An ongoing review of politics and culture

Jesse Helms and the Future of Gersonism

The scholarly article to read on the topic of Sen. Helms and Mssrs. the Edge and Bono is Bono Made Jesse Helms Cry: Jubilee 2000, Debt Relief, and Moral Action in International Politics, by Josh Busby. The setup:

Bono claimed that Helms wept when they spoke: “I talked to him about the Biblical origin of the idea of Jubilee Year…. He was genuinely moved by the story of the continent of Africa, and he said to me, ‘America needs to do more.’ I think he felt it as a burden on a spiritual level” (Dominus 2000, 6). Of his meeting with Bono, Helms said, “I was deeply impressed with him. He has depth that I didn’t expect. He is led by the Lord to do something about the starving people in Africa” (Wagner 2000). The story of Helms’ tears may be apocryphal, but it speaks both to the peculiar religiosity of the United States and more generally to the power of a compelling frame to persuade key veto players or “policy gatekeepers” to support a morally motivated policy. This article, through a case study of the Jubilee 2000 campaign for debt relief, seeks to explain how states may be moved to support “moral action.”

Indeed. The spiritual burden to take on the burden of the suffering of foreign strangers is right at the heart of Gersonism, and when Gerson is finished applauding Obama for joining spirit and state on behalf of domestic citizens, get ready for a ringing eulogy of Helms. Also prepare for a great irony: opponents of Gersonism recommending the morally decent but relatively hands-off policy of ‘just throwing money at the problem’ — especially by recycling Holbrooke’s notion that AIDS, for instance, is a national security problem.

The point, I think, is that a substantial difference can be drawn between applying federal resources to actions with morally laudable ends and organizing federal action around the pursuit of interminable moral imperatives. The preservation of prudence requires a certain amount of circuitousness, messiness, and roundabout indeterminacy. But the kinds of evasive, wiggly, reticent paths you wind up with given a politics of prudence is starkly at odds with the marching orders of modern culture: straight line to fixed destination. Postmoderns (except Rorty) want us to waver away: bad for the culture, but good for domestic politics. So we come back to a basic question: how much should what’s going on in the rest of the world distract us from doing our own thing in a healthy, successful way? At the meta level, my bet is that we can recur to prudence again.

by Alan Jacobs

07/04/08

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Jesse Helms

Jesse Helms has died, which brings to mind a story I heard years ago from a young man who as an undergraduate did an internship in Helms’s office. Senator Helms was a particular target of Bono’s persuasive powers, and indeed near the end of his career he threw his considerable weight behind increased funding for AIDS projects in Africa. This young man claimed that he was in the office one day when Bono came by with the Edge in tow.

“Senator Helms,” Bono said, “I’d like you to meet the Edge.”

Helms stuck out his hand. “It’s a pleashuh to meet you, Mistuh the Edge.”

by David Robinson

07/04/08

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The Meta-ness of "Bolt"

So one of the in-theater previews that seems to be accompanying G-rated movies at the moment is for “Bolt,” a Disney film coming out around Thanksgiving. The next paragraph is my best effort to explain its dizzying layers, but the easiest way to understand the discussion that follows is to watch the trailer, here.

The central character is Bolt, a heroic talking dog who protects a little girl from evil villains. Except, he’s not really heroic because he’s actually an actor, in a TV show inside the movie. The TV show is about a heroic dog who protects a little girl from evil villains. What Bolt doesn’t recognize is that he is an actor-dog, playing a hero-dog on a TV show, inside a movie. Only his costars (like the actress-character who plays the little girl in the TV show within the movie) know that he’s an actor.

The amount of wising up required, in order to appreciate the Bolt idea, is staggering. As a viewer, you are expected to understand that you’re watching an actor, playing a dog who “really” is an actor-dog playing a hero-dog, not that he knows it. Since the central action of the film revolves around the actor-dog’s false belief in the authenticity of his hero-dog role, you have to suspend your disbelief of the actor-dog’s implausible ignorance. Can anyone capable of that also be capable of genuine childlike wonder? I’m not sure.

