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White Hot: The Boys in the Waistband

There's a fascinating word missing from White Hot, Netflix's new documentary about the Abercrombie and Fitch years: the word is Aryan. And it dovetails with a similar elision in examining Bruce Weber's visual aesthetic - which the documentary rightly centers much of its grim fascination and derision upon - as the film also elides comparing Weber to Leni Riefenstahl.

And yeah, I get it: "Nazis? Can't you see why that might be a problem?" The point is, yes I do, and frankly I am neither the first, nor the last, to have brought up those comparisons. The other point is, the very reluctance of this doc to follow its own through line to some logical, difficult and obviously uncomfortable ends is why the film, which dances adroitly around the hard questions, never really lands a solid indictment of what was, and is, most deeply problematic about the whole moment when A&F dominated our popular culture.

And boy (cute boy), did it ever. I can tell you because I was there: The whole Abercrombie and Fitch thing was a little nuts. The cadre of topless boys outside their flagship stores! They literally sold a softcore porn catalog 4 times a year! They ran an ad of a naked man on a horse! (BTW - bareback? Get it?)

The first 30 minutes or so of White Hot get at, mostly well, but somewhat imperfectly, what it was to live through the madness. How desirable the bran was at its height. The weird, oversexed vibe of the stores. The even weirder, even more oversexed vibe of the advertising. After that the documentary delves, more deeply, into the underpinnings of how the venerated brand was reshaped by owner Mike Jeffries, and the role, especially, played by Bruce Weber, in creating the brand's visual identity.

Left surprisingly unspoken, really, is the role of the changing culture around the brand, and specifically, the sudden, newfound openness of the American culture to explicitly gay iconography. A&F spoke, as a brand, to teens and college kids... but even more obviously, it spoke to a generation of young, often recently out, gay men in their twenties and thirties, newly positioned in urban enclaves and white collar work. Largely white, heavily professional and service working, these gay men knew Weber, knew what he was doing, and knew it was aimed at them. And they, in turn, helped propel "A&F style" into a cultural watchword.

That the documentary misses, or at least sits quietly, around these dynamics is part of the major hole in its presentation. Because it's the very white, very oblivious nature of this gay community to its own internal racism, that helped create the problems the documentary points to: a culture within A&F focused on lookism and frankly racist definitions of attractiveness that affected hiring, store staffing, as well as advertising and marketing. It's partly why all of this was a merry little game   part of which was merrily avoiding asking why images weren't just overwhelmingly white, but so very male. Or asking why "Fierce" the store's signature fragrance, was a men's cologne. Or asking, eventually, whether straight frat boys understood how gay all of this really was?

The film unpacks, cleanly and effectively, the unravelings of the brand as lawsuits over representation, hiring policies and the like came home to roost. It helps, but also hurts, that key players like Jeffries and Weber don't participate in the documentary, thus making convenient, easily blamed bad guys.

But questions linger: why does the film absolve virtually every staffer in the film of any role in perpetuating just this kind of racist iconography? What does it say about a top to bottom corporate culture that hid, minimized and mistreated its minority work force? What does it say about our culture that the brand was so dominant, so revered, so damn hot? And can we not, at the very least,, take a moment and unpack that difficult and uncomfortable role of Aryan ideals luring in Weber's work?

No, by the end of White Hot, everything has vanished: the images from the bad years, the voices of the minority workers, the omnipresent, overly easy moralizing of folks like Robin Givhan.... in favor of corporate branding that literally tries to paper over the past. It's okay, the film says, because A&F now runs ads with a wide mix of body types and skin colors and... blah blah blah... world peace. That the film soft pedals its own outrage and runs away from the hard questions is, unfortunately indicative of how this mess came to be in the first place: if we don't examine our idealized views of these perfect fit bodies and sexualization of youth, we really aren't trying to sort out how this all worked to sell the brand to begin with. And that's the real problem we need to solve. not run from. Or at least, not continue, in our dirtiest secrets, to ogle them while claiming pious purpose. Cause boy, you still look hot in dem jeans.

Instant Gratification Takes Too Long

The one thing that won't die in the internet age - the instant, and wrong, hot take - for me is actually the hopeful sign that our way out of the pandemic year isn't in fact written yet. The nearly cataclysmic changes we've all experienced in the past year aren't minor, aren't things you just "get over"... and the massive implications for our society and our economics (never mind our politics) are things we can only begin to start figuring out.

And that's why I don't mind the "jobs will instantly return to normal" and "everyone has to stop wearing sweatpants and put on real clothes again" type hot takes. The instant gratification culture of immediate analysis and pronouncements has been thoroughly up ended, even if the media may be the last to really understand what hasn't happened, and what isn't happening, and even start beginning to make sense of where we actually are.

At the most base level... people died. I've been stunned at the number of conversations of the past few months - you know, those reconnecting "hey, we haven't seen each other for a year" post vaccination convos, and dinners and re-gatherings - where that conversation veers into frank discussions of loss and pain and death. More than half a million people died of Covid (that we know of) - random, often pointless losses of family, parents, coworkers. But often, just as surprising, the losses people share turn out to be the other deaths - not covid, but the other stuff of cancer, heart attacks. The reckoning of these losses, over 18 months, has really only just begun, in part, yes, because Trump lacked the basic humanity to properly put the losses in context. But separation, and the near incomprehensibility of losses on this scale, is also a big part of it. No one in popular media, really, has yet found the words, the context, for all this loss. We're just beginning to grope for the words.

Then, too, I think of the enormous life changes so many have experienced as a result of this strange surreal, and yes, lost, year. People who have made major, significant life changes over the pandemic. All of the people who put significant life changes on hold because of it. And so many who have changed nothing... but for who everything has changed. Six months ago, I quit my job and embarked on this new course of writing and living differently. Only today, did it occur to me that perhaps expecting everything to be sorted after only six months is, well, not very realistic. Extrapolate that kind of major upheaval in so many lives... and really, our culture has no comprehension of what is and isn't happening in people's lives, and the ways those changes impact economic and social life. Are people "going back to work?" What does work even mean just now? What is "going back?" So much economic analysis just now is slapdash, lazy, and obvious. It will take months, if not years, to sort out all the forces in play, and what they mean.

