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On The Insignificant Moments, And The Pointless 47th Anniversaries

What do you get for a 47th anniversary?

I'm sure there's a Hallmark list out there somewhere, but I'm mostly being facetious; my point is... we don't generally concern ourselves with "anniversaries" that don't end in 5 or 0. And even then, we're probably being a bit excessive with our cultural addiction to mindless counting.

My larger point is that up until a few weeks ago, maybe, no one particularly cared that Glenn Beck was going to be part of a rally at the Lincoln Memorial which, as it turns out, happened to coincide with the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King giving his "I Have A Dream" speech at the same place.

Coincidence? Probably not. But unlike many who seem to be convinced the apocalypse is at hand - including many of Beck's fans, one might note - I tend to think the lesson from yesterday's gathering was mostly that collective assemblages on the Mall in DC are kind of silly. We like to think that America is a culture overwhelmed by mass opinions, run by the will of crowds, all too familiar with the tyranny of the majority.

The reality, I tend to suspect, is that in America we tend to ignore just how not true any of that is - that the real proof of the amazing freedoms that we've created in this country (the freedoms we are convinced will evaporate before our eyes at any moment), is just how little power the majority, or the crowd, has over any one of us. Nowhere, really, offers a place for the anarchist separatist quite like some out of the way spot in some forgotten corner of an American city. And nowhere else is that lonely separatist likely to find a bunch of others, free from intrusion or harassment by the outside world.

Let your freak flag fly, I say.

More Than A Woman, Less Than A Word

Speaking of unpleasant and disagreeable - it was in there, somewhere - I've been meaning to say a few words about Dr. Laura Schlessinger and the comments that led to her leaving talk radio.

It's worth remembering, for one thing, why Dr. Laura rose to prominence in the first place: her show, and her shtick, had everything to do with a pendulum swing response to the rise of psychologizing every personal problem, especially for daytime television. That movement - the "pop psychology" wave that took flight in the sixties, and became something of a driving force in the seventies - was a lot of what built Phil Donahue into the phenomenon he became, along with a slew of imitators, obviously and most directly leading to the modern day dominance of Oprah Winfrey.

Schlessinger's rise was part of the oppositional response, grounded in a sense that pop psychologizing had become a lazy, catch-all way of evading personal responsibility for one's own flaws and mistakes. Nor was this an entirely outrageous assessment - while pop psychology helpfully removed the stigmas surrounding say, addiction, and conditions like depression, there was also a tendency to substitute the naming of a problem for actually doing something about it. The naming itself was so refreshing and freeing that the struggle of actually dealing with the problems in question - of actually treating depression, or overcoming addiction - seemed superfluous. It was also the case that actually solving those problems also turned out to be difficult, painful... and not necessarily uplifting television that fit conveniently into a 48 minute talk show format. And so the easy shorthand became: present tortured victim with problem. Bring on "expert" to explain name of problem and possible solutions, and finish with some indication that hope is possible and suggest further reading.

The blowback to that was the intersection between people who felt, in an especially American way, that taking action and personal responsibility was being de-emphasized in favor of a "victim-ology" and a new kind of inertia; and traditionalists who viewed progress on psychological problems with skepticism, and favored older, more "common sense" approaches to personal problems.

Schlessinger was neither the first, nor the best of the anti-pop psychologists; but her heavily rightwing stances and her willingness to say uncompromising, controversial things guaranteed success on talk radio and a kind of notoriety that would increase curiosity and ratings.

In the rush to tag Schlessinger's latest "n-word" comments as beyond the pale, many people lost sight of the fact that Dr. Laura - who, as many noted, had slunk well out of the spotlight after a number of controversies in the nineties - was not saying or doing anything especially surprising. The "advice" she has offered to her callers has always been about providing confrontational "you're the one with the problem" type of harangues that insisted all could be fixed by taking some responsibility and wallowing in less self pity. The advice she was offering to her caller that day - revolving around the woman's concerns that her husband's friends were expressing prejudices that made her uncomfortable in her mixed-race marriage - was of a piece with her advice all along. Get over it. Stop complaining. Grow up.

It's also worth pointing out that, really, much of pop psychologizing has become more attuned to this sense of personal responsibility and taking action; Oprah's presentation of these issues - her discussions of struggles with diet and weight issues, of relationship complexities, etc - reflect the sense that a viewer should feel "empowered" to tackle her problems, take action, and work towards concrete results. Eat... Pray... Love... is still, ultimately about doing something.

