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!
Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon:
Octomom’s tragic new low
Nadya Suleman declares bankruptcy and mulls porn. Now can we stop taking pleasure in her humiliation?
Item! Gossip columns are sick and depraved!
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!
I received news of Trayvon Martin‘s death around the same time everyone else did. It was not until this article, unfairly, that it had any emotional reality to me. Not because of the facts; I knew those, intellectually. Not because of the picture; I was already inclined to view Trayvon as “one of those”.
The Wire has a distinction for them: “stoop kids and corner kids”. They’re both what the culture calls “ghetto”, and they both front tough among friends. There’s no solid reason to think Trayvon was either. Was he “ghetto” at all? We don’t know. To some degree, we can’t know. It’s pretty easy to speculate that even if he was, he wouldn’t be what George Zimmerman would have meant, or claimed he meant, when he said “ghetto”, or a “thug”. A stoop kid. (You try getting a corner kid to wear Hollister, for one.)
This is a distinction predicated on obedience to authority – predicated in-universe by a cop, who has become an educational consultant. This is not an admonition on flying freak flags, which only seem to count when the recipients are white and well-off – the right kind of odd, an accepted kind of off.
This was not a kid who would give his mother shit. This was a kid who could sit still and smile and look like he has a life ahead of him for a picture taken at home, for only the benefit of his loved ones. As far as David Simon or Ed Burns – higher authorities, I consider, than myself, or George Zimmerman, or Florida police dispatch – can tell, that would tend to make him a kid who could comply with orders, or even sufficiently firm requests.
In that sense, then, Trayvon Martin’s death is a travesty. There’s a tragic element of it, in the same sense that each of these murders carries with it a classical tragedy: for the reasonable hubris of respecting themselves as human beings, black youths and adults of all temperaments and profiles are gunned down or seriously maimed on a daily basis by racist forces as cold as indifferent as Zeus, gatherer of clouds – in the person, as simultaneously human and god-ridden as Medea, of the racist murderer du jour. Foreclosures give the homeowners’ association an excuse to turn their backs on illegal promises; a decades-old academic debate is made into a new front in a race war to win a political party votes. A drunk calls the cops on a child, and chambers a round to make sure. Greater forces than any man inspire a paranoid to pick up a gun and avenge himself on a universe where mortals dare to seek justice. Is this not tragedy?
But beyond tragic, there is travesty in Trayvon Martin’s death: an inversion of the anticipated order to the loss of all involved. He did not cross the blood-soaked red lines to make a quick and not exceedingly dishonest dollar selling drugs, or to avenge himself on an enemy with gunplay. He crossed them over puppy love. The years marking out his death do not represent the grim certainties of his life; they were not set in stone from the moment he was born the color he was with the mind he had. If you had asked the people who knew him to write out the year of his death, they would not have guessed the correct decade, let alone the correct year.
And that is what makes it a travesty, objectively: that to no one’s just benefit, this young man had his life cut short.
That’s not what got me about it.
I had heard all of these details before. I had no reason to doubt any of them, and the more I read crystallized my dry, intellectual view. I would not have written any of this; certainly I might have waited on it, let the anger on all sides die down a little, find a better reference than The Wire (which has been much in my thoughts lately; it is a fantastic show with a lot to say), and so on. This is too raw and angry and unsettled to air; it matters too much, and I could be too easily and completely wrong, or worse, have nothing but trivialities to express.
But then I read something, one asinine little detail, and I began asking questions I couldn’t answer – questions like, what stupid career did he still have in mind? Was he ready to even think about death? How far had he gotten with a girl? Had he had his heart broken? How much did he know? What things are there in this life that Trayvon Martin never got to learn? How much life did he have, before it was taken away?
The detail that stuck me, ridiculously, was one that didn’t tell me anything new at all.
“1995-2012″.
My youngest brother was born in 1991.
(Title via.)
