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ACA, Meet The Supremes

I haven't written much about politics, and even less on healthcare in a long while, and I wouldn't necessarily see a reason to start now, even with the Supreme Court arguments this week... but I think there's a few points that bear repeating. 

Which is to say: I feel like much of this "health care debate" is old news and the point's been made, but let's try again, just for giggles.

First, I tend to think the Supreme Court case is premature, but at this point, it was unavoidable. Once three Appellate Divisions had ruled, 2-1 in favor of it, there was pretty much no way for the Supreme Court not to take up this case. That's why the Supreme Court exists, to resolve disputes among the different Circuits. Still, I think the Court will regret taking this up too soon and in an election year, when the decision can't help but be all politics, and little in the way of good law.

Second, even though I think the case should have been left aside, I think the arguments that came out this week were fascinating reminders of why we're having this dispute. As someone with a lot of understanding about the issues of healthcare and health insurance in America, I still tend to forget how few people can see the bigger picture, or have thought deeply about the system of insurance and payments that we have. That, I think, has been a big driver of the "mandate is unconstitutional" side, and a lot of their naivete was on display in the Court recordings. Paul Clement's attempts, for instance, to separate health insurance as a market from healthcare services was almost laughable (and for everyone so sure of the outcomes... it was also telling that the most skeptical voice on this separation was John Roberts). Why people buy health insurance, how people use health insurance, what healthcare costs for people who don't have it, what kind of care people without health insurance can get... these are basic questions for understanding the health care problems we have, and the displays of lack of comprehension of these topics within the Supreme Court debate was deeply revealing... and deeply depressing.

Third, I think it was pretty clear that the mandate is constitutional, if unpopular. Healthcare is, virtually by definition, interstate commerce. Even separated from health service, health insurance is interstate commerce (all that takes is one company that operates in more tha one state, buying health insurance for its workers). Devising a system where people show proof of insurance or pay a penalty is a "necessary and proper" function of the tax code. This isn't hard. There might be a narrow argument that the government can't "compel" economic activity... but compulsion seems like a vague, hard to define standard (if passports require a photo... why can the government compel you to get one?). 

Fourth, the mandate isn't nearly what its opponents try to make it out to be. No one is "forced" to do anything, or buy anything, under the regulation. It says, basically, either you have health insurance or you pay a fee. The fee is comparatively small (indeed, it may be small enough that it, too, creates a perverse incentive to not buy insurance until one is absolutely desperate). Most people already have health insurance - again, more than 85% of the population, most workers through their employers, and the elderly through Medicare, just for starters. Those percentages have probably shifted somewhat since the economic downturn, but the vast majority of Americans are, still, insured. That makes the fee a dead issue for almost everyone, and the point of the healthcare legislation is that, with the mandate and other incentives, business and insurers will work harder to make sure more workers are insured, and for others, there will be increased access to programs like Medicaid, or the new health insurance exchanges.

This is not a great, or an elegant, or a nearly perfect solution to our healthcare problems; the solutions do nothing about health care cost, and they codify our employment based system of insurance in ways that probably make things worse. But that brings us back to the yearlong debate about the ACA tyo begin with - yes, there are other solutions... but most of them require enormous leaps in our healthcare systems that we're just not prepared to make as a nation. Broadening the availability of insurance is a reasonable, workable workaround. And doing it probably buys some time to craft other solutions without leaving millions with few healthcare options.

Finally, to go back to the beginning, the real mistake here may be the first one the Court made: as they debated on the first day... this case probably should be punted until the penalty fee actually goes into effect (this is the argument over the "Anti-Injunction Act" which says that you can't sue the government over a tax the government hasn't yet collected). Until the government has to start collecting the fee, we won't know how many people have to pay it. And the better case against the fee is actually probably by people who have no way to get insurance... a prospect which is much more likely to be the case if the Federal government and the States can't work out differences over Medicaid, if the health exchanges don't come together successfully, or if eocnomic conditions get worse. Even Massachusetts had to reexamine the timing and structure of their mandate fee, and the avilability of low cost insurance, as it became clear that the fee made more sense for many uninsured people when affordable insurance was unavailable. That may well be a signpost for a similar outcome, on a much larger scale, when the penalty fee goes into effect.