Criticism of Schlessinger has focused, naturally, on her use of "the N word". I have little use for either the word itself or the "N word" construction we use to avoid saying the actual word in print or aloud. Am I shocked that she used the term, repeatedly in her extended diatribe? Perhaps, as we all are, given how it is so anathema for it to be said in polite society... but given Dr. Laura's willingness to shock, I'm not, really.

And beyond the word, the real problem with Schlessinger's advice, and the real prejudice she revealed was when she said to her caller, a black woman, "if you can't put aside some of your sensitivities, you shouldn't have married outside your race."

What perked up my ears - and why I suspected that Laura's retirement was not far off was that final clause: "married outside of your race." It's a wording that's, well, archaic. "Married outside your race" speaks volumes to notions about staying with your own, about enforcing social conventions, and making judgments about other people's life choices. Love sees no color... but we, as humans, do. It's what we do with what we see that matters. And when you look at an interracial relationship and think "ah, look - they're dating outside the race..." their relationship is not the problem. What you're seeing, is.

The reason Schlessinger's type of harangue is of such limited value in the end is that it, too, is inherently contradictory: rejecting "victim" status, standing up for yourself are celebrated in her worldview... but for Schlessinger's advice to be meaningful you have to agree that she, in the end, is better at evaluating your life and your problems than you are; that is, you should stand up for yourself... after I tell you how you are a mess-up. But who is she to judge? Especially when, as Laura herself has demonstrated in the past few weeks, she rejects anyone's assessment of her own actions, other than her own?

Finally, Schlessinger's "why can they say n****er when I can't" is itself a generic, poor substitute for a thoughtful discussion about attitudes on race and language; it's a coy way of saying "I want to be able to use an ugly insult, but can't because it's socially unacceptable... yet others can use the term as long as it isn't used in that deeply offensive way." The whole construction is naive, and ultimately, makes the point it's trying to avoid. Moreover, Schlessinger seems well aware that she crossed a line, a tacit admission that, in fact, her shtick has been, in its way, shtick all along. More than what she said, that she said it at all, desperately pushing her way back to the kind of cultural relevance she once enjoyed, is a good indication of why the ride is over for her. And as much as Schlessinger has become yet another example of the way we avoid, as a society, the complicated discussions of racial issues - like attitudes about interracial relationships - in favor of isolating those who challenge the established truce of silence, the fact remains... she's no more interested in the hard parts of the discussion than anyone else. The discussion we need on race is about more than some cheap shot from a has-been radio host... and extends beyond one unnecessary word. You feel me?

The Sound Of Anger, Voting

However much I may have issues with Rachel Maddow and her snark, her point last night was well taken, late in the show: the idea of "anti-incumbent fever" driving this fall's elections appears to be largely a dud, and it's really only desperation that keeps driving that narrative as the "one to watch" with each new set of results.

"Tea Party Rage" may have had its moment, but as I pretty much guessed last summer, translating anger into effective election strategies has proved elusive, at best. The two most prominent Tea Party "successes" - Sharron Angle in Nevada and Rand Paul in Kentucky - have both proven to be erratic campaigners, the success of either in considerable doubt. Even Marco Rubio, poster child for how Tea Parties would allow a "fresh wave" of rising GOP stars to reshape the party, has come undone by Charlie Crist's refusal to go quietly, with Crist now looking to achieve the victory he expected all along.

The Florida race is one of those that will get some greater clarity tonight, when Democratic primary voters decide whether to back Kendrick Meek or Scott Greene, the billionaire who decided he was better suited to represent the needs of Florida's working class. That's the kind of interesting hybrid we're getting this year: plutocrats with a generous streak, and a desire to help. No Seriously: After Greene, let's discuss Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman.

The kind of anger that's been brewing since the start of the serious economic downturn - nearly three years, come this fall - doesn't translate well into action. It's anger at our circumstances, at the fact that a whole conception of the world has changed (at least its finances), and impotent rage that government, everywhere and at every level, can't seem to fix what's broken. And what's broken can really only be fixed the hard way: no more parties, less fun, less  spending beyond limits, and more acknowledgment that limits exist. That's not been the American way... certainly not in at least 30 years or so, if ever.

