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!

I’ve said too much about movies I haven’t seen for one lifetime (film courses will do that to you), but let me just summarize: comedy has targets. Comedy wounds. Even the broadest, most toothless comedy has to try and communicate the message “what fools these mortals be!”. This is a truth so fundamental it should be considered a requirement for reviewing a comedy of any kind. And while to some degree you get a pass based on “speaking truth to power”, The Dictator is in all but name about a man who was ousted from power before it wrapped. What it has to say, it must say without that excuse; it has chosen its targets and we must judge it in part by them.

I mean, from this review alone, let me draw up a list of Baron-Cohen’s targets:

• Some mysterious group who would enjoy reenacting the attack on the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics, history’s worst tragedy, but are comically ignorant about the nature of Jews – a group into whom his hilarious character “General Aladeen” falls. Bearded men????
  (Oh, I get it, it’s one of those zany irreverent South Park jokes, without a message or a political agenda! It’s just inchoate misanthropy! My demographic loves that kind of thing. Whew!)
•  The severed head of a man described by three separate reviews as “a civil rights leader”, “a drug dealer”, and “an elderly black man”
• Those damn hipster kids, especially the ones who have the gall to be those damn hipster kids with titties on ‘em (what an angry boner that is!)
• Leftists
• The perfidious Chinese
• The backwards Arabs
• A wealthy society lady
• Abortion
• Dictatorship
• American celebrities
• American socialites
• American politics
• Americans generally

But never fear: you see, after all this free-floating directionless misanthropy, which never threatens our delicate sensibilities by having a shrill political agenda to which the audience isn’t completely inured, Baron-Cohen seemingly falls in love with his completely imaginary character, and then has him deliver a cynical speech which O’Hehir is sure skewers our smug foolishness in an important way.

On the one hand Baron-Cohen has nothing but bad things to say about any of the above groups, who sort of add up to “everyone and everything the despicable blitcons who helped us commit national suicide hate about America and its world order” – but on the other hand he loves an imaginary man who is his Sandler-esque schtick character in an El Presidente costume. There’s a progressive message buried in there somewhere, I’m sure of it – or why would I have laughed? I’m too good a person to be taken in by someone I disagree with!

Most of all, what galls me is O’Hehir’s presumption to judge this a better movie than The Great Dictator in one pivotal regard:

I shouldn’t spoil Aladeen’s climactic speech, in which he praises the many virtues of dictatorship (which the Western world has so foolishly left behind), except to say that it’s a brilliant, sardonic response to the paean to progress and democracy delivered by Chaplin’s barber in the guise of the dictator Hynkel — and that its targets are you and me, not the known tyrants and despots of the Arab world. “We are coming into a new world, a kindlier world, where men will rise above their hate, their greed and brutality,” Chaplin’s character tells the world. [...] But the new world without hate, greed and brutality — nuh-uh, he’s heard that one before.

O’Hehir, you worthless Gen-X smuglord, you fucking merchant of bullshit, you’ve lodged film so far up your ass your teeth are a fire hazard. How lost can human history be to one man who can read and write? I haven’t seen The Dictator, but I have seen both the original Great Dictator you aim to slander and its frequent companion Duck Soup. The difference isn’t the anarchic sensibility and glib misanthropy of the Marx Brothers versus the conventional piety of Chaplin. The difference is that in 1933 the world was less afraid of Hitler than it was of Mussolini. The films had two separate targets. That’s not to say Mussolini wasn’t evil – he was – or that the Marx Brothers’ penetrating satire of interwar jingoism wasn’t great – it was. Mussolini was a hot high-flying balloon fit only to have air let out of him. Hitler was a sincere and extreme threat to left and liberal values, and not only sought to dominate the world but had that aim within his grasp.

The comparison is still unfair – I don’t care how good The Dictator is, Duck Soup is better; and for the record, before you call the farrago of cheap shots at targets not in the business of defending themselves on the silver screen “misanthropic comedy” it might do you some good to rewatch literally any Marx Brothers film for a refresher on what “misanthropic comedy” means (God knows you won’t consent to learn by any means but film) – but it’s at least a comparison that isn’t ignorant and ridiculous to make. Chaplin’s over-optimistic speech ruined The Great Dictator for generations of film nerds mumbling ‘but that’s not what happened’, like Hitler was just a character in a movie – like Nazism was just a cartoon of an ideology. But it was the best that mustachioed little Brit could do to say why, at a time when the world was going to war with Hitler without America (or, for that matter, the USSR – and with it party-line Communists the world over), any of it mattered. Baron-Cohen isn’t making a movie where “for the love of God, we must do something” is a defensible statement. However much he might act like he’s living in a world that seeks to murder him, he has the luxury of affecting a sneer. Chaplin did not. Sorry if it makes his the more boring film to watch now; I’m sure he’d apologize for it if he wasn’t busy being a goddamn hero.

(Also, grow some patriotism and a spine, you simpering anglophile power-wimp.)

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!

I feel heart-sick at the prospect of actually wrestling with the flood of trivial gossip-columnry that issues from Mary Elizabeth Williams’s smuglord fingers, so I’m not going to do that. I just especially like this one because it doubles down on her usual act:

1. Prefacing and following her column with propitiatory hand-wringing about how destructive and trivial what we call “gossip columns” (factoids about celebritoids) are;
2. Writing a conventional “gossip column” between those paragraphs.

See, if you make your gossip column about how it’s telling about our weird culture that [GOSSIP ITEM], you can fool well-meaning liberals into treating it as cultural critique or news instead of a fucking gossip column.

But this is my Internet job, which I do for no money and less recognition, so here we go, let’s have a brief gander at what Williams thinks constitutes news.

There’s one thing even more pathetic than the news that Octomom Nadya Suleman is facing bankruptcy and mulling a career move into masturbation porn. It’s the idea that anybody anywhere would enjoy this.

Cracking form, MEW! You even managed to condemn yourself with this one, without precisely owning up to it. It’s that kind of delectable tease that got you where you are: writing Salon‘s gossip column.

This week Suleman, World’s Greatest Bumpaholic

Okay, what? “Bumpaholic”? Don’t act like you’re being ironic, you fucking printed that.

and, according to Suze Orman, the woman “everybody hates,”

Who the fuck is Suze Orman and why the fuck should I care about what she has to say? I mean, she’s wrong – I don’t hate her, I don’t know anyone who hates her, and I can’t even conceive of the mentality that would hate a woman for having eight kids while swarthy/single while the Duggars get a TV platform for their horrible beliefs and two Presidents from two parties bomb wedding parties.

Oh, and I looked her up – evidently she offers glib bank-friendly financial advice on Oprah’s television network and branded a card which essentially exists to steal from people who watch Oprah’s television network in empowermentese. Suze Orman is your idea of a cultural commentator, MEW? Is she more important than whoever else – say, Amanda Marcotte – because she’s on TV instead of a blog, and she has straight did blonde hair and a face like a corn farmer, and she pretends to care about money? I don’t know what gets you off, MEW.

I spared you an internal Salon link, to MEW doing the same basic act with the original news that Suleman was doing mild fetish porn.

managed to yet again redefine “rock bottom.”

