One of the favorite tricks of the radical right is to pretend that their opponents have little respect for the tragic cost of human life. In a recent imbroglio, various people who thought of themselves as experts on the Holocaust sneered at the possibility of the Nazis using To each his own as a motto.
Pop history is history enough for most.
Andrew O’Hehir, Salon:
Sacha Baron Cohen’s dark political farce
The “Borat” creator’s nutty Arab “Dictator” moves to Brooklyn, falls in love and schools the West in democracy
Finally, cinema’s prayers are answered: a version of The Great Dictator that equivocates about its powerless target!
Title, again, via.
Science fiction no more: The perfect city is under construction
Cities as technologically precise as a Formula One race car are being built now. Do we really want to live in them?
This time, for sure!
Every time someone embarks on a literary project, there is a certain amount of by-product. Presented for your approval is this, some of the industrial effluent of my upcoming fabulist project; while it passed quality control, it’s too irregularly-shaped and prosaic to fit with the other material and it would have caused stacking problems with its round edges and its glimmer of human dignity. Thus, it is suitable only for you, our undiscriminating readers.
Please to enjoy this blogging, a true but fictional story of Willard “Mitt” Romney / Wilford “Dick” Hopper / Wilhelm “Brick” Manley / Pendejo “Jellybean” Brighamyoung Junior.
1. While campaigning, Wilhelm Carringford Manley officially went by his nickname “Brick”. In all future references – no less than once per public apperance – he referred to himself as “The Adversary”. Is there anything sadder than trying to choose your own nickname – and failing?
2. When “Brick” destroyed his wife Wilhelmina with a long sledge hammer in front of a helpless joint session of Congress, she did not cry or grimace or even laugh in pain, but looked forward into the middle distance with a strange haunting smile the entire time.
3. His insane decision to boast about scouring Kansas City from the Earth with nuclear fire; his claque of dystrophic eunuchs applauding, as if nothing was wrong with this.
4. What motivated “Brick” to have all American citizens of Indian ancestry interned in camps is still beyond us, even after years of constant vague propaganda. It’s not like they could vote.
5. When duly defeated in an unconstitutional race for a third term, “Brick” had his opponent Bowie Wilkes Brown (D-LA) shot by a Dallas mobster on national television.
6. “Brick” ran unconstitutionally for a third term. On what seems to have been his behalf, every expert asked repeated that the time for law was over and only “Brick” could lead America to the fate she deserved.
7. “One White, One Vote” campaign – obviously illegal. How did he even get away with that?
8. Whistleblowing on his own administration.
9. After #8, his still-baffling decision to relieve his press secretary and mock and torture reporters on live TV.
10. “I am proud to announce I have destroyed all life in Kansas City, Missouri with a nucular barrage” – nucular!! What is this, 2003???
11. “Brick” launching twenty-four warheads totalling 35-50 mT payload at Kansas City, Missouri, killing or grievously injuring ten million people in three states and completely derailing the Super Bowl halftime show.
12. The notorious “I am now imperbious to vullets” gaffe. When even the dystrophic eunuchs crack up, you know you’ve laid one.
13. “Brick” casting an audience that dared to laugh at his “all sixty-two states” mistake into slavery, then forcing the Supreme Court to overturn not only the amendments rendering this illegal but all Amendments.
14. Opening the yawning abyss of Stygia on the shores of Lake Erie – did he not get the memo on his bad PA poll numbers?
15. “The Your Loved Ones Raped Forever In Hell As You Watch Program” – two words: “creative accounting”. Can this administration do anything right?
16. Seizing the crown of Canada from Camerlengo Nordicus Harper’s hands at the big ceremony last year. After all the nice things he had to say about “Brick”, can’t we all agree that was just rude?
17. And enslaving Harper’s entire race in the Flaying Pits – talk about adding insult to injury!
With debt acknowledged to Umberto Eco, a fine wop and no mistake.
