-mockery here, I gathered you conceded that
the films he likes are probably those anyone who has a
larger stake in the world probably ought to watch. The
bumpkin was visited by a lord, and afterwards felt
contented and even thrilled.
So, yeah, I'm thinking noblesse oblige.
Douglas Moran
@Emporium @Douglas Moran @Andrew O'Hehir Ah, I
see; thanks for clarifying. I've got it now: You're a
pompous, pretentious bore who believes that, by reading
192
a couple of posts by people you don't know in any way

whatsoever and of whose past interactions you have zero
knowledge, you nonetheless feel informed and wise enough
to pass judgement thereon. Got it.
That will save me considerable time in the future should I
happen upon another of your comments; I'll simply skip
over it and save myself the trouble of trying to untwist your
tortured syntax. Thanks; appreciate it.
And by the way, Pro Tip: If you're going to use such overboiled phrasing and grammar, you might want to re-read
your comments before pressing the "Post" button. For
example, I "assured" Andrew; I didn't "ensure" him. Also,
a single return after a paragraph suffices. I'm sure on rereading other edits will occur to you, given your vast and
superior knowledge of the written form.
Andrew O'Hehir
@Douglas Moran I have to admit, this whole thing was
hugely entertaining. And one of my main reactions (to
myself) was: Dude, no freakin' way is some guy in the
comments going to out-marxist-analysis me!
Douglas Moran
@Andrew O'Hehir @Douglas Moran [laughter]
193
---------Emporium
@Andrew O'Hehir @Douglas Moran
When you see 200+ movies a year, you become a specialist,
and you're looking for something you've never seen before.
Whereas ordinary moviegoers, by and large, want to see
essentially what they've seen before, done well or with a
new twist, and with a familiar outcome.
This description of ordinary moviegoers would seem to
have nothing to do with how many movies they watch.
Anyone who wants to see what they've seen before with a
familiar outcome, isn't going to seem to naturally evolve
into someone who prefers the new and different if they
upped their viewing habits. Rather than finally yearn to barf
it up, then change it up, they'll eat their predictable bland
plate of steak and potatoes with the same insistent pleasure
Homer Simpson would his one-billionth donut.
That is, it's more honest to say that even if the critic can
only for some reason make it to ten rather than the two
hundred films they prefer or at least usually have to watch,
they just naturally are people who take most pleasure, not
in the repetition of thrills, but in the piquant, the fresh, the
new. They're beyond repetition-compulsion; are more
evolved than middlebrow and it's not owing to practice.
There certainly are critics that are that. True leaders; better
than the average dope, I mean. Still, there's a good number
194
I reckon unconsciously pick choices they can imagine

leaving the mob in a fit of frustration. Became the critic, to
indulge the delight in stymying. Critic film geeks.
Emporium/Patrick McEvoy-Halston
12 Years a Slave (Review Part One)

very>
Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-
195
fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;

12 Years a Slave (Review Part One)

I've only seen one film this year that kinda gets at how
someone could become a person as sadistic as Fassbender's
slaveowner is in this film. Insidious 2 got how a little,
vulnerable boy, completely owned by an absolutely
terrifying mother, was going to have no chance building an
independent self apart from her. His life was on the line,
and you can imagine how a six or eight or however old a
boy he was, would have a brain formed largely on ensuring
he does nothing outside of what she wants. The point of life
... is to not be devoured. And the great homo sapiens brain
of his would be using all its evolutionary excellence to
contrive means to ensure he manages this--even if this
means making him into someone who would be to any sane
outsider, deviant, insane ... strangely ill-purposed to what
life would confront him with. The rest of the world does
not realize that this one brain alone negotiated avoiding
oblivion! What of if it if it's ill-purposed to manage
anything else in life, which after all might be about selfdevelopment and adventure, such strange, completely
uncountenanceable things, that are firmly known to be, for
that matter, completely disavowed for him by mother, when
life has clearly showed itself in its definitive first allimportant years of being experienced as only about
avoiding being killed? It was vital but young Ender in an
adult mission against a planet of bugs, and in a fever of
genius, it won! it won! it won! The full compass of the
universe was revealed, and in one hell of a pitched, ongoing
196
battle, a definitive victory was for all time achieved! What

the brain does, though, isn't quite what is shown in this
film. It doesn't figure out primarily how best to obey her-here by dressing up as a girl and disavowing himself as a
boy so to not remind his mother of her former husband--but
rather to be part of her, to be her. As her, he'd never need
worry about being devoured by her or, just as importantly,
losing her approval and feeling abandoned. In real life, the
young boy would have dressed up as a girl on his own
initiative--a replica, specifically of his mother, that is; not
just any odd female--rather than terrorized into it. And his
later development into a "Psycho" adult who dresses
evidently as his mother would have synced up. In real life,
too, he'd proceed further and be hunting down innocent
people, taking huge delight in sawing them up--what fun!
cackle! cackle! cackle!--because he'd be his mother, whom
his brain would only have let know as fully right to be so
devoted to terrorizing his innocent, vulnerable child-self,
for fear letting him be even in the smallest sense aware of
her true perversion would have lead to his being spotted
out. If despite knowing how she doesn't want you to see her
limitations, her thorough deviance (and trust me, she
doesn't), you actually were allowed by your brain to be
cognizant of her game, you'd also know she'd deem the
"you" you've revealed to yourself as permanently unworthy
of and removed from any further love--an impossible
actuality to accept. You've got, that is, to be consciously
only allowed to know her as a saint; someone you'd defend
against insults to the death ... that much more so if all she
does between stuffing herself with amusements is blender
babies into milkshakes. Each time he found a young victim,
197
he'd be more fully fused into his mother, and the vulnerable
child self that is intolerable to be reminded of, that much
more outside. Constant fusion into a sadistic alter, constant
victimizing of people representing his "guilty" child-self,
would be his life ... just as it is for the perenially sadistic
Fassbender.
Fassbender's slaveowner had a mother who did to him what
he does to his slaves? Yes, this is absolutely right. Every
slaveholder had one such mother, which is why, exactly,
slavery became institutionalized. The slaver shown in the
film who makes the slave stand for hours in a painful
position while he laxy-dazies ... yep, this is something that
slaveholder was afflicted with in his own childhood (I
knew something of this myself, with my mom lying on her
bed, reading fantasy books, eating cookies into a belly
contented that it could hold down four or five bagfuls, and
luxuriating, while I stood uncomfortably attending to her
like a eunech at attention before a Sultan queen).
Fassbender making even his prize slave, the one
unbelievably gifted at speed-gathering cotton, exist in so
much filth she wretches at her own smell ... yep, this is
what Fassbender himself endured by his mother during his
own childhood. Collectively, all the slaveholders making
their slaves into stinking, shit-stained, confined wretches,
recalls for me what the Germans did to Jews, Gypsies, and
"unsocials," when they re-inflicted their own horrible
childhood experiences onto them in the 30s and 40s. To
wit: upon a German's "birth, 'the wretched new-born little
thing was wound up in ells of bandages, from the feet right,
and tight, up to the neck; as if it were intended to be
198
embalmed as a mummy babies are loathsome, foetid

things, offensive to the last degree with their excreta
' Babies simply could not move for their first year of life.
A visitor from England described the German baby as 'a
piteous object; it is pinioned and bound up like a mummy
in yards of bandages it is never bathed Its head is
never touched with soap and water until it is eight or ten
months old.' Their feces and urine was so regularly left on
their bodies that they were covered with lice and other
vermin attracted to their excreta, and since the swaddling
bandages were very tight and covered their arms as well as
their bodies, they could not prevent the vermin from
drinking their blood. Their parents considered them so
disgusting they called them 'filthy lice-covered babies,' and
often put them, swaddled, in a bag, which they hung on the
wall or on a tree while the mothers did other tasks"
(DeMause, "Childhood Origins of World War 2 and the
Holocaust").
The whipping and lashes too, Fassbender and the rest of his
slaveholder ilk would have suffered? Once again--yup.
Very much--yup. Germans did this to Jews as well, as it had
been done to them by their parents: "It was brutal beating,
beginning in infancy, that visitors to Germany most
commented upon at the beginning of the twentieth century,
with the mother far more often the main beater than the
father. Luthers statement that 'I would rather have a dead
son than a disobedient one' is misleading, since it implies
disobedience only was the occasion for beatings, whereas
mere crying or even just needing something usually
resulted in being punished. ' Dr. Schreber said the earlier
199
one begins beatings the better One must look at the

moods of the little ones which are announced by screaming
without reason and crying [inflicting] bodily
admonishments consistently repeated until the child calms
down or falls asleep one is master of the child forever.
From now on a glance, a word, a single threatening gesture,
is sufficient to rule the child.' Havernick found 89 percent
of parents admitted beating little children at the beginning
of the twentieth century, over half with canes, whips, or
sticks. The motto of German parents for centuries was
'Children can never get enough beatings.' They were not
just spankings; they were beatings with instruments or
whippings like Hitlers daily whippings with a dog whip,
which often put him into a coma. (As Fuehrer, Hitler used
to carry a dog whip with him as he gave orders to be
carried out.) It is not surprising that German childhood
suicides were three to five times higher than other Western
European nations at the end of the nineteenth century, fears
of beatings by parents being the reason cited by children for
their suicides. No one spoke up for the children;
newspapers wrote: 'boy who commits suicide because of a
box on the ears has earned his fate.' The beatings continued
at school, where 'we were beaten until our skin
smoked.' Children could be heard screaming on the streets
each morning as they were being dragged to school by their
mothers. The schoolmaster who boasted he had given
'911,527 strokes with the stick and 124,000 lashes with the
whip' to students was not that unusual for the
time. Comparisons of German and French childhoods in the
late nineteenth century found 'no bright moment, no
sunbeam, no hint of a comfortable home [with] mother love
200
and care' in the German ones, with 'sexual molestation and

beatings at home and at school consistently worse in the
German accounts.' Endes massive study of German
autobiographies of the time found 'infant mortality, corporal
punishment, and cruelties against children' were so brutal
he had to apologize 'for not dealing with the 'brighter side'
of German childhood because it turns out that there is no
'bright side.' Other studies found most Germans
remembered 'no tender word, no caresses, only fear' with
childhood 'so joyless, so immeasurably sad that you could
not fathom it.' When Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that 'the
German people today lies broken and defenseless, exposed
to the kicks of all the world' both he and his reading
audience read this not as political metaphor but as the real
kicks of their parents and teachers and real memories of
lying broken and defenseless. The tortures of childhood
were far more traumatic and constant than the later studies
of 'authoritarianism' ever imagined. There was a good
reason that Germans and Austrians spoke so often about
their Kinderfeindlichkeit (rage toward children), and it is
this rage that is embedded in the early violent amygdalan
alters which is inflicted upon others in World War II and the
Holocaust. The child-hitting hand was even the symbol of
Nazi obedience, since the Nazi salute endlessly displayed
the open palm of their beating parents as they fused with
them, flush with opioids. 'Ghosts from the nursery'
embedded by extremely insecurely attached children were
displayed everywhere in Nazi Germany. To imagine tens of
millions of people 'just obeying Hitler' as though there were
no inner compulsion to inflict their nightmarish earlier
childhood tortures on others is simply absurd (DeMause,
201
"Childhood Origins").
12 Years a Slave does worse than Carrie did to nudge us
closer to understanding how someone could become a
thorough sadist, but, like that film, it does at least show
some truth: here, that slavers are less respectful and loving
people--not, that is, just people under some spell of a
collusion of adult preaching inflicted on them when they
were young; victims of ideology, that is. Fassbender and his
wife are colossal assholes, full of hate, full of desiring other
people--their slaves--to be subjugated for the wretched
crimes they committed. Benedict Cumberland, the nicest of
all possible slavers, knows at very near, at very, very, very
near a conscious level, that the clearly educated slave he's
purchased had to have once been free, to be someone he
himself would recognize as free if he met him while
touring the north, but won't let him go. The capacity of this
man to love, which is some, pales in comparison to the
attorney who arrives to free Northup, or more notably, Brad
Pitt, who movingly risks his own life to do so. But still, the
link to parenting isn't there, and we might just as well
assume that the institution itself poisoned them, stunted
them, than ever consider that each one of them might have
had a mother as terrifying as Fassbender's wife. If the film
had done that, shown that mother force her children to
know filth and whippings and abandonment for being
deemed willfully disobedient brats that needed to be
broken--even if as expected they were still groomed into
betters--what a wonderful and useful connection would
have been made: that is how a child could grow into an
adult who would find such righteousness in getting
202
disobedient underlings into line, not at all blanching when

whip stroke after whip stroke actually spooned chunks of
flesh out of people, and more likely being aroused by it (as
the Germans were, as they masturbated during their own
floggings of Jews). The approval from mom that every
small child needs, could only ever be found in wholeheartedly joining her cause.
But I'm going at this film as if we might be interested in
using it as an opportunity to test, refine, revise, or--rather
better--completely re-understand how an institution like
slavery could come into existence--letting the idiotic
economic rationale dissolve for good. But this would mark
progress, growth, and so this isn't something we're apt to be
doing. Rather, we're using this film as a reward to show that
we've refit our society that so innocuously we can watch a
film about a strictly two-tiered society--master, and slave-something ostensibly 150 years and a civil war behind us,
and be surprised by how much we involved ourselves in the
position of the slave. We increasingly see our own society
as two-tiered, with avenues of plausible climbing closed
off--the one percent vs. the ninety-nine. And this isn't
because reality has forced us off our preferred conception
of living in something multi-tiered, involving the essential
middle class. Instead, we knew a long while ago that we
wanted something stratified, with the upper-echelon a class
apart, and set things in motion so that even when massive
bank-loan leveraging was keeping us housed and up with
every electronic trick, our outer reality would soon rather
better reflect the "Kantian" schema we were game to force
onto it. We're in a period of penance, where because
203
previous collective growth was making us feel terrifyingly

abandoned, as it recalled how in our youth our own
emerging self-attendance eventually drew anger from our
immature mothers for it meaning a permanent turn away
from having up to that point mostly focused our existence
around her, we feel compelled to shut it down so to know
her back with us. We kill the growth we've accrued; we kill
the potential to grow; and familiarize ourselves with
"stuckness"; and life more and more becomes us as
children not yet old enough to leave the hearth--the fragile
ninety-nine percent--in the perpetual company of entitled
parents--the obstinately set, one. She's there, our mom's
there; and even if she's aloof and removed, she's not mad,
not angry: even if we're not all acting like good children,
we do the essential part and communicate that owned
children "is" who we are, and that we won't be doing any
shifting of structure for a good long while (like the last
Depression, about twelve years?). Her enemies--emissaries
of real growth--will, unless they're mostly going to be
incorporated into making our "parents" lives easier or more
luxuriant, become our own, as we either chase any one with
any notable new ideas out of public view or somehow make
it possible that even if they were a glorious new dawn
visited upon us ... we're just not seeing it, sorry. So we have
a culture where James Wolcott appropriately writes:
"Although we live in a culture of uncircumcised snark, it
actually seems a more deferential time to me, the pieties
and approved brand names--Cindy Sherman, Lena
Dunham, Quentin Tarantino, Junot Diaz, Mark Morris,
Judd Apatow, John Currin (feel free to throw other names
into the pot)--more securely clamped down over our ears."
204
Where "today's social media making even the meanest

rattlesnakes mend their ways in the hope of being liked,
friended, and followed in numbers sufficient enough not to
be mortifying." If you're "in," you stay in. If you're out, you
should know the part you're assigned--and it's to be as if
marked by something intangible and intransigent that
you're always a step down. You can be like Northrup and
play your fiddle like a genius, or instruct on how to
engineer a way through a stuck problem that'd only fail to
impress the most trenchantly set against you, but not if it's
to prove the point that as much as anyone, you don't really
belong where you're stationed. "Parents," the one percent,
are playing a role as well, something collectively assigned
to them, only they just don't know it. I think it is this
unconscious knowing that they've masochistically,
unselfishly, surrendered themselves to playing a part-which remains, even if hard to see, still very much a
demeaning surrender of human potential--that is buoying
some of the pleasure they're taking in living these days ...
opiates flowing from felt parental approval. I admit I'm
mostly thinking of those like the ones Walcott mentions
here, those of the liberal literate elite, who are evidently
not perturbed that they all share the same habits and
assumptions to the degree that the dullest gentry-clot did in
centuries past. They're not about moving us ahead, but
about station--manners have become the point itself,
something which really is just a lubricant when gentry's on
one of its roles and Byronesque genius gets to come out of
them as much as from any ambitious Shakespeare
merchant' son. You listen to their discourse, and you know
they're no trolls. The Gandalf who rows up the pleasant-
205
offered cheerful "good morning!" with contestation and

complication ... in today's climate, he's but another of the
trolls who's descended down from the mountains. He'd
quickly learn to stifle it, and next time by master Baggins'
he'd be, "yes, yes, it is a good morning! Indeed so! Sorry to
disturb you, and thanks again for your kind remembrances
about my fireworks .. though remember if you can to like
my "Good Old Grandpa Gandalf"
fireworks Facebook page; every bit helps, you know!" and
he'd shuffle off as quick as a fox, as tamed as the pathetic
car-buffing Biff, to chance disturbing the morning no
further. Society would be one further up on propriety, and
shorn one possible mega disturbance; and even if they were
made aware that in subscribing him into the role of a doorto-door salesman it cost them one potentially world-saving
wizard, it'd still be felt as completely worth it.
Paul Krugman recently recounted the damages that have
been afflicted by our current austerity-maintained
Depression: "These dry numbers [he, writes,] translate into
millions of human tragedies--homes lost, careers destroyed,
young people who can't get their lives started. And many
people have pleaded all along for policies that put job
creation front and center. Their pleas have, however, been
drowned out by the voices of conventional prudence. We
can't spend more money on jobs, say these voices, because
that would mean more debt. We can't even hire unemployed
workers and put idle savings to work building roads,
tunnels, schools. Never mind the short run, we have to
think about the future! The bitter irony, then, is that it turns
out that by failing to address unemployment, we have, in
206
fact, been sacrificing the future" (NYT, Nov. 7 2013). We're

inflicting a lot of damages to ourselves, a lot of anxiety.
This is important, because when you take into
consideration how even when jobs were leaving us and our
incomes were wilting away, banks were still enabling us all
the stuff we wanted for a further twenty years, it undoes all
the accruing we had been doing pretty much without pause
since World War 2. Further, it's adding "revenue" of despair
into a pot that will eventually fill so that we sense that
enough joy has now finally been sacrificed to our mothers-she's mollified, and satiated--that we kinda now feel safe to
begin to tip toe away from her and embark outside on real,
undetermined adventure, while she goes on a severaldecade-long snooze. But it's a mistake to say these figures
delineate only misery. When we know we've succeeded in
making deep sacrifices happen, Mother is with us, not
going to leave us, and we know a kind of contentment--one
that even liberates, and enables some fun ... if we go about
things properly. The recent Thor movie tries a wee bit to
explain why the Norse aristocracy--an empowered King
and Queen--is just, but it barely bothers. We feel watching
this movie that those creating it and those watching it will
just accept the aristocracy as normal, not because we're
dealing with old gods but because it's how we're attending
to our own society as well (note the recent
hopeless Salon effort reminding people not to focus so
much on the "Queen" battle of Hillary vs. Elizabeth Warren
as it's the "little people" congressional battles that'll matter
most), and would have as the new normal, rather than
anything queerly demos. And there's no wishing in the
movie from the "little people" for any mollification. The
207
intern Ian who is throughout the movie referred to as

"intern" rather than by name, objects, but mostly shows that
... whatever, it's out of his power. For his shrugging, for his
acceptance and mostly non-complaint, for his willingness
to let himself be used and mildly abused and for showing
that if he spent the rest of his life as he just might in a
role perennially servile to an actual scientist with multiple
degrees, that, well, that's just what life's allotted him, the
movie grants him a boon: at the finish he gets to do
something heroic and strong, and thereafter receives
admiration and a kiss from the senior intern--even if it
means once more being the passive. Ian's the Northrop in
12 Years, who for doing remarkable things ... who for
showing that even doing something really accomplished
need not press on being a class challenge, he gets rewarded.
Just like in the Great Depression, we're going to see a lot of
people in servile roles in movies, and take note that when
you hear them complain, about "what a lady has got to do
to get a buck or a bit of respect in this here depression," or
whatever, what you'll be hearing is less tearing down the
walls and more their being resigned to them. It needn't be
done so loud that you're cognizant that the cages somehow
seem surer after "your" complaint; just loud enough that it
registers with your masters.
As a side note, if you're incapable of actually drilling
yourself to want to live in a dream-inhibiting age, if you're
one of those genuinely good liberals, birthed of truly loving
parents, who believed that Occupy's facilitation of society's
understanding of itself as of master and servants was
something other than our conceding that we've roomed our
208
house as we would like it, and instead as a sure prelude to

insurrection and thereafter an equal society, these could be
real tough times for you in particular. I'm thinking
specifically now of Robert Frost's sister, a liberal, whom his
brother had committed into an insane asylum during WW2.
Morris Dickstein writes that "with a history of violent
outbursts, Frost's sister had grown increasingly hysterical
about the war, yet Frost [...] paints her as the paradigm of a
liberal gone berserk, a bleeding heart who really bled. 'I
really think she thought in her heart that nothing would do
justice to the war but going insane over it.' He, on the other
hand, was fatalistic and self-protective, the kind of
conservative for whom there's very little anyone can do to
alter the basic conditions of life, which include going crazy
and dying. For his sister, he says, 'one half the world
seemed unendurably bad and the other half unendurably
indifferent. She included me in the unendurably indifferent.
A mistake. I belong to the unendurably bad.' 'It was
designed to be a sad world,' he later wrote to Untermeyer"
("Dancing in the Dark").
EndFragment
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Labels: 12 Years a Slave, james wolcott, lloyd demause, morris dickstein, paul krugman, thor the
dark world
Sunday, November 3, 2013
209
The Circle, part two

The Circle
It's difficult to figure out why everyone is so ready to laugh
at the humiliated Carrie in Carrie. We're told at the
beginning that it's the popular gang's fault, where everyone
else laughs along so to not be caught out and be deemed
part of her very dubious camp. And this is substantiated at
other times, when one or two kids show that, when no one's
really attending, they're quite prepared to interact with her
as if she might not have the plague. But then again, when
the prom's on, and they laugh at her while she's covered
with blood, it's impromptu, immediate, reflex: there's no
calculation of what is expected of them, they simply
automatically in chorus respond in awful jeering. So, what?
Kids can be mean? Except they're not really quite kids
anymore. So, people can be? Except not everyone is.
There's not an ounce of it in the gym teacher. Nor in a few
others who met her at the prom and reacted to her openly.
The film has an inkling to show that the inclination to
empathize has something to do with what kind of parents
we have. The popular girl, who almost immediately realizes
how horrible it is to torture this dismayed girl, is shown to
have as a mother someone who goes out her way to try and
make Carrie's own oddball mother feel appreciated. And
the dastardly evil girl is shown to possess a big business
father who is entirely indifferent to people he judges as not
really mattering. But then again, no one has a mother as
grievous as the one Carrie possesses, and there's no hint in
210
the film that Carrie has any inclination to torture the

exposed and vulnerable. Her own "bullying" at the end, is
really just self-exertion, as she found herself either
terrifyingly confined or horribly hounded.
The reason kids bully does not owe, fundamentally, to
someone's foreignness. They actually recognize their
similarity to the bullied profoundly, but often not
consciously. The loner, the exposed, the insecure, is
themselves, not when they were first in school, or any such,
but when they were younger than that, when they were
infants, and they badly needed attendance, and over and
over and over again, didn't get it. This is the very opposite
of nothing to a child, and more closer to the apocalypse
bearing down. It changes your brain, for instance. Installs
the superego, to make sure you never do whatever caused
you to be in that situation again. Since the only thing you
could conclude is that it was your vulnerability and
neediness which was to blame, your brain makes sure that
when you see the vulnerable the capacity to empathize gets
shut down, and takes any course to make sure you see this
person as not the once-you you can never let yourself
remember, but as someone foreign. If you just saw this
person as different from you it wouldn't be enough, though,
for if that was all that you were when you were left alone
and unattended, then it would make your parents seem
culpable, as it's paltry excuse just to abandon someone. You
judge it instead as criminal, as guilty. And in taking the
"guilty" down, you show the rightness in your parents once
having abandoned you, thereby keeping them those who
wouldn't be offended by your inner-most thoughts, thereby
211
still maintaining them as potential sources of provision and

love. So now you understand why Carrie, humiliated in
ways that would recall one being a soiled, shit-stained child
(twice covered in running dirty pools of excretions) would
red-alarm people to suddenly wish her to be laughed at and
hounded into a crunched-down, crumpled form. Of course,
this means that a whole lot of us were possessed of hardly
perfect parents, cause if we weren't, the vulnerable would
only draw our sympathy, and we'd all be closer to the
welfare state of Sweden, where even when it's in its worst
moods there's no chance they'd leave a portion of their
populace to the wolves in the same fashion still-awfulparent-afflicted U.S.A does. How bad portions of the U.S.A
are, is revealed by how even after everyone has agreed
we're in a Depression, it's nothing at all for many states to
summon the legitimacy to think the proper next order of
things is to cut food stamps.
The reason why I'm bringing up why kids would want to
torture a helpless, panicky Carrie in this discussion of the
Circle, is because I'm a little concerned that when I hear
people say Dave Eggers' book has changed the way they
see our public-share networks, what has really happened is
that they have recognized the helpless Carrie of this book
and taken Eggers' pro-offered route to count themselves
mostly of the "outside." Near the end of the book, Mae
Holland is in hysteria over the world-wide publicized fact
that some people in her company do not like her. It drives
her crazy, as she becomes someone who in dismay
cherishes the completion of "the circle" as those who've
lost their efforts to remain human spend their days with
212
meth cheeks and maddened eyes chuckling in anticipation

of the apocalypse. She's the child who when first left alone
screams and tantrums, but after sustained, prolonged
ignoring, quietens down like one of Harry Hallow's isolated
monkeys, as what was right in them to keep them for so
long trying has left them for good. Mae in this novel isn't
the exception; everyone who believes in the circle who
doesn't instantly get the approbation they need, panics in
heightened alarm. Not responding instantly to an e-mail
sets one off into hysterical crazy land. Another by the
possibility that his constant pre-ejaculating might make him
less than a perfect ten out of ten lover. Eggers may want us
to believe that those furthering the circle, killing every bit
of privacy left in the world, and making everyone else at
least pretend smile while in their company, are fascists,
sharks devouring everything else contained in the tank with
them. But I really think it is this show of them that sticks-the alarmed, besotted, powerless infant, that is.
So in her we recognize, or rather we find, our early
childhood powerless selves, but rather than identify with
her, with our once-selves, Eggers nudges us to use her
instead as a place to keep those nasty nagging things safely
posited. She can carry all our early-life vulnerability, and
we can laugh at her for it, mock her, as we feel compelled
to do, without an inkling of guilt. For though she
fundamentally is our childhoods, we can certainly just think
of her as Eggers would have us, as produced in adulthood,
owing to letting herself get lost in company think. We can
safely mock her Carrie-like horrible exposure, because she
let herself get so upset over learning that 3% of the
213
company didn't like her, rather than let herself leisure in

knowing how the whole rest of the human pie could not
have been more pleased. How greedy can any one get!
How needy! And if she's alone, it's clearly her fault:
repeatedly outsiders, former friends/lovers, have tried to
talk sense to her, tried to reveal for her the cult-think she
was adopting, and she nudged them out of the picture, or
forced them to the point where any further bothering would
put them at desperate risk. And we can be those in the book
who have little delight in the prospect of the completion of
the circle, the supposedly powerless and at risk--but in real
life actually those who believe the worst damage of our
times are going to hit those for whom
facebook/twitter/constant share are the only things going
for them; and despite their own participation, this clearly
isn't them. Something we help cement by declaring, after
reading the book, that our own facebook/twitter lives is
going to be allowed to droop a notch. Unlike "you" the lost,
who we'll likely see next chasing down with bats any poor
sod who failed to "like" your latest insipid post, a bit more
of our private lives will once again be kept under wraps.
We're seeing great rewards in turning cold--our withholding
will surely set you all deliciously off! and so more of our
unwanted selves can be drooped into you. Thanks in part to
you, dear Dave.
Eggers might be regressing to old form. I first remember
him for his magazine Might. It was a very clever thing, but
nasty as well--Bender from the Breakfast Club taking
people down a notch: if he's not happy, why should you be
allowed to be? It's been called one of the origins of snark
214
into our contemporary culture, but I remember it most for

its interest in leaving the audience feeling played. Eggers
and the subject he was writing on was in on the trick-someone or another young and famous ostensibly dying,
for instance--but we'd come to realize that our desire to be
in the know was being allowed to come to the forefront of
our consciousness, our desperate need to feel as smart,
knowing, and cool as these whip-smart under-30s, and
about that time forced by the reveal to sit sunk for a
crushing while in the dank regrettable stinking dark pool of
it. Abused and sodden. Exposed as needy as hell. With
Eggers likely snickering ...Why should we be allowed to be
happy?
If we apply a bit of the humanism from another hipsterproduced effort--the Royal Tenenbaums--to our reading of
the book, we'd realize that her being upset at being
reminded that some few refuse her acknowledgment, isn't
necessarily a silly thing. In the Tenenbaums, each child for
awhile was getting every accolade from every source, but
when their father ended up hardly caring, that was all that
mattered, and they stopped even being able to try. Many of
us, like them, are in striving to complete our own circle of
approval, just trying to undue our mother and fathers not
being sufficiently interested ... not being genuinely
interested, in the person beyond the eager projections they
self-servingly placed onto us--demon, angel, hero, genius,
ungrateful filthy scum, or whatnot. If it's one out of
hundred, or three, the sole "exception" always harkens back
to them.
215
It's such an obvious thing, when we're inclined to

understand.
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Labels: carrie, dave eggers, royal tenenbaums, the circle

Saturday, November 2, 2013
Ender's Game
Ender's Game
One of things that is supposed to be notable about Ender, is
that he encourages other kids to think for themselves and
chip in. He is even reminded of this just before his biggest
battle against the bug aliens. So what does he in fact do?
He leaves all his other commanders' forces to be sacrificed,
and therefore left with nothing to individually command.
How nice it would have been to see the focus pulled off
him, as he ostensibly wishes, and actually witness some of
the other commanders make decisions. But we don't get
that, and instead the sense that all we need is one great
leader, and everyone else might as well being prompt,
order-applying drones. A good pilot or good gunner might
get some special accolades--nice flying/gunning, ace!
especially you, cutie!--but not for any property of
leadership. Maybe one of the reasons he has so many
sympathy for the Queen alien, is that he's effectively
216
looking in the mirror. The two boss commanders, vastly

superior to everyone else, in discussion, in camaraderie,
after battle: "I alone know how you feel."
He's upset over his genocide, but how about making his
own species shrug its shoulders and leaving Earth's purpose
mostly all to him? We could try, but he'd do it ten times
better anyway, so what's the point. I'll let an actual drone do
my part, and be in the bar remembering the days when
human volition had a demonstrable point. You all can go
about still worshipping him if you like.
In actual truth, though, he--or his representatives in
history--is not really special at all, atypical. But rather
instead brilliantly representative of the current appetites of
the people. Hitler was in in Germany, only because he
wanted it as bad as Germans did. He directed the German
"finger," this way or that. But the choice wasn't his whether
or not to pull out the gun. If he was distinctive, they'd
actually look past him, picking even an imbecile over him,
to imagine as superhuman--which is what they had done for
him, after all--if he's as thirsty for punishment, murder, and
massive wasteful human sacrifice as self-punishment for
the terrible sin of having enjoyed life too much, as they
were. The best leaders, the ones remembered as singular, as
genius, always end up being the bloodiest ones ... the point
is, they delivered the gross blood bath we wanted, and for
as much we're willing to dress them up, however
preposterously, as if they were fundamentally neat-freak
creatures of tactics and calibration.
217
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Friday, November 1, 2013
The Circle (Dave Eggers)

very>
218

The Circle
Dave Eggers clearly thinks most of us have become
incredibly needy and paranoidguessing that anyone who
is private, is doing so to deliberately withhold approval
from us, and must be chased down and punished. There is a
scene in this book where the main protagonist is going to
pieces upon learning that 3% of her workplace doesnt like
her. All she can do is imagine who they might be, and
wonder how they might be courted to her. Our collective
regression to the emotional state of an abandoned child, is
according to Eggers what could empower our wanting
some giant companya Google gone total world
domination, for instanceto have everyone in some way
under wraps. Little lollypop Google icameras everywhere,
ensuring no one does anything that might be felt by our
Earth hoard as a snubbing. Terrorism isnt the issue. Nor
really crime or racist behavior. Its that someone if they
could would unfriend you, if only if it could be done
anonymously.
Gravity
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very>
Gravity
I almost dont want a movie to provide a simulacrum of
what it might be like to be out in space right now.
Engineers, and other employees whose brains are 90%
scientific data, still after fifty years of space inhabitation,
holding court over who gets to tell us what its like to see
your home planet from the outside--how we might prefer to
220
be in the situation where only Apollo and his lute was able
to express the same. We think New Mexico, and we dont
only think of cowboy yokels bearing daily witness to desert
beauty, but artists, poets, hippies, doing so. Space, however,
is kept rigidly by those who see nothing amiss in their
space station--the ostensible center for a community in
space--being as cold and human-indifferent as any structure
nearly forgetting it was built not just to withstand, but to
house. When Sandra Bullocks character peeps into her
shuttle, the objects that float out arent items of dcor, of
domicile, but a Space Jam character--the difference in
inner-life between any of them and your typical cubicle
geek, is slight. I could handle it if this was critique--they
made the main protagonist a likely NPR listener, after all-but its apparent the filmmaker kind of liked that the
heritage of space still isnt something we could imagine
anyone knitting an afghan cover for. Throw a nervous Betty
in midst of it, and it'll be a perpetual struggle for her to
keep herself together--one doohickey into a slot, is about
what she could manage--and that with relief. Which would
contain her.
Part of me followed, immersed myself in Bullocks
character, with gratitude all the way appreciating her being
at the forefront of heart-palpitating situations we can relate
to. Part of me just balked at the whole thing, fixed on some
corner of the screen, and kept my own composure whatever
was happening. It's an hour and a half of struggle-something perhaps only soldiers and Formula One drivers
and James Cameron, never cease to want to re-experience.
The rest of us remain wary that if we too often brace
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ourselves against assaults, we'll get to the point where we

never quite relax all the way out again. At the end she
tasted the relief of being in a medium--the sea--where she
had more control, those toned muscles, useless in space,
getting to visibly, kinetically show they were worth all the
hard work. I felt like telling her she should insist this be the
worst inhibition she should ever let herself know--if space
for us must still be first fish crawled onto land, we should
let it go until the worst sublimation it can inflict still leaves
us knowing the evolved flex of our substantial
monkeydom.
EndFragment
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Labels: gravity
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
(Still Pending) Response to commenter

Reuben Thomas, on Richard Brody's review
of 12 Years a Slave
222

very>
Reuben Thomas:
To me Brody does not get it. "Django unchained" is the
film you want to see after seeing "12 years a slave". The
last one simply came after. And I'm pretty sure of the
historical existence of characters like the one depicted by
Samuel L. Jackson in Tarantino's movie...
But it mystifies me more that Brody does not seem to be
able to infer through his own imagination any of the
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realities actually suggested by both films. If we accept that

it's actually impossible for even all of the slavery related
films as a whole to narrate every single moment of real-life
historical abuse, then we should offer our own minds to
fill-in the blanks as homage to the effort and as proof of our
own capacity for compassion. It's like Brody were saying
that the current world is in such a state that without the
explicit nature of these images we can no longer gather
enough empathy against slavery.
I agree that empathy is lacking, but only because both films
fail when they show the horrors of slavery as the result of
the actions of madmen. The horrors of slavery were the
result of the acts of psychologically sound businessmen and
plantation entrepreneurs. People like you and me. People
who truly believed in the inferiority of the black race and
the need for slaves to sustain an economy and a way of life.
Come on, even a war was fought around these "facts". I
wish a film would come and actually show that
@reubenthomas Slavery was the result of madmen--or
rather, people who were brutalized by their parents when
they were young. When collectively childrearing is brutal
enough, it leads to institutions where a populace re-afflicts
the horrors inflicted upon them upon some simulacrum of
their innocent, vulnerable childhood selves--what Germans
in the 30s were getting themselves prepared to do. If you're
the type to enjoy good parent Richard Brody's writings,
you're way beyond being someone who could be
indoctrinated into seeing any institutionalized human
224
torture as okay. Doesn't matter if your head was drained of

all prior teachings; unless somehow they excavated all the
love you received out of you--you're beyond them.
I also have major doubts about slavery as about good
economy, but little that most people want to flee
considering how the particular nature of their childhoods is
still afflicting them. The typical historian's method of
evasion, is to see humans as essentially the same--as
rational, homo economicus. Trust me, the societies that
were abandoning the institution of slavery, did so
fundamentally because through increased love from
generation to generation, they'd become people who no
longer felt the perverse need.
The Africans that were stolen out of Africa, what were their
societies like? Did they possess institutions as abhorrent as
slavery? If so, that was something they were going to have
to work out of themselves, through the same means-increased empathy from mother to daughter, gradually over
generations--as well.
Link: Richard Brody's review of 12 Years a Slave (New
Yorker)
EndFragment
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225
Carrie
Carrie
There's a moment in Carrie when Carrie becomes remote
from us, not owing to the carnage she wrecks, but to her
being possessed of a self-assuredness there's no way we'd
be able to match. Her mother, attempting to prevent her
from seeking a life for herself which might allow some
pleasure, bangs her own head repeatedly against a wall,
with sufficient force it might lead to breaking herself open.
Carrie watches it, but insists on her own life anyway, letting
her mom break herself into brain pulp, if such is her wont.
This was what she was going to need to do to individuate,
push on despite being guaranteed that if her mom could no
longer physically desist her by scaring her to holy hell with
knives or carting her off into isolation closets, she'd
probably slit her own wrists before her, to show her the
wreckage her "selfish" pursuits were inflicting physically,
emotionally, psychically on her. She's basically Rose in
Titanic, who ultimately told her own mother to shove the
hell off, even though this was going to bottom her mother-high in lineage, but nada in riches--out, but somehow with
a much, much, much more daunting mother, and without
someone--apologies to the good gym teacher--near Angelsent to temper her the strength to do it. Intent on going to
the prom, she telekinesises her mother into a closet, fuses
226
any possible exit, and embraces a new world. The world is

set-up to turn on her, as it turns out, and when she turns on
it, it's less out of shock and rattled umbrage and more as if
out of now familiar, superb, quite controlled and evenpleasurable rebuttal (great! I get to use these powers again-and in an even larger venue!). The confidence in which she
directs and motions her carnage, the presumption, without
hesitation configuring how aptly to direct the environment
to butcher the particular wretched kid she's caught sight on,
is more or less the same we saw in her disabling her maniac
mom when she'd become immune to her. We take stock of
her at the end, and with her poise, apt calculation, and
tremendous power, with her not seeming to have done in
anyone who didn't deserve it--it's mostly the real nasties,
like the corrosive black-haired twinish girls, who are
squashed down into trampled-down floor rugs like the
deflated evil witches in Wizard of Oz, who are done in, but
everyone in the crowd was laughing at her covered in pig's
blood while video played of her terrible shower
humiliation... so what loss, really, any of them?--I basically
ignored the finish and imagined her carted off by Professor
Xavier. She'd beat down her mom and home, beat down her
school and small-minded, hipster-absent town (hipsters
would have admired her aesthetic and askew beauty), and
now was really just ready for bigger game. Not, that is, to
be herself quit by death, and folded into a lesson for smaller
people.
I'll admit, though, that I actually did identify with her some.
When I was about to leave my mother and embrace the
wider world, I would find her lying as if dead, in midst of
227
some house pathway I would have to cross. Since she knew

I knew she was performing, and that this would be amongst
a number of innumerouses I would have to ignore just to go
about my own day, she knew I would have to step over
her--as if she, a bum on the street, and I, the callous--and
that by doing so, no matter my awareness of what she was
doing, there was still a gamble-worthy chance I would still
feel doomed by some rightful, me-overlording judge as
having done the unpardonable: "Your mother was lying on
the ground, possibly sprawled in death, and you
just walked over her ... you did this, to your mother!!! I
don't care what kind of hinderances she presented you with,
you crossed the line, and are the saddest, most selfish, most
demonic cad ever born to earth! Your fate is to be cursed
with guilt after every fun thing you do, never-ending--and
this only to start!"
There's another way I know I could have identified with
her, harnessed her power of self-righteousness, but chose
not to. When Carrie explains why her mother is wrong to
hem her in, she doesn't just do this by explaining the
innocuousness of such normal life events like the prom, the
rightness every human being has to participate in and try
and enjoy them, but effectively by chastising her mother as
being self-centered and selfish. Referring, that is, to her
own powers of telekinesis, she explains that this power is
actually fully normal to their shared mother-daughter
lineage, only that it skips every other generation. She
makes her mother's preference that her daughter understand
it only as Satan's "gift," a betrayal of the whole story of
their heritage, a wilful ignorance of bloodline and history,
228
that selfishly makes her own self more normal--or rather,

better, less sin-ridden--than her daughter. She makes her
seem a selfish rebellion against her own telekinesisempowered mother! The way we can do the same with our
own parents, is by finding a way to make our generation
seem more akin to our parents' parents, with their own
selves the historical aberration. This is okay-easy for gen
xers to do, but easy-peasy for millennials, for, like them,
baby boomers' parents were defined by their living the
great span of their youth in hope and dream-inhibiting
Depression times. The baby boomer parent points a finger
at their millennial kid, calling them spoiled and selfish, and
the crafty millennial, perhaps looking at their own lifestyle
of "Kinfolk"--read overtly ancestral, paradingly
masochistic, grandfatherly and sparse--ways, sees the
absurdity of someone built out of decades of prosperous
post-war years chastising someone who like the 1930s
sufferers, doesn't even feel guaranteed any kind of job. To
them, a house and a car, isn't bottom-level middle class-what everyone who doesn't live on the street could
possess--but a sign that you've gotten lucky and hit upon a
career path vixen, unaccountable Future gloriously spared
by shining some favor on. To be called spoiled,
increasingly invites a collective glare back ... a judgment,
against the abominable absurdity of the revealed exploiter
still insisting morality has anything at all to do with them.
Depression Nazi Youth, against their own Weimer-spoiled,
dessert-fattened, bourgeois parents, that is.
If we adopt this strategy in categorizing away our own
parents, it would amount to the same sin the same afflicted
229
upon this movie. Carrie makes the link between Carrie and
her grandmother in order to isolate her mother, and this
comes at the cost of appreciating that this grandmother-surely having come at her own daughter as menacingly as
Carrie's mother did with Carrie--is equally as dismissalworthy. Further, it comes at the cost of understanding why
exactly her mom was as crazy as she was (do we really buy,
considering what the film shows of maternal power, that it
owed to religion?), why she was confined for life to
appreciate pleasures as the worst possible thing in the
world, the great villain in the world, that everyone
attempting to be selfless and holy will crusade against. Very
likely, it comes at the cost of appreciating that her mother,
in actually desisting against the voice in her telling her to
kill her new-born child, and choosing instead to keep and
hold and temporarily tend to her, may have been doing
something heroic, in relation to her lineage's history. Some
part of her daughter, she was able to believe, deserved to be
loved--something she herself may have had even less
experience of.
I'll end this review by mentioning how much I appreciated
the popular high school couple in this movie. It was
moving for me to see the girl, especially, trying to figure
out how to make amends to Carrie, not just to expunge
guilt, but because she wanted her mended and happy. It was
a miracle to see her boyfriend manage his prom date with
Carrie, without either making her feel she was being set-up
or not truly of interest to him. He wanted to convey how he
felt, that she was interesting, and that he was pleased to be
her date, could very readily have a good time with her, and
230
did very well with this. He moved her to allow herself a

little bit more time with him, an hour more at the afterparty, perhaps--the baby-steps forward toward larger
happiness she was still going to need. When the bucket
crashes down and kills him, I almost wanted to stop the
movie there. He and his girlfriend have a lot going for them
to make them feel they could manage whatever hit they
might take through so publicly befriending the most
despised person in school, but they weren't guaranteed to
float though. It was lovely courage, and terrific love, and
they deserved much better.
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Labels: carrie
Thursday, October 3, 2013
Don Jon
Don Jon
It's a considerable task put to Julianne Moore's Esther for
her to present as the preferable alternative to porn as porn
and our porn-watcher are presented here, and I don't think
she manages it. Jon--the watcher--has his life perfectly
compartmentalized. There's his time at the dinner table, his
time at the gym, his time at church and the confessional, his
231
time at the bar with his friends, his time in bed with this
week's select girl, and his time afterwards in porn--summed
up nicely each time with a single crumpled up tissue sent
into a black waste bin--and in none of these activities does
he feel a disadvantage. I mean by this that though he's a
millennial and not an owner of a home, nor of a job that
puts him outside of being defined as a loser or as
underclass servile--he's a bartender--he's not mastered in
his family home, his job place, amongst his friends, nor
anywhere else, exempting sex, whose for-him arduous
quality requires a besting amendment. His life seems
perfect, an already commendable, substantial realization for
anyone fraught with being a mastered young man ill-placed
to make any kind of stake against the world, until rather
than settle for his usual 8-or-9-in-hotness babe he goes after
a 10, and he starts loosing leverage over his life. Scarlett
Johansson's Barbara culls Jon to her powerfully, and each
step towards her she uses to adulterate him in a way more
amenable to her. Julianne Moore is too old to be within the
echelon of women Jon and his friends would even rate, and
is more like someone sage--an Obi Wan ... or a croon,
even--needling him insights to loosen and unroot him from
an allegiance to a sun-radiant sashaying shrine of a woman
he can do little but obey and forbear. She also gets him to
rethink his attachment to porn, by showing him that a great,
nurturant, reciprocal relationship with a woman--with her,
in this case--can give him the high he thought only
obtainable through it.
In effect, what she's doing is akin to unrooting someone to
their obsession with, say, texting, to spend more time
232
directly involving himself with people. Once you know

how great a real-life conversation can be, you'll lose your
interest in the shallows of more generic and detached
conversations ... ostensibly. But clearly to millenials there
is worse than something detached and not entirely
satisfying, and that is, that whatever is too pronounced and
of too much affect can subjugate your shallow defences and
eventually overwhelm and subjugate you. That phone call
that you think communicates more than the text, that is
obviously a better, a richer, form of communication, is to
millenials an affect-loaden, commanding mother's harague
that can't be dialed down into something just font and text,
on a device never stripped of its potency as an authoritative
cultural object to diffuse everything communicated into it
into a community that has been messaged the same thing
before. So her learning him to be a responsive partner and
to enjoy reciprocation and conversation development, may
be a genuinely helpful learning, until his ability to imagine
himself a kind of device which powers down people's
ability to dictate terms to him, lapses, and he becomes a kid
who has lost his varnished advantage--his youthful alpha
perfect form and sexual potency--to a crackening, wise
older woman, who has hard-earned won the argument over
who should be allowed to break in every part of innocent,
ignorant him. She's a superior Barbara, that is, in that
there's no one out there to lesson him on how he might be
better off without her. Which may be why the film inflicts
her with a periodic tendency to shut down, broken over
rememberance of her lost family, so to become sort of a
null object he can actually act over from time to time.
233
If this film was true life, Jon would forgo her the first
moment possible--making his switching off at some
moment where she had curled into herself once again in
pain. He'd bookend her experience with her with it lending
him the authority to talk back to Barbara and acknowledge
the rightness of his feeling neglected by her (guys are going
to like this moment in the film), and perhaps with his
gaming how he schedules and goes about his life a bit--a bit
of social mixing it up with basketball might be better than
just the familiar routine of weights--but otherwise return to
what he had, with maybe also a bit more sass at the church,
and so not just with his dad. He'd forgo the commanding
10s this time, spot out the less-fielty-owed 8s and 9s, and
every week, catch one. He'd take them to bed, which
though it punished him with missionary sex which hardly
flatters the form of his mate, reducing them to compressed,
blockened slabs of somnambulist flesh, though it means
felatio which terminates just when its getting good, or
which from the start--when he's eating her out--is pretty
rank and foul, is still something which might lend life into
his follow-up routine of amended sex through porn. He's a
hunter who can claim more from his follow-up routine of
administrating, handling, and plying apart his prize stalked
prey, than can the big game hunter readying things with a
blooded carcase for a later feast.
In short, a device clearly used to make guys who watch
porn not feel like they're losers--he's a guy who's got an
active sex life, and with total scores--probably has most of
them thinking that though they like the involvement of the
Obi Wan Kenobi female friend, they'd just-fine take what
234
Jon has from the start. And you can understand why
apparently some porn companies cooperated with the film.
Here presented is a fully honest account of why guys go to
porn, and apparently it's as innocent-dewed as Playboy
magazine in the 1950s. Guys go to it for better tits, better
ass, and a feeling of empowerment and satisfaction they
don't always so much feel in sex, which can turn servile.
Not ideal, maybe, but understandable, and hardly character
defining--a bit hen-afflicted man still turning his head at the
gorgeous young blonde strayed into his path ...
quintessential manhood. But go to a porn site, and see if
this is what you see. Do you perhaps instead see something
a little bit more disturbing than just chasing down the
perfect ass? Or even, something more salutary than just
cold sex, stripped of any genuine sensuality that might have
been more evident in porn during the free-love 1970s?
Maybe what you get is a lot that is damning men, making
them beyond recoverable--a heightened longing for
revenge, not compensation. Rape fantasies. And maybe also
a bit that is genuinely buttressing them, giving them some
company that is actually teaching them a thing or two about
mutuality, but delimited by being entirely under their
control.
Prisoners
The movie begins with Hugh Jackman's character, Keller
Dover, attending his son's successful kill of a deer. Just into
the film, we're not quite sure what to prioritize, how much
yet to ascribe any particular that strays into our sight, so we
give the fact that the movie shows hunting to be about
235
springing on an animal whose attention is preoccupied

elsewhere, full due. Hunting means killing, and possibly in
the process, terribly wounding an animal whose flank is to
you. When Keller salutes his son for the effort, we're
certainly willing to submerge this fact so it doesn't too
much incriminate a father whose love for his son is real, but
it's certainly not completely out of mind when Keller's best
friend's oldest daughter asks his son if he is comfortable
stalking deer. The son replies not with his experience but
with what his father would say in retort: hunting is a way to
keep nature in balance ... and besides, how soon are you
about to turn away from innocent-cow-produced burgers?
So, when we eventually find out that the person intent on
hunting down children describes her efforts about as coldly,
if for an inverse purpose--for her it's about disrupting God's
plans, not tending them: nothing tees people off into
madness than the disappearance of children--are we in
mind to ascribe equivalence, even slightly? No, the movie
isn't that sophisticated. They're not both addled on over
onto the same suspect line, which might include everyone
sufficiently besotted they're non-blanched at making insipid
imprints on beautiful flesh, including the numeroustattooed, somewhat sullen and snide detective, Loki (Jake
Gyllenhaal), but rather one doggedly good against one
entirely evil. But likely unconscious to us, we've still in
some way aligned them together: you've got to be able to
turn hard on other's suffering if you mean to pursue larger
goals. He ends up torturing a young man for days and days
to get information he just knows he possesses, and it's the
most abominable path in that it leads him to a point where
no one--not even you, the movie-goer--has any sure faith in
236
him anymore. He's all alone in a void where going on looks

to be about either obliterating all awareness that he might
actually have made an awry choice which resulted in his
doing something damnable, useful only in satisfying a
desire to feel efficacious and rage against a world with no
choice but to suffer his bruising imprint; or maybe just, still
holding onto his awareness that his victim had given him
sure signs--the kinds of signs an experienced hunter
recognizes instinctively in the gives of prey--that to get to
the kids their location has to be broken out of him. What
could have doomed him, what was dooming him, instead
hefted him off into herodom ... he was right, and gets to the
true child abductor--the aunt--first. Jail for his actions
becomes, what, scratching him with a few negligible
abrasions as he slowly stretches up into a human giant? Yes
indeed; only that.
Taking her down fails, looking to be owing to his not being
so good going after another hunter--he'd become excellent
at some point, but remains at this point nonetheless a
newbie at this. He prides himself in once again getting into
her house, seemingly through another successful
deception--he'd done a number on the detective previously,
and seemingly also before the aunt, so surely he's already
got good game with this skill, right?--not realizing this
means getting him off the street and turning his vulnerable
flank to actually pistol-armed her. And for a human being,
who, like a deer, can be taken down by even one shot, this
means the end of his efforts. But it still seems like an
instance of first through the wall always gets hurt: with the
follow-up pursuit by the detective, the aunt relents almost
237
immediately, as if the game has got now to be up entire,

hoping only for one last successful slay of a child, one last
nasty rippling through of the human community to
unsteady God, before becoming rendered a shot-through
crumpled form requiring burial or cremation.
The movie gives a great deal of give on who it's okay to
be--for instance, the priest we first encounter as a drunken
mess, had once taken upon himself to do in someone who
had slain numerous children and would have slain more if
he hadn't stepped in, even if this still made him someone
who stores a bound corpse in his basement. But it's not so
pleasant to true teddy-bear types. The father of the other
abducted child, Franklin Birch (Terrence Howard), is a
professional, wears fine sweaters, endeavours to play the
trumpet, makes his basement into a friendly entertainment
space, and he, unlike Keller, can't bear to keep what Keller
is up to to himself. So while Keller, to keep the possibility
of retrieving his child's location alive, lets himself be
thought of as someone who deals with a crisis selfishly by
escaping to a retreat and into alcohol, Franklin coughs it up
pretty much immediately to his wife Nancy (Viola Davis).
Keller finds this out by Nancy's banging on his door to
accost him, with her husband behind her, sundered and
shamed for betraying his friend's trust and relenting to his
wife to handle things subsequently. The film figuratively
castrates him once again, when his wife actually ends up
agreeing with Keller, telling her husband to adopt Keller's
ability to think on their children rather than take the "easy"
way out, and absolve the long-tortured, mentally-disabled
man any subsequent abuse.
238
It's not so easy on tortured, abducted kids, either. It's

probably not so unpleasant to those like the Birch's girl,
who succeeds in an escape not too far long into her capture,
but those kept long enough in terrible conditions that
they're going to show signs of crippling owing to it, sure
aren't treated that well. Think Paul Dano's character Alex
Jones, a victim of child-abduction, who we are repeatedly
told hasn't any sadistic intentions towards children himself
and is possessed of a ten-year-old's mental state and
intelligence, and who is beat to near the point of death and
then boxed in and subjected alternatively to blasts of
intense heat and intense cold. Think David Dastmalchian's
character Bob Taylor, who we learn too was an abducted
child subjected to terrific abuse, and who too now though a
bag of quirks remains nevertheless essentially harmless,
and is beaten to a pulp by the detective before he does a
quick steal of a gun and blows his own head off. The film
does agonies of horror to these two, and then when it gets
to the child-afflicter herself, it lets her off with but one easy
bullet ... is it too much to say it was done out of respect?
Abused children are urinals you can piss in yet again, just
let it gush and gush all over them, while the abductor is a
just-come-upon statue you're surely baiting the gods by
taking down in any drawn out way.
P.S. People have accused Chris Nolan's Dark Knight series
as being misanthropic, and you'd have to wonder then what
adjective they'd need to invent to adequately damn this
film. Dastmalchian was a tormented, insane man in that
film too we remember, and Batman scolded the DA intent
239
on tormenting information out of him that he was raging on

someone mentally sick--a schizophrenic--and that he wasn't
going to get anywhere with this. Batman also said the thing
that took him out of his despair of finding himself
parentless, alone, and in a hell of self-accusation that was
sure to render him insane, was a surprise moment
of kindness--Inspector Gordon's putting his coat around
him and talking to him in nurturance and sympathy. Dark
Knight's philosophy applied to this film would have had the
torture go nowhere, and for the breakthrough to have come
from Nancy's effort to break with the program and show
some trust in Alex, who'd known so little of it in life. I like
this film, but you can bet I would have preferred to have
seen this. It's the truth--kindness is the way to go, if we're
really interested in making a better world rather than
accosting ourselves for once having put purposeful posts up
in that direction. And boy oh boy does the world need this
reminder.
The Family
The Family
When the mob family descends on their new locale, a
quaint village in northern France, their identity is of
American. The mobster's wife, Michelle Pfeiffer's character
Maggie, enters into a local grocery and asks for peanut
butter, descending upon her a crowd of locals dismaying
American obesity. Certainly too, when the teen boy and girl
in the family join the local school, they're the improvising,
brass-balled Americans, whomever sets out to take
240
advantage of them regrets their imposition near

immediately. Later, however, it would seem that what they
are mostly is Italian--Maggie is fierce in pitting her olive
oil diet against the French obsession with cream, as if
bulwarked by centuries of Italian lives and culture. They
churn out burgers and Cokes for the locals, only to satisfy
expectations--Americanism has become a red cape they
float before onrushing french bulls they're cannily flanking
and spotting out. I'm not quite sure how much fun it is to
watch a pleb mob family reduce the French into imbeciles,
but I suppose if you understand that what they're doing is
impressing themselves upon new cushions so they are
succumbed of some of their store presence to take on more
of "you," I suppose you can at least get at the sanity of what
they're wanting to do.
But what becomes interesting is how in their individual
pursuits they find themselves extraneous to one another.
The father goes from being a retired patrician mobster to
become an excited cell terrorist, activated in his fervour to
take down a corporation. The mother goes from sallying
forth destruction to the arrogant French in piquant moments
to finding her own insides blasted out, with a priest taking
what she had revealed to him as ingredients to mix back a
mirror as to how long a road of evil she's traveled. The
daughter goes from teaching awkward, totally overmatched
teenagers a lesson they'll never forget to taking on a
polished young instructor, who'll show her that spunk and
sass can be quickly subsumed if any inflection at all is
given the life someone poised and learned is due to lead.
The boy manipulates a whole school to his advantage, but
241
becoming Zuckerberg to the school spanks him as to how

top dog substitutes paltry happiness if it's not something he
can adequately return home and show family. They've gone
so far out in their own individual sports that gangsters
arriving to kill them really serve as a welcome call back
home. The French, who had temporarily been given some
advantage, are once again relinquished all, as the gangsters
dump however many they need into corpse status to show
the power of this call; tailing along with it, a whole family
back tightly together again.
The episode packages up, and the family is off to fuss up
some other European station for awhile. We take stock, and
see them as a blotch of virus who are eating up small moth
holes into a fine swatch of something precious we weren't
really allowed to see, for it making their presence there
beyond endurable. Exempting the boy--he is the lone one of
the family who can strategize, delay, his revenge--they've
each got major problems restraining themselves, which
their CIA overlookers greatly assist them with. Fine. But if
they needed a soothing, antique village with a lot of prop
people to serve as a calming backdrop for this containment
"therapy," it's too bad it couldn't be done entirely in
simulation.
Insidious 2
I leave it to Insidious 2 to faithfully expound upon the most
significant fact about evil--those doing it aren't themselves,
but rather are possessed by alters driving them to take
sadistic pleasure in murdering innocents. It's quite
242
something, after seeing the damage the adult Parker Crane

has done to women he's culled from local denizens--rotted
bodies aligned in church rows--to finally be introduced to
him as a young boy, and for him to be attributed about the
same amount of empathy as the good boy in the film, Josh
Lambert. They spy him in long braids and a girl's dress,
combing his doll's hair. When he turns around, he actually
warns them to get out of the room--he actually tries to help
them! Later we see his mother descend upon him and make
him feel as if his entire known universe will be squashed
out if he doesn't obey her in all respects, and cast himself in
the role of female full-time so to be fully owned by her and
bear no resemblance to a husband she wants cast out of
memory altogether. Later he would own his mother's look-eyes of convinced sadism, a wide smile supped on other
people's powerlessness and pain--and it's clear he's in no
way his own self anymore: his mother alter has simply
taken him over.
There is nothing scarier for human beings than the look of
our mothers when they themselves are possessed. I've seen
it--at an age where I was old enough to have the resources
not to feel the normally life-saving need to bury my
awareness of it. She wandered into my room while I was
still awake, with the complete scary visage of someone
under possession, driven to seek out innocents to harm. But
while it was true that I was in her home at the time owing
to vulnerability, I wasn't so vulnerable not to take some
delight in this kind of "photo capture" of the source of the
fear that had dissuaded me away from whatever full kind of
self-realization I might have been capable of--"you, kid, are
243
owned by me; I will flush into you my emotions, and they

will have their full play with you." Here was the source of
the absolutely terrifying "eye ball" nightmare I used to have
all the time as the kid, where my dreams would be going
casually along their route, and then all of a sudden a
boulder-sized eyeball would appear and advance upon me.
Here is the source of that maybe still subliminally felt
sense, that if I'm out enjoying life, adorning myself with
possessions and accomplishments beyond what my mother
would have thought me allotted--something uncomfortable
to her--that all of a sudden out of the blue I might casually
open up a door and see a terror of teeth about to have it out
with me.
Actually, this might be an exaggeration ... it is possible that
now I'm completely demon free. What I do with my
independence might take my mother--in all respects-further and further away from me (which, trust me, is pretty
damn scary as well; and is surely the source of my
conjuring her up in my daydreams and my writing), but it
may be I can't see any Joker face, twisted to take delight in
pain, and not instantly see the helpless "Parker Crane" that
was going to have no choice but to let this demon into
him/herself, and own them whole in response to triggers of
self-fulfillment and helplessness.
The Butler
The Butler
244
The current generation of liberals have clearly reached

expiry date when they find themselveswithout knowing
it, of courseactually favoring Uncle Toms, thereby
becoming exactly those whom they in their better days
would have been at lead in toppling. The current black
situation is that the huge bulk of them are in the
dispossessed 99%, with the vast majority, in the worst
ghettos of this unlucky group. And liberals look at this
group, and see a hopeless situation. They see people who
have simply transmogrified, who, having their claim on
bourgeois respectability taken from them, have over the
last 30 years of taking sustenance from the sort of foul
stuff you count as familiar when you're trying to
makeshift an accommodating life for yourself in hell
with cock-fight UFC becoming your sport,
sadomasochistic Fifty Shades your fiction, heavy whiskey
drinking your milk, and hard-core porn and onlinebetting not even a poke that something has gone wrong
and now stand before them as a people anthropologically
different, fixed forever in their degraded status, like brief
fresh flesh to stagnant rotten meat. At the same time
liberals have stopped believing past-times shared by all
are really America's greatest cultural offering, and
accoutered themselves in whatever way to make them
feel that as if by DNA, every sprout of their lived lives
must have behind it years of private-school teaching. The
idea that you should want the 99% to be given a loud
voice, and dominate American culture, is about as absurd
as saying you want to bring down the walls staunching
back a zombie hoard. You might assist them a little, agree
to minimum wage increases and health care benefits, but
you'll turn armaments against whomever would say it is
insufficient to let them rest with administrations that still
245
keep them compartmentalized and accountable.

It's not so much right to say that they remember your
origins, either, who you were before. Rather, it's a bit as if
for an agreed upon extended period of years, they stayed
eyes-fixed to their New York Times, and looked up so
they could see everything again with fresh eyes; and so so
much of the democratic world that was built upon the
belief that people are equal, and once had ample evidence
for this belief, can look now, with this spread of loonies
partaking so much of the population, simply absurd to
them. They go to a liberal web site, and look down from
the article to the comment section, and cannot believe
that people had once thought it worth so much effort to
place such a close bridge between writer and audience.
They look at the grand numbers of people who can but
don't vote, and actually hope they rest content in their
apathy: if they all went out to the ballot box, they'd force
the unpleasant acknowledgement that one person-one
vote, is a fantastical, silly, dangerous proposition, when
so many are only one-fifth as human as they themselves
are. And they realize that their task is to argue for the
reality of the number of unhumans loud enough, that the
moral imperative becomes to take down the morays that
have made it seem as if larger inclusion is a humane and
necessary thing. So courageously they in unison pit their
courageous resources, and the crowd of unknowns that
hippies once thought you should know, for believing you
could be spiritually pure regardless of how anonymous
your situation or what-not anonymous no-place you're
from, become trolls, unknowns, but dank killers, who
from under bridges or out of dark corridors can be relied
upon to stank up any good thing the civilized might be
246
forging. And so eventually, pounding this lesson home

trolls! trolls! trolls!, progress begins to be made, and sites
that were once open-access begin to require commenters
to provide their full name with their posts, a seemingly
small request, but really a final nail, considering that
coinciding with this request is a society that has made
newscast-main-story the fact that individuals caught
saying the wrong thing can get 35 years, or a visit from
the unimpressed, who've located your address, and who'll
show how you can be turfed out of your job or kicked to
shit with bats, in a startled, shocked, blink of an eye. And
as to the public vote, you can't let it come to your actually
denying people it: there's no way this wouldn't cause
dissonance that would destroy even you. So what you do
is make them feel so apart from a world that would give a
shit about them, that in frustration they come to believe
their only hope is through violence. And then you make
violence, a decision to desist from the public
conversation and just stage revolt, something that is
goodness gone foulsomething wildly excessive
and spoiled, for it being completely unnecessaryand
something you can destroy like something tolerated gone
arrogant, like a weed proclaiming itself a latinized plant,
in a truly terrific garden that shudders the thought. For
which all, you'll need directors, traitors to the underclass
that take your view and makes it incontestable. You'll
need Uncle Toms ... and so enter the butcher, or sorry,
Lee Daniels's foul weapon, The Butler, so all that would
disquiet the over-class can begin to rest the fuck in peace.
The Butler takes you through black history in America,
from cotton-fields to today, and everything Daniels, a
black man, shows you concerning black Americans is
247
either exemplary or understandable ... exempting the

Black Panther movement. At a time in history when black
Americans were buoyed by the huge love and
peacefulness of Martin Luther King, and who would
eventually find others his equal to relate to and support
first Nelson Mandela, then (ostensibly) Obamahere,
according to the film, is where even a very good and
righteous population can go foul if it shorns patience for
hate. The Black Panthers, we learn, though ostensibly
about community service, were really just interested in
taking out two of you for every one of them. Their way, is
blood on the streets, payback, with anything good that
could possibly come from this, really beside the point
(the only point they're concerned with, is your head, on
the end of a pike). And it is okay, regardless of your color,
to hate them.
How do we know this? Because the person who
exemplifies membership to the Panther movement that is
true to it, rather than based on what it purportedly stands
for, is the sole black villain in this film. She is the butler's
eldest son's girlfriend, Carol Hammie, who looks down
on her boyfriend's family, at just that point in the film
when the butler's wife has ceased drinking and cheating
on him for her realizing she just can't any longer do this
to such a good man. The wife, Oprah Winfrey's Gloria
Gaines, identifies Carol as low-life trash; and the
occasion of correct naming, sparks momentum in the
film to show up how foul she really is, demarcating how
even her five-year-long love for her boyfriend was false.
She's model gorgeousthe most beautiful woman in the
film, by farand the Black Panthers are fierce in their
black attire, but they're lost souls tempting blacks to
248
where chaosno true love; all hatereigns.

So you take a film like this where done by a black person,
the one thing that a liberal crowd allowed itself to
question regarding black empowerment is given huge
leverage. When a dispossessed people begin to dress in
spooky garbin this film, Carol's aggressive afro doesn't
really jive with her boyfriend's black leatherhe still
looks an affable Theo Huxtableand is effectively in
affronting Joker garband beget violence, then,
effectively, the KKK has got company: one ranges more
over Southern rural, and the other NorthEast urban, but
it's all just more goons on the landscape. Once you've
chosen this path, your life circumstances no longer
applies, for no amount of previous suffered hate prevents
you of your God-given ability to choose the path of love.
And so as liberals free their homes of the presence of the
dispossessed, by raising rents, and thereby effectively
shipping them off to the outskirt ghettos; and in a sense
free them from their presence on the way to work, with
tax policies that attend to "your" drive but pay less and
less attention to their public transport; and keep them
seeming contained, at least, as they explore their
preferred websites, by construing comment sections so
they seem fetid marshes you screen out as you fix on your
own haute-bourgeois/aristocratic compartments, at first
the dispossessed do nothing as you enjoy how "scum"
miraculously seems less present in your everyday life, but
later manifest, in a terrible waywith a burnt-down
luxury apartment building that had taken the place of
something low-rent, scrawled with anarchist hate; with
minimum-wage food chains looted across the country
after strikes had gone nowherewith stolen burgers from
249
them shoved up the arses of uptown gourmets; with

private roads laced with fowl killed in oil spills, that leave
morning drivers retchingthese dispossessed are going
to be received with nothing but a merciless hard
crackdownregardless of huge a high percentage of
them are black, mentally-ill, and starving. If they had
waited, their sufferings would eventually have been
noticeddid you not see how the butler eventually had
the support of a president to get his raise-hike?but
impertinently, impatiently, greedily, and
unnecessarily, they chose the path of hate, and have
become vermin.
Crackdown is to be lead by the likes of Daniels as well.
The Butler shows he's got all the right attributes. You
don't want them too smart and sophisticated, and he's
not. You don't want him thinking an aristocrat, an officer,
is anything he can aspire to, but rather contented to
himself as a gruff staff-sergeant, and he is. And you want
him beguiled to "betters," as if they are gods, harsh as
hell on any of the underclass who'd try and rival them,
and heto near a point that should make him look a bit
ridiculously stupid to his bettersis. If you're showing
cotton-field masters, it's okay to show them as brutal
sadists, but if you can't show scenes of them and their
black servants/slaves that doesn't spark something
outside folk portrayalall evil, and all innocence
narrative needs are determining what you are seeing in
life. If you're showing students being prepped to suffer
abuse by forcing other students to play the role of
accosters, at a historical time when psychology was
becoming famous for its prisoner/guard experiments,
where students couldn't help but play their delegated
250
roles for real, and for the Maslow experiments, where

people told to shock a victim could find themselves
apparently shocking them from pain into
unconsciousness, and you do it just straight, then you're
not post but pre-Kubrick, and are actually dialing back
what we know of people and the world. If you show
someone in close proximity to presidents, yet nothing
shown looks different from what an ignorant person from
afar would project as how these scenes would play, you're
pretty much taking the accomplishment of Aaron
Sorkin's The West Wing back, and substituting
something more dutiful to authority; more respectful of
mystique and distance. And if you show every worn
president but not the one who currently resides, you
make it seem as if they were all leading up to the one so
pure and beyond he's most accurately represented as a
light that's effused itself over the social landscape,
concentrated heavy beyond the door you're about to
enter, and about to take you some place as rapturous as
heaven. And if you show Jackie O as a natural aristocrat,
a true princess, and her rival beautybut of the
dispossessedas a snake villain, you're the Uncle Tom
who's undertaken the tradition of G.W. Griffith. So
fabulously unaware are you, that the lesson you think you
know by heart, is one you impertinently cast aside to put
a stake though the snake: "guess who's coming to
dinner," isn't supposed to favor the traditional-minded
family who's shocked by the strange black thing planted
down at the dinner table before them, but shown up by
him or her.
And when we've lost that lesson, we no longer believe in
democracy, but shown that though it might have taken
251
three centuries to prove it, the whigs were wrong: gates

need to be put in place to keep these tempering hordes
from bucking up into a revolution.
Posted by Patrick Hallstein / McEvoy-Halston at 11:10 AM No
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Labels: lee daniels, the butler
Monday, August 26, 2013
Kick-Ass 2
Kick-Ass 2
When Roger Ebert reviewed the original Kick-Ass, he
wasn't primarily taken aback by any one single incident
Hit Girl's being shot, with the audience having to take a
moment to remind themselves about her bullet-proof
vest, for instancebut by the fact that people behind the
movie were so comfortable exploring a whole terrain of
something which had pretty much taken him off stride
upon first occurrence. He couldn't believe that a movie
primarily involving kids could be so comfortable with
people dying, being butchered, all over the place, coldly,
bloodily, humiliatingly, with this not counting it as
beyond fun and games. "This isn't comic violence," he
writes, "These men, and many others in the film, really
252
are stone-cold dead. And the 11-year-old apparently

experiences no emotions about this. Many children
would be, I dunno, affected somehow, don't you think,
after killing eight or 12 men who were trying to kill her?"
Ebert worried about what would happen to the 6-yearolds who wanted to see the film, and, despite his
proclaiming himself not so worried about them,
evidently also about the sheer fact of the older ones
who'd already been ruined to become of the
internet. Specifically he writes, "The movie's rated R,
which means in this case that it's doubly attractive to
anyone under 17. I'm not too worried about 16-year-olds
here. I'm thinking of 6-year-olds. There are characters
here with walls covered in carefully mounted firearms,
ranging from handguns through automatic weapons to
bazookas. At the end, when the villain deliciously
anticipates blowing a bullet hole in the child's head, he is
prevented only because her friend, in the nick of time,
shoots him with bazooka shell at 10-foot range and blows
him through a skyscraper window and across several city
blocks of sky in a projectile of blood, flame and smoke. As
I often read on the Internet: Hahahahaha.
Ebert pretty much assumes that if you liked Kick-Ass,
you've got to be pretty much lost to the human. Zombies
might have great sport figuring out what to do with the
various body parts that remained after they've gorged
themselves full, perhaps bowling human heads through
assembled foot-and-ankle "pins," or making rib-cages
and thigh bones into cunning hefty decorative wear, but
anyone still human isn't going to be in mind to demarcate
their creativity here, but just drain it of distinction so that
the sheer fact of its blunt awfulness, not its
253
variegatedness, holds your attention. If in real life a mob

is ripping apart its victim, do you describe particulars
involved so the act looks to possess a distinguishable
aesthetic, a uniquenessworth? Would irony save it
from now possessing validity? Or do you eclipse it, deny
it, and just hold it as not worth describing? Ebert does, or
shows, bothwe already have the description, and he
ends his piece with, "then the movie moved into dark,
dark territory, and I grew sad." But since his description
is compelling enough to have you think that Ebert was
aware that his foremost problem is not with the film but
with a world that gets sufficient kicks from energies he
finds repellent that it gives latitude to art that partake of
them, he mostly sounds as if with this essay he knows
he's successfully enunciated his own demise. The
foremost thing he did by setting out as a critic to analyze
the film, was welcome himself innocently but
conclusively to how little this changed world is going to
factor him in. It's not true that this was the last essay of
Ebert's I ever read, but it's the last one of significance he
ever did: it's tough to admire the work of someone who's
crawled into his own dark corner, out of realizing that as
considerable as he is, he hasn't the momentum to take on
a world when it isn't dialing down its emerging
preferences.
I liked Kick-Ass, just like I also liked (or rather, loved)
Refn's Drivea movie Richard Brody accused as being
inhuman, of being in love with the idea of "the poker face
as the key to success"and as well Game of Thrones, a
show Maris Kreizman argues with genuine case is for
"Star Wars fans who thought Princess Leia should have
been raped." For both bad and good reasons. The bad, or
254
at least, the regrettable reason, is because I'm not so

different from those 1930s artists who were daunted by
their predecessorsthose 1920s greats who hung out at
the Parisian cafes, like Fitzgerald, Joyce, Hemingway,
and the rest of those populating Midnight to Parisbut
grew wings when a Depression climate frowned on those
who arrogantly showed how ripe human life can be. You
watch Kick-Ass or Drive, and you know that completely
non-misanthropic critics like Ebert and Brodyboth the
highest class of loving peopleare going to find
reprehensible anyone who'd take much pleasure from
them (Brody would give you the okay, only if you liked
Brooks' gangster, and not, that is, for Ryan Gosling, the
film's style, and the 95 percent of the rest of the film).
Being someone who is bit daunted by how personality
rich these two men are, who is fascinated at what kind of
early experience enabled them to bring so much presence
to the world (it's more than their being surely firstborns), and whose inclination is to quieten myself to take
in more and more from them and maybe locate the
maybe-still-tapable source, I like films which break this
spell, which give you a sense that somehow the world has
incrementally changed, accrued, layered, so that things
that wouldn't have had much chance to distract the
attention of men like these, can find themselves irritating
them for their requiting them to swat at them or tear
through them before lunging awesomely at what they're
actually in mind to take on. It's easy to imagine them
eventually willy-nilly pinned or hopelessly entangled as
these accumulations bear downlike the great uber-man
in Prometheus stunningly blocked and enveloped by theeven-greater, great python-muscled tentacle horror that
barged in his pathif they don't find some place of
255
refuge, and you can kind of factor them out and see the
worldhowever Depression grey and stilledas your
own grounds now to range over.
Also bad, is the fact that I like the fact that films which I
know to be, maybe not precisely misanthropic, but
endorsing orientations towards the world which are
reroutes away from approaches which'd have one face
one's personal scourges and actually, like, grow, appeal to
me for the fact that they favor reroutes I know I also need
to have championed to appear ideal. They convince me
that I don't stand out too much as a self-realized, selfsatisfied douche, a bitchy demon presiding over our age
would feel the need to sweep down upon and teach a
swift scolding lesson to. She could read deep into my
thoughts, recognize that I know everything that is going
on in an age which inverts what is goodself-realization
for the badself-sacrifice/diminutionknow that I
ultimately want Her gone for inhibiting something as
precious as a human life, and at such an awesome scale,
but still pat me on the head as no threateven give me a
lift, if I needed one, and smile genuinely to mebecause
She knows I'm still broken sufficiently that I'll need her
"fix" like all the rest of them. This means that when
someone like Brody chastises a film like Skyfall for
something that may well be regrettable, and that I should
want to be the kind person who like him had instantly
noticed, I'm actually glad that at the moment it hadn't
occurred to me.
Specifically, when he writes,
ThecolossalchasescenethroughIstanbulatthebeginningof
256
SkyfallrecallstheescapethroughShanghai,earlyinIndiana
JonesandtheTempleofDoom,withpushcartsoverturned,
merchandisescattered,terrifiedbystandersdivingforsafety.
Spielbergoffensivelyturnedordinarypeoplegoingabouttheir
businessintojustsomuchconfettiforhisspectacleexactly
thesortofcavaliercolonialerabravadothatmighthave
repelledafilmmakerwhostartedhiscareerinthelatesixties.
Plusachange:Skyfall,too,scattersIstanbulsresidentsand
theirgoodslikebowlingpins.Fromthestart,SamMendes,the
directorofthelatestinstallmentof007,provesfaithfulto
tradition,yetnotalwaysthebestofthattradition.
I realized him to be like the sober peasants in Monty
Python's Holy Grail, who made clear King Arthur's
requisiting them not just for directions but for
confirmation of his own grandiose status, or like the
whole feel of the Lancelot bit in the film, where Lancelot's
a crazed loon with a sword, hacking away at an innocent
assembly of peacefully gathered people, for a point he'd
actually end up staunching himself in retreat from. But
the point is that I evidently enough relate to the fantasy
of being someone inflated that when you see the like in a
film, you're too much enjoying and partaking in his
paving through swaths of less-mattering people to be
instantly critical or self-reflective of what he'd just done
to the actually probably quite fulsome people around
him.
Same thing applies, especially, with Brody's superb
criticism of Drive, where he argued that "Refn doesnt
seem interested in pain but in its inflictionspecifically,
how blank-faced, soft-spoken people manage to commit
mayhem and, at the moment of violent outburst, stay
257
fixed on their plan and maintain a fearsome calm in the

face of disgusting gore." Yes, absolutely true: Refn clearly
enjoys that Ryan Gosling's ostensibly accommodating,
becalming, boyish manner, can be exploded so
conclusively that anyone who might privilege their own
interests through it find themselves unable to handle
whom he has revealed to them as a good part of his core,
and he's got them now in a position where they'll never
be quite sure about him; always a bit fretful and fearful,
prepared to disengage and let "you" be free, so you can
decompress and relax in your own space, the moment
you show any hint of being tweaked from normal. He
enjoys creating protagonists who experience other
people's startled pulling back, like as if it's at this
point where you can begin to form a friendship with
them, if it would still take, and they remain interested,
because you now know them well enough from what they
have revealed to youyou've had that advantagebefore
you revealed the dragon-self they've actually also to
tangle with (something akin to Black Widow's technique
in the Avengers). And I know what that is about. One of
my favorite characters from fiction was once Severian,
from Gene Wolfe's Shadow of the Torturer, and this was
him to a T. Just as soon as you think you've got him
pegged, and are moving on with your further plans, he
shows what he's been hiding, and does the like of
surprising you by punching your nose-bone into your
brain. And though I'm aware enough of it's immaturity,
or rather, its origins as a defense mechanism against
abuse, like the "ignoring of emotions of others and the
crawling inside boxes and clinging to hard surfaces and
mechanical devices in place of relating to caretakers"
(deMause, "Why males are more violent") that autists do,
258
I can't quite stand outside a film like Drive and find it

hard to slip Gosling's character on. Rather, it is a bit
more the character Brody actually likes in this film,
Albert Brooks' gangster, whom I am prone to engage with
rather secondarily.
Brody makes the gangster out to be a horror, "[some]one
whose professional identity emerges, tantalizingly, only
by degrees," but he isn't, like Gosling, the guy who
disengages and puts the cold-face on, but rather the
saddened older guy who realizes there's really no other
option for him, and so does what he has to, still himself
the whole while. Indeed, when he forks and knives a guy
repeatedly to death, in a scene of massive violence and
emotional heat, it's as if it's more his way of displacing
his anger at his partner, who caused the problem but who
just can't any longer suffer himself the gore, like a
husband requited to killing the pest in the tub or who was
eating away at the yew bush, that he had no real truck
withthat is, more a manner of communicating, to
someone else, like a hard-slammed door, than it is your
spelling a hard lesson to whom you're directly accosting.
Gosling, on the other hand, when he kicks and crashes in
the skull of the assassin fallen before him, has entered
some other kind of state, separated from emotions, with
even his nearby beloved completely momentarily out of
the picture; and it is only afterwards that he can regroup
himself to something human like earnest communication
even though you've surely fallen back by then, probably
concussed into pitiful trembles and nervous quivering,
and on your way to actually running away.
How the hell could I orient more towards Gosling than
259
Brooks in this film, you ask? Because Gosling in this

picture is more drawn from wounding than Brooks is,
and I relate, and whatever love I've gathered since then
hasn't quite become sufficient that I tilt more the other
way. This means that I expect a good portion of my life
has still been too much about a re-route than about a
healthy full-on engagement with a logical path, and this
means any god on the lookout for anyone treading
disallowed hallowed grounds and heaping and
integrating life riches found there-on into his life
drawers, might temporarily fix on meor even quite a bit
but ultimately desist, contented in my non-threat, like
the momentarily confused military drone in Oblivion.
This isn't exactly the right comparison, but I won't be due
to be a Bradley Manning; which is the way I need to have
it.
And now to the good. To the good reason that is, for
liking or loving films that enormously astute and
psychologically healthy critics like Ebert and Brody are
bound to find offensive and largely unenjoyable. There
are some periods of human existence, where, as I
mentioned concerning the 1930s, all the great artists
sound about opposite the great artists who thrived just
before, when humanity was involved in some kind of true
renaissance period. These typesthe actual lessersdo
in this instance have the advantagethe times are behind
them, for them, and it means for them they see, they
experience, a landscape of fresh things they might
explore, rather than blockages, howling spirits
instructing them on how despite their whatever genius,
they're not wanted, they don't matter, and they're no
goodnow try to do your best work with this holy hell of
260
shit on your tail! So artists like Walker Evans, who

thought humanity so spoiled it needed to be taught the
Depression lesson, thrived, and artists like Fitzgerald,
whose blood was Jazz-Age, began to wilt. If you look at
30s films from the perspective Ebert and Brody show
towards Kick-Ass and Drive (or that Maris Kreizman
shows towards Game of Thrones), as you show up every
director for their potential amorality, their dispirit, their
exploitation, their dehumanization, you'll be showing up
a lot of what turned out to be the best films of the era.
42nd Street made people into "cogs in a wheel"
(Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark), it took away their
worth as individuals, favoring only what they counted for
as part of a collectiveit kind of was a Nazi film: and
Busby Berkeley was great 30s innovation, for example.
And critics who could only point out the bad and not
recognize that increasingly it is from sour motives that
real art is increasingly to be found, have surely come to
their terminus: If it's not humans but oily kaiju masters
who are making the better 'bots, no matter how much
you hate them, you've got to be at least be able to
recognize this. Brody thought Drive a poor movie, with
only one thing going for it; Ebert showed no sense of how
exciting and out-of-the-blue Kick-Ass was; and years
later you go about and talk to bank-tellers, retail workers,
average joesmovie goersyou watch how they light up
when you talk about these movies: they were favorites of
the year, for many. So, concerning Ebert (I know, I know
rest in peace) and Brody, and their likewise actually
wonderful ilk ... do we keep them? One begins to think
no, lest we come across something awful they spelled out
about friggin' Game of Thrones, a world-wide beloved
phenomenon, for Heaven's sakes, and feel compelled to
261
seek them out and torture them out of their eyes and ears
to demonstrate our point that clearly for them, their
owning them no longer much matters.
I don't remember a single particular moment of Kick-Ass
I especially enjoyed; it was more how surprised I was,
how excited I was, to see a film-maker just truck on
through a landscape of horror like it was all just so what?
Yeah, a pre-teen is carving up bodies and having a heap
of funif this sounds like something you've got to work
yourself up for an entire movie to be ready for, you're
dark ages, because this director instructed us to the fact
that a whole bunch of talent is about to take it as nothing
really special. So, if in good times, when artists do this,
make inroads into taboo turf, this means they're
exploring hush-hush topics like racism or adult sexual
relations, then in the badtimes of purgatoryit's going
to mean going the distance with things likely to wound
more evolved predecessors. So if you're looking for
people making inroads, then these days when artists put
butterfly-knives into the hands of children and explore
what they do with them, or not pull away when the
barbarian horde does its pillaging and raping, but instead
lets the cameras role on and even go for grim close-ups,
here perhaps most especially is where you're going to find
it. The reasons they're being explored are surely sordid,
but you couldn't work with this material beforefor
reasons that were never truly convincingso you should
be able to find some way, through watching their
explorations of it, how it might someday be made to work
in a humanist sense.
Kick-Ass 2 doesn't provide that same sense of a taboo
262
territory confidently being repossessed for public use,

though from what it does in the beginning, I was actually
a bit surprised at this. The movie begins with the villain
accidently-on-purpose killing his mother, and donning
her clothing for his next super-villain persona. Any time a
villain does this, adopts a mother-persona, it usually
means that this character is going to be given greater
latitudes than you'd normally expect. This will be true for
a 1960's film like Psycho, but especially true for any film
emerging out of a Depression period. Depressions are all
about a population punishing itself for having taken too
many cookies from the cookie-jar previously, and it's
pretty much lived as if there isn't anything you do that
your righteous mother with her tightly gripped rollingpin isn't felt to be watching over. The last thing you're in
the mind to do, that is, is say anything derisive about her,
no matter what the hell she might be up to, and you're
not about to take advantage of her likeness in film to
overtly show what you really think of her abuses. Instead,
you'll see the likeness, and immediately take advantage of
this opportunity to manifest a repentant attitude, and not
say a word no matter how many how many
transgressions she pulls, no matter how many cookies
disallowed to you, she swallows down herself. Brody
could watch a film like Skyfall and point out M's rather
arrogant "clinging to her position," which actually made
things worse, but the rest of humanity, be sure, stayed
mum. Yes, the rest of humanity was also secretly joyous
when she gets disposed of at the finish, and that, thank
god, an affect-dialed-down male lead is left in charge of
operations, while Brody was free of any such malice, but
Brody was casually telling the emperor off to her face,
with his not even being aware he'd done anything
263
especially inopportune: which you just dont do.

The boy arch-villain, Motherfucker, isn't actually the one
given any latitude; he aims at one point to rape someone,
Night Bitch, who'd been set up as if already abusedwith
her perpetual nervous trepidationand as akin to the girl
in a horror movie who's doomed to be slain for her being
sexually active, and thus part of the cohort that are
usually not in geek films spared humiliations but rather
made to feel susceptible to being bitch-slapped
consummated into fully ravaged victims. But his penis
fails him, and she ends up being denied her ill-fate by the
someone present who probably could have been shown
raping her, with a strap-on, and with the camera not
feeling the need to fret and pull-away, as if it's got sure
protection for its plainly powerful-indulging, evilpurposed scrutiny. Specifically, Mother Russia, the
gargantuan villain recruited into Motherfucker's service,
who's not like a brute in a Bond film in service to the
mastermindclearly a number twobut rather more like
Kraken to Poseidon, a vastly dwarfing entity, who's show
is now its own once released into the film. It felt strange
that the movie handed the mother's mana all to her, after
it had just set up Motherfucker as the mother-visaged
psycho due surely for a number of personally inflicted
massacresthough I got the point behind this afterwards
but regardless, Mother Russia is the bad bully mother
in this film, whom geeks fear so much you should explore
their decision to converge in basement-caves at the onset
of real world-beckoning adolescence, as owing to it. She's
Iron Man inflated to 400 percent power, she's the
adrenaline hit that Hit Girl takes later, to enable drama
to potentially take place that without her it wouldn't
264
dare.
The key scene in the film, the only one maybe worth rewatching on Youtube, is when the gang of villain elites
marches into the suburbs, each one an arrogant sure
shell of ego for essentially standing behind the power of
their way highest paid, Mother Russia. She's going to get
to do anything she wants, is what you feel, and it may be
the movie's encouraging you to feel this way, to be
reminded that moods can take over people where
trespasses can be effected, and the world thereafter just
can't placidly reset, is what it deserves credit for, and not
really with what it shows done within this protective
cloud of latitude. She launches a lawn-mower into the
face of a police-officer, and gives you the same sense that
the first Kick-Ass at times did with Hit Girl and Big
Daddy, that this just happened: in real life, someone like
her, a real human being, could have come out of the blue,
and done this. They're ridiculously costumed, and theyre
striding into the suburbs as if conquerors of Rome, but
it's not, it's not, simply funny. You cant quite comic book
them, which makes the scene feel kind of awesome.
Mother Russia is ostensibly in the film to be an
appropriate foe for Hit Girl, but she's really in it for this.
This said, the fact that Mother Russia dwarfs everyone
else who is also part of the elite club of villains, helps
make another of the film's points. What Kick-Ass
suggested has been already terminated: we're not in
the mood to inflate geeks so they might pass as true
super-heroes, but for splitting them off into the sliver few
the 1%who are undeniably awesome, and the rest,
who even with costumes on and trained, look like they're
265
just waiting for someone truly skilled to take them down

for their silly pretense, la what you felt was partly at
work when Night Bitch gets paid that grim visit at the
hospital, and what was behind even mafia-trained
Colonel Stars and Stripes surprisingly quick exit from the
film. To me, it's amazing the movie would want to go this
way, but it didand with confidence. It gets right that
what we wanted was for Hit Girl to receive what looked
like her due in the original Kick-Ass, to not properly
belong in any movie too much owned wholly by geeks.
When she rides off alone at the finish, she's the 18-yearold with the physical capacity now, to fit right into the
Avengers without blinking, with a big-league foe played
by a big-league actor, taunting her, rather than
essentially unadulterated nobodies and Hollywood
castaways. And if she surprised us in Avengers 2 by
serving as Black Widow's replacement, we'd calculate the
actresses' already-stardom, as well as what she's surely
due; consider her character's superlative killing out of
Kick-Ass; and actually probably let her do the
unthinkable and be the only one you're ever likely to see
in a Depression period, rise from the slums and get to
keep their stay.
Be warned, however, that though it looks like she's off to
the big time, it's not quite true to say she's leaving
everyone else behind. All the other heroes drop their
super-hero garb and personas, but they don't sulk back
into the individually bullied. Rather, they take the other
empowered end of the super-hero stick that the last
Depression periodthe one that gave birth to
superheroes in the first placeenabled. Specifically, like
the last Depression gave us Captain America and
266
Superman, it also ended up giving us the people as folk,

or in Germany, as volk. That is, the people ended up
being the depersonalized "cogs in a wheel" that Dickstein
rightly laments, but these same cogs ended up feeling
that as an anonymous legion they were empowered
together as something all-pure, all-powerful, and allvirtuouslook into the New Deal era, or, sorry, the Nazi
vision of "people's community," to get some sense of this.
Every one of the heroes are shown indistinguishably back
in their street clothes, amongst the mass, but one feels
that when "filth" passes by them, they're going to be at
liberties to disassemble them that you just couldn't
imagine. Here's where an awful lot of latitude is going to
fall over the next number of years, and I think we feel this
at the end of the filmhow Dr. Gravity, surrendered of
his "Superman" and contented in his "Clark Kent, "
almost eclipses Hit Girl's racing off to her own individual
future in Manhattan, when he smiles to participate in a
righteous lynching. If his skills were a bit better, he'd fit
in with Coulson's crew of black-garbed, non-glam agents,
which as we know, no one's passing over for its
possessing serious, serious legs.
Posted by Patrick Hallstein / McEvoy-Halston at 4:05 PM No
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Labels: 42nd st., Dancing in the Dark, Game of Thrones, Gene Wolfe,
Kick-Ass, Kick-Ass 2, Monty Python, morris dickstein, Oblivion,
Prometheus, Richard Brody, roger ebert, Shadow of the Torturer,
267
Skyfall, the Avengers
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
Blue Jasmine
Blue Jasmine
One thing I was not really fair to, to my experience of
Elysium, is how impressed I was by how it accurately
conveyed, that if you're not amongst those essentially
expected to live as if there is no constraint upon them
all smiles, celebrations, new restaurants, and "isn't life
the greatest!"are outside the fortuned 1%, if you ever
dared offering up any sass, any reflection about how you
truly feel, you'll follow it with a thousand embarrassing
surrenders to whatever authorities might expect of you,
hoping that way to abet an executioner's suddenly raised
strike from tilting to ultimately fall down on you, and cast
you out from a life that still has the bearing of relevance,
however spit upon and dim a one. There's a worse fate
than being a factory worker at a job-place that truly
believes not a one of them is particularly valuable in what
he does, each one to be replaced by another, if need be, as
can any newly purchased tool be schlepped in to replace a
lost one. If you somehow still seem part of a story, can
count yourself part of something, inclusion and purpose
can keep you sane. If you're outside of one, with the
world around you moving with purpose, there's no
socially acceptable narrative for you to count as your own
in which to unconsciously share and funnel your
perplexing life afflictions into, and they just keep popping
up, your insufficiently addressed life afflictions, all the
268
time, at scary conscious level, and are alone to you. And if

your being in sync to no one means the like of you
suddenly rehearsing something you said, or something
someone else said, out loud, you're going to tether out
pretty close to crazy-town for most people, which in
today's world will bring not empathy but shock "therapy,"
to kill that strange buzzing aberration dead that appeared
rather startlingly out there on the street to affront us.
The tragedy of Jasmine, is that she has acuity, some
potential to articulate precisely how things are, which
with the help of her summoned kindness can take other
people out of life patterns that are "solutions" which
enable them to live, but which themselves cry out to be
solved as well. Almost as soon as she lands on her sister's
doorstep, she knows her sister's life, her friends, her
community, fully rightly. She's stumbled into a morass,
but one that if she hangs on tight and bears it to the best
of her ability, will bear her enough so she can evolve the
extenuations required to finally once again get some full
bracing against the world. She might try applying herself
to her surroundings, but since up close they're befudging
nullity, which brings to the person who is able to
summon considerable momentum to understanding
them the feeling of having summoned a great wave that'll
break its barrier with so little resistance it now requires
its own taxing down, the solution is better to drink when
she has to, Xanex herself when she has to, and just gain
the proclivity necessary to downscale the nerve-stressing
constant attenuations of a help center-type job, so she
can build up the protein-juice resources inside herself
from which promising extenuations might eventually
sprout.
269
She has terrible luck. The one thing that could still get
her once she has recuperated sufficiently from her pasts
great heave of traumas and developed the ability to work
as a receptionist--and so survive regardless if her sister
stopped hosting her--was if something arrived that
looked to instantly take her away from this lifemake it
all seem like some extra-long but still now forever gone
nightmare, into which she was insanely transported but
now from which she has neatly danced her way out. And
with her meeting Peter Saarsgard's Dwight, she goes allin with this perfect way out. When she accidently meets
her sister's former husband on the street, we see what
this way out would have cost her. Caught out, she can in
instant defense show how alive she can be to other
people's motivations, and seem instantly adult. But since
this means having to reckon with things she did
horrible things, like losing a deserving hard-working
mans very realistic opportunity for a more enfranchised
life; like in a moment of venom alerting authorities about
something she was always at some level aware of but
hadnt blown the whistle on until it seemed perfect spite,
which killed her husband, spiraled her son into thinking
a forgotten cave is better than spending one moment
further outside, and undid her whole lifeshe can't help
but take the bait to be as if still ordained by a rigid law of
the universe to recover to be the Blue-Jasmine, perfectprincess again.
At the end she's on the street, dead eyes, and babbling.
Somewhere on the horizon a crew will soon appear to
diagnose her as needing to have her head shocked from
one planet to the next, leaving her in a permanent daze,
270
puddling drool down the front of her cream blouse and

Chanel jacket. But it's appropriate she just gives up. The
universe clearly has it in for her. She was right that her
sister would find for herself a better mate once she
judged herself worth a bit better, but her first magical try
with this ended so traumatizingly she ensconced herself
even harder with whatthank god!was still available to
her. This meant Jasmine's presence would be thereafter a
reminder of a conscious decision on her part to force
herself to believe this was whom she was naturally right
for. This meant Jasminewho reflects back at her now,
clearly justified mockerywould have to be out of her
life hard. Jasmine couldn't pick herself up from this, and
go back to the certainly plausible and now already partly
traveled path of becoming a decorator, because
sometimes you're just handed too many blows, and
you've got to just sit down, give up, and let yourself be
broken down by the universe to be reconstituted into
something which actually has purpose. (The only salve
temporarily available to you is that you might
humorously blow at the ants taking bits of you away, like
Ron Perlman's puffing at the legion of flames already up
the wood-ladder and eating at him in Name of the Rose,
so a clearly humorless God has the humiliation of having
to chow down on some farce before he takes you.) We felt
for her when sheso long a time a natural denizen of the
most sophisticated richwas brought down to being a
sales clerk serving her former friends, which is like
becoming a maid-servant after having once been a
duchessis usually a kind of humiliation you're made to
suffer just before being executed, like being raped. Truly,
its amazing she managed. We certainly knew what she
meant when, after being accosted and groped by her
271
dentist boss, someone she had expended every frenzied

effort to communicate was not someone she wanted to
get intimate with, she just couldn't bear to take to court.
We knew how she felt when she requested more silence
and solitude in her sister's home, with her really, truly,
having expended every effort to make this a last-ditch
recourseher ability to neuter down her own proclivity
to just arrogantly own whatever space around her, had
been commendable: her sister needed to speak up then,
and the guys needed to go to the bar insteadany
recourse away from that would have been universal
indignity.
The universe moves on, and eventually society recovers
its poise and actually cares about people again. This
becomes a time for true therapy, where if you babble to
yourself so you are aware of the specific instances which
afflict you, this is actually an asset therapists would use
to make sure they zero in on you more preciselyits like
being able to describe your dreams with precision. This
becomes a time that the story to be told when someone
like Jasmine falls into your life, is how she, despite her
flaws, improved you for the better, before she hefted
herself off to a world she after all was more natural to:
more Mary Poppinsor better, Cold Comfort Farm. The
problem with purges of the kind were experiencing now,
is that its going to leave us with fewer Jasmines when
were actually in mind to appreciate them. Seriously, a
good number of our babblers are actually going to be
amongst our best, but just tragically untethered from
madnesses we use with proficiency to assure ourselves
sane--like what happened to Fitzgerald in the '30s, when
a world thought things like fascism sane.
272

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Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Elysium
Elysium
When Matt Damon's Max encounters the kids who
surround him hoping for money, there's a tiny bit of
tension in the moment, like what we've got is a wildlife
encounter between a mature bear and a curious pack of
wolves, which should end with maybe one nip or a loud
roar, or maybe some mutual entertainment, but could
potentially go horribly wrong. But as soon as Max drops
them a bit of money, we understand that in this movie, if
you're of the dispossessed kids, are elderly, or a woman,
you'll understandably do what you can for a bit to eat, but
you're all earnest and good, even if choked down some
for being so always scared. Guys can get rangier, but are
not more interesting for it: unless of course that they'd
get a kick out of an exoskeleton being drilled and bolted
into you is going to make you look even uglier and cause
273
you a great deal of pain, is for you a show that they're

"complicated." So there really is nothing about the people
left behind on this overcrowded, desert planet, that is
interesting, and there's not much to our hero: who serves
up samples of guesstimated-minimal-necessary shows of
the abeyance and cowering and obliging that he has to
do, lest he lose the one thing that gives him some
satisfying edge over everyone else on the planethis
having a joband just seems to add more and more pussfilled wounds to his large, fatigued mass, as he goes about
the movie. He has sufficient pulling strength to ensure
the narrative moves and so we don't feel permanently
caught in this awful place, and that's really about it.
He says he wants to live, and that's why he wants to get to
Elysiumto have his radiated, disintegrating organs, all
in a magical moment, repaired. And of course this means
he'll end up sacrificing his life and not living, even if he
can't say, like Robert Kazinksy's also-ultimately-selfsacrificing Chuck Hansen plausibly does in Pacific Rim,
that he rather enjoys living his life. But the character who
really shows the kind of exhilarating heft that comes from
not passively letting a world turn ill-fortune toward you,
is of course evil-agent Kruger, who takes upon his taking
over the space-station command with the same
persuasive suavity as his swaggering a three-shooting
missile-launcher into launching position, to down three
ships that would have been traumatized a space station
as if befelled by an insect invasion, if he didn't stop them
short before arrival.
It's not really Jodie Foster's Delacourt, that is. There's
something about these overt mother-types in current
274
movies, that whatever their momentary grandiosity,

makes them feel from the start horribly doomed. Like M
in Skyfall and Crystal in Only God Forgives, who also
looked to possess the acumen to persist and thrive in
their positions, they're hit with some kind of wounding
accusation that's set them up for some kind of justified,
necessary, coup-de-grace by the end of the film. Theyve
leveraged themselves in an un-allowed way so
profoundly, that even if most men still part around them
or out of fear pretend to keep faith with themonly
offering up at-best glancing blows so that only other
empowered women might hit them by mid-point with
something more solidan executioner has been let loose
in the world that's going to get them, even if not
themselves left in the end to be an ongoing hero. They
can dwarf whole male hierarchies for awhile, but
something about their being all alone while a whole
world waits to get behind a single moment of seeming
narrative necessity, makes it feel like they can for sure be
taken out.
Once shes out in this film, Kruger soon goes too. And so
we have a bunch of androids bringing medicine down to
huge hoards of dispossessed people, who of course oblige
their weakest to get their remedies first. Somewhere
some village boy shows appreciation, but kind of
preferred when the space ships aired but got blown up in
spacethat was cool, mom! And the other villagers
gather around and stone him, and not a spark of
interesting doubt ever showed itself in this universe for a
millennium of years. The men are dumb while the
women are smart--but since this just means they go
nurse rather than ambition doctor, male anxieties remain
275
soothed.
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Wednesday, August 7, 2013
Only God Forgives

Only God Forgives
If you've suffered from being used incestuously by your
mother as you became a young man, Ryan Gosling's
character Julian shows what you might do in
recompense. One, get away from your mother, like a long
way awayThailand's good. Two, find yourself in
structures that seem as if a bunker and are labyrinthine,
and where the wall patterns are like compact shelves of
ancestors, or warding glyphs, scary to those who aren't
used to them, and maybe even partially in your favor, so
you couldn't possibly be unwillingly dragged away, and
where any intimacies you might entertain within have the
protection of carapace around yolkthey will have their
time. Three, have boys around you about the same age
you were when you were abused, and instead give them
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encouraging pats of supportfrom this, some good to

others, as well as some assuagement of your own hurts.
Four, re-explore relationships with women, but where if
you're the one submitting, it's done very gently; and
where for the most part you're just getting used to the
idea that women, that sex, can be something under your
control. Five, exist at a time when if your canny,
resourceful, you-dwarfing and daunting, war-ready
mother arrives back into your presence, masters you in
your own den, your still-existing pliancy to her means
you're the paltriest obstruction to a crusader supped on
resources of a vast conservative landscape that has once
again begun to stir: bent inwards to her, you hardly
require scything, and can pretty much be just walked
through as a righteous kill is staked.
You'll have to have something that would yoke her back
to you, though. Her out of the picture altogether, means
no chance for rapprochement, for adjusting or in some
limited fashion mastering her, so you might know for a
moment the self-assurance that would come from
knowing you had it in you to finally insist on borders, as
well as brokering for yourself a new kind of space you
might use with other people. And possibly out of
structures put in place to keep her more under your
terms, sneak in for yourself a bit of the whole scale
intimacy that boys hunt for from their mothers like
dwarves through staunches of ore to gold. And Julian has
this something with his older brother, Billy, the mother's
favorite for being the eldest, the strongest, and for
possessing a penis so large it draws awe, who for being
the favorite when this means the inverse of what it
normally does, seems incapable of immunizing himself to
277
her ingrained influence to try something like genuine

intimacy on, and is seemingly susceptible every night to
having his need to dispense his sense of being a childvictim scale over into his becoming a perpetrator of
butcheryinevitably involving someone young and
hopeful, like his once-self was, attacked so thoroughly to
form her own gross pond of parts and blood.
His succumbing to his drive to kill someone young and
vulnerable, draws his mother, Crystal, back to Thailand,
and when she arrives she stakes her claim on longassumed territory, and garners her penthouse roof suite
away from whatever hotel-precedent that would dissuade
her temporarily from it. The flowers in the background
are pink, and so too the limited, nervous, would-bescene-abating receptionist's garb, but the place never
really knew the color until she came in and showed them
what it can do worn, when affixed to even a very tired,
great lady. We have a sense that in each place shes in
subsequently, she feels so presumptive, so masterly, she
might boast that shes no longer sure she dressed to
match the dcor (which, you note, she always does) or
whether it had taken antecedent notice of what she was
in the mood for and made adjustments. Still, even with
her feeling that her claim on this section of Thailand is
broad and meaningfully unchallenged, Julian gets some
of what he would hope to acquire from her. Hes had
enough time with his girlfriend, the proud prostitute Mia,
to feel he can square it against whatever mockery his
mother might present against it, and gain the foothold of
a mother having to realize her claim on her son is itself
going to have to be adjustedeven, potentially, subjected
to the harrowing sidelining of becoming secondary. This
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is all he could possibly get from her, though, as when Mia

challenges him on why he lets himself be ridiculed by his
mother, his response to her is simply fervor: staking any
more than some presupposition against his mother
requites him back into simply being her hardest
defender.
But even as Crystal fits back into her Thailand operation,
exhaling smoke as casually and confidently in her
spacious hotel room as a dragon nestled in its adopted
den, or admiring young mens muscles like chops served
before her, she has made a miss-step: as warned, the
Thai climate is no longer one where cops can be killed,
and the best move from her would have been to have
spent less time repossessing and luxuriating, and more
time reconciling and preparing. What has changed is
ancestors and ancestral traditions, represent not so much
something that is being dissipated as a country sways
urban, but being recovered, having strength lent to it, as
people once again are finding something most true about
themselves as a race, in customs ostensibly unchanged
for generations. The movie paints this as sanity, a slow
return to decencythe ways of villages and country life
are beginning to speak again. But it admires that what it
at least as much is, is about a capacity for righteous
revenge that whatever milieu it is slowly preparing itself
to replace, would be stopped short by. You for sure like
the cop in this film, Chang, the representative and
embodiment of this renewed spirit, when he asks his
daughters baby-sitter about what she prepared his
daughter for dinnerhe respects the sweet sitter, and he
means his payment to feel well-earned, a tribute to her
(its the movie that would have us contrast this payment
279
with the exchange of money made at the beginning of the

film, which was for drugs). But your admiration for his
penchant to respect the often-overlooked but valuable is
more than curbed, when proper payment for not seeing
becomes the loss of your eyeballs, and for stubbornness,
the loss of your life. For sure around him if we were
comporting a colorful scarf, sunglasses, and carrying
tude, wed lose all such in a hurry: there are two that do
this in this film, and neither ends up doing very well.
Otherwise hed grab whatever conventional tool in his
near vicinity, and use it to instruct us on some respect
no doubt involving some permanent maiming. And as for
his second in command, theres lust in his eyes, craving:
we feel it, and its repellent.
Chang slays Crystal for her egregious presumptions on an
intrinsically modest people, and here is as sure in what
he does as many Russians are becoming in their attitudes
towards homosexuals, or British are becoming in their
hard-line intolerance of porn, or Americans are becoming
in their universal cheering-on of athletes having their
careers cut off brutally for being exposed as cheaters. If
hes a god, I insist hes a god to fear, not one to welcome
into our lives as someone doing necessary cleansing,
however sometimes hard to watch, as his executions are
often performed before us, demanding our assent. But at
least for Julian, his killing stroke to her neck stills her so
he can do something indecent but which makes sense
putting his hand inside her womb, as the child in him
nestles along maternal warmth, freed from
complications, like incest, or envelopment. This is what
he needed from his motherclose proximity, warmth,
safetyand his cunning, intuitive, brash act here might
280
even helped service a huge wound of his own. And it is

true to what I think Chang actually represents that these
hands which were ineffectual as weapons but effectual in
obtaining compensation for a parents abandonment,
may in the end have been severed from him. What really
gets Changs goat, is what is at issue with any parent who
would spank a child senseless: a child presumes.
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Labels: only god forgives
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
The Conjuring
The Conjuring
I don't know if contemporary filmmakers are aware of it,
but if they decide to set their films in the '70s, some of the
affordments of that time are going to make them have to
work harder to simply get a good scare from us. Who
would you expect to have a more tenacious hold on that
house, for example? The ghosts from Salem, or us from
2013, who've just been shown a New England home just a
notch or two downscaled from being a Jeffersonian
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estate, that a single-income truck driver with some

savings can afford? Seriously, though it's easy to credit
that the fatherRoger Perronwould get his family out
of that house as fast as he could when trouble really stirs,
we'd be more apt to still be wagering our lossesone
dead dog, a wife accumulating bruises, some good scares
to our kidsagainst what we might yet have full claim to.
The losses will get their nursingeven the heavy
traumas, maybeif out of this we've still got a house
really, a kingdommultimillionaires might blanche at
trying to acquire, while at a time when even those a scale
up from truck-drivers probably can't even afford a runt
house and are surely just renting, like runt peasants of
old.
Normally, I think it's likely that if everyday sort of people
are presented to us in film, we're more likely to identify
with them, and wish ourselves more akin to whatever
more possessedcoolercharacters are also about. Not
so true with this film, though, as Ed and Lorraine Warren
the paranormal expertsare about as chastised and
wary as we tend to be. They are the type who when they
describe their wedding night sex, sound like those who if
they added a few extra raisons in with their porridge
would feel like they've made a guilty trespass, with
pleasure beyond that, something they're now
permanently apart from. They are the type who can make
their basement into a hold for a Dante's Inferno worth of
evil-possessed artifacts, each one a trauma of a whole
family (at least) being slaughtered, and have it not feel
like they have too much to be concerned about. There's a
kind of immunity to further harm, it would seem, if you
go about like as if you've already ingested your life's
282
portioned quantity of it before you've even seen much

grey hair reflected back at you in the mirror. If life has
poisoned you near mortally when you're still at the point
where you should still resonate optimism and promise,
all the demonic uglies will part around you in thorough
disinterest and seek preferable preysomething that will
empower you as if a pillar they've got to nonetheless still
recognize and be inconvenienced by in their having to go
around, and a lesson which also felt right in if-youingest-yourself-with-malaria-it's-likely-you're-going-tobe-okay World War Z. The Devil is interested in those
who affront by being ripe with lifenot, that is, with you.
The Perron family is that, however. With their large
brood, pet dog, ambitious home, and pretentions to being
entirely self-sufficient and nuclear, they're the post-war
American dream. And so they're exactly the sort the Devil
would chase down even if they didn't set up shop in one
of his Earthly abodes. This is effectively what happens in
the film, by the waysomeone's being chased down. Only
in this film it's after what one person in particular has
achieved for herself: the mother, Carolyn. She has
achieved a glorious family, with her favorite life moment
being a time with them at the beach, with it already clear
to her that with them she had everything she'd ever
wanted. This moment is used to lend strength to her
when it looked like she was going to go all witch, but it is
also the one that ensured her a regressed, beautyshunted, generation-older woman would afflict her by
trying to undo it as well. The great beast in this film is
simply a mother's mother. We don't traffic in psychology
which once had the momentum and the guts to face it,
but when pretty much every mother has a child, she has
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simultaneously something all her own as well as a cruel

visit by someoneher mothertelling her to dispatch it,
slit its throat or beat it senseless, and come back fully to
her. It's near every woman's experience, as she desists
against her mother's need to continue lifelong supplying
her her own unmet needs for attention and love, and
instead presumptively chases down her own; and it's
something science and-so-not-just-folklore has
fortunately pinned down as an actual existing thing we all
have to reckon withspecifically, the postpartum.
Few women talk about it, but it's something nearly all
women near at conscious level come to know. And which
their guys will no doubt remain oblivious to, as women
decide sharing would show themselves devils to faces
that will never, ever, understand, and remove them from
life anchors needed to compact the great acquisition of
their own family down. So couples go about their childblessed, married lives, never shorn of near-justified
mockery, represented by what lies beneath. She's out
there, though. Your spurned mother is out there. And
from unaddressed quarters in places you have the good
sense to be wary of, she's hoping still to hatch her
requisition for your love and the full loss of everything
you preferred to have lent your love to.
P.S. One of the comforts in the film is in its instructing us
on how much better it is to desist in anything hubris, and
instead join convention. We've got two paranormal
researchers ... who bow completely to Catholic tradition.
It's like they're not so much aberrant as they are
representative, of what a church has taken seriously for
centuries before the modern fuck-you. They're all fidelity,
284
that is. And in this film, along with beingtenement-like

amongst a crowd of other people, an extended family
rather than selfishly nuclear, doesn't this feel like the safe
place to be? That is, when the Catholic church agrees
with the researchersseems of the same base perspective
and wave-lengthdon't we feel sorry for those who were
never baptized and have now got to depend on leniency
to not be left to being tortured and soul-fucked by a
scary-as-shit assassin, in complete sadistic control?
I'm not a Catholic, and in fact on my own time read the
presumptuous, self-satisfying John Updike, who would
seem to support every self-pleasure, every I-love-youhoney-but-your-concerns-and-needs-are-not-exactlybeing-factored-here orgasm, that would make a Catholic
fret and recoil from upon witnessing, but this film will
move me to cross myself a bit more in public, I suspect. I
think I'm going to need to have some of the demonpossessedeven if only the dumber onespresume me
one of their own. I'm just one brick amongst a heraldic
company of others. Dont tell me all alone I might be
sandstone serendipitous sculpture!
The Wolverine
The Wolverine
It may be that what Wolverine would need to recover
from dealing with foes on the scale of a Magneto or a
Dark Phoenix, is find himself amidst an environment
where no one he comes across looks like he or shed
present much of a problem to that great big bear we
encounter at the beginning. Its a pisser that that venom
woman can spit into him a spider that cancels his
285
healing, because otherwise the movie looked like one for

Wolverine to remind himself he could reasonably just
vacation himself through an onslaught of angry swords,
guns, and knives. Truly, other than this one deadly ability
from the venom woman, mutants here seem so
downscaledany ordinary guy, good with a sword, would
seem just as much a problem. So if all he needed to get
past Jean, was to get some soothing attention from a
humbled, lovely girl, who you know is incapable of even
making a loud gesture let alone bursting into a fiery,
taunting, red-headed demon-woman, then this trip to
Japan was just what he needed. Only, this environment
was one that could infest him with a parasitic tickthe
spiderhe couldnt possibly have worried about
incurring while living cave-man in Alaskan woods (btw,
when he removed it, were you too thinking of the slicing
open of a salmon and the removal of guts? Maybe I did
so out of fidelity to that great bear.). And because of it,
while Japan might requit him back to womennear
literally through baby stepsit still reminds him of how
badly human beings can suck.
Think on what he had invited upon himself here. He had
once saved the life of a manYashidafrom nuclear
explosion. After this, he had the presence of mind to
realize that this mans honor might still be vulnerable
his fellow officers had hari-karied themselves, in ritual
recognition of their endand manages to refute his
offering up of his family heirloom sword in a sublimely
honor-salvaging, appropriate way: he makes it seem that
his keeping it is just his taking care of it for awhile until
he comes backafter his eventual deathto reclaim it, a
plausible enough scenario. What a sublime offering he
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gives this young officer, and Yashida makes use of the

rest of his life to become a great industrial leader and the
father of a great clan. What he does to Wolverine in
recompense is beyond the pale. He lures Wolverine to his
home in Japan, tugging once more on how brilliantly
being from a honorable culture can be used to
inconvenience anyone with a sense of decency. Then
when Wolverine gets there, he tugs once more: not so
much by security reacting to him like he might be a threat
though this was a way of soiling someone you are
supposed to veneratebut by ensuring he gets a
monstrously-thorough scrub-down before meeting him,
which can play as just Japanese custom but also as
someone using excusable means to show you through
your constant honoring of expectation, that your proper
role is as a supplicant: with your suffering yet one more
inconvenience, how sure are you that your most
profound instinct is actually not to submit? His piece de
resistance is of course to instruct Wolverine that his curse
is to be a warrior without a lord and so ostensibly that
what he was waiting for was not just to be sundered of his
perpetual youth and healing abilities but to be essentially
bidden to do so by a lord he had surely been lost without.
We wouldnt much admire Wolverine if he didn't finally
put up road-blocks to this manipulative idiot exactly then
and there. The whole thing plays a bit like someone
taunting someone out of envy whom he knows hes going
to have to play underhanded in order to actually get to
submit. We can imagine ourselves personally tripping
up our well-earned defenses against people in his
situation, and are in fact fully bonded to Wolverine when
he knows hes going to have to rip apart a good chunk of
287
Japan to achieve some self-esteem-salvaging, fuck-youfor-that push-backbut now without this being at all an
easy thing to achieve ... Fuck! how did we get ourselves in
this situation? It must have been stupid, stupid, stupid
me! (fists slammed repeatedly against our heads.)
The revenge motive does work in this film, and we cheer
his getting his healing powers back like we would a
recovery of our own after a masterful, humiliating play
on our own openness and gullibility. And were angry
that the film connives yet some other thing that can best
his healing powerthe poison-cauldroned arrows.
Really, we just wanted him to flip all those arrowed to
him, to him, so he could mince them like fan blades; and
for the rest in the film, melt through any foe presented to
him as quickly and easily as through butter.
Those who made the film seem stunningly unaware of it,
but the idea that anyone should buy into pressing
arguments that it is time for them to die, is given pretty
powerful refutation by the setting of the film. In a
flashback, we saw a good part of a Japanese city
destroyed at a time when aggressive nations were taking
their defeat as a sign that their cultural history was over
that it was time for them to die (indeed, during WW2
Germany's last days tens of thousands committed suicide
the largest mass suicide in history). Yet the movie is
mostly set at a time when the city has long past taking
even this in stride. Sometimes the harridon that is
preying on you finally desists, not for your finally
confronting it, ripping its influence away from your
heart, but for its having finally had its fill, and falling off,
satiated. If this is what happened with him and Jean,
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maybe he should desist being the warrioras as

admirable a course as this seemed for himand head
back to better know his young new Japanese girlfriend.
He might go through a long lovely spell with her, and be
totally demon free.
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Labels: the wolverine
Pacific Rim
Pacific Rim
The movie Amadeus argued that when a protective,
tolerant environment is nurtured, genius that otherwise
might have been cowed from developing, can gain the
confidence it needs to come to life. Pacific Rim argues the
same. If Earth is up against an alien force that'll crush it
unless it reaches the pinnacle of the one thing that has
been instrumental in blocking itthe drift between two
well-matched individualsthen relationships, deep
bonds, are going to need to be given the allowance
needed to develop and ripen.
If it wants to die, that is, it would replace the one
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program that got humanity excited in its ability to match

the adapting alien invadersthe Jaeger programwith
one that feels anti-innovative rather than innovative, one
that substitutes a you're-lucky-to-have-this-job
environment for one where all humanity felt part of a
team. You'd build a wall, that is, where people dying
while working on it is both bad and good news (someone
diedbut left an opening!). And which when busted
through by an alien in one hour, simultaneously both
dispirits and gives a lift: One looks at the alien's physical
resemblance to the Sydney Opera House it incurs
immediately after breaking through, and you think not
just of its mockery of it but of how great if would be if
conjured now was something on our side which more
aptly responded to it.
It is met by just that Jaeger. And what begins a sequence
where the rulers-in-charge start scrambling, revealing
themselves as self-concerned elites and no longer being
listened to, is for sure some sense that its young pilot
Chuck Hansenmakes such quick work of it, and
conveys authoritatively that all we needed were better
pilots: alone he makes whatever people-abating
arrogance the wall-idea still possessed, wilt even further.
While the film errs, in my judgment, in not quite giving
this thoroughly arrogant Chuck Hansen his due, it
remains true that it is in good part his rightful arrogance
here which shoulders out of the way any further
contesting that the remaining Jaeger program is really all
that humanity has got left. They were quit by the same
kind of arrogance they were trying to abrogate to
themselves, a deadly "Et tu, Brute." But as perfect as it
was to have this vital young bull-dog beset upon these
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decrepid autocrats, who maybe all along have coveted the

idea of being left alone in luxurious bunkers while the
rest of humanity got crushed, it is precisely this
bullying, intimidationwhich is antithetical to the Hong
Kong Jaeger abode he is due to inhabit.
He's the best pilot, but there's a sense immediately upon
encountering the environment that presumes in Hong
Kong that his less pleasant aspects more make him rather
than Raleigh, the exposed artifact the place near wishes it
could rebury. What Admiral Stacker Pentecost is
presiding over, is a base where you respect whatever
leads to accomplishments; and especially as he patrols
down the line of the four remaining Jaegers, slowing
people down to individually consider the crafts
themselves and the crews commandeering them, he
makes clear that this can come from phenomenon that
might require a bit of work to see as exceptional. The
sense you have is that even if the Chinese crew had
relationships with the basketballs they always carried
around that seemed grossly fetishistic, that even if the
Russians never relaxed out of their stern intensitylike,
everthe respect you'd have for them would envelope
everything they presented to you in the most appreciative
manner. Pentecost doesn't direct Raleigh to attend
carefully to the genius of his scientistsin fact when
Raleigh to some extent dismisses them by saying "this is
your research division," his response isn't to defend them
but to acknowledge that "things have changed." But
implicitly he does, by how his being around them doesn't
do anything to force them to quail any of their very loud
peculiarities (it's funny how even their individual
attempts to show themselves likewise finding the other
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scientist's mannerisms and arguments bonkers, very

much work counter to purpose). It's not that he's vested
in seeing them as mad scientists, himself the calm
commander acknowledging the mad idiosyncrasies at
work in the labs, but that he knows that these are men
who have had to have had enormous fight in them to
have remained, despite the abuse they've certainly had to
shoulder, so still confident in themselves and fresh to life
(they love having people share in their cool adventures
it seems to trump every other consideration). And from
these types, even from just a couple of them, he knows
you can get giant results.
Their greatest result comes mostly from Pentecost's not
cowing one of them from doing something "rock star" on
his own, which he saw no possibilities in. He's
permissive, and an adroit protector of anyone who has
demonstrated his or her wortheven if this meant
disobeying ordersbut still of limited visionthe father
who can't quite see what his kids are capable of until in
fidelity to their own growing confidence and sense of
what they actually need, they disobey and show him. And
he's not quite in fidelity to something the film is quite
explicit in trying to communicate: his singular
leadership, his understanding of himself as a fixed point,
his tendency to encourage one person while discouraging
the other, doesn't lend to the kind of powerful dynamism
you'll find with a pairing, and in fact partakes of the
bluntness of a wall. It's as if unlike Raleigh, who one
never really understands why he could go solo
(something to do with him having such an enlarged
feminine as well as a masculine half?) or what was really
so distinguishing about his ability to do so (do most
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Jaegers lose a pilot in a fight?it wouldnt seem so), the

reason he could commander a Jaeger solo was surely
because he was never really built to be on the same
standing as other human beings in the first place. The
only way he could ride with another, it would seem, is if
the other knows hes masteredwhich doesn't really
equate to the cooperative and equal, two-hemisphere
brain analogy, and more like ego making quick work of
id. But he's still effectively protection for individuals to
eventually reach the sort of deep bonding you sense they
would be happiest and most fruitful effecting. Something
akin to very well-matched marriages between remarkable
individuals, in fact, and a giant evolution from the
pairings we'd heretofore seen, which would work more
because of what they already share with one another
passively from DNA or shared childhoods rather than
what they might eventually learn as adults to contribute
to each other.
The scientiststhe mathematician, Gottlieb, and the
biologist, Dr. Newton Geizslerknow each other's
tendencies so well, not just because of their close
proximity and because they're otherwise likely friendless,
but because each of them has with integrity taken the
subject matter they are most interested in to similar
climactic heights. When they come together in a mindbond, you know itll be a good one thatll produce very
important results because theyre not just inherently
simple people who can come together as readily but byitself as uselessly as two simple molecules or lego bricks,
but very complex but diverse, spirited matter that once
finally paired might take on a load beyond what other
minds could handle and beget a miraculous
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breakthrough. You might say that if all the other sorts of

pairings were type one to three, theirs was type four
which would of course make what happens between
Raleigh and Mako Mori humanitys type five:
our endgame Exterminator.
Previous to Makos pairing with Raleigh, memories are
shown as if they are all laid together in a neat sequence:
all settled, and a bit bland for ita newsreel youve seen a
million times that you spin through to get on with fresh
material. This is even true with what incurs between the
scientists. But it isnt true with Mako, who interjects into
Raleigh a memory sequence where a specific memory
resists any such pressing-down, arrogantly piercing any
tendency to make a settled story of it with its assertive cry
for further attendance. It isnt at first supposed to be true
with any pilotas Raleigh says, first bonds are rough. Its
a sign of inexperience that a pilot chases the rabbit
that is, unruly undealt with memories that draw you to
them. But still the film suggests that usually the way
towards control is not so much to deal with these
memories, tend to them, but rather to as quickly as
possible learn to subjugate themas if the best bonds the
program had known had come from people who could be
dissuaded from thinking much about what had
constituted them. Though he seems to appreciate that
something better could be forged, Pentecost fears taking
it on, believing there simply isnt time for it. He is moved
ultimately to give her a chance mostly in fidelity to a
promise he once made to her, but he should have
recognized that he had someone on hand who could
finally make it less of an issue. That is, though it turns
out that Pentecost sought Raleigh out because he could
294
commandeer a Jaeger solo, the film makes clear that he

should have been staking him out for the magic he could
forge with another person.
When Raleigh first meets her, we get a quick but clear
offering of what will make them develop into such a great
team. Theyre not afraid to test and challenge: she
assesses him immediately as not what she had imagined,
and he responds just as quick in Japanese, as a nod to
how the fault, the aberrance, might actually be in her. But
theres humoragreeabilityin the situation, the earned
touch, and Raleigh rests with that to make sure the
encounter becomes mostly a friendly, even charming,
well met. She doesnt fall back from her assessment that
he isnt really right to pilot the Jaeger, but when, after he
requests it, she admirably forthrightly tells him so, he
makes sure it doesnt lead to grievance but for grounds
for subsequent consideration on her part. Importantly,
when he says she might be righthe means it, and is
visibly affected, even hurt, by it, before he regroups,
which shows his respect for her ability to assess him and
the importance that he let it in. But at the same time he
has strong faith in himself, in all the conclusions come
from constant testing hes been through, and begins the
very important process for her to think that if youre too
much perfect pattern its a perfection that comes from
being denied your rightful due acquaintance with life.
If he touches her here, its going to cause quite the stir.
And with her becoming obsessed with him, with her
challenging of him taking on some of the tone of someone
whos lashing out at everybody else is really just an
expression of her increased dissatisfaction with herself,
295
and of Pentecost of someone who is quickly sliding away

from well-earned love into precarious disrespect, he has
unwound her from her over-attachment to what had been
virtuous in her long spell of respectful abeyance.
Pentecost decides to make her Raleighs partner, but his
consideration was concurrent with her beginning to
insist this must be her role as convincingly as a great
daemon new through the rift. It turns out she isnt ready
to be quickly processed into a Jaeger pilot, but also that
what Pentecost could only see as a disasterher early
trauma truncating the influence of her bond partner and
dominating her while in control of a deadly giantis
viewed by someone she has the capacity to form the
deepest bond with, if he can be made to part of even this.
Having scared everyone to death, everyone in the base
parts from her, but isolation from them but guides the
creation of a quiet cocoon where she and Raleigh can
reconnect after each one has witnessed and experienced
what has mostly constituted their current identities. This
disaster developed into a miracle youll hardly ever see in
crisis timesa profound improvement in understanding
and earned trust. And one senses in exultation after a
hard-won victory, that here between Raleigh and Mako
youve got a development, a creation of a mature bond,
youd stake against any engineers fifty diesel muscles
per muscle strand to show that humanitys fate
ultimately lies in its capacity to take on the hardest
assignment, even in pressing times. Humanity wasn't
ready to take it to the aliens, until all prudence had been
shed.
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Labels: pacific rim
Sunday, July 14, 2013
This is the End, and Summer

Self-Surrender
This is the End, and Summer Self-Surrender
I saw This is the End again, and the thing I noticed more
this time is how scary the film ends up becoming. The
lady beside me twitched as if herself hit, when a car
crashes through a guy on the street, flipping him rapidly
upwards and away to pavement as but a smashed-up
carapace due to be crunched into even more ignominious
road splatter. The film picks up again into something
really disturbing, when a devil with a massive spearing
penis subjugates Jonah Hill into a rape victim. And
afterwards it gets worse, when Seth Rogan and Jay
Baruchel find themselves without it realistically seems,
any means to innocently show the kind of self-sacrifice
and not-self love that would get them by surprise into
heaven: Craig Robinson had seemingly claimed all
possible avenue to demonstrate yourself sincerely
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repentant after knowing that this is the avenue to

abscond yourself indulgently into heaven, with his
amazing "take your panties off!" charge on the Lord of
the Rings Balrog thing. This means that while they see
many others taken safely away to a further lifetime of
new experiences and shedding of all that lied past, they'll
be left alone, with unloved destitutes without any fate,
denied even the pleasure of knowing someone intended
this barren fate for them: they were just passed
completely by as a narcissistic self-loving judge sought
out his same amongst the innumerable chastising
ponderous before him.
What happens to Rogen and Jay at this point of the film
is pathetic, though not with this saying anything undue
about either of them. It's a hard thing to be a selfpossessed, self-respecting individual, someone who
doesn't just give in when someone powerful draws down
on them; and it comes close to impossible when someone
forces you back into the experiential state of an infant
about to be abandoned for good by his parent. Rogen and
Jay will clearly do anything now to still have a chance at
being picked--there are no limits, and you can tell. And
this has nothing really to do with their belief that God can
be trusted, but owing to the intolerable fear of being left
to rot, while so many others are drawn off to God and a
halo of eternal happiness. I know they ostensibly are
those who finally learned to be true friends to one
another, but, really, who they are at the end of the film is
the guy who poked his head into Franco's house earlier,
willing to titty-fuck or be titty-fucked, if only they'd let
him in. If they were self-possessed, they would have
remained in many ways who they were earlier. Both of
298
them, we note, are at heart natural skeptics, questioners,

doubters, who serve as constant reality-checks for friends
who might be becoming lost to themselves. Even with the
Devil clearly possessing Hill, Rogen is still calling out his
friends on their arrogant presumption of the Trinity; and
his inability not to show when he thinks someone is
sounding crazy even when it compromises a moment
when it would feel good to be completely agreeable to a
bro, comes clearly through when Franco delineates his
absurd plotting for the finish of a proposed Pineapple
Express 2.
Rogen is reluctant to agree with Jay that Franco's party is
full of assholes and that his house "is a bit much," but it
certainly isn't clear that this is just his deluding himself
while the "hipster" outsider Jay has here kept his cool. At
the finish, Jay admits he was afraid to join Rogen in LA,
and it is possible that what this party is is just an LA that
would have brought a wrath upon itself for too closely
arrogating the assurance and confident self-regard that a
jealous Athenian god would have assumed for herself. Or
himself ... one wonders if the reason we are shown so
much of the various demons' gigantic phalluses owes as
some kind of quitting response to Franco's own sculpture
one. In retrospect we realize that not one of the
partygoers was chosen into heaven--it's the only way they
wouldn't have credited Jay's accounting of what had just
happened to them. And for a moment Franco, nestled in
his cozy "throne" chair, with his whole company of
grateful, happy, beautiful friends by his side, for good
reason draws Rogen to doubt what he might have seen or
even turn his back knowingly on Jay: two presentations
of considerable power have just been handed him, and
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considering the former involved people dying horribly

and a night sky filled with pockets of beaming
"spaceship" lights, it's to the massive credit of what this
LA has going for it that when it is feeling at its most selfassured, there is genuine reason for a momentary rethink of who best to ally oneself with. God, from
whatever pantheon s/he belongs, is, quite incredibly,
going to have to amp things up a bit to close the deal.
This, s/he certainly does, and the Seth and Jay we
encounter at the end might wish for themselves each day
a plate of their favorite cookies and a date with their
favorite band, but one thing they won't do is be
meaningfully distinguishable from any of the other
heaven drones impossibly happy to yet be alive, ready to
do as bidden, and willing to see Master in any which way
s/he pleases. As Tony Stark remarks in the Avengers,
"historically, not awesome." And so in good faith to what
Rogen normally offers, I offer my own amendment to the
film where rather than Franco at first being drawn to
heaven but losing this prize for being a poor winner, Seth
loses it for considering that as grateful as he now is, that
God as much as Jay should probably still have tried
harder to get to like the people at the party ... Michael
Cera's butthole indeed was as adorable as we all
imagined, and the rest just seemed to be having a good
time.
I originally thought to write this second take on the film
as a preamble to a discussion on the Internment, another
film from the summer where we're supposed to just be
happy for two guys making it into some utopian space,
considering the hellish wraths they'd be exposed to if
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they didn't make it in. The hells are about the same,
actually. Owen Wilson's life as a mattress salesman,
where if he isn't perennially sharp and obedient he'll be
outside in a clown suit in forty degree weather, would
have drawn him for sure into alcoholism and very likely
at some point, suicide. He for sure, never, would go out
on a date, as befouled for being a loser as the plagueridden were in hence-times. But I think you can pretty
much transplant my thoughts on This is the End onto this
film. For my purposes what it still serves is to show how
humiliating it is that the god in This is the End is never
really questioned, for just like the Google one all he really
does to convince others' eager acquiescence and
surrender of self-pride, is show himself the only safehouse available while the world underneath pretty much
everyone, crumbles away. Then he counts on you
dressing him so He's The Great Human Benefactor; and
you do.
It's certainly a trend this summer to have Utopia offered
to people, but it isn't always allowed to stay in a light
favorable to its own preferred self-regard. Oblivion, for
example, ends up showing its own up. Yet even though it
surely wasn't its purpose, Oblivion still suggested how
much we'll hide in the safe abode, regardless of how
much integrity we'd assume for ourselves if we braved
living on the more tenuous outside. I know, for example,
that Tom Cruise's initial digs were certainly something I
am longing for. So too his sense the perimeters of what
each day might expect, and the portioned human
bounty--his adult friendship and love affair with his
wife--that awaited him at the end of each day. How sure
am I that I would be able to addle on over to the outside,
301
if each day there meant being bludgeoned by something

sizeable you might have to account into your awareness
of things? As an attempt at recompense, I might dream of
being absolved into known grids.
Given our current clinging inclinations and fear that risk
might mean abandonment, Wall-E's efforts to nudge us
outside of pattern and safety seems lovely therapy that
we should be glad to have incurred into our constitution.
Jerry McGuire's bold sinking us into someone's failure
and outside status for most if its film, however, has
become something way too undistilled for our rattled
tempers to handle ... I wouldn't look for it any longer on
subsequent top one-hundred AFI lists--unless of course
that and Forrest Gump turn out to be two of God's
favorites.
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This is the End

This is the End
302
Emma Watson makes an appearance in This is the End,

and it's to scold Jay Baruchel on his better-thanthouness, and subsequently later to axe off the top of a
giant scrotum statue that camps mock-proudly in James
Franco's fortress dwelling, as she goes raving femmefatal on these jumpy boys. She isn't meant to come off
badly; in fact the film wants to make it seem like
it's deferring to her. But basically she's one who can't be
included within the boys' play; and it can, and sorta is, a
way of revenging yourself on someone. Like Kate
Middleton, she's become too high stature to be other than
someone you part your way around, like a school of small
fish around a shark, when she's predated herself upon
your premises. This film's reminder of this status was
probably invisible to her; in fact I think she thought she
was including herself in with those expected to bear some
of the ribbing, and therefore also part of the fun. But if
she wanted the film to force people to make more of an
effort to treat her as someone worthy of engaging in some
truly respectful, that is, not beyond genuine critiquing
and in a less stand-offish way, to have cooperated it
wouldn't have used the film's "rapey vibe" joke as a plant
to really just set her off and jet her out of the film.
Rather, rather than the safe humor enabled by keeping it
to Tatum Channing alone, it would have challenged us to
think on why we were so disquieted by how they were
willing to show themselves depicted when she ended up
following Tatum out on a leash as one of cannibal-leader
McBride's zipped-up gimp bitches. Think on it. We
wouldn't have fretted because we would have found
ourselves thinking "this could end your film career; we
would have done so because since there is absolutely no
303
way we're ever going to not want to see Watson as film

royalty since she's one of those serving as a god-type
starlett fully immune to disposal that keeps us feeling
small, temporary, and therefore unpretentious,
somehow we're going to have to live with an image so
much more impossible to chase out of our heads than
Middleton's caught-unaware boob shots. How many in
the film audience would have thought that if she let
herself be shown in this position she's dumbly submitted
herself to a further collective pile on? That is, to what
happened to actresses caught out in the films before,
notably with Elisabeth Berkeley, and as was at issue and
palpably for a moment at hand in Seth Macfarlane's
assaulting query at the Oscars to all of still-acting
Hollywood's accomplished actresses who'd ever for
continued relevance bared a boob? And yet regardless
we're still keeping you in place, even in a position where
hereto cognitive dissonance and upset would meant our
immediately needing to chase anyone like you out, is
what we could not at some level be aware of. For some of
us it'd be a spark to reflect bravely on why. And from
this, some subsequent work toward counting her just as
much worth dignity but on the same human level as
ourselves.
The film is ostensibly about the end of life, but to me it's
about how to best spend time while in an ostensible sort
of purgatory. Kind of like Casablanca is ostensibly about
that, when in reality they're both about how to spend
time in a place that you'd want no way out of. New life
comes to James Franco's castle home and ongoing party,
just like all newcomers find their way to Sam's suave
long-standing cafe, from a world that has become
304
increasingly hostile: Germany has crashed through

Paris's gates in Casablanca, but here still, with people
taking swipes at Rogens film career while greeting Jay at
the airport, and with the "mean shopkeeper lady" scaring
him from even attempting to buy a chocolate bar while
sojourning to a grocery store, things on the outside are
making doing anything while exposed to it other than
full-immersion buffering it, an increasingly unlikely thing
as well. Hosting is left to someone who knows to let
everyone come in and find their place and do their
business, while never leaving people without someone
who still will conduct affairs. There's some underhanded
dealings on the outskirts of the place, and, we can
assume, some rowdier characters, but the center is the
confident host and his robust rotund piano-playing
entertainer, keeping things humming, pleasingly tipsy
and teased.
When hell descends, it's rather as if the boys had
retreated back to Seth Rogan's place, home for xboxing
fun and a lower scale sort of ribaldry boys wrestling
and "I drank my pee" jokes in a noticeably confined
space. No longer is it so much a place to spend much time
in, and the outside world of flames and awful happenings
seems to not have much of a fortress wall to give backtalk
and bulwark to: the sense you have when one of them
steps out, is of someone leaving their pitched tent into a
ranging tempest forest fire ... it does feel brave as shit
when Craig Robinson ascents to entering it. And so there
is a sense that the rest of the film is about dogging
towards a mechanism by which a space sort of akin to the
lost safe James Franco party-world can be unlocked,
while meanwhile entertaining us with the full possible
305
supply of fun and jokes that can be squeezed out by a

bunch of quick-witted guys caught in some place quickly
being besieged by their own excretions. At the end, when
they all ultimately leave it, it feels like they were forced to
... the outhouse had packed brown and was pushing
them out.
The relief from leaving it, almost makes once again
meeting Danny McBride a thrill, even as we're
understanding him as a pack-leader cannibal. And so too
even James Franco's being eaten, as after-all this links us
back to the party where he actually suggested this
happening to him in a sequel to Pineapple Express. Mind
you, we were already primed to like McBride. In a movie
world ultimately built of people taking pleasure in refuge,
he actually exults into a status of someone who isnt
going to let anything from the outside cage him. When he
greets his former friends, it feels appropriate that he
seems almost to have forgotten them "You guys are still
alive?" He can do the shocking thing of cutting ties when
appropriate and moving on, which is a miracle in a world
designed to make people want to cling to the familiar. No
wonder his peers were shocked that hed leave them so
totally, and no wonder even after trying to shoot them
they let him go untouched. However much we get a spell
of a great purgatory in this film there's of course no
Divine or Fiend, but this was unanticipated and
unfamiliar enough to for a moment seem an outerworldly
visitation.

306
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Labels: this is the end
The Bling Ring

The Bling Ring
"Bling Ring" ends focusing mostly on Emma Watson's
character, Nicki. When the enjoyable world she had
participated in ends, she gets sucked back into her
mother's embrace, her cult, that heretofore she had found
successful means to quarantine as something only to be
endured while at home. Her own escapades have ended
with her mother having her back entire, and even if she
talks back to her, gets angry at her for repeatedly
insisting on inserting herself into her interview with the
Vanity Fair reporter, we see she's due to become as much
the harmless clown as her mother is. Harmless, because
however much she might climb in this world -- her family
is by no means poor or without resources -- they are
made to seem so much trapped in a disassociated
mindset, poor things petting their preciouses, they're
more like pilgrims caught enspelled that the more sane
world pilgrims may have to temporarily reckon in but
mostly will shake their heads at and step by, as they
307
interact with adult matter that still undergirds world

affairs. There's also Marc, who we also focus on, and are
made to understand as someone who was grabbed into a
situation there's no way he could resist, and will now
have to spend having his temporary bling-ring enrapture
cleansed by four very brutal years in prison, hopefully
keeping himself together so that when he's free he's
thoroughly sobered but not spiritually snuffed out.
The film turns a cold shoulder, that is, to the actual
ringleader of the Bling Ring, Rebecca. When Marc gives a
look to her in the court room, knowing she'll be remote
from him but hoping she might just not be, it's like she's
been revealed as an alien slitherer deposited amongst
teenage life, blithely unconcerned if what she made of her
surroundings interjected a poison into the community
that stalled the social fabric. She's just a few steps away
from being someone a TMZ or even a Vanity Fair
reporter might turtle before if s/he had to make light of:
Do you yet remain someone who's propriety keeps from
considering things I could engage that could upend your
positioning in a conversation and make you my
plaything? The film lets her seem someone so cold she
would draw people to her to fulfill her own ends, all the
while intending to leave them as scapegoats while she
scoots off to a foreign locale. Someone almost
unfathomably awful, who is incapable of remorse and
immune to any impulse to oblige us by compromising
herself so we can imagine her as either chastened or
harmless, and thereby laugh at or maybe sympathize with
but otherwise quickly regroup from and head on with our
regular life. Someone who demonstrates that some
children deserve to be tried as adults: no one is left
308
feeling sorry for her four years in prison. And indeed her
four-year term might not be enough: we may need eight
to fortify ourselves to her next invasion.
It can indeed be difficult to reveal who she is in this film
to show she does deserve to be taken in almost near
opposite. I am drawn to think of her as a conquistador
who's come upon the Aztecs, or any European who found
themselves on an island of dodo birds, in the way she
shows this whole rich land of Hollywood homes is ripe
for the taking. Like only one hundred conquistadors were
required to claim a whole civilization, like dodos were
almost like walking already-cooked turkeys to their
European discoverers, Rebecca shows that five kids are
sufficient to make it seem as if all Hollywood has been
used as somebody else's boarding house. But the fact that
Hollywood has become a place where cars and homes are
so unprotected that their plundering comes across as
innocence for the first time plucked, should ground the
more mature amongst us to realize Rebecca in a more fair
light. The sense you have is that somehow all of
American's sense of vulnerability and fear and violence
that we know is everywhere has been quarantined away
from these affluent quarters into the world of Middle
America. Mid-America has been left a stronghold
suffering from torments from within and from without,
which explains why when at the finish we see signs of
people who actually populate it (in the courthouse
guards, mostly), there's not an ounce of rosy life in any
grim one of them. (And pity Marc, who when he is shown
in the bus with fellow prisoners, comes across as a last
sad twilight of still-cheery ros before a remorseless term
of sole stone-grey.) Its been going on for enough time,
309
we suddenly realize, that Hollywood could learn to assert

as a reasonably confident norm something which had
been unthinkable: there is no need to lock your doors, for
we know we have no reason to fear intrusion. And so this
shocking innocence comes across as the grossest
vulgarity; another status symbol to show that being rich
means being in a literally different universe from the
poor.
Rebecca is portrayed as mostly someone who has evolved
to the point that attitudes built around older realities
have slipped away from her first, and so in this
deliberately wrought out world of unchastened innocence
she indeed understands it as a world of accessibility. She
isnt, that is, afloat in some realm of unreality, but
understanding it straight. (Showing Marc this, by the
way, is one of the ways shes generous to him a true
best friend, with the first of course being that she
immediately apprehended insecure him as someone fun
to know.) Shes the first into this land of open resources,
and knows to make full use of it, so her story isnt about
how she robbed celebrities homes but how she cohabited them, fit their world onto hers, and long enough
so that it could be integrated near as blas hers. I think
we sense that we have a lesson to learn from her; and
maybe for some of the time in their readily and
intelligently discerning particular items amongst all the
wealth of stuff (they're familiar with all the items, or at
least the clothing and jewelry, and with plausible justice
believe they know how to better ensemble it than their
"owners" do), we take advantage of their being so
engaged to maybe imagine ourselves along with them,
plucking an item we see that they may not yet have
310
claimed, and delighting in it. Im not saying that we ever

find ourselves as confident as Rebecca, but when Marc
slips off being so apprehensive and learns to chill, I think
were wondering if we somehow have been taught a
lesson we needed to learn as well; and this is
disorienting.
And when Rebecca sees nothing amiss in taking Paris
Hiltons dog, I dont think we so much awaken from an
evil spell that might have been partially cast upon us and
see her as the foul snake she surely all the while has been,
but take advantage of a trespass we can trap as surely
irredeemably foul, to cooperate with an evil we may
temporarily been loosened from. That is, I think what
makes this rich landscape so plausibly innocent of the
trauma affecting the rest of the nation is a collective
agreement on our part to defer to the rich and powerful,
to enable them with privileges appropriate to emperors
from four centuries ago. When we walk amongst their
paradise, we find sign to be angry at them but realize we
cant be drawn even in these conditions to see them
downed; a realization which would force us to realize how
much of our awful world is really of our own sad, sick,
surely masochistic, wanting. So us, actually the ones still
caught in a kind of spell, decide at this point in the film to
view the kids as having temporarily been caught in one.
They just went on a wild ride which disjoined them from
reality that they would have to sober up from. I think
with enfranchising ourselves at their expense, were in
the mood to make allowances, and I think especially with
Nicky and Marc, we make them however much Nicky is
a made a subject of ongoing laughter as she and her
family become a bundle of idiocy.
311
We know that we were actually taken inside Paris

Hiltons own home in this movie, and that what we saw
up close were her clothes closets and designated party
rooms. I hope that some of us feel sick that thereby
theres a paul cast over all this film where the rich can
draw as close as they want to us, let us feel their
presence, if this is what theyre in the mood for, but it
ever goes the other way it has to be managed so that the
rightful norm that ascent is only by permission of the
powerful, is confidently reasserted.
.
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Labels: the bling ring
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Man of Steel
ManofSteel
312
Kal-El doesn't have the very best of upbringings -- though

it is still very, very good. His Kansas parents genuinely
wish him the very best, but struggle sometimes -- owing
to their own limitations -- to provide what Kal-El needs,
what any kid would need, to in fact become an adult who
through belief in self might just change the world (not
impossible: in certain favorable times -- times of
permission, not times of crisis or war -- near loneindividuals in fact do). His father is worried that if his
son shows his super abilities too early, he'll be
overwhelmed by how the world would react to him, and
the alarmed world wouldn't have an adult him, to calm
them down some and help them stay sane. And this is
sensible, but clearly installs in Kal-El a sense that any
time he summons his natural instincts, summoned along
with it is a frustrating grapple-hold of restraint that'll
frustrate and infuriate him. His mother will do what she
can to calm her son down, but never quite soothingly
confidently, but rather as if, if she isn't particularly
skillful, a genius at calming down her own aroused fears
and self-doubt, her son will be lost to inner-torments and
feel all alone in the world. The son grows up in a world
where everything is so heightened. Apparently with the
littlest thing, any understandable natural kid instinct
given life, his whole known universe could go up in
smoke, however much he still does have a mother and
father always ready to step in and stomp down some of
the impact. The result of his confounding upbringing is
that when Kal-El's father refuses to let his son save him
from the tornado, one feels not just sympathy but anger
towards him: don't you know that you've confounded
making your son feel perennially tight with some
conviction that his agreeing to cede himself so totally to
313
you has meant losing you as a father?

No wonder he ends up wandering about spare, terse
landscapes awhile afterwards, working one little-thanks,
scarce-contact job after another: he needs to be in a long
zone where his need to temporarily refute his upbringing
-- all affections -- is given echo by his surroundings. And
fortunately, he eventually finds company with his original
Krypton father, who is a bath of cushioning natural ease
of self-comportment, and who is given time to enclose his
much-loved son safely within it. From him, and from
allowing himself a good span just to practice and get used
to all his abilities that he has for so long kept under-wrap
-- bounding up and arcing against Earth's atmosphere's
kiss with deep space, and the like -- his son could stop
being someone who looked naturally bound to Christ-like
sacrifice himself just to cleanse himself of his Earthparents' expectations of him as epic, to being a true super
man, who not just through physical abilities has it in him
to have a formidable impact on the human race.
It should be noted, that this is what he does do: when he
allows himself to be captured, agrees to have hand-cuffs
placed upon him -- and without any dis-comportment -people aren't taken aback by any physical ability but by
his ability to let himself be humbled, appear humiliated,
if it serves a larger purpose. Yes, some of us have still
been raised with enough support and love to evolve this
much maturity, is what he communicates. There is still
hope for Earth.
Many critics find the destruction of good portions of New
York really bothersome in this film, offensive, I'll explain
why for me this was not at all the case. There is a way of
314
experiencing this film, including the alien world stuff, as

really just documenting a normal human life, some good
person born outside of privilege, who's potential to
realize himself will ultimately have to grapple with the
fact that our contemporary world isn't one that is
interested in seeing class divides being crossed. I promise
you that I actually experienced the Krypton bit, the prebirth, as something uterine: all the oval shapes, placental
tentacle entities, pools of great significance.... So to me
Superman could have just been an everyman, whose
developmental story, from embryo knowing only a
uterine world to a child birthed into a vast blue-skyed
"Kansas" cosmos, is the fantastic story everyone
experiences, and which we sometimes attend to -document -- to show how magnificent and remarkable
each and everyone of us is. The everyman version of this
story would have the parents perennially amazed by their
child, perhaps because he was a late-birth, when all hope
of it seemed lost. And their belief that their child will
change the world, every really loving parents' difficulty in
accepting that such a beautiful, glorious miracle could
ever not just continue to incrementally grow to affect our
collective destiny. And so when Kal-El's fate ties him in
with New York, a feeling I had the first moment he made
contact with a Pulitzer-prize winner -- Lois -- I couldn't
help but think of what New York society would do to him
if he was an everyman hoping to become upwardly
mobile in the big city.
Without super powers, it'd recognize him only as
someone without an ivy-league background, without
establishment connections, and without all the
mannerisms that are causing many of the well-to-do to
315
not really be able to recognize the rest of their human kin

as human in the same way they are. With them, New
York would actually kind of do the same. "You're out of
Kansas; your father is a mechanic this is what we
cannot shake as mattering most; so how now do we
account for the fact that your super abilities and true
alien status make us feel silly for still intrinsically
experiencing you this way?" The answer is to make you
into a Lebron James (credit Andrew O'Hehir for this
reference), a super athlete we talk all the time about at
the water coolers, but who is never found outside a
circumscribed categorization as some kind of supermachine. He could in reality become someone who kind
of is like Christ in being morally ahead of a people he was
born into, but because recognizing this would mean
crediting that they have something to learn from the
Kansas-born and raised other than some
accomplishment of great physique, it'd be consistently
waylaid, in preference for the always-available greatphysical-feat bit. Hed eventually be taken as a moral
example, but only when elite society had decided it was
ready to make the American proletariat in general as
much as well, which would happen when it could be done
in such a way that it showed them to be great suffering
workhorses, not those who really ought to be directing
the world.
And so what would an everyman do to still have his say in
New York? It wouldnt matter hed have no chance. But
what would a super-powered everyman do?: hed shock
the elite, the establishment, clear some way amongst
them, and start setting up something of his own from
where they had scattered away. The big blast of New York
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in this film, the buildings going wither and tether, is a

manifestation of what this Superman would do
(figuratively, not literally) when he had to reckon with
the big city (yes, there is a way in which I see the villains
as mostly an extension of a universe that empowers KalEl). He wouldnt be a Clark Kent, because such a figure
would be only allowed to work mail room, and would
never be introduced to anyone important (Clark Kents
appearance in this film as someone whod work close
with prize journalists/editors/publishers, is really just a
momentary substitution of a previous cinematic
Superman Christopher Reeve as a cute and expected
way of dolling up a legacy picture (The film had really
ended at this point).).
Its harsh, but this is the only way available to him. If it
had been a different era, the 1920s say, rather than the
very 1930s-like now, when a regular man from the
Midwest a Gatsby could shake the core of a big city
like New York and find it actually grateful for his great
awakening stir, there could have been near simultaneous
integration included with his meteor-level impact. But
since our times are the opposite, with our Sears and
iHops not reminding us of what they long to do (at least)
in the film -- of post-war American mid-America; of true
heartland virtues held by those who hold the blandest,
the least discriminate of tastes -- but of American dregs,
even something fundamentally good is going to be taken
as bombast missileanic.
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Labels: man of steel, superman
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Mud
Mud
There's a movie that Mud appears to be, but isn't, that
one would probably wish it had in fact been. That is, one
that looks upon the heroes of our youth and sees in them
projections of the strength we at the time needed them to
have, for understanding them as versions of ourselves but
in the adult world. Ellis is a fourteen-year-old boy with
an abnormal amount of bravery, self-control and heart,
but a lot of what is distinctive about him looks like it
might be at risk as the life that nourished it--his life with
his two parents, living up river amongst loner
individualists--is collapsing, and he'll be absconded by
his mother into a townie life. The townie kids hang out in
packs, are ruled by peer expectations, and don't seem
worth a whole bunch. They make great components of
your own feats, if all you do is periodically range amongst
them and thwart or humiliate them, but if they were your
everyday milieu your automatic need for company and
experimentation amongst people your own age, might
mean your own inviting upon yourself a poison which
would cripple what was notable about you. If you sensed
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that something of the kind was due to hit you, you might
in Ellis's position start imagining suddenly being visited
upon by mythic characters of great strength, that seemed
to have bridged the divide between childhood and
adulthood but wholly retained their fierce nature, heart
and will. And when they talk about life, as Mud does, as if
it is fundamentally ruled by mythos, you'd have the
reassuring sense that your own appreciation of the world
is brewed from the same mix the whole universe is
universally of. You might lose confidence during the day,
and feel powerless and without sympatico friends, but in
the evening glancing at the constellations of the Archer or
the Centaur, you'll feel that wink of appreciation that will
gather some of your strength back to you.
Arguably, the mythic characters I'm referring to in this
film--Mud himself, his "dad"--the retired military sniper,
and Juniper--are shown to in fact be, if not nothing,
certainly lesser of the sort. But not too much, in my
judgment, for they still seem of greater motivation and
purpose than anyone in the film--exempting Ellis's
mother, whose drive to finally live her own life, and even
her wishing for her family to gather for dinner, chimes in
the movie as sort of a death-knell an incantation of
powerful eternal adolescent spirit has to be very quickly
created against. And the danger in their being
represented this way is that it conveys that what you need
to do in life is set your sense of yourself early, abscond
from the social world your peers will get into during
adolescence and early-adulthood, and arc back into some
kind of interaction with the world in adulthood--as if you
alone had diverted from "the college" path in the game
"Life," to rejoin them later in contest of family and other
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stakes, should you desire. I'm sure in some cases this

might keep you "truer," more truly functional and happy
than everyone else--ala Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. But it
probably means that the universe of conversation and
social refinements and personal awareness and
understanding that one can be become acquainted with
amongst life with groups of people, that can make one
actually surpass becoming an adolescent's hero and
become a fully realized social adult, will be denied you.
For this kind of growth you've got to be able to relax and
hang--be the kid who sees some good from milling about
with a peer group; be the kid who would near more want
to relax and jam with Neckbone's uncle Galen (to be fair
to the film, Galen is not portrayed here entirely without
his attractions), than putting the universe right by
conjoining Mud to his eternal equal.
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Labels: Matthew McConaughey, mud
Wednesday, May 22, 2013

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One of the criticisms of Abrams -- perhaps the foremost

criticism of him -- is that he likes to let other directors do
the hard work of staking out new territory, and then he
comes in into fully delineated terrain, and makes some
adjustments -- "Sally would work better with Jonathon,
and the couch should go there--". With his last film
everybody had him as of the dutiful flock of Spielberg,
and with this film, at least at the beginning -- the same.
It's Raiders of the Lost Ark, with tribesman chasing
down our interloper heroes, spears thrown, an artifact
used to momentarily buy time by tricking the tribesmen
into forgetting their current purpose and supplicating
themselves, and an escape into an airship (no snake, but
discord of a kind: Spock and Kirk feuding). But okay, in
truth this sort of chase is how he began his last Star Trek
film, so maybe this is just how he gets a number of his
films revved up. The possibility, though, that Abrams is a
bit too comfortable being in a great director's shadow,
being a "mini-me," clasped in clothing and
appenedendums to someone/something solace-offering
and protecting, comes more to the fore --very irritatingly
to the fore -- when we realize that Kirk and his crew
aren't actually adults out on their own adventures, but
more like misbehaving kids back home with disappointed
parents, who can't believe what they made of the freedom
granted them to explore the woods. This is the way it was
in Abrams Mission Impossible 3, if you remember. And I
bring up this film because, for me, this is not a crew who
will ever credibly go on some five-year journey all on
their own, but more like a team of top-notch agents, who
will go out on raiding missions but always at the end back
to home base, reconnecting with an older and more
entrenched culture, that coddles them, relieves them of
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some of the responsibility of their own actions. Mind you,

Abrams has this way of making it seem that if it's too
much just your own braced against the world, where
you're the head, accountable to no one, or when you're
engaged in affairs that are a bit too much gravitas -- as in
this film, when a great-power world war is threatened
-- then there's no room for play. Everything has to be
rigidly taught (taught, as in tight), and often angry as
hell, so that you've got so much seriousness going on it'll
ostensibly allay any moment that sneaks in that reveals
how you're as nervous as hell and feeling totally not up to
it! Older characters seem to manage this okay, and in
truth get to be relaxed about it -- witness the cowboy
reaction,"Ah hell," the admiral offers Kirk when he learns
he's been talking to Khan. Ostensibly it's more their turf,
like as if Cold War and WW2 was more their turf rather
than our current more insouciant foreign policy. Abrams
does better when things are allowed to be not so serious,
when the seriousness has been tempered down, and
affect and warmth and can slowly infiltrate and build into
something. When Kirk decides not to seek out and kill
Khan, but rather capture him and have him go through
due-process, you feel it in the theater like a relief of
tension; and it is no surprise that on their mission to
capture him we get some development in the UhuraSpock relationship which had been crushed by all the
emergent seriousness, with tendrils for a later more
whole-hog exploration of it --"What is that even like?"
What is that even like?, or what would that be like?, is in
fact a question that in effect gets floated up a number of
times in the film -- what is like to be fired by your best
friend (Scotty, by Kirk)?; what is it like to feel someone
else's death (Spock, through Pike)?; what is like to see
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McCoy flirt?; to see Scotty souced? And it is a question

that gets its best reaction and exploration from us when
we've been given a climate suited for empathic
identification rather than route response. Down-play the
stakes a bit, and we get that -- I swear the film would
have been just as good if the whole thing took place in a
bar, exempting of course Khan, who could be checked
into every once in awhile for bedazzlement at what one
superhuman can do to whole line-ups of opponents.
No doubt, it is partly owing to Abrams' deeply democratic
nature that he has more than a few of the crew serve as
captain (Kirk, Spock, Sulu, and -- in effect -- Uhura, when
she leads the encounter between the crew and the
Klingons), but just as true is surely because he seems to
intrinsically identify a position of ultimate command as
confining, as something you almost want to loft for
someone else to do (sucker!): Don't necessarily think of
Sulu as privileged here, for instance; he's more stationed
while everyone else cavorts into space.
Back to my thought that what this crew is is a team of
elite special agents, never completely detached from
home base. At some point in the film I began to think of it
as akin to the last James Bond movie -- Skyfall. Two
great genius agents (Kirk and Khan; Bond and Raoul)
betrayed by an older, very near retirement-aged Mother
or Father who ultimately had bequeathed them. I have to
admit I actually did not enjoy this Trek all that much,
and felt that when things threatened to be taken out of
the youngins' hands and given to seniors who didn't seem
so equivocating and abashed at going out on their own,
even though this meant huge regression to Clash-of-
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Civilizations war, it looked to be more captivating than

the plentiful smaller shows that Abrams put on. So in
compensense I did force myself to think upon how much
more evolved this special-agent film was to Skyfall. We
were supposed to root for the militaristic turn in Skyfall,
with headquarters being drawn back to a WW2 bunker
rather than kept open but vulnerable in the city, with M
quoting Tennyson, about old men, old values, returning
undaunted in a world of threat. We were supposed to
hate counsels and trial-justice. We were discouraged to
empathize: never for a moment were we supposed to like
Raoul, or consider that he had just cause (even though he
was sacrificed for heaven's sake!) -- rather perhaps heap
more on his misery, by insulting his bold fashion (I liked
his shirt, myself). It's very bad when you essentially have
a twin of yourself but cannot think of anything nice to say
about him, because this means you're as far away as you
can be from empathizing for your unwanted qualities
being grafted onto him for dismissal. Into Darkness
sidesteps this darkness -- we are to like law courts, hate
or at least regret old dinosaurs returning, like a relaxed
atmosphere that kindles an appreciation of nuance, and
of course throughout thoroughly enjoy and like Khan -and tries to fold all kinds of calamities including twice
the devastation of good parts of a downtown -- into it that
can still be managed in a non-inflated, non-emergency
measures, unalarmist way. There is an evolved person in
Abrams, however much it is still true he's a boy-adult
head-of-family caught as a fulcrum in a Serious Man /
Everybody Loves Raymond world. Making something of
the domestic, because he likes the living/family room,
but also because theres no way he can allow himself out.
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Oz the Great and Powerful

Oz the Great and Powerful
Some time in the past there were tinkerers who were
great and powerful -- so great that in this mundane world
of ours it still would require a moment's recalibration to
not consider them actually half magic, if someone
persisted in your face that they were in fact so. Edison, if
you want the best example, though you might also go
with Benjamin Franklin, or whoever it was Scorsese's
movie Hugo was worshipping. Stage magician Oz hopes
to be like that, and spurns women left and right to keep
himself fixed to this goal. He'd have been okay if this
didn't also mean his deceiving women into his bed, but
for this, judgment appears to have cast upon him and the
rest of his life is going to be about lifelong serving the
bequests of women, fixed to a spot rather than a free
wanderer, readily reached by three very empowered,
three very great and powerful, witch-women. But the
actor playing Oz is James Franco, and so maybe the
people behind this film had in mind some revenge upon
women too. For Franco is sensitive and responsive
enough to suggest to most sensitive souls that he's hardly
a man so involved with machines or aspiring to sky-high
goals he's dulled to humans, but there's something about
how though he says and does and expresses about as
you'd expect and desire, he's still applied a thin layer
everywhere that registers as if it's all a lie--like you're in
truth interacting with some puppet of himself, that's
close to him but not really him, he's operating via remote
control, a la Tony Stark's suit in Iron Man 3 -- his
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passive-aggressive revenge, let's not kid ourselves, on

Pepper, for her owning his day world while he couches in
his basement cave. Franco probably isn't so savvy, so
great a magician he's made himself entirely inaccessible
to you; he can be figured out. But the thing is, what
would cause him to smirk like he's got something on you
you can't balk, is that you don't really want to figure him
out: he's the only plausible man in town, and Oz had
become akin to the Castle Anthrax, managed by women
who are becoming insufferable to one another and in
need of a man, that beacons out promise of man-rule
glory to get some hapless guy in to serve as some post to
steady them, as well as for stud. Anyway, Oz might
become convinced that he's really great and powerful,
after apparently making up for every past sin against a
woman he's ever effected -- which is so much his
foremost concern the last gesture he makes to the latest
evil witch haunting the land is an apology -- but the
audience knows this guy is owned by a need for
reparations. How easy it is to keep a guy like that from
growing up -- just making every step ahead seem a
spurning of everything and everyone who preceded it,
and he's back to being yours. The end of the film shows
two great ones battling-- the white good witch vs. the
more mentally balanced evil witch -- and when the good
witch defeats the evil one, it most certainly doesn't end
with her apologizing but with her sure of the rightness in
making this once actually most beautiful and regal witch
(here played very stately by the stunning Rachel Weisz),
the only nightmare horror/grotesque to be found in the
land -- something of irrevocable consequence just
happened here. This is grown-up matter for the only
grown-ups in Oz. Ben Kenobi vs. Darth Vader at the
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finish of Star Wars but at a time when boys who know

best toys and tech, a la George Lucas, arent going to be
allowed to be so ball-danglingly front and center, so these
roles go to the girls while the guys do the patching up.

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Tuesday, May 14, 2013
The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby
One thing I never confused the movie for the book for,
was its portrayal of Gatsby. In the book I could believe
that the huge estate he had prepared was but to lure him
Daisy, while in the movie it is surely his
aggrandizement--I honestly thought most of the time of
Orson Wells's Kane while watching puffed up Leo. He
strolls his party not so much invisible, as he is in the
book, but hidden master of it all. And he shows off how
that special person and that special person and that
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special person are all there, rendered as they are into part
of his ample house collections, with them trapped to not
want to be anything else, owing to his hosting the biggest
draw in town--Beethoven in his second act, and this just
one feature. Every night he houses his parties, and every
night the whole town is corralled into it -- he's master of
the house and master of all. And so at the end of the
evening when he strolls outside and looks across the
water at the beaming green light across the bay, it's
absinthe to well the evening down amidst cool air -- the
logical follow up to the evening's clamor, a cleanse, not
what what has been sitting with him throughout and that
he has longed to return to.
Daisy comes across as someone he has to possess for a
complete validation of himself as great and complete. By
his side, the past when he was just a young officer on the
climb, unsure if he should dare merge with someone of
assured standing, becomes smoothed into him. As much
talk as there is in the film that once again knowing Daisy
means Gatsby's all-important green light's dwindling out,
the only way there's any sense of it the film is that it
might mean Gatsby and Tobey McGuirre's Nick Carraway
being distanced from one another, as it is their
encounters that are a bit of magic. Magic, as in first-date,
guard's up but set for maybe great change, is not Gatsby
courting Daisy with tea, but Nick for the first time
refusing his own otherwise agreeable and placating
stance and leaderly simply refusing to let Gatsby leave his
home and thereby lose his great chance with her he's put
so much effort into procuring, while also humiliating and
really hurting Daisy. Nick here instinctively puts aside his
friendly bemusement at Gatsby's unpredictable
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dramatics, for doing what has to be done so these two

people he's fond of don't lose from this hereto magical
and charming day, full as it still remains of possible
beautiful portent. There is magic also in all three of them
hanging together during the day in Gatsby's mansion,
with Gatsby tossing his shirts at them, partaking of the
clownish fun of sport throws at town fairs, but take away
Nick and leave it to the other two to display something
meaningful, and it's the gesturing carapaces, animated
but without souls, embraced together on the grounds
outside of one of Gatsby's parties.
I'm being a bit hard on Gatsby, but there is a sense that
just maybe there really is very little to the guy--that those
who'd judge him--notably Daisy's husband Tom
Buchanan--are possessed of something solid that refuses
them any slip into admiring or being bedazzled by him.
At the beginning of the film, Tom is made to seem a nonthreat, for being by one and all regarded as someone with
rearguard prejudices in a world of Jazz Age authority.
But still you don't forget him as a judge too, possibly
because his relation--that is, Nick--is just meeting Gatsby
too, and he's in a sense quickly onto him as well. Nick
realizes that Gatsby needs tempering--"if only he could
have been content with his sweet date with Daisy over
tea," he alases. He's like old money prejudices, with a
lighter side, a real fondness for youth and their eager
tries and newish ways, who'd court peers he still belongs
to to try and see them the same way; and his having so
much standing in the film, gives solidity to Buchanan.
When Buchanan reality-tests Gatsby in a way which fully
renders him down--the only real murder in the film--and
gains back his Daisy, Nick had already been rendered to
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the point that the best he could do for the person he still
wishes the best of luck to but who realizes he has no hope
of further influencing, is communicate true love and
support for him through his otherwise lying nods to
Gatsby's determination to gain sake himself Daisy--the
only thing he wants at this point from Nick is a show of
deferent affirmation, so it has to be the conduit for
something truer and larger he'd prefer to communicate:
great realization and maturity and love, from Nick. Nick
knows it's likely "the wolves" for Gatsby; Buchanan only
supplies them. Hard judgment to the softer man's
realization--"Amadeus's" Count Orsini-Rosenberg to
Baron Van Swieten, upon Mozart's decline and death.
Nick of course is shown writing a book that we know will
puff up the Gatsby legend that is being debilitated as his
estate is being looted. But I think this is just pause for us
to think on the words that are being literally inscribed for
us on screen. There was a great show of a kind for us in
this film, but it may pass as just a film amongst others -not even possibly being one of our Depression's notable
showy numbers, that we should get to high acclaim if this
one wears like the last one ("Forty Second Street," Busby
Berkeley, all show, no depth, anything to beat back the
pressing accretions of the Depression, and all that), while
we know Fitzgerald's words are lasting three-gens plus,
and are looking immortal. The book is our true green
light, something truer to be engaged in, whatever our
current society's overall bent and mood, if that's actually
territory we're fond to explore just now, however much it
might not be, with all the bon-bons in this film looking
like they might just have been offered a little early, when
we still haven't fixed ourselves to believing you can be
like Gatsby and have fun and possibly be successfully
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ascribed, at least, as paper-thin, if you've accepted your

lot is to live in times with no chance to beat back
judgmental oppressors if they're really, really
determined, to fix on you. The sin-watching Tom
Buchanans are going to have no handle on you, for your
mad gambits and wild dancing are acknowledgments, not
questionings, of how ascribed you are to live in mostly
dream-defeating times. The Toms would take note of
that, and would have no problem allotting you your
driving "Daisy" home.

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Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Iron Man 3
Iron Man 3
If you ever give someone a twenty-foot stuffed animal for
a present, you might want to consider that you're doing
so more out of a desire to affront the receiver than please
him/her, and that also possibly you're communicating
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that you're the one -- the denied child -- in gigantic need

of love yourself. It could pass as just making up for long
neglect, as it is does in this film, but when you're
following up by fooling your lover (here with Pepper
engaging with simulacrum Tony while the real one pulls
his strings in his den) and then maybe not-so-accidently
fixing it so that your den toys substitute as nightmare
horrors to scare the Dickens out of her, the truth is that
you may be the one who is frustrated and in anger, and
that you are unconsciously being driven to communicate
it as loudly and aggressively as possible. Tony Stark is in
need of attendance -- being ready to lose his life in favor
of saving the world and finding himself in some other
dimension against the onslaught of aliens while with the
Avengers, has him the mercy of reoccuring anxiety
attacks -- he's got PTSD, as bad as any out of
Afghanistan. This might seem difficult to identify with,
but it's not really, as you've got a Depression on your
hands which is making sure you suffer the incredible
aggrievement of actually feeling more and more without
support while our awareness of the particular historical
situation we're in increases. You need a manger to lie in,
not your cold removed den, and this is what Tony gets, as
he finds himself removed from the world in some small
town down south, where he gets to be slotted in with
some small boy's modest home and essentially just talk
bubble gum and comic books and harken to early-life
Christmas scenes -- so the Savior taking small liberties, in
the fortuned house to host him. Here's where it begins to
become clear to the astute that what you're still hurt from
is not what you're macho-maintaining saying it is, but
maybe out of the things that are floating up while on layaway -- topics/concerns like boys without fathers, bullies,
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and the discourse you're floating always at your new bud

children which said a slightly different way is the sort to
flatten a child hard. Tony abandons the expected needs of
his new boy-friend about half a dozen times; he clearly is
taking pleasure doing so. This is supposed to be just
cover for the fact that he's the kind of guy who couldn't
care more -- but of course if this was you and what you're
actually enjoying, using as a remedy, is that here
repeatedly you've got a subject who has to be neglected
and abandoned "you" while you skirt off satiated and
unaffected, this is the excuse you'd use too. If you get too
much into this remedy you might neglect to cover what is
supposedly afflicting you -- as happens in this movie
when you take that wormhole that opened out of space
that afflicted our universe with multitudes of replica
aliens that is ostensibly the source of Tony's trauma, and
have it be inspiration for your own horrible revenge upon
foes as your penthouse's den hole opens and out comes
an armada of iron men to kill some other's dream. When
you're parted from your manger and back in adult digs
and engaging with your lover, you might make her
constituted momentarily as if out of nightmare things
herself -- like what happens to Pepper in this movie,
where she finishes as ripped older woman, dragonblooded, and android (she's sporting parts of Iron Man's
armor). Basically a gargoyle, but for a moment not
removed from you, but akin, and family -- you're of
wormholes and annihilating/abandoning/table-turning
revenging things yourself. Apportioned some
"equipment" from pre-birth nightmares -- actually the
greatest sort.
Further: The dangerous Orient is made to seem a
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harmless old man who smells up bathrooms, a

disappointment worse than the revealed wizard in the
Depression's "Oz." Is this because he's not ripped like
everyone else or because it's not "time" (who are we
kidding if we haven't half set it up already as our next
greatest enemy?) for China? Or are we expected to
implicitly appreciate that while left behind, that stinking
shitcloud of odor is accumulating, and will be source of
inspiration for the next worm-hole hell to chastise the
character-armor we're using against our times into
malfunction -- maybe the false villain really could only be
the true one once we've been made to associate him with
decrepity, bathrooms and shit -- spouted hell, not
singular and contained (-- the hero's-only denizens?)?
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Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Pain and Gain (2013)

Pain and Gain (2013)
No film which can at all remind you from where Ronald Regan-era
began to about the termination of the first incarnation of Tiger Woods
-- all muscle, arrogance, and domination -- is going to really seem a
Depression-era film, where stupid willfulness is going to be
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showcased simply as a sort of madness the hopeless adopt to believe

they've got a chance in the world. In this film you've got Michael Bay
as director, a bunch of body-builders as the main protagonists, and as
well a very A-team-reminiscent van as home-base, so you basically get
what you'd expect out of an 80's/90's film -- if you can amass a
signfiicant amount of stupid wilfulness, you'll be treated as a meteor
that's got to be allowed to destroy it's loaded-up fuel content of
others' carefully procured affairs. If you show enough of yourself
while daring to equivocate with them, it's "dispatch" for you -- as
appropriately happens to the Miami porn-king, who tends to the
gang's leader -- Mark Wahlberg -- the fact that a lot of what he says
makes no sense at all. Neither did anything about Reagan or Tiger or
Mr. T or Thatcher really make sense, but when society's obliging them
big-time, your reality-checks will go unappreciated, thank you very
much! Quite frankly, this film was delightful nostalgia -- the lady a
few seats behind me laughed numerous huge-heartly laughs, and I
chuckled along with her. The 80s, after all, as stupid as they were,
were paradise to our current time when the only ones who can
prosper are those who aren't will and muscle but just cany -- doing
nothing but what the times allow, without even a fiber of muscle
daring the alacrity of showcasing itself.
Posted by Patrick Hallstein / McEvoy-Halston at 11:58 AM 2
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Labels: pain and gain
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Place Beyond the Pines

Place Beyond the Pines
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One might be tempted to say that after seeing this

film what youll want to be is a good parent being
there for you child, so he doesnt go astray but
this isnt really foremost what this film
communicates. Instead, it is really more about
automatizing, exerting yourself against the pull of
others, and experiencing how your self-assertion
forces others to adjust to your insistent sense of
purpose.
We encounter Ryan Goslings Luke as he is about
to take part in a circus act, where he spins about in
a circle cage, intertwining his motorbike with two
others in angry-bee-but-still-beautiful kaleidoscope
patterns. The camera doesnt enter the cage with
him; we stop short outside but however fantastic
an ability he has as a performer we get that this is a
skill one can acquire eventually, if bike-riding is
your natural bent. In short, theres no adventure in
it for him, however much it does require a moment
of steadying before going on. There is no real
adventure to any part of his life until he learns he
has a child, and the fuzzy outlines of a new and
exciting acquisition and self-narrative being a
parent and exploring life with a child; being the
parent he ought to have had tease into view. He
becomes the willful child who wont oblige what
others expect of him he quits his job, despite
contract obligations, his boss telling him he cant
quit and is beginning to intrude himself into the
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life of the mother of his child regardless of how

obviously strongly paired she is with her new lover,
whos not charisma, but a dependable provider and
a dependable partner in this landscape of frightful
people-indifference, poverty and uncertainty. His
end-goal really is impossible regardless, it turns
out, but he cant quite know it at the time, as it still
is just maybe something accomplishable if he
begins the adventure of acquiring an even more
risky skill bank-robbing which could also
involve his own death if he failed even just once,
but which opens up otherwise unavailable
wealth--magic to acquire what is otherwise
beyond him. The rush he gets from actually
carrying out successful heists lends him the brass
authority to put together a crib he purchased for
his child in his rivals home, however certain this
moment of macho-assertion would lead him out of
his familys life. But before hes firmly out of her
life, he does winnow a family together for a short
while, earns himself a proprietorial sense of family
which a photo, which, appropriately, lasts and
lasts, captures.
We are supposed to believe that when police officer
Avery (Bradley Cooper) shoots and kills Luke, he
ended the life of someone elses father. But this
truth is undermined because we know Luke was
pretty much played out anyhow there was no
future for him; he was someone who lived a lot in
337
his short time, owing to his balls. So really the

effect of all Averys muddling over the moment
plays out more as him pausing on exactly how selfdetermining he is at this point in his life. He
became a police officer, it is made to seem, owing
in part as a passive-resistant way of telling his
father to fuck the hell off and let him lead his own
life. His assessment of his police work, of his fellow
officers, seems in good part determined by who
they must be to make himself seem part of a
different more pure, simple and less
compromised world than the one his father
belongs to. This illusion cant hold up; and very
soon it becomes apparent that this new world hes
lent himself to is just as ready to make use of him
for its compromised purposes. There is a moment
of self-actualization, of conviction, when he spins
his car around and balks his police officer
buddies to engage with his father once again. In
teeth of others willful expectations, he does what
he wants to do, and the film makes it seem as if
everything else is presumable after that: hell be
someone who upsets others expectations (Just as
Luke was on the right path when before his boss he
essentially spits in his face and quits, here Avery is
on the right path when he forces the attorney
general to accept his terms, regardless of how
much this pisses him off), but who successfully
accomplishes his goals and has others adjust to
him. He decision to rat out a corrupt police force is
338
shown to mean depriving sons the company of

fathers they need, as they are jailed, longterm, and
therefore out of their sons lives for the their whole
teenage lives, but theres more a sense here of the
thrill of how one persons decision, of how possibly
your decisions, can create a wake around you and
force others to change their life courses, even
drastically, regardless of their curses and
vituperate anger, their insistence that you are the
one who is going to have to bend, not them.
Lukes son actually does seem to have a good
father. Hes shown to be a regular family presence,
and there for his son in times of stress. But the
film, rather than show the importance of this,
shows it as meaning little but a challenge. How do
you tell two reasonably good parents that they
arent going to get to affect how you choose your
life? That his mother lied to him about Luke comes
across as an excuse for the boy to use to commit an
act of matricide the letter to mom which
informs her he knows she lied. And I guess his
father actually not being a Darth Vader he at one
point encourages his son to see him as his true
father by saying, Luke, I am your father! but
rather more like the dependable, non-descript
uncle in Star Wars who gets burned to death
without anyone much caring, is hardly shown to
require any refuting at all theres no authority
there to balk, just a perpetually standing place-
339
holder. The son steals, does drugs, and nearly kills

two people, but all this is shown as the sort of wild
acting out that might be required for him to shake
off others expectations and ready assessments of
him, so at the finish he could plausibly be a fully
self-automatizing individual, heading off fully free
into his own future.
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Labels: place beyond the pines
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
Oblivion (2013)
Oblivion
How many films exist where there are two worlds a
protagonist will exist inthe first, ostensibly
superior, almost always cleaner, but really corrupt,
and the second, more raw if not also dingier
but really the last remaining refuge of humane
community? Lots and lots, of course, and Oblivion
is another, and belongs with probably the whole
host of those which dont really convince that the
340
hero doesnt actually forego the more appealing

world. The two worlds in this film are the first one,
where hes essentially living in a Tony Stark pad,
with his very pretty Pepper, who, we note just as
we note with Pepper comes close-enough to
being his age-equivalent. Good for the Tom Cruise
in this world, for conquering his fear of intimacy of
older women for the pleasure in mature company!
He has a hankering for old ways of the past, which
makes him not so much sentimental as cherishing,
but which could look to become obsessive: witness
his whole lake-cabin thing. And she has, or refuses
to acknowledge, not a wit of it, which can make her
seem a bit clinical, anesthetic, but also maturely
distancing they are going to have to leave all this
behind as well as a useful counter to her
husband. They work together as a team, and they
have the daily pleasure in knowing that what they
are doing assists the other enormously. But they
also have distance, so that every day when he
arrives back they have the pleasure in taking in one
another, maybe not so much anew, but with what
each of them accrued in their time spent apart. We
have here, or what we see and feel of them here, is
an adult couple.
The second world is essentially a tenement world.
Lots of dingy people, closing huddled together. Its
a world of a wife, his actual legally married wife,
that is, but which has throughout really the feel of a
341
siren lover who has enraptured him they talk

about how they would grow old and argue with one
another, but all we ever see speaks of new romance
not of how couples relate past this, try to romance
past this (his false wife in the first world, did a
good job previously showing how this gets done).
He gets to be a savior of this world, which makes
him a bit epic, mythic what an adolescent dreams
of being before learning what it is to function
proprietarily in a world of adults. He gets to kill off
Mother for belonging to this world, but in the
previous one She didnt require killing because She
had already been managed into the delimited role
of a boss someone who is ultimately just as much
just doing her job, as accountable and non god-like,
as you are. Yes, Im stretching a bit here, but
there is a sense that She, the god, really is just
mission control.
The first world wife judges Cruise tainted, and
wont let him into their domicile after seeing him
devolve with his floozy. He is. Hes entered the
adolescent imagination this SciFi film, of all places,
had built a world against in its first world. Shes a
Ripley without the credit.
OriginalArticle:Aplagiarist'slameexcuse:
Addictionmademedoit
THURSDAY,DEC1,201109:32AMPST
Hisproblemisthathewantsyoutobelieveheintentedthe
342
alphabet;whenitgetstothepointthatotherpeoplesworks
becomelikethealphabetsomethingeveryoneknowswasntour
owncreation;onlysomethingwereusingtohopefullycreate
somethingworthypeopledoingthesamewillbeequallyworthy
assaluteasoriginalauthors.
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OriginalArticle:Aplagiarist'slameexcuse:
Addictionmademedoit
Re:Yettherushtolabelhisselfishbehavioradiseasetendsto
undercutthesincerityoftheatonement.
Anyonewhossettledinwellwithadisease,shouldunderstand
otherseffortstogetinwithoneaswell:therein,liesnotjustsure
excuse,butsureexcusetodelightinanyandeveryselfish
endeavorimaginable.ReallyMary,onedayafterdelineatingforus
howyourenotwaitinguntiltomorrow!andinsteadareenjoying
youreverypleasuretoday!,yourefindingsomepoorsure
damnationattracting/drawingsodwhosputtogetherhisown
pasticheofpleasures,togrindtoground.Ifyourestillfinding
yourselfanxiousaboutlivinglifeuninhibitedbydenial,dont
projectanddisownyourownsinfulselfintosomeother
defencelesspatsy,toshowhowmuchyounormallydespise
uninhibitedselfindulgencethatsjustcruel;instead,get
sympathetictreatment,fromsomeonewholovesandadmiresyou
someonewhoknowsinotherthings,s/hehasagreatdealto
learnfromyou.
Whenwerenotallinthemoodtoseekoutanddestroysinful
people,wemightadmitthattherewassomethingcapableand
343
compellingaboutsomeonesuccessfullymakingapasticheofother
peoplesworks,intoaprovedwinsomewhole.Hemadeother
authorscontributionsinto,lettersofthealphabet,fromwhichhe
assembledalargerparagraph,chapter,andon.Idlovetosee
moviesbemadeavailableforartfulotherstoreassembleinto
uniquecreationsItrulyhopewegothere.
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OriginalArticle:Theargumentagainstthrift
Haventyouknownquiteafewpeoplewhoareevidentlydoing
well,butifyouaskthem,willtellyouhowsomuchofwhatthey
earngoestowardspayingoffafflictions.(Tomindinstantly,ishow
everycollegeprofessorweseemtohearfromatSalon,for
example,isinsomehurrytotellyouabouttheir60hourwork
weeks,andhowtheycouldearndoubleiftheyworkedin
business.)Myguessis,isthatyoupersonallycouldbegiftedinthe
futurewithsomehugelotteryticket,andsoonenoughwedstill
enduphearingfromyouaboutpossiblyevenyourdentalwork,
certainlytheclaimingcharities,relatives,andavastpantryfullof
otherafflictions.Youdneveradmitthatthebulkofyourlifewas
aboutselfadventureandlivingitup.(Inourweirdculture,getting
cancerisonlyguiltfreewaytogiftyourselfwithabucketlistof
goodies.)
Growth,untaintedgoodthings,makesomanyofusfeelanxious,
exposed,punishmentworthy.Whenwestartingfeelingespecially
anxious,weactuallywanttobeinvolvedinsomethingofthelike
ofadepression,sotheresnowayanyonecouldpointusoutand
suggestwerenotactuallymostlycruelly,unfairlyburdened.
344
Ifdentalworkandthelikewasntsoeasilyapprehendedbyyouas
anaffliction,thunderedintoittoinstantlyprovehowdeprivedyou
are,youmighthaveaddedthatwiththesethings,too,thereis
adventurepossibilitiesforselfknowingness,expansion,
consolidation.Whatdentistdowechoosethistimetovisit?What
sortofdentalwork,service,attendance,mightactuallybeoutthere
forus?Therearesomanywaystocareforthebody,somany
interesting,differentpeople,toencounter,sortthrough,and
experienceaswecometothewaythatworksnowbestforus,why
notthesamewithsuchostensiblesimplydreariesascarrepairs?
Maybe,ifwehaveamindtolook,thatworldhasbecome
interestingtoo?
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WEDNESDAY,NOV30,201108:46PMPST
Continuingtoupdateourselves,investinproductsthatrepresent
selvesweareevolvinginto,isaveryhealthythingandifmost
peoplereallywantedsuch,ratherthanaseverecoldspellthat
cancelsoutbadconsumeristichabitsweprobablyneed
rescuingfrom,wewouldntelectinpeopleallagreedthatwhat
weneedisausterity.Thereissomesimilaritybetweenwhatthis
authorbelievesandwhatPaulKrugmanbelieves;he,Paul
Krugman,remember,wantsthegovernment,atleast,tospend,
spend,spend,andletausterityfullysuckit.Itsprobablyoneofthe
reasonssomepeoplethinkhesababyboomerdouche.
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345
Alladultsnotjustparentshaveapowerfulpsychological
urgetoputtheirdesiresonhold,andthaturgemakesusreceptive
tothenotionthatwedbetterbesavingmoreandspendingless,
justlikeallthemainstreameconomistsandreputablejournalists
keeptellingusto.Weknowwhatwillhappentoourbank
accounts,ourwaistlinesandourmarriagevowsifwestoplistening
totheirinsistentvoiceofreason.
Evenso,wevereachedthepointwherewehavetoconfrontour
fearsaboutconsumerculture,becausetherenunciationofdesire,
thedeferralofgratification,savingforarainydaycallitwhat
youwanthasbecomedangeroustoourhealth.
Thispowerfulpsychologicalurgewasnotmuchinevidencethese
lastfiftyyears;however,yourerightthatmany,manypeople(but
notall)areruledbyit.Itsoriginslieinourrelationshipwithour
parents,who,owingtothefactthatmuchourpurposewasto
somehowsatisfyandattendtotheirownunmetneeds,feltdrawn
toanddidthreatenuswithabandonmentandthelikewhenwefirst
soughtoutaworldofacquisitions,allourown.Thisscareisfor
thechildsoprofoundthatitaloneisresponsibleforthe
developmentofthesuperego,orifyouwill,theparentalalter,most
everyoneofpossess,andwhichusefullywardsawayfromtoo
muchspoilingourselvesinlife,forfearofreexperiencingthat
worstofallpossiblehumanexperiences(tothechild,parental
abandonmentmeansannihilation,oblivion:thatwhichcannot,
aboveallotherthings,bereexperienced).
After(DepressionandWW2sacrificepermitted)30yearsof
unambiguousgrowth(1950stoendof70s),andtwentyyearsof
manicgrowth,theparentalaltersinmostofusarespeakinghugely
346
loudly,warningusthatOblivioniscomingunlessweterminateall
growth,rightfrigginnow.TheDepression,weguess,oughttodo
it;anditwilldoit,endangeringourhealthofcoursepartof
whatitissupposedtodo,toshowourcommitmentnowto
selflessness,totheverypointofnoendinsightsufferingbut
alleviatingusofthefeltsensethatagreaterOblivionispast
zeroinginonusandbeguntoheadourway.
Yourerightabouteconomics.Enjoyedyourpiece.Hopethereare
plentymorepeoplelikeyououtthere.Ifnot,andifyoullexcuse
me,ratherthanabountyofgifts,IllmakeTHATmyselfish,
selfishChristmaswish!
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OriginalArticle:Thisisournewnormal
Alsofun!Thankyou.
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Fun!Thankyou.
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OriginalArticle:WhyisHollywoodstill
347
terrifiedofabortion?
WhatIappreciatesomuchaboutpostwarfeministsisthatthey
madepersonalrealizationsuchanimportantthing.Thisisntacut
therealized,thehappywoman,islivingthelifeLIFE,inmy
judgment,isaboutbeautifullystretchingoutforothersthe
realmofthepossible;plus,whentheyraiseachild,forhavingnot
deniedthemselves,forclaimingsomeofthelovethathadcruelly
beenabsent,theyllgenuinelydobetterfortheirveryimportant
kidsaswell.
Abortionisatrickything.Rightwingerswhonowaresoagainstit,
foritbespeakingfemalerealizationandtheirlifeoutsidethe
containinghome,couldbeallofasuddenforit,ifitendsup
meaningsavingtheworldfromuselesseaters.Watchforit;they
(rightwingers)areidentifiedmostfortheirhatredoflife;their
particularstance,isadaptable,actuallyentirelyreversible.
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Thecapitalistsystemfailed,then,andwillgodowntodefeat
amidstgoodstylesocialistreform.Despite30yearsoffailing
schools,parentsmoreandmoreawayfromhome,everypersonal
problemtreatedimpersonallywithdrugs,coldconsumerculture,
everywhere,agenerationwasneverthelessformedsofullof
goodnessandenergy,onlytheunattunedwouldmistakethemas,
really,essentiallydenied;zombielike.
Permalink
348
Itstrue,womenwhokeeptheirbabiesarebeingmadetoseem
pure,THEMSELVESkeepable;thosewhoabortthem,creatures,
harlots,diseasedaliens.Anditsclearlynotjustwinningover
therightwingers.
Drained.Asifasmuchattheendofalong,wearyjourney,as
beginninganewone.Unlikethe60s,vitalitydidntgivebirthto
them.
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OriginalArticle:Who'smakingakillingoff
studentloans?
Theyvebeenliedtobyeveryonetheytrust,andwhentheyrage
anddespair,theyregleefullyhateduponasspoiledandpampered
asONLYNOWabouttoknowwhatrealpainis.
Sometimesawholegenerationissetupforsacrifice,sotoabate
theanxietypreviousoneshadabouttheirownlifegains.Thefirst
349
worldwar,forinstance,wasoncesuchhorriblemoment.Stickit
out,kids.Youdonthavethatmanyfriends,butifyoufindway
nottoreadilysacrificeyourselvesinordertofeelgoodforfully
submittingtoeldersneedsofyou,werenotasbloodthirstyaswe
werebackthen.Recognizeoursickneeds;onlypretendtogivein
tothem;andknowyouverymuchCANoutlastus.Theyllbefun
toysalongtheway,toothe30shadjazz,swing,andCitizen
(friggin)Kane!
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Capitalismhasntlookedgoodfor30years,anditscertainlyno
ideal.Butasasocialist,Illmaintainthatthecommunismthatwe
arelikelytoseeemergingoverthenexttentofifteenyears,will
be,unfortunately,Sovietstyleonceagain.Thatis,fortrueserfs,
thosewithoutdistinctionorpersonality,witnessthekindofdead
populacewellsoonstartapplaudingfortheirnobleselflessness.
Werealreadyseeingit;todaysliberalyouth,enjoyingbecoming
partofthenameless,leaderless,washedoutOWSlot.
Understandable,butsad.
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Gotcha;andIagree.
350
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The50sto70sfollowedalongdepressionandaworldwar
peoplefeltpermittedahugeperiodofgrowthafterthatheroic
sacrifice,andthatswhytheygotit.TheONLYreasonwereall
abouttogothroughanotherstupidperiodof,notjustoligarchy,but
ofhatredtowardsanythingthatdoesntsmackofpersonality
abatementandselfsacrifice,isbecausewefeelsuchisnecessary
toforgosomekindofevenworsepunishment,whichwouldsurely
visitusifwekeptonarrogantlygrowing,definingourselves
specialsnowflakestyleandotherwisemisbehaving.
SomyguessisthatitllbelikethelastDepression;wellhaveto
waitoutabout7or8yearsofcompletestiflement,thentherewill
beamomentwherewebegintopullourselvesout,followedby
anotherimmediatesquashing;thenwellprobablycollectively
arrangeanotherworldwartohappeninwhichtosacrificeagood
numberofouryouthrepresentativesofourguiltyambitious,
strivingselfvesin,and,penancefullypaid,wellgetanother
stretchof30yearsofunambiguouslygreatgrowthagain.
Hopefullymostofusprovetohavestayingpower,andwhen
wonderful,presumptuous,youthfulprogressivesareonceagain
permittedtoreign,theyllfindawaytomostlyabatethis
horrifyingcycle.
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351
Re:Sheclearlyseemslikeaprettysickpuppy,andhasalways
hadastreakofselfloathingamilewide.Assuchmeansshesnot
likelytoREALLYclaimmuchforherselfinlife,Ithinkmany
youngpeoplewillfindheradmirable,inthissacrificeyourself
andyourethegoodgirltimes.
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WEDNESDAY,NOV30,201111:23AMPST
Abortionisassociatedwithindependence,freedomwith
presumptionandsoitisnosurprisethatwearebeinggreeted
withwomenpreparedtousetheirbabiestoshowhowprepared
theyaretosacrificeambitionanddistinction,andbecomethelikes
ofaresponsiblebutblandandthereafterinconsequentbreeder,
duringanerawherethissortofselfsacrificemeansescaping
damnationasgrotesquelyselfish,spoiled,andundefeated.Itsnot
theflapper20s,wonderfullygivingVictorianteatottlersthebird;
itsthedepressed30s,whereMotheronceagainrulesthefamily,
andhasusallunderwraps.
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OriginalArticle:Ischildhoodobesityabusive?
352
Beans,LaurelWASrighttoencourageyouunderstandthatyour
dietwhichisrathersimilartomyownisaveryblandthing
toinflictoneveryoneelse.Igrewuponsugarlesscerealandskim
milkbeans,wholegrains,andgreensIcouldstillwith
considerableregretdomostlywholesalewhennecessitycalled.
Othersareatsomelevelvery,veryrighttogofortheircheesesand
fatloadedsundaes,secondandthirdhelpings,andtellmommas
boyJamieOlivertobuggeroff.
ItstheproblemwiththenofatpeopleIinmanywaysrespect.
TheyrethetypetolamentthattheDutch,whowhenisolated
duringWW2hadtoforgotheirfattydietofcheesesetc.and
indulgedmoreingreensinstead,mostlylefttheirgreensandbeans
dietbehindthemafterthewar.Thatis,whentheDutchwentback
tobeingopulentandlifeenjoying,ratherthanstarvedandisolated,
theyweresuchthatleadnofatdieters,overall,actuallylamented
theirostensibleregression.
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studentloans?
Thequestionisrather,whatchancehavethesekidsgot,whentheir
ownPARENTSmorbidlyactuallywantasystemwhichgivesthem
nochance.Deepinourmostregressedpast,wewereofcultures
thatpracticedinfanticide.Itsnot,unfortunately,fullyyetoutof
oursystems.
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353
studentloans?
Therearetimeswhenpeopleintuittheethosisswitching
fromsortofdemostocompletelypatrician/plebian.Were
enteringintoonesuchtime1%constitutionallydifferent
patricians,99%personalitylessnoblesufferers(thepublic
aggressivelywantsitthiswaynowisthetimeforthemto
showhowvirtuoustheyareforlargelysufferingawaya
decadeortwooftheirlives).Ihopesomeinthisdebate
pointedoutthatprobablythenumberonereasontogetinto
(thelikesof)Brown,owesnowmoretoyourwantingtolook
likeyoucouldscoretheleisurelygentlemansB,thanyour
abilitytomatchtheworkethicandcompetencyofanyasian.
OriginalArticle:Whynoone'stalkingabout
Newt'sweight
Idontthinkso.Hemanifestlyrepresentstheinstitution;assuch,
assomeonemoreimportantspuppet,itgiveshimlatitude:he
couldbeasbigasatruck,andsomehowtheinstitutionspin
stripeswouldworktothinhim.Christiesonhisown,andso
weremorelikelytotakeintoaccountallthathespresumingto
bringuptothetable.
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OriginalArticle:Whynoone'stalkingabout
Newt'sweight
354
NewtCOULDbeasfatasChristie,andyoureright,itstill
wouldntbeascommentedon.Newtismorepartofaninstitution,
soitseemsnotsomuchabouthim,butratherthelargeedificehes
foldesthimselfamongst.Christiesonhisown,sowelookonlyat
him,andhisbustingoutgut.
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OriginalArticle:Whoneedsabucketlist?
Youhearthewordpegged,andthinkdildos(wink,wink)and
porncommonusage.Youthinkofthosewithproblemswiththeir
babyboomerparents,andthinktheirresponsibleofyour
generation!Whenyouseepoeticlanguageinuse,youbragabout
yourplainness,andsuggesttheotherislikelyautistic.Whenyou
encountersomeoneevidentlydifferentthanyourself,youthink,
firstoff,andthensupplyhelpfulcorrection.
Howsureareyouthatyouarentageek/pervert,aparentpleasing
goodboy,orabore?
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OriginalArticle:Whymysmallbookstore
matters
TUESDAY,NOV29,201112:34PMPST
Credibilitydoesntlieindirectingmoreandmorepeopletolittle
bookstores,becauseTHATisthedirectiontheyreactuallyheaded,
andIndybookstoresareasthisastutepostersuggestsnow
goingtoenclavesofboutiqueness,tight,smartintelligencesthat
355
givetheirfrequenterssomesensetheyresurelyempowered
againsttheunscrutable,insane,everywheremasses.
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OriginalArticle:WallStreet,takeourchildren!
TUESDAY,NOV29,201111:39AMPST
WallStreetwouldnthavebeenpermittedtoeatourchildren,
unlessthelargerpublicactuallywanteditto.Childrenaptly
representourownstrivingselves,ourowndesiretolivelivesthat
areuninhibitedinwhatmightbeaccomplished.Unfortunately,few
havebeenraisedtoescapeatsomeverydeep,profoundlevel
thinkingthisdesireultimatelyhorriblyselfish,andsowhenwe
NONETHELESSacquiregoodthingsforourselvesinlife,we
JUSTHAVETOMAKESUREsocietyoffersupaptreplacements
tosufferthefateweourselvesbelieveWEdeserveforourown
guiltarousinglifegains.Ourliterate,liberalculture(even)is
findingeverywaynowto(pleaseGod!)GUILTFREEpublically
visualizethehurting,thehumbling,thehumiliationofchildren.
ITSALLostensiblybeingdonetoshowhowmuchtheyactually
DOcare,toshowevilothersupbutthatsnotreallywhyits
beingdone:notaliberalnowwhotalksofeating,hurting,
maimingchildrenisntpleasedwevegotaculturevery
successfullydoingjustthat,andwill,howsodelightfully!,
continueonandondoingthesame.Afterall,theyretheones
whovebenefitedthemostitjustcantbemadenotobvious,
despitetheevilsofWallStreet,andtheirownsupportforhumane,
green,utopicurbandevelopmentandbornagainlittlecommunity
bookstoresandeverywhereaboutthemtheangryDepression
voiceofdisapprovalsounds.
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356
Inthisage,ifyougetpegged,youredead.Besttoleavesome
suppleness,formaneuverabilitysakes.
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OriginalArticle:Will2012beareplayof1968?
TheOWSersarenotjusttheyoung,either,butitisimportantto
notethatthatisnowhowthemovementhasbeenessentialized
asaburdenloaded,bitterlyangryanddesperate,youthmovement.
Iarguethatnotonlywillittherebyrightnownotgatherhuge
sympathy,butactuallydrawantipathyforvisuallymanifestingall
thedistress,fear,andaloneness,thatothersfeelinthemselvesbut
needexpressedinotherpeople,soitcanbepunished,butasan
outsider,andtherebyfullydenied.Hurtingyoungpeopleisthebest
waytoshowhowapologeticyouarenowforyourownspoiledlife
acquisitions.Inhurtingthem,yourelettingthepartofyouthat
urgedyouontogrowthknowyoujusthowmuchyoudespiseit,to
thegreatpleasureofouridhatingsuperegos,who,inthis
depression,haveseizedholdofthereignsassurelyasallstick
QuaritchdidattheendofAvatar.
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357
Ifyouwerentonthefiveyearlist,itslikelyyoubedoing
muchofthesame,though.Culturehascrestedthebaby
boomershavewilleditso.Itstimetorevisit,indulgeinknown
pleasures,knowingthattheonlythingnew,butstillcomfortably
awayaway,inthehorizon,isthedoomofdiscord,crazed
agitationsandenthusiasms,andwartrumpets.Itfeelslikeendof
timesthenewonthescenedontseemsomuchofthesortto
wanttocommunicateandthefreedomgrantedinthiswilldraw,
isdrawing,manytoindulgeinfamiliarjoys,andsuppressthe
agitatingarrivalofthealsogenuinelyworthybutUNFAMILIAR,
notyourown,whoddareentertodisquietthislovelycollective
swansongmood.
Permalink
OriginalArticle:Will2012beareplayof1968?
ObamasbesthopeisifpeopleseeOccupyWallStreetersasa
bunchofstudentsloadeddownwithstudentloanscausepeople
hatethem.The50s/60s/70sweregoingtobeaboutyouth,about
youthfulness,becausetheDepressionandWW2wereaboutthe
denialandsacrificeofallthat.Nowthatwevehateourlong
periodof,first,unamibuouslygoodgrowth,and,second,equally
longperiodofmanicgrowth,wereintoDepressionmodeonce
again,whichisaboutthehatredofallthingsyoungandpromising.
Itdoestheseveryvulnerableyouthagreatmisservicetohavethem
thinkingitmightbethe60scomeagain;itisntforthemost
part,OWSersarehelpingESSENTIALIZEthemselvesasspoiled
andyetstilldisgruntled,fortherestofthepublictoBEGINtheir
pickingon.Iftheyenduplookingmostlyouted,cold,andwithout
358
hope,thepublicwillkeepvotinginthoseproperlygivingthem
theirdue,graftinguponthemallthemiseriesandinsecuritiesthe
restofthepublicwantsdeniedinthemselves.
Permalink
OriginalArticle:Supportyourindiebookstore!
PatrickMacabreHalstonhere,AuntMessy,andImnotwhining,
Imhelping.Independentbookstoresarecomingbackagain,andit
willowetothepurchasingdecisionsoftheliberalelite.Theyll
thinktheirsupportofthemmeanstheyreforthesmallguy,that
they,wierdly,AREthesmallguy,butitreallyowestothem
havinganopportunitytothistimeclaimsmallbookstoresasall
theirown,asakindofboutique,thatactuallymostlydistinguishes
themfromthemongrolizedpluralityofthe99%.Whatbetterway
fortheenfranchisedtosupportthe99%thaninawaywhich
continuestheirloathingandfrettingthem?
OriginalArticle:Supportyourindiebookstore!
MONDAY,NOV28,201108:52AMPST
Independentbookstoresarecomingback,butnotasbeloved
neighborhoodstaples,folkystuff.Theyllbebrutalclass
demarcators,thrivingboutiques,wherethoseofrefined,patrician
tastegotoassurethemselvestheyhavelittletodowiththe
mongrel99%(andtokeeptastealive!),andwhichthealienated
99%wishtokeepalive,too,tokeepsomeremoteglamoramidst
theirwasteddebasedworld.Smallhavensofotherwisedisallowed
personality,justlikethe30s.
359
Permalink
OriginalArticle:Howshouldwedesignthe
citiesofourdreams?
SUNDAY,NOV27,201110:25AMPST
Re:Andtheresreasontobeoptimisticthattheywill,becausethe
generationthatwillretrofitouroldcitieswithnewideasisthe
sameonethatscurrentlydevelopinganinstinctualaversionto
economicunfairness.
Itwontbeagenerationthatsgoingtodoititllbeforemost
fromthechildrenoftheendowedrightnoweachoneofthem
verymuchgreen,poorconcerned,butalsosoverydifferentin
mannersfromthe99%thattheirclassconcernedparentsdontfind
themselvesnotentirelyenthusedaboutthem.Theyareprincesand
princesseswhovebeendeniedthecorestufftobreakthrough
instinctualaversionstobeallforthepeople;whatwecanexpect
fromthemiseverythingsothatthewellentrenchedwillnevernot
reallyknowthemselvesasaristocracylovingaristocrats.Inevery
greenguildedurbanlandscape,theyllseethepatricianeasynessof
theirpower,anditllactuallybemostlythatthatpleasesthanwhat
theytelleverybody,includingthemselves,itcommunicates
theirostensibledemocraticcore.
Thisarticleisabouthowthe1%willneverrecognizethemselves.
Itistime,onceagain,forpatricians.
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OriginalArticle:Howgossiptookoverthenews
360
WhyisitwhenonereadsthisarticlethatonesensesOxfords
wallsfirmingupandgettingstronger?Itfeelsalmostasifwhatwe
needmost,now,isforinstitutionstodotheirduty,thepressto
soberupandleavethemalone,andforthepublictoletthemselves
belead.
Permalink
OriginalArticle:IsDonDeLilloreally
prescient?
IfthisauthorreallymeanttobringupDeLillostrulyprescient
point(aboutthetwotowers),onewonderswhyhedidntinfact
mentionit.Whatthisauthordoesdo,however,isarguethatDelillo
hasamorbidandparanoidpointofview,thatheshouldbeseenas
retrofitinghisvisiontowhatevergrandtragedyormomentof
socialdysfunctioncomesalong,andwhosetendencyistousehis
charactersassimpleconduitsforhisownwrongheaded
mouthings.Itishardtoseehoweventhegreatestgeniuscould
fromthisbleeckmaketheclimbuptodeservingtobeamajor
writer;itcertainlyseemsthestuffforwhatanostensiblymoresane
generationwouldrecognizeasacon,ahack.
Tome,though,ifIwanttofindmyselfmoredispirited,Idturnto
moreofJohnWilliamsworkswaybeforeIdDelillos.
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OriginalArticle:Thedilemmaoftakingcareof
361
elderlyparents
TheauthorhasexplainedhowinAmerica,childrenandparents
loveoneanotherthegenerationofbabyboomerswhogave
theirparentsthebirdwhentheyleftthenest,clearlyneverexisted;
theplentitudeofpopularmoviesandbooksthatshowedussuch,
clearlywereallliessoyouclearlydontexist.ButifyouDID
exist,shehasalsoexplainedhowthesituationwouldbefully
upsidedowny,soguaranteedYOUwouldgettobethepersonwho
beatsthehelloutofyourparent;though,Imustadmit,whatIthink
babyboomersareconcernedaboutisthatthisupsidedowny
situationismoreillusorythanreal,moretheirownparents
temporarilymakingthemselvesseemsoharmlesssothetruer
situationthatalltheoldfeelingsofwhenyouwerefullyunder
theirthumbdontfloodsostronglyintoviewyousomehow
DONTacquieseandfindawaytohomethemwithyou.
Twentyyearsago,thesituationwouldhavebeendifferent,because
itwasstillayouthculture.Now,withcrammedlivingquarters
ratherthannuclearsuburbcastlestheexpectednorm,withself
sacrifice/sublimationratherthanselfsatisfaction/realizationthe
commandingethos,withtheDepressionfeelingaspenancefor
babyboomergreeditsgoingtoputgrandmaandgrandpaback
inthelimelight.Giveupthemasterbedroomnow,folkstheold
kingsandqueenshavereturned.
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elderlyparents
SATURDAY,NOV26,201105:35PMPST
362
Ifextendedfamiliesonceagainprovesthetrick,wellhaveto
comeupwithsomethingelsebeforelong:causeatsomepointthe
diaperchangersaregoingtofindsomegiganticwarthattheyjust
HAVETOpartakein,togivethemsomeperiodofguaranteed
relieffromdomesticcrap.
Permalink
elderlyparents
SATURDAY,NOV26,201101:50PMPST
Howcanyoubesurethatnoonewantstoignoreparentalneeds,
whenyourealsososuretheyreallprecariouslyperchedIlove
myparents,buters?Itjustseemsmorereasonabletometoleave
plentyofroomforseeingsomeofthoseleaningheavilyonthe
but,asactuallyatsomelevelmorehopingtoridthemselvesof
theirparentsthanfurtherattendtothem.Doesmatricideand
patricideexistonlyatthesamelevelaswhiterunicornsand
fairies?Onewouldhavematricidicalfantasies,notsomuch
matricidalones;ormaybebetter,dark,unicornal,magimatridical
fantasies,justsonoonegetsconfused.
Permalink
OriginalArticle:NeilGaiman'saudiobook
recordlabel
Gaimanisthemostnonaggrievingguyontheplanet.Atatime
whenwearepreparedtocommunicatehardthatthatistheonly
363
voicewelltolerate,itsnowonderhesbeenannointed.What
weneedfromtheBritishnowisanotherJohnCleese:thatguy
couldteachAmericanssomeaboutwhatitistobetakeninto
account.
Permalink
OriginalArticle:Shouldliberalsbemore
thankfulforObama?
WhatChrisMatthewsdidntcatch,butJoanseemedtoabit,isa
certainedgeinChaithesnotsomuchmakingapoint,as
beginningapointedindictment.Chrisbearhuggedhimwithlove
andadmiration,andthoughitobscuredmosteverythingelsefrom
view,Istilldidseethecircumspectlittleguy,notquiteplussed,
withhispointyknifestillstickingout.
Permalink
OriginalArticle:ThegeekytriumphofPepper
SprayCop
Ithashelpedcementtheideathatovertdisobedienceisayouthful
stance,atatimewhenthenationisinmindtoprojectitsown
selfishness,desireformore,intothismostappropriateof
containers,todenyandpunish,isinmindtoseealineupof
youthbeingvictimizedandfinditaphallanx,animageactually
abitcompellingforitshomoeroticismfrontlinesoldiers,the
youngestandthebravest,givingthemselvesupforexpedient
364
slaughter,thewhateverwishesoftheirdesirouselders.
SprayCop
Thatsfunny.
Permalink
SprayCop
Therewasatimewhennaziconcentrationcampguardswerentso
fugitive.Maybeweremoreenteringtherethanthepartyoure
skippingaheadto?
Thisofficerisgoingtobepubliclycondemned,butmaybebecause
hesacouplestepstoofarfromwherepeoplearepreparedtogo
rightnow.Soinsteadmanywaystokeephiminview,ostensibly
ofcourseforourvillification,butmaybeactuallymorefor
purposesofconsideration.
Permalink
SprayCop
365
TheSouthhadhillbilliesandredneckswithguns,theNorthhad
shopkeepersandrespectability.Whoultimatelyprovedmalleable
andcarpetedupon?Historically,whatismostnotableabout
warriorculturesisthattheytendtobeofthekindthatprettymuch
throwthemselvesupontheiropponentsbayonets.Theyaimso
hardtobesadistic,butsubmitattheendsoenthusiasticallyto
masochisticsubmissiontheirGodlikesnothingbetterthana
largefieldoftheirownboyslyingdead,indutiful,noblesacrifice.
Ourslamentstheinsanity,andmoveson.
Permalink
SprayCop
Hesamemeinpartbecause,Isuspect,manypeopleareimpressed
withhisimperturbality,infaceofstrugglingchildren.Near
everyRepublicanwouldwanttobelikehim,andmany,many
liberalstoolikeagoodportionofthosewhoapplaudedObama
soloudlyforremainingsereneandadultwhileRepublican/Tea
Partierswentaboutlikespoiledchildren,oreventhosewho
applaudedthatGothe@#!#toSleepbook,where,facedwith
screamingchildren,adultsimaginelaughinginresponseatthem,at
givingthemthebird.
Thisisntthe60s,whereyouth,afterawitheringGreat
Depressionandthemasssacrificeofaworldwar,weregoingtobe
allowedtodefineandruletheworldforalongishwhile.Thisis
endofcycle,wheremoreandmorepeoplearegoingtogetakick
outofadultsactinglikestern,disapprovinggrandfathers,who
areunsparinglybrutaltowardactingupchildren.
366
Permalink
OriginalArticle:Thefaceofpolicecruelty
Oritmightnudgethemintocomplicitselfsacrifice.Wehavedone
everythingpossibletomakeyouthfeeltheyarenottobevaluedin
thissociety,andIsuspectmanyhaveinternalizedtheattitude.
PuttingyourselfinthewayofpolicewhoWILLhurtyouwould
surelyprovideevengreatersatisfactionthanselfcuttersgetby
theirmeansofpunishingtheirownwretchedyouthfulness.
Whenawholenationofyouthlaunchesthemselvesintowar,ithas
agreatdealtodowiththejoyfulfeelingtheygetfromknowing
theyrecommitingthesacrificetheirnationeagerlydesiresofthem
finally,now,theyreincontrovertablyvirtuousgoodboysand
girls.
Permalink
OriginalArticle:ThecomingoutstoryInever
thoughtI'dwrite
Imdelineatingthewayahead.ThenewleftImdescribing,the
onethatwillincreasinglyidentifywiththeworkingclass,isa
vastlyregressedleft.Itwillturnongroupsthepreviouslothad
spentsomuchtimelovingandsupporting.
Permalink
367
thoughtI'dwrite
Iwonderhowmuchtheurgetocomeoutrightnowowestoa
sensethatwereattheclimaxofaculturalage,onethatisinthe
processofchangingwholesale.Thepreviousliberalperiodwas
aboutenfranchisingthekindsofgroupsmiddleAmericatendedto
discriminateagainst;thecurrentoneisonethatwillmostly
identifywiththemiddle,withtheAmericanvolk.Forthe
previouslot(ofliberals),withnogrowthahead,nomoretruthto
bediscovered,itsaboutdailyfindingawaytotriumphyourfully
realizedselfNewt=bad,Salon=good,kindofstuff.Inthe
meantimethenewleftcomposesitself,andtheneventually
launchesawholesaleattackontheboutiqueliberals(Chris
Hedgesterm)who(verymuchostensibly!)representthekindof
mecenteredselfdecadencethatbroughtdowntosuchasadlow,a
oncehardy,oncemanly,robustworkingclassnation.
Permalink
thoughtI'dwrite
Well,IdisagreebutIdbewithyouifyouweretoarguethat
fewwhosharemyopinionmeanhomosexualsanygood.They
pretendtohelp,buttheymeantoeviscerate.
IfinditdifficulttobelieveyoureactuallyFOReducated
psychobabble.Andsomesympathy,pleasethesamekindsof
peoplewhohateongaymentendtohateontheJewishscience,
psychoanalysis,aswell.Tothem,itsallsignsofasocietygone
368
fullydecadentandretrograde.
Permalink
thoughtI'dwrite
Hewasbuilttopleaseassuchhewastheperfectcandidatefor
homosexuality.
Permalink
thoughtI'dwrite
Boysturngaytosafeguardthemfromfeelingfullyabsorbed
withintheirmothersneeds.Becausetheywerecuedearlyonthat
theynearexistedtopleasetheirinsufficientlylovedmothers,
theyrehighlysensitive,anditispartlythiswhichdrawsthemto
Salon.ItisALSOthatpeoplelikeWalshandMEWremindthem
inpartoftheirmothers,andthisisstillnaturalenoughand
drawingcompany.ItisALSOthatSalonregistersasasitethatis
sensitivetonottoomuchoffend,makeanxious,theirreadersif
itstirsthingsup,weallsenseitllhurryalongtofullycalmdown
thestirredwatersandnestlesimplyagreementforagood
subsequentbit:suchanenvironmentiscomfortableforgaymen,
wholearnedfromthestartoftheirlivesthattheonethingaboveall
othersthatyoudonotdo,ismakemominanywayanxious.
369
thoughtI'dwrite
Youreright,theallAmericankidenjoyssportsbutdoesnthavea
lesbianforamother.Ifhesimplyhadtoomuchmotheras
youreinsinuatingthenhisconclusiveturningtowardmenis
largelyaturninghisbackonher:itdoesntcementtheirbond,but
theopposite,makingthemsafelyaskew,securelydelineated,from
oneanother.Theoriginal,theprimaryfaghagwillonlygetso
muchoutofhiminthefuture:Iwonderhowmuchitisthis
wonderfulsafetythatiscelebratedwithcomingout?
Permalink
OriginalArticle:Ontheeveofdestruction
MONDAY,NOV14,201103:41PMPST
Theylostpublicsupportowingtoacollectivedesiretoimagethem
spoiledbrats.Youletthemairoutyourowndistress,andthen
disownthem,indulginginanotherlongtermofsufferingbeforea
movementarisesthatisuncomplicatedbytheexpectationswe,
REALLY,deservebetterthanthisoftheverybest(notsaying,
ofcourse,thattheseareitsonlyconstituents,butthattheyare
surelyamongstthemitssorancidnowthatnomatteryour
[commendable]appreciationofongoingdiscourseandsocietys
abilitytorightitselfyoushouldfindyourselfassessingitallasa
choiceawayfrompossiblesalvation).
Permalink
370
OriginalArticle:Ontheeveofdestruction
MONDAY,NOV14,201103:15PMPST
Alotofliberalshavedonesomeinnercalculationsanddecided
theyrenotgoingtolosemuchiftheystaymostlystatusquoand
letthenexttwentyyearsbeatotalhorrorformostotherpeople
theyllfeelguilty;butthisafflictionwillactuallysatisfyin
showingtheyrenotcompletelylivingit.Theyrenotevil,butjust
nothealthyenoughtofindlittlesatisfactionwhenaspectreof
doomhasdecideditllpassthemby.IfJoanmakestherestofher
lifeaboutpreventingthenexttwentyfrombeingabouthuge
widespreadmiseryandeventualgrandsacrificethroughworldwar
(theusualwayitgoeswhenourcollectiveconcernissuddenlyto
purgeoutallbadness),itllowetosupportfromgrandfriendslike
ChrisMatthews.IfpeoplelikeJoanandChrisbalkcompletelyout
oftheirfamiliardiscourse,tome,atleast,imaginingmany
peoplelikethemdoingthesame,imaginingallofthemasakinin
innerresourcesasthey,thefuturewillsuddentlyseemopen.
Note:theylllosealltheirfriends,thoughtheresonlyacouple
peopleIcanthinkofatSalonthatwillstandcompletelywithJoan,
andbelieveitornot,neitherisGlenn.Ifsubliminallysensingall
this,ifyouwereher,wouldntyoufindyourselfdoingrecheck
afterrecheck?
Permalink
OriginalArticle:IfTolkienwereblack
Updikehasbeenaccusedofsomethingofthesame(byBloom,for
instance),i.e.,possessedofgreatgifts,butlackingsomethingmost
meaningful.Personally,IthinkitsthatbothheandAnthonyfocus
mostlyonthedomestic,seetheworthyplayandadventurethere,
371
thatscaresawaypeopletakenabackbytoomuchhearth.Ireally
dofindAnthonyscreativityofanearwhollydifferentkindfrom
somanyfantasyauthors,whosinventionalwaysendsupreeking
tomeofcompensense.Thisislesstrueforalmostallwritersinthe
genreduringthe70s,ofcourse,whenyoudidnthavetohaveall
thatmuchinnerfiretohavetheagepropelyouontoquitenew
things(LeGuinsinthere,forsure).Hisstyleispronounced,
mostlywithouthedge.Uncircumcized.Hereallyisthecloses
writerIcanthinktoUpdike,muchmorethantheDelillos,Oates,
andallthem.
Permalink
OriginalArticle:IfTolkienwereblack
Itstoughtotellrightnowhowgenuinepeoplearebeingwhen
theyciteUrsulaLeGuinastheirprimaryinfluence.Shesthepre
eminantfantasywritertociteifyoudontwanttocollectaround
youany(oratleast,theleastamountpossible)considerationasa
geek.Noneoftheotherslitpeoplementionquitegiftthesame.
Personally,Iwishmorewouldciteandactuallybeinfluencedby
PiersAnthony.HesfantasysJohnUpdike,itsboldest,least
cowed,ACTUALLYleastgeeky,adventurer.Ifyouseeallthatbut
stillthinkhimadork,somethingaboutthewholegenremustsadly
playtothatpartofusthatactuallyneverreallywantstogooutside
ourdoor.
Permalink
OriginalArticle:WasShakespearereally
372
Shakespeare?
THURSDAY,OCT27,201103:42PMPDT
Rightnow,youreeitherpartofthe99%,orpartoftheruling
class.TheDepressionlostsightofthemiddleclasses(they
certainlyexisted,buttheydidntfitthetimesdynamicsowere
ignoredinpopularimagination),andsotoowe.Thisiswhythe
considerationofShakespeareasanaristocratishavingitsday.
Permalink
OriginalArticle:Democratscan'toccupyWall
Street
TUESDAY,OCT11,201109:11AMPDT
Oneofthegreatestthingsaboutgrossinequality,isthatyoudont
needtolistentothosewhowellmaybeabletellyouhowtolivea
littlebetter,withtheirmorethanlikelycomingfromaclass
absurdlyelevatedbeyondyourown.Youcanremainstuckina
classthatissuffering,butthathasalsodecided,unlikethe60sand
70s,thatitmightbefemmemannersofthemiftheylearnedto
lovecookingfrench.Manymainstreamdemocratsaregoingtotry
veryhardtobecomepopulists(thenewSalon,anyone?).Ifthey
cantgetin,itscauseofourownwallingthemout.
Permalink
OriginalArticle:Democratscan'toccupyWall
Street
Bythis,bydemonizingtheelementsofmodernAmerican
373
workingclasslife,fromSUVsandlowpriceexurbanboxstoresto
thekindsofcuisinethatupscalefoodiesfrownupon,areyousure
dontjustmeantalkingaccuratelyaboutthem?SUVsare
deplorable.Theboxstores,justasbad.Whattheyeatastrong
signthathumanscanletthemselveslivewiththeirmoreimportant
partoftheirbrainsinactive.Liberalelitesaregoingtogetit
becausetheyareareminderthatwecanaskformoreoutoflife
thanthis;expectit,even.Theyllbereplacedbypopuliststhe
masseswillwanttolistento,wholltellthemJamieOliverstyle
howtheyhavetostopdrivingSUVsandstuffingtheirfaceswith
fattyfoods,butnottogoforsomethingmorerefined,but
somethingmoredeprived.
Permalink
OriginalArticle:Unions,Democratsand
OccupyWallStreet
WEDNESDAY,OCT5,201109:13PMPDT
Itwasinevitable,andthustheydidntsomuchmakeitasfailedto
preventit.Everygenerationthatbeginsbyleadingasociety
beyondwhereeverithadpreviouslypermitteditself,thatisallowed
toleadit,becauseasocietyhasdecidedforatimethatinnovation,
overallimprovement,ispermitted,hasbeenearned,endsupat
somepointpullingback:notonlydoestherestofsocietybeginto
feeluntetheredoverallthishubristicinnovation(asocietythat
risesallboatsmyword!),butmanyoftheleftthatleadthegood
thingsbegintoaswell.Thepivotaloverallpsychicchange
occurredattheendofthe1970s,whenthemassesmovedthingsso
thatgrowthwouldlargelybesomethingdeniedthem.Insum,the
spoiledbabyboomersthatcametofocusonconsumerismand
themselves,wereverylikelythebestgenerationhumanityhasever
374
seen.Wegettobethelotthatseeswhatisintruthfleshedout
personalities,andratherthanaccomplishmentseeselfindulgence,
blameworthyselfattendanceandotherneglect.
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OriginalArticle:Unions,Democratsand
OccupyWallStreet
WEDNESDAY,OCT5,201109:42AMPDT
TheNewDealdidntariseoutofafearofunrest.Social
improvementscameoutofthemassesfeelingtheywereowed
something,forveryclearlyhavingalreadysufferedsomuch.
Socialjusticeisntjusthandedtous,notbecauseitHAStocome
fromafight(withmanysadlossessustained),butbecausewe
dontthinkwedeserveitifitcomestooreadily.(Twiceacentury
itseemspeoplebecomemorecomfortablewithallowanceand
permission;otherwisewereverysuspiciousofthemassofus
livingbeyondwhatwethoughtpossible.)ThatstheONLYreason.
Also,thespoileddangerouskidsofthe60swon.Americalargely
cametounderstandtheAmericanswhosawthemasdeserving
punishment,asolder,regressive,primitiveArchieBunkertypes,
whonotonlyhatedthekids,butblacksandhomosexualsand
immigrantsanduppitywomenaswell,andeffectivelyrepresented
everythingthe60sgenerationhadtoopposetofinallygivesome
sanitytoAmerica.Thehatershadtheirmomenttofreelyexpress
theirabsolutehate,butitmightaswellbeenalure,foritservedto
movetheyouthintopositionsofconsiderableinfluenceandpower,
anddoomedthemintoconstantlybeingonthedefense.
The60syouthwereemblematicofwhatwasrightwiththe
countryitwasgoingtobeatimeforyouth,forromanticism.
375
Unfortunately,ourcurrentlotisformanyofusasignofwhatis
rightaboutitnowtoo:weveenteredatimewhereyouhavetobe
delusionaltoseetheyoungasatalloverindulgedorspoiled.If
theystartgettingthethingstheyaskfor,itllowetousgauging
theyresosufficientlybrokenwhattheywantwontbesooutof
lineofthereducedwayofexperiencingtheworldweexpectoutof
them.Havingyourdebtspaidoffandhavingsomesortofjob,
needntmeanyoureonyourwaytobecomingfullyhuman.You
couldjustbeaNewDeal/Sovietworkingant,nodifferentfromthe
restofthethrivingbutpointlesscollective.
Permalink
OriginalArticle:WhyAmericannovelistsdon't
deservetheNobelPrize
Withhowmuchtheirdamnpresumptionandspoilednessclearly
bothersus,Ithinkitfairforusalltotakeapauseandconsiderthat
eveniftheyreallywere/aregreat,wemightnotbetheonestoever
accordthemthis.
Perhapstobegreat,youhavetofocusoneheckofalotononeself
thatis,perhapsyouhavetobecomeonewhomalater,more
shrunkengeneration,whohasschooledthemselvesintobelieving
theirownegoisticdesiresmakethembad,andisdeterminedtosee
anytheyseerisinginothersgetsretractedandpunishedaswell,
willseeassimplytooselfattendantandspoiled?
Whatwewant,apparently,whatclearlymakesussick,isforartists
topartakeinthecollective,tobesomewhatblandandnon
descript,andtodowithoutblinkingwhatwewouldhavethem.
Permalink
376
MONDAY,OCT3,201106:53PMPDT
Theymaynotknowasmuchaboutsufferingoritmaybethat
theyactuallyknowquiteabitbutarentasDETERMINEDbyit
buttheysurelyknowmoreaboutallowanceandplay,andnot
playingouttheirlivesasotherswouldhaveofthem.Guesswe
differonwherewethinkinventionandcreativitycomefrom,
perhapsowingtoourdifferenttakeonhowmuchfunpeople
shouldallowthemselves.
Permalink
IfIcouldgiveanobeltooneAmericanhorrorwriter,itwouldbe
toStephenKing.Iftoonefantasywriter,toPiersAnthony;and
oneSciFiWolfe.All,Ithink,couldbecalledindulgent,but
theyaretheoneswhollchangemankindforthebetter,while
lettingeveryoneknowitsmorethanokaytocomplementyourfull
bellywithsomeafterdinnericecream,somesherryorrum.Idont
thinkwellseetheirequalsforacouplegenerations,butwellget
lotsofonmessagerevelsingrit,byauthorswhoareteaching
themselvestheyveneverknownanythingother.
Permalink
377
Rated!
Permalink
The1930sturnedhardagainstselfcenterednessandspoiledness
too.Fortunately,aftertheywereallowedtheirunfortunately
longishturnatharanguingeveryoneintogoodbehaviorand
championingpostofficeart,thenationeventuallyreturnedtogood
sense,andspoiledbratshadtheirindulgentturnagain(Yay
UpdikesCouples!).Imencounteringgoodnumberstryingto
turnusallagainstUpdikethebestofAmericanwriters;most
fun.PleaseallowyourselftocounterWallaceseviscerationof
UpdikesTowardtheEndofTimewithMargaretAtwoodstake
onthebook.Shesthegrownup;Wallacehasprovedjustaself
laceratorwevemadenowmostlyintoawhip.
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OriginalArticle:Thecreativeclassisalie
SATURDAY,OCT1,201112:35PMPDT
Thelastbigdepressionalsosuppressedtheindividualpowerofthe
actorwegotthefactorysystem,andreplacable,nervoustalent.
25yearsafterthisbeganwasaboutthetimethefactorysystemfell
378
apart,soImguessingyoureprobablyherespeakingaccurately
onlyaboutourimmediatefuture.Inmyjudgment,theproblem
nowwiththedigitalrevolution,whichwasNOTtruewhenit
began,isthatitisnolongersupportedbyacollectivewilltomake
itgenerallyempowering.Ifwereinthemoodtoseethepreviously
spoiledthoroughlydemoralized,leftonlywithflowersand
bonbonswedfindtheiruseasinstrumentsofhumiliation.Suchis
ourmoodnow.
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OriginalArticle:Thecreativeclassisalie
SATURDAY,OCT1,201111:45AMPDT
Thewholepointofadepressionistosuppresscreativityand
individualityadepressionisthepenanceforpreviousgood
times.Pointingoutitseffectivenessindoingsomaynotevenbea
lamentwhatgoodthingsweallowourselvesnowneedtobe
bettercamouflagedascompromisedpleasures/opportunities.The
richgettostruttheirstuff,unblanchedweenjoypointingto
themtoshowhowgoodandsufferingweourselvesnoware.This
goesonforabouttenyears,thenwegetabigwarwhereawhole
bunchofpromisingyouthsacrificetherestoftheirlivestothe
nation,andthenweallslowlybegintofeelthatthatsabout
enoughforcompromisedofferings:bloodpricepaidinfull.
Wethenstartdetachingourselvesfromourextendedfamilies,
claimourownpiecesofearth,andhaveoneofthosetrueyouth
leadperiodsofcreativity,selffulfillmentandfun,thatonlyare
permittedtocomeabouttwiceeachcentury.Hanginthereguys.
Andmaybesomeofyouevenbuckthetrend:itwouldmakeme
nearbelieveinmiracles.
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Saturday, June 23, 2012

"Brave" IS brave, but leaves the significant tear unattended
Andrew OHehir at Salon has suggested that Brave, however feminist,
doesnt really undermine patriarchy the daughter weaves a spell of
command and rhetoric to sway them to her side, but ultimately its to
the men to determine when sharp changes to tradition can be
undertaken. But the whole (or almost the whole see below) of what
Brave does is show only women as capable of the maturity, the
majesty to see what the realm needs to survive; the men, are twits,
practically always ready to hack at one-another over the smallest
slight. The men, that is, though they can supply buffoonish charms,
are mostly a drink-fest and a random melee waiting to happen: does
the movie really supply any doubt as to who maneuvered these realmsaving patriarchal traditions into place in the first place? Andrews
former peer at Salon, Stephanie Zacharek, has argued that Brave is
closer to Ratatouille and The Incredibles than to Wall-E and Up; and
with its preference to show ordinary folk as afflictions on those
mentally at least one rung up, theres no doubt about it it is.
You could tell by the released preview of the film that it is the
dynamic between mother and daughter which was going to make this
movie good (and maybe great), and this certainly proved true, with
the surprise being that the film actually ends up becoming more the
mothers than the daughters. (Asked now to conjure up an
emblematic image, it wouldnt be the redheads magnificent locks, but
the queens surprise as she tries to cover her bare self from view, or
her eyes as she started turning whole bear.) We remember not the
young lass shooting arrows, but her delight at seeing her mother gain
competency catching fish its not so much the mother
countenancing the changes in her teenage daughter, that is, but the
daughter countenancing her mothers accommodations to new status
and frightening powers. I liked this, but it goes against the natural
order, against plain fairness, frankly. Its nice that the mother knows
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new adventures and stretchings out of the possibilities of self, but if

the daughter doesnt have her time now, during her teenage years,
when the whole pull of her lifeforce is directing her that way, her best
bet for it will be after shes married and with kids, when her
adventuring might be mixed with anger at her previous long denial
and not do them any good.
You always hope films directed at young kids will still introduce them
to something adult. What is adult is to appreciate that the reason
teenagers can actually end up shortchanging their efforts to
individuate, is owing to fear of the anger this arouses in their mothers
(to the mothers, their individuation feels vindictive), not to their
mothers ultimately prevailing to induce some appreciation of the
complicated ways of the world into their still limited and fully selfabsorbed minds. The youth agrees to marry whomever, to cruelly
circumscribe herself the beautiful adventure of finding a soulmate,
after maturely coming to appreciate her desire for as much as
selfish. A whole environment is Truman-show produced to show her
brave act of telling her mom to piss the hell off, as something so
intrinsically abase it would lead to the like of her mom being
permanently disabled, and a whole realm at the cusp of war.
Fortunately, the mother has been apparently introduced to enough
fun that she ends up speaking up (or effectively motioning, if you
prefer) for the wisdom of allowance, for her daughters needs for the
same, and with permission granted thereby her daughter sways a
bit off the masochistic and is saved the fate of being life-long humped
by one of the idiot clansmen claiming her.
Still, there is a sense that the adult does make its appearance here,
perhaps to be mulled over and chewed on without us being so much
consciously aware were up to as much. When the mother starts
losing her own persona and going whole bear, the daughter is face to
face with someone who just a moment ago was her familiar mother
but has suddenly become someone fully absent from her, and also
very, very frightening and savage. I would argue that, outside of a few
very lucky ones, theres isnt any girl out there who hasnt known
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wicked fear at experiencing from their own mothers, this sort of

upsetting transformation. The look the bear directs at the daughter in
the film, a quick but very impressionable one, as of someone suddenly
alien who means her terrific harm, is of the obliterating kind that
foremost keeps young women from fully being comfortable with their
intuitions to explore the adult, with their developing mental checks,
inner-scolds, that keep them from letting life be too much about
ostensible mother-betrayal and self-realization. We only get this look
twice in this film, and perhaps you are agreeing thank god for it!
Putting something this true into the film cant quite be called brave,
as its too subliminal, too deniable, to seem more than what a goodintentioned but also very careful place-holder might put forth. Same
thing can be said with the films other brave element its actually
countenancing that what a family needs is a strong wife, able kids,
and a strong father. As mentioned, the real father in this film is an
idiot, and overtly this film belongs with a depressing, long slew of
films were likely to see forthcoming, where its near beyond
countenancing that female members dont just simply take over. All
the men in this film are like cartoon characters put in odd pathetic
abundant company to a sex possessed of something vibrant and real
exempting one notable exception. The adult male monster bear
possessed somewhere inside by the spirit of a ranging, foundingfather clansman has no truck for idiots or fools, either, nor is he
about to be toyed about by wee fey boys who idolize sweets, and he is
a fantastic creature which inspires equally fantastic engagement on
part of mother and daughter to be brought down. His is a powerful
voice the mother bear is something in defense of her cub, but
he never in the battle, owing to someone elses ferocity, loses his own
magnificence and the three of them together undeniably in their
engagement inspire something along the lines of great, create a
landmark encounter from which a worthy mythology might be
constructed (the fathers engagement with the bear, from which he
wrung out a lifetime of tale-telling, was in comparison but Ekler vs.
Sugar Ray). The young girls talk of bravery subsequently, in fact,
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only gains some credence owing it.