I'm not trying to play Mary Sunshine here - of course the Sipreme Court's conservative majority could overturn the whole thing; proof that this is far more a political choice than anything about the laws involved, more a way to score points for conservatism generally. But conservatives have, really, still no answers for the various problems our healthcare systems create, only a "fend for yourselves" approach that's disastrous not just for some, but for most of us. The Affordable Care Act is unpopular... but more to the point, it is still not really understood. And that may be reason enough to do away with it. But it's not a good reason... just like this case, really, is not a good case.

Articles We Never Finished Reading: Here, There... Somewhere

Deepika Bahri, a friend and an associate professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, where Mr. Rushdie is a distinguished writer in residence, said that Mr. Rushdie was game for interacting online with any person or subject, highbrow or low. “I don’t think it really matters to him,” Ms. Bahri said, when asked how such behavior might affect public perception. “He does not fear or have concern about what people think or what it will do to his literary reputation.”

                 - Laura Holson, "From Exile To Everywhere," The NYT, Sunday Styles (emphasis mine)

"Everywhere," it seems, refers to Manhattan nightclubs and restaurants, not frequent flights to Atlanta, where Salman Rushdie is apparently "in residence."

This one isn't a "don't bother" because of the actual piece - like most Sunday/SunGay Styles articles, sure, it deals in trivialities, but it's not as bad as, say, building a makeup line off of the villains in The Hunger Games, or treating Kim Kardashian impersonators as art. No, what made me throw this one down was the subject of the article, Rushdie himself, who still, somehow, manages to garner this kind of coverage as if anything he's done literarily is remotely relevant or important. Even when The Satanic Verses was published, earning Mr. Rushdie death threats from fundamentlaist Islam (mostly Iran), Rushdie was more social butterfly than literary light; and time spent in hiding didn't particularly help ground him much better. But even the Times article notes that whole escapade ended after about ten years, and we're a good twenty years past that. And still, Rushdie is most notable for catting around with attractive women, frequenting nightclubs and bars, and vaguely talking about writing a new series for Showtime. And the difference between him and some other guy you run into on the Hotel Gansevoort rooftop? Not much, save that Rushdie is paid absurd sums to serve as things like "Distinguished Writer", no seriously... wait for it... "In residence" at Emory in Atlanta.  

Of course, Emory is welcome to throw its money away in any way it sees fit, but I just feel bad for the actual students at Emory, who deserve better than some Page Six Publicity Monster who can't even be bothered to take terms like "in residence" seriously.  And to be even fairer, this is hardly even one of the ten top reasons I'd never take Emory seriously, either (number one: Atlanta). None of which can be blamed on the Times, though it's hard to tell just how firmly Holson is relaying all of this seirously, or tongue in cheek. In either case, I couldn't be bothered to find out how this one turns out... because the thing really seems to write itself.

The Hunger Games: The Revolution, Televised

I freely admit that I'm not one of the people obsessed with The Hunger Games, and not particularly invested in how it's adapted to the screen. I find the whole level of attention devoted to it a bit weird. Though it is example C (or D) in the adaptations of tween novels to the big screen, it seems to be the hardest to explain. Fans of Twilight can quickly sum up the imprtance of it - the romantic triangle of Bella Edward and Jacob - as can the Harry Potter fans - magic, interesting boy and mysterious back story - but what I've found in the past couple of months is that Hunger Games fandom is much less coherent. It's something about the empowered girl and the exicting plot ("I couldn't put it down" seems the most common expression), but beyond that, not exactly clear.

