Golden Fleecing

Art doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's a reaction--a commentary, an interpretation, a criticism--of the world we live in, and it can't help but be shaped by the material conditions of its creation. Most people know this, practically take it for granted. What gets less attention is how subsequent events shade our understanding and response. Argo was ostensibly intended as a taut and reasonably fun thriller that told the fascinating story of the Iranian hostage rescue mission that didn't fail; at most, its real-world resonance would be a modest rehabilitation of Jimmy Carter's reputation. Fate would have it the movie hit theaters barely a month after the September 11 attack on the American consulate in Libya that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens, the worst diplomatic disaster since, well, the Iranian Hostage Crisis. The timing can't help but color one's response.

Recent history gives Argo's opening scenes an especially visceral immediacy. Cutting archival footage of the 1979 storming of the American embassy with period perfect re-enactments, and depicting attempts within the embassy offices to deal with the rapidly escalating situation, the sequence has a terrific on-the-ground quality that starts the movie off with bang. By so vividly recreating the events of '79, it provides an uneasy vicarious experience of the Egyptian and Libyan missions of but a month ago. (I don't know if Warner Brothers ever considered delaying the movie's release out of "sensitivity" regarding the Libya attack, but since such moves are stupid and self-defeating, I'm quite glad they did not.)

After six American diplomats manage to escape and find asylum in the home of Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor (Victor Garber), the movie settles into what is essentially a heist flick mold. Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck), CIA rescue ops badass, is tapped by State Department mover and shaker Jack O'Donnell (Bryan Cranston) to figure out how to rescue the six Americans. He eventually settles on a plan, "the best bad option," to enter the country posing as a Hollywood producer scouting locations for a fake Hollywood science fiction movie, and to disguise the diplomats as his production crew and take them back with him. To do this he needs to create a believable dummy production--including script, concept art, and authentic trade magazine publicity--with the help of Planet of the Apes makeup man John Chambers (John Goodman) and producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin). Which is hard enough before having to actually go to Tehran and get the Americans out before the sweatshop workers piecing together their shredded embassy photos can alert the Revolutionary Guards that there are Americans hiding in Tehran.

The plot pretty much takes care of itself, explaining the steps to be followed and then upping the ante with a raft of complications along the way. It's solid stuff, and the script and actors deftly balance the grave seriousness of the problem with the absurdity of the solution at hand. The good humor of Arkin and Goodman (who at one point tells Affleck, who directed this movie, that you "can train a rhesus monkey to direct in a day") dominates the Hollywood-heavy first half, somewhat to the detriment of the back end. As they can only sit around and wait to be rescued, the American hideaways are only given the barest of character development, and so it falls mostly on Affleck to carry the picture once it moves to Iran. He does good work as the smartest man in the room, steely and unflappable except for a concern about having to be away from his family that is exactly as perfunctory as it needs to be. Still, it would have been nice to get to know the trapped Americans better in order to contrast them with the roles they are forced to adopt for their survival.

Without getting into too much detail, the movie's third act goes perhaps too far in the use of creative license. The action got to be enough that it took me out of the film, and I started to wonder how much of this was true. It's not a fair complaint--there really was a lot that was fictionalized, to the movie's benefit--and William Goldenberg's editing does wonders tying together three plot threads that moment-by-moment push the tension ever higher. But the movie does start to feel (ironically?) a little too Hollywoody, whereas everything that came before was believable and restrained.

Maybe it's just recent events, the "too soon" factor, that make me fault the movie for its drift into fancy. If so, it works more than one-way. For not only does the September 11 consulate attack shape the way one approaches Argo, but Argo shapes the way one looks at the consulate attacks. It isn't much of a spoiler to say that the operation is successful but the U.S. government must publicly give all credit to the Canadians because the embassy hostages would otherwise face brutal reprisal. The movie ends here, but in the real world history marched on: those hostages and the failed attempt to free them, for whose sake the government buried the story of its most spectacular rescue mission, helped destroy Jimmy Carter's presidency, and it was not until he left office that they were freed.

Too often secrecy is invoked by our government today as a means of covering up information that would embarrass it. Argo presents an all-too-rare instance of secrecy that did precisely the opposite, that downplayed success for the greater good until 1997, when the mission was declassified. If there's a takeaway from the timing of the movie's release, it's that there is often more going on in international relations than we realize. Unknown unknowns, and all that. Moreover, the people who are involved in these hot spots, do realize what's going on. Or, at least, they know the risks. As an end-of-movie caption inform us, all of the rescued diplomats, in spite of their harrowing experience, returned to the foreign service. One imagines Ambassador Chris Stevens would have done the same.

The Summer Movie as Democrat Election Parable

The Avengers is a great summer movie. I don't need to elaborate on why, for if you are reading this you likely have already seen it and either do not need or do not want convincing. A.O. Scott, however, even when praising the film for its entertainment value, is queasy about the cold corporate calculation of it all.

“I’m always angry,” [Bruce Banner] says at one point, and while “The Avengers” is hardly worth raging about, its failures are significant and dispiriting. The light, amusing bits cannot overcome the grinding, hectic emptiness, the bloated cynicism that is less a shortcoming of this particular film than a feature of the genre. Mr. Whedon’s playful, democratic pop sensibility is no match for the glowering authoritarianism that now defines Hollywood’s comic-book universe. Some of the rebel spirit of Mr. Whedon’s early projects “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Firefly” and “Serenity” creeps in around the edges but as detail and decoration rather than as the animating ethos. 

“I aim to misbehave,” Malcolm Reynolds famously said in “Serenity.” But for all their maverick swagger, the Avengers are dutiful corporate citizens, serving a conveniently vague set of principles. Are they serving private interests, big government, their own vanity, or what? It hardly matters, because the true guiding spirit of their movie is Loki, who promises to set the human race free from freedom and who can be counted on for a big show wherever he goes. In Germany he compels a crowd to kneel before him in mute, terrified awe, and “The Avengers,” which recently opened there to huge box office returns, expects a similarly submissive audience here at home. The price of entertainment is obedience.