The most significant rift in this film is between mother-daughter and
an astray father, who has no in to meaningful involvement with his
family, and pretends to have true volition only with the rush that
comes from fleeing his impotence with them and wading into battles
with other intrinsically cowardly men. The great bear shows such a
presence the other two need to be at their best to shape its fate, and as
its not so hard to imagine something understood mostly as majestic
being something that should be slotted at or near the head on your
own side, the great bear serves for a moment as akin to a beloved
strong, fierce, formidable father surprising the involved conspiracies
women were shaping by appearing forthright into their dynamic after
a long spell of traveling was finally over. And to everyones relief.
I would argue that mostly owing to the male bear, and not to the
movie-short shown just before Brave, which in retrospect seems a
calculated effort to perhaps alleviate some young mens feeling
shortchanged by the film, boys might find themselves feeling
provisioned by this theater experience. But I still strongly suspect
that a lot of young men will walk away from Brave feeling as if
mocked by it, as if having suffered yet another rebuff. The film
informs us that progress in society involves further exploring the
relationship between mothers and daughters, putting men on the
backburner for a change. What a film like this, as well as a societal
current which favors its view, denies is that real progress would come
when boys, not girls, become more subject of their mothers attention
and love. In real life, mothers and daughters already have extensive
involvements with one-another, with the result being, and though Ive
talked in this review mostly of the harm, still mostly a fleshing out of
the personality on the part of the daughter, the development of more
soul and intrinsic warmth. Boys still mostly lose sight of their
mothers, and as the psychohistorian Lloyd DeMause argues in his
great essay, Why Men are More Violent, though mothers may
dominate their little girls and expect them to share their troubles,
[. . .] domination has been found to be far less damaging to the childs
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psyche than abandonment and routine distancing. Without involved

contact with their mothers, in comparison to girls, boys become
personality-thin, evidently deprived and sadly dull. That is, the film
actually shows a truth in showcasing teenage boys as unappealing to
the eye, without any needing to look to their fathers to know theres
no use trying to excuse them for just going through an awkward stage,
and in still showing more-or-less infant boys still within the realm
of maternal attention as far more captivating and spirited. May a
brave film appear that actually overtly argues that something should
be done about this deplorable true-life actuality (and please not by
Adam Sandler, who I've long appreciated but no longer trust).
---------Thursday, June 21, 2012
"More cuts, please!": Current films and our self-torture
More Cuts, Please: Current Films and Our Self-Torture
Patrick Hallstein / McEvoy-Halston 2012
If youre like me and youre beginning to notice a lot of evil being
passed off as innocuous, just a joke, or even as good, and youre
wondering why this has become so widespread, why people are doing
the opposite of the holy crusader and enterprising ways to target, to
demean the precariously placed, let me tell you what this is all about.
Most people are not comfortable when too much of the good life has
been made available to them. All the great things theyre hugging to
themselves has them feeling theyre worthy of disownment, of
catastrophic punishment, as this was the crippling experience they
were made to feel when they first as children started attending more
to their own needs than the unmet ones of their mothers. The
superego, set up as a child to protect him from reviving this
intolerable experience, by dissuading him from having too much fun
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in life, takes over and comes up with a scheme thatll save the self
from oblivion. Individually, we agree to take actually good things as
only of a form we can lament as gross and sinful self-love, gluttony,
and so on and collectively we make sure society is restructured so
that, rather being dominated by an aspiring middle class, it becomes
of the smallish quotient of the protected prospering accompanied by
the spread of losers. The moment when we began to become more
focused on our own individual lives and our mothers turned away
from us, abandoned us intentionally for our unconsciously
presumed to be deliberate abandonment of them, is replicated and
stretched out for a tedious sum of years. And this time the child
does not find way to inevitably grow anyway, but simply to suffer
wounds, sores degradations it intuited it deserved for this most
quintessential and worst of crimes, while the mother is put in plain
view in her absolute worst light, self-absorbed, disconnected, cruel,
thereby allowing the child to demonstrate absolute obeisance to her
will by seeing all but allowing himself to register nothing. Woe to all
those, that is, whod call Her a tyrant! Thereby believe it or not a
worse fate is felt to have been averted.
Most people alive unconsciously want our society to be for awhile of
disconnected winners and afflicted losers. This sounds ridiculous to
you, I know, but how do you account for the fact that Romney has
been mostly identified at this point as an elite, lifelong ensconced in
pampered surrounds, as an uncaring asshole who bullied other kids
and is thoughtless to those our pets defined by their being under
our care, as someone who unabashedly is a friend to corporations and
who is very, very awkwardly trying to fit what is evidently wholesale
their agenda into packaging that sounds at least a bit bottom-up, and
yet very plausibly has a legitimate shot at the presidency? And how do
you account for the fact that since dealing with the cleanup of 9-11
the very last thing weve had to worry about is mass public denial of
the afflictions to public service men and women, debilitated through
their experience in whatever service theyve undertaken the
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physical injuries theyve suffered, the psychological ones driving them

to suicide, the financial ones telling them theyve got destitution
awaiting them in their home life as well with I think the near
conscious collective realization that no one for a good while is going
to do much about it, even with all the facts laid bare, week after week,
by our news media?
Politics and economics produce the carnage. What the media does is
ensure we all know its being done, transforming all the incoming
variant data of external suffering into quotients of sacrifice we can
please ourselves by counting and stacking up. Fairly assessed to be at
the helm of this madness is what is most commonly assumed to be a
tag-along popular arts, which, rather than offering escapes, keeps
us at some level keen that none of this carnage owes to happenstance
but rather entirely to our dictates. Films, that is, are directed if its
on the screen, its cause somebody wanted it there. And more and
more were assuming theyre done, not by auteurs lead by their own
idiosyncrasies, but by those skilled at taking percipient guesses as to
what were going to want next.
What we wanted not that long ago were still films that told us we
really dont deserve to be kept stunted, and that what we really need
are more sparks of encouragement and love in our lives to start us on
the path to realizing ourselves Wall-E is perhaps the strongest last
evidence of this. The grossly askew in this film are the robots put in
power when society had become all corporate, determined to slacken
human beings into their most passive forms to expedite vulgar profitmaking specifically Auto, who can only recognize real life as
something aberrant and destructive. To the perceptive, the ostensibly
ordinary in this movie, like Wall-E and the corpulent, childish
captain, are more evolved than the superficially superior specimens
to Eve, who is shown as massively repressed, as essentially deprived,
despite her lavished-upon Apple-white gloss, her Maximilian
physique and power. Part of the point of Eve in the movie is in fact to
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show up an awesome arsenal as mostly just good protection to absorb

the shocks and blows that might incur should you chance to actually
begin a souled life. The difference between her and the tiny linemaking robot, whom Wall-E drives into fits over the most trivial of
trespasses as fair register of its inanity, is ultimately trivial.
But around the time Wall-E was released came also very popular
Ratatouille and Dark Knight, and subsequently it has become evident
that whereas Wall-E was at the crest of something good, these films
were at the core of something foul which has become the bulk of our
view. Ratatouille is the dark to Wall-Es light. Wall-E holds to the
generous view that what is greatest in humans is to be possessed by
each one of them, regardless of cultivation or IQ; Ratatouille to the
opinion that the masses are dispossessed of anything worthy, and
only worth a nod if they at some level recognize their bumpkinness
and put themselves at your disposal. That is, while Wall-E gives you
irrepressible Wall-E, as well as the indefatigable captain, Ratatouille
gives you limp-noodle Linguini as your representative of the average.
While Wall-E portrays manipulation and control of the masses as
evil, Ratatouille shows it as necessary not just to ensure the
cultivated and smart collect within the society they truly belong to,
but because without being ordered and directed about nothing
notable will ever be realized. (Ditto everything said here with Brad
Birds subsequent film, Mission Impossible 3, which conspicuously
delineates regular cops as not rocket scientists, as idiots, that is, and
allows abusive handling of Ethans limp-noodle ally Bogdan for his
being dispossessed of any ability to help himself.)
The issue in Dark Knight is why the exceptional should care about
those so execrable theyd annihilate a true hero who stood amongst
them if it would quit them of a momentary uprise in uncertainty and
fear; and the only reason the Joker doesnt quite entirely win this
debate, isnt really owing to the fact that the business man doesnt
end up turning the key and blowing up the other ship, as he remains
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as we assessed him first, not in anyway credible as a man; but because

if Batman stops being interested in the people, Batman in all
likelihood stops being interesting to the Joker, whod already gotten
bored with what the rest of humanity makes available to him. The
lieutenant deserves exemption, and so too Maggie Glynwethall as the
love interest, but for the most part humanity is drab and scurried, and
is actually at its most fetching when harassed into lipstick and white
paint before sacrifice. And when bound into some kind of tight
collection, your thoughts can become quickly inclined to ponder over
just much really is lost is someone connived to cart them off
elsewhere.
Dark Knight is no doubt to me the most important movie of our
time. Products of genius are only really possible when your own
visions can be taken aloft by the prevailing inclinations of an era it
wants what you have to offer, and your unconscious intuition of this
gives full confidence to your initiatives. And when it starts
demanding sacrifice, demeaning attitudes towards human beings it
prefers portrayed as diseased, a masterpiece like Dark Knight arrives
to daunt those whod hope to mount something built of love and
hope. To me there is something intense about this film, specifically,
that probably helped shoulder out some of the hopeful in our
obviously downward-plummeting era; and mostly afterwards what
Ive experienced in movies not made by auteurs whod built their
reputations on films made decades ago, is not so much great
bombasts of, well, evil, but steady deposits made in film after film of
quick but telling swipes taken at the dignity of average, struggling
people.
We get films more akin to Iron Man, released around the same time
as Dark Knight, which might even be noted for their positive
estimations of people, but which rather seem to have in supplicant
modesty queued up so the new Big Man on the scene can see who
theyre truly in sympathy with. Tony Stark is moved to change his
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business wholesale after he really gets what his weapons are all about,
how much damage they do to regular people, how much they inflate
petty tyrants. He removes his tie, and sits amongst the people eating
a cheeseburger and corporate-heads panic! But man-of-the-people
Tony Stark prompts the civilians he now champions to in fact behave
in a manner which historically has served as pretext to launch armies
to wipe them out. When he as Iron Man arrives to save the men from
being shot before their distraught sons, daughters and wives, he
leaves the boss terrorist to the fate of the peasants, whom one is
presumed to assume will converge on him and deliver a fate crueler
than anything he could possibly deliver. One is presumed to assume
that theyd immediately mob him and rip him up into a debris cloud
of sinew and viscera before he could even quite squeal out a
NOOOOOOOO!!!, leaving us with a still haughty Tony Stark,
deliverer of clean blows, as well as the apropos, and the ravaged
peasants, dispensers in their revenge of a mess of blood and gore. Its
just a quick scene, and the rest of the movie prattles about as far as I
can remember under the assumption of the dignity of the people, but
what a denigrating truth it drove in: the common people can be
counted upon to degenerate into savages; you might loosen your
tie amongst them, but how much closer would you really want to get
yuck!
This spring, week after week I saw the cuts, gauges, wounds, films are
plainly eager to make to regular people. Friends with Kids has been
praised for its generous treatment of the long considered but
ultimately discarded love interests. But how kind is it to decide
against the gorgeous, talented brunette Megan Foxs character for
showing her possessed of an aversion to kids as if they were spiders,
or dirty rodents, delineating her as someone who, though she has
cleaned herself up nicely, remains solidly fucked-up at the core? And
how nice is it to show the considered love-interest who is comfortable
with kids, and is also nice, sweet and reliable to boot, as possessed of
a shortchanged, mundane appreciation of play? When she squeals in
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alarm at the kid in the restaurant, she is the trauma-informed kid,

born of a trailer park, who rose to become what someone born in that
position and is beautiful and determined is plausibly able to do get
to New York and become a star performer. When his dull intellect
blanches at seeing any sense to her morbid games, he is the
unimaginative lower-order intelligence who certainly didnt come
through Berkeley, and who has succeeded, but who may not thrive for
long as society displaces everyone who cannot make instant play with
whatever demands are put before them, like her ad-man perfect
partner can. The trauma-infused lower orders, and the stunted
middling ones, are considered for equal status but damningly
rejected. An especially hard hit given that they are ostensibly
represented by their best.
If you can only trudge through life, leaving the dreaming and their
carrying out to the higher orders, you shouldnt and youre not going
to feel safe enough to feel the world has gifted you a safe-zone
wherein to figure out what you want in life, to feel convinced that for
you the world can still about testing, trying, learning, developing,
ably riding and otherwise enjoying. Youll go on like a soldier in the
trenches, knowing at any minute you or your best mate may be shot
down, and youll be upset for a half hour before out of necessity
putting your mind as to how their demise might enfranchise you.
Friends with Kids knows that the friends belong to the protected
circle, that they enjoy knowing that they are the ones who can
frighten the servile with instant doom. Done much like as in Iron
Man, where it looks to be about something else, this film showcases
the vulnerability of the working class, of everyday folk, by making it
seem mostly about a means for Adams Scotts character to show
much he cares about his lifelong best friend. Perhaps the whole life of
an insufficiently fawning servant the nanny is up in the air, to
make one nice milestone moment happen for a privileged couple. Its
Atonement, but without the mother surprising all by appearing out of
nowhere and raging head on at the car, making ample demonstration
390
at the injustice done to one of the working orders to her dear,

beloved son just to demonstrate the resiliency of an idiotic, rigid
social order.
In What to Expect When Youre Expecting a whole class of people get
it too, and just as sneakily as with Iron Man and Friends with Kids.
While the rich in the film can seem dopey, theyve got heart, and can
indeed learn a new trick or two as well; the poor, or at least the
precariously placed, are the opposite of redeemed. A wad of money is
denied most of the movie by a son with a sense of pride, but finally
accepted to show hed abandoned selfishness in favor of learned
selfless concern for his wife. Very nice, except the means by which
this wad of money was put to generous use counted on the fact that
nurses presumably way past the luxury of professional and personal
pride, having known too long cuts to their pay, instability of hours,
and an overall environment resonate with abuse are most likely
now open to your bribes. Its a chilling moment. The son of the rich
dad is made to seem loving that he bumped his wife up ahead of
others doesnt count against him, as he is only doing what anybody
would do to save the life of their loved ones and the professional
who is supposed to be in right frame of mind to countenance one
persons upset against that experienced by all the patients, comes out
looking possessed of the moral center of a street hood.
If the nurse who accepted the bribe got caught, he might end up a
hood this at least is the working assumption in 21 Jump Street. In
this movie, which showcases the Abu Ghraib-akin humiliations you
can feel free to subject gang members to (the two main-character
police men mock hump one of them from behind while he lay pinned
on the ground), the head of a new drug ring centered at a high school
is a teacher, who was driven to it, we are told, owing to the paltry
wages paid him. His situation isnt even hinted at as something worth
concern, though. Instead, he is the medium whereby the film feels
comfortable trying out humiliations you may not ever have seen
391
before as a source of humor specifically, his penis gets shot off, and
we see him fumbling about on the ground trying to find it. Teachers,
we are told, are, like the nurses of What to Expect, part of a now
suspect occupation. They are like lower class occupations of old
where people involved in them were presumed to be always just this
close to going illicit. It is true that the high school teacher involved is
a boorish male, and it is worth considering that he is subject of
remorseless abuse mostly because of his belonging to this category of
disrepute, but another contemporary film, Me and My Boy, does have
you wondering if, no, while not apt to be portrayed as drug dealers,
weve still presumed female teachers might have been forced to go so
off-kilter that boys dreams of teacher sex is something some of them
might be voraciously making happen.
One might assume those of one working class occupation the police
come out of 21 Jump Street okay but this actually needs to be
considered. The one character with smarts is shown to be someone
who, if hed actually been treated with some respect in high school,
would have been off to Berkeley rather than exploring the trades.
This would have meant, like Tony Stark in Iron Man, not just being in
possession of a posh pad, but never needing to dirty himself, not ever
needing to find some kind of compensation within the realm of the
macho which seals the deal as to what kind of social rung he belongs
to. He humiliates his opponent, but as the film shows, his world is
easily one where he and his partner could end up being, and
essentially at random, shot to pieces. Just after their preparing
themselves for just such a fate, the original (that is, the TV show) 21
Jump Street cops surprise us with their appearance and prevent this
from happening; but any pleasure incurring from their visit is quickly
replaced by shock at how quickly they become dispatched by a hail of
bullets star status, we are conclusively being told, is eclipsed by
their being in the role of discardable cops. No magic exists now to
keep members of the working class safe.
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Construction workers are the ones who get it in Dark Shadows;

theyre one of two groups we see the awakened vampire presume to
prey upon in the film. The other group is composed of young
sensitive hippies, who are done away with, it is made to seem, simply
for being out of sorts and vulnerable to society for existing outside
their heyday. To be vulnerable means someone is going to get to prey
on you very brutally, and to have it portrayed as the most inessential
of side matters, an after-thought, and maybe if it can, as with this
film, look to be mostly about rounding out our understanding of
someone relevant of no import at all. Unlike Monty Pythons Holy
Grail, no trail of police officers is due to track him down for his
butchery. If lords were slain it would be a different matter, but no
one is going to speak up for the working class dregs or other similarly
disenfranchised again with this film, its do to them as you wish,
while you mostly attend to curious plucks on the threads extending
out of your privilege.
Unlike Wall-E, debilitations arent adorned on men but for their
triumphant shedding of them. The momentum of these films isnt
towards their standing on their own two feet, but towards being
loaded down by encumbrances, and pretty much accepting that their
fate is be drawn down inexorably as sacrifices into a predatory maw,
la the most iconic moment of Toy Story 3. The critic Stephanie
Zacharek said of The Avengers that its time for Whedon to retire the
idea of the hole in sky that suddenly breaks open, unleashing horrors
upon an unsuspecting world. But, Im sorry, the portal isnt going
away, because dealing with a felt need to feed it is in fact the primary
concern of our age. It is the maw of our mothers, which wants
representatives of our self-ambitioning, self-nourishing selves
sacrificed to it so it can know satiation and justice the time for self
and societal-growth is over; its now about whos to pay the price for
accumulating for decades, and how much each guilty one. If you
already had some sense as to what this age was about, you could
pretty much have predicted that Snow White and the Huntsman
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would have a scene where the expectant queen would have before her
a multiple of strewn-about youths, drained into carcasses for her
replenishment. So, too, that the experience of watching Prometheus
could fairly be described as one commenter at the movie-review site
Movieline did as being riddled with a million wounds; and that the
pursuit of origins, rewarding, renewing discovery enlightenment
would be easily outmatched by some wretched-awful beasts insistent
demand that its going to be about biology, about your body as host
and its about presumptive spawning. You could also have predicted
that the girl would come out okay so long as she was shown
thoroughly decimated beforehand. And especially if it could be made
to seem a choice between wholly-taken-down-a-notch her and some
still proud figure, which is of course what we get, with her being lead
to believe for a moment that her just-deceased husband had managed
to impregnate her, only to find out that this miracle had occurred
owing only to his already being in part a DNA-manipulating beastthing (making her someone who essentially was fucked by a fiend,
and near-forced to give birth to its kid), and with his being of a
species of humanity which has presumed to temper themselves into
gods.
The humiliations were seeing applied in all these movies towards the
kinds of people we know are most precariously placed, isnt about
Hollywood not giving a damn, but about our being able to show well
actually pay for films which show people like us treated abominably.
Were cutting ourselves to pieces, and the abasement happening to us
in society, through loss of jobs, through service in war, through
competition in schools and being owned by student loans, through
pleasure-critical, self-lacerating diet and fitness regimes, takes on the
environment, stances on youth and youth culture, on your sheer right
to have any confidence in your ability to supply yourself just the
basics, is our best hope to show ourselves so afflicted we cant
possibly be taken as greedy types that deserve to be sucked into the
maw. Well feel ourselves drawn into it, but our own sure scar-
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procuring, fervent self-brutalization will keep us from ultimately

deeming itll much be moved at the finish to actually seek
nourishment from us any pride still there that might yet be sucked
from us, isnt worth anyones trouble, no matter how voracious.
Well come out of this at some point, and itll actually come with our
sense of pride being replenished. But this story, friends also
essentially dark will come at another time. As a preview, it'll be
about re-polluting categories of people fifty years of collective effort
has been put into humanizing.
---------Review: "That's My Boy"
Adam Sandler deserves credit for being angry that a culture he grew
up knowing pleasures from, has essentially been demarcated
subsequently as something you can only bring up with shame. The
really quite wonderful Grosse Pointe Blank is, however, an indication
of this unfair pattern the 80s were Reagan and aids, a time to get
trapped in. Well, in truth, so it was it was a period where society
seemed mostly interested in abandoning its dependents and building
remove so to not hear their complaint (bang on, Risky Business and
Breakfast Club). The kinds of things we were offered to take pleasure
from showed what growing up in that decade did to our preferences
Im sorry, but though Vanilla Ice, Mustang 5.0s, gloomy uterine strip
clubs did please for seeming to grant us access to black culture,
powerhouse prowess, the illicit, something is off with you in
retrospect if you cant see that the main reason to now stand up for
them is because they once meant something to kids. The kids who
grew up with them may rightfully still feel better provisioned than
todays, and I think they are, but this is only because things have just
become more scrutinized, tightened up.
But I did still enjoy Vanilla Ice, I did still know awe at the power of
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the 5.0s, I was excited by the sense of realm-transgression offered in

the strip club; and I thought when we turned away from those we
began to feel guilty about taking enjoyment from, kicked them while
they were down so that we could feel for awhile like we were in
charge, it was an indication of the extent of the damage wed
incurred. We abandoned our stars hard, near encouraging them to
suicide themselves so to not trail us through our lives. Sandler
bravely stands up for them, and is trying to use his Hollywood power
to encourage a safe-zone whereby we can do something about this
period so many of us grew up in other than flee it, and feel cool for
doing so. With the considerable help of his work, the pieces come
back into view, and youre not going to be allowed to say, simply,
God, did we really grow up with that?, a response that has for
subsequent decades shortchanged us the ability to really reflect and
engage with the past that determined much of our adult selves. Its
become time for Sandlers long, aggressively appreciative engagement
with it. You need not only to hear of Vanilla Ice again, know that he
survived his suicide-attempts and is occupied fruitfully making
homes, but spend part of an evening with him, even if just to allow
you the slow goodbye someone who was once (he was, assholes, dont
deny it) a meaningful part of yours deserves.
But its never time to believe that this period did not ultimately
shortchange us. It did. It became cool to pick on anybody who could
remind us of our father-shortchanged (80s were the time for divorce,
and I don't remember seeing my dad all that much -- did you?),
mother-overwhelmed selves gays in particular. I do appreciate that
this film was made out of truly righteous anger at what is always
denied when we talk about teachers sexually preying on their students
specifically, that this was a dream near every male student had,
which shouldnt have become something which cant be mentioned
lest you be made to seem to have given excuse for rampant human
victimization everywhere. But its not so cool to suggest that maybe
there was something right about young mens fear of gay culture as
well. Think about it, the right of young men not to be ashamed of
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their fantasies is stuck up for by someone with the formidableness

Sandler to show he knows something about the charms of mature
love Saran Sarandon and Adam Sandler together mostly ends up
communicating the beauty of an erroneous but still well-watched
pair. It is stuck up for by someone with the formidableness to argue
that what kids need badly is more attendance; and to convey the
pleasure to both parties that come from this with convincing honesty
theres not, as there more than sometimes is with Wes Anderson,
any coveting of the lost-look, the apartness, being abandoned is often
pictured as giving you. Alone, his kid isn't centered enough to
sufficiently stand up for himself -- and that's about right.
But it is also stuck up for by someone who shows you another
coupling society sees as a crime, and aggressively supports its
judgment bother-sister incest. The two involved somehow, but still
appropriately, become the good-looking people, the kind that scared
the insecure 80s boys of the sort who burrowed into Dungeons and
Dragons dens, forestalling meaningful self-development, went to strip
clubs because it brought women down to essentials you could handle,
were the first to join in on dissing the fags, Mili Vanilli. They
become the kind of people who readily picked on us, but whom we
might imagine actually picking on, if they could somehow be tipped
over into a category of priss for their liking, say, jazz dance (they wore
pink Ralph Lauren, so to ignorant us, plausible enough), if they could
be made to seem -- gay.
This is a shameful aspect to this movie. There were a couple parts in
it that drove a few people in the audience to pick up and leave; but
even at their worst the fact that so much of Sandlers main point
deserves respect, and because he has cast some of the more empathic,
more good, SNL members of times past in this movie (Ana Gasteyer
in particular), I worked my way through them but are you really
okay with the stripper blowjob scene?, can you honestly say the girl
giving the blowjob didnt exist in this movie to play the part of the
insecure youth who is outmatched and overwhelmed by someone
older -- specifically here by the stripper matriarch -- and then used by
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men at will, so that while one insecure youth is redeemed in this film,
another is sacrificed? did the 80-year-olds sexual advance, ostensbily
about some other thing redeemed, not still remind you of the shower
scene of the Shining? But if Sandler endorses what are in fact true
offenses, unable to recognize them simply as bad because they
happened to also be discredited at a time when society was cruelly
concerned to make young men feel suspect about themselves, their
inherent inclinations, what they did to shore up some sense of
themselves as strong, as in charge, rather than perennially preyed
upon, Im sorry, but Im turning on him hard. It wont be about
abandonment, but about communicating to him that he is now just as
much picking on people himself.
One last thing, did Sandler know by choosing to make his character
the one who drove the 5.0, leaving ostensibly redeemed Vanilla Ice to
the passenger seat, in the context of macho he thereby shamed him.
One wonders if part of his purpose in redeeming people everyone else
seems bent on denying, is that thereby they become his doll
collection, all his own to play with.
---------Thoughts on "Prometheus"
1) "Prometheus" succeeds in showing us that whatever the ultimate
secrets of the universe might be, they're going to have to be really
something to not instinctively seem less rousing than when a spirited
human being is roused into action out of fidelity to a felt truth that
she is part of something worthwhile and good in this world. The
android draws wonder from two things in the movie -- the aliens'
cosmological map, evidence of their distilled, focused interest in us;
and the anthropologist's surprising resiliance. I did find the light
show appealing, but when we realize the star men are considerably
less possessed of life than the android is -- that they're really just
battle robots, further evolution of the android looks to involve his
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drawing wonder that the young woman hasn't shorn herself of

needing to find something outside of herself for authority and
inspiration. "It speaks for you that you want to see greatness in
everyone around you, for it betrays that you know greatness inside
yourself, and that it is worth pursuing, but it wasn't so much in your
boyfriend, and it hasn't proved so much in ancestors, however
celestially hued ... Look, girl -- people like you are the evidence that
someone out there should cast about and look for something better,
which means the opposite that you should be occupying yourself
doing the same thing. Your not conceiving of yourself as akin to the
origins of life, as someone who through her spirit can stir other
people to greater things, is inhibiting you from just making rather
than studying and searching. The cultural products these aliens have
made is barren and gross; let's see what you might come up with,
instead. Adventure, is better than answers, for it means not finding
out but interacting, changing, challenging -- I go with you now to the
home planet 'cause I see this has become your main point."
Maybe the film needed to be set in Venice. As is, all those not blind
can see is her spirit.
2) Mind you, the great vaginal-placental beast in this movie is really
quite something. I was happy that someone with our DNA could offer
a bit of resistance to it. It says something that Ridley Scott still keeps
us focused on the female anthropologist; anyone less developed
would have been thinking only of the climax moment involving
satisfying the vivid, hungry maw, and no personality would have been
fleshed out for us in the film. She's the counterforce, the outside, that
keeps us from being tentacled and sucked in to the squid horror like
everyone else.
3) I thought the android and the lady anthropologist made a great
pair; I am glad they went off on adventures together.
---------"Friends with Kids" is about the "with kids" part
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Maria Aspan has written an article praising Friends with Kids, and I
would feel inclined to do the same if I felt the film began to open up
for new explorations what had felt foreclosed in pattern. But I tend to
find that in many films that tip the hat to your preferences, youll
relax enough in them to want to praise them for the new theyve
shown you, the possibilities, considerations, theyve lived out for you.
What to Expect When Youre Expecting, if, like the central
characters, youre comfortably mainstream, uninterested in having
the intellectual edge on anyone and more just participating in the -to you -- exciting trends/new truths manifesting now, does have the
material to have you thanking it for what it did right too, for it
fleshing out in a compelling fashion a whole variety of ways expecting
a child affects you and your partner. But if the mainstream is
loathsome to you, the film becomes simply garbage; no true
explorations, just extensions into drudgery. Myself, I can certainly
put myself in the frame of mind to consider New York smart-set
elitism garbage, and dismiss the film as readily as most critics did
What to Expect.
Ill do so now. Noam Chomsky has argued that most of what should
be discussed regarding politics and the economy, isnt actually
engaged by the media. He would have us see them, the members of
the media, as obsessing over a permitted sliver as if it were all the
world. I felt a bit like Chomsky regarding the media while thinking
upon Aspans review. She found the film refreshing, as opening up
new ground. I agreed that, sure, it might do that, but limited to the
latitude permissible to a class that is otherwise comfortable when
most of the innovative is off the table. I find this an era of foreclosed
opportunities, an era so staving off it drives people into thoughts of
ongoing demonstrations in hopes it might initiate a grand happening
that would pull us into a grand narrative that would stop us from
feeling immobilized. The only people I can imagine as finding this
era, on the contrary, flourishing, as provisioning, as perfect avenue to
explore terra incognita or at least the previously criminally
400
overlooked, are people deemed no threat to the presiding directive

no growth! of this era. They have to be people who get a kick out an
era regardless of how bad for its enabling them. They have to be
people who get a kick out of the fact that if they threaten to fire you
for ill-service, color will drain from your face as you know that, once
again amongst the unemployed, conditions might have worsened so
this time you could be out for good. Kindness is their option, and one
theyll use; but they tolerate and even like that if they withdraw it, it
could well mean oblivion for you: they are agents of a ruling
nastiness and keep their weapons of you-destroy ready at their hip.
They have to be people who like that despite whatever ostensible
growth theyre incurring, none of them are especially distinctive. The
point is to cow through betraying the daunting inevitability of the
ruling class. Stick within the medium of expectations something
youre so wonderfully entirely built to do and youll communicate
youre impossible to dislodge, of being principally a member, not an
individual ostensibly to be taken at his/her measure. You take one of
them, study him or her, and you see his or her cohort, even if he or
she distinguishes him/herself for his/her struggling while being
studied in isolation. They have to be people who are comfortable with
the fact that if you do anything truly notable and different, doom
awaits you for going grand when minute variations are whats called
for; for imposing on your own what weve all agreed is to be so
abandoned to the imperatives of the era that it seem beyond the
human and under prerogative of God.
This must seem mad as hell, for the innovation the film explores is of
two friends successfully raising a kid together, not exactly something
not extraneous, right? Well, actually, what they foremost are, are a
variant of the marriage possibilities readily allowed in a movie moved
by the most mundane of Hollywood world-views, namely, alreadydiscussed, What to Expect When Youre Expecting, with this movie,
rather than former party animals who thought it cool to cheese-out
their wedding in Los Vegas, we get the New Yorker preference for the
cosmopolitan kept alive while a couple have their kid. Whats
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important is that, like all their other sophisticated friends, theyre

finally down the path of having one.
Couldnt they have just kept single, that is, not have a kid? Not if they
plausibly wanted to seem as if they werent on some other path from
their friends -- a very treacherous one. That is, it was once New York
to be double-income-no kids, til maybe about ten years ago. And
previously all that New York independence and sophistication was
differentiating you from the hordes of common North Americans, but
you were all in your own way expanding. But now that easy credit
isnt keeping them feeling of the same status as those post-wars bluecollars whose jobs were garnering more for them than many whitecollar ones, now that the idea of having kids feels wrong to their
financial situations, now that theyre beginning to feel out the
possibility that theyre of the 99 % dispossessed rather than of the
plump middle class, and that their historical role is not to determine
what is essentially great about America but to show in their wreckage
just how bad-behaving America must for a long time have been, the
smart-set having kids has become a very different thing.
A grand culling has clearly been called for, and if youre not feeling
cowed, evolution has clearly distinguished you as its favored, even if
ultimately only for your effectively humiliating its scorned. And
youre expected to literally breed the future, even if your role makes
your prized offspring into sordid dumpings onto the poor. If you
choose instead to not have kids, youre wrong to the times for defying
expectations others are finding themselves ruled by. Everyone, even
the most rich, are best understood for their having surrendered the
prospering to arrogance, though an essentially false facsimile of it.
Everyone is doing their thing, letting themselves be drawn into
prevailing currents, and there you are standing apart, clearly with His
will so manifest, believing yourself more special than God. The price
youll pay is to be judged asocial, out of bounds but in precarious
plain view everywhere you go, even in New York.
----------
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Review: What to Expect When You're Expecting

Alison Willmore, in her review of What to Expect When Youre
Expecting, aired her humble request to Hollywood that when it
makes a film which features a young, precariously situated couple,
with no obvious love-bond yet who have conceived a child, that it at
least - then -- bring up the possibility of abortion. Certainly seems
reasonable, except since by expecting the film leads us to think of the
late-term child rather than onset protoplasm, I thought the request
actually out of place here. Yet I appreciate the attack in any case, for
the film, if not as bad as critics have taken it as, is vile, very much
advocating Willmores other concern with the film, that you havent
known human fulfillment until youve had a kid.
You could be an Adonis, and be a rival -- for a moment. But as the
film shows with the comparison of Chris Rocks character, Vic, leader
of the men with babies for being amply besot with them, against
Davis, a single man of exceptional endowment -- muscles, good looks,
the sexy job, and even if now just with but one, surely at his beck and
call armfuls of ripe gorgeous babes spread out in convenientlyremote-from-one-another exotic locals -- its not to your advantage to
be the Greek hero when the times are all Christ submission and
community of grace. Youre allowed it -- rivalry -- for a moment,
cause isnt there even with Christ some admirable, some singular,
standing up to God?; but if you dont let up itll leave you seeming
impressive solid granite the rest of us will nevertheless walk around,
pleasantly more attendant to generous broad blue skies and relaxed
human activity, the multiple other attractions available to us in the
park. Youre the best we could imagine, before we became endowed
with children and got with humanitys overall central pattern; now
youre the gorgeous gladiator we admire, but which never shames us
for registering more and more as being delimited to the arena of
boyhood while we partake in the communal flow opened up by adult
life. And that you finally did end up with kid, saved you. Getting in
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with the times has saved you the stress of having to keep your
musculature proving it might never lapse to the point of
acknowledging defeat which, even if somehow successful, is
counter-intuitive enough to draw our consideration, but never having
us thinking that something central had now just been disproved:
eternity is across generations, not in the distinction arisen in one: it's
better to be average, but with a kid.
And this is probably best case. The next is that youre in service to
someone who is fecund, as the fat sales assistant is, bearing the worst
of her masters store owner Wendys -- lapses, aping out the worst
of her ridiculousness to pacify her effect, sitting on her hands when
her personal possessions get smashed in error but at least she isnt
abandoned.
But if youre with kid, youre part of the group which seems bent on
mending any difficulties they have, surmounting any limitations that
have been conceived -- the obtuse will become attendant when it
matters. Youll cross paths many times, and though you may never
know one another, the possibility is ever possible and if you do itll
be to fortify one another, attaching into one greater complex
macromolecule, interlocking and expanding, exhilaratingly, by divine
right. This ex potencia, which still exists for the young couple for not
talking abortion, for at least being oriented the same as the other far
better economically situated couples, would have been denied them if
theyd considered abortion. Their (even if playfully) at-war oceanside food carts would never port into the safe and secure denizens of
the affluent, in loyal vassalage, but also recognizably within the same
family, as the full-sized margarita stand by the pool of the super rich
race driver baits their income-makers with. Theyd be the egregious
wedding photo the adopting parents try to hide, but without any
excuse. People can be goofy as they enthusiastically become part of
the married fold its odd commemoration, this Los Vegas-style, but
the attitude is essentially right, and theyre in it all the same. What
they dont do is have an abortion, inflict willingly the worst possible
out-0f-your-hands calamity. Gods ways might be unknowable, but
404
its easy to spot the mechanisms of the Beast; they tear vicious gaping
cuts through the fabric of reality weve all collaborated to knit, leaving
all of us feeling shaken and sundered. Asocial kid killers, with knives
-- slash, slash. It's obvious what we're at some point going to have to
do with them.
---------Take the kids to "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel"
Alison Willmore, in her review of "Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,"

argues that the film "is a precision instrument aimed directly at the
heart of its intended underserved older audience," and one wonders if
even if its intention was to serve only them, if the reality is that it
could and should serve a swath more. The film, like the Harry Potter
series, features both young and old, with key storylines for both, only
with "Hotel" the focus is on the latter rather than the former. But one
could never say of "Harry Potter" that it's principally for the young,
that it serves its intended audience well -- and only them -- without
expecting reproach for this being obvious nonsense, that "Harry" is,
rather, clearly universal, with appeal to anyone who hasn't lost all
touch with life. In fact, if you were to say that the films / books were
only for the 7 to 12 set (or, as they move along, the adolescent), and
that adults enjoying them probably are still in contact with their
youth but only in a pathetic, sad way, as A.S. Byatt did ... well, take
care, for here very swiftly follows the torrent to bash gravities of
humiliation against your small dribble of bile. But as swift as so many
are to defend books and films thought by some only for children, do
we doubt how few would throw any disconcert Willmore's way for
presiding "Hotel" as "for the aged only"?
What, though, is a 12 year old to make of adults, not in their last years
acting like infants, but maturely trying to square their desire for
renewal, for new life, new adventures, with their understanding that
405
they are besot with already established life courses, by ruts of routine
responses and resurfacing old tricks, worsening in their ability to
catch some good game? It sure doesn't look much like a ride to entice
fresh crowds into Disneyland. Yet in this age where we've gotten used
to books and films being targeted to the emotional and intellectual
capabilities of differing children's age groups, to their set-determined
particular interests, there's still the reminder of lasting books written
just a generation or two ago by the likes of Roald Dahl, Richard
Adams, Ursula LeGuin, Madeleine l'Engle, E.B. White, and Salinger,
that don't sit so well with the idea that there isn't somehow something
adult, already fathomed in the childish mind. Personally, I've never
thought enough thought has gone into how it is an older writer is able
to write for children at all; instead thinking the proofs on how anyone
cannot but offer, regardless of whom they're intending to write for,
mostly unabashed contact with their 30 -, 40-, 50, 60-ish or on writer
selves. And if children go for it, it has to be that they're very fond
of the adult in these writers, even as they still very much do
appreciate the various considerations allotted them, the faeries, farm
animals, and guardian wizards that assure them this is a world they
can handle.
Even with "Harry Potter" we're already a bit keen to this possibility.
As the series progressed there are encounters simply between adults
that could challenge you to wonder, if all collected and left by
themselves, how bogus it'd be to label them anything short of
literature. I'm thinking in particular of Snape and Dumbledore, of
Snape and Voldemort; with the challenge, subsequent Snape's reveal,
being to determine if the Snape we've long known without fully
knowing his past is fair measure of the key early experiences we are
told have determined him. Yes -- we have to conclude to be satisfied
with the reveal, in a blink sifting through forty or so years of another's
developing -- this product, out of an already complex early
person, could be begot from this; it plausibly fits. And if we're not
similarly now boomer-aged, knowing ourselves how great spans of
time's drift accord with great early pushes in a set direction, how on
406
earth might we determine this? And yet I think it's possible that we
may. Or if not, at least that we might sense that we've already
experienced enough of life, of how things go, to make us one day feel
capable of doing so. "I don't quite just now understand you -- but I
did catch sight of you; you're not alien, and feel I'll one day see you
straight," we, the 7 t0 12-year-old kid, even, might well feel the urge
to communicate.
Of course, to say that small parts in children's books and films
perhaps thought mostly for the adults are actually as much still for
children, isn't to say that if "Up" was entirely about the life story of a
loving married couple, or if "Fellowship of the Ring" somehow mostly
about past-prime Bilbo settling into his own exotic hinterlands, kids
couldn't get enough of it. As alluded to, no doubt not to feel
overwhelmed or wretchedly bored it's got to feel about them, not their
grandparents. But as true as this surely is, I'm tempted to argue the
case anyway, perhaps through reminding people of just how literate
people were a generation or two ago, of how many educators hoped to
stuff as much classical literature into you, hoping you'll even oblige
their skipping ahead past more-relatable "Romeo and Juliet" if
"Hamlet" or "Lear" was judged the master work. And of how this
meant early encounters with works we'd introduce college kids to,
presuming the opposite of child-obtuse pedagogy and rather Mozartin-the-womb zeroing in on what kids actually need for life.
Presuming something more, actually: that what kids actually most
want is not to be catered to but rather to be introduced to humanity's
show, the best that human heritage has begotten -- the good stuff.
And they realize it not necessarily immediately, without, that is, some
pushing, for garnering something from the great requires adjusting,
at least temporary unsettlement and even repelling dis-ease; but
rather sometime afterwards, after life has gone by some and the new
and one-time perturbing has manifested more clearly as a facilitating
component of you.
There, I moved quickly from being tempted to make the case in favor
of the difficult, the non-pleasing, to actually more-or-less making it;
407
and I realize I did so because, despite believing that what kids can't
help but love about the literature they read is their contact with adult
minds, and that kids are more perspicacious than we often judge,
capable of encounters with the adult before "this is for kids aged --"
categories look to communicate, it's never the less true that if you
take your kids to "Hotel" they may well hate you for it. Unlike how
the critic Stephanie Zacharek assessed another movie sure to be
thought, as she puts it, "just a little nice movie for grannies and no
one else" -- "Letters to Juliet" -- I cannot, that is, sincerely argue that
kids will like it foremost for the youth they will find in these aging
people. In "Letters," Zacharek found the 73-year-old Vanessa
Redgrave "living assurance that the young people we once were
can stay alive is us, no matter how much we grow and change,"
proclaiming, when Claire finally meets her long-ago love, that "it
takes zero imagination to see the face of the young Guenevere in this
older one." But though with Tom Wilkinson's plot-line in "Hotel" one
can find the near equivalent of this particular moment, I declare
"Hotel" worth a visit primarily because it makes you realize just how
much better than you there is out there; it's appeal lies in its not
being reassuring. It teaches you that all that youthful energy you
possess is not something you should so much be concerned not to
lose, but be concerned to use, to acquire the depth fully available to
you only in growing older.
To be more fair to Zacharek's review, I'll note that though she singled
out the moment of youthful presence in Claire as what in particular
would reverberate with youth, it's clear she thinks they'll actually take
to all they'll see of her. She actually follows proclaiming the film not
just for grandmas by drawing attention to Redgrave's
adult substance, of how she "puts all she's got into something other
actors might cast off," how "[s]he's present every moment," as much
as her youthful vitality. And she takes care to establish the moment
immediately before Claire meets her long-ago love as a complex one,
as something which to fully understand requires testing your acuity,
some extension of yourself into behavior you may not quite be able to
408
delineate for it possibly not yet being wholy part of your own
resources. This moment's all about adult considerations, about being
aware that however much the 15 year old he fell in love with is gone (a
cowing realization that has her shelter herself, not so much out of
self-pity but "as if [. . .] trying to hide from herself"), "she's not."
And -- now to be more fair to her as well -- Willmore's assessment of
"Hotel" isn't just that it's pigeoned for old hearts not young ones, that
it's simply "about growing old in a terribly British fashion," but about
not-to-be-missed moments as well, presumably, with her herself
being delighted by them, available to both young and old. She
highlights some of the ones I'd be inclined to; but rather than list
them in the exact fashion she does -- "Billy Nighy joking with Judi
Dench about his inability to fix a telephone, Maggie Smith forcing
down local food in order to be polite, Tom Wilkinson joining in a
game of pickup cricket and Penelope Wilton looking terrified during a
tuk-tuk ride" -- I'd have been tempted to italicize the great actors'
names as well: for what we agree is so special is getting to see great
living people interact smartly with one another, not our chance to see
characters from a book so capably enfleshed. Or do what Stephanie
did with Vanessa Redgrave in "Letters," and involve myself more fully
with why Penelope Wilton making clear with Nighy that it's over
between them, or her thanking Wilkinson for sparing her further
humiliation -- both moments of self-account that reminded you how
much one must have to be able to convey so much self-possession
after catastrophic revelations have deflated you to wondering if you're
a fraud -- is so special.
You get enough of great people here I'd be tempted to compare it to
the Louvre, a storehouse one's never to early to start familiarizing
oneself with; but to flatter it now surely a bit too unjustly, here you
get the artist him/herself, as well as his/her oeuvre: a doubling down
of greatness. "Midnight in Paris" reminded Armond White of how far
these actors were from the greats they portrayed; please don't
underestimate who I wouldn't put these actors toe-to-toe with.
So I think the kids should go to this "Hotel" for the elderly. Don't be
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spooked by the specter of death; we're told it's of course going to lurk
everywhere but it proves delineated and contained within a single
source: Tom, the only one not to be sparked to new purpose for his
chasing down of an old one. If kids never-the-less resist, I'll accord
one legitimate reason why it might still be possible that if they flee
your grasp and escape for, say, one more viewing of The Avengers,
they might be wise to. For this is a time when youth may be less
about vitality than about constantly taking it -- the world does right
now seem to have it out for them, with some now declaring it none
other than a period of child / youth sacrifice, to beget a Generation
Occupy. They may, that is, simply have known just too much of it to
garner treasures from a film where youth are shown denied yet once
again. They could be at the point of psychic toppling, with the trigger
-- who knows exactly what? And the key youth in the film, the young
owner of the hotel, is here mostly denied. Cover is of course
provided, for no older person wants to think themselves intentionally
presiding forever over the young; but there is a sense that the film is
intentionally pitting aggressive youthfulness against elder
wisdom/knowledge of people/canyness and patience, with the latter
lot clearly triumphant. The young owner ostensibly comes out with
his dreams realized, his hotel afloat, and the resplendent wife he's
fought for at his side; but the feel is mostly that he's gone from sole
owner of a hotel to its bell hop, enthusiastically presenting himself to
the ring of a bell. This is good therapy for Maggie Smith's character,
who's been head servant but never inexctricable to the family she
served, but unfair to him.
Still, the last time a generation turned whole-hog on a preceding
generation it judged self-indulgent, the result was some vitality -they felt they got their own era -- but, in my judgment, also a criminal
curtailing of depth. It was the '30s, with artists who thrived then
sometimes being the ones unable to thrive in '20s Paris, for all the
great but also incredibly daunting personalities they mixed with
there; but were able to once self-sacrifice and common purpose, not
self-indulgence and individual enrichment, became king. Personally,
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I'd prefer not to think youth have had it so bad they'll take the barren
ramshackle over the opulent for it at least being theirs, but the film
does argue a case for this as well. So, yes, at the finish, I'll admit there
is still some valid last minute weighing to do ... but please do decide
to take your kids to "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel."
---------Making "The Avengers" -- Men Only
Recently, Andrew O'Hehir had this to say concerning The Avengers

and its (ostensibly) all-male demographic:
I don't think I'm breaking any news if I tell you that "The Avengers,"
Joss Whedon's ensemble action-adventure that unites an entire posse
of Marvel Comics superhoes, will be far and away this weekend's No. !
film at the box office. [. . .] Or that a large majority of those ticket
buyers will be teenage boys and young men. Like most summer
"tentpole" productions -- those designed to support franchises, and
ensure the financial future of major studioes -- "The Avengers" is
aimed squarely at guys under 35, long the demographic, psychological
and economic bulwark of the movie industry.
All this is standard operating procedure in 21st-century Hollywood,
where the industry is dominated by post-boomer males reared on the
comic books, TV shows and blockbuster movies of the 60s, 70s and
80s, and the audience is understood in almost Pavlovian terms as a
slavering horde of permanent adolescents. Audience familiarity and
pre-awareness are greatly prized, so nearly all these guy-oriented
movies derive from superhero comics or video games or other
decades-old pop franchises. (It is, of course, possible to go too far into
the pop-culture past. Lets observe a moment of silence, once again,
forJohn Carter.) We can certainly argue about which of these
movies create an interesting twist on existing formula and which are
cynical crap, but I dont think we can argue that it makes much
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difference to the bottom line. The Avengers will make a kazillion

dollars, and so did Transformers: Dark of the Moon. The differences
between the two are mostly a matter of fine-grained detail; theyve
both got cartoonish male bonding, a lot of stuff blowing up, and hotchick eye candy.
If youre female and youre interested in any or all of the above
pictures, by the way, I apologize for making it sound as if you dont
exist. But in marketing terms, you dont.
[. . .]
All of this reflects deeply ingrained social and cultural ideas about
gender, which are present in people of both sexes. Maybe mens
preference for violent action yarns and womens preference for sappy
love stories and our tendency to understand one as more serious
than the other are hard-wired in some biological way, although that
falls a long way short of scientific truth. But despite the torrent of
male-centric franchise flicks well see this summer, and next summer,
and for all the summers into the foreseeable future, the tide in the
Hollywood gender wars has begun to shift, slightly but perceptibly.
I personally wonder if what we will see this year, next year, and
further beyond are periodic interruptions by liberals of their basic
enjoying of life to float out mouthy j'accuses at still-male-centric
society, allowing some smaller bite, to come off themselves. And I
wonder if it was time for one such interruption to come from Andrew,
and this is what actually explains why it is only in the comment
section of this article that we learn why Joss Whedon's
Avengers apparently wasn't permeated by Whedon's ostensibly
natural female orientation, rather than for the film being in the end,
mostly all Marvel.
What I am drawing upon here is not right-wing concerns, but rather
that of some leftish occupiers -- Chris Hedges, specifically, as well as
some of truthdig. In "Death of the Liberal Class," Hedges challenged
readers to imagine liberals as mostly being uninterested in what
happens to most Americans, in actually finding them disgusting, and
as having since the late '70s spent their time essentially walling
412
themselves from them. He contends they've actually become

courtiers, a class distinct from "fellow Americans," and use
"boutique" issues of race and gender to justify their privileges and
relevancy while keeping the rest of America feeling suspect, probably
owed their inferior place. And so thereby life goes along comfortably,
even if significant changes to American life -- the kind of stuff Hedges
contends liberals once defined themselves by -- are intentionally
forestalled, and democratic America comes to be increasingly
pyramidic -- in accord with liberal preference. If you're on my end,
you might just indicate how much you agree with Andrew, but unless
this becomes your one and only comment ever on a comment section,
a brief passing by conveying no sense that you live on the web but
rather are for the most part out and about on other things, though
your heart will be deemed in the right place, the whole otherwise
anthropology of you will keep you a jumble more than a bit comically
less kept-together than he.
We are told that this essentially is Marvel's picture, not Joss
Whedon's. Personally, I wonder how someone supposedly so infused
with female respect could ever not effuse his affectional ethos all over
a film of his make. If this film does indeed feel all-male, I'd
encourage people to look back on his earlier works for signs of
significant female discomfort that would lead him -- when such could
be excused -- to ultimately seek to sublimate himself into projects
where women end up shoved to the side while male concerns
predominate. A lot of men who champion women are trying to be
good boys, showing their mothers their allegiance to them through
their annhilating misbehaving boy-men -- their own bad boy selves.
These types always find some way to guilt-free revenge themselves
for this ongoing maternal domination, though. For Whedon, it might
have been this opportunity to do damage through the excuse of
following Marvel heritage. Perhaps if this psychology holds true with
Andrew, look for signs of it in the kinds of art movies he can
preference which others blanche at -- ones that contain significant
examples of female humiliation and torture, for example; for with art
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films, you could always convince yourself it was the other things that
tintilated, or that the manner of the portrayal conveyed unmistakable
criticism, or some such.
----------
Thursday, June 21, 2012

Stephanie Zacharek, and the news of Avatar 2, 3 and 4
Stephanie Zacharek's review of the film, we note, was very harsh. It's
always great to have her take, but it'd be nice if she'd accord some of
her assertions, particularly this one -- "But if you're out to change the
face of filmmaking, you have to work much harder at a lot of the thigs
Cameron just shrugs off" -- and perhaps also this one -- "In Avatar,
the technology is everything" -- and also this one -- "'Avatar isn't
about actors or characters or even about story; it's about special
effects, which is fine as far as it goes" -- with what actually ended up
happening. Cameron didn't leapfrog off this project; the world, the
people in it, mattered to him -- and do we doubt that audiences
haven't either? And this, his sticking to the Avatar universe, isn't
because he's old, or because Avatar is ideal ground for his special
effects fetish, or because the aquatic's hold on its lifeforms doubles
nicely its recent long hold on him; but rather because despite his early
errancy -- i.e., Titanic's "Goodbye, mother!" - he means to spend the
rest of his life in the lap of his mother deity, Eywa; it really does come
down to that.
Stephanie was astray from the life in this film as she was from the life
in Avengers. This line from her review of Avatar, "It's a remotecontrol movie experience, a high-tech 'wish you were here' scribbled
on a very expensive postcard," just like this one from her review of the
Avengers, "all a filmmaker really needs to do is put them all into a big
stock pot filled with elaborate set pieces and some knowing dialogue
414
and he's golden," shows she's been sending up movies that it turned
out audiences have bought into -- and brother, have they!
Or, audiences these days are such that they fall head over heels for
movies that really are all about special effects and already-cultivated
prejudices, with tedious characters, no meaningful story
development, and removed directors (Armond White thinks so). It'd
be nice to see her take a momentary break from movie reviews and
write an account of what it's like to draw back from an appraisal of a
film to situate oneself amongst what-turn-out-to-be zombies, who
clearly accepted as hearty feasts what you had established as cold film
corpses.
---------Iron Man vs. Captain America
Note: this is a reply to Maria Aspan's discussion of the four key

things that worked about the Avengers (at movieline.com).
Re: The Avengers doesn't try to give equal time to each of the
heroes; it might as well be called Iron Man 2.5. Thor is there to
swing his hammer and drop off the villain from his movie, Hawkeye
gets brainwashed before we even know him, and Captain America
fades into Tony Stark's straight man. And you know what? Those
are good things. The movie's already over two hours. And by
choosing a few Avengers to focus on, Whedon made me more
invested in what happened to Stark and Black Widow and the Hulk
during the course of the movie.
Stephanie Zacharek, you'll note, saw it different. She argued that Iron
Man's pronouncement, his "self-important wisecracks, begin to wear
a rut in the movie" -- that he wore on us, leaving the hero who all
along didn't try to hard -- Captain America -- as the stand-out
Avenger. She said it was the hero who remained most human that
you remember; and it is true that the ground fight involving the least
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powerful Avengers -- Hawk Eye, Captain America, Black Widow -- left

together enough human precariousness and human uplift to make
them seem for a moment the human core and the rest as external
battle armaments. I wrote awhile ago, in a comment that may, alas,
have gotten lost in the woods, that we might see in this film a
transitioning away from the super-hero types we've gotten used to
wanting to associate with -- the wise-cracking Wolverine or Iron Man
types -- towards actually wanting the patriotic, the square, the
straight-man types redeemed for our appreciation, even our
identification. I thought the old preference would have to be allayed,
played to, to make the transition possible while keeping our selfrespect. I think we're all still more here with Iron Man than we are
with Captain America, as you argue, but that comment in the film
about America actually being in the mood for old school, and the
scene where Captain America garners the respect of the police force,
began to clear a path, I think, for Captain America to more take over
in the next film -- with his perhaps even being accorded a knock-out
win in an argument with Stark, with average intelligence but solid
virtue stearing wit and snark clear to the side. How this will happen
while engaging an inter-galactic villain, I don't know, but I still expect
to see it.
A final note on this: there was a sense when Iron Man brandied wits
and, well, brandy with Loki, of these two actually being cosympathetic, fundamentally akin -- with both being conniving, smartas-sin, full-of-themselves court wits, who'll ultimately need to oblige
themselves to more straight-laced kings. You're right -- Iron Man's
sacrifice didn't register (note: I'm referring here to another of
Aspan's comments; specifically that she "believed in Coulson's death
much more than the movie ever made [her] believe that Iron Man
would actually have to sacrifice himself to save Manhattan); and, we
noted, it was the best that he had. Penny is going to need to absolve
him, and perhaps with this, absorb him -- already she wasn't seeming
so second-fiddle; instead as if already reeling in the stray dog wanting
his being reigned in.
416
---------The Avengers -- Review

Note: this review builds on Stephanie Zachareks' review of the movie
at movieline.com
Not to say Loki doesn't have presence, but the story proved to be
about the team settling together in a very satisfying fashion, with
everything else but interjections to this realization.
Personally, the agent getting tongue-tied before an American legend,
perhaps because it was presaged by his being highlighted, playfully,
certainly not sincerely, but still a bit oddly as a romantic rival to
Stark, kind of felt like he was being set up for something -- the
overreaching kid, due a sad fate for being likened to things he'll never
be -- a manly hero; a playboy -- and for never being able to
subsequently quite pull himself tightly together again thereafter. But
you let that momentary consideration dissolve because its purpose of
helping limit the sense of Captain America as anachronistic, now
irrelevant -- a joke -- that nobody too much wants while we're all
becoming entranced to bond with Eastwood, old American virtues,
locales and industry, is effectively lessened here. Anyhow, the
moment felt too functional and too much like it was spotting one guy
out to be affecting. To me, the moments that worked best were when
the heroes have had their fair estimation of one another and have
begun to settle in. Thor standing alone quietly with Hulk for the first
time as mates -- which, other than Hulk's Indiana Jones-like
trouncing of the gloating, over-estimating opponent, might be the
film's most satisfying moment -- worked for this reason first, and
then secondly for the terrific follow-up humor it spawned.
I'm not sure Black Widow's best moment was the one you mentioned.
I was more struck with her encounter with Loki, another plausible
instance where something human -- there's just no denying it! -could catch short even the likes of "magic and gods"; and so much
417
more satisfying than when an F-18 or a nuke are used to do the same.
It was a terrific surprise; Loki blanched and guffawed, as we did.
And we were pleased that Whedon didn't let a talent she'd after all
shown she had simply surrender itself because before someone
ostensibly way out of her countenancing; and I thought good for you
Whedon for giving something pronounced to the more simply human
characters -- with Captain America of course getting undaunted
leadership, as well as emblemmanship of the times -- to help settle
them in experientially amongst their powerhouse teammates as
legitimate peers. Hawkeye didn't get a standout trait; but they did
make his arrows something sorta akin to Iron Man's arsenal. And
with him more or less the one exception, and with him being played
by a movie star actor, and with us wanting one or two of the Avengers
to be allowed to sulk a bit in the shadows -- good enough.
---------Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Hunger Games (novel) -- Review
The basic message of the book is that in a competitive system, the

cream always rises to the top. More than this: than an unsparing
competitive system emboldens life stories so vivid and interesting,
there's nothing their equal in possessing. Withdraw societal life
supports, and though many may die, you'll finally have the chance to
really know what it is to live! Very pro-capitalist. The other lesson is:
if someone in authority gives a girl the highest grade and it makes a
rival male very angry, it's because he's jealous; not, rather, because
the girl was eager to please and a suck-up and so of course was the
one who got the A +.
Reply to this post from Tryfan:
Seriously -- have you read the books? Because that's certainly not
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what they're about. I may not be as optimistic as Sutherland, but to

call the "Hunger Games" series "pro-capitalistic", and about "cream
rising to the top" is just plain wrong.
My reply to Tryfan:
Overtly, totalitarianism is criticized in Hunger games; but if you mean
to show how brutal a society is primarily by having it pit young people
to fight to the death in battle royales, you don't (1) show these battles
as serving nicely to out people's true worth; which (2) suggest you
could go through it all and still come out looking the prince or
princess; where (3) people, where kids, who die often overtly deserve
to, have had it coming for a long time, in fact, or find their status
enhanced owing to it; and (4) that you'll come out of them several
steps further along the way of knowing who you really are and what
you want most in life.
The contest begins with Katniss appraised highest by authorities, and
though this must feel good (the novel never has her admit to being
flattered by it -- but boy do we well how important it's been in the
past to the author, and how many readers, using Katniss of course as
their avatar, rejoiced and savored it), the unforgiving contest
demonstrates how much better it feels to prove you're really worth it.
(It also does zero to suggest we actually want authorities outed -their worth is proved in their rightful assessment of Katniss's, and in
their readiness to oblige their honest assessment, despite it being
culled from affrontery.) The contest could have been efficiently
criticized by showing how it degrades its participants, but Katniss,
though involved in a contest which in order to win must have her
killing kid after kid after kid, isn't involved in even a single one which
sullies her. She kills the brutal boy who dispatched holy Rue; she
with innocence ends the life of the evasive Fox; and with mercy, even,
closes things out on the worst sort of bully in the world. She ends
things for one or two others -- but they're of the favored, mean and
unsparing sort too
... and this is another problem: if you want to criticize a society by
showing it as one which enables contests which kill kids, you don't
419
depict the contests as producing teams of people so mean they

obviously deserve their deaths, and of others so innocent you just
have to root for them. What is just and unjust looses its fix on the
contest itself and focuses on who, exactly, are the ones to die, and
who, exactly, ends up spared. Further, you don't have the most
innocent -- Rue -- dispatched, but in a way which makes it seem as if
this was the only way for her to become as she was clearly meant to:
that is, of mythic and lasting importance, cemented in the
imagination as heavenly grace once briefly visited upon Earth before
departure owed to what is most crude and coarse in man. Lastly, you
don't make the contest one which loosens people to develop as human
beings: Peeta, through the contest, gets to know a relationship with
the person he's always coveted; and Katniss too begins along a path of
becoming a sexual human being, of in fact initiating all the various
sorting outs that'll lead her to become an adult. Without the contest,
they would have remained stunted the whole of their lives. They
never would have known the beauty of loving cooperation, even,
spared participation in this sort of brutal but ultimately saged, just
competition. Capitalism, of the Spenserian sort, even, has found its
new love-child with this book. Maybe everthing gets righted in the
second and third without requiring a lobotomy before undertaking
them, but I'm not holding my breath.
Reply to this post from Bread & Circus:
Of course, a lot of the brutality is set up to allow Gale to argue that
anything goes in the war against the capital. Unlike most stories
about a hero fighting against a totalitarian regime, Katniss never
takes charge, and never takes over the movement except as a
symbol. I thought the critique of capitalism was in the relationship
between the Capital and the Districts; resources flow into the
Capital and prices are kept artifically low by starving the workers
in the districts. When the districts protest, they are brutally
repressed. This is a bit like when a company (like Shell, for
example) supports a government (like Nigeria) while producing oil
for expot. The government benefits from the profits and represses
420
the people who say that it isn't a good deal for the country's citizens.
Meanwhile, the company is able to keep cots low becuase it isn't
asked to conform to the environmental or labour standards.
Nigerians get paid crap for working for the company, have to deal
with oil spills and government repression, and we (citizens in
developed countries) get cheaper oil. [. . .] The unequal and violent
relationshi between Panem's capital and districts helps us reflect on
how violence and repression can create unequal relationships in our
"free" market global economy.
My reply to Bread & Circus:
You can and should find major critiques of capitalism and
totalitarianism in these novels -- just not any a leading capitalist or
tyrant totalitarian would be spooked by. If having dignity is
unambiguously associated with being dispossessed, and at major risk
of being lost if one starts to middle or better, totalitarians will know
you have a comfort level with being amongst counted losers you'll
never find courage to really shake off: denied everything, you can't be
shuck of being noble; start accruing, with dreams and hoped-for
aspirations suddenly quite realizable, and you're no longer spared
being assessed a self-focussed, spiteful aspirer.
*****
Jen Yamato:
It can certainly be argued that Collins' book series and the Gary
Ross-directed feature adaptation has the potential to influence a
generation of youngsters who'll come for the sci-fi escapism and
leave the theater appreciating its personal messages of personal
accountability and standing up for what's right in the face of
impossible odds. More subtle are the franchise's critiques of
capitalism, celebrity, and media exploitation; if The Hunger Games
succeeds in teaching kids to think critically about reality television
alone that will be some sort of cultural coup.
My response to Jen Yamato:
Re: More subtle are the franchise's critiques of capitalism, celebrity,
and media exploitation.
421
Super subtle, or they don't in fact exist? Katniss is the opening

ceremony's sensation; she is the darling of the selection process,
gathering the highest score and the most focused attention of the
scorers; she is the prime focus of the contest's otherwise most worthy
participant -- Cato -- and of its most self-sacrificial and virtuous -Peeta; the cameras that are everywhere can't help but fixate on
winsome, deadly her: this is what kids will take from the movie,
because its evidently of prime importance to the author -- there's
nothing better than being the star! But though it's what you covet,
you can never admit this to yourself -- to do so would make you
selfish, crass, a for-sure climber, not the superior princess of the ball
who only gets lofted owing to superior qualities one can do nothing to
disown oneself of. The author is experiencing her dream self through
Katniss, which involves being the star at everyone else's expense; but
to eliminate the guilt, her subconscious makes sure to pretend as
primary, as the implied take, that Katniss really isn't into all the
attention and accolades she garners ... and nor should you be.
Katniss is an exercise in developing a false consciousness. You get to
pretend to be the saint while actually nurturing the kind of stuff that
would have you knife in the back anyone who would steal even one
photon of your greedily-clung-to limelight.
Reply to this post from Bread & Circus:
Except that the kids in the districts don't really have a choice in
being a star. Someone is going to be. Also the poorest kids have to
increase their odds of being chosen if they want to feed their
families. Then after it's all over, the tribute who won is in the
control of the president forever because of threats to their families. I
don't know if the movie will focus on this, but all the star treatment
and circus surrouding the tributes is really just to retty up and cover
up the control and force used to maintain the status quo in Panem.
What I like most about the Hunger Games is you can argue and
think about it for ages.
My reply:
If I sensed that the author wanted most for people to simply live
422
authentically, regardless of whether or not they're appreciated for

what they think, feel or do, I would have praised her for it. What I
sensed, was a novel that registered that its readers want to believe
themselves authentic -- but in truth really most wanted to be attended
to and feel the rush of being superior to every dispossessed one of
miniscule the rest of you. As such my criticism. The author so felt the
guilt of imagining herself annointed and above thee, she gave
everyone aplenty "truths" they as a chorus could unite behind to
abash demons popping up proclaiming -- nay!
---------Hunger Games (film) -- Review
Katniss's district is shown as so drained of vitality, she, Gale, and

Peeta come across as Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli did when they first
entered the no-more-cheer-than-a-graveyard domain of the subjected
Horse Lords. The result is that the Reaping looks like just as good an
opportunity to actually save oneself as Gale's proposal to flee into the
forest does: the Opponent is becoming as weak and drained as all the
adults have become. This is true for all the kids actually reaped -excepting the ones killed off in the first few minutes, dull as
dishwater, excepting the frizzy-haired boy, who might in some
alternate universe had a one-in-a-million chance to jump-start into a
Sideshow Bob. Gale is a stag; Katniss, your alert, quick deer; and
Peeta the one a sophisticate would assess as so multi-capable his
great flaw is that, owing to his mother's apparently catastrophic
denial of him, though he can with facility heft hundred-pound bags he
isn't anywhere near knowing the extent of his reach. Rue is supposed
to remind Katniss of Prim -- but this is crazy talk: she is further proof
that the Reaping took Katniss away from country debilitation toward
being amongst "Princeton's" shining elite -- these type have got it so
going on they even know what it is to loosen themselves to impish
423
play.
The favored district is composed of non-blanched meanies; but upon
watching the film I realized the experience of their involvement with
Rue, Thresh, Peeta and Katniss is kinda like the popular high school
set figuring out exactly how best to deal with spark-possessing new
varietals that one day might compose a competing rival one: even
while conniving how to dispose of them, pick them off, one by one,
they're experimenting with and enabling the mental/physical/spatial
relocations that could let them acceptably fit them in as their own.
This is a bit of a stretch, I know, but it is still the close high school
equivalent.
It's the crowds that stand apart. It may be that in their united fealty
to Katniss, District 12 figures in the imagination as pure, while the
Capital is set as a grotesque -- but I am pausing on this one. If so,
however, the film does enable a certain class of people for ruthless,
empathy-denied elimination -- the Capital's crowds of splendorentranced, disconcerned entitled elitists; and for this then should the
film principally be explored for its say on fascism.
*****
Jake's comment at Movieline.com:
[. . .] Consequently, I found the arrogant "bad boy" teen leading the
group of evil teens to be far more interesting a character with his
simple moment in the finale when he suggested that all the killing he
did was not worth it. That moment of regret showed more depth
than katniss, Peeta, Rue (sp?) and all the other characters combined.
My reply:
Cato's final moment wasn't for me so much the character regretting
as the film archly regrouping to argue the contest as simply an evil
thing, rather than as a glorious opportunity for come-uppance on the
arrogant popular kids (with denouement looking to involve wizened
commentary on the sure fall of the arrogant). I believe, though, that
Cato spent his last moments sniffling something Peetaish -- that
special Miss Katniss was of course the one in the end who was going
to prove victorious. I preferred the book where he was kept such an
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arrogant, powerful brute, Katniss wasn't sure he couldn't even have

made his way through all the dogs (which were, by the way, way too
inflated in the film -- Conan, let alone Cato, would find himself evenly
matched if pit against one). I will cooperate and acknowledge there is
a way in which Cato's sniffling seems in character -- or, rather, at least
in archetype: he might be Hubris recognizing that Selflessness is
what in the end is armor-clad by God. Cato's group did seem as if
versions of the fallen out of Paradise Lost or Pilgrim's Progress -- or
perhaps better, out of Greek myths -- with each ordained an
appropriate fall for claiming glories belonging solely to the gods:
Glamored-up becomes hideous; tall-as-a-tree is shot through at the
trunk; furious dexterity is humbled by unabashed strength; Herculesproud and strong, crushed by a pride of much stronger lion-dogs. It's
enough there, I think, to make Katniss and Artemis comparisons at all
worth our bringing up.
---------Mirror Mirror -- Review
Almost from the start you feel the director's efforts to please the
audience's key and only regal lady -- the blossoming young woman,
traditionally picked on by patriarchy, and whose current allegiance
guarantees you status as a modern man that gets to lubricate with
subservience but without any contestation, the way ahead -- and so
the Queen's proclamation that it is her story being told is really
understood as falsehood, pretty much moment one. The film pleases
those who are pleased when people fuss effort over them -- and much
effort is fussed here. It is to update Grimm, but with every particular
summoned, dissipated for its patriarchy, chill, bigotry, and antidemocratic sentiment. But with enough kept of at least the protector
man so the tentative, growing girl gets the expected satisfaction of
feeling notably special, as well as the sure companionship of someone
425
to serve as the adroit male draught horse who's to accompany her

along and familiarize her with, life's unsteadying rush of dramatic
new impulses. And also too, to have us forget about all that servile
mechanism-pulling, curtain-raising / closing, young Queen-pacifying
sweat and stress -- to lose sight of the chamberlain -- and simply
enjoy the movie.
If there is dissent in the movie, some measure of the not fully
accounted for that could maybe one day locate ruin upon all that's
been claimed, it's not the late arrival of the ostensible penultimate
grim moment -- the Queen's sly bequeathing of the ruinous poisoned
apple; that thunder had already been claimed by the Queen's surprise
popping up into Dwarvish denizens to introduce the Beast to Snow
White, a silly, appropriately ill-defined entity doomed as much as
everyone else to register the princess's bequest. Rather, it's the
Queen's isolated mirror-retreat, which way trumps the dwarfs' madeto-be-domesticated forest composure to serve as an impenetrable
man-cave in the film, and which at the end no one but the old Queen
is aware of.
To be more clear: This film showed "Brave" in the previews, where
the great opponent to spirited young-intelligent-girl-assent is not
boys, nor Father, but very clearly pissed-off Mother; and it seems
pretty clear to me that if one is to look most clearly for dissent from
men in this era of female appeasement, it's going to be located in the
safer armor of older lady garb. In this film, her remaining retreat is, if
slight, and hardly even still clearly aligned to her, still the only
remaining antidote to the princess's chilling final conquestorial
gesture and proprietary dance and song at her absolutely-everyonenow dominion of the realm.
---------American Reunion -- Review
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Perhaps it's the foremost goal now for most people, not to be a
runaway success, but to situate yourself so you get a comfy-enough
seat in which to watch how it all unravels. It's been 13 years, and it
seem the point of the reunion is to strip away whatever attenuations
becoming visibly adult after high school brings upon you -- something
for self-esteem purposes you need to feel you'd donned -- to mostly
lounge back, lifelong, into a niche, a "knit," you've always known as
pleasing and comfortable. Well, for these characters -- good for them.
It'd be nice to see people settle into their permanent habitat after
they're fully formed rather than while shadows of greater essences -of true world-exploring adventurers, of truly individuated, mature
couples; but I think even with where they remain they'll have fun,
know some good living.
I think they'd be wise, though, not to be made subjects for any further
films. Stifler, the only one of them who remains an agent of true
living -- that is, not just a joiner in common-place activities like
horking down hotdogs with genial-enough friends, but generating,
initiating upon them new adventures, experiences and landscapes -seems pretty much near used up by film's end, exhausted from having
to play through all the requisite and predictable (note: in a time
where collectively to help bide time we make ourselves feel evolved
and accomplished perhaps primarily by ridiculing white male alphas,
it plays out as requisite, not a surprise, that his high school sportsmates are all gay) humiliations that have to be suffered upon him.
The film seems to realize as much, as an effort -- a sustained one -- is
made to resuscitate him in the last few moments before the finish. All
of a sudden after so much victimizing he's generously funnelled every
plausible available target to feast and food for himself through
thorough banging or deflating -- without of course -- or at least done
in a fashion that gives ready avenue for denial -- chisseling away one
iota at categories of people we are fully vested in remaining
righteously affiliated with -- some renewal and vitality. But it still
427
plays out with him seeming more like their potentially straying,
thoroughly wrought-over, hyper-respondant traumatized dog than a
co-equal who can confirm with what he generates that yet still with
ample provisions, mapped-out destinations, and of course, preselected accomodations, they'll know in life some subsequent true
adventure.
---------Dark Shadows -- Review
You might like this film, if your thing is to be in near proximity to

someone who can be tight to the world as a sealed box. With the help
of hypnotism, past connections, or, for us, an entising opening, we all
come to him; and though we press upon him sufficiently to make him
lean, we feel -- withstood. I'm tempted to say he's a (Karen)
Carpenterish restrained school girl, budding, but with books tight to
the chest to keep from betraying herself with jiggle. But I probably
say this mostly because the finish has the just-passed-pubescence,
adolescent girl growing all hairy and unruly, raging all out at the fullfigured presuming witch who dared trespass into her room. It flashed
upon us like a primal scene amidst otherwise decanted space, maybe
searing into our memory. Afterwards, the boy finally summons up
his ghost -- leaving it to a woman (the ghost's his mother) to unleash
the arsenal required to daunt the witch -- and the ocean opens us up
to a subsequent villain, but to no avail: we'd sealed up already,
content with the first-offered surprise reveal.
Friday, November 11, 2011
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Saving Liberals from Chris Hedges

Death of the Liberal Class, Chris Hedges (2010)
Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston
----Saving Liberals from Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges, in Death of the Liberal Class, ostensibly isnt wishing
the liberal class to die hes simply demarcating it as deceased, or so
he argues but he certainly doesnt have much good to say about it
either, and as a DeMausian psychohistorian, Im probably normally
not much in mind to defend it myself. He describes it, the liberal
class a composite of left-leaning artists, journalists, and academics:
lefty intellectuals as if it entrance to it now requires abdicating
anything that meaningfully defined liberals as liberal in the first
place. You have to agree to no longer serve, to betray, the people,
their best interests, and effectively end up sycophants to the
mandarin corporate ruling class. And to see my sort of psychohistory
at all accepted within academia right now, I would likely have to see it
especially emphasize the destructive aspects of patriarchy, how it
afflicts women; I would have to see it value all periods of history,
applauding any acute psychohistorical study, whether it concern
Ancient Greeks or modern times; and I would have to see it adopt the
academic tone and focus tightly on subject matter, thanking friends
and loving support for making our work possible but otherwise
keeping our personal life, and the personalout. And this would
mean full disrespect of the remarkable truth that patriarchy, though
indeed now retrograde, was once significant psychogenic evolution
people moving up the scale. It would mean implicitly slighting the
fact that evolution of the old kind, gradual betterment of people
through time, is real, that the further you go into the past the more
primitive the people you are dealing with are, making deeper descent
into history an increasingly more harrowing descent that at some
429
point must stop you into bluntly asking yourself why you were so
eager to climb down in the first place? It would mean betraying our
awareness that our families didnt just give us the support we needed
but likely determined exactly what were up to in this reified realm of
scholarship, and that the measured, neutral, reason-clearly-incharge-here voice usually shows signs of its being an older
psychoclass innovation. It would mean betraying what I ought to
love, degrading myself, ostensibly too, from heights to lows, knight to
accomplice, elf to forlorn orc. Nevertheless, if I am true to what Ive
either learned or confirmed from exploring DeMausian
psychohistory, Im not about to judge Hedges my peer; and am in fact
trying to use the book to help keep faith in the same liberal
establishment which treats the sort of psychological ideas so precious
to us so very warily.
THE LIBERALS STORY: HEDGESS TAKE
Hedges holds that those who believe in human perfectibility are
ruinous to the maintenance of the best that human beings can
actually hope to achieve. His sort of liberals the classic ones born
in the 17th century and who experienced their heyday in the late 19th
and early 20th, were perfectly clear-headed, however, in that they had
a skeptical attitude towards human beings, believed that though
conditions on earth could be improved its never going to be made a
utopiafor people are constituted so that they cannot be made all
good. They guarded against parts running rampant over wholes, in
particular, private interests and self-serving passions over
respectively the structuring of society and overall bent of mind. The
mind was best constituted with reason checking passions; and
society, with multifarious interests and independent viewpoints
having to contend, indeed, often highly combatively, with one
another. The high-times of American society still mostly
decentralized, with regions and interests fruitfully engaged yet still
clearly separate had this, but was sundered of it rapidly once
independence of mind, independence in general, was made to seem
430
injurious, traitorous, to hope of victory in the First World War, and

with liberals coming to see a fractious society as inconsistent with
their new view of human beings as perfectible and society as
potentially harmonious. The state concentrated, opinion
concentrated and narrowed, at the same time as liberals came to see
concentrated power as necessary to disseminate their message of
human perfectibility and the subconscious-targeted manipulations
required to unleash it in the mass (62-63, 101-103). The end result,
according to Hedges, was of course not perfection en masse, but
rather mass degradationpeople lost much of their Puritan inner
guardedness, of guilt, and let themselves be ruled by their passions
(101-103). And from the 1980s on, liberals full-scale abandoned the
public they had, with two notable exceptions, spent their time
annihilating much of the dignity of, to competitively compete with
one another for corporate supportonly corporations, now having
the public they always wanted, and apparently feeling less the need to
keep liberals afloat as a prop to keep the fiction of the democratic
state alive (25), soon started abandoning the-now-useless them to
their death knell. What follows for all of us is surely the chaos of
hypermasculine response to widespread powerlessness, unless
somehow some brave someone sounds a clarion call that draws fallen
liberals back amongst the people.
THE LIBERALS STORY: THE DEMAUSIAN TAKE
The DeMausian take on liberals in the 20th century can be reached
simply by inversing everything Hedges says. The altered liberals, the
ones that came to genuinely hope for the elimination of all strife and
who thought they saw its realization in the near future, werent fallen
but rather progressed from their classic predecessors. The classic
liberals were notable, for being an advancement beyond their
medieval/renaissance predecessors, and for representing a belief in
what human beings were capable of (and deserved) that lead to
considerable social reforms, but only, really, in the now very qualified
way that patriarchy was an advancement over matriarchy: It should
431
look good to youbut only until you become familiar with what all
succeeded it. The changed liberals Hedges deplores were no-doubt
members of a superior psychoclass, who stopped seeing strife and
division as necessarily a good thing[1] for having experienced the
truly better things issuing from out of their less divided, less
intrapsychically stricken minds (DeMause, Foundations of
Psychohistory, Creative Roots, 1982, 238).[2] That they saw within
human grasp, utopia, speaks strongly to their credit: because it was
only with this psychogenic advance in ambition that the inequalities
and cruelties the classic liberals understood as not just ineradicable
but, in full honesty, as actually desirable for it well communicating
the fact of human imperfectability and the limit of their potentially
hubristic highest accomplishments could in fact begin to be
eradicated. It would mean the reduction in size of a handy class of
people to project all ones anxiety-arousing desires into; but they were
better prepared to handle this great but daunting leap forward as
well.
WHO REALLY BETRAYED WHOM?
The growth Hedges believes liberals sadly ended up leading the
public into, and that he deems as only wholly regrettable mass lapsing
to base drives, wasnt on the contrary simply a beautiful thing. The
socializing-psychoclass dominated 20th century, with its erotic
materialism, its my soul would be quiet if only everyone could buy
endless material goods (DeMause, 237), certainly didnt have it all
figured out. But still what they sought out in life was far from vile,
and overall represented true growth in human ambition. Indeed, it
could at times simply be about joy in living, playful experimentation
and expansion of self, not simply the quieting of the disquieted soul,
one of the two periods Hedges applauds liberal participants within
partook of in a variety of ways. In fact, it was really generous true
display of fidelity to the larger publics best interests displayed by
postwar liberals during the 60s and 70s that lead the public to, in
effect, shortchange, to betray, its further fruition in the 80s. Hedges
432
regrets that, unlike their 30s ostensible counterparts, 60s liberals

were of two parts when they would have been best served if composed
of but one. They were, wonderfully!, truly with the people and for
conflict, for fighting vested interests in way of common cause and
social improvement; but they were also, so sadly!, so ultimately
doomingly!, for urging everyone to realize the American Dream the
spread of hedonism (even Martin Luther King, who, Hedges believes,
compares poorly with his counterpart, Malcolm X [184-185]) as
well. But the truth is that it was because they were so full of
hedonistic impulse, or rather, of genuine, untainted love of
themselves and the possibilities of life, that we know their social
reforms were moved out of goodthe former lead to the firm
expectation of the other. If reform was moved by a more staid, more
degraded impulse it might have lead to the results of reform efforts in
the 30s, which may in fact, if what reformers then mostly worked to
do was confirm a publics substitution of bland, mundane aspirations
for previous exciting Jazz Age ones, have been about cementing the
neutering of dreams than their partial realization, defining them and
shutting them down until new life could begin after the war. It would
have made the 60s liberals their opposites, and only now kin to those
who thrived in the 30s, their ostensible counterparts, when group
phase had regressed gaspingly to Depressed from thrillingly
Innovative.
HEDGES GROWTH PANIC
DeMausians appreciate that if 80s on liberals actually came to
despise ordinary people, this was, though still unfortunate,
understandable, for ordinary people were responsible for the creation
of an environment which would objectively make them seem less and
less appealing. For three decades, they, the ordinary people, those of
lesser psychoclasses, were mostly in-sync with the less ordinary, the
members of higher ones. They permitted and engaged with the
reforms, the expansions of experience, of pleasure, the more loved
and evolved amongst them lead them onto, were allowed to lead them
433
onto, owing to pretty much everyone feeling that some great

mountain-world of happiness had been earned to partake in by the
giant sacrifices endured through the Second World War and the two
decades of dreariness previous to it. Three decadesuntil the more
regressed psychoclasses experienced in a way that could not
temporarily be abated through war or recession but only through the
more total sort of renouncement involved in what we understand as
historical group phase change, their maternal alters chastising them
for pleasing themselves too much, threatening upon them
abandonment which spoke to them as death.[3] Truly good things
began to look mostly sinful, and bland things, more appropriate, if
not exactly desirable, for the former speaking louder of guilty selfpleasure and the latter of its forsaking. And they decided to help
more fully demarcate themselves from those with self-respect by
bonding themselves to the likes of sludge-pile Limbaugh while
innovation-prone liberals sought out refinement on the coasts, with
Prada, with Armani.[4] And what happened to the 80s psychoclasses
that finally succumbed should be understood as incurring upon Chris
Hedges right now.
Hedges is now fully with the people. He announces this fact,
entrenchs it so that it is sunk into his every thereafter-moment in the
text, by beginning his book with a vivid personal account of one
suffering owing his being criminally forsaken: people like him
specifically, one Ernest Logan Bell are not only always on his mind
but much closer than any time previous, his near proximity. He
makes clear he wasnt always here, though, that before as an
employee of the New York Times he existed within a highly seductive
culture, daily-exposed to voices that baldly tempted sin but also
heights fully and thrillingly aloof from pedestrian morality. Exposed
to the same, he lets Doug McGill, an employee of the Times for ten
years, recount its essence: [I]f you keep writing good stories you will
keep getting access to the CEO plus perks like lunches and home
telephone numbers for future stories (133); I was beginning to get
too used to having mayors and governors and CEOs call me up, as if I
434
were a friend, and pay for my dinners and give me their press releases
and have me describe them in glowing terms (134). But he, Hedges,
found way to stick to his principles, something that ultimately lead to
his being loudly booed at universities and coldly dismissed from the
Timesbadges he wears and prouds around in his book that serve,
like warriors wounds, to announce his commitment away from
himself, apart from his previous life which he had come to
essentialize as soul-claiming and self-indulgent for so baldly
proclaiming that it might be okay to claim something all for yourself,
without even any tinge of morality to buttress or qualify it. Given that
all such are described as having to go through the same humiliations
and be clear, the humiliation rites he describes are not really to be
understood as descriptions of what happens to those who balk
establishment expectations but as markers required to delineate one
as martyr-hero[5] it leads to him being counted in his own mind
within the same class of those, the real greats, who, for speaking
inconvenient truths, incur sharp miniaturization in status and
subsequent near-empty-cupboard levels of financial compensations.
It could us draw us to think of him along the lines of Chomsky, who
comes up frequently in the text to serve as the lone hero who braved
balking establishment consent we should all try to emulate, or of
Michael Moore, who got booed and jeered at the Oscars for speaking
off message, or of Ralph Nader, who drew upon himself a whole
chatter-classes animosity for presuming the same could be
institutionalized and perhaps one day even the norm; but perhaps
because it is difficult to talk of these renowned figures and simply
conjure up feelings of disavowal, to delineate the fate of those who
speak truth to power he temporarily delimits our attention to the sad
fate of mostly-unknown-to-us Finkelstein, who for refus[ing] to back
down and demolishing myths surrounding Israel (151) incurred a
life sentence of marginalization and a frozen income level of $15, 000
to $18, 000 a year.[6]
Whatever actually develops with him, the-now-ever-increasinglyrenown Hedges, he made his choices assuming they meant his
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following the martyrs path: this is the truth he will cling to, and you
are not to question it! If you indeed questioned how much his
principled stand was mostly egoism, hoping to prompt him to
question if his description of martyrs, with it involving defiance and
execution [that] condemns [the] [. . .] executioners (206), likely had
an aspect of relish to it that told the truer tale,[7] hed probably ask
you when the last time was youd volunteered in a soup kitchen? And
after debasing you by suggesting how reluctant you are to do the least
bit to close with the suffering and note, it wouldnt have mattered if
you could recall a recent time you had, for he would understand it as
merely show, an anxiety-ward, a boutique gesture hed follow
through with more thunderous humiliation by asking you when the
last time was you risked loss of life or career termination for a cause
you believed in?[8] Then hed quickly slide past you for knowing for
not simply assenting to him, guaranteed, youre part of the amalgam
of outraged left who seek to bring down people like him simply for the
crime of showing up their own emptiness,[9] and are a complete
waste of his further time. Youre one of those hes encountered time
and time again whove left him with remembrances that have piled up
in his mind so readily and appropriately as simply more heaps onto
an already comically massive pile of degrade, it might draw him to
laugh. That is, one who engage[s] in useless moral posturing that
requires no sacrifice or commitment (156), is childish (194), has
been rendered impotent (19), who has nothing to offer but empty
rhetoric (9), possesses an irrational lust for power and money that
is leading to collective suicide (194), is passive and only encourages
rot (200), who wallow[s] in the arcane world of departmental
intrigue and academic gibberish (126), is beholden to those not
endowed with decency or human compassion (204), is seduced by
careerism (142), is damningly complicit in the rise of [. . .]
oligarchy (142), who hide[s] [his] cowardice behind [his] cynicism
(205), who would applaud the aghast act of shoving a health care bill
down our throats (27), who is smarmy, fatuous, oily,
buffoonish, ignorant, a parasite and a courtier (190), and so on.
436
[10]
WHAT THE TRUTH HAS TO FACE
I realize I could make either Chomsky or Nader (or even maybe my
foremost hero, Paul Krugman) look bad through a selective massing
of their quotes, but with them I would be sure to suggest, probably
through an equally large counter, that they are still warm men who
mean most everyone wellfor they would be delighted if through
their efforts more people became happier; I feel it in them, these
hubristic leaders permitted to rise and draw us closer to the ideal
during our last growth phase, through all the disgust and otherevisceration, however aplenty. But though theyre his heroes, I judge
this simply not so with depression-hefted Hedges, wholl Ill let be
understood by these actually-not-so-selective quotations without
attenuation for being someone who to me will only be satisfied when
most people count amongst the humbled, not the happy. I feel I
might possibly get through to Chomsky or Nader in a way I never
could with him; for with these two counter-evidence, proof of errors
of observation or presumption, that could lead to more selfawareness, wouldnt be abused into mere opportunity to cement a
rigid coursesomething they were evidently primed to cripple and
then assimilate within a pre-existing schema. If Hedges, clearly
under the rule of his maternal alter, obsessed as he is in seeing the
neglectful and self-centered punished, let in information that
unmistakably communicated to his subconscious fidelity to truth, at
all times, truly above anything else, his alter would immediately
understand the implications of it and remind him why he installed it
in as his protector, his super-ego, in the first place.
Even if his disposition, his emotional well being, his psychoclass, was
equivalent to Chomskys and Naders, youd still have to be really
skilled to draw him to doubt, for each of these men believe theyve
already fully delineated what is unreal in this world and possess as
heightened a sense of raw pure truth as is possible to achieve. To us
psychohistorians it may seem ritualistic, a bit too apropos, pre-
437
determined, childishly simple and binary, that once youve come to be

able to acutely diagnose the mistruths of those who hold power you
end up inevitably finding such great virtue in those most afflicted by
them, but nevertheless ordinary people cannot be understood by
these men as other than noble-hearted John Bulls. Perhaps one of
the reasons for this incredible inability to consider them differently,
more skeptically, is that they probably believe they have been so
abundantly induced to think of them as ignoble by scorning liberal
brethren, that surely long ago they engaged with its possibility in full
its simply to be presumed, and its simply on to long overdue
redemption. But with Hedges, at least, the primary explanation
actually lies in his so coming to see suffering people as doing, simply
with their suffering, something noble, as being noble, that their
overall degradation as human beings cant be seen. Hedges and the
multiple of leaders that will emerge during this depression will draw
us so very close to the peoples suffering for the same reason heroes
allowed to emerge in the Great Depression, such as John Steinbeck,
did: to confirm that people are doing as directed and making much of
the rest of their lives about withering for previously having made it
for so long about self-enrichment.[11] Theyll weave romance around
brutal suffering, cast a chilly spell that fully obfuscates but suffices to
calm: All we expect is the absolute basics, and for this we submit
Wont Mother now you just let us be?
THE DEMAUSIAN FIX
I understand that my analysis looks, with its identification of Hedges
as someone who has come to hate anything that smacks of true
growth, to be aggressing to view the group he despises, contemporary
liberals, as golden. I dont think they are, and so my start of the costs
larger acceptance amongst them would currently require for
DeMausians. But I think more than just that their helping bulwark a
society of mak[ing] more money, meet[ing] new quotas,
consum[ing] more products, and advanc[ing] careers (200) is
preferable to the payback and full-stop Hedges wants to get behind
438
and the cleansed society he wants to help put in place, more than just
that the specialist[]s master[y] [of] narrow, arcane subjects and
disciplines (115) sounds like far better bedding for the next growth
phase to arise in than Hedges righteous thunder and implo[sions]
(140) does, more than just their ostensibly typical belief that if our
repressions can be removed by confessing them to a Freudian
psychologist then we can adjust ourselves to any situation
(Malcolm Crowley, quoted in Hedges, 101) sounds better for the
future of psychohistory than Hedges disdain for self-esteem
movements, for psychoanalysis proper, and the preoccupation with
the self (111) does. I think that as many of the highest psychoclass
liberals watch their peers rapidly start sounding like Hedges (the
online liberal magazine Salon, frequently accused of being too
lifestyle focused and pointless, has, for example, recently relaunched
itself as aggressively populist, encouraging readers to support its
abandonment of fluff for the righteous fight by becoming core
members), regressing into conflict-obsessed warriors akin to him,
they will from being disturbed, rattled and alienated by their alien
thunder become more cognizant of who truly are their natural peers,
and psychohistorians will find themselves gifted through the
mechanism of psychoclass migration and realignment with some very
talented people to further their own studiesright now. Liberals
havent exactly been golden, but fidelity to them may help gift us with
another golden age of psychohistorical studies, way before it was in
fact due.
[1] No doubt, also, a strong centralized state was less offensive to

them owing to their experiencing more abatement of early placental
smothering from their less needy, better assuaging, more-your-ownneeds-concerned themselves-better-loved psychoclass mothers.
439
[2] This is not to say that unification during the period Hedges speaks
of it largely arising the First World War wasnt actually mostly for
a short time simply a truly regrettable regression into growth panicspurred group think, but that its ongoing continuation should be seen
as owing to psychoclass innovation.
[3] For the degree to which death is infused with feelings of
annihilation incurred from maternal rejection, see of course Joseph
Rheingolds The Mother, Anxiety, and Death (Little Brown, 1967).
[4] The 80s-on mass concentration of liberals to the coastal cities
should be understood as a wisely informed psychoclass migration;
unfortunately one that didnt let itself be quite segregated enough.
[5] Or rather, hard-to-acquire prizes, that sparkle forth as if giant
gushing gem-stones, which could draw upon him a charge of vanity
that might stick if he doesnt stop showing them to people, and put
them down for awhile.
[6] As opposed to those professors we remember Hedges delineating
for us at the beginning of the text, the ones apt to earn $180, 000, not
$18 000, so long as they refrain[ed] from overt political critiques
(10).
[7] Specifically, that executioners should properly be understood here
really as patsies upon which ones own martyrdom is exultantly
executed.
[8] For, yes, to Hedges, what happened when he spoke unpopular
truths on campuses make him, in essence, the soldier who took
bullets for the crowd (he refers to himself as someone inflicted [with]
career wounds [127])showing each other their wounds, neither in
his mind would trump the other: I dare you to read this book and
440
judge any different.

[9] About the liberal establishments reaction to Chomsky, Hedges
writes, He has consistently exposed their moral and intellectual
posturing as a fraud. And this is why he is hated (35-36).
[10] Presuming higher discourse than the like hed encounter on Fox
News, after having previously been asked by Kevin OLeary if he was a
left-wing nutbar on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company)
interview show, the Lange & OLeary Exchange (Oct. 6, 2011), a
disgusted Hedges snorted, itll be the last time, after at the end
being thanked for appearing. One wonders how less offensive
Hedges own scornful 3-word encapsulation of the liberal class would
be and if something likely, like fetid, cowardly, sycophants, if this
would be something hed hesitate to say on a respected stage?
[11] Though Hedges sees Steinbeck as noteworthy for raising a
nations moral reach by balking mean stereotypes through his
capacity to empathize, show skepticism, and his startling willingness
to verify what was really going on amongst the destitute showing in
detail what was happening to them in material terms (138) I agree
with Morris Dicksteins assessment of him in Dancing in the Dark
(Norton, 2009) as instead someone who helped homogenize people
into homo economicus, who played to preferences at the price of the
real, who couldnt empathize with those he closed in with enough to
not mistake them for possessing inner resources sufficient to power
heroic endurance simply impossible for people so stricken to be able
to possess (140), and who cursed a Depression generation by helping
cement it with an apotheosis of the real, the material, with [a] [. . .]
grave suspicion of the imagination (107).
441
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Wanting War, Jeffrey Record

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston
----Jeffrey Record, in Wanting War, would have you know that the Iraq
war was/is a war of hubris, that Iraq presented no pressing threat but
an enticing prize, neo-cons and George W. Bush made use of a
nations powerful need to simply trust to empower their intent to go
after. Im sure youve heard this one before, and possibly long, long
ago accepted it in full, thinking what we most needed to know about
the war has been repeatedly revealed; and perhaps for this reason,
principally, we should go into why Records account does us all little
good.
BUSHS LURCH
Record wants to leave no doubt that Bushs decision to go to war with
Iraq after 9/11 had nothing to do with the new realities of the world
revealed by the attack, and as such, left us all of course in a much
worse fix (with such like Irans influence on Iraq now even being
greater). Afghanistan was the more likely suspect, not Iraq; regional
history was ignored rather than carefully studied; old gripes and
plans, not newly awakened sensitivities, the primary movers. It was
an abashingly stupid and ruinous thing to have done, and it depended
entire on the confluence of George W. Bush, neoconservative
influence, and 9/11 (p. 92). The neo-cons had always wanted
Americas foreign policy to be about showing all of Americas scummy
enemies that it meant business, and thought to communicate this
most clearly by every once in a while focusing intently on one of them
and eviscerating them, as an object lesson to the others (pp. 92-5).
442
They took advantage of a President who had no clear-cut foreign

policy and could be lured by their offering of a plan which would offer
profound personal satisfaction in that it would lay waste to a
personal enemy, Saddam, whod greatly afflicted his father and, with
Americas withdrawal in the previous Iraq War, hadnt quite yet
sufficiently been paid back for all his harm; and in it matching his
preference for Manichaen, simplistic, solutions to pressing problems,
to become a blessed chosen agent of God.
Record argues this war had one very noteworthy success it did
create a nominally democratic political system in Baghdad (p. 149)
but overall has proved a giant mistake, and implicitly that
addressing the requirement we never see its like again in the future
requires a greater alertness to two different styles of leadership
leaders lean to. Leaders can either let reality inform their actions, or
let their inner preferences loose upon the world. The first is
responsible, but can lead to doubt which can admittedly be
cripp[ling] (p. 141); the second can spur you into effective action
(Record tends to make achievements of this course significant at first
[as expected, the Iraq army was squashed in a hurry], but ultimately
effectively lurches that leave you scrambling in quagmire), but isnt
enough to craft an effective national security strategy (p. 141), and is
mostly not about tactics but inexcusable relapsing to childish
preferences. His Shakespearean account of sly advisors and weak
leaders prey to them, and neo-Victorian account of good sons who
own up to their responsibilities and bad ones who never stop hoping
to elide them,[1] is noticeable enough that psychohistorians arent
just about to let his account inform them only of Bush and the neocons: no doubt youll all start noting Records own simplistic,
defensive tendencies, how he can probably successfully make an
argument telling people we all have to look at leaders wants and
motives, without appearing to give psychologists any room to now
take over. His title bespeaks of id, but theres no room for
psychobiography given here: ones background can certainly
influence you as Bushs particular religious upbringing plays upon
443
him but, ultimately, the choice is yours as to whether you take the
easy or the hard way. Its Kings Speech, stripped of its
Freudianism. And recognizable as such, I think that the primary
concern we would finish the book with is how we might work against
this wall which can freely permit talk of delusion and unreality and
binary thinking (though of course this actual term is never used), but
staunchly still keep psychology (and empathy) out while leaving
moralizing and righteous anger clearly in.
THE LURCH RECORD MAY WELL LEAVE US IN
But if were left stumbling over this problem, and wishing if only
people could read it and see it as but a facilitator to the gates of
something about Bush weve written, weve let ourselves be more
worsened than marginally informed by the book; for wed at the end
be thinking mostly leaders, when psychohistorians should never find
themselves thinking mostly of them. Psychohistorians should be
wary when anyone puts the blame squarely on the shoulders of our
leaders, who we know are but people we study to aptly guess at the
psychic needs of those who wished them in, and this indeed is the
only place Record puts it Americans-at-large are to him, sensible, if
not pronouncedly disgusted by excess and lack of good sense (other
nations [or at least the ones America has tended to have wary
relations with] come across as level-headed as well, with them being
not-at-all sacrificial and in fact realistic and savy in matters of war
[pp. 174-75]: Bush and his neo-cons are in this account, astoundingly
alone.). To Record, Most Americans do not believe that it is their
countrys mission to convert the rest of the world into like
democracies, and they have limited tolerance for costly crusades
overseas that have little or no foundation in promoting concrete
security interests (p. 149). But arent we also the lot thats spent the
last thirty years or so participating in manic consumerism, losing
ourselves into an excess of work and after-work purchase in an
economy that may not at all have meaningfully improved despite the
444
activity? Havent we all been lead by want, unconsciously knowing

that we were thereby coating everything in our culture with a shine
we could subsequently easily point to as evidence of the sinning self
we would disown and stand cleanly apart from?
If Record had been eager to do something other than nicely
complement his account of grossly negligent leaders (and my, does he
ever offer it up: U.S. performance in Iraq has been a monument to
the combination of arrogance, ignorance, poor planning, worse
execution, and a willful refusal to acknowledge, much less correct,
mistake after mistake after mistake [p. 149]) with a rudely ill-served,
staunchly and commendably conservative and fair polis, he might
have done some of the work that would have us psychohistorians
learning from his wisdom rather than maybe actually being tripped
up by his key folly. If he had, for instance, wondered if the fact that
we were all so quick to wake up to this nightmare deception with his
book being maybe the thousandth to have come after Bushs first
term delineating Bushs hubris may suggest that maybe we all-along
kinda knew the President was smacking back at a world in way that
was grossly indifferent to precision and to good form, would be easy
to thereafter spot-out as in fact actually rotten, and therefore why we
all would want something like that.
I wonder it myself, and I think actually that we were at some level
aware that our president was responding to 9/11 by drawing the world
to recoil and maybe awe at our readiness to just whip out our
collective cock and humiliate and fuck, in public, indifferently, before
abashed and stunned you and you and you, whomever stumbled
mostly readily into view in our reptilians minds after being let loose
and agitated to seek out some tit-for-tat revenge. I wonder if we went
after Iraq knowing it drew us back into a time when imperialism
hadnt gotten the cleaner coat we knew it needed, because it would
make the humiliation we would apply less sparing and complicated
more indulgent and satisfying and because it would be so easy to
thereafter pin on the hubristic desires of leaders who made use of our
understandable need to trust to draw us back into neanderthalic
445
politics unrelated to our current world, to our current selves. I think

we made use, are still making use, of the neo-cons and President
Bush, maybe not so much ultimately even to deposit and disown our
own hubris but to no longer recognize it in future; and so when
authorities like Record sum up Bush and the neo-cons (or, more
precisely, the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine) as evidencing a nostalgic
yearning for the days when wars were wars (and men were men), as
having very little relevance in a world in which instrastate wars and
intranational terrorism replaced interstate warfare as they primary
threats to U.S. security (p. 175), we can substitute into this wellpounded imprint of archaic, regressive, boarish manners and
therefore of manners, presentation, in general in the definition of
what all is actually occurring as a consequence of our foreign policies,
a substantially more sober and current style, to help begin our
process of making the sacrifice and humiliation we enjoy so that its
largely invisible to us as anything but appropriate conduct.
Individual Nazis may have needed twin selves, one that humiliates
and destroys, and the other that goes home for dinner and talks
domestic, to execute as much; but maybe we think weve found a way
to (perhaps only temporarily) manage it with but one.
Record is by no means against war. He just wants it kept
competent, realist, clearly defined, evidently last resort, with
public and congressional support but presumably lead by
extraordinary statesmen like Roosevelt (pp. 151-52). One wonders,
though, with his intent to see Americans in his preferred fashion,
probably losing himself to temporary needs of narrative empowered
by the fact that he can rely on it not being anywhere near his alone, if
hed recognize it when he saw it. I kinda doubt that what Obama is
actually doing, what Americans are enabling him to do, abroad, is
competent and adult, but he surely knows hes got to present it that
way.
Psychohistorians know that leaders are ones to be particularly
sensitive to, never criminally obtuse to, our most deeply felt desires.
If Bush wanted war for gross reasons, we wanted it for the same as
446
well. Bush intuited our desire to indulge one last time in blatant
drunken excess, and delivered; Obama, our desire to continue on with
the same but feel ourselves clean, by delivering ourselves for awhile to
an aesthetics of sensibleness, consideredness, restraint and sanity,
sourced from our leaders. Record sees Bush and the neo-cons as
nostalgic and archaic; I see them as but part of the same gross onetwo punch.
[1] To Record, Bush Sr. took a weightier account of the world which
drew him ultimately to respect restraint (pp. 155-56), and he and Jr.
end up seeming as much good path-bad path brothers in the same
fraternal order as father and son.
---------Thursday, August 25, 2011
I'm a vegetarian, but I'm not so foolish to think Michael Pollan
trumps Julia Child
Following my recent column about vegetarianism, I received a
wave of hate mail from meat eaters. This came as no surprise
-- as food has finally become a political issue in America (as it
should), some carnivores have become increasingly aggressive
toward anyone or any fact that even vaguely prompts them to
critically consider their culinary habit. Although the
stereotype imagines vegetarians sententiously screaming at
any meat eater they see at the lunch counter or dinner table,
I've found quite the opposite to be true. In my personal life, I
go out of my way to avoid talking about my vegetarianism
while I'm eating with friends, family or work colleagues, but
nonetheless regularly find myself being interrogated by
447
carnivores when they happen to notice that I'm not wolfing

down a plate of meat.
Having been a vegetarian for more than a decade now, and
having been raised in a family of proud meat eaters, I'm going
to use this space to publish a brief primer for both vegetarians
and those who are considering vegetarianism -- a primer on
what kind of blowback you should expect to face when you are
forced to publicly explain your personal dietary decision, and
what succinct, fact-based responses are most appropriate
when confronting the tired cliches that will be thrown at you
from enraged carnivores. [. . .] (David Sirota, A
vegetarians guide to talking to carnivores, Salon, 24
August 2011)
The carnivore-in-the-vegetarian's guide to discussing
sensibly with its new solely vegetarian self.
David, I'm glad to hear you read the comments. I feel it's always
appropriate, but not always a class-circumspect thing to do (or at
least to admit to).
I grew up meat-eating in the 70s and 80s. Loved so much of those
times, and the food -- the whole pleasure of life learned
"encountering" it -- is something I treasure. It may be that someone
vegetarian at birth is not missing out on something if they never came
to know what tastes, what treasurable stories of experience, meat
afforded us, but I think that those of us who went vegan at some point
but certainly remembered how much they once enjoyed meat, should
always communicate some considerable fidelity to this fact.
You shouldn't be killing animals for food -- to be able to consciously
kill an animal is something that if we don't powerfully and fully flinch
448
from, automatically shows us possessed of sadism, some disturbing

capacity to switch to a otherwise disconnected self when engaged in
acts of violence. But it may really be that the world of experience is
wonderful, resplendent, "Julia Child" lessened in not knowing the
tastes afforded by meat. (No one in our century-past communicated a
love for food that surpassed what she afforded [compared to her joiede-vivre, our Pollans in fact seem depleted, and as if out of their
venerance for unadulterated, rough-skinned vegetables]. The 60s and
70s had abandoned restraint and went whole-hog for pleasure, and
this generation of highly evolved people weren't yet one that had
abandoned meat. The unfortunate thing about current vegans is that
they came on mostly after the 60s and 70s golden ages had passed,
and so haven't yet had their time when they didn't also communicate
shrewism, scolding, restriction. That'll come, but only after the
current depression fully unfolds, another possible world war, and
then, finally, accompanying the collective agreement that a golden
age is once again fully warranted.)
It's hard for us born loving meat to know for sure, but if true, we
shouldn't be afraid to admit this even as we lessen the pleasure we
take from fat, expand that we take from vegetables and legumes, and
refuse to inconscionably kill what should simply have been respected.
Link: A vegetarians guide to talking to carnivores (Salon)
---------Reading lists, and all they entail
While there's no way to know whether Hillary Clinton would

have hung tougher than President Obama with those
recalcitrant Republicans, here's a safe bet -- her summer
reading list would have included a few more women authors
449
than his.
Obama opened his Martha's Vineyard vacation by purchasing

Daniel Woodrell's "The Bayou Trilogy" and Ward Just's
"Rodin's Debutante." He'd already packed novels by David
Grossman and Abraham Verghese, along with Isabel
Wilkerson's "The Warmth of Other Suns," a nonfiction
account of black migration from the American South. (Some
reports also had Obama carrying Aldous Huxley's "Brave New
World" and Emma Donoghue's novel "Room.")
That would make Obama's reading 70 percent male -- which
is actually a better male-female ratio than the past.
[. . .]
Now the fact that the president of the United States

apparently doesn't read women writers is not the greatest
crisis facing the arts, much less the nation -- but it's upsetting
nevertheless. As I suspect Obama would agree, matters of
prejudice are never entirely minor, even when their
manifestations may seem relatively benign.
It is a well-known fact among those of us to whom this

matters that while women read books written by men, men do
not tend to reciprocate. The reasons for this imbalance are the
subject of much speculation and little conclusion, but, simple
as this may sound, it looks an awful lot to me like we think
they are more interesting than they think we may turn out to
be. And I very much doubt that's a message Mr. Obama
450
means to endorse -- especially as a father of daughters who

might enjoy and even be inspired by seeing their father cart
around a book emblazoned with a woman's name writ large.
In recent months, women writers have tried to call attention
to this discrepancy and received some hefty pushback. In
February, a group called VIDA released a study detailing jawdropping differences between how often men and women are
reviewed in such publications as the New York Times and the
Atlantic. Both publications reviewed dramatically more fiction
by men than women. (Robin Black, President Obama:
Why dont you read more women? Salon, 24 August
2011)
Don't push the fe-man too far!

When you deliberately elect in a man who is now essentially
constituted to abay women's whatnot anxieties, you have to allow him
his escape to his man-cave, else he go insane and lose all use. What is
Obama but someone elected to obey our mothers' demands that we
now show self-sacrifice, to evidence our awareness that we should
have spent more time diligently attending to them?
Robin, What Makes You Even Slightly Different..

...than the chuckleheads who have been ripping the
president's reading list from the Right?
You are a parasite; your article is parasitic. (Chupacabra)
----troll bait
451
This article virtually screams for Zorkna's contumely, and alas

will richly deserve it when it comes. (absolut carnage)
----Strange Article
It must be silly season if this article gets such a high billing on
the Salon home page. Seriously Robin I hope this is not
keeping you up at night!
I suspect most people, regardless of sex, do as I do when
selecting reading material - chose based on subject of interest
regardless of whether the author is male or female.
(hemp4evr)
----Why Are Women So Resentful?
What horrible person would make a gender issue out of the
President's reading list on an annual vacation? How sick are
so many women in this society? (mobutu)
----Holy crap!
I bet he doesn't have any Sarah McLachlan on his iPod either!
The cad! (greengoblin)
----Because
Women aren't good writers. Hey, write a stupid article, get a
stupid response. (g50)
----This is a ridiculous article
I'm sorry. This just sounds like one more dumb reason to
bash Barack Obama. I think the President should be able to
read anything he damned well pleases on vacation. This is a
waste of brain cells and energy. (gaylefleming)
----A Reason NOT to Be President
At least if you're NOT president, you don't have people
complaining that your reading list doesn't have gender
452
balance among the authors.

Geeeeeez! (cross1242)
----[50 more consecutive responses of essentially the
same]
another perspective
What is noteworthy about these comments, aside from their
viciousness, is their complete failure to understand the point
of the article they are commenting on. A serious issue is
raised, and it is not what President Obama reads or doesn't
read. It is the fact, well documented (as is pointed out) that
women writers do face a struggle for recognition beyond that
confronted by all writers. Since President Obama's reading
list was made public, it afforded a perfectly reasonable way to
raise the larger issue. It's too bad that commenters have
seized on this harmless illustrative device as if it were the
central point of the article; had they bothered to read in order
to understand, we might have had an interesting discussion
instead of an outpouring of venom. (mysteryperson)
@mysteryperson
RE: It is the fact, well documented (as is pointed out) that women
writers do face a struggle for recognition beyond that confronted by
all writers.
This privilege is evidence of a culture that has mostly surrendered the
rest of the ground to women, so long as "they" have some elevated
mountain top to swap secrets, share signs, and indulge in all men for
awhile. Some women want even this sundered, but when this is
453
accomplished -- the termination of such a obviously-needed

masculinist ritual -- the results aren't pretty (see Donald Tuzin's
"Cassowary's Revenge" for an example of what happened after a
millenium-held long masculinist cult dissolved).
Most men are still born to insufficiently-respected, insufficientlyloved mothers. Such mothers don't magically, despite their lack of
sustenance, become enabled providers, but inevitably look to their
boy children as "gay hags" do gay men -- to satisfy, serve, and then
dispose them until their next craving. Later in life these unfortunate
men are either going to need an incredible dose of spot-on therapy or
masculinist sexist escapes, or else, and even if very literate, theyll
start doing base things like suiciding themselves or indulging on
impulsions to physically abuse women.
Women, grow up and afford yourselves a more mature understanding
of what lies behind these masculinist escapes. Also, admit you voted
for Obama for what actually leads to him needing these periodic
escapes -- because you sensed in him someone constituted, fully
broken, to respond to your distress and needs.
Really, people?
The vast, vast majority of these comments just go to show
how important it is that SOMEONE make the point(s) Robin
Black made in her piece. Otherwise, the myriad sexists on the
internet and off might never come crawling out of the
woodwork spitting their venom.
I invite you to call me a feminazi for posting this, but the issue
of gender in the arts, and how prominent people consume
them, does deserve to be examined. The sickening anti-
454
woman stench coming off of this comment thread is evidence

enough of that. Once Obama's summer reading list has been
publicized (and it has been!), critics have the right to ask
questions about it. And the lack of women writers on Obama's
summer reading and other reading lists - conscious or not just speaks to a larger, society-wide issue.
The New York Times reviews far more men than women
(http://www.slate.com/id/2265910/pagenum/2) and, (again)
whether it's conscious sexism or not, it's reflective of a bias
that (AGAIN) is also reflected in this disgusting comment
thread.
Or it could just be that women write worse than men.
(For the clueless among you, also known as most of you, I was
being sarcastic in that last bit. You're welcome.)
(seriouslah)
seriouslah
Re: I invite you to call me a feminazi for posting this, but the issue of
gender in the arts, and how prominent people consume them, does
deserve to be examined. The sickening anti-woman stench coming
off of this comment thread is evidence enough of that. Once Obama's
summer reading list has been publicized (and it has been!), critics
have the right to ask questions about it. And the lack of women
writers on Obama's summer reading and other reading lists conscious or not - just speaks to a larger, society-wide issue.
I considered it, seriouslah. It's right there, and kinda obvious -- or
were you too much prepared to enjoy your indulgent haughty snark to
internet plebs to consider it? Still, what did you make of my argument
that masculinism owes to a need for compensense, for boys who grew
455
up with insufficiently loved and respected women who could not then
but help using their dependent boys to feed them some of what they'd
been denied?
How to disagree
It is with some discomfort that I disagree with Robin Blacks
piece. I am a friend of Robins and have been an admirer of
her writing since before she was published. The problem with
her premise, I believe, is that she is conflating two things that
on the surface appear to be related but which are not. The
coverage and positioning of female writers (sorry, I just cant
go with the popular usage of women writers) in the media
and what President Obama chooses to read in his free time
are vastly different. One is a business/editorial decision and
the other a matter of personal taste. Could both have
influence? Sure. However I think its reasonable to assume
that someone in the editorial meeting at Time magazine
thought Jonathan Franzen was a pompous gasbag but still
sided with putting him on the cover. Hopefully the President
chooses to read books that he is truly interested in and not
because hes trying to make some sort of impression.
Robin Black does not need anyone to defend her. She is quite
capable of that all on her own. I find it, however, despicable
the language used and way in which some here have disagreed
with her. Many of the cowards who have posted comments
would shirk from the chance to voice their opinions publicly
on matters of art, politics, or society, and yet feel free to do so
in the basest, most vulgar ways on the internet because of its
faceless, impersonal nature. Yes, we live in a country where
freedom of speech is a right; however, shame on us if we dont
use it in a manner that is commensurate with its importance.
456
(bdudlick)
@dudlick
Re: Robin Black does not need anyone to defend her. She is quite
capable of that all on her own. I find it, however, despicable the
language used and way in which some here have disagreed with
her. Many of the cowards who have posted comments would shirk
from the chance to voice their opinions publicly on matters of art,
politics, or society, and yet feel free to do so in the basest, most
vulgar ways on the internet because of its faceless, impersonal
nature. Yes, we live in a country where freedom of speech is a right;
however, shame on us if we dont use it in a manner that is
commensurate with its importance.
Dudlick, I'm not sure if you're a dude, but you sure sound like a
gentleman concerned to defend his lady from unruly ruffians. Just so
you know, feminists have long ago dissected such ostensibly womenserving behavior as vile and inherently patriarchal, because it
reinforces the idea that women, however becoming and noble, are
more delicate than men, which would leave contentious stuff like
politics and business mostly to those better constituted for the fray.
Yes, you begin by saying she surely is capable of defending herself,
but with her absent from the discussion and you immersed within it,
this seems about anxiety-calming, about manners, and being
fundamentally disingenuous, and this too does your case no good.
Also, if you are a guy, a marxist perspective would have your
gentleman's refutations of the boarish to be mostly about aristocratic
privileging at working class expense. To other eyes, that is, it's about
selfishly making claim to the chick and dicking her, dudlicks. Thought
you should know.
457
Link: President Obama: Why dont you read more women?
----------
Good times, and turkey dinners

But before any of these inquiries are but a twinkle in Isaac's
eye, I know I'm going to face an interrogation about
vegetarianism. At some point soon, he'll ask why our family
doesn't eat this stuff called "meat" that's everywhere.
I have my substantive answers already lined up, so I'm not
worried about what I'll tell him. (We don't eat meat because
it's unhealthy, environmentally irresponsible, expensive and
inhumane.) With this question, I'm more concerned about the
prompting. Why is he almost certainly going to ask at such an
early age?
I think I know the answer -- and it's not the ad campaigns that
make meat seem like a rational choice ("Beef: It's What's for
Dinner"), a healthy alternative food ("Pork: The Other White
Meat") or a compassionate cuisine decision (Chik-fil-A's
billboards, which show a cow begging you to spare his life by
choosing chicken). No, Isaac's going to have questions
because of the grocery -- more specifically, because of the
vegetarian aisle that subliminally glorifies meat-eating.
I realize that sounds like an oxymoron, but the next time you
go shopping, imagine what a kid gleans from veggie burgers,
veggie bacon, veggie sausage patties, veggie hot dogs, Tofurky
and all the other similar fare that defines a modern plantbased diet. While none of it contains meat, it's all marketed as
458
emulating meat. In advertising terms, that's the "unique

selling proposition" -- to give you the epicurean benefits of
meat without any of meat's downsides.
Obviously, this isn't some conspiracy whereby powerful meat
companies are deliberately trying to bring vegetarians into the
megachurch of flesh eaters. If anything, it's the opposite: It's
the vegetarian industry selling itself to meat eaters by
suggesting that its products aren't actually all that different
from meat. The problem is how that message, like so many
others in American culture, reinforces the wrongheaded
notion that our diet should be fundamentally based on meat.
For those who have chosen to be vegetarians, this message is
merely annoying. But for those like Isaac who are being raised
as vegetarians, the message is downright subversive. It
teaches them that as tasty as vegetarian food may be, it can
never compete with the "real thing."
That message will undoubtedly inform Isaac's early curiosity
-- and maybe his questions won't be such a bad thing. Maybe
they'll motivate me to spend more time in the supermarket's
raw produce section, and maybe my ensuing discussion with
Isaac will help him better understand why our family has
made this culinary choice.
However, that doesn't mean the subtle propaganda won't
ultimately win out, thus adding another carnivore to a
destructively meat-centric society. (David Sirota, Why do
vegetarian products glorify meat, Salon, 19 August
2011)
Turkey dinners
459
If you grew up loving your turkey dinners, if some of your favorite

childhood memories are of the times around the succulent-meat-aplenty table or excursions to eat fatty steak, burgers, or prime ribs,
then you remain fidelitous to the good things in your past when you
choose Tofurky and veggie bacon after really connecting with and
deeply caring about the truth that it is a terrible thing to kill animals
for sustenance. For you, it isn't transition but fidelity to the blessed
things of your past that were very much part of the furnishings for the
love that made you care. Though it might be even more mature, to
move on entirely might well in fact for you be about birthing a new
kind of inorganic rupture and violence.
---------When progressives fail just to mind their own business
There is a shadowy group of malcontents in America today,
plotting a grand takeover of our political institutions in order
to completely remake the country according to their wishes.
Despite the fact the members of this group are a small
minority of the population, and an unpopular one at that, they
seek to infiltrate the courts and the government at every level,
in order to replace our long-standing system of law with their
own extremist, undemocratic religious code. These true
believers are especially dangerous because they think they're
doing God's work, and you ignore them, or play down the
threat they pose to America, at your own risk. This tiny band
of fanatics is largely distrusted and despised by regular
Americans, but a terrified media coddles them and pretends
they're harmless. I am speaking, of course, of the Tea Parties,
a group now officially less popular among Americans than
Muslims.
Professors David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam have a
460
column in today's New York Times explaining that the Tea

Party movement is made up largely of ultra-religious ultraconservative Republican partisans (shocker?), and now that
America has caught on to this fact, the Tea Party people are
much less popular than other groups who largely seek to mind
their own business:
Polls show that disapproval of the Tea Party is
climbing. In April 2010, a New York Times/CBS News
survey found that 18 percent of Americans had an
unfavorable opinion of it, 21 percent had a favorable
opinion and 46 percent had not heard enough. Now,
14 months later, Tea Party supporters have slipped to
20 percent, while their opponents have more than
doubled, to 40 percent.
Of course, politicians of all stripes are not faring well
among the public these days. But in data we have
recently collected, the Tea Party ranks lower than any
of the 23 other groups we asked about lower than
both Republicans and Democrats. It is even less
popular than much maligned groups like atheists
and Muslims. Interestingly, one group that
approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right.
So it turns out that going around in funny hats screaming at
people for a few years is not a great way to endear yourself to
the American public, unless you're Joe Pantoliano.
Better luck with next election cycle's rebranding campaign
that fools everyone in the political press for a year or so, ultraconservative Republicans! (Alex Parene, Tea Party
people less popular than many other hated minority
groups, Salon, 17 August 2011)
461
... until Progressives become the minority group of concern

Yes, and we can expect Salon to gleefully join with Obama in
destroying them. Afterwards, now lost in the feeling of healthy vigor
and purity acquired in disposing of presumptive malcontents, they'll
begin their war on progressives (real ones), who also unfairly would
hoist their minority agenda on the rest of America. Though it was
what they did in the '60s and '70s, and, we remind, to everyone's
benefit, time now to see similar efforts/presumptions on their part as
simply "Tea Party" beyond countenancing.
Few of us will escape the drive to make someone else embody our
own -- to us -- increasingly suspect selfishness. Tea Partiers first, and
then in a far more brutal way -- for their representing it vastly more
convincingly -- their inverse: the best, least regressive people alive,
true progressives.
Obama is about so depleting America that most everyone will be
hardened and made spirtually pure from knowing long sustained true
suffering. This is his (albeit, mostly unknowing) agenda, and it is
drawing, and will continue to draw, most of us to it. I expect a second
term, and a president progressives will fear to assail, for fear of what
their liberal friends might say and do in return.
Link: Tea Party people less popular than many other hated minority
groups (Salon)
----------
THURSDAY, AUGUST 25, 2011

I'm a vegetarian, but I'm not so foolish to think Michael Pollan
trumps Julia Child
462
Following my recent column about vegetarianism, I received a

wave of hate mail from meat eaters. This came as no surprise
-- as food has finally become a political issue in America (as it
should), some carnivores have become increasingly aggressive
toward anyone or any fact that even vaguely prompts them to
critically consider their culinary habit. Although the
stereotype imagines vegetarians sententiously screaming at
any meat eater they see at the lunch counter or dinner table,
I've found quite the opposite to be true. In my personal life, I
go out of my way to avoid talking about my vegetarianism
while I'm eating with friends, family or work colleagues, but
nonetheless regularly find myself being interrogated by
carnivores when they happen to notice that I'm not wolfing
down a plate of meat.
Having been a vegetarian for more than a decade now, and
having been raised in a family of proud meat eaters, I'm going
to use this space to publish a brief primer for both vegetarians
and those who are considering vegetarianism -- a primer on
what kind of blowback you should expect to face when you are
forced to publicly explain your personal dietary decision, and
what succinct, fact-based responses are most appropriate
when confronting the tired cliches that will be thrown at you
from enraged carnivores. [. . .] (David Sirota, A
vegetarians guide to talking to carnivores, Salon, 24
August 2011)
The carnivore-in-the-vegetarian's guide to discussing
sensibly with its new solely vegetarian self.
David, I'm glad to hear you read the comments. I feel it's always
appropriate, but not always a class-circumspect thing to do (or at
least to admit to).
463
I grew up meat-eating in the 70s and 80s. Loved so much of those

times, and the food -- the whole pleasure of life learned
"encountering" it -- is something I treasure. It may be that someone
vegetarian at birth is not missing out on something if they never came
to know what tastes, what treasurable stories of experience, meat
afforded us, but I think that those of us who went vegan at some point
but certainly remembered how much they once enjoyed meat, should
always communicate some fidelity to this fact.
You shouldn't be killing animals for food -- to be able to consciously
kill an animal is something that if we don't powerfully and fully flinch
from, automatically shows us possessed of sadism, some disturbing
capacity to switch to a otherwise disconnected self when engaged in
acts of violence. But it may really be that the world of experience is
wonderful, resplendent "Julia Child" lessened in not knowing the
tastes afforded by meat. (No one in our century-past communicated a
love for food that surpassed what she afforded [compared to her joiede-vivre, our Pollans in fact seem depleted, and as if out of their
venerance for unadulterated, rough-skinned vegetables]. The 60s and
70s had abandoned restraint and went whole-hog for pleasure, and
this generation of highly evolved people weren't yet one that had
abandoned meat. The unfortunate thing about current vegans is that
they came on mostly after the 60s and 70s golden ages had passed,
and so haven't yet had their time when they didn't also communicate
shrewism, scolding, and restriction. That'll come, but only after the
current depression fully unfolds, another possible world war, and
then, finally, accompanying the collective agreement that a golden
age is once again fully warranted.)
It's hard for us born loving meat to know for sure, but if true, we
shouldn't be afraid to admit this even as we lessen the pleasure we
take from fat, expand that we take from vegetables and legumes, and
refuse to inconscionably kill what should simply have been respected.
464
Link: A vegetarians guide to talking to carnivores (Salon)

----------

Reading lists, and all they entail
While there's no way to know whether Hillary Clinton would

have hung tougher than President Obama with those
recalcitrant Republicans, here's a safe bet -- her summer
reading list would have included a few more women authors
than his.
Obama opened his Martha's Vineyard vacation by purchasing

Daniel Woodrell's "The Bayou Trilogy" and Ward Just's
"Rodin's Debutante." He'd already packed novels by David
Grossman and Abraham Verghese, along with Isabel
Wilkerson's "The Warmth of Other Suns," a nonfiction
account of black migration from the American South. (Some
reports also had Obama carrying Aldous Huxley's "Brave New
World" and Emma Donoghue's novel "Room.")
That would make Obama's reading 70 percent male -- which
is actually a better male-female ratio than the past.
[. . .]
Now the fact that the president of the United States

apparently doesn't read women writers is not the greatest
465
crisis facing the arts, much less the nation -- but it's upsetting
nevertheless. As I suspect Obama would agree, matters of
prejudice are never entirely minor, even when their
manifestations may seem relatively benign.
It is a well-known fact among those of us to whom this

matters that while women read books written by men, men do
not tend to reciprocate. The reasons for this imbalance are the
subject of much speculation and little conclusion, but, simple
as this may sound, it looks an awful lot to me like we think
they are more interesting than they think we may turn out to
be. And I very much doubt that's a message Mr. Obama
means to endorse -- especially as a father of daughters who
might enjoy and even be inspired by seeing their father cart
around a book emblazoned with a woman's name writ large.
In recent months, women writers have tried to call attention
to this discrepancy and received some hefty pushback. In
February, a group called VIDA released a study detailing jawdropping differences between how often men and women are
reviewed in such publications as the New York Times and the
Atlantic. Both publications reviewed dramatically more fiction
by men than women. (Robin Black, President Obama:
Why dont you read more women? Salon, 24 August
2011)
Don't push the fe-man too far!

When you deliberately elect in a man who is now essentially
constituted to abey women's whatnot anxieties, you have to allow him
his escape to his man-cave, else he go insane and lose all use. What is
Obama but someone elected to obey our mothers' demands that we
466
now show self-sacrifice, to evidence our awareness and hence our

possible redemption that we should have spent more time diligently
attending to them?
Robin, What Makes You Even Slightly Different..

...than the chuckleheads who have been ripping the
president's reading list from the Right?
You are a parasite; your article is parasitic. (Chupacabra)
----troll bait
This article virtually screams for Zorkna's contumely, and alas
will richly deserve it when it comes. (absolut carnage)
----Strange Article
It must be silly season if this article gets such a high billing on
the Salon home page. Seriously Robin I hope this is not
keeping you up at night!
I suspect most people, regardless of sex, do as I do when
selecting reading material - chose based on subject of interest
regardless of whether the author is male or female.
(hemp4evr)
----Why Are Women So Resentful?
What horrible person would make a gender issue out of the
President's reading list on an annual vacation? How sick are
so many women in this society? (mobutu)
----Holy crap!
I bet he doesn't have any Sarah McLachlan on his iPod either!
The cad! (greengoblin)
-----
467
Because
Women aren't good writers. Hey, write a stupid article, get a
stupid response. (g50)
----This is a ridiculous article
I'm sorry. This just sounds like one more dumb reason to
bash Barack Obama. I think the President should be able to
read anything he damned well pleases on vacation. This is a
waste of brain cells and energy. (gaylefleming)
----A Reason NOT to Be President
At least if you're NOT president, you don't have people
complaining that your reading list doesn't have gender
balance among the authors.
Geeeeeez! (cross1242)
----[50 more consecutive responses of essentially the
same]
another perspective
What is noteworthy about these comments, aside from their
viciousness, is their complete failure to understand the point
of the article they are commenting on. A serious issue is
raised, and it is not what President Obama reads or doesn't
read. It is the fact, well documented (as is pointed out) that
women writers do face a struggle for recognition beyond that
confronted by all writers. Since President Obama's reading
list was made public, it afforded a perfectly reasonable way to
raise the larger issue. It's too bad that commenters have
seized on this harmless illustrative device as if it were the
central point of the article; had they bothered to read in order
to understand, we might have had an interesting discussion
468
instead of an outpouring of venom. (mysteryperson)
@mysteryperson
RE: It is the fact, well documented (as is pointed out) that women
writers do face a struggle for recognition beyond that confronted by
all writers.
This privilege is evidence of a culture that has mostly surrendered the
rest of the ground to women, so long as "they" have some elevated
mountain top to swap secrets, share signs, and indulge in all men for
awhile. Some women want even this sundered, but when this is
accomplished -- the termination of such a obviously needed
masculinist ritual -- the results aren't pretty (see Donald Tuzin's
"Cassowary's Revenge" for an example of what happened after a
millenium-held long masculinist cult dissolved).
Most men are still born to insufficiently respected, insufficiently loved
mothers. Such mothers don't magically, despite their lack of
sustenance, become enabled providers, but inevitably look to their
boy children as "gay hags" do gay men -- to satisfy, serve, and then
dispose them until their next craving. Later in life these unfortunate
men are either going to need an incredible dose of spot-on therapy or
masculinist, sexist escapes, or else, and even if very literate, theyll
start doing base things like suiciding themselves or indulging on
impulsions to physically abuse women.
Women, grow up and afford yourselves a more mature understanding
of what lies behind these masculinist escapes. Also, admit you voted
for Obama for what actually leads to him needing these periodic
escapes -- because you sensed in him someone constituted, fully
broken, to respond to your distress and needs.
469
Really, people?
The vast, vast majority of these comments just go to show
how important it is that SOMEONE make the point(s) Robin
Black made in her piece. Otherwise, the myriad sexists on the
internet and off might never come crawling out of the
woodwork spitting their venom.
I invite you to call me a feminazi for posting this, but the issue
of gender in the arts, and how prominent people consume
them, does deserve to be examined. The sickening antiwoman stench coming off of this comment thread is evidence
enough of that. Once Obama's summer reading list has been
publicized (and it has been!), critics have the right to ask
questions about it. And the lack of women writers on Obama's
summer reading and other reading lists - conscious or not just speaks to a larger, society-wide issue.
The New York Times reviews far more men than women
(http://www.slate.com/id/2265910/pagenum/2) and, (again)
whether it's conscious sexism or not, it's reflective of a bias
that (AGAIN) is also reflected in this disgusting comment
thread.
Or it could just be that women write worse than men.
(For the clueless among you, also known as most of you, I was
being sarcastic in that last bit. You're welcome.)
(seriouslah)
seriouslah
470
Re: I invite you to call me a feminazi for posting this, but the issue of
gender in the arts, and how prominent people consume them, does
deserve to be examined. The sickening anti-woman stench coming
off of this comment thread is evidence enough of that. Once Obama's
summer reading list has been publicized (and it has been!), critics
have the right to ask questions about it. And the lack of women
writers on Obama's summer reading and other reading lists conscious or not - just speaks to a larger, society-wide issue.
I considered it, seriouslah. It's right there, and kinda obvious -- or
were you too much prepared to enjoy your indulgent haughty snark to
internet plebs to consider it? Still, what did you make of my argument
that masculinism owes to a need for compensense, for boys who grew
up with insufficiently loved and respected women who could not then
but help using their dependent boys to feed them some of what they'd
been denied?
How to disagree
It is with some discomfort that I disagree with Robin Blacks
piece. I am a friend of Robins and have been an admirer of
her writing since before she was published. The problem with
her premise, I believe, is that she is conflating two things that
on the surface appear to be related but which are not. The
coverage and positioning of female writers (sorry, I just cant
go with the popular usage of women writers) in the media
and what President Obama chooses to read in his free time
are vastly different. One is a business/editorial decision and
the other a matter of personal taste. Could both have
influence? Sure. However I think its reasonable to assume
that someone in the editorial meeting at Time magazine
thought Jonathan Franzen was a pompous gasbag but still
sided with putting him on the cover. Hopefully the President
471
chooses to read books that he is truly interested in and not

because hes trying to make some sort of impression.
Robin Black does not need anyone to defend her. She is quite
capable of that all on her own. I find it, however, despicable
the language used and way in which some here have disagreed
with her. Many of the cowards who have posted comments
would shirk from the chance to voice their opinions publicly
on matters of art, politics, or society, and yet feel free to do so
in the basest, most vulgar ways on the internet because of its
faceless, impersonal nature. Yes, we live in a country where
freedom of speech is a right; however, shame on us if we dont
use it in a manner that is commensurate with its importance.
(bdudlick)
@dudlick
Re: Robin Black does not need anyone to defend her. She is quite
capable of that all on her own. I find it, however, despicable the
language used and way in which some here have disagreed with
her. Many of the cowards who have posted comments would shirk
from the chance to voice their opinions publicly on matters of art,
politics, or society, and yet feel free to do so in the basest, most
vulgar ways on the internet because of its faceless, impersonal
nature. Yes, we live in a country where freedom of speech is a right;
however, shame on us if we dont use it in a manner that is
commensurate with its importance.
Dudlick, I'm not sure if you're a dude, but you sure sound like a
gentleman concerned to defend his lady from unruly ruffians. Just so
you know, feminists have long ago dissected such ostensibly womenserving behavior as vile and inherently patriarchal, because it
reinforces the idea that women, however becoming and noble, are
472
more delicate than men, which would leave contentious stuff like
politics and business mostly to those better constituted for the fray.
Yes, you begin by saying she surely is capable of defending herself,
but with her absent from the discussion and you immersed within it,
this seems about anxiety-calming, about manners, and being
fundamentally disingenuous, and this too does your case no good.
Also, if you are a guy, a marxist perspective would have your
gentleman's refutations of the boarish to be mostly about aristocratic
privileging at working class expense. To other eyes, that is, it's about
selfishly making claim to the chick and dicking her, dudlicks. Thought
you should know.
Link: President Obama: Why dont you read more women?
---------THURSDAY, AUGUST 25, 2011
Good times, and turkey dinners
But before any of these inquiries are but a twinkle in Isaac's
eye, I know I'm going to face an interrogation about
vegetarianism. At some point soon, he'll ask why our family
doesn't eat this stuff called "meat" that's everywhere.
I have my substantive answers already lined up, so I'm not
worried about what I'll tell him. (We don't eat meat because
it's unhealthy, environmentally irresponsible, expensive and
inhumane.) With this question, I'm more concerned about the
prompting. Why is he almost certainly going to ask at such an
early age?
I think I know the answer -- and it's not the ad campaigns that
make meat seem like a rational choice ("Beef: It's What's for
Dinner"), a healthy alternative food ("Pork: The Other White
Meat") or a compassionate cuisine decision (Chik-fil-A's
billboards, which show a cow begging you to spare his life by
473
choosing chicken). No, Isaac's going to have questions

because of the grocery -- more specifically, because of the
vegetarian aisle that subliminally glorifies meat-eating.
I realize that sounds like an oxymoron, but the next time you
go shopping, imagine what a kid gleans from veggie burgers,
veggie bacon, veggie sausage patties, veggie hot dogs, Tofurky
and all the other similar fare that defines a modern plantbased diet. While none of it contains meat, it's all marketed as
emulating meat. In advertising terms, that's the "unique
selling proposition" -- to give you the epicurean benefits of
meat without any of meat's downsides.
Obviously, this isn't some conspiracy whereby powerful meat
companies are deliberately trying to bring vegetarians into the
megachurch of flesh eaters. If anything, it's the opposite: It's
the vegetarian industry selling itself to meat eaters by
suggesting that its products aren't actually all that different
from meat. The problem is how that message, like so many
others in American culture, reinforces the wrongheaded
notion that our diet should be fundamentally based on meat.
For those who have chosen to be vegetarians, this message is
merely annoying. But for those like Isaac who are being raised
as vegetarians, the message is downright subversive. It
teaches them that as tasty as vegetarian food may be, it can
never compete with the "real thing."
That message will undoubtedly inform Isaac's early curiosity
-- and maybe his questions won't be such a bad thing. Maybe
they'll motivate me to spend more time in the supermarket's
raw produce section, and maybe my ensuing discussion with
Isaac will help him better understand why our family has
made this culinary choice.
However, that doesn't mean the subtle propaganda won't
ultimately win out, thus adding another carnivore to a
destructively meat-centric society. (David Sirota, Why do
vegetarian products glorify meat, Salon, 19 August
474
2011)
Turkey dinners
If you grew up loving your turkey dinners, if some of your favorite
childhood memories are of the times around the succulent-meat-aplenty table or excursions to eat fatty steak, burgers, or prime ribs,
then you remain fidelitous to the good things in your past when you
choose Tofurky and veggie bacon after really connecting with and
deeply caring about the truth that it is a terrible thing to kill animals
for sustenance. For you, it isn't transition, but fidelity to the blessed
things of your past that were very much part of the furnishings for the
love that made you care. Though it might be even more mature, to
move on entirely might well in fact for you be about birthing a new
kind of inorganic rupture and violence.
Link: Why do vegetarians glorify meat? (Salon)
---------

When progressives fail just to mind their own business
There is a shadowy group of malcontents in America today,
plotting a grand takeover of our political institutions in order
to completely remake the country according to their wishes.
Despite the fact the members of this group are a small
minority of the population, and an unpopular one at that, they
seek to infiltrate the courts and the government at every level,
in order to replace our long-standing system of law with their
own extremist, undemocratic religious code. These true
believers are especially dangerous because they think they're
doing God's work, and you ignore them, or play down the
threat they pose to America, at your own risk. This tiny band
475
of fanatics is largely distrusted and despised by regular

Americans, but a terrified media coddles them and pretends
they're harmless. I am speaking, of course, of the Tea Parties,
a group now officially less popular among Americans than
Muslims.
Professors David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam have a
column in today's New York Times explaining that the Tea
Party movement is made up largely of ultra-religious ultraconservative Republican partisans (shocker?), and now that
America has caught on to this fact, the Tea Party people are
much less popular than other groups who largely seek to mind
their own business:
Polls show that disapproval of the Tea Party is
climbing. In April 2010, a New York Times/CBS News
survey found that 18 percent of Americans had an
unfavorable opinion of it, 21 percent had a favorable
opinion and 46 percent had not heard enough. Now,
14 months later, Tea Party supporters have slipped to
20 percent, while their opponents have more than
doubled, to 40 percent.
Of course, politicians of all stripes are not faring well
among the public these days. But in data we have
recently collected, the Tea Party ranks lower than any
of the 23 other groups we asked about lower than
both Republicans and Democrats. It is even less
popular than much maligned groups like atheists
and Muslims. Interestingly, one group that
approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right.
So it turns out that going around in funny hats screaming at
people for a few years is not a great way to endear yourself to
the American public, unless you're Joe Pantoliano.
Better luck with next election cycle's rebranding campaign
that fools everyone in the political press for a year or so, ultraconservative Republicans! (Alex Parene, Tea Party
476
people less popular than many other hated minority

groups, Salon, 17 August 2011)
... until Progressives become the minority group of concern
Yes, and we can expect Salon to gleefully join with Obama in
destroying them. Afterwards, now lost in the feeling of healthy vigor
and purity acquired in disposing of presumptive malcontents, they'll
begin their war on progressives (real ones), who also unfairly would
hoist their minority agenda on the rest of America. Though it was
what they did in the '60s and '70s, and, we remind, to everyone's
benefit, time now to see similar efforts/presumptions on their part as
simply "Tea Party" beyond countenancing.
Few of us will escape the drive to make someone else embody our
own -- to us -- increasingly suspect selfishness. Tea Partiers first, and
then in a far more brutal way -- for their representing it vastly more
convincingly -- their inverse: the best, least regressive people alive,
true progressives.
Obama is about so depleting America that most everyone will be
hardened and made spirtually pure from knowing long sustained true
suffering. This is his (albeit, mostly unknowing) agenda, and it is
drawing, and will continue to draw, most of us to it. I expect a second
term, and a president progressives will fear to assail, for fear of what
their liberal friends might say and do in return.
Link: Tea Party people less popular than many other hated minority
groups (Salon)
---------
477
Not exactly seeing it in its best light
Since you all abandoned the other thread

"Starkey racism row: It is the political elite's
ceaseless denigration of white working-class culture
that has 'turned kids black' "
(Link:http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100
101050/starkey-racism-row-it-is-the-political-elitesceaseless-denigration-of-white-working-class-culture-thathas-turned-kids-black/)
What changed is not so much that blacks, followed by whites,

immersed themselves in the lingo or outlook of their
ancestors, but rather that white working-class culture has in
recent years been denigrated to an extraordinary degree.
From the way the white working classes speak (un-PC, foul) to
what they eat (junk food, which makes them obese) to
what they wear (the girls dress like slags, the boys like
scum), virtually every facet of white working-class life has
been subjected to the ridicule of the political and cultural
elite, finding itself mocked on TV shows and tut-tutted over or
legislated against in parliament and the press. Meanwhile
working-class institutions are either in a state of disarray
(trade unions being the best example) or have been invaded
by the intolerant nannies and nudgers of the prole-loathing
elite: consider the public house, once a relatively free zone,
now colonised by morality cops on the lookout for smoking,
excessive boozing and anything with a whiff of rowdiness.
Football games, post-work pints, EastEnd attitude, northern
478
grit hardly any aspect of white working-class culture has

escaped being problematised by the snobs, therapists and
health obsessives who govern modern Britain.
At the same time, immigrant cultures are more likely to be

celebrated, as vibrant by the educational establishment and
as cool by the trustafarian chattering classes who like
nothing better than listening to Niggaz with Attitude on their
outsized headphones. The movers and shakers of modern
British society demonise white working-class culture while
simultaneously slumming it with what they consider to be the
noble savages of the immigrant community. In such a
climate, is it really any wonder that white working-class kids
are turning black? Their so-called blackness was not in
any way the cause of the riots, but it does point to a problem
that at least contributed to that urban upheaval: the fact that
huge swathes of lower-class youth feel cut off not only from
society but also from their traditional cultures, turning them
into confused, at-sea, potentially nihilistic individuals.
Comment from Australia:

Australiaisdying
Today 06:07 AM
We see the same here in Australia. White kids listening to
gangster rapp, acting like black thugs, they've completely lost
their own identity. Also the media is constantly telling white
people over here how evil we all are leading to a depressing
sense of identity as well. We are only about 5-10 years behind
the UK and I fear for our survival as we are being swamped
with Black American culture (especially) and the constant
witch hunts by the media against whites whilst trying
(unsuccessfully) trying to cover up the growing horrific crimes
479
commited against white Australians by African and other

immigrants. There is huge racial tensions between the
Africans and Aboriginals who call them 'invaders' (are you
going to call Aboriginies racists Fabian delusions?) and even
our Middle Eastern immigrants have problems with them. I
never hated any other ethnic group before but am growing
tired and weary of this no so-obvious planned destruction of
Western countries and the now inevitable genocide of the
European race.
See, folks, this is happening all over the Western-European

world. And people see it. Even the other "trolls" on Salon who
hate me say the same thing: "Oh, it's hate whitey day again on
Salon."
So, what can we do? (Grand Duchess Anastasiya
Nikolayevnas paregoric bottle, in comment section
of associated presss London police charge 1,000th
person in riots probe, 17 August 2011)
@Duchess
The liberalism you despise is about to come to a complete close. The
reform in manners you hope for will come to; it'll keep people feeling
contained and controlled as a snug-fitting Nazi uniform.
Liberalism has been just awful for quite some time, but the truth that
is so important to understand but near impossible to be
countenanced, is that everything since the late '70s was due to
become a frustratingly warped form of its earlier incarnations.
Liberalism will once again unambiguously shine golden, but this will
require the commencement of a new golden age, where regressives
give progressives some stretch and more or less for a time let them
lead the way, and where progressives themselves are free from self-
480
shakles they'll end up applying when they too have decided society
has had it too good. This will come only after what we're about to see
here: the emergence of the everyone-agreed -- noble working
classer, the emergence of the spritual greatness of original stock folk,
and a war against polluted others that everyone will feel good about
but that will obnoxiously, terrifyingly outdo in carnage the
scapegoating and casually applied debasement you goad liberals for.
Link: London police charge 1,000th person in riots probe (Salon)
--------

Fattening up the idle rich
If the rest of us are sweating through a wretched climatechange-seared August, it's a good bet the super-rich and
powerful are calm, air-conditioned and happily summering in
the world's most posh retreats.
Of course, to paraphrase the late great Molly Ivins, most
Americans do not employ the word "summer" as a verb,
because such usage implies an annual season of luxury that
the typical prole can only dream of during his few days off at
the local state park (if he's lucky to have a vacation and lucky
enough to live near a state park that hasn't been shuttered by
budget cuts). But summering is what the wealthy do -- and
when they do it so ostentatiously in such a pulverizing
recession, it all but screams "Let Them Eat Cake."
So, too, does the rhetoric of a presidential race beginning in
earnest. As the 2012 candidates now romp through primarystate hamlets, they are already road-testing a carefully
sculpted type of "Let Them Eat Cake" rhetoric that somehow
481
makes them sound simultaneously like populist Huey Longs

and loyal mouthpieces for their biggest corporate campaign
contributors.
With that as a preview, let's look at this month in "Let Them
Eat Cake." (David Sirota, Let them eat cake!:
Summer edition, Salon, 17 August 2011)
We're not exactly shoving this exulted pap down their

throats, but ...
Let's admit it to ourselves. Many of us wanted these kinds of stories
to circulate, for they make us, by way of contrast, in our poorness,
insecurity, and perpetual striving, more honest, noble, and good. The
rich, though they know it not, are mostly our delegates, playing the
part of the unconscionable bad "guy" so we can begin to feel ourselves
more worthy after having selfishly partaken of so many riches we
really hadn't the resources to afford.
Further, they are playing the part of the self-absorbed, their-childrenignoring parent, who must ultimately not be dethroned lest the child
impinge on her/himself the psychologically untenable realization that
their parents, not ultimately somehow themselves ("I must have been
disobedient," the child concludes, after his father demonically beats
him with a belt; "I must have been noisy," the child concludes, after
his mother left his father.), were responsible for their ill-treatment.
It's psychologically untenable, because this realization puts you
beyond ever proving yourself now finally worthy of receiving their
love.
The rich have their part to play in this completely unnecessary
depression, and though we're going to hear just as much or more
about the noble American suffering their way on through, they mostly
won't be touched. Our narrative, our immature emotional needs,
demand it.
Link: Let them eat cake!: the summer edition (Salon)
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--------

Dan Savage joins team Obama
Lauerman: There's still a lot to be concerned about. But do
you get giddy with the progress you're seeing?
Dan Savage: [Laughs.] Yeah, I actually am! You know, we're
winning.
Anyone who wants evidence that we haven't won yet just
needs to look at the Republican field. You know, we live in a
two-party system, and for one party, the only thing they can
seem to agree on is hating gay people. They hate us like they
hate evolution. Unfortunately, they just can't wish us away,
any more than they could wish evolution away. It's not a done
deal and it's not sewn up. But they're now fighting a rearguard action, while we're advancing on all fronts.
The heartening thing, even if we are cursed with a President
Santorum, which is not going to happen, or President Perry or
Bachmann, is what we've seen over the past 20 years, under
Democrats, there's been some progress. There's been great
progress since the Democrats got the wake-up call in
November of last year, on gay issues, legislatively. But there's
not a lot of regress under Republicans. They seem to shrug
and live with it, with gay progress, once it's achieved.
[. . .]
So how do I feel about the Obama administration? I'm really
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very pleased with what's been delivered. I am not an idiot,

and I'm not a Pollyanna sort of kumbaya type. I don't doubt
we wouldn't have seen these things, that these things would
not have been delivered, if we didn't make it clear there would
be a price to pay if they weren't. Obama "isn't there yet" on
same-sex marriage -- if you believe him. And, frankly, I don't.
I don't think somebody who was for same-sex marriage in '96
is against it in 2011. And I agree with Tracy Baim, the editor
of Windy City Times, who did the interviews with Obama
back in the '90s when he was running for state Senate in
Illinois, that we're not going to listen to what he says
anymore, because it's too aggravating. We're going to watch
what he does. And he's doing the right stuff. (interview
with Dan Savage, Kerry Lauerman, The evolution of
Dan Savage, Salon, 16 August 2011)
Losing the language for complaint

I hope true progressives out there are taking note as to what is
currently happening. When (ostensibly, but certainly within the
current reigning paradigm) absolutely righteous men like Dan Savage
more and more bond with end-of-growth, depression/mass
cruelty/regression-ensuring Obama, and begin to turn their venom as
much against the unpersuaded, taken-aback left as the Santorums,
they'll be left stumped for a lexicon for successful protest for their
greatest composed efforts gleamingly undeniably evily back at them.
You'll be left wanting to argue against everything you've suely ever
hoped for, and for it will be vulnerable in a hundred different ways.
You'll be tempted just to disengage with thought altogether, else just
resigning yourself to concluding you're the biggest suckers who've
ever lived, who surely deserved what they got. Some of those left now
without any sustainable defense, will wish you could have been a bit
smarter.
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@nortonshitty
A slight mistake Mr Shitty? Read it here:
Dan Savage--Oct. 2002-"Say Yes to War on Iraq"
"No to War! No to Oppression!"
The above anti-war message was delivered to me via a sadlooking pink poster. I pulled the poster off a light pole and
hung it in my office over my desk. I look at the poster every
day when I sit down to work, and every day I wonder how and
when the American left lost its moral compass.
You see, lefties, there are times when saying "no" to war
means saying "yes" to oppression. Don't believe me? Go ask a
Czech or a European Jew about the British and French saying
"no" to war with Germany in 1938. War may be bad for
children and other living things, but there are times when
peace is worse for children and other living things, and this is
one of those times. Saying no to war in Iraq means saying yes
to the continued oppression of the Iraqi people. It amazes me
when I hear lefties argue that we should assassinate Saddam
in order to avoid war. If Saddam is assassinated, he will be
replaced by another Baathist dictator--and what then for the
people of Iraq? More "peace"--i.e., more oppression, more
executions, more gassings, more terror, more fear.
While the American left is content to see an Iraqi dictator
terrorizing the Iraqi people, the Bushies in D.C. are not. "We
do not intend to put American lives at risk to replace one
dictator with another," Dick Cheney recently told reporters.
For those of you who were too busy making papier-mch
puppets of George W. Bush last week to read the papers, you
may have missed this page-one statement in last Friday's New
York Times: "The White House is developing a detailed plan,
485
modeled on the postwar occupation of Japan, to install an

American-led military government in Iraq if the United States
topples Saddam Hussein."
These developments--a Republican administration

recognizing that support for dictators in Third World
countries is a losing proposition; a commitment to postWWII-style nation-building in Iraq--are terrific news for
people who care about human rights, freedom, and
democracy. They also represent an enormous moral victory
for the American left, which has long argued that our support
for "friendly" dictators around the world was immoral.
(Saddam used to be one of those "friendly" dictators.) After
9/11, the left argued that our support for brutal dictatorships
in the Middle East helped create anti-American hatred.
Apparently the Bush administration now agrees--so why isn't
the American left claiming this victory?
Because claiming this victory means backing this war, and the
American left refuses to back this or any war--which makes
the left completely irrelevant in any conversation about the
advisability or necessity of a particular war. (Pacifism is faith,
not politics.) What's worse, the left argues that our past
support for regimes like Saddam's prevents us from doing
anything about Saddam now. We supported (and in some
cases installed) tyrants, who in turn created despair, which in
turn created terrorists, who came over here and blew shit up...
so now what do we do? According to the left, we do nothing.
It's all our fault, so we're just going to have to sit back and
wait for New York City or D.C. or a big port city (like, say,
Seattle or Portland) to disappear.
486
It seems to me that if supporting tyrants creates terrorists,

withdrawing our support from those very same tyrants might
help to "uncreate" terrorists. Removing the tyrants from
power seems an even better way to uncreate terrorists.
But wait! Taking out Saddam means dropping bombs, and
dropping bombs only creates more terrorists!
That's the lefty argument du jour, and a lot of squish-brains
are falling for it, but it's not an argument that the historical
record supports. The United States dropped a hell of a lot of
bombs on Serbia, Panama, Grenada, Vietnam, Germany,
Japan, and Italy. If dropping bombs creates terrorists, where
are all the German terrorists? Or the Italian terrorists? Or the
Vietnamese terrorists?
But wait! Iraq isn't in cahoots with al Qaeda, so why attack
Iraq in the war on terrorism?
Because we're not just at war with al Qaeda, stupid. We're at
war with a large and growing Islamo-fascist movement that
draws its troops and funds from all over the Islamic world.
Islamo-fascism is a regional problem, not just an al Qaeda
problem or an Afghanistan problem. To stop Islamo-fascism,
we're going to have to roll back all of the tyrannous and
dictatorial regimes in the Middle East while simultaneously
waging war against a militant, deadly religious ideology. To be
completely honest, I would actually prefer that the United
States go to war against the ridiculous royal family in Saudi
Arabia. The Saudis have been using American money to
export their intolerant and deadly strain of Islam all over the
world (the kind of Islam that inspires people to blow up
discos in Bali), and getting rid of the Saudi royal family and
their fascist clerics makes more sense than getting rid of
Saddam. But the Saudis are our "allies," so perhaps we can
pressure them to reform, as Josh Feit suggests.
487
In the meantime, invading and rebuilding Iraq will not only

free the Iraqi people, it will also make the Saudis aware of the
consequences they face if they continue to oppress their own
people while exporting terrorism and terrorists. The War on
Iraq will make it clear to our friends and enemies in the
Middle East (and elsewhere) that we mean business: Free
your people, reform your societies, liberalize, and
democratize... or we're going to come over there, remove you
from power, free your people, and reform your societies for
ourselves.
Post-9/11, post-Bali, what other choice do we have?
(Ccommentator)
Ccommentator
I think you'll find a lot of gay men are unconsciously drawn to support
efforts -- like Bush's wars or Obama's collective sacrifice -- that ends
up looking at the finish to have been mostly about purposely
destroying the lives of multiple innocents. Being gay is a defense
mechanism against the overwhelming mother, one of a number
possible. Children of such insufficiently loved mothers understand
that they are bad if they do not devote themselves entirely to them -an "education" that later in life makes them susceptible to "gay hags,"
women who blithely readily presume upon them and dehumanize
them as property. Since life cannot but be about some growth and
"selfish" acquisition, as means to safeguard themselves from
annihilative punishmen, unconscious self-protective alters within
them will drive them to find some guilt-free way to punish other
innocent children for their own neediness. At the finish, after using
mostly-impossible-to-argue-against saints like Dan Savage to destroy
progressives who would kill this advancing child-life
destroying/grossly inhibiting depression if they could, Obama can
probably expect people like Dan to masochistically submit to sacrifice
488
expectations themselves.
@Patrick McEtc-Etc
"Being gay is a defense mechanism against the overwhelming
mother -- one of a number possible."
And it is a well-established fact of geography that if one sails
too far out in the ocean, one will fall off the edge of the Earth.
It is also a proven medical fact that rhinoceros horns and tiger
penises are wonderful cures for impotence. (robwriter)
robwriter
Psychoanalysis pretty much died in the '70s, and it's a wellestablished fact that whatever happened afterwards was so much
better for mankind.
Link: The evolution of Dan Savage (Salon)
--------
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24, 2011

When you're mostly still interested in acquiring the wound, it's way
too early for medicine
Not only is the United States slouching toward a double dip,
but so is Europe. New data out Tuesday show even Europe's
strongest core economies -- Germany, France, and the
Netherlands -- slowing to a crawl.
We're on the cusp of a global recession.
Policy makers be warned: Austerity is the wrong medicine.
[. . .]
489
But chalk up a big part of Europe's slowdown to the politics

and economics of austerity. Europe -- including Britain -have turned John Maynard Keynes on his head. They've been
cutting public spending just when they should be spending
more to counteract slowing private spending.
The United States has been moving in the same bizarre
direction. Cutbacks by state and local governments have all
but negated the federal government's original stimulus, and
no one in Washington is talking seriously about a second. The
pitiful showdown over increasing the debt limit has produced
the opposite: a Rube-Goldberg-like process for capping
spending rather than increasing it, and a public that's being
sold the Republican lie that less government spending means
more jobs.
Yes, governments on both sides of the Atlantic are deeply in
debt. But policy makers on both sides seem to have forgotten
that economic growth is the most important tonic. (Robert
Reich, Austerity is bringing on a global recession,
Salon, 17 August 2011)
We always get what we want, and sometimes it's stark
curtailment after one too many dip-ins into the cookie jar,
that has us all feeling a bit edgy
Doom is what we want, as:
Economic depressions are motivated internal sacrifices which
often kill more people than wars do. Cartoons prior to and
during depressions often show sinful, greedy people being
sacrificed on altars, and the depressed nation becomes
paralyzed politically, unable to take action to reverse the
economic downturn. Just as depressed individuals experience
490
little conscious anger--feeling they "deserve to be punished"-so too nations in depressions are characterized by
"introverted" foreign policy moods, start fewer military
expeditions and are less concerned with foreign affairs. The
feeling during depressions is "I should be killed" for my
wishes rather than "I want to kill others." Depressions are
economic anorexias, where people starve themselves to avoid
being eaten up by the Dragon Mother, the maternal vulture of
infancy. The nation begins to look for a Phallic Leader with
whom they can merge and regain their failed potency and who
can protect them against their growing delusional fears of a
persecutory mommy.
*****
At the end of the 1920s, for instance, as economic and social

progress seemed to have gotten "out of control," world
bankers-chief sacrificial priests of modern nations-pursued
deflationary economic policies, trade barriers were erected
and many other "mistakes" were made that were motivated to
produce the Great Depression that sacrificed so much of the
wealth of the world. As Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon
said in 1929 as the Federal Reserve pushed the world into the
Great Depression, "It will purge the rottenness out of the
system." Business cycles, as William K. Joseph has shown, are
driven by the manic and depressive cycles of group-fantasy, as
manic defenses against growth panic are followed by
depressive collapses into emotional despair and inaction.
Indeed, most death rates car crashes, homicides, cancer,
pneumonia, heart and liver diseases rise during prosperous,
manic times and are lower during depressions and recessions.
Only suicide internal sacrifice rises during economic declines,
491
reacting to the prevailing group-fantasy need for internal

sacrifice.
Depressions and recessions are thus not due to "the Invisible
Hand" of economics but are motivated sacrifices that often
kill more people than wars do, halting dangerous prosperity
and social progress that seem to be getting "out of control.
[. . .] Like Aztec human sacrifices, recessions and depressions
are accompanied by national sermons, "cautionary tales,"
about how sacrifices are necessary to purge the world of
human sinfulness." (Lloyd DeMause, Emotional Life of
Nations)
Depressions aren't just the rich, even if ultimately to their own
detriment, hogging it all selfishly to themselves. Greed, self-interest,
gone amuck. We've got to look at other motivations behind this
evidently willed madness, most notably, I would hope, collective
masochism. Referring to preferred social science
assessments/assumptions of human behavior, further DeMause to
help prod deeper inquiry into why nations do the mad things that
they do:
Social behavior, using these models, cannot therefore be (a)
irrational (because all men use only reason to achieve their
goals), (b) empathic (because empathy for others would not
be totally self-interested), (c) self-destructive (because no one
can rationally ever want to hurt themselves), nor (d) sadistic
(because people don't waste their resources just to harm
others). At most, people might be shortsighted or uninformed
in their social behavior, but not unreasonable, benevolent,
suicidal or vicious-i.e., not human.
The exclusion of the most powerful human feelings other than
greed from social and political theory plus the elimination of
492
irrationality and self-destructiveness from models of society

explains why the social sciences have such a dismal record in
providing any historical theories worth studying.
Link: Austerity is bringing on a global recession (Salon)
---------WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24, 2011
The more abused, the least ensouled, unfortunately
"This isn't about me." That's what eager, well-intentioned
and lily-white aspiring writer Skeeter tells the nervous
African-American maid Minny in "The Help." It's her pitch
to try to get Minny to open up about her experiences as a
domestic, and her feelings on the roiling racism of Jackson,
Miss., in the early 1960s. But it's also one of the most telling
moments of what's shaping up to be one of the most
controversial and surprisingly divisive movies of the year.
Because novelist Kathryn Stockett wrote a book that wasn't
just about her. And that has a made a lot of people very
uncomfortable.
[. . .]
On Monday afternoon in Times Square, the audience for
"The Help" was surprisingly packed and unmistakably
diverse. For a few hours, a variety of young people and older
matinee goers, men and women, black and white, sat down
together and watched a movie about what happens when
black and white people sit down together. Then, as Viola
Davis walked down a Jackson street, the lights came up. And
for every member of the audience, an opportunity for
conversation began. (Why the Helps critics are all
wrong, Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon, 16 August
2011)
493
Nothing new to see here

The debate about The Help in which MEW is engaging is the
same debate that has dogged books written by whites about
blacks for years, going back at least to Mark Twain's
masterpiece Adventures of Huckleberry Finn--in which the
protagonist learns to recognize the humanity of his friend
Jim, but, incidentally, not of all black people ("I always
knowed he was white inside," Huck says toward the end of
the novel.) In my view Stockett's book is only partially about
the black experience; it is also about a Southern woman's
dawning understanding of that experience. Of course
Skeeter's understanding is incomplete, as was the
understanding of just about every Southern man and
woman of that time. Yes, there were Southerners who were
genuinely evil--the murderers of Emmett Till, Bull Connor,
etc. But most people in the South were simply people who
had been raised with racism as part of the fabric of their
everyday existence, and to whom it had never really
occurred--or only fleetingly--to question that racism. Most
of these people were even capable, like Skeeter and Huck, of
loving individual black people while not questioning the
overall racism of societal structures. (Huck doesn't exactly
become a revolutionary with the intent of knocking down the
edifice of Jim Crow, just as Skeeter does nothing more than
write her little book and Atticus Finch does nothing more
than try a single court case that doesn't change anything.)
But the experience of whites--flawd people that they were--is
part of the story too. Stockett's book is about a young
woman who is just beginning to understand the rotting
foundation upon which the society she has grown up in is
built. And stockett was no more wrong than Twain to try to
give her black characters a voice. They are real characters,
just as Jim is--he is in fact the only consistently responsible,
494
compassionate, grown-up person in Twain's novel. I am sick

and tired of the moral superiority of those who claim that no
white Southerner can speak intelligently about race. Let's
not forget that whites in Chicago and Boston rioted about
integration, too, and before that allowed institutional
racism, in the South and elsewhere, to go unchallenged.
Racism is, unfortunately, a legacy of our whole nation, not
just one region of it, even if it was worse in that region than
anywhere else. Those who don't like Stockett's book, or
Twain's either for that matter, are entitled to their opinions,
but it doesn't make those of us who did enjoy both works
clueless racists. I understand that it is important to absorb
the perspectives of black writers who did, in fact, live the
experience, but that does not mean all other voices must be
silent. (recovering lawyer)
@Recovering lawyer
RE: Yes, there were Southerners who were genuinely evil--the
murderers of Emmett Till, Bull Connor, etc. But most people in the
South were simply people who had been raised with racism as part
of the fabric of their everyday existence, and to whom it had never
really occurred--or only fleetingly--to question that racism.
Terrorism of a people isn't seen or felt to be abnormal owing to the
fact that one was raised to see it as a fact of life, but because the
people doing the terrorizing (or who see it as a matter of course) are
perpetrators suffering from mass dissocation. In regards to the
Germans in Nazi Germany and Americans in regards to the Iraq war,
Lloyd DeMause explains this phenomenon this way:
Examples of mass dissociation of perpetrators are legion.
Lifton documents how Nazi doctors "double" themselves and
create an "Auschwitz self" to divest themselves of
responsibility toward those they experimented on. The Nazi
495
commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hss, when asked if the

Jews he killed had deserved their fate, replied that "there
was something unrealistic about such a question, because
[we] had been living in an entirely different world," that is,
the world of social alters. Jews weren't particularly
personally hated. Their blood just had to flow in order to
purify the blood of Germany. And America, in the 1990s, had
to conduct a genocide of over a million Iraqi children
through our embargo in a trance-in fact, no one noticed we
were killing them! They weren't human because they weren't
real. We were just punishing evil Iraqis. The Nazis used to
say they were just cleansing Europe of Jewish pollution.
How could one ask if Jewish children deserved to be killed?
"It never even occurred to us," Hss said. We were just "good
Germans" and "good Americans" when we killed millions of
children. The most important psychodynamic of history is
people's ability to switch deep into their social alter, identify
with the perpetrator and periodically persecute helpless
people who represent ones' own childhood self. It is the social
alter's duty to remove bad, sinful children. As one German
policeman ended his description of his execution of Jewish
children:
...while leaving the execution site, the other comrades

laughed at me, because pieces of the child's brains had
spattered onto my sidearm and had stuck there. I first asked,
why are you laughing, whereupon Koch, pointing to the
brains on my sidearm, said: That's from mine, he has
stopped twitching. He said this in an obviously boastful
tone...
The psychohistorian asks: "Did he wonder incredulously
what could possibly justify his blowing a vulnerable little
496
girl's brains out? Do Americans wonder why they must

gratuitously kill a million innocent, helpless Iraqi children?"
The answer is that it is precisely because children are
innocent and helpless that they must be obliterated, to
punish them for our own imagined sinfulness. (Emotional
Life of Nations)
Southerners weren't evil -- which is a unhelpful, nonsense concept -but people who'd in their childhoods collectively suffered from a
simulacrum of the abuse they ended up suffering on black people.
Blacks had to suffer, because to these poorly nurtured whites they
were full of the badness they themselves felt possessed of and needed
some neat way of hefting principally into someone else. In readily
accepting as normal a culture that evidently would seem hateful to
anyone more (loved and therefore more) sane, even if born in the
South and never exposed to outside ideas/possibilities, they
demonstrated in their everyday simple acceptance of slavery their
intolerance for their own neediness, and therefore their claim to some
goodness/purity.
As every psychologist will tell you, the more abuse, the

more ensouled
I said this on Matt's thread, but just as a reminder to those ostensibly
more bold thinkers out there, being the subject of constant abuse
guarantees the evolution of your personhood, of your capacity to
emphathize and be spared some of pronounced sadistic or
masochistic impulses, will be stalled. That is, in truth, the more you
reveal about how awful the treatment of black people was, the harder
case you make for us to really believe you'd ever truthfully yourself
ever be able to show things simply from the black perspective. If you
couldn't show them as principally heroic in the masquerading-asuninflated, simply-honest-accouting mode, and had to show them as
grown-ups know they had to have become after knowing a life of
497
torture, submission, and fear, my guess is you'd actually lead the

effort to again making whites and their evilness the principle concern,
in hopes that our narrative needs would mostly apply to the tortured
blacks the noble status reality would guaranteed steal from you.
The black community drew together and supplied the support and
love that whites would wholesale deny? I would recommend not
taking a closer look at that one either, and in fact leaving this actually
oppression-supporting argument for soul-nurturance fully alone.
(The great thing about this depression is that you know it'll be
narrated by a future generation as an occasion to forego idleness and
selfishness and develop community -- something, that is, like
ginormous pointless sacrificial wars, to make a people "great.") They
brought it with them from Africa and found some means to keep it
alive? Again, I wouldn't touch it: not just my poor demon-possessed,
jealousy-moved and other-fearing peasant Celtic and German
ancestors weren't doing all that well even just a short while back. How
we all love the folk, though, with their community focus, common
touch, and faith in things unseen.
Link: Why the Helps critics are all wrong (Salon)
---------TUESDAY, AUGUST 23, 2011
Michelle Obama's sacrifice
When the Washington Examiner's Byron York asked Michele

Bachmann if she was submissive to her husband at the Fox
News GOP debate Thursday night, the crowd gasped and
booed. That's because wifely submission -- also known as
complementarian theology -- is central to the faith of many
evangelicals. York's question wasn't about religion per se,
but was an attempt to probe whether, if Bachmann became
president, America would be getting Marcus' decisions and
498
not hers.
[. . .]
Submission theology is built around the notion that God has
a "design" for men and for women; that they are unique
from each other and have their designated, God-given roles.
The husband is the spiritual head of the household, the wife
his obedient "helpmeet," the vessel for their children, devoted
mother, and warrior for the faith. By committing themselves
to those gender roles, evangelicals believe they are obeying
God's commands. They see the wife's obligation to obey her
husband's authority as actually owed to God, not her
husband.
But the obligation falls on the woman to be obedient, even
when the husband doesn't love her as evangelicals believe
God commands.
[. . .]
Regardless of the Bachmanns' relationship, candidate
Bachmann's policy initiatives, as they relate to issues like
gay marriage, abortion and funding for Planned
Parenthood, stem directly from her "biblical" view of gender
roles. "God's design" for gender roles is not limited to the
issue Bachmann usually applies it to (opposition to gay
marriage). Gods design, in her view, is for (Christian) men
and women to get married to serve God, and for the woman
to be a mother and a fierce defender of the "biblical
worldview." Bachmann's worldview, which she sees as
under siege by secularists, feminists, imaginary socialists
and other boogeymen, must be defended for future
generations. "An arrogant corrupt Washington elite,"
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Bachmann insisted earlier this year, has "declared war on

marriage, on families, on fertility, and on faith." (Sarah
Posner, What Michelle Bachmanns submission
theology really means, Salon, 15 August 2011)
Michelle Obama's sacrifice
America seems to need reassurance right now that women
professionals won't dominate their husbands. Submission "theology"
was at play, after all, with our election of Obama, with how we were
going to imagine Barack relating to Michelle, as opposed to how we'd
imagine Hillary relating to Bill, as Salon.com noted at the time:
Damn it all, Michelle Obama has quit her $215,000 dream job and
demoted herself to queen. Though the party line is that she's only
"scaled back" to a 20 percent workload, I doubt her former coworkers will bother alerting her to many staff meetings. She's
traded in her solid gold rsum, high-octane talent and role as vice
president of community and external affairs at the University of
Chicago Hospitals to be a professional wife and hostess.
Now, the energy and drive that had her up jogging before dawn and
a gratifying day of work and family will mainly be spent smiling for
the cameras. Just as we watch curvy, healthy-looking singers and
actresses like Lindsay Lohan become anorexic too-blonde hoochies
before our very eyes, so we're now in danger of having to watch the
political version of that process: Any day now, Michelle Obama's
handlers will have her glued into one of those Sunday-go-to-meeting
Baptist grandma crown hats while smiling vapidly for hours at a
time. When, of course, she's not staring moonstruck, la Nancy
Reagan, at her moon doggie god-husband who's not one bit smarter
than she is. (Debra Dickerson, "Michelle Obama's sacrifice," Salon,
21 May 2007)
Liberals don't get much of a kick from Bachmann, but however much
they're willing to press her on her submission, with their collective
failure to admit they kind of liked Michelle hemming in her career a
bit, I'm not sure they're exempt from liking the idea a considerable
500
some as well.
Link: What Michelle Bachmanns submission theology really means
(Salon)
--------SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2011
Why losing fat is ACTUALLY so hard to do
I was channel surfing mindlessly, avoiding some household

chore, when I landed on a cable talk show discussing child
abuse. The guests were talking about horrible things:
parents who starve children, beat them or sexually abuse
them. Parents who let their children get fat. This last one,
one woman leveled, was the same as any other form of
abuse and deserved the same unequivocal response: Remove
the kids from the parents.
I had happened upon yet another media debate in response
to the controversial JAMA article that came out a few weeks
ago. This study looked at whether intervention was ever
warranted when parents allow their children to become
dangerously obese. The study itself was balanced in its
approach, but the talking-head response was anything but.
This particular pundit -- shoulder-shrugging with a clear
look of disgust on her face -- talked about taking fat kids
away from their parents as if it were nothing more than
trading in a car. I had to turn the TV off, my stomach in
knots.
I wondered what this woman would say if she met my own
parents. Would she blame them for the way I turned out?
501
For that matter: Should I?

Let me back up a bit. I'm fat and have been since I was a
toddler. Not "trapped in my trailer" fat, or "have to use an
extra-wide electric wheelchair at the grocery store" fat, but
medically, technically, morbidly obese. I confess that
whenever I hear that term -- morbidly obese -- I giggle,
because I picture chubby Goths with back nail polish and
dog collars. That is not to say I do not take it seriously,
because I do. It is the first thing I think about when I wake
up in the morning, the last thing on my mind when I go to
bed at night. And I will never be a member of the "fat
acceptance movement," because I don't accept it. I have been
fighting my weight for over 35 years.
But I don't believe I deserve to be hated, and hate is what I
feel every single day as a fat woman. I feel it in the stares
from strangers' children, and when someone screams "fat
ass" as I walk my dogs. I feel it when I get a flawless
performance review, but my boss asks if I have considered
weight loss surgery -- as if that has something to do with my
professional skills. I feel it in the constant stream of media
images about what women should look like, in the tired fat
jokes from comedians (come on, stop phoning it in -- get
creative!), and in the constant articles about the doom that is
The Obesity Epidemic. Fat people are taxing the healthcare
system, they make other people uncomfortable on planes
and trains, they use more fossil fuels because it takes more
gas to haul their big butts around thus causing global
warming, and they suck up the world's food resources while
others starve.
And yet, I understand: These arguments aren't without
merit, and it is after all human nature that some people
express their points with meanness and derision. I don't take
502
it personally.
But even at my most open-minded, I could not bear the
debate that erupted in response to the JAMA article (and the
derisive online comments). While the study, by Dr. David
Ludwig and Lindsey Murtagh, did suggest that obese
children -- in some extreme circumstances -- should be taken
away from their parents, coverage of the article focused on
the most sensational elements of the argument. It resulted in
a cascade of hate on cable news and morning shows that
was packaged as concern for children, like that disgustedlooking pundit who made me sick to my stomach.
Did my parents make me fat? Probably. They fed my
siblings and me meals of bologna on white bread, hot dogs
and potato chips. They let us have four of those Oreo-knockoff cookies-that-don't-quite-taste-right in a sitting, rather
than one or two. They used fast food as a reward and eating
in general as a form of entertainment. If I was upset, I might
be offered a tasty snack as a pick-me-up. Even if nothing got
done all day, not the dishes, not the vacuuming, not mowing
the lawn, by god dinner would get done and there wouldn't
be any leftovers to pack up and put away. I suppose to some
people it is a portrait of failed parenting.
But my parents are also a success story. They were teen
parents. They had me -- the eldest -- at age 16. It was not a
mistake but a planned pregnancy. My mother grew up in a
household where she faced daily abuse at the hands of people
she trusted. There were challenging finances and in a family
with eight children, food could sometimes be scarce. My
father grew up in a slightly more stable financial situation,
but where violence was the primary outlet for anger, or
disappointment, as well as for discipline of children. When
503
these two wounded, but hopeful souls met they made a

forever pact in heart-shaped doodles on their class
notebooks. They crafted an escape plan: Create their own
family where they would make different rules. That is just
what they did.
And they did it all on their own. My dad worked two jobs
while finishing high school. My mom went back to night
school after I was born. Dad worked double night shifts and
Mom cut coupons and raised the kids while balancing work
at McDonald's. They never got welfare. They never received
food stamps. They modeled hard work and commitment and
most of all, love. They are still married -- still go out on date
nights and still laugh and look longingly in each other's eyes
-- almost 40 years later.
Doctors did warn them about the children's weight, and
these problems were not ignored. My mom worried. She
ached for me when I came home crying after schoolmates
teased me all day long. She was my biggest cheerleader
when, in the fifth grade, I became the youngest member of
the local Weight Watchers group to reach the 50-pound
weight loss mark. She saved money we didn't have to buy
weight-loss shakes and exercise equipment. She went
without sleep sewing cute clothes that actually fit well,
unlike the pricey crap in the husky department. Dad did his
best when he wasn't working.
But once the fat is on, it is hard to get it off. When you get it
off, it comes back with a vengeance. My parents could never
quite bridge the gap between what was recommended and
what we could afford, between what they went without and
what they would never allow us to miss. And who's to say
what part their parenting played in all this, really -- which
part was simple genetics and which part of was the learned
504
behavior of emotional eating; which part overindulgence

and which part the negative side effects of yo-yo dieting;
which part was uncooperative children and which part plain
lack of knowledge and time. To think of that pundit giving
such a disgusted look to my parents, crushes me. They tried
so hard. They, in fact, did way more than so many. From
troubled beginnings, they created a family where the cycle of
violence was broken, where their children had access to
more education and opportunity than they had. Did they
make mistakes with food? Yes. But there was nobody better
to raise my siblings and me than the two people who
sacrificed so much to make sure we grew up happier and
healthier than they had.
That's the real point here: We are healthier for their efforts.
No matter our size. (Stacey Hall, Should I blame my
parents because Im fat, Salon, 14 August 2011)
Makes you wonder who would foremost keep bullying

society alive and well
The writer is clearly pleased to be possessed of something that
guarantees she won't be going through life without a good dose of
affliction. She can accomplish stellar things -- absolutely perfect
performance reviews! and even then! she won't just be collecting
satisfying accolades. What she is incapable of communicating is that
without people unfairly dumping on her she'd feel much more
uncomfortable than she does now, for not being able to convince
herself she isnt actually having it spectacularly good. She'd think
herself spoiled; self-enriching, other-neglecting, and fully
punishment-worthy.
Most people, sadly, are in some way like this, and all people who
share multiple siblings are, for we get this way from learning at an
early age that we exist primarily to meet some of the unmet needs of
505
our parents (mothers who have multiple children have them

primarily because infants and very young children are absolutely
focussed on the mother, make the mother feel primary, important
and loved, while older children inevitably begin to focus on their own
needs, on concerns/interests outside the home, necesitating the
plopping out of yet another sure thing!), and our insufficiently loved
parents always interpret our later desire for independence and selfexploration as us rejecting them. A betrayal they instinctively
countenance by such for-the-child catastrophic things as complete
disinterest and rejection. Ever-after do such children remain loyal to
their parents, protect them from knowing that much of their future
life was predicated on never feeling they'd done something, acquired
anything, insuffiently adorned or trumped by some sobering
disability/curse/deflation that it made them feel worthy of a revisit of
this super ego-installing punishment.
This writer is fat, and, thanks to a fat-hating society and efforts from
people like her to keep it seeming pretty much inevitably always so -despite every valiant effort! -- she's thereby found way to make
whatever true life gains she acquires something she feels a bit more
okay about savoring. (Even better, it's left her in her preferred
position of stalwartly defending her ostensibly primarily selfsacrificing parents: oh how the pieces delightfully fall into place!) You
may not be, but perhaps you'll be lucky to count yourself amongst the
people truly stricken through this depression, which will glory you
with sure means of demonstrating how incontrovertably
unbegrudable have been your own claims upon, and acquisitions
through, life.
No, and you shouldn't blame yourself, either.

I am completely sick and tired of self-righteous jerks who
are completely ignorant of the reams and reams of medical
research demonstrating that, for people who have a real
506
obesity issue, 1) diet and exercise don't work, 2) repeated

efforts to diet make the problem worse, 3) several different
genetic/metabolic mechanisms seem to be involved, etc., etc.
Do NOT blame your parents and do NOT blame yourself. My
parents sent me to nutrition counseling, weighed my food,
fed me extremely healthy meals, enrolled me in Weight
Watchers when I was 12. When I was a teenager, my mother
took me to a "diet doctor" who prescribed mysterious diet
pills. She was desperate and I was desperate. I have ben on
every diet plan ever known, and I have been successful at
losing weight--so disciplined and so successful that I have
lost a total of more than 700 pounds over the course of my
lifetime. And I am now, once again, morbidly obese.
Those who would consider fat people lazy and undisciplined
should also consider that some of us managed to graduate
from college with honors, from major law schools and
medical schools with honors, and hold down extremely
demanding jobs--these are not the hallmarks of lazy or
undisciplined personalities. We are smart enough to
understand that extra weight probably is not healthy
(though the risks are probably lower than the unhealthy
effects of extreme dieting). We are smart enough to realize
that we are penalized in a million ways, social and financial
and medical, for our weight. And yet we are fat.
Thousands of us go through extreme surgical procedures
that effectively remove our stomachs and require us to eat
extremely limited (and, yes, unhealthy) diets for the rest of
our lives in order to lose weight. Those of us who go to such
an extreme do not do it because we are too "lazy" to exercise.
Really, if this were a matter of walking an hour a day, or
just maintaining an 1800 kcal. diet when we notice ourselves
gaining a couple of pounds, or keeping the kids away from
507
candy, nobody would be overweight, much less a hundred or

more pounds overweight, and nobody would be removing
his stomach to prevent himself from eating.
Personally, I think the people who are ready to throw stones
at fat people (or deny them health insurance or the love of
their parents!) should submit themselves to a thorough
examination of their own health habits, including the
possibility of unlucky genetic traits or environmental
circumstances that may predispose them to heart disease,
cancer, alcoholism, diabetes, chronic pulmonary obstructive
disease, and a zillion other "preventable" diseases or
conditions. I don't see why I should pay higher premiums to
cover some moron whose drinking gets him into a car
accident or whose loud mouth gets him into a fist fight. And
those old people walking around with expensive portable
oxygen tanks really should have known better than to live in
smoggy cities or smoke cigarettes--why don't we lob some
damning insults in their direction? Ditto the slender, but
heart-attack prone legions of bankers and lawyers jamming
high-end steakhouses across America--can we all agree that
they should have been removed from their parents before
they were allowed to grow up as assholes (let alone allowed
to develop high blood pressure and coronary artery
disease)? (M.A. Mayo)
M.A. Mayo
Re: "Really, if this were a matter of walking an hour a day, or just
maintaining an 1800 kcal. diet when we notice ourselves gaining a
couple of pounds, or keeping the kids away from candy, nobody
would be overweight, much less a hundred or more pounds
overweight, and nobody would be removing his stomach to prevent
himself from eating."
Have you heard the rumor that a good number of Americans eat 1800
508
kcal meals pretty much every single time they sit down to dine? If this
isn't simply a rumor, how would narrowing your diet to a third of its
current, and largely denied everything you look for to achieve hungerriddance and temporary satisfaction, be so obviously easy to achieve?
I think perhaps if you replaced all these Americans and put in their
place, Europeans, it might be accomplished. But otherwise it would
seem almost impossible, and what you'd be left with is a nation of fat
people immodestly spreading the word of experts who insist it has
nothing to do with diet and exercise -- so stop the abuse! -- as they sit
more comfortably fully sedentary, imagining a walk around the block
a bit much, let alone an hour of purposeful striding, indulging
themselves the extra helping they crave with a bit more, at ease, "ca
ne fait rien."
Predictable responses to touching article

The author's love for her parents is palpable and lovely.
Don't blame them - plenty of kids get the same food and are
skinny. I suggest instead reading Gary Taubes' books - Good
Calories, Bad Calories, and Why We Get Fat and What to Do
About it - and forget about feeling sad. Ms. Hall's parents
were great. (jcc126)
jcc126
RE: The author's love for her parents is palpable and lovely. Don't
blame them - plenty of kids get the same food and are skinny. I
suggest instead reading Gary Taubes' books - Good Calories, Bad
Calories, and Why We Get Fat and What to Do About it - and forget
about feeling sad. Ms. Hall's parents were great.
What is palpable is the author's need to so essentialize her parents as
hard-working, self-sacrificing, and self-denying that attacks upon
them can readily be dismissed for their absurd cruel-heartedness
alone. What is palpable to some of us is the author's absolute need to
understand her parents as not at fault, which mostly communicates to
509
us how complicated her love for them actually is, in that it may in fact
mostly be at the service of intimidation-born requirement.
Gary Taubes tells people to pretty much consume no sugar. The
biggest meat pattie in the world, if you like, but absolutely for sure no
bun to bed it in, fries to accompany it along, or sugary drink to wash it
all smoothly on down. My guess is that if you turned on every obese
person onto this diet the only weight they'd lose is in strangling
people like you for blanching them temporarily of their king-feastly,
abundant starchy fun.
Calories, non-smoking, etc.

I'm near the author's age, and virtually all the kids in
elementary school & junior high were skinny yet had a lunch
just like she describes -- so I don't buy for a minute that her
weight was from what she ate for lunch.
I learned the hard way in my 20s that caloric restriction +
exercise aren't always helpful. I exercised at the gym for 2
hours 3 nights per week and ate nothing more all day than a
plain sandwich (a few pieces of lunchmeat, mustard, wheat
bread), only drank water...yet I only became fatter.
Fortunately, the anti-depressant I was prescribed
(Wellbutrin) speeds the metabolism up or something, so I
finally reverted to being a proper weight (5'2" ~112 lbs.)
even though my increasingly painful neck deformity meant I
couldn't work out at the gym anymore.
Comparing society's attempts to get people to lose weight
with anti-smoking campaigns is absurd. The reason society
restricted citizens' right to smoke anywhere they pleased is
because -- unlike being obese -- it physically harmed others.
(Even if you don't believe in the effects of secondhand smoke,
the chemicals still trigger allergic reactions like headaches
510
or full-potentially deadly asthma attacks. As the old saying

goes, your right to swing your fist ends at my face...)
(XyzzyAvatar)
XyzzyAvatar
Re: I'm near the author's age, and virtually all the kids in
elementary school & junior high were skinny yet had a lunch just
like she describes -- so I don't buy for a minute that her weight was
from what she ate for lunch.
So Europeans are skinny owing to their superior genes? Or do we get
some kind of wonderful compensense in exchange for our absurdly
cruel collectively-held genetic defect, which has so many of us gaining
weight, not just on regular, but even on starvation diets of water,
whole grain, and non-sugary spread?
RE: Fortunately, the anti-depressant I was prescribed (Wellbutrin)
speeds the metabolism up or something, so I finally reverted to
being a proper weight (5'2" ~112 lbs.) even though my
increasingly painful neck deformity meant I couldn't work out at the
gym anymore.
One of the problems about people you know are on anti-depressants,
or "inclined" to go on them, is that they have a tough time seeming
entirely trustworthy in the tales they tell: truth seems never likely to
have it over giving just the right sort of lift. Your increasingly painful
neck deformity that you tell us about is mostly in service to your
explanation, or is it something of a primary point in itself? That is,
did you want us to finish reading and consider how damnably cruel
and mis-understanding others must have been in assessing your
likely reason for quiting the gym? Another thing, beyond weight, that
unfairly draws scorn upon the innocent, to be used to draw satisfying
consolation from oneself and (complicit) others?
RE: Comparing society's attempts to get people to lose weight with
anti-smoking campaigns is absurd. The reason society restricted
citizens' right to smoke anywhere they pleased is because -- unlike
being obese -- it physically harmed others.
511
I'm not sure about physical abuse, but be sure some of us suspect that
a nation of fat people will intellectually harm us, in aggressively
inhibiting/squashing debate when it doesn't tell things as they would
have it.
For weight loss, forget "eat less, move more"
Just stop consuming easily consumable, easily digestible
carbohydrates. It shouldn't be difficult, decades ago most
people managed to do it without having to think about it.
The problem is fighting the efforts of all the industries whose
very existence is dependent on such consumption. It wasn't
always this way. Junk food is heavily laden with the worse
kinds of carbohydrates. When did obesity become a major
health issue? There are physical mechanisms in the body
that go haywire when carbohydrates are processed. No
amount of exercise can stop those processes. Exercise
promotes the consumption of still more carbohydrates. The
body has no off switch for consumption of food while
carbohydrates are being consumed. These ideas seem wrong
or counter-intuitive because of the misinformation spread in
recent decades. (Charley Horse)
@Charley Horse
RE: Just stop consuming easily consumable, easily digestible
carbohydrates. It shouldn't be difficult, decades ago most people
managed to do it without having to think about it.
Just like decades ago (lets say the 60s and 70s) pretty much every
Republican was more liberally in support of social programs than
most democrats are now. That is, "decades ago" is sadly a realm no
one living now is easily going to be able to resurrect or revisit; no
matter how hard think someone thinks about it, "they're" not likely to
come to know it.
If we as a people collectively "Jamie Oliver" lose weight now, it'll be
for terrible, non-praiseworthy reasons: namely, to essentialize
512
ourselves as pure and fit and isolate poisons neatly in some other
culture/group; and two, to emphasize the difference between
ourselves and the readily indulgent elite, something that serves our
masochistic need to feel noble, selfless, and less inviting of the harsh
judgment sweeping over a land that clearly previously had suffered
way too much scarcely limited and unquestionably unearned gaudy
spoils and unrepetant fun.
Link: Should I blame my parents because Im fat (Salon)
---------FRIDAY, AUGUST 19, 2011
Parading as the very opposite
American historical films are forever refighting old wars,
congratulating themselves for being on the right side, and
encouraging viewers to pat themselves on the back for being
on the right side, too. They view the war from the general's
tent up on a distant hill and imagine that they're right in the
thick of it. That's how Paul Haggis' "Crash" swept the Oscars
in 2006 -- by serving up a contemporary story of Los
Angelenos who said and did brazenly racist things in public
constantly, as if it were 1967 and everyone was wearing love
beads, Afros and hard hats. The characters seemed crude
and primitive, lacking in self-awareness, unenlightened; this
made them easy to label, judge and dismiss. A variation on
this strategy has enabled another race drama, "The Help," to
become an instant hit, a likely Oscar contender, and yet
another reminder that when mainstream cinema depicts
discrimination, it tends to ask the same two questions: "How
did this affect white people?" and "Aren't you glad you're not
bigoted like the creeps in this movie?"
[. . .]
513
This isn't the story of beleaguered domestics standing up for

themselves during a time of American apartheid. It's the
story of a perky proto-feminist writer (Emma Stone's
"Skeeter" Phelan) cajoling black women into standing up for
themselves by telling her their stories and letting her publish
them in book form. It's about what a good-hearted and
tenacious person Skeeter is, and how lucky the maids are to
have met her.
[. . .]
There was no real-life book similar to Skeeter's magnum
opus; it's a fictional flourish that feels like a college-educated
white liberal's wish-fulfillment fantasy of how she would
have conducted herself had she been time-warped back to
the civil rights era. I wouldn't have just stood by and let it
happen. I would have done something! Something brave!
[. . .]
And so, yet again, for what seems like the zillionth time, a
heart-tugging Hollywood film transforms a harrowing and
magnificent period of African-American life into a story of
once-blinkered white people becoming enlightened. The
black characters' struggles are sensitively rendered,
magnificently acted, and sometimes heartbreaking
sideshows. Although Viola Davis' subtle performance
anchors the movie, and will likely earn this perpetually
underrated actress an Oscar nomination, giving Aibileen the
movie's voice-over won't fool anybody. This is Skeeter's
movie. She's the one who sets the plot in motion. Without her
youthful idealism, these downtrodden black women would
have continued to suffer in silence.
This sort of thing just keeps happening and happening and
happening,
[. . .]
I've heard somewhat sheepish arguments to the effect that
the white folks' stories take center stage in these films
514
because they're more clearly dramatic. Why? Well, you see,

it's because drama -- commercial mainstream drama,
anyway -- is about people learning, changing and growing,
and the non-white characters' stories are less dramatic
because they already know discrimination is bad, which
means their "arcs" are inherently less interesting. No, I
promise you, some moviemakers really do think this way.
The only proper response to this kind of thinking is to smack
one's forehead -- or better yet, the filmmaker's -- with a tack
hammer. At least it's offered timidly and rarely, and as a
commercial rather than an artistic defense.
Even more problematic is the overriding sense -- conveyed
not just in "The Help," but in so many historical movies -that the era being depicted is tucked safely away in the past,
a closed chapter, and the collective insanity that gripped
society has dissipated thanks to the efforts of good-hearted
people like you, the viewer.
It is inconceivable that any viewer of any race, age or
gender could look at the bigoted, greedy, petty, pinch-faced
shrews who torment poor Aibileen and her colleagues and
think, "That person reminds me of myself," or "I know
somebody like that." They're not fully rounded, likable
people who happen to have a few revolting qualities, and
who therefore complicate our reactions. They're paper
targets that the film can pepper with rhetorical buckshot.
[. . .]
It might not be a bad idea for filmmakers to lay off the big,
tried-and-true historical topics for a while -- civil rights,
slavery, the Holocaust, America's righteous participation in
World War II, the moral tragedy of Vietnam -- and deal with
more recent eras. I'm not suggesting anything radical. I
mean "something that happened 20 years ago as opposed to
50." Movies about actual recent history -- 9/11, Iraq, the
financial meltdown, the dog-whistle racism of 21st-century
515
America -- tend to bomb.

Better yet, filmmakers could deal with controversial subjects
by way of metaphor or parable. This sounds like a dodge,
but it could be liberating. And it couldn't possibly yield a
more tepid movie than "The Help." As engrossing as it is, it's
still a white liberal fantasy in historical drag -- "Crash" with
smiles and hugs. (Matt Zoller-Seitz, Why Hollywood
keeps whitewashing the past, Salon, 12 August
2011)
So let's tell it straight? But what if this gets the story all
wrong too?
Re: And so, yet again, for what seems like the zillionth time, a hearttugging Hollywood film transforms a harrowing and magnificent
period of African-American life into a story of once-blinkered white
people becoming enlightened.
The period was actually, indisputably, a harrowing and magnificent
(epic?) period of African-American life? Good thing, because if
Hollywood ever takes up your call and gets real, it wouldn't have
presented itself with the dreadful problem of not showing much
anything of interest, let alone of magnificence!, for their (i.e.,
Southern blacks) just being relentlessly unconscionably hated upon
and abused. There's this simple, idiotic myth/assumption that when
whites attack another culture, project their own unwanted demons
onto some Other for purposes of punishing and destroying it, that this
Other was more spiritually pure, psychologically sane, less mad,
hateful, and more community-oriented and naturally benefactory
than their oppressors. The only thing I know for sure when a group is
being oppressed is that it shows the illness of the persecutor and that
it must be stopped; it doesn't tell me damn all about the oppressed.
They could have been better, even vastly so, as was the case with the
Jews in Nazi Germany, who were possessed of genuinely more
affective and tolerant child-rearing inclinations than their punitive,
516
indulgence and progress-fearing German "brethren," but nothing

discounts that they may have been even worse.
Would this be a subject matter/consideration you'd be okay with
Hollywood tackling in regards to the South, Matt? A film that shows
whites for what they were, and how the blacks may have been also
(that they were all a mess, with it being best to have lived in the North
where you'd find at least some who were civilized)? Or are you at last,
even after all your preference for nuance and distaste for the
impossibilities of the purely good or simply evil, still stuck with a silly
default defense of primitivism and the folk, very much ready to
destroy anyone who'd poke holes at your own maddingly intractable
mythology, allowed to persist on and on, not in the least bit for its
claim on truth but because its espousers know that no one but a
purely evil person who must be hunted down and destroyed for the
good of all would take them to task on it? Is the road you've taken
really so very, very uphill or hard?
-----The wall
For Matt the wall that blocks all further forward progress, all further
larger public engagement with the real and trespasses into exciting
unexplored possibilities of who we might become, is white people's
need to enslaven all narratives to their need to feel important. It's
gotten as far as they (i.e., white people) can allow. Bit by bit,
previously simply demonized Others have long not just been exempt
from demonization, but even granted memorable roles for supporting
actor/actress nomination. But they cannot be made primary to white
protoganists, for we've collectively learned we need these protagonists
kept essentially as they are enfranchised, the primary heroes -- to
keep ourselves feeling sexy and vital.
The problem for me is that Matt's own heroism is the one that seems
517
most unfairly protected from deconstruction. What Matt will never

permit you to consider without being made to feel grossly
punishment-worthy for it, is that disenfranchised people may not be
empowered to show any of the traits we ought rightly to consider
ennobling or heroic. He wouldn't have you consider that if you
focussed purely on the blacks that all you would mostly see is the less
pretty things that happen to people after suffering ongoing abuse:
that you wouldn't just discover how awful torture is, but that suffering
from whole-scale torture makes a people, though absolutely worthy of
essential respect, still truly hard to like, leaving them, not so much
with assertive, pronounced, striking and nobly defiant souls, but near
bereft of all such entirely.
He certainly wouldn't have you consider that black culture might not
have been so pretty to begin with, even before the in-fact truly
demon-haunted, unloved and unevolved whites set themselves upon
them. If you consider any of this, Matt'll show no nuance in IDing you
as evil, for to him your primary use is to ensure that he himself is
never in the end mistaken for being evil himself. Nothing of the massbucking/disregarding, controversial things he says can suggest a core
lack of empathy or sympathy, because of how clearly he distinguishes
himself from you indisputable monsters. Making clear your
inarguable evilness/villainy keeps him within the pale, bravely
looking like he might even risk being horribly misunderstood to keep
himself -- and hopefully thereby some of us -- at the forefront of
reality exploration/confrontation. That is, Matts own kind of
narrative needs, for their actually also too very much being privileged
over bare truth, however much parading as the very opposite, are to
me what is at risk of keeping us all from stretching out into
unfamiliar, more discomforting territory.
Link: Why Hollywood keeps white-washing the past (Salon)
----------
518

Reply to Barbara Ehrenreich
My reply to Barbara Ehrenreichs essay on Salon:
Helping the stupid Depression story be told
Re: To my own amazement, "Nickel and Dimed" quickly
ascended to the bestseller list and began winning awards.
Criticisms, too, have accumulated over the years. But for
the most part, the book has been far better received than I
could have imagined it would be, with an impact extending
well into the more comfortable classes.
Associating oneself in anyway with you gives one working classsympathies cred, as well as appreciative-of-one-of-America'sforemost-essaysists cred (I mean, who dislikes you?). In addition,
your extended sojourn amongst the untouchables didn't leave you
exempted from where you'd been previously -- back once again to
being one of America's NYRB foremost. In addition, your book was
warzone adventure, from someone who lived, breathed, and even ate
it, all its ghastliness. You really counted flinching from the
frighteningly permanently destitute such that it'd leave you ignored
this time around? You're not just one of those who, no matter their
success, for some reason always finds some reason to define
themselves as not immoderately empowered/influential? I'm hearing
even the President -- eternally hopeful, but always hamstrung -defines himself this way, and I'm guessing its what people do when
they want to communicate they're not at all responsible for the
519
widespread muck they mostly actually want, or at least get some kind
of weird kick from.
Look at how Laurel here debases herself to you: she's pretty much do
as much to none other -- even her expecting God might be in for
worse than just a few minor correctives. You're none other than one
of our collectively-agreed-upon few gods, you fool. Average Middle
American, indeed!
Re: A Florida woman wrote to tell me that, before reading
it, she'd always been annoyed at the poor for what she saw
as their self-inflicted obesity. Now she understood that a
healthy diet wasn't always an option. And if I had a
quarter for every person who's told me he or she now
tipped more generously, I would be able to start my own
foundation.
Too bad Laurel didn't chime in on this one, for she'd have said the
perfectly fair and in fact just plain necessary in reminding you and
this earnestly self-deluding fool that the poor don't eat healthy owing
to lack of options, but because they like fatty foods to the point that in
some moods they'd choose a follow-up burger over peaceneverending, but with only an apple as chaser.
Re: Even more gratifying to me, the book has been widely
read among low-wage workers. In the last few years,
hundreds of people have written to tell me their stories:
the mother of a newborn infant whose electricity had just
been turned off, the woman who had just been given a
diagnosis of cancer and has no health insurance, the
newly homeless man who writes from a library computer.
At what point did you pass up concluding that this aggressive flow
suggested people kind of enjoyed this opportunity to showcase their
suffering, and wonder if your efforts for a better America for the
working class would be shortchanged owing to most of them being
broadly aware that a better America would make it incrementally
harder to show how nobly unspoiled and self-denying they'd become?
Their wounds are real and ruinous; how every accuser's accusation is
520
sundered by this stark, undeniable corporeal fact.

Re: In 2000, I had been able to walk into a number of jobs
pretty much off the street. Less than a decade later, many
of these jobs had disappeared and there was stiff
competition for those that remained. It would have been
impossible to repeat my "Nickel and Dimed" "experiment,"
had I had been so inclined, because I would probably
never have found a job.
Now it's even easier to credit to yourself that those who believe you're
lazy, not only don't know what they're talking about but are probably
to be counted amongst those who'll burn in hell for prospering at a
time when it surely means living it at the-public-at-large's expense.
You'll live the rest of your life relatively prosperous and always
lauded. Theyll, however, live it that much greater, truer heroes -even if it means a 30-year shortchanged life, and most of this with
some sort of missing limb or malfunctioning organ, plus a further list
of afflictions not even an evil Santa could bear to count without at
some point pleaing for mercy.
Re: But at least we should decide, as a bare minimum
principle, to stop kicking people when they're down.
Good news! This is what they can expect to receive in plenty. During
the last Depression at some point everyone was for the noble,
suffering poor, which is fortuitous because it's the one sort of notentirely-inversed plentitude they can handle. They need yet more
years of jaw-dropping sacrifice and self-wasting before they'll believe
they've shown inner persecutors they're clearly not what they're
accused of being: indulgent, greedy, self-centred -- selfish! Then,
they'll be all for the next Roosevelt, who'll permit some growth -- but
not that much! -- before ensuring the inacting of some giant war
that'll waste away many of them as well as their kids for good, and
prove beyond doubt that liberals may have a point in thinking we now
might deserve better and in doing what they can to finally actually
enact it. We're in for such good times, people -- we always get what
we want. The rich are but toys we wind up again and again to undue
521
the good things we've become highly anxious over possessing.

The South
As a book and a movie and a social phenomenon, "The Help"

functions as a kind of Rorschach test that measures how you
feel about the history of racial inequality in America.
[. . .]
Stockett herself was not born until 1969, and drew on her
own experiences being raised by African-American women
who worked for her parents in the '70s and '80s. Her book is
set in the dramatic context of the early '60s, when the civil
rights movement was just beginning to capture national
attention, but as she has said in interviews, relations
between affluent white Mississippians and their black hired
help really hadn't altered much between that time and her
own childhood. And for all the cultural shifts America has
experienced since then, the fundamental economic disparity
between whites and people of color has hardly improved, if
indeed it hasn't gotten worse. A recent study by the Pew
Research Center suggested that the current recession -- and
can we stop pretending it ever ended? -- has slashed the
median net worth of black households by 53 percent (and
Hispanic households by 66 percent), while white wealth fell
by just 16 percent. The raw numbers are even more
astonishing: The median household net worth for white
Americans is $113,149, and for blacks it's $5,677. That's not a
misprint or a misunderstanding; the median white
household is 20 times richer than the median black
522
household. (Andrew OHehir, The Help: A tale of not-soancient American history, Salon, 9 August 2011)
Hate the South.
Southern white people suck.
"Maid sues Queens exec over bad pay, abuse"
Link: http://articles.nydailynews.com/2002-0827/news/18210475_1_josephs-court-papers-domesticworker
An immigrant domestic worker charges she was "treated
like a slave" by a Merrill Lynch executive, who kept her
prisoner in his Queens home where she suffered constant
verbal abuse and was fed table scraps.
Filipino-born Elma Manliguez says she was paid the
equivalent of 6 cents an hour over the two years she worked
for Martin Joseph and his wife, Somanti.
In a lawsuit filed against the couple, Manliguez also
complained she was forced to take meals on the kitchen
floor, was often told she was "stupid" and was denied basic
necessities like sanitary napkins.
"I can't forget how I suffered," Manliguez, 41, told the Daily
News yesterday.
---------------------------------"[Walnut Creek] Woman indicted for allegedly
exploiting nanny]"
Link: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?
f=/c/a/2008/11/19/BAIV147LUS.DTL&feed=rss.news
A Walnut Creek real-estate agent will appear in federal
court today on charges that she lured a Peruvian nanny to
the East Bay with promises of a better life but instead kept
her as an indentured servant for nearly two years.
Mabelle de la Rosa Dann, 45, also known as Mabelle Crabbe,
was indicted by a federal grand jury in June. She has
523
pleaded not guilty to a charge of harboring an illegal alien

for the purpose of private financial gain.
Dann and others brought Zoraida Pena-Canal, 30, of Peru
into the United States on a three-month visitor's visa in July
2006, authorities said. Pena-Canal had worked for Dann's
sister and Dann as a housekeeper and nanny in Peru several
years earlier, investigators said.
---------------------------------"Ooops! She Did It Again: Susan Tabas Tepper is
Serial Nanny Beater?"
Link: http://www.phillyfuture.org/node/5328
Dahhhlings, how are we? I have been silent for too
long...been contemplating new summer fashions (Lily is
definately out, but strappy sandals and espadrilles? Sooo
In!)
So there I am minding my own business running errands
and what comes over the radio? Main Line Social
LIGHTweight, Susan Tabas Tepper, has oops done it again!
"Alleged serial Nanny abuse" - look out our own Naomi is
back in action...
Susan is beating the help...again? In a sick way I can't help
but mention that it was almost a year to the day since the
last incident...then she was wielding carrots (organic,
natch!)...today she might need a mani/pedi as she is accused
of doing it the old fashioned way - hands, fists, nails,
whatever.
---------------------------------"Annette John-Hall | The quiet anger felt by 'the
help'
By Annette John-Hall
Inquirer Columnist"
Link:
http://www.saveardmorecoalition.org/node/1612/nannyga
te-update-nannies-speak-out-tabas-tepper
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The news that Main Line socialite Susan Tabas Tepper had
allegedly gone all Naomi Campbell on a nanny again didn't
sit too well with the sisterhood of nannies gathered at
Rittenhouse Square yesterday.
That's where most of Center City's babysitters congregate.
You know, down on 18th and Walnut, by the fountain.
Especially on perfect mornings, nannies on the Square are
as predictable as perennials in the springtime.
Yesterday, they were out in force - black, white, Asian,
Latino, almost all foreigners - a virtual bouquet of
caregivers, their caravan of strollers parked, their eagle eyes
focused on their preschool charges, almost all of them white.
You better believe they had an opinion about Tepper, the 44year-old Villanova villainess who stands accused of
assaulting her most recent nanny, Urszula Kordzior, only
months after landing in community service for smacking
down another valued employee. The nanny's 9-year-old
daughter allegedly got pushed when she tried to help her
mom.
It appears the hits just keep on coming.
The Rittenhouse nannies agreed to talk only if I didn't use
their names. After all, they like the families they work for.
Oh, and they want to keep their jobs.
"If she did that to me? I would fight back, yes I would," says
a Jamaican nanny....The problem with privileged folk, she
continued as the children clung closely to her, is that they
often view "the help" as nothing more than another child, to
be seen and not heard.
Course, while they're at the wine sip, "the help" has the allconsuming responsibility of raising their kids.
It seems that Tepper, the daughter of the late Main Line
financier Daniel Tabas, treats animals with more dignity
than her employees. She's been known to tame a tiger, but
can turn on humans - especially those she considers beneath
525
her - with the ferocity of a wild beast.

...."They think we're inferior, that we're not educated," says
the Jamaican babysitter, a teacher for 11 years in her
homeland before coming to Philadelphia last year. "A lot of
nannies around here are educated people. But you would
only know that if you spoke to the nannies."
I followed her suggestion and spoke to other nannies. Some
were college-educated, others weren't. Many are doing child
care as a temporary job until they can find something better.
And while all of the women said they had yet to experience
the Mommy Dearest wrath of a Tepper, they complained
that certain families had a tendency to take them for
granted.
"They think they can do with you whatever they want," says
a ponytailed native of Spain.
---------------------------------So, we have Queens, New York; Walnut creek, California;
and Philadelphia, PA. All in the North, all wealthy, all in the
past ten years. Damn those Southerners! Won't they ever
learn!? (Grand Duchess Anastasiya Nikolayevnas
paregoric bottle)
_____
OK, you insufferable troll
Quit hijacking the thread, seriously. I said nothing about the
South in this review, except that it's where the movie is set. If
you had actually read the review, you'd have noticed that
most of what you're posting actually supports the point that
prodigious inequality persists in America, and may even be
worse now overall than it was in the Jim Crow South.
Sane readers: We really will have a way to get rid of these
people. I keep saying that, but it's getting closer. (Andrew
526
OHehir)
Trolls for the working man
Laurel defends put-upon Southerners, those in regions which didn't
thrive when domestic manufacturing lost its impetus, but hates gay
marriage and spoiled teachers for, according to her, ruining the
foundations of society and making it near impossible to build a better
one. Duchess entrenchedly defends put-upon working classers, but
hates most Jews for, according to him, enslaving and depriving
everyone else into a society with no further forward momentum.
The problem for those who haven't yet put together their troll-kill
program is that time is rapidly running out when it is easy and safe to
target their trolls as TROLLS. For during depressions eventually
EVERYONE, including coastal urban elites, becomes for the
struggling working classes, people of the South, places like
Pittsburgh; the very worst villain becomes the person who'd spit upon
them, something most urbanites ACTUALLY WERE even a couple
years into the depression -- "goober on, Tea Bagger / mad internet
commenter!" -- before instantly transmogrifying themselves; AND
THE WORST VILLAINS become those "leeches" without the moral
fibre still existing in those real Americans bearing through a wasted
republic -- usually the likes of Jews, gays, too-long-tolerated spoiled
public servants, and other vulnerables.
Looking at where Joan W. is heading now (firmly into an Obama
camp that will destroy her as soon as she's no longer useful, for her
in-truth being far too good to be anything at all actually like them), it
is indeed possible that by the time you guys get this thing going, the
trolls you end up dispatching might actually include some of those
calling for this current lot to get the heave-ho. (Soon, for feeling so
impossibly isolated and excluded, no one is going to scream more
lunacy than the few true progressives out there.) Laurel, you'll note, is
beginning to seem comfortably settled -- maybe she senses it's near
her time. Indeed, the difference between her and Ehrenreich,
defender-of-the-noble-but-ever-put-upon working classer, didn't
527
seem so legion to me.

Link: The Help: A tale of not-so-ancient American history (Salon)
Yes, America will once again quietly queue up in bread lines
Today, the answer seems both more modest and more

challenging: if we want to reduce poverty, we have to stop
doing the things that make people poor and keep them that
way. Stop underpaying people for the jobs they do. Stop
treating working people as potential criminals and let them
have the right to organize for better wages and working
conditions.
Stop the institutional harassment of those who turn to the
government for help or find themselves destitute in the
streets. Maybe, as so many Americans seem to believe today,
we can't afford the kinds of public programs that would
genuinely alleviate poverty -- though I would argue
otherwise. But at least we should decide, as a bare minimum
principle, to stop kicking people when they're down.
(Barbara Ehrenreich, How America turned
poverty into a crime, Salon, 9 August 2011)
The Coming Explosion...

When the number and desperation of people at the bottom of
the economic ladder reach critical mass, there will be a
revolution in this country that will put all others to shame.
We are armed to the teeth, and there aren't anywhere near
528
enough police and national guard to quell mass riots, nor is

there any assurance that our demonized and demoralized
public authorities would be willing to shoot down people by
the hundreds or thousands. They might just join in and turn
those guns on their exploiters.
Think it can't happen here? Think that Americans in the 21st
century will quietly queue up in bread lines as they did in the
1930s?
The thin veneer of civilization is wearing very very thin.
Time for those in power to get serious about improving the
lot of everyday people, or ignore same at their dire peril.
(michaelira)
michaelira
Re: Think it can't happen here? Think that Americans in the 21st
century will quietly queue up in bread lines as they did in the 1930s?
Yes, this is what some of us think, as:
Economic depressions are motivated internal sacrifices which
often kill more people than wars do. Cartoons prior to and
during depressions often show sinful, greedy people being
sacrificed on altars, and the depressed nation becomes
paralyzed politically, unable to take action to reverse the
economic downturn. Just as depressed individuals experience
little conscious anger--feeling they "deserve to be punished"-so too nations in depressions are characterized by
"introverted" foreign policy moods, start fewer military
expeditions and are less concerned with foreign affairs. The
feeling during depressions is "I should be killed" for my
wishes rather than "I want to kill others." Depressions are
economic anorexias, where people starve themselves to avoid
being eaten up by the Dragon Mother, the maternal vulture of
529
infancy. The nation begins to look for a Phallic Leader with

whom they can merge and regain their failed potency and who
can protect them against their growing delusional fears of a
persecutory mommy. (Lloyd DeMause, Emotional Life
of Nations)
Why do you think it'll be different this time around? I'm genuinely
curious.
respectfully,
patrick
Link: How America turned poverty into a crime (Salon)
---------SUNDAY, AUGUST 14, 2011
On class size and lazy teachers
Few things about a school seem to matter more to parents

than class size.
[. . .]
But you may be surprised to learn that the effects of class

size on learning are not 100 percent clear. Conventional
wisdom tell us that smaller class size is crucial for learning
-- that kids of all ages learn more in smaller groups. And
indeed, in the early years of schooling, there is some
research to back this up.
But there is a substantial body of research to suggest that
530
kids in small classes dont necessarily learn more. In the

range of things that schools can do to improve outcomes for
your child, reducing class size may rank a distant fourth
behind solid teacher training, a clear and well-sequenced
curriculum, and a staff that is well supported and regularly
evaluated. For decades, class size was largely a function of a
communitys population. A lot of kids born in a particular
year? The local school found a way to cram them into
classrooms. In the 1970s, though, as the discussion of the
achievement gap sharpened and schools began to be seen as
an instrument of racial oppression, "overcrowding" became
a catch-all concept for the inequities between poor and
middle-class kids in public education. Writers like liberal
activist Jonathan Kozol decried the antiquated, crumbling,
and overcrowded classrooms where poor children had their
dreams denied. "The overcrowded classroom" was
associated with poor performance, high truancy, and high
rates of juvenile crime.
In the last twenty years, legislators have tried to institute
state-wide standards in an effort to keep teacher-student
ratios low, especially in poor and underperforming schools.
[. . .]
In general, the powerful teachers unions do endorse small

class size. Although it is popular to bash the unions, you can
look at their enthusiasm for small class size in a couple of
different ways. It may be an honest reflection of the
experience of the people who are on the front lines in
education. A great number of classroom teachers point out
that they can barely learn the names of thirty students by
the end of the first month of school, much less pitch
531
instruction to different learning styles so the students can

learn best. Teachers also describe a sense of connectedness
that can grow in a small class, creating a learning
environment that is intimate, flexible, and, when it works,
highly productive. A more cynical take is that the union
support for small classrooms is part of an effort to protect
the working conditions of its members. Smaller class size
makes it easier for teachers to teach. It takes much less time
to grade fifteen essays than thirty.
The most cynical take is that smaller class size also increases
the number of teachers who are hired and strengthens the
union that supports them. Randi Weingarten, head of the
American Federation of Teachers, acknowledges that raising
class size is a branch on a tree of hard decisions that cashstrapped states are facing. But, she says, "if somebody says
they want to raise class size, theyre doing it because they
want to cut the budget, not because its actually going to help
children." Teachers union representatives point out that the
same fiscal conservatives and corporate-type reformers who
encourage high student-to-teacher ratios in classrooms are
often the ones who send their own children to private schools
where -- you guessed it -- the kids receive instruction in
small groups, often twelve to fifteen in a class.
Does class size matter? For some interesting reasons, its
hard for researchers to come up with a definitive answer.
[. . .]
To be sure, all the nay-saying and bellyaching about the way

the Tennessee test was conducted didnt slow the enthusiasm
532
of class-size-reduction proponents. In fact, the Tennessee

project changed education policy in the entire state of
California. In 1996, state education officials on the West
Coast got legislators to appropriate $1 billion a year to cap
elementary school class sizes at a strict twenty kids to one
teacher. A pricy undertaking, it led to an unprecedented
hiring binge, with the state bringing 28,886 new teachers on
board. Six years later, the Rand Corporation published a
study examining the results of the California effort-- and it
was discouraging. The good news was that, overall,
Californias educational performance had gone up. The bad
news was this: despite hiring all those new teachers, the kids
in the small classes were performing about the same as kids
in the larger classes. And those positive downstream effects
-- better grades in high school and higher graduation rates
-- never materialized, either.
So, what happened? No one is sure. But there are two strong
hypotheses: either the Tennessee results were specific to that
state and that experiment, or -- and this is one that most
educational experts favor -- teacher quality matters more
than class size. (Peg Tyre, Does class size really matter,
Class size matters slightly, but not as much as other

factors
For example a small class of 15 would not do as well as a
larger class of 24, assuming that the class of 15 kids ONLY
ATTENDED 5 hours a day, and 180 days a year, and the
533
class of 24 attended EIGHT hours a day, TWELVE MONTHS

of the year....just like kids in Europe, Japan, China -- every
place that beats our socks off.
But we can't have that, can we? Because of the immense

power of the teacher's union, and the fact they want to
protect their short days and VERY short school year, which
means they are GUARANTEED a paid 2.5 month summer
vacation each and every year, to sit in the yard and sip iced
tea, and play with their kids, and go on nice vacations, while
the imbeciles who PAY THEIR OUTRAGEOUS SALARIES
AND LUX WAGES slog into their regular 8 hour a day jobs,
all bleepin' year long.
@Follow the Money

I am sorry, but NO, you are NOT a professional. Teachers
are not professionals. They do not work full time. They
attend teacher's college, which is the easiest and most
undemanding program anywhere (they reject NO ONE, you
don't even have to speak proper English to get accepted) and
they "prepare you" for a job where you work part time, can't
ever be fired, and retire 15 years before anyone else at
almost full pay and benefits.
That's a rip off. It is not "professionalism". Sad you do not
even know the difference.
@Engineer Bill
Teachers have a right to decent working conditions; I agree.
But they have FAR FAR MORE THAN THAT -- they have
Socialist benefits that would stagger the most affluent
534
European. Even EUROPE, nobody gets THREE MONTHS

OF PAID VACATION. Nobody works only 4 hours and 45
minutes a day!
Teachers also mostly DO NOT have "advanced degrees".
They have an education degree, which is an ordinary BA,
about what you'd get if you majored in Tibetan Basket
Weaving or English Lit or "Communications".
And they earn far more than "people who have advanced
degrees", according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics -- more
than engineers, more than nurses, more than architects,
more than physicists, more than Optometrists. WHY?
because those folks work all day, 12 months of the year.
Teachers only work a 5-6 hour day, max, and they get all
summer off, 2 weeks at Christmas, 1 week at Easter and they
can retire FIFTEEN YEARS EARLY at 90% of highest salary
(which is often six figures).
On a "per hour worked" basis, teachers are some of the
highest paid people in the work force, frequently earning
$50-75 and much more, PER HOUR ACTUALLY WORKED.
Don't bother, BTW, with the crap about "but they must
grade papers at night!" You don't grade papers in gym class,
in typing class, in health class, in KINDERGARTEN. And I'm
a working professional, and I take work home frequently,
and nobody has a pity party for ME. Every professional I
know has to take work home -- reports, professional
journals, employee evaluations. Nothing unique there. But
teachers are whingers and fakers, goldbrickers and clock
watchers.
535
The truth is finally OUT and being heard by the public, and
changes are afoot. Thank god for the courage of people like
Gov. Chris Christie in speaking "truth to power' when he lets
the public know about the greed and corruption in the
teacher's union, and how it has dragged our national
educational levels down to that of Latvia (and that's an
insult to Latvia).
***
BTW: I went to school in the sixties -- height of the baby
boom. My classes had 40-44 kids in each -- I have the class
pictures to PROVE THIS. And we had ONE teacher per class
-- no aides, no assistants, nothing -- and we got a good,
decent education. A far better education than 7/8ths of kids
today get! We didn't have inflated grades, we did not have
social promotion.
What is missing in education today is NOT "small classes"
which is just teacher union code for "hire more union
teachers at high salaries and bankrupt cities and suburbs".
What is missing is this: get rid of all illegal immigrant

children and make it a law they cannot steal an education
from the taxpayer.
What is missing is this: utilize unused school buildings (or
build new facilities) for REFORM SCHOOL. Really
disruptive, violent bad behaving kids need to be in REFORM
school, in uniforms, no cell phones and listening to Lawrence
Welk muzak all day until they realize they need to mend
their ways. Violent, misbehaving kids DESTROY education
for the good kids, and drive teachers insane, and suck up all
536
the time and resources. Put them where they can be

controlled and disciplined.
What is missing is this: truant officers, and a lot of them.
Most schools have missing kids -- staying home to watch TV,
fake illnesses, lazy parents, drugs, video games or just
hanging with friends. It makes our communities a mess with
crime and drugs; it leads to unplanned pregnancies. Get
every kid in school.
What is missing is this: pass uniform state laws to FORBID
dropping out before age 18 OR graduation from an
accredited high school OR a GED. No more dropouts! Don't
behave? REFORM SCHOOL. Add to this, no driver's license
without a high school diploma. See graduation and literacy
rates SOAR.
I could go on all day. American education is an epic failure
and white hot crisis. It won't change until we take back
power from the evil and corrupt teacher's union, and
institute NORMALIZATION of teacher wages, benefits and
retirement (i.e, what other people get and no more than
that). (_bigguns/laurel)
To Echo One of the First Commenters
If you increase the class sizes of the "best" teachers, you will
lose the "best" teachers. The fact is, the best teachers are
often those with multiple degrees and certifications, and
years of experience spent learning how to manage
classrooms and build relationships with students. There are
exceptions: I have met a number of teachers who are quite
simply gifted--an instinctual ability to relate to young
people. However, those teachers are the exceptions. Most of
us become successful through hard work, training,
537
mentoring, and practice, practice, practice.
When you start implementing practices that punish your

best employees (increasing their work considerably without
providing either monetary compensation or professional
recognition), you will lose your best employees. And after
years of this sort of nonsense, the people who teaching in
public schools will be either pure saints, or people who
couldn't get hired in any other field.
But that's the plan, isn't it? Deprofessionalize education, and
staff the schools of the underclass (i.e., anyone who isn't
wealthy and/or influential) with human "information
delivery devices." When the kids fail, Rhee, Right-Wing
politicians, and their Corporate Sponsors (as well as, I
suspect, this Peg Tyre charlatan) will use it as an excuse to
abolish public education entirely.
This entire movement is a con. Like the extortionists who

took our economy hostage, these people claim to want to
destroy public education in order to "save" it. In fact, they
just want to destroy public education. (Lisa Rathert)
@Mornings Minion: yadda yadda yadda
Lady, you work at one of the white, affluent privileged
private schools in Northeastern Ohio, and they are the kids
of millionaires, doctors, sports stars and so forth.
Your experiences are MEANINGLESS to people whose kids

are in public school, and can only dream about sending their
kids to a lux private academy.
538
I've met kids from your precious schools, and they are all
spoiled, entitled brats.
Do us a BIG FAVOR and tell us what ONE YEAR'S TUITION
is at your "Whitey Rich-Kid's Academy".
Then we will know why you can have classes with 15 or 18
kids.
The rest of us live in reality, and we can't afford any more
taxes to give teachers summer vacations, or 15 more years in
retirement luxury on our dime.
Teachers have failed us again and again and again. They
said our kids would thrive is we had "open classrooms" -- we
did, and it was a failure. They said "whole language" and
"new math" and we did those things (expensively) and our
kids were worse off than ever.
They said "raise our salaries! double them! and your kids
will learn!" so we raised their salaries to double and more,
and our kids failed worse than ever.
They said smaller classes, they said teacher's aides, they said
more computers -- we tried everything.
Today, adjusted for inflation, we pay TWICE what we did in
1970 per child, and teachers make more than double in
adjusted dollars (and far more benefits) but our kids are
worse off than ever.
It's always "the parent's fault" or "societies fault", never the

teacher's fault-- the lazy, goldbricking clock watching
teachers waiting for their giant cash retirement payout at
age 52!!!!
539
Here is how you solve this problem (Lord Karth is close, but
not quite): fire every single member of the teacher's union.
Then go to the local unemployment office. Ask who has a 4year degree in any subject. Hire those people for $25 a hour
(WORKED HOURS only), and a decent but not lux health
plan.
Watch our kids thrive and succeed. Because ANYONE chosen
at RANDOM would be better than the lazy, useless,
goldbricking members of the nation's most corrupt union.
Remember these words: CLAW IT BACK.
That is our only choice -- that or continued failure, because
anything the teacher's union proposes is guaranteed failure
for our kids. (_bigguns/laurel1962)
Misery
Most liberal Americans are regressing; it's why they're mostly still for
Obama (the key lie is not the one Greenwald, with his insistance that
Obama actually got the deal he himself wanted, exposes, but the one
he ignores: that MOST LIBERALS THEMSELVES at some level
MOSTLY KNEW this about him, and mostly explains why they chose
him over the "less cooperating" Hillary) and why someone like
Laurel/_bigguns talk of "lazy, spoiled" whatevers now appeals to their
sensibilities, when before, when they Gollum-in-his-better-mood had
kowed back the demons threatening to overwhelm their minds, they
would have associated such talk with the Archie Bunkers they were
hurriedly leaving behind in the dust.
The talk now is of how the Tea Partiers are responsible for bringing
down the whole nation. In my judgment, they're something of a
convenience for many liberals who have become more and more
comfortable with crackdowns, and are at some level pleased to have
540
them to help hide from themselves for awhile the real fact of who
they've become. Without the Tea Partiers, they themselves would
have had to figure out a way to argue for the sort of cuts we've just
seen, and though they would have found a way it never would have
gone down easy with them: guilt over doing the unconscionable
would have chomped good portions of them up.
BTW, EVERYTHING worked better in the '60s and '70s; the reason
for this owes to the fact that after periods of war and mass sacrifice,
people feel entitled, permitted to make life once again about growth.
EVERYTHING went downhill in the 80s, and this owes NOTHING to
what went on previously -- the truly beneficent 60s social agenda that
Laurel complains about, or whatnot -- excepting the key fact that
what went on was mostly unambiguously spread-out improvement
and dream realization, and this is only permitted a short while before
we once again collectively decide we are the sort of immature, sinful,
ungrateful cretins to be rightly filled up with a heftier portion of
constriction and misery. Republicans go for this sort of thing whole
hog, of course, but more liberals than we have yet permitted ourselves
to appreciate do also.
Laurel/_bigguns has voted for moderate democrats the whole of the
way, and though currently still here a troll she is for the most part
representative. This will become more evident here. Even with her
talk about gay marriage and teachers, that is, though right now she's
considerably ahead of the curve, you can already feel preparations are
dutifully being made so that much of the rest of Salon at some point
keeps pace with her. It's one big nightmare. I wonder what will
happen to the Krugmans, who seem completely absent the afflictions
of the punitive superego?
Link: Does class size really matter? (Salon)
---------
541
SATURDAY, AUGUST 13, 2011

Old coot at the age of six
I don't know about you, but the chirpy tales that dominate
the public discussion about aging -- you know, the ones that
tell us that age is just a state of mind, that "60 is the new 40"
and "80 the new 60" -- irritate me. What's next: 100 as the
new middle age?
Sure, aging is different than it was a generation or two ago

and there are more possibilities now than ever before, if only
because we live so much longer. it just seems to me that,
whether at 60 or 80, the good news is only half the story.
For it's also true that old age -- even now when old age often
isn't what it used to be -- is a time of loss, decline and stigma.
Yes, I said stigma. A harsh word, I know, but one that speaks
to a truth that's affirmed by social researchers who have
consistently found that racial and ethnic stereotypes are
likely to give way over time and with contact, but not those
about age. And where there are stereotypes, there are
prejudice and discrimination -- feelings and behavior that
are deeply rooted in our social world and, consequently,
make themselves felt in our inner psychological world as
well.
I felt the sting of that discrimination recently when a large
and reputable company offered me an auto insurance policy
that cost significantly less than I'd been paying. After I
signed up, the woman at the other end of the phone
suggested that I consider their umbrella policy as well,
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which was not only cheaper than the one I had, but would, in
addition, create what she called "a package" that would
decrease my auto insurance premium by another hundred
dollars. How could I pass up that kind of deal?
Well ... not so fast. After a moment or two on her computer,
she turned her attention back to me with an apology: "I'm
sorry, but I can't offer the umbrella policy because our
records show that you had an accident in the last five years."
Puzzled, I explained that it was just a fender bender in a
parking lot and reminded her that she had just sold me an
insurance policy. Why that and not the umbrella policy?
She went silent, clearly flustered, and finally said, "It's

different." Not satisfied, I persisted, until she became
impatient and burst out, "It's company policy: If you're over
80 and had an accident in the last five years, we can't offer
you an umbrella policy." Surprised, I was rendered mute for
a moment. After what seemed like a long time, she spoke into
the silence, "I'm really sorry. It's just policy."
Frustrated, we ended the conversation.
After I fussed and fumed for a while, I called back and asked
to speak with someone in authority. A soothing male voice
came on the line. I told him my story, and finished with, "Do
I have to remind you that there's a law against age
discrimination?"
[. . .]
543
Yet too few political figures, policy experts or media stories

are asking the important questions: What are the real
possibilities for our aging population now? How will we live
them; what will we do with them? Who will we become?
How will we see ourselves; how will we be seen? What will
sustain us -- emotionally, economically, physically,
spiritually? These, not just whether the old will break the
Social Security bank or bankrupt Medicare, are the central
questions about aging in our time. (Lillian B. Rubin, The
hard truths about getting old, Salon, 3 August
2011)
age
Thanks for the truthful article, though I'm glad several have
pointed out that the life-span of U. S. citizens has not
increased significantly in years.
The self-satisfied cretins who have commented, indulging in
the very stereotypes you write about, show just how
dominant age bigotry is. If the old wanted to be mean, they
would point out that all these commentors will die someday.
Of old age, if they're lucky. If they continue to push the
stereotypes, they will know exactly the dismay the aged feel
now, and one hopes they suffer for it. If they really believe
they will be exempt, well . . .
You notice I call it age bigotry, not age discrimination.

Discrimination is too polite a word.
I spent fifty years writing learning about writing. I'm

smarter and more alert than all but a tiny fraction of thirtyyear-olds. And that's being generous. I'm a better teacher
than ever. I just published a fifth novel and a ninth book. I do
544
calculus for fun. I know more about my art than the ones
who do get hired will EVER know. But I can't get hired.
Betty Davis is reputed to have said, "Old age isn't for sissies."
Amen. It takes a strong character to accept and understand
that your body is getting weaker and you will die and
though you might improve your situation with exercise and
diet and activity, as I do, there is absolutely nothing you can
do about the process as a whole.
Yeats wrote of "this caricature, decrepit age,/ tied to me as

to a dog's tail."
I wrote this:
The old keep saying, You too will come
to this.
The young keep answering with a kiss.
One tries to remain accepting and even-tempered. Probably
the most insulting treatment you receive as you get old is to
be ignored, to be treated as if you no longer matter.
There's a lot of help here, kiddos. You could save yourselves

a lot of grief by paying attention. But you can't do yourself
any good at all by ignoring the facts.
What will it take before every human can understand the
simple fact that time of life is NOT a firm and fixed class of
people, but a phase, a temporary passage, and EVERYONE
must go through it? Be proud of your youth, but you did not
create it. And make no mistake, you WILL get old.
Ahh, but why should the young care? They know they will be
545
young forever. (hontonoshijin)
hontonshijon, old coot at the age of six

RE: "I spent fifty years writing learning about writing. I'm
smarter and more alert than all but a tiny fraction of
thirty-year-olds. And that's being generous. I'm a better
teacher than ever. I just published a fifth novel and a ninth
book. I do calculus for fun. I know more about my art than
the ones who do get hired will EVER know. But I can't get
hired
I'm wondering if you can't get hired because you know more than
anyone on the planet, and thus whoever's hiring you is put in the
humiliating position of pretending, however clearly preposterously, to
be your boss. I'm not sure how old you are, but I seem to remember
someone also aged and important and ever-wise arguing that
novelists continue writing great things until they're about 50, and
then slide hard; and I clearly remember Updike later in life saying
that though he hopes accumulated wisdom makes his later books near
equal sources of treasure to his earlier life-filled ones, he admits that
everyone seems to want to default back to "Rabbit Run."
RE: Betty Davis is reputed to have said, "Old age isn't for
sissies." Amen. It takes a strong character to accept and
understand that your body is getting weaker and you will
die and though you might improve your situation with
exercise and diet and activity, as I do, there is absolutely
nothing you can do about the process as a whole.
People who think it shows strong character to do such and such
usually have been showing such character-establishing and otherdeflating tendencies since they first started to define themselves. It
might have been when you first broke your arm but mostly managed
to stifle the cry, but my guess for you it was when you realized, unlike
your enfranchised, dreamy, reality-denying peers, that life wasn't
546
going to give you nothin' unless you worked your ass off for every
square inch(!); a realization you probably had sometime around the
age of 5 or 6, if it didn't dawn on you while within the womb, with it
prompting your first newspaper route or whatnot.
In truth, to narrate your life so that you count amongst the virtued
and noble for your ostensibly adult ability to reckon with inevitably
flawed existence, is a wicked easy posture to adopt; it's in truth our
near human default, as few people are raised to believe that making
life significantly less flawed and far more, if not "unicorns, raucus fun
and pixie dust," then at least drastically more leisurely, pain-free and
fun, doesn't make you but an idle dreamer, a dumb child who won't
grow up. With more and more liberals now actually sounding more
conservative than conservatives from the 60s and 70s, we can expect
the few true progressives that remain to be summed up and dismissed
as children who won't leave behind their foolish ideals and do the
adult business of dealing with the hard truths of reality.
RE: One tries to remain accepting and even-tempered.
Probably the most insulting treatment you receive as you
get old is to be ignored, to be treated as if you no longer
matter.
You're attention is flagging, sir; best not get behind the wheel. Half
the people here are reminding you that baby-boomers have not been
ignored at any point in their life cycle. With them in their 60s, you
can already feel how the only thing anyone is going to know is how
life begins at 60, then 70, then 80, then after awakening from cryo.
Since we're in a Depression, the poor will eventually be rediscovered;
this will be the only way the youth will sneak in.
Re: Ahh, but why should the young care? They know they
will be young forever.
I personally think they far more know the aged will never listen than
that they'll remain forever young, something they haven't even really
known. Most of the young are looking at two or three jobs and 60
hour workweeks, and if you listen to them their recompense for this
true life-denying awfulness is that it has them feeling more adult,
547
clearly -- and without all the wastings and wiping-aways that later life
"provides" -- buying into the idea that denial and suffering somehow
GIVES you something, when all it truly does, despite the saintliness it
floats you, is deny. When a whole generation believes denial, wounds,
and withering gives you character -- which this lot increasingly does
-- the aged have enacted a sparse, neutered future as a big part of
their legacy. Personally, I'm ignoring the aged who despite every
attention, pretend themselves right to be aggrieved they're being so
ignored and humiliated, and stick to or at least remember the
boomers who showed the noble life is yours when you pheonix-like
rise way above where anyone else has gone before, not when you
accept the inevitability of blockages, hinderances, sags, and stopsigns.
PMH
Interesting how much you know about me, Patrick McEvoy
Halston. Why you must be psychic, little boy.
I've read your other letters, and have a pretty good idea both
of the level of your intelligence and empathy, and what to do
with this particular letter. (hontonoshijin)
hontonshijon
If it's to wipe your dripping bottom, wonton, I wouldn't depend on
one measily letter ...
Link: The hard truth about getting old (Salon)
---------
548

What if Hillary had ...
As liberals rail against the debt limit deal and Barack
Obamas choices leading up to what they see as an epic
capitulation, it seems fair to wonder if a different president
-- someone with, say, a reputation for toughness and savvy
and with a history of combating Republican obstructionists
-- could have produced a better outcome. Someone like, oh, I
don't know ... Hillary Clinton?
That, after all, was the premise of Clinton's Democratic
primary campaign in 2008 -- that Obama might be able to
inspire the masses, but that only she had the experience and
know-how to get results. And now here's Obama seemingly
validating it -- and hardly for the first time in his
presidency. Can we now safely say that Democrats made the
wrong choice three years ago?
The short answer is: No. Believe it or not, the best evidence is
that if Clinton were now the president -- or, for that matter,
if any other mainstream Democrat were -- the differences
would be very small. (Jonathan Bernstein, Would
President Hillary be a stronger leader than
President Obama?, Salon, 3 August 2011)
It's in her wish

If Obama could somehow have made America continue on in a spirit
of Krugman-style never-ending growth, it would make him
uncomfortable -- his style is to walk about a handsome, kept-in and
composed aristocrat, granting assurances and placations amongst
townspeople subdued into a hunch of abayance, a non-arousing,
defeated cloister of mottled greys and unassured, uninspiring greens.
Hillary would mostly dig it. Something in this is why Obama was
549
chosen over Hillary: they -- the people -- too had become unnerved by
what might be drawn if things shine too spritely sweet and gay, and
fled Hillary's buoyancy and often-cheerful resonance for more spent
"country."
Both WOULD have followed pretty much the same course. But that
wouldn't be the thing. Everything about Hillary would sit uneasily
with, would be gainly testing, mocking, its spirit, while Obama is in
entirety all smooth cooperation. (Remember Hillary's -- referring to
whole body airport scanners -- "I'd avoid them if I could," which read
as "don't go quietly into this good night!," and her meaning it.) About
all this kowtowing to the debt: there is something in her that would
keep us reminded that she could be prompted to REALLY avoid it if
she could, while, as Greenwald reminds and reminds, Obama would
spit venum at any voice that could forestall America becoming
growth-stalled and frozen for at least ten years. He -- Obama -- knows
Hillary is one such voice. But the plan I think was to keep her sort of
relevant, and thereby placated and subdued, until voices like hers
resonate only with an easily demolishable minority, until people like
her and Krugman are but absurd and entitled, fully dismissal-worthy
douches.
Link: Would President Hillary be a stronger leader than President
Obama? (Salon)
--------SATURDAY, AUGUST 6, 2011
Populists and trolls
With the details of the pending debt deal now emerging (and
for a very good explanation of the key terms, see this post by
former Biden economic adviser Jared Bernstein), a
consensus is solidifying that (1) this is a virtually full-scale
victory for the GOP and defeat for the President (who all
550
along insisted on a "balanced" approach that included tax

increases), but (2) the President, as usual, was too weak in
standing up to right-wing intransigence -- or simply had no
options given their willingness to allow default -- and was
thus forced into this deal against his will. This depiction of
Obama as occupying a largely powerless, toothless office
incapable of standing up to Congress -- or, at best, that the
bad outcome happened because he's just a weak negotiator
who "blundered" -- is the one that is invariably trotted out to
explain away most of the bad things he does.
It appears to be true that the President wanted tax revenues
to be part of this deal. But it is absolutely false that he did
not want these brutal budget cuts and was simply forced -either by his own strategic "blunders" or the "weakness" of
his office -- into accepting them. The evidence is
overwhelming that Obama has long wanted exactly what he
got: these severe domestic budget cuts and even ones well
beyond these, including Social Security and Medicare, which
he is likely to get with the Super-Committee created by this
bill (as Robert Reich described the bill: "No tax increases on
rich yet almost certain cuts in Med[icare] and Social
Security . . . . Ds can no longer campaign on R's desire to
Medicare and Soc Security, now that O has agreed it").
Last night, John Cole -- along with several others -promoted this weak-helpless-President narrative by asking
what Obama could possibly have done to secure a better
outcome. Early this morning, I answered him by email, but
as I see that this is the claim being pervasively used to
explain Obama's acceptance of this deal -- he was forced into
it by the Tea Party hostage-takers -- I'm reprinting that
email I wrote here. For those who believe this narrative,
please confront the evidence there; how anyone can claim in
the face of all that evidence that the President was "forced"
into making these cuts -- as opposed to having eagerly
551
sought them -- is mystifying indeed. And, as I set forth there,

there were ample steps he could have taken had he actually
wanted leverage against the GOP; the very idea that
negotiating steps so obvious to every progressive pundit
somehow eluded the President and his vast army of advisers
is absurd on its face.
[. . .]
In other words, he's willing -- eager -- to impose the "pain"
Cohn describes on those who can least afford to bear it so
that he can run for re-election as a compromise-brokering,
trans-partisan deficit cutter willing to "take considerable
heat from his own party." (Glenn Greenwald, The myth of
Obamas blunders and weakness, Salon, 1 August 2011)
rjcrane on what Obama wanted
It's impossible to know what Obama really wanted as part
of raising the debt ceiling.
Well, yes and no. It only appears to be impossible to figure
out if you assume that he had one single thing in mind all
along.
If you make that assumption, then it would certainly be
impossible to know what Obama really wanted.
But the assumption is false. In reality it is very easy to know
what Obama really wanted so long as we accept that his
desires as a politician are entirely oriented around process,
not outcome.
What Obama wants the entirety of what motivates him,
across the board, in terms of every aspect of his
administration's agenda is to achieve a vague kind of
glowy status as someone who takes on sacred cows and
entertains opposing viewpoints and sits at the center of it all
brokering the compromises that get things done and that are
the hallmark of serious people who get things done.
552
Beyond that Obama has no actual fixed position on

anything. His only guideline is: when you get 10 putative
experts in a room, what is the middle ground?
Of course, even the question of who is a legitimate expert is
subject to debate and compromise: Obama also has no fixed
position on that question, nor even a fixed set of standards to
apply.
Why should he? Great statesmen, as far as he's concerned,
are defined as being the ones who make great compromises.
So he's always looking out for another great compromise to
make.
So it turns out to not be that mysterious, does it? Like the
plot of Lost, the most important thing to grasp is that there
is no plan, there is no well-established arc, it's all ad hoc,
based on contingencies, and the belief that "it will all become
clear in the end" is pure wishful thinking on the part of
people who are bound to be disappointed.
This is one of the areas where I disagree somewhat with
Glenn Greenwald I don't think that Obama came into the
White House, or into the 2011 budget negotiations, with the
explicit intent of cutting lots of spending. He came into the
process with the explicit intent of listening to his "experts,"
and listening to the opposition, and coming up with a
compromise.
If his experts had told him that he needed to raise spending
and raise taxes, and it had been the Angry Progressive
Caucus instead of the Tea Party burning down the doors to
Congress, he would be signing spending bills right and left
right now, urging everyone to stay calm and follow his lead.
As the often right, always interesting Cornel West said
recently, Obama's problem is that he sees the highest virtue
as being a thermometer, when what the country needs is a
thermostat.
Anyway the reasons don't really matter in the end. This guy
553
has made himself into another Hoover. Let's show him the
door. (Amity)
**********
GG
Could you elaborate on this thinking? Once you decide to
consciously refrain from doing things that would help hi get
elected and thus possibly cause him to lose/the GOP to win -"he will not get any of my money or campaign support" -why doesn't that rationale extend to voting?
It's a very good question, Glenn, thanks for asking.
The truth is, I'm speaking rather emotionally this morning.
I'm thinking about all the hard-earned money I sent him last
time (that I can afford even less this time around, thanks in
no small part to his leadership) and the campaign work I
did, and I just don't feel like I can raise the spirit to go out
and affirmatively, actively support him in 2012 after all this.
But I know I will vote for him. All my Naderite/third-partier
friends assured me in 2000 that there was no difference
between Gore and Bush, and withholding support from
Gore, even if it resulted in his defeat, would "teach the Dems
a lesson" and force them to re-affirm their core principles.
How did that turn out? They were wrong on both counts.
The DNC went further right and nobody will ever convince
me Gore would have been the same or worse than Bush,
that's just ludicrous.
There it is, Glenn. I'm sorry it is not more logically satisfying
than that. I may very well end up holding my nose and
giving him support once I see the nightmare alternative. I
just never imagined Obama could possibly be this horrible.
The Right was right, he DID turn out to be a Manchurian
Candidate, just the other way around.
What choice do we have? What can I do? I ask sincerely, not
rhetorically. (Jestaplero)
**********
554
Jestaplero
What choice do we have? What can I do? I ask sincerely, not
rhetorically.
Don't have an answer yet, except to say that since we don't
even know who is running yet -- and the election isn't for
another 16 months, during which much can happen - I think
it's wildly premature to decide. (GlennGreenwald)
**********
@GlennGreenwald
Don't have an answer yet, except to say that since we don't
even know who is running yet -- and the election isn't for
another 16 months, during which much can happen - I think
it's wildly premature to decide.
Really? What makes you think it's "wildly premature"? Tell
us what you think is a real, honest voting strategy for 2012.
(ondelette)
**********
@Jestaplero
Is it? I will not countenance a Republican in the oval office
with my vote. Not until there are prosecutions first.
I watched every day of the Iran-Contra hearings (did the
equivalent of live-blogging on them for my community of
like minded concerned citizens at the time) went through the
Tower Commission report and all the other available data at
the time, and then watched the 2000s unfold with virtually
all of the key players reinstated to power and worse of the
same starting virtually from where they left off. I do believe
in their continuity, and do believe there will be a price for
putting the Republican party back in the Executive Office
that is worse than the price of protesting what's wrong with
the Democrats.
Unless there are choices for alternatives to the Republicans,
that doesn't really leave a choice of votes. Glenn has
criticized people for their "wildly premature" decisions, and
555
for what he sees as handing over the keys. But he has

articulated nothing that amounts to a viable strategy for
doing otherwise, given the above. Unless he really doesn't
believe the above. I would like to know who killed Amiram
Nir before I trust that it's okay to put any Republican back in
office for a third re-run of the "off the shelf clandestine
organization out of the reach of congressional oversight."
(ondelette)
**********
ondelette on wild prematurity
Really? What makes you think it's "wildly premature"? Tell
us what you think is a real, honest voting strategy for 2012.
I agree with ondelette. Sixteen months is not wildly
premature.
It's not even premature at all. It's kind of late, given that
major-party primary season starts in 4 months.
There are three options for unseating Obama
1) Defeat in the primary
Ingredients:
1 competitive Democratic candidate, finely parsed
2500 assorted delegates, washed and let dry for 1/2 year
2) Third party upset
Ingredients:
2 competitive 3rd party candidates, combined and whisked
50 million 3rd party voters, proportionally divided among
50 states
1/4 billion dollars (or more depending on what else is
being served)
or 3) Republican White House
Ingredients:
1 tolerable Republican candidate, warmed over(*)
20 million crossover Democrats, blue-state are best
So we're standing here staring into the fridge with only a
556
short time before dinner. What have we got to work with?

