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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.

The Roganing

In 2020, Joe Rogan did an episode of his podcast, a 5 hour conversation with Alex Jones. In 2015, he did an interview with Milo Yiannopoulos. 

They are among 42 episodes that - surprise! - vanished from the collection when Spotify paid over $100 million to Rogan for rights to his podcasts.

Keep that in mind when Spotify acts shocked to discover that Rogan might be doing things which are... controversial.

Rogan is sort of emblematic of the hard road many ambitious folks have in show business. A modestly successful comedian and entertainer, Rogan had a small role on the series NewsRadio in the nineties, a somewhat longer gig hosting Fear Factor on NBC, and some niche success as a standup comic - it's hard to quantify success with comics these days, in part because while they may do well enough playing the 2nd or 3rd largest club in Phoenix, the streaming service level of desperation for comic content provides many opportunities to be filmed.

I'm not trying to minimize his success, but as careers go, it may not have been the kind of thing you planned on when you started out.

I mention all of this because Rogan has always been something of a specific draw - not so much a runaway success as a solid, reasonably well liked genre specific star, that genre being a sort of scruffy, working guy icon, with some appeal in his own demographic of 25-54 white guys (hence the added gigs hosting, say, MMA fights on tv), but not necessarily a lot outside of that.

There's a defense of Rogan's podcasts - I'm getting to them - that insists that critics are attacking Rogan's audience, a putdown of all white men wrapped in the takedown of a widely followed (perhaps even wildly liked, though I'm not clear on what that even means) podcast. So let's be clear: I don't blame the audience.

The problem with the podcast is Rogan himself.

Rogan hosts the podcast much the way one would expect for a middle aged comic/reality show host to do (don't take my word for it - watch Andy Cohen) - bring up a topic, bring out a guest or two, ask some questions, bing bang boom, you've got a podcast. Get in the game early enough, promote the hell out of yourself, grab some ziz by mouthing off a few times... and you too could be sitting on the podcast that attracts millions.

But you're late and you don't, and that's kind of the point: what Rogan's doing isn't genius, or even especially hard. It isn't, really, all that different from his overall career. It just happens to be the platform where he's managed to achieve the most reach, ever, of his - again, not being critical - modest success of a career. That's what Spotify paid $100 million for. It's also why we have a little bit of a problem.

The problem, really, is Rogan's minimalist approach to hosting and topics. The whole shtick, really is "I don't know a lot about this, let's talk to someone who does" and it has, as a rising total of pulled podcasts demonstrates, led to Rogan blithely allowing quacks, frauds, Nazis and racists to share, uncontested, questionable information and views which turn out to be, inaccurate, invalid, or simply too much. It has allowed Rogan himself to casually offer up insulting slang as, one supposes, he probably thought was no big deal in smaller setttings. It's a predictable problem that could have occurred to Spotify prior to purchase had Spotify's billionaire owner seen himself (who does, these days) as not just a pass through to audiences but a content provider with a role in determining the quality of the content.

The bottom line point - and it's breathtakingly obvious - is Rogan needs an editor. A supervising producer. Someone, really, whose job exists to plan content, research guests, help prepare the host with questions, and identify potential potholes. It's the way GOOP needed actual medical advisors to point out that jade eggs might cause serious health problems inserted into your cooch. 

This isn't hard. It's not world ending or anti-white guy to point out, in passing, that unsupervised, unmoderated Joe Rogan just spitballing on an interesting topic is likely to be what it, well, is: inaccurate, embarrassing, tactless, even offensive and dangerous. It's the problem created by social media where we all just assume we can do the same thing Chuck Todd does for NBC with a budget, a staff, and a Senior Producer. Content creation is hard, it needs structure and it needs, desperately, expertise. The alternative, as the Roganing of our discourse demonstrates, is a messy, often inaccurate, frequently maddening morass of dubious vitamin cures, "i'm no expert but" opinionating, and a lot of, as it turns out, dangerous misinformation.

It's not the audience, and, I'll say it... the problem ultimately isn't necessarily Joe Rogan - though I do think, as a grown person, it's fair to ask why "maybe I don't know a lot about this and should consult people who do" isn't simply a reasonable expectation of those who wish a central role in our discourse. But, hey, that's me. What I do know is, at some point, Spotify has to move to rein in the free for all of its podcasting plans, or continue, as Rogan demonstrated, to reap the whirlwind of every loose comment and off the cuff rant. Our discourse could use grown ups. And "I hate grown ups" looks fine on a college comic at an open mic... but it may be time for Joe Rogan to think about what maturing means.

Melania Trump Is Selling A Hat

There's a lot going on in the world, but I find myself stuck on the strangest, if not smallest, of news stories: that Melania Trump is auctioning off her hat.

The hat - one she wore to meet President Macron and his wife - is part of an online auction where Mrs. Trump is also selling NFT's of photos of the hat for cryptocurrency.

According to the press release, the starting bid is $250,000.

