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Friday Favorites: Gone Girl

I started writing film reviews on this blog with The Prime of MIss Jean Brodie; a still-odd choice for me, because I tend to be a more modernist film critic, and less about the past... and because that film is really, really dark. And I at least try to cover up my love of really dark, really messed up entertainment. Not necessarily successfully.

So it's probably appropriate to attempt a return to form with Gone Girl, last year's easy winner in the messed up (or, for the less refined, f*cked-up) film category. Nobody's idea of a date movie, Gone GIrl arrived as the adaptation of a monster bestseller, hinged on the selling point that you, dear reader, had no idea of the astonishing twist the narrative would take.

On that selling point alone, I bought the book ...and promptly failed to read it. For years. The book would taunt me. I'd see others reading it; I would ask and to a person they said it was amazing, and the twist was unexpected... and it couldn't be shared. So naturally, I waited for the film adaptation.

The film version does not disappoint, either. Director David Fincher has brilliantly realized Gone Girl both as a tasty, chilling thriller, but also as a deeply subversive, equally chilly dismissal of current pop culture, of true crime "journalism," celebrity obsession, and the way we reward the showy, the glib, and the insincere. This is not the film to tell you that things get better, or to simply root for the good guy and truth will prevail in the end. If you want a light, upbeat tale of true love... this film is not for you.

The film starts quietly, simply: Nick Dunne is a nice guy on the day of his 5th wedding anniversary to Amy, when she disappears under mysterious circumstances. As we unpack the mystery, we learn more about Nick, Amy, and what seems to be a beautiful relationship put under stress by the economy, and the tensions of two people maybe growing apart.

Things get more complicated as a series of revelations suggest that Nick is not the simple, concerned spouse he seems - there's an affair, some curious financial doings, and more. Also Amy has layers of complexity hinted at from the beginning - there's her complicated relationship with her parents, author of a series of books whose child heroine, "Amazing Amy," is an idealized version of the real woman. Amy's diary seems to suggest an uncertainty about her life and her marriage that only adds more questions. And still, no one seems to quite know what happened or where she is.

That's where the twist comes in, and it's a doozy, a moment, rare in fiction these days, where all that's come before is simply turned on its head. It's here that Gone Girl becomes more than a simple whodunnit, to a dark examination of roles and expectations for men and women, and how easy it is for us to simply believe what we see, what we are told. Gillian Flynn, who wrote the book, also handles the adaptation to film, and she has a real sense for the old adage about "show, don't tell" - there's a lovely economy of actual dialogue, a trust that we will see for ourselves what is actually unfolding.

Davids Fincher's been on this kind of kick for years, but I think Gone Girl may be his best effort yet at adapting a novel to film, while still preserving his own icy, subversive worldview. He's not afraid to explore darkness and true madness (as with, say Se7en, or the Girl with The Dragon Tattoo), buit there's a quality to Gone Girl that seems lighter, playful; Fincher seems better able to deploy sarcasm that sees the sarcastic humor of it all.

And of course, he's helped immensely by a superb cast. Ben Affleck has labored for years against that certain lunky presence he brings to film, and Gone Girl, well, wallows in just that. As he shambles, as he gets caught in a carefully spun web, you can see the mix of decency and loutishness, the guy who wants to be good... ish.

Then there's Rosamund Pike as Amy, beautiful, tightly coiled, as enigmatic as the greatest screen beauties (Gene Tierney's Laura comes most obviously to mind... but so many others as well) and every bit as dangerous. Pike does a remarkable job of making a highly improbable character real, complex, and fascinating. And even dangerously amusing.

The rest of the cast is similarly focused and effective - perhaps none so much as Neil Patrick Harris, as Amy's most dangerous ex; but one has to shout out Tyler Perry as an over the top cross of Johnny Cochran and... well, Tyler Perry, as a well known, wily lawyer.  Who's probably the closest thing the film has to a purely good guy.

Nothing is simple in Gone Girl, and the remarkable thing, I think, is how this film found an audience of enough sophisticates to actually be a success. Dark, defiant, and deadly, Gone Girl doesn't celebrate America's greatness, or wallow in our culture's false sorrows. Instead, it says that behind the most glowing successes is a pretty dark, messed up interior. And I for one, thinks that notion captures us pretty damn well.