* When prepared in Massachusetts some years ago, a
version of this recipe using Mitt Romney proved surprisingly
delicious. (Amity)
**********
Okay, Amity
So if the third party route is taken, you need to do a two part
assault. You need the party machine and candidate. I
suggest Elizabeth Warren for the candidate. A lot of people
are pushing Bernie Sanders, and he's good, but Elizabeth
Warren is a genuine pedigree stamped outsider right now at
a time when pollsters are saying that voters are so mad with
everything in Washington that they genuinely don't believe
that whoever they vote for will change anything and
whoever they vote for therefore has to at least begin the
process of changing that during the campaign. She has the
credential that she was actually kicked out of Washington.
For machinery, you need to pick people who aren't tainted,
which will be a trick, but she can probably do that. She has
been working on ending corruption against consumers for
20 years, she knows how to smell it, and she just put
together one large organization.
The biggest thing that's different with a third party
progressive run against the establishment, if it's going to be
an anti-corruption run, is that it needs to run against the
media. For real. To do that, it needs to create at least its own
quasi-media to run with. So it will have to tap resources that
most campaigns don't tap, suggest getting people from the
cinema industry that are progressive on board early, like
Ben Affleck, George Clooney, Don Cheadle, if they'll do it,
and teaming up with anyone in Silicon Valley from social
media who will give a firm commitment to anti-corruption
557
(be ready to fire if they won't stick to it), and the blogging
community, and the Digital Cinema community, and NAB.
Craft the new media necessary to force the broadcasters or
go around them and go get the funding that those crafting
the plan says it needs. In other words, don't assume you will
get coverage, create the coverage.
If all that can happen, then there can probably be a viable
third party candidate. What's holding it back will be that
last: the media. They are the gatekeepers, and the PTB, those
who benefit by the corruption, are going to try to keep them
in charge of the gates.
I will gladly switch votes to a third party candidate if one
can win. If no one challenges the seat of power over
elections, which aside from Diebold is the press, not the
parties, then there won't be one.
And no, I'm not volunteering.
**********
ondelette on options
So if the third party route is taken, you need to do a two part
assault. You need the party machine and candidate. I
suggest Elizabeth Warren...
Okay so we have Elizabeth Warren.
Pros: articulate, photogenic, principled, has a message
Cons: dry, wonky, not a bimbo, works for Obama
Not a bad start so, one nomination.
Yes, she would need a first-rate message machine. Also she
would need a first-rate fundraiser I assume she's not
herself a billionaire.
As a press strategy, one that has worked in the past for 3rd
party candidacies is to aggressively publish concrete
platform positions on "hot button" issues that are current in
"the conversation."
That requires being able to produce position memos quickly,
558
and it requires having the gonads to put your position out

there in detail and at least seem sincere.
The press seems to like that because it gives them a readymade quote which usually contrasts nicely with standard
political mush-mouthedness.
And if that doesn't work you have Youtube, which is a gift
not available to outsider candidacies in years past.
In terms of fundraising, how many people would need to
donate $1 each to cover a decent budget for the February
2012 primaries? You need to make a strong showing in a
head to head contest with the big two, so this isn't something
that you can shoestring. (Amity)
Populists and trolls

I don't think Obama has much to concerned about with those who
want progressive reform but who still want it furthered through the
current political system, because I think most of these are
considerably moved by a psychological need for decorum -something Obama will always offer, and seems almost to represent -and which "other alternatives" will never be able to confidently show
themselves characterized by or even in possession of. I think, that is,
that there are those highly critical of the president, who show him up
as false and even pine hard for third party alternatives, yet will
inevitably find themselves mostly in some kind of conversation with
him rather than, primarily I think at some point just to avoid,
immersing themselves with some other kind of company, within some
other sort of discourse, because Washington manners and decorum
keeps them feeling secure and at a safe distance from let-loose
emotional storms they have a tough time not projecting as raging
everywhere else in America.
I am not saying that a leftist populist movement would in fact mostly
be populated by crazies -- my guess is, rather, that it will be
559
constituted possibly mostly by the most psychically/emotionally

healthy, which does NOT, by the way, include the forementioned likes
of George Clooney and Ben Affleck, and rather more the likes of Rob
Reimer and Matt Damon -- but that there are many progressives of
the kind with some considerable trepidation towards third parties,
even at this point of obvious complete betrayal/plain reveal, who are
not healthy, self-integrated enough to imagine joining them as
anything than surrendering to emotional states they have spent much
of their lives trying to keep kept in and as much to the manageable
side as possible. They'll see the best of progressives, in a sense, as letloose subterranean farts and haragues, as "trolls," even despite
themselves, despite their intact and nagging larger awareness of this
falsity, and will in some loose sense find themselves sticking with
Obama even if in means, as it surely would, convincing themselves
they're surely doing the very opposite in their forever showing him up
as a villain or phony. Washington has nothing to fear from these folk,
and will likely benefit from them, because as some true friends split
off, readily join and see as welcoming what they fret, what they find
ill-formed, disgusting, and no-doubt contagious, they'll at some level
be aware of how powerful their need for establishment and
apartness is, how shamefully debasing/damning/minisculing this
need is, and will end up wacking the good for their being responsible
for this uncomfortable self-reveal and for in such a blanched, stark
way showing their clearly being far better than them -- a "height" no
one else was allowed to surpass, because their sense of being the most
civilized, Olympus-like cleanly afloat and apart from the messy world
gave them an essential confidence to at-their-own-pace take on some
of the demons within themselves they've kept at bay but still possess
enough of an impulse to ambition a way to productively engage so to
live in a yet more at-ease, satisfying, and comfortable sort of way.
I think this will be phase one, where a leftist populist movement does
arise, comes to realize just how few are truly with it/them (like "the
douche" Paul Krugman, they'll represent [at least] abundance, galling
560
insistence on indulgence, when everyone agrees its all about some

kind of hemming-in/osterity now), and then retreats into forms that
eventually, but for a huge bulk of time anonymously, crystalize into
new and greater kinds of civilization. When the second phases arrives,
the sort of progessives I have been talking about will want no part of
them either; but here, for very good reason, as they will be the ones
Chris Hedges in my judgement conjures with his disgust of "boutique
liberals," ones who are denied all the good things decorum-concerned
progressive Salonistas embody: an acceptance of "your" feminine self,
being pained when the manners and sensitivities necessary for
productive, enjoyable discourse have become illegitimate for their
somehow being simply weapons of the already franchised, for their
revealing your posturing, feminine, primarily self-concerned douche
"stank." This new movement will in fact be composed of trolls, bullies
-- Masculine, hard, intolerant, joy-fearing "old left" bullies/machines
who'll insist you evidence your battle scars, your poverty-responsible
work stink, your hurried impatience with rational discourse/reasoned
assembly -- for yet more talking(!!!) -- rather than your concern to
politely engage and lather properly for the debate to count yourself a
member of their tribe.
On the plus side, if you're older and relatively affluent, even if you
find yourself trapped/pinned in spot, trapped into repetition for
having no welcoming other place to go, no one really wants to have
much of a go with you: dont fret too much; however longterm, you'll
be assured a comfortable-enough "cell." They know you still have
fight, and the concern will be to concentrate on those who've near
been bred to be filled with yet more suffering.
Link: The myth of Obamas blunders and weaknesses (Salon)
----------
561

Gay marriage and enlightenment
Psychologist Christopher Ryan is out to defeat an archetypal
figure in the mythology of monogamy. No, not prince
charming; he's after the widespread belief in a prehistoric
hunter who would slay an antelope on the plains and
heroically haul it back to his nuclear family.
You might wonder what this has to do with monogamy.

Well, Ryan argues that in actuality the meat would have
been shared with the entire tribe, because pre-agricultural
societies shared everything -- including sex. This is a key
point he and co-author/wife Cacilda Jeth make in "Sex at
Dawn," which was released last year in hardcover and this
month in paperback. Our hunting and gathering ancestors
were nonmonogamous, they argue -- the implication being
that, biologically speaking, sexual exclusivity is unnatural.
The book challenges much of the previously accepted

wisdom about the sex lives of our ancestors, although the
authors admit they haven't exactly proved their case.
Regardless, they have gained praise and admiration from
sexual radicals like sex columnist Dan Savage. (Tracy
Clark-Flory, Is monogomy like vegetarianism?,
Salon, 30 July 2011)
What's with these articles, anyway?
I wasn't aware that there was either a massive polygamous
movement or a massive backlash against a polygamous
movement, one or the other of which would be necessary to
explain Salon's recent fascination with the subject. It's like
562
seeing a week of arguments about debating the benefits of

locomotion by somersault, or making homemade cheese, or
something else unusual -- one article is mildly interesting,
two might be justified in the interests of balance, but unless
someone really missed a chance to clinch their argument,
three or more articles suggests an editor with a fixation,
rather than a strong interest among the public. (The Vicar)
@Vicar: what's with these articles? LOL!
Well, it's this, Vicar. Salon (and other lefty publications) are
on a major, BIG push to destroy traditional marriage. Gay
marriage is the biggest, but not the only, weapon in their
arsenal.
They intend to first legalize gay marriages, which effectively

redefines marriage COMPLETELY into a "super duper best
friends with benefits" relationship. As most gays do not
practice sexual fidelity (not all, of course, but most), that
pretty much takes a big chunk of the CONCEPT of sexual
fidelity being at least a GOAL of marriage and drop kicks it.
Then promptly after redefining marriage, they legalize
polygamy (see: Canada, The Netherlands) and then incest
marriage (see: Germany, Switzerland). I'm sure there is
some barking about legalizing bestiality marriage
somewhere too. And NAMBLA must be gloating and rubbing
their hands together with glee. Consent laws? they just keep
LOVING PEOPLE apart, like Mary Kay Le Tourneau and
her 8th grade boyfriend.
The reason for the timing of this series is A. the recent
blackmailing and coercion of New York State legislators to
"legalize" gay marriage against the will of the voters in that
563
state and B. the big interview with sex columnist Dan

Savage in the New York Times, which promoted his idea of
being "monogamish" -- committed to one partner, raising
children with that partner but in no way sexually faithful to
that partner.
It's the ultimate in New Age urban-hipster memes -- change
marriage, because a small group of lefty liberals don't like
marriage the way it is. Boo hoo hoo.
And yes, Tracy has a fixation. She has two overwhelming
emotional issues, right now. One is her poor mother is very
ill; a terrible thing for which I have great sympathy (but one
which brings up all kinds of memories of your childhood,
your upbringing, your parents when young, your parents
marriage).
The other is she is growing up -- about 26 or 27 I think -- and

wants to get married (having your mom be so ill is a
powerful driving emotion to have your own child), and there
is no suitable guy around. Or there IS a suitable guy, but he's
an S.F. urban hipster, and he likes Tracy well enough, but
not enough to promise her sexual fidelity. Should she accept
him on his own terms? Maybe if there is some meme or
paradigm, some book or trend! one that tells you that
monogamish marriages work, or that polyamory is right, or
that monogamy is silly and stupid anyways, and bonobos
aren't monogamous -- right? then you can justify what you
want to do anyways.
SO that's why we've had this (pretty useless) series.

(_bigguns)
564
@Laurel...
Well, it's this, Vicar. Salon (and other lefty publications) are
on a major, BIG push to destroy traditional marriage. Gay
marriage is the biggest, but not the only, weapon in their
arsenal.
It has nothing to do with "destroying traditional marriage",

whatever that means. Pushing for gay marriage has more to
do with fairness. It's unfair that gay people don't have the
same right to be married just as straight people do. And
WHO CARES that the some laws may need to be changed,
the marriage law has already been changed dozens of times
in the last 100 years. This is just another one of the changes.
Get used to it. Less and less people are having any problem
with gay marriage these days.
But as long as you can keep your fantasy that this has
anything to do with "destroying" something (how very
constructive of you), then you can feel noble and good about
your intentions, as if you're the "protector" of something
sacred, and that "they" are your sworn "enemies" and "they"
need to be "defeated", as if this has anything to do with
triumph and defeat, or winning and losing.
Then promptly after redefining marriage, they legalize

polygamy (see: Canada, The Netherlands) and then incest
marriage (see: Germany, Switzerland). I'm sure there is
some barking about legalizing bestiality marriage
somewhere too.
565
Except that animals can't give consent. Face palm. Just

because you don't agree with it, doesn't mean that it's
wrong. If you do, then you should at least state
LEGITIMATE reasons why. (Astronomy)
@Astronomy
Of course it does. Redefining marriage is a big step towards
destroying it. (Undoubtedly legal polygamy, incest marriage
and bestiality will finish up the job.)
Pushing for gay marriage has everything to do with the

"lefty liberal paradigm" plus a HUGE grab for power, in the
face of increasing right wing power (Tea Party, etc.).
Instead of fighting for single payer health care, or a public
option, or protesting to end the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the left has chosen instead to throw its entire
weight, its control of media outlets and its money (much of
it, interestingly, from WALL STREET -- guess the Kochs are
just fine when they back your paradigm!) into legalizing gay
marriage.
Marriage laws vary wildly from culture to culture, but they

are ALWAYS about male & female. Actually, for all the
mystique gays assume about marriage, the big "secret", the
whole underlying structure is "male & female". That's it. The
whole enchilada. Without that, it's nothing but "super duper
friendship with benefits" Or even without benefits. I mean,
who cares if two gay people don't have sex? They can't
procreate anyways.
I think it is a huge mistake on your part (and that of Salon in
566
general) to ASSUME that people "don't have a problem with

gay marriage". I'd say they have a HUGE problem with it
and the way it continues to be forced on states WITHOUT A
VOTE OF THE PEOPLE by left social engineering courts
and/or legislatures rife with corruption, blackmail and Wall
Street money.
If you TRULY BELIEVE ONE WORD YOU HAVE WRITTEN

HERE, then you'd be happy -- overjoyed -- to allow
Americans to vote on this, in their own states, and PROVE
that they "don't care if gay people get married".
I also never called anyone "my sworn enemy" and that's
pure nonsense. I speak out against corruption of the
legislatures of this country, against bribery and blackmail,
against Wall Street money corrupting the legislative process
and against "outing" people against their will. I speak out
for the voters who are betrayed by the legislators they
elected to carry out THEIR WILL, which is what an elected
official is sworn to do -- not to re-engineer society in the
image of lefty ideology.
And as far as consent: since you are such a brainiac about

the history of marriage, you'd know that before the mid-19th
century, CONSENT wasn't even commonplace. Many if not
most marriages were ARRANGED, sometimes between
CHILDREN. (But they were still legally valid, because they
consisted of ONE MAN and ONE WOMAN.) Even today,
arranged marriages are NORM between the Orthodox Jews,
in Amish society, in Muslim and Indian/Hindu nations.
So the idea that consent is an absolute is pure nonsense. And
567
frankly, I have met nutty pet lovers who would LOVE to

marry their dog or cat. (Do ya think anyone might have
married Leona Helmsley's dog, the one that inherited $12
million????)
It's not a matter of what "I agree with". It's a matter of what
Americans want in America, which means "not what lefty
judges and ideologues and bribed corrupt legislatures" want
to do to us and our social customs, without a vote.
So here is my legitimate reason: I believe that marriage is a

relationship between ONE MAN and ONE WOMAN, and
that any other relationship, no matter how sincere or loving,
is SOMETHING ELSE. And I don't want to be downgraded
in my marriage to a "Partner A or B". And I -- and many
millions of other people in 45 states -- will fight this battle for
as long as it takes, to get a Constitutional Amendment
defining marriage as between one man and one woman.
And yes, sad it has to come to that, but it is only way to
render all these bogus "marriages" illegal, and permanently,
so we don't have to fight this nonsense for another decade.
(_bigguns)
@Astronomy
What do you exactly suppose that is supposed to be "destroyed"?
You can still get married and remain married, and nothing will be
changed on your part. You will still be married just as you were
before.
Laurel is arguing that they can't get married anymore, because
"marriage," all marriages, has/have been redefined by permitting
gays to marry, as what they do is more along the lines of best friends
568
with benefits. According to her, one of the points of marrying is to

submit yourself to the power of a longstanding tradition/higher ideal
that will help you remain fidelitous, true to your one partner; this, to
her, no longer exists, and we can expect marriage now to be less
effective in keeping married couples loyal to one another.
It's not an assumption. According to a recent Gallup poll, for the
first time more than 50% of the Americans favor gay marriage. Kids
these days grow up looking up to people like Lady Gaga, who is
bisexual. More and more people are having less problem with
homosexuality ITSELF, much less gay marriage. The times they are
a-changing. I would give it another decade or so until
homosexuality is completely accepted by society.
People saying they're for gay marriage may be them saying they're for
easy-reach enlightenment, one more stay from focussing on un-dealtwith personal issues. That is, they may be for gay marriage in the way
they are for a greener America and a black, well-spoken President:
mostly because it demonstrates more that they've all got it on than
that they're pretty close to falling apart. Once the Tea Partiers are
dealt with, confirmed by all as public waste, and more regressive
postures can be undertaken by the holy majority without making
them seem akin to them -- that is, base, neanderthalic, defined by the
overwhelming inner psychoses that have determined their mongoloid
outward forms, and rather in an old school but encouraged way,
which I think Laurel actually mostly represents -- I think all this
current celebration will probably work against homosexuals. It will
likely help cement them as those who danced as the bulwark of
civilized society -- the moral values (ostensibly) our grandparents
bound themselves to and thereby made sure to keep intact -- breaks
apart. We'll see.
I am for gay marriage, btw, and a true friend of those who hope
marriage gets redefined in allowing gays to marry. Only this bit about
the likes of Laurel being cast permanently in shadow can be sustained
in my judgment only for a short while. Obama will ultimately prove
no real friend to the gay community.
569
Link: Is monogamy like vegetarianism? (Salon)

----------

You don't need workaholics to redeem the loafer
I used to beat myself up for not working out enough, or
having one beer (or five) too many. Simpler times, those
were. Job stress? Not really. Ten extra pounds? Whatevs.
Not accomplishing things -- that's what's killing me lately.
Forget gorging on a cheeseburger and fries followed by a
slice of cheesecake. These days my greatest indulgence is
doing nothing.
Things I currently need to do but can't quite make myself

do include: adjusting the contributions to my 401K,
networking, finding a new health insurance plan, getting
new tires on my car, catching up on unread New Yorkers,
writing overdue thank you notes, washing my bed skirt,
flipping the mattress.
It's not that I don't enjoy idle time. I love it. But I can't
escape the feeling that I should be improving my life right
now, getting organized, simplifying my routines, creating
platforms for future income, educating myself, getting
smarter, getting better.
[. . .]
570
The sad irony is that I don't even have a full-time job. Oh

sure, I work for a living, but as a freelance public
relations consultant for Internet companies, I sometimes
log as few as 10 hours a week. I should have plenty of time
to get tasks done. But I lose so many hours to
lollygagging. A longer-than-anticipated hike on a sunny
afternoon. A morning drinking coffee and reading blogs.
An hour outside reading a magazine.
My habits stand in stark contrast to those of my father. At

65, he can't bear to be still for more than five minutes.
This has become especially clear lately, as he recovers
from knee replacement surgery. For the first two weeks,
he barely left his bed. After that, he could only move with
the help of heavy painkillers. I've never seen a man more
miserable in my life.
You'd think a major surgery like that -- where they

actually shaved off the bottom of his femur and the top of
his tibia and drilled holes in them to insert titanium
screws -- would focus a person on what matters: getting
better. But his to-do list is as long as ever. It fills the front
and back of three index cards, getting longer every day.
My father has been a runner and an athlete all his life.
He's raised nine children, six of them boys, and worked up
to three jobs at a time for the last 40 years. But it seems
there is one thing he cannot do: relax so that he can heal.
My youngest sister, Caity, discovered this recently when
she took a leave from work to provide emergency care.
After two weeks, my father had made no progress in his
recovery, and on the surface, it didn't make sense. He only
571
had to do five sets of 15-minute exercise intervals per day.

What was going on?
From the minute she arrived, my dad bombarded Caity

with directives. Run the sweeper. Restack those
magazines. Wash the sheets. Wipe down the granite
countertop with the special granite countertop cleaner
and dammit don't use regular Windex. Dust in the dining
room. Sort the mail. If Caity wasn't up by 8 a.m., she'd
hear him banging his walker around at the bottom of the
stairs. There was work to do, dishes to wash, breakfast to
make, trash to be taken out. Having Caity around to do
these chores -- my mother couldn't be bothered, but I'll get
to that in a minute -- was what ultimately put his mind at
ease enough to concentrate on his therapy. Before he
could settle down and do nothing -- he needed to know
that something was getting done.
The story was a revelation to me. I grew up thinking I

was lazy. I berated myself for not having accomplished
more, for not being in better shape, not being as
financially disciplined as I could be. My dad was the
model against which I judged myself. He created a
formidable family, climbed to the upper rungs of the
corporate ladder. I'd admired and resented him for his
ruthless efficiency and ambition. But it struck me that his
success might not be due to discipline so much as a kind of
helpless workaholism. In other words: He's not trying to
be like this; he just is. If my father isn't constantly
productive, he starts to go a little nuts.
Is that the kind of personality required to be "successful"?
572
I used to be one of them, sort of. By the time I was 31, I

was a vice president of public relations at one of the
world's largest banks. I could scarcely believe it myself.
Eleven years of climbing the ranks, being on call at all
hours of the day. Fifty-plus-hour work weeks. Countless
exercises in crisis management, anything to keep a client
happy.
But in the summer of 2009, almost 11 years to the day
after I started working, I crashed.
[. . .]
But I took a break. And I discovered that left to my own

devices, I could pass the time doing nothing more taxing
than reading, going for long walks or hikes, thrift store
shopping, sleeping and embarking on pet projects like
painting my living room or trying my hand at writing a
screenplay. I had some compulsion to get things done, but
nothing like my dad's. In fact, what I began to realize was
that I was far more like my mom than I'd ever realized.
My mom is a loafer. Now that she's settled into

retirement, I feel like I'm finally seeing her true essence.
She reads at least five books a week. She plays games like
Scrabble and slot machines on her iPad. She stays up late
watching '80s movies on cable and TV shows like "The
Closer" and "Justified" and then sleeps till 10. She
occasionally goes to lunch with a friend or attends a
meeting of her book club, but otherwise she's happy
staying home and waiting for one of my siblings to come
visit with the grandkids. Any chores she's responsible for
573
get tackled at the absolute last minute, when they can't go

another second undone. This is not a person who would be
frustrated while recovering from surgery. She'd be excited
at, say, the chance to reread all the Sue Grafton alphabet
mysteries back to back. I'm not saying she's lazy -- having
raised nine children, she was far from it -- just that now
that she can, she prefers to chill out.
I sometimes wonder how her people survived evolution. I

don't wonder this about my father. He comes from tough,
wiry and determined folk. They are survivors. Hunters
and gatherers. But my mother's lot is sedentary. She and
her siblings enjoy sitting around my grandmother's living
room in Kentucky, eating potato chips and telling stories,
happy to be near each other and jawing away a few
hours. These are round people. People who know their
baked goods.
[. . .]
I don't know that I'll ever stop feeling bad for not being a
Type A personality. Or worrying that I'm not
accomplishing enough. After all, I do want to own a home
some day, and to retire when I'm old, and not to stress
about how I'll afford kids. But maybe for now, I should
enjoy my idle time. Sit around talking to my aunts and
uncles about the absurdity of it all. It may not get me
anywhere. But maybe for right now, at this second -- here
is where I'm meant to be. (Sara Campbell, Tales of a
reluctant loafer, Salon, 30 July 2011)
574
Well, there are several issues here

For starters, Sara Campbell is apparently home on
MEDICAL leave (her doctor enabled her to do this,
possibly unethically) for "stress" or something similar. So
she's using her long-term DISABILITY insurance -- which
most folks (me) don't even have -- for a LONG, long
vacation from reality. Very few people can do this, stress
or not.
If she had small children to support, or a spouse in school

(all realistic possibilities at 32), she couldn't "take off" like
this, or work 10 hours a week. She'd be STUCK, like most
adults humans are STUCK -- having to support herself
and her family.
So this is a privilege and a vacation, and I guess she feels
"she deserves it" after 11 years, even though most of us
don't get this even after THIRTY years in the workforce.
As Babylonian correctly says "blah blah blah". Or boo hoo
hoo.
If Sarah wasn't drawing down some serious disability
pay plus her part-time hours, she'd be in sh*t city, because
Los Angeles is one of the nation's most expensive cities. If
you don't work, sweetheart, how does the rent get paid?
How do you keep the lights on? What do you for
GROCERIES? (Forage? where in LA? on the freeway?)
This is a child's fantasy of how you want to live -- no
responsibilities, no spouse, no elderly parents to care for
(her sister Caity has that duty), no children, no house
(with a yard to cut, and repairs to make).
575
And she strangely conflates this with her mom's

RETIREMENT -- which her mom EARNED by working
for nearly FIFTY years. Yes, you earn the right to sit
around reading mysteries and sleeping late when you
spend decades raising NINE kids and all that entails (it's 4
times the national average number of offspring, so a
really heroic effort). Just thinking about all the laundry
your mom had to wash, Sarah, and all the meals she
cooked (tens of thousands) over 30+ years you kids were
small makes me tired.
But you, sweetie, have done ZIP to earn her retirement.

Not to mention, retirement is a pretty sure sign you are
finished with living, and lining up to go to the Big
Retirement Home in the Sky. I shudder to think what kind
of gormless young'un you are that you WANT that kind of
passive lifestyle, all sleeping and reading books, with most
of your life in the PAST. That's no way for a young
woman to be looking at life.
I'd almost say "maybe at heart, you are a bum". After all,
some people ARE -- we all know one or two. They just
have zero ambition and don't care if they have to sleep in
their car, because the very idea of "doing thing" is
repellent to them. So long as they don't mooch off relatives
or Uncle Sam, that's their right.
But it does not compute, because you have had serious
jobs in the past, great professional success and your
"loafing" has gone on a few months whereas your hypercareerism seemed to last at least since high school and
into your first several (very high ranking) jobs.
576
So I imagine your therapist ALSO TOLD YOU that you are

depressed. However, she did no favor for you by giving
you a fake permission slip to go on disability. People tend
to get better faster from depression when they have
meaningful work (and meaningful relationships) -- you
won't have either if you spend all day watching soap
operas and sleeping till noon.
Also, in our modern era, people date and socialize around

work (assuming you are old enough to be out of school),
and having no real day job means you aren't meeting a lot
of folks and when you DO meet someone, you get to say "I
slack all day, and work a few hours here and there",
which isn't going to impress a really decent guy that you'd
make a very reliable life partner. (Will you get bored
raising kids with him, then decide to run off and "find"
yourself"?)
So, in short, you might want to get your act together. Go

back to work. Find something you really like to do, which
apparently IS NOT PUBLIC RELATIONS.
I recommend you look into getting a teaching certificate.
Public school teaching is a very secure job (you can't be
fired for ANY reason) and the days are only 6 hours long,
and you get all summer off, plus two weeks at Xmas and
another week at Easter. Sweet! It sounds like it would suit
you very well.
I also recommend you look into moving somewhere
577
OTHER THAN LOS ANGELES. The very high cost of

living in LA means you are pressured, very hard, to make
a lot of money simply to pay rent. Taxes are very high,
too. And the culture of So Cal is such that people feel
pressured to have fancy cars and clothing. All this will
tend to make you unhappy with a real middle class job or
moderate wages. Unfortunately, in THE REAL WORLD
the trade off is between very high wages (your job at the
top of the heap, at the world's biggest whatever) and free
time. The jobs that offer reasonable hours rarely pay in
the high six figures.
Scale your ambitions to your nature, and move out of the

fast lane. And take your Prozac. And go back to work.
You'll be fine, in a few months. (_bigguns)
Not ease and play

Where does creativity come from? Foremost from those who work,
work, work, or those who dally around a little bit -- maybe more than
a little bit? If the latter, it's not hard then to find a possible source of
evolutionary fitness that accompanies those who come to find
something unfit in those who never seem to be comfortable slowing
down sufficiently to truly take in the smell of the roses.
Also, with people like _bigguns/laurel, can you imagine them EVER
believing life should be about ongoing comfort and play? Even if
benevolent aliens arrived on the planet and gave us every indulgence,
without limit, guaranteeing it without recompense and for eternity,
_bigguns and her like would still see day-to-day relaxation and ease
as something that had to be EARNED, not as something which leads
to greater things, not as something surely you're shown up as crazy
for, with impetus removed, not just immediately sitting back and
578
enjoying; and would find some excuse to explain why everyone still
needs to delimit themselves, their day, and most of their lives with
driven effort, duty, purpose, and labor. Without such, and against all
evidence, people like her will insist the world will fall apart, and in
this context mostly show the real concern all along was that without it
they themselves would.
Mothers have kids because kids focus themselves entirely upon them
-- they make the MOTHER feel loved and central, something
someone who has nine children clearly hadn't known enough of
elsewhere previously. This is primary; the rest, all their mountains of
efforts selflessly, witheringly taking care of children without break for
spans of years and years make them feel as if they've made life
sufficiently about suffering that they shouldn't be punished for the
indulgences they've permitted themselves before they've parked
themselves in the feedlot that disposes one out of the world. This
backbreaking work is PRIMARILY selfish too, that is. Please don't
nobody back down too readily to the ever-looming, chastising,
overworked Mother.
That we haven't been loved enough to believe that life SHOULD be
about ease and comfort and creativity, continues to be our key
problem as a species. Maybe evolution's too hard at work to notice its
essential stalling.
Link: Tales of a reluctant loafer (Salon)
----------

Afloat from reality
579
After I had been sober again, from alcohol, for a year, I

found a new way to unplug. For a month and a half, I only
visited the planet Earth for brief moments; the rest of the
time was spent in a haze I'd achieved from a combination of
prescription and over-the-counter medicine.
The final time I indulged in my magical concoction, I almost
checked out for good. I awoke in the psychiatric emergency
room. My friend and my sister were with me, their faces
gentle but serious. The toxicology report showed a lethal
combo of chemicals. I hardly knew what was in the innocent
pills I had been taking; I just knew it was making me numb,
good. My doctor asked later, during our post-emergency
visit, why I wanted to kill myself. I insisted I didn't. I'm all
nerves, I told her, I just wanted a little break. That little
break almost killed you, she said.
That's when I realized it wasn't the booze or the pills that I
needed to quit. I had to quit checking out; I had to quit
giving myself over to recklessness. Ultimately, I prefer to
live. But life is complicated. Life means waking up every
morning with the tight hand of anxiety opening and closing
on my esophagus. For a while, I took Prozac to cope with
that problem, and although it didn't give me the abandon
that I was seeking, it left me chemically content and
disconnected. My fretful thoughts floated in a balloon above
me as I went around and marveled at the fact that I was so
strong I never cried, or got too mad, or orgasmed, for that
matter.
Life after quitting abandon wasn't easy. I decided to quit
everything chemical, including Prozac, to stop numbing
myself. I'm not condemning Prozac. It works for some
people, and the drug helped keep the angst in check, but I
580
think I need to be a little raw to stay alive. In a twisted way,

I now live with the constant urge to lose myself and abandon
everything, and that feeling makes me keep the recklessness
under control. It makes me put on a bike helmet when I leave
my house in the morning, put the headphones away, ride on
the correct side of the street, pay attention to signs and cars
around me. Pay attention, period. (Jowita Bydlowska,
How I stopped numbing out, 29 July 2011)
"... put the headphones away..."
Great idea! At age 43, the CD player in my car broke; I
never got it fixed, and now, three years later, I'll listen to a
Youtube song when the urge strikes, but I no longer
surround my life with racket.
No MP3 player, no radio. No TV. My soundtrack is the music
that life provides. I would seriously recommend this to all
who have frazzled nerves; it helps one to gather one's
thoughts and to put all in perspective. (kaonashi)
@kaonashi on music
"At age 43, the CD player in my car broke; I never got it
fixed, and now, three years later, I'll listen to a Youtube song
when the urge strikes, but I no longer surround my life with
racket."
All this paragraph shows is that you're old, not that you're
enlightened about music. If you think of all music as "racket"
then it sounds like you never had taste in music to begin
with. Music represents multiple modes of thought: Some
music is repetitive or mind-numbing, but other types of
music can focus thought or even enhance it. There are times
when I've been in a glum mood and the only remedy turned
out to be music -- not caffeine, not exercise, not yoga, not
581
drugs. Music was the whip that cracked me out of my stupor

and got me on my feet, being productive and remembering
why I wanted to move forward. Incidentally, what is "a
YouTube song"? If you're listening to music on YouTube then
your options are severely limited. Ever listen to a whole
symphony on YouTube? A great jazz live performance in its
entirety? No? Yeah, well, again, this explains why you
dismiss all music as "racket" and apparently never had any
taste to begin with.
"No MP3 player, no radio. No TV. My soundtrack is the
music that life provides."
Why on earth would you lump music in with television?
What television presents is a text. Music is not text unless it
is lyrics-based. The best music is not lyrics-based or even
programmatic -- or it does have lyrics but they can be
ignored, or they work at a subconscious level as well as a
direct level. Bottom line: If you're lumping TV and music
together, you fundamentally misunderstand music. As for
your statement about "life" being your "soundtrack," that's
nice as a cloying sentiment, but horribly trite otherwise. Yes,
the sounds of life itself are pleasurable and can function as
music; that doesn't mean they obliterate the joys of music
itself. Birds chirping, the hum of the road on a trip, the
chatter and giggles of happy children, the sounds of a busy
restaurant, the crickets in a pastoral landscape....yes, these
are all terrific. But so is Sibelius. It's not an either/or
proposition.
"I would seriously recommend this to all who have frazzled
nerves; it helps one to gather one's thoughts and to put all in
perspective."
582
Maybe you should make a list of all the crappy, white-trash

music you listened to and then we'll avoid it. Since you didn't
have any taste anyway, your recommendation is only
meaningful to the extent that we can all agree that having
bad taste does not enhance living. (rattigan glumphobo)
@rattigan glumphobo
The sad thing is that I think we're enabling a culture in which sane,
critical people like yourself just don't get it. The only way in which
you should be able to feel you can get away with such bland thoughts
-- hers, not your own -- is if critical analysis, somehow for just being
critical analysis, has confidently in the broad context become alien
and unwelcome. We're being floated a lot of the kind of comments of
the sort you're rightly critiquing here, and yet it's like your sharpest
strike mostly works to better show up the kind of environment we
now find ourselves within: these voices proceed, unchanged, and in
greater aggression, as if they hadn't encountered any obstacle at all. I
think we're being made to understand that for some basic but
essential surrender some people are going to be able to say anything
they want, the more absurdly childish and afloat from reality the
better, and more than get away with it: the extent of this prize better
demonstrates the fact that a new kind of judge has arrived on scene,
with considerably different expectations than we've been used to.
I think you're the person I once recommended write some stuff for
Open Salon. I did so because I thought OS was on the ascent (as it has
proved to be), would float more and more of its "finest" to the front
page of Salon, and because you, owing to your interesting, challenging
thoughts and fine writing, would find yourself there, for your and our
benefit. I see now that until you more come to cooperate in seeing the
banal as brave and even miraculous -- which is actually possible for
some critical people: witness some of the teetertottering we
sometimes now see from Matt Seitz -- Salon isn't going to want much
from you. Grounded critique isn't going to elevate you one bit.
583
I gather you heard from Andrew that Salon is about to go troll

hunting. I'm not sure myself if with this effort it's just going to be the
likes of the Duchess who can expect to have their beastial flanks
spanked.
My mistake
I realize now you were referencing one of the poster's comments, not
the article. Sorry for the sloppyness -- I had read the article earlier, as
well as all the comments, and had readily blended kaonashi into
Jowita.
Link: How I stopped numbing out (Salon)
---------

Wondering about the pride parade
Yet despite the often crushing realities of the world, people
still want to believe. Isn't that why, amazingly, people are
still watching "The Bachelor"? Isn't that why we New
Yorkers were so jubilant this week, when gay and lesbian
couples were able for the first time to exchange vows? Isn't
that why campaigns selling "true love" get made? Because as
much as everybody loves a happy ending, there's something
almost unfairly seductive about the notion of a happy
beginning -- and the expensive fantasy that a whole lovely
lifetime could be lurking within one tiny blue box. (Mary
Elizabeth Williams, Shes the one: the Shes the
one director would like to sell you a ring, Salon,
29 July 2011)
584
@_bigguns
There are no good arguments against gay marriage. They
are all bullshit.
You can't argue that you're right because "marriage is
between a man and a woman". There is no "marriage".
There's no Magic Space Library on Jupiter where a Super
Dictionary is kept in which words are universally defined
throughout space and time. "Marriage" used to involve (and
still does, in some parts of the world) a woman being handed
over like property to a man who can treat her like garbage if
he wants. Women in "traditional marriages" couldn't work,
vote, inherit property, get divorced or even testify in court
against him.
Look to the Middle East to see what marriage "is". It
involves women being murdered to restore honor to her
husband because she was raped.
If your definition of marriage is a religious one, then blow it
out your ass. Our Founding Fathers probably made church
and state separate at least partially because they knew how
stupid, unsubstantiated and dangerous it was... they came
from a country with an official state religion. Today's Tea
Baggers would happily have an official religion today, as
long as it was theirs, but we liberals have a more
Enlightened view of the matter.
If you really think that the consciousness of the universe is in
any way concerned about whether two people on Earth
declaring their love for one another have different-looking
peepees, then you're an idiot and you shouldn't vote. (Oh,
noes! Gay people getting married! Now Jesus is all weepy!)
585
You can tell how evil and dishonest anti-gay-marriage

spokespeople are, because they so regularly use dishonest
arguments. They know that they're fighting for the right of
the majority to oppress the minority, so what do they do?
They talk about "activist judges" who want to "redefine
marriage" by "legislating from the bench". Nothing is more
disgusting than listening to right-wing pundit after rightwing pundit spew the EXACT SAME TALKING POINTS -not because they're legitimate or even logical, but because
they were crafted to be rhetorically effective. EVIL!
It's none of your business what genitalia two fiancees have.
There's no defense of your assertion that you have the right
to look inside my underpants on my wedding day. And if you
can't see what my junk looks like, you can't tell what sex I
am... so how do you even know it's a gay marriage?
(Clavis)
@Clavis
You know, people who are opposed to safe, legal abortion
use your same argument, i.e. "there is no argument FOR
legalized abortion; it is always wrong".
Of course in your eyes, gay marriage is always right. But
you are in a small minority of extremists.
There actually IS that "Magic Space Library" and it's called
HISTORY, and throughout history, every culture and
society, every era and regime and religion and nation, has
recognized that MARRIAGE is between male and female. In
the west, this has been ONE MAN, ONE WOMAN for
thousands of years (before Christ, or Christianity, ever
existed).
That people do bad things (rape women, then murder them
in honor killings) does not equate to "marriage all bad".
586
Most marriages are happy, functional and produce

biological children and marriage is the very basis of human
society.
By your logic, NO gay marriage will ever be bad, and no
gay married people will ever fight, abuse each other, lie or
cheat. That is pure nonsense; read up on the Jenkins-Miller
split (a lesbian couple in a civil union, and the nastiest
divorce/custody I've read about in years).
Not only do Tea Baggers NOT have a official religion, but I
AM NOT A TEA BAGGER. It is not just Tea Baggers who
oppose gay marriage or how would Prop 8 have passed with
a clear margin of victory? Tea Partiers are maybe 30% of
the REPUBLICAN party. (I am a Democrat.)
So, let me ask you: is the consciousness of the universe
concerned about whether a brother and sister marry? How
about if you wanted to marry your own grandmother? How
about if you wanted to marry an underage child? How
about if you wanted to marry YOUR DOG?
I mean, you just said that THE UNIVERSE does not care if
"your pee-pees are the same or different". So surely the
universe does not care if you marry a dog, or a dolphin, or
your own father.
The fact is, there are RULES about who you can marry and
how and why, because without RULES, you'd have CHAOS.
The fact is, those talking points ARE TRUE. Lefty social
engineering judges and courts DO want to redefine society
for themselves, or their friends, or their kids, or whoever is
pressuring them, or get votes or big Wall Street money. It's
important enough that Wall Street BRIBED -- openly
587
BRIBED -- the New York legislature and NOBODY even

cares. It's important enough that they blackmailed and
coerced legislators to vote against their constituents.
That's evil.
Also: I can tell a man from a woman without "looking in
their underpants". For starters, there is common sense. Then
there is DNA. Then there is your various ID forms (birth
certificate, driver's license) that ANYONE needs to get a
marriage license.
Surely if genitalia does not matter, then species does not
matter. Kinship does not matter. Age does not matter. The
fact is, Clavis, what you promote is chaos and anarchy.
bigguns (Laurie Laurel)
There were an estimated 500,000 people who marched in or
attended New York's gay pride parade the weekend gay
marriage was passed here, so I don't think anyone is too
concerned about the 10,000 homophobes you managed to
round up.
You're eventually going to need to get your fat head around
the fact that, whatever nonsense you may think about
national polls, you are most definitely a minority view in
New York...and shrinking all the time. Which is what was
properly reflected in ALL of the news coverage I watched on
this. Largely jubilant and celebratory with occasional
mention made of the MINORITY view against gay marriage.
There was plenty of news coverage of the homophobes
BEFORE the vote, by the way, pretty much equal time with
pro-marriage equality protesters (including endless
nonsense from the Catholic Church). And then what
happened?? Oh yeah, you and they LOST, BIGTIME!!! So
588
now the news coverage has moved on to the celebration, to

the people whose lives have been improved by this. So
moving on might not be a bad idea for you too.
I love the statement in your post that the duty of legislative
leaders is to protect the jobs of their colleagues. That says
volumes about how you think society should be run. He
should have shut down the vote on a technicality, I suppose,
rather than allow his members to vote their conscience as he
did. You've complained about social engineering in prior
posts. What kind of engineering would you have called
"manufacturing" a defeat like that when all of the votes were
clearly there for a victory??
I think your time would be better spent protecting that
backwater of Ohio where you live from the ever increasing
likelihood that gay marriage is coming there soon, than
trying to carry your brand of hate across state lines to New
York, where you've already lost. But suit yourself.
(@rm2gro)
@rm2gro
I think a march with 10,000 people, on short notice, is
significant. The piece I quoted showed where the protest
march was ignored, while pro-gay marriage activities and
celebrations were given huge media attention; that's the
POINT.
New York CITY is an outlier, because of its vast size, media
industry/domination AND its huge gay sub-culture. The rest
of New York State is completely different, and would likely
have voted against gay marriage had they been given the
right of referendum.
The right of referendum FOR THE PEOPLE is important,
589
and New Yorkers have long lacked this right: here is an

example of why denying people the right to referendum is
dangerous and wrong.
Where you are naive is in not realizing that the media is
MANIPULATING (or trying to manipulate) public opinion
by focusing on gay marriage in New York, making it look
glamorous, making the celebrations look fun or important
and IGNORING THE OPPOSITION. Then, when New York
Staters manage to overturn gay marriage, and invalidate all
the bogus gay marriages (in a couple of years; it will be slow
because of the lack of right to referendum), they will be
screaming "haters!".
Also: the vote squeaked through -- EVEN WITH
BLACKMAIL AND COERCION -- by a couple of votes. That's
not a landslide, and we did not lose "big time". (Actually I
did not lose at all, since I don't live in New York State.)
When Prop 8 WON by a similar margin, did you say "they
won BIG TIME" or did you scream "it was only by a few ten
thousand votes, so it hardly even counts!"? You twist the
truth to your own agenda.
Nobody's life is "improved" by gay marriage; the lives of
tens of millions of ordinary straight married people is
RUINED when their marriages are DEVALUED and
REDEFINED as "super-duper best friends with benefits".
Rm2gro, I suggest you google and read the recent, very indepth article that the NYTimes (very liberal and pro-gay
marriage) did on the New York legislature and the vote.
They made it clear that legislators DID NOT vote their
590
conscience -- they voted AGAINST their conscience, and

AGAINST THEIR constituents to get the Big Wall Street
money for their next campaigns (remember when you guys
HATED Wall Street? And the Koch brothers? so now they are
good????? hypocrites!). Or they were blackmailed and
coerced like Carl Krueger, with false and humiliating
accusations and daily protestors outside their HOMES
calling them names.
What you want is to fight corruption in the government
EXCEPT WHEN IT GOES YOUR WAY. You are the most
dangerous and hypocritical kind of ideologue.
Again, I have not "lost" anything. IF I lived in New York
State, however, I'd be working double time to make sure that
my hypocritical, lying, cheating, double-dealing legislator
would never be elected again -- or recall him/her if I could.
Then I'd work to ensure that ALL New Yorkers had a right to
referendum votes, to throw out evil social engineering
legislation written by special interest groups for their own
benefit. Then I'd get rid of Anthony Cuomo. But of course, I
don't live in New York State.
What will you say when the REAL referendums OF THE
PEOPLE in places like New Hampshire and Minnesota and
Iowa DON'T GO YOUR WAY? I'll bet my last nickel, you'll be
screaming that "they must be forced to accept gay
marriage!" You don't really like democracy, rm2gro.
(_bigguns)
@laurel/_bigguns -- the surplanting of gay marriage

I think a march with 10,000 people, on short notice, is significant.
591
I agree, it is significant.
Where you are naive is in not realizing that the media is
MANIPULATING (or trying to manipulate) public opinion by
focusing on gay marriage in New York, making it look glamorous,
making the celebrations look fun or important and IGNORING THE
OPPOSITION.
Making gay marriage seem glamorous and fun is hardly
unambiguously doing it a favor: witness the reception of Sex and the
City 3, with a consensus of critics saying "thanks for the party girls,
but haven't you noticed -- it's going to be a bit harder these days to
imagine ourselves enjoying your fun." Every ebulliant, victory-isnear-in-our-grasp gay pride parade, every voice that is jubilant at the
inevitable country-wide spread of gay marriage, is unaware that right
now it is being essentialized, setup, in a way that will serve it rather
poorly in the future. Once the Tea Partiers go down and the
conservative mindset can be adopted without risk of IDing its adopter
as a neanderthal -- and rather as a sane middle-of-the-roader, as you
present yourself -- all this dancing and jubilance will be reimagined,
transformed by the public near instantly as beyond preposterous and
more a disgrace. You're so affronted by all this, but you're actually
getting the setup you'll need to get the society you want.
Nobody's life is "improved" by gay marriage; the lives of tens of
millions of ordinary straight married people is RUINED when their
marriages are DEVALUED and REDEFINED as "super-duper best
friends with benefits".
Gay marriage is to you not just an affront, another middle finger
raised at the millions of ordinary Americans, but something worse
than cancerous as it instantly transforms, or rather, malforms every
single marriage, which is actually something even worse than it
appears, as:
592
[biological] marriage is the very basis of human society.

I continue to wonder how anyone who does not believe that
homosexuals are in some way inferior to heterosexuals, could argue
that when what they do in their relationships is surplanted onto what
heterosexuals do the result is the worst possible thing to happen to a
civilization: its dissolution in chaos, for having its bedrock, its
essential structural support, crippled.
I have tried to make the case with you before that the surplanting of
gay relationships onto heterosexuals ones (or at least marriage) is
actually to the benefit of heterosexual marriage, in some sense, gives
it a name, an association, it might live up to! This has nothing to do
with what gay relationships are actually about (you've heard my
hugely controversial take on that), but about true value of the
progressive mindset that is broadcasting their supposed essence.
Namely, that relationships do not reach a new height in binding
themselves to a weight of tradition and rules, but are sundered by it,
denied by it. Only the infantile so need society, expectations and rules
to encourage them to do what is right, and you should never find
value in a tradition that tells you that you are foremost
untrustworthy, impulse-driven children in need of restraint and
supervision. Adults manage it more autonomously, more
independently, more beautifully, more truly.
Link: Shes the one (Salon)
--------WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 3, 2011
Cowboys, Aliens, Chicken Salads, and Trolls
You know what's wrong with this damn country? Chicken

Caesar salad. (Stand aside, Rush Limbaugh. I'm talkin'
593
here.) I could just as well bring up flavored coffee. I mean,

what was so doggone wrong with the flavor of coffee that
people felt like it would be better off tasting like hazelnut
candy and imitation vanilla extract? But it's the ubiquitous,
and nearly always awful, chicken Caesar that really fries
my butt. Caesar salad wasn't something you ate all the time,
and not everybody liked it. It was garlicky and spicy and
salty, and in the old days often had anchovies ground up in
the dressing and served whole on top of the lettuce. (Oh, I
know they still make it that way, for $17.95, in some ever so
precious restaurant you frequent. Spare me.)
Then somebody had the brilliant idea that more people
might like Caesar salad if it was less scary -- if it was less
like itself, in effect -- so they took out the fishies and turned
the dressing into a flavorless, oily, Parmesan-cheesey glop
you could buy at the grocery store. Fewer people hated that,
I imagine, but it was an inherently boring salad no one
would ever make or buy on purpose. Romaine, with a salty,
grainy, viscous fluid somewhat like dirty motor oil drizzled
across it. Then came the stroke of genius, in the form of
chopped-up strips of grilled chicken breast, the most
innocuous and non-carnivorous form of meat. The result is a
hybrid mishmash of incompatible elements, which seems as
if it ought to be appealing and which nobody actively
dislikes, but which is, in fact, unsatisfying on every level.
And that's how we get, dear reader, to "Cowboys & Aliens,"
which is not merely the chicken Caesar of movies but the
chicken Caesar with raspberry vinaigrette, bleu cheese and
some of those godawful walnuts crumbled on top. [. . .]
(Andrew OHehir, "Cowboys & Aliens": Daniel Craig
does Eastwood in a steampunk mashup, Salon, 27
July 2011)
594
----------
What's wrong with a classic Caesar with grilled

chicken added?
Dude, I am completely with you regarding classic Caesar
salads. They must have anchovies to be TRUE Caesar salads.
Not anchovy-flavored dressing, but actual fishies. So far, so
good.
But what if you're at a restaurant and you're ordering a
Caesar, but you're also really hungry? And what if they offer
grilled chicken with the salad "for a few dollars more" (see
how I worked in a Western reference there?)?
Seriously, then you'd have a classic, true Caesar but with
some lean, perfectly-grilled, lightly seasoned chicken on the
side for protein. And then you've got a meal. A Caesar alone
is a decent lunch, but not much of a dinner. Add chicken and
boom -- it's a dinner.
So what's your problem? And where are the chickens in
"Cowboys & Aliens"?
Also, please tell me the name of the restaurants that serve
Caesar salads with sliced almonds, raspberry vinaigrette
dressing, and bleu cheese crumblies. I think you're making
that shit up, or they aren't actually selling those salads
under the name Caesar Salad. (rattigan glumphobo)
-----
But what was wrong with the film?

Forgive me, Mr. O'Hehir -- and I like your writing so much
that I put a paraphrased quote* from one of your reviews on
595
my Facebook profile, I thought it was so beautiful and true -but in this review, you spent so much time making with the
ha-ha that you didn't spend nearly enough time detailing
what you thought was wrong with the film -- why it didn't
work; why it was "mediocre"; etc. Just sayin', I wanted to
know what you didn't like about the film, and after reading
what you wrote, I still do.
.
.
.
The quote:
*"We all live and die amid confusion and injustice; life seems
too short no matter how long it lasts; and the days we have
are miraculous, and then they are gone." - Andrew O'Hehir
(Clavis)
----Not a good review, by the way
The Salon front-page headline proclaims this "The summer's
lamest hack-job." Then, when you click the story, it says
"Daniel Craig does Eastwood in a steampunk mashup." Why
is the headline different in two places, and why does one
headline proclaim the movie utter garbage while the other is
non-judgmental? That's very odd and hints at editorial
indecision or second-guessing.
The subhead does say the movie is cliche-ridden and
irritating, but the article gives the reader very little work
with in terms of analysis. Instead we get an extended
metaphor about salad. Comparing a movie to food is itself a
cliche, but I haven't seen Caesar salads used before (credit to
O'Hehir for knowing his way around a Caesar salad).
Nonetheless, extended metaphors have to be backed up:
596
HOW is the movie like a salad done wrong? And WHY did
you miss the opportunity to compare the alien monsters to
giant anchovies? I mean, you had it all lined up and
then....nothing.
Reading this review, dividing it into paragraphs, you get a
really long metaphor, a description of the movie's Western
setting and characters, a 2nd description of the movie's
Science-Fiction hybrid plot, some background information
about the graphic novel (even though the movie is barely like
it), and an off-the-cuff concluding paragraph that mentions
Somalia, John Boehner and how it's okay for summer
moviegoing fare to lack social/political relevance.
What I am saying is: There's no REVIEW in this REVIEW!
Why did the movie bother you? What about the alien twists
was lame? Which parts were hackneyed? The headline says
it's a lame hackjob, but the article says Jon Favreau's
directing is "reasonably accomplished," or something.
Andrew, how about getting it together and reviewing more
of the content of the films your write about? Try reading 10
old reviews by Roger Ebert and another 10 reviews by
Pauline Kael before you start writing your next review.
Those two writers actually write about life, and the reasons
people care about going to the movies, and investing
themselves in the stories and characters, or escaping, or
reflecting, or whatever reason people go to movies. They're
into moviegoing, and it shows. They don't reduce movies to a
laundry list of elements to be summarized, and they usually
don't compare movies to Waldorf salads or whatever.
(rattigan glumphobo)
-----
597
Heh
While I have no intention of seeing this film, I found your
review to be cliche piled upon cliche of hackish, uppity movie
criticism, which--as you might guess where I'm heading-just ends up being irritating. Very irritating, before the end
of the first paragraph even. You might want to rethink your
approach. (ban-ghaidheal)
-----
Where's the review in this review?

I was hoping for a review of the movie. Instead, I got
a...well, I'm not sure what I got. It definitely wasn't a review.
Seemed more like an exercise in being contrarian and
obtuse. Are you sure you actually watched the movie, and
didn't cheat by watching the trailers and then going out for
salad? (Jon Henshaw)
-----
I finally figgered out the trick to salads

you have to make them YOURSELF.
Personally, I like less lettuce, more other veggies and meat, a
greater variety of toppings, and more dressing.
Moreso, since I almost exclusively eat organic food, which
almost always tastes better, it makes the salad taste better.
With the dressing, I often mix one or more HIGH QUALITY
organic commercial dressings together, then throw in more
vinegar, since I love vinegar, olive oil, since we do not get
enough Omega 3s in our diets, and a bunch of herbs and
spices, since I like things hotter and spicier.
598
As a topping, I sometimes crunch up some Thai spice Kettle

brand potato chips (my personal trick, since these are my
favorite chips of all time).
Can't fail. This is the BEST salad you will EVER have. I
actually started to like salad after I began to make them
myself. (Liberty2Day)
----I couldn't care less about this stupid movie
but a real Caesar salad (if one assumes that Cardini actually
invented it) has no anchovies in it.
romaine lettuce
olive oil
crushed garlic
a good wine vinegar
freshly squeezed tart citrus juice
Worcestershire sauce
coddled egg yolks
freshly ground black pepper
freshly grated Parmesan cheese
freshly prepared croutons
a dash of salt (EdipisReks)
-----
Blah blah it's only a movie, dude, blah

Relax and lighten up, dude, it's only a movie, dude.
Just thought I'd throw that out there, since it's the standard
response to reviews like this and SOMEBODY HAS TO SAY
IT.
It's THE LAW. (Matt Zoller Seitz)
599
Matt Seitz
re: Blah blah it's only a movie, dude, blah
Relax and lighten up, dude, it's only a movie, dude.
Just thought I'd throw that out there, since it's the standard
response to reviews like this and SOMEBODY HAS TO SAY IT.
It's THE LAW.
Reminds me of David Edelstein's charming post on Stephanie's
"Inception" review:
Kill the beast! Spill her blood! Smash her face!
You must be punished for your dumbness and illitarecy. Christopher
Nolan RULEZ you drool! Whoo---ahhhhhhhhhhhh.
All good. Surely takes some balls. Except some of us are wondering if
even a couple years from now, when most of America is pretty well
showing how maybe the last thing they need is to be made more sport
of, if you guys are going to keep this good stuff up. Hope so; but my
bet is you'll actually be TARGETING people still talking like you're
talking now. May this feedback make it less likely you'll end up so.
-----
@Alix Dobkowski
You know, Alix, my complaint about the headlines not
matching is a perfectly valid comment. It's so valid, in fact,
that I notice Salon's editors have now completely excised the
"hackiest, lamest" headline from the article -- both on the
home page and on the article. So what's your problem with
me pointing out that the headline doesn't make sense? When
Salon's writers and editors do work that is not only sloppy,
600
but completely inaccurate and inconsistent to a fault, are we,

the lowly, pathetic readers of Salon, supposed to just suck it
up and roll over and say, "Yes sir, I'd like some more?" As
far as I am concerned, I pay Salon's fucking bills by reading
their articles every day -- I am regularly exposed to the
advertisements that pay Salon's electric bills, as well as
paying for the postage stamps so Salon's editors can mail
their freelance writers a special certificate that says,
"Congratulation! For your efforts, you have been awarded a
Gold Star (not included, only metaphorical)! Maybe some
day, you too can earn monetary compensation for your
writing efforts! Until then, thank you for your
complimentary submission, and keep 'em coming! Who
knows? One day we might even hire you to work on our
esteemed staff, at least long enough so that you can enjoy a
delightful unpaid U-Haul trip across the country, and then
another delightful U-Haul trip when we lay off your sorry
ass."
And yeah, I complained about the metaphor, but only
because it made me hungry. After reading Andrew's column,
I totally wanted to toss a salad, especially one that smelled
of fish. It could be named Caesar, or hell, Cecilia. Who by the
way is breaking my heart and shaking my confidence daily.
No, I do not read the comments of oda7103sf or Liberty2day
for one simple reason: I prefer to choose when and where I
enjoy slapstick comedy merged with tragedy. Whether that
choice is a Jerry Lewis movie or something featuring Adam
Sandler getting kicked in the balls by Sarah Silverman, it
makes no difference. I want to be able to savor it.
Liberty2day and oda are far too random, and especially
with oda, I think he works that whole "chronic masturbator"
persona a little too much to be funny.
601
Regarding Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael, I am not saying

O'Hehir should emulate them. I am saying he should read
some good reviewers from the olden days to get in the mood.
O'Hehir is a good writer, but even good writers go off-track
or lose their mojo once in a while. O'Hehir is capable of
cranking out about a dozen well-written and intelligent
Cannes articles in a few days, so I know he's capable of
kickass movie criticism. But what he's done here shows he's
not in the mood or something. Frankly, after O'Hehir
finished writing that whole long paragraph about Caesar
salads, he should have done one of two things: (1) Kept
going, writing a whole big article on Salads for Salon's food
section, which recently lost Francis Lam; or (2) Deleted the
entire paragraph, starting over with an extended metaphor
about Matzoh Ball Soup, or Dietemaceous Earth, or possibly
something to do with Squid Jism.
Some of the best reviews I've ever read weren't by Kael or
Ebert or Sarris or Glieberman or Zacharek or Seitz or
O'Hehir or Rainer or Rafferty or Lane or Sragow or
Kauffmann or Denby or Siskel or Canby or what's-her-face
at NY Times or what's-her-face at EW or what's-their-faces
at Variety or Hollywood Reporter or Libby Gelman Waxner
or even Joe Bob Briggs or that guy with the mustache or that
other guy with the scrub-brush mustache and Ch-ch-ch-chia!
'fro.
No, the best reviews I've ever read were by nameless
reviewers at the LA Weekly, or the Phoenix New Times, or
the Willamette Weekly, or RE/Search books, or in regional
daily newspapers whose writers haven't become jaded yet
and aren't just rung-climbing to an editorial position, or in
small 'zines, or blogs written by people who really, really
602
love movies to the point where they're really, really paying

attention to things and they have an almost Zen sense of the
details and textures and story references and thematics and
visual motifs and characters. And they also are completely
tuned in, with laser precision, to the things that are wrong
with the stories, the way the assumptions are subtly
insulting to the audience's intelligence, or the way the movie
rewards viewers who are opening their awareness to the
film. Yes, these writers use snark and wisecracks, but they
use them for a reason, which is to illuminate something
important about their evaluation of the film, and not just to
fill space with acceptable copy so they can hit "save" and call
it a day. I'm not saying O'Hehir doesn't do the former, or
that he does the latter -- actually I think he does a little of
both the good and the bad, and I'd love to see the ratio
improve much. (I have few illusions that I'm helping matters
much by being the buzzing mosquito of annoyingness
around here, but then again, I'm fucking partially paying
Salon's bills, so I can do whatever the hell I want.)
Regarding the movie: I don't intend to see "Cowboys &
Aliens" either, not after some of the other reviews I've read.
Last I checked it had 50% on Rotten Tomatoes, which means
the tomato is half-rotten. I usually throw half-rotten
tomatoes away, unless I'm making a salad for somebody I
can't stand. Not a Caesar salad, though. They don't have
tomatoes. (rattigan glumphobo)
Link: "Cowboys & Aliens": Daniel Craig does Eastwood in a

steampunk mashup (Salon)
---------
603

Addressing the shitbox
RESPONSE BY LK WALKER
I usually don't reply to letters as this is an open forum for
readers where you can vent. But I have to correct one thing.
I never used the word 'loser' in any part of my article, and I
never would use that word to describe anyone. That is a
word chosen by the editors to incite readership. And look! It
worked.
As my ex-fiance's grandpa used to say: There's a lid for
every pot!
Thanks for reading... (LKWalker, comment in
discussion thread of LK Walkers How I learned I
dont have to settle, Salon, 26 July 2011)
@LK Walker, the pretender

re: I usually don't reply to letters as this is an open forum for
readers where you can vent.
[. . .]
Thanks for reading...
So you insult your readers by essentializing them as venters, not
thinkers, or your-thought elaborators (with you offering some
thoughts that could be expanded upon to make for a discussion), and
then you thank them for reading.
May I suggest next time you enter the discussion you provide
consistent feedback, and say something along the lines of, "I usually
don't reply to letters as this is an open forum for readers where you
can vent, however ... That clarified, by all means continue on with
your expletives and rants -- hey, it's your shitbox. Thank you for yet
604
remaining being able to mostly read."

Link: How I learned I dont have to settle (Salon)
--------WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 3, 2011
Norway shooter and the Oklahoma City bomber
The world was stunned Friday by a double tragedy in
Norway: An explosion in the nation's capital, Oslo, left seven
dead, while a shooting spree on the nearby island of Utoya
reportedly claimed the lives of 86, mainly teenagers from a
Labor Party youth camp. Though many at first suspected the
involvement of international terrorism, both acts of violence
have now since been pegged to a 32-year-old Norwegian
man named Anders Behring Breivik. Breivik has confessed
to orchestrating both attacks, and says he acted alone.
(Though he made further statements in a court hearing
today -- where he pleaded not guilty -- that have stoked fears
about two more possible terror cells in the country.) Breivik
has called his actions "atrocious," but also "necessary."
The facts we've learned about Breivik in the days since the
massacre paint a portrait of a disturbed and isolated man.
Unearthed documents have shown that Breivik -- the son of
a retired Norwegian diplomat -- was fiercely xenophobic,
railing against Muslims, women, and cultural and political
"leftists." Indeed, ABC News notes that, after his arrest, he
told Norway's acting national police chief that he "wanted to
attack Norwegian society in order to change it" and that "he
wanted to transform the Western world." He also called for
a "conservative revolution [... and] armed resistance against
the cultural Marxists/multiculturalist regimes of Western
Europe."
Per the Wall Street Journal:
605
In bombing those government buildings and hunting

down those campers, Breivik was not taking out
people randomly. He considered the Labor Party,
Norway's dominant party since World War II,
responsible for policies that are leading to the
Islamization of Europeand thus guilty of treason.
The Oslo bombing was intended to be an execution of the
party's current leaders. The massacre at the campwhere
young would-be politicians gathered to hear speeches by
Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and former Prime Minister
Gro Harlem Brundtlandwas meant to destroy its next
generation of leaders.
[. . .]
The most shocking testament to Breivik's twisted worldview,
however, is a 1,500 page document that he titled "2083: A
European Declaration of Independence," and that reveals
Breivik's infatuation with American cultural conflicts. (At
one point, he lambasted American liberals' "War on
Christmas.") Its sections allegedly included the following:
"What your government, the academia and the media are
hiding from you," "Documenting EU's deliberate strategy to
Islamize Europe" and "How the feminists' 'War Against the
Boys' paved the way for Islam." The man cited a number of
American, Canadian and English writers in his manifesto -including Robert Spencer, who runs the website Jihad Watch
Web, on 64 occasions, the New York Times points out.
[. . .]
The Daily Beast's Michelle Goldberg, meanwhile, notes the
606
strain of misogyny running through Breivik's work:

Rarely has the connection between sexual anxiety
and right-wing nationalism been made quite so
clear. Indeed, Breivik's hatred of women rivals his
hatred of Islam, and is intimately linked to it. Some
reports have suggested that during his rampage on
Utoya, he targeted the most beautiful girl first. This
was about sex even more than religion.
Goldberg also points to statements Breivik has made
complaining about the influence of his diplomat stepmother,
whom he faults with instituting a "super-liberal, matriarchal
upbringing, [that] contributed to feminise me to a certain
degree." Likewise, he wrote, "The female manipulation of
males has been institutionalised during the last decades and
is a partial cause of the feminisation of men in women."
(Peter, Finochiarro, What we know abou the Norway
shooter, Salon, 25 July 2011)
---------From Lloyd DeMause's "Psychogenic Theory of History":
Consider a typical example of a traumatized child growing
up and joining others in fashioning a historical groupfantasy. Timothy McVeigh, one of the Oklahoma City
bombers, experienced continuous maternal abandonment as
a child, according to neighbors and relatives, as his restless
mother, who regularly cheated on her husband, kept leaving
the family for weeks at a time. Timothy asked friends, "Is it
something I did?" when trying to understand why his
mother wasn't there. When he was ten, he became interested
in guns and became a survivalist, collecting rifles in case
607
Communists took over the country. When he was sixteen and

his mother left him for good, he began to refer to her as "a
bitch" and as "that no-good whore." Neighbors reported he
was often like two people, "angry and screaming one
minute, then switching to quite normal" for no apparent
reason. In the army, when he failed the Green Beret test -another rejection -- he quit in disgust and began hanging out
with Right-wing militarists. After going to Waco to watch
how the government had abandoned the children during the
siege, he went to Oklahoma City to act out a scene in a
Rightist novel where a group packed a truck with a
homemade bomb and set it off at F.B.I. headquarters. But
four months before he acted out this rage against authority
(his mother), McVeigh visited the day care center in the
building, pretending he had children he wanted to enroll.
Thus he picked out a site where children who had been left
by their mothers would be blown up too, thus punishing
abandoned children representatives of himself restaging his
own abandonment and the carrying out the punishment he
thought he deserved for his rage at his mother.
[. . .]
The raging part of Timothy McVeigh, elaborated by militia
group-fantasies, often made him seem, said others, like two
people. The process was similar to that observed in the
creation of alters, or alternate personalities, in people who
have Multiple Personality Disorders, a diagnosis recently
renamed Dissociated Identity Disorders. Dissociation is
defined as "a loss of the usual interrlationships between
various groups of mental processes with resultant almost
independent function of the one group that has been
separated from the rest," and is involved in such
pathological syndromes as hypnosis, depersonalization,
608
fugue, sleepwalking, possession and visionary experiences. A

Dissociated Identity Disorder has three criteria: (a) the
personalities seem to be distinct and lasting, (b) the
dominant personality at any particular time determines the
individual's behavior, and (c) each personality is complex
and organized with its own unique behavior patterns. There
are four possible core dissociative symptoms: amnesia,
depersonalization, derealization and identity confusion.
Severe, repeated child abuse and neglect almost always lie
behind the full D.I.D. disorder. Kluft says, "Most multiples,
as children, have been physically brutalized, psychologically
assaulted, sexually violated, and affectively overwhelmed."
As Ross puts it, a multiple personality disorder is a little girl
imagining that the abuse is happening to someone else. The
imaging is so intense and subjectively compelling, and is
reinforced so many times by the ongoing trauma, that the
created identities seem to take on a life of their own, though
they are all parts of one person.
[. . .]
The social alter is the inheritor of earlier dissociated
persecutory feelings and has as one of its roles the setting up
of group punishments that are "object lessons" to us all.
McVeigh's staging of the Oklahoma City explosion was
carefully arranged to have "abandoned" children like
himself punished along with the more conscious aim of
punishing bad authorities. The formula for restaging early
traumas is: (1) Fuse with your persecutory alter ("Terrifying
Mommy"), (2) find a savior alter ("Grandiose Self") whom
you follow to (3) kill the victim alter ("Bad Child"). Empathy
for victim scapegoats is lost because they are so full of our
negative projections and are seen as bad children-growing,
striving, wanting too much. The larger the success and new
609
freedoms a society must face -- the more its progress

overreaches its childrearing evolution -- the larger the
historical punishment it must stage. When an American
Senator, voting for more nuclear weapons, said that even if
a nuclear Holocaust was unleashed it wouldn't be too bad
because we would "win" it ("If we have to start over with
another Adam and Eve, I want them to be Americans"), the
weird trance logic can only be understood if nuclear war is
seen as an "object lesson," enabling us to "start afresh with a
clean slate."
Link: What we know about the Norway shooter (Salon)
-------TUESDAY, AUGUST 2, 2011
When a new addiction beckons
When I finally stopped going to bars
A year after I quit drinking, I avoid my old haunts. But now
that I'm not a lush anymore -- what, exactly, do I do?
I quit drinking more than a year ago. It was time. None of
my closest friends said, "Wow, I didn't know you had a
problem," because that was untrue. What they mostly said
was, "Good for you." And, "Let me know how I can be
helpful." But what I struggled with -- and still struggle with,
more than 365 days after I drained my last glass of
sauvignon blanc at a friend's wedding reception -- was
telling people who weren't my closest friends. Who might
have been close, but not that close.
[. . .]
610
But since moving back to Texas from New York last month -and embarking on the string of reunion dinners and meetups this entails -- I feel I owe my former drinking buddies
fair warning. I know what it was like to anticipate a
debauched evening at the bar only to hear, "I'm pregnant!"
Or, "I've decided to cut back." And what was going to be a
last-call rager got tragically downshifted to two guilty
glasses and bed by 11 p.m. Yay, good for you, I'd say, sipping
a glass of wine that suddenly felt like it was the size of a
thimble.
[. . .]
When Tim and I did meet for lunch, at a place I remembered
for its hearty salads, we talked about this for a bit. I was
expressing disappointment that I hadn't seen the guys from
the magazine he runs, the guys I usually catch up with over a
pint or four.
"We could go bowling," Tim says. "Or play kickball."
Ugh: sports. I didn't want to sound too negative. But how do
you explain to someone you only know through bar chatter
that you are embarrassed by the world? That you can't do
anything that involves running, sweating or standing
outside? This is why drinking was so convenient. It was a
smoke screen for the fact that I sucked at everything else.
[. . .]
What I really like to do, though -- what I like more than
anything else, more than anything in the world, whether I'm
at the bar or languishing in my apartment -- is to talk to
people. I like to have honest conversations with other
humans that surprise me, and challenge me, and make me
611
think about my life in new ways. It's what I always wanted

from the bar in the first place. And it strikes me, driving
home that day, that it's exactly what I just had. (Sarah
Hepola, When I finally stopped going to bars,
---------fuck that
Thats a lot of nerve about choosing a "healthy
lifestyle"........try boring. Not to say getting drunk off your
ass every night is a good choice but the fact is that sobriety
as it is preached by the American Prude Movement, both
right and left, is pretty fucking boring. So what do you
do?????Play board games and drink decaf coffee. Bad choice,
unless you were headed to the grave on the fast track. And
even then, Fast track to the grave may be a lot more fun than
singing the blues about boredom. (quiet man)
----"Lush"
So people who drink are "lushes". Whatever.
(kugelschreiber)
----Allow me to be bold, as an anonymous voice in an electronic
wilderness. There is a book; a short, simple, cheap book, that
neither preaches, nor feels like self-help in any way. But if it
helps you even a tenth as much as it helped me, it will be
worth you picking it up.
It's called The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle.
I think what you seek will not be found in husband, kids,
drink, job, or any of those things, for those are identities, and
in the finality of it all, fictitious.
The identity is the problem, and this moment is the solution.
My best wishes and best of luck to you. (John McCall)
612
----Think of things you like to do and do them

Take a class at the local college. Go on an alumni travel tour.
Hang out at museums. Learn to ride a horse. Find a really
nice cafe and make some new cafe friends. My late mother
used to go out for breakfast at the same place every day.
She'd only have a Danish or some toast and coffee, but over
time she got to know the regulars and so it was always a gettogether. (expatjourno2)
----Ms H, I Know Just How You Feel...
Way back in my 300+ lb days, before I learned I was a Type
2 diabetic, I treated food the way you treated your drinking.
But in my case, I had to stop using food as I had: I ate from
boredom, recreation, fear, anger, fill in the blank.
Once I regulated my eating habits, I learned how to eat
again: B/C I WAS HUNGRY. I was amazed at how much
time and $$ I was wasting on my earlier habits. That's when
I got a life--and I still regulate my blood sugar w/diet and
exercise alone, 15 yrs later and 140 lbs ago.
What you did is what I did: you reclaimed your life and time.
And as you age, you come to appreciate how precious time
really is, and learn not to waste it.
Good for you! (elsma03)
----A year sober
Congratulations!
You've already kept sober for a year and made a major
lifestyle move, back to TX.
I'm assuming you've GOT to have a car now, and there are a
lot of scenic and historical things to see...and since it's now
safe for you to drive... (Greeneyedkzin)
-----
613
Identity
You probably know this but I'm going to say it out loud. It's
not that there isn't anything fun to do outside of going to
bars -- it's that the people you want to spend time with only
know how to have fun at bars. It's a quandary. There are
tons of interesting people doing interesting things at all
times of the day and night without alcohol -- but you have to
shift your sense of your self to find them.
Good luck. I enjoy your writing and I hope that you find
something that works for you. (And have you thought about
corresponding with Roger Ebert?) (amspeck)
----Realize this.
Those old drinking "friends" aren't really friends if they only
like you because you drink with them. I put the cork back in
the bottle twenty-five years ago. There are people I used to
see and drink with weekly who I haven't seen nor spoken
with for twenty-five years. They only wanted to be around a
"Good-time Charlie" and I only wanted my sobriety and life
back. I have new and better friends now, people who enjoy
my company because of who I am, not who I become when
drunk. Good luck. Once you get past the, "nobody loves me"
stage of your new-found life, you'll will get on with the
business of actually living. I wish you peace. (Robert
David Clark)
----The Discoveries Are Inward
It is indeed hard to replace the social aspects of the bars with
the humdrum everyday activities of sobriety. But the sad
truth is that sobriety only got worse until I went inside and
opened up the spiritual longing that I had tried to fill with
alcohol, sex, drugs or a host of other diversions. I am
614
grateful now that I have been driven from the rather narrow
diversion of the bars and into the broad and exciting scope of
a spiritual reality (I, frankly, once thought of as bullshit).
Anyone can stop drinking. I did it every day. Sobriety is so
much more than the cessation of drinking: it is the opening
up of a new life of adventure I never imagined to exist.
(trungpapa)
----You shouldn't make fun of these "hobbies"
You lost your hobby, drinking - you should find another one.
There are in fact people who passionately care about art,
book clubs, dance, music, politics, actually important things
that make your life deeper and richer. Find which one of
these you love and throw yourself into it! (TomRitchford)
----On a side note, I second an earlier poster's suggestion that
you learn to ride a horse. It's a great way to get outside and
play without alcohol, sports talk, or boredom. Admittedly,
though, you'd meet more men (if that's one of your goals)
with contra dancing. (EditGrrl)
----Put away your prejudices and the insecurities that you hid
with drinking and choose exercise. Go bowling! Go to a
softball game. There may be drinking there as well but you
might find it easier to avoid. If you can't, go to a yoga class
or a spin class. No drinking there and no one will judge you
if you aren't great at first. You'll find a social circle among
people whose values are healthy in both senses of the word.
(BuffCrone)
615
No longer the lush

How about just dwelling on the fact that you appear to have left
something damning behind you, and just in time? I mean it; every
day you could just look at the rest of America that is still, despite all
the news and bad press, keeping on with their depressing bad habits,
their indulgent, self-destructive ways, and know that they -- not you -are going down. You'll find many other former sketchy ones who now
too count themselves amongst the pure -- like that former Salon
editor who lost 200 pounds and kept it off for a year, who wrote in to
let us know that and also of how he has learned to subsist on less than
1200 calories a day, leaving us to think his new reformed self is such
that he needed to learn he still required more than the random
nutrients you inhale as you walk through the streets of New York to
survive; or the new food writer, Felissa, who has left luxuries behind
her and made life "an exercise of reduction" and humility; or the
young un Drew Grant, who newly preaches how "you still owe them
[i.e., your parents] your life and your respect," showing how you're
never too young to scold like an elder and to abort much that could
have interesting in your life for a surer sense of earned protection.
I truly think this is going to get you by. You'll more than survive, and
even thrive, and every day you'll be encouraged to think yourself
elected and deserving. Whatever great adventure you make of your
life now that you've finally begun living, whether it's joining exciting
groups, seeing America's notable sites, or just settling into a less
complicated but more human, satisfying life, it will be this pleasure
that foremost makes you feel you've made a turn for the better.
Link: When I finally stopped going to bars (Salon)
-------MONDAY, AUGUST 1, 2011
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As gay marriage comes to America

Seven years later, after she'd adopted my biological kids, my
wife and I, along with other Canadian couples, sued
Canada's federal government for same-sex marriage rights.
After a three-year fight, we were victorious and, in 2003,
just after our 10th anniversary, we wed, the coolest group of
daughters and dragmaids at our sides.
In 17-plus years, I had never imagined, not even for a sliver
of a second, that my wife and I would part through any
means besides death -- that's how happy and bonded I
believed we were. If anyone had asked me my favorite thing,
my answer would have been to spend time with my wife.
Doing anything.
Only days before she started making noises about leaving
me, my wife and I were renewing our vows during a horsedrawn carriage ride under the Eiffel Tower, and while the
horse hooves clopped their way along the cobblestone side
streets of Paris, I was swooning. I was delighted at how
fresh our love still was. We were not symbiotic or enmeshed,
but independent, free and happy. Our relationship glowed
with health. When we had issues, we had meetings and
solved them, and nothing went along unresolved.
Then came the shock -- and the unraveling. [. . .] (Jane
Eaton Hamilton, What kept me together after the
divorce, Salon, 19 July 2011)
---------Ms. Hamilton, you're demonstrated something very
important
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When it comes to matters of the heart, homosexuals are no

different from heterosexuals. This is why it is a crime that
homosexuals are not allowed to marry, and thankfully, that
situation is changing. In my own state of Maryland, where
legalizing same sex marriage narrowly failed this year, our
Governor has just announced that he is making passage a
personal legislative priority (unlike the previous attempt). I
have no doubt we'll win this time. New York was a game
changer.
Best of luck to you. (Beans&Greens)
@Beans&Greens, and world-at-large
Re: When it comes to matters of the heart, homosexuals are no
different from heterosexuals.
I'm beginning to suspect that there are liberals out there who support
such things as gay marriage now on the condition that it, one, keeps
them feeling liberal, enlightened -- costumed in just the right way to
keep them feeling "of the moment," enabled by momentum,
protected; and two, because at some point they're betting
"indisputable" evidence will come to light -- of the kind
laurel/_bigguns keeps pointing out that suggests homosexuals ARE
rather different in affairs of the heart: more promiscious; involved in
relationships so distinctly different in kind that they are not
transferable from homo to hetero, or hetero to homo -- that will
permit them a full retraction. "You're actually like that!!! ... Well now,
I was your friend, taking on every bloody elephant in the room in your
support, on the condition you were as you presented yourself to me. I
took you at faith, and you've been lying to me all the time!" With (the
eventual coming of) tea partiers effectively neutered, with most
everyone beginning to sound puritan and rigid, many democrats, in
my judgment, are no longer going to be so much friends of
homosexuals.
It may be even here, with the inevitable spread of gay marriage that
618
will so show laurel how out of touch and impotent she is -- "rage
away, lunatic; you're still fated to be just washed away in the torrent!"
-- what we're actually seeing is a setup that will empower, justify a
later heavy and nasty turnabout. The narrative setup may be here to
make it look like the "fallen," homosexuals, almost took control of the
very reigns (!) -- i.e., marriage -- that sourced the most profound
virtues of the country!!! It may be something which will at the end not
so much leave her soaked and humiliated, barely able to stand let
alone shriek, but comfortably throned, expecting the cascade of
inevitable tribute to start, with you just nearby on a spit. You're her
greatest nemesis, and she'll ultimately dine on you, enjoying every
chew of your multi-morseled torso-kabob, and in full concentration
("Beans&Greens but no beans and greens for mEEs tonight!"), but
room first for a few more satisfactions of repentant Salon staff
shuffling up to thank her for her early and brave more good faith
stances, of the kind they humbly submit you couldn't deny they were
at least attempting, but hadn't anywhere near the earthquake of soul
to show it first so boldly and undisguised as she was able.
I would recommend people begin to more see and consider the
implications of the numerous liberals about who are beginning to
sound more and more conservative -- notably in regards to sex and
relationships, but elsewhere too (note the commenter who explained
how Andrew Leonard's ostensibly liberal stance towards government
debt would have seemed conservative 40 years ago). What is going on
here is not so much a change in heart -- though it is about turning on
their own liberalness, "fretting" it now more and more as suspect
permissiveness, unfettered indulgence, excess -- but a concern for
purity, something which always works against groups like
homosexuals for their readily being made to seem those who prosper
when civilization has lost its way, an embodyment of its decadence.
If this happens, the best out there -- good people like you -- will still
be supporting gay marriage, but I'm wondering if even for you this
voice of love and support comes out strangely and humiliatingly
619
muted, for your realizing you needed to believe homosexual love was
the same as heterosexual love to provide so much unsecond-guessed
support, to people who deserved your full support regardless. You
might perhaps avoid knowing this, but because the source of this info
will now becoming as much from ostensibly liberal sources as
conservative ones, you'll have a tough time doing so.
The only requirement for a marriage is MALE AND

FEMALE -- in western civilization, we understand that to be
ONE MAN and ONE WOMAN, which is very logical, as it
takes ONE MAN and ONE WOMAN to make a baby.
Anything else might be lovely or wondeful, loving or even
very long lasting -- but it is not a marriage.
Marriage is a relationship between one man and one
woman.
I hope to see that become the law of the land, by
Constitutional Amendment, in a few years.
I think the awful corruption and payoffs in New York will
only ensure that pro-traditional marriage supporters get
really galvanized in the next election cycle -- they realize
now how easily their rights to traditional marriage can be
taken away, by corrupt politicians bribed by big Wall Street
money. (_bigguns)
----If ANYONE here can understand Patrick McEvoyHalston's rant...
...I'd love to know what the heck he is saying. Honestly, dude,
I cannot make ONE LICK OF SENSE out of anything you
write -- not one -- and I can't even figure out what side you
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are on. (_bigguns)
Laurel, and the takeover of Salon

Laurel, you're not aware of your central lie: that you, at heart, and
despite truly not wishing so, do not think gays are equal to
heterosexuals. If you really thought so, THERE'S NO WAY you'd be as
opposed to gay marriage as much as you are, making it seem as if the
one thing that keeps civilization ago has just been stopped in its
tracks. More than this, I think you think they deserve punishment for
daring to enfranchise themselves in the same way heterosexuals are
enfranchised, for SPOILING, permanently -- simply for trivial, ofthe-moment pleasures they'll quickly come to learn they really have
no use for -- their most treasured institution.
I've heard your call/request, and I'll interpret my post for you: I am
NOT so much someone who suspects that at the end of the day you'll
find yourself helplessly neutered from having any influence here at
Salon letters or "abroad," but rather someone who thinks that even
now you're increasingly "tolerated" here out of felt intuition that
where, that who you are now is kinda where many Salonistas are
going to find themselves in some not-so-long while.
You're registering more and more as simply a voice of punishment;
absolute intolerance for the (ostensibly) idle, spoiled, and delinquent
in whatever guise. Though they're hating it (i.e., your angry wrath)
when you're directing it against gay marriage, I think some sense
yours is the voice of the future, and are more likely to start abiding it
than risk becoming another of its targets. More than this, and because
there are in truth way fewer of these truly ideal Salonistas out there as
you make seem, they're increasingly listening to the part of
themselves that has judged this is a time for curtailment and
responsibility and sacrifice, not yet more stretched-out claims for
indulging yet more me!me! satisfactions -- what surely got us in these
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dire straits, in the first place.

Some imagine you howling, echoing, endlessly but alone, as if shut
out for good from the rest of your kind, but I'm beginning to see you
more as one who might well be speaking to the gathered's "hearts,"
drawing them to you. My strong hunch is that it will be good, loving
(if however annoyingly smug) people like Greens&Beans -- the voices
of true encouragement -- who will find themselves not so much
listened to, at some point.
Link: What kept me together after the divorce (Salon)
--------THURSDAY, JULY 28, 2011
When society favors the geek
Some say that all narratives ultimately tell only two stories.
One: Someone goes on a journey. Two: A stranger comes to
town. The summer before my eighth-grade year, when I was
12, I experienced the intersection of both. In other words, I
learned how to escape.
This was 1979. My mother had been home from the hospital
for a few months, and my sister, brother and I were just
coming to understand her. Our "new" Mom.
The new version of my mother was a changeling. At 38 years
old, she had suffered, and barely survived, a ruptured brain
aneurysm. The head injury caused her to be mostly
paralyzed on her left side. Her brain became scrambled. She
limped around the house, couldn't tell time and didn't know
the day of the week. Often, she'd make inappropriate
remarks, swearing at the slightest provocation or making
some lewd joke in front of friends. At times, she scared me.
"Ethan!" she'd yell from her lair. "Help me get up!" She
622
might be half-dressed in her bed, or on the toilet, or on the

floor, or in the bathtub.
Years before my mother's "accident," as we called it, my dad
had moved several hours away. We saw him regularly, but
he and my stepmom were largely out of the picture. A family
friend had moved in to help take care of my Mom, my
siblings and me. The theory was, Sara Gilsdorf might make a
miraculous recovery, and the friend would move out. We
eventually discovered this would never come to pass.
It didn't take long to figure out I couldn't tame my mother,
not this beast. I knew I couldn't save her, either. I fought
with her for a while, usually battling over her inability -what I mistakenly read as her refusal -- to regain her old life,
be it making a cup of coffee or making a family decision.
After a while, I gave up. And kept my distance. I was stuck
with a mother I was afraid to love.
We began calling her the Momster.
------[. . .]
Then, later that same summer of 1979 when my mom came
home from the hospital, a stranger came to town -- a new
kid moved into the neighborhood. And a new path appeared
to me.
[. . .]
I hung out a lot at JP's house that summer. After a few weeks
of watching "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century," listening to
Electric Light Orchestra's "Discovery," and programming
primitive video games in BASIC on his TRS-80 Radio Shack
computer, JP told me about Dungeons & Dragons.
------[. . .]
That summer, I kept making Super 8 movies, but D&D soon
took over. It quickly became more than a game: It became a
vital experience that let a geeky, introverted, non-athletic kid
623
-- a kid who felt about as powerful as a 3-foot hobbit on the

basketball team -- take action, be the hero, go on quests, and
kill monsters. Not that all guys (and they were mostly guys
in those days) who played D&D were geeky, introverted,
non-athletic kids, but enough were, and at least this one felt
invisible. With everything going on at home, perhaps I was
the perfect candidate for escape. But I was also drawn to the
idea of this game. I had always sensed that something was
missing from the real world. My no-budget movies were one
Band-Aid. But shooting my "Star Wars" remakes and clay
monster battles took weeks and resulted in three-minute
movies. Entering the D&D fantasy was effortless,
instantaneous and endless. Epic.
I now see it was no accident that the year I found D&D, or it
found me, coincided with my mother's return from the
hospital. It took courage for a teenage boy to deal with the
Momster -- more courage than I could muster at the time. I
couldn't face down the creature that plagued my own house.
But playing D&D let me act out imaginary, possibly
symbolic battles instead, and distracted me from the
prospect of facing the real ones waged within my family's
four walls. In the D&D playscape, I learned to be confident
and decisive, and feel powerful. Even cocky. Some of the guts
and nerve and derring-do I role-played began to leak into
my real world. By the time I graduated high school, I had
transformed. I had used fantasy to escape but also to gather
strength for later, when I could face and embrace my mother
again. Which, as an adult years later, I finally did.
But in the summer of '79, I was but a newbie. I needed to
gain experience. I had only tasted the power Dungeons &
Dragons. I didn't know that game was about to save my life.
Back to those two archetypal narrative plots: someone goes
on a journey; a stranger comes to town. That summer, two
strangers came to town: JP, and my mother. Three, if you
624
count me. I would become a stranger, myself, again and

again. I would play many new roles. I would go on
incredible journeys to imaginary lands. And I would defeat
many monsters.
When I got home that night after my virgin D&D session,
after slipping past my mother, I headed straight for
Webster's. "Cleric |klerik|, noun. A member of the clergy; a
priest or religious leader in any religion." The next day, back
at JP's for another adventure, I would learn that in the D&D
game world, clerics weren't just priests. They were
characters who had dedicated themselves to a god or
perhaps several gods. They could cast spells such as "cure
light wounds" and "protection from evil." They could dispel
the undead.
Surely those powers would come in handy, at home, or in my
head, or in whatever life I would choose to live that summer,
or in some realm far away in the future. (Ethan Gilsdorf,
My Summer of Dungeons and Dragons, 18 July 2011)
-----------
Zero plus zero equals the infinite, apparently

How does hanging out with other geeks end up making you less
somehow of a geek (giving you true courage, of the kind that applies
to the "real"world, etc.)? How does zero plus zero generate anything?
I'm wondering if the truer story is that somewhere along the line
society decided geeks were preferable to healthy self-esteemers, for
their preparedness to take shit, bow to bullying power, and in service
to it, humiliate others with more true backbone: that is, for having no
real self-respect. In preverse times, their disadvantage, their
malformation, actually rendered them more fit, and they ended up
with subsequent life stories that allowed them to believe their
625
adolescent escapes had been subsequently revealed as healthy, even

leaderly, pasttimes. Rather than socially retarded, time has
apparently shown them they have as much a claim to being vanguard!
And, oh, the part about his mom becoming the momster, principally
owing to her illness, is foremost a lie: he'd have been hiding away
from a tyrannical mom, battling her bulking likeness in the form of
dragons, demons, and whatnot, regardless. That despite everything
he has accomplished and come to realize, he still cows to her and has
therefore in some profound sense barely moved an inch, is evident in
his emphasizing the illness so you don't think momster was due to
make her years-long appearance in any case. "It wasn't YOU, mom; it
was just the illness: I'm still your good, loyal, appreciative boy brave
knight to your cause, tending cleric to your maladies."
The cruelest fate for fabulous endeavors which would make YOU part
of the tale, is that its history is largely about compensating for a
bullysome world, or rendering it more appropriate for traumasatured minds, rather than about boldly encroaching upon an
insufficiently magicked one even when it shines golden, as it did
during the 70s when D & D was born.
Link: My summer of Dungeons and Dragons (Salon)
-------MONDAY, JULY 25, 2011
Young predators, and the greens & beans crowd
It was always something: glossy garnet plums, candy red
romas trucked from Mexico in the dead of winter. I wanted
to eat a local, seasonal diet, I really did. I liked the idea of
buying all my produce at the farmers' market, or joining a
CSA, or growing most of our food. But somehow I never got
626
around to joining the CSA, and the weekend crowds at our

local farmers' market kept me at bay. We did garden, but
Seattle's seasons were not conducive to a high yield: Some
years our tomatoes never ripened beyond dark green. In the
end, I bought most of our produce at the local grocery store,
where I tried to do my best.
Our local supermarket was an overpriced yuppie mart with
a good selection of local, organic, seasonal produce. I had the
opportunity to use my buying dollars to support small local
farms, but it was rough to shell out $4 for a bunch of kale. I'd
read Michael Pollan's argument: "We [Americans] spend a
smaller percentage of our income on food than any other
industrialized society; surely if we decided that the quality of
our food mattered, we could afford to spend a few more
dollars on it in a week." As much as I admire Pollan, there is
something cavalier in his dismissal of the problem of price.
Does Pollan really remember what it was like to struggle
financially?
[. . .]
My husband and I were both laid off in October of 2008, and

while we've worked on and off since then, we've keenly felt
the economic crunch. For the past three years, our lives have
been an exercise in reduction. First we stopped eating out,
then we stopped buying specialty items, then we found
ourselves unable to afford items that had once seemed basic:
peanut butter, bacon, grapes in February. We moved to the
country in order to cut our expenses, but our move coincided
with the end of my husband's unemployment benefits, and
our budget dwindled more quickly than our expenses.
627
[. . .]
Unfortunately, I'm a little late. Many of the mushrooms are

fuzzy with white mold or crawling with black flies, and a few
have been chomped by slugs. I'm knocking a slug off the log
with a stick when I'm startled by a giant mottled
salamander, which seems more annoyed that alarmed by
my presence. It stares at me with obsidian eyes, unmoving.
In all my years in these woods, I've never seen this species
before. And the salamander isn't the only one laying claim to
this territory: A few feet down on the same log, cougar scat
sits like a warning. I think twice about continuing on, but I
can't quite tear myself away from the bounty of mushrooms.
Despite my bad timing, I find clusters of fresh new
mushrooms here and there. The pell-mell arrangement of
logs requires me to duck and stretch in order to get at the
most promising patches. I am crawling across a particularly
precarious log when I hear a heavy thump in the woods
above me. I freeze. A cat wouldn't make any noise if it was
stalking you, I comfort myself. It's probably just an elk ... or
a bear. My heart is hammering. I hop down, dip under the
salamander log, and scramble down the hill to my bike. I set
my bag of mushrooms in the basket and hightail it for home.
(Felissa Rogers, When eating local is the cheapest
option, Salon, 16 July 2011)
----------
Overpriced???
In the last couple years I have put a commercial kitchen in a
barn. My business has a 3 acre orgranic farm where the
628
kitchen get its ingredients to make locally grown, locally

processed products like roasted tomato sauce; marinated
mushrooms; pestos; jams; dehydrated herbs (and kale and
apples); pickles galore... the list could go on an on. It is
delicious and fun -- but as you might also guess, expensive! It
just kills me to read (constantly) that foods priced right
(even underpriced!) are considered "elitist" or whatever.
Does it ever occur to anyone how expensive it is to grow and
process locally? We pay local (fair!) wages. We pay payroll
taxes out the wazoo. Workers Comp. About 4 other kinds of
insurance. Plus, I think our kitchen is the only building in
town up to code. Then property taxes and on and on.
I'd like to ask these people who think our products are elitist,
"How much do you think quality, traceable food is worth?" If
the answer is, say, more than your latest tech gadget, then
what's the problem? No, you can't have it all and you have to
make choices. Back in the 1900s when people paid the true
cost of their food there weren't fancy ipads to tempt them
toward frivolous spending while still needing to eat. If you're
so outraged by price then you should be doing something
about farm subsidies -- which go 99.99% to commodity
producers of corn, wheat, cotton, soy. NOT fruit and veggie
farmers!! If that box of twinkies was actually priced to
reflect the true cost to make it, then a $4 bunch a kale would
seem a lot more reasonable.
Producing food (organically, esp) takes a lot of work, a lot of
energy (human or otherwise) and a lot of money. So if you
care about the food your family eats then stop complaining
about the price, and start feeling lucky there are farms out
there willing to undertake the substantial financial risk to
make it available.
I will be lucky if my business ever breaks EVEN let alone
makes any money for me. I fully expect never to recoup the
kitchen construction costs. (And yes, this irrelevantly means
629
that I have off-farm income somewhere. So I do this work at

great cost to my family.)
Good food costs a lot to produce -- it's just that our country
has been conditioned to think otherwise. Get used to it.
(nycmom)
----@nycmom
I fear for your heart. You took a simple comment about a
grocery store's prices and took it in all sorts of directions. I
shop monthly at Puget Consumers Coop in Seattle which is
likely the store she is referring to. I paid $2.59 there the
other day for a can of black eyed peas. Ihe discount grocery
outlet sells them for 79 cents. Sure 79 cents doesn't buy
organic. But that is still a helluva price disparity.
I recently retired early on social security alone. Needless to
say I'm not living fat on the hog. I'm a vegetarian anyway.
But not eating out and watching prices closely on everything
allows me to be done with a job that was killing my soul and
not doing anything positive for my body. And my weight is
going down and I am much more cheerful and aware.
nycmom-I recommend that you do some soul searching. To
spill so much bile over her comment about grocery prices
does not indicate a happy life being lived.
(Ccommentator)
----Ccommentator
Thank you, but you do not need to worry about my heart or
soul. They are just fine because I AM taking action about the
issue most important to me.
Yes, my post was frustrated, and probably misdirected at
this particular article. But it happens to be about the 1000th
time I've read that good food is "elitist" or overpriced. I
speak from a producer's perspective about the cost of
630
production. It is not for the faint of heart, or faint of wallet

for that matter.
I'm not sure where that $2.79 can of beans you bought came
from, but I can tell you with some certainty that the $.79 can
came from somewhere like China where the workers who
produced it do not enjoy the same Social Security benefits
that you are.
By the way, I'm a vegetarian too and have been since I was a
child. I have a farm and a personal garden. I am on the
board of a very active nonprofit that works specifically on
food justice issues. Previously, I worked very hard for a
grassroots nonprofit to organize sustainable ag groups to
achieve sane federal farm policies. (THAT was and remains
depressing). So please do not say that I am "spilling bile". I
know whereof I speak.
I think the truth is that I offended your wallet. But you made
your choices: you chose an ill-fitting career and then chose to
quit and live on social security. Good for you, I try not to
judge.
I am working hard every day to create a local food economy
and GOOD JOBS(5!). I am very proud of that. A by the way,
just for a fun tidbit of info, the employer contribution to
Social Security is 2x the employee contribution. So I am
doing my part. Are you???
Admittedly I may be over-passionate about my work. Here I
am in my few free minutes (I have little kids too!) putting in
my $.03 on a silly article and responding to you! I need
balance, yes, but not soul-searching. And frankly, I think you
could use some meaningful work. Oh, and if you're worried
about the price of beans, why don't you just by some very
inexpensive dried ones, and plan ahead.
Good Food for All,
NYCMOM / Entrepreneur / Local Food and Farming Activist
/ Very personally-satisfied-person-who-is-not-satisfied-
631
with-our-country's-food-system (nycmom)
----@Susan Wood: Felisa is making CHOICES and some
of them are impractical
Or even self-destructive.
She and her husband lost their jobs in late 2008; they had
two YEARS to reduce their yuppie standard of living and put
something away for the "hard times" in case they didn't find
new jobs (which they did not). They choose to move to a
VERY remote rural area (her parent's vacation cabin)
KNOWING that her husband's UI had just been cut off (after
99 weeks, ahem -- 4 times the former average).
What kind of person says they can't afford PEANUT
BUTTER -- a big jar of the generic stuff is $2.50, less on sale
-- but in other articles tells us she buys KEY LIMES
(imported from Key West, no doubt) and COCONUT OIL (at
something like $15 a jar -- and if it's the highest quality
organic, $30 a jar).
Felisa is this kind of scary broke and near hunger NOT
SIMPLY because of the economy but because of HER
CHOICES. She did not have to move to a remote cabin where
THERE ARE NO DECENT JOBS WHATSOEVER (even if
things improved). She did not have to forgo applying for
food stamps. She did not have to spend whatever windfalls
she gets from relatives or the odd Salon gig on key limes and
coconut oil.
And it doesn't have to be like this, but she STILL SAYS she
won't apply for the food stamps SHE IS ENTITLED TO,
because "she just doesn't feel right about doing that" -- she'd
rather be hungry, or forage for food, than have a pantry of
healthy, fresh, natural basic foods that would last her
through a long hard spell.
I've read a LOT about "foraging" but nothing about why she
chooses not to get the food stamps she is entitled to NOR
632
anything about canning or preserving or "putting food by".

Susan, you stated that this is a political problem and would
never happen in FRANCE, because France has a superior
social safety net. I can't answer for that -- I don't know what
kind of unemployment programs France has -- but I DO
KNOW that we HAVE a safety net, and it's called FOOD
STAMPS and Felisa won't use them. SO I assume even if she
lived in France -- even if we adopt more comprehensive
safety net programs (universal health coverage) SHE
WON'T USE THOSE PROGRAMS.
She wants to live like this. That's what I have concluded. She
likes foraging. She likes feeling sorry for herself. She must
get some "mileage" (sympathy? Checks from the 'rents?
stories published on Salon.com?) from making herself
poorerer and more desperate than is remotely necessary.
(_bigguns)
Oh, and this:
I shop at local farmer's markets and await the first really
local produce with great anticipation each year. In
Northeastern Ohio, we have a lot of farms but a very short
growing season (compared to places like California or
Florida). We do get some amazingly great local produce -organic and conventional alike -- from local farms (some
Amish).
I have personally found that GREAT, fabulous "family farm"
produce is CHEAPER than anything they drag up (unripe)
from Chile or elsewhere. I am confused why it would be
different where you guys are; I suspect you are being ripped
off (maybe by "Whole Paycheck").
The only slight exception is our local strawberries -- fabulous
-- but the growing season is a pathetic 3-4 weeks (less if the
weather is bad). A pint of superb local strawberries was
$4.49 this year (up from $3.99 last year) -- the tough mealy
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imported ones were $2.99. I gladly pay the extra for this
rare and short-lived treat.
But in general, the local stuff is CHEAP. Not as insanely
cheap as in the past, but affordable EVEN by people on food
stamps, or the working poor.
The local squash, onions, peppers, tomatoes, corn -- it just
goes on and on. The summer is a wonderful time here where
we CAN eat locally, every day, for very little.
So I buy LOCAL KALE grown on local farms and it doesn't
cost anything like nycmom's $4 a bunch (yikes! that is
seriously a lot for kale). It used to be around 79 cents; now
it's running $1.19. Again, this is family farm stuff, sometimes
Amish grown -- within 50 miles of my home.
In addition, we have several superb local farmer's markets;
two are within 3 miles of my house. The other is a giant
ethnic food market (delightfully free of yuppie pretensions
and high priced stuff) downtown. There are also a few
"farmer stalls" here and there, like at the local garden center
-- some sell "backyard" produce that is the rival of any
boutique farmers (its where I first got to taste locally grown
"San Marzano"-type tomatoes FRESH, not canned).
And on top of THAT, the local SNAP (food stamp) program
HANDS OUT gift certificates of $5 to $15 of FREE PRODUCE
for anyone with SNAP card (or on SSDI). At one stand, they
have reclaimed several old empty lots around the market
and turned them into "urban farms" growing raspberries,
blueberries, tomatoes, peppers and corn.
The rain made our corn crop late, but we are currently
enjoying awfully good California corn instead. (We'll get our
local corn, just late. When it comes in, it is 10-20 CENTS an
ear. Lordy, people, how much cheaper than THAT could it
get????)
I admire people who farm and produce stuff, but frankly
some of them (loony, self-important, entitled lefty organic
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ones) are impractical and just can't figure out how to

make/grow a GOOD or GREAT product and do it at an
affordable price -- and being angry and entitled doesn't
translate into "we are bad people if we won't buy the $4
kale".
Maybe we are just middle class or working poor and trying
to feed our families at a reasonable cost. That we can't afford
your "baby boutique heirloom veggies" or "$40 truffle oil"
does not translate into "we don't appreciate good, fresh,
healthy local foods". And no, I won't even buy DOG FOOD
that has been made in China; their standards are so abysmal
I can't trust any foodstuffs from there. (I caution people to
avoid Chinese garlic, when we have splendid, vastly superior
American garlic, at all price ranges. CHECK THE LABELS.)
(_bigguns)
----Bigguns
Good for you! You're buying direct from the farm. Better
prices for sure. Again with the judgment for zero reason. We
do not make truffle oil. We do not grow heirloom baby
vegetables. We do, however, make an amazing Roasted
Tomato Sauce that we sell at farmer's markets for $10.
Zucchini relish. Bread and Butter Pickles. Marinated
Mushrooms. Holiday pies made with 100% local fruit (that
we freeze for the winter). We farm and we buy from other
local farms. You make a lot of arrogant assumptions.
We farm and process in New York. Not Ohio. Does that make
me "angry and entitled"? Yes, I'm dyed in the wool lefty. But
I have to admit that starting a business has given me a
different perspective on the cost of doing business. How nice
that you can quote the prices of the produce you buy. Bet you
have no idea of the costs to produce.
Here in the northeast, we have a VERY short growing
season. So preserving that produce for the off-season is
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important.
I NEVER said anyone is "bad" for not buying $4 kale. I never
said we sell it for that price. What I said is that I understand
the actual costs involved in growing, and getting
produce/products to market. Retailers take their own cut,
remember. We operate a low-income CSA. We take food
stamps. We have a farm store. We sell to restaurants. We do
farmers markets. We know a lot about growing
(organically) at as low a cost as possible. It's still not that
low to hire local labor, and pay them fairly and legally, no
matter what you all prefer to think.
So you can make all the assumptions you like about
something you know nothing about. I would love to hear
from other growers and producers, but hey, I don't think
there are too many of them on Salon. I am not angry, I love
my work. I am often frustrated at the expense and red tape
involved. Don't call me entitled. I work around the clock and
invest money in the food system when I could be vacationing
and wearing Prada.
I am not the one being judgmental. I am offering a
perspective that is not offered often. I can promise you your
local (fruit and vegetable) farmers in every state agree with
me. It is unfortunate that food, and especially processed
products are so expensive. God knows, I wish they weren't.
But the reality is that they are. Should I offer a product
below the cost of production? There are not many other
businesses doing what we are doing, and those that are feel
the same way: that consumers must learn to pay more for
local, sustainably-produced food. That's all.
The fact that the economy is in shambles is not our fault. The
unemployment rate and income disparity is not our fault.
That fact alone ought to convince someone like me not to do
what I'm doing, but I do it anyway because it makes me
happy to offer a product that doesn't exist elsewhere. So
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yeah, I guess I'm loony.

I am truly sorry and sad if that offends. (nycmom)
-----
@nycmom
Rest assured that plenty of people appreciate what you've
written here. Farming is hard work, and your commitment
to organic farming says much good about you. I would buy
your stuff in a heartbeat.
One more thing, since you seem to be new here. There are
two Salon letter writers with similar names. The first is
Bigguns, a longtime Salonista who I and others like and
respect, and then there is _Bigguns (note the dash before the
B), a troll. For the sake of the former, whom you might meet
if you stick around here long enough, please don't confuse
her with the latter. (Beans&Greens)
----Thank You!
Thank you Beans&Greens and XyzzyAvatar. Thank you so
much. And many many apologies to the real Bigguns.
Yes, I am new to commenting and do not know the rules. I
read Salon occasionally but it takes something really big or
something about local food to really feeling active.
I am doing the best I can, as I'm sure we all are with what
we're given. I do not intend to seem angry, but I feel
attacked. And I feel attacked not for what work I am doing,
but because a few people have made some very large
assumptions. I suppose that impulse is the same one that has
caused me to jump into the issue with full abandon.
I appreciate those of you who've expressed understanding. It
means a lot. I was briefly tempted to give my company's
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website so everyone can see the good things we are doing -not for more sales because we do not ship -- but I have too
many people who are invested in the work (employees) to
invite hatefulness on my account.
And I just have say. If there is one issue that liberals and
conservatives ought to agree on, it's local food. It's good for
economies, the environment, public health, employment. It
preserves land, prevents sprawl, gives families good clean
fun in the spring and fall (berry picking, pumpkins).
One person's "grocery prices" are another person's
"revenue". It is not so simple and not so small a thing. Low
price is not the only important thing in the world. I think we
all know we vote most strongly with our dollars, no matter
how many we have.
Again, I am passionate not angry (although my husband
might say zealot). Whatever. I still feel pretty good about it
all. (nycmom)
----@nycmom: I'm not the "enemy"
Oh - -and there is no "real bigguns". It's just a username.
Anyone can use it (or a variation on it). Even you.
The big mouth "beanbreath" (Beans&Greens) used to be
Durian Joe, but he doesn't acknowledge that. He gets to
change his username, but in every thread, he has to be SURE
to let people know "I am not the real bigguns" (though there
is no real bigguns...never was, never will be).
I can prove that. HELLO??? hello? bigguns? BIGGUNNNNS?
(See? she isn't here.)
******
I was commenting that you are angry about customers (or
potential customers) who criticize your high prices. (I am
sure your roasted tomato sauce is delicious, but that is FIVE
TIMES the cost of an ordinary jar of bottled tomato sauce;
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what makes yours worth 500% more?)

You mentioned kale, which is why I commented on its price
(I love kale!).
In the final analysis, you seem to be saying "good food has to
cost a great deal more than low quality food, and if you
want HOMEGROWN STUFF, it by necessity will be very
costly". I dispute that.
As I stated, I buy a LOT of local farmer products. My region
(Great Lakes) is not a lot different than yours -- long cold
winters, short growing seasons. So the costs should not be
too different.
The farmer products I buy are either WAY cheaper than the
standard fare from Chile or Mexico OR they are just slightly
higher for a dramatically better product. NOTHING LIKE
FIVE TIMES AS MUCH. I mean like 50 cents extra for
amazing local strawberries vs. awful mealy unripe ones
from Chile. I happily pay this tiny difference.
But if the good local strawberries were (like your roasted
tomato sauce) FIVE TIMES what the Chilean ones were -like FIFTEEN DOLLARS A PINT -- I couldn't afford to eat
them. (Beanbreath could. But not me. I don't earn $240,000
a year.)
I do not know all the details of how these family farms (some
Amish) grow this amazing, gorgeous produce -- honestly, it's
like something out of Dutch still life masterpiece! -- and sell it
for peanuts, but they do. Every year. Its' one of the great,
incredible blessing of living in an ABUNDANT, foodsufficient culture. The good part, we often do not talk about.
(We'd rather snark on the failures.)
They also are not POOR doing this. Farmers in this area are
pretty affluent. (Time Magazine did a recent piece on "Go
into farming and get rich!") The Amish are very, very selfsufficient. They reside in large numbers just an hour south of
me, and it is a great treat to drive past their beautiful, tidy
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farms and acres of corn, wheat and soybeans and other

crops, or the barns of beautiful animals.
So maybe we could take a minute, and stop whinging and
celebrate the great, wonderful abundance of American
farming. It is truly a great thing. (_bigguns)
-----
@Beans&Greens
I like you very much, sir. You are indeed an inspiration. But you are
also such a tool for calling _bigguns a troll. She moves quick, has
things to say, and can do magic ... and you make her seem as dullard
as your diet, as unappealing as your hobbitan smugness. To some of
us you're BOTH the best and the worst of the baby-boomers. To be
nice, I'll just say you're both inspiringly full of life (truly, you are), and
soon -- to be not so nice -- hopefully, full of the holes some of us will
put in you, to help finally rid you out of our way.
@Patrick McEvoy-Halston: I can never make much
sense out of your letters
But this one is short and sweet. And thanks for saying that I
am not a troll (which is true).
A troll is something specific, like that loser vasumurti, who
cuts and pasts HUGE LONG multi-part screeds on veganism,
in threads that are totally unrelated.
My posts are always on topic. I also have to deal with a LOT
of Salon anger at anyone who dares to defy the "lefty liberal
politically correct meme".
Also you get huge creds in my book, Patrick, for the term
'hobbitan smugness". Wish I'd thought of it myself! You
NAILED that ridiculous, preening hypocrite!
640
Unfortunately, you also seem to be suggesting you are going

to shoot both of us. That's troubling. You might wish to ring
the nurse, and ask her to up your meds. (Let her read the last
line of this post, too.) (_bigguns)
----Has anyone else noticed a disturbing trend?
I follow Felisa Rogers' columns. I also follow the comments -all of them.
Has anyone else observed that Patrick McEvoy-Halston
(spelling is probably off) has been sounding like that state
senator who pointed a gun at a reporter?
In the comments on one of Felisa's columns (possibly the one
where she got the bicycle and saw cougar scat), he was
comparing her to a predator herself. Someone joked that it
was a werewolf. He seemed, however, to be saying that she
was preparing herself for the day when she and people like
her -- or, more to the point, like PM_H -- rose up and
attacked Baby Boomers.
He's just talked about "putting holes" in people in this
lettercolumn.
What do people have to do around here to violate the terms
of service and/or creep people out? There are a few people -both on staff and in letters -- whose comments on sexuality
make me want to bleach my brain. There are some master
sarcastics and our resident bullies, trolls, and MRAs.
I don't think even joking remarks about "putting holes" in
people are funny, cool, or remotely safe.
Mister, if you're joking, you're not funny. If you've got
firearms, you're talking about them in an abusive and
unprofessional manner. And this is just a rabid case of
"epater le bourgeois," knock it off. (Greeneyedkzin)
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@Greeneyedzkin
The essential part of the post you are referring to is not really the part
of wishing them (baby boomers like laurel and G&B) full of holes,
believe it or not, it was actually the part about them being so full of
substance, holes become more notable for their working more as
marked inversion. I'm actually not truthfully interested in even
disposing them -- not even just to let some other generation have
their chance: the idea of making anyone shut up, live life with a
shrunken, diminished status is obsene to me: the idea really is just to
enfranchise everybody, and I'm glad I don't think that this is only
accomplished violently, by finding some way to disenfranchise,
discredit or monument and/or "etherealize" (as by, for instance,
making them Elders, Emeretuses -- people already half-way shuffled
off to a higher plane and half-way otherwise sedimentation) the
already strongest voices on the scene. I think baby boomers have yet
more to say, and I would have them say it: but only if it means
fighting through an enfranchised, accustomed way of looking at the
world that actually mostly does them credit -- you are mostly great,
world builders! of the great-Eden-within-a-rock-from-Wrath-of-Khan
type -- but that still prevents them from doing the good they could to
generations after them that are suffering and are determined to suffer
far more yet.
People like Felissa are my more natural true opponents. What she is
up to is I think predatorial -- she is making the worldview of baby
boomers, she is making baby boomers, seem discard-worthy, right
even before them, knowing that because of how she presents herself,
because of their own desire to fit her within their preferences, and
because of their flacid ability to recognize alien viewpoints for so ably
and for such a long time dominating the world scene that
epistemological alienness, true difference, can hardly now even be
seen, her efforts aren't likely to be spotted. Felissa isn't though just a
younger version of most of you -- dashed with the slight, not-muchaggrieving difference that informs you you made sure her generation
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developed their own voice. Her small asides aren't so much potential
draw-aways from the main point as they are actually distinctive tells.
She isn't quite so much taken to Pollan, the whole farmer's-market
scene, vegetarians because they're, though her "friends," and however
much truly admirable, just for one reason or another beyond her
lesser or restricted capacities, but because "they're" all part of a
stupid, indulgent, actually counter-human scene, of the dumb
touristy kind she rejects while out of country. Baby boomers, she
believes, created a world that is removed from struggle and which has
come at the cost of making them ridiculous. They have domesticated
everything around them, removed from view all true disquiet, all true
agitants, making it seem as if the whole point of the universe was to
float up a gargantuan spread of grazers who have gobbled up every
outside affront and are without any otherwise natural inner spur.
Felissa considers this "claiming" a vulgar affront to generations that
struggled their way through their lives, against worlds quite ready to
claim them without hesitation or grief, and who proved with every
true effort -- even if after successive generations there wasn't sign that
these efforts were all that much building on one another -- that
human beings are about some kind of purpose far grander than that.
Trust me, that salamander that didn't daunt to Felissa, that,
diminutive as it is, still would have disproved its claim to its spot, has
to her more worth than a whole cattle farm of Pollan-worshipping
farm-market shoppers.
Her voice is the conservative one, the one that appears at the end of
all good times that believes that buldging flacid excess is about to get
its comeuppance, that it will be finally be showed that difference does
indeed exist out there, is and was always ultimately stronger, and that
it wants to -- quite rightly -- dine on you. Voices of this kind appear at
the beginning of liberal times, but have little weight because their
carriers are too readily made to seem the ones lacking in invigorating
spirit. When they appear at the end of liberal times their weight is
considerable because the mood shifts so that when people compare
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foragers and isolationists to domesticators, exchangers, shoppers,

markets and crowds, "domestication" less seems where civilization
finally got its start than where mankind must have first lost its
fighting spirit and soul.
Though she here and there makes herself seem akin to the Michael
Pollan crowd, I wish it were more obvious that when people tell
Felissa to start greenhouse-farming and going on food stamps that
this is just so laughably something she is building herself to naturally
consider more unwelcome than spotted cougar scat. What she is up to
now is hurriedly doing the struggling, the daily encounters with
survival that surely made her and our ancestors hard but reverant and
spritually great, so that she can feel through accumulation, in
constitution more akin to them. She's effortlessly becoming the story
of how she puts food onto her plate, while you bait her with
remissions that just ensure her course.
Even if the world ensures that there continue to be means for Felissa
to get better foodstuffs, and to get it easier, there is a sense she would
actually take ultimate withering over such easing: it would firmly
include her within a harsh but awesome universe that would
recognize, understand, welcome and incorporate her, in a way it
would surely not if she had allowed herself to become what she is
accused by the ignorant of being: a hipster foodie, whose life is
fundamenally about fun and play rather than really just surviving.
But Felissa and a generation that is mostly like her, because they want
civilization to be shamefully shown up as unequal to the ground it
built itself upon, will ensure politicians happen to get in power that
can't but further wreck it, wiping out social programs that, ostensibly
-- but to her, fully debatably -- help the weak. Eventually social
programs will find their way back in, but only when they point to the
considerable fibre built into a nation of hardy survivors, not to their
absence or fast dissolution, and this is going to take an awful lot of
suffering and fear-encountering/battling days to ensure.
644
If I could wave an all-powerful magic wand I would have Felissa and

her generation know that the kind of conversation and company you
get amidst those farmer crowds, the pompous hipster foodie scenes,
should actually mostly draw you to them. Only because "you've" come
to draw pleasure from suffering and scarcity, from daily proving
victorious over demons that really could full-on devour you, only
because you've surely been relentlessly abused and have become quite
mad does the life you're living now seem such a compelling draw to
you. For of course having no such wand, I gesture to a near equalthough source of future-altering power: Blessed Baby Boomers,
please start really looking at people like Felissa and recognize the
difference between you and them. They're more brutal and savage -considerably so -- and you've got to step in, somehow give them more
life, and make it harder for them to demarcate the line they're already
far-along in establishing between themselves and those like Michael
Pollan who've sadly forgotten what it is to struggle, and are forever
damned for it.
Link: When eating local is the cheapest option (Salon)
--------THURSDAY, JULY 7, 2011
Success story?
For 40 years, I was fat. No sartorial trickery could hide it.
No amount of career or personal success made me forget it. I
want to say I learned to be comfortable in my skin, but it's
not true. I hated being seen with my shirt off -- which meant
no gyms, no swimming pools or beaches. I hated the
multiple-angle mirrors of dressing rooms. I even felt selfconscious ordering food at restaurants. Then, two years ago,
I moved to New York City -- and within 11 months, I wasn't
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fat anymore.
[. . .]
Back in the Midwest, where I lived my entire adult life, the
most common question was, "How did you do it?" Some
people asked with a wink and nod -- you know those vain
coastal people and their shortcuts. No, I didn't have surgery,
didn't take supplements, didn't hire a trainer or even buy a
miracle-cure book.
I walked more, and I ate less.
Part of my diet plan was simple necessity. Back home, I
drove a car everywhere I went. I cherry-picked parking
spots to get as close to the door as possible, shaving my walk
to the minimum. But my normal daily walk in New York City
was about three miles, just getting to school, walking to
work either in Greenwich Village or Midtown and meeting
my friends and wife for dinner.
At the same time, I cut back my eating. (I always thought Id
be fat, Michael Humphrey, Salon, 27 June 2011)
----------
Success story?
Did the psychological troubles that moved your over-eating disappear
with the weight loss too? Or have they just been differently
channeled, and into a form that very pleasantly draws little attention
to their existing?
@Patrick M-H
What psychological problems? Where is that in the article?
Please point it out for us.
646
The author moved from an area where not only did he have
to drive everywhere to get around, he was surrounded by
overweight people who consistently made bad food choices.
In New York, you have no choice. You walk. Just about
everywhere. It's like Toronto or Chicago that way. San
Francisco? Same deal. You might as well walk. (Wasn't it
Mark Twain who quipped that the women in San Francisco
have the best legs in the world?) They're set up as pedestrian
cities.
If you're staying in a reasonable (by that I mean a couple of
miles) distance from home to get things done, you have no
choice but to walk. If you are dumb enough to drive, and IF
you're lucky enough to get a parking spot, you're going to
end up walking about the same distance anyway. There's no
point.
When we moved to Texas from Toronto, I gained 20 pounds.
I never changed my eating habits, I just couldn't walk
everywhere like I used to. There were no sidewalks, ground
level ozone levels were downright dangerous because of all
the trucks and even if I ignored all that, we lived at LEAST a
30 minute drive to go to the grocery store.
When we left that suburbopurgatory and moved to Chicago,
that weight was gone in about 6 months. It was all about
activity level. (Aunt Messy)
@AuntMessy
The author believes it is all about activity level, and makes it seem as
if this is obviously the case, in his losing pounds so readily when he
actually had to walk, but his primary previous difficulty wasn't the
lack of a firm prompt to exercise but that he gorged himself too much,
that he had, as they say, an "unhealthy relationship to food" -- that it
likely served as compensense for his previous profound lack of
attention during childhood. He went to exercise and good foods --
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though maybe in body-hating and certainly body-taming portions:

starvation-level -- because he finds opiate nourishment in belonging
to this new of-the-moment elect club of puritans, who have in their
attainment passed beyond the point of having to look back at any
previous inhibiting sin. If this obese-to-thin movement wasn't now
the rage, beckoning through the privilege of full loss of disavowed self
to join its membership, Michael Humphrey no doubt would, even in
walk-to-work New York, be tagging along that extra-package that ice
cream bars and whiskey surely gift one with.
I hope Salon doesn't become wholly constituted by people in a hurry
to lose all touch with reality. Michael Humphrey isn't fat, but he likely
remains the same man: and that's surely his still ongoing problem.
Link: I thought Id always be fat (Salon)
--------TUESDAY, AUGUST 2, 2011
When a new addiction beckons
When I finally stopped going to bars
A year after I quit drinking, I avoid my old haunts. But now
that I'm not a lush anymore -- what, exactly, do I do?
I quit drinking more than a year ago. It was time. None of
my closest friends said, "Wow, I didn't know you had a
problem," because that was untrue. What they mostly said
was, "Good for you." And, "Let me know how I can be
helpful." But what I struggled with -- and still struggle with,
more than 365 days after I drained my last glass of
sauvignon blanc at a friend's wedding reception -- was
telling people who weren't my closest friends. Who might
have been close, but not that close.
[. . .]
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But since moving back to Texas from New York last month -and embarking on the string of reunion dinners and meetups this entails -- I feel I owe my former drinking buddies
fair warning. I know what it was like to anticipate a
debauched evening at the bar only to hear, "I'm pregnant!"
Or, "I've decided to cut back." And what was going to be a
last-call rager got tragically downshifted to two guilty
glasses and bed by 11 p.m. Yay, good for you, I'd say, sipping
a glass of wine that suddenly felt like it was the size of a
thimble.
[. . .]
When Tim and I did meet for lunch, at a place I remembered
for its hearty salads, we talked about this for a bit. I was
expressing disappointment that I hadn't seen the guys from
the magazine he runs, the guys I usually catch up with over a
pint or four.
"We could go bowling," Tim says. "Or play kickball."
Ugh: sports. I didn't want to sound too negative. But how do
you explain to someone you only know through bar chatter
that you are embarrassed by the world? That you can't do
anything that involves running, sweating or standing
outside? This is why drinking was so convenient. It was a
smoke screen for the fact that I sucked at everything else.
[. . .]
What I really like to do, though -- what I like more than
anything else, more than anything in the world, whether I'm
at the bar or languishing in my apartment -- is to talk to
people. I like to have honest conversations with other
649
humans that surprise me, and challenge me, and make me

think about my life in new ways. It's what I always wanted
from the bar in the first place. And it strikes me, driving
home that day, that it's exactly what I just had. (Sarah
Hepola, When I finally stopped going to bars,
---------fuck that
Thats a lot of nerve about choosing a "healthy
lifestyle"........try boring. Not to say getting drunk off your
ass every night is a good choice but the fact is that sobriety
as it is preached by the American Prude Movement, both
right and left, is pretty fucking boring. So what do you
do?????Play board games and drink decaf coffee. Bad choice,
unless you were headed to the grave on the fast track. And
even then, Fast track to the grave may be a lot more fun than
singing the blues about boredom. (quiet man)
----"Lush"
So people who drink are "lushes". Whatever.
(kugelschreiber)
----Allow me to be bold, as an anonymous voice in an electronic
wilderness. There is a book; a short, simple, cheap book, that
neither preaches, nor feels like self-help in any way. But if it
helps you even a tenth as much as it helped me, it will be
worth you picking it up.
It's called The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle.
I think what you seek will not be found in husband, kids,
drink, job, or any of those things, for those are identities, and
in the finality of it all, fictitious.
The identity is the problem, and this moment is the solution.
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My best wishes and best of luck to you. (John McCall)

----Think of things you like to do and do them
Take a class at the local college. Go on an alumni travel tour.
Hang out at museums. Learn to ride a horse. Find a really
nice cafe and make some new cafe friends. My late mother
used to go out for breakfast at the same place every day.
She'd only have a Danish or some toast and coffee, but over
time she got to know the regulars and so it was always a gettogether. (expatjourno2)
----Ms H, I Know Just How You Feel...
Way back in my 300+ lb days, before I learned I was a Type
2 diabetic, I treated food the way you treated your drinking.
But in my case, I had to stop using food as I had: I ate from
boredom, recreation, fear, anger, fill in the blank.
Once I regulated my eating habits, I learned how to eat
again: B/C I WAS HUNGRY. I was amazed at how much
time and $$ I was wasting on my earlier habits. That's when
I got a life--and I still regulate my blood sugar w/diet and
exercise alone, 15 yrs later and 140 lbs ago.
What you did is what I did: you reclaimed your life and time.
And as you age, you come to appreciate how precious time
really is, and learn not to waste it.
Good for you! (elsma03)
----A year sober
Congratulations!
You've already kept sober for a year and made a major
lifestyle move, back to TX.
I'm assuming you've GOT to have a car now, and there are a
lot of scenic and historical things to see...and since it's now
safe for you to drive... (Greeneyedkzin)
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----Identity
You probably know this but I'm going to say it out loud. It's
not that there isn't anything fun to do outside of going to
bars -- it's that the people you want to spend time with only
know how to have fun at bars. It's a quandary. There are
tons of interesting people doing interesting things at all
times of the day and night without alcohol -- but you have to
shift your sense of your self to find them.
Good luck. I enjoy your writing and I hope that you find
something that works for you. (And have you thought about
corresponding with Roger Ebert?) (amspeck)
----Realize this.
Those old drinking "friends" aren't really friends if they only
like you because you drink with them. I put the cork back in
the bottle twenty-five years ago. There are people I used to
see and drink with weekly who I haven't seen nor spoken
with for twenty-five years. They only wanted to be around a
"Good-time Charlie" and I only wanted my sobriety and life
back. I have new and better friends now, people who enjoy
my company because of who I am, not who I become when
drunk. Good luck. Once you get past the, "nobody loves me"
stage of your new-found life, you'll will get on with the
business of actually living. I wish you peace. (Robert
David Clark)
----The Discoveries Are Inward
It is indeed hard to replace the social aspects of the bars with
the humdrum everyday activities of sobriety. But the sad
truth is that sobriety only got worse until I went inside and
opened up the spiritual longing that I had tried to fill with
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alcohol, sex, drugs or a host of other diversions. I am

grateful now that I have been driven from the rather narrow
diversion of the bars and into the broad and exciting scope of
a spiritual reality (I, frankly, once thought of as bullshit).
Anyone can stop drinking. I did it every day. Sobriety is so
much more than the cessation of drinking: it is the opening
up of a new life of adventure I never imagined to exist.
(trungpapa)
----You shouldn't make fun of these "hobbies"
You lost your hobby, drinking - you should find another one.
There are in fact people who passionately care about art,
book clubs, dance, music, politics, actually important things
that make your life deeper and richer. Find which one of
these you love and throw yourself into it! (TomRitchford)
----On a side note, I second an earlier poster's suggestion that
you learn to ride a horse. It's a great way to get outside and
play without alcohol, sports talk, or boredom. Admittedly,
though, you'd meet more men (if that's one of your goals)
with contra dancing. (EditGrrl)
----Put away your prejudices and the insecurities that you hid
with drinking and choose exercise. Go bowling! Go to a
softball game. There may be drinking there as well but you
might find it easier to avoid. If you can't, go to a yoga class
or a spin class. No drinking there and no one will judge you
if you aren't great at first. You'll find a social circle among
people whose values are healthy in both senses of the word.
(BuffCrone)
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No longer the lush

How about just dwelling on the fact that you appear to have left
something damning behind you, and just in time? I mean it; every
day you could just look at the rest of America that is still, despite all
the news and bad press, keeping on with their depressing bad habits,
their indulgent, self-destructive ways, and know that they -- not you -are going down. You'll find many other former sketchy ones who now
too count themselves amongst the pure -- like that former Salon
editor who lost 200 pounds and kept it off for a year, who wrote in to
let us know that and also of how he has learned to subsist on less than
1200 calories a day, leaving us to think his new reformed self is such
that he needed to learn he still required more than the random
nutrients you inhale as you walk through the streets of New York to
survive; or the new food writer, Felissa, who has left luxuries behind
her and made life "an exercise of reduction" and humility; or the
young un Drew Grant, who newly preaches how "you still owe them
[i.e., your parents] your life and your respect," showing how you're
never too young to scold like an elder and to abort much that could
have interesting in your life for a surer sense of earned protection.
I truly think this is going to get you by. You'll more than survive, and
even thrive, and every day you'll be encouraged to think yourself
elected and deserving. Whatever great adventure you make of your
life now that you've finally begun living, whether it's joining exciting
groups, seeing America's notable sites, or just settling into a less
complicated but more human, satisfying life, it will be this pleasure
that foremost makes you feel you've made a turn for the better.
Link: When I finally stopped going to bars (Salon)
---------
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MONDAY, AUGUST 1, 2011

As gay marriage comes to America
Seven years later, after she'd adopted my biological kids, my
wife and I, along with other Canadian couples, sued
Canada's federal government for same-sex marriage rights.
After a three-year fight, we were victorious and, in 2003,
just after our 10th anniversary, we wed, the coolest group of
daughters and dragmaids at our sides.
In 17-plus years, I had never imagined, not even for a sliver
of a second, that my wife and I would part through any
means besides death -- that's how happy and bonded I
believed we were. If anyone had asked me my favorite thing,
my answer would have been to spend time with my wife.
Doing anything.
Only days before she started making noises about leaving
me, my wife and I were renewing our vows during a horsedrawn carriage ride under the Eiffel Tower, and while the
horse hooves clopped their way along the cobblestone side
streets of Paris, I was swooning. I was delighted at how
fresh our love still was. We were not symbiotic or enmeshed,
but independent, free and happy. Our relationship glowed
with health. When we had issues, we had meetings and
solved them, and nothing went along unresolved.
Then came the shock -- and the unraveling. [. . .] (Jane
Eaton Hamilton, What kept me together after the
divorce, Salon, 19 July 2011)
---------Ms. Hamilton, you're demonstrated something very
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important
When it comes to matters of the heart, homosexuals are no
different from heterosexuals. This is why it is a crime that
homosexuals are not allowed to marry, and thankfully, that
situation is changing. In my own state of Maryland, where
legalizing same sex marriage narrowly failed this year, our
Governor has just announced that he is making passage a
personal legislative priority (unlike the previous attempt). I
have no doubt we'll win this time. New York was a game
changer.
Best of luck to you. (Beans&Greens)
@Beans&Greens, and world-at-large
Re: When it comes to matters of the heart, homosexuals are no
different from heterosexuals.
I'm beginning to suspect that there are liberals out there who support
such things as gay marriage now on the condition that it, one, keeps
them feeling liberal, enlightened -- costumed in just the right way to
keep them feeling "of the moment," enabled by momentum,
protected; and two, because at some point they're betting
"indisputable" evidence will come to light -- of the kind
laurel/_bigguns keeps pointing out that suggests homosexuals ARE
rather different in affairs of the heart: more promiscious; involved in
relationships so distinctly different in kind that they are not
transferable from homo to hetero, or hetero to homo -- that will
permit them a full retraction. "You're actually like that!!! ... Well now,
I was your friend, taking on every bloody elephant in the room in your
support, on the condition you were as you presented yourself to me. I
took you at faith, and you've been lying to me all the time!" With (the
eventual coming of) tea partiers effectively neutered, with most
everyone beginning to sound puritan and rigid, many democrats, in
my judgment, are no longer going to be so much friends of
homosexuals.
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It may be even here, with the inevitable spread of gay marriage that
will so show laurel how out of touch and impotent she is -- "rage
away, lunatic; you're still fated to be just washed away in the torrent!"
-- what we're actually seeing is a setup that will empower, justify a
later heavy and nasty turnabout. The narrative setup may be here to
make it look like the "fallen," homosexuals, almost took control of the
very reigns (!) -- i.e., marriage -- that sourced the most profound
virtues of the country!!! It may be something which will at the end not
so much leave her soaked and humiliated, barely able to stand let
alone shriek, but comfortably throned, expecting the cascade of
inevitable tribute to start, with you just nearby on a spit. You're her
greatest nemesis, and she'll ultimately dine on you, enjoying every
chew of your multi-morseled torso-kabob, and in full concentration
("Beans&Greens but no beans and greens for mEEs tonight!"), but
room first for a few more satisfactions of repentant Salon staff
shuffling up to thank her for her early and brave more good faith
stances, of the kind they humbly submit you couldn't deny they were
at least attempting, but hadn't anywhere near the earthquake of soul
to show it first so boldly and undisguised as she was able.
I would recommend people begin to more see and consider the
implications of the numerous liberals about who are beginning to
sound more and more conservative -- notably in regards to sex and
relationships, but elsewhere too (note the commenter who explained
how Andrew Leonard's ostensibly liberal stance towards government
debt would have seemed conservative 40 years ago). What is going on
here is not so much a change in heart -- though it is about turning on
their own liberalness, "fretting" it now more and more as suspect
permissiveness, unfettered indulgence, excess -- but a concern for
purity, something which always works against groups like
homosexuals for their readily being made to seem those who prosper
when civilization has lost its way, an embodyment of its decadence.
If this happens, the best out there -- good people like you -- will still
be supporting gay marriage, but I'm wondering if even for you this
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voice of love and support comes out strangely and humiliatingly

muted, for your realizing you needed to believe homosexual love was
the same as heterosexual love to provide so much unsecond-guessed
support, to people who deserved your full support regardless. You
might perhaps avoid knowing this, but because the source of this info
will now becoming as much from ostensibly liberal sources as
conservative ones, you'll have a tough time doing so.
----The only requirement for a marriage is MALE AND
FEMALE -- in western civilization, we understand that to be
ONE MAN and ONE WOMAN, which is very logical, as it
takes ONE MAN and ONE WOMAN to make a baby.
Anything else might be lovely or wondeful, loving or even
very long lasting -- but it is not a marriage.
Marriage is a relationship between one man and one
woman.
I hope to see that become the law of the land, by
Constitutional Amendment, in a few years.
I think the awful corruption and payoffs in New York will
only ensure that pro-traditional marriage supporters get
really galvanized in the next election cycle -- they realize
now how easily their rights to traditional marriage can be
taken away, by corrupt politicians bribed by big Wall Street
money. (_bigguns)
----If ANYONE here can understand Patrick McEvoyHalston's rant...
...I'd love to know what the heck he is saying. Honestly, dude,
I cannot make ONE LICK OF SENSE out of anything you
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write -- not one -- and I can't even figure out what side you
are on. (_bigguns)
Laurel, and the takeover of Salon

Laurel, you're not aware of your central lie: that you, at heart, and
despite truly not wishing so, do not think gays are equal to
heterosexuals. If you really thought so, THERE'S NO WAY you'd be as
opposed to gay marriage as much as you are, making it seem as if the
one thing that keeps civilization ago has just been stopped in its
tracks. More than this, I think you think they deserve punishment for
daring to enfranchise themselves in the same way heterosexuals are
enfranchised, for SPOILING, permanently -- simply for trivial, ofthe-moment pleasures they'll quickly come to learn they really have
no use for -- their most treasured institution.
I've heard your call/request, and I'll interpret my post for you: I am
NOT so much someone who suspects that at the end of the day you'll
find yourself helplessly neutered from having any influence here at
Salon letters or "abroad," but rather someone who thinks that even
now you're increasingly "tolerated" here out of felt intuition that
where, that who you are now is kinda where many Salonistas are
going to find themselves in some not-so-long while.
You're registering more and more as simply a voice of punishment;
absolute intolerance for the (ostensibly) idle, spoiled, and delinquent
in whatever guise. Though they're hating it (i.e., your angry wrath)
when you're directing it against gay marriage, I think some sense
yours is the voice of the future, and are more likely to start abiding it
than risk becoming another of its targets. More than this, and because
there are in truth way fewer of these truly ideal Salonistas out there as
you make seem, they're increasingly listening to the part of
themselves that has judged this is a time for curtailment and
responsibility and sacrifice, not yet more stretched-out claims for
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indulging yet more me!me! satisfactions -- what surely got us in these

dire straits, in the first place.
Some imagine you howling, echoing, endlessly but alone, as if shut
out for good from the rest of your kind, but I'm beginning to see you
more as one who might well be speaking to the gathered's "hearts,"
drawing them to you. My strong hunch is that it will be good, loving
(if however annoyingly smug) people like Greens&Beans -- the voices
of true encouragement -- who will find themselves not so much
listened to, at some point.
Link: What kept me together after the divorce (Salon)
---------
THURSDAY, JULY 28, 2011

When society favors the geek
Some say that all narratives ultimately tell only two stories.
One: Someone goes on a journey. Two: A stranger comes to
town. The summer before my eighth-grade year, when I was
12, I experienced the intersection of both. In other words, I
learned how to escape.
This was 1979. My mother had been home from the hospital
for a few months, and my sister, brother and I were just
coming to understand her. Our "new" Mom.
The new version of my mother was a changeling. At 38 years
old, she had suffered, and barely survived, a ruptured brain
aneurysm. The head injury caused her to be mostly
paralyzed on her left side. Her brain became scrambled. She
limped around the house, couldn't tell time and didn't know
the day of the week. Often, she'd make inappropriate
remarks, swearing at the slightest provocation or making
some lewd joke in front of friends. At times, she scared me.
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"Ethan!" she'd yell from her lair. "Help me get up!" She
might be half-dressed in her bed, or on the toilet, or on the
floor, or in the bathtub.
Years before my mother's "accident," as we called it, my dad
had moved several hours away. We saw him regularly, but
he and my stepmom were largely out of the picture. A family
friend had moved in to help take care of my Mom, my
siblings and me. The theory was, Sara Gilsdorf might make a
miraculous recovery, and the friend would move out. We
eventually discovered this would never come to pass.
It didn't take long to figure out I couldn't tame my mother,
not this beast. I knew I couldn't save her, either. I fought
with her for a while, usually battling over her inability -what I mistakenly read as her refusal -- to regain her old life,
be it making a cup of coffee or making a family decision.
After a while, I gave up. And kept my distance. I was stuck
with a mother I was afraid to love.
We began calling her the Momster.
------[. . .]
Then, later that same summer of 1979 when my mom came
home from the hospital, a stranger came to town -- a new
kid moved into the neighborhood. And a new path appeared
to me.
[. . .]
I hung out a lot at JP's house that summer. After a few weeks
of watching "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century," listening to
Electric Light Orchestra's "Discovery," and programming
primitive video games in BASIC on his TRS-80 Radio Shack
computer, JP told me about Dungeons & Dragons.
------[. . .]
That summer, I kept making Super 8 movies, but D&D soon
took over. It quickly became more than a game: It became a
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vital experience that let a geeky, introverted, non-athletic kid

-- a kid who felt about as powerful as a 3-foot hobbit on the
basketball team -- take action, be the hero, go on quests, and
kill monsters. Not that all guys (and they were mostly guys
in those days) who played D&D were geeky, introverted,
non-athletic kids, but enough were, and at least this one felt
invisible. With everything going on at home, perhaps I was
the perfect candidate for escape. But I was also drawn to the
idea of this game. I had always sensed that something was
missing from the real world. My no-budget movies were one
Band-Aid. But shooting my "Star Wars" remakes and clay
monster battles took weeks and resulted in three-minute
movies. Entering the D&D fantasy was effortless,
instantaneous and endless. Epic.
I now see it was no accident that the year I found D&D, or it
found me, coincided with my mother's return from the
hospital. It took courage for a teenage boy to deal with the
Momster -- more courage than I could muster at the time. I
couldn't face down the creature that plagued my own house.
But playing D&D let me act out imaginary, possibly
symbolic battles instead, and distracted me from the
prospect of facing the real ones waged within my family's
four walls. In the D&D playscape, I learned to be confident
and decisive, and feel powerful. Even cocky. Some of the guts
and nerve and derring-do I role-played began to leak into
my real world. By the time I graduated high school, I had
transformed. I had used fantasy to escape but also to gather
strength for later, when I could face and embrace my mother
again. Which, as an adult years later, I finally did.
But in the summer of '79, I was but a newbie. I needed to
gain experience. I had only tasted the power Dungeons &
Dragons. I didn't know that game was about to save my life.
Back to those two archetypal narrative plots: someone goes
on a journey; a stranger comes to town. That summer, two
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strangers came to town: JP, and my mother. Three, if you

count me. I would become a stranger, myself, again and
again. I would play many new roles. I would go on
incredible journeys to imaginary lands. And I would defeat
many monsters.
When I got home that night after my virgin D&D session,
after slipping past my mother, I headed straight for
Webster's. "Cleric |klerik|, noun. A member of the clergy; a
priest or religious leader in any religion." The next day, back
at JP's for another adventure, I would learn that in the D&D
game world, clerics weren't just priests. They were
characters who had dedicated themselves to a god or
perhaps several gods. They could cast spells such as "cure
light wounds" and "protection from evil." They could dispel
the undead.
Surely those powers would come in handy, at home, or in my
head, or in whatever life I would choose to live that summer,
or in some realm far away in the future. (Ethan Gilsdorf,
My Summer of Dungeons and Dragons, 18 July 2011)
-----------
Zero plus zero equals the infinite, apparently

How does hanging out with other geeks end up making you less
somehow of a geek (giving you true courage, of the kind that applies
to the "real"world, etc.)? How does zero plus zero generate anything?
I'm wondering if the truer story is that somewhere along the line
society decided geeks were preferable to healthy self-esteemers, for
their preparedness to take shit, bow to bullying power, and in service
to it, humiliate others with more true backbone: that is, for having no
real self-respect. In preverse times, their disadvantage, their
malformation, actually rendered them more fit, and they ended up
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with subsequent life stories that allowed them to believe their

adolescent escapes had been subsequently revealed as healthy, even
leaderly, pasttimes. Rather than socially retarded, time has
apparently shown them they have as much a claim to being vanguard!
And, oh, the part about his mom becoming the momster, principally
owing to her illness, is foremost a lie: he'd have been hiding away
from a tyrannical mom, battling her bulking likeness in the form of
dragons, demons, and whatnot, regardless. That despite everything
he has accomplished and come to realize, he still cows to her and has
therefore in some profound sense barely moved an inch, is evident in
his emphasizing the illness so you don't think momster was due to
make her years-long appearance in any case. "It wasn't YOU, mom; it
was just the illness: I'm still your good, loyal, appreciative boy brave
knight to your cause, tending cleric to your maladies."
The cruelest fate for fabulous endeavors which would make YOU part
of the tale, is that its history is largely about compensating for a
bullysome world, or rendering it more appropriate for traumasatured minds, rather than about boldly encroaching upon an
insufficiently magicked one even when it shines golden, as it did
during the 70s when D & D was born.
Link:MysummerofDungeonsandDragons(Salon)
MONDAY, JULY 25, 2011

Young predators, and the greens & beans crowd
It was always something: glossy garnet plums, candy red
romas trucked from Mexico in the dead of winter. I wanted
to eat a local, seasonal diet, I really did. I liked the idea of
buying all my produce at the farmers' market, or joining a
CSA, or growing most of our food. But somehow I never got
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around to joining the CSA, and the weekend crowds at our

local farmers' market kept me at bay. We did garden, but
Seattle's seasons were not conducive to a high yield: Some
years our tomatoes never ripened beyond dark green. In the
end, I bought most of our produce at the local grocery store,
where I tried to do my best.
Our local supermarket was an overpriced yuppie mart with
a good selection of local, organic, seasonal produce. I had the
opportunity to use my buying dollars to support small local
farms, but it was rough to shell out $4 for a bunch of kale. I'd
read Michael Pollan's argument: "We [Americans] spend a
smaller percentage of our income on food than any other
industrialized society; surely if we decided that the quality of
our food mattered, we could afford to spend a few more
dollars on it in a week." As much as I admire Pollan, there is
something cavalier in his dismissal of the problem of price.
Does Pollan really remember what it was like to struggle
financially?
[. . .]
My husband and I were both laid off in October of 2008, and

while we've worked on and off since then, we've keenly felt
the economic crunch. For the past three years, our lives have
been an exercise in reduction. First we stopped eating out,
then we stopped buying specialty items, then we found
ourselves unable to afford items that had once seemed basic:
peanut butter, bacon, grapes in February. We moved to the
country in order to cut our expenses, but our move coincided
with the end of my husband's unemployment benefits, and
our budget dwindled more quickly than our expenses.
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[. . .]
Unfortunately, I'm a little late. Many of the mushrooms are

fuzzy with white mold or crawling with black flies, and a few
have been chomped by slugs. I'm knocking a slug off the log
with a stick when I'm startled by a giant mottled
salamander, which seems more annoyed that alarmed by
my presence. It stares at me with obsidian eyes, unmoving.
In all my years in these woods, I've never seen this species
before. And the salamander isn't the only one laying claim to
this territory: A few feet down on the same log, cougar scat
sits like a warning. I think twice about continuing on, but I
can't quite tear myself away from the bounty of mushrooms.
Despite my bad timing, I find clusters of fresh new
mushrooms here and there. The pell-mell arrangement of
logs requires me to duck and stretch in order to get at the
most promising patches. I am crawling across a particularly
precarious log when I hear a heavy thump in the woods
above me. I freeze. A cat wouldn't make any noise if it was
stalking you, I comfort myself. It's probably just an elk ... or
a bear. My heart is hammering. I hop down, dip under the
salamander log, and scramble down the hill to my bike. I set
my bag of mushrooms in the basket and hightail it for home.
(Felissa Rogers, When eating local is the cheapest
option, Salon, 16 July 2011)
----------
Overpriced???
In the last couple years I have put a commercial kitchen in a
barn. My business has a 3 acre orgranic farm where the
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kitchen get its ingredients to make locally grown, locally

processed products like roasted tomato sauce; marinated
mushrooms; pestos; jams; dehydrated herbs (and kale and
apples); pickles galore... the list could go on an on. It is
delicious and fun -- but as you might also guess, expensive! It
just kills me to read (constantly) that foods priced right
(even underpriced!) are considered "elitist" or whatever.
Does it ever occur to anyone how expensive it is to grow and
process locally? We pay local (fair!) wages. We pay payroll
taxes out the wazoo. Workers Comp. About 4 other kinds of
insurance. Plus, I think our kitchen is the only building in
town up to code. Then property taxes and on and on.
I'd like to ask these people who think our products are elitist,
"How much do you think quality, traceable food is worth?" If
the answer is, say, more than your latest tech gadget, then
what's the problem? No, you can't have it all and you have to
make choices. Back in the 1900s when people paid the true
cost of their food there weren't fancy ipads to tempt them
toward frivolous spending while still needing to eat. If you're
so outraged by price then you should be doing something
about farm subsidies -- which go 99.99% to commodity
producers of corn, wheat, cotton, soy. NOT fruit and veggie
farmers!! If that box of twinkies was actually priced to
reflect the true cost to make it, then a $4 bunch a kale would
seem a lot more reasonable.
Producing food (organically, esp) takes a lot of work, a lot of
energy (human or otherwise) and a lot of money. So if you
care about the food your family eats then stop complaining
about the price, and start feeling lucky there are farms out
there willing to undertake the substantial financial risk to
make it available.
I will be lucky if my business ever breaks EVEN let alone
makes any money for me. I fully expect never to recoup the
kitchen construction costs. (And yes, this irrelevantly means
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that I have off-farm income somewhere. So I do this work at

great cost to my family.)
Good food costs a lot to produce -- it's just that our country
has been conditioned to think otherwise. Get used to it.
(nycmom)
----@nycmom
I fear for your heart. You took a simple comment about a
grocery store's prices and took it in all sorts of directions. I
shop monthly at Puget Consumers Coop in Seattle which is
likely the store she is referring to. I paid $2.59 there the
other day for a can of black eyed peas. Ihe discount grocery
outlet sells them for 79 cents. Sure 79 cents doesn't buy
organic. But that is still a helluva price disparity.
I recently retired early on social security alone. Needless to
say I'm not living fat on the hog. I'm a vegetarian anyway.
But not eating out and watching prices closely on everything
allows me to be done with a job that was killing my soul and
not doing anything positive for my body. And my weight is
going down and I am much more cheerful and aware.
nycmom-I recommend that you do some soul searching. To
spill so much bile over her comment about grocery prices
does not indicate a happy life being lived.
(Ccommentator)
----Ccommentator
Thank you, but you do not need to worry about my heart or
soul. They are just fine because I AM taking action about the
issue most important to me.
Yes, my post was frustrated, and probably misdirected at
this particular article. But it happens to be about the 1000th
time I've read that good food is "elitist" or overpriced. I
speak from a producer's perspective about the cost of
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production. It is not for the faint of heart, or faint of wallet

for that matter.
I'm not sure where that $2.79 can of beans you bought came
from, but I can tell you with some certainty that the $.79 can
came from somewhere like China where the workers who
produced it do not enjoy the same Social Security benefits
that you are.
By the way, I'm a vegetarian too and have been since I was a
child. I have a farm and a personal garden. I am on the
board of a very active nonprofit that works specifically on
food justice issues. Previously, I worked very hard for a
grassroots nonprofit to organize sustainable ag groups to
achieve sane federal farm policies. (THAT was and remains
depressing). So please do not say that I am "spilling bile". I
know whereof I speak.
I think the truth is that I offended your wallet. But you made
your choices: you chose an ill-fitting career and then chose to
quit and live on social security. Good for you, I try not to
judge.
I am working hard every day to create a local food economy
and GOOD JOBS(5!). I am very proud of that. A by the way,
just for a fun tidbit of info, the employer contribution to
Social Security is 2x the employee contribution. So I am
doing my part. Are you???
Admittedly I may be over-passionate about my work. Here I
am in my few free minutes (I have little kids too!) putting in
my $.03 on a silly article and responding to you! I need
balance, yes, but not soul-searching. And frankly, I think you
could use some meaningful work. Oh, and if you're worried
about the price of beans, why don't you just by some very
inexpensive dried ones, and plan ahead.
Good Food for All,
NYCMOM / Entrepreneur / Local Food and Farming Activist
/ Very personally-satisfied-person-who-is-not-satisfied-
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with-our-country's-food-system (nycmom)
----@Susan Wood: Felisa is making CHOICES and some
of them are impractical
Or even self-destructive.
She and her husband lost their jobs in late 2008; they had
two YEARS to reduce their yuppie standard of living and put
something away for the "hard times" in case they didn't find
new jobs (which they did not). They choose to move to a
VERY remote rural area (her parent's vacation cabin)
KNOWING that her husband's UI had just been cut off (after
99 weeks, ahem -- 4 times the former average).
What kind of person says they can't afford PEANUT
BUTTER -- a big jar of the generic stuff is $2.50, less on sale
-- but in other articles tells us she buys KEY LIMES
(imported from Key West, no doubt) and COCONUT OIL (at
something like $15 a jar -- and if it's the highest quality
organic, $30 a jar).
Felisa is this kind of scary broke and near hunger NOT
SIMPLY because of the economy but because of HER
CHOICES. She did not have to move to a remote cabin where
THERE ARE NO DECENT JOBS WHATSOEVER (even if
things improved). She did not have to forgo applying for
food stamps. She did not have to spend whatever windfalls
she gets from relatives or the odd Salon gig on key limes and
coconut oil.
And it doesn't have to be like this, but she STILL SAYS she
won't apply for the food stamps SHE IS ENTITLED TO,
because "she just doesn't feel right about doing that" -- she'd
rather be hungry, or forage for food, than have a pantry of
healthy, fresh, natural basic foods that would last her
through a long hard spell.
I've read a LOT about "foraging" but nothing about why she
chooses not to get the food stamps she is entitled to NOR
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anything about canning or preserving or "putting food by".

Susan, you stated that this is a political problem and would
never happen in FRANCE, because France has a superior
social safety net. I can't answer for that -- I don't know what
kind of unemployment programs France has -- but I DO
KNOW that we HAVE a safety net, and it's called FOOD
STAMPS and Felisa won't use them. SO I assume even if she
lived in France -- even if we adopt more comprehensive
safety net programs (universal health coverage) SHE
WON'T USE THOSE PROGRAMS.
She wants to live like this. That's what I have concluded. She
likes foraging. She likes feeling sorry for herself. She must
get some "mileage" (sympathy? Checks from the 'rents?
stories published on Salon.com?) from making herself
poorerer and more desperate than is remotely necessary.
(_bigguns)
Oh, and this:
I shop at local farmer's markets and await the first really
local produce with great anticipation each year. In
Northeastern Ohio, we have a lot of farms but a very short
growing season (compared to places like California or
Florida). We do get some amazingly great local produce -organic and conventional alike -- from local farms (some
Amish).
I have personally found that GREAT, fabulous "family farm"
produce is CHEAPER than anything they drag up (unripe)
from Chile or elsewhere. I am confused why it would be
different where you guys are; I suspect you are being ripped
off (maybe by "Whole Paycheck").
The only slight exception is our local strawberries -- fabulous
-- but the growing season is a pathetic 3-4 weeks (less if the
weather is bad). A pint of superb local strawberries was
$4.49 this year (up from $3.99 last year) -- the tough mealy
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imported ones were $2.99. I gladly pay the extra for this
rare and short-lived treat.
But in general, the local stuff is CHEAP. Not as insanely
cheap as in the past, but affordable EVEN by people on food
stamps, or the working poor.
The local squash, onions, peppers, tomatoes, corn -- it just
goes on and on. The summer is a wonderful time here where
we CAN eat locally, every day, for very little.
So I buy LOCAL KALE grown on local farms and it doesn't
cost anything like nycmom's $4 a bunch (yikes! that is
seriously a lot for kale). It used to be around 79 cents; now
it's running $1.19. Again, this is family farm stuff, sometimes
Amish grown -- within 50 miles of my home.
In addition, we have several superb local farmer's markets;
two are within 3 miles of my house. The other is a giant
ethnic food market (delightfully free of yuppie pretensions
and high priced stuff) downtown. There are also a few
"farmer stalls" here and there, like at the local garden center
-- some sell "backyard" produce that is the rival of any
boutique farmers (its where I first got to taste locally grown
"San Marzano"-type tomatoes FRESH, not canned).
And on top of THAT, the local SNAP (food stamp) program
HANDS OUT gift certificates of $5 to $15 of FREE PRODUCE
for anyone with SNAP card (or on SSDI). At one stand, they
have reclaimed several old empty lots around the market
and turned them into "urban farms" growing raspberries,
blueberries, tomatoes, peppers and corn.
The rain made our corn crop late, but we are currently
enjoying awfully good California corn instead. (We'll get our
local corn, just late. When it comes in, it is 10-20 CENTS an
ear. Lordy, people, how much cheaper than THAT could it
get????)
I admire people who farm and produce stuff, but frankly
some of them (loony, self-important, entitled lefty organic
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ones) are impractical and just can't figure out how to

make/grow a GOOD or GREAT product and do it at an
affordable price -- and being angry and entitled doesn't
translate into "we are bad people if we won't buy the $4
kale".
Maybe we are just middle class or working poor and trying
to feed our families at a reasonable cost. That we can't afford
your "baby boutique heirloom veggies" or "$40 truffle oil"
does not translate into "we don't appreciate good, fresh,
healthy local foods". And no, I won't even buy DOG FOOD
that has been made in China; their standards are so abysmal
I can't trust any foodstuffs from there. (I caution people to
avoid Chinese garlic, when we have splendid, vastly superior
American garlic, at all price ranges. CHECK THE LABELS.)
(_bigguns)
----Bigguns
Good for you! You're buying direct from the farm. Better
prices for sure. Again with the judgment for zero reason. We
do not make truffle oil. We do not grow heirloom baby
vegetables. We do, however, make an amazing Roasted
Tomato Sauce that we sell at farmer's markets for $10.
Zucchini relish. Bread and Butter Pickles. Marinated
Mushrooms. Holiday pies made with 100% local fruit (that
we freeze for the winter). We farm and we buy from other
local farms. You make a lot of arrogant assumptions.
We farm and process in New York. Not Ohio. Does that make
me "angry and entitled"? Yes, I'm dyed in the wool lefty. But
I have to admit that starting a business has given me a
different perspective on the cost of doing business. How nice
that you can quote the prices of the produce you buy. Bet you
have no idea of the costs to produce.
Here in the northeast, we have a VERY short growing
season. So preserving that produce for the off-season is
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important.
I NEVER said anyone is "bad" for not buying $4 kale. I never
said we sell it for that price. What I said is that I understand
the actual costs involved in growing, and getting
produce/products to market. Retailers take their own cut,
remember. We operate a low-income CSA. We take food
stamps. We have a farm store. We sell to restaurants. We do
farmers markets. We know a lot about growing
(organically) at as low a cost as possible. It's still not that
low to hire local labor, and pay them fairly and legally, no
matter what you all prefer to think.
So you can make all the assumptions you like about
something you know nothing about. I would love to hear
from other growers and producers, but hey, I don't think
there are too many of them on Salon. I am not angry, I love
my work. I am often frustrated at the expense and red tape
involved. Don't call me entitled. I work around the clock and
invest money in the food system when I could be vacationing
and wearing Prada.
I am not the one being judgmental. I am offering a
perspective that is not offered often. I can promise you your
local (fruit and vegetable) farmers in every state agree with
me. It is unfortunate that food, and especially processed
products are so expensive. God knows, I wish they weren't.
But the reality is that they are. Should I offer a product
below the cost of production? There are not many other
businesses doing what we are doing, and those that are feel
the same way: that consumers must learn to pay more for
local, sustainably-produced food. That's all.
The fact that the economy is in shambles is not our fault. The
unemployment rate and income disparity is not our fault.
That fact alone ought to convince someone like me not to do
what I'm doing, but I do it anyway because it makes me
happy to offer a product that doesn't exist elsewhere. So
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yeah, I guess I'm loony.

I am truly sorry and sad if that offends. (nycmom)
-----
@nycmom
Rest assured that plenty of people appreciate what you've
written here. Farming is hard work, and your commitment
to organic farming says much good about you. I would buy
your stuff in a heartbeat.
One more thing, since you seem to be new here. There are
two Salon letter writers with similar names. The first is
Bigguns, a longtime Salonista who I and others like and
respect, and then there is _Bigguns (note the dash before the
B), a troll. For the sake of the former, whom you might meet
if you stick around here long enough, please don't confuse
her with the latter. (Beans&Greens)
----Thank You!
Thank you Beans&Greens and XyzzyAvatar. Thank you so
much. And many many apologies to the real Bigguns.
Yes, I am new to commenting and do not know the rules. I
read Salon occasionally but it takes something really big or
something about local food to really feeling active.
I am doing the best I can, as I'm sure we all are with what
we're given. I do not intend to seem angry, but I feel
attacked. And I feel attacked not for what work I am doing,
but because a few people have made some very large
assumptions. I suppose that impulse is the same one that has
caused me to jump into the issue with full abandon.
I appreciate those of you who've expressed understanding. It
means a lot. I was briefly tempted to give my company's
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website so everyone can see the good things we are doing -not for more sales because we do not ship -- but I have too
many people who are invested in the work (employees) to
invite hatefulness on my account.
And I just have say. If there is one issue that liberals and
conservatives ought to agree on, it's local food. It's good for
economies, the environment, public health, employment. It
preserves land, prevents sprawl, gives families good clean
fun in the spring and fall (berry picking, pumpkins).
One person's "grocery prices" are another person's
"revenue". It is not so simple and not so small a thing. Low
price is not the only important thing in the world. I think we
all know we vote most strongly with our dollars, no matter
how many we have.
Again, I am passionate not angry (although my husband
might say zealot). Whatever. I still feel pretty good about it
all. (nycmom)
----@nycmom: I'm not the "enemy"
Oh - -and there is no "real bigguns". It's just a username.
Anyone can use it (or a variation on it). Even you.
The big mouth "beanbreath" (Beans&Greens) used to be
Durian Joe, but he doesn't acknowledge that. He gets to
change his username, but in every thread, he has to be SURE
to let people know "I am not the real bigguns" (though there
is no real bigguns...never was, never will be).
I can prove that. HELLO??? hello? bigguns? BIGGUNNNNS?
(See? she isn't here.)
******
I was commenting that you are angry about customers (or
potential customers) who criticize your high prices. (I am
sure your roasted tomato sauce is delicious, but that is FIVE
TIMES the cost of an ordinary jar of bottled tomato sauce;
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what makes yours worth 500% more?)

You mentioned kale, which is why I commented on its price
(I love kale!).
In the final analysis, you seem to be saying "good food has to
cost a great deal more than low quality food, and if you
want HOMEGROWN STUFF, it by necessity will be very
costly". I dispute that.
As I stated, I buy a LOT of local farmer products. My region
(Great Lakes) is not a lot different than yours -- long cold
winters, short growing seasons. So the costs should not be
too different.
The farmer products I buy are either WAY cheaper than the
standard fare from Chile or Mexico OR they are just slightly
higher for a dramatically better product. NOTHING LIKE
FIVE TIMES AS MUCH. I mean like 50 cents extra for
amazing local strawberries vs. awful mealy unripe ones
from Chile. I happily pay this tiny difference.
But if the good local strawberries were (like your roasted
tomato sauce) FIVE TIMES what the Chilean ones were -like FIFTEEN DOLLARS A PINT -- I couldn't afford to eat
them. (Beanbreath could. But not me. I don't earn $240,000
a year.)
I do not know all the details of how these family farms (some
Amish) grow this amazing, gorgeous produce -- honestly, it's
like something out of Dutch still life masterpiece! -- and sell it
for peanuts, but they do. Every year. Its' one of the great,
incredible blessing of living in an ABUNDANT, foodsufficient culture. The good part, we often do not talk about.
(We'd rather snark on the failures.)
They also are not POOR doing this. Farmers in this area are
pretty affluent. (Time Magazine did a recent piece on "Go
into farming and get rich!") The Amish are very, very selfsufficient. They reside in large numbers just an hour south of
me, and it is a great treat to drive past their beautiful, tidy
677
farms and acres of corn, wheat and soybeans and other

crops, or the barns of beautiful animals.
So maybe we could take a minute, and stop whinging and
celebrate the great, wonderful abundance of American
farming. It is truly a great thing. (_bigguns)
-----
@Beans&Greens
I like you very much, sir. You are indeed an inspiration. But you are
also such a tool for calling _bigguns a troll. She moves quick, has
things to say, and can do magic ... and you make her seem as dullard
as your diet, as unappealing as your hobbitan smugness. To some of
us you're BOTH the best and the worst of the baby-boomers. To be
nice, I'll just say you're both inspiringly full of life (truly, you are), and
soon -- to be not so nice -- hopefully, full of the holes some of us will
put in you, to help finally rid you out of our way.
@Patrick McEvoy-Halston: I can never make much
sense out of your letters
But this one is short and sweet. And thanks for saying that I
am not a troll (which is true).
A troll is something specific, like that loser vasumurti, who
cuts and pasts HUGE LONG multi-part screeds on veganism,
in threads that are totally unrelated.
My posts are always on topic. I also have to deal with a LOT
of Salon anger at anyone who dares to defy the "lefty liberal
politically correct meme".
Also you get huge creds in my book, Patrick, for the term
'hobbitan smugness". Wish I'd thought of it myself! You
NAILED that ridiculous, preening hypocrite!
678
Unfortunately, you also seem to be suggesting you are going

to shoot both of us. That's troubling. You might wish to ring
the nurse, and ask her to up your meds. (Let her read the last
line of this post, too.) (_bigguns)
----Has anyone else noticed a disturbing trend?
I follow Felisa Rogers' columns. I also follow the comments -all of them.
Has anyone else observed that Patrick McEvoy-Halston
(spelling is probably off) has been sounding like that state
senator who pointed a gun at a reporter?
In the comments on one of Felisa's columns (possibly the one
where she got the bicycle and saw cougar scat), he was
comparing her to a predator herself. Someone joked that it
was a werewolf. He seemed, however, to be saying that she
was preparing herself for the day when she and people like
her -- or, more to the point, like PM_H -- rose up and
attacked Baby Boomers.
He's just talked about "putting holes" in people in this
lettercolumn.
What do people have to do around here to violate the terms
of service and/or creep people out? There are a few people -both on staff and in letters -- whose comments on sexuality
make me want to bleach my brain. There are some master
sarcastics and our resident bullies, trolls, and MRAs.
I don't think even joking remarks about "putting holes" in
people are funny, cool, or remotely safe.
Mister, if you're joking, you're not funny. If you've got
firearms, you're talking about them in an abusive and
unprofessional manner. And this is just a rabid case of
"epater le bourgeois," knock it off. (Greeneyedkzin)
679
@Greeneyedzkin
The essential part of the post you are referring to is not really the part
of wishing them (baby boomers like laurel and G&B) full of holes,
believe it or not, it was actually the part about them being so full of
substance, holes become more notable for their working more as
marked inversion. I'm actually not truthfully interested in even
disposing them -- not even just to let some other generation have
their chance: the idea of making anyone shut up, live life with a
shrunken, diminished status is obsene to me: the idea really is just to
enfranchise everybody, and I'm glad I don't think that this is only
accomplished violently, by finding some way to disenfranchise,
discredit or monument and/or "etherealize" (as by, for instance,
making them Elders, Emeretuses -- people already half-way shuffled
off to a higher plane and half-way otherwise sedimentation) the
already strongest voices on the scene. I think baby boomers have yet
more to say, and I would have them say it: but only if it means
fighting through an enfranchised, accustomed way of looking at the
world that actually mostly does them credit -- you are mostly great,
world builders! of the great-Eden-within-a-rock-from-Wrath-of-Khan
type -- but that still prevents them from doing the good they could to
generations after them that are suffering and are determined to suffer
far more yet.
People like Felissa are my more natural true opponents. What she is
up to is I think predatorial -- she is making the worldview of baby
boomers, she is making baby boomers, seem discard-worthy, right
even before them, knowing that because of how she presents herself,
because of their own desire to fit her within their preferences, and
because of their flacid ability to recognize alien viewpoints for so ably
and for such a long time dominating the world scene that
epistemological alienness, true difference, can hardly now even be
seen, her efforts aren't likely to be spotted. Felissa isn't though just a
younger version of most of you -- dashed with the slight, not-muchaggrieving difference that informs you you made sure her generation
680
developed their own voice. Her small asides aren't so much potential
draw-aways from the main point as they are actually distinctive tells.
She isn't quite so much taken to Pollan, the whole farmer's-market
scene, vegetarians because they're, though her "friends," and however
much truly admirable, just for one reason or another beyond her
lesser or restricted capacities, but because "they're" all part of a
stupid, indulgent, actually counter-human scene, of the dumb
touristy kind she rejects while out of country. Baby boomers, she
believes, created a world that is removed from struggle and which has
come at the cost of making them ridiculous. They have domesticated
everything around them, removed from view all true disquiet, all true
agitants, making it seem as if the whole point of the universe was to
float up a gargantuan spread of grazers who have gobbled up every
outside affront and are without any otherwise natural inner spur.
Felissa considers this "claiming" a vulgar affront to generations that
struggled their way through their lives, against worlds quite ready to
claim them without hesitation or grief, and who proved with every
true effort -- even if after successive generations there wasn't sign that
these efforts were all that much building on one another -- that
human beings are about some kind of purpose far grander than that.
Trust me, that salamander that didn't daunt to Felissa, that,
diminutive as it is, still would have disproved its claim to its spot, has
to her more worth than a whole cattle farm of Pollan-worshipping
farm-market shoppers.
Her voice is the conservative one, the one that appears at the end of
all good times that believes that buldging flacid excess is about to get
its comeuppance, that it will be finally be showed that difference does
indeed exist out there, is and was always ultimately stronger, and that
it wants to -- quite rightly -- dine on you. Voices of this kind appear at
the beginning of liberal times, but have little weight because their
carriers are too readily made to seem the ones lacking in invigorating
spirit. When they appear at the end of liberal times their weight is
considerable because the mood shifts so that when people compare
681
foragers and isolationists to domesticators, exchangers, shoppers,

markets and crowds, "domestication" less seems where civilization
finally got its start than where mankind must have first lost its
fighting spirit and soul.
Though she here and there makes herself seem akin to the Michael
Pollan crowd, I wish it were more obvious that when people tell
Felissa to start greenhouse-farming and going on food stamps that
this is just so laughably something she is building herself to naturally
consider more unwelcome than spotted cougar scat. What she is up to
now is hurriedly doing the struggling, the daily encounters with
survival that surely made her and our ancestors hard but reverant and
spritually great, so that she can feel through accumulation, in
constitution more akin to them. She's effortlessly becoming the story
of how she puts food onto her plate, while you bait her with
remissions that just ensure her course.
Even if the world ensures that there continue to be means for Felissa
to get better foodstuffs, and to get it easier, there is a sense she would
actually take ultimate withering over such easing: it would firmly
include her within a harsh but awesome universe that would
recognize, understand, welcome and incorporate her, in a way it
would surely not if she had allowed herself to become what she is
accused by the ignorant of being: a hipster foodie, whose life is
fundamenally about fun and play rather than really just surviving.
But Felissa and a generation that is mostly like her, because they want
civilization to be shamefully shown up as unequal to the ground it
built itself upon, will ensure politicians happen to get in power that
can't but further wreck it, wiping out social programs that, ostensibly
-- but to her, fully debatably -- help the weak. Eventually social
programs will find their way back in, but only when they point to the
considerable fibre built into a nation of hardy survivors, not to their
absence or fast dissolution, and this is going to take an awful lot of
suffering and fear-encountering/battling days to ensure.
682
If I could wave an all-powerful magic wand I would have Felissa and

her generation know that the kind of conversation and company you
get amidst those farmer crowds, the pompous hipster foodie scenes,
should actually mostly draw you to them. Only because "you've" come
to draw pleasure from suffering and scarcity, from daily proving
victorious over demons that really could full-on devour you, only
because you've surely been relentlessly abused and have become quite
mad does the life you're living now seem such a compelling draw to
you. For of course having no such wand, I gesture to a near equalthough source of future-altering power: Blessed Baby Boomers,
please start really looking at people like Felissa and recognize the
difference between you and them. They're more brutal and savage -considerably so -- and you've got to step in, somehow give them more
life, and make it harder for them to demarcate the line they're already
far-along in establishing between themselves and those like Michael
Pollan who've sadly forgotten what it is to struggle, and are forever
damned for it.
Link: When eating local is the cheapest option (Salon)
--------Building upon a good review of the Deathly Hallows
Conclusions to fantasy epics and quest narratives pose a
diabolical problem for their creators, one that calls to mind a
remark I once read in a journal by Edmund Wilson, one of
the 20th century's greatest cultural critics. Late in his life
Wilson had decided to give up reading history, he wrote,
because "I know the kinds of things that happen." Epic
fantasy is, if possible, even more familiar than history, in
that we know exactly what will happen: Good will triumph
over evil at great price, but only after the hero endures a
crisis of self-doubt and agrees to sacrifice himself for the
683
greater good. So the execution of such a conclusion becomes

largely a technical matter, a matter of How more than
What, and still less Why. In the case of "Harry Potter and the
Deathly Hallows: Part 2," a movie with no beginning and no
middle but two-plus hours of thundering, momentous
ending, all of this is carried to a comical extreme.
I'm not trying to wage some kind of King Canute battle
against the tide of approbation for this remarkable series
and its final chapter, honest. I am suggesting that we're all
congratulating the filmmakers for not having screwed the
whole thing up too badly. (Which is something to be
celebrated: Consider the ever-dwindling "Chronicles of
Narnia" series, or the disastrous efforts to turn Philip
Pullman's "His Dark Materials" and Lemony Snicket's
"Series of Unfortunate Events" into movie franchises.)
Director David Yates, screenwriter Steve Kloves and their
formerly young cast -- Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and
Emma Watson began this enterprise as schoolchildren and
now seem ready for divorces and rehab clinics -- bring the
Potter cycle to rest with a great cinematic clash of cymbals
(and symbols). "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part
2" is a grave and violent picture built around the large-scale
destruction of Hogwarts, Harry's beloved alma mater, and
the final confrontation between Harry (Radcliffe) and the
reptile-headed Dark Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), who
are linked to each other in ways they don't quite understand.
As he began to do in "Deathly Hallows: Part 1," Yates
deliberately recalls the inspirational movies about the blitz of
London and the lonely courage with which the British faced
Hitler in the dark early years of World War II. I don't know
whether J.K. Rowling has ever discussed the Battle of Britain
as an influence on her fantasy universe, but she's precisely
the right age to have been raised on such national
684
mythological tales of Churchill-era nobility and sacrifice.

While most of "Deathly Hallows: Part 2" is set in and around
the climactic siege of Hogwarts -- in which, yes, some
beloved Potterworld personages will die -- we also see
Harry, red-headed Ron (Grint) and shockingly grown-up
Hermione (Watson, of course, but in this sequence also
played by Helena Bonham Carter, and don't make me
explain) stage a daring raid on the Gringotts Wizarding
Bank, which ends with an abused captive dragon totally
destroying the place. Any consonance with current events,
which renders it especially satisfying to witness a bank
reduced to rubble, is presumably coincidental. (As we now
know, many financial institutions in the Muggle universe are
also run by greedy and untrustworthy goblins.)
If the Gringotts raid is one of the Potter series' most effective
uses of large-scale CGI effects, I found much of the final
battle at Hogwarts, including the O.K. Corral showdown
between Harry and Voldemort, disappointingly generic. Oh,
I don't mean that it's boring to sit through, exactly. There's a
whole lot of spell-casting and Death-Eating and exploding
Gothic architecture and Fiennes' lizard-man Voldemort
howling in pain and pointlessly murdering underlings as
Harry and friends gradually discover and destroy the
Horcruxes that contain fragments of his soul. (I can't stop
myself: The next-to-last Horcrux is inside ... mmrp! Stifled
by the Spoiler Cops, just in time.) Yates and
cinematographer Eduardo Serra do a nice job of keeping the
viewer oriented in space and time, no mean feat when space
is an imaginary digital artifact and time is completely
elastic. There's a lovely and crucial flashback sequence into
the memories of ber-Goth potions expert turned Hogwarts
headmaster Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) -- for my money
the most compelling character in the whole series -- whose
685
long-running and ambiguous role in the Potter mythos is

finally revealed.
Along with Rickman, numerous other beloved players make
final cameos, making this peculiar film -- which is
simultaneously too short and too long -- feel an awful lot like
an extended curtain call. Maggie Smith as Prof. McGonagall
and Jim Broadbent as Prof. Slughorn, Robbie Coltrane as
Hagrid, Tom Felton as the chastened Draco Malfoy, Bonham
Carter as the adorably evil Bellatrix Lestrange, David
Thewlis as lycanthrope Remus Lupin and Evanna Lynch as
New Agey Celtic seer Luna Lovegood all get a few seconds of
screen time. So do various departed characters, including
Harry's long-dead parents, Gary Oldman as Sirius Black
and of course Michael Gambon as Albus Dumbledore, who
appears in a misty-moisty afterlife scene where Yates
simultaneously manages to screw up a crucial plot point and
render the spiritual underpinnings of the entire Potter
franchise as total bollocks. (We also meet Dumbledore's
grouchy brother, nicely played by Ciarn Hinds, a personal
favorite.) And I guess Harry's so-called paramour Ginny
Weasley (Bonnie Wright) makes an appearance, but not so
you'd notice it. (Potter fans hate me for this one, but the
submerged sexual tension between Harry, Hermione and
Ron is a central element of this universe, and one Rowling
herself seems barely aware of. Ginny is a transparent and
inadequate attempt to defuse it.)
What bugs me about "Deathly Hallows: Part 2" may be an
inevitable consequence of the fact that Yates and Kloves,
previous directors Chris Columbus, Mike Newell and Alfonso
Cuarn, and everybody else who's worked on this amazing
14-year, eight-film odyssey has had to serve so many
masters. Loyalty to both the letter and spirit of Rowling's
books was more important than it almost ever is in a
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Hollywood production, because the universe of Potter

fandom is so large, so well-organized and so vocal. But the
filmmakers also had to appeal to moviegoers who hadn't
read the books and were absorbing the whole story onscreen, as well as casual viewers who might dip in and out,
depending on reviews or what their friends said, in search of
an exciting yarn but without much caring about the history
of the Diadem of Ravenclaw or the backstage intrigue
among the Hogwarts faculty.
Viewed in that light, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:
Part 2" is an adequate and often artful exercise in checking
off boxes. If you haven't imbibed a minimum of four or five
other Potter books and/or movies, including "Deathly
Hallows: Part 1," then the exposition surrounding the action
sequences will be total gibberish and you shouldn't even
bother. (By the way, I saw it in Imax 3-D, and unless you
can't stop yourself don't spend the extra money.) This is
almost entirely a movie for the Potter fan base, which may
have been the only possible outcome in adapting Rowling's
torrents of verbiage, dense plotting and encyclopedic
arcana. But this final installment, driven far less by acting
and characterization than any of the preceding seven, fails
the Peter Jackson test of becoming an affecting and
absorbing work on its own terms.
The "O Children" sequence in "Deathly Hallows: Part 1," and
indeed the entire haunted, lonely middle section of that
vastly superior movie, have stayed with me powerfully.
Hours after seeing this one, I don't look back on it with any
emotion, or even much in the way of sense-memory.
Radcliffe as Harry, and even more so Fiennes as the
wounded Voldemort, who feels victory escaping his grasp as
evil wizards always will, are both splendid. But the final
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confrontation between these intertwined geniuses, at least as

we see it here, has no moral or intellectual heft; it's a
lightning-bolt battle out of a 1980s "Doctor Strange" comic.
(I'm not saying that's the worst thing in the world.) Seconds
later, I was out on the sidewalk in front of the theater, feeling
a little baffled and irritated: Wait, Dumbledore said what to
Snape and what to Harry? Voldemort is incapable of killing
Harry because ... why, exactly? Which Horcrux is the giant
snake and which one is the Magic Cup of H.R. Pufnstuf?
What the Sam Hill are the Deathly Hallows again, and what
do they have to do with anything? (Answer: They don't.)
So ends this enormously important, and enormously
extended, chapter of pop culture, with a combination of bang
and whimper. Nothing quite like this series has ever been
tried before in cinema history, and as I wrote last year,
following the central trio of Radcliffe, Grint and Watson
through the aging process has itself forced the movies to
confront Rowling's central themes, which I take to be "the
painful transition from childhood to adulthood, the loss of
parents and loved ones, the first intimations of personal
mortality." For better or worse, Rowling's books and the hitand-miss movies based on them have reshaped not just the
marketplace for fiction and film but the contemporary
cultural imagination, re-establishing fantasy as the central
narrative mode (arguably for the first time since the Middle
Ages). I suspect that Rowling will remain popular for a long
time while the films fade a lot more rapidly into the
background. But we have only begun to live in the world
they made. (Andrew OHehir, Harry Potter and the
Deathly Hallows Part 2, Salon, 13 July 2011)
----------
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Alas ... fantasy

Churchill-as-heroic-leader is the kind of fantasy that was being
chisseled away at in more post modern-centered departments of
universities. It's admirable to be willing to gout impossible leaders, to
not need to so much inflate reality, even if in "your" deconstruction
you're still kinda neglecting it; and I think it's THIS firm "medieval"
retreat back to fantasy that I am most apprehensive of. It's what the
genre had least need of: sign that when it finally takes off and
overtakes the literary, the primarily reality-avoidist geeks are surely
in charge. This whole G.R.R Martin thing is probably the same thing:
pasture-inclined, actually knowing older critics ascenting to legitimize
a genre that looks to coast them through the rest of the way with a
steady stream of discord-obliterating lies. It has momentum, is
constituted not to confront, seems legitimate in harkening back to an
unfairly neglected, inherently meaningful manner of story-telling that
ruled before bourgeois prefences staked their claim, and is wellwritten enough to cover your ass. And that's apparently plenty.
Struck me as a very astute review. I'm not sure if seeing this will do
me much good, and might just keep aside. It's nostalgia for a time
that nurtured the rebellious, irreverant period that enabled so many
striking, baby-boomer greats (I agree about Snape), without a stir to
reclaim it (the "next generation" seem to me, mini-mes, at best: I wish
them well, but I wish people would stop just complementing,
encouraging them -- trust me, they'll all soon be drawn to rage,
alchohol, and flights from reality; they're ALREADY war-torn, and yet
they'll still be amongst the BEST of their generation). It looks to be
mostly for the lost.
I'm not seeing Hobbit either. LOTR had many of the qualities I look
for, but Jackson doesn't have it to stay Paul Krugman-like on course.
It'll be lapse, not prelude. Maybe at some point at Salon we can put
aside the primarily you-pleasing Gaimans and Harry Potters, and go
with some Ursula LeGuins and Gene Wolfes and Michael Bishops-those who'd recognize all that was going on between their characters,
and mostly motion you to really see and understand it; fantasy writers
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who are really at base mostly reality OBSERVERS, not escapism

ENABLERS. If not, then how about we just tunnel our way further
into the McEwans, Kingsolvers, and Updikes.
Let us not put too fine a point on it
But the neomedieval or Gothic Revival aesthetic began in the
19th century - in England in particular - and has not really
abated since then, despite every modernist claim to cultural
rupture & transgression. Gothicism is an incredibly
powerful, universal language. Consciously or not, every
generation grapples with The Gothic in it's own way (just as
they will with classicism.) There is a strong argument to be
made that it has not entirely abated at any time since the
Middle Ages, and realism, itself a fantastic kind of stylization
(that I like very much) is the anomaly.
I think it's important to point out that the reason the 19th
century Gothic revivalists were so ga-ga about the Medieval
was precisely for the purpose of establishing cultural
continuity & rebuking the idea of neoclassical, post-medieval
rupture. They meant nothing less than to heal the chain of
historical continuity that had been (and remains) broken.
You don't have to like medieval art to appreciate the wisdom
of this, and the danger of cultural amnesia and hubris that
makes a nostalgic, trite fetish of our shared past.
Having said that, these Potter movies barely scratch the
surface of medieval aesthetics & it takes disciplined
willpower to divine the medieval experience of Art. Maybe if
as a culture we dared to stop talking about budgets & deficits
& money 24-7, we would be more worthy of the privilege of
communing with our ancestors. (Del Rio)
@del rio
Will you make your point more strongly why we shouldn't want to
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disconnect ourselves entire from a time of lords and peasants, of

knights, hacking one-another to death, for the smallest of slights?
Perhaps healing begins only once you've made the source of pain go
away, when you've developed the courage to balk expectations and
simply walk away.
We needn't look to the past and see relatives, you know. I simply see
different people -- almost different things, and not ancestral ones;
ones I wish knew the self-aware states possible to many of us, proved
actually worthy of remembering, emulating, commuting with, without
this really amounting to wrong-headed fancy, a regreful waste of
time.
It may be that it requires "disciplined willpower to divine the
medieval experience of Art," but it surely more requires an evolved
ability to see things straight, and, in my judgment, an ability to access
mental states that are significantly inferior to your own; and I'm not
sure the two can go together. It might well be impossible to be a
Medieval historian (or historian of the Medieval Ages, if you prefer) -what a fascinating, and quite possibly true, thought!
There seems to be an underlying
cynicism in Mr. O'Hehir's review and in the whole genre of
fantasy.
The fact is there has been no serious public scandal
surrounding the cast (Mr. Radcliffe's recent admission about
his issues was not dragged through the public eye), that all
the young actors in the film seem to have matured as a
group as pretty straight forward and regular people with
the potential to become skilled in their craft or move on to
other pursuits.
These films are a progression as the books are.
As for what is more entertaining, a repeated group of adults
getting drunk and losing consciousness in movie after movie
or a group of films that strung together that tell a story...
well, juvenalia has nothing to do with age now does it.
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Nothing would have made the reviewer enjoy this movie

except the end credits. (Helpmehannah)
@helpmehannah
Re: The fact is there has been no serious public scandal surrounding
the cast (Mr. Radcliffe's recent admission about his issues was not
dragged through the public eye), that all the young actors in the film
seem to have matured as a group as pretty straight forward and
regular people with the potential to become skilled in their craft or
move on to other pursuits.
These films are a progression as the books are.
As for what is more entertaining, a repeated group of adults getting
drunk and losing consciousness in movie after movie or a group of
films that strung together that tell a story... well, juvenalia has
nothing to do with age now does it.
The kids have "matured" into a time when they will spend the rest of
their lives as royalty, where the public will mostly constrain
themselves to see royalty as regal-but-plain stalwarts, and where
royalty will consent to make it very easy to imagine themselves this
way -- not insisting on dragging their whatever erroneous
misadventures/wanderings through the public eye. At some level we
understand that behind the scenes they're uncentered, skitterish,
unstable, fully-dependent and mostly-infantile catastrophic messes,
but they are constituted to stand erect and do what is expected of
them while in public, and to do what they can to at least attempt to
blanche/fagellate anything interesting and unexpected out of their
personal lives as well.
Their parents got to be individuals and free and genuinely interesting
-- even if now mostly just seen as pompous, absurd, scenecrowding/stealing douches; these kids are the relief from true
accomplishment and will only be the publics'. I actually doubt they'll
divorce, but even if they do they'll consent to make it seem a private
matter and a themselves-discrediting shame that should be swept as
soon as possible under the table, rather than the baby-boomer style of
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being unleashed and alive to the world again.

If it means sensing that the future generation is going to go along life
as if following a script they'll never know the stuff to deter from -group suffering, heroes arising from the ranks, toppling of allpowerful evil menace to gift a subsequent generation with the chance
of a better world -- then a strung-together, well-told story can indeed
be depressing. "You'll" simply do as directed, and therefore never
really nurture your own story. You had a right to that, as much as
anyone. Hope you get a do-over.
pretty brainy responses for a kids movie!
I love to see folks exercising their grad school muscles.
O Hehir does have knee-jerk disdain for the genre, with some
good reason: when Hollywood processes books they always
come out black and white-- a mirror of events processed
through our pathetic media.
HPATDH2 displays the book's major plot weaknesses-- so
much depends on random chance, like it happening to be
Draco's mom who examines Harry, or Harry stumbling on
Shape in time to get his all-important memories.
I'm not impressed with Daniel Radcliffe-- he just doesn't
seem to have much character. Sorry, I said it. The parts of
the movie that shone for me were when the grand old actors
roused to the defense of the castle-- the kid's parts were like
Gap ads in comparison.
I don't know what O Hehir is talking about in the afterlife
scene-- that seemed very close to the book, and I thought
explained things competently.
Oh, and Ron looks like a total schlub at the end-- which, also
taken without alteration from the book, always struck me as
a parent-centered anticlimax.
But there it is-- we may grow up in a magical world, but
sooner or later we turn into boring grownups-- so don't
worry, Andrew! (Shepa Dorje)
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@Shepa Dorje
This doesn't help: "pretty brainy responses for a kids movie!
I love to see folks exercising their grad school muscles."
This does: "HPATDH2 displays the book's major plot weaknesses-so much depends on random chance, like it happening to be Draco's
mom who examines Harry, or Harry stumbling on Shape in time to
get his all-important memories.
I'm not impressed with Daniel Radcliffe-- he just doesn't seem to
have much character. Sorry, I said it. The parts of the movie that
shone for me were when the grand old actors roused to the defense
of the castle-- the kid's parts were like Gap ads in comparison.
Link: "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2": An
action-packed curtain call (Salon)
--------SATURDAY, JULY 23, 2011
Marriager vows
Presidential candidates are asked to sign pledges all the
time, but the GOP primary has been roiled for the past few
days by an uncommonly influential document -- the
Marriage Vow: A Declaration of Dependence Upon
Marriage and Family -- put out by an Iowa group, the
Family Leader.
[. . .]
After losing in the primary, the fiercely anti-gay Vander
Plaats led the successful campaign to oust three supreme
court justices who had voted for the same-sex marriage
decision. Now at the helm of the Family Leader, he has
brought in presidential hopefuls for a speech series and is
openly cultivating an image as Iowa kingmaker.
I spoke with Vander Plaats by phone Monday night to check
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in on the developments surrounding the Marriage Vow and

the presidential contest in Iowa. The following transcript of
our conversation has been edited slightly for length. (Justin
Elliott, The man behind the marriage vow, Salon,
12 July 2011)
---------While our laws and customs are influenced by and based on
Judeo-Christian traditions and culture, that is not the only
influence. I'm not sure what you wish to substitute for
centuries of culture and tradition -- lefty philosophy? that's
even more dubious, given the history of the 20th century,
with it's experiments in lefty stuff like communism. Polls? the
wafty (and constantly changing) theories of social scientists?
psychologists? the DSM IV?
I consider my own thoughts and beliefs, Dave, but I don't
discount thousands of years of western civilization, though,
writing and yes, faith when I do so. What YOU and your ILK
are doing is putting your lefty sympathies and social causes
ABOVE OTHER PEOPLE'S equally valid beliefs, and
ridiculing religion while you place 100% of your beliefs in
"yourself", a kind of empty, transient, shallow "Oprah" faith
that is "me centered" instead of "god centered".
You have every right to do so, and I will defend to the death
your right to have any faith, or no faith at all and practice
that freely. But it doesn't give you the right to impose your
lefty social engineering on the rest of society, in a nation that
is substantially majority Christian and where lefty atheists
are a tiny minority.
The right to PRACTICE what you believe does not give you
the right to DESTROY other people's beliefs. (_bigguns)
---Nobody is remotely suggesting "oppressing homosexuals"
unless you think that gay people living openly and freely,
having the vote and the right to free speech, living where
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they choose, owning property and businesses, having higher

than average incomes and education, constitutes
"oppression". (_bigguns)
---The New York laws won't go into effect until the end of the
month. And I don't live in New York State.
But yes, PEOPLE IN NEW YORK STATE have just had their
real marriages devalued because they have been
"downgraded" to "partners A and B" instead of husbands
and wives. The very concept of marriage in New York has
been REDEFINED from a real marriage to a pretend gay
marriage with partners, and a kind of "best friends with
benefits" relationship.
Long term, I believe this will result in fewer traditional
male/female couples bothering to marry, because the
tradition of marriage is demeaned....it isn't special or
important anymore, it's something any pair of gay guys can
do as a joke (see Savage, Dan).
I believe that NEW YORKERS themselves had a right to vote
on this, and that right was taken away from them. I can only
hope they rise up to remove their corrupt legislators who
were bribed and coerced to pass this bad legislation, and
hopefully, in time, like Iowa, they will pass a Constitutional
Amendment to define marriage as a relationship between
ONE MAN and ONE WOMAN.
Hint: you don't get to say what makes OTHER PEOPLE
suffer. I believe that gay marriage is causing a lot of
suffering, if nothing else, simply in the way it is fracturing
society, and harming the Democratic party, and might result
(again) in Republican wins, because the Democrats are
(again) so vested in a social issue they can't see the forest for
the trees and reveal they are woefully out of touch with the
public.
(And Beans: the reason YOU DON'T CARE is you don't have
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kids, so you don't care about the future. For you, it's all
about YOU, and your lefty creds. If you have to sell out the
rest of humanity for that, it's A-OK with you.) (_bigguns)
----I continually post the anti-religion screeds here back to
places like the Jewish ADL and NOM and other faith-based
organizations that wish to protect ACTUAL religious
freedom -- not just demean any people who believe, in favor
of lefty social policy. (_bigguns)
Pixie play
Laurel/_bigguns believes that legalizing gay marriage is a VERY BIG
step towards the end of civilization. Fundamentally what it does,
according to Laurel, is weaken the ethical bedrock which not just
strong marriages but civilization are/is build on -- sacrifice,
selflessness/other-concern, duty; promoting instead instant, nixiepixie whimsical gratification, whose aerial insubstantialness is to be
understood as finally reaching the higher plane. You combat it, and
you become rightwing -- even if your entire past has been a voting
record of middle-of-the-way, steady-as-she-goes democrats; but she
takes on the burden -- truly -- mostly out of faith to goodness -- to
you -- anyway.
Others believe Laurel/_bigguns probably isn't aware of how her
defence of marriage is mostly based on a distaste, a repulsion for gays
-- something she reveals, so believeth they, starkly, in near
essentializing gay "relationships" as two people so self-involved that
basically no intertwining, no relationship! ever takes place. They
believe that only at some level does Laurel believe homosexuality is
gene-determined, for everywhere in her portrayal of them does she
show she most deeply believes them spoiled, laggard second sons,
pursuing lifestyles of horse-gambling, drink, and excess, permitted,
enabled only because the responsible first sons committed themselves
to expected duty: she shows them as if irresponsibly choosing a
lifestyle, which if made legit, the norm, means the end of historical
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cycle in a wild party of excess. They believe she thinks that promoting
gay marriage is like putting the fool in charge of the rightful king, the
self-involved stewart in place of the rightful king of Gondor: it makes
no longer tolerable our already suspect and stretched tolerance for
the dependent, babyish, hangers-on. They think she is mostly saying
that gays themselves are not okay, have too long been tolerated, that
she inspires real hatred towards them, and therefore loudly let her
know what scum she is.
What this is really about is about how the next twenty years of
depression suffering is going to gets its first five or so years underway,
without liberals feeling compelled to do much to get in its way. If
you're still pushing for such things as gay marriage, you're fighting for
good, for progress, even though the country has most truly slipped
while under your sway. Once the depression is all there is, sane
"voices" like Paul Krugman's made into absurd douches, then many of
the liberals who used gay marriage to disassociate themselves from
the cementation of more important, larger "struggles," will show how
they've really come to think of gays, and there will be rather fewer
people disagreeing with Laurel than there currently now are. The
problem for Laurel will be holding back the inclination to imagine
Jews in the same fashion she imagines gays: there is a sense that in
her lambasting of gay marriage, of suspect, civilization-weakening
inclinations -- self-involvement, parasitism -- she should be reporting
herself to Jewish authorities.
----Patrick McEvoy-Halston:
Are child molesters "gene-determined" in your learned
opinion? (Jake007)
@Jake007
Re: Are child molesters "gene-determined" in your learned opinion?
No. They're sufferers of child-abuse/molestation/incest, just like all
conservative Christians. Children who've been abused end up
698
possessing voices, parental alters, in their heads, which tell them they
deserved the abuse -- a near life-saving measure, for it allows them to
believe that those they were and still are most dependent on, i.e., their
parents; their mothers especially -- weren't so much intent to hate
and hurt them but to do what needed to be done to help them; that
they've been bad, simply for being weak, needy, and vulnerable, and
seek out throughout their lives weak dependents -- people like
themselves -- to victimize/punish for their own dependency and
innocence. For their being truly innocent, they are sinful, and mostly
deserving of punishment: this is the "logic"/"truth" that drives pretty
much the whole lives of conservative Christians and child-molesters.
That seems like an over-generalization
Not every child molester (or conservative Christian) was
molested as a child.
Thanks for your answer though : ) (Jake007)
@jake007
You're welcome, Jake. I hear you, but please note that I however do
not think I'm over-generalizing: I truly believe what I said.
----@Patrick McEvoy-Halston
You know, Patrick, I honestly think you write sincerely, but
you are so obtuse that I often literally can't tell what you
mean or how to respond to you. But I'll try to answer your
allegations.
I do not have any distaste whatsoever for gays or lesbians.
I am not repulsed by them. I am not "squicked out" by gay
sex (or anal sex). I know a fair number of gay people -- at the
risk of sounding trite, it is FACT that some are among my
oldest friends. I also have gay family members. They all
know me to be tolerant and polite.
There is no "one kind" of gay relationship, as human beings
699
are all different and have different kinds of pair bonds. I

know quiet private gay people and I know colorful
flamboyant gay people, and many degrees in between. I do
not believe in stereotypes.
I certainly believe that gay people have "intertwined"
relationships. I do NOT believe all gay people are spoiled
(any more than I think all straight people are pillars of
moral virtue). The stuff about "horse gambling" (????) and
drink are too ridiculous to even refute.
I have voted (or supported) the candidacies of local gay
politicians, and worked for gay bosses. I have no problem
with gay people. GET OVER your pathetic stereotypes.
In point of fact, the only really hateful, malevolent scumlike gay people are the ones I have met HERE ON SALON,
who insist on attacking and threatening ANYONE who
opposes their views.
The economic recession (or depression) is not related to gay
marriage; however I am increasingly appalled that many of
the brightest and most potentially effective political entities
of our generation are throwing themselves 100% at
legalizing gay marriage, while seemingly not caring that we
are actively losing the right to women's reproductive
freedom -- that global warming is worsening daily -- that
the economy IS in the toilet -- that we still don't have
universal health care coverage for all Americans. Frankly, I
believe they have thrown all those PROGRESSIVE (and
liberal) issues under the bus in order to have gay marriage
legalized as many places as they can.
I've got NO idea what "Jewish authorities" you think I
should be "reporting myself to". Judaism is not, as you
apparently imagine, some kind of secret society where you
take a blood oath to uphold certain specific beliefs, and
where I will be punished or ostracized for what I talk about
in public. I don't imagine gay people as anything but human
700
beings, with the same concerns, fears and emotions as I have

-- and the same is true for Jews. We aren't some strange
exotic "other race" and frankly, I wonder about YOU, Patrick
that you think I will be "punished" by some secret Jewish
cabal for failing to support any particular agenda.
(_bigguns)
@Patrick McEvoy-Halston: just read your follow up
letter to Jake
And I'm sorry I even bothered to respond to you.
You are a very VERY sick person.
ALL Christians are child molesters? Yeah, that sure is
REASONABLE. Can you PROVE any of that?
Since 80% of the US population is Christian, and even more
years ago, that would make almost every child a victim of
molestation. Which is absurd.
Your insane hatred of Christians pretty much renders
anything you say to be utter, crazy nonsense -- like "lunatic
naked guy screaming in the bus depot" crazy. Like "tin foil
hat to block the alien thought control" crazy.
No wonder you think "Jews have a secret cabal that punishes
people who speak out!" -- YIKES.
I hope there is someone who loves you enough to have you
declared mentally incompetent and put away in an asylum
for your own good. (_bigguns)
_bigguns/laurel
Re: No wonder you think "Jews have a secret cabal that punishes
people who speak out!" -- YIKES.
You have taken to LOUDLY pointing out how you're reporting
instances of anti-semitism on these threads to some-or-another
watch-groups -- that was what I was referring to.
I've said before that if America turns homophobic, not just
homosexuals but Jews will find themselves under threat. The point
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will be to go against anything that isn't pure, and neither group is

secure from being imagined this way. I will defend both groups, from
peoples intent on projecting their own unwanted selves onto them,
from demonizing them. I am too reasonable, too sane, to convince
anyone actually fairly attending that I believe in cabals (the real
power is always in the masses -- the middle classes, especially: in fact
so much so that if we get a society full of rich-cats and bundled
masses it's because the masses want it so: it plays to their feeling so
punishment-worthy, only poverty and being actively discriminated
against can work to shore up their sense of possessing any
innocence), and when you are more so, unless you still remain
insistant on buttressing frankly rightwing conceptions of tradition
and authority, you will know that I am hardly someone you should
disparage, Laurel.
_bigguns/Laurel
Re: In point of fact, the only really hateful, malevolent scum-like gay
people are the ones I have met HERE ON SALON, who insist on
attacking and threatening ANYONE who opposes their views.
You do work to essentialize gay relationships as less serious than
heterosexual ones; you do work to make heterosexual relationships
seem where the important stuff of civilization -- what amounts to the
bedrock: duty, selflessness, commitment -- takes place. I stand by my
assertion that you work to make homosexuals in general -- not just
the (quote-unquote) scum-like ones you are afflicted with here -seem, at best, not serious: as, I've suggested, spoiled second sons, not
especially taken to duty or purposeful labor. Parasites.
Re: The economic recession (or depression) is not related to gay
marriage; however I am increasingly appalled that many of the
brightest and most potentially effective political entities of our
generation are throwing themselves 100% at legalizing gay
marriage, while seemingly not caring that we are actively losing the
right to women's reproductive freedom -- that global warming is
worsening daily -- that the economy IS in the toilet -- that we still
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don't have universal health care coverage for all Americans.

Frankly, I believe they have thrown all those PROGRESSIVE (and
liberal) issues under the bus in order to have gay marriage legalized
as many places as they can.
I said something of the same in my post; I am curious to know why
you didn't refer to it. Anyway, the reason is because focusing on gay
marriage for awhile keeps them away from looking at women, at
mothers (when they're thinking gay marriage, they don't so much
have in mind lesbians) -- even many liberals, as evidenced by how
they winced at notable-pelvic Hillary as possible president, have
sympathy-worthy mother troubles. Attending to women's
reproductive issues now would have them essentially staring straight
on at the Vulva; and you don't have to be gay-turned to already have
significant issues arisen from already having known too much of that!
They stare straight at the anti-woman/mother, the gay, and allow the
destruction of whole social programs to take place by their side,
widespread misery, so to wedge themselves some safety while
showing they agree that the American populace, for being so selfish
and therefore insufficiently MOTHER-ATTENDANT, deserve the
angry wrath inspired from awesome neglect of suffering and
punishment.
P.S.
You assert that I hate Christians ... Personally, I think that though you
are quick you write too fast and reflect nowhere near enough: please
explain how someone who asserts that conservative Christians are
people who have suffered from child-abuse, is likely to be someone
who obviously must just HATE, HATE, HATE them. Surely I am,
despite my insanity/astonishing delusionment, someone who is
actually likely to be OFFENDED when people make war with them,
indulge them with YET MORE abuse -- it's the truth; I am; and isn't it
really the more likely?
----Jake007
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Re: Whether you want to believe it or not, you are overgeneralizing, in at least one regard. My wife and I are conservative
Christians -- and so are our four children -- and none of us were
molested as a child. Maybe we are the only six in the world, but
that's still six more than zero : )
Well, you're a "conservative" Christian who is at ease discussing
civilly, familiarly, at a largely liberal website. Further, you seem goodhumored and loving: since you're surely a fount of inspiration and
growth, I am hardly mostly interested in showing how ill a person
you've become owing to your background, and more in mind to clarify
what I mean by "conservative." Very best to you.
re: Imagine the uproar here if I stated that all homosexuals were
molested as children?
A conservative Christian can expect to get in real trouble over this;
the liberal but psychoanalyticaly-inclined can most likely expect to
simply be ignored -- 40 years out of date, and all: they REALLY ARE
beyond the pale. : )
I'll wait for your definition of "conservative" then.
In the meantime, let's review:
I asked "Are child molesters 'gene-determined' in your
learned opinion?"
You answered "No. They're sufferers of childabuse/molestation/incest, just like all conservative
Christians."
Unless "conservative" is now being (re-)defined by you as
anyone who sufferered child-abuse/molestation/incest, I
would submit that you are proveably wrong. (Jake007)
Jake007
Okay Jake: yes, if you do not find natural kinship with liberals and
find it instead with conservative Christians, then GUARANTEED you
have suffered from child-abuse, from mother-neglect/misuse -- every
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conservative embodies their early trauma, even the inventive,

charming ones (we saw more of them in the '60s and '70s, when
everyone was inflated to be essentially more liberal, more permissive
-- witness the William F. Buckleys); every liberal, more evidently,
their early good treatment and care.
There are no "six exceptions." I was playing to the part of you that is
good, that aspires, not interested in simply sinking you into reject.
Are we really now further along?
Patrick, that is just plain nuts
Okay Jake: yes, if you do not find natural kindship with
liberals, and find it instead with conservative Christians,
then GUARANTTED you have suffered from child-abuse,
from mother-neglect/misuse . . .
Enough with your dime store psychoanalyzing! You do that
often in these letters pages to people you do not know at all,
and it's offensive and ridiculous.
People like Jake can be conservative, Christian or otherwise,
without having suffered childhood abuse. They simply have a
different general set of moral and ethical outlooks than
liberals, but personally, as a liberal atheist, I can find common
ground with conservative Christians on all sorts of issues.
(And no, I did not suffer childhood abuse either).
(Beans&Greens)
Freud and friends
Re: Enough with your dime store psychoanalyzing! You do that
often in these letters pages to people you do not know at all, and it's
offensive and ridiculous.
What type do you prefer? I'm not sure how posh Freud is, but do you
really mean to suggest his lust-for-the-mother thing would be okay
with you, simply for its essentially-the-same content being more
thought-out and refined? What I mean is, next time, leave out the
"dime store": your problem is simply with non-tepid, non-apologetic,
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plain psychoanalysis. I know we haven't caught much sight of it since

the '70s past on, but you were around then.
People like Jake can be conservative, Christian or otherwise,
without having suffered childhood abuse. They simply have a
different general set of moral and ethical outlooks than liberals
To be conservative you have to like, find companionship with, other
conservatives. Please look again at the lot of them, and ask yourself a
little harder how, if you're perfectly sane, even if you agree with their
opinions you still wouldn't be drawn to hang out with the kids at the
other table, who, despite their heresies, don't carry so much the alltoo-apparent stink of having known much neglect. The sanest
conservatives -- who, I still argue, are still a significant step behind
the sanest liberals -- are those who are more or less aloof from the
party, often truly, surprising, family-centered: witness Ron Paul, and
the twin douches, Tucker and Brooks.
Re: but personally, as a liberal atheist, I can find common ground
with conservative Christians on all sorts of issues. (And no, I did not
suffer childhood abuse either).
Prediction: 5 years from now you won't suggest any such thing: for
well-raised/loved/praise-worthingly self-satisfied you will mostly be
keeping your head, while the regression-prone, primarily DENIED -conservatives, rightwingers -- will, through their inevitable
regressions, show more starkly the nature of their actual
"inspiration."
For some of us the evidence is ample; we indeed shake our heads that
self-satisfaction, good living, has also lead to people like you so
wanting others themselves to be full of life, that you place it squarely
there despite it being mostly a slight, there-then-absent, kindle. There
can be problems with being good-hearted, if it still means that if for
being without sufficient suspicion, you've left yourself so that if you
actually begin to suspect your opponent has something more a
problem with them than just a well-considered but ultimately
incorrect world view, s/he must then be demonic. Why not get to your
Freud now, to save yourself the self-hate that will come from the
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name-calling, other-cruelty you'll ultimately otherwise find yourself

inevitably partaking in?
Moronic
Okay Jake: yes, if you do not find natural kindship with
liberals, and find it instead with conservative Christians,
then GUARANTTED you have suffered from child-abuse,
from mother-neglect/misuse -- every conservative embodies
their early trauma, even the inventive, charming ones (we
saw more of them in the '60s and '70s, when everyone was
inflated to be essentially more liberal, more permissive -witness the William F. Buckleys); every liberal, more
evidently, their early good treatment and care.
There are no "six exceptions." I was playing to the part of
you that is good, that aspires, not interested in simply
sinking you into reject. Are we really now further along?
Just moronic. Even from someone who generally despises the
mouthbreathing drooling right this is just idiotic.
May I remind you that in our parents day it was considered
impolite to discuss politics and religion (the longer I live the
more I realize they knew what they were doing). In fact it
wasn't until the 90's where am radio blowhards made it
popular to spout about politics and be proud of being a
misinformed ignoramus.
Thus, throughout history politics was not any sort of litmus
test for friendships and among many people they still aren't.
Imagine that. (atyourthroat)
@atyourthroat
Re: May I remind you that in our parents day it was considered
impolite to discuss politics and religion (the longer I live the more I
realize they knew what they were doing). In fact it wasn't until the
90's where am radio blowhards made it popular to spout about
politics and be proud of being a misinformed ignoramus.
707
Thus, throughout history politics was not any sort of litmus test for
friendships and among many people they still aren't.
I think there are periods of time throughout history where everyone is
more in mind to count themselves amongst people rather than go at
one-anothers' throats, and I think our parents did know a good
stretch of such times -- as I've said, as many have noted, a few
decades back everyone, even the conservatives, for example, seemed
permissive -- liberal. I think you're right to favor those times, and to
disparage the '90s on (I would go earlier, and disparage the late '70s
on), but still think politics IS a litmus test for friendship -- you can
know what KIND of person someone is, if you know the kinds of
voices they find familiarity with.
Pity you didn't bring up the fact that once the all-'round good feeling
for being prosperous and American died down (i.e., our parents'
time), the left left for the coast and the right stayed fly-over: when
actual personality-differences became more inflated, more tabled, the
different-of-opinion no longer much wanted to remain close enough
to one another for there to be any point finding out the politics of
your dinner guests. That is, it wasn't mostly about economic class, but
about how your neighbor "smelled."
@Patrick McAvoy-Halston
"Prediction: 5 years from now you won't suggest any such
thing: for well-raised/loved/praise-worthingly self-satisfied
you will mostly be keeping your head, while the regressionprone, primarily DENIED -- conservatives, rightwingers -will, through their inevitable regressions, show more starkly
the nature of their actual "inspiration."
Well, I remember one insight from Freud: he pointed to "the
narcissism of small differences."You seem to be seeing a Black
and White opposition (scarred conservative Christians vs.
enlightened liberals) that isn't there.
Now, it's true that Michelle Bachmann and I, for instance, see
the world quite differently. But in the big picture, our
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ideological difference is a tension *within* modern Western

liberalism (in the broad sense). She's a lawyer; she and her
husband own a private therapy practice; she's a *woman*
holding political office, for goodness sake. She's running for
US president!
In my opinion, Bachmann is who she is because she is modern
*and* reactionary. Her worldview is one kind of adaptation to
the uncertainty of our current modern predicament; my
progressive adaptation (as a middle-aged female professional,
like Bachmann, but one who turns to the left rather than the
right) is another.
She's not my opposite. And she hardly offers proof of
childhood abuse just because she takes an extremist reaction
to the contemporary world. (Benthead)
@benthead
Re: Now, it's true that Michelle Bachmann and I, for instance, see
the world quite differently. But in the big picture, our ideological
difference is a tension *within* modern Western liberalism (in the
broad sense). She's a lawyer; she and her husband own a private
therapy practice; she's a *woman* holding political office, for
goodness sake. She's running for US president!
In my opinion, Bachmann is who she is because she is modern *and*
reactionary. Her worldview is one kind of adaptation to the
uncertainty of our current modern predicament; my progressive
adaptation (as a middle-aged female professional, like Bachmann,
but one who turns to the left rather than the right) is another.
She's not my opposite. And she hardly offers proof of childhood
abuse just because she takes an extremist reaction to the
contemporary world.
We see Bachmann differently. For one, I think you flatter her by
saying she, like you, actually SEES things, is responding, however
differently, to still the exact same plate of stimuli. Look at her eyes -do they really seem properly focused, absent of gremlins dancing in
709
her view, to you? I also don't think she so much has a worldview as an
aggressively felt need to hurt as many innocent people as possible -something that arises, in my judgment, only from having known
ample abuse and being unable to free yourself from feeling it well
deserved. The prevalence of people with similarly insufficient
childhoods is what has ensured that after a long period of prosperity
we find ourselves in a situation worthy of seeming simply a
confounding predicament, apparently worthy of all kinds of, if not
reasonable, certainly still understandable responses, even extreme
ones: if so many of us didn't at our core believe ourselves still very
bad children that deserve punishment, be sure the good American,
more or less uncomplicated groove would simply have continued on.
We all -- but mostly people like Bachmann -- ENSURED this
predicament came to be.
Still the good, the sane, remain: You're likely not an adaption but a
REMINDER of where we once were before we DECIDED it time to go
off track. This, I judge, will become more apparent to you, miss
professional bent-in-the-head.
Link: The man behind the marriage vow (Salon)
---------
WEDNESDAY, JULY 20, 2011

Claiming your armchair
Wether in need of examples to bolster the fight for same-sex
marriage or boost one's spirits in the face of disillusioning
high-profile failures of monogamous marriage, one need only
look to Judith Stacey.
The sociology professor at New York University is something
of an expert on alternatives, having spent more than a decade
studying everything from "monogamish" arrangements
among gay men in California to polygamy in South Africa to
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nonmonogamous, matriarchal households in southwest

China.
[. . .]
She isn't recommending a break from tradition for everyone
and, while she may have utopist leanings, she doesn't actually
expect Americans to suddenly reject amorous restriction in
favor of free love. She just wants people to be a little more
honest, with themselves and their partners, about what they
want and need -- regardless of whether that's a "Big Love"esque arrangement or strict sexual exclusivity. In that sense,
she falls right in line with Dan Savage who preached about the
same ideal of romantic truthfulness in a much-talked-about
piece in last weekend's New York Times Magazine. (Tracy
Clark-Flory, Scouring the globe for sex advice, Salon, 9 July
2011)
There is no way that Judith Stacey was going to look at other
"cultures" and find anything actually mostly sickly. No matter what
she found there, you know all she would allow herself to see was
variation we can learn from. This is not a person who is going to learn
much from experience because experience is under the control of her
expectations -- or rather more precisely, of her INTENTIONS. She is
not an armchair anthropologist/sociologist, but something worse:
someone whose truths suffer not from not actually being there, but
from mostly being there to entrench her a more comfortable claim to
her armchair.
Other "cultures" essentially are now mostly spiritual places in which
liberal anthropologists draw mana to inflate their own privilege and
deflect the masses. You are there to collect a predictable resource. It's
not about learning, science, but recharging and sacred rite.
I think at this point, most of us actually sense this -- even many
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liberals who go along with her. What she offers are "truths" that can
be expected to irritate monogamy-worshipping mundanes -- you can
hear their shreaks while you soberly lay out your arguments;
ostensibly blunt truths that ACTUALLY SEEM, that MOSTLY
SCREAM transcendent ideals rather than fact. Grounded in to-theearth anthropology, but the point is to make one feel afloat and
removed. "Yes, these conclusions are actually completely untethered
to reality; but since they give such ground for authority, we are
nevertheless ably existing amidst them. Alas, not so with you, my
friend. And note, if we catch sight of you, know that we know we
possess the art to abstract you out or to obliterate you within a quick
massing of your ignorances and prejudices."
@_bigguns, @Patrick McEvoy-Halston

_bigguns:
Totally.
And your excerpt regarding her "fact-free exposition" - I
almost pulled that one myself. Great minds think alike! Or
sane ones.
Speaking of examples from the animal kingdom, a good friend
of mine studied physical anthropology in the 80's. She told me
how in the late 80's, all of a sudden, all of the animals became
gay. In other words, the Leftists began to use zoology to
support the gay agenda. "Oh, look, two male bonobos are
fucking, that must mean that we are all gay!"
Patrick McEvoy-Halston:You nailed it.
------------------------------------Salon has become a parody of itself. This is a very strange
phenomenon, but I now come to Salon Letters for the same
reason that I used to come to Salon - for stimulating
conversation, and new and interesting ideas, and insights.
None of that comes from Salon staff anymore. Instead, Salon
staff writes the stupidest, most insane bullshit this side of
712
Lenin, and the readers contribute interesting, insightful,

stimulating conversation. It's like sitting at a table with worldclass chefs at McDonalds, poring over McRib sandwiches and
Big Macs. Oh, how these burgers could be so much better! (An
expert)
Link: Scouring the globe for sex advice (Salon)
--------MONDAY, JULY 18, 2011
Stuck in an elevator, with Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins, the atheist almighty, has in a fury thrown
some rhetorical thunderbolts at someone he disagrees with.
This wouldn't be in the least bit surprising except for the fact
that his disagreement isn't over the existence of a higher being
or the significance of religion. No, he's pissed off that a female
atheist has dared to complain about unwanted advances from
a male nonbeliever.
It all started with a video blog from Rebecca Watson, founder
of Skepchick, about her experience at an atheist conference
last month in Dublin. She participated in a panel in which she
talked about the problem of sexism among atheists, and the
rape threats she had received from men in the community
who don't agree with her. Importantly, Dawkins was on the
panel and the guy who went on to hit on her was in the
audience. Afterward, she went to the hotel bar with
conference-goers until 4 a.m., when she told everyone that she
was tired and wanted to go to bed. A male attendee followed
her out of the bar and into the elevator, where he said, "Don't
take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting and I
would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel
room for coffee?" This is what she had to say about the
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encounter:
Um, just a word to wise here, guys, uh, don't do that.
You know, I don't really know how else to explain how
this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I'll just
sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know,
in a foreign country, at 4:00 am, in a hotel elevator,
with you, just you, and -- don't invite me back to your
hotel room right after I finish talking about how it
creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when
men sexualize me in that manner.
That's all. It took up just over a minute of an 8-minute-long
video. She didn't call for the man to be castrated or claim to be
a victim of great injustice; all she expressed was that his
overture made her feel "incredibly uncomfortable," and that
guys should generally avoid doing that. "That" being 1) hitting
on a woman after she has gone to great lengths to explain why
she doesn't want to be sexualized within the atheist
community, and 2) ignoring her remark that she is tired and
just wants to go to bed. PZ Myers, a biologist who pens the
bookmark-worthy skeptics blog Pharyngula, wrote a post
about it and then Dawkins himself -- the rock star of atheism
-- waded into the comments thread with a satirical letter
addressed to a Muslim woman:
Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your
genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and ... yawn ...
don't tell me yet again, I know you aren't allowed to
drive a car, and you can't leave the house without a
male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat
you, and you'll be stoned to death if you commit
adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the
suffering your poor American sisters have to put up
714
with.
Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself
Skep"chick", and do you know what happened to her?
A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room
for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He
invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she
said no, and of course he didn't lay a finger on her, but
even so...
Who knew Dawkins had such flair for creative writing -- and
for being a dick? OK, so, many people had already concluded
the latter from his atheistic pomp -- but, being an arrogant
nonbeliever myself, I resisted such a reading of him until now.
He's of course correct that there are much worse things going
on in the world, but that's a crap rhetorical move meant to
belittle and silence. It's an argument that could be easily made
against Dawkins' own work: Why are you arguing over
whether God exists while children are starving in Africa.
[. . .]
He went on to make fun of Watson's defenders who have
pointed out that she was "stuck" in the elevator with the man,
whom she hasn't directly spoken with until then: "No escape?
I am now really puzzled. Here's how you escape from an
elevator. You press any one of the buttons conveniently
provided."
Clearly, Dawkins has never experienced what it's like to carry
around the fear of sexual assault, as most women do on some
level. Myers helpfully explains why fear in this particular
situation would be understandable: "Try googling 'elevator
rape'. [. . .] All that said, though, it actually sounds like
Watson didn't feel threatened by the man, only creeped out.
Remember: All Watson did was briefly call out a behavior that
made her uncomfortable; and later, she criticized the outsized
anger she received in response to that original aside. (Tracy
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Clark-Flory, Richard Dawkins: Skeptic of Women,

Salon, 8 July 2011)
Felling good men
His problem is that he is healthy enough to be attracted to literate,
liberal women; ones who, yes, have shown some hurt -- it's not quite
equal terms -- you can imagine yourself soothing, but who certainly
aren't defined by it. If he was retrograde and went for a social class we
are as a whole a bit ambivalent if maybe they don't actually DESERVE
their whatever afflictions -- like waitresses, barmaids, clerks -- he'd of
had to have had a whole line-up of them, AND been in a social
position where we've decided we'd had enough of his saintliness and
wanted to see downed for at least a bit, before anyone would care: in
fact, he'd been seen as doing something of a required social service:
reminding the lowly of just how low and humiliation-deserving they
are.
Dawkins is a very good man. A very strong man, of the kind, like Paul
Krugman, that frustrate people who actually want to submerge
themselves in a regressed mental state, without any sane "external"
present to remind them of their actually quite sickly inclinations. If
Dawkins is downed here, the message is out: time for other legendary,
larger-than-life, ostensibly "pompous" boomer types like Roger Ebert
and Krugman, whose unchecked self-assurance and self-esteem we
have long been getting irritated at but couldn't see downed previously
owing to our dependency on their strength, to be waylayed. This will
be oh so easy to do: because their first inclination has never been to
do safely within what society has deemed okay: they actually have the
temerity to lead, to follow their largely good impulses, unchecked.
I think you're possibly broken, Tracy. A liberal, probably like the
afflicted writer here, assured to do well because there won't be much
true resistance "there." You'll help take down actual good men,
leaving those who know how to tend your needs in ways you find
immediately satisfying, but are quite sinister. You'd take down those
few around who could actually lift you up.
716
It was probably to the writer's discredit that she DIDN'T take him up
on his offer. Someone should write an article about that.
----DAWKINS MUST GET REJECTED A LOT
Looking fromn the photo at how geeky Dawkins is I'm certain
he's had to deal with a lifetime of rejections by women. Guys
like him who gain a position where they can lash back often
times take the opportunity to do so with gusto.
Dawkins obviously harbors many years of resentment towards
women and his angry over-reaction against this woman
reflects all of that pent up hurt. It explains his juvenile
behavior, but it does NOT excuse it.
Time for Dawkins to grow up & man up! (Ramparts)
@ramparts
re: Looking fromn the photo at how geeky Dawkins is I'm certain
he's had to deal with a lifetime of rejections by women. Guys like
him who gain a position where they can lash back often times take
the opportunity to do so with gusto.
Dawkins obviously harbors many years of resentment towards
women and his angry over-reaction against this woman reflects all
of that pent up hurt. It explains his juvenile behavior, but it does
NOT excuse it.
Salon picked an unflattering photo -- it wanted to make sport of this
good man. At some point, be assured, it will do the same to other
good men -- or as it'll make them seem, "douches" -- like Krugman
and Ebert. Any ebullient, more-or-less happy baby-boomer who
stands as an irritant to this age which wants fundamentally bullied
people -- like smoker, lack-of-affect Obama -- to serve as its lords, its
"allowance" of how jolly and self-satisfied you're allowed to be, can
expect to be disposed for some kind of inexcusable behavior. I've said
before that eventually it's going to happen here to former Salon editor
717
Joan Walsh, and that friends of hers, people like TCF, are going to
find themselves torn between the good part of themselves that wants
to support her and the bad part of them that is telling them she
deserves her fall for pretending to so damned much! (TCF, though
less enthusiastically than MEW, will of course ultimately lapse to the
dark side.)
My guess is that Dawkins scared this woman because she's not used
to close encounters with mostly EMOTIONALLY MATURE men; not
so much geeks, but their opposite. His goodness and openess and
genuine interest in her company made him an alien species (it really
could have been coffee and conversation; he does have some issues,
but he's mostly actually sensitive to your discomfort, your prefences,
and a gentleman). It is precisely the fact that there was amazingly no
stalkerness about him, even with all the 4 am-alone-in-an-elevatorin-a-strange-country-after-spooky-stories-and-rape-talk stuff, that
bothered, that scared her. (She likely threw in "foreign country" to
provision more armory in her war against her own self-knowledge of
his fundamental innocence and her own inquisition-worthy
skittishness.) He's too much the person she could only dream of
being; she knows at some level she runs away from exactly what she
should be more inclined -- at least -- to close with; and she felt need
to humiliate him for making bare what she does not want to face
about herself.
He lashed out at her because he knows she is one to ENTIRELY
DISPOSE of someone, if need be, just to rid herself of some
discomfort. She's the "Atonement" girl who'll never cue herself to
grow up, because we keep telling her how marvelously brave and
evolved she is, and she feels so shallowly constituted that her only
option is to listen.
----Oops!
Well, I've just learned that Dawkins was not the "accoster." I so
718
assumed it I blurred my way through the evidence. I took this as a

prompt to actually watch the video as well.
So my guess is now that she was not attracted to this guy; she was
repulsed by him -- and I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out he was
a creepy, because I suspect he is the kind of guy who is perhaps
foremost attracted to victimizable women: people like Rebecca, who
communicates in her every exaggerated kick-ass gesture that the
world foremost is a threat to her.
Seeing the video, is it possible to imagine Dawkins being attracted to
her? I would say actually a bit yes. Even though I stand by my
assessment of him as MOSTLY well-souled and mature, there's
enough of the hurt geek in his well-expanded-upon personality (as
there is in other wondrous "douches," like Ebert and Krugman) to be
drawn to pretty, clearly-vulnerable coltish women, charmingly
making every effort to insist themselves all grown up. If he had, she
would have spurned him, but not as effortlessly just lambasted him -even with him being a married man and all. She's kinda the "Girl who
kicked the Hornet's Nest," and he's the man she's never really known
who'd, not only mostly do no harm, but mostly provision the
opposite.
In any event ... The most important thing to note IS that it is likely
time for good-souled baby-boomers to take their fall (it is appropriate
that this guy mostly remain anonymous, and Dawkins to stand out so
for our accosting). Their well-being and self-satisfaction makes them
an affront to our consolidating Depression mindset; serves as a
reminder of the kind of tasty goods whose eager partaking, foremost
doomed us. Rebecca and her ilk can accuse and destroy because
establishments know they can just assume them, just so long as they
ensure they can go about their ostensibly righteous destruction
against ostensibly horribly-empowered opponents without reprisals;
with ample evidence of the prowess of their firm refutation of
misogyny. When they "fightback," their opponents will only be let
known their defeat: for this repeated satisfaction, Rebecca and her ilk
will, unlike their feminist predecessors, unlike people like Joan Walsh
719
and Geraldine Ferraro, will only now be slaves of the establishment.

The man was creepy and not "creepy," because you all are to know
that if you get in the way of people like her, you will be managed so
that we have every right to go after you -- the only important point is
that you stood in her way. We're not about journalism or fairness, but
prejudgment, reality-creation, and executing the sentence. This isn't a
time for fairness, but about wholy hypocritical and completely
unthwarted exercise of power. We'll all be food for "it," and it's all we
deserve.
Why are people bothered by "creepy"?
Why is this woman being attacked for calling a guy creepy?
It's not like she said "HE'S A RAPIST!" or "HOW DARE HE!"
She was just saying that after a talking about how unwanted
those types of approaches are all day it was kind of
disheartening and sort of creepy to be hit on in an elevator.
(M.Fast)
@M.Fast
People are objecting to "creepy" because we're all hearing the word
applied now, not in service to precision and fact, but to communicate
that what we're up to is not really so much a matter of conversation
but about repeatedly cuing how we're LONG past the point of debate
and simply into the execution of sentence. Those out there who fit
well with tyranny -- and decimated specimens, warped, insecure
feminists like Rebecca do because they can be purchased so easily by
guaranteeing them satisfying reprisals to male enemies (and their
stupid, servile female defenders) that will never stop making their
appearance -- increasingly intuit that they will be given unchecked
license to "resolve" every inner tension by unleashing wrath upon
deserving "victims," and are cuing us all to this fact while enjoying
their practice run -- their first exercise completely outside restraint -by applying the word "creepy" to near every man in sight. As they
grow more sure, the usage might well lessen, but each use will spell
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out more doom.

Link: Richard Dawkins: Skeptic of Women (Salon)
--------FRIDAY, JULY 15, 2011
Why, unlike Finland, here we torture kids and teachers
When I heard the news last week that the Department of
Education is aiming to subject 4-year-olds to high-stakes
testing, all I could do was shake my head in disbelief and
despondently mutter a slightly altered riff off "The Big
Lebowski's" Walter Sobchak.
Four-year-olds, dude.
[. . .]
Finland's story, recounted in the new documentary "The
Finland Phenomenon," is particularly striking. According to
Harvard's Tony Wagner, the country's modernization
campaign in the 1970s included a "transforming of the
preparation and selection of future teachers."
"What has happened since is that teaching has become the
most highly esteemed profession [in Finland]," says Wagner,
who narrates the film. "There is no domestic testing ...
because they have created such a high level of
professionalism, they can trust their teachers."
[. . .]
Where Finland rejects testing, nurtures teachers, and
encourages its best and brightest to become educators, we
fetishize testing, portray teachers as evil parasites, and
financially encourage top students to become Wall Streeters.
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(David Sirota, Testing 4 year olds isnt the answer, Salon, 8

July 2011)
Why
The obvious reason, as stated by a previous poster, is that we do not
sufficiently love our kids. We still send them to school to humiliate
them, abandon them to testing that will tell them that what they are
are all potential misfits that need to be kept under constant, if distant,
surveillance and control. We like them this way: a whole nation of
little Big Macs, so still inherently sloven, slacking and ill-defined we
have just cause to round them up and send them off to war or prison
or low-paid assistants-to-aging-boomers life-long servitude, without
much accord for their rights as affirmed human beings.
Some people in this country have experienced the long and slow
growth in empathy that can happen when one generation of mothers
gives to their daughters slightly more empathic treatment than they
themselves received. These type would make teaching the most
respected occupation. Others have grown not at all; are barbarians;
and if left to their own would make education nothing but a lengthy
series of humiliations and hurts, and life would be for their children
mostly about recovering from hurts, not generating anything exciting
and new. "Society" would sit still for milleniums, which was the case
for our earliest ancestors, who had just barely arisen from the muck,
and true kindness had not yet come in the universe.
We do not respect teachers, but we make our ivy-league professors
into old-world gods. We cannot allow teachers full respect because
that would make us truly in spirit democratic, which we aren't
comfortable with because it puts ultimate authority, ultimate
responsibility, too close to home. We sense that our own psychic
makeup is such a disorded mess that we need institutions, distant
bankers, ivory-tower professors, removed presidents, up high enough
to not have their truly mundane status revealed to us on an ongoing
basis, to keep Chaos at bay. Teachers, despite an earnest attempt to
armor them with professional status, we make seem as now but older
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examples of the inadequate kids they teach, as a reminder of what

inevitably happens to you when you keep kids so close: you get
leached upon, you get contaminated. They, like the kids they teach,
are inevitably lost, and so schools become garbage bins into which we
can project and contain our own vile hatred and blame-worthy
insufficiency, which serves the purpose of getting rid of it and
pressing in the contaminants that the school as institution may yet
need help in enclosing.
Our society has been bad, and we seek its punishment. The worst part
of our story isn't that Big Business is really just an agent to
accomplish the suffering we feel we as a society deserve, it is that
liberals have decided that the problem will only rest with them and
other elites -- a fiction the poor can actually live with, actually WANT,
because they've known since birth that respite is only possible by
placating angry, little you-despising gods.
Link: Testing 4 year olds isnt the answer (Salon)
---------
TUESDAY, JULY 12, 2011

Bears and werewolves
Flash-forward 10 years. The current economy has me once
again relying on eggs as a major source of protein, but this
time I have a few advantages: improved cooking skills,
superior cooking equipment, the inclination to supplement
my diet with foraged ingredients, the beginnings of a garden
and a better source of eggs, which means eggs that are lower
in cholesterol and higher in nutrients.
[. . .]
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The problem began when we ran low on other food. A lag

between grocery runs and paychecks led to mostly bare
cupboards. Except for eggs, of course. Souffl gave way to
hard-boiled eggs and fried eggs sans bread or potatoes or
tortillas. We ate our nascent garden down to the nubs. Rich
was doing heavy physical labor every day, and breakfast and
lunch of hard-boiled eggs wasn't cutting it. We both admitted
to feeling a little ill and instated a two-day hiatus from eggs.
Even a short period of deprivation can have an amazing effect
on the senses. My check came in the mail, and we went
grocery shopping. A vista of possibilities opened up before
me: Suddenly I had cheese, and zucchini, and kale, and
cream, and butter. We set into eating eggs again with
enthusiasm (though this time I kept it to one meal a day). I
whipped up a cat's-ear, arugula and Cheddar frittata. Friends
came to visit for the weekend, and I made miniature oyster
mushroom quiches in a chicken-fat-infused crust, and a
traditional Nicaraguan breakfast with fried eggs and gallo
pinto. Finally, nearly two weeks after the start of our egg
challenge, I used the last dozen to make deviled eggs for a
neighbor's barbecue. Lifting the last egg from its carton was
almost surreal.
[. . .]
Heavy cream is certainly a luxury, but because the eggs were a
gift and the vegetables, spices and mushrooms were
homegrown or scavenged, this meal cost me about 70 cents
per person. If I'd paid for the eggs, it would have been about
95 cents per person. The good news is that this protein-rich
meal is still a decent value even if you shop for all of the
ingredients -- radishes are not expensive and the oyster
mushrooms are not essential to the dish. That said, I don't
724
think I need to mention that I didn't lose 30 pounds on this

diet. (Felisa Rogers, Eggs, two meals a day, Salon, 2 July
2011)
---------@Felisa: the whole eggs/cholesterol myth
That was pretty well debunked many years ago; EATING
foods with cholesterol in them does not GIVE YOU high
cholesterol. The only exception would be a small number of
people who are very sensitive to cholesterol in any food, and
already have severe coronary artery disease.
People vary in how likely they are to get high cholesterol. It is
influenced by heredity more than anything else; it is
absolutely possible to be thin and fit and still have high
cholesterol (or be fat and out of shape, and have perfect
cholesterol numbers). But very generally, it is saturated and
transfats that can push normal cholesterol numbers up, and a
diet too heavy in animal proteins.
To single out eggs never made any sense. Eggs are a very
healthy part of a normal diet EATEN IN MODERATION.
At your young age, without heart disease and at a normal
weight (and I assume living in the country, you get plenty of
exercise walking and chopping wood, etc.), eating eggs is
probably not any problem at all.
That being said: 7 dozen eggs! yikes! I'm glad you gave away a
few dozen, but it reminded me of the line (I think from
Dorothy Parker) that "eternity is two people and a ham".
Actually, it's any number of people facing down dietary
monotony for a long period of time -- even the most luscious
chocolate will be nauseating if you MUST eat it 3-4 times a
day. NOTHING is so delicious you can eat it (and nothing
BUT it) at every meal.
Eggs are still relatively cheap (though they have doubled in
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price since just a few years ago) and yes, you can make may
delicious, cheap meals from them -- omelets and stratas,
frittatta's and quiche. Deviled eggs (yum!) and egg salad
sandwiches. But again, what is absolutely delicious if you have
it once in a while, is sickening if you must face it down at
every single meal.
Your husband is also incorrect that eggs are an insufficient
protein for a working man doing hard physical labor. They are
every bit the perfect protein package, as good or better than
any meat. BUT I am also sure he was sick of eating hard
boiled eggs (and probably constipated).
Living so meagerly that you must wait for a check from Salon
to go grocery shopping -- Felisa, that is madness. And I JUST
DO NOT get this. Seriously, I do not. You are smart, you are
educated, you are literate. YOU KNOW BETTER THAN THIS.
Is this a stunt? or a way to create material for a book, a sort of
survivalist-forager-in-the-mountains variation on "No Impact
Man"? Frankly, I am sick of these "I did _____ for one year!"
books. They are contrived and after you read a couple, you've
read them all.
I ask you again, in the name of reason and sanity and common
sense: go on your county food stamp website (you don't even
have to DRIVE anywhere, you can apply online in Oregon -- I
checked it out for you!) and start your food stamp application.
If you can't even keep very basic foods stocked in your
cupboard -- simple things like rice and beans and pasta and
flour and canned or frozen veggies -- and you literally don't
have food to eat at times, then you CLEARLY qualify for and
deserve food stamps.
It would give you and your husband a "baseline"; enough
money to buy healthy basics like meat, milk, cheese, fresh
vegetables, bread, cereal -- and then if you WANT to
experiment foraging or creating low-cost budget meals: more
power to you! Many people are struggling today, and would
726
truly benefit from articles on clever ways to economize,

budget and save money.
But playing with food insufficiency is just plain stupid. At a
certain point, it won't work anymore. What if Salon ceases
publication? What if the road crew has to cut back, and your
husband loses his job cutting brush? What about if your
garden fails? What if winter sets in early? What if you became
pregnant?
I don't think you prove anything by being a martyr here. Get
the food stamps; use your writing and foraging skills to share
great recipes and pragmatic ways to save money in tough
times. (_bigguns) (laurel1962)
----Bears
RE: It would give you and your husband a "baseline"; enough
money to buy healthy basics like meat, milk, cheese, fresh
vegetables, bread, cereal -- and then if you WANT to experiment
foraging or creating low-cost budget meals: more power to you!
Many people are struggling today, and would truly benefit from
articles on clever ways to economize, budget and save money.
But playing with food insufficiency is just plain stupid. At a certain
point, it won't work anymore. What if Salon ceases publication?
What if the road crew has to cut back, and your husband loses his
job cutting brush? What about if your garden fails? What if winter
sets in early? What if you became pregnant?
I think we get closer to what she is (and good numbers of her
generation are increasingly) about if we imagine that, after Salon
ceases publication, the road crew cuts back, her husband loses his job
cutting brush, her garden fails, the winter sets early, she becomes
pregant, her first thought thought is on how much nourishment she
might take from carving out chunks from fretfully imaginative people
like you, who have no clue that this all, the real reality of it -- that
727
clearly, would so scare you -- might just even better suit her mood.
She is making posts on a smug, beans-and-greens, baby-boomerpleasing/placating kind of site, and, admittedly, looks to be all about
youthful experimentation and foodie play -- of the kind that might
invite the understanding and appreciative baby-boomer elder to still
want to wizen by cluing or even startling her (as needs be) to her true
straits, and thereby better the resources very much available to her -but what she is, I think, is getting closer to this type: someone who
can't but forage out for sup because her primal instincts are finally
being unloosed, and, with the overall environment increasingly
responding to /echoing them than to the admittedly still-in-place,
effeminate "food stamp" safety nets, this time -- given the leverage -there's no tightening back in the beast:
http://nplusonemag.com/mother-nature-s-sons
I'll try and respond later this weekend on this subject. It's an
important one, that delineates how the baby boomers are without
their knowledge, with them actually sort of dumbly playing into it,
being zooed while the rest of us are getting busy engaging the wild -such a neat but true "turn" from trite simplicities like gentrification
and liberal class retreat.
----Bread, water -- and sickly Salonistas, if need be
Felisa has made it seem as if what she most is, is very much like most
of you, Salonistas. She moved to depressed, backwoods Oregon -- but
for reasons anyone at all human can understand: to re-engage with
home, after knowing so much constant moving about. She shirks food
stamps, but out of pride and independence -- something anyone at all
American can understand. She is younger than most of you, but in
spirit much the same as you; and so you mostly delight in her
adventures, with only a cautionary word to ensure she doesn't, owing
to inexperience, make that one youthful, arrogant misstep that you
know would stop her adventures cold. And so you viraciously defend
728
her, while gently cautioning her (here, even Laurel has stepped back
her attack a considerable some -- gauging Felisa mostly now a martyr
["I respect your staunchness, but you hurt yourself more than you
have to"] rather than a fraud), and she modestly but appreciately
thanks you for your support.
I would suggest, however, that you all consider seeing her as -- and
I'm sorry for this, Felisa -- a worse sort than the actual foodie you
once had in mind to destroy: Gerry Mak, the struggling, unemployed
20-something who actually went on food stamps, but to buy pretty
much anything! he wanted so to find himself eating better than he
ever had before! Mak, certainly as he was first presented to us, with
pretty much his food stamp-purchased cases of Perrier, was an
affront to everything decent: in his tough times he found means to go
about life pretty much pheasant hunting-pleasantly along, leaving you
with no one to sympathize with, no one to tend to, no one to remind
that even in depressed America it's still not the Medieval Ages, dear:
don't martyr yourself, Gerry Mak; I can tell you means to make that
foie gras/grass-fed .../blueberry fanna cotta stretch over two meals
rather than the one you had planned, before whistling in tomorrow's
lobster cognac -- why not? -- one day ahead, if you only follow how in
the same straits I cunningly made my batch of eggs-and-leeks
whatever garbage goo last two whole weeks rather than the single one
I had planned! Mak is a genuine foodie (though he looked at last
sight to be repenting his truly-glorious achieved heights) -fundamentally a lover of ease, a specialist in refined taste, a friend of
conversation and (therefore) of the salon, if not quite, maybe in its
present form, as clearly of Salon -- while Felisa is a fraud: not because
she might actually have money behind her she isn't owning up to -there is a sense that, even if the case, this is of no import -- but
because she foremost isn't actually one of the foodie you; closer, is she
at least becoming, to one of McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" true-hunter
types that would make bullet-play of you for your dumb vulnerability,
your ridiculous clinging to sensible civility, if ever casually caught
glance of in a saloon.
729
While Mak was as effete as the delicacies he prepared, Felisa is

getting as tough as the wild bushes she hacks her way through, and as
alien and mercenary as the sword ferns she hangs from and the firtips and nettles she finds some way to grind down. So someone like
Laurel cautions her away debilitation, and doesn't appreciate that
Felisa is actually becoming so far away from the yuppie-seeming
hipster/yuppie who might experiment frontier after becoming bored
with "cheaper rent and hipper coffee," so much more truly, honestly,
intrinsically someone who'd look through and past all the tourist fair
while on sojourns to South America -- thanks to her entwining her
soul to a habitat still ridged and rocky, bristly and fully buckling out
the stupid eons of everywhere-else, soft-civilization silly-puddy
spread -- that each stagger into a precipice she had not anticipated
looks more likely to entrench her further into the bare but vital
survival spirit enlivening every one of the tight and taut entwined
sinews of bone and tested muscle wholy constituting her ancestors, to
the heart of the home she's seeping herself into, than it looks to
weaken or stop her.
Felisa is not a friend of the salon, of, preferrably, civilized
conversation, because she is becoming someone who thrives when
anything conceivably overwrought, precious, and delicate can be so
readily, fist-in-the-face -- or, rather, tomahawk-in-the-soon-to-bespilling-forebrain -- be brought up short. She isn't listening to you
about food stamps, not because she's proud -- that is, aware of your
actual true sensibleness, but staunchly faithful to her independence -but, essentially, because you're weak. Because she knows that every
bite downed by food-stamp purchase softens you into a mingle with a
dainty, disconnected administrate already fretting the pokings-up of
the undeniably real, strong, and brutal, and about to finally know
"their" their-responsible full-on devourment; because she knows
you're farmers' cattle and on and on about the benefits of farm life,
when the care-taker farmers themselves are even now leaving as the
wild spreads and overtakes, with the doom of wolves already even
now more than one step beyond just a loud chorused, chilling howl
730
and an increasingly-close check-in; because she knows you're not so

much potentially saged kin as you are, if things get really
neanderthal-stark desperate, to be categorized as last-ditch food
supply, Felisa is taking advantage of your self-absorbed, past-relevant
"signaling" to but fix the clarity of her understanding of who she now
is -- thinking of, and further respecting, the old ancestral, pre or
contra-civilization voices she knows she will increasingly be attending
to and be influenced from.
I am principally a Salonista, but I would encourage you again to check
out N + 1's thoughts on this new type. See the clear hunting wolf here
in omnivorant, badger-foraging clothing.
----Watch out, Felisa:
One of your readers is turning you into a fictional, potentially
cannibalistic werewolf.
If you're within commuting distance of Astoria, I may have a
job for you. (bettenoir)
The Wait
Bettenoir: "Felissa darling, did you hear: One of your readers is
turning you into a fictional, potentially cannibalistic werewolf."
Salonista-filled room: "Har! har! har!"
Felisa: "Well, if I'm going to likened to a lycanthrope, I guess I'll take
some comfort in being sized up as only potentially cannibalistic:
suggests some inspiriting wherewithal to improve my dire straits,
don't you think?!"
Salonista-filled Room: "Har! Har! Har!"
[Room clears in good chear and friendly goodbyes, leaving Felisa to
herself]
Felisa: "Good ... The cattle embrace an escape of warning as but
731
good humor to accompany their wine, cheese and base stupidity. Still,
may be best to ease up for awhile my talk of machetes and becoming
one with the unforgiving alien wilderness -- and maybe even my now
being drawn to Vince Lombardi football: a little too much old-world
imposition in that embrace of all-American heroism, and fluff up even
more my talk of intrinsic lazyness, my making best with all the little I
have, my admittedly-youthful and therefore mostly-tolerable
weakness for self-pride and my girlish, hipsterish insistence on
fancies I should be ashamed, given my straits, to be even mentioning:
won't due to have them thinking I'm maybe not so much possibly
spoiled and youthfully rash as I am ... actually rather a little bit
weirdly drawn to what is genuinely unsettling in raw folklore.
It is not yet time. The ancient and pure, the composed for eternity
and most truly great, must still for a time play to the spoiled and silly,
who, though fundamentally but a longish moment, remain hoisted
for it nevertheless being their time. But God the ample fat on their
bones attracts near as much as the spread of their imbecility draws!
Still, let me see ... next time, perhaps: "Salonistas, thank you for your
patience with me; I have been a bit silly, and am thinking over your
encouragements to lay aside some of the pride and perhaps sign up
for the food stamps and visit those actually not-quite-so-far-away-asI've-made-seem stores that I ..."
Link: Eggs, two meals a day (Salon)
--------Felisas articles (Salon):
How my hippie parents turned me into a consumer
How I learned to stop worrying and love football
How the recession turned me into a scavenger
Scraping by on stinging nettles
Scavenger: How my grandmother taught me to eat weeds
How I became a hillbilly
Hunting the fickle fiddlehead
732
How I (kind of) survive in the wilderness

Sourdough, the frontier way
What Costa Rica taught me about budget eating
SATURDAY, JULY 9, 2011

Bravely facing the faux bully
On the last day of fourth grade, my youngest daughter was
tying her shoes while I stood waiting with her lunchbox. "Do
you remember fourth grade, Mom?"she asked, as she
struggled to lace up the Chuck Taylors.
My answer surprised both of us. "I hated it. It was the worst
year of school I ever had."
My fourth grade tormenter looked like a Gap Kids model. "C"
had porcelain skin, perfect white teeth, cornflower eyes, and
blond hair that hung thick and straight, regardless of weather
conditions. She arrived in Mrs. McKenna's classroom, took
one look around, and decided she wanted my best friend Kitty
to be her best friend. And she went about driving me away
from the herd the way only elementary school mean girls can.
She teased me for being fat, for wearing glasses. For days at a
time, she would be kind to me, inviting me to birthday parties
and sleepovers. Then, BAM -- I would be back in the
doghouse, with no idea what happened. I later found out that
she passed notes around to the girls in class written in her
perfect handwriting and decorated with flowers: "Don't talk to
Nancy until Friday."
I remember eating lunch alone, fleeing the classroom in tears
day after day. I begged my parents to let me transfer to a
different school. On the last day of fourth grade, relief came at
last. The middle schools in my town ran from 5th to 8th
grade, and C and I were heading in different directions for the
next four years.
733
When we met again in high school, I'd gained two invaluable

weapons: perspective, and confidence. With a close group of
new friends at my side, C had no power over me. She
remained beautiful and unfriendly, but now completely
irrelevant to me. As is so often the case with a bully, I learned
later that C's family life had been particularly unsavory during
the year she picked on me.
A dozen years out of high school I was working in San
Francisco. I left my desk one day and went out for a lateafternoon waddle in the November sunshine, eight months
pregnant with my first daughter, and I passed C on the
sidewalk. True to form, she was still drop dead gorgeous and,
mindful of my spherical form, I put my head down and kept
walking.
Then I thought: Why? My life turned out great. And, on some
level, I wanted her to know that. I pivoted and called her
name, and we stood there on the sidewalk chatting. Anyone
walking by might have thought we were two old friends. The
truth is, she had as big an impact on my life as any good friend
might. Her childhood cruelty stoked my own confidence;
because of how she treated me, I discovered a quality in
myself I hadn't previously recognized -- resilience. The ordeal
helped me become a compassionate adult, one who will not
tolerate bullying by my own children.
But I guess C still held one trump card, despite all my
bravado. As I only realized the other day in the front hallway,
she managed to make me hold my breath from the last day of
my fourth grade until the last day of fourth grade had passed
safely for both my daughters. (Nancy Davis Kho, What my
grade school bully taught me, Salon, 30 June 2011)
---------Pity the children
Re: She remained beautiful and unfriendly, but now completely
734
irrelevant to me. As is so often the case with a bully, I learned later

that C's family life had been particularly unsavory during the year
she picked on me.
She had become completely irrelevant to you, but once again and it
looks like for the longterm picked up relevancy in your now for some
reason having to chastise her further -- in your following noting her
absolute inability to "blanche" you, given your acquired superhero
signia of popularity and friends, with you situating in her the
principle seat of victimization and private misery. Pity you didn't also
learn later that bullies pick on people who best represent their -you're right -- victimized selves, but your putting your head down and
scuttling along tells us what we need to know: you're still the bullied
person she keyed in on because she sensed your already-bullied
status would allow her to perfectly engage the rather more pleasing
role of the tormentor rather than the tormented, and are hoping to
work out a pretend victory against tormentors closer to home than
her -- but that you cannot even now manage to face at all -- by
effecting some kind of satisfying turn-about upon her.
You've spun out a drama of defeat-turned-into-self-realization, but
some of us doubt if you've even made step one -- it's all, perhaps, a
distraction. And you post on Open Salon, where everyone plays to
one-another's inclination to avoid, to lie, in an effort to cow truth
away by pretending through thorough mutual engagements with a
wide-spectrum of assholes and angels to have fully engaged every
possible reality. And you have it moved up to Salon -- which you still
all sense at some level as a risk into discomfortable, "not-playingalong" adult-realm, but where increasingly ever more hands bait a
pretend freedom from long-troubling anxieties to sanity-inclined
holdouts, to make indepedent Salonistas effectively and permanently
into "lie to me" fully-dependent, infantile and lost OpenSalonistas.
You've turned into a compassionate adult, who won't tolerate her
735
children: Yes, from your not receiving the counsel you deserved, this
is to be expected. Pity your children and their likely sufferance to the
ongoing cycle you yourself could not absent yourself from.
(addressed to Mr M-H, whose comment is above)
you DO recognize that what you are doing (accusing the writer
of this article, whom you have never met, of being weak) ... is
itself a form of bullying?
You have wrapped your point up in an enormous number of
words, but the bottom line is that you are simply attacking
her, and you do so under the guise of educating her, which is a
particularly revolting way of trying to tell someone that you
think they are weak.
Wisely, I think, Ms Kho will likely not give you the rise you are
seeking to provoke from her. But I'm quite happy to call bulls
%$t when I see it.
Re: the misuse of the forum to project and work out one's own
personal issues - have you looked in the mirror lately?
(mateomateo)
----ignore Paddy McHalston-Klein
He's a good example of a rare breed - a well-spoken moron.
He has a certain way with words, but when you look at the
actual content of what he's saying you discover it's pure drivel.
(Sour Scribe)
@mateomateo
This isn't simply somoeone telling us how she set herself free; it's
someone who's taking advantage of a spreading environment which
buttresses and praises those who'll lose themselves to lies, while
pretending absolutely different, and which will come, which IS
736
COMING, at the expense of any irritating counter who smells the rat
and is keen to point it out too. The mob is trying to blob out sane
response -- it aggresses; and the only sane response response is
letting it know you're cany to it and won't be backing down. It's about
self-defence, your survival, too.
People who are bullied at school inevitably have been bullied FIRST
at home. Bullies pick on them, sensing their already-victimhood: in
picking on them, they become that much less the kind of person who
is foremost a victim themselves. This author is quite willing to dwelve
on the family abuse inevitably to found driving bullies, but not at all
interested in exploring if something of the same is at work in
producing those who'll prove their victims. In a sane world, we would
all notice that, and direct her attention to it. In a different
environment, one in which sanity is secure or on the ascent, I would
reply with much less fight. Believe it or not, I mostly do wish her well,
but not at my expense.
@Patrick M-H
You're kind of a prat, aren't you? In your world, everyone is
"mentally ill" except for yourself, is that it? What a sad little
life that must be for you, being the only healthy person on the
planet.
I have to say that the last time I saw my Grade 1-12 nemesis,
she had gotten so obese that I had to look twice to see if it was
really her. She was always heavy, but she used to have a neck.
I think she recognized me, but thought twice about talking to
me because I was laughing so hard at her that I had to sit
down.
Karma's a bitch. (Aunt Messy)
----Sorry - she still won
You stood there on the sidewalk, charring with er like you
737
"wre too old friends." So you are still playing along with her
fantasy. She gets to treat you now like *nothing ever
happened.*
Why didn't you say "Why were you such a bitch to me in 4th
grade?" Or "What made you decide to turn my life into a living
hell?" or "Did you ever get over the perverse satisfaction you
got from torturing another human being, or are you still doing
that in your place of employment?"
Or even, "I heard that your family life was really unpleasant
when we were in 4th grade. Is that why you were so mean to
me?"
Then, if she denied it, you could straighten her out with an
"Oh, I see. you only remember the nice stories. Listen, babe,
you were a real piece of work. But I'm raising my daughters to
never be scared of little dictators of the type you used to be."
You were just too pusillanimous to confront her, even after all
these years. Your 4th grade self is saddened by your adult
betrayal of her. You wouldn't even fight for her! Instead, you
just wanted her to "like" you, to realize that you finally were a
person worth being let into her club.
Don't be too self-congratulatory. (ourwisemodel)
@ourwisemodel
re: You stood there on the sidewalk, charring with er like you "wre
too old friends." So you are still playing along with her fantasy. She
gets to treat you now like *nothing ever happened.*
Why didn't you say "Why were you such a bitch to me in 4th grade?"
Or "What made you decide to turn my life into a living hell?" or "Did
you ever get over the perverse satisfaction you got from torturing
another human being, or are you still doing that in your place of
employment?"
Or even, "I heard that your family life was really unpleasant when
we were in 4th grade. Is that why you were so mean to me?"
738
So her friend replies to her, "Perverse satisfaction? Still doing that in

my place of employment? My decision, yet family life drove me to it?
-- Look, hun, if you're looking here to show how you're not afraid of
me, how you're way past me, way past being the kind of person I
could bully and manage so efficiently, with your so-many-years-past,
your new directions, baby rotunditry and busy San Francisco' employ,
the only way to have done that would have been to communicate
somehow how, though I of course still affect you, you'd come to know
how it never really was about me at all. I hurt you bad, but only
because I sensed you were someone who was ideal for hurting -- you'd
known it substantially, way before I came along: I was only following
a pre-established route. With all these years since and all you've
managed is wondering what might have been wrong with me, clearly
still too afraid to explore what is was that was wrong with you, with
your family life, that made you the particular one I keyed in on to so
easily and mercilessly pick on ... I'm not sure if you've even convinced
me you've taken step one.
Look, I'll help out: dwelve a bit; please just start, just start
considering what your mom and dad were doing to you at the time
that served you on a platter for an everyday bully like me. I guarantee
they had made you someone who was ready to shrivel, perhaps
someone who felt bad enough about herself that she actually desired
and prompted further shriveling, and I simply took advantage of that
-- using you to enable my need to feel an empowered tormenter
rather than a cowed victim -- and/or responded to your masochistic
desire to show how your bad self had gotten the fair response it surely
deserved, that you were going to seek it elsewhere in life, on and on.
At base, I'm not someone you should be looking to get square with,
but a possible prompt you should learn to use to get you in line with
where you need to get looking. The way to get mostly fully past me, to
miniature me, despite all my awful bullying, incredibly just into one
of the people you once knew, the way to ensure you'll be a
739
compassionate parent and not just perpetrate the crimes you've

suffered from upon your children, is to focus on how your parents -not me -- debased you. As is, you're likely just another parent who
maintains the near life-sustaining illusion that she has the stuff to
learn from the past and escape mistakes, without the capacity to
appreciate that likely inevitably for her not facing the real issue, she'll
be driven by inner haunts to look at her children the same way her
parents were driven to look at her: as deserving bullying punishment,
simply for being vulnerable and desiring of love.
If you're going to write about this encounter one day, I hope it's not at
some place where you so expect people have themselves been
sufficiently bullied to need to pretend you as having delightfully
moved on so they can pretend themselves the same, that all you've
ensured yourself are a lineup of 'you go girl!' replies. Peace."
Wow @Patrick
Based on the skimpy set of facts in her article, I'm trying to
figure out how you know so much about the writer that you
can accuse her of lying.
Also, what does "dwelve" mean? I plugged it into the
Merriam-Webster online dictionary, and "drivel" came up in
the list of words I actually might have been searching for.
(SoFla Kate)
Link: What my grade school bully taught me (Salon)
--------THURSDAY, JULY 7, 2011
Tyranny of closure
Dear Cary,
I follow your column off and on, and I appreciate the way you
handle questions from all ages and types of people. I am a 56-
740
year-old man, married with a teenage son. I live in the town

close to where my parents grew up. I have relatives here that I
mostly avoid, even though I was close to some of them when I
was younger. My father died about 20 years ago from
complications of alcoholism. He was living in another state
(unintentional pun), and his family brought him back here to
die. I am pretty sure that they expected me to take care of
him, but I refused.
He had left us years before, and maintained very little contact.
When I told his family I wasn't going to be around to help, this
created a lot of hard feelings, and they set me up as a villain,
even telling the story to other people, their version of course. I
basically wrote them off, but have kept up marginal contact
with some of them. I don't really have many friends here and
would have left years ago, but my wife and I have good jobs,
my wife and son like it here, and my mother is here.
Now my mother, who is 87, is in a nursing home dying of
leukemia. She probably will only live another two months.
Since I am the only one of her children living here, I have had
to assume a lot of the responsibility for her care. My sister and
brother both live a day's drive from here. I owe my mother a
lot. Besides the fact that she took care of us as a single mother,
she also had to help me through an accident I had when I was
10 years old, which involved a number of surgeries; she made
sure we were housed and fed, and she pushed us to get
educations. My sister has a master's degree and my brother
and I both have Ph.D.s. She was a quiet person, and like many
women in her generation, she valued family and getting along
with others. She also served as baby sitter/daycare-giver for
one of my nieces and for my son before he started school. She
adores my son. But now she is dying, and getting weaker as
the weeks go by. She does not leave her room or bed, even
though the staff try to take her to the common areas of the
nursing home. At the same time, she doesn't seem sad. She is
741
mostly in good spirits. I would describe her as resigned and

content. She loves visitors and flowers, even though she won't
leave her room. I don't think she is in pain.
My problem is that I have such a hard time visiting her. All
she wants is someone to sit with her, but that is hard for me. I
take my son with me sometimes, and it is wonderful to see her
face light up. She doesn't say much, but we just sit for a while
and then leave. I wish I could go there and spend more time,
but it is really hard to do that. It literally drains me of all of
my energy. I'm not complaining about her. She makes no
demands. I'm not the dying person. I feel I should want to go
see her as much as possible now.
The idea of having a funeral makes me sick. I have already
made all of the arrangements and paid for it. I had to, so that
she would qualify for Medicaid and be able to stay in the
nursing home. I went along with her wishes to be cremated. I
picked out the urn and wrote the obituary. Everything is
prepared. It is common here to have a visitation for about two
hours and then a funeral. I cannot stand the idea of the
visitation. I don't want to see my relatives from either side or
her friends and acquaintances; I don't want to be comforted
by them. I guess I am afraid I won't be able to handle it. I
don't know what to do.
Lost in an Alien World (letter to Cary Tennis, Salon, 29 June
2011)
Tyranny of closure
My mother has contrived cunning means by which my duty, after I
insisted on my adulthood, was to never cause her trouble and to try to
appease her -- make her eyes light up! No time that I subsequently
lent myself to her, did I not feel once again taken: er, I don't exist
simply to delight you out of your depression. If your difficulty is
actually more like mine, and it probably is, in your being the child of a
742
single mom who clearly has steered and intimidated you all into
thinking her always selfless rather than, say, simply masochistic ("Oh
look at me, always thinking of other people and never of myself!") -as forever after, even though she would ostensibly never claim such a
thing, rightfully, at least, in her full always service, though you were
no doubt already all along that -- and have all had difficulty never
allowing yourselves to distance yourselves too far from her, I would
recommend not seeing her. At some level, she might respect that she
raised a son who could resist her and guilt and everyone thinking him
the worst-of-the-worst, to aggressively demarcate at this time when it
easiest to disavow his true needs, that it's actually going to be about
him (and please don't lie to yourself: refusing your father was not you
remaining firm to yourself and stalwartly refusing to defer to good
opinion: it was actually easy, and probably actually mostly at your
expense, because it was an ideal way to show yourself loyal to the one
whose opinion of you you mostly need to fear, your [as the story goes]
betrayed mother). Rather than simply feeling guilty, as having missed
something you'll always regret, it must be suggested that just as likely
you might feel proud of yourself for finally this time not giving in -- so
much better than trying to take nourishment from what is actually a
false simulacrum: your giving your dying dad the bird. And
regardless, it's about time he, that you, did.
I'm guessing, though, the tale will end with her owning you the whole
of your life (and, my, doesn't that reflect badly on her!), with you
never escaping her preferred narratization of her and her use of you
("I owe her a lot!": no dear, you were pretty much born to make her
feel good; she pulped you good to nourish herself, whatever you-andyour-sisters' accumulated shiny MA and PhD baubles, that, we won't
fail to also note, no doubt made your mom's eyes light up good!), and
you taking out the lifelong-accumulated frustrations from pains you
cannot acknowledge as such on those actually well-loved enough to
never feel it their appropriate default to give up themselves until the
very end, to their moms.
743
@ Patrick
I can't even be mean to you, because clearly you are in
tremendous pain and were, at least in your imagination,
horribly hard-done-by.
But please do try to remember that not every mother is
abusive or narcissistic. I'm sorry if yours was. But to project
your inner torment onto a total stranger is just...wrong. It's
not the LW's fault that you are suffering. (Dorothy Parker)
@Dorothy Parker
Alchoholic father. Abandoning, betraying father. Alchoholic,
betraying, abandoning -- self-serving -- father who at the end of his
life, would deny even more of you.
Selfless angelic mother, who is to be summed up by all she has given
her kids and all they rightfully -- though she of course would make no
claim to it -- owe her.
Son who wants to delineate for himself his ability to remain true to
himself in face of cowing further expectations and guilt, but has only
worked himself up to doing so in his safe trial run: when spurning
someone he's taken care to describe as obviously having more than
earned his spurning -- his father, an act he still takes care to also
communicate his loyalty to his spurned mother, as being perhaps
principally in service to her rather to himself. "You abandoned her
when she needed you most, so I'm ignoring you now -- fair turnaround, asshole": and so our writer surely plays the puppet for his
mother's revenge fantasy.
I recognize this guy, and see what he's working himself up to but fears
there's no way he'll manage. How about from the very available clues
he has fortunately been able to give us, we try giving him the
encouragement he really wants and needs? Wakey-wakey, people.
@Dorothy Parker
Further, if there is something Freudian going on here -- and I'm with
you in thinking there is -- it is in how the writer portrays his father.
744
Very likely, he cannot admit to himself how he actually understands

his life alongside his mother -- as feeling abandoned to someone
devoted to principally nourishing her own unmet needs -- but still
finds way to punish her for her endless self-satisfying in isolating her
crimes in the person he has been made to feel permitted and
encouraged to resent and disparage, his father. The reason there is
such disbalance, with a father who ends up looking like he should
know he amounted at the finish to nothing that shouldn't rightly be
ignored, and who remains such a nothing he can fairly readily be
made sport for irreverant jokes, and a mother it looks like the worst of
crimes to harbor any feeling of neglecting at all, is owing to this
displacement.
@ Patrick
Never mind, dude. You're just off some kind of deep end. I
don't see any Freudian anything, I see you very blatantly
ranting about your own highly narrativized life and
attributing it to a total stranger that you claim you "know" and
"recognize" (hint: you don't, this is the Internet)...and I've just
read your other letters around Salon, and...forget it. (Dorothy
Parker)
----About Patricks point of view
Back again, people have been pretty hard on Patrick, but he
brings up a very relevant point. It is possible - though I would
not assume it - that part of the LW's distress in having to be
the primary relative involved in his mother's death isn't just
about dying itself, but about unfinished business. Many
parents do leave emotional scars on their children even if
there are good parts to the relationship too. When the intense
time of caretaking and taking responsibility for the parent
comes, for the adult child all those scars can get ripped open.
745
It's true that we don't KNOW that this is happening with the
LW, but it might be. It's like all that unfinished business roars
up to the surface for that last chance of resolution.
So LW if any of that really is happening for you, please
thinking about getting into therapy for the duration. Might be
a good idea anyway to give you extra support as you see your
mother through to the end. Please don't let the judgers and
the haters bring you down. I still stand by what I posted
earlier - honor all your feelings, the need for relief and the
desire to do the right thing. (Aquatic)
----On Sentiment and Duty
Many in this thread have given sentimental reasons why LW
should continue to visit his mother every day: he should
"cherish" the time he spends with her; he should have
"reverence" for the death process; he should think of it as
"sacred" work. These are fine sentiments--if you have them.
But if LW were capable of sentiments like those, he would not
have needed to write for advice. It is clear that he has a strong
aversion to visiting his mother. Sometimes we can induce
feelings in others by getting them to think of things in a
certain way, but as a general rule, you cannot argue someone
into having a feeling.
In my original post, I simply advised LW to do his filial duty,
and several others on this thread have emphasized duty as
well. Admittedly, there is something impersonal about duty.
In fact, were LW to tell his mother he was visiting her because
it was his duty to do so, that would be cold. He'd be better off
not visiting her at all than to tell her that. In fact, it is part of
LW's filial duty not to let his mother think that duty is his
motive for being there, but rather that he is there because he
wants to be with her at the end. In other words, he has duty lie
746
about how he really feels.