I don't think the "MSM" was wrong to posit the "anti incumbent fever" theory; it made sense, especially heading into the end of last year, that there was just so much anger, and so much energy... that something was bound to change. But nothing, really, did, or has. Our two party system is constructed, after all, to resist change and protect the status quo. Some politicians went out and learned the language of rage. Some learned to paint the angry folk as crazy, out of step, and dangerous. And some politicians didn't have to learn anything at all; many House members, still, will benefit mostly from carefully drawn districts, large cash on hand, and opponents who can't realistically pose any threat to their reelection. That's the power of incumbency.

Sure, we've had a handful of high profile flame-outs, most notably probably Arlen Specter, desperately chasing reelection by recasting himself as the Democrat in Pennsylvania, only to have actual Democrats reject that notion out of hand. Specter, after all, is the proof that there are limits, still, to just how outrageously you can treat the electorate's option to choose someone other than you before they reject you. But perhaps most of us didn't draw the right conclusion - that you have to go as far beyond the pale as Specter did before facing consequences. Charlie Rangel, I suspect, learned that lesson all too well.

Primary after primary, including tonight's various results, have shown that incumbency is still more powerful than almost all reason, and certainly most rage.  And that money, after incumbency, pretty much rules the results. Neither of those oppressive realities suggest that Republicans have much more than a slim chance at possibly a narrow return to a majority in the House, and I'm comfortable saying even that seems unrealistic. Expecting voter anger to drive Republican success, absent Republicans offering any credible alternative notions for governing now seems wishful; it has all along.

In the last couple of weeks my own Congressional district has been revealed as a hotbed of just this angry approach: John Hall's opponent, a doctor, is up with ads suggesting that Washington has "excessive spending disease" and the cure is "radical surgery" by removing Hall and replacing him with her. We'll see if it succeeds, but the idea of a voting down the "Hall-Pelosi" agenda sounds pretty shrill and ludicrous in the ad, and unlikely to happen in reality. Painting Hall as some sort of lefty extremist, out of step with upscale suburban Westchester professionals, seems a fool's errand, even if Hall's district was once of a bellweather of Reagan Democrat voting patterns. That time has passed, and the northeastern swath of liberal Republicanism that stretched from Westchester into Connecticut is pretty much dead as well. Conservative extremism did that in years ago.

But as a voter... sure, I'm annoyed, and I'd love to vote for someone, anyone, who'd represent a significant change to governing, especially at the state level. So far... living that dream seems hopeless, too: faced with choosing between lackluster Andrew Cuomo and known failure Rick Lazio for governor, Cuomo's ascendancy seems assured. That's the kind of political reality we're stuck with: anger that would lead to considerable change, married to the same lousy choices we've always had (really... were I in Arizona, facing the unappealing choice of JD Hayworth or John McCain, I'd pretty much give up). Sure, it'll piss you off... but then what?

No seriously... then what?

But Of Course... That's Not How It Happened.

In the ever unfolding, never ending discussion of the "Mosque At Ground Zero", perhaps the best indication of just how much it's taken over this American moment is how the discussions that arise out of the controversy have become about nothing and everything, filled with hyperbole, bad metaphors and best of all... misremembered history.

I like to think of American as not so much poor at history as ahistorical - that is, our current events unfold in a vacuum where the past generally doesn't exist, except to confirm our generalized sense that our current moment is exceptional and the apex of our best moments (this is also why next season on American Idol is sure to be it's... best season ever!).

This evolving conception of reality makes for especially fascinating roles for America's historians, who often have to resume discussions of history from square one, re-explaining the most familiar events and reminding us that things weren't, well, that good, even recently. I find this, often, when talking about race issues, patiently explaining that Loving vs. Virginia happened in my lifetime, for instance.

Sunday's talk shows were filled pointless, unproductive discussions of the Mosque story, most often because basic facts and common matters of our history were either ignored, left uncorrected, or set up for debate as if there were more than one answer. Sadly, that was even the case when Daisy Khan, the woman who is helping to spearhead the Park51 project, appeared with Christiane Amanpour on Amanpour's still nascent approach to "This Week" on ABC... only to be followed by 4 of the usual suspects (Judy Woodruff and Al Hunt - Carville and Matalin for the senior set - along with Robert Reich and George Will) who spoke about a "mosque by Ground Zero" even though Ms. Khan had patiently explained the whole "Community Center" concept.

