Human, All Too Human

Few have driven the Tea Party drama of late so much as the nearly thirty years dead Ayn Rand. With the jump in sales in her work following Obama's election, the "Going Galt" posturing, and the anti-government rhetoric of the past three years that, due to Occupy Wall Street, only now is beginning to wane--this has been an explicitly Randian era. Her beliefs and their consequences are a natural target for liberal scorn, no exceptions here. But after reading Jennifer Burns' Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, it's hard not to feel sorry for the extraordinarily damaged woman behind them. Ayn Rand's life, as told by Burns, shows a startling juxtaposition between sympathetic misfit and cold and alienating tyrant.

The trauma of Rand's early youth is the key to understanding her persona and philosophy of hyper-individualism and anti-statism. Growing up during the Russian Revolution, she became an early enemy of the Soviet union when government officials claimed her father's business in the name of the people. The resulting tumult left her family in increasingly dire conditions, living in miserable housing subsisting on "millet, acorns, and mush." Her response was a near-pathological aversion to "collectivism" which held that altruism of any kind was an infringement on the best and most productive members of society and crushed the individual and creative spirit.

Hers was such a one. She grew up bookish, awkward in social situations, and spent much of her youth writing stories of knights and princesses that she would tell her family. Solace from the drudgery of life in the Soviet system she found in the films of Hollywood, which she devoured--through film school--with impressive zeal. In 1925 alone she saw, graded, and cataloged the stars of 117 movies. In another time and place she would have been known as nerd; the bookish appeal of Atlas Shrugged and The Lord of the Rings is real enough. The later Rand's conversation-starter, "What are your premises?" is an extension of this: both amusingly, precociously pretentious and appealingly dorky.

Some of Rand's most sympathetic episodes occurred in the early years after she came to America. After a characteristically awkward stay with relatives in Chicago (her typing all night made them nuts) she decamped to Hollywood, where she worked for no less than Cecil B. De Mille, who was struck by her powerful gaze and impressed with her life story. The man who would become her husband, Frank O'Conner, was drawn to her for similar reasons.

Perhaps most endearing about her in this time, captured vividly by Burns, is the struggle of the aspiring writer, which Rand felt acutely after De Mille's studio closed with the advent of the "talkies" in film:

Unskilled and anonymous, she had to settle for a series of odd jobs and temporary positions. She fell behind on her rent and started skipping meals. This was not the fate she had expected when she disembarked in New York years earlier. Though she accepted small loans from her family, she was unwilling to ask Frank for help, or even to reveal the extent of her problems to him. On their dates she kept up appearances, never letting him see the depair that was beginning to suffuse her life.

What writer hasn't felt this way?

Also most humanizing is the affection she had for her husband, the way they called each other "Cubbyhole" and "Fluff," how "[s]erious and focused in her professional life, Rand could be silly and girlish with Frank." 'Girlish' is the last word one would use to describe Rand, but the inclusion of such a detail throws the less savory aspects of her character into starker relief.

It is in these same early days that the flaws of Rand's personality and character that would become all-consuming first began to bloom. She became fascinated with the case of William Hickman, who remorselessly murdered and dismembered a twelve-year-old and whose trial became a national sensation, planning (but never starting) a novel with a protagonist based on his Nietzschean superman qualities. Her description of the the character inspired by Hickman, Danny Renahan, skirts sociopathy (emphasis original):

He is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness--resulting from the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning or importance of other people.

It's like Crime and Punishment, without the moral redemption. Indeed, without wanting it in in the first place.

Rand's formulation of Objectivism, which true to its name posited that there were universal, objective, truths about the world that the individual could learn by commanding complete rationality in his thinking and behavior, was a long elaboration on and exercise of the Renehan idealization. Rand took this idea to its outermost extremes: she attracted a handful of close acolytes, including Alan Greenspan, who called themselves The Collective and came to adopt her and her characters' views and even fashion sense. Those who questioned or deviated were castigated in front of the others in a manner not unlike the Soviet show trials she lampooned in her fiction. A unified theory of everything left no room for interpretation or variation.

Perhaps the greatest casualty of her "Virtue of Selfishness" was her husband Frank. Once an up-and-coming actor, his career stalled out, making Rand early on the household's breadwinner. He stumbled on a second career as a gardener during their second extended stay in Hollywood, but it fell apart when Rand insisted they move back to New York. He later displayed a latent talent for painting which gave him some personal satisfaction.