He is psychologically privileged. In much of the West, and especially in America, he has a mindset that is adaptive and career-enhancing. Psychopathy and extroversion are marbled through the core of his being. He might be a sociopath, but he always acts like one; he either feels nothing for his fellow human beings or contrives justifications for ignoring those feelings on an instinctive level. The result is the same.
He is not necessarily otherwise privileged. Every other aspect of privilege is a matter of ‘probably’. He’s probably male, probably straight and white, if otherwise probably a very media-friendly kind of queer and/or ethnic. The managerialist workplace is not fundamentally bigoted by intention; it may make instrumental use of bigotry (exploiting any species of bigotry to contrive reasons to hire or fire, or make or remake contracts more favorably to itself) but it is generally willing to accept any charismatic psychopath with a high-school diploma as a manager. To the extent this interacts with social injustice, it is statistical and not intentional: for example, outside of certain major cities it’s essentially impossible for a black male psychopath to attain social success without winding up in prison, so outside of hiring pools including those cities the managerial class will have few and unusual black men.
In fact, the managerialist dream is to transcend cultural privilege with mental privilege. The more progressive elements of management want to see a more diverse executive class that treats the world exactly as they do. Doubtless there’s at least one Boswash-based firm now whose media director is a gay hemiplegic Yemeni transwoman who continuously throws hot coffee on underlings out of spite. Perhaps there’s an Oscar for Meryl Streep in it.
He has risen to the level of his incompetence. He is no longer capable of performing his job without significant input from his underlings, which he doesn’t understand or want. Nevertheless, he has realistic prospects of promotion. He is well-liked and well-connected because of, not despite, his deranged and hostile outlook. (This is not to call his position a travesty; nepotes and cronies tend to succeed because of suction instead of collegiality, and tend to be far more pleasant.) But because of this fundamental incompetence, he has to find a way to excuse away his increasingly poor performance:
He externalizes his failures. Even when he knows it is a lie, to admit his actual mistakes would be weakness. (He may make a propitiatory show of accepting noble failures – wasted effort, professional courtesy.) He is being failed by everyone around him, but mainly and especially his underlings.
He lives the hierarchy. It is right and fitting that there is a great chain of being starting with the boss and ending with his underlings. The general public outranks his underlings and the customers outrank the general public. (The phrase ‘the customer is always right’ arises from a frustrated effort to clarify this rank relationship, not from service courtesy.) A good manager will reflexively side against the people working for him, because:
He sees himself as a frontier outpost of managerial competence, under siege by vandals. The employees seek to tear him down; so internalized is this assumption that he seeks reasons for their behavior, not alternative explanations. Subtypes begin to emerge. The narcissist sees them as jealous of his status and his great work (the ‘tall poppy syndrome’ idea) and punishes them for it continuously. They’re secretly plotting against his legacy; he’s sure of it. The paranoid sees them as playing him and the bosses for a sucker (the ‘moocher’ idea) and constantly scrutinizes their work for signs that they are slacking, malingering, or otherwise gold-bricking. They’re drawing paychecks for nothing; he’s sure of it.
He doesn’t believe in qualified expertise. The narcissist type sees it only in himself and his immediate superiors, and only as a basic quality – the killer instinct, the right stuff; the paranoid considers it a myth perpetuated by parasites. Both attitudes are adaptive in and dovetail with neoliberalism. In any case, anyone who can’t claw their way to his level is worthless, a waste of money and a waste of time, and need to be kept in check and reduced in number. (There’s a reason that layoffs are uniformly greeted with upticks in stock price, even when they don’t serve any conceivable purpose.)
He is Homo Economicus. The assumptions of economics fit him perfectly, and make perfect sense to him. He might be at political variance with freshwater economists, but he understands them as only they understand themselves. He shares their strange social obsessions: the danger of short-changing the elite, the ‘tragedy of the commons’, a simultaneous contempt for professional sociologists and fascination with amateur sociology.
