From FireDogLake.com:
Now, let’s discuss how we can be less nice to each other.
Less polite.
Less CIVIL.
I spent last Thursday with the Wisconsin Assembly debate on the Screw the Workers We Don’t Need ‘Em Anyway Act on in the background while I worked, and as I listened to speeches by Republicans and Democrats I was struck by something.
These people were angry. They were hurt. They were unapologetic. They said things like “lies” and “hate” and “wrong” and “unjust.” They said these things loudly. They said them to the people they were saying them about. They made no apologies. They didn’t pretend to be friendly. They didn’t smile and nod and easily give way to the gentle lady from East This and That. They raged.
It was GLORIOUS...
We can’t make decisions about who best represents American values if everybody’s busy pretending they all really want the same things in the end. We can’t make choices about who we want to lead us if our candidates value being nice over being honest. And we can’t understand the consequences of politics when we act like politics is inconsequential.
These people, these Republicans in Wisconsin, hell these Republicans nationally, really are willing to tell the whole world to go to hell so that they can keep cutting taxes for the wealthy. Schoolteachers, firefighters, cops, ironworkers, steamfitters, farmers, they can all die early and poor, lest David Koch’s stock drop a quarter of a point. That deserves to be met not with bemused and polite opposition, but blistering outrage and sincere and vociferous contempt.
People are cynical about politics because they take their cues from the behavior of their leaders, and their leaders, who make their living in politics, appear determined to convince us all that politics is a dirty word. Politics isn’t something you should care about. Politics isn’t something you should raise your voice for. Politics is a big ironic joke, and really, it’s no big deal either way, so don’t get upset. Politics isn’t CIVIL.
Well, maybe it shouldn’t be. What happens as a result of political decisions isn’t civil. People starve in poverty. People die of preventable disease. People’s children are educated in schools with holes in the roof and chains the doors. Two unwinnable wars, scores of people dead, secret prisons, torture, indefinite detention, warrantless eavesdropping … because those things were done by men and women wearing suits and ties doesn’t make them any more rarefied than some protester yelling something mean.
When all the great pundits of our time get together and talk about how civility has vanished from American public life, they mean somebody like me said fuck on the Internet. They mean somebody at a MoveOn rally had a Hitler sign. They mean, hell, that somebody at a Tea Party rally had a Hitler sign. They’re all focused on what those of us out here are doing and saying, and not at all focused on what people in power are doing and saying.
I for one don’t deplore the combative tone of the Wisconsin State Legislature. I love it. Looking back at the past decade, looking back at the past four decades, I’m not sure our country can take much more civility.
Late Night: A Plea for Less Civility in Politics
Allison Hantschel
Monday March 14, 2011
http://firedoglake.com/2011/03/14/late-night-a-plea-for-less-civility-in-politics/
Showing posts with label Jon Stewart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jon Stewart. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Geithner consulted with Jon Stewart on economy: US Treasury
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/geithner-consulted-stewart-economy/
Geithner consulted with Jon Stewart on economy: US Treasury
Daniel Tencer
Thursday, November 4th, 2010
If the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear didn't convince you that Comedy Central's Jon Stewart has made the leap from comedian to political force, perhaps this will.
According to Bloomberg news service, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner met with Stewart at the Daily Show host's New York offices in April. And according to a Treasury spokesperson, it wasn't a social visit.
“Jon Stewart is influential in America, so we took the opportunity for the two to meet and to discuss the economy,” Treasury spokesman Steve Adamske told Bloomberg's Ian Katz in an email.
The meeting was buried in Geithner's appointment calendar, which has been released by the US Treasury. It shows that Geithner met with Stewart on April 2. This despite the fact that "Stewart’s program has poked fun at Geithner, including a segment last year about the Treasury secretary’s trouble selling his New York home," Katz notes.
What is not clear is what, exactly, was the purpose of the meeting, and who said what to whom. Joe Wiesenthal at Business Insider speculates that maybe Geithner was trying to exert pressure on Stewart to be more positive on the administration's fiscal and economic policies.
"The more paranoid would note that Stewart has skewered big banks and bailouts, and that Geithner may have wanted the comedian to see the other side of the programs Geithner architected," he writes.
Teddy Partridge at FireDogLake suggests a more complex motive for the meeting. He notes that Stewart's older brother, Larry Leibowitz, is the chief operating officer of the New York Stock Exchange, and that the usually low-profile Leibowitz gained public attention at an economic conference held three days before Geithner visited Stewart.
"Had Geithner found himself a back-channel to the COO of the New York Stock Exchange that wouldn’t require disclosure by either party?" Partridge asks.
Unless Geithner or Stewart spill the beans, the speculation will abound. But, as financial bloggers noted today, the meeting itself shows that Stewart is being taken seriously as a political force in the US.
"Stewart long has declared that he isn’t a journalist and has he talked down his influence. Now, it is time to give up the pretense. Face it, Jon Stewart, you are a major cultural and political force in America, dude," writes Shira Ovide at the Wall Street Journal.
"This basically ends any debate about whether Stewart is a comedian or a newsman," Wiesenthal chimes in. "Presumably Geithner thought it important that Stewart be well-informed on aspects of policy, and Stewart felt the same way."
Geithner consulted with Jon Stewart on economy: US Treasury
Daniel Tencer
Thursday, November 4th, 2010
If the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear didn't convince you that Comedy Central's Jon Stewart has made the leap from comedian to political force, perhaps this will.
According to Bloomberg news service, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner met with Stewart at the Daily Show host's New York offices in April. And according to a Treasury spokesperson, it wasn't a social visit.
“Jon Stewart is influential in America, so we took the opportunity for the two to meet and to discuss the economy,” Treasury spokesman Steve Adamske told Bloomberg's Ian Katz in an email.
The meeting was buried in Geithner's appointment calendar, which has been released by the US Treasury. It shows that Geithner met with Stewart on April 2. This despite the fact that "Stewart’s program has poked fun at Geithner, including a segment last year about the Treasury secretary’s trouble selling his New York home," Katz notes.
What is not clear is what, exactly, was the purpose of the meeting, and who said what to whom. Joe Wiesenthal at Business Insider speculates that maybe Geithner was trying to exert pressure on Stewart to be more positive on the administration's fiscal and economic policies.
"The more paranoid would note that Stewart has skewered big banks and bailouts, and that Geithner may have wanted the comedian to see the other side of the programs Geithner architected," he writes.
Teddy Partridge at FireDogLake suggests a more complex motive for the meeting. He notes that Stewart's older brother, Larry Leibowitz, is the chief operating officer of the New York Stock Exchange, and that the usually low-profile Leibowitz gained public attention at an economic conference held three days before Geithner visited Stewart.
