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I Hate Myself For... Hating You.

What an ugly election season this is shaping up to be, and no, I don't mean the two main candidates for President. We live, of course, in unpleasant times. So the unpleasantness surrounding this election isn't necessarily surprising. Still, that doesn't make what's happening right. Or good.

From "BernieBros" to the Trump Nation, no one - no, not even the passionate defenders of Mrs. Clinton - can claim a lot of high ground. Name calling, finger pointing, the spreading of horrendous "memes," the loss of patience and decorum in even the mildest of disagreements... the primary season has been awash in foul language, and fouler innuendo. Not to mention actual bursts of actual violence.

What worries me isn't the unpleasantness itself - we Americans love the illusions that either we were much more graceful and kind to one another in the misremembered past and that we are simply gentle blushing flowers incapable of such terrible words and deeds... but really, this is us, and has always been so during our political campaigns.

No, what worries me is the blood sport that's developed around the unpleasantness, the Twitterverse and Facebooking of conflict, the glee of repeating the latest unholy epithet, the 24 hour news channels breathless flogging of the latest injury or slight, both real and imagined (or for Fox, mostly imagined reality... but why split hairs?). There's a cottage industry in - or in the cases of Politico and Wonkette, nearly no other reason for existence than - the teasing and promoting of conflict between and amongst the political players.

In the case of inter-party conflict - the D vs. R, right v left, your side or mine, and on and on - the presence of conflict has become the wallpaper of our debate. Everyone's on a side. Those who claim no side are either naive or lying, and we all claim to be sick of the game. Until it resumes, and we return to our corners. It's why this fall is shaping up to be both beyond the pale and a near literal parody of itself - we are running out of ways, and words, to define just how deeply we abhor the opinion/position/claim of "the other side." This poisoned atmosphere didn't just produce Trump v. Clinton... we nearly all insisted it be so. Changing the players wouldn't really alter the game - but these players will, we tell ourselves (like it or not), make the game good.

Yet it's all so obvious - how opposed we are, how well defined our polar opposites look - that on the edges, and even closer to home, we go through the motions, but the real will to fight on ebbs. The Clintons and Trumps know each other, have socialized together; as have much of Washington's left and right elites. The panels on those cable news shows share too many knowing laughs and across the divide looks to truly not know that the show is, often, just that. James Carville and Mary Matalin aren't alone, and certainly not new, in cross-political love and marriage; and the devastating loss Mary Katherine Ham suffered this year when her husband, in the Obama Administration, passed, was a pain felt and shared by many, and no one is callous enough to see politics in that.

Because we can't get the same thrill in old hates, I think, we thrive these days on the new ones, the internal divides. Even as Republicans settle mainly into the dulled, resigned acceptance that Donald Trump is their man, like it or not... news organizations thrive on finding the remaining contingent of "or not." Marco Rubio folding like a card table in the face of party exile was simply a moment, this week, to rehash all those colorful, awful thing Rubio said in his desperate last days on the trail. Conservatives are assailed at every fresh interview with some tale of internal dissent, some new round of unpleasantness at a rally and asked "how can you..." or "do you really..." just to slake our thirst for outrage du jour.

On the left, of course, it's the final, flailing days of the Sanders campaign that provide the gas, "Bernie or Bust" being just the jumping off point for another day, another round of tantrums hurled back and forth. He wants superdelegates! They don't get math! She's too horrible to contemplate!... and on and on. News organizations, week to week, drag out the inevitable moment of Clinton's final confirmed, no turning back, success in amassing delegates to clinch the nomination; "what if Bernie wins California" they breathlessly intone, though no poll has suggested anything near even a close result. I mean... hey, it could happen, and then... more conflict! No matter what happens, the news reporters tell us, Philadelphia and the Convention will be... crazy! Protests! Yelling! "Bleaaarrgghh!"

The orgy around hating - of people all too willing to tell you just how terrible your guy is, and how awful you are for even thinking it's ok - has an energy that I don't think can really be sustained. As with the left/right divides, drama has become farce has become pointless... and many are, at this point, all too weary of continuing at this pitch. There is, of course, the question of all the underlying rage, especially the white working class anger that has fueled the loudest and most sustained of protest voting exercises; but there, too, we all get it - there's a rage that needs to be addressed. Even Donald Trump, for those who care to listen closely, has long since tamped down the most egregious of his button pushing remarks. In  part, he doesn't need to, the angry voter is already his.  But in part, his performance was always just that, a rage to reach others, a feeling he doesn't, really, share.