If They Asked Her, She Would Write A Book

Personally, I thought it was hilarious, the day last year when I was invited to "like" the Facebook page Ready For Hillary. I mean, laugh out loud (that's LOL, kids) funny. Like, um, I was "ready for Hillary" before 2 of my 3 nephews were born.

The news this week - and the last month - is that Hillary Clinton wrote a book. From this we can conclude that she is running for President. Again. Or maybe not. Or something.

It might not be a great book, but people who've read it seem to think it's interesting, and at least readable. Or at least, that's the impression I get. Like following "Ready For Hillary," I try to follow the news about Mrs. Clinton. But spending a lot of time discussing her, and her plans, and all the rest... not so much.

Look, brass tacks and all, I think we know where this is headed. What strikes me is how we all seem to know, all seem resigned to it, without necessarily being enthused. I get that in, say, conservatives. I'm sort of fascinated by that block of Hillary supporters, of which I was a part, many of whom also seem to have let go of the passion. The fight was then. Now, it seems, well, old news.

I disagree. Since running in 2008 - to the point of, essentially, a tie - Mrs. Clinton has served as Secretary of State, throwing pretty much any discussion of lack of experience or preparation out the window. She remains the person who can take this country past theoretical and futuristic discussions and give us the actual example of an actual woman President. And she's spent pretty much her whole lifetime and several careers espousing the kind of ideas Democrats claim to believe in most.

Why, really, are we having a discussion plagued with doubts about where this is headed?

Probably, I think, because that's where we left off.

There's basically no one who has run for President in the past 50 years (outside incumbency) with the resume of Mrs. Clinton at this point in her career, with the possible exception of George H.W. Bush. Executive Branch experience, including time in the White House. A legislative career. Experience running a state. Regional expertise in several parts of the country. International experience.

I have lived my life in the northeast, where sophisticates often take credit for feminist advances that hadn't actually happened. How New York had never elected a woman to state wide office until Mrs. Clinton, in 2000. How Massachusetts never elected a female Senator until Elizabeth Warren. Yet, we were told, what wonderful progress women had made. Just look at all the possibilities. It's like we had a woman Governor... even though we never did (Jodi Rell, Connecticut).

It's easy to sympathize with the passionate liberals - progressives, if we  must - who feel that Mrs. Clinton now doesn't represent the challenge to vested interests she represented even 6 years ago. We can't know, really, what might have happened differently, or not differently, on her economic watch. But it's telling that we hear these conclusions about her opinions before she's even expressed them. We just know, don't we? We know it all.

Feminism and sexism, of course, are not supposed to be the issue with Mrs. Clinton. Not now. When we ask, now, if America is ready for her, it's just you know, a person. Not about how we see women. Or don't see women. Because we know she's a woman, okay? We get it.

So all those articles, all that discussion about "pitting Mrs. Clinton against Monica Lewinsky" about debating whether she had a "traumatic brain injury" and was unfit to serve, when we dredge up Whitewater and Vince Foster and all the rest... that's not about denigrating a woman. It's about, you know, her. 

It's nonsense, of course. It's readily apparent that when a woman runs for President, we will, in fact be discussing America's attitudes towards women. And sexism. And feminism. When people express those familiar feelings of feeling lukewarm about her, the "I just don't trust her", the "I never really liked her..." sure it's about her. It's also about how she's been presented, and talked about, and vilified at times, and raised to heroic status at others. 

Mrs. Clinton has written several books. She's engaged in fairly thoughtful policy discussions in each one, though we rarely mention that. This book may well be just one of those campaign tools that seem to be part of the candidate landscape these days. Few of the others will be able to talk time served as a Cabinet Secretary.  But you know, it's not as if she's special, or anything.

So maybe she runs for President. If she does, it seems to me the point of all this should be that we will be able to elect an experienced, thoughtful, well rounded person ready to take on difficult issues and engage in a healthy debate. And maybe I've kind of lost track of what we look for in Presidents. Maybe that's the book we need... and I'm pretty sure she could write that one, too.

Related articles

Hillary Clinton away from the microphone

Hillary Clinton on Monica Lewinsky: I wish her well

Hillary Clinton: 'We were dead broke' after leaving the WH

Is book tour a dry run for 2016's election for Hillary Clinton?

Hillary Clinton Just Made The First Gaffe Of Her 2016 Campaign Rollout

The 6 big issues where Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama disagree

Let's be honest: Hillary Clinton is running for president

The Retail Worker's Dark Weekend

For various reasons, I try never to shop on "Black Friday Weekend", avoiding the post-Thanksgiving madness and the media-constructed frenzy of shop-til-you-drop consumerist Americans and their lemming-like trip to the malls. I've worked in retail too long to see the romance, I don't like crowds, and frankly, the "bargains" of this shopping holiday are overstated.