If you’ve read The Tipping Point (and you have… c’mon…. admit it), you may recall a related vignette about a certain episode of Sesame Street, in which Big Bird searches for a new name. The plot of the episode was fun for adults—-Big Bird, in a moment of existential ennui, concludes that his name is oddly functional and lacking in character, and spends the rest of the episode looking for a new one. But the story was confusing to young children, who speed up their learning about the world by assuming (usually correctly) that the things they encounter have one consistent name apiece. The layering was overkill. It makes for an interesting vignette because most of us have long since forgotten what it would be like to lack layers, to view the world as a simple place where the distance between things-as-they-are and things-as-described doesn’t hold a lot of inherent interest.

From Big Bird to Bolt, it seems, we’ve come a long way. But I’m not sure I like the progression. I’m tempted to say that if a typical five-year-old is Bolt-ready, we are doing way, way too much wising up of young kids, way, way too early. My favorite book on this subject is Thomas de Zengotita’s Mediated. De Zengotita writes as if he were speaking, and the book diagnoses this layering as a serious problem—-we aren’t able to experience reality because we’re too darn busy experiencing unreality, and judging things as being unreal in particular ways. It’s as though the only conversation we can have is about layering; everything is unreal and we are constantly tied up diagnosing its unreality.

And now a confession. When I’m writing or reading about mediation, I go back and forth between thinking it’s really profound—-maybe the central observation possible about the world we live in—-and thinking that it’s a bunch of self-referential, naval-gazing nonsense. Either way, there’s a simple truth at the bottom: Exposing young kids to the vertigo of a film like Bolt is, on some level, totally nuts.

07/03/08

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Everything the Taliban Hates

Fraser Nelson of The Spectator explains the profound significance of Kylie Minogue’s OBE.

by Matt Feeney

07/03/08

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Hancock, weird but not meta

Far from meta, as it might seem in the previews, Hancock is a superhero movie of almost comic earnestness and intimacy. If you’ve seen NBC’s fine “Friday Night Lights,” the other recent project by Hancock’s director, Peter Berg, you might have an intuition how strange his take might be on the superhero movie. But you wouldn’t think to trust that intution. Berg wouldn’t create a superhero movie that, like FNL, is full of probing handheld camerawork, long takes examining painful emotions with the earnestness of a concerned parent, and which is scored with those poignant scraping cello chords and gentle arpeggios from somebody’s soulful acoustic guitar…would he? It turns out that, yes, he would. It’s not the mix of form and content you would expect, and a lot of critics have, understandably, had a hard time with it, and I had moments of difficulty, too. I mean, it’s hard not to snicker when characters are having the sort of tearful heart-to-heart you associate with a teenage breakup, but they’re talking about, I don’t know, how long have you been able to fly? Berg’s intimate approach in FNL leaves little room for fakery in storytelling. If you’re going to buy into the level of involvement he creates with all those tight angles and somber tones, all those human faces right up in your grill, it’s hard to tolerate moments of narrative contrivance. So it’s hard to imagine how this style could fly in movie that’s all contrivance. And there’s loads of dissonance in Hancock, but I sort of liked it anyway. Will Smith’s regular Will Smith act is extremely muted and more affecting for it. The movie is pretty funny at several points. And how can you not warm to Jason Bateman and Charlize Theron rekindling their romance-for-the-ages from Season 3 of “Arrested Development”? (I s’pose there’ a little meta for you there, a little intertextuality, but it’s the good kind, I think.)

by James Poulos

07/03/08

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Broder's Unwise America

Happy Fourth, he exults:

Young people may not know the Constitution as well as we would like, but they found their way to polling places in record numbers this year and joined enthusiastically in many campaigns. And they volunteer for all kinds of good works in their communities.

I have not worried about the fundamental commitment of the American people since 1974. In that year, they were confronted with the stunning evidence that their president had conducted a criminal conspiracy out of the Oval Office. In response, the American people reminded Richard Nixon, the man they had just recently reelected overwhelmingly, that in this country, no one, not even the president, is above the law. They required him to yield his office.