It's the media, though, who can't, and won't get this memo until well after the fact. Anger makes great television, pushes ratings, sells the product. Gin up the anger machine. Throw some gas on the fire. Watch it burn. News is our voyeur, the watcher in us all. The doing, the changing... not so much. Changing the interest in hate, tamping down the glee over the shouting match... that has to be us. When we stop watching, when we stop caring. Or start. When we ask everyone - ourselves, our friends, even our enemies - to do better, try harder, be more. We are not the sum of our hatreds and our fears...but we can be. Or not.

Let 1,000 Bidens Bloom...

Joe Biden is the Jennifer Lopez of Democrats - he's the guy who, always, is about 3rd on the national list of favorites. In 1988, he generated little real excitement. He was nowhere in 1992. Or 2004. And in 2008, he quickly got sidelined in the 3 way contest of Edwards, Clinton and Obama. Just as Lopez is nobody's absolute favorite singer, or seen as America's most talented actress, in a general way, Biden's on the national list because... well, he's been there a while and he seems intent on doing it.

I don't mind the idea of Biden running, yet again, for President... or anyone else for that matter. Let a thousand Bidens bloom, and let's sort it out with primaries - that, after all, is the kind of glory our system was meant to provide, and look how it's helping the GOP! But seriously, a fresh debate about the American left and a consensus on where to go from here could only help.

All I ask is, let's not pretend that Joe Biden somehow, magically, became a vastly better Democratic candidate for President than he's been in 30 years.

Since Maureen Dowd hit that new low - I know, in a career as horrendously atrocious as hers, that's saying something - of shamelessly suggesting that Biden's son Beau urged a run on his deathbed, the liberal left seems to think Presidential elections will only do in lieu of flowers. True or not, that should have been private, and it's surely the depths of shamelessness to make everyone complicit in what is profoundly unfathomable grief. Biden deserves, after all these years, the simple dignity of being taken on his own terms.

What the public deserves, though, is a thoughtful examination of each candidate, both pro and con, a full look at strengths and weaknesses. Neither Biden, nor Bernie Sanders has really gotten that kind of healthy scrutiny; driven, in no small measure, by a disdain for Hillary Clinton that borders on monomaniacal by her detractors. Where Biden and Bernie can do no wrong, Mrs. Clinton can do no right. We must be repeatedly told no one likes her, or trusts her, or believes a word she says - handy, self-fulfilling prophecies for those who live for the gotcha moment that will finally prove them right.

Mrs. Clinton deserves scrutiny, and by no means should our primaries be seen as preordained or a coronation... but still, she's an experienced public official with years of government service and stated positions on issues well in tune with the liberal tenor of the times. There's a positive case to be made for her that, just as myopically, is not being made at all. If we, as voters, should make a well informed choice, it's the providers of information who, really, ought to be on notice about failing to do the work, in every respect.

Then, too, the foolishness of this hot summer in politics is a reminder of modern realities - that conservatives have made a hash of the Republican Party, that they can barely hold together, that their clown car approach to the Presidential race is yet again a recipe for ultimate failure. Democrats have rarely been so well positioned to simply show up and succeed - yet the last couple of months have been full of the legendary ability of liberals to doubt the rightness of their own views (and to lurch, madly, at folks like Sanders for simply stating the obvious), doubting our leadership choices, and questioning the ability of the general public to vote for their own interests. Fear may be a great motivator, but liberalism needs the confidence of our actual convictions. The sickening attempts to pervert the decent work of Planned Parenthood, alone, is reminder enough that we have to believe what we say to fight for the things we want.

There may be a good case for a Biden presidency. That argument probably deserves to be made and given a hearing. It's also worth considering that our current President is a divisive figure, the results of his Presidency - outside of healthcare - are something of a mixed bag, and the sitting Vice President, surely, carries a weight of defending this Presidency that no one else will bear.The compelling mediocrity of the President and his team, as well, was reiterated this week as they stumbled from tacitly throwing much of their weight behind Clinton to a confused exercise of all but endorsing a Biden run. The Obama team - they'll stand behind you... until suddenly they run away. What will they do, a month or two from now, if Biden stumbles? What then?

Behind all of the roiling is a lot of much harder questions about what the left really stands for, realistically assessing the national mood and taking a hard look at what, really, even the most ambitious liberal President could accomplish. Revisiting the Biden dream is, in a way, a cop-out: it's a last gasp of the old, dem establishment machine cranking the gears of unions and faded urban coalitions, refighting the old fights, reasserting the old ways. Nothing on our side of the race is really about fresh blood - Biden and Sanders are over 70, products of sixties era political movements, as is 67 year old Clinton. Elizabeth Warren, the great hidden hope? She, too, is 66. All of them, any of them, will need a VP candidate pulled from a generation under 50, probably someone out of the new majority-minority melting pot. That we, as Democrats think the answer to not selecting a qualified woman candidate is reviving the prospects of an old white man isn't just reductive, it's thoroughly embarrassing. No wonder much of the energy, this summer, has come from young African American activists demanding greater accountability from our leaders. We should at least take a moment to actually be ashamed of where this is headed, if we just let fear paralyze progress.