While much of her husband's family, including his children from his first marriage, are embroiled in a series of financial and political scandals, Melania Trump has managed to find a fairly private life in the post presidency. She is rarely seen. She does not speak, and only occasionally nets public attention, particularly, it seems with auctions. This is her second foray into NFTs.

There are of course, all sorts of questions to be asked over this turn of events - why does she need the money? Is she unhappy? Does she have, as most former First Ladies do, an office and a staff? What do they do, anyway? Sell off her possessions?

And again... why does she need the money?

Myself, I have more questions about the hat. It's a Herve Pierre hat, by the way, and while many may not know, Pierre - a veteran of Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta and Carolina Herrera - designed Mrs. Trump's Inaugural Ball gown and has been a stylist to her for a number of years. The hat was the topper to a severe white suit Mrs. Trump wore, which complemented the white Chanel suit Mrs. Macron wore that day. The hat, however, was wide brimmed and oversized, and generally blocked most views of Mrs. Trump's face. Mrs. Macron, one might note, did not wear a hat. One might also observe that, in general, outside of the British nobility, hat wearing has largely fallen out of favor.

And - this is really only my opinion - it was kind of an ugly hat. I may not be a huge fan of hats, but I enjoy a dramatic picture hat as much as anyone, or the "fascinators" of Britain, cloche hats, cowboy hats... I'm not hard to convince. But the Trump/Macron hat was the sort of hat that, well, annoys me: too big yet not big enough to be a dramatic statement; droopy, rather than jaunty; limiting things like sight and hearing, which seems counterproductive in a social setting. 

So, on the one hand, I get it: why not unload an outfit specific, already worn hat that, frankly, only sort of worked? On the other hand... if you're going to auction off First Lady items, ostensibly "for charity" (vague "scholarships" are promised), why not pull together a substantial, wide ranging representation? Why just... well, you know... a hat?

By virtue of her silence, Mrs. Trump remains largely a cipher. It's why, aside from being well written, that the two books about Mrs. Trump - Stephanie Winston Wolkoff's and Stephanie Grisham's - have been the most intriguing looks behind the Trump curtains. Mrs. Trump, it is suggested, feels the press is unfair to her. Yet this could easily be addressed in a friendly interview. There is of course the fact that she does not seem entirely confident of her English (though her facility in a number of languages was touted frequently by Trump press agents), why not surprise everyone and do the interview in French? Or Italian?

Aside from the Trump family claims of press mistreatment, there's the similar, but not the same feeling across the conservative right that 'Liberal media" is deeply unfair, even disrespectful to Mrs. Trump, and her role as First Lady. This is, yes, a bit rich, coming from the folks who coined "Pig in a Pants Suit" and suggested, repeatedly, that Michelle Obama was a man. But then, too, the "support" for Mrs. Trump is itself kind of odd - a kind of force fitting of a few thinly known details into a blown up, largely fictional presentation of the former First Lady as a folksy, classy mom just trying to stage tasteful events. And indeed, though Mrs. Trump has been dogged by some fairly salacious photos she took as a model, the idea of widespread liberal disrespect for her is a bit extreme. One would have to have a much better sense of her to really even know where to begin or what to criticize.

As it is, Mrs. Trump largely sailed through the Presidential years largely unseen and undisturbed - arguably bringing a rarified, if occasionally severe sense of high style to White House decorating, and occasionally raising controversy with outfits like "I really don't care... do U?" and $75,000 Dolce jackets that were perhaps a bridge too far. And continuing that largely private life appears to be her plan. Which only brings us back to the overall weirdness of this story: why is Mrs. Trump selling that hat?  

 

The Curious Case of George W Bush

Speaking of guys who offered up some eyebrow raising remarks on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, we also have the bracing words of George W Bush:

"On America’s day of trial and grief, I saw millions of people instinctively grab for a neighbor’s hand and rally to the cause of one another. That is the America I know. At a time when religious bigotry might have flowed freely, I saw Americans reject prejudice and embrace people of Muslim faith. That is the nation I know," he said.

"At a time when nativism could have stirred hatred and violence against people perceived as outsiders, I saw Americans reaffirm their welcome of immigrants and refugees. That is the nation I know," he said. "At a time when some viewed the rising generation as individualistic and decadent, I saw young people embrace an ethic of service and rise to selfless action. That is the nation I know."

It was, yes, a lovely speech, and a graceful, not to mention, pointed, reference to the events of January sixth. Bush's remarks were welcomed as a strong corrective to the tendency among conservatives these days to try and whitewash 1/6 and continue to play Trump's apologists. Bush, for his part, was yet another Republican refusing to mention Trump by name when discussing the bad aspects... but his language was surprisingly direct.

All of that said... no one should let Bush get away with absolving himself of either his behavior after 9/11 or the way his actions and of the people around him also helped get us to exactly where we are now.

