Tuesday, March 13, 2018

WHY WON'T YOU DISGUSTING PERVERTS ACKNOWLEDGE MY TOLERANCE?

Things at The Federalist are weird -- well, they always are, but lately nearly all the writers are spiking Stella Morabito levels of dysfunction. That's what happens, I guess, to junior debate club kids trying to exert moral authority in the Time of Trump -- their internal gyroscopes go kerflooey with the strain, and their thinkholes emit weird monsters of broken logic. Take D.C. McAllister -- always terrible, true, but usually in the ordinary wingnut "You're The Real [Fill In The Blank]" manner. But this week she's outdone herself. Take in the hed and dek:
The Return Of ‘Queer Eye’ Could Be A Win For The Right Kind Of Tolerance
If we focus only on how we’re different and demand approval of those differences, we will never live peacefully with one another.
Sounds like a temporizing, come-let-us-reason-together thing, doesn't it? It even has "Tolerance" in the title, and starts with McAllister talking about how she likes those queer-eyed guys:
Each of the original Fab 5 was a delight to watch, and the new Fab 5 doesn’t disappoint. Fashion savant Carson Kressley was my favorite in the original, and Antoni Porowski takes the prize in QE 2.0. He’s the handsome food guru with a sweet, almost shy, smile and authentic empathy that reaches out and grabs your heart through the camera.
Grrrl! Then she gets to an episode where the QE guys have to work with a Trump voter, which sounds like the sort of Lesson In Love and Life that makes ratings soar and me vomit. McAllister seems to be down with the yay-tolerance theme: "'Queer Eye' says it wants to bring some civility and love to our country again. Who can oppose that?" But then:
However, as I watched the series, two feelings wrestled within me — an appreciation for the positive, open dialogue and a creeping sense of being manipulated.
Grrrl, I know, this is ratings bait bullshit, let's ditch this Very Special Moment, binge on Ben & Jerry's and watch Berlin Alexanderplatz!

Then McAllister had something to get off her chest -- a deep-seated memory of her childhood days at revival meetings (picture McAllister a few feet shorter, no makeup, wearing a potato sack and a big purty bow) where the pastor "called sinners to come forward" and "converts would line up with tears on their cheeks, and church members would surround them with hugs and words of acceptance."

But this was "often just emotionalism," McAllister sees now, "ginned up to sell 'Jesus.'" The scales have fallen; she's not going to be fooled by such appeals again!
...this is a feeling I can’t deny as I watch “Queer Eye,” and it’s not about the political and cultural issues being addressed, which is so needed; it’s about the core “product” I’m ultimately being sold through feel-goodisms and the staged tears of reality television: approval of homosexuality.
[Blink. Blink.]
...what they really want is not common understanding between people who disagree — this is the essence of tolerance, which I support wholeheartedly — they want to fight for approval. And this is my main problem with the show.
McAllister just wants to tolerate those sassy gay boys -- she doesn't want to have to approve of them!
...In the same way, some people, who think homosexual marriage is wrong because they believe marriage, as a public interest, is between a man and a woman, can still love a gay married couple.
"Won't you and your abomination come over for dinner sometime?"
...Yet, “Queer Eye” wants more than tolerance. The creator of the show, David Collins, told ET, that the biggest difference between now and when the show first aired is that, “People are ready to have a dialogue" ...we are ready to have that dialogue because it has been foisted on us through activism and the courts. That’s both a good and bad thing, though the ensuing dialogue might not go the way he and LGBT activists want.
So watch it, gay people, because while McAllister wants you to know she loves you, she also wants you to know the dialogue she's so tolerantly engaging might not go the way you want, and once dialogue time is over and President Pence is bringing on the Time of the Handmaids, she'll cheer as your so-called-marriage certificates are burned in the church, and blow you a kiss as you're marched off to conversion therapy. She's all for tolerance, and she'll tolerate you a lot better when you've been straightened out.

Monday, March 12, 2018

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about how conservatives, and not just Jeff Sessions, beat up on California in order to make their own fucked-up red states look less like hellholes.

Among the many outtakes trimmed for space was this limited but telling bit of slander: When Mexican Presidential candidate Ricardo Anaya Cortes recently spoke to Mexicans in San Francisco, exhorting immigrant “Dreamers” to “not forget that you are not alone,” the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that a “pro-immigrant group… said Mexican immigrants in the U.S. may be a deciding factor in the elections in Mexico due to their ability to cross south of the border and vote.”

The “pro-immigrant” group to which they referred and linked was the Center for Immigration Studies, run by the notoriously anti-immigrant Mark Krikorian of National Review, and there is no evidence Cortes had asked for California-dwelling immigrants’ votes; yet conservative sources such as The Daily Caller and Fox News reported the Mexican candidate “campaigned” in California, and Daniel Horowitz of Conservative Review straight-up claimed, “this man is seeking the votes of Mexican nationals living in the United States under the promise of being tough with Trump.”

But do read the column -- the basic stuff is funny and infuriating enough.

Friday, March 09, 2018

FRIDAY ‘ROUND-THE-HORN.


I love this version, but there's a more garage-band version out there
and I can't remember who did it. Anybody?
UPDATE: Thanks to commenter Skeeter Jarvis 
for unearthing the Vice-Roys' version! 

• As if the Bari Weiss debacle hadn't already put a rancid cherry on the shit parfait that is the New York Times Op-Ed section, here come the radioactive sprinkles in the form of Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward, who explains to Times readers, as libertarians will, how conservatives are bad but liberals are worse; while the right is "churlish" and "politically incorrect," they can hardly be blamed as they are responding with a "hold my beer" to the provocation of liberals, who assail them with their greatest weapon,  “barely concealed smugness," from their "elite enclaves on the coasts." (Mangu-Ward, her Reason bio tells us, lives in Washington, D.C., but I'm sure someday she'll live somewhere more downhome-American, like McLean, Virginia.) Policy, and the effectiveness or counterproductiveness thereof, are not really meaningful -- what's important is whether you're being smug (the word and its variants appear 10 times in her essay). She even matches "'the dirtbag left' of the 'Chapo Trap House' podcast" with "the alt-right," presumably on the grounds that making fun of Megan McArdle is the moral equivalent of a neo-Nazi march. "Due for reconsideration" in Mangu-Ward's estimation, therefore, are "transpartisan coalitions," with liberals replaced by "Blue Dog Democrats" (like liberals only with more racism and fundamentalism, an obvious improvement!) and conservatism with "cosmopolitan libertarianism" (i.e., conservatism). Well, nothing left for the Times to do to top this but enlist a Koch brother for an Op-Ed -- whoops, they've been scooped by the Washington Post. Damned liberal media!

• As to the allegedly upcoming North Korea talks, here's my main question: Who here was the slightest bit concerned about getting bombed by the Norks in 2016? The problem being solved, if that's the word, is not America's, but Donald Trump's. Anyway it's already been definitively proven a bad idea.

Wednesday, March 07, 2018

I WOULDN'T LIVE THERE IF YOU PAID ME.

I've been seeing a bunch of sites saying some variation of "California has the worst quality of life in the 50 US states, and some conservatives are celebrating," so I went to see the McKinsey/U.S. News & World Report stats this was based on. Turns out in overall ranking Cali's at #32, which seems low to me -- I mean, Connecticut's #24; would you rather spend a weekend in Hartford or San Francisco? -- but chacun à son goût.

Turns out while McKinsey ranks the state #4 for business (something I thought conservatives appreciated), #11 in health care, etc., McKinsey put them last for "quality of life" -- which they say has to do with "air quality, pollution, voter participation, social support and more." Their #1 for quality of life: North Dakota. Well, it takes all kinds, and if you think Minot's where it's at, God go with you.