That is not the sign of a nation that has lost its sense of values or forgotten the principles on which this system rests.

In his national greatness enthusiasm, Broder obscures a fundamental point: political participation — especially voting in one-off national elections — is not a reliable index of civic health or even vibrant citizenship. Broder thinks that enthusiasm about America — expressed by enthusiastically doing something America-themed — is patriotism. This is a seriously imbalanced view. Dormant citizens who rise from the grave of civic republicanism to cast a fevered ballot once every two or four years do not a healthy electorate make. Volunteering for a campaign is better, but ‘joining enthusiastically’ can mean, a bit lower down on the totem pole, sloganeering, attending rallies, and plastering bumper stickers, all without any reflection deeper than “My candidate cares about me“ or “My candidate’s a true patriot.” And community volunteering is great, but has no necessary connection to any knowledge of, or appreciation for, the American national identity. (Indeed this may be a good thing.)

I don’t know why exactly Broder leaps back to 1974 to buttress his argument that enthusiasm is patriotism, but here’s the bottom line: when we’re dealing with a mere “sense of values,” we’ve already lost the concreteness of our conviction in those values. Our hearts are in the right place, vaguely speaking, and quite possibly nothing more. This is a thin crutch for national greatness. Confusing a gauzy and uninformed sense of our national principles with a real and abiding understanding of their authority is easy for Broder (or anyone else) to do when passion is considered a substitute for wisdom.

A ‘fundamental commitment’ to America is not enough for America to flourish — nor for its citizens to do so. Actually, I don’t even know what a ‘fundamental commitment to America’ is. The proof is in the pudding of what we say to each other and what we mean when we’re pressed to give content to that loosey-goosey stamp of enthusiasm. What I’m getting from Broder, as far as that goes, is little more than what I got from SNL’s spoofed Chris Matthews, interviewing Hillary on Hardball: “Yer Great!”

by James Poulos

07/03/08

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Meta Meta Meta Meta Meta Meta Meta Meta BOOM

Finally got around to Iron Man last night. How bizarrely and refreshingly personal it was: focused in so tight on the relationships of its characters, so generous with its first act, that when Stark returned to America from caveside, my wife leaned over and whispered “This is a twenty-five minute movie?” I still don’t know who handed Jon Favreau and RDJ the pile of money necessary for those special effects (some of the least pseudorealistic I’ve seen, in a good way), and obviously I’m way to late to the film for anything I’ve got to say about it to ride, y’know, the wave.

But I can talk about the previews.

The previews were for Tropic Thunder and Hancock. These previews, and the movies they promised, were so meta that I almost ran out of the theater. Both movies seemed to be about meta-ness, with the characters just stock stand-ins, puppets, props.

The gimmick in Tropic Thunder is the flipside of the one in Hancock. In the former, self-absorbed and self-referential to the point of insanity, Black, Stiller, and RDJ deliver ironically un-meta lines in an ironically ultra-meta setting. They think faking it is still real! With guns! Oh the hilarity. Of course no ironically un-meta performance is complete without its own episodes of self-conscious meta-ness: fake black guy RDJ consoling a real black guy, who doesn’t need to be consoled, by whispering the Jeffersons theme song in his ear; getting called out on it; whispering just as seriously that it doesn’t matter. This is nearly as sweltering and dispiriting an ordeal as hacking through the jungles of ‘Nam. Can we admit this style of humor is dead of its own compound inauthenticity?

In Hancock, self-absorbed and self-referential to the point of celebrity, Will Smith is coached by some scumbucket PR agent (“I do PR” appears to be an actual line from this film) to embrace his inner and outer meta — self-consciously donning a rubber suit, mocking it before the cameras, etc., etc. Instead of artificiality as reality, we get reality as artificiality. Meta-ness as salvation: an unholy message if ever I heard one. And a fully deliberate filmmaking choice. The audience, you see, would be turned off by seriousness. This is revealing:

Although Hancock – with Charlize Theron and Jason Bateman in key roles – is dark, Berg says that the original screenplay, written by Vincent Ngo, was way more so. “You know the Nicolas Cage character in ‘Leaving Las Vegas’?” he says, referring to the booze-soaked, suicidal scribe that won Cage an Oscar. “Well, Vincent’s screenplay took a left turn from Leaving Las Vegas … We all loved the idea of that character, but weren’t ever interested in making a film that tough.”