And that was the bright spot of the weekend - Amanpour, in fact, is already making Sundays vastly more interesting and productive as these things go - what with Fox's usual right side polemicists and David Gregory giving Rick Lazio wide berth to be especially dense, little fresh thinking was in evidence, and no real headway was made bridging the differences the proposed Center has revealed within our culture.

What prompted me to write about this, though, was tonight's moment with Lawrence O'Donnell covering Keith Olbermann on Countdown on MSNBC, talking to Time's editor for Muslim issues, asking if yesterday's ugly protest in New York - I didn't see it, and I suspect O'Donnell was overdoing his descriptions of it, as he does - were some sort of turning point, where ugly depictions of prejudice changed people's minds.

Set aside, for a moment, the idea the "ugly prejudice" is as American as apple pie (mine, not your mother's less interesting version ) - I did, after all, already talk about that - what struck me was O'Donnell's example of a moment in our history which was supposed to prove his point: the tensions around busing in Boston, which, according to O'Donnell, reached their apex when an angry crowd attempted to stab a black man with a flagpole, American flag still attached. O'Donnell then opined that after that... "people pulled back" and Boston "found its way" out of the tensions of busing.

I don't know the story... but O'Donnell is pretty much deliberately misremembering the story of busing... the tension ended, well, when Boston stopped forced busing of kids to integrate Boston schools. In other words, the racial tensions ended when everyone was allowed to return to their comfortably separate enclaves... which, by the way, is the story of Boston pretty much down to this day, where Roxbury and South Boston remain calmly separated, and Cambridge has all the educated upper class integration it can possibly hold.

If O'Donnell's point is that we'll get past this moment when we can shunt Muslims comfortably off to their own separate area... well, that seems like what the sensible opposition is arguing as well. Build "a mosque" or a community center... just somewhere else.  But I think what O'Donnell had in mind was something else: the notion, that sunny alternate world of America, where we comfortably integrated, and everyone learned racial tolerance, by rejecting the segregated South.

It's a lovely story, one you hear frequently from older liberals... but that's not really how it happened. I lived the supposed "post integration" years in schooling... where I comfortably integrated many a classroom by being the only person of color in class, or one of three or four, all of us comfortably suburban and middle class, more like our white peers than the distant communities where most people of color lived. It wasn't awful... but it surely wasn't progress. In reality we haven't made much progress; our K-12 school districts are less integrated now than they were in the seventies, interracial marriage is still in the single percentages.

It's an obvious point really, the one about how we don't understand our own history, never mind reflect on it, never mind use our understanding of our history to inform our current debates; it's unlikely we'll start now to try and undo that. Without keeping a clear eye on our past, and understanding what's happened, and what hasn't... we can't make much progress... and I can't help but feel a little sad for that nice lady who spoke with Christiane Amanpour, calmly convinced that this would all work out if people just knew the facts. It's lovely to think we do the good things just because someone tells us how to be good... but that's not really how it happens... if it ever really happens.

Friday Evening Flotsam

jinb
 

Park 51 And Why We Are Not A Nice People

Being liberal does not make you a better person.

If you said "well, obviously," and I think my few loyal readers did, kudos for being honest about it. When I was younger, especially during my more rad, angry phase in college, I went through the superiority thing, convinced that I was not just correct in my politics... but good. Better, even. It took a while to let that go - years, even, to apply it fully - but that sense of being absolutely right, or thinking oneself virtuous, needs a reality check. Mine came when I saw some ugly maneuverings in a campus dispute, and began to understand the complexities on all sides of an issue (in my case, divestment policies for colleges supporting businesses supporting South Africa under apartheid - don't ask). No one was entirely right. no one was exactly wrong.

There's a thing about Americans - a dangerous thing, really - to see ourselves as especially enlightened and good, and even virtuous. We measure ourselves, as a nation, by our good intentions, our higher ideals, our better natures. Our idea of foreign policy is that we are out in the world to spread freedom, to stand for justice. Our military fights for the good side, does the right things. We are the good guys. We do this even though we've learned, painfully and at great cost, that we are ot always good, and not always right. Try to suggest that everything about Vietnam was doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons... and if not outright anger and rejection, you are likely to get the traditional American fallback position - our naivete. "How could we have known?" "What else could we have done?"