Like all men of quality / knights of the realm / etc etc I was right pleased to hear that Angus King, America’s next Maine, plans to never caucus for as long as he lives, cross his heart and hope to die, no homo forever usw.
Certainly he’s going to win: everyone loves this beautiful man and his manful moustaches. I have received reliable intelligences that some in the Maine press have loved his moustache as often as thrice a day, which to man of my advancing age just seems like so much commotion.
I have yet to hear word of Thom Friedman on this potential rival, but I am here to announce with some excitement that I do not need to; having come into several luxurious moustaches and hundreds cash myself, I have taken the liberty of seizing the creative rights he seduced out of the doting old widow de Tocqueville, but a restless ghost these past hundred-some years. By this means he wrote the (bestselling? remaindered? do basic research) That Used To Be Us, a hard-hitting text which brilliantly examines conventional wisdom by putting English words in order such that it appears, in print, and then signing his name on a paycheck.
In this book, which can only be called a scholarly tome, Friedman employs – along with ink, wood pulp, and his devastatingly furry lip – the latter-day words of Alexis de Tocqueville, famous to every high school student as that Frenchman who had something presumably important to say about America from that time they skipped the paragraph in their history textbooks quoting him. I, too, now have the moral right and indeed the journalistic duty to offer up the opinions of Alexis de Tocqueville – the man, I mean, the very count himself. These are not my words but his; this is evinced in their being italics, to suggest their original French character, and by how evident it is that – though we share handsome and in the words of our past lovers “deceptively Jewish” faces – he is not, and I am, enormously fat.
Without further ado, here at last are the words of Alexis de Tocqueville, liberal, scientist, and count of ancient and noble blood, on the subject of Angus King, a select American.
I have been told of this senator and I confess that the main thing on my mind is an intense hunger for a Reuben sandwich. I suffer from what doctors in my country refer to as «need a Reuben now syndrome». By happy chance the saucissier Arby’s offers a «sandwich au Reuben Super» for five dollars and ninety-nine cents cash money. I advise you eat at Arby’s today. It’s good mood food.
What an honor!
(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.
Apres Levitt et Dubner, et à cher frère Cadre.
When America had industry we were in the unique position of being so big that you could feasibly dump a thousand miles away without creating an international incident. This is why we invented the biggest smokestacks, pumping waste into the air to fall dozens, hundreds, a thousand miles away. Our foundries poured poison into the heartland, and for a time as the Europeans looked at their own pollution problems and extrapolated to our scale, there was a real catastrophe on our hands.
Technology saved us, as it always does. The official history gives credit for smaller stacks and scrubber rims to the market, but the state and its scientist pals got what was needed done, and there was much rejoicing. And in time, as Reagan and the finance industry broke the industrial heartland and auctioned it off piece by piece, the need to throw poison into the air slacked off and the Yellow Sea took the acrid burden from Lake Erie. We could at last throw away Silent Spring, which sympathized with mosquitos; everything was all right again.
But Pandora’s box was stuck open wide, and three generations of growth and stagnation made China and ourselves coke and gas junkies. No matter how clean we cleaned our act, our looms and drive-trains were as ominous in their silence as unattended infants. The carbon flowed as the carbon must flow.
The Europeans again looked at their own pollution problems, the summer storm and winter drought and the rising of the sea, and they looked with alarm to us and to China, to Russia and to the second world, and we realized there was a catastrophe on our hands. We had stopped the destruction of the ozone long before we stopped the poisonous haze of sulfur, but the carbon was different, we were told: an integral part of who we were, and if that was to change we would need to gather electricity different ways. The wind, the sea, the sun, the atom – some source of free energy other than the earth’s ancient biomass would be needed.
But the people who survived the American economy had bottom lines to protect, and they saw denial as a better investment than cooptation. For a time there was a crisis as the bearded men who knew why we had seen the hurricanes from Hell were denied by billionaires in baseball caps. Wind farms are an eyesore, said they, and solar power is for fags. What we need is a way to keep on burning ancient carbon forever (for God will always furnish us with more).