The corporatism goes deeper than cinematic aesthetics. Marvel Comics quite infamously screwed Jack Kirby from receiving proper compensation for co-creating the Avengers and dozens of other iconic characters that Marvel simply would not today exist without. They imposed limits on his rights to his own artwork and have made billions of dollars off his creations. In the months leading up to The Avengers' release there was talk of a boycott on these grounds. The number of people were enlisted to the cause is moot, however, in the face of a $200 million opening weekend that has unstoppably grown the movie Hulk-like into a billion dollar baby.

In a way this reminds me of liberals' moral dilemma when it comes to the question of re-electing Barack Obama. Politically speaking, Obama is The Avengers to liberals: hip, energetic, pushing all the right buttons. He stanched the bleeding of an economy in freefall, saved Detroit, passed Health Care Reform and financial regulation, repealed Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and is the first president to come out in support of gay marriage. He saved the day and looked cool and smart doing it.

Yet his presidency is littered too with illiberal policies that, were they done by a Republican, would have liberals howling: "extrajudicial killings, violating the War Powers Resolution, waging war without Congressional approval, violating the Geneva Conventions, whitewashing torture, warring on whistleblowers," to name a few. The liberal wish list is being dutifully checked, while fundamental issues of the rule of law have been left to atrophy or, worse, have been outright attacked. Like The Avengers, the slick surface sheen obscures a fundamental emptiness.

Tim Brayton, in a positive if weary review, referred to the Marvel mashup as "Transformers: Dark of the Moon for literate people who enjoy wit." Implicit in the complaint is a reluctant defense: "Have you seen the alternative?" With yesterday's release of Battleship, which grafts an alien invasion plot onto the mechanics of a Milton Bradley guessing game, we get a stark view of just how much worse it can be.

So Avengers, so Obama, whose opponent is a man described by his own underling as an Etch-a-Sketch in what was supposed to be a compliment, who once promised to "double Guantanamo," wants to start a war with Iran, and can barely even be bothered with pretending to care about the law. Unlike movies, elections are zero-sum competitions. One of these two will come out victorious, and anyone who votes for a third-party candidate or abstains out of protest would do well to keep that in mind.

The problem remains that the better of the viable options are still far from ideal. The Avengers is ultimately insubstantial, as is Obama's approach to the law. But these choices don't present themselves out of the blue. They are both, in fact, animated by the same thing that drives their vastly inferior competition: corporate cash and popular sentiment. Like the Jack Kirby case, Obama's legacy is handicapped by monied interests. The health care and financial regulation bills both conceded numerous demands in the interest of receiving industry cooperation. When industry sets the terms of regulation, the word has lost all meaning (that the Wall Street-backed Republicans tried to attack the legislation as a giveaway to the financial industry merely demonstrates, again, the debased nature of the choices we have).

A deeper problem still is in fact the feature of democracy, the wisdom of the crowd. Obama is one of our canniest politicians, such that even a humane gesture like supporting gay marriage is calibrated toward pacifying constituencies, garnering votes and donations. That's just the nature of running for office. Yet where is the civil liberties constituency? I'm not even speaking of liberals, but of the broader electorate that any candidate must court in order to win. Will they favor their franchise toward appeals for due process, executive transparency, and an unwinding of the security state--or promises of jobs and protection from whoever may or may not be trying to take away their influential minority's rights? Whether it's Jack Kirby or Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the American public has far less interest in upholding fairness and justice than in self-gratification, particularly when life is so dire already.

Obama was once promised to be transformative. That just as well describes Mitt Romney, both for his ideological shape-shifting, and his policies, which have their cinematic analogue in the  empty-headed mayhem of the Transformers movies. Obama and The Avengers are both compromised, but as a product of the broken systems in which they operate. For all the valid criticisms of them that do exist, one must ever ponder the alternative. Revenge of the Fallen was by all accounts a terrible movie; we don't need to watch it again.

Racism Isn't Just Acting Like John Derbyshire

This Thursday past, longtime National Review contributor John "Derb" Derbyshire published a column about how black people are stupid and dangerous and should be avoided except for, maybe, the smart ones. This wasn't on the National Review's website, but elsewhere, Taki's Magazine, which bills itself as "Cocktails, Countesses, and Mental Caviar." Here are some of those intellectual fish eggs on which to feast. Note that this is a sub-list of item ten of how to interact with black people:

(10a) Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.

(10b) Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.

(10c) If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date (neglect of that one got me the closest I have ever gotten to death by gunshot).

(10d) Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.

(10e) If you are at some public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.

(10f) Do not settle in a district or municipality run by black politicians.

(10g) Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.

(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.

(10i) If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.

After at first only tut-tutting the article, National Review editor Rich Lowry gave Derbyshire the boot. The reasons for doing so should by now be obvious, but it's worth reprinting the official explanation of their ways-parting:

Anyone who has read Derb in our pages knows he’s a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer. I direct anyone who doubts his talents to his delightful first novel, “Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream,” or any one of his “Straggler” columns in the books section of NR. Derb is also maddening, outrageous, cranky, and provocative. His latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation. It’s a free country, and Derb can write whatever he wants, wherever he wants. Just not in the pages of NR or NRO, or as someone associated with NR any longer.

The first thing that should be noted is that the nature of the column in question is not new. The Atlantic Wire has a good roundup of Derbyshire's long history of proud racism, but suffice it to say it's hard to imagine anyone else having a career as a opinion writer in a mainstream magazine after telling the University of Pennsylvania's Black Law Student Association, in person, that as African descendants they should collectively resign themselves to being dumber than whites. John Derbyshire often comes off as a terrible human being, but he is compellingly terrible, and both refreshingly and alarmingly upfront about his white supremacy.

So really, this whole fracas is just "Derb being Derb." And that's part of the problem, for "Derb" has some qualities, if not redeeming (there's no redeeming the unrepentant), then that at least help explain why he lasted as long as he did. His cranky pessimism (his most recent book was titled We Are Doomed) led him to butt heads with his erstwhile National Review colleagues ever so often, on issues like George W. Bush, creationism, and Terri Schiavo. This was amusing, if nothing else, but it also made him idiosyncratic and not at all a mere conservative apparatchik. He also has a way with words and on occasion put them to good use, such as his account of how he ended up playing an uncredited thug in a Bruce Lee movie.