"At a time when religious bigotry might have flowed freely..." really? Do we really want to reexamine the arrests of random people with arabic names after 9/11? The rounding up of people? The immediate increase in threats to mosques in the days weeks and months after 9/11? The work of the Bush administration to insitute permission to torture suspected terrorists? How about the Iraqi prison where they were tortured? Or the Black sites? Or bloody Guantanamo Bay...WHICH IS STILL THERE???

How about Bush's cowboy mentality and his threats to hunt down and kill terrorists in caves? How about starting a war in Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11? How about starting a 20 year war in Afghanistan with no clear sense of the mission to be accomplished or plan to leave? How about "Mission Accomplished" and Bush landing on an aircraft carrier?

George W. Bush would like nothing better than for you to forget that 9/11 both happened on his watch and led to the kind of anti-Muslim paranoia on the right that Trump managed all too easily to exploit on his way to winning the White House. Bush would probably like, even more, to forget that he helped create a Republican Party aimed mainly at propping up his fragile ambitions, over anything resembling a coherent approach to governance of any kind... or that the hollowing out of the Republican Party (firmly accomplished by Karl Rove on the way to winning 2004) left a party scrambling to find its way and left open to the repeated work of opportunists and their personal interests.

As I said (rather presciently), in 2009:

By sheer force of emotion - not will - he remade the Republican Party in his image: anti-intellectual, inconsistent, too concerned about the image, and not enough about the details. He replaced conservative ideals with cant, and then doubled back and destroyed the cant by, as his family does, wavering in the face of failure.  He called himself a strong believer in free markets... and engineered the largest government takeover of the banking industry. He called himself a compassionate conservative... and then let the Gulf Coast drown.

And he lied. He lied about getting into war, then he lied about staying in the war, then he lied about getting out of it. He lied - and still lies - about 9/11 (Saddam Hussein... not involved). He lied when it would have been just as easy to tell the truth.

And really, I suspect... he lies to himself. It's easier that way.

I welcome anyone, including and especially the former President, who wants to call out the current conservative movement and insist that it has to be better and do better. I will not, however, stand idly by and let George W Bush recast himself as some kind hearted warrior for justice who had no hand in creating the Republican Party as we see it today. This is very much his fault. He was there, and he had a hand in making it what it became, and how it became the party of Donald Trump. 

Just because we were united in grief doesn't mean that we deserved a needless, preventable tragedy. Or so mcuh of what came as a result of it. And no one bears the responsibility for how we got here the way George W Bush does. Never forget that. And never let him get out from under it. 

Moon Unit

The most surprising Trump news from this weekend wasn't, surprisingly, his abject failure to show up to any of the solemn memorials (like every other living former President save the Carters), choosing instead to pay a Reality Celebrity appearance at the police and fire units near his apartment. Nor was it, drunken Rudy Giuliani's rabid ramblings at a memorial dinner that evening (though these were a sure sign of Rudy's falling into a sad Joe McCarthy-like final decline).

No, Trump managed to upstage himself by making a paid video appearance in promotional materials for the Unification Church of (the now deceased) Sun Myung Moon.

The Church - now led by Moon's wife and sons - has long been staunchly right wing in America. Among other things, they own The Washington Times. Still, Trump's taped remarks were, at the very least, disconcerting, and raised long simmering questions about the Church's malign influence.

Also, Donald Trump is a financially desperate hack who'd take money from anyone who will prop up his fragile ego and fan his delusions of self importance.

In my youth, the notion of "Moonies" - those who had surrendered their independence of thought and finance to the Unification Church - was part of a general concern about cults and the danger they posed. In the sixties, these concerns had started with the Helter Skelter killings of the "Manson kids", followers of Charles Manson. In the seventies, cut concerns took on added urgency partly because of the odd behaviors of Unification church members, Hare Krishnas, and ultimately, with the tragedy of Jim Jones and his followers in Guyana, after they'd fled the San Francisco Bay Area claiming persecution.

Like so many things that have become weirdly politicized, it's hard to know where cult acceptance bifurcated on party lines. Probably, one could point to David Koresh and conservatives trying to suggest "live and let live" libertarianism about a doomsday cult with odd notions about Christianity and some clear implications of underage sexual abuse of children. Whether it's of a piece with a blind spot about authoritarianism combined with "anything goes" notions of religious freedom (especially for anything nominally claiming to be Christian)... who can say. But the failure of conservatives to get tough and stay tough on religious cults does seemed to have moved form merely curious to oddly problematic.

Liberals, being the more comfortable home for religious skepticism, have a somewhat different problem: there's a decidedly passive, impotent approach to tackling cults once they are found out, also having to do with a confusion over choice versus coercion. Cults are marked by the work they do to brainwash adherents (well documented, clearly identifiable tactics like "love bombing", isolation, and deprivation), but often, cult involvement is treated as more of a personal weakness than a dangerous exploitation... until, well after the fact, the exploitation is all too clear. Most recently, that trajectory seems to explain how the NXIVM cult quietly destroyed many young women until its tactics were brought out into the open.