It's also the case, these days, that I will probably also be working for most of it.

Black Friday this year was notable for a couple of things - one was the encroachment of the shopping into the actual Thursday of Thanksgiving, and the second was a planned, notable, if debatably successful attempt at labor actions outside of many Wal-Marts around the country. Even by the organizers' generous assessments, the number of workers participating in these protests was in the hundreds, though media coverage did clearly amplify the noise and the effect of the protests.

The remarkable thing, really, is that it's taken much of my lifetime for Thanksgiving to be breached by retailers as sacrosanct; only Easter Sunday - and Christmas Day, I suppose - remain as the day of no shopping, and that anachronism may be the hardest to topple, but it's also the one that makes the least sense (at some point, Christian traditionalism will be damned). Literally 20 years ago, I was having conversations with family and friends that one day, obviously, retailers would launch the "Thanksgiving Day Sale" - I mean, heck, one day, Macy*s was sure to notice that there was a crowd of people outside the store after that darn parade, if nothing else - and one more domino would fall on the notion that for one day, at least, we could forestall the real American pastime (shopping, not football).

Let's be clear: we don't close stores for the sake of shoppers. Keeping shopping out of Thanksgiving wasn't some kind of "have respect for this important American holiday, consumerism can wait." No, the point of closing stores was simple human decency for the American worker. Let's take one day, just one day, and nobody, or almost nobody, should have to work. The problem with Thanksgiving, arguably, started with my company, Starbucks; we're the most major corporation I know of that sees no particular reason to close its outlets on any holiday at all. Almost all Starbucks are open on Thanksgiving, for at least some portion of the normal day. Many are open on Christmas. We are almost all open on Easter, normal hours. We close early on days like New Year's Eve and the Fourth of July. But we are open. Always open. And people get bewildered when we close, even for obvious practical reasons, like a hurricane.

But Starbucks isn't just a restaurant - food being the general exception to "closed on the holiday" - we are a retailer, and we are located in shopping centers and malls like the other retailers and we sell more than just drinks and food and we're helping, I think, to erode the idea tbat there's one day, any day, when a retailer should be closed. 

And the people who get punished, when we lose even one day of being closed... are workers.

I was struck, this year, by the fact that, however small, people (and the media) seemed to take nte of the workers. It wasn't a big story, and it was surely subsumed by the stories of stampedes and fights and all the attendant madness of crowds. But the Wal-Mart action and the Thursday opens did get people talking, and talking about what these things mean to workers. Which is, after all, almost all of us. We are a nation of service workers, now, and it means that many of us work to serve the rest of us. It's a different equation about work and what we think of people who serve and it's complicated... and I think we're only just beginning to sort out the cultural and social implications, never mind the political and economic ones.

The Wal-Mart action revived the favorite liberal topics of how bad the big W is, how badly its workers are treated... but Wal-Mart in many ways is really just a stand-in for most of retailing, where the wages are low, the hours are long, and the rights of workers mean but so much. Attempts to unionize most retail workers, in or out of Wal-Mart, are rarely successful, and are unlikely to succeed en masse or long term. To say this is to be labeled "anti-union", and I'm not; but the realities are stark. I've been in retail a long time, and I've known many, many of the women (mostly) and men who work there. Don't take my word for it... but most of them are not interested in a union. And won't be. They are students and mothers and transient and free thinkers. Not being organized provides a kind of flexibility and set of options many workers want, and even need. Unions have not found a way to convince retail workers, generally, of their value long term. And still, that's unlikely to change much.

Even more to the point, as I've said before, because we are no longer a nation of mostly manufacturing jobs, Unions do not really respresent the majority experience of most workers in this country now. Yet "Organized Labor" is allowed, mostly by Democrats, to serve as the "Working Person's Voice" even when the policies unions promote don't necessarily refelects the needs and opinions of most workers. What we need, really, is a change in how we talk and think about the issues of work and labor in this country, and try harder to develop a sensible labor policy that reflects who we actually are and what we actually do. That's why, I suspect, the Affordable Care Act has managed, quietly, to be  a key selling point of President Obama and the Democrats this past election - it's not perfect, but it makes sure many workers will get health insurance, a practical slution many people need. Similarly with the debates of contraception and abortion - in the place where airy philosophical debates mean less than the practical issues of real people actually face.