But rightwing randos take this to mean California's a hellhole and, from their perches in Bumfuck deliver between spurts of tobacco juice jeremiads like "Liberalism Has Finally Gone Too Far in California… State’s Beyond Repair," from Conservative Tribune's William Haupt III:
This progressive state is facing an epic shortage of trained workers and business start-ups.
Haupt provides no citations, natch, but the trained workers thing, which makes no sense in the here-and-now, seems to come from the Public Policy Institute of California's projection that the state is trending toward a shortage of such workers by 2030 --  which is another way of saying that California will have more good jobs than they can fill. (The fact that North Dakota has to recruit workers for fracking is generally considered a plus by conservatives.)  As for the start-ups crack? Not likely.
Imported unskilled labor lured by a lucrative welfare system has turned capitalism into quasi-socialism. New cottage industries have replaced real businesses and economic cleavage between the haves and have-to-depends reeks havoc on the mostly highly taxed state in the U.S. Liberalism has turned all prosperity into poverty.
The weird thing about this cartoon vision, which has become common on the Right, is how it slides from traditional conservative tropes like slurs against Mexicans to a woke-ish pretense of concern for income inequality. Them big cities got big fancy buildings, an' people sleepin' on the street! I sawr it on Law & Order! Most Americans want to address this rich-poor split by taxing the rich, but Haupt blames it on furriners and the evil generosity of liberals toward same.

The longer Haupt's rant runs, the more florid his prose becomes, until:
When they euphonize [?-ed.] Prop 13 next election, this will be the holocaust of methodic genocide. This will pacify every Left Coast progressive vying to emulate the failures of Barack Obama. Just as Jim Jones did, voters will drink a fatal dose of liberal Kool-Aid and embolden the progressive dream of social Darwinism paid for by taxpayers. This will nail the coffin shut on the goose that laid the golden egg, as the few remaining entrepreneurs and tax-paying elites abandon California to escape the calamity of the liberal morgue...
This metaphor melange reminds me of the predictions of doom conservatives made when Bill de Blasio became Mayor of New York in 2013 -- remember? (My favorite derangee then was Daniel Greenfield, who forecast that terrorists would flood the subways with poison gas and, if citizens tried to escape by air, the terrorists would blow their planes out of the sky.) They all looked pretty dumb when de Blasio got reelected while racking up the lowest New York City crime numbers since the 1950s.

And I suspect these criers of doom for Cali will look dumb down the road, too -- hell, they look dumb to me now. But then, I get around a bit; most Americans don't, and many only know what the blowhard in the red hat tells them. And they're highly motivated to believe scary stories like this: They live in Republican states where services are sparse, workers get bait-and-switched, poverty's a crime and being black's an aggravating circumstance, the national parks are being sold off, etc. If you lived somewhere like that, and perhaps dreamed of fancy places like Los Angeles and New York, and some fellow came along and said no, those places are dumps, why some of those people don't even have cars and have to ride in a hole in the ground, plus they're all being killed by Mexicans and the liberal media's covering it up, and look at this picture do you see all the black people -- well, maybe you'd prefer to think those golden places are shit, too, just so's you could stand to live where you're stuck living.

Monday, March 05, 2018

DOGS AND CATS, LIVING TOGETHER!

There's been a lot of nonsense written about the Oscars, but Rod Dreher has surpassed everyone and even himself, through the agency of a "reader" "mail":
“The Academy used to play it safe with controversy, but now it’s moving the Overton window faster than in real life,” he wrote. “Who’d have thought one decade ago that the most prestigious award in the film industry would go to a film about bestiality, and casting it in a positive light?”
Yes, he's talking about The Shape of Water, which I told you about here -- but even if I hadn't, if you've had a halfway decent liberal arts education you'd recognize it from even a summary as a fable, like Ovid's Metamorphoses or Penny Marshall's Big.

But not Dreher. "I don’t pay attention to the Oscars, or Hollywood," he sniffs, "because I’m interested in other things' -- oooh he's an intellectual, look at his eccentric glasses! -- but though actually exposing himself to Hollyweird mindrot is beneath his dignity as a pedant, Dreher asks his readers to tell him about the movie -- and then he can’t even wait for that expedient before giving forth with the crack-brain hooey:
Could it be in this film, what happens at the Occam facility is Elisa, who works there as a janitor and first encounters the creature, learns to separate morality from matter, so that she can open herself to a sexual relationship with an aquatic creature? In other words, if there is no intrinsic meaning to matter, including humanity, then we can do with it whatever we want. Including submitting sexually to animals, or any creatures that give us pleasure and affection?
Here's another clue for you all -- the Walrus was Paul.

I don't know whether Dreher's gurus actually let him watch movies except to get something to yell about-- I remember him denouncing The Hours in 2003 as an "apologia for evil" -- but I like to imagine him leaping from his seat at A Midsummer Night's Dream when Titania makes love to the donkey-headed Bottom, screaming SACRILEGE, LIQUID MODERNITY! (I could go on like this all day -- e.g., Dreher sees Carl Dreyer's Day of Wrath and when it's over cries "I knew it! Witches are real!")

Imagine getting this far in life, and in a writing career no less, and having no fucking idea what art is nor what it's for. As I've said many times before: For these maroons, culture war is war on culture.

UPDATE. Dreher got mad because people made fun of him:
You guys, knock it off with “you didn’t see the movie so you don’t have the right to say anything about it.” I conceded early on that I hadn’t seen the film, and that my comments are based only on the Wikipedia description of its plot, and things both the director and others favorable to the film have said about it. Of course I could be wrong! If I’ve made a mistake in my description of the plotting, then I welcome correction. Nobody has yet said that I got that wrong...
It says right here in the review that she fucks a fish, so it's propaganda for fish-fucking -- because what else could it possibly be?

UPDATE 2. I saw a headline at Media Matters -- "Fox News keeps running columns from the same guy explaining, 'I'm a Democrat but [insert agreement with GOP]' -- and it put me in mind of two things: First, Harlan Hill; second, Rod Dreher, whose "reader" "mail" from Liberals Who've Had Enough is legendary. And he has a beautiful one today! Excerpts:
I read what you said about having spoken with four people recently who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 but are considering it now because of the left’s recent behavior. I’m not quite in that camp, but am close to it; I suspect my progress on the issue largely resembles those of your friends and (I suspect) a substantial minority of other Americans as well.
Oh that's another thing -- all Rod's apostate liberal "readers" have their finger of the pulse of America.
...I’m certainly not a typical Trump supporter — I believe in climate change and America’s responsibility to take policy steps to reduce our contribution to it, I’m anti-NRA, pro-Obamacare to an extent, and detest the Republican Party generally. The day after Trump got elected, I posted a scathing denunciation of everyone who had voted for him, which got the millennial social capital gold: hundreds of likes and almost 40 shares, including by several people I didn’t even know.
This is where all the folks on the Mourner's Bench go "oooooh!" 'cuz they know a conversion narrative's a-comin'.
...But leaving the nuclear issue aside, the Left’s behavior in the last year has pushed me steadily more and more in the direction of being willing to vote for a sort of lower-key Trump (someone like Ben Shapiro)...
I wonder if Dreher owed Shapiro a favor; if I weren't quite sure he's humorless, I would suspect him of making a joke.

UPDATE 3. Just had to share Dreher's sputter-back in his Shape of Water comments section:

I wonder if Rod really means to posit the Ancient Greeks as his socio-sexual model.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Trump tariffs and the enduring embarrassment of conservatives having to either back this shit in contradiction of everything they pretend to believe in, or try to explain those alleged beliefs to the totally uninterested grifter who represents them to the world and to history. It couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of guys.

Sunday, March 04, 2018

OSCAR NIGHT!


I saw Phantom Thread and The Shape of Water — couldn’t get to Call Me By Your Name before the Big Show, but I’ll take a stab at the Oscar thing anyway.