But the advantage of emphasizing duty is that it is primarily a
matter of behavior. You don't have to feel anything to do your
duty. You can even have the "wrong" feelings, and still do your
duty. If LW tries to force himself to have the sentiments
recommended to him, it will only make what he has to do
even more difficult. It is not in him to feel those things. But
telling him to do his duty imposes a much easier task, well
within his ability to perform. (disinterested spectator)
being the distinterested spectator
re: In fact, were LW to tell his mother he was visiting her because it
was his duty to do so, that would be cold. He'd be better off not
visiting her at all than to tell her that. In fact, it is part of LW's filial
duty not to let his mother think that duty is his motive for being
there, but rather that he is there because he wants to be with her at
the end. In other words, he has duty lie about how he really feels.
But the advantage of emphasizing duty is that it is primarily a
matter of behavior. You don't have to feel anything to do your duty.
You can even have the "wrong" feelings, and still do your duty. If
LW tries to force himself to have the sentiments recommended to
him, it will only make what he has to do even more difficult. It is not
in him to feel those things. But telling him to do his duty imposes a
much easier task, well within his ability to perform.
The problem with visiting her armored autisticly in duty is that
mother might pick up from your robotism that you're there but for
duty, even without you (more overtly) telling her such. If mother is
sensitive, alert to how you're responding to her, if you don't really
want to be there there's no way you'll not communicate this to her. If
you don't want to be there but come to her anyway, the only way
this'll work -- other than you coming to enjoy your time with her -- is
if she is someone who is readily able to take from you even while
you're evidently not in mind to be supped. But if she is such a person,
747
and the fact that she is explains why none of you really left so far from
her that you're not all at least potentially available for a "late-night
snack" -- even with you being the meal of choice, your siblings live but
a day's drive off -- then the reason you don't want to be with her now
is because of the carnage to self composition that might follow when
duty demands than you lay down every self (defence, interest) in
deference to her, not duty. If LW listens to you, disinterested
spectator, he'll come in a knight to Duty, but Mother will make short
work of that ignoble spurning and leave him feeling royally screwed.
His only real compensense will be that he did what his siblings didn't;
but like he likely did with his father, in his in some way taking them
to task for their absence and neglect, he'll just further cast a shadow
on his mother's true legacy.
At the finish, LW, your true feelings showed you were agnostic
towards your mother. Whether you see her or not (though we all
know you will -- this letter served as the only resistance you were
going to permit yourself), time to focus on why all this selflessness on
her part still strangely left you in a state where some of us would
counsel you away from showing how you truly feel.
Link: I cant watch my mother die (Salon)
---------THURSDAY, JULY 7, 2011
Go the F**k to Sleep
What's more absurdly hilarious than an ersatz bedtime story
called "Go the F**k to Sleep"? Funnier even than Werner
Herzog or Samuel L. Jackson reading it? Answer: The
uproariously hyperbolic opinion piece that ran Monday on
CNN CNN! -- by author Karen Spears Zacharias, who
claims, "The violent language of 'Go the F*** to Sleep' is not
the least bit funny, when one considers how many neglected
children fall asleep each night praying for a parent who'd care
748
enough to hold them, nurture them and read to them." Wah

wah waaaaaaah.
Zacharias, whose bio says she has a forthcoming memoir on
the murder of 3-year-old Karly Sheehan, is careful in her piece
to state that "Nobody is suggesting that there's a connection
between Adam Mansbach's book and child abuse or child
neglect" and that "Mansbach is undoubtedly the kind of father
who heaps love, affection and attention upon his daughter."
But, as she explains, "the lines of what's appropriate parenting
have become blurred" and, as a concerned Oregon attorney
says, the book is full of "violent language in association with
children." For the corker, she quotes child development expert
Dr. David Arredondo, who implores, "Imagine if this were
written about Jews, blacks, Muslims or Latinos," and she says,
"It is hard to imagine this kind of humor being tolerated by
any of the marginalized groups Arredondo cited." I wonder, is
that because the sleep habits of Jews, blacks, Muslims or
Latinos aren't relevant? Because "Take a Nap Right Now,
Goddammit, Person of Color" just doesn't make a lick of
sense?
Zacharias, whose comedic credentials include a blurb from
Jeff Foxworthy, has drummed up a world of disagreement;
her story has received over 2,000 comments in just one day
since her bizarre Op-Ed appeared. The more restrained can be
summed up by the reader who noted "Humor helps people
deal with stress" and the person who suggested, "This lady is
out of her mind."
[. . .]
Comedy explained isn't comedy at all. And when you speak up
and say that something is offensive, you inevitably run the
risk of being labeled a humorless scold. But real humor rarely
involves taking cheap shots at groups of people who are
749
regularly misunderstood or victimized. It comes instead from

observation of the absurdities of life, from the frustrations of
being the underdog, from sticking it to the man. Being
shocking is fine; taking lazy jabs at the already put-upon is to
bomb unforgivably.
That's why it's so silly to take umbrage at "Go the F**k to
Sleep," because Zacharias doesn't seem to get who the joke is
on. She argued Monday on Twitter that "The point is that far
too many children live in homes where ugly thoughts are
acted upon," as if ugly thoughts inevitably lead to ugly deeds,
or ugly thoughts shouldn't be laughed at. It's not that
sometimes children aren't verbally browbeaten for real. But
Mansbach's humor is about the tyrannical boss -- the boss, in
this instance, being the baby. And if you're a parent, you
damn well know who wears the poop-loaded, spit-up-stained
pants in your torturously sleep-deprived relationship. (Go
the F**k to Sleep and Tracy Morgan's comedy battle,Mary
Elizabeth Williams, Salon, 28 June 2011)
---------Tyrannical, demanding children are the problem
The book could be everything you say it really is, MEW, and it would
be a shame if what this is a most-welcome, fun book that mostly gives
some humor and compensense/relief to parents who overall
obviously really do love their children, but nevertheless can
sometimes of-course resent some of the wear and strain involved in
taking care of them, and who shouldn't feel guilty for some harmless
jibing back. Or, it could be what Zacharias suggests it is, part of
acceptible, guilt-free way in which a climate can be created for
parents to legitimate their desire to strike back against children for
their ostensible interminable spoiled self-centeredness and
demandingness. I've read the book, think it clearly the latter, and am
glad Zacharias spoke out -- but just wish she hadn't allowed that
750
Mansbach was absolutely for-sure loving of children; because the

truth is if he was that I wouldn't find the book objectionable:
regardless of where-the-shit-fuck he went with it, it would
communicate this love, and the lost-in-space, puritan dumb-tards
would be objecting a book that is actually serving their end!: those
who want a climate that encourages children to feel insecure and
fearful (and please, look around, and don't deny the every evidence
that most Americans clearly do not want good things for their kids)
would actually have to discourage people from actually
reading/buying the book to have it work their way.
Perhaps you all disagree, but I sense increasingly we're having various
groups floated for "consideration," mostly for the purposes of making
their victimization something they had coming their way. While we've
all been suffering, forced to make ever more sacrifices, haven't we too
long tolerated the goodie-goodie understanding of adult motivation
that would have us feel guilty if we dare on occasion resent the child's
spoiled demand that we attend to his/her each-and-every moment-tomoment whim?, that would impede some fair and sane turn-around
and make children seem, at least in a fairer world, in need of giving a
little bit more back to us for a change? Childrearing wasn't always
about that, we note -- forever attending to them and giving-in to
them. For quite the while it was mostly about hardening, in fact -restraining, disciplining, shaping them. No one want to go back to
that obvious, cruel overkill of spanking and closet-time banishment,
of course, but surely if they learned something more of that young -that not every one of their endless whims deserves attendence, and
are perhaps in need of restraint and punishment -- they won't grow
up into adults so still insisting of making a tyranny of their incessant
needs they were willing to bloat to the point of immobility both
themselves and their nation in service to them!
When adults start finding ways to legitimate a climate where more
"honest" complaints/assessments of babies can be made -- especially
about their endless needs -- be sure you're at time when adults are
feeling guilty about having in their lifetime actually managed to
751
satisfy some of their own. They punish themselves for this greed by,
for instance, voting in politicians who would near kill an economy just
so everyone can feel more virtuous, less selfish, more principally selfdenying and less blameless, but mostly "merge with perpetrator" and
go after those who most fundamentally represent neediness and
dependency: welfare types, precariously-living immigrants, and most
especially, children.
This book is not so much much-needed relief, but sign that in this
obviously child-hating America, things are getting in line for
unimpeded persecution. Soon books like this won't have to hide
behind a "harmless" joke. "Our kids are spoiled brats; long past time
we reigned them in."
Further discussion on how we turn principally on needy, defenceless
children at the finish of prosperous times, at psychohistory.com
Link: "Go the F**k to Sleep" and Tracy Morgan's comedy battle
(Salon)
TUESDAY, JULY 5, 2011
Old Youth
You write about how poverty breeds creativity. You think
about how scavenging for wild food gives you the perfect
opportunity to slow down, to really appreciate your
surroundings. You talk about how frugality is more
environmentally sustainable. You pontificate on why creating
meals from scratch is cheaper, healthier and deeply satisfying.
Then you run out of cooking oil.
You love fat. As a child you ate margarine by the spoonful.
You didn't know any better. Now you've moved on to more
delicious pastures. As a cook you can never resist sneaking in
that extra bit of butter, that tablespoonful of olive oil, that dab
of bacon grease. You believe that cake is a vessel for frosting,
that salad dressing should be two parts oil to one part vinegar,
752
and that packaged low-fat foods are a symptom of the decline

of Western civilization. Fat makes food taste good.
Under the best of circumstances, you have eight or nine
varieties of fat on hand. In ascending order of importance:
chicken drippings, vegetable oil, chili oil, peanut oil, light olive
oil, coconut oil, bacon grease, butter and, of course, extra
virgin olive oil. (You would sell your first-born child to be the
sort of person who could afford to use truffle oil on a regular
basis.)
[. . .]
You could, of course, borrow a cup of oil or a stick of butter
from your friends down the road. You could call upon your
neighbors. But here's the thing about being broke: Suddenly
asking a simple favor feels like begging. If you had the money
but were just trying to postpone a trip to town, it would be
easy to borrow a stick of butter. Your empty wallet changes
the nature of the errand. In your own backward way, you are
stupidly proud.
[. . .]
In your freezer there is a container full of fat and bone that
you've been saving for your friend's dogs. You think about this
fat. The excess fat was cut from a fresh piece of meat and
stored in a clean container. Nothing wrong with it. But isn't it
a little like eating dog food? It's not dog food till the dogs are
eating it, you reason. In the end, your love for fat wins over
your sense of propriety. (Felisa Rogers, Can you live
without cooking oil, Salon, 25 June 2011)
-----I just wonder
how the other half lives.
This was, unexpectedly from its title, a wonderful piece. From
the early comments, though, you can see what the overall tone
753
will be: many folks see this 'back to nature' as a smokescreen.

For those of us who grew up with a tub of lard handy, this
particular essay rings hollow.
Good writing, really, but I've never met anyone who's tasted
truffle oil. (Pulcritude)
----Uh...lard?
Unless you live in a tree above the jungle canopy, I feel certain
that a pig farmer or abattoir lurks nearby. Lard rendered from
pork fat is beyond cheap---most butchers toss itand the
ancillary product is yummy cracklins for snacking or salads.
Pork fat is WAY better for you than any veggie oil, has a
neutral taste and a very high boiling point. Fries in any other
oil or fat do not make it. I have a friend in Northern B.C. who
hunts bear and does a real snout to tail by rendering bear fat
into lard and his pancakes with wild berries are like kissing
the hem on an angels gown. If youre really insistent on living
off the local land, find the oldest folks in your area who went
through the Depression and ask them how they ateor else
just continue to be the whining dilettante. (Panama
Borsalino)
----It's very difficult
Offhand I can't think of a significant cuisine which doesn't
rely on cooking fat of some sort or another. It might be palm
or peanut oil. It might be lard or blubber or canola or tail fat
or butter. They all rely on some form of fat for most of the
cooking techniques.
It's not just aesthetics or tradition. We need fat soluble
vitamins. No matter what Beans&Greens gabbles on about
754
they're difficult to get from a vegan diet without heavy and

expensive supplementation. And they're nearly impossible
without fats.
It absolutely is hard to live without cooking oil.
Of course, this is where bulk buying and friends come in
handy. You might not be able to buy your designer extravirgin cold-processed olive oil hand-pressed by wizened
artisans from one particular valley in the Tuscan hills. But
four people can club up and split a 20 liter jug of canola oil for
a reasonable price.
And no, the fat you saved from that cut of meat is not "dog
food". It's full of those all-important vitamins. And it doesn't
take much to get those nutrients or make a tasty meal.
(anuran)
----Really Enjoyable
Thank you for this piece. I so enjoyed how, all at once, you
employed enough detail to: make us realize what we have and
take for granted (down to the specific detail of city dwellers
like me who currently have both a change jar and corner
store); give a growing sense of horror while keeping a sense of
perspective on how temporary and soon-to-be-fixable it is,
even admitting things you could do but don't; and provide an
excellent recipe that I'm going to prepare for breakfast right
now. I laughed at how much this felt like a funny, scary movie:
I was just so relieved it had a happy ending of found fat and
potatoes. The "happy ending" makes the recipe itself even
better. Well done! (Agniescka)
----Felisa, you just seem hell-bent on making things hard
755
for yourself
I can't quite tell if it is a stunt -- along the lines of "No-Impact
Man" -- or you really ARE this impractical and naive.
Obviously we've discussed before that you clearly would seem
to qualify for food stamps, even if your husband works
clearing brush and you sell a article every two weeks to Salon.
Clearly that is not enough for you to buy groceries regularly.
There is no reason to run out of cooking oil; it keeps a very
long time in a cool dry cupboard, if tightly sealed. It isn't very
expensive, and you can buy it on sale, or in those giant jugs at
the big box stores like Costco.
There are also "alternatives" like bacon drippings, any fat
trimmed off meat (as you actually did have in the freezer),
lard, Crisco and so on.
Apparently you have some false pride about asking neighbors
FOR A STICK OF BUTTER (or even margarine, which costs
about 30 cents a stick), and that's ridiculous. I am sure you
would gladly give a neighbor a stick of butter or margarine, a
cup of vegetable oil, and not even want to be repaid. In the
deep country, people depend on each other and THAT IS A
GOOD THING.
As I have said before, I have family in the country and yes,
they have close neighborly relationships, because so far from
things like repair guys you can call on the phone 24 hours a
day, YOU NEED a neighbor to help you with that bad tire on
your car, or the sump pump that won't work. Trying to do it
alone is almost suicidal.
They also have learned you CANNOT COUNT on short trips to
the supermarket or Kwik-E mart, so you BETTER DARNED
WELL have a plan for storing groceries, and a back up plan,
and somewhere to store staples and stuff, because if nothing
else, in the winter you might be stuck in the house for weeks
at a time.
It doesn't take much brilliance or cash to put aside a sack of
756
flour, dried beans (hey! Beansy! your favorite!), rice, canned

veggies, tuna, and yes, a JUG of OIL, for whatever tough times
(blizzard, flat tire, no money) is coming your way.
I also have to agree wtih emceemk, and I've mentioned this
about your other articles. You are more a citified foodie than
you are a "back to nature survivalist", and it shows in every
word. It's amusing you can't see this or own up to it. Nobody
REALLY REALLY POOR would EVER have bought things like
key limes, coconut oil, wine, and other lux goodies -- because
they would have used the few extra dollars they had to do
what I suggest above: stockpile staples for the "tough times".
The cost of that coconut oil would have paid for 3 jugs of olive
oil or big enormous Costco can of Crisco.
As emceemk says (good post all round), people who REALLY
HAVE TOUGH TIMES -- who have hungry children -- who
haven't worked in TWO years -- who don't have a side job
writing foodie articles online -- who can't even FIND a job
cutting brush -- whose house is in foreclosure -- who face
homelessness -- would LOVE to have the problem of "not
enough fat/oil to cook some organic foodie dish".
I love the metaphor of "lemonade made from lemons, but with
no sugar whatsoever". Bad times teach you to be a survivor,
but they also teach you that BAD TIMES SUCK ASS, and to
try to ensure you don't reach bottom EVER AGAIN.
I also want to second the words of mattwa33186: you can
make your own butter easily from WHOLE MILK. Of course,
I'd bet my last nickel, Felisa, you guys only drink fat free skim
organic milk, that costs $6.50 a gallon, because the regular
stuff isn't good enough for you. (Note: you cannot make butter
out of SKIM milk.)
@Panama Borsalino: what you said
PRECISELY. Find an old grandmother or two who lived
through the Great Depression, or if not, at least the 50s era.
They will give you the recipes for cheap, easy meals with low
757
cost ingredients, reusing and repurposing everything, and

stuff like "use lard" because lard is cheaper than BUTTER and
OLIVE OIL.
I was lucky enough to grow up with two such grandma's; you
grew up eating imported truffle oil. That's just the first of your
survival problems. (Greens&Beans)
----Stories..
Beans and Greens- I completely agree with you. They don't
live on their own land, they beg-borrow and steal to make
ends meet, have neighbors that give them meat, milk, eggs
etc.
I think that these "stories" are mostly made up by a young
(childish) idealist that thinks a life of poverty is a glamorous
adventure. She seems to have grown up with these
adventures.(Grown up may be a bit of a stretch)
Felisa, do you pay rent? Do you have access to the whole 58
acres that you talk about or just a house? How do you afford
internet service? (Internet is a priority, but basic food needs
are not?)
I also live in the country and have cows and chickens. We do
all we can to help out our neighbors in need, but eventually
you see that one or two are just living in the area so they don't
have to get real jobs.
I live on a fairly decent income in these times and certainly
can't afford things like bacon, wine and coconut oil.
I would think that things for you would be less stressful if you
lived in your car and begged on a street corner nearer to a
mini-mart than relying on your community to take care of
you. Or better yet- even 2 minimum wage jobs can pay for a
small apartment and basic needs. (By the way- what is your
husbands back ground, education and work history?)
758
It seems as though you can afford many comforts that most of

us cannot. Perhaps less trips to mexico would afford you some
good EVOO.
http://www.peoplesguide.com/1pages/personal/bios/writers
/felisa.html (AnnNonomouse)
----Also, VERY bad style choice
Second-hand narration is pretentious, clumsy, and
presumptuous. It smacks of "MY experience is so important
and universal that naturally YOU would think and do exactly
as I would". Whenever I read anything formatted like this, I
keep thinking "who the hell are you talking to?" (And just FYI,
I couldn't make it past the halfway mark, it's so irritating.)
Please put away the high school essay tricks next time.
(Serai1)
----Reverse Classism Liar-fest
1) Nobody REALLY REALLY POOR would EVER have bought
things like key limes, coconut oil, wine, and other lux goodies
-- because they would have used the few extra dollars they had
to do what I suggest above: stockpile staples for the "tough
times" Laure1962
Really poor, multi-generational poor people buy cigs and
cheap booze --- because they usually have to work for prissy,
self-aggrandizing scum like you, and therefore they
desperately need the relief provided by mild intoxicants. Their
cigarettes alone cost more than Ms. Rogers few gourmet
tidbits. They rarely have enough space in their trailers to store
all the cheap bulk stuff you insist they live on. A pantry full of
anything is beyond their reach.
759
2) Please. You had coconut oil and plan to replenish your olive
oil stash? That ain't poverty.You were giving fat and bones to
a dog and hadn't made stock from it already? That ain't
poverty.Soy sauce? You can afford soy sauce? Damn, must be
nice. NINALOCA
Yeah, she tries to give something back to the neighbors who
helped her this past winter. It's called pride. As I mentioned
above, her jar of coconut oil cost about the same as 1/3rd a
carton of cigs -- at the reservation smoke shop.
3) I live on a fairly decent income in these times and certainly
can't afford things like bacon, wine and coconut oil.
I would think that things for you would be less stressful if you
lived in your car and begged on a street corner nearer to a
mini-mart than relying on your community to take care of
you. Or better yet- even 2 minimum wage jobs can pay for a
small apartment and basic needs. -- Liar
You can afford the time to post from home on your own
computer & maintain an internet connection, (midday
Saturday the libraries are verrryyy busy) but are too poor to
buy coconut oil or wine? Right. You win the trifecta of
horseshitting!
You vile, aging twits reveal your ignorance of contemporary,
rural western poverty with every filthy word you write. It's
willful ignorance, judging from what you've indicated about
yourselves. You all have hired hands & other service providers
who desperately need a smoke or three after they deal with
you.
You hate her wholly because she is young, hopeful, welleducated and damned resourceful. The comparison between
her and you is endlessly humiliating to you -- as it should be.
(Holly McLachlan)
-----
760
Adapting
Wow. Lots of haters out there! For those who say "oh, none of
us have ever done that, or know anyone who has ever used
truffle oil," I think a lot of us lived differently before 2008. I
would spend $5.00/day on a mocha coffee because I thought I
deserved it working at my crazy job in the big city. And then I
was unemployed and my high-minded ideals of never
stepping into a WalMart ended because they did have the
cheapest cereal in our rural town we had to move to for my
husband's job. So, enjoy the article for what it is--a story of
changes of life, adapting, cooking. Each of us experiences life
differently and through our passions; our kids, cooking,
Bunco, whatever. Oh, and if the author's articles drive you so
crazy, STOP READING THEM! (Caseystay)
----Loved this article.
I can sort of relate, because I've been in the running-out-ofthings situation myself, things that will just have to wait
another three days until payday. (I liked the suggestion about
making butter from whole milk, that was very clever.) My
suggestion: if you think hamburger grease is OK as a cooking
fat, always keep a pound of hamburger in the freezer. Switch it
out with another pound every so often. And always keep an
emergency stick of butter in the freezer, too. When you buy a
new carton, switch the frozen stick with a new one. That
butter will always be in there, for when you run out. (marco
polo)
----@NINALOCA
Nina, Felisa is a very nice young lady, with a lot of very
761
gourmet food tastes and a lot of naive and charming ideas of

"foraging and living off the land....FOR FREE".
I grew up in the 60s and 70s and I got a lot of that from
friends and schoolmates; this idea was all the rage 40 years
ago. Communes, Birkenstock sandals, the Whole Earth
Catalogue, yadda yadda yadda. Felisa is way too young to have
heard of any of that, so she must have gotten a hand-me-down
version from her parents.
Most people gave it up because honestly, it is tough way out in
the country and lonely (a bit better and easier today with cell
phones and the internet, but still) and it's not actually CHEAP
but kinda expensive (you need land and tools and seeds and
labor and fuel and stuff).
It is definitely NOT a solution to "I lost my job and my UI
benefits ran out". That's crazy talk.
That she's not thinking either "country/rural" or
"survivalist/forager" is clear because she is still spending the
pittance of income they DO have on soy sauce, olive oil,
coconut oil, key limes and other items instead of stuff like
dried milk, rice, flour, pasta, plain generic vegetable oil, lard
and other cheap, reliable menu stretchers.
I understand some of this, because frankly, I hope (AS GOD IS
MY WITNESS!) never to have to eat commercial white bread,
cheap hot dogs, margarine or powdered milk if I don't
absolutely have to, to avoid starvation. Been there, done that.
The solution is elegantly simple: APPLY FOR FOOD STAMPS.
Felisa and her husband would likely qualify for $300 in free
food (and the program is quite generous; you can buy
imported olive if you like, even truffle oil).
This is false, hair-shirt poverty -- a bit like whipping one's self
with a cat of nine tails to "beat the sin out". In this case, the
sin appears to be material well-being.
@Beansy
Just because YOU are healthy, Beans, does not translate into
762
"this is a healthy diet for other people". You may just be an

outlier. Or you may be a poor judge of your own health. We
could easily find a few outliers who are perfectly healthy (BP,
weight, etc.) eating at McDonalds! That doesn't make
McDonalds an ideal diet.
@Alkaline
Don't burst an aneurysm, sweetie. I was making an educated
GUESS, because Felisa states "she dreams about truffle oil".
Those are not the words of a poor rural mountain gal, foraging
off the land, but a urban hipster who has expensive Whole
Foods tastes. Most of urban hipsters I know will drink
NOTHING in the dairy department EXCEPT fat free skim
organic milk, and indeed, it does cost about $6.50 a gallon. (Greens&Beans)
----@AnnNonomouse
Thanks (I think you mean me!) and yes, I think Felisa is living
in a cabin her parent's used to own (or still own) and she is
paying rent, but it seems like very minimal rent.
It sounds like she has nice caring neighbors -- they gave her
elk meat! -- but has let her reserves run down to almost
nothing anyhow. How much of this is "poor planning" vs. how
much is "I'll see how little I can get by on!" vs. "I'm dead
broke" -- I don't know. She's a bit cagey on the details.
Yes, I think like many young people having wi fi internet is a
priority over food, clothing, shelter and heat. I know people
who have been FORECLOSED ON, and their children literally
thrown out of their own bedrooms, and those people still have
i-Phones, with expensive data plans. Seriously.
Some people on Salon seem to think I am constantly hatin' on
cable TV and internet, and cell phones and lattes, but that's
not really true: I think they are all fine IF YOU CAN AFFORD
763
IT. My problem is when people who are seriously, no-shit,

going-down-the-tubes broke and in foreclosure and
bankruptcy and they STILL cannot give up $4.75 coffee drinks
or $125 a month data plans for their $400 smart phone.
That's ADDICTION and STUPIDITY, sorry.
For the record, as much as she has stated here, Felisa was
formerly a well-paid copywriter and her husband a paralegal.
However, there are no such jobs in the RURAL MOUNTAIN
COUNTRY, and it is unclear what their long range plans are (a
book deal for her?), since you can't really expect to earn a
living from cutting brush once in a while.
BTW: thank you for the links to Felisa's bio. She has given no
indication here that she spends EVERY WINTER IN
MEXICO, nor the name of her small rural town. I agree: the
cost of even a minimal vacation would pay for a LOT of
groceries.
Also Deadwood, Oregon is a whopping one hour from Eugene,
a good sized college town....I know people who commute
further than that to WORK each day.
PS: Ooops....what Deadwood is actually near, is Mapleton,
Oregon. It is SEVEN MINUTES AWAY by car (meaning you
could WALK if you had to). Mapleton Yellow Pages listed
more than a dozen supermarkets, including Stop N Shop,
Fred Meyer, and Safeway. I think I may have to start calling
B.S. on this series. (Greens&Beans)
----@Holly McLachlan: thanks for the bitch-itude
Stupid-poor and smart-poor are two different things, Holly.
Nobody said that Felisa SMOKED. All poor people DO NOT
SMOKE.
Yes, there are people who are poor because they make
wretched decisions (lotto tickets instead of baby food) but
764
there are also people who simply have bad luck or hard times.
That you can't understand that undermines any of your
points.
I don't own a business or employ anyone, and I doubt Felisa
does, and neither do NinaLoca nor others here. To jump on us
as some kind of "capitalist slime" holding down the
"proletariat" is nonsense. Go back to to your lefty Political Sci
class and on the double!
No, there is nothing wrong in giving back to your neighbors -scraps for the dog or whatever -- but Felisa is so
uncomfortable with those same neighbors she feels she cannot
go over and BORROW ONE STICK OF MARGARINE or a cup
of corn oil, suggesting they are not as tight as you imagine.
Again, comparing coconut oil to cigarettes is unfair unless you
have reason to believe she is wasting her dollars on smoking.
75% of the US public DOES NOT SMOKE. And plenty of the
ones that do, are middle or upper class. (I see plenty of high
paid Hollywood "talent" smoking!)
I don't know AnnNonomouse's backstory, but I can tell you
that I have a USED several years old computer that I bought
second hand, and my internet costs $9.95 (dial up). It's also a
bit of an indulgence, but my husband needs to be able to pick
up work emails on the weekend.
I agree that the library, which used to be a good source of free
internet for the poor, is so terribly swamped now with victims
of the economic downturn, that its next to useless.
HOWEVER, Holly, there are plenty of people who simply
can't afford internet so THEY DO WITHOUT IT. Certainly it
does not come before FOOD.
You are insane if you think I have "servants" or am a
millionaire business owner cheating their employees. (And
Ms. Alkaline says that I make things up? HELLO! are you
reading this????) (Greens&Beans)
765
----@Leeandra Nolting
I agree. I think most country folks would be very OK with a
neighbor borrowing a stick of butter or cup of oil, and
probably say "honey, don't even bother to repay me!" I think
even SUBURBAN folks would do this. It's simple
neighborliness. I pity anyone with neighbors so mean or
parsimonious they won't loan you an egg or a cup of milk in a
pinch.
Now, doing it constantly: not good. I am not endorsing
mooching, just honest borrowing once in a while. And it goes
both ways, naturally.
As you say -- and good point -- mayo can be used for an oil in
some things. I have used it in cakes to substitute or oil or
butter and it works well; mayo is made out of OIL, EGGS and
seasoning.
I've also sauteed in Italian dressing when I had nothing else
on hand; it's mostly canola oil and vinegar. It won't work for
everything, but is fine to saute some strips of chicken for a stir
fry (it won't take much heat).
Country Crock is pretty gross IMHO, but yes, it's very cheap. I
wouldn't want to sentence anyone to eating margarine -- I
believe it is very unhealthy -- unless they are dirt poor and
nothing else is possible. Corn and canola oils (generic brands)
are not expensive and some house brands of olive oil on sale
are just as cheap. Lard is even cheaper than that. I'd only eat
margarine if there was ABSOLUTELY nothing else
whatsoever. (Greens&Beans)
----@Holly McLachlan: well, YOU are here
I don't know about the others, but I got up early -- took my
766
dog for a long walk in the park -- did a couple loads of laundry
-- paid the bills -- ran them out to the post office -- went to an
neighborhood yard sale -- drove to the local park for the
annual "Green Festival" -- had a picnic lunch -- came home
about an hour ago and logged on to pick my email. Read some
other stuff, then Salon and posted a few letters. Not exactly
MY WHOLE FRIGGIN' LIFE, lady.
While you have nothing of value to comment on this article
about, just to tell us all how much you despise us, while
engaging in the IDENTICAL BEHAVIORS we do.
Pot, meet kettle. (Greens&Beans)
----GreensMy story- I have a small farm in rural Eastern WA. No "hired
hands" no employees. What comes in goes back out. Its a
heart felt commitment to no savings and no health insurance.
But we do well enough to take care of our needs and help out
in the community. Kids in school + homework= INTERNET
PRIORITY. Whereas gas is a priority over wine, canning
supplies over specialty oils and vacuum cleaner bags over key
limes.
I don't know Ms. Rogers or what parts of her storys are real
life. I loved the foraging articles and am a sucker for
sourdough. Very humorous and insightful, but would have
been just as enjoyable without the "feel sorry for me" pitch.
True hunger is something I don't wish on anyone, but to play
up (should I say play down) your life just to get the emotions
of the readers is fiction. These articles lead us to believe they
are honest and true experiences of the writer. Maybe they
should be categorized differently under "entertainment".
(AnnNonomouse)
767
----@Greens and Beans/Laurel

I agree that Country Crock is pretty nasty-tasting as compared
to real butter, but it's extremely cheap and you can fry things
in it.
According to Wikipedia, Mapleton, Oregon, is an
unincorporated community with a population of only 918
people--so I doubt that the dozen supermarkets that advertise
in the Mapleton yellow pages actually are in Mapleton. More
likely, there's one or two grocery stores in Mapleton proper
and said dozen supermarkets you mention are in other nearby
communities.
That said, if she really WAS hungry and in need of food, the
amount of time she spent hunting edible mushrooms for a
single omelet she split with her husband and boiling down
Christmas trees for tea..well, that could be put to much more
efficient use applying for food stamps, or going down to the
local extension agency (shouldn't be too hard to find, since
she's not too far from the University of Oregon) to learn
things about how to make do, or taking the truck into the city
and shopping in bulk on Fred Meyer's double-coupon days, or
you know, looking for work that puts food on the table.
Or at least writing about how to put food on the table on the
cheap, but doing so in a way that's useful for most people who
are out of work. (Leeandra Nolting)
----To answer some of your questions.
Mapleton is a 45 minute drive from my house. There is one
store in Mapleton that sells groceries and it is small and, like
many country stores, expensive.
I AM working. Along with other Web-based writing and
768
editing work, I get paid to write about the time it takes me to

forage for mushrooms. Maybe it's not enough to live on, but at
least it kills two birds with one stone.
I did not spend the winter in Mexico, though it certainly
would have been nice.
Sincere thanks to those of you who have written in my
defense, and thanks for the suggestions. Thanks to everyone
for reading.
Cordially,
Felisa Rogers
----As a highly urbanized meat-eater...
...I always enjoy reading Felisa Rogers' articles.
I don't see why people are so political about them.
She and her husband are of an age and temperament to try
this lifestyle out. Because they have a mind to (and she may
get a book out of it, and I hope she does), why is this a
problem?
To the politicoes: what's it taking from you that you don't
want to give? (Greeneyedkzin)
----No shortage of dirtbags in Republic or Spokane
Pride or not,if you can afford to give food to the neighbors
dogs you aren't POOR. Reverse classism my ass, damn near
no one in this country knows what it is to be poor or hungry.
To the first sentence: bullshit. Utter bullshit. People shared
food and medicine in concentration camps. That sharing is
a well documented part of what it means to be human. To the
second: precisely the dodge I expected, and likewise, bullshit.
The tirade you went on further down the page, about the
769
nature of chronic deprivation, describes the lives of many,

many young Americans today. Who don't have the time to
unload on strangers on the net, because they are out there
hustling to live -- as is Ms. Rogers.
Both you and Laure1962 rely on many service providers -- not
personal pool boys, perhaps -- but every clerk at every 7-11
you shop at needs a well-deserved cigarette break after
dealing with you. Because you are pitiful, foul, ugly people.
Garbage beneath the heels of all decent folks, Ms. Rogers
included. You have no defense for your posts. You both have
made assumption about her that are unfounded, and as
negative as possible. Those assumptions mark you as
wretched, honor deficient fucks who have no business
attempting to drag down anyone else -- in any forum, for any
reason. (Holly McLachlan)
----@LaurelGreenBeans
"...also a local map of NEXT DOOR Mapleton, Oregon, which
has a dozen supermarkets and is close enough that she could
walk or bicycle there (less than five miles)."
Well, Laurel, people say you make things up because, well,.....
you make things up. A lot.
The closest Safeway and/or Fred Meyer to Deadwood is either
in Florence, OR (32 miles away) or in Eugene (nearly 60 miles
away).
There are NOT a dozen supermarkets in Mapleton, OR. There
seems to be but a few mom and pop type stores in that small
community.
Please do refute this: please provide a list of the dozen
supermarkets right next door in Mapleton, OR.
I am waiting with bated breath... (mamalicious)
770
----No shortage of dirtbags in Republic or Spokane

Pride or not,if you can afford to give food to the neighbors
dogs you aren't POOR. Reverse classism my ass, damn near
no one in this country knows what it is to be poor or hungry.
To the first sentence: bullshit. Utter bullshit. People shared
food and medicine in concentration camps. That sharing is
a well documented part of what it means to be human. To the
second: precisely the dodge I expected, and likewise, bullshit.
The tirade you went on further down the page, about the
nature of chronic deprivation, describes the lives of many,
many young Americans today. Who don't have the time to
unload on strangers on the net, because they are out there
hustling to live -- as is Ms. Rogers.
Both you and Laure1962 rely on many service providers -- not
personal pool boys, perhaps -- but every clerk at every 7-11
you shop at needs a well-deserved cigarette break after
dealing with you. Because you are pitiful, foul, ugly people.
Garbage beneath the heels of all decent folks, Ms. Rogers
included. You have no defense for your posts. You both have
made assumption about her that are unfounded, and as
negative as possible. Those assumptions mark you as
wretched, honor deficient fucks who have no business
attempting to drag down anyone else -- in any forum, for any
reason. (Holly Mclachlan)
----It's the Green-eyed Monster, Greeneyedkzin
I don't see why people are so political about them.
Greeneyedkzin
The "politics" is in their posts because they find it useful. It
can provide them allies among people who would otherwise
771
despise them.
Their motivation is more envy than philosophy. The envy
common to people whose best years are behind them, and
who now devote themselves to wrecking the happiness of
others.
There was no hyperbole in what I wrote in my prior post,
however harsh or histrionic you might find it. There are few
things lower than people who live to deprive others of joy.
I expect Salon's editors regularly council their shocked writers
about the letters section here, and that they say something
along these lines when they do. (Holly McLachlan)
----@holly
You have absolutely no idea who you are hectoring and you
are so completely offbase in your assessment of me that the
urge to laugh and tell you to STFUB passed immediately and
all I could do was feel sad. It sucks to be poor and its easy to
feel as if your dignity is constantly under assault so Im going
to just assume you're not an asshole but someone whose been
fucked over and feels shitty.
BUT
If I take the time to say,'You can get 5 lbs of cheap chicken,5
lbs of rice and 5 lbs of beans for the cost of your expensive
oils" and you choose to see that as proof of hatred, contempt
and disdain for the poor thats on you.
Your concerns are at about Level 4 on Maslows Heirarchy of
Needs. Laurel and I are focusing on #1- physical survival.
When someone tells me they are hungry but then complains
that they need chocolate and EVOO and coconut oil because
fuckdammitlifeishardandicantbedeniedmhumanity it feels to
me as if I were a surgeon tring to perform an emergency csection but the patient starts bitching that the incision would
772
damage her abdomen and appearance and consequently her

selfimage and self esteem. Self esteem and dignity don't mean
jack if you're dead.Lets get you a little further from being dead
THEN lets worry about the other stuff.
Greens&Beans and I are from the same town. I wonder if its a
cultural thing, because I'm 100% with her on this one.If I had
$20 and needed to feed my kids for a week, I want her to give
me advice even if it means I feel criticized for my past choices.
I dont want someone to tell me- give the bones to the dog and
go ahead and get the coconut oil.
I volunteer with the homeless a fair amount. I cook,serve food
and donate handmade items and toiletries. I always take the
time to cook nice items, to cook them as if I were cooking for
honored guests and serve them as if they were paying
customers. I donate not my leftover items, but toiletries of the
same quality that I buy for myself.I also collect them from
others to donate. And I make things for kids and I make them
nice with yarn I buy or solicit myself because life is hard and
ugly and the poor suffer enough without having to be fed
donated slop and wear donated rags and cast offs.Nothing
pisses me off more than people acting as if the poor deserve
no better than some slop they half ass cooked,some ugly assed
dismal miserable undecorated shelter to sleep in and all that.
Individuals may not be able to provide for themselves more
than the basics.Organizations may struggle to provide more
than the basics. But whenever possible,after the basic survival
needs are met I believe strongly that people also need
beauty,that good tasting food and clean aesthetically pleasing
surroundings are needs not luxuries. They just arent the
MOST urgent need.
Anyway. If food insecurity is an issue coconut oil or EVOO is a
want not a need.
I also have spent a lot of time over the past 13 years writing
blogs and teaching people the skills they need to survive and
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how to make a dollar out of 15 cents, as they say. Food prep.

Menu planning. Budgeting. Gardening.Sewing. Bartering.
There but for the grace of god go I. (NINALOCA)
----Thank you, Holly!
I am grateful for your comments, especially this one: "There
are few things lower than people who live to deprive others of
joy."
I am at the point where I am afraid to read comments on
Salon articles because of the vitriol.
Why so nasty? Why so much ego? Sadly, this foulness pops up
in so many Salon forums. Particularly annoying are the
continuous laments over how Salon is not the paragon it
supposedly used to be. Why not go read somewhere else? Poor
Tracy Clark-Flory. The comments she gets are so evil and
repetitious that I am astonished she hasn't quit yet. Wait!
Maybe she is too smart to read the comments. I hope so.
(imnrg)
----No
You have absolutely no idea who you are hectoring and you
are so completely offbase in your assessment of me
No. I am not.
I could be utterly incorrect about your age, sex, location and
nationality, but your lame, sick motivations are obvious. Your
retreat into pedantic nonsense is likewise, both foul and
obvious in its intent, and its motive.
You believed you had an opportunity to bully this writer with
impunity. You don't. (Holly McLachlan)
774
----@beshok semaj
Of course if one eats a diet of raw foods one doesn't have to
worry about cooking at all (except for the use of a dehydrator).
Then one is being stupidly wasteful. It's been so well
established that it doesn't even need to be demonstrated
again. Raw food is much less nutritious than cooked food.
Meat. Eggs. Fruits. Vegetables. Flowers. Roots. All of it.
Cooking makes proteins much more readily available. It
gelatinizes starches. It breaks cell walls. You get significantly
more minerals, calories, protein and so on from cooked food.
In controlled experiments with the highest quality raw food
people on three to four thousand calorie a day diets could not
maintain body weight. In the studies of women of childbearing age even highly prepared uncooked foods in gorgeyourself quantities were insufficient to maintain menstruation
in over half of participants. That's with modern varieties of
fruit which have undergone thousands of years of selective
breeding to be more nutritious.
There is no human society in recorded history or the
archeological record which subsisted mostly on raw foods.
Not one. Our near cousins the chimps and bonobos do. But
they have jaw muscles which go all the way to the sagittal crest
(which we no longer have), pouchy, muscular lips,
enormously stronger teeth (ours are like an ape's baby teeth),
and a significantly longer digestive tract. And at that they
spend 6-8 hours a day just chewing and digesting.
We are the ape which cooks its food. That is one of the few
universal defining characteristics of all human cultures.
(anuran)
-----
775
Well... I enjoyed it
Flame wars aside, I thought that was an excellently-written
article. It reminded me of my "getting started" time years ago,
when I used to comb through the couch trying to find enough
change to go buy Ramen.
I don't miss those days at all. (Dancing_Angel)
----Wish I had found this before the trolls did
Your writing is, as always, refreshingly good. It's unfortunate
that so many people are only able to find joy in the putdown
of others. That one particular poster has time to write
numerous comments under a name that was slightly altered
from a more sensible poster tells me that she has no respect
for her own opinions and must therefore hide behind another.
She also has way to much time on her hands. Unfortunately,
she is only one of several people who take offense that you are
not living as they would have you live - though we cannot
assume that they would ever truly practice what they preach.
Your words will always be wasted on them.
Such are the problems of the Walking Wounded. These are
people who have become so broken, for whatever reason, that
they cannot see the wholeness and goodness in others. They
are incapable of understanding that another person's
experiences and goals are different from what they might have
experienced or wished for themselves. Pity them and move
on. In the meantime, I look forward to another brilliant essay.
Thank you,
Rachel (RenaissanceLady)
----A publication-wide eidtorial decision
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Pity them and move on. In the meantime, I look forward to

another brilliant essay.
Beautifully written.
Another thing both letter writers and Salon contributors
might do is to complain to the editors (red bolded link on the
lower right of the page). The letters section is under their
control. They could change the tone with a little oversight, by
removing a few posters from the contributing population
(repeatedly, until the ban sticks).
Whack-a-troll is a time-consuming endeavor, but probably
should be seen as a cost of doing business and just budgeted
in as such. The current online norm is to accept them as
unavoidable, and complain only when someone makes an
issue of it (writing off all push-back as a "flamewar"). To some
extent trolling is unavoidable. However, they can be kept at
bay. Entire letters sections don't need to become fever
swamps of dysfunction and bile. (Holly McLachlan)
----I read this, and thought about my in-laws...
...Who, as Dutch immigrants in the 50's and 60's kept a farm
in the far corner of Northwestern Ontario (Rainy River
district). Serious rural life, that. Predates the Trans-Canada
Highway.
In many ways, even though they've moved to the modest town
of Fort Frances, their instincts are still based on that farm.
They have a garden, from which every fall they _can_
potatoes, beans, beets and pretty much everything else they
can manage to grow there (my father-in-law grouses about the
deer that sneak in and pilfer the produce from time to time).
They buy everything in what seems to me to be ridiculous
quantities or sizes (flour, oil, eggs) and yes, save up the bacon
fat in the fridge. My father-in-law even got into making his
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own wine from those kit things. He filled about half of their
basement with the results.
I can't imagine them ever running out of cooking oil, even
back when they were living on the farm (not sure, though, that
they would ever have had coconut oil on hand).
So, to me this reads like someone who had idealized the rural
life, but who now has has gotten into it without having the
instincts.
Learn from this, do what the neighbours do and stock up in
quantity (on the cheap stuff -- and really, bulk canola is the
cheap stuff). And then, as other posters have said, feel more
free to borrow from them, but because you'll have bought in
bulk, you'll also have something to give back if they run low.
(Michael Mackinnon)
----@mammalicious
I got that info straight off of Google yellow pages. I don't live
in the area, but I can read a map! Mapleton is right next door
to Deadwood.
Even Felisa admits there are small stores in Mapleton, but
SHE DOESN'T LIKE THEM, so she won't even buy a STICK
OF BUTTER at such stores. I suspect she "has to go into
Eugene" because Eugene has a Whole Foods or other gourmet
emporium she LIKES better.
@Leeandra Nolting
I've chatted with Felisa several times about food stamps or
even food banks (which have no paperwork nor limits of
income, just "need"). She doesn't want to do it; she's either
too stubborn or too proud. (Or has some money she doesn't
want to reveal that disqualify her from the SNAP program.)
It also suggests this is a stunt, based loosely on "No Impact
Man". I don't believe a smart, educated woman would sit
778
there with NO FOOD IN THE CUPBOARD, and eat nettles,

when she could be eating cheese, meat, fresh veggies, fruit,
milk, bread and other healthy items.
Yes, I also said that "Country Crock is cheap but tastes awful".
Magarine is a chemical "soup" of junk vs. butter. But I know if
you are poor, you can get a big tub instead of one stick of
butter at the same price. I don't look down on anyone trying
to survive poverty. (Greens&Beans)
----@Holly Mclachlan: you are seriously nuts, lady
Time to go back on your meds!
I don't smoke. I hardly know anybody anymore who smokes -my stepdaughter was the last hold out and she quit last year.
I never go into the 7/11 -- I'd have to be seriously desperate for
a popsicle or something. I live in a suburb with enough other
stores that I never need to go in there.
You don't know squat about concentration camps, you hateful
ugly hag. People shared FOOD and MEDICINE with OTHER
HUMAN BEINGS -- not with dogs. I love dogs, but I don't
value dogs over human beings.
Ninaloca or whoever said that "nobody that poor would save
food for someone else's DOG' was correct. And Felisa ended
up eating the scraps!
To use the Holocaust as an example here is just despicable.
Ms. Rogers is not "hustling to live". She chose this lifestyle
quite deliberately (and I think, with the help of her parents
who OWN the cabin and loan it to her free, or very cheap)
because she sensed a book deal in it. She's a professional
writer by trade. And she could get FOOD STAMPS any day;
she choose not to. That's a very unusual choice, and we have
every right to question it. (Greens&Beans)
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@NinaLoca: a word of support

Holly McLachlan is a hateful, spiteful troll. She has no point
here except "you are not allowed to EVER criticize any writer
no matter what".
She is wrong. You and I are right. I don't have any trouble
saying that or sticking with it.
I am not surprised to learn you are a sensible soul from the
Midwest, or share my hometown. I also volunteer for the
Hunger Center and donate food, blankets, clothes and
toiletries to the homeless, including the City Mission. I cook
food at the local Food Bank. I work at soup kitchens on
Christmas and Thanksgiving. I am really insulted that anyone
like "Holly" would ASSUME I am talking from some arrogant
perch, looking down on people. I've been broke and
unemployed; I know what tough times are and I was raised by
Depression-era grandmothers who knew who to survive bad
times.
I am ashamed of people like Holly who think that eating
chocolate and olive oil and having "fun" outweigh basic
human survival, and that somehow criticizing anyone's bad
choices means "you must smoke cigarettes!" (????)
Nobody is "bullying" Ms. Rogers. We are making
COMMENTS on her ARTICLES which she is PAID FOR and
which are PUBLICLY PUBLISHED. If she wants the privacy to
do what she wishes, she doesn't HAVE TO WRITE ABOUT IT.
BTW: her bio on her Mexico vacation book blogs says she
"travels to Mexico EVERY WINTER". (Greens&Beans)
@Holly McLachlan: will you put your money where
your big fat ugly mouth is?
Because the "problem" at Salon is not criticism of an article,
but that posters are ROUTINELY allowed to call women "the c
word", to lie and make obscene allegations ("your gay! your
husband is gay! your ex husband is gay! your ex husband left
780
you for a gay man!"), to "out" people you disagree with, to call
names and make ad hominem attacks -- oh, and did I forget
"rampant anti-semitism?"
Will you speak out as eloquently about THOSE ISSUES as you
do about "one poster who thinks Felisa Rogers should get food
stamps so she and her husband don't go hungry"?
Can you point out -- and please do! -- where I have used curse
words, vulgarity, allegations about people's sexual orientation
(negatively), "the C word", or OUTTED ANYONE for
expressing an opinion?
What is that? I never did such things? Yet you still want to
ban me? Thanks, you have revealed yourself to be a total
asshat and bigot.
Salon has TOTALLY FAILED to ban Zorkna (he's on like 15th
username) or Steel The First (horrible anti-semite who is on
like his 15th username), so why do you feel I will be an
exception?
Do you think literary criticism is JUST AS WRONG as antisemitism? Do you think asking why someone doesn't go down
the road to the country store to buy a stick of margarine is
EXACTLY THE SAME as outing someone's home address on
the internet, and telling other people to "get her!"?
Salon has so little budget for maintaining "standards" (cough,
cough -- such as they are) that they are dependent entirely on
A. unpaid student interns, B. writers off Open Salon who
charge peanuts and C. PAGE CLICKS.
They encourage flame wars to get page clicks, you dolt. Don't
you realize that????
The only person reducing this otherwise placid thread to "a
fever swamp of dysfunction and bile" IS YOU, Holly
McLachlan. (Greens&Beans)
@Miss Buggins: Still not on that 5 month camping
trip?
781
Guess that was another your fantasies ("lies")!

@Michael MacKinnon
I agree. I have family in the country, and they have many of
the same limitation as Felisa (small expensive country stores,
city hours away, etc.) and they NEVER run out of food -- they
grow crops, they can/preserve food, they have a food
dehydrator, they freeze stuff, they save bacon grease, they
RELY ON THEIR NEIGHBORS if things get tough.
You don't need to go full-tilt into farming to have a small
kitchen garden (which should be producing by now, Felisa -why don't you have any food from that? I don't grow much -herbs and strawberries, and a few cherry tomatoes -- but I
already have food from my BACK DECK).
A couple of chickens would give Felisa and her husband a
ready source of protein from eggs (even if they never
butchered the chickens for meat).
I'd like to reiterate your excellent words:
"....this reads like someone who had idealized the rural life,
but who now has has gotten into it without having the
instincts.
Stocking up when you have a few bucks is basic common
sense, and you don't have to "live in the country" to realize
that.
(BTW: there are many kinds of coconut oil; the crude stuff can
be as cheap as $12.00 for a 32 ounce jar, but the really good
stuff -- organic, high grade -- is $32.00 for a 32 ounce jar. SO
yes, in most cases, you could get quite a lot of ordinary
vegetable oil for that amount, a good deal of olive oil or a
truckload of cheap margarine.) (Greens&Beans)
-----
Here is a list of what is within 20 minutes of Felisa
782
In 10 seconds of googling, I found these stores, all within 20

minutes of Felisa Roger's cabin in Deadwood, Oregon.
One is .4 miles away, meaning a crippled person could hobble
there on crutches in 10 minutes. (You can apply for food
stamps (SNAP) online; you don't have to drive ANYWHERE.)
Randy's Riverview Market
.4 mi
10792 Highway 126, Mapleton, OR 97453 map
Swisshome General Store
3.4 mi
13298 Highway 36, Swisshome, OR 97480 map
Deadwood Country Market
6.7 mi
14699 Highway 36, Deadwood, OR 97430 map
Stop N Shop
12.0 mi
87764 Highway 101, Florence, OR 97439 map
Fred Meyer One Stop Shopping
12.1 mi
Grocery Outlet
12.4 mi
Food Services Of America
12.7 mi
1525 12th St, Florence, OR 97439 map
Safeway Pharmacy Pharmacy
12.7 mi
Market BIN
12.9 mi
1417 6 St, Florence, OR 97439 map
Cleawox Market
13.5 mi
783

Abhi One Stop Market
13.6 mi
Lakeview Grocery
16.8 mi
19385 Highway 36, Blachly, OR 97412 map
Smith River Store
17.5 mi
16334 Lower Smith River Rd, Reedsport, OR 97467
Horton Market
21.7 mi
94636 Horton Rd, Blachly, OR 97412 map
LOW Pass Market
22.8 mi
22501 Highway 36, Cheshire, OR 97419 map
ALSO:
Waldport Food Share (a food bank that provides FREE food
supplies for needy families)
28.6 mi
*****
Felisa, my question is this -- is your problem more about a
snobbery for shopping at "down market" chain stores like
Safeway or Fred Meyer or Stop n' Shop -- OR that you are
deeply vested in shopping at the Whole Foods store (or
similar) in Eugene? and you won't "settle" for shopping
elsewhere? (Greens&Beans)
----The last page or so of letters proves
What does it prove?
Laurel1962sockpuppets is butthurt at being caught out. She's
still a cruel, self-righteous, dishonest, narcissistic
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advertisement for the Dunning-Kruger effect.

And she's still so wrong she couldn't see "mistaken" without
the Hubble Telescope. (anuran)
----What on earth is the Dunning-Kruger Effect?
The last page or so of letters proves
[] Laurel1962sockpuppets is butthurt at being caught out.
She's still a cruel, self-righteous, dishonest, narcissistic
advertisement for the Dunning-Kruger effect. anuran
I suspect that she is a typical upset bully -- enraged by
confrontation.
There are many good reasons to avoid push-back against
these sorts of internet freaks. However, Salon's writers,
particularly its precarious freelance piece workers, are
actually human. They aren't as wholly immune to criticism as
they would like to be.
They should have to deal with it gracefully when it's
legitimate, and done in good faith, but there is no reason why
they should be subjected to the foul rants of America's
blowsiest losers.
There is no defense for Laure1962, or NINALOCA.... or any of
the other hard-to-shake fungal infections a writer can pick up
here. (Holly McLachlan)
----@Felisa
I sincerely hope you get a commission on click revenue for
high-volume threads like this one. It would be the height of
delicious irony (appropriate for a food-related article) if
Laurel's craziness were actually generating you extra income.
I like to read your articles for the content, they're well-written
785
and evocative, but I gotta admit -- the crazy also keeps me

coming back. (whetstone)
Old youth?
It has been suggested here that Felisa Rogers has been ganged up by
resentful, aging, menopausal boomers. Probably has been; but we
remember in her articles that she's not exactly been their biggest
supporter either. Felisa is about continuation of age-old traditions.
Keeping matrilineage, patrinlineage, intact; descendents keeping
faith to a blessed tradition; passing on with fidelity and love; one
generation to the next. Getting married by the same old tree whose
branches grandma used to scrape her teeth clean on. Except when it
comes to the self-indulgent boomers, who knew hardship and sparcity
only as a lifestyle choice -- letting it be known that heritage and
environment and grand/parents and the old hanging-on world were
at their service, never themselves to "it." In regards to the boomers,
tradition isn't about continuation, but exclusion. It becomes, not
about fidelity and love, but about crime and retribution -- it becomes
old, in a mean and twisted and unforgiving sort of way, pretending
them (i.e., the boomers) as a bastard aberation that strayed so far
from message -- and so readily! so maddingly flippantly! and so
damned near totally! -- they're to be at first heavily scorned at, and
then simply not to be brought up at all anymore.
Felisa is channelling the spirits of Depression-era grandparents, so to
sublimate herself into/with them. She's all about the icing on the
cake, but in her recipes she almost seems to be laying herself out bare
for their taking. Here are the spare and plain ingredients for my
(however savory) spiced nettle soup. (There's talk and evocation of
truffle oil -- but to show how rarely I'll indulge the real thing again;
how akin I am to you and your periodic Hollywood escapes to
compensation land.) Nothing so complicated to hide variation;
nothing so variant from what constitutes you to suggest my rebellion:
My coffee and sport-loving, my common, simple-loving husband and
I are fully yours, ancestors. In our recipes we fully aim not so much to
786
advance beyond as to close the distance to you. We will be anonymous

but worthy, in the way you were anonymous but worthy-- knowing
that every one one of our private, particular experiences we covet and
hope to pass on, is replicated by all those inceasingly multitudes now
forced to live just as fidelitous as we, and so are always also common
and unexceptional. Everytime we speak our our savorings, of how we
spiced up our increasingly spare stock, you will hear as much of what
we've been denied, of what we were actually willing -- unlike our
boomer parents -- to deny ourselves, to remain fidelitous to you and
the nearly-lost virtues of your simple treasure pleasures.
Felicity is, I would suggest, very debatably the voice of youth. She
aims to be, and is succeeding in becoming, a wretched, withered
Depression ancestor brought back from the grave. Perhaps because it
is easy to imagine a stern, unforgiving tradition-guarding
grandmother stirred to life with the eager availability of such an apt
and willing vessel, I am prompted to wonder if Laurel et al. are not
truly so much responding bullyingly to youth, but in alarm and out of
fear of slippage to a spectre they long ago -- and never fully -succeeded in beating back: a dreaded voice from the rightfully
discarded past that wouldn't allow anything beyond the most minimal
amount amount of fun to not silmutaneously speak of cold, brutal
withdrawal.
I hope here that Felisa not just appreciates the support, but the
challenge -- I think you are bent on losing yourself, drifting from
reality to some awful disassociated state, speaking always not so
much from first-hand or second-hand but from third-person
perspective -- as if looking down upon yourself at a distance which
balks, chastises your individuality and renders you a somewhat
pathetic plain "type" -- and it is mostly this some of us are concerned
to alert you to and wake you up from. If "Salon" soothes you from
internet bile, "their" blanket will also contribute to further
smothering you.
Link: Can you live without cooking oil? (Salon)
787
----------
MONDAY, JULY 4, 2011

Frank and Beastial
In a blog post that divides the world as he sees it into "Pegs
and Holes," Dilbert creator and occasional sock puppet
master Scott Adams stirred up quite the online crapstorm
earlier this month. Unsurprisingly, a number of critics took
him to task for his assertion about "tweeting, raping,
cheating," that "the natural instincts of men are shameful and
criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal
and acceptable. society has evolved to keep males in a state
of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as
unhappiness." Jezebel's Lane Moore took him to task for
suggesting "that 'boys' are pretty much designed to be rapists"
and Mediaite's Alex Alvarez took on the "misandrist notion
that men are base, selfish creatures who cannot control their
impulses and, thus, require something else like women to
act as the gatekeepers of morality." Here at Salon, I called
Adams' post, among other things,"spectacularly bonkers" and
"extremely lunkheaded," and noted "the world is full of men
who can distinguish between sexual urges and violent,
aggressive ones."
In response to his critics, Adams laid down the gauntlet in a
follow-up post: "I'd like to offer an opportunity to one of the
writers at Salon, Huffington Post, Jezebel, Mediate, or
Mediabistro. Allow me to interview you, by email, for this
blog, on the topic of why you so vehemently disagree with
your hallucination of my opinion. (Fair warning: It won't work
out well for you.)"
Well, how could I resist an offer like that? (Jezebel's Irin
Carmon also took up the challenge.) I wrote Adams that if he
788
would let Salon run the interview as well, I was all for it. On
Wednesday, he replied, asking me to "BRIEFLY describe your
main objection to my blog post, Pegs and Holes," and we have
both agreed to run our responses unedited. This is what
transpired, on Adams's blog. (Mary Elizabeth Williams, Scott
Adams takes on Salon, Salon, 23 June 2011)
LINK TO DEBATE
---------King Ape
If what we were debating here was if there was some deeply satisfying
pleasure we have been missing out on had society enabled the more
primitive instincts -- not just male -- in us some play, I think we're at
the point where the onus is on the person intent to disagree with this
possibility. Not so much the male self, but the rather traditionally
male-seeming neanderthal, our TRUEST WHOLE selves, everywhere
we're learning/rediscovering, has been suppressed; our everyday
normal life is being revealed not so much as civilized, however
compromised, but as perverted -- in denial of who we really are. The
food we've been eating is too processed and finely prepared; our
delicate take on children (and child-rearing), so distorted to demand
stark reveals; criminals, vandals, too tenderly treated and
optimistically imagined; Pittsburgh steel workers dispossessed and
scrambling while East Coast literatti tea; Others' sensitivities and
rituals, too long in the way of common sense and what is really good
for our country. Distortion after distortion -- it's past time to get back
to bare knuckles, to cease this nonsense of being tolerant and civil.
Both Scott and MEW seem similar in that they've both had it with
patience and are FOR the melee -- neither of them (at heart) would
seem too discomforted if the Gods and Authority in their arguments
made their opponents feel as if pressed to make their riposte while
managing a big foreign dick in their mouths. ("Does this make you
uncomfortable? Good.") They are both FOR the neanderthal, with
Scott showing himself still more essentially the cubicle man, and
789
MEW, that she's always been king ape, finally demonstrating her
reign. The civilized may not now even just be becoming dilettante:
convincingly, they've been cubicled, and what's up now is the rest of
us sizing up and clubbing to see who'll command the largest slab of
meat.
----And the winner is MEW -- and Scott's overall point
Mary Elizabeth Williams just shot Scott Adams full of holes.
(Amity)
----I don't know what happened to nice, proper, pencilsharpened, assignment-neatly-filed Mary Elizabeth
Williams, Editor I don't know, and I don't care, because I
would much rather read what this Valkyrie, this slayer, this,
okay if not towering giant then at least an upright-standing,
strong-backed, journeywoman of coherence and intensity
has to say. (Amity)
----MEW, well-done, you handed Scott Adams his balls, so to
speak. (mneme48)
MEW is victorious here, but in victory she mostly proves the essence
of poor, marginalized, emasculated Scott's point: that there is
something not just natural but GLORIOUS in our more aggressive,
primal selves, that feminizing civilization / sociability can only
understand as barbaric -- to be kept in check, if complete banishment
isn't possible. Scott is willing to miniature himself -- "I accept Society
is good and that it must come at the cost of my manhood" -- so to
make his castration, his grievances, more deserving of soothing, but
in truth, and especially with MEW, what this debate shows is that the
glorious, angry, uncompromising, brutal and engaged
790
Valkryie/neanderthal/King Ape suppressed in all of us, is

OBVIOUSLY worth a hell of a lot more than whatever had worked so
long to cage it in -- whose ostensible all-too-obvious virtues are now,
actually rather in need of being unscrolled for us again.
As Amity conveys, what MEW mostly shows here is that what
society ... scratch that ... what WE need most is less of the caging and
compromising and placating, and much more of virulent "piss[ing
off" and "goad[ing]" so our inner, magnificent -- to hell with it -FRANK AND BEASTIAL selves are aroused and finally get more play.
The debate is not so much "MEW 4 and Scott 0," but FOR drive and
unimpeded, uncomplicated conquest and THE FULL WITHDRAWAL
of finicky, touchy, tremulous civility and restraint.
Link: Scott Adams takes on Salon
----------
FRIDAY, JULY 1, 2011

Debate on gay marriage
With New York state's same-sex marriage vote likely to come
any day (or hour) now, President Obama is strongly hinting
that he'll soon have a brand-new position on the issue to share
with the country. "Hes very clear about the fact that his
position is evolving," White House press secretary Jay Carney
said yesterday. That's a call-back to an unsatisfactory old line
the president once used when he wanted to assure the LGBT
community that he's secretly on their side.
[. . .]
But if marriage equality happens in New York, legislatively
and not through the courts, it will have passed with
Republican support. Which will be embarrassing for the
791
White House. (They're New York Republicans, yes, but Staten

Island Republicans can go toe-to-toe with the Iowa GOP any
day of the week.) With the president still "officially " opposing
gay marriage, he won't be able to celebrate the victory -- or
criticize the failure, if the New York state Senate acts like the
New York state Senate and the talks collapse at the last
possible moment.
If it does pass, though, Obama will have a very nice
opportunity for a fabulous coming out party. (Alex Parene,
Barack Obama should come out for gay marriage already,
Salon, 21 June 2011)
--------@sethew
1.) I do think THIS GROUP of polls that came out recently
reflect bias on the part of the people constructing them; polls
are only as useful as the questions they ask and the
methodology supported.
If indeed Americans are now solidly pro-gay marriage, than
MY OPINION should not be getting people riled out -- all
you'd need is an easy-peasy ballot issue and hurrah, gay
marriage for all. Clearly it is more complex than that.
We do have rights and they are ENUMERATED in the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and nowhere do they
address marriage (or homosexuality). They are about the right
of free speech, free assembly, the right to own firearms and
the right to own property and so forth. Gays already have ALL
THOSE RIGHTS (and had them long before women or blacks
did!).
Laws about marriage reflect our customs and traditions, and
go back to antiquity. If laws about same sex marriage are
"wrong" than laws about incest marriage and bestiality and
polygamy are also "wrong" because those all reflect morals
and social mores in our culture. (Of course Salonistas are
madly in love with incest and polygamy, so that' may not
792
make much of difference.)

Marriage is one of those "not mentioned" things that are left
to the states to manage, so I don't expect a nationwide
referendum on gay marriage. I have stated that I will accept
the results of any state that lets VOTERS decide this issue, if
they go for legalizing gay marriage.
I wouldn't agree with it, of course, but in a DEMOCRACY
that's how you change MAJOR LAWS; not JUST by legislative
or judicial fiat. You can't just rewrite culture and society on a
WHIM. In this case, legislatures are acting KNOWING they
are going against the wishes of their constituents. (In some
cases, we have proof that special interest groups are
BLACKMAILING representatives.)
I disagree that the "vast majority of Americans" are lefty
liberals, and while the population tends to concentrate around
big cities, it is definitely NOT hard left or even "left of center".
Every Californian is OBVIOUSLY not a lefty, or Prop 8 would
not have passed handily (same percentage as Obama
received!).
Our political system is set up to have one half of Congress
represent the states equally (Senate) and one half represent
population (House), and yes I think that is fair IF THOSE
POLITICIANS follow the will of the people and do not
substitute their own beliefs, especially if they are being
coerced or blackmailed.
2. I never said that gay couples were violent or abused
children. Gay marriage is bad for society because it redefines
real marriage, into just a sort of loose partnership based on
sex, and takes away the male/female aspect of it which is
essential to REAL reproduction (not the turkey baster or the
paid surrogate type).
Nobody remotely suggests taking away the right of gay people
to cohabitate with anyone they wish to. But we cannot EVER
call that a marriage, because it does not meet the definition of
793
marriage.
We can't stop people from committing incest either, or living
in polyamorous groups, or having sex with animals. But we
don't have to label those things "marriage" and we don't.
3.) YES. Having gay marriage totally changes my marriage
from a REAL MARRIAGE to a "gay partnership with Partner
A and Partner B". I don't want that, and I will fight to keep it
from happening.
If gay marriage passes in your state, then THERE ARE NO
MORE WIVES OR HUSBANDS, just Partners A, B (and likely
C, D, E and F, etc.). They have already changed all kinds of
documents at the Federal level to include this, using Partner A
and B. Marriage licenses in some states already have gotten
rid of Wife and Husband. Judge Vaughn Walker stated in his
opinion that "men and women are entirely interchangeable,
and have no unique differences", hence marriage can be
between ANY two people.
I do not consider this a "trivial discomfort" but a huge
intrusion into my marriage, which ultimately will debase and
devalue marriage for my children and grandchildren.
4.) No, marriage is a relationship between a man and a
woman, and should not be changed to accommodate other
people on lefty political agendas. If we "celebrate" enough, we
will soon have incest marriages and polygamy; good reason
enough NOT to change the definition of marriage.
Divorce has it's own problems, but banning divorce isn't even
on the table (if anything, divorce laws are becoming more
LIBERAL), and anyhow, most societies have legal divorce.
Only Catholics don't accept modern divorce law (in theory).
That's a dumb point.
5.) A Salonista is NOT merely one who posts here. It is
someone who is hogtied by lefty ideology and can't think for
themselves -- someone who hates America, hates families,
hates heterosexuality and generally signs on for a very
794
extremist agenda that is opposed to everything most normal

Americans hold dear. So it does not apply to me; I'm just a
talky visitor (Laurel1962)
----@Fightthetheocracy: I want to know...
Canada is about to legalize polygamy.
The Netherlands has already legalized "triad marriage"
(polygamy).
Switzerland is about to legalize incest.
This is not an empty argument; these are facts. The war to
destroy marriage and family and society is very real, and
fighting to keep traditional marriage is being on the front
lines.
You don't get to decide what HARMS ME or my family. I feel
gay marriage causes me direct personal harm; I explained
why. That the lawyer for Prop 8 did a poor job doesn't mean
that the rest of us don't know we are being had, or that a lefty
political agenda is driving this thing. (Laurel1962)
----I dont even know where to start....
*Being gay is natural and inborn. You should be proud and
happy to be a free gay American man.* -Laurie1962
Ok...so do you think that beastiality, incest, and polygamy are
natural and inborn too? Because you also said that they are on
the same "spectrum of sexuality" and a natural consequence
of my marriage. You think Im natural and should be free to be
me - so should those who want to sleep with dogs and
relatives be allowed to do the same as long as they only live
together and never want to get *married*?
Honestly, does this even make sense to you?
I ask again - what need is being fulfilled in you by being here?
(Doc1976)
----@Doc1976: I am not full of hate
795
I like and even love many gay and lesbian people. My kids are
not gay, but if they were I would love them! (My grandkids are
too young to know either way.)
I've seen all kinds of crazy stuff on Salon, so I see it as a forum
for ANYTHING -- they publish stuff by anti-semites and NeoNazis! anything I would write is tame, tame, tame by
comparison.
Also I think it is public service to tell blinder-wearing clueless
lefties the TRUTH about what MOST AMERICANS think,
because they are truly in the dark.
I resent your saying that I EVER said I hated ANYONE
because that is NOT TRUE.
I am sure you are a nice person, and so is your boyfriend.
However, you can't be married, not in the eyes of most people.
Not while DOMA stands.
You might adopt, but you will NEVER EVER have children,
because men cannot get pregnant and give birth. You need a
woman for that, my friend, and you don't have a woman in
that so-called "marriage".
Would having a child, knowing that child would NEVER
HAVE A REAL MOTHER, be the right thing to do? Or just a
selfish act by two men who care more about political
correctness than a child's wellbeing?
I never said "you were dogs" and I would fight for your right
to live freely and openly with your boyfriend, however you see
fit.
What I said was that legalizing gay marriage is just like
legalizing polygamy and incest, and that it is a path to
destroying marriage, and EVENTUALLY even things like
bestiality.
You can live anyway you choose, but you can't ever be
married, because you are two men -- and you can't ever have
children, because men are NOT CROSS FERTILE WITH
EACH OTHER.
796
You are probably nice guys, but honestly: time to come down
to earth.
----Still havent answered the question, Laurie...
Do you tell your gay friends and family members that they are
among the same variants as incest and polygamy? No, really I want to know....do you? And if the answer is no, why not?
My marriage to my husband is recognized in my state - it is a
state's issue, right? You do know that we live in a
Constitutional Republic, don't you? Constitutional republics
attempt to weaken the threat of majoritarianism and protect
dissenting individuals and minority groups from the "tyranny
of the majority" by placing checks on the power of the
majority of the population.
No matter what you say, please go to bed tonight knowing we
have a marriage license. And that we are going to have
children. We are right here on earth living a life that you
abhor - and there is nothing you can do about it. And if one of
your grandchildren turn out to be gay, I really hope you keep
your online identity anonymous - you have no idea the
damage you would cause them. (Doc1976)
@laurel1962
Personally, I am for gay marriage / polygamy / incest MOSTLY ONLY
because of the bedrock who's for it -- the Salonistas, that you mock.
THERE IS a huge ridiculousness about them, in that they ecstatically,
enthusedly triumph things they would actuallly prefer ... that they
cannot ALLOW themselves to know too much about, because their
gleeful, righteous triumphing depends on a certain image they have of
ALL groups / ideas the rightwing, conservatives have traditionally
disparaged. For them, the disparaged must not only be discrimated
upon but in actuality be very good and worthy, so to make
rightwingers that much more awful in their perpetrations. But these
same ridiculous Salonistas ARE NOT FOR making use of these
797
whatever groups as poison cointainers into which they'll project

unwanted aspects of themselves -- for the purposes of annihilating
them -- something the far more horrid rightwing does and will
continue to do. They do not see squarely, but the overall impulse of
lefties is towards love while the overall impulse of the right is to hate.
Gay marriage is supported by lefties; if is legalized it will
communicate a leftist victory (though if with [the efforts of] Obama,
I'll present soon a caveat): it won't help tear apart what is most
worthy about marriage because it will mostly communicate that leftist
understandings of everything -- which includes an understanding of
marriage as, not duty, and even chastisement, self-sacrifice, but as of
companionship and love and self-fulfillment still rule.
Because of liberal support, I am for gay marriage, and yet in truth I
think being gay is not biological but a defense mechanism; it is an
understandable, necessary psychic "adaptation," when presented with
intolerable, overwhelming stimuli: the overwhelming, smarming,
incestual mother. To avoid being sucked into her, women in general
are written off as sexual companions.
"...the overwhelming, smarming, incestual mother..."

Wow. I mean it. Wow.
A claim completely, totally discredited about 40+ years ago in
informed circles. Which hasn't been taught by anyone
anywhere in the mainstream in at least three decades. A
psychoanalytic theory with no evidence to support it. None.
Yet here it comes again, exhumed, dusted off and regurgitated
like forty-year-old vomit. (robwriter)
Being gay is a defense mechanism?
From a smothering mother?
People still buy that Viennese voodoo (thank you Mr.
Nabokov)?
Homosexual behavior is rampant in the animal world (as are
798
all kinds of "deviant" behaviors), and if you've spent any time

at all in the outdoors, you'll know that smothering mothers
are NOT rampant in nature.
So how does one account for gays who have no mother at all?
Or mothers who aren't smothering? Who have fathers who are
not absent?
How does one account for gay identical twins - clones - raised
apart by different parents?
Sorry, Freud and his followers should have been literary
critics and left psychology to the scientists. (heller88)
----@Patrick McEvoy-Halston
Buddy -- I can't make head of tails out of that post. I can't
even tell if you are for or against what I said, or arguing for
tolerance, or what.
The whole bit about the "incestuous mother" though-- that's
crazy talk. I know a lot of gay men (I don't even know HOW it
applies to lesbians!) and they have perfectly nice, decent,
loving moms.
Homosexuality is an inborn trait, like blue eyes or the ability
to wiggle your ears. It is neither good nor bad; just a normal
human form of sexual behavior. In any human sub-group,
there will ALWAYS be 1-2% or so that will be homosexual.
All that stuff about bad mothers and smothering is pretty
much totally debunked, and years ago.
The only remotely understandable thing I got out of your post
is that yes, liberals see this as a HUGE political victory and
that's why they are working so hard for it -- they have utterly
given up on fighting for the wars to end, or for Gitmo to close
or for heath care. This seems like an "easy victory" and yes,
they see marriage as "romantic self-fulfillment" entirely
without real obligation, fidelity, sacrifice or dedication, so is
cheap and easy to extend it to anyone who claims to want it.
(Laurie1962)
799
@laurel1962
Re: This seems like an "easy victory" and yes, they see marriage as
"romantic self-fulfillment" entirely without real obligation, fidelity,
sacrifice or dedication, so is cheap and easy to extend it to anyone
who claims to want it.
Obligation, fidelity, sacrifice comes VERY, VERY easy to us. It is for

many of us an instant way to feel somewhat good as a person. Suffer
through a depression, throw yourself into whatever war, define
yourself mostly as someone "owing," and you're the Greatest
Generation, who deprived themselves so that -- ostensibly -- others
might benefit. To really believe we deserve happiness -- to do as the
flappers and hippie boomers did and make life seem mostly about
possibility -- is the much, much harder part. Whenever we evolve and
get there, voices like yours soon enough begin to takeover and all we
hear of is people's punishment-worthy, bloated vanity.
It is with fidelity to purer causes -- self-sacrifice, etc. -- that you begin
to get such things as anti-semitism, that is, the public "mounting" of
groups into which to project THEIR OWN unwanted aspects -- their
vanity, materialism, spoiledness, etc. The Germans began to feel the
need to become the self-sacrificing, selfless, personality-less Volk, and
so the Jews (and others) had to become vain, self-serving public
parasites. What moves an anti-semite, I judge, is not entirely absent
from you.
----@dickdworkin: excellent point and thanks for

bringing it up
There are plenty of OLDER children in foster care in the US
who DESPERATELY need permanent homes. Unfortunately,
800
many of these children are not technically "free" to be adopted

(because they have living parents who have not relinquished
parental rights) and mostly because they are older, black,
mixed race or have mental/physical handicaps.
People are not lined up to adopt such kids, not even gay
couples. Most people want to adopt HEALTHY WHITE
INFANTS.
HEALTHY WHITE INFANTS are in very, very short supply.
Almost none are available through traditional adoption; most
people who do adopt healthy white infants either go through
the gray (or black) markets, pay a butt load of money for the
kid OR they go overseas for an expensive foreign adoption.
Foreign kids are pretty much "priced" by skin pigmentation,
with Russian/Ukrainian kids being the most expensive
("white") and the prices goes down to Asian kids, then
hispanic kids, then at the bottom, black kids (African). It's
disgusting and yes, it is racist, but that's what people want and
how their adult needs have distorted the world adoption
market.
Basically the most "desirable" kids go to the wealthiest
couples, but introducing gay couples to the mix has
complicated stuff. Now there is more competition for the most
desirable children, and many gay couples are VERY affluent,
two income partnerships. They are basically EDGING OUT
traditional families to take adoptable infants -- who are in
VERY short supply -- and denying those children a home with
a mother and a father.
The only thing protecting these children or giving them a
chance are laws favoring married straight couples. However,
with legal gay marriage, adoption agencies are FORCED BY
LAW to give babies and toddlers (who have the best shot at
having a mother and father in a traditional marriage parent
them) to gay and lesbian couples.
Naturally gays and lesbians cannot have children by ordinary
801
means (lesbians always have the turkey baster, but many are
too old even for that) so they by DEFINITION are going to
make up a disproportionate number of potential adoptive
parents.
Look at Doc1976: he had a marriage ceremony with his
boyfriend, now he wants to ADOPT. He is a DOCTOR with
plenty of money to buy any kind of adoptive infant. Would
you want to be an ordinary middle class married straight
couple trying to compete with Doc for ONE OF THE VERY
FEW INFANTS UP FOR ADOPTION? OR compete on the
foreign market with him, when he has a huge income to travel
or hire legal assistance?
If you mean "older hard to place children", I know a few older
gay couples who are indeed raising such children. But YOUNG
gay couples refuse to consider this -- they want WHAT
STRAIGHT PEOPLE HAVE, which is a perfect tiny adorable
infant. And they often have the means to edge out ordinary
middle class straight couples in the competitive adoption
market.
If we want to talk about assisted fertility -- donor eggs, donor
sperm, surrogates -- that is a problem too. There are countless
celebrities who are at this moment openly abusing fertility
technologies designed for infertile STRAIGHT couples so they
can have a "gayby".
Most of these gay and lesbian celebs are not remotely infertile;
they are young and healthy. They just can't come to terms
with being in a non-procreative partnership and want "what
straight people have", which is an infant.
Most are so cruel and selfish that they do not consider the
needs of the child FIRST: that a child above ALL OTHER
THINGS needs a mother AND a father, if not his biological
parents, then a substitute set of male and female. Anything
else is not going to be the same, and the child will have a
serious deficit in his/her life. (Laurel1962)
802
----@Laurel1962
Re: Most are so cruel and selfish that they do not consider the needs
of the child FIRST: that a child above ALL OTHER THINGS needs a
mother AND a father, if not his biological parents, then a substitute
set of male and female. Anything else is not going to be the same,
and the child will have a serious deficit in his/her life.
First off, people who are eager-ready to scold people for their
selfishness are no doubt way worse than couples who'd marry
primarily for their self-pleasure: when they have kids, be sure they'll
communicate to them mostly that what they are is primarily sinful
and selfish, from the start denying their parents the love and
admiration they deserve for commiting themselves so selflessly to
them. Anyone who rants against selfishness is someone who
"learned" early that their own rightful claims were somehow rotten,
suspect, owing to them amounting to love toward something other
than their immature parents. When they rant they imagine their own
parents approving them for defining themselves as willing to give the
whole of themselves up to satisfy other people's (their parents') needs.
They have their own self-soothing in mind; they are being selfish.
Secondly, I agree that children really need both men and women in
their lives, and I really like that the current understanding of
marriage communicates this need. However, as important as this
need is, it is rather more important that they grow up in a loving
family, and it is far more important that marriage communicate
THIS. As is, traditional marriage doesn't: the barbaric couple that'll
spend most of their parenthood either abandoning their children or
using them, looks more worthy, more essential, more right, than the
liberal gay couple, committed to human rights, who'll find ways to be
mostly kind and attendent to their children. Because of this "crime,"
803
marriage does need a good turn of being imagined as something other

than man / woman inextricably bound: it may be ground for making
the quality of the care the foremost "concern," essential pre-requisite
for subsequent legitimization.
----Patrick
Loud & clear. (g50)
----Apocalypse Cow
It's time for another special edition of cow talk, ladies and
gents and ... er.. Laurie.
Apocalypse Cow. We believe this is an allusion to the Bayeux
Tapestry, a 50 cm by 70 m embroidered cloth which explains
the events leading up to the 1066 Norman invasion of
England.
We would welcome any enlightenment on this subject from
that master of lighten himself...@Patrick McEvoy-Halston!
Bravo, sir. Tis a sore deed that you do so deededly. Also. Well
done.
Other Worthy Moo Outs:
@Doc1976...many sincere moos of happiness and
congratulations to you and your husband. If you ever tire of
saving lives, there may be a big future in flagging waiting for
ya. A worthy aspiration on this thread.
@sienar and @orange swan... valiantly guarding the
Normandy invasion from revision and moo(t) interpretations.
Also, the Constimootion and Canada, too.
@jtanneru... for not invading Normandy, (a trick learned from
cow class) and reminding us that a person's a person no
matter how Ralph.
804
@Balaamsass... for the cool moo tunes, and @David

Ehrenstein & @G50 for persistence in the face of moo poo.
And, of course, also @bigguns ... our own cow talk sponsor!
And now we return to the regular insanity portion of the
Salonistas. (steppedonapoptop)
Link: Barack Obama should come out for gay marriage already
(Salon)
----------
Never having abandoned the heartland

No doubt "Battle for Brooklyn" will be of most interest to New
Yorkers, and particularly to people who live or work in the
city's most populous borough. But the film's basic situation -local residents and community activists vs. the development
schemes of major politicians and big business -- is an
archetypal element of urban life, one that can be found in
almost any city, large or small, from Maine to California.
What distinguished kazillionaire developer Bruce Ratner's
plan to remake the center of "America's fourth-largest city" (to
borrow the boosterish phrase of Brooklyn Borough President
Marty Markowitz) was primarily its size and audacity, along
with the fact that the ensuing battle turned very ugly and
inevitably attracted the attention of the national media, much
of which is headquartered a few miles away across the East
River.
[. . .]
805
But I would never have denied that the dilapidated Long

Island Railroad yard along Atlantic Avenue that Ratner picked
as his centerpiece, along with the mixed-use area around it,
was in need of revitalization. The question was more about
how it would be developed, and who would get a say in the
decision-making process. I think the same question was being
asked all along by Daniel Goldstein and Shabnam Merchant,
the activists who met and got married and had a daughter
while the filmmakers were watching them fight against
Ratner's plans.
Goldstein got involved at first by happenstance, because he
lived in a condo building Ratner planned to demolish, and
where he ultimately became the last holdout after every other
owner had sold out. I'm not sure he and Merchant would put
it exactly this way, but their struggle -- and those of a ragtag
collection of local activists and residents -- eventually became
more symbolic in nature, an act of resistance that was always
likely to end in defeat. Among other things, they wanted to
expose the way Forest City Ratner, the development
corporation, had gamed the system by using its pull with
powerful officials like Markowitz, Mayor Mike Bloomberg and
Sen. Chuck Schumer, and had used odious and divisive racial
politics to bulldoze local opposition.
As "Battle for Brooklyn" makes clear, TV news cameras were
hypnotized by an easily comprehensible angle, the idea that
the development fight pitted privileged white yuppie
newcomers, who were a bit too easily offended by
construction equipment, against poor, black longtime
residents who wanted jobs, affordable housing and a Brooklyn
basketball team. This was never true or fair. If anything, it was
a perception deliberately created by Ratner, who funded
"grassroots" community groups that hadn't previously existed,
806
hired local black ministers as consultants and recruited the

now-notorious ACORN to rally housing-project residents to
his cause. African-American officials who actually represented
the neighborhood, including City Councilmember Letitia
James and the local assemblyman and state senator, were
uniformly opposed to Atlantic Yards, and correctly perceived
Ratner's promises of local jobs and affordable housing as
empty. (Battle for Brooklyn: in breaking news, Goliath beats
David, Salon, 17 June 2011)
---------Really, Andrew?
You live in Brooklyn? That's just astonishing! Imagine a Salon
writer who lives in Brooklyn....oh, wait. ALL Salon writers by
edict must live in either A. Brooklyn (preferably Park Slope)
or B. San Francisco/Berkeley.
It's amazing how you guys manage to bypass every writer in
flyover country, thousands of cities, 48 states (and Guam and
Puerto Rico!) and all types of writers from every religion, race,
culture, ethnic group and economic level.
How many writers here are from (or working IN) the
Midwest? The South? The Southwest? Rural Maine or urban
Des Moines, Iowa? Arizona or Rapid City, South Dakota?
Huh. That would be NONE.
How many writers here are affluent, educated, WHITE, urban
and live on the East or West Coast? Huh, that would be ALL
OF THEM.
No wonder we have no diversity here of opinion or attitude or
lifestyle or awareness of how the other 95% of American lives,
works, thinks, dreams. No wonder you are clueless and wrong
about almost everything.
Also, Andrew: there are no middle-class neighborhoods, nor
middle class people in Brooklyn, or anywhere in New York
City. That ended a long, LONG time ago when prices escalated
807
past madness.
You may like to think you are middle class, but no middleclass person could afford to live in Brooklyn, where rents top
$2000 a month for a small rental unit, and $500-600K for a
small co-op or condo.
If you can afford these prices, which are standard for the area,
you are not middle-class and you likely have NO IDEA what
middle-class even means. The average household income in
the US is around $45,000 a year, Andrew, which translates to
about $2200 in take-home pay. In other words, it would
require almost 90% of average American take-home pay for a
family to live in just a 1 bedroom Brooklyn apartment
(probably having to stuff the kids in a closet or large bureau
drawer).
Either you are vastly above the mean (or median, or average,
or all three) OR you are on the parental dole somehow to be
able to afford to live there, OR (my own personal theory) you
are not middle-class but well into the affluent class. Are you
Bill and Melissa Gates? Of course not. But please don't insult
real, struggling middle class families in American by claiming
to be one.
Also: I don't know anything about Atlantic Yards, but I
wonder why you think you have achieved "victory" in creating
a wasteland of parking lots instead of AFFORDABLE homes
for people who are not as wealthy and privileged as YOU ARE.
Is this a kind of closet racisim? Isn't it true that no matter the
corruption of the stadium deal (which I believe is likely true),
what you really wanted to do is block low-income housing,
and keep poor and working class people (ESPECIALLY those
with black skins) out of your white, affluent, yuppie enclave?
To protect your housing values, by keeping the area "upscale"
and exclusive?
Interestingly, your colleague Mary Elizabeth Williams, wrote
about this in great detail in her book "Gimme Shelter"; it was
808
fascinating for me (far away in flyover country) to read about

the obsession the literati has with Brooklyn, and certain
neighborhoods in Brooklyn, and why (the chi chi coffeeshops
and boutiques and restaurants, and "all the right people are
there", etc.). It would have been a much more interesting
article had you addressed any of this honestly. (Laurie1962)
Please cool your jets on the class warfare

At least when you have NO IDEA what you're talking about -and I do mean you, Laurie or Laurel or whatever you're calling
yourself these days.
(This is really irrelevant, but I won't resist: Yes, our writers
mostly live on the coasts -- that's where writers gravitate to!
Our current editor in chief, Kerry Lauerman, grew up in
Indiana. Joan Walsh is from Wisconsin. Off the top of my
head, other people in recent Salon history have been from
rural Pennsylvania, Texas, upstate New York. There aren't any
national journalism jobs in those places.)
Now then:
Median household income, United States of America, 2009:
$54,554
Median household income, Brooklyn, NY, 2009: $42,932
That comes from the Census Bureau. You want to start this
discussion over again?
Brooklyn is in effect a large city, with an economically,
demographically and racially mixed population of 2.5 million
people and all the associated problems that come with that.
(Only about 36 percent of Brooklynites are white, despite
what you may think you know from other sources.) It
absolutely, definitely has middle-class neighborhoods, and
mine, which was historically an African-American
neighborhood of single-family houses and now is more mixed,
is definitely one of them. (I don't live in Park Slope. Can't
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afford to.) And how much do you think a movie critic for an
Internet publication gets paid, exactly? Trust me, my
household income would not define me as "rich" in
Oklahoma, let alone New York City.
As I think I made clear in the piece, African-American
community leaders like Councilwoman Tish James, state Sen.
Velmanette Montgomery and the more progressive preachers
were among the leaders of the campaign against Atlantic
Yards. The collapse of Ratner's huge dream for the Yards only
had a little bit to do with the activists, though, in the end. It
was mostly a result of his grandiose overreach, since he didn't
stick to undeveloped land and sought to condemn and drive
out numerous residents and business owners, and even more
than that a result of the financial collapse.
No one thinks those acres of empty land and parking lots are a
victory. They are a monument to greed, pride and stupidity.
And it wasn't people like Tish James or Dan Goldstein who
were the proud and stupid ones. (Andrew OHehir)
Never having abandoned the heartland
The cultured go to Brooklyn/Berkeley, not really ESSENTIALLY
because that is just where the jobs happen to be, but because it's
prequisite to establishing them as natural aristocrats -- the best of the
best, who not only know what real culture is and where it is most
undistilled to be found, but have it them to insist on manifesting
themselves there. What is important in their letting you know how
they origined from Indiana et al. is not so much their having been
born but their having LEFT there. They can pretend otherwise, and
seem inclined to want to -- you turn instantly European and notAmerican if you just loathe on the stupidly unpretentious, Nabokov
style -- but what they mostly want you to know is not that, at base,
they're still of the working class, but rather that they're so much not
that that even being born a world apart couldn't prevent them from
junking it behind them, once independent and adult. They're showing
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their essential modesty in a savy way that mostly works to highlight

their exceptionalism. They laugh when people understand them as
elite, as they know that, even in living in a way they casually, easily
admit to really, really enjoying, there is pretty much everyday
sufficient aggrievances, humiliations, to make plain what they still
mostly are, sigh, are at best modestly-empowered, and possibly most
truly, anonymous and small. And because those aggrieved at them are
so ignorant to jolt them to guffaw at the inflation and ridiculousness
of their visions rather than to secure and consider their truths, they
don't have to think on how their everyday true understandings of
what it is to live "at court," which serves as ready counter, both shows
them as not now merely newly arrived and makes them seem, I think,
actually part of the complicated but undeniable nesting of manners
and experience that produces the miracle of community, of civitas,
that rightly draws subsequent others in.
Yet there is a sense that that this is all quickly becoming passe.
Whereas before, to be relevant, to be truly part of "the discussion"
with the distinct, those in focus, those that matter, YOU'D BETTER
call this nexus your home -- or have gone to the right MFA schools, if
not -- I think it's quickly becoming a place that will ID you as actually
irrelevant, the wrong part of a publicly shared joke, really. It may be
that right now if you want to secure a place as a relevant
writer/thinker in the upcoming age -- which is different than just
feeling safely ensconsed as one -- your best bet would be to NOT
make the move to Brooklyn/Berekeley, as it'll make you seem
ungrounded, detached, flighty, vain, thin -- opposite of hearty, and
oblivious to the obvious. Better for you to really demonstrate your
essential groundedness, your true proletariansim, your relevance in
an age where bards must be of the same sinew and blood of the
suffering -- else just be boutique -- to have never left Indiana. I think
writers are cottoning on this. Look for more and more of them to
announce -- in what really amounts to a self-serving, tactical move -to their being possessed of that (now special) something that drew
them, not to seek out New York, but to stay faithful to home. (Perhaps
811
too, to their never having been part of any signficant MFA program,
mostly out of sensed distaste for the kind of seekers, the enfranchised
mama-boys and princesses, who'd find themselves there.)
The future in writing, I'm sensing, may belong much more to the
Aaron Traisters (Pittsburgh) of the world than to the Rebecca
Traisters (Brooklyn). They'll be the ones society will highlight; they'll
be buoyed and sought out; and it's going to be bloody hard, as they
posit their beer-bellies and craggy appearances smack down,
immodestly, before us, to target them as they now really are -- elite.
Our cultural critics are going to have to get really good, or these
bullies are going to ride rickshaw ...
Link: Battle for Brooklyn: and in breaking news, Goliath beats
David (Salon)
----------
TUESDAY, JUNE 21, 2011

Debate on circumcision
The Academy Award-winning actor and father of two sons
came under fire last week for a rambling series of tweets that
kicked off with a declaration that "Circumcision is barbaric
and stupid. Who are you to correct nature? Is it real that GOD
requires a donation of foreskin? Babies are perfect."
Predictably, he was deluged with rebuttals from followers,
and Crowe, never one to back down from a fight, seemed
happy to take them all on. When a user responded that
circumcision is "more hygienic and nobody remembers it," he
lobbed back, "Hygienic? Why don't you sew up your ass
then?" Regarding circumcision's place in the Jewish tradition,
Crowe told his followers that "... The Mayans had ceremonial
acts too." And with a direct nod to a famous pal he added, "I
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love my Jewish friends, I love the apples and the honey and
the funny little hats but stop cutting yr babies @eliroth" -- a
comment that prompted actor/director Eli Roth to jokingly
reply, "You didn't seem to be complaining when I was
recutting you this afternoon."
[. . .]
Yet in the harsh light of hindsight, a whole heap of backlash,
and who knows, maybe a little more clarity of thought than
when he'd originally been posting, Crowe deleted the
offending tweets and issued an apologetic message. "I have a
deep and abiding love for all people of all nationalities," he
wrote Friday. " I'm very sorry that I have said things on here
that have caused distress. My personal beliefs aside I realize
that some will interpret this debate as me mocking the rituals
and traditions of others. I am very sorry."
[. . .]
"This is a great forum for communication," he graciously
wrote this weekend. "I, like any human have my opinions and
you all have yours, thank you for trusting me with them."
Whether you agree with his views or not, you've got to give the
guy credit for being able to know when to apologize, and how
to listen. In the morass of Twitter wars and flames that can
make the Net feel like a cesspool, Crowe, it turns out, is
anything but barbaric. (Mary Elizabeth Williams, Russell
Crowes anti-circumcision rant blows up, Salon, 13 June
2011)
Breach
Does anyone else get a sense that with Tracy Morgan and Russell
Crowe, some shells have hit the sides of a vast and thoughtimpenetrable battleship, and for the first time made some significant
dent? Yes! This here ... this is the way!
The story ostensibly here is that if you attack Hollywood, no matter
your inner bulldog, you'll find yourself backing down and apologizing
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while still finding a way to pretend you've stuck to your principles.

But it isn't.
Rather, as with Tracy Morgan, the story here is that the
establishment's ability to ostensibly back you down, is beginning to
seem cover for the fact that some means has been found to effectively
make a strike. After the fact with both of these two men, is that
neither really is going to take a lasting hit for their tirades. They have
been ostensibly put in a place by an empowered friend, not-at-all
associated with their mindset (a follow-up we hesitantly obliged for
Whoopi [with Gibson], but eagerly here with Roth). But with their
breaches, they are both are serving to successfully nest in the public
that there IS something intrinsically immoral and manipulative about
Jews and Gays. Mel Gibson was not permissible! Tracy Morgan and
Russell Crowe, are coming closer to just right.
Also, I am against circumcision. It's child hate. (Not much one for
God, though, either.) Can't agree with Crowe, because I think there is
intent in him to demonize people. It's not just saying what has too
long been obfuscated, and so must come out of you in a way to blast
through layers of bulk. Could be narrated this way; will be narrated
this way; but it's not mostly true. The soothing here, for some, is not
from seeing a more genteel way to handle differences, but from a
successful breach, without retraction.
@Patrick McEvoy-Halston
But with their breaches, they are both are serving to
successfully nest in the public that there IS something
intrinsically immoral and manipulative about Jews and
Gays.
If you really believe that, then I pity you. (Beans&Greens)
@Beans&Greens
RE: But with their breaches, they are both are serving to
successfully nest in the public that there IS something intrinsically
immoral and manipulative about Jews and Gays.
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If you really believe that, then I pity you.

I have no idea how from this you would assume I'm anti-Semetic /
anti-Gay. I am TRYING to help people understand that from how
these two men are being handled, we should see that anti-Semistism
and homophobia is becoming more acceptible, even amongst liberals:
that is, I'm at their (i.e., Jews' / Gays') genuine service.
How are you helping, in your just saying how correct Crowe is? He's
making a dangerous breach, and you assume him as if he's making a
humane point. Anti-circumcision talk gets air in A kind of climate,
and its about progress. If it gets air in the wrong kind -- IT IS antiSemitism: demonization, and regress. We're in the latter kind of
climate. His God part tips us off. As does, somewhat, his never
backing down to a fight -- his disposition. There's some Mel in that -it's not just heroism.
@ Patrick McEvoy-Halston
Being anti-circumcision is not the same as being anti-Semitic.
I personally know (and you can find in this thread) many
proud Jews who don't feel the need to have their sons
mutilated for an imaginary bloodthirsty sky-demon. There are
anti-circumcision groups in Israel. Circumcision among Jews
in western Europe and Latin America has dropped
precipitously - not out of fear, but out of recognition that
hacking off part of a helpless baby for "G_d" is a sick
unnecessary barbaric way of welcoming a child into the world
and into a religion. If anything, Crowe is given a pass here on
the crudity of his statements due to the fact that he has always
been publicly rude, crude, abrasive and insulting. I rather
think he would make similar comments about any group, not
just Jews, with which he disagreed. That said, he is still
insulting and boorish... (eschu21)
@eshu21
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re: Being anti-circumcision is not the same as being anti-Semitic.

I know this. That's why I said that in some contexts anti-circumcision
is about progress -- which would never entail hatred toward another
group, because progess is always about increase in empathy and love;
about helping the child, not demonizing then hunting the perpetrator.
However, it CAN mostly be anti-semitism. I've read through your
letters, and you're one of the beautiful reaching out to help stop abuse
of children, without yourself being hateful to those emotionallydisturbed enough (cultural heritage can't move you to long appreciate
what-you-at-some-profound-level know to be abuse) to be driven to
do the tormenting. I know that circumcision has been too long
protected in America, and it is agonizing to be amongst those whose
efforts to do good are readily made to seem -- however absurdly -evil. But please take care when taking advantage of the avenues
opening up now to finally make your argument more fully heard, as I
believe that many of the openings now owe to a public interest in
withdrawing the protections against select groups, in empowering
righteous demonization, and not to evolution in consciousness. There
is some of that too, though. My sense, not so much here with Crowe.
respectfully,
patrick
----Barbaric science
I think we will find that increasingly the "science" protecting
circumcision is going to be loudly questioned, that despite whatever
eras long surely protecting it, it's about to lapse and crumble very
quickly. But again, the reason will owe mostly to it being linked to an
effective means to legitimize anti-Semitism -- though every article will
take care to point out how this is NOT "their" aim, and how "they"
especially would be amongst the first to stomp-down those who
would use their research for such an end (so with it, also, a culturewide absolute non-tolerance amongst the civilized for blunt, loud
816
anti-Semites -- old models -- of the kind we get here at Salon). (True)

Progressives, largely unable to control themselves, will celebrate the
ostensible emergence of sanity over barbarism, of true clear-sighted
science over science in defiance of evidence -- false science. And with
this, they'll have spent some of their life and energy growing a worse
enemy they do not want to fight. I hope they're attentive to tone.
----My god, what a pack of pathetic whingers
@unmutual
You moron, I'm Jewish. You say I've NEVER SEEN A
CIRCUMCISION? are you bleepin' nuts? I've seen at least 2
dozen in my lifetime, including my own son, my two nephews
and a bunch of cousins, etc. Do you think I'd allow a
procedure on my own flesh and blood if I thought it was crazy,
barbaric or painful? If the FATHERS and GRANDFATHERS
did not all have the SAME EXACT thing (and they were fine,
obviously able to have sex and reproduce)?
If it was painful and awful, the ceremonial bris at 8 days
would be a horrorshow instead of a wonderful loving warm
family get-together. A mohel is extremely well trained to do
this surgery quickly and painlessly; the baby is sedated with a
little bit of wine. I've seen babies who literally slept through
the WHOLE THING, not a whimper. Most of them cry a little
but are quickly soothed. In my EXPERIENCE, which is
considerable, it is similar to the fuss a baby makes when they
get a pin prick or small injury. You must not have kids,
because INFANTS wail over literally everything -- a wet
diaper, a loud noise, milk that isn't warm enough.
Let me emphasize for several woman-hating doofuses here:
this is a MALE ritual performed by a MALE mohel and with a
MALE rabbi attending (in most congregations) and the
FATHER of the baby presents him and stands by. Women are
817
on the sidelines. If this was a "vagina conspiracy", why are

men at the heart and center of choosing this FOR
THEMSELVES? (Laurie1962)
@DannyOS: you are missing the point here
I don't think even the strongest proponent of circumcision for
disease prevention wants to FORCE anybody to have their
baby circumcised.
We are addressing various levels of posters -- from controlling
left social engineers like GreenBeans to pure Jew haters -who basically want to LEGALLY PROHIBIT Jewish/Muslim
circumcision and force it underground, ideally JAILING
parents for following their RELIGIOUS FAITH, as they have
openly for HUNDREDS OF YEARS just here in the US.
That is the goal of the recent ballot initiative in California -not to discourage gentiles from having an elective procedure,
but to FORBID AND BAN circumcision for the religious.
That's against everything I believe about religious freedom
and I have not heard one reasonable argument or example
that shows properly done circumcision is brutal or inhumane,
nor that it causes damage (but rather, SOMETIMES it is
beneficial). Adult men who are circumcised are a majority of
the US population; if they had serious sexual problems, we'd
have know it for many decades now.
Frankly, I think everyone knows this and is just doing a polite
lefty dance around the main subject -- how to FORBID Jews
from practicing a religion YOU DON'T LIKE ANYWAYS...and
of course, lack of religious freedom (you hope! you hope!)
might drive them out of the US, thus depleting their horrible
"Jew influence" on Congress, hence reducing the power you
imagine that Israel has.
Come on; nobody seriously believes this is all "penis concern
trolling". (Laurie1962)
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@Durian Joe: hey! you changed your name, Mr.

Troll!
Also: as a Jew, you should be ashamed of promoting the
criminalization of an honored Jewish tradition, one that was
likely done to you by LOVING PARENTS and which has
caused you no harm or torture or mutilation. (Laurie1962)
@robspost: I think I get your point just fine
Your think your ideas about "what's unnecessary" should
dovetail precisely with "everybody else", but I assure it does
not. Even with reduced rates of circumcision, MILLIONS of
families (non-Jewish) make this choice for their babies.
It makes me wonder what you think about abortion, especially
later term abortion; do you think it causes pain and is
"torture" and violates the fetus's rights? Because, robspost,
there are MILLIONS of Americans -- every one as "sure" as
you are that THEY are right -- who believe that a woman's
right to her own body is NOT AS GREAT as keeping that fetus
from potential pain. Some of them were willing to murder Dr.
George Tiller in order to enforce their viewpoints on other
people.
Obviously people DO think circumcision has great value as a
cultural and religious rite of passage. Are you willing to make
a LAW to prevent them from practicing a millennia's old
religious faith? Put them in jail?
Often anti-abortionists list their objections to abortion and
desire to make it illegal again, but clam up when asked about
their real agendas -- putting ordinary women and doctors IN
JAIL or even the death penalty for what they see as "murder
and torture" just as you see circumcision as " a violation of
human rights".
I imagine you don't give a damn, but if you are SERIOUS
about making this illegal in the US, you are going to face these
819
arguments over and over, so I suggest you give them some

more articulate formulation than "I, robspost, do not give a
damn what anybody else thinks or feels". Because frankly, my
dear, you are not that important. (Laurie1962)
@Mr. GreenBeans (nee: Durian Joe)
Obviously circumcision is NOT THE SAME as chopping off a
nose on an adult human being. lt's not "chopping off"
anything; it's removing a small bit of skin from around the
penis in a humane manner -- usually using wine as a sedative
(a little wine for a 6 lb baby is a good sedative) OR in a
hospital under anesthesia.
Whether it is "mutilation" is obviously in the eye of the
beholder -- a great many women vastly prefer the look of a
circumcised penis. Is it "mutilation" to pin back the ears of a
kid who has Dumbo ears? Mutilation to make straight teeth
out of crooked teeth using braces (assuming no serious bite
problems are involved, just cosmetic work)? Straightening a
crossed eye (does not improve vision, just cosmetic)?
If you seriously think babies are being tortured by their
parents during a religious bris ceremony, then A. you don't
know many babies (and here I mean: 8 day old infants) and B.
you have not attended many brises.
I wonder if you would share your DIRECT observation of any
bris ceremonies you have attended -- as you state you are a
practicing Jew -- and how often you have babysat for a
NEWBORN INFANT. I'm guessing "neither". (Laurie1962)
I see analogies to abortion here. People who object to abortion
don't just think it's a sort of poor idea -- they think it is
literally murder. So they don't just want to regulate the worst
excesses, they want to ban it outright because it offends their
morality so deeply. When they say this, liberals typically
respond "you cannot legislate morality!" Yet here, they clearly
820
think YOU CAN legislate morality (about little boy penises,

but not about late term abortion).
When right-wingers want to ban abortion, I frequently ask
them if they have thought the whole thing through
LOGICALLY: putting ordinary people in jail for the "crime" of
ending a pregnancy. They usually get all waffly at that point.
They don't quite think about what it would mean to put one
million women and hundreds of doctors IN JAIL and ON
TRIAL each and every year -- they just imagine that abortion
would magically "disappear" and women would reluctantly
(but ultimately happily) have their cute little babies.
In the same vein, the anti-circ group here just imagines that
everyone would stop circumcising automatically and accept it
without a protest. In fact, observant Jews and others would
just take it underground. So if you truly consider it "barbaric
torture", you'd have to vet baby boys by medical authorities to
see if they were "cut", then punish the parents for doing so.
Right? Is that something you see as workable? Making male
children drop trousers (so to speak), then prosecuting their
parents for following their religious faith? (Laurie1962)
@laurie1962
I personally see circumcision as child abuse, though I know of many
salutory liberal Jews, people who are heads above the level of sanity
and beneficence of most Americans, who practice it. (Their children,
who hopefully will be a notch better than they are, will hopefully
disfavor it.) But I think your fear about what an enlarging argument
against it means for Jews has real merit -- EVEN in liberal /
progressive communities, like those arguing against it in California.
For me, it's a matter of the time discrimination comes about. There
are times when a legal outlawing of such things as spanking or (for
me) circumcision would simply be a sign that humanity is becoming
more loving -- both ARE things we need as quickly as possible to see
an end to. But particularly right now, where I feel there is much more
821
about a desire to start oppressing than to urgently finally start

helping, it is in our cultural context with liberal-seeming causes that
this dark ID impulse (let's call it) gets the SUPER-EGO, guilt-free
pass. In my judgment, so many things are on the cusp of just being
banned, new ways forced on people, all under an amazingly
impenetrable veil of enlightenment -- for it seeming an extension of
liberalism, of good things like empowerment and freedom (I'm
thinking just now of the incandescent lightbulb ban, which may be
coming to where I live, which would seem to be just about being
Earth-friendly but which is actually intended to let everyone know, to
powerfuly feel and without-a-doubt understand, how nothing in their
everyday assumed life is safe from being instantly unokayed and
withdrawn if it falls short of our new basic starting-off point).
I think voices like yours that are raising alarm, however, will be
rendered inert BECAUSE your argument is based, not just on the
REALLY problematic intentions of the enlightened oppressors, but
on the validness of the practices they mean to stamp out. That is, I
think circumcision will readily be revealed as harmful, the scientists
favoring it readily shown to have owed their being attended to to
some reason other than evidence, and the movement against
circumcision will likely go without being prompted to reflect on its
motives, now that its opposition has set itself up for complete
dismissal for their defending the indefensible. "They could not have
been more wrong about that -- they are surely wrong in all their
concerns," is what they'll without an afterthought think/conclude.
Careful, too, about your argument that whole huge numbers of people
couldn't have been harmed or we'd have heard it by now. It's not an
effective one just now. It strikes me that we're at a time when people
are quite ready to overturn assumed normalities, to believe they've all
been living a lie -- things like the huge paleo food movement, which
suggests everything we've assumed about food is wrong, and barefoot
walking, which assumes the same for how we've let ourselves walk,
and anti-pharma, which argues that the doctors turned wholesale to
pharmaceuticals for NO actual good, are being grabbed up. You
822
might, that is, be playing into people's hands.

@Partrick McEvoy-Halston
Honestly, I have a hard time reading your letter; I can't even
quite tell where you sit on this issue.
I do NOT promote circumcision for gentiles; I think it should
be legal if they want it, but I don't think it should be pushed
on anyone for health reasons. There ARE health benefits, but
in western industrialized nations, the benefits are minimal.
It's a personal choice, and as such, there are "trends" and the
trend is away from circumcision for GENTILES.
However, don't expect it to just "die out" among Jews and
Muslims. Our traditions go back THOUSANDS of years and
we are not likely to give this up without a fight. I believe the
Constitution guarantees our right to practice our religion(s).
This is a harmless procedure that does NOT mutilate or harm
babies or adult men, has SOME medical benefit and is a
deeply cherished part of our history and faith. You don't like
it? Too bad.
I don't think the current California initiative will pass and if it
does, it won't survive on appeals. It is a clear cut affront to
religious freedom, and when justices get a glimpse of the
promoters "comic books" with racist caricatures of Shylocklike mohels...I'm not seeing it upheld.
If it was ever criminalized, you'd obviously see Jews and
Muslims go "underground" and do this in secret. So you'd
have to empower some kind of squad of nurse practitioners or
physicians to do exams to "prove" little boys were not
circumcised and then to "turn in" the offenders for jail time
for "mutilating" their sons in keeping with their religious
faith.
Jews and Muslims together outnumber the gay/lesbian
population of the US, so imagine the problem in chasing
down and incarcerating EVERY PARENT of a newborn baby
823
boy. Frankly, I wouldn't want to be the legislators who pass

THAT piece of B.S. nonsense.
It's sad how these things, which are so extreme and out of the
mainstream (curtailing religious freedom) are so popular on
Salon, and so rigidly held. It's not enough to say "do whatever
you like within your own family"; no, you must be judged and
harassed and lectured and lambasted for an ORDINARY
minor procedure that has been done to babies for
THOUSANDS OF YEARS without ill affects, but suddenly it's
"torture and mutilation".
You guys missed great careers with fundie abortion groups,
gunning for abortion doctors. You have all the techniques of
thought-control and damnation and loaded phrases and
fanaticism down pat. (Laurie1962)
Intentions
Re: I don't have to. I have seen OVER 20 ACTUAL
CIRCUMCISIONS including my own child, you moron. I also do not
watch anti-abortion films, where they show regretful sobbing
women begging the monstrous grinning abortion doctor "not to kill
my BABEEEE" but the doctor cuts their baby up into pieces (while
the baby screams) in an OCEAN of red blood.
Do you have any idea how similar your tactics and rhetoric is to
that of the anti-abortion movement? Are you shortly planning to
have radicals execute mohels? The way Dr. Tiller was
shot?(Laurie1962)
Your defense of circumcision reminds me, sadly, of the defenders of
such things as sex with children, which was also made to seem of
obviously of no long-term consequence to the child ("Why would I
ever want to hurt a child, I LOVE children"), and who also
complained of opponents' intentions and tactics.
RE: If you REALLY have kids, you'd know that a screaming infant is
pretty standard and they cry like that when they get necessary
824
vaccines; they cry when a doctor puts a thermometer up their little

butts. They cry when they are wet or lonely or scared.
Here you have some of us hoping more people come to understand
the screaming infant as NOT standard, as just normal; that they don't
describe children in the manner in which you have here, which seems
dismissive of progressive and ostensibly "unreal" understandings of
their potential overall childhood experience. With the popularity of
such books as "Go the F*ck to Sleep," looks like we're heading
elsewhere, though. Even the anti-circumcision movement, if it gets
popularized, will, alas, probably be more about setting up Jews and
Muslims for righteous discrimination, about inflating and giving
righteous avenue to "our" own anger, than it will be about making
childhood that much less about surviving (truly) villainous
perpetrations: it may well here NOT actually be about the children,
however many people posting here belong to the group thinking
perhaps-entirely of them. You are actually right to get people to
consider how different their motives are from the anti-abortion
crowd, but will in your efforts FURTHER their cause with your mean
clawing away at them (better to imagine you the preying witch who
dines on innocent children), and with your fetishism, your
dehumanization, of children (little buts, golden treasures). (You also
are too willing to believe mothers in their favorable accountings of
how circumcision impacted on their own children's lives: "Wouldn't
their children have complained by now?" Please, just how easy do you
think, really, it is for a child to accuse his mother of sadistic purpose
towards him? Some think the super-ego was put in place primarily to
ensure we don't face the psychic carnage from ever daring
considering such). You communicate mostly that children, those little
treasures, exist to serve the ritual, that they must defer to It, (and so)
you do not well persuade that it at all well serves them or does them
little harm. If it did real harm, their would be significant challenge to
Ritual -- and you can't have that, regardless. Though the opposition
may be suspect in the way you imagine, you SHOULD have
opposition, a strong counter: you ARE an obstacle in the way of
825
children's proper happiness, even if, in your clearly considerable and

very valuable self, you are better than many or most people out there.
Link: Russell Crowes anti-circumcision rant (Salon)
----------
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 15, 2011

BARELY still good to be gay
But last week, he drew gasps instead of laughs during a gig in
Nashville. As audience member Kevin Rogers wrote in an
explanatory "Why I no longer 'like' Tracy Morgan" post,
Morgan peppered his set with anti-gay remarks, including the
assertion that "all this gay shit was crazy and that women are
a gift from God and that 'Born This Way' is bullshit, gay is a
choice, and the reason he knows this is exactly because 'God
don't make no mistakes' (referring to God not making
someone gay cause that would be a mistake)." He also
reportedly said that his son "better talk to me like a man and
not in a gay voice or Ill pull out a knife and stab that little
nigger to death." Rogers says that "As far as I could see 10 to
15 people walked out. I had to fight myself to stay seated, but I
knew if I got up ... he won."
[. . .]
If there's any good to come out of Morgan's completely
boneheaded behavior, it's that he was called out for it and he
issued an apology -- something that one might optimistically
view as a teachable moment. And more than that, it's opened
up the conversation about the issue of sexual orientation and
nature vs. nurture. An astute exchange on Jezebel Friday
asked, Why should it matter? As one commenter wrote, "I've
826
always said that the unspoken underpinning of the 'born this

way' argument is that it tacitly legitimizes the idea that if
people chose to be gay, hating them would be justifiable.
Instead of, you know, hateful."
During his set last week, Morgan reiterated an old, selfjustifying gag of his, that "if you can take a dick, you can take
a joke." But whether you're born this way or find yourself
along the way doesn't matter. You can take a joke without
taking abuse. (Mary Elizabeth Williams, Tracy Morgan goes
on an anti-gay rant, Salon, 10 June 2011)
----------I'll say it again: working class people don't care about
gays
And Tracy Morgan is a transplant from the working class.
This is a problem that gays are going to have to figure out.
Your alliance with liberals is skin-deep at best; it's fashion, an
affectation, like organic food.
Meanwhile the gay sons and daughters of the working class
grow up in a culture of hatred and abuse. (SedanChair)
It Gets Ugly on the Liberal Plantation
Tina Fey has let it be known that she is Tracy's boss, and that
she owns him. Without her, he would be just another talentless, no-name beggar in rags on the street. The statement she
has released on this issue is:
"the Tracy Morgan I know...is not a hateful man and is
generally much too sleepy and self-centred to ever hurt
another person. I hope for his sake that Tracy's apology will
be accepted as sincere by his gay and lesbian coworkers on 30
Rock, without whom Tracy would not have lines to say,
clothes to wear, sets to stand on, scene partners to act with, or
a printed-out paycheck from accounting to put in his pocket."
827
On the scale of personal insults, this is close to a 10. I would

much prefer being called a nigger. (Mobutu)
Tina Fey
"the Tracy Morgan I know...is not a hateful man and is generally
much too sleepy and self-centred to ever hurt another person."
The Tracy Morgan she knows can actually be angry and hateful. The
question I would have Tina Fey ask herself is, why does she find
appealing the sort of man who could reveal himself to be, who could
strongly sway, antigay? Why isn't she just drawn to better people?
Why do we idolize her so much? Is it to put a managable ceiling on
what we'll permit to be extraordinary?
----This Letter was deleted from the Tracy Morgan
article,
so I reproduce it here for your viewing pleasure:

So, when overweight teens are bullied and depressed and
commit suicide, it is O.K. to stand on the stage and make
jokes about fat people, and to have comedy skits on TV
making fun of fat people.
But when gay teens are bullied, depressed, and commit
suicide, it is NOT O.K. to make jokes about gay people, and to
have comedy skits on TV making fun of gay people.
I get it. We get it. Don't worry, it gets better. No one will be
allowed to make fun of you for the rest of your life.
It's good to be gay. It's all the rage now.

Thank you, and have a pleasant tomorrow. (Scriptorum)
Barely still good to be gay
828
I would say it's barely still good to be gay now, Scriptorum. I think in
an age swinging strongly Depression, no one really wants to be
associated with anything he or she still thinks of as 'weak,' as in need
of spirited defenders. The impulse amongst liberals will be to at some
level communicate a hesitancy to associate yourself too strongly with
them. Something of this is involved in the hipsters' movement to the
neanderthal/paleo/industrial/ grandfather 'worship.' And in the
blossoming in the acceptability of anti-boutique-liberalism-sort-ofliberalism of back-to-fundamentals Chris Hedges. Maybe too with
Tina, where though everywhere around her are her elf-workshop
gays, I think she would rather us not think her 1/10th lesbian.
----Scriptorum
RE: Liberal Jews and Gays control the media. They run it, they
staff it, they are it. And they will make fun of and trash anyone they
damn well please, but woe to the man or woman who makes fun of
or trashes them. (Scriptorum)
The most emerging liberal voice is Chris Hedges', who maintains that
liberalism has become as exclusive, self-concerned, as unfair and
inert as you believe it to be. When you read his language of justice for
the working man, see how well anyone not typically understood to be
constituted of working stock, of pure blood, common man aspirations
-- of the Appalachians, perhaps -- could find themselves belonging
within it -- however much he may salute the gay community or what
not.
Liberals have been exclusive. The people they so eagerly disparage
have been victimized. But the people they have antagonized are WAY
worse than they. When the tide tends their way, how easy a time they
are going to have in rebuttal when many liberals are themselves
looking to distance themselves from the remnants of hippie liberalism
in favor of something stockier, and when the IMAGE of the
829
dispossessed minority is allowed to fade at a time when the casual

truth of who "they" everyday are, conveys an instant accusation
against them -- even if it's just simply their urbanity. "You've spent 50
years defending this! -- and against humble, unassuming, TRULY
tolerant, TRULY put-upon us!" Blood on the streets.
----@Scriptorum
Gays are prominent in the entertainment industry because a
number of us are very entertaining!
The biz is one of the most competitive in the world. If you
aren't pleasing a lot of people in one way or another, then you
are OUT, and there are a thousand people in line behind you
ready to take your spot.
Are you bemoaning the fact that 'your folks' aren't adequately
represented in the entertainment business? Well, then, maybe
you should go into show biz and see how easy it is. Start
producing media/entertainment, instead of just being a
consumer. You'd get an education, if nothing else. (willie99)
willie99
Gays are prominent in the entertainment industry because a number
of us are very entertaining!
The biz is one of the most competitive in the world. If you aren't
pleasing a lot of people in one way or another, then you are OUT, and
there are a thousand people in line behind you ready to take your
spot.
So gays are prominent in show biz because they are more willing to
please a lot of people in one way or another than people like
Scriptorum are. This may be reality, but do you think this reality sits
well with a public that hates the fact that their feeling the need to do
the same has made them effeminate, an affliction they are spending
much of their spare time compensating for? You'll draw ire with it,
830
because your success mocks, and demonstrates to many people what

is most wrong with America.
@Patrick
I don't really understand your post.
I don't think effeminacy is an "affliction". However, I DO
think that a lot of homophobic men (both straight and gay)
who have ignorantly equated effeminacy with homosexuality
evince an irrational fear of being perceived as effeminate, and,
therefore, they spend a lot of energy trying to compensate for
that.
It's kind of sad hearing them try to lower their voices, or mute
their facial expressions, or censor themselves in the language
they use, lest someone think they are suspiciously effeminate.
Anyway, back on topic, I hope Tina Fey fires Tracy's ass.
Tina's comments were funny, and appropriate, but Tina and
NBC need to take action, otherwise they're just hypocrites. A
tap on the wrist isn't enough. Sorry. (willie99)
willie99
I don't think effeminacy is an "affliction". However, I DO think that a
lot of homophobic men (both straight and gay) who have ignorantly
equated effeminacy with homosexuality evince an irrational fear of
being perceived as effeminate, and, therefore, they spend a lot of
energy trying to compensate for that.
Clearly YOU don't think effeminacy is an affliction, but I am
suggesting that good a good bulk of the American public
(increasingly) does. What do they think effeminacy is? -- well, of the
likes of being constituted to read and please the endless expectations
of other people, something you say is ACTUALLY sufficiently
characteristic of gays that is mostly responsible for gay success in
show biz.
-----
831
@Scriptorum
Re: Jews never assimilate to the societies in which they live,
they always set themselves apart, they always look down on
others. Their own Rabbis preach that non-Jews are less
human. So it is just coming out of the wash now. They can't
hide it, and they don't even try to hide it anymore.
(Scriptorum)
I don't think any community of Rabbis is really going to keep a flock
from affiliating with Others they have a strong affinity for -- people
who, if no one was telling them "otherwise," they'd want to be social
with, out of sensed similar disposition. Like is drawn to like,
regardless. If despite this Jews can still seem bundled, it may have to
do with them actually being very different from the people you would
have them more affiliate with -- that is, the experiment you would
have them undertake, has already at some level been tried, or strongly
felt out, and they're back to what makes sense.
Should they (more affiliate)? Maybe not if they're ACTUALLY better,
and have consistently been, historically. The conservative ones aren't,
but the liberal ones as an aggregate surely are (it's Rabbit from
Updike's "Rabbit" series' overall take, though he wonders why he
always sees them with blondes) -- though they'll be doing better once
they abandon circumsicion, which IS still based on child hate. There
is a sense that what most Americans still most need is to become
more Jewish.
You're (having) at Salon for its ongoing liberalism, but as I am
making apparent, I think you can see signs of a drifting conservatism
even in what looks to be all too evidently liberal responses, and it is
that I think is most significant, am most concerned about.
Appreciate your honest take.
Link: Tracy Morgan goes on an anti-gay rant (Salon)
832
MONDAY, JUNE 13, 2011

Wanted by both sides
Goldfield's book has been well-reviewed, because if it's
sympathetic to Southern whites, it depicts the savagery of
slavery and post-war white terrorism with unflinching and
gut-wrenching clarity. (Literally. The book's tales of slaves'
abuse and Southern white post-war savagery will make you
sick.) Still, this Civil War history challenges the absolutism of
the "Northerners were heroes, and Southerners were vicious,
violent racists" school of history. He exposes and excoriates
Southern whites' violence against black people before and
after the war. But he also links the war to the pro-business
evangelical Protestant crusade to eradicate native American
Indians, Mexicans, Irish and German Catholic immigrants,
and an emerging class of landless Northern laborers anyone
who stood in the way of their vision of clean, hard-working,
business-friendly American progress. And he counts the
South as a victim of that Northern evangelical crusade.
Southerners were another group that simply wasn't
conforming to their doctrine of "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free
Men," as the title of Eric Foner's equally complicated and
fantastic Republican Party history puts it.
[. . .]
In an interview with Leonard Lopate, he contended that the
abolition of slavery was inevitable "in a world that was
hurtling toward the Industrial Revolution." I can imagine
that, had a more politically creative group of politicians tried
to compromise on a way out of slavery perhaps offering to
compensate slaveholders for their slaves, the way every other
country that abolished slavery did we maybe, maybe, might
have avoided the Civil War. (Joan Walsh, Everything you
833
know about the Civil War is wrong, Salon, 9 June 2011)

From Joan Walsh
Thanks for these letters, they're thoughtful and mindopening. I knew nothing about the history of Galveston,
incredible. Diogenes, there's a lot in the book about Darwin's
work helping forge a white North/South consusus about black
inferiority. On Twain, honestly that quote, out of context,
does look like satire, but there are several other examples of
his (temporary I think) horror at the results of universal
suffrage. cabdriver, thanks for making the point that we can
disagree about this without anyone being a neo-Confederate.
Finally, of course, I should have headlined this Everything
you know about the civil war is wrong -- unless you've studied
a lot of U.S. history. Which sadly most of us have not. (Joan
Walsh, response to post)
the reason:
We SHOULD read history, 'cause it's such a great way to distinguish
ourselves for all those Republican hippie soul-searchers.
----There's ALWAYS an alternative to war, if that's what you
REALLY want
I think abolition was inevitable as well, and that both sides just
happened to want war, NEEDED war -- that is, to project unwanted
aspects of themselves into convenient "containers," and eradicate
them: producing a wonderful bounty of sacrifices so a nation could
feel delightfully less burdened by sin. This said, Northerners overall
were less primitive than Southerners were. But both were crazy.
N.B. If Catholics had greater numbers and power, they'd have been
posting newspaper headlines calling for the eradication of
Protestants: they were victims, but surely quite mad as well. I hope
the book doesn't somehow communicate that being a victim makes
you surely sane and virtuous: your foes ARE projecting their own
834
rejected parts onto "you," it has nothing to do with who you really are
or what you've done, but you could just happen to be a nutcase.
----Slavery: not even homo economicus is up to something as
inhuman as that
The point of slavery wasn't to make money -- it was to inflict upon a
class of people a worse facimile of the kind of torment you got in your
childhood -- so no doubt all along there was some better way to
riches. They hung on to it longer than the Europeans did, because
Europeans on average were evolving better (slightly bettering
childhoods) than American Southerners were, resulting in their
moving up a bit to still abased but slightly better ways of abusing a
whole collection of people (wage slavery et al.). So even though
Southerners were retarded on this score, Northerners, if they were
healthier, if they themselves didn't crave war and sacrifice, could have
waited out their brethrens' mass regression and made abolition
happen afterwards -- and before Southerners naturally evolved to it
(Screw you, preacher: You can't do THAT to another human being!) -amounting to hugely less carnage. Didn't you all learn that in school?
----two points to Patrick McEvoy-Halston
were the south of the Mason-Dixoners the only ones to import
captured Africans?
if no was the northerners trying to make money?
@benvorhauer
They evolved out of it. Money gets made, but I like when people point
out that things like slavery and wars are so not at the root about
money that they are effected in instances when about no-one -- no
even, hardly, historians so running away from themselves they can
only understand human beings as homo economicus -- can argue it's
about the green anymore. I've seen from a few books coming out that
the idea (truth) that what is often called evil is actually lack of
empathy and an accompanying full-rim of sadism, is making way
835
back into discussion. Thank God. With that we'll be drawn to asking
ourselves what kinds of childhoods lead to empathy, and what kinds
not. And eventually to understanding that any period of history where
slavery can be rationalized, MUST have as its primary constituents
extremely poorly-loved people. For, if you've known love -- not an
entire cultural apparatus is at a deep level going to convince you that
something screamingly wrong is being done to people with the likes
of slavery (you will KNOW them to be human, even if you've only
been told their not, 'cause you will have less of a need to see them just
as an embodiment of your own personal demons and some of the
obvious will sneak in). How do we think change comes about? A new,
more humane perspective -- even if at this point, not SO much more
humane -- when before: nothing to draw upon? It's about growth in
heart, and nothing at all really with money matters. Homo
economicus is more evolved than man as wicked and sinful, but it's
a concept bubbled up from people not yet up to seeing people as they
really are. It is ONLY when empathy is nowhere to be found, that a
quarter of a population could perish in a by-both-sides-wanted war.
Link: Everything you know about the Civil War is wrong (Salon)
---------SUNDAY, JUNE 12, 2011
Bored lords?
This intra-critical dispute has a little to do with a lot of things,
including the symbolic schism over films as different as
Terrence Malick's family history of the universe, "The Tree of
Life," and the Marvel Comics-derived mutant-superhero opus
"X-Men: First Class." It has something to do with the utterly
unsurprising fact that most critics have decanted bucketloads
of scorn all over summer flicks like "The Hangover Part II"
and "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides," and have
836
seen them go on to become massive worldwide hits,

demonstrating once again that eggheads who watch 350
movies a year have become specialists or experts, of one
variety or another, and don't have much connection to
ordinary moviegoers or the reasons why they buy tickets.
It has a whole lot to do with the ancient 20th-century feud
between advocates of art-house cinema, which is essentially a
remnant of what used to be called "high culture," and fans of
mass-market popcorn entertainment. Which is weird, because
one side won that battle a long time ago but refuses to
acknowledge its victory and wants to go on acting like the
aggrieved underdog. And as tempting as it is to compare the
winning side to post-Reagan conservatives who keep whining
about what victims they are, decades after their demented
ideology has permeated our culture from top to bottom, it
isn't totally fair, so I won't!
[. . .]
Now, I'm not saying that our variety of boredom was superior
to anyone else's (or, to be more honest, while I may believe
that at some level, it clearly isn't true). The boredom of
Eisenhower-era America produced that extraordinary cultural
and political efflorescence known in the aggregate as "the
'60s." The boredom of the first impoverished generations of
Parisian bohemians produced Impressionist painting and
Symbolist poetry. The boredom of the Hollywood studio
system produced Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, George
Lucas and Brian De Palma (and, boy, talk about mixed
results). The boredom of life in America's neglected Reaganera inner cities led to hip-hop. Watch any Chekhov play, and
you grasp the national ennui that preceded the Russian
Revolution. I'm saying that boredom is a productive and
indeed revolutionary force, by the way, not that its results are
always or everywhere pleasant.
I think what gets critics all het up about contemporary culture
837
from time to time is the sense that the tyranny or hegemony

of entertainment has pushed boredom so far into the margins
that it's no longer available, or at least not in the density or
quality required to produce cultural revolutions. What we
have instead is the meta-boredom of a pop culture that's all
bells and whistles all the time, can't be switched off and
watches us while we're watching it, rather too much like the
telescreens of Orwell's "1984." As I wrote a few months ago
when reviewing the unbelievably boring "TRON: Legacy," it's
the "boredom of endless distraction and wall-to-wall
entertainment, the boredom of a culture where boredom is
forbidden ... and the once-proscribed Pleasure Principle has
become iron law." (Andrew OHehir, In praise of boredom, at
movies and in life, Salon, 7 June 2011)
bored lords?
It's the problem with being a movie critic these days. Everytime you
watch "non-boring" movies that appeal to the current nervous state of
the masses, that play to the limited kind of stimulation they can
handle and assurances they require, you're for a couple hours
grouped in with them, always at risk of being reminded of ways you
may remain like them -- not a pleasing thing when what defines the
masses these days is not so much their low-brow taste but their forsure susceptibility to a brutal fate.
But at least it gives you the sense that you're still engaging with your
fears, something you couldn't get if the gig was mostly about
critiquing high-brow fare. And there is a remedy: some involved
discussion afterwards of things that remind you you aren't really SO
much one of them, despite whatever shared background and lingo.
(Even better when the discussion can count amongst its participaters
at least one who is near fully sincere.)
The reclaiming of true leisure, growth out of relaxation and boredom,
could just be all good. (I enjoyed Mark Helprin's fairly recent defense
of the same.) But it can remind you of articles like that one recently
838
written by David Brooks, which argue that what we need most now is
a return of a leisured, governing class -- people who are still
constituted to appreciate the slow, to deliberate, patiently, and do
what is necessary for the long-term. People like Obama, who can
remain mostly serene, cerebral and assured, governing over a nation
turning itself fully over to the lords, as far away as it can from the
plebs, while making this seem somehow a return to architectural
sanity. It needed, that is, be about reclaiming the '70s, but its
opposite.
Link: In praise of boredom, at the movies and in life (Salon)
----------
FRIDAY, JUNE 10, 2011

Seeming adult, without actually being so
A reader, prompted by last week's commentary on whether
great books can make you a better person, wrote in to ask a
related question. Her favorite author is Charles Dickens;
his books have been beacons for her. While she'd like to
know more about him, she recalls reading long ago that
Dickens behaved badly in his personal life. Should she
investigate further, even though she worries that this will
lead her to "doubt the impression I always had of Dickens:
that he was a kind, sensitive soul who had suffered as a
child"?
[. . .]
If Dickens sometimes behaved badly, Naipaul is
unquestionably a bad man, notorious for his floridly
abusive relationships and bigoted ideas. Does this diminish
his work? Naipaul's fiction is not to everyone's taste, but
the grace of his prose and the power of his early books,
839
especially "A Bend in the River," is hard to deny; I admired

much of that novel even as I gritted my teeth over its
blinkered depiction of Africans. "A House for Mr. Biswas"
is a veritable touchstone for New Yorker critic James
Wood, a tough crowd if there ever was one.
For myself, I ended up feeling that Naipaul's prejudices
(less glaring in his earlier books, but still evident and
clearly fueled by cultural insecurity) bar him from the sort
of insight that renders a novelist truly wise as opposed to
merely smart. Other writers make for more ambiguous
cases. T.S. Eliot was an anti-Semite, Virginia Woolf a snob
and Ezra Pound a flaming fascist, but I'm not ready to
shrug off "The Waste Land," "To the Lighthouse" or "The
Cantos."
[. . .]
Similarly, needing to believe that your favorite author lived
in an exemplary way, embodying all the virtues of his best
work, is an adolescent desire, passionate but ultimately
unfair. Learning the truth is disillusioning at first, but
enlightening in the end. Part of the sadly underrated
process of growing up is realizing that people, the world
and life are no less beautiful and amazing for being
imperfect. (Laura Miller, When bad people write great
books, Salon, 7 June 2011)
Hobbits
How is it grown up to enable a way to easily justify/excuse/notcontest your love for an artist's work, upon learning about their
personal sideshow extras? Maybe the clearly damnable ostensible
other side of the author is actually front in view of you within the text
itself? Maybe you haven't just come to learn that the author you loved
has aspects that are not at all admirable, but that the love you felt for
the text itself was flawed --apparently simply damnable as well -- but
ran away to the first opt-out you could find to avoid seriously
840
considering that the sudden realization you had was just as much
about your own being attracted to what is perhaps ultimately suspect,
as it was the author's.
Also, really be brave: if you learn things about the author you do not
like, but still very, very much like what they wrote: don't dismiss, but
EXPLORE what they were doing in their lapses and villainy. It might
not just be shadow, but, strangely, the light extended, from page to
life. Let's not all be hobbits afraid to venture out our door.
----is Carroll = pedophile
William S. Burroughs = murderer
Gunter Grass = Nazi
Have read books by all of them, enjoyed all of them.
(Krasnaya Zvezda)
@Krasnaya Zvezda
Have you considered that some part of you may be a pedophile, a
murderer, a Nazi? Or is this dark-side-of an-otherwise-brilliant-artist
concept, strong enough to keep you from ever feeling compelled to do
so?
@Patrick
Have you considered that some part of you may be a
pedophile, a murderer, a Nazi?
That is seriously the dumbest shit I've ever heard.
Have YOU considered that grown adults can read things
objectively and enjoy them on their own merits without
turning into monsters?
What are you, 11 years old? (Unsinkable Bastard)
@unsinkable bastard
What we're all concerned to protect is the idea that the vile Other
we're aghast/disheartened to learn about, is not somehow very much
841
ALSO within the work of art we enjoy. It maybe needed be -- but the
only reason I would allow this possibility is that I know such things
like that the majority of nazis had/have split personalities, where one
part of them detached itself from what the vile other part concerned
itself with and enjoyed: but clearly, even here, even dealing with their
'better' parts of themselves, we're not dealing with especially
wonderful people -- the kind that would never feel the need to split off
and do/experience such things -- and for liking THAT, finding worth
in the artistic production produced by that, something is probably off
with us. I don't think we're grown up if we're not considering this
possibility. "Alas, we're all imperfect" is obviously mostly escape, not
engagement. Look for immaturity there.
Of course, we're living at a time when the good person increasingly
seems suspect of being just the NEUTERED person, determined at
the cost of any self-elaboration to show how willing they are to sit in
place for life; and at times like these, you must look for life, goodness,
in strange places. In case this isn't clear -- never, however, in Nazism.
Just use your imagination.
----The unspoken contract is that art, once produced,
exists in its own rarefied realm...
Though reputations and human foibles do shape which
stories are told and lost.
Speaking of bastards... Caravaggio, perhaps the greatest
artist of his or any age, was generally considered a fiend.
He accidentally murdered a rival when attempting to
castrate him.When Vasari wrote his profoundly influential
work, The Lives of the Artists he deliberately made no
mention of Caravaggio, because he personally knew and
loathed him. As a result, for centuries Caravaggio had a
diminished reputation in the art world.
Paul Gauguin abandoned his wife and children to frolic in
842
Tahiti with a twelve-year-old.

As noted, Dickens forced his wife to leave their home,
didn't allow her to visit her own children (her older
daughter and son secretly visited her) all so that Dickens
(one of my favorites) could cavort with a girl the age of his
daughter, though there is still plenty of ambiguity
surrounding whether the relationship was fully sexual.
Branwell Bronte was an opium eater whose habit forced his
famously shy sisters to become governesses, jobs they
loathed. His own art career was ruined in the process.
Christopher Marlowe was a brawling SOB who fatally
stabbed himself in the eye while trying, in a drunken
temper, to kill someone else (though there are persistent
rumors that he may have been a spy). Doesn't make his
work any less great.
Mary Lamb murdered, a la Lizzie Borden, her mother; she
still wrote charming translations of 's plays for children
(though modern adults would find her syntax and diction
plenty challenging).
The man who wrote the most entries, by a large margin,for
the OED walked up to a stranger and murdered him for no
reason. W.C. Minor was a vet from the Civil War and it
seems clear that he was suffering from PTSD. His
contributions to the dictionary were written from his
prison cell.
The pages of literature and art are literally splashed with
blood, but it has always seemed to me that one of the
fantastic paradoxes of art is how, once born into the world,
it is both detached and connected to the hand that made it.
I may look askance at these lives, but I wouldn't dream of
giving up the pleasures of the work. (Mornings Minion)
@morning's minion
You have a way of making sins seem mostly about will, deviation, and
843
activity -- very much part of Greatness/Genius, not its unfortunate

accompanyment.
There's no way you'll lose this argument, phrasing it as you do: to go
against you, to suggest that in your faith you've decided to
shortchange yourself future growth, you have to go up against every
significant pillar of Civilization.
But it seems like something of this sort has to be enabled, because
most great artists I love -- and that I would think you should come to
love -- are to be known mostly for their love (the core of it all,
even/especially self-love) -- both on and off the page. Humanities
departments were kind of up to that, actually, and for quite some
while -- how many literature professors -- even at the cost of some
self-deception -- were mostly concerned to involve themselves with
'Great' works but to undermine them? -- but I think that this hubris,
though long lamented to be everywhere spread and unstoppable, is
near close to coming a full stop, owing to the re-energizing of the
power of elder-worship, youth-scorn/hate, Traditionalism.
I don't think we really care for what the Ancient Greeks were inspired
by: our concern is for what they themselves were up to. Something
like that has to be enabled for a future generation -- for them to be so
great, and so good, it really becomes mostly about them now: bye-bye
500 years of Euro story, and so the authority implicit in every
mention of its heroes. Most Great Art should at some point in human
evolution be forgotten -- there's a better 'man' to come, and should
look to what s/he's up to mostly for satisfaction and prompting selfawareness: we were historically mostly about making sure s/he got
there, and personally about engaging thrillingly with life.
----very nice
Beautifully written, thought-provoking, insightful... and
from a woman no less! That oughta show mr. v. What a
dick.
As much of a feminist as I am as a man, however, I'm
844
having a hard time thinking of books I've read that were

written by woman... I guess I've never even thought about
the subject. I'll have to make a point of reading a novel by a
woman, a work of fiction that is. Any suggestions anyone,
something modern? (colinjames71)
@colinjames71
If you have to make a point of reading a novel by a woman, do you
think this may have to do with your not having found that they write
as well as men do? Lots and lots of female writes out there -- What
accounts for your forced effort, do you think?
Link: When bad people write great books (Salon)
----------

Standing Tall
I don't necessarily want to be the guy who tries to hang a
discount-store T.S. Eliot essay about the Death of Culture on
yet another mediocre Hollywood sequel, but there's
something a little depressing about all the hype and
excitement surrounding "X-Men: First Class," the new
Marvel-Fox product that's expected to be among the
summer's biggest hits.
[. . .]
Oh, OK, I know why. I'm just playing Socratic idiot. It's
summertime in spirit if not in fact, and people are covered in
beer and bug-juice and have collectively lowered their
expectations. They've convinced themselves that they want to
see a big, exciting adventure with cool guys and pretty girls
845
and maybe the faintest hint of moral significance but not

much resemblance to real life. I suppose a ridiculous yarn
about how a group of superhuman genetic mutants in silly
costumes intervene to resolve the 1963 Cuban missile crisis
(after starting it in the first place) fits the bill, somewhat. But
I'm pretty sure that those who are claiming that "X-Men: First
Class" is actually good are engaged in the kind of brainwashed
magical thinking that goes along with a culture where the
entire media and most of the public have to behave like savvy
insiders all the time.
[. . .]
It looks good and has some nice acting moments; as a friend
of mine used to say about poetry readings, it's better than
some TV. If it makes a butt-load of money, all of us parasites
on the sweaty underbelly of the film industry are
hypothetically better off, so we might as well like it.
[. . .]
While the whole film is professionally executed and goes
down smoothly enough, the underlying stupidity of its subject
matter can't help but show through in the end. I was left
wondering why I'd spent more than two hours in the dark
watching a story about how a kid who survived the
concentration camps grew up to be an adult who wears an
embarrassing faux-Spartan helmet and calls himself Magneto
(rhymes with neato). (Andrew Ohehir, "X-Men: First Class":
Slick, dumb big-screen candy, Salon, 1 June 2011)
I suppose a more charitable way of saying what I said about
the collective lowered expectations of summer is that summer
movies are meant as a communal escape that's libidinal and
visceral and not really subject to intellectual analysis. Believe
it or not, I don't want to interfere with anybody's enjoyment
along those lines -- but on the other hand, it isn't my job to
congratulate Hollywood. (Andrew OHehir)
846
Standing tall
Leave out the part about you not wanting to be the discount store T.S.
Eliot essay contributer. Also the part about your bud nudging you on
how poetry readings are better than some tv. Also the (actually selfeffacing) estimation of yourself as a parasite on the underbelly of the
film industry. Also the part in your reply about you knowing that you
haven't any influence on box-office returns. You've seen crap; know
you can will yourself to speak against a crowd, against true T.S. Eliot
types (Ebert's so casual, so American, but this Pulitzer Prize winner
qualifies a bit, doesn't he?) when it speaks to Truth; and you know
deep-down this all speaks FOR you. Communicate this. "This is crap;
and if you mostly like it, something is quite wrong with you. I
understand this means I think I'm better than you. I do; I am. Now
use what I've given you to start bettering yourself."
Also, in your reply, I don't get how you can argue that you don't want
to interfere with anyone's enjoyment along these lines (i.e., libidinal
and visceral enjoyment of a film, rather than intellectual), when your
whole review suggests that that this is in fact your drive. I think you'd
be better again to not be charitable, and EXCLUDE the film entire
from ones that do SO satisfy libidinal needs -- something not only
more basic or needed/required but more mythic (deeper?) as well -to put those who'd just make wry cuts on the film on absolute
defence: everyone knows they're missing something essential -Laputans.
I think you saw the film and knew that that if it became popular it
would not do to have it excused even by critics as owing to relaxed
summer expectations. I think you knew that this meant that
something very wrong was happening to people that they actually
found satisfaction -- or worse, meaning -- in this kind of shallow
offering, and had in mind to be amongst those who'd try and let them
know they were going wrong. I like that.
Link: X-Men: First class (Salon)
847
----------

Reading and the cultivation of empathy
Seeing a favorite critic expound at length on a favorite author
is an undersung form of literary pleasure -- as close as you can
get to reading two great writers at the same time. William
Deresiewicz's "A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels
Taught Me About Love, Friendship and the Things That
Really Matter" certainly achieves that effect for this particular
reader. Like Austen, Deresiewicz is lucid, principled and
knows how to think as well as how to feel, without ever
sacrificing one to the other. He understands that most of us
want more than just an exquisite aesthetic experience from a
novel. His reviews are gratifying even when you feel inclined
to quarrel with them, and (unlike a surprising number of
esteemed critics) he has a sense of humor.
[. . .]
Does reading great literature make you a better person? I've
not seen much evidence for this common belief. Some of the
best-read people I know are thoroughgoing jerks, and some of
the kindest and noblest verge on the illiterate -- which is
admittedly an anecdotal argument, but then, when it comes to
this topic, what isn't? (Laura Miller, Does reading great
books make you a better person? Salon, 31 May 2011)
Empathy
How does one become emphatic? In my judgment, it owes to
spending a lot of time around people who were themselves well
enough loved to be naturally inclined to well attend to you, to love
you, rather than use you as means to hopefully satisfy some of their
own unmet needs. Like with our lifemates, I think there is an
848
automatic inclination to link ourselves with people who are at about

our own psychological/emotional level. It would indeed be to our
benefit if somehow we found ourselves in the company of those ...
even better: who could nurture us, so we can make a step up, rather
than feed us responses that satisfy on some level but ultimately keep
us in place.
Teachers can amount to/do this -- AND through their choice of
reading material. For a short bit, they can put you in the company of
people, of authors, who are potentially better, emotionally more
healthy, than your own parents are. It is nowhere near as good as a
more involved interaction, where the text itself, THE AUTHOR
him/herself, could respond to your responses, and so on, but at the
very potentially substantial least you know what it is to be in the
company of someone you intuit would know you to be more worthy of
attendence and love than you've been made to understand. People
routinely hear about authors who love their characters, and those
authors who truly do, love their readers as well -- and their readers
also intuit this about them. From learning this, out of this gift, partial
fulfillment, your life will be just a little bit more about seeing what
you can give other people, rather than tasking them for claiming
things you never got to lay much hold of and are convinced are mostly
about MEism -- selfishness.
As far as William Deresiewicz: He speaks very well to the moment -such clever, often true stuff about elite universities -- but I do not
trust the man.
About whom to read: the ones I turn to, who I think, can love in ways
I'm trying to reach, or reach, but sometimes fall back from, are, it
seems, falling away from the moment. But Kingsolver's one. So too
Updike, Piers Anthony, Michael Bishop, and some good bit of Ian
McEwan. The ones I see most on the upswing right now, though,
frighten me. I think they're mostly about making empathy, lightness,
incomensurate, a betrayal, of the hard times we're entering. Sort of
David Foster Wallace on Updike kind of thing, but not even as
"charitable," and certainly not as sensitively "offered." They want to
849
show you how bad they are, and so too you. And then agreed, all on a
hunt for those who might think of themselves, something different.
----Empathy, but also demons
People who do not at the start of their lives obtain for themselves
sufficient love/empathy to lead to them being well-souled enough to
drift so often to how they might learn more about and help out others,
but receive it later -- through whatever means -- have a tough time in
life believing they really deserved the good nurturance, the absolute
attendence they ended up receiving. At some point, they become
convinced they'll be punished for it, and project their bad selves onto
unfortunate others, to be punished. This explains why an emergant
benefactory generation (like the '60s), a ME-ME but also evidently
YOU-YOU generation, can at the end of their term drift really
reactionary, abandon so willing those they used to forthrightly
champion, and is a truth that should be used against those who would
cancel out the possibilities of light and truth from Art simply by
showing us how a lot of formerly progressive art-lovers ultimately
drifted. "Yes, not always anywhere near to bad, mind you, but THIS
IS to be expected. After true Light, inevitably Darkness: it's its bitter
'aftertaste.'" Only the likes of miracle good people like Paul Krugman
escape it entire. (But note: he has.)
We're very comfortable saying (the likes of) we were intially asses but
learned to become better people, more attendent to other people's
needs, through --. (It's the framing for the prototypical Salon
lifestory, is it not?) We are NOT comfortable saying that we love other
people because we ourselves are pretty great and interesting -- and so
too, surely, must you be! The former assessment keeps us seeming
essentially modest and small -- of the sinful; keeps the demons at bay;
but doesn't lead to much presumption or growth. The later surely at
some point invites the demons: but for awhile can lift a generation on
to great things ... before the also-consequence. But next time around,
850
though the same nasty flip, it's not as devestating.

Link: Does reading great books make you a better person? (Salon)
----------
SUNDAY, MAY 22, 2011

The "Angry Black Man" returns -- but only for a short while
Melissa Harris-Perry and Adam Serwer wrote majestic
takedowns of Cornel West's vicious and deeply personal rant
against President Obama published this week, so I didn't
think I had to. But there's one thing missing in the torrent of
reaction to West I've seen this week: a recognition that maybe
this is the way identity politics had to end, not with a bang but
a whine. Dizzying racial and personal insults have come from
all directions, and they're beginning to lose their meaning.
Much has been made of the personal pique that animated
West's attack on the president: How dare the bellhop at
West's hotel Inaugural Weekend wind up with tickets to the
event itself when West didn't? How could Obama stop
returning his calls? West's animus was impossible to miss,
and it clearly drove the awful, ad hominem anger of West's
invective.
The most tragic thing, to me, about West's meltdown was the
way he tried to frame it as a universalist defense of poor and
working-class people -- who in fact haven't gotten enough
help or attention from this too-close-to-Wall Street
administration -- but then somehow descends into personal
attacks on the president as "a black mascot of Wall Street
oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats." If that
wasn't bad enough, West claims Obama's problem is that he is
afraid of "free black men" due to his white ancestry and years
851
in the Ivy League. "He feels most comfortable with upper

middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves
very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they
want," West claimed.
Give Brother West credit for consistency: On MSNBC's "The
Ed Show" Tuesday night, he repeated his criticism that
Obama is too close to "upper-middle-class white brothers and
Jewish brothers."
Oh no, the Jews again. Haven't we been here before?
How did the man who wrote in "Race Matters" that it's time
"to replace racial reasoning with moral reasoning" come to
this? I don't disagree with some of West's critique of Obama,
but Ta-Nehisi Coates is exactly right here:
Was there something more Obama should have done to get a
public option? Should he not have traded the Bush tax cuts
for extending unemployment benefits? Did Obama settle too
quickly on a small stimulus package? Was he wrong to allow
the GOP to shut down planned parenthood in DC? Is the
strategy of increased drone attacks in Pakistan inhumane?
Was the financial reform bill he signed ultimately too weak?
I think all of this is fair game. I think Charles Ferguson's
critique in Inside Job was really solid. I think calling
someone a "black mascot" or a "black puppet" because they
don't agree with you is much less so.
The Washington Post's always terrific Jonathan Capehart says
that, essentially, West is "no better than a birther,"
challenging the president's credibility on specious, deeply
personal racial grounds. (Joan Walsh, Cornel Wests tragic
meltdown, Salon, 19 May 2011)
"The angry black man" returns -- but only for a short while
So the fact that we elected Obama is being tested -- successfully -- to
852
make the angry black man once again acceptably "the angry black
man." This way, rational, fair, mature, concerned Obama can ensure
the Depression -- his ultimate role in history, I think -- and those
most likely to be hurt, become primarily fair creatures of sport. (For
me, with the examples that foremost come to my mind -- with West,
with Armond White, with the brother in "he's climbing in your
window," emotional,"irrational" black men are being set up as
deserving whatever might happen to them: instantly dehumanized.)
I think this is only temporary, however. Once the Depression is really
rooted in, I think that like the last big one, everyone who had for a
short while snickered at the habits and inclinations, the evidence of
upset, of the poor and disenfranchised, will suddenly see the suffering
masses as noble. No more talk of birther-politics. And, I think, no
more illustrations of the angry black man. Instead, I think antisemitism rises, becomes legitimate amongst the literate classes, even.
America, everyone once again agrees, demonstrates its purity, its
intention to be true to its heritage, its brothers, its folk, by reparing
the damage done by slavery and keeping faith with black people -- by
NEVER allowing blacks to be fair subjects of sport: and who must it
have been to have done the considerable evil in temporarily swaying
them away from their faith?
Plausible?
----The core of the matter
Black men's "theatrics," style, heritage, voice is now being readily
deconstructed, brushed aside by liberals as really just plain
inexcusable disrespect. This is amazing. It's the opposite direction
from the '60s, which was about empowering the carnival of the
disempowered -- whatever its true virtues -- not using it as evidence
that they need not be listened to. Obama empowered this? That
because you remain in support of him the very last thing you can be is
racist, so enough of what-is-in-truth-your-inexcusable clownishness
that we've long grown tired of pretending as otherwise? It empowers
it, I think, but what motivates it is, one, that what-is-in-greatest-truth
853
interestingness, signs of individuality, of being well nurtured,

emboldenly ensouled -- what great black men like West and Armond
White and Jesse Jackson mostly "are" -- is not allowed anymore: that
these men flowered to the point of being so rich in individual
personality suggests the permissiveness of the '60s, not the fearful
restraint, denial of today (something Obama, ever careful, ever
dispossessed, "embodies"); and two, because it's not going to last so
long that guilt at what we liberals are up to cripples us.
At some level we all know that two groups in particular are getting
destroyed out there: the working classes, and those most traditionally
disenfranchised -- black people. And at some level we all know that in
making Birthers the most ridiculous people in the universe, those
who most fundamentally need our opposition, we are making it so
that we don't need so much to see the awfulness that is happening to
great segments of the working classes -- those, who, if they're not
birthers, are most likely to support such populist creatures as Rush
Limbaugh. Krugman can rant all he wants about how Obama is
enlarging the dispossessed, and yet he is trumped by an image or two
of them -- that calls up the multitudes we've been exposed to and
hated on -- crazily doubting Obama's heritage. He can't really
communicate, because we've activated a switch, an alternative, which
empowers us to hear him but to not let it squarely sit -- he is referring
to a people disconnected from what is most in play in the public
arena. And at some level we know that in making it so that emotive,
"unaccountable" black intellectuals like Armond White and West are
mostly clowns or trolls, we're setting up the tradition they've been
characterized as representing, embodying, as clownish too, which
means that when we encounter the large swaths of black men who
angrily loathe on Obama, who will suffer most under his
management, our instinctive reaction is not to emphatize but to
mock, to hate. "You're not just showing your 'color' -- in fact, it's
never really been about that. You're just being disregarding and rude;
probably from the beginning, mostly deserve to be put in place; and if
this is what Obama is effecting -- good friggin' for him." We might not
854
allow ourselves to quite THINK this, but we feel it automatically -and it'll doom them of empowered friends. But I think it likely that we
at some level know that we've not commited ourselves to being
opposite to two groups we're supposed to want to enfranchise and
represent: that we've untethered ourselves from exactly what made us
liberals in the first place. Once the Depression has irrecovably set in -and so long as Krugman still insists that government spending can
still sway us away, it probably hasn't -- like the last Depression,
liberals stop mocking the habits of the poor and become one hundred
percent behind them. In fact, it'll be all we'll do, non-stop, for ten
years at least. That is, even if the majority of the dispossesed were
holding the craziest political inclinations, supporting the most ugly of
populist leaders, and if black men were ranting away in the most
outlandish, disrespectful manner, all we'll let ourselves see are noble
people being unfairly picked on by cruel, corporate culture. Like the
last Depression, this won't ultimately do much for them -- it was the
awesome suffering, which empowered the belief that some gain is
now surely deserved, which ended the Depression. And, as I
suggested earlier, what it might actually empower is a spread of antisemitism: in full regret that they for awhile turned against the
common man and the descendents of slaves, that they swayed the
very opposite of Good, liberals will lascerate themselves -- but also
look to punish the sneaks surely responsible for their temporary,
grotesque transmogrification.
I like West, and am inclined to want to defend him, but 5 years on I
think he'll be very empowered again ... and heeded -- about what he
had to say about Jewish influence. What he has to say about Jews is
grotesque, and I am glad Joan was angered by it. It's not carnival; not
now, because it's time for other groups to be picked on, but it can
produce carnage.
Link: Cornel Wests tragic meltown (Salon)
855
--------SATURDAY, MAY 21, 2011

Not sure if we can beat it
Every couple of months, a reader sends me a link to a blog
post denouncing the influence of Master of Fine Arts
programs in creative writing, apparently in the conviction that
such challenges are rare. Yet surely the only thing more
unkillable than MFA programs is the idea that no one dares
criticize MFA programs.
[. . .]
So Mark McGurl's 2009 book, "The Program Era: Postwar
Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing," actually was rather
daring: McGurl presumed to look at the work produced by
MFA holders and find it good. He asserted that university
creative writing programs have had a profound effect on
American fiction in the past 50 years, but he really went out
on a limb when he stated that their influence has resulted in
"a system-wide rise in the excellence of American literature."
Elif Batuman, an American academic and author, does not
agree, and in a lengthy review of McGurl's book for the
London Review of Books, she laid out her own objections to
"program fiction." Then McGurl, manifestly stung by what he
regarded as Batuman's "snarky slurs," wrote a slightly less
lengthy riposte for a new publication, the Los Angeles Review
of Books. He accused Batuman of being a shameless "cultural
conservative" who thinks the "masses of the world" should
not presume to encroach on the elite terrain of art. Each of
these writers misrepresents the other to a certain degree but
McGurl is guilty of greater distortions (as is often the case
when one is angry). The back-and-forth has kindled yet
another furor of denunciations and soul-searching on the
merits of MFAs. (Laura Miller, Are MFA programs ruining
856
American fiction?, Salon, 17 May 2011)

The times we live in
Not about creative writing, but stuff within academic journals has
become less interesting. That is, I think the problem I'm glad we
sense has more to do with the times we live in than anything else. If
MFA/New York loses cred, if DIY U gains real life, my guess in fact is
that it'll be more about giving the wolves more space to roam and
cowing those who, even if they're not up to something interesting, will
keep the tradition alive, and perhaps have children who may yet be,
than anything else. Our Romantic period ended sometime late '70s;
we're living in the period that subsequent generations skip over. Even
if we all get a grip on it, I'm not sure if we can beat it.
There does seem to be a sense that the MFA right now is about
creating a class of innocents sheltered from what everyone else is
experiencing, yet believe that they, especially, can actually get the
core gut of it all. I suspect THEY'LL suspect soon enough that this
isn't quite true, but by that time the Depression will have worsened,
and they'll have left the schools to really get at the grime -- which,
still, they won't really get at all. That is, I think they're being nurtured
as sources of humiliation for the body public. Not as bad as the
military, but not good.
--Guildenstern era?
As Morris Dickstein makes clear in "Dancing in the Dark," a cultural
history of the Depression, there are just some periods where
"personality," exciting individuation, THAT IS RESPONSIBLE for
drawing all to you, not just your literaryness and your obvious
consent to be of a mold, just isn't allowed. He documents how after
Fitgerald/Joyce/Chaplin et al. in the '20s, you get the factory system,
interchangeable parts (at least 'til "Kane"), and a reductive
understanding of human beings (homo economicus) by virtually all
artists: a wiping of MORE than just the smile off people's faces. And I
think that's our problem: it's not schools -- where 30 years ago there
would have been essentially no minuses to being around some of the
857
most deep, the best writerly minds for a few years in your early '20s
(though I appreciate the hippies who dropped out and managed at
least as well) -- and outsiders aren't the solution -- not those familiar
with all of literary history, as they're the sort to indulge in all sorts of
things that are just not as interesting as what the MFAs have been
reading; and not those who don't suspect they're actually missing out
on something for not being around such truly ripened senior writers,
because the bulk of them have. It's that the age of permission has
ended, something the huge sacrifice of the war granted to the
subsequent generation (the truly great baby-boomers), and not even
generous great writers of current MFA programs are now sufficient to
buoy you on to be greater than they were -- whatever their concern,
also, that you showcase through your causes their own purity, that
you be pure and golden, and reflect back love onto them, and that you
not write much that truly agitates them.
The worst part is that the current generation increasingly senses all
this, and understand the deprival as making them "adult": we're in a
sad and grotesque period where once again, being truly withered, not
ripened, evidences your prime.
--@Benno
Youre welcome, Benno. Hope you enjoy the work as much as I did.
There's also a bit from one of Jacques Barzun's books that comes to
mind: perhaps in "Classic, Romantic, Modern," he gets at why all of a
sudden the New -- in this case, Romanticism -- suddenly became, in
his words, "easy" to produce. The reason he offers -- that the previous
mold had exhausted itself to the point that everyone suddenly could
not but be aware the current course had exhuasted itself, and so
finally onto gleeful, productive experimentation -- is probably very
misleading, however. My guess is that all along the late classicists
were very aware they weren't really innovating -- and so felt
protected, some, when their era had suddenly made the switch to
believing people don't deserve to stand out. It took a generation
858
amounting to less than their predecessors, to permit a new one to

come on the scene that surpassed everyone.
Link: Are MFA programs ruining American fiction? (Salon)
---------TUESDAY, MARCH 15, 2011
Glitters
Despite the fact that by all accounts, Baz Luhrmann is likely
well into pre-production on The Great Gatsby which will
likely be shot in Australia, and in 3-D, and feature Leonardo
DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Carey Mulligan in starring
roles the elusive director refused to admit anything at a
dinner for Geoffrey Rush in Brooklyn on Thursday night.
Im not doing Gatsby right now for this reason, he told
Vulture when asked why he was shooting Gatsby in
Australia when his team was mostly located in New York.
Because despite what might be out there, I have made no
comment about anything. So until I say it, its not said, you
know. Not really.
Luhrmann explained further, with the clarity of a murky
swamp.
What it means is, much like what goes on

in any event, when youre in the middle
of the work, theres all sorts of things
youre doing, and, you know, when Im
really clear I, right now, my only focus
is absorbing Ive been studying [F.
Scott] Fitzgerald now for three years,
859
and my only act now is to absorb the

DNA of his world, his life, the world of
the novel. Thats why I have published on
our website all the books were reading.
And I think before we all engage anyone,
the first thing to do is to do your
homework, read the books, and then lets
talk.
Got it. So hes not making The Great Gatsby. No, Im

making The Great Gatsby. Oh. Eff it all. Good luck with this
one, Baz! Wake me when the trailer debuts. (Christopher
Rosen, Baz Luhrmann is still full of crap, Movieline, 11
March 2011)
-----------I can't believe someone whose aesthetic is designed to exalt
decadence and empty artifice is going to direct a horrid
misreading of the most powerful Indictment of decadence
and empty artifice ever created.
I always wanted to see a faithful Gatsby film.
Alas, it will never be. (Jack Knive)
Instinctive reaction is to insist that there is some of Gatsby's desire to
"suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder"
in Luhrmann, and that it is compelling. He can, I agree, seem so thin,
even vapid, but he strangely does draw you back to him.
True, the desperate drive and denial that pushes towards the
American "orgastic" future could be captured, at least as an
essential visual energy.
860
I just fear that the wealthy and their "retreat into

carelessness," essentially that the "love story" is one-sided,
that Daisy would rather live within the confines of the
illusion of control offered by material possession than risk
relating through an unmediated reality...
I just hope he makes it the tragic portrait of the thwarted
masculine that it truly is. I don't want to see a post-feminist
revision of Fitzgerald.
And so far, Mr. Luhrmann's portraits of the Masculine and
the Feminine seem like the exaggerated plasticine figures on
a wedding cake-- what an effeminate spazz locked out of
that particular existential struggle would think of it if he
were simply reproducing its surface features.
You know- the very idea of Nicole Kidman as Woman, and
Hugh Jackman as Man. Someone is very confused. Or either
obsessed with making a subversion of gender to the degree
that this could overshadow the essence of Fitzgerald's
unflinching text. (Jack Knive)
It is odd his deciding to do Gatsby at the onset of what looks like (by
which I mean, for sure is) a new long depression, since Gatsby was
written comfortably within one of the millenium's foremost go-go
times. That itself to me seems very odd, has me suspect its moving
energy, and has me fretting the film -- though I'm for sure going to
see it now!
About your comment on material possessions: I'm turning to the
book, again suspecting Fitzgerald would have a tough time at the time
showing up luxury, never-ending glittering things, persuading us that
the text is best understood as tragedy or critique rather than
celebration, when frequent and always-varying partying, lavishness,
details, exotica, out-of-placeness, perpetual newness and perhaps
even, I'm wondering, also empty-headed insouciance had an appeal
to pretty much every someone at the time (weren't flappers somewhat
in opposition to depth; advertisements for the power and worth in
861
ostensible triviality?). And looking at it again this morning, I think he

did. If there isn't beauty IN all those empty material possessions, all
the beautiful things, their gloss certainly appeals. Their glitter actually
scintillates -- are part of the acuity and precision and refinery and fun
that marks, I think, most every sentence of the text -- everything
vapid is so very much evidently worth delineating. Tom is supposed
to be shown up as a barbarian, as base and brutal, but reading it now,
whatever Fitzgerald's intent, I think EVEN GATSBY IS -- incredibly,
FOR his being largely unaffected by all the delicate surface beauty he
has surrounded himself with. Have a glass of champaigne and party,
you fool!
If Luhrmann does make it "a tragic portrait of the thwarted masculine
that it truly is," if he makes it ring as true to Fitzgerald as this week's
Jane Eyre is ostensibly to Bronte, it would have to be, amazingly, for
it showing Gatsby's fatal flaw being his inability to appreciate the
empty life, out of preference for the deep and meaningful. Daisy has
no soul, but is a full of hints, and is a considerable flirt -- which in this
text makes her kind of awesome, actually, though to very few, I think,
even but a year or two outside the heyday of capitalist fun and within
a depression's deflating, cowing check.
Well, that is the tragedy of the masculine-- seeking the

essence beneath the shifting masks of facade that the
feminine offers. When there is nothing beneath the shifting
masks. And, when Gatsby (or, I should say the actual human
being, James Gatz) attempts a facade of his own (the Gatsby
identity) to win her, he is in fact tragically mirroring the
facade of the feminine in his very attempt to attract a master
of facades. Takes a fake to catch a fake. But then what?
The text is about the tragedy of American inauthenticity and
narcissism. To see it any other way is to not understand
being run over by the american dream car and found
floating dead in a pool shot by a bullet meant for the bastard
862
who got away.

You can't get away with being a fake.
When Tom dabbles in the working class and brutalizes and
murders, he retreats to his real identity as an unaccountable
member of the upper caste. Gatsby ends up dead and
blamed. And shot by another member of the lower class, to
boot. We kill each other while the Tom's and Daisy's of the
world saunter on.
The last line describes the endless search for the essential
ungraspable ineffable thing that can never be had. You
know, the nature of desire. You want it until you have it,
then you don't want it anymore. That's the engine of
american culture (or maybe all culture, but ours with extra
horsepower.)
I understand that a thinker trying to reconcile his own
narcissism and celebration of protean, shifting identities has
to try to find the fun in the nihilism-- but this is the very
reason why I say it is unfair to "correct" Fitzgerald in this
way-- his was a moral tale.
Don't make it into po-mo "aesthetic celebratory" non-sense.
To confuse the exhaustive decadence as being ambivalently
approached by the text is only as accurate as saying the
garden of eden story is about how tempting that fruit looks.
Tempting is tempting.
Tom is brutal because he can be. Because he is rich, and he
can retreat into the comfortable emptiness of lavish things
and his detached wealthy "c'est la vie" sigh.
The 20's decadence preceded the Great Depression for a
reason, just as the vast "do as you will" culture of "lifestyle
commodity" preceded our current situation (and we are
indeed still pre-depression: I assure you, you will know
when we're there for the blackouts and the gunshots out in
the hungry night.)
A properly understood Gatsby film translation is highly
863
necessary art at this time. Nick is saved by what he sees, and

an audience might be similarly affected (inasmuch as a piece
of media can redeem it's own alienating affect.)
"There are no second acts in American lives" is not meant to
be a condoning of how great the first act was. (Jack Knive)
If Gatsby is as you say it is, entirely a moral tale that shows up the
emptiness of 20's youth culture, their lives of glitter, New York!, and
endless flirting, rather than itself a contributor to and an evocation of
it, it's hard to see why the book, which came out smack middle of the
go-go 20s (and was commenced in 1922, I believe), would have been
so popular, or how Fitzgerald could ever have been seen as someone
who was working to cement the 20s as primarily a youthfocused/lead period, as helping instill a new (and to their elders,
vapid) morality.
For you, all the novel's scintillation, all its finely, lovingly, wondrously
delineated accountings of all the particulars in an endlessly glittering
and beckoning world, was exhausting -- deplorable, and readily
summized as decadent, probably from the start. For you, very likely, it
never was an Eden or a ripened apple tree which tempts. For me, it
was; it WAS a party I hoped to see more of, but alas the quickly
fainting Gatsby and ranging Tom episodes ensured little more of it as
the text wound down. The moralizing comes unrelentingly at the end,
and I guess if you're already in mind to agree with it the previously
encountered could be managed into a tempting-but-ultimately-evil
retrospective accounting of it, but for me the finish was ponderous,
and its moralizing, unconvincing (if you're originally from the MidWest you can never really lose your past, be a fashionista, au current,
abreast of the latest, a participating New Yorker??? Excuse me Nick,
but despite your whip-lashings it's pretty clear that your
extraordinary ability to see, savor and fashion [in your prose] glamor,
catch and INITIATE its evident actual spirit, powerfully contests this
thesis, and you're not so dumb not to at some level know it. All your
lesson is is that you might still find it all the more comfortable if you
sometimes keep to the sides -- but still, very much, within.), and was
864
in mind to partake of another big bite of life of the Big Apple myself.
(I was evicted, but was never persuasively made to see the rightness
behind the eviction: am I safely away from the tempting sin-laden
tree, or just behind "Soviet" walls, bidden to the very worst of masters
-- tired, I suppose, somewhat pleasingly familiar but awfully well-tred
moral truths, and dumb sobriety?) I suspect the 20s generation that
loved the book and weren't anywhere near-ready to shift into, geez,
"mommy and daddy did know best" old-timer think, sure, took the
ending as a possible anticipation of what might follow -- we're
ultimately damned for our fun; it's all an (albeit impressive and
powerful) staving off, and we know it -- but recognized the book
overall as one OF its era, an authority and a catalyst for further
MORE of just their kind of fun, where if this here is proving a
disappointment, another surely awaits in the 'morrow, and you know
with the added focus it's sure to be more even more splendid than
ever! And this is in fact the true glory evil, degrading, past-dismissing
Capitalism befell upon them, for another four to five more years.
Lucky buggers!
I'm hoping Luhrmann helps remind us all that this great era actually
happened, and was worthy, even if this means being blasted by
incredulous critics as an attempt at a Sex and the City 3, after number
2 was just loudly everywhere damned as a must-never-be-seen-again,
worst kind of inexcusable out-of-stepness and excess. If it's just loud
and sure morality tale and damnation, then it's just Dick Diver, and
what ten years of the Depression did to Fitzgerald, as he lived out his
second act.
You're point about desire, to the hopeless task of catching and
keeping what will only surely slip out of your hands the very moment
you grasp it: Nick says something along these lines in the text, but
Fitzgerald writes him as someone who delights in his smart and
capable grasping of phenomenological experience -- in his
remarkable capturing of all that he sets out to capture. He makes the
effort constantly -- it's pretty much, for me, what the book is mostly
about; what he mostly does. And he succeeds, and he knows he
865
succeeds -- and in a way that would draw admiration from others and
that he himself will relish -- every time. What HE desires doesn't so
much slip away from him as he does from experiences he has already
succeeded in catching, "nailing," and savoring. And rightly so. He has
his breakfast, enjoys it, and when ready, begins his looking-forward to
lunch. This isn't so much Capitalism as it is someone who is not of the
depressed. Take Nick (from the first part of Gatsby, before he
converts over to Gatsby) and place him away from New York and out
for a long spell without possessions in the wilderness, and you've got
yourself Annie Dillard from Tinker Creek, in this case, enjoying the
daily rush of experience Nature provides. She, we remember, doesn't
retreat sadly back away from the thrilling onrush of the Now and into
retrospect and past-obsession, until she has the willies startled out of
her: until something "massive" and awful stops her forward progress.
The rest wasn't her getting wise, just her recovering. I think he puts
the stop in to some extent just to steady himself -- he is not
ultimately, her equal. But put a true Westerner into the spoils of New
York, and you'd never get from him a Great Gatsby: Nick, whatever
your reticence and discomfort and breaks-on, New York was already
well within you, my friend.
Fitzgerald self-destructed because of his discomfort with the
empty artifice you describe. And his inability to ultimately
find that life palatable.
Literary works don't become popular simply because they
celebrate the culture they describe. Quite the opposite.
Usually they articulate an unspoken longing in the culture at
large for something beyond the anodyne offered as a salve to
the wound of the human existential burden of the era.
We readers have always found hope to live in the bridge
across alienation offered by evidence of another troubled
soul out there engaged in the same struggle.
Water water everywhere and none to drink. And you're
admiring the fountain.
866
Only a hopelessly lost narcissist longing to make their false

identity a reality would believe that the bottom line of every
text is a celebration of the self.
All true literature is critical.
"Look how pretty we all are.. and how!" is not enough of an
impetus to engage with the painful construction of a work of
literature.
Read about Fitzgerald as a human being. His life is evidence
of a soul that can't give up seeking a transcendent truth
drowning in decadence.
And yes, you can side with the decadence and see Fitzgerald
as flawed for seeking "more." I think that's perfectly fair. But
then, I side with Francis.
It's called the lost generation for a reason. But clearly, you
are lost, so you interpret the exploration of being lost as an
exhortation and celebration of that meaningless series of
fragmented trajectories.
His construction of the novel was in and of itself an event to
win the poisonous psychotic Zelda. And, as Hemingway
pointed out to him over and over again-- he was a writer
who couldn't let go of the pain of never being able to truly
touch some ineffable, essential perfection.
"We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to
be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you
get the damned hurt use itdon't cheat with it. Be as faithful
to it as a scientist." Ernest Hemingway, 1934 letter to F.
Scott Fitzgerald
Does this seem like something an intimate would write to a
glitz and glamour celebrating dilettante?
I admire your instance on the attempt to find a
phenomenological value system. I admire it the same way I
admire the beating heart behind "Jay Gatsby's" artificiality
and "James Gatz's" attempt to make his narcissistic facade a
reality.
867
The beauty of failure is exquisite.

The text clearly indicates that this course is tragic. But I see
that frightens you.
Just as I am frightened by the gals from Sex and the City.
This is where I'd put a smiley face emoticon.
To be fair, I need to lighten up. So did Ernest and F. Scott.
But you could get a little heavier, stranger.
Let's hope Baz thinks about it at least this hard.
Truly, this dialogue gives me hope that the struggle to tackle
the dynamic between the glitz and the emptiness could be
accomplished in a nuanced, ambivalent way-- even by
someone unaware of his own denied inner depth. (Jack
Knive)
I'll remember your advice. And well met, Jack Knive!
Link: Baz Luhrmann is still full of crap (Movieline)
SUNDAY, MARCH 13, 2011

Sub-humans
Its bad enough that Michael Dowses retro-comedy Take Me
Home Tonight isnt nearly as much fun as the 80s actually
were. Even worse, its less fun than most 80s comedies were
and thats bad. Topher Grace plays Matt, a recent MIT
grad circa 1988, whose life is stuck on pause: Hes working
a dead-end job at Suncoast Video, and he still has the hots
for Tori (Teresa Palmer), the golden goddess who wouldnt
look twice at him in high school and who barely looks once
now. She comes into the store one day; he not-so-subtly puts
the moves on her, telling her he works for Goldman Sachs (in
the old days, this was supposed to drive girls wild). They
agree to meet later at a huge Labor Day bash, where Matt
868
will be able to perpetuate his silly lie and, with luck, win the
girl.
[. . .]
I get that Dowse (Fubar, Its All Gone Pete Tong) isnt just
mimicking 80s comedies; hes actually trying to make one,
trusting, I suppose, that the audience is in on his ultra-ironic
joke. The movie is badly lit and cheap-looking, presumably
intentionally. But if modern audiences are really looking for
sub-John Hughes, Adventures in Babysitting-caliber
filmmaking, theres nothing to stop them from going straight
to the source: You can pick up a treasure trove of this stuff
for a few bucks from the revolving rack at your local
convenience store. (Stephanie Zacharek, Coke Adds Life
Just Not to Take Me Home Tonight, Movieline, 3 March
2011)
Re: But if modern audiences are really looking for sub-John Hughes,
Adventures in Babysitting-caliber filmmaking, theres nothing to stop
them from going straight to the source "
That's it, that's what they're looking for: an ecosystem of worn and
repeatedly-done-before you can safely imagine participating in
without a whiff of maybe-anxiety/uncertainty-causing counter or
contention (genius or original voice, mostly certainly counting here),
to get some kind of "I exist!" thrill to take home and cuddle. The
concerned move reviewer who cares enough about what we've all got
to deal with now, might soon realize "their" task is perhaps mostly to
take whatever moment of demure stir to be found issuing from
current movies, and while praising it -- genuinely (imagine you're
dealing with terrorized, hide-prone children, and so thereby find the
way) -- still relate it carefully to something a tiny bit more daring
done before or elsewhere. It's how the good genius Stanley Greenspan
got former autists, completely set to turtle before, to never really see,
everything but a very narrow spectrum of stimuli -- a narrow
spectrum, mind you, that could be expanded to eventually make at
869
some point for an actual, deep conversation -- back to normal-level or

better emotional functioning, to no longer be autistic. Otherwise, the
fate may be to be tuned out entirely, except by those with already a
nose for quality, or maybe not so concerned with helping. It sadly
isnt true that just exposing people to greatness will instill amongst
many of the previously ignorant a desperate search for more of it.
Something has to tease you first through instant recognition, and you
have to be inclined to want it, for growth to happen. A whole
generation can actually want otherwise, though, to actually seek to
reduce themselves and without it really being Big Brothers doing;
and not even a tower of Great Artists is going to be much able to get
through to them: theyre just going to have to more or less sit this one
out, and wait for a better audience.
Link: Coke Adds Life Just Not to Take Me Home Tonight
(Movieline)
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Labels: art, autism, big brother, stanley greenspan, take me home
tonight
SATURDAY, MARCH 5, 2011

Tomorrow's ivy-league goals
870
According to a new report, the roundly chilly response to

James Francos Oscar hosting gig has hardly lessened his
profile at Yale. In fact, the post-grad polymath who is in
the early stages of obtaining a Ph.D. in English from the Ivy
League institution was back on the East Coast mere hours
after the Oscarcast ended, journalists in tow and mythology
expanding by the hour.
At 9 the next morning, notes todays NYT, [Franco] was in
a Starbucks in New Haven, hunched over a book and barely
recognizable in a gray sweatshirt, but still wearing his
tuxedo pants. I mean, of course he was still in tuxedo pants.
Just add it to the legend promulgated by Francos peers and
faculty alike: (S.T. Vanairsdale, Report From Yale: James
Franco Still Likes Doing Things, Movieline, 4 March 2011)
"journalists in tow and mythology expanding by the hour" is really
good.
He, like Portman, speaks to our love of frenzied activity, of not sitting
still, and routine daily acclaim; who will speak up for the benefits of
leisure and contemplation, of great lasting deeds but perhaps-nevereven-in-your-lifetime loud acclaim? (I hated seeing Crystal on stage -an insult to Franco and Hathaway -- but it likely made me recall now
that, unlike Franco, who wants you to know how much better he is
than you [but not in any way you could ever pin him down on, of
course] for being so unblanchedly able to reset to today's agenda even
after yesterday's titanic undertaking, he was ready to admit spending
good portions of time revisiting most of his jokes and their reactions
the nights after his hosting the Oscars -- at genuine risk, we all noted,
of making him seem needy and insecure -- affectable, injurable -even though what he was surely just admitting to was as much just
the kind of absolutely necessary processing of experiences we all need
to do to actually grow from them).
871
Franzen tried, for years locking himself away from feedback while he
tried to write true -- but despite all his isolation he never convinced
with his finished products that he'd ever let himself out of the
zeitgeist: a hutzpah that cows him and lowers him before his TRUE
master and fellow isolationist, DeLillo. Gandalf's back again in a
couple years -- maybe he'll do it. If not, perhaps just recall of the
Shire, and therefore some also of the Inklings and their lifetime
works.
Doesn't surprise me that Franco is not about to lose his charm
amongst youth: THEY NEED to believe he can automatically reset
after anything -- daring everyone reflecting on and obsessing over
what he had already finished to risk in quick retrospect seeming
laggard, strangely over-eager, and exposed -- so to believe their own
resets are just as complete, provisioning, and other-balking. They
identify with him too much to allow that he may have may have been
substantively affected by this, which he likely was, and hence the
prompt show of today's sufficient Starbucks study to ensure timely
completion of tomorrow's ivy-league goals.
Link: Report From Yale: James Franco Still Likes Doing Things
(Movieline)
---------Oscar winners and cultural impact

But a gut feeling tells those of us who were only mildly
impressed by The Kings Speech that something feels wrong.
Thats not to say the multiple Oscar-winning biopic of
stuttering King George VI isnt good. It is. But would it feel
any more right if it was The Social Network that had won
Best Pic and wound up outranking some of the above titles?
Maybe, if only because TSN felt more impactful in the
872
overall scheme of things, culturally speaking; the same could

be argued of Black Swan, with its stylish bravado and
unforgettable central performance.
Then again, digging into the list were reminded of Oscars
prior history of selecting dubious Best Picture winners; The
Kings Speech also outranks Shakespeare in Love, Forrest
Gump, Dances with Wolves, and Crash. And that feels just
right. (Jen Yamato, Is Kings Speech Really Better Than
Unforgiven, The Sting, and These Other Best Picture Oscar
Winners?, Movieline, 4 March 2011)
I have a feeling that King's Speech is going to last; the friendship it
pro-offers is too interesting and inspiring -- moving -- I think, for the
movie to just have the title now owing to its commitment to and its
helping entrench a just-before-long-war preferred attitude shift
toward selfless service and sacrifice. I think the film will now do more
harm than good, but a different generation could recover it for better
purposes, and will likely want to: it evidently has a lot to teach a
nation concerned with the careful knitting of a frayed social fabric
about empathy and love. For me, it's above Unforgiven, certainly.
Forrest Gump has lasted as long as Pulp Fiction (and they both hold
that year's title in my mind). You know this -- why did you include it
with the rest of list of readily left-behinds?
----------
FRIDAY, MARCH 4, 2011

When Greats finally pass up the ball, it may not be about fatherly
benefaction and selfless generosity: take heed if you accept it
ABC News: All Chinese children learn English starting in
kindergarten. By the time they are ten they are bilingual!
873
American schools can't teach reading and

writing one language very well.
Lloyd (Lloyd DeMause, Learning, Realpsychohistory, 15
Nov. 2011)
----"ABC News: All Chinese children learn English starting in
kindergarten. By the time they are ten they are bilingual!
American schools can't teach reading and writing one
language very well. Lloyd"
Lloyd. Your current posts would not make it past your own
1999 - 2005 filter for *others'* posts. (Rachel Stoltenberg)
----Rachel: Did you see the ABC News report on Chinese
children now all learning English from the beginning of their
schooling? It was very detailed, had lots of schools
reporting, gave statistical evidence that was convincing.
Your doubt below is unvalidated. Can yougive evidence the
ABC News report was wrong?
Lloyd (Lloyd DeMause)
----Lloyd!
"Rachel: Did you see the ABC News report on Chinese
children now all learning English from the beginning of their
schooling? It was very detailed, had lots of schools
reporting, gave statistical evidence that was convincing.
Your doubt below is unvalidated. Can you give evidence the
ABC News report was wrong?"
874
Apology. My remark appears to be in response to your last

post re. China. It' not. It's about several of your recent posts,
at least. (Rachel Stoltenberg)
-----
Lloyd, for me the concern would be that you tend to make America
seem "bad," fully worthy of the downfall it seems intent on willing on
for itself. The rest of the United Nations Europe, whose social
improvements you frequently delineate for us, mostly, but also now
not-so-long-ago, absolute-progress-stopping, foot-binding China (are
you for memory, or not?; or is it that you would just have us put aside
or showcase as suits the momentum of your current inclinations?)
are by contrast mostly made to seem sane and civil. You kinda get the
sense that you're mostly concerned these days, through the like of
flattery and appropriately directed scorn, to count yourself amongst
the few deserving Americans around still able to appreciate the
maturity of the international community, and who maybe won't be
suffering from what their peers' folly has earned for themselves. The
feeling is that you're shirking most of the rest of us off, to count
yourself amongst the bland but safe. Lloyd the revolutionist is at the
end neutering himself to seem as prosaic as denatured,
internationalist Obama.
Patrick
----Patrick wrote the following: "The > feeling is that you're
shirking
most of the rest of us off..."
My commentary: Please remember, that this is not a tea

party group but
875
a psychohistorical discussion group. So

your formulation "most of the rest of us" is hardly true. If
you
believe the contrary, please do so. During the times of
neoliberalism
I never used my limited ressources to discuss with
neoliberals. I did
not estimate it as something productive. I do not judge it
appropriate
to behave in another way with Tea Partiers. That's all I have
to say
to that.
Florian (Florian Galler)
----Patrick: You cannot tell what my views are when you have
never
subscribed to my Journal
and read my articles. You just endlessly attack me on
realpsychohistory for unstated crimes.
Lloyd (Lloyd DeMause)
----Not so, Florian. With posts like this he is showing he is talking
directly to (and counting himself amongst) civilized but a bit dull
people, while bleeding into the background those who've encountered
all he's done before who he knows would instantly recognize / sense
his going simple (we may be sane and unpredictable, but he's quickly
judged, probably not of most consequence). (And there is a sense that
he's not even so much talking to any of us as he is to someone beyond
who would approve of all he is saying, of the clear deference [to Her]
he is with his words communicating.) He is making himself more
boring and certainly more "in-line" than he actually is, as Pauline
Kael used to remark about fellow critics, feeling inclined to turn
876
traitor, I'm sensing, on people who represent the striving and

accomplishing Lloyd he could never quite convince himself would
ever find safety from retributive attack.
This long story of prosperity is terminating in a colossal way. We
know who's coming, know it's payback time, and his inclination is to
skip as fast as he can to the side to get out of the way. There is always
a ball in play here, and sometimes its still drawing us to stretch out,
participate, and still grow, but you do get a weird sense that the
pleasure derived whenever it is made part of an interesting game, also
derives from it outing into firm remembrance and therefore later sure
punishment, who exactly it tempted to not only take but run with it.
----And just a reminder, guys. When the next purity crusade is on us, an
era in absolute obeisance to the sacrifice / punishment-desiring
maternal alter, it will not come about in any form that would tip its
hat to its true nature it cannot, cannot, cannot make the liberal,
well-behaving, civilized amongst us feel anyway GUILTY. That is, it
will not be (for example) anti-Semitic (the exact last thing it will in
fact be), anti-black, against homosexuals, anti-woman or aggressively
for the alpha male, for banning ALL alcohol, not Green, anything
really Bush / Cheney, previous prohibition-looking in origin. It will
come across as eminently sensible, reasonable, evolved, moderate,
adult. Therefore it will be FOR education reform, digitization and
access, for making America once again ahead of nations (like China,
that now shame us) it was once so far ahead of before (as the story
goes) individualism and greed became the cancer that destroyed its
host, for reform /re-invigoration of industry, manufacturing,
transportation the muscle fiber of the nation for making it clean,
green, ordered, interconnected and finally vigorous again. It will be
done multiculturally, through colors of every hue, operating in a
preferred environment of cooperation, sanity, and mature decorum.
Expect the United Nations to cheer it on. And all of this will be done
877
to the overall effect of mounting more and more numbers to the

increasingly DESERVING suffering, to the inhibition of freedom, to
strangling what is actually good about America, though all the time its
loudest proponents will actually come from the (regressing members
of) Left.
That is, if you want to make psychohistory another means to serve
Mother, you will be offered many things by the Obama administration
that will look so very supportable but that actually work against what
is real in psychohistory. Obama can be made to seem the only option
against the Tea Party nation, and therefore a bulwark that MUST BE
supported to the psychological health, to the evolutionary progress, of
the nation even if it this means the quieting-down / suppression,
the stigmatizing of other (dissonant) liberal voices, which ostensibly
now serve to weaken what must only now be supported but, thank
god, there are little demons and goblins all the way through (the likes
of) Lloyd's "Emotional Life of Nations" that will be mocking you along
the way for your ultimate capitulation to the voice you've spent a
lifetime trying to steady yourself to no longer heed. I hope that if I
keep pointing these irritants out, we'll at some point have feel the
need to either address what is evidently moving us to cooperate with
the so readily offered "easy outs" in discussion, and not stay true to
what is still everywhere and obvious in "the text," or find some way to
ostensibly guilt-free "burn the book," and in our moment of instant
never-the-less-unavoidable what have I done!, self-recogize and reorient, and thereby finally once again start up our goal to keep some
hope alive through a clear-eyed look at historical motivations.
Link: Learning (Realpsychohistory)
Link: Emotional Life of Nations
----------
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THURSDAY, MARCH 3, 2011

Maybe the issue is now not so much what is being done, but the spirit
in which it is engaged?
As if on cue, openly gay Oscarcast co-producer Bruce Cohen
is facing the ultimate Web sanction for that censored Javier
Bardem-Josh Brolin smooch from Sunday night: an
attacked Wikipedia bio calling him a liar and homophobe
in cahoots with ABC. Slow clap, Internet, slow clap.
Bruce Cohen is a liar who claims he does not partake in the
homophobia of the ABC network when clearly he does,
reads the recent addition to Cohens bio a bio that includes
Cohen having married his partner Gabriel Catone in 2008,
worn a White Knot to the 2009 Oscars in support of samesex marriage and earned his second Best Picture nomination
that same year for co-producing Milk. (He won for his first
nomination, American Beauty, in 2000.)
On the one hand, it seems reasonable to assume his
immunity to the Esperanza Spalding-ing of his biography.
On the other, dont be nave! Any and every slag tactic is on
the table these days. Im surprised it took this long, to be
honest, or that he wasnt targeted earlier for his
questionable taste in hosts. Thoughts? (S.T. Vanairsdale,
Bruce Cohen is a Liar: Gay Oscar Producers Wiki Bio
Attacked Over Censored Kiss, Movieline, 3 March 2011)
We've had such a long period now of seemingly-every-award-showmanifest guy-guy or girl-girl kissing, don't you think? Instinct tells me
that two years ago he would if anything felt near ABC-directed to
focus on the kiss -- close up: the public demanded yet more instances
to demonstrate their too being enlightened, righteous, and of the
Now. It may, that is, not have most to do with sexuality as with hints
of an unimpeded spirit of indulgence and excess, when the mood has
879
shifted sharply to the austere, self-denying, and deferent. That's the

consideration I'm playing with.
When's the last time a guy-guy kiss has been shown on an
awards show? Or the time before that?
don't make a mistake about it, ABC decided to cut away
from this kiss because they bowed to institutionalized
homophobia, particularly when it comes to male affection.
It's got nothing to do with some imaginary swing toward
prudence by the public. Not at all.
I don't believe Cohen's homophobic as wel, however. The guy
just knows who puts food in his bowl. He also knows the
Hollywood machine is a vicious beast that doesn't forget. So
when someone questions the integrity of his masters, he's
going to lie and compromise as much as necessary.
(tommyoc, response to post)
Could be. But it does strike me that not so long ago it was definitely
the thing to be actually hetero but to show your non-Bushness / nonTea-Partierness / just-plain-reasonable-headedness by finding
someone center of stage of the same sex to kiss, each and every time
you possible could, and I think most of America was ALL FOR IT: it
became SO mainstream, in my judgment, the censor's ingrained first
instinct became to be most wary of FAILING to show rather than to
show it, as I just said. This here wasn't about a first man-on-man kiss
at an Oscars, a broach through to-the-must-now-be-okay which
couldn't be allowed to be okay; it was about adding one more to a
huge tilting pile that seemed maybe about to spill all over everyone.
Even just a reasonably short while ago, however often it had been
done, I don't think this worry would ever have surfaced: each add-on
just continued a wished-for momentum that HAD TO be kept going,
lest we lose one of the key discoveries to keep ourselves feeling
intrinsically righteous, "unneeding" of pause or a sort of self-inquiry
there is no way we were going to risk undertaking while going about
880
the constant precarious balance of our lives. We could see two men
kissing, and even celebrate it: how more evolved could we possibly
become? -- Continue on!
Gay men are going to be allowed, even motioned, aggressively
prompted, to kiss, even at the Oscars: so long as "we" know it'll
mostly communicate a kind of propriety, circumspection, not
lavishness and joining in the fun. If we're looking for homophobia in
the next while -- and I think we should be looking for it -- we'll find it
in an intolerance for promiscuity and just-plain-indulgent-fun, which
for many people is the near natural way of essentializing gayness, not
in such like even gay men being impulse-drawn to pull back from men
in a kiss, out of fear of the corporate whip and broad mainstream'
disapproval. Overt, blatant disapproval for homosexuality may come
-- though I don't think it will -- but in my judgment we're going to get
a lot more of the likes of the end of "don't tell" before we come to
understand that the significant turn against homosexuals actually
began with those quite willing to end it. Obama represents the
mainstream, not the Tea Partiers: when publically-wished-for
oppression comes, it'll make itself seem holy out of its distinct
difference to what the Tea Party would expect done.
Maybe some help Movieline: instances of man-on-man kissing a few
years ago with what we're seeing (or failing to see) today? Or perhaps,
kinds of kisses -- has it maybe actually through time still increased
but moved from ravenous tongue-on-tongue to more "polite" lip-onlip?
Link: Bruce Cohen is a Liar: Gay Oscar Producers Wiki Bio Attacked
Over Censored Kiss (Movieline)
----------
Apparently, from now on it'll be the limo ...
881
The contest:
The King's Speech:
Bertie: Cant you just give her a nice
house and a title?
David: I wont have her as my mistress.
Bertie: David, the Church does not
Recognize divorce and you are the
head of the Church.
David: Havent I any rights?
Bertie: Many privileges
David: Not the same thing. Your beloved
Common Man may marry for love, why
not me?
Bertie: If you were the Common Man, on what
basis could you possibly claim to be King?!
David: Sounds like youve studied our wretched
Constitution.
Bertie: Sounds like you havent.
VS.
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
Cameron: [Ferris slowly pulls the Ferrari out of the garage] No,
Ferris. I'm putting my foot down. You're just gonna have to think of
something else.
[Ferris keeps driving]
Cameron: Ferris! We could call a limo! One of those stretch jobs
with the TV and the bar. How about that?
Ferris: [Ferris pulls the car back slightly] Come on. Live a little!
[Cameron crosses himself, walks to the car]
Once, being anal and clingy only meant your likely to poop diamonds,
now it means youre apparently just the stuff to balk back Hitlers and
882
are due the throne.

---------Our various public offerings
Sheen is feeling more and more like OJ driving up the 405,
tweeted David Poland earlier today. I dont even think
people realize they are just waiting for the gun to go off. Oy.
Well, how about a drive down memory lane instead to a
happier, more innocent time when Charlie Sheen actually
volunteered to leave a TV show after a healthy payday. (S.T.
Vanairsdale, Remember Charlie Sheen Really Winning on
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Movieline, 2 March 2011)
Every once in a while there appears some celebrity with enough
Celebrity to let us feel that if we let loose all our despise upon
him/her, s/he can take it all in, and then perhaps kindly die, for a
fully restive period of, even-if-short, still-pleasing respite. We've been
denied it for quite awhile; keep on getting poor offerings -- already
fully dissipated Corey Haim and Gary Coleman -- or being effectively
checked, with undeniable momentum-carried-and-respectableenoughs getting in the way, as Heidi Klum did with Britney Spears, or
knowing we at-base really want kept around to become leading
examples of the kind of austere reform we all need to undertake for
past gross self-allowances, as with what is slowly happening with
Tiger Woods. Charlie Sheen has Sylvester -- but his canyness-owed
surprise summer success hasn't given him much more cred than box
office' has given Gnomeo, so that won't prove enough. If he makes it
through, my guess is that it'll owe to our unwillingness to not owe him
some for his helping gift our preferred conversation about bottomrung women: is anything more society-approved or desired these days
than a teeth-out hunt for barmaids and hookers?
883
Link: Remember Charlie Sheen Really Winning on Who Wants to Be

a Millionaire? (Movieline)
----------
Spotting out the truly dangerous

Lloyd's new article is up at www.psychohistory.com.
You'll note a couple of changes in this latest work from what he's
written before. After a quick first read, these two stand out:
Current:
Kennedy soon needed a new war to consolidate his defensive
masculinity pose, increased the U.S. military spending the
largest amount in any peacetime, and then committed
16,300 U.S. soldiers to Vietnam. When he went to Dallas,
where there were many highly publicized death threats to
kill him, he needed still more toughness, and told his wife,
Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with
a rifle, nobody can stop it. His Secret Service aides told him
he better put up the bulletproof plastic top on his limousine,
so he specifically told them not to do so, committing suicide
to demonstrate his hypermasculinity. (Global Wars to
Restore U.S. Masculinity)
Here, Kennedy is hypermasculine, even in suicide demonstrating his
toughness.
Before:
Despite all the warnings, however, Kennedy unconsciously
accepted the martyr's role. He was, after all, used to doing
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all his life what others wanted him to do. So although a

Secret Service man told him the city was so dangerous that
he had better put up the bulletproof plastic top on his
limousine, he specifically told him not to do so. In fact,
someone instructed the Secret Service not to be present
ahead of time in Dallas and check out open windows such as
those in the Book Depository, as they normally did whenever
a president traveled in public as Kennedy did. Only then,
with the nation, the assassin, the Secret Service and the
president all in agreement, the assassination could be
successfully carried out. (Assasination of Leaders)
Here, Kennedy is the life-long martyr, so used to compliantly doing
what others want of him he agreed to "follow through" even to his
death.
----Current:
In addition, the U.S. is the only nation not to sign the U.N.
Convention on the Rights of the Childall of which helping
us understand why the U.S. spends half of the worlds
military budget. (Global Wars)
Before:
Sorry, can't find the exact quote. But it's more that the reason for
America's comparatively enormous military budget lies with its "right
to happiness" philosophy: that is, owing to the marked allowances
permitted by the long-ago psychoclass innovators -- the American
founders -- not its mostly reactionary (psychoclass-lagering) "core." I
wonder if Lloyd believes that America is not even home to the best of
the world anymore? That what-would-appear-to-be modest -- and
therefore benefacted -- Swedes are perhaps the most innovative in the
world as well. I know in hockey, this is appearing the case. The best in
the NHL are not Cdns or Russians anymore: other than the important
885
exception of Crosby, the next three are Swedes -- the Sedin twins, and
Lindstrom. People are noticing that the Swedes are less flashy but
ultimately more effective and far, far more lasting (they're playing
strong at 40, whereas everyone else is depleted by 30 or so years of
age); maybe true genius can't be seen when what we're looking for is
truly as much hightened sensation?
Or is lack of attention to America's highest psychoclass in Lloyd's
current writings owing to something else? Sweden is clearly doing
great things, but it's easy to take non-individualistic Sweden as mostly
an example of a nation that quietly has all along been laying solid
foundations while reckless America has so lost all that was once great
about it to be now fairly just identified as a base, resource-depleted
nation. That is, it's easy to not look at America too clearly, if your
efforts are to show how you now too are for the long slog, the less
flashy, but also the less selfish and more community-building: in
sympathy with the kind of mindset that dominated the communal,
purity-concerned, "simple but grounded" 1930s crowd.
My own guess is that the very highest psychoclass are still in the
States, and that Sweden's best to some extent flourish because they
bow, masochistically, before nation-before-self "philosophy," which
earns them tolerance for a more enabling state apparatus.
--------I will add to this a note about "hypermasculine" language, something
Lloyd talks about a lot in this chapter.
I would ask anyone who is on the lookout for tough-talk so as to ID
groups or leaders as regressive to be somewhat careful, because if
you're not empowered, if you're amongst the groups that are being
heavily discriminated against, though possibly your language use
might remain the same, very likely you'll start talking tougher. You're
not actually hypermasculine, driven mostly by your innate rage, but
as you are being pressed upon to the point that you sense that some
people are trying to completely lay waste to you, your language will
start seeming as if composed of an alphabet of missiles while your
confidently empowered opponents -- representatives of the Great
886
Maternal, who they know has surely got their back -- will have an
easier time seeming moderate, patient, more-than-fair, and perhaps
even laid-back considering, and finally, reasonable, and grossly
affronted by your unruly conduct. This advantage wouldn't make
someone like Johnson become less hyper-masculine in style, but it
will probably assist Obama in remaining so. In sum, be careful: when
regressives are getting their time, and by regressives I'm not thinking
so much tea-partiers as I am the regressing center, the regressing left
-- the Obama-loyal -- part of what'll assure them of their rightness is
how calm and reasoning they remain while their opponents flap about
like nut-cases. Remember, the likes of conservative-and-ultimatelydeficit-focussed-and-therefore-massive-sacrifice-enabling David
Brooks, who recently wrote an article titled Make everyone hurt
and wasnt so much not kidding as licking his lips who laughs at the
more moronic of Republicans but points out more vividly the Hitler
talk used by Democratic public unions as well as their Orwellianism,
who is looking for founding fathers of austerity who will show the
public, [b]y their example, [how to] [. . .] to create habits that diverse
majorities can respect and embrace, when, as Krugman points out, it
was largely through oligarchs that the deficit-bloom was created in
the first place, which should, you would think, lead everyone to focus
a bit more on what the mass of public benefactors have to say about
all this rather than to a rarified elite, is probably playing out as the
voice of reason here.
Watch all this Wisconsin business, how it plays out. Pay attention to
who is using hypermasculine terminology. My guess is that the people
under normal circumstances are least likely to use it -- the real
progressive left, those of the more advanced psychoclass - are
actuallly going to be the ones caught out for their threatening,
disturbing aggressiveness, their unbalanced mental state. The
California students who rebelled against criminal, jolting,
astonishingly cruel sudden drastic tuition increases, became very
aggressive. Be assured, these weren't regressives but progressives
once again caught out by a state that is beginning to seem Nazi-
887
denatured from normal emotional response.