Economists saved us, as they always do. To save our cities from the rising sea and the buffeting sky would require India and China to have nice things; what we needed instead was a pump, a giant pump, a big old hose as long as the biggest skygouging smoke stacks ever planned, so big you could pump poison into the air and it’d never come back. But what magical poison would save us from the carbon dioxide? How could we undo the greenhouse flux that had been a part of the Earth’s climate since life began to metabolize oxygen?
Sulfur dioxide, said they. We remembered the name but we couldn’t recall where from; the oil and coal men assured us it was from their pitiable complaints that they had to spend all this money throwing it away – when it could save us from ourselves! The market had finally come through for us, and the economists and their corporate pals got what was needed done, and there was much rejoicing. We could at last throw away Michael Moore and Al Gore, who were fat and had beards and sympathized with ecoterrorists. Everything was all right again.
The hose was delivered by the lowest bidder, not really a hose but a massive spire of a fine modern resin. They did a serviceable job, but they didn’t overbuild it; it wasn’t that expensive and we would just build more when this one started to degrade. A mainframe, for now inert, would work out how much sulfur needed to be in the air to maintain a permanent volcanic-style haze, to cool the Earth back down a degree and a half.
At the appointed date the sulfur levels were off by no less than ten percent, but that would be solved in time. There was concern in areas outside the thirty-mile circle in a near-abandoned rez no one could enter without permission that the hose was leaking; the contractors given the job of maintaining it affirmed that emissions were within parameters. The gas we had lost in the sky, said they, must have undergone a chemical change or floated into the sky. More plausible, surely, than some kind of conspiracy to cover up the poor construction of the pump.
Whatever its problems, the sulfur plan had given us back our freedoms – our lives, our liberty, our pursuit of carbon dioxide. We had not silenced the beardos but they no longer mattered; the plan had worked, and if it stopped working we could just build another plant.
Some time later they explained that the pump facility was old, and because of alarmists and nimby-pimbies it was hard to site them where we would have liked; because the sites we got weren’t ideal, didn’t have the access to refineries and strong security we had in Arizona, they were smaller and weaker. It was a sign of the concept’s strength, we understood, that what would work with one twenty-mile hose would work with five or ten. We had a site in Turkey; we had a site in Hawaii; we had a site in Tibet, in Rhodesia and Patagonia, two in the Northern Territory and one in Finnish waters north of the Arctic Circle. They weren’t as efficient as the older site, but they got the job done.
Our greatest fear, that terrorists or Russians or some other monsters would destroy our last hope because they resented the carbon scam being over, never came to pass, and even though dropping Earth’s temperature below its prior levels took until the 60s, the worst of the crisis was over.
The beardos would never be happy about our clever plan, and in their resentful anger they made the inefficient coral and plankton species dying out to be the sulfur-plan’s fault. A well-known blogger with a Harvard bachelor’s told a TV host that the ocean being more acrid than lakes was a big deal, and we laughed and laughed, because it always has been.
When the Arizona stack fell it hadn’t been our primary pump for decades, but that didn’t stop a lot of misguided concern about the carbon production of the Sinobanana’s trucks or new paracoal plants in unihabited Congolese desert. And there were calls for pump regulation by statists, and there were ignorant claims that no living thing had inhabited the Sea of Cortes since before the disaster. But we ignored their foolishness, and when the carbon dioxide production that buoyed our economy rebounded, we replaced the old Arizona pump with cheaper, less heavy stacks in Belarus, Saudi Iraq, and the islands the US had given Cuba in the 30s.
Communism’s corrosive effects linger on, as we all know, and the new plants had a few minor incidents – but those piled up, and before anyone (the beardos’ babbling aside) knew what was happening, we had random tides of dead fish and crop failures. Those failures got bad enough that instigators in Africa readily started riots, producing a real scare as the sulfur production slacked off. In the time it took us to build reserve facilities, the haze dropped badly enough that air passengers reportedly saw the ground at night and the Earth’s temperature had risen again.
