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.

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]

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.

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?

Navajo O

Dave Weigel noted a couple weeks ago that he doesn't pay much attention to the Birthers anymore, since they seem to be stuck in a feedback loop. Luckily, there's a new meme that's gaining currency on the right--Obama wants to give the U.S. back to the Native Americans:

The outrage began after the President announced on December 16 that the U.S. would reverse course and support the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. The Declaration was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 2007, but the U.S., under President Bush, opposed it.

"The aspirations it affirms -- including the respect for the institutions and rich cultures of Native peoples -- are ones we must always seek to fulfill," the President said of the Declaration at White House Tribal Nations Conference where he announced the reversal. He went on to describe efforts to improve health care, education, and unemployment rates in tribal areas.

...."Perhaps he figures that, as an adopted Crow Indian, he will be the new chief over this revived Indian empire," [Brian] Fischer [of the American Family Association] wrote. "But for the other 312 million of us, I think we'll settle for our constitutional 'We the people' form of government, thank you very much."

No less than John Bolton, George Bush's ambassador to the U.N., actually takes this seriously:

"It's a kind of feel-good document that has so many unclear phrases in it that nobody's really sure what it means when you agree to it," he told FoxNews.com. "It's wrong and potentially dangerous to sign onto a document that you don't fully understand the implications of."

I do sometimes wonder if Obama conspiracy theories are not some elaborate thought experiment on the outer limits of human credulity, gone tragi-comically awry.

Pragmatism, Then and Now

Another find in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. This is from an article by William Greider:

In the "old politics," this sort of maneuvering was an accepted technique for approaching tough decisions, euphemistically known as "keeping your options open." The "new politics" of the McGovern campaign, which likes to frown on the old ways, will have to think of something different to call it.

The South Dakota senator has always insisted that he is, above all, a pragmatic politician and his handling of the Eagleton crisis confirms his description. Beneath the exterior of the earnest and open man, there is a cautious tactician, more calculating than either his hard-boiled critics or his starry-eyed admirers have admitted.

Barack Obama's had his share of hard-boiled critics and starry-eyed admirers, though as of late the latter haven't been so visible, mostly because anyone who thought that the man could just work magic on national and world affairs probably wasn't paying much attention to begin with.

Yet even for those of us who have tried to keep things in perspective, Obama's calculating strategy has been painfully frustrating, on gay rights and torture, particularly. But let it not be said that he doesn't know how to get what he wants. A stimulus package, health care reform, financial regulation, student loan reform (tucked into health care, no less!), diplomatic isolation of Iran. Obama has never gone as far as his supporters would like, but one must wonder at how effective this would have ultimately been. As Nancy Pelosi was rounding up votes for the final health care reform vote, it was pointed out that Dennis Kucinich, for all his passion and standard-bearing, had really accomplished very little in his 13 years of legislating.

But Kucinich is a Congressman. When talking of Obama's pragmatism in the Executive Branch, and its unreliability for liberal causes, Christopher Hayes rightly pointed out that Abraham Lincoln was not a fiery abolitionist, and instead would have done whatever it took to preserve the Union, whether it freed all, some, or none of the slaves. This is an odious view, but to focus on it is to obscure the larger, more significant fact, that these half-measures did eventually lead to the end of the slave system in America.

If talking about, say, health care reform, one can point out the many things still wrong with the new law, but only with the knowledge that voting against a such a bill for not going far enough is what prevented us from getting a nationalized health care system from Richard Nixon. As Ezra Klein noted:

You could imagine a lot of presidents more dogmatically liberal than Obama, but I wonder whether there are a lot of plausible hypotheticals in which they amass more liberal achievements than Obama. At the executive level, it might be the case that being too liberal is a liability to, well, liberalism.

Which is not to say there aren't fights worth having. In the coming weeks pragmatism will be put to the test once more, when maneuvers are made to bring a Don't Ask, Don't Tell repeal to a vote. Joe Lieberman says the votes are there, and repeal is widely supported by the population at large. If Barack Obama really wants the matter to be taken up by Congress as he says, then he's going to have to do the arm-twisting he knows it takes to get things done. "Old politics" need not needlessly perpetuate old policies.

Kenyan Anti-Colonialism

Addressing University of Indonesia students and staff while in Jakarta, President Obama praised Indonesia for the progress it's made since gaining independence:

Like other countries that emerged from colonial rule in the last century, Indonesia struggled and sacrificed for the right to determine your destiny. That is what Heroes Day is all about -- an Indonesia that belongs to Indonesians. But you also ultimately decided that freedom cannot mean replacing the strong hand of a colonizer with a strongman of your own.