I don't think we can "save Thanksgiving" from the retail encroachment; the wall has been breached, business needs have overtaken simple decency and humane respect for workers and their families. We will, as we do, work around these new relaities. We are workers, after all. But I think this year may mark another, more refreshing turning point, one where the discussions around our working lives, and the pratcical need for a life beyond work, begins to become more public, louder, and more insistent. It doesn't mean service workers will unionize, and new laws may not be the answer (certainbly, that's not the whole answer); the change we need is cultural, social... not just political, and not just economic. 

And I could go on... but I really have to get on with my day - I have to work this evening.

Articles We Never Finished Reading: Survey Says... Misogyny Is Bad (Thank Goddess)

"There was one description of the president that truly seized me:

'The metrosexual black Abe Lincoln has emerged as a hyper-partisan, hyper-liberal, elitist politician with more than a bit of the trimmer in him.'

This sentence is just so deliciously ridiculous, insulting and incendiary — perfect Republican fodder.

Let’s dissect it, shall we? Scalpel!

First, there is the word metrosexual. It is usually defined as a man keenly interested in grooming and preening. Despite the sexual root, the term isn’t rooted in sexuality. In its truest sense, President Obama of mom jeans infamy — as he told the 'Today Show' in 2009, 'I’m a little frumpy' — is far less metrosexual than Mitt Romney of the perfect hair, copper tan and Gap skinny jeans.

But this term is rarely appropriately applied. On the contrary, it’s often delivered with a snicker to question sexuality and feminize the subject, and femininity in a misogynistic culture is the greatest of sins. Metrosexual has become a roundabout homophobic taunt."

 - Charles Blow, "Dirty Racial Politics" in today's New York Times.

I give Blow credit for identifying a "misogynistic culture" that makes feminization of men an insult; I'm a little more perplexed that Blow seems to suggest that this insult is, well, really insulting. If we're trying to end a misogynistic culture, rather than just admit its existence (powerlessness... there's another good issue to discuss), then it doesn't help to just identify emasculation and then complain about it. That, it strikes me, is just giving the tactic all the more credence. Making a man seem woman-like wouldn't be an insult if we stopped treating being a woman as insulting.

"Metrosexual" is a dopey word and its use in the Ricketts material was, obviously, telling; in the context of that extreme sentence, a volume of assumptions and dislikes of the President certainly were made clear, and who wouldn't expect an Obama cheerleader like Blow (who later admits that Obama is a "moderate left centrist" who can anger "devout liberals", as if liberal ideas were religious dogma) to defend him? Blow is meant to represent a fresher, younger approach to opinion writing, and it's things like identifying anti-woman biases that add to that formulation; but Blow is, in most ways, more of the same on the NYT Op Eds - a supportive Democrat who wants the simplicity of two party distinctions and shows his contrariness by blaming Lefties who Go Too Far.

In general, I never really finish Blow's pieces - his hook is to accompany his pieces with some element of recent survey data, data that invariably shows him to be absolutely riight about his conclusions, which in turn our usually that some Democratic friendly idea, proposal, or candidate is good or right (or both). His opening paragraphs are lively enough (that "scalpel!" reference, however trite, is bracing), but he devolves into boilerplate and statsical citings pretty quickly, and it's prety much downhill from there.

I'd be more impressed if Blow was braver, if his opinion on a particular subject wasn't so obviously telegraphed by whatever graph accompanies his column, or at least if he'd question the whole reliance on poll driven opinionating a lot more than he does. Being more adventurous - which he seems readily capable of - would lift his op-ed writing out of the ordinary, and beyond partisan boilerplate. Or is it too girly of me to point that out?

Articles We Never Finished Reading: The Crying Game

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

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

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

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

Let's Talk About Sex, Baby

Rush Limbaugh beat me to it.

There I was, trying to explain to my Mom last weekend about the sense that the "insured contraception mandate" discussion was not, as Republicans claimed, about religion, but indeed about contraception, I also said, as a follow-on, that I thought the subtext of the "debate" - and the reason Republicans got some traction on it - was because the real issue was sex, and Americans are uncomfortable with talking about that.

And then Rush Limbaugh took the subtext and made it text.