Still, this is summer - it's hot, many serious, thoughtful people have taken the month, or months off, fall will return and things will likely look much different in 6-8 weeks. And maybe this fall and winter will be the exciting tale of determining whether Clinton or Biden is the best prospect in a serious examination of issues that matter, rather than shouting and fuming about the scandal du jour. We can always hope. We can, actually, take some control of this messy process and insist on better reporting and a more serious process. But mainly, we could be the liberal left we are capable of being - the people who aren't afraid to stand up, speak out, and do the work to change things. That's bigger, and more powerful, than even a thousand Bidens. If we choose to believe it. And do something.

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Don't Axe Me (I Kinda Like It)

Men's grooming is a touchy topic.

Aside from that poor guy who gets stuck with the assignment at GQ or Details, most media studiously avoids it. Start talking about fragrance or moisturizer or makeup or hair dye and everything gets weird.

Ostensibly, this is because men are "not interested" in this stuff; mostly, though, its because aspects of appearance, "beauty" and such are considered feminine in our culture. Breaking through this wall, never mind breaking down the rigid notions of gendered expectations, becomes all but impossible - "that's girly," "that's gay..." any way to marginalize or label away anything that seems different.

Sure, we make occasional stabs at progress. The rise of out and open gay men as a consumer force has at least made some room for men's products on shelves. The halthing acceptance of straight men doing some grooming soetimes makes it inot mianstram press, usually followed by a backlash.

Like many gay guys my age, I've been dragged into this discussion mostly without wanting to have it. As gay men we have a kind of freedom to ignore gender expectations if we so choose, choosing not so much to accept some label of effeminacy as to resign from the discussion altogether. I started dyeing my hair in college. I started using moisturizer and other products once I started working in department stores (the gals and guys in cosmetics are more fun). And at this late date, I'm quite over discussing whether or not its masculine to use face cream. Do it, or don't... but don't loop me into your debate. Just get on with it... and get over it.

Which brings us to Axe.

Axe is a line of shampoos, body washes, and deodorant sprays from Unilever, one of the big companies in personal grooming and hygiene. Axe is a line for men, but is pitched, curiously and often controversially, at teenage boys. And it has, perhaps unsurprisingly, succeeded brilliantly.

One part of the controversy is the marketing. Axe pitches the scent of its products as simply irresistible catnip (in every sense) to women, its ads featuring bevvies of beauties, usually less dressed, falling over each other to catch some youthful male model doused in the stuff. The ads are over the top, and the sexism is breathtakingly obvious, but there's also a knowing wink of humor in the extremes of the "Axe effect"

   

The other, corollary issue around Axe is that success with teen boys: encouraged to create the "Axe effect", and lacking boundaries (not to mention sense), there's every indication that boys douse themselves in the stuff, layering body wash and spray until a cloud of scent emenates. It doesn't help that the fragrances (especially in the body spray) can be especially intense. This has led to tales - some that seem quite apocryphal - not just of insult, but actual injury from the assault of fragrance, especially in junior and middle schools.

If both of these "controversies" seem like a boon to Axe's marketing department, well, naturally; it can't hurt the product's general cache that parents and angry adults try to keep teen boys from the stuff, turning each purchase into a private rebellion. And popularity breeds more sales - if everyone is doing it, you can't be seen as weird or different for, well, wearing perfume.

In the wake of Axe, most of the major soap and fragrance makers have moved into the market. Old Spice has been probably the most agressive, but Irish Spring is now selling similar smelly washes, and Dial offers somewhat less "aggressive" offerings, less concerned with looking male and butched up, even humorously.

And for this gay guy, the competition has finally opened up options for buying body wash that doesn't smell like lavender (which I hate) or other especially light or sticky sweet scents often aimed at women, which for a long time seemed like all one could find in the body wash department... or winding up with some especially expensive option only available in a department store or high end male boutique.

My point is... as much as I get the sexist anger aimed at Axe's advertising, this debate shouldn't occur in some vacuum that ignores how we got here: if we hadn't constructed such an enormous stigma about men using scent, then companies wouldn't be left chasing teen boys with marketing as far removed as possible from even a whiff of homoeroticism rather than risk wasting millions only to be sidelined as only for gay men. We're nice... but we can't provide sales anywhere what Axe generates now.