"Had Geithner found himself a back-channel to the COO of the New York Stock Exchange that wouldn’t require disclosure by either party?" Partridge asks.
Unless Geithner or Stewart spill the beans, the speculation will abound. But, as financial bloggers noted today, the meeting itself shows that Stewart is being taken seriously as a political force in the US.
"Stewart long has declared that he isn’t a journalist and has he talked down his influence. Now, it is time to give up the pretense. Face it, Jon Stewart, you are a major cultural and political force in America, dude," writes Shira Ovide at the Wall Street Journal.
"This basically ends any debate about whether Stewart is a comedian or a newsman," Wiesenthal chimes in. "Presumably Geithner thought it important that Stewart be well-informed on aspects of policy, and Stewart felt the same way."
Stewart/Colbert rally preaches compromise and complacency
http://wsws.org/articles/2010/nov2010/stew-n01.shtml
Stewart/Colbert rally preaches compromise and complacency
By Joseph Kishore
1 November 2010
On Saturday, US comedic television hosts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert organized a demonstration that drew over 200,000 under the slogan “Rally for Sanity.”
Participants included many young people, along with families and retirees. The general mood was one of hostility toward the right wing, and the rally was in part organized in response to one held by Fox television host Glenn Beck in August. The event was heavily promoted by liberal supporters of Obama, including the Huffington Post, which spent $250,000 to bus people in.
Many of those participating were drawn from relatively insulated layers of the middle class for whom the rally’s central theme—that there is not much to be angry about—resonated, at least to some extent. However, insofar as Stewart and Colbert are associated with a certain antiestablishment sentiment, the demonstration attracted broader layers.
The widespread support that Stewart and Colbert have among young people in particular is an indication of the general disillusionment with the political system and the mass media. One cannot think of a political figure who could draw a similar attendance, as there is no one in either party that has a significant base of support. At a rally on Sunday in Cleveland, Ohio, for example, Obama was greeted by 5,000 empty seats in a stadium intended to seat 13,000. The Stewart/Colbert rally was also about three times larger than the Beck rally organized in August.
Stewart and Colbert attempted to portray their event as “nonpartisan” and the comedians are not directly political figures. However, there was nevertheless a definite political line underlying it: support for the Obama administration and the Democratic Party.
Under conditions in which the majority of the American population is increasingly disillusioned by the pro-corporate and pro-war policies of Obama and the entire political establishment, the basic theme of the event was the need for a political consensus between the two parties in Washington and their allies in the media.
This generally corresponds with the aims of the Obama administration itself. Indeed, at the end of a generally favorable episode-long interview with Obama on Stewart’s “Daily Show” three days before the rally, the US president gave his endorsement to the weekend event, saying he wished it had been held two years ago.
Stewart spoke about his own conceptions behind the event in his closing remarks on Saturday. He expressed the hope that behind every political conflict is some sort of misunderstanding that can be resolved through reasoned discussion. “We can have animus and not be enemies,” he said.
Stewart directed his main criticisms against the media, repeating his analysis that the problem is that media pundits are too partisan and extreme, that they inflate problems and hinder resolutions. “The country’s 24-hour politico pundit perpetual panic conflictanator did not cause our problems, but its existence has made solving them that much harder… If we amplify everything, we hear nothing,” he complained.
If drivers with different political views and backgrounds can merge in an orderly fashion in a traffic jam, Stewart said, then certainly everyone in Washington DC should be able to work together to get things done.
This is first of all an utterly false portrayal of the real state of affairs in the American media and political system. The mudslinging among media pundits is intended more to distract from the real problems facing millions of people and to draw attention away from the fact that the political establishment as a whole is in basic agreement on all fundamental issues.
At the same time, Stewart’s “politics of the golden mean” is a facile one, devoid of any understanding of the social forces driving politics, including the significant corporate financing behind the promotion of an extreme right-wing movement in the United States. Stewart expresses the attitude of the relatively comfortable middle-class supporters of the Democratic Party who are constantly trying to reach some sort of accommodation with the right.
The basic sentiment that Stewart sought to cultivate was one of complacency. The rally was called in the midst of the greatest economic crisis in generations, but there was absolutely no mention—either before or during the event—of the desperate situation facing millions of people. There was nothing about the ongoing wars carried out by both political parties that have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands. There was no hint of the unprecedented attack on democratic rights in the United States.
According to Stewart’s analysis, the immense divisions that are emerging in American society are little more than a media creation. The outlook is in fact preposterous.
There was also an ugly element to the rally, a deliberate attempt in particular to blackguard and delegitimize any left-wing opposition to the policies of the ruling class. On a number of occasions, Stewart lumped together left-wing opponents of Obama with the extreme right, declaring, “Why would you work with Marxists actively subverting our constitution? Or racists and homophobes who see no one’s humanity but their own?”
The attempt to equate socialists with racists and homophobes is a deliberate attempt to render illegitimate any argument that the political system is dictated by the interests of the corporate and financial elite—a sentiment in fact shared by millions of people.
The call for all Americans to come together as one was combined with a nationalist and at time jingoist subtext to the entire demonstration, beginning with the singing of the national anthem by US military veterans. Later, Stewart and Colbert covered themselves in American flags, and Stewart accompanied musician Jeff Tweedy to sing that America “is the greatest, strongest country in the world. There is no one more American than we.”
While Stewart and Colbert have at times in the past leveled some sharp barbs at the political establishment, the media, and the corporate elite, their criticisms have generally been of a limited and superficial character. Their shows have become fixtures of the same political system that they have at times scorned. All manner of politicians—including the president himself—have allowed themselves to be interviewed. Last year, Colbert was given access to top military figures as part of a trip to Iraq, during which he whitewashed the disaster inflicted on that country by the US government.
While there were no doubt many people in attendance this past weekend who looked to the demonstration as a way of expressing their opposition to the direction of US policy, nothing of the sort was provided by Stewart and Colbert.
Stewart/Colbert rally preaches compromise and complacency
By Joseph Kishore
1 November 2010
On Saturday, US comedic television hosts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert organized a demonstration that drew over 200,000 under the slogan “Rally for Sanity.”
Participants included many young people, along with families and retirees. The general mood was one of hostility toward the right wing, and the rally was in part organized in response to one held by Fox television host Glenn Beck in August. The event was heavily promoted by liberal supporters of Obama, including the Huffington Post, which spent $250,000 to bus people in.
Many of those participating were drawn from relatively insulated layers of the middle class for whom the rally’s central theme—that there is not much to be angry about—resonated, at least to some extent. However, insofar as Stewart and Colbert are associated with a certain antiestablishment sentiment, the demonstration attracted broader layers.