And what does this have to do with the Unification Church? Well, for one thing, like Scientology, the Moon family has worked hard to shroud the cult like aspects of the organization in order to put a more benign, quasi-religious face on its operations to avoid deep scrutiny. That includes using its Wash Times mouthpiece to whitewash potential allegations, courting conservative political cover, and most recently, going full MAGA to gain trust from Trump. Trump's paid appearance is, apparently, something of the culmination of those efforts.   

Trump's Moon Unit this weekend, might have played badly in conservative circles at one time; but at this point, the cult-like atmosphere of conservatism itself, never mind the more specific contours of MAGA support, probably slough this off as some liberal conspiracy to trash Trump by calling the speech benign, at best. Everyone else's views of Trump are so low at this point, one more round of him trolling for a check is hardly a blip.

Still, I wouldn't lose sight entirely of this momentary weirdness and the ways it could, and probably should, blow back on Trump and the right. Despite its own efforts to camouflage its cult aspects, conservatism generally likes to keep its Unification Church connections at arms length - plausibly deniable, while happily pocketing (some might say laundering) the Church's lavish cash. And while this moment, like so many isn't in itself enough to derail Trump's weak if noisy plotting for a political comeback... I wouldn't be too surprised if, should he really try to come back, that a lot of Moon-related questions suddenly appear. While Trump's sleazy business of talking to anyone with a dollar and a scheme worked once... this time, all those sleazy associations could be his, never mind the GOP generally, undoing.

 

Shang Chi: How Do You Say "Wakanda Forever" in Cantonese?

One surprise of the pandemic period is how Hollywood has struggled to save the film industry. No one, necessarily, could have predicted that TV and streaming would be more nimble in facing every problem from restarting production to creating material more relevant to a sudden change in the zeitgeist... but watching big time film production both struggle to adapt to wholesale shift in media consumption while also stalwartly refusing to change preplanned future productions... well, the mind reels.

From kicking a whole bunch of film canisters down the road (I do think the world may be ready for James Bond by November) to haphazardly releasing projects to generally dismal box office, this has been a bad year for the big budget film and things are only barely looking up (and in a year when the only seeming sure thing Hollywood can agree on is... Ryan Reynolds, is that a surprise?).

Mostly, I'm dismayed that Hollywood seems to have entered this vicious circle of throwing already finished films out to see if anything hits, with no regard for where audience tastes might be, and then being surprised when nothing really hits.

And so, after watching Black Widow basically fail (and after stunning streaming audiences with the string of hits starting with Wandavision)... Marvel too is just sailing along blithely, sending out Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings as if we're all just watching comic book movies and the genre isn't fast heading towards a dead end. Nice try - and to it's credit, Shang-Chi hits some fine notes in the early going - but in the end, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings offers a surprisingly stale mix of standard International Asian Legend hooey crossed with Black Panther crossed with typical third act CGI overkill, and the result is about as pedestrian as one could come to expect.

We open with some narration about an ancient Asian legend and what falls somewhere between cutting room footage from Mulan and whatever recently got made in Hong Kong or Taiwan - which is to say, ancient Chinese soldiers guarding some Forbidden City looking gate... blah blah blah. The legend is about the man who holds the "Ten Rings" - magical bracelets that have otherworldly laser power or something - and how he conquers, well, whatever he wants.

This turns out to be Tony Leung Chiu Wai and in the first fairly bravura move of storytelling, our villain is our opening narrator... and the film does a nice job of setting up a string of unreliable narration, which carries much of the first two thirds. This leads to the actual into of Shang, er, Shaun Chi, the villain's son, who is leading a mild mannered life in San Francisco as a young adult until Dad shows up to reclaim his son's birthright... or something. This leads us to Macau, where we meet Shang-Chi's sister, more fights ensue and we learn that Dad is trying to find the magical land where their mother is from to bring her back from the dead... or something.

And, much like Black Panther, for much of the early going, the mix of well executed action sequences and nods to cultural integrity play well. There's a lively sequence on San Francisco's hill streets with a bus that's very solid and the Macau sequence of a multilevel fight on the bamboo scaffolding in front of a mirrored tower is close to a visual masterpiece. But for all that setup, once we're locked into the fairly standard comic book family dynamics. Shang-Chi has almost nowhere to go, and the weariness shows. The film takes over an hour, for instance to introduce Michelle Yeoh's character and once she's in, she has almost nothing to do except motivate the kids to defend the magical hamlet that gave them their mom (her sister). From there it's the usual, over the top battle with a CGI monster that's busy with visuals, but hard to connect with emotionally. And ultimately, that's been the last 5-7 Marvel and DC pictures in a nutshell, and it's why the whole genre is starting to wear a bit thin.