I thought about this again this morning, as I showered with my Axe body wash (Apollo - because nothing beats astronaut), a pleasant fragrance that I kinda like and smells nice on me. I don't use the body spray (although I did while doing some community theater, sweating up a storm through ten costume changes), but the stick deodorant works well, too. It's not just for teen boys, after all. And I don't expect angels to fall from the sky and chase me... but if a nice man noticed me in the grocery store.... well, that's just fine.

I doubt we'll ever completely unpack all the gender issues and cultural complications around beauty and grooming... but changing it starts, most simply, by changing ourselves: I tend to think everyone is beautiful, in their own way. And if fragrance, or hair color, or a touch of makeup is what you want to add, well, then, go for it. You don't have to meet an unrealistic expectation, just be the person you want to be.  And when my eldest nephew starts pouring on the Axe, I know it will be the moment when his favorite Uncle can finally step in and teach him a thing or two about grooming.

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Articles We Never Finished Reading: The Myth Of Mr. Nice Guy

From the beginning, the president's reelection campaign has taken a brutal, no-holds-barred approach that's sharply at odds with the conciliatory image that was the central predicate of Obama's entire pre-presidential political career. Whether or not the specific issue of Bain Capital ought to be off limits -- Booker has taken pains to clarify he doesn't think it should be -- there's no denying that Obama's 2012 campaign has seized every opportunity to turn the campaign toward sharply personal attacks of a type that the 2008-vintage Obama would surely have recoiled from. From Romney's treatment of his onetime pet dog to his high-school pranks to his income-tax rate, from the "war on women" to the "war on caterpillars," from "I like being able to fire people" to "I'm not concerned about the very poor," no potential controversy has been too petty, too rhetorically overblown or too out-of-context to be exploited to the hilt.

None of this is shocking -- it's how the game is played. But Obama once ostentatiously refused to play it. In June 2007, for example, when Obama's primary campaign distributed a memo titled "Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab)" detailing Clinton's connections to India, Obama publicly upbraided his staff, calling it "a dumb mistake" and "unnecessarily caustic." As the New York Times put it at the time, "The memo...raised quesitons about Obama's claims that he is above attack politics, which are epitomized by secretly distributing opposition research about a rival."

 - Molly Ball "The New, Nasty Obama Campaign," at The Atlantic Online.

It may be nasty... but there's nothing "new" about the Obama campaign running vigorously against its opponents. If anything, Democrats are a bit relieved that a primary challenge never materialized, and that Mitt Romney is rising to every expectation of being the lousy campaigner we knew him to be.

This notion of that "hope and change" meant "nice and kind" is a fantasy that played mostly in the heads of Obama's most youthful, or most ardent, believers in 2008. The "can't we all just get along" arguments, the "he's the only one that can bring us together" notes of the pro-Obama hymn, were pretty (and about an inch deep), but they belied the reality that the Obama campaign's approach to beating Hillary Clinton was often brutal and desperate. And while his supporters moutheed words of Kumbayah and World Peace, privately they tended to gripe that Obama should be even rougher and tougher... hardly the notion of gentle niceness that was meant to be projected.

The "India memo" cited above (which is news to me, all these years later), is really more of a prime example of the hamhandedness and neophyte campaign mistakes of the Obama team, lessons they only seem to have partially learned and dealt with since. There is still the inordinate faith in his speeches, still the part where they get caught flat footed when news breaks that's out of their control, and still a kind of amateur quality to their attempts to go hard and mean against opponents. It's not that Mitt Romney's "Bain problem" should be off liits, it's that the message of that Bain problem needs to be spelled out correctly. As far as I can tell, the Obama people get it about half right (and then seem skittish when suggestions arise that they "go too far"). Still, they suffer from the liberal anxiety of being seen as actually believing the things they claim to find important.

The President would be in much rougher shape if Republicans had fielded a candidate - arguably Rick Santorum was closest - who actually appealed to a wide swath of voters who are actually indifferent to the President's record thus far. These are largely the sorts of people who found Hillary Clinton interesting as well - working class people, often white, but also many of color, as well as other distinct minorities, like gay men and lesbians. Instead, because he and Romney are fighting over a fairly narrow percentage of a small part of the overall electorate - educated, but non partisan voters in the middle and iupper middle class - things are bound to be ugly, and charges thrown around. 