Automation had saved us, as it always does. We threw away the local laborers and building inspectors and kept them out with drones and lasers, and we were at last free of their sympathizing with food-moochers and wobblies. The pumps would last a hundred years.
Mammals and bridges lasted fifty, and the Hoover Dam two hundred and twenty. Whether anything else from what we called Earth would write its names on the cosmos before the Sun erased Nixon’s and Gandhi’s I couldn’t tell you.
Behold this classy ad for some kind of fascist rally or something being held by Michelle Bachmann:
1) Couldn’t you have found something less lynchy than a lasso, what with race being in the news ex. Jackson Jive, a Georgia peckerwood making and promoting a veiled death threat to a representative from another state, and that entire classy NewsMax coup thing? It’s not like you really ever want to ask your constituents to fantasize about lynching the government, but now is a particularly bad time. Oh, who am I talking to.
2) It took me a few minutes to realize this next thing, and I find that depressing. I hate living in Nevada.
3) Madame Sturmtruppefuhrerin, I know you’re really enthusiastic about Real America stringing the coloreds up high, but if I may: in what conceivable way could you take back reins with a fucking lasso?
1) It was a dark and stormy night, and Pat Boone was depressed about the poor fortunes of his close personal and professional friend Bob Dole. As he prepared to cross the Canadian border and leave this undeserving nation forever, around the corner appeared the surviving Sex Pistols, each erect.
2) 1965: low Earth orbit. Edward White, doomed son of Texas, stepped out of his capsule, his tether carefully spooling him out into the void. While he knew that he could see less this way than he had in the capsule, and that in the grand scheme of things he was still just a high-flying sky-man, his eyes were filled with glory and a hope we know to be forlorn. Today would not be as planned, though: in the corner of his restrained, space-drunk vision he could make out a flash of the different, more beige gray his superiors had warned him of. He mentally reminded himself of his space revolver. He was ready for Leonov. He was ready to kill in orbit, or die in it. What he was not ready for was love.
3)Retirement had been good to President Bush. Nobody made him hang around horses any more, and he got to hang around in Kennebunkport as his station in life demanded instead of slumming it with those lazy-eyed Texan fuckers. He didn’t even have to sit down and shut up when Cheney had something foul to say any more. It had been a good day even before his manservant Sowadjec announced the arrival of today’s guest. Cybernetic boy-jockey in tow, Crown Prince Abdul-Aziz entered the room with a warm greeting, still gloriously toned beneath his assless robes after these long seven years. “Tonight you are the House of Saud’s camel,” continued the conservative heir, offering his hand and a greased velvet glove to his New England colleague.
4) Once again, Lee and John were eager with anticipation, sporting a boner and bonah respectively as the limo streamed into view of the warehouse. But today John’s wife and her Greek lover knew how to keep the safe-word unsaid. Little did either know that they had already begun their last tango in Dallas.
[5] “And thanks to my guests, Ollie North and Bay Buchanan. America salutes you. God bless all of you at home.” Another day, another Hannity’s America, another hundred thousand dollars. But as the swarthy hive took down the set for the night, Sean noticed Colonel North wasn’t leaving — and, as Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch swaggered in with a gleam in their old, wet eyes, Sean realized his endless fidelity was about to be repaid, his love for the GOP consummated. Tonight the Republican Party would make an honest woman of him.
(6) In a sinister dacha in the Crimea, a man in a particularly cruisy wheelchair snickered openly at his own perfidy with his friends Alger Hiss – codename ALES – and Josef Stalin. “Oy,” said Rosenfeldt, “always with the betraying of America’s doughty Aryan allies.” He squealed with girlish delight as he noticed that Stalin’s balls also had tiny, angry moustaches, and then took out his big queer cigarette holder in order to slosh them around in his stupid mouth.