(As to those last two movies: I’ve been trying to figure out whether the last part of Phantom Thread is meant to be taken literally, which inevitably gets me to wondering whether the first part was meant to be taken literally. The odd meet-acute in the Blackpool tearoom, in retrospect, looks like someone, or two, acting out their first meeting, either as a sentimental gesture or for therapeutic purposes; and the integration of Alma into the House of Reynolds, from his sister sniffing her over to her near-erasure among the other white-coated votaries, seems like a highly distilled version of experience, at least. I started out, perhaps influenced by the writing about it, thinking Phantom Thread was about gender roles, but I’m willing to consider that it’s about the weird power of love itself. Definitely the most rumination-worthy of the bunch.)

(Oh, and as to The Shape of Water: This is the Pan’s Labyrinth guy, alright, and another fable, but without the hard fatalism of the Spanish Civil War one, because we’re in America and Americans aren’t fatalists — though if you like you can think of the ending as non-literal, but if you do what’s that make the rest of the movie? [Publicity for the 1978 Superman said, “You’ll believe a man can fly”; The Shape of Water can boast, “You’ll believe a fish can fuck!”] It was thrilling to see the magic realism blend so seamlessly with the caper-suspense elements, and also to see the good guys and bad guys — though, as fable demands, clearly assigned and starkly painted — all get their little bit of humanity; even the Michael Shannonical scumbag moved me when he asked his general for permission to be just decent. [The general, however, can go fuck himself. I hate that guy.] I can see now why kulturkampfer Kyle Smith hated it so much — the black and the gay and the sex vs. The Man! — and, well, that’s just the icing on the fishcake.)

OK, let’s have a crack at these nominees:

Best Picture: The Shape of Water. Sure it’s odd — but it feels like what we used to call a movie-movie. I think Three Billboards has a chance, but Moonlight’s victory last year probably has voters thinking that would be just too much Quiet Brilliance in an industry mostly devoted to producing special effects extravaganzas.

Best Actor: Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour. You get old and play a British Prime Minister in heavy makeup, they have to give it to you.

Best Actress: Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. I was thinking Johnny Belinda II but great as Sally Hawkins is, voters may be wondering why Hillary Swank has two Oscars and McDormand only has one.

Best Supporting Actor: Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water. This is my sucker bet, some everyone expects either big prize-taker Willem Dafoe or Billboards’ Sam Rockwell to win, but my instinct, such as it is, is that the collision of the two favorites (and Woody Harrelson, who they’d love to give an Academy Award to sometime) will make an opening for a dark horse. Plus Jenkins’ arc is deeply moving.

Best Supporting Actress: Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird. I haven’t seen Allison Janney, but Lady Bird needs an award.

Best Director: Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water. I thought they were going to give Christopher Nolan this but

Best Original Screenplay: Get Out.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Call Me By Your Name.

Best Cinematography: Dunkirk.

Best Production Design: The Shape of Water.

Best Film Editing: Baby Driver.

Best Foreign Language Film: The Square.

Best Costume Design: Darkest Hour.

Best Original Score: Phantom Thread.

Best Original Song: “Mighty River,” Mudbourne.

Best Makeup: Darkest Hour.

Best Sound Editing: Dunkirk.

Best Sound Mixing: The Shape of Water.

Best Visual Effects: Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

And in the Who The Fuck Knows categories:

Best Documentary Feature: Last Men in Aleppo.

Best Documentary Short: Traffic Stop.

Best Animated Short: Garden Party.

Best Live Short: Watu Wote/All of Us.

And now -- magic time!

UPDATE, 8:18: I'm already losing!

UPDATE, 8:32: 1 for 3. There goes the rent money.

UPDATE, 9:30: [tears up his tickets and walks away slowly, in the rain]

UPDATE, 11:50: Well, I got the Big Five right, but otherwise wiped out -- 11 of our 23. I'd like to blame the Academy -- huh, Best Costume Design for a movie about fashion! So predictable! -- but really my mistake was paying attention; I always do better when I've seen like three movies all year. 

Friday, March 02, 2018

MOVIE NIGHT.

(I only have three more movies to see for my Oscar push since I saw these two and, my friends, I am going for the cycle!)

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. This may be the modern version of old-fashioned character-driven Nice Movies like Driving Miss Daisy; small-bore, humane, poignant -- only with more swears and a lot more violence. Though its wide dark streak will turn a lot of people off, Billboards still reflects, in its funhouse-mirror way, the values of the Nice Movie: the main characters progress toward understanding, notwithstanding that the Missourians' understanding is incomplete, and based more on existential despair than Christianity. Mildred Hayes, seeking vengeance for a daughter who met a particularly grisly fate, is the hardest of hard cases — calling her a bereaved mother and a domestic abuse survivor would be accurate but absurdly inadequate; she is nearly fearless and not only capable of violence but as comfortable with it as a carpenter is with a hammer. She’s also brilliant — her snappy comebacks are downright aphoristic and, as her nemesis Chief Willoughby of the local PD notes, the billboards she puts up constitute a “chess move” to get action on her daughter’s case. But though intelligent and directed, she is also unmoored — by grief or, we get the impression from many clues, life itself. She’s smart enough to know that, but damaged enough to go on anyway, and her comic-tragic implacability sets off a series of funny-horrible incidents — the greatest example being a man absorbing the message that love may be the answer while a molotov-cocktail fire rages behind him. (Billboards’ other great coup de cinema is a reflex that innocently coats Mildred’s face with blood, which should be a hint as to the movie’s tone.) In the end, we get the best we can hope for: for the madness to wear itself down if not out, and the makings of one hell of a buddy-comedy sequel. As Mildred, Frances McDormand is shrine-worthy; when, struggling with her son for a fire extinguisher, she screams his name, it's like Mildred's whole biography has flashed like lightning across the screen. Woody Harrelson’s Willoughby is now in my Top Ten Good Guys With a Badge. Big ups also to Peter Dinklage as the rare spurned swain whose angry comeback actually has a point, and especially Sam Rockwell as a white trash dumbass in whose foggy mind may be sown a seed of grace.

Darkest Hour. I guess everyone watches this for Oldman’s Churchill, since the movie treats a turning point in World War II as the PM’s personal trial at least as much as Britain’s. Oldman is very good; his great insight is to play Churchill as a brilliant but undisciplined diva; childish, messy (did Churchill really eat like that in front of his King?), so devoted to his genius that any contradiction of it feels to him like betrayal -- and when he's forced to hear what the philistines call reason, he goes practically catatonic; Blimey, 'e's lost 'is mojo!  Lest we feel that civilization was only saved by Winnie’s pique, he is given a shy and doting secretary (Lily James, who is obviously great at dialects) who appears to inspire him, and a bull session with The British People in the Tube that bucks him up for the Never Surrender speech and turns the tide. Even this absurdity Oldham carries off by his devotion to the character, which banishes at least some of our reasonable doubts. The film looks great, indeed has an impressive unified design, from the giant newsreel-font credits to the now-moody, now-brutal photography to the slightly florid clothes and etching-specific sets; only now and again does it seem to be a bit pushy, as if Joe Wright thought we could only be made to buy the In Which We Serve uplift with music video tricks. (I wonder if the near-extinction of World War II vets from movie audiences might have something to do with these liberties.) But, look, I liked The King’s Speech and it was no less pushy; sometimes it's just nice to see the good guys win.

(Previously covered here: Get Out, Dunkirk, Lady Bird, and The Post.)

Thursday, March 01, 2018

BUILT TO SPILL.

