Pseudonymity

I was looking at one of those ridiculous blogosphere-ridiculing articles in the New Republic, this one by a fellow named Lee Siegel, and this quote jumped out at me:

But, then, Zuniga--let's cut the puerile nicknames of "DailyKos, "Atrios," "Instapundit" et al., which are one part fantasy of nom de guerres, one part babytalk, and a third thuggish anonymity--believes so deafeningly and inflexibly that it's hard to tell what he believes at all, expecially if you try to make out his conviction over the noisy bleating of his followers.

Are you kidding me? On top of these misguided and foolish attacks on left blogosphere, and Siegel's idiotic claims that Kos is a fascist, this attack on pseudonymity is ahistorical and just dumb.

Put aside completely that the culture of the internet is one that uniquely embraces pseudonymity, for numerous historical and practical reasons. Remember perhaps that the Federalist Papers, some of the most important documents of the early US, were written pseudonymously. Or that Thomas Paine signed many of his writings "Common Sense." Or that Benjamin Franklin published something called Poor Richard's Almanac. Or we could think about George Orwell, or Mark Twain.

Siegel claims to know what exactly is meant when Instapundit, Kos, or Atrios post as such. First, Insty and Kos have had actually hidden identities for exactly none of the time I've been aware of them. Atrios has been out as Duncan Black since 2004. They are closer to stage names. And I hardly see Siegel attacking Woody Allen as fascistic or thuggish because he doesn't go by Allen Konigsberg.

My point is that imputing motives based on the fact that a writer or performer does his or her business pseudonomously is careless thinking, and beneath even a diarist at TNR.

{and someone like Siegel probably shouldn't be attacking others as peurile, either}

She who must not be named

There are certain public figures whose ugliness is such that sunshine will not disinfect, who are so awful that we are better off never thinking of them. Not that these people should be silenced in some sort of awful totalitarian way, but that people like this, who seem to crave attention and conflict only, are best left where they belong, on the margins, rather than in the mainstream of cultural debate.

There is a certain of these who will remain unnamed, but who recently had published a book calling liberalism a religion and simultaneously tarring liberals as irreligious. Which is of course as vapid and pointless as it is wrong, but that's her beat. It's quite a bit weaker and less inflammatory than calling us traitors, which is a good sign of sorts.

Her indictment is weaker even as she's become more shrill, and her looks (which are central to her draw) become less credibly enticing as she reaches her middle forties. There's something particularly convincing about the argument that she should be ignored, would that it were quite as easy as that.

She is at the outside of her her marketing tour. Like a musician releasing a new album or an actor talking up a new film, she has to sell herself on the teevee. But now it seems that this is her sole purpose, to sell the idea of herself. As a bold "non-PC" truth teller unafraid of slaughtering any sacred cows she might encounter. As a sexy, smart conservative. What she is is a hollowed out mask, the endpoint of any media personality has embraced becoming totally commoditized, whose exchanges only exist to support her brand and to move units.

She's a wretched loose-limbed collection of tics and talking points, and I find myself in sympathy for how hollow her existence must be and how unfulfilling it must be to play such an ugly role. It must be lonely as the Andy Kaufman of "conservatism," ridiculing the 9/11 widows just as Kaufman wrestled women. But i think of what she and those like her have done to this country and I sympathize no more.

For some sad, unknowable reason, people buy her schtick. Not the way Kaufman fans dug his absurdity and daring, but like teenage girls buy bubblegum music hearthrobs. They are conned by her contrived and tailored sexuality, they find her contempt for straw man liberalism not merely trenchant but entertaining, they congratulate her for daring to say ugly things in front of friendly audiences. It's mystifying. It's like watching otherwise sane people champion the infallibility of astrology.

Anyone willing to step back sees a sad little hustler, a skinny aging broad. Anyone can see that her pretences to intellect begin with her contempt for the allegedly inferior and end with her Ivy League degree. Her verbal jousting ability, which is fairly impressive on screen, becomes the self-aware vituperation of a bright and angry teenager on the page. The constant invocation of religiosity from this empathy-devoid ice queen is shown as the flimsy and cynical rhetorical gambit it is.