Having seen the filmed result, I can kind of see both the appeal and the incoherence... but generally, I'd call myself underwhelmed. The Hunger Games is a curious bid for a blockbuster - briskly plotted, but also predicatble and a bit dull, overthought and (literally) underfed. Surprisingly didactic - how else can one put allegory and class consciousness onscreen, exactly? - The Hunger Games strikes me as yet another curious tween monstrosity, another "empowerment" tale for girls whose underlying themes are really anything but.

Much of what ails The Hunger Games I'd probably chalk up to a familiar problem with much of fantasy futurist science fiction: the problems really lie with the premise, and how deeply one is willing to invest in the creation of an alernate reality.

The Hunger Games takes place in a vaguely futurisitic quasi-America, where another apparent Civil War resulted in some sort of brokered peace deal that divided the country into 13 "Districts", 12 subsidiaries ruled by a capital district where wealth and power have apparently centralized. And the fiction comes down, literally, to how fully one is prepared to buy into this premise. Finding it skeptical on several levels (point A: the new capital is not a coastal city, but a landlocked valley area in between mountain ranges. This is rarely how national or international capitals work. Example B: it's hard to explain how the 12 subsidiary districts simply came to accept this sort of centralized control, given that they are mineral rich, or farm producers, etc. That's a building block of independence right there), I had a hard time buying much of the film which is built on it.

The 12 subsidiary districts, as a condition of the peace, are required to send two young adults, boy and girl, to an annual contest where only one winner will survive. These are, yes "The Hunger Games" and have some impact on how food is distributed (though the film is especially vague on this connection). As the film starts, a new Games cycle is underway, and the "Reaping", where the children are selected, is the first big moment. The film starts in District 12, the Mining District (meant to represent, none too subtly, Appalachia), and we are introduced to Katniss, a hard scrabbling young woman who helps sustain her family's meager fortunes by bow hunting on forbidden land. When Katiss' younger sister Primrose (the names are uniformly groan inducing) is picked for the female roel, Katniss leaps up to take her place. She and a local boy - Peeta, no really, Peeta - are then whisked away to the Capital for two weeks of preparation and then the Games.

After a futuristic train ride (which called to mind nothing so much as Atlas Shrugged, of all films), the two are deposited into  a frenzy of activity of preparation and TV appearances. One of the ancillary points of The Hunger Games is about media distortion and TV reality programming gone mad... which is interesting, but odd, since the story seems curiously agnostic about the stage managing and manufacturing of false drama; it's bad... but also, for the plot, often quite convenient.

Similarly, the film wants to make a murderous competition amongst teens seem shocking.... but it does this, mostly, by putting children in considerable danger and making them into the bad actors in the demise of other kids. My mother has often pointed out to me, especially in horror films, that this use of children as monstrous actors is exploitative and offensive, and I've come to similar conclusions. For all the attempts to try and dress up this kid on kid killing as both allegorical (it's sci-fi!) and extreme so as to make a point... the reality remains that this film has it both ways at once: isn't it terrible that kids are killing kids, hunting each other for sport? And hey... isn't it interesting to find out who wins?

Actually, it's not that interesting to find out who wins, since the series heroine is unlikely to die off in Part One; and her fellow competitors, save for hapless Peeta, are largely ciphers, barely drawn in and given simple motivations and obvious plot filling roles which they do, and die, largely in logical order. Nor is the behind-the-scenes manipulation of the Games all that compelling, since the Capital adults are pretty much uniformly painted as twisted wrongdoers with no moral compass (save for Katniss' mentor Cinnah, the perfect, morally upright black man the world needs right now).

The film, for what is, seems both overlong and a bit thin; brisker editing would have helped in a number of spots, but the Game itself is less enervating than many of these "Human Hunting in the Wild" escapades - Deliverance, for instance, comes to mind as vastly superior in suspense and execution. Moreover the cinematography of the action sequences is done with jerky, handheld cameras which frequently make the action unclear as to who is doing what to whom, and often out of focus. It's an odd, unsatisfying set of moments. The scoring, too, is predictable and dull, but the film could actually use more incidnetal music, rather than long stretches of stiff, uncomfortable silences.