And isn’t it so gross how people are saying that about her? You know, that she’s hit rock bottom.

Just earlier this month she’d vowed on the “Today” show that she would never do porn, but she’s been on the slippery slope ever since her octuplets were born back in 2009.

God, how gross this is – you can smell the anticipation on Williams for it, just willing this woman on public assistance for her children to do hardcore so she can talk about it.

Last year she did a fetish shoot in her home, whipping a baby clothes-clad man named Tattoo while posing with her children’s toys.

Thanks for telling me, MEW! I was not aware of this – any of this – before you pointed it out in this, a forum for news. Isn’t it weird how people keep on publicly degrading and humiliating Nadia Suleman? Almost like they’re enjoying any story that makes her look bad.

“A baby clothes-clad man named Tattoo!” “Posing with her children’s toys!” Hoo doggy! Is what they – TMZ maybe, who she links to here – would say. The scoundrels!

Then last month, for the reported fee of a mere $8,000, she did a topless (albeit nipple-free) spread for a British magazine.

(A second TMZ link there. That’s how you can tell you’re doing a journalism.)

A “mere $8,000″! Is what they would say, those bastards, enjoying news of her ignominy.

And all the while, the porn vultures have been circling her, none more closely than Vivid’s Steve Hirsch. Two years, ago, he offered a reported half a million dollars for one sex scene. Last year, her market value was down to $100,000 for three scenes. Now — given the increasing desperation of her situation, and her admission that “I’m not going to allow my kids to be homeless. I’m terrified” — her willingness to go further and cheaper is a matter of record.

Thanks for that, MEW. I can’t tell which makes me want to take an hour-long shower and just scrub my skin completely clean more – learning about some sleazy splay-handed porno shitdick chiselling a woman who people want to see naked, that woman evidently being afraid that she and her children – surrounded by people amused by her pain but unable or unwilling to support her materially – will wind up in the street, or your glee at the impersonal forces driving a woman neither of us know to prostitution.

Definitely not that last one, because this isn’t a gossip piece – it’s cultural reportage.

There isn’t much about the story of Suleman — a woman who says she never got “unconditional acceptance and love” from her own mother — that isn’t sad and disturbing.

And thank you for telling it with such warmth and compassion.

For three years now, she’s eagerly vied for public attention, peddling a reality show, shilling for PETA and trying to build what she naively refers to as an “empire” around her mega brood.

But Suleman is not a likable personality. She’s a woman whose motives seem grossly misguided, who’s acted entirely without benefit of a media-acceptable support system. She’s the lady who makes Kate Gosselin look sympathetic. And for that reason, her attempts to leverage her unorthodox lifestyle have fallen short. Even a public that can make celebrities out of those enthusiastically breeding Duggars will stop short of endorsing a single woman who seems so blatantly out of her depth, so recklessly willful about her reproductive system, so blithely clueless about the consequences of her choices. What’s left for a woman like that? Not quirky TLC reality shows. Not a stint co-hosting “The View.”

Yeah, those pious, conventional, house-proud fuckers. How dare they lavish those Quiverfull hate machines with money, love, and attention and let this woman starve? She was only doing what the culture told her would give her life meaning, right?

Nope, Suleman now faces roughly the same options as many women who’ve made rash choices, who’s been blind to protecting themselves and their families.

That bitch! She should never have made those choices that society rewarded other people for while brown!!

(I’m inserting this, MEW, because you’re so far down the rabbit hole that you can’t be bothered with outrage – even the faintest glimmer of it – over a woman the gossip culture you inhabit has helped reduce to prostitution. If you can’t do that, you’re not qualified for snarky kultur reportage.)

The depths of sexual degradation.

Oooooooo! Do tell! I’m schadenfreude-moist already!!

Suleman’s certainly not mulling a deeper step into adult entertainment because that’s her personal inclination. She’s clear that she’s increasingly desperate and her choices are narrowing every day. At 36, she likely knows that even her option to sell herself sexually is rapidly diminishing.

Right. You’ve established this woman is tumbling into a yawning abyss and that it’s super sexy. Yeoman work. Go on.

Poor as her decision-making has been historically – and, based on her recent moves, apparently continues to be –

Right. Having twenty-some kids because your cult wants to cover the Earth with white people: good choice. Having fourteen kids because you live a meaningless, lonely life in a culture that fetishizes spectacle and motherhood: poor choice. Naturally you’re gonna have to do porn after that.

And you can’t even say that you disagree with this – the articles you linked on Suleman and Duggar were respectively “ooo, she’s doing a fetish shoot!” and “you triflin’ bitches, stop judging that nice Duggar lady, oh my gaww have you never heard of a woman’s right to choose like double you tee eff.” (I summarize, both because I sort of dislike you and because your writing tells me you know better.)

the bottom line is that Suleman is still responsible for 14 children who have no other family but each other. And while her behavior has been horribly ill-thought-out, a culture that would punish a woman for that recklessness by taking pleasure in her humiliation, that would send her the clear and repeated message that her value now is simply as a sex show freak, is just sadistic.

The bastards! Telling us all about this woman they’ve blown up into a figure of disgust and anger falling into sexual degradation under their constant scorn! Tell us more!!!

Suleman and her kids don’t just need to pay their rent and their bills now. They need resources. They need help. They need sustained, professional emotional and social support. Yeah, she made her own bad decisions and she’s got to live with them. And no, I don’t get why someone with that much debt didn’t cancel her DirecTV account long ago either.

Thanks for that, incidentally. She and her brood should live in a garret in sackcloth and ashes as punishment for their Choices, which they Chose. I’ve heard as many of 50% of these octomoms have telephones and computer machines and color TV! Not so “poor”, are they??

But a family of 15 human beings dragged down into bankruptcy and autoerotic porn isn’t just Nadya Suleman’s problem. There’s no satisfaction to be had in her downfall, no “told you so” payoff. Mercy isn’t just for people who are good. Compassion isn’t for mothers who do the right things. It’s for the people who make the biggest mistakes, who screw up the hardest. It’s for people like Nadya Suleman.

Good, thanks. Thanks for not ending your column on “this bitch is spending welfare money on color TV!!”, which if your editor had screwed up even a little you would have. Thanks for balancing out your almost erotic fascination with Nadia Suleman’s public humiliation and sexual shame with a magnanimous little paragraph about how we should be nicer to people.

This is the culture you’ve decided to inhabit, Mary Elizabeth Williams. These are its concerns. These are the words it puts in your mouth, makes you speak or respond to the speaking of. While America burns, it seethes in anger that a stranger with 14 kids won’t cancel her TV before doing hardcore pornography. And you seethe with it.

I like to think you’re better than that, Mary Elizabeth Williams.

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!

I feel I’ve already gone to the mat with Doig and done a fairly good job of illustrating my fundamental problem with his outlook. (He is insufficiently skeptical of the wild promises of any man in a turtleneck.) So I will only go into particular detail on one strange disjoint in his piece:

The technology isn’t the only wild card — the very idea of an Urban Operating System is a risky proposition. “Aerotropolis” author Greg Lindsay points out that a scaled-down version of it has been tried before, in New York City in the 1960s, when the RAND Corp. designed a computer model to streamline the city’s public services. Written about in Joe Flood’s book “The Fires,” the computer systematically withdrew fire protection from New York’s poorest neighborhoods, setting the stage for the blazes that would decimate the South Bronx over the next decade.