If there's something heartening about the latest Rush furor, I think it may be that feminism finally had a clear example of "slut shaming" that made an often abstract discussion very literal. Slut Shaming is trying to marginalize voices, especially women's voices, in political discussions by calling people things like sluts and whores, implications that are negative, sexual, and promiscuous. Sandra Fluke, a law student at Georgetown, was offering a reasonable, thoughtful take one the issues of contraceptive cost and availability, and there was Rush, to call her a slut and a whore.

Unfortunately, I suspect that raising awareness about Slut Shaming is about as good as it gets; what's really problematic here is that conservatives will continue to get truck out of the contraceptive debate because liberals, even as they defended and praised Sandra Fluke, tended to run away from the uncomfortable aspect of the contraception debate that is  the reality of our American cuture: that is, that we are nation at once obsessed about sex and deeply conflicted about the issues around it. And the idea of people having sex, especially a great deal of it, tends to raise flags about morality that cloud reasonable policy discussions.

Which is to say... it's fine if you want contraception, ladies... just don't be all sexed up about it.

The Iron Lady: The Lioness In Winter

A few years back, I finally caught A Cry In The Dark, the Meryl Streep movie where she plays Lindy Chamberlain, an Australian woman whose daughter was taken by wild dingoes. It's the "Dingoes Took My Baby!" movie. I'd avoided it in theaters, my own moment of Meryl overload - too many accents, too many weepy dramas, all of that.

That was silly - A Cry in The Dark is a fine film, and Streep is, naturally and predictably, quite good in it. It's also less deliberately tragic than some of her earlier efforts, more about the sensational trial Hemmings went through than the event itself.

What struck me more, and stayed with me, is how seamlessly Streep inserted heself into an ensemble cast, not being bigger than the film or her costars, but one of them, and part of the film.

Streep has had a fascinating career as America's Greatest Living Actress; it's an assessment that got made very early in her career, and the remarkable thing, really, is that she has lived up to that rep, pretty much unbroken, ever since. Yes, even with Death Becomes Her on her resume.

The other interesting thing, though, when I thought about it, is how Streep has made her name playing, in essence, smaller parts. Nearly every film she's made is an ensemble piece. She's rarely the sole, or central, point of attention. She's played wives and mothers, and committed professionals, most of them part of a group, a family, or a team. And that, I think, is what complicates her history as an Oscar nominee - her chances hinge on the strength of the ensemble, and how one takes the whole film. Which is why, for instance, she wouldn't win for A Cry in the Dark - she's the best thing in an okay film.

My point is, really, that Streep has redefined what it is to be a star, largely on her own terms; which, by now, it should be clear are pretty feminist. Streep is a proponent of women's lives and women's roles, and a woman's approach to making film and art.  What's remarkable, really, is how she's been able to chart a course doing largely that in a business often aligned against anything of the sort.

All of which is why The Iron Lady may well be a breakout chance for Streep to win an Oscar (or not - apparently the Gods are smiling on Viola Davis). Playing Margaret Thatcher may well be Streep's first real turn in a "Great Lady" part, the central role in a film built entirely around her character. I don't think Streep has ever made herself the central star of a biographical picture, ever. But of course, The Iron Lady is not like other biopics. Directed by Phyllida Lloyd, The Iron Lady asks a question not usually asked of biographical subjects: what happens after the most important thing you've ever done? 

The Iron Lady is a fascinating look at what it means to age, and to age out of the spotlight that once you held. Some have compained that the film is an injustice or an insult to Thatcher; I'd disagree. Lloyd hits the high notes of the Thatcher period in Great Britain, and doesn't give any easy answers about Thatcherism, either. But by showing an elderly woman dealing with what it means to be past your prime, Lloyd, and Streep, illuminate aging and confronting mortality with more light than I think I've seen in, like, ever.

Margaret Thatcher, of course, is a strong, indomitable figure to portray, and Streep goes at it with gusto. Thatcher was the first, and one of the few, women to serve in Parliament, the first to rise through the ranks of the Conservative (Tory) Party, and the first woman Prime Minister. Because she is a peer of Ronald Reagan and carried strong views, conservatives here and in England tend to lump a lot of what happened in the eighties into one big right wing ball. But Thatcher was very much her own creature. Her sense of conservatism was, to her, a kind of common sense. She grew up a grocer's daughter and believed, firmly, in the value of hard work and a sense of purpose. Her rejection of government ownership and social welfare came out of her belief that both things held back individual ambitions.