But creatively, the film's biggest flaw is probably in art direction and costume design, where the films "rich vs. poor" obviousness becomes just too much. On the poor side, the depiction of hard conditions and deep poverty rob the characters of a lot of their diginity - it's all dirt and rags and grim greys. On the rich side, the film doesn't just refer to one opulent period, but instead gloms almost all of them onto one another - art deco (ie Nazis) on top of Baroque (Revolutionary France) on top of Late Empire (Napoleonic) on top of Gilded Age until the effect is cartoonishly overdone. It's not just "less is more", it's that this kind of eccentric melange - the kind, most obviously, that John Galliano turned into high art at Dior, for instance - is actually very hard and takes a very precise, knowing eye. Instead, what we get here is all wrong - bad perms, clown makeup, tight, uncomfortable looking dresses and improbable, impractical shoes... and that's not just the girls, it's actors like Stanley Tucci, Toby Jones, and Woody Harrelson, too.

Those latter three names give a sense of the overloaded star power careening through this film (add in Donald Sutherland in an inexplicable cameo as President and it's all just too too much), most of them phoning it in for the paycheck (only Harrelson, I'd argue, really finds the center of his role as a former champion turned trainer). Of the yonger leads, I thought Jennifer Lawrence was too old for the part (given that she's already played a much more mature notion of the Katniss part in Winter's Bone), but she actually underplays quite nicely and grounds the steeliness of Katniss in some much needed uncertainty and naivete, though she's largely superheroic and wildly confident. Liam Hemsworth, as the love interest left behind, is colorless. Josh Hutcherson, as Peeta, is charming, but doesn't have all that much to do beyond suffering and looking noble.

I can't entirely knock The Hunger Games as hopeless - as frustrating as it was at times, this is undeniably more fully thought through and precisely plotted than much of what passes for Hollywood Blockbusters of late. And in that, its popularity reflects, most likely, a yearning for better written big budget films, a wish I have as well.  Mostly, I suspect, The Hunger Games gives a comfortable perch from which to feel guilty about privilege and plenty without having to do all that much about the people suffering with less. The trilogy, apparently, continues into a revolution by the Districts against the Capital... but like most of the story's plot, these developments are broadly telegraphed in advance and don't feel like they deliver much, ultimately, in emotional payoff, but I'm happy to wait and see.

As empowered and strong as Katniss is, she's hard to root for, distant, overprepared and stoical - oddly, not all that far from Twilight's Bella, minus the disastrous relationship choices and self destructive tendencies. As positives as her strengths are, thematically, The Hunger Games basically posits that the only route out of poverty and hard circumstances is personal confidence, combative skill and mass uprising. I'd like to think the options on all three aren't quite that limited, much the way I think we need more than manufactured, televised drama to make our lives worthwhile. Curious and unsatisfying, The Hunger Gmes isn't so much a disappointment as a puzzling oddity.

Yet More Articles We Never Finished Reading: Supreme Obliviousness

As the Supreme Court lawyer Tom Goldstein puts it, “Paul has turned the health-care fight from kind of a conservative dream that’s untied to reality into a very serious threat to undo the president’s signature accomplishment.” This alone would be a landmark achievement—and, for most lawyers, would have required their complete attention. But health care is just one of seven cases that Clement will be arguing in front of the Supreme Court this term, a caseload previously unheard of for a private attorney. In fact, since leaving the position of solicitor general under Bush, he has become, in the Obama age, a sort of anti–solicitor general—the go-to lawyer for some of the Republican Party’s most significant, and polarizing, legal causes....