It's worth remembering that the 2008 campaign, against McCain had an undercurrent of ugliness that never entirely went away; it's mainly that it was so clear, early in October, that McCain was doomed that the Obama team was much better positioned to stay on the high road, and did so most of the time. It's clear that many conservatives, still, think that they lost because McCain didn't go harder and uglier; but at the same time, they are also the ones who complain, still, that Sarah Palin was subjected to all kinds of ugliness, from the press and from the Obama team. True or not, both ideas miss the point that McCain failed mainly because he was a lousy candidate, and Sarah Palin's selection was Example A (or possibly B after McCain flopped on the economic meltdown in the fall of 2008) of the kind of bad decision making that did him in. The obama didn't so much "play nice" as they simply ignored him, for close to a month. And this year, they may indeed get a similarly luxury option towards the middle of October as well. That won't be a win for "niceness", merely an expression of the reality that Republicans remain in spectacular disarray. There's nothing "new" about the Obama team's "meanness"; and still, nastiness may not define his presidential victories. Either of them.

Articles We Never Finished Reading: Money Talks... Or Something

At its {Buckley v. Valeo, 1974] center is a distinction between expenditures and contributions. The Court said that, under the First Amendment, Congress could not restrict campaign expenditures. Spending money was like speech itself, because “every means of communicating ideas in today’s mass society requires the expenditure of money.” That included printing handbills, renting halls, and buying ads on television. It is a result of Buckley that wealthy candidates like Mayor Michael Bloomberg can spend as much as they want of their own money on their campaigns; it would be unconstitutional to limit their expenditures.

But, according to Buckley, limits on contributions were constitutionally permissible. The Court said that a campaign contribution served only as “a general expression of support for the candidate and his views, but does not communicate the underlying basis for the support.” In the Court’s view, limiting contributions did not significantly inhibit political expression by the person giving the money. This was why the Court concluded that it was permissible for the law to limit how much an individual could contribute to any particular campaign.

In the 1974 law, Congress had tried to set up a tightly controlled system for financing campaigns: the government would monitor and regulate both the inflows and the outflows of money. It is not clear that the proposal would have worked as intended, but at least it made holistic sense. Congress could essentially select a number for the over-all price of a congressional or Presidential campaign, and then force candidates to live within that number. Buckley ended that system before it even started, and imposed a different one, of the Justices’ own creation. The court declared that contributions could be limited but expenditures could not, and for two generations that distinction has been the central feature of the constitutional rules of campaign finance. The bottom line was that money is speech.

 - Jeffrey Toobin, "Money Unlimited," an analysis of the Citizens United case, in the May 21st issue of The New Yorker

The "bottom line", of course, is Toobin's; he himself has just written, in the prior two paragraphs that the "bottom line" is not nearly the bright (and in the paragraphs preceding it, he points out that Buckley v. Valeo is a contradictory, complicated, and extremely long decision that's hard to understand). But "bottom line'... Toobin's happy to shorthand it for you.

And shorthand that, and much else, Toobin does, for pages and pages in The New Yorker. Poorly written, sloppily fact checked - somewhere, the ghosts of the old New Yorker staff are spinning in mausolea - Toobin's exercise is mainly one of Supreme Court soap opera, full of (unverified, as far as I can tell) postulating on who does what to whom and how the Important Work of the Law gets injured in the process. Toobin's take is catnip for liberals, and blasphemy to conservatives, but both reactions give Toobin too much credit. Toobin's lazy assertions, like the breezy (and popular) sum-up of Buckley, tend to show that his investigation of campaign financing, never mind its "reform" are secondary to scoring political points and cheap shots (his disdain for Roberts, Alito, Scalia and especially Clarence Thomas are glaring). Though Toobin attempts - and he'd have to, because otherwise the article is little more than gossipy fluff - to ground his storytelling in a historical and theoretically detailed historical perspective, his retelling is slapdash, lazy, and lacking in useful specifics. For instance, he breezily sums up Watergate and the campaign reforms out of it - which led to the Buckley case - without really laying out why Congress approached the reforms as it did, or which aspects of Watergate were the real drivers for reform). This matters, I swear. He's equally lazy, and curiously vague, when describing the even earlier aspects of the Gilded Age-era practices that first led to some attempt to regulate campaigns; and he acts as if problematic campaigns, never mind questionable campaign spending, suddenly became an issue after 1870 (try looking up "Ma, Ma, who's my Paw?" for just one earlier example).