It's possible - just possible - that we Americans are not a nice people. That we are not good, and not so virtuous. We are a nation of greedy people, using and consuming and hoarding the world's resources at an unsustainable rate. We fuel the world's drug trade with a near insatiable demand for illicit substances. We are a nation of loose morals, casual marriages, frequent divorces. We gave the world jazz... and 24 hour television. And endless advertising. And beverages consisting of little more than sugar water and food coloring. We are not, necessarily, making the world a better place.
 
Perhaps the mistake, then, in the way we are thinking about the "mosque at Ground Zero" debate is fooling ourselves with notions that all people need is an appeal to our best intentions and our better natures. Since the plans for the Park 51 project - a muslim run community center in lower Manhattan with a number of planned uses, including an area for prayer and religious services - were announced, pretty much every poll has an overwhelming number of Americans opposed to it, in the mid sixties. Among New Yorkers, it appears to be in the mid seventies. And the opposition, frankly, does not seem to come from a good place; it's the ugly rhetoric of racial and ethnic and religious divisions. It's language that equates "radical Islam" with terrorism, and paints awful notions of Islamic ideas and teachings.

And a lot of people seem pretty comfortable with it.

There's a story we like to tell about our history that makes us look good, better, even, than we are.  It's this notion that we are a "great melting pot," that New York City is an exciting, vibrant place because of the continuous swirl of new people coming here to Try and Make It. The less pleasant reality, of course, is that this nation has rarely been especially welcoming to immigrants, legal or not, and New York City is less some wondrous Oz than a gritty, practical lesson in the power of conglomeration and the lure of large metropolitan cities as generators of economic potential. If you can barely make it as a cabdriver here... you have not made it, and may well not make it anywhere.

I'm not saying it's a good thing that so many people are so opposed to the mosque, or that much of the opposition isn't ugly, parochial, xenophobic, even racist. What I am saying is... that's who we are. Like many people, most people, even. It's nice to think that "we learned something" after 9/11, and that it was all good. New York, I think, is still a much different place since that day, and in some ways better - people pulled together, lived through an awful experience, admitted, at times, to being vulnerable. But we are not nobler for it, necessarily.  It is a different city, not always a better one.

That's why I think the lonely liberal voices who insist that we are betraying our "American virtues" by opposing the mosque - many of them the same people who kept insisting, for the past few weeks, that the whole project was "no big deal" - miss the point: we are not virtuous, and being liberal does not make us right or good. We are not good people... we are not a nice people. We are human and imperfect and flawed and sometimes we do not act on our better impulses, or the call of our better angels. And the discussion of the Park 51 project, which deals practically, and realistically, with people's ambivalence and anger and fear... has to admit that these things exist. That it's not wrong to be scared or angry... because feelings aren't the problem. And maybe that building, in that location, isn't the best place for a mosque or a 14 story community center or whatever it turns out to be.

This mosque story - which is not just going to go away, and is not "nothing" - is not going to be a story about how good we are, how tolerant we are, what a great nation we are welcoming any and everyone to our shores. This is about our intolerance, our intransigence, our prejudices and our fears ruling the day.  We're not nice people for giving into our fears. But then, we are not a nice people. And the more clear-eyes we are about that, the better, it seems to me.

Hot Rods, Warm Dinners, Cold Comfort

It's been a long day, one of those days when motivation, never mind subject matter, is hard to find.

It took me several hours, after getting home from work mid afternoon - late afternoon, more realistically - to drum up the energy and motivation to even cook dinner, my favorite simple meal of pasta and meat sauce with fresh mozzarella. The cheese is one of the last of my personal indulgences, since fresh mozz goes bad within days and I can get one, maybe two uses out of a small mound before the whole thing starts to spoil. But it's about the only cheese I like, and I've come to adore it melted into my pasta. So, for $5 or so... I get a day or two of pleasure.

Before dinner prep started, I was lolling around with cable news, half watching the kind of shows that do nothing for me - Glenn Beck, blathering away vs. Hardball with some Matthews sit-in substitute, flogging the Muslim Mosque non-story into the Ground Zero. My ambivalence was pretty well summed up by Obama's two comments - I'm sure there's no good reason not to permit a mosque (or community center) to be built... just don't ask me to be wildly in favor of it.