He sees the world the way he is. He can’t conceive of vocation as a concept because his own work is not fundamentally satisfying. (He takes satisfaction from the robustness of his professional contacts, not his actual job.) He struggles similarly with any physical or mental illness or disability he lacks private experience with; he considers malingering much more significant and widespread than it is because it’s his main interaction with sickness behavior.
He always needs more. When he succeeds, he’s earned it. When he fails, he’s being wronged by the universe. He is his own religion, and his own fleeting happiness is a jealous and avenging God. He’s earned everything he wants because he is who he is. In his bones he knows he won’t, shouldn’t, can’t be held back. The arc of the universe bends towards his success, and it had better be short.
Serve him at your peril. He will destroy you for his own gain – and he would consider doing otherwise immoral. Nothing he sucks from the world’s veins will trickle from his greedy mouth. Invite him into your house and he’ll eat your family. Not only will he devour you alive, he will gnaw your bones clean – and he will call himself a hero for filling his belly with your marrow. He will never be satisfied; he will never be content. He is the face of the new order: hungry, angry, petty, proud. A hungry eye and a jealous maw. He wants history and he wants the future, and he wants this world and the next, and it will all vanish forever down his consuming throat, held captive by an asshole too greedy to shit.
Sick sick sick I am sick unto death of flash mobs. They are the literal worst.
Let’s all live in High School Musical.
Let’s all be cheery and express that cheer and our general exuberance to be white and have jobs in the form of camera-friendly dancing.
Let’s push the critical spirit away from our sacred blood and soil with jazz hands.
Let’s call our white cop friends if we see drugged-out hoodie lumpens destroying the property value of our flash mob.
Let’s exult in theatrical fealty to our beloved corporate masters, all under the still gaze of the benign Super-Spectator, Steve Jobs.
Let’s be thin, healthy pre-teens forever and ever and ever.
Oh wow oh wow oh wow
Shantih shantih shantih
etc etc etc
A new age of spite and entitlement is dawning in the West, as the haves, confronted by a yawning abyss of their own manufacture, struggle to find a way to so demonize their opposite numbers at the bottom that they need no justification to remain at the top.
It is observed, including by my own perennial favorite Adam Cadre, that a powerful motivator for this sort of behavior is simple spite – that after a certain amount of privilege accrues, one of the main ways of enjoying it is finding ways to wave it under the noses of those without it. We observe this on a daily basis with money – the whole category of Veblen goods could not exist otherwise.
A trans-Atlantic culture of fat snobbery has emerged on similar terms, with people – blessed by the mix of economic and physical privilege such that they do not, by their normal day-to-day- routine, gain or retain large amounts of weight – basically heaping abuse on the disgusting, morally incontinent fat-asses who inexplicably now form a majority in the US and a plurality in the UK. While the temptation, as always within the framework of choice-based liberalism, is to view obesity as a simple consequence of personal choice, a more coherent view emerges if you construct it in the same manner at least some liberals are willing to qualifiedly accept class or wealth.
(Certainly much more coherent than Jamie Oliver flogging up-market delicacies as a substitute for prolefeed with similar caloric content, and treating the choice as one not just of diet but of morality – as though money were no object.)
But these are not subjects I am touching on in detail today. With the 2011 autumn of rage still sputtering along and still making the odd headline, I would only be adding to a vast stream of noise about money to discuss it; and I have already done too much futile speaking for too long on my left approach to obesity, and a man gets discouraged after a while.
What I am interested in now is a new push against the discipline of mental health.
Michael Lind is at it again. Everyone’s favorite incomplete Republican convert is of course haranguing the Occupy protests, insisting that for a variety of reasons only a certain species of racist shit-eater can be truly populist and the Democrat Party is dominated by latte-sipping elites blah blah blah blah blah.
The thing is, this is something that passes for analysis so often in the media that seeing it trotted out here shouldn’t surprise me. I suppose folderol of that specific character going up on Salon is what’s doing it (although the fact that they recently published a non-paid advertisement for a group of pickup artists should have blunted that concern a little).
