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Tiger Woods And The Morality Play

If there's something to be said about Tiger Woods - and count me among those who think most of what's happened speaks for itself just fine without my help - perhaps the most indicative of the moment we're in is how reaction to his troubles is a reminder of the conservative crackup, particularly when it comes to the "values agenda."

For a long time, conservative moralism was one of the right's most successful weapons; agree or disagree with their "traditional morals" viewpoint, one had to admit that complaints of loose morality, enshrinement of poor values, and our general cultural interest in salaciousness did make a point, one that was hard to beat back.

And it's not, as some suggest, simply the steady drumbeat of conservative mess-ups that has undermined the morality play as much as the fact that the shattering of conservative unity has revealed that on the right, as much or more than on the left, there's no firm agreement on just what the "morals" are supposed to be, or when "bad morals" utterly disqualify someone from any defense of decency.

That muddle has been especially true in the days since Tiger Woods crashed his car outside his house, and a world of sneak around infidelities has been revealed. The question isn't who's trying to excuse Woods' behavior - since almost no one is trying to call it acceptable or okay - but the struggle to explain exactly what's wrong, and why, and what it's supposed to mean in a cultural context. And it's telling, I think, that just as no one wants to defend what Woods has done, over the years, few seem to be able to explain exactly why these public revelations should have an impact on his career in golf.

And the dirtiest secret on the morality front is... that's probably because they won't, or shouldn't.

Sarah Superstar

In all the breathless coverage of Sarah Palin's memoirs, I've been debating what to say. Like many I share a concern about her prospects, even the vague fascination with Palin's popularity on the right... but mostly, I find her a somewhat interesting, but irrelevant diversion. And little of the coverage of her seems to get at this.

It wasn't until I saw a clip of her with Sean Hannity that something crystallized for me: Palin is not seen, I don't think, for what she is. In reality, Palin is riding the wave of celebrity culture to her 15 minutes of major fame, and she's doing it by turning politics - perhaps the last bastion of "seriousness" - into the same kind of celebrity name driven gossip currently given to Hollywood and the music industry.

Seeing Palin as a serious politician, it seems to me, is the mistake. What she is, really, is famous for being famous. And by not seeing her book tour for what it is - a chance to consolidate her attention getting - conservatives are deluding themselves into making her vague political ambitions into a huge mess up, while liberals may wind up doing damage control from the needless energy of trying to stop her.

Rush And The Capitalist's Tools

Let's be clear on what happened, at least: Al Sharpton did not make the NFL reject Rush Limbaugh from becoming a part owner of the St. Louis Rams. Indeed, Al Sharpton didn't make the rest of the people in the conglomeration of purchasers reject Rush either.

No, they did that on their own.

I don't know if Rush Limbaugh should be part owner of a football team. I can't say it radically changes my opinion of football, or team owners all that much (can anyone be shocked after Marge Schott?), and frankly, I kind of liked the ironic messaging to Limbaugh's fans that while Rush talks about the problems of the common man, when you have the millions needed to invest in a sports team... you are not part of the ordinary masses.

But we kind of knew that, anyway.

Limbaugh's been on a tear since the bid was made public, and the rather quick turn from interesting side note to full on controversy to flat out rejection actually added a touch of humanity to it all. Even people barely familiar with Limbaugh's messy path to stardom could be vaguely aware of his passion for sports and his real dream of being a sports announcer. As I always try to remember... don't fuck with people's childhood aspirations. It's really very mean.

Still, Limbaugh's tetchy, angry screeds about rejection and his defensiveness over things he was said to have said (more on that in a moment) seemed oddly misplaced. And for someone who so passionately defends the American system of capitalism and personal responsibility for one's failures and successes, he seems strangely or perhaps not so strangely - blind to what that means in his own story. If businesses should be allowed to make business decisions based on whatever whim suits their business thinking... then the problem isn't them. It's you.

The Blonde Leading The Blonde

As I was flipping around morning news TV - a fool's errand if ever there was - I tripped over a little informative fact I'd missed, that along with Liz Cheney, Debra Burlingame has become a Board member/spokesmodel for Keep America Safe, the new "let's compain about Obama and foreign policy" group that prefers to call itself concerned with advocating for the "policies that kept us safe for the past 8 years."

There's plenty to debate in those notions, but I was struck by the appearance of Burlingame; in case you've missed her, Burlingame is the sister of one of the pilots of American flight 77, which crashed into the Pehtagon on 9/11. In the aftermath, among a number of other family members of victims, Burlingame moved into a fairly prominent role, speaking out for the concerns of families, and more generally, revealing herself to be a fairly traditional notion of a conservative woman.