It's hard to rank the members of Trump's cabinet for awfulness. Rex Tillerson might seem just ineffectual, spalshing around in his whirpool bath of bullshit ("Rex Tillerson May Be Finally Settling in at the State Department," wrote The National Interest -- on February 26, 2018), but by surrendering the histroic purview of his office to the President, who is just ignorant, and proxies like John Bolton, who want war with North Korea, he may be doing the most damage. On the other hand, Ryan Zinke's active destruction of the environment is going to be pretty hard to undo.

But don't sleep on Ben Carson, who has done fuck-all as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development except cut his department's budget, but whose tenure I think also serves a more sininster purpose.

We only hear about Carson anymore when yet another story about his insane mismanagement of the department comes out. Recently the HUD inspector general began looking into allegations that Carson's son, who runs a private equity company, was leaning on people with business before the department -- something by which no one who will be suprised if they read Alec MacGillis' story on Carson in New York magazine last August ("I watched with some amazement as the younger Carson, clad in tinted aviator shades, circulated among those seeking his father’s attention..."). And we've all heard about his bitching that his furniture wasn't grand enough and firing an underling allegedly because she wouldn't help him spend more than he was allowed on it; this has led to a number of embarrassing stories like "See HUD's $31,000 mahogany dining set."

It has not been lost on me that the most prominent African-American members of Trump's presidential retinue have been individuals likely to bomb in their respective positions: Omarosa Manigault, a contestant on Trump's TV game show before becoming Public Liaison comms director, and Carson who, after distinguishing himself as a surgeon, was the most buffoonish of the 2016 Presidential contenders -- in fact during the campaign Trump made fun of the ridiculous autobiographical stories Carson told on the trail to cover his inability to grasp public policy on even the simplest level.

Manigault is out, and Carson may not be too far behind. And I wonder if maybe Trump wasn't planning on this all along. His former "Apprentice" had at least a journalism degree and Washington experience to recommend her -- but her better known showbiz celebrity left her vulnerable to the impression that her appointment was unserious. When she was fired, the reason Trump obviously leaked to the press was "improperly using the official White House car service." Come on. I used to be a dispatcher; misusing car vouchers is something for which messengers get fired, not executives -- let alone White House executives.

All Trump appointees are by definition shit, but being shit is only one of the qualifications. Admittedly it's important, because it cements their loyalty to this criminal administration; they all realize honorable people won't work with them, and so will do anything to keep this golden opportunity (though it seems Jeff Sessions, of all people, may be losing patience).

But they also have to have some other utility. Former HHS Secretary Tom Price, for example, was hired because he could be counted on to fuck over Obamacare and to step aside and gesture invitingly toward Medicare and Medicaid as Congress came to kill them; that he was also a greedy pig meant he could be counted on, but his greed got so obvious he was making it look bad and Trump replaced him with someone who, more like Tillerson, would wreck the country on behalf of a specific corporate sponsor rather than just for himself, and thus give an impression of responsibility to something, even if it wasn't the United States.

Now, I know they've fired or pushed to resign dozens of white people, but I doubt that when those worthies were shot out of the airlock, Trump's base thought, "reckon white people can't handle the big jobs." Carson and Manigault represent the Administration's half-assed attempt to confuse white people who don't see (or don't care about, or actually approve of) the President's obvious racism. When Carson goes, however, I think I know how they'll take it.

Tuesday, February 27, 2018

DREHER GETS WITH THE NATIONAL FRONT.

Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the granddaughter of French literal fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen, spoke at CPAC last week, and Rod Dreher went gaga for her. Yet he has trouble admitting that she's pretty much what you'd expect National Front royalty to be -- he keeps saying he just doesn't know enough, though he really likes her! I think there’s more than one reason for that.

Calling Le Pen's CPAC speech "dynamic," Dreher swooned, "she went on to condemn euthanasia, gender theory, and transhumanism." She even quoted Mahler! "Continental conservatives in the Le Pen mold are more traditionalist, focusing on natural law, religion, and culture," Dreher explained approvingly.

But he wanted it made clear: "To the extent that she represents his racist, anti-Semitic views, Marion ought to be ashamed," said Dreher later. Still,  he said, "despite having read Bill Wirtz’s TAC piece about her, it is not clear to me what she believes on race and Judaism." Wirtz's piece notes that in 2016 Le Pen's National Front "ran on banning the kippah in public places" -- though he did not cite, possibly because he could not find, Mademoiselle Le Pen explicitly affirming (or, for that matter, denying) her party's position.

"I prefer the flawed attempt of Marion Maréchal-Le Pen to address from the traditionalist right the most pressing problems of our time to the doubling down on the same tired dogmas of the US conservative establishment," said Dreher. Again, he really, really wanted it known that he abjured her grandfather -- "To be clear — pay attention here — Jean-Marie Le Pen is an actual fascist, an anti-Semite, and a disgrace" -- and said elsewhere that he also doesn't like "her secular nationalist aunt Marine, whom I find unappealing" (though he was much more sympathetic to her when she ran for the French Presidency).

And, to make his gutless equivocation even more obnoxious, he added, "Do not take me as endorsing Marion Maréchal-Le Pen! I honestly don’t know enough about her to do such a thing, and I certainly condemn the racism and anti-Semitism of her grandfather — and, if she espouses it, then her own racism and anti-Semitism."

But he kept on about her. In another post contemptuously dismissing Mona Charen and other anti-Trump and anti-Le Pen conservatives as dainty "Principled Conservatives," Dreher wrote, "Marion Maréchal-Le Pen’s [CPAC] speech can only sound like blood-and-soil nationalism to Principled Conservative ears... whatever the sins of Marion Maréchal-Le Pen and her family, Anglo-American conservatism has something important to learn from the European conservative tradition, and needs to think about it, does not make one an anti-Semite or a blood-and-soil nationalist."

Among other things, Le Pen said at CPAC, "We do not want this atomized world of individuals without gender, without mother, without father, without nation" -- a quote that was promoted on Twitter by the straight-up Nazi Defend Evropa. In fact, Defend Evropa was altogether more forthright about what Le Pen was about and why they liked her than Dreher in their own coverage of the speech:
Marion talked about pride, guilt, atomization of society, identity, enrootment to the land, peoples, legacy, survival of nations, family and many more. A beautiful speech, well received from the American public. The tide is turning, Le Pen reminded us, the Nationalists, why we should fight. And we will fight!
DU also cheered when Le Pen condemned the European Union as "an ideology without land, without people, without roots, without soul, and without civilization." She didn't mention blood, though, so Dreher's still in the clear.

And that's what his hard sell with soft details is all about. Dreher's always tergiversating about Trump -- saying he dislikes his "vulgar" style, but implying that maybe there's something valid about his movement; doesn't he attack the same people Dreher reflexively hates, after all? -- and he does something similarly sneaky with Le Pen, in fact, overtly associating Trump with Le Pen and not in a negative way:
The fact that we have Trump has a lot to do with the failures of establishment conservatives — and they still don’t seem to have any real idea why they failed. Is it really the case that the only reason people like Trump and Le Pen find traction on the right is racism and bigotry? The only reason?
You see what he's doing -- he's saying sure, maybe there's a leeedle bit of racism there, and maybe you find it disturbing -- but look, she represents a new kind of conservatism: She doesn't like trans people, either! And if that doesn't turn you on, she's also a nationalist ("Let me be clear here: I’m not offended when I hear President Trump say America first… I want France first for the French people!"). And if that doesn't do it for you... well, like he said, he's not sure what she really believes, we shouldn't judge her by her grandfather, and wasn't that speech stirring...

For her own part Mademoiselle Le Pen makes a valiant effort in her public appearances to keep the potentially less attractive features of National Front ideology quiet, but sometimes the mask slips -- as when The Guardian asked her about mixed marriages and she said, "I'm not against it... For me, marriage is a very personal choice. The only thing I'd say is that I know, from people who've told me firsthand, that sadly mixed marriages can be a bit conflicted on everyday issues. For instance, the naming of children – Muslims need children to take Muslim names, often they want women to convert to Islam..."