And sure, it seems frivolous to relate these near existential issues - life and death, work and purpose - to the more superficial parts of our lives, the daily business of consumerism and consumption that make our American culture hum. But that's the point, isn't it? So much of the frothy, frivolous exercises merrily rolling along in early 2020... are just gone. if nothing else, the pandemic was a forced pullback to "is that really important" that offered many a chance to reassess all sorts of choices And that's just the beginning. Stores have closed that will never reopen. Dining has changed. Vacations have changed. New routines are part of all of our lives. And it's routines and habits that really guide our interests and choices. And again... we're only just beginning to figure out what these look like, what they might mean.

Just one obvious practical example to finish: "planes are full again." It's the hopeful, meaningless, deceptive storyline that will drive this summer's coverage of travel and leisure. Domestic air travel is still well below half of what it was before the pandemic, losses that have nothing to do with leisure or vacation travel (and don't even start on the embers of international). It's business travel that was the backbone, and profit center, of airline revenue. Will it resume? Sure; some of it will seem essential, some will argue that face to face beats Zoom and win. But many won't. At a moment when the whole concept of the "downtown office" is in flux, major city to city air travel looks like a relic.And again, that has economic implications no one wants to face and has gone largely undiscussed.

It's an odd moment, this juxtaposition of the "now now now" internet world we have and the almost luddite realities the pandemic placed on our existence. It's an odd, fascinating place none of us expected to be, and trying to intellectually sort out what it means is useful, and necessary... and all but impossible when we also want it all figured out, entirely, as of yesterday. As you peruse that Vogue telling you to get out of those sweatpants, and take in those reports that lazy workers are reluctant to give up unemployment to go back to work... just remember, no one, really, has figured any of this out. Instant gratification takes too long... and maybe the problem isn't "instant"... it's that maybe we're beginning to figure out this life needs more than just... gratification.

The Land Without A King, Talk Radio Without Rush

There didn't really seem to be a reason to memorialize Rush Limbaugh - don't speak ill of the dead and all that - but Eric Boehlert makes a point I share: there won't be any more Rush Limbaughs:

"Once a leading platform for popularizing conservative candidates and policies, talk radio is on the verge of becoming background noise, drowned out by a cacophony of voices on podcasts, cable TV and social media," the Washington Post reported this year.

The pandemic also hit talk radio hard. "2020 is the year that in-car AM/FM radio has hit the proverbial iceberg," Radio World reported. "The COVID-19 pandemic and its related lockdowns severely curtailed regular commuting journeys, where much of consumers’ radio-listening originates."

The right-wing talk format also skews way too old. "We're at the sea-change moment," Radio America's Mike Paradiso recently told Axios. "At some point, the stations need to make a shift to bring in younger listeners." 

AM Radio was slowly dying when Rush moved into talk radio in the mid eighties, and while he stanched the bleeding for about 10 years, as Boehlert and his sources note, the demographics got away from even him. Where broadcast deregulation (from ending the Fairness Doctrine to dropping ownership limits to opening up cable and broadband) gave Rush an opening, those very changes also spelled his, and the genre's, demise: there are too many choices, and too little spark remains, to recreate the dominance of a singular voice as Rush had and did.

Moreover, that's how Rush wanted it. No one did more to clear the field and salt the ground than Rush himself: hyper competitive, hateful to the point of spitefulness, Rush didn't just trample challengers, he obliterated the possibility of even trying. He was vicious, on air, to anyone who dared come for him, and behind the scenes he bigfooted any attempt to challenge him, going so far as to jump stations in major markets if he felt it would increase his dominance (or, more importantly, his paycheck). Sean Hannity gave up trying; others, like Laura Ingraham, paid the price and left the business almost all together (until Ingraham limped her way into Fox's 10pm slot, she'd been a nonstarter in both TV and radio). Rush's show was a solo operation - especially when he decamped from WABC in New York and set up his own quasi network in Florida, whose sole purpose was to feed his daily 3 hours. He trained no successor. He encouraged no supporting talent. His network didn't even offer a complimentary show to extend his reach. No the Rush show was just that... The Rush show. And he took it with him as he left.

So who can replace him? Boehlert mentions new shows being shopped by Dana Loesch and Dan Bongino; I laugh at both. Loesch, at least, is a proven talk radio quantity - but that's the point: any known radio voice is already known to not be able to dominate 12-3 as Rush did. Bongino is largely a joke - he lacks (I know, I know, but stay with me) even a tenth of Rush's actual warmth and respect for the genre. Hannity? He's the star that remains, but his appeal was always weaker. Mark Levin? Fuggedaboutit.

There will, of course, be skeptics. People who think of Rush as all purpose demagogue, and the right is just ready to plug and play any replacement... say, Tucker Carlson. That, really, is to misunderstand what Rush dominated, how he did it, and why. Carlson does, yes, sit in the same catbird seat as Bill O'Reilly and enjoys, I'd argue a dominance on par or slightly higher than Bill's: an agenda setter, sure, but mostly the lead presence to harangue naysayers and enemies into submission. Rush was something else. At his height, he didn't just set the tone or start the conversation - he completely up ended the conservative agenda, and forced the right to heel the madding crowd. Rush's real skill, after all, was how finely attuned he was to his audience; he could carefully recalibrate almost any point, if callers proved it unpopular. He did no interviews, asked no experts, flew on nothing but his own opinions and the words of his listeners. No one, really, has shown themselves anywhere near able to do what he did at the scale he did it. 

And that, in part, is where we should perhaps honor his actual skill: Rush loved talk radio, lived it, breathed it. He mastered the genre like no one before... or indeed, since. He wasn't just good at it. He was masterful. And that, ultimately, is why we will never see anything quite like it again. Yes, the circumstances that fueled his rise are gone... but mostly, so is he. There was always a local radio version of Rush in nearly every major market: Howie Carr, after all, still reliably delivers it, day after numbing day. Rush was the one who took it national, who swung for the fences and played for The Show. And then he took his bat and knee capped anyone who dared come near him.

There will be blowhards. There will be demagogues. We will, for however much longer, be saddled with Tucker and Hannity and all the others (and here's to Greg Gutfeld, who proves that there will never be a Rush of late night comedy either). There will not, though, be a singular player in the field dominating it the way Rush did, for anything like the period when he did - it's worth observing, after all, that neither his ratings or his reach were anything like what they'd been, either during the Trump years or at his death. Indeed, Trump is the playing out of Rush's dominance for the farce it was - cynical blowhards have their place, but it's not as the head of national government. The world moved on, even Rush knew that. And there is no mantle to take up, no crown to make one's own. Talk radio without Rush is just the sad backwater it was doomed to become all along, and standing tall amongst the remaining midgets won't make you the right's newest star. There won't be another Rush. And isn't one enough?