Derbyshire's mixture of qualities both compelling and repelling, then, tends to trip up even (especially!) folks who we would like to think would know better about this sort of thing, but hate to see someone with otherwise admirable qualities as so morally deficient. I myself will admit to not saying anything when certain acquaintances have made ugly, racist remarks, for risk of jeopardizing the relationship. If we are to grant President Obama's understanding for his white grandmother, who feared black men passing her on the street, we can on some level feel that Lowry and company being slow to action regarding Derbyshire (whose bigotry is much, much worse) is understandable, if not acceptable.

The sad fact is most people don't grapple with these issues enough to have an informed opinion. To the casual observer, racism is a skinheaded, swastika-tattooed Edward Norton curb-stomping a black guy--not some crusty old Englishman who writes for a magazine the average American has never heard of. Thus the depressing number of people--if the comments on some of these pages are any indication--who echo Derbyshire's sentiments and claim they aren't being racist (though, notably, Derbyshire has before admitted his racism straight up). I don't wish to defend such ideas, but I do think it important see where the people who espouse them are coming from, that they may just possibly be corrected.

Regarding National Review, it's perhaps uncharitable to say Derbyshire got fired for being too obviously racist, but Lowry's statement that "Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise," even though Derbyshire said plenty of other nasty things under the National Review banner, suggests he was fired because of the shitstorm he brought to their doorstep rather than their understanding of why the shit was storming. It's not only Derbyshire's ridiculously offensive prescriptions that are the problem. They are the symptoms of the disease: a rotten dehumanization and objectification that is palpable in the very words he employs.

Consider the "intelligent and well-socialized blacks," which Derbyshire finds so remarkable as to require a category unto themselves. He encourages his hypothetical children to befriend these "IWSBs," because these ostensible friends are an "amulet" to guard against charges of racism, like a crucifix to ward away the devil. ISWBs are furthermore, "something of a luxury good, like antique furniture or corporate jets: boasted of by upper-class whites and wealthy organizations, coveted by the less prosperous." Black people were once literally white people's property, and today John Derbyshire argues they are at best a commodity good.

That black people aren't really even people to him, just "blacks," just objects and things that are without agency or feelings or lives outside of a general incompetence and hostility to whites, is inherent in the very premise of the article. The piece is a tongue-in-cheek response to "The Talk" that black parents give their (male) children about interacting with trigger-happy and negligent law enforcement and the culture at large. This is a horrific and persistent issue, with the Sanford Police Department's botched handling of the death of Trayvon Martin (and Geraldo Rivera's subsequent declaration that Martin brought it on himself for wearing a hoodie) being only its latest and most visible iteration. Derbyshire's response is to treat the death of innocent youth as a joke and write a "Nonblack Version" of The Talk that proves its point by getting the issue precisely backward; in response to a talk about how to maneuver in a world of prejudice, we have a "talk" on how to perpetuate prejudice.

This mindset, viewing vast swaths of people as cultural grindstones and other mere tools, goes beyond this single episode. Recently leaked documents from the National Organization for Marriage revealed a strategy to court conservative blacks and Latinos--the latter of which must have their assimilation into the culture interrupted for fear of losing their conservatism--purely as a means of attacking gays. Nor is this at all restricted to conservatives. Bill Maher's recent declaration that he can't be a racist because he gave a million dollars to Barack Obama (as a follow-up to an Alexandra Pelosi video that 'documented' dumb, poor, liberal New York City blacks in response to criticisms of her footage of dumb, poor, conservative Mississippi whites), displays a similar reductiveness.

The whole episode, and the Martin case more broadly, is a depressing reminder of our discourse's gross immaturity. Racism is not demonology. It is, at heart, like a great many problems, a failure of empathy. To miss this crucial point and focus on the obviously outrageous is, pardon the term, so much thinking in black-and-white.

Contraception Contradictions

The ongoing spat between the Obama administration and Republicans over whether (the insurance companies providing) Catholic Church-run organizations' health insurance plans should pay for contraception is largely partisan--it's really only because Obama is pushing it that Republicans are going to the mat to fight access birth control (I also can't help but wonder if Democrats would have let it slide if Obama had quietly taken the Church's side). But outside of the Washington snake pit there are people who sincerely believe the Republican argument--perhaps it's more correct to say the Republicans take their side insincerely--so it's worth unpacking what's really being argued here. At heart this is another proxy battle in the conflict between liberal and conservative views of liberty.

In an absolute sense, having the requiring Catholic organizations to provide services the Church finds morally abhorrent is an infingement on their right. As a private religious organization they should, in theory, be free to provide or withhold services to whomever they want without interference. No citizen or group wants "the government" to dictate what they should be doing.

But this kind of situation does not occur in a vacuum. For one thing, and this must needs be stressed, contraception is a settled issue for the majority of Americans, and Catholics. The only people really bothered by it are evangelical Christians and Catholic clergy, comprised 100% of "celibate" men. As has been pointed out already, if the religious organization in question were enforcing Sharia law or excluding black people from coverage, many would be singing a different tune.

Yet this is not merely a popularity contest; there is actually a principled reason for overriding this "absolute" liberty that is just as much concerned with freedom. The libertarian perspective is generally, 'keep the (federal) government out, and let whatever happens happen, because private actors should be free to do what they want.' But the federal government is not the only powerful actor at work here. State and local governments, corporations, and organizations like the Catholic Church, wield huge influence over our lives. The example of "excluding black people" isn't a hypothetical; it was the reality in huge swaths of this country up until the 1960s, and it took federal legislation to end it, legislation which Congress's most visible libertarians, the Pauls Ron and Rand, have infamously criticized for its federal intrusion in the private sphere. When it comes to the contraception issue, the Catholic Church owns around 12% of hospitals in the United States, and is acquiring more all the time. If we are going to allow giants, they need to be mindful of who their out-sized feet are stepping on.

It all comes down to first principles. If you start with the premise that an active government is a bad thing by definition, then even if you believe in a woman's access to contraception, or the equality of black people, the fact that those rights are denied in huge parts of the country by private or local actors is regrettable but ultimately acceptable. If your "highest value" (to use and subvert a little Randian terminology) is actual liberty for as many people as possible, then you care about the size of government only insofar as it protects the rights of others, from others.