All of that got blown aside when the verdict suddenly came down in the Rod Blagojevich case... or really, the non-verdict, since a mistrial was the result on 23 of 24 counts. Cue another round of discussions with legal types that didn't illuminate very much, either.

Mostly, I was happy to settle back into the pasta dinner and watch some more Buffy DVD of Season 3. I'm up to Bad Girls and Consequences.

Over time, I've settled on a recipe for pasta and meat sauce that's a bit idiosyncratic; heavy on the garlic (mincing a clove or two is my favorite prep task), frying up thin hot dog slices (inexpensive but flavorful), adding a store bought tomato basil sauce (no added sugars; I was stunned when I started Atkins a few years back and discovered how much sugar was in, say, Prego. Now I can't buy anything with more than about 6g of carbs on the label). It's not that I do Atkins now - that would be the pasta - but some attention to those details just seems prudent.

By the time the meal was ready - including a salad of fresh spring greens (10 years of Whole Foods changes a girl) - Mom was home and it was time for her nightly Rachel Maddow ritual. I don't judge, but it was quickly apparent to me that Maddow's show is of little real use. Smug sarcasm from a liberal point of view is still too much smug superiority for me, and agreeing with it - as opposed to thinking Laura Ingraham both unfunny and cruel, say - just seems worse. I think it may hark back to my first exposure to preppiness and The Preppy Handbook: the best kind of superiority is the one you don't have to announce.

Blagojevich, of course, has none of the kind of preppy elan: he's a working class guy, straight up from the white ethnic enclaves of midwestern immigrants that made up so much of Daley's Chicago Democratic base. It's part of the reason the former Governor's machine politics and quid pro quo dealings could seem almost quaintly appalling - the Smart Set thinks it's tacky to get caught... and to seem to desperate and grabby. Pushy, even. It's all so... low class.

It wasn't that Chris Hayes was wrong, pointing out the seaminess of Blagojevich's  grabby approach; it was the apparent snarky joy he took making Blago look foolish and greedy. If this is a serious case - and I suspect, really, that the jury's failure to reach verdicts suggests that in many ways, it wasn't - I think Hayes tended to underscore why no one, really takes this very seriously, but treats the Blogjeviich as more sideshow than serious danger. We're mostly making a fuss about making sure Blago is put in his place. And that his worst sin, probably, was aspiring to upper class respect without taking on upperclass manners and deportment.

Me, I just want dinner. And maybe the chance to spend some time in a world where class issues are less pronounced and the dividing lines between good and evil are easier to draw, and more ntertaining to watch. My mom is mystified by my affection, even now, for Buffy, and other supernatural stories. Me, I think the whole thing's kind of obvious: I like my monsters to be plainly identified, to root for the complicated heroes who serve as demon killers, and to live in that world of American popular fiction where we all exist in a vague, all encompassing middle class where everyone is part of it, and we can all share in the rewards and benefits. There's a reason our entertainments seduce so many, and why so many people aspire to those American dreams. It's probably cold comfort to Rod Blagojevich, these days. And maybe it's best, them, to settle for the pleasures of a nice hot meal. And then head off to bed. That's my plan, anyway.

Naughty, Naughty

In many ways, Middle Men is the kind of "indie" film that improves the cineplex: adventurous, daring filmmaking on a difficult subject (the dark side of the porn biz) with an interesting cast and a lively script. That's not exactly the reality - Middle Men comes from Paramount Vantage, one of the quasi-indie arms of a major studio that's become, in effect, the only way to make the more modest size, middle budget films that used to be the factory product of studio operations, now outsourced to smaller production companies nearby. And while Middle Men is indeed a quality film on a more modest budget, that "bracing" examination of porn economics is, often, conveniently aimed at making the audience feel dirty while the film, literally, gets away with murder.

Based on true events - or one of those slippery wordings that says reality had a hand in this at some point - the film follows Jack Harris, a wheeler-dealer club operator, who trips over one of the internet's better ideas: the system which processes credit card transactions for a third party, allowing people to purchase, say, porn on the web without the exact nature of the transaction showing up on the bill.

In tone and structure, the film follows the lead of films like Boogie Nights - lots of back and forth narration, stories within stories, porn played more as sleazy comic asides than seriousness... until things get especially dark and dangerous. Then, off to the easy moral lesson factory we go... and soon, all is well.