You Can't Do That!

Like many a Gen Xer, let me just say up front: I'm quite relieved they didn't have Twitter in my youth, because... well, God knows what I'd have to be apologizing for now. As it is, I know all too well that hiding in this blog alone are words and pieces I'm not necessarily sure I want repeated or blown out of context.

Still, that said... I'm comfortable with saying generally, nothing I've written went there without a lot of thought beforehand.

But let's back out to 30,000 feet for a moment: In a rather odd week, I've been fascinated with the confluence of a small string of events - the dreadful murder spree in Georgia resulting in the deaths of multiple workers and clients in massage parlors, the discussion it has engendered about attacks on Asians in America, Fox News struggling to not cover this, and the fall of Alexi McCammond.

Bear with me... because I think this all has a central point.

First of all, Fox: it's remarkable, really, how the entire network has been fully flummoxed by the unfolding story in Georgia. It was clearly one thing that, early on, the combination of a young white male shooter and the fact that he killed mostly Asian women working in the massage parlors wasn't, let's say, a good look for them. But a dramatic set of murders, gun play and Southern law enforcement really couldn't somehow get reworked to their purposes? Since January - if not earlier - Fox has been falling quietly apart: a massive reworking on the dayside schedule has resulted in largely sagging ratings, lack of Trump has robbed them of their centrality to each days's new drama, and what's been left in his wake  (yes, we all know about the Dr. Seuss thing), well, just isn't much to build an hour broadcast around. And 5 more minutes of Candace Owen trashing WAP? That just sells Cardi B's next single.

It's one thing for Fox to try and flog its own right wing version of a "main story"; it's another problem entirely when the thing leading every other news broadcast on cable or network - or anywhere really - for more than 36 hours is seemingly invisible to Fox. The murders were graphic and public and provided such a high body count in such a short period of time that the story was simply unavoidable. Add in the clearly troubled young man with the guns and his, by his own admission, complex notions of sexuality and deviance... and it's no surprise how this captured the zeitgeist. And when Fox, or any news claiming network really, refuses to acknowledge the zeitgeist happening right in front of them (and what is Fox, but The Voice of What Happened in The South)... well, that's just a failure.

Which isn't to say this is a story where news organizations are particularly distinguishing themselves; from over emphasizing the violence to trying to explore the stories of the victims to getting a bit lost in a tangle of sex work, misogyny and yes, anti-Asian bigotry... this story is a mess and few reporters or news organizations seem to be getting the story right or well. We barely know who the victims are. We certainly don't know much about the shooter's choices or even if he knew any of them. And from his stated reasoning about sexual activity to killing women to the specific choice of establishments with Asian workers... there's a lot to unpack, and mostly, Americans have spent not just years, but generations, trying to avoid just about every aspect this story raises. 

Whatever one thinks about just how these events particularly illuminate, or even intersect with a larger conversation about a rise in anti-Asian bigotry arising out of shallow thinking around the pandemic... myself, I'd say there are no accidents. We are here because we were bound to get here, one day, in one way or another. Objectification and sexualization of Asian women, indeed all women of color, is just one piece of the large conversation around race America desperately needs to unpack, examine, and thrash out. It's not an easy or simple discussion. And while it may not be central to the "Kung Flu" type insults of the pandemic... this is where the point is not some round of picking or choosing which insult is worst. Whatever this sad, murderous kid thought, whatever the world taught him to think about others not like him... it's long past time to have a reckoning about yet another way in which our culture fails a minority group and we all need to do more and better to fix it.

So... here's the thing about Alexi McCammond. McCammond's hiring as Editor in Chief at Teen Vogue, announced weeks ago, got hung up on a revived conversation about a group of tweets she'd written in college, mostly using "Asian" in some derogatory way (but others, as well, that casually engage in hawking "gay" or "homo" as pejoratives). Since college, McCammond has worked her way through journalism and publishing, widely respected, and quite successful. When the issue of the tweets came up in 2019, she apologized at length. Yet and still, staffers at Teen Vogue asked why it was still considered ok or appropriate for McCammond to assume the top spot. In the wake of this week's events - and I'd argue, obviously influenced by the developments - Conde Nast gave up and McCammond withdrew her name.

And who pounced on McCammond's unhiring as their latest example of their mythical "Cancel Culture" morality play? Why, Fox, of course.

To her credit, McCammond, at least, isn't playing along; she's offered no hysterical "cancel culture" defense, and while other journalists are at least lightly bemoaning the state of affairs, the "Cancel Culture" narrative remains largely its own peculiar Fox invention. As it should; as I started, I don't doubt McCammond's sincerity and let those of us whose youth is not widely available online show a bit of pause - there but for Twitter in high school go many of us. But the questions raised do linger - is a 27 year old apologizing away her words at 19 really the point? When did you realize that "gay" and "Asian" and "homo" and who knows what all probably shouldn't be used that way? Who needed to tell you? And why, really, did you need to be told?

And therein lies the thread that I gently pick up and use to tie things together: maybe, in a week of extreme anti-Asian violence and bigotry, we can see why Alexi McCamond was wrong for Teen Vogue in a way that (still) flummoxes Fox. We shouldn't have to say "don't kill Asian women working in massage parlors as some sick response to your sexual issues" just as we shouldn't have to say "don't say that" when using racial and homophobic slurs in casual speech. Just as we shouldn't have to explain to Fox why you can't cherry pick the news when it goes against your narrative. You can't do that. Maybe, in some past time, as a culture we let this stuff slide. And yes, that's on us, and that reckoning was, and is, somewhat overdue. But still.  When Teen Vogue takes on a tough piece about Asian women, sex work, and the myth of the "Exotic Oriental" - one that Fox will probably say is inappropriate for its audience of teen girl readers - this will all make sense. Doesn't it?

 

Parler Games

Nothing quite says "the spell is broken" more than Twitter's decision to impose a lifetime ban on Donald Trump. If one had to point to the one thing that defined this Era of Trump Madness, it was those omnipresent tweets (ones I explored daily and tagged with #EverythingHeSaysIsALie ) which substituted for any and every aspect of an actual presidency: policy conversation, press conference, daily schedule and insult magnifier rolled into one, ugly, endlessly venal hopelessly untrue steamroller of disinformation. Without it, really, was there anything there at all?