The lesson? Humans will act in ways that even the smartest computer model can fail to anticipate — which is fine, until you put your entire city in its hands.

That is what he learns? That’s his lesson? That the triumph of the technocratic will must be more agile? Maybe what we’re looking at is one of those social promotion cases.

The thing is, to learn the actual lesson that horrifying story was trying to teach him, he’d have to accept a certain core limitation of technology and of models generally – and accept the cruel fact making his reveries over a “dream city” impossible.

We cannot remove the man from the machine. The mind that divines the formula knows the numbers it wants, and the hands that set the gears in motion ache for a direction of travel.

It has been the dream of theorists of all stripes to remove the human element. In fields like city design, government, and so on – fields where data is so overwhelmingly abundant that one must begin to define chaff so as to be left with wheat to winnow out – it has for generations been the frustrated dream of a certain cybernetic school to provide answers that require no human interpretation. They devise simplifications, and simulations, using little mechanical models of the field as they see it. The worst thing that can happen to them is they get the opportunity to use their devices, to put the Model into practice.

Sometimes the failure is simple; the model is predicated on outwardly false assumptions and it simply fails to make valid predictions when stress-tested. (This fate befell cybernetic models of ecology.)

But sometimes, the failure is more insidious. The priorities of the designer become the priorities of the model, and these become the priorities of a system that must interact with human beings. Doig suggests that the RAND-designed computer model failed because humans somehow defied it; the problem is not that it failed but that it worked exactly as designed. Told to optimize economic efficiency, and discover the best investment of funding dollars, it did exactly what RAND analysts, outside of the antiseptic light of day, did – it sought to produce a better New York City for the elite by destroying the working class. If you value money and human dignity the same, you could come to no other honest conclusion.

And the computer provided a layer of objectivity to results that were not fundamentally different, or more rigorous, or more intelligent than the sort of thing RAND technocrats would have suggested privately; and as the programme ran itself out and the Bronx burned, polite society blamed the victims before they blamed infallible machines.

This isn’t some kind of lefty bomb-throwing. The “garbage in, garbage out” problem is self-evident in the ideas of Doig, and men like him, for “smart cities”:

• A mayor, a community of broadly libertarian technologists, and an insurance agency agree that spending billions of dollars on sensors designed by a firm of experts is a travesty when they can just optimize services for people who own late-generation Apple products by employing the voluntary services of comfortable technologist dilettantes. Spotted the witch’s brew of problems here? Maybe an ironically exact repeat of the South Bronx catastrophe? Congratulations, you’re sapient!
• A “future city” in Portugal seeks to sell a glass-house lifestyle to 150,000 workers for a small cartel of tech firms. Sure is a good thing they’re operating in Portugal, which could easily afford to pay for all of the externalities and emergency bailout costs that utopian projects like this tend to slough off on government as a last resort, isn’t it?
• Doig does seem to realize that a company town with built-in truancy officers could make the air in a concentration camp seem free, but ah! Here are the Fruits of our Study to liberate us: don’t make the dream city in the exact shape of an aeroplane! Thanks, city planning seminar in college! Problem solved!

The pothole example is particularly amazing in its exact narrative match to the South Bronx fire example; the resonances are sublime in their directness and simplicity. A cultural elite, confident they have solutions denied to fifteen generations before them, set out to deal with the perennial angst of big city budgets. They don’t have to reduce the budget by doing less for less – alone in history, they can do more for less.
And they optimize with the tools they have learned to fetishize: in the case of RAND cost-benefit analysis, computerized statistical analysis, cybernetic system models; in the case of the pothole app smartphones, “the cloud”, e-volutarism. And the poor, mysteriously unattended-to by the cultural elite, die. Lesson learned: people are hard to predict and you must never ever go back in time and engineer Brasilia.

(And this specific concession – ‘people are hard to predict’ – is so ill-matched to the example Doig gives that I have to be a little uncharitable and assume it was just chosen out of a hat as a canned criticism of cybernetic technocracy, and left unaddressed, as some kind of weird rhetorical gambit.)

Again and again, Doig seems to hover on the awareness of how ridiculous this “dream city” idea is. I won’t do the sparty thing and point out in what dire straits many American and European city governments now operate – that would be uncharitable – but if he’s going to live in the airy realm of theory, he is obligated to follow those theories even when they go into deep recesses the light of day does not penetrate.

If he doesn’t learn to look unafraid into the darkness, he will go to his grave depending on the hand that holds out the light, and mistaking the contours its desires urge it along for the shape of the world.

Tyranny of cloth diapers
I gave birth at home and breastfed. My mom was drugged up and never lactated. Which one of us got the better deal?

Wow, what an impressive abyss I’ve got here! Better never look at it again.

Part of what pisses me off here is that this is an article that started out well. It’s initially willing to contemplate the degree to which “modern”, “natural” motherhood is a stifling and arduous novelty. But then, with a dismissive wave of the hand at imaginary snooty French broads and dried-up old feminists – always questioning our liberating, natural choices, those dried-up old feminists, like they’ve seen a cause they’ve poured a long, difficult life into go astray and think they know better than us because of it – she turns away, ignoring the voice shouting at her, “You have thrown away dignity for authenticity. You have seen motherhood done right, and you are doing it wrong.”

Let’s look at the article before it goes off the rails:

Kids love hearing the story of their birth and, growing up, I was no exception. I came into the world just as feminists began demanding that women be allowed to labor naturally, huffing and puffing their way through contractions, husbands and friends in the delivery room for emotional support.

(Natural birth is a ‘feminist’ demand – nothing to do with a national scare about the potential infant health effects of the hospital. After all, whatever a feminist does is feminist.)

My mother would have none of that. She was gassed into a twilight sleep and shot up with opiates for the pain. Flat on her back and feet in the stirrups, she pushed on command until I fell into the doctor’s arms. My arrival – another girl! — was announced to my dad, who sat with other bored men in the waiting room. He would first see me through a window, where I was displayed among the other newborns, swaddled tight and sleeping.

One final detail I insisted that my mom include with each retelling: “And then you got a shot?”

“That’s right,” she would say, referring to the heavy dose of estrogen once routinely injected after a birth. “That way my body wouldn’t make milk, and I could go back to work.” I couldn’t help myself; I cheered.

I loved that shot because of what it meant to my mom, something I understood even at a young age. She had tried being a housewife after my sister was born the year before, but the drudgery of washing and folding diapers, the inanity of popular soap operas, the lack of tangible accomplishments at the end of each day, had her clawing her way back to a steadily rising corporate career when I was only 6 weeks old.

And I thought, “What a fool! I want to cuddle an adorable little baby all day!” Because feminism.

Yeah, I did say this was before it goes off the rails. Wait for it, it gets worse.

Contrast this with my own children’s more feral birth stories, which involve some or all of the following: midwives, birthing tubs, hospital-grade pads lining my sofa and living room floor. And breastfeeding. Lots and lots of breastfeeding. I squeezed what maternity leave I could from federal laws. In the end, though, I quit my job so I could figure out this life-shifting role without the hassle of long commutes, expensive child care, and pumping breast milk while perched over a toilet.