At the age of 45, Clement, who has thinning brown hair and the faintest trace of a midwestern accent left over from his Wisconsin childhood, is already in the upper echelon of the Supreme Court bar. It’s an elite group of lawyers who, much like the justices they routinely argue cases before, conceive of themselves as being Olympian in their detachment from politics. Almost all of them graduated from Harvard or Yale or Stanford law school; clerked for a Supreme Court justice; or worked in the solicitor general’s office. (In Clement’s case, he did all three.) Now, in their private practices, they pride themselves on handling only serious cases brought by serious people in a serious manner; even if their client doesn’t prevail—or, worse, turns out to be on the wrong side of history—that stigma doesn’t fall on the lawyer. John W. Davis, who argued the losing side in Brown v. Board of Education, is still held up as an exemplary Supreme Court advocate.

Nevertheless, despite these lawyers’ contention that they aren’t political animals, they are, of course—and their extrajudicial activities often reflect as much. Ted Olson, the man Clement has supplanted as the top conservative Supreme Court lawyer, was an outspoken critic of Bill Clinton, served on the board of directors of The American Spectator, and helped found the Federalist Society. His legal cases were always assumed to reflect his ideological convictions. (Even now that he is seeking to overturn Prop 8, Olson’s personal support for gay marriage is a major story line in the legal fight.) The unusual thing about Clement is that, while he’s undoubtedly a conservative and a Republican, he has managed to avoid this fate. His persona is rarely conflated with the case he’s arguing.

                Jason Zengerle, "The Paul Clement Court", also in New York's current issue.

Clement's political persona is "rarely conflated with the case he's arguing"... except, of course, that he's arguing the opposing side of Obamacare, the repeal of DOMA, arguing against race-based redistricting in Texas and defending South Carolina's attempt to impose voter ID. Clement is defending such a laundry list of right wing cases that Zengerle can barely keep a prose-bound straight face as he attempts to sell the notion that Clement represents a non-partisan ideal in Supreme Court advocacy. It's not the examination of Clement I object to, or the attempt to do a "let's see it from his side" presentation of Clement's views (that, at least, is moderately interesting). But seriously - the man is the former Solicitor General for George W Bush, currently serving as the go-to Supreme Court lawyer for Republican state Attorneys General. If that alone isn't a clear indication of the man's politics... then what, exactly, do political labels mean? It's not as if Clement can be mistaken as a Democrat, or that we can even find a liberal who'd take the depth and breadth of conservative causes on Clement's plate (and the example that proves that observation is Ted Olsen, the most noteworthy example in recent years of a lawyer crossing his usual political expectations to argue in favor of gay marriage rights). It would just be more honest, and more accurate to paint Clement as the kind of Republican that's all too hard to find these days: pleasant, respectful, willing to respect the rule of law, whatever the outcome, after making a well thought, full throated argument for his side. That's admirable enough, without pretending he's somehow nonpartisan.

Articles We Never Finished Reading: The Crying Game

If the nineties were the decade of Prozac, all hollow-eyed and depressed, then this is the era of Xanax, all jumpy and edgy and short of breath. In Prozac Nation, published in 1994, Elizabeth Wurtzel describes a New York that today seems as antique as the one rendered by Edith Wharton. In the book, she evokes a time when twenty­somethings lived in Soho lofts, dressed for parties in black chiffon frocks, and ended the night crying on the bathroom floor. Twenty years ago, just before Kurt Cobain blew off his head with a shotgun, it was cool for Kate Moss to haunt the city from the sides of buses with a visage like an empty store and for Wurtzel to confess in print that she entertained fantasies of winding up, like Plath or Sexton, a massive talent who died too soon, “young and sad, a corpse with her head in the oven.”

            Lisa Miller, "Listening to Xanax," New York Magazine (current issue)

Miller actually kicks off this article remembering the night she rummaged through her dying mother's medicine cabinet - in front of her mother's home care nurse - looking for an Ativan, surely a sign of the bad to come all by itself. But Miller's evocation, and dismissal, of Wurtzel (as fashionable now as it was when her book first appeared - Wurtzel will forever be punished for speaking truth to medicalizing women's problems) is itself an all-too-glib indication of missing the point: there will still be late nights of crying on the bathroom floor, whether you choose a happy pill like Prozac or an anesthetizer like Xanax or Ativan. We just haven't gotten to that part of the story yet.