Just days later, it's abundantly clear.... not much really was there at all. A silenced Trump may rage alone in the darkened halls of the White House, but without amplification, his sycophants grow restless, his party is rudderless and his opponents know the sweet air of freedom. How much different would our world be, or have been, had anyone had the nerve to take these actions years ago... when, just an aside, it would have been more than appropriate.

Within minutes of the decision - and the parallel, not exactly simultaneous decision to block Trump on Facebook and all of its associated properties - the right wing pundits had their instant storyline, one which thankfully absolved them of facing the aftermath of insurrection head on. Instead, we were gifted with a storyline about the Death of the First Amendment, the Unreasonable Censoring of Conservative Voices, and the "who, us?" excuse making of trying to argue that no one, really, could call Trump, or any of his minions, directly responsible for inciting a riot.

The decision fixed a heavy, awkward spotlight on the fledgling alterna-network for the right, Parler. Hastily assembled and built, according to the tech savvy, mostly on the "paperclips and string" approach to coding... Parler was already a bit of a stumbling mess as Trump's access went down - a hub of privacy invasion, bad infrastructure, conspiracy theorists pushed off legitimate forums... and the odd convergence of QAnon and Saudi exiles too eager to push the propaganda needs of the Crown Prince. Any port in a storm? More like Port of Last Resort.

In a rational world, Parler might have been able to buy itself the time needed to get itself together and to get serious... but this is the age of Internet Madness, and Trump's implosion only made Parler's underlying problems that much more stark. Having spent months trying to fend off reasonable requests from Amazon (its cloud server host) to better police the content floating through its social network, Parler's role in the January 6th events was bound to come under scrutiny, and it's failure to offer even a modest "lick and a promise" intention to clean up left Amazon little choice. Parler's arguably in over their heads leadership has tried valiantly to spin their disasters as that much more Unfair Censorship to Silence The Right, but even a minimal amount of research suggests a company that was simply overwhelmed by its users interest in a forum that let any and every crazy rant run free. And that's being charitable, since Parler even now can't seem to indicate what content it would moderate if it even knew how.

The reality is that this era we've been living through is, in many ways, the cusp of en ending, not the beginning of a New Age: a "wild west" of disinformation and questionable content, the various social networks have been struggling for years, particularly after the 2016 election revealed a debacle of Russian interference, fake stories, false accounts and deliberate propaganda aimed at fomenting civil unrest. There are no heroes here; only corporate entities with too much influence and too little oversight, gamely attempting to put several genies back into bottles. And while conservatives may have a point that some innocents may be caught up in the new oversight, that too is a tangent to a problem they've had for too long and done too little to police - a refusal to draw lines, and rule out obvious problematic actors and content pushing White Supremacy, Militia based talk of Revolution, and QAnon conspiracy fantasies. Yes, it's true Facebook and Twitter have all sorts of problems, failed enforcement and bad content moderation... but that's with at least a modicum of effort. Parler, god love it, wasn't even trying. And that failure to even adopt a fig leaf of "please stop, that's bad" just made the failure especially stark. No one's going to race to your alternative social network for more puppy videos. They want the hard stuff, the mean stuff... the stuff nobody else will let them say.

In all of this Trump was more symptom than disease - simply the biggest, worst, most prolific and most profligate example of a systemic failure to take action against obvious disinformation and malicious content. Every day, week, month, that passed it was grossly, starkly obvious that Trump flouted every possible rule and convention for content. Twitter (and eventually, Facebook too) had to step in just to acknowledge that virtually everything Trump had said regarding the 2020 election was a gross falsehood, flat out misinformation or deliberate provocation. And even that did nothing to slow the manufacture of lies, the fomenting of violence, the egregious bullying pushing things ever further to the edge. And what edge? Well, we need not ask that, not after January sixth.

It will take time, and effort to get things under some modicum of control - to push the fringes back to the fringe, marginalize the marginal, undo the massive damage to our culture, our discourse, ourselves. Like everything else, this isn't about "going back to before" - we are in this new Internet landscape to stay. But we already know that Facebook and Twitter can and will evolve, that they will not be exactly what they were, and though it's not impossible, it is unlikely that one man will be able to construct what Donald Trump did with his unique combination of avarice, idiocy, falsehoods and self interest. I do tend to think that, for better and worse, Trump's incendiary rhetoric was never so much a brilliant plan as a dopey use of bombast and bullying to play with matches and gasoline everyone else could see as potentially disastrous, even as he couldn't, or wouldn't. Much of the defense of his actions on the sixth are of the "he probably didn't mean to" sort and they're right up to a point: I don't think he meant to create what actually went down. But mostly because, I don't think he had thought that far ahead. And that, really, is the definition of incitement.

As for Parler and these semantic games the right would like to play about "free speech," I think time is running out on this "outrageousness dressed up as constitutional liberty" sales pitch. It's a tiring game of wrapping up age old prejudices in History Channel or Civics Class doublespeak that misuses faux intellectualism to sell the most anti-intellectual arguments imaginable. This isn't about free speech or even the outlines of a healthy debate; it's about one side's ability to mouth off without consequences and the other's to just take it. And that's just bullying, which is the ultimate point.

 The jig is up, the game is over... whatever metaphoric cliche one likes, where we are isn't where we were even a week ago, and even with only about a week to look at, it's clear that Trump's absence, alone, from social media is already having an impact in ratcheting down the chaos and slowing down the fuse on its way to the powder keg of further internal conflict. Which doesn't make Facebook or Twitter heroes, just slightly more socially responsible than they had been. And that, alone, is the indication of a tide turning, that modest sound of us being our better selves, trying harder to get it right. Conservatives have a choice about whether to follow that tide or get washed away. We can't make it for them, I can't guess which way they'll go, but these pointless Parler games aren't really worth playing on the way to an outcome.

What in the World, Matt Lauer?

Lest we get too carried to near tears as Savannah Guthrie was this morning, let's try to remember that there's a reasonable case to be made that firing Matt Lauer from the Today show could also be presented as overdue, and necessary.