Somebody call Dinesh D'souza!



h/t Jim Fallows

We Are All Narcs Now

This New York Magazine analysis of narcissistic culture and our electoral politics of late is very, very good. A sampling:

“The most provocative thing you say gets attention,” says Brian Baird, a Democratic congressman from Washington State who’s retiring at the end of the year, after six terms in office. Baird had his own unfortunate experience with this phenomenon this election cycle, though he isn’t running for anything. He was addressing an auditorium of 3,500, many of them tea-party enthusiasts, when a Marine veteran named David Hedrick grabbed the microphone and bellowed, “Stay away from my kids,” declaring that Obama’s health-care bill authorized compulsory training in child-rearing for parents. The video became a viral sensation, earning over 1.3 million hits. Hedrick appeared on the Fox News circuit and became a congressional candidate in the primary in Baird’s district, where he finished second out of three GOP candidates. Three weeks ago, he was arrested for allegedly striking his wife in the back of the head twice. You can, however, still purchase a “Stay away from my kids” tote bag online.

The takeaway:

That the left doesn’t recognize the similarities between the Obama and the tea-party movements is probably a function of just how good the Obama movement was at making its supporters feel special. But the fact is, this cycle, Republicans are taking advantage of this same desire for reempowerment, and they’re using the same tools. The tea-party movement is propelled by Facebook activity, copious tweets, and rallies celebrating the power of the audience. At the inaugural tea-party convention in February, Palin described the movement as “a ground-up call to action that is forcing both parties to change the way they’re doing business, and that’s beautiful. This is about the people.” In other words, Yes, we can.

There was always a certain messianism about the Obama campaign (which the Right was only too eager to point out), but Obama himself always managed to stay grounded. What's more interesting is, as alluded here, the Tea Party has adopted that mindset.

Sarah Palin, for instance, is almost a Bizarro version of Obama. The superficial form--physical attractiveness, youth, outsider appeal--was for him a vehicle to sell the measured, thoughtful content beneath. But with Palin, the form is the content. There's heat but no light beneath the "hot librarian" exterior; a spiting anti-intellect spitting wanton fire, and nothing else. Remember the Celebrity ad? McCain juxtaposed Obama with Paris Hilton, and then went and made Paris Hilton his running mate.




Obama won a Senate seat and learned the ropes of national legislation between his 2004 Democratic convention speech and his victory in 2008. Palin, assuming she runs, may well be the first presidential candidate to have learned absolutely nothing about governance since the last time she "ran."

I'm wondering how Obama will recalibrate his pitch for 2012. Even the most fervent of his 2008 believers isn't going to believe in a second coming. But with the opposition painting him as the Antichrist, he'll probably be glad to get back down to earth.

[Edited for unnecessary name calling]

Taxation Misrepresentation

On some level I appreciate the subversion that Grover Norquist and his anti-tax lemmings are going for in appropriating Obama's campaign imagery to attack him. Change...the tax code (or something)--it screams. It's funny. Really. Like, Bob Saget on America's Funniest Home Videos funny.

But given that the tax increases in question were built into the Bush tax cuts.... I'm not going to say it.

This is Not a Pipe Dream

The language turns in on itself and ferments in both describing this National Review interview with Dinesh D'Souza, and in the document itself.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates notes, D'Souza gets Barack Obama's memoir exactly wrong:

Go read his book, starting with the title Dreams from My Father. The whole book is about how Obama shaped his values, personality, and identity in the image of his father.

This reading is hardly by accident, though. According to D'Souza and his book The Roots of Obama's Rage, nothing the president says is to be taken at face value:

Some people consider Obama very serene because he talks about issues like equality and the poor in a very calm manner. He sounds like he is reading from his tax return. Some liberals are confused, and say that Obama must be a very cerebral guy. But there is an alternative explanation. He sounds bored about these issues because he doesn’t care about them. He isn’t motivated by poverty or inequality. He is motivated by hatred of the rich and the banks and the investment companies and the drug companies. Notice that when Obama speaks about these groups, his lip curls and his face darkens and he shows real passion. That’s when he wants to, in his words, “kick ass.” So there is a sublimated rage in Obama that is reminiscent of the rage of Barack Obama Sr., a man who often sat outside his hut and went into drunken rages against the West for denying him the fulfillment of his anti-colonial dreams.