Rand, who did love her husband after her own fashion and needed him to offer balance in her life, nonetheless craved the kind of towering, heroic individuals she created in her fiction and found it in Nathaniel Blumenthal (whom she rechristened Nathaniel Branden), her greatest devotee and twenty-four years her junior. She embarked on an affair with him that lasted a decade and a half and was conducted--rationally, you see--with the knowledge and 'permission' of both Nathaniel's wife Barbara, and Frank. Barbara became increasingly prone to panic attacks, which Rand dismissed as weak mere Emotionalism. Frank, whose abiding stoicism neatly complemented Rand's dominating egotism, was twice a week turned out of his own apartment so Nathaniel and Rand could consummate their tryst. He spent much time at a local bar and may well have become an alcoholic.

Towards the end of his life Frank descended into senility, and Rand--having furiously excommunicated Nathaniel when he eventually confessed that he had been having an affair with a younger woman--dutifully cared for him, albeit it through the filter of her unwavering belief in willpower; she initially hoped he could overcome his condition by rational explanation and training. Her approach to her own mortality following his death is surprisingly poignant: "She did not believe in life after death, she told [Phil] Donahue, otherwise she would have committed suicide by now in order to join Frank." Rand died of lung cancer in her apartment, alone but for a hired nurse.

It's not hard to understand the appeal of Rand's basic notion of individualism to today's conservatives, nor the reflexive repulsion of liberals. But it is a simplified image of Rand that both camps respond to; frankly, given the specifics of godless Calvinism, it would make better sense for both camps to disavow it, as indeed was the case during her lifetime. A closer study of Rand, as provided by Jennifer Burns, would allow her to be appreciated for her place in history, and in history alone remain.

Light Reading

So I'm going over an idea for a writing project, a play, that deals with the current economic climate, class warfare, and Wall Street, and have started doing some reading along those lines. Simon Johnson and James Kwak's 13 Bankers made the financial crisis about as digestible as a lay person as possible, yet the Byzantine quantity and workings of such "innovations" as derivatives, Credit Default Swaps, Mortgage-Backed Securities is... daunting, regardless.

My latest read is Jennifer Burns' excellent Ayn Rand biography, Goddess of the Market. I find the ideology of Rand and her followers morally repugnant, but there is no denying her influence, and any inquiry into the lead-in and aftermath of the crash would be incomplete without an understanding of the mindset that stripped "Greed is good" of all irony.

Rand is fascinating figure in her own right, and I'll have more to say along those lines. This is merely a heads-up on the direction the blog will be taking, after laying fallow for so long.

Why Othello is Almost as Funny as Falstaff

Tonight I attended a lecture by the new director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Michael Witmore, on using data-mining technology on the works of Shakespeare. The use of quantifying technology, typically associated with the sciences and other "real world" pursuits, with something as subjective as literature is novel, and offers many insights, not the least of which has to do with its own subjectivity.

The talk began with an obligatory crack about the Roland Emmerich Shakespeare authorship abortion slithering into theaters this Friday ("The media was asking me for the Folger's position on Anonymous. I told them we're a library; we don't have positions, we have collections.") and then gave some background information on his topic. As an English professor at Carnegie Mellon University was introduced to a program called Docuscope that breaks down text fed into it and assigns tags to different words based on the functions they serve. Originally intended for improving the writing skills of incoming freshmen, Witmore and his University of Glasgow colleague Jonathan Hope fed it Shakespeare's 36 plays and have been using it to analyze the results on grounds of genre.

Witmore's blog demystifies some of the technical aspects of how this works:

Docuscope, that is, codes words and “strings” of words based on the ways in which they render a world experientially for a reader or listener. The theory behind how texts do this, and thus the rational for Docuscope’s coding strategy, is derived from Michael Halliday’s systemic-function grammar. But what is particularly interesting about Docuscope is the human element involved in its creation. The main architect of the system, a rhetorician named David Kaufer, spent 8 years hand-tagging several million pieces of English according to their rhetorical function, and then expanded out this initial tagging spread with wild-card operators so that Docuscope now classes over 200 million strings of English (1 to 10 words in length) into over 100 distinct categories of use or function.

The resulting data clusters, they found, would belong in certain categories, while being (categorically?) excluded from others--given text chunks would be characteristic of ABC, but not XYZ. Add these together and you'd get a Gaussian scatter plot, divided among Tragedy, Comedy, History, and the Late Romances of Shakespeare. The purest Comedy section came from The Merry Wives of Windsor, while the purest History was a scene from Richard II, which after consideration most would probably agree is the least funniest of the History plays.