The widespread support that Stewart and Colbert have among young people in particular is an indication of the general disillusionment with the political system and the mass media. One cannot think of a political figure who could draw a similar attendance, as there is no one in either party that has a significant base of support. At a rally on Sunday in Cleveland, Ohio, for example, Obama was greeted by 5,000 empty seats in a stadium intended to seat 13,000. The Stewart/Colbert rally was also about three times larger than the Beck rally organized in August.
Stewart and Colbert attempted to portray their event as “nonpartisan” and the comedians are not directly political figures. However, there was nevertheless a definite political line underlying it: support for the Obama administration and the Democratic Party.
Under conditions in which the majority of the American population is increasingly disillusioned by the pro-corporate and pro-war policies of Obama and the entire political establishment, the basic theme of the event was the need for a political consensus between the two parties in Washington and their allies in the media.
This generally corresponds with the aims of the Obama administration itself. Indeed, at the end of a generally favorable episode-long interview with Obama on Stewart’s “Daily Show” three days before the rally, the US president gave his endorsement to the weekend event, saying he wished it had been held two years ago.
Stewart spoke about his own conceptions behind the event in his closing remarks on Saturday. He expressed the hope that behind every political conflict is some sort of misunderstanding that can be resolved through reasoned discussion. “We can have animus and not be enemies,” he said.
Stewart directed his main criticisms against the media, repeating his analysis that the problem is that media pundits are too partisan and extreme, that they inflate problems and hinder resolutions. “The country’s 24-hour politico pundit perpetual panic conflictanator did not cause our problems, but its existence has made solving them that much harder… If we amplify everything, we hear nothing,” he complained.
If drivers with different political views and backgrounds can merge in an orderly fashion in a traffic jam, Stewart said, then certainly everyone in Washington DC should be able to work together to get things done.
This is first of all an utterly false portrayal of the real state of affairs in the American media and political system. The mudslinging among media pundits is intended more to distract from the real problems facing millions of people and to draw attention away from the fact that the political establishment as a whole is in basic agreement on all fundamental issues.
At the same time, Stewart’s “politics of the golden mean” is a facile one, devoid of any understanding of the social forces driving politics, including the significant corporate financing behind the promotion of an extreme right-wing movement in the United States. Stewart expresses the attitude of the relatively comfortable middle-class supporters of the Democratic Party who are constantly trying to reach some sort of accommodation with the right.
The basic sentiment that Stewart sought to cultivate was one of complacency. The rally was called in the midst of the greatest economic crisis in generations, but there was absolutely no mention—either before or during the event—of the desperate situation facing millions of people. There was nothing about the ongoing wars carried out by both political parties that have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands. There was no hint of the unprecedented attack on democratic rights in the United States.
According to Stewart’s analysis, the immense divisions that are emerging in American society are little more than a media creation. The outlook is in fact preposterous.
There was also an ugly element to the rally, a deliberate attempt in particular to blackguard and delegitimize any left-wing opposition to the policies of the ruling class. On a number of occasions, Stewart lumped together left-wing opponents of Obama with the extreme right, declaring, “Why would you work with Marxists actively subverting our constitution? Or racists and homophobes who see no one’s humanity but their own?”
The attempt to equate socialists with racists and homophobes is a deliberate attempt to render illegitimate any argument that the political system is dictated by the interests of the corporate and financial elite—a sentiment in fact shared by millions of people.
The call for all Americans to come together as one was combined with a nationalist and at time jingoist subtext to the entire demonstration, beginning with the singing of the national anthem by US military veterans. Later, Stewart and Colbert covered themselves in American flags, and Stewart accompanied musician Jeff Tweedy to sing that America “is the greatest, strongest country in the world. There is no one more American than we.”
While Stewart and Colbert have at times in the past leveled some sharp barbs at the political establishment, the media, and the corporate elite, their criticisms have generally been of a limited and superficial character. Their shows have become fixtures of the same political system that they have at times scorned. All manner of politicians—including the president himself—have allowed themselves to be interviewed. Last year, Colbert was given access to top military figures as part of a trip to Iraq, during which he whitewashed the disaster inflicted on that country by the US government.
While there were no doubt many people in attendance this past weekend who looked to the demonstration as a way of expressing their opposition to the direction of US policy, nothing of the sort was provided by Stewart and Colbert.
Jon Stewart and the left
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_6532.shtml
Jon Stewart and the left
William Blum
Online Journal Guest Writer
Nov 4, 2010
The left in America is desperate; desperate for someone who can inspire them, if not lead them to a better world; or at least make them laugh. TV star Jon Stewart is sometimes funny, especially when he doesn’t try too hard to be funny, which is not often enough. But as a political leader, or simply political educator for the left, forget it. He’s not even what I would call a genuine, committed leftist. What does he have to teach the left? He himself would certainly not want you to entertain the thought that Jon Stewart is in any way a man of the left.
He billed his October 30 rally on the National Mall in Washington, DC, as the Million Moderate March. Would a person with a real desire for important progressive social and political change, i.e, a “leftist,” so ostentatiously brand himself a “moderate”? Even if by “moderate” he refers mainly to tone of voice or choice of words why is that so important? If a politician strongly supports things which you are passionate about, why should it bother you if the politician is vehement in his arguments, even angry? And if the politician is strongly against what you’re passionate about does it make you feel any better about the guy if he never raises his voice or sharply criticizes those on the other side? What kind of cause is that to commit yourself to?
Stewart, in fact, appears to dislike the left, perhaps strongly. In the lead-up to the rally he criticized the left for various things, including calling George W. Bush a “war criminal.” Wow! How immoderate of us. Do I have to list here the 500 war crimes committed by George W. Bush? If I did so, would that make me one of what Stewart calls the “crazies”?
In his talk at the rally, Stewart spoke of our “real fears” -- “of terrorists, racists, Stalinists, and theocrats.” Stalinists? Where did that come from, Glenn Beck? What decade is Stewart living in? What about capitalists or the corporations? Is there no reason to fear them? Is it Stalinists who are responsible for the collapse of our jobs and homes, our economy?
Writer Chris Hedges says, “Being nice and moderate will not help. These are corporate forces that are intent on reconfiguring the United States into a system of neofeudalism. These corporate forces will not be halted by funny signs, comics dressed up like Captain America or nice words.”
Stewart also grouped together “Marxists actively subverting our constitution, racists and homophobes.” Welcome to the Jon Stewart Tea Party. In his long interview last week of President Obama on his TV show, Stewart did not mention any of America’s wars. That would have been impolite and divisive; maybe even not nice.