Lauer, the highest paid anchor on NBC, at $25 million a year was the longstanding face of a cash cow, but beyond that... well, discussions of his role there were often kind to say the least. His immediate predecessors went on to host the NIghtly News (Brokaw) or be the face of NBC Sports (Gumbel), but no one ever suggested Lauer was good for any of that Indeed, it's hard to say, even now, just what he was good at. His interviews were never called "must see" or memorable, he wasn't the go-to person for major "gets," as they say. He wasn't especially insightful and did little in the way of political moderation (and when he did push his way into the format, last election season, his inartful pestering of HIllary Clinton was widely panned).

Lauer sat with several cohosts - Katie Couric's star power was undeniable, Meredith Vieira's quietly assured, Savannah Guthrie's enthusiasm widely admired. Lauer was none of these, and worse, really, in helping to wreck Ann Curry. Lauer was the face of endless self satisfaction, of having nailed the catbird seat on a money train no one was prepared to stop. He was the nonthreatening, disinterested, slightly sarcastic face of a show that gave up on hard news and settled comfortably into puff pieces and cross promotion, soldiering on through Olympic mornings and Macy's parades without ever rising above expectations. No wonder, on his watch, Today fell from first to third (briefly) in morning shows, the subject of endless backstage gossip and production team shakeups, full of senior executives too nervous of change or too scared of anger to point out that the thing most in need of a revamp was sitting at the main desk.

He started blandly handsome and never especially developed into anything more, and arguably helped immeasurably in making morning television exponentially worse. Weddings on beaches, travelogues from across the globe... and of course another day of diets and that book everybody's reading and that movie that opens at $150 million or more. Lauer's tenure turned Today into People and people into marketing ploys. Hard news? Why even bother?

And for all of this he was known and seen all over New York as one of those guys who had it all and expected more. The ever growing absurd salary. The helicopter to the Hamptons just to go to work. That house and the perfect wife and those puffy articles in magazines you never read at the doctor's office (like, erm, People, the print equivalent of Today). He was never especially loved - tabloids were all too happy to attribute internal strife at Today to his ever growing ego - but post enough publicists on the project and from a certain light, not examined too closely, he was just an ordinary guy doing another day's work. Or something. And hey, check out that mansion!

It took less than 3 hours for Guthrie's "we had no idea" innocence (and hey, how better to elicit that reaction than to tell her an hour or so before going on air) to be subsumed by reports that both Variety and the New York Times had been working, for some time, on reports of complaints against Lauer - and that NBC knew of those allegations. That's gonna sting, and gives some indication, still, of how on air female talent is treated next to male costars. I'm thinking less of Gayle King and Norah O'Donnell than I am of Kelly Ripa, who finally put her foot down after repeated attempts to be written off while carrying ABC's syndicated "Live!" NBC has wasted years perpetuating this TV "husband and wife" silliness of Today cohosts, despite a storied history of women - Barbara Walters and Jane Pauley through now - perfectly able to carry the show alone.

But more than that, more than the way Lauer's story dovetails so neatly with all the "we're shocked, shocked" responses to power male misbehavior, the real test it seems to me is if someone takes note of the way Lauer's endless mediocrity warped and degraded the very fabric of the Today show itself, into the fluffy, pointless, four hour monstrosity he leaves behind. It's that glossy, false fun patina of endless morning cheer that really deserves to die, sacrificed on the alter of the sacred monsters allowed to thrive in its fake living rooms and rope line courtyards. No more Matt Lauers. Is that really too much to hope?

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Knowing

By no means a Hollywood insider, I have to say, I am just a lover of film. Have been since I was at least 13. That's the summer - I remember it well - that I spent in the dark of the Walters Art Gallery auditorium getting my introduction to the classics of film. Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn... I fell in love with Hollywood's Golden Age. It led me to The Oscars, and histories of The Academy, and to taking film seriously, and to the criticism of Pauline Kael (along with Steinem, the writer I aspire to be).

I don't care a lot about celebrity, but I like getting the "inside scoop" on Hollywood, how films are made, who's doing what, what it takes to get to the top.  Over the years, I've learned about producers, and studios and the work of directors... just to keep up, to be "in the know."

The point of all of this, and why I bring it up now is that... I'm no insider, and even I can't say I had no idea what was going on with Harvey Weinstein.

In the midst of his stunning downfall, the claims of "I had no idea" or "if I had known" are spreading far and wide. And I get it. No one, really, had a handle on the specifics and the scope of Weinstein's activities until near simultaneous reporting from The New York Times and The New Yorker (I'll get to Ronan Farrow in a minute), and there's an enormity to the revelations in total that matters. But at the same time... this thing about "knowing," and what it means, sticks with me, and I suspect, it will haunt us in film and pop culture in the months to come.

My point about knowing, and saying that I knew... something, is that Harvey Weinstein's very public lifestyle and professional behavior were pretty much impossible to hide. He was proclaimed legendarily difficult, temperamental, and damned everywhere with faint praise when directors and stars of his productions were interviewed. Stories abounded of his crass acts, bad moods and public unpleasantness. They were joined - and here's what people tended to focus on - by tales of his passionate concern for the quality of the finished product, his commitment to the talent, and his hucksterish skills promoting the work he cared about. 

And herein lie a number of the problems his actual behavior have revealed. First, there's the unmitigated power he held over individuals and careers. The success of Miramax, and subsequently The Weinstein Company, lay in cornering the market of "Art House" or "Classy" productions, the stuff we call "Oscar bait" and "small films" which imply both Too Good for the Mass Audience and a sort of labor of love that may never make back its cost. In fact, Weinstein was very good at turning a profit on these productions, both by keeping them relatively cheap and promoting the hell out of the ones that he thought would catch on. But outside of Weinstein, that kind of success has been increasingly rare. And because of it Weinstien had a power over one segment of the film industry (at his height) that was fairly unmatched going back perhaps as far as the days of the great moguls. That power, in turn, made it easy for him to corner aspiring starlets and other neophytes, and behave in spectacularly inappropriate ways with no fear of consequence.

Second, Weinstein benefitted from the casual ways of doing business in Hollywood, where there is a formal casting process for most roles and another, less formal approach to star parts and star making ones. This story isn't new, and the rumors have abounded, forever, that the route to stardom for many, if not most, is littered with agreeing to do things one wouldn't necessarily want to do... and the winners are the ones who did. The revelations of Weinstein, literally "go down on this and I'll make you a star," are little more than... well, the fantasy made flesh, and a reminder that the reality is way worse than any fantasy would ever imply.