Sure, Shang-Chi boasts Yeoh and a fine turn from Akwafina, as well as Simu Liu as Shang-Chi and Leung, of course, who really can convey pages of dialogue in a single look, and little here is wasted with him. But Leung's acting strength alone can't save a largely predictable, awfully pedestrian enterprise, try as he might. And ultimately, what doesn't quite carry through is either the much ballyhooed direction of Destin Daniel Cretton or the weak, much labored on, script; neither of them seem like more than the newest toys off the Marvel studio factory assembly line.

There are lessons here should Kevin Feige - or anyone else with some senior executive status - choose to look: the first being that lively post credit sequences can't save moderately entertaining films; and beyond that, the whole genre could use an infusion not of new blood so much as new approaches to telling fresh stories. Wandavision hinted at this; so did The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings just feels like Wakanda Forever in a shiny Asian dress.

Jaded? Perhaps. In many ways, in this golden age of the MCU, we've never had it so good and it may be a little unfair to expect every film to be a profound reimagining of what comic book movies can do (see what I did there?). Still, even in a world untouched by pandemic problems and struggles for film as a medium, it's hard to portray Shang-Chi as much more than a colour-by-numbers Mad Lib version of 3 other, better comic book films at least. That the film's weaknesses will be more apparent in a less instant boffo BO world like the one we have now doesn't mean we shouldn't look harder at this Marvel revolving door of machinery like film production over livelier, more risky creative swings. It's a little too easy to imagine what a better, smarter, more creatively adventurous Shang-Chi could have been; and that's yet another not good sign for a Hollywood film business that desperately needs to get ahead of their problems, not fall to them, repeatedly. 

The Hillbilly Elegy of JD Vance's Senate Campaign

While it's not entirely surprising that JD Vance has achieved "massive distraction status" in his campaign to campaign for Ohio's Senate seat, that doesn't make it any more serious.

Vance, a veritable compendium of notes on white rural poverty in Appalachia with a soupçon of absurd Trumpism plus a lot of angry white guy, has enjoyed outsize success with a modest book... and well, that's about it. Initially hailed as possessing some sort of unique insight into the Appalachian communities of his ancestors, over the course of the Trump years Vance devolved from Trump critic keenly aware of Trump's know-nothing appeal to rural communities to a Trump cheerleader eager to join the jeering crowd of rural supporters. 

The theory is that Vance's high profile combined with a media ready presence results in a field clearing romp to the GOP nomination; so far that 's been held up by a number of pesky realities. One of which is that Vance isn't from Ohio, but Kentucky, and though he has borderline appeal with some parts of neighboring Ohio territory, he's been out of step with Ohio's less rural, more cosmopolitan cities and nearby suburbs. Another is that Trump personally, for a variety of reasons, favors other Ohio candidates. A third is that Vance seems to be struggling to find a narrative that can be comfortably pro-Trumpist, while not edging into simply "out there" politics. The latter is what's been surprising, since Vance initially seemed well within political mainstreams.

But these are wild times and Vance has, so far, managed to head for Crazy Town at almost every opportunity. He advanced a "pro-family" notion of politics so weirdly extreme even conservatives were baffled (claiming at one point that all left wing politicians including Nancy Pelosi, a mother of 5, could only be childless and anti family). His opposition to even the most common sense approaches to vaccination and other public health responses to Covid has been as extreme as a deep southern governor: fine for them, but absolutely at odds with the popular, sensible policies of Ohio's Mike DeWine. More to the point, Vance has yet to advance the kind of holistic politically centrist policies of a senatorial candidate that have traditionally marked Ohio, where candidates achieve national status as bellweathers of the "realistic middle").

Democratic fear of Vance, aside from the relative star power, has everything to do with the vast nameless fears that Trumpism isn't in retreat but rather running silent, but deadly, under America's cultural notice. The theory being that while normal people may think this stuff is crazy and disastrous for the GOP... just like 2016, liberals will be caught short when Republicans overwhelm them again at the polls.

What can one say? Perhaps that's true... though as a theory it tends to favor 2016 over all that's happened since, including Trump's eventual defeat in 2020, and the sense that without Trump, Republicans are struggling to achieve similar vote results (which, fair enough, could be fine for 2022, but just kicks the fears to Trump re-emerging for 2024). 

Either way, though... Vance, as a harbinger is so far not working out as planned. He continues to poll weakly in potential Republican matchups, never mind any scenario in which he actually gets a nomination and runs against a Democrat. Hillbilly Elegies alone won't solve that problem, and political extremism, so far, is making it worse. Unless some GOP behind the curtain magic works to transform Vance's extreme edges and tendency to mouth off unsupervised, it's hard to see how Vance pulls off a primary, never mind the general.

One larger thread to pull from this, though, is an insight that upsets both the right that's invested in Trump and the left that fears that they're right: ultimately, Vance's take on the rural audience may be right about their anger, but wrong about how that translates to long term political success. Vance's insights, such as they are, provide a window into the sense of hopelessness and despair that drives rural poverty, and he's surely onto something there. But rather than proving that populist politics can be their salvation, the events of the last few years have probably illuminated that hopelessness and despair tend to lead to poor choices, not wise ones, and thus, may just reinforce what it was meant to relieve. Trump, in other words, is a dead end. And Vance, provocative views or not, can't solve that any more than any other non-Trump voice. Trump himself only manages to camouflage the dead endedness with more bluster.