The end of the interview is distilled negation:

Obama’s father, Barack Sr., was by his own account an African socialist. He wrote a paper in 1965 proposing tax rates of up to 100 percent. He said that there was nothing wrong with 100 percent taxation as long as the benefits accrue to the state and to society as a whole. Interestingly, Obama, who knows everything about his father, has never alluded to this paper in any of his writings or speeches. Even more remarkable, there has been virtually no reporting on a document that seems to throw valuable light on what Obama is doing in the White House, on what Obama means when he says the rich won’t pay their “fair share,” and so on.

Because Obama's very absent father wrote a paper, it follows that Obama has read it and it informs his entire worldview. So of course it's a mystery why Obama and the media have never, ever brought this paper up before now.

In discussing this pernicious anti-logic on TNC's page, I mentioned an idea that had been brought up before, that of Leo Strauss's esoteric readings, whereby an author's true intent is not to be found by reading what he says, but reading between the lines to discern a hidden motive. Fellow commenter Cynic elaborated on it better than I could, and so I'll post the entirety of his response:

Spot on. You can see this in the interview in D'Souza's discussion of "Obama’s suppressed rage." He acknowledges that "some people consider Obama very serene." But, he argues, "there is a sublimated rage in Obama" that surfaces when he discusses the rich and powerful, as "his lip curls and his face darkens and he shows real passion."

Follow the logic. Obama's outward serenity, his preternatural calm, becomes evidence of sublimated rage. It can be discerned only by close observers, able to scrutinize his outward appearance to understand the contents of his soul. (The "face darkens" bit is a particularly nice touch.) It's all of a piece. Obama bursts on to the public stage by offering his own story as an affirmation of the unique splendor of this nation; therefore, he actually hates it. He seems serene; therefore, he seethes.

You can't argue with logic like this, because it takes all contrary evidence, and reinterprets it as a demonstration of even deeper perfidy. He is not what he seems. That conviction is absolute, and unalterable. And the more innocuous he seems, the deeper the hatred becomes.

In nether words:

Huggy Barry

Apparently Obama and Rahm Emanuel's hug projected weakness to the rest of the world.

Remember, this is on global television. And it has to do with the very top of the United States government. Our friends and enemies were all watching.

I think the hug lacked dignity. It did not send a message of American power and forcefulness. So I fret about the reaction around the world to this kind of fraternity-like emotionalism in full public view.

Why not just a dignified, stand-up, serious handshake? That’s what Reagan would have done. A strong handshake shows friendship, respect, and even affection. But a big fat hug seems to go over the line.

Whatever

you

say.

Law and Order

One of Sullivan's readers, on the Obama administration's defense of DOMA and DADT:

I think you are being a little more than disingenuous when you claim that the Obama administration is to the right of some conservatives with respect to DADT and marriage equality. Like a law or not, it is the duty and constitutional obligations of the executive branch to defend every law. While I disagree with DADT and believe DOMA to be unconstitutional, I still want the executive branch to litigate to uphold the legality of these laws. Once you set a precedent that an administration should not defend laws with which it disagrees, it will start to work against you. What would happen if a Republican administration decided not to defend challenges to EPA regulations or not to defend challenges to the constitutionality of health care reform? (Whether to appeal is a different matter.) You can fault the Obama administration of many things, but not for doing its constitutional duty.

What if Republican administrations decided to stop enforcing regulations of important industries? What would happen if a Republican administration decided not to uphold legally binding international laws against torture to which it is a signatory? What if subsequent administrations gave those lawbreakers near-total legal immunity?

Thank goodness we don't live in such an awful world.

The Inmates are Running the Asylum

So let me get this straight:

- Andrew Breitbart releases video of Shirley Sherrod saying she didn't want to help white farmers
- Fox News spreads the video hither and yon
- NAACP condemns Sherrod
- Tom Vilsack (vil)sacks Sherrod
- NAACP gets ahold of the full video--in which Sherrod's not wanting to help the white farmers is preceded by the story of her father being murdered with impunity by a white man, and followed by seeing the white farmers get screwed by the white lawyer she recommended and learning that it's not about white vs. black but rich vs. poor--and apologizes for being "snookered"



- Vilsack stands by his decision
- White House stands by Vilsack
- Fox News, by way of Glenn Beck, attacks the White House for firing Sherrod

Remember those boisterous town hall gatherings last summer? Those were nice, weren't they? I imagine we'll be looking on this episode equally fondly this time next year, when the Republicans have gained seats in the House and the Senate, and Breitbart and his horde have trashed the careers and organizations of countless others in the meantime.