Still, one of Berg’s early cuts of Hancock featured Smith’s character, a guy who can fly, who has super strength, and whose body is impervious to harm, trying to kill himself. If you’re invincible, suicide becomes a serious challenge.

“It’s a great sequence, but it’s just very dark,” Berg says. “And we felt like it would be hard to get audiences laughing after that opening … The film has always been tonally challenging. It took a while for the tone to sort of shake itself out.”

Yes. Flee from the human experience. Enough layers of meta, and we need never be seriously invested in any experience. No risk, no downside, we can enjoy a pure — and purely impoverished — relationship between spectacle and spectator, where all spectacles refract out from self-spectators themselves, and all of those selves are themselves spectacles. Nice trick while you can keep it up, but I feel a very un-meta kersplat coming up. (Or not.)

07/03/08

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Top Choice Clique

A friend of mine was looking for an up-tempo hip-hop track for a film, and Hua Hsu recommended the following.

Unrelatedly, James Carmichael very much enjoyed the less festive= “Queens Get the Money.”

I just purchased a couple of Tilly and the Wall albums and I particularly like “Falling Without Knowing,” which sounds extremely late ’80s. It occurs to me that my first crush was on (embarrassingly) a brunette hippie vocalist from the late ’80s, or possibly a girl from a Pop Rocks commercial. It’s funny how these things linger. So anyway, the music of that moment still resonates with me, as is the case with music of the Top Choice Clique era. I haven’t fully assimilated the Fleet Foxes EP and LP, so track recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Buying the new Ladytron has repaid me a hundredfold in musical entertainment. I really want to buy the new Jay Reatard compilation, but I can’t find it as yet in a convenient format.

by Noah Millman

07/02/08

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Fetchez Lavache

I had hoped to post reviews of this past weekend’s Canadian theatre outings in time for Canada Day, but I just didn’t get around to it.

Actually, it’s more than just that. We saw three shows this past weekend – All’s Well That Ends Well, The Music Man, and a double-bill of Krapp’s Last Tape and Hughie. I wanted to start with the toughest to review – the Shakespeare – but I have had a great deal of trouble getting my head around this most troublesome play. So, having spent a couple of days flailing about, I’m just going to give it a go and see what happens.

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by Alan Jacobs

07/02/08

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i know what you're thinking

Over on this thread I’m disagreeing with Steve Sailer’s evident skepticism about Barack Obama’s claim to be a Christian. Steve doesn’t think there’s any “evidence” that Obama’s a Christian. My response is, in effect, that there’s never any evidence of religious sincerity for those who choose the path of skepticism.

It’s easy to come up with a story explaining why this person or that person is falsely professing religious belief; and, because we don’t have any (human or mechanical) mind-readers at hand, such skepticism can never be either refuted or confirmed. I’ve been around this highly annoying block way too many times. I have politically conservative Christian friends who are certain that Bill and Hillary Clinton have never been Christians but have been faking it all these years for political leverage; I have politically liberal friends who say exactly the same thing about George Bush. Maybe they’re all right; maybe they’re all wrong. How the hell would I know?

(Of course, this phenomenon is not confined to religious matters. Last week, one of the more generally thoughtful bloggers I know of, Tim Burke, wrote a post in which he denounced David Brooks’s “calculatedly dishonest approach to commentary.” When I asked him why he wrote “dishonest” rather than, say, “inconsistent,” he replied that while “some people are inconsistent in ways that strike me as sincere or unknowing,” Brooks is “inconsistent on purpose, instrumentally, as a manipulator.” But how the hell would Tim know?)