All of which makes soggy, slippery ground for Toobin to try and ground the discussion of Citizens United, though mostly Toobin can't be bothered to lay out the specifics of McCain Feingold, why they were seen as problematic from before the law even passed, and why the Supreme Court started looking askance at the law soon after it became law. And Toobin can't really avoid the fact that First Amendment issues were a concern for the Court well before the specifics of Citizens United were brought to it (a case called FEC vs. Wisconsin Right To Life in 2007 made clear that the Court was concerned about speech restrictions), but he insists that it's a "crusading" Court, led by John Roberts, that's trying to eviscerate Campaign Finance Reform. I'm at least pretty sure that's not how they would puit it; but you'll never know from Toobin, since he makes virtually no attempt to get perspectives from anyone who seemingly disagrees with his assessments.

I'm not trying to defend the Citizens United decision, or suggest that money equals speech is a great standard; if anything I don't need to, since Toobin's article, really, does most of that work itself. Though Toobin is incredulous about the path that set the Court towards overturning McCain Feingold, he does, in fact, backhandedly lay out why the decision's logic makes internal sense: trying to separate a biased, provocative, deliberately propagandistic film from other forms of political "advertising" is in many ways a distinction without a difference, and whie the Court is more willing to regulate advertising than other forms of speech, political advertising, because it is a form of speech so central to our Constitutional approach (elections, where people can freely debate ideas and assumptions), gets more than usual protectionunder the First Amendment. That's why "money=speech" is complicated, and difficult. The money Proctor and Gamble spends to sell Tide is not afforded special consititutional protections. But Mayor Bloomberg's ability to spend his own money to advocate for his own election is. And probably should be.

In any event, exploring this fascinating, difficult, and challenging subject would make for a great, thoughtful article one could chew over and debate with friends. The most frustrating thing is that Toobin hasn't written it. Which is reason enough not to bother reading it.

 

Articles We Never Finished Reading (Except For The Pictures): The Rocks That I Got

"The house, a classic white brick manse, is huge—nine bedrooms—and sprawls out from the center hall with two giant wings. The interior is echt J.Lo: luxe, modern, and sexy—dark floors, gray curtains and walls, pastel-colored furniture. Her assistant, Gilly, deposits me in Lopez’s office and says, “Jennifer will be down shortly.” I hear kids shrieking somewhere upstairs. Like Lopez herself, the office is both masculine and feminine. There are wood-paneled walls and wingback chairs, a killer sound system, and a fur throw draped over a sofa. There’s a huge plaque (30 MILLION ALBUMS SOLD WORLD-WIDE); a ledge full of various film- and music-industry awards; and on her desk, nude shots of J.Lo for the advertising campaign for her forthcoming perfume, Glowing (the sample fragrance bottle actually lights up). A quick glance at the shelves reveals a taste for the classics (The Grapes of Wrath, Shakespeare); memoir (Arthur Miller’sTimebends); and self-help (Lies at the Altar: The Truth About Great Marriages). On the glass coffee table there is a big, lush book on Pucci, which somehow seems perfect."

"Venus Rising", a profile of Jennifer Lopez by Jonathan Van Meter, in the April 2012 Vogue

I just wanted to prove that not everything I put down is in New York, and also that not everything is a political or intellectual diatribe. I don't (generally) buy People or Us (though I admit a weakness for the sleazier Star) or other mags with fawning celbrity profiles... but Conde Nast can get me to read them anyway, posing as fashion (Vogue, GQ) or deep thought (Vanity Fair, which isn't). At this late date, I know what I'm in for: a quick tour of the Star's Lovely Home, a few bites of Our Star at a Meal, the old "they're just like us" anecdote, and another few thousand words about how, really, they're not (multiple divorces, million dollar lifestyles, blah blah blah). Sometimes they're interesting (Julia Roberts, Charlize Theron), even thoughtful (Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway)... but sometimes you can't even fake the necessary interest, which appears to be the case here. I kept putting this issue at the top of my pile, even after the new one came out, determined to read the Lopez piece all the way to the end. But I just couldn't do it; I'd get hung up on descriptions, like the one above, which illustrate both the absurdity of her wealth and the vapidness of the profiles like this (and, by extension, the vapid prose of writers like Van Meter). Then there's the fact that Lopez, still, is the odd kind of nondescript star only America can quite produce: she's not exactly good, her career is kind of middling, she's the third chair on a reality panel show whose recording career has been modestly succesful. Although she seemed a promising actress, that hasn't really worked out either. So why does she get Vogue covers? I mean, obviously, she's attractive, but that seems to be about it, and even there, there are more striking brunettes and women of Puerto Rican descent. So mostly, I've given up, the Vogue goes into my back issue pile, and I'll never know Jennifer's beauty secrets. Oh well. Life, I suppose, must go on.