And PS, congratulations to the various drug companies enjoying free advertising for their trademarked drug product names!

This American Lie

Maybe it's just a matter of timing - I didn't see it until late Friday afternoon, and the paid blogosphere does seem to cut out before Happy Hour on Fridays - but I'm surprised that the exposure of Mike Daisey as something of a fraud isn't resonating more on the right.

That may sound odd, but bear with me.

The discrediting of NPR has been an odd hobbyhorse of the right's most ardent screechers, something about the confluence of soothing voices, liberal boilerplate, and perceived objectivity, from what I can tell (roll that all up in a ball and you get... Nina Totenberg). James O'Keefe, in one of his more amusing sideshows, helped take out the head of fundraising at NPR with a tape of a conversation with a fake Middle Eastern investor, which led to a stunning series of off-point comments from senior officials at NPR that mostly made matters worse. NPR was also at the center of the Juan Williams "scandal", in which Williams was dropped as a commentator after telling Bill O'Reilly that he harbored suspicions that Muslims on his flights were possibly terrorists. 

Given all that, surely someone on the right will spend the weekend chortling as This American Life, one of NPR's most popular shows, has had to retract its most popular podcast, an episode recorded with Mike Daisey about Apple's dubious record manufacturing iPads and iPhones in China. Adapted from his monologue "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs", "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory" garnered a lot of attention, and started a string of modestly bad press for Apple, which has tried to minimize the fallout while trying to beef up standards at its plants (and I say "modestly bad" because none of it has really hurt Apple's sales or profits). 

Daisey's claims - that Apple's plants were rife with child workers and exposure to dangerous chemicals, among other horrendous practices - had been questioned by knowledgable reporters (though the practices were also confirmed by their reporting), but it wasn't until this week that Marketplace, PRI's business show (also on NPR), found Daisey's chinese translator who was with him on that trip, who said much of what Daisey claimed to witness - speaking to child workers, or observing workers injured from chemical exposure - never happened. Daisey calls it "dramatic license", now, and TAL is red faced.

But this isn't really just about This American Life; the New York Times has already had to issue its own correction to an online op-ed Daisey wrote making similar claims, and the Associated Press is looking at retracting coverage they did of Daisey on the topic as well. Others will surely follow. Even New York's Public Theater, where Daisey's show has been running, had to issue a statement generally supporting Daisey, but admitting that the show is not exactly entirely accurate (and that's okay, cause that's how drama works. Or something).

Perhaps you can see where I'm going with this - this is a "Mainstream Media" disaster of large proportions, undermining a popular storyline (corporate malfeasance! Cheap Chinese manufacturing practices! Labor rights!) that the right already can't stand. And this, really, is a classic unforced error: no James O'Keefe fakery needed, no dicey ideologue like Juan Williams to make the scapegoat. This was, as Ira Glass admitted, simply shoddy journalism that tends to undermine the credibility of a show like This American Life - failing to ask basic questions, check primary sources, or to make sure that information was fully confirmed. It doesn't help that TAL often comes off as smug, slightly sanctimonious, and hipper than thou on most topics it covers; this was hubris waiting for a fall.

Conservatives may shy away form this because it is, after all, Apple; on the one hand, an emblem of exactly the kind of capitalism they want to enshrine, while at the same time, a do-gooder sort of firm that liberals love to shop because it seems hip and cool and socially conscious. Embracing the discrediting of Daisey, when Apple still faces unpleasant questions about its corporate actions and conditions in factories, could easily be a two-edged sword, and it may just be that conservatives miss the connections: all that raling against MSM and bad journalism is less potent when there's no obvious political payoff.