Perhaps rather than look for hypermasculineness -- which would just
have us shaking our heads at tea-partiers (who, I repeat, are mostly
irrelevant: just the foil by which the relevant meanies make
irrefutable their ostensible own fair-headedness) -- we need to be
looking for lack of heart, disconnect, signs of a fugue-like status -calm language at a time when a nation is so willing to undergo
another 20 year period of uninterrupted sacrifice (everyone is agreed:
we must reduce our deficit) that in their minds they will still persist in
seeing it happen even if some miracle could stop it from actually
occurring, when if it was truly reasoning, it could step out of it maybe
even pretty much near right away? With this, we'll spot out the most
dangerous, that much more quickly.
Link: Global Wars to Restore Masculinity (Journal of Psychohistory)
Link: Make Everybody Hurt (NYT)
----------
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2011

Fealty to the Wretched
The Kings Speech is lovely. Some of my colleagues have,
disparagingly, called it middlebrow, but I guess that
depends on where your particular brow happens to be
located.
In a world more perfect than the one we live in, my favorite
movie of the year, Sofia Coppolas extraordinary, steel-rod-
888
delicate Somewhere would be on this list. Its not a movie

about a rich, spoiled, Why should we care about him?
movie star; its a story about a human being whos lost his
way. Apparently, thats just not as interesting as watching
Paris fold over on itself. (Stephanie Zacharek, Stephanie
Zachareks Oscar Picks: Middlebrow Schmiddlebrow,
Movieline, 25 Feb. 2011)
"King's Speech" makes not only aesthetes but rights-of-man folk
nothing but self-indulgent, self-serving parasites. It makes the dutyto-country crowd just plain right, and those who aren't quite prepared
to cowtow to what's ordained -- specifically, King George, in planning
to marry out of love, and in cutting down ancient trees (being old
doesn't make you grand, it just makes you old) just for a better view!,
the worse than Fredos of the family. You wanted "Avatar's" Grace to
do more chain-smoking; I'd have preferred George -- the one, we
remember, who turned down the to-Bertie acceptable idea of having a
kept mistress in preference to being allowed the company of a wife he
actually loves -- be given more a chance to extrapolate on the flaws of
be-be-be-be-Bertie's positively medieval sense of women,
commoners, loyalty, and subjugation. I'm not sure what kind of brows
I've got, but be sure they're both frowning away.
----Re: "In a world more perfect than the one we live in, my favorite
movie of the year, Sofia Coppolas extraordinary, steel-rod-delicate
Somewhere would be on this list. Its not a movie about a rich,
spoiled, Why should we care about him? movie star; its a story
about a human being whos lost his way."
My particular complaint about Social Network isn't that it would have
us care about someone rich and "spoiled" -- I am very interested in
knowing about and caring more for Zuckerberg; he most certainly IS
worthy -- it's what it suggests for those not either just moved along by
genteel lineage or blessed with a genius to seize the zeitgeist of the
889
time: people like Harvard-insufficient Erica Albright, blessed it would

have appeared with some innate goodness and keen intuition, but
without anything that would surely keep her in the game, whom you
have a sense is given some chance to say something real, wounding,
and sticking because its her last words before he finds himself a
societal fixture and she is dispatched to irrevocable irrelevance.
Seemed appropriate that Sorkin betray even this to a class of people
he would see dispatched entire, as he further stomped her out (at the
Golden Globes, I believe) in establishing Zuckerberg a true
benefactor, not the asshole she had prophesized he was doomed to
become. Way to go, Aaron! For your fealty, let us anoint thee also.
Link: Stephanie Zachareks Oscar Picks: Middlebrow Schmiddlebrow
(Movieline)
---------WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2011

Great movies we appreciate but also rightly mock
Happy Oscar week, you third-class stowaways. Quoth the
thespian Bill Paxton, Are you ready to go back to Titanic?
The point is youre not. Its 2011 and were still 192 years
away from comprehending Titanics world-paralyzing
success, its Best Picture win, and Jack Dawsons hack
drawing skills. Hes just never going to get into Oberlin at
that rate. You wont find explanation for James Camerons
sorcery here, but near, far, wherever you are you will
remember and recoil at the royal badness of Titanic. (Louis
Virtel, Bad Movies We Love, Oscar Week Edition:
Titanic,Movieline, 23 Feb. 2011)
-----
890
I have never understood why people liked this movie. James

Cameron has never been the greatest at dialog, but this was
by far the worst script he's written. You know it's bad when
Billy Zane plays a one-dimensional character that would
actually have been more complex and nuanced if they had
given him a mustache to twirl. And I never understood the
concept of a rich woman falling in love with an eleven-yearold boy that likes drawing boobies. And what makes it so
much more disappointing for me is that many of his other
movies (Avatar, True Lies, Terminator 1 & 2, Aliens) rank
among my favorites. (Tommy Marks, response to post)
Whatever the dialogue, Tommy -- and I don't dislike Cameron's
dialogue as much as so many others seem to -- the situations the
characters are in play out very real. I guess I'll take as genuine that
many discerning were wholly uninvolved in the movie, owing to its
stereotypical characters and embarrassing dialogue -- though I don't
buy it, really -- but however one-dimensional (rigid? uncomplicated?)
Billy Zane, when he slaps his wife-to-be around for making him a
fool: that was real. He was beyond pissed off, and you felt it: he was a
terror. I think most important, the film got at -- with the mothers'
constant watch and difficult-to-rebuff moral code -- how difficult it
was going to be for someone with a lot of natural spunk -- Rose -- to
ever really free herself. I believed that even given how considerable
she already was, without Jack, she was for-sure caught and done for
life. But with her constant dialogue, interaction with him, you
believed she could slowly come to free herself from a whole
upbringing of duty, move beyond insufficient truculent rebellions -like a preference for the New, like Monet -- to untether herself for
good, even without the facilitation of a dislocating disaster. People
could say that the reason this romance works so well for so so many
people, is because they're just filling their own expectations and
dreams onto what is really so thinly put before them, but for me at
least, this just isn't true here. Cameron's magic isn't just in his action
891
and exempt everywhere else; his genius owes to his really

understanding what breaking free is, what romance and play is, and
he wouldn't tolerate creating films where you couldn't hope to realize
it some for yourself as well.
The problem for me with Cameron is that though he clearly got
somewhere really good, it certainly wasn't SO good he shouldn't have
moved on a considerable some from there. I think it's false to say he's
a forever adolescent, because I would cheer if adolescence actually
meant even for a brief while feeling as uninhibited as he is. But still,
once you yourself have made passage from being the trimmed rose to
being the wild one -- and most of you blessed discerning, haven't -you really only need revisit him now and again out of friendship, to
say thank you. He's set, in a fairly good place, but further progress lies
with you.
...
This film, though, does deserve to be in the "great movies we however
rightly mock" category, however. A service is done, by pointing out
the numerous things in this film that really are problematic, that if
viewers weren't onto, they're not a sufficient number of steps away
from stupid.
Most central for me is that it helps keep the truly ignorant and stalled
feeling smugly enlightened. If YOU know who Freud or Monet is, this
knowledge doesn't mean you're in the same position as Rose
ostensibly is: she is supposed to be an early appreciater of the New,
possess sufficient sense of independent judgment that she is on to
quality from the start, while as someone alive now your knowledge of
these folks only means you're in the same position the Edwardian
mundanes were when they'd long accustomed themselves to once
rabble-rousers, now ho-hums, such as Darwin or Dickens. That is,
your being onto Freud or Monet could easily mean that you're really
just the prosaic Cal, who actually has no appreciation for new genius,
not the avant-garde Rose -- and given how the not-especiallyinspiring mass went for it, probably does. The question you fairly ask
yourself as you remember those who found such meaning in "Titanic"
892
(including yourself, if you, like me, are one of them) is how many of
them could pass over the film's knuckleheadedness out of fair faith to
its mighty spirit, and remain those of praise-worthy, TRULY
sophisticated taste? It's a question which would have you juggling
around greats like Ebert and Zacharek, ultimately deciding to let one
or the other -- or even both -- "fall."
Knuckle-headedness isn't always damning, though. Sophistication
isn't always a sign of elevation. The '60s generation were not
sophisticated, and its elders constantly hoped to blast them back into
supplicants for their untutoredness, their lack of refinement, their
"stupid" discare for how things had been and "really were," but were
spiritually evolved and Good. Late 20th/early 21st-century products
like Franzen and Martel are hugely sophisticated, smart, aware, but
maybe in the end mostly deferent and perhaps defeated and warped
-- not so good.
Link: Bad Movies We Love, Oscar Week Edition: Titanic (Movieline)
---------SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2011
Knifing the f*cker back in return
Seeing two 3-D movies in a row is pretty much my idea of
torture, and a colleague and I came very close to decamping
to see The Touch (with my beloved Elliot Gould), which is
being shown as part of the festivals Ingmar Bergman
retrospective. In the end, persuaded by a few enthusiastic
colleagues, we with much eye-rolling and many
deprecating remarks opted to check out Wim Wenders
Pina. Im glad we did.
[.]
Id always avoided Bausch, assuming it was all bony
893
dancers in drab skintone leotards, miserably acting out the

angst of mankind, or whatever. I now know how wrong I
was. Some of Bauschs ideas may not result in anyones idea
of conventional (whatever that is) beauty: She might scatter
the floor with peat moss, which would mingle with the sweat
clinging to the dancers dresses, resulting in damp, motherearth stains; a man in a tutu, being pushed along slowly on
a railway handcar, appears to be carrying some pretty
heavy-duty German sorrow and guilt on his shoulders.
But Wenders makes it all seem accessible, framing and
connecting images sometimes very strange ones in a
way that draws us closer rather than alienating us, without
ever softening the intended effect. [. . .] Wenders hardly
pretends this is business as usual. Rather, he coaxes us into
understanding, or at least reckoning, with the jarring but
wholly compelling image in front of us. Its as if he were
saying, I realize this woman has stuffed raw meat in her toe
shoes, but trust me, go with it. (Stephanie Zacharek,
Berlinale Dispatch: Wim Wenders Takes His Place in the 3D Vanguard, Movieline, 14 Feb. 2011)
Your friend Laura Miller (kinda) wrote recently that precise prose and
careful delineations are also tiring to the eyes and mind -- slows down
reading speed, sometimes to a crawl, when you know you've got a
whole book ahead: I'm wondering if some people have to prepare for
your reviews akin to how you did this double-feature: in this case,
with a bit of "Oh God, another load of particulars and careful
delineations about some film I have no sense of!," to gird for
themselves some countering camaraderie within the melee of
stimulation they may soon be treated to? I'll wait 'til I've seen what
you've seen to make reading your review more an immediate
experience of compare and contrast -- "look, sister, I take your point,
but this is what you didn't see --." For now it's the reality-
894
possibilities ... like is it true that what is jarring can also be

compelling? You seem sure of it, for how else last time would "the
land look menacing and alluring at once?" Mind you, "menacing"
already has something of the alluring within it -- you're wantedenough to be wholly devoured; "compelling" here is a smart wink, and
a hinted-at better path ahead, after having had a door slammed in
your face: it's harder to see how you'd ever after let yourself just be
drawn along, when all the time you're surely mostly thinking how you
can knife the f*cker back in return.
Link: Berlinale Dispatch: Wim Wenders Takes His Place in the 3-D
Vanguard (Movieline)
Link: Why We Love Bad Writing (Laura Miller, Salon)
----------
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2011

The Factory System
When you see an article titled The Day the Movies Died,
you can probably expect a boatload of negativity. That said,
Mark Harris polemic in this months GQ on the state of
Hollywood is pretty even-handed. After all, it blames the
upcoming string of lame comic book movies and sequels on
the one group you might not have expected: Us, the people
who do most of the hand-wringing. We can complain until
were hoarse that Hollywood abandoned us by ceasing to
make the kinds of movies we want to see, but its just as true
that we abandoned Hollywood, Harris writes. Studios
make movies for people who go to the movies, and the fact is,
we dont go anymore. [] Put simply, wed rather stay
home, and movies are made for people whod rather go out.
The moral? If you like movies, start supporting the good
ones and ignoring the bad ones. [GQ] (Christopher Rosen,
Only You Can Save Movies, and 7 Other Stories Youll Be
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Talking About Today, Movieline, 18 Feb. 2011)

Anyone who reads Movieline would note that the particular "adult"
movie -- Inception -- Harris laments hasn't become the model for
Hollywood, is exactly the one Stephanie here blasted for being at-thecore infantile. And something of a sham: putting itself in place of
something -- Hitchcock -- that truly was adult, so that the truly
childish could never not know themselves to be not-adult (I hope I got
that right). They'd also know that The Social Network was hit hard by
Armond White for its uncritical look at what is essentially immaturity
and a-whole-generation-spread psychological disorder -- autism.
Black Swan, too, again by Stephanie, for being so obviously clichedriven, and yet flummoxingly completely ignorant of it. And though
she really liked it, still made aware by her that The King's Speech was
first reacted-to by friend critics as essentially middle-brow -- which it
is: a taste for luxury and refinement, mass taste/opinion disregard,
equals Bad; mostly maintained anal-retentiveness -- this, taking into
full consideration all the expletive-exhalation exercises -- justassumed self-sacrifice for the nation, equals Good. And personally,
though I loved True Grit, it had the feel of satisified film-makers
who've found their peace (congrads! you deserve it!), and are mostly
now offering the field to self-assured new-comers they'll insist to
themselves represent a vital, respect-worthy energy, rather than the
likes of the gibbering nincompoops we hear of in the film, inflated to
emboldened crusader status for embodying an energy way more foul
than that (I'm not actually so much thinking Hailee with this -- but
more what's to follow). If the lament in the article is mostly that there
are few good films being made, I'd say for me it's that the problem
Harris identifies throughout his article -- a preference for formula;
abandonment of anything "hard" or truly challenging -- afflicts the
sort of films he would see more of.
His point that stars aren't as requisite as franchise is interesting. We
are living in an age where that previously so often aired wished-for
truth for Tiger Woods by sour-grapes, other-pro golfers -- that he
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wasn't bigger than the game, when, apparent to all, he couldn't more
have been at the time -- which has become truth for him, is true now
for movie stars as well. It seems to me that what this means is that
there isn't going to be anything going on within a film, that out of its
uniqueness and budding power, will extend out and set a new
standard. The shell, the encasing armor, won't permit it, and the only
people who'd step inside it are the ones who wouldn't really think to
try it -- whatever their ability to contort themselves, fundamentally
they just want their place (I'm more than kinda even looking at you,
James Franco and Anne Hathaway). Perhaps that's mostly why the
smart stay out of theatres: once we agree to go, we're not really
agreeing to participate, but following into the Depression' factorymode like everybody else. The '60s generation was once told by its
elders that they needed to learn the language to have a real voice; they
responded -- smartly -- instead by attempting to levitate parliament
buildings through love.
I prefer their theatre, but maybe their descendants -- us -- are
showing in our own way that we're onto the same truth: participate as
directed, and they've got you. We'll let some time pass; let the
stupidity follow and take root; and take advantage of stopping
surprise and dumbfounding bafflement to hit them with a Citizen
Kane at some point, and stay more in the game after that.
Link: Only You Can Save Movies, and 7 Other Stories Youll Be
Talking About Today (Movieline)
Grabbing hold
Filmmaker, writer, performance artist, what-have-you
Miranda July ambled onto the scene in 2005 with her
debut film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, which
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became a surprise arthouse sort-of smash. Since then,

July has published a book of short stories, created art
projects for the Venice Biennale, and put together a
performance piece. Shes working hard at becoming the
Woody Allen of the Meh Generation, and shes getting
closer, and not for the better, with her new picture The
Future, which premiered at Sundance and is one of the
competition films at the Berlinale.
In The Future, a youngish couple (theyre in their mid30s), stalled out in their careers and their relationship,
decide to adopt a sick cat that will require constant care.
Its never spelled out exactly why these two theyre
named Sophie and Jason, and theyre played by July and
Hamish Linklater have decided to embark on this shaky
adventure. Is it a trial run for a baby? Or just a joint
project that they hope will make them feel more connected
to each other and the world? Neither they nor we nor
anyone else knows, least of all the poor cat, who we hear
in voiceover reflecting on his sad, lonely life as a former
stray and counting the days until his new people will pick
him up. He needs to recover for a month at the vets,
though the couple is warned that if they dont pick him up
on the assigned day, hell be immediately euthanized.
[. . .]
Close, but no cigar. Theres just too much July in The
Future, and a little goes a long way. She looks like an
alien flapper doll, with her arms and legs attached at
slightly off angles, and the false modesty of her
characters spacy observations and pronouncements
comes off as a perverse kind of self-importance. Sophie
and Jason moan about their not-so-horrible lives, while
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their potential adoptee, lonely and desperate in his little

cage, waits. And waits. And waits. We know just how he
feels. (Stephanie Zacharek, Berlinale Dispatch: Miranda
July Cant Quite Read The Future, Movieline, 16 Feb.
2011)
She had her husband in "Me and You" burn his hand before their
kids, and you had a sense throughout that anything vaguely
dependent was being kept around, sometimes for knowing
commentary, but just as much to be savy but still for-sure compliant
deposits of sadism. If this proves the voice of a generation, it's one
that wants to be put out of its misery. Seems untenable; can't go on
like this. There's got to be some purpose to make self-sacrifice seem
just plain necessary or, even better, noble, rather than so apparently
just a grotesque entrenched impulse to repeatedly play with
sacrificing themselves or near-obvious "them" substitutes into the
cairn. A generation that indulges too much in being, not profoundly
lost, but repetition-driven, pointless, is going to stop licking and
pointing to its wounds when it fears that too much time is passing to
keep their old wounds and wound-makers relevant to their current
behavior; at some point, with even entrenched old tormentors surely
now onto many other things, with even the recent past, in the
increasingly rare instances we really focus on it -- as today's daily
survival and urgent reverberant events commands all our attention -at best just a bafflement of how could they have done or thought
this?, their urgent scrambling for a hold will mean their taking
whatever proffered to upgrade from "meh" to become the "greatest"
generation: what the post 1920s depression generation did as it went
from the crowd that doesn't get to have any fun to one that
entrenched itself into cultural memory for maybe millenniums.
Even poor cats are a bit hard to imagine as having pleading eyes, or as
ever really being that attached to you; the death-dealing vet could
probably near as easily provoke it into one last purr as readily as a
ten-year owner might: I wonder if she selected a cat so to be an
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improvement on the kids in her first film; something actually

stronger, more distinctly alien, to push back with an empowered
unrelatingness against her scary, rebounding play with snuffing the
vulnerable but "hip to" out? I wonder if shes already looking for a
better hold, and not so much just waiting, agonizingly?
Link: Berlinale Dispatch: Miranda July Cant Quite Read The Future
(Movieline)
---------FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2011
Over John Dewey's dead body
Heads up, Harvey! Incoming fire at 10 oclock! Dont let the
Academy get anywhere near this hot potato: A writer at Big
Hollywood has finally said what needed to be said about the
vexed stutterer whose dramatic, heart-wrenching travails
have touched the hearts of awards voters everywhere: Who
the hell feels sorry for the King of England?
Take it away, Ned Rice:
My main problem with The Kings Speech is that the

character were supposed to identify with, the downtrodden-schmuck-who-cant-catch-a-break-but-weroot-for-him-anyway-because-for-all-his-faults-hesgot-a-heart-of-gold just happens to beTHE KING
OF ENGLAND! Thats right: in order to enjoy this film
Im supposed to feel sympathy for a man who, almost
by definition, is an unsympathetic character. Like a
Frank Capra film about the riches-to-mega-riches life
of Donald Trump, this movie simply doesnt make any
sense to me despite fine performances by Colin Firth,
Geoffrey Rush, and Helena Bonham Carter.
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I had the same problem with The Queen, which, youll

recall, was about the trials and tribulations of a
woman- oh, lets call her THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND!
whose big life crisis was being criticized for not
grieving enough after the death of Princess Diana.
Well, aint life a bitch? Ill bet you after those nasty
British tabloids had their say about her Queen
Elizabeth cried all the way home to herENORMOUS
CASTLE. [] Call me heartless, but I just cant feel
sorry for anyone who has their own moat.
My antipathy towards the royalty genre in movies
goes beyond the absurdity of being asked to identify
with bejeweled billionaires seated on solid gold chairs.
I frankly find it appalling, in this progressive,
politically correct, anti-Establishment age, that
supposedly civilized people like us continue to
tolerate, and even celebrate, royalty. Slavery, as were
reminded by the mainstream media on almost a daily
basis, was a terrible, evil institution. So was Nazism.
So was, and is, communism. So, I would argue, was
disco. But you know what was a really, really bad
institution? Royalty, the notion that God considered
some men more valuable than others, that ones class
is an unchangeable accident of birth, and that the
lower class should be, in effect, the slaves and
property of the nobility. Does anybody not grasp the
evil of this? Who could not be enraged by the fact that
by law one man should bow down before another
simply because the two mens ancestries were
different- and that refusing to do so could cost the
commoner his life?
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Scott Rudin and Team TSN couldnt have said it better

themselves! (S. T. Vanairsdale, Will This Awesome Kings
Speech Takedown Rock Oscar Race?, Movieline, 10 Feb.
2011)
You don't get much in the way of bejeweled billionaires seated on

solid gold chairs in this film, though. THOSE kind of royalty -- the
ones that are for the most part indulgence -- are hated on in this film:
witness the portrayal of King Edward VIII, and his life of you:
indifference, me: self-concern. Or perhaps more accurately, what you
get mostly is, "what would it be like to sit on a solid gold throne for
hours on end?"--"F*cking painful!" "How the hell did you do it?"
The film argues that the reason the good king deserves all this
attention, to have every resource tried to assist him, is because there
is something royal kindling in him that is absent in most of you. God
may or may not see something more valuable in him, but we certainly
do. When we need uplift, some erection of solid nobility nobody else
can put forth -- for spending most of our lives in rendering,
distracting domestic sociability -- he still has the resources to deliver
-- given, perhaps, just the right sort of guidance.
This is still an awful, very undemocratic message. Very disparaging to
the constant, casual sociability ultimately responsible for the king's
sure speech delivery. Very disparaging to the Deweyite message the
therapist for much of the film (but maybe not, ultimately) embodies.
But I don't think it's mostly fought off by responses like this one, that
out of its ravaged spirit, its skittering, wayward progress, conveys
mostly a longing to be saved, as if the complaining masses have
already leveled everything down for so long that the energy that
excites their purpose now is covertly mostly a managed hand out for a
rescue.
This reviewer had better not be an Obama fan. If he is, he is beyond
laughable.
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Dear Ned Rice,

I think you missed the point. I'm sorry you are blinded by
illusions that money can buy happiness and freedom from
difficulty. Im sorry that you cannot step outside of your little
bubble (or off of your high horse) and put yourself in the
shoes of another human being that is struggling to overcome
an extremely debilitating problem. It seems to me that you
would have been able to relate to the average man who had
this same issue, but you cannot relate to someone you
perceive as NOT WORTHY of YOUR concern due to his place
in society. Im sorry youre a complete hypocrite. (cerealface,
response to post)
But the film is maybe not so much FOR the average man who has this
problem, concerned as it is for giving "them" the one and only dose of
support, before launching them off to unrelenting even-worse
deprival. Yes, once they're all either half-downed in combat or shellshocked from bombing or winnowed spiritless from endless
endurance, the film would have it that they receive receptive tendingto for their ailments -- if the world were just. Without that, if you
already have the look and carriage of a pathetic Tiny Tim, it's for you
as well, just as automatically as it is for the king. But if you ultimately
romance and legitimate the suffering part, the overcoming should
seem suspect. I know it's not clear-cut with this film, but it's certainly
not uncontestedly against the ridiculous tortures people have endured
for no actual purpose: no film that is actually for war, for
ennoblement through collective, shared sacrifice, is against all that.
Every aesthete in the world should tell this film to go scr*w itself. To
right its wrongs -- for one thing -- for what it did to Edward VIII.
Link: Will This Awesome Kings Speech Takedown Rock Oscar Race?
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(Movieline)
----------
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2011

The inconvenient '60s: sorry guys, they happened
Judging by the trailer, the eight-part miniseries The
Kennedys, which has endured nearly as much bad luck as its
titular family, is even worse than youve heard. Which is
saying a lot considering how much has already been said
about the project starring Greg Kinnear and Katie Holmes
as the fabled first couple in Camelot that the History
Channel, Showtime, FX and and Starz all flat-out refused to
air.
[. . .]
But Katie Holmes. Poor, poor Katie Holmes. Attempting to
play Jackie Kennedy was a losing battle from the start and
here, Holmes is able to look elegant and poised. The problem
appears to be when she opens her mouth. In some parts of
the trailer, she delivers a back alley acting class rendition of
Upper Class Massachusetts and in other parts, she speaks
with no accent at all relying on that lop-sided grin and
constant blinking that Anne Hathaway parodied so
effectively on Saturday Night Live. (Julie Miller, Katie
Holmes Performance Is the Biggest National Tragedy In
This Kennedys Trailer, Movieline, 2 Feb. 2011)
Anne Hathaway is a giant compared to Katie Holmes -- SHE, like
Jackie, actually HAS presence -- so I can forgive her more than
sneaking a laugh at Katie's expense: seems but appropriate. But the
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aim might be with this to make the '60s seem more like Mad Menlight, as if everything was the same but got muted after the '50s,
rather than intensified, wholly changed -- finally awakened. For those
of us who sense none of the charisma about Obama that others seem
to, we're wondering if this is all a plot to keep him and the rest of the
talented but still shortchanged (even lovely Anne Hathaway?) the
absolute perfection of human kind, rather than themselves,
significant slippage.
I know this is supposed to be a Republican take. I don't think that's
quite right: it's just the anti-hippie take.
Link: Katie Holmes Performance Is the Biggest National Tragedy In
This Kennedys Trailer (Movieline)
---------Worrisome flips more than flops for scripts
In the interest of scientific exploration, I offer a few random
dialogue samples from the 3-D cavediveapalooza survival
adventure Sanctum: Lifes not a dress rehearsal you
gotta seize the day! The exit! Shit! Wheres my mask?
Goddammit! I am not wearing the wetsuit of a dead
person! You spend your lives wrapped in cotton wool! You
want to play at being adventurous? Yeah, this is it! And last
but not least, the ever-popular Weve got to get out of here
now!
Sanctum wasnt directed by James Cameron hes merely
an executive producer but the script is pure Cameron
gibberooni, the kind of language that would embarrass a
40s comic-strip character if he found it penciled into one of
his voice balloons. (Stephanie Zacharek, Sanctum Wasnt
Directed by James Cameron, But Its Dumb Enough to Seem
So, Movieline, 3 Feb. 2011)
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For what it's worth, I really like this bit of dialogue from "Avatar":
GRACE: Alright, look -- I don't have the answers yet, I'm just now
starting to even frame the questions. What we think we know -- is
that there's some kind of electrochemical communication between the
roots of the trees. Like the synapses between neurons. Each tree has
ten-to-the-fourth connections to the trees around it, and there are
ten-to-the-twelfth trees on Pandora -SELFRIDGE: That's a lot I'm guessing.
GRACE: That's more connections than the human brain. You get it?
It's a network -- a global network. And the Na'vi can accessit -- they
can upload and download data --memories -- at sites like the one you
destroyed.
SELFRIDGE: What the hell have you people been smoking out
there? They're just. Goddamn. Trees.
The dialogue's not embarrassing. What is is Cameron being

completely unaware that Selfridge here comes close to being the
Ripley to Grace's Carter Burke -- if only the "network" had something
else on its mind rather than jungle homeostasis.
RIPLEY: No good. How do we know it'lleffect their biochemistry? I

say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to
be sure.
BURKE:Now hold on a second. I'm not authorizing that action.
RIPLEY: Why not?
BURKE: This is clearly an important species we're dealing with here.
We can't just arbitrarily exterminate them -RIPLEY: Bullshit!
Link: Sanctum Wasnt Directed by James Cameron, But Its Dumb
Enough to Seem So (Movieline)
Script excerpts from IMBD.
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"The King's Speech"
"The King's Speech" should be a film I like. Being a Dewey democrat,
that is, I should applaud that a film respecting of aristocracy spends
so much effort showcasing what democratic, truly mutual
relationships are like -- and apparently arguing them as superior to
others. People need and deserve to be treated with respect. People
deserve our efforts at fully understanding them; they need and
deserve to be constantly listened and attended to. They need to be
encouraged to enjoy doing what they like to do, to resist doing what
they hate doing -- so long of course as this doesn't mean their staying
with comfort zones born of deprival. No one person is really superior
to any other -- whether you be King or other. This is what the film
teaches.
Or does it? At the end I admit that the sense of this film as mostly in
the democrat's camp, was perhaps more alien to it than I thought and
wished it to be. What perhaps we most get from the film, is that FOR
THE KING, and for the long-deprived, long-suffering, selfless king
mostly only, all this attention is requisite and required, but not so
everyone else. THE KING needs to be buttressed, faithfully
understood, have everything we can give provided to him to the point
of rattling every previous protocol, so he can be lead to lead a country
through a war effort which would deprive everyone else for decades.
All those faces we see at the end, listening to his speech -- the
soldiers, the families, the multitudes of ordinary bar denizens:
everyone -- know they're about to go through a period of sustained
sacrifice, and what they need, we are told, is leadership to inspire
them to nobly suffer through their deprivations, to ensure they
endure. There is NO sense that what these people truly need is for this
war effort to somehow become unnecessary, for some miracle of
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diplomacy to be tried and actually work, and so each of them can

come to know more about what the film is for so long on about, like
the need for constant, nurturing attendance, of playful, non-denying
domestic life, to learn reason to know more about yourself and come
to appreciate self-love. Such a thought would be traitorous in this film
because it is at base FOR the war before being for anything else. If
through the war, you found way to somehow be consistently playful
and satisfied -- mutterings of Shakespeare; enjoying family life; every
moment, every day an added treasure to your memory store -- you
would not so much be the playful but highly sagacious "fool" of a
therapist, but the irresponsible, indulgent Edward VIII: the film
would hold you to that, be sure. And you would be his equal because
he was a king in title only. Real kings, the film teaches, REALLY ARE
the best of men -- holders of a pure, regal flame that remains alight
when everyone else finds theirs diminished or out entirely, out of
attending mostly to their personal needs, their own daily concerns.
Alas, no democrats film, this. In fact, I mostly fear it, and dread its
upcoming Oscar knighthood.
---------FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2011
Discussing "The Social Network": film about the maker of facebook
"Immoral", Patrick? What word is left for people who steal
and rape if you're gonna call a group "immoral" for
disagreeing with you on film quality. Jesus. (Daniella Isaacs,
response to post, Mike Ryan, Armond White Responds to
Lisa Schwarzbaums NYFCC Complaints by Calling Her
Racist, Movieline, 20 January 2011)
I think it's high quality, Daniella, but I do think it immoral -- meaning

that I think it's a film aiming for high acclaim that couldn't really care
less for those without the talent to reach a kind of co-equality with
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entrenched Mayflower-descendent types: the bulk of most joe and

jane facebook users out there. I think it "argues" that we really ought
to be keying in on these people, be fascinated by them, because,
despite their debauch, they CAN work significant wonders, while the
rest of you out there enjoy the genuine magic but only to come up
with your own flat notes of nothing. When people are at real risk of
losing under-girding for their already highly suspect and susceptible
respectable social standing, I don't much like films which "argue" that
if it further beyond-all-doubt looks like we've moved from something
that could at least pretend to be a Jeffersonian democracy -- with
each "man" the equal to any other to simply an Asian khanate, it
actually pleases, because it's more in-sync with core truth of the
distribution of focused talent or descendant-born corporeality, with
the proper regard owed those who either are or who actually do
matter.
I know there's the moral girl, the one who couldn't do Harvard, but
despite being named and brought up at beginning and end, she's still
undistinguished. (Probably, she's MOSTLY a haunt, only owing to her
insubstantiality.) We find that you can't properly moralize 'till you've
proven you're matter. Otherwise, she's just the sharpest swish a
slight, untenable cold breeze could manage: She could completely
fade away, and it is only YOUR obsession, grand facebook-maker,
which matters.
No?
Link: Armond White Responds to Lisa Schwarzbaums NYFCC
Complaints by Calling Her Racist (Movieline)
----------
SATURDAY, JANUARY 29, 2011

The stars, guns, and snakes, were finally enough: the Oscar snub
wasn't needed!
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Lets just get this out of the way up front: Great job,
Academy! That the AMPAS found room for everything from
Winters Bone to Toy Story 3 to the ferocious performance
given by Movieline favorite Jacki Weaver means they
deserve a bit of kudos. (If youre one of those, Yawn, Im too
cool for the Oscars! people, just go back to bed today.) Of
course that doesnt mean many, many deserving nominees
were left out in the cold this morning. Ahead, the six biggest
from the major categories. (Christopher Rosen, Your
Favorite was Robbed: The 6 Biggest Oscar Snubs,
Movieline, 21 January 2011)
---------I disagree. I thought the noms were fair and on the mark. I
predicted that True Grit (this year's Blind Side) would be the
sleeper movie and the Coens would get best director. There's
an upset coming. I also predict that Colin and Jeff will split
the best acting....or Jeff walks away with the best acting
award. (response to post, Chicago48)
----I agree. Comparing True Grit to Lifetime movie of the week
The Blind Side is ridiculous. There is so much nuance and
meaning in True Grit. Can you really say the same thing
about The Blind Side? That movie was only Oscar nominated
because it was a crappy year with very few stand out films.
If it had come out in 2010, it wouldn't even have made a blip
on the awards radar.
I think the biggest snub this year is nominating Hailee
Steinfeld for a "Supporting" role. Did the Academy not
realize that True Grit is Mattie's story? Mattie is in every
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scene, it's narrated by her character. It's told completely

from Mattie's perspective. How is that a supporting role? If
anything, Bridges and Damon were supporting her.
(response to post, Karen)
I agree. Hailee should have been nominated for best actress, best
movie, or not at all. The lesson in the film is that a smart, headstrong, civilized girl can make most of the wild have to be at their
best to not already seem akin to a tamed wild-west show. Rooster has
his (touching) wild ride, Laboeuf gets his miraculous shot, but there's
a sense that her only equal was Ned, the compelling leader of the
congress of louts. The gun recoil and the snake terror ease her into an
easing, more capitulated form, and leaves Rooster alone to
demonstrate his experience, endurance, and drivenness, but had she
been a couple years older, we would have been left without all that,
and it would have simply been: "THIS is all you can conjure ..." As is,
the night-conjured wild stars reign supreme, and clear the deck.
I'd like to have seen Damon nominated for best supporting. He's like
Wilbur proving he's really quite the pig after all, and it made me
cheer!
Link: Your Favorite was Robbed: The 6 Biggest Oscar Snubs
(Movieline)
---------Who'd want to be just a horse?
Kutcher and Portman play Adam and Emma, two young
people making their way in Los Angeles with varying
degrees of success: Emma an overachiever who admits
that shes not particularly emotional or affectionate is a
doctor; Adam irrepressibly warm and affable, if a bit
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goofy works as an assistant on a weekly teen-musical

show, though he really wants to be a writer. Adam and
Emma met years earlier, as kids at summer camp the
movie opens with that flashback, in which young Adam
(played by Dylan Hayes) fires the first of the movies
sexually explicit salvos when he asks Emma bluntly, Can I
finger you?
[. . .]
Adam agrees, though of course we know that since hes just a
big mushbug, hell be the one to cave in first. And sure
enough, he shows up at Emmas apartment while she
along with two of her roommates, played by Greta Gerwig
and Mindy Kaling are all having their periods. Not only
has he brought them cupcakes, which they descend upon
with hormonally charged voraciousness; hes also made
Emma a period mix CD, including obvious choices, like
U2s Sunday Bloody Sunday and less obvious ones, like
Frank Sinatras Ive Got the World on a String.
[. . .]
Its possible that Kutcher loosens her up. That may be one of
Kutchers great gifts: He can, apparently, loosen anyone up.
Kutcher is one of those actors who may, for the whole of his
career, be just bubbling under. Maybe someday hell give a
big breakthrough performance, playing a death-row
prisoner whos proven innocent via DNA testing or a football
player, loving dad and model citizen whos dying of cancer. I
sure hope he doesnt: Though I wish him success and the
chance to make many more movies, I like him the way he is,
throwing away his total adorableness as if he were Ingrid
Bergman in Saratoga Trunk, being told shes beautiful and
laughing, Yes! Isnt it lucky? (Stephanie Zacharek, Actions
speak louder than dirty words in No Strings Attached,
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I wonder where Ashton gets his instinct to please from? Maybe there's
something in the roles he takes, or the kinds of women he tends to
date, that could give a hint? Anyway, it's surely wholly commendable
-- who'd want to just a horse when you can be the prancing pony the
whole of your life? Unless of course you could be the embarrassing
jackass, Gervais: you'd think seeming like you'd never crawled out of
the crib would count against you, but I swear he tore down the world
sensing that life-long babies are morphing into scarily-bequeathed
enfants terribles, who won't much longer have to know what it is to
have to back down to adults.
Speaking of adults: Stephanie, you're always commendably calling for
more films for them; let's keep up some voice for more adults in film,
too: I know this one's about childish adults, but I don't want to wait
for Ashton to be in some cancer role for someone to tell him it's NOT
this time his part to play the fool.
Link: Actions speak louder than dirty words in No Strings Attached
(Movieline)
----------
THURSDAY, JANUARY 27, 2011

Loving Forrest Gump
Happy Oscar nominations, babies. You got what you
wanted, though you have to throw those gold-plated, NSFW
Andrew Garfield valentines in the trash. It could be worse.
You could be living in 1994, when the Academy honored not
Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, or my darling
Quiz Show with a Best Picture victory, but a staggering sh*t
fortress of offensive whimsicality called Forrest Gump. You
saw it. Its dumb. Loony. Its got a lot of nerve. But heres a
secret you and I share: Were both attracted to bastards, and
Forrest Gumps the slimiest john I know. Lets love it.
Synopsis: Tom Hanks plays Forrest Gump, a man with an
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IQ of 75 who assures the world that in order to be an

inspiring mentally challenged person, you need only to act
like Winnie the Pooh. Point to your head and say, Think,
think, think. Cock your head when others are speaking.
Dont understand when youre playing a football game.
These things.
[. . .]
Heres the key to loving Forrest Gump: Our heros life
includes run-ins with war, the Black Panther movement,
several presidential assassinations, drug culture, and AIDS,
yet the movie manages to have nothing to say about them
other than, This cloying cipher doesnt really get it. Cute as
hell. Shhh, those angry black people can learn from him.
Every opportunity to reinspect history is a red herring. This
movie is a red herring. This movie is like some direct-tovideo sequel of Being There called Bein Everywharr!, and
Chauncey the Gardener is replaced by one of the Rugrats in
a Tom Wolfe suit. This movie honestly wants you to gawk at
its glib, twee (your two favorite adjectives) instincts, forgo
common sense, and melt into its outrageous story. Word: Its
not that hard. I just did it!
Lets take a look at some of the zestier accomplishments in
Forrests life.
When a bunch of bullies approach Forrest on the street,
Forrests damaged friend Jenny (Robin Wright[-Penn])
encourages him to run as fast as he can. Now, Forrest starts
the movie in rigid leg braces, but no matter: He turns into
Forrest Griffith-Joyner (ya-pow!) in seconds, the leg braces
tumble off his body, and hes cured. In high school, when
bullies follow him in a jeep, he outruns the jeep. If this Jenny
can detect who among the physically disabled can heal their
handicap and outpace a Cherokee, she deserves more than
these Curious George books shes reading.
He plays college football and nails 99-yard touchdowns with
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his nimble little gams. The crowd cheers, cries, and holds up
signs telling him to stop running once he hits the end zone.
This condescending malarkey precedes Susan Boyle by 15
years, so I cant discredit Forrest Gumps soothsaying
powers. Its like the new Network that way. Except Faye
Dunaway is too subtle for this movie. For real.
He saves his lieutenants life in Vietnam. But war-proud Lt.
Dan (Gary Sinise) didnt want to be saved, and he resents
Forrest afterward until they start up a shrimping
company together and fulfill the dream of their fallen
comrade Bubba. Lieutenant Dan pulls off the Helter Skelter
zeal well. Which makes sense because this is ThE SeVeNtIeS!!
1!
He gets real good at ping pong and it heals international
disputes with China? I dont even know what Rob Zemeckis
was going for here. Whatever happened, it allowed Forrest
to meet the president an occurrence he enjoys a million
times this movie.
Holler, LBJ! Bad news: Forrest Gump isnt a real person, so
to make his interactions with super-for-real presidents forreal, the movie uses special effects to manipulate stock
footage of our great leaders and make their mouths look like
theyre saying droll things to Forrest. It looks freaky. LBJs
twitchy CGI mouth looks like lost footage from the
Sledgehammer video. At this point, its clear Forrest can
zap himself to any notable moment in history whenever he
wants. You might know this movie by its original working
title, Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?. (Or Zelig Gump.)
Forrest gets on The Dick Cavett Show, mumbles something
about religion and heaven, and fellow guest John Lennon is
Jesus, this movie inspired to write a jingle called
Imagine. John Lennon would love Forrests absently cutesy
shtick. He so would. John Lennon was annoying sometimes,
and at least this movie understands that.
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After a tedious sideplot where Forrest runs back and forth

across the country for no reason and ratchets up this movies
run-time to 2.2 hours, he reunites with the tempestuous
Jenny, who secretly had his child and contracted an
unknown virus. Look, Jenny: Having a troubled past and
an abusive father gives you no right to ruin Forrests good
time. Or die of AIDS when youve given us two scenes notice.
Not fair. You will not score an Oscar nomination with that
gig. Theyll give it to Andie MacDowell or Joan Plowright or
someone else who eats up screen time with major headtilt
seriousness. Or worse, theyll soon give Sean Penn two
Oscars. Yeah, now youre awake, Robin.
There you have it. Thats our movie. Forrest fathers his newfound son, and by the time the credits roll, I remember that
Forrest has muttered his mothers favorite phrase Stupid is
as stupid does at least a dozen times. And why is that?
Because its a message to home-viewers that theyre the ones
sitting through this insipid sequence of daydreams. Stupid
is as stupid does is easily decipherable code for Im not the
one watching this movie. You are. I hear you loud and
clear, Forrest: The smart ones flee. But us? Were placated in
our leg braces, drifting like a whimsical albatross feather
into your void. Run, dear reader. Run. Or stay. With the rest
of us. (Louis Virtel, Bad Movies we loveForrest Gump,
----------well i see the "Bad Movie" part, but where is the "We Love?"
(response to post, Citizen Bitch)
It's there at the beginning, Citizen Bitch, but yes, I think "Forrest
Gump" is one of those works of art that if you are too much concerned
to explain why you like it, were/are affected/moved by it, you're
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stained for life. Just to mind as another example, is when some Salon
writer a number of years ago "explained" why she had once fallen for
Piers Anthony's Xanth series: you ended up more aware of the series'
"ridiculousness" than its (what remain, thanks to "you")
OSTENSIBLE virtues, and you had the sense the writer had braved as
much as she was able, mostly in admitting to having liked the series
before company she'd normally expect to pull away from her after
that: her chore thereafter was to look to have pulled off the feat, but
also to have made clear that NO ONE would more shun -- or maybe
stomp and kill! -- the fiend who went a smidgen further than she was
willing, in testifying to its qualities: "you" end up okay, because "you"
didn't so much break the dam but remade it anew, in territory too
riskily befouling for concerned others to consider undertaking the
nagging job (and here, discussing "Forrest Gump" was a problem that
was nagging -- IT was the one that won the oscar, as well has having
as much broad-effect as the ongoing hero, "Back to the Future"),
AND all the while making the snidish feel themselves open and fair.
You may never be a great writer/reviewer, but we remember your
sacrifice of yourself into besmirching territory.
If you mean to do the in-your-world brave and stand up for the likes
of Xanth, "Titanic," "Forrest Gump," "Dangerous Mind," it requires
an awesome feat of steadily-maintained, artful, protective
dweamorcraft to get the job done -- and I don't think I've ever seen it
managed, not even by A. O. Scott, who, for example, will often defend
Tom Cruise, but NEVER without letting you know the actor doesn't
have extensive range (very brave, A.O, very brave: how about just a
compliment, and leaving it at? Such things are possible.); if that's too
daunting, you just make the praise (as with here) amount to worse
than some (in this case, most) critiques -- that's safe enough. The
whole point is not to really get at why?, be fair to the film and its
lasting influence on you, and air it out, but to see if you can manage
something akin BUT WITHOUT being caught out by misstep -- we're
all watching -- and it makes for something of an abominably unfair
effort, and usually just a resort to curses.
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Personally, I liked the brazenness of Forrest's life being tested but not
really affected by "major events" that ARE SUPPOSED to stop you
cold, if you care or are human at all: he was allowed to breathe,
following his own rhythm. Gene Siskel WAS stopped cold by these
events -- Vietnam, JFK'S death, etc -- but loved the movie for feeling
it had helped quit shocks he personally had still been suffering from.
There must be something considerable in a film to accomplish
something as wonderful as that. (According to Movieline's twitter'
feed, Gene Siskel's birthday is today. I think the episode is on
YouTube.)
Link: Bad movies we loveForrest Gump (Movieline)
Link: Siskel and Ebert review Forrest Gump (YouTube)
----------
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2010

Interns
Every production assistant, intern, receptionist, runner
and/or other member of Hollywoods aspirational poor
can rejoice today as Bourne franchise and United 93
director Paul Greengrass held forth on the biggest
unresolved scourge afflicting the film industry today. No,
not piracy. No, not the Golden Globes. Greengrass has it
out for the exploiters who are raping and pillaging
young people for the sake of a few budget savings here or
there. Bold!
[. . .]
The filmmaker participated in the Dunhill conversation
series opposite actor David Morrissey who elicited the
following response with a simple inquiry about
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Greengrasss early days in documentary:

One of the problems we have in our industry is that young
people in our industry are being exploited. There are
companies in London, sadly, that are making very good
livings on work experience which really means people
being expected to work for nothing. And if we we in the
industry whove had good livings think that we are creating
a sustainable industry by raping and pillaging young
people, then were very, very sadly mistaken. And if I were
to point to a single issue in our industry that is not being
dealt with and offers the most profound threat to the
regeneration of our industry, it is the way we exploit young
people.
Preach it! Or not? I think we all know the difference
between low- or no-pay and pure exploitation the
former offers exposure to professionals and actual work
experience on a film or TV set, while the latter amounts to
cleaning and coffee-fetching with little if any access to the
happenings either behind or in front of the camera.
Sometimes the job descriptions blur. But as someone
whos worked an unpaid internship or gopher role on
more than a few sets and offices over the years,
opportunity is more often than not in the eye (and
initiative) of the beholder, and making smart decisions
about certain gratis duties and jobs and employers
(especially employers) can entitle rookies to a little more
experiential leverage than a paycheck gets them. (S. T.
Vanairsdale, VIDEO: Low-Wage Hollywood Has a
Champion in Paul Greengrass, Movieline, 16 Dec. 2010)
Re: "But as someone whos worked an unpaid internship or gopher

role on more than a few sets and offices over the years, opportunity is
more often than not in the eye (and initiative) of the beholder, and
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making smart decisions about certain gratis duties and jobs and
employers (especially employers) can entitle rookies to a little more
experiential leverage than a paycheck gets them. And whats worth
more?"
This Horatio Algeresque response -- make most of your
opportunities, be smart with your resources, and you'll succeed where
others failed -- has me thinking of this bit, from Morris Dickstein's
book about the Depression, "Dancing in the Dark," about why powerdifferentials stood unchanged throughout the period:
As one psychiatrist who had trained with Freud later told Studs
Terkel, "Everybody, more or less, blamed himself for his delinquency
or lack of talent or bad luck. There was an acceptance that it was your
own fault, your own indolence, your lack of ability. You took it and
kept quiet." Thanks to this "kind of shame about your own personal
failure . . . there were very few disturbances." (220)
Why must you always come up with the most vague,

nonsequitur ways of making your arguments? All I'm
saying is if you try to build an instinct for good
opportunities, and then make the most of them when they
occur, then that can add up to a fairly priceless
investment in yourself.
Will it always work? No. And it's not for everybody. In a
perfect world everyone would be paid what they're worth.
But until they are you've gotta determine what sacrifices
are worth it -- and then follow through as best you can.
Paul Greengrass is saying that abuse of youth by the film industry is

cruel, and will amount to the degeneration of the industry. If youth
mostly only encountered this wasting here, then your drawing them
to make use of what resources are available to them is apt, and maybe
very helpful, because they still have said resources to draw upon and
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continue to expand / cultivate, and so learn to manage best, and

perhaps very profitably, this non-idealic "situation." However, if what
he is saying is true of what society AS A WHOLE is doing to its youth
-- and how can we not fairly from "here," "go there"? -- more making
use of them than at-all properly developing them, then it's just not
much use to point out that opportunities really do continue to exist if
they could but school themselves to make use of them (since most of
them are now by constitution doomed to be those who readily, even
masochistically deliberately, fall into traps, whatever flag waved to
forestall them), but a bit cruel too, as it actually plays to the sick part
of how they're constituted in need of no further encouragement -- the
voice in their heads, that is, that reminds them over and over again, in
every unfair situation: "Quit complaining! Stop denying it: you know
if you don't succeed, that it's mostly YOUR fault, you lazy buthole ...
Things are tough. So what? -- And just what do you think should
fairly be meted out to those who just expect life to hand things to
them?"
I fully agree, though, that there remain opportunities, and people
should not be too quickly discouraged; but am perhaps mostly not too
much concerned about those who will make use of them so long as -for instance -- every now and then they're reminded of others'
successes in similarly trying situations. Rather, my mind is on the
much larger crowd of youth who can only be saved if less-run-down /
ruined elders think more in terms of systematic change than
encouraging more one-on-one pep talks or broadly broadcasted
fireside chats.
Sunnydaze mentioned the "rich kids." I see these people all the time
doing "for experience" work, and I just know they'll do fine, that
they'll be noticed and often-enough ushered ahead, that they're on
their way. They'll never really be used, their experience of interning
will be of it as a necessary, sometimes distasteful, always hard but allin-all still encouraging and illuminating first step -- what the
experience is supposed to be like -- not just out of resources and
resourcefulness, that their advantaged parents / schooling gave them
921
sufficient skills and "get up and go" to succeed, but because they don't
so much draw out the more sadistic impulses of those over them.
Their societal role now is to just succeed, to live life near as if nothing
truly averse is happening -- everybody is beginning to now really feel
it -- and so make clearer that a class of human beings is supposed to
exist that is simply to be served, and so thereby everyone else of a
class that is just supposed to suffer, that we are determined to make
suffer, waste away, and yet still blame themselves for all of it. Stand in
the way of this "due course," at your considerable peril.
That was the situation during the Depression, where the full
consequences of the running-down of a whole generation that
Greengrass fears (the next flappers weren't seen until the '60s, with
the hippies) is on its way was actually effected, and which I do think
we're right now once again stepping into.
Link: VIDEO: Low-Wage Hollywood Has a Champion in Paul
Greengrass (Movieline)
Appendum: Sunnnydazes response:
The problem isn't just with young people. The attitude in this biz is
that you are so lucky, so blessed to be involved why on earth would
you expect to get paid? This for any age of individual. Makes some
sense when a person is new to the industry but when you are 35 and
have been in your craft for 20 years being asked to "volunteer" is an
insult. It also creates an environment where the "rich kids" have all
the fun and success while people who actually need to work for a
living fall away and into other fields to survive.
---------MONDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2010
"Being resilient in crappy times"
Before Hollywood discovered it could reap huge profits by
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adapting comic books, mainstream movies used to attempt

subjects that might have something to do with real grownups lives. That impulse rarely surfaces these days, but its
the motor that drives The Company Men, John Wells
downsizing drama set in the Boston area circa 2008, just as
the economy was beginning its long, slow-motion crash.
The harsh reality is that being able to make a decent living
from really working as opposed to just pushing money
from one place to another is practically a luxury not just
in America but, increasingly, everywhere in the world. You
wont get rich actually building or making things, or trying
to run a company in a way that honors or respects its
workers. The only way to make money in this climate is to
squeeze people as hard as you can and then discard them.
Thats a view The Company Men both acknowledges as a
reality and rails against.
[. . .]
But in the end, its simply about being resilient in crappy
times. And thats something many of our parents and
grandparents knew something about, even though each
generation thinks its problems are original and unique.
(Stephanie Zacharek, The Company Men Offers a Rare
Portrait of the Working and the Nonworking World,
Movieline, 10 Dec. 2010)
Cautionary note: people who like the idea of being persevering,

generally ensure they end up living in an environment that
shortchanges them. You take the current lot of American humanity, in
their hunt for adultness / penance in self-sacrifice, small hopes, and
hardship, and provide them magically with instead their every dream
come true, they would hate you to the point of wanting to kill you for
giving them way beyond what they're prepared to accept -- for
adorning them after they've finally near sheared the most
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compromising parts of themselves off. So instead, a future of a first

long bleakness; then some bits of New Deal solace amidst the shared
suffering, the untended to, valid complaints of indifferent, resistant,
ongoing corporate culture; until some massive sacrificial war permits
a later generation to the moving-beyond actually involved in growing
up. ("You can never outdistance your ancestors" -- I look forward to
all the "growth" that'll follow that thought / inclination.) The
challenge now is to make sure we don't too-fast race into the
depression mind-set -- getting "there" before it too much settles in,
would suggest it might just be following our lead.
Your fancy prose misses the point entirely. Most Americans

are simply struggling with being poorer than they'd like to
be, and it has nothing to with a "hunt for adultness /
penance in self-sacrifice, small hopes, and hardship." And
please, no one would kill you for making their dreams come
true because they're some sort of scarred animal in a cage.
Remember: it's the economy, stupid. (Tamar)
I hear your point, but to me, people get the economy they actually
want. If they truly feel they deserve (have earned), if they truly want,
happiness, you get the like of the 30 years of on and on growth that
was 1950 to 1980. Nothing could put a stop to it, not corporations,
late capitalism -- run-amock, widespread greed -- terrestrial limits,
Celestial scorn, ancestors-all-in-disapproval -- nothing. However, if
what they want is to be "Americans simply struggling with being
poorer than they'd like to be," to be some (idiotic) generation that
renewed all the "ennobling," "necessary" sacrifices their grandparents
were stupefied (and stupided) by, who could believe themselves truly
desiring of better ONLY given there being little chance any such
would befall them, then nothing could stop it either. If aliens landed
on the earth right now and forced endless bunches of riches into
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everyone's pockets, we're very near the point where we spoiled

Americans would monk and monastery ourselves before the
abundance. If they took that refuge away, and forced us forever into
5-star accommodations, then we'd deem virtual reality the "truer"
one, and absolutely refuse to forego the Xbox so we could reify (yes,
maybe even the likes of snobbish "I don't own a TV" critics) the likes
of "Fallout 3" until the even-more-appropriate "Penance 2morrow"
could be made. If they took that away, then we'd slowly go insane,
depriving, UGLIFYING ourselves near to the point of hacking off our
own limbs -- even if that 5 star-occupying, top-of-the-line refrigerator
couldn't be managed to be appropriately tumbled to provide some
unlikely-but-maybe-still-possibly? excuse
... unless of course they yet somehow proved killable, then, yes, we
would kill them, for feeding us abundance when what we want is
hardening through suffering, for drawing out our deepest, and truly
regrettable, wishes, and forcing us to catch some sight of them. The
zombified of the 1930s weren't perseverers; they were (in greater
truth) grotesque willers of their own penance-born deterioration.
Some (the interesting) mocked their own back then -- that is until
everyone was about ennobling. Let's start with that, and see where it
gets us -- I don't want a rehash of the 1930s/40s, even if it did end up
serving out "adult" dishes of grace and wit, in film, in art, that
apparently no critic seems to see the main drawback to (that it was
always born out of and remained true to an ethos of compensation,
not really enrichment).
Most of us have the hard choice between time or money.

With money you have comfort which you can't enjoy because
you are at work all the time... With time you have no comfort
because the fuse has been lit and the bomb will go off at any
minute, but you do get odd moments of true freedom before
the sh*t hits the fan.
God did not decide this is the way things should be. Jesus
925
doesn't want you to pay rent nor does Mohammad respect

you for all of your hard work. This system was created by
humanity and humanity VOLUNTEERS to work with-in.
The bottom has dropped out leaving people who work at
Wal-mart paying money to eat at Red Lobster so the people
who work at Red Lobster can afford to shop at Wal-mart.
The only real change will occur when enough people say,
"I'm mad as Hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!"
Thru out history this is known as REVOLUTION. And
sometimes, this point of action succeeds in evoking positive
change. Many times it just cuts off the head of one beast and
replaces it with another more or less terrible entity.
But when things have gone as far as they can go, and things
have gotten as bad as they can get> Is it worth the risk?
Gandhi once said, "10,0000 Englishmen simply cannot
control 350 million Indians, if those Indians refuse to
cooperate."
This has become us and our corporate masters.
Question is> What are you going to do? (Sunnydaze)
I disagree. When people are mad as hell and not going to take it
anymore!, they do the likes of chopping off leaders' heads -- along
with those of anyone even remotely connected to them, until numbers
pile up beyond number, and even your best friend begins to seem
suspicious. Only AFTER bodies of both sides lie everywhere, now so
much seeming more born of the same purpose than foes of opposite
stripe, only AFTER people have begun to forget the point of it all but
still gauge that surely some awful blood price has more than fully
been repaid, does society move ahead -- rock and roll, flower power,
and even soldier mockery. Revolutionaries mostly want to sacrifice
themselves, along with you too, more than probably. Never readily
trust them, or their grievances -- they'd be shortchanged if their foes
ever agreed to an agreeable compromise, and / or offered fair redress:
926
almost always, that's not what they want. (There are exceptions ... I'd
trust Krugman, for instance.) Society doesn't so much grow when
people are prepared to fight hard for their fair lot; it actually mostly
grows when people feel permitted to partake in and enjoy the rather
ample lot that looks like it might be opening up for them -- even if it
really doesn't end up requiring much of a fight. Their enemies could
in fact step aside; amplitude, really just theirs for the ready-taking;
and yet they'd manage even being somewhat truly pleased it proved
all so all-so-easily-guilt-arousingly easy -- they're in mind to relax,
and enjoy themselves some while, not to fight to salvage what is at
least necessary for human dignity, from bastards who couldn't care
less how much they've suffered, only that they yet try and shave,
shower every now and then, serve, but otherwise be done with.
Link: The Company Men Offers a Rare Portrait of the Working and
the Nonworking World (Movieline)
----------
First, then second, consideration

The Tourist is one of those movies that will leave some
viewers scratching their heads, wondering why there isnt
more action, more snazzy editing, more obvious crackle
between its stars, Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie. But I
suspect the people who get The Tourist will simply adore it:
Its the kind of espionage caper that doesnt get made
anymore, a visually sensuous picture made with tender
attention to detail and an elegant, understated sense of
humor. (Stephanie Zacharek, Espionage Caper The Tourist
Offers Mystery and Glamour, Plus Depp and Jolie,
Movieline, 9 Dec. 2010)
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KEY SPOILER ALERT

(First consideration) She is really good and appropriate in this
picture. Something about how Angelina refuses the viewer, and her
spare personality, works to remind you to attend to everything else
perfectly worthwhile in the picture. Elegance, a sure splendor of it -it's hard to imagine anything making an appearance in the film that
wasn't (as Stephanie says, tenderly and appreciatively)
"considered" ... But I followed this by re-watching "Knight and Day" -a movie I just can't deny as one of favorites from this year -- and I'm
reminded why something in the TRULY "Wisconsin"-born (read:
large-hearted, big-souled American) (once Depp reveals his true
identity, we should wish him well but still be quite ready to leave him
behind -- his human undeterminedness was fake: he's as furnished
and complete as the beautiful hotels he for a glorious time inhabited),
hammy, down-to-earthness, can ultimately trump every element of
fragile stunning beauty some place like Venice has to offer, perhaps in
the same way a single human life, perhaps even before its begat into
something storied and interesting, can still trump the whole awesome
complexity of the entire rest of the ecosphere: no, I'm sorry, whatever
your -- albeit -- formidable luxury of experiences and details,
whatever the extent of patience required to appreciate all that's in
their tiniest sliver, there's no comparing even the sum of it to
spending time along someone with sufficient soul to remainder it all
to backdrop.
Where Stephanie really scores points with me in this lovely, faithful
review, is that Americans should be able to appreciate this (kind of)
film, all that it respects enough to quite-to-the-exact-precariouspoint-of distraction think about and love -- not just loud star vehicles
-- and how many can? The film loses me, for its making its lesson by
noticeably submitting the human -- nothing they "existed" made me
really forget the kind of hotels (and trains, and such) they had been
in. Great PEOPLE made those grand hotels, but more LIVING, vital
presences should still readily backdrop them, and they didn't enough
928
-- struck me as about near always-even (not quite, they surely existed

more than the other human-types that "accompanied" them) -- for
my preference. I COULD take my eyes off them, and though it opened
things up, in retrospect, this isn't so much quite the thing I supposed
it was on first consideration. Still a really good film, though.
Link: Espionage Caper The Tourist Offers Mystery and Glamour, Plus
Depp and Jolie (Movieline)
----------
Keeping the con alive

Salon readers have never been the shy and retiring type, but
Monday's Life story -- "How I Became a Con Artist" -certainly brought out the knives. "You don't deserve to live in
a civilized society," read one of the 200+ outraged comments,
peppered with such descriptors as douchebag, degenerate and
morally bankrupt. At least one furious reader actually emailed writer Jason Jellick's employer to complain. Readers
directed their scorn at us as well. "Is this the best Salon can
do, especially at the start of the Christmas holiday season?"
Ouch. We weren't just ethically bankrupt. We were ruining
Christmas.
To clarify, Salon doesn't advocate stealing -- but for that
matter, neither does Jellick. His account of a youth spent
indulging in petty crimes against chain stores and other
corporations ends with a hard stare at his own shady
behavior, with a realization at just how much damage his
behavior has wrought. Jellick's story is one of regret as much
as misdeed. It is about the lies we tell ourselves -- that we are
better and smarter than everyone else, that we deserve more
than the shreds we've been given, that our swinging fist
doesn't hurt anyone. Like all our Life Stories, his tale offers a
929
window into human behavior in its imperfections and

complexity. All of us have tiny private shames we're afraid to
tell others. To confess them isn't just fascinating. It's
liberating. (Sarah Hepola, Our con story and yours, Salon,
2 Dec. 2010)
----Thank you for your expulsion from Eden; welcome to Salon

His account of a youth spent indulging in petty crimes against
chain stores and other corporations ends with a hard stare at
his own shady behavior, with a realization at just how much
damage his behavior has wrought.
All your life stories read like this, to the point of feeling prescribed.
This isn't about discovery; and certainly not complexity, either. It's
more about self-fashioning, and probably mostly about salvation: a
collective concern to identify yourselves as amongst the repentant,
and therefore feel less guilty. So much so, that I bet the author of this
piece doesn't even allow himself to partake of what this piece is
tantalizingly ripe to offer him -- namely, further sense that in he is
rather still, artfully, nimbly, making use of others' route requirements
to benefit himself -- the fox.
At some level, the author believes himself braver than most others.
His true lack of courage comes not only -- as Hutman pointed out -not doing anything near the Michael Moore and doing his thing
directly before empowered adults (though it is true that some people
might not manage what he managed, even if required for truly good
benefit, and that this lack isn't to be shamed but certainly to be dealt
with, to be insistently pointed out), but in his Salon-preference need
to demonstrate himself imperfect but repentant, ultimately more
formula, general-type, sumupable, quiescent, than an interesting,
riseable particular, so he might count himself amongst those actually
930
less worthy of a beating in these purity concerned times. If it still

seems as if he's too much rejoicing in his memory of the "score," don't
worry: though he is still laughing at you a bit (he can permit himself
some of this -- after all, you're outside the gates in the land of the
loud, pained, but ultimately powerless and distinctly separated letter
writers; you're the plebs whose role is to uninterruptedly experience
the snub, with never any worth-affirming real attention or
recompense), he'll make it about further demonstance of his blatant
(but ultimately actually redeeming) human weakness, and further
expunge this voice in later writings.
And this bit:
It is about the lies we tell ourselves -- that we are better and
smarter than everyone else, that we deserve more than the
shreds we've been given, that our swinging fist doesn't hurt
anyone.
is gross. How on earth are we supposed to accomplish anything if
some of us don't imagine we might do better than what was done
before, insist on better than we were handed, conceive of ourselves as
noteworthy and perhaps special? But you're about flattening a sinning
generation now, aren't you? Submerging personality, uniqueness;
every individual's desire sublimating into something the crowd would
okay (I noticed how Andrew Leonard managed his desire to once
again self-absorb in video games, by making it into part of a collective
ritual of primarily more selflessness-intended sharing across
generations. He made his son, that is, serve his lie.) Everyone
abandoning every pretense to something special, sinking themselves
as close to the ground, as obsequiously within the okays of the group,
only rising to cut the legs out from those who would dare roam about
on their own. Welcome to righteous, jealous-eyed, village life.
Welcome to the the shamed covering-up, followed by the grim, selfpreserving pointing of fingers, that follows the unaccounted for,
hugely blasphemic, orgy. Welcome to Salon.
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----Regret
You do need to be able to con. You do need to be able, if there is just
cause, to be able -- in an instant -- do otherwise than what you've
always been told you're supposed to do. If society is turning puritan,
for example, you do need to be able to protect, hide, those that are
being assigned the role of the rats. If society is corporate, against
cooperative efforts, you need to be able to find some way to help
communicate that its control is not total. A first step toward this, may
just come from the likes of returning books you never purchased: you
may actually thereby be safely convincing yourself you can thwart
authority, and survive: foundation for scarier, more relevant, efforts.
If you sense that this is part of what your own cons were about, to do
most good, you don't repudiate all you once did -- just work on why
your efforts became to seem near mostly about repetition compulsion,
about always proving you can avoid the scrutiny of the angry eye,
from your own projected parental-figure, about why you keep keeping
it within a context whereby not corporations but vulnerable,
perennially-trapped people kinda like yourself, are actually the ones
you imagine most at risk of being taken in your scams. There is
psychological work you could make of this, and it could make it so
that rather than a repentant, you become more truly what you once
(however still faintly) set out to be: a truly moral person, who respects
"the human" enough to be a potentially change-prompting, certainly
anger-arousing, irritant, when appropriate.
I remember reading "Why They Kill," of how rapists and killers get
"there" by first partaking of smaller thrills they believe others would
fear to similarly manage, so I'm not ignorant: the truest villains can
be made to seem heroes, if what you're mostly doing is championing
deviance, deviation, defiance. Still, though there is a world of
difference, heroes ARE those who can brave anxiety-provoking
experiences, for some better purpose, and I do sense a little bit of the
hero in this person. I just wish that there was an environment around
to encourage it. As is, he's just doing what Tiger Woods is about to do,
932
and castrate himself to a larger order, and participate in society's

revenge against those who would dare range about as selfishly as he
once did.
Link: Our con story and yours
---------TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2010

When the good-parent Dumbledore is artfully being shown the door
How Should the University Evolve?, part 1 of 2 from BLSCI on
Vimeo.
and the Q&A is here:
Im in the midst of Thanksgiving prep so dont have time to
contribute my own commentary. Basically we were a bit at
cross purposes. Siva gave a theatrically impassioned and wellsupported defense of the traditional university and I tried to
make the point that I dont care much what happens to the
traditional university. I come neither to bury nor to praise it,
but to talk about the needs that learners have (whether
students or no) and how those needs might best be met (using
both technology and traditional forms and new hybrids of the
same).
This discourse was pronounced both empowering and
bullshit on Twitter, and rightfully so I think. Kyra Gaunt, an
anthropology professor at Baruch, a TED fellow, and a hero of
mine, gave out more truth at the microphone during the Q&A
than I heard coming from the stage all night. She correctly
intuitedMy sense: @sivavaid who really liked your book was
doing the academic devils advocacy thing which I hate.
#debateisnotengagement
At some point academics end and you have to take a stand on
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stuff. My fave Tweet was this one:

@unboundstudent: @anya1anya @sivavaid DIYU Takeaway?
future of higher ed is a conversation of the ppl! (Anya
Kamenetz, Video of Debate with Siva Vaidyanathan at
Baruch College on 11/18, 24 Nov. DIY U)
At one point you mentioned that no thing was guaranteed (to last, to
remain), and were okay with that, and Siva responded that he hoped
university could be, that is must be. I sided with Siva here a bit. I
think youve got a high self-esteem, and it is this that makes it so that
for you now the disappearance of ostensible societal necessities
wiki or what-not neednt automatically register as if your safety
blanket was suddenly lost to you. Youre more like, well, okay,
something substantial did just go down -- but is it possible that what
remains and is now better exposed to view, is actually better? And if
it is, youre glad the older, more primitive form is lost, and get to
making the more mature and evolved forms reach their potential
ends. And if it isnt, you point out the current flaws, and get back
what was wrongly disposed of. Youre fair, appropriately excited by
what could and should be, and just as appropriately impatient with
the mediocre and insufficient in its loud fight to on-and-on-and-on
still-prosper. But most people dont strike me as healthy as you are,
as secure as you are, and actually need some secure place that can
withstand their own storms as well as outside ones some
Hogwarts to exist, for them to have some chance of not becoming
mostly survivalist, feral, truly lost incapable of doing much
interesting with sophisticated technology, open acess, not out of
unfamiliarity, or from being priced out, but because they havent at
any time in their lives known the lengthy period of guaranteed
support that enables everything else worthwhile (including openness
to risk, to loss) to develop. Even if they dont make it to university,
have no plans thereof, they intuit and are to some extent buoyed by
the overall nurturing, good character of a society, if it is pronounced
934
in its fight to erect and support institutions (government,

universities) primarily UNDERSTOOD as for, well, guarantees,
respite, fellowship and support.
For you its something stodgy, elitist, and inhibiting being rightly
challenged by what is vital, most democratic, and promising. But for
most of the public my guess is that this conversation will be about
whether it wants to eliminate the good parent Dumbledore (the
university) for an environment that leaves more and more children
unsheltered, exposed to errant mischance (the free market, as it
understands it now), with less of a chance of any child
misunderstanding it for different (for us to create such a world, what
must we truly think of you, dear child?). University that is more aloof,
and harder to reach, and the rest of it a wild of perhaps pot-luck
success but mostly scammers. My concern is that their increasing
support of you (DIY U and such) will not be born of caught-sight of a
perhaps better way, but because they think their children deserve a
more desolate, less certain environment to unlearn them of their fixed
spoiledness. Whatever your hopes, America has in mind to make of
your righteous cause, further means to hurt its kids. Its that sick.
Even many of its liberals.
Link: Video of Debate with Siva Vaidyanathan at Baruch
College on 11/18 DIY U
---------TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2010
Sauron thrived when things grew dark, too
Hillenbrand's second book, seven years in the making, is

"Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and
Redemption" and likely to be as big a hit as "Seabiscuit." The
935
theme is identical -- the triumph of an indomitable underdog

in the face of titanic obstacles -- but this time the protagonist
is human: Louis Zamperini, an Olympian in his own right (he
ran in the 1936 games in Berlin), war hero, POW camp
survivor and inspirational speaker.
[. . .]
Those hopes were, of course, pulverized by the outbreak of
war, and Zamperini became a bombardier in the Army Air
Corps, stationed in Hawaii. The book's exciting descriptions
of foot races give way to even more exciting accounts of
bombing raids and airborne battles.
[. . .]
Zamperini and Phillips' luck ran out when, while on a rescue
operation, their plane conked out and crashed at sea. Only the
two of them and a third serviceman survived, floating on rafts
through shark-infested waters for 47 days, a record. They
survived on snared sea birds and collected rain, and after a
Japanese fighter plane peppered their raft with bullets, they
had to simultaneously bail, fight off sharks and patch the
holes until it was restored to a fragile seaworthiness.
Miraculously, they finally floated toward land -- only to be
captured by the Japanese.
And so "Unbroken" segues once again, from man-against-theelements survival yarn to an even darker tale of human
cruelty and defiance.
[. . .]
When the war ended, Zamperini returned home in triumph,
only to have the terror and impotent rage he felt in the camps
come back to him every night in his dreams. The greatest
generation (and you can only regard this moniker as
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thoroughly earned after reading "Unbroken") suffered from

post-traumatic stress disorder, too, and Zamperini's
desperate efforts to overcome this final and perhaps most
challenging trial serve as a pointed reminder of the difficulties
so many of the current generation's vets are facing right now.
(Laura Miller, Unbroken, Seabiscuit authors latest
triumph, Salon, 14 Nov. 2010)
Juiced?
I'm quite sure that every nation that went to war has examples of such
men. They were all -- Americans, Germans, Brits, Italians, Egyptians,
Russians, Japanese -- I suppose, members of the greatest generation.
But one has to wonder who it was who brought about this ready
heroism-enabling, life-destroying war about in the first place? Sure,
they fought off some sharks, but for collectively seeing the necessity of
wasting away millions of lives, maybe an asterisk beside their
extraordinary tales of heroic perseverance?
Remember Goldhagen ("Hitlers willing executioners") -- it's not
(just) the leaders: it's (primarily) the people, what they want.
Patrick
You would have preferred the alternative to the fight.
You would have been a Loyalist 235 years ago in the name of
peace. On yur knees MFer. You would have preferred allowing
the South to secede, splitting the Union and continuing their
slave industry in the name of peace. You would have stood
aside 68 years ago railing against the French Resistance as
violent extremists. You're pathetic. (oda7103sf)
oda
937
The Greatest Generation was a generation that got heroism, but out of
war. That's sick. They were sick. With this tale, near makes me root
for the sharks ... and I hate sharks.
-----
Can the same person "care for the soul," who would hack
their arm off to survive? Or is this just the province of the
beastial?
It is true that what you've given here is what you denied in your antiNational Novel Writing Month post. A whole generation is worthy for
their mostly anonymous replication of the kind of marathon
struggling people like this dude demonstrated. Some of these very
same people who forced their way to 50 000 words in a month, might
just in the future be the ones to marshal their way through a
war/depression-induced hell of obstacles. (I couldn't do 50 000 in a
month, and you're not going to remember me for hacking off my arm
to save my life, either.) Given the power of your previous impress, you
come pretty close to implicitly making war into the missing backdrop.
(i.e. Their mistake is not that they would as a horde show fantastic
perseverance at the cost of discretion and care, of denying themselves
the ripened ability to enjoy other people's artistic talents, but that
they are doing as much outside of a context which would instantly
awe all outsiders to their exhausting performance.)
How about try instead, a whole generation left the experimental,
original (19) 20s for depression and war ravishment. When you take
any two who used to converse profitably but fall into squabble, there
may still be something exciting in their coming to and lasting through
blows, but boy does it pale compared to what they had going before
they broke down into squabbling and self-cover. I don't really want to
hear about those who survived or heroiced their way through bleak
striving: there must be something savage in them for them to
accustom themselves so readily to that much bleakness; and it's an
938
insult to those who might shrivel up some then, but who naturally
blossom when people SHOULD naturally do so -- when the
atmosphere is allowing, patient, gentle, kind.
Link: Unbroken, Seabiscui authors latest triumph (Salon)
----------
Kindness
Conservative commentators have been bemoaning the decline

of the American man almost as long as the American man has
been in existence. As it turns out, they are right: Men these
days are a mere shadow of what we once were. We've become
physically weaker than our ancestors. We're slower runners.
We can't jump as high as we once did. As Peter McAllister, an
archaeologist with the University of Western Australia and
the author of the new book "Manthropology: The Science of
Why the Modern Male Is Not the Man He Used to Be," puts it,
we might be the "sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens
to ever walk the planet." I, for one, blame guyliner. (Thomas
Rogers, The dramatic decline of modern man, Salon, 14
Nov. 2010)
Ice Age aboriginal tribesmen, he discovers, were able to run
long distances at approximately the same speed as modernday Olympic sprinters. Classic Grecian rowers could attain
speeds of 7.5 miles an hour, which today's rowers can only
attain for short bursts of time. Our culture may be obsessed
with muscles: He notes that, since 1982, G.I. Joe's Sgt. Savage
has gotten three times more muscular and Barbie's Ken now
has a chest circumference attainable by only one in 50 men,
but the luxuries of our contemporary lifestyle have caused a
939
steady decline in genuine physical power.

[. . .]
Up until about 20,000 years, Homo sapiens were very, very
robust in comparison to what we are these days. It's not that
we're so different from those robust Homo sapien males, but
our bodies are actually geared up to respond to pressures that
we don't get anymore. There's the example of aboriginal
runners who, we know from fossilized footprints, could run as
fast if not faster than [Olympic sprinter] Usain Bolt. And the
reason why is that they did it from a very early age. The Greek
trireme rowers could do feats that can't be duplicated by
modern rowers. Greece was a very tough country to make a
living in. Everybody walked everywhere. The people lived as
shepherds, it was a very rough existence. Our bones are about
40 percent less mass than the bones of Homo erectus, but
genetically ours are not that different. It's just that we don't
get put under that kind of pressure. Arm bones of tennis
players, for example, are almost as thick as those of Homo
erectus.
There are some interesting statistics there about how hard
people could work during the Industrial Revolution -- these
rather small, malnourished men were able to wield these
incredibly heavy sledgehammers all day, and the same
phenomenon still applies to Nepalese hill porters. These little
guys of about 55 kilos carry 90 kilo weights for about 75 miles
over a period of days. It doesn't seem to have any
degenerative effects on them as well.
[. . .]
There's been this movement all through history. The dandies,
the macaronis and other feminized males were popular
940
during times of great assurance, when England ruled the

waves. That people want those stronger, more masculine
figures in times of crisis makes sense to me.
[. . .]
It says something about the substitution of pomp and show
for real manliness. There is an inherent male and female
attraction to muscularity -- it's an instinctual thing. Big
muscles are very, very sexually attractive. There's no doubt
about that.
[. . .]
I've cited some studies of children of the Viking Berserkers [a
group of notorious Norse warriors known for their
aggression], and found that these are hyperviolent men and
actually did have more children than comparable warriors in
that society.
[. . .]
Nearly every group I've ever come across does it [i.e., hazing]
in some way, and the fact that the civilized, affluent West still
does it shows that it's, for want of a better word, a very
natural practice. One of the paradoxes is that this very violent,
abusive treatment actually serves to greatly heighten the need
of the initiate to belong to that group. It strips away their own
personal power and individuality, it makes them crave
belonging to the group and it makes them bond more tightly
to it. I'm not arguing, at all, in favor of hazing. I'm just
pointing out that it does seem to have a very strong resonance
within the heart of masculinity.
It seems to be a very deep, masculine thing. I think it relates
941
to human societies being so patrilineally based. And

incidentally, we could argue that's largely why there's malaise
among men these days, because we're naturally so geared to
being a part of a band of brothers. It seems to be a very deep,
inherent thing. At the moment, I'm in an area of Australia
called the Little Sandy Desert, and I'm dealing with Martu
aboriginal men. In about a month, they're going to round up
all the young men from all the settlements and they're going
to take them out to the bush and circumcise their penises.
Just a little way over they actually subincise them. (Peter
McAllister, interviewed by Thomas Rogers, The dramatic
decline of modern man, Salon, 14 Nov. 2010)
Displaced into the city

RE: "I'm dealing with Martu aboriginal men. In about a
month, they're going to round up all the young men from all
the settlements and they're going to take them out to the
bush and circumcise their penises. Just a little way over
they actually subincise them."
I wonder how this would look if we replaced the periods with
exclamation marks?
"I'm dealing with Martu aboriginal men! In about a month,
they're going to round up all the young men from all the
settlements and they're going to take them out to the bush
and circumcise their penises!! Just a little way over they
actually subincise them!!!!"
Yes, as I thought, more honest. I hope you enjoy the show of what
finely-muscled Martu men can do to boys they've taken out into the
942
bush (take a break to sneak-peak on the boys just a little way over
"actually being subincised"!?). Remember, though, if ever back in the
city you see a lot of men rounding up street kids for maybe something
similarly penile-related, you probably ought to switch modes and
report it rather than report ON it. I'm sure they're actually just being
made manly men, but displaced into the less virile, less vigorappreciating city, it'll be deemed wrong.
-----
What do we expect from anthropologists?

Anthropologists find that our earliest ancestors were greater athletes,
less "weak," than we are. It seems near frustratingly difficult to argue
for the virtues of apparently effeminate civitas, in their company. But
what should we expect with those who stayed all the way? For if at
some point before certification they judged their studies' brawny
performance a bit of a no-thing, juvenile, a bore, wouldn't they have
soon-thereafter abandoned apish men for the couth and actually
interesting?
Could it be that once modern wo/man is finally past all its
primitiveness fetishizing, its astute angling over others amongst the
civilized, s/he will conclude that there is in fact nothing much
interesting to be learned from past shells, our discards? Rather than
just evolution taking us a different way, maybe we just grew moral,
considerate and considering, and moved on ... for a reason.
-----
Shakespeare's 2 cents
"Let me have men about me that are fat; Sleek-headed [i.e.,
bald] men, and such as sleep o' nights. Yond Cassius has a
943
lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are
dangerous."
"Julius Caesar" (Act 1, Scene2) (austinboy, response to post)
*
This article is exhibit one.
What a dumb premise. How do we define fitness? Brawn?
Speed? Virility? Then why aren't the chimps running things?
And which ancestors? Paleolithic, neolithic? The romans?
From this perspective it's been nothing but downhill since the
days that H. erectus was cock of the walk with their weakling
smartypants use of fire and refined toolmaking and cooked
food. (dogu44)
*
"The British archers at Agincourt could draw a longbow at
about 150 lbs with good accuracy. This is more than twice the
draw of modern longbows of about 60 lbs. The archers started
training as young boys."
This is true (though you may have overstated the draw weight
of those bows).
Yet, the English would eventually put aside the longbow in
favor of the musket, even though your average musketeer was
less deadly than your average longbowman (until rifled
cartridges became more available).
So why the change? Because musketeers were a more reliable
option. Lost longbowmen could take upwards of a year to
replace; musketeers a matter of weeks. This made armies that
utilized musketeers more effective, since losses could be
replaced much easier.
My point? Longbowmen may have been physically strong and
effective specialized troops, but technology (in this case,
muskets) made an average man the match of a highly trained
longbowman. Society doesn't need to count on large numbers
944
of men to be exceptionally strong or athletic, thanks to

technology. (moidalize)
*
Society's Development and Evolution
This article completely ignores the fact, as a society...we have
evolved to the point where intellectually man can develop
since he is no longer tasked with basic needs every day.
This specialization has allowed development since innovation
happens around those circumstances.
The non-scientific humour seems trite and precocious to me.
Thank you for wasting my time, Thomas Rogers.
You made no mention of the size of mankind's brain
dwindling, just the size of his dick. Thank you for that.
(Ra_earth_wind-Fire)
*
One example that came to my mind is that in the running of
the first "marathon", the runner died. After running 26 miles.
Today, tens of thousands compete in marathons without ill
affect. If ancient men were so fast, fit and hearty, shouldn't a
long run like that have been a piece of cake? Or the death
noted as really unusual?
One thing you can't argue with it that people used to live far
shorter lives -- nasty, brutal and short. Again, as Silence
points out, generation after generation of men killed
themselves in pointless, endless wars of aggression. Women
died in childbirth. The average lifespan was roughly 45-50,
and THAT assumes you didn't die in childbirth or from some
infection or plague, or got killed in war. Women didn't even
live long enough, on average, to go through menopause.
(Laure1962)
945
Tough times
It could have been that our ancestors were not in fact stronger and
faster than we are, anthropologists could have uncovered that by 20
they were in fact so beat upon they had the constitutions of modernday 90 year olds, bones of brittle not hard metal, so long as we
concerned about perhaps lost virility no one who once ranged about
the plains, prepared to prey on or otherwise be preyed upon by beasts
and other men, can easily be apprehended by the brain as "weak." For
me, it doesn't do to show how those physically-softened but strongin-mind are truly more potent, or to show how the flabby are more
predictable and less riseable -- and therefore actually better for the
overall health and maintenance (the sturdy constitution) of the
"commonwealth": our complaint must rest with those concerned to
make the "issue" about strength and weakness in the first place, for
such people are orienting / priming, setting parameters around a
debate which will leave no room for valuing things most valuable
about our finally becoming civilized.
Men don't become "strong" when, rather than abuse their boys
through the kinds of "hardening" rituals they themselves might have
been subject to, they instead seek to free them from all that trauma
and seek another way -- they grow kind, compassionate. When we
start finding extreme physical exertion a bit exhausting to watch /
experience, and hard to imagine anyone want doing / celebrating, we
haven't gone soft, but become a bit more mature in our tastes.
Chimps weren't our ancestors, but I would suggest that when we're in
the right frame of mind there's nothing about virile homo erectuses or
now-"redeemed" bone-hardened 4 ft- tall Victorian factory workers
that should draw us to agree to recognize much of a link with them
either. Our concern is how to make our world more kind and fun -not more virile or more fit. I know that the 18th-century liberal Brits
fended off their conservative "kin" by arguing that you could have as
much, a nation of shopkeepers, of fanciful fops, and still also the
strongest navy and most assured nation ever known, but this still
946
tipped the hat too much to those primitive-enough to still insist atbottom it has to be about meek and strong, meek and strong: as if to
move too far away from that, is to lose all that is most truly, assuredly,
human. Their fancy is okay, but BECAUSE it's proved itself just
another variant of the strong: the first stretches of a kind, welfare
state -- the 18th-century genteel were for animal rights, child-safety,
against slavery -- may have been defended by such thinking, but it
wasn't born out of it.
If we agree to this, to argue in terms of virility and strength, we are
agreeing to enter into a darker period of human existence: for no age
built on commerce, entertainment, experimentation and self-growth,
is not ever surely insusceptible to being charged luxurious and fallen
-- better to go back into base mode, less ample mode, more
restricting, more striving mode, where just being part meant
demonstrating you had it in you to live in tough times. But later, a
more mature generation will emerge, that will shirk you off like the
Tudor courtiers did their numbskull, French (effeminacy)-fearing,
dark age ancestors. They might relapse too into numbskullery, but at
some point humanity will streamline, and then just grow, peacefully
on.
Link: The dramatic decline of modern man (Salon)
---------SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2010

Spending time with better people
Welcome to the second session of Salon's Reading Club,

everyone. For those just joining us, we're discussing Jonathan
Franzen's new novel, "Freedom." Last week, we talked about
the first part of the book, "Good Neighbors," through the end
947
of Patty's "autobiography" (pages 1 through 187). This week,

we'll consider half of the second part, "2004," reading
through the end of the chapter titled "Enough Already" (pages
191 to 382).
[. . .]
All of this raises a question I've been wanting to ask since we
started, concerning an observation people often make about
Franzen's (and many other authors') characters, which is that
they are "unlikable." I confess, I've grown to hate such
remarks. It makes me feel like we're all back in grammar
school, talking about which kids are "nice" and which kids are
"mean." It's a willfully naive and blinkered way to approach a
work of literature.
James Wood, in his book "How Fiction Works," wrote that
this complaint implies that "artists should not ask us to try to
understand characters we cannot approve of -- or not until
after they have firmly and unequivocally condemned them."
That we might recognize a character's unappealing qualities
while simultaneously seeing life through her eyes, "and that
this moving out of ourselves into realms beyond our daily
experience might be a moral and sympathetic education of its
own kind," doesn't seem to occur to far too many readers.
Wood calls this sort of criticism, so common in Amazon
reader reviews, a "contagion of moralizing niceness."
Patty is not nice. She does some bad things, and she can be
grouchy and bitter. I wouldn't necessarily want her as a
friend, but then that's not really an option because she's not a
real person. She's a literary character -- which means it's not
imperative that we take a moral stance on every single thing
she does. Literature is an experiment of the imagination, and
if we don't try to leave behind our contemporary compulsion
to pass judgment on everything and everyone when we enter
948
into that experiment, then we are the ones who lose out.
Speaking of "beyond our daily experience," I for one found
Richard's views on "female bullshit" fascinating and
astringently delightful. Few women ever get a glimpse of the
inside of a consummate womanizer's mind, and I, like
axelrod, underlined the passage where a client's flirtatious
wife makes what she thinks are challenging remarks about
Richard's music and then "waited, with parted lips and a
saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence -- the
drama of being her -- was registering." How I love that
miniature, well-barbed character sketch!
So, fellow Salon Reading Club members, what do you think?
Do you find the characters in "Freedom" likable or not -- and
does it matter? (Laura Miller, Why must a novels characters
be likeable?, Salon, 11 Sept. 2010)
Tweaking
You give those who complain about having to spend so much time
with unlikeable characters, quite the scolding. You sick an erudite
critic on them, and equate them all to Amazon-commenter slosh. I
admit to appreciating spending time with characters who show what
it is to live better than I currently now do. Some of this same desire is
expressed in the novel, toward the end (please forgive the small
cheat), when certain characters address why they seek Walter out
(though you probably thought these imperfect meanderers, just
adults, the mature turn-away from implausible mary janes). MY
desire for someone better, at least, was motivated FOR a desire for
moral / sympathetic education, something I thought I found less of in
this author's knowing descent than I might of if I spent more time
with someone who found means to be generous-hearted and open in
a world in dispirit / defeat, alongside an author / narrator (or authordirected narrator, if you prefer) who himself knows the inner-
949
dialogue of such people best for its matching his own. (Note: I do like
Franzen, though, just not as much as I like, say, Barbara Kingsolver,
who I just sense to be a grander, more beautiful human being.) Maybe
there are others out there amongst the complainers who aren't simply
interested in spending more time before their own mirrors? And let's
be fair: these people ARE (meant to be) us. Be sure, many of those
who think they see inferiors are just being given a taste of how an
intelligent, disinterested other could show them to actually be.
Franzen would meet them, ignore their petty judgments and see their
own Pattyness pretty plainly -- and this no doubt is part of Franzen's
point, and perhaps, stern intent ("You are, you are, you are -- flawed
[with some upside]; you are how others see you, but also how others
made you to be.").
RE: "She's a literary character -- which means it's not
imperative that we take a moral stance on every single thing
she does. Literature is an experiment of the imagination,
and if we don't try to leave behind our contemporary
compulsion to pass judgment on everything and everyone
when we enter into that experiment, then we are the ones
who lose out."
I guess we see here more evidence of why you dumped hate on
"Reality Hunger" -- that is, his "Fiction these days is just clothed
biography; why not just go for the even realer stuff?, attend most
closely to those with enough self-trust to bypass the well-guarded
avenue to mostly hide?" In my judgment, if you experience a
character as not just believable, but real; if you experience reading a
novel as being proxy to, involved with, actual happenings -- i.e., it's
really real while you read it; you follow along because someone's
situation is so convincing it looks to delineate your own fate -- then
when someone thereafter spooks out at you for your
misapprehension, like Laura here does, consider that SHE may be the
one inherently in the wrong. What is happening here is as close to
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real as Franzen could make it, arguably so that whatever moral

stances / considerations, disappointments and accomplishments it
encourages / delineates could also be applied to that oh-so-close
simulacrum to the read world we emerge from -- the real world -- so
that modest, deflating Franzen would be in the grand position to say,
"here's about where we are; here's what it is to be one moral point in
our seemingly played-out but actually still possibly -- thank god -- ex
potentia moral universe," and have others skip argument, discussion,
right to feeling their way to solutions / renewal. Some fiction IS really
just reality once more before us, with some tweaking, and with a
guide -- we'd sense if it was just one ultimately limited / skewed /
directed someone else's experiment / opinion. Yes of course, though,
we shouldn't just judge so we don't have to courageously,
imaginatively, reflect and explore -- Laura's right about that.
Link: Why must a novels character be likeable? (Salon)
---------Frozen Franzenage
What do you think of the phrase "Franzenfreude"?

I think in German it literally means "joy in Franzen." But I'm
no stranger to literary envy and am in no position to deplore it
in others.
There's been discussion in the Salon Reading Club
about which character in "Freedom" most represents
you. Which one is it?
All four characters draw equally on my experience of life,
though I admit to having a particular fondness for the
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youngest of them.
The characters in "Freedom" appear to make
decisions, but they're all rooted in their experience
and biology. It's striking, for example, how much like
Patty's father Walter turns out to be, and her
relationships with both Walter and Richard make all
sorts of sense on the basis of her upbringing. Where
do you come down, ultimately, on the question of
free will?
This is exactly the kind of question I want to leave to the
reader. The novelist is responsible for creating an experience,
not for interpreting it.
The book has received a tremendous amount of
publicity. Is there another book that you really liked
that has recently come out, that you think might have
been overshadowed by your own?
I've been so busy with publicity that I haven't been able to
read any recent releases, but reliable friends have told me that
Jennifer Egan's and Gary Shteyngart's new books are very
good.
Of the criticisms you've read of the book, which hits
home the hardest?
Well, I don't read reviews, so I'm not familiar with the
criticisms. But I'm sad when I do a public event and
somebody tells me -- as if an author would want to hear this!
-- that my characters are unlikable. I feel like I'm being told
that I myself am unlikable.
[. . .]
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Obama famously was photographed with a copy of

"Freedom." If he read it, what do you hope he took
away?
I hope he was so preoccupied with urgent national affairs that
he wasn't able to take away much more than a general
enjoyment of the experience. I didn't vote for him in
expectation of his mooning around pondering literary novels.
In a way, the book is about watching flawed humans
during the downturn of an empire using their
glorious "freedom" to do damage to those they love,
to animals, to other countries. In writing the book,
were you thinking of George W. Bush's use and
misuse of the word "freedom"?
I was indeed. (Jonathan Franzen interviewed by Laura
Miller, Reading Club interview: Jonathan Franzen
answers your questions, Salon, 25 Sept. 2010)
----That's It?
I was somewhat disappointed in the short, rather superficial
answers to the questions considering all the hype this Q&A
received over the past month. (Jason C)
Jason C
He knows we're looking for more, to open him up, so he answers
questions in such a way that HE remains tight and WE are likely to
feel as if we were less interested in answers than in satisfaction at his
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expense ... even if we weren't (we're all flawed, don't you know -though much more flawed than our superb but self-effacing and
delightfully polished and restrained god, Obama. [Franzen knows
this, and so his flawed self still has one up on all of us.]). It's not an
interview, it's a moral lesson. The best you can get from him is a draw.
He'll offer an answer that can be readily argued as inarguably
complete and honest -- all what we said we were looking for -- but
feels deliberately cut-short and essentially withholding. And you can
drumbeat keep moving on through with your interview. The world is
made a better place.
He doesn't read reviews ... One wonders how much of the current love
for Franzen (including Oprah's), is born out of our seeking abeyance
and approval by the cold and withholding? Even in his icyness, he's
probably just responding to our needs, and resents the hell out of us
for this.
Even in a frozen Franzenage, I'd still "take" Kingsolver. But not
without some power-ups -- his chill is everywhere, man!
Link: Reading Club interview: Jonathan Franzen answers your
questions (Salon)
---------SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2010
Provoking the dread
For me, the end of October is always slightly tinged with
dread -- provoked not by Halloween spooks, not even by
election season, but by the advent of something called
NaNoWriMo. If those syllables are nothing but babble to you,
then I salute you. They stand for National Novel Writing
Month.
[. . .]
The purpose of NaNoWriMo seems laudable enough. Above
all, it fosters the habit of writing every single day, the closest
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thing to a universally prescribed strategy for eventually

producing a book. NaNoWriMo spurs aspiring authors to
conquer their inner critics and blow past blocks. Only by
producing really, really bad first drafts can many writers
move on to the practice that results in decent work: revision.
[. . .]
I am not the first person to point out that "writing a lot of
crap" doesn't sound like a particularly fruitful way to spend an
entire month, even if it is November. And from rumblings in
the Twitterverse, it's clear that NaNoWriMo winners
frequently ignore official advice about the importance of
revision; editors and agents are already flinching in
anticipation of the slapdash manuscripts they'll shortly
receive.
[. . .]
Why does giving yourself permission to write a lot of crap so
often seem to segue into the insistence that other people read
it? [. . .] But even if every one of these 30-day novelists
prudently slipped his or her manuscript into a drawer, all the
time, energy and resources that go into the enterprise strike
me as misplaced.
[. . .]
It was yet another depressing sign that the cultural spaces
once dedicated to the selfless art of reading are being taken
over by the narcissistic commerce of writing. And an
astonishing number of individuals who want to do the former
will confess to never doing the latter.
[. . .]
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This is not to say that I don't hope that more novels will be
written, particularly by the two dozen-odd authors whose new
books I invariably snatch up with a suppressed squeal of
excitement. [. . .] But I'm confident those novels would still
get written even if NaNoWriMo should vanish from the earth.
Yet while there's no shortage of good novels out there, there is
a shortage of readers for these books. (Laura Miller, Better
yet, DONT write that novel, Salon, 2 Nov. 2010)
Valid complaint
Re: And from rumblings in the Twitterverse, it's clear that
NaNoWriMo winners frequently ignore official advice about the
importance of revision; editors and agents are already flinching in
anticipation of the slapdash manuscripts they'll shortly receive.
This to me is the problem. Potentially, if every child was born into a
challenging, nurturing, uber-literate environment (and what are we
as a species fighting for, if not that), we could have a whole
population efforting to write their first novel some November-on, and
they'd all smack of unmistakable promise -- and given the evidence of
such good work, we'd force ourselves beyond the appealing
workableness of the idea that there is never more than a near
curriculum-containing number of true artists out there, and get to
work figuring out how the most appropriate readers of a work do end
up finding that particular work from amongst the ridiculous treasurehorde of excess (if you only had twenty readers of your work, if they
were all Shelleys, Coleridges, or Alcotts, would you care?).
But since in actuality few do the editing, the refinement, the beingfair-to-their-own-material, to their own potential ability to articulate
best (or at least better) what they want to say, you do have the sense
that few amongst them actually are literate, really appreciate what
literacy has to offer you OVER dopamine-rush excitements in
whatever form -- whether hurried novel-writing, or losing some two
956
hundred pounds of fat (and gaining a taut mind that thereafter only
thinks of muscle) to urgent use of the treadmill -- and I think it is fair
game here for Laura to insist on their trying-out a measured bit of
library book light-lifting instead.
Too bad, though, because there is a more interesting conversation to
be had here, one that would challenge literate writers to appreciate
that given all that they now tend to do when they edit, they might be
at the point where their work would benefit more than it loses from
being loosed out of grasp before the second-glance can reconvene and
reconsider.
You work that superior dance, church lady.
How do you survive existing among such lesser beings?
softdog
@softdog
Re: "You work that superior dance, church lady.
How do you survive existing among such lesser beings?"
After our conversation / essential agreement on "Almost Famous,"
my sense was we were more the same than different. Still, I included
way too many "works" in my first post, and am too humble-feeling
now to orient on your most-any-other-time fair question.
This is a harder issue to just agree on than you might think, though.
Unlike Laura, I find what we get most of from our "best" writers is
agreeable, well-written work, that should still ultimately launch us
into tirades out of it being at bottom too nice, too safe, too much in
accord, too much of what literature is not supposed to be about, but
doesn't because we have enough sense of our current fragility, that
there are, unfortunately, possibilities out there whose consideration
we know would rock us silly, to go anywhere near broaching the issue.
So I think it is convenient for these writers, or for literate reviewers
957
like Laura, that there are maybe no massings out there right now (for
me, Stewart and Colbert included) properly identified as both
populist AND sane, because the truth of this fact is so informed by
generous lending-to and earnest experience of, that almost any
counter is too accurately sized up as ignorant or gross-appetiteinhibition born to do anything but the preferred: abate self-doubts,
and root current preferences more trenchedly in place.
Right now at least, I do not trust earnest, mass efforts. It is the
aristocratic "take," and such can be cruelly intended and completely
misinformed, but right now individualism, a fully-formed personality,
is in the path of aggressive, swarming, insistent group-think /
impulse, and I despise when those who ought to know better praise
the inclinations of those who would eat them up. Other times, it could
well be democratic, generous, and open: ranging, wild, Louisianan
sniper-fire that makes mincemeat of ordered British regimentation.
But not now.
@Patrick Mc... Halston

Patrick: "But since in actuality few do the editing, the
refinement, the being-fair-to-their-own-material..."
Serious question: How do you know the ratio of people who
are self-critical and realistic to those who are selfcongratulatory and delusional?
Patrick: "...few amongst them actually are literate, really
appreciate what literacy has to offer you OVER dopaminerush excitements in whatever form -- whether hurried novelwriting..."
A regimented writing exercise might be many things, but a
generator of dopamine-rush excitement is not one of them.
Writing eight pages of text per day, even lousy text, still
requires a degree of patience, focus and frustration. The way
you describe it, the writer is sitting there merrily typing away,
going "Wooo hooo! I'm making literature here!" and then
958
collapsing into a misguided heap of euphoria.

Patrick: "I think it is fair-game here for Laura to insist on
their trying-out a measured bit of library-book light-lifting
instead."
Again with the Fallacy of Mutual Exclusivity. There is no
reason why a person could not both participate in NNWM and
also devote time and effort to reading more. (Obviously that
person would be strapped for time if he tried to do both in
November, but you get my drift.) (Xrandadu Hutman,
response to post))
@Xrandadu Hutman
Re: "Serious question: How do you know the ratio of people
who are self-critical and realistic to those who are selfcongratulatory and delusional?"
Okay. Honestly. Laura's comment that few in fact do the editing that
they all ostensibly agree is required, is a big tip-off. Also, I don't
believe we are going through a time when any collective effort that
would principally appeal to the self-critical and realistic, is going to
reach mass form. Franzen frowned on Oprah, for good reason; she is
still too much sensation. As mentioned in my post to softdog, I am
thinking of Stewart and Colbert's massing-for-sanity as well.
Re: "A regimented writing exercise might be many things,
but a generator of dopamine-rush excitement is not one of
them. Writing eight pages of text per day, even lousy text,
still requires a degree of patience, focus and frustration.
The way you describe it, the writer is sitting there merrily
typing away, going "Wooo hooo! I'm making literature
here!" and then collapsing into a misguided heap of
euphoria."
959
Well, there is some play here. But, yeah, I considered this point before
I wrote, but still wrote what I wrote because it smacked more true
than false. Pretty much the entirety of a year-long war can be (largely,
essentially) irrational, primarily dopamine-fueled and sustained,
despite the pin-point shot amidst the errant-fire, the frequent
intermissions, the thereafter General's talk of strategy and tactics; a
one-month slog at a novel is a stretch beyond the evening blur, but to
me, still readily potentially mostly rush. Barbarians used to raid barechested, mostly drunk, sacrificing themselves to their foes; they were
coordinated enough to master running, charging, and axe-slicing, but
they went about their albeit-somewhat-coordinated business in poor
fashion for victory. I know I'm not convincing you with this, but it's
what comes to mind.
Re: "Again with the Fallacy of Mutual Exclusivity. There is
no reason why a person could not both participate in
NNWM and also devote time and effort to reading more.
(Obviously that person would be strapped for time if he
tried to do both in November, but you get my drift.)"
But Laura is saying that something about (the coloring of) this
movement attracts people who in the end DON'T do both, and it may
be true that something of the selling of this movement actually
further UPRAISES those intent on exhaling themselves all over the
rest of us, and DISCOURAGES, wicked step sister-like pushes away,
those into self-recalibration and interested, respectful, otherattendance.
Do You Really Believe, @Patrick....

... that people who try to write a novel during NaNoWiMo
really need Laura Miller, or you, to "insist" that they "[try] out
a measured bit of library-book light-lifting instead"?
I just don't know who it is you people are talking to. I've never
960
met anybody involved in this activity who wasn't also an avid

reader. Maybe not during November - but are they really
cheating the literary world if they don't read other people's
book EVERY month of their lives?
This is a way for people to try out writing, rather than just
thinking about it. There are, of course, other ways to try out
writing - but this is a way that a bunch of people seem to enjoy
and get something out of. I have no idea why "real writers"
like you and Laura Miller feel the need to denigrate the effort,
much less "insist" (!) that they do something else instead.
People enjoying themselves, engaging with the written word,
having a sense of accomplishment, maybe getting past some
of their blocks - what a disaster for Real Literature! (Spectrum
Rider)
@Spectrum Rider
A whole novel in a single month, is like a plateful of hotdogs stuffed
into your mouth. If you market book writing as if you're appealing to
the carnival-accomplishment taste of the Doritos crowd, then I think
you should expect for the discerning to shy away, and creatures of
appetite to be all over it!
Like I said, massings can afford safety, and be all about wonderful
productivity and shared fun. A multiplication of but not really
different from the group games that lead Mary Shelley to write
"Frankenstein," and inspired her for the first time to actually feel fully
individuated and self-determined. My experience of groups right now
suggests this isn't much the time for this kind of thing, that just
hearing of collective enterprise should spur on individualists to take
on the mass. Laura I think is intent to take them on -- she wants them
to improve. This makes her different from many of the cruelly and
truly snobbish (e.g. most movie critics who went after fan-boys of
"Inception"), who would produce in their own mind a land full of
stupids even if no such constituted the actual lay of the land.
961
She's Saying It, @Patrick

"But Laura is saying that something about (the coloring of)
this movement attracts people who in the end DON'T do both,
and it may be true that something of the selling of this
movement actually further UPRAISES those intent on
exhaling themselves all over the rest of us, and
DISCOURAGES, Cinderalla-like pushes away, those into selfrecalibration and interested, respectful, other-attendence."
Yes, she's saying it. Based on the NNWM people I've know, I
don't believe it. Why do you?
It seems to be an opinion shared by "real" writers and "real"
editors, but not by the folks on the ground here. I think it's
sheer snobbishness. Those foolish jerks who THINK they can
write a novel - they simply MUST be spoiling it for the rest of
us! (Spectrum Rider)
*
@McEvoy-Halston
"we could have a whole population efforting to write their first
novel"
I'll read your criticism when your literacy and writing skills
improve to the point that it's beyond babbling incoherence.
And "efforting?" SERIOUSLY??? (Discoursarian)
*
Patrick: "Laura is saying that something about (the coloring
of) this movement attracts people who in the end DON'T do
both, and it may be true that something of the selling of this
movement actually further UPRAISES those intent on
exhaling themselves all over the rest of us, and
DISCOURAGES, Cinderalla-like pushes away, those into self-
962
recalibration and interested, respectful, other-attendence."

I realize that's what Laura is saying; what I don't see is any
proof of it. Upraises how? Discourages how? The way I see it,
if people are encouraged to write, and to connect with each
other over their writing, then a likely by-product is that they
will also be reading each other's works. I would also think that
the experience of writing a whole novel would bring a fresh
perspective to the act of reading.
I just don't understand the very idea of Laura Miller knocking
what is essentially a program to encourage people's
imaginations and creativity. She's supposed to be a person
with an appreciation for the act of creativity, yet here she is
taking a dump on those who would have the gall to participate
in the creative process. It seems entirely wrongheaded to me,
and I feel like it is, in itself, an article gimmick (the idea being
that more people will click on a negative story than a positive
one) rather than a genuine sentiment.
Like I said, imagine a film lover telling people they're foolish
for participating in the 48-Hour Film Project.
Or imagine a music critic scoffing at a program that
encourages bands to write and record songs, because the
critic thinks "The last thing the world needs is another album"
and "A lot of those bands probably won't do the hard work of
remixing their recordings." (Xrandadu Hutman)
Xrandadu
Re: "Like I said, imagine a film lover telling people they're
foolish for participating in the 48-Hour Film Project.
Or imagine a music critic scoffing at a program that
encourages bands to write and record songs, because the
critic thinks "The last thing the world needs is another
album" and "A lot of those bands probably won't do the
hard work of remixing their recordings."
963
I do not believe that Laura is telling people to desist mostly because

she sighs that the last thing the world needs is yet another novelwriter; she does so because she believes / senses / knows that the last
thing these would-be novelists need is another avenue to extend their
indulgent selves. Rather, if they are up to the truly considerable and
self-and-other-benefiting enterprise, she believes they should first
broaden their range through the compare-and-contrast of literature,
become more self-aware, profound, interesting, and then launch at us
-- at whatever speed -- something perhaps unrefined but obviously
considerable that might take us aback, drives us some place
unfamiliar most everyone interesting will at least consider exploring.
If I was noting from 48-Hour Film Projects that the produced work is
not really working to deepen film-makers, and in fact was cooperating
in making thin novices feel that their high from manic self-exertion /
enterprise and "I made a film!" exhilaration, also really comes from
their having demonstrated that they are such quick-learners, so
foruitously constituted, that they have moved beyond the patient,
slow learning ostensibly necessarily required for true
accomplishment, then I would alert them to the fact that Deweyite
"learning through action" true wisdom is clearly failing, at least for
them, that they're going to have to learn to appreciate extending
themselves on turf that will provide them with less pleasing, more
confounding, resistance. If I noticed otherwise, that these projects
were working not just to extend their abilities but deepen what they
have to offer, then I might even discourage them from too much
attendance to what others have come up with, and attack those who
would school down their efforts through calls for a more disciplined,
restrained, approach.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston: "I do not believe that Laura is
telling people to desist mostly because she sighs that the last
964
thing the world needs is yet another novel-writer..."

That is explicitly what she said. In any case, I'm not sure what
is to be benefited from doing guesswork as to Laura Miller's
motives.
Patrick: "she does so because she believes / senses / knows
that the last thing these would-be novelists need is another
avenue to extend their indulgent selves."
Another avenue in addition to what? Are there a bunch of
other write-a-novel-in-a-month programs out there?
Patrick: "she believes they should first broaden their range
through the compare-and-contrast of literature"
I see you're doubling down on the Fallacy of Mutual
Exclusivity.
Patrick: "If I was noting from 48-Hour Film Projects that the
produced work is not really working to deepen film-makers"
The point of the project, nor of the NNWM, is about the
creative process. The NNWM program materials make it very
clear that for the purposes of this exercise, they favor quantity
over quality. Obviously, the NNWM creators know full well
the limitations that come with that approach, and, let me
repeat this for about the fifth time: They aren't claiming
people are going to end up with ready-to-publish works.
Patrick: "...and in fact was cooperating in making thin-novices
feel that their high...also really comes from their having
demonstrated that they are such quick-learners, so foruitously
constituted, that they have moved beyond the patient, slow
965
learning ostensibly necessarily required for true

accomplishment..."
Wow, you really labored to come up with that mashedpotatoes pile of assumptions, didn't you? That's practically a
miniature Devil's Tower of Worst Case Scenario.
Sorry, but with everybody making hot dog metaphors, I can't
help but join in with some potatoes. (Xrandadu Hutman)
*
@Lary Crews
I bet you had to walk to school in snow up to your chest,
uphill, both ways, too!
Eh, different people are different. Anyone who doesn't
understand that is not human enough to be the kind of writer
I would want to read. Some people need a push, or a
challenge, or some way to turn off those nagging voices in
their heads.
Whatever works. NaNoWriMo works for some.
To you, and Laura and Patrick - get over yourselves. You're
not that special. (khalleron)
khalleron
You believe it's hard to get writing, and that NaNoWriMo is about
challenging, prompting, cajoling / aggravating people to finally get
doing what they've always wanted to do. It's a much-needed /
appreciated agitant, not some facile enabler: it's actually working to
bring people a bit closer to where Laura would hope they become, and
it could only be out of still-haughty ignorance that some good person
like her could disparage it. Some of us see the situation differently,
sense the movement is somehow mostly about gathering,
aggrandizing, authoratizing mass "preferences" (your brave extension
is for us a sighted effort of significant overlay we are no so stupid as to
966
dismiss), and hope some people out there in some credible position to
do so will insist on doing the soon truly dangerous but intrinsically
kind / hopeful, and prompt, aggravate, members of the forming
assemble so that it settles less readily / assuredly into something that
would block from consideration what is clear-seeing, en potentia -sane.
When Stephanie Zacharek insisted in her review of "Inception" that
Nolan is no Hitchcock, she wasn't just being smug; she was trying to
be fair to her informed sense of what is truly right, and be helpful. She
sensed the encroachment, the false substitution, and knew it was
ultimately instigated out of a need to do the required to block from
view authorities that still "stand" that complicate efforts towards
uncontested group-think, that could disturb one or another from
trance, and played to whatever part exists in those who are
succumbing that has been drawn previously to what she has to say, in
hopes of keeping that much more sanity "in play."
Laura is doing the same thing here. If you like what Laura has to say
before this, please know for sure that if she met more of you, caught
better sight of how much you actually do read, actually participated in
the event, and read more of your produced work, she wouldn't think
any different. You honestly think you want to "acquaint" her, but
don't realize just how much you would rather more have her
succumb. (The instant Laura stood amongst you, you'd know the
issue is how to break her -- she will not cooperate, "friend.") We know
you're about the modest, the smallest pretense, claiming only the
tiniest of space and most modest portion of our time, but we sense
something in the nature of the time we live in that tells us you're
actually already probably at some level aware you're going to be
carried along to trample all over us. You think elites like Laura are the
ones with power -- and right now you'd prefer to never think different
-- but power now really belongs in those who would abstain from
being interesting and would orient the elite to be less true counter
and more an assumed part of the story. The most sane and good
"about town," won't go down without a fight, for both your and our
967
sakes. Franzen obliged Oprah, and "Freedom" was his proof of

submission; his friend, Laura, liked his book but was irked by its
terminating capitulation, and stands still, trying to not let you down.
@Patrick
Oh, did I hit a nerve?
Good.
I love puncturing pomposity, it's my fourth or fifth favorite
pastime.
Boo! (khalleron)
----Why not...
As a published writer, NaNoWriMo interested me. I have
previously only written poetry, and if there's anything that
sells fewer copies than fiction, it's poetry. In fact, fewer poetry
books are actually read, purchased, or stolen than any other
genre. I applaud anyone who picks up a book of poetry and
actually reads it. (Windebygirl)
*
Everyone's entitled to an opinion
I'm am an independent author who'd never written anything
longer than a short story before learning of NaNoWriMo back
in 2007. (Gldrummond)
*
Respectfully, you missed the point
Laura,
I found your piece and read it thoughtfully. I completely
understand your point of view and agree that you make some
fine points when speaking in generalities.
968
However, NaNoWriMo's contribution to art and letters is not

about the hundred thousand participants who never finish
their novel. Nor is it about the thousands more who fail to
properly set the first draft aside, move on to another project
to reinforce the habit of writing each day, and later return to
the initial manuscript for an honest and thorough rewrite.
NaNoWriMo, in my opinion, isn't even entirely for the
hundreds of writers who *will* follow the proper steps,
perform the due diligence and just fall short on the talent
curve.
NaNoWriMo, in my opinion, is for two kinds of people: buried
treasures and lifelong readers eager to try their hand at
creating what they have so voraciously consumed. (Statesboro
blues)
*
It was about two weeks when I read Andrew O'Herir's (a
writer whom I've enjoyed a great deal) review of the newlyreleased "Secretariat".
Between the gratuitous references to "burning crosses",
etcetera?...I reacted by writing a letter (the tone of which was
a mix of irritation and disappointment) in which I basically
asked why in the world O'Herir was suddenly writing such
transparently "click inducing" (as in most of the bait offered
by "Broadsheet") crap.
It just occurred to me (and, yes, Otherwise-Unengaged Me
has come back, this morning, to this letter thread)...Oh?..has
someone told Miller (whose work has always been duly
appreciated, without raising any sort of ruckus) that she
needs to write something that GETS MORE CLICKS!!!!!!
I think it was just last week that I wondered why she was
suddenly (and this is a cheap, obvious gimmick that's simply
become all-too-common on Salon) asking "What fictional
characters would YOU equip with modern
969
technology?....WRITE IN AND TELL US WHAT YOU

WOULD DO!!!!!!! We'll look forward to seeing your responses
on Salon.com!!!!!".
I read that (and I've obviously paraphrased it) and was
instantly reminded of the recent time when I heard that a
previously very-fine program produced by our local NPR
affiliate was going to be IMPROVED (!) by adding "listener
call-in, requests, and audience INTERACTION!!!!". (David
Terry, aka Dterrydraw)
*
What a cow!
Ms Miller,
You are an arrogant (insert ugly word of your choice).
You don't sell well and perhaps you need to read something
along the type of books you write: Article Writing for
Dummies. (Anya Khan)
You're entitled to your opinion...
But we all know what opinion's and diapers have in
common.... And well here's mine...(rasplundjr)
*
You are missing the point of NaNoWriMo
Laura,
I think you misunderstand both the purpose of NaNoWriMo
and the novel writing process.
NaNoWriMo does not claim that you will have a
*publishable* novel by the end of the month, nor does it claim
that you should send your NaNo novel off to agents. NaNo is
about getting words down on paper. I had to write 3,000
pages of crap to get to my 324-page (published by Simon &
Schuster) novel. (Dorothy hearst)
*
970
Poor woman wasn't a winner.

I suspect Ms. Miller attempted NaNoWriMo and failed. No
one could possibly be this worked up over something that
others do for fun without having personal experience with it.
Lol (BlueBKLYN)
*
Disappointing
Another published novelist here -- in about 10 countries, with
fiction nominated for major awards and, to top it off, a Ph.D.
and publications in VOGUE, NY TIMES, and many other
prestigious markets. Am I good enough to address you, Ms.
Miller? (Greeneyedkzin)
*
more than just writing
I have always loved reading Laura Miller's defense of readers,
and as someone who works in publishing I understand the
"don't flood the market with schlock you were encouraged to
write badly" message. But I think this time she's missed the
mark by focusing on what NaNoWriMo sometimes produces
(overeager novelists unwilling to revise) instead of what the
process provides. (meganlyn)
When someone's shown she no longer need be considered

Well, the whole spectrum has shown up to inform Laura she doesn't
know what she's talking about. Not just spurned participants, that is,
but well-published authors who've never tried the thing, as well as
editors who know slush-pile better than Laura does -- even of pickypicky literary journals. Heck, even the voice of all that is generous,
patient, allowing, reluctant, restrained, thoughtful and considering -David "draw" Terry -- has decided he must show up to let Laura know
971
she's maybe having a bit of an off-day with this one. David does all his
modesty and fairness in a way which probably makes more than just
me feel as if he's being wide-stanced into a corner while listening to
this most 'greeable of personages, but, overall, we're still though,
comfortably all-agreed: Laura is so beyond-all-evidence off on this
thing it may not even be unfair to start considering if she IS actually
lessening into a witch, an isolated cretin whose crime though is not
just ignorance but greedy jealousy, who figures some score that no
other than she is aware of will be settled if she collects together some
large share of clicks from out of other people's misery.
But is it possible for representatives of every position to "convene,"
representing the entirety of everything at-all possible to be
considered, and yet for it still to amount to a collective assembled to
keep out anything dissonant that does exist and that would provoke it
out of a drama it's drifting into and that JUST MUST be lived out?
Well, yes, it is. During the Great Depression, for instance. For a few
years at the commencement there were pot-shots taken at the
struggling / trying, but very soon everyone was agreed -- the
astonishingly literate and completely illiterate, the earnest and wisecracking: all -- that the people are as they are being presented here,
decent "folk" with no pretensions, giving it their best shot, doing the
intrinsically American and just trying to make something more of
themselves and of their lives, and only the hugest ass would know
them different. The few people who "objected," who argued, no, these
people are shrunk, lacking in sustenance, personality -- requiring not
a voice at the table but some beginning of a differentiated voice at-all
worth hearing -- hardly existed, and when present, hardly known,
gaining larger recognition only 30-years on, after the war, with the
beginning of a new era-long period where everything that was known
for sure could finally be seen in a different light, and be reevaluated.
As Morris Dickstein recently said of Nathaniel West, who saw in the
folk simply still the "drained-out" mass, he "would paint their fury
with respect, appreciating its awful, anarchic power and aware that
they had it in them to destroy civilization." Laura IS civitas. If people
972
like her succumb, soften their stance, see your point-of-view and try
in the future to be fairer to you, it's going to naught but prescribed
agreement the rest of the way on. If this isn't your thing, you're going
to have to learn to take solace with that maybe subsequent generation
who might better recall you, while you're removed from today's hotseat back to the corner playing solitaire.
The 60s, or 30s?

One final admission. The 1960s was not a time for restrained,
discerning readers (maybe not even for readers, so much more was it
into rock 'n roll, community life, and your own take); it was more
about letting out the previously contained / denied, the irrational, the
not-tried-out, than it was about the 2nd, 3rd, 4th careful re-edit. The
old T. S. Eliotian trinity of irony, ambiguity, paradox was being
challenged by a favoring of spirit and appetite, and the old guard
could only lament how even their best pupils were drifting away from
"profound and carefully organized" writing toward the "hopped-up"
and way-too-insufficiently considered (Dickstein, "Gates of Eden").
And it wasn't as it is now an elite Brooklyn/Berkeley control, but
funneling out of every variant nobody corner of the land. Any piece,
however inarticulate, that spoke your truth, was better than the
mountain-castle of learned but repressed naysayers, hiding. You had
at least begun, whereas their whole effort was about telling people not
to.
And the 60s was the best decade known to wo/man.
So if you think NaMoWrMo is mostly about recognizing, encouraging,
developing the at-least possibly beautiful that is so often contained by
intolerant, self-protecting elites -- your creativity, for instance -- look
back to the 60s: you've got ammo on your side that might balk back
arguments that you're not reading enough, or that you're not reading
the right type, or that you may be reading the right type but not in the
right way, without any recourse to proof of contra; for all the same
973
was said of even the intellectuals of the 60s, and who now looks to
Trilling as Ginsberg's master/better?
But if we're heading into another 30s / 40s, then understand that you
aren't going to prove true Romantics, together, urging on your own
voice / creativity, but a gobbling, intolerant horde -- the most
profoundly societal-inhibiting / repressive / scolding / alldetermining force; the soon-to-be-in Laura's ostensible place -- and
you'll be making sure that the few people like she who is not
dismayed, find no respected vehicle for their voice to be heard.
Link: Better yet, DONT read that novel (Salon)
----------
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2010

Absorption / Deflection
"In modern democratic nations, we usually don't actually kill our
leaders; we periodically throw them out of office and replace them
with revitalized substitutes. But the decline in potency of the leader,
his inexorable abandonment of us as we grow still is felt today. This is
because the leader is a less a figure of authority than he is a delegate,
someone who tells us to do what we tell him we want done, someone
who "takes the blame" for us. As poison container for our dissociated
alter, the leader is expected to absorb our violent feelings without
collapsing. Many societies actually designate "filth men" to help the
leader with this task, relatives who exchange blood with him so they
can "intercept" the poisonous feelings of the people directed at him.
In modern nations, cabinet members are our "filth men," and are
regularly sacrificed when the leader is under attack." (Llooyd
DeMause, Psychogenic Theory of History)
974
Is is possible that Jon Stewart and his gathering crowd are attempting
to serve as "filth men," in the way Lloyd describes? Jon Stewart has
Obama on his show to cement the link, and then gathers his crowd in
Washington to intercept / counter poisonous feelings ("insanity")
directed at him (Obama) during this unnerving midterm election.
Obama, we know, is losing Rahm, and for the most part seems more
"naked" than he does at other times (casual self in "supplicant" /
lower position on "Daily Show"). Tea Partiers will get their place; they
will find office at a time when Obama is less potent than he will likely
at some point once again become; but a considerable body has
manifested itself near the same time in Washington that shows it
exists to absorb / counter some / much of the hatred that Obama
might for the moment be imagined as not quite being able to handle
without "collapsing."
Different thought: We know that after long periods of growth, when
we're about to enter that horrifying stretch of time that follows manic
growth, the termination of the historical cycle, we're all inclined to
merge back with the engulfing mother and sacrifice substitutes of
ourselves to Her.
Is this move into government, in near proximity to socialist /
engulfing Obama, means for the Tea Party movement to in fact
become part of Her (Obama as agent of Mother) (something Jon
Stewart is also doing, and perhaps ultimately for the same reason, in
his own massing on Washington)? Should we expect them to function
as Gingrich et al. once did and continuously oppose the president? Or
will they at some point -- after he has suffered and endured their
anger, accepted their presence within government -- essentially serve
as extensions of him, and cripple -- believe it or not -- other righteous
"crazies"? Should we expect Tea Partiers to in fact quickly become
denatured -- offering up their own potency to Obama, perhaps -- a
non-story, and begin its own Obama-lead crackdown on people who
behave pretty much exactly like they did (excited, angry, claiming)
before their ascension to Washington?
Last thought: If Obama is Hoover -- someone elected principally to
975
ensure the Depression, and not "lead" our way through it -- he will
never become more present, less distant, in our lives. This will fall on
our subsequent delegate. From the beginning I remember Pat
Buchanan saying that Obama doesn't speak with heart; maybe rather
than a messiah, we rejoiced in the erection of a thoroughly / already
known, pretty place-holder, which would content / assure us as we
isolate ourselves and slowly succumb to the psychological
modifications that would drift us towards a simpler, more emotive,
less complicated leader. As is obvious, I'm not sure of what exactly we
truly wish of him, just yet.
Patrick
----Amendment:
Concerning my last thought: It may be that what we need time for
isn't just to slip into a more disassociated state, but to make a
forthcoming long Depression, extensive sacrifice, less guilt-arousing,
something we may in fact be doing by the likes of the apparent
scholarly return to / redemption of "culture of poverty" thinking,
which -- as it suggests government is limited in what it can do to
change people, and has historically been used to effectively stigmatize
the poor as being largely responsible for their own debased condition
-- works against the efforts of near-undeniably, wholly-conscious,
good people like Paul Krugman to make us feel like some foul part of
us must actually want sacrifices to not now allow the spending we
know from history would have prevented the Great Depression from
ever occurring in the first place.
Patrick
----Further thought: If a Depression was ensured during time of a
Democratic president and congress, this might prove far too guiltarousing for actual-sacrifice-wishing liberals to take, even if they had
already begun to make poverty a near-"natural," deply-ingrained
976
"condition," via the resurrection of culture of poverty theories. A

Republican-lead congress would abate all guilt, entire. "We were just
18-months in, and were prevented from the further progress we
would surely have effected!"
My sense of most liberals now, is that they would feel very
uncomfortable if they actually were able to forestall the depression
and initiate a period of unrepentant, all-benefiting growth. Reason:
Mother looms, and is ready to destroy any show of an unwillingness
to just go along with the curtailment of individuality. What they want
is the guaranteed depression, guaranteed sacrifices, then -- like they
did in the last great depression -- to join the masses, imagining them
not now as "crazies" but as the unjustly suffering -- the folk. I feel the
compulsion toward this narrative is very powerful, and hope that
there are enough of the advanced psychoclass out there to show that
very visibly, some liberals have now almost entirely escaped the need
to shift from being innovative thinkers to being depressed ones. Who
wants to wait for the termination of a ten-year depression, and some
giant war, for liberals to once again show their stuff? Show instead
that instead of being incarcerated, rendered invisible, this generation
of the more evolved can frustrate the grotesque compulsions of the
regressing middle.
Krugman has escaped, and believes Republicans could thwart
Democratic wishes. As I have been suggesting, it is possible that
Krugman is in error about the desires of Democrats, and mistakes for
sure conflict what might end up proving -- complicity. If so, use this
to find your own, Krugman, not abandon all in astonishment and
disgust.
Patrick
Link: "Deflection and / or absorption" (realpsychohistory, 30 October
2010)
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2010
The Stewart and Colbert Purity Crusade
977
Many of you probably watched the famous Jon Stewart "smackdown"

of -- in particular -- Tucker Carlson on Crossfire. I knew then that the
primary crime Tucker was guilty of was possessing too much
personality (his punchy bow-tie, pink shirts, buoyant, boyish hair),
self-determination / initiative (he is famous for being the ostensible
conservative who did the non-permissable, the treasonous, in
accurately reporting the extent of Bush's "potty-mouth.") at a time
when Stewart's accrued fame and true power had accumulated to the
point where his maternal alter would hereafter determine his course,
telling him to activate to suppress / destroy those who most closely
represent his own desire for full autonomy / actualization and
satisfaction.
Stewart and Colbert still now strike me as the type liberals will look to
to ensure a guilt-free purity crusade. Ostensibly, what they champion
is sanity, reasoned discourse, but what they are against is uncurbed
personality, individuation, show that you still respect / value (are
reluctant to denigrate) that part of you that still aims to make your
own particular mark on the world (Colbert's "I AM AMERICA"): they
want denatured, reasoned neuters reporting both sides of the news,
becalmed not from being reasonable but for being in denial of
agitating emotions, for being wholly in sync with the needs of the
purity crusade -- for the pervasiveness of this type, and its successful
idealization, will show Mother that the kind of self- attendance
(mother-neglect) that leads to personality has been throughly
repudiated from the public scene.
The following DeMause quotes are playing on my mind (taken from
"War as Righteous Rape"). From them, I am alert to think of nonpejorative forms of our desires that people like Stewart and Colbert
are blasting in their call for sanity. Along with genuine lack of
reasoning (as we see every time Stewart showcases any of the
genuinely always-unreasoning FOX News types), we will see grouped
its actual opposite: the impassioned fight to resist obfuscation,
978
curtailment of truth, flight from sanity toward group disassociation,

we consistently find with the likes of Joan Walsh and Chris Matthews
(two liberals who have showcased as insane -- or at least as talking
insanely -- by Stewart). As I have suggested elsewhere, I have no
doubt that Krugman will be targeted by liberal "reasonables" as
amongst the clearly unreasonable. They have to (go after him), for he
has too strong a claim on being reasonable right now himself -- on
defining what it is to be reasonable in our current era -- and yet so
strongly and genuinely opposes the sort of personality-killing
depression / suppression most liberals are increasingly drawn to near
openly insist upon. It's risky, because disposing him (considerably)
arouses the spectre of undeniable guilt -- of feeling impure,
fraudulent, intrinsically hypocritical. So when they close in on him,
psychohistorians have to be prepared to remind them throughout
their efforts of deposition that the only way HE could now be the one
they target is if THEY are in fact the ones behaving irrationally,
crazily -- scrutiny-worthy. That is, their upcoming attack on Krugman
will in my judgment be our best means of playing to the part of
liberals that may yet resist this strong pull towards ensuring the
depressive end to this historical cycle (of seeing huge crimes against
people). It can be used to draw some back to sanity, and keep some
part of our age still innovation-prone, genuinely aspiring and happy,
despite the clawing, claiming efforts of the regressive-prone.
Patrick
DeMause quotes:
1) If there ever were a society where parents really helped their
children to individuate, it would be a society without growth panics,
without engulfment fears and without delusional enemies. The enemy
is a poison container for groups failing to grapple with the problems
of an emerging self. The enemy therefore inherits the imagery of their
growth panic, so the enemy is usually described in terms of our
childhood desires for growth. "They" (for instance, Jews) are
imagined to be guilty of the pejorative form of every one of our
979
desires: "greed" (all our wants); "lust" (our sexual desire);

"pushiness" (our striving) and so on. It isn't even necessary that the
enemy really exist. Simple societies imagine that witches, ancestors
and spirits are relentlessly persecuting enemies, and some nationsincluding Japan today-can even imagine Jews as bloodsucking
national enemies when there are virtually no Jews in their country.
2) In fact, nations enter into depressions because they feel persecuted
for their prosperity and individuation by what Jungians have termed
the "Dragon Mother"--the needy, "devouring mother of infancy...who
cannot let her children go because she needs them for her own
psychic survival." Weston has found anorexics in particular are
dominated by fantasies of persecution by the Dragon Mother, who
"gives her child the impossible task of filling her limitless void''' so
the child fears being "eaten alive." To prevent this, when these
children grow up and try to individuate, they refuse to eat so they
won't have any flesh on them for the Dragon Mother to devour.
Economic depressions evidence similar group-fantasies of devouring
mommies; they are "economic anorexias" where nations inflict
economic wounds upon themselves to limit consumption, become "all
bones" and not tempt the devouring Dragon Mother. Banks, in
particular, are often pictured as greedy dragons. For instance,
President Jackson imagined the Bank of the United States was what
he called the "Mother Bank" that by issuing paper money was a "bad
mother dominating her children" who had to be stopped before the
nation was eaten up, and so conducted a "kill the Great Monster"
campaign that would "strangle the many-headed hydra" and kill it.
Needless to say, his success in "crushing the Mother Bank dragon" led
to an economic downturn.
Link: The Stewart and Colbert Purity Crusade (realpsychohistory)
Evidence
980
The U.K. has cut back expenses hugely and fired millions.
It will certainly go into a major Depression. As Tony Blair
said when asked why he hit his one-year-old baby: "You
have to discipline them!"
Lloyd ("U.K. Cuts Back Gov't Expenses,"
realpsychohistory, 21 Oct. 2010)
----The U.K has unveiled a new National Security Strategy
this week --- mostly about cuts in defense spending, and
making sure that future efforts are tied to specific
national interests and defense goals. It seems hard to
argue with this. The U.S. needs to do the same thing.
-------Jim (response to post)
----You may all have read it already, but here's Paul Krugman on the
cutbacks:
Both the new British budget announced on Wednesday
and the rhetoric that accompanied the announcement
might have come straight from the desk of Andrew
Mellon, the Treasury secretary who told President
Herbert Hoover to fight the Depression by liquidating the
farmers, liquidating the workers, and driving down
wages. Or if you prefer more British precedents, it echoes
the Snowden budget of 1931, which tried to restore
confidence but ended up deepening the economic crisis.
The British governments plan is bold, say the pundits
and so it is. But it boldly goes in exactly the wrong
direction. It would cut government employment by
490,000 workers the equivalent of almost three million
layoffs in the United States at a time when the private
981
sector is in no position to provide alternative employment.

It would slash spending at a time when private demand
isnt at all ready to take up the slack.
Why is the British government doing this? The real reason
has a lot to do with ideology: the Tories are using the
deficit as an excuse to downsize the welfare state. But the
official rationale is that there is no alternative.
Indeed, there has been a noticeable change in the rhetoric
of the government of Prime Minister David Cameron over
the past few weeks a shift from hope to fear. In his
speech announcing the budget plan, George Osborne, the
chancellor of the Exchequer, seemed to have given up on
the confidence fairy that is, on claims that the plan
would have positive effects on employment and growth.
Instead, it was all about the apocalypse looming if Britain
failed to go down this route. Never mind that British debt
as a percentage of national income is actually below its
historical average; never mind that British interest rates
stayed low even as the nations budget deficit soared,
reflecting the belief of investors that the country can and
will get its finances under control. Britain, declared Mr.
Osborne, was on the brink of bankruptcy. ("British
Fashion Victims," NYT, 22 October 2010)
----Krugman certainly gives a needed point of view, an
important counterpoint to the cracker-barrel economics
still taught and believed by, presumably, most people in
the world (or at least America) that are paying attention
at all.
However, whenever I read his work --- and I do enjoy it
--- I am usually struck by the observation that he
conveniently leaves off an essential part of his neo-
982
Keynesian argument.
That point is that the reason the U.S. can get away with
heavy deficits, and heavier trade deficits, is because of our
military control of MidEast oil. As long as this remains in
effect, the excess dollars can be exported overseas and
other countries, particularly China and Japan, are
obliged to accept them -- as OPEC oil is sold for dollars.
Thus those excess dollars can be buried in the desert sand,
i.e., recycled by Arab elites into Dubai skyscrapers or
Saudi Rolls Royces, or sent more directly back to the U.S.
in purchase of low interest Government notes and bonds,
and high priced U.S. stocks.
The U.S. military control of the oceans is a key part of
this. If China were to get too horsey about accepting the
diminishing-value US dollars, the U.S. Navy could shut off
China's oil supply at will. This may sound drastic, but the
step was actually carried out, very successfully against
Japan (before Pearl Harbor!), and has been hinted at as
recently as this year in the currency disputes between the
countries.
There are a couple of problems with continuation of this
neocon wet dream, of course. One is the possibility that
U.S. deficits and debt hit a tipping point, where the dollar
actually collapses. contemporary Kondratiev wave theory
would suggest (according to some professional
interpreters) that the hyperinflation danger is still at least
a couple of decades away. The other challenge is the
mysterious potential that MidEast Oil depletion takes
effect sooner rather than later. When/if this occurs, the
grand strategy of the U.S. will have the rug pulled out
from under it.
Oh yes ... I do recall that this discussion is about the U.K.
But the U.K. banking system is joined at the hip with the
U.S., as are its petrol industry and military affairs. Thus,
983
it should be OK, economically, as long as the U.S.

dominance holds out.
In theory, alternative or renewable energy sources could
also affect the world balance of power, but none of these
appears to be close to unseating petroleum at the present
time.
--------Jim
----James, Krugman is the only advanced psychoclass (or at least very
near) economist I'm aware of; as such he doesn't for me so much offer
a "counterpoint" as he does the main-line argument. leave it to the
regressing others to chip in / at, here and there.
Brits wouldn't continue to get away (naughty! naughty!) with heavy
deficits if they could: those in charge are right now responding to the
overall desire for a depression to be ensured through tight-money
policies. If the Brits were in a wholly different mood, even if it wasn't
through borrowing, they'd find some way to make sure they didn't
waste away a whole generation in a 20-year-long chill.
Patrick
----Patrick, this reasoning is totally circular. Unless you have
access to information about the early childhoods of
Krugman and other economists, then you are simply NOT
permitted to make assumptions about psychoclass based
solely upon observations of the adult.
What you have done (not the first on this list to commit
this error, BTW) is to start with a theory that less coercive
childrearing leads to some desirable personality outcomes
for adults, and then turned its on its head by asserting
that anyone you agree with must have had such a
984
childhood. This is the logical fallacy of circular reasoning,

and is actually vacuous of meaningful content.
Not to mention that my discussion was about the role of
geopolitics in the world's economic reality, not about
political leanings of Krugman or anyone else.
-------Jim
----Re: Unless you have access to information about the early childhoods
of Krugman and other economists, then you are simply NOT
permitted to make assumptions about psychoclass based solely upon
observations of the adult.
(James, if I'm not sane, don't bother reading what I've uncovered
about someone's childhood. If I'm sane, focus on what I've observed
from sheer experience of the living presence of the thing. Circular,
square, linear -- whatever; it's true.)
We of the advanced psychoclass recognize one another. There is
warmth and sanity in Krugman, chill or at least repression in most
others (i.e., "crazyness"). From the adult formation, you know the
origins. I do. You can't win an argument with someone who wants to
convince you that Obama, for example, is high psychoclass through
their studious digging-away at his childhood, because these people
are intent to make what is so readily before you for assessment ("I'm
right here, guys -- on friggin' Oprah, for heaven's sakes. No historical
figure, me") something to be trumped by what they feel they are in
position to put a smothering control on. When Lloyd was in mood to
convince us that Obama is well loved -- capital "P" progress -- you
couldn't counter by showing how evidently uncomfortable he was
sitting beside Hillary during the campaign (he always seemed to turn
away from her, drawing back from her maternal thighs; a boy who
knew what it was to cower before mama -- and often) -- that is, by
pointing at the obvious -- you couldn't effectively counter at all,
985
because he oriented on a particular uncovering of his childhood as

"true proof," one he could count on (with he himself being silent on
this one) being defended as unassailable not merely by the here-andthere Obama-rejoicing psychohistorians, not merely by the wall of the
type of timid liberal historians he has spend a lifetime lampooning
and being lampooned by, but by the Historical Enterprise itself.
"What is your lone opinion, intuition, against this mass of adult,
authoritative research and evidence, young man?" ("But sir, if I can't
read him well now, what makes you think I'll focus well on what is
offered up from his childhood past?" "Does anything you've ever
written say different?") This was Lloyd of recent past, as he leveraged
History in its sense as the most conservative and repressive of
studies, as an abode of monastic, professional stewardship / control,
as he smacked of everything he has spent a lifetime lashing out at.
On a related note. One of the great things about psychohistory is how
wonderfully hippie anti-authoritarian it can be. Some Phd launches at
you with tombs of research, and contends that you can't even begin
until you plumbed somewhere near equal. The advanced-psychoclass
lounger responds by lamenting that the Phd didn't spend all that time
in nurturing therapy so s/he could have commenced the whole
enterprise in a spirit closer approximating sanity ("In short, I'm not
really quite sure you've even begun, sir." "That is, it's probably on the
mark to say that once I begin sentence one, I'm already ahead of your
library of time with the thing.").
Patrick
----Patrick said "We of the advanced psychoclass recognize
one another. There is warmth and sanity in Krugman,
chill or at least repression in most others (i.e.,
"crazyness"). "
Problem is, every one knows that they're right. Good luck
finding some one who really believes that they are crazy,
986
wrong and out of touch. These crazy, chilling, repressed

folks you mention know, like you, that they are correct.
Why, they can just *feel it*.
Rachel
----With my sense of (at least current times) America, Rachel, I'd have
been more convinced if you'd argued that most everyone deep-down
thinks they're shit, that they probably don't deserve to be happy
(they've got their maternal alters to thank for that), only that hippietypes who hope they might be / deserve otherwise, and the poor and
vulnerable who publicly demonstrate their very own shameworthy
neediness and dependency, are so much more rotten than they are.
Once on crusade against them, in service of the Maternal rather than
to themselves ... yeah, they might own up to feeling pretty righteous,
I'll grant you that. But in reality these monsters are FEEDING, not
feeling -- that's what their would-be food, us hippie-type,
emotionally-healthy, advanced-class hipsters do. You know it.
Patrick
----Patrick said, "I'd have been more convinced if you'd
argued that most everyone deep-down thinks they're shit,
that they probably don't deserve to be happy"
Well, yes. But now you seem to be suggesting that low self
regard can't exist with an inflated self image in the same
person, or that this has something to do with being
convinced of a certain worldview - any world view. The
point stands: everybody thinks they're right. The person
with low or no self regard has still convinved themselves.
Otherwise, they wouldn't have the beliefs or think the
thoughts that they do.
987
This is veering into philosophy 101. Sturges, I think, was

pointing out, not so gently, that you were skipping the
most important steps and assuming too much. That
somehow, a group called They has this problem called not
being self aware enough, but you don't need to be.
Because you're right. No big deal as this is a mistake we
all make, maybe the easiest one to make - and I would
guess, the main reason this particular online group exists.
----re: Problem is, every one knows that they're right. Good luck
finding some one who really believes that they are crazy, wrong and
out of touch.
These crazy, chilling, repressed folks you mention know, like you, that
they
are correct. Why, they can just *feel it*.
It is possible to read this, Rachel, and actually think you're talking

most here about how right they feel ABOUT THEMSELVES -- not
their opinions, their take on the world -- about how they deep-down,
ESSENTIALLY, think about themselves as human beings -- are they
crazy? wrong? out of touch? So I don't think they do, in this sense,
know themselves to be "correct," or "right," in the sense that "chill"
people like me do. If you feel yourself to be right as a human being, to
deserve to live an uninhibited, happy life, I don't think you're likely to
be one of the crazy, repressed folks I mentioned. This is mostly why I
answered you the way I did.
James was saying that I was skipping the most important part. I know
that (he thought that), and it's probably why in the next post I jumped
right to it: with psychohistory, it's not about the argument anymore;
it's about your state of well being. James's point that with
psychohistory you can't infer backwards (which is dubious, or at least
988
very, very complicated, to me) is not something I got into, because to

mind instantly I knew that this whole thing isn't so much about
knowing more, but about caring / feeling more. The more advanced
psychoclass is able to, and cares now to, see the abundant cruelty,
insanities, that previous generations, more regressed people, could
not see, despite it being everywhere before them. Members of such a
psychoclass can't be convinced that to convince what they need is
more information, or different sources, not just because they just
know they've already got plenty before them of a kind that "proves the
point" (If Jimmie Carter listens well, respecting you, respecting your
point, but never deferingly / self-diminishingly; if Paul Krugman talks
with charm and style but also with deep concern and serious intent; if
Jim Henson reaches out in ways that make it no surprise that beyond
a generation have through their encounter with him felt more worthy
of being loved; and you see / sense all this, you just want to laugh
when someone feels this isn't what you should be pointing at to prove
how a person is constituted [i.e., their psychoclass]), but because they
know the problem before them isn't really evidence -- it's the
inability, disinclination, of the person you are talking to see the
obvious. I know I'm not going to convince by digging at childhoods
"here" (which to me was foremost here who Obama is now as a
person, not how you just know he must have "gotten on" with his
mother), so I don't get into it. What I do is try to prompt out people to
act in ways which show them aspects of themselves which I suspect
may be used to suggest to them that the problem isn't really my
inability to argue properly -- however well I am in fact arguing -- or to
look at what I should have drawn upon, but in factors working against
their ability to cooperate in well attending to what I have to say. How
does Lloyd convince (and the point can be made that even amongst
psychohistorians, he HASN'T, mostly -- how often do you encounter
psychohistorians talk about how their mothers have determined the
course of their lives: point number one of DeMausian
psychohistory?)? By argument? By historical evidence? Or is it by
perhaps by playing to a part of ourselves that is still yet not defeated
989
in its struggle to not betray itself, to not defer to how it senses it is

being instructed to see and exist in the world before it, to see what the
better off of us at some level ALREADY KNOW TO BE TRUE, and
just need support, demonstrated proof that you can fight back
without being destroyed, to help us acknowledge it? If this here is
philosophy 101, then even if no job there is I think still something
valuable to be had via an undergrad education. (A PhD could only
make you godly.)
Maybe if I felt that the person I was talking to could be swayed with a
different kind of proof, with references to childhood behavior, I might
have ventured there, despite me thinking it not necessary. If I doubt
it, I go a more appropriate route -- if I sense the point can somehow
still be made (otherwise I wish them well, and go bye-bye). With
James, always ... despite his Libertarian leanings and Republican
daughters.
Patrick
----"...I don't think you're likely to be one of the crazy,
repressed folks I mentioned."
Doesn't change things if I am. The comments from me
have just been impersonal, basic log-in-your-eye stuff.
Yes, most / many / maybe all people rely on a gut feeling,
or what have you, based upon communication cues and a
"feeling" when projecting on, er, judging a person- you
kind of have to - and you also have to shed this strong
tendency when effectively talking about the subject matter
here and move forward.
This has careened off topic, which was U.K. cuts back
gov't expenses, so I think this is the last I'll say about it.
re: Problem is, every one knows that they're right. Good
luck
990
----Very good point, Rachel.

There are some on this list who persist in thinking that
Group Fantasy motivation is only the province of people
they disagree with -- not seeming to understand the core
PH principle that fantasy underlies all human
thought/behavior and Group Fantasy underlies all group
behavior.
-------Jim
----By "you" here I didn't mean you yourself, Rachel.
By all means, Rachel, lead the way. If impersonal, tight-to-the-chest
reasoned discussion is not an enemy of naked, vulnerable full
disclosure -- what I clearly think psychohistory needs more of, and
why it must wait for the next hippie-revolution to once again grow
wings -- if it can take us further, I'm for it. I knew James would call
my argument circular; I knew it (my argument) was absolutely
vulnerable to being accused of being circular when I felt it's intrinsic
truth and insisted on saying it bare and plain (rather than with some
kind of accompaniment to lure truth to some place I knew it didn't
belong, would sully it). This, I think, should interest / intrigue you
(and James); should count against what identifying an argument as
"circular" is supposed to do to facilitate understanding. Rather than
extend yourself, you use the strict and available and do an immediate
superego close-down on an interesting possibility. We won't come up
with anything unless we're prepared to appear embarrassing,
reckless. Read how historians greeted Lloyd's first works. To them, he
never did anything a serious academic must do to demonstrate
himself worth attendance: he was more curl up under covers into a
fetal position to access a medieval's childhood origins, but he might
also have put forward the circular argument or two. His subsequent
991
works are better warded against attack, but perhaps -- despite even
the massive brilliance of Emotional Life of nations -- not to the better
legacy of psychohistory.
Patrick
----OK, Patrick. If you intended to disarm me with this, you
have succeeded. Anyone that would actually say they are
waiting for a revival of the 60's-early 70's hippierevolution movement is worthy in my book of a second, a
third, a fourth etc. look. I am truly impressed by this
thought. It is so off-the-wall ... and yet deep down I admit
that I wish for it myself.
Just in case Santa Claus is reading this ... if a new hippierevolution movement is too much to ask for, then how
about a redo of the 90's? I'm sure I could time the bubble
right this time.
---------Jim
Link: U.K. Cuts Back Govt Expenses (realpsychohistory)
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2010

In consideration of all he has accomplished
BOYCOTT THE HACK ZACH ... in perpetuity
I think it's simply a "travesty" that a supremely spoiled
sophomoric pack of so-called ACTORS can RULE the film
industry. LIKE anybody in THAT CAST has EVER DONE
anything (frankly) remarkable in THEIR ENTIRE LIVES.
WHO HASN'T DONE THINGS THEY REGRET ?? ... THAT
they SHOULD JUDGE MEL GIBSON?
992
Basically "character" actors, which NEVER had the IMPACT

in this industry -- or THE WORLDWIDE audiences Mel has.
(iconklee, response to post, The Hangover 2s Mel Gibson
controversy, Matt Zoller Seitz, Salon, 22 October 2010)
.....
Roman Polanski is a child molesting douchebag. he doesn't
seem to have stopped his shenanigans, evades punishment,
has been arrogant and crazy and makes movies I won't
watch. (mrsmonkey)
.....
Significant artists throughout history have had
reputations
Not all guys who do questionable things are great artists or
creators, but many of the most respected and lauded artists
of the past have had remarkably controversial lives.
In the end, the ART or the CRREATION won out, regardless
of what all the lip smackers and victorian prudes today have
to say about it.
So I would not worry about it so much. I personally do not
watch much of Gibson's output, but it is not unlikely that
future generations would laud his Christ movie of
Braveheart or some other output. Already, Road Warrior
has become a legend in sci fi, MOSTLY due to Gibson's acting
in that film.
Let the ninnies have their stand. I am sure future
generations will have long forgotten the Hangover while
Gibson's output remains in the public consciousness.
(Liberty2Day)
.....
Something that does allow for continued acceptability in the
public eye, for right or wrong, is the public apology. Alec
Baldwin issued one of those along with a promise to work on
behalf of those suffering from parental alienation (whatever
that is). But this kind of apology/redemption narrative is
993
demanded for continued work. This is alongside the

punishment.
The problem is that Mel Gibson, at this moment, has fallen in
to the repeat offender category, with each revelation and
instance more appalling than the last. As anyone with a
sense of history knows, it has not been his anti-Semitism that
did him in. While it was a bad moment, people were willing
to look past-- but then after that comes some fairly powerful
racism, more sexism, and violence (punches to his
girlfriends teeth) and I suppose all we can say at this
moment is: too soon. There is no sign of remorse or
betterment. (Hunterwali)
.....
Hey, out there, whoever you are: So you don't watch "30
Rock" because Alec Baldwin is an asshole? So you don't buy
the "Mad Max" trilogy on Blu-Ray because Mel Gibson is an
anti-semite? So you can't ever watch a Woody Allen film
again because he's a dirty old man? You don't listen to the
Dixie Chicks because they insulted George W. Bush? So you
don't buy Norman Mailer's books because he stabbed his
wife (a lot bigger deal than simply getting in some drunken
fights, aarong, and it's awfully cheap of you to minimize it
the way you did). So you don't watch any Leni Riefenstahl's
documentaries because she was Hitler's cheerleader, and
you won't buy "Birth of a Nation" on DVD because D.W.
Griffith was a racist and you don't want any of his family
members getting a dime of your money.
Bully for you for drawing the line against an artist, alive or
dead, current or ancient, and making your own principles
plain. Whoever you are, whatever your rationale is, I don't
disagree or agree with you. Do whatever you think is right.
Go with God.
I'll be over here watching, reading and listening to the work.
All of it. (Matt Zoller Seitz)
994
Ralph Nader, Geraldine Ferraro

I think it is misleading to focus on things like racism, murder,
(notably) wife/child abuse, to rightly get at what is so readily
condemnation-worthy at this point. We can get closer, I think, when
we consider how aggrieved the mounted defenses are that someone
who has evidently accomplished so friggin' much, consistently, over
such a long period of time, someone who has impressed themselves
on the national psyche owing to their brilliance and originality, could
be so readily, presumptively, be assailed by those "constituted" of
nothing more than spirited vacancy. YOU are in authority (and we
note -- however incredulously -- that you indeed are) over (legendary)
HIM/HER -- HOW is this possible?!?
It's possible, predictable, because when nations are being driven by
guilt over their previous selfishness, there is no greater crime "before
you" than personal, unique accomplishment. If you've done
something -- good, that is; truly noteworthy -- you may be suspect, for
no one accomplishes anything noteworthy who isn't focused heavily
on their own craft, that is, intently on their own selves -- who didn't
follow their own inclinations enough to mature into their own
distinctive, unique person. Past personality, your crime in being too
much self-lead, now shows up rather obviously in your not automatic
response/repositioning to the daily changes in mood.
The vacuous are full of themselves, will continue laughing their way
through all of us, because they are the way they are from being
foremost responders to other people's cues. They are much more truly
selfLESS, and for this abandonment, for their being beaten enough to
have succumbed to being lifelong puppets of others' whims, they get
now the long, assured, easy ride, as retributive History assumes them
and uses them, and hunts those still seemingly intent on building on
themselves. Here at Salon we've seen Mel Gibson, (recently) Pat
Buchanan, Jodie Foster, Geraldine Ferraro, Ralph Nader get this
arrogant treatment. Jew-hating Gibson, that is, actually gets it for the
995
same reason Hippie-man Nader gets it: It's not about having once
raped/viscously hated somebody, but about having spent enough
time in your past being loyal to yourself. We point to all they've
accomplished, and try to make the presumed verdict the crime, when
all we're really doing is laying out the proof that justice has here
clearly been served.
Link: Hangover 2s Mel Gibson controversy (Salon)
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2010

Substituting a goat
Substituting a goat
And in other miracle-related news, some people in
Hollywood decided to stand on principle.
The issue was Mel Gibson, charismatic movie star, Oscarwinning filmmaker and drunken, bigoted, death-threatissuing lout. Gibson was supposed to make a cameo in
"The Hangover 2," the sequel to the 2009 hit "The
Hangover," but was booted from the production,
reportedly after cast members -- supposedly led by costar
Zach Galifianakis -- told the film's director, Todd Phillips,
that they were uncomfortable working with Gibson. The
cast apparently was not uncomfortable appearing in the
last "Hangover" opposite convicted rapist and onetime
mugger Mike Tyson, who subsequently told ESPN radio
that he did the cameo "for drug money."
[. . .]
If artists should be publicly censured and denied
996
employment on the basis of offenses they commit in

private life, how come Gibson is a pariah right now for
threatening and hitting his ex-girlfriend Oksana
Grigorieva, while Alec Baldwin, who verbally abused his
11-year-old daughter on the phone, lashed out at a
photographer, and has a long record of frightening
behavior toward his ex-wife Kim Basinger, is currently
one of the most beloved figures on network TV?
[. . .]
Instead of either/or, how about both/and? Baldwin is a
hot-tempered, maudlin, navel-gazing bozo, and one of the
great character actors and improvisational comics alive.
Mel Gibson is an anti-Semite, a sexist, a homophobe, and
very possibly a deranged religious fanatic; he's also one of
the few bona fide movie stars of the last three decades and
the most brilliant action filmmaker since Sam Peckinpah.
Polanski is a great director and a sex offender. Kazan was
a great director and a rat. Lohan and Moss are substance
abusers and arresting beauties whose most interesting
work probably lies ahead of them. Sheen is a master of
droll self-parody and an unexpectedly charming sitcom
star, and a wife-abusing scum that should be behind bars
right now. (Matt Zoller Seitz, "The Hangover 2's Mel
Gibson hypocrisy, Salon, 22 October 2010)
What is it if you've never raped, if you're Tom Cruise
I'm with Matt, it smells. One wonders if the worst thing you can do is
be someone we used to adore, and then not find some means to
announce yourself as wholly willing to undergo whatever
rehabilitation we ask of you ("I ... will suck ... your dick."). Even if you
never really did anything. I'm pretty sure the only thing Tom Cruise
did was jump up and down on a couch, showing he will never not be
997
the possessed Tom Cruise we grew up with and loved. He needed to

have been able to have quickly shown he thought himself an assclown for his behavior, to have some chance of figuring for continued
relevance. The Tropic Thunder resurrection was a little late, a little
too completely last straw: "kinda appreciate the gesture, but there's
something of you, Tom, that though we take as staleness or complete
derangement still smacks -- annoyingly -- of integrity, if you can
believe it. As if something might be off -- WITH US -- for not wanting
to stay related to you: We have no interest in even innocently being
made to feel as if it us, in our jumping on cue, on and off trends, who
is dancing fool.
Except of course for "grandma" Betty White. She could have humped
a whole kindergarten and some would still kill to keep her cool. ("I
literally screwed them for life -- two dozen of them, dripping in vagina
goo -- and you still want me to repeat on SNL?" "That would be
'Yes.'") What does that say about our era?
.....
If your artist stewed of small children, he never in fact
created Art.
I still think, though, that finding out someone was "likely a killer" or
was for sure a rapist should mean a pretty profound re-examination
of what it is about us that drew us to like "his" films in the first place.
(We condemn loudly, perhaps, so we feel less implicated.) I don't
think we should be much drawn to artistic work done by people who
raped or killed. Knowing that we were, and still perhaps are, amounts
to a wonderful prompt to stop and see what is stalling us -- for
something is indeed, for sure, off with us. The killer, the rapist, is NO
DOUBT in my mind in the work itself (an artist of two temperaments,
two minds -- one that creates, the other that rages -- is even in the
sympathetic, saner part, "incomplete," still crazy). (Artists may be
delegates; do what we wish/prompt but do not dare. But no one sane
responds this way.) If you find out a culture was cannibalistic or
998
sacrificed legions of virgins to some hairy god, take another look at

the colorful art you used to praise: hopefully it required looking at it a
bit distracted/askew or objective-intent, to deem it Beautiful. But the
problem isn't just in the art or the artist, it is you too. Reassess,
slowly; be kind to your former self; and hopefully grow. That creation
fundamentally comes out of knowing love and tolerance is only made
hard to see for it being historically rare. Amidst cultures that sacrifice
children, substituting an innocent goat that-never-did-no-harm-tonobody is a miraculous, beautiful thing.
Link: "The Hangover 2's" Mel Gibson hypocrisy (Salon)
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2010

Repeat
The time has come to admit it -- Jodie Foster is not all that.
Foster, beloved child actress turned two-time Academy
Award winner, Yale magna cum laude, respected director
and person who has lived in the public eye for 40 years
without a nip slip, bar brawl or nutty Twitter outburst,
seems in many ways the epitome of graceful modern
womanhood. She is serious about her work, she is devoted to
her children and she was honored Monday as one of Elle
magazine's top women in Hollywood. And it was there that
she spoke of "an amazing actor, an incredible friend, a loyal
friend of mine for 18 years." She described him as
"incredibly loved by everyone who ever comes into contact
with him or works with him ... truly the most loved man in
the film business, so, hopefully that stands for something."
She was talking about Mel Gibson. Say what?
[. . .]
999
Yet Foster's suspect loyalty to internationally acclaimed,

unrepentant creeps doesn't end with "the most loved man in
show business." She'll soon be heading to Europe to costar in
"The God of Carnage," directed by Oscar-winning child
rapist Roman Polanski.
[. . .]
Perhaps the oddest thing about Foster, however, is how she
continues to be lauded as an icon. Aside from publicly
thanking "my beautiful Cydney who sticks with me through
all the rotten and the bliss" three years ago, she's steadfastly
never acknowledged her personal life or relationships,
which, frankly, for somebody of her power and influence, is
pretty cowardly. (Mary Elizabeth Williams, Jodie Fosters
baffling Mel Gibson defense, 21 October 2010)
Whittling with your whip
I guarantee it, at some point Salon will go after Paul Krugman. With
liberals, at least, the point for Salon isn't that you too are crazy, but
that you're showing you may not be one to dutifully follow along
when liberalism becomes one long crazed sequence of whip-lashings
against the misbehaving. Fight to keep your head, to think for
yourself, to reach out and truly do good, and Salon will hope to hurt
you bad for reminding "them" of a fairness they know at some level
they were so eager-ready to leave behind.
At some point too, MEW will join an emerging chorus and go after
Joan Walsh as well (remember her [Walsh's] fair and genuine
concern for Rush Limbaugh? It was too deeply rooted to be just a "becareful-with-that," once-only.). Since I suspect that right now they're
(MEW and Walsh) friends, the dynamics involved in this will be
fascinating to watch.
However, I don't care who his friends are (or are not) and
1000
certainly do not judge people for staying friends with

someone I myself would personally not hang around with. If
you do that, MEW, in very short order you will find yourself
with few friends (or none at all) as human beings are
naturally and perhaps tragically very imperfect beings.
(Laure1962, response to post)
"Friends"
MEW is at no risk of losing friends with this, because she is showing
here that she is intent to smear anyone out there who suggests some
kind of troubling independence, someone who can't ultimately be
counted on to just defer, who isn't yet defeated and might balk, is
resisting, stalling, beginning to talk/snarl back, and most of her
friends will increasingly be defined by their "subscription" to this life
prescription. Well, not friends, maybe, but a whole host of people
conjoined in servicing the current ethos -- "show you will be no
different; show you will defer." There will soon be lots of them, but for
awhile they'll feel themselves first-ascendants to an exclusive,
exhilarating adventure -- maybe the only one actually available right
now: they'll be smeared by those they cast off, will feel themselves
brave and afflicted, loyal and (therefore) loved: they'll think
themselves friends, and may never know different.
The point of these early depression years seems to be about
"familiarizing" everyone with the new ethos -- true individualism,
pokings-about in what may be genuinely new directions rather than
whatever sanctioned ones, resistance to trends that just must take
over -- is over. You will be cued as to what you are supposed to
think/believe "now" -- likely, first hate the stupidity/spoiled
indulgence of everyone everywhere, then, when the depression has
fully kicked in years hence, count yourself once again amongst the
"injustly suffering masses" (i.e., the mass you did everything you
could to create by not too much focusing on the economic decisions
which ensured their creation during the first years of the depression,
and instead mostly on the particular variant of craziness in the
1001
unveiling list of never-ending crazies -- such a perfect counterpoint to

the distanced-but-rational primary Depression executor, Obama) -and you will be made to feel as if your very survival depends on your
speed of adoption.
They're starting off easy, for an assured trial run. Past-date Jodie
Foster and anti-Semitism. Repeat. But so you're properly on the
watch, notice now the long, long stretch required to dethrone (or at
least submerge) Krugman, which you feel they're already
"considering," finding some way of floating into consciousness,
seemingly just to show their frowning-upon-it but actually also to
venture out for further straight, larger public consideration, and
which looks like it will commence shortly. The frown-prone Brits are
currently frowning upon Keynesian economics (Krugman is all
Keynesian: spend! Goddamn it, spend! -- what are you waiting
for?!?). Will this luring, brutal British stoicness prove means for
some sanity-intent liberals to join Republicans in venturing him as
possibly too hippie, too permissive, for our current, deadly serious,
economic conundrums?
...
Why Salon? Because it feels like where the fight for the soul of all
liberals will be staged; lost or won. It looks like where we will
determine whether hope, true straight-talk, is something that can
sustain through the heat of battle, survive the light of day, or
compelled to lurk in shadows, find friendship with the oblique,
deform into it, to be less visible, more overlookable, but less
penetrable/vulnerable. Right now, it's certainly "be alert to and fear
the whip," but the fight hasn't fully settled yet.
Link: Jodie Fosters baffling Mel Gibson defense (Salon)
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2010
Retreat
Welcome to the third and final session of the Salon Reading
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Club for Jonathan Franzen's novel "Freedom." Last week, we

took the discussion up through Page 382, and now it's time
to consider the book's conclusion.
[. . .]
I'm a little ambivalent about the ending of "Freedom." While
it was definitely satisfying to see Walter and Patty reunited,
part of me thinks it's not very realistic. But perhaps that's
the point; if those characters had done what most divorced
couples do and kept moving on to new lives, they'd be
exercising the American-style freedom about which Franzen
is clearly so ambivalent.
[. . .]
What did you think of the way Franzen depicts the political
climate of the mid-2000s? Walter's road trip with Lalitha to
promote Free Space is a Magical Hysteria Tour of the
endemic rage of the period, which Walter regards as
"loony," even though it is, in a fashion, a reflection of the
repressed anger he's been nursing since his boyhood in the
motel. There's a strong sense that Americans have been
making their politics carry an emotional load displaced
from their personal lives -- it's a lot less destabilizing to rant
on the Internet about Dick Cheney or Bill Clinton than to get
into it with your spouse and parents, let alone your own
messed-up self -- to the detriment of public life.
[. . .]
In fact, the whole little neighborhood drama about the cats
and the songbirds at the end deftly encapsulates the themes
of the book: Walter is right, but in the wrong way. Linda is a
monster, but taking her cat to the pound only makes him
one, too. But, again, I'm not sure I'm optimistic enough to
believe in Patty's solution -- even if I'd like to. (Laura Miller,
Road trips, political rage and catnapping, Salon, 18 Sept.
2010)
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Retreat
Freedom, apparently, is something we pursue until the point where
we can chase down what we really want -- rapprochement -- under
our terms. All this early consideration of the rape, as if it were a
"rosebud" moment, when what it was was a vehicle to leave parents
behind you -- justifiably -- so that you can explore / be carried along
the currents of the times that move / accompany your adulthood, and
rejoin your heritage later as an encounter between one who has
experienced and lived and those who have been kept back. Patty
doesn't only find her way back into old patterns; she pins down as
much as possible both parents on points that have always concerned
her. With neither of them is there much potential for an enlarged
conversation -- which is just fine if the point is to momentarily enjoy
your ability to stand before them undaunted, witness their fainting
back and retreating, and thereafter without complication just savor
their ties to old assured ways and old strengths before admitting
you're -- alas -- confined to always be one of them, intent as you are
now to merge back into them.
To this particular contemporary reader, the book feels like (I
experienced it as) an accurate account of the last 20 years of
liberaldom. A good stretch at first of other-daunting, hells-bells,
frontier-like freedom -- ethical households multiplying out of
nowhere in run-down neighborhoods -- experienced as without
doubt, as pushed forward, as is any first opening of a frontier ("Good
neighbors"). Then, Iraq, and terrible self-damning experiences of
guilt for voting in a near unified swath of Democratic politicians who
supported the war, of seeming as oil-stained as any ol' coarse
Republican ("Mountaintop," "Bad News"). Rescue, with Obama -dramatic re-imagination of image -- ("Fiend of Washington") but
troubles still with the economy, with the first couple years, especially,
where no one was really confident that the sorts of people who were
most going to go under had crystallized (first struggles between
Walter, alone, and Linda). And then at the end some sights of a
gradual awakening to a realization that a certain class of liberals were
1004
going to do okay, to the sense that a certain, specific kind of target

was desired, and that you actually have more freedom than you think
to move about, to err, and, apparently, to be arrogant (Walter's soulsaving, other-diminishing tirade; then more confidently Patty's
expertly managed sequence of pseudo-kindness to Linda, sudden
total abandonment of her, and signed, departing "gift" of a catbalking, bird-turd enclosure), because your central concern for selfabnegating rapprochement over freedom, your overall willingness to
cooperate in favoring the downing of emerging age-designated targets
-- even if not always with fervor or without regret -- has been
repeatedly noticed and unerringly proven to ensure you aren't one of
them, and that the way ahead will shortly be guaranteed for you and
as gratifyingly delimited, denatured, and era-defining (other dramaobfuscating) as is a settled-upon war (Tea-baggers vs. the Obamaloyal; mangy cats vs. implacable birds).
Walter is a monster for steeling himself to kill the cat, but he sees and
recollects Bobby's individuality, and through it, Linda and her
family's own worth. Patty "maturely" desists in attacking her
daughter's blog postings, choosing instead to restrain her true
response to it, to her, and just support her enthusiastically with
bland, unfocussed praise. To me, our near last sight of Walter was our
last glance of something maybe opening up, before a terminus that
sealed down everything that might otherwise have been challenged
and pithily grown.
Link: Road trips, political rage and cat-nappings
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2010

Chelsea
The Democrats, as usual, are still fighting the internecine
party battles of the '90s. While Jerry Brown struggles with
the 1992 presidential primaries out in California, Bill Clinton
1005
is attacking a prominent liberal critic and defending his

legacy of triangulation.
At a joint appearance with former British prime minister
and warmonger Tony Blair, Clinton complained about
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow (without naming her) for,
basically, telling the truth about his presidency. (Alex
Pareene, Bill Clinton peeved that Rachel Maddow called
him a Republican, Salon, 14 Sept. 2010)
Chelsea
I foremost think of Republicans as emotionally-neutered individuals.
Subdued blues; nothing bright, pink, and affecting. As such,
Maddows and Obama (and Jon Stewart / Colbert) feel more
Republican to me than do either of the Clintons. Take a look at who
they begat: bright, spunky, welcoming Chelsea: the Democratic
essence stirs in them. Too bad they had their reign when they could
only reign, Republican-light.
Link: Bill Clinton peeved that Rachel Maddow called him a
Republican (Salon)
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2010
Hillary Clinton
The thing that had a radicalizing impact on me began after
[Hillary lost in] Iowa. Because there was this pile-on, and to
me it was mind-bending. It was coming often from people on
the left. It was like something they had been keeping inside
as they bit their tongues and covered this woman who had
the gall to be the front-runner and the "inevitable"
candidate, which was the word that they threw out there.
And finally she had shown weakness, and they were just
going nuts.
[. . .]
Eventually I became a lot more aware of the ways in which
not only Hillary but also her supporters were being talked
1006
about. I became increasingly sensitive to the scorn directed

at her, and it built and built as she continued to fight, and it
drove me nuts. Because I thought her continuing to fight was
awesome and hilarious. I thought it was completely
redefining how we view women and our expectations for
them in public and political life. She would not comply. She
would not give in. She would not do what the pundits
wanted her to do, what her opponents wanted her to do,
what reporters were insisting that she do, what everyone
was telling her was the smart thing to do or, in one case, the
classy thing to do. She just kept going. (Rebecca Traister,
quoted in Curtis Sittenfield, Big Girls Don't Cry: The
election that changed everything for women, Salon, 12 Sept.
2010)
Hillary
HRC WAS way better than Obama, guys. Only she reminded people of
their swarming, intentful mothers, so they looked away, moved apart,
and voted in the more denatured, affectless Obama. She WAS brutally
treated during the campaign; reporters could barely look at her, and
looked away as soon as excuse was given. Credit is due Rebecca for
noticing this; discredit, or considerable suspicion, for not being
drawn to her from the start.
@Patrick McAvoy-Halston
Patrick: "HRC WAS way better than Obama, guys."
Strange that you direct this comment at "guys." So there
weren't any female Obama supporters, is that it?
Patrick: "Only she reminded people of their
swarming, intentful mothers, so they looked away,
moved apart, and voted in the more denatured,
affectless Obama."
Okay, let me ask you: Are you joking? Is this some sort of
satire? If not, then I am amazed at your ability to
1007
psychoanalyze an entire voting bloc. I'm even more amazed

at your extra-sensory powers in detecting that hundreds of
thousands of voters have "swarming" and "intentful"
mothers! (I didn't realize the primaries were decided by
honeybee larvae.)
Patrick: "She WAS brutally treated during the
campaign;"
"Brutally"? Really? Which part was brutal-est? Was there
anything much more brutal than the later claim that Obama
"pals around with terrorists"?
I think it's really cute how people want to claim Obama
supporters were "BRUTAL!" to Hillary. But when Obama
supporters point out that it works both ways, suddenly
people are saying, "Oh, she's just feisty!" and "She paid him
the respect of giving him a good, hard fight!"
I also vividly recall Obama getting raked over the coals
because the pastor at his old church was obnoxious. But that
wasn't brutal, that was fair, right? So let's see: If people are
critical of Hillary, they're being "brutal," (practically
woman batterers, if you want to get clinical about it) but if
people are critical of Obama, it's peachy. Got it.
Patrick: "...reporters could barely look at her, and
looked away as soon as excuse was given."
Now, again, this has to be satire, right? Because I am pretty
sure that people looked at Hillary Clinton on an ongoing
basis, very intently.
Okay, no, I am convinced you're kidding. Sorry for missing
it up till now. (Xrandadu Hutman, response to post)
@Xrandadu Hutman
No, not satire. When they (the press) could switch from talking to
Hillary to talking to Obama, they seemed relieved. They did almost
enough (though not enough: note the SNL skits which played on the
1008
press's strange aversion to Hillary) to save face, but it WAS as if they

were risking close contact / involvement with some toxic medusa.
They engaged with her scrunched up in a grimace, bracing themselves
to the first touch of her affect. Obama was cool, smoke in hand. For
all the talk of charisma, it was his sparing absence which drew "us" to
him.
Palin you can bond to, have carry around her like a pistol in her
holster, because you'll be killing baby seals and runt liberals, not
bonding with her in some cuddled global village. The first sense we
have that she's turning to make us into one of her sprats, we'll turn
her into our first lady, permanently ensconced as secondary to
Obama. There is a sense, perhaps, that she's settling into that position
right now. Can Obama master his uppity (Palin) wife, like he did his
previous mistress?
That Salon gave Hillary support, speaks FOR Salon.
Link: Big Girls Dont Cry: The election that changed everything for
women (Salon)
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2010

Liberal "crazies"
(Hofstadter pointed out that the left is certainly not free of
this mind-set, and so Dick Cheney and Halliburton have
often served as the designated superhumanly competent
malefactors for the other side, as in the 9/11 "Truth"
movement.)
[. . .]
Is it any wonder, then, that a growing number of Americans
insist on believing that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim?
This fantasy is the last piece needed to make an imaginary
international Islamic conspiracy fit the formula for political
paranoia laid out by Hofstadter 46 years ago. (Laura Miller,
1009
The paranoid style in American punditry, Salon, 15 Sept.

2010)
liberal crazies
The thing to be careful of is equating the crackpots--the "extremes"
on both the right and the left. If they're on the right, they are those of
such psychic fragility that they cannot stand when society changes or
grows too much, so when it does they cannot but come untethered. If
they're on the left, then they're those of such psychic healthiness that
they can see that the next period of American political life will largely
be about coating ongoing economic disparities and war in a way
Obama-liberals can well live with, feel right about, and are hardly in
the mood to cooperate with this evil. Both will scream and screech,
only one will register madness, while the other, fair alarm; but to
Obama-liberals they'll both neatly be grouped within the same arising
wave of loonies-emerging.
Also, if you're a liberal who is coming to understand that s/he is going
to be of the ones who'll actually prosper under Obama, one who still
gets, is in sync with, his "style," his age, then its pretty easy for you to
remain becalmed and rational. What emotional agitation you do feel
can safely be expressed, manifested through the rest of us, so you
don't have to be at all troubled by it.
Link: The paranoid style in American punditry (Salon)
What do the weak exist for?
When the Jon Meachams and Mika Brzezinskis work up the
courage to condemn the people who have done and are
continuing to do this for the "blood they have on their
hands," then their purported outrage and beliefs can be
viewed as sincere. But they don't do that and won't do that.
Righteous anger at those who spill blood is reserved only for
hated foreigners (Osama bin Laden) and for the
1010
marginalized and powerless who haven't actually spilled

any blood (the Koran-burning Pastor and WikiLeaks). That's
why this Pastor circus has received so much media
attention: it's a cheap, petty and easy way for people with
enormous amounts of blood on their own hands to show
what Good, Caring People they are by pretending that they
hate those who cause it to be spilled. (Glenn Greenwald, The
Pastor and Cheap, Selective Concern for Blood-letting,
Salon, 10 Sept. 3010)
What do the weak exist for, except to be trod upon?
It's a matter of aesthetics. Both sides want slaughter; one side is just
better at using the other to make their own execution seem clean,
matter-of-course. Obama was elected, so that slaughter could
continue, but in a way that would enable many liberals to join in and
comfortably settle into.
I personally think we're near past the point where pointing out a
prejudice against the weak and ready deference to the strong, could
be shame-inducing: too strong to mind would come the sense of
forthcoming reward. That beating up the weak is just good right now
might explain why we might soon experience a period where the weak
are beat upon, just 'cause. A stretch of untethered free-fall we use to
consolidate our understanding of the essential motivator behind our
attacks, before we clothe it again in more overtly righteous -- but not
especially essential -- cover. The weak exist to be savaged; the strong,
to be served: how can such essential simplicity / coherency be
anything other than right?
Link: The Pastor and Cheap, Selective Concern for Blood-letting
(Salon)
SATURDAY, AUGUST 21, 2010
What to do when history is not on your side?
1011
I cant believe were going through this again.

In January 2005, Time magazine featured on its cover a
photo of a young man in a shirt and dress slacks sitting in a
sandbox. The headline: They Just Wont Grow Up. The
article featured the research of one Jeffrey Jensen Arnett,
PhD, a developmental psychologist who coined the term
emerging adulthood to explain these puzzling, infantilized
adults.
The cover story of the New York Times Magazine this
weekend, already situated snugly at the top of the MostEmailed List, is a near-exact repeat of this story from 5
years ago, this time asking What is it About TwentySomethings? Again Arnett is the resident featured expert.
The Times only innovation, besides the slightly higher
quality of the writing and the greater length, is tarting up
the article with lots of sexy pictures of 20somethings (Im
lying on my bed, all angsty! Look down my shirt!) so
readers can lust after them while simultaneously shaking
their heads.
[. . .]
There is no mysterious collective 20something malaise. The
poor position of our nations future workforce is the
outgrowth of decades of economic policythe growth of
consumer and national debt and the deterioration of the
American job market, the protection of old-people programs
like Social Security and Medicare and the faltering of
opportunity-creating programs like education and health
care for all. Maybe the Times should be talking to its own
Paul Krugman, not a psychologist. (Anya Kamenentz,
Whats up with Twentysomethings? In a Word, Economics,
DIY U, 19 August 2010)
I think that the economy has certainly helped ensure a delayed
transition, but it isnt the cause of it. The cause is whatever was on
1012
the minds of adults that ensured that they (note: not greedy elites)
created a world that would leave their children scrambling to
convince themselves theyll ever be as adult as mature as their
own parents were/are. If your own parents kind of like the idea of
their kids being unlikely to ever effectively warrant their holding
presumptive moral authority over them, kind of like the idea of a
world that ensures that their kids will never quite feel secure and safe
enough to roam too far from their own expectations / wishes of them,
then youre fighting against a lot that might keep you from feeling
trenchantly independent, even if you were to score a franchise of
husband-wife, career, house, children by the age of 25
(accoutrements, of course, that demonstrate you are living the life
others expect of you that you are playing along: there is no escape).
There are people hovering over you, of the type that (increasingly
maybe not even) covertly partake in the seemingly now guilt-free
opportunity to peer down your shirt that your blameworthy /
childish / bad-lingering has somehow freely opened up for them,
while overtly sighing and wishing you would finally grow up: theyre
clearly ones to enjoy the fruits of a situation they are pretending only
to decry. If youve spent your youth amongst parents/elders like that,
long experiencing unresolvable, contradictory expectations from
you in what R.D. Laing once determined as a schizophreniainducing kind of environment you havent the sanity or the stuff to
create your own 60s to clear your way free of your parents intention
to always be your overlords. Rather, there will be something in you
working away until you yourself are convinced you are as lazy and
indulgent as your parents perceive you as whatever the state of
economy, how impossible an environment youve been given to prove
youre up to snuff. Repeatedly through history, but a good while back,
this kind of horrific, impossible environment drew many to eagerly
sign up for war. Instantly, they were war heroes, ready to
demonstrate their in fact existing virtue in their willingness to play to
the sacrificial wishes of their mother-country. A shorter while back,
we remember Faramir sacrificing himself so his disapproving steward
1013
father would finally for once think better of him, and how an
audience engaged with what was on screen, with what they felt inside
themselves.
The 60s generation made their way free because after the mass
sacrifice of WW2, allowance / permission (even if at first, cautious)
had power over restriction / punishment hemming parents were
pit not so much against their children as against historical law, and
surely felt and maybe knew their fate was to be neutralized until their
own children had franchised themselves to the point that they were
now ready to statue their slowly-crumbling parents as the Greatest
Generation. There is no such great wind behind the backs of todays
millenials; their best bet is if some of them despite Reagan, 80s on
actually have the self-assurance / self-esteem they keep being
credited for possessing: with that they might smartly placate but
never dumbly play into the desires of an older populace, increasingly
intent on ensuring that the one thing kids do not do is lead / possess
their own independent lives.
Note: If charged, emotive talk of mass child-sacrifice seems out of
place in an economic discussion, please skip Paul Krugmans most
recent NYT article. Mind you, since hes moved from repeatedly
calling current economic policies cruel to thinking of them as willed
blood-lettings of the-mad-but-in-charge, Im not quite sure how long
Krugman will keep his hold as a man to be reckoned with. What do
you do with a man who once routinely offered sober reasonings but
now finds explanations in strange analogies, runes and animal guts?
Krugman link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/opinion/20krugman.html?hp
FRIDAY, AUGUST 20, 2010

Thoughts on "The Switch"
(Originally posted at Movieline.com)
Wallie tries to explain to Cassie what he had done, essentially
1014
immediately after he recalls his having made the switch 6 years

before. Cold sober, chilled but vividly intent, he is well on the way to
explaining ... and then the movie takes his moment away from him.
Very evident that he is in the effort of trying to say something of huge
import that he fears will damage both of their lives thereafter, that
could ruin everything they shared between one another before then,
the movie has her recoil away when her own embarrassing admission
"demands" she suddenly stop him in his effort and squirrel back
inside her apartment. Better, the movie seems to think, that he make
his sin clear at a moment when it would look more last-straw and
inadequate, which would allow her to announce that future contact
would be under her terms and you wouldn't feel that she would even
in this still be reckoning with someone with real "sand." She relents
because he's there for him, and he's a good guy, not because she
found herself struck, shaken in his unmistakably having moved
beyond being a best friend you could presume upon. There was touch
here of a bracing, but ultimately more here of the "Marley and Me" -I'm compromised but (apparently, actually, quite depending on this)
still happy -- new man. Outstanding.
Xbox your movie

Xbox your movie
3D will interest when it seems linked to an argument that the whole
experience of BEING TOLD a story for two hours straight needs
explanation, when the possibility might be opened up that you could
rather play a part in the movie-world you've "entered." Right now,
we're on the wall somewhere -- a camera, a microphone. Attending,
listening -- not a chance to further participate until the movie-world
shuts down and we're talking about it a reality away. If 3D takes us
more transparently into the world, maybe we'll soon insist on having
a voice there as well. But if this isn't already our inkling, 3D alone
won't take us there, though. You're more immersed, but still straight-
1015
jacketed. Even if it comes to the art film, this may not be progress.
How might we redeem the turn from watching a film to actively living
/ experiencing / determining a new reality -- making it reality -- so
that it doesn't seem a freedom craved only by the finger-twitching
XBOX sort?
Link: 3-D filmmaking's radical, revolutionary potential

When people are porn
My story has occasioned a healthy amount of reaction
around the web, including from TED and Chris Anderson
himself.
First, the snark: Maura at The Awl (a commentary site run
by ex-Gawkers) calls the story breathless and smug.
Most of the commentators admit that they enjoy watching
TED talks anyway. I batted back with some snark of my own
but also tried to answer what i took as her serious point,
which was that TED seems just as elitist as the old-line
institutions its being compared with:
I actually think we have similar concerns about elitism vs.
openness.
My contention is that many of the cool things that TED does
spread more widely than the cool things that Harvard does,
because of its attitude toward openness and its use of social
media.Harvard has a crappy open courseware siteits very
difficult to find and view many Harvard lectures online. MIT
has the best open courseware site, but even the mostwatched video lectures have been watched a few hundred K
times, while the most watched TED talks have been viewed
over 6 million times.
Lectures are admittedly a small percentage of the benefit
1016
offered by either TED or Harvard, but theyre not nothing.

The spread of the TEDx platform with over 600 events
worldwide offers a way for ever-more people to participate,
often for free, in a much closer approximation to the TED
experience. I would love to see Harvard & Yale try
something like that.
Open Culture, a cultural blog, took umbrage too: Will
watching 18 minute lectures ones that barely scratch the
surface of an experts knowledge really teach you much?
And when the 18 minutes are over, will the experts stick
around and help you become a critical thinker, which is the
main undertaking of the modern university after all?
I responded: I never claimed that watching TED
talks=attending Harvard. If you read the article closely, Im
asking if *participating in* TEDand to a lesser but broader
extent, TEDx-confers a lot of the benefits of attending
Harvard, albeit in abbreviated (and much cheaper) form.
That means talking about the ideas with the presenters,
including asking questions; forming relationships with
fellow TEDsters; and having TED on your resume, which
can open all kinds of doors.
In addition, Im asking if theres any way that Harvard and
other universities can follow TEDs lead and open up to more
people. When a single Harvard lecture has been viewed 5
million + times on YouTube, this goal will be closer to being
reached.
[. . .]
Finally, TEDs Chris Anderson seems to be getting concerned
that TED is being accused of overreaching. When the article
came out, he Tweeted Fast Company have just publisheda
truly amazing feature on #TED. Wow.
http://bit.ly/aNOsQH.
Today, he added, linking to Salams and Yglesiass posts
above, For the record, we dont for 1 min think TED isthe
1017
new Harvard! http://bit.ly/arU8Z1 Backlash!

http://bit.ly/ciCJEV (Anya Kamenentz, Is TED the New
Harvar? Reactions from around the web, DIY U, 16 August
2010)
People seem irritated that your response wasnt properly subdued
(i.e., too breathless). Your real problem as is true with other good
people like Alfie Kohn is that you truly understand that
EDUCATION, LEARNING is the point, with how we get there a
truly open possibility. The way you think is that if someone is
educated, and you find out that this person got that way sans
university but simply Goodwill Hunting-like through a library card,
then youre one to give the library full credence: it doesnt first
acknowledge the university (as) clear master before listing its
strengths, but, through evidence, has proven it can stand fully equal
to all. This isnt whats going on in other peoples minds, and to them
its merely convenient that TEDs lectures are gratefully neardismissably only 18 minutes long. What theyre thinking is that
becoming educated is primarily about being educated, being acted
upon, by someone else being broken in. They dismiss TED for its
apparent lack of interactivity, but what they hate about it is actually
that it seems to privilege the individuals right to be an active,
choosing, fully-enabled consumer of education what they see
probably as its fickleness. In a way, to a certain extent, the webbrowser becomes akin to empowered gentleman-amateur of the past,
who would attend a professionals lectures but never once feel his
inferior: s/he has picked and chosen, sampled and savored, and
became more worldly; the professional wallows in a technicians
expertise. People just now arent any longer allowed / permitted to
think of themselves that way: the web has demonstrated that people
are porn, not participants or prodigies. Itunes U (to them) is better,
because its potentially more arduous its not so much about
entertaining, about lecturers finding ways to please your creditworthy sensibilities, but about you developing the discipline, the
1018
seriousness, to best engage with them: theyre reaching out, but the
signal will not be received unless youre able to listen (a talent best
nurtured, of course, after serious engagement with a physical
university). The they Im talking about are moving away from the
more Romantic estimation of people as flowering best away from
institutions, toward understanding them as requiring the breaking-in
that institutions can still yet enable. Names like Harvard,
Princeton, MIT are summoned not to be matched or breezed-by,
but because the overall cacophony and indulgent behavior is such
that it REQUIRES the attention, the schooling-down, of longexperienced 'wakening Kings.
Interactivity is being mentioned a lot. Im with Stanley Greenspan
(note: hes as good as Kohn) in thinking that back-and-forth
conversation is so all. But as the psychiatrist R.D. Laing made clear
when he established how the wrong sorts of conversations can lead to
the like of schizophrenia, further involvement isnt always to be
preferred to standing back, aloof, and in charge. Personally, I dont
much trust that interactivity in universities isnt now more about a
way to feel more securely enmeshed behind walls that are keeping the
rabble at bay. Not about responsiveness for growth, but about further
relinquishing for security and safety.
Link: Is TED the New Harvard? Reactions from around the web
How eager should we expect the civilized to be?
The essence of learning is found neither inside nor outside
the classroom, neither online nor offline. Its in the flow from
lived experience and practice, to listening, researching, and
sharing the fruits of your work with a community and back
out to the world again. Now that so much high-quality
information is available for freelike the 1,900 courses on
MIT Open Coursewareand platforms to allow people to
exchange words, images and sound online are exploding in
use, many of us are excited about the possibilities of self-
1019
organized education that is pared down to this essence, thus

affordable, efficient and accessible. But whether or not you
attend a traditional university, you will need to trace this
path again and again, from experience to theory, from
empirical to abstract, from action to reflection, from real to
ideal, in order to keep learning throughout your life.
Today theres a lot of emphasis on getting the best value for
money in higher education. This is important. But the most
important resource in higher education is free. Thats the
motivated learner. Thats you. (Anya Kamenentz, DIY U in
Forbes, DIY U, 13 August, 2010)
Increasingly, the net is being conceived as an abode for loud, impulseridden losers. Weve given it its chance, is what they say, and even
if there are gems amidst the slush couldnt they just tone it down
some? Owing to this, traditional universities arent seeming quite as
ridiculous as they should for their stodginess. I would hazard a guess
that the most important resource in higher education is now perhaps
more the CIVILIZED learner (that is, the tamed-down one), more
than it is the motivated (eager) one. Universities may be where people
go to become gentlemen / ladies if to an elite one, then up a notch
to aristocrat. Im noticing it more: its not so much what you have to
say as how you say it (impatiently? excitedly? did you drool?). The
winners may be those who say nothing much new, but do so
becalmed, with consideration.
Link: DIY U

Glum and glam
Like its star, Salt is a spare and lean piece of work; its
everything a modern action movie should be, a picture made
with confidence but not arrogance, one that believes so
1020
wholeheartedly in its outlandish plot twists that they come

to make perfect alt-universe sense. The story the script is
by Kurt Wimmer draws numerous outrageous loops, but
Noyce neither dwells on them ponderously nor speeds
through them in a misguided attempt to energize his
audience. And he makes fine use of his star, an actress
whose lanky gait is as delicious to watch as her springloaded leaps are. Noyce frames the movie around Jolies
finely tuned sense of movement, and yet its her
expressiveness that anchors the story emotionally: In an
old-fashioned, old-Hollywood way, Noyce and his
cinematographer, Robert Elswit, are wholly alive to her face
and all its possibilities.
[. . .]
Noyce has made his share of action thrillers (hes the
director behind the Tom Clancy adaptations Patriot Games
and Clear and Present Danger), but hes pulled off more
serious, emotionally complex material too (like his
meticulous and thoughtful version of Graham Greenes The
Quiet American). Salt is, of course, closer in style to the
former than the latter; still, Noyce approaches the material
with a healthy sense of humor. The subject matter alone is
likely to give moviegoers of a certain age a pleasant shiver
of Cold War nostalgia, and Noyce runs with that. (The Cold
War wasnt so much fun while it was going on, but as much
as we feared that the Soviets might someday come over and
liquefy our buildings, they never actually did so.) Touches
like Orlovs dumpling-thick Russian accent, or the way Salt
wraps herself in a swishy fur-trimmed cape, topped off with
a Dr. Zhivago toque, are served up with a sly wink.
(Stephanie Zacharek, Salt, Angelina Jolie Deliver the ActionPacked Summer Blockbuster Goods, Movieline, 21 July
2010)
-----
1021
It's a mark of the stupidity (and hypocrisy) of Stephanie's

lazy fanboys that they actually admire her for her critical
double standards, her inane protocols, and her lack of
intellectual rigor. For her review (gee what a surprise that
an Angelina Jolie starrer gets an unqualified rave from
Stephanie - gosh darn it, never saw that one coming!!)
praises Salt for all the same qualities she derided
Inception for having: an unbelievable plot set in an "alt
universe," "outlandish plot twists," over-the-top images
which equate "awesomeness" with "greatness," paper-thin
characterization, etc., etc. No use trying to find consistency
and fairness in a Stephanie Zacharek evaluation. Read
between the lines and she's basically excusing Salt for
containing the exact same elements she found objectionable
and tiresome in Inception. To describe a movie as taking
place in an "alt universe" where "outlandish plot twists"
occur is to admit the movie is junk after all.
The only difference is that Salt doesn't take itself too
seriously: being self-consciously "hip" rather than
attempting to be "deep," and also having a glam heroine
rather than a gloomy hero, Steph can ignore the fact that in
all other respects, it's just as undistinguished as the other
film she panned.
Essentially she loved Salt for one main reason: because it
has Angelina Jolie as a kick-ass heroine. Since Stephanie,
like so many of her smug admirers, has always been a
delusional, self-congratulatory narcissist, of course that
combo would go down well. It always does.
Secret to making a movie that SZ is guaranteed to love:
make the plot knowingly "hip" in its outrageousness. Make
sure you include plenty of preposterous plot twists, but make
sure you show, every step of the way, you're in on the joke.
That way no one can accuse you of taking yourself too
seriously. That also is guaranteed to make SZ and like-
1022
minded hipsters feel super-cool and "with it" when they

watch.
Next, add in a glam-girl heroine who, despite looking like a
waif, can by some miracle kick ass effortlessly, even when
up against men twice her size. Stephanie, being a narcissist,
will always praise any movie that allows her to "identify"
(the way a little kid "identifies" with her barbie dolls) with a
sexy, witty, butt-kicking, devil-may-care babe. (Never mind
that in real life, a woman with Jolie's physique would last
about 30 seconds against any of these heavies: in today's
market, movies are about flattering the female ago just as
much as the teen male ego. At least James Cameron,
whatever his other faults, cast the brawny Linda Hamilton
as his female ass-kicker.) Most people outgrow this kind of
dumb fantasy long before they're Steph's age.
Finally, cast Angelina Jolie in the lead. This isn't always
necessary, but it's a marked bonus.
What's especially funny is that I guessed more or less what
SZ was going to write the moment I saw the poster for Salt.
She has become that crushingly predictable. There wasn't a
single paragraph of this review that took me by surprise.
Stephanie, you truly are a paint-by-numbers hack.
This part of SZ's review made me laugh:
The movie opens with a flashback, jolting us back to
early-2000s North Korea. A semi-naked Salt is
being tortured by soldiers in a dank-looking
dungeon. They keep insisting shes a spy; she keeps
repeating, with unwavering authority, Im not a
spy, Im a businesswoman
God, I've never seen that one before! Didn't Madonna
parody this one in her "Die Another Day" video? Isn't it the
opening scene of every episode of Alias ever? Thank God
Salt's there to keep the hoariest of cliches alive. (Chris,
response to post)
1023
Chris: I think you do a good service in getting us to compare her

reviews. Having read her review of "Prince of Persia," for example,
with its key praise for it being that though it isn't perfect it does at
least aim for "grandeur" ([i]n a moviegoing climate where so many
people out of necessity or preference end up watching movies at
home on DVD"), I think you really should ask for some explanation as
to why "Inception" was so panned SPECIFICALLY FOR its aiming at
the OMG! awesome. I don't think it's quite a contradiction because I
think she really appreciates ambitious reach, lavish and scale, and
wants us to extend ourselves to films that generously offer as much,
but doesn't want to sense that a film's grandeur / awesomeness
depends on your willingness as a filmgoer to experience it as an
acolyte oh-so-ready to lose yourself to rapture, or just on your having
sat before a film that will willy-nilly juice you until you're brain-fried,
but it's worthy of a clarification, and my guess is that few who read
both reviews thought one was required.
Reading this review, I myself would want to know how exactly a
reviewer would square praising a film for it "believ[ing] so
wholeheartedly in its outlandish plot twists that they come to make
perfect alt-universe sense," with its also deserving kudos for its
"healthy sense of humor." It seems, at least, that the same film is
credited for its level of seriousness and immersion but also for its
laid-backness and modesty, its evidencing of a knowing and awry
distance / detachment. Maybe the two can go together, but not
obviously so; and it's worth a check to see if with this film they're
congruent and / or that if for some reason to a certain reviewer taking
oneself seriously is always a precarious lurch, even when its clearly
established as a subject of praise. I don't want to be prepared to be
generous with a film simply because a film maker shows s/he's
prepared to shift tones / weight if what s/he's up to "now" is making
me uncomfortable -- not simply because it gives me room to think /
feel for myself -- or because it extends some reach but beyond what
remain MOSTLY ACCEPTED perimeters (i.e., standard summer
1024
blockbuster fair): I'd be concerned, I think, that what I foremost

want / expect movies to show me is that they are first of all MY
subject -- i.e., just a movie -- with from there being the starting place,
the only place, from which something worthwhile might develop. I'd
be afraid that previous shocks were delimiting, were limiting, current
explorations, who I might still become. Or is it sheerly childish to ask
that a movie be allowed still to alter you, morph beyond being just a
movie to actually become a life-changing event -- to a certain extent
even without your permission -- with adulthood being about
attenuation, modest reconsideration / recalibration to a largely
settled core? Do we actually APPRECIATE the bossyness in the
Nolans -- the bossy Nolans -- if "they" help us color all of what might
be good for us but what we can't bear to brave, so we can engage them
optionally, perhaps LARGELY laughing, mocking, deriding and
closed?
Re: I think you really should ask for some
explanation as to why "Inception" was so panned
SPECIFICALLY FOR its aiming at the OMG!
awesome. I don't think it's quite a contradiction,
because I think she really appreciates ambitious
reach, lavish and scale, and wants us to extend
ourselves to films that generously offer as much,
but doesn't want to sense that a film's grandeur /
awesomeness depends on your willingness as a
filmgoer to experience it as an acolyte oh-so-ready
to lose yourself to rapture
Patrick, I understand that everyone has their personal
quirks and biases, and that what turns one person's crank
won't turn another's. Every single critic and moviegoer on
the planet brings her or his own personal prejudices to the
table. And I know there's no objectively "right" or "wrong"
opinion about any movie under the sun. (And I must repeat:
I'm fairly lukewarm on Christopher Nolan myself.)
1025
But Stephanie takes subjectivity of response to a nearly

psychotic extreme. Skim through her reviews and it becomes
glaringly obvious she just plain likes certain qualities that
aren't inherently "better" or "worse" than others she detests:
she just likes movies that contain certain ingredients and
that's that. It doesn't matter if the ingredients are sloppily
flung together, it doesn't matter if the recipe is poorly
prepared in the kitchen, all that matters is that it contains
Stephanie's favorite ingredients. She's like a restaurant who
loves pasta more than anything in the world, so therefore
gives every single Italian restaurant she visits a four-star
review. Whereas she hates Chinese food, so every Chinese
place gets the thumbs down regardless of how good or bad
the food is. Just the fact that it serves Chinese food is enough
for her to give a restaurant a thrashing. Have critical
standards sunk so low that we now revere individual
reviewers simply for not saying the same thing as everyone
else? One can be a moron as long as one isn't a sheep? Just
because Zacharek departs from the general consensus on
Chris Nolan movies, she's to be revered as some sort of hero?
Having read (like a masochist) enough of Stephanie's
reviews over the years, I'm prepared to say again that the
main reason she loved Salt and hated Inception is this (to
quote from myself): Salt is a movie having a glam
heroine rather than a gloomy hero.
Again and again SZ says nice things about movies with
heroines who play into SZ's wish-fulfillment fantasies. It's
quite revealing what she does and doesn't like about the
movies she reviews. What really irritates her about
Inception and The Dark Knight is that the kind of wishfulfillment they tap into is more of a guy thing, whereas SZ
likes chick flicks of a certain sort, not gushily sentimental
ones like Titanic, but Angelina's movies, or the TV show
Sex and the City, chick shows and chicklit and chick flicks
1026
of a certain hip, cool register. Chris Nolan's universe is too

much of a geeky boy's club, but it isn't actually "worse"
artistically so much as it appeals to a different niche.
.....
Oops, this....
She's like a restaurant who loves pasta more than
anything in the world
should read She's like a restaurant REVIEWER who
loves pasta.... etc. (Chris, response to post)
She really liked "Letters to Juliet," and it wasn't so much cool and hip
(in fact it wasn't at all that) as it was bright, warm, relaxed and --conditionally -- AVAILABLE: I think, the opposite of hipster. I think
you can provide a lot of examples of the cool and hip she goes for, but
it would as you know need targeting to convince, because with just
hearing that she goes for the hip and cool it's too easy to think of
movies that are a kind of cool, that are in fact so LAMENTABLY
cooled down that you recall most vividly her attending to the few
instances of vibrant "aliveness" the films did allow, the refreshing bit
of color -- glam? -- in landscapes otherwise so everywhere neutered
and grey. Your claim that she is attracted to glam is interesting,
though. As I've suggested / implied, it could be made to be about her
preference for color over drabness, part of her war against freezing
mannerisms -- which would be a sign of her own aliveness, her
expectancy for soulfulness, much more than it would her girlish
adolescence -- but you mostly want to make it equivalent to the
stunted guy's going for glum and grime it would seem.
You made the point earlier that the legacy of Pauline Kael (I
remember now I actually did try to get into her work -- a couple of
times in fact -- but so wasn't drawn in that I could barely recall having
tried her on: I was always way, way more for Nathaniel Branden than
I was the kinda alien creature-seeming Ayn Rand as well) has been
the omnipresence of critics who cannot allow that their ostensibly
more evolved, more involved engagement with films has mostly been
1027
a kind of cunning skating on the surface, an ongoing disinclination to

throughly analyze, deeply involve oneself with film, in preference to
sporting with them. You focus on Stephanie because you think she's
so beholden to her, because she represents THE PROBLEM -- the log
jam -- it would mostly seem, and not because you're a masochist
(though you say this, and I accept it, and hope you know it's worth
your exploring too). And it seems -- from one of the things you said
on the "Inception" thread -- also because you have seen what she can
do, and sense her potential. If I were you, I would continue to finesse
out where she goes wrong, and -- very much please -- at some point
also where she goes so wonderfully right, for all our sakes. Maybe you
could best do so by responding after you've just seen a film she's
"taken on."
You know the challenge involved in showing the kind of reviewer who
seems attendant and responsive to every film molecule to be actually
mostly closed off / shut down, so I wish you a universe of good luck,
as well as an unbeknownst deity or two to have your back. But my
rooting for your cause is genuine: Wouldn't it be wonderful if one day
Stephanie looked back and recalled "Avatar" in such a way that you
wouldn't be drawn, as one commenter on the Salon thread did, to ask
if she in fact had a limbic system? As I thought the alien flower she so
appreciated and attended to in the film notable but still so easily and
immediately trumped preamble, I had to wonder too, and would
certainly cheer at this!
Link: Angelina Jolie Deliver the Action-Packed Summer Blockbuster
Good (Movieline)
SUNDAY, JUNE 27, 2010
Ammoing up
The Killer Inside Me isnt a misogynist picture.
Winterbottom takes great care to show his own attitude
toward the brutal suffering of both of these characters. And
its easy to accept that hes made the violence graphic so well
1028
grasp the full moral weight of it this isnt jazzily cut

cartoon brutality presented for kicks.
But that doesnt mean that in addressing that violence,
Winterbottom has made the right choices, artistically or
emotionally. (Those who are extremely sensitive to spoilers
and who havent already read Thompsons book might want
to stop reading here.)In an online interview with The Wall
Street Journal this past April, around the time his film was
presented at the Tribeca Film Festival, Winterbottom
expressed dismay when the interviewer mentioned that the
women in The Killer Inside Me enjoyed having rough sex.
Thats interesting, you think that they enjoyed the
violence? Winterbottom said. The story is being told from
[Lous] point of view so its his version of what happened. In
his head at least, theres no doubt that these women love
him. Yet the movie clearly shows us both women enjoying,
and sharing in, Lous sexual proclivities. Are we to believe
what a filmmaker tells us with his camera, or how he
explains himself in an interview? And if a story is told from
one characters point of view, does that mean a filmmaker
has abdicated his role in shaping the material? Whos in
charge here, the character or the director?
[. . .]
Im not looking for a tasteful treatment of violent material
if I were, I wouldnt feel the admiration I do for
Thompsons novel. But Id argue that extending the violence,
as Winterbottom does, is actually anti-Thompson in its lack
of economy. Thompson describes Joyces murder in five brief
paragraphs, several of them only one sentence long but each
one hitting with the weight of a lead-crystal candlestick. I
backed her against the wall, slugging, and it was like
pounding a pumpkin. Hard, then everything giving away at
once, Thompson writes in two tersely horrific sentences.
Thompson takes 21 words to get to the heart of a vivid,
1029
sickening idea. Winterbottom takes a good five minutes, and

thats 280 seconds too many. (Stephanie Zacharek,
Characters deserve better in violent Killer Inside Me,
Movieline, 17 June 2010)
This may not be a misogynistic; it need not be misogynistic; but it is
certainly seeming lately that the way for liberal, self-protecting men
to express in-some-way-need-to-be-expressed, apparently near
furious anger at women, is to enact brutal "revenge" with highpurpose cover. Right now it may be the liberal men can get away with
saying that "anyone who might find the violence in this movie
gratifying or arousing is already virtually beyond the bounds of
professional help" (Andrew O'Hehir), but if as I suspect we see more
Watchmen/ Girl with the Dragon Tattoo/ Killer Inside of Me followup, at some point we've got to suspect that high-concept / purpose
has become the last hold-out for expressing deeply felt gripes against
terribly wounding female treatment. One suspects it already in their
ammoing up.
Link: Characters deserve better in violent Killer Inside Me
(Movieline)
FRIDAY, JUNE 25, 2010
Toy Story 3
Toy Story 3 takes a rather dark turn near the end (be
prepared for this if you plan on taking really little kids), but
the resolution is so funny and so joyous truly a
Sometimes theres God so quickly moment that I dont
think it will cause any nightmares. (Stephanie Zacharek,
Toy Story 3 brings series to brilliant, bittersweet close,
Movieline, 17 June 2010)
It should give you nightmares. Two futures are presented in this film,
1030
one that will soon be familiar to the cast-aside -- a nightmare of being

used, tortured and ruled over, without respite, until you're broken
and finally gone -- and the other for those who have found some way
to sculpt themselves to be relevant -- another couple decades of
feeling vital to the future of the American dream. I think most liberals
feel that if they continue to fight for the impoverished, to fully side
with them, they risk joining the nightmare of junk, and sense that if
they only persuade themselves Brad Bird-like that there is simply no
hope for the damaged-to-the-point-of-grotesque, that they can
continue to accumulate and thrive, enjoying even a sense of now rare
election (in a suitably self-downplaying way, of course): it's simply the
way of the times. Bird showed he was for construing society so that
many of those who saw his films should probably rot, a few films ago.
"Wall-E" showed Lasseter still moved by enough of something special
that he seemed still for all of us. Not here, though. Another liberal on
the other side. May he at least feel guilt pains.
"It's vintage!": for safety, another clue to abandon your status as a
hipster, and possibly as a homosexual.
----And it was brilliant and funny and exciting. But it was also
possibly one of the tear-jerkingiest movies to come out of
Pixar yet. Click through to see what scenes caused the most
waterworks, but, of course, beware of spoilers.
5. The Toys Accept That Andy Wont Play With
Them Anymore
4. Andys Mom Takes In Andys Room
3. Woody Has to Leave Bullseye the Horse Behind
2. Woody and Friends Accept Death Together
1. Andy Hesitates Handing Woody Over to Bonnie
(Dixon Gaines, You got a friend in me: 5 tearjerking moments from Toy Story 3, Movieline, 20
June 2010)
Re #5: It's not so much that they're not needed, but that they don't fit
1031
his understanding of himself as one of the chosen still permitted the

path of blue skies, clipped yards and picket fences; college on; the full
realization of the American dream. Bringing one precious toy with
him would just show anyone who happened inside his dorm room
that he came from the right past of involved parents and idyllic
(romanced traditional) childhood interests and attachments. Bringing
the whole horde would suggest he's too much akin to those broken
who won't now find their way to college (increasingly, probably not
even the full way through high school), who cannot but now cling to
everything with some, with even the faintest bit of, friendly link, as
the threat of abandonment or disaster can never now be pushed far
enough away from conscious presence to not seem an any-moment
possibility.
Re #4: Andy's mom is acting out the drama of son departing for
college, in just the fashion all mothers continue to dream of acting out
-- because of its resonance of family fitness, healthiness, job-welldone election -- but which we all know and sense that fewer and fewer
will able to realize. The mother's look inside the barren room is
today's version of Marie's "let them eat cake." Sad indeed.
Re #3: Woody is still infused with a sense of election from proving to
have the stuff to be the only toy to find uncompromising relevance in
Andy's movement along the right path, his shift away from all that
might compromise him. "Bullseye, you're just so sad. Just like a kid,
you were always too dependent: no would-be emerging adult in this
biting world wants to be reminded of having once been THAT
vulnerable. May you find solace in the trash ... but whatever you
dumb clinging pony: just find some way out of my sight. Now that's a
good pony."
Re #2: Sad, because we all know it's a result of Woody's naive sudden
trust of Lotso (what happened to the Woody who took like forever to
accept the spaceman?), which seems strangely out of character, and
possibly therefore born of some kind of death-wish, willingness,
desire to be placed in a situation where you'll be sacrificed. Last
straw, or the realization of foremost desire? I suspect the later; may
1032
no Afghanistan-bound young American see this film lest s/he believe

solace, group camaraderie, sweet-resting-home and eternal
acceptance lies in letting oneself passively be drawn into its inner,
urgent, hungry maw.
Re #1: The toys go to Bonnie, and get a 5-year reprieve -- until she
discovers boys. After that they'll need a PR savy spider to join their
cause and "spin them" as the "most specialest of toys," so as to give
them some chance of not being donated to some of the increasing
numbers of mongoloid, bent kids, who will obliterate themselves once
they've finished off everything before them, and whose mothers
cannot but call thrift stores their home.
----Wow. You use a lot of big fancy words.
But it doesn't disguise that you're wrong.
The Woody of the first film isn't cynical. He's assured
because of his place. When he loses that place to Buzz, he's
angry (like a small child) but grows to realize that trusting
and placing his trust in another (Buzz) is his only hope of
salvation.
The Woody of the second film BEGINS the movie saying that
no toy gets left behind. Woody wouldn't abandon anyone,
and is quick to even give Stinky Pete a chance at happiness
with Andy. He is truly shocked when Pete betrays that trust.
The Woody who gives Lotso a reprieve is a culmination of
Woody's journey from self-assured ruler of the roost to
loving and caring leader of the toy family, and one who
believes that every toy should get a chance.
Which is why your analysis is wrong. (Duane, response to
post)
Thanks for the great counter -- particularly your Stinky Pete example,
which I admit I don't remember all that well, and will have to look at
again. Examples aside, though, my overall sense of Woody as
someone too worldly-wise and adult -- and sometimes cynical -- to
1033
not only feel the need to urgently rescue Lotso but to trust him to
rescue them rather than once again deceive and abandon them, was
established in the first film, with his long exasperation at everyone
elses' idiotic simple trust and naivety (their pre-schoolness), their
dumb eager willingness to fall for what should be the most obvious of
scams. In TS 3, his instant naivety was meant to make him seem too
innocent to thrive, and make their rescue and new home more
salvation-like and cling-worthy -- you weren't thinking of the games
they were going to enjoy, but simply that they'll have the mercy of a
few more years away from the curb.
----"because we all know it's a result of Woody's naive sudden
trust of the bear-thing (what happened to the Woody who
took like forever to accept the spaceman?), which seems
strangely out of character..."
Nope, not out of character...he saved Lotso because he was
going to die. It would have been out of Woody's character to
watch a helpless toy die. (LEM, response to post)
It was meant to play out as Woody being (apparently) doomed for
being in the moment immediately receptive and trusting (and
therefore the considered play of the bear being wide-eyed frightened,
pinned, weak, and vulnerable). He wasn't principled though
begrudging, but naive and trusting: simple. From my remembered
sense of him, this isn't the Woody from the first two films, who could
get wickedly upset when his friends fall for simple charms. Not meant
for the real world is this Woody, whose innocent gallantry could make
him fall for the first deception a slickster puts in his way.
Relevant, recalled Lloyd DeMause quote: "Of course, in true
borderline style, the price of some closeness with God is total
devotion, the medieval Christian saying: 'To my beloved, I will forever
be His servant, His slave, All for God, and nothing for me.' As
contemporary borderlines say: 'I know you will love and take care of
1034
me if I dont self-activate. Ill please you by clinging and complying

with your wishes, so you will take care of me, and these bad
(abandonment) feelings will go away.' (Evolution of Psyche and
Society)
Link: Toy Story 3 brings series to brilliant, bittersweet close
(Movieline)
Link: You got a friend in me: 5 tear-jerking moments from Toy Story
3
the uncomfortable
What happens once the self-publishing revolution really gets
going, when all of those previously rejected manuscripts hit
the marketplace, en masse, in print and e-book form,
swelling the ranks of 99-cent Kindle and iBook offerings by
the millions? Is the public prepared to meet the slush pile?
You've either experienced slush or you haven't, and the
difference is not trivial. People who have never had the job
of reading through the heaps of unsolicited manuscripts sent
to anyone even remotely connected with publishing typically
have no inkling of two awful facts: 1) just how much slush is
out there, and 2) how really, really, really, really terrible the
vast majority of it is. Civilians who kvetch about the bad
writing of Dan Brown, Stephenie Meyer or any other hugely
popular but critically disdained novelist can talk as much
trash as they want about the supposedly low standards of
traditional publishing. They haven't seen the vast majority
of what didn't get published -- and believe me, if you have,
it's enough to make your blood run cold, thinking about that
stuff being introduced into the general population.
Everybody acknowledges that there have to be a few gems
out in the slush pile -- one manuscript in 10,000, say -buried under all the dreck. The problem lies in finding it. A
1035
diamond encased in a mountain of solid granite may be

truly valuable, but at a certain point the cost of extracting it
exceeds the value of the jewel. With slush, the cost is not only
financial (many publishers can no longer afford to assign
junior editors to read unsolicited manuscripts) but also -- as
is less often admitted -- emotional and even moral.
It seriously messes with your head to read slush. Being
bombarded with inept prose, shoddy ideas, incoherent
grammar, boring plots and insubstantial characters -- not
to mention ton after metric ton of clichs -- for hours on end
induces a state of existential despair that's almost impossible
to communicate to anyone who hasn't been there
themselves: Call it slush fatigue. You walk in the door
pledging your soul to literature, and you walk out with a
crazed glint in your eyes, thinking that the Hitler Youth guy
who said, "Whenever I hear the word 'culture,' I reach for
my revolver" might have had a point after all.
[. . .]
Perhaps this system will work better, but I'm not so sure.
Contrary to the way they're often depicted by frustrated
authors, the agents and editors I've met are in fact
committed to finding and nurturing books and authors they
believe in as well as books that will sell. Also, bloggers or
self-appointed experts on particular genres and types of
writing are, in my experience, just as clubby and as likely to
plug or promote their friends and associates as anybody
else. Above all, this possible future doesn't eliminate
gatekeepers: It just sets up new ones, equally human and no
doubt equally flawed. How long before the authors
neglected by the new breed of tastemaker begin to accuse
them of being out-of-touch, biased dinosaurs? (Laura Miller,
When anyone can be a published author, Salon, 22 June
2010)
1036
Watch when they get the vote, and then you'll see!
Re: "Contrary to the way they're often depicted by frustrated
authors, the agents and editors I've met are in fact committed to
finding and nurturing books and authors they believe in as well as
books that will sell. Also, bloggers or self-appointed experts on
particular genres and types of writing are, in my experience, just as
clubby and as likely to plug or promote their friends and associates
as anybody else. Above all, this possible future doesn't eliminate
gatekeepers: It just sets up new ones, equally human and no doubt
equally flawed."
Probably would have been better to have written, "Though they ARE
clubby and likely to plug or promote their friends' works, the agents
and editors I've met are also committed to ..." As you wrote it, the
bloggers or self-appointed experts take the big hit you ostensibly
meant to be spread all around. Also, I gather you didn't mean to have
us thinking of the ghastly accumulation of oil spillage when you
referred us to this horrific massing of slush, but given all the inertia
and choking and pure ugliness we've endured of the former "spread,"
we may be a bit more primed to agree with your argument that we
might otherwise be -- for what American is going to readily assent to
the aristocrat's / gentleman's point-of-view: "Friend of democracy,
are you? .... let me show you some of the nincompoops of this navelgazing mob you so want to champion but completely misunderstand,
and we'll see if you'll still desire they be given the vote any time this
millenium!"
Sometimes the fall of a system represents evolution of HUMANITY,
of spirit, not just technology. There are huge hordes of bloggers /
writers out there that will create something WAY WORSE, more
punitive and self-serving, than what's currently in place, as they strive
to find their way to become what they've always loathed and
misapprehended (the gatekeepers). But there are good bunches of
people out there who sense that the current conception of, the
realities of, the publishing industry, though better than other
possibilities, is still insufficient to, unreflective of, their own
1037
conception of democracy and brotherly / sisterly love. They want the

idea of the author, the publishing house, to go bye-bye, as it currently
works against the realization of what they sense could be our
democratic world. I'm with them.
----I have a friend who is a wannabe writer- and one of the things she has mentioned is that sheer
hostility to writers from the publishing industry. Especially
beginner writers, who make up the vast bulk of the slush
pile.
I always thought she was exaggerating a bit, but after
reading this article and the comments, I'm not so sure.
What other art form, what other activity, is it perfectly okay
(in fact, almost expected) to dump on people for the sin of
being novices? Words like "garbage" and "really, really,
really, really terrible", "dreck".
What other kind of artists would take this kind of casual
abuse but writers?
And she isn't saying that the vast majority of manuscripts
are not bad, she's saying they are bad because, by and large,
they are by beginner writers, so why all the hate? (Tobbar,
response to post)
Superego world
Tobbar,
I disagree that the problem is just that they're novices. If that was the
problem, Laura would have pointed that out -- she is very much one
to recognize and champion novice writers. What she is thinking of,
and has herself been damaged by experiencing, are the ghastly
multitudes of damaged people who believe they've got what it takes,
but who really are in truth sadly undeveloped, deformed people with
worse than nothing good to say -- to the point that "you're" left
stunned that they aren't on, even in the smallest degree, to the gaping
extent of their own awfulness.
1038
But I don't trust that publishers, editors, have the stuff to recognize
and praise work that makes them uncomfortable. I think they would
begin to become uncomfortable, be less genial, with a competent but
novice writer if s/he ventured into areas, ways of writing, they find
inexplicable, beyond disproved and everyone-knows asinine -- there
are so many things you're simply not allowed to say these days: what
have the last twenty years been about, if not that? If they had their
say, s/he would be disowned, removed from the conversation and
forgotten about. And that's not good enough.
----To Patrick:
Im going to have to disagree with your disagreement of my
original observation re: hatred of novices. I think that Laura
Miller champions a few select novice writers who are
already published or well on their way.
To use a borderline racist term that my friend assures me is
all the rage in the publishing world, Laura Miller seems to
champion the special snowflakes who have managed to
rise to prominence.
Further, although Ms. Miller may be sympathetic to novices,
you yourself do not seem to be: ghastly multitudes of
damaged people who believe they've got what it takes, but
who really are in truth sadly undeveloped, deformed people
with worse than nothing good to say -- to the point that
"you're" left stunned that they aren't on, even in the smallest
degree, to the gaping extent of their own awfulness.
Honestly, how can you know this about these people?
Beginner yoga students are probably undeveloped
(flexibility-wise) with worse than no skills in regards to
knowledge of poses, and may even be unaware of their
shortcomings, but is it standard practice in yoga studios to
dump so savagely on those beginners?
Again I have to askwhy the hate? Why the language that
seems to thrive on denigrating the writers?
1039
As to your last comment about editors lack-of ability to risk

reading outside of what they know, or maybe even what
they already like, I cant really speak to that, but you bring
up a good point. What is that old saying, the surest way to
lose the present war is to re-fight the last one? (Tobbar,
response to post)
Being real
Re: "Honestly, how can you know this about these people? Beginner
yoga students are probably undeveloped (flexibility-wise) with
worse than no skills in regards to knowledge of poses, and may even
be unaware of their shortcomings, but is it standard practice in
yoga studios to dump so savagely on those beginners?
Again I have to askwhy the hate? Why the language that seems to
thrive on denigrating the writers?"
It's not hate, Tobbar -- I'm just being real. I've read enough of Laura's
work to know that if most submissions were inadequate mostly owing
to the fact that their writers were still at the beginning of their
journeys, she would never have written her piece this way, as she has
always wanted to believe that in everyone out there is, or could be, an
inspired artist (or art appreciator) waiting to be born. She doesn't so
much believe this anymore because her long experience with what is
put in her hands -- and her strong hold on sanity -- has shattered her
preferred and high estimation of the average Sue submitter's
capabilities, as she has come to conclude that something very wrong
lies in emotional / cognitive makeup of these people. My experience
of people, of what has happened to them after near 30 years of social
assistance withdrawal, of enduring the realities of a meaner society,
has made clear to me that many people out there aren't so much
better than Hogarth's gin-drinkers, that we've pretty much forced
them to devolve to the point that you figure it's pretty much done for
them, and you're mostly hoping they don't have too many kids. We're
not all blank slates. Whole bunches of us are near born, filth-smeared
and broken. I'm figuring many of these might estimate themselves a
1040
genteel author, and do the pre-requisites (send the finished

masterpiece to a reputable publishing house), but also that you'll
meet nary one of them in your average yoga class.
----the uncomfortable
Also, about the gifted writer / thinker who puts forward the
uncomfortable: Lloyd deMause's books have all been self-published,
and they've proven amongst the most important I've ever read. His
version of psychohistory was something you could almost get away
with in the more permissive, free-wheeling 70s, but even then, though
a few prominent and even universally respected names (the historian
Lawrence Stone comes to mind) were considering giving his unusual
ideas credence (Stone eventually backed away), most historians were
affronted whenever his essays found their way amongst more
preferred takings of history, and his longer works had to be selfpublished. Today's "Lloyd deMause" would have it worse: even in
Laura Miller's trepidation in an author arguing a king would envision
"the nation as a version of his own body and vice versa" (a bit from a
book review of hers), I saw how the palest version of a kind of
exploration I find most meaningful and fruitful, has become more
bemusing than Freud's most far-fetched. If it's psychohistory, and it's
published, it'll be the most tepid, backpedalling of stuff -- there is no
other option. Self-published -- it might just be a prompt for where we
can go next. So I'm for self-publishing, and seeing what selfpublishers might just be up to.
Link: When anyone can be a published author (Salon)
THURSDAY, JUNE 24, 2010

spirit of punishment
Talk about snakebit: Peggy Noonan chose Friday to publish
a column writing off President Obama off as an unlucky
1041
president, comparing him to Jimmy Carter, just when his

presidency has a little spring back in its step. Its title is
luscious: "A Snakebit President: Americans want leaders on
whom the sun shines."
The sun seemed to shine on Obama this week. It's true his
Tuesday night speech wasn't his best, but that's because it
lacked the news he was able to reveal Wednesday: That BP
had agreed to create a $20 billion escrow fund to
compensate the victims of its Gulf oil disaster, to have it
administered by the tough Kenneth Feinberg of the 9/11
fund, and also to put off paying shareholder dividends
through the end of the year.
And on Thursday, Obama got relief from the harsh,
unnatural media glare in the wake of the disaster, which
had landed upon him in the absence of any other visible hero
or villain in the mess, when Tony Hayward testified before
the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Hayward's
constant insistence that he either didn't know or couldn't
recall ... virtually anything he was asked, finally made clear
there is one leader whose lack of preparedness can be
blamed for the crisis, and his name is Tony Hayward. (Joan
Walsh, Barack Obamas very good week, Joan Walsh,
Salon, 18 June 2010)
1) Spirit of punishment
People who aim to show how ineffectual this president is / will be,
will be rendered absurd as Obama will prove again and again,
increasingly and increasingly, someone who can transcend
expectations, produce something of a miracle, after weeks or months
of surely-THIS-TIME-nothing-will-be-done. Healthcare is in, and not
wavering. BP coughed up 20 billion, as if in response to an emperor's
slight motion to fall on his sword. This administration HAS power
because we -- everyone, including corporations, including many
republicans --WANT IT to have power.
After long periods of pleasant or manic excess (i.e., happiness), we
1042
begin to want leaders in who will set the scene for prolonged sacrifice
and (guiltless) other-demonization, through depressions, huge wars
-- whatever. It will always seem to be about helping out the
distraught, but the reason everyone -- including corporations -- will
ultimately prove surprisingly ready to bow to him, is that they sense
he is the primary incarnation of a spirit of brutal punishment these
"bad boys" are terrified of, and that will -- and they want to -- rule this
age.
Edit:
Amendment: He is the primary ARM of a spirit of punishment. He is
not the incarnation itself. That seems more accurate.
----2) The media may conclude that the people have once again proved
themselves impatient and impulsively needy, ultimately unequal to
the poised, patient, thoughtful and resourceful man they've elected
president -- as it did after Obama got healthcare. Obama is not Carter,
mostly because people want now more to turn on themselves than
they do this emotionally distant, possibly judgmental, president, who
hovers over an age of unbelievable excess, lack of restraint. "Reagan"
won't follow him because "Reagan" would do what we want of him -which would drive us to a state of sinfulness that would be paralyzing.
Obama acts under his own terms, at his own pace, seeing the filth at
the heart of the ordinary man that would drive any sane man away -why else do so want him to show some responsiveness than to
confirm he knows the degree of our own fallenness? Don't
underestimate our desire to turn on ourselves and ultimately
INCREASE our loyalty to Obama. That's my sense. (Note: THIS post
-- #2 -- originally posted at realpsychohistory, 16 June 2010)
Link: Barack Obamas very good week (Salon)
the killer inside of you

As I wrote in April, to complain that "The Killer Inside Me"
1043
is full of misogynistic violence is a little like reading "MobyDick" and objecting to all the stuff about whaling. Violence
against women is Thompson's text and theme and central
metaphor -- and in case I haven't made this clear, anyone
who might find the violence in this movie gratifying or
arousing is already virtually beyond the bounds of
professional help.
[. . .]
Within the first few minutes of the film, Lou is sent to run
Joyce out of town and she responds by slapping and
slugging him. She's bored and lonely and sick of sleeping
with ugly guys for money; she's looking for a reaction, and
she gets one: On the verge of walking out, Lou comes back
and tackles her, pulling down her panties and whipping her
bare ass with his belt. The sequence is both erotic and
violent, profoundly troubling and potentially arousing,
designed to provoke a whiplash of emotional, psychological
and libidinal responses. It sets the table for what follows: an
exploration of the dividing line between sex and death that's
at least as morbid and philosophical as anything in
modernist European literature. (Andrew Ohehir, The
Killer Inside Me: Much ado about misogyny, Salon, 17 June
2010)
Arousal
Re: On the verge of walking out, Lou comes back and tackles her,
pulling down her panties and whipping her bare ass with his belt. The
sequence is both erotic and violent, profoundly troubling and
potentially arousing, designed to provoke a whiplash of emotional,
psychological and libidinal responses.
Are you saying here that YOU found this panties-being-pulled-down,
this bare-ass whipping erotic, that you are to be counted amongst the
"potentials" who were aroused while watching it? Or that it JUST IS
erotic and violent, smartly rigged to potentially or even likely trigger
libidinal responses, ostensibly possessed by all of us?
1044
If YOU found the scene erotic, I wish you had just said as much, and
made clear whether or not you were also aroused by it -- and if not,
how you were able to sense that others would find it so -- and either
defended the remarkable possibility that you can be fundamentally
woman-loving and experience eroticism and arousal in a scene of this
nature, or brought forward the possibility that the fact that you did
enjoy a scene you suspect you shouldn't have enjoyed, means you're
not quite in fact so distinguished from the clearly mongrel, beyondthe-pale male who relishes this kind of violence.
----Killer inside of you
Personally, I think it unlikely that many men don't get a hard-on
while watching explicit scenes of female victimization, not because
they all regrettably still are in the possession of reptilian brian-stems
that make they forever capable of lapsing brute animalistic, but
because most were raised by mothers who were severely
emotionally / intellectually deprived in the patriarchal societies /
families they grew up in, and therefore spent their earliest part of
their lives foremost serving their mothers' unmet needs rather than
their own. Deprived mothers aren't magically capable of producing
nurturance; nurturance only comes from the well-cared-for, the
respected, the loved. So most men find ways -- are driven to find ways
-- to enact revenge for their being used, but also to pretend that this
isn't what they are up to, as they also learned early on that the one
thing you don't do -- at the threat of abandonment, of experiencing
catastrophic aloneness, destitution -- is to convey that you are on to
the fact that mothers weren't entirely self-sacrificial and marvelous in
their motives (their version, the only version), that they wanted to
squeeze every bit of attendance out of you before they abandoned you
once aging, teenagerdom, turned you on to other things. Patriarchy
hurts mothers; hurt mothers hurt their kids: any other version is a lie
"good boys and girls" have learned to, have been scared into, tell
(ing).
1045
Link: "The Killer Inside Me": Much ado about misogyny

(Salon)
sacrifice
Only today, the Associated Press revealed that a Kasich
operative advised a state pension fund executive on how to
minimize Lehman's role in the fund's losses when talking to
reporters. So Kasich was understandably a little sensitive
about the issue, accused me of a "smear" and complained
that I was "picking on" him. He also advised me to read his
book "so you can learn how to control yourself." Yikes! It's
called "Hardball," sir.
Also, in the "things I wish I'd said" department: TPM
reported in January that Kasich was warning his fellow
Republicans that the Tea Party movement was so angry,
they would "hang" Republicans "from the nearest tree" if
they didn't endorse their far-right agenda. That doesn't
make them sound like the reasonable folks Kasich was
describing today. (Joan Walsh, John Kasich, Lehman
Brothers populist!, Salon, 16 June 2010)
sacrifice
Kasich got to speak most of the time, with Chris trying to make him
feel respected and at ease, yet despite the pro-offered time and space
blew up when Joan poked at him for a brief moment. Once again,
mommy issues? Of course. You can't get to the heart of republicanism
and patriarchy without understanding that. Something to be explored
further -- and not simply derisively -- perhaps?
I also wish Joan had focused mostly on refuting the contention that
tea-baggers are reasoning and sane, like she did when Buchanan blew
up at her. They are insane, "not well," and we need to spend more
time announcing this fact, getting comfortable being derided as
liberal elitists when we make our understanding of this clear, so we
1046
can move beyond to exploring exactly what this means. Kasich feels it
means they'll (tea-baggers) respond to a world-view that entrenches
an elite, and resonates everywhere of "sacrifice" and children being
served. I think he's right about that.
Link: John Kasich, Lehman Brothers populist! (Salon)

Unresolved parental issues
You can call that pragmatism in the face of harsh political
reality if you like. That's not a bad description. But the truth
is that there was never any point in time when getting capand-trade passed was going to be anything but
extraordinarily difficult. It still will be now, if Obama tries.
A White House that gave up on the issue when it seemed too
hard and came haltingly back when it seems marginally
easier isn't exactly the picture of idealism Obama painted
when he talked about how his presidency would be
remembered. At least on this issue, I thought we were
getting a big president. (Gabriel Winant, The medium-big
president, Salon, 15 June 2010)
----Unresolved Parental Issues
I am becoming increasingly convinced that large swathes of
the US media have unresolved parental issues. Why the
obsession with incessantly noting that "Daddy" is not acting
like we want him to, not matter what he does? (Phyllis Beck
Kritek, response to post, The medium-big president)
Re: Unresolved Parental Issues
On this subject, it could be judged that pretty much all of us have
unresolved parental issues, making pointing this out more a prompt
for serious exploration than a point for mockery.
1047
We may assume that what we want out of a president is a fully

responsive leader, but some have argued that if we didn't have
parents who were immediately responsive to us, we actually feel
uncomfortable with leader-figures who too readily attend and smartly
deliver. This speaks more to than just how our parents treatment of
us determines our leadership preferences, but on the subject of how
instances in the "crib" determine the nature of the larger landscape, I
offer this:
Every childrearing practice in history is restaged in adult
political behavior. Children whose mothers swaddled them
and were "not there" emotionally could not as adults maintain
object consistency and grew up paranoid, imagining
"enemies" everywhere. Children whose mothers regularly did
not feed them in a timely fashion experienced the world as
malevolently withholding. Children whose mothers rejected
them with depressive silence experienced peaceful
international periods as threatening. Children whose mothers
dominated them and who were engulfing often choose
totalitarian political leaders. Children whose mothers were so
needy they describe their children as "born selfish and
demanding" and or who saw them as "angry since birth"
experienced other nations as demanding too much or as angry
"bad babies." Children whose mothers used them as
antidepressants chose manic, often violent leaders to counter
their own depression. And mothers who ridiculed and
humiliated their children whenever their activities didn't
coincide with her own were experienced in the international
sphere as poison containers of intolerable ridicule and shame
-- as in "the shame of Versailles." (Lloyd deMause, Emotional
Life of Nations)
Link: The medium-big president (Salon)
1048
Flushing out more lefties

There are two pressing reasons that I find Obama's current
stasis so worrisome. One is that we're at a dangerous time,
given the world economy, and on the right, Obama's election
has worsened a 20-year pattern of Republican obstruction
and destruction (and it's got an undercurrent of hate and
demonization that can't be denied.) At the same time,
Obama has an incredible moment to articulate what
Democratic leadership stands for: Improving the lives of
ordinary Americans, protecting the country from the
unbridled, deregulated dangerous corporate excess, and
moving boldly on problems, like climate change, that
require boldness and leadership. Between the BP oil disaster
and the near-collapse of the world economy thanks to the
finance industry both have in common a corporate
arrogance that big risks to make big money were worth
taking, no matter the impact on the rest of us Obama has
the perfect context for laying out why government matters,
and why Democrats run the government best. Instead he's
carping about "folks up there" in Washington and
complaining that if he'd tried to regulate the oil industry
before the spill, people would have said bad things about
him. Grow up, Mr. President. (Joan Walsh, Protecting the
Obama brand, 13 June 2010)
As Obama frustrates more and more of the left, how sure is the
Republican leadership that its own people won't develop more love
for the man?
As Obama responds to every crisis in a distant, unemotional,
unresponsive, withholding manner, how sure are we that the
American people won't respond to him PRIMARILY by distinguishing
themselves from the disloyal "complainers," and actually increase
their attachment to the man, in hopes thereby of receiving more love.
1049
During a time that is proving itself rotten primarily by previous

excess, how sure are we that we would actually be comfortable with a
president that did all we would ask of him? Maybe his role now is to
prompt out those who maintain such hubris for the rest of us to
swarm over and dissolve, so we can feel like we're at least beginning
to make some amends?
----Guests tonight include ...
I think some people here have a chance to be invited to Obama's next
basketball game / water fight, and some don't. When the disloyal
finally reveal themselves, do those who remain true feel a rush of
satisfaction and a sense of election? Maybe at some point our
commander-in-chief will encourage you to put a clamp on us, or at
least suggest in some way that he might notice your efforts if you were
to serve your country in this most appropos of ways? After all, how is
he to be expected to get anything done when those now most guilty -those abandoning him on the left, who should be steadfast behind
him after their withering after decades of Republican system-sullying
-- suggest to all that what-have-you-done-for-me-lately support, is all
the support this president should expect?
----He's compromised, just like you
Being a corporate democrat does not mean being the corporations'
man: it means being the peoples'. When the first wave of lefties
expressed their dismay at Obama's betrayal (over healthcare, where it
came to a head), other democrats, including many of those now
composing the second wave of lefties to near abandon him, ridiculed
their brethren for not realizing the always obvious: that Obama was
the man of his previous in-plain-view record, and would always be
attendant to corporations' needs / requests and all other in-this-time
unavoidable political realities. That is, the label "corporate democrat"
proved hardly libel (for Obama, not for the complainers), and rather
just another reminder that he was a complex, nimble, realistic man -the only kind of person who could be counted on to help navigate our
1050
way through very compromised times.

Now a second wave is right-ready to reject him, and "corporate
democrat" is again used to disparage him, when it will prove once
again to remind people that Obama, like you, who hears almost
nothing in any medium that doesn't have a catch, who is subject to
possible manipulations from beginning of morning to end of day, who
grew up knowing it spoiled to expect mommy and daddy to give us
what we want, AND WHO FINDS HIM/HERSELF ALMOST
COMFORTABLE WITH THIS ENVIRONMENT, is part of the same
story-universe as you are, and will ultimately be responsive to your
needs for plotting, climax, sacrifice; and is not in the least bit related
to people like Hillary Clinton, who you sense could never be
sufficiently "tarred" by whatever corporate influence to not seem a
60's hippie who could come close herself to truly do without the
cheeseburger, the bathroom smoke, the suspect bit of extrasomething on the side.
I'm sure Obama will one day seem very uncompromised -- and we
will be shown -- but right now we enjoy how his delays, his wateringdowns, his indirectness, is working to make squack those we will soon
have not the least bit of tolerance for.
Link: Protecting the Obama brand (Salon)

A-Team
For a movie that reportedly required 11 writers and more
than 10 years to complete -- all without any real reason for
existing in the first place -- "The A-Team" is reasonably good
fun. If you're a 12-year-old boy riding an intense Cherry
Pepsi buzz and totally devoted to destroying some brain
cells, that is.
[. . .]
OK, I do have two younger colleagues who sheepishly admit
1051
that they thought Stephen J. Cannell's NBC series, which

starred George Peppard and Mr. T (he of Nancy Reagan
fame) and ran from 1983 to 1987, was "cool." They were
little kids at the time; I suppose it's forgivable.
[. . .]
This "A-Team" reminds me of the sub-James Bond action
movies I used to enjoy on Saturday afternoons, 30-odd years
ago: The "Saint" franchise, or Olympic skier Jean-Claude
Killy in "Snow Job" (which I went home and told my parents
was the best film I'd ever seen) or Alistair MacLean
adaptations like "Puppet on a Chain" or "Force 10 From
Navarone." It presents the same utterly bogus version of
masculine bonhomie, the same shorthand character
development (wisecracks under pressure = toughness), the
same ludicrous death-defying stunts, and the same
implausible chicks who appear every so often to lend an
almost-grown-up veneer and then vanish again, to
everyone's obvious relief.
Or rather, "The A-Team" presents all those things turned up
to 11.9, injected with crystal meth and steroids, and CGI'd
right up the wazoo.
[. . .]
Carnahan's action sequences have a lot of "kinetic energy,"
which is a nice way of saying that after the first 15 seconds
you have absolutely no idea who is where or which way is
up or what the hell is supposed to be happening, beyond the
fact that some shit is blowing up and the good guys are
kicking some tail. If you can switch your mind off entirely, so
you become measurably dumber during the two hours
you're sitting there, and you never think about the fact that
the gross national product of Equatorial Guinea was spent
several times over on this stupid, empty and noisy event, it's
largely painless. But then, I do still have a 12-year-old
entombed inside me, and, Jesus, is he high on Twizzlers.
1052
(Andrew OHehir, A-team: A cheerful C -, 10 June 2010)

So was it fun, or wasn't it?
Is this review what you get when a reviewer actually enjoys a film he
knows he is not now supposed to have enjoyed? I'm not entirely sure,
but it reads like an id vs. superego showdown, where a 12-year-old's
joy is simultaneously choked AND satisfied.
For those interested in having the smallest range of independent
personality, maybe critics could supply us a list of media you can
enjoy without needing to cover with some sort of admission of sin.
Link: A-Team: A cheerful C (Salon)
Re: Sadness of the Gore split

There is oil gushing into the ocean and people are killing
humanitarian aid workers and the earth is still warming.
Those things are on a different plane of sad and have
already left us all terribly afraid and depressed and angry
this early summer. I didn't know I had any room at all to
care about the Gores' relationship, but maybe because it's
something so much smaller, so much more personal, a
headline so much easier to absorb than the other larger
tragedies playing out around the globe that this small piece
of political gossip turns out to be such an unbelievable
freaking bummer. (Rebecca Traister, the sadness of the
Gore split, Salon, 1 June 2010)
Giving way
On the bright side, it makes it that much more likely that we'll never
need to doubt Obama's marriage -- our dependency on its beauty is
now upped a further notch, so that he could actually have been a
Tiger Woods, a thousand skeletons could begin to funnel out of his
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closet, and we know we'd collectively pluck our eyes out before having
to attend to any of them.
A few further lords out of the way so Obama can be King.
Link: The sadness of the Gore split (Salon)
The movement would hurt people

Is that the Tea Party philosophy at work: "Accidents
happen," people die, and private industry should be left
alone, not even criticized, when they do?
I'm getting a little weary of people insisting journalists must
pay homage to the Tea Party as a great infusion of political
energy, and not call them racist, and examine their ideas
with respect. As I've stated before, it is pretty clear from
polling that the Tea Party is just another name for the
traditional Republican base -- older, whiter, heavier on
males and angrier than the rest of the country. Aside from
their costumes and protests, I don't think they're that
revolutionary or newsworthy. But OK, I'm willing to respect
them. Respect means asking them what they'd do if they
were in government, reporting on what they say, and letting
the world know. (Joan Walsh, Taking the Tea Party
seriously, Salon, 21 May 2010)
The movement would hurt people, which is what we want,
and why it is (accepted as) legitimate
Tea partiers are racists -- or rather those so self-hating they readily
project aspects of themselves they would disown into other people -but so were -- comparatively -- our parents. Since depression periods
are always those where elder wisdom, where "I told you so," once
again rules supreme, tea partiers, for demanding people fend for
themselves, for wanting for people to be left without resources to offer
options other than long-suffering without complaint, is accepted as
legitimate.
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Any public, good progressive will find him/herself dumbfounded by

how many of his/her ostensible friends will turn on them. I wouldn't
count on Rachel Maddow, for instance.
Link: Taking the Tea Party seriously (Salon)
Be careful!
Undoubtedly, had this been the behavior of a Republican
administration, "the left's" big environmental organizations
would be scheduling D.C. protests and calling for firings, if
not criminal charges. Yet, somehow, there are no protests.
Somehow, there have been almost no calls for the
resignation of Salazar, who oversaw this disaster and who,
before that, took $323,000 in campaign contributions from
energy interests and backed more offshore drilling as a U.S.
senator. Somehow, facing environmental apocalypse, there
has been mostly silence from "the left." (David Sirota,
Laying bare the myth of the left, Salon, 21 May 2010)
Be careful
When primitive civilizations used to feel guilty for excess and too
good living, they devised sacrificial wars where all their best and
brightest -- representatives of happiness, ambition -- could be offered
up to placate the anger of their abandonment-suspecting gods.
What we're doing now is trying to entice our best and brightest -those who cannot be stopped for fighting for a progressive, nurturing,
fair society -- to clearly ID themselves by marching on to Washington.
The rest of us liberals will wildly cheer them on, which they'll
misinterpret as larger support -- "maybe we'll get some senators out
of this!" But once they're pot-banging and out in the open, we'll
withdraw and actually join the chorus in understanding now that
what is actually substantially worse than a tea bagger who wants to
limit support, is the ridiculous hippie who in an age of withdrawal
and the circumscibed, just can't stop from demanding more and
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more.
Progressives, understand that Obama supporters are those who are
looking for ways to show they're not in fact one of you -- that they'd
spit on you, if they had the chance. Don't play into the public desire
for the crazies on the LEFT, now, to come out and ID themselves.
Thanks for being you, David.
Link: Laying bare the myth of the left (Salon)
TUESDAY, MAY 18, 2010
Review of "Robin Hood"
One of the surprising things about the tea-bagger revolution, is that

without any of the sort of in-film help kindly proffered in Life of
Brian, it suddenly becomes much harder to hear of peasant revolts
against unfair taxes and instantly hate the surely unjust, greedy lords
at work cruelly starving the populace, just to fight primarily vanitydriven, foreign wars. Instead, for at least a moment or two, we
wonder if there might in fact have been some justice in the taxing,
and some (not starvation driven) insanity in the peasants, and further
that if we continue to cheer on those we are directed to cheer for, if
were not in some way taking in of the same very bad inputs which
produced these American misanthropes in the first place.
This isnt the first time with Ridley Scott, but despite every bit of force
motioning us to despise the new king for dismissing the long-serving
Earl Marshall, I cheered for the royalty. In this case I specifically
cheered -- build dem roads! get dem taxes! Even if in this film
universe the moneys primarily going to wars and not as the king
argues, to run the country, and even if the reticent withholding
northern lords arent withholding from the king because grain isnt
even on hand to supply their own dinner plates, let alone feed their
people, but in fact because they horde away their riches in gross
portions in the fashion of Friar Tuck and his stored-away barreled
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conglomeration of honey, I know that the royalty, the government,

elsewhere --most everywhere -- has a good point: how do you do
anything new with your country when well-positioned people in your
own retinue judge all change as lapse of wisdom in pull of impulse
and whimsy? Scott didnt intend this, but when good people are for
one, mostly old, and completely frozen in disposition -- in grimace -and outlook, all his ostensible villains need to do is poke at their
stoned faces with the slightest bit of sneer or mockery, have the
slightest bit of teasing fun with them, and our sympathies should be
theirs.
The film would have us believe that the greatest unearthed treasure
here is the revelation that way back in the 12th-century, a man
produced a document with implications so revolutionary they might
stop us in our tracks, even today, if we allowed ourselves to think on
them a bit. But for me it was the young to-be-kings continuing to sex
his french vixen, while his wizened, wrinkled, grandmother,
impotently beamed all her supply of wrathful looks upon him. What a
treasure! He understood his grandmother as just another of
Englands stony looming gargoyles, who scare away with show of
eternal judgment but who are born out of fear of life, of stupid
ignorance and misunderstanding of anything beyond familiar reach,
not lifetimes of accrued wisdom; and showed himself in tune with the
slow breaking of routine and duty in favor of mischief, mirth and
experimentation that marked the beginning of the English learning
from the French and the Italians, which marked the beginning of the
roots for the English renaissance!
Intriguingly, Scott doesnt actually have it in for the French. They are
it seems by nature driven to be smartly and ruthlessly conquistatorial
and scheming -- its just who they are -- and they arent so
individually self-inflating they cant readily accept that they might
function better as each one of them part of a larger state, and so at
worst always have a comprehensive functioning state while England
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could at any turn disintegrate into a swath of broken, squabbling

chiefdoms, and are possessed of an arrogant -- and actually in a way,
self-diminishing -- and ultimately limited, but still formidable
understanding of human tendencies. They are a formidable
opponent; are right to doubt that there is anything actually really
existing and worthy when the English are in mood to bash their
shields and herald their virtue before them; and they serve as a test as
to how well the English are embodying their in-truth potentially
superior selves -- as truly uncompromised, noble individuals, obliged
to a King but whose castles are their own homes, who when united
can repel huge armadas and armies as can any vibrant young body,
multitudes of weakness-drawn contagens. Who he has it in for are the
English who dont understand that their way to best form, is not to be
seduced by French novelties, things suited really only to those of
apparently unadulterated French constitution, but to uncover basic
truths concerning their nobility they seem everywhere either prone to
forget or cover over, or to twist into worst possible deviant forms.
This means remembering / learning to be honest, forthright, brave,
unrelenting, and so forth. It means boasting the soul of a stonemason -- bearing-out truths youd inscribe on an otherwise
unadorned sword: It means life becoming about not an increasing
awareness of, and adding of and an appreciation for complexities, but
about refusing to add layers, life, story, to sully perfect and simple
beginnings.
To say that Scott would have the English, would have us, work against
life amounting to a story, to make maturity delightful because it
means a constant conversation of previous experience, perspective,
with the newly encountered and just understood, is, for the most part,
actually fair. His heroes are too often attractive men and woman who
ultimately disappoint because they not just accord themselves with
but seem trapped in code: they are trapped to be noble because they
exist to show up other peoples deficiencies or fallenness, and take
vengeance on them for it. But there is enough of another possibility at
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work in his work that Ill certainly mention it: and that is, an
argument not against change, but in favor of cultivating a state of
being that makes you able to enjoy a life of mature enjoyment and
development, without diverting oneself onto wayward paths opened
up by the pettiest of motivations. You sense amongst his main
principles, that is, self-esteem. You do. Robin Longstride is the better
man for returning the sword to the family of a deceased good-hearted
man, and acting without pretense while returning it. His stay in
Nottingham, with Marion and father Loxley, offers what you never
believed would have opened up in Gladiator had the turn in that
movie had been to allow Maximus to return to his family -- namely, a
fairly convincing show of amiability, friendship, comfort and good
living, you would be hard-pressed not to kill and kill again, if such
was necessary, to have some chance of reclaiming or returning to it.
But since his characters for the most part seem to stop developing at
some point, at exactly the same point, it seems, that they finally learn
how to properly comport themselves and become wholly principled,
Scott ultimately does not make self-esteem the beginnings of onward
journeys, but its termination -- the beginning of character stasis. To
be noble is to lose self-confliction, but to become a bore -- and just
look what that did to the English kings foxy vixen French wife:
Plunge the dagger into yourself, my dear, youve surrendered your
sizzle and mischief in your giving in to grandma -- dont allow
yourself to live long enough to prove an example of how others
similarly vitally sexed can sabotage everything great in them to show
off the knowingness and majesty in vastly too long-lived, aged owls.
What Scott does, though, is make character cementation the
beginning of their involvement in his movies greatest battles -- and as
such there is a sense that theyve been molded into familiar pieces
that will be involved in none the less surprising, you-never-know -even when at some level, you do know -- military engagements. Chess
pieces -- rooks, bishops, knights, pawns, kings -- that can each be
downed by strategy or errant happenstance, at any instance. Where
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bravery and skill we find really does count, but in execution seems so
much more subtle, invisible, amongst the multitudes of intentions,
one-on-ones, variant goings-on, that even a charging, competent king
at the front of the battle seems in need of having his bravery being
recounted afterwards -- so that it can be poetically foregrounded -- to
seem as glorious as we might have wanted him to be in the instant,
and who could be quitted -- and not just killed -- by attendance to
something else unusual or at least unexpected but not in fact out of
ordinary for the occasion, like a cook experimenting away from his
post to crossbow (what turns out to be) a king, or even -- for me at
least -- just his bringing up of soup, for a brief time-out for harried,
exhausted soldiers, at top of the castles turret. For Scott, battles are
where we get what we would have hoped to receive in conversations
between characters -- where unexpected turns are met with
improvisations that show our heroes as heroic for inspired reactions
to developments before them, for being able to see the battle as a
story they can yet sway into some variant form rather than another.
Yes, Robins ask me nicely, the whole bedchamber sequence with
Marion, is an example of wonderful improvisation and discovery
through conversation, but it is not Scotts main fortay or inclination.
Instead, heroes are mostly plain and stalwart in conversation -- this
shows their minds already know everything they need to know, so
every conversation away from the everyday is just a potential lean on
them toward the bad -- and villains, those most prone to complicate
what we might expect with turns toward some possibility we might
not have accounted for. Villains will show that they shouldnt be
killed, because their best-loved cousin is french -- a farceful play, that
seems to have swayed his french foe -- or that they shouldnt accord
their self-righteous mothers wishes, because though confronted with
those wearing-thick plain virtue, they can easily, correctly, but still
remarkably show how even while themselves undressed and in
seemingly the baldest of compromised positions, theyre actually
evidently right in insisting theyre not the ones foremost in bed with
those shorn all decency and allegiance to duty.
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In battles, everything seems tossed up and kind of random and

unpredictable -- in the moment of it, and despite all experience of
how these things normally go, still hard to foretell -- and so it is in
Scotts battles where everything that the healthcare-fearing teabagger would despise -- the chance for meaningful change and
unpredictable, onward growth -- is manifested. The battles are where
we still may sense Scott embraced by baby boomers who remember
how the 60s social battles were moved by sufficient expectation for
change, that every twist and turn in any particular engagement might
just determine exactly how the future would take shape. You could be
great and fearless, and yet find yourself suddenly surprised by
beginning a battle with two arrows in you that have already doomed
you -- as happened to the german warrior in Kingdom of Heaven -that ensures well mostly just see in your perseverance just how good
you must have been in the battles that built your reputation. Or in a
moment of slight over-extension, be ended after a lifetime of killerblows to everyone else -- as happened to the muslim knight, again in
Kingdom of Heaven. You could deliver what we have been given
every bit of evidence -- in battles that rain arrows just about
everywhere -- to suspect as just as likely as any other possibility, a
purely random shot that ends the life of a king. Your efforts may
amount to cruel nothing, or make the greatest of differences. And so
while I feel I havent much more interest in Scott, for I loathe his
foreclosing of character development, his making of potentially
interesting people into dull chess pieces, his most boring, dumb, and
unmoving solutes to democratic principles, I still see in his work
some evidence for understanding living best as being open to
unexpected nuances that could lead to grandscale changes, of being
open and desiring of life amounting to the surefooted engaging
willingly in forays that could have them slip, for the unexpected -- and
maybe even -- the better.
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SATURDAY, MAY 15, 2010

There is place for growth in leisured paradise: Review of "Letters to
Juliet"
It is unbecoming of a lady to marry her steward, and so the pseudoItalian fiancee, who is expert and fussy-obsessed with all the variant
particulars concerning his estate -- his newly opened restaurant -- is
to be discarded for a gentleman whos only obligation is to show
himself good-looking, vital, and inherently decent and well-mannered
-- a proper lord. This is one of the things you understand while
watching Letters to Juliet, yet another film which must be objected
to lest we become unable to see reality.
Our lady, Sophie, has gone to Brown, what has apparently become
THE finishing school for ladies in our times, being not so ardentseeming that it might coarsen you with too professional a sense of
purpose, yet still as established and esteemed as any of the more
prominent ivyies. If youve gone to Brown, you may be the sort who is
just not pushy enough to have already scored a career as a major
writer at the New Yorker by the time shes twenty-two, not brutally
driven enough to have portfolioed herself into the most obvious
upmost echelons, like Harvard or Princeton, but whos relaxed
possession of larger qualities, whose preference for discreteness,
anonymity, quiet grace, makes you EXACTLY what lords of
commercial society need as near to them as possible to suggest their
own timelessness and quality -- certain by divine right, to survive and
continue to prosper, if the time's primary henceforth call is for people
to define themselves as either sacrifice or to-be-satisfied.
Shes gone where Lady Di might have gone to if she was an American,
and her future husband has gone to Oxford -- where all boyish princes
who would be Kings must go. If hed gone to Cambridge, it would
have again made him REALLY seem invested in doing something for
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the country by craft or trade -- which would have lowered and

coarsened him -- when it is his loftiness -- his sheer existence -- which
most keeps the regression-prone countryside from devolving into
dispersions of the-really-quite-insane, gnarly, garish multitudes. Yes,
of course, hes supposed to be a lawyer devoted to helping the weak,
which is supposed to sound like the lord turning away from
expectation and risking being forgotten about but which by this time
we all REALLY know means hes perfectly orthodox -- perfectly
certain, and safe, given our newly updated standards concerning
how lords are to define themselves.
It isnt a good thing when being as alive as a sunflower but not a wit
more interesting, cant make you -- an ostensibly ambitious human
being -- the subject of some ridicule. And yet this might now just be
where we are -- in that too many who can at some level see that these
leisured, liberal humanists / gentry, who ostensibly have the time,
quietness, and tutored capacity to range greatly and uninterruptedly
while in this world, are just beautiful script, lines curling up, down,
and on through a plot already known and before them, content to
take pleasure in the variances of sensation they can see ahead and
know are coming, but still very much to be taken pleasure in, because
vividness exists primarily in the rush of what is before you not in the
nagging memory of what you once knew, because they are in-mind to
give up the reigns to someone else themselves, and want no evidence
anywhere extant that makes them feel small, feel guilty, for doing so.
Claire --the grandmother -- could be a problem. Which is why all her
genuine gravitas is summoned but drawn to essential vacancy -- her
love of her life, who she once loved and never --ostensibly rightly -learned to lose interest in, is SO MUCH perfect acquisition, perfect
object, well-groomed and already, beautifully-told story, that she
serves as unmistakable proof in the pudding, as General Colin Powell
to George Bush, that what is not actually here in the film, IS actually
there, if only you had the capacity to find it.
Photo still: "Letters to Juliet." www.celebritywonder.com
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I want one!
The picture never looks fussed-over or flattened it
breathes, as opposed to just looking merely pretty.
Pontecorvo approaches the actresses with the same
uncalculated respect.
The actors here offer plenty sturdy support for their female
counterparts: Bernals character is scattered but
sympathetic; Egan, deeply unlikable at first, by the end
opens himself to the camera in a way youd never see
coming. But the picture really belongs to its two leads.
Seyfried gives a wonderfully loose, unstudied performance
nothing she does is forced. And it doesnt hurt that she has
the most gorgeous, enormous eyes in movies today: Not even
Disneys Nine Old Men could have dreamed them up.
[. . .]
Nero makes his entrance here, Lancelot-style, on a white
horse. Its a touch so perfect, so silly-wonderful, that its
something of a salve after the almost-too-painful moment
that comes immediately before. Redgrave is now 73, but it
takes zero imagination to see the face of the young
Guenevere in this older one. She isnt merely beautiful; shes
a living assurance that the young people we once were can
stay alive inside us, no matter how much we grow and
change. (Stephanie Zacharek, Leading ladies lift lovely
Letters to Juliet, Movieline, 13 May 2010)
From a guy's perspective, it's not so much the eyes as it is the breasts
-- of course the film didn't feel flat: not even Disney's Nine Old Men
could have dreamed them up! Egan was too nice: caught in a film
where the guy's dragging his gal all about the place is cause for
divorce, but where "his" driving Daisy everywhere she needs is
gentlemanly and appropriate, if he didn't evidence some
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disgruntlement before the end, slobbering CALIBAN would have

climbed that tree, not sweet Percival.
Redgrave is living assurance that true love means a vineyard-owning,
warm Italian, with gentle manners: As a grown-up still-15-year-old
who's moved on from ponies -- or Tony Stark, in regards to "melons"
-- would say you just want one.
----Further, I'M a bit disgruntled that this film made losing your mom
into a mercilessly effective bargaining-chip -- as if the romancing the
self-abnegating knight bit wasn't enough to plot out how your man
might be wholly owned.
Link: Leading ladies lift lovely Letters to Juliet (Movieline)
FRIDAY, MAY 14, 2010

Correct thought
One of the less trumpeted features of the Internet is the
unprecedented access it provides to really, really bad
writing. Of course, awful books have always been with us,
but nowadays a specimen of unkempt, puffed-up prose or
stumbling, lugubrious verse doesn't even need to make it
past an editor or publisher to glide slimily into the
awareness of the unsuspecting public.
[. . .]
In the early 20th century, dinner party guests would
entertain each other by reciting passages from the
alliteration-heavy works of one Amanda McKittrick Ros
(1860-1939), regarded by experts as the greatest bad
novelist of all time. In Oxford, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and
their friends competed to see who could read aloud from
Ros' books the longest before cracking up. (Laura Miller,
Bad writing: What is it good for, Salon, 11 May 2010)
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Correct thought
I think if you laugh at prose so that it strips it of authority (what the
Moderns did with their Victorian predecessors), so that your own
artistic ventures feel more legitimate, it is a sound thing to do. More
than this, it is a GOOD thing to do -- as laughter, mockery, is at the
service of growth.
If you're laughing at prose without any real authority, then you're not
servicing your own growth, rather, you're foreclosing it: as who
amongst the legitimate would risk writing anything that would leave
themselves open for laughter from their peers? None at all -- and so a
culture freezes in its preferred prose, state of mind, and current
grammatical correctness. Some time later, after they've crumbled
away, a new generation emerges that laughs "their" way on toward
unusual things. Or not -- and we're left with successive generations of
elites against the mob, complaining of plagiarism, not knowing that
IN ESSENCE, that is all they are.
Link: Bad writing: What is it good for?
WEDNESDAY, MAY 5, 2010
Divides
In fact, while it's possible that before Hunter started
speaking on her own behalf, I might have entertained the
notion that she was a slightly dopey lady who fell hard for a
bad man who was running for president and got caught in a
very unfortunate saga, I now feel quite confident that in fact
she is a borderline simpleton, fame-seeking narcissist whose
self-interested grab for attention is likely doing further
permanent damage to the Edwards family, including her
daughter and her siblings. If her appearance on the Oprah
show seemed like an unjust setup, then Hunter proved that,
every once in a while, someone so amply meets all
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expectations for awfulness that it's impossible to muster

anything other than loathing for them. (Rebecca Traister,
Rielle Hunter's undeniable awfulness, Salon, 29 April 2010)
Good girls get their consolation prize
RE: "I now feel quite confident that in fact she is a borderline
simpleton, fame-seeking narcissist whose self-interested grab for
attention [. . .]"
Is this the consolation prize -- ripping her, ripping people like her,
apart -- for your being a "classic good girl," for there not being any
way for you to "alter [your] fundamentally conscientious, perpetually
guilt-ridden, grateful-for-a-job sense that [you] should always be
working harder than [you] were, and that [you] [were] probably
already being overcompensated for whatever [you] [were] doing?"
By punishing her, do you feel even more the good girl, feel good at
last being the good girl -- the person you ostensibly regret being
forced to become?
Whoah, thank you for reading my work with such attention!
I don't think that my reaction to Hunter's televised
revelations about her personal life have any connection to
my assessment of my own professional habits. But I'm very
flattered that you're such an avid reader.
Best,
Rebecca (Rebecca Traiser, response to post)
Divides
Rebecca,
If you felt the same pressure to be a good girl in your personal life as
you admit you did/do in your professional, then it strikes me that
what you are doing here would be working to make your
compromised state less compromise and more advantage -- it would
be working against efforts on your part to free yourself of deeply
1067
ingrained "good girl" inclinations -- and that anyone who is at all

good, who cares about your future journeys, should point this out.
Since you only feel/felt this pressure in your professional life, then I
can understand this particular attack on the "bad girl" not seeming
related to your very previous post, where you railed against all that
hems women into the good girl mold.
Link: Rielle Hunter's undeniable awfulness
Oysters
The fact is, we tell women that being good people involves
agreeability, cooperation and a little bit of self-sacrifice. In
addition to telling them to be polite and deferential, we teach
little girls from the beginning that life is going to be hard
and involve compromise. This dose of realism is not terrible;
it girds us for some hardship along the way. But it also
lowers expectations for remuneration and recognition.
Despite those who say that women have lately been told that
they could "have it all," that promise has, in my experience,
always been accompanied by caveats that a) we probably
can't, b) if we do, it's going to be incredibly difficult, and c)
that if we somehow do manage to achieve any kind of
satisfaction or balance, we should be damn grateful.
Gratitude, I've found, is not an attitude that results in
promotions and raises. (Rebecca Traister, A nice girls
guide to getting ahead, Salon, 26 April 2010)
Oysters
I think we all need to remember that during the medieval ages, men
did their best to become like women, so they might imagine
themselves more worthy of claiming love from their mothers -- as
Lloyd deMause explains:
Since Christians were bipolar, they were either manic
(violent warriors) or depressive (masochistic clerics,
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martyrs), but in either case they risked dying for God their
whole lives: For Your sake we have been killed all of the
day. Martyrs would sometimes castrate themselves to
demonstrate their potency and devotion to God. In fact,
clerics were said to have become female when they gave up
fighting, because the male must become female in order to
escape the moral dangers of his masculine state. In fact,
Christianity can be seen as a way for males to become more
like femalesthus priests didnt get married and wore
female dressesbecause young boys experienced their
mothers as preferring her more passive daughters to her
rough, impudent sons.
I chased down this quote because I think this is about where we are
today: men who do the the things that are supposedly lauded -- show
initiative, refuse to kow-tow -- in truth go the Jerry Maguire route,
ending up rejected and cloaked in failure, whereas men who try and
make themselves women by showing in some fashion that they can be
broken by whatever authority-figure they happen to be working for -are allowed to pass on and on and on, on our current, good girl, A+
route of societal approval.
Male or female, if you grow up these days with truly healthy selfesteem, you'll be too busy dealing with the unleashed sharks to find
any of those damned world-oysters you were expecting. Be glad
you're still inclined to self-lacerate, Rebecca. Cover's better.
Link: A nice girl's guide to getting ahead
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 28, 2010

Psychology of hoarding
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Psychology of hoarding--explained?
1) When most of us look at an object like a bottle cap, we
think, "This is useless," but a hoarder sees the shape and the
color and the texture and the form. All these details give it
value. Hoarding may not be a deficiency at all -- it may be a
special gift or a special ability. The problem is being able to
control it. (Randy O. Frost, interview with Thomas Rogers,
Stuff: the psychology of hoarding, Salon, 25 April 2010)
The hoarder is Robin Williams from the Fisher King: a humble lifepoet who sees the magic in the (quote unquote) junk. Or a young Luke
Skywalker, in touch with the energy field created by all things.
Future prospects: A future magician who will show us the magic in
everyday life, help us move away from a consumption-oriented
society. Must learn to control his power, so it doesn't control him.
2) If you spend one weekend with someone with a camera
crew, a cleaning crew and no therapy, youre making some
educational contribution by showing people what hoarding
is -- and that its really an illness [. . .]. (Randy O. Frost)
The hoarder is mentally ill. Tread with care.
Future prospects: One house-cleaning away from the crazy-house.
Patrick Mcevoy-Halston is mentally ill
Tread with care.
Dude, I'm all for esoteric, but WTF are you talking about?
(untimelydemise, response to post)
Response
We are offered two different accounts of hoarding here. One (the first
quote) makes it primarily a gift, possessed by someone who feels the
beauty in things in a culture that can no longer do the same. The
other (the second quote) makes it primarily an illness, to the extent
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that a cruel show that effectively traumatizes those it pretends to help

still deserves kudos for it at least making this point clear.
If they're wizards, then not just house cleaners but therapists too need
to tread carefully, for they are dealing with those well beyond their
capacity to understand, and whom they must primarily not so much
try and help but begin to try and learn from.
If they are sick, then all this appreciation for shapes, textures, colors
of objects the rest of us understand less meaningfully, has to be
contextualized so we understand that the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer
appreciated certain objects this same way too.
Hope that's clear.
----Culture Changes
In the U.S., we've also gone from a culture where some
degree of hoarding was helpful and even necessary (when
items were expensive and stores were far between) to a
culture where "things" are widely available and cheap. It's
not surprising that some people go overboard.
My mother grew up in a poor farming family during the
Depression. To my grandparents, saving things was a
matter of survival. You saved every bit of wood and piece of
string, and reused every container and washed out every
bag, because you had to. My mother lived in the suburbs, but
she had a closet full of carefully saved plastic bags and
magarine tubs - it was just too ingrained in her to save and
reuse, she just couldn't throw away something that was still
good. She wasn't a hoarder - she didn't buy extra things just
to save them and she threw things out when she ran out of
space - but that impulse to stock up and save things "just in
case" is something that used to be a necessary part of life,
especially in rural areas. So many people now think of it as
dysfunctional and puzzling now that we live in smaller
spaces and when you can easily replace anything you throw
out, but the hoarder is just an extreme version of what many
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people were doing a couple of generations ago. (KayWWW,

response to post)
@KayWWW
So if by some odd bit of luck, and if your mother had been born a bit
earlier -- in the free-wheeling '20s, not "your grandmother actually
knew best" '30s -- your mother actually found way to considerable
income during the depression, she wouldn't have developed into a
hoarder? Having known an era where treats were, if not quite
allowed, still very much enjoyed, every time she went out and bought
something new she wouldn't have said to herself, "this is selfish -- I'm
selfish," and more or less learned to just sit on her fortune, still
reusing the same container, over and over again? Possible, but many
people in the '20s thought they were going to be punished for all their
fun -- thought they DESERVED to be punished for all their fun: the
30's ruination actually "fit" their sense of justice.
Some people actually take pleasure when the drift in society is toward
war or depression, because it makes their own (truly) pathological
tendencies (sadism, anal-retention) seem too widely shared and too
appropriate to be anything other than rational. For a taste of this,
witness how delighted some now seem that the apparently nearcertain upcoming ruination of the Earth means that we all need to live
as invisibly, as minimalistically, as possible. Should have us begin to
suspect that things like wars and depressions, are actually things us
still sin-focused people will into existence to make sure we stick to
living in ways that make us feel guiltless or properly repentant.
Link: "Stuff": The psychology of hoarding (Salon)
But they were your friends

Whenever a character serves as an improved or idealized
version of his or her author, as a vehicle for the author's
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fantasies of power, allure, virtue or accomplishment rather

than as an integral part of the story, that character is a
Mary Sue. He may resemble his creator in most respects, but
he drives a hotter car, lives in a posher part of town and has
a cooler job. She may be as moody and self-absorbed as the
novelist who invented her, but instead of boring the people
around her these traits only enhance her crazy-girl
magnetism, making her the center of everybody else's world
as well as her own.
[. . .]
Because genre fiction tends to trade in wish fulfillment to
begin with, you're far more likely to find shameless Mary
Sues in mediocre mysteries, science fiction and romance
novels.
[. . .]
What irks readers about Mary Sues is that telltale whiff of
an ulterior motive. Instead of contributing to the seamless
fictional experience readers want from a book, this
character, they sense, is really a daydream the author is
having about herself. It's an imposition, being unwittingly
enlisted in somebody else's narcissistic fantasy life, like
getting flashed in the park. And just about as much fun.
(Laura Miller, A readers advice to writers: Beware
of Mary Sue, Salon, 21 April 2010)
Come to know your Mary Sues
If someone is prone to create Mary Sues, they've got a psychological
problem. If they attend to your advice and keep writing, my guess is
not that the psychological problem has gone away, but that they now
feed off creating characters that are more pleasing to the high-brow.
If you create Mary Sues, you've got a HUGE problem. Psychological
turn-around may in fact come from spending more time attending to
the Mary Sues you tend to create, with exactly what you are doing
with them, rather than abandoning them quickly for the quick-fix
turn to the literary. Also, Mary Sues are likely compensatory: there's a
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(much) better way to be than that, but until you managed the
considerable self-change required so you have no further need of
them, their service deserves some respect from you -- they weren't the
friends you deserve, but they were your friends.
Link: A reader's advice to writers: Beware of Mary Sue (Salon)
FRIDAY, APRIL 9, 2010

You had your moment
I wonder if they'll regret their decision to celebrate their
"night to remember" while shutting out a friend. I know I do.
My own prom date was a hilarious guy named Troy. He was
tall, had half his head shaved, and loved punk rock. This was
unusual enough for our sleepy Midwestern town, but on top
of that, he was also the only openly gay student in our
Catholic high school.
[. . .]
Troy and I went to prom as friends. My boyfriend was at
college that year, but I wanted to go anyway. I mean, this
was small-town USA and come on: Prom's a big deal.
[. . .]
And then came the after parties. Word got back to me that if
I brought Troy as my date the meathead football players
"would kick the shit out of him."
Years of Catholic teachings and after-school specials and
John Hughes films had trained me for this very moment, for
this very test and I fucking failed it.
[. . .]
So, Troy and I went our separate ways. I dont really
remember the party -- aside from the fact that it involved a
muddy hill, lots of pot, and that my best friend threw up on
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her own legs. What I do remember quite clearly is seeing

Troy the next morning. As I walked up the driveway to my
parents house, where we had agreed to meet up for a postprom brunch, I spotted him through the window. His pink
cummerbund was loosened, and he looked tired, and a bit
sad, as he chatted with my mom while she flipped bacon. It
was only in that moment that I realized the error of my
decision, and I felt positively sick.
I had chosen the desire to "belong" over kindness. I had
placed my own fantasy idea of a high school "moment" over
someones actual, real-life feelings. I know, "belonging" and
the myth of "glory days" can be pretty powerful stuff when
youre a teenager -- but who am I kidding? I acted like a
total jerk, and Ive never really forgiven myself for my
behavior. (Johanna Gohmann, The night I ditched my gay
prom date, Salon, 8 April 2010)
The moment you grew-up
Re: As I walked up the driveway to my parents house,
where we had agreed to meet up for a post-prom brunch, I
spotted him through the window. His pink cummerbund
was loosened, and he looked tired, and a bit sad, as he
chatted with my mom while she flipped bacon. It was only
in that moment that I realized the error of my decision, and
I felt positively sick.
I had chosen the desire to belong over kindness. I had
placed my own fantasy idea of a high school "moment" over
someones actual, real-life feelings. I know, "belonging" and
the myth of "glory days" can be pretty powerful stuff when
youre a teenager -- but who am I kidding? I acted like a
total jerk, and Ive never really forgiven myself for my
behavior.
You didn't strut into the after-party with your Ducky, but this
retrospective account still feels like a successful John Hughes
moment, though. You were of the sort to attract the devotion of the
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most interesting, idiosyncratic person in school. You left him for

orthodoxy, but regret was instant (and enlightenment apparently
total) when you saw the remains from your neglect -- that sad but
striking and especially communicative moment of loose pink
cummerbund and flipping bacon, of downed boy touching casual
maternal routine. You've penned here an idealistic account, a to-bewished-for account, of a sad moving-on to adult realization. You had
your moment.
Link: The night I ditched my gay prom date (Salon)
They fey-fearful
I have a great deal of love and respect for my grandfather.
He was a B-29 pilot in the Pacific during WWII; he became a
potato farmer when he returned home from the war. He
always took care of his family and his responsibilities, but he
was not an easy man for his family to be around. For all his
amazing qualities, he was as deeply conflicted about his life
and what he had done with it as many of my male friends
are today. For all his "manliness" he was not a particularly
happy or fulfilled guy.
Sometimes it can feel like my generation of men was raised
by wolves, and that we are trying to cobble some
approximation of what it means to be a man through vague
and intentionally incomplete recollections of an increasingly
distant generation -- or, worse, from media's portrayal of
the men who came before us. We want to remember them as
giants of masculinity completely unconflicted about who
they were.
[. . .]
It is also important to remember that as brave as these men
were, as many sacrifices as they made, as many challenges
as they faced, many of them were unable to rise to the
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challenge of even a modest leveling of the playing field

between them and their wives and sisters and eventually
daughters. The confusion of my generation and my father's
generation regarding their role and what is expected of them
is a testament to that fact. (Aaron Traister, Retrosexuals:
The latest lame macho catchphrase, Salon, 7 April 2010)
The conflicted warrior-chief: they fey-fearful, seek
elsewhere?
Re: "I have a great deal of love and respect for my
grandfather. He was a B-29 pilot in the Pacific during
WWII; he became a potato farmer when he returned home
from the war. He always took care of his family and his
responsibilities, but he was not an easy man for his family
to be around. For all his amazing qualities, he was as deeply
conflicted about his life and what he had done with it as
many of my male friends are today. For all his 'manliness'
he was not a particularly happy or fulfilled guy."
The picture you paint is not of Willy Loman. It is of a truly selfpossessed, independent man -- someone OTHERS (i.e., weaker,
dependent people) had to adjust to, mostly unhappily. Trust you me,
many men -- perhaps you too one day -- would/will see this fate as
life fulfilled.
Re: "It is also important to remember that as brave as these
men were, as many sacrifices as they made, as many
challenges as they faced, many of them were unable to rise
to the challenge of even a modest leveling of the playing
field between them and their wives and sisters and
eventually daughters."
Again, you seem to be using your denouncement as a safe opportunity
to bring to life, experience, and "validify" old-style heroes. A
commanding warrior with absolute blind-spots regarding his
"family," is the (true) father-hero we're most familiar with and
continue to WANT to give (mostly adoring) life to: see the father in
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"How to train a dragon," for instance, who needed to learn some, but
whom you had some considerable respect for even before he became
more appreciative of his son's concerns. Feminism is tolerated most
by mother-bullied men when it makes men formidable, well capable
of backing people away, if still tyrannical. Feminist men who feel
cowardice to some extent moves their crusade, emphasize the
bullying in patriarchy -- it's a way to hit back hard at those they
champion, without themselves being aware. Women who do the same
-- emphasize the power of the bully patriarch -- need him too to
create distance from their controlling mothers.
Ann Douglas' "Terrible Honesty," an account of the '20s, gives good
insight as to how a different generation made use of angry, lonely,
cold male "gods," to make them feel their Victorian Matriarch-ridden
predecessors (even though now dead) weren't them, and wouldn't
dare make claim to them.
Link: Retrosexuals: The latest lame macho catchphrase (Salon)
TUESDAY, APRIL 6, 2010
It suddenly became clear
One thing is clear: It's no accident that Obama beguiled the
electorate (and maybe himself) by over-promising his ability
to change Washington, end partisan gridlock and "part the
waters," so to speak. He'd been practicing similar social
jujitsu most of his life.
[. . .]
In "The Bridge," Obama's mother comes alive as a smart,
stubborn idealist, a devoted but also practical globalist, a
lifelong anthropology student who also held jobs at New
York foundations and women's banking groups and did
pioneering work in the now-mainstream field of
microlending (as well as policy prep work for the United
Nations' 1995 World Women's Conference in Beijing; in a
time-travel cameo, Dunham had high hopes, Remnick tells
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us, for first lady Hillary Clinton's advocacy). She was a

devoted mother who loved her son passionately, but
nonetheless left him without her for large swatches of a
sometimes-forlorn childhood. Clearly Dunham deserves her
own biography.
[. . .]
His rapid ascent notwithstanding, Chicago politics was not
an easy pathway for Obama. His biggest problem was race.
[. . .]
Still, even at one of the Clinton campaign's lowest moments
-- when Geraldine Ferraro angrily, ahistorically and
unapologetically insisted, "If Obama was a white man, he
would not be in this position. And if he was a woman of
color, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very
lucky to be who he is" -- Obama advisor Mona Sutphen told
Remnick that many in the campaign in fact also believed
race was helping Obama more than it was hurting him.
[. . .]
Obama has mostly defined the politically possible by what he
can accomplish. If the skinny black kid with the big ears and
the funny name can make all this happen, it's clearly at the
outside limits of the possible -- and well within the
boundaries of social good. I find myself wishing Obama had
hit a few more speed bumps along his path to power, in
order to learn the limits of his analysis (or at least to
compromise after negotiation begins). But "The Bridge"
makes clear Obama has the smarts to learn from his
mistakes and course-correct. I think anyone who bets
against this president having two terms to learn the limits of
what's politically possible is betting against history. (Joan
Walsh, Barack Obama: the opacity of hope, Salon, 5 April
2010)
It suddenly became clear
Re: She was a devoted mother who loved her son
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passionately, but nonetheless left him without her for large

swatches of a sometimes-forlorn childhood.
I used to talk about my own mother that way. But at some point I
understood that I was making commensurable the truly
incommensurate: no one who truly loves another could abandon him
to the point of his becoming forlorn -- not duty but absolute interest!,
keeps you coming back. If you leave your dog alone a lot, you don't so
much love your dog's company as you do how her absolute devotion
can make you feel.
Obama impresses on me most as someone who "agreed" to be the
puppet of other people's desires, the whole of his life. I also believe he
was "guaranteed," someone whose rise to the presidency was for him,
someone who is so acutely sensitive to others' needs, as as predictable
as (and not much more exciting than) next day's morning routine -baby boomers can use him to finish life feeling that their accrued
societal accomplishments have them moving toward some
unexpected, increasingly pure terminus: accomplishing the longsought but clearly impossible, these aging darwinians-all will feel
increasingly sure that proof is at hand that mundane, self-obliterating
history was true for everyone before them, but that they are surely
ones foretold in some originating prophecy. Their young will try and
match their claims, but they know Obama to be THEIR
accomplishment, and will expect all fuss and bother to be focused on
them, earning and needing final shaping and polishing before
becoming like clear constellations above, but in a new land of
rediscovered love and total meaning.
----@PATRICK MCEVOY-HALSTON
What the hell are you talking about? Is there any one in your
world (other then your own very "central" self) whom you
couldn't analyze to death? (response to post, Lucy with
Diamonds)
the space odyssey, Lucy With Diamonds
1080
I'm thinking, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. You don't feel that
Obama is a glassy, opaque monolith, signing that unremarkable
history is finally trespassing into the mythic? Maybe it's 'cause we've
just "discovered" it, and have been busying ourselves first in fitting it
in for usage in long-known squabbles, within long-familiar
paradigms, as it patiently awaits our steadying ourselves for its
actually rather profound implications. He stands as evidence the
impossible to hope for, has been achieved. We may play at imagining
him mostly the career politician, someone well compromised and all
too familiar, but we have to accept that something remarkable,
something transcendent in us has resulted in the election of someone
so fine that only shock over our being a large part of the realization of
something so truly perfect and great, has delayed his bridging of the
parties, his uniting the country, his showing that within the America
we've known to the point of blandness, lies something unaccounted
for, very great, and ready to rise at our call.
Link: Barack Obama: the opacity of hope (Salon)
ipad is for readers, and you, sir, are no reader!
Once I clicked on that e-mail attachment, though, and Joan's
review filled the tablet screen in my hands, I knew this
would be different. I nestled into the sofa, propped the iPad
against my knees and blissfully read the whole 3,000 words
from start to finish without once experiencing that nagging
urge to check e-mail or Twitter or Facebook. OK, so maybe
some of that is a testament to the piece itself, but I assure
you that in light of my recent track record with on-screen
reading, it was extraordinary.
Reading a document on the iPad feels ... serene. There's no
dock filled with application icons lurking at the edge of the
screen to suggest that I log onto iChat to see who else is
online (maybe it's Joan, and she can explain this one
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reference to me ...) or double-check the day's to-do list. No

files on the desktop remind me about that other thing I need
to put the finishing touches on and send. No notifications
from TweetDeck pop up to inform me that Rose had
insomnia again last night or that Ron found a fascinating
article on the Guardian Web site or that Michele just posted
an adorable new photo of her dog.
[. . .]
We are often urged to frown on devices that don't prompt us
to collaborate on and create -- or at the very least comment
on -- all the amazing old and new things, from news reports
to scientific studies, Web comics to video mash-ups, that
proliferate online. It's so undemocratic, so anti-DIY. So old
paradigm.
[. . .]
The iPad may not be ideal for what the tech industry calls
"productivity," but it's well-suited for the purpose I had in
mind: absorption. [. . .] When people complain nowadays
about not being able to think or read as deeply as they used
to, they're not just acting like a bunch of old fuddy-duddies:
They're noticing a genuine lack of substance, the threadbare
sensation of living in a culture where everyone's talking and
nobody's listening.
But speaking of fuddy-duddies, should any of them still be
with us, they're probably asking why, if I don't like reading
on my computer, I can't just stick with paper. (Laura Miller,
The ipad is for readers, Salon, 5 April 2010)
License to leave-behind our trying interconnection?
In a different age, I'd believe it was all about absorption -- being true
to the level of interest and involvement someone interesting
instinctively draws from you. Today, you wonder if part of the delight
in this new device is that it makes the sexiest new thing about
IGNORING the irrelevant, as you focus on the preferable, a wondrous
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movement away from computing devices which told you that

whatever you were up to IT SHOULD be about giving every blasted
dullard of the posturing electronic diversity an ear -- even if only for
moment, before you've twitched on to some other "light" you assess
instantly as better-if-snuffed-out.
---------For more rarefied airs
The articles over this long-weekend have characterized, what an
appreciating social anthropologist 5 years ago would have assessed as
"multivocalities" -- a world of enabled individual voices that cannot
be suppressed or bidden -- as just unwelcome rude noises that blast
us from every direction it is long past overdue we find a way to step
away from. It's been near a tag-team effort, with Laura here pointing
out a first step away from the old afflicting matrix, by means of a tool
ostensibly still belonging to it, and others -- with Thomas finding
sober professional's reasoning that we CANNOT, for the sake of
bodily/mental health, any longer tolerate the variant "noises [we once
understood as but] [. . .] a normal byproduct of our gadget-obsessed
times," with Jeanette showing how the played-out history of the web
has shown that IT IS NOT in fact full of previously hidden worthy
amateurs but rather the kinds of morons who pollute Amazon's
comment-streams with five-star evidencing of their ignorance, and
with Andrew showing up its ceaselessly reproducing news sources as
now a gross agglomeration of dung in the process of blotting out all
that had been good in Journalism -- showing that that step ahead
needs to be made. And now.
Something is in play, here. A need, it seems, to make an escape away
from a community we were told and we accepted we all belonged to, a
kind of egalitarian "state" in this long age of income/status disparity
-- the infosphere, the Great Wide Web -- not seem a kind of guiltworthy abandonment of those we prefer remained caught behind.
We're not at first-stage, surely: Salon's featured "crazy of the week"
shows the desire to make the loud and disparate, not unshackled
geniuses but SHACKLE-WORTHY idiots, has gone on long enough
1083
that the clamps are already being put on. There is the business,
though, of making what had been estimated by so many of the still so
highly esteemed -- the whole "Wired"'/"Boing-Boing" gang, and all -as sign of our age's great realized promise, not seem a grand retreat
into "fuddy-duddyism" out of fear of the brilliant but frustratingly
uncontrollable world. What we've seen this weekend, the kind of
thing Laura recently evidenced in assessing "the [kinds of] people
who post [web] comments [as those who don't] even bother to read
the article in question," will need to be repeated yet quite a bit, but
still it is possible that elites will find a way through repetition to make
the old web a once highly-touted domain, now home to but raging
cranks and abandoned hopes.
It HAS been a long, long mess; but I don't like using what should be
beautiful -- peace, order, simplicity, calmness and fairness -- to take
us some place likely even worse.
Link: The ipad is for readers (Salon)
The new "James Bonds"

Hence my decision to appeal to an Internet audience by
demystifying the process of filmmaking. I decided to blog the
behind-the-scenes making of the film, posting outtakes as
well as on-set clips every day and discussing the progress of
the film as it was being made.
I don't think I'm the first person to have done this -- at least I
hope not.
[. . .]
So, I reasoned, there was little to be lost -- the clips I posted
were short and mostly funny goofs. The interest that the
"film diary" was provoking naturally seemed good for the
movie's profile. Who could begrudge a little advance
publicity?
Still, a week or so into shooting, somebody did. I got a rather
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stern e-mail (and a series of worried calls from my

producers) saying that one of the financing entities behind
the movie had stumbled upon my blog and weren't at all
happy with what I was doing.
[. . .]
My reaction? Fear and shame. Suddenly I was in sixth grade
again.
I felt the terror of having made the authorities angry and I
quickly pleaded for forgiveness. After all, this particular
authority came with money behind it.
[. . .]
On our next weekend off, I sat down and banged out a blog
entry called: "Information Democracy: or How I Learned to
Stop Worrying and Love YouTube."
[. . .]
The response was instantaneous. I usually averaged
anywhere from three to eight comments per post. The next
day -- even before the next day -- there were 20 comments
posted.
[. . .]
The company who'd objected to the clips now admitted that
perhaps they'd been a little -- sudden in their opinion.
Perhaps they'd simply been surprised at what they'd seen
and unprepared for such a bold experiment. I could put the
clips back, they said. But no edited scenes (which was fine by
me -- I hadn't been posting assembled footage anyway). And
keep the clips short, under 30 seconds. (No problem, said I.
The Internet attention span doesn't really go beyond 30
seconds anyway). And no production stills -- they need to be
approved by actors. (Yes, yes, of course.) And, by the way,
Raymond ...
Yes?
How many hits are you getting on that blog of yours?
Close to a thousand a day.
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Good. Keep it up. (Raymond de Felitta, Blogging "City

Island": Why I did it, Salon, 5 April 2010)
The new "James Bonds"
This account brings to mind any number of Shakespearean comedies,
with adolescent presumption at the last making peace with elders'
scorn. I think many might be inclined to take a piece like this as
evidence that there still are avenues for discussion and mutual
discovery between the brazen and the disapproving, still "allowances"
in these corporation-everywhere times for lone intent to breach
boardroom impress, and not to ask if peace was made here because,
from the beginning, the venturesome "fool" was prepared to desist
should the "court" not found peace with his "coming not to offend."
I suspect this, because I think most of us are quite ready to buckle
before authority right now -- keep our hide, let someone else be the
somebody who FINALLY said it!!! -- but don't want to know this
about ourselves. What we want to know is that that bit of trouble we
caused at our workplace, that surely-not-just-token act of our true
independence, that we tell ourselves we charmed away into actually
becoming an account of inspired employee contribution, is proof that
the real Jerry Maguires work with finesse within, that only slow and
clumsy independents -- would-be rebels -- lose their jobs in their
efforts to keep some dignity.
Link: Blogging "City Island": Why I did it (Salon)
By Zeus! You were right!

