I’ve decided I like Gail Collins a lot. She’s sarcastic, but she never quite looses her shit, which I’m afraid I would do if I had to write about the mind-blowing stupidity in Washington on a regular basis. (This is a big reason I am not – not – a columnist for the New York Times.) From her column this morning:
Now Shelby has upped the ante with a blanket hold on (all Obama administration nominations). His incredibly grave reasons were the desire to see that a defense contract for a new tanker is awarded to a bidder who will do the assembly work in Alabama. Also, he feels that a new F.B.I. facility for testing explosive devices should be conveniently located in Huntsville.
“If this administration were as worried about hunting down terrorists as it is about the confirmation of low-level political nominations, America would be a safer place,” said a spokesman for the senator.
Those two paragraphs nicely encapsulate the two prongs of Republicans’ incredibly confusing philosophy of governance, which are:
All government spending is bad, but some government spending is good.
I have two things to say about The Bonfire of the Vanities. First, it’s profoundly racist. Not that Tom Wolfe is racist, necessarily. I don’t know the guy. But there’s not a single sympathetic black character in a 700-page book full of black characters. If there’s a non-racist explanation for this, I’d like to hear it.
Second, who ever thought that this book’s description of the excesses of Wall Street would someday sound, well, quaint? I mean, Great Jove! Sherman makes one million dollars per year? That makes him… like… a millionaire! And try to imagine an I-banker worried about losing his job over one $6 million mistake. Are you kidding? That’s petty cash! HIGH FIVE BRO!!!
I guess I don’t regret reading The Bonfire of the Vanities as a part of my cultural education. It’s just that as a piece of culture, it hasn’t aged well.
And in that moment Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later. For the first time he realized that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps, love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. And now that boy, that good actor, had grown old and fragile and tired, wearier than ever at the thought of trying to hoist the Protector’s armor back onto his shoulders again, now, so far down the line.
The blacks who are enraged by “Precious” have probably figured out that this film wasn’t meant for them. It was the enthusiastic response from white audiences and critics that culminated in the film being nominated for six Oscars by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, an outfit whose 43 governors are all white and whose membership in terms of diversity is about 40 years behind Mississippi. In fact, the director, Lee Daniels, said that the honor would bring even more “middle-class white Americans” to his film.
I’ve been wondering for ever so long why movie studios always manage to release odd films with roughly the same premise at basically the same time. Two volcano movies, two asteroid-destroys-the-Earth movies, two Victorian illusionist movies, and now – now! – two guy-wandering-through-desolate-post-apocalyptic-wasteland movies. First, The Road:
What really attracted me to Obama during the campaign was common sense. He said he wasn’t an ideologue. He said there was stuff to do, and by golly, he was going to do that stuff, and get it done, and he would do so bipartisanly. It didn’t work out so well.
For the first year, I thought he was crazy. Principled, but crazy. It looked like he’d brought the proverbial knife to a gun fight, like he was playing chess on a rugby pitch, like he was quoting Shakespeare when all anyone really wanted was fart jokes.
If I were him, I would have dropped the gloves a long time ago and started nut-punching. The Republicans have been so incredibly destructive over the last few years that it almost seemed like a moral imperative to destroy them back. But now there’s this hour-long video of Obama wading into a meeting of Republican lawmakers, taking their questions, and absolutely devastating them the way only a former law professor can:
After watching this video, I’m starting to think that I underestimated Obama, severely. He wasn’t just mouthing talking points when he boosted bipartisanship in the campaign. The man was stone-cold serious. Bipartisanship really is his philosophy of governance, and (like it or not) he’s demonstrated that repeatedly by including Republican proposals in legislation passed by Democrats.
By fielding their questions clearly and firmly, Obama managed to reveal the Republicans for the nincompoop, hypocrite obstructionists that they really are, while at the same time inviting them to join him in moving the country forward. This was a display of not only incredible political savvy, but profound intellect. After watching this, I really think there’s a chance that Obama will turn out to be one of the great, historically-important presidents of the United States of America.
I also think Republicans will never, ever again let themselves be filmed asking Obama questions.
I’ve been thinking for some time now that the greatest hypocrisy of fiscal conservatives is coupling a fundamentalist opposition to new social spending with ferocious support for the American Military Welfare State. Glenn Greenwald has a great post on the topic. I found this graphic to be enlightening.
I just stumbled across The Faster Times, which bids itself as “A new type of newspaper for a new type of world.” It was launched in June of last year. I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, it’s always nice to see people starting new things. All media is moving onto the Internet sooner or later, and the sooner that process is complete, the sooner I might actually have some sort of career ahead of me.
On the other hand, is this really a new thing? Looking at the “About us” page, I see the same line-up of under-employed New York City freelancers one would probably rub elbows with at a Media Bistro party in Midtown. For some reason this gives me the creeps.
In other words, The Faster Times is basically a blog about, well, everything.
That’s OK, I guess. But it certainly isn’t as revolutionary as their manifesto on the “About us” page leads one to believe (manifestos pretty much always disappoint, don’t they?). Also, I continue to insist that in order to be successful in Internet media, you need a theme, or a motif. Dare I say a niche?
Slate is contrarian: “You thought it was this way? It’s actually the opposite!” BoingBoing is totally random, but they bring it together with short, easily-skimable posts and the slogan “A directory of wonderful things.” Gawker has an Economist-grade fanaticism about consistent editorial voice. TalkingPointsMemo has a very well-defined audience.
What’s The Faster Times’ motif? The New Newspaper? I’m not feeling it.
Here’s the problem with current standards in American politics: In order to think you’re competent enough to run for state-wide or national office, you kind of have to be an arrogant, overly-self-confident, extroverted prick. Which, if you think about it, almost exactly describes a womanizer.
There are therefore two ways to avoid losing an entire class of political Golden Boys to sex scandals:
Stop pretending that arrogant, overly-self-confident, extroverted pricks don’t cheat on their wives.
Start electing women for basically everything.
There is, of course, a third course of action, which is: Don’t do anything and just enjoy the goddamn shit out of the whole thing. Which is what I chose to do.