I'm sure Dreher knows, as it is not (yet) Le Pen's business to, how something like that might go over in the States -- like gangbusters with the Trump base, perhaps, but not so well with the more soap-and-toothpaste-involved middle Americans. But he also knows that you might could sneak it over the plate if you keep it vague and, if someone smells a rat, make sure to protest that you don't approve of the old version of this exciting new conservatism, from which the new thing is, in some ineffable way, just different. There'll be plenty of time to sort out the details later -- when it's too late.

Monday, February 26, 2018

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Stoneman Douglas High kids, the NRA boycott, and the panic these have engendered among the people of the gun.

I will add that it's easy to see why so many wingnuts have refocused their attention on the deputy who failed to enter the school while the shooting was going on. Among the most secure safe spaces of conservative snowflakes is the comforting notion, supported by a million TV and movie action sequences, that in a pinch they'd be heroes, dodging bullets like Neo and kicking ass like Jack Ryan, and if some guy doesn't live up to that standard, that's nothing to sympathize with or even forebear to judge because in their dreams they've already shown themselves to be better men. That's why Trump made the ridiculous claim today that he'd have burst in on the gunplay himself; he knows the armchair commandos will relate to his delusion, and welcome him into their fantasy Seal Team Six.

Thursday, February 22, 2018

GUN NUTS, PART INFINITY.

The latest NRA charmless offensive shows how bad the situation is. When the NRA found its normal post-massacre duck-and-cover routine -- that is, waiting until our attention was drawn away from the latest multiple-casualty Second-Amendment demonstration -- had left it vulnerable to the protests of telegenic survivors, they immediately went on offense, with Wayne LaPierre babbling about socialists and Dana Loesch lying at top speed at the Parkland town hall. If you want to know why LaPierre and Loesch chose not to take a more reasonable and conciliatory approach with the kids in the wake of the mass gun murder they'd just suffered through, dismiss from your mind the absurd idea that it's the natural product of principled advocacy; ideas that are right don't need to be defended with bullying and bullshit. The NRA's PR makes clear that they are not peddling an Amendment or a specific interpretation thereof so much as the fear of violation and the thrill of violence.

That's why they came hard -- not because they're tough, and certainly not because they're right, but because they're full of shit. And they count on their belligerence to convince Americans they're fighting for them, rather than fighting to keep up the nice livelihood gun manufacturers have bestowed upon them, and against "socialists" and other ooga-booga rather than against the young citizens who have seen the effect of their depravity up close and want it stopped.

Too many liberals seem to think shame or conscience is going to stop these guys. No. They have to be repudiated decisively at the ballot box and throughout public life. If they aren't, things will only get worse.

Depressing, isn't it? Thank God we've got Rod Dreher for lulz! Right out of the gate God's Gastronome gives us a striking comparison:
I get as annoyed with right-wing Second Amendment absolutists who insist that any attempt to control guns will lead to a civil liberties apocalypse as I do with left-wing First Amendment absolutists who hold that any attempt to control access to pornography is welcoming Big Brother.
You'll get my porn when you pry it from my warm, sticky hands, Dreher! Porn, or what passes for porn at the BenOp compound, turns out to be much on Dreher's mind: After suggesting school shootings are caused by kids going to large schools -- as opposed to the one-room schoolhouse where Rod's ancestors l'arned to read and cipher -- he suggests a connection to stories in magazines like The Lily and Teen Vogue "pushing polyamory," ass-fucking, ice cream douches and vibrators -- "the most tender, intimate expressions of love between a man and a woman, reduced to bestial gestures," preaches Rod; "...It’s almost as if the dominant culture and its institutions are radically dehumanizing teenagers, and are mystified as to why some of those teenagers don’t see others as human beings worthy of respect and care."

I wonder what's the mechanism of action for this -- do the antisocial young men who comprise the majority of mass murderers get corrupted by reading Teen Vogue and Vulture? Or do they somehow meet the sort of big-city gals who read these publications, perhaps at potential-mass-murderer mixers, and become intoxicated and corrupted by their intimate Ben & Jerry's scent?

As usual, the Dreher "reader" "letter" is the highlight:
UPDATE: Reader Matt in VA writes:
I am surprised that you don’t draw out the parallel between school shootings and another common theme on this blog — early-onset transgenderism.
The easy availability of machine guns can't be the problem; otherwise why would they be so much more scared by the monsters under their beds?

UPDATE. Who could have suspected that Rod would have a woody for third-generation French fascist Marion Maréchal Le Pen? She speaks French and hates homosexuals -- il se pâme! ["Lady Marmalade" plays] Voulez-vous détester les Noirs (ce soir)?

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...since sometime this afternoon, but I didn't have time to announce -- some idiots wanted me to work! Me, work! Ah ha ha! --  so apologies. Anyway it's about Black Panther rightwing reax and o my brothers, it's a festival of lame and I do not mean lah-MAY.

Among the many outtakes, I had to drop the VDare entry because, shit, when so many mainstream conservatives are going I'M NOT RACIST BUT it seemed a little superfluous. But just in case you were wondering, VD's Paul Kersey guessed the film “will surpass $200 million, as black identity and Main Stream Media cheerleading are creating a formidable marketing combination” — you know how suggestible those people are.  But he found “disturbing” that “the film is telling blacks that the problems of Africans in the West and in Africa is simply the fault of white people,” and worried that “the hunger by blacks to be portrayed as ‘kings’ who can defeat the hated whites is driving much of the appeal of this film” would lure them into the embrace of villain Killmonger’s plan to use Wakanda's “advanced technology to arm black revolutionaries to wage a war on white people worldwide."  Then all ooga-booga would break loose!

The sad part is, you really don't have to go to the fever swamps for this kind of thing -- remember when Joe Klein predicted black people would riot when Do The Right Thing opened in 1989?

Sunday, February 18, 2018

HOLIDAY MONDAY 'ROUND THE HORN.

• The Village Voice column is delayed by the holiday til Tuesday. As part of my research I went to see Black Panther. I've told you good people before -- for example, back in 2009 when people were talking about The Dark Knight as a serious movie -- that I don't relate to the comic-book flicks that even some of my most intelligent friends enjoy. In fact, I find them idiotic. There may be a Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown movies, but as far as I'm concerned comic-book movies don't even have a Dances with Wolves. (Exceptions, or rather excuses: Ghost World, which I revere, is [clears throat] based on a graphic novel -- I know, that's like Lisa Loopner calling The Way We Were "a film not a movie" -- and Tim Burton's brutal Batman Returns is a Batman movie like Godard's Weekend is a road picture.) I can't even relate to those Lord of the Rings pictures. Magic kingdoms don't send me. My nerdness does not that way tend.

Black Panther is no exception. I'm not saying I didn't enjoy it; in fact once I got used to the unfamiliar sensation of having my eyes and ears pummeled while prone in a multiplex barcalounger,  it was a treat. The Afrocentric threads and sets are supercool, I am definitely down with the Praetorian Guard of tough bald chicks (the baddest-assed of whom is a general), and I'm happy for anyone who gets an ethnocentric or any other kind of thrill from it.

But I couldn't take it any more more seriously than I did Kokumo and Pazuzu in Exorcist II: The Heretic. I've never seen a made-up ancient tradition that wasn't at least slightly ridiculous (including the "real" ones we all grew up with). When the Wakandans were shown cheering T'Challa at his coronation in mountain niches going up hundreds of feet, all I could think of were Hummel figurines in a specialty display, or It's a Small World at Disneyland.