And that bluster, I suspect, is itself wearing thin... which is why, while Trump serves as a major distraction for the GOP, he doesn't represent any kind of solution down the political road. Between legal issues, his own short attention span, laziness and greed, Trump would happily scoop up all the money he could and shirk the actual work of even running again if he can avoid it. All because, unlike Vance, Trump isn't running away from a nightmare past in rural poverty. And because much more like Vance, he has little empathy or sympathy for all the people still trapped there.

As an aside, I suspect Vance would seem more dangerous, his appeal to rural whites more on point, had Hillbilly Elegy translated into a film that had not been met with derision rather than awe. Ham-handed and overthought, the film underscored that as much as Vance's story had some appeal, it was not necessarily new, save for the reality that America tends to ignore the addiction issues of non-privileged whites. And indeed, were Vance to position himself as an earnest, hard working voice fighting to help those addicts against an unfeeling system of bureaucracy and privilege, he might very well be the threat many left and right imagined he might be. Doing that, though, would require tapping into the things Vance himself has rejected via Trumpism: a sense of hope, of fairness, of seeing the good in what we do when we help one another.  By defining his quest in terms of his own personal victory, Vance underscores why the Trump dead end is just that dead: "only one of us gets out of here alive. And it better be me."

Gavin Newsom's Electric Kool Aid Recall Test

One of Gavin Newsom's biggest flaws - which, I suspect, will turn out to be key to this California recall vote - is that he has been, up to now, one of the more generically forgettable politicians of his time. Vaguely handsome, absolutely unmemorable, Newsom has casually coasted through success on the Left Coast by being less visibly flaky than Jerry Brown while catering to the needs of the deeply progressive base of California's Democrats... and somehow, leaving next to no trace of mostly being there at all.

Quick - quote me a memorable Newsom speech.

Newsom works best, as politicians do, by never being too risky, and it largely paid off. Even when he had to get tough during the pandemic, for much of it he was acting in the shadow of Andrew Cuomo and Jay Inslee - Inslee because Washington state got hit first, and Cuomo as New York got hit harder. Newsom probably needed to respond sooner and more forcefully, but his failures on that score were subsumed by the ultimate scale of the pandemic, and more than most, he was able to have the kind of success you can only have when every level of government in the state largely falls in line and works for the same goals.

But one fancy dinner at French Laundry, and a restive population that has long equated their state with breezy openness, and Newsom looked a bit, well, cavalier. Decisions about reopening were bound to be complex, but Newsom embodied the "Do as I say, not as I do" hypocrisy that, frankly, has become a struggle for almost all of us who care about public health. When to unmask, when to go back to restaurants... our choices have been a confused mix of Listening to Science and Deciding to Do It Anyway.  It's worth noting, for instance, no one involved in the French Laundry episode got sick. But that just kind of underscores the "well, why do we have to isolate so much" aspect of all our conversations, these days.

Recalling Newsom took on a life of its own once national conservatives and Fox News decided Newsom was weak enough to be beatable... whether that ultimately pans out is still a tossup of sorts, but so far, that choice looks ham handed, at best. Newsom has run a generally low key, below the radar effort to lock down a no vote on recall (from choosing an obscure September date to do it to quietly enlisting the known liberal universe to stump for him). So far, that seems to be working: polls have "no" consistently beating "yes" on recall, and while turnout is as low as expected, it's not clear that Republicans in CA have overcome their built in disadvantages to get anywhere near where they would need to be to succeed.

Partly, that's because the California GOP remains in tatters: lack of statewide leadership, indeed, any clear leadership of any kind, has been the hallmark of this effort. Driven by faceless pressure group interests, the Recall zombie walked right up to its signature deadline not knowing if they'd hit it. Once they did, no one emerged as a real potential hopeful to replace Newsom. The largely hilarious failure of Caitlyn Jenner to work up more than a vanity driven, reality show style of a campaign hurt considerably. And at this point, the GOP hopes rest on Larry Elder, a fringe-y outsider with loads of bad baggage and no real sense of what it would take to govern the largest state.

Yes, the prospect of Elder should scare people... but that, too, just plays effectively to Newsom's shambling "oh no, I'm in danger" approach to the whole thing. Everyone's worried, democrats are terrified... and yet, Newsom still has spent much of this recall campaign largely low key, barely in public, trying less to draw attention than to avoid it. That's probably, from a political strategy standpoint, the smart play: Elder flails especially for lack of a true foil, and conservative news outlet struggle to give the whole recall enterprise a sense of real urgency. Still, as I said from the start, Newsom's generic blandness has been his secret weapon all along, as well as his Achilles' heel. He will likely survive a recall... but it's hardly the most inspiring effort anyone has ever seen... and that's partly why he struggles to be seen positively at all.