I think the conservative/libertarian critique of over-sized government has its place, especially in regards our current deficit situation. And using the government to restrict the rights of one group to ensure the rights of another is in its way messy and contradictory. But such is life. If you care about personal liberty, then you need to care if your system of ethics and the policies it implies are actually making people more free. From a personal liberty standpoint, it doesn't make any sense for a handful of people who will never have to worry about birth control yet can still find reason to be incensed with Griswold, to dictate to 50% of their employees what to do with their bodies. A ≠ B.

Rick Perry Apologizes For Bernanke Remarks

Nashua, NH--Texas Governor Rick Perry apologized Wednesday for comments that implicitly threatened Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, saying they were not violent enough.

At a Tuesday campaign stop in Iowa, Perry had described the possibility of the Fed printing more money before the 2012 presidential election as “treason,” and that “I dunno what y’all would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas.” Critics pounced on what they said was an implicit call for violence against a public servant. In a follow-up speech, Perry apologized for the vagueness of his comments.

“I understand my responsibilities as a candidate for President of the United States of America,” Perry said, “and I am sorry that I fell short of the ideal of a bloodthirsty, hyper-masculine ultra man.”

He elaborated: “I should have clarified what I meant by ‘pretty ugly down in Texas.’ I mean, Ben Bernanke hasn’t killed anyone and he’s not retarded, not completely anyway, so we can’t execute him—at least not without botching an investigation first. You might have also thought that for committing treason we might elect him governor, but no dice.”

“So to level with y’all, what I meant is that we would strip Bernanke to his skivvies, chain him to a pickup truck—not my pickup, not necessarily—and drag him through the town square, where he would be branded, hung, and burned to death. Like in the good old days!”

Observers seemed mostly satisfied with the apology, though some still pressed Perry for specifics.

“It’s not enough to say he would just hang and burn the Fed chairman,” said supporter Fred Wallace. “We need to know what he would do while carrying this out. Would he sodomize him with farm implements? Spit on him while yelling ethnic slurs? I don’t know that I can support a candidate whose policy positions are so simplistic.”

Perry is set to continue his tour of New Hampshire, where he will meet supporters, shake hands and kick babies.

Fancy Boy

A number of pieces I wrote for the Washington Fancy before their launch, went online today. There's too many to take the time to cross-post them all, so one can either go to my author directory to peruse them all, or click any of the links below:

Anthony Weiner, Tired of Crude Jokes, Changes Name to Ned

DC Under Siege by Roving Segway Gangs

Bachmann Presidential Run Shocks, Shocks Nation

Mitt Romney Literally Melts Down at Campaign Stop

California's Proposition 8 to be Tried by Golden Retriever

They Don't Want a Stimulus Package

According to Ezra Klein, bipartisanship, like sex, is a matter of consent:

But after writing this morning’s post on the Republican report that recommended the exact deficit-reduction package that the Republican leadership ultimately walked out on, I realized that even that definition of “bipartisan” doesn’t quite get it right. Rather, a “bipartisan” bill is a bill that the opposing party treats as bipartisan, while a partisan bill is a bill that the opposing party treats as partisan. That puts the agency where it belongs: on the minority party. The idea that the president can “be bipartisan” is dead wrong. He can be partisan, designing bills that the opposing party would never want to vote for, but he can’t be bipartisan unless the opposing party lets him. And knowing that any reputation he gets for bipartisanship will be used in his reelection campaign, why would they do that?

Which makes the current incarnation of the Republican party some kind of cockteasing abstinence dominatrix.

Armageddon Strikes New York With Legalization of Gay Marriage

NEW YORK—As retribution for the New York state legislature’s legalization of same-sex marriage, New York City Friday night experienced cataclysm and biblical tribulation that left almost no survivors.

A tense vote on a contested gay marriage bill resulted in a 33-29 victory for same-sex marriage proponents. Upon the bill’s passage New York City—whose destruction many have remarked would be more iconic than that of dull and unremarkable capitol Albany—descended first into a city-wide orgy of state-sanctioned hedonism, and then into an apocalyptic inferno as fire and brimstone rained from the sky.

Such an outcome was predictable, says Focus on the Family president Tony Perkins. “We have been sounding the alarm on this for years,” he explains. “Homosexuals have been trying to destroy traditional marriage by shoving this new definition of marriage down our throats like some giant, irresistible penis. Now they have to swallow the biggest, most irresistible penis of all: God’s.”

President Obama, by contrast, prefaced his remarks with condolences for the dead. “Our hearts go out to the industrious and vibrant people of New York City,” he said. Though later on in his speech he veered to a testy defense of his own qualified gay rights stance. “I hope now you see why I don’t like to deal with these issues.”

The tumult began with the casting of the final ‘ay,’ vote, during which heterosexuals throughout the city, now suddenly compelled to leave their spouses for people of the same gender, were gripped with euphoria.

“gagas not so bad after all” read the cryptic final tweet of one BroFo2099.

A sea of humanity thereafter gathered around the Stonewall Inn to celebrate the consummation of the gay agenda with racy smiles and jubilance. Though preliminary reports described the crowd as chanting “USA,” they were in fact yelling “Ooh, it’s a-aaaaaiiiieeee!” crying out as temperatures suddenly rose, a whiff of sulfur wafted through Christopher Street, and fireballs rained down from the sky.

Details beyond the beginning of the carnage remain sketchy and contradictory. Some witnesses, sending frantic tweets and text messages from their phones, described a ghoulish figure riding a pale horse across the Brooklyn Bridge as the Angel of Death, though others insist it was merely a resourceful hipster from Williamsburg. Others spoke of giant monsters and alien space ships. What is uncontested however, is the enormity of the destruction: Manhattan’s skyscrapers leveled, the outer boroughs aflame, and millions dead.

The only known survivor was Rubén Díaz Sr., a member of the New York state legislature and the only Democratic senator to cast a ‘no’ vote, for which he says he was spared. Díaz returned to New York after the vote to get his wife, Leslie Díaz, out to safety. He would have succeeded had she not looked back at the burning city to capture some video on her iPhone and turned into a pillar of salt.