How these results were reached all have to do with the generic criteria at work. As Witmore described it, comedy often involves two people plotting away, which involves a lot of 'I' and 'you' exchanges, setting in motion a snowballing series of misunderstandings. A hallmark of History, by contrast, is heavily descriptive dialogue, which makes sense considering the sheer amount of, well, history that needs to be conveyed.

These distinctions lead to the seemingly unusual grouping of Othello with The Merry Wives of Windsor in comedy. Its plot, recall, revolves on an elaborate scheme of mounting falsehoods to trick Othello into suspecting his wife of cuckoldry. Familiar comic territory, but punctuated with the horrible success of Iago's stratagem.

An obvious objection to this computerized approach to textual analysis is that its reasoning is circular. A computer program can only find what its programmers tell it to find, so how can it actually tell us anything new? Witmore was asked such a question in the follow-up Q&A (I think. It was by an analyst who works with similar data, and so the wording was far more technical and above my pay grade.), and his response was, essentially, that one had to find a balance, that overly detailed programming would indeed provide narrow and redundant results.

I myself had a hard time getting past the issue of the premises Docuscope is given, but it seems its real strength is in allowing us to re-examine our notions of genre and classification of plays. Witmore mentioned to me that one of the other surprising results was the grouping in History of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and this had all to do with the extensive descriptive language in the play, plus the whole Pyramus and Thisby episode. One can actually track the points in a play where it veers into different territory, he said. More accurate than identifying plays by genre is their tendency towards a given genre.

Thus the usefulness of the Docuscope approach is in fact its strict logic. Though we may know what we're telling it when we input its text tagging parameters, its thoroughness and consistency in applying them will show us things we may not have before considered.

The Revolution Devours Its Own

Netflix's decision to split its DVD-by-mail and streaming video services into two completely separate companies is... vexing, to say the least:

...What is Reed Hastings smoking? As far as anyone can tell, he seems to have rolled up pages from The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christensen's influential 1997 book about the ways that successful companies die at the hands of upstarts. Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, coined the term "disruptive technology," which describes innovations that come out of nowhere to undercut a market leader's dominant position. Christensen cited the way that Digital Equipment, the leader in 1970s-era corporate minicomputers, completely missed the 1980s boom in personal computers. But a better example may be Netflix itself—its all-you-can-eat business model disrupted, and eventually killed, the previously dominant Blockbuster model for movie rentals. Hastings is likely paranoid, then, that Netflix is vulnerable to the same kind of disruption. And that's the logic behind the mail/streaming separation. Hastings would prefer to kill his own golden goose before anyone else beats him to it.

In its own technocratic fashion this brings to mind the image of the Titan Saturn (Cronos, to the Greeks) devouring his children. He did so in order to prevent the same kind of overthrow he led against his father, which famously led to his wife Ops/Rhea substituting a stone for the last of them, Jupiter/Zeus, who grows up to lead a rebellion against the Titans. (God of War 2 summarized it nicely.) Netflix, in announcing the Qwikster split, just swallowed a stone of its own.

CEO Reed Hastings is essentially betting that because streaming technology is "the future," he needs to cut off the DVD-mailing service before it becomes insolvent and obsolete. But their streaming library is underwhelming and best functioned as a compliment to its vast DVD library. It doesn't have enough to justify a subscription on its own. That Qwikster was seemingly named as a nod toward another doomed internet upstart, and with no consideration that the domain name and Twitter handle had already been snapped up, does not bode well.

The net effect of all this, of course, is to anger a customer base already irate with having its monthly rates jacked up. For myself, my movie-watching habits are bad enough that I've had discs sitting for months at a time without getting watched, and my internet connection isn't fast enough to let me watch movies uninterrupted. I'm probably going to cut "Netflix" loose because I can't justify paying for something I can't/won't use, especially when my Amazon Prime membership gives me free access to a sizeable library of streaming films already. I may hold on to Qwikster to get ahold of more obscure titles, but even that's not a certainty. Redbox aside, Netflix has until now dominated the movie rental market; dividing itself and its customer base makes it much more vulnerable now to competition than it was before.

Netflix may have done the Qwikster split in order to get rid of a declining business model, but in doing so they may have hastened their own decline. As with many a revolution before, the insurgent, now established as the leader, can only go down and will resort to dread measures to keep its grip on power. Netflix's anxiety is perfectly understandable, but they should have known what the Greeks and Romans figured out millenia ago, that those who try to escape their fate will only blunder into it the worse.