Rebecca West once wrote, “There’s no such thing as an unmixed motive.” Human personalities are complex. Few of us are utterly unscrupulous; few of us are utterly sincere. And, again, none of us can read minds. So please, let’s just drop the motive-mongering and focus on the issues. If our opponents in the public sphere are inconsistent or incoherent, it’s their inconsistency and incoherence that matter, not their supposed reasons for being so. Especially since it’s not likely that we, their critics, are any more morally pure.

07/02/08

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The Media

Racism Everywhere!

Media Matters for America has, rather eccentrically, identified the following line by Chris Matthews on Hardball are meriting scrutiny.

They’re the working-class white voters Hillary won and Barack didn’t. Can Obama win over the regular folks against John McCain?

Shrewdly, Media Matters doesn’t explicitly call this line racist as that would be flatly absurd. But they seem to be suggesting that Matthews has crossed some line by referring to working-class whites as “regular folks.”

Note, incidentally, that Matthews was asking me — a college-educated brown man — about working-class whites, presumably because I know something about them. If I can know something about them, perhaps his suggestion that Obama can’t connect with them has less to do with Obama’s race than with his ideology or sensibility. But we’ll leave that to the side. I happen to think Obama is perfectly capable of connecting with working-class voters, and indeed that he has connected with working class whites, in Oregon and elsewhere in non-Appalachian America.

To the regular folks line, I often quote a statistic I first encountered via Ruy Teixeira: in 1940, non-college whites represented over 80 percent of American adults over age 25. Today they represent roughly 48 percent. To be sure, 48 percent isn’t a majority, but it is darn close. “Regular” implies the norm, what is most common. Note that when we talk about young people in elite media, we focus almost exclusively on the college-bound. Anya Kamenetz of Fast Company and Douglas McGray of New America have both talked about how narrow and misleading this prism can be. The same obtains for the overall population.

That is, Matthews is implying that college-educated whites — who dominate our culture, and our cultural “mindshare” — are not regular. So is this classist? Clearly not. Rather, it is a suggestion that we spend some amount of time thinking about another large and important group that happens to consist of 48 percent of American adults over 25.

Is Matthews implying that Asian Americans over 25, like myself, and African Americans and Latinos are “not regular”? In a manner of speaking, yes. He is implicitly suggesting that they are minorities, and as a result face unique challenges that are not identical to challenges faced my members of the majority. Which is incontrovertibly true. To be sure, these challenges aren’t separate and distinct in every case — many are the same, as we all share a broad economic environment.

But is this racist? Or mildly offensive? Clearly not. Is Media Matters, staffed by very bright people who do a lot of valuable work, being anything other than obtuse in this instance? I certainly think so.

I obviously have a bias here. I was on the segment, and I used to work for Matthews, who was a great boss. But I’m also biased because I am an American of South Asian Muslim origin and I have encountered some actual hostility and discrimination based on my background. This kind of charge trivializes that, and it trivializes experiences that have been far worse than mine.

by Peter Suderman

07/02/08

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Beyond Stereotypes

From a press release that just hit my inbox (emphases mine):

AMERICAN TEEN is the touching and hilarious Sundance hit that follows the lives of five teenagers – a jock, a popular girl, a heartthrob, the artsy girl and the geek – in one small town in Indiana through their senior year of high school. We see the insecurities, the cliques, the jealousies, the first loves and heartbreaks, and the struggle to make profound decisions about the future.

…The result is a film that goes beyond the enduring stereotypes of high school to render complex young people trying to find their way into adulthood.

No, no stereotypes here. Obviously not.

07/02/08

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The Media

Bookstores

The rest of this post is navel-gazing-y and skippable.

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07/02/08

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The Perils of Friending Strangers

Last year, I wrote a short article on my Facebook friending approach — my general rule of thumb is to avoid friending strangers, and to have some substantive exchange with would-be friends before accepting or making a request. But I recently relaxed my rule when some random person friended me because I had assumed I had met and forgotten him. We had many mutual friends. I sent a message to the effect of, “Hey, have we met?” And he referenced having seen a play I was in as a college sophomore. Fair enough. Substantive connection. Today, however, I found that he had insulted one of my good friends on my Facebook wall. Classy move. I deleted and defriended in that order. This is all pretty juvenile, I realize, but I was mildly enraged by this, as the friend in question is an unusually cool dude.

by Matt Feeney

07/02/08

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Some Douthat guy wrote something

Ross has a great response to the predictable critique of Grand New Party from what you might call the conservative mass media.