Of course, lamenting that the old "Clash" is so much better
than the new one will take us only so far. Any remake has to
stand on its own merits. That said, "Clash of the Titans" still
sucks.
[. . .]
The Kraken is big all right, and his design -- a small, turtlish
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head perched on a gargantuan body -- owes a debt, as so

many modern movie creatures do, to H.R. Giger's design for
"Alien." But this Kraken is disappointing; there's no glamour
or mystery to him. He's overscaled and underwhelming, and
even in 3-D, he lacks dimension.
[. . .]
But what about everything Hollywood, with movies like this
"Clash of the Titans," is failing to give us? The movie is big
all right. But where's the magic? (Stephanie Zacharek,
"Clash of the Titans" could make the gods weep, Salon, 2
April 2010)
I promise you, boredom, demi-gods!
Minor spoilers (leakages):
Kalibos bleeds scorpions that are 500 times more powerful than he is
(and Kalibos rips people apart, making him 500 times more powerful
than regular-strength Perseus is). Medusa is 500 times more
powerful than heroes are. Kraken is about same as original, but here
you're left feeling he should have been the size of Jupiter -- the planet,
that is -- for right-balance sake.
Good movie to go to credit that your absolute unexceptional
normality keeps you well within demi-god range. Have to be able to
imagine yourself standing up to parents who promise a lifetime of
standing-around and being bored, though.
---------You were right, Zeus! Spare us!
As a further note, I have heard that what in particular marks Art in
depression eras is showmanship and spectacle. As someone who was
into the 1920s but skipped the rest bit until "It's a Wonderful Life" or
so, I'm actually wondering if what Art most tries to prove during these
times is that man is about as ordinary, as humble-worthy, as
disapproving fore-fathers decreed. If depressions are Adam after
Eden, willed proof of our own sinful nature, that is -- which is what I
think they are -- then maybe what people most want now are a steady
flow of films like this that have you thinking that maybe the last 5 000
1087
years of artistic accomplishment were just a fluke after all -- that this
steady flow of junk is true proof of all we're made of and all we should
subsequently expect. It's our way, perhaps, of suffering the
depression, without incurring the release of the Kraken.
Link: Clash of the Titans could make the gods weep (Salon)
The American Bottom

I tend to use Amazon more as a resource about books than to
actually purchase books. I can find publishing dates, latest
editions, cover art and synopses. I can also read several
pages of a book I might be interested in ordering, and I like
the age recommendations if I am shopping for a young
person. But, above all, I am always drawn to the reader
reviews, especially reviews of books I have already read
myself.
[. . .]
Then there are the reviews that I'm drawn to somewhat
masochistically, those that give one-star ratings to a work
that has moved me inexpressibly or influenced me indelibly.
I thought it might be fun (well, depending on what your
definition of "fun" is) to see what some of those one-star folks
had to say about a few of my favorite books, as well as some
of the books that appeared on others' lists.
Here for your amusement, completely unedited, are some
heartfelt one-star Amazon book reviews! (I have left off any
names, although most of them are written anonymously.)
[sic throughout] (Jeanette Demain, Salon, Amazon
reviewers think this masterpiece sucks, Salon, 2 April,
2010)
The American Bottom
When people are looking for sure signs of the decline of the U.S., I
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would think they would need to explain themselves some if what they
point to is too much allowance for the amateur and an abominable
widespread inclination to thumb noses to betters. Whatever the wellwrought philosophical poeticism of the founding documents, it seems
to me that it's the equivalent of a rude and impromptu finger to the
king, which marked the spirit of its founding.
Many have hoped to costume themselves "betters" by mimicking
gentry bemusement / irritation at the mob. I don't at all recall any
great writer having much good to say about them, though. "Amateur"
can be redeemed; "pretender," "hangers-on": not so much.
----------Why evil may be good for the humanities
For some time now, those in English departments who sought to
teach what made Great Works great, were on the defense.
Departments were essentially "owned" by those who "problematized"
the works, making them seem more historical documents, full of
misogynistic, homophobic, racist stuff, than works of eternal genius
to be studied and worshipped.
I wonder if our instinct to use the past to show how depraved our
contemporaries are is now once again so strong that the tendency will
once again be to make great men Gods. Gods we can enjoin, that will
buoy our laughing at former neighbors and friends, whose
unfamiliarity with Beckett, discomfort with Austin, means they have
earned their torture, before the cracks open up, they fall away, and
die.
Link: Amazon reviewers think this masterpiece sucks (Salon)
Deducting penises
Here is a list of ways being battered by a partner could
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make you feel: Betrayed, unsafe, compromised, unable to

trust your partner or yourself. And here, according to one
U.K. ad, is how it could make you feel if you are a man: As if
you don't have a penis.
[. . .]
Of course, intimate violence affects both genders. And it's
true that ideas about masculinity -- that men have to be
strong, in control, unafraid, invulnerable -- can keep men
from acknowledging the seriousness of their situation, or
from reporting it. However, it's unlikely that a man who
feels his masculinity will be compromised if he reports abuse
is going to be persuaded otherwise by an ad that basically
says, "so, being hit by your partner made your dick fall off."
And then, there's the other implication: That having a penis
is a sign of power, that not having one is a sign of
powerlessness, that penises are nature's way of signifying a
totally-not-abused person.
[. . .]
People who have dicks aren't abuse victims; people who are
abuse victims don't have dicks. Being a man without a penis
is terrible, largely because it makes you like all those other
natural-born victims out there with a reputation for
dicklessness. You know: women. (Sady Doyle, Domestic
abuser ad misfires for men misfires, Salon, 1 April 2010)
Deducting penises
Re: intimate violence affects both genders
Are you a mind-spirit, knowing best and first, signposts and
significations -- and all else denatured and cerebral -- and now have
trouble speaking for those unfortunates who've "known" spousal
abuse"?
----Re: However, it's unlikely that an man who feels his
masculinity will be compromised if he reports abuse is
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going to be persuaded [ . . .]
Man: "I feel my masculinity might be compromised if I report my
abuse."
Other man [to himself]: "If King Kong should fall . . ."
----[1] That having a penis is a sign of power, [2] that not having one is a
sign of powerlessness, [3] that penises are nature's way of signifying a
totally-not-abused person
[1] Penis = possession of power
[2] No penis = possession of lack of power
[3] Possession of penis = Other's (i.e., nature's) demonstration
through you that you are entirely without abuse.
----Re: Being a man without a penis is terrible, largely because
it makes you like all those other natural-born victims out
there with a reputation for dicklessness. You know:
Women.
"Women" possess vagina-dentes, that chew up men altogether. Being
without a dick means that you've lost yours to one of them. It can end
up being empowering, though, as you join the Women-directed
dickless horde that gangs up on those so proud to keep their dicks all
to themselves.
Terminology
Patriarchy = invention by men and women to imagine society as
father-warded against maternal claims (i.e., collapse of self through
identity-dissolution). Improvement from matriarchy; enabled
civilizations; but is out-dated, and rightly IDed as cruel and way
insufficient.
Men, according to (the worst of) academic feminists:
Determined by societal factors they themselves are oblivious to.
Through study and strict discipline -- a process of enlightenment
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which has marked them unable wholly to return back, leaving them
still inclined to emote as sparsely / foreignly and speak as removedly
as do the cautious-learned logician-angels they've come to know -and natural genetic superiority, academics/feminists see what you are
not able. Truthfully, they know -- unless you're a promising graduate
student -- you will never be capable of what they themselves were,
and so don't really work by changing YOU but by changing the
environment you are "subject" to -- that is, they work at changing
structures that will end up changing you (or, really, the next gen. of
"yous"), for the better but without your likely ever being aware. Even
while talking to you, that is -- something they are occasionally drawn
to do because, though their lives are mostly elsewhere, your fate is
their foremost concern -- their mission is with greater things. Their
looking away while talking to you, to the societal conditions that are
making you talk / think the way the predictable way you do, is
aggravating to someone involved in a conversation with them -- who
always hopes for one's full intention, respect for their own ability to
possibly influence / change "you" as well -- and this will of course
compound the aggravation you necessarily know and daily feel in
your being almost entirely the hapless subject of societal forces you
know not of. They know this, but it cannot be helped -- though "you"
are everything they fight for, you are also -- *sigh* -- the foul crop
that has already come in: all blithe; little to no promise.
In truth, their kind of looking away, to their own affairs, while
ostensibly looking at you -- their neglect -- is the kind of thing that
INSPIRES people to create less than humane societies. In-link to the
core of it, actually. I think at heart that we're at the point that many
academics sense this, and somewhere inside exult in their ability to
exult in their sadism, which creates frustrations which fuels their
right to continue-on laughingly at your expense.
Link: Domestic abuse ad for men misfires (Salon)
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Watch out, liberal extremities!

Watch out, liberal extremities!
websmith says:
White people and an increasing number of minorities are tired of
being called racists by the true racists and more appalled that this
loony bleeding has spread from the heart to the brain."
This is what many progressives are going to have to get used to
hearing -- that THEY are the true racists! I've said this before but
'60's liberalism goes down when enough people have decided that, in
sum, it was never truly about what minorities, impoverished people
wanted/needed, but instead what certain AFFLUENT WHITE
PEOPLE wanted to believe those they ostensibly spoke for
wanted/needed. They (progressives) will be made to seem, not the
most caring, but the most negligent, most truly self-serving. Of
course, most democrats in power will not be too afflicted by this,
because they're ready to turn on the 60s too. Why? Because, sad to
say, they're getting in mood to want to see the weak and needy set-up
as punishment-worthy as well -- the punitive alters in their minds,
which "argue" that weakness and neediness is "bad," set up in
childhood (representing/embodying their parents
castigations/norms) but which they've so long managed to beat back
or keep cornered, are beginning to take over -- and to do that best the
middle-american they used to (admittedly) take pleasure in
disparaging must increasingly become actually what's right and pure
in America. That is, they're all getting set to become middleamericans now.
So fear now Al Franken, fear now Michael Moore.
Link: Whats the matter with white people (Salon)
TUESDAY, APRIL 6, 2010
Thou shalt not be aware
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Then Halperin asked me directly: "Would you like to see

[Obama] work with Republicans -- on education, financial
reform, on economic development -- or not?"
"You know what, Mark?" I answered. "Actually? 'Not.' Not
for the sake of just working with Republicans." I explained
how Obama worked hard to craft a bipartisan stimulus bill
that was smaller than many Democrats wanted, and that
was low on funding for infrastructure building programs as
well as support for cities and states that were shedding cops,
firefighters and teachers at the same time the stimulus
money was coming down. Keeping people employed is an
excellent unemployment program, I noted, but thanks to the
president's efforts to win Republican votes, the Obama
stimulus was too small to do more than a little of that. (Joan
Walsh, Mark Halperin: Obama must still chase GOP
support, Salon, 24 March 2010)
Thou shall not be aware
Please remember that a lot of us grew up with parents who were
irresponsible and unaccountable, and learned (through the help of
our superego, which steps in to help us from arousing parental ire
that a dependent child cannot bear) never to confront them with this
fact -- learning, instead, to suspect that WE, that our own needs, our
own attempts at growth, were really at fault for whatever our parents
did to us, and to find every way to account them (our parents) selfsacrificing, principled, and just.
That is, your instinct to show ridiculous people up as ridiculous, to
say what fairly should be said and stand up for what is truly right, will
trigger something in a lot of people that will make them want to make
you feel that you are way out of line, that you are being "bad" in your
disparaging "parental figures" -- what Halperin tried to do to you here
Anyhow, good show. And thanks for describing how this encounter
made you feel. It was good to watch.
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Link: Mark Halperin: Obama must still chase GOP support
Man of Action!
Watching Rachel Maddow recite the many good things the
healthcare bill does on her show Monday night, I was elated.
Hearing that Republicans have vowed to repeal the bill, I
was insulted. My insurance pays for lifesaving care. My
insurance has saved my life. It is easy and natural to shield
oneself from the bloody, painful, grievous facts behind the
numbers when one is not, oneself, one of the numbers.
Having cruised along healthy for so long, I was able to put
out of mind the gruesome, deathly consequences of a broken
healthcare system.
I can no longer treat it as an abstraction. I take it
personally. So I am happy when progress is made and
angry when such progress is threatened.
Do Republicans know how murderous they sound? When
your life depends on decisions made by people whose faces
you will never see, based on rules you had no part in
making, in a language so technical you cannot parse it, you
finally, truly encounter your own vulnerability to the actions
of states and institutions.
[. . .]
I now want to work more openly for political change. I have
stayed out of the political fray for many years, finding it
more skillfully and brilliantly played by our political team
led so admirably by Joan Walsh.
But if you find my approach to ethical, moral and spiritual
problems of some relevance to your life, if you have come to
know me as a decent, thoughtful person, certainly imperfect,
given to excess, occasionally verbose and self-absorbed but
1095
of fundamentally decent and positive character, then

perhaps when I take a political stand from time to time you
will see the reason in it and see fit to join me. Or perhaps you
will choose to try and show me the error of my thinking.
Either way: I must take a public stand on issues where it can
do some good.
Having emerged from a harrowing experience, running the
last leg of my long route toward recovery, I hope that this is
not an ephemeral change of heart, but one that sticks. (Cary
Tennis, It took cancer for me to care about health care,
Salon, 23 March 2010)
Man of action!
Speaking of republicans, Here's an accounting of Ronald Reagan's
conversion experience, with which you can compare:
"His conversion from acting as a career to being an anti-communist
politician was, Reagan said, like finding "the rest of me," like moving
from a "monastery" into a life of action.(30) Now, rather than
accepting the self-image of a passive boy, guilty of his father's death,
he could assume the active role as a fighter against those who want
authorities dead. Rather than staying at home and endlessly watching
himself on the screen without legs, he could-like FDR, another man
who had used politics to conquer the loss of his legs-take action
against those who now embodied his dangerous wishes. The moment
he switched from being a liberal Democrat to a crusading anticommunist, he not only found the rest of himself, he solved the
problem of guilt in his life, by taking all the things he felt guilty about
and putting them into an "enemy." At the age of 36, Ronald Reagan
had finally found how to live without crippling anxieties." (Lloyd
deMause, "Reagan's America")
Losing yourself to crusader roles usually ends up involving punishing
the weak and the spiritful, not just the regular ol' lot of "bad guys."
We would do well to remember this, as so many now realize how
much rejuventation and past-distancing is to be had in joining up
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with this current purity crusade (in truth, it won't be a "choice" -they'll be drawn to lose themselves so). Do any of us doubt that Tiger
Woods will soon follow?
Link: It took cancer for me to care about health care (Salon)
No better, no worse
West understood that mass culture had spawned a scary
hunger for borrowed and processed "authenticity," and this
makes his novels appear, in the words of the novelist
Jonathan Lethem, "permanently oracular," anticipating
such piranhaesque spectacles as reality TV and Gawker.
Against the urge to idealize writers of the past,
"Lonelyhearts" presents a portrait of a literary milieu as
double-dealing, bitchy, hypocritical and self-deluding as
pretty much every conglomeration of ambitious artists since
the dawn of time. It certainly was no better than our own.
The switcheroo?: Ours is no worse. (Laura Miller, Lonely
Hearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen
McKenney, Salon, 21 March 2010)
As soon as s/he was born, I was aware s/he would die
This week we learn that literary milieus with people being people
and all -- were, are, and always will be ambitious but also doubledealing, bitchy, hypocritical and self-deluding. Last week we learned
that being adult means knowing enough of life to be respectful of its
wounds, and enough of history to be leery of all ostensibly new, outof-the-blue, grand and sweeping claims. The week previous, that
genius may be more available than we thought, but only after a
lifetime of hard, persistent and focused work (Einstein being the
genius, not because he dreamed big, but because he persisted in his
efforts longer than anyone else). Like the 30s AND 40s over the
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presuming, hard-playing, elder-mocking, juvenile 20s, do you see

yourself as a kind of vulture overhang -- part of the gallows and proof
that nothing can be so brilliant that it can't be mastered and broken
by something longer, deeper, and totally self-balking?
Link: "Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and
Eileen McKenney" (Salon)
TUESDAY, MARCH 30, 2010
Mirror, mirror, on the wall
I didn't want the world to define her; I wanted her to define
her world.
I didn't understand then just how challenging this would be,
not only vis--vis my daughter, but vis--vis me. Like many
other women, when I got pregnant I was determined to
establish a reasonable balance between my work life and my
family. My goal while Julia was small was to take care of
her as well as write my first book. This equilibrium sounded
good in theory and in e-mails to my friends but in truth
I had a hard time actually doing it, actually ensuring that I
had both a child and my own life. I believed in balance on
paper but never felt truly entitled to it.
[. . .]
We had been together 10 years before we had children, and
they had been lived as equals. Suddenly, this was no longer
the case. Suddenly, we had very little time together, and
most of it was spent talking about his work and life. My
future, my career plans and goals, felt sidelined by fatigue
and logistics. The "flexibility" I coveted suddenly meant I
was picking up all the slack and getting very little respect in
return. Before long, it seemed whenever I raised a qualm or
demanded help, he would say, "But I have a job!" I'd get
upset in return, of course, but my voice always seemed to
1098
fall flat. Mostly I'll never forget how degraded those words
made me feel, nor how I stood there just praying that Julia
wasn't old enough to understand them.
[. . .]
In a sense, I have always lived life as if I were a character in
a movie perhaps every woman does. One of the strongest
memories I have of being pregnant is not how it felt to be
poked from the inside by my little girls, but of walking down
the street, large and slow, and feeling an overwhelming
sense of pride in the satisfied and sentimental looks of
strangers as I passed by them. It's the feeling of someone
else's approval, and it's probably one of the most powerful
things in the world.
My daughter knows that look; I know she does. She has a
pair of fairy wings that she loves to wear about town. She
almost always flutters in front of me when she does, and I
do love the look of joy and abandon on her face as she jumps
about, arms spread wide. I want to say there is a sort of
freedom there nestled in her curly blond hair, bouncing off
her round baby cheeks, and perhaps there is the freedom
you find in fantasy and imagination. I only wish that
sometimes she could stay in that little world, eliminate, that
is, the bystanders who walk by and smile, innocently
enough, at her in such a way that she beams and winks her
irresistible wink.
[. . .]
She knows her mother's been going through a hard time.
Sometimes, without warning, I cry in supermarkets and on
sidewalks, uncharacteristically unconcerned if others see me
without makeup on, or with it somewhere down around my
chin. I always mutter "Sorry, sweetie, sorry" to Julia
whenever I do this, though I'm beginning to realize it may
not be the worst thing for a daughter to see her mother
being human, having an interiority, struggling to regain a
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self she let go.

In the past few months, she's been understandably more
needy and prone to tantrums and fits of her own. The other
day, during one of her meltdowns, she did something I found
so disturbing that my shoulders tighten just thinking about
it. She ran to her room and stared at herself in the mirror as
she cried. I followed behind her and sat by her side as she
did, but that only upset her more. With a glassy stare
somewhere between fear and confusion, she took to looking
frantically back and forth between the mirror and me, and it
was at this point that I started crying too.
[. . .]
I gave her a little tickle, and we both chuckled. I don't mind
her knowing that I'm struggling that sometimes you have
to go through hard times to get to honest times but I also
want her to know that I'll be OK too. Leaning back and
giving me a kiss, she seemed to intuit this. For a blissful
moment, we weren't talking in funny, fake voices. We were
just Mommy and Julia. And I knew then that if anything
could make us happily ever after, it was that. (Ashley
Sayeau, Help! My daughters a girl girl, Salon, 21 March
2010)
Mirror, mirror, on the wall: "What do the princess's
sparklings portend for me?"
You ARE failing her. You clearly WANT her to feel the TORNNESS
that every women necessarily feels in this degrading, patriarch-laden
world, 'cause after all, YOU could never come to feel yourself entitled
to an uncompromised world of promise, so why should she? And
besides, what is she doing being so persistently fairy-merry and selfpleasing when before her so often is the one in so much real due need
of fun and relief-from-pain, with you being so broken-down,
narrative-ridden, husband-disparaged, and only human and all.
When she broke down, dazed, fazed, and in dismay, and you knew
1100
that that look of joy and abandon and freedom would likely only
thereafter be occasional and unsure, never fully unprotected yet
always mother-breachable, OF COURSE you reached out to her:
What a good girl!!! Her buckling proved your "wearerings" could own
her, and that she may never really stray -- that you'll have her maybe
forever in your mother-pleasing paddock, staying in line with
whatever your current mood holds is all she need know of the right
lessons of daughterhood.
Damn being beholden to what other people expect from you! Damn
the patriarchy!(?)
Link: Help! My daughers a girly girl (Salon)
Mordred
Frankly, as a YouPorn masturbator, I was pretty offended
by this. (By the way, you can also hit me up on
Chatroulette.) What's more, the last part kind of makes him
sound like serial killer: "My local life is clean. I am more
focused than they are. Stronger and better suited to what is
near me -- my family, my wife, my job." It almost feels like
his next sentence could easily be, "No one would ever dream
of looking in my shed."
But the other weird part about this is that he says, "you
don't fight men over stuff like this" -- yet he goes and does
just that. He fights with men (with me) about it, he just does
so in flaccid anonymity.
[. . .]
First of all, I would never, never describe making love to my
wife as "sweet." There is actually a lot of grunting, if you
must know.
[. . .]
This is not a cheating piece, this is a revenge piece; society
1101
isn't nice with all its fancy expectations for little Prince
Anonymous, so I will treat my wife passive aggressively -no, make that cruelly -- and I'll do so in complete anonymity
(just like this article). I will use my wife and these women to
get back at the big bad modern world that doesn't
appreciate me. Performance reviews, training, 401K, too
much work, deadening career, flawed and antiquated
apparatus of marriage.
This is not a cheating piece. It's more of this Nouvelle
American Man Poor Me bullshit. This is just a retread article
by a guy with no sense of humor about himself, who is too
soft to take any real responsibility in his life. Don't like your
boring job? Quit, and learn how to live with less, or find
something that interests you more. Living too long? Get a
heroin problem. Don't like being married? Don't get
married. Or man up and get a divorce. Fix just one aspect of
your miserable life and stop giving me shit about
masturbating to YouPorn. Don't act like some jaded
character resigned to his fate, don't be an anonymous guru
who purports to have some deep insight into what men
really think, because ultimately, while there are a bunch of
guys over the age of 30 who think and act like this, most of
us got over this angsty stuff a long time ago. The only thing
this particular anonymous has any insight into is the way
spoiled little boys think. (Aaron Traister, Explaining Tiger
Woods and Jesse James, badly, Salon, 19 March 2010)
Mordreds
When we sense that Morgana, not Arthur, rules the realm, the most
obnoxious -- for sensing themselves so obnoxiouslybacked/empowered -- are the Mordreds of the world, those who have
offered up their scrotums and their souls to their mother-wives.
Why does Aaron so often repeat that he's a YouPorn watcher -- put
this fact before us, not so much as if he was owning-up to his
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clownishness, but as if he was muscling his balls before our face?

Because it posits him the teen boy whose bathroom grunts are to be
understood by mom as but natural -- that "that's what little boys do"
-- not someone who is contesting her centrality of interest to, her
ownership over, him. His juvenile grunts show he has retreated away
from any claim to adult self-possession; he becomes the adolescent
who proves daily in his ostensible adulthood that he will never in fact
defy or move on.
This is a rewarding but also humiliating place to be. You do feel some
wife-revenge in his making clear "we're up to grunting, not just
petting" -- a way of covering with the mutual his intention we know
how daily HE makes HER grunt -- but it is well diverted toward some
other intention, toward the primary "out" for his revenge. For in the
age of Morgana, the wife-fidelitous YouPorner feels -- and actually
can -- make mince-meat of any ranging 'squire, and so frustration
finds release primarily in OUR carnage. He needn't even argue or
write well: it's enough for him to show off his branding for us to know
that our God, our Lady, has ordained the day for him.
Link: Explaining Tiger Woods and Jesse James, badly (Salon)
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 24, 2010

Bye-bye, Kucinich
Kucinich knows as well as anyone that the president is far
from a socialist; he's a centrist corporatist Democrat, and
that was clear back when Kucinich stood well to his left
during the 2008 primaries. And even though the Cleveland
progressive normally avoids partisan calculations about
power and opportunity, and votes his conscience and
ideology, Kucinich decided to support Obama's healthcare
reform plan because right now, partisan calculations about
power and opportunity actually serve his left-wing
1103
conscience and ideology.

Kucinich understands that there will be no healthcare
reform for another generation if this bill doesn't pass. There
will be no second Obama term either (and don't dream about
lefty primary challenges -- there won't be a Democrat in the
White House in 2013 if his name isn't Obama). The only
thing worse than being an alleged socialist in American
politics is being a weak, ineffectual socialist, and if the
president and his party can't get this package passed,
despite controlling the White House and a healthy majority
in both houses of Congress, they will be rebuked by the
voters. And maybe rightly rebuked. What better sign that a
party isn't ready to govern? (Joan Walsh, Dennis Kucinich
speaks for me, Salon, 17 March 2010)
Bye-bye, Kucinich
You read GG and you get a sense that Obama is slowly paving way to
wage war against select numbers of the American people. And it is,
for me, very difficult to trust the hand-extended, when I know the
other is clenching into a fist. YOU support the bill because you care;
Kucinich now does so because he saw the fist, and was aroused by the
possibility of it. The little dwarf has proven himself no good at all. He
will hurt people.
Speaking of Speaking for People
It's nice you printed a response of one of the subjects of
"Hipsters on Food Stamps" article, who disputes Mr. Bleyer's
reporting. But since Salon set itself up as the main source on
"Food Stamp Hipsters" I think you need to do more.
For once, don't act like other media outlets - starting a
questionable uproar, then letting it drop with a single
perfunctory follow up. Instead actually doing that "larger
conversation" journalists so often use to justify their choices
and which Salon so often flogs.
You have done multiple articles and follow-ups and
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responses on Sara Palin, and if Lord of the Rings is a classic.

You spent months on every aspect of Hilary Clinton's
campaign.
Why not go beyond the occasonal "Pinched" article and
spend at least a week scrutinizing Food Stamps, myth and
reality, and the ethics and rhetoric of economic trend pieces?
It doesn't involve celebrities, but impacts all of us. And it
would be something few journalists are willing to do.
I'm cross posting this letter here in hopes of getting a real
genuine response. I think you could do something special
here, something which Salon was allegedly created to do.
(softdog, response to post)
@softdog
I agree, softdog. That article may well have worked toward creating a
new underclass of people for the Newt Gingrichs (on the right AND
the left, apparently) to wage war on. We're about to pass healthcare,
and those least likely to find coverage under the bill -- students, parttime workers -- are being set up by Salon as deserving less, not more;
as worthy of punishment, not assistance. (Akin to what Gingrich did
to welfare-"queens.") "They" should not want to play any part in
encouraging that evil. It has not yet been remedied.
When we feel a society needs punishment for its previous wickedness,
you might think all attention drifts toward the self-indulgent rich. In
truth, it goes there, but it is toward the youth that it settles most; for
the young represent OUR OWN striving selves, what we at heart most
believe brought us into a situation where somewhere above someone
menacing is calling for merciless crackdown and tributary sacrifice.
You said...
"...those least likely to find coverage under the bill -students, part-time workers... "
I would be interested, do you have a link to back this up?
1105
My daughter (a student and a part time worker ) was kicked

off of our policy when she hit 22. Now we have to help her
pay for an expensive "hit by a bus" policy.
Right now...
"a third of Americans age 19 to 29 are uninsured, the largest
and fastest-growing segment of the population lacking
health insurance. For those who aren't full-time students, it
climbs to 39 percent.
But the new HCB would let parents keep their kids on their
insurance until age 27, isn't that a big improvement? (ECHO
LEFT, response to post)
@ECHO LEFT
Admittedly, I was going on what I've heard other people say, and, to
be honest, an overall intuition that young people are not just not last
in line but strapped to tracks ahead of the Obama's societal-renewal
express. Glad you chimed in: It would be nice for kids to sense that
out there if they lapse or fall, isn't the boogie-man, but a kind catcher
in the rye.
All this said, I was for the healthcare passage earlier, primarily -- if
you can believe it -- because I think earlier it was passed through the
hands of an Obama with still, to us, some 60's progressive
effervescence, while now I feel that it has gone, and that the bill will
pass because somehow, despite it being about "health" and "care," it'll
be part of a conversation that would appeal to Moses as he espied the
heathens.
What a lovely reply. You have a gift. (ECHO LEFT, response
to post)
Link: Dennis Kucinich speaks for me (Salon)
1106

America the beautiful
Think of it as the effect of a grinding recession crossed with
the epicurean tastes of young people as obsessed with food
as previous generations were with music and sex. Faced
with lingering unemployment, 20- and 30-somethings with
college degrees and foodie standards are shaking off old
taboos about who should get government assistance and
discovering that government benefits can indeed be used for
just about anything edible, including wild-caught fish,
organic asparagus and triple-crme cheese. (Jennifer
Bleyer, Hipsters on food stamps, Salon, 15 March 2010)
The more spirited always look sick to the more beaten-over:
sex, drugs, and rock and roll
As someone who believes depressions are self-willed phenomena that
arise owing to mass discomfort with prosperity, I think the author
here is playing with fire in her baiting us into considering
students'/recent graduates' foodie-habits as akin to a previous
generations' "self-indulgent" immersion in sex and music. When
we're looking for scapegoats for societal selfishness, our first thought
is already to turn to the youth, owing to their so well
representing/essentializing growth, presumption, ambition (or if you
prefer, rampant self-indulgence, elder-disrespect, and narcissism).
Still, THIS IS the kind of forum to manifest -- if weren't already aware
of it -- that we've become obsessed with explaining any seeming
extravagance as MOSTLY really about responsibility and clear
thinking: It's a good thing, 'cause it means they care about their
health, and will prove less of a burden in the long-term; It's good,
'cause it means they care about the environment, responsible
engagement with fragile earth.
Why it is (primarily) good, to me, IS actually that it means kids won't
default too readily to eating food they don't enjoy. They take as much
1107
pleasure in their ongoing food adventures as the more sickly do in

their (in truth -- and whatever the poverty) mostly masochistically
motivated, revenge-avoidance moved consumption of gruel. They
can't be cowed/reprimanded away from enjoying life, and it is in
THIS spirit that we might one day find that such things like
depressions cease to be. I really believe this.
If we won't let them have their 60s, may they at least ably find their
way through us.
----I am one of the subjects of Jennifer Bleyer's recent article
about hipsters on food stamps. I am writing to address the
particular sort of ire that this article drew toward people
like me -- educated, unemployed, 20- to 30-somethings who
work in creative industries. Much of this vitriol is based on
certain assumptions that I would like to address.
While organic and local foods seem like luxury items to
many, it's important to understand that cheap food is the
result of government subsidies while local farmers get little
to no assistance. Cheap food is the real extravagance. My
interest in food stems from my having to care for a diabetic
father, and good food is the only form of healthcare I have
access to. Even when I was working full time for a
publishing company, I received no benefits, and paid an
average of $2,500 to Uncle Sam every tax season despite
wages that were meager by any American standard.
[. . .]
I can tell you that many of the artists I know in Baltimore
work as dishwashers, baby sitters, house cleaners, movers
and dog walkers. They temp, sling coffee and freelance. They
teach inner-city kids and counsel rape victims to make ends
meet. They come from all walks of life and from all parts of
the country, they are black, white, Asian and Latino, and all
1108
of them struggle to varying degrees. What makes them less

deserving of assistance when they need it than anyone else
who qualifies, and why is it such a travesty that food stamp
recipients have access to quality, healthy food?
[. . .]
By the way, a whole rabbit at Lexington Market is $10, feeds
at least four people, and is healthier than factory-farmed
chicken (around $6 for a whole one at the same market).
(Gerry Mak, A hipster on food stamps responds, Salon, 17
March 2010)
Full Disclosure
I have reported all of my income. I receive no significant
help from my parents (they paid for college, so I wouldn't
expect any more from them even if they had the means). The
Department of Human Resources in Baltimore has my social
security number, and they know my employment history.
As for food, I generally don't even buy organic or local. I try
when I can, and usually that's with my own cash. Mostly
though, I eat sardines out of a can, which are sustainable
and high in omega-3s. I eat sweet potatoes, which are cheap
and nutritious. I sometimes eat chicken that I buy at the
halal market for about $2.99/lb. I eat a lot of vegetables,
mostly not organic, but I try to get stuff that looks good and
fresh.
I am only a hipster in that I make art in my spare time. I am
not good enough to have sold anything yet. For most of my
professional career, I have been paid to write and edit.
Unfortunately, the publishing industry is in dire straits,
which is why I find myself barely employed. (Gerry Mak,
response to post)
This is how you portray yourself here:
My interest in food stems from my having to care for a
1109
diabetic father, and good food is the only form of health

care I have access to.
Further, you now make clear that you eat food that is "cheap and
nutritious"-- rather than cheap, nutritious, and DELICIOUS.
This is how you are portrayed in the article:
"I'm sort of a foodie, and I'm not going to do the 'living off
ramen' thing," he said, fondly remembering a recent meal
he'd prepared of roasted rabbit with butter, tarragon and
sweet potatoes. I used to think that you could only get
processed food and government cheese on food stamps, but
it's great that you can get anything."
That is, in your response you're all of a sudden EXCLUSIVELY a
foodie out of necessity/responsibility, whereas in the article we had
you as a foodie in good part out of a disdain for the paltry and a
preference for the magnificient -- you were in it for its music and sex,
that is.
You might be well protecting yourself, but I really wish you'd left
room for challenging people to question if finding every means to
enjoy life is a sign that you are spoiled, that you are in some way
irresponsible for dining on rabbit, sweet potatoes and butter while so
many wish you'd content yourself with 100% life-discomfort and
gruel. For some of us, the best way to be socially responsible is to
show that YOU NEED NOT let regressing, punishment-minded elders
bully you into demonstrating you're just as wary of lust-for-life, of
seeming spoiled, as everyone else these days. And don't kid yourself:
even if your in-truth only occasional hipster ways lead you away from
being an embarrassing failure as an artist toward some one-day
considerable success, don't think "we" still won't expect to see you
repentant and modest. "We" want all youth now to be ready to
surrender themselves to our own needs, not consolidating themselves
firmly away in their own uniquely rich way of life, and this is why
we're in the business of trying to starve you out right now. If your
instinct is not to tell us to fuck off right now, to protect your right to
life of HAPPINESS AND PLEASURE!, you'll eventually find someone
1110
else more spoiled than you to single out and bully, and so America
becomes one more person toward the barren, mean, and grasping.
----The Entitlement Generation
Food stamps and other forms of public assistance are
intended to be a last-ditch safety net for people truly in need.
California's food stamp statute, for example (Welf. & Inst.
Code 18900) states in the first line that its purpose is to
combat "hunger, undernutrition, and malnutrition" among
low-income people. In other words, food stamps (and
welfare) are supposed to provide truly needy people with a
last line of defense. College-educated 20- and 30-somethings
hardly fit into that scheme.
I'm guessing that most of the "hipsters" who are using food
stamps have a lot more options in life than the average food
stamp applicant. They have parents they can move back in
with. They are mobile enough that if they can't find work as
a light technician in a Manhattan art house, they can move
to Jersey and sling coffee or tend bar. They could even
(gasp!) get one of those jobs that we're always told
Americans won't take, like janitor, hotel maid, etc.
It's the idea that our tax dollars are being used to subsidize a
lifestyle that bothers people, not the use of food stamps for
healthy food. The idea that some people feel that they're
entitled to live in the hip enclaves of their chosing, work in
their ideal field, and live their lifestyle no matter what the
cost, even if it means suckling off the public teat to do it.
That's not how the real world works. You lose a job,
sometimes you gotta move, change fields, downgrade,
scrimp, and yes, eat ramen for a few months.
It's deeply troubling that we have raised a generation that
views it as their right to burden already overstressed
1111
systems in order to continue to live in the style to which

they've grown accustomed (or, more likely, into which they
were born).
One final point: it is the height of arrogant ignorance for a
20-something art student to assert that "food stamp-using
foodies might be applauded for demonstrating that one can,
indeed, eat healthy and make delicious home-cooked meals
on a tight budget." I'm sure struggling families around the
country are deeply grateful to Autumn and Skyler for
showing them the folly of their ways. (N1063W, response to
post)
Sex, drugs, and rock and roll!: where art thy former (dropout) defenders now?
And I saw in my path a many-mouthed beast, which went by the
name of GLUTTONY; and another draped-over in silk, pearls, and
toy-poodle encumbrances, which went by the name of
EXTRAVAGANCE; and another adrift in endless hours of artful
posings, set for endless hours more, that went by the name of
IDLENESS -- and I knew God would be displeased if I failed to
ground to the dirt, every last spoiled-rotten one of them.
The American left? Who knew?
Links: Hipsters on food stamps (Salon)
A hipster on food stamps responds (Salon)
Most accurately, you've written yourself a most handsome turde de

force!
If there's a hell for book reviewers (and I'm sure many
authors hope there is), no doubt we will spend eternity there
being jabbed by trident-wielding imps bearing certain
adjectives emblazoned across their brick-red chests:
1112
"compelling," "lyrical," "nuanced" and so on. Even in this

world, the conscientious critic is bedeviled by clichs; how
many ways are there to say that a book is "beautifully
written" or that the characters in it are "fully realized"
instead of "two-dimensional"? These are the words that rise
up in a reviewer's mind, like those clouds of gnats that ruin
so many walks in the woods. No matter how hard you try to
bat them away, they just keep coming back.
[. . .]
Within a couple of hours it seemed like every book reviewer
in the country had been forwarded multiple links to Kerns'
column. "It's getting worse," tweeted Ron Charles, fiction
editor and critic for the Washington Post Book World.
"People in the office are now emailing me Book Reviewer
Clich Bingo without comment." In silent shame, dozens (if
not hundreds) of delete keys wiped out instances of
"poignant" and "gritty" and "tour de force." (Laura Miller,
Book critic clich bingo, Salon, 16 March 2010)
Most accurately, you've written yourself a most handsome
turde de force
If the reviews are seeming stale, mightn't in truth the books be so
much stasis as well -- or are you different breeds, with one in need of
more precise wording to delineate/describe the exact nature of their
surging, and the other in need of well-intentioned friendly-fire to
keep them from more downhill sagging? How do authors keep writing
things that keep drawing you to declare "tour de force," while you
guys twitch at any suggestion of being old hat, as if the concern was
already sufficiently pronounced that you'd prepared yourself to be
ever so quick to ensure it need not continue to be the case, when
presented with its apparent existence?
Some of us are suspecting you're all into fine-tuning the largely
indiscriminate, which has us wondering if precision is what you aim
for when the interesting and novel is not in fact something you're
1113
anymore interested in -- the thing that eventually did the scholastics

in, that is.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston???
Patrick, I think you take yourself a bit too seriously. Are you
for real??? I have two degrees; I excelled in my English
graduate program; and your verbosity and pomposity was
a marvel to behold, in equal measure. Congratulations. You,
sir, are a tour de force...
But all that was surpassed when I looked at your website at
http://patrickmh.blogspot.com/. My favorite of yours is
"Hey gang! You're at Me, Central--THE place to all good
things...."
Oh yeah, nice hat. (Keith Stroud, response to post)
Thanks, Keith
It's feels good to write something that can provoke a response that -for me at least -- is one to remember. Hmmm. Maybe if I became a
successful writer, that would help solve the critics' current problem
(or at least help prove a point)!? It would be nice to help out, so.
I'm back in the west, but no longer cowboy -- I've got glasses that
keep me feeling just as singular but now urban and strange: where I
like to be.
Luminous
Sometimes cliches are necessary to get the work done, but
"luminous" really gets my goat (pardon the cliche). It may or
may not be a reviewer cliche yet, but it has been a blurb
cliche for the last 30 years. It sounds so earnestly
meaningful, but its presence on the backs of half of all books
is good indication of what it really is: lazy and meaningless.
What is it supposed to mean with regard to prose? It is so
completely without application that you can call any book
luminous without having read it and not be any less
1114
accurate than anyone else who has ever called a book

luminous.
Reed Richards
P.S. Patrick: What fun! Keith: So true! (richarre, response to
post)
Link: The sins of the book critic (Salon)
We saw YOU, and we saw the plague
While the fiery debates sparked by my first two articles in
this series were irresistible, in a sort of car-accident way,
there was a lot more heat than light in those discussions.
Obviously we believe home schooling is a viable and
valuable part of the educational puzzle, or we wouldn't be
doing it. As a product of public schools myself, I can
understand why some people see home schooling as a
violation of the social contract, or as a reactionary,
overprotective rejection of the public sphere. Ultimately,
though, home schooling may be more important as a venue
for some unconventional ideas about education than as a
widespread social phenomenon or a panacea. (Andrew
OHehir, Why our kids wont go to kindergarten, 15 March
2010)
We saw YOU, and we saw the plague
It's your tone, Andrew. You get a sense in a lot of what you write that
you are actually quite happy to sculpt your life so you seem
increasingly detached from, not related to, the flailing, dumb rest of
us. I think you use your columns for this purpose. It's so frequently
one arm fully-extended to us, but FOR THE PURPOSE OF making
clear that we no longer (are in) touch, that we are fated to drift away
from one another. "Sorry guys, I wish I could, but I can't!" Guilt
1115
abates, even as your columns work to ESTABLISH that the rest of us

SHOULD imagine ourselves as amongst the unsavy and irrelevant
that really SHOULDN'T find their way to safe-haven before the flood.
So you write articles about why "Dark Knight" should have been
nominated, WHILE MAKING ABSOLUTELY CLEAR, not only that
you didn't much like the movie but that something is likely off with
you if you DID like it. You see in your comment section all the sad
fanboys, the easily entertained by, in truth, the truly unremarkable,
who ostensibly needed someone of gentle rank to speak for them, but
whom you can't sadly at all anymore relate to. Same thing with
LOTR. People thank you for allowing space to argue it one of the
2000's best when all you were doing was cruelly making use of
people's dismay to draw together a good lot of the sad hangers-on for
you to sigh at, disingenuously speak up for (highlighting ostensibly
imaginative responses by clear geeks, in an effort to essentialize
EVERYONE the films still speak to as being for the most part
unimaginative and uninspired, of non-professional calibre, of needing
over-enthused responses to their work to shore up their surely
flagging self-esteem -- as if being exulted might for a moment take
them away from their everyday experience of losing traction with a
world with no use for them), while twice or maybe three times making
sure EVERYONE knew the films no longer spoke to you or any other
professional film-critic you were in acquaintance with.
I would like to associate home-schooling with those who are getting
their children to know play. But I sense very little play in what you
write. "It" seems mostly about making clear that you are amongst the
elite, that an elite exits -- and owing somehow to its cleanliness, its infact MODERATION in tone and ambition, in an age where many are
disassembling and rambling on on over to enthused, over-inflated,
left-or-right-variety crazyland, DESERVES to exist -- and that you are
buoyed by having the good fortune of just having the right "look" to
allow you to innocently prosper while the rest of us get our messy,
panicky mental-states well away from your calmly-controlled,
securely-denatured presence. You well hide it from yourself, but you
1116
are using our Salon, our meeting-place, to build for yourself, a small
fortress.
Link: Why our kids wont go to kindergarten (Salon)
MONDAY, MARCH 22, 2010

Wetting yourself
But times have changed, and manhood is an even trickier
proposition than it used to be; only Philip Roth still believes
in the ol' saved-by-the-booty formula anymore. Younger
writers know that won't wash, and as a result the literature
of the masculine midlife crisis feels at once richer and riskier
than ever before.
Knowing, self-deprecating humor is the default approach
these days. Take Sam Lipsyte's satire about a failed artist
turned academic fundraiser, "The Ask," a novel so caustic
you might want slip on a pair of safety gloves before turning
its pages. Milo Burke, Lipsyte's narrator, is emasculated
both at home and abroad, from the wife who withholds sex
and casually cheats on him to the third-rate university that
keeps him on only at the insistence of an old friend turned
philanthropist intent on jerking his chain.
[. . .]
Which brings us to this week's choice, Thomas Kennedy's "In
the Company of Angels," definitely not a satire. The gravely
injured 50-something man at the center of this novel has
infinitely better reasons for losing faith than Lipsyte's and
Hynes' narrators do. [. . .] Such impotence is utterly
incompatible with his previous understanding of manhood;
therefore, he must be unmanned. The urge to cancel out a
shaming weakness with some act of force is a temptation
that all the men in Kennedy's novel face. If they succumb,
1117
they will only perpetuate the contagion, but to transcend

violence requires an imaginative courage difficult to muster.
[. . .]
"In the Company of Angels" is a novel about grown-ups,
people battered and dinged by life, painfully aware of their
own responsibility, whose understanding of their past never
stops evolving. It's the dignity of their adulthood the
elusive prize at stake in any midlife crisis that makes them
so admirable and, above all, so moving. (Laura Miller, In
the Company of Angels, Salon, 14 March 2010)
She'll wet herself
Re: "Younger writers know that won't wash, and as a result
the literature of the masculine midlife crisis feels at once
richer and riskier than ever before."
Knowing, self-deprecating humor is the default approach these days.
So it FEELS riskier, but it clearly isn't -- after all, we all know that
being Letterman/Clooney self-deprecating, pretending to think you're
heavily compromised and surely inadequate -- even clownish -- pretty
much is the only way to get a free-pass these days. Risky would
probably be to write, "hanging around young women actually can do
the trick," and to take yourself seriously as a man -- even if you know
this won't wash.
Re: '"In the Company of Angels" is a novel about grown-ups,
people battered and dinged by life, painfully aware of their
own responsibility, whose understanding of their past
never stops evolving."
(some version of) Lester Bangs: "You're flipping out. That's
good. Alright. This is how you blow their minds. She's going to ask
you -- this is Laura Miller, right? -- she'll ask you how the novel's
going. Here's what you do: Tell her, 'it's a think piece about a mid-
1118
lifer struggling with his own limitations in the harsh face of changing
times.' She'll wet herself."
Fascinating litmus test
I must say that I'm finding the comments to this column
revealing. The novel I wound up recommending is about a
refugee who was imprisoned and tortured for over a year by
the Pinochet regime, and the people in his life who are
participating in his recovery. I find it hard to see how this
material constitutes "boomer navel-gazing" or "whining" or
what Elizabeth Gilbert's memoirs have to do with it. (And
confidential to ropty: none of the novels I mention are about
people who teach at universities.)
I confess that I've sometimes wondered whether the people
who post comments even bother to read the article in
question; some seem to be responding to the headlines alone.
I think I've got my answer. (Laura Miller, response to post)
Whining
John, I can't tell you why the crop of novels I looked at this
month were mostly about middle-aged men, just coincidence
I suspect. But I guess I disagree with many of the
commenters here because I do think that it's a worthwhile
subject if the writer handles it well. I didn't like the Lipsyte
novel that much, but the Hynes book is great and obviously
I'm a big fan of the Kennedy novel.
Why not the Shapiro or the dominatrix memoirs? Because
this week I was looking at fiction, not memoirs.
Bebe, perhaps I'm naive in hoping that comments added to a
story are about the contents of the story. I like to think that
this column demonstrates that not all novels about middleaged men are "whiny" and that the story of someone
surviving trauma and violence has significance even to those
of us who have never had to suffer such ordeals. Most people
1119
experience loss as they age, and this has been a theme of

much great literature -- "King Lear" for one. Most of all, I
just don't see why there's such an outpouring of contempt for
middle-aged men here! (Laura Miller, response to post)
By modesty loose immodesty "out"
I read your bit, Laura, and I didn't get how being self-deprecating
COULDN'T amount to working STRONGLY against any effort by an
author to take risks. Without reading the works, as soon as I hear
we're going to be escorted along by self-deprecating narration, I
assume the effort's likely mostly all about, as they say, "selffashioning": an effort (in this case) primarily intended to establish the
author as sufficiently clownish enough, unpresuming enough, not to
be harassed if in his own life he continues to proper, or aims to
prosper, while so many now are being downed for their immodest
assumptions, their selfishness, their hubris. If this is the case, we
shouldn't participate in hiding away this self-lie by making its cover
seem so true, brave, and emboldened.
You scold and hope to cower, by bringing up a Lear-terary giant and
his (eternal) truths-in-aging, when surely you know what giant-killing
New Historicism -- what Stephen Greenblat -- must have made of this
"ploy," this particular Renaissance self-fashioner.
----A pack of hounds...
...is what the "letters" bunch remind me of. I actually feel
that Ms. Miller's reviews were spot on, and showed a great
deal of insight. (yekdeli, response to post)
@yekdeli
We're not hounds, we're Post-Whips. We're not here to rip apart the
posts; we're here to offer helpful correction -- to challenge the writers.
And we don't bite the hand that feeds us -- just little nips, and that's
1120
it.
Link: In the Company of Angels (Salon)
Incrementally flushing the '60s out of our systems

I've argued since August that the evidence was clear that the
White House had privately negotiated away the public
option and didn't want it, even as the President claimed
publicly (and repeatedly) that he did. And while I support
the concept of "filibuster reform" in theory, it's long seemed
clear that it would actually accomplish little, because the 60vote rule does not actually impede anything. Rather, it is the
excuse Democrats fraudulently invoke, using what I called
the Rotating Villain tactic (it's now Durbin's turn), to refuse
to pass what they claim they support but are politically
afraid to pass, or which they actually oppose (sorry, we'd so
love to do this, but gosh darn it, we just can't get 60 votes). If
only 50 votes were required, they'd just find ways to ensure
they lacked 50. Both of those are merely theories
insusceptible to conclusive proof, but if I had the power to
create the most compelling evidence for those theories that I
could dream up, it would be hard to surpass what
Democrats are doing now with regard to the public option.
They're actually whipping against the public option. Could
this sham be any more transparent? (Glenn Greenwald, The
democrats scam becomes more transparent, Salon, 12
March 2010)
Incrementally flushing the 60s out of our systems
I don't believe that the democratic leadership is against the public
option/public healthcare, period, only "they" don't want this reform
when it seems (or is largely construed as) still largely moved by
1121
hippie-progressive desire for a softer/kinder -- more caring -- society.

Obama and the democratic leadership want to think themselves,
"muscle," not those connected to, in sympathy with, the "weak."
What is happening here, I think, is a move which will more
marginalize progressives -- old-style hippie progressivism, that has
been the face of the left for 30-40 years -- than is the case currently.
(Hillary has turned hawkish and rigid, but no one can forget her 60's
past -- so her turn sets a good example but is the last movement she'll
make politically, as we all admire her but also pass her by. Obama,
however, being younger, can become one fully disconnected to this
face of liberalism -- something he is right now in the midst of insuring
-- the agenda, we'll come to "espy," for his first year.) For a bill will be
passed without a public option, and not only will the nation come to
love it but both parties will increasingly clamor for it to be
EXPANDED -- to the point that Obama (or at the very least, his
successor) will be ENCOURAGED to draw the government in.
Incrementalism will be proved the method of those who truly cared -and all those who came out to insist that passage without public
would not deal out real reform at all, will have neatly IDed
themselves, corralled themselves, for FULL exclusion from public
influence. And so goodbye to nice people -- those who really care
about immigrants, students, homeless, etc, who will continue to lose
out, come to radicalize, and thereby become even easier to imagine as
ungrateful vermin worthy of clampdown -- to the nation's great
pleasure.
This is not really an issue as to WHETHER we want the government
in, but HOW we will come to imagine government. If government
comes to seem less feminine, for the weak, and more about making -even forcing -- Americans to become lean and mean and all-in-one,
government influence over healthcare will draw patriot' support.
Link: The democrats scam becomes more transparent (Salon)
1122
What Dennis missed out on

"And I'm going to hold people, like Dennis Kucinich,
responsible for the 40,000 Americans that die each year
from a lack of health care. And I don't care if you're a
Republican or you're a conservative Democrat or you're
somebody like Dennis Kucinich. The fact is, this does a heck
of a lot for a lot of people ... It's not the ideal solution. But we
have our foot in the door, and if somebody like Kucinich
wants to block that, I find that completely reprehensible."
(Markos Moulitsas, quoted in: The liberal case against
Dennis Kucinich, Alex Koppelman, Salon, 10 March 2010)
The persecutions ahead
Nader has been trivialized, and now "we're" onto the next easiest
target -- alien-seeing, munchkin-seeming, Kucinich. But we've got
bigger battles ahead, in our effort to take down those who see the
world so Reese Witherspoon promisingly, who would want to avoid
an age that exults in the bad boys out there being IDed and "dealt
with," to truly dispense love and understanding as much as we can:
the Paul Krugmans, and then, finally, the Joan Walshs. Koppelman -though at first with many, many regrets -- WILL dump on Walsh at
some point. She's guilty of still being loving and hopeful, when the
mood is to punish all those whose pursuit of their own needs has
ostensibly lead to all the trouble we are in. Koppelman is looking
forward to being part of that kind of muscle.
Did you know Patrick-that Al Gore never claimed to invent
the internet? That he never claimed that the movie Love
Story was based on him?
That's right Patrick-total fabrrication by his many enemies.
Now did you know Patrick that Kucinich never claimed to
see aliens? He says he once seen an unidentified flying
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object. You know what that means Patrick? He seen a flying

object that he couldn't identify. Go outside tonight Patrick.
See if you can identify every flying onject that you observe
on the sky. get it Patrick? kucinich has bnevr said or claimed
that he has seen Alens. But you just did. And ignorant people
like you will pick that meme up and run with it. (Mister Dot,
response to post)
PS @Patrick McEvoy-Halston
Patrick-you characterize Kucinich as "munchkin seeming."
Why don't you post a photo of yourself so we can all see
what an asshole looks like. (Mister Dot, response to post)
Mister Dot, this is my point
Flying objects, aliens -- whatever: the point is that he could admit to
having seen something, even if he well knows this admittance could
be used to make him seem even more the odd-ball -- to isolate him
further. Everyone with enough self-esteem to just be natural is going
to be so very easy prey when we've decided to make use of
ANYTHING unusual you say or do to expulse you from political
discussion. As Stephanie Z. has argued, we need to stand up for
idiosyncrasies, or those who experiment enough in conversation to
put their foot in their mouth every now and then (read, in my
judgment: Chris Matthews, Pat Buchanan, Paul Krugman, Joan
Walsh, Ralph Nader): not just cause they make the world interesting,
but because in this age they're perhaps the surest sign we're dealing
with someone who thinks for themselves -- i.e. people of high selfesteem -- aka: the good. But of course we're in the process of
establishing that those who say the unusual are but another candidate
for Salon's "crazy of the week."
P.S.
I was born with natural good looks, but the munchkin 's daring has
me wish I could at least ape his rare leadership, with a more
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unexpected visage.
----Remember, some see TWO ways to a healthier body-politic
History will prove Kucinich wrong that substantial health care reform
won't soon enough lie in the wake of the passing of this bill. We'll see
it, soon enough after its passing -- gradually clearer signs that
politicians on both sides want to see it EXPANDED, not backstabbed, afterwards. Kucinish, Nader, the impatient and unreasoning
on the left -- as Joan Walsh has assessed them -- will be proven selfcentered, impolitic, essentially enemies of the people, and will be
ignored. Expect Koppelman to chime in on this, more than once.
What will make this possible? When it becomes clear that Obama and
the democrats who back him, despite all their multi-colors and their
refreshingly engendered, are truly no longer liberal, no longer even
feel the need to appear liberal -- and thereby validate its vision -- that
their efforts are in fact as much about intending to HURT people as
they are about helping, about identifying and making punishmentworthy the lazy and spoiled as it is about enabling them, when it
becomes clear that healthcare reform has morphed into a rightest
populist measure to promote the well-being of hard-working
Americans -- that is, when it IS ALSO an implicit attack on the legions
of ostensible vermin of the kind democrats have for long been known
to protect, who, it will be agreed upon, bleed the body-politic dry and
keep it feeling sickly -- then healthcare will suit the public mood, just
fine. The center now is where people who are regressing, people who
want a world of truly good and absolutely punishment-worthy bad,
go: the corporate-controlled understanding of it (the center) will get
us nowhere: people, corporate heads, want sadistic relish much more
than they want money -- they'll in fact lose plenty of the green, to see
more of the red (the largest story of what wars are about).
This won't be obvious for some time, however. And in the meantime,
those who sense the misdirection early -- people like Krugman -- will
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very readily find themselves rendered Nader-Kucinich impotent and

ridiculous. "In the face of every possible bit of counter-evidence, he
yet still complains," will be the damning claim made upon him (and
so goodbye!). Eventually, with most Americans enjoying being part of
the movement, with them enjoined to the promise of the large-scale
persecution it will deliver on, people like Joan Walsh will loudly balk.
At that point, many Saloners will see her too in the way of tens of
thousands of lives being saved (or some such), with much blood on
her hands, and all sense that this expression is partly rhetoric will
have gone as many contemplate a more appropriate fate for those
whose stand hurts thousands of people, than simply being rendered
impotent.
You can substantial health care come to pass, but in a way which will
be sickly to progressives. I think this is what is about to happen.
Link: The liberal case against Dennis Kucinich (Alex Koppelman,
Salon)
MONDAY, MARCH 22, 2010
Everyone wants to be a hero
Above all, Shields' book yearns to be what its subtitle
proclaims: a manifesto. That desire is really the easiest thing
to nail down about "Reality Hunger."
[. . .]
Shields is far from alone in his taste for bold and sweeping
aesthetic calls-to-arms. A manifesto makes people feel that
their writing (and reading) is caught up in and contributing
to some greater movement or cause -- possibly one that will
be looked back upon by future generations with as much
admiration as we feel today toward, say, the surrealists, the
beats, or the writers who clustered around the old Partisan
Review.
[. . .]
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Culture is always evolving, of course, but the idea that new

forms make the old ones obsolete and therefore useless is
relatively recent. It's part of the core creed of modernism, a
broad artistic movement insisting that art and literature
needed to be entirely rethought and reconfigured to respond
to the unprecedented conditions of modern life -- conditions
brought about in large part by technology.
The irony is that even modernism got old. [. . .] The
champions of various modernist movements announced that
their new art would sweep away the old, but when the dust
cleared, this mostly turned out not to be the case. [. . .] This
history should make anyone leery about sweeping claims
that certain commonplace art forms are "dead" -- because
what does that even mean?
[. . .]
Because when you write a manifesto, you are, after all,
telling a story, and casting yourself as its hero. It's a story
every bit as familiar and traditional as the plot of the most
conventional middlebrow novel: A visionary revolutionary
fights for progress by bravely challenging the reactionary
old guard. It's an old-fashioned tale, no doubt -- well, let's
face it, it's really pretty hokey. But it still plays. (Laura
Miller, RIP: The novel, 9 March 2010)
More Avatar haters

So his efforts are useless because he's up against all of history, which
proves different. And even if he's successful, he isn't -- because he'd
be just another hero bringing down a giant, and they've been telling
that one since "Moses."
If Nietzsche didn't say we shouldn't let history dwarf our own
individual lives -- and I think he did -- he should have. Even if it's the
truth, this "your efforts have been done before, your claims will not
last," is one of those we are better off forgetting. If it's only one of
1127
those things we keep in reserve, to spring on those who presume too

much, we should serve to prove that however many of us have been
defeated in the past, how boringly familiar the story of our own
defeat, heroes still are right to keep smacking us down. They may be
crazy and done-before, but can't you smell how elitist-awful we've
become?
I would suggest some other way of shooting down slips to a
regressive, me vs. you states-of-mind (which may well be what this is
all about). Though you grossly diminish and humiliate when you
contextualize, you clearly aim to sound broad-minded, urban, and
adult; but to me you sound about as smug and silly as David Denby
did when he said he couldn't imagine having much fun living in
Avatar-land (never played sports, David? Never?), with nary a New
Yorker or coffee shop in sight.
Link: RIP: The novel (Salon)
Cameron is to Bigelow, as Hillary is to Obama
Cameron is to Bigelow, as Hillary is to Obama
As a hunch, "Avatar" lost because it felt too cheery (or cheer-worthy),
was too exuberant, when Hollywood was in the mood to salute those
who kept things delimited, neutered (more broken, less affect), and
controlled. We voted in Obama, not Hillary (though we found a way
to give her kudos), and he's going to be around for more than a short
while. (Does Bigelow smoke? Did Cameron quit a long time ago? I
wonder.)
I would hope with these Oscars that many of us are realizing how
predictable we want things to be right now. For awhile yet, we can
still pretend we're really into change/progress by handing out crowns
to yet another who's never known election, or maybe switch to
handing out buckets of them at a time, rather just to one pathbreaking singular, but at some point it will become obvious to us that
we're for some reason terrified of moving on. I guess we figure we'll
1128
"deal" with this moment when we get to it, but for now and the shortterm: what would it be like if all in one year the best picture, best
director, best actor/actress were all female/black? What kind of a
charge of affirmation would be get from THAT? -- enough to carry us
on? How about along with HALF indie-selections? -- or would that
leave us too little room for next time?
At the end of the day, the movie that has stayed with me, is Star Trek.
True for anyone else?
Patrick
Yes, Star Trek is sticking with me. As a Trekkie, I was
worried it would suck big time, but it won me over with its
humor and its affection for the characters.
I haven't seen Avatar, but it looks like the usual bloated
overkill to me. I am afraid it will strain my nerves to watch
it. (Presumptuous Insect, response to post)
Link: Oscars: Hollywoods war against itself (Andrew OHehir, Salon)

Genius is play
Above all, what Shenk wants to communicate is that "the
whole concept of genetic giftedness turns out to be wildly off
the mark -- tragically kept afloat for decades by a cascade of
misunderstandings and misleading metaphors." Instead of
acquiescing to the belief that talent is a quality we're either
born with or not, he wants us to understand that anyone can
aspire to superlative achievement. Hard, persistent and
focused work is responsible for greatness, rather than innate
ability.
Shenk does have a lot of evidence for this assertion, most of it
1129
coming from geneticists and other biological researchers

who are perplexed at the way their disciplines get depicted
in the media. (Laura Miller, The Genius in All of Us, Salon,
7 March 2010)
If you right nurture them -- genius; if you well hurt them -autism/schizophrenia: we ready for this?
Well, if things like genius are mostly environment (which is what I
think it is -- but mostly about readiness to grow and play than about
persisting and work harder), then things like autism and ADHD are
probably environment as well. I'm fairly certain parents can put 2 and
2 together, and figure out some means to put an end to this wellcredentialed, careful "nutjob."
I don't understand your argument. Why would medical
disorders prove to be environmental if talent and ability
prove to be? (Christopher1988, response to post)
@Christopher1988
The argument here makes genius the responsibility of good
childrearing, not (so much) good genes. If parents embrace this new
way of accounting for mental ability, they've positioned themselves so
they're going to have a tough time not feeling obliged to attend to
emerging arguments that make environment mostly responsibility for
mental DISABILITY as well. This doesn't seem obvious to you?
Maybe it's not; but it seems to me that it is. In any case, autism as
mostly childrearing, not genes, is essentially implicit in everything
Stanley Greenspan has written. And I really hope we haven't forgotten
about dear R.D. Laing -- the guy who helped stop Britains from
electrocuting their schizos, by getting people to understand that
schizophrenia IS crazy (I know, I know -- he came to conclude it was
actually a state of enlightenment), but still often the only available -the sanest -- mental "response" to insane parental demands on the
1130
child.
Sorry, just not seeing it. Deciding on the basis of this article's
argument that autism and bipolar issues are a result of
child-rearing is like saying being born without an arm or
being born color-blind is a result of parental upbringing.
There is a very huge difference between falling in the normal
range of human intelligence and how the way we are raised
leads this natural ability to flourish and being born with a
geniune medical condition that prevents one's brain from
working normally. (Christopher1988, response to post)
@christopher1988
Re: There is a very huge difference between falling in the
normal range of human intelligence and how the way we
are raised leads this natural ability to flourish and being
born with a geniune medical condition that prevents one's
brain from working normally.
I hear you. And thanks for the feedback. But a good portion of what
we now delineate as "genuine medical conditions that prevent one's
brain from working normally," were once not so neatly tucked away
into the nurture camp. Even if "it" showed up at birth, people had in
mind to more investigate the nature of the womb environment than
speculate about one's DNA. Regarding things like ADHD, Autism,
Schiziphrenia/multiple personalities -- that is, mental afflictions a
good number now are estimating all about your genes -- not just some
worthy neglected psychologists/psychiatrists but a huge number of
the fretful parents who've helped ensure the current predominance of
(neither you or your parent's fault) nature theory at heart believe that
the whole current mental-disease medical edifice is just emergent
froth from our own brew of homemade deceptions and self-deceits.
Not a learned outsider telling us how it is, but a (soberly-dressed)
phantom of our own imagination/preference telling us what we
1131
want/need to hear, calming us down with (the equivalent of)

mechanic's talk of geers and spark-plugs. Doubt it? Stand your
average parents with an ADHD-afflicted child along a long wall of
current books which establish beyond doubt how ADHD is all genes,
along a long wall of full-agreement, confirmation and those-whothink-your-affliction-means-there's-something-wrong-with-youpersonally-are-just-scientifically-ignorant assurance, and just start
talking sceptic -- the likely rage you'll very quickly encounter comes
from them knowing that these experts are just extensions of their own
needs, that they (the experts) have not well addressed/tackled deeply
felt counter evidence to everything they argue, that have left them
remaining feeling vulnerable to consciousness disassembling -overwhelming panic-attack -- should being member of the DNA club
stop supplying them the elative uppers being part of the hip and
perennially societally relevant provides you with.
"If parents can encourage their kids into genius, surely they can drive
them into psychosis": we'll see if this prevails over your "very huge
difference."
----@DMSWhat
Re: That's different from telling everyone, "You, yes YOU,
can be a genius! You already ARE a genius!" This is just
pandering to the narcissism that's been running through
our culture for decades.
Yeah, and you had add that to the "it just takes lots of hard work" idea
-- a way of estimating your own life efforts that pretty much everyone
subscribes to (i.e., we're all suffering and working non-stop doggedly)
-- and you have an even easier time imagining this a message
Charlotte would spin to keep the rather ordinary feeling
extraordinary.
1132
Re: The truth is that the vast majority of people do not

have it in their range to be a genius at anything, no matter
how enriched their environment or how superhuman their
perseverance.
If you convince with this argument, I can't but help that it's because
it's aided along by our tendency to associate creativity with IQ and
our preference/need to believe that out there are but a few greats
--who are so much greater for there being few of them -- we can
attach to to breast such things as our own personal depression and
fears of imminent societal collapse.
Personally, since I just think of genius as never really being cowed, as
seeing/imagining everything before you as in play -- and wanting to
play (and play! and play!) with them -- I think it's accessible to
everyone. (What does high IQ do for you, more than add another
couple of the same you might juggle with? Isn't everyone in MENSA
an autistic logic-puzzle solver -- that is, lacking of nuance, too
concerned with familiar repetition, and essentially retarded?) You
don't tell your kids s/he's a genius, you just keep challenging them,
communicating that their play and challenge is welcome and
wonderful -- not by saying this, but by the manner in which you
engage with them -- keep developing the "conversation," wherever it
goes. These kids will delight and astonish people (or scare the hell out
of them). It's guaranteed. But if we're intent on pushing them to
Princeton, if we need to see them a certain way regardless of who they
in fact are (leaving them ignored, and therefore, less developed), if
we're actually AFRAID of the new because it has the capacity to
unsettle in a way we worry we cannot handle, we'll see none of them
emerge when so easily we could have seen them everywhere.
To be a genius right now means to be ignored -- 'cause we're
tightening up, going into stupid trance-states, and really just want the
predictable -- and so this (i.e., predictability/pliancy) is what you'll
find with everyone we now tell you is beyond brilliant. If you're going
to say something new and be accepted, make if the most incremental
1133
of steps forward, and crowd it with as many people as possible that

assure you are saying much the same as what so many others before
you have felt comfortable suggesting. If we let it stand, we'll make a
very visible statue of you, not so much to salute you (though we do
ever-so-much appreciate you making us feel venturesome and bold,
without making us feel the least bit unsettled and anxious!) but to
clearly demarcate exactly where-beyond, no one further will be
allowed to pass.
Doubt it? Stand your average parents with an ADHDafflicted child along a long wall of current books which
establish beyond doubt how ADHD is all genes, along a long
wall of full-agreement, confirmation and those-who-thinkyour-affliction-means-there's-something-wrong-with-you,personally- are-just-scientifically-ignorant assurance, and
just start talking sceptic
Your argument might hold water a little better if there really
was some kind of evidence and there were any books written
about a proven genetic link for ADHD. There is not. You're
just talking out of your ass, just as you want to believe that
discovering the factors that result in talent and high
achievement should somehow change conditions that
children are born with into something you can blame on
what the parents did after the child was born. (Angela
Quattrano, response to post)
continuing
@Angela Quattrano
Re: Your argument might hold water a little better if there
really was some kind of evidence and there were any books
written about a proven genetic link for ADHD (Angela
Quattrano, response to post)
1134
Would it hold water better if not a one of the long line of books on
ADHD on the shelf suggested that "your" mind went hither-tither
owing to your parents never letting it know safe-harbor? I've seen and
pa-roused the long line, and yet still wrote "genes": it may well have
been just nerves? bio-acids? chemical? but I went with genes cause
it's the "most usual" when we're retreating from mommy-didn't-loveme assessments of our mental problems.
@Christopher1988
I think what I'm saying is that right now NOT EVEN doctors can get
away with explaining to patients/parents that an "affliction" is a
"nature" problem/benefit, because we've so long disengaged from
believing we've got to engage with our past to understand/move
beyond our present -- and at some level know how disengaged, how
vulnerable, this has made us at a time when we suspect whole
bunches of us may not (be allowed to) make it -- that you can't
suggest nature/environment in even the whitest of coats, the most
affectless (blameless?) of terms but soothing of tones, without people
thinking you're in mind to remind them of what it once felt like as a
child to know hate and fear in the guise of love, in those you HAD to
have love and want you. These same people can't handle, not just the
fact of what they may have done to their own kids to create such
chaotic minds, but a closer look at what-responsible? for the
anxieties/fears/"visitations" that drew them to have such ambiguous
relationships with their children.
Link: The Genius in All of Us (Salon)

Response to Steph's assessment of Burton's "Alice"
presumption
1135
This would have been a fun one to have seen and then commented on,
but regarding this bit
"Alice in Wonderland" does offer its share of slender pleasures:
Wasikowska plays Alice as bright and unassuming, and watching her
is never a chore, even when the story devolves into a "Girls can do
cool stuff, too!" empowerment tale. (Stephanie Zacharek, Tim
Burtons Alice in Underland, Salon, 4 March 2010)
-- I'm sorry to hear she plays it unassuming, mostly because I'm tired
of unassuming people being praised -- SPEAK UP, DAMN "YOU"!
DON'T SQUEAK ABOUT LIKE A MOUSE: PRESUME! PRESUME! -but also because it's a significant deviance from the Alice I very much
liked in the book. Alice was notable as much (if not in fact, more) for
her default inclination TO PRESUME on the tilted creatures that keep
frothing up to spook at her with unsteadying strangeness, as it was to
accommodate and defer to them, and as a result she is often shown to
sort of spark the creatures she meets into a state that comes a bit
closer to recognizable sanity -- she gets real and recognizable, not just
crazed and abstract, conversations and reactions from them, and by
so doing SHE brings THEM into unfamiliar territory. You can read
Alice as an initially quiet and unsettled stranger who quickly becomes
someone who could see through the lies and breast the cowering and
possibly idiosyncrasy-inspiring intimidation, to near take down the
queer king (queen)dom. It's the Caucus Race where I first felt her
influencing Wonderland -- making "it" experience the uncertain step
toward a larger field of consciousness --not just reacting to it, but all
these instances are significant as setting her up as at least a potential
agent of unsettling change:
`Did you say pig, or fig?' said the Cat.
Ì said pig,' replied Alice; ànd I wish you wouldn't keep
appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite
giddy.'
Àll right,' said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite
slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with
the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had
1136
gone.
and this bit:
`Have some wine,' the March Hare said in an encouraging
tone.
Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it
but tea. Ì don't see any wine,' she remarked.
`There isn't any,' said the March Hare.
`Then it wasn't very civil of you to offer it,' said Alice
angrily.
and this bit:
"OFF WITH HER HEAD!"
`Nonsense!' said Alice, very loudly and decidedly, and the
Queen was silent.
The King laid his hand upon her arm, and timidly said
`Consider, my dear: she is only a child!'
and this bit:
`You promised to tell me your history, you know,' said
Alice, ànd why it is you hate--C and D,' she added in a
whisper, half afraid that it would be offended again.
`Mine is a long and a sad tale!' said the Mouse, turning to
Alice, and sighing.
Ìt is a long tail, certainly,' said Alice, looking down with
wonder at the Mouse's tail; `but why do you call it sad?' And
she kept on puzzling about it while the Mouse was speaking,
and of course, of course, the final bit:
`Stuff and nonsense!' said Alice loudly. `The idea of having
1137
the sentence first!'

`Hold your tongue!' said the Queen, turning purple.
Ì won't!' said Alice.
Òff with her head!' the Queen shouted at the top of her
voice. Nobody moved.
`Who cares for you?' said Alice, (she had grown to her full
size by this time.) `You're nothing but a pack of cards!'
@ Patrick M-H
Excellent comment.
I too read that bit of SZ's review and thought "... wait a
minute". What are either of the two Alice stories BUT "girls
can do things too" empowerment? In the first story, a girl
essentially stands up to tyranny. In the second, she become
QUEEN.
(Perhaps SZ's objection is to this movie's way of depicting
the empowerment; I haven't seen it yet, so I can't say. But
the theme alone is extremely "Alice".)
I'd like to see the film, even if I suspect it won't be very good.
I'm interested in the visuals, and I care enough about "Alice"
that I'd like to see even a bad version in order to be able to
talk about why I thought it failed. (If I end up thinking that.)
I'll say at the outset that unless SZ and other reviewers are
leaving out plot points, what has irritated me since the
beginning of the advertising blitz is this:
Carter is playing THE QUEEN OF HEARTS. Not the Red
Queen. Playing cards = "Wonderland". Chess Set = "Through
the Looking Glass".
I would find it interesting if this movie suggested that the
Queen of Hearts had assassinated and usurped the role of
the Red Queen, as a bid to take over all of Wonderland. That
would make her opposition to the White Queen make sense.
But she isn't the Red Queen in and of herself -- that's a
separate and actually *helpful* character, not at all like the
1138
tyrant Queen of Hearts.

If the movie loses that distinction entirely, that's more than
disappointing. (sgaana, response to post, Tim Burtons
Alice in Underland)
@sgaana
Re: "I'd like to see the film, even if I suspect it won't be very
good. I'm interested in the visuals, and I care enough about
"Alice" that I'd like to see even a bad version in order to be
able to talk about why I thought it failed. (If I end up
thinking that.)"
One of the things Stephanie does is show that there is fairly
considerable pleasure to be had in pinning down exactly what it is
about a BAD film/performance that made it so bad. I sometimes see
her as an artful cafe-flaneur, taking some pleasure in going wherever
needed to best delineate the experience of what strides/flashes forth
before her, who can near lull you into agreeing with her just so you
can accord her wordings some rightful permanence -- even, that is, if
something inside is telling you she may even be obfuscating, that she
did something worse than not nail it.
I'd love it if they'd let us know that certain films would stay on Salon
until the end of the weekend. I'd love to hear what this most
intelligent/sensitive audience of readers, after being challenged by
Stephanie's assessments, concludes about how THEY themselves
experienced them, and so offer the sorts of eye-opening, consciousraising disagreements/discussions we are able to offer when
discussion revolves around (for instance) a book we all happen to
have read. Stephanie's sharp, and makes you conscious of how exactly
you experienced things, and thereby, I think, leave you with tools to
move beyond just asking yourself IF you liked/hated a film, toward
asking yourself WHY in particular you love/hate films that are/do
such and such. With her help, you can not just get to know the film
but also yourself, better. Alternatively, it can help you see HER better
1139
-- her own predilections (let's say) -- and I can't but think Stephanie
would like it if contributers here helped her see what, for some
investigation-worthy reason, she was prevented from seeing in the
first place.
Appreciate you chiming-in. If not with "Alice," hopefully with other
films and books, we'll get to talkin'.
Link: Tim Burtons Alice in Underland (Salon)

What's in your life-script?
My life script has me killing my first born so Quetzookabul
will be pleased -- what's in your life script?
But as Sheena Iyengar describes in her new book, "The Art of
Choosing," arranged marriage has been the norm in many
parts of the world for 5,000 years -- including in the Sikh
community in which her parents were married -- and our
opposition to the idea says a great deal about the ways in
which culture and history have shaped the way Americans
think about personal choice. (Thomas Rogers, The art of
choosing: The hidden science of choice, Salon, 2 March
2010)
Alternatively, one might suggest that it says a great deal about just
how long barbaric practices can persist (I think child-sacrifice lasted
several millennium as well, and I don't think it ended so much owing
to the popularization of a new "script" for understanding deityplacation but because a new, more EVOLVED -- more empathic -generation finally emerged that looked more sanely at what their
parents were doing, and said, in-effect --"wtf! -- what the bleep are
you doing to those kids, you friggin' savages!")
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By contrast, in Japan, you dont sleep alone until maybe 8 or

9 or 10. You often take a bath with your mom until
elementary school, and, as for asking a child what they want
to be when they grow up, you wouldnt think a child would
be equipped to answer that question. (Sheena Iyengar,
interview with Thomas Rogers)
Yikes! Someone give these Japanese-mothers some men so their
children can stop understanding themselves as so much hand soap.
What we can learn from the arranged marriage is the
importance and value of compatibility. I think what the love
marriage can teach is the importance of shared
understanding. (Sheena Iyengar)
Interesting how contemporaneous cultures are all of equal value -each culture has its good and bad points -- something that is a bit
harder to manage if you attempted the same "move" with A culture's
(Western, specifically) historical development. Was the move in
Western culture from wife-as-possession "culture" to wife-as-lifepartner "culture," also a story of gains AND losses?
Its a big part of it -- and its something that constantly
separates the Republicans and Democrats: Are we going to
create healthcare which provides equal outcomes for all,
giving everybody the same helping hand, or are we going to
provide equal opportunity for all, by removing both barriers
and aid? Those are two entirely different scripts about what
a fair choice is and we hold to them very passionately.
(Sheena Iyengar)
Actually, the two "scripts" are of actually desiring your fellow human
beings to live long and healthily, and of actually desiring your no-
1141
doubt sinful "neighbor" to live insecurely, fearfully, as

demonstrations of intrinsic human fallibility and evilness. Can you
say something like this if you're a leading researcher? Or must it all be
so sober-sounding but completely disengaged and unreal?
Link: "The Art of Choosing": The hidden science of choice

What Fox Books "offered," that "Julia" will not permit
But if, too much of the time, I find Streep predictably
mannered and actressy, there are also times when I fully
succumb to adoring her, when all my conflicted and
annoyed feelings about her are temporarily erased. I felt
that way about her performance, as one-half of a sistersister singing duo (opposite Lily Tomlin), in Robert Altman's
final film, "A Prairie Home Companion." And I feel that way
about her rendering of Julia Child in Nora Ephron's "Julie &
Julia," which is my favorite of the Oscar-nominated
actresses' performances this year. (Stephanie Zacharek, My
love-hate relationship with Meryl-Streep, Salon, 2 March
2010)
What FOX Books offered, that "Julia" will not permit
I'm glad you titled your piece your "love-hate relationship with Meryl
Streep," because anyone younger than a boomer would be doing
something traitorous in offering Meryl Streep unambiguous praise
while describing her performance in this film. This is the kind of film
an established generation -- the boomers, in this case -- creates to
further enshrine themselves. When she was still youngish and
striving, Ephron created the film, "You've Got Mail," where a 30-ishyear-old woman is helped along her way to independence from her
1142
mother and her mores, by way of a representative of an ostensibly

merciless patriarchal/corporate/non-domestic "force." With FOX
Books, came the impossibility of living out her well-superior mother's
plans for her, and life suddenly becomes more open, and she, more
adult. Here we get a near replica, but this time an older Ephron offers
us a would-be emergent -- Julie -- who we are supposed to
understand as being bettered, not by finding some means to make her
ostensibly worthy predecessors seem still worthy but also fatally
fragile and out of date, not by slipping away from domesticity, but by
becoming more and more acquainted with a maternal elder whose
greatness makes her seem ever-so-much smaller.
Streep showed us someone grand and grounded-- someone who's
accepting reaction to accidents no doubt once made a generation feel
more relaxed and self-accepting, but who now serves to mock a
younger generation who will never get to know an environment where
they will be allowed to live as largely, with as much permissiveness, as
she did. Streep is a vehicle of the established -- those who seem near
joyously to be shutting down, covering over, deligitimizing the same
escapes/narratives that empowered/legitimated their own ascension.
For (especially) in comparison making Julie seem so scrambling and
pathetic, for playing a part in making being scrambling and pathetic
the natural-sexy way for the young to understand how THEIR
life/professional- "development" will be acquired and permitted, I'm
personally now much more in mind to hate than to love her.
Alice Munro chose not to let herself be nominated for a recent
prominent literary prize. Regardless of her work's merit, she said she
wanted herself less in the way of young writers. Perhaps she just
wanted to be less the target for youngins' gathering murderous
impulses, but my guess is she was responding to unacceptable routine
privileging and other-writer neglect. True, she DID look even grander
for doing so -- which surely drew as many eyes TO her, as it dissuaded
away -- so I do leave some room to hope that Streep, in fact by being
so OBVIOUSLY, possibly TRANSPARENTLY and SUSPICIOUSLY,
crushingly awesome and superior here, is doing something even more
1143
generous in possibly INTENDING to open an avenue for making

generational disquiet seem never-more appropriate and of the
moment.
Link: My love-hate relationship with Meryl Streep
Roger Ebert, and the beauty of confusion
Roger Ebert is all kinds of badass. He wrote a Russ Meyer
movie(one that's crazy even by Russ Meyer standards). He
has a Pulitzer Prize. He's done more for thumbs than any
individual since the days of the gladiators. And while he's
easily lumped into the big fat group of givers of movie
marquee exclamations, he remains, in truth, one of the most
consistently passionate, insightful, witty and bold film critics
the form has ever known. In recent years, throughout his
very public battle with thyroid cancer, he has been
forthright, and self-deprecating -- writing recently that
"Well, we're all dying in increments. (Mary Elizabeth
Williams, Roger Ebert on Oprah: The critics voice, Salon,
2 March 2010)
Roger Ebert, and the beauty of confusion
Roger Ebert IS good. My understanding of him is largely as one of the
baby boomers (I guess he's a bit +) who didn't understand living as a
constant recourse to tactics and positioning. He lives, explores, selfquestions, develops, knows ease and has fun. His life has been an
inspiring well-spring of life-engagement, leadership, and generosity,
that inspires but also potentially INTIMIDATES, balks, those of us
who grew up in the more recent years of, alright, it's now no risingtide-that-lifts-all-boats but a delimited single pie: have at one
another, "boys."
Contemplating contemporary manners, I remember awhile back him
feeling the world around him had morphed into sheer nightmare.
1144
Like David Denby, he saw and experienced but really couldn't get
inside this new world of snark and sneer, so he seemed simply
confused and aghast. I'll admit that it was actually pleasing to this
probably better man serve as further confirmation for the possible
mistruth that the aged at some point lose traction and relevance: no
generation should feel that their best efforts will seem but a slip away
from what their predecessors managed.
Link: Roger Ebert on "Oprah": The critic's voice
Being Geraldine-Ferraroed: I can't forget it
They actually show Breitbart's ultimate breakdown:
When Madden asks, reasonably, whether James O'Keefe
and Breitbart ever exposed ACORN abetting actual
prostitution (rather than the prank prostitution O'Keefe
and Hannah Giles tried to represent), Breitbart, by
anyone's measure, kind of goes off the deep end, shaking
and shuddering and flapping his hands as he yells at
Madden [.]
[. . .]
The crux of Marcus's argument is that Breitbart's hysteria
is justified, because in Breitbart's words, "The worst thing
you can do ...in politically correct Americais accuse
somebody of being a (sic) racism." [. . .] But even more to
the point, it's ludicrous to say the worst thing you can
accuse anyone of today is "being a racism," or even a
racist, as Breitbart argues. It's clearly worse to be accused
of supporting death panels for elderly people, of usurping
the presidency you're not eligible for, of being the
murderous "Joker" from the Batman series, of being a
totalitarian Marxist when you're a mainstream corporate
Democrat all the charges the increasingly unhinged
right routinely toss at Barack Obama. (Joan Walsh,
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Andrew Breitbarts side of the story, Salon, 28 Feb.

2010)
Being Geraldine Ferraroed: I can't forget it
The worst thing you can call someone now IS a racist -- sexist, a
distant second. Many progressives will come to understand this when
they themselves (absurdly) successfully get labeled racist, when their
essentially egalitarian efforts are reshaped into elitist-white-person
agenda. We will hear much of white progressives' arrogant
presumptions of what black people want, and see them AT THE
LEAST go "Geraldine Ferraro" stunned, as THEY become the
foremost suspect racists. It is possible, too, that we may see them
kind of "go off the deep end, shaking and shuddering and flapping his
hands as he yells at Madden," as they find themselves shaken, upset,
and wholly alarmed, after their world is turned upside down. If this
happens, I'm still with them, even though I really wish they'd had the
foresight to anticipate this development and so keep their minds so
they wouldn't "cooperate" in their "exclusion" by looking so damnably
foolish. (Note: I actually suspect that many who see this clip will still
identify with Breitbart: he seems a bit Truman ["Truman Show"]
coming untethered, as he comes to grips with the horrifyingly
malignant world he has been born into.)
Many of the left enjoy being part of the crowd and hounding the
crazy. Many now do seem more interested in teasing the right than
investigating potential ACORN' improprieties. The right can point to
much that is true, but still in greatest truth, always in every case, be
FAR FAR less truly caring, more truly indifferent to -- or even,
desirous of -- others' suffering. They are those who scream of the
killing the unborn but who would have a society where the birthed are
poorly tended to -- essentially abandoned: they think themselves
well-meaning, Other-caring, but are not well-souled enough to be
about anything beyond raising hell over their own personal slights.
Link: Andrew Breitbart's side of the story
1146
Turning away from disease-theory

Six months later, I'm still mad at her for leaving. But I hope
that near the end she found a kind of peace, the peace you
feel when you stop struggling against the tide and just let it
carry you out. That's what I would feel if she'd had any
other fatal illness, because I know that's really what she had.
Not all suicides are depression-related, of course. And not all
depressed people kill themselves -- fortunately, many can,
with therapy or medication or both, control it. But Ali died
of the same thing that's eating away at approximately 21
million Americans right now, the thing that killed Alexander
McQueen and Andrew Koenig and now Michael Blosil. They
didn't take their lives because they were selfish. They did it
because they succumbed to a selfish disease one that
wanted them all to itself. (Mary Elizabeth Williams,
Depressions Latest Victim: Marie Osmonds son, 1 March
2010)
The disease model of depression has outlived its usefulness

and yet we persist. We persist in avoiding responsibility for
our habits of thought and our habits of relating. We persist
in avoiding responsibility for the alienation our culture
breeds by making depression a "disease" of the brain,
somehow disconnected from the personalities and personal
histories of the individual sufferers. The real killer in
depression is person who turns his hand against himself.
Emotions are not external agents, the demons of animistic
cultures. Neither are they the unpredictable byproduct of
brain disease or chemical imbalance. Emotions come from
thoughts. Emotions are an integral part of being human,
1147
inseparable from relationship to self, to family, and to the

larger community. (srquist, response to post, Depressions
Latest Victim)
@Sara Rosenquist
I think you mean to use words like "choice" and "responsibility" to
provoke people out of willfully "succumbing [to the lure of being
victim] to a selfish disease" -- the retreat to science-legitimated, nofurther-thought required. I think your shock is helpful, especially
when Mary makes suicide after depression a Sunday to enjoy after a
six-day work-week ("But I hope that near the end she found a kind of
peace, the peace you feel when you stop struggling against the tide
and just let it carry you out"), means of imagining yourself bidden
toward a likely afterlife of lyrical ease and loving recompense ("They
didn't take their lives because they were selfish. They did it because
they succumbed to a selfish disease one that wanted them all to
itself.")
Still, if turning away from disease-theory means a movement toward
blaming others -- which is what most people will think of when we
associate suicide with choice -- it'll be regression, not progress. In
truth, I don't believe depression is a disease, but I do think it is an
affliction WHICH CAN determine a person's behavior and "choices."
Early childhood, if you did not know sufficient love, if you came to
understand your own needs as selfish and your role as someone who
pleases others (your parents), your adult, independent life will be
largely under the rule of an angry, watchful superego, which will
ensure that you are much more prone to make some choices than you
are others.
Link: Depression's latest victim: Marie Osmond's son
She was often a bitch, but at the end I swear I saw her Athena-helmed
1148
and golden
The experience of having my mother take her life was
enormously difficult and raised a lot of questions about
what it meant to be a good daughter; I wasnt sure if that
meant trying to talk my mother out of killing herself, or
helping her do it. I wrote the book in part to better
understand that dilemma. [. . .] I was fortunate that in the
last year of her life my mother talked about nothing else!
Planning her death was her last great project. [. . .] I also
wasnt sure how seriously to take her. More than once, she
changed her "death date," which made me think talking
about suicide was a ploy for attention. [. . .] And so, after
months of trying to talk her out of it, I accepted her decision
and even admired her for being so strong and unblinking in
the face of death. [. . .] One thing about my family, were all
incredibly blunt and outspoken, but there is humor mixed in.
So I could say to my mother, "Stop worrying about pruning
the trees in your backyard. Youre going to be dead soon.
Relax." And far from offending her, she delighted in that.
[. . .]
I think the time you spend with someone who is dying is
extraordinary. I was with both my parents when they died
and witnessing that profound event in their lives was
incredibly moving. There is a way that you love someone
when they are dying that is very pure, very uncomplicated
and incredibly healing. All the old resentments and
difficulties disappear. (Nelle Engoron, Imperfect Ending:
When mom wants to die, 28 Feb. 2010)
She was often a bitch, but in the end I swear I saw her
Athena-helmed and golden
We've long been pilling our kids, and now we're overdosing our
parents: seems linked; sorta easy, actually -- in a the-road's-already-
1149
been-paved kinda way. We did it to our kids -- if we can be honest

with ourselves for a moment -- just so that it makes "[a]ll the old
resentments and difficulties disappear," as we focus our purely loving
eyes upon the poor afflicted child whose difficulties AREN'T now
about parental abandonment, or any such messiness, but about
neurological something-or-another, and now we're doing it to our
parents so we can think of them as brave and blunt (as they would
have it) in an immature world, rather than those whose abuse
inspired a lifetime of nowhere-near-addressed "resentments and
difficulties."
If your lifetime experience of your parents was mixed with a good
portion of resentments and difficulties, if your own life was
inhibited/blocked owing to them, distrust any finish which has both
you and your parent feeling transcendent. You make "next-stage,"
"pure love," seem like so much escapist blather: isn't "next-stage"
really just another exit-stage-right (Don't bother me -- I'm planning
my death)?; out of excitement of the moment, how can you feel true
love for anyone who continually found means to shut people up, to
shut you down?
Link: "Imperfect Ending": When Mom wants to die
If you were my wife . . . : Talk on "Hurt Locker"

It's that I'm still coming to grips with how a woman could
possibly have dreamed up this spartan American soldier in
Iraq, who, while obsessively romancing death as a bombsquad ace, outdoes the most extreme images of machismo
ever produced by mainstream America. [. . .] Looks to me
like she's masquerading as the baddest boy on the block to
win the respect of an industry still so hobbled by genderspecific tunnel vision that it has trouble admiring anything
but filmmaking soaked in a reduced notion of masculinity.
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(Martha Nochimson, Kathryn Bigelow: Feminist pioneer or

tough guy in drag? 24 Feb. 2010)
First off, if you were my wife, I'd be happy to go back to bombs too.
Secondly, I didn't much like the teflon-soldier, either. Had me
thinking at times of the worst part of Gladiator, when Maximus
steps back from the scribe who wets himself. I understand the current
appeal of narrowing your focus, though. Just get into a groove, do
something over and over and over again, and maybe when you pull
away, things will have changed. If not, back into the groove again.
That is, there is a sense that Norah Ephron's latest is actually kinda
like "Hurt Locker." A whole book of recipes, that drives her (the
blogger) away from being a nothing. At the end, with whatever
numerous potential recipe-bombs defused, with her now set to
master whatever daily recipe before her, one suspects she'll be apt to
go at it again, after her brief pause of no clear mission. No?
----I'd like to once again chime in to make clear that it is unlikely to me
that Bigelow is masquerading as a hyper-macho bad boy to gain
someone else's approval, but that she is instead attracted to
characters who can "keep their head" in stressful situations because
she knows and is inspired by this character trait. And though I have
voiced some criticism here of the teflon-soldier, you do see someone
worth trying to emulate -- whatever your sex -- when Will throws off
the headset, focuses on his task, and manages a successful defusing of
the car-bomb. He keeps calm and inquisitive, in stressful situations,
and will balk authority in order to do so -- and that's a trait the Clint
Eastwoods AND the Norah Ephron's surely possess. His comrades are
made to seem hyper hyper-alert, not just less narrowly-focused. And
his patience is perhaps more calming than it is upsetting. He needs to
be a better listener? Probably. But I think the movie suggests his
ability to do what he has to to feel calm and in control, to be true to
1151
his own needs, actually is what affords him the ability to be

generously receptive to the world around him -- he doesn't look at the
porn-selling kid as just another potential hazard, something his
companions would have a tougher time managing. He is more playful
and human -- on the battlefield. Again, maybe a lot of directors are
the same way, away from home (life).
Nochimson's point that Hollywood -- in motioning Bigelow to be the
director of the year -- is up to something ultimately womendisparaging, requires a better engagement than we have thus far
offered, because we all know, for instance, that something quite not
so feminist was at work in promoting someone like Margaret
Thatcher into office in Britain. If Britains bragged about having a
female prime minister, about how it made them more evolved than
Americans, I think many would think of how she was going to go at
and eviscerate many of the social programs put in place to help
women, try and argue that she is in fact best proof of the HOSTILITY
of most Britains towards feminism, and have many Thatcher
supporters successfully shut them down as having a narrow,
circumscribed estimation of women's interests -- as being sexist
themselves, that is. And yet "we" would still truly know that
something other than what we mean by feminism was forwarded
when the Iron Lady gained her "crown." Same thing here? I'm not
sure. A better test would have been afforded if Ephron's latest had
been all about Julia and her life -- the half of the movie that
Nochimson evidently believes most worthy. If the movie had been
that, and Ephron wasn't nominated, I'd be more pissed at the warchick getting the accolades over the warmer display of joie de vivre.
I'm not sure I'd be thinking sexism, though -- but surely that a culture
has in mind to shape "their" psyches into bullet form (what happened
to art deco in 30s and 40s).
Link: Kathryn Bigelow: Feminist pioneer or tough guy in drag?
1152

Listening vs. talking
Sidibe's reticence -- her recognition that Precious may never
feel comfortable with all-out happiness -- is part of what
makes the performance so touching. Monologues are often
the thing that net awards for actors, even though they're
never the best test of an actor's skill, chiefly because they
involve talking rather than listening. And in "Precious,"
Mo'Nique is the one who gets the movie's big, show-stopping
monologue. But Sidibe, who is far less experienced as a
performer, holds her own in "Precious." She's a receptive
presence but not a passive one, playing a character who
can't hide from the horrors swirling around her, but who
also has to fight to keep from getting swept away by them.
The cautious hope that steals across Sidibe's face is the best
thing about "Precious." Her performance is more about
listening than it is about talking, a part of the job that more
experienced actors often forget. (Stephanie Zacharek,
Gabourey Sidibe: Playing the victim, Salon, 23 Feb. 2010)
Listening vs. talking
We should draw attention to good listeners, to the virtue in being a
good listener -- especially if what it is to be a good actor, an
impressive personage, has been made to seem all about crowding
projection/dominance rather than empathic allowance/entrance.
Since we've gone from Bush-dumb to Obama-aware, I'm betting most
people are now in mind to agree with you, and appreciate your efforts
to highlight actors/performances who/that are less "forced," in your
face, and more generous to and appreciative of the full weight of the
environment an actor/person is involved in. Has me thinking of a
recent debate here at Salon on the virtues of Cdns and Americans,
where one respondent suggested that what Americans need to
appreciate about Cdns is they are better listeners, and therefore -- I
1153
believe he was arguing -- the better people.

But he was responding to my claim that what Cdns need to learn from
AMERICANS is that they actually SAY THINGS, that
sensitivity/awareness/attendance to others' sensitivities doesn't work
as well as it does on Cdns to keep them from saying something
controversial, potentially upsetting -- or just plain new. Your sense of
a good listener may be a Spock, and your sense of a self-absorbed
talker, a Kirk, but so many of the good listeners I have known are
good listeners because they learned early on that their primary role
was to attend to and satisfy someone else's needs. It is the result, not
of having been well-supplied, and therefore not in need to constantly
demand "gimme!," but of having been bullied, of having been
deprived -- of NEEDING to know how to placate, for reprieve, to
survive. And what these people primarily need is not to learn how to
better listen to other people, but how to listen and become better
acquainted with their own needs -- to speak up more, louder, and less
(in a way) respectfully. Being present and less pliable, is just a
necessary step towards learning to impress themselves more on the
environment they are in.
John Dewey once criticized stimulus-response theory by saying it
essentially lied in setting up animals/humans as primarily responsedriven. The environment acts; the animal/human attends/listens,
and then reacts. He argued that, instead, they are primarily ACTIVE,
PURPOSEFUL -- that THEIR actions determine the particular
response of the world around them. Whatever the truth of it, the
empathy and love, in this instance, was clearly in Dewey's
quintessentially American declaration/understanding of human
beings.
I would prefer we be careful to not create an environment where
Chris Matthews'/Joan Walsh's/Barbara Kingsolver's/Piers
Anthony's/Ralph Nader's confident and loud sort of self-expression,
and sometimes Other-obliviousness, could end up seeming
fundamentally ungenerous ego rather than well-fueled soul.
Kirk out.
1154
Link: Gabourey Sidibe: Playing the victim (Salon)
Because Vernon Hunter was understood as victim

Googling "Vernon Hunter" on Monday night I was stunned
by how little the national media, beyond Bunch, Crooks and
Liars, the Associated Press and ABC's "Good Morning
America," had paid attention to Stack's victim. "GMA"
seemed to write about Hunter because the show featured
Stack's daughter from his first marriage, Samantha Bell,
calling her father a "hero." To her credit, Bell retracted her
statement, and labeled Hunter the hero, when she learned
about the man her father killed. (Joan Walsh, Why so little
attention to Vernon Hunter? Salon, 22 Feb. 2010)
Because Vernon Hunter was understood as victim
I think many of us still avoid identifying with the "passive" victim,
and take some pleasure in associating with the effective self-exertion
of the killer. I think it means a lot of us have known substantial
bullying in our lives, 'cause the most frequent reaction of those
who've been bullied, when they witness someone else under attack, IS
NOT actually to defend them but rather to (in psychological parlance)
"identify with the persecutor" -- join the bullying crowd, and thereby
avoid a re-encounter with previous shame and fear. Those who reach
out to the victim: the better loved, not those who've suffered from
bullying themselves. Vernon Hunter was not of course passive, but he
is largely UNDERSTOOD as a "victim" -- that is, as fatally vulnerable.
And so all the attention veered toward the hunter, rather than
Hunter. That's my largest sense of the why.
There are also those who see him as a proxy. He is THEIR man, who
just wouldn't shut up and take it. He isn't yours. He isn't mine. But I
think we need to take care to note that in different situations, with
different individuals, WE TOO might become so focused on the some
1155
particular someone who finally expresses OUR OWN discontent,

rage, that the humanity of other people is lost to some extent in their
becoming "wreckage" of our proxies' noteworthy concussive power.
These headlines of yours have me thinking a bit of the "finally,
someone speaks out!" excitement/relief, that has drawn many of the
right in this instance to lose all contact/interest in Vernon Hunter.
1) The President Obama we voted for
I'll let a smart friend explain why Obama beat the GOP and won back
his base, at least for a glorious day
2) Finally, some spine
The president gives (another) great speech. But it will take more than
words to get his agenda back on track
and particularly this one:
3) Thank you, Sen. Franken
Senate Dems are saying he stifled Joe Lieberman to keep debate on
track. Liberals are happy, whatever the reason
Link: Why so little attention to Vernon Hunter (Salon)
Why copy someone else, when you can copy yourself, risk-free?
To this conundrum, Hegemann has added a heaping dollop
of generational special pleading, and the story has prompted
teachers to offer multiple examples of students who don't
seem to understand what plagiarism is or that it's wrong.
Kids these days, this Cassandra-ish line of reasoning goes,
have unfathomably different values, and their elders had
better come to terms with this because children are, after all,
the future. You can't tell them anything! It's as if people
under 25 have become the equivalent of an isolated
Amazonian tribe who can't justly be expected to grasp our
1156
first-world prohibitions against polygamy or cannibalism -despite the fact that they've grown up in our very midst.
(Laura Miller, Plagiarism: The next generation, Salon, 16
Feb. 2010)
The equally bad variant
You need all As to get a good grad school. Experimentation might at
some point lead to something great AND polished, but at first it'll be
but an inkling, look awkward, feel raw, and draw the occasional "10"
but also more than a few "5s" from the Korean-Swiss-Americanwhatever judge. Who can risk Bs while you get the hang of it, when it
may just be enough to count you out for good, and embarrass you
while your more professional-minded friends stick with the familiar
and certain and collect their ready baskets of achievement accolades?
Almost no one. If you abandon the effort, and repeat the already
known, even you're hippie parents will secretly be relieved to have an
easier time now bragging about your brilliance.
So the cynical smart student -- the one we apparently want -- learns
not to plagiarize, which is risky, but to put forth the solid but familiarboring, over and over again -- that is, not to grow. The grad school
gets the writing sample beginning with, "This essay will
problematize . . . " know they've got a savy careerer, and invite
her/him on in.
Plagiarism is an interesting topic. But let's not let those who get As
but who aren't fundamentally interested in self-growth, know their
doing anything but a (socially approved/desired) variant.
Link: Plagiarism: The next generation (Salon)
Boring, as a virtue?
"Can I ask you a question about Canada?" he asked.
Sure, I replied, expecting something about healthcare or
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Anne Murray. Nope.

"Why are all you Canadians so terribly boring?"
Canadian national identity has always been a curious
mixture of American populism and British propriety, a fact
that, along with our climate, geographical size and
complicated relationship with our neighbor to the south, has
led us to be suspicious of acting too impulsively or
dramatically. Some people might call that boring; we call
that prudent. Were the only country in the Americas to have
gained our independence from Europe without violence -choosing, instead, to pursue it through a series of
incremental accords. As Pierre Berton, Canadas best-known
historian, put it, "If this lack of revolutionary passion has
given us a reasonably tranquil history, it has also, no doubt,
contributed to our well-known lack of daring." (Thomas
Rogers, Olympics Opening Ceremony: Canada will rock
you (politely)," Salon, 12 Feb. 2010)
Yes, bullshit Thomas. You're part of the problem when you
write articles like this about Canadian mediocrity and overt
politeness. You only reinforce the stereotype and do a
disservice to your fellow Canadians.
You spend the first 3/4 of the article in this self-effacing
"Canadian" mode then for the last two paltry paragraphs
actually state some of the positives of being Canadian.
Next time reverse the ratio. (Reid Mohr, response to post,
Olympics Opening Ceremony)
Re: Yes, bullshit Thomas. You're part of the problem when
you write articles like this about Canadian mediocrity and
overt politeness. You only reinforce the stereotype and do a
disservice to your fellow Canadians.
Wrong, Reid, he does Cdns A SERVICE, by SHOWING them how
politely deferent they for the most part are -- how this may well be, in
1158
truth, their greatest defining asset (read: character flaw). From what
he offers, we can compare Thomas, who takes care to not to step on
anyone's toes -- unless they be nonPC, in which case, he'll stomp the
that much harder than anyone else, driven to take full advantage of
the opportunity to righteously make someone else experience what it
is to just have to take it and take it and take it, without any effective
means to make them please just stop! -- then compare him to the
likes of others at Salon, who are not just literate but have it in them to
INSIST on using their literacy to actually, like, SAY SOMETHING,
personal -- and not just programmed code -- to challenge and grow,
and know what a bland white-washing wasteland the Great White
North truly is. You've got great healthcare, but who should care if
automatons have the chance to walk a few more miles in the snow, on
route to their nowhere of any interest in particular?
@champers
Re: Canada has achieved what the architects of the
Enlightenment dreamed of.
They dreamed of a people that hides in shacks until unrulies have
found their distraction, elsewhere?
Re: We have a big space to play in, most of it beautiful and
full of food and water.
Great -- if you're otters; but what if you're urbanes like David Denby
and guess that you'd find all the Avatar-play a bit dull after awhile?
Re: We have a killer arts culture and all-round high
respect for creativity in all forms.
Otters ARE tool-using, and I'm sure take great delight in their stonepolishing play, but why don't we let, say, New Yorkers assess Cdns'
openness to cultural creativity. I know that if I was doing my best to
slam shut the door to any notable (read: unnerving, unpredictable)
creativity, I'd probably school everyone to think I was instead up to
something like "forwarding cultural appreciation and learned
advancement in a way that does all Cdns proud!"
Re: The weather is truly what makes life limp and bleak
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and even hopeless in a place like Toronto.

To understand Cdns, you must understand the weather. I believe it.
Cultivate YOUR OWN soul, and weather won't prove so much your
master. In fact, I bet we'd hear more about your Toronto winter-blue
skies accelerates your creativity than your being owned by the 6month-long grey-brown stay of salt and slush. You'll like it when (and
if) outsiders think of Canada, and at first thought think of written
culture, lived brazenness, of particular, notable, individuals, and not
so much grand spaces and their vast swath of determined -- even if
ostensibly light and happy minds -- it'll mean you're becoming
more fully human.
I'm going to skip the first couple of run-on sentences in your
post. It looks like you have your Tourette's under control
towards the end.
"know what a bland white-washing wasteland the Great
White North truly is".
Canada is only bland relative to America's own perception
of itself which is completely and utterly subjective. Any other
country, in most American's eyes, is just plain doing it
wrong - they (the foreign country) just don't quite get it.
Hence, the Yankee's frustration with Spaniards who don't
speak English or the bedazzlement of driving on the left
hand side of the road in some Commonwealth countries or
the complete befuddlement when the local currency is
printed in different colours.
Perhaps, in order to not appear too bland to Americans, us
Canucks should just start being more opinionated about
reality TV, attend more UFC wrasslin' matches and get
drunk on pissy beer at NASCAR events. (mhatkinson,
response to post)
1160
Re: I'm going to skip the first couple of run-on sentences in

your post. It looks like you have your Tourette's under
control towards the end.
That's right -- Cdns wear quiescence-registering smiles, uniformed in
over-all cultural blandness, BECAUSE they are a nation under rule by
disciplinarian-minded schoolmarm grammartarians. Yours is the
punish to help understand the why of Thomas' excuse-me: from this
readers get the picture from which truth-of-Canada might be
"distilled."
Re: Perhaps, in order to not appear too bland to
Americans, us Canucks should just start being more
opinionated about reality TV, attend more UFC wrasslin'
matches and get drunk on pissy beer at NASCAR events.
That would just make you boorish. To avoid the bland, how 'bout
being known for saying/thinking things that are, like, "out there,"
true assays, attempts at something personal, true, and new. More
New Yorker, Slate, Salon -- even the Newshour. It's all safe and
schooled in Canada -- the Walrus not exempted. As literate as
possible, without saying anything at all, is in truth your motto, but is
really just no way to go through life. But you've found a way to make
anti-life fully decent/humane/civilized, and registers of great -absolutely suspect. Awful and cruel, and it has to be pointed out.
By "out there," I mean when someone thinks/feels something, and it's
clearly their best effort to interact/understand/fashion what is before
them, and thereby grow, advance, develop, change, without being
sidetracked/determined by some Other's directions or someone else's
possible understandings/misunderstandings. I'm not sure if this is
clear, but for me being "out there" is pretty much what I understand
by living. The reason we can see so little of it, is because being "out
there" means being true to yourself, living for yourself, means you are
not readily directed to attending to others' -- by cueing and
intimidation -- considerations (read: scowls), and this is a way of
being most cultures still frown upon and distort-- for in truth, no
good reasons. America got a huge chunk of yahoos, and THEY are
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responsible for things like healthcare not yet being a given. But
America also got Europe's most evolved -- the lefties of their time -while Canada got the duty-to-crown loyalists -- THOSE, that is, who
not so much by belief but through constitutional/mental
AFFLICTION had been thoroughly scared/bullied away from
speaking for themselves, supporting those who (though admittedly
still hugely imperfect) sought out independence and freedom, if still
also revenge and war. The result is that unless you prefer the
company of court sneers, those smart but primarily expert at taking
down the novel, or those who don't frighten you with things you
haven't yet prepared yourself for, if you're an unbroken literate
dreamer, you'll find more to praise in the U.S. than you will in
Canada.
re: The Whole Picture
"how 'bout being known for saying/thinking things that are,
like, 'out there'"
Well, because while simply saying things that are, like, "out
there" may make a people more exciting and less bland they
don't necessarily have a real purpose.
I mean, I find fundamental right wing Christianity, prison
gang violence and dramatic cosmetic surgery exciting to
watch and hear about but I'm glad that kind of excitement
isn't something my fellow Canadians aren't attached to.
Patrick, despite my snarky comments in my last post (and
any in this one), I don't think Americans and Canadians are
so terribly different.
Montreal and Quebec city are far from bland and they have
an air of excitement only found in a few US locations. The
regions of Manitoba and Saskatchewan aren't a lot
different, geographically and culturally, from the states to
their immediate south. And if Vancouver and Victoria go to
bed at 10pm every night, it's so they can go mountain biking
and surfing early the next morning in some of the most
1162
beautiful and jaw-dropping locales in the world - a lot like

their buddies in Oregon and Washington state. (mhatkinson,
response to post)
You experience both nations as near the same. I hear you, and
appreciate you making the effort to convince me of their fundamental
similarities. But I admit to hating when things like mountain-biking
and surfing are put into play to salute a nation, primarily because it
makes non-literate pastimes seem the primary way to enjoy life on
earth -- in truth, makes a nation feel fundamentally suburban and
rural-minded in character, and book reading, city-culture, somewhat
alien. It is possible that a good number of people who enjoy these
pastimes, this vigor, are similar to one another in both countries, so if
this is the point you are making I am probably prepared to agree with
you. But though these are not all Republican-minded, a good number
of them are, and though I've loved sports in my time, these are not
primarily my people. The "out there" I attend to is in a different kind
of cultural-personal expression, and my experience is that Canadians
are far more likely to keep-in any novel thought of their own that in
the same instance an American would take wonderful opportunity to
express, out of "speaking your mind" not feeling like an imperative
but rather a natural inclination of "their" largely freer soul.
re: The Whole Picture
if you're an unbroken literate dreamer, you'll find more to
praise in the U.S. than you will in Canada.
There's a lot of unbroken dreamers in the US prison system
right now. On the whole I think the US is a more restrictive
nation. A citizen is simply not as "free" as he/she would be in
most other Western nations.
But I admit to hating when things like mountain-biking and
surfing are put into play to salute a nation
The intent wasn't to salute any nation but, rather, to
demonstrate that Canadian and American values (in this
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case, specifically, Pacific Northwest values) aren't that

different despite any perceived Canadian blandness.
it makes non-literate pastimes seem the primary way to
enjoy life on earth -- in truth, makes a nation feel
fundamentally suburban and rural-minded in character,
and book reading, city-culture, somewhat alien.
That's absolutely ridiculous. The identity of nations like
Canada, Australia and, yes, the States is built upon the fact
that we can be cosmopolitan, well-read and still enjoy the
natural splendour of our wide open spaces - even at the
same time.
my experience is that Canadians are far more likely to
keep-in any novel thought of their own that in the same
instance an American would take wonderful opportunity to
express
My experience is that Canadians are better listeners than
they are talkers and that Americans are often expressing
their "novel thoughts" loudly and to the chagrin of anyone in
immediate earshot (American or otherwise). The rest of the
world has a word for this: tacky. The American who truly
has something original and intelligent to say is an
increasingly rare phenomenon. (mhatkinson, response to
post)
Link: Olympics Opening Ceremony: Canada will rock you (politely)
(Salon)

Spock is the new black, and other observations
Sometimes, when I stand in a room of white men, I feel
1164
unfeminine and unsexual, no matter the strappy heels, the

makeup, the dress. I know there are white men out there
who find black women attractive, but you, John Mayer -- the
guy down enough to be on"Chappelle's Show," the guy so
sensitive he writes love songs -- now represent the ones who
don't. Maybe you should think a little bit about that.
I doubt you have any idea what it feels like to be invisible, to
come to a party looking for a little sexual validation and
have white men look through you like you're wearing
sweats. I doubt you know what it's like to feel the weight of
cultural expectations every time you stand on a dance floor,
knowing that your dance card will be empty since you won't
play the freak. I doubt you know what it's like to question
everything about yourself -- how you stood, how you
dressed, how you smiled, trying to figure out what you did
so wrong that men simply stayed away? I'm not ignorant
enough to think my color is the only reason men would
dismiss me, but when that happens enough times, it's hard to
ignore the common factor. Do you know what it's like to be
ignored in a roomful of romantic partners your age? Well,
multiply that by 300 years of servitude. (La Toya Tooles,
John Mayer: A black woman responds, Salon, 11 Feb.
2010)
the new crowd
It would take a lot to be convinced that skin color could matter to me.
But if I couldn't quite shake that any particular black-skinned woman
was inevitably connected to some ginormous cohort of endless
suffering, I might step away too. My family is very nuclear -- I've only
just recently met an aunt --and you're helping set up being blackskinned as not so much "with me you get my family" but "with me you
get my race -- and every passed on ounce of suffering inflicted by
people colored just like you."
If it isn't you, and it really is some weird aversion on others' behalf,
1165
you've got to be able to find a different crowd. The new Star Trek had
Spock and Uhura pair up: AND it was about the two TRULY most
sexy pairing up, not the black chick and the whitey -- a step way
beyond (and more evolved) than "look who's coming to dinner."
That's where most (especially younger) liberals are at, me thinks.
Uhuru was sex
But Patrick--Vulcans? Ewwww. (Jack Sparx, response to
post, John Mayer)
JackSparx
Nice one, Jack : )
Vulcan is kinda the new black. Uhura is just one of Starfleet -- what
distinguishes her is not her color but her strident smartness and
sexiness. Kirk wasn't her man, 'cause he is just too pliable, to
ultimately step-onable, to be taken seriously. But they do kinda make
Spock now a last representative of a blasted Vulcan-kind, and not just
the mostly singularly distinguished member of the crew. I'm not
suggesting that Uhura's love for him is a sign of liberal guilt -- an "I'm
in touch with those who've suffered most." It's not that, but it's a fun
enough suggestion for me to have played it out a bit in my mind.
Wait, Spock was half-human half-Vulcan, right?
Half WHITE human?
Wasn't Jane Wyatt (original) Spock's Mom?
So, she was two-timing with Robert Young and a Vulcan?
So, there is a "one-drop" rule for whites too? If they mate
with space aliens, we consider their offspring "white"?
It gets so complicated in outer space.
Interracial dating on earth is so much simpler than
interspecies dating. We should all just mind meld together
and get along. (Jack Sparx, response to post)
1166
Thanks for clarifying Patrick

Before I even asked the question.
We apparently are mind melding.
I thought avatar blue was the new black, but I guess its
vulcan. (Jack Sparx)
What reach, Avatar?
Star Trek (Uhura) black is the new white (singular, conquistorial,
Kirk-like taste for "aliens"); Avatar blue is the new red-yellow
(obvious); Vulcan green is the new black (carries the weight of his
heritage within him [Spock]; struggle between duty-to-kind and dutyto-self).
It is getting complicated. No wonder we've moved on from elves and
orcses.
I see you, Patrick
I was thinking about what Avatar Blue "represents" while
reading the Charlie Chan thread, and I agree that it seems to
be yellow/red. BUT, I note that the actors playing the blue
are black.
It's interesting, though, in movie biz terms, that we never see
the black blue actors as black on screen, but we do see the
white blue (avatar) actors as both white and blue.
I guess it's like they say: once you go blue, you never go
black. (Jack Sparx, response to post)
Such odd comments

I'm enough of a denizen of the internet to know that it's a
place where people often feel comfortable, and even
compelled, to give voice to their most negative and vitriolic
kneejerk responses to what they read. So I'm not shocked to
1167
see the number of people glibly chiming in with

assertions/implications that Ms.Tooles is narcissistic and/or
has low self-esteem and/or is whining and self-involved
and/or is silly for caring about what men might think of her
and/or is silly for being affected by the words of a rattlebrained guitar-playing goofball. [. . .]
It also seems that critical reading has also begun to vanish.
[. . .] And I'm sorry, but to those who toss off facile
boilerplate pseduo-therapeutic comments about how she
shouldn't define herself by how men see her or that you
yourself are so mature and self-actualized that you find it
hard to imagine how comments like this could be hurtful, I
can only say this: bullsh*t. (treming930, response to post,
John Mayer)
@treming930
Re: The fact remains that beauty is a cultural construct,
and that in our society, the epitome of beauty is defined as
young, white, female, thin, etc., etc. etc.
At least with the color bit, this is naive estimation of what our current
over-all cultural construct of beautiful is. Here for the olympics in
Vancouver, and noting that Coca-Cola has ads all over the place
showing the beautiful exclaiming Olympics 2010 and Coke, with but
one white person in the five or six bunch -- the least convincingly
enthused (potent), and therefore, perhaps, most replaceable of the
lot, one notes as well.
Re: She's not talking about defining oneself by what the
other (or same) sex thinks of you. She's pointing out the
obvious: part of being human is to enjoy connecting one
another, to enjoy being drawn to others. One way that
manifests itself is through sexuality. Married or single, black
or white, female or male, young or old . . . all of us like to feel
affirmed that we are desirable on some level. That applies to
1168
all of us, including every last author of a letter on this

thread. Anyone who says they don't feel validated by
knowing they are considered attractive or who says they are
immune to criticism or insults to their desirability is simply
not being honest. Would you necessarily dwell on these
feelings long enough or deeply enough to reflect on why you
had them and then feel compelled to share them with others?
Perhaps not, but that might simply be because you lack the
courage to do so.
Part of being human is connecting with one another -- okay. But so
too, amongst many, as you well evidence, is the need to feel selfrighteous and the desire to distance yourself (with you, your larger
awareness and more considered empathy) from a much-worse-than
lot. What not being properly validated offers, is righteous alarm,
flight from self-conscious inquiry, and loyalty to -- connection with -one's "heritage." None of this may be in play here. It may just be a
whole lot of white men who find black women physically repellant. If
that's the all of it, that would just be awful to experience, and she's
just got to find herself amongst a more sane lot. But if you're most
interested in our being honest with ourselves, keep the search for
what is honest seeming an open, unpredictable, inquiry. You seem
yourself so ready to buy in to the most convenient (for you)
possibility.
Link: John Mayer: A black woman responds (Salon)
Bag-lady fears
To me it was always about my bag lady fears. It's a fear that
men don't have, by the way. It comes from distant parenting
or childhood abandonment. I had that. It's what happens if
you dont have a nurturing environment as a child, and you
think this could happen, that you're going to end up on the
1169
street. (The Bag Lady Papers: How to lose money and

alienate people, Alexandra Penny in discussion with
Thomas Rogers, Salon, 10 Feb. 2010)
Re: It's what happens if you dont have a nurturing environment as a
child, and you think this could happen, that you're going to end up on
the street.
She's offering us a ton here. She's says guys don't know this fear, but
it certainly is something I'm familiar with. I doubt, though, that it's
just the distance that does it. The connection between finding yourself
alone, on your own, and very vulnerable to absolute dissolution,
requires something more than just having well known indifference
and huge-gapped distance. More likely, it is that as a teen on -- that
is, when you've moved beyond the stage of childhood, where you are
naturally drawn to your parents and the familial surround, to wanting
to explore a world all your own -- your poorly nurtured parents reject
you for the sin of moving beyond them (the same fate they suffered
from their own parents, when they stopped be so interested in feeding
their parents' own attendance needs). (So it's not the distance, but
rather the DISTANCING -- the INTENTIONAL abandonment.) So
even if you understand all your gains as well-earned, as the product of
hard-work -- that is, even while you try and tame down your joys by
associating them with long-suffering -- you always feel that at some
point being eaten away on the streets, will be in it, for you.
A big bag of warmth and love for you, Bag Lady. I'm sorry the therapy
didn't quite do it for you. That must have been very discouraging.
Link: The Bag Lady Papers: How to lose money and alienate people
(Salon)
1170
Daring Mandela, after having mastered God

After you've played God twice, as Freeman has done in
Tom Shadyac's "Bruce Almighty" and "Evan Almighty"
and been God, there's not really much left to do, except play
Nelson Mandela. [. . .] The movie's first third is stiff and dull.
And through that section, so is Freeman. [. . .] And
eventually, Freeman reaches that something deeper, not by
clamping down on the performance, but by loosening his
grip on it. [. . .] Suddenly, instead of just seeing Nelson
Mandela as a great man, we get an idea of how a guy could
survive 27 years of unjust imprisonment and, instead of
becoming embittered and broken, emerge with a better sense
of what makes human beings tick. He has a sense of humor
as well as sense of responsibility. [. . .] It's hard to pinpoint
the exact moment in "Invictus" when Freeman lets go of
playing qualities dignity, affability, fortitude and starts
playing a person. (Stephanie Zacharek, Morgan Freeman:
Making Mandela sexy, Salon, 10 Feb. 2010)
King of the World?
In your earlier review of the film, you called Freeman "aggressively
noble." Since you are essentially likening him, in his daring Mandela
after having mastered God, to Cameron, who also leap-frogged the
world for the universe, I think you should have said the same here.
Rather, here, you insinuate but take care not to heavily implicate. Be
consistent: go for the kill: at heart, he's an ascending, immodest
jackass, one who's managed an admirable turn by making an icon
into a warmblooded human being.
In the film, Freeman was stiff at first, but loosened up "as we got to
know him": sounds like the perfect gentleman. That is, it may well
have been a terrific performance, but he certainly offered us what we
wanted out of him -- just like Sandra Bullock did, when she
essentially helped allow every tyrannical middle-American woman to
1171
understand their character faults as signs of saintliness, if they could

just make sure to align them with some currently fashionable larger
movement. For laudship, it is not usually enough just to offer a great
performance if who we get to know in the film is likely very off from
the person in real life. We may have liked Jack and Rose from
Cameron's Titanic (I did), but may still regret that the film could
isolate us from understanding history as means -- as a chance -- to get
to know people as they really were (the gentry, for instance). So it
seems Freeman provides us with the Mandela we all want to believe is
true. Pure love. In truth, I would be okay with this, if we were all also
well aware that the real Mandela is likely well different, that prison
(for instance) may have served him as it likely did John McCain (as
the SNL skit portrayed this) -- that we're just using the film version of
him to project for our consideration and good company, the ideal
leader. But this isn't what we're up to. Instead, this is the Mandela
who MUST be, regardless: we need him to be the unassailable
mountain of purity that can be counted on to keep straight and true,
even while the whole universe sags around him. With him, you dig
about a bit, and you just must find something even better.
I went after the person who went after Salinger because she wasn't
largely opening us up to a larger discussion, opening us to be more
aware, but dumping him into the pit of deposed men. If her purposes
were different, I would have just agreed with her: it's just sickening
when we see evidence of people being estimated largely out of our
own needs of the time; as liberals, of the more conscious, we've got
the make-up to demand more of ourselves. Good things happened
with Mandela, and I wish the best for him, but is he really more than
what our projections have set in place -- once past what we want of
him, will we truly discover something better? I'm not sure, myself. By
which I mean, I doubt it. But it would be still good for all of us to see
him the more plainly.
Link: Morgan Freeman: Making Mandela sexy (Salon)
1172
Tossing Salinger into the pit of deposed men

Both Joyce Maynard and Salinger's daughter Margaret
were vilified for violating the great man's privacy when they
wrote about their own experiences with him and exposed his
predatory, controlling relationships with women. Instead of
exploring the insights these revelations might bring to
readings of Salinger's work (not to mention the women's
right to tell their own stories), critics dismissed their books
as exploitative, attention-seeking stunts. When Maynard
decided to sell some of the letters Salinger had written her -letters that confirmed her story of their affair -- the response
was even more bitter. A typical reaction was that of author
Cynthia Ozick, who wrotethat Maynard "has never been a
real artist and has no real substance and has attached
herself to the real artists in order to suck out his celebrity."
This sort of backlash is not exclusive to Salinger -- when
Pablo Picasso's former wives and lovers began to expose him
as a physically and emotionally abusive man, they were
subject to similar criticisms.
As feminists have long known, the personal is political, and
women who tell unpleasant truths rarely find a receptive
audience. (Mikki Halpin, Salinger: Recluse with an ugly
history of women, 8 Feb. 2010)
Please wake up. Any time a famous man dies now, and we don't
thereafter learn what a junk of a human being he was to women, we
breathe a sigh of relief: My God! It is possible to die and not as a
retreating spirit have to watch a gaggle of awfuls piss on you in hopes
their evidenced disgust at you shores up their own immunity to the
same fate.
Yes, we should be alert to how our own needs shape our
perception/taking of the real. Given the now, bringing up the women
made your important point inaudible amongst the shame-shame-
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shames.
Thanks Mikki
He was a woman-hating male writer, like so many others.
Men don't want to hear about that. But women do. And we
also want to hear the truth and not a made-up version of
somebody's nobility.
Thanks Mikki for taking the time to write about that. (Deb
McEachern, response to post, Salinger)
I'd like to hear the truth, too, Deb. But there is NO SUCH THING as a
"woman-hating male writer," that is, some worst slum of demons
who's somehow prowled out of the dankest part of the inferno to
squeeze love, hope, and joy out of womankind.
Screw you for wanting to keep this pit of mad-mean myth alive and
open for more deposits. No one hates someone else, unless they've
been thoroughly beat upon. Unloved, unrespected mothers, use their
boys to satisfy their own needs. They end up hating them, when they
(the boys) focus on their own lives. This is where the woman-hate
comes from. No one is to blame. Our earliest ancestors knew little
more than the reptilian, and love has just taken a gargantuan ton of
time to start trumping that huge, long impress of savage. That is all.
Start dealing with THAT truth, and I'm with you. Then when we hear
of woman-hate, we're also hearing something else: reason, fairness -love, maybe even -- no revenge.
Gag order from beyond the grave
enforced by a self-appointed army of thought police aka
fans.
The outrage is totally out of proportion to any accusation,
which is why it is clearly not rational in nature.
This only happens to women who attempt to tell their side of
the story in a relationship with a powerful man. (Angela
Quattrano, response to post, Salinger)
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@Angela Quattrano
The outrage is totally out of proportion to any accusation, which is
why it is clearly not rational in nature.
In may be no exaggeration to say that the entirety of pop-culture
analysis these days revolves around the periodic full reveal of great
men to puerile exposure, and a collective subsequent watching to see
all the blood rivulets and crass contours that develop in the desperate
attempt at some recomposition of the flagging victim / splayed
corpse. We get the day-to-day -- and then the lottery! Yay! Another
man down -- THIS time, WITH LETTERS!
Link: Salinger: Recluse with an ugly history of women (Salon)
If only (James) Cameron wore a tutu
"[T]he lumbering, gentle Oher", "in a cautious and economical
performance", "is the only one who automatically sits down at the
table to eat, presumably out of simple good manners, but also out of
some idea of what Thanksgiving should be, drawn less from his own
experience than from Norman Rockwell's 'Freedom From Want.'"
(Zacharek, "Oscars 2010: In defense of Sandra Bullock")
+
"'Crazy Heart' is exceptionally modest in both its ambitions and its
scope." "[P]laying their characters' cautious affection [. . .]"
"Gyllenhaal is an understated, guileless actress -- she always lets the
role come to her instead of going after it with gusto. Her speaking
manner is casual, and as an actress she's often soft-spoken in a way
that hints at deep personal shyness." "a strange and slightly awkward
sentence that doesn't even have the shelter and the protection of a
song around it." (Zacharek, "Crazy Heart")
+
"The expressiveness of those unnaturally mobile eyebrows or the way,
either in character or during the course of an on-camera interview, he
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almost seems to blush when he makes a self-deprecating joke, as if he

were wary of calling too much attention to himself." "Just as his body
has been trained and disciplined to sustain all sorts of physical abuse
in the ring [. . .], so is Johnson, as an actor, fully willing to endure all
kinds of humiliation, ribbing and teasing emasculation and always
with a smile."
"Strangely, and to his credit, he looks much more comfortable in a
tutu than he does bragging about his athletic prowess or stature."
(Zacharek, "Dwayne Johnson")
+
"In every movie, including this one, he's happy to stand by and let his
co-stars do their stuff, without feeling the need to step in and grab our
attention with clownish facial expressions or torrents of jibber-jabber
la Jim Carrey or Robin Williams. Ferrell is content to be low-key
and goofy" (Zacharek, "Land of the Lost")
Versus:
'''Avatar' would be great fun, if only Cameron -- the picture's writer,
director, producer and editor -- had a sense of humor about himself,
which he clearly doesn't. Instead Cameron -- who is no longer just
King of the World but Emperor of the Universe -- has to make it clear
he's addressing grand themes." "'Avatar' is Cameron's 'Let's be fair to
the Indians' movie." "Cameron is less a sage than a canny bonehead.
Characters signal their motives and intentions with thundering
dialogue, mouthed by the actors in ways that suggest the guy at the
top has a tin ear, or at least some pretty strange ideas about
punctuation." "Cameron takes all this 'We must be one with nature'
business very seriously." (Zacharek, "Avatar")
Generosity should be lauded, and bullying self-assertiveness, taken
down. But I for one sense in Stephanie an intention to make the side
effects of being bullied -- most notably, the thereafter carefulness to
please and charm but never offend -- praiseworthy, desirable; and the
side effects of understanding the world as a place for wondrous,
expansive self-assertion, as vain, intrinsically ungenerous, and wholly
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punishment-worthy.
Why, after knowing that "we're not supposed to call Johnson "The
Rock" anymore -- [as] he has politely stated, in interview after
interview, that that's his preference" -- did you title your article
"Dwayne Johnson: He still rocks my world"? HE would never ask you
anything of the sort, of course. Too blunt; too much risk of unsettling.
But since one wonders if somewhere between all his amenableness he
just must find some dispensable amongst his fandom to suffer for all
his forever-pleasing and never really being listened to, one also
suspects that he -- like Cera -- really now most needs to become more
obtuse and bad-ass, if not Cameron-level oblivious and indifferent.
For many of us he may thereby prove less likeable, but I suspect it'll
help him come to like himself more -- which should be the point.
Let's not romance masochism, and vilify signs of (what is actually in
greatest truth) healthy self-esteem.
Link: Oscars 2010: In defense of Sandra Bullock (Salon)
How to tell a story
What passes for screenwriting these days is worrisome by
any measure. "Avatar," the most successful film of all time
(and a glorious spectacle), has some of the worst dialogue in
recent memory. Now more than ever it's critical to recognize
those that are striving to keep the art of the screenplay alive.
The best-picture Oscar can and will remain a populist
award. That shouldn't be the case for recognition of genuine
craft. (Andrew Grant, Screenwriting, the most
meaningless Oscar, 2 February 2010)
--Extending on the comments above about what it takes to plot
a movie, let's say that AVATAR *had* been nominated. Why
might that have happened?
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Well, have you seen lengthy dissections of the Avatar plot on

political blogs as well as on science and tech blogs? Have
you seen the debates about whether the Chinese should be
allowed to see the film? People aren't having these
discussions about the future of 3-D. People are taking time
out of their day, day after day, to discuss the MEANING of
this story. How many films accomplish that even for one
day?
Aside from the effects, Cameron (for all his lack of social
skills, for all his pedestrian dialogue) has tapped into
something that resonates with millions of people around the
world. If, in the alternate universe in which Andrew Grant
lives, AVATAR had received a screenwriting nomination, it
would have been for creating a story that gets liberals
arguing with conservatives, that gets media interviews for
linguistics professors, that indisputably enters the zeitgeist.
(Brian Nelson, response to post, Screenwriting, the
mot meaningless Osar)
--Brian -Everything you mention about Avatar -- its politics, its
technological impact, etc -- is all perfectly valid, but the fact
remains that the dialog is simply dreadful, and I doubt any
critic praised it for its screenplay. It's a prime example of
lazy screenwriting, and an indicator of just how low the bar
is set. Its reliance on expository dialog is simply
embarrassing. (Though it didn't get an Oscar nomination, it
did get one from the WGA. That's concerning.) (Andrew
Grant, response to post)
How to tell a story
Re: Everything you mention about Avatar -- its politics, its
technological impact, etc -- is all perfectly valid, but the fact
remains that the dialog is simply dreadful, and I doubt any
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critic praised it for its screenplay.

Well, I'm pretty sure the critic, Brian Nelson, is making a case for
understanding the dialog as being one of the vehicles behind such
widespread discussion of the movie's message. You essentialized the
film as "spectacle," yet it's difficult to see how sensation alone
provokes political discussion. If it was also the story, how did he
manage such power, with the wording such an all-too-obvious
embarrassing muddle? Explain, please.
Re: Its reliance on expository dialog is simply
embarrassing.
Hemingway had the same complaint: that is, You may need more
than this to convince, here -- this sounds too much like an airing of a
school of thought (on how to properly tell a story), to simply
convince.
Link: Screenwriting, the most meaningless Oscar (Salon)
30's-40's fashion, wasn't the 20's

In the independent-oriented 20s, the aggressively thin presumed over
the fat and maternal (the Victorian Matriarch). With the communal
closing-in in the 30s and 40s, maternal thighs just made you in-sync
with the "mother actually did know best," plodding times. In case you
haven't noticed, we're heading back there, and it is as no something to
be hip to your big ass now as it was to your multiplication of Channel
finery, five years ago -- just riding the socially approved wave. If
you're overweight, you're being used -- don't let it happen to you,
whatever the applause.
Link: Body image revolution postponed (Kate Harding, Salon, 8
January 2010)
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Maybe communicate that at some point you would care

actually says that this is "the first generation in which more
women than men have college degrees" and that women
outearn men in less than a quarter of American heterosexual
couples. If gender inequality that favored men hadn't been
the norm for so long, such modest advances for women
wouldn't be news at all. (Kate Harding, College gender gap
levels off, Salon, 26. January 2010)
Apparently it won't be worth a worry until enough women have
entered college that they equal all those generations of men who've
been given degrees, even though most of them are now dead, or
getting there. Of the now, and of the subsequent future, how many
women are getting degrees? and how many men? And why? Is it
because college now favors those more weighted to do as theyre told?
Who can please enough, stay within parameters enough, to ensure
everything is steady-enough to carry them quietly but assuredly on
through? Is it because girls actually experience a less traumatic
upbringing than boys -- who are viewed as disobedient, and expected
to take it -- and therefore are able to keep steady through the climb
while guys fall this way and that? Is it "Gran Torino"? Or was that just
part of the backlash of men who are uncomfortable when women
prosper and grow?
According to Morris Dickstein's new book, "Dancing in the Dark," the
depression was terrible for sex, 'cause most men felt emasculated as
they saw their wives become the primary breadwinners. He doesn't go
into it much, but he certainly doesn't suggest this was a good thing, a
way for men to experience some of the inhibition of power women
have historically felt, for instance.
Link: College gender gap levels off (Salon)
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Paul, you've known too much warmth to understand

A spending freeze? Thats the brilliant response of the
Obama team to their first serious political setback?
Its appalling on every level.
Its bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is
still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff
writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim
Geithner and replace him with the rotting corpse of Andrew
Mellon (Mellon was Herbert Hoovers Treasury Secretary,
who according to Hoover told him to liquidate the workers,
liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness.)
Its bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from
the essential need to reform health care and focusing on
small change instead. (Paul Krugman, Obama liquidates
himself, Salon, 26 January 2010)
Good growth -- that is, growth in something other than the military,
which is just wastage, if not worse -- makes a lot of people anxious.
They simply did not grow up in nurturing-enough environments to
believe that they DESERVE good things in life, even if this just means
the equal opportunity to see a doctor as anyone else. If growth
continues, if Obama seems a president to some extent still intent on
making America more peaceful, fair, and hopeful, he would
increasingly make many, many Americans feel nervous, if not
hysteric. To them, good things, the chance at good things, means they
can expect punishment for aiming at something they cannot believe
they can have, seek to have, without being punished for their greedy
aspiration. To them, it is the parents -- the ones kids grew up trying to
placate, entertain, please, not disturb -- are the ones who MUST be
attended to, lest they abandon you and make you feel absolutely
vulnerable. That these kids are now adults, doesn't matter -- their
parents are still in them, in the form of the superego, who/that rules
over the rest of the psyche.
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Krugman grew up in a healthy background, and thus can't make sense

of what Obama is going through -- what many Americans are going
through. Obama is now in to make Americans feel less prey to being
punished, and he can accomplish this, by inhibiting America's chance
at good growth.
Link: Dead wrong, or deeply cynical? (Salon)
Dilly-dallyingly presumptive
First and foremost, this is a referendum on Coakley's
campaign, not on President Obama (thought I'll get to him
later.) She blew it, taking a Caribbean vacation after the
primary, assuming she'd merely coast into the Senate. She
didn't see the Brown surge, didn't use any of the questions
about his record against him, didn't try to define him until it
was too late. Proof that the vote wasn't about Obama: She
lost many voters who said they still support Obama. (Joan
Walsh, Learning the wrong lessons from Massachussetts,
Salon, 19 January 2010)
I don't buy that it was the campaign. I think when Obama got in, and
both houses were democrat-controlled, many Americans felt
strangely hemmed-in by net. The tea-baggers were taken as feisty
fish, battering, this way and that (and thus were attended to way
beyond what support for their political stance, would by itself
allowed) -- and Brown's victory, the glorious emergence. Knowing
that escape is possible, it is actually possible that Obama's policies
won't be opposed with quite the same vigor. Maybe they (Scott Brown
cheerers) just needed to feel they'd demonstrated why they need to be
attended to --their own self-importance, capacity for empowered selfmovement -- before they nestled in more comfortably with Obama's
1182
plans.
No better campaign would have helped her, because the electorate -and the press-- was in the mood to imagine her as dilly-dallyingly
presumptive, and her opponent as all vigor. If she hadn't gone on
vacation, something -- anything -- else would have been used to
maintain this fantasy. The fact of the matter, would, in my judgment,
hardly have mattered: it was going to be Rocky 2, regardless.
Link: Leaning the wrong lessons from Massachussetts (Salon)
People-friendly works, does it?

People-friendly works, does it? If it does, then -- believe it or not -Obama would have lost to Hillary, for Hillary was the one becoming a
movement just before the democratic convention. Obama was
seeming passive and distant (as he does now), and even though
Hillary rose, he still ably won -- and not by suddenly re-acquiring the
people's touch, but really just by remaining the staid-iron same.
Things are more complicated than they seem. Obama was, is, always
removed -- why they like that in him but not in others, is worth
exploring. My guess is that they elected him in for his second act: he'll
come out more when liberalism no longer reaches, when its laying,
fully-extended, dead flat out on the ground, and not while he's still in
a way -- by necessity -- 'filling its mission.
Obama's healthcare reform was DEEMED liberal -- it felt like it was
an agenda moved (and it part it was) by a liberal impulse to attend to
the vulnerable. The fact that the liberal blood has become so
corporate-congested that nothing good passes through without huge
sendiments of garbage coming along, doesn't mean that some of
Obama's movement wasn't taken as connected to the 60s-on victory
by liberals of the cultural war. ALL democrats who were once
hippy/communal liberals but are now knee-deep in corporate and
consumption, still are kinda still moved by that earlier huge glow of
1183
peace, love, and happiness -- and we all feel it. But a lot of democrats
are actually ready to let that all go, and find wretched empoweredness
in the hot glow in coal. Healthcare, I still believe, will come readily
when it is linked to a more rightest movement for a fit nation, to
empower the "American-seeming," "hard-working," middleAmerican, not when the tendency is still to take it as about tender
respect and care for those who instinctively feel bullied/marginalized
by "American as apple-pie." 60s on, liberalism won the cultural
sphere, put rightest, neanderthal thought, fully on the defensive -- as
someone like Pat Buchanan will tell you -- and "its" people was hardly
the mainstream. This is what this is all about.
Link: David Axelrod and the zeitgeist (Joan Walsh, Salon, 21
January 2010)
My book
My book "Draining the Amazon's Swamp: All that we do when we
read, write, watch, make -- live -- our fictions" is now available for
(free) viewing/download. Essays I wrote, 2002 - 2006. Books and
movies become part of our lived life, worlds we experience -- for real.
Much here, especially, about how we use books/movies to satisfy
needs/urges we would rather remain unconscious of. Also, some
feelings-out of how we experience things like movement, shapes,
spaces, in these environments. How these things make us feel. Typical
plot assessments become artifice, obstructive-cover for the more vital
stuff we're up to.
Cheers
A hell of a lot happened to us and our friends out there

Seriously. Ask anyone who's seen it, ask someone who's just
1184
walking out of the theater ask them what happened in the

movie or if they remember any particular lines or scenes or
dramatic or memorable moments. (Amity, response to post,
James Cameron: Artist, termite, or elephant man? Salon,
20 January 2010)
It would be inaccurate (to how they experienced the film) and
distracting for people to think of the particular, when they are still
collecting themselves after being offered, not just an affecting
experience, but almost a new philosophical/psychological/spiritual
DIRECTION, a right-seeming/feeling way of being that has captured
the kind of rescue they want for the way ahead. They're not quite sure
why they like it, but they know there's something important in it -some essence -- that has made them very happy, and are right now
drawn more to cover, flame, and relish its overall fire than risk losing
its source by stepping back to examine. They'll happily offer-up 3D,
great action -- albeit with familiar storylines -- as what the film's all
about, but it's just easy, passable, non-thought talk that ready ables
them to carry along while they slowly work at the real "junk" that's
working away at them.
For myself, there are countless instances I'm replaying. Most
especially now, his running along the huge-limbed trees, when Jake's
first met Neytiri. Immediately after the film it was that too, plus the
whole affect of the tree-downing scene, and the sad emotional retreat
to Eywa.
Of the lines, I liked and remember Selfridge's. I really like Cameron -all this films, certainly including Avatar -- but the film will help
people seem even more glassy-eyed and unavailable. They'll take my
corrective, hopefully sanity-recalling snarks, and see only a person
who doesn't care at all.
And guys, let's talk less about intellect and theory, and more about
how we FELT as we LIVED the film. It was mostly real for many of us
-- and a hell of a lot of life happened to us and our friends out there.
Link: James Cameron: Artist, termite, or elephant man? (Salon)
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MONDAY, JANUARY 25, 2010

Too attentive to not be offensive, than is healthy for you
But plumbing the appeal of Dwayne Johnson the actor
requires setting the size of the package aside for a moment,
the better to zero in on subtleties: The expressiveness of those
unnaturally mobile eyebrows or the way, either in character
or during the course of an on-camera interview, he almost
seems to blush when he makes a self-deprecating joke, as if
he were wary of calling too much attention to himself.
Johnson is so good-natured that even when he's not wearing
a smile, his facial muscles carry the ghost of one. Maybe
that's part of his charm as a performer: For such a big lug of
a guy, his star quality is of the quiet sort.
[. . .]
But they haven't tarnished Johnson either. Just as his body
has been trained and disciplined to sustain all sorts of
physical abuse in the ring (he retired from pro wrestling in
2004), so is Johnson, as an actor, fully willing to endure all
kinds of humiliation, ribbing and teasing emasculation
and always with a smile. (Stephanie Zacharek, Dwayne
Johnson: He still rocks my world, Salon, 20 Jan. 2010)
Try watching WWE for a week, and turn back to your crush
No one can be part of the WWE environment for all that time, and be
all that sane. He'll blush, and play the puppet for you, but that's just
sad. On SNL, I root for him to be able to be TRULY in on the joke. He
manages it, but just barely. He's known what it is to be long alone and
unsure of his worth, and he's not wholly downed, which is why I cheer
for him; but he's not much more than an amphibian to Pamela
Anderson's fishy-fish -- but a couple (well, maybe a few more than a
1186
couple) steps up in the "fully there" department, that is.

He managed to do WWE and be hugely popular, all the while still
communicating that this was but a stage he'd be abandoning for the
more respectable -- which does say something for him. If you prefer
him to a Tom Cruise, it must have something to do with liking guys
who are more attendant to not be offensive, to soothe down the
nerved, than is healthy for them. I think that's it.
Link: Dwayne Johnson: He still rocks my world (Salon)
MONDAY, JANUARY 25, 2010
Hamlets without Hamlet -- Thoreau, or dark ages?
The application of the real world is the most powerful tool in
our educator toolbox, and what better way to understand a
philosophy about cultivating land than to do it? As we read
pages of "Walden" and planted our seeds, quotes from
Thoreau such as "I chose to live deliberately, to front only
the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it
had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I
had not lived," carried much more weight with action. And
guess what? We even wrote paragraphs about it.
[. . .]
When your elementary-school child is forced to pick up his
or her toys after recess, you are going to claim that because
your child is a "privileged American" he or she should not be
taught the values of simple tidiness? When your child has the
opportunity to attend a field trip to the zoo to see the lions
after studying the climate and culture of Africa you are
going to say, "You're not going. Read another book"? And
frankly, what about the farmers who enjoy their life as it is
and truly do not need to know the entirety of "Hamlet" to
have a good life and make a good living? She dismisses
physical work, under the guise of respecting students'
1187
upward mobility, but it also hints darkly at her views of the

people in those fields. (Alissa Novoselik, The school
gardener strikes back, Salon, 15 January 2010)
RE: And frankly, what about the farmers who enjoy their
life as it is and truly do not need to know the entirety of
"Hamlet" to have a good life and make a good living?
But what about the corporatists, those living in the metal jungle, who
well enjoy their life of millions but will never aspire beyond Dan
Brown? Will you speak up for them too? Or do you just have a thing
for the different kind of green? There are good ways to move away
from Shakespeare, but for me -- an urbane --pastoral romance is the
worst of ways. There is no wisdom in dirt, just random happenstance.
If we turn to it so we better understand "Shakespeare," okay, but if we
do so in an effort to make HIM the one who is optional, then the
ONLY reason this is still a plus is because progressives tend to be the
ones so turned on to garden-learning. Personally, I way prefer the
glass and concrete; I just want interactive, democratic, child-focused
learning, to be the norm.
Re: I was so angry after reading "Cultivating Failure," that
I assigned my 11th grade students a writing exercise on this
question: "Is interactive learning important? Why or why
not?" After 10 minutes of frantic scribbling, I heard about
the necessity of things like our school garden in my
students' own voices.
So something was bothering you, and you made your students sort it
out for you. Maybe next time ask what was really bothering THEM,
before assigning them to match your irritated state with their frantic
scribbling. You make it seem as if they eased your tension, with their
experiencing your pain. They're not extensions of you to use to stamp
out internal fires. I hope one of them told you to piss off. And you
proved okay with that. That's the kind of fire I MOST want to see: I
could give a fig about the worms (mostly).
1188
Link: The school gardener strikes back (Salon)
Jack Bauer gone soft: Salon's sexiest man alive!

The old Jack is long gone, though, replaced with this sad
little half-caf Jack, who takes other people's feelings into
account and looks straight into his own daughter's eyes
when he's speaking to her. I mean, come on, Jack! What
have you become?!
[. . .]
But does Wilty Jack find Dead Inside appealing? Because,
let's face it, Wilty Jack is more like a Sexy Lady Victim Du
Jour this season, and Dead Inside is more like Classic,
Casually Murderous Jack, which means that Dead Inside is
likely to ignore Wilty Jack's pleading for sanity and mercy,
sallying forth heedlessly kicking ass and taking names as
necessary to round up plenty of wayward executail.
But we don't want someone with carefully applied mascara
on to save the world! We want Jack Bauer to do it, damn it!
(24: Jack Bauer goes soft, Heather Havrilesky, 16
January 2010)
Re: But we don't want someone with carefully applied
mascara on to save the world! We want Jack Bauer to do it,
damn it!
Who's "we"? I'm thinking it probably at least ought to be you guys,
but I'm doing my damndest to find the old Jack Bauer amongst your
2009 most desired, and not coming up with much.
I'm not sure if James Franco wears mascara, but he probably pees
pink. Neil Patrick Harris. Raphael Nadel is to you, all ass, not squarejaw, and delights by dousing fires with a "charming response to a
jarring moment." Joseph Gordon-Levitt went all "dolled up as an
eyeliner-smeared Nancy Spungen for a fun stab at gender bending,"
1189
to your approval. Neil Patrick Harris. You "finished" Zach in a way

you'd think would have finished him off, making him both a bear and
one who wants to cuddle-wuddle with the kids. You really turned on
to Lenny Kravitz, only when he tried on Nurse John. Clooney got
koodos for being "delighted to enjoy a snuggle with a nerdy goof like
Kristof." Levi got it for "going camp." Ted, for being "vulnerable and
disarming." Jamie Oliver, for getting kids to eat their broccoli, while
being so thoughfully "accessib[ly] charm[ing]."
Neil Patrick Harris.
That pretty much left Rahm as the only candidate for a Jack Bauer,
before he got soft. If you're true to your heart, you probably ought
now to spend more of your time watching your Rahm: think of him as
your agent, balled-up, and even closer to the heat of things.
*****
Jack Bauer doesn't give a shit
Jack Bauer doesn't just piss excellence, he also shits gold.
Bauer is so viral his simple gaze is substitute Viagra.
Jack Bauer is responsible for the birth of 4,440,000,
including his own grandchild.
Jack Bauer will have his cake AND eat it too.
There has not been a terrorist attack in the United States
since Jack Bauer first appeared on television.
Jack Bauer is the only reason why Waldo is hiding.
Jack Bauer doesn't give a shit and he knows you know he
knows that. (yojimbo_7, response to post, 24: Jack Bauer
goes soft)
But Jack Bauer NOW shits gold, and makes of it, a tiara.
But Jack Bauer is NOW fit for graze, beyond even the hope of Viagra.
But Jack Bauer NOW sighs his responsible, hoping for forgiveness
from his over-burdened grandchildren.
But Jack Bauer NOW will have his cake, but well mourn it too.
But Jack Bauer will NOW prove responsible for 4, 440, 000 deaths,
since he went all soft on tele.
1190
But to court Jack Bauer is NOW the reason Waldo will finally come
out of the closet.
But Jack Bauer NOW gives a shit, and frets you may feel a bit
decomposed, should you 'come in the know of it.
Link: 24: Jack Bauer goes soft (Salon)
Sense and Sensibility, with shovels

What's even harder to forgive is the way Anna is forced to
wobble through the Irish countryside in a very pretty but
extremely precarious pair of $600 (at one point she makes
note of the price) ankle-strap platform shoes. The camera
repeatedly lingers on these absurdly unstable shoes: Anna
totters around on them, along city streets and through
airports, as if perched on baby deer feet. The effect could be
defended, I guess, as disgustingly adorable, until these shoes
become an unavoidable symbol of how low a bunch of
filmmakers are willing to go to humiliate a character: First
their spiky heels sink deep into beach sand; then they find
their way into thick piles of cow poo. When Anna finally has
the good sense to take them off, she slips in the mud and
becomes covered, from head to toe, in brown slime.
(Stephanie Zacharek, Leap Year: One giant leap backward
for romantic comedy 7 January, 2010)
Strange, this, going to movies which entrench cow poo in such near
proximity to all your memories of the genre's exemplars of wit and
charm. While you go to sleep, and you're not so there to keep their
emotional / cognitive neural-arrays neatly categorized, you might find
movies like this actually are seeping their way into the ones you
hoped to keep clean. It is possible, if they have cunning, and you're
feeling worn-out, that they may read this film as analogy and make
1191
sure all your wit and charm delights incur cow-dung implantation. I
suppose in the daytime you might remedy this by recalling your
favorites and forcing into your memory of them a long line-up of
shovels, to be handed out to the main principals for use at night to
scoop away the slimers. I suspect this would work . . . but at the cost
of never knowing your sense and sensibilities again, without knowing
them, with shovels -- a high price to pay, in poetry/farm exchange.
I think you should hire someone who likes this film to screen future
romances for you. If s/he likes them, have her/him give a detailed
plot summary, and then fake it for us. We're all eating a la "Francis
Lam" and keeping company no more, with Hobbitan swine, so we'll
understand.
Link: Leap Year: One giant leap backward for romantic comedy
(Salon)
SATURDAY, JANUARY 23, 2010

Talking smack to some old bird
Weaver's character -- her name is Dr. Augustine, and she's

modeled, at least loosely, on Ripley from the "Alien" films -is most believable when, in her human incarnation, she's
puffing on her nearly ever-present cigarettes. (A chainsmoking scientist: Now there's something you don't see in
the movies every day. I wish Cameron would show us more
of his naughtier side.) (Stephanie Zacharek, Avatar:
Dances with aliens, Salon, 18 December 2010)
Still, I think many of us have been wondering: What will
become of Michael Cera? It's hard to be a sex symbol when
you resemble a beatific, unassuming, preadolescent Jesus on
a holy card. (Stephanie Zacharek, Avatar: Dances with
aliens, Salon, 18 December 2010)
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[. . .]
But "Youth in Revolt" suggests, at least, the possibility of
something more for Cera. He won't be able to do much about
that baby face. But when he's wearing Francois'
Eurowardrobe, his gait and his carriage are different. He
has more swagger, more attitude -- in fact, he's more
successful at getting at theidea of sexiness than even some
so-called sexy actors are. (The handsome but chilly Jude
Law, as good an actor as he may sometimes be, comes to
mind.) Cera may be reaching the end of road as far as
playing the eternally sweet, baffled kid goes. His future may
lie in his ability to channel his inner shit. (Stephanie
Zacharek, Youth in Revolt: Michael Cera, sex god?,
Salon, 6 January, 2010)
All might be good on that score. Just saw Michael Cera in the park
with Signourney, chain-smoking and talking smack to some old bird
who just ain't down with all the what-all, of all that the kids have it in
them to say, these days. Later I hear they're going to set some dumb
old tree on fire, watch squirrel-monkeys scramble about, on fire,
snark, "look!, see -- they moved," as a trial balloon for channelling
some inner-shit Giovanni Ribisiesque career-action. As I understand
it, they're kinda hoping you might join up, and rather than shed "this
embryonic reviewer's youthful genderic biases and extremely
parochial appreciation of the film experience itself" (Msakel), make it
your calling card, and go over-the-top bad-ass.
Link: "Avatar": Dances with aliens (Salon)
Link: " Youth in Revolt": Michael Cera, sex god?
Feeling taken, for having taken in the Ring

If I could ever write my perfect response to this film, it would
effectively sort through what I think is brilliant and empowering
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about the emotion in it, and what is foul about it. These were fleshedout, passionate, brave, good people -- delightful to know, and worth
our caring about. Out there, in a way we all need to come -- to allow
ourselves -- to be. It's just a pity that Jackson seemed to use this
beautiful miracle as a kind of bait to move us this way and that, which
can make us feel a bit dependent and used -- in retrospect, fools, for
having allowed ourselves to be drawn in -- which, in the end, has
served to draw some of those reluctant to allow emotion into the
circuitry of their reason, ready reason to retreat back to intelligent but
affectless cognizizing. They took him in, are now feeling a bit taken
for it, and in recovery, in pay back -- subsequent years of the kind of
removed consideration, in film, in art, in mind, of the like we know or
at least suspect would balk Jackson back into a kind of "you're just
snobs who hate fantasy!" retreat. You can feel the steady layering of
book scholarship discussion sealing down all memory of joyous
hobbits, bouncing delight, and singing glee, in hopes to entertain all
company.
It did streamline; and despite its length, went down as without
contradiction as a smooth shot of whiskey. But I shake that dumbness
off, and remember people acting inspiringly beautiful towards one
another. Learn and be inspired, by that.
Link: The case against LOTR: Scrubbing bubbles! (Salon)
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 13, 2010
Exeunt Peter Jackson, chased by our inner Anthony Lane
Exeunt Peter Jackson, chased by our inner Anthony Lane

The more we talk "longish orcish life [. . .] hinted at during the closing
of TTT, when Shagrat and Gorbag are . . ." the further confident the
Andrew O'Hehir in most of us will be in its inclination to have little to
nothing to do with this film, for rather the longish while. Our decadeend sum: For a moment, we kept fellowship with the geeks -- and it
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speaks well of our humanity for doing so -- but, alas, they are very
clearly a breed apart: fiddling with their forever toys, are these lot of
unredeemable, squalor boys.
One wonders if in fact this article wasn't bait to coat the film-memory
well enough in sludge, so that it could be left behind for good, so
much more the cleanly. When you want to dump someone, you are
inclined to focus on the bad, and conclude that's more of what it was
really about than we -- in the moment -- could realize. So it was a
kind of joyous, silly play we allowed ourselves, but since it is now
obvious that those who stick with it amount to the small-towners who
never had it in them to last even a week in the big city, it is now time
to draw back, become more nuanced, and engage with an
unaccountably intertwined and complex world. This will require the
help of a different sort of film.
Of course it will prove a classic. Too much love and innovation in it
for it not to. But let's never allow its beautiful fellowship to seem all
that irrelevant to our current needs. Boy I liked Viggo's smile -- it can
carry you on through as assuredly well as can the latest "New Yorker."
We know this; let's not forget it.
Link: Dude, wheres my LOTR? (Andrew OHehir, Salon)
The feeling now is of the scurried, pissing on the fallen

We know these myths, we encounter them every day
embedded in in our language, our culture and our psyches.
No matter how beautiful and heartfelt the LOTR trilogy was,
nothing new is revealed by them. (ThisMorningofJune,
response to post, Dude, wheres my LOTR?, Salon, 6
January 2010)
Exposure to the truly beautiful and heartfelt can very much mean
being exposed to something new, something we haven't really known
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before. There is a lot of heart in LOTR -- a lot of impetus to imagine

the preferred psychological state as open, accepting, giving. I think
the goodness in this is why we must try for a decade-end push to
ensure the memory of this movie isn't stamped over by those who
HAD been shut-down but have re-emerged -- now that the film's
protectors have flown -- who complain of plot deviations from the
book. The feeling now is of the scurried, pissing on the fallen giant.
Ever see "Can't buy me love"? -- it's the geek gone star, possibly in
position to be dropped on back down to loserdom, to absolutely
everyone's loss.
It is a manipulative film. You can feel Jackson trying to make you
dependent on him, to count you amongst a fandom which means
being grossly infantile, subject to shame. I understand; and there is
enough of it to make me want to polish off the uncouth bastard and
let him muck shit about in someone else's backyard. But there IS huge
good in the film, and it's worth our fighting for.
Link: Dude, wheres my LOTR? (Salon)
What if Philip K. Dick had directed LOTR?

Why did LOTR drop off the critical radar at decade's end?
Methinks it's due to that perennial, fundamental disrespect
of the fantasy and science fiction genre, the same reason
"sci-fi" literature was/is ghettoized and consigned to the
bring-your-own-blacklight section of your local bookstore.
See Ellison, Harlan, or King, Stephen. Or better, Dick, Philip,
K. (while he was alive). "Fantasy" is just not as critic- or
award-friendly as, say, our annual dose of Clint Eastwood
directed melodramatic "relevant" Oscar fodder.
[. . .]
There are a lot of "fantasy" films that fully deserve critical
scorn, and audience disdain. As the great fantasist Theodore
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Sturgeon opined, "90% of everything is crap."

But that 10 percent that isn't should be allowed to keep
winning the race against "Seabiscuit." (Erik Nelson,
Fantasy still cant get no respect, Salon, 6 Jan. 2010)
What if Philip K. Dick had directed Lord of the Rings?
Harlan Ellison? Theodore Sturgeon? Philip K. Dick? If we mixed all
these authors into a brew, are we sure we wouldn't be more likely to
end up serving out some Synecdoche New York than Jackson's
LOTR? How are hobbitans supposed to get respect, when their
defenders seem near as much to have escaped the shire for the civitas
as any urbane who complains of their smelly feet and rank stupidity?
Closer to Jackson's LOTR is David Eddings and Piers Anthony. It is
the friendliness, the family, in LOTR, that matters, not its passedover erudition, its overlooked sophistication.
(Care to say anything nice about these two authors, about those who
like these authors, Eric? You won't look as cool to film "snobs" who
can appreciate a return to the warmth of the ring, with their cool
Blade Runner guard well up, or with some reference to the likes of
Fredric Jameson and commercial culture -- as Matt Zoller Seitz made
sure to do, to adjudicate / circumscribe his applause of Michael Bay.
You'd very quickly find yourself outside the "fantasist" section, the
imaginative and cerebral -- and near Marquez, and well redeemable -and back munching bags of chippies with all the dorks in fantasy / sci
fi. How prepared are you to jump up and down on couches, and
scream out the love of your life?)
Link: Fantasy still cant get no respect (Salon)
3-step evolution of the urbane Salon "Avatar" experiencer

Evolution of the urbane Salon "Avatar" experiencer
Step 1) Selfridge stage: Stupid story -- but great special effects. To
those who say it's the story, What have you been smoking out there?
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It's just the 3D!"

Step 2) Jack Sully stage: Right-wingers hate it, so I'll see it again to
stick it to them. First time entering the avatar, after focusing on its
technology. Real world is still right-side-up.
Step 3) Avatar stage: The story is simple -- as simple and pure as
Obama's faith in our future! You've seen it again, and are never
really leaving. Avatar --"this is my land" -- has become your world.
Link: Convervative backlash against Avatar (Andrew Leonard,
Salon)
Abandoning pappy for our Ewya-mother

On becoming good boys and girls
The movie is about abandonment of a previous God -- the father, the
patriarch -- in favor of a return to an older one -- the mother, the
matriarch. The patriarch God IS something -- he's the colonel, who
singly seems fit enough to take on half the forest. And he was useful,
because his focus and force helped us beat back obligations, accountsowing, and focus on our own lives -- IN our own lives. But while his
might remained, that in shadow, well gained. Noticing Her, sensing
and fearing her retribution, and feeling all alone, we've decided to
abandon our protective pappy and rejoin our Eywa mother. As good
boys and girls who are no longer sinning by using dad to abandon
home and mother, we feel protected, righteous, and re-invigorated
again. Our next move will be to attack those who pollute our togetherworld with alien thoughts, disturbing intricacies, unacceptable
independence. That is, our next move is at least as likely to be against
NYT-reading lefties as it is those who stink corporate, on the right.
So, yes, corporate-cheering right, be wary. We are coming for you -unless you learn to McMarch your arrogance on Earth's behalf. But so
too, the David Brooks -- and likely even more -- the Paul Krugmans.
Our nation can be made to seem our Eywa. Obama, the war-leader,
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on Her behalf. It's the way it's going to go -- can't you just feel it?
I find the conservative backlash simply hilarious
considering their main information source - Fox News called the film "pro-military." (Smart Moose, response to
post, Conservative backlash against Avatar, Salon, 5 Jan.
2010)
@SmartMoose
It is certainly pro-warrior, and could easily be deemed pro-military.
The problem in the film is not military, but a CORRUPTED military.
It is military distorted, disfigured, through lack of righteous purpose.
It is near evident in their physiogamy -- certainly in their unwashed,
uncombed, snide-ful countenances. They're elves turned orcs.
Afghanistan is already something different than Iraq. It's not yet
Green and save-the-earth -- it's not "blue-men," serving Eywa -- but
it's not so much Blackwater either. Let's just say it's already better
shaved, if not yet at the point where it's spun around to fire back at
the grunts with the gun.
Link: Conservative backlash against Avatar (Andrew
Leonard, Salon)
Awakening-mother Ewya
@geometeer
Geometeer: "Perhaps the most wonderful thing in Avatar is
that the hero when human has a hand-rolled wheelchair -two-century-old tech at the story's date, in a techworshipping culture! -- just to have him seem more sad and
pitiful."
The movie explained this with the reverence to how cheap
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the government was when it came to veterans' benefits.

(Xrandadu Hutman, response to post, What the news big
can learn from Avatar, Salon, 4 Jan. 2010)
Xrandadu:
It did that. But it also worked to set him up as sad and pitiful -- to the
rest of the "core." The point is also made, in the way the other (let's
call them) marines reacted to his disability, that they're now much
more paid grunts (the fallen) than they are military men: military
men may have teased him, but would have more readily appreciated
his I-can-do-what-you-can-do attitude. That the colonel looks past
this, baiting him with new legs but focussing entirely on his mentalmakeup, makes him a bit apart from the rest of the rangy crew. That
is, the colonel is never in the end the military man who went
corporate soft, but an old-style patriarch -- the devil? -- whose
formidableness can't match that of awakening Mother Ewya. In a
way, the last fight is a replay of what we saw in Aliens -- with a
mother and her colony against a lone, independent, let's-dance
warrior (Signourney, in Aliens) -- but with a reversed outcome. Felt
that way to me.
Right-wingers who complain about the film, see it as leftist, should
note that Cameron takes extra care to make the military grunts seem
like ill-groomed anarchists. That is, when people see them, they may
as quickly think anarchist street-youth -- or even, disspoiled treehuggers -- as they do military men. Got the Olympics coming to
Vancouver, and the public seems in mind to imagine its leftie
protestors as this kind of foul. The mountain-loving folk who just
can't wait, can't imagine why anyone would want to spoil their
outdoor, innocent, sporty fun.
Link: What the news biz can learn from Avatar (Andrew Leonard,
Salon)
Generation interlude
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In Katie Roiphe's world, the boy crisis is fictional. Not in

the sense that the much-hyped threat to manliness is a
fiction. No, the provocateur argued in Sunday's New York
Times Book Review, that evidence of masculinity's decline
is found in fiction -- more specifically, in the imaginary
sex lives of imaginary male protagonists in novels written
by men. This is a new take on a familiar argument, but
Roiphe places the blame on the very same culprit framed
for ruining the real-life sex lives of real-life men:
feminism.
[. . .]
She seems to believe that men, be they real or fictional, are
supposed to emerge cocksure on the other side of young
adulthood -- or at least convincingly appear to. Even the
hot pink graphics accompanying the article practically
scream: C'mon you sissies -- grab your balls, be a man!
But I dare say the real issue here -- for men and women,
too, clearly -- is growing up, not manning up. (Tracy
Clark-Flory, Male writers go limp, Salon, 4 Jan. 2010)
feminism isn't it; it's that allowance, in general, largely
ended, late 70's
80s on, we all became more aware of how best to please, how to
convince yourself "this is living," while really doing what you can not
to seriously piss anyone off. And it has come at the cost of selfdefinition, true enablement -- personhood. So it is possible that a
whole generation could amount to something of an interlude, with
their predecessors having the great fortune of living at a time where
there was more allowance, less in your way (despite all they'll say) to
drive you to school down all your desires, growth, so self-consciously.
It's the true rule from "Almost Famous": something really awful
happened at the end of the 70s that has made even rock-and-rollers
seem like just couldn't break past the (w)all of mother's disapproval.
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If we want people to seem less like they're all too well broken in, we
need boomers now to appreciate that good growth from their youth
means, not just well-behaved leftists, with their all As, pleasing
world-concerns, their striving for Princeton, but people whose
thoughts and behavior will likely make them angry (a point Barbara
Ehrenreich has made recently -- "hey professors, do you want freethinkers, or don't you?"). Real change -- for the good -- is going to
piss you off: because it will mean surrection of a belief system, an
ethos, you cannot make claim to -- it will be all about them, not you -will mean they are prepared to pass you by.
It is nearly impossible to mature when the culture -- note: even the
indie escapes -- around you wants to keep you pliable, deferent, afraid
of looking ridiculous, of being caught out --Tom Cruise-like -- on your
own. We may have to wait for a new era, and be kind to those who
would have been pilloried if they persisted in any effort to be more
ballsy.
Feminism has become something which keeps pretty much everyone
at bay. But it's not feminism but rather the era that has temporarily
shaped the nature of its mission. This has not been a good era for any
ism; however much its fight to provide and empower, it will have
been bent to kow and control. People say we've been through a period
of ridiculous excess, but it strikes me most, as one of atonement.
Link: Male writers go limp (Salon)
What critics will come to acknowledge
What critics will come to acknowledge, about their draw to
the simple
Sitting in a theater being dazzled by James Cameron, I
found myself suddenly feeling pretty good about the future.
The technology behind "Avatar" is amazing -- but even more
incredible is the artistic creativity inherent in the good old
human mind. (Andrew Leonard, What the news biz can
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learn from Avatar, Salon, 4 Jan. 2010)

But it seems to me, this is the story from Avatar. Out of ruin, dispirit
-- genuine uplift and communal embrace: the answer. I predict that,
eventually, people will drop this it's the technology cover they're using
to excuse / understand their being dazzled by the film, while they
gradually acclimatize themselves to an awareness of the fact that they
are now finding themselves drawn to the simple and reassuring, to
what hereto they would have, without remorse, lambasted with scorn.
The film did the miracle of laying out the storyline for our future -- in
the end, being ungrateful to it would amount to keeping company
with Selfridge, way distant from the excusing embrace of Ewya.
"What have you people been smoking out there? It's just a god-damn
tree!," is the voice of the critic, of an era, that is passing. Crazily, it is
-- alas.
Link: What the news biz can learn from Avatar (Salon)
"Athlete, parent, lover, jerk" -- Tiger's ascension to be

That concept does seem well in line with Buzz Bissinger's
accompanying story on Woods' downfall, and a "hubris that
revealed his fundamental arrogance." In it, Bissinger speaks
of "image versus reality, the compartmentalization of two
different lives." So is this image of Tiger, the one who looks
ready to get rich or die tryin', any more real than that of the
baby-faced guy in dorky shirts we've seen waving from the
green all these years? Or is it possible that Woods, like any
of us, is a bundle of many contradictory things at once -athlete, parent, lover, jerk? (Mary Elizabeth Williams,
Tigers abs unleashed, Salon, 4 Jan. 2010)
Fortunately, he came to know he was of the fallen, before it
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was too late . . .

re: "Or is it possible that Woods, like any of us, is a bundle
of many contradictory things at once -- athlete, parent,
lover, jerk?"
Fox News wants to make him Christian; you're kinda already offering
the same service -- him just being human, one of us -- after all. So all
that we have now, is not the fall of Tiger, but the removal of pretense.
He hasn't gained impropriety, but lost it -- with the thing he really
needed to seem human, relevant, Obama-in-the-"now," being the loss
of his status as distinguished from everyone else. The worst part of
acknowledging sinners, though, is that they always drift to going after
people way worse than they. These being, almost always, those who
won't so readily admit to being "jerks," in a way which makes them
seem elected.
Mary Elizabeth, you may be a jerk, but I am not. Please don't group
me within your surround of retards.
----tricking the phantoms
All that had been bottled up in him, is now outside, in the ether. If all
that's been aired tries to invite itself back in, as self-doubt, it's going
to have to fight its way past near unassailable taut muscle and lean
purpose. Neat trick, that.
Link: Tigers abs unleashed (Salon)
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 13, 2010
The left might slur, but the right would repeatedly beat you
Why oh why....
is it continuously incumbent upon me to point out what an
obscene, blatant, pathetic hypocrite you are, Joan? I can't
for the life of me understand how someone like you with such
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intelligence can have zero grasp of who she and her fellow
liberals truly are. Here's the deal: When you feel
passionately about my side of the argument, people like you
and your ilk (i.e. - Matthews, Olbermann, Maddow,
Grayson, etc.)are complete trash. The same is true for your
side. That's just the way it is. I agree with you about one
thing: I have no wish to see any harm come to you or the
others I mention above. I have a karma issue with that type
of wish. However, it is beyond insulting that you write about
your fellow liberals as if you all are the peaceful ones, and
conservatives are evil and hateful - as a whole. Come on,
Joan. Get a grip why don't you. In just a minute, one of your
liberal readers will see my letter and write something to the
effect of: "RE: Junebug4 - Fuck You!" Guess what? That
letter will get a gold star. Trust me, Joan - you are every bit
as evil and foul as you think Rush Limbaugh is. You simply
have to be on my side of the fence to see it. (junebug4,
response to post, Get well, Rush Limbaugh, Salon, 1 Jan.
2010)
@junebug4
Despite all you see, you are missing the crucial. Despite liberals
talking about pissing on Limbaugh's grave, most of them, in the
company of those who have done them the most harm, can still quite
possibly see/feel the humanity in their opponent. They would never
have them lined up and shot -- and not owing to some self-serving
concern to estimate themselves more civilized.
Some on the right, when they've begun to feel particularly untethered,
would save their opponents, only so they can be sure to torture them
endlessly first. Once dead, they'll attend to their victims, only to shout
at them and beat them over the head a few more times. Remorse is for
the emotionally more evolved -- those who tend to find themselves on
the left, or in some way well within their company (Tucker, Brooks -even a little bit -- though you're not going to believe it -- Coulter), if
1205
on the right.
Whatever depraved are on the left, they are just nowhere as "gone" as
those on the right. Salon was right to focus on the crazies on the right
over those on the left -- one is beginning to slur his/her words, the
other is away gone in slobbering gibberish. The sane know this; and
they're only to be found on one side of the fence.
Link: Get well, Rush Limbaugh (Salon)
Warriors! Come out and play-e-yaay!: Say no, to Cheney' taunt
The former vice president is just taking a cheap shot here
that aids his overall goal: Delegitimizing this president, and
he's been doing it from day one. Cheney has emerged as the
leader of the Republican Party, and some of his recent
obnoxiousness seems at least partly directed at his old boss,
President Bush, who by contrast has acted the way former
U.S. chief executives traditionally do: Keeping quiet and
respectful. Cheney's still angry that Bush wouldn't pardon
his buddy Scooter Libby and that he began to put some
limits on torture and interrogation. So he's aiming at two
presidents with his belligerence.
But I wonder where it stops. Clearly Cheney's aiming to take
over the Republican party and bring about a neocon
restoration. I'm blown away by the immediate disrespect
and political posturing by people like Cheney, Sen. Jim
DeMint and Rep. Pete Hoekstra have shown the president at
a time of real threat. (Oh, and Pete Hoekstra: I think raising
money to fight the "Obama/Pelosi" approach to national
security by running for Michigan governor is a little
backwards; you have a tiny bit more influence on such
issues on the House Intelligence Committee.) Way to aid the
terrorists, guys: Undermine the president as a nave
weakling unready to fight. I think the kneejerk partisan
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savaging of Obama is un-American, it's what Republicans

would have called traitorous had anyone tried criticizing
Bush this way any time after 9/11 (actually, you were called
a traitor for challenging the Iraq war in 2003). (Joan
Walsh, Lets get Dick Cheny on facebook! Salon, 31 Dec.
2009)
I prefer it when you don't allow him into your mind
Boy I like you and Chris. Such good people. And you just feel the level
of sadism on the right, and the exasperating self-delusion. But you
can also feel how dealing with huge unfortunates like this can really
lure "you" to do such things as make the war, once again, in essence,
Bush's mess, and so far away from considering that it might just be
the way the Obama administration wants things too. The concern for
those of us who believe Obama is not just a good man who's doing his
damndest in hugely trying situations, but someone who will be
abandoning -- who would abandon, even without opposition from a
largely insane right --many of the people the left has for so long been
trying to empower and protect, is that the need to put these guys in
their place is so alluring, so, alright, this has gone on long enough!,
that we're kinda going to lose you for awhile. I mean both you and
Chris. If you have to deal with them, deal with them. Please consider,
though, that it is possible to see people like this, and actually think
mental illness, and therefore not be so much drawn to want to crush
them. It is true that Obama has been under attack from day one, and
the unreasonableness of this, the unAmericanness of this sort of
behavior, toward the people's choice -- their hope, their extension
into the future --makes fully emotioned attacks against them a sign of
one's clear headedness, because its degree of unreasonableness is
such that it should not be bearable to any at all the least bit sane, but I
suspect that also true is that they may agitate some significant
putuponness that you've known a long, long while, that still draws
your return fire -- your, no, I will not let you do that to me! -- and can
carry you away.
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Obama is the perfect aesthetic to make continued war sacrifice,

possible. The relief at his measuredness can so readily allow corporate
appeasement, to become the only thing to be done. This kind of thing
can just go on and on and on. Some of us can see 8 years on, a largely
expanded war (with, quite possibly, some talk of the draft), students,
young people, largely ignored -- if not now the newly suspicious -and an increasingly expanding lower class (with many now being
shaped to seem responsible for their fate, if not actually in truth most
responsible for the ills of all Americans) -- and also a left
exasperatingly still so readily drawn to talk of Cheney et al.'s latest
disregard. Scares me. We're afraid we won't be seen, by people who
could protect us. And we are a left that will do immense good, if we
can make it on through.
Link: Lets get Dick Cheney on facebook! (Salon)
The image of the burning towers defined this decade. It
dominated waking and sleeping life, political debates and
Sunday dinners, birthday parties and weddings and
funerals, for a solid year, maybe two, then lurked in the
background for the rest of this decade, haunting elections
and reelections, military debacles and constitutional fights.
And it forced every artist in every medium to start each new
piece by first asking if the work was meant to confront the
image of the burning towers or deliberately avoid it
(avoidance is also a response). (Matt Zoller-Seitz, Image of
the decade: Osama and the towers, Salon, 31 Dec. 2009)
Cover for the fall
If we focus on this image, then it means we're attracted to the
awesome, feel the need for awe. There is a sense that it belongs in the
"mission accomplished" category, only much more successfully. That
is, it might mean we'll be getting on through by means of huge truelife kicks like this.
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The other image to be considered, is the one we are not prone to so

readily replicate / revisit (just try it in art, and see what happens). The
people falling. You felt there their experience. We briefly considered
it, and decided immediately that, however much art there was in that,
we will never, ever, allow ourselves to go back there -- not really -- the
whole rest of our lives. We've all agreed. And most of us won't. Our
super-ego allows the crash-bang, as cover, perhaps, of what it just will
not allow on through, because it would disassemble us.
Link: Image of the decade: Osama and the towers (Salon)
"Rejected"" Don't make corporations your (Oedipal) father

Rejection means being attended to -- we'll cling to that, if we have to
The disorder here fails a bit, because he makes corporations seem so
solid. The disapproving "father" can be relied upon to notice,
disapprove, and continue on, making this still naughty kid's play. I
don't like when we make corporations seem necessary because we like
believing we know what it is to be alone, but don't have it in us to
engage with what this feels like. Corporations would see the need in
people like this; they fear those who can still see the greens, and are
prepared to step past them (i.e., corporations) on way to them. Still, I
liked this quite a bit.
Link: Films of the decade: Rejected (Eric Kohn, Salon)

Childhood origins of terrorism
Childhood origins of terrorism
If Cheney isn't already thinking this then he has some catching up to
1209
do, because some in the republican brain-trust are surely thinking

this: namely, that criticizing Obama, being hypocritical, unfair, to
him, is a good way to keep the press in the mood to defend him, keep
them thinking of him as a reformer, and, most importantly, feel
themselves still it's-a-new-day good Americans, while he goes about
and passes an agenda that is actually mostly pleasing to many on the
non tea-bagger right. If they (republican leadership) played it fair and
respectable, it would be harder to resist the lure that remains out
there -- that Obama is Bush3. Both sides are getting what they want
out of this.
Focusing on mental illness would be so helpful. For the psychological
explanations behind terrorism, that move young terrorists to strap
explosives to themselves -- to want to die -- that I accept as true,
please check out link at sig. ("Childhood Origins of Terrorism," Lloyd
deMause). Whole nations can go mentally ill, though. "Estranged lone
individuals" are part of a mythos that keeps us from understanding
that huge things like war cannot be undertaken unless a large part of
the populace is mentally ill. The corporate control theory, the greedof-those-on-top theory, is false. It's what's going on in the
unconscious desires of the rest of the pack, that matters.
A lot of people in my world respect deeply the restraint
Obama brings to his leadership style. It takes a level of
maturity (something Dick Cheney sure doesn't have) to hold
back from reacting to critics impulsively while still being-and conveying that he is-- totally in charge. Those critics on
the left and the right who view Obama's deliberateness as
weakness are entitled to their opinions, of course, but for
now I'll just say I'm very glad for his measured sense of
authority. (Lucy with Diamonds, response to post, A big
double standard for Obama, Joan Walsh, Salon, 30 Dec.
2009)
After Bush, being impulsive means being clownish. Every politician
1210
knows this. If you want now to deliver the hammer, you have to do it
only after much patience and apparent consideration. Then you can
do what you had the urge to do originally -- squash -- but can
convince yourself that it really was only after "exploring every other
option." (It's a way, too, of making the violent climax that much more
triumphant and exultant.) To me, the appeal, necessity of this new
style / aesthetic these days is so obvious, that those who would
convince us Obama really is just by nature temperate, patient,
measured, would need to show how these lifetime, expert, crowd
pleasers -- crowd READERS -- are just being true to themselves, and
not just faithful to our gargantuan need for a becalming papa.
But about the measured approach . . . Aren't those who end up
mowing down crowds described later by friends and kin, as polite,
shy, well-mannered -- saintly?
Dick Cheney versus Mohammed Ali
America has just deflected a hit. It wasn't pretty, but the hit
was deflected.
Dick Cheney's strategy: No is madder than me! I'm the mad
dog! Let's start flailing madly, maybe knock out the guys in
our own corner, hell, let's maybe jump out of the ring and
knock out some guys in the audience. Let's beat our chest
and roar! Smackdown!
Muhammed Ali's fight strategy: Let's calmly assess the
situation even as it unfolds. Let's plot a reasonable strategy.
Let's focus on footwork. Let's wait for the right moment.
And then: strike.
I'm glad that Obama has a poster of Muhammed Ali in the
ring, and not Cheney. (Jack Sparx, response to post, A big
double standard for Obama)
Jack Sparx
You're great, Jack, but maybe consider my last comment. If you're not
careful, you may come to like / appreciate Obama, and we need you to
1211
stay wholy sane.

Link: A big double standard for Obama (Salon)
Link: Childhood Origins of Terrorism (Lloyd deMause)
2009 best of decade, movie list

My list
Wall-E
Beowulf
Rachel Getting Married
Wendy and Lucy
Step Brothers
Lord of the Rings
Nick and Norah's
Beautiful Mind
Observe and Report
Transformers
There Will Be Blood
Incredibles and Ratatouille struck me as films for editors, for they
make those who shape and control the rangey (i.e., Buddy), the
heroes. Wall-E was the film for artists, those who know its about
aggressing and going outside the lines, even if it makes you a fool /
child / Tom Cruise. (I saw the rat in Auto, and was glad to seem him
get his comeuppance.) Personally, I think it's hard not to be super
self-conscious/aware right now. I think this is just deadly for art, but
great for self-management.
Lord of the Rings. I am simply astonished at how
infrequently these magnificent films are mentioned.
Honestly, I can't figure it out. Were they too popular? Too
epic? Too faithful to the source material? Not faithful
enough? Too lucrative? I simply don't understand it. A list of
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25 films, and they're not there. I mean, c'mon now. (Douglas

Moran, response to post, Stephanie Zacherak on the best
movies of the decade, Salon, 29 Dec. 2009)
Excellent point, Douglas -- particularly apt in consideration of
Stephanie's regret at movie makers / viewers without memory. My
guess is that LOTR draws you out -- emotions on your sleeves, as it
were. You retract afterwards, 'cause it's just no time to feel like you're
a dodo, but also because Jackson IS intent on playing upon you -- he
is manipulative, a bit sinister. Big fan, but I would be wary about
joining his Fellowship: his films have me going a bit "Shakespeare in
Love" after "Titanic" too.
Link: Stephanie Zacherak on the best movies of the decade (Salon)
Seeing 600 movies, at Wilt Chamberlain expense?

George Clooney's real performance of the year
wasn't "Up in the Air." Plus: Jane Campion, "Star
Trek" and madness!
A month or so ago, as critics' top-10 lists started trickling
onto various Oscar-related blogs, I noticed that one list or
another would be branded "idiosyncratic," and I started to
wonder exactly what that meant. Is there a hypothetically
perfect list, a list that follows some ideal template? Is the
ideal list the one that's most in tune with the Zeitgeist? One
that doesn't contain any foreign-language or otherwise
"weird" films that the majority of the American populace
hasn't seen? Considering that 2009 saw the theatrical
release of some 600 movies not that any critic comes close
to seeing them all isn't any list made by any individual
human being going to be idiosyncratic in some way? The
notion that there's an acceptable critical view, that certain
1213
movies must or must not appear on a list in order for

any given critic to be taken seriously, flies in the face of what
criticism is supposed to be. (Stephanie Zacherak, Stephanie
Zacheraks best movies of 2009, Salon, 27 Dec. 2009)
These are the voyages . . .
Strange this, teleporting in and out of so many worlds like you're a
voyager from Quantum Leap. Don't you ever get the urge to pick one,
and stay awhile? It'd be different if they were just different shades of
the same fauna, but they are not that, are not they (are not not
they?)?
Going zero, in 3D
On the subject of Star Trek and new decades, perhaps we'll allow
ourselves a parallel universe this time around. The idea of going 2011,
just defeats. Not even Rocky got past 8 or 9. So we'll go zero once
again. The past will still be around, but he'll be like old Spock -- nice
guy, still there, but not hanging around to be obtrusive. When we get
to one, we'll decide if we'll let it roll on like we did last time, or if we'll
figure out some other way to imagine life. Might it be zero all the
time? Like some accumulating palimpsest? Or some ziggurat (but not
the kind legions of virgins were sacrificed to)?
We could still see movies. But maybe this time they wouldn't be like
the latest meal, or as near read and toss-away as a postcard (3 reviews
a week, as if, in greatest truth, they really did nothing to you
compared to the workaday), but experiences we live -- Avatars, even if
the prose is sharp, and the acceleration muted. They already are that,
but it would be exhilarating and genuinely universe-opening, if we
could acknowledge it, and consider the implications.
Link: Stephanie Zacheraks best movies of 2009
Minding your Msakels, and losing your worms
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I'm also excited to announce that starting in early January,

Salon's talented Joe Conason will start a daily blog. Salon
loyalists will remember the great Joe Conason's Journal, a
daily blog Joe ran back before the blogging revolution.
Finally, you'll get your Daily Joe again on Salon.
Happy holidays. Let us know what you'd most like to see on
Salon in the new year. (Joan Walsh, Some holiday
improvements from Salon, 24 Dec. 2009)
Red Wigglers
The occasional article by people like Nan Mooney ('Not keeping up
with our parents") would be nice. I do think there is a chance that
some of the huge distress students are experiencing, might be missed
amidst all the better comics format, new and/or expanded Food, Film
and Books sections, and more Conason. Thirty percent student
tuition increases. Take yourself back to the 60s and imagine what you
would have done with that, amidst an aging left, still capable of
marked innovation but seeming susceptible to becoming more and
more adrift in once sages and Great Books. (Feel your pain!?: I can't
even see you, dear . . .) To be clear, the new sections/expansions
COULD prove great. I just hope it's easy to imagine liberal 20-yearolds finding home in them, not just out of shelter from the storm.
Fewer articles written by people making sell-outs seem practical,
grounded, fit. Fewer articles making truly sane progressive thought
seem as "unbalanced" and unreasonable (i.e., crazy) as its
"equivalent" on the right. (Really, just count how many articles seem
mostly about helping their writers massage out muscle-tightening
feelings of compromise. I'm not broken; I'm a realist, patient, an
adult -- "you're" the one who's crazy!)
Why no surprises in the letter sections (other than smaller print)?
Has this been well discussed? Hope so. First thing I noticed about
Salon was that it had a very empowering, front-in-face, letter section.
More dynamism there would thrill.
1215
Become a website Coca Cola would hesitate to associate with, even

with it changing with the world, as we all try and live positively, help
one another through the Tides, and learn more. (Oh how we admired
the 'KRP for wriggling itself free from cadillacs of worms!)
Great lineup for SALON's readers on film/books!
But please don't let Film Reviewers hang on an
imbalanced wire...of gender or ageist bias...
Great news and I look forward to Joe's column and the new
Film/Books Reviewers. Although, admittedly, one tends to be
rather subjective in choosing the film reviewer who more
likely represents their own personal tastes, aesthetic
proclivities or socio-cultural experiences, it's nice to expect to
see a more balanced perspective from Salon's Film
Reviewers! And not the blatantly unrealistic genderic and
ageist bias found in Stephanie Zacharek's Hollywood version
of directorial and cinematographic competence.
In particular, her review on Nancy Meyer's newest
directorial effort did not even attempt to thinly disguise this
embryonic reviewer's youthful genderic biases and
extremely parochial appreciation of the film experience
itself, especially as it relates to its own historical roots *and*
to pioneering women directors.
Love it or hate it, Hollywood is the Sahara desert of women
directors and pseudo-erudite reviews in a pedestrian style
such as the recent Meyers-bashing article by Ms Zacharek
[as clearly depicted by the overwhelmingly negative
responses from readers!] are hindering readers' aesthetic
viewing appreciation, not enlightening it!
Yea, okay, Ida Lupino may not have been Cecil B. DeMille,
and Nancy Meyers may not be Howard Hawks! But what's
the percentage of women working as Hollywood
mainstream directors, anyway? One percent? Meyers gets
that the current Hollywood realities are ones predominantly
1216
formulated by male directors. And this ain't good for young

women--as evidenced by Stephanie's own review,
lamentably lacking in sufficiently balanced insights.
But surely Stephanie's film myopia prevents her from seeing
that Meyers' 'Something's Gotta Give' and 'It's Complicated'
hold promise of Billy Wilder's 1959 'Some Like it Hot' and
Hepburn's 'Holiday' of 1938.
And for Stephanie to dismiss Meyers for daring to bring a
"woman's" perspective to the current Hollywood Crude
Comedy stables--while further insulting her readers'
intelligence by her arrogantly displayed dismissiveness of
"older" women's viewing habits....well let's just give this
myopic neophyte the news that 15 years from now, she'll be
sharing the viewing habits of those "older women" she so
despises....with relish! Amen. (Msakel, response to post,
Some holiday improvements from Salon)
It's a vast and great wall, but there is a potential weakness
You know, one more thing now does come to mind . . .
In addition to more youth, more articles that smoke out the meanness
in the Msakels, the vindictiveness in the aging and intolerant, would
be appreciated. What my generation needs to know is that we are not
blocked: and seeing how when boomers (and on) get upset they can
seem shaky, gives us confidence that with apt navigation, if we stir the
pot, we can make our way through them, genuinely does give some
hope for the future.
Link: Some holiday improvements from Salon (Salon)
Making it moo for poop-juice

You nailed it
1217
Thank you, Stephanie, for that brilliant and perceptive

review. I haven't seen the movie - but I've seen the trailer.
And that was enough to convince me that your review is
spot on. (Boopboopadoop, response to post, Its
Complicated: Another missive from romantic-comedy hell,
Salon, 23 Dec. 2009)
You took that movie, and made it moo for poop-juice!
Awesome. Haven't seen the film, but I've seen the poster, and it was
more than enough to convince me your review could not be more spot
on and brilliant. The only draw back is that I was hoping to avoid the
film, but your words served to show me the world I hoped to miss.
Mystifying.
Link: Its Complicated: Another missive from romantic-comedy
hell Stephanie Zacherak (Salon)
Leaving wrinkles to the scaly
Leaving wrinkles to the scaly
Speaking as someone who is looking forward to the day when we have
chips in our head that will allow us to see people as they would prefer
to be seen (or not -- we could dialog it), I am not anti-botox. This said,
I am someone who strongly suspects that a good portion of people
over 50 are going to be spending the next twenty years of their lives
doing things like this, writing humorous, what-they-prefer-to-deemself-effacing-but-will-prove-to-be-largely-self-elevating articles, on
their struggles to deal with anti-agism in the work-force -- their
struggles with aging -- their kids' neglect, wine and au provence, and
of how wonderful it is to finally have a prince back in the white house
(did you hear what that nasty person at Salon had to say about
Obama?! They've had their fun but isn't it about time they put an end
to it -- he's such a nice person, who is really, really, trying, and . . .).
We're afraid as a mass you'll not just be freezing your faces but all
1218
cultural growth, lest it have the least potential to cause you any
anxiety, as you FINALLY come to focus on your own needs after a
lifetime of selfless giving and neglect. Some of us are thinking Brazil,
that is. And a bit, White Noise.
Open Saloners might hope they'll breach a Salon echelon trespass, but
when Salon itself is leaving some of the pointed and wirey behind
(think a Mary Elizabeth Williams over a Stephanie Z.) for the slow but
fiery, it may feel scary and alone when you get here, but you'll be
welcomed, made to feel as if you've become part of a club, as you
would upon leaving any salon.
Wit, brutal honesty, no longer ruled, once 20's style seemed but viper
threat in an upcoming age of mules.
(Originally posted as response to My visit to the skin-torture doctor
Mary Kelly, Salon, 18 Dec. 2009)
Attendants, and abuse

When I heard Wednesday that Sen. Charles Schumer had
called a flight attendant a "bitch" under his breath, my
response was to figuratively shrug my shoulders. I couldn't
even muster so much as a literal shrug. It's not that I
thought it appropriate for Schumer to call the flight
attendant a "bitch" for asking him to simply comply with
federal law like everyone else on the plane and turn off his
cellphone; nor did I think it was a particularly pleasant
comment for his female colleague and seat mate, Sen.
Kirsten Gillibrand, to overhear. Still, I felt rather "meh"
about it.
[. . .]
I was mulling all of this on my lunch break today, when I
walked by a homeless man blitzed out of his mind who
flashed me a lecherous grin. When I didn't respond in kind,
he hurled a choice word at me, and I bet you can guess just
1219
what it was: "Bitch," he snarled. Then he added, "I'll piss on

you." Well, okay, then. That right there is why I'm
desensitized to the word -- if I wasn't, I would be crying in a
bathroom stall right now instead of writing this post. In
fact, if I hadn't been anesthetized to the word "bitch" quite a
long time ago, I'd hardly be able to leave my house alone.
(Tracy Clark-Flory, Feminist silence on Schumer, Salon, 17
Dec. 2009)
People who have daily contact with other people, eye-to-eye contact,
interactions, are the most important of people -- they do the daily
attendance, therapy, which can tilt a whole nation closer to the good.
Crazily, they tend to be set up sometimes as lessers who exist to
pleasure the powerful -- to please, and suffer further abuse. Please
figure out what is working away at you here. Take a time out. And
return to defend no group more strongly, than these most important
of people.
Link: Feminist silence on Schumer (Salon)
A couple recent postings on healthcare

New Jerusalem
If it's going to help people, they should fight like hell to get as much as
they can, but also to pass it. I say this not because I don't believe more
substantial reforms couldn't be initiated later, but because I believe
this is the one and only year Obama is going to seem the least bit
liberal. It will be liberals who will come to fret the government, if
government -- even its social services -- comes to seem more muscle
than nurture. Making a nation fit for war is not something we liberals
have in mind, but it is something ill-liberals could come to see some
sense in.
Liberals probably would be wise to at least begin talking succession.
1220
New style -- with finesse, with the least amount of antagonism, of

course. There are just so many people in the US who want public
healthcare -- a good society; more than enough, that is, to populate a
country. When you come to realize that your dreams can no longer be
realized, and that you are at risk, you owe to yourself to set off. I mean
this truly. Start thinking about it. Return when you have the strength
to convert.
Link: Should the democrats start over on healthcare? (Joan Walsh,
Obama's strained year as a liberal
Obama is weak right now only because he is still in his liberal
incarnation. Once healthcare is passed and true progressives scream
in dismay and alarm -- out of some presumed possession --and
Obamarahm starts turning on them, we will see a new incarnation,
that may well enable him to expand healthcare in the future.
What we get in healthcare reform in this climate may still to some
extent be imagined as a liberal gain. I don't know if this will effect its
implementation/execution, but it might. If further healthcare reform
is moved by a more rightist concern for the health of the "volk" -- the
traditional American, of the like Michael Moore upraises
--progressives would be right to experience some difficulty in praising
it, for it could be part of a national conversation about purity and
illness that will end up doing them and those they spend so much
effort trying to help, more harm than good.
Link: Why democrats must pass healthcare reform (Joan Walsh,
Michael Bay, of Art House St.
"Go! Go! Go!" "Incoming!" "Hit the deck!"
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WwwwwsshhhhhhhhSSHSHSHSHSH---KER-BLOOOOOM!
"Lock and load!" 'Get some!" BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA
BUDDA! Bleee-OWWW! BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA!
"Aim for the gas tank!" BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA!
Ker-BLANG! Splut! Gooooooshhh -- KER-BLOOOOOOM!
"Yeahhhh!" "Woooo-hoooo!"
What Michael Bay movie is that from?
In spirit, all of them. But to truly experience the above you'd
need to read it while riding a roller coaster. The car would
have to be equipped with strobe lights, sparklers, a halfdozen monkeys battering you about the head and shoulders
with ping-pong paddles and a boombox blasting the "Here
comes the cavalry!" orchestral stylings of Bay's court
composer, Hans Zimmer. The director of "Pearl Harbor"
(2001), "Bad Boys II"(2003), "The Island" (2005),
"Transformers" (2007) and"Transformers: Revenge of the
Fallen" (2009) doesn't make movies, he makes rides. He's
the filmmaker every studio boss dreams of -- the director as
adrenaline pusher. He has a facile eye, staging terrific oneoff sight gags (transfusion blood stored in Coke bottles in
"Pearl Harbor"; the mini-droids morphing from kitchen
appliances and Sam's brief trip to robot heaven in
"Transformers 2") and tossing off dozens, even hundreds of
gorgeous widescreen tableaux that most filmmakers would
be lucky to compose once in a career. (Matt Zoller Seitz,
Directors of the decade: No. 10 Michael Bay, Salon, 15
Dec. 2009)
thinking this through
"Bay is a juggernaut clomping through our imaginations, his iron
boots leaving footprints emblazoned with his initials. You cannot
escape his awesome destructive power. Surrender or die."
You referred to Sam's verbal nimbleness; I am tempted to think
through Transformers to see/feel it is really more nimbleness than
1222
iron boots, which leaves the strongest impression. The test,

immediately, is to recall if I more often said, "wow!," rather than,
"how cool!" -- or even, "neat!" "What the hell just happened?" may
not owe simply to things happening too fast, with an indifference to
whether or not you could take it all in, but because you saw
something -- albeit, very quickly -- you're not sure if you've seen
before. Some dynamic, combination, if/then, that worked in a
pleasing way, that you may have experienced in life but hadn't had
the chance to think / experience through in art. Can it be that
something in the way objects are made to interact / relate / crash
bang with one another, affords some insight, options, as to how you
actually do or could experience your world, that you are currently
blind to? His films can have me think through why it is objects that go
through walls feel different in his films than they do in J. Cameron's,
about the emotional signficance of experiences of puncture, fracture,
combination -- phenomenological basics. Don't just take me on a ride,
but consider what exactly this experience involves, how it differs from
others I've been on. Convince me that this is a very appropriate thing
for me to be doing. Not just that the films make you hyper-alert, not
just all the set/reset, I don't think.
Also, I hear loud and dumb a lot. Way too precise for that (at times,
it's even elegant -- think/recall Starscream's launching of missiles at
the dam). In Transformers, the military proves useful, but there's a
sense it's a bit preposterous it managed anything at all against the
Decepticons. It looks to be awesome, but "we will use deadly force"
doesn't quite hold up. There's a lot to stage regular grunts as real
men, but they seem sort of absent compared to those Mann obviously
has an affinity for: the nerdy, more human, more complex and
particular -- less uniformed. The whole be-a-soldier bit at the end felt
like it risked sinking the hero into blandness -- which it did a bit. I
know the intentions, but I really don't think it added to his prowess.
We allow it as we might any experiment, then agree that Sam worked
best when he spun away from the grunts, when his engagement with
the villain was less at their bequest. Soldiers are for Afghanies --
1223
dumb and loud. Sam's is with the Devil -- intertwined, faceted, smart.
Not so coarse, but like you've got a million variant options.
Nimbleness, particularness, may explain why Transformers can feel
so libertous, so freeing, so exhilarating.
Also, not just a tomboy: she was more alive than that. Sam's got heart,
and they made a good pair. There was some charm in their pairing,
and she didn't seem a natural grunt's girl that he somehow got lucky
with. Again, objects interacting, in ways that work, with enough
distinction to afford charm.
@ various almost astonishingly stupid commenters
If you actually, I dunno, read and think about what he's
saying, you'll find "you can't escape it" doesn't mean that
you can't avoid Michael Bay's movies, which of course you
can and probably should, but that you can't avoid his
influence over the way movies are being made in Hollywood
today, be they dumb summer blockbusters or Oscar bait.
Which is very true, and this is a funny and insightful
exploration of that. (jfurg, response to post, Directors of the
decade: No. 10 Michael Bay, Salon)
Thanks, jfurg. . .
For first reading the article! (Kerry Lauerman, response to
post, Directors of the decade: No. 10 Michael Bay)
@jfurg
jfurg wrote:
If you actually, I dunno, read and think about what he's saying, you'll
find "you can't escape it" doesn't mean that you can't avoid Michael
Bay's movies, which of course you can and probably should, but that
you can't avoid his influence over the way movies are being made in
Hollywood today.
The review certainly does emphasize Bay's influence, and thus his
1224
relevance as a "historical document," but since you read the piece,

you'll also note that this reviewer, at least, would think those who
skipped his films missed the chance to see "hundreds of gorgeous
widescreen tableaux that most filmmakers would be lucky to compose
once in a career." Not just relentless bloom, blam, that is, but artistic
tableaux done with a magnificence and an assured frequency that
leaves most filmmakers seeming dumb fumblers.
To me, Bay is life-affirming. I'm glad he's around.
He's a robot in disguise?
Now I know who to blame for ruining Transformers.
Although, I think the animators/effects people should share
some of that blame, for never actually holding a plastic and
metal transformer toy and working out how it transforms.
So much easier to cut from clip to clip on close up with a
pan, while the different sections of the robot "transforms."
That way you can't tell what happens, just a vague blur with
the iconic transformation noises. Remember that these
transformations were often integral to the action/fight
scenes. And how much did they get paid for all those vague
blurs? A round of applause, please, for the vague blur!
(pwakeman, response to post, Directors of the decade: No.
10 Michael Bay)
@pwakeman
"So much easier to cut from clip to clip on close up with a pan, while
the different sections of the robot 'transforms.' That way you can't tell
what happens, just a vague blur with the iconic transformation
noises."
This criticism is very interesting. It didn't seem like a vague blur: to
me, there was a sense that what was happening was integral to the
transformation process -- that someone had thought it through; but it
WAS real fast, and it may mostly have worked to seem physiological
preparation -- muscle tightening, prepping, stance changes -- just
1225
right before battle. There was considerable cunning in it, but if the
transformations weren't made to seem integral to particular battle
situations, there IS Village People effect in it also, some dumbness. I
can understand your being disappointed.
And Bay's hard-on for the military is the equivalent of
George Bush emerging from the jet plane with the "Mission
Accomplished" banner behind him. Bay doesn't respect the
everday soldier, the real one who is putting his or her life on
the line, but the ideal image of a soldier -- G.I. Joe come to
life as a living, breathing person making sure anyone who is
not like him no longer lives or breathes by dispatching them
with the latest hi-tech weaponry. Bay's romaticization of
this kind of soldier is fascistic; the only difference between
the way Hitler glorified the soldier and the way Bay does it
is that at least Hitler saw real warfare. Bay is one of those
assholes from affluent backgrounds who feels that someone
else can do the dirty work of fighting a real war while he
feels entitled to stay at home and just play war with a movie
camera. (Chad Mulligan, response to post, Directors of the
decade: No. 10 Michael Bay)
@Chad Mulligan
About Armageddon: maybe check out Siskel's "weird thumb's up"
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6WjXAZJ9P0). It's funny.
Your claim that Bay doesn't respect the average soldier is interesting
as -- especially in Transformers 2 -- there is a clear effort to seem in
sync, primarily sympathetic to, their point of view. How he glories the
soldier evidences his fakeness, makes him, in a way, less true than
Hitler -- astonishes. If true, and if the war march here proceeds, Bay
should come to see more alien, removed, pretentious -- as we get
directors who go more Hitler-in-sync with those who know the real
smell of war. But between directors who really could, like, kill people,
and those like Bay, who really just go for the tableaux, I'll take Bay
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USA! USA! everytime.

Bay may in the end be deemed of the Art House. What a wonderful
claim! Thank you for it.
Link: Directors of the decade: No. 10 Michael Bay
Canada cannot muster the cookie-monster
We're not sure what explains the sudden explosion of crazy.
Is it deep, destabilizing economic insecurity? The looming
2012 apocalypse? Having a black president? No one knows
for sure. All we know is that within the GOP's base, and on
certain frontiers of the left, as well as the wacky-science
crowd, crazy is hot this year. Crazy sells. It's the year of
crazy liberation! Say it loud, I'm nuts and proud. (Joan
Walsh, 2009: The year in crazy, Salon, 14 Dec. 2009)
In my country, boring is what we do. In 1995 we let a huge
province vote to succeed and they almost succeeded. No
guns, no violence, just democracy. Very little drama.
But crazy is exciting. Extremes are dynamic and fun. Wars
and economic collapse fill news holes and sell advertising.
Polar opinions are riveting. Cataclysmic prophesies on the
right and left help one feel important and unprecedented. In
short, crazy works.
Until America grows up, settles down and takes its
responsibilities to its people and the world a little more
seriously, crazy will be the norm. (Mike Steers, response to
post, 2009: The year in crazy, Salon)
@mikesteers
Until America grows up, settles down and takes its responsibilities to
its people and the world a little more seriously, crazy will be the
norm.
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But how grown-up is a nation that still talks as if it were the

Edwardian? Can you imagine such a nation having its own 60s? If
not, it's not serious, or boring -- more like moribond, or dead, with a
gleam of rich sadism just lurking behind the peaceful facade.
Cdns like being boring because they thereby never quite feel like
they're kids with hands caught in the cookie jar, which is what creates
so much of the psychodrama in the American scene. So violence gets
abrogated, at the cost of self-minimization -- of living. Poor trade.
Still, Quebec got off, not because Canadians are so peaceful but
because they weren't yet in the mood for war. If they try it again a few
years from now, Canada will invade, punish, cripple, as many
Canucks decide, rather than be known for silver, they'd too like to
command respect through steel.
Link: 2009: The year in crazy (Salon)
Tiger draws back

The Tiger Woods drama can't be bottomless -- or can it?
Eventually we're bound to hit bedrock, but fear not, because
that day is surely not this one. By the time you finish
reading this sentence, another eight women will have come
forward to say they tapped that PGA ass, and a lurid video
or voice mail will have been released and reached 8 million
hits on YouTube.
Let's bring it up to speed. We've got endorsement dropping!
A possible VIP coochie-procuring ring! The inevitable busty
cougarangle! The suddenly ironic last interview! And three
words:Crazy. Ambien. Sex. (Mary Elizabeth Williams, Your
daily Tiger Woods, Salon, 15 Dec. 2009)
Declaring fealty
When myriad steroid scandals were finally overwhelming the flexed
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bulk of big-leaguers, when every man with a capacious smile was

being brought down, Tiger might even have sensed his current morph
no longer suited the current taste. Someone said he's a republican.
My guess is that we'll see him start dressing more priestly and join
amongst Obama's ranks, as a man now most commited to rebuilding
America. The lords will fall, and we will have but one king.
Urgent Question to our Media: Why now??
A scandal this broad and deep doesn't happen overnight. A
huge number of people knew about this and yet it never saw
the light of day.
Kind of puts lie to the idea that there can't be a conspiracy
about the Kennedy assassination because people would spill,
eh?
Why now?? (tnmc, response to post, Your daily Tiger
Woods, Salon, 15 Dec. 2009)
@tnmc
Re: Why right now?
You'd think with republicans crying everyday about encroaching
communism, that the upcoming age would be of a lot more of what
we've seen lately: Glenn Becks rallying independents against Obama
overlay. In such an age, you'd figure stand-outs, stand-alones -- like
Tiger -- would continue to be buoyed by popular support, and their
transgressions unfocussed on, truly unseen, even if so well before our
eyes.
But all this talk of bend-over-and-touch-their- ankles rankles, on part
of republicans, is in my judgment -- and whatever the bombast -- just
the moment of concern and alarm before jumping in where the
water's well warm. That is, we think they're going militia when in fact
they are actually going Obama -- they will join up with him, as Obama
proves a military king mostly concerned to stamp out progressiveingrates, the weak, needy, and "selfish" (i.e., the young and the poor),
who will come to seem the nation's worst problem. That is, I think
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people, en mass, are about to lose themselves to the group, and in

such an era, as in the army, individual personality must be dissolved.
So whither Tiger, in his current guise. He was bound to join the pack:
the girls were / are the easiest way to precipitate this, so we used it
now, but we would have used anything. Not with scandals, of course,
but something similar will / is occuring with Oprah. It started just
before the election, when she went Oprah / Obama, and never quite
left. Obama, his minions, and the horribly at risk, is about where
we're headed, unless we able Salonistas figure out a way to head it off.
I would just love it if we could pull off a Silverado. That'd be
awesome.
Link: Your daily Tiger Woods (Salon)
My snark at the "Platform"

The film that defined this past decade for me is itself a
decade-spanning epic: Jia Zhangke's 2000 "Platform," a
generational bildungsroman by turns joyful and crushing,
an account of China's open-door '80s as experienced at
street level, by the members of a small-town performance
troupe. (They go from propaganda skits to break-dancing
demos.) There are films from the past 10 years that I've
probably watched more often ("Mulholland Drive," "PunchDrunk Love," Hou Hsiao-hsien's "Caf Lumire"), but
"Platform" has the special force of a state-of-the-world
address. (Dennis Lim, Films of the decade: Platform,
King of the world
Was "Titanic" this decade? That was pretty good. Leonardo, before he
tried to wipe the personality off his face. Stalled ship, with everyone
partying ecstacy, just before they're clawing their closest, with some
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hopeful examples of how to take measure, and be good, amidst all

that. "Almost Famous" is cool, but I hope we get to talk about that
one. Also, it was so good, it made a lot of money: means we'll all be
ready to talk it over, just as soon as you post.
Link: Films of the decade: Platform (Salon)
Jacking-off, to "The Real Cancun"

That it was released in theaters only five weeks later makes
it a legitimate poster child for the burgeoning digital
revolution of the early 21st century. As a sloppy assemblage
of spoiled, attractive young party animals gather to do body
shots, dance and make out like horny banhees and banshees,
all hope for the future is tossed away like an empty bottle of
Cuervo.
Truth be told, I had planned to stay very far away from
"The Real Cancun" based on the advertising, but a friend
highly recommended it after attending a sneak preview. She
was right. I saw "The Real Cancun" three times in the
theater, bringing different friends every time. Most good
movies have three or four moments that make you say
"Wow." By my count, "The Real Cancun" has 24. (Michael
Tully, Films of the decade: The Real Cancun, Salon, 15 Dec.
2009)
Normally I avoid the theatre, but . . .
Is this satire, or were you trying to sound like the alarmed dainty
trying to make sense of her being very aroused by porn spectacle?
"Relevant historical document," is what you came up with. Look, your
piece is "reality shot" porn: after garnering 24 wows from your canon,
who's going to want to look it up, let alone pick it up.
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The ferocity with which so many championed the war, or

opposed it, made it easy to ignore sizable chunks, of just
about all demographics, that either accepted the
administration's message of "shopping/business as usual,"
or were genuinely ambivalent. Does the film film
legitimately or accidentally offer some insight into those
mentalities, or does it just serve to spotlight one
manifestation of entitlement?
At least a decent percentage of the Real Cancun
demographic, I think, woke up in 2008. Anyone watch this
film since the election? (btrader, response to post, Films of
the decade: The Real Cancun)
@btrader
If the waking up of the real cancun democraphic means cleaning up,
donning uniforms, and off to war -- so mama can be proud -- I would
prefer they remained all beefcakes and booty-call.
Setting up kids as spoiled and selfish is always the pre-amble before
sending them off to war. We project our own selfishness into them,
and get rid of it all, by disposing of them. Leave the kids alone.
The hypocrisy is that these able-bodied young men and
women of prime age and fitness to serve in the US military
in direct support of the Iraq venture were instead partying
on some beach, while middle-aged men and women parents, community members, people with responsibilities were sent to fight the war. (calgodot, response to post,
Films of the decade: The Real Cancun)
@calgodot
The hypocrisy is that these able-bodied young men and women of
prime age and fitness to serve in the US military in direct support of
the Iraq venture, were instead partying on some beach, while middleaged men and women - parents, community members, people with
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responsibilities - were sent to fight the war.

The responsibility of peace-loving adults (the only ones worthy of
respect, of defence) is to ensure that youth are NEVER set up so that
subsequently sending them off to be shot and killed would be to their
and our benefit. You make them sound like prime cow, that exist to be
eaten. They'll hear your call, and we may lose near a whole
generation, who'll bleed so the nation can live -- or some horseshit -but I hope some elder Gandalf stands tall, to at least try to talk them
out of it.
Link: Films of the decade: The Real Cancun (Salon)
Salon discussion of "Almost Famous" gang-rape scene

Patrick McEvoy-Halston: The "Almost Famous'" gang-rape
scene?
Isn't this the film that features the deflowering of a virgin -- out of
boredom -- by a pack of predator-vixons, who otherwise thought so
little of him they were quite willing to pee in his near vicinity?
Maybe we'll come to conclude that "[t]he scene only works because
people were stupid about [boy by girl] [. . .] rape at the time" (Amy
Benfer).
Sawmonkey: Lucky boy
Pull that stick a few more inches out of your chute, Patrick. This was
one of the best flicks of the decade. (sawmonkey, response to post,
Films of the decade: Amost Famous, R.J. Culter, Salon, 13 Dec.
2009)
Patrick McEvoy-Halston: @sawmonkey
It made an impression on me too. Great charm. Great friends. But it
is one of the things you (or at least I) notice on the review, there is the
SUGGESTION, with him being so (rightly) upset with the girls feeling
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so free to pee right before him, that sex with him is just further
presumption and disregard on part of the girls, the movie decides to
play it off mostly as some great score for the kid. My guess is that
Crowe is conflicted about the incident. Packs of girls / women as
friends but also vipers, is certainly something you notice in his films.
The male protagonist who associates with them, who ardently
defends / serves them, forcefully represents their interests to his male
peers ("Joe. Joe. She's written 65 songs . . . 65. They're all about you";
"You guys, you're always talking about the fans, the fans, the fans; she
was your biggest fan, and you threw her away!"), is made to seem
possibly more evolved (the women certainly are in a hurry to deem
him such) but also possibly someone who will never garner full
respect from women -- someone, who in the end, is actually the one
who making the mistake in not hanging out at the "Gas 'n' Sip on a
Saturday night completely alone drinking beers with no women
anywhere." Crowe seems someone who could well ask,"One question.
Are you here because you need someone or because you need me?,"
but also someone who'd immediately retract, capitulate, owing to still
being a bit afraid to stand up for himself and put his foot down.
Brian D: Wow
I believe some people need to re-read the premise for these "reviews."
I think it had something to do with which movies were the most
personally influential films, not perhaps the critical best.
The film had a similar affect on me personally, but I wouldn't say it
was the best film of the past decade. And yes, there are some issues of
gender politics in the movie, but name a film where there isn't. (Brian
D. response to post, Films of the decade: Almost Famous)
Patrick McEvoy-Halston: @Brian D.
The premise behind this new Salon feature is to launch "salvos" and
otherwise get a spirited conversation going. How does, "And yes,
there are some issues of gender politics in the movie, but name a film
where there isn't" draw us further into the film rather than school us
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on out? I was getting at something I felt fascinating and significant

about Crowe, that hasn't been much remarked upon, and was hoping
for expansion and engagement, not dismissal.
sawmonkey: You're right, in a way Patrick.
If gender issues had nothing to do with the scene it would be a
horrific gang-rape. The social mores, being what they are, say the
opposite to me. What 14 year old boy doesn't dream about being
surounded by a sea of pussy? Some of Crowe's more self-serving
moments don't hold up well (ie: this particular scene) but on the
whole, he captures what it's like to be a kid living in his skin. The
soundtrack ain't bad, either.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston: @sawmonkey
Well said, sawmonkey.
Link: Films of the decade: Almost Famous (Salon)
When people've been bad, they don't deserve to survive

We all need a strong leader, even if it's just that little voice in
our heads telling us that the CIA is tapping our phone.
Dictatorships, domestic abuse, religions centered around
loving but vengeful patriarchs, the military, yoga retreats,
Oprah all symptoms of our childlike desire to be led
around by our noses.
And never before has the populace strained quite so
strenuously against the unbearable oppression of free will.
Look what our independence has bought us, after all:
Houses we can't afford that are worth less than our gigantic
loans. A terrible legacy as the world's jackboot-wearing
cops. Lady Gaga. Where does it end?
[. . .]
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So far this season, though, we haven't seen much evidence of

strong bonds forming between other players. Sometimes
we're kept in the dark about these bonds, but this year,
somehow it seems likely that they don't exist. In fact,
everyone seems to recognize that Russell is double-dealing,
but no one knows quite what to do about it.
Why? Because they've all enjoyed the luxury of being led by
their noses since they landed on the beaches of Samoa. If
someone else is doing most of your thinking and your dirty
work for you, and miraculously you remain on the island
day after day, why stir the pot? That's like landing in
paradise, then taking God to task for the inadequate flavor
profile of the pineapples there.
And let's remember, these players are weak. They're hungry.
They're not sleeping well. Is this really the time to take a
stand? Once it comes time to fight, will any of us recognize
that the hour of destiny is upon us? Most of us, when pressed
to face up to a big challenge, tend to order a pizza and cue
up "South Park" instead.
[. . .]
Will Russell prevail? Personally, I'd love to see him emerge
victorious. (Heather Havrilesky, Will Survivor
mastermind Russell reign supreme?, Salon, 12 Dec. 2009)
The kids were spoiled, rootless, and pathetic--they were
asking to be fucked over!
I've noticed for a bit that Salon's solution to "too much garbage in our
face" is veering toward becoming, becoming the Axiom. This, "those
left behind got what they deserved, anyhow," will help quieten any
guilt, if they still have the capacity to emphathize.
If we find ourselves in the position where we're cheering on, not only
abusive people, but justifications for abuse, let's hope somebody let's
us on to this fact, in a way we are likely to be able to hear. I don't
know if Heather is in full possession of herself right now, but what we
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heard just here sounds like it was voiced from the persecutory alter in
her head, the "place" we switch to when reminding ourselves what it
is to be weak and vulnerable, is all too much to handle.
When nazis put jews in filth, feces, and torment, some would openly
masturbate in excitement. If this sadist here wins, and we exult, are
we participating in this sort of glee? Given this article, it sounds like
it.
Godwin
sure shows up in the strangest places. (sansh01, response to
post, Will Survivor mastermind Russell reign supreme)
BTW, sansho1 is absolutely correct; Godwin's Law is
inarguable. I hardly consider voluntary participation in a
competitition to win $1 million comparable to the suffering
of victims of the Holocaust. (Guy Caballero, response to
post)
A story that exults of a sadistic leader and his
broken, pathetic, subjects, is no place for a nazi
reference
"It's time for a sure-handed, charismatic commander to lull
us into sheeplike complacency once again. Fascism,
communism, whatever flavor suits his or her mood is fine
with us, as long as we don't have to make bad decisions all
by ourselves anymore. Just make sure the little cameras in
our bedrooms broadcast to the Web, so we can watch along
with our fearless leaders, thereby helping to snuff out
insubordination, laziness and chronic masturbation.
We'll be just like the Red Guards in China, only less fit and
much more perverted."
So THIS is a "strange" place for a nazi reference? Really, sansh01?
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Given it's lead, it would seem the most appropriate of places.

"I hardly consider voluntary participation in a competitition
to win $1 million comparable to the suffering of victims of
the Holocaust."
Guy Cabellero: Jews were eliminated, in large part because Germans
came to think of them as greedy money-strivers, whose immorality
needed to be removed for Germany to be pure. Setting up people as
DESERVING what they get, is how you get holocausts. Their
humiliation and disposal thereby can be done, without guilt. This
show is helping some people view most people this way.
Read more
Obama, the new Israel
I still don't understand why the right is giving O any public
praise for this. I would've expected the right to quietly toast
and gloat, but continue its public criticism of of O and the
Oslo speech on whatever trivial or manufactured grounds it
could come up with.
I don't see what the right gains tactically from publicly
praising a Dem prez for a war speech, when the Repubs
have gotten so much mileage for decades on asserting
ownership of national security.
Someone 'splain, please? (ironwood, response to post, The
strange consensus on Obamas Nobel address, Glenn
Greenwald, 11 Dec. 2009)
Left vs. right is in a process of re-sorting into war-craving, sacrifice
desiring, and the genuinely peaceful. The war-craving understand
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that Obama is the right cover to legitimize sadism on a scale that

Bush could never accomplish, owing to his whole aesthetic seeming
about 20 years out of date. For many Republicans, Obama is the new
Israel, in a way; and the left that just cannot believe that the greatest
threat, the most insidious traitors, in this America with a black
democratic president, will increasingly turn out to the THEM, will be
the Palestinians, routed from their homes for suspicious conduct.
Cheney et al. love for people to think of them as conniving, of motive
-- they need to think they're Cartesian, mind in charge. But in reality
they're the most prone to lose themselves to the sacrifice dance.
Republican party is full of people like that; but, to a lesser extent,
there's plenty on the other side too. Watch carefully: even Jon Stewart
and Colbert will at some point start banging drums. I'll be curious to
see what happens here at Salon. Hopefully we'll all help each other
stay sane and good.
Link: The strange consensus on Obamas Nobel address
Too porn, and gimme-gimme
If the tables were turned, and believe me I really want to

turn the tables, we would live in a world were women could
express their sexual interests and desires openly, without
fear of harassment or damage to reputation, and in a world
where women would have an easy time explaining to men
how good conservation and foreplay can turn them on.
(svutlov, response to post, Sexist female pigs, Tracy ClarkFlory, 9 Dec. 2009)
I think that would be excellent too. Truly. But in this best of words,
men too would feel free to voice their foremost desires, without
instantly finding themselves set up as inconsiderate pigs. I noticed
you went from nipple-licking to vagina-tonguing: Does seem when
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people now speak of women's foremost sexual desires, the prepped

picture that comes to mind is man's face on woman's crotch. This isn't
putting a bag on her head and doing your business, but it's missing
something worth preserving / emphasizing in the eye-on-eye and
flushed cheeks. Too porn, and gimme, gimme.
Link: Sexist female pigs (Salon)
Avatar's here -- and it's HER lamp, not you bachelors'
(Note: This is a reply to Stephanies Zs review of the film,

which I just missed being able to comment on.)
Saw this movie; thought Cameron felt this movie way more than
you're arguing he did. Special effects so awesome, a world so
beautiful, so eternal and seductive, a story so satisfying and true:
neither we, nor he, are ever supposed to decide to leave. The next step
for him, that is, is not the next movie, but for this movie to be made to
seem our world. I don't think he was a distant individual paying
homage to some "other,"or ever for a moment thinking bachelor, but
someone who is making clear that this story is his soul, as he humbles
down, in a way, to embrace the communal lush.
People on this thread are talking cosmopolitanism and philistinism.
Cameron has always been an interesting case. If philistinism is
lapsing into group think, losing yourself to emotive child stories, in a
way the particular cannot relate to, Cameron's films tend to be way
too alert, I think, for them to seem really philistine. If the characters
don't think, be actually quite smart and discerning, they're dead. This
is true even with Titanic -- which did lose all the T2 wit -- with Rose
thinking "what to do? what to do?" until the whistle-grabbing very
end. Even though most cosmopolitans hate Titanic, they want you
to know they love T2 -- and often Aliens -- and I think it's because
you're kept alert, smart, and feel distinct, from beginning to end, in
many of his films.
This changes here. Stephanie yet again here saves the actress, but
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she's the emotionally primitive date you lapse to when you've actually
now begun to tire of the Sigmourny Weavers of the world, whose level
of interestingness unceasingly demand you stay conscious and awake.
Stephanie's right about the guy. There is nothing particular about
him. He is just a wash, making him so different from what we usually
get with Cameron. And the villains: the corporate hack goes
Sigmourny's way in this film: he is nowhere as present and relevant as
he is in Aliens and (if you allow a bit of latitude) in T2 (I'm thinking
the psychologist). We get a truck, instead. And it, he, fights the tree -the group spirit in this film, which arises in the end, to give you that
feeling you never get elsewhere in Cameron: being buoyed by a largerthan-you spirit of righteous, benevolent goodness, that will address
all concerns, make you feel undefeatable, will make you whole.
(Actually, I suppose there was some of this at the end of Titanic, but
it's in full rush here.) The action could end up seeming less distinct,
moment-to-moment possible and crucial, and it would thereby PLAY
to the sense of enrapture, the mystical and pre-ordained. If I go,
there's another right behind me to take my place: you feel this dumb
awe which numbs / kows individual pretensions, at the end of film.
And this is philistinism. I feared it was our future, just as soon as
democrats chose dream-addresser Obama, over conference-maker
Hillary.
Someone said Gaia. This is my concern. Gaia was a concept by hippies
who, though they talked collectivism, were just as much about
nurturing individual difference -- your own special genius. Their
personalities unfolded, and they became particulars, names,
individual stand-outs. But this is Gaia as lapse into group belonging.
If the youth go for it, cosmopolitans will become alien to them,
become enemies to them, and we'll be surrounded on all sides.
----Dear Pat
What I do when I find I am so late reading the thread that
it's already closed is post a link to the article and then say
whatever the hell I want on my own blog
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( inkpaperwords.blogspot.com ). You might consider that

rather than interrupt a thread that has nothing whatsoever
to do with your comments. (Thesaurus Rex, response to post,
Long live The Young Victoria, Salon, 18 Dec. 2009)
@Thesaurus Rex
What I did was wait until I actually could see the film, before
commenting. This way I could say something about the film itself,
rather than just about Cameron or Stephanie -- You can't have a (or at
least much of a) conversation about a book before reading it, wouldn't
you agree? The thread's been up a few days, but that's only reviewer's
privilege -- opened here Friday, couldn't see the film until Saturday
morning, started writing about half hour after the film finished, and
the thread clunked out, ten minutes into the writing. So I posted here,
and wrote a letter to Salon encouraging them to do what's necessary
to make Salon conversations about movies as interesting as they are
elsewhere. Until they do the sensible and keep the thread up until
Sunday evening, I'll do everything I can to see the movie Friday
evening. I'm intending to keep this a one only.
My name is Patrick.
Link: Long Live "The Young Victoria" (Salon)

Playing fool, to boomer-king
Concerning my despicable boomer "hatred"

Contrary to reports, HTWW does not want to sentence an
entire generation to mandatory euthanasia
Judging by the comments thread on yesterday's post, "Curse
of the Boomer Hegemony," and some extremely upset and
vituperative letters written to me personally, I really hit a
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nerve with my comments on the generation that supposedly

won't let go.
I will cop to an inflammatory headline, but for the record, I
am not calling for mandatory euthanasia for baby boomers,
nor do I bear them any special ill will. (Andrew Leonard,
Concerning my despicable boomer hatred, Salon, 11
December 2009)
THIS is your power, boomers
I really hit a nerve with my comments on the generation that
supposedly won't let go.
Supposedly? So the truth is otherwise? They really want to pass the
baton onto youth, but circumstances have just determined they have
in fact handed them the bayonet?
Indeed, as a 47-year-old born in 1962, I belong, according to some
demographic calculations, to the final trailing edge of the boomer
generation, although I have always considered myself part of the
pitiable "lost" generation, stuck between the boomers and Gen X,
with no identity to call my own. But if you want to, consider me a
self-hating boomer wannabe.
I don't hate you, I really hate myself: If I make myself seem all small
and pathetic, will you promise not to eat me? Note: that slight cut at
you in the end, if it catches more than the glimmer I intended, is,
again, to be primarily understood as one of the tics born of being so
ill-positioned and self-loathing. Take it as evidence your presence is
so solid and impressive it draws me -- quite genuinely -- to slide to
the side out of snaky deference and take cuts while I can: it's a
compliment, really. And please don't press me on this. I know I'm
capitulating: I'll lose ALL self-respect if I can't think of myself as
slippery in net.
And just to make the point of my last sentence -- "Conspicuous, selfinvolved consumption abhors a vacuum" -- totally clear: While I can
1243
understand why that might sound hurtful to a 55-year-old who has

kids in college and is living on the edge of unemployment, my point
was actually hopeful, in that it pointed to the possibility of a new
generation of Chinese and Indian consumers pulling the locomotive
of the world economy, replacing the yeoman efforts of American
baby boomers. As long as such consumption doesn't overheat the
planet into unlivability, I'm fine with that.
When I referred to laviscious, self-absorbed assholes, you must
understand that I was really thinking of you as plowmen, and of
others, as engineers, all in train to flex National vitality through
girded spending efforts (forgive the evident hyperbole -- it's not as
much sarcasm as you might think: I meant it to be largely believed,
IN PART because I expressed the plain truth through exaggeration,
which I now want to use to help convince you that I'm always at play,
and therefore to be believed if I exempt myself from slights made to
those whose toes I've stepped on I actually do fear could stomp me
out.) The only thing actually really consuming, is the selfconsumption arising from being unable to resist in the end wryly
implying that your engine of accomplished consumption, still might
just -- and this is what I really meant to argue -- be worrisome. You
are truly awesome, my lord -- way too big for me! -- but do not know
your strength, and its possible implications.
Link: Concerning my despicable boomer hatred (Salon)
Wilbur-bourbon
Cider-bourbon braised bacon

Get the rings and the bubbly ready, because you're going to
officiate the wedding (Ian Knauer, Cider-bourbon braised
bacon, Salon, 9 December 2009)
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So you're pulling a Good Fellas on the poor Wilbur ...