It would be easy to make a political biograpy of this; Thatcher herself did, over several volumes, discussing her time as Prime Minister. But Lloyd is more interested in the drive and ambition of the actual woman, the details that make a personal life. The film focuses on the support and care Thatcher got from her marriage; her husband Denys being her chief cheerleader and rock of support. When Thatcher's hotel was bombed by IRA separatists, she was in her suite of rooms with Denys, and her initial response wasn't about about strength or justice... it was trying to find her husband.

In the film, Thatcher is hauunted by the presence of Denys, still nattering aorund, offering advice, refusing to leave, even though he's already passed. This allows for a framing device that brings in flashbacks to Thatcher's rise and eventual success as prime Minister, and also to look at the questions of aging and dementia (which Thatcher's daughter has alluded to in interviews). But the film is not a tragedy, nor is Thatcher protrayed as simply weak and decaying in her senior years. Instead, we see Mrs. Thatcher ultimately apply to herself what she always believed: that there is no point to wallowing. One has to get up, get tough, and soldier on. In this case, alone.

This is great lady stuff, Katharine Hepburn stuff, and Streep, as usual, disappears into the role, carrying off not just the accent, but the sense of what it is to be such a commanding, determined presence. When she gives her doctor a long lecture on how one's hopes and beliefs becomes one's character, she is authoritative, yet also immensely human and true. One can debate the ultimate value or success of Thatcher's policies, but in another sense, we hold the debate on her terms: the world we have, post-Privatisation and after Thatcher ended or changed much of the social welfare structure of Britain, is a world that it is not nearly as apocalyptic as her worst critics insisted it would be. And that, in some sense, proves her right.

Lloyd hasn't delivered the sort of pure, unvarnished ode to Thatcher's commanding greatness that many wanted or expected, and there is, surely, a time and a place for that film. But this film, which captures and dissects what it is to age, and how we, as a society, determinedly look away from the hard parts of the final aspects of aging, is a remarkable, and worthwhile, effort. And I suspect, over time, the value of The Iron Lady will become clearer, and another Streep performance will get its due.

Or we could just give her the Oscar and get it over with.

By All Means, Let's Make The Election About Domesticated Fags And Loose Living Tramps (Thanks, Newt!)

I have to admit I pretty much figured this year's Presidential election was foreordained as a Romney vs. Obama slugfest over the economy, with a predictable, if dismal, win for President Obama. And that's probably what we're still going to get. But how we get there, apparently, still matters.

If Romney has failed to exactly inspire the Republican base, the last couple of weeks haven't been entirely about him. What's changed, I thnk, is that Rconservatives have decided that they can't win on economic issues... and so they unpacked their favorite old trunk, the thing we often call "social issues."

Maybe it's age, maybe it's the sense that I've heard this song before, but my patience for euphemisms is pretty much gone. And so, I am tired of hearing about "social issues" when what people mean is "let's say awful things about blacks, gays and other minorities and see if Americans will give in to their worst instincts."

"Social Issues" is supposed to be about abortion, gay marriage, "family values" and the like, but really, it's about dressing up age-old prejudices and judgements about others without saying the ugly words. What's wrong with gay marriage? Something about men, women, tradition and procreation... since marriage equality opponents insist, all the time, that they don't hate gays. And what's behind the spate of new restrictive abortion laws and the brouhaha over Catholic charities and insurance coverage for contraception? Concern for life and religious freedom, not hatred of women or opposition to contraception, since that's what they keep telling us.

If there's a reason American conservatism has utterly failed to broaden its appeal, certainly in the past thirty years, it has a lot to do with just how negatve and unappealing their pitch has been. There's been virtually nothing positive that conservatives have had to offer, nothing but anti-this and opposition to that. Immigration, in fact, is a perfectly sensible issue that really does need reform, but it's become a "social issue" about the Mexican border and a specific group of undocumented immigrants because... well, "anti-Hispanic" isn't attractive, either. 

It's not surprising, really, that conservatives have drifted back into this corner; an actual election about economic injustice and issues like health care would have been an interesting discussion, especially if the right had something to offer groups of people - especially in the working class - who have really been shafted, left and right, over time. But of course, Republicans have nothing to offer on jobs, housing, financial reform, or health care. All they have is an intense dislike for President Obama and anything he's done on those issues. 