Articles We Never Finished Reading: And The World Screams, Kiss Me, Son Of God

"[Cornel] West and Cone did a Q&A at a Princeton bookstore last winter, and afterward, they and a handful of friends and colleagues—including the journalist Chris Hedges, who wrote the Truthdig piece; Carl Dix, a local communist organizer; Brother Ali, an albino rapper; and a few professors—went to dinner. There, West was in his element. He had no one to provoke, and it was clear to see why some might compare West to Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.E.B. DuBois, or even Mark Twain. The conversation started with an appreciation of the works of novelist James Baldwin. “At Baldwin’s funeral,” said West, “I sat next to Stokely Carmichael. He’s a hard brother, and he cried like a baby.” West regarded Baldwin in the light of William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Amiri Baraka, and his friend Toni Morrison. Then the conversation took a turn, touching briefly on the works of the slavery historians ­David Brion Davis and Leon Litwack, and the civil-rights historian Howard Zinn, ­before resting for a time on Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, the definers of ­twentieth-century Christian theology—both of whom taught at Union. About the literary critic Harold Bloom, West pronounced, “He’s not always right, but he’s always got something to say,” and then he veered straight through Martin Heidegger to praise his lesser-known disciple, Hans-Georg Gadamer."

 - This week's profile of Cornel West titled - I'm not kidding - "I Want To Be Like Jesus", by Lisa Miller.

Miller does manage the neat trick of being both fawning and dismayed in profiling West, apparently going with "how could such a great mind have so many personal problems," but none of West's admirers can outdo West himself. If you can get past the Jesus part - it's an actual quote that West says he doesn't see himeself as any of Jesus' disciples, but rather as Jesus, himself - there's still West polishing his resume over a string of appointments at Ivy League schools (the hook for the story, ostensibly, is that West is leaving Princeton for Union Theological Seminary), and name dropping like mad. It's not West's celebrity that gets me, or the self satisfaction; his Jesus complex is no doubt helped by the sycophants he's trained to follow him and who shower him with accolades and praise. Miller does a nice job, really, of highlighting the fact that all this mass love is no substitute for the fact that he has few friends, three bad marriages and even a fairly checkered set of professional connections (and really, when forced to choose between Larry Summers or Professor West, who's really worse?).

No, the thing that got me to throw down the artcle was the paragraph above, which to me laid bare the intellectual pomposity that annoys me when West talks in most interviews and appearances (I can only imagine what his classes would be like), the scattershot deployment of Big Intellectual Names You Must Know, the smattering of celebrity names and inside gossip that make you feel like an intimate (why else name drop of Stokely Carmichael?) , but the considered lack of thought about the ideas that are supposed to drive these big thinkers and their works. I feel very lucky to have had college professors who challenged me not to just read the assignments, but to think about what I read, synthesize my own ideas and apply the learnings to all sorts of aspects of life in general. It's not who you know, or how fabulously well read you are, I think it's what you do with the ideas that you discover along the way, and the life you put together as a result. Otherwise, why bother learning anything along the way?

West, the article suggests, is suffering now because he's one of the few major black intellectuals to have soured on President Obama, but that, of course, is of a piece with West's general approach: his over-the-top praise for Obama initially was both too much and too intended to get attention for himself, and his new contrarianism is just as self aggrandizing and just as poorly thought through (if you can stay long enough, Melissa Harris-Perry takes it apart in the article, with her usual combination of smarts and class). Maybe it's my life spent around collegiate types, and faculty in particular; but the best teachers, and the best friends, I find, carry less pretension and look more to share ideas rather than win the contest of Obscure References, because it's a better world when we all know a little bit more. West can probably win the name game... but that doesn't make you Christ. Or even Christ-like.

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.

What's Black And White And Red All Over?

I promised myself not to write anything about the News of the World "phone hacking" scandal until Rebekah Brooks, the CEO of News International, resigned. I did that because, ultimately, any piece before she did would amount to " Rebekah Brooks will have to go".

And now she has. And she's been arrested to boot.

I've been following the phone hacking story for months, at least; I kind of remember being interested back when Sienna Miller first filed suit in 2007, claiming her phones had been hacked, messages deleted, and details related to the messages showed up in the News of the World. But since then, watching this story unfold, it's fascinating and truly compelling to see how one minor incident has snowballed  into the calamity that may take down Rupert Murdoch's empire, his livelihood, and possibly his career. 

But if you're lloking for me to join in vocal outrage over the phone hacking details... well, you should know I don't do outrage a lot. Also that I tend not to take the familiar, obvious line; in this case, I'm not especially sympathetic to cries that "reasonable expectations of privacy" are really the story of the phone hacking scandal. Indeed, the unfolding of the phone stories has reinforced a faith I have that the belief in a "right to privacy" is actually kind of a vague all purpose shield that tends to wilt under close scrutiny.