That Day

It was a school day. I was a high school sophomore. After waking up and showering, I got ready for class. My high school operated on the block system, whereby instead of seven or eight classes of less than an hour each were crammed into one day, three or four classes roughly an hour and a half long were spread over A and B days. The B days had a kind of study hall period in the early morning, so that one needed not be there until 9:30 or thereabouts. That Tuesday was such a day, and so I was able to be more leisurely about getting ready.

My mother, having worked the night shift at the hospital the night before, called the house. No surprise there. From what I remember, it was a typical phone call: be there in 15 minutes (or whatever), don't forget to put the garbage out.

Then, before hanging up, almost as an afterthought, "Turn on the TV, the World Trade Center's been attacked."

What?

Such was my understanding of the wider world around me that the phrase 'World Trade Center' sounded familiar, though I really had no idea what it was, not even that included two iconic twin skyscrapers. In any case, it was news. I went over to the living room TV and switched it to some station, any station, to the chagrin of my younger, hockey playing brother who had been watch ESPN.

And here memory, notoriously unreliable, fails completely. I don't remember what I said, much of what I immediately felt, or even what I saw. I might have seen the live 8:28 (my time) collapse of the second tower, but probably not the 7:59 collapse of the first. But everything is fragments.

At the school they had the TV, a box large-screen sitting on top of a rolling cart, airing coverage of the unfolding disaster. Classes proceeded as normal.

A friend of mine was somewhat bewildered, saying, "They cancelled classes at my dad's school when Kennedy was assassinated."

Being so removed from the disaster, the following days felt less alarming than slightly menacingly strange. The grounding of nearly all air traffic felt particularly off because the high school is located in front of our town's landing strip, and descending aircraft were an unremarked feature of everyday life.

My brother was angry with Muslims. My mother and I explained to him that collective punishment was wrong, and used as a personal hypothetical his Chinese friend whose life would be made more difficult by an attack by China. He came around.

We heard about people saying very unkind things to the Egyptian family with whom we were friends.

Strange times. Strange times, all and ever.

Political Animals

Alyssa Rosenberg looks at Rise of the Planet of the Apes through the prism of contemporary anxiety about cultural institutions:

It makes sense that movies like these — and their hopeful, escapist alternatives, like Captain America — are so appealing right now. Whether you think it’s unemployment rates, or partisanship, or you embrace Drew Westen’s rhetorical theory of the Obama presidency, Americans are angry at established institutions, they’re hurting economically, and even if they’re not, they’re frustrated by the failure of a range of policy problems. We may not know where we’re going or what we could do to make things better, but neither do Magneto and Caesar. These movies are the fantasy of rebellion without the requirement to build a new order. And the heroes aren’t who we expected them to be.

This sounds about right. Blockbuster movies obviously can't afford to offend large segments of the country, and so their politics can be neither too deep nor too incisive. Apes is most peculiar, though, in that its universal appeal comes from ideas that are incredibly radical.

Obviously there is the animal rights angle. The mistreatment of the apes in the refuge and the Gen Sys (is it reading too much into this to consider that the name of intelligent apes' "creator" may be an allusion to Genesis?) testing practices are obviously vicious and grossly unjust. Nothing terribly controversial here.

But the film goes much further than just arousing our sympathy for the apes. It also depends on a pretty thorough vilification of the humans, who are largely cruel and greedy and fully deserving of their deaths. Will, the scientist, and his father and girlfriend are the exceptions, but they're ciphers anyway. We know humanity isn't going to survive the ape revolt, and the movie takes steps to ensure that we feel that this is right.

Perhaps what's most surprising is the movie's subtle, favorable, nod to authoritarianism. There is a scene in the sanctuary where Caesar is talking/signing to a circus orangutan about the need for the apes to work together against the humans. He uses the example of sticks, that one can be broken, but that multiple sticks together are strong and remain intact. This is quite literally fascism: fasces, the root word, being Latin for a bundle of sticks bound together, deriving strength from unity.

It may be unintentional, and indeed the same strength-in-numbers illustration has been used in movies before (see the beginning of Akira Kurosawa's Ran), but it ties in well with the satisfaction we're supposed to feel in the coming anti-human genocide. It may in fact serve as groundwork for conflict that will be developed in the movie's sequel; it's easy to imagine a split in the ape ranks leading to opposing factions led by Caesar, who received his intelligence from his mother and attacks the humans mostly as a means to escaping them, and Koba, who received his intelligence through direct experimentation with a more potent virus and looks to be much more violent (and scary looking).

Not that this distracts from the movie. Indeed it's probably the most satisfying popcorn movie of the season. I'm just amazed, and amused, that its success is built on actual misanthropy.