EVIL DUPLICIOUS MAN: "Guess what little piggie! -- we think
you're so ring-ding special, we're going to save your hide and anoint
you special!!!"
WILBUR: "Squeel! squeel!"
[Evil despicable man leads Wilbur to "ceremony" room]
REPREHENSIBLE, UNEMPATHIC, UNCARING MAN: "Sorry
pig, You shouldn't have been born so tasty sweeeeeet . . ."
["Blamo!" -- as voiced by Marisa Tomei, from My Cousin Vinny.]
[Followed by chef-prepared, Wilbur-bourbon; pig-skin wallets for the
best men; and a burp, by reprehensible pig-eating thug-man]
-- FIN -NOTE: You would have to say that a pig WAS very much harmed in
the making of this drama, but he got good press, and should prove
good to wear.
Next up!: Vegan meat! -- it'll save them from losing their souls to
meat from a vat, and us from more of their blather.
[Followed by vegans being ground up, a la Fargo, and a grand feast,
catered by the Obama-loyal, grateful to dispense (with) the untrue.]
Link: Cider-bourbon braised bacon (Salon)
Cormac McCarthy U: Come bag yourself some Shakespeare
My "radical living" experiment convinced me that the things
plunging students further into debt -- the iPhones, designer
clothes, and even "needs" like heat and air conditioning, for
instance -- were by no means "necessary." And I found it
easier to "do without" than I ever thought it would be. Easier
by far than the jobs I'd been forced to take in order to pay off
my loans.
[. . .]
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I refused to join those ranks. I became a deserter, an

eccentric, an outsider. At Duke, I felt like an ascetic in the
midst of wealth, a heretic in the Church of the Consumer. I
had to hide.
Because I was so paranoid about campus security finding
out about my experiment, I kept myself apart from other
students. Whenever I did talk with a fellow classmate, I
found myself souring the conversation with preposterous lies
-- lies I'd tell to protect myself. Whenever someone asked me
where I lived, I'd say "off campus," or I'd make up an
address before changing the subject. I found it easier to
avoid people altogether.
[. . .]
While I have plenty of good things to say about simplicity,
living in a van wasn't all high-minded idealism in action.
Washing dishes became so troublesome I stopped altogether,
letting specks of dried spaghetti sauce and globs of peanut
butter season the next meal. There was no place to go to the
bathroom at night. I never figured out exactly where to put
my dirty laundry. Once, when a swarm of ants overtook my
storage containers, I tossed and turned all night, imagining
them spelunking into my orifices like cave divers while I
slept. New, strange, unidentifiable smells greeted me each
evening. Upon opening the side doors, a covey of odors
would escape from the van like spirits unleashed from a
cursed ark.
But no adventure is without bouts of loneliness, discomfort
and the ubiquitous threat of food poisoning. I loved my van.
Because of it, I could afford grad school. So naturally I was
nervous as I listened to the security guard's weapons jingle
as he ambled by my windshield.
But he just kept walking. (Ken Ilgunas, I live in a van down
by Duke University, Salon, 6 December 2009)
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frontiersmen as men-of-letters--or was that just Northern

Exposure?
Do your grad school papers reek of beaver stank? Was the paragraph
ahead an adversary, the one past, a trophy kill?
Rather than go 2001 cavemen -- BEFORE they found fire -- we would
do better to BUY the ipod, go itunes U, and enjoy our free
education ... with a drop of brandy.
Best to you, but you'll need a few years of recoop, in the spa. Actually
that's probably what we all need . . . hopefully Obama's got that on his
agenda.
----@boots
I talked about it! Itunes U -- it's free! I already have 11 degrees, from
all the best profs from around the world! May never really get
credited, unless they figure out some way to scan my head and say,
yep, he's real smart!, but real university attendance is so stressful it
drops you down the evolutionary ladder, even if still helps you along
the corporate one.
That's too cute. It gives you PTSD. You go lupine, even if you don't
grow fur. Canines chunking down the curriculum, but just as ready to
dig into your own skin, so you're always on the ready. Humanities -fuck. The best capture of this is a 30 second bit in "Accepted" when
Bartleby visits the real university to see his girl, and the essay by
Deresiewich.
----The good news is that the best education, i.e. the most
valuable education this guy is getting is how to survive on
less. When the lights start to go out; all over the world, those
skills will come in very handy.
Who knows how to cook a meal on a gas stove anymore let
alone trap a rabbit, skin it, cook it and eat it?
The oil is half gone, and in the future we are all going to
have to learn how to live using just a fraction of the energy
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that we use now. Ken is leading the way.

The average single family home was 2,349 square feet in
2004, that takes a lot of energy. That energy has to come
from somewhere, and right now that's the middle east.
America's thirst for energy from oil, is one of the root causes
of war. (Bill Owen, response to post, Ken Ilgunas, I live in a
van down by Duke University)
Cormac Macarthy U
Yeah, let's train our kids so they're ready for fracturing of America,
the clash of civilizations, the environmental collapse. They'll be all
jacked up on mountain dew --not the best neurochemical mix for
contemplation, but I've seen Gladiator et al. and know the first to go
is always the liberal arts "professor," who, despite all evidence, thinks
life's about peace, solitude, friendship, and soul. Heck, his/her excess
brains and lack of response-readiness make him/her sure zombie
meat anyway, so maybe sooner rather than later we should think of
using him/her to shore up our own body fat. Maybe if we all start
skinning rabbits, the more sensitive and weak amongst them will see
where we're going and nobly sacrifice themselves, in hopes the rest
will find some wry way away.
----@calgodot
Some of us don't want people to take a Call-of-Duty approach to
university. There are times when people go off the grid, and despite
the debris, it still smells of flowers. Dillard's stuff can still read like
that. Whole Earth Review still reads like that. Makes you more
soulful, and more truly civilized. Here we get the Call of Duty ethic,
cloathed in Thoreau. It is about bagging the biggest buck, survival of
the fittest, pretending that the worst thing in the world is the current
conditions (which it is) when you're in fact using it to enable your
own self-narratives, to legitimize as desperate and necessary a
regressive course (engage the fear!) you clearly prefer to be on (as
someone below pointed out). Someone else referred to Wendy and
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Lucy. See that film for a strong sense of this truly being exactly what
we should want to avoid. It'll have us either joining the packs, or
clinging to moribund Great Books for some sense of the lasting, at the
cost of self-development and a worthy future.
What I would like to see here at Salon in the future are stories from
people who go OFF university altogether. I think the time is near
ready for it, because I think that some of the most sensitive, most
genuinely curious, just won't be able to take much of the university
atmosphere as it is right now. If they have the strength to find one
another -- and this is key -- it is probably in their best interest to form
something on their own. For the longest time, regardless of the state
of the universities, the best still went there (though I agree with those
who argue that their journey-of-the-soul approach, ensured they
never made it to the ivy-leagues). I think we're at the point, though, of
"what the hell else is there?" After all, if you go to university and
everyone there is thinking career while you're still hoping soul, the
company you keep might just deflate and estrange more than it
invigorates and "accompanies." Could be like Goethe and court.
Make itunes U your friend. Leave grades behind; leave large lecture
rooms behind. Adults ARE closing in on you -- sadists strangling the
struggling child -- but please find your own way through without
becoming bullets and armor.
----Dukes
The Duke part of the story is crucial. It's about aura, the woodsman
that becomes Abe Lincoln, the rapiersman who becomes a royal
Muskateer, and thus participates in further disenfranchising the
anonymous good person from the mid-level university that bookgrrrl
speaks of, who puts his/her skills to best use, at genuine risk of never
receiving real credit/attention for doing so.
Can you go about your life with NO means of demonstrating you're
relevant rather than wastage? When people get scared, I think they
de-evolve into preferring kings, queens, princes and magic solutions,
over the beautiful in the everyday. Becomes harder to ignore the
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crowd, living without aiming to please, and be a true hero.

Link: I lived in a van down by Duke University (Salon)
Neat freaks
Salt and pepper sets are arguably among the most mundane
and ubiquitous of gifts. But this particular set, the Taste of
Talking, sums up a lot of what can be wonderful about
products that are idea-driven -- inspired by thought and
creativity.
The part with the holes? Those parts are mouthpieces and
earpieces from old telephones. They are NOS (new old
stock), not used. There are stockpiles of such product left
from the days when we all used such phones. They're
repurposed here to pour seasonings at the table.
[. . .]
There are a series of progressive values reflected in the Taste
of Talking. It's green: It uses recycled (and nonbiodegradable) parts that might well otherwise truly end up
in a landfill. And in using these mundane, disused materials,
a wholly unexpected result is achieved, which, I think,
changes your perspective on the materials themselves,
causing you to look differently at some of the castoffs of our
industrial culture. Beauty in a telephone mouthpiece, or an
auto sidelight lens? Yet, viewed through this lens, these
things are indeed beautiful.
And, these shakers are -- in a word that a lot of my design
community colleagues use -- democratic. They marry
thoughtful and even groundbreaking design with simplicity
and affordability. My favorite corner of the design world is
democratic modern design: great and elegant principles
applied to create affordable objects. My family and I live in
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an Eichler house here in Marin. Joe Eichler built

subdivisions in the Bay Area in the 1950s and 1960s, and
was truly a Utopian. He hired some of the finest modern
architects of the times, and they created stunning
prototypes, and he put up hundreds of small houses, with
groundbreaking architecture, that were affordable for
families of very modest means, buying their first home.
(John Pound, Taste of talking, Salon, 4 December 2009)
Neat freaks
If they were used stock but were really well cleaned, would it still be
possible to get AIDS from them? Is that the problem? 'Cause I think
you'd probably be okay.
I think the problem is that unlike most recycled goods, where the
story behind the materials gets sort of scrubbed away in the process,
this doesn't really work with spit. You'd be using your shaker, and
lifetimes of human interaction / distress / would assault your food,
with the dash of salt. Interesting that. Same thing would probably
happen if we knew car parts were owned by dead-enders -- the sort
that all too visibly are drifting into insanity right now; or bike parts,
from the kinds of kids we progressives are probably going to *sigh*
off to war. This could be compensated if we knew who designed them,
maybe -- clean, neat, super smart but never exposed, is what we want
to welcome into our souls.
Link: Taste of talking (Salon)
Hippo-daddies, not hipsters, in the new depression era

How often have you been at a fancy dinner party, or a
rocking kegger, and overheard someone lamenting the fact
that their friends with children have suddenly been rendered
incapable of discussing anything except the contents of the
baby's diapers or the adorable thing little Cullen did to the
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dog? There are Facebook groups for venting frustration with

parents who constantly yammer about their offspring and
the business of raising them. I understand where these
people are coming from. But it is hard for me to understand
why they are so annoyed after all, those people are free.
The common misconception of childless, alcohol-imbibing
party guests and cyber-ether baby-haters alike is that
parents blabber constantly out of some arrogance or
indulgent desire to show off their great kids and their perfect
parenthood. Nothing could be further from the truth. We
parents have so little now; the children have taken so much.
We just have nothing left to say. We sometimes hear
ourselves and know how we must sound to others, and we
feel great shame. Our children have broken us and turned us
into single-subject simpletons. They've accomplished this
feat in what is supposed to be the prime of our intellectual
life.
[. . .]
So next time you find yourself tearing into a friend or
acquaintance who can't shut up about their kids, the next
time you find yourself ready to fire off an angry missive
about the unrelenting surging tide of mommy blogs,
remember that you're hammering a dead cat. We know it's
sort of sad, but it's all we have until the kids become a little
older. Allow me and my kin to engage in our one
conversation, even if it's just to stay in practice for when we
emerge from the bunker. Maybe you can even find it in
yourselves to muster a little understanding for us next time
you're out past 10 p.m. at one of your fancy childless keg
parties where you discuss the new Philip Roth and the
Phillies' amazing World Series defense. Because, who
knows? You may find yourself dumb like me someday.
(Aaron Traister, Is my kids making me not smart, Salon, 4
December 2009)
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re: "We know it's sort of sad, but it's all we have until the kids become
a little older. Allow me and my kin to engage in our one conversation,
even if it's just to stay in practice for when we emerge from the
bunker. Maybe you can even find it in yourselves to muster a little
understanding for us next time you're out past 10 p.m. at one of your
fancy childless keg parties where you discuss the new Philip Roth and
the Phillies' amazing World Series defense. Because, who knows? You
may find yourself dumb like me someday."
We're hearing now of how some of the rich are beginning to spend
again -- Hermes, Jaguars. Maybe they (rightly) sense that America
actually gets kind of a weird kick of knowing some people are still
enjoying wall-street heaven, while everything else crumbles. But this
group of fortunates actually serve as cover for a more evolved sort -those who not only know the right strategy to best enjoy the next
twenty, but how to properly exult in it, revel in their own
superiority/fitness, without anyone being on to them -- without
themselves really being on to what they're doing. They're THIS crowd
-- the ones who are full of "excuse me this," "mightn't you allow me
that": those who, if you let them, will try and convince you they are
nearly ridiculous, completely compromised, left out. But don't be
fooled -- somewhere inside of them they know that all those divorced
couples, all those bachelors with time for Roth, are strangely coming
to seem genetically / culturally unfit in the new America -- 20s
flappers/swingers, that had come to seem just WRONG when
America had returned back to the conservative hearth. Aaron will
forever persuade himself that the world believes YOU are the ones
who have it made, and will use this belief to enable his "but I get to
have my little bit, and it's actually kinda fun too!," but if you look up
close at him and his ilk, you'll know what I say is true.
Don't be fooled into letting him have his "one conversation," without
a strong measure of (inevitably unreasonable) complaint: he makes it
seem so innocent and small-scale, but it's really about the new
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revival, set to leave your flapper ass out in the cold.

Link: Is my kids making me not smart (Salon)
Salon store
Welcome to the Salon Store -- a new Salon feature that we
hope you will find engaging, entertaining and a useful
extension of what Salon is all about.
The Store's mission: to offer a collection of products that
reflect what always interests us at Salon -- startling
creativity, soul-pleasing utility, interesting ideas, unique
perspectives and sometimes just the profound wackiness of
our culture.
Why do we think the interests of Salon and its audience
translate into products? Because, in various ways, things
matter to all of us. They make statements, they offer
solutions, they express or create emotion. I think of Salon as
a place -- a destination, a community -- that is defined
chiefly by an evolving set of shared interests. So we think it
will be fun, interesting and appropriate to identify products
that reflect those interests and showcase them on Salon. And
we are particularly interested in your feedback about the
products we offer as well as others you think we should be
offering. We'd like your participation not merely as
purchasers but as curators along with us. (Richard Gingras,
Welcome to the Salon store, Salon, 29 November 2009)
small question
if we buy small things from the salon store, and sip and chat drinking
some starbucks' love brew, does this mean we get to have nothing to
do with those kids being shot and killed in afghanistan, having their
tuitions upped 30 percent, those poor suckers losing their houses,
considering military employment, and bound to have their kids turn
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increasingly feral?
the goods look pretty good, actually, but it kinda feels like you're
opening the door to further wall-street bonuses, evidence that despite
it all, you really don't have to give a fuck this christmasy time of year.
Salon can feel rangey, but still be colorful and fun. You've put a neat
bow on the site, which makes us all feel a little less like them, which
isn't quite what our souls need.
Link: Welcome to the Salon store (Salon)
Amid the $1,000 (and $10,000) titanium-framed, fully
suspended, on- and off-road competition bikes for sale
around bike-obsessed San Francisco, I stumbled onto this. A
custom Sting Ray chopper re-creation. All chrome. With
spiral/twisted fork ... and high-density spoke wheel ... and a
steering wheel ... and mufflers ... and a spare tire, to top it
off, carried in the back, like my granddad's '35 Ford.
I called the phone number the next day. I found myself
talking to a young guy -- a kid, the owner/builder. He lived
in Richmond, an economically challenged city in the East
Bay. At the end of my day at Salon, I drove across the Bay
Bridge to have a look.
I drove up a street with no occupied houses, save for the one
that was my destination. It was encircled by a high fence.
There was a large dog in the yard. I honked the horn,
walked up and met a Hispanic family. There were three kids
playing in the yard and driveway, a well-kept house, and a
garage full of projects with wheels. No English spoken here,
save for the owner of the bike. Mom sat on the front stairs
watching over everyone, friendly but guarded.
[. . .]
Two-hundred fifty dollars was a lot of money for a bike that
had seen a pretty hard and well-used life, no matter how
deeply it had been loved. The fork was loose; the wheel
spokes had a patina of rust. But for a signpost, a memory of
a hardworking family, doing their best against really bad
1255
odds? I paid him, and hoisted the bike into the back seat of
my car. I asked if I could take their picture, and received an
emphatic "no" from his protective mom. (Of course not -what was I thinking?) The bike now sits in the courtyard of
our little house in Marin.
[. . .]
But on the other hand: Products -- the right products,
designed with passion, for the right reasons, made
responsibly -- can be inspiring. They can be the embodiment
of values and, indeed, of dreams. They can literally change
people's lives, both those who produce them and those who
consume them.
A product may distill the conviction of a young designer,
studying art, wanting to make a difference. Or it may
represent the deeply held beliefs of an engineer who has
spent a lifetime studying a need and developing a theory. Or
it may embody the witty, fun imaginings of an inventor who
just wants to make people smile. Or it may hold the hopes of
a 14-year-old kid who can make something of chrome that
embodies his loves and passions, that gives him a reason to
work toward his future.
[. . .]
The mission of the Salon Store is to find and showcase
products that fit with Salon -- because they embody ideas.
As a starting point, we embraced three key words: smart,
funny and progressive. (John Pound, Products that mean
something, Salon, 1 December 2009)
Clean slate
Is the hippie that sold out, now a redeemable aesthetic? Top-teer art
school, clean, modern aesthetic -- this DNA injection is carrying Salon
further into the celestial, away from all the accumulating rust, rage,
breakenings.
And bike-builder -- American poor aren't yet Guatemala rural (and
1256
true!). You won't be fashionable for some time, and, as I've argued,
you don't quite match the current aesthetic anyway: one brief tour to
the discrepid, and now no more to the commons, and the disquiet.
Link: Products that mean something (Salon)
If we learn to talk to ghosts, maybe Jim Henson can
summon us an army of muppets
He'll get health care, many of the (not in truth, all so) left
"abandoning" him this instant will be back with him, and then as a
very monstrous beast, they'll turn their many heads on the
progressives who've outed themselves, loudly, out in the open, as
anti-Obama, and strike.
They'll have Obama, FOX news, liberals, Palin, conservatives, CNN -maybe NPR, and Salon store. Like Viggo, we progressives are in need
of some more men.
Link: Yes, its Obamas war now (Salon)
Just friend them; they're as frightened as you are
I did not go quietly into that lonely and unpopular night.

Each morning, I tried to assume a casual air of friendship.
Big mistake. My efforts backfired, and my former friends
apathy toward me turned to hatred. Soon, I was not just
ignored at school. I was tripped as I came out of the shower.
People made flatulent noises when I sat down in class. My
locker was magic-markered with the word "loser." We are
tempted to remember this behavior and make light of it. Oh,
it couldnt have been that bad, we said. But I remember it
well. It was that bad.
[. . .]
Whatever my intention was when I contacted my former
1257
friends, its different now. I no longer want validation; I no

longer am testing the waters to see if they now find me
worth their time. These women are not who I thought theyd
be. Theyre people having a hard time in the economy,
people who are struggling through their days, their
relationships. I dont have enough in common with them to
think that, had we not fallen out, our friendships would have
survived. But here, now, I am someone who also struggles
with these things. I have stretched across a social divide that
was narrower than I thought, and I found community
where I least expected it. Am I pathetic? Maybe. But what I
also am, finally, is a popular seventh-grader. I think of my
younger self, eating her lunch alone, wondering when this
agony will be over. I wish I could tell her I haven't forgotten
about her. I wish I could tell her I've made it OK. (Taffy
Brodesser-Akner, Facebook, the mean girls and me, Salon,
29 November 2009)
They've befriended me, but still insist I have a mangina!!!
You are that popular seventh-grader if you know that if you found
yourself back in that place, at that time, that something about you
would make you liked, not despised. I think a lot of people assume
that if their older self was teleported inside that youth from way ago,
s/he'd show everyone a thing or two. I suspect many would actually
find to their horror, that they haven't grown as much as they need to
think they have.
All your friends are suffering. It would have been better for you if
these old pals proved to be doing just as well as you imagined. It
would have been good for you (but poor for them) if, after they
friended you, they taunted you in the way you recognized. Better help
you to test to see if you have come as far along as you deserve to have,
or if "old ghosts from the nursery" continue to haunt.
----beat me, I'm worthless
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@smontgomery
re: "Most likely, if they have any decency, then they'll
apologize up and down, you can accept it--and then you can
have an *honest* friendship. And if they don't... you know
they aren't worth it."
I like the idea of bringing it up. But I think what one would hope for is
an honest response from them, more than you would an apology. It is
possible that they tormented her because she seemed almost to want
to be tormented--which is what masochism is all about. The sense
that her neediness made her bad, which still haunts her now, very
likely afflicted her then.
----@kisilano:
We weren't all extremely needy. Only those who were poorly attended
to were. These are the ones whose neediness was so profound, they
either tormented similarly needy kids, in an effort to DENY their own
neediness, or put themselves in a position to be bullied, to confirm
the rightness of parents who had assessed them as not worth the
time.
In any case, I'm all for going back. But the main problem isn't there:
it's earlier, and elsewhere.
----Writing under Ross cover
I don't think this article is particularly brave. For some time now
we've not lived in a society where all boats have risen, and we've all
come to understand geeks as those who later on in life are near
expected to become Ross-types from friends: their geeky traits
actually evidenced their appropriateness for our sophisticated
information age. Under this protection, we're seeing a lot of people
own up to being geeks. Intellectual, cautious, and accomodating, they
even now have their own president. So if you're a successful writer
writing now of your previous torments, there is a sense that you're not
just uncovering old wounds, but cementing a sense of yourself as
constitutionally fit, in a way. To many of your current peers (and us)
1259
you may not even be tipping your hat to them (i.e., your early
tormentors), to their lasting influence on you, because many of us are
barely off talking to one another about how wonderful it is to be
carried afloat with Obama, after so many foul years of being pressed
down by Bush.
Again, I think the journey back is extremely important. But there are
so many temptations to do so so "armored" that we discover nothing,
really, but in a way that allows us to pretend that we've uncovered
everything. Also, that tightness in your stomach: It's primarily from
your experiences inside your home. Most kids even now are more
needed by their parents than they are loved by them. They function to
give their parents the love they themselves missed out on. When kids
start reaching out on their own, to explore who they might be, not
only do parents start to lose interest, they also lash out at their kids,
for abandoning them just like their parents once did to them. As a
result, many kids develop "alters" inside their heads, which tell them
they are bad when they reach out for what they themselves want.
These alters are a crazy-awful affliction, but they serve the child
because they ward him/her away from a superego crackdown. Bullies
no doubt function as external alters. In any case, they're not
unfamiliar to you, when you first encounter them in school.
Take on your mom. Establish for us what it felt like to be abandoned,
bullied by her -- what it still might feel like to be afraid of her. Do it in
an environment when showing how you were once a geek doesn't
evidence your likely current withitness, but rather that something
horrible was lacking in you, may still be lacking you -- that not
treated, will deny you so much of what you deserve through life. Even
if you become a senator, who no longer responds to out-of-town
requests.
Link: Facebook, the mean girls and me (Salon)
American gothic
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I have a lot to give thanks for this Thanksgiving, but I find

myself particularly grateful for one thing: I'm not President
Obama. From Arianna Huffington on his left, warning that
rising unemployment could be "Obama's Katrina," to the
ever-crazier Glenn Beck on his right, threatening to
desecrate the memory of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with
an anti-Obama March on Washington 47 years to the day
after King's triumphant convening: His critics are sparing
no rhetorical excess in their rush to denounce the president.
[. . .]
But using Katrina as a point of comparison is excessive.
Katrina was an example of government incompetence and
indifference, all at once. Obama is neither incompetent nor
indifferent. He is a centrist Democrat, one who brought in a
record amount of Wall Street money during the campaign
and, not surprisingly, a whole lot of Wall Street veterans
with him into the White House. I find that many
progressives who jumped on the Obama bandwagon early,
selling him as the progressive candidate in the race
contrasted with corporate sellout Hillary Clinton, are, like
Huffington, among the most disappointed by the president. I
was an Obama admirer but a skeptic, and I find I'm less
chagrined about the ways he falls short of my ideals than the
folks who swooned for him early.
[. . .]
In his New Yorker blog, George Packer examined Obama's
declining popularity and rising troubles at home and
abroad, and, like me, argues that part of Obama's problem
is the unrealistic expectations of many enthusiasts. Packer
adds this troubling observation:
[. . .]
I'm a little more patient with Obama because I never saw
him as the great left hope, but I agree with liberal critics
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who want the president to deliver on Democratic ideals and

focus on the many casualties of the economy. It's funny but
with a Democrat in the White House, Matt Drudge is
trumpeting what liberals have always talked about as the
"real" unemployment rate -- the unemployed plus the
underemployed and those who've given up finding work -and it's over 17 percent. A third of all African-American men
are jobless. Let's welcome the right's sudden focus on the
casualties of the economy, and challenge them to come up
with solutions. They won't, but Obama can and should.
[. . .]
On this Thanksgiving, I remain grateful Obama is in the
White House. I'm thankful Dick Cheney is flapping his gums
as a private citizen, not the most powerful man in the world.
I believe in Obama's intelligence and decency. Like a lot of
liberals, I believe he shares "our" values; I've just never been
entirely sure he has either the political courage or savvy it
takes to act on them, quite yet.
[. . .]
The real challenge is to show Obama and other shaky
Democrats that there are political rewards for representing
the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. Too many
politically conflicting interests got to say they elected
Obama, and too many progressives jumped too soon to
claim him as our own, without asking him to prove it. (Joan
Walsh, Im thankful Im not President Obama, Salon, 24
2009)
American gothic
Strange how this article has a way of making IDing someone as the
centrist democrat with wall-street backing, a way of re-establishing
him as still, potentially, our great hope. Who is he? He's not the
crazies on his right, he's not the swooners on his left. In a world of
crazies, his prosaic origins beacon reason.
But these ARE portent times. Crazed goblins bounce about the body-
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politic, away from office but everywhere still in our face; the blind
gain sight; hope has become an affliction. And it is appropriate, then,
that Obama actually be made to seem most like an idol -- something
near frighteningly unknowable. Someone/thing with great potential,
but yet remains inert and removed. Someone/thing we would draw
out -- to should and could!, but remain inclined to serve, to show
before we would dare have him prove.
Link: Im thankful Im not President Obama (Salon)
Creationism--> Evolution --> Imagination

The moving force we likely know, but is not worthy of our
love
The universe, according to Dawkins, was put together randomly--not
out of love, or hate, or volition, or disinterest. We find this
disconcerting, because we are meaning-craving human beings. What I
find strange is that Dawkins isn't more respectful of our need for
things to BE beautiful, by which I mean, moved out of true love, not
just out of fascinating processes, not just SEEM beautiful--to see in a
forest something that is intrinsically spiritual and good, rather than
just a marvelously successfully adaptive/adapting manifestation. If
everything before us was made without intent--conditions simply lead
to changes, formations--then why should it interest us so? That is,
Shouldn't we become less interested in the fact of what is out there,
now that we know it better, and more interested in how we--as
meaning-making, as makers with the potential to create out of
empathy, true love--are prone to see/perceive this world we have
been born into? Our phenomenological experience is to me the God
mind out of which so much great matter, might be fabricated. Since
WE can be loving, personable movers/makers, shouldn't our focus
come to be on what we fabricate in this universe--not just our technie,
our machines, but lifeforms, too? Shouldn't we insist that scientists be
more than not demon-haunted? Shouldn't we expect them to be
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empathic, emotive, poets, too--who don't just study the world about
us, but transform it into something as personable, as truly relatable,
as we instinctively are prone to engage with it as?
Just to be clear: yes, creationists are demon-haunted, not to be
listened to. Yes, corporations who bio-engineer are currently hardly
poets at work creating loving things. Yes, Dawkins can be very
inventive and exciting in his explorations, but is not fully worthy of
us, either.
Your unfortunate relativistic gobbledygook is as exhausting
as it is meaningless.
"The universe, according to Dawkins, was put together
randomly--not out of love, or hate, or volition, or disinterest.
We find this disconcerting, because we are meaning-craving
human beings"
The knowledge we have about how randomly the universe
was put together has absolutely nothing to do with Dawkins'
(or anybody else's) assertions or beliefs and everything to do
with scientific facts.
Speak for yourself if you find it disconcerting. I am
positively nowhere near the "meaning-craving" anything
you choose to be.
"Shouldn't we become less interested in the fact of what is
out there, now that we know it better, and more interested
in how we--as meaning-making, as makers with the
potential to create out of empathy, true love--are prone to
see/perceive this world we have been born into?"
So now that we as a species are getting so good at really
understanding the world we live in, in the most wonderful
and USEFUL ways (basically, acquiring more knowledge the stuff that rapidly evaporates our incapacitating
mysticism) - now we should "become less interested" in that
and more interested in... realizing our potential as meaning-
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making makers, or something. And by the way, "we"

(scientists, clear thinkers, humanists, etc) are plenty
interested in how human beings perceive the world. Read
"Consciousness Explained" by Daniel Dennett. Warning:
you will find it deeply disconcerting as a meaning-maker.
And then there's this (best for last)...
"Shouldn't we insist that scientists be more than not demonhaunted? Shouldn't we expect them to be empathic, emotive,
poets, too--who don't just study the world about us, but
transform it into something as personable, as truly
relatable, as we instinctively are prone to engage with it
as?"
No. Absolutely not. We absolutely, definitely should not do
that.
Cheers (Untimely demise, response to post, Creationism vs.
atheism: Its on! Salon, 23 November 2009)
I don't understand why the self-assembly of our amazing
planet and the resulting biosphere isn't miracle enough for
people's spirituality. (Alteira99, response to post,
Creationism)
@altaira99
re: "I don't understand why the self-assembly of our amazing planet
and the resulting biosphere isn't miracle enough for people's
spirituality."
It's cool. It's astonishing. But the fact that Moby Dick might
eventually be written if you let a bunch of chimps pound at a
keyboard for a few millenia, is interesting too: but if it was the fact of
it, I think our assessment of the book would lessen. It was written by
someone motivated to create something lasting, meaningful, and
great--it was MEANT to speak to us, and that's a much more beautiful
thing.
The earth wasn't, and to a certain extent should leave us a bit non-
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plussed--more entranced by the fact that we can imagine it as worthy

of love--by ourselves, that is, and become way more interested in
what we fashion out of the raw materials.
Evolution somehow lead to something that takes over in a way
superior, fantastic sense (we need to stop speaking as if we're still
operating under some other force: natural selection randomly lead to
something--us--that is motivated, that can act out of love--not, that is,
unknowingly out of a desire to spread the love meme). Tyrell was
something in Blade Runner; but he created something far superior in
Roy, who knew life was in the science, in a way I can respect.
Praise the Flying Spaghetti Monster!
...and the Invisible Pink Unicorn. (Wendy in California,
response to post, Creationism)
Originally posted as letters in response to:
Creationism vs. atheism: Its on! (Salon)
Your pain is worthy, but there is a lesson to be made of you
Let me be clear: I think those are all perfectly reasonable
questions. It's just that I think they're perfectly reasonable
questions to ask about the objectification of Megan Fox, and
every other Action Movie Girlfriend in history, as well.
Treating a man just as poorly as women have long been
treated in films made for young male audiences is not the
kind of gender equality that gives me hope for the future.
But thinking critically about why folks become so offended
when they see that happening might, in fact, lead to a bit of
progress. Why is it so unsettling to see a young male actor
dehumanized, but not his female counterpart? Why do we
sympathize with a man saying it's hard to be nothing but a
pretty face, but vilify a woman who says it? Whether or not
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you can answer those questions, if you can at least spot the
difference, you are obliged to do one of two things. In
Doyle's words: "Be less weirded out by the fact that ladies
are getting all freaky about Robert Pattinson. Or be MORE
weirded out by the dudes getting all het up about various
lady movie stars." (Kate Harding, Another feminist defence
of Twilight, Salon, 23 November 2009)
Broadsheet sees no dawn for men: learn to love the leash
Guys, you're shit out of luck. You think you've earned a right to a
hearing, but you've only really just begun to understand the suffering.
Women have been boy-toys since cave-men invented patriarchy.
Milleniums of objectification, with no remedy, no notice, no justice;
and now with the leash barely on, you think we'll respect your
wimper? Maybe sometime year 3000, but since you started it all,
maybe never.
Also, hope for a better future and all that.
Signed,
Broadsheet
P.S. In truth, we think Megan Fox is a bimbo slut. She proved
momentarily useful, is all--have at her.
Link: Another feminist defence of Twilight (Salon)
When you're not buoyed, and when you are

Thing is, that derision is not only about Park Slope, and it's
not only about strollers, which have somehow become
synecdoche for the perceived ills of indulgent parenting
everywhere. And it's not only about "parenting," either. No,
I am telling you, it's about mothers. (White mothers,
generally, and usually urban ones -- if in part because
they're out and about on sidewalks and subways, not
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cloistered in carpools and playrooms.) You know them, or at

least their epithets: "Stroller moms," the "stroller mafia," the
particularly objectionable "stroller Nazis" -- and while we're
at it, the "helicopter moms" and "sanctimommies." Along
with the area blogs, the New York Times got in on the
Maclaren fun with a silly shark-bait story on the allegedly
"palpable sense of anxiety" the recall had wrought on the
"hyper-conscientious" Slope. Standard online comment: "If
the typical 'Slope Mummy' was not so hell-bent to get to her
pilates classes, yoga classes, or whole foods market to pick
up her 'fair trade, organic food items,' perhaps she would
not be so careless as to fold 'Johnny's finger tips' into the
hinge mechanism and amputate them." (Lynn Harris,
Everybody Hates Mommy, Salon, 22 November 2009)
----As a man who was once interested in marriage with
children, I came to realize that this was no longer a
reasonable aspiration for men who are perceived as
average or less. More and more, having a child has become
an economic and/or cultural statement by women who feel
they are special enough to procreate. They pass this bias on
to their children who then make it increasingly difficult (hell
in fact) for the declining number of children from normal
backgrounds, to be accepted. (RealConservative, Response
to post, Everybody Hates Mommy)
@realconservative
Remember though, the most recent talk concerning parenting is
about over-parenting, about a need to give kids range, freedom,
again. It's more than the "newest": it has at least some feel of a
genuine awareness that the last 30 years of child-rearing was done in
a trance-like cultic state, no one could break out, and where no other
option existed, that did no one any good. Guys like you who rightly
concluded the time wasn't yours, may find pockets opening up that
1268
allow for your original dreams to be more readily realized.

Expecting
Mom's have succeeded--they are fecund, relevant to the future. The
rest of you neuters ought to stand to the side, offer what you may, and
then fade away, so your viral ways don't afflict the children.
Maybe "Mom's" [sic] have "succeeded," but you still haven't
succeeded in figuring out where an apostrophe belongs.
I knew someone would come up with some Social Darwinian
jeering. It never, ever fails.
That, you know, is a sign of real happiness with one's lot in
life.
(Freudian slip -- I actually wrote Darwinish! I corrected it,
but had to mention it.)
The only people "relevant to the future" are those who
succeed in leaving something immortal behind them. I refer
you to Plato's Symposium for further details. (Gigi_Knows!,
Response to post, Everybody Hates Mommy)
@Gigi_Knows!
There are times when a culture tends to buoy certain groups, and
depress others, to an exaggerated degree. My feeling is that for some
time now, those who have strayed from paths society deems relevant,
potent, have been made to feel worthless-- a feeling they can try and
take advantage of, or ameliorate, by being masochistic, herald their
gains in ways which speak more of what they've been denied. I think
that currently certain groups of parents now feel that sense of
inflation, are often "on" the opiates it constantly encourages, and am
therefore not at all convinced that what they are up to is best
described as "hard." Hard, in my judgment, is finding yourself living
without the charge, without the means to readily reproduce that
exultant but crazed look, everyone who is successful is expected now
to share. Your experience of life becomes one of waiting, serving, and
1269
the last thing you should be told is of your need to serve yet some
more. Rather, you need to know that this too shall pass--wait it out-and in the meantime, time to offer moms some honest feedback, so
they perhaps can snap out of it.
@Gigi_Knows!
Re: "I knew someone would come up with some Social Darwinian
jeering. It never, ever fails."
Just so we're on the same page, my first comment was intended to
help point out how social darwinist our era feels--how the childless
have been made to feel, how awful it is. (Maybe my previous
comment to you pointed that out.)
I saw the error just as soon as I posted. These things happen, not just
out of ignorance or sloppiness. You know this--this is a conversation,
not a publication: it's about being as literate as possible, while you
partake in the energy and the flow. Not so much spellcheck; and it
may be the way the literate not just make unnecessary errors, but
possibly allow room for their language, grammar, to evolve, grow. Not
this time--sure: But free-range, not contrivance.
Patrick, dear
I'm sorry. I didn't know. I thought you meant it. (That even
happened to Glenn Greenwald recently, if you can believe
it.)
I don't have kids. I don't think it's awful.
There was a time when people who tried to make me feel
awful could. That was a long time ago, so long it's hard to
remember.
(My recommendation: Watch some foreign films. In fact, try
nothing but, at least for a while. Seriously.) (Gigi_Knows!,
Response to post, "Everybody")
Link: "Everybody Hates Mommy" (Salon)
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SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2009

Almost as if God gave each one of us a brain
Literary awards are more than just ego boosts these days.
As the critic James Wood observed a few years back, "prizes
are the new reviews," the means by which many people now
decide which books to buy, when they bother to buy books at
all. There are some 400,000 titles published per year in the
U.S. alone -- one new book every minute and a half -according to Bowker, a company providing information
services to the industry, and there are fewer people with the
time and inclination to read them. If you only read, for
example, about five novels per year (a near-heroic feat of
literacy for the average American), you could limit yourself
to just the winners of the NBA, the Pulitzer, the National
Book Critics Circle, the Booker Prize and then, oh, a Hugo or
Edgar winner -- or even a backlist title by that year's Nobel
Prize winner. You'd never have to lower your sights to
anything unlaureled by a major award.
On the other hand, if you've just self-published a book on
parrot keeping or your theories on how the world could be
better run (a favorite topic of retired gentlemen), what can
you do? If you weren't able to find a publisher who wanted
it, you can also expect to be routinely disqualified for review
in the general media and, above all, for prizes. Yet have no
fear, you Cinderellas of the publishing game, because (to nab
a line from someone else's promotional campaign) there's an
app for that. (Laura Miller, Vanity Book Awards, Salon, 17
November 2009)
---------I'm a novelist
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A book is published every ninety seconds?

Memoir is the most popular form with readers?
I think I'll just go and kill myself now. (LauraBB, Response
to post, Vanity Book Awards)
@laurabb
It gets worse: around the globe, there's probably a thousand people
born EVERY SECOND! Could you imagine if we had a world/society
nurturing enough, that each and everyone of them could write
something particular to themselves, and great to read?! Could you
imagine a hundred million writers out there -- all good to great --and
what that would do to an author's self-esteem, place in the world, the
contortions it would inspire to his/her ostensibly progressive
sensibilities?! There's genius and beauty in every one of you -- what a
nightmare if that were in fact true!
Patrick
Whatever your problem is - I sense a case of toxic
resentment - it isn't with me. (LauraBB, Vanity Book
Awards)
@laurabb
What is your problem with a book being published every ninety
seconds?
---------Being an author still carries status, and there are a lot of
unhappy people who want that. But they do not realize how
much work goes into being excellent, no matter what the
field. This is not necessarily their fault. Popular media loves
the Cinderella story in its many permutations, and
downplays the time and work that precede discovery.
In open-to-anyone writers' groups, there are people who
seem to learn the mechanics of writing even though they do
not possess the ear for it. It is akin to someone who is tone
deaf learning to go up a note and down two and sometimes
being on key, but invariably ruining a song by at least one
1272
off-key assault.
They cannot help it. (trace element, Response to post,
Vanity Book Awards)
Re: Being an author still carries status, and there are a lot
of unhappy people who want that. But they do not realize
how much work goes into being excellent, no matter what
the field. This is not necessarily their fault. Popular media
loves the Cinderella story in its many permutations, and
downplays the time and work that precede discovery.
Books felt like this about thirty years ago--now in so much that is
lauded, I smell deference, not discovery. Rather, you get a sense that
if someone actually came up with something new, s/he'd have slipped
off the only track those regularly published are capable of seeing
before them. It's why some literate people write books titled, "Is it
just me, or is everything shit?"; it's why some of the literate go
through blogs and letters more keenly -- where exactly are the
interesting to be found, if not in books?--than you might know.
re: In open-to-anyone writers' groups, there are people who
seem to learn the mechanics of writing even though they do
not possess the ear for it. It is akin to someone who is tone
deaf learning to go up a note and down two and sometimes
being on key, but invariably ruining a song by at least one
off-key assault.
They cannot help it.
But I thought you were arguing that the danger in too many books is
that it becomes more difficult for the truly literate to be spotted. This
portrayal of non-writers vs. real writers makes it seem as if those who
actually are "NBA" quality will always spotted, regardless of how
many towers surround them. Speaking of the NBA--one senses that if
"they" learned they were missing the real talent, they'd adjust. They
care more to find talent, perhaps.
re: The profusion of books, including the self-published
ones, means the real jewels are often hidden beneath a pile
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of mediocrity, and this reduces their chances of being

found, let alone read and lauded, as they should be.
I keep company with a lot of imaginative people. I don't see a world of
greats vs. non-greats. Rather, there are many greats out there: the
question is which ones are best suited for you. People need to be
sufficiently nurtured so they develop that sense you rightly laud, so
they really do become particular, large, interesting, but they also need
to know their voice counts--to get it out there!--so those who would
have a nose for their voice, for what they have to say, can find them.
Your vision of the few amongst the mediocre many smells of a need
for order, of grandiosity . . . comes across as fearful and cruel. People
who talk like this I think would be upset if the real truth developed
that there are actually a heck of a lot of really good writers out there:
that the buried gems analogy could not be well applied to reality.
They want a world of dum-dums hoping for props for their (snicker,
snicker) masterpiece.
Link: Vanity Book Awards (Salon)
The Wild Things ate my Freud, and ain't my friends
Freud is not my co-pilot

When Max is asked in the film what is the cure for loneliness,
he responds that "a little loneliness is good."
There's a sadness and a beauty in the way Max manages his
loneliness by using his imagination. He takes himself to a
place we've all visited, where our greatest fear is being eaten
by a monster, and our greatest defence is becoming bigger
than any other person, so big that we become confidant and
advisor to monsters.
When Maurice Sendak's book was published in 1964, a
dumpster bin-sized amount of literature spewed out,
upchucking explanations for the monsters as oversized,
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morality play characters, each representing a basic human

emotion. In Jonze's film version, monster Carol (James
Gandolfini) could easily be read as a transvestite with an
insatiable sexual hunger, hence his voracious appetite for
past kings. The asexuality of these creatures could make for
a Freudian buffet of psychoanalytic opinion. The book has
been said to demarcate the fine line between fear, comfort
and some deep-seated desire to gobble up your own mother.
But spare me, please. Enough is enough. This child of divorce
isn't interested in living a life obsessively psychoanalyzed.
Jonze has no patience for this either, which is why I left the
movie theatre surprised, but satisfied. The film reminded me
that loneliness is too easily made into monster, that
loneliness also has the power to conjure magic for a child
who lives inside excellent forts, and who possesses a
storybook that makes her the King of the Wild Things. (Mine
Salkin, Where the Wild Things Were, Tyee, 17 November
2009)
Down with Freud: give me a razor, and /or some pills, please!
re: "The film reminded me that loneliness is too easily made
into monster, that loneliness also has the power to conjure
magic for a child who lives inside excellent forts, and who
possesses a storybook that makes her the King of the Wild
Things."
Loneliness / abandonment does other things, like make you create
imaginary friends that talk to you when you're a child, then turn on
you to harrague you ever-after about how bad you are, how selfish
you are, adolescence on (oh those wonderful persecutory alters, split
personalities -- sorry, I meant wonderful spiritual animal friends!).
Other things too: like make you adopt a posture of acquiescence,
defeat, self-minimization ("a little in a bit of solitude"), in hopes that
this will make you finally well suited to obtain the attention and love
you missed out on. Psychoanalysis --or just intuitive, loving therapy --
1275
can help out with this. But if you're down with Freud and up on
romancing deprivation and cruelty ("I was abandoned; but this
turned out to be a good thing!--thanks, mom!"), I hope at least you
accomplish little when people like you turn on progressives who
aren't so keen on making isolation and deprivation seem grounds for
the imaginative life: who see it instead as the source of becoming
demon-haunted, schizoid, self-lacerating -- fucked-up.
----Attendance
Appears as if I was quoting you, Dorothy, but for some reason I
actually thought I was quoting the article: I read the article and the
responses, and my guess is that your "a little in a bit of solitude" well
enough captured the feel of, the circumlocation one feels/experiences
within, the piece, that I inadvertently quoted you.
In any event, I hear you, and like having you call me friend.
There is a myth out there we are all too ready to cooperate with, even
though it helps facilitate a great evil--a block to social improvement,
to living standards--and that is that creativity is born out of "seeing
both the good and the bad in life," in knowing bare cupboards, the
uncertain meal-ticket--real want. I hold this as entirely false, and that
imagination is in fact kindled by being well attended to by supportive
people who make you feel secure enough to venture out, who are
there for you when you want to return, and delight in the back-andforth you see when loving people share adventures with one another,
when they spur each other one. Every sad artist had more self-esteem
than his/her brethren--and in that s/he was sort of lonely, but
comparatively, very well fueled.
We tend to focus on the cruelty, on the isolation, but the story is in
the attendance, in the love. Always.
Link: Where the Wild Things Were (Tyee)
Things are not as they seem: thoughts on Obama / Palin
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Now that her Oprah appearance is over and boy, did

Oprah let the liberals in her audience down; what a waste!
let me confess to my own Palin fatigue. I just can't take
seriously the idea that she'll ever be president, even after her
moderately successful softball game with Oprah. Palin
sealed that fate when she quit being governor (although
maybe she can run with Lou Dobbs on the All Quitters ticket
in 2012). She'll never obtain the record or the reliability she
needs to run credibly for president now that she gave up the
modestly challenging job of running Alaska. I don't see her
ever having the self-discipline or the humility to admit how
very much she'd need to learn to be remotely qualified. (Joan
Walsh, I have Palin fatigue already, Salon, 16 November
2009)
Intuition: I wonder if it will end up that Pailin is to Obama, as McCain
was to Bush? That is, despite it all, I am not actually convinced that
those who support Pailin actually hate Obama -- I think they fear him,
are afraid of being co-opted by him, but could actually find
themselves by his side if Pailin motioned at some point for them to
support him. I think we're at a time when a heck of a lot of people are
going to be crossing sides -- and the groupings that remain, whatever
they are, will be composed of people psychologically similar to one
another but who may hereto actually have been members of different
parties.
What's moving this thinking is the tone in which some guy on FOX
news this week admitted Jon Stewart was right, and "they," wrong, on
some issue or another. Wasn't angry -- but sort of welcoming. Somber
dressing, ex-smoking Stewart, was never flower-power. You can feel
with the aesthetic touch of everyone on the show, that there's more
than a bit of FOX in them. Not going to go Republican, but might end
up seeing a different tone in which his show engages with FOX,
though. Or different media targets. As with GG, perhaps more antiTucker Carlson and David Brooks attacks, than anti-FOX.
1277
Also, how Glenn Greenwald reported recently that George

Stephanopoulos admitted, through twitter, that GG was right to
lambast his reporting on some issue or another. Again, of the moment
-- both GS and GG seem psychologically similar, and I could see both
of them, in the end, being important supporters, essentially agents of,
Obama's administration.
Two absurd claims here. But I believe them both true.
@Saintzak
Those bigots you grew up with, wouldn't be ones who loved WWE's
the Rock -- the black guy who played Obama-Hulk last year on SNL -would they? Maybe what is most key about bigots is that they possess
an intense need to project their own unwanted character traits,
feelings, onto others, and not their hatred of a certain, particular
group of people? That is, maybe they could all get behind Obama /
Palin, so long as they provide them with groups to hate, efforts in
which to sacrifice themselves for the glory of the mother-nation?
What is coming to mind here is how the Nazis turned to hating Jews a
bit late in the game--after all their anger and hatred was targeted at
the needy and poor, who were keeping Germany weak. Anti-semitism
was supposed to be a French thing (Dreyfus affair) but materialized
everywhere in German when "they" now seemed the most appropriate
group. The hatred was key; targets-flexible. Maybe true here too.
Something we will know for sure if these tea-bagger-folk end up
supporting Obama, as he sends off more young men and women to
kill muslims, sacrifices more of our "selfish," "greedy," "needy," youth
(representatives of our striving, ambitious selves) so we can all feel
pure and good again.
Link: I have Palin fatigue already (Salon)
Salon as a ritual site, to enact the birth of the righteous
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Regardless, I found myself doing the baby boy victory lap.

I was excited about having a boy, but I was also excited
because I had endured a good deal of ball-breaking from my
guy friends before the gender had been determined. My
buddies ribbed me about having a yucky girl baby. One
friend went so far as to assure me my wife and I would only
have girl babies for future pregnancies as well. It would be a
plague on my house -- a plague of girls.
When it turned out the curse had been lifted -- or, more
precisely, that it never existed -- I admit: I crowed.
After that opening salvo of macho banter, I began to wonder
if we speak about the sex of our impending children in vastly
different ways and if the reservations about baby girls were
not just limited to juvenile 20-something dudes. But it wasn't
until we were expecting our second child, two years later,
that the question transitioned from a passing curiosity to a
legitimate concern. (Aaron Traister, And may your first
child be a feminine child, Salon, 15 November 2009)
Guys, he's not lying about the incidents -- Aaron WANTS / NEEDS to
think of himself as being wholy contrite, soul-bearing, here, so there's
no way he would make an error in any of this. If you focus on them, it
will in fact help enable what he is really up to: using Salon as a ritual
site, confessional, in which to establish himself as a sinner who aims,
at least, to be the good boy who'll attend to the neglect women have
suffered. He is returning to mother's lap; admitting how wrong he's
been; and how, now, he'll try to do good. It's more than about a
release from anxieties, from feeling punishment-worthy -- though it is
that: it's about priming himself to war against all those truly bad boys
out there who cannot be deterred from understanding their own
needs as as important as their mothers', as their wives'. War against
the ostensibly selfish.
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The falseness we're sensing here comes from this being part of a ritual
-- he wants it to appear soul-searching, about self-discovery,
realization -- but his course is predetermined, and those not similarly
on course sense the something strange that is up, here.
He's not the only in all this. Check out "Hi, I'm Marty, and I'm a
recovering Republican," to get a sense of what, I think, we can expect
an awful lot of here at Joan Walsh's (maternal), at Broadsheet's
(furies), Salon.
Hope you snap out of it, Aaron. Become even more truly self-aware
than your sister is.
Link: May your first child be a feminine child (Salon)
"What's with this rabble?" bores

So he's come. Prince Charles, the man who, against my will,
I had to pledge allegiance to, the future King of Canada. Like
all naturalized Canadian citizens I had to take the citizenship
oath or be denied. The oath says I swear (or affirm) that I
will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty
Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, Her Heirs
and Successors, and that I will faithfully observe the laws of
Canada and fulfil my duties as a Canadian citizen. Trust me
no American wants to plege allegiance to the English
monarchy but at least we were warned. (Matthew Adams,
Prince Alarming: Why Charles visit should make us royally
sad, rabble.ca, 6 November 2009)
But weren't all the dragons killed off in the 13th-century? I could
understand having knights around then, but I don't quite see their use
now. But I guess if they've got all that royal blood, there's nothing to
be done about it.
Actually, what are doing with "nations"? Isn't that an 18th-century
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concept? -- the successor to empires and fiefdoms? Anyway, if we're

stuck with countries, it sure is unfair Americans got all "unalienable
rights of man" rebels and "pursuit of happiness" dreamers, and
Canada got all the "what's with this rabble?" bores. Don't you agree?
Link: Prince Alarming (rabble.ca)
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2009

The left is seeing folk, when they should be seeing mosaic
A book finds same-sex couples produce perfectly healthy
offspring. Is this the best argument for marriage equality?
(Tracy Clark-Flory, Gay marriage: Good for the kids?,
Salon, 9 Nov. 2009)
In Canada, some on the left are beginning to favor imagining "their"
constituents as more everyday folk than components of an urban
mosaic. That is, there's a switch to imagining them as hardworking,
traditional-minded, unpresuming and humble -- and therefore
deserving of employment, etc. -- away from imagining them as urban,
artistic, complex, diverse. It's a move to the right, in my judgment -toward the German volk, in fact -- by the less evolved in the left, by
the newly devolving on the left. In British Columbia, for instance,
Save our Rivers does great 'cause "they" portray their movement in a
way Cdns are ripe to accept and therefore not question -- as good
hearted, rural folk, that is -- whereas anti-Olympics does poorly
'cause the country is beginning to frown on the urban-seeming, antigrandscale (non-conformist), and strange (how can you be against
Olympics? - are you against mountains and "Oh Canada," too?), and
just one marble-tosser at horses feet is readily made use of to
determine/characterize the whole essence of the movement.
My sense of the States -- with some in the gay community concerned
about just who it is they helped elect in, with abortion funding likely
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to be left out of healthcare, for instance -- is that the cultural victory

managed by the left, where those "they" aimed to protect/ empower
they didn't show as different but equal, but as superior, mostly, which
reigned for 30 or 40 years, worked to help / serve their
"constituents," but is weakening too now. What I'm getting at is that
10 years ago a study like this would help the gay movement, because
those who aimed to show the gay community differently -- as perverse
-- would be obliterated by a united left, concerned not only to help but
to link themselves to, to possess some of the manna of, those they
protected/enshrined (think Robert Redford and native indians, for
instance). Now, I think they have fewer friends, fewer really
interested in backing them, and so if it isn't in fact now true that they
raise "perfectly healthy offspring," someone can show them as just
average, and the study could be used to set up the left as having
offered a misrepresentation of their constituents, as having served up
lies, not just now but likely for some time, and argue that the entire
way the left has presented such groups as immigrants, homosexuals,
artists, students, the unemployed / homeless, need be reassessed -completely rethought. That is, studies like this could very likely lead
to a decrease in rights, rather than to an increase, if there's a hint of
dishonesty in them.
No more glowing reports. No more triumphalism. More acceptance
that 30 years of concentrated corporate rule and social disintegration
has made us all a bit fucked up.
Link: Gay marriage: Good for the kids?
Anti-olympicers destroy dreams, but should not be shot
Civil liberties are never in question unless they are exercised
in a way that the majority of the population disagrees with
-- and that's when they need to be defended. That became
evident Friday, when anti-Olympics protesters in Victoria
succeeded in blocking a small portion of the Olympic torch
run.
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[. . .]
Predictably, the media focused not on why 200 protesters
occupied an intersection to voice their opposition but on
thetorchbearers who were unfairly deprived of their
opportunity to run the flame.
More predictably, media featured a young man with
cerebral palsy who could not take his turn. Fortunately he
later got his chance in Nanaimo.
[. . .]
Last Wednesday a group called Moms on the Move held
protests in 20 communities to protest B.C. Liberal cuts to
funding for special needs kids, including to autism, fetal
alcohol syndrome and mental illness treatment programs.
Despite the obvious importance of their plight, the protests
received next to no media coverage, with less than a dozen
news stories online and none in major media.
But disrupt the Olympic torch run and watch the media fly -there were hundreds of stories about the protesters'
disruption and it dominated television coverage. (Bill
Tieleman, Dissent and BCs Media, the Tyee, 3 Nov. 2009)
Don't you just hate it when someone crashes the corporate
party?
Whenever people are being set up as fundamentally hatred-worthy,
protections by civil liberties are soon to go. Civil liberty talk becomes
all about setting the speakers up as, in essence, restrained and
principled, so at that point when they decide protestors simply have
gone "too far," and civil liberties are dispensed with in favor of beat
first, piss on later, they have demonstrated to themselves that what in
truth is their sadistic indulgence, is really, is incontrovertibly,
absolute last measure necessity to keep anarchy at bay. It's all about
setting things up so that when they later turn all militant brutal, they
feel no guilt. With the way Bill sets this up, with self-involved
protestors taking away chance of a lifetime thrills, you know what
path he's on. Count him amongst those who will effort to crush those
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who dare think and behave independently.

I wonder if someone was once awakened out of a fugue-like, sick
happy trance, by someone's independent action? Is this story about
dreams spoiled, and lifetime trauma incurred, or awakening to the
fact that there is life outside of McHappy town, and it's to be
preferred?
Ignored moms + spoiled children = trouble for nondeferent youth
Further: Any story about ignored moms and attention-stealing kids,
is written by an author who learned as a child that his own attentionseeking efforts, his attendance to his own needs, was wrong, was bad,
because his role was to attend to his mother and all her concerns. As
an adult, he will feel compelled to punish self-substitutes for his own
(always suspect) life accomplishments. They are punished, while he
stands up for moms everwhere -- and thereby feels exempt from
angry punishment.
As to Immigrant's other comments, try reading my columns
and blog - I've stood up for people with disabilites,
vulnerable children and others in need for years and will
continue to do so.
And I've written about them before and after the Olympic
protestors showed up - but I haven't seen most of those folks
at other events to support those facing cuts. (Bill Tieleman,
Response to post, Dissent and BCs Media)
The Bill of the people. Whither immigrants?
Immigrant, please do check out his blogs.
Like this one, where he "is honoured to share the stage with" rightwing Bill Vander Zalm
(http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2009/09/15/ZalmHatesHST/), whatever
his past and over-all intentions, and this one, where he blasts
Margaret Atwood for supporting the BQ's "social democratic
tendencies," in ignorance of its past, its primary purpose
(http://thetyee.ca/Views/2008/12/02/NoCoalition/).
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In the latter article you'll find him declaring how he's no friend of
Stephen Harper but has firm respect for his having "just won the
most number of seats in Parliament in a free and fair democratic
vote." The people want the Olympics -- he clearly wants to believe -and deserve respect. The people want Harper, and their wishes need
to be respected. Those who get in the way are wrong and worthy of
(and receive) his ridicule. Since the opposition he now loathes seems
more and more to be, if not of the weak and fragile, then of the
sensitive (don't miss his revolting dismissal of Suzuki for his unmanly
hypersensitivity), and his friends seem to be of the marching militant,
he is clearly much more drawn to muscle and inclined to disparage
the vulnerable, than otherwise.
----If anti-olympicers have to
If anti-olympicers have to demonstrate there's not a marble-thrower
amongst them, the public clearly WANTS to see them as urban
delinquents, and their efforts will count against them. How can there
not be marble throwers, how can there not be some, or even many,
involved, that are drawn to mayhem and humiliation, when they've all
suffered through 30 years of corporate rule, public disintegration,
family discord? Corporations can't lose: they've helped create society
so ruthless and unnuturing, that those who protest against them can
be shown up as "unbalanced" cause they've ensured that at least some
involved surely are that, and thus set-up for further discrimination /
abuse, if the public is in the mood to cooperate.
Save the Rivers has managed to avoid being set up as lumber-jack
injuring anarchists, owing its success to being understood as backed
by concerned, good-hearted wilderness appreciaters. Why the
difference? My guess it has something to do with how the public
PREFERS to imagine the two. The public wants them to seem pure -and therefore skims over the anarchists amongst them, and estimates
them mostly composed of small town, clean-air breathing and
humble, middle-aged lovers of God's green earth -- and wants the
anti-olympicers to seem viral --and thus focuses on "irresponsible,"
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self-dramatizing youth and terrorist-like tactics, and resists

acknowledging that most anti-olympicers are save-the-river types as
well. (But are most save-the-river types also anti-olympicers? Not
sure, myself.)
Anti-urban sentiment? Fascist favoring of mountain hikes and clean
lakes -- the simple and grandscale --over complex city dynamics and
strange philosophies? What do you think?
Link: "Dissent and BC's Media"
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2009

Shaken, not stirred: How to make slaughter cool again
Rootless Cosmopolitan
Too suave for Bush, who fit so well with Husseins cartoonish
pomposity, Bin Laden is just right for 8 years of Afghan chess, with
classy Obama.
There is something in Obama's patience which does strike one as near
deliberate withholding, as wiser-than-thou, empowered
demonstration of maturity and wisdom. What comes to mind is that
Clint Eastwood film, "Heartbreak Ridge," where all the new recruits
sprint past Eastwood, as he jogs slowly along, but find themselves
later passed by as they exhaust themselves with their full-on burst of
speed. His character ends up claiming all of their respect, in the end.
Obama might do the same -- though perhaps, not with Brooks -- as he
did when he finally did triumphantly win his election contest over
Hillary, making himself seem casual, savy, inevitable, and his
doubters, impulse-ridden children. Withholding is sadistic, but can be
a demonstration of one's strength, many of the bullied will recognize
and end up respecting.
When America chose Obama over Hillary, for me it was confirmation
that we wanted someone in who could be depended on to fulfill our
desire (he is, in actuality, the most attuned to our needs and desires,
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even if sometimes our needs are complex enough, counter-intuitive

enough, that we mistake his obedience for independent leadership -how many of us are aware that we may actually at times want / expect
our leaders to be withholding, for example?) for the nation to turn
even more sadistic than it was under Bush. What Bush did was help
define what was evil, the style, the sense of it: it is very melodramatic,
with cartoonish, misshapen villains, clownish leaders; grandiose,
inane gestures; blunt, 80's-style take-overs. It is appropriate that it
was about Texan leaders and meglomaniac Iraqi tyrants -- Bin Laden
is too nimble, withdrawn and aristocratic, and had to await the arrival
of the more appropriate Obama, for his part of the story to resume. So
if war now seems less indulgent, more focussed/ calculated /
intelligent / dexterous and reluctant, and also somehow less
emotional and distanced (less grandiose), it's not evil, it's its opposite:
sanity. Simply by a wholesale change in style, the actual number of
people killed here could be way worse than what we've already seen,
and seem mature necessity not abhorrent slaughter. It's the way it is
and must be, until that day arrives when we finally have done enough
reparative work to undertake something more pure. The cruelty could
be way worse than what we've seen, and it will become near
impossible to point out to those who unconsciously want warsacrifice, because they know what bad war "smells" like -- they know
what even the left has helped make bad war smell like -- and this isn't
it. Obama provides the perfect cover for us to actually indulge in our
sadistic desires, and believe we're actually demonstrating mature
restraint.
The left has got a huge problem on its hands. Once they turn off their
support of Obama and their lambasting of Limbaugh, and start really
critiquing Obama and his ongoing, cruel war, they can be very easily
now made to seem tamtruming, unreasoning children who fail to
understand that nobody wants war, but sometimes it has to be
engaged lest society disintegrate altogether. It's lesser of greater evils:
if you can't appreciate that, you're not good, but immature -- not
worth listening to. Obama knows as much, as so should they. The
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right and war-favoring -- less evolved -- left are cottoning on to just

how empowered their position is about to be.
Joan is saying some very right things about Afghanistan here; let's
help her make the truth of it overwhelm people's preferred way of
imagining it. Let's be the resistance that scared the Olympics away
from Chicago to the near third-world, where things, where people,
prove more readily manageable.
Link: Real men dont need D.C. pundits (Joan Walsh, Salon)
@ Patrick McEvoy-Halston. I think it is 'dexterous'.

Your Heartbreak Ridge analogy is good, but where does the
homo-eroticism play into it? For that matter how bout that
Grenada invasion? (Support our Tropes, Real men dont
read D.C. pundits)
You posted:
There is something in Obama's patience which does strike
one as near deliberate withholding, as wiser-than-thou,
empowered demonstration of maturity and wisdom ...
Withholding is sadistic, but can be a demonstration of one's
strength, many of the bullied will recognize and end up
respecting.
Obama's "patience" is his reticence to make a further
decision until he sees how the wind is blowing in the polls.
It's indecision and he is sacrificing America's treasure while
he "dithers" - period! You describe it as sadistic.
Obama is not demonstrating strength - he belongs on
Dancing with the Stars because that is what he excells at dancing to the tune of the piper (his handlers) (Old Joe,
Real men)
Old Joe: I think if you lull people into squawking for immmediate
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attention, action, you make them seem needy and silly, and yourself
patient and serious. This is sadistic, even if it is just playing to others'
masochistic impulses. I believe his handlers are the American people.
Most of them are turning very sadistic, very sacrificial right now.
Support our troops: Dexterous may indeed be the word. I prefer
not to spell-check, though. Allows me to go with what feels most
right. Couldn't live with myself if I didn't ensure I played a part in the
process which allows language to change and evolve. Spell check
freezes everything in place, never forced to address this crime against
the beauty of change through time, against the living. Got my training
in English; now I let it stay or evolve, without censure. Thanks,
though.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2009

First they came for Limbaugh, then they came for
Re: Rush Limbaugh is facing the consequences of the

buffoonish, offensive cartoon persona thats made him a
gazillionaire: The controversy-averse brotherhood of NFL
owners harrumphed disapproval of Limbaughs role in a
bid to buy the St. Louis Rams, and within a few days the
group Limbaugh was part of dropped the radio bully from
its bid.
Im sure the snub is causing Rusty to relive childhood
traumas, and I feel a little sorry for him. It must be awful to
be kicked to the curb by guys who used to admire you, and
the deep pockets you brought to their bid. And Limbaugh
sure got angry that his bid ran into choppy water. This is
not about the NFL, it's not about the St. Louis Rams, it's not
about me. This is about the ongoing effort by the left in this
country, wherever you find them, in the media, the
Democrat Party, or wherever, to destroy conservatism, to
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prevent the mainstreaming of anyone who is prominent as a

conservative." (Joan Walsh, First they came for Rush
Limbaugh, Salon, Oct. 15 2009)
Rush is being "discontinued" precisely because he so well embodies a
child's anger, mistreatment, alarm. We project all our anger at
ourselves having been left alone, into him; we dispatch him; and we
feel absent agitations -- more at peace. He feels/ expresses so we
don't have to. Process will continue, on the right AND the left.
Remember what you've had to say here about Limbaugh, because you
are something of the passionate crusader yourself. You might suit.
Those who will do well as we go on are those who appreciate AND are
well able to mimic Obama's composure, his controlled, near
dispassionate manner, all the while hordes (40, 60, 80 thousand!) of
young men and women are sent into the maw of Afghanistan. That is,
zombies -- or better, nazi-types: that is, people who are in some ways
dead to themselves, who can spend their days humiliating / torturing
people, disown what they do, and return home for staid dinner with
the wife and kids.
Link: First they came for Rush Limbaugh (Salon)
Yukon U: 'Cause antlers give you reach, too
Want Cheap Tuition? Try Yukon College

Classes are small, and now it's a key outpost of climate
change study.
It seems an unlikely place for a college, serving a territory
the size of Sweden and with a population of only 35,000.
But Yukon College has made an advantage out of its
smallness and remoteness. And on Wednesday of this week,
it became the home of the Yukon Research Centre of
Excellence, dedicated largely to studying the impact of
climate change on the north.
[. . .]
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Yukonners are famous for multi-tasking: running gold

mines and tourism operations, or B&B's and security
companies. Yukon College, too small to survive with a single
specialty, is doing the same thing. In the process, it may
teach survival skills to colleges in southern Canada as well.
(Crawford Kilian, Want Cheap Tuition? Try Yukon College,
The Tyee, Oct. 23 2009)
Guys, remember to compliment you antler-head U training, with at
least some courses from Princeton and MIT at itunes U. They're free,
and there is now talk of the inevitable: professors okaying your
results, acknowledging your competency, without the 60 000 fees,
deference-registering perfect "A" gpa, and perfect SAT scores.
Remember, Kilian is not your friend. He delights in the idea of an
aristocratic (high-order thinking) few governing the plebian
many.http://thetyee.ca/Views/2009/02/27/PostSecondary/ He likes
the idea of university being restricted to the few really worthy of
higher learning. He's much more Plato Republic than he is Dewey
democrat.
Let's not encourage people to see the world through a trade school
point of view. Leave the nut-gathering stuff to squirrels.
talk of the inevitable?
hey patrick, wondering if you could elaborate on
"there is now talk of the inevitable: professors
okaying your results, acknowledging your
competency, without the 60 000 fees, deferenceregistering perfect "A" gpa, and perfect SAT scores"
I'd be curious to read more about this conversation
(steveo, response to post, Want Cheap Tuition?)
This is a good link to get a sense of just what's going on right now
with itunes u. Right now, people are both stunned at just how many
courses from top universities are available at itunes u, and just how
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many downloads they're getting. Millions of them.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article6
869552.ece?print=yes&randnum=1151003209000
There is an article out there written in the last week or two about
professors discussing grading, or acknowledgements, and itunes u,
but can't find it just now. Some universities are already playing
defence, though: Oxford is arguing that its education is tutorial,
mostly about advisors, not lectures, and thereby distinguishing itself
from universities which are mostly about lectures -- and which are
therefore now competing rather inadequately against the very best
lectures available out there for free. Inertia can keep things going for
awhile, but soon enough we'll get some big names endorsing just
downloading Princeton, Oxford, MIT lectures, and completing their
coursework (MIT has made their coursework available, I believe),
rather than taking undergrad at any old. Smarter universities are
going hybrid, loadly proclaiming how their students can attend
classes physically, or just use their ipods and download. Helps them
seem with it. But in sum, itunes U is gradually making most mid-level
universities seem rather PC redundant. Old style university
attendance could end up seeming fit for fobs, slow-moving sloths.
Mightn't you already see the (devestating) commercial?
Steward Brand did Whole Earth Review as an alternative to
university. He, Rheingold, Jobs, all very non-placative attitudes
towards university, but were huge on learning. Itunes U fits with that
attitude, at a time when the talk at universities is all about raising
tuition fees and closing doors. University's public image is not that
much better than wall-street right now, really. All parents want their
kids to do "Harvard," though, and in face of being told that while they
can't do/afford UBC, hey, there's always Yukon U, they'll want,
THEY'LL PUSH someone like Steve Jobs to make Itunes Princeton a
legitimate way for their kid to participate in the ivy-league and seem
of the now. As more savy, in fact, than the next door who thinks it's all
"so" that their kids attending UBC.
The very best, wherever they're to be found, and all for free -- that's
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itunes U.
Link: Want Cheap Tuition? Try Yukon College (The Tyee)
Obama towel-smothering tantruming child. Tucker complains.
The number one rule of American politics: the greatest, most
insatiable need of the standard conservative is to turn
themselves into oppressed little victims. In The Daily Beast
today, Tucker Carlson devotes his entire column to
complaining that Obama is "bullying" Fox News, absurdly
claiming that the White House and liberals are trying "to use
government power to muzzle opinions they don't agree
with." Needless to say, Carlson doesn't say a word about the
endless -- and far worse -- attacks by the Bush White House
on a whole array of media outlets, ones that went far beyond
mere criticisms. (Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson and the
rights perpetual self-victimhood, Salon, October 23 2009)
Towel smothering, to the delight of the perpetrating left.
What I hear mostly is talk of the far worse efforts by Bush et al.
Obama is the entranced parent calmly smothering a towel over the
tantruming child. Salon helps serve particulars on the right up as crybabbies, and Obama silences them. It's a very brutal tag team, which
will eventually turn on the very best, the most out-spoken, on the left.
Greenwald seems to especially dislike Tucker and Brooks -- two of the
most free-thinking, most resistant to "party" cues, on the right. I hope
you don't end up -- in effect -- becoming an Obama agent, who vents
loudest against those who actually managed to remain independent.
This is brilliant parody, Patrick McEvoy-Halston. Thanks
for the laugh!Comedy gold here:
Greenwald seems to especially dislike Tucker and Brooks -two of the most free-thinking, most resistant to "party" cues,
on the right. I hope you don't end up --in effect -- becoming
an Obama agent, who vents loudest against those who
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actually managed to remain independent.

Okay, now that you've had your fun, did you have a genuine
point or what? (Iokannan in the Well, Response to post,
Tucker Carlson)
----Patrick McEvoy-Halston
Greenwald seems to especially dislike Tucker and Brooks -two of the most free-thinking, most resistant to "party" cues,
on the right.
Anyone who considers Tucker Carlson a free-thinker also
considers High School Musical fine American theater.
(Karla_1960, Response to post, Tucker Carlson)
Karla 1960
re: Anyone who considers Tucker Carlson a free-thinker also
considers High School Musical fine American theater.
From Wik article on Tucker Carlson:
Carlson initially supported the U.S. war with Iraq during its
first year. After a year, he began criticizing the war, telling
the New York Observer: "I think its a total nightmare and
disaster, and Im ashamed that I went against my own
instincts in supporting it. Its something Ill never do again.
Never. I got convinced by a friend of mine whos smarter
than I am, and I shouldnt have done that. No. I want things
to work out, but Im enraged by it, actually."[18]
In 1999, during the 2000 Republican Presidential primary
race, Carlson interviewed George W. Bush, then Governor of
Texas, for Talk magazine. Carlson reported that Bush
mocked soon-to-be-executed Texas Death Row inmate Karla
Faye Tucker and "cursed like a sailor." Bush's
communications director Karen Hughes publicly disputed
this claim.
Asked by Salon about the response to his article on Bush,
Carlson characterized it as "very, very hostile. The reaction
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was: You betrayed us. Well, I was never there as a partisan

to begin with. Then I heard that (on the campaign bus, Bush
communications director) Karen Hughes accused me of
lying. And so I called Karen and asked her why she was
saying this, and she had this almost Orwellian rap that she
laid on me about how things she'd heardthat I watched her
hearshe in fact had never heard, and she'd never heard
Bush use profanity ever. It was insane. I've obviously been
lied to a lot by campaign operatives, but the striking thing
about the way she lied was she knew I knew she was lying,
and she did it anyway. There is no word in English that
captures that. It almost crosses over from bravado into
mental illness. They get carried away, consultants do, in the
heat of the campaign, they're really invested in this. A lot of
times they really like the candidate. That's all conventional.
But on some level, you think, there's a hint of recognition
that there is realityeven if they don't recognize reality
existsthere is an objective truth. With Karen you didn't get
that sense at all. A lot of people like her. A lot of people I
know like her. I'm not one of them."[17]
Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_Carlson
I appreciate your response. But my wider point is this: I find
there is something is seriously wrong with the fact that other
media companies simply cannot call out Fox for what it is.
In fact its downright disturbing.
The medias corporate owners are making it increasingly
difficult for journalists to dispense with false equivalency
and simply call it as they see it. The amount of daily
misinformation is staggering and is hurting us at a time
when we need straight, truthful news to help make critical
decisions. Carlson is entrenched in the business of spin. I
take your point that he plays the maverick from time to
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time, but make no mistake, he serves his corporate masters

very well. (Karla_1960, Reponse to post, Tucker)
Karla 1960
My read on Tucker is that he's about the same as a Joan Walsh or
Conason. He has the capacity to remain independent, remain wholy
sane and good, but can be drawn to occupy himself with the
outrageous claims, advancements made by the other side. Nothing to
do with party bidding with any of these good people, though. All of
them need our support, most especially when they buck the tide,
make themselves vulnerable to taking huge hits, something they are
each capable of doing more than just every now and then.
As far as Brooks goes. I like the way Mark Shields speaks / thinks of
him. Shields sees when Brooks is slipping, but also understands he
sits across from a decent human being who often has relevant, very
helpful things to say. He can do damage, but he's a good person we
can't allow to see crushed.
Link: Tucker Carlsons perpetual self-victimhood (Salon)
But Rush ain't no footballin'

News flash! Climate change is not only a fraud and a hoax,
but it is a sinister conspiracy of the "left" to create an
unelected eco-dictatorship that spans the globe. Millions of
the worlds poorest will die, and civilization as we know it
will perish unless we stop this plot before it is too late.
That remarkable message was delivered this week by the
flamboyantly pompous Lord Christopher Walter, the Third
Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, at a lunch time talk hosted
by the Fraser Institute, and sponsored by the so-called
"Friends" of Science. [. . .] Let's start by pointing out that
Lord Monckton is not a "lord" at all if by his title you
assumed he is a member of the British Parliament's House of
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Lords. In fact, he received no votes in 2007 House of Lords

Conservative Hereditary Peers' byelection. (Mitchell
Anderson, Why are oddballs like this guy winning?, The
Tyee 21 Oct. 2009)
So long as our opponents look the part of clowns (but what's more
clownish -- fake lords, or "real" ones in the 21st century?), we're okay.
The left will know its opponent, and be able to unite against it. More
worrying will be when the emotive clowns are dispatched (this always
happens at some point -- McCarthy and Gingrich were everywhere
one day, and nowhere the next), and sober respectables (read:
Ignatieffs) carry the day. Respectables, that is, who are no nonsense,
into self-sacrifice, environmentalism, localism, and who will claim the
support of at least half the current left AND the right. If
environmentalism goes hand-in-hand with militarism, youth blood
sacrifice (oh, the spoiled youth of today!), punishment, and loses all
connection with peace, love, ease and happiness, the right will
embrace it in a way which will astonish. Watch for it. Here and in the
States.
They (i.e., the right) primarily are interested in seeing people suffer.
They'll use whatever at hand for righteous cover -- God or Nature, will
do equally well. Jesus and flower-power, not so well.
Link: "Why are the oddballs winning?"
Something rather more wasting

On Saturday, Tyler Perry, who executive produced the
Oscar-buzzed forthcoming movie "Precious," spoke on his
Web site of being something else -- a survivor of physical
and sexual abuse. [. . .] On his Web site this weekend he
wrote about the mother of a childhood playmate. I was at
the front door trying to get out, when she came in and laid
on the sofa and asked me if I wanted the key She put the
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key inside of herself and told me to come get it, pulling me on

top of her. [. . .] Its a brutal, heartbreaking, unflinching
litany of more pain than any child should ever endure. [. . .]
Though accurate data is hard to come by, the Lucy Faithfull
Foundation estimates approximately 15 percent ofsex
abusers are women. (Mary Elizabeth Williams, Tyler
Perrys House of Pain October 6 2009)
Just a measure?
re: Its a brutal, heartbreaking, unflinching litany of more pain than
any child should ever endure.
How much pain should a child be expected to endure?
re: Though accurate data is hard to come by, the Lucy Faithfull
Foundation estimates approximately 15 percent of sex abusers are
women.
One of those 15 percent women bad / 85 percent men beyond awful
stats women are using to justify their upcoming hegemonic dominion
over mankind? Or is this a "maybe a little bit" that might blossom
into "actually quite a lot," once we're ready for ready to engage
something rather more wasting than the drunken dad with lust in his
eyes for little boy "Tom"?
Maternal incest occurs earlier, is more ongoing, and leaves a vastly
larger imprint. In most abusive families, children spend way more
time with mom than they do with daddy. They learn very well,
though, never to speak a bad word--mom made sure there'd be none
of that. So we go after dad. It's an avenue we know; it's one we're
allowed, even encouraged, to go down; and it makes dad present -even if brutally -- when for the most part he never really was.
Link: Tylers House of Pain (Mary Elizabeth Williams)
Same Old Song
Half a year after brutalizing his then-girlfriend -- by hitting,
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choking, biting and threatening to kill her -- Chris Brown is

still following the script of domestic abusers everywhere. He
loves her, he really does, it was totally unlike him and he
promises to never ever do it again. That's the tune the R&B
crooner sings in a clip from his pre-taped interview for
"Larry King Live," which airs in full this Wednesday at 9
p.m. [. . .] CNN also reports that in as-yet-unseen footage, he
announces that he still loves Rihanna. The declaration of
love, the shock at being overtaken by such uncharacteristic
rage and the promise to never do it again -- it's straight out
of a domestic violence PSA. The only difference here is that
he's telling this to us, the American public, the fans he's
trying to win back, instead of his lover. I can only hope -- for
his sake and that of his worshipful young fans -- that the full
interview reveals Brown as being ready and willing to
confront in uncensored detail what he did and begin to work
at truly healing himself. (Tracy Clark-Flory, Chris Brown:
Same old dance and song, Salon August 31 2009)
It's a bit disingenuous to set this guy up as someone who's coming
pretty close to trying to get away with murder and then finish with
your hopes that he come to heal himself. You write as if what you
most want is for him to wake up one morning with his own dick in his
mouth ("try singing that same old tune now, dickhead") and a knifewielding ex-girlfriend grinning by his side. Only then should therapy
be considered -- but, really, who's to be bothered with stitching-up
when there's so many other bad boys out there to be spotted for
totally awesome comeuppance.
Guys who go beat up their girlfriends are taking revenge upon them
for abuse they suffered from their own mothers (who themselves were
so unloved they could not help but use their boys as antidepressants). That's where the anger originates. Feminism want to try
taking on that "angle" again, so that we can stop essentializing young
men as evil
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Link: Salon (Tracy Clark-Flory)

Mom genes?: Salon discussion on why "gay hags"
The first time somebody wanted to be my fag hag, it was the
year 2000, I was 16 years old, and I was sitting in the back
of a high school physics class. A fun South Asian girl to
whom I'd recently admitted I was a "flaming homosexual"
was chatting with me about her boy problems, and, at some
point, the discussion veered onto familiar territory: "Will &
Grace," the hit NBC show about a gay man living with his
straight female friend. I don't remember much of the
conversation. I do remember the following: She told me that
she was going to be the "Grace" to my "Will," and then
uttered the words that would haunt me for years to come, "I
want to be your fag hag."
[. . .]
But the neutered gay characters on the show were about as
sexual as a pastel-colored cardigan, and in the decade since
the show first aired, the fag and his hag have become a tired
trope everywhere from "Sex and the City" (Carrie and her
queeny sidekick Sanford) to "The Real Housewives of
Atlanta" (NeNe Leakes and her "gay boyfriend"). It's turned
what was once a special relationship between two cultural
outsiders -- gay men and the straight women who love them
-- into an eye-rolling clich. It also turned me and other
young gay men into something unexpected: a must-have
item.
[. . .]
I would mention my boyfriend to a girl in my biology lab,
and she would inexplicably plop down next to me in class for
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the rest of the semester. Strange drunken girls at college keg

parties would tell me that they're really "a gay man in a
woman's body," and ask me to take them to the local gay
bar. At a recent birthday party, a female friend of mine (who
later described herself as a proud "fag hag") forced me into
conversation with another gay friend of hers before telling
us, "I thought my two fags should meet -- maybe you can
date?" as we both stared at each other uncomfortably.
(Thomas Rogers, Ladies: Im not your gay boyfriend,
The attraction to guys comes later; first comes presumptive
use by women
I'm one that believes becoming gay is not so much choice or destiny
as it is a psychic defense mechanism: it develops out of being used
presumptively (read: incestually) by your lonely, depressed mother,
and means that you feel yourself largely armored against further
shameful abuse by "women." Probably meant, though, that as a boy
you understood your role was to please her, work against her
depression, loneliness, and that meant becoming quite good at
reading her moods and tending to her emotional needs. These
characteristics don't go away; nor does that learned, near instinctive
reaction to please "women" who come to you expecting
attendance/support--your embrace. Women ("fag hags") intuit all
this, and some take advantage of it; gays respond, willy-nilly, and end
up feeling played on/preyed upon, once again. Result: angry,
righteous responses--hateful slurs, even, however well "protected"-such as this article. More self-defense.
One of Ginsberg's poems--I believe it was the Howl--more-or-less
dramatizes/argues all of this. Doesn't inform my intuition, but kinda
confirmed it for me.
----
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Re: PMH
Sexual attraction for either gender, by either gender is not
the result of dysfunctional parenting nor childhood trauma.
It's hard wired into your system the way Apple or IBM
compatible is hard-wired into the systemboard of a PC.
The need to distance yourself from it by explaining it away
with theories that have, long since, been discounted and/or
disproven likely is, however. As the old saying goes...
"denial" is not just a river in Egypt. (gkrevvv, response to
post, Ladies: Im not your gay boyfriend)
Everything is DNA related these days. There was a huge turn away
from childhood/psychoanalytic explanations for behavior, at the end
of 70s/early 80s. Some of us think this is not owing to greater
accuracy, but to collective aversion/cowardliness--distancing, if you
will. Few anxieties are raised, reprisals invited, if one speaks of
genes--doesn't say much for science as objective, but in my judgment,
that is the why of it. If it was/is early incestual use by mothers, the
slur (of women) as "fish" seems about what you'd expect.
Saying it's all about incestual handling--something most of us, to a
less or greater extent, have experienced--puts me in denial, makes me
gay--how's that again?
---Re: Patrick McEvoy-Halston and Faxmebeer
Patrick McEvoy-Halston: Spare us your bullshit pseudopsychological theories about the origins of homoosexuality.
Let me break it down simply for you - homosexuality is an
inborn genetic trait. Period. It has nothing to do with "overmothering" or "feminizing" of male children by mothers and
female siblings. Study after study has proven this.
Faxmebeer: It's hilarious to me how every time Salon posts
an article dealing with gays or lesbians, there is some
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insecure ignoramus who posts something that reads like it

just came out of seventh grade gym class. Every time!
Seriously! It's like clockwork. Now, hurry along Faxmebeer,
or you might be late for your Birther meeting, or how UFO's
are secretly controlling the stock market. (DQuintanaNY,
Response to post, Ladies: Im not your gay boyfriend)
Re: @ Patrick McEvoy-Halston
Is gayness innate or a reaction to deprivation/abuse? Has
anyone studied the commonalities of gay backgrounds?
Is male fondness for lavender and snap-snark more innate
than NASCAR mania?
Is Oscar Wild more healthy a paradigm than John Wayne?
Are not macho and fey locked in a mutual un-admiration
society hug?
Alice Miller, writing about child abuse, mentions that Freud
originally believed his patients WERE sexually abused.
When Viennese society turned on him (due to guilt?), he
recanted, saying parents didn't screw children, evil kids
wanted to screw Mom and Dad.
So might gays deny parental abuse be fudging (!) things for
the same reason?
Are 1 in 10 of us really gay...or is that a faux-fact used to
make homosexuals feel "normal"?
Why is gayness any more "natural" than being a "cutter"?
I suspect politics and emotions inform both sides of the Great
Het/Homo Divide. (MerelyMortalMale, Response to post,
Ladies: Im not your gay boyfriend)
Re: @patrick mcevoy-halston
It's a nice theory. The trouble is, your description perfectly
fits my mother and her relentless neediness has had pretty
much exactly the effect on me you describe - the need to
please, to be understanding, the resentment - except it didn't
1303
turn me gay. I guess that could be because my dad was such

an arse too, but I dunno. That would mean I was - what? - a
repressed homosexual who was only homosexual because his
painfully conflicted relationship with his mother had
repressed his heterosexuality. Oy, the layers of the onion. In
the end, I know what looks good to me and turns me on.
That, at least, seems pretty straightforward. (digitbit,
Response to post, Ladies: Im not your gay boyfriend)
@digitbig; @MerelyMortalMale:
@digitbit:
I'm glad you're aware of the effect your mother's "relentless
neediness" had on you. Being geered to respond to everyone else's
needs, means not sufficiently attending to your own.
@MerelyMortalMale:
Is gayness innate or a reaction to deprivation/abuse? Has anyone
studied the commonalities of gay backgrounds?
There surely must be studies, but this is one of those areas where
certain results would be preferred; others, rather not so much. I don't
think gayness is innate.
Is male fondness for lavender and snap-snark more innate than
NASCAR mania?
I'm with those who say NASCAR prowess is born out of early-on
feeling all too vulnerable and weak. There's a lot to be said for guys
who like lavender. Many of whom get to like and know snap-snark, to
fend off those who see in you the friendly lather.
Is Oscar Wild more healthy a paradigm than John Wayne?
As popularly understood/processed, neither is particularly good. Both
are strong; both tend--however differently. But they're also both the
lone man (note: escape from female/motherly enmeshment through
loner status) with the capacity to take on and out a culture of
"heathens"--which is great for revenge fantasies, but not so much for
healing the world.
Are not macho and fey locked in a mutual un-admiration society
1304
hug?
All macho were once fey (machos primarily understand the fey as
vulnerable, open to attack: weak, dressed-up dolls--girlie toys).
Machos aim to annihilate feys in hopes that by doing so their own
weakness, vulnerableness, is now more than denyed: it is destroyed.
For all the talk these days of straights and gays going camping
together, I think we're beginning to head that way now.
Alice Miller, writing about child abuse, mentions that Freud
originally believed his patients WERE sexually abused. When
Viennese society turned on him (due to guilt?), he recanted, saying
parents didn't screw children, evil kids wanted to screw Mom and
Dad.
Freud's original understanding was correct. Viennese society turned
on him because most of us understood early-on, that blaming mom
and dad means forever being absent their support and love--we
ourselves put the superego in place, to school us away from ever going
"there."
So might gays deny parental abuse be fudging (!) things for the
same reason?
Yep.
Are 1 in 10 of us really gay...or is that a faux-fact used to make
homosexuals feel "normal"?
If gayness is better/more accurately understood as wariness to
female/maternal enmeshment, manipulation, then the majority is
gay. Patriarchy means neglected mothers. Neglected mothers cannot
help but squeeze the love out of their kids, in an attempt to satisfy
their own unmet needs. This has consequences--like future aversion
to too present/ pressing women. This last election, how many
reporters seemed comfortable interviewing, being in near proximity
to, Hillary Clinton? How comfortable did Obama seem?
Link: Ladies: Im not your gay boyfriend (Salon)
1305
Napolean-garbed hippies asking for the moon (20 August 2009)
God bless Barney Frank. His outburst at a "town hell"

protester who accused him and Obama of supporting "Nazi
policy" spread virally around the Web early Wednesday and
expressed a lot of liberals' head-splitting frustration. "On
what planet do you spend most of your time?" he countered,
to lots of applause. Frank called it "a tribute to the First
Amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so
freely propagated," and closed by saying: "Ma'am, trying to
have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue
with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it.
[. . .]
In related news: The dumbest statement of the day didn't
come from Frank's town hall critic in Massachusetts; it came
from the White House, where an unnamed "senior White
House advisor" told the Washington Post that the
administration just doesn't understand the passion for the
public option among liberals. "I don't understand why the
left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo," said the
clueless senior White House adviser. "We've gotten to this
point where health care on the left is determined by the
breadth of the public option. I don't understand how that has
become the measure of whether what we achieve is healthcare reform." (Joan Walsh, When liberals fight back, Salon,
20 Aug. 2009)
White House' patience seems to be wearing thin. Soon enough we'll
be likened to Pink-Lady crazies, told to pluck the flowers out of our
hair, and "get a life!"
Link: "When liberals fight back" (Salon)
Professional bloggers' kind request (19 August 2009)
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re: Blogger confuses us today because weve conflated two

different meanings of blogging. There is the formal definition:
personal website, reverse chronological order, lots of links. Then
there is what I would call the ideological definition: a bundle of
associations many observers made with blogs in their formative
years, having to do with DIY authenticity, amateur self-expression,
defiant disintermediation (cutting out the media middleman), and
so on.
Today professional journalism has embraced the blog form, since it
is a versatile and effective Web-native format for posting news. But
once you have dozens of bloggers at the New York Times, or entire
media companies built around blogs, the ideological trappings of
blogging are only going to cause confusion. (Scott Rosenberg, "Time
to retire the term 'Blogger'," OpenSalon, 18 August 2009)
Maybe we could figure out a way so that every screen will read every
professional writer/blogger's print as black or grey blue, and every
amateur's self-expression as crayola pink or orange. A proper "home"
must be prepared for adult, formed writers thinking more and more
of making the net their place of business; the kids can find some place
to play outside, or in the pen, where they won't bother anyone.
Link: "Time to retire the term "Blogger" (OS)
Salon CEO firing (the) duds (19 August 2009)
Richard Gingras--CEO of Salon--is laying off personel:
For several months we have been working on a redesign of
our product, that we will launch this fall, and also a redesign
of our underlying systems. We are moving away from a
very traditional magazine production model and becoming
more of a true Web publication, with a more direct
publishing system. Moving forward, we are investing most
in the writers and creative participants who can help us
1307
continue to attract the smart, discerning readers attracted to

Salon. We think this direction makes us a stronger company,
and puts us in a good position to not just weather the
economic storm but emerge much stronger than ever.
Economic times are difficult and that necessitates change.
But change is also healthy and you'll be seeing many new
developments from Salon over the coming months.
The financial changes emphasize what we do best publish
sharp, fast takes on the important events in the world, as
well as the in-depth stories, reviews and blogs that readers
come to us for and will also allow us room to grow. Salon
has always been about great writing from great writers.
That will continue.
Let me also clarify the facts on reductions in edit staff. There
were only six positions cut out of 29 in editorial: 3 editors, 1
writer, a photo editor and a multimedia producer. Let me
also point out that all those effected last week are talented
and hard-working folks and they'll be missed, personally
and professionally. Source: Valleywag
I wonder how these "talented and hard-working folks [who'll] [. . . ]
be missed, personally and professionally," think of his making their
firing part of a larger plan to "invest most in the writers and creative
participants who can help us continue to attract the smart, discerning
readers attracted to Salon"? For all their hard work and talent, they're
the ones who brought in the duds, it would seem . . .
Salon discussion on John Hughes (18 August 2009)
A country of human self-doubt birthing a nation of

superhuman hubris -- its not the paradox it seems. After all,
the popaular culture sustaining this oxymoronic reality
revolves around exalting the impossibly gifted virtuoso, the
against-all-odds champion, the Mount Rushmore-size
1308
megastar -- in short, the larger-than-life individuals from

Michael Jordan to Lance Armstrong to Ronald Reagan
whom we know we cannot be.
While such deification drums up national pride, it also
evokes the ugly feelings associated with personal insecurity,
which is why I think so many mourned last weeks passing of
John Hughes. The 1980s filmmaker was one of the only
contemporary artists who found success providing an
uplifting antidote to those darker emotions -- an antidote
that is more relevant today than ever. (David Sirota,
Champion of mere mortals, Salon, 15 August 2009)
Sirota: flawed you are, but no mere, alas.
No, not true. What made him exceptional is that he understood what
real greatness is. In "Breakfast Club" he had a group of teenagers you
believed could, at the end, brave standing up for one another,
standing up to peer and parent. If that had been the norm, Gen Xers
would be asking for way more than what compromised Obama offers;
if that had been the norm, the future is set in a way better way than
people now fear. If it continued to be the norm, people wouldn't be
making use of his demise to further marginalize/isolate/disparage
him, which is what we've been seeing, not from you, but even here at
non-dour Salon. He championed those who could see lies for lies;
who could recover, even under huge psychological duress; who had it
in them to fight for life as self-discovery, not as some variant of the
fitting-in--even if this meant be ignored, shunned, misunderstood,
attacked. He focused on special people who could mount the climb to
the extra-ordinary--a space neglected by those who don't like what
shine reveals about themselves.
You're more alone than you think, David. Brace yourself.
---As a fairly regular Salon reader, I would like to comment
1309
that the letters section makes me ashamed to be a

progressive: we all come across so bitter, petulant and
humorless. For godsakes, even a tribute to a dead director
brings out the a-hole in most of you. People, not everything
has to be serious and political. Do we all have to watch
nothing but documentaries about the horrors of the world,
or boring films directed by George Clooney, to be relevant?
John Hughes made good movies that rose above most teen
comedies. He was a master of that very rare talent so
lacking in modern life: plucking the heartstrings. No, he is
not a Scorcese or Woody Allen or Jane Campion: he was
perfectly suited to his limitations. His movies fill a role:
teenage drama done right. I guess it is the Gen X'er in me,
but of all the very fine films I've seen, few touch me like
"Pretty in Pink"; it has a sweet ambience to it, an attention
to detail, and perfect characterizations that are indelible.
Has there ever been a better WASP'y high school creep then
James Spader's? A sweeter, funnier high school weirdo than
Duckie?
Sometimes it is not about being the most critically acclaimed
artist; it is about capturing something in a way no one else
can. Not to mention how well he fused great pop music with
the right scene. Perhaps many of you have no use for your
inner teenager anymore, but I still love mine, and John
Highes helped me define him. (frannynzooey, response to
post, David Sirota, Champion of mere mortals)
He plucked heartstrings?
RE: "He was a master of that very rare talent so lacking in modern
life: plucking the heartstrings. No, he is not a Scorcese or Woody
Allen or Jane Campion: he was perfectly suited to his limitations."
You see this as tribute, do you? It would seem the worst of slurs . . .
----
1310
Re: You see this as tribute, do you? It would seem the

worst of slurs . . .
Nah. I just see it as a pathetic attempt to drum up some traffic for
my lame blog - linked to at my sig every time I make an asshole
post.
But that's just me. (K. Trout, response to post, Champion of mere
mortals)
@k trout
Pointing out that identifying Hughes as a heartstring-plucker is not
the best of ways to redeem/defend him, is hardly an asshole post, k
trout. Sounds to me about the worst of diminishments, actually.
---So To some of you, I show I have no love inside by declaring:
I never, ever thought John Hughes was speaking for me or
anyone I knew, and at the time I resented, as I recall, what
I'd call now the ubiquity of Hughes and Spielberg and their
influence. (for the record, I didn't care for Michael Jackson
either--more a Prince guy) And so did many of my friends.
HEATHERS was more our speed and closer to the mark, but
wasn't around till we graduated.
I don't get sentimental about his movies. I think they're
smug, patronizing, and false, pure marketing profiting well
from a post-boomer awareness of how every generation
wants to feel like someone is its voice. That's leaving aside
things like how every girl I knew, whether they liked his
films or not, hated Molly Ringwald, or Ringworm as she
was usually called. You wouldn't believe how many times
I've heard the following sentences from these women: "Do
you know that spoiled little b@#$ch made Hughes rewrite
PRETTY IN PINK to make her not go with Ducky? And that
1311
he DID it! OOH I hate her!" They also had no idea why she'd
want Jake in 16Can, who left his drunk girlfriend(Kate
Vernon, I think, who also did another memorable drunk
recently on some little sci-fi show...) to whatever fate with
Anthony Michael-Hall, whose character spells drunken daterape "This...is gonna be good." (dust1969, response to post,
Champion of mere mortals)
@dust1969
I wonder if your girl friends at the time were approached by (the
equivalent of a) Jake, if they'd have dropped their duckies for the
buck, in an instant. Duckie only shows self-respect at the very end--a
bit when he dresses so towardly, magnificently, for the prom, but
mostly when he encourages Andie to go for Blane. This--what?-grace?, true goodwill?, makes it seem appropriate and even believable
that some lovely (other) self-possessed Pinkie suddenly appears to
take special note of him. Even with more of that from him, I still say
Andie and Blane work best. Ringwald was right to push.
The sneering, the leveling, succeed in "Heathers." The world is so full
of shit, so truly indecent, it makes looking to the nature of your own
behavior seem a bit optional. You "see," and that kinda makes you
way beyond good enough. Hughes--perhaps most evidently
with/through Duckie, but also with Bender and others--saw this
means, a strategy, to keep yourself from taking risks and growing, and
asked for more out of people than just that.
---re: As an aside
John Hughes has been portrayed as a champion of the
down-trodden but in most of his teen flicks the dorks, dweebs
and losers get to do nothing but gaze fondly upon their
betters, hoping for the odd pat on the head or an indulgent
glance. Whilst everyone else is hooking up (and moving up a
1312
notch or two in social standing) the loser is either portrayed

as a date rapist or a door mat. Check the end of "The
Breakfast Club". The geeky guy not only gets the opportunity
to write the essay, he is comforted by the fact that he is the
only one that will be furiously maturbating tonight while the
rest of the clubbers carry on with their selfish little liasons. I
always hoped that he'd bring a real gun to school next time...
(sawmonkey, response to post, Champion of mere mortals)
sawmonkey
The geek in Breakfast Club writes the essay, but what he manages
there is a one-on-one fuck-you to the principal, something he
wouldn't have dared do before the BC experience. Since it is what he
wrote and his voice which "plays" as we see the various pairings go
their way, there is a sense he stands a bit above and beyond at the
end. He is removed; but more self-determined (more broadlyaware?), more author than geek. And he gets more than an indulgent
glance at the end from Bender, who for the most part had previously
just managed him about. When the conversation turned to
trigonometry, the geek's knowledge base/abilities is made to seem
somewhat akin in "potency" to Claire's social status and the jock's
athleticism, and crowds out (the formidable, savy) Bender some.
More than some.
About Sixteen Candles--it doesn't finish with the geek more enabling
himself amongst his dweeb friends: it ends with him having a fairly
mature conversation with the girl/woman he (very likely) slept with.
Again and again through the film, the geek puts himself in potentially
dangerous situations, and is shown with capacity for empathy and
(even) bearing (his encounter with Samantha in the shop car is not
played as a joke [on him], but with respect [for both of them]).
Arguably, what develops with him seems more open that what lands
with Samantha. Who knows where he'll be the following year? Not so
much the geek, the film suggests.
Ferris Bueller: You're absolutely right.
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---re: Patrick
I stand by my prior assertation. JH was all about the elite.
Striving, laughing at and ultimately becoming part and
parcel of the same. Maybe he had the finest joke in the end,
after all, he who laughs last, laughs best. Did you go to one
of those hilarious "state" schools or does your sense of
humour only include the jokes of the Ivy variety...
(sawmonkey, response to post, Champion of mere mortals)
sawmonkey
For me what stands out is his recognition of and tribute to, people
with personality, with some considerable capacity for self-realization
and the give-and-take. Blane/Jake see something in Samatha/Andie,
and, in my judgment, it is to their considerable credit that they do.
The pairing of Samantha and Blane works at the end because they've
both got class--real class, of a type not exclusive to any one particular
social class. The WASP/Ivy-Leagues, for me, amount in his films to
the "catcher in the rye": "it" cushions people from the potentially
crushing vissitudes of life--it's a giant pillow for those not entirely
sure where they'll be sleeping the night after next. But there is no real
action, no true life, to be found there--it's perimeter, not ground;
weekend escape, not day-to-day dalliance, fight, and play.
@Patrick
Fair enough. You got yer druthers and I have mine. Cheers
to you, Sir! (sawmonkey, response to post, Champion of
mere mortals)
Ps.
Ferris really needed a beating! That is all... (sawmonkey,
response to post, Champion of mere mortals)
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---re: Also
I can't believe that everyone has forgotten the real message
in BREAKFAST CLUB. As long as you conform you're OK.
What. you say? Well, I give you the Ally Sheedy psycho-girl
character. Who later would have been a Goth. Once she gets
a Molly makeover, all is fine, right?
Tell me you didn't find that disgusting. I liked her better than
all the rest and in fact I liked her better before the makeover.
Life goes by pretty fast, If you're not an overprivileged white
kid from the North Shore who wears the right clothes, you
might miss it! (dust1969, response to post, Champion of
mere mortals)
@1969
Ally Sheedy's character is testing, knowing, but hidden and
inaccessible/unknowable (full of lies). For her, the change in dress is
about moving out of comfort zones, allowing herself to be vulnerable,
to show/reveal herself as undeniably interested in others' assessment
of her. Claire does the same, and pairs up with the "stoner" Bender-note: without him donning a suit. The movement may be more about
reciprocity, finding a middle ground, than it is about a move to
normal. No?
Link: Champion of mere mortals (Salon)
AP photo (from Salon.com)
Salon discussion on "Sixteen Candles" date rape scene (14 August
2009)
It wasn't long after John Hughes died that online
1315
commenters began to poke holes in his legacy: There was, of

course, the unforgivable issue of Long Duk Dong, but even
on Broadsheet, letter writers brought up a different dark
moment from "Sixteen Candles." As commenter Nona put it:
"Let's not forget the barely conscious drunk girlfriend the
Jake Ryan character sends off to be raped by the Geek in
Sixteen Candles. I believe he says 'be my guest.'
[. . .]
Were the John Hughes movies progressive? In terms of their
sexual politics, they were often not. They merely reflected
some of the prejudices of their time. Considering the horror
of Long Duk Dong, the Jar Jar Binks of the '80s and one of
the worst Asian stereotypes ever committed to film, maybe
we should be grateful that in his best films, Hughes rarely
tried to move past what he knew: white, suburban Chicago
teenagers. But he did class better than almost anyone else. In
the middle of the hedonistic '80s that glorified all things
yuppie, he made heroes out of working-class teens and and
villains out of wealthy kids, who were often callously
exploiting their peers in ways that reflected what some
thought their corporate parents were doing to the country."
(Amy Benfer, The Sixteen Candles date rape scene, August
11 2009)
Long Duk was hardly Jar Jar: he was all over the place, but fun and
competent (we cheered him on!); Jar Jar was just all over the place.
The "date rape" scene in Sixteen Candles read just as the boyfriend's
disgust at his drunken girlfriend, the whole mess of a party. For it to
have read differently, different people would have to have been cast in
the roles and it would have had to have been directed by someone
else. Anthony Hall's character is sweet, and when they wake up in the
car together later, the film is WITH both of them--not trying to break
either of them down, but rather, lift them up--wake them up to their
potential, to the possibility of moving beyond past life-roles. Blane in
"Pretty in Pink" is reserved, but not bland--he is charming.
1316
Characters do often end up with 80s bland, though; I think because as

"objects" they possess some sense of WASP everlastingness/solidness: their blandness has something to do with their
legacy spanning generations, with them not being in any special hurry
to accomplish anything. They can take your heat, if not fully
understand it, and carry on. The characters with "character" tend to
be less fixed, less oriented. Makes them strong with huge potential, in
"Breakfast Club." But perhaps elsewhere--and especially with Ducky-makes it seem easy enough for them to spiral out of control, fall apart.
Characters need something "sure" to help settle/calm them down-they need security. Big element in Hughes films.
Hughes wanted people to do well. The date rape bit from you does
show just how mean and off-course we've become. The truly mean,
but more deceptive, will see in many these days, ripe sport for
immediate ready agreement and inevitable glorious betrayal.
----re: And it wasn't Bender's sexual aggression that won
Claire over, it was his dropping his mask and revealing a
softer side. (EdwardDunne, response to post, Amy Benfer,
The Sixteen Candles date rape scene)
I think it fair to say, though, that Claire did at some level appreciate
Bender's sensitivity, even when used aggressively. He had a good
sense of bullshit, of how people work (so did the others, mind you),
and was fascinating--to Claire too, me thinks--in how he could make
use of his understanding of people, of the situation he was in, to draw
people out, to make something--even if it just turned out to be
discord--out of what would otherwise have been silent, constrained
students, waiting through the hours. Claire was both fascinated and
horrified at Bender's willingness to draw upon himself the whole of
the principal's anger, vengeance. Her plea that he cut it out!
registered she cared for him even then.
----re: But with Bueller--here is a very rich kid, who takes his
very rich friend out for a day on the town. And how do they
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have fun? By taking advantage of every middle/lower class

guy around. The maitre'd at the fancy restaurant. Principle
Rooney. Bueller uses his privilege to get everything he
wants, every day, while working stiffs are left holding the
bag, looking pathetic for standing in Bueller's way.
(electro87, response to post, Amy Benfer, The Sixteen
Candles date rape scene)
Electro: Rooney is played quite a bit by Bueller, and to loud effect, but
is savy to him (unlike Ferris' parents) (and is over-all shown to be
alert, not dim), and comes within a hair's breadth of getting him (if
maybe not ever getting TO him: this is not Bender and "I've got you
for the rest of your natural born life" empowered principal). At the
end of the day, my thoughts stay with Rooney: at the end of the
movie, he seems not to far from being worn-down enough he could
have joined the "Breakfast Club" circle and chatted it up--Ferris
Bueller is always to advantage, ever aloof, and never so recognizably
sapien.
Enjoyed your post.
----re: Claire runs that school, and she's not a complete bitch not like the girls in Heathers, who were mean just for the
sake of it. In 16 Candles, Molly Ringwald makes a deal with
the nerd - it's a give and take situation - he just gets her
panties. In Ferris Bueller, Sloane is the loved, respected,
even-keeled character who tempers Ferris' boistrousness
and Cameron's neurosis. (suzeqzee, response to post, Amy
Benfer, The Sixteen Candles date rape scene)
re: "Claire runs that school, and she's not a complete bitch not like the girls in Heathers, who were mean just for the
sake of it."
In my judgment, the film makes it seem more like school is composed
of various fiefdoms, with no Ferris in view, with no one person able to
rise too far beyond group norms. She is near the top of the richies, but
it is not clear this makes her amount to evidently more than any
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particular top Varsity jock, for instance. The potential status

equivalence of these two groups is registered in the film by Andrew
Clark asking Claire if she's going to such-and-such a party, and in the
nature of her reply--i.e., she reacts as if it a matter-of-course the two
groups would mingle.
re: "In 16 Candles, Molly Ringwald makes a deal with the
nerd - it's a give and take situation - he just gets her
panties."
Yeah, I like that. It is to a certain extent played to show-"up" her
status, too: she's no popular, but a trophy way beyond the reach of
geeks (it's not JUST because she's a girl that she's a draw). There is
play in this. Play with humiliation--yes. Play with playing along with
the weird, advancing King of the Geeks, adventuring along with him.
There is experimentation, gamesmanship, adventure, friendship.
She's of a world/class where varied, unusual, dizzying, humiliating,
remarkable, catastrophic, experiences can occur. She can be the Alice
in Wonderland. More popular than she, and none of this is
possible/available. It's too much for all of life, but for awhile, it's
varied mix--nutrient soil.
----re: I was a teenager in the 1980s...
...and I was not a fan of John Hughes films. It always
seemed to me he was superimposing his experience as a
teenager in the 1960s onto the 1980s. There's a kind of
inherent nostalgia in his films for the innocence of his own
youth; I can't think of a single Hughes movie that dealt with
teen pregnancy, or the actual drug trends of the 1980s,
which in my white, suburban high school included MDMA,
methamphetamine and the beginnings of the neo-hippie
thing (the Dead's "Touch of Grey" was being circulated in
bootleg form my senior year). Now I can appreciate his
work, though I would argue that Risky Business - Tom
Cruise and all - is singularly better than any John Hughes
movie. (JaceFreely, response to post, Amy Benfer, The
1319
Sixteen Candles date rape scene)

JaceFreely: If it was all Hughes lost in his own past, why would it
have connected with so many 80's teens? Mustn't it have played to
something WE ourselves had experienced too?
This said/asked, I think I connected to his films because there was
some carry-over in his films of the 70's joie-de-vivre, sense of
possibility--yummy-candy. (I probably like Forrest Gump and the rest
of Zemenkis's films for the same reason.) There is a chill,
mercilessness, possibility of devastating abandonment, evoked in
Risky Business, that was also true to 80's (and on and on) life, but
amounted to an argument against any hope for Jim Henson-style
love, warmth, community, in our future. It was cold sweat of fear-real, but not the whole of it. Hughes remains a source of life, as
Henson has (though unfortunately, I am hearing less and less of his
works, just now).
It seems so apropos to compare the great Risky Business with
Hughes' films. Thanks for doing so.
----re: @Patrick McEvoy Halston
Thank you for your respectful response.
Hughes is a great writer, and as such can bring out a certain
universality in whatever story he's telling (I actually read
"Vacation '58" when it first appeared in National Lampoon,
and loved it). I have close friends my age that consider his
movies integral to their teen years, so yes, there's no doubt
he had a rapport with the 80s generation. As to the larger
discussion at hand, I think his orientation as a baby boomer
needs to be taken into account when addressing his
sensibilities regarding teen sexuality and racial stereotypes.
Even his musical taste betrays his boomer-ness.
As to Risky Business: I just remember every kid I went to
high school with talking about how they were going to
major in business, or economics. It was the Reagan era. For
me the period is embodied in First Lady Nancy's
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prescription for the drug epidemic ravaging the inner cities:

Just Say No. As if it were that easy. Someday "Just Say No"
will go alongside "Let them Eat Cake" in the Upper-ClassDetachment hall of fame...anyway, Hughes had a keen eye
for the ways class politics entered the halls of high school
(Rush's "Subdivisions", anyone?), and for that alone he
deserves high praise. (JaceFreely, response to post, Amy
Benfer, The Sixteen Candles date rape scene)
@jacefreely
Everyone was going into business/economics--how true. My sense
was that it was in the 80s where the smile was wiped off everybody's
face, replaced by the blank (emotionless) stare, the "i can't hear you"/
you can't get to me ipod/walkman in the ear. Hughes tried to break
this down--the journey was from cast/group identity to individual
expression/empowerment/realization. The journey right now seems
to be the other way. Test the limits, but in the end you can be sure it's
off to Yale/Princeton belonging/protection (so long, sucker!).
Regarding the article: There is in it some sense of how we are more
comfortable with the barren, skeletal, cruel, than we are with fleshy
warmth, true radiance. Every film now is much more closed to,
armored against, possible attack--of the kind offered here. "Nick and
Nora's Endless Playlist" tries for the expressive/ebullient, but is
aware all the way of being caught off guard. Claire, before her Bender.
I'm thinking about your baby-boomer claim. In mind is that the huge
Forrest Gump/Pulp Fiction divide, was not principally one of
generations. I'll think about it.
----re: RE: the Forrest Gump/Pulp Fiction Divide...
...referred to earlier: I grew up around and play music with
a lot of self-described Punks who view the world very much
in terms of this divide, according to which baby boomers
kept the alternative rock and punk movements
underground through the 80s by using their power to
endlessly stroke the Springsteens and Stones of the world,
1321
even as they (the latter, at least) descended into creative

malaise while the Meat Puppets and REMs were quietly
making great music - a phenomenon that began in the early
70s with the rejection of bands like Black Sabbath and Alice
Cooper by Rolling Stone magazine and the culture it
represented. John Hughes could be said to be the film
equivalent of this boomer mainstream-dominance, while
more anarchistic film-makers like David Lynch were
relegated to art houses. The 90s, in this view, represented
the leveling of this field a bit, as the post-punk sensibility
finally entered the mainstream in the form of Nirvana, etc,
and commercial success for Lynch and yes, Quentin
Tarantino. Personally, I acknowledge some validity in this
way of seeing the past two decades, but I don't entirely buy
it. In reality, the hippie/punk dichotomy is much more
ambiguous than most Black Flag fans would like to believe.
Kurt Cobain loved the Beatles and Led Zeppelin; even Joey
Ramone professed in interviews his love of Janis Joplin,
Hendrix and the Grateful Dead...generational shifts are
certainly a component of artistic movements, but I find that
aesthetic sensibilities transcend differences of age. Every
era has its anarchists. Antonin Artaud was punk before
there was punk, and for all his violence, Tarantino can be as
sentimental as Cameron Crowe... (JaceFreely, response to
post, Amy Benfer, The Sixteen Candles date rape scene)
Link: The "Sixteen Candles" date rape scene (Amy Benfer)
They sacrificed virgins: Why we need to know more (6 August 2009)

Some archaeologists might pussyfoot around this question
more than Pauketat does, but it also seems clear that
political and religious power in Cahokia revolved around
1322
another ancient tradition. Cahokians performed human

sacrifice, as part of some kind of theatrical, community-wide
ceremony, on a startlingly large scale unknown in North
America above the valley of Mexico. Simultaneous burials of
as many as 53 young women (quite possibly selected for
their beauty) have been uncovered beneath Cahokia's
mounds, and in some cases victims were evidently clubbed to
death on the edge of a burial pit, and then fell into it. A few
of them weren't dead yet when they went into the pit -skeletons have been found with their phalanges, or finger
bones, digging into the layer of sand beneath them. (Andrew
OHehir, Sacrificial Virgins of the Mississippii, Salon,
August 5 2009)
Well now that they we know that they were as mentally crazed as your
average (well, maybe a little worse than that) extremist right-winger,
but are now nowhere so present to do us harm, we should of course
forget about them--or maybe find some way to get rid of their virginclubbing grotesque presence completely. I mean, a thousand years
from now I don't want museums or historical organizations keeping
intact whatever might remain from contemporary right-wing culture
(simply having existed doesn't mean of obvious relevance, necessity
of preservation). Maybe we could just build a bunch of nice organic
gardens over them all. Sort of a way to say, glad you existed and hope
you're all some place nice, but it would have been nice if you could
have lived in such a way we could not but regret your passing.
Link: Sacrificial Virgins of the Mississippii (Salon)
Kill. Sacrifice. Virgin. Die. Eat baby. Troll. Salon talk (6 August 2009)
Obama wants to kill your grandma. Sacrificial virgins of the
Mississippi. Prada model in wolf's clothing. I don't like his kids.
Models, vampires and spoiled brats. Glenn Beck's bashing the the
birthers. Prep school casualty. The troll's revenge. Harry and Louise
must die. Let the military commissions die.
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How could a mother eat her own baby?

All Salon article titles, from August 2nd, 2009, to August 6, 2009
(with the bulk from 5-6th).
This is not sensationalism; it's something's on our mind. If we did a
fantasy analysis of it, it'd have us thinking of/wishing for the young
and quite old as in for rather a lot of trouble. If we were about to go
into a trance state, disengage from reality and engage our dormant
troll, we would begin seeing our leader, Obama, and
hypnotism/trance states associated together:
Can Obama be deprogrammed?
To see how you too can do fantasy analysis, and see the troll maybe
now "stepping" out of Salon-writer/reader' clothing, check out
www.psychohistory.com. Get with it before we get you!
Heads off, for Obama sport (5 August 2009)

What trophy-heads will "you" bring home, in your attempt to court
the Master? Orly Taitz is a good choice, but others make claim to it.
Look to see who might lie ahead as an irritant to Obama, and make
some kind of early claim to it. Obama will get healthcare, but it will be
of the sort easy for democrats to cheer but also for Krugman to
ponder over. You'll need to do some considerable work to make the
likes of him seem suitable for cut-and-baste, but if you can find a way
now to ease him on over to the Geraldine Ferraro/Ralph Nader camp
of out-of-dates, it might actually be done in a blink, rather faster than
we right now be drawn to think.
Link: Should Orly Taitz replace Paula Abdul?
It's not going to matter. This is period where the press assist Obama
in demonstrating just what will happen to you if you raise a stir,
where we get a sense of the kind of muscle that backs Obama, and I
1324
think Americans will get an erotic thrill from the devastating

ruthlessness. It may in fact be what they "were looking for." The
birthers, the doubters, the annoying pests will be eviscerated, and
Obama's agenda will get back on track. And then when some
complainers start taking on this agenda in the "wrong" way, they too
can be shown refusing rides, talking to the wrong people, as having
read the wrong books, said the wrong things: they too can be derided
all Geraldine Ferraro out of the way. The truth of this is not going to
matter. The land-of-birth thing strikes me as immensely silly. But it
won't matter. Even if in our face, we won't see it--if it comes close to
that, we'll just start taking a closer look at all that "youve" been up to.
Link: Salon's handy-dandy guide to refuting the birthers (Salon)
Ensuance from Vegas trip discussion (30 July 2009)
new line cinema

"They all want me as a friend or as a fuck" (Heather Chandler,
"Heathers")
NOTE: Following all taken verbatim from emma's Vegas

post and ensuant discussion (link at bottom):
----Vanessa Richmond's most recent (dour) piece at the Tyee is about (or
at least mentions) how (your typical) fashion mag's brilliance bullies.
Maybe the issue you're dealing with is that your gang of 13 is in some
sense "Legally Blonde" (your reveal has made you seem kind of a
mix--never quite back to emma peel black for you!), and your
effervescence bothers those in shadows? There's a huge bunch of gush
1325
at OS, though, that smacks of people on a dopamine thrill ride they

cannot afford to let stop. (Mind you, I find it difficult to not be at least
a bit performative right now.) There's also a lot of people with stellar
personalities, huge souls, that shine bright 'cause life has buoyed
them up, not beaten them down.
I recommend watching the popular crowd in "Pretty in Pink," "Legally
Blonde," maybe "Sixteen Candles," again (I'm gen x, evidently), and
see if there isn't in fact some, as they say, "they all want me as a friend
or a fuck" ("Heathers"), in your guys' strut.
----Michael: Wow. What a fuss over nothing. Are we to now be
crucified for supporting our friends? As youve said several
times, Emma, this is not personal. Perhaps gushing and
cliquish were improper to use, and we apologize for that.
But understand those words were meant for a friend who
felt she was being unfairly attacked for expressing her hurt
feelings. No one is saying these types of gatherings shouldnt
happen or be written about. As we said in our comment, No
one begrudges anyone the right to go and have a good time
somewhere, and anyone is free to tell others about their
good fortune if they wish. But I cannot. I cant eat in front of
someone whos hungry, and I cant celebrate around people
who are weeping. This is not a judgment against anybody. I
would be a hypocrite if I attempted to bring division to this
place. Its people like DJ, the peecemakers of the world, that
we most admire. Melissa and I have never had an unkind
word to say about anyone here, nor do we now. (metaness,
response to post, Hurt and sickened by cliquish Vegas
posts, emma peel, 25 July 2009)
re: "What a fuss over nothing. Are we to now be crucified
1326
for supporting our friends?"

Michael, likening the lot of commenters here to "fuss-overnothingers," to inquisitors, may well mean you have in fact had an
unkind word to say about some people here, that you in fact have
done so here.
----If you expect every kid who knows what it is to be back-of-the-bus, to
not enjoy playing at being popular when the opportunity's available,
you expect too much, way too absurdly, cruelly much. Given the
opportunity, I'd expect them to flaunt about some, in-your-face-likenobody's place!, at our expense--and good for them. That can be fun.
That can be appropriate. That can be a release from the chains of
modesty; can be empowering. It may be that none of this was taking
place, that what we had here amongst this Ocean's 13 (there were 13
of you, right?) of some of OS's most popular, its celebrities, were
people simply concened to meet, greet, enjoy, and love,
enthusiastically but no more than due, making them seem very
inappropriately suited to the Earth's primary home for vastly more
than simply that! But if not, fair enough to be off-put by it, but there
may be redemption, there may be good in it.
----none of the vegas meetup posts ever seemed to make editor
picks or the front page from what I can tell. so yeah, I can
see how ppl can miss it. another indication of a divergence
between the "Community" and the Management. (vzn,
response to post, Hurt and sickened . . .)
Like BBE said, don't feel guilty about having some joy and
celebrating that joy. Those who have a problem with it,
1327
honestly need to look at their feelings and think: "Why in

God's name am I feeling hurt and sickened if some
acquaintances on the internet had some fun". Feel that
"sickened and hurt feeling" and honestly try to divert your
feelings to things that matter, like making joy in your life.
Envy is a terminal heart condition that frankly there is little
if any cure for in this life. Envy can eat one up and increase
their misery beyond imagination. Until, people who are
sickened explore their jealousy, they will not overcome it.
The world will not and cannot create a bubble to prevent
people from experiencing envy and all the horrid sickening
feelings that it brings on. (Stellaa, response to post, Hurt
and sickened . . .)
vzn: Well spotted. Most popular likely means not editor's prefered.
The editor likes to talk up the OS crowd, but shows his suspicion of it
in prefering pieces with ascetic remove over stuff that draws
out/encourages our liveliness and life. Lauerman is about the
opposite of Walsh, who unapologetically will gush, gush, gush over
puppies! The Las Vegas stuff should have been cover. It's what drew
my attention and interest. The good stuff was there.
stellaa: The mode of thinking that spots and condems ENVY is also
the mode of thinking that works against ever admitting any untoward
INDULGENCE going on here, for it amounts to about an equal
sin/crime. If someone wants to ID accusers as envious, then they
MUST understand all the goings-on as simple innocent fun, even if
this assessment is not fully in accord with the truth, even if it means
making what you need to be true the only truth you're ever prone to
know.
new line cinema
1328
Sorry Patrick but I think you're assuming too much. No one

on this Vegas trip was 'flaunting' or playing at being
popular, or intending anything at anyone's expense (except
our own). I wouldn't have a problem with anyone being this
wa y, it's just that on this trip no one was.
We piled 5 to a room to keep costs down. I skipped every
meal but two, to keep costs down. I did not buy coffee in the
morning, to keep costs down. I kept my hotel stay to 2
nights, to keep costs down, and had my return date on
Monday instead of Sunday - again, to keep costs down.
I'm completely broke, lending my apartment to an even
more broke friend while I cram myself into a closet at my
new husband's house. I haven't drawn a salary in two years
to that I won't have to lay off my employees. I pay for my
business travel out of my own pocket, letting the company
accumulate IOUs. I used frequent flyer points to defray the
cost of the trip to Vegas.
I know I am not the only one that was economizing to this
degree. In such an atmosphere, there is zero 'flaunting' or
pretending to be something we're not. Mostly, what we did
was hang out together at the pool, at the casino, in the room,
talking and sharing stories and laughing. It was an OS
gathering but no one talked about OS - we were there, in
person, spending the time to get to know one another more
deeply.
You don't need money for joy, as Stellaa so aptly points out.
Joy is manufactured from within. The only thing we need to
be happy is to make the decision to be so. I've been lucky in
1329
life and had some big boom times. I had fun then, but not
because of money. I knew that then, and I know it now,
having very little but experiencing the happiest time in my
life. That's due in large part to the 3 years of therapy I chose
to invest in - I was harboring some unpleasant habits of
feeling and decided it was high time to get rid of them. It was
hard, but possible. An interesting side effect - it greatly
enabled my writing. (Sandra, response to post, Hurt and
sickened . . .)
Well Sandra, I understand that you enjoyed yourself, but I for one
truly wish that you could have lived it up even more. It's a meeting of
what is apparent to all of us, a very lively, interesting, pronounced
and fun group of people. For the joy you treasure, any place might
well have served, but since it was las vegas I had hoped you guys had
the means to put to play every bit of excess Vegas' gorge and glitter,
into a "thousand-miles of (summer) fun."
There may be good point to setting things straight. I think I trust your
account, but I do sense in that sacrificed cup of coffee maybe also a
quarter or two displaced into the cup of well-regard. There may have
been no flaunting; but flaunting can be a form of play--not something
to be excused or denied, but appreciated: there very much can be a
spirit in the flaunt, in the flash, that I can very much like. It can
bespeak not primarily meanness or sinful selfishness, but a kind of
therapeutic, rightful insistence on self. Step toward being generous to
yourself, to being truly motivated to give aid/love to others. The
power of GUSH as an accusation, condemnation, needs some working
against. Something I have hoped to offer here.
May you find yourself better situated, sooner rather than later. It's
tough to hear of your living in conditions so evidently so very unequal
to you.
1330
Link: Hurt and sickened by cliquish Vegas posts (emma peel)
I assure you this is the ONLY time in my life I have ever been accused
of being a Heather of the in crowd. It feels weird.
Promise in high school which you are referring to here I was the geek
who went to all school assemblies and not the keg parties in the
woods, was always pictured either typing or in the corner reading a
book in the yearbook, and was upset by others' stories of the prom I
did not attend. I think I fulfill that role as well in Oceans 13 ;0) So I
get why people might have been upset but . . .
2010 will be my 30th high school reunion. I left that behind a long
time ago. I don't understand why others have not done the same. It
was not the happiest time of my life so I choose to no longer live
there.
Dorinda Fox
JULY 30, 2009 01:35 PM
Dorinda, If you can go to a 30th and have it all feel all so left behind,
that's quite an amazing accomplishment. I think, though, that we all
know that is how people are supposed to feel, supposed to be able to
effect, and if they don't there's something shameful about this. I think
whereever you are, is where you are. Accept, explore.
First time a Heather? How wonderful for you--Welcome to the club!
Remember: Others will hate you, but they'd kill to be you.
JULY 30, 2009 01:48 PM
Patrick, the indulgence on OS, compared to the melodrama and
1331
personal tragedy is miniscule by comparison. Take a random day and

compare the melodrama to indulgence ratio. You will see who the
winner is.
Stellaa
JULY 30, 2009 01:55 PM
Well, I'm all for more indulgence, then. How can we be proper
Heathers if we don't well understand the whole point is to enjoy the
fun our spinning ride of color affords?
JULY 30, 2009 02:06 PM
Patrick, you see, this is my issue, in the search for Western people to
cover up their guilt for excess, they have created a circle of misery
that is completely artificial. In that vain, they have managed to
portray their lives as filled with misery and suffering, yet, they have
more resources and take more of the "benefits" of this planet. In that
vain, they have managed to never appreciate any of the joys in life,
instead, the cover their lives in a mythology of faux western suffering.
So, for all those who suffered because some other people of western
developed world are prettier, thinner, have more fun, are clever, I say
get over it and figure out what you have of joy. I have lived in third
world countries where the poorest of the poor find how to express joy,
yet in America and the Western world, there is a self imposed misery
that is bathed in envy of the "other". The more people envy, the more
suffering they invent.
I don't know if my comment makes sense, but I appreciate that you
started the discussion.
Stellaa
1332
JULY 30, 2009 02:09 PM

You know, I have some lovely pics from Vegas. I will not be posting
them. Heaven forfend they cause somebody pain and suffering.
Likewise, I came up with the most AMAZING molten chocolate cake
recipe the other night. But I know some people are allergic to
chocolate, so I won't be posting that either. And while the funniest
thing just happened to me the other day, I know there are one-legged
Little People out there who don't have the best relationship with
alpacas, so I won't be writing about that either...
Wouldn't wanna be a Heather.
I'm more a Veronica.
Verbal Remedy
JULY 30, 2009 02:16 PM
Verbal, what if I feel deprived because you did not post the cake? This
is becoming a Meta day.
Stellaa
JULY 30, 2009 02:22 PM
Envy can be a cover. How many people do you know of those whose
lives seem every year to be improving in obvious and real/true ways-career rise, acquisitions, children's success, etc.--cover each step on
up with so many complaints, with so many "tellings" of all the
difficulties they have to do deal with, that one would think they
needed nothing more than for God to strike them dead, so to spare
any more future suffering? I noticed it long ago in those around, and
understood that good things, happiness, make "them"
uncomfortable--they think it might afford them punishment of some
kind, and so they try and co-op "you" into helping them believe that
1333
the truer understanding of their life is pure infliction/misery.

People who can enjoy life with (what some would consider) little, are
very capable people. But if these same people don't enjoy their life
more if they find means to go more upscale (I'm not necessarily
talking Hamptons, here--though I don't mean to dish Hampton-style
too much, either), there is something wrong with them. You do get
what you pay for. Expensive bicycles are better bicycles. You should
find yourself more happy with one, even if you find much fun with the
beater you're using now.
JULY 30, 2009 02:28 PM
Patrick if you had read any of my previous posts my life has not been
improving in many ways and I will not feel guilt over having some
fun. You deserve to know that I have a 33% chance of being on earth
in four years so leave me alone about enjoying my trip.
I am so tired of people being petty.
Dorinda Fox
JULY 30, 2009 02:32 PM
Verbal,
Heathers rule the school, but yet aloof Veronica still keeps her cool.
JULY 30, 2009 02:38 PM
Dorinda, No I oughtn't. It's way out of place. Hope your ride takes you
way beyond, though. And best to you, lovely Dorinda.
1334
JULY 30, 2009 02:41 PM
Patrick, let me get personal here. Since you colored a large swath of
people with the "mean girl", "Heather" cultural narrative, let me
challenge you.
You are a therapist, I don't know what kind of therapy you do. Your
job, your well being depends on people constantly being in a state of
misery and suffering. Forgive me if I think that you have a
professional interest in taking joy and converting it into some kind of
social pathology. A social pathology that has the intent of hurting
others.
I do not frankly understand your point and your pursuing this
argument. You have taken a meeting of people, a group of people
sharing their holiday, vacation, fun, joy whatever, and perverted it
into some kind of It can bespeak not primarily meanness or sinful
selfishness, but a kind of therapeutic, rightful insistence on self.
What lesson are you trying to teach? Are you trying to teach people to
be temperate and prudent, or modest? Or telling people that just the
expression of having a good time is a pathology.
Well, I don't buy your take on humanity.
Stellaa
JULY 30, 2009 02:46 PM
You are out of place professionally as a therapist if you try to perform
analysis on people you have never met and who you know very little
about. When given more information you spit it back using threesyllable words. I also have a Ph.D. and don't feel the need to use
academic terms in and non-academic environment to impress people.
1335
I am a nice person. You should not delude yourself into thinking that
you are.
It is Dr. Fox to you.l
Dorinda Fox
JULY 30, 2009 03:15 PM
The pathology would be in, if there was some better-than-thou strut
in OS fun, people felt the need to deny it, to not be accepting of it. I'm
not for temperance, modesty, or for prudence--or any other soberminded Christian sounding self-deniance. (I'm not for constant
elation either, mind you.) I think there was some therapeutic
insistence on self, on self-display, in the Vegas posts--in the Vegas
fun. I'm not sure Cartouche needs much of that, but her posts were
especially radiant, much more than just small-smiled, small-scale,
friend-fun. It feels good to let yourself be the show--Saturday Night
Live, unapologetic-style. We shouldn't all be in a position where such
is simply--lamentable. Something to deny, minimize, feel guilty about
(I'm thinking about Joan Walsh right now, concerning her own recent
reactions to ostensible or real excess display, right now).
Quite frankly, though, when I sense too much trepidation, shadowy
retreat, amongst a crowd, when they see others all in too much pink
and glow, my inner Heather Chandler speaks, and I kind of do want
to make fun of them. Offers appropriate and much needed feedback
to them, and good sport for me. We all come out of it, on top-Heather Chandler style!
The point of bringing this up again, is that it was settled rather
insufficiently, as is. It was emma bringing up concerns and asking for
honest feedback--which was cool enough, followed by the only thing
that was happening here was simple good times, and anyone who has
1336
a problem with such is an envious 'tard/turd. I thought a whole bunch

of discussable truth was forcefully pushed off the chatting-room table,
and found that a bit less than we might be up to managing.
JULY 30, 2009 03:19 PM
Patrick, that is where you are wrong, prudence, temperance and other
virtues are not the property of Christian tradition. The virtues have
always been a human pursuit.
I see another layer in your pursuit of this issue, they will not say it,
but I will. The women, of course they were mostly women, were
attractive. Attractive women are typically demonized and trivialized
into indulgent beings to be scorned. So, maybe a bit of self reflections
is in order. Would you have seen this as being self indulgent and
mean, if the women were not as a group rather attractive based on
social and cultural standards?
As a group, attractive women can be objects of scorn and bitterness
and called Heathers, mean girls , dumb blondes, etc. Practically all
religions seek to hide pretty women. Is it the pretty woman we are
afraid of, or the envy and desire that they bring in other women's
hearts and in men?
Just some thoughts to ponder.
Stellaa
JULY 30, 2009 03:34 PM
Dorinda: You make professionals sound of insufficient ambition and
presumption--limited. Aristocrats imagined them thus, which is why
they were at first useful technocrats, and the more imaginative, bold
leadership was up to others.
1337
I use language which is natural to me. This is the way I speak and
write, always. Coming to OS was natural to me; I have not felt out-ofplace; I presume my language is sufficient/appropriate here. Some
have said, though, that OS really ought to be thought of more as
Yahoo.chat. That would be your verdict, I guess. Not mine as of yet.
You don't use showy language, but you advertise this fact so very
showily. As you do with your use of "Dr." here. Fits in with this
particular discussion, but it is unnecessary and the opposite of
impressive: it doesn't make you seem so much someone to be heard,
as someone who wants to quit/intimidate someone else by letting
them know just who backs them--makes you seem someone who got a
PhD, in part, so that you could trump all arguments at some point,
with this sort of (what-ought-to-be-deemed) rather pathetic little
inclusion/surprise/well-as-it-turns-out.
I'm a socialist. People without too much need for titles, perhaps
without any, are the ones who impress me: they are the only who
truly see something beautiful and wonderful in everyone. They are the
only ones who can imagine equivalence meaning, everyone as
resplendent. They are the only ones who would have you know that if
you think/say/feel something brilliant, THAT is all that's important:
doesn't matter at all how here-to-fore, others have "placed" you.
JULY 30, 2009 03:39 PM
You have no clue why I pursued a Ph.D. and are a lousy therapist if
you think you know.
You are "mean boy" using big words to intimidate the girls who
shunned you in school as is obvious by your obsession with high
school imagery.
1338
Others can play your stupid game.

I have never been more angry at anyone on OS. I tried in my first
comment to accommodate. I tried in my second to explain to a total
stranger why I went on that trip. I will NOT explain why I earned a
Ph.D.
But yeah mean little boy using big words because pretty girls might
scare him,
Dr. Fox
STFU
Dorinda Fox
JULY 30, 2009 03:46 PM
Patrick, you couldn't be more wrong about Dorinda. I loathe most
academics even though my husband is one, one of the good ones I
might add, and so is Dorinda. She is as humble as the day is long. I
spent probably more time with her than almost anyone in Vegas and
if there was a whole lot of artifice and posturing going on, she hid it
very well.
I don't what "truth" it is that you are after, but to pursue this as you
have done indicates that you have some kind of issue with a group of
people meeting up to get to know one another better. You are free to
read anything into the meet-up that you please, but I was there, my
bullshit detector was still working, and it mostly came up empty. And
no, I'm not gonna tell.
emma peel
JULY 30, 2009 03:52 PM
1339
Stellaa: Fair correction, but I don't like the "virtues." All I can say is
that when you speak of them, I don't dislike them as much. That's a
compliment, but not a backdown. This said, sometimes when people
speak of modesty, or moderation, or some such, they're not in their
minds thinking of the circumscribed; they might be thinking just
being at ease, or being fair to "your" current situation, pleasure,
whatever: that is, I've heard these terms used where to me they speak
of virtue, but the terms, the generally history of their use, do not go
the way I would want them to. There's something wrong if we need to
school at Dopamine High, show a huge need of other's desire (I know
there is that in a Heather; but in Heather Chandler, specifically, there
is considerable Reese Witherspoon-inner sunshine, too!), but our love
of ourselves, our self-radiance, should be such that's it is obvious to
one and all, even if that's not the point.
Pretty woman--pretty, joyful women, especially--draw our
aspiration/appreciation, and thereby for many also draw out our
discomfort/disease with self-pleasuring. Just to be clear, I wasn't
disparaging them by calling them Heathers, myself. I really do like
Heather Chandler! (Also Veronica, though.) Legally Blonde captures
what the beautiful (in the myriad of ways) and happy "face," so very,
very well.
Huge issue right now, you know. What happened to Tom Cruise,
even. The guy was just happy about his marriage! Goes off to Paris,
gets married--wonderful show! It's not everyone's fun, but it's great
Las Vegas fun--playful fun!, and so we go at him the best we can.
Apparently, he needed to do his best to minimize the show, minimize
the Tom Cruise in the Tom Cruise, for heaven's-sakes!, to have had
any chance of a pass-over.
If you got it, flaunt it! If you flaunt it over me, I'll see in this a way to
doing it so that it's really not the least bit at my expense--it can be a
1340
way of showing how worthy someone finds you--too. There's love of

life in that!; real fun in that!
JULY 30, 2009 04:00 PM
I'm confused. Does Patrick hate the folks who went ot Vegas or love
them? Whatever...Vegas is so "yesterday'. I'll have my eye on the
Boulder trip. And then the New Orleans trip...
spotted_mind
JULY 30, 2009 04:04 PM
I am utterly confused as well. I am even a socialist, and I am still
confused.
emma peel
JULY 30, 2009 04:08 PM
Ok, I join the confused. Because I do not understand the criticism and
the need to evoke the negative imagery from Hollywood etc, to actual
people and put them into that light. Particularly, since the people
involved, we all know many things about their lives, their ideas and
feelings.
So, I will go to my garden and fight the grape vines.
Stellaa
JULY 30, 2009 04:28 PM
Hi emma.
Re: "with a group of people meeting up to get to know one another
better." You believe this pleasant honest, but it sounds peasant
1341
modest (which yes, is a bad thing). My main interest in this is in how

the "feast" (I know, it wasn't a feast--it was a friendly plate of humblepeasant pie) has been digested. It has to do with the fact that you
colour/color (I think this is what you're doing--it's not just aptly
describing) the trip this way, rather than in a more appropriate, a
rather more true way. The Vegas stuff was fun for me, fun for many of
us, because it was a get-together of some of our favourite color/colour
here at OS. You guys have shined brightest here. You're the life. Huge
part of the draw. Look at what Cartouche did in her report back--that
was more fun to witness than anything going on elsewhere in the
world of report that day, that week--whatever! It was glorious. And
the trip itself: that to me was the OS tribute party, even if it was just
everyone in small-talk and a collective scraping of pennies. I know
you're saying that to you it was just a friendly get-together, something
mild, but to be looked forward to, but I still find it strange that
nowhere in your writings will you acknowledge that it too had as
much right to be understood as, be most fairly summized a, meeting
of the OS Stars in Las Vegas, baby! To deem it simply as it might well
have felt--just friends, is inappropriate to anyone at all savy of the
larger sense of the event--a group that well includes you. (Then again,
maybe you well might--you were surprised by the 170 comments,
after all.)
The praire girl in you still finds rampant fun (okay, okay--there wasn't
any of that) suspect, off-putting. It's not just about good taste; it's
about fearing what happens when everything you really want is prooffered to you on a plate. You could have been nickel-and-dining it.
You could have imagined a more evocative place, and (in truth) more
dazzling/engaging people (though I am not suggesting this the case).
It was still a meeting of the OS stars, our OS Summit, if you will, no
little get-together for biscuits and tea, and you knew it. BTW, that's
cool you know. I LIKE that that was part of your guys' event. It's just
part of the good fun here. It's okay to have a popular crowd.
1342
It's every Cdn's situation, unfortunately. Its good aspect is that it

affords us sensible wants--things like health care. But at the cost of so
much discomfort with even the possibility of lived-out sunshine fun!
(I know, I know--there wasn't any of the grand--but if there was?) is it
really worth it?
I'm glad to know you had as much fun as you did with Dorinda,
Emma. Good on you guys. I know that along with the favoring for the
duly modest she efforts to claim for herself here, she must have a lot
of life, to have drawn your attention and friendship.
JULY 30, 2009 04:40 PM
spotted_mind:
I like the folks/stars who went to las vegas, a lot. Dorinda reminds me
of all the girls in highschool who used to make fun of me, so I'm not
so inclined to think much of her, though.
JULY 30, 2009 04:57 PM
Better to be characterized as a star than a sucking black hole, I
suppose, but I'd ask you, dear sir, to search your own analysis for
hyperbole.
Signed,
Got my ass kicked a-plenty by the pretty, popular mean girls and
mean boys in high school too--are we now comparing credentials?
Verbal Remedy
JULY 30, 2009 05:15 PM
1343
Fair request, Verbal Remedy. But OS is hot--so stars for now,

however much the current retreat. If the Colorado thing pales: stars
hereafter, as well.
I was kidding about the least popular in high school, btw. (Just
playing off the "just said" with Dorinda's further efforts to level.) I
didn't like my home life, so I got my revenge, some feeling of turnabout, by making people at school feel as inadequate as possible. I
probably ruined a few lives, actually. Not especially proud of that, but
at the time the demonstration of prowess was, admittedly, at-somemuch-needed-level, quite satisfying.
JULY 30, 2009 05:33 PM
Here's the thing, Patrick. I have never thought of myself as a "star"
here. I don't get EPs, I don't even write that often and I take a lot of
heat from various people. This isn't false modesty, or offensive
"peasant" modesty as you assume. It just is.
I wasn't close "friends" with all the people who went, and I'm still not
close to some of them. I think you are reading far more into this than
it merits. Perhaps there are some who feel that they are stars and
going to Vegas was a "star turn" but I don't know who they are.
emma peel
JULY 30, 2009 05:44 PM
Oh, and I've had plenty of "rampant fun" in my life. I spent most of
my 30s and 40s in pursuit of it. It was interesting that some in Vegas
noted that I was one of the "quieter" ones. I attribute it to the heat,
fatigue and having had so much fun in the past that I don't see it as a
competitive sport any more.
1344
emma peel
JULY 30, 2009 05:46 PM
"I have never thought of myself as a "star" here. I don't get EPs, I
don't even write that often and I take a lot of heat from various
people. This isn't false modesty, or offensive "peasant" modesty as
you assume."
emma: I believe you. But with the 170 comments, I presume you have
full proof that you count amongst the OS renown (or is just further
proof that you're not best understood as popular, but as someone
whose controversial presence draws the attention and ire of countless
lots of people?), even without EPs, even if this is not at all what you
want, is of no particular interest to you. That is, when you next take
account of who you amount to here, you won't now just be drawing
attention to your lack of EPs to suggest your presence is a modest
one, or simply just a controversial one. That you have had more posts
written about/concerning you than anyone else here, didn't tip you
off, surprises me, though. (Popular people are often the most hated-thus my Heather reference.) Maybe your view count is low, or
something. Maybe your posts gather few comments, and even fewer
rates. But evidence that you weren't simply one of the crowd, based
on evidence, not to be evident to you? Surprising.
Still, I hear you that you count yourself one amongst many. No
interest in being a star. There is a lot to be said for that, truly--it can
be said from someone who knows the way to ease, right comfort,
peace, but not much for a reluctance to faithfully be true to your
understanding of how others see you.
A fair post from you, perhaps, would be about why surprised by
170+comments. Why was that the news of the OS region week? How
could I not know? Maybe this will look less necessary, if this OC
1345
rivelet streams into an ocean. But if not, I'd like to hear something
about it, maybe with pictures.
JULY 30, 2009 06:08 PM
emma: So long as you're aware you're telling a most attractive
narrative. It's out of your system, so it's not that you at all freeze or
retreat when things are going on!, when all parts of you are emergent,
growing, getting experienced--it's just that it's all been done to death.
Good, wouldn't want the truth of the matter to be that all this crazyparty earlier action was done in part because it seemed to address
(but didn't quite really--because that would be too big a risk) a fear
you couldn't quite get on out, owing to a too well/long known comfort
in shadows that offered safe but terrible treat from all the vissitudes
of life, the unwanted/discomforting attention/notice of others'.
You were born into a country that deems the well-lived life, very
suspect--very American. If you really lived it, you accomplished
something the protagonist of Bell Jar essentially died for fear of.
emma peel is smart as a whip, and kick's ass. but she is unknowable.
you know this, right?
JULY 30, 2009 06:30 PM
I'm with the confused pack. I'm an OS Star. I'm the Star-iest. I didn't
get to go to Vegas. I couldn't afford to, and there were some other dire
circumstances that wouldn't have allowed me to go even if I had the
means.
It didn't even occur to me to be upset by any of the Vegas posts. I was
baffled that this even evolved into a discussion. Doesn't having envy
1346
to the point of pain over this whole thing sort of screwed up to the
major? It's one thing to have a feeling of wishing you were there, and
a whole 'nother thing to harbor bad feelings toward those that went
and dare to speak glowingly, or even (prepare yourself) GUSH of their
time there. If you can't separate from your ego enough to realize that
people exist and have nice experiences apart from you for their own
sakes and not to somehow punish you, or promote themselves beyond
you, then hon' you got more problems than can be hashed out in the
comments section of a blog.
FreakyTroll
JULY 30, 2009 09:19 PM
Freaky Troll Supermodel: When you don't speak purple, we're too
caught by surprise to understand.
re: "If you can't separate from your ego enough to realize that people
exist and have nice experiences apart from you for their own sakes
and not to somehow punish you, or promote themselves beyond you,
then hon' you got more problems than can be hashed out in the
comments section of a blog."
Are you speaking to me?, someone else?, or is this a monologue to
and about yourself? Oh, that's right--the whole purple superstar-thing
that pops up everywhere and claims all to herself, is just an alternate
self--just a joke, no semblence to the originator, the real thing. You've
convinced all of us that. No doubt. For sure. No need to see what
happens to you when someone else in this developing scene comes up
with some rather more current trick, when the new know nothing of
you and when "we" have had enough of seeing a flippin' freaky troll
supermodel on our plate, 'gardless of what were talking about, what
we were dining on.
1347
JULY 30, 2009 10:40 PM

ah... huh?
And no, I'm wasn't speaking about *you*. You stated both in your
post and in your comments that you wrote about this to promote
discussion of the topic. I discussed.
I'm guessing that last bit was you trying to tell me that I would get all
bitter if I become not the flavor of the week. Eh, if you check my
ratings and comments and EPs, it's not like I'm slaying them in the
aisles. I do my own little thing in my own little corner of this place.
But you know, I do find interesting that you assume that I would
come all pouty about things... hmmmmm.... 'cause really that's not
the case.
And gee, if people don't agree with your "Mean Girl" premise, you get
kind of personally aggressive.
FreakyTroll
JULY 30, 2009 11:19 PM
So Freaky Troll Superstar is, with her "little place" and "little things,"
near bachelor-place invisible on OS. Yes, this speaks to a noticeable
characteristic, a notable problem here, and is an apt and worthy
addition to this post. Success encourages so much anxiety it makes us
just have to imagine ourselves the smallest of selves, our conscious
mind can give credence to. If you ever become more popular, I expect
we'll hear you speak of yourself in third person--it's some other you
people are referring to, not really you. They may do book things here
at OS. I expect it. You really think you haven't a chance (along with
others, of course) at the cover?
1348
JULY 30, 2009 11:43 PM

Being in the place of commenting, as it were, in the fact of the
hyperbole directed at the tree next door, I too wonder about the
cultural relevance of snakes on a plane to Las Vegas. I use certain
comparisons to illuminate my words but avoid pararghraphical
inferences towards anything I might say. To put it simply: I really like
butter.
My understanding of your implication that my inference was in
response to your statement brings me back to my main point. The
cultural signifiers of said experience may or may not have prompted
some analysis of the anthropological meanings of such said
experience. Although "butter" may not have played an immediate role
in the anthropological setting of "Las Vegas", it is to be assumed that
it did, indeed, affect the outcome of the behaviours of those who were
part of the "Vegas Experiment".
In conclusion, I must say I have no point to make but am so enjoying
the pedestrian act of typing that I will file another report tomorrow.
aim
JULY 31, 2009 12:13 AM
look forward to it, aim. aim well.
JULY 31, 2009 12:20 AM
Respectfully, Patrick, you're full of it.
emma peel
JULY 31, 2009 02:37 AM
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White-wingers distract the left for wall-street Obama (30 July 2009)
So if the battle is long and intense, but Obama ultimately takes these
unfortunate white-wingers out, and the left cheers!, and the left
cheers!, and the left cheers! Then when this Wall-Street approved
proceeds along his Wall-Street approved way, will the left need to find
some other foul variant of the right to focus on, so they aren't left
thinking, wait a sec, did we just help entrench this guy?
Link: Is GOP using race to block Obama? (Joan Walsh)
Hot momma-on-son action--with tongue! (30 July 2009)

As an anthropologist, I feel compelled to correct Tennis on
the part about the incest taboo. Every culture has an incest
taboo, but how incest is defined varies from culture to
culture.
Ok, now on to this poor wife: she's poor because she doesn't
have much affection coming her way in her life, and if she
did, she wouldn't know how to handle it.
Just about every person has lips, and the way her husband
uses them to kiss his mother probably isn't the same way he
uses them toward her. She should know that and embrace it.
It kinda reminds me of the time when parents explain to a
child that many different kinds of love exist (i.e. love from
parent to child isn't the same as romantic love between
parents). Well, lady, different kinds of kisses exist, too!
And as many previous letter writers have written, she
should seek some professional advice about her jealousy
issues or about being weirded out by her husband's
behavior before ever bringing it up to him. (daugherofeli,
response to post, Cary Tennis, My husband kisses his mom
on the lips, Salon, 29 July 2009).
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re: "Every culture has an incest taboo, but how incest is

defined varies from culture to culture" (daughterofeli)
How incest is defined does vary from culture to culture. How true.
Letter Writer, If you should happen upon other truths you find
shocking owing to your evident naivety concerning cultural variety
and meaning assessment, like if in fact it turns out your husband
comes from a culture where every once in awhile moms put lips to
penis, not just to mouth (different kinds of kisses! yay! blessed-be the
glory and the wonderfulness!), please, too, go see a therapist and get
yourself straightened out.
Please don't be thinking being an anthropologist means becoming a
child-abuse apologist. It's true; but it's not their primary concern:
They exist to catch sane people like you up.
Link: My husband kisses his mom on the lips (Salon)
Glenn Beck prompts the president (29 July 2009)
Our prompts? Our tools?

I think these right-wing flare-ups are ways of communicating to a
president that "they" (i.e., the people) want more leadership--of the
epic kind. These "agents" test the president's mettle, he meets the
test, they fade away. I think we might forget just how fast certain at
one point very pressing and visible enraged populist figures all of a
sudden so quickly vanish, once their role in the public narrative, their
forwarding of the plot, is done with. McCarthy, Gingrich--larger than
life, "king of the hills!," then essentially, poof!--gone!--mostly
nowhere to be found. The President "gets it right"; qualms disappear
and certainty stands and stays: we no longer need these guys. And so
to help excuse our quick dumping of them, make it a bit less guiltarousing, we start hearing/encouraging stories that make these
figures seem a bit too embarrassing to justify having in our presence--
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sordid personal stories, of the dumped his wife while on the

deathbed, kind; and they're more-or-less not to be found, forever or
for quite the time (until we have the notion their kind of service might
again prove useful). They're our tools, prompts--even true for many of
us lefties.
Note: Ignore the picture of the guy on the right. Pretend he's (Joseph)
McCarthy.
Link: Right-Wing Racism on the Rise (Joan Walsh)
Be well leery of the Rings (27 July 2009)

Be Well Leery of the Ring
Remaining true to what you know youve just seen, in Peter
Jacksons Lord of the Rings
By Patrick McEvoy-Halston
July 2009
I've taken Lord of the Rings out of my film collection several
times. With no trepidation. With no dis-ease. I know by this, I think,
that it is unlikely to partake of the one and only's inevitable draw. But
it may be that it in fact does, but under much better guise. A beautiful,
radiant golden ring is good form for an evil essence with intentions of
being returned to master, but less than best for convincing anyone at
all roughly-hewn that's its "unusual" properties are simply, all-in-all,
rather a nice plus. An Oscar-winning "franchise" about good
triumphing evil, is, however, a better suited tome to stay long in your
hands, without you suspecting its influence might debilitate, worsen,
as much as it entertains.
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How might it worsen? It might well encourage us away from

being self-aware. One step backwards in our collective effort to see
the world around us clearly, absent as much wish-fulfillment-owing
projection as possible. It is an effort the film appraises and actually, if
not often, still significantly pedestals and praiseswitness, in
particular, the Fellowship's successful effort to demonstrate exactly
why Frodo should be the one accorded the singular ability to take
on/deal with/temporarily quit the great power of the ring. Fellowship
could have shown this as just a matter of strange happenstance
(hobbitstance?), that there is just something about these queer
hobbits that makes them for the most part ridiculous but also
strangely empowered: making them akin to faeries or sprites, or some
other odd and unaccountable thing. How can we not think this is the
case with Bilbo, for instance. And likely, too, with Gollum. They're
both quizzical, unpredictable, slyto be fair to Gollum, he manifests
himself later in the series as actually a bit demonically smart, patient,
wry, with some notable self-impetuswillbut partake too much of
the "drunk, fat, and stupid is no way to go through life" school of
social conduct to see them as having something truly noteworthy
over, say, whatever elvin'/human' notable. Fellowship shows Frodo as
being someone Sauron ought rightly to have had his eye on way
before the possession of the ring made this a no-brainer. Though
Gandalf nixes himself as ring-bearer in a way which makes his
problem seem he's just got too much on/over everybody else, Frodo
has the potential for the kind of stuffspecifically, self-possession
that looks to excel what either Gandalf or Elrond can summon
up/make claim to. When the various Middle Earthens gather to
determine what to do with the ring, all are shown finding themselves
lost in quarrels, caught up in mad angerexcept for Frodo, who
stands apart from all, considers, and understands, rightly, given the
evidence at hand, that he is the only one well-suited to take on the
task of destroying the ring. This could have been played as him just
feeling the urgent need to terminate all the noise, all the upsetting
"parental" squabbling, but it wasn't. It showed notable composure,
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greatness in him, for him to have faith in the seemingly unlikely (i.e.,
that amongst such great titles and personages, he could well most
ideally serve as the ring-bearer), to remain true to himself when all
others had lost their minds, had lapsed away from conscious
awareness into unconscious madness.
The Fellowship does right with Frodo throughout, in fact. His
ability to have confidence in his own judgment/assessment, even
when in very unfamiliar surroundings, in situations of high/regal
important, or in the presence of very unfamiliar high magic, is
evidenced later when he understands/intuits the true nature of the
magic sealing off the mountain pass, and presses Gandalf to
understand the charm as riddle. And again, and perhaps most
especially, when he leaves the rest of the Fellowship behind,
understanding from evidence that even the greatest of friends will
have trouble remaining true to himthat even Aragorn will have
trouble remaining true, as the journey closes in on Mordor.
Frodo's excellence largely, it seems, redeems that ostensibly
possessed by the Shire. It seemsif only barelypossible to credit
that Frodo's sense-of-self arose from growing up in an environment
with enough casual, mildly begrudging but essential tolerance of the
laissez-faire, that it empowered curious, open, inquisitiveness,
confidence-providing experimentation, true geniuseven if well
hidden under the guise of the peculiarnot available to those always
so ready-prepared for the vissitudes of war. And it is important that
the Shire seem something more than a wished-for ideal of easy
"maternal" provisions/comforts, of ongoing comfort and essential
sameness, an abode of those appreciative of the good life but unaware
of the higherthat it seem not just ideal for vacation but for
foundation: for Gandalf's pronounced interest in it as something
beyond a well-holed Traveller's Inn, would otherwise seem
unaccountable, inexcusable.
Frodo doesn't do all that much that strikes us as so leaderly,
independent, notable through the rest of the series. Yes, he gets to
Mordor, but along with perseverance he demonstrates that wear-and-
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tear really does mean being worn down, becoming dependent on

others for spirit and sanity, amounts to shrinking not expansion of
self. Just like the broken sword of Anduril, like a valued relic, though
he slips away from best/most lively form, our sense of him, his
notable greatness, is never lessened: the nature of the Fellowship's
portrayal of him means we find it, if still a surprise, still a matter of
due course that Aragorn "bows" to him at his own moment of high
ascension. The drama had shifted to high kings, regal manner,
physical stature and good looks, but never so far away that Frodo's
special and noteworthy singularity could fall too far from mind. This
is not the case with Merry and Pippen, however. And it is with them,
with how they are "treated" in Two Towers and Return of the King,
that I will largely focus my concerns as to the series'
manipulativeness, its great act of bad faith to the ostensible principle
argument moving the film.
At the finish, Merry and Pippen are given huge due, but with
them, unlike as was the case with Frodo, this may well seem both
surprising andespecially with so many other great personages about
over-done, inappropriate. It was their right due, too, however; it's
just that this fact was made clear but then subsequently and very
determinedly obfuscated so as to make the moment of high acclaim
even more a surprise, something even more worthy of being held dear
to those viewers who could/would readily imagine themselves akin to
the uncertain of place. For there were two towers of pressing threat,
one was taken out in dogged toward fashion by Frodo and Sam, but
the other too was taken out by hobbits, only in a more sly, subtle
fashion: the Two Towers may start off with Merry and Pippen in dire
need of rescue, but it develops to show how it is to Merry's inspired
management/trickery of Treebeard that Saruman's tower (and in
truth, the bulk of Saruman's army) owes its fall. The film makes this
clear, but then does what it can to encourage us to understand Merry
and Pippin as in need of considerable redemption before they can
seem fit for high-estimation. The hobbits who literally drew
Treebeard down the path that guaranteed his involvement in the war,
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a huge tipping of scales, as it turns outwhatever Treebeard's

previous indulgent talk of likely doomare introduced to us in The
Return of the King as silly and indulgent hobbits, with breaths of lazy
smoke, with bellies full of pork, who by all rights seem full worthy of a
hearty laugh, a knowing smirk, a kept-in, quiet, exclamation of
"hobbits!" Oh indeed those wacky hobbits! To share in our friends'
good cheer, we accede to imagining the hobbits good for a laugh, a
lurch that sets us adequately enough up to soon think of them as they
first seemed when they pushed their way on through, willy, nilly,
impetuously, on the more likely, the more Fellowship-worthy, Sam's
coat tails, into the Fellowship (Yoooouuu . . . got into Harvard
law!?!?)that is, a huge risk and likely hindrance to the cause. Merry
is shown as guilty of a crime with consequences so potentially heinous
he becomes worthy of little but Gandalf's scorn and doubt thereafter.
Redemption is to be found in following Galdalf's directions, and
climbing an escalated "pyre"; and through following the Stewart's,
and performing as expected in his new role as a guard of the citadel.
This is something; but also not in truth really so much of anything
about in fact what we'd hope a complete novice under stress might be
capable of accomplishing, about equal to what any professional grunt
might manage under command, amidst a work-day of no special
consequence. The effect is that we are drawn to root for Merry to
perform, in part, for the same reason we may well have rooted a little
bit for loathsome Jar Jar to accomplish as much in Phantom Menace:
we root for him to not fair so badly, so that the greats who have so
long had them in their company, don't seem, at best, guilty of a
momentary lapse in good judgment that has forever after earned
them "the albatross," or, at worst, prey to a self-destructive taste for
the attentions of the under-aged.
What is made of Merry in particular, but also of Pippen,
through Return, should seem shameful to us. There should be
something somewhere therein to add validity to an urge to show-up
Gandalf, when he turns so hard on Merry. Something to draw out and
validify our wish Merry was capable of balking Gandalf and
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remarking, "Look you white-bearded fool, this Took peculiarity you

constantly berate now bears responsibility for taking down Saruman
surely something to be well counted against even the greatest of
future mishap? We're to be kept under humiliating lock-and-key, but
it was well outside your sightsif you recallthat we wisened our way
to down a tower, even if this did lead to the recovery of a stone that
played well upon our instinct for inquisitiveness." Fair, I think, that
we expect the film to allow room, in fact, to deem Gandalf akin in
blindness and negligence, as being similarly cruelly unfair, here, to
the younger-son-ignoring stewart of the Gondor' throne, whose
unfairness to kingdom and youngestand truly most remarkable
son, was so well remarked upon and understood, by Gandalf.
We are drawn to hesitate in our estimation of the hobbits as worthy
greats, so that when they receive acclaim, the experience is that much
more of a surprise, that much more satisfying, full-filling, and
powerful. The draw to indulge most ecstatically in a revelation, in an
experience, a culmination, a turn-of-events/turning-of-the table, is
the principle draw offered in this film to not counter/compare current
experience with previously offered fact, too not hold what we
encounter to right account, to be unfaithful to our own memory of
what already happenedand it is offered to us throughout. Before
letting this account of "downed" hobbits lie, we should note that we
also ought to have been bothered that Return puts Merry and
Pippens ability to perform in combat so bald-facedly forth as a
legitimate issue of concern. It's alright that some ignorant Rohan
warriors might doubt Pippen's ability to well perform in combat, but
to have Merry fret his own, and thereby also encourage us to doubt it:
Look, dude, Fellowship had you dicing up perhaps as many as a halfdozen goblins between the two of youit's an issue that long ago was
way past settled: one goblin a piece would indeed have been more
than enough to address itthey slaughter dwarves, keep company
with trolls, after all, and you with turnips and carrots (and, oh yeah,
wasn't it you two who fearlessly jumped on the back of the mighty
troll, spearing him repeatedly, before the elf finished him off?)! To
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once again be combat virgins, for the film to encourage us to try and
convince ourselves we didn't see what we in fact saw way down deep
in the mines of Moriacome now! Come, come, COME ON NOW!!!
What happens, it seems, is that what was put down earlier to
heighten a moment, so very often works, so to speak, to "step on the
heels" of future desired character/plot developments. The film cannot
resist the urge to encourage us to indulge, to draw us to accede, to
forget/look past the inconvenient truth and previously put-down,
with the "argument" that righful reckoning of past experience will
intrude on the ability to well savor the awesomely satisfying
significance/experience of the soon-to-be-offered. You know you
want the Witch King of Agmar to be mighty great, to seem right-fit to
rightly draw the dismay of (note: Balrog-defeating) Gandalf, so that
his distraction by the arrival of Rohan's army seems to accord this
accomplishment even greater noteworthiness, so that his defeat by
Eowyn can be made to seem even more a matter of legend and
miracle; and so you will now forget that he was once easily-enough
one-handedly waved away, with (but) a torch. You know you want the
upcoming battle to be of heightened significance, to be even better
yet! so you know you'll forget all the "this is the battle that will forever
seal the fate of Middle Earth" stuff you were treated to not just the
last battle but seemingly every other battle of significance
encountered along the way. You know you want members of the
Fellowship to be superlative warriors, so you know you'll delight in
their downing of about a hundred Uruk-hai to show off their good
stuff and heighten the tragedy when one of them is finally at last
downed by them, and agree to largely pass over this meaning largely
forgetting all the previous setup of such hugely muscled warriors as
being of such notable formidableness. And you'll agree that there isn't
something a bit askew in how it is that nearly every battle features a
member of the Fellowship just a whisker away from being dispatched
but saved at the last moment for another dollop of nick-of-time
satisfaction and friendship cementation. Time and time and time
again. As if there was no memory of it happening before.
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There is so much such. It's everywhere, and all the way through. To
mind, also, is how the reunited sword is shown to command the
power of/over an army so powerful it would over-run Mordor, if given
full reign, making it, if not the most powerful artifact, certainly the
artifact that evidences the most power throughout the film. And use
of this is okay, and not the ring, because? And a follow-up: Why
exactly was Boromir made to seem so unsound of mind when he
suggested the ring could be used to save Gondor, when later another
artifact of power is shown responsible for exactly that? Don't ask, the
film encourages, for the ripple effects of this question could end up
making a fool out of the likes of Aragorn, Gandalf, and so too you, for
holding it so long near as your dear precious.
But do be concerned. For being lured into forgetfulness
should seem unacceptable in a film whose great lesson is the great sin
involved in forgetting. And I would encourage you to actually bewell
angry: the film would have you capable of disregarding generous acts
of others', whatever the immensity of their scale, the colossal
goodness in their widely felt impact. For are you truly sure that if you
could do as much with Merry and Pippen, that if you cooperate "here"
you aren't capable of as much with other once-greats"real" ones,
perhaps like Ralph Nader, for instanceout of behoovance to the
enticing lure of someone else's promised charms?
It may partake of the ring. Youve been warned. Do not forget.
Works Cited
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Dir. Peter Jackson.
Perf. Elijah Wood, Viggo Mortensen, Ian McKellen. 2001. DVD.
Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Dir. Peter Jackson. Perf.
Elijah Wood, Viggo Mortensen, Ian McKellen. 2002. DVD.
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Dir. Peter Jackson. Perf. Elijah
Wood, Viggo Mortensen, Ian McKellen. 2003. DVD.
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"Uncle Pat," forever: No more "Pitchfork Pat Buchanan" (21 July

2009)
I'm hearing Pat Buchanan referenced quite a bit lately--especially

here at OS. To pretty much everyone, he's the devil--someone who
might be ID'd right now as Uncle Pat, but who's the devil: an intrinsic
fiend who'd like nothing better than to (and please try and forgive me
this) stick a black man, a pro-choice feminist, and someone jewish on
the ends of his pitchfork' prongs.
Is he that? Well, in a way, he sort of is. But I mean this in that, at least
as he is currently figured in the public' imagination--or, rather, as he
had been before he moved from Pitchfork 'to Uncle--and, thinking
now of Milton and of the Romantics, also a good time before, he has
a/the devil's propriety, his stature, style, mean. That is, he stands
alone, speaks as a powerful orator whose voice enchants, charms,
twirls about, but also blusters and bombs, and has the devil's
cunning, sly awareness (he knows, don't you know, that Rachel
Maddow isn't actually all that impressed with Sotomayor; he knows,
don't you know, that Obama has the words but not the heart; he
knows, don't you know, America's most (il)licit desires . . .). That is, if
you'll temporarily forget the first image of him I conjured and focus
on the second, the way he carries/conducts himself is such that if you
suspected that a lot of people who would have you believe they bring
up his name in hatred, actually possess a deep affinity for, a profound
attraction to, him, you'd be surely right in your suspicion.
Specifically, who might these people be? Won't be naming names, but
if you sense in someone who rails against Buchanan, someone who
knows well what it is to be bullied, managed, shut-down and shut-up,
made to feel just a lowly nothing, well hidden, smothered; someone
who may well normally associate him/herself with/within groups, but
every now and then belligerantly announces just how God-damned
independent s/he really is, in a way which leaves you immediately
and readily attendant, placative, and what's-gotten-into-"him"
1360
startled/surprised; someone who would have you believe s/he is selfeffacing, modest, just your ordinary joe, but announces this in a way
which makes self-effacement seem a way to clear and open up space
rather than close it down; this person might actually find the man
very appealing, and so now struggles so very hard to establish the
opposite, in hopes this might break his appeal.
Doesn't work, though. Because though in part they bring up to smash
and break, they also evoke to sympathize--not, that is, to accede to his
points, but to borrow, link to, partake of him in an effort to possess
some of his power: "Sympathize," that is, as in the anthropological
term "sympathetic magic." In a nutshell, they thunder at him so that
Pat Buchanan! can thunder on through them. This single man,
talked about as if he could bring down a nation through oration,
evoke and direct its colossal wrath through his beration, is talked "up"
by those to be counted amongst those who profit by being his
prophets.
For to those who have not been so bullied/neglected, so unfairly
aggressed upon, Pat can end up seeming not so much the devil, but
rather, the beloved, the often wily but just as equally often clueless,
flawed uncle. The emotionally settled, those more at peace, can see
much to admire in Pat, they can even admire and speak of his
personal charm, but though they will find him someone well worth
listening/attending to, they will not find him dangerously seductive-they can readily shut him up, without feeling they've thereby startled
themselves out of a pleasing, out of a necessary-feeling/seeming,
trance. Of his manner of speaking, his oratory, they would see/sense
weakness as much as they would strength. For he does speak as one
who not just aims but needs to capture your attention, as one who is
loathe to let you slip away, not just because he has something to say,
but because he needs your company to fill a void. (They sense that,
though people talk of his belligerence, focus on how he exhales, as it
were, it is at least as appropriate to talk of hiswithdrawing into
oratory ecstasy, of how he inhales and thereby moves away from
those he is talking to.) This sense of him, too, of course, works to
1361
make him seem Romantic/romantic, but bespeaks of a pronounced

need for respectful, kind treatment rather than emulation, to those
able to see him as ordinary, as redundant, enough, even, to be (just) a
well loved uncle.
Sometime later I might get into the good things that Pat does. He can
be especially intuitive, aware; he can be very brave, very empathic,
very kind. His admiration of Palin is so hugely suspect, suggests just
how far off and gone he can be; he isn't racist, but his love of the
common people isn't entirely disconnected from a hatred of all things
"alien" and "strange"; but he really can be admirable--beautiful. But it
may be that I'll just leave him now be and focus more on those I find
even more beautiful--some, admittedly, like Chris Matthews, who
take hits along the same lines Pat does. But for now let me end by
saying that if Pat Buchanan ever merges beyond just being "Uncle
Pat," a fair possibility given that (deep breath now, one and all!) it is
clear to me that though some people address him so because they
really do believe his time is done, that he is lost forever-more to
history, some do so because though they may well want him to come
out again in his former Pitchfork guise at some point, still want to
keep him close at hand, they can only justify (to themselves, to
others) associating themselves with him, keeping him so manifestly
present and resonating in their lives and readied for easy emergence
into a crash/bang eventful future, by making him seem forever
denatured and tamed (read: non-politician political), the problem
won't be Pat Buchanan's dangerously powerful oratory skills, his
other-even-if-netherwordly wrath and prowess: the problem, instead,
will rest in those needing someone well suited to be set-up as an allpowerful Patriarch, someone appropriate to spearhead righteous
vengeance upon those who've brought people so lowly down (to the)
ground. So-to-speak, the power will be in the problem with the
people, not in any such prowess some think incubates away in Pat.
In any case, even though his name is coming up quite a bit lately, no
ones going to put a pitchfork in Pats hands for a good while. May it
be possible for people in the nation to evolve so, that few ever find
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themselves in mood to cue Pat to pick any such up again. Be unfair to

us; be hugely unfair to Pat--someone who has clearly grown to like
resting more idly as our somewhat odd uncle, someone who is in fact
best served if he deigns himself just one more welcome dinner guest,
as he dines querously but happily away amongst a numbered many at
our generously sized, dining room table of a nation.
Thoughts on space exploration (21 July 2009)

re: The 40th anniversary of the first manned moon landing is a
good time to reflect on the wisdom of putting humans in space at all.
For those born since July 20, 1969, space flight is something that's
always gone on somewhere in the background, and the landings
themselves are ancient history.
Nowadays, even as NASA cheerleads the need to revisit the moon as
a stepping stone to reaching Mars, few people would set that as a
high priority for our collective strivings.
[. . .]
That cost, just for the Apollo program, was $25.4 billion. In return,
we got about 400 kilograms of moon dust and rocks and a photo,
"Earthrise," that Al Gore used to advantage in An Inconvenient
Truth.
The political return on investment, however, wasn't even that good.
Even Apollo 13, for all the drama of its aborted journey, couldn't
match the excitement on the screen of Star Wars and Battlestar
Galactica, not to mention the eternal Star Trek.
[. . .]
Supposedly the cost of such expeditions is the price we pay for being
human, with a mystical urge to go out and explore. But only a few
dozen humans will get the opportunity, and the farther they go, the
more physically and psychologically miserable will be their ride.
And the taxpayers will get nothing but news reports and some cool
video.
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Space exploration should certainly continue, but putting people in

space only runs up costs while yielding no scientific benefits -- unless
you want to include scientific studies on how humans deteriorate in
an environment they were never designed for. (Crawford Kilian,
Lunar Loony Tunes, The Tyee, July 20 2009)
Not sheep, but rather . . .
It never really works when people try and set-up "manned" space
adventure as silly, because it did work to awe a generation (+), make
them believers of the formidableness of human potential, "its"
inherent genius. Holy shit! . . . We did that. Wow.To not deal with
this, come on . . .
Doesn't mean I'm for it. But I respect the effect it had on people, a
ton. I am not sure it's glamor we need ("glamor," we note, though, is
again one of these suspect feminine terms we're hearing a lot of these
days, here at the Tyee. To have glamor means to be seductive; to
resist its allure, means to possess manly self-possession, restraint--to
be able to see steadily on through to the "truth" [which inevitably has
one saying things like, "[t]he political return on investment, however,
wasn't even that good," or some such, that actually could be accused
of "charming" through an appeal of sobriety]). But we do need fun; do
need adventure; do need to know that life should not easily be set up
as something best taken in with due modesty, restraint, sobriety,
work-day seriousness--i.e., the same old preferred Canadian way to
neuter anything that seems exciting, into forms more comfortably
dealt with. We're a nation of grandpas.
.....
wanderings/trips
First thought that comes to mind:
Just pushing further away from "home" just doesn't seem all that
adventurous. If the trip to Mars ends up feeling the same as trip to
moon, then so what? Progress? Really? It is perhaps just the
experience of what we're doing when we travel, traveling anywhere-corner store, gas station, Pluto--whatever--what travel amounts to,
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means to, us, that needs adventurous change. Explorations of,

developments in, how we experience our external world.
Second thought that comes to mind (involving some
reconsideration--i.e., forward progress [?])
If we travelled to the moon again, but did so not in an effort to show
up another nation, not to accomplish something grandiose,
spectacular, phallic, but out of recognition that a planet will always
mean something to us, and stepping beyond, reaching beyond,
something too, that might well be something of real value to us. We
could do so not to plant a flag on it, simply tag it, but to encounter it-that could be something beautiful, worthy of resources and support,
maybe. And thinking this way, it is possible too, that reaching beyond
a solar system will always means something epic to us as well, no
matter how much we try to persuade ourselves that, really, you can
have/live the same experience just by finally convincing yourself to
leave old life habits behind you, and maybe out of respect for natural
desires, we should aim out there as well.
We need to appreciate the fact that it just feels different when a
human being is the one out there, rather than an instrument/robot of
some kind. When a human being is out there, s/he is not one of a few:
in a very real sense, we feel like we were out there too--We were in
touch with something New, too. Can't be denied, I think. Scientists,
objectivists, need to respect human ways of experiencing, making
meaning out of, their environment. Otherwise they're just robots,
technicians, drained of soul. Human being on Mars. Touching Mars'
soil. Waving back to Earth. Waving forward, further out there. You
know this could be something really great. I'll think further about
this.
Link: Lunar Loony Tunes (The Tyee)
Salon debate on Red-Army' rape (18 July 2009)
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As the film makes clear, the Red Army arrives in Berlin in a

collective foul mood. Millions of their comrades have died fighting
the Germans, who had committed numerous atrocities during their
occupation of the Ukraine and western Russia. None of that justifies
raping civilian women, but it clearly created a climate where
indiscriminate anti-German violence was seen as pure payback.
(Andrew OHehir, Rape in Berlin: Facing the Truth, Salon, 17 July
2009)
Why do you rape?
To the rapist, every rape is payback. There aren't some who do it
'cause they're EVIL, and another sort who do it 'cause they believe
themselves rather hard done by. Hitler was put in power, we
remember, to undo the shame of Versailles. If you're going to start
excusing--or, sorry, make understandable--Russian' rape, please
make an effort to do the same with the Nazis (if you dare), just so
there isn't any doubt as to what you're up to.
---All rape (of women) is done by men to revenge themselves upon
mother-substitutes, for incestual handling, sadistic treatment they
suffered from their mothers when they (i.e., men) were
infants/children. It is about revenge, as O'Hehir gets at, but it's in
response to way earlier shaming--and not (primarily) from men.
Mothers aren't to blame. When you are not loved, you will use your
children as playthings, you will let them know their role is to give love
to you, that they are bad when they focus on their own needs; and
when they grow up, they will turn on someone ideal seeming someone
else, for revenge. What do you think wars are all about? Further
exploration of this view of rape (and war) as revenge, found at sig.
----Okay, we've got a lot of people writing how "the Germans deserved
it" because of what "they" did to the Russians. Suppose this is the
case.
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Then WHY do acts performed by the German military, ordered by

the German civilian leadership, need to be revenged upon the
German WOMEN back home? Who didn't participate in the war
effort (unlike American women)? Who were not armed? Who were,
in fact, disturbingly vulnerable at the end of the war, once the
civilian law enforcement authority was gone?
Why should "revenge" be carried out on those who were neither
culpable nor able to defend themselves? Why is it always okay to
rape and abuse the WOMEN of the conquered?
That's the real question. (Zandru, response to post, Andrew OHehir,
Rape in Berlin)
Two bits from Lloyd deMause's Emotional Life of Nations (link at
sig.)
War, then, is the act of restaging early traumas for the purpose of
maternal revenge and self purification. Wars are clinical emotional
disorders, periodic shared psychotic episodes of delusional organized
butchery intended--like homicide--to turn a severe "collapse of self
esteem" into "a rage to achieve justice." Wars are both homicidal and
suicidal--every German in 1939 who cheered Hitler on as he promised
to start an unwinnable world war against overwhelming opposing
nations knew deep down they were committing suicide. Like all
homicides and suicides, wars are reactions to our failed search for
love, magical gestures designed to ensure love through projection into
enemies, by "knocking the Terrifying Mommy off her pedestal" and
by "killing the Bad Boy self." As Kernberg puts its, violence occurs
only when "the world seems to be split between those who side with
the traumatizing object and those who support the patient's wishes
for a revengeful campaign against the traumatizing object." Thus the
early crisis in maternal love, which had been internalized during
childhood in Terrifying Mommy and Bad Boy alters, is resolved by
acting out on the historical stage the revenge against the Terrifying
Mommy and by the wiping out of the Bad Boy self.
[. . .]
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RIGHTEOUS RAPE OF MOTHER SUBSTITUTES Even though wars

are supposed to be fought between men, they have equally affected
women and children. In most wars, more civilians are killed than
soldiers, and, according to UNICEF, "in the wars fought since World
War II 90 percent of all victims are found in the civilian population, a
large share of them women and children." In our imaginations,
however, wars are mainly about women and children. Divine wars
were always fought for a goddess of war, from Ishtar to Teshub,
almost always mothers of the war heroes,"crying to be fed...human
blood." Even the Hebrew Lord counsels Moses to "kill every male
among the little ones and kill every woman that hath known man by
lying with him. But all the virgin girls keep alive for yourselves [to
rape]." Yanomamo war raids might kill a few men in raids, but would
abduct all enemy women and rape them. Child murder and rape were
the center of ancient war. The Greeks often used to rape all virgin
girls and boys in wars and often trod all children of a city to death
under the feet of oxen or covered them with pitch and burned them
alive. As van Creveld puts it, "During most of history, the opportunity
to engage in wholesale rape was not just among the rewards of
successful war but, from the soldier's point of view, one of the
cardinal objectives for which he fought.
---I believe that's the first time I quoted someone at length, during my
time here. And if I do it again, not more than once every blue moon
(and I'll try for never). Sometimes there's occasion, but most times it's
rude, unequal to the poster and to those who read/chance upon the
post.
Why the innocent?--which felt like a plaintive plea--drew it out.
---re: "Why women and children"
Wow. Thanks, Patrick McEvoy-Halston.
Your quotes make sense - but they're probably not what most men
would believe about themselves or their motives. (Zandru, Response
to post, Rape in Berlin)
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---I find it funny just how morally superior everyone here is. My God,
if only YOU people had been there to fight the war it would all have
been different..
I especially love the women here who will never ever have to be
drafted, shoved into the front lines, watch comrades die by the
thousands, fight through every possible fear and degradation while
hoping, praying that you not only survive but that the fate of your
mother, your father, your sisters back home all rely on you sit in
judgement of these men.
These men were destroyed in that war, and much as I hope
humanity never, ever goes through that again, I will not, now from
the comfort of my home, sit here and pretend I am superior because
I find what they did repulsive to me.
Go fight a grueling war as all these MEN did, and lets see how much
of your ethics and mental stability you have left by the end of it.
(6stringer, response to post, Rape in Berlin)
6stringer:
So if the depressions worsens, worsens, and we all go through a lot.
Not what soldiers go through, mind you, but a lot--a hell of a lot. Then
if we rape: screw all who "sit at home," who judge but cannot
understand?
You romance the warrior's lot, rather have us understand it. All men
are drawn to bear warriors' scars.
---@Patrick McEvoy-Halston
In which way did I ever say rape was justified or something we
should aspire to?
You want to argue a point, then pick one I actually made, not one
you feel like fabricating.
My point was clear... Men, reduced to animal natures by war are
not going to act like normal, healthy people.. Women are also
mentally wounded and do things they otherwise would not do under
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duress in times of war. Its only the smug, morally superior here who
like to think they somehow would have been different.
And if I am in love with some romantic warrior image, you then are
in love with your Enlightened GodLike superiority. Fact is, in the
same position, in the same time, in the same era, you would have
been no better, no different..and I suspect much worse than most.
@6stringer
I like empathy for, real reach to, understand/assess psychological
effects of constant war. I love it when people attend, with respect and
love, to those we are directed to simply hate and quickly
discard/disregard. But, to me, that wasn't what you were JUST up to.
I admit that what I mostly felt from your piece, is the WHY we get so
many Hollywood films which feature battered, stressed, drawn-out,
scar-bearing warriors: it's an empowered "position." Brought to
"your" knees, humiliated, stressed and tested to the extent of human
forbearance, you NOW can go all righteous against the "clean" and
judgmental, with the expectation that they ought to, that they can
bloody well be made to!, back down. All that wearing down seems to
me to lend considerable over-all swagger, which enables all kinds of
things "you" might actually really want, but in normal circumstances
are too readily shut down, through judgment.
I never feel when I read pieces like the like of what you wrote (not
that I just blended in your response with a whole pile of others), that
"you" REALLY believe that war is something we ought to avoid--I
always smell opportunity, reason for its continuance. I'm not sure if
that's a kind thing to say, but it's how I feel.
----@ Patrick
I'm glad thats how you "feel". After all how you "feel" about what I
wrote, and how you get to interpret whatever you want onto what I
write says more about you, than it does about me. Doesn't it?
As well as your need to see this theory of yours in everything you
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read. Its easy to feel right, and self righteous when you get to just go
by what you "feel" people mean, than by what they are actually
saying.
Or is that unkind to write?
Or maybe, its your, as well as others, need to feel superior that lends
you to think you would have behaved any differently, or that you
would have been any better had you lived the same circumstances as
these people did. And maybe that need to feel superior to others
comes more from your fears? Of what you WOULD do under that
kind of duress, of what you ARE capable of.
Or maybe we should just throw out every verbose theory we can,
just as long as we continue to reduce people to abstractions, and not
actual real, living, human beings put in a situation that drove many
people mad, insane, and crazy.
Let me make my point easy for you.
These men and boys, conscripted to fight, weren't playing war
games to be heros. They were FORCED into it, as most men are. And
that draft is just as much, if not more, of a rape of a mans mind,
body and soul as the actual rapes of these women were.
That is what you, and many of the posters here cannot begin to
understand, so busy are you all standing on your pedestals. Just as
every man in America today is RAPED at the age of 18 when he
signs a draft- or better said, he is informed of the intent to rape if
ever society deems it is time to use his body as a gear for the war
machine. And he has about as much choice in the matter as the
women who are raped.
There is no big mystery of the Terrible Mother here. There is no deep
psychology of Purity cleansing. Or even romancing the Warrior.. It
is simple, men are violently conscripted by society (men and
women) to fight. Where their bodies and existence are used up. So
when they get to the people who they feel caused their trauma, they
inflict the same anger onto them.. rape, murder, degradation.
But to see this, you must see men as human beings, capable of being
traumatized, raped, used... and who wants to do that when we can
1371
use the occasion to paint men as war/rape loving animals.. right?

6stringer
I'm not judging them. I'm all for the empathy and interest, you
advocate for. My concern in regard to your responses is about men
who USE abuse/disregard to justify, to muscularly legitimize, that
which would otherwise be estimated (at the very, very best) "bad
behavior," to what normally is readily shut down by "polite" society.
Again in your response, you evidence the same. You set me up as
uppity, someone unattentful, someone on a pedestal with little regard
for those beneath him, and fire away. This is to your regret, not to
your preference? The writing doesn't show as much.
In fact I would say it works toward making my "point" that rape is
revenge and a delight to worn-out "soldiers," who've simply had
enough of "betters" uninterested in showing any regard for "soldier's"
needs, their plight, their sacrifice, their pains, their personhood.
Every war X-box game, every Hollywood action movie, features some
slighted warrior who effects some kind of huge humiliation on those
uninterested in feeling his pain. This fact deserves attention; deserves
to be explored with the interest you rightly argue is owed to those
whose monstrosity is wholly owed to trauma.
That is, if it's respect for the soldier, genuine interest/concern as to
what war-experience brings (though, again, to me experiences that
most greatly affect us occur way, way earlier in life--war is cover), I'm
with you. If it's respect for a narrative that can help lend momentum
to a turn against women, better-than-thous, the girly-seeming, I'm
not.
Too many toys is a virus in the bloodstream (16 July 2009)
Michael Lerner
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Photo by sduffy
If progressives, whether in unions, activist groups or political
parties, don't soon begin doing politics differently -- radically
differently -- they will fail to show that "a better world is possible."
And the price of failure will be catastrophic.
We have known for years that our consumer culture is out of control
and our obsession with having more and more stuff has reached the
status of a virus. Our consumer-driven global economy is a lethal
threat to the planet and every one of its eco-systems.
The lock that consumerism has on Western so-called civilization is
formidable -- a virtual death-grip on our culture and our future as a
species. It is a kind of madness but one which we can apparently
adapt to. This manufactured addiction to more and more stuff
undermines community, threatens the planet and doesn't even make
us happy. Consumerism, driven by the most sophisticated and
manipulative psychology the advertising industry can buy, has had
the effect of atomizing us. We are defined more and more by what
we have, less and less by our relationships to family, friends,
colleagues and community. (Murray Dobbin, Left Needs Soul
Searching, The Tyee, 9 July 2009)
Things are "out of control." We have a "virus." Our problem is our

sinful and ongoing want for "more and more."
If this sounds about right to you, just a word-or-two of caution, if I
might: this rhetoric is very much akin to that spouted by those
Michael Lerner would, be very assured, not rightly so very happy to
be likened to: those darned Nazis.
Nazis?--Yeah, Nazis. When Germans got in the mood to vote this
unsavory fellow in, their complaint was that Germany had gotten
much too greedy (oh how the Nazis hated those free swinging swingdancers!), that it had a virus in its bloodstream, that it needed to
become pure again, in touch with primal Germanic, masculine,
simple and communal purity (does this have anyone thinking of
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another recent Tyee article?), and this required people enjoining

together and organizing some kind of very substantial purge.
So who was it in Germany that was prospering most, that engaged
most successfully in professional, commercial affairs, that tended to
treat their children in a more liberal, permissive fashion? And guess
who got purged so the nation could feel all stoic manly again?
Commercialism isn't the problem. Rather, it's many people's tendency
to feel dislocated, out of touch, when society moves ahead too much;
it's people's intrinsic discomfort with abundance, with getting what
they want and deserve to possess. (For those interested in the sort of
language that presaged Hitler Germany, check out the
link:http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/eln06_war.html)
If some other someone wants to put forward a vision of a society that
suggests that life is about accumulating, realizing growth, love,
friendliness, playfulness, but that it just isn't well
represented/encouraged by the kind of culture we're "in," I'll very
much be listening, by the way. For what we got now, certainly ain't all
that much of what I really want. I just trust about no one who rails
talks "viruses" and rails against greed, even from someone as worth
attending to as lovely Lerner most certainly is. And getting together in
most any group can make you feel a sense of belonging, purpose,
vitality; but group-think can make a lot of what later is understood as
hugely abhorrent, look in the moment all too very "hit-the-right-spot"
right, virtuous, refreshing--meaningful.
Is the Tyee going to prove a vehicle for some to reclaim their lost
manliness, their solid heritage of once-upon-a-time simplicity? If it
does, some may stop thinking of it so much as a friend to the Left,
who have historically been seen as a bit feminine and foreign, a bit
luxurious in their tastes, by their more "prosaic" peers. Please don't
go there. It may be that all good left-wing communal efforts talk in
ways akin to how Lerner manages here. But I think it would do good
to have someone write something delineating/detailing how
historically, it is always the Right that most loudly rages/riots against
things like commercial excess, about the ill-offerings of ostensible
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societal progress'. Offer some History.

Useful, perhaps, will be some offerings from the British 18th-century,
when the isles got really wicked commercial, when it became a nation
of shopkeepers, where everyone pretended to be gentry, in no small
part owing to their possession/accumulation of all the right
assemblage of fashionable goods. The Right, then--the conservatives,
then--all said society was becoming soft, loosing all sense of real
purpose and meaning, and that as consequence it would prove
militarily weak and earn collapse owing to invasion, or some other
widespread and total calamity. Turns out they didn't know what the
hell they were talking about, with Britain fairing not so bad, overall,
in subsequent centuries--even without them giving up their taste for
domestic, pretty, niceties.
Of course, as mentioned, my taste for shopping excess would never,
ever involve West Edmonton Mall--that elephantine pleasure-house
for taste-crippled proles.
Nighty, night.
Link: Left Needs Soul Searching (Murray Dobbin, Tyee)
Why Obama get universal healthcare (15 July 2009)

Clinton couldn't get it passed because he couldn't get universal
healthcare to not seem hippie-communal indulgent. Obama is a
different story. He can make it seem part of a plan to shape up
America--to get America into shape. He can make it a macho
endeavor, one linked to making America seem tautly muscled against
outside threats, seem too narrowly thin, too alert, and too evasive-even--to be readily caught by predators. There might well be some
delay, but once he is more seen as a war president, once the war in
Afghanistan expands, I can see universal healthcare coming through
in a way which makes the president especially potent, and the nation
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all together connected to, unified with, him.

----Wrote my last post, wouldn't you know, before I encountered this
recent quote of Obama, elsewhere on Salon: "Muscles in this town to
bring about big changes are a little atrophied but we are whipping
people back into shape." Added to faith in my intuition, very much for
sure don't you know. America wants him to be Mr. Muscle. They want
him to help make social services not a bloated vampire that drains the
nations, but nuts-and-bolts that constitute it "back" into perfect form.
Link: Obama's Healthcare Clock is Running Out (Robert Reich,
Salon)
Discussing the dissing of horse racing (14 July 2009)
photo by Zach_ManchesterUK
Fighting has broken out in Siena's Piazza del Campo. Girly fighting
too, by the look of it. From across the piazza all you can see are
flailing arms at the point where two crowds of young people have
met, a wild flurry of slapping and punching. I can't see the colour of
the scarves each group is wearing, but someone says it looks like
Tartuca versus Chiocciola, or possibly Aquila against their old
enemies Pantera. The enmity is long-standing although actual fights
in the public square are not generally done. The kids can't help it
though -- it is Palio time again. (Steve Burgess, At the Worlds
Wildest Horse Race, 10 July 2009)
re: "Girly fighting too, by the look of it. From across the piazza all you
can see are flailing arms at the point where two crowds of young
people have met, a wild flurry of slapping and punching."
Steve, fighting that amounts to a wild flurry of slapping might well
seem most aptly summed-up as girly fighting to you, but, please note,
such a summation can actually contribute to a mounting societal
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assessment of WOMEN, of females, as all so in truth, in essence,

rather ridiculous, so rather-not-to-taken-seriously, so put-them-backin-their-proper-place, girlies. Please note, woman have been spending
the last two centuries and a half, trying to escavate themselves from a
Hunt, from a God-damned, you barely deserve to live let alone be
expected to be respected, hunt, and it would be a pity if, hoping, after
all their efforts, after all this time, they've made some forward
progess, they made the mistake of looking to your assessment of
horsies and crowdie' antics, they felt that, no, it's all the same, that
things won't change, no how, no time, nowhere--no way.
You're an interesting guy, with a promising future, so I'll resist
flagging this post and reporting of your contribution to a belittling,
hateful atmosphere toward women, to those who truly are to be
counted on to be concerned about such matters, which may,
unfortunately, given your position with the Tyee and its professed
respect for women's rights and animosity toward any and all that's
disrespectul to those who've historically been the brunt of brutal
discrimination and shame, prove of a smaller cohort than we've been
lead to believe. Of course I could be accused of making too much of
such a small thing, but hopefully we've all done enough redemptive
work, to know that this might amount to digging a deeper hole.
Mancations; West Edmonton Mall women, shopping--as a, as THE
problem; girly vs. manly kinds of fights . . . Changes ahead? I'm
indeed wondering where you're headed, Tyee.
----I dont understand the need to trash the writers of the Tyee
everytime there is an article that offends hegemonic sensibilities.
While it is important to hold our writers accountable, it has to be
done with real reason. As for the sexist ramblings in this article, a
couple of lines, including the reference to Monica Lewinsky also left
me a little puzzled as to what the authors intentions are. However,
the need to question the direction of the Tyee everytime an article
does not meet some mysterious standard is becoming absurd.
Vanessa Richmond wrote an article last year comparing and
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contrasting the media treatment of Spears and Jolie. While it was

shallow article, it was designed to provoke thought and discussion.
However, it brought calls of Why is the Tyee publishing this sort of
National Inquirer crap by some commentators who did not even
bother to read the article.
There is a great variety of writing at the Tyee. If you dont like this
piece, you could spend some time commenting on the Liberia, a
Tricky Path to Justice or the "Food Inc" piece. I encourage the
writers at the Tyee to continue to take risks and provide us with
many alternative subjects to consider. (Moat, response to post, At
the Worlds Wildest Horse Race)
Moat, you didn't reference SicPreFix's post, which addressed the
entirety of the piece, not "just" a "couple of lines." S/he, you noticed,
is one whose (silly?) "hegemonic sensibilities" weren't so highlystrung, they disabled her/him from finishing reading the piece.
I am one that tends to really engage in stuff some find unworthy of
even a brief comment. But there are times when I won't do it, and will
instead offer some broader critique--from part to whole. And when
I'm beginning to sense that the range that you yourself still see, seems
to me to be much less marked, and of a nature/direction that
genuinely concerns, I talk it.
Pieces just don't "provoke discussion," here. Many times they are not
most fairly/accurately summed up/essentialized as of the kind of stuff
that opens things up. Many times there are articles here that
discourage/disparage certain ways of looking at the world, that work
to shut things down, to shut people down. I like it when people go at
these articles in an alive way, to challenge what might well be--who
knows?--a rather unfortunate narrowing, rather than a wholy
commendable opening of things up (something all periodicals/media
outlets pretend to: even [or even especially] the likes of FOX news).
You may not intend, but you play in a way to taught appreciations of
the media and readers, here, to shut certain readers/commenters
down and buoy journalists up, which requires some challenge.
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Most times, again, I really go at the entirety of the piece, because

most articles are alive enough that you may not most fairly go at them
(though this doesn't necessarily follow), that you cannot resist not
engaging with them, by taking on two lines. If this the case with this
piece? I had too many other articles also (reverberating) in mind
when I read/addressed this one. But SicPreFix didn't--was focused
solely on this one. And looks to be one who feels the whole of it is to
be found in the smaller part.
It is no good when people are afraid to say things, however. And it is
good when writers operate with a certain, with a considerable,
disregard for what others might say--how else to integrity? how else
to productivity?, how else to, even, sunshine!, pirates!, sundae
sweetness!, and a better world? And it is true that people are very
quick to shut people down when they say anything un-pc, as many
who contribute to discussions here, have learned from past
experience.
Perhaps almost as quick as they are to jump on those who can be set
up to seem implusive, flippant, indulgent--"girlie": i.e., those whose
obsession over the trivial, makes them sadly inferior to those able to
hold to proper account.
----Since people seem to feel strongly about this, I'll respond.
"Girly fighting"--It's a joke. Pick your battles, folks. Save the outrage
for the real issues. Or can one of you explain to me the underlying
lack of respect, the clear disdain for gender equality, represented by
an old-fashioned term for slap fighting? Am I failing to acknowledge
the very real hopes and aspirations of 21st century women to haul
off and break noses with solid pile-driving punches?
SicPreFix wrote: "... the whole story reeks of outmoded, sexist, proviolence, tribal warfare...."
So you don't object only to my perceived attitude, but to the reported
facts as well? Perhaps I should rewrite the story so that an eightcentury-old Italian tradition no longer offends your sensibilities?
And why is it that so many Tyee posters take umbrage at any
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attempt to broaden the scope of this magazine beyond their pet

subjects? Down with tyranny, I say. (Steve Burgess, response to
post, At the Worlds Wildest Horse Race)
Maybe stop with the broadening of scope,
and entertain some appreciation, some respect, for this wild ride?
Guess we didn't realize you weren't saying they slapped away at one
another like girls, that what you were saying is that they fought in the
manner people used to without compunction reference as girly
fighting, before feminists, concerned leftists, showed how using these
ostensibly "innocent" terms, however innocently, very much
contributed to an everyday lived environment which denigrated
women while it upraised men.
These same concerned feminists have been trying to show that it's
never a little joke obsessed over only by the intrinsically silly, whose
sillyness is such that they quite rightly ought to be the subject of quick
but forceful dismissal by Hemingway-venturing men, who feel they
have a solid claim on being feminist, themselves, but who take
suspicious, not-so-feminist pleasure in setting up people as overlysensitive, easily offended, silly-types, with pet projects and a domestic
narrowness of scope--that is, in ways/terms traditionally used to keep
women in their place, well out of the affairs, and hair, of men.
Link: "At the World's Wildest Horse Race" (Steve Burgess, The Tyee)
Bruno amounts to a rather large penis in the face (13 July 2009)
everyman pictures
"Brno" is not good for gays, but not for the reason you may suspect.
Brno is, ostensibly--is seemingly incontrovertibly--Sasha Baron
Cohen as a ber-feminine, frilly, flashy, fashion-obsessed, "girly-man"
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homosexual. But he is in fact more accurately understood as a hypermasculine, phallic aggressor, phallic male, whose aim is to not so
much to show up others prejudices, cruelty, ridiculousness, but
rather to ridicule people in a way he can readily get away with, tear
away at any self-dignity they claim for themselves, to, in effect, come
as close to making him his "bitches," as he can.
Brno may look to be someone a mans man would abhor, would
react to, just as the wrestling mob reacted upon finding themselves
being duped into having cheered on a homosexual coupling. But
natural queer aversion, isn't how best to account for the mob's
reaction. The wrestling crowd was stunned and, in greater truth,
traumatized by the reveal, because Cohen had set them up to
look/feel like fools--colossal ones. He had unmanned them, made
themhis "bitches"--a very cruel act, one no different in true intent
than manipulating the high school' least popular into
approaching/flirting with the good looking quarterback, to drive her
to near suicide-level self-estimation--but one that operates under way
better cover.
This bad for gay men? You betcha. Because while to the American
public, gay men can be understood as the aggressors--"vampires,"
whose approach, whose near touch and breath, can leave you forever
after affected/infected, what comes most readily to mind when they
think of homosexuals is of themselves being made to seem
ridiculously "girly"--"bottom-bitches," as they say. That is,
humiliated, powerless, disarmed and in full surrender. And what
Brno most effectively communicates, in my judgment, is that there is
no better remedy for feeling at risk of being made to feel akin to
Brnos "bottom-bitch" (in the hotel scene, be sure that Cohen made
sure he was the one caught with his penis up someone elses rear end,
not the reverse), note--not to Brno, than to strut about swishing
your dick in everyone else's face.
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Not a satire. Not social commentary. Brno is a paean to the hypermasculine--to the penis-empowered, in full (and brutal) disregard of
the lay "pussy" victim. If America turns on to this film, it will be
because Cohen has convinced them there is in fact something to be
said for finding your dick halfway up someone elses anus, a disaster
for the truly "girly"-seeming, wherever they're to be found.
Editors as id enablers: Conversations with the editor (13 July 2009)

Patrick,
We can't gamble the Tyee's existence on creating a forum for 'near
libelous' statements. Nor do we wish to create a forum for racist and
sexist comments, or personal insults directed at our writers or other
commenters. We wish to create a forum where many feel
comfortable and welcome to comment. And we acknowledge that
personal vitriole, and racist and sexist comments do cause harm.
(David Beers, On Monday, a New Tyee, July 8 2009)
Of course get rid of the libelous, rascist, sexist. Let's pretend that's not
so much what constitutes the Wild West (which I know is what it is, of
course), and say that's Cess Pool stuff, that no one ought to redeem (I
won't). (By libelous, I really didn't mean libelous--I was thinking
lurid, but "libelous" now embodies more the sense/feel of the lurid, of
the sinful, than even "lurid" now does, so I went with libelous.)
And, yeah, I didn't make any effort to redeem good reasons for your
(i.e., the editorial staff at the Tyee's) care and scrutiny. It is indeed a
very good thing to play a part in making sure people don't walk away
from their encounter with the Tyee, feeling like they don't matter,
feeling like a victim, feelin' like they've just eaten shit.
Still, overall I do think that despite some talk now of redeeming freerange play, that the overall societal trend (I know that sounds very
ranging and grand, but still) is toward keeping things in control-something that ensures we get far fewer ranging, all-over-the-place,
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risk-taking Christopher Laschs, or William Irwin Thompsons (a leftie

who would, for example, call the theory of evolution into question-something you'd never see someone on the left--even if they shared
his concerns--dare give voice to right now). Makes things more
boring, if more tanquil, settled, and predictable, than I'd like it to be.
I haven't experienced a Salon discussion with anonymous comments,
that's before my turn there, but I was told that once you could post
anonymously (that is, under the actual name "anonymous," which
means no one can readily differentiate you from all the others who
post under the "anonymous" moniker, which means you really could
just yell stuff anonymously from 'mongst the crowd), and so I checked
way earlier Stephanie Z. stuff, and saw them there. About a month
and a half ago, Joan wrote about the changes--You could now flag
comments; the best comment featured was being discontinued;
couple other things. In that post's comment section is where I found
some of the talk redeeming (let's call it) fully anonymous posting,
along with warnings about the climate created where every post very
visibly is at risk of being flagged by others on the site.
It's a worthy discussion, you know. I think we're used now to thinking
of editors too much as superego, when they might now prove most
useful as id enablers. Editors could weigh in, maybe, and address
posters who are playing it too safe. I've seen John McLaughlin do
this; same too, Chris Matthews. That is, really hammer away at those
who won't say what's really on their mind, for fear it'll offend
someone, for fear it would get them in hot water, operating under the
assumption that the whole point of living in a free society is that
people should much more feel the impetus to let it out, than to keep it
all so very guardedly, hemmed in. Feisty fish.
Link: On Monday, a New Tyee (Tyee)
You kept your couch--for how long (12 July 2009)
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photo by House of Sim

If you're still wearing the same clothes you bought ten years ago, then
part of you hasn't changed through all that time. Too bad--Since you
weren't all that to begin with, we were hoping to see a change.
----Look again--Some people noticed, travelingferret, and they might
have appreciated the recognition. But yeah, the design is good. Also,
though some are trying to defend IDEA goods by pointing out that
they can last the long while, I believe more effort ought to be put in
defending the idea that the nature of their composition and their cost,
make them easier to imagine as only temporary goods. Goods well
suited for who you are NOW, that is, constituted so you don't feel you
have to keep them around forever, or pass them on to other people
they no longer well suit, either. You can get rid of them, as you should
anything that remains static, while you go about life's primary
business--growing into something richer and more wonderful-different.
What we need to do is really get good at re-using the materials. You
buy knowing you'll be breaking in on down soon enough, to be put
back into something relevant and new. Planned obsolescence is
moved by the wrong energy, but can be "re-made" into a philosophy
which redeems change and growth, that is, into something rather well
usefully suited to work against an age increasingly driven to redeem
stuff that should be well out of our face by now, but was,
unfortunately, well built to last. More talk about the good old days
and the crappy youth of today, grandpa? Lovely, can't get enough, as
they say. . . Say, How're your bones doin', gramps?
Link: "IKEA is as bad as Wal-Mart" (Stephanie Zacharek)
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Freaky Troll Supermodel vs. Death Star (10 July 2009)
photo by Nin Swift

Freaky Troll--We all do love you (we do), but at times you can inspire
Jar Jar creepies. I'll find myself appreciating what you have to say,
and enjoying that crazy wig of yours, and laughing, and laughing . . .
and then for some reason start wonderin' if there might just be a
season for huntin' freaky trolls, maybe something someone in the
government wrote in as a lark, just for kicks.
It'd be more than a fair fight--you'd have your Black Forrest abode
and your wigged-out awesome troll-stuff--and I'd have whatever
resources America would have considered using to get rid of Jar Jar, a
few years past--which I think means I'd be nuclear, if not a primitive
version of a Death Star.Well, in truth, I must admit that wouldn't be
so fair, after all--after all, Carrie Fisher's wig was pretty pronounced
and remarkable, but I don't seem to remember it stash for stuff that'd
down a Star. So in the odetteroulette new spirit of things, may this
time can wait until you've gone fully Freaky Troll supernova, Freaky
Troll SuperModel, superstar.
Sarah Palin acting like a Starbucks' whore (8 July 2009)
photo by arimoore
On today's Hardball, Joan Walsh scorned Palin for acting like a
Starbuck's barrista, saying, specifically, "to up and quit with 2 weeks'
notice like you're a barrista at Starbucks . . .?!"
Joan, I wish you'd said "like a McDonald's employee," for it would
have made it beyond clear that your comparison may not just have
worked to lessen Palin, but also to make barristas seem even more
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than they now do like low-life transients, without any commitment to

their job, without any real warrant for any solid societal' respect.
There might just be some people who enjoy working at Starbucks,
who believe they provide an essential service, one worthy of respect,
who would credit that there's a lot of turnover, but would prefer not
to made the perfect "example" to set-up Sarah Palin as a wanton,
flouncing, tramp.
Do we really want to create a cultural climate where a lot of those who
work at minimum wage jobs end up considering switching to military
service, just so that they can be seen, beyond doubt, as employed in
something worthy of a dignified reference? Could happen. Let's not
the left be party to it.
Link: Hardball
People don't put in two weeks notice at McDonalds, they storm out
mid shift throwing their apron or hat, whichever, on the floor.
ocularnervosa
JULY 08, 2009 08:38 PM
That doesn't help, ocularnervosa. Can you say something nice about
them?
JULY 08, 2009 08:52 PM
People at McDonalds? I worked there for three months and it really
encouraged me to crack down on the books.
Starbucks? Never been there.
That's the best I can do.
ocularnervosa
JULY 08, 2009 09:16 PM
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Well said. Thanks.

Cocoalfresco
JULY 08, 2009 09:17 PM
Thanks Cocoalfresco.
JULY 08, 2009 09:20 PM
But, Patrick, you know that Starbucks isn't the point.
emma peel
JULY 08, 2009 09:21 PM
"Sarah Palin acting like a Starbucks' Whore!"
Um... I don't think she's acting.
mr e
JULY 08, 2009 09:39 PM
I do think it works to essentialize Starbucks' employees in a harmful
way, at a time where this cannot be allowed to pass unnoticed.
Anyone working at a minimum wage job right now, is not just
accorded little respect: we've pretty much set them up so that they're
"untounchables"--people so lowly you don't want to be associated
with them, people so lowly it doesn't really much matter what
happens to them. We live in an age where increasingly if you don't
find yourself going to the right schools, in the right professions--you
lose: drawbridges are up, sucker! I aim to do what I can to help
"correct" this situation.
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I know what she was up to, but kind-hearted Joan kinda meant to
disparage Starbucks' employees there. I felt it. That's what bothered
me. She's most certainly a very good, warm person--but she needs
this kind of feedback. Many good people in "Washington" need it-Coming to mind also is Hillary Clinton--who I like--arguing that
today's youth need to start working harder, to stop being slackers,
which had me thinking, hey, the youth of today grew up in an age of
diminishing expectations, of accumulating societal cruelty--they were
fucking abandoned: ease off!
Thanks for the comment, emma peel.
JULY 08, 2009 09:40 PM
patrick - you raise a wonderful point. except, i dont think mcdonalds
is a good analogy, either. people work to have food, and it should not
be criticized. i am sure joan didnt plan to say it, or she would have
made her point differently. i personally think that the lack of respect
that accompanies minimum wage jobs is half the reason for the drug
sellers. i mean, why work for minimum wage and no respect? i
wouldnt, if i had an alternative.
jane smithie
JULY 08, 2009 11:18 PM
I've always thought that jobs like barista and fast food employee were,
for the most part, transitional - something we do while we're
attending college, or waiting to be hired into something we'd rather
do. Thanks for the reminder that for some people, it's a career and/or
longtime position, a way to earn money to support themselves.
I suspect that Joan was just thinking on her feet - those interviews
provide little opportunity for word-searching and that was probably
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the first thing that popped into her mind. She's not a mean person I'm sure she didn't mean it in a derogatory way.
Umbrellakinesis
JULY 08, 2009 11:26 PM
Hi jane smithie.
If she referred to a mcdonald's employee--synonymous with "as low
as you can go"--it would have called attention to the fact that her
reference was, to a certain degree, participating in/exacerbating a
cultural trend to set-up the minimum waged as near-untouchables.
She didn't because she doesn't go to mcdonalds--she goes to
starbucks, and, you know, probably hasn't the highest of regard for
the people who work there. I most certainly am not saying Joan isn't
mostly warm and kind, though. She is that.
Thanks for the challenge.
JULY 08, 2009 11:29 PM
Thanks, Patrick, I wasn't happy when it came out of my mouth, but
McDonald's wouldn't have been good either. I was looking for a job
where people are reasonably easily replaced (although my favorite
baristas are not, and our local Starbucks lets us take in Puppy Sadie)
so...I just apologize all around. But: I didn't refer to Starbucks
whores!
Joan Walsh
JULY 08, 2009 11:32 PM
I think that was what emma peel was getting at, umbrellakinesis. And
I think what you both say is mostly true. But she belongs
amongst/associates with those who would be very uncomfortable if
their children ended up at Starbucks, unless "it" was clearly
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delineated as NO more than just a summer job/experience (which

would be democratic and fine--very nicely part of the
accepted/socially acceptable life storyline). Her immediate company
(though not for the very most part, Joan herself) is still that who
profess/and most often display sympathy with the "downtrodden,"
but who also spend a great deal of time making sure that every life
step they take evidences their genteel and clean constitution,
evidences how they in no way can be counted amongst the horrors,
the disposables, who've strayed from the defined path in such a way,
to such a marked extent, that forever after they no longer count. If she
spends more time following along/participating in OS, this will help
her--it's a more ranged sort, here. Most of us don't have book deals
lined up, and likely never will, which is why some reputables prefer to
keep their distance from us, whatever they say to the contrary.
JULY 08, 2009 11:54 PM
people who work minimum wage jobs aren't untouchable because of
walsh's comment. any regular job would have made a good example
because the comment was about the complexity of your role there, not
whether or not you took pride in it. how do you begin to take the reins
as governor during someone else's term?
shoot, i sold diamonds for a living, and i was eminently replaceable. i
wore a suit everyday, and they'd boot you in a second for failing to
wear panty hose. the cultural climate you're talking about is already
here. people were nicer to me when i delivered pizza.
bstrangely
JULY 09, 2009 12:09 AM
Seriously, Patrick, you doth protest too much. I mean come on. I
think you can acknowledge that quitting a job as governor might be
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just a bit more of a career statement that leaving a job as a barista.

Most people I know have nothing against Starbucks' baristas one way
or another. This idea that there is a some kind of bourgeois
movement against working at jobs that aren't necessarily life-long
careers -- not that there are many these days anyway -- is stretching
it.
emma peel
JULY 09, 2009 12:16 AM
Hi Joan. Good people here like emma peel and umbrellakinesis are
pointing that out, are coming to your defence. And that's great. It
would certainly be nice if the reputation of those working at service
jobs which involve a lot of human contact, were all very well regarded.
Seems like they ought to be. Their jobs are near moment-to-moment
human touch--which is just amazing! If they got their appropriate
right regard, then there would be nothing more to say about your
reference than that is was wonderfully apropos: people at Starbucks
are probably, for the most part, transitionary, which is NOT what we
expect from elected officials. It just so happens right now, that a lot of
people in work like that are held in pretty low regard--and this really
pisses me off.
You didn't liken them to whores, but Palin plus low wage service
sector jobs, brings certain connotations to mind. I may have
encouraged some to think you suggested as much. I'll think about
that. Feedback affects.
Best to you.
JULY 09, 2009 12:17 AM
Actually I don't think a lot of the people who work at McDonalds or
Starbucks just up and quit frivolously (as Palin looks to have done),
cuz THEY need the $, such as it is. (Don't have a suggestion for what
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Joan 'should' have said, tho.)

Myriad
JULY 09, 2009 12:21 AM
Let's not forget that Starbucks does offer health insurance to their
employees, something I am fairly certain McDonalds does not.
Personally I have a lot of respect for Baristas. I wouldn't last one day
trying to keep all the various beverages straight. I would be the Lucille
Ball of baristas!
Ablonde
JULY 09, 2009 12:36 AM
emma peel: It may not be worth a gigantic protest, but, you know, it's
just the kind of thing that too many have passed over, for it now never
to seem, simply just an incident. If you've got a job with a uniform,
and you're not with the government, with the military, you're suited
up for service to the genteel, and all that that entails--that's what
came in with Reagan, and has been accumulating ever since. Joan
regreted her reference, immediately afterward, you note. The last
time society divided so markedly into the haves-and-have-nots, being
a clerk meant being a likely prostitute--or at least a "would-be" one. I
wonder if in that moment afterward, some sense of this other
association, slipped into mind.
All this said, i'm not interested in creating an environment where
people are afraid to give voice to what strikes them in the instant as
being most apt/true. Still, discussions like this--if not too accusatory,
if the protest doesn't prove TOO much--might shift associations
around in people's minds so that the next time they heep praise on a
well delivered Obama "note," for instance, it's in reference to the great
"vibe" procured by that terrific americano barrista, two weeks' last.
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JULY 09, 2009 12:45 AM
wow patrick, i'm wondering, reading your comments, if this post
doesn't say more about you. starbucks + palin = implied whore?
people say enough weird shit without adding invisible inferences to
these equations.
bstrangely
JULY 09, 2009 11:13 PM
Playboy knows better: girls of starbucks/mcdonalds/walmart: They're
there to please; they don't have much future, so they're probably
desperate; and they're always in-and-out, so treat them as you will.
Palin's "no commitment/no obligation"+ Starbucks + Joan's
scorn=tramp/whore.
JULY 09, 2009 11:25 PM

No need to shop me a redherry pressie (8 July 2009)
photo by only alice

re: For people Bashing Rebecca...get a life. If you want to indulge in
nihilism go ahead. Dietary purism and absolutism belongs to people
who can not think beyond their narrow existence-ie Republicans. I
am sure she generalized...but that is part of thinking and invites
debate. I am guessing you want her to talk about however you eat
or see your body.
For her to raise the obvious at the start and to bash her for raising it
1393
is cutting off any discussion in favor PC BS that the right raises.

Believe it or not she is trying to encourage debate...not stupid
reactions or cliches.
To state the obvious...women who obsess about their bodies and
become nihilist are not as interesting or complete humans as
someone who entertains the possibilities that existence presents to
us.
PS. I am much more inclined towards women who enjoy what life
has to offer and not nihilist. (sigmund5, response to post, Rebecca
Traister, I do not eat rice cakes and salad, Salon, July 7 2009)
Sigmund5 is inclined towards women who enjoy what life has to
offer,
not to the stupid, the obsessive, the indulgent--the out-of-control.
But arent those who entertain upon the possibilities that existence
presents to us,
taking in a whole big stupid-dumb lot, too? How can one do as much
without looking a little silly, even if you take in but one small portion
at a time?
How did being dumb before the infinite, get to seem not so dumb and
indulgent?
---re: PATRICK
I really can't believe I am answering you...talk about putting stupid
words in my mouth and presenting a redherry you might want to
look it up...but then again that would require being familiar with
how language works.
I was just hoping to have a chance to talk to you--no need to shop me
a redherry pressie!
Why would language want to work, when it go . . . play! Rebecca
plays! We play! Fun times, all! Yay!
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I'm going to dolop a bit of sincerity on top of my cheerios tomorrow

morning. I'm know it will taste good, but I sure hope it doesn't make
me fat!
---Sorry I meant to type red herring...You make less sense than I do. I
checked out your page..are you really a redneck..not that I don't like
rednecks
[. . .]
I looked at some of you posts...but damn dude. If you think Fox is a
shill for Obama or could ever...you are a wingnut and moonbat.
Sorry to call names but damn dude once you get around to posting a
logical post...
[. . .]
Wow...I had nutin better to do and I went to your site..making up a
lame bog site and shooting your mouth off with a couple of
friends......well it doesn't matter. No problem you are incredibly
jealous of Rebbeca. No problem with that
Thanks for looking at my posts, sigmund5. I'm flattered. But if i ever
catch you looking up my dress--naughty!, naughty!
I like Rebecca. She's great. She wrote an article awhile ago about
relationship battles, the sex wars, which was far more sincere and
self-aware than it was in any way fun. Since that's the kind of thing
you most like, maybe you've already read it. If not, you might want to
chase it down. It certainly has stayed in my mind.
Best to you.
Link: "I do not eat rice cakes and salad" (Rebecca Traister)
"Large in spirit, not so much in body" (8 July 2009)
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Dueling odes, continued:

Can't we all just get along?
I say cheeseburgers AND salad!
I am large (in spirit, not so much in body)
I contain multitudes.
And all of you who are raging at this post suck.
We miss you, Rebecca Traister!
Can't wait for the book.
(Emily, response to post, Rebecca Traister, I do not eat rice
cakes and salad, Salon, July 7 2009)
my reply:
Emily speaks from her large heart, and her actually fairly
trim, even spritely, gut
Emily is large in spirt (but not so much in body)
She contains multitudes, but composed (lets be clear now)
rather not of bulkitudes
All of you who rage at her surely suck
--but maybe not of cocktails
(I mean, look at you!: mix in some water!)
thank you, thank you very much.
Link: I do not eat rice cakes and salad (Rebecca Traister)
Rebecca Traister's no eatin' no (7 July 2009)

I do not eat rice cakes and salad: an ode to joys of not eating
chick food
I do not eat things bland and pallid
1396
I will not eat yogurt parfait

Life's not about how much I weigh
I don't like crap in place of lunch
When what I crave are taste and crunch (but not rice cakes)
I'll have good pizza, I'll have some sushi
I'll eat a cheeseburger with John Belushi
I'm a chick, there's no doubt of it
But take your Diet Coke and shove it
(Rebecca Traister, Salon, July 7 2009)
My reply:
On Second Thought, Ill Stick with my Diet Coke: an ode to
the travails of not eating chick food
I no longer want things chalky, static
I will not be eating carrots when what I want is some rabbit!
Lifes about expanding your brains, your mind
And me thinks as with the "library," to food, in kind
What I crave is taste, the munch--the gorge
So I'm havin' good pizza, I'm havin' some sushi
I'm eating cheeseburger and growing like John Belushi
I'm now no stick--there's no resolvin' it
So gimme your Cake--no fork, I'll shovel it!
(Patrick McEvoy-Halston, July 7 2009)
Oh to possess feminist balls! (7 July 2009)
photo by BrownHead
RE: Whenever a society finds itself in the midst of great change, as
1397
we do now, it is important to take stock of the institutions that form

its bedrock, giving it the solid foundation that has allowed it to build
itself to great heights.
I would like to draw attention to a certain tradition that is at risk of
being lost in today's dynamic environment since it is one of those
customs that belongs only to men, and thus, its value has diminished
over recent decades.
This practice has allowed men to realize their place within the larger
society, to preserve the stories of the tribe and to achieve a level of
consciousness not able to be attained during their hectic day-to-day
lives.
What I am referring to here has gone by many names over the
years, including boys' weekend, hunting trip and lately, "The
Mancation." But I prefer the simpler and more inclusive moniker
"the guys trip."
This institution was borne of the need that men have to recharge
their masculinity by getting away from the lady folk for a few days.
I am not talking any Robert Bly stuff that involves reciting epic
poetry to the thump of frame drums, but an experience more primal
that chimes with a louder ring of truth -- namely quaffing copious
quantities of beer while chucking wood on the fire and insulting one
another. (Nick Smith, In Praise of Mancation, The Tyee, July 7
2009)
Re: "This practice has allowed men to realize their place within the
larger society, to preserve the stories of the tribe and to achieve a level
of consciousness not able to be attained during their hectic day-to-day
lives."
Reach a level of consciousness? Ambitious and, if achievable, surely
commendable, but how does this claim "chime" with your
finish--"Yes, we have come here to laugh at each other, and in doing
so, put each man in his place"? Honestly, you make it sound as if a
crouched crap was more the summit of your cranial climb.
I'm also not sure how the practice helps you "realize [your] [. . .] place
1398
within the larger society." If it amounts to an acknowledgment that

you can't feel masculine while amidst "lady folk," and this means
spending the bulk of one's life withdrawn/kept away from something
primal, something hearteningly satisfying--and thus surely essential,
doesn't it reveal that there's something fundamentally lacking in dayto-day feminized reality?, that it requires fightback, not redemption?
If this was a feminist's lament, about how her personhood, her
essential womanhood had been denied rightful expression in
everyday life, would there not be a larger note of societal "j'accuse" in
the penned essay? Wouldn't there be less of a note of, "I was and
always will be an idiot, so feel free to not take me too seriously--but
just let me and my friends have our space, 'kay? We'll be your fools-and glady!, but just let us be--'kay?" If the Mancation is so satisfying,
surely you should be advocating more widespread, less delineated
and isolated adoption of homosocial rituals, to figure out ways
womanizing day-to-day life--to figure out ways WOMEN--might
lessen/drain their erosion of primal masculine vitality, of the good
stuff. Not Skirting around the real issue/problem your lament so
obviously raises, shouldn't be too much to expect out of a Mancation
recharge, should it?
re: " Without the trip, I am afraid that, individually, we would become
more serious, that much more grown up and sure of ourselves."
Are you sighing here?, applauding?, capitulating? Is this praise, or
lament?
What is this?
----re: Hey G West and Patrick,
ultimately it is about sharing the memories. Maybe there could be a
little less focus on the drinking or noise creation, but that does not
seem to be the issue with you guys.
Besides the celebration of masculinity does not imply the rejection of
femininity or family. There is very little reference to these concepts
1399
in the article.
There are lots of men who secretly want to out and build a treehouse
or fort somewhere... if they want to get together and talk about it, let
them have their fun. I think that author recognizes and celebrates
the absurdity of it.
It not like they were getting together and watching that boxing or
UFC together this weekend. ;) (Moat, Response to post, In Praise of
Mancation )
A plea to those who would disparage those who would defend
Mancations. By Moat.
Moat: My point is that if what they're saying is that Mancations give
back lost masculine manna, then Mancations DO amount to IDing
culture as feminizing, even if the rest of society is not primarily being
focussed on. And if that is what the rest of society amounts to to those
who go on Mancations, then you'd think--quite rightly--they ought to
man-up and wage holy war on those who've dared drain away their
precious masculine' primal goodness, to those who've drained away
their very f*cking souls!
Look, if women went off into the wilderness to replenish themselves,
to shake loose and disgard broader influences that had withered away
at their attempts to understand themselves as fully enfranchised, fully
worthy, fully women, and then on the way back home slunk back into
being largely uninterested in holding the rest of society to account,
wouldn't they amount to a movement somewhat unworthy of
respectful attendance by others'? Even if you did so in a less selfcongradulatory way than G West and I tend to evidence when we
heep scorn, wouldn't you be tempted to ridicule them, at least a little
bit?
Men, when you write up your "odes" to masculinity, please try, try,
try, to write more ballsy stuff! Channel Margaret Atwood; get inside
what she would do if she were a man and in your soul-drained
situation. Do you really think she would ever finish her ostensible
man/manna restoring expedition, by CONCLUDING--as this fellow
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did--how wonderful it is to find yourself properly LOWERED back

into place? Egads!--If that's what you discover when you've
uncovered Real Masculinity, then maybe it ought to be asked if men
are all that necessary, anyway?
---re: In my circle it's called a Road Trip.
I enjoyed the article until I came to the comments. Boy, SOME of you
folks sure can read a lot into nothing. Ball polishing? Real
Masculinity?
I think you faux psychologists SHOULD get out in the woods a little
bit and "get your minds right" as my buds and I call it. No drama.
No navel gazing. Just the lads kicking back and yes, playing hard.
We pay for it the next morning but thats our choice. No harm done.
I'll have a beer with you anytime Nick! (I know we'd get along as
you don't make a point of being called "Nicholas")
Ever done the south end of Birkenhead Lake.....? (happy, Response
to post, In Praise of Mancation)
So happy, we're supposed to be like Nick and not make too much of it.
That is, we're supposed to be like the good sporting mate who offered
us this:
"Whenever a society finds itself in the midst of great change, as we do
now, it is important to take stock of the institutions that form its
bedrock, giving it the solid foundation that has allowed it to build
itself to great heights.
I would like to draw attention to a certain tradition that is at risk of
being lost in today's dynamic environment since it is one of those
customs that belongs only to men, and thus, its value has diminished
over recent decades.
This practice has allowed men to realize their place within the larger
society, to preserve the stories of the tribe and to achieve a level of
consciousness not able to be attained during their hectic day-to-day
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lives."
No thunder, no manic portent, in this "brew"? Really? I suppose it
could have all been a joke, like some beer commercial that starts off
all mock-epic, before slipping more assurely into domestic--small
scale--comedy, but it seemed genuine to me.
---And a very well written one. I had a smile on my face through the
whole article, when I wasn't laughing outright.
Why? Because its true! Every word. I've even done the "supply boat"
thing. Note to Author: Don't ever tow an aluminum cartopper
behind a power boat at speed. If they get outside the wake they can
roll - real fast. That sucks. Beer doesn't float.
Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of (ahem) older men.
Or so I've beem told... (happy, Response to post)
It's hard to read how one is supposed to take it, 'cause, yeah, it looks
to be mock-epic switching to domestic-comedy--a la a, don't take this
seriously, beer commercial. But it can't resist closing on a pretty
angry note ("And that is a place from which no one can chuck us
out"), making the whole piece feel like it was almost purposely
moving from broad expanse to tiny, closed space, as means to show
up what society has made of men--but without wanting to be exposed
as having any such "high ambition," such serious social critique, in
mind, without being in a position where it isn't well defended against
those fools who would read into the piece. This is why, I think, it felt
cowardly to me; why it felt sad, not funny. Why it made me implore
that either those who think this way find way to be more forthright
and ballsy in their complaint, or allow someone to test to see if they
might just all be made to fit into even tighter confines, just so we
could be as much rid of such depressing silliness, as possible.
I wonder, How many ridiculous, near worthless Mancationers could
you fit in a coffin, if you took out some of that draft beer . . . If amidst
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campfire tale-telling, I said I packed in twenty, I think my friends

would look to me with considerable horror and awe. This is no doubt
sick, but mightn't it be in some way preferable, to pathetic, mutual,
low self-regard?
----re: Ok Patrick, I know that we are probably not going to reach a
consensus here, but my point is that you, G West, and Vivian Lea are
reading far too much into this article and getting hung up on the
word mancation.
I do agree with you that women went women went off into the
wilderness to replenish themselves, to shake loose and dis[re]gard
broader influences that had withered away at their attempts to
understand themselves as fully enfranchised, fully worthy, fully
women that I would ridicule them a little bit. In fact, I would
ridicule men if they did this I-am-animal-hear-me-roar thing! But
I dont think the author is even remotely suggesting that the
mancation is a result of frustration or disenfranchisement. I dont
think you are being mean spirited, but I think you are being unfair
to the author and addressing themes out of the scope of the article.
It is also perplexing as to why you and VivianLea and you also get
so stuck on the line Without the trip, I am afraid that,
individually, we would become more serious, that much more
grown up and sure of ourselves. VivianLea, are you saying that
being grown up and sure of ourselves is a good quality that we
cannot examine or question? Maybe I am reading too much into
your statements. like I think you are with this author.
Real life activities such mowing the backyard or washing the car
on the weekend are far more ridiculous (and robotic) than the
mancation. I dont think there is a sense of resignation here at all,
just connecting with long term friends.
Moat: Good to hear from you. (But the correction I needed was
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"shake loose and disCARD," not "shake loose and disREGARD.") To

me it felt like the author was well aware that if he wasn't careful about
how he wrote the piece, he would very quickly be accused of Robert
Bly ridiculousness (something we are all so sensitive to, that he was
anyway), of being so unmanly, uncomposed, immoderate enough, to
"take the whole thing way too seriously." But it's cover. You could feel
real lament, pain, even--or at least I could. But he's hemmed in; can't
say what he seems like he wants to say, without feeling even smaller
than he now (admittedly) does. That's the situation guys are in, these
days, I guess. And it's pretty sad. Genuinely. I feel for these guys.
They deserve way better.
I guess somewhere here I could have made it clear that what I like
about Robert Bly, is that he took the need to be a man very
straighforwardly, very seriously. He wasn't concerned that his sober if
not reverential references to myth, would make him look ridiculous,
embarrassing to many of his own generation, and evidently to
subsequent ones. He was, I guess, the Tom Cruise of a different
generation'.
----Re: Some good points from you Patrick but I dont get your
comment, They deserve way better. How so? Only those with
freedom and privilege can take the time to travel somewhere
consuming valued resources at their leisure. While they are on there
trip, I think many of them are thinking I dont want to be anywhere
else right now. It does not mean that they want the mancation to
go on. At no point does the author imply that the mancation is a
substitute for family or real life working relationships. There are far
more obvious themes here that can be discussed. (Moat, response to
post)
The end does suggest something about what lies elsewhere. Two
things: 1) without Mancations you become more serious and less fun;
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2) and you'd never feel like you'd established at least some place
where people couldn't feel so free to toss you about so readily/facily,
so disregardedly about the place (terminus: "And that is a place from
which no one can chuck us out"). So while it doesn't itself argue that a
Mancation is a substitute, a possible replacement, it certainly lends
one to conclude that, you know, maybe it really ought to be.
There is my mind a sense that it is styled so that the writer can point
to the piece to defend himself against those (including, even himself)
who would accuse him of taking the whole thing too seriously, which
would of course make him seem ridiculously unmanly, in some
circles. But to me at least, this is a piece written from someone who
finds everyday life quite belittling. We have managed in society to
make the man who suffers through job and wife, but gets together
with his mates for some well earned respite, every once in a while, a
way of showing that you are amongst the true blue, true-grit, regular
joe, real men. So I think the article itself, not just the Mancations, is
part of reassuring yourself you're a man. But shit, guys who feel this
way, deserve better than to occupy their time compensating for an
everyday life which doesn't satisfy in not-so-modest way.
Leisure: He's got leisure, but does that really say much. Some might
call it an outlet, or liken it to bread-and-circuses, that is, to the kind of
things a particularly nasty, denying society offers those it treats with
insufficient well attendance and respect, just to make sure they aren't
reduced to the point that they'd risk cat-calling about, for More.
I'm a bit tired right now. But right now this is my best response to
you, Moat. Thanks for the encouragement to really think it through,
and for your own intelligent, sensitive reaction to the piece.
Also, I think it would serve us well to talk/think about the Mancation
article, in reference to all the campfire stuff in Bruno. (A thought
provoked by having just seen the film, and by fred-gherkin's
comment.) Might also want to see how this article shapes up with
other Mancation-equivalent stuff, here at the Tyee. A Tyee' tribute to
the famous snow boarder who recently died, comes to mind.)
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----re: And thank you too for the thoughtful responses, Patrick After
rereading your posts, I definitely see a change in tone, but not in
opinion from your first post. I now believe that you are questioning
the motivation for the mancation, and that you are not necessarily
opposed to the activity of a mancation. You are right in saying that
the mancation should not be a substitute for something lacking
from day to day living. Now pinning down what day to day
experiences may be deficient is a more difficult task. So this article is
not a question of authenticity as, but maybe a question of the
feelings of a quality of life experience.
The themes I think that we sort of danced around a bit here is the
ritualized connection through the use of substances. These guys here
first connected in a smoke pit, and much of the article is a discussion
of beer. We should not judge these fellows for their love of beer, but
there is a question to be asked here. Would these guys participate in
this trip if it were an alcohol free event? Why or why not?
The second issue here is the need to laugh at each other, and in
doing so, put each man in his place. The whole cross-cultural
tendency of men find pleasure in making other men insecure has
been discussed at length other forums, but the pleasure derived from
the giving and receiving of the abuse appears to be an integral part
of the mancation, or whenever large groups of males are together.
In a related line of thought, however, I do think fred-gherkins
comment is unfair at best and makes too big of an assumption.
Where does the author even imply someone would be excluded from
the mancation based on sexual orientation?
From reading the Globe and Mail this morning, it is obvious that
many males are going to gather together tonight and watch an
MMA fight over a couple of beers. A few mini-mancations tonight?
Should we label this activity as barbaric and lacking authenticity?
Or can we look further into the function of such activities without
being judgmentally dismissive. Future discussion will indeed be
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interesting in the context of other writing. (Moat, response to post,

In Praise of Mancation)
Moat. fred-gherkin may or may not be thinking of the author, of this
article--he may be thinking just of guys heading out for casual
camping trips, mancations. Any case, he's right in his intuition: the
kind of guys who go for mancations, are the kinds of guys who, if they
aren't wont to do so already, WILL PROVE TO BE the guys who end
up turning against homosexuals, in the near future (it's already
beginning to happen--just beginning, though). I know it from
knowing these guys, from knowing what it is that makes them seek
homosocial isolation, what it is that makes them feel driven to tear
each other down to size. Guys like these grew up in the kinds of
families where the father wasn't so involved in the rearing, the
mother was way more present, immediate than the father ever proved
to be, and where the mother was sort of left alone, depressed,
genuinely needy, and couldn't but use her boys as stimulants, as
playthings--maybe even as sexual partners, as implossible and gross
at this may well sound (ever read Ginsberg's The Howl?). These are
mother-used boys. They are the victims of maternal use/abuse. The
last thing they can tolerate is being made to feel as if they are
feminine; and gay men always represent to them who they were, what
they felt like, when they were boys--unmanned, "girly"-boys--the last
"place" they ever want to revisit, the part of themselves they most
want to deny, to eradicate.
There are societal "situations" where it becomes mandatory, and
legitimate, to go after, to discriminate against, those who represent
that part of yourself you most want to reject/deny. In these situations,
gays are preyed upon, like no other. By guys like these; by these guys.
Before then, they'll all profess AND BELIEVE they're not ones to
discriminate based on gender. They all know a friend who's gay, who
is just one of the guys. They well may have a gay bud who joins them.
But eventually, though they know it not, they will experience an
irresistable drive to help "nurture" a social climate, where it suddenly
1407
seems allowable to start preying upon the urban(e), "femmy" guys,

the feminine-seeming, gays. Early warning signal: watch for articles
that start talking about how our current problems arose from things
like, too much shopping. Excessive neediness. Luxury. Inconstancy.
Flirtiveness (i think that's a word, if not, well, now is).
Selfishness/self-centredness.
Haven't gotten at why they tear each other down, but it a lot to do
with the fact that guys who grow up with mothers like these, whose
existence seemed all about pleasing mother, and whose greatest fear
was displeasing her, always feel their OWN NEEDS, their own
presumptions to lead enabled, self-satisfying lives, are the stuff that
could lead to abandonment--are sinful. That is probably not
sufficient, but I'll go with that for now. If you ever want a link or two.
I could send them to you.
Link: In Praise of the Mancation (The Tyee)
Letter to Scott Rosenberg (7 July 2009)
(From Salon letters)
Scott, you're making quite an effort to redeem blogs in your book (still
not so sure about the "they're like phone calls to your mother" sell
job, but still . . .), so you shouldn't be surprised that some are
sensitive to the possibility that however much you aim to redeem
them, to be fair to them, you might by your actions work to reinforce
the presumption/assumption that if you're REALLY serious, truly
someone to be taken seriously, you're not JUST to be associated with
blogs--Being an active blogger while you also write books is fine,
perfectly respectable, if not ideal in this interconnected, wired world,
but just blogging means never really being assessed by adults as more
than just the nerd in the parent's basement. (I could even see GG
make a move to write a book at some point, to--in part--make him
more comfortable to a crowd wanting to include him as one of them,
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to imagine himself as reputable beyond contention.)

[Update: checked--he does have a book.]
There is quite the conversation at OS concerning concerns you might
at heart be akin to the veteran comedian who professes his ongoing
love for comedy, but who is noticeably making sure he is more-andmore associated with the established, the long reputable, and away
from the fluff.
Link to OS discussion here.
Residential school abuse (6 July 2009)

You ask the average liberal, university-educated Cdn, how native
indians were likely treated by Christians, in any context, throughout
Canada's history, and s/he would say, awful, beyond awful, and would
instantly summon to mind the horrors described here. And they
would be right in their assessment.
And if you asked him/her how native indians treated their own
children before Western "advance," what would they say? "With
dignity," "with respect," "in the spirit of the warrior," or some other
some such. Would they ever consider that the upbringing might have
been as bad, or even worse? No way: regardless of the truth of the
matter. If such a thought entered his/her head for but an instant, s/he
would have half a chance of going completely mad. We cannot bear
the thought, the momentary consideration, because we are still so
simple we cannot distance ourselves from concluding that if native
indians were -- on a mass scale -- horribly abusive to their own
children before anyone else got to them, that somehow Christian
education/abuse would be redeemed, that somehow they are not so
worthy of societal respect and support.
There are truths that cannot bear the light of day, for liberals to
consider. Hope they brave doing so, before a conservative-turning
nation makes opportune use of their soft spot, the weakness in their
defense.
1409
----re: I think your thesis requires more elaboration.