He billed his rally as being “for people who are politically dissatisfied but who are not ideological.” (Democracy Now, November 1, 2010) Really, Jon? You have no ideology? To those who like to tell themselves and others that they don’t have any particular ideology I say this: If you have thoughts about why the world is the way it is, why society is the way it is, why people are the way they are, what a better way would look like, and if your thoughts are fairly well organized, then that’s your ideology, even if it’s not wholly conscious as such. Better to organize those thoughts as best you can, become very conscious of them, and then consciously avoid getting involved with individuals or political movements who have an incompatible ideology. It’s like a very bad marriage.
William Blum is the author of “Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2,” “Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower,” “West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir” and “Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire” He can be reached at: BBlum6@aol.com.
Jon Stewart and the left
William Blum
Online Journal Guest Writer
Nov 4, 2010
The left in America is desperate; desperate for someone who can inspire them, if not lead them to a better world; or at least make them laugh. TV star Jon Stewart is sometimes funny, especially when he doesn’t try too hard to be funny, which is not often enough. But as a political leader, or simply political educator for the left, forget it. He’s not even what I would call a genuine, committed leftist. What does he have to teach the left? He himself would certainly not want you to entertain the thought that Jon Stewart is in any way a man of the left.
He billed his October 30 rally on the National Mall in Washington, DC, as the Million Moderate March. Would a person with a real desire for important progressive social and political change, i.e, a “leftist,” so ostentatiously brand himself a “moderate”? Even if by “moderate” he refers mainly to tone of voice or choice of words why is that so important? If a politician strongly supports things which you are passionate about, why should it bother you if the politician is vehement in his arguments, even angry? And if the politician is strongly against what you’re passionate about does it make you feel any better about the guy if he never raises his voice or sharply criticizes those on the other side? What kind of cause is that to commit yourself to?
Stewart, in fact, appears to dislike the left, perhaps strongly. In the lead-up to the rally he criticized the left for various things, including calling George W. Bush a “war criminal.” Wow! How immoderate of us. Do I have to list here the 500 war crimes committed by George W. Bush? If I did so, would that make me one of what Stewart calls the “crazies”?
In his talk at the rally, Stewart spoke of our “real fears” -- “of terrorists, racists, Stalinists, and theocrats.” Stalinists? Where did that come from, Glenn Beck? What decade is Stewart living in? What about capitalists or the corporations? Is there no reason to fear them? Is it Stalinists who are responsible for the collapse of our jobs and homes, our economy?
Writer Chris Hedges says, “Being nice and moderate will not help. These are corporate forces that are intent on reconfiguring the United States into a system of neofeudalism. These corporate forces will not be halted by funny signs, comics dressed up like Captain America or nice words.”
Stewart also grouped together “Marxists actively subverting our constitution, racists and homophobes.” Welcome to the Jon Stewart Tea Party. In his long interview last week of President Obama on his TV show, Stewart did not mention any of America’s wars. That would have been impolite and divisive; maybe even not nice.
He billed his rally as being “for people who are politically dissatisfied but who are not ideological.” (Democracy Now, November 1, 2010) Really, Jon? You have no ideology? To those who like to tell themselves and others that they don’t have any particular ideology I say this: If you have thoughts about why the world is the way it is, why society is the way it is, why people are the way they are, what a better way would look like, and if your thoughts are fairly well organized, then that’s your ideology, even if it’s not wholly conscious as such. Better to organize those thoughts as best you can, become very conscious of them, and then consciously avoid getting involved with individuals or political movements who have an incompatible ideology. It’s like a very bad marriage.
William Blum is the author of “Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2,” “Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower,” “West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir” and “Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire” He can be reached at: BBlum6@aol.com.
The Phantom Left
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_phantom_left_20101031/ Oct 31, 2010
Chris Hedges
The American left is a phantom. It is conjured up by the right wing to tag Barack Obama as a socialist and used by the liberal class to justify its complacency and lethargy. It diverts attention from corporate power. It perpetuates the myth of a democratic system that is influenced by the votes of citizens, political platforms and the work of legislators. It keeps the world neatly divided into a left and a right. The phantom left functions as a convenient scapegoat. The right wing blames it for moral degeneration and fiscal chaos. The liberal class uses it to call for “moderation.” And while we waste our time talking nonsense, the engines of corporate power—masked, ruthless and unexamined—happily devour the state.
The loss of a radical left in American politics has been catastrophic. The left once harbored militant anarchist and communist labor unions, an independent, alternative press, social movements and politicians not tethered to corporate benefactors. But its disappearance, the result of long witch hunts for communists, post-industrialization and the silencing of those who did not sign on for the utopian vision of globalization, means that there is no counterforce to halt our slide into corporate neofeudalism. This harsh reality, however, is not palatable. So the corporations that control mass communications conjure up the phantom of a left. They blame the phantom for our debacle. And they get us to speak in absurdities.
The phantom left took a central role on the mall this weekend in Washington. It had performed admirably for Glenn Beck, who used it in his own rally as a lightning rod to instill anger and fear. And the phantom left proved equally useful for the comics Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who spoke to the crowd wearing red-white-and-blue costumes. The two comics evoked the phantom left, as the liberal class always does, in defense of moderation, which might better be described as apathy. If the right wing is crazy and if the left wing is crazy, the argument goes, then we moderates will be reasonable. We will be nice. Exxon and Goldman Sachs, along with predatory banks and the arms industry, may be ripping the guts out of the country, our rights—including habeas corpus—may have been revoked, but don’t get mad. Don’t be shrill. Don’t be like the crazies on the left.
“Why would you work with Marxists actively subverting our Constitution or racists and homophobes who see no one’s humanity but their own?” Stewart asked. “We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is—on the brink of catastrophe—torn by polarizing hate, and how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done. But the truth is we do. We work together to get things done every damn day. The only place we don’t is here [in Washington] or on cable TV.”
The rally delivered a political message devoid of reality or content. The corruption of electoral politics by corporate funds and lobbyists, the naive belief that we can somehow vote ourselves back to democracy, was ignored for emotional catharsis. The right hates. The liberals laugh. And the country is taken hostage.
The Rally to Restore Sanity, held in Washington’s National Mall, was yet another sad footnote to the death of the liberal class. It was as innocuous as a Boy Scout jamboree. It ridiculed followers of the tea party without acknowledging that the pain and suffering expressed by many who support the movement are not only real but legitimate. It made fun of the buffoons who are rising up out of moral swamps to take over the Republican Party without accepting that their supporters were sold out by a liberal class, and especially a Democratic Party, which turned its back on the working class for corporate money.