Also, I have to say that while I see why T'Challa had to defeat Killmonger, the latter had a good enough argument; why shouldn't Wakanda help liberate black folk around the world? History certainly supports W'Kabi's prediction that, once Whiteyworld got a whiff of their secret Vibranium stash, they'd do as they have always done with Africans. The Wakandan isolationist ethos is about protecting Wakandans; I see nothing in it about the brotherhood of man. It's nice T'Challa and Shuri are sufficiently guilt-tripped by it all to go to Oakland and start starship midnight basketball, but if they'd decided to go the Black Planet route instead I think it would have been more interesting.

But like I said, it's a comic book movie, and it was enough that it moved and looked good. And if I'm sympathetic toward Killmonger it may be in part because Michael B. Jordan, in a cast full of winners, steals the plum. Admittedly he has the advantage of being able to speak modern argot in a movie full of pseudo-Royal-African, and everyone else's jokes are corny enough that lines like "'Hey, Auntie" bring the house down. But modern, too, is the monster of reaction to injustice that Jordan makes of Killmonger, and though his viciousness made me want him defeated, as it was meant to, when he said at the point of dying that he wished to be buried in the ocean like his ancestors who "knew death was better than bondage," I wept. That, I took seriously.

• Also, returning to the Oscar derby I started with The Post, Get Out, and Dunkirk, I saw Lady Bird. Story: Christine, who prefers to be called by the fanciful eponym because I guess it will make a good title someday, is a driven though perhaps not exceptionally bright girl attending a Catholic school her parents can barely afford who wants to get out of her third-tier city (the same one auteur Greta Gerwig grew up in, what a coincidence) and make it big in New York — come back, reader! I swear it’s not bad! Along the way she does a lot of growing up — Reader? Hello?

Ha okay, leave if you want, but first let me tell you why it’s worth a look: Lady Bird and the other characters reveal themselves quickly (wanting-more daughter, angry-loving mother, becalmed-depressed dad, et alia) and, I'm forced to say, none of them shows much in the way of hidden depths. Nor are they full of surprises  -- in fact the characters usually do things you should have seen coming a mile away. But I stayed interested and rooted for them throughout. I think that's because Gerwig and her actors understood that, first, when characters are closely observed, the audience will notice that, and think them worth watching. (Gerwig even has one of Lady Bird's teachers mention the similarity between love and attention. If that doesn't do it for you, the really-real performances of Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, and Tracy Letts should.) Also, they knew that the characters don't have to surprise us to be worthy of our attention;  they just have to really try to be — what’s that phrase Mom uses? — the best version of themselves they can be. Sometimes just that struggle alone is worth watching.

I especially felt it in every scene involving Lady Bird and her best friend (Beanie Feldstein -- remember the name), a more obviously talented but also more ungainly girl whom she betrays, in a slightly ridiculous high-school way, before deciding to ditch her new cool friends and take her to the prom with her. I know, ick, after-school special, right? But when they went from crying in each other's arms to laughing with their mouths full of cheese and crackers because they couldn't believe they finished it all, I loved them. Later on, when they were mooning over what they would be doing next summer, they bored me. But I'll remember the cheese and crackers for a long time.

Thursday, February 15, 2018

WATERING THE TREE OF LUNACY WITH THE BLOOD OF CHILDREN, PART INFINITY.

Another day, another bunch of dead kids, and Republicans reliably rush to aid and comfort the NRA. At National Review we have yet to hear Charles C.W. Cooke's traditional post-slaughter sermon about how you cahn't ban assault weapons, it's in the cawn-stuh-tyu-shun, but we have had proposed alternative solutions from other staffers such as David French:
Rather than tweet impotently, I’ve armed myself to protect my family and my neighbors; in my past role as a member of a school board, I’ve worked to better secure my kids’ school; and I’ve vowed that if — God forbid — I ever see evidence or warning signs of the darkness of a killer’s heart, I’ll have the courage to seek the intervention that can save lives.
That is to say: He bought more guns, and fantasized about what he'd do if he ever saw someone suspicious. That's usually the beginning of a success story, alright.

French's colleague Robert VerBruggen has a simpler solution: "Arm Teachers." I don't recall him suggesting that we arm preachers after the church shoot-em-up in Sutherland Springs last November, but maybe his condition has only recently advanced to this stage. VerBruggen elaborates:
[Training is] something a teacher could easily accomplish during summer vacation, even if schools insisted on rigorous training.
And why would they? Clearly any gun-wielding amateur marksman will be able to quickly take out a heavily armed mass murderer, and avoid shooting the wrong people or themselves in a panic -- they must be superhuman or else why would we pay them so generously?

If this sounds more like a recipe for Roddy McDowall in Class of 1984 than a sane society, remember that a sane society is the opposite of what they want: This is why they were so enraged to see New York City's crime drop after years of strict gun control, and why they're so eager to inject guns into polities that have benefited from their exclusion -- they want to make every part of America as hair-trigger gun-crazy as Fritters, Alabama, because that's how you breed Republicans.

UPDATE. Regarding French's I'll-know-one-when-I-see-one, Patrick Blanchfield makes a good point:


I wonder who David French and guys like him are likely to pre-cognize as a poison-hearted potential killer?

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER.

Much has been made today of Megan McArdle’s promotion to the Washington Post. (I thought the Times was more likely to take her, but one “Liberal Media” outfit is just as good as another.) There have been some good new considerations of her nightmarish career, and renewed interest in old ones.

These get the broad outlines well enough — her libertarian lack of concern for people unlike herself (recently epitomized by her amazing column on the Grenfell Tower tragedy), her impressive imperviousness to alternate points of view — the elements, that is, that made her rise inevitable.  But these miss some of the shadings, the characteristics that make characters, as Forster had it, round rather than flat. That job needs more time to do properly than I have at present, but I can perhaps put a blush on the marble.

For one thing, McArdle likes to play the serious centrist, which position somehow always turns out to be right wing; for example, she has portrayed herself in the climate-change debate as a “lukewarmist,” that is, someone who believes climate science is “guesswork” and is darn sick of those slovenly radicals who practice it calling her a “denialist.” Being serious-centrist, she can admit, okay, there’s  “a small chance of climate catastrophe” — comparable to that of the earth being destroyed by an asteroid — and as a way of addressing it bids her followers read a nine-part essay by a guy who writes for Watts Up With That. There, now -- isn't that even-handed?

When climate scientists laughed her off for this, she declared them adherents to the “hypothesis” that “name calling will advance the cause,” rather than experts who found her self-satisfied ignorance ridiculous. (She really hates to be laughed at, which, given how frequently she has proven dunkworthy, may constitute the only genuine hardship she has ever experienced.)

McArdle is a great advocate of the Marriage Makes You Rich philosophy, which she has claimed liberals wouldn’t admit because they're jealous of the happily married. She has also said that people should get married as soon in life as possible — notwithstanding that McArdle married in her late 30s. No, she didn’t think she made a mistake -- come on, now! -- but —
Obviously, you can choose not to settle. I did. But I’ll be honest: that decision is a lot scarier at 33 than it would have been a decade earlier.
— there are rules for peons, and there are rules for McArdle.

Generally, on the subject of the poor and money, she is given to statements like, “it's all too common for well-meaning middle class people to think that if the poor just had the same stuff we do, they wouldn't be poor any more…” (Put it this way: were you to tell her the famous Hemingway-Fitzgerald story about the rich being very different from you and me, she wouldn’t get the joke.)

McArdle has supported this what's-money-got-to-do-with-poverty POV by telling readers about a girl she knew who, even though she “grew up in a middle class home which would happily have paid for college,” wound up “on the Section 8 waiting list,” which seemed to prove to her that helping is futile — “more money… would solve the sort of problems that stem from a simple lack of money. But it would not turn [the poor] into different people.” That's what the poor need -- not money, but personal transformation, like you get from a yoga weekend. If you disagreed with her and still wanted to shunt more of America’s resources to these waste-cases, well, you were just “imagining away their humanity, and replacing it with an automaton,” which is just like a liberal.