If we cannot make her disappear, if Leno insists on lobbing this wannabe fascist softballs, then we might as well remind her admirers exactly what they're looking at.

What to Admire

Oh, I admire passion. It's part of the whole charisma thing. People who are passionate get our hearts pumping as well. it's probably something fairly primitive, as if passion indicated vigor, vigor indicated health, health indicated good leadership and suggested one was a good mate or some such crap.

But "saying what you believe in" and showing passion is not an indicator of good character, or trustworthiness, or leadership ability. That is one of the fictions of our age: that apparently sincere, passionate people are the people we should listen to. And the appeal is a lot harder to countenance in times like these. People tend to be more easily taken in by "true believers' in times of chaos and upheaval and crisis. Our historical moment is one of upheaval, perhaps, but our society is in many ways fat and happy. Why then does a run up the AM dial reveal so many demogogues and mad prophets, each in his own way full to the brim with nonsense?

I couldn't tell you, but it has to stop. Because those sorts of people are exactly the last ones to listen to. Because people who come across so militantly sincere are so often cynical and calculating. Because passion is a long time friend of extremism, racism, scapegoating, xenophobia, and cruelty.

This isn't a plea against rhetoric, but a plea against gullibility. Why is it that people who function so well in working life and elsewhere are so easily fooled by obvious emotional appeals? By religion that absolves them from having to make real moral choices and in turn provides them an illusory sense of superiority? By a politics that holds in dark contempt everything that operates north of the medulla oblongata and has the gall to claim higher values?

People simply aren't thinking. We don't teach thinking enough in this culture. Not how to think, but that sometimes you don't just go with your gut, which is pretty lousy at making decisions, and instead weigh options and ideas. It'd also be nice if we taught our kids to value beauty and character and knowledge and good sense instead of cunning and brute strength and shimmering aesthetic trivia. It's not so hard to raise a kid unconvinced and uncompelled by the scummiest and cheapest of pop culture. It's not so hard to raise a kid hungry for the splendor of human existence rather than merely attention and coerced validation. We should try it sometimes.

The big revolution in American culture will happen when we stop endorsing brutality and selfishness. It will happen when people see good judgment and prudence as the hallmarks of common sense, rather than the ability to manipulate others. It will happen when we stop confusing seduction and beauty. It will happen, most of all, when we stop listening to our inner asshole.

Russ Feingold

I was on the plane today watching the cable news networks, which I do not do, and not just because I don't have cable.

I had a dark period of my life during which I struggled for proper employment and consumed more political TV news than is conceivably healthy. One must also consider that this dark period coincided with a terrificly shitty economy, living with my parents, and the stifling and awful political atmosphere leading up to the Iraq War. Later, I discovered blogs and began reading and getting my news from non-wingnuts. But at the time I was willingly exposing myself to the darkest, most hateful and vapid elements in our society at precisely the moment that said elements were most in vogue.

Which is all prelude to saying that all the cowards who seem so squeamish about the potential political fall-out of Russ Feingold's call for censure, and I mean the putative allies of the Democrats, the democrats, etc., are deserving of enormous scorn.

Notwithstanding the fact that, as I saw, the forces of darkness will always drag out reptilian bigots like Tony Blankley to compare Clinton's concealment of an affair to Bush's dismantling of the Constitutional freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, finding Bush's act not merely less offensive but somehow, quite obviously not a crime. Regarding this extrajudicial wiretapping, as there's no proof of it having been abused (and mind you, the project was highly classified until a leak), there's clearly there's no harm and no foul.

This pathological watercarrying for a president who is not merely unpopular, but unpopular in a way that is both rare for a modern president and staggering considering the degree to which he's become the standard-bearer for both the Republican Party and for conservative movement, reduces me to the same incoherent rage that made me so unpleasant in the run-up to the war.