The thing is, I’m sure I’ve made my background a matter of the public record, but if not, here it is: around 1992, when I was five years old, my parents began working together to get my dad, sick and tired of an unfulfilling career as an electrical engineer, qualified as a medical doctor. He started out wanting to do anesthesia, and has settled into dealing with trauma.
The point is, at around the same time my father started having to take out large amounts of student debt and my mother had to stop working her usual service-industry jobs permanently instead of temporarily to deal with a string of babies being born. The decision knocked us out of the lower middle class and into the student poor.
Lind, of course, doesn’t see any of this as work. Electrical engineering takes a degree and involved mostly freelancing, so it’s the vocation of a decadent sit’n'thinker, and my mom’s eight-hour shifts selling decorative arrangements, flowers, and home furnishings (a trade that required a significant amount of on-the-job training, as the service industry had yet to completely suck the marrow from their workers’ bones) were unanswerable to unionization and besides only sold things that other people made. Besides which, to be wholly blunt, to a man that idealizes “horny-handed sons of toil”, anything my scrawny high-school-only mom could do could hardly qualify, could it?
It’s a species of knock-on to laborism shared by Orwell at his worst – an obsession with sweaty, hard men doing sweaty, hard things and an overriding contempt for anyone who deliberately spurns a life of honest muscular toil, even people who work themselves to the bone doing things outside of the canon of manly labor.
The crucial thing is that it’s an elitist view. Lind is a lifelong political operative and Orwell was a scholarship-educated belle-lettrist; the idea of the honest poor doing honest work for an honest day’s wage is unsustainable by the realities on the factory floor, where compensation has always had more to do with custom and demand than skill or work. In fact, the cruelly arbitrary reality of a system in which some menial workers make enough to buy a car and some make too little to rent a flop is one of the original motive forces of the socialist movement – partially from the bottom, but partially as well from decadent elites, the children of ‘honest toilers’ who made good but never forgot the shit they were born into.
At least in Orwell’s day, though, there was a ‘working man’ to be fetishized in this manner. The industrial product of the first world generally and America especially, through both honest movement of capital to countries with lower productivity (and thus lower wages) and rent-seeking currency, wage, and labor manipulation by ‘tiger’ economies under the approving gaze of financier-dominated US governments , has more or less been shattered. (It doesn’t help that the bipartisan soft-Reaganite movement of mergers, acquisitors, and tech-jobbers deliberately smashed the industrial state for their own profit and were cheered on by the crowned heads of the economic academy.) At every turn, labor has been cut off at the fucking knees by an organized, right-wing political movement and has been encouraged to blame the Dirty Fucking Hippies for every moment of it. It’s bait Lind has eagerly swallowed – not because of his experience with unionized labor, because I’m not sure what if any he actually has. No, he swallowed it because he spent the 80s and 90s being a Reaganaut activist, and can’t bring himself to admit that the people he was dutifully following orders to villify were blameless.
The destruction of the American labor union came from within – it came from bosses servile to a Carterite consensus that political change through electoral politics was a failed model, that Washington was intrinsically instead of sectionally rotten; it came from writers and speakers and publishers willing to buy a bill of goods to strike out at a culture the country hated and feared; and more than anything it came from the pension funds, a little Trojan Horse of managerialist cash-above-all hypercapitalism in the breast of the labor movement.
In short, there’s a reason that the private unions have been largely gutted, and there’s no reasonable way to make that reason the kids in the street in New York and other cities around the country. Like me, most of them were born to parents who stopped getting promotions and raises regularly when they were children, and have never had a stable or useful job. Lind has no fucking idea what it’s like to mature into a country where double-digit joblessness is the new normal. He wouldn’t know what work now means if it jumped up and bit him. And if he were jost an elitist shit, that would be one thing; but no, he’s sure he knows what labor is and wants.