I'm not sure Mitt Romney really does have anything to offer, but to his credit, he's studiously avoided reverting to the social issues morass unless heavily pushed; it's not really the Mormon way (Orrin Hatch is a good example of this), and it's not Romney's style to appeal to people's worse instincts. So perhaps it's understandable that the "not-Romneys" of the primary season have found themselves forced to resort to the basest appeals to the base.

Of all of them, though, I suspect the real turning point  was South Carolina and Newt Gingrich's win; Gingrich really had nothing to offer except boilerplate rhetoric built on right wing talk radio bromides, the familiar litany of how things are terrible and liberals are to blame for it.  It's Gingrich who, rather skillfully, re-introduced the sham issue of insurance coverage for contraception. And Gingrich offered the kind of rhetorical cover that conservatives need to revert to "social issues" as their driving force - we're not clased-minded bigots... we're decent people looking out for America, and the Constitution.

Of course, Gingrich himself is a twice divorced Catholic convert who would, literally, say just about anything to win an election, and the dissonance between who he is and what he says just got more pronounced as his prominence grew. Rick Santorum, on the other hand, doesn't have quite that problem. Unlike almost any of the other conservatives who got big and flamed out, Santorum doesn't have to go to some of the ugliest places to sell his fealty to "social issues"; he's already been there (remember "man on dog"?). And so Santorum pitches himself as the populist voice of the unheard working (white) man (and we do mean men), and all of the "social" issues are covered as well.

I don't know if Santorum can actually ride this wave all the way to the Republican nopmination; it would be frankly hilarious if he pulls it off, but we (and he) can't possibly be that lucky. It's telling, though, that Romney and his team are, yet again, flummoxed by Santorum's success. He's the one thing they don't quite have an argument against: a true believer who thinks moderation is for wimps.

Either way, an election that revolves around the angry right renewing its worst calls against gays, pushing familiar virgin/whore/mommy lines about women's roles in society, selling familiar prejudices about blacks and hispanics... is an election held on familiar ground that they really can't win. There's too many of us, too few of them, and too many like me who are tired of listening to carefully chosen words meant to mask really hateful ideas and prejudices. None of it makes President Obama a better President, but it certainly makes clear the starkness of the choice. Which is a much easier election than the one about those pesky problems with jobs and housing and health care and such. 

Euphemisms And Political Math... And Birth Control

Abortion is a form of birth control.

If I have to explain the obviousness of that statement, then we both have a problem... and a good explanation of the wild politics of the past week.

Nothing was stranger, and yet more American, than all the men - and it was almost always a man - who said, piously, that the discussion we were having "was not about contraception" as if it were true. It's about freedom of religiion, it's about government coercion, it's about the rights of the Catholic Church...

Most obviously, this debate is all about contraception, and the fact that abortion is a form of contraception.

Lots of people said this "controversy" - and it's not "controversial" when the vast majority of women, Catholics and, in fact, most Americans favor coverage for contraception - started last November, but the seeds of this debate go back to the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Remember when they tried to strip provisions to cover abortion out of the bill? That was the warning shot for this. And then, as now, a big problem is the muddle of euphemistic words like "pro-choice" and "women's health" when we discuss contraception, and more pointedly, abortion.

Liberals often seem confused by anti-abortion, pro-life rhetoric; I think part of the mistake is that many of the "reasonable", pro-choice people see two separate issues: a dispute over abortion, that may also extend to contraceptives. The truth, I think, is that many people have it backwards: truly Pro-lifers oppose contraception, birth "control" of any kind. Abortion is just the most extreme example.

Morning after pills, "Plan B", tubal ligation, the pill, IUD... there's scientifically little difference to what these approaches do to prevent pregnancy. And it's problematic to try and separate them, to try and draw some sort of "contraceptive line" where some of these are better/different/more reasonable than others. Yet, that's the "muddy middle" of the pro-choice moderates, the ones who say "safe legal and rare" and genuinely mean that abortion shouldn't really happen all that much. If at all.

There's a tacit agreement among many professional Democrats that abortion politics are in fact too loaded to touch; that while pro-life conservatives are wrong on the specifics, they're right on the emotional impact of opposing abortion and calling it baby killing. It's safer to talk about "women's health" (as if we don't know that the main differential here is... pregnancy), it's safer to try and set artificial distinctions for liberals than to take on the whole stupid, brutal underlying argument: that, at heart, conservative pro-lifers don't want women to exert control over the sexual reproductive process.