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]

Programming Note

It strikes me that there's no reason for me not to cross-post the material I write for my other gigs, so I'll be doing so with my Washington Fancy pieces as they're published. My contributions can be found in one convenient place here.

The Writer's Notebook

So it's going on nearly three weeks since I last posted here, and all I have to offer is naval gazing.

From inception this space has been prone to inconstant atrophy, which has almost always been contingent on my having a job. When I had just graduated and was unemployed, I spent a month writing limericks about headline news. When my theatre world was crashing down around me (or at least I thought it was) last August, I decided to spend more time here. Over several months, again abetted by unemploymnet, I put out what I would say is some good work, and also got something of an audience. Then I got a job--two, really--and so my output went down. It had been making a comeback of late, and I even managed to be tweeted by Josh Green.

But real life is intruding once more, in the best possible way. I've been for the past couple months volunteering for a major theater's lit department, reading script submissions and writing supplementary materials for their website. And for three weeks--basically since my last post here--I've been at work producing material for a political news parody website that will be launching next week, The Washington Fancy. (My pseudonym will be Doug Limey). Writing scenarios for often absurd public figures is a great deal of fun, but doing so at least three times a week on top of two jobs and a volunteer gig requires a great deal of time and energy (right now I ought to be figuring out how to salvage a Jon Huntsman piece that isn't working that's due tomorrow).

"A writer’s notebooks grow thicker in inverse proportion to his other work.” This blog has been a notebook of sorts, albeit one much more coherent and articulate than the one I scribble in before I go to bed. And so it is that my other work is taking me from it once more. I may have the time and inclination to say something here, I may not. This isn't the first time I've made excuses for falling through. But something has to give, and unfortunately this blog, haphazardly maintained as it has been already, is it.

'til next time.

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:

See For Yourself

Andrew Sullivan posted an excellent and moving poem, "Reverse: A Lynching," accompanied by a photo of the Duluth Lynchings. I hadn't heard of this event and so followed the Wikipedia link, and there came across this photo, of the lynching of Henry Smith, used in the Lynching portal:



The imagery is stunning: a sea of Paris Texans come to elevate the dejected only to debase and destroy him. Behind them an indefinite swirl of color, with a particularly bright burst behind the victim, bound and head-down, giving him an especial visual gravity. Written on the platform on which he stands, "Justice," a mockery of the concept.

I always have to stop and absorb such pictures, with their horrid juxtaposition of the dead or dying victims and their killers' ghoulish indifference or glee. Scenes like these grab me because they are so alien to my experience and because they are even now terribly novel. We all supposedly know what a lynching is, but to see it is something else entirely. (A long time ago I wrote something similar regarding public executions.)

Part of what makes such a scene so foreign is a failure of education, but another part is, to be frank, race. A white American simply has no collective memory of mob violence and slavery like a black American does, and so beyond the shock of lynching imagery there is a narrow blindness that settles over considerations of and assumptions about other issues. The ex-slaves were as much of the South as their white former owners, but they are scarce referred to when discussing "Southerners." The Civil War killed 600,000 Americans, but it freed four million.

This makes it easy for otherwise well-meaning people to be taken in by Confederate apologia that whitewashes blacks out of all consideration of the war and its aftermath. Consider this link, posted to Facebook by a friend of mine (my emphasis):

Even after Lincoln’s death, and for twelve years after the war had ended, Reconstruction further proved that the fighting had little to do with slavery. If the North cared primarily about freeing slaves, soldiers would have vacated the South shortly after Lee’s surrender. Instead, there was nation-building in Dixie. Anyone connected to the previous regime or military (essentially all Southern males) could no longer vote, run for office, or exercise any of their constitutional rights without pledging support for the Union. A Southerner was forced to surrender his dignity and vow allegiance to the conquerors who had ravaged his people and his land. Southerners had their right to a representative government suspended indefinitely, their dignity trampled, and over a quarter million of their citizens killed by foreign invaders from the North, then were forced to suck it all up and like it. Not surprisingly, the vanquished South held onto its anger for generations after Appomattox. Even now, in the modern, post-industrial South, being called a Yankee is no compliment. And it has little to do with the Emancipation Proclamation.

It's easy to complain about federal interference in the South when one airbrushes away the evils that flourished in its absence--Jim Crow laws, lynchings, the Ku Klux Klan, Mississippi Appendectomies. Nothing beats education on these matters, but a haunting and revolting image, like the ones the lynchers themselves captured for posterity, are an important start to shaking one out of complacence.