Weinstein's fall, some have suggested, is actually an indication that he hasn't actually been powerful for some time, and I tend to agree. Primacy has a short shelf life in Hollywood, and we're long past the days of high Merchant Ivory and Shakespeare in Love. The Weinstein Company is important, but plenty of avenues exist to go independent, and Moonlight is merely the latest in a string of examples of how the Awards givers are aching to challenge the public to see more and better. Weinstein can be taken down now because, in part, his hand doesn't control all the levers like it used to - remember when he launched Tina Brown into Talk? And while this week's events may have hastened his breakup with Georgina Chapman, how long was that marriage going to last if Marchesa's dominance of the gown market was sliding away from lack of celebrity stylist use?

The thing about Weinstein in Hollywood is that there's always a Weinstein. Someone with too much power (hey Mike Ovitz), too much control (hey Mike Eisner), too much bad behavior (hey Simpson and Bruckheimer). The question is, do we plan to take the next woman - or man - seriously when charges of sexual misconduct come up? Is Hollywood planning to rule some behavior ethically unacceptable, no matter how powerful? Or, as we did this time, are we going to sit there and pretend, with straight faces, that we would have done something... if only we had known. Because we knew. People knew. And people did, in essence, nothing.

In the aftermath, as we do in America, there's a fervent search for someone to blame. It makes things easier, and absolves us from the harder conversations that a) lots of people have some responsibility here and b) that blaming isn't really the point. Blame Hillary Clinton for not responding fast enough. Blame NBC for not feeling that Ronan Farrow's story was strong enough last March or last August... or whenever. Blame Cyrus Vance Jr. for not prosecuting Weinstein in 2015. Blame Bob Weinstein, because surely "brother's keeper" ought to mean something. Blaming is useless (and with Clinton, among a list of politicians and other celebrities, especially ridiculous), and misses the point. If this behavior troubles you deeply - and God knows, shouldn't it? - then the problems we have are about preventing it, and taking it seriously when its reported. And I, for one, have heard precious little about fixing that.

I hate the idea that good people knew and did nothing. It saddens me to think that women who could have saved one another from predatory behavior were too scared or felt too powerless to intervene. It angers me that someone like Vance, or members of the TWC board, can sit there and make excuses for not doing enough, or anything, soon enough. Mostly I just hate knowing that as bad as I ever thought Harvey Weinstein was, he was something far, far worse. The problem is.. that's not all we know. But I think we'll pretend not to know, again, next time.

 

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Bad Milo. Bad, Naughty Milo.

Even his name - "Milo Yiannopolous" - is something of an alternative fact: he changed it from "Hanrahan" which was the name of his father, who left when he was six.Yiannopoplous comes from his maternal grandmother, who raised him.

There was never much reason to pay attention to Milo, a bratty British schoolboy eager to spread his opinions, calling it "journalism," in that way conservatives do, repeating twice told tales to justify their negative views of others. Being British, and snide, was about all that differentiated Yiannopolous from the other far right voices - slap a dress and a blonde wig on it and you've got Ann Coulter. Or Monica Crowley. Or Kellyanne Conway. Or...

He'd made himself something of an internet star, mouthing off about "Gamergate" - which boils down to teenage boys trying to put a "No girls allowed" sign on video game playing, with just the sort of especially ugly, hateful results one would expect. For no particular reason, he decided to turn his negative energy - and that of his teenboy fans - on Leslie Jones, resulting in that much more negative attention and a lifetime ban on Twitter.

As Andrew Sullivan noted, the kind of bratty conservatism espoused by Milo (and Sullivan, from much the same background) thrives and grows on the negative response. It's political theory as reaction formation, why I've been clear on what Coulter and Malkin et al actually are since college - what was "Dartmouth Review" but the "politically incorrect" screed of kids eager to express opposition to feel good slogans of liberal activism? And 30 years on that's what conservatives have to offer: not ideas, but something outrageous, designed to oppose perfectly reasonable proposals meant to help others. It's not what you're for, but what they're against.

Since the Jones imbroglio, Milo enjoyed a rapid rise to that curious kind of American stardom that only happens in the fevered circles of the angry right - he got a book deal, and speaking gigs... and last week, he popped up on Real Time with Bill Maher, and got announced for a speaker role at CPAC, where the show always needs the fresh ziz of the latest hateful thing.

If I'm surprised by the fall Milo has had in only 4 days, it's only that I figured he'd at least get to give that CPAC speech. As it was, the only thing that could embarrass CPAC (and it's leader, the smooth talking Trump supporter and Fox "contributor" Matt Schlapp) was new exposure to old interviews Milo had done, applying his bratty British humor to gay sexuality and the priest sex scandal. That was enough(!) to lose Milo the book deal, the speaking gigs, and his job as Associate Editor at Breitbart.com. Because, naturally, where else would Milo  be working, but Breitbart?

It's easy to get hung up on Milo's outrageous comments around sex - and it's not as if that particular element hadn't been swirling around him all along. Part of Milo's shtick was wearing his status as a young gay man on his sleeve, touting his (reductive, racially insensitive) love of black men and hinting at his own sexual prowess. (It's especially amusing, given CPAC's checkered past with gay conservatives, that they blustered into booking Milo anyway.) And it was, in fact, the cavalier way Yiannopolous described his own experiences of priest sex abuse that drove much of his downfall, given that, as even he admitted in his Tuesday press conference, that abuse goes a long way to explaining his bratty public persona since.

But let's not get too lost in focusing hard on Milo: the real lesson here is about conservatives, their role in propping up and pushing hateful rhetoric like Milo's, and the endless need to find fresh flavors of the month expressing all that hate. Let's remember CPAC played that role in launching Ann Coulter, and Michelle Malkin, and numerous others (hey, Ben Carson!) as well. Let's point out, as well, that this flameout illuminated yet more clearly all of what's wrong with "news outlets" like Breitbart, which never called Yiannopolous to account for many outlandish things he wrote and said - and indeed, never raised a peep about those sex comments at the time they were made, nor in context of his overall persona. One can only marvel out how dysfunctional a work environment could be that a "half dozen" staffers at Breitbart threatened to quit this week if Milo were allowed to stay on. This week!

Conservatives would like, of course, to isolate Milo now, now that the cat's out of the bag, that he's "gone too far" despite the reality that "too far" was an interview he gave last year, and ignores years (and years) of examples of Milo's excessive, hateful words and actions. It was too much for Twitter... but conservatives still clung to him (and arguably, too, Twitter's actions were years past due as well). Simon and Schuster lost authors over holding onto Milo's book... but still they held on. Until this week. Conservatism didn't become "like this" yesterday. And Milo is a symptom, not the disease. Removing him addresses neither cause, nor cure.