~
The main line of Lind’s articles has generally been that there is a decadent academic latte-sipping creative class that dominates the Democrat party with its identity politics (which all decent white people despise natch) and its ideas about ‘nudging’. (The fact that Lind’s reflexive ‘bipartisanship’ has contributed to an environment in which no one on any side of the political spectrum believes in electoral politics as an engine for change is irrelevant; when Bloomberg and his pals try to ‘transcend’ politics by throwing money at bloodless capitalist automatons and by undermining faith in partisan elections, it’s innovative and hopeful and good; when professional antagonists of public-sector unions suck the blood from their charges with ‘incentives’ transparently intended only to screw people out of promised pay and work, it’s innovative and potentially Messianic; when progressives occasionally take power and use small amounts of taxpayer money to subsidize the adoption of expensive but long-term beneficial changes in consumption patterns, it’s patronizing and elitist.)
But more than that, he’s sure that these people, these gross horrible disgusting mongrels and race-traitors and layabouts, are committing a grave offense against the Working Man by – let’s be honest – not getting their solids via Hungry Man, not getting their clothes via K-Mart, and not getting their news via a Fox affiliate.
This is a view of the poor – that they are desperately loyal to their beloved Walton chain warehouse and horrible big-city elitists are looking to take it away, oh noes – that can only be sustained by someone who has never been poor or even seen poverty up close. This is the view of someone who has gone to the supermarket for cheap bourbon and admired the toily honesty of the sturdy, beat-down men and their fat, prematurely aged wives pushing carts of frozen vegetables and meat.
I might not have come by a childhood of hunger and want the honest way, by my dad’s union bowing to Whip Inflation Now and letting the bosses throw him out on his ass, but I can tell you that nobody who lives through that likes or wants it. Target’s entire business model is substantiated by exactly that – by being a big-box shop with prices and merchandise accessible to people on a budget which doesn’t wipe your nose in the fucking destitution of America’s post-industrial hellscape. If you give those beat-down men or those run-down women a million dollars, they will never darken Wal-Mart’s door again.
I don’t know if they’d shop at Whole Foods. I sure wouldn’t, but never mind that – I think running into a leftist who wasn’t obsessively loyal to what Lind imagines is our core culture of fancy consumption would give him hives – they’d just avoid Lind’s beloved big-box shitholes like the plague.
Here’s a man who believes that the working poor go out and raise credit to buy SUVs because big man like big car hnnngh. Makes sense, if you’re a patronizing shit, but when you only have one car you need to fit your entire family into it and drive them anywhere, and the SUV is a cheap, horrible way of achieving that. The idea that the Common Man is in love with low fuel efficiency or constant fucking engine problems is impossible to believe if you’ve ever met one. If you live in the imaginarium of talk radio, sure, it’s all culture, and that’s Lind’s gimmick.
“The working man loves the owning class fucking him up the ass,” says Lind, “and how dare you get in the way, you horrible decadent faggots”. The idea that when we get money we spend the rest of our lives sleeping on our backs is surely neither here nor there.
(N.B.: I wrote this whenever ‘a recent post’ was recent. The film itself is no longer even remotely relevant, but Alec told me [probably a year ago, christ] that the review was worth posting. So: here.)
After I saw Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, I spent some time trying to concentrate my thoughts on the film enough for a post here. I was never able to do so to my satisfaction, and eventually the film stopped being timely. Luckily, a recent post at Alicublog brought up Anthony Lane’s review of the film. Instead of making an overlong and off-topic comment there, I’ll make you all suffer. (Here be spoilers for both film and comic.) Lane pans the film as an inhumane celebration of thuggery, and he repeatedly states that the comic and the movie are philosophically similar. I mostly agree with Lane’s assessment of Watchmen the film, but couldn’t agree less with his association of Snyder’s love of thuggery with Alan Moore himself. The film is an eviscerated parody of the comic I read. On its own, the superhero story is not particularly notable –it’s the kind of “dark” inverted hero story that Frank Miller might have written. What I find appealing about Watchmen that both Snyder and Lane missed are simple human stories, cut short by Veidt’s scheme.