Sounds like the style of birth and natal care that you committed yourself to because your subculture destroyed your ability to hold a job that you profited from. If you’re at all representative of modern middle-class women, isn’t this a giant leap backwards? Isn’t this a return to the life lived by women outside of the elite before the 1941-1968 workplace revolution?

The way I looked at it, I was taking the maternity leave my society didn’t want me to have and that women like my own mother never wanted. But the French feminist and philosopher Elisabeth Badinter argues in her 2010 book, which was finally released in English this week, I was yet another newbie mom screwing things up.

Because the book is about you, and your choices, personally, and you are being judged and found wanting.

Yeah, I said it’d be going off the rails. Wait for it.

In “The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women,” Badinter explains that, 30 years ago, things were looking good for a generation of moms in Western Europe – women had total control over reproduction, they had achieved financial independence, wage gaps were shrinking. Then a global economic crisis kicked women off the job, pushing them back in the home and searching for meaning. At the same time, a renewed interest in the environment persuaded grown-ups to look to the earth and tradition for answers. Marry the two, Badinter argues, and a new type of mom was born — one who knew what she wanted for her babies and believed she possessed some innate wisdom to make it happen. Problem is, these moms, the daughters of Badinter’s and my mother’s generation, set women back decades with things like drug-free births, generous, state-sanctioned maternity and paternity leaves, and, of all tools of the Man, cloth diapers.

You can just feel the derision here – drug-free births are liberating, and cloth diapers – which solve a minor environmental problem by forcing parents (usually the mother) to fiddle with their children’s shit – can’t possibly be a tool of the Man. Cloth diapers are pure, and natural, and gentle. They’re immune to the rules of marketing and commerce.

There’s a new tyrant oppressing women’s lives, Badinter claims. And it’s a nipple-sucking, nap-fighting, incontinent little baby.

Doesn’t sound like a bold claim to me – the displacement of traditional female coverture onto babies is well-documented, not least of which by this very blog, literally from the beginning.

For Badinter, this naturalist parenting has taken over, triggered mom guilt, convinced us that we should refuse epidurals, breastfeed off-schedule, and, of all things, take advantage of long, paid maternity leaves.

So far so factual. (Although the sarcastic pretense to bafflement about cloth diapers underscores her fundamental disconnection from the wider reality, in which grown adults don’t want to slosh a baby’s shit around in their laundry.)

And of course, then it goes off the rails.

Who cares that these things might actually be the woman’s choice,

The woman’s choice! Of course! That is what we are for, as Feminists, is Choices. This means all choices made by women are equally valid, and equally feminist, and interrogating those choices – exploring the degree to which they are narrowed by the patriarchy, and the degree to which the “rewards” of naturalist mothering are to the significant and exclusive benefit of the patriarchy – that’s scolding. Or old-fashioned. Or part of the “mommy wars”. That is all this woman wants to do, in her text about society encouraging women without any medical or psychological basis to make themselves into some strange, romantic idea of a medieval brood-sow. She isn’t asking why it should be so popular in a time of austerity for women seeking meaning and encountering pressure away from the workplace should attempt to experience the world through a baby sucking the life from their naked, sexless teats. She is questioning you, and your choices, and that’s a crime.

make sense for her family,

Couldn’t possibly be that you thinking in terms of “her family” instead of “her” is why Badinter wrote this fucking book, could it?

satiate her curiosity about the thresholds of human pain?

I am struggling for an appropriate comment on Holler’s belief that this should be integral to motherhood and failing. I won’t even try.

Okay, just one. Can’t you just see the T-shirt? “I Satiate My Curiosity About The Thresholds Of Human Pain – What’s Your Superpower?”

Jesus Christ on a fucking bike.

By participating, women are ceding power back to men. The men? They don’t have to lift a finger – thanks to moms, they’ve regained control over everything.

She means “men” in the aggregate, you liberal cretin! She’s talking about larger social forces! Your fuckin’ hubby isn’t the 1.2 billion men in the G-20!

I’ve been a modern mom long enough to look at mommy-wars rhetoric like Badinter’s with the skeptical eye of a wounded veteran.

And I’ve been reading self-obsessed liberal dross for long enough to look at mommy war rhetoric like yours with the thousand-yard stare of a nostalgic poilu – a flower of youth withered on a poison vine; quiet, looking past it into the middle distance, smiling humorlessly and silently continuously screaming, gasping for air just out of reach but unable to drown.

I love metaphors!

I mean, she makes a great case that mothering trends come and go and are rarely based on irrefutable science. Epidurals? Safe. Breast milk? Not all that. Skin-to-skin bonding with babies? Fun but hardly crucial. I think we all know we’re not going to be snacking on placenta forever.

Way to flit your eyes over the abyss, lady! What a champ!

Then again, does a home birth really have a negative impact on the stubborn wage gap?

I have no fucking idea. I don’t think you do either, or you’d have offered evidence. I don’t even know if Badinter knows. You just refuse to accept that a Choice you made, as a Feminist, could be impoverishing women in general to the benefit of men in general. It just strikes you as implausible, because the pay gap is caused by bad people and you and your working, bacon-bringing husband are good people.

Badinter particularly has it in for breastfeeding, something she thinks too many women have been tricked into and something French women aren’t all that interested in trying. Why bother, she wants to know. It ties moms down, adds a layer of guilt, isn’t any better than bottles and formula. Anyway, it’s taxing – on the woman and her “conjugal partner.” When it comes time to bed down, rather than offering up bountiful breasts for her mate to fondle, moms are pushing fathers to the couch to make room for her new lover – a co-sleeping baby. It’s an arrangement, she recounts with seeming horror, that can last for years.

Badinter’s critique is not surprising, given how zealous the “breast is best” messengers can be. (She dedicates a delightful number of pages to taking down La Leche League.)

See, from just that you’d think she was ready to accept that maybe the advocacy for breastfeeding has been a double-edged sword, right? She’d go at least that far to accept Badinter might know what she’s talking about?

Nope:

But as a mom who breastfed her kids for years, I can assure you that nurslings are a ball-and-chain only as much as the outside world won’t welcome them in.

So women can’t breastfeed in public and the answer is… what? To stop breastfeeding, or at least stop militating for breastfeeding as an exclusive means of child nutrition? To withdraw from the public sphere and eagerly pray for a better class of human being to occupy it?

In which case, it’s not breastfeeding moms who are undermining women’s status, it’s the same old mother- and child-averse institutions – work, school, swimming pools swarming with conservatives.

The latter. Those damn conservatives! First they insist that if you don’t or can’t breastfeed your child you’re a harpy who doesn’t deserve to reproduce, and then they insist you breastfeed exclusively in private! It’s like they have an ideological commitment to female seclusion or something, and someone or other is playing right into their devious trap!!

Modern engineering has made babies a kind of go-anywhere accessory.

And here we have the crux of the problem. This woman’s article is about her. Her baby is about her, and to a large extent in the context of her life her husband is about her.

Problem is, too much of society prefers they’re not anywhere, no matter what they eat.