Many in the disaster’s aftermath looked to God for answers. However, when asked how He could justify the leveling of a great American city, the Lord was reticent and would only answer, “Because.”

New York’s Pride March went on the Sunday after as planned despite the destruction, and was described by patrons and planners as “even more flaming than usual.”

[Cross-posted from The Washington Fancy]

Obama Abandons Principals, at School Picnic

ANNAPOLIS, MD— President Barack Obama abruptly left a Department of Education picnic on Saturday, and in the process deserted some of the country’s most cherished principals.

The event, held at Annapolis High School, was organized as a means of celebrating American learning and wisdom and the people who help to cultivate it. After meeting with the nation’s standout students, parents, and teachers, Obama was in the middle of talking with a group of principals when his Blackberry alarm sounded.

“Oh damn,” he muttered, and then turned to the people assembled around him. “You know, I’ve got a lot to do—running the country, dealing with Republicans, you know—and I’ve got a singing lesson in twenty minutes.” He then began to quickly walk back to the presidential limousine while warming up with The Sound of Music’s “Do Re Mi,” to the bewilderment of those he had just left behind.

“I don’t understand,” said Lawson Goode, of New York City’s St. Francis Elementary School. “During his campaign he talked constantly about building up this country’s principals, but then ditches us when we become an inconvenience.”

The walk-off was not the first such incident. Obama began his term with a vow to restore the principals held in detention by rogue students of the school district established on Guantanamo Bay, yet the district itself remains under the jurisdiction of vice administrators. Tensions heightened earlier this month when he suspended one principal, Prudence Libby of Denver’s Rocky Mountain High, over inclusion of the War Powers Act in her school’s civics curriculum.

The reaction to Friday’s incident split along party lines, with Democrats largely applauding the President for his pragmatism. Said Vice President Joe Biden, “It’s unfortunate the way it played out, but being President comes with the responsibility of making tough decisions, and I think siding with song and dance over principals was the right call.” He went on to add, “Barack does an extraordinary rendition of “America, the Beautiful.” Members of the President’s liberal base voiced their displeasure, but were told to raise their hands if they wanted to be called on to speak.

Republicans meanwhile castigated the President for not doing away with principals altogether. “These are people who have no problems restricting Americans’ freedoms with arbitrary rules, such as ‘no running in the hallway,’ and ‘4th graders eat at 11:10, 5th graders at 11:15,’ for completely inexplicable reasons,” said former Bush advisor Karl Rove. “I really want to know, can we trust the judgment of someone so deferential to abstract principals?”

The President later apologized to the offended parties by way of an autographed “Yes We Can” poster.

[Cross-posted from The Washington Fancy]

Mindjob

William Saletan explores whether Anthony Weiner's dick pics qualify as cheating:

In the annals of lust and sin, Weiner is just another straying husband. But in the unfolding story of information technology, he's a milestone worth thinking about. The trajectory of political sex scandals—Clinton, Mark Foley, Kwame Kilpatrick, Mark Sanford, and now Weiner—has taken us from phone sex to chat rooms to sexting to email to Facebook and Twitter. We're finding new realms in which to wander, meet people, and flirt. You can call these adventures whatever you want to. But we all know what they are. They're relationships.

X-Men reached this conclusion nearly a decade ago. During Grant Morrison's New X-Men run, Cyclops, Scott Summers, found himself attracted to telepathic Emma Frost, and they began a tryst, but telepathically; no physical contact was ever involved. This would pass Weiner's test, not that that made much of a difference to Jean Grey:

With Liberty, Injustice For All

In the politics of the Paul family, like son, like father:

Just about a year after his son Rand Paul stepped in it when he told Rachel Maddow he was opposed to provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) told Chris Matthews Friday he wouldn't have voted for the law in the first place had he been in Congress at the time....

"Yeah," he told Matthews when asked if he would have voted against the act in Congress. "But I wouldn't vote against getting rid of the Jim Crow laws."

Ron, like his son, said that his statement about the Civil Rights Act has nothing to do with the law's intentions -- i.e. ending institutionalized discrimination in a wide swath of American life, including in the public accommodations where African Americans were denied service at the height of the Jim Crow era. Paul said he would vote against the law because it imposed unfair rules on what private business owners can and can't do on their own property. Essentially, they should be free to discriminate if they wish, Paul says, however distasteful that may be.

Ron Paul has a notoriously troubled history with race, yet we can, even if only for the sake of argument, disregard this. His ostensible anti-racism fails on its own terms.

Put simply, Paul believes racial equality is a good thing but would have voted against legislation that would have furthered it, because it violated his absolutist stance on individual freedom: that business owners should have the right to make whatever disagreeable policies they like. In a maddening way it's an admirable, principled position, of the same conviction as his anti-war stance that makes Paul such an outlier in the Republican party and made him an occasionally appealing figure for liberals in the bad old days of George W. Bush.

But results matter. The rottenness of the status quo which a defeat of the Civil Right Act would have maintained is self-evident, even to Paul. Yet he would have preferred that an enormous segment of the population continue to be treated as second-class citizens, rather than that the powerful class keeping them down should be stripped of that particular "liberty."

The whiteness of the beneficiaries of Paul's position may be incidental to his overarching worldview, but it is very real, and no amount of freedom-talk changes that. The problem isn't that Ron Paul's a racist, it's that he would have voted in the name of freedom against a law aimed at abolishing second-class citizenship for blacks.

Fictitious Times

In thinking about the Osama bin Laden hit my mind keeps coming back to fiction. There was much of it to go around during those heady hours following the initial announcement: fictitious firefights, fictitious human shields, even fictitious Martin Luther King and Mark Twain quotes that spread among social networks and blogs in response to the news of bin Laden's death. Twain's adage about a lie getting halfway around the world before the truth has put its shoes on would be fitting, were it not similarly undocumented.

These words and ideas spread and were spread, of course, because they sounded so good and so right. It brought to mind a decidedly different fiction, an old episode of The Simpsons, "Lisa the Iconoclast." Lisa learns that Jebediah Springfield, the venerated founder of Lisa's hometown, was really a murderous pirate. She ends up keeping the bombshell secret to herself, concluding that Springfield's myth brought out the best in people, which was sufficient for keeping it alive.