Fox News’ Beck and his allies on the far right can use hatred as a mobilizing force because there are tens of millions of Americans who have very good reason to hate. They have been betrayed by the elite who run the corporate state, by the two main political parties and by the liberal apologists, including those given public platforms on television, who keep counseling moderation as jobs disappear, wages drop and unemployment insurance runs out. As long as the liberal class speaks in the dead voice of moderation it will continue to fuel the right-wing backlash. Only when it appropriates this rage as its own, only when it stands up to established systems of power, including the Democratic Party, will we have any hope of holding off the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party.
Wall Street’s looting of the Treasury, the curtailing of our civil liberties, the millions of fraudulent foreclosures, the long-term unemployment, the bankruptcies from medical bills, the endless wars in the Middle East and the amassing of trillions in debt that can never be repaid are pushing us toward a Hobbesian world of internal collapse. Being nice and moderate will not help. These are corporate forces that are intent on reconfiguring the United States into a system of neofeudalism. These corporate forces will not be halted by funny signs, comics dressed up like Captain America or nice words.
The liberal class wants to inhabit a political center to remain morally and politically disengaged. As long as there is a phantom left, one that is as ridiculous and stunted as the right wing, the liberal class can remain uncommitted. If the liberal class concedes that power has been wrested from us it will be forced, if it wants to act, to build movements outside the political system. This would require the liberal class to demand acts of resistance, including civil disobedience, to attempt to salvage what is left of our anemic democratic state. But this type of political activity, as costly as it is difficult, is too unpalatable to a bankrupt liberal establishment that has sold its soul to corporate interests. And so the phantom left will be with us for a long time.
Politics in America has become spectacle. It is another form of show business. The crowd in Washington, well trained by television, was conditioned to play its role before the cameras. The signs —“The Rant is Too Damn High,” “Real Patriots Can Handle a Difference of Opinion” or “I Masturbate and I Vote”—reflected the hollowness of current political discourse and television’s perverse epistemology. The rally spoke exclusively in the impoverished iconography and language of television. It was filled with meaningless political pieties, music and jokes. It was like any television variety program. Personalities were being sold, not political platforms. And this is what the society of spectacle is about.
The modern spectacle, as the theorist Guy Debord pointed out, is a potent tool for pacification and depoliticization. It is a “permanent opium war” which stupefies its viewers and disconnects them from the forces that control their lives. The spectacle diverts anger toward phantoms and away from the perpetrators of exploitation and injustice. It manufactures feelings of euphoria. It allows participants to confuse the spectacle itself with political action.
The celebrities from Comedy Central and the trash talk show hosts on Fox are in the same business. They are entertainers. They provide the empty, emotionally laden material that propels endless chatter back and forth on supposed left- and right-wing television programs. It is a national Punch and Judy show. But don’t be fooled. It is not politics. It is entertainment. It is spectacle. All national debate on the airwaves is driven by the same empty gossip, the same absurd trivia, the same celebrity meltdowns and the same ridiculous posturing. It is presented with a different spin. But none of it is about ideas or truth. None of it is about being informed. It caters to emotions. It makes us confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge. And in the end, for those who serve up this drivel, the game is about money in the form of ratings and advertising. Beck, Colbert and Stewart all serve the same masters. And it is not us.
Chris Hedges, who writes every Monday for Truthdig, is the author of the new book “Death of the Liberal Class.”
Chris Hedges
The American left is a phantom. It is conjured up by the right wing to tag Barack Obama as a socialist and used by the liberal class to justify its complacency and lethargy. It diverts attention from corporate power. It perpetuates the myth of a democratic system that is influenced by the votes of citizens, political platforms and the work of legislators. It keeps the world neatly divided into a left and a right. The phantom left functions as a convenient scapegoat. The right wing blames it for moral degeneration and fiscal chaos. The liberal class uses it to call for “moderation.” And while we waste our time talking nonsense, the engines of corporate power—masked, ruthless and unexamined—happily devour the state.
The loss of a radical left in American politics has been catastrophic. The left once harbored militant anarchist and communist labor unions, an independent, alternative press, social movements and politicians not tethered to corporate benefactors. But its disappearance, the result of long witch hunts for communists, post-industrialization and the silencing of those who did not sign on for the utopian vision of globalization, means that there is no counterforce to halt our slide into corporate neofeudalism. This harsh reality, however, is not palatable. So the corporations that control mass communications conjure up the phantom of a left. They blame the phantom for our debacle. And they get us to speak in absurdities.
The phantom left took a central role on the mall this weekend in Washington. It had performed admirably for Glenn Beck, who used it in his own rally as a lightning rod to instill anger and fear. And the phantom left proved equally useful for the comics Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who spoke to the crowd wearing red-white-and-blue costumes. The two comics evoked the phantom left, as the liberal class always does, in defense of moderation, which might better be described as apathy. If the right wing is crazy and if the left wing is crazy, the argument goes, then we moderates will be reasonable. We will be nice. Exxon and Goldman Sachs, along with predatory banks and the arms industry, may be ripping the guts out of the country, our rights—including habeas corpus—may have been revoked, but don’t get mad. Don’t be shrill. Don’t be like the crazies on the left.
“Why would you work with Marxists actively subverting our Constitution or racists and homophobes who see no one’s humanity but their own?” Stewart asked. “We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is—on the brink of catastrophe—torn by polarizing hate, and how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done. But the truth is we do. We work together to get things done every damn day. The only place we don’t is here [in Washington] or on cable TV.”
The rally delivered a political message devoid of reality or content. The corruption of electoral politics by corporate funds and lobbyists, the naive belief that we can somehow vote ourselves back to democracy, was ignored for emotional catharsis. The right hates. The liberals laugh. And the country is taken hostage.
The Rally to Restore Sanity, held in Washington’s National Mall, was yet another sad footnote to the death of the liberal class. It was as innocuous as a Boy Scout jamboree. It ridiculed followers of the tea party without acknowledging that the pain and suffering expressed by many who support the movement are not only real but legitimate. It made fun of the buffoons who are rising up out of moral swamps to take over the Republican Party without accepting that their supporters were sold out by a liberal class, and especially a Democratic Party, which turned its back on the working class for corporate money.
Fox News’ Beck and his allies on the far right can use hatred as a mobilizing force because there are tens of millions of Americans who have very good reason to hate. They have been betrayed by the elite who run the corporate state, by the two main political parties and by the liberal apologists, including those given public platforms on television, who keep counseling moderation as jobs disappear, wages drop and unemployment insurance runs out. As long as the liberal class speaks in the dead voice of moderation it will continue to fuel the right-wing backlash. Only when it appropriates this rage as its own, only when it stands up to established systems of power, including the Democratic Party, will we have any hope of holding off the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party.