This issue - the one where we try, at a very basic level, to do something based on common sense that helps women - is a "loser" for the left because the left is terrified about being seen as favoring infanticide. And basically, my point is, we can't turn this around until liberals are willing to try harder and own it. That is, until someone can stand up and make the basic point that the breadth of contraception, from condoms to abortions, are all on a continuum, all practical and all useful, we're kind of doomed. We wind up wilting the closer conservatives get to calling us baby killers.

In that context, I'm not surprised that the President - and his men - invented a fig leaf of compromise that might, maybe, survive close scrutiny: most women will be able to get coverage for contraception. Those who work for certain charitable organizations will also get coverage, just as a paid add-on absorbed by the insurer.

The real news here, though, is probably that the thin shreds of obfuscation that the euphemisms provide really broke down this week; as with Susan Komen and Planned Parenthood, the real action here was how many women, especially younger professional women, made it clear that the euphemisms were silly and that access to conraception, women's health care, and, yes, abortion, is not up for grabs. Or up for debate. That, in itself, is a big step towards reframing the discussion of women and pregnancy and who decides to be not pregnant, and when. But the problematic math remains: as long as conservatives are more comfortable linking abortion to other methods of contraception, as a way to stop all of them, lefties are in the weaker position. We can't win defending half a position, no matter how artfully we try to word it.

Whitney

I am writing this about an hour after the news first appeared: Whitney Houston has died.

It's one of those losses that is utterly unbelievable, yet somehow, inevitable.

To think that we'll have to - I'll have to - explain to people what she was, what it was like, what she meant. There hadn't been anyone quite like Whitney Houston; no one who had that voice, her looks, her onstage presence. Just as music video changed everything (and Whitney was as video-ready as anyone), changes in television production allowed more artists to perform live onstage, as opposed to lip-synching to already recorded tracks. Whitney Houston was one of the first artists to use this opportunity to her advantage, rearranging and reconstructing her songs on the fly. It wasn't the strength of her voice or the breadth of her range that was so astonishing. It was the times that, mid-song or mid-phrase, she'd simply take off in an entirely different direction than she'd gone the last time you'd heard her. I remember when she performed "All At Once" at the American Music Awards, and re-did the second verse so it rose from the depths of her low range to soar an octave higher by the end of the phrase, all in one breath.

That was the way she paved the way for all the Mariahs and Christinas and at least three seasons of American Idols; none of what happened to pop singing - the extended melismas, the fluttering around notes, the frank oversinging - was possible without the way Whitney Houston took on a song. At her height, she was unstoppable, undeniable. No one sang like she did, no one sang as consistently. And she made it look effortless.

Of course, it was too much, too soon and all of it was insane. I remember seeing her live - it was an imperative - with the lucky break of getting a seat in the fifth row. It was astonishing. And she was so innocent, so ingenue to it all. When she sang "I Am Changing", and got to the final notes, "and nothing's gonna stop" - pause - the audience couldn't wait. The ovation was deafening. And she stared at us, wide-eyed. It was a mixture of appreciation... and fear. It's scary, I think, to be that loved, no matter how good you are at what you do.

Clive Davis sold her to America as the embodiment of the American Dream; our Golden Girl, the triumph of talent and beauty and class and taste. And it worked. So what if she couldn't dance? (In Living Color, famously, spoofed her as the "Rhythmless Nation", verbalizing something we all whispered). It was two albums and six years before the reality, and then the less pretty parts, started to sink in: no one's life is that golden. No one, really, can not break under all that pressure.

The problems were apparent long before the rumors moved from whispers to scandal. She was erratic on her films, not a strong actress, and tales off set suggested some real problems. The fact of her drug use was apparent long before it was openly discussed. By "I Will Always Love You" it was clear that her voice was suffering under the strain. By My Love Is Your Love it was all too clear that her range was far less than it had been, and there'd been some real damage. And maybe, just maybe, the story of the past year or two is that her singing could never entirely recover. And she lived to sing. I'm sure that would be crushing.

I am, frankly, stunned. I can't explain, exactly, how much she meant to me, how influential she was, how much I admired her; the most analogous I could be is to say she was, in some sense, my gay generation's Judy Garland, the singer of our age against whom others were measured. Such a beautiful, stunning, talented creaure. And, of course, perhaps how obvious that talent that burns that bright cannot last for long. Not long enough. Not nearly long enough. I just thought we'd get to see her rise, like a phoenix, one last time. And instead... she's gone.