So CPAC will offer up "President Trump" and plenty of other familiar lines of conservative anger and hate... and pretend Milo was a bad dream that maybe never even happened. That's what they do, over and over, as these once hot flavors "go too far" or the lies catch up to them. And suddenly, there's no speaking space for Ann Coulter. Or Sarah Palin. What a shame Milo couldn't hold it together long enough to provide another Outrage Du Jour...

Because, of course, what passes for conservatism these days is so utterly bankrupt and bereft of intellectual heft and interesting ideas that it is simply beyond embarrassing.  Literally. Everything about Milo's rise, his career, his galloping leaps toward greater fame... all of it was an embarrassment, a waste, a pointless exercise in watching a bratty child act out for others' amusement. Watching Milo's smirky, childish appearance on Maher - what little I could take - I figured it was a matter of time before something would wipe that smirk off his face. Two days later, no smirk. And a month from now, or a year... it's just another chance for another flavor of the month to rise.

If any good can come of this, I'd like to hope it comes from Milo reckoning with his own demons, working out his issues, finding some measure of personal grace. I wouldn't even necessarily mind the "I was a bratty jerk, but now I've changed" book he'll be pushing in a year, or two, or five... if he comes about it honestly, and expressively. That would at least show that someone is capable of growth and change. Because Lord knows, growth and change isn't going to come to the Conservative movement. Just another naughty bad boy, or girl, looking for attention. And getting it.

Doubleplus Ungood

Aside from the clear demarcation of "before" and "after" - of which there have been more in my lifetime then I ever thought there would be - the six days of Trumpery have certainly been everything promised, and then some. And nowhere more vividly than the glorious, contentious relationship between the new Administration and a thoroughly stupefied, if somewhat reenergized, press.

Given the lack of press conferences, or even general availabilities to the press made during the transition, it's not surprising that things got off to a sudden and rocky start. It's a reminder that people don't hold press conferences because they like to, but because being more communicative is generally helpful to getting one's point of view across. When Trump finally gave his first - fairly disastrous - press conference in New York, it was his first time taking questions in 6 months. Similarly, until the Saturday announcement in the briefing room - a room the new Administration had threatened to move out of the White House - Sean Spicer, nor any other spokesperson, had not held any kind of formal press availability as well.

Much has been made of that initial, tetchy moment when Spicer offered a blustery attack on "the media" for "false stories" related to the Inauguration... only to provide a series of factually inaccurate and false statements as rebuttal (lines about traffic on the WMATA Metro and the use of white flooring on The National Mall most prominently). It's surely a moment of infamy that already defines that bright line from old to new, and sets a tone that even Spicer has been spending the days (mere days!) since trying to undo - often to little avail.

It's clear that we have entered - suddenly and sharply - a new era where words like "fact" and "truth" will be in short supply. The lies, exaggerations, and yes "alternative facts" of the new Administration are breathtaking to behold, somehow, more gasp inducing than even the near daily (to be generous; I can't account for every single day) string of misrepresentations of the campaign. Spicer's job, after all, as a campaign spokesman is a job historically marked by telling the version of events most favorable to your guy (or Hillary Clinton). White House Press Secretary is usually thought of as a more fact-based exercise, using word choice, diplomatic phrasing, and the well timed silence to make your political points. 

Still, history isn't so clean that Spicer being both pugnacious and even fact challenged isn't a first; many old hands are recalling the golden age of Ron Ziegler, press secretary to Richard Nixon, who had the thankless task of standing in front of the press field during the unfolding of Watergate, who had, even prior to the worst of it, been renowned for slippery phrasing and poor press relations. If anything, Spicer has yet to show Ziegler's elan - or for that matter, Mr. Trump's - in looking less nervous, or sounding more authoritative, in his prevarications. Even just in the room, he's upstaged by Hope Hicks, Trump's longtime spokesperson at the Trump Organization, who seems eminently more comfortable saying absolutely anything and punishing the press who dare to challenge her.

Even Hicks, though, probably isn't read for the centrality of the stage of the White House - all eyes are watching, and the press that stood by and watched Trump as a campaign (and surely should have stepped in sooner and more aggressively) is in something of a different place watching the White House - more eyes are watching, more staff is investigating, more statements are held to the kind of scrutiny there should have been all along. To say, "they're getting away with it" is to redefine what "getting away" means - Kellyanne Conway's blithe assertion of "alternative facts" to Chuck Todd didn't withstand a day of scrutiny, howls of absurdity and refusal to stand down (even Fox simply pretended the whole weekend of disastrous press relations largely Never Happened, ignoring the bulk of it). Within a day, Trump's egregiously false claim of millions of "illegal" votes was exposed as false, forcing Spicer to reduce it to "it's what he believes" rather than an objective truth, and the press pushed Trump, probably foolishly, into setting up an "investigation" into something no one actually thinks happened.

I'm not trying to minimize the fears of perfectly reasonable, and extremely thoughtful people, who see nefariousness in the Trump team's every move against the mass media. I've read Masha Gessen in the New York Review of Books and I get it, too: there are moves here reminiscent of totalitarian regimes, past and present, in terms of creating "false realities," and trying to delegitimize any question or challenge from outside. But, by that measure, the Trump folks are working haphazardly, making significant mistakes, and not showing an especially effective or unified approach. There's too many stories of inside fighting and score settling, too many obvious missteps, and too much freedom and openness in our culture, for them to really succeed, even if (and I don't entirely buy it) that was their goal.

For all the hand wringing and references to George Orwell, its worth pointing out that we've never seen a "1984" like moment in a Western Democracy. That Russia under Putin has returned to an era very similar culturally to the world of the old Soviet Union is less a lesson for us as it is a reminder of history: old habits die hard, especially in the hands of an ex-KGB officer turned "President" whose life experience favors mass media controlled and heavily edited by The State. As Americans, we know less than nothing about this; it is outside of every aspect of our culture, our way of life, indeed, in how our media is structured. Even as we've bemoaned the concentration of corporate control of mass media, the point is there: our mass media is in private hands. It would be all but physically impossible to reverse that. All the Trump people can do, on the margins, is denigrate and attempt to humiliate the free press, while using a collectively smaller partisan group of sympathetic outlets to push narratives more favorable to their worldview. Yes, the world of Fox and Drudge and Breitbart and talk radio trades on the Trump narrative and leads significant numbers of Americans to believe the lies. But we remain worlds away from the "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery" perversion of our every act of public communication.