On the other hand, it's the very clean spin of the Daisey case that I think should give lefty defenders of NPR through the previous scandals some pause: it's one thing to have been pranked by O'Keefe and his ilk, it's no fun having to defend the notion that Juan Williams didn't deserve all of what he got... but the through-line here is much like the unraveling of the NYT after Jayson Blair: lying to your editors shouldn't be this easy, and it's just arrogance to have missed the signs that this report was seriously flawed. Many lefties will, no doubt, want to take the line that Daisey's real disaster is undermining the efforts to investigate Chinese factories. But this, really, amounts to "he may have stretched the truth, but he wasn't wrong" and that's not true. This wasn't stretching, it was fabrication and falsehoods. Journalism can't let that stand. And NPR, as a whole and not just on one program, probably needs to reexamine its mission and how that mission is pursued. 

Most imortantly, though, is that listeners probably need to also ak more questions, and take less reporting at face value. That's the reality of our current American Lives.

Making Love

Via The Sword (which I won't link to, cause it's totally NSFW and if pressed, will pretend I never heard of), I found a link to a New York Times article about "the Gay Film which changed my life" which is one of those shared experiences gay people have, finding overt, and often covert images and representations in films that let us know we're not alone. Indeed, The Celluloid Closet - more the film documentary than Vito Russo's amazing book - makes clear that those images were often put there on purpose, often that very same purpose, the winking acknowledgment of our own existence to one another.

It's a somewhat less relevant point, I find, as my gay generation gets older; we are so much more visible than we were, and the covert, hidden world no longer matters as much. Which isn't to say it's entirely irrelevant, but reading some of the younger generation's choices, you realize how much the world has changed. 

In any case, I kept trying to think of what, exactly, that film would be for me... and sadly, I came back to the obvious: Making Love, the 1982 drama starring Harry Hamlin and Michael Ontkean, about a married doctor who has a gay affair and comes out to his wife. It's a dreadful thing, trying too hard to be "groundbreaking" and too nervous about its topic to be of much use... but you know, you're sixteen and you've got very little to go on... and you take what you can get. Particularly since it was the first thing I can remember that had anything close to approximating two men in bed having sex.

The film was touted as one of the first "major studio" attempts to tackle the topic (which topic? gays? gays in marriages? who knows?), and it generated lots of press buzz, but not much in the way of box office. But it did enjoy a healthy, early run on cable television (HBO, and even Showtime, as I recall), which is where I, and I'm sure many others, managed to get in surreptitious viewings of the forbidden.

As for the performers, Ontkean was kind of stiff (he's more appropriately square and reserved in Twin Peaks, where he played the upright town sheriff), Hamlin was surprisingly relaxed (oh was he a hot, swarthy mess in his youth), and Kate Jackson, as the wronged wife, was stuck in a thankless part (which was supposed to help her flee television and roles like Sabrina on Charlie's Angels; ultimately she wound up back in TV). Though I wouldn't recommend it, I think it was, in its way, a necessary step: somebody doing it all wrong so later, others could get around to doing it right. And, to be fair, it was a rare film that said being gay didn't make you crazy or sick (and even if it did suggest that being a promiscuous gay slut was a deeply unfulfilling personal choice... that didn't stop us all wanting to be Harry Hamlin, or at least wanting to sleep with his type).

So, yeah... it was Making Love. Which isn't the worst way to go, I suppose.

Articles We Never Finished Reading: And I'd Rather Be On A Yacht In Greece

Cory Finley, a recent Yale graduate, applied to work at Bridgewater Associates, a large Connecticut-based hedge fund, during his senior year of college. Mr. Finley, 23, said there was “definitely something tempting” about the structure and prestige of a high-paying finance job. But he decided to follow his dream of becoming a playwright instead.

            - Kevin Roose, "Wall Street's Latest Campus Recruiting Crisis" in the New York Times.