It hasn't ever been Bush that has made me enraged, but the way that he has been fawned over out of all respect for proportion or reality, and the degree to which other people have accepted this bizarre mirrorworld as their own. That is, while I obviously don't like sleazy, vindictive, entitled idiots like the president, there's something genuinely maddening about the fact that the country, for several years, pretended that his sleaziness was charm, his vindictiveness was gravitas, his entitlement didn't exist, and that his manifest intellectual dullness was somehow evidence of a grounded, salt of the earth genuineness. They compared the man to Churchill, for God's sake! Tony Blankley and his crew may be dead-enders for all I know, but their brief reign as arbiters of truth in America has left an ugly scar.

The unwillingness to actually go after an obviously limping president, one whose job approval rating is in the mid 30s, displays a fear of this ghost of a president just as delusional as the myths Tony Blankley and the other Fox news goons spin about him.

It's always important to imagine what would happen if the shoe was on the other foot. Do you suppose for one second that Republicans would hesitate from censuring Clinton for tying his shoes in an unfashionable manner if he was at 33% in the Pew poll? They'd pound him into hamburger, and the press would help them. There would be stories about how Clinton had a history of missing a lacehole, and preposterous analyses of old photographs with him wearing velcro.

Bush's has been a presidency, and in a certain way this has been an era, in which perception has always trumped reality. Bush's approval was in the mid 40s and Chris Matthews was claiming the only people who didn't like him were the wackos.

We have a president who conscientiously extends his constitutional mandate and has people wiretapped without any oversight, and the only discussion is whether bringing this up, and bringing Bush to account for it, is a good strategy for the Dems. Enough!

Everyday people

I'm writing a paper concerning the epic as it regards a certain Early Fritz Lang film called Siegfried. Siegfried is among the legendary heroes of the Germanic peoples, and examining what it is that makes the epic mode what it is, I've stumbled upon something I think rather important.

Most fiction created in contemporary Western culture that serves the purposes that the epic once did are crap. Deeply unsatisfying. In some significant way, the superhero comic stands for the epic mode. Like so many American modes of cultural production, the superhero comic has seen radical changes and inversions in the past few decades. Just as in the pictures, one can't go from a genre featuring heroes to one featuring antiheroes and back without suffering somehow.

Despite the current relative vogue for Superhero film adaptations, there is something unsettling, weird, wrong, about the Spiderman and X-Men movies, and their inferior cohort. What is most troublesome is that the rise of the antihero type and the attendant changes in US society have introduced a Realism into a genre concerned with myth and metaphor. While the two can occasionally coexist (I'm thinking at the moment of The Seventh Seal), there is something about the difference between Tobey Maguire as Spiderman and Christopher Reeve as Superman (and i don't think this is just the difference between the myths of each*) that makes Spiderman small and useless. His world and its stakes are too familiar and quotidian. Take out the superweapons and supervillians, and this is not the majority of the film, and you have a blend of adolescent confusion and realistic angst about intimacy and responsibility.

The Incredibles deals with these issues in an exceptional, perhaps even brilliant manner. But it does so in a way that invites imitation. Just as Scream presented itself as the answer to the stuck, tired horror genre, only to be sequeled and imitated until the product, the self-aware teen horror movie, becomes both ubiquitous and significantly less charming than a fourth-hand Z-grade ripoff of Halloween, so there's a danger of a crop of self-aware superhero flicks that gracelessly recycle and misinterpret this film.

The Incredibles seems to be very much about what it is to be exceptional and how the contemporary world has little use for this. What keeps the film from being stuck in a hellish continuous lecture about responsibility and the ugly consequences of being superhumanly strong in a world where builing collapses flatten children and old ladies is what pulls Mr. Incredible out of retirement- a crisis which turns the ordinary world of 9 to 5 and babysitters and laundry into a world where the stakes are exceptional and all the ugly consequences are thereby mitigated.

it is only by resorting to unreality, or at least a reality so far removed from our own as to be genuinely alien, that myth can really fit into it. It is only through some significant measure of fantasy that a fiction can talk about its culture on this kind of scale. And I can easily imagine Peter Parker with a fever blister or a hangover.