This sounds nice--so good and so right--but as the cases of Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman have shown us, looking away from inconvenient truths involves actively duping people, including grieving families, and often in service of less than noble causes (namely, ass-covering). We re-learned this lesson just a few weeks ago, when it was revealed Greg "Three Cups of Tea" Mortenson's Pakistani school-building philanthropy was really a poorly-implemented cover for his own enrichment. If we care not just about feeling good about ourselves but about the state of things in the real world, then knowing the truth and grappling with its implications is imperative.

Osama bin Laden is dead and no longer a threat. That much we can celebrate. But what if he didn't go down in a firefight? What if he was in fact captured, in our protective custody, and then executed in front of his daughter? What kind of legal precedent does this set?

There is another, fact-based, fiction I've pondered regarding this matter, Steven Spielberg's Munich. Its broader concern with the War on Terror was evident when it came out in 2005, and to my mind the questions it asks are even more pertinent now that bin Laden is gone. Now that we've taken out the 9/11 mastermind, where do we go? How far down the chain of command are we going to be knocking off Al Qaeda leadership, including an American citizen?



I argued before that revenge and justice are one in the same, and that avenging 9/11 was justified and defensible. I still believe that. However, an eye for an eye system of justice only works when both sides are willing to, eventually, call it even. As the endless grind of the Israel-Palestine issue shows, however, reprisal can all to easily take on a life of its own. And so I fixate on Munich's closing, warning, words:

There's no peace at the end of this, no matter what you believe.

The real Munich avenger never said that, never had such doubts. But it sounds so good to imagine he did.

A Dish Best Served Cold

Time will tell if the death of Osama Bin Laden will have any decisive impact on what used to be known as the War on Terror. For now, however, his death should be enjoyed as a greatness unto itself. This is an admittedly morbid stance, and whether we should celebrate the bloody end of the September 11th mastermind in the same manner as the Palestinians who celebrated September 11th, is a fair question. I propose that it is so, for this is in fact the most satisfying revenge for September 11th we could have hoped for.

First some words about a word: by revenge I do not mean going ballistic and inflicting disproportionate violence in retaliation. This kind of thinking has long warped our sensibilities on acceptable treatment of prisoners and where we ought to be going to war. What I speak of is the kind of revenge described in William Ian Miller's Eye for an Eye, a prescription of precision: you take my eye, I take yours, and we're even. Obviously this is not so easily applied when it comes to one person plotting the deaths of thousands, but it gives us something to shoot for: fitting the punishment to the crime. I'm generally skeptical of the death penalty, but in Bin Laden's case incapacitation and probable execution were practically a moral necessity, committed as he was to continuing to carry out terror attacks. The manner in which he died I consider to be the best and most fitting we could ask for.

Let us not forget that less than a year ago, whether Bin Laden was still alive was an open question. It would have been ever so depressing to learn, years after the fact, that the murdering bastard had expired of natural causes or failure of his dialysis machine or something equally mundane. For the U.S. to have unknowingly killed him, along with what would probably have been several innocents, in some bombing run would also have robbed the act of justice and reduced it to something approaching a Four Lions gag.

Capture of course was the ideal. It would have had the same effect as his being killed in action, and the news of it would have been greeted in much the same way. This is part of why I find the rowdy scenes outside the White House and Ground Zero are appropriate. The crowds are not celebrating a person's death so much as a madman's (in this case final) defeat: Osama Bin Laden will never plan another terrorist attack. His capture, in a perfect world, would have been followed by a trial, and then either shipment to a Supermax prison where we'd never hear from him again, or execution, and in the meantime we could extract valuable information on other terror plots, sleeper cells, key figures. In doing all this we could have proved to Bin Laden, to the world, and (most importantly) to ourselves, that our values and our methods of justice work.

But it would have never panned out that way. The abortive attempts to try Khalid Sheik Mohammad in New York, to close Guantanamo, to prosecute the enablers and architects of the Bush Administration torture policy, provide a glimpse of the ugly sideshow that would have followed the capture of Bin Laden. The initial jubilation would have given way to calls for waterboarding, to the embarrassment of a military commission, and perhaps to a bloodthirsty execution not unlike Saddam Hussein's.

What happened instead: a surgical strike in which no U.S. forces were harmed; in which neither sadism nor undue compassion had any time to manifest themselves; in which the great Islamic holy warrior was reduced to using one of his wives as a human shield; and in which we learned the cave he ostensibly dwelled in was in fact a swinging palatial man-cave.

Given the lousy alternatives and the ugly realities of U.S. politics, I fail to see a better revenge for September 11th, than two bullets in Osama Bin Laden's head, his endangered species hair shirt atatter, and his body at the bottom of the Arabian Sea.

For the Record

There are a lot of things wrong with U.S. policy regarding Islamic terrorism, but the death of Osama bin Laden is not one of them. That is all.

So Much For Civility

This whole Birther episode has been infuriating enough on its own, but Fallows' guarded optimism at the end of his follow-up to his initial angry post--"Perhaps the media types who have been paying attention to Trump and his braying will stop to think about what they've actually been doing. Conceivably there will be a moment of recoil about the unworthy, irrational indignity of this stage of national life."--recalls a similar silver lining moment from only a few months ago:

And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy -- it did not -- but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud.

We should be civil because we want to live up to the example of public servants like John Roll and Gabby Giffords, who knew first and foremost that we are all Americans, and that we can question each other's ideas without questioning each other's love of country, and that our task, working together, is to constantly widen the circle of our concern so that we bequeath the American dream to future generations.

They believe -- they believe and I believe that we can be better. Those who died here, those who saved lives here, they help me believe. We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another, that's entirely up to us.