Wall Street’s looting of the Treasury, the curtailing of our civil liberties, the millions of fraudulent foreclosures, the long-term unemployment, the bankruptcies from medical bills, the endless wars in the Middle East and the amassing of trillions in debt that can never be repaid are pushing us toward a Hobbesian world of internal collapse. Being nice and moderate will not help. These are corporate forces that are intent on reconfiguring the United States into a system of neofeudalism. These corporate forces will not be halted by funny signs, comics dressed up like Captain America or nice words.
The liberal class wants to inhabit a political center to remain morally and politically disengaged. As long as there is a phantom left, one that is as ridiculous and stunted as the right wing, the liberal class can remain uncommitted. If the liberal class concedes that power has been wrested from us it will be forced, if it wants to act, to build movements outside the political system. This would require the liberal class to demand acts of resistance, including civil disobedience, to attempt to salvage what is left of our anemic democratic state. But this type of political activity, as costly as it is difficult, is too unpalatable to a bankrupt liberal establishment that has sold its soul to corporate interests. And so the phantom left will be with us for a long time.
Politics in America has become spectacle. It is another form of show business. The crowd in Washington, well trained by television, was conditioned to play its role before the cameras. The signs —“The Rant is Too Damn High,” “Real Patriots Can Handle a Difference of Opinion” or “I Masturbate and I Vote”—reflected the hollowness of current political discourse and television’s perverse epistemology. The rally spoke exclusively in the impoverished iconography and language of television. It was filled with meaningless political pieties, music and jokes. It was like any television variety program. Personalities were being sold, not political platforms. And this is what the society of spectacle is about.
The modern spectacle, as the theorist Guy Debord pointed out, is a potent tool for pacification and depoliticization. It is a “permanent opium war” which stupefies its viewers and disconnects them from the forces that control their lives. The spectacle diverts anger toward phantoms and away from the perpetrators of exploitation and injustice. It manufactures feelings of euphoria. It allows participants to confuse the spectacle itself with political action.
The celebrities from Comedy Central and the trash talk show hosts on Fox are in the same business. They are entertainers. They provide the empty, emotionally laden material that propels endless chatter back and forth on supposed left- and right-wing television programs. It is a national Punch and Judy show. But don’t be fooled. It is not politics. It is entertainment. It is spectacle. All national debate on the airwaves is driven by the same empty gossip, the same absurd trivia, the same celebrity meltdowns and the same ridiculous posturing. It is presented with a different spin. But none of it is about ideas or truth. None of it is about being informed. It caters to emotions. It makes us confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge. And in the end, for those who serve up this drivel, the game is about money in the form of ratings and advertising. Beck, Colbert and Stewart all serve the same masters. And it is not us.
Chris Hedges, who writes every Monday for Truthdig, is the author of the new book “Death of the Liberal Class.”
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
THE RALLY TO RESTORE VANITY
http://exiledonline.com/the-rally-to-restore-vanity-generation-x-celebrates-its-homeric-struggle-against-lameness
October 30, 2010
THE RALLY TO RESTORE VANITY: GENERATION X CELEBRATES ITS HOMERIC STRUGGLE AGAINST LAMENESS
By Mark Ames
Maybe what’s happening in America today will seem funny to some other culture in some future time—how it happened that in the depths of America’s decline, Liberals, the great opposition to everything mean and ruthless in this culture, couldn’t muster up a get-together for anything better than a mock-in. Led by a clown.
I confess, I couldn’t hack it. I came to the rally–saw those two pastry chefs from the Mythbusters show get all the Liberal Elites to hold a post-modern human wave, an ironic human wave allowing all the self-conscious Liberal Elites to play like Real America, while salvaging their vanity because it was all ironic and post-modern… And to make sure that everyone knew they were not really human-waving but rather meta-human-waving, the Mythbusters duo deconstructed the human wave. And all the Liberal Elites smiled and laughed knowingly, because all 150,000 were in on the biggest inside-joke wankathon in American history. And that was it for me–I was outta there.
A century-old ideological movement, Liberalism: once devoted to impossible causes like ending racism and inequality, empowering the powerless, fighting against militarism, and all that silly hippie shit—now it’s been reduced to besting the other side at one-liners…and to the Liberals’ credit, they’re clearly on top. Sure there are a lot of problems out there, a lot of pressing needs—but the main thing is, the Liberals don’t look nearly as stupid as the other guys do. And if you don’t know how important that is to this generation, then you won’t understand what’s so wrong and so deeply depressing about the Jon Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity.
That’s what makes this rally so depressing and grotesque: It’s an anti-rally, a kind of mass concession speech without the speech–some kind of sick funeral party for Liberalism, in which Liberals are led, at last, by a clown. Not a figurative clown, but by a clown–and Liberals are sure that this somehow makes them smarter and less lame–and indeed, they are less lame, because they are not taking themselves too seriously, which is something they’re very, very proud of. All great political struggles and ideological advances, all great human rights achievements were won by clown-led crowds of people who don’t take themselves too seriously, duh! That’s why they’re following a clown like Stewart, whose entire political program comes down to this: not being stupid, the way the other guys are stupid–or when being stupid, only stupid in a self-consciously stupid way, which is to say, not stupid. That’s it, that’s all this is about: Not to protest wars or oligarchical theft or declining health care or crushing debt or a corrupt political system or imperial decay—nope, the only thing that motivates Liberals to gather in the their thousands is the chance to celebrate their own lack of stupidity! Woo-hoo!
It’s the final humiliating undoing of Enlightenment Idealism that made Liberalism possible–imagine if Jefferson, Diderot, Montesquieu, Madison et al reduced the entire Enlightenment’s struggle against the old feudal order to “I’m against the monarchy because the monarchy’s stupid…but then again, Rousseau makes a fool of himself with his Romanticism, and Tom Paine is so serious with his ‘Rights of Man’, the Revolutionaries are just as crazy as the Monarchists, so rather than join either side and risk opening myself to mockery, I’m just going to stand back and laugh at them all and say, ‘Really? Independence? Everyone is created equal and has the right to pursue happiness? Really, TJ? You sure you want to say that about Bluebeard? Really?” [LAUGH TRACK]…
It’s not Stewart’s or Colbert’s fault, let’s be clear on that—they’re the only ones doing their job here. They’re the only ones fighting this battle, and the only way they’re surviving is by elaborately pretending they’re not really fighting anyone’s battle over anything, they’re just having a laugh—it’s the same rationale that jesters used in medieval times, and Stewart and Colbert play the same role as the jesters did then…and we’re also playing our role as powerless peasants reduced to self-mockery and snickering at our Masters behind their backs. It’s not their fault that Liberalism today has as its highest priority not looking stupid—and that its premiere rally is framed in such a way that everyone who came to this rally is somehow indemnified from looking foolish precisely because it’s not really a political rally, it’s more like a mockery of a political rally—in a self-consciously smart sort of way. And the Daily Show Democrats who gathered celebrated themselves for this amazing achievement: that they didn’t make fools of themselves standing for something that some other guys could then use to mock them. That’s the biggest sin of the other side, the Tea Partiers especially, at least as the Daily Show fans see it: they look silly, and worse, they’re not shamed into suicide from looking silly, the way Liberals would be shamed into OD’ing on Ambien if they opened themselves up to that sort of mockery.