More than she likes anything — except, perhaps, her kitchen accessories, and power — McArdle hates liberals, particularly the unreasonable hippies who told her she was wrong about the Iraq War and were so smug about it and made her so mad that she quit the internet for a brief while.  Thus, in almost every argument she makes, you can see her trying to Own the Libs, as the kids say; even when it comes to rainbow-flavored positions that young and groovy conservatives are allowed to have, like gay marriage not being the end of the world, McArdle is compelled to portray them as a comeuppance to liberals: now that homosexuals were getting hitched, she said, “the forces of bourgeois repression have won”:
That's right, I said it: this is a landmark victory for the forces of staid, bourgeois sexual morality. Once gays can marry, they'll be expected to marry. And to buy sensible, boring cars that are good for car seats. 
That’ll show you liberal-tines! Then she went back into her Marriage Makes You Rich routine (“the disastrous collapse of marriage outside the elite”) and again pushed early marriage, graciously adding “I married at 37 myself, so I'm not judging, here. But if we want childbearing to take place inside marriage” blah blah blah.

Speaking of childbearing, which she has also not personally performed, she was annoyed that Democrats wanted to include contraceptive coverage in Obamacare, and explained her feeling thus: “according to the reasoning… I am being denied something every time my employer refuses to buy it for me: cars, homes, Hummel collectible figurines.” Things McArdle doesn’t need are by definition luxuries.

On race, she is capable of writing something like this
I really don't want this post to come out as "See--black people don't understand how hard white people have it!" Rather, I'm continuing what I tried to say in this post: that both communities, because they have a less than perfect understanding of the others' experience, are more suspicious of each other than they need to be.
And if you’re gasfaced over that, let us step back a few grafs:
I think it's safe to assume that minorities and women know more about life in the dominant group than the reverse--if for no other reason than the ways that media centers around their experience. But that can be tricky. Have you ever noticed how Europeans think they know way more about life in America than they actually do, because they watch our television and movies?
You’ve seen all the Vince Vaughn movies, my black friend, but you’ve never been to me!

But soft, the glow-worm shows the matin to be near; this should give you noobs some idea of what to expect. Look out below!

WINGNUT PRAVDA.

There have been plenty of rightwing tantrums lately over press coverage of the North Korean presence at the Olympics, but Ben Domenech’s takes the cake:
Dear America: Your News Media Absolutely Hates You
It’d be nice to say that American media doesn’t hate this country. It’d be nice to claim that the American press, while maintaining objectivity and balancing against bias, is still inherently American – that they are patriots who love this country even as they report on its defects... 
But we cannot say these things when the American media, time and again, illustrates its utter hatred for the nation and its people in those newspapers and on television. Having judged the American project kaput after the election of Donald Trump, they are now stooping to the level of defending the North Koreans – perhaps the most brutal and heinous regime in the world today – thanks to some side-eye from its minister of propaganda, the sister of Kim Jong Un. If the headlines are to be believed, “North Korea heading for diplomacy gold medal at Olympics” is the story American media want to tell about this moment.
The stories Domenech cites are ordinary reported pieces describing a diplomatic push by the North Koreans at the Olympics being held in South Korea. One such story from CNN quotes a "senior diplomatic source" disparaging Mike Pence's show of protest at the Olympic reviewing stand; this Domenech describes as "15 year veteran reporter at CNN, Will Ripley, just straight up delivering North Korean propaganda whole cloth to an American audience, simply because it criticizes the Trump administration."

Domenech doesn't say anything bad about the senior diplomatic source, perhaps because he's afraid it'll turn out to be John Kelly or some other rightwing made man, and he'd get in trouble.

I'm very old and can remember when we used to make fun of the Soviet media for reflexively slurring America as a hellhole and its allies as running dogs and lackeys. We had room to talk, of course, because we had a free press and, liberal or conservative, we were proud of that. Domenech has a different feeling about it, obviously, and would prefer to patriotize the press so that any description of activities involving countries hostile to the U.S., even innocuous soft diplomacy at the Olympics, be screened by the Committee for inappropriate tone and unflattering realities.

It’s long been clear that Trump’s ultimate goal is to delegitimize all press outlets not devoted to his praise, and painting them as unpatriotic for telling the truth is part of the strategy. Here’s hoping the clumsiness of operatives like Domenech, and the memory of the kind of country we used to be, will keep him from succeeding.

Monday, February 12, 2018

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the wife-beating charges at the White House and the awkward defenses offered -- in the abstract and the specific -- by our conservative brethren.

These things tend to run long so I had to cut a few bits -- like this interesting theory at The Future of Capitalism: after some bullshit about media "narratives," the unnamed author (the site is run by Ira Stoll so it may be him) says,
But there's a third possible narrative that the Porter story might fit into — one that I haven't yet seen written about. That is the story of a too-powerful and potentially abusive FBI at war with a White House that is trying to rein it in.
RECORDSCRATCH
...The Porter domestic violence history or allegations (he was never convicted or charged with any crime, so far as I can tell) surfaced as part of the extensive background investigation that the FBI conducts on anyone seeking classified clearance or a sensitive government job...
By this means the FBI gets "its own files of what the Russians call kompromat," FoC says, so maybe the feds leaked this particular story to the Daily Mail "as the bureau's way of pushing back against the release of the Nunes memo":
In essence, the FBI would have been sending the message to Trump, "okay, you want to air our dirty laundry in public, be careful, Mr. President, because we can play that game, too, and you will wind up getting burned."

It's just a theory. Maybe there's another explanation. But the timing is odd.
"The timing is odd"? This administration has a scandal every couple of days. If they're timing it, we ought to applaud whoever's serving as traffic director. With this bunch, isn't massive mendacity and incompetence the Occam's-Razor alternative?

Thursday, February 08, 2018

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.



It's nice to find a newish band you kinda like

•   Last week Megan McArdle shared with the world her 12-point secret to happiness which somehow did not contain "get paid a lot to write terrible shit." Most of it was about being nice to people -- not peons, just those near and dear, and perhaps donors -- and one item was "save 25 percent of your income," which led to her being smacked around by people who understood that saving 25 percent of one's income may be easy for her, but hard for low earners who did not, as McArdle did, come from moneyed professionals. This led to a McArdle Twitter tirade about how she had to eat ramen for a while and how the left was mean to her. Later she wrote about how rent control would be very bad for rents, as if rents could get any goddamn worse. All this reminded me, not only of how terrible McArdle is, but how fucked out conservatism is in general -- that is, that sliver of conservatism not devoted to Trumpian nationalism, the kind that six-figure columnists have to push. Increasingly our citizens are taking a second look at socialism, rent control, single payer etc. because uncontrolled Reagan-style capitalism has obviously fucked us over, and all its handmaidens like McArdle can do is groan NOOOOO DOOON'T IT WILL BE VENEZUELLLAAA with a flashlight under their chins and talk bootstrap penny-saved-is-a-penny-earned gush. What market is there for that, besides New York Times managing editors? At least the full-on Trumpkins offer the pleasure of unreasoning hate. Yet still they heap money on her and I'm wearing a cardboard belt! Sigh, I am too childish-foolish for this world.