I'm not sure whatever the 'situation' was relative to pre-contact
First Nations 'civilization' that it has anything whatever to do with
this debate.
In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest it is completely irrelevant. Absent,
of course some more persuasive logic from you. [. . .]
In my view it smacks of 'blaming the victim' and I think that's the
kind of thing which ought to, as you put it, give (liberals or anyone
who advances that thesis) half a chance...of going completely mad'
(G West, Response to post, Christine McLaren, This is how they
tortured me, The Tyee, July 6 2009)
The right can make the left seem primarily interested in using native
indians to make Christian conservatives look bad. They can show the
left as actually being rather uncomfortable with native american way
of life, when it isn't "massaged," domesticated, into a preferred
"storyline." And the left can/will be left thinking that it defended
native indians assuming them constitutionally/communally in tune
with harmonious rhythms (or some such) -- the antithesis of
everything right-wing, closed-minded, oppressive/overbearing, foul;
when they cannot but sense they've glossed over so much (what they
truly will assess/react to as) "stink," they'll grimace, if not turn away,
and they'll (i.e., they and their steadfast concern to/interest in
defend[ing] native indians against further oppression) be done for.
The left is not beyond blaming the victim, unfortunately. One should
sense this in its over inflation/estimation of native indian history, way
of life. The left is healthy, way healthier than the right, but it is not
THAT healthy. I'm doing what I can to get it there.
I am curious, though, if there is any dynamic in a culture
oppressed/traumatized/bullied by Europeans that would get you to
1410
turn away from them. I hope there isn't any. I can't imagine you
turning away, but I could imagine a moment of recoil, self-doubt--and
the gasp of horror! this would produce amongst those depending on
YOU to be the one who never fails in the defense. For their sake, make
sure you can read accounts of native indian life that don't make them
seem Earth's noble warriors; pretend for a moment that all such is
true; and not experience a moment of doubt as to their worthiness of
ongoing, expanding societal support, respect, and love.
---Re: Child rearing in pre-contact North America is worth looking
into. I'm sure it wasn't a Disneyland cartoon. I'm with G West
though in missing the point of comparing that to the residential
school regime. "It was for their own good" makes me gag actually.
Alongside ME2's "Cultural genocide? Hogwash.", I'm very
disheartened to find these attitudes even here. I'm optimistic that
these viewpoints are a dying breed. We've got some atonement to
do, and that starts with admitting mistakes - not excusing them.
(mikev, Response to post, This is how they tortured me)
mikev: I'm most certainly not saying residential schools were "for
their own good." No abuse is ever to be redeemed (and hell, I'm a
free-schooler--a true hippie). I'm saying that those interested in
redeeming, maybe not residential schools, but western heritage, could
begin to point out how the left has (rather sillily) tended to establish a
rather romantic estimation of native indian "traditions," seeming to
make a NECESSARY link between the desecration of a NOBLE past
with need for our collective atonement. No link was necessary--abuse
is wrong, in any circumstance. But it's been forged--primarily to set
up the right wing, to set up Christians, so they seem especially
cruel/evil, and to make it so that it seems we inhabit a world with
beings so fantastical and perfect, they make the world seem one
especially ready to loose oneself in--a wonderful counter to
depression. Destroying the life of another person is never to be
1411
redeemed. But this isn't quite the argument they've set up: as I'm
trying to explain, it seems to me the argument that's gone around, the
particular need for atonement, does not just concern, is not just in,
the ill intentions of Christian settlers, but in how they destroyed a
simple, noble, essentially perfect people that had found a harmonious
way of living with the Earth, we of the West have barely learned to
approach. In my mind, if this truth is exposed as myth, as in error, as
a near total falsehood, we will not be left with a left that thinks like
you and G West do, where they can still very readily say, okay, but
that's doesn't excuse you, us, from a collective need for atonement,
from expanding societal services to reduce current
suffering/exploitation. We will be left with a left that begins to doubt
just how much effort they want to spend defending a culture they
actually find a bit repugnant.
Think about how many of the left view the GG eating seal' meat
"occasion." Do you not sense some of them saying to themselves, I
don't know how long this practice has gone on--it could even have
been for a millennium, this could never, ever have been how it's been
sold to us--a demonstration of culture's harmonious relationship with
nature. Some, in my judgment, are coming close to saying to
themselves that, no, that's just deer hunting pathos, unredeemable
cruelty--savagery, even. They'll never fully admit this, let it percolate
too long in conscious thought--because few have the resources for this
not to lead to considerable self-laceration, a quick turn against a right
that unfortunately no longer is quite so easy to estimate as being quite
so very wrong. But deep down they'll be suspecting Blood Meridianall-is-savagery-Cormac McCarthy got it down right, and abandon the
field of fight to those like Ignatieff, so moved to make Canada seem
clean, united, uncomplicated, again.
Link: This is how they tortured me Christine McLaren
"More fun at the kid's table": Response to Sandra Stephens (5 July
1412
2009)
I'm wondering if he understands that if you post on OS, you're
insufficiently independent--perhaps by definition, not so worthy, or
at least not a real writer. I know writers who'll do blogger but would
never consider OS -- it would make you too much one of a bunch,
never sole proprietor. Old-fashioned understanding of what a real
writer's identity is all about. I have a strong hunch that that's it. My
sense of Kerry Lauerman right now is that he still likes to flag posts
which seem like they could fit in with Salon's front stories, rather than
recognize posts which carry more of the indigenous OS flavor/genius.
It's more, "look, we have some people here near as good as you guys;
and not, look, here at OS is emerging THIS sort of communallyinspired charisma." (I'm posting this for my own consideration, too.)
Scott's a good guy, but even from someone who helped start up OS,
this could be it. Other things that come to mind: It is possible that he
thinks OS a bit maternal -- not something someone at WIRED wants
to be linked to, not something that comes to mind midst a WIRED
interview.
---Julie Tarp: RonP01 IS very much getting at how OS is appraised by
many. The old identity of a reporter is sort of masculine -independent, not communal. OS does not fit that old model at all. It
will come across as gossipy -- not a knitting-group, but something
akin. What it is is casual, supportive, friendly -- an environment
which could prove inducive to innovative, playful stuff, but also to the
development of good friends, good living. Scott should have had
confidence in it. And we should not look at it as Salon's lesser site, but
as Salon opening up to something more. Lead the way, OS.
----About the ad stuff: What some of us didn't like was how it was
presented. You don't see ads on the page one day, and then turn to
Kerry's post about how we can make money here too!, and not think
he suspects we lack a wee bit of integrity. If he was talking to Salon
1413
regulars, he wouldn't spoken to us as if we're the infomercial crowd.

My disappointment with Kerry there was akin to yours with Scott,
here. Also, I like that some would still fight to keep OS as ad free as
possible: I would respect a site, where just to keep the ad pollution
down as much as possible, to keep up its communal, wholesome feel,
good numbers who could be making money of ads, chose not to do so.
Ads were coming; but they came after we had a sense of what it was to
be in an ad-free environment: it was a good thing that many here
genuinely were concerned that ad money would encourage a different
crowd, cheapen the current crowd, weaken the communal feel. Again,
the sense provided was that ultimately, Kerry couldn't care less about
the sort of community dynamics that were developing, because he too
is Salon independent, not OS bowed ("this is a business, after all" -something he would never dare say about Salon [hey guys, we're not
ultimately in this to fashion a better country, to beat back rightwing
advance -- it's about the sweet green . . .])
----Sandra, I said that it would be assessed as maternal, even though,
after considering for a bit, I knew that it might well even be 50/50
here. It's domestic here. People will show one another their cat/dog
pictures, sometimes their boobs -- or some semblance of them -quite readily. I like that. But, in an old-fashioned sense, that makes
OS not serious. It makes it gossipy -- for the "women." Personally,
none of my friends who publish only with the "well regarded," who
would feel cheapened, dirty, if they associated with OS, strike me as
all that mature -- they're reporters, writers, in part, for defensive
purposes. (Even wonderful people like Joe Conason, who would
never, ever consider posting on a social site like this, regardless of
how reputable - -are a bit immature, me thinks.) I maintain that the
best writers, best people -- friends -- could well emerge out of OS, if
the friendlier, better adjusted, continue to find their way here. I think
we should, for the post part, forget about what WIRED knows, what
the NYT thinks. Let's go for it -- have fun, take chances, be a bit
clueless: be the "free range" kind of community that everyone's now
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looking to cultivate but fear have lost all sense as to how one goes
about creating it.
----Hey Liz, lets hope that those "notable" writers, the ones who "at best
[see] OS [as] [. . .] an outlet or an incubator or an experiment," aren't
paraded too often on the cover. For how can you take a "magazine"
seriously that would praise most those "sober enough to not take it
too seriously"? Visit OS! -- here you'll find a bunch of scrambling
would-be EPers, and a few who can write, who stop by for a piss and a
drink, and to try out a few one-liners before heading back to the
show.
Personally, I'm with all the "kids" up for some Looney Tune, Alice in
Wonderland, kid's table redemption, here at OS. Should draw in a
few, thanks maybe in small part to the "sanguine," "mature,"
"monetizing," "marketeering," "adult" space you've helped summonup as counterpoint.
----Kerry's comment on gender is disappointing. Yeah, you made use of a
situation here to demonstrate your PC nature, and to denigrate those
of us (i.e., me -- Patrick McEvoy-Halston -- RonP01, and
mishimma666) who were trying to provide an honest assessment of
our feel of OS at this point (perhaps we weren't, as you insultingly and
too hurriedly/eagerly assessed it, so much "immediately trying to
denigrate it, " as we were -- from our experience posting here -- fairly
trying to assess it), and help stifle a worthwhile discussion through
invocations of the PC police. (A person apparently denigrates Oprah,
if, after watching many episodes, decides that it has the feel of a show
that would appeal largely to women: THIS, is Reason?) For the
record, again, I like this site -- a lot -- and feel very comfortable here.
Link: Wherefore Open Salon (Sandra Stephens)
* Marvelous line said by Dr. Spudman 44.
1415
Rouge around the nipples (3 July 2009)

Rouge around the nipples helps. But if after all this time her
"competition's" still possessed of a "pulsing latina XXXX," you might
as well indulge in some more icecream and enjoy the allowing fit your
own "bermuda" comfort affords . . .
---------Did you know that you can get flavoured rouge specifically for that
purpose?
Natalie Not Pedantic
Awesome. I'll get you to try it on for me, sometime.
I have no nipples. Its a common trait among Australian women and
the reason why Australian men seem to always look so grumpy.
Yeah, I wondered as much. But answer me this, without primed
perks, without sweet succulants, what's to suck on? Don't tell me all
the men down there go at it gaping mouthed -- trying, stupidly, to
take in the whole damn thing? Such, surely, would be beastial -beyond poetic redemption, even by any so skilled in lending favor
they could tease romance out of a pound of crap, out of a grandiose
dollop of virulent piss.
Holy Crap[-stick.......
Gary Justis
Earlobes, tips of tongues and bottom lips. They don't do too badly at
it either, from what I've heard.
1416
Pirouetting with Armageddon (3 July 2009)

It is also why my reading habits have long since led me to
the British papers where wit, originality, and proper
grammar aren't yet considered antisocial. And frankly, I'm
not interested in socializing with my newspaper. [. . .]
I was doing research...Oh, all right, I was at the grocery
store on a Saturday afternoon standing in one of those long
"express" lines, and perusing tab covers while waiting to pay
obscene amounts for broccoli.
I stood slack-jawed gazing at cover-after-cover featuring
some unattractive middle-aged woman whom I had never
heard of and her dodgy-looking husband. I asked the cashier
who they were? She didn't know, but in putting out the
magazines, had managed to glean that the husband was
having an affair! I looked askance at the well-groomed
60ish woman behind me: she shook her head and shrugged
her shoulders.
Intrepid reporter that I am, I pulled out a magazine,
brandished it over my head, and addressed my fellow
shoppers.
Excuse me: Does anyone know who these people are? I
asked the assemblage. Much confused discussion followed,
until a woman with a stroller transporting twins
enlightened us all.
Oh, of course. If we don't know who some supposed-celeb is,
it must be reality TV..., we all concluded, and went back to
business.
Probably more than we need to know
But it was undoubtedly a community-building moment. I'm
certain of this, because I bumped into one of the assemblage
last week.
Hi, did you see Jon and Kate are getting a divorce? she
asked.
1417
I replied that there was a rumour that the Other Woman (a

grade school teacher!) would be on a future episode. We
chortled -- neither of us watches the show -- and scooped up
our bags of apples secure in the notion that, should
Armageddon come, neither of would be voting the other off
the raft or out of the shelter because we were both clear on
our status as nice, social people.
With the importance of self-preservation in mind, I've also
stopped yelling at all the people playing that wretched, selfindulgent Thriller everywhere I go. (No pop song should be
five minutes long!) I now realize they probably don't like the
music any better than I do. They just want to say what all
the grey-haired Baby Boom is thinking: He was just X years
younger/older than ME. (Shannon Rupp, Science Discovers
Celebrities are Useful for Something, The Tyee, July 3 2009)
Note to Shannon: Writing a piece to demonstrate how elevated you
are, could be read by some to be rather self-indulgent stuff. Also,
identifying yourself so loudly with British wit and substance, and
against crass works of popular culture (oh, the writing of the sports
journalists!; oh, how I looked askance at all the wretched selfindulgence that permeated my glance!), identifies you as the country
bumpkin with pretensions, able to believe herself refined only
because she has no idea as to how a lady really thinks and feels. It all
has to be done much, much, more softly, discreetly, casually. You
thunder about too much: the words you use you think show your
class, really mostly blast out at us. Right now, Armageddon struck me
as an apt pseudonym. Right now, when you said you "bumped into [. .
.] the assemblage," it was too easy to imagine said assemblage
crumbling. Right now, when you said you "chortled," it was too easy
to imagine you . . . chortling.
Also, word to the wise, if I were you, I wouldn't too loudly complain
about the quality work doesn't guarantee recognition bit.
1418
Link: Science Discovers Celebrities are Useful for Something

(Shannon Rupp)
Tyee wins Edward. R. Murrow Award (2 July 2009)

Re: "I'm a bit dazed and of course very proud The Tyee has gained
this recognition," said editor David Beers. "We have an incredible
team -- creative, dedicated, out to prove that good journalism,
rather than fading, is in a time of exciting reinvention.
"Credit for our win goes to every web designer, photographer,
illustrator, flash animator, videographer, podcaster, reporter,
essayist, editor and advisor who have contributed to the Tyee's flow
of offerings since we launched this experiment in November of 2003.
"Huge appreciation, as well, to our business team, our financial
backers, and the donors -- including hundreds of readers -- who
have given us the resources to do what we love.
"And, all credit, of course, to our readers, who alert us to news we
should report, share our stories with others, and reward our efforts
with their visits. Without the Tyee community, there's no Tyee."
(Tyee Wins Edward R. Murrow Award, July 2 2009)
Re: "And, all credit, of course, to our readers, who alert us to news we
Surely unintentional, but you make your readers sound a bit like girly
flounces here. We shrill; you respond to our call. You report; we share
your stories with our friends. You sweat, make, effort; we drop by for
visits. You flatter; we make you gift baskets -- You'd almost think
there wasn't a very lively and intelligent discussion following nearly
every post.
----Re: "And, all credit, of course, to our readers, who alert us to news we
1419
A fair response could be this, for instance:
"And we in return would genuinely like to thank the reporters of the
Tyee for time-and-time-again bringing back such interesting stories
for us to sort through, analyze, and interpret. Without all their
exhaustive, persistent, intrepid work and focused pursuit, our legs
would surely be getting most of the workout, not our minds."
See, "it sounds like a compliment, but really it's (something of) an
insult" (Harry Met Sally). Would make reporters akin to responseready gophers who spend so much time chasing down stories, they
cannot be expected to do -- or offer -- much else, and us citizens,
freed up all the bothersome, menial stuff, akin to repose-minded,
analytically-grounded, discerning gentlemen, who process all the prooffered information for higher order purposes.
Link: Tyee Wins Edward R. Murrow Award (The Tyee)
Liberals co-opting greenies (2 July 2009)

Re: There is a way. It will be painful and you have already suffered
much for the cause.
It is possible if we can get a movement going, to retake the BC
Liberal party back from the fascista and send them packing off to
the welcoming arms of Wilf Hurd over at BC's Neocon central. The
party itself is very weak with almost no attendance at constituency
meetings and almost no grassroots fund raising. It is ripe for a
progressive counterattack. Tell your Green friends that now is the
time to rally and gain control of the ruling political machine.
It is very easy for determined special interest groups to hijack
political party's in Canada because the electorate is so disinterested.
For inspiration look at David Orchard a far left progressive who
almost beat Joe Clark for Conservative party leader. Look at how
1420
Harper and Stockwell Day and the religious right were able to
hijack the ReformaTories. Look at how the Gordo and his media
wing was able to wipe out Gordon Wilson who was leader of an
actual Liberal party until Neocon mass membership buys defeated
him. We can do unto Gordo as Gordo did to Gordon Wilson and do it
within the year.
If progressives start buying party memberships in large quantities
we can easily within the year take back all Liberal party
constituency associations and their executive, make massive
changes at party policy conventions, force a leadership review
convention, change the party name back to Liberal and elect a
progressive MLA as party leader.
You need to talk every progressive/green person you know into
joining the BCLiberal party.
http://www.bcliberals.com/make_a_difference/bc_liberal
_party_membership_information
Then having infiltrated coordinate a surprise attack leveled at every
constituency.
I know it sounds horrible and the stench of rotting meat will be
almost unbearable, but we can do it if we hold our noses and smile
through gritted teeth. There are already lots of real Liberals in the
BCLiberal party Christy Clark, Ken Jones, Carole Taylor, just
booted Gordon Hogg and myriads more still hanging on hoping a
messiah will come along and save them from the suffering neocon
yoke. Some like Carole Taylor tried but the odor eventually
overwhelmed them and without support they were had to quit.
This is Lotus Land where all is possible. (Seth, Reply to post,
Crawford Kilian, Good luck BC: Mortons Cry of Despair, The
Tyee, June 30 2009)
Seth: There aren't a whole lot of Greenies to be found about right
now. You see, we took your lead and hacked the heads off many of the
traitorous vermin, a short while ago. I could go see if they'll go for
your join the liberal party suggestion myself, but since Ralph
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Nader's still kicking about, even after killing 3 million people!, I'm
glad you've got someone else in mind for the sell.
Re: Kindly put your comment in some form of understandable
language.In fact you might find there are some "greenies" around:
My self for instance. I would "very much" like to understand what is
going on.I do not find your contribution helpful at all.Seth had a
damn good idea! (doggone, Reply to post, Good luck BC)
I can give you context, doggone. Seth's not exactly been a trustworthy
friend of Greenies (his word, not mine) as of late. He set them up as
RESPONSIBLE for fascist success, in grim terms -- Ralph Nader, he
says, has the blood of millions of dead iraqis on his hands, for
instance, and he said something similar in regards to the effect of
Greens voting Green, here in B.C. Now he's their "best friend,"
encouraging them to cozy-up with corpses, sell their souls, and
perhaps other fates you wouldn't wish upon your worst enemy.
Reason for caution, me thinks.
The liberal party will be revitalized, but not by progressives. It's going
fascist too, and in my judgment will well succeed with head ghoul
Ignatieff at the helm. Progressive Greens were not co-opted by the
NDP. Right now they seem to have integrity, which draws some of us
to want to know more. Switching to Liberal would amount to
lounging about with even darker hellions, would amount to
dissipating strength rather than accruing it, might amount to falling
for quite the con.
Re: I don't think the Greens who are committed to running
candidates in elections would be of much help. They are an
extremely tiny proportion of green folk bestowed with the power of
that "Green" label that they routinely invoke to destroy rather than
heal. Their performance in the 2000 election with Ralph Nader in
the US so horrified Americans that the Green's moved en mass to the
Democrats. Without them Obama would have lost. Certainly Harpo
1422
and the Gordo depend on the Green party for significant help in
winning elections for their Neocon hordes.
The Greens we are looking for here make up the vast majority of the
movement - the ones like Alexandra here who believe in protecting
the environment sometimes at the cost of compromising some of
their ideals in an effort to try to form a power base with other
progressives.
I for example, am a pronuke greenie which puts me beside James
Lovelock and Steward Brand but at odds with most other Greens. Be
happy to debate the issue at any time. I vote strategically for the
most progressive ticket that I hope can win putting aside differences
until after an election when a consensus might be achieved.
Yes the Liberal party in Canada has a horrible track record but that
is mostly because progressives tended to bow out of political life. It
was easier and we couldn't stand the stink I suppose.
But the ball is in our court. We can rise up and overpower the weak
ineffective neocon infiltrators, then seize and hold power. We know
all about backroom boys and how to send them packin' off to a
revitalized BC Con party.
Its the only chance we have. (Seth, Reply to post, Good luck BC)
I very much doubt you're right about the move away from Nader
being the principle reason Obama got in, Seth. But if that is what they
did, perhaps seduced by their own projections, perhaps by his fine
manners, perhaps by the prospect of finally having a person of color
in office, they would NOW then be responsible for electing someone
in who is continuing the war in Afghanistan, Iraq, who can spin it so
that it seems less about oil, so that it might, with apparent legitimacy,
be expanded, and certainly prove harder to stop; is causing the
gay/lesbian community to suspect he might at heart actually be
homophobic; and is keeping the have/have not world afloat. They are
beginning to look like easy dupes, who have turned away those like
Nader who well understood the true nature of someone like Obama.
They will probably continue to feel dirty, foolish, girlishly infatuated
1423
(sorry girls), and this self-doubt might cause them to believe they now
DESERVE what's coming to them (you're hearing some of this selfloathing from some members of the gay/lesbian community that
voted for him, right now--a trend that will surely increase), making
them seem like they might end up seeming more a France to a WW2
Germany, than I'd like.
The Progressive Conservative party was taken over by regressives
because their primitive mental states were a match for a populace
increasingly inclined to scapegoat, to prefer thinking in polarized
terms. Maybe it is Seth's own tendency to do the same, to identify
Progressives he doesn't agree with as blood-on-their-hands
murderers, that has him now sensing out a way someone who had
preferred to identify as Green could join up with a "strong" war party
like the Liberals, helmed by its own sexy, upright "Obama," without
this move inducing too much guilt.
Link:
Abortion talk (1 July 2009)
re: "The more mainstream anti-choice groups provide
encouragement for the extreme right wing, then they
absolve themselves when something like this happens"
(Tom Sandborn, "Tension high at Abortion Clinics," The
Tyee, June 20 2009)
Comments like this do little to calm the waters. The more mainstream
anti-abortion groups would probably prefer not to be summized as
essentially concerned with constraining female choice. The real truth
may be otherwise, but let's not do what we can to push the moderates
into extremists, thank you. This kind of "cuteness," rhetorical play,
can wait 'til less heightened times.
----To be fair, lines like this -- "We treasure all life, even the abortionists"
-- are scary as shit. Someone might also want to let the moderates
1424
know about Freud's theory about how the unconscious doesn't

know/understand negatives . . .
----Re: Anyone supporting abortion or anyone considering abortion
needs to look very closely at the child which is dismembered and
sucked out of the mother's womb.
To deny that, that is a person is the height of selfishness.Simply look
at the pictures of the child at different stages of growth and then
consider what you are saying, when you say killing that child is OK.
Shame on us as a society, we are not progressing we indeed are
digressing.May God have mercy on us all, as we ALL are guilty of
innocent blood.The truth is indeed sometimes offensive.
(jimorsheryl, reply to post, Tension High at Abortion Clinics)
jimorsheryl: Okay, but anyone against the pro-choice option has to
look at who generally supports pro-life -- and they do tend to be those
who ultimately care least for women, children, a good society (I know
none of them think so, but it is true).
Some of us support pro-choice primarily because of who tends to
support and who tends to oppose it. If it was all just women's choice,
I, for one, am not entirely sure what the significant difference
between a woman's body and a woman's home is -- they're both
surrounds.
----Re: You said:
"Okay, but anyone against the pro-choice option has to look at who
generally supports pro-life--and they do tend to be those who
ultimately care least for women, children, a good society (I know
none of them think so, but it is true)."
How in the world does this justify ripping the arms off a living child
inside it's mother's womb? And then suctioning out the torn pieces.
Are you saying that people who condone this barbaric behaviour
somehow care for children?
Twisted logic at it's best. (jimorsheryl, reply to post)
jimorsheryl: Most pro-lifers tend to pretty "conservative," that is, they
1425
vote for parties which actually take pride and pleasure in creating a
world that is viscously mean and abusive. As pro-choicers have long
and rightly noted, pro-lifers don't actually evidence much interest in
human life -- their anger is loud, but its source isn't from where they
believe it is. In my judgment, they're not actually thinking of the child
but are using the situation to recall early abuse they themselves
suffered and want revenge for. It's an unwilling act of projection, that
can't be helped, but still ultimately amounts to a lack of interest in,
sympathy with, the unbirthed child.
A fair retort to your account must be in documenting the cruelty,
human suffering, conservative governance brings with it. Blow by
blow.
----Re:"Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants
it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State."
~Edward Abbey
Otherwise, as the Planned Parenthood ad reads, 77% percent of
anti-abortion leaders are men. 100% of them will never be
pregnant.
My personal view is a bit more radical. The essence of 'human being'
is not defined on the basis of potentiality, but on actuality - that
is, its independence from the womb; its structure and function in
that independent world of fellow humans. An unborn (potential)
human has no ability to function independently in the world. As
such, an independent woman's rights to control her body
unequivocally take precedence over any potential human growing
inside of her.
quod erat demonstrandum (wayfarer, reply to post)
wayfarer: That argument doesn't strike all of us as all that strong. A
two-year-old is very unlikely to be able to support herself for long,
either. Her protection is the parents'/mothers' home (surround),
desire in others to take care of her. To me, it's just too easy and
appropriate to extend the logic of your argument so that you could
argue that a mother's home is her own, and only until a child is able
1426
to function by itself on the streets, is it truly a human being. Until

then, it's just all potential, of significant less worth than the
woman/mother whose space it occupies.
Not a good argument -- there's got to be more empathy: you make
mothers seem egotistical monsters, quite unwilling to agree that you
have rights until their own needs have been accorded primacy of
place.
Pro-choicers do best when they draw attention to how much they do
to assist pregnant women, to really validate their choice if they decide
to give birth. When they demonstrate -- as they so often do -- not
their anger but their love, for everyone involved -- including the
unbirthed child.
----Re: PatrickMcEvoyHalston,
You misrepresent the premises in my argument and draw a false
conclusion.
A 2-yr-old child, a disabled person requiring assistance are all
distinct entities from a fetus or unborn potential human, which is
necessarily connected to its mother for feeding, breathing, indeed
life. Under my definition, this potentiality does not equal the
actuality of a 2-yr-old or any other being that has been given the
privilege by its mother to enjoy an independent, autonomous life.
The general debate over this right is over, except for a minority of
religious zealots who draw their moral outlook and conclusions
from mysticism and religious texts.
It's not even worth my time to debate this fundamental right of all
women, except that I have a few minutes to kill and it's never a bad
idea to review one's philosophical positions on rights and freedoms.
I don't want Sandborn's point in the above article to be lost in a
futile series of red herrings initiated Fraser Valley Bible-belt
dogmatists and engaged in by the rest of us rational folk.
The real issue here is around public safety for those who choose to
exercise their rights, and for doctors and health care providers who
1427
heroically put their own lives on the line helping women exercise
those rights. That's my main concern, and it should be yours.
The related issue is whether authorities are doing enough to enforce
the law in preventing anti-choice lunatics from harassing or killing
people who are doing little more than exercising their fundamental
human rights.
Debating a women's right to choice is like debating your right to
speak freely in a democratic society. It's been settled and therefore
moot. The job now is to ensure those rights are not eroded or
infringed upon. (wayfarer, reply to post)
wayfarer: You're right that the debate has been settled. In a way.
Certainly the left seems to operate now with enough confidenceevidence routine, that it is genuinely startled when old arguments are
presented as if they actually should be addressed, and not just quickly
picked up and put back in the junk bin (how did you get loose?). This
has made the left a bit vulnerable -- lacking of vigilance (as the LOTR
narrator would say), off-guard. The argument you present is not that
good -- it won the day because the other side is represented by the
scowling, patriarchal Right, by a generation the baby-boomers
delighted in and quite rightly needed to individuate themselves from.
Being pro-life means being unclean, to a lot of people -- it means
being counted amongst "one of them." That's the very enabled stage
the left has won for itself in respectable quarters.But my sense is that
there are a lot of people out there who are looking for a politician, for
means, to make pro-life/anti-choice clean again. It could come from
someone like (old school feminist defeating -- i.e., Hillary and
Ferraro) Obama; it could come from someone like Ignatifieff: both
politicians whose leanness and greenness, whose claim to a clean,
virtuous, (traditionally masculine) higher-purpose could, and in my
judgment will, offer/extend respect/validation for their homophobic
and anti-choice leanings. My sense, again, is the left needs to prepare
itself: look to Salon.com, perhaps, and its accounting of Obama's
early betrayal of the gay community, to the gay community's
1428
surfacing concern (and even panic) over who the hell they've just help
elect in.
I completely agree with you in arguing that abortion clinics need and
deserve full respect and protection. Women who have abortions
cannot be allowed to exist in an environment where they are
stigmatized, deemed unclean, unworthy. But again, a 2-year-old is
not meaningfully less dependent/vulnerable than an unborn. The
only difference is that someone else can take care of the 2-year-old.
(This may well prove possible for the unborn as well, though.)
P.S. Please don't announce that you're advancing an argument simply
because you've got time to kill. It's disrespectful to your reading
audience, to who youre talking to (in this case, to me). Next time it's
not worth your effort, find something else to do, please. Remember,
the Right argues that woman have abortions primarily because
they're an inconvenience.
----Fair request, VivianLea. I am hoping someone else might do it. What
I'll offer now amounts in my judgment to "one word says it all," so if
offers some of the extension I know is needed: Pro-choicers are right
to argue that THEY are actually the ones who are most pro-life: they
ARE the ones who support societal programs which enable, empower,
a more nurturing, caring world; they are the ones who sniff out the
sadism and despair in pro-lifers'/conservatives' advancement of
ostensible free-market bounties.
----jwstewart: They tend to vote for governments which would weaken
healthcare, childcare, and welfare systems as they exist now. They
would pay way less taxes, disempower government's ability to reduce
misery and enable citizens, if they could. They are, unfortunately,
much more comfortable with suffering (suffering and sin is man's
lot), than they are with happiness. Personally, I admit to being sorry
they can vote at all.
-----
1429
They are human beings. But. In an environment where conceding this

would mean no possibility of abortion, more than this, would mean
advancement of pro-life ambitions against progressive
thinking/progressive mothers, I would never concede this fact. It
would just be tissue, until the way is clear.
Pro-choice is doing what it needs to do, what it ought to do. The way
is not clear.
----Re: The problem with that argument is that it still doesn't deal with
the physical 'reality' which is very different for women than it is for
men.
Personally, I'm prepared to turn the matter over to women for their
sole adjudication.
Whatever the majority (of adult females) decides is fine with me
(GWest, reply to post).
G West: Women have just emerged from tribal council and decided
that children are adjuncts, until they are able to feed and cloth
themselves. They appreciate your respect for and defense of their sole
adjudication, but would appreciate if you'd now just hold the door,
while they indulge in some late afternoon poppy-seed and baby cake.
----Re: My coven paused in the midst of thealogical
debate and mooncakes, and G West kindly, without condescension,
held open the door, as I was requested to convey our sincere offer of
an honourary membership. (VivianLea, reply to post)
I gather that now that you're done with your bequeathing, you'll be
gettingthat coven started up again. But G West, word to the wise--you
might might to pause to reconsider, before partaking in their prooffered, quote unquote, mooncakes.
(My apologies, VivianLea, but I just had to.)
Link: Tension High at Abortion Clinics (The Tyee)
1430

Response to Emma Peel's praise of Canada (1 July 2009)
I know I'm taking liberties, but if you don't mind, Emma:Atwood lives
downtown Toronto -- I don't even think you can see "geography" from
downtown Toronto. And I'm not sure where exactly her loyalties lie:
in "Surfacing" -- her supposed most nationalist and anti-American
work -- other than the main protagonist (a literate, isolated Atwoodtype), the Cdns in it come out seeming worse (or at least more
pathetic) than the boarish Americans do. And I remember in her
earlier work, at least, rural-types seemed oppressive morons. And if
you don't like primitive rural-types, shaped by whatever river or
mountain or prairie that happens to be nearby, I didn't think you
were allowed to be Cdn. (Emma Peel hardly seems blue-grass. You
sure you weren't shaped more by British wit than by prairie gophers?)
Also, all you people readily favoring literate Cdns, check out bookwriting Rick Mercer's show-biz history: had a show where all he was
concerned to do was show stupid you all are. We're assassins, you
Yankies (I'm dual -- favoring my American side). Be careful when you
open your arms to us (as you fools are want to do) -- we'll be tempted
by your exposed vitals. Falling at our feet with praise on your lips,
might placate us for awhile, though.
Link: Oh Canada, my Canada (Emma Peel)
Expedia left me for a latin lover, and then dry humped my (27 June
2009)
carpet dog.
She did, the bitch!
1431
"This sticker is dangerous and inconvenient, but . . ." (25 June 2009)
talladega nights (columbia pictures)
If OS ended up having 300 000 members, revenues that were off the
charts, but had come to seem loud and obnoxious, even if still liberal,
would the editors at OS care? My guess is they'd be toasting the times,
congradulating one another on their entrepreneurial acumen and
evidenced democratic sentiment, excusing/assessing all the noise as
democracy in action. EPs would bring in some bucks, feel more like
published authors, and show how all -- if you look at it the right way
-- has actually matured and progressed over time ("Sure, we'd all like
to live in Utopia, but it's really about time you came to appreciate that
with adulthood comes compromise, kids"). You'll lose a lot of the
truly decent, the inspiringly hopeful and ethical; hopefully they'll be
off to start up a non-profit, and keep us in the know about it.
Ads in the middle of the page -- how obnoxious. "This sticker is
dangerous and inconvenient, but I do love Fig Newtons" (Talladega
Nights"). "This ad is counter to the content and feel of my post, to
why I associated myself with my favorite site in the first place, but
hints that I might just go big-time . . ." (OS).
"Transformers 2" (Michael Bay) (24 June 2009)

One of the things Micheael Bay does well in both Transformer films is
convince you that the battle would go on, even if you weren't there to
observe/experience it. This differs from LOTR, where too often you
sensed that the battles were conceived with you in mind--are the
halflings going to "get it"?! No, for just as you begin to wince in
1432
anticipation of the falling sword, comes whomever to save the day.

The feeling you get is as if Bay asked the CGI dudes/lasses to forget
about the viewer and concentrate on what whatever particular robot
would do in the situation he found himself in. The result of this
immersion, interest in something other than making you feel a
certain way, integrity of the art form, even, is that the battles (for the
most part--there is a bit of the nick-of-time stuff here) feel
uncontrived, unpredictable, outside (not the projection of someone's
inner world) -- really happening, and incredibly immersive and
exciting. These films are not just loud and bombastic. And thank God.
For Stephanie (Zacharek, at Salon) isn't just making a comment about
Michael Bay, here; she's saying something about the American
populace that would like this "crap." To her, the bulk of humanity
finds satisfaction in naught but loud noises (though are these the
same people she sensed were trying to convince themselves they were
having fun while watching Phantom Menace?). Fortunately, it
appears that the current rabble do have some of the same sense for
art their equivalent had way back when, when Shakespeare's make of
the razzle-dazzle dominated the stage. The popularity of
Independence Day scares me way more than does the popularity of
this series. (And there is stuff in this film I really don't like -- I don't
like what it does with the Washington-type [but I didn't like what
Incredibles did with the boy-genius, either], which feels pre-requisite,
and doesn't help us any, for example.)
About the editing: this is one film I'd certainly like to see circulated to
fans to fiddle around with. One too many dizzy mommy moments, for
example. And maybe also choose between the fem-bot and the
humping dog-bot. (Dump the chick and keep the dog, is my sense.)
Unlike the first film, there are a bunch of other robots that never
really "gel" into enjoyable, apprehensible entities/identites. It's a
relief when bumble-bee (who shines in the battle sequences) bashes
the two annoyo-bots together--"I don't understand either of you--get
out of my face!"
Stephanie said the action felt "clumpy." Despite the worthy family
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stuff that goes in these films, which to me is as worth talking about

here as it is in that movie about gentrification, The Incredibles, I
would like it if in future with major action movie releases, she
expanded on this kind of impressionistic analysis of the action. This
kind of criticism seems most appropriate here; and is interesting,
intriguing, and possibly helpful. I certainly watched the film
wondering how I would over-all summarize the feel of the battles. I
didn't immediately come up with clumpy, but I'm still thinking about
it. Bay certainly likes wrestling throws and mid-air twists and turns,
and boy they are fun to witness and experience. You kind of want to
mimic them yourself, as I did all that shotgun cocking and curling in
Terminator 2, for instance.
Also, Someone please draw attention to all the quick verbal and visual
humour in these films. And with respect: the humping bot and
destruction balls were true enough to the occasion, clever, and funny,
to be worth noting and discussing.
Link: Transformers (Salon)
----We'll see
No, but I'd prefer if you'd do more with the summer's major movie
release than just quickly pee on it. If the first Transformers had
uninspired action sequences, people would not have liked the film.
(One thing the bulk of X-box humanity has got down, is when there is
and when there isn't LIFE, in action sequences.) I liked that the
action felt sort of unstaged, adhoc, unpredictable. I felt there was was
both aggression and genius in it, and preferred it to the pin-point,
neat dancing you get in X-Men, or the right angles and geometry, you
get in Dark Knight. That you get "pussy" and "bitch," seems only
appropriate for a movie uninterested in being quite so noble.
-----
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Mikaela
Also, I didn't experience Mikaela as "prancing"; nor when drawn to
attend to her butt did I think of its "pertness." This woman isn't a
perky elf--she's got too much flesh, weight, sway--sensuality, to be
fairly summized this way. The outfits are all form-fitting, as they are
in Incredibles, Star Trek, and everywhere else, out and about, in this
tight and controlled age.
Walsh/O'Reilly debate (18 June 2009)
fox news
Moderator: "Before we begin the debate, do we agree that you both
believe the other to have blood on their hands, that is, to be
responsible for murder, and so rightly should be jailed if not recipient
of more just deserts, kept away from humanity, forcibly and forever,
and most certainly not debated with?"
And the debate wasn't civil. Must have been all O'Reilly's fault.
----Further:
Dr. Paul McHugh very much sounds like a dangerous human being
devoted to defending perpetrators and causing further pain to
victims, but the Sotomayor debate primed many of us to once again
see credentials as everything. Sotomayor was first in her class at
Princeton, so, Right, shut the hell up. Dr. Paul McHugh was some bigwig at John Hopkins University, so Left, shut the hell up. Paul
McHugh could have been first in his class at Princeton and be
otherwise massively credentialed, and we still need to be amidst an
environment where the very fact that he works to advance the idea of
false memory syndrome and thereby disenfranchise the abused, can
work to shut him down. The way it is, if the Right is smart, they'll
work with universities supported by corporate interests (that is, every
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university) to ensure "their own" are the ones who tend to get tenure.
Turn all the lefties into indepedent scholars or travelling TAs, and you
won't have to listen to them.
Chicken and egg problem (11 June 2009)

Re: An important new study has just been published giving good
evidence
that states that
have higher gender equality and female security are more peaceful.
So the way to
have safer states is to give women rights.
Psychohistorians have also of course shown how violent patriarchy
and violence againstwomen in earlier societies lead to more
violent wars.
The study is: 'The Heart of the Matter" by Valerie M. Hudson et al,
International Security 33(2008): 7-45.
Lloyd deMause
Psychohistorians have of course also shown that imagining yourself
giving praise to unsatisfied, embittered older women, at a time when
previous prosperity has brought to looming proximity, the angry,
disapproving, overwhelming Mother, is also a good way to buttress up
your "good boy" status, and maybe delay the felt need for a day of
reckoning a little while longer. Psychohistorians have of course also
shown that the whole patriarchy-and-violence-against-women thing,
is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, one not so much on the radar of
those in a hurry to castigate patriarchy as worse than worse, as
violent!, violent!, violent!. (Anybody remember a particular someone
who made clear how, as brutal as it was, as based on fear/hatred of
women (mothers) as it was, patriarchy was actually a step more civil
-- less violent -- than all-is-dissolution matriarchy was? And yes, well
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loved children cannot but be egalitarians, and have no interest in

either sex, in anyone, dominating the way.)
Link: Gender Equality (realpsychohistory, May 25, 2009)
"Marley and Me" New Man
20th-century fox
We seem to be living at a time where the compromising male gets in a
way, to play it alpha -- to be society's most fit. Marley and Me
featured this new man, someone who relucantly agrees to focus on
the family, domestic issues, rather than pursue the traditional male
reporter's pursuits, but who -- seemingly as a result of his masochistic
surrender -- finds all further life's riches readily come his way. His
buddy -- the traditional man's man -- is made to seem almost out of
step with the times -- the loser, in a way.
My guess is we're going to see an awful lot more of this new man
around -- more praise for him than criticism. Lots of talk about men
needing to accept the new times, their changing roles. And it will
eventually be followed by a period where these very same men start
seeing something they like in battle-ready patriarchs.
Link: Dude, man up and start acting like a mom (Aaron Traister,
Salon)
"Star Trek" review: Complete
paramount pictures
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Come into My Space Dungeon and Let Me Poke You with a

Pogo-Stick
Review of J.J. Abrams Star Trek, Part One
May 2009
Its not exactly what Star Trek offers, but the film is perhaps most
easilyif not most fairlyassessed as belonging to the bread and
circuses school of societal extension. It offers a plot, a delineation
of the way ahead, people can readily imagine themselves participating
in, readily imagine themselves wanting to participate in, which if
followed by a similar national narrative could at least help pave the
way for a neat and orderlyif totalitarianway of finishing all things
off. The pro-offered life of adventure, appeals. The sense of purpose,
also very much so. But the best drug it offers comes out of allowing
you room to readily imagine yourself playing a part in something like
this, and thereby partaking in the dopamine-high of specialness
counting yourself amongst the few select geniuses good enough for
the Enterprise affords one. To be a member of the Enterprise means
you are the best at your positionit means that though for the most
part you will sit alertly but still somewhat placidly in place, every once
in a while, when visited upon by, ostensibly, some miracle of
realization / inspiration, all eyes will be drawn to you as you act up
and save the day, and perhaps your species, and maybe the universe,
as the prize rises so that the high doesnt ever have to flag. To be a
genius is never suggested to be anything other than a rare and special
thing in Star Trekit is always noteworthy, but is made to seem
something most anyone with sufficient desire could imagine
themselves being in possession of: you need to 1) be able to be brash,
and in a way in which your brashness ultimately and for the most part
immediately garners praise, without any really ill-consequence and
sometimes with further good fortune (e.g., Kirk gets banished from
the Enterprise for his acting out, something that leads very rapidly in
succession to a quick high-speed chase, the discovery/recovery of
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great treasure, and an enterprising way of taking charge of the

Enterprisei.e., the requisite kind of stuff he needs to seem the One
and Only), and, to 2) know things, like lots of languages or whatever,
or the select, impressive fact, like, for example, some incident
surrounding some aspect of your bio youre unlikely not to have well
attended to, not primarily because it is associated with one of your
parents death but because youve long seen how useful details in your
tragic but unique bio are in garnering both sympathy and ready
assessments of yourself as being selected by fate for some special role.
So if youve ever bullied your way, Uhura-like, to the head of the line,
legitimating your presumption as only appropriate to one of your
importance, and as evidence that you dont count amongst the
pathetic sheepeople who stand aboutyouve managed to convince
yourselfsolely out of fear of what others might think; if youve ever
spent hours staring ahead at the TV, but also found it in you to do
things like turn away from just watching TV toward using it as a
site for violent wii/xbox control twitching (Time to fret, Death Star
Im going off auto-pilot and switching to manual); if you know
things, like, for example, the plot-lines of the whole current
panopticom of SF shows, or ever brought up some the universe-in-anutshell fact garnered from your bachelor arts education or handy
philosophy tract, that awed friends suspiciously and frighteningly
willing to cooperate with your need to be special smart, youve
probably got it in you to see yourself readily, ably, ingeniously,
serving as one of the Enterprises new crew.
But if you would like to be part of something similar to the Star Trek
trek at least your purpose would be not just to wander about or
boldly go, where-ever, but to save civilization against rogue villains
that is, to work on behalf of humankind in a really obvious and
immediate way. Well, your conscious mind would never think
otherwise, but in truth the core of you would throw one hell of a
tantrum if they didnt end up serving youyour self-assessments
needs (again), something they could in fact best do by being
dispatched or humiliated rather than saved. For demonstrating your
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own prowess would have to go into exhausting, stressful overdrive if it

wasnt for the fact that everyone beyond your immediate crew is made
to seem somewhat deficient, if not well retarded. For Kirk to seem the
potent fighting cock, chock full of potential, five trained soldiers have
to end-up seeming, in sum, just beyond him in a bar fight; for Uhura
to seem more the translation wizard (Wow! You know four hundred
esoteric languages! Amazing! Our computers only know a handful
plus a billion of them.), some other has to be efficiently but ruthlessly
dispatched as not up to snuff; for Captain Pike and his prodigy, Kirk,
to seem especially able captains, another captain has to be shown as
thank you sir, may I have another? eager ready to obey/satisfy the
sadistic needs of terrorists (Come into my dungeon; stand still before
me; and give me satisfaction by letting me stab my handy-dandy,
ready-side, space-spear into you); for the crew of the enterprise to
seem Luke Skywalker-able, and the ship itself, oh so fleet-of-feet, they
have to survive when a whole slew of other ships are scattered about,
a calamity and a pity, but also their just deserts, for so easily being
drawn into the enemys trap.
So if this is the sort of narrative that grabs the publics imagination,
that suggests some sense of how the future could afford all a life that
feels purposeful and well laid-out, surely would-be totalitarians out
there will soon realize the public will be soon be in the mood to
respond ever more enthusiastically to their call. Totalitarians would
deliver: they would suit-up and militarize the nation; offer everyone
some role to play against whatever pressing villain; organize them
into community groups, where every resident best Americano,
pizza, sushi, whatever maker in town, could imagine themselves as
being part ofreallythe most distinctive, able group of freedomfighters around; ensure they get a lot of praise, and, lest they forget!,
give them room to every now and then voice some kind of rebel yell
after all, people whose self-esteem is so dependent on external
sources likely sense the extent of their dependence, and need to act
out some loud demonstration of their not in fact existing
independence every once in awhile so that the charge they get from
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the resulting muscular arousal/engagement makes them feel like they

could scatter all away as so much space debris, go their own way, and
be so much the happier.
Spocks Humanization Project

Review of J.J. Abrams Star Trek, Part 2
But no film can fairly be critiqued as simply playing to people's
insecurities and damned for doing nothing other than help playing a
part, however small, toward a societal shift toward militarism, would
ever risk showing an audience up, draw attention to their own
inauthenticity, by showing them what a human being with real
substance is like, draw attention to their brave-seeming evasiveness
by showing what real engagement with something difficult is like, but
Star Trek in fact does, and in a way where a comparison between the
twopretense and real substancecan hardly escape notice.
When Kirk is expelled from the Enterprise, sent to the ice planet as
punishment, we might wonder for a moment if Kirk might be made to
experienceif even only for a short whilewhat being alone,
abandoned, can really be like. That is, not so much about an
opportunity to showcase your badness, your ingenuity, your
uniqueness, or to bond with an ally and conspire something
enterprising "between you two," but about being left alone and left
behind, unequipped to deal with whatever variant thought, feeling
you experience, outside of the context of experiencing it amidst a
cocoon-offering group. Though we might even have laughedout of
shock, possiblywhen along with Kirk we discovered that Starfleet
could intentionally dispatch an unruly crew member to his own
private ice Guitanimo, we may also of had a moment of disquiet as
well, resulting from encountering somethingnamely, isolation
until then the movie had set up as pretext for more action. Action
follows, and were back to genius vs. ordinary, giant-devours-the-
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suddenly-pathetically-small, sadistic-relish normalism, but when it

leads to him encountering (Leonard Nimoy's Spock [hereafter "old
Spock"]) Spock, someone who's known this ice isolation, apparently,
for 25 years, rather than 2-and-a-half minutes, the earlier hint of the
kind of brutal test abandonment can present to the origins and
solidity of your fair self-assessment, self-esteem, becomes trenchant.
Spock has known what it is to be isolated for decades, away from all
his friends, all space adventures, and, owing to Leonard Nimoy's
actingowing to Leonard Nimoywe feel all this when we "meet"
him. He has been forced to witness the destruction of his home planet
and all his kin, and we sense his distress. All this would be only
logical, as it were, but how differently we are encouraged to
understand isolation here from how it was presented when Scotty, for
example, spoke of his own isolation, where it wasn't allowed to
amount to a wound that would play against the crew's ascendance to
form, and in fact largely served to establish Scotty as quirky,
estranged, somewhat removedappropriate to someone whose
natural abode will soon be the Enterprise's underbellyand how
different is the feel of old Spock's experience of his kins
extermination from how we are encouraged to imagine it as playing in
the life of new Spock, where it seems energy that can be directed to
showcase how this Spock handles his "predecessor's" logic vs.
emotion conflict, and, worse, to assess and enjoy the frisson in the
naughty fracture that is his relationship with Uhura. The pain has
beaten old Spock down, but all is far from lost: he is persuasively
made to seem someone who though he had come to prefer being
amongst friends, could weather long stretches of being alone, titanic
experiences of loss and pain, if he must, primarily because of the love
and friendship he gained from so many years of knowing and loving
good friends like Kirkhis gimmicky, immature-seeming vulcan vs.
human nature-thing, seemingly long left behind him as so much an
easy identify and comfort-zone providing childish prop. In a film
which had hereto suggested the ultimate prize to be being part of an
elite crew, and the sheen you get from being part of something so
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relevant and fashionable, the greatest thrill, it's very beautiful if a

little bit overwhelming to witness the satisfaction and soul-food a
lifetime spent being amongst supporting friends can offer one, and
wholly out of place: here in our encounter with what should amount
to the most familiar (i.e., Leonard's Nimoy's Spock), is our one and
only taste in the film of something rare enough in its frantic, frenetic
universe, to seem truly alien.
This is not to say that the new Kirk would ever want the sort of
layered, deep relationship old Spock created with old Kirk: he might
indeed feel it amounts to too much "weight" inside the heart and
head, with his preferred sort of friendship being maybe more
narcissistic, light and trivial, a tactile skin rather than a bloated body,
an ain't-it-wonderful-that-genius-me-is-reflected-in-genius-you, sort
of affair, with his preferred sort of genius not seeming to exempt him
from his being vacuously carried aloft in whatever adventure space
titillates his way, here-and-there. But for any one amongst the
viewing audience whose need to be thought worthy of love, not owing
to amounting to some sort of prize but out of appreciation of the
quieter, slowly accumulating, good-and-the-bad, the resonant and the
ordinary, day-to-day things you offer the world through your
presence and company, it is not nothing to finally encounter someone
in the film universe shown to prize a friend primarily for this reason.
But if the current film-going generation is one which has been
abandoned to the degree that they cannot risk or even imagine really
going their own way, giving weight to and following their own
intuition, lest they feel despairingly alone and panicky, if they are
those who cannot imagine giving of themselves, developing an
involved report with friends, lest it leave them feeling exposed, overextended and scarily vulnerable (though they can and will readily
play-act all thiswith it really amounting to all self-containment,
with pleasing "feelings" of volition and muscular engagement), then,
ultimately, if a film-maker wanted to at least begin to prepare a
generation to base their self-esteem on something more solid,
establish friends whose relationship is more real, take chances in a
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way which could lead to genius, then s/he would likely have to do
what Abrams does in this film, even if its appeal is such that it means
we're no doubt heading toward a totalitarian future. "Kids" want their
preferred way of living, existing, validated (and you know, they
deserve to have their timewhatever they enjoy should be validated,
made to seem right ground for "extrapolation" which can lead to selfgrowth, life adventure, societal betterment)Star Trek tells them
that there are no traits more apt and fit right now than always being
in a state of hyper-arousal, hyper-alertness, to be perennially set to
encounter/interact the world implacably, as a hard, unbreakable
shell, and violently, with every word a sword-stab, a puncture. "Kids"
want to be in charge, not intimidated away from expressing
themselves by a previous generations' accomplishments and
authority, but also (unlike the original Star Trek, we note) to have
adults somewhere not too far off in the background, like so much a
corporate head office keeping an eye out onand thereby in a way
offering the sense of security which enablesthe playful goings-on in
the office, and so it is captained by a new, less intimidating and more
awkward Kirk, who seems as manageable and non-constraining as he
does commanding (yes, his famous cheat dramatizes his selfcommand, but how many times in the film is he shown following,
sometimes rather dumbly, the lead of others?), is overseen by elders
like Pike with little depth, with no capacity to well read your soul,
with ready complicity to make what is truly juvenile seem wise, and
with the rest of the Federation never too far distant in the mind's eye.
But as long as he is not presented in a way where it intimidates or too
readily brings to the fore their awareness of their own vulnerability,
once introduced to someone someone who fears s/he is not worthy of
love, who suspects s/he is, perhaps, in truth, totally inadequate, could
imagine actually enjoy getting to know them, they would want this
person kept around; and Star Trek, while making him seem a bit
slow-paced to well function on what the Enterprise has become
primarily, that is, a response-ready battleship (i.e., he's not a
"wartime consigliere")allows old Spock a distant but still accessible
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place in the new universe. Perhaps, just as the film makes it seem
right that new "latch-key" Kirk, sparked on by the nature of his
abandonment, who seems fated to become akin to trigger happy,
action-figure, Captain Pike, and more naturally suited to eventually
deem McCoy, not Spock, his best "fratboy" bud, captains the ship over
a Spock fueled on by well-attendance, by maternal love, who can
second guess himself, disengage from friends, step back, alone, in
contemplation, reflection, consideration, but at the same time suggest
that his being in the "shadows" will help him be more nurturing and
less brutal (notice how careful he is to not humiliate Sulu, to ease the
bridge, when he functions as first officer, but how markedly blunt and
even brutal he is to Uhura's replacement and to Kirk, when he
functions as captain), facilitate the kind of slow growth, soul growth
requires, develop into the kind of leader we will eventually turn to,
and that this will be how it could go for us as well. That is, maybe our
need to play it rigid, safe but violent, routine, and brutally sacrificial,
is such that it's going to take awhile for the well-rounded, wellattended, easeful Spocks of the world to introduce us to something
more satisfying, variant and human, and we should be well enough
pleased to learn that people are attracted to films like Star Trek (and
Wall-E, which communicates the same message), which suggest, at
least, we seek a more desirable future than rigid mobility and ray
guns, but need plenty of time to ready and steady ourselves, to once
again venture about so bravely.
Work Cited
Star Trek. Dir. J.J. Abrams. Perf. Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto.
Paramount. 2009. Film.
Glossing your brood in genteel shine (27 May 2009)

"But you -- the UBC Arts graduates of 2009 -- are well-equipped for
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challenges. You've learned to think critically, communicate well, and

cooperate with others to achieve common goals. You've acquired a
respect for the insights and accomplishment of past generations, so
that you stand on the shoulders of giants -- rather than starting at
ground level again." (Michael Byers, Dear Grads, Help Save Us!,
The Tyee, May 27 2009)
Last time I checked, this whole standing on the shoulders of giants
thing was under about 50 years of non-stop challenge by people in the
Arts, who pretty loudly assessed these giants as amounting to, well,
giants -- that is, monsters. Faculty of Arts a bit on the conservative
side at UBC? Or is it just tactically smart to feed students' parents
what they want to hear (and can be expected to handle), that is, that
will gloss their brood in genteel shine?
The speech you delivered was no doubt truthful to your experience
and sense of things, but seems dumb and inadequate. The link
between Shakespeare, Keats, and Nietzsche, and over-all wellpreparedness to handle things like global warming and economic
fracturing, requires some extrapolation, some fleshing out. Or at least
it ought to require as much: There is some chance that, as Barbara
Ehrenreich suggests, the Arts programs can keep on advertising the
study of Shakespeare as miraculously ideal for attending to the
student's soul AND his/her career needs (who'd a thunk, eh?) AND
now our collective need to save society from itself (this is a bit of a
new one -- allowing you some room to de-emphasize the ideal career
prep bit), and actually serve employers rather well -- they want and
need intelligent enough, tractable recruits, in loads of debt and
desperately in need of reassurance, to reliably be counted on to think
themselves the world's saviors, while dutifully towing the party line.
Link: Dear Grads, Help Save Us (The Tyee)
Once you've read this informed review, you will remain crazy (20 May
2009)
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RE: The claim that Japanese-Canadian fishermen posed a security

threat provided a perfect cover for their elimination from the
fishery, a long-time objective of their enemies in the industry and
elected office. Yet as early as 1944, Canadian authorities
acknowledged there had never been a single instance or even
allegation of treachery by Japanese Canadians before or after Pearl
Harbour (Geoff Meggs, The Resilient Japanese Canadian, The
Tyee, May 20, 2009)
The assumption in this article is that revealing that the Japanese in
Canada posed no threat does some kind of good. It may not, you
know. For when people in psychological panic are in the mood to set
some poor lot of people up for mistreatment, sacrifice, these people
are probably doomed. Why? Because the discriminators are going
crazy, experiencing an overwhelming need to project all their
unwanted characteristics onto someone else, so that they themselves
can feel absent of internal conflict, all nice and pure (think how useful
"bad" countries are in making many Americans [not me] feel like they
live in the land of the free and the brave). It might do something to
push reality in front of their face as often as can be managed, but their
ability to push away any inconvenient fact, twist it into some other
form, make it nevertheless serve their interest, cannot be
underestimated. Stop setting them up as selfish, or obstinate, or some
such -- which is an awful lot about making the informed feel good
about themselves. What they are, is damaged -- the driven
unfortunate who will see evil in others, because they must, lest they
themselves go even crazier.
(Often, in fact, as was the case with Jews in Germany, the picked on
group is actually overall psychologically more advanced, more truly
virtuous, than the psychologically regressing mass.)
But no Tyee reader is going to count amongst those who think the
Japanese in Canada were up to something sneaky in WW2. I don't
mean to disparage your article, but if you want to challenge the Tyee
reader in what I believe to be a way more useful way, why not tackle
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the implications of the tendency amongst many Tyee contributers to

set up the Greens this election period, as the nefarious, sneaky group
(ring any WW2 bells?), that need to be kept under watch, for the good
of one and all?
Make Tyee readers see, what is hard for them to see.
Link: The Resilient Japanese Canadian
----Interesting challenge, G West. What happened was that the middle
class started experiencing huge anxieties, terrors, *owing to* their
sudden prosperity, their real growth, "advancement," as you say -they started feeling like they would be punished for all the good
things they were coming to enjoy. So they set up the Jews as the
*really* greedy, sneaky, folk; and in playing a large part in wiping
them out, they got to feel all pure again.
No one from a warm family would participate in anything this awful,
though. No one -- doesn't matter what books/pamphlets people pass
on to you, others' aims, schemes, to manipulate: you're way beyond
their reach -- can't be anyone else's tool (Manipulators don't use the
"susceptible," though--what actually happens is that those we prefer
to imagine as susceptible make aggressive use of manipulators'
"deceptions" to legitimize, engage, and exercise their own need to
hurt those they've projected their own "badness" onto--that's what
actually happens in Milgram's study, btw). Germans historically have
had amongst the worst childhoods in all Europe, though. You might
be sick of the deMause stuff, but his exploration of German
authoritarian childrearing and the beginning of WW2, agrees with
how you present German preWW2, and is one to read. (If you take a
look, scroll down about half way to you reach "Causes of WW2 and
the Holocaust.")
Link: http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/eln06_war.html
Also, I agree that kids, women, the unemployed, the poor, the
"foreign," will be set up as "the problem." But for most Tyee readers,
this will not be something to be pointed out -- most of us will
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recognize and abhore when this is done. In the Tyee' forums -- that is,
amongst those in B.C. who most readily can "be reached" -- during
the election, the Greens were the ones most vilified. I just moved
here, and I need to get a better sense of who the Greens are in this
province, but it is possible to me right now that the Greens could be
set up -- by some middle class NDPers, even--akin to the way the
educated German middle class set up literate, artistic, Jews for target,
before and during WW2.
----Forgot to mention, G West, that the part that's hard to shake off about
deMause's articulation of the causes of the Holocaust, is where he
points out how all the various things that were said to and acted upon
by the Nazis upon the Jews (and homeless, weak, etc.), were things
the Nazis and their supporters had to endure when they were
children. DeMause goes into the details, about what exactly German
children had to endure, and how they exactly replicated what they
experienced in their abuse of the Jews (but this time with them as
perpetrators rather than victims). It's really powerful, and I wish
you'd take a look at it.
Regarding your complaint against the use of the term "concentration
camp," in regards to what happened to the Japanese in Canada
during WW2: if the motives were the same--that is to stigmatize,
humiliate, punish--and I think they were, then even if the sadism was
less, if the abuse, less harsh--which it evidently was--than what
happened to the Jews, I don't think I'm too off-put by the use of the
term. Born of the same source, it's hyperbole, but not misdirection.
Using the term is a tactic used to make it more difficult for those who
really would want to "manage" that part of our history, so that our
own arising desire to prejudice others feels more buttressed,
substantiated -- less guilt arousing. Of course, there's another reason
-- a really regrettable one, and I'll get to it.
I don't think it's just that "they weren't treated fairly," which, you'll
admit, sounds sort of near inconsequent. My sense is that it was
about setting up a group of people as proper subjects of suspicion,
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hatred, and abuse -- something vastly more horrifying than being

inadequately attended to by whatever Cdn adminstration.
That the Japanese were up to something more awful in Japan, is
something I would readily be prepared to believe (though, again, not
out of evilness, villainy, or blameworthy anything, but of what
happens to a populace that is going crazy sadistic, owing to the fact
that the particular nature of their own childhoods has made it so that
they cannot handle it when good things--like ANY kind of personal
growth--happen in their lives). And it is extremely annoying that
current criticism of widescale abuse seems way too largely motivated
to set up conservatives as misanthropes, something that be better
effected by making sure that all victims are best understood as saints
(a practice we've seen in a number of book reviews here at the Tyee),
by making sure that all abuse once or still supported by "everyday,"
six-pack, Cdns, is set up to seem as close to Holocaust scale as
possible. This is self-inflating (for the left-leaning writer/thinker) and
mean spirited (of the same source? You know, though the left is
always better, it actually is.)
Please remember this discussion about Paul Krugman. I would like to
bring it up again, a year or two from now.
An incomplete review of "Wendy and Lucy" (11 May 2009)
Help Wanted
Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt)
May 2009
With Wendy and Lucy involving one proud woman traveling
through rugged or decrepit surroundings, hoping to work her way to
the one place available which might just hold promise of a secure life,
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and perhaps fulfillment (i.e., Alaska), the film could be deemed postapocalyptic. But in films of this genre, where civilization wears and
wolves encroach, setting serves to highlight and facilitate/necessitate
heroic action from the main protagonist, and overall register a strong
sense that this is the only appropriate backdrop for manly,
independent livingthe one gigantic thing civilization cannot offer
because it ostensibly comes at the expense of. The film works the
other way around, where adults born when American society felt
assured, prove still worth seeking out, for they may be, if not the only
certainly the best source available to help orient you to take on a
more substantive, human, way of relating with the world.
It certainly isnt fair to say that Wendy simply reacts to the world. She
is shown throughout the film making something of the environment
she finds herself in. She steals; parks her car where-ever-where;
transforms a gas station bathroom into her own personal safehouse;
and, when she is more comfortable therein, less braced against all its
first-encounter newness, ranges wide across (her) town, bulletining
images of her dog everywhere appropriate, in an act which reads as
much of personal territorial possession/demarcation as it does of
fervent canine rescue. She is in fact quite aggressivewith even her
relative or absolute stillness in certain situations, reading not so much
of forced paralysis but as a wily-enough-a-way to ride things through.
But though her aggressiveness may in fact be born out of a fear of
paralysis, of being or feeling susceptible to being used, its not as
much a triumph to witness as one might expect: one can imagine a
whole life of such willful demonstrations ahead; and though its better
than just giving up, you wonder how far a life of sharp survival
instinct is from one infused with soulful intenthow distanced all
such is from the animalistic? Again, to be fair to the film, the loners
libertarianism is not exactly disparaged here, but there is a sense that
while it argues that it is much, much better to be the lone wolf than
the pack animal, that the loner who survives through canniness, a
willingness to act, alone, for better or worse, is vastly more dignified
than those who mongrelize away into groups, its stillso very sadly
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so many worlds away from where humans need to, and should, be.
This, then, is not your 70s post-apocalyptic, where being alone but
with your dog was essentially shorthand for experiencing the height
of human freedom and existential grandeur. With apologies to the
Cold War, oil shortages, and Americans all-drunk-on-narcissismfunk, this is a film made 30 years past the 70s hysteria30 years past
the period where even Republicans voted for increases in social
welfare spendingand those 30 years of brutal withdrawal of social
concern and common purpose has made a future of large-scale
dissolution seem possible enough for us now to believe, believe,
believe in Obama because he just has to be the answer. So in an era
where the decomposition 70s style anti-heroes loved because it drew
all to their own certain will, feels like it is really could be just ahead,
the big draw is not so much libertarian range but securityAlaska
draws Wendy because it may offer a job, in a cannery, which should
sound horrible, last resort, but may in fact appeal because it suggests
a life without too much adjusting to experience amidst the uncertain,
insecure now.
When an aging, middle class manthe one who ends up taking care
of Lucywho in more sure times would have laughed at by anyone on
the outside for his inane, life-abnegating, bourgeois staidness, is set
up in the end primarily to represent stability, predictability, good care
and kindnessthe good homeyou know a society has weathered to
the point where simple security can seem golden. Wendy knows its
lure, and is reminded of it the very moment she loses Lucy. Before the
loss, while Wendy was with Lucy, Wendy had some composure: she
could listen to a group of train riders respectfully if inertlybut
dust them off as so much wtf and head on along on her way. Set,
content, with a dog of considerable well-being and joyfulness, it is
even fair to say of her that she seemed someone with the capacity, at
least, to make Alaska more than just a place to get a jobto make it a
place where a better life might just be realized if not found. But when
she looses Lucy, the search for her has some of the urgent feel of the
loss of a security blanket to an easily panicked child. Her self-
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composure is uncertain enough that she needs the external

environment to aid in propping it up. This is natural enough for the
child but undeveloped for the adult (however many true adults there
are out there), and what Wendy needs she cant in fact get to any
sufficient degree from any pet, however radiant, beautiful and
responsive that pet might be. For what Wendy needs is what only
parents can, potentially, offer their children: namely, a clear (to the
child) ability to weather their various mood inconsistencies, their
reaching-outs (for individualization) and coming-backs (for comfort).
But not because they are dependent on themwhich is why a pet can
offer the samebut because they sense the child's need for a secure
foundation to ground their efforts to reach out and explore their
world.
Another way of saying all this is that Wendy has grown up without a
nest. Its evident in her impulse to cling and in her impulse to register
the least amount of responsiveness possiblethe default response of
the abandoned chick, lest an inopportune squack strike the interest of
a nearby hawkand we particularly feel it when, at a moment when
she is evidently in need of reassurance / orientation, she calls her
brother and his girlfriend, and they respond so defensively she ends
up having to reassure them. It is possible, however, that when Wendy
made this call, she was enjoying the comfort-food available in just
participating in the shared social convention/expectation of turning
to immediate family when occasion dictates, and also, perhaps, to
confirm what she was already coming to know: namely, that the kind
of support she is in need of is to be found in her contacts with
strangers, not family, in her developing friendship with the aged
parking-lot security-guard, in particular.
(A few more paragraphs. The end.)
Work Cited
Wendy and Lucy. Dir. Kelly Reichardt. Perf. Michelle Williams. Field
Guide. 2008. Film.
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Losing masculinity by fathering a child (26 April 2009)
photo from http://growthstylenlove.wordpress.com/2008/10/

Seth Rogan: "Kids like me but when they meet me they're horrified by
me... These guys bring their kids (to screenings) and I kind of resent
them. To me it's kind of a sacrilegious thing and the kid would cry. It
was horrible..."
"Now that the movie's out and I don't have to promote it anymore, I
can say that I hate children. It's out; it's made $60 million. I can say
it: I hate kids. If no kid ever came up to me, I would be more than
happy." (World Entertainment News Network)
Re: What were discussing here, however, is a lot of men on cusp of
middle age who, at some sub-rational and visceral level, see their
masculine identity threatened by the act of fathering a child. They
understand babies to be enemies of what makes it great to be a
straight man. Thus, having one is gay. (Vanessa Richmond,
Having Kids is so gay, The Tyee, April 26, 2009)
Quite the disparaging piece. And quite cruel to set up a class of people
as ridiculous, whose concerns are so obviously born of irrationality,
emotion -- silliness and sheer bigotedness -- that the research of one
noted baby-boomer sociologist, Kimmel, would really have been
enough to show them up as self-centered slackers who need to shut
up, step up, and grow up.
Quick reminder that women's concerns were often muted by
identifying them as irrational. Reasoned researchers stepped in and
showed women to be hysteric(al), completely unaware of what really
ailed them, invalidated their concerns, complaints, made them
(women) worthy of treatment, and to the public at large, appropriate
subjects for "drawing room" derision and laughter. To use your
1454
words, the joke was on them, sadly enough.

You do describe becoming a parent as becoming part of the Borg:
"Don't worry, you'll come to like it. Come join us," is what I hear from
the men whose stories of becoming a parent you relate. This should
scare more men off, but strangely, my own sense is that a lot of men
will be drawn to this, like soldiers are to their demise on the
battlefield -- just get it over and done with.
I would like to see most people (or at least warm, empathic people)
marry and have kids. For sure. I think, potentially, being a parent can
offer rewards I would never want to deny myself. This said, there
actually may be a best time for this, there may be something about the
time we're living in which should lend respect for those concerned
about leaving familiar comfort zones, for waiting just a few more
years. People had a lot of babies AFTER the war, after all. This wasn't
just about money -- it had something to do, MORE to do, I think, with
society finally relaxing -- with a large-scale expansion of collective
comfort zones, of societal permissiveness, which made a family just
naturally seem to mostly be about enrichment, life-enhancement,
rather than restriction --regardless of bachelor-party pretense at the
time.
Times have changed, evidently, and I look forward to more insightful
explorations of why men are freezing in place, than ones done by
researchers who to me are not so much moved by reason but by an
unconscious desire to show men up as sexist assholes at every
bleeping turn (oh, and bleep you, Kimmel, for your smug hate
propagation, your misandry), and who seem lacking in the sort of
attuned sensitivity and self-awareness to be trusted to offer a spot-on
sense of "what's up," in an individual's, or a culture's, psychic core.
Link: Having Kids is So Gay (The Tyee)
---------Update #1:
VivianLea: What sociologists get right is that there is something really
1455
off about certain men's need to feel like real men. This phenomena
shouldn't be naturalized, or just readily accepted -- ideally, and very
possibly, no human being will feel the need to buttress their selfassessment in this fashion, or at all, period. What they get wrong is
their unwillingness to credit that men's fears of women, of being
entrapped and rendered pussies, are born out of actual experiences of
feeling dehumanized in their interactions with women. More
pointedly, they would never credit what I believe to be the case:
namely, that men who were used as boy-toys for the entertainment of
their lonely mothers, who were traumatized/abused by their mothers,
will always by hyper-ready to expect entrapment and shameful
surrender of self, in their relations with women. They can't go there,
because this would involve exploring their own past with an intimacy,
with a degree of self-introspection, their very training has worked to
establish as wholy suspect, as in the path of scientific neutrality -objective truth. Plus, it would mean inviting abuse from the parental
alters (super-ego) they've established in their heads, to stop them
from asking, "why did you do that to me, mommy?" Some poets go
there --there's that famous line from Philip Larkin ("they fuck you up,
mom and dad"), for instance, but about zero, give or take zero,
sociologists. Kimmel would blame culture, but never seriously
consider DeMause's contention that "culture is explanandum, not
explanans," that is, that saying that "'culture determines social
behavior' is simply a tautology."
http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/eln05_psychogenic.ht
ml
---------Nightbloom: I think your suggestion that young men are sort of
forced into become family refugees is interesting, and has me perhaps
reconsidering my decision not to allow my sisters as facebook friends.
But I believe it starts way earlier than in adolescence. Again from
1456
DeMause, who offers the empathy and respect missing from

Vanessa's provocative article:
"It is not just genetics but more importantly maternal environment
that Tronick and Weinberg blame when they see from their studies
that Infant boys are more emotionally reactive than girls. They
display more positive as well as negative affect, focus more on the
mother, and display more signals expressing escape and distress and
demands for contact than do girls.23 This is because from infancy
boys are expected to just grow up and not need as much emotional
care as girlsindeed, boys are regularly encouraged not to express
any of their feelings, since this is seen as weak or babyish in
boys.24 While mothers may sometimes dominate their little girls and
expect them to share their emotional problems, they distance their
boys by not making contact with them and expect them to be a man.
This begins from birth: Over the first three months of life, a baby
girls skills in eye contact and mutual facial gazing will increase by
over 400 percent, whereas facial gazing skills in a boy during this
time will not increase at all.25 Boys grow up with less attachment
strengths because careful studies show that mothers look at their boys
less, because both parents hit their boys two or three times as much
as they do their girls, because boys are at much higher risk than girls
for serious violence against them, and because boys are continuously
told to be tough, not to be a wimp or a weakling, not to be soft
or a sissy.26"
http://www.psychohistory.com/originsofwar/02_whymale
saremoreviolent.html
---------You can sense a bit of masochism -- if I suffer or sacrifice, I'll be
worthy of appreciation -- in some responses here, that probably ought
to be pointed out, but it's really awful to see someone once again go
after men, and I'm glad to see people defending themselves from
Vanessa's mean-spirited, gutless attack. She sets people (single men
-- the easiest of targets to ensure hate-speech is lauded rather than
1457
blasted) up so that they seem worthy of derision. It's crappy when this
happens to anyone in the gay and lesbian community, and it's crappy
here.
I don't want to see people projecting forward and imagining no
dramatic change in who they are. I hear a lot of people doing that in
my own social circle (I'll never get married; I'll never have children),
and it frightens and saddens me. You do hear people saying they are
proud of what they've accomplished, and no doubt they have
managed to effect a life well worthy of their and our respectful
consideration/appreciation. But if we're going to probe at some
aspects which could well reflect an unhealthy rigidity, which prevents
them from FURTHER elaborating, nurturing, their sense of
themselves and what they might offer to the community at large, we
need to begin by respecting the pleasure they take in their lives and
the legitimacy of their fears in broaching anything substantially new.
Vanessa goes after the easiest of targets with real meanness and lack
of respect. At some level she must know that what and how she writes
ensures she does not get criticized by those she can't easily blow off
and handle, that she gets (or that she can imagine herself getting)
praise from the empowered, who help legitimize their
enfranchisement by thinking correct thought, by hating incorrect
people. This is not life, forward progress --it's appeasement, that itself
speaks of a termination in self-growth that may never be coaxed into
evolving into something more beautiful.
--------Yeah, I read it as a really disrespectful piece, primarily moved to show
these man-boys up. I know she's effecting to summarize Kimmel's
take here, but when she says that bailers are "guys try[ing] to prolong
their post-adolescent male bonding pleasures and their kind of
fantasy locker room world though activities like video games and
online porn," this to me reads as HER identifying them as, in essence,
irresponsible social parasites who fart about with their time and take
1458
pleasure in other people's victimization: that is, as, at best, disposable

people. (I wonder how aesthetic gay men used to be characterized by
respectable society? Like that, probably.) A suspicion that cannot but
be confirmed by how she ends her piece, where she shows men's fears
as baseless (jokes on you guys!), and laughs-off emotion-driven
gender concerns with the HUMMER/pussy reference.
One of the guys quoted mentioned that his lifestyle wasn't so much a
hanging on to something that ought to pass, but an accomplishment
-- a carving out of play and self-expression, curtailed everywhere
elsewhere in life. If she had taken that point on with some more
respect, that would have been something. And we hear here too of
men becoming less ashamed of life preferences than they used to be:
What is it about Vanessa's article that made this feel something
different than an admirable coming out?
Btw: Perhaps more important than having a male "lifestyle" reporter,
would be to have journalists who do not at some level loathe
themselves, and hate men. Nothing worse than a "good boy" male
reporters, after all, for they denounce other men more loudly than
anyone else is wont to. Still, I'm pleased to hear you've been
encouraging The Tyee to broaden it's point-of-view, its perspective,
through the hire of a male voice. Why don't you take it on?
Carnivores--what's up with that? (22 April 2009)
Lion, your lion days are numbered!
Did someone here suggest we get lions to go tofu? I'm all for that. A
touch of coaxing, and a taste of DNA alteration, and I figure it's
doable, maybe not now, but maybe in twenty, maybe. So don't fret
you bloodied-up herbivores, and your bazzillion years of being
someone else's food without no one giving a shit, sayin' it's all
evolutionary goodness and shit: cavalry's comin.' And what we did to
the abominable snowman in Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and
shit, makin' him go veg. and shit, we'll be invitin' pon all dem African
1459
pussies. No doubt. Word to your mother. No doubt. Word to your

mother. Word.
Link: "Earth" (Salon)
Interacting with your mother, once outside the nest (21 April 2009)
@imnobody:
Good on you for having the strength to move 9000 kms away. Says
that you got enough nurturance from her to surrect sufficient selfrespect, self-will, to do what you had to do to become independent.
My mom had/has all kinds of psychosomatic stuff she tries to use as a
tool to manage the rest of us, extend her control OVER us -- a change
in tactics, now that adulthood has brought with it a change in terms.
It means she feels empowered and in control, but also kind of lonely:
it gives birth to passive-aggressive but very real anger, in those that
end up tending to her. I saw what was happening, and have none of it.
I let her know that, one, I won't be bullied, and two, that the kind of
relationship she most wants -- one of real respect, substantial love, is
available to her, but only if we interact on wholly different terms than
we did during my teen years. It kind of works. This said, I'm moving
across the country, possibly in part, because I sense that, like you, I
will feel more independent, empowered, to pursue my own interests
(I got my first girlfriend, after-all, only when I first moved cities,
when I went to college) when a continent divides us. Saw her last
week. It was a good meet-up, a lot of mutual tending to and respect.
But she still ended by directing me as to how I could attend to her
better. I told her I would listen to her requests, but also that the bulk
of my adolescence seemed all about attending to and appeasing her
moods, adjusting to her career needs, so I wouldn't be right-ready to
do so. There is still in me some fear that if I make ANY adjustments, I
might just give-up the ship. Wish this wasn't the case, but it is.
Obviously I hope you see yourself as valuable enough that you can
end up managing your guilt. My mom left her parents behind when
1460
she moved from Australia to Canada, and I don't think she ever
stopped feeling guilty for doing this, of feeling the need to convince
herself it was a move born of necessity, rather than of dreams. But
with this move came her enfranchisement, and good on her for
refusing to allow the chance of a lifetime to slip away.
Finally, don't under-estimate the changes that can accrue when
someone finally realizes there is NO chance you'll capitulate. When I
found the strength to live my own life, my mom became more willing
to venture outside her comfort zones. And with this came some sense
that the best in our relationship is yet to come. Be better than nice,
spawn more than hope, but, regardless, I'm onto my own life.
----@weirdo:
re: When I see her by Skype, I feel like crying when I see how
physically deteriorated she is.
Deadly. Can totally relate.
One thing about going back home for awhile is that it can at least
confirm that the "problem" lies there. Remember reading stories
about soldiers turning home from war, and thinking of how, when
they were described as being so unable to get the war out of them and
fit back in, that there was far more wish in this than there was a hint
of reality: sorry, no soldier's experience can displace the power in the
nursery. Maybe it is possible to go back home and remain
empowered, but this may take more than a ready willingness/ability
to offend (I'm thinking Rachel Getting Married right now), distance
oneself from others' sensitivities: it may require seeing yourself as
advance guard of some much larger, up-and-coming social
movement: You're the Michael Stivik to the rest of the family's, Archie
Bunker.
Thanks for the well wishing : )
Link: Hot Cougar Sex (Salon)
Compromise, and being compromised (16 April 2009)
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re: "If you can't compromise your lofty ideals every so often, you
will most likely end up living in a cave or a bachelor apartment,
lecturing the silent walls about the coming environmental collapse."
(Dorothy Woodend, "Recipes for Disaster," The Tyee, April 10,
2009)
But this isn't true to your experience. You describe your isolation as
that of empowered bike-ride -- a life with no regrets (and the social
bus-ride as all powerlessness and compromise).
You fluctuate, but over-all you seem to WANT to believe that life must
inevitably contain portions of deceit and compromise (by which I
think you really mean, submission). I suspect that that much of what
you say here is born from the fact that you have not yet learned that
the UNCOMPROMISED, UNCOWED pleasure you now take from
bike-riding, can be ably applied to other parts of your life as well -yes, even to your dealings with other people. How did you once
narrate your bus-riding experience? Was it always all venom? Or was
it about a time to journal, watch people, reflect on life experience, all
while avoiding the affront to public civicness that is the single-driver
cocooned within her own private space? I bet that once you start
extending your ambition and reach, we'll start seeing articles from
you arguing that you can't expect to milk life-wisdom from those
dumbly cowed.
patrick mcevoy-halston
P.S. I'm in mind to read Barbara Kingsolver's _Animal, Vegetable,
Miracle: A Year of Food Life_, and see if it too amounts to a recipe for
disaster. My guess is that good-natured, smiling, forever-growing
Barbara, shares with us a differently fated family story.
Link: Recipes for Disaster (The Tyee)
----If I can expand on what I said, I would like to argue that we should
not be too ready to normalize the feeling of loss, of -- as seemingly
insensible as this sounds -- BEING compromised, when we think of
1462
what it feels like to participate in fair compromise. If compromise is

about a reaching out to and valuing of the particular needs of all those
involved, and not about self-surrender, though you may not "get all
that you want," the actual end experience of this sort of mutual
respect/attendance and purposeful cooperative action, will be of net
gain. If it isnt, if it feels like surrender, thwarted ambitions, if it has
you considering the possibilities of the single-life -- even encouraging
you to ultimately denounce it so that it doesn't function in your own
mind to remind you of your own inhibitions in insisting on something
better, then you are involved in something unhealthy. That a lot of
people are involved in such relationships is not too surprising. Free,
truly happy people, make a lot of people nervous, even angry. They
remind you of what you are not, of what you were not permitted to be.
When it comes to looking to our immediate environment for
confirmation of the limits of human potential, fair reminder that it
was not Canada but its neighbor to the south, that embraced the idea
that life should be about happiness. We try to content ourselves by
suggesting that this has amounted to nothing more than an
insatiable, inconsiderate chase of unworthy things, though the less
deluded amongst us see that this has also lead to many of them
leading less capitulated lives, to real leadership and surprising and
exhilarating invention and life-satisfaction, as well.
And finally, my experiences of bus-riding had me thinking that after
students were done with education, they should be encouraged to
drive their own vehicle for a good, lengthy while, for selfempowerment sake. But you're right, the bicycle does the same, and is
the better idea.
How much do you value your penis, young man? (11 April 2009)
re: EDITED FOR CRUDE LANGUAGE. KEEP IT CIVIL, OR PLEASE
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COMMENT ON A DIFFERENT SITE WHERE EXPLETIVES ARE

WELCOMED. HERE THEY AREN'T. -- TYEE MODERATOR
(moderator, NDP Would add 3 Billion to B.C. Deficit, Andrew
MacLeod, The Tyee, April 10, 2009)
Moderator:
I don't know how many sites there are that actually, as you say,
WELCOME expletives--which makes it sound as if their arrival is
greeted with warm cheers and eager hopes for more! I know that, for
instance, Salon.com (a fairly sophisticated, literate news site) doesn't
censor (or too much censor) expletives, and they certainly are used,
sometimes in abundance, and the reason may be that they are seen or
can be imagined by the eds. as a valid way of most
accurately/truthfully expressing oneself. What is civil, respectful,
becomes at times at Salon that which is most HONESTLY expressed.
Expletives don't necessarily debilitate, and can actually serve to
ENCOURAGE good, lively, debate. Their "permission" also suggest a
respect for EMOTION as rightful enabler of good thinking -- they can
add some of the life that constitutes a lively debate, an idea many
traditional, regressive sources would deem worse than a colossal joke.
Now I've seen expletives from posters to Tyee, so I'm guessing that's
essentially the case here as well. And despite the requests for cookie
recipes, or was it favorite holiday films?, this obviously doesn't seem a
Good Housekeeping sort of site. But if what you're saying really is
please don't go OVERBOARD, because this well can lead to cruel
treatment/abuse as well as a marked diminishment in good debate,
then I wish you'd said as much. For the way you say it looks to be a
practice OF incivility, rudeness -- dehumanization, even, for you seem
to be eager-ready, capital letter emblazoned, to banish those who
swear to porn sites or equally base/barren but appropriate "homes"
for the wicked. But just in case you really mean it when you say you
tolerate NO expletives, you must know that this speaks of a near
Victorian assessment of what is civil. You may feel strict propriety
serves the times and the Tyee well. But you must espy that since the
up-and-coming always seems to articulate themselves with unnerving
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trespass, it's really hard to imagine swimming well upstream amidst

all this.
Please take care in how you yourself express yourself. Sometimes
when you announce yourself on the site, you are as severe as God, or a
thundering, castrating parent (How is what you said not some 50s
patriarchal, "SO LONG AS YOU LIVE IN MY HOUSE, YOU'LL LIVE
UNDER MY RULES!," kind of talk?). And we don't want readers
either padding themselves on the back for being good boys and girls
who practice "right speech," nor tredding with trepidation if they
suspect they too might stray off the righteous path. All such lessons
the potential in the offerings from Tyee's disparate, worthy
contributers.
I say all this because this kind of mod visitation has thundered its way
into enough conversations, to draw my concern and alarm.
Link: NDP Would add 3 Billion to B.C. Deficit (The Tyee)
Giving "Observe and Report" its fair due (10 April 2009)
De Line Pictures
The movie largely presents drunk women as grotesque and offensive,
and pedestals ideal sex as that between couples who give a damn
about one another (and where everything is comparatively low-key
and tame). The sex with Brandi is presented as him still living the
schmoe's life - -a life without any dignity: it is no score, but a
collective embarrassment. All this said, the movie is to some extent
moved out of a hatred of the rejecting woman. But the revenge is
nowhere in the sex, but rather in how the film terminates -- with her
being targeted for special attention by the mall flasher. This is
displaced, angry rape, and our sense of her at the end of the film is
indeed of her having been despoiled (Talladega Nights was actually
born out of a kinder impulse to women).
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Film tells a familiar message as far as understanding men's needs:

they need to be listened to and loved. It's what they deserve, and, as a
plus, it's also the way to tame the "beast."
----Rogen's character is not meant to be seen primarily as an asshole. He
is meant to showcase more quintessentially American qualities, of
resilience and spirit, which can carry the day, and of over-all good
heartedness. This said, though it's all about date-rape and gross
exploitation HERE (i.e., the discussion this excerpt was taken from),
more notable in the movie is perhaps his propriety -- witness his
reluctance to follow his security cop partner "all the way," and
perhaps, even, delicateness -- witness his tending to of his mother.
For anyone who wonders why Rogen appeals, it is because he seems
someone who can play along, be a good sport, but who has a
conscience -- he always seems to be drawn to tend to those who
really, really are fucked up, to prevent them from going completely
overboard and really hurting someone.
----Whoever is starring comments is not doing Stephanie a favor here:
they kind of cooperate with her piece to make her seem extrashorthanded when confronted by displays of male anger.
I remember Stephanie looking somewhat incredulously at Andrew
O'Hehir when he had good things to say about Watchmen (Salon
posted a video of them discussing the movie) and it's brutal rape
scene. She clearly wanted to respect O'Hehir, but you could tell she
was actually verging on asking herself, "who the hell are you that you
could like that?, that you are not repelled by that?," but couldn't and
didn't owing to the chaos that question would bring to surface. Too
bad -- you could tell there was something suspect in his tolerance of
the scene, and his preference not to explore it too inquisitively. But it
was graphic literature, and Andrew O'Hehir, so it was an easy one for
the psychic pass.
----Re: He is not a hero but rather an ANTI-HERO. You would not
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want to be like him or do what he is doing. (Josef Gancz, Response

to post, "Observe and Report," Stephanie Zachareck, Salon, April 10,
2009)
***Spoiler Warning***
Appreciated your response to the movie, but personally I think this is
a mis-read. Hard to not think that quite possibly ANYONE who
currently feels somewhat circumscribed, bullied, a victim of
circumstances (recession related?), wont at some level be cheering
him along as in face of brazen intimidation and potential brutal
defeat, he single-handedly takes on a gang of street thugs and (at
another time) a gang of police offers, and handles himself more ably
than the barbarian chief managed in similarly unfair circumstances at
the beginning of Gladiator. The movie just doesnt make him
someone with DELUSIONS of grandeur: it gives him juice to display a
considerable amount of it, and not too far into the film.
And we must be fair to the movie and not suggest that what he is
doing amounts to non-stop thuggery or fratboy boarishness.
Stephanie notes his gentleness, which is on display when he tends to
his mother. But also of note is his receptivity: he listens with
consideration to what his mother says, and hopes the best for her.
Stephanie Z. suggests that his relationship with Nell, the young lady
he visits every morning for coffee, is one-sided, with her offering
much and him, little. But personally, even if perhaps its only because
Rogen is playing the part, I sensed receptivity, reciprocity, fair
consideration (though yes, he could also be ignorant of how she was
responding to what he had to say, which did lead to hurt feelings) in
how he interacted with her. Unconscious of it, for sure, but his
manner of attending to her overall communicated that he thought her
someone of value -- she was PRIMARILY a person to him, not a
coffee-girl. This might be made to seem of little consequence, but
perhaps especially in a movie set in a shopping mall, we should be
alert to consider this as something of real value -- something perhaps
too rarely encountered (if at all) by those society tends to think of as
somewhat disposable.
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In fact, while we all wonder whether this will lead to more date-rapes,
I think that if we are to be fair to the proportions of what this movie
communicates, we should spend more time wondering if this movie
might help validate men enough to move them to treat women with
some of the respect and fair consideration, they themselves have been
lacking.
----@Josef
but Seth Rogen's character is not a frat type of man
Well, the frat boy may sense the BMW and the career job on the road
ahead, but hes known a life of indefinite masculinity and Ritalinshame, requiring something more than Xbox compensation.
She is far more of a woman than Ronnie can handle and she is
totally in control of the relationship.
I agree with you that she is presented as being in charge. Of note,
though, that this changes in the end, where he puts her in her place
(as Rogens character finally managed to the empowered female
Other, in Knocked Up).
Thus, the comedy here is that Seth Rogen takes the obligatory
Hollywood conventions and twists them in a weird way. That is
what makes it funny.
I don't think I principally found it funny. I experienced it to some
extent akin to how that closet-hiding police officer, anticipating
culmination and hilarity, actually experienced overhearing Ronnie
being told he didnt make the force: that is, as a bit sad. Ronnie was
not a character, some vehicle for social commentary: I experienced
him as a real person involved in something just so unequal to his
lengthy and deep anticipation/trepidation. The touching but also
ridiculous scene where he gets clothing advice from his mother,
makes sure that there is pathos as well as the laugh, in our reaction to
the sex-scene.
Older but nicer--Having babies when you've sorted things out (8 April
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2009)
A lot of people I know become not just mellower but nicer as they age.
(I sense this, perhaps, most especially in novelists -- where main
protagonists are obviously more patient, sweeter, to other characters
in later books than they were in the novelists' very vibrant but more
charged and angry earliest works.) I have some suspicion that what
happens with those who have self-esteem-enriching experiences of
validation and attendance when they were young, but also hampering
experiences of abandonment and sadistic treatment, is that they still
have it in them to acquire more of what they were lacking and deal
with some of what has tended to haunt and stop them, while they go
through life. This may in fact be -- without them being consciously
aware of it -- what a great deal of their life endeavors are mostly
about. And if they end up getting some of the attention they were
needing, learn not to denigrate but work to satisfy their own needs,
they no doubt end up being better able to attend to their children
when they have them than they would have been if they had had them
when they were younger. That is, even if the seed is worse, the DNA
somewhat hampered, the story of the unfolding and development into
its final psychogenetic form may be a better one with older parents.
My mom is a nicer, more giving person than she was when I was a
teen: she listens better, more generously, than she once did, and
conversations with her leave me feeling warmer and more optimistic.
She has largely satisfied her need to be the career woman, a pursuit
which left us feeling like our own ambitions were of secondary import
when we were teens. I wonder, given how important the quality and
quantity of attendance is to the emotional/intellectual development
of children of our species, if we should be looking more to the best
PSYCHOLOGICAL age and less to the best biological age, for having
children?
In any case, this is vein to be mined. Not just because real rightness
will be discovered there, but much needed fairness too: as Vanessa
argues, if you're in your 30s, without kids, and not obviously on a
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professional path, you will be looked at as if you are the runt of the
pack. Conversely, if you are professional, late 20s, and have a child or
two, you are being everywhere "told" you shine golden -- whatever the
actual degree of dullness of your story.
Link: No Baby For Old Men (The Tyee)
Switching to alters at Columbine (7 April 2009)

re: "For systematic change, I also suggest honoring those who get
up everyday and go to work, even if they don't like it. It takes
toughness to do that. The thugs on street corners and the killers in
schools aren't tough enough to go to work everyday." (bigguns,
response to article, "What you never knew about Columbine." Salon.
April 6, 2009)
Would need some work, but it could draw them in - -especially if the
working world regresses to Organization Man manliness (and maybe
that's where business is headed -- certainly Revolutionary Road
understood the draw of such for men; so too Apatow and Ferrel; so
too Mad Men) and away from JPod effeminacy. But it would come at
the cost of empathy towards, and understanding of, delinquents,
which would not be so okay.
Personally, it was when I understood that much audacious behavior
that can strike one as brave or even heroic, is accomplished by bullied
people who have switched into a different brain state -- an alter, not
so susceptible to disabling emotions like fear (and empathy) -- that
I learned not to be impressed by the audacity and accomplishments of
righteous loners. People who are bullied when they are young,
dependent, so very impressionable, know the awesome power of
angry terror -- threats of abandonment, strong displays of aggression,
are writ large and become nothing less than threats of absolute
annihilation to the self. They integrate this voice, this personality,
and it essentially becomes Freud's punitive super-ego, a voice which
normally functions to school one away from doing presumptuous
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things, but which can readily accomplish the horrifying but also
audacious and imposing, when it fully takes over in pursuit of
righteous punishment of "guilty" others.
Link: What you never knew about Columbine (Salon)
Stewart Brand et al.--forever, forever, and forever (4 April 2009)

I do not mean denigrate the people and their efforts, Lord
knows they've collectively done more than I could possibly
hope to do, had I a couple of additional lifetimes. Rather, I
question why the film chooses to present them as it does. It is
really necessary to give them titles like "The Radical," or
"The Politician" or "The Futurist"? These one-word
descriptions may be meant to give perspective, but they just
seem like toe-tags.
All these folks are keeping on keeping on, but the other thing
you notice is that they're all pretty damn old. The next
generation of environmental warriors, while still in short
pants, will run up against problems that are considerably
larger, more complex and infinitely more dire. All the
swelling strings in the world won't help them one iota.
(Dorothy Woodend, Too Much Eco-Elder Worship?, The
Tyee, April 3, 2009)
Yeah, since we're not yet up to challenging their magnificence or
openly deriding their refusal to fade away, we're left with dreaming of
them dead and gone, and/or envisioning the emerging world as too
complex for their 60's -- and ostensibly relatively simpler mindsets -to handle. This is not where I want us to be, but it's a macabre mindset which speaks of an ability to see and a willingness to confront,
generational injustice, of an awakening dissatisfaction with the
accommodating life and all the comforts it has afforded. And it's a
start.
Stewart Brand et al. I know your type, dude. You guys/gals did
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great things in your day, but have NOT allowed your children to have
their own era. Instead of rebellion, you guided them to "Harvard,"
and while they did all their progressive causes which allowed you to
believe you'd encouraged them to speak and live freely, you coached
them away from ever doing ANYTHING which risked really
irritating/angering the older generation professors/liberal
establishment, which risked a tarnish in the straight-A resume, and
the only real ticket to relevance. Leftist thought culminated with you
guys -- everything else is praiseworthy but, really, just fleshing out.
That's what you really think. Any really divergent strand of thought is
either ignored, or identified as "Rightest," politically incorrect, and
dismissed. The really awful truth is that you created a generation of
progressives so shaped and guided they may not be able to surpass
your brilliance, even if they come to see their low-key approach as not
just bespeaking their more even and gentle temperament, their
greater satisfaction with the simpler things. But acknowledging that
truth might at least give them a chance, give US avenue, now, for
more open and solid rebellion, and perhaps ensure that we don't end
up looking at our own kids and think, "we didn't get to -- why should
you?": perhaps ensure that we don't see a marked de-evolution in the
greatness of leftist genius and spirit, which, I think, is actually a real
risk.
Link: Too Much Eco-Elder Worship (The Tyee)
More discussion on an extreme-skier's death (2 April 2009)
re: It frustrates me that so many are quick to judge those who are
killed doing dangerous outdoor sports. I sometimes wonder if they
would be happier if the youth only got their inspiration from massmurder video games, ultimate fighting, and crystal meth. (Armor
de Cosmos, response to post, Vancouver Ski Legend Dead at 39,
The Tyee, April 2, 2009)
Hey Armor. Some of us aren't quite sure if there's a whole heap of
difference in the phenomenological experience of extreme skiing and
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engaging "obstacles" in hyper-violent video games. If you can argue

the case, go ahead. Strikes me that pretty much all the soldiery you
play in first-person games, are unshaven but it in great shape, and
engage with villains amidst awe-inspiring scenery. I actually think a
lot of good things can go on in these games, but it is the kind of epic
aesthetic that appeals to the militant as much or more to the peaceloving environmentalist -- no? (Wasn't nazi-youth all into fresh air,
and crisp, manly, mountain climbs?) And again your take reminds me
of my concerns with Geoff's: apparently to some extreme skiers have
inspired, the alternative to the pure, manly "pioneer," is either (with
Geoff) pathetic laziness or (with yourself) drugged-up decipatedness.
(And yes, society right now is getting to like the idea of shaping up
youth and creating a more pure society: which, since it's the mentality
that's everywhere just before a nation gets seriously militant, is very
much our collective, concerned problem.)
That you're grateful that people like Shane showed you what is
possible, is very much the appropriate reaction for you, though. I'm
glad people like Shane have showed many that life can be exhilarating
self-actualizing. But they shouldn't shy away from a thorough
exploration of the motivations behind such charged, aggressive,
embattled fun
---re: The B.C. tradition of extreme skiing is strictly a peace and love
aesthetic. Shane was part of that tradition.
It's not that I want to "shy away" from discussing the motivations
behind "such charged, aggressive, embattled," activities; it's just
that I know that is not what the culture is about.
Don't believe everything you see on TV, Mac. I'd suggest instead that
you go take a hike. Trust me, it won't make you a war-monger.
(Armor de Cosmos)
Lately in threads were hearing from soldiers who are saying that the
infantry is primarily about helping people and promoting peace, and
from extreme skiers, that their sport is all about brotherly strolls,
ease, peace and love. Hmm . . . Might it be fair to conclude that the
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most accurate take might actually come from those who see things
from a distance (like, on T.V.), rather than from within?
An extreme-skier advocate isn't one to "shy away" from anything. I
get it, and perhaps regret my use of the term. Still, I think to present a
more plausible case you should explained exactly why the sport got to
be called "extreme" in the first place? Isn't the extreme label used
'cause the sport wants to see itself as well-beyond ordinary limits,
beyond what the rest of sport offers and the rest of us can handle?
And isn't this charged, aggressive -- macho -- stuff? And isn't this
what the military advertises itself as offering?
Link: Vancouver Ski Legend Dead at 39 (The Tyee)
Link: Who don't do the dew (Open Salon)
Extreme sports, and pussies who don't do the dew (30 March 2009)
It's too easy see his death and to moralize. For those of us
outside his tribe, it's easy to call him crazy and dismiss him
because, in some way, it affirms our safe choices. (If letting
your body whither behind a desk, eating fast-food, driving in
rush-hour, road-rage traffic every day a safe choice... or
even living). And, yes, for those inside his tribe or on the
fringe of it, it's probably too easy to put him on a pedestal.
But the fact is Shane McConkey was one crazy motherfucker
who reminded us all that if we have the audacity follow our
dreams, well, we just might be able to fly. (Geoff DAuria,
Vancouver Ski Legend Dies, _The Tyee, March 30, 2009)
Why write a piece where anyone who questions whether it is maybe a
little romantic and inaccurate to identify Shane as someone who
"befriends rather than fights his demons and then rides them to
worlds beyond ours," becomes some chicken-shit who is afraid to
live? I hope that's not part of the culture Shane partook in, doing
something, in part, not just because it pushed limits but because it
gave him status above the rest of us mundanes. If it was, then though
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I really like how you describe him as someone who is always

tweeking, stretching, growing, how you make his life one of
experimentation, learning, and adventure, there is plenty I hope
others don't feel moved to want to emulate. Most certainly, I don't
want more young people thinking that if you don't do the extreme,
become the marine, you're some pussy who doesn't know what it is to
live. Living this way may actually have a lot to do with a hyper-active
need to ceaselessly re-engage with life-crushing terror, rather than
life-enhancing flight. It may have been born from something gone
wrong, rather than something that went right.
There is room here for admiration, but also the therapist's query. You
should have allowed us that.
Link: Vancouver Ski Legend Dies (The Tyee)
On an autistic's monstrous rage (26 March 2009)

I'd explained all this. But when I showed up at the group
home that morning, he was drinking coffee and pacing and
still not dressed. I went into his room, took some clothes
from the closet, handed them to him. And hinting at what he
was about to do only with a small sigh, as if to say, "I've had
enough," my son picked me up and threw me across the
room.
I had three broken ribs and a bit of damage to my liver that
made my doctor fret. Still, who among us hasn't wanted to
toss our mother across the room when she's nattering on
and making cheerful sounds in the morning? (Ann Bauer,
Monster Inside My Son, Salon, March 26, 2009)
Many people have. I certainly have. Nattering on communicates to
the kid that his/her primarily role is to take in/adjust to/tend to
parents' moods, rather than his/her own. If you get too much of this,
you either go inward and remote (autistic), or you attempt to blow
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away the oppressive "party."

If, as I suspect, autism arises from a form of neglect/bullying, then it's
no surprise that within every gentle autistic lies a seething monster.
Stanley Greenspan argues, btw, that the way to awaken an autistic is
to work with, engage with, ANY felt emotional response the autistic
"expresses." That is, while it is a good thing that we're now in the
mood to complicate our previous preferred understanding of
autistics, maybe the next step is to see the rage as something not just
to be treated, but WORKED WITH -- an avenue, as absurd as it might
seem, for beginning the kind of back-and-forth conversation that
leads to awakening.
Certainly, at the very least, the rage should be validated. I actually like
that article writer was impressed by the thoroughness of her son's
destruction of his room. Though she likely in part told us this to draw
us to validate her instinct toward further self-absorption, THAT sort
of destruction suggests to me that she has a son who hasn't been
completely cowed -- many have thought of doing something similar,
but were afraid of the consequences of such an impressive and
thorough expression of their disquiet. I wanted to put a gardening
pick-axe through our family portrait when I was the mother-bullied
teen, but didn't because this would have felt too EXISTENTIAL -- too
deliciously of me at the fore-front, which was the position my mother
had claimed for herself -- through intimidation, of course. Evolution
for me came with not denying myself the pleasure. Not with pickaxes. But just not denying myself the pleasure.
I expect a good number of us have mothers who've let us know they've
considered suicide, and that if they ever do so, we're the cause. It is
good to remind yourself that after death there may not be a place you
go to savor all the "I was such a bad person for not properly attending
to her needs/pains," you're hoping to get. Why not instead much
more extensively attend to how your own mother bullied/neglected
you, and how this has affected, determined, your instinctual way of
relating to your son? Validate your pain: you did not deserve it. And
work with those who'll both listen to you and help you undo the
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damage you did to your son, in your effort to squeeze from him the
love and attention you did not sufficiently get from your own mother.
Link: Monster Inside My Son (Salon)
Sure in, into heaven (25 March 2009)

re: Patrick, somethimes your allusions are elusive. What in heaven's
name is 'a sure in, for sure'? (KWD, Response to post, _The Tyee_,
March 24, 2009)
Hi KWD. I meant a sure-in into heaven. When wealth disappears, so
too, for many people, does their burden of sin. They join the
righteous.
Also, it would be nice if there was a turn away from manic capitalism
toward something much more generous, easeful and affable. But what
I sense now is people EAGERLY looking to define the last period we
were in as (simply) sinful (it wasn't great, but I actually grew as a
person during this period [with some of this growth owing to my
explorations of/adventures with the many purchases I made] -- didn't
you?), and this makes me think that what will follow is more likely to
be about holy judgment than it will wholesome togetherness.
"Speculative economy," "place of luxury," casinos" VS. "frugal living,"
"soul-searching," "pursuit of enlightenment," "socially responsible
ventures": that's the past and emerging present, according to the
voices we hear from in this article, and it's a black and white, good vs.
evil, drama right out of that (other) Puritan' "bible," Pilgrim's
Progress.
The article is supposed to be about how we can live more happily, but
don't you be fooled: To this crowd, you need be nothing more than of
color and of life -- someone who really wants to live a joyous, happy
life, and you will be guilty of most unforgiveable presumption.
Caliban from Robert Browning's poem, "Caliban Upon Setibos,"
offers the best advice to those who want the watchful Eye to pass you
by: "Meanwhile, the best way to escape His ire Is, not to seem too
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happy": that is, even if you don't complain, learn to live a life worthy
of complaint: be self-denying, self-abnegating, self-sacrificing -entirely and cruelly selfless, and you won't arouse suspicion. (And
word-to-the-wise, if you're a writer, don't use successive triple colons:
it's probably ungrammatical, and certainly over-bold.)
Appreciate the feedback.
Link: How an Alberta Economist Counsels Victims of Bernie Madoff
(The Tyee)
From economic ruin--angels? Maybe not (24 March 2009)

I distrust people who seem so ready to disown and disparage who
they once were (People acquired because they got something they
valued by doing so -- was it really all bad?). I distrust people who
need to believe that everyone is or soon will be, in their position.
(Actually, they won't quite be, 'cause the early "losers" are already a
mile ahead in doing all the looking-within stuff.) I distrust people
who don't understand that when people start romancing frugality and
demonizing luxury, the climate may not be ready-right for easeful
experimentation and curious exploration: that instead, it's one set for
easy demonstrations of your virtue and pleasing condemnations of
those less well "situated."
As far as the fear of committing suicide: Many people are going to be
relieved that they are now no longer at risk of seeming as if they're on
a path straight to hell. They'll just preach sharing, humility,
kindliness to neighbors, living the soulful life, spending time with the
elderly, et al., and when it's their time, they'll feel a sure in, for sure.
Link: How an Alberta Economist Counsels Victims of Bernie Madoff
(The Tyee)
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On way to the neat and green: Gentility in a decaying world (20

March 2009)
'Stop!' I wanted to scream at her. 'I just put in trickling
showerheads and dim lightbulbs. I got an ass-crack rash
from recycled toilet paper and you're telling me there's no
hope? Don't be so depressing!' But what would that do to my
reputation in the neighborhood? Instead, I just pasted on a
smile and nodded along." (Robyn Harding, Unplugged and
Unglued, The Tyee, March 20, 2009)
This isn't sad, and you (should) know it -- what you're doing here is
identifying yourself as fully in fashion: Every green heroine these days
lives the green life, admires its rightness but complains of its expense,
and experiences the oh so very fashionable green guilt (which isn't so
severe as to be crippling -- in fact it kind of pleases, in that its light
continual press always reminds of your over-all ethical rightness).
The "I just pasted on a smile and nodded along" should be pathetic -I mean, what would you do if you were living in a rascist small town
(sorry small towns) and your thoughts were out of line? But of course,
if this was the case you never would have admitted to just walking by
without at least some reply of brash resistance you'd either have
expressed at the time, or, if not, most certainly later -- for if you had
you wouldn't have gotten the pass/approval from your readers you
seem to depend upon and so most assuredly will get here. You'll get a
pass for your pasty cat-walk pass, because it's imitable, for four
reasons: 1) deference here signals over-all approval of the Green
Agenda; 2) to be the good, CBC-listening, Globe-reading, "uppercrust," "Upper-Cdn," Cdn, you have to appear constitutionaly
DISINCLINED to engage in overly-emotive, loud public squabbles,
and INCLINED toward (gentle and genteel) restraint, repression, and
shy aversion; 3) it makes you sound like all the heroines we encounter
in British/Cdn lit. who move into small towns and have to deal with
their always disapproving and moralizing "Cranford" matriarchy; 4) it
pretends to (being about) compromise, but cat-walking past
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disturbance on way to the neat and green is the sexiest walk to walk
these days, baby! Morally in-step, failing but trying, and maybe you'll
be allowed to stay on your present course: it's worked to keep many
successfully ever upward and aloof for the last twenty-plus years -why not try and stretch it for another comfortable twenty?
Link: Unplugged and Unglued (The Tyee)
Puritan witch-hunts (14 March 2009)

As Tucker Carlson pointed out in the famous "this'll be the end of
Crossfire, episode of Crossfire," Jon Stewart has had his days of
kissing noteworthy guests' asses, of being a bit too "I'm not worthy,"
too. But he's now King, takes no shit, but has become, also, something
of an unempathic terror. If Cramer reforms, and starts hunting
corporate heads' heads, to get him some of that "my opponent is so
awful that self-criticism is now optional" heaven, that Stewart
comports on, I'm fairly sure the world will not be the better for it.
There is real goodness and strength in Cramer (as there is in Stewart),
and it is a crime for Stewart to not have shown somewhere in his
interview that he senses this in him, too. The way he did it, Cramer
will be that much more inclined to pay it all back on some other
appropriately set-up unfortunate.
He should have realized that something about the situation was
making the normally feisty Cramer become readily contrite and
shamed. "This is not a confessional--fight me, damn it! Would it help
if we changed seats?" I wish he'd thought and maybe said.
Link: There's nothing unique about Jim Cramer
David Brooks--too feminine for the times (12 March 2009)

Two more letters in defense of David Brooks and his aversion to guns:
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@ G West:
G West, I said he's Republican, but also that if you haven't seen him,
you'll imagine him best if you picture him as a genteel, soft-mannered
democrat. I think this is right. Mark Shields (a democrat--and one of
the greatest!) at the Newshour, has said much the same.
God speed to Michelle. I like her, and am rooting for her and her
husband. But THERE IS RIGHTNESS in David's wariness of her
"guns," and WRONGNESS in many people's praise/defense of them.
Some sense of why the latter might be the case is in how it (i.e.,
people's praise/defense of them) moved nightbloom to mock and set
up for vitriole, "hissy" and "tizzy," North East pussies. A nation in
step will march right over their tender little feelings, and perhaps of
others similarly in possession of a more -- to use nightbloom's terms
-- "feminine persuasion." I'll leave it to your imagination to picture
who they might possibly be. But if you hear of anyone described so
they seem anything other than manly and spartan, know that they too
might be being shaped so they seem unworthy of sympathy, and hope
that they deserve no more than that.
@nightbloom:
The history of such goes a long way back (my first sense of it in
American history is when the men-of-letters first greeted the ascent of
the first non-gentry President, General Andrew Jackson), and there is
an awful lot that isn't good about it. There is a lot there that is just
about class, and I understand when people then go out of their way to
defend the up-and-comer from snide, belittling comments, as you
have done. Still, sometimes, and maybe all the time, the resistance
isn't fairly dismissed as just about keeping "proper" heirarchies in
place: newcomers often get in when the country is more in the mood
for a no-nonsense, general's leadership. It happened with Jackson, it
happened with Reagan. Important to note, too: it can also happen
when the country is finally on to something truly good: witness
Jimmy Carter.
Like you, I find Michelle radiant and beautiful. She has her own style,
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and isn't being asked to "adjust" it, as Hillary Clinton regrettably had
to do to settle down public anxieties, and likely wouldn't do so,
anyway. But my sense of pretty much all who are spending lots of
time toning their muscles these days, is that their ultimate fitness is
not co-sympathetic to those whose leisured take on life has earned
them muscles somewhat less taut. Michelle is ready for a fight, and
like Batman, she will be stunningly smart in motion. But I want to
hear from the David Brooks of the world too, but since they do kind of
suffer from anasthenia, they can be shut-down if conversations come
with too much thunder and lightning.
I am sorry if I misrepresented/misunderstood you, nightbloom. I
certainly suggested you were worry-worthy, which wasn't all that nice,
and given your respectful response, more than likely, unfair. I aim to
slow down and attend to you with consideration and imagination, in
future. This may be obvious, but I do have sympathies for the gentry
crowd that -- Edith Wharton-like -- is so often the subject both of our
scorn and admiration. In some, I have found their soft manners
TRULY all about well-attendence, mutual respect. And I speak now
on their behalf because they're worthy, and sure to be in need it.
Link: The Right to Bare Arms (The Tyee)
But mightn't my Harvard crimson trump your Yale blue (12 March
2009)
As the editor who published this piece, I never saw it as a

technical analysis of the economy. It is political analysis, a
learned observer's sense of where power resides, how those
with power must be appeased even when they may not have
earned it, and, yes, where to lay some blame. Rather than
shallow, I find Michael's take to be unencumbered by a
bunch of economic and academic gobbledygook. He calls it
as he sees it -- and he sees it as a noted professor of US
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history. (David Beers, "Tbarnston, another view," _The

Tyee_. March 12, 2009)
Folks, don't dare object to the piece, for it's written from a "learned
observer," " a "noted professor" -- that is, from someone from within
an establishment David Beers evidently has great respect for.
Considering that this journal (i.e., The Tyee) evidences some signs of
being a guerrilla, alternative, "mouthpiece," some of us might now be
confused as to when we're supposed to defer and when we're allowed
to object. If the editor doesn't want to have to chime in again to tell
the unsavy why this particular piece is one they should just just try
and learn from, or if compelled to comment, just offer up a Jeffrey J.
and be done with it, he should find some way of marking the piece so
we're all in the know. He kind of did -- he told us this particular
author is being published by YaleUP, but again, all that stuff about
feisty fish confuses -- so we're NOT supposed to pour scorn on those
who know what the little spoon is for? We're supposed to revere wellpositioned plain-speaking academics, even though they tend to be
conservative, and dump on those who talk in academic
gobbledygoody, even though they tend to come from the postcolonial,
feminist/gender studies, new historical, marxist schools, that tend to
lean strongly progressive? Okay. Oh dear.
Link: Rescuing the Wealthy Idiots (The Tyee)
Why, I've always preferred plain rocks to jewels--and you? (12 March
2009)
@ Michael Fellman and Tyee readers (and you guys too, at Open
Salon!):
Anybody else beginning to worry that if you spoil yourself and buy
something real nice to wear, you risk it being "lost" in a tarred and
feathered ruin of an evening? (In this climate, God help you if you
1483
have a taste for anything fine in anything other than organic

coffee/food.) And is anybody else wondering how right this writer is
in thinking that the wealthy are safe from pitchfork prodding? But
what if someone offers to serve them up to satisfy (if only
temporarily) the bottomless hunger of those who hate, hate, hate the
greedy rich -- how long do you think they'll last, then? And when
they're gone, who might we turn to next? -- Why how 'bout the
Americans, even if Obama's still at the helm, who have surely made
greedy, presumptive use of our generous, neighborly will for far too
long! Mightnt indeed the short term bathos be such that it'll become
difficult to keep the long-term, long-wave, long-view in sight, even if
you're the historian well practiced in calming her/himself by doing
so?
This historian (i.e., our author) likes the idea of greed as a primary
mover of history. Most do, as it means you don't have to explore
psychology much, nor, more to the point, do much messy
introspection of your own unruly mind, to understand the ways of
people and their times. But, worth noting, is that some
psychohistorians actually look to those who, in a sense, desire LESS,
not more masochists -- to the sheep rather than to the wolves -when searching for those who keep the narrative of haves, then haves
and have-nots, a seemingly neverending one.
It's certainly been ongoing, but there is an achievable end, though.
That is, Attend to the masochists, cure them of their love of being the
righteous impoverished, and the narrative wall WILL fall, thank God.
That is, Historians be damned: In these dampened times, please
know that an ahistorical utopia is still well within the possible! It's not
only true, it's just gotta be a better beacon to keep our eyes on than
the one our "history is and forever will be, a dispiriting tale" author
offers us.
If YOU want more, check out http://www.psychohistory.com/,
but keep it under hat, will you -- not the safest of times to be showing
off your New and Dazzling.
Link: Rescuing the Wealthy Idiots (The Tyee)
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If you be gentle, fret, fret, the coming of the might (11 March 2009)
Dowd writes, "Let's face it: The only bracing symbol of
American strength right now is the image of Michelle
Obama's sculpted biceps. Her husband urges bold action, but
it is Michelle who looks as though she could easily wind up
and punch out Rush Limbaugh, Bernie Madoff and all the
corporate creeps who ripped off America." The subtext?
Some people are intimidated by a first lady who symbolizes
strength, instead of support.In a taxi, Brooks argued to
Dowd that "Washington is a place where people have always
been suspect of style and overt sexuality. Too much preening
signals that you're not up late studying cap-and-trade
agreements Washington is sensually avoidant. The wonks
here like brains. She should not be known for her physical
presence, for one body part." [. . .] Bonnie Fuller, an exfashion magazine editor, thinks that Brooks and many of his
muscle-a-feared Republican cohorts are resorting to verbal
bicep jabs because they have nothing else to say as a party
right now, are afraid of the strength of the Obama era, and
unable to make actual bicep jabs ("I bet he's got jiggly girlyman arms," she jokes). [. . .] Michelle Obama is not typecast:
she's playing a new role for her. She's also reinventing the
role itself. Not just because of her achievements, nor her
color, nor her wardrobe, but because of a combination of all
three, and because of what she's communicating with that
wardrobe. [. . .] With her bare biceps, Michelle Obama is
carving out a new style and role for first ladies and for
women generally. It's making some people, possibly those
wearing tight fitting suits, very uncomfortable. But it suits
1485
her, and many other women, very well." (Vanessa

Richmond, "The Right to Bare Arms." _The Tyee_. March 11,
2009)
We have here what happens when Vanessa writes about a woman
whose self-assertiveness, whose refusal to kowtow to others'
expectations, she respects, and NOT what happens when she writes
about someone whose similar efforts to do the same, she evidently
doesn't. Michelle has well-toned muscles and her own style-sense,
and "your" problem with it, "your" hate-on for her, shows only "your"
insecurities, lack of style, and obvious need to keep women and black
people in check. Gwyneth has writing-gumption and her own quirkystyle, and "your" problem with it, shows "you've" got taste (are not
tone-deaf) and that "you" can see the signs that meme the end of all
good things. (Vanessa's last article, on Gwyneth's "Goop":
http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2009/03/04/Goop/)
David Brooks is the one who is really taking the heat on this one. Do
you know who he is, Tyee readers? Yes, he is a Republican. But don't
you be thinking Rush Limbaugh or the like. In fact, it'd be better if
you searched across the aisle, for in demeanor, mannerisms, he's
much closer to your average genteel-democrat than he is to any
Republican I can think of -- he's unusually sensitive, effete, for even a
Washington (brain-oriented, style-oriented) Republican. To get a
good sense of him, it might in fact be best if you imagined him the
sensitive English lit/composition professor, who when he listens to
you, reads your work, does so with tender respect, a willingness to
learn (from you), with an inkling to gently show yourself to yourself
and suggest a better way you might consider taking.
Yes, he showed no such with Michelle, but because she affectively
overwhelmed him. But we might find that the Obamas come to
encourage this reaction not just from Republicans (who, I actually
think, will not so long from now stop fretting over being courted,
acknowledge their true desires, and join the Obamas in their steel and
track, tanking of America) but from sensitives, the genteel, who are
mostly to be found amongst the left. (I am thinking now of the elegant
1486
[but not captured] progressive, Geraldine Ferrara, and her horror at

the flaggrantness of Obama operatives as they tried to destroy her
reputation in a single minded effort to 'surrect their King.)
If you have a hankering for the gym/an athletic nation, populist popculture, seeing preppy better-than-thous wallow (and maybe worse
than wallow: _Salon's_ article on this topic was, "Put away the guns,
Michelle [you're scaring David Brooks!]"), you'll never tire of what
Obamanation offers. But if like David you prefer quiet talks, an
easeful atmosphere, letting your "opponent" have her/his say, and
aren't averse to reading some Mrs. Dalloway, don't let populist elation
quiet your disquiet. Like Brooks, at the very least, say something -- if
not revered, you might at least be remembered for having done so
before the advance of "Thunder" and "Lightning" pounded you 'to
pulp.
Link: The Right to Bare Arms (The Tyee)
Soldier and the preppie: Overheard in the Salon (10 March 2009)
Brooks, however, is consistent to type and cautions: "Shes

made her point. Now she should put away Thunder and
Lightning. Yes, put those guns away, Michelle, you're
scaring the poor man. (And his nicknaming each of
Michelle's biceps is scaring poor me.) Washington is
sensually avoidant," he continues, as though showing off her
buff arms is the equivalent of wearing a deep V-neck with a
push-up bra. "The wonks here like brains," he says. "She
should not be known for her physical presence, for one body
part." If only she could hide the fact that she's a lady, and a
strong one at that, then, maybe, the Beltway could take this
brilliant and accomplished woman semi-seriously. (Tracy
Clark-Flory, "Put away the guns, Michelle!," Salon, 9 March
2009)
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Salon readers and the Spartan War-Cry

I wouldn't be surprised if one day many liberal Salon readers come to
prefer David Brooks over Michelle Obama. Not a man/woman thing:
rather, more an Athens/Sparta thing: he, the genteel, is for the parlor,
the play, the salon; she, the steel, is for the gym, the fight, and the
shutting off of all childish-things.
No, this is relevant
How we react to the president and first lady's dress, habits, comport,
physiogamy, and the like is important stuff -- not fluff. Clinton
enjoyed big macs -- he was going to be kinda casual, even fun, and so
were we. Obama is lithe and solid -- he's in the mood for to shape up
America, and so are "we." The new ethos may suit anyone who's ever
been accused of being effete -- which I assume holds true for the
average Salon reader -- quite poorly.
Welcome to our regular stable of "wimpy upper-crust
liberal" trolls. Enjoy your stay. A couple of questions for
you:
(1) Have you ever noticed that your name sounds exactly like
a stereotype of an effete preppy?
(2) Why is it that right-wingers tend to be so out of shape?
Not only could Michelle Obama kick all of your asses without
even trying, most of you look like my 89-year-old
grandmother could take you with one hand tied behind her
osteoporotic back.
Also ... the Spartans lost, you know. (Dvorkin, Daniel, Reply
to post, "Put away the guns, Michelle," 9 March, 2009, 5: 21
PM PDT)
@Daniel Dvorkin
Hey Daniel. Fun questions. Answers:
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1) No, I haven't. Looks, with it's peaks and valleys, kind of like a
mountain range, though. Looking at it again, maybe more a rollercoaster.
2) Not a right-winger. Mark Shields likes David for the same reasons I
do -- he can listen well, with full respect. My guess is that most in the
army/navy/marines vote Republican, or at the very least, have
conservative tendencies. So, too, most everyone in professional
sports. I'm not interested in warriors in the White House -- I want
nurturers. As much love and as little blood as possible, thank you.
@Patrick
Okay, I'm going to zero in on one of my favorites here:
My guess is that most in the army/navy/marines
vote Republican, or at the very least, have
conservative tendencies. So too most everyone in
professional sports.
I can't speak for the pro jocks, although I'll note that
endowing them with some kind of warrior mystique is a
mistake common to those who don't have any idea what real
violence looks like. As for the service ...
I am a liberal. I am a veteran. Most of my family and friends
are also liberals, and many of them are also veterans. Those
of us who are veterans are proud of our service, and those
who aren't are proud of us for having served.
I am a Democrat, and among my fellow Democrats what I
encounter is respect for my service and -- frequently -- the
bond of meeting a fellow vet, who is also proud of having
served, as well as a committment to cleaning up the mess
that conservative chickenhawks have made of the country
over the last eight years. You know, the people who "support
the troops," but God forbid they or their kids should ever
actually serve a day in uniform or hear a shot fired in anger.
See, one of the great things about the military is that it's
pretty much a cross-section of the country. Liberal and
1489
conservative and libertarian, black and white and Asian and

Hispanic, Christian and Jew and Muslim and atheist and
Hindu and every other religion you can think of -- you will
find all of these, in every possible combination, serving
America. Which is, when you come right down to it, a pretty
liberal phenomenon in itself.
You, I expect, have lived your entire life surrounded by
people pretty much just like you, and you're perfectly happy
in your little comfort bubble where "the troops" are heroic
abstractions doing heroic things far, far away. I.e., a
conservative chickenhawk, just like your heroes Bush and
Cheney. Don't worry, you can keep doing that. People like
me, and people unlike me, who can put their differences
aside to agree on a common goal, will keep on defending
your right to be a self-righteous asshole, however little you
deserve it. (Dvorkin, Daniel, Reply to post, "Put away the
guns, Michelle!," 9 March 2009, 7:10 PM PDT)
How true are the guards/guardians of the pretty people
stable?
Not an even cross-section: few progressives will sign up for something
which strips you of your individuality and personality, out of a desire
to lose yourself amidst something "greater." Joining up automatically
makes you "one who serves" -- a hero. I really regret that. Maybe you
do too.
Surely you would agree that those who would "keep on defending
your right to be a self-righteous asshole, however little you deserve
it," could readily be imagined as turning on said righteous assholes,
as soon as they've had it up to here" with them. The military would
love to turn on all the pretty people, as you evidence. Peace-niks knew
that, but it's been awhile. Since the Obamas might not just stop once
they've kicked 'publican ass, but move on and push the whole country
further into militarism, all the pretty, peaceful, cardigan-wearing
Salon readers should take note of the current preference for meaness,
1490
leanness, and musculature.
@Patrick
Not an even cross-section: few progressives will
sign up for something which strips you of your
individuality and personality, out of a desire to lose
yourself amidst something "greater."
Except that many do, whether you want to admit it or not.
Joining up automatically makes you "one who
serves"--a hero. I really regret that. Maybe you do
too.
No, I don't. I'm very glad of my service, and again, whether
you're willing to believe it or not, what it did for me was to
make me more fully who I am, not strip away my identity.
Many other people have had the same experience.
Also? Be very careful with the h-word. "Hero" has a very
specific definition in the miltary, and it's wildly overused
outside it. During my two years as an infantryman and
eight years as a medic, I knew many brave soldiers and
airmen who served with courage and distinction, but I knew
all of two who could genuinely be described as heroes. The
idea that anyone who puts on a uniform automatically
qualifies for that status is an insidious kind of
dehumanization, and as such is a favorite of the 101st
Fighting Keyboarders crowd.
Surely you would agree that those who would "keep
on defending your right to be a self-righteous
asshole, however little you deserve it," could readily
be imagined as turning on said righteous assholes,
as soon as they've had it "up to here" with them.
Can it be imagined? Sure. Is it going to happen? Probably
not, at least not the way you're thinking. Because, you see,
we aren't mindless drones. We know when we're being used,
1491
and we damn sure know it's not the "peaceniks," as you put
it, who are doing the using. (Dvorkin, Daniel, Reply to post,
"Put away the guns, Michelle!," 9 March 2009, 9:07 PM
PDT)
@Daniel Dvorkin
Okay, so soldiers understand that there are only so many heroes, but
signing up still has about it some some sense that, apparently
instantly, you've shown you are no longer selfish and suspect but
rather someone who has chosen to undertake the noble cause of
serving others -- if not a hero, certainly a worthy citizen, someone to
be proud of. Since some of us see the military as still largely about
self-righteous bullying of people, many of us regret this, and wish
more was done to redeem the "panty waist" jobs recruiters must so
easily pluck young men and women from, with but a pluck of their
poorly strung self-esteem.
Everyone who signs up must want to come to talk like you do. Earned
the right to sneer so readily at self-righteous "pretty people" like me,
and scaredy cats too afraid to join up. To be able to say though all
their years of service, they've known many, many who were brave and
courageous, but only a few who would leap on a grenade, or what-not.
Maybe you're right and it's not so much about heroes, as about
becoming a true "Man." And since this evolution at the very least
seems to involve a ready and cruel dismissiveness to those deemed
"feminine," toward a selfish elevation of oneself above the less-thandeserving crowd, I hope more challenge the worthiness of the endproduct of "being all you can be." The learned demeanor smacks me
of that of a righteous rapist, actually. Akin to the tone/stance of the
article's title: "Put away the guns, Michelle! You're scaring David
Brooks." (Oh David, you little hus, stop fretting and open yourself up
to Thunder and Lightning . . .)
Link: "Put away the guns, Michelle!" (Salon)
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It's a psychological thing: Why we don't have universal (9 March

2009)
Lloyd DeMause argues that the reason we don't have universal
healthcare is because America is the nation which mostly
enthusiastically "argues" that life can be all about being happy, living
your dreams, while all those with univeral healthcare advocate some
kind of modest, humble, "just make sure you don't stand too far apart
from the crowd," approach to life. Subjugate yourself, and collectively
you come to believe you now deserve to have such "parental"
provisions such as universal healthcare. It's all messed up -- but it's
what happens when you grow up in sin-cultures, where being happy
is too readily associated with selfishness, where somebody has to be
punished for all the fun.
If with Obama America changes how it imagines itself, where
individual happiness becomes seen increasingly as indulgent, as in
the path of public renewal, and it becomes all about doing your part
for the nation, I wouldn't be surprised if America gets universal
healthcare, sooner rather than later -- the current climate,
notwithstanding.
Link: Questions our health debate ignores (Salon)
Short bit on why I liked Rachel Getting Married (8 March 2009)
Because, in part, it lets you know that all interactions between family
members are well worth noting and thinking about. Because it shows
the types of reactions that can cause you to doubt yourself. Because it
shows people fighting back, standing up for themselves, and the kinds
of reactions you get for doing this. Because it shows people trying to
break-through, and showing that this is actually possible, but that it
1493
can happen without you even knowing at the moment that that was
what just happened, but still at some level knowing: Kym didn't just
not vear left or right, she headed through the bush, just as she went
right at her mother -- repeat, emphasis, exclamation point,
imprinting -- fuck you bitch, I AM! I AM! I AM!
If you aim to respect someone, pay them fair attention (6 March

2009)
Re: "Looks like I hit a nerve. Interesting. But not surprising."
(Jeffrey J.)
Jeffrey J., You're commending Vanessa for supporting Platrow's blog,
but on that subject, Vanessa, after assuring us that it was only
"cultural fascination that drove [her] to read her project" (and not,
say, genuine curiosity born out of a respect for Paltrow), offers
QUALIFIED praise -- she "found SOME of it to be genuinely useful"
-- while still pointing out her ridiculousness ("Despite eye rollinducing recommendations"). She then quickly slips into a more
serious engagement with exactly why "it's not all that hard to
understand the 'haters'," and terminates with a fearful vison of
Paltrow et al.'s vacuous celebrity culture meming their way, en total,
into our resisting but hopelessly permeable brains.
Making Paltrow into a meming, channeling worm is not high praise
for her, I assure you. In fact, the whole essay could be seen as an
example of the kind of "flak" you believe a woman celebrity will
receive when she "overstep[s] [her] [. . .] bounds." If you take women
writers as seriously as you pretend, surely you would have noted this,
surely you would have evidenced some sign that you were really
paying attention to Ms. Richmond's writing while you "read."
You're not generous to Vanessa, nor to others you pretend to want to
commend. For grouped amongst your trolls was certainly me, and
quite possibly Bailey -- that is, two men who noticed Vanessa dissing
1494
Goop, and made an effort to offer more enthusiastic support for

Paltrow's efforts.
If in the future Vanessa writes an essay on Goop or its equivalent
where she doesn't spend so much time covering her ass, and goes for
a more involved exploration of how "useful, helpful, interesting" it all
is to her -- maybe even daring not cutting/undercutting all such good
stuff (off) with a "that said," maybe even daring to suggest she found
herself "inspired" -- then please do praise her efforts, while rolling the
rest of us into some kind of troll-sandwich -- she and we would
deserve no less.
Link: Is the Future of Journalism Goop? (The Tyee)
With knights like this, maybe you could get used to trolls (5 March
2009)
Paltrow writes a blog and the corporate and financial elites
go nuts. Ms. Redmond writes favorably about Ms. Paltrow's
blog, and certain Tyee readers go nuts.
Hmmm, what does this tell us? Actually, quite a lot. The
phenomenon of both events is well studied in the field known
as sociology, which remains the cutting edge of intellectual
analysis and thought. And for good reason. It's scholars seek
to critique what ACTUALLY influences societal trends to
happen.
Authors such as Naomi Klein, Edward Herman, Noam
Chomosky, Ben Bagdikian, Marc Edge and others have
significantly educated millions of us about how societal
elements operate. And once we understand how the
'template' works, each of us can in turn apply this analysis to
almost any event involving powerful entities for better
understanding.
Speaking of which, Paltrow and/or ANY celebrity are NOT
permitted to enter the realm of written discourse.
1495
Particularly female celebrties. It is overstepping their

bounds and they will face significant 'flak'. It they persist,
they will incur even more wrath and ultimately be black
listed. It's how things work. I salute Ms. Paltrow's courage in
taking this step, and only time will tell whether she can resist
her critics.
As for Ms. Redmond, one sees a similar reaction to her work
on the Tyee. Flamers and trolls who normally stick to
undermining independent political critiques, lash out at her
columns. Why? Likely the combination of being female
(easier to attack females in pubic as per their perceived lack
of power (which ties into the bullying nature of those with
more power)) coupled with her courage in writing about
non-male dominated topics.
Which is exactly why I love the Tyee. Keep rocking that boat.
It will take continued courage and character for all of you,
but we're standing behind you 1000%." (Jeffrey J.)
(completion of title) . . . and their flaming farts?
Well Vanessa, your current effort has earned you Jeffrey J as your
knight in templated armor. He thinks you wrote favorably about
Paltrow's blog -- which does make one wonder how well he'd appeal
to someone who reads, but no doubt he's stalwart, and with his "the
phenomenon of both events is well studied in the field of sociology,"
he shows some co-sympathy with your talk of memes and
evolutionary psychology: So maybe even if you don't initially
subscribe to the particular service he is offering, continue writing as
you do and maybe his blockish "coos" will ultimately ram a way into
your heart and soul. But as he is away fending off us ugglies,
"educating [us] [. . .] as to how societal elements operate," converting
us while spawning a meming army set to "apply [. . .] analysis to
almost any event involving powerful entities for better
understanding," maybe for sanity's sake you'll finally decide to jump
ship for the ewy-gooey, isle of trolls.
We might eat you alive, but who's to say that's the worse fate? And
1496
besides, if you change your mind, try clicking your heels three times
while chanting "Great article, Tyee" (the chanting's probably the
important part), and no doubt you'll find him once again by your side,
devotedly your one, one hundred thousand percent of the time.
Link: Is the Future of Journalism Goop (The Tyee)
Fab over flab: The Limbaugh romance may not last the night (4
March 2009)
And what about poor Michael Steele? He told Politico's Mike
Allen that he'd been "inarticulate" and that he hadn't said
what he really thought about Limbaugh. Do you need help
remembering what Limbaugh said that was "ugly,"
Michael? How about the Chelsea Clinton "jokes," back when
she was 13? What about visibly mocking Michael J. Fox for
his Parkinson's tremors and insisting Fox was exaggerating
his disease for political gain? Remember when Limbaugh
complained, "We are being told that we have to hope
[Obama] succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the
ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because
his father was black, because this is the first black
president." Is that "ugly" enough for you, Michael? Maybe
you want to rethink your apology? Sadly, I doubt it. (Joan
Walsh, March 4, 2009)
Joan, My own thoughts are that people always squirm before they
finally capitulate and become part of a movement. Troopers
beginning basic training not really wanting to be "[but-]bent[t] over
forward, backward, whichever," to suit someone else's whims, either,
but soon enough are eager-enough front-liners, pleased to have
direction and target for their need to rape and kill.
I've thought Limbaugh would storehouse the Republican future, only
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to direct it onto Obama once Obama has lead the nation more fully
into Afghan war and aggressive assault. But, you know, Limbaugh has
a sensitive side -- your characterization of him as a bully is fair, but it
is also true that he picks up on people's sensitivities, and you can even
sense in him a need to suppress an instinct to reach out and care.
Sounds crazy -- but I've seen it, I've felt it, and I wasn't surprised to
hear he was a long-time Mac user: it tells you something, it really
does. My guess is most Republicans have felt it too, and since they are
intrinsically PC--i.e., those who fear warmth, affect, too much
personality and friendliness, and who associate sensitivity too readily
with feminine surrender and infantilization -- they will soon enough
cast off their hold on Limbaugh's massive "girdle" and BY
THEMSELVES invest/manifest in Obama's more evidently "gird[ed]
[. . .] loins" (Joe Biden).
Link: Delay: Limbaugh's a GOP "role model" (Salon)
Goop is good: Rise of Gwyneth Platrow and the genuine (4 March

2009)
As the Globe's Lynn Crosbie said, "Goop is, ultimately, a nice
little forum for ideas about self-improvement, ideas that are
rooted in harmless acquisitiveness, simple playfulness and
an exceptionally fragile sense of the mind and soul. It is this
fragility that makes Goop (its name is, admittedly, dreadful)
hard to dislike, as it puts forward such tentative feelers
toward art and literature, spirituality and the dream of a
whole, harmonious life. (Vanessa Richmond)
Well, here's the professional writer at work -- the kind of mind well
wrought/rot from compromise, ready-full of condescension. Sensing
an advance of the amateur and genuine, her first move is to belittle
and contain -- and so we get talk of "ultimately, a nice little forum," of
an effort "whose fragility" "makes [it] [. . .] hard to dislike," that oh so
charmingly aspires to epic reach. Vanessa evidences a better taste for
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it (Will Vanessa ever stop seeming the castle-caught princess, who

longs to embrace the commons but is afraid to seem, common?), but
she still introduces Goop in a way the Globe's Lynn Crosbie would
approve -- i.e. "It's clearly well-meaning -- and suggests that Goop's
success might mean that "content [really] is [no longer] king."
Vanessa is right to suggest this isn't just talk about a sweet, harmless
effort, but wrong to once again ultimately direct us to affect-less
terminology academics offer in their demeaning assessments of the
whys of human behavior. And it may not be all about the lure of the
celebrity. Rather, though focused on/through those most
public/prevalent, it may just be mostly about the genuine. And if
people are now chancing a turn in this direction (which is what I felt
in both Paltrow and Phoenix's "latest"), then has this last long period
of massive self-censored professional writing been mostly about
surrecting the predictable -- about making nice stepping stones to
shore up a world of well-turned shoes? Has what made you
professional, baited you into suppression, "learned you" into
suspicion, all along been more about gentrified contentment and
containment than about true content?
May it be true that such unsure sprouts of the sweet and earnest,
foretell a confident and collective, ROMANTIC full-blossoming.
Link: Is the Future of Journalism Good? (The Tyee)
After the meldwon--cotton-candy pixie play? (2 March 2009)

"'excellence, however, is rather simple.' Ummm... no it's not.
Excellence is elegant. Elegance can make excellence appear
simple. But excellence is never ever simple. Excellence is
always preceded by years of toil: deliberate, intense,
comprehensive study and carefully reflected upon
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experience.
More and more we seem to believe in notions of instant
gratification. Knowledge and skill is just a download
away...not. Sorry to break it to ya kids, but for the
foreseeable future there are certain things that our meatrix
can and can't do.
And no it's not just hard work. Everyone works hard (except
for maybe the richest, as there's no way they could ever
work hard enough to justify their wealth).
Patty you go on to prove my point. To take your
example:Tired: Mac vs. PC commercials and lacking the
creativity to communicate in your own tropes.Wired: You
figure it out. Oh, and realizing that just bitching is part of
the problem. Bitching is easy. Bitching is simple. Bitching is
not excellence.Cotton candy spinnery is all fluffy sweet, but
it's a nutritional desert. It's all just clever trash. What a life
waste that is." (James Burns)
James, Your way of narrating the development of excellence is one
many readers may be familiar with, but they ought to know that many
people believe genius, great creativity, emerges only when people look
at life with an attitude of spirited play. Progressive educators like
Alfie Kohn and Stanley Greenspan have the same end as you do -they want kids to grow up truly creative, but they see this end as
coming through getting kids to relax, take chances, being more than
willing to look stupid, take delight in what they do: the care-free
approach. They avoid the kind of talk you're offering -- that is, of
taking care, being deliberate, of comprehensive study -- because it
makes learning seem "tight" and arduous, with pleasure not as
something that arises naturally enough from -- because it is
inherently part of -- the doing, but as something you get after many
years, and only after much pain and frustration. Personally, I find
your attitude toward rewards a bit calvinist: where creativity MUST
be seen as emerging from toil because any other kind of life MUST be
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judged as about instant gratification, lazyness-- as about bad stuff, for

bad people, heading nowhere at all good.
I think to show me up as unimaginative (and not just as someone que
n'est pas au current), rather than argue that my turning to the P.C. vs.
Mac trope by itself showed I couldn't have much of a mind, you would
have done better (or at least have reached me more effectively) if you
had shown how I used the Mac vs. P.C. trope with little imagination.
Poets/rhetoriticans can show great creativity when they fashion new
tropes or other poetic forms/devices, but they can show their stuff
just as well when they make effective, imaginative use of the materials
already at hand. The tropes in pastoral poetry are familiar to all who
use them, for example: the fun is in seeing how they tease and twist
their shepherds, lovers, flowers, and nymphs, in novel ways that
delight, surprise, and convince.
For me, turning kids on to the possibilities of itunesU isn't about
instant gratification. It's about getting kids to know that THEY can be
the ones in charge of their own education, about not being so ready to
bow their heads to the powers that be. It's about empowerment, the
nurturance of self-belief and self-esteem: for me, the kinds of things
that engender creative exploration. I think that if they nurture this
attitude toward their world, their development will become worth our
demarcation and study -- that is, I think my cotton-candy talk can
lead to the enterprises you would like to see more of in society, and
when table-talk turns to the post-secondary.
Link: After the Meltdown, Back to Post-Secondary?
Not trod, trod, trod--Have wings! Will fly! (2 March 2009)

PC: "Change doesn't come from mere rejection of tradition."
Mac: "Change comes from those who eagerly anticipate the future,
the what might be!"
--PC: "Intellectual tradition comes out of old monastics."
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Mac: "Spiritual evolution comes from long-haired hippies, holding

hands, in sunshine circles, who dare to dream."
--PC: "I want to see solutions, demonstrable best practices."
Mac: "I want to see purple ponies . . ."
--PC: "Not the latest home cooked theories elucidated by a smattering
of buzzwords gleaned from the glowing phospors of iTunes and the
Onion."
Mac: "'Gleaned from glowing phosphors!'--What pretty words! What
inspiration! (Are you sure you're not like Milton, and in the 'devil's'
camp, not knowing?)
What else might we gleam in glowing phosphor' light?"- - Only cooperate as long as you have to. Right now, ItunesU modestly
sustains. But it'll soon give flight to those with wings.
Link: After Meltdown, Back to Post-Secondary?
Be the titan, or the web-caught fly? (1 March 2009)

It's true, as Mr. McAvoy says, that big changes will always
be driven from without, but unless they also resonate within
the structure, such changes will be much harder to bring to
be. (Bailey)
ViveanLea:
So ViveanLea, do you want to be one of those who "drive big
changes," or one of those who "resonate within the structure"? Wanna
go big, or small fry? Be the Titan, or the web-caught fly?: How well
Bailey does articulate the choices available to you now.
Bailey's response would have resonated better with me if he had
brought up liberals like Pelusi or Feinstein or (Barbara) Boxer.
They're not Naders, but they're not frauds, either -- just tactically
minded, adaptable, good people. Gore's an opportunist and a fraud.
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He's managed to persuade himself otherwise, but his

environmentalism is about tactics as much as anything else. People
who readily ride with him, likely do so because they sense that he is
one who help them justify/validate a new zeitgeist -- one ultimately
less earth-friendly, even -- if the need should ever arise (and it will).
Last thought: People like me are hoping that the establishment
becomes mostly populated by those who had the stuff to call an end to
the degree when it seemed fit to do so, rather than those who
continued on, because 1) they were not capable of dealing with others
looking at them as if they had just made the worst decision of their
lives, as if they were now and forever, irrelevant, 2) because they
continued to hope the hope that the university degree would lead the
way down the straight, narrow path toward smart income, smart life,
smart kids, smart partnering, smart locals: the professional's
paradise, 3) because they were ones who never sensed that education
of the mind/heart/soul was always the higher purpose, university just
a means of getting "there."
Link: After Meltdown, Back to Post-Secondary?
"The degree is your ticket to admission . . . " (1 March 2009)

VivianLea:
Please ignore Bailey's advice. Ignore anyone who tells you that "the
degree is your ticket of admission." Those who say so these days, are,
after all, the ones who laughed at and rebelled against the pro-offered
future in "plastics," a al The Graduate. They clearly are ones who
don't really want the status-quo to change all that much.
For the last while, the cool kids respected those who got into
Berkeley/Harvard. That day is ending. The emerging breed are going
to respect those who valued themselves and true education enough,
not to be degree or grade chasers. They'll stop the degree when it
seems right to them, not when it looks right to unimaginative,
uninteresting others. They're the ones who are going to do the stuff
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worth watching, in this new "America."

Link: After Meltdown, Back to Post-Secondary (Tyee)
Pederast in my pocket, and I know (28 February 2009)

VivianLea:
The old tradition of scholarship is of asocial monasticism. Being in
the office of someone who values the old ways, and looks at the new
era of professionals expected to justify and share, to be out there,
rather than all holed up, made you feel like you were in the company
of a pederast -- and you may well have been. (Harold Bloom is old
school, and you may have heard that Naomi Wolf accused the old
sage of trying to feel her up while in his office for a chat.) It's about
true nerdyness and fiddling, more than it is about leaving the genius
alone to do his/her work.
I'm all for finding ways to stop spending on all the big lectures
(they're just a different version of a textbook) -- let's get all those from
itunes U, and from preferred universities/professors from all over the
world. (If all you're going to do is lecture, you'd best be good, because
I'll otherwise turn to so-and-so from MIT and hear what s/he has to
say, instead. Actually, I think I'll do that anyway.) Lots of
teacher/student contact/interaction (and lots of student/student
interaction, which is just as important), I'm all for. Some say that the
ideal of scholarship gets in the way of furthering this end, though.
Lots and lots of people going to university hasn't just meant free
training for business. It's also meant a lot of people coming from the
rough getting to know people/ideas of a different sort. It has been
about rising a huge mass of people, making them better -- about
furthering along the old humanist mission. As mentioned in my
previous post, I'm all for turning off/trimming down the postsecondary, but only so long as it is because other, more empowering,
ways for people to learn, invent, challenge one another, are becoming
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available.
better things for you,patrick
Link: After Meltodown, Back to Post-Secondary?
Would-be autocrats (26 February 2009)

One comes close to sensing in this article a delight in the possibility
that tuition hikes, the leveling of the middle class into the depressed
poor, might bring with it an end to mass striving and the reemergence of the aristocratic ideal. Imagine some Republic, where
the elites are few and apparent; trusted to roam where they will;
spared the indignity of sharing space with noisome lessers; and you
will share in every conservative scholar's non-egalitarian dream.
How about let's stick to the progressive plan, people. That is, one
which values life enough to not ever give up on the idea of bringing to
the fore, EVERY human being's beauty and genius -- not just the few
stellar Obamas needed to delight, comfort, and lead the support of an
aging, sagging, populace.
(About institutional leadership and spirited teachers "surprising" and
"shocking" their hard working, appreciate students: Five words:
"Don't taze me, bro!" And maybe seven others: "Thank you, sir!--May
I have another!?")
The sixties generation was a great generation because they learned to
look to themselves rather than to the establishment -- true Romantics
unshackle themselves, in part, by shackling their teachers. Whatever
the post-secondary rucus, really explore what you can do with your
own journals, discussion groups, and ready access to itunes U. Let's
make it so that if there must be a really best, they're the ones freely
sharing, loving, and living, outside the scholar's tower.
Link: After Meltdown, Back to School?
Turn away from the professorial (28 February 2009)
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Thank god for professors -- experts in the such-and-such. If the world

about us starts crumbling noticeably, we can just turn to them and
listen to them say something, anything, moderate and reasonable,
and we'll continue on until societal fractures inspire enough doubt to
demand another calm-down (visit).
We are a nation that is beginning to "switch" and find people and
behavior everywhere that can no longer be tolerated. If you're young,
believe in peace, pot, and living your dreams, push ahead, but fear
your "neighbor" -- they're beginning to wish they could send you to
Afghanistan to war and die, and to realize that it's well within their
power to do so.
Link: Fear and Murder in Vancouver (the Tyee)
You haven't lived (28 February 2009)

@cd4928
That was me! No "guy" here--I'm Patrick. Hello there.
About your argument that you can wear the same sweater for ten
years and undergo many internal changes. You know, if I twist your
true intent some, I kind of believe you. Sometimes we might need for
something to be sort of unchanging, stable, dependable, before we
make the leap to some other more appropriate "place." Saying this, I
know you're saying that internal changes can readily occur,
independent of our external surroundings.
But yes, I do think we identify ourselves through our objects. Objects
are powerful stuff, they can move us closer to where we need to go -they can co-operate, synergize, with the kind of internal growth you
rightly flag as important. Of particular objects, I am now thinking of
pcs and of how I truly hope Apple's efforts to switch PC users aren't
thwarted by the recession's efforts to switch us all off. People come to
associate with smiley apples and not downer pcs, and they will begin
1506
to know and eventually prefer a more people-friendly, liberal world.

Buying into the better can do much for internal stimulation and selfgrowth.
Link: Case against thrift
Staid but true (28 February 2009)

@GYfort: I sense we're all just grasping to the staid and (therefore)
True right now, but not too far on many of us will wholeheartedly
embrace those who stirred us while we lurched for steady ground.
That is, be in good humor, for though the Obama honeymoon has just
kicked in, time is ticking on our collective attachment to the familiar
and re-assuring, our shared dreams for the posthumanous.
P.S. You checked out Completely Novel yet?
@skybird: The idea that something great must be monumental, a
giant block of the-impossible-to-ignore, is interesting. I think,
though, tastes have changed, and that the soft, ephemeral, modest
attracts its due these days. Obama isn't the bombast, is not just cool,
but modest, and carries himself as if he knows he's got our eye and is
here for the longterm -- no need to shout! And he's our President, not
stormcloud Hillary.
Link: Why Can't a woman write the Great American Novel (Salon)
Better and better (25 February 2009)

Judith Levine:
If you're at all Freudian, you'll certainly explore the psyche of
someone who is prone to save a lot to see if they're withholding/anal,
and those of those who buy, buy, buy, to see if they have unmet oral
needs.
And if you're at all a fan of Lloyd DeMause, who believes most of us
1507
have parental alters in our heads -- that is, voices of our parents
which take over at times when we're buying and growing too much -you'll certainly wonder if many of those who think we have earned for
ourselves a depression are being possessed by their Cotton Mathertype parents.
Buying things can be all about self-growth. That's what it's been for
me these last number of years. About coming to know what I like,
who I am, and who I want and can be. I've heard some people talk
about how they're going to be okay in these sparser times, 'cause
they're not those fickle to fashion. And when I think of them in their
unchanging ways, I really wonder if they're living at all. Get rid of
your ten-year-old sweaters, books, cars, sofas, et al., pause, and go out
and see what sorts of things are out there that will better match who
you are now, rather than the way you were yesterday. And if it
proves the same sort: know that very likely, some whole part of you is
locked away in a vault.
Sorry you were concerned to save at all, Judith. I wish that rather
than saving money, the concern would be to make sure we give
money in support, not just of all the wonderful designers/engineers
out there who make all the things we so rightly enjoy, but charities as
well. People who feel well-pleased, who feel "saved," when they save,
and even more pleased when big spenders get their lot, are sick.
Perhaps in this great time of need, if we're going to hold back on
buying things, we could focus our income on supporting those who
can reach those who believe life should be something other than
about the better and better.
Link to DeMause's website, for those interested:
http://www.psychohistory.com/
Link: The Against Thrift (Salon)
Rhetorical persuasion and true love (24 February 2009)

Rocket999:
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There's something about Dark Knight which leaves one thinking it's
about getting the best from every particular scene rather than from
the whole plot, which would seem to give real credence to your
argument that there is little or no character development in the film.
But there are many developments within conversations WITHIN
these scenes, notably between Batman and the Joker, but with other
characters as well, which has me thinking that the film, rather, is
actually ALL ABOUT psychological movement and development. You
experienced the movie as primarily about chasing, but the Joker isn't
so much a dog chasing cars as he is the
rhetoritician/politician/therapist set to make artful use of language
and his subject's sensibilities, to draw them to see "just how pathetic
they really are." He seeks to change people, and how, by appearances,
such an outlandish, merciless, crazy, clown, set against the
impossible, will actually manage (or come surprisingly close to
managing) to win people (and you) over, is the question you get to ask
in every scene he's in as you move along. And you watch, in
fascination, as the Joker persuasively moves people who have set
their will against him, through interesting back-and-forths, to ask
questions of themselves, to doubt, to consider his point of view, to
begin to think that maybe he isn't so crazy, after all.
Your characterization of the "love affair" between Wall-E and Eve as
really that of a crush between 8 year olds, is bang-on enough to have
me asking myself if it's the all of it. I would say no, because right now
I find most relationships I see on T.V. and film rather guarded, and I
would love it they could display the sort of vulnerable, enthusiastic,
full commitment that Wall-E displays -- it would amount to a
considerable evolution. This said, Wall-E immediately falls for
someone who is all guarded up, who is ready to destroy anything
which comes close to touching her. It's not necessarily typical of an 8
year old's crush, but there is some sickness, something wrong,
something greatly undeveloped there, too. In sum: It's better than
what many adults have, but it's not mature love, as you rightly argue.
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Link: Oscar's Angst: It's fun for now (Salon)
Ben Stiller's mockery of Joaquin (23 February 2009)

@bigguns:
I thought Stiller's bit was mean, too, but not effectively so. He enjoyed
being Joaquin too much, and who wouldn't?--while Joaquin plays
with/feels out dropping out, being impromptu, in a way which
suggests he might just get real about it, Stiller and others can go mean
at Hollywood "scripting" in films like Tropic Thunder, but will remain
Zoolander dancing monkeys.
Link: Are the Oscars recession-proof (Salon)
On Dark Knight and Wall-E (22 February 2009)

Yeah, Dark Knight -- thanks for that. Dark Knight was an exploitive
film, but it did bring back some of the 9/11 chill. Wall-E did
something of the same, too, and perhaps for this reason they both
struck me as vital. Neither so bleak, though. Both are as much
romances as they are anything else: wall-e and the joker made good
use of their barren (unpeopled, with the former; peopled but with
boring, predictable people, with the latter) landscapes, but really
come to life when the love of their lives comes into their lives (with
both batman and eve being reserved, muscled, bad-asses,
interestingly enough). The batman and joker romance as part of the
Romance montage, then? I would like to have seen that. Would have
shown the Oscars got the point.
Link: Are the Oscars Recession-Proof (Salon)
Been all around, but still the Truman Show (22 February 2009)
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Yeah, if there was a nation out there where parents and kids had it
figured out, or which showed how differently parents and kids can
relate to one another, it'd make it more difficult for us just to throw
up our hands and accept, that that's just the way it is.
When you say, "But who among us has not wanted to tell our mothers
to 'f*** off' occasionally?," I'm guessing it means you haven't yet. Hey,
even if none of us have felt that urge, if you've felt it, if you feel it, still
validate it, and maybe also give it an airing here and there. That is,
Let it out. Your mother might appreciate the honest feedback, your
not holding back. Or maybe she'll emotionally abandon you for
awhile, and give you good reason not to do the same again. But with
this misery would come the helpful clue as to how we could endure
endless hours in perplexing, confounding, less than ideal
relationships, and yet still be so ready to find reasons to settle.
There is better out there. There really is. But the way there involves
considering that what these disparate films might all have in
common, is the shared need to romance the mistruth that all families
are, and MUST BE, psychotic.
Link: Take the Kids to Reel2Real (Tyee)
Flee for the Forest of Arden (21 February 2009)

Obama is going to keep the camps going, because he's going to need
them to place all the Nation's best and brightest. When the Germans
went crazy awhile back, they sent Jews to camps because they thought
they were too uppity, thought they were symbols of liberty, freedom,
prosperity. Obama and the broken, smoking/ex-smoker crowd, will
be blaming wall streeters for now, but who they truly hate, who they
are going to long to go after, are not those who could cheer and relate
with Santelli, but rather the pretty people in their cardigans, who are
temperamentally sweet, and believe they can help create a better,
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warmer world.
So the Joan Walshs, Robert Reichs, Paul Krugmans, Alexandra
Pelosis, et al. -- those whose first instinct is not to war, but to warm -will hopefully soon realize that what they need to be doing is finding a
way out -- create their own Israel, or better, their own Green World,
and away from court as fast as possible!
Link: Bagram Prisoners Have No Rights
Part cowboy-coffee camper, part cafe-coffee dilettante

dorothy: Well, I like both yours and Sarah's style. Part cowboy-coffee
camper, part caf-coffee dilettante -- why not?
gerard: Your comment about wishing for the low-key is interesting,
worth thinking about. But perhaps making something a movement
gives it momentum, strength, a protective shell, even: it helps makes
something good really happen. Plus, there can be something fun
about this -- it makes it more tangible, more something you can play
with. (I also have a sneaking suspicion it's about helping a generation
muscle it's way in to the forefront, like the baby-boomers eventually
did with whatever cultural movements to push aside the "Greatest
Generation." Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, are what the young "White
people like," [for good reason], after all.)
But everyone: please just say no to Tim Hortons. It's not just the
coffee -- it's what happens to you when you veer near, not the cowboy
cool, but the beastially coarse! Best to go to the places Sarah directs
us to, but settle for a Starbucks if you must: Tim Hortons, willy-nilly,
will tar your spirit to the Harper side. No (truly) good company is to
be found, there -- just bats and bat droppings.
Link: Now's No Time for Bad Coffee
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Bush/Cheney/Obama (18 February 2009)

Maybe they're all hanging out in the same cave? Chillin,' figuring out
who's worth chilling? Won't be Hillary, 'cause though she's almost a
different breed, and came near to being a firebrand!, she's now-allthere-with-a-pack-of-chips herself. So of Obama and Hillary: Peace to
both, but how can we toast the terror she'll roast and the cool chill
he'll will?
Link: Salon
Losing yourself, losing friends (18 February 2009)

Newsflash: Whores and wanton hussies happier, more
productive than ever! Bed-hopping tarts rule the small
screen, is the headline of Heather Havrilesky's column in
Salon this week. She writes, We want to watch as wanton
floozies cheat on their husbands, grope their much-younger
lovers and have illicit dalliances with lesbian brides. We
want to see classy courtesans put on maid uniforms and pee
on prominent politicians. We want to gasp at the brazen,
oversexed antics of the modern-day harlot, balancing her
debauched profession with her everyday life.
Of course these shameless tarts' stories are morality tales,
just like they always were. But this time around, the moral of
the story goes like this: Carpe diem, whores and tramplets!
Get out there and grab every man, woman and man-child
who strikes your fancy! As long as you lounge around in
black lace, thigh-high stockings, smoking and brooding
away your ample free time as the camera circles, we're
behind you 100 per cent!
[. . .]
I have three friends right now newly dating. All three giggle
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incessantly, forget things, change topics mid-sentence (back

to dating) and frequently stare into space dreamily. Of
course, I and other friends in long-term relationships are
jealous (but much happier this way, darling, in case you're
reading).
"Oh that time when all you want to do is make-out..." sighed
a married friend recently. "In six months, you're back to
reality, but they're a good six months."
I guess if six months isn't enough time for the stimulus
packages to work -- economic ones, that is -- we can just
move to new loves or watch those on the small screen.
(Vanessa Richmond, Down with Reality! Up with the Love
Drug!, The Tyee, 18 Feb 2009)
If people are finding themselves drawn to overpowering, humiliating
older women right now (what comes to mind right now is both the
Salon essay Vanessa refers us to, and the recent "Cougar" skit on
SNL), it may be because many of us are beginning to regress and relive what it felt like to somewhat powerless and under our mothers'
control. But the wanton warrior-bitch will surely soon pass on, for as
excited as we are by her child-rape --which (take another look at the
above) is what she's up to -- her presence will soon prove too
overwhelming, and we'll turn our attentions/affections exclusively to
Obamas/Harpers as they become phallic leaders we can depend on to
help revenge ourselves upon some dressed-up, no good, hussie or
another.
Hopping from one relationship to another might be a good way to
keep the dopamine buzz going. Alternatively, we could do the latest,
and just quickly switch from one zeitgeist to another. That is, Is it just
me, or we going through the phases of this depression thing a little
too self-consciously and a little too quickly? If next week we decide
that the depression was just so winter 2008-9, it would actually be
sorta apropos: for manic mood switches are surely more on display
these days than any real sign of depressiveness, n'est pas? Makes you
kind of think that there's something else that's going on, we can, for
1514
awhile -- while matching-up cultural similarities between the 30's

depression and our own, seems so self-evidently relevant an activity
to be up to -- give scant attention to. For me, what this might be may
have everything to do with what seems to have been on Vanessa's
mind as she was finishing her piece, when her thoughts turned to how
her friends' mental/emotional state compared with her own. That is,
We may be going through a stage where some of us are beginning to
realize/suspect that many of those we thought were our friends, we
thought were like, were with, us, prove not to be. They're the ones
who not just enjoy (or enjoy demarcating) but IDENTIFY with
characters with multiple-personalities/alters, 'cause that's what
they've got. They're the ones who are NOT going to evolve from six
month dopamine-feuled lovers 'to mature, self-possessed adults, as
Vanessa managed, but will be the "we" she probably rightly so halfheartedly identifies/merges with when she concludes: "I guess if six
months isn't enough time for the stimulus packages to work -economic ones, that is -- we can just move to new loves or watch
those on the small screen."
I think it's becoming a time when for some, you can't help losing
yourself within some great cause. And for others, a time where it
increasingly dawns on you that you're going to have to quickly find
means to do the same, or risk losing friends, and finding out how
serious and scary it is these days to be deemed out of fashion.
Link: The Tyee
Dog wags its own tail (11 December 2008)

Articles like this one do continue to prop up the idea that if only the
centre-left would get a fair hearing, the Canadian populace would
receive them well. Most of the left, it seems, still believe that the only
way you could have an economic/political system exist which
produces a country of haves-and-have-nots, which wastes enormous
1515
resources and destroys the lives of countless in wars -- and which

does much the same with the environment -- which works against the
best interest of those who vote for those who continue the system's
existence, is because people have been misinformed or left
uninformed, by the evil powers of the misanthropic status-quo.
I don't believe this is the case, and instead think that the reason
progressives are only so well received in this country, is not because
the wrong books/papers/arguments have been put before the
populace, not because other viewpoints have been stigmatized or
hidden, but because too many Cdns are not raised with sufficient
nurturance for them to sort of naturally believe -- at a gut level -- that
life should be good, that they ought to, *deserve* to, live in a warm,
welcoming, world. Instead, they see in Harper and Ignatieff, their
own. And that's our problem.
patrickmh
Link: The Tyee
TUESDAY, AUGUST 25, 2009

Just who do they think they are? (12 December 2008)
What follows will likely prove a PR slaughter. My guess is that Harper
will easily manage to depict the more left-leaning coalition as
presumptive (and therefore un-Canadian), not owing to PR
cleverness -- better produced You Tube videos and the like -- but
because Cdns are getting in the mood to blame all our troubles on
those who embody a more positive sense of human/societal potential
(i.e., liberals, with their preference for an open and tolerant society).
Tyee readers will of course see Harper's presumption, but for the
most part they're not in the same head-space as the rest who populate
Canada. The Canadian Tire/Tim Horton Canadians, that is, those
who prefer to imagine themselves as non-descript and monotone, see
in progressives an Apple-like inclination toward a colorful, rich,
1516
beautiful life, and it makes them furious (I wasn't allowed to be like

that! You're not allowed to be like that!).
Again, if I'm wrong -- good. It means, so to speak, that were moving
beyond PC moguls towards mountainous Apple glory.
patrickmh
Link: The Tyee
Child-abuser eyes (12 December 2008)

quarry bay:
If Harper destroys everything of value, then he is doing exactly what
the populace who voted for him, wants. Accumulated wealth makes
people who received insufficient love from, who were treated
sadistically by, their parents (with the nature of their relationship to
the mother being of primary importance), feel extremely anxious: the
reason for this is that unloved parents (mothers) need their children
to give them the love they themselves did not receive from their own
parents (mothers), and communicate in unforgettable ways to their
children (through threats of violence, abandonment) that they are
being very very bad children when they turn from their parents and
start focusing on their own particular needs and wants (which begins
to happen in a big way with adolescence, which is why there is often
so much strain in child/parent relationships during this period).
Accumulated societal wealth, for a society with a large number of
insufficiently unloved constituents, makes people fear the visitation of
some kind of horrific, catastrophic visitation, and this fear is in part
abated when a leader arrives who helps find ways to get rid of all that
anxiety-producing wealth. Spending on the military is usually the way
immature societies do this; other ways include piling up bunches of
blankets, and burning them (though this isn't done as much, these
days).
Other ways of dealing with growth panic is to cling to a strong,
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patriarchal leader (it is the arousal of maternal anger, we fear, since

differentiation is always from the mother, not the father) and support
him as he sacrifices representatives of our growing, needing, "bad"
selves, through wars -- economic or military.
If the coalition wins the day; if it proves relatively popular; it
Canadians decide they really would prefer to not have an autocratic
government and can handle a more anonymous and complex one;
then what we know is that childhoods have been improving, and we
have really been maturing, emotionally, as a nation.
But in my judgment, such a nation would never have voted in Harper
-- with his child abuser eyes -- in the first place.
patrickmh
Link: The Tyee
Sin (4 January 2009)
Alda, here you (in effect) equate pleasure with sin [and also sort of
suggest to me that you might find a return to living in these old times,
a bit overwhelming]:
"You couldn't be more wrong. Who wouldn't love like to return to our
childhood era of the 50's and 60's and 70's when most of us, blissfully
unaware of environmental damage, enjoyed living in one big, happy,
mindless, Disneyesque golden years patry expansion - new vehicles,
appliances, industries, styles, architecture, etc? But we can't do that
now, and sane, realistic people know that in their hearts."
Here you (in effect) equate presumption with sin:
"It's the PLANET itself -- the natural resources and fresh water supply
that will ultimately determine its limits. The phenomenon of Peak oil
should tell you that. Spend a year in India or Japan and come back to
say that hindrances to development are caused by attitude. They're
NOT. They're determined by a much bigger, mysterious entity than
ourselves - MOTHER NATURE."
And here you sound more like well mannered, sober-minded on the
1518
upper decks of the Titanic, than you do the bohemians in steerage:

"If anything, the environmentally minded folks I hang out with have a
great appreciation for the sensual arts - music, theatre, etc., and in no
way are they either cruel or prudishly conservative and judgemental,
but in fact, quite the opposite."
patrick mcevoy-halston
Link: The Tyee
Let them play, I say (21 November 2008)

I'm far more concerned that our youngest remain playful than if they
if they know how to do "practical" things (which sounds vaguely
Thatcherite -- didn't she want Brits, owing to the ostensible demands
made by contemporary necessities, to stop studying English and the
like, and learn how to make things?).
For sure, fear might inspire Spartan survivalist vigilance, but it won't
do much to inspire Athenian play.
Maybe rather than look to Jane Jacobs, who with her depressing and
conservative last book showed exactly why she ought to be left
behind, we might look at other books to light the way forward. We
might, for example, look to 1) Douglas Rushkoff's Playing the
Future, 'cause he actually can say good things about what kids are
doing on the net and with their Xboxs; and for sure to 2) Stanley
Greenspan's Secure Child, 'cause here he really reminds us what
happens to kids when they grow up forever worrying about wolves
and scarcity.
patrickmh
Link: The Tyee
Burn off the fat (7 January 2009)
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I still know some people who read almost a book a day! In addition to
getting them to think more about why they over-consume, I'm also
trying to get them to be more environmentally-friendly and go Kindle.
(Actually, over-consumption is for me all about trying to make up for
lack of love and attendance, and it is incredibly cruel to go after
ANYONE who over-consumes in the spirit of an avenging angel.
Times when they tend to do this usually get summed-up as times of
"purity crusades," that is, times where people are on the lookout,
where-ever-where, for the unfit, for "witches" to burn.)
Link: The Tyee
Four Christmases (18 February 2009)
It's interesting to hear about this phenomena. Thanks for directing
our attention to it. Certainly does bring to mind that the biggest film
(Four Christmases) so far this season is about a couple who do
everything possible to avoid Christmas gatherings.
I wonder if avoiding the Big Wedding means we are becoming social
anorexics. Anorexics, some say, loose the weight, lose the fat, in order
to imagine themselves less desirable prey for social predators: Could
people be moving toward small, bare-boned weddings, out of a felt
sense that all those people that otherwise would be there, are out to
eat them? (Fear of crowds, is the fear of being smothered and eaten.)
Maybe to most fairly access the truth in this proposition, we should
imagine what it'll feel like this Christmas if we happen to be amongst
those heading home to a mob of relatives and friends.
patrickmh
Link: The Tyee
Sucking on Lloyd's titties, for nurturance sake (18 February 2009)
1520
James, While it is true that I do one day hope to find myself sucking
on Lloyd's titties in an effort to secure for myself some delicious
DeMausian milk, I know for certain that I cannot have, as you
suggest, a cult-like interest in DeMause and his work. It's impossible.
Iknow because I've been a life-long user of apple products, and no one
who uses macs regularly can be anything but a buoyantly happy and
healthy human being.Let me relate a story. A couple months ago I
had a party where a whole bunch of us were sitting in a circle talking
this and that. Someone asked me about my interest in psychohistory,
and, afterexplaining why I don't actually like the term, and after
emphatically DIScouraging them from studying history and
emphatically ENcouraging them to read books by people who are
alive now, I explained the idea of psychoclasses and suggested that
one would probably find that those people who are of the helping
(advanced) psychoclass used macintosh computers, while those who
were of the socializing class (or worse) used windows machines. My
friendsuddenly grabbed everyone's attention, and asked everyone to
indicate the kind of computer they used -- Mac or PC. Turned out that
all the people who used Mac were seated on one side, and all the
others, on the other. What had happened, of course, is that without
knowing it, members of the same psychoclass had sought each other
out. It was like Loyalist vs. Patriot, all over again (Mac users being the
Patriots, and PC users being the dumpy Loyalists,of course.)But while
I don't want to dump on my PC using friends, it is true that most of
them wear more drab clothing, are more inclined to smoke, and are
more likely to be personality-challenged than my mac using friends. If
you go into an Apple store, you'll get a good sense of what we're like.
We tend to wear bright, extravagant, "fun," clothing. We tend to smile
a lot, and hang out with other people who wear bright clothing and
smile a lot. We're always the life of the party -- even when we're trying
not to be. We like taking pictures of one another smiling, and delight
in sending these pictures of our smiling selves to one other. One
might make the mistake of thinking we're narcissistic -- like the
barbaric greeks were, according to our darling DeMause -- but really
1521
we just like being in one another's sunshine -- it's such a great way to
live!You know if I was to have a party where I invited only my mac
using friends, I'd might think to invite over that James Dale Davidson
of yours. You know, he's no Paul Krugman, and he does seem to enjoy
theidea of being a survivor amidst financial societal ruin -- which isn't
the best of fantasies -- a little too much, but he is fun and
adventurous, and I bet some more time amongst those healthier than
himself might bring him a little further toward the sunnier side.Oh! -that's another thing we mac people like to do!!!: We mac people enjoy
helping others!!!Makes us smile : ) in fact.
maccultenthusiastsincebirth,psycholiteraturely,patrickmh
Link: RealPsychohistory
Consolidating gains (4 October 2008)

I'm thinking about your reply. I admit I'm surprised: I would have
figured the numbers had increased. Mustn't have felt very good totake
risks and have the numbers dwindle like that; being "punished"with
relative obscurity for doing right -- Hmmm. Maybe, though, this
development could serve as a spur to encourage you to let those who
are interested in psychohistory but are not those who would push the
discipline where it really ought to and could go, go. (I wonder ifsome
of your interpretations of America's current situation could be
presented so that mags like McSweeney would draw their readers'
attention to it. I think your Reagan's America one of the most
interesting and fun works I've ever read. Something like that donefor
the current four year cycle, maybe . . . )
In any case, maybe this discussion group could continue to do some
real good that'll draw in some of those who've had it with it with
tentative bullshit from those who are far more interested in
consolidating their lives' gains than in engaging in potentially
1522
psychologically unnerving explorations (to me, that sums up a hell ofa

lot of academia, as I experienced it) of psychic experience. I knowthat
personally whenever I see writers/thinkers these days who arewilling
to look foolish to explore ideas they find interesting, Icheer loudly.
Hasn't been an age forthis kind of thing -- for it usually means being
ignored by everyone("what's up with that strange fellow?"--and then
they move on) whileothers are oh so loudly and repeatedly feted: and
that's almostimpossible for even the healthiest to be able to take. Still,
thereare books being written like that popular underground British
one Isit Just Me or is Everything Shit? --which suggest to me that
maybebrazen risk-takers will start getting the support they deserve
and mayto some extent need, from the people who'll most matter in
theupcoming years -- that is, by those who have had enough support
fromtheir mothers that they don't need to use
literature/science/societyto shore-up/strengthen their fragile psyches
("please don't let theearth crumble from underneath me!"), and who
really are interested inundertaking new journeys, whatever the risk.
Happiest war best (17 February 2009)
James, the sort of "hyper-adrenalized" state I associate with animal
passions(!), is something I associate with those who have experienced
the sort of brain development that follows a traumatizing/menancing
childhood. Love, empathy (the higher emotions!), I associate with
those whose course of brain development was determined by long
accompanying loving caregivers. I truly do believe that the
marvel of homo sapien sapiens is that their DNA hasn't trapped them
so that regardless of phylogenetic development, they remain
fundamentally, at the core, brutish (I understand that this isn't
quite what you're arguing). Instead, once freed from sadistic threats
(something I believe entirely possible), the homo sapien sapiens child
will become, for all intents and purposes, an entirely loving being.
1523
I've read a lot (well, quite a bit) of the neuroscience (though it isthe
work of Stanley Greenspan which ripples through my thoughts/
feelings right now), and, I feel sure, so have you. But it isn't allthis
which convinces me: instead, it is my experience of people: Ihave
encountered those it cannot but seem misleading to attend to how
parts of them still draw them to be aggressive and such. I'm sureyour
experience of people has lead you to different conclusions.
You know, what works on the battlefield is really something I'd have
to hear more about. I've heard various different generals arguevarious
different things. Moreover, I think a heck of a lot ofmilitary officers
like to imagine their troups as needing bravery morethan they do
minds/self determination, to satisfy their own self-assessment needs.
Typical managerial (classist) think. Knowing/suspecting this doesn't
mean you're wrong, though. Also, not making aconnection between
the field of sports and the battlefield might bethe right thing to do,
but it certainly would go against the(historical) grain.
Intellectualization as a defensive tack to ward of feelings of
abandonment, sounds interesting to me. I'm thinking that I associate
it mostly with early experiences of maternal emotional excess. Whatis
coming to mind is all the literature I've read where complaintsagainst
unreason and for good reasoning (and the spartan life), gohand-inhand with tirades against (feminine--read: maternal) luxuryand
indulgence.
Nymphs and pixies fight good too (17 February 2009)
No, not a fantasy, James. The most advanced psychoclass would be all
about peace, of course. However, they would have within their ranks
the most creative (least stultified, least rigid--most free) thinkers
on earth, who could ably attend to such necessities as insuring they
are not vulnerable to their "barbarian" brethren's perpetual need to
war and sacrifice (their own). (They' be like Apple -- fun, happy,
1524
with technology that outpaces all competition.)

I know it's easy to imagine those who are most loving as a bunch of
wayward nymphs and pixies. But what they'd really be would be those
who, when forced into combat (for them it would really be last resort
-if they sensed their "enemies" [lower psychoclasses] were in the mood
for war, they'd be the type to figure out a way to address their
opponent's need with the least amount of bloodshed as possible), they
would be most ably constituted to resist sacrificing their own, to
magnify the conflict, so as to satiate Mother.
When Britain began their great economic expansion in the seventeenhundreds (the time when they became a nation of "shopkeepers"), the
conservatives at the time said that the emergence and social
predominance of a middle class (the emerging new psychoclass, as
delineated by Lloyd and Stone) who believed life should be about
commercial pleasures, would ensure that britian would become easy
prey
for more martial nations (Athens/Sparta references were everywhere
in
the conservative press). I believe it was Burke who pointed out that
the emergence of a nation of shopkeepers had gone hand-in-hand
with
(and was largely responsible for) the emergence of Britian's great
naval fleet, which was scoring victory-after-victory, as Britian's
commercial empire grew and grew and grew.
Obama's dress (30 October 2009)

As we well know, the last attacks on Obama have centered on him
ostensibly being a redistributionist, a commie. The American Right
1525
seems to enjoy thinking of him as such. My sense is that the Right

(though of course they could never admit this to themselves) actually
WISH him to become the controlling "mommy" they all knew intheir
childhoods. Someone all powerful, who hands out and withdrawsas
s/he wishes, leaving them feeling powerless, mere extensions of her
body, extensions of her skirt. I had thought that America wouldn't
come close to being in a position where a liberal leader could
implement universal health care coverage. I have beenthinking
recently (with the Republicans' evident wish to see him as aCommie
leader who lords over his emasculated subjects) that it ispossible that
the American populace will tell their receptive newleader (Obama is
healthy, but not THAT healthy -- he remains someonewho will do
largely what his "followers" bid him to do.) they want himto seem allencompassing, so that he better fits their fantasy needsfor a
returning, swarming, enfleshing, mother-figure. Will Obama/Biden's
term(s) be Obama/Oprah's?
Pelosi's gentleness (17 February 2009)

There is something delicate about Pelosi. Wonderful that it is the
considerable humanity in her that moves her to respect Republicans,
to want to see and recognize their sanity; discouraging that one
senses that if it ever dawned on her they might be otherwise, that as a
whole they might be wildly schizophrenic, massive projectors of hate,
incapable of substantive empathy -- really messed up people -- she'd
have to find some way to repress the thought, else it destabalize the
"evil elites vs. misguided masses" foundation her efforts to serve
humanity are based on.
She's healthier than her mother, but I'm afraid people like her will
run away when paradigms of thought start becoming more evidently
-- paradigms, ones perhaps rather untethered to reality.
1526
Link: Salon
Honeymoon for salmon-eaters (16 February 2009)
There are theories which argue that people who come out of more
controlling and less loving families, tend to vote Republican. They
fear Socialism, are repulsed by the idea of hippie-togetherness, and
like to grand-stand Independence, because as children, being part of a
family meant experiencing life as if they were mere extensions of their
parents' (not just wishes and needs but) BODIES. They fear real
economic and social growth, and are willing to vote for those who
would destroy such, because as children they also understood that
when they attended to their own needs rather than those of their
parents, they were acting up as selfish, spoiled, egocentric--bad: and
they are forever hoping to demonstrate themselves good boys and
girls by voting for those who see life as about hardships, and by hating
those they can construe as believing otherwise (i.e. democrats).
Other point: Pelosi suggests that the democrats are honeymooning
right now. Their euphoria seems a bit forced, to me. And they seem
more angry than island-sunners should be. How sure are we that the
pains the Right is experiencing right now, aren't fundamentally
related to those that are causing democrats to be somewhat less than
ebulliently happy? I'm not suggesting that it's 'cause we're all
suffering from the economy. Instead, I'm wondering if BOTH
repubicans and democrats feel abandoned right now -- that they're
both waiting for Obama to emerge as an empowered, assertive daddy.
Perhaps Pelusi is happy because Obama right now still is somewhat
like her mother to her, like her and her friends, in that he is the elite,
polished/mannered, person-in-power, who is not yet charged-up with
a nation's passion. He is the salmon-eating, ivy-leaguer, who looks
trepedatiously at a coarse nation, that Hillary Clinton believed
America would never be able to relate to. This won't last for long. And
I suspect when things settle in, when he becomes more Andrew
Jackson and less John Quincy Adams, the mannered left will feel less
1527
easy with him. Whether the Right will declare him their Omighty, I
can't yet tell. But to me it is more than a possibility: I actually expect
it.
Link: Salon
Re: "I'm not saying having 14 kids isn't crazy"

No, you're not, but please soon develop the stuff to declare it such: if
you have more than a few kids, no matter your best, there's no way
you'll be able to well attend to them. They become lonely, lost -- they
become what we're trying to get the hell away from: neurotic,
unconscious -- animals.
You're always stepping away. We notice. Please stop; find out what
watches overhead and beat it into mulch; and become the more
interesting person we all sense you to be.
Link: The Tyee
Co-ops are coming (12 February 2009)

The age for co-ops is coming. I think it will happen at about the same
time as when Generation Ys gain the strength to break free of the
tyranny of their parents' dreams for/expectations of them, and
become dropouts, a la Joaquin Pheonix, respectable society finds
hard to love and is getting in the mood to want see jetisoned. (It
might be too late for many GenXers, who may have decided to accept
the self-hate, while sticking with their diet-pepsis.) When they stop
wanting to couch and undermine their independence with a clear
demonstration that they, as much as their parents, ultimately seek
ivy-league, professional, clean-and-green, onward-and-upward,
relevance -- note how the cool kids in Nick and Nora's Infinite
Playlist and Superbad, for instance, despite whatever wavering,
1528
still make clear that they are going to or could go to the ivy-leagues -then I think they'll go for shared living environments as a way to
spend the whole of their lives.
Right now, they have to endure, I think, some sense that no one is
there for good. It's not even a sexy possibility -- instead, the cool kids
do the bait-and-switch. Vanish, immediately, if offered the right ticket
to somewhere special . . .
Link: The Tyee
If what one most cares about (12 February 2009)

If what you're most concerned about is getting smart, creative kids,
you might want to direct them to school themselves by going to itunes
u. It's all lectures, unfortunately --which are never as truly educative
as the back-and-forth. (But many Harvard undergrad classes are just
large lectures, too, though: some significant education takes place in
inadequate settings.) Anyway, not just putting money into the old
system but finding different ways to think of education, should be the
agenda. If the next few years look like just more and more spending
cuts to education, maybe just say to hell with it, and get your kids
hooked on itunes U. Berkeley's there! So too MIT! They want to reach
you, not wait 'til you reach them! Plus, though it's slow in motion,
true, it's part of a beginning trend to challenge the for-to-long
unchallengeable surrection of the institutional degree as Saint, as
assured transport to respectability and the middle class.
Maybe check out Ehrenreich's damning (but also very fun) article on
higher education:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbaraehrenreich/the-higher-education-scam_b_47287.html
Yes ME2, but one doesn't cause the other (12 February 2009)
Living standards and incomes go up when people start believing
1529
everyone DESERVES to live in a better world. This isn't born out of a

change of philosophy; instead, a new philosophy emerges naturally
from people who, owing to slowly improving childrearing over time,
are different/better than previous generations (Lawrence Stone and
Lloyd DeMauses thesis). People aren't homo economicus -- people
ruled by staid but rational monetary concerns. Many wish them such,
like to see them as such, but people lust, love, hate -- they ARE, more
often than not, best understood as irrational--human. If you are the
type to want to know just a few people but very well, and very
lovingly, you will not feel the need to have bunches of kids -- and you
cannot be prompted to have them. You'll have a few -- depression or
no; despite some tumult, you and they will know real love; and they
will be ones who'll make the world a better place.
Link: The Tyee
Probably right to (11 February 2009)

Probably right to ease off of Britney and Lindsay, but your impluse to
go after Angelina is sound.
I agree with you that though Angelina could readily be characterized
as monster-superior, the press has wanted to imagine her more as
MOTHER-superior. The reason for this, I think, is that the many of us
who were born of mothers who used us as little playthings to ward off
depression, and who interpreted our emerging desire to attend to our
own needs rather than their own, as treachery, see in Angelina some
version of the mother who must be praised and placated -- or else!
Did you know that there are cultures which encourage their kids to
play with knives. Not for their own good -- Angelina's purported
motivation -- but because kids aren't valued all that much once they
focus on their own independence. Take New Guinea parenting, for
instance:
"There are many ways New Guinea parents demonstrate that when
1530
the child cannot be used erotically, it is useless. One is that as soon as

infants are not being nursed, they are paid no attention, and even
when in danger are ignored. Anthropologists regularly notice that
little children play with knives or fire and adults ignore them.
Edgerton comments on the practice: 'Parents allowed their small
children to play with very sharp knives, sometimes cutting
themselves, and they permitted them to sleep unattended next to the
fire. As a result, a number of children burned themselves seriously...it
was not uncommon to see children who had lost a toe to burns, and
some were crippled by even more severe burns.' Langness says in the
Bena Bena 'it was not at all unusual to see even very small toddlers
playing with sharp bush knives with no intervention on the part of
caretakers.' But this is good, say the anthropologists, since when
'children as young as two or three are permitted to play with objects
that Westerners consider dangerous, such as sharp knives or burning
brands from the fire, [it] tends to produce assertive, confident, and
competent children.' Children, they explain, are allowed to 'learn by
observations...e.g., the pain of cutting oneself when playing carelessly
with a knife.' As Whiting says, when he once saw a Kwoma baby 'with
the blade of a twelve-inch bush knife in his mouth and the adults
present paid no attention to him,' this was good for the infant, since
in this way 'the child learns to discriminate between the edible and
inedible.' Margaret Mead is particularly ecstatic about the wisdom of
mothers making infants learn to swim early by allowing them to fall
into the water under the hut when crawling and slipping through gaps
in the floor or falling overboard into the sea because they were 'set in
the bow of the canoe while the mother punts in the stern some ten
feet away.'
(Lloyd DeMause, "Childhood and Cultural Evolution," Emotional Life
of Nations
http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/eln07_evolution.html)
Link: The Tyee
Obama cartoons (10 February 2009)
1531
You're on the mark, ballspot. Pretty much every cartoon I've seen of
Obama right now has him matched against something hideously large
and bloated, and -- owing to how Rebublican's have greeted his
"birth" -- it's as often a obscurantist, confident elephant as it is a giant
"economy" pig, or "multiple hotspot/demand" octopus, or big pile of
wobbling, tobbling, "everything's about to crash!" pile of dishes. It's
knight against beast, and the elephantine will soon be tamed, just as
you predict. (Again, for what it's worth, I believe the bulk of Obama's
reign will involve a surprising number of republicans as his chief and
most loyal servants. Obama will only for a short time be all linear,
lithe, and/but alone: the future is in Obamanation.)
Link: Salon
McJobs? (10 February 2009)

Canada/U.S.A might now be a McJob nation, but if you listened to
politicians, it's still a nation built of concrete and steel. Last night, for
instance, when Obama (who actually, for all his talk of medical-record
digitization, more vividly put forth images of train tracks and
concrete bridges) talked of the unemployed, he made it seem as if
they were all former factory workers, and we note that this article
defends the unemployed by directing our attention to laid off mill
workers, the oil patch, and Ontario factories -- not laid-off retail
clerks, laid-off parents of children living in MacKenzie, Grandfalls, or
Windsor, laid-off singles living in urbane abodes like downtown
Toronto. So it probably is true that if politicians suggest that the laidoff, traditional values, old-style, working class/proletariat--people in
car manufacturing (or who think they should be), for instance--are
intrinsically lazy, they'll get in trouble for it. But if they target those
working at McJobs, who refuse to work for less than twenty bucks an
hour, as dolphin paints them, as "shifty" youth, will-never-grow-
1532
uppers, or those who look like they lack the stuff to ever find a way
"back," the voting public might be more than okay with it: they might
already be prone to see these people as irresponsible and dispensible:
people we should be happy to be rid of, for their loss makes the nation
feel pure, virus-free.
Note: If the Tyee would like me to write a fictional piece on the
midnight adventures of a mob of MacChine-Gunning McJobbers, lead
by a baby-boom house burning, Vanessa Richmond, styled a la
Thomas Pynchon, I might be up for it. Could do the pubic good to see
in clerks the potential to be a bit more than prickly.
Link: The Tyee
Life is a box of chocolates? (9 February 2009)

I hope Dolphin is right that there exists an omni-present left wing
media that complains loudly when anyone dares identify
unemployment insurance recipients as lazy. It would be nice, though,
if the left (and this article) argued that the way we became modern
and advanced and all, is from being a nation that, however
inadequately, appreciates and supports free play and whimsical
invention. It's a pity when even the left -- the wing responsible for
societal innovation, true progress -- has to make itself seem as
bourgeois boring as possible ("We're a nation that appreciates the
virtues of 9 to 5") in order to be taken seriously.
(Cause seriously, the "California" culture that produced Apple and
Pixar, which just never seems to stop innovating and being relevant,
is one which values free play -- recess and fun -- as much as it does
back to the books, life is a box -- naught but a plain, boring,
cardboard box -- rectumtude.) (Actually, it probably doesn't value
that much at all ; )
Link: The Tyee
1533
Lazy, no good, little brats! (9 February 2009)

And so, too, did Hillary call her daughter's generation lazy (which got
her an earful -- way to go, Chelsea!).
Folks, when politicians start calling people lazy, they're entering into
a trance-state they won't soon be exiting. The parts of their brain
which we're all active when *their own parents* called them "lazy,"
"no good," and "worthless," are all reved-up again. It's not "you"
they're really thinking of -- it's themselves, but nevertheless, owing to
a little psychic defence mechanism called "projection," you'll be the
one who gets met out all the punishment.
If talk/thought like this interests you, please do check out (and maybe
even consider thoroughly exploring) Lloyd DeMause's Psychohistory
website (and particulary the book he posted there -- The Emotional
Life of Nations):http://www.psychohistory.com/
Link: The Tyee
anarcho: (4 February 2009)
Anarcho: 1920s Moderns reacted against Victorians, and made fun of
their prose style. They deemed it sentimental and florid; they argued
their writers catered to the tastes of their female readership; and
argued in favor of (in Raymond Chandler's phrase) "brutal honesty":
masculine, straightforward prose that was simple, direct, and clear -what you are asking from me, what most teachers of writing ask from
their writers. It IS a masculine prose-style. It was fashioned by
moderns deliberately -- to help beat back the overbearing Victorian
Matriarch "bitch." And its predominance has made it so that today,
even if you like Victorian prose, you had better not imitate the style
when you write papers/essays -- you'll be killed for it.
I'd have to do research to find out what they specifically thought of
Dickens and such, but I know of Henry James (someone whose prose
bridges both periods) that Fitzgerald and Hemingway tended to make
fun of his genteel, femmy, prose style.
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I'm genuinely sorry my writing amounts to a mass of words for you.

Not much fun if I can't communicate even the sense of what I was
after.
ME2: I've very well educated. Specifically, I'm a frequent visitor of
Itunes U, and by now I bet I have the equivalent of ten-or-maybetwelve degrees. When they decide to credit this, I'll put down those
dustjackets (how did you know?), and spend my time admiring all the
degrees papering my bedroom walls.
Link: The Tyee
I'm a flaneur, sir, not a frontiersman (4 February 2009)

It sure is a loaded sentence, I agree, but it's my style, and if I hadn't
accidently edited out the missing words, I would have been quite
happy with it. You do know that the moderns favored the short,
simple, and direct because they found Victorian flourish, all their
sentences, with all their endless qualifiers, that never seemed to end,
very feminine, right? That is, you are aware that there are some
feminists out there who identify this particular writing philosophy
you support, as arms of a masculinist culture that aims to stigmatize
prose/thought that might play a part in creating a world which truly
values/respects the feminine -- that is, prose which encourages
discussion rather than confrontation, imprecise but suggestive
intuition over brute fact and deductive logic, the personal and
affective/sentimental over stoic, blank-faced, reservedness -- right?
I'll take the french salon over the frontier, anyday. If you truly aim to
speak to me, then please try and find some virtue in rhetorical
fourish, language play, dissemination, imprecision, and conversations
that go on and on and on, in all their tittery, glittery, gossipy, glory:
I'll be more apt to listen to you in a way which might encourage me to
change, if you speak to me in my own language.
Link: The Tyee
1535
The story of one white bigot . . . (8 February 2009)

Called a low-life, a reactionary, an obstacle to progress, racist, antiwoman (and even, pro-rape), in an environment where offering
anything other than a loud cheer (or should we just say, offering up a
Jeffrey J.!--Great stuff, Tyee!) when encountering any subject matter
which comes within a thousand miles of what might be construed,
even in a thick, pea-soup, foggy day, as PC, is hunting death-smack,
Patrick McEvoy (-Halston) could not be broken: taking heart in
others -- such as Emma Arabella -- who kept going (when others
might not have) despite the daily cruelties the cruel world offered her,
Patrick kept hope that he might one day succeed in showing future
would-be low-life, anti-progress, reactionist, racist, anti-woman (and
even, pro-rape)ists, how, with a strong belief in yourself, and a little
pluck and luck!, you really can succeed, despite it all.
--You know M2, this could work for me: I think you might be right that
narratives like this one -- despite their evident silliness -- can help
those struggling for fair recognition keep on at it. (Anyway, I certainly
hope so, for it would be a pity if the world wins and we are left with
only one acceptable/permissable narrative line, and with true
progressives left on the out by properly "clothed" conservatives [if
Harper could transmogrify himself into a black woman, he would],
wondering what the hell just happened.)
Link: The Tyee
Solid as Barock? (4 February 2009)
There's a lot of talk about rage/anger in the press right now. If we're
feeling immersed, trapped, in a rage "miasma," I wonder if we'll
actually soon be in the mood to go easy on the man-hate and even
surrect the idea of man as knight, so that we have something
1536
strong/certain/singular in place to pull us on out? (Not that feminists

don't uphold the idea that men are strong -- however anxious they
depict men, I've seen many a male professor declare themselves
feminist because they liked how women scholars made men seem
such potent hegemons [Freud does much the same for the castrating
father, too, which is why so many 20s moderns went for his
theories.])
Link: Salon
Rage (4 February 2009)

The recession related levity seems to have lasted all of two weeks, eh?
It may be that we are rageful because we are feeling abandoned -- we
still imagine our leaders as neglectful parents -- parents who won't
attend to us even though we're enduring all this carnage earning the
masochistic wage of only ten bucks an hour! The benefit of working
10 bucks an hour (something you've referred to a few times in your
last articles), btw, is that "your" rage is unquestionably righteous -"you" work the "front lines" for peanuts while "armchair" managers
coast on 10 mill a year?! Guillotines, indeed!
And what about the Americans? They've been sucking out our
lifeblood on the cheap for ages! Even if it further sinks our economy
(which is what we want anyway, to get rid of all the anxiety economic
growth brings with it), it's about time someone stood up to those
brutes! Time for (our version of) Pitchfork Pat (Buchanan)!? Why,
perhaps -- yes: watch the transformation former neo-con Harper
joyously makes to court our favor and direct our rage!
Link: The Tyee
Willy Wonka and the Great, Crass, Palimbaugh (3 February 2009)
1537
Further (and different) thought, as seeing images of Palin and

Limbaugh bring Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to mind: I
can easily imagine Limbaugh and Palin both morphing into grotesque
"spoiled" children. Obama will become the ascetic Willy Wonka (I
know he was amongst pleasure, but he was the clean, neutered
ascetic, in my judgment), and dispatch the (bad) emotion-full
children.
Link: Salon
Anti-superbowl ad more than it is pro-veggie (3 February 2009)

PETA knew they weren't going to get NBC play. It actually is about
mocking/shaming the average football fan -- it pretends at first, with
aggressive guitar chords and shapely, disrobing women, to be about
arousing male interest, to be "in the men's corner," then switches to
be about women confidently self-pleasuring themselves. That is, male
pretence to be in control is what is being laughed at here.
Link: The Tyee
Couples (1 February 2009)
Couples who spend most of their life together in a loving, sharing
way, are not best understood as traditional, for history has offered us
very little of such. My guess is that the healthiest of the current
generation, who are very at ease with the specific sort of talk about
multiple-partners, orgasm and pleasure, Vanessa offers, and who
would find 50s Playboy stuff, at best, humorously clumsy and silly,
will end up in the kind of lifelong (essentially) monogamous
relationships History has so long held up as the ideal. Not about
control, not about putting a ring on it -- but about life partners
enjoying an ongoing, enjoyable "conversation"--sexual and
1538
otherwise--with one another. Relaxed and fun, not tight and dutiful.
We've got to stop teaching boys a history where their origins are in
the management and abuse of women. It's sin-focused and abusive.
Something drove men to feel the need to want to control women. The
current answer seems to amount to suggestions of some inherent
badness, but I think fear of female sexuality arises out of boys being
used sexually by their mothers -- out of real felt personal experience
of fearful female sexuality, out of incest. Women are always suspect in
the male imagination after that. As women get more respect and love,
they feel less of a need to use their boys to ward off their depression,
and their boys grow up fearing women, less and less. And so we get
some of the healthier couplings we see today.
Link: The Tyee
Generation-will-never-own-a-home (30 January 2009)
Better not wait for your next life, Jeffrey J., for the time to participate
in the dopamine rush of equal rep. while all else rots (in anguish) or
wilts (in boredom?), is now. The generation Vanessa talked about
earlier Generationwillneverownahome -- would have known
instantly, if Hillary had won the presidency, that she'd have continued
sending young people to their deaths in Afghanistan, and talked a lot
more about how young people need "to work harder" (read: suffer
more). And some of them will soon get over their Obama worship -which promised the near irresistible vision of pacified parents (end of
discord), generations uniting -- and understand too that he'll
primarily be about making sure baby-boomers are taken care of while
they spend out their remaining years thinking themselves all Green,
tolerant (did you know there were no black people in the major
leagues in 1940?, and now we have [voted in] a black president!),
relevant, and wonderful -- on their way to heaven (while tended to by
admiring youngins), surely!
There is nothing bold these days about advancing women's rights.
1539
(Unless you long for hell, when the subject of women or race comes
up in any conversation, you'd better find means to broadcast your
wished identification and thorough support and sympathy!) And
don't you see that we've set things up so that people like Harper are
going to have such an easy time of it, 'cause all they'll need to do is
hire more non-white females to advance destructive policies than the
opposition does to hopefully advance nurturing ones -- and the
opposition can readily be blocked or broken with charges of
racism/sexism? For a taste of what this is like, check out how FOX
News tried to identify Ralph Nader as racist (and itself as pure)
here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IshiClQqCM
Link: The Tyee
Watch over the next several months (26 January 2009)
Watch over the next several months just how readily the Right
(including, soon enough, Rush Limbaugh [but perhaps not Ann
Coulter]) identifies themselves Obamanites/Obamaknights. Within a
year, watch FOX News declare itself in full support of Obama. (More
than this, watch FOX declare itself the Obama station -- though this
might take a couple.) And watch progressives, anyone on the left, who
finds problems with his militant approach and policies, increasingly
declared racist and threatened with the worst. Obama is the right face
to make the intolerable more than tolerable, and impossible to
protest, and the time to stop romancing the new messiah, is now.
Incidently, I've been called a few names above, myself -- two of them,
harmless, but one of them, in this climate, especially dangerous. I
look forward to seeing a protective, EDITED FOR PERSONAL
INSULT.
Link: The Tyee
American Apparel: Pedopilia or Child Advocate? (22 January 2009)
1540
Sexualizing children is crossing the line. And exposing

underage kids to graphic sexual imagery, as Butt magazine
does, is sexualizing them.Does anyone other than a
pedophile disagree? [. . .]
Unfortunately, American Apparel thrives on sex-related
controversy, so media attention only encourages them.
Founder and CEO Dov Charney is notorious for collecting
sexual harassment suits from female employees who object
to his frequent self-pleasuring as outlined in Jane magazine
in 2004, and other media. Charney likes to whack-off for the
benefit of reporters, too.
So, bad press they love. But would the company be so thrilled
if their stores were restricted to those over 18? Shoppers
could be carded at the door, effectively denying them access
to that oh-so-lucrative tween and teen girl audience.
It's not an unreasonable approach. As I followed the
coverage, it struck me that porn is a lot like smoking:
something that was once restricted to certain social
gatherings or private quarters. Eventually smoking
encroached on every aspect of life until it was no longer
considered bad manners to smoke at your desk, to puff while
people ate in restaurants, or to light up while walking down
a crowded street.
So we introduced bylaws to keep disgusting and hazardous
behaviour out of the public square -- aimed particularly at
the protection of children.
It wouldn't be difficult to make it a requirement of business
licensing that retailers serving underage audiences keep
tasteless-albeit-legal products away from public view. Now,
no one thinks twice about tobacco being kept behind
cupboard doors.
Extend that to TV advertising. No more ads featuring antisocial images for goods marketed at children. We did it with
1541
cancer-sticks and booze, why not limit ads for sex-andhorror thrill-kill films?" (Shannon Rupp, "The Porn Glut,"
The Tyee, Jan. 21 2009)
Did you know, kids, that the Depression-era also marked the return to
ascendence of the disapproving Maternal scold (banished for awhile,
as women repeatedly did one horrible un-Victorian thing or another),
who saw little but scandal and perversity in the seditious, go-go 20s.
Today's version will further circumspect your freedom (and it's felt
pretty friggin' tight for some time now too, hasn't it? -- turn off your
x-box! stop listening to your ipod [. . . and listen to me]! what kind of
comics are you reading?! -- how disgusting!, let's introduce you to
more wholesome fair, like the great outdoors! (but I liked reading
them, mommy.).
When she comes at you, so righteously affirmed, please feel free, in
whichever way you wish, to sc&* the bi*&%h, royally. She can't help
herself, it's true, but she aims to do nothing less, to you.
Link: The Tyee
-----
photo from npr

I think what really bothers many parents about American Apparel is
that their kids actually find empowerment in the clothing. To a
certain extent, through the clothing, kids become inaccessible to their
parents, feel more independent from them, and become part of the
glaring street army that truly can buttress predators' attention and
march its way on into adulthood.
Yes, this is no ideal. I don't much like the uniform, "socialist," style.
But many kids feel power in the "black" mass, the collective,
1542
aggressive sexuality, the sparseness and sureness of style, and this

should be respected.
As for porn. If the 80s and on had amounted to a continuation and
expansion of Jim Henson, the Bee Gees, Jimmy Carter, of innocent
fun, porn these days wouldn't be so much about "feel the
shame/pain!" We talk about 9/11, and about what this age of
uncertainty is doing to our kids. But the turn-around occurred much
earlier. And so we have a large populace -- at the very least, one whole
generation -- that turns to the Dark Knight, or dark porn, or dark
comics, cause they see reflected there-in a recognizable world they
find relevance in. (Maybe they hope to find answers there . . .)
If turning (our attention) to our kids amounts to what is has been, a
further turning *on* them, what might they do when they intuit there
no longer is any escape? The usual answer is that they throw
themselves onto one sacrificial battlefield or another. (Afghanistan is
looming . . . Or maybe they'll just start shooting each other again?
Make it even more a part of their daily routine.)
Finally, I genuinely like that the discussed author enjoyed watching
amateur couples do "the nasty" so affectionately and funly. It would
be nice if there was a lot more of that on the web -- something
adolescents interested in sexuality/sex could find easy access to. (I
imagine there are a more than a few lesbian writers who find this
author's preferred tastes, more than a bit staid and oppressive,
though.)
cheers,patrick mcevoy-halston
-----
No one, so far as I know, is attacking whatever 'amuses'

adults. Their freedom to practice whatever perversion they
choose is limited by the fact that other adults and children
have rights and freedoms too. As someone whose primary
purpose seems to be to promote loving, caring, happy
1543
children in similar family situations and the kinds of things

which make that kind of life experience available to most
and hopefully all children, I'd have thought that protecting
them from the kind of thing Dov Charney seems to wish to
put front and centre as part of his advertising would be
entirely in keeping with your philosophy.
As for Charney, I could care less, and furthermore, his brand
of narcissistic self-indulgence and Oscar Wilde's genius are
poles apart, in my view. I wonder what his uncle thinks of
him?
Suggesting that an interlocutor's contrasting analysis is
simply a generational artifact is about as effective (and
frankly as dishonest) as a way to support public
masturbation as your attack on David Beers was a couple of
days ago.
If you can't make the case for your point of view without
suggesting that your opinion is superior to that of another
anonymous poster's opinion(s) because of relative age is
bizarre.
Especially considering you have no idea how old your
interlocutors actually are.
Try again, you can do better than that. (GWest, Response to
post, Porn Glut)
I don't believe the intent I'm hearing is to protect the children. I really
don't. I know the Puritan tone, and I'm hearing it (though not
exclusively) in this discussion. If I didn't, I would have talked more
about what we need to do so that children don't find themselves
interested in dark-themed anything. (Woodend in her recent "post,"
suggested that all children are attracted to fearful things, and that all
we can do is sort of work to manage things so that kids' own natural
instincts don't lead them into harm. I don't believe that kids are
naturally drawn to dark things; rather, I believe they come to know of
darkness, of dark things, from their family's complicated attitudes
towards them, and turn to "art" that replicates that experience in an
1544
effort to deal with their fears. At this point, if you simply take away
that "art," you may have taken something away that actually
empowers them. You risk becoming [once again] the predator. [And
by "you," I'm not really thinking of you, G West.])
I don't think that Charney is best understood as an exploiter (the
article says the reporter in question kind of enjoyed it when Charney
did his masturbation bit. You find this difficult to believe. I don't.)
You do. Maybe we're the same age, but when you sense such a gap
between how the same thing is apprehended -- especially in regards
to a sexual theme, especially in regards to the sexual activities of a
relatively young guy--the normal way (the way that most readily
comes to mind) to typify it is as arising out of a generational divide.
Age-wise, it might well be wrong, but sense-wise, it strikes me as
possibly right. (So I went with it.)
(You wonder what his uncle thinks of his behavior?)
As for the whole Beers thing [editors note: for explanation of
what this thing is, please see below]. I see Shannon Rupp as a
righteous predator. I suspect she and those who support her efforts
are going to encourage, not deflate, suffering in children. I think she'll
find some way of characterizing a lot of things that kids these days go
for in terms of sexual practice and general activities, as perverse.
She'll go after the suppliers, justify her efforts in terms of "not
abandoning the young," but she'll make anyone who does anything
she doesn't like feel like cowering -- most especially the kids. I hope
the Tyee understands the dangers this kind of predator presents. And
appreciates when people speak up loudly -- against them.
---Denouement (aka: the David Beers thing)
---------------------------------------------When she comes at you, so righteously affirmed, EDITED
FOR SEXIST COMMENT. She can't help herself, it's true,
but she aims to do nothing less, to you. (editors change to
my original post. Note: bold not in original)
1545
----Moderator
EDITED FOR SEXIST COMMENT ?????? I can't believe I
just read that!! NO EFFING WAY, MR BEERS- - - I will not
contribute to any GD PC outfit.
Censoring in an attempt to maintain decorum - perhaps. But
you can put censoring to prevent hurt feelings where the sun
don't shine. (ME2, Response to post, Porn Glut)
----ME2 and Patrick McEvoy
McEvoy's words encouraged this course of action for a
person subjected to a "maternal scold": "F**K the *B*TCH"
any way you choose"... or words virtually the same, with
clearly the same meaning (I didn't keep them).
That's playing very loosely with encouraging rape. I
censored the prescription for that action. Not the swear
words. And if you say it was a joke, that will not change my
decision in the least. It was a terribly sexist joke.
Our commenter guidelines say sexist remarks are not
allowed on our threads. If you choose not to abide by the
rules, please feel free to comment on other sites that consider
exhortations to rape, and other sexist comments, perfectly
fine. We don't. (David Beers, Response to post, Porn Glut)
*Patrick McEvoy-Halston's* words, that is, David Beers. And if you
truly would encourage others to comment freely on other sites that
consider exhortations to rape perfectly fine, then you, indeed, by your
own standards, should censor yourself. For encouraging rape is never
okay, on your own site or anyone else's. Mr. Beers.
Or were you being sarcastic? Using language-play? Surely the matter
at hand is too serious for any such, Mr. Beers. You might, after all, be
misconstrued, and end up surrecting what you claim to want to
suppress.
1546
(How seriously do you want to be taken, anyway? How relevant are

you?)
----Your full name doesn't appear above your posts on this
thread. Sorry I didn't refer to you in full.
Regarding your questions: I was neither being sarcastic nor
engaging in word play. I was merely acknowledging that
there are other sites on the internet where hateful and/or
insensitive sexist comments are allowed, even encouraged. I
don't control those sites and of course don't seek to control
you beyond the boundaries of The Tyee. But if I didn't make
myself clear: Comments like the one of yours that was edited
are not welcome here and will again be edited by the
moderator. If you persist in making them, you will be
blocked from commenting on The Tyee. (David Beers,
Response to post, The Porn Glut)
Good. When you say things like "please feel free to comment on other
sites that consider exhortations to rape, and other sexist comments,
perfectly fine," it's best to clarify yourself. Rape is not something to
joke about, sir.
----Since you treat this a joke or a chance for one upmanship, I'll
assume you don't accept my decision to edit your comment,
and so don't intend to abide by our commenting rules. Do I
have that right? (David Beers, Response to post, The Porn
Glut)
I didn't realize you were looking for confirmation that I would abide
by your commenting rules. You gave fair warning, and I didn't follow
with anything that would be construed as sexist. What is your
problem, exactly? I have every right to point out that your phrasing
could easily be construed as encouraging hate-speech. You should
have acknowledged that.
1547
Link: The Porn Glut (Shannon Rupp)

"Gran Torino" (9 January 2009)
SPOILER ALERT!
Saw it this afternoon. Here's what I think:
First off, the climax is just as I expected -- Eastwood's character does
finish things off with a macho display of violence. Yes, he pulls out a
lighter rather than a gun, but the delivery is violent, and essentially
alone, he meats out his (evidently evil) opponents' destruction. (What
would have been unexpected is if Walt listened to his priest's advice,
contacted the police, and *they* figured out a way to inhibit the
gangs' predations; instead, we get a priest who comes to learn that
Walt was right all along).
Also, I wish the film was more aware of an interesting equivalence it
sets up: namely, that Walt and the evil gang-bangers share violent
reactions to trespasses into their territory. But as Dorothy notes, the
film is not interested in drawing connections between Walt and gangbangers. They are set up so we have no empathy for them, so that we
can hate them. (Those who want to war against druggies, will shape
their fantasies in the same way.)
Also, Thau is not set up to take things over. He ends the good boy that
really, at heart, nobody takes too seriously -- the fate Michael avoided
in the Godfather by taking violence into his hands. Walt is to be taken
seriously. And so too -- to some extent --the priest, who confronts
things head-on himself.
Also, this is a grandparent's film. Right now I live in Toronto's annex
-- a place populated by liberal 60-year-olds who are forever hoping
they might take in as renters those who are quiet, deferent,
respecters-of-elders types, and who are forever complaining about
their insufficiently attendant children. In short, they seek out
"orientals" for the same reason some older men seek out young
women. Wish the film had the sass to point this out.
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Also, didn't like how the movie portrayed Walt's kids. If in confession
he admits to being haunted all his life for not attending to his kids,
the film should have showed the kids being the way they were owing
to a lack of something (i.e. attendance), rather than owing to them
being "spoiled" (god I hate that word) by too much of something.
In sum, not a film that will encourage older people to come to respect
the youngins these days. More a film for the Don Cherrys of the world
(wear a shirt and tie, young man! sacrifice yourself for noble causes!).
All this said, I enjoyed the film. I cared for the people in the film. I
liked seeing Clint interact with his neighbors -- a lot. I liked a lot of
his relationship with the neighborhood girl (though she did overact at
times, and I didn't like how her overt, urgent, hurried sassiness at a
certain part of the film really seemed primarily about getting us to
like her all so much that we'd want to hate those who attacked her as
much as Walt does). And I liked Walt.
Finally, Dorothy, please consider getting into the fray like Steve is
wont to do with his reviews. Don't just post and vanish. Stay awhile.
Link: Gran Torino: Is this Eastwood's Self-Pitying Swan Song?
About Stewart and Colbert (5 January 2009)

Colbert et. al aren't just clever parasites--they care more than that.
But as Alda rightly senses, they aren't types to expose themselves to
any risk in pursuit of something they believe in (both have had it way
too easy these last number of years).
Also, I don't think I've ever encountered a satirist who isn't somewhat
(or very) conservative. Like the conservative (well, at least he was
interested in psychoanalysis) Christopher Lasch was prone to do,
through ridicule, they attack and in part hope to help demolish, many
progressive ideas, better things.
(And Rick Mercer is the worst. He is a bully--he picks on things [like
Americans] that win him easy praise and no strong push-back, and
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he'll do as told by anyone who clearly owns the throne. Once the
cultural sphere shifts more obviously to the right, he'll be Harper's
dog, before you know it.)
Reponse to Lloyd (1 January 2009)

Lloyd, research does nothing if one is the mood to imagine someone a
certainway. Everything you're saying about Obama's mother could
lead to differentconclusions, though. She could have woken up at 4
o'clock every morning inorder help her son become the person he
wants to be, but how many mothersdevote themselves to their kids
primarily out of their own self-assessmentneeds, out of a desire to
fashion for themselves their preferred son? Everyhockey mom in
Canada wakes up at 4 in the morning ostensibly for theirchildren, and
how many of these kids end up living out their mother'sdreams -- of
course, not all, but many, many, many. You write of her
"abandonment by her spouse and [of how she] had to work." Come
on, Lloyd,you're the one who always talks about how put-upon
mothers are hardly theones to look to for great nurturance. And why
narrate it as of her being"abandoned." You know this type of narrative
plays to our desire to protectthe mother and demonize the father, the
nasty patriarchal ass, who isunwilling to show any gratitude for all his
wife's love, any sympathy at all forall her considerable hardships.
Further it works against looking at othermotives behind spousal
break-ups. Many mothers are primarily interested inhoarding their
children all to themselves, and DIRECT the fathers elsewhere.Many
mothers are masochists who direct their spouses to abandon them.
Andwhat healthy, happy mother ends up marrying someone who
"abandons" her,anyway? If he was that awful, she couldn't have all
that great, either(Seriously, don't like end up marrying like?).I don't
think he had terrible mothering. But I actually don't think eitherhe or
his wife rise even to the level of the Clintons -- and I don't think
they'reall that great, either. Right now there's a lot of people who are
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just so quick to identify Obama asa good guy. I think this in done in
part to demonstrate our owngoodness for we are
progressive/advanced/good enough to cheer the arrivalof the first
black president, and recognize both he and his mothers benevolence.
Even Joan Walsh, the editor of Salon, after being an earlyholdout, has
succumbed to this desire. But watch out!, for Joan was rightto think
something terribly amiss about Obama's willingness to allow his
operatives to shut down progressive critiques of his policy goals
throughcharges of racism. In fact, my guess is that it will be through
Obamathat progressive thought -- which won the 60s cultural war -is effectively puton the defensive, as progressives are effectively
characterized as whiteelitists, as those fundamentally insensitive to
the real needs/desires ofthose they aim to serve. I will be watching for
this to see if I'veguessed right -- hopefully to those willing to believe I
might just be right.
patrickmh
Response to Bailey (29 Dec. 2008)

The drama you are drawing attention to and reinforcing is the very
attractive one of "good christian soldier," learning/finding ways to
ward of "Satan's" various temptations/lies. We do this through
vigilant attention to, and management of, our desires.
I like your encouragement of introspection, but I amproposing that
you too are offering something -- in your case, a strategy -- framed so
that it will appeal to many at a very deep level, so that it draws one in
before ample consideration. (Who doesn't want these days to imagine
themselves especially well-armored to take on a threatening world?)
Personally, I would like to encourage people to consider that in fact
the would-be manipulators are much more our puppets than they are
our controllers. They don't so much manipulate our desires as they do
1551
play their prescribed role and do their damnedest to satisfy them.

Their power evaporates, we get better politicians/corporate heads -not when we learn to control our desires, but when our desires
themselves change for the better. And targeting THAT problem
requires finding a way to give love to those who received too little
earlier in their lives (and who therefore possess desires that
overwhelm, which are dangerous) -- that is, as much through desire
and emotion as through intellect.
Link: The Tyee
Response to Shannon Rudd's "Beward of neuromarketing" (28 Dec.

2008)
My first thought is that this sort of article has me thinking of the
popularity of Dark Knight, which suggests that for some reason we
kind of want right now to imagine villains as master-minds, as all
powerful (did you notice how many things just seemed to go the
Joker's way, btw?), and kind of too readily "co-operate" with
arguments made by those who would show just how hopeless things
are right now.
It does sound like Buy-ology is one of those books written by someone
who enjoys believing that the rest of us (not him, surely) are despite
our hope/belief that we are otherwise -- all too easily moved and
controlled by those who know better than we do about how people
work, and so doesn't really want to explore the considerable problem
subliminal advertisers are faced with amongst a considerable some in
our populace.
Namely: If somewhere deep down in our subconscious we don't want
to "associate" with those who would use and abuse us, we won't do so
(and there are prominent neuropsychiatrists -- who know that our
subconsciouses are not as Freud argued, that is, essentially all the
same, but vastly variant, depending on how well-nurtured we were as
infants -- who'd back me up on this [Allan Schore comes to mind]).
1552
Sensed deep down there, we know when we're in the company of

manipulators. And if you've been raised in a healthy family, in a
healthy community, you'll recoil from (rather than be attracted to)
manipulation, and spend much of your teenage/adult life (the
influence of commercial culture, notwithstanding) associating with
businesses that share your respect of others and the world. And there
are many, many businesses out there that are like that. And many
more ready to emerge.
(And second time in a row, Shannon, you've written an article where
you begin by summoning forth mighty villains, and finish by
concluding that resistance is futile. Are you helping set the scene so
that when a true hero arrives, we'll cheer especially loudly?)
Link: The Tyee
In response to attacking Margaret Atwood (25 Dec. 2008)
It's too bad that growth now seems to have become a neo-con term.
(One would hope progressives would see something in it they might
like. Stasis -- homeo or otherwise -- just sounds so conservative.) So
the story of evolutionary biology is that we start off with lots and lots
of stuff, and end up with the same amount of lots and lots of stuff?
We never did just have a couple fish, and end up with a bounty of
them?
Atwood -- being somewhat typically Canadian -- finds growth,
anxious (so do I, some), and so all this activity has her thinking of
resting and quiet talks. Periods of manic economic growth (what
we've been living through) make most people anxious. Industrial
England made the Cranford ladies extremely uncomfortable -- to the
delight of Elizabeth Gaskell! The 1920s were another such period, and
its termination was ultimately greeted with a sense of relief (in the
Great Depression, there were FEWER suicides -- no joke!). And so
ended economic growth. And so ended artistic growth. And so ended
societal growth.
I bought a lot. I also experienced a lot. It was what I had to do during
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this period to live. Now that the societal climate has changed, I won't
buy as much, but I'll still find ways to grow.
Link: The Tyee
In response to "New Depression Chic" (25 Dec. 2008)
I said this:
Shannon,
Things are changing. People are declining paper bags, asking about
where this or that particular item was made, and other such, much
more than they used to. Part of this is owing to them being better
informed; part of this is owing to their desire to help out; and part of
this is owing to their desire to "shape" themselves so they seem less
worthy of punishment from a culture that seems extremely impatient
for the "privileged," "sexist," consumerist," "glutonous" (etc.), clearly
bad lot to get familiar with the real Hurt.
I also said this:
I very much do agree that if Canadians don't want there to be a
depression, there won't be one (wonderful insight, by the way).
Accepting this thesis as true of course demands assessing human
beings in a different way than as simply homo economicus, that is, as
beings who are ruled primarily by a desire to make a buck. It would
demand accepting that human beings can actually desire the world to
turn bad, for people to lose their jobs and most of their money, for
people to be hurt, in mass -- even if means that they themselves will
suffer. It is theory that would be laughed at by many, but I think,
though, that the alert Tyee reader -- perhaps even by looking at how
many Tyee contributers tend to assess our contemporary civilization
and unfold their visions of the future -- already intuits the truth in all
this.
I would also like to add that, for fear of the efficacy of others' efforts
to make their depression fantasies come true, I really do fear that the
next number of years could quite possibly be quite terrifying for a lot
1554
of us. My sense is that I am not alone in suspecting this; that this

suspicion might be widely held; and that consumers (hate that word,
by the way, but that's a conversation for another day) are quite right
to sort of continue-on with their old ways (if that really is what they
are doing) until they are provided a more surer sense that we will get
through all this. (I would hardly be pleased if people started holingup in preparation of a Cormac McCarthy-like vision of the future--I
survived Great Depression 2 'cause I knew how to organic farm and
you didn't, friend.)
Link: The Tyee
Response to alda and realisticman (25 Dec. 2008)
alda: I believe you when you say you believe the power hungry are not
monsters but rather the sick who deserve our sympathy (which is how
I believe you characterized them). But, from reading above, you tend
to characterize them, government leaders, and the sheeple, in ways
that make them primarily seem blameworthy. People who "abuse
their power," who "buy this pablum, of course, hook, line, and
sinker," don't seem so much those who deserve sympathy and therapy
but rather those who deserve what's coming to them.
I would never have anyone stand straight in line for Christian,
masochistic sacrifice. I'm all for the fight. But we'll win sooner, I
think, if we find a way to like those we're fighting. Some of them will
come onto our side.
And btw: My focus is primarily on those who vote in the politicians
who essentially work to abuse them. The reason I attend to them
more than I do power-brokers or members of parliament, is because I
think they are the ones in charge, and right now they're getting what
they want -- namely, abuse. I believe that if you really want to know
the true answer behind why the people "are so gullible?," not find
yourself so exasperated and angered when you listen to tales told by
grieving parents, wives and husbands of dead soldiers, you should
1555
please spend more time thinking about the pathology in the people,
about what happens to a populace who for the most part received
insufficient love for them to believe they deserve to be happy, to
believe that progressive societal gains need not be followed by some
kind of punishment/sacrifice, to believe and so readily accept that
they don't deserve the hard-lot in life.
Realisticman: Hello. Glad you like my sic mammilian (poetic license)
hamsters and poetic manners. I like them too!
Link: The Tyee
Response to alda and margot (25 Dec. 2008)

alda: I agree that wars are never motivated by the motivations we
usually ascribe them to, and that the left is on the right track in
resisting the conservative rule that, since life is complex, wars must
be thought of as the result of a myriad of causes, and instead push on
with the singular argument that wars are simply about one simple
and awful human motivation -- greed. Still, the idea that wars are
primarily about stealing oil and other resources is the left's current
way -- their only way -- of understanding war, and I do have some
complaints with it.
One, the idea that there are evil, greedy people out there sounds quite
Christian, antique; I like that the 20th-century breathed life to so
many ways of looking at human motivations that allowed us to see
pathology, rather than evil, in human beings.
Two, if we set up our opponents as villains, so that we are right to
exult when and if they endure humiliating defeats, do we also blind
ourselves to how much we enjoy it when they fall, how much we too
are moved by less than desirable motivations, such as hate? Do we
"show," by our anger, by our desire for revenge, that we at some level
kind of need villains? -- that they might just be, our puppets?
Three, anyone who is a war profiteer would love the way the left
currently narrates them: that is, as evil but cunning master
1556
manipulators, who require a Herculean populist effort to bring down

-- it makes them feel powerful; it's a reward and a reminder to
continue on. What they truly hate, is to be made to feel weak and
irrelevant. And, to a certain extent, they are weak to those who see the
way forward as focussing on those who promote and encourage love
in the world.
Margot: You're aware, I gather, that you rather seem to prefer
imagining yourself a caged hamster who dreams of soaring hawks and
roaring dinosaurs. I like to imagine you as the big-brained
mammilian hamster, who can also see in hawks and dinosaurs, great
shells and gaped vacuity. That is, as someone "greater than," herself.
Link: The Tyee
Response to blogger, Sharing is Good (25 Dec. 2008)

Hi SharingIsGood,
The way to communicate with those who vote conservative, who
believe the whole environment-thing is overdone, who think those
who would oppose the war in Afghanistan are essentially traitors, etc.,
is to find a way to like them, to respect them.
How is this possible? The old way of thinking of them as primarily in
need of our cavalier attacks on the media that manipulates, uses
them, allowed us to mostly focus our attention of their/our collective
enemies -- we didn't really have to face up to the fact that we likely
thought their tastes, their company-- *them* -- kind of disgusting, we
really didn't have to look at them. And so now as some on the left
begin to acknowledge that the problem is somehow in the "sheeple"
as much as in the "shephards," the left is left with only the knee-jerk
response -- "What the fuck is wrong with you people!" --and so we
think of national collapse, and hope that the beasts who voted in
Harper "enjoy" the hell on earth he will surely provide them with.
If we take a longer, less self-deceptive look at the broad populace, if
we allow ourselves to understand ourselves as democratic, with
1557
democratic sympathies, while still overtly assessing them in what

might easily be made to seem an aristocratic way (i.e., that they are by
constituion not as healthy as we are), we can move toward loving and
respecting those who would still support Harper, regardless of how
often the "Tyee" found its way onto their porches. You'll see in their
eyes and their demeanor--they have not known the love we have
known. They are the results of childhoods involving a considerable
amount of fear and sadism. AND, almost no matter how damaged,
how limited their ability to love is, we'll see that they likely still
possess the ability to read in other peoples' eyes, true respect. They're
not much used to such a response; they'll likely think they probably
don't deserve it; but they'll love us for it. And, eventually, as we listen
to them with more true respect than we hereto have managed, they'll
better listen and attend to our stories, too.
That, in my judgment, is the way to get to them, SharingIsGood. But
the truth is, if your childhood was garbage, there's only so much
growth possible. Tactically, as always, you've got to get to the
children. May every well tempered, progressive person, go into
education.
And have kids (though not too many, lest they experience
abandonment issues -- one or two will do, nicely).
Link: The Tyee
Reponse to post, "Panic press sweepts the nation" (25 Dec. 2008)
Articles like this one do continue to prop-up the idea that if only the
centre-left would get a fair hearing, the Canadian populace would
receive them well. Most of the left, it seems, still believe that the only
way you could have an economic/political system exist which
produces a country of haves-and-have-nots, which wastes enormous
resources and destroys the lives of countless in wars -- and which
does much the same with the environment -- which works against the
best interest of those who vote for those who continue the system's
1558
existence, is because people have been misinformed or left

uninformed, by the evil powers of the misanthropic status-quo.
I don't believe this is the case, and instead think that the reason
progressives are only so well received in this country is not because
the wrong books/papers/arguments have been put before the
populace, not because other viewpoints have been stigmatized or
hidden, but because too many Cdns are not raised with sufficient
nurturance for them to sort of naturally believe -- at a gut level -- that
life should be good, that they ought to, deserve to, live in a warm,
welcoming, world. Instead, they see in Harper and Ignatieff -- their
own. And that's our problem.
Link: The Tyee
In response to someone's praise of "Atonement" (25 Dec. 2008)

Your reaction to Atonement is quite different from that of many of my
friends. They found the book easy to get into, but boring after the
80th page or so. It kind of feels right, from my reading experience of
the book, to say that the rest of the book after the first part's
implosion amounts to a rather extended "mulling things over." And a
whole lifetime spent mulling things over is much, much worse than
the one evening poor Scrooge had to endure doing something similar,
and hardly fair as holiday fare. No?
Link: The Tyee
Battlefront (25 Dec. 2008)

Margot said this:
"People are reviled for refusing to do the Santa dance with their
children.
Santa is about training children to pretend to believe the
preposterous in order to get a material reward, however destructive
1559
and brain-sucking the 'reward' may be."

In response, I said this:
"Well, if the material reward is an Xbox 360, it can stimulate the
brain and maybe even provide spiritual uplift. Have you ever played
Star Wars' Battlefront? I know, I know--it's an old game; but it's still
my very favorite!"
In response, she said this:
"Battlefront? I rest my case. I'd rather children sat on the snow by the
river and watched swans."
And in response, I said this:
"Margot, river-side, swan-watching might be just the thing gardening
lions might one day come to prefer, but for children already halffrozen by the after-shocks of 9/11, better parenting advice comes from
those such as Royal Tenenbaum, who advocate unrestrained, active,
mobility:
'I'm not talking about dance lessons. Im talking about putting a brick
through the other guys windshield. Im talking about taking it out
and chopping it up!'"
Link: The Tyee
In response to "Seven things I learned from pop culture" (25 Dec.

2008)
Vanessa,
Anyone who spends so many hours exploring popular culture
probably not only enjoys it but genuinely learns something
meaningful from it. Why not have written an article truly detailing the
seven things you DID learn, that changed you, in promising ways,
from pop culture this year?
1560
Such an article would have set you up for ridicule? Left you
uncomfortably exposed? Probably; but the article as written has
something of the smug, superior tone that Victorian gentleman
brought to their articles, when they reported back to their London
readers on the latest crazy goings-on in the colonies -- the kind of
tone postcolonial critics now rant against as the voice of the
empowered and unempathic.
Link: The Tyee
Dorothy wrote (25 Dec. 2008)
Dorothy wrote (in reference to something I wrote):
"..the eat or be eaten "ethos" that was the only story the universe had
to tell 'til that point."
- What point was that? This has changed?
Madoff/Enron/bcrail/Eron/etc.,etc.,etc.
Is there in fact more than one used planet in our cosmos already? I
am sure we don't live on the same one.. Do enlighten me, someone..
And in response, I wrote:
Hi Dorothy. Happy holidays!
If you are human and are treated kindly / lovingly in your childhood
-- the reptilian part of your brain not withstanding--you will be a
wholly (possibly sic) loving "entity." Most progressives have received
a fair bit of love in their childhood -- the "universe" they came to
know at birth (and even before, in the womb) was often a very loving,
fun place. They can be counted on to want others to experience the
same, and to do enormous good. And, ultimately, as they are the most
creative/playful and least demon-haunted/fearful people about, the
future is with them (thank God).
So to your list, I counter: Jim Henson/the
Tyee/Greenpeace/Obamanation/the low-key, peaceful, recycling
generation/etc. etc. etc. And also centuries of gradually improving
standards for the treatment of all living things, despite periods of
terrible regress.
1561
The development of homo sapien sapiens, a species which has the

capacity to be and -- though in patches -- is becoming, an entirely
loving species, and the universe they are in the process of remaking, is
best evidence that the truest story of the universe now is a love story.
("A coming-of-age tale" would be a very distant second.) Before true
empathy emerged, there was simply darkness, naught but a horror
story.
Link: The Tyee

Gardening lion (25 Dec. 2008)
It's too bad that in order to be Progressive you've apparently got to
love Nature too. Myself, I don't much like swamps. I'm not sure if I'm
all that big on fir-trees, either. I guess when it comes to nature I'm
mostly in the Annie Dillard camp -- you know, amongst those that see
quite a bit of amazing beauty in nature, but a good hunk of absolutely
horrifying muck as well.
It'd be cool to be allowed to be progressive and really prefer cities,
urban landscapes--wo/man-made stuff. It'd be nice to be able to
count oneself as progressive and mostly be focused on all the amazing
particularities and beautiful variances in high-end designer goods,
rather than those in nature.
It'd be nice to know that no one could say of progressives -- "You've
seen one progressive, you've seen them all"--and readily be believed.
And I still think that progressives ought to be those who, when they
see some poor starving lion snacking on some poor baby antelope,
would find themselves drawn to think, "you know, we've really got to
stop all that needless suffering. " Who'd hear talk of the beauty of
ecosystems and the horrors of human intervention, and still find
themselves thinking, "you know, I'd still prefer it if those starving
lions stopped munching on those baby antelopes . . . Maybe we could
1562
encourage them to garden . . ."

Link: The Tyee
X-box
Alda says: "Living the simple, good life - healthy gardening practices,
close community, supported by local, renewable crafts and industry doesn't have to be mediocre - but could be beautiful, inherently
workable, and yes, small."
Sounds excellent, but can I bring my Xbox? I don't want to spend ALL
my time knitting.
Link: The Tyee
Live richly (25 Dec. 2008)

Evolution, after a hideously long start, finally resulted in the
emergence of a species -- homo sapien sapiens -- which is capable of
doing something other than participate in the eat-or-be-eaten
"ethos," that was the only "story" the universe had to tell 'til that
point. Nothing should be treated with disrespect, but neither the
Earth nor the Universe is to be looked to for wisdom.
The way forward is to imagine life as something we deserve to enjoy
very richly. It is to continue to see in the everyday so many new
opportunities to play and grow. We should treat those who feel the
need for dopamine-fueled episodes of narcissism I'm King of the
World-type stuff (forgive me James Cameron -- I very much still did
enjoy your movie!) -- but also those who feel the chronic need to
downplay their own life's gains, to characterize the life they *prefer*
to live, as mediocre.
Link: The Tyee
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SUNDAY, AUGUST 23, 2009

Best be a boy? (3 Dec. 2008)
In his article/chapter "Why Males are More Violent," Lloyd DeMause
argues that the upbringing of boys is worse than that of girls. He
writes, for example: "Mothers may dominate their little girls and
expect them to share their troubles, but domination has been found to
be far less damaging to the childs psyche than abandonment and
routine distancing." I find this possibility really fascinating. I must
admit that I always thought the fact that mothers tend to see the son
as an Other, as someone who is not herself, while looking at
daughters as parts of herself, was a huge boon for boys. I thought,
with mothers looking at their sons as entities that were different from
themselves, that it kind of meant that boys, regardless of all other
shit, had a greater chance of experiencing themselves as individuated
persons. I wonder if it is true that what really tends to happen to boys
is that the manner in which their mothers tend to interact with them
tend to make them not so much feel individuated from their mothers
but make them feel possessions of their mothers (as Lloyd argues).
Girls are parts of their mothers; boys are their mothers' possessions.
Maybe this summarizes the situation for children of unhealthy
mothers. In regards to girls, though: It really does seem true that the
reason they take their husband's name is so that they can belong to,
be part of, that something else -- a sly way of participating in the boys'
experience of difference. That would make marriage and taking the
husband's last name not so much about losing one's identity, but a
ritual that enables girls to become a greater part of that something -a man -- which knows what it is to feel separate from a mother. Once
they divorce the man and take back their own maiden name -- I think
they are then experiencing something of the reapproachment Mahler
is talking about.
My mom did that. Taking my dad's name was part of her
1564
understandable plot to distance herself from her own mother. Later

in life when her own mother moved in with her, I think my mom did
react to her as if she was different from her. I think she became her
own person. Despite what my mom says and needs to believe, my dad
got used in the process, though. No villainy -- just somewhat
unhealthy peoplepossessing that wonderful drive to move beyond
insufficient initial surroundings.
I explore the idea of men as a tool toward individuation in a paper of
mine: (http://www.scribd.com/doc/3737684/Useful-Object-A-Manas-the- Means-Toward-Salvation-in-The-Beauty-Queen-of-LeenaneApril-2005- Scanned). About Martin McDonagh's sad but brilliant
play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane.

Not so wonderful
It's a Wonderful Life is quite the depressing film and ought to be
avoided. It's about putting a good spin on the depressing story of how
the one guy with all the talent never gets to see if he might not just
have been happier if he explored the world some. About how a man
finds himself living his wife's dream life, rather than his own, and
how he should learn to put on the happy face.
Sickening and sad. I'm all for Terminator instead. Bring on the
sequel, baby.
Dec. 25 2008
Labels: lawrence krauss
With the protagonist, or with those she
1565
sucked off?
Richard Brody wrote:
What the four-hour run of the two volumes of Lars von
Triers Nymphomaniac shows and says about its protagonist
is trivial, but what it reveals about von Trier and his method is
worth considering.
A man returning from a small convenience store finds a
woman lyingtorpid and bleedingin a sepulchral courtyard.
She refuses medical care, refuses the police, but will accept a
cup of tea, and goes with him to his apartment. Shes Joe
(Charlotte Gainsbourg); hes Seligman (Stellan Skarsgrd).
After getting cleaned up, she rests in his bed and tells him the
story of her life, which is mainly the story of her sex life.
Throughout the telling, the quietly fanciful Joe, a sort of erotic
Scheherazade, intently affirms a vague and unnamed guilt that
the polymathic scholar Seligman tries to reason her out of.
Joes precocious genital consciousness led her to follow the
lead of a high-school friend, called B (Sophie Kennedy Clark),
in a game of sexual conquests aboard a train. (Young-adult Joe
is played by Stacy Martin.) In her independent life, Joe often
took as many as ten lovers in a single night. Some of them are
young, some old; some handsome, some plain; some fit, some
flabby; some stylish, some lumpish. And if theres any doubt of
their variety, a montage of lovers genitals, seen in close-up,
makes the point: Joe doesnt pursue a parade of groomed
beauties or well-endowed studs, she has sex with a seemingly
representative slice of the male demographic. And Joe,
apparently, is not aloneshes only one member of a group
that formed in school, a secret sect of young women, or, as B
called it, a little flock, that chants mea vulva, mea maxima
vulva, and repudiates love in the sole pursuit of sex.
1566
This indiscriminacythe choice of partners not by beauty,

charm, or charisma but on the basis of what Joe calls
morphological studiesis the key to the movies pitch. Von
Trier is the best advertising person in the movie business, and
he has come up with a movie that is an ingenious commercial
for itself. The average male art-house viewer emerges from the
first part of Volume I filled with the pleasant idea that there are
young women out thereyoung, pretty, sleek, and determined
who will suck him off in a random train compartment even
though hes forty, married, and faithful, or sleep with him on a
regular basis despite his bald pate, bad clothing, bland affect,
and blubbery gut.
[]
Nymphomaniac is von Triers sexual tantrum, a cinematic
declaration against faithfulness. For von Trier, love means
having to do things you dont want to do at a given moment,
whether its sleeping at home beside your spouse when a
momentarily more enticing lover awaits or having Sunday
dinner at the in-laws. Love means always having to say youre
sorry. And far from being sorry, hes cavalierly indifferent.
Along the way, he offers repellently racist words and gags
along with a sophistical endorsement of them; a definition of a
good Jew (wanna guess? anti-Zionist); a repudiation of
therapy (old news chez von Trier); a revulsion at parenthood;
and a generalized sense (rendered as a specific visual metaphor
in Vol. II) that any attempt to defer or deflect immediate sexual
gratification is a mortification that leads swiftly to a total
monastic repudiation of life itself.
[]
Actually, there is one sequence that von Trier films with care
and passion.
[]
The masochistic relationship is what von Trier films with an
1567
almost palpable sense of excitement. Whats notable about

those scenes is the way that they define the sadist (a man,
called K, played by Jamie Bell) and leave his motives
undefined. He, not Joe (now the adult, maternal Joe, played by
Gainsbourg), is the focus of these scenes, and the meticulous
practicality of his ministrations, as well as his overt, robust,
nearly gleeful vigor in inflicting pain, is the sole focus of von
Triers visual pleasure.
[]
The core fantasy is of a woman who is mans random source of
pleasure and who, when she withholds herself from manhood
at large because of her emotional bonds (or would take other
action resulting from those bonds), von Trier sees fit to punish
her for it, brutally. And the woman finds that punishment just
and apt, not requiring redress of any sort.
[]
(Lars Von Triers joylesssexual tantrum, Newyorker.com)
She comes across mostly as a rebel -- I'm not sure how well
male viewers are avoiding situating themselves inside her,
experiencing her as their avatar. Going through the train might
have brought to the fore our own memories of having done
something generically akin to that -- the specifics concerning
the man who had to be sucked off to win the candy might not
be that important if we were conceptualizing him mostly as the
tough-get we were once obligated to chase down to make up
for previous losses. In regards to the man with the blubbery
gut, this was the part of the film where after shucking off
societal norms she was figuring out what actually would meet
her needs -- I'm wondering if even this male viewer was too
much indulging in this "Groundhog Day," what if there are no
1568
rules? possibility to be stepping outside her much, even when

his likeness in physique and affect is draped into view as a
draw.
I appreciate your concerns about how love is portrayed, but
somehow despite the interest von Trier takes in the
sadomasochism, she still came across here as the getting-on,
hopeless addict, who lost a better happiness for some mid-life
crisis, crazy thrill-ride. This might say something about what
Labeouf brought to the film.
Parenting and therapy is refuted, but it can seem her loss.
Seligman might not have much of a draw for her -- she can be
pretty cold, brutal to him -- but I thought they both would have
done well if they'd ended up friends, a la "Breakfast Club."
Both decent listeners; willing to offer feedback and also open
to being proven wrong. His being so excited at being able to
relate his book knowledge to her experience, is pretty
compelling -- and I don't think she was quite immune. I also
enjoyed some of the moments she shared with her "adopted
daughter," as well as with her father. Von Trier's excitement for
the violence, is no friend to the human warmth that is in the
film.
specialtramp @AyeEye
If interviews are anything to go by the depression you refer to
is the director's own. Why, then, make a trilogy of movies
about depressed women whose sexuality goes off the rails? In
Antichrist Gainsbourg's character's sexual desires lead
indirectly to the death of her child (punishment) and then
directly to the her murder of her husband and suicide. Here
Gainsbourg abandons her family because she wants more sex,
even though she gets no pleasure from it. IOW, why not a male
1569
protagonist? (Here's a trick, if you're not sure if something is

misogynist, imagine a man in the same role/position, ask
yourself "Is it degrading, humiliating or just plain wrong?" and
then ask yourself why.)What's feminist about a woman who
compulsively has sex she doesn't enjoy, and yet believes she
deserves punishment for it. Scratch that - what's *interesting*,
new or insightful about watching a female character who
compulsively has sex she doesn't enjoy, and then gets punished
for it? I believe the descriptions of critics claiming the films
aren't pornographic but I'm pretty sure Von Trier is getting off
here.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston@specialtramp
I'm glad he did so, though. A mother's willingly torturing her
child -- the big reveal in Antichrist -- is pretty much beyond
what any of us can tackle right now. The limits of therapy were
helpfully revealed, when her husband realizes why he was
having so much trouble dissuading her she was evil -- "You did
... what?!"
very>
1570
This film teased at an explanation, beyond evil. The child's

abandoned because it's seen as something which mocks and
laughs at you when you so desperately are in need of the
opposite. And the reason why you need so much, and why
you'd spend your life throwing yourself at the rescuing-knight
male sex, is because you had a "cold bitch" mother who turned
her back on you. Isn't that why the final scene in Antichrist -men had thus far proved irrelevant to the fates passed on
through the mother-daughter dyad? Willem Dafoe was
beginning to get it; Seligman was a step back.
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The beginning of time
1571
Lawrence Krauss wrote:

At rare moments in scientific history, a new window on the
universe opens up that changes everything. Today was quite
possibly such a day. At a press conference on Monday morning
at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a team of
scientists operating a sensitive microwave telescope at the
South Pole announced the discovery of polarization distortions
in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, which is the
observable afterglow of the Big Bang. The distortions appear
to be due to the presence of gravitational waves, which would
date back to almost the beginning of time.
[]
For some people, the possibility that the laws of physics might
illuminate even the creation of our own universe, without the
need for supernatural intervention or any demonstration of
purpose, is truly terrifying. But Mondays announcement
heralds the possible beginning of a new era, where even such
cosmic existential questions are becoming accessible to
experiment. (A scientific breakthrough lets us see to the very
beginning of time,Newyorker.com)
----PatrickMcEvoyHalston
For some people, the possibility that the laws of physics might
illuminate even the creation of our own universe, without the
need for supernatural intervention or any demonstration of
purpose, is truly terrifying.
I doubt it. It'll just be interpreted as further hemming God in,
1572
which doesn't get rid of Him but inflates the needs of acolytes
to clear Him some room.
God suits an emotional need, born out of the kind of care we
received as children. He likes you so long as you
masochistically subject yourself to Him. If you had more
loving parents, the sky is cleared of gods; and while you'll
thrill at further learning how the universe was born, the truth is
it could accidentally be revealed to have at its core some awful
Demon, or bizarro God, and, as long as now tamed, might not
instruct how we go about our life all that much.
very>
*/ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-
1573
size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:"";

Better health coverage might be a bigger deal, as well that

artists get the funding to introduce new things in the universe
for us to get excited about. New things, built out of our current
matrix -- and thus most especially relevant to us, our current
desires/needs, not one which way predates a conditionally
loving God, child-sacrificing neolithics, barely empathic first
mammals, dumb, ridiculous-sized reptiles, clumps of cells with
no cognation, bare planets, heat, waves, dust.
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ay, July 29, 2016

Recent comments at Salon.com (July 29

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the latest incarnation of British monarchy... much more like how

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corrects IE6 width calculation

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Patrick McEvoy-Halston's Blog

Patrick McEvoy-Halston's Blog