Not six months after asking the nation for more civility in our politics, the President of the United States submitted to the indignity of proving his citizenship to a blow-dried hairpiece and his legion of wild-eyed spittle-flecked followers. Words really do fail to capture one's outrage and disgust at this sordid episode:

Birtherism is the Streak in America's Underwear

Like many others, I like seeing Jim Fallows get righteously angry:

This alone disproves Donald Trump's crock-of-shit* insulting and preposterous assertions that Obama was an affirmative action or charity admittee to the Ivy Leagues who couldn't really cut it on his own IQ or test scores, as if there weren't already evidence enough: It is his use at time 0:50 of the word "bemusement" in its proper sense (puzzlement, confusion) rather than what most people think it means (mild amusement). I would like to have someone ask Trump what he thinks the word means. Maybe some variant on "easement"? [* Update: OK, it's a sign of defeat to resort to profanity. My exasperation is a sign of how I feel about this line of slurs. First, whatever is wrong with Obama, no sane person thinks he's stupid. Second, I wonder how many people think Donald Trump is in a position to judge Obama's smarts. Third, there is no avoiding the racist connotation of saying that a successful black person got there -- wink wink -- through special treatment. "Of course the black guy ended up as editor of the Law Review. What do you expect?" So I should just have said that rather than "crock of shit." On the other hand, a crock of shit is what this is.]

TNC thinks "the cursing was quite appropriate." I agree, and think it important to unpack why.

Let's examine the phrase, "crock of shit." A crock, according to the handy Dictionary.com, is in its literal meaning an earthenware pot, a holding unit. Sometimes it is a broken earthenware pot. Its slang definition--as in, 'what a crock'--is 'nonsense.' Nonsense isn't necessarily good, but it isn't necessarily harmful either. It's just kind of there, like the tall tales young boys tell their smiling, incredulous mothers.

Then we have the qualifier, "of shit." Shit, and its descendant "bullshit," needs little explanation, but again, I think it important to look at the literal definition. Shit is crap is feces: the byproduct of a vital element of survival, food, from which anything healthy or useful* has been extracted.

In this case, a loyal opposition is necessary to a functioning polity; the Affirmative Action charge, Birtherism, and all of these absurd and frankly racist attacks on Obama's legitimacy, however, are not loyal in any sense. It's contrarianism conducted under bad faith, and asserting the other side's illegitimacy to boot, and on grounds so frail the slightest nudge of evidence explodes the argument like a breeze on a dandelion gone to seed. (And, also like a dandelion, Birtherism has continued to come back only to be refuted [refudiated?] again and again. But I'm mixing metaphors. To shit, then. Birtherism is the digested and defecated remains of the necessary good of the opposition party, made all the more rank and formless by the debased state of today's Republican party.)

So foul to the senses is shit that it is impossible to focus on anything else when it is around, as the Birther story has proven, as did "Death Panels" before it. Anything it comes in contact with carries thereafter the stain and the stench: Donald Trump, a fecal fetishist (a connoisseur of kink that even the famously open-minded Dan Savage just this week called "unfuckingreasonable") whose eagerness to dance in this shitstorm is hurting his Celebrity Apprentice ratings; the media, whose complicity in taking Trump's buffoonery seriously and keeping this story alive debases their profession; and Barack Obama, who degraded himself by caving and showing his birth certificate, and in doing so legitimized questions of his citizenship.

So a crock can be either a (broken) holding receptacle, or a source of nonsense, and shit is, well, shit. Trump's assertions about Obama's intelligence and citizenship are indeed a cracked and spewing source ideological refuse, and so Fallows was ever appropriate in calling this a crock of shit. His choice of words was apt, and will likely continue to be so. It's barely an exaggeration to imagine Obama will next be asked to provide his transcripts to prove he wasn't a lazy Affirmative Action admission, and when that isn't sufficient he'll have to produce his schoolwork. Obama wants to wash his hands of this whole sordid affair, but washing his clothes is another matter entirely.

Politics and Prose

This Rumpus piece posits an interesting reason why Washington politicians's fictions are less successful in literature than politics:

It’s a running joke that politicians tend to do a poor job of writing fiction, and for the most part, the joke holds true. But I think there may be something more to this failure than just the fact that many of them are trained in legalese or that they’re busy. I think it has to do with the fact that being a politician requires putting the human capacity for empathy on hold, or at least minimizing it. It requires putting an idea or a philosophy or a party above people in order not to go mad.

This isn't wrong, but it's not completely right either. I would add that literary writing requires a grasp of imagery that isn't present in political writing and speech except in usually the most hackneyed of forms (most of our representatives are unmemorable speakers; it was a speech, recall, that propelled Barack Obama to national prominence, some years after he had already turned some heads as a writer with the publication of his memoir). Compare one of the duds, Vale of Tears by Peter King...

The conversation in the bus was still solemn, very similar, it seemed, to the expressions of the New Yorkers walking the streets — somber but undaunted. But there was nothing at all somber about the scene along West Street as the bus — now going south — approached the vicinity of Ground Zero.

Hundreds of people lined the streets cheering, waving American flags and holding up signs, thanking and encouraging the rescue workers who’d come from all over the region and country to do what they could. The windows of the bus were shut tight, but its passengers could clearly hear the crowd’s defiant cheers of USA! USA!

...with the only real standout example, Jim Webb's A Sense of Honor.

He tried, just for a moment as he nodded off to sleep, to remember a time when he did not view the world as a chimera to be attacked, a progression of moments capable of violent destruction, a painful jungle designed to test his tenacity. He could not think that far back. He could get past first-class year and second-class year and youngster year. He could remember the incredible, unnerving scars of plebe year, as if his memory itself were falling into its own small sea and treading water there, trying to keep from drowning. He could identify each terror-filled event of plebe summer, those weeks that ripped his old self from him like someone reaching inside a plucked chicken and tearing out the guts, then packing in fear where they used to be.

Both of these excerpts deal with people in heightened states of emotion, but only Webb's really digs into its imaginative potential. Look at the creatures and concepts conjured forth: a 'chimera,' 'a painful jungle,' 'its own small sea,' 'reaching inside a plucked chicken and tearing out the guts;' all vivid and fantastical images used to complement the concrete events of the last several years of the character's life.

King's piece, by contrast, features no figurative language whatsoever, only passable description. We're told the conversation is 'somber,' the crowd 'defiant,' but we don't get any further than such surface detail to better understand these states of mind.