It's not surprising that Burlingame's wound up in the Cheney group... but I think it gives a good indication of just what Keep America Safe is about... and what it isn't. And it seems likely that we'll have another semi-serious, pseudo-activist  group to watch and groan by, should we tune into those 24 hour news channel programs where people largely unconnected to things actually happening opine about how their easy to predict viewpoints reflect fresh, deep insight into the issues of today. The combination of Cheney and Burlingame - both so camera and soundbite ready - will likely be yet another exasperating example of what isn't happening in our political discourse, and harder to counteract because the objectionable lines will come from attractive blonde women.

And it's that familiar approach to dressing up conservatism that's got me this morning.

Mo Betta MoDo

Usually, I don't think of Maureen Dowd as a lousy columnist - she is, but still - I think of her as someone who's simply missed her calling to be the next Rex Reed. From her thoroughly well executed takedown of Dan Brown's new book, a real skill at eviscerating his use of language:

His metaphors and similes thud onto the page. ­Inoue Sato, an intelligence official investigating a disembodied hand bearing a Masonic ring and iconic tattoos that shows up in the Capitol Rotunda, “cruised the deep waters of the C.I.A. like a leviathan who surfaced only to devour its prey.” Insights don’t simply come to characters: “Then, like an oncoming truck, it hit her,” or “The revelation crashed over Langdon like a wave.” And just when our hero thinks it’s safe to go back in the water, another bad metaphor washes over him: “His head ached now, a roiling torrent of inter­connected thoughts.”

You can practically hear the eerie organ music playing whenever Mal’akh, the clichéd villain whose eyes shine “with feral ferocity,” appears. He goes from sounding like a parody of a Bond bad guy (“You are a very small cog in a vast machine,” he tells Langdon) to a parody of Woody Allen (“The body craves what the body craves,” he thinks).

But Brown tops himself with these descriptions: “Wearing only a silken loincloth wrapped around his buttocks and neutered sex organ, Mal’akh began his preparations,” and “Hanging beneath the archway, his massive sex organ bore the tattooed symbols of his destiny. In another life, this heavy shaft of flesh had been his source of carnal pleasure. But no longer.”

...

The author has gotten rich and famous without attaining a speck of subtlety. A character never just stumbles into blackness. It must be inky blackness. A character never just listens in shock. He listens in utter shock.

And consider this fraught interior monologue by the head of the Capitol Police: “Chief Anderson wondered when this night would end. A severed hand in my Rotunda? A death shrine in my basement? Bizarre engravings on a stone pyramid? Somehow, the Redskins game no longer felt significant.”

Bravo!

You Manipulative Son Of A...

Via Andrew Sullivan, one of the most flawless assessments of Glenn Beck yet, and further proof - as if it was needed - that Stephen Colbert is genius.

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You Deserve An Award For The Role That You Play...

The head-smacking, obvious absurdity of it all can't just be explained away: there's basically no reason Barack Obama should be the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, it's inappropriate and embarrassing that he was considered and that, apparently on their merits, he won.  And I suppose, to be generous, the real point here is what critics have laid out for a long while, and what, I think has been catching up to the Nobel committees for a while: the Peace Prize is becoming irrelevant. And no more so when a young, untested President is rewarded for doing, essentially, nothing.

Liberal and progressive bloggers are already howling about the sighs of derision from the right (and let's be fair, they really can't muster outrage; who can?), but in this case, and with a half hour of Rush under my belt from lunchtime today, I'm inclined to take their points, especially the one about how convenient it is that recent lefty leaders of America (Carter, Gore, Obama) have the Prize while right side ones (Reagan, Bush, Bush for starters) do not. And no, it's hard to say in the thirty years that cover all of these men, any of them have, ultimately, made the world more peaceful, or safer for the cause of peace.

If we plan to make this one of the dividing lines between true believing liberals and everyone else... I think I'll stay outside the lines. I do think, in a series of events filled with absurd moments and bad Presidential theater, we may have a turning point - there is a point where all that "he's the one" energy really does spoeak to a negative, unpleasant impulse in people to go over the edge in sycophancy. And the blowback, in these moments, is hard to undo. I suspect, more than I have lately, that we've reached the apotheosis of Obama's anointing... and it's about time - okay, honestly, well past time - this nonsense was called out, and stopped. For the good of us all.

Seriously, after working for two days on a post on the continued presence of absurdist future speak, I literally hit the "publish" button and not ten minutes later heard the Peace Prize news in the car in stunned disbelief. It's one thing for us to talk about a set of vague, as yet unseen developments in domestic policy... but we're really over the edge now. Just over it. And if you are among the well meaning, good hearted people who want to try and make this seem okay... well, ya lost me at 5 am. Wish you well... I cannot stay.