*Superman is unlike either Batman or Spiderman (probably the most beloved superheroes) in that Clark Kent is Superman's costume and not vice versa. Superman's authentic self is a superheroic alien, not a vengeful billionaire or a freakish youngster.

Barton Fink and the Common Man

Barton Fink is, I think, the Coen brothers' most interesting, most trying, most confounding film. It's quite ambitious, even though there are things about it that open it up to the same criticism often made of the Coens, that there work is stylish but empty, deeply unwilling or unable to mean anything.

I think people who approach it this way have a particular sort of viewing experience in mind. I think there's something to be said, as both artist and audience, for being able to walk and chew gum. The film's coolness, and its evident self consiousness (the arty mirrored images and language, particularly the ending which recapitulates the Hotel picture, the story within a story, the surrealist touches), aren't mere special effects. Without being paricularly indigestible formally, the film communicates a number of compelling ideas.

For the moment I want to speak to what is among the most obvious themes of the film, that of empathy and representation. In some significant way these are dealt with through questions simply aren't asked in the same way today. There isn't much of a question, at least posed as this film does, how one should represent the common or mass man. In part because that creature is no longer part of our vocabulary.

The Common Man of Barton Fink, and this is part of the point, is for Barton an exotic. He is today, still, but a different sort. David Brooks, for example, writing about Patio Man, might as well be writing about Peking Man. Barton doesn't listen to Charlie, is utterly irritated by him most of the time, even though he is at least superficially the perfect abstract Common Man that is Barton's subject. The film is about listening, and refusing to listen. It is a cautionary tale about using people as a means to a personal end, rather than as ends in themselves.

Every time I see the film, the line that jumps out at me is uttered by Judy Davis: 'Empathy requires understanding, Barton.' Understanding in this film appears far more elusive than Barton's ersatz understanding. The world is mad, and fickle, and unfair. That is, people are. Understanding requires pain, the pain of dealing with real, messy people. Barton's idealism is the idealism of those escaping the real world, those constructing a better world inside their heads. This is a profoundly pessimistic film, even moreso, I think, than the similarly darkhearted Miller's Crossing.

One of the reasons I like this film so much is that it genuinely confuses me. Sure, it does this with its ripe, complicated symbolism, but it also confuses with its ideas. Does this film try to prove that this life is, for all intents and purposes, hell? Is it calling the artist an arrogant, self-deluded fool? Is the artist's only choice building a levee, as Bill Mayhew has? Do people want or need a fruity story about suffering, or is a story of a big man in tights all the audience deserves?

It's wrong to confuse confusion with sloppiness. This is a fantastically well made film. Its construction shows care and thoughtfulness. Although this film can be clever in the pejorative sense, it is nonetheless, if not a plumbing of the depths of the human condition, then one of the most compelling and provocative explorations of the artist's role and responsibility I know of.

Hit

Reuters has a history of being a little overly politically correct in the terminology it uses. The right wingers had a problem when it refused to call terrorists terrorists, instead opting for "militants" or what have you. But seriously- they have an article up called "Man hit by Cheney to leave hospital".

Not "shot by Cheney". Not "shot in the face by Cheney". "hit by Cheney". Unbelieveable. Admittedly, they refer to it as a shooting in the text of the article, but it really does matter how you headline a story.

Also, the story shows Whittington (the injured party, the one who was "sprayed", or "peppered" with birdsho and who subsequently had a heart attack) apologizing to Cheney and family for all they've had to endure. (!) I have to apologize to Cheney myself. Mr. Vice President, I'm sorry you've had to suffer the indignity of bad press after getting liquored up, shooting a man in face and neck, and pretending it hadn't happened for 24 hours.