Badinter isn’t the first aging feminist to accuse younger women of trying to settle the score with their feminist foremothers. Was my decision to take a career break, suckling my babies for years and even, occasionally, wrapping them in cloth diapers a rebellion against my mother’s hard-driving, job-focused ways? The artificial milk and endless hours at a babysitter’s?

Couldn’t be! Just a coincidence that your life is arranged exactly as though you were doing precisely that. I mean, your life is a result of your choices, right? And those choices – you made those in a vacuum, right?

That’s not how I see it. My mother and I both reacted to the demands of our time. In this book-length attempt to scold the young’uns for screwing up progress, Badinter, like others before her, fails to see that what her generation gave us were real choices.

Right. That’s all – choices, which we made, individually, all of us.

After I was born, the corporate career window was closing on my mom with every day that I got older. She crawled back through just in time and made a decent life for herself and her family. I, on the other hand, felt like I had time. Sticking with one company for life was as outdated as a postpartum estrogen shot.

And how much better we are for it, now that loyalty flows upwards from employees to employers and women, in becoming mothers, must lactate.

I didn’t have to rely on the one job that I left. I could start a new career when I was ready. My mother’s urgent return to work had paved a slow and meandering path for women (and men!) of my generation. I wasn’t expected to leave my job to be with my kids, which is exactly why I could consider it.

No, you weren’t expected to at all. No one lauded you for your decision, and a whole subculture doesn’t exist to consider your decision the only ethical one you could make. Your choice was made in complete free will.

Generation gaps aside, Badinter’s book ultimately feels outdated. Most of her data comes from the 1980s and ’90s, and family life has evolved dramatically since then.

1999? Ancient history!

I’m in Year 11 of motherhood, and I feel I’ve witnessed modern parenting change right before my eyes.

2001? I practically had my baby in the brave new world of 2012!

Where Badinter reports regression for women, I see signs of progress.

Anecdotes notoriously trump data, don’t you know.

Instead of the old-guard patriarchy taking over the wheel, more and more partners share the load – either through necessity or a sincere desire to be with their kids.

The Patriarchy isn’t Al Bundy, sitting shiftlessly in his chair with his hand down his expanding waistline, hating his wife and family and seeking a domestic rule history has allowed to slip away from him. It’s the complex web of interrelationships between men and men and women and women and men and women – between you and your husband and me and my wife and me and your husband and you and my wife, undergirding the whole of American society. You can’t fix it with kinder, gentler men. At least the 17-year-old Nice Guys who fall into this trap do it because they feel the need to look good for girls they want to have sex with.

I have as many stay-at-home-dad friends as I do similarly barely employed mom friends. These dads can work the cloth diapers as well as any oppressed French eco-femme. They heat formula, thaw frozen breast milk and pack healthy lunches. They attend playgroups and work the co-op preschools during the day and send out resumes and story pitches and teach classes at night. Want to piss them off? Just call them “Mr. Mom.” Or tell them they’re doing a great job babysitting their kids.

Don’t be churlish. I know the brave new world of modern manhood as well as you do, and I’m not going to pretend even for a moment that even nice liberal men take an equal part in child-rearing, in the aggregate. Especially in situations like the one you freely chose to enter into in a moral vacuum – where the money comes from your husband, and to earn it he has to invest energy into things outside of your family – the contribution is symbolic, not substantial. Your husband cleaning your baby’s cloth diapers makes you feel better about your decisions to (a) become a kept woman and (b) invest hours of your week into reusable shitwipes. His nice, caring, loving ass is helping keep you out of the workplace, and helping keep you from paying attention to how badly modern motherhood has narrowed your future.

And even in situations where the children are raised by a domestic father, society still pressures women to supplement the father’s role in key ways that suck up time available to either her marriage or her job. And those situations are a small and disfavored minority even now. What, do you think “Mr. Mom” emerged from some Roger Ailes memo, drafted in a smoke-filled room? It’s the culture we inhabit.

Badinger’s assertion wasn’t that bad men were growing stronger because good men do nothing. Her assertion was that changes in motherhood systematically favor those in power – the “patriarchy” – to the detriment of those out of power.

But you don’t believe in men. You barely believe in your man. You live in a moral universe of one, and you are a good person.

I’m not saying Badinter is completely out of touch with Western mothers’ lives. It’s true that motherhood lowers women’s status. But that’s not a modern phenomenon – and it has little, if anything, to do with cloth diapers.

Surely the decaying status of women couldn’t have anything to do with a minor environmental issue being spun to choicey do-your-part pwogs as a chance to Save the Earth by living with feces in an unnecessary and disgusting way.

Surely making wallowing in other people’s shit like a nursing sow an intrinsic part of Responsible Motherhood couldn’t have even a symbolic role in the degrading and devaluing of women.

Surely I’m going to wear out the letters in “surely” at this rate.

Has she even seen modern cloth diapers and accompanying accessories? If it weren’t for the fun colors and ridiculous brand names (Fuzzi Bunz?), you could easily mistake them for Pampers.

Yeah! See, she wrote it thinking cloth diapers were an ugly, inconveniently-fastened way to collect an infant’s stool such that you have to scrub it out and get it all over yourself and your things. Every modern mom knows that cloth diapers are a kicky, fun, normally-fastened way to collect an infant’s stool such that you have to scrub it out and get it all over yourself and your things.

Where modern women do undermine themselves is the constant questioning of their choices and allowing for an onslaught of guilt. No matter what we do, it’s wrong in someone’s eyes – so why do we take any of this criticism seriously?

Yeah! Haters gonna hate! I chose to be a slave and I’m proud of that choice, because I was free to make it! Democracy forever!! Grrl power!!!

Instead of doing as we please and moving on, as Badinter praises French women for doing, we do as we please and then punish ourselves with guilt. I should know: Though I stand by the choices I’ve made as a mom, this book made me feel like shit.

Sometimes that’s your body’s way of telling you you’re a fool living a lie for the sake of a dream.

Then again, so did the Tiger Mom treatise and, more recently, the book about how superior French parents are to me. Why so little faith in my own decisions?

Because they’re not your decisions! Because you’re making an endless series of magician’s choices and your freedom to make those choices is the only thing that gives you dignity as a human being!

My mom, on the other hand, never regretted her estrogen shots or worried that baby formula had made me fat. Yet she absolutely loved the idea that I nursed her grandkids. For a baby shower, she gave me cloth diapers. My mom even managed after a while to stop making negative comments about mothers who didn’t go to work every day. These weren’t slights against me — just an old habit from when she had to defend mothers who did.

They weren’t about me – that would be wrong. Because I’m me, and I’m special, and in the immortal words of Betty Friedan, I’m worth it.

Me.

Third-wave feminism, in its fixation on the limits imposed on women by the radical and occasionally utopian programme laid out by second-wavers, has bred a generation of myopics. Their liberation begins at the bridge of their own noses and ends in their own vulvas – which, thanks to a generation of BDSM mainstreaming, are now locuses of ennobling agony and embarassment (the Red Tent Party, the “threshold of human pain”) rather than sexual objects either for themselves, their partners, or the world.

Their babies, living, breathing human beings who will have to experience the world through the stories they have learned on their parents’ knees, are fashion accessories. Holler’s children are their own people and she’s her own person and her mother is her own person, and the golden thread linking them all is not human experience or social place or historical contingency but just genes and meat.