The distinction matters because, at the most basic level, we give Trump and his cronies too much credence and too much power imbuing them with the ability to warp the very act of public communication and the reporting of journalists; journalism will survive. By all means, we need to question everything, challenge every falsehood, expose every lie. This is a battle over something most of us didn't think needed fighting, and in some ways, yes, we are ill-prepared. But we are not defenseless, and we are not fighting the Ministry of Truth. And keeping things in perspective is as much an act of honesty as forcing Spicer, Conway, et al to own their lies. Without it, I'm not sure what we're actually trying to save.

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Stop The Presses

Only a week or so in, and one of the main themes of this Trump Presidency (feel free to substitute "Trump Nightmare"... but remember, you're not dreaming) has surely revealed itself: the tortured role of the press and mass media in the age of a raging narcissist.

In addition to two painful meetings with various media outlets - an interview with the Times where he basically admitted his campaign was a big lie, and a name calling session with TV network hosts and executives - Trump spent the weekend berating the cast and audience at Friday's performance of Hamilton on Broadway, when the audience booed Mike Pence and the cast begged him to treat everyone decently. Oh, the humanity!

In the rush to sort out Just Whose Fault We Got Trump, "The Media" has been a popular choice. It's certainly true that the refusal to take on Trump in a serious way, to often broadcast him uninterrupted  at rallies laying out falsehood after falsehood, surely didn't help. Still, no one culprit really can take all the blame. I think - and this is a longer discussion - that one thing we all need to face is that in some ways, Trump was more inevitable than anyone would like to admit.

The question is, though, now that we've got him (at least, temporarily), will the media know what to do with him? 

There are some railing about the press "normalizing" Trump. There are others already building up conspiracy theories that every Trump move - like the Hamilton tweetstorm - is a brilliant trifecta of savvy mental manipulation by Trump against a gullible public. And through it all, there's Trump himself, just blathering away, looking endlessly foolish.

I think one thing that's not quite clear yet is what the media array of a Trump led USA really looks like. We forget that a lot of who and what dominates media now - from Lester Holt to Anderson Cooper to Megyn Kelly to even Rachel Maddow - are developments of, and partly because of, the Obama years. It's very likely that we will see new stars, and new shows, that arise because a different kind of media will be needed in the Trump, um, era (that sounds awfully permanent - ed.).

That the media we have can't quite cut it seems quite clear - I wouldn't call it "normalizing," but I think traditional Washington hands are truly flummoxed by what you do with an outlier like Trump, so beyond their sense of political norms. It's the way Mitt Romney is being discussed for Secretary of State - it's such a relief to hear a familiar, even "Establishment" name, that people aren't paying attention to perfectly reasonable reasons why Romney is completely ill suited to the task. Panel discussions that seemed entertainingly contentious prior to the election - oh look, they're ganging up on Jeffrey Lord! - now have an uncomfortable air of fear from one side, and excessive self satisfaction on the other.

It's also the case that the new opposition hasn't quite figured out how to effectively challenge Trump's obvious impending ethical failures and corrupt intentions. "Ivanka Trump met with Shinzo Abe!" plays great at a Chevy Chase dinner party - it's a little obscure and secondhand for the case against a man who apparently plans to let out his hotel in DC to foreign dignitaries eager to curry his favor. Proportion, people; clarity and outrageousness. These items are key.

Still, I wouldn't discount the fact that Trump, in these things, is his own worst enemy and best taken at his word. The Hamilton brouhaha was silly and - despite claims to fire up his base - mostly pointless. Keening at Alec Baldwin merely invites what will surely be heaps of scorn and derision from pop culture icons in comedy, music, theater, television and film. Hating Trump won't just be popular... I guarantee Hollywood knows it's profitable, too.

And then there's those meetings with news outlets, which seemed to catch the  people in them off guard at the depth - wrong word? - of his thin skin.  There's a delicate dance between public figures and the press chasing them - the fawning that's required to get access, but the distance to look dispassionately and even critically is rarely in the right balance. But my guess is Trump did himself no favors mocking people like Martha Raddatz and Katy Tur, trying to manhandle his way to favorable coverage. Trump is apparently in no media to give the media much of anything; and in turn, I'm not sure the news outlets owe him anything at all.

In part, Trump is parroting a right wing line railing against the "MSM" as conservatives love to do, saying they never get a fair, or positive shake. When he claims The Times is at death's door, he's not so much concerned about ad revenue (a business I'm fairly sure he doesn't really get) as he is that people make choices about news sources based on reading only what confirms the views they like. There will be media sycophants chasing Trump because it's easier, and more fun, to be liked. But The Times will make money regardless. And the people they really represent - the Upper East Side world of the owners and their close associates - are the very people who have made Trump's social climb the struggle he hates. They will never let him in, and he knows it.

What Trump wants from the press isn't really important - "Stop calling me a thief" he says, as if that will stop them from reporting every time he steals. He wants the attention, he just doesn't want to people to see who he really is amidst the glare. And that, really, isn't in his control. In fact, it's not really in the control of mass media. Certainly not in America. And Trump's just not careful enough (as that "hot mike" moment on Access Hollywood really showed) to understand that for the image to be the reality, you kind of have to really be it. Trump is President. That doesn't make him presidential. And he's not really ever understood the difference. Trump's need to be liked - his need for mass love - is actually the thing that makes him weak: he chases the press for attention and they, in turn, should realize they're the ones with power in this situation.

Regardless of that power, we will just be setting up unreasonable expectations if we expect the press to solve our national Trump problem all on their own - that they will magically produce the perfect scandal that ruins him before he can do too much damage. There will, over time, I hope, be less trying to explain away his worst actions and words, and a better ability to call things out for what they actually are.  But even so, all the reporting in the world will mean little to an audience that's in no mood to hear it. Trump doesn't need or want to stop the presses, but his real power, thus far, is like The Shadow of radio lore - he clouds men's minds. Even though there's some movement to buyer's remorse, Trump's loyalists are still defined most by hearing what they want to hear. That's not a media problem. That's all of our problem. And the solution is something more than black and white... and read all over.

 

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