Now, look, I'm sure that the financial crisis and the pressure on banks and investment firms to limit bonuses has changed the career plans of some college seniors... but come on. The kid who says "I thought about investment banking, but then decided to be a playwright" is hardly a serious example of what, I suspect, is a dubious trend article anyway. Aside from Finley, Roose has found about one other college grad to speak to their recruiting experience, and padded the article with obvious quotes about how this week's disgruntled resignation letter in the Op-Ed section proves no one wants to work at Goldman Sachs. Is that a trend? Probably not. But back to our poet. Nothing says "I don't need to work" like a 23 year old who can take all the time he needs to craft a play. I know I wanted to take some time off after graduating college and write a novel. Unfortunately, I also needed to do things like eat, and have a roof over my head. Still do. But if anyone wants to fund my foray into novel writing, let me know. I'm totally worth it.

Articles We Never Finished Reading: Not That Different From Each Other

Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, buttonholing the reader in his short story “The Rich Boy” (1926). “They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.” Today’s rich are not only different from you and me but different from yesterday’s.

No one who has followed the heedless speculation that led to the 2008 financial meltdown and the subsequent bailouts would think of millennial-era greedheads as being anything other than steel-toed in advancing and achieving their interests; it is the rest of us who appear soft, our trust playing us for suckers. The distance between Fitzgerald’s very rich—now the extremely rich, the 1 percent—and the remaining 99 percent has never been steeper. The 1 percent occupy a higher altitude than the rest of us: their clouds look fluffier; their sunlight gleams with Hollywood gold. In Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis novels and in film classics from the previous century, the rich are portrayed as builders and expansionists, their pharaoh fortunes amassed from steel, brick, minerals, timber, railroads, shipbuilding, newspaper publishing; even those who won their money on Wall Street seem propped on industrial girders. Round-bellied, a watch fob looped from a vest pocket, these bankers and tycoons command offices as grand as railway stations, eat in dining rooms fit for Versailles. What they do and how they live have weight, imprint. The vast wealth depicted in movie/TV drama today is divorced from manufacturing and an invisible army of laborers doing their part; it’s divorced from anything resembling work. It’s floating and caressing, immortalizing.

- the generally perceptive James Wolcott, blathering about images of wealth on TV in the latest issue of Vanity Fair.

Now I generally like Wolcott, and I especially like him when it comes to culture watching - he takes it seriously, and he watches a lot - but this one is weak. Never mind the kind of lazy premise, a chance to quickly rope in a wide swath of series television in a highly generalized observation; the problem actually lies in the premise itself - his notion that somehow wealth today is vastly different from wealth in the past. This is just absurd - the first decade of the Twentieth Century was called The Gilded Age for a reason, and it wasn't because the men who made fortunes were "builders and expansionists"; it's because they made enormous profits in their businesses, and even more money in stocks and financial dealings. The Rockefellers and Vanderbilts, Morgans and Whitneys and Astors were not especially different from the wealthy bankers and hedge fund types of today: flush with absurd amounts of cash, spending it on pointless displays of generally poor taste. Wolcott generalizes off of Theordore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis... as if he's never heard of Edith Wharton or Henry James, the real chroniclers of this life of ease and indolence. Indeed, he goes so far as to dress up this middling case with a familiar line from the greatest of these observers of wealth, Fitzgerald himself, as if to miss entirely the point of The Great Gatsby.

I'm not trying to suggest that film and television are doing some great job dramatizing the realities of life as most of us face them; but what's deeply problematic in Wolcott's narrow view is some sense that This Just Happened and It's Not Like How They Used To Do It. The reality is... this is exactly how they used to do it, and it works. And perhaps the most telling failure to see this lies in Wolcott completely overlooking the largest and most tasteless display of excessive wealth: Downton Abbey. Or doesn't that count?

Articles We Never Finished Reading: All This, And Daddy Issues Too?

Seriously?

“Horizon” was the first play by O’Neill I ever read, at 9 or 10, and as a black-and-white introduction to a dramatist’s worldview it’s not inappropriate reading for preadolescents. (On the other hand, its portrait of life as a dream-smothering joker might well scar a sensitive, unformed mind. Thanks a lot, Dad, for the recommendation.)

- The often astonishing Ben Brantley, piling daddy issues on top of his so-so critical writing, in a review of Eugene O'Neill's Beyond The Horizon at Irish Rep.