A smarter, saner Republican party - or a less crazy conservative movement, at least - would probably have seen the Recall for the fool's errand it's turning out to be. Newsom isn't a political superstar... but he's also no abject failure a la Grey Davis, either. And again, frankly, Republicans have no secret Arnold Schwarzeneggar this time to swallow up the celebrity oxygen, either. No, this is just another flaky, only-in-California moment that underscores both the fecklessness of the public and the confused panda notions of what passes for state government in the Golden State. Tightening the recall process, really facing up to the state's internal issues... these are probably the real lessons of what is, and isn't happening with this Recall, and why. But seeing that would require seeing past the electric circus mentality of national conservatives, flailing through the initial moments of post Trump existence with no real sense of who they are, what they want, or how even to start. Gavin Newsom, even in their equation, is a handsome, generic detail. One widely disseminated dinner party does not a revolution make.

And sure, there may be more recalls (though most states have much higher barriers to them) and more falderal from the far right now that desperation has long since taken over good sense. But failing to oust Newsom is, well, failure. If conservatives can't turn their fanciful, ginned up narratives into political success - and so far, it's not looking great on most fronts - that's just another proof that their marginalization is more real, and less scary than as has been over advertised since the failed "insurrection" of January sixth. The foolishness is not pointing out how absurd, wasteful and dangerous conservatism has become... but how we imbue it with more power than it actually has, more triple A batteries in a flashlight than full on electric klieg lights. And if you can't beat Gavin Newsom with a flashlight... just how badass are you, really?

You’ll Have Another Governor Next Week

The problem was best illustrated not when Andrew Cuomo responded to Tish James by sending out his own lady lawyer to do the only thing he knows - attack his accusers and try to discredit a process he probably put in place himself. No… the problem was best illustrated months earlier when Andrew Cuomo responded to allegations from more than a dozen former employees by suddenly ending his daily self congratulatory press appearances celebrating the magnificence of his response to the Covid pandemic.

Indeed, by March it was clear that the “Masterful Pandemic Response Show” had well overstayed its welcome anyway.  Not that Cuomo wasn’t an effective and commanding executive during the initial response; despite conservative complaining, virtually no executive had done more in worse circumstances in 2020 at a time when Trump’s uselessness was especially pronounced. Still, the revelations of “managed” statistics of nursing home deaths, if not objections to policy choices made for that population were simply too much to ignore, and at least deserved a comprehensive response.

There’s a lot of giving Cuomo a hard time for things that are not, necessarily the bad things about him: yes, he’s tetchy and high handed and sure, he’ll steamroll anything in his path to achieve whatever end he thinks is a priority at the given moment. But that’s basically Being A New Yorker, and it’s not necessarily bad, to New Yorkers. Cuomo’s self aggrandizing press wasn’t a failing… it was his Achilles heel: as long as you were buying it, he was happy to sell. When you stopped buying it… well, no more press conferences for you, babe.

No, what destroyed Cuomo was simpler: a terrible manager who made a series of incomprehensible decisions meant solely to either consolidate his power or achieve his political aims or most likely both, discovered that years of built up ill will and repeated examples were simply too much to ignore. That story, too, is very New York. And at this late date, it’s a problem, bigger than Cuomo, about the state’s failures in governance.

Had Cuomo stayed, he was very likely to become the 2nd Governor we’d impeach; as it was, he was the 4th resignation under uncomfortable circumstances in a string of state level scandals that have hit both parties and almost all of the state’s leaders from the mid to late 20th Century. It’s embarrassing, dismaying, and a subject that deserves more thoughtful conversation than has been attempted across 30 years at least of reeling from scandal tp scandal. At some point; this isn’t a bug. It’s a feature of our leaders.

Sure, we can make this about Cuomo’s personal failings - that ego! The nerve! The seek and destroy approach to politics… yes, all that and so much more. But that elides the reality that in April 2020, perfectly reasonable New Yorkers who knew damn well of multiple scandals Cuomo had played a part in were portraying the man as a genius who was all we had standing between us and the abyss. And that was his genius, his secret power - he’d so scorched the earth of New York politics, there was no one but him. 

But was that so different from Elliot Spitzer? Al D’Amato? Nelson Rockefeller? Alan Hevesi? Joe Bruno? Over and over…. New Yorkers ensconce power mad narcissists in senior roles and then wonder how it all goes so wrong (but hey, we tried to tell you Donald Trump was bad news), turn around… and do the same thing again. In part, it’s because we’ve never (ever) developed a healthy leadership bench. But more than a little of it is, why even bother? There’s a fatalism to our self governance that no one, really, should envy or emulate. We have quietly and calmly expected - over the course of my lifetime, to be sure - that Albany is just a cesspool of corruption and bad faith. Fix it? We don’t even know if government runs without it!