It was this same lack of ironic self-awareness (or rather, this absence of any sort of mockery-avoidance technology) that led my generation to pillory the hippies and progressives–that’s why we were South Park Republicans before we were Daily Show Democrats: because back then, standing for liberal values meant something, and that made you look lame. Only now, when Liberal ideals have vanished into mythology and all they stand for is “not as crazy or stupid as Republicans” is it safe to camp out with the Democrats. They put nothing on the line ideologically, which perfectly jibes with this generation’s highest value. And that makes it perfectly safe to go to something like a large political rally like Stewart’s—you side with a hollow movement stripped of ideology or purpose, and then you gather to celebrate your own hollowness at a rally whose one promise is “You won’t open yourself up to mockery if you attend this rally” and whose goal is to show how not-stupid “we” are compared to the mockable activists on both the right and the left–the Beckites and the Code Pinkers.
I’ve come to the conclusion that this has been the Great Dream of my generation: to position ourselves in such a way that we’re beyond mockery. To not look stupid. That’s the biggest crime of all–looking stupid. That’s why they’ve turned Stewart into a demigod, because he knows how to make the other guys look really stupid, and if you’re on the same team as Stewart, you’re on the safe side of the mockery, rather than dangerously vulnerable to mockery.
In fact, I think this is why so many Gen-X/Yers turned against Obama: because he made them look stupid. They made themselves vulnerable to looking stupid by believing in him–and he jilted them. That’s how they see it–not that politics is a long ugly process that has nothing to do with self-esteem and everything to do with money and brawling–it was more like an “indie” consumer choice: They bought into the Obama brand, wore it, and suddenly discovered that the label wasn’t as cool as it seemed at the time, especially after the sentimental high of electing a half-black president wore off to the hard slog of what came after… so they threw the Obama jeans away and went to work trying to salvage their coolness creds for having made that fashion mistake. It’s captured best in this Awl essay by Tom Hanks’ daughter–E. A. Hanks, of all people: “Dear The Left: A Breakup Letter” which begins with her reaction to the special Senate election that Scott Brown won:
Dear The Left,
It’s interesting that you couldn’t keep Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat. I’m taking it for granted that you understand that I don’t mean “interesting” at all, but rather “detestable.”
So little Miss Hanks is not joking in her title for the essay–it really is written like a breakup letter. Leaving aside for now the question of “What the fuck is Tom Hanks’ daughter doing talking as if she and ‘The Left’ ever had a deal?”–or the other issue of “Why does your father make shitty Romantic comedy movies that turn decent people into anti-American suicide bombers?”–because we’ll get nowhere if we try answering those…anyway, leaving that aside…By framing her disillusionment as a breakup letter, she reduces the political struggle to a kind of frivolous private-school irony for 20-something Heathers, indemnifying her against Gen-X/Y reader suspicions that her break with Obama might mean she’s one of those Lefties who “have a cow.” She’s not–she’s cool and ironic and has a “Scott Brown? Really? You lost to Scott Brown? No, Really?” attitude, just like all the people who read her have.
Keep in mind that this E.A. Hanks “break-up letter” wound up becoming a hugely popular, heavily-e-forwarded article earlier this year among all the Daily Show Democrats, as embarrassment swept across the Liberal egosphere following Scott Brown’s surprise victory in the Senate race. She is the voice of the Rally today.
So now ask–who writes breakup letters? What’s the point of that? If you’re breaking up with a lover whom you just want to get away from, you won’t publish a breakup letter, you just want it to go away. But if you’re breaking up with a lover because s/he humiliated you, or you’re worried somehow how this will affect your reputation among the cool crowd (the obsession of Gen-Xers and –Yers), then you DO write a letter and publish it, so that you make HIM look like the fool, you transfer the mockery and humiliation out of your hurt little feelers and restore your public image as someone who is cool, who is self-aware, who never gets too excited about things but this one time you did and you got burned and that sucks dude….It’s an elaborate Gen-X/Y rhetorical strategy to abandon a movement or a trend that’s in serious danger of making its fans look stupid. And it’s even worse than that—there’s something very 1950s about her peevishness and selfishness, a kind of Ayn Rand cheerleader dumping the QB because he lost the Homecoming game—all the while she waited it out beneath the bleachers to see who’d win, but she’d foolishly placed her bets a bit too early with the new black QB…
What E. A. Hanks didn’t realize–what no one at the Rally today celebrating their coolness realizes– is that this isn’t about cheerleading for the sentimental favorite and getting rewarded for it by some kind of Liberal Hollywood God—she’s supposed to fight a long dreary battle that goes on and on, long after the credits roll. But that’s not what she signed up for: She saw it as Obama escorting her to the Prom after he made all those hard-hearted Randian cheerleaders weep into their pom-poms at how he overcame adversity and realized the American Dream…only it turned out he can’t win the Big Game, he’s got no Red Zone O. I mean, like, where’s my The Blind Side black man? If Christians can have their Blind Side, why can’t we have our Liberal Blind Side too? The idea that Ms Hanks and the Gen-X cheerleaders looking over her shoulder are supposed to help win the game by any means necessary is as far from her petulant thoughts as possible here.
Instead, as the wounded party, what’s first on her mind is making sure she’s the first to dump, the easiest way to restoring her cool credibility:
Which is to say, we’re over. Yep, sorry. We’re through.
It’s not even that I don’t agree with you, because I do, on all the big ones, at least: Teddy Kennedy’s legacy, gays, abortion, endless wars for the profit of private companies, drowning polar bears, the works. I’m not running off to declare nonsense as truth like, “Health Care Will Kill Us All!” or anything like that.
But, you know what? I don’t think you’re good for me. Or for America, for that matter.