Look, Rush has a serious and principled point: Maybe conservatives shouldn’t try to reform the welfare state; maybe the lesson of the Bush years is that you just can’t achieve conservative ends within the framework that FDR and company built; maybe Reihan and I are just government-loving quislings. But like Daniel Larison, it seems to me that if Rush really believes this, he shouldn’t be wasting his time with the modern Reagan-Gingrich-Bush GOP at all – it’s just a pack of quislings from start to finish. There’s only one contemporary politician who would pass Limbaugh’s stringent purity test, and his name is Ronald Paul.

My only quibble is that I don’t think Limbaugh’s is a principled point. Not that I think Limbaugh is dissembling or the like. I just think that the small government trope in the hands of people like Limbaugh has almost nothing to do with principles of governing and everything to do with politics, which is to say, rhetoric. None of us, Limbaugh included, lives in a world in which small government is ever gonna happen. It just isn’t. Our government is either going to stay the same size, shrink by tiny degrees under concerted effort, or grow at varying speeds. So what does it mean to lash people for violating the principles of small government in such a world? It means setting yourself apart, preserving the space in which your ritualized anger makes some minimal sense, and it means stoking the utopian crankiness of a certain sort of devoted listener. But it makes minimal sense at best, because if Limbaugh were really principled about all this, as Ross suggests, he would go with Larison, go with Paul.

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by Peter Suderman

07/02/08

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Robotically Yours

David has already pointed out one potential note of contradiction in Wall·E. Let me suggest another. (Some spoilers involved.)

Pixar is a company devoted to breakthrough technology. Each of their films are technical and technological marvels as well as artistic accomplishments. They are showcases for the frontiers of CG innovation — and they are clearly designed as such. Moreover, the company’s films have consistently revolved around sentimental attachments to inessential consumer products: toys, cars, expensive meals. Additionally, Pixar specializes in loving, awe-struck portrayals of the intricacies of mechanization: Think of the baggage conveyor-belt chase in Toy Story, the gonzo Rube-Goldberg factory in Monsters, Inc., the whirring high-tech villain’s lair in The Incredibles, or pretty much any scene in Wall·E.

In nearly every scene in Wall·E, the studio’s creative wizards are clearly impressed by their own creations: the ship, the interlocking chains of choreographed, factory-like movement across its decks, the array of devices that sprout from its every nook and cranny, the armies of cleverly designed robots who scurry about. One subtext of all of these scenes is, more or less, “Gee whiz! That’s neat!”

And indeed it is.

Yet Wall·E is structured in large part as a warning about the perils of over-reliance on machines and technological conveniences.

It bears noting that both Wall·E and EVE are machines, machines which are explicitly products of humanity’s quest for comfort, convenience, and technology-assisted living. Yet these machines are shown to have more character, more life — indeed, more humanity — than any of the humans we see. And it is through the actions of these machines that the humans finally return to Earth and, presumably, regain their humanity.

Save for one overwritten speech by the ship’s captain, the theme, that technology becomes a hobbling crutch, is integrated seamlessly into the narrative, and it rings true, of course, because there is at least an element of truth to it. Yet it’s at least complicated by the fact that it’s being delivered by a team of professionals who’ve made their reputations on high-tech entertainments and are clearly personally enamored with the luxuries and wonders that can only technology can bring.

07/01/08

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The Perfect Food

The post below is about food and it might bore you to tears.

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by Noah Millman

07/01/08

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The Media

Q2 Re-mark

Time to take a look again at my year-end predictions. I revisited these once before, at the end of March. Another quarter has gone by since then, so let’s take another look.

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by Peter Suderman

07/01/08

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