Politicians pride themselves on their ability to empathize with their constituents, but in reality, as the Rumpus article notes, their existence as politicians is dependent on being brutally practical in their thinking. It also involves endless consumption of political news bites that are almost by definition shallow and anathema to creative flourishes. It's no surprise that their creative writing should reflect this. Verbiage in, verbiage out.

Who Cares About Torture?

And here I thought I was done writing about C.S. Lewis and politics.

Barack Obama ran for president on a platform of principled opposition to the Bush administration's gross abuses of executive power: its secrecy, torture, extraordinary rendition, ill-conceived wars. His conduct on these fronts as President have been a grim disappointment: Guantanamo is to remain open indefinitely, Khalid Sheik Mohammad will be tried by military tribunal, Bradley Manning is receiving inhumane treatment without even having been convicted, and we are now involved in a third war in the Muslim world (fourth, if one counts the drone strikes we've been carrying out in Yemen).

For the sake of argument, let's grant that Obama's hands are tied by Congress and other political considerations (except when it comes to Libya, in which such an argument is absurd on its face). The defense is actually damning in its tacit admission that civil liberties are not important. I don't simply mean unimportant to the electorate, which is generally not much interested in politics anyway, but also to Obama's defenders.

It's true that for liberals, Obama is on balance better than the Republicans on whatever pet issues one cares to rattle off: health care, gay rights, education. But not all issues are created equal. The abuses of executive power radically upset the checks and balances system, and the torture issue in particular, moral considerations aside, undermines the very notion of a state built on the rule of law. By not prosecuting the architects of the Bush torture policy, Obama has reduced it to just another policy preference.

These are fundamental issues, and it is frankly disturbing to read and hear people all but say, "Well, yeah, starting military conflicts without even asking Congress and forcing a prisoner to strip for his guards is wrong, but other than that..."

This is where Lewis comes in. From The Screwtape Letters:

...Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity, or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest of merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.

The denunciations of George Bush and "enhanced interrogation" were vociferous and unequivocal, while the response to Obama's complicity in the whole ugly mess is an excuse, half-muttered, that he's not as bad as the Republicans. At least they're honest about their blood thirst.

All of this is not to say one should not vote for Obama next year. Politics is the art of the possible, a particularly narrow category in America's two-party system. But let's not pretend Obama is blameless. His is a profound failure of moral leadership on a critical issue. For most of us, that's not a deal-breaker. But if that isn't, then what, if anything, should be? And if not, why not?

Tucson's Reluctant Hero

Barack Obama got all the media attention at the Tucson memorial service last night, but the real, and reluctant, star of the night was Daniel Hernandez Jr, lauded as a hero in the days since the attack on Gabrielle Giffords that killed six and wounded several more. There was a back-and-forth on Hernandez' hero status throughout the night. It was first conferred, gratefully declined, and then foist upon him once more by no less than President Obama.

I felt a little bad for him.

When he went to work last Saturday, Hernandez was just an intern. Five days before, he was barely that. He had already done great things, yes--getting the nursing assistant certification that would later help save Giffords' life and being a member of Tucson’s city commission on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues at age 20 (20!), are great indeed--but these were part of the normal order of life, the beginnings of a career in public service. Administering life-saving care for your boss in the midst of the attack that brought her down is a complete derailment of all such normality.

The Giffords attack is traumatic enough on its own. For Hernandez, being all over the news for doing what to him was the only thing that made sense at the time (and this is what makes him indeed a hero) and then being applauded by 13,000 people, including the most powerful person in the world, is a lot to take in. An explosive situation just propelled Hernandez into the public stratosphere, and it was obvious by his humility and stoicism that he's still trying to get his bearings.

No doubt great things lie ahead for Daniel Hernandez. But the man just survived a massacre and has been violently jolted out of the subtle comforts of routine. We'll hear of him again, when he's good and ready.

Eyes Undimmed by Cynicism and Vitriol

As is often the case, President Obama had to pull off a great deal with tonight's speech. Not just because of the subject at hand, the shooting of Gabriel Giffords and several of her staff and constituents, but because of all the meta-commentary on discourse and root causes that's led up to the speech, climaxing today with Sarah Palin's "blood libel" whine.

It ran a bit long, yes, but it served its purpose of honoring the fallen and rather ingeniously pivoted off of the most famous of them--Christina Green, the nine year-old 9/11 baby who attended Giffords' Congress on Your Corner meet-up to see government in action--to implore the nation to live up to our expectations, and hers.

It's an ambitious call to action, if perhaps fuzzy; there's no objective way to measure the quality of our discourse, after all. But it is important, and gets at something that's been bothering me for a few days now.

I'm basically ready to retreat from the argument that a charged political atmosphere contributed to Jared Loughner's killing spree. The man's "brains are scrambled," and his fixation on Giffords seems to have stemmed from an exchange he had at one of her constituent meet-and-greets. Moreover, having pushed back against the idea that violent entertainment is to blame for school shootings, I don't think it consistent or fair to make such hazy arguments about "political climates." I still think Republican rhetoric is dangerous and irresponsible and could prompt actual political violence, but this simply wasn't a case of it.

This isn't the first time I've backpedaled or changed my mind after making too hasty a judgment and it certainly won't be the last, but I'd like them to become less frequent. I've realized lately that reading and writing about politics tends to bring out the worst in me (such as writing about the Giffords attack without once expressing any concern or sympathy for its victims), and that most of it is superficial pith anyway. Without any wonky specialty, all I have to bring to the conversation are curated prose and punchlines. (And hopefully some clear thinking, but clarity without expertise is a pretty, empty package.)

This isn't to say that I'll stop completely writing about the news--I'm too egotistical to keep my opinions to myself--but I'd like to shift focus, or rather get a focus. There isn't any particular topic this blog singles out, and I'm not yet sure what that would be; the most popular pieces here are almost without exception the ones in which I'm getting scammed or physically attacked, and as interesting as they are I would just as soon not have to write another one anytime soon. But I do enjoy writing about my own experiences and actually doing some kind of original "journalism," so maybe that's the tack I'll take.

In any case, I'm finally starting to figure out life is too short to be constantly and impotently bitching about politics. I'll still be something of an ass--it's in the name, after all--but perhaps a new, constructive ass.