So now we look to Kathy Hochul - try to squint hard enough so you ignore her central role in Cuomo’s “Women’s Party” meant to derail Zephyr Teachout!~ as hopefully not more of the same. Or maybe Tish James rides her ambition that much further now that she’s iced Cuomo. Even now New Yorkers are quietly convincing themselves that women and/or minorities represent the hope for government beyond self interest and scandal. Because, as you can see, we have done so well, convincing ourselves of things.

What we need, really, is not so much a new star, but less corrupt and healthier institutions. Better, more effective policing of corruption. Dismantling the various personal fiefdoms that help individuals aggrandize power to themselves. A less sprawling, more manageable system of local governance. Election reforms. There’s plenty we could do. But we won’t, most likely, as we stand by, looking helpless and stunned that another shining hope let us down. The dysfunction isn’t the lying liars who lie to us… it’s us, the lied to, who put the Empire in Empire State, who put the scepter into the Emperor’s hands and say “be kind.” Get another governor? We’ll have another governor next week. And another one… probably soon after.

Loki: If You, Could Save Time, In A Battle...

Not every attempt at comic book TV can be a home run hit out of the park... but I get that I'm going to look contrarian saying that Disney/Marvel's Loki has turned out to be the weak link of series programming by the company thus far.

From a geeky, comic book standpoint, the yea-sayers are probably right: Loki laid the groundwork for much of what's to come in the MCU, and those developments were compelling and intriguing to consider. But to those defenders I would confidently respond... "okay, then why was Loki mostly a long, talky dud?"

While previous series laid ever more tantalizing clues and foreshadowing as they went, week to week, Loki was a set up in search of a promising result. It may be interesting to imagine what the end of time looks like... Loki is the sad reminder that you may be really, really disappointed by what you find when you get there.

Over and over, the series set up promising pot machinations only to stall: when our wayward God of Mischief leapt through time and space to escape his captors... he wound up on a dying moon where the only outcome was certain death. When he cheated that ending (in a total Deus Ex Machina where he wasn't even the Deus), we were left floundering in yet more bureaucratic hell while...zzzz... Excuse me, where were we again? On the dead planet at the end of time? Does this set come only in grey?

Loki was exhausting. Based on the "now what" implications of Loki making off with the Tesseract (again) in the time traveling part of Avengers Endgame (also a bit of a dud), the series started promisingly enough with the introduction of the Time Variance Authority (TVA) policing the "variants" who do something or take things that impede the orderly flow of time itself. Loki - or many Lokis - do this a lot. That's interesting. So is the TVA itself - a homage to seventies era imagery of endless bureaucracy, wood paneled, brutalist architecture, endless files, life in constant triplicate (the show homages everything from A Clockwork Orange to Brazil to Hitchhiker's).

The trouble is... where to go? Loki quickly sets up the existence of an even more remote agent of chaos, a variant who is upsetting timelines in ways that cannot be easily mended. This turns out to be another, female, version of a Loki, chased by TVA authorities across multiple time and landscapes. Also promising. But once we meet this young woman... things gradually stall. What a first looked like thrills and chills and wild adventures become more and more talky set pieces musing on the nature of love and loss, free will vs. determinism and... well, lots of other stuff that I started to just tune out.

Which is unfortunate. I wanted to like Loki, and as with all the Marvel series, I do think it's smart and well executed, even as a talky often pointless existentialist rumination on the nature of free will. But that doesn't make it great, and we should hold Loki, as with all shows, to some standard set of expectations. And there, really, Loki just doesn't meet the imaginative brilliance of Wandavision or the deft weaving of contemporary politics, racial awareness and heroism at pay in The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. Loki has grander ambitions. And, grandly, it swings hard and misses. A for Effort. C for execution.

Filled with top flight performances - Tom HIddleston's Loki is brilliantly complex, ably abetted by Owen Wilson, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Wunmi Mosaku (the casting in the MCU is really off the charts, these days). Sophia Di Martino and several of the other Lokis are fun, but the effect of so many shades of one persona is... wearying. Jonathan Martin provides some zip towards the final proceedings... but getting there is still a bit of a slog.

Visually, too, Loki is a bit of a letdown. As those sets devolve into ever murkier browns and greys and blacks, the murk just takes hold and sludges up what had been fairly brisk pacing. And tonally, I think the show never quite found the - yes, hard to find - comic book sweet spot between seriousness and humorous hooey. Not Batman level drudge, but Loki spends considerable time being a bit of a downer. You can't just occasionally bring up jet skis to get around the fact that episode after episode of Loki boils down to 2-3 characters expositioning one another to near death. And that's just a preventable, unforced writing trap that no one, I think, was watching out for.

Tp their credit, Marvel and the Loki team are the first to get a Season 2 and I say... good. Take a minute, work out the kinks, and deliver on the promise that lurks, so sweetly, at the edges of this talky, murky letdown. Give us a Loki who jumps into action! A story that's compelling! Time travel that's interesting! I know you got this. But you don't get an A for snoozy. Not yet.