•   Further proof that conservatism is fucked out: Not one but two idiotic National Review columns on how it's great to pray to Jesus for your football team to win. "Yes, God Cares about Football" by -- who else? -- David French is excruciating; French starts by basically admitting that there's no reason to talk about this -- there's been no recent backlash against God-bothering footballers for him to defend against ("Perhaps event militant atheists were grateful to see the Patriots lose") -- but he figures he'll go ahead and homilize anyway, and oh how I'd like to know what great preachers like John Donne would make of this:
Moreover, there’s something specific about football — distinct from other sports — that can concentrate a person’s faith. Yes, football is more religious in part because of its southern strongholds (the South is more religious). Yes, football is more religious in part because it’s disproportionately black (African Americans are more religious). But I’d also posit that something else is in play: keen awareness of human fragility...
So football is God's Favorite Sport, as opposed to basketball -- which, French has previously told us, is too "clustered in progressive urban centers" (pushes in nose, pushes out lower lip and tongue) for His taste. What could be worse? Well, French actually inspired colleague Nicholas Frankovich to chime in, and Frankovich manages to work in the paranoia French was too embarrassed to affect:
The question [Is it appropriate to pray for victory in sports?] embarrasses believers who are anxious to be taken seriously in public and goes to the heart of why they feel that anxiety to begin with. In theory, they still enjoy freedom of religion in the public square, but the social reality is that what they enjoy is the freedom to worship in private. Under the law, they are free to speak as if those parts of their religion that clash with materialism were true, but they risk some loss of social stature and credibility among peers when they exercise that right. Their problem in this regard is not legal or political. It’s social, cultural, and intellectual...
The "freedom to worship in private" bit is actually related to a fundamentalist trope about how Godless liberals are trying to trick believers into being grateful they can go to the church of their choice when real freedom means raving and snake-handling in public. Only, in this case, the allegedly proscribed conduct is praying for Jesus to cover the spread. Man, why do these Christians even stay in this country if they don't like it here?

• I don't commend our comments section enough, so I will do so now, with special attention to commenter keta's own version of McArdle's 12 Steps. Sample: "If you're going to praise someone, lay it on thick. Nobody ever died thinking, 'geez, I wish I hadn't been such an obnoxious phony suck-up without an ounce of integrity in my entire being.' Get that nose up in there." But really, they're all winners.

• Aha, this again: "San Francisco Bay Area Experiences Mass Exodus Of Residents," reports a local CBS News outlet. The proof points are a study from the kind of think tank that has David Brooks do their keynote address; some lady from San Jose who's moving to Tennessee to escape SJ's "sanctuary city status"; and "Operators of a San Jose U-Haul business" who "say one of their biggest problems is getting its rental moving vans back because so many are on a one-way ticket out of town." This of course is being repeated credulously by wingnuts ("IT’S OFFICIAL: There’s a mass exodus happening in San Francisco"). But I've seen this sort of "Har everyone's leaving the blue cities" yak before -- sometimes even with moving company stats!-- yet San Francisco is still growing, as are other big cities, because nobody wants to live out in Bumfuck if they can help it. Part of the Trump strategy is to make sure fewer Americans can help it, of course, and also to strip wealth from the cities and make them less attractive, because keeping people stuck out in the great land of meth and assault weapons helps turn them angry and crazy enough to vote Republican. But that could take years to move the needle if it happens at all. Meantime they can just go on telling themselves that cities are expensive and crowded because no one wants to live in them -- which contradicts their alleged economic beliefs but, as we just saw with the budget bill, they don't really believe that shit anyway.

Wednesday, February 07, 2018

WHY SO SERIOUS?

Among the many similarities between the Trump people and the more overt alt-right is their common impulse to cover their more repulsive sentiments as jokes. Look at Trump's recent declaration that Democrats who didn't applaud him at the State of the Union might be traitors, and his spokesman Hogan Gidley's assurance that Trump was -- obvs! -- just kidding. The brethren took the hint; Dan McLaughlin of National Review portrays Trump's statement, unimaginable from any previous President, as gentle if totalitarian ribbing -- "the subversive, somewhat cleansing but ultimately corrosive part of Trump’s brand of political performance art," McLaughlin puts it, trying as best his shitty prose skills can manage to soften the "corrosive" part with an invocation of a Lenny Bruce for Bigots -- and asks the libs Are You Triggered:
...if you watch the actual video, you can see the flippancy here. Trump is plainly not being serious about treason – he’s playing this for laughs, and getting them – and liberals going to DEFCON 1 as if he is are yet again proving how little interest they have in distinguishing between tyranny and mere boorishness. The loss of perspective is just wearying to watch at this point.
I can imagine McLaughlin at the computer, musing: Am I wearied by the loss of perspective or amused by it? I assume he eventually flipped a coin.

This treason-amirite stuff is of a piece with other apparently serious and horrific Trump comments that his factota later disown as gags -- like asking Russia to steal Hillary Clinton's emails -- or that Trump himself laughs through, either to cover the violence or because he genuinely finds it funny, as when he light-heartedly told cops to smash suspects' heads into car doors.

And it really reminds me of the trollery of alt-right icons like Milo Yiannopoulos, a professional asshole who pretends, semi-successfully, that his slurs are a type of stand-up, and such elaborate kidding-not-kidding as the Chuck Johnson crowd claiming the OK sign as a white power symbol, then denying they did it.

I'm not sure to what extent these alt-right guys get encouragement from Trump,  or whether their outrages, fed to Trump in his morning memo, give him encouragement (though I'm pretty sure Trump's Me/Not Me development is sufficient retarded that, if he likes something, he assumes it originated with him). But the real meaningful resemblance between Trumpism and the alt-right isn't their compatible bigotry and viciousness; it's in their similarly bland insistence that it's all just a joke that you'd be a Fool and a Chump and Triggered to take seriously (unless you're people like the Kochs and DeVoses who have big money to promote it, in which case please take it very seriously indeed!). It's like every up-and-coming wingnut is, in the manner of Trump advisor Stephen Miller, that one friend everyone had in high school who made outrageously vicious statements and, when he didn't get laughs, told everyone to lighten up -- only expanded into a movement with millions of followers.

Now even some old-time, credentialed conservative writers are picking this up. Here's Robert VerBruggen on the recent analysis by Washington Post reporters who found, sure enough, the immigration restrictions Trump has promoted with volley after volley of racist vomit would in fact keep America whiter for a few more years -- which news, I don't think it's unreasonable to believe, would thrill a substantial portion of Trump's base, if they ever read high-falutin' big-city papers like the Post.  Now, VerBruggen is one of National Review's more obvious racists, but still paper-trained in the classic Buckley manner so he's unlikely get kicked out for being too obvious like John Derbyshire -- and now that he's caught on to the New Breed's why-so-serious style, he's got a fresh new way to cover his tracks:
Now the Washington Post has done the yeoman’s work of calculating how the [Trump] framework would affect the demographics of the nation as a whole, and you won’t believe how pale everyone will be a quarter-century from now if we let Orange Hitler have his way... 
In 2044 this country will be only about 47 to 49 percent nonwhite, instead of 50 percent. The Make America White Again plan could delay the dawn of a majority-minority United States, currently expected to arrive 26 years from now, by one to five years. In wanting to stop immigrants from bringing over chains of distant relatives with no regard for their skills, Trump is clearly motivated by nothing other than — come on now, don’t be shy to say it — racism.
Ha? Well, I didn't say he was smooth about it. But that doesn't matter. In fact, a certain clumsiness goes with the territory -- to successfully tell a joke, after all, you have to have at least a little joy in your soul that you wish to express, but to these guys, "joking" is just a formal strategy for the very serious business of realizing their will to power. I mean, look at The Daily Wire's response to Jimmy Kimmel's gag about conservatives not being smart enough to do late night TV -- "7 Conservative Talk Show Hosts Who Are Smarter Than Jimmy Kimmel." (Here's a taste: "Dennis Prager is the longtime host of The Dennis Prager Show and author of eight books on theology, history, and politics..." Stop, yer killing me!) Trying to disprove Kimmel's point with actual humor isn't even an option. Humor isn't their strong suit. But, like the Soviet functionaries who used to squeeze out Krokodil every month, they'll pretend, because they dimly perceive that it brings down the defenses of those Earth People they're trying to sucker. And, who knows, maybe it even helps them fool themselves.