The emotional peak of the comic is the execution of Veidt’s plan. A half-dozen small plots with decidedly non-superheroic characters – a cabbie’s fight with her girlfriend, a newspaper vendor talking to an uninterested youth reading a pirate comic, the paranoia- and drug-fueled murder of Hollis Mason, the eventual disgrace of the cop who captures Rorschach, and Rorschach’s psychiatrist spiralling into despair and alienating his wife — begin to be drawn together. At that moment, Veidt’s plan to murder half of New York takes effect, and all of these lives are obliterated in a series of panels which still makes me tear up even after dozens of readings.
Watchmen does briefly reference the iconic scene with the newspaper vendor and youth in silhouette before everything goes white. You’d just about miss it. And it symbolized exactly what was wrong with the film — I had no emotional response, because I had no reason to care about these characters.
Quite a lot of the film is spent slavishly recreating the hero arc of the comic, to the expense of just about everything else. The resulting plot arc, with the characters as written, would have been pretty strongly biased in favor of Veidt. Moore’s Adrian Veidt is a fascinating character, one of the best villains ever written — because he is strong, and handsome, and charming, and makes a fairly convincing argument that he had to murder millions of people to save the world. Furthermore, Moore never explicitly rebukes Veidt’s actions. The comic’s protagonists come around at the end, agree to stay quiet, and return to their lives — except one, the psychotic (and ultimately suicidal) serial killer Rorschach. Beyond that, the only person really questioning Veidt at the end is Veidt himself.
Snyder realized this, although he didn’t seem to recognize the value of the excised plots (the part he’s restoring in his director’s cut, apparently, is the well-done but marginal Black Freighter story). So he turns Veidt into a weaselly, snivelling Eurofag (with a directory labelled BOYS on his computer, natch), makes Dan and Laurie stronger and more appealing, and does everything he can to make a psycho killer like Rorschach an antihero.
This is what Lane saw in the film. I agree with him on that. The dehumanized script of the film had to increase the severity of Veidt’s crime by a tremendous magnitude, replacing “half of New York” with the complete obliteration of a handful of the world’s biggest cities. The comic’s Dan Dreiberg is shocked and appalled at Veidt’s murders at first, but ultimately agrees to go along with Veidt’s plan. In the movie, the same scene ends with an absurd sequence where Dreiberg beats the shit out of Veidt and accuses him of “deforming humanity.” It’s fitting that a film directed by the guy who did 300 replaced half the plot with a burly man repeatedly punching a homosexual in the face.
(An aside — I’m aware Snyder didn’t write the script, and I’m being lazy in attributing all of these decisions to him. I apologize. However, I suspect that Snyder was satisfied with the script he filmed, and his previous work on 300 as well as his obvious love of filming scenes of merciless violence reinforce this. Oh, and before I forget: the comic depicts the pre-Keene Act rioters as middle-aged, pudgy working people. The film depicts them as bomb-throwing hippies. It all adds up.)
In general, the film’s script slashes out any scene that doesn’t feature a superhero but dedicates minutes on end to loving expansions of sex and fight scenes (Dan & Laurie on the airship, the Comedian’s death, the thugs in the alley) which were dispensed with fairly quickly in the comic. I know the entire book comic would have been impossible to film, but when you expand a scene just so you can show more of Malin Akerman getting a deep dicking you open yourself up to questions about priorities.
Life on Titan? A liberal NASA plot. They say there’s life on Titan, then Obambi and the Democrat congress declare it a wildlife refuge and we can’t drill it for oil!
huh huh hhuuuh
I don’t know how many arms these Titanians have, but I know that each one of them is going to end up holding a Democrat welfare check!!
hhhuuh huuuuuh huh
Maybe they know where Obama’s birth certificate is located!!
hhh hhhuhh [choking sound, heavy clump of body striking floor]