No, what's really unfolding out of the revelations of phone hacking is something much more fundamental, especially for the British, whose culture, after all, is actually quite different from Americans. What's fundamentally unraveling in England, and may drift over to American shores, is a fundamental reassessment of just what constitutes news and what we deserve to know. In some ways, yes, that's the flip side of "privacy", but it's really the more relevant, more controllable question. Just how freely should the press rummage about in people's lives, and what amounts to going too far? 

That's the real question that "phone hacking" has generated. And it's why, really, the phone hacking scandal probably begins and ends with Milly Dowler.

The Darn Thing Has Wings!

The Emmy Awards are silly.

I wouldn't bother to share this insight, but I tripped over the fact, just now, that today was the "official release of the Emmy nominations," a showing of pomp and circumstance meant, like all things Emmy, to emulate the actual suspense around the reveal of the Oscar nominations; TV still suffers from movie envy. 

If you want a quick indication of the pointlessness of the Emmys, here's a few obvious examples: Mariska Hargitay's umpteenth nomination for SVU, long past the point the show, or her performance, is anything to write home about. Or the "so sorry about Charlie Sheen" nomination for Jon Cryer of Two and a Half Men, nobody's idea of a brilliant comic performance.

How about this? The program with the most nominations of any show is Mildred Pierce, HBO's bloated remake of James M. Cain's noir potboiler, which premiered to dismal reviews and compares weakly to the 1945 film (or, as we like to call it, Joan Crawford's Oscar). Even if it's decent (I haven't seen it, and I'd bet Downton Abbey, the BBC miniseries for masterpiece actually wins), does it deserve 21 nominations? I'm guessing no.

And those 21 categories are just the tip of the Emmy iceberg.

It's an odd moment for television; I can't remember a time where so much good episodic television is being produced, nor a time when network television was as generally poor. The great work of producing television, really, is off the network path, whether it's the cable channels that mimic network like TNT and USA, or the higher end efforts of HBO and Showtime, or even the upstart work of mini-net the CW. The options are so wide and varied, it is, in some sense, no wonder that the Emmys can't possibly take it all in. What's sad, and has always been sad, is that the Emmys rarely reflect the boldest, or most innovative efforts in series television, going back to, say Twilight Zone or Star Trek - reflecting a general failure to respect science fiction - up through ignoring shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Emmy Awards generally play catch up, or reward, as is often noted, movie stars willing to slum on the small screen.

This year, among the overlooked: Burn Notice, Southland (now on TNT), Rizzoli and Isles, The Vampire Diaries, Supernatural, Archer, RuPaul's Drag Race (tell me, really, how So You Think You Can Dance is better). That's just off the top of my head, and the top of my viewing interests. Yes, the Emmys were quick to recognize Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire (both of which I'd like to see), and recognized the bright spots of NBC's comedy lineup as welll as the obvious necessity to reward The Good Wife. But still; the Emmy Awards continue to reward industry darlings, movie stars, and marketing ploys. Want another example? How about Betty White's forgettable performance in Hot In Cleveland, an altogether pointless excuse for a sitcom? It's embarrassing, and as I said, it becomes silly to try and take the nominations seriously, never mind the awards.

I mention all of thie because it's a good moment to plug a couple of blogs I read for entertainment news. One, most obviously, is Deadline Hollywood, which still showcases the genius and reporting godlike qualities of Nikki Finke, along with a new band of hardy coanchors. Nellie Andreeva is their main TV reporter, and she is generally great, though her Emmy coverage is depressingly conventional, and tends to accept the status quo. 

The other blog I feel compelled to mention is Alyssa Rosenberg's new effort over at Think Progress, which is devoted to "cultural criticism", the kind of blog idea that makes me slightly green with envy... except that, as good as she is, Rosenberg's blog is interesting only in starts and fits. She's settled into too many TV series recaps (her Burn Notice recaps seem especially poorly conceived), and her overall insights on film and television are, too often, pedestrian and kind of obvious. Still, she's a bracing feminist critic and she's clearly passionate about the material, if muddy on her overall concept. 

But here's the thing: I expect, as with Deadline, that Rosenberg will take apart the nominee lists, pick her favorites, and generally cheerlead the run up to the awards. And I think that's giving the Emmys a seriousness that they just haven't earned. When they do, if they ever can... that's an interesting question. And one worth pondering. For such a pretty award, it's a shame it's just so... silly.