In the case of Middle Men, this results in a fascinating attempt to whitewash the Harris character, played by Luke Wilson. The film sets up as a wholesome, God fearing puppy of a man who proposes to his sweetheart over friend chicken at the church picnic, and is led astray into world o' porn by economic necessities and greed. That tends to elide the seamier aspects of the story - such as Harris' bacjground as a Chicago mobn enfoorcer, or the kind of shady business around the nightclub he operates in LA that requires a slew of big beefy black bodyguards. The good boy briefly gone bad act doesn't really wash, and that, along with its convenient lapses into easy moralizing tend to undermine Middle Men's otherwise bracing, even refreshing attempts to take down the prudishness around porn and the easy moral superiority and condemnation it gets. Considering that it is, still, the billion dollar backbone of most commerce on the web... somebody seems to know what's out there, and buys it.

Harris winds up paired with a couple of coke-addicted pornhounds, one of whom is the actual creator of the credit card program, introduced to them by a sleazy lawyer with some criminal issues of his own. Harris gradually helps turn the business into a million dollar concern, licensing out the credit card processing service, while he struggles to unravel the bad nusiness decision the pair made to tie themselves up with the Russian mob in LA.  Harris has almost managed to negotiate out a settlement, when a series of complicatiosn results in the death of a Russian bagman in his LA condo.

From there, the film is a quick trip through the sleazy rewards of success and the perils of mob connections and coke addiction, which all unravels prety quickly when Harris' business partners, in cole induced paranoia, reveal the secret of the mobster killing - which they witnessed -  to the wrong people. Harris' storybook marriage is also complicated by his involvement with one of the top female stars in porn, a young beauty with some street smarts and a host of relationship issues.

As things come to a head, Harris finds the opportunity to disassociate himself from this crazy porn fueled lifestyle, and to return to his wife. This is billed as a Come To Jesus revelation of The Error of His Ways, but it seems more like a convenient, even fortuitous confluence of circumstance more than a sudden leap to high moral standards. In order for this conversion to work, someone's got to be left holding the bag, looking especially sleazy... and I suspect that the film would like, conveniently, to blame the audience for wanting to look. If you didn't spend all these billions of dollars of porn content... this stuff wouldn't be there. Or something.

That's probably true enough... but Middle Men suffers most from trying to have it both ways - grinning salaciously at the flesh parade, gawking at boobies and hinting at louche behaviour at lurid orgies, Luke Wilson's narration blathering away about losing one's moral compass. Maybe, but it seems to me that Harris' compass was working just fine, pointed right in the direction of the intersection of big money and naughty shenanigans. At best, Middle Men owns up to the idea that we ought to be honest about our bad impulses and forays into dirty business. At worst, it wants to pretend,as we all do, that all the sleaziness is someone else's problem, or someone else's fault, lying to itself and to us about just how dirty it was, and even kind of fun. Mining the contradiction for all it's worth makes Middle Men a fine entertainment... but failing to square the circle, leaves mostly a bad taste from yet another too easy morality play. And that just leaves everyone feeling dirty. Lying does that.

If I Only Could, I'd Make A Deal With God

It's been a slow, painful return to writing after taking the time off to do community theater. Just how slow and how painful wasn't immediately apparent to me... but then the multiple missed days started to pile up again... and there I was, stalled and silent.

As usual, this summer, a lot of the silence comes from struggling to find something fresh to say. A lot of politics doesn't excite me, I'm sort of frustrated by how dismal things are, and I tend to think a lot of things (the economy, the left/right divide, healthcare developments) are in holding patterns that cannot last... which is basically waiting for something cataclysmic, which is hardly the best approach.

And the thing is... I haven't exactly been standing still. I've been working, a lot, and trying to catch up on some home projects - never enough to please my matriarchal roommate - and spending some time with friends. I also did some diving into the life that's packed away in my moving boxes stored in the basement and retrieved some books and DVDs that were languishing, an admittance that this time at home isn't as temporary as I once thought.

In the past few weeks, I've plowed through Seasons 1 and 2 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, neither of which I had ever watched in any complete way. I'm now about halfway through Season 3, still marveling at how smart and how complete the universe of Buffy is: I never realized that James Marsters had pretty much established Spike in Season 1, or how the dramatic arc of Season 2 may well have been the show's most complete and best executed (indeed, in many ways, Season 7 is simply a reprise of the major themes from 2, adding a few elements from 3).