And we wonder why when the freshwater economists and the mombloggers and the austerians and the Walkers and all the other hounds of economic and social patriarchy arrive, there are no voices raised to oppose them on any deeper principle.

What rough beasts, their hour come at last, slouch towards Chicago to give birth?

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.

Look, I know how people love and need a simple narrative by which to live their lives. The power of our superior punk kultur dragging down the power machine, flowers blossoming through concrete, etc. I, too, was once twelve years old and full of light and hope.

But when your gushing review of some kind of “democratic” or “anti-authoritarian” phenom in Russia includes this -

A concert in Tallinn, Estonia, to support the band drew several notable politicians, including President Toomas Hendrik Ilves.

- doesn’t it occur to you to stop and contemplate what exactly it is you’re celebrating for its beautiful little riot grrl aesthetic?

Ilves, after all, is on the relative left of a political culture that maintained a monument to a Waffen-SS unit until international pressure forced it down. Estonian politicians across the board agree that Russians are genetically perfidious and that a blood-price needs to be extracted from their turbulent neighbor at all costs; while that in and of itself is understandable, they have also generally latched onto the red armband school of modern Eastern European history: the West betrayed them to the USSR by not invading, the Nazis were obviously the lesser of two evils and barely an evil at all, because the Jews ran the Communist Party, and the Jews are still a Judeo-Bolshevik threat to their livelihoods – and homosexuals and feminists represent a new fifth column for international Jewry – and so on and so on and so on.

And now the road to Moscow is via Brussels, but austerity is still important. And this is according to Ilves, himself! The president of Estonia, who drummed up support for this damn band at this damn concert! Is that so unremarkable in an article about the shadowy, corrupt forces of authority and repression?

I hate to besmich an entire country, but fuck Estonia is what I’m saying here; being cool with polite society in Estonia suggests there’s something grievously wrong with you, and yet the author seems to take it as something to Pussy Riot’s credit.

~

This is because the author, again, wants to believe in a simple, comforting vision of the world in which there are Good Liberals and Bad Authoritarians and never the twain shall meet. Putin: bad authoritarian. Toomas Hendrik Ilves: good liberal. Pussy Riot: good liberal, and also feminists, and Riot Grrls, hooray!

I am not behind Putin, but I prefer him to the people the West is willing to accept as legitimate opposition – bourgeois liberals looking to continue the bloody-minded privatizing and symbolically liberalizing Yeltsin/Gaidar regime. The liberals tell the West there is a vast conspiracy against them, because they cannot by any other means explain why the left has long been the only effective opposition to Putin’s centrist/paleoconservative party. Putin cannot be a politician they can’t effectively oppose; he must be a demon in human form, and the Communist Party and Just Russia must be his catspaws.

~

Quote after quote reveals this fundamental assumption; Putin is a monster, and anyone who is against him must thus be good and worth hurrahing:

And yet, with three of its alleged members now imprisoned and facing seven-year jail sentences, the pastel-balaclava-wearing, sloppy-guitar-playing riot grrrls have become an icon of a brewing cultural revolution in Russia.

Russia is only now undergoing a cultural revolution, after allowing United Russia rule for the last twelve years for some reason.

Pussy Riot’s now famous performance of Punk Prayer in Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow’s Kremlin, which earned them the personal ire of both the Orthodox Church’s patriarchate and Vladimir Putin himself, was a call for the Virgin Mary to become a feminist and exorcise Putin.

The Russian Orthodox Church is in the thrall of Putin. (ROCOR arise!) Putin is a demon, and only an appeal to God will save us, and also women, who are being mistreated by his authority.

Other feminist and anti-authoritarian performances included disrupting a fashion show by taking over a catwalk, performing unpermitted in a posh boutique,

The key to a new Russia is punk chic at the botiques.

and playing a song called “Freedom to Protest — Death to Prisons” on the roof of a building in a Moscow prison complex to jailed anti-Putin protesters.

Arrests of protesters represent suppression of the right to protest.

Last week a “Party Riot Bus” circled Moscow blasting punk rock and stopping for news conferences and performances calling for the release of the imprisoned band members.

(See, they’re so indie and avant-garde they don’t have a Myspace or merchandise, but having press conferences is still totally punk rock.)

While punk bands engage in nihilistic lyricism, Pussy Riot’s songs are direct attacks on the confines of their authoritarian state and patriarchy.

Russia is especially authoritarian and patriarchial.

It is fitting, then, that one conservative Russian website translated Pussy Riot to “Uprising of the Uterus.” What was once scandalized, forbidden, subaltern, rises from its rightful caste hidden and below and speaks in the very locations of its oppressing power. Who are these women, these punks, to perform, to pray, to protest in sacred locales?

People who can afford to hire out a van and buy balaclavas and who are supported by the expat press and Estonian politicians are subaltern, undercaste.

To desecrate is one of punk’s existential tasks. The smashing of sacred relics conjures society’s most archaic reactions: in this case, imprisonment, public shaming, flogging, concerns of Satanism, witchcraft, hysteria.

The reaction to Pussy Riot – and to the anti-Putin protests generally – is barbaric, redolent of the knout-marked past in which Russia is doubtless set.

Perhaps part of the reason punk has begun to lash out so effectively in the former Soviet Union is the nature of the extreme oppression in Russian society.

Russian society is extremely oppressive.

Kostya tells me Russia has its own anti-activist police force, called the “Department of Fighting Extremism.”

The Russian government is especially interested in suppressing liberal activism.

If Pussy Riot is any indication, it appears at scenes of intense banality or oppression. They have appeared on the catwalk, on top of a prison and of course at the altar.

In Russia, the catwalk and the altar are forces of banality and oppression in a special way they are not in the West.

With a new right-wing offensive against women escalating to the withholding of contraception and forced transvaginal ultrasounds, the coalition between the church and authoritarianism is as relevant in the United States as in Russia.

Special pleading is needed to prove that the political culture of the US, familiar with the readers and plunging in some circles into the Dark Ages, is as bad as the political culture of Russia, unfamiliar but vaguely imagined to be terrible.

~

Some of these things are probably true; others are debatable. But they are all woven into the fabric of the article, assumed without evidence or criticism, and then posed as counterpoints to the noble crusade of Pussy Riot, punk militants. The author knows a lot about modern punk, a good deal about historical punk, and has heard just enough about modern Russia to hang a punk-oriented story on.

This is not me claiming to be an expert on punk in Russia. God knows I know too little about punk rock to even dispute Gittlitz’s bold claim that the Ramones invented punk rock and in so doing “liberated” the guitar. I do know enough cultural history to tell that claiming the Ramones as revolutionary is about as self-consciously preposterous as calling Nixon an anarchist; the way the article is written even helps paint their gesture – a move away from the critical spirit and corrupt intellectualism of prog rock towards hidden, universally available guitar revelation – as a reactionary one.

And indeed, the history of punk is, on balance, more reactionary than revolutionary. Especially in Russia, where the youth-culture forces chafing at the bit under the materialist multicultural political state were animated by nationalism, nativism, and mysticism, my sense has never been that the punk scene is especially liberal in any respect.