Romanspeak

As a kid of the seventies, I find the return of the Roman Polanski case fascinating, because it's treated now, as if it was a big deal at the time... and it wasn't.

Polanski's arrest, legal troubles, and subsequent flight generally caused barely a blip in coverage. It was later, when Polanski returned to fairly prolific filmmaking that the question of his "exile" became more of a story... and prompted a return examination of the initial story.

And even then, probably two events really raised the temperature to where we are now: his Oscar for The Pianist and the subsequent documentary Wanted and Desired, which both laid out the events of the rape of a 13 year old girl, and made the point that there was, in fact, no serious effort to return Polanski to LA for any kind of resolution.

In the flurry of attention and energy that's been generated since Polanski's arrest, in Zurich, for extradition to the US, I think there's been a push to pick a side... and less acknowledgment that, in fact, there's an uncomfortable middle that's probably where we belong. Should Roman Polanski come back to LA? Probably, yes. Does that serve as the end of this story? Probably not.

And that's because the person who really needs to speak out and explain himself is... Roman Polanski.

Odelay? Odelie!

Since I offered a take on Glenn Beck, I feel like I should keep charting his comet-like flight across the news celebrity sky. The clip below - via Ezra Klein - is from an interview Beck did with Katie Couric (sorry about the sound), and Couric, as she does, manages to flummox Beck with the obvious... when he said "Obama hates 'white culture'"... what did he mean by "white culture"?

You can go at this in a number of ways, especially given that Beck, for all his bluster, can't seem to muster the nerve to speak his mind (which, I think, goes back to just how his "mad as hell" number is a bit of a put-on). But I think there's two key points: a) what Beck won't say, which would likely be catnip to the "race" discussion we're currently mostly not having, and b) that Beck succumbs, as many conservatives do, to a kind of cold disdain when questioned by the perceived "MSM" keyholders of the"liberal media."

The first point goes to the meaning of "white culture" which is really very meaningless but is meant to reach disaffected, mostly working class whites as some kind of sop about "Middle America" that's really very condescending: it's meant to denigrate Obama for not just being black, but being part of the educated elite (Ta-Nehisi has done some great work explaining the fear of the black middle class)... but at the same time it's "they're making fun of you for liking Nascar and shopping at Wal-Mart"... whereas Beck just thinks they can be easily exploited for ratings and commercial success. Cynicism abounds.

But the second point is what I find really striking in this clip: it's not that Beck succeeds at - what I'm pretty sure he thinks is meant to come off as "I treat you with the respect I never get from people like you" but can't really hide the thinly veiled contempt. He talks to Couric as if she were a child, as if "this should be obvious" but she won't hand him any sense of her thinking. Sarah Palin did this - somewhat more effectively - as well, though her own chipper demeanor saved her from seeming cold. Michelle Malkin or Ann Coulter, by contrast, never can hide their disdain or their disrespect. And being contemptuous, while displaying a convenient faux politesse, is the current vogue in conservative media when dealing with their supposed enemy; I suppose there's no real alternative... but the prim "I'd give you the what-for, but I'm too classy for that" shtick is getting old... and it helps if you can get that across, better, without sneering at the same time.

I have my issues with Couric, though I think, overall, she's turned out to actually be better than one would have feared as anchor... partly because she's developed into knowing her actual strengths - like her solid ability to interview and follow up - and not her supposed ones that werer never entirely real (like the forced cheeriness and let's all be gals together bonhomie that was never as good as her Today backers would gush). Couric prepares, she's serious, and she's respectful without being mean. That conservatives can't sense the difference, I think, is why the media/PR sell they attempt tends to backfire so badly: until you either treat Couric, and her cohorts, with actuial respect as an equal - or simply let rip with the undiluted vitriol you save for blogs and Fox news appearances - you're lying. As Back is doing here... and oh, the lies...

Roman Ampitheater

One of the better lessons from regular blogging is... you don't have to have an opinion on everything. Like say, a feminist who admits her love of wedding blogs... I could have an opinion, but why bother?

Or, consider Roman Polanski. Please. Don't ask me what I think... because I am studiously avoiding taking a position. At least for now. When people I admire and respect can lay out passionate points on both sides... I listen, and for the moment... I'm leaving it at that.

This is all kind of new to me... I like to think of it as some sort of growth, on my part. "Go in, guns blazing" used to be my default approach. Age, and a little experience, has made me realize it's okay to listen, and wait, and take it all in.

Jeralyn lays out the case for Free Roman. Ann Appelbaum offers points over at WaPo...

And Kate Harding takes them apart. As does Melissa over at Shakes. And feminists all over marvel at the defenders...

And for now... that's all I got.