(And I should add, all of the enjoyment of that Buffy box is thanks to my sister, who gave me just about the best Christmas present ever when she gave it to me.)

See? It's not that I have nothing to write about, or little to say, or no experiences from which to draw... it's something else... call it life, perhaps, or the call of something beyond the web and the lonely business of banging out words to try and create meaning. To write about experiences... you do have to have them, after all. Maybe it's just been the heat - in the past few, cool days, almost everything seems easier, less fraught, less wearing. It's too late in this game, along this long road of blogging to ask for patience or forebearance. I fyou're at all interested, I figure you'll check back. I'm still here, and at some point I'm hoping to be running up that hill, instead of trudging, and taking frequent breaks.

Mrs. Dash

Salt is so thoroughly artificial, it seems a special violation to be named for such a pure seasoning. Never genuine, thoroughly unreal, and utterly predictable, Salt trades on Angelina Jolie's kickass cred and wrecks it in a way that the other entirely formulaic exercises never could - it makes her uniqueness into something kind of bland and dull.

Taking "craptastic" to a whole new level, Salt doesn't engage in the pointless destruction of cherished landmarks (as opposed to, say, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or The Day After Tomorrow), but instead recklessly crushes  the premises which underpin our approach to governance in a civil society, with no particular concern for the destruction left in its wake - it's a film where it wouldn't hurt to bone up on the rules for Presidential succession, for instance. The result is the same as other big budget bludgeoners of good sense and taste: why not just have film executives beat us with hammers and take our money rather than film these monstrosities, when the effect is essentially the same?

If you intend to care, Salt is the tale of Evelyn Salt, a CIA agent who has been mostly going about her business as a covert operative, except for that time when she was found out in North Korea and tortured until they made a prisoner trade to release her (oh wait... isn't this the opening to Die Another Day? When did "sexy torture by North Korean warlords' become the new route to action hero cred?)

Back on the job some time later - enough time to return to being blonde and Angelina Jolie, anyway - Salt is leading a fun, mundane life in DC as a cog in the intelligence machine, when a Russian defector shows up in her office just as she's leaving (it's kind of like that time in The Devil Wears Prada when Andie has to go back to work and attend her boss' fabulous party...without the Galliano gown), and after a shaggy dog tale about Russians trained to infiltrate America, he accuses Salt of being one of those very Russians!

After this, it's all a game of Who Do You Trust both for Evelyn, and for us, since we can't know whether she's Evelyn or some Russian superspy. Or both.

To say all of this unfolds without much in the way of dramatic tension is decidedly an understatement. Plot points are so completely telegraphed that by the time Salt is sharing her knowledge of conversational Russian, you can pretty much guess where all this is headed, even as gets more and more preposterous by the minute. Full of plot holes, the script doesn't so much paper over them as simply smack questions down. If you have to ask... why did you bother buying a ticket?

None of this is necessarily terrible - the film is fairly handsomely filmed, though Phillip Noyce's generally enervating action filming style seems fairly dulled down here - but it's all pretty ersatz. Jolie manages to look haggard, bored, and confused all at once... which kind of constitutes a performance, but it's long past the time that she needs to find a fresh direction, and the "badass mama with a killer bod" business is beyond old. The performers around her are able enough - though Liev Schreiber can't even seem to muster the energy top chew scenery with his usual verve and mostly phones it in - but none of them are any more memorable than she is. Jolie's a fairly unique presence in that her generally aloof demeanor doesn't require deeply connecting with her costars, but there's cool distancing... and then there's the abyss. It doesn't help that by the end, most of the other characters are dead (oh seriously... that's no spoiler) or at least unconscious. 

It's nice enough that Jolie remains the rare woman who can, and gets to, carry action pictures, but Salt is one of those formulaic embarrassments that Hollywood churns out with machine like regularity, wanted or not, cutting and pasting the interchangeable star parts (the script was originally tailored to Tom Cruise, though it's hard to see him doing much with the film's inherent ambiguities), that rarely enhances anyone's resume. And now that the heatwaves seem to be passed, air conditioning alone is not enough of an excuse to see Salt. And that was about the only reason to make such a lazy, pointless exercise in running around and smashing things.