It's not like Obama's going to stick up for them.

Funny, I Forget You're Straight All the Time

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a great response to Chris Matthews' "I forgot Obama was black" gaffe gush, that however sincere and good his intent, it reveals a mindset with a limited idea of 'blackness.' That idea doesn't include things like leadership and so when Obama exhibits such a quality, that Matthews 'forgot he was black' reveals his own narrow expectations.

This may be a misreading (one of the discussions in the comments section is about whether Matthews meant to say that Obama is such a natural leader that we don't pay attention to his race, that we now just think of him as 'the president' as opposed to 'the first black president'), but it reminds me of experiences I've had as a gay man living amongst 'normal' folk.

I was in a strange closet limbo for much of high school and my first few years of college. My second year of community college I came out to a few close friends and then opened it up further after my third year. The thing is, hardly any adjustments were made by either me or my friends. My personality is what some would call "straight-acting," in that I don't have any femme qualities, I don't talk in a lisp, etc. etc. Even after coming out, about the only thing that would clue outsiders in besides a double male symbol pin I wear to easily communicate my orientation is that I make a lot of really raunchy gay sex jokes. And whenever I would come out to somebody, the typical reaction was of the "Oh wow, really, I never would have guessed!" variety.

I always took some pride in this 'hiding in plain sight,' that I didn't fit the typical gay mold, and even considered myself in some ways superior to the queen bitch types in not letting my gayness define my identity (an attitude whose dissection is worthy of its own post). But occasionally I would hear something to the effect of, 'you're the coolest gay person I know,' a statement which needs some unpacking: whoever it was that said this to me almost certainly grew up and lived in rural Idaho, and so his experiences with gays, period, was extremely limited, probably as much as Chris Matthews with black people.

One of his readers cites a similar experience:

I remember (and I realize the vast difference between this and what African Americans experience, but it's the closest I can get) when I lived in Israel and people would rail at me about Americans and I would finally say "But, I'm American," and they would say "Oh, you're not really like an American!" and mean it as a compliment. Dude, don't tell me that your ability to get over yourself with regard to who I am reflects well on me.

Everyone has a pre-conceived notion of what constitutes gays, blacks, Americans, gay black Americans, what-have-you. These stereotypes are a product of both unfortunate reality (lots of gays are twinky queens, poverty and crime are a constant presence in black America, and Americans and American foreign policy can be really belligerent and obnoxious), and a blinkered perception--in part supported by a lazy media--that accepts these, the most visible examples of a given group, as the norm, if there even is such a thing, and in the process reduces anyone we come across who doesn't fit our 'normal' template to an easily-pigeonholed 'other' with a stock set of expected characteristics. These traits may prove false or irrelevent the more one gets to know him. Put more simply, a rural Idahoan will meet a flamboyant gay man and see him as a flamboyant gay man, with whatever baggage is implied, before the sees him as a person. My own temperament allowed me, when I was still in the closet, to bypass that prejudicial wall, as a sort of Trojan Horse, after which the person may be forced to reevaluate his notions of what a gay man was (perhaps this is how I justified my air of superiority).

This all comes back to the problem of 'the norm.' Everybody's is different. A native-born Kenyan is born into homogeneity, a middle-class black may not be, and an inner-city black will be born into a homogeneous environment that is still outside that. Though the demographics are changing, there still is a heterosexual WASP majority in this country, and this is reflected in the makeup of our politics and our media, often to an extreme extent, to the exclusion of minority representation. I can only speak for myself, but when I see any number of advertisements with a white, straight couple, it's just background noise. The norm. If, say, a beachside hotel ad featured a gay couple instead, it would stand out precisely because it's out of the ordinary. I came of age with no "gay community" support, and as a result I still socialize almost exclusively with straight people--the gays I meet I are usually incidental, through Theatre or some other mutual interest. So removed am I from the gay community that I actually view the idea with some antipathy, that gays should make more efforts to integrate into mainstream society instead of insulating themselves in clubbing ghettos. That's awfully harsh, but it's my perception, shaped by my limited 24 years of life experience in Idaho. I try to keep that contingency in mind, as I think Chris Matthews did, trying to articulate what Obama means to a white man of his generation.

The takeaway question, I suppose, is: are we ever, especially in a country as geographically and demographically large as ours, going to settle into a more nuanced idea of the mainstream, or are we going to be constantly having to renegotiate our own conceptions and blind spots?