~

This is not to disparage punk rock. But punk rock – especially the derivative, commercialized punk rock aesthetic – is an insufficient platform from which to engage in revolution. When Emma Goldman said “If I can’t dance I don’t want to be in your revolution”, that didn’t mean her idea of a revolutionary cell was a fucking mosh pit.

Russia might have serious problems, but it also has the tools to solve them in its own political culture. You’re not going to see the people who save Russia from Putin at CBGB, and you’re not going to see a nation liberated by the guitar.

Please to enjoy this blogging, a true but fictional story of Willard “Mitt” Romney / Wilford “Dick” Hopper / Wilhelm “Brick” Manley / Pendejo “Jellybean” Brighamyoung Junior.

Once upon a time there were two men – Wilford “Dick” Hopper and Israel Ant. They differed in many things; in means and motives and opportunities, in background and in ambitions; but that is nothing compared to their temperament.

Israel – Izzy, to his colleagues – was a serious type. He was a hard-working and sober man without time for fun and games. He kept his nose to the grindstone and he managed the money he was able to come by carefully.

And Dick preferred a life of ease. He didn’t care for Izzy’s sort, in all honesty – he felt that dumb attention to menial labor betrayed a fundamental stupidity. He couldn’t stand stupid people, or tedious people, or boredom. He was a fast fellow, and all his friends thought he was going places.

When we are interested in them – for it would be inappropriate to discuss their childhoods, or parents, or education – each man was thirty-eight years old; Israel was a tailor and Dick was an investor. Dick preferred not to throw his whole life into capital mobility – after all, that would leave him little to cultivate his higher interests. By contrast, Israel – simple man he was – threw himself into his work. He had been promoted to foreman at his clothing factory; he supervised a line dedicated to hard-wearing winter clothes.

And one summer day, he was supposed to be brought in to discuss a change in manufacturing with management. He waited outside the door, and eventually a smart-looking man (his age, but younger-looking, and healthier) poked his head out. His hair was expensive, and his face tanned. “You must be the foreman,” he said.

“Finally,” grumbled Izzy. “Are we ready to start?”

“Already have, champ,” he said. Dick had no reason to patronize Izzy; it came naturally to him. “We’ve already done all the heavy lifting, so you can get back to work.”

Israel said and did nothing. “I was supposed to -”

“Oh, it’s okay,” said Dick, reassuringly. His card was already in his hand. “I’m with the consultancy firm. Here’s my card. Call me if you need to discuss anything.”

They shut down the plant the next day. It was a week until, digging through his work clothes and deciding what to do with them, Israel discovered the card.

It was just a regular business card. On the back, it said “GROW SOME BALLS, COWARD”.

And then Israel Ant was inspired.

By cover of darkness, Israel – a large man, just taller than six foot and with the premature receding hairline and jowls of an aging bruiser – cracked the window in Dick’s summer home with a brick. Silently, a machine in the house called several numbers.

Crawling through the door, already bloody from broken glass, Israel stood naked in the darkness. The first thing he heard was a dog: an Irish Setter, big, dumb, and handsome. He barked and snarled and bared his teeth. Uncharacteristic for the breed; what had made this dog so vicious?

Israel didn’t give it any thought. He just plunged his big hunting knife into the dog’s mouth, silencing it immediately.

Over the twenty minutes he had to himself, he basically tore this dog apart – stumbling across its name-tag, identifying it as “Seamus O’Dog”. So that was the dog he had just killed.

Its blood and a little of his were all over the living room. He had begun screaming, at some point. The knife was lost, already bent over the dog’s thick bones.

And Izzy was lost to the world when Dick found him – still howling, smeared in blood and shit. Izzy recognized the sound of a man entering the room on nice, expensive shoes; Dick did not recognize Izzy.

With the kind of cool, collected decisiveness that made him a top player at his firm, Dick sprayed his hose – the hose he had already taken with him into the room, as if by instinct – right into the center of the great, horrible mess. “Thanks for ruining my carpet, you dumb fuck,” he said, without any real anger, as he drowned Izzy and swamped the room.

The security company chose to get rid of both bodies without telling anyone, and Dick Hopper chose to take the $2.3 million bonus he got for selling the parka factory at the value of its assets. Then he chose to get a new dog with the same face and the same name, and then he chose to take his children and his new dog to Disneyland.

MORAL. Never be afraid to take a calculated risk.

As I have come to expect every time he opens his twee mouth, dumb little man with a dumb little name Will Doig has offered up for praise another paean to crunchy small-scale social-media fascism. This time, it even comes with stock villains, and I could write a whole demeaning, dismissive article on his particular choices – like a freshly-minted art-school student’s, as broad and obvious as he could possibly make them. Take a deep breath, because this is a doozy – what is the competition against our Benevolent Corporate Data Mining Overlords? IBM and Robert Moses. Jesus Christ. I could go on all day, but let’s just summarize: if I were his professor – you know, grading his papers for a salary instead of being invited by Salon to do so for free and in exchange for ad spam – I’d bump him down a grade for cliche on the strength of that alone.

Let’s leave aside his half-skeptic outlook about those of our benevolent corporate masters who fail to swaddle themselves in Helvetica. (It’s a rhetorical cantrip anyway – “look, we can’t just let some giant unaccountable corporation run our lives! [pause for applause] it needs to be a giant cartel of unaccountable corporations!”)  Here’s a piece that is half-aware of how badly it falls down in ideology – it understands that when IBM flacks claim civic self-government has failed, we should be rooting against IBM… but it can’t bring itself to the same fundamental hostility when it comes to noble design innovators.

Like so many of the worst articles on Salon, what galls about this article is not that it lacks self-awareness of its terrible worldview – it’s that it hovers at the threshold of awareness, stealing unconscious peeks into the abyss before turning away. Here, look:

Greenfield admits that these could be seen as a raw deal, government shunting its responsibilities onto the people. “But looked at from another perspective,” he says, “it’s empowering.” It’s a bit like how Twitter has become a place where people get their news — sure, a media company could have built and run a similar system itself, but on Twitter we send the links around for free, and gladly.

Empowering, even! Strange, isn’t it, that that’s the eternal logic of the anti-public faction: somehow it’s degrading to have your taxes pay for mandated public services and empowering to pay a middleman with absolute power to change prices and services; somehow it’s degrading to express your preference with votes, letters, assembly, and candidacy, and empowering to express it with money. Strange, how very strange, that what empowers us is exactly what empowers them - the privatizers, the data miners, the startups.

And the magnanmity is glorious, a thing of beauty. Looked at from one perspective, it arrogates all power to an unaccountable elite with interests orthogonal to the public good and further disempowers a citizenry which has been encouraged by an increasingly abusive social and economic elite  to see themselves exclusively as the powerless party in a consumer-producer power relationship; but looked at from another perspective, I would very much like to be one of the unaccountable elite.

Greenfield is right when he says “The intelligence is just bound up in the actions and behaviors of its users. If we harness that intelligence, we win.” The we is, of course, the corporate masters. The win will trickle down to we the consumers-public, just as the oats trickle down to the sparrows.

