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!
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!
A.M. Gittlitz, the New Inquiry / Salon:
Punk’s cultural revolution: Pussy Riot’s masked women have become icons of Russia’s anti-Putin movement — and turned the genre on its head
Maybe if we all pray hard enough to the 80s we’ll have another shot at replacing Russians with East Coast bourgeois.
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!
Let me get this out of the way: I am here to talk about art.
As far as I’m concerned, art is the glorious act of transmigration from one mind to another: the movement of statements from the artist to the audience. Art, seen in this way, is the main thing distinguishing the heterogenous family of thinking animals from the universe; it is ever-present in human life, and the most important thing in the world. It is what keeps understanding from being a burden, and what makes the solitude of consciousness bearable. And as far as I’m concerned, criticism counts as art.
Criticism is art: the art not just of judgement in a vacuum, but the art of adversarial judgements. In its most basic form it is a firm and reasoned answer – suitable for conveying the fruit of one person’s critical mind to anther – to the question. “Is A or B better?” It grows more complex as the ground multiplies in comparison to the figures:
“Is A better than B?”
“Is A worthy of inclusion in the canon of C, D, E, and F?”
“Is A better than the average of all the 200-some films in genre G?”
“Is A as good as all the 800-some films made this year?”
“Is A better than all of the several thousand films ever made?”
“What can A tell us about the several million surviving works of art in our culture?”
“What can A tell us about all human endeavors?”
Not all criticism aspires to compare the figure of some solitary work with the ground of the whole creative universe, but successful criticism can and has. It need not even focus on the figure at all; the orientation of the ground can tell its own story.
I am a critic, and not a fantastic or a gifted one; I can still read a good line of criticism, and am equipped to be awestruck at its lonely glory. This equipment comes from wading my whole life through a kind of art – critical discussion. One of my hobbies might properly even be called metacritique. I’ve endeavored some years now to understand criticism and make sense of its practice and standards.
If criticism as an artistic discipline needs a defense – and can be defended to people who admit to the existence of verbal arts at all – the best defense I can offer are these ending lines, which I consider to speak for themselves:
~
Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.
~
~
~
And finally, in their own right some of the finest sentences ever set down in English, and part of an essay which can generally be described in the same terms:
~
Further notes are to follow on the nature, practice, and deficiencies of criticism in its present form.
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
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.
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.