The moral of the story, pace little boy Doig, is that the public seeing the positive rights it receives in exchange for its participation in civilization taken away without their consent can be good. That as long as the people stealing away our entitlement to health, good order, and security aren’t arrogant stuck-up engineers – cold, indifferent, unkulturlich megacorps who don’t have an art-school cool-boy on staff to tweet gaily on the infosphere – then those entitlements can be seen as a waste, locking up valuable commercial relationships behind a barrier of mere democracy.

Finally, but not least importantly, I hope for his sake that Doig has only been online since about 2010 and as such has not seen the endless cycle of shilling, tub-thumping, and abuse of power that accompanies literally every new social medium – that he is gently innocent of the idea of a spambot or social media marketing, that he should harbor such innocent admiration for neo-cybernetic demagoguery. Anyone who had been online with both eyes open could not sustain the naive belief that we are in a position to reassign power to gentle, neutral machinery that means us well – that we could be the happy masters of a new kind of social machine, free of human foibles.

There are men in the machines, and they have their own masters.

1. Jean-Richard “Rico” Perret (TX)
Why. Widely assumed to be the frontrunner in the veep nom pross (vee-pnoss to experts) and an early primary backer. Good “dumb state” cred.
Why Not. Jean-Richard “Rico” Perret is a failed European clone of Brick Manley, and literally too stupid to legally hold office.
Fun Facts.

•  Rico Perret ran a massive graft ring in which take-home pork was directly proportional to campaign contributions.
• Actually worse than his gubernatorial predecessor, globally despised favorite son and unelected president Texas “Tex” Nixon – a concept once considered impossible, or at least too horrible to imagine.
• Out of laziness or some kind of perversion maybe, Rico Perret notoriously drinks all his food from a sippy-cup.

2. Lady-Mike “Eva” Essess-Sturmbannfuehrer (MN)
Why. The “Governatrix” was mooted to offer a repeat of 2008, in which choosing Poopsie Gilliam (R-AK) as running-mate allowed Joe “Sore” Loserman (I-CT) to squeak out a humiliating defeat against a black man with a weird name, but also make it with a real girl.
Why Not. Unlike Poopsie, who loves strangers’ money, partying, and also what people on Craigslist describe as “partying”, the Governatrix is a hateful, unlikeable scold and shrew, noteworthy exclusively for the strange niche appeal her psychotic transfusion-influenced prophecy ramblings won her among Republican faithful and the clinically insane.
Fun Facts.

• The Governatrix continues to hold exciting new ideas about tort reform, the deficit, and other Jewish matters.
• It was once said by her devotees that if the Governatrix was denied the medically unnecessary blood transfusions she received on demand as often as three times a day from 1998 to 2015, the blood god Jehovah would tear the flesh from real Americans’ bones with a new dust bowl. Of course, in reality the new dust bowl now tearing the flesh from real Americans’ bones is wholly unrelated to any satan, living or dead. The timing is a coincidence.
• Known among the new Republicans for her sense of humor, the Governatrix responds to people laughing at the thick purple varicose veins throbbing with purloined blood in her floppy useless chorizo-fingers merely by telling them the exact time and manner of their death in a voice only they can hear.
• The Governatrix once thought she was being abducted by lesbians. Ha ha! Isn’t that crazy??

3. Hengh-Hengh Bellavisti (SC)
Why. Hengh-Hengh (“Hengh-Hengh” to her supporters) was particularly beloved for spectacular requirements of fealty, once trying to have Wilmington, NC – not even under her jurisdiction – thrown into the sea for failing to send her flowers on her birthday. A generation of pundits still thinks sadly on the day they discovered they wouldn’t have to live in constant erotic terror that the insufficience of their glorious displays of genteel obeisance to a lumpy brunette in a pantsuit would end in their final public humiliation / sexy shame death. She would have “elevated the tone” in this exact manner.
Why Not. She actually rejected the proposal – grading it a “B minus effort” – on the grounds that “Brick” failed to offer her the Presidency first. Also, her principled refusal to run against a black man for fear that something would happen to her school district scuttled her veepsmanship prospects early.
Fun Facts.

• With Hengh-Hengh’s ability to grade us poorly at a new low ebb, we can now safely reveal that she smells worse than anyone alive, like if a corpse let itself go.
• According to a South Carolina legislative aide – who wants to remain anonymous, because his sterling report card is the only thing that keeps his mother from cutting his tap-dancing elective – the literally constant stream of quote “beefs and queefs” was a palpable relief, “like someone covered up the smell of a paper mill with a wet, loud, oniony fart”.
• Other anonymous sources were disgusted by her allowing her big nasty-smelling dog to lick her all over her face and even inside her mouth. One of them vomited on my feet, cavalierly, like that was an acceptable thing to do to a decent person.
• Mega racist, and this is for a Republican from South Carolina.

4. Rno “Rino” Pual (TX)
Why. It was conventional wisdom that those mimeographed 1989 KKK newsletters were just what the party needed.
Why Not. Oddly enough, his past as an obstetrician. “Brick” slammed him as a “birth pimp” and refused to shake hands with a man whose hands were covered in runny green shit and placental mass.
Fun Facts.

• Only during the vetting process did it emerge that Rno Pual had actually died of brain softening in 2007, and his entire political career past that point was just one long “Weekend at Bernie’s” comedy of misunderstandings – yet in retrospect wasn’t it always obvious?
• Fuck you, I’m not writing the Internet’s eleven millionth fucking joke about Ron Paul. It’s a beautiful spring evening and I’ve got my whole life ahead of me.
• I said leave me alone! Go fuck yourselves, all of you!

5. Jimmy-Jim “Jimbo” Traficant (OH)
Why. Mostly of interest in the media, the American Select candidate for Veepsman was only ever considered because he was once a Democrat and that meant the ticket would somehow be good.
Why Not. Look, as much as they love using his big bushy dumb moustache for protective ideological cover among Serious Moderates, do you think even Republicans are dumb enough to take anything Thom “Boy” Friedman says seriously, even for a second? These are people who run and occasionally win campaigns for national office, not people who get their tongues stuck to metal poles every winter. Also, at the time of the election Jimmy-Jim “Jimbo” Traficant was on a fifteen-year bid for exsanguinating a Mexican.
Fun Facts.

• There are no fun facts about Jimmy-Jim “Jimbo” Traficant.

Facts.

• I’m going to be totally honest here, I don’t really know who Jimmy-Jim “Jimbo” Traficant is or what he ever did before he did those murders.
• Something to do with hair? Like, one of those “I’m also a member” things? Where he makes and sells rugs for vain bald men and also wears one because he’s a vain bald man?
• That huge drummed-up imbroglio over “Sister Souljah” had something to do with him? Or Whitewater? Some 90s thing that only Mormons care about. One of those things has to be what he did.
• Oh, I know! He’s that guy who founded the Wikimedia Foundation to use money by objectivist demagogues to campaign against Encyclopedia Britannica.
• I’m certain that’s who it is.
• Why Encyclopedia Britannica, though?

As we all know, “Brick” Manley chose none of these, and in fact tried to kill them all with a heat ray. Instead, he ran as his own veepsman, and lost, and became President and veepsman anyway!

And the pageant of democracy marches on!

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!

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.