Here’s where something much more sinister about what passes for “Liberal” in my generation is revealed: the totally-selfish Ayn Rand activist, the petulant Libertarian protagonist who has a brand manager’s understanding of what it means to be “Liberal” or “Left”. It is this brand manager’s disillusionment with the brand that is fuelling the Jon Stewart rally—by identifying herself so closely with something that turned out to be not nearly as cool as the buzz claimed, she made herself vulnerable, and mockable. Which may seem frivolous to you old folks out there, but for her and for Gen-X/Yers, exposing yourself like that is the equivalent of a decade of marching for Civil Rights and against the war, getting arrested, beaten, jailed, negotiating with authorities, teaching, etc….here is the Gen-X/Y equivalent of “laying it all on the line”:
There was a moment, after the inauguration of Barack Obama as our 44th President (the one you take credit for) when there was an in-coming wave of people singing.
As the noise got closer, those words made famous by Bananarama became clear and rang out, golden over the Mall: “Na Na Na / Na Na Na / Hey Hey Hey / Goodbye!”
Countless people were waving up at the sky, and when I craned my neck back I could see Marine One was taking the previous President away, forever. His time was done.
I started to wave and sing too, but before I could really give it my best, I burst into tears, The Left. You would have been proud.
When I looked up to try to chip off the frozen snot and salt water from my face, I noticed something: the 100 people in my immediate vicinity were also crying.
And I don’t mean quiet, private, attractive tears.
People were sobbing, really going for it. There was more choking and heaving than a seventh grade girl’s bathroom.
I caught an evanescent understanding of the meaning of catharsis.
It’s not a pleasant, tidy emotional process, wherein one gets closure by having neat conversations that make you feel okay-it’s the violent purging of the cancer that’s been pulsating wetly in your guts for eight years.
Now you might be thinking here, “Hey wait a minute, this sounds just like something Meg Ryan would say, straight out of Sleepless in Seattle or You’ve Got Mail!” Except that it’s worse: like so many disillusioned, spurned Daily Show Dems, she’s flustered that it didn’t all turn out the way a movie would—Obama got her all hot ‘n’ wet, and then somehow things got messy and ugly, it didn’t follow a 3-act dramatic plot. It just turned into work, with no credits ever rolling signifying the end, period. Work is supposed to be compressed into a 30-second montage because work is boring and lame—fuck this shit! It’s the purest expression of a profoundly hollow mindset, devoid of ideology, devoid of purpose beyond protecting her brand.
Why couldn’t Obama be more like him?
Hanks’ “break-up letter” wouldn’t matter here if it hadn’t been so popular, and such an early expression of the same mentality fueling the Jon Stewart rally. Somehow, far, far poorer Liberal Elites from the coasts identified with the far richer, privileged Hanks girl because everyone’s stuck in the same rhetorical rules and mindset that were formed in a more prosperous era, when being petulant and frivolous and ironic made a bit more sense, economically speaking. Now we’re fucked, and we’re incapable of adapting to our own desperate, declining circumstances with a more serious rhetorical style that matches our desperation and decline—we’re stuck rolling our eyes like we did in the good ol’ days, but rolling our eyes now is just plain bizarre for everyone but a privileged, selfish crypto-Randroid like Hanks. And not only have we learned to talk and act like celebrities, but we have absorbed the stupidity of their stock plots, in which a happy ending like the Obama Rally stays happy after the credits roll—nothing changes or gets complicated or ugly, it’s just over—over, goddamnit, like in the movies! That’s just not fair, you’re not supposed to cut to a new set of struggles after the happy ending—what kind of movie is that?
So even though we’re jobless and on food stamps, we’re afraid of coming off looking stupid complaining about it–whatever dire situation we’re in, the main thing is not to look stupid when complaining about it. the best way not to look stupid is to blame the guy who made you look stupid:
But I standing [sic] on the National Mall, crying in the arms of that stranger from Georgia, I realized that the anger I had for President Bush gave me was nothing in comparison with the rage I felt for The Left.
The Left.
DailyKos and MoveOn and CodePink and yes, that other one, too. Grand-standing Congresspeople, bandana-ed prostesters and pontificating talking heads.
So much talking! So much feeling! And yet… nothing changed!
Yes, where’s that permanent change! It’s not supposed to be an ongoing struggle—change happens, it’s over, you get up and leave the movie theater. It’s not supposed to be like this! Fuck you, Code Pink!
Like Stewart, she hates on CodePink as much or more as the crazies on the right. That’s been misinterpreted by earnest Lefties as false equivalency–”How can you compare the war crimes and the tens of thousands of deaths caused by one side to shrill protests by CodePink on the other side?” they cry. But you see, that’s not what the Daily Show Democrats are talking about when they equate the two–what makes them equally bad is that they’re equally lame. And siding with either side makes you siding with lameness. That’s worse than any alleged war crime, by my generation’s standards.
You focused so much attention on beating Fox! All of your energy was spent on seeing who could win the spin war, and suddenly we were all shouting “You’re wrong! You’re wrong! You’re wrong!” together, to the point where we were just as hysterical and terrified as the other side! Probably even more!
In other words, “you” started to become effective. Not in the way a petulant Gen-Xer wanted it to be though, because one had to look lame to be effective. One had to be like CodePink–and CodePink isn’t cool. Gen-X/Y didn’t sign up for lame, they signed up for Obama, the sentimental favorite!
And then of course comes the requisite Gen-X self-awareness and self-mockery, preventative-mockery, the most popular rhetorical strategy of my Generation:
And yet here I go, changing everything between us. If I’m being honest, our relationship was all about placating my ego. All of it: the marches, the sit-ins, the phone trees, the whole shebang.
It was about glorifying my personal beliefs, and convincing myself that I was more against the war,more for gay rights, more serious about securing abortion rights, than anyone else.
If you think about it, it was pretty nifty thinking: It’ll look like I’m selflessly placing myself in harm’s way to make a point about how fucked up things are! Then everyone will know how serious I am, how serious I take things. Everyone will be super-impressed.
The only word I can think to describe it is masturbatory. My relationship with The Left was masturbatory.
The only purpose this part of the essay–and it’s the most important part of her argument–is that it serves to bolster what rhetoricians call her “ethos”: She’s establishing herself as self-aware and cool enough to mock herself in-advance, because only lame people or people who take things too seriously or weirdos are incapable of self-mockery. It’s a reverse-helix trick that answers the reader’s inevitable question: “Wait, is she just whining because she got dumped first? Because if she got dumped first, then someone’s a-gonna make fun of her…But no, she must be the one doing the dumping, because she’s showing that she can laugh at herself, and that means she’s not in any sort of emotionally-committed state. She’s not very mockable, which is exactly where I see myself.”
Then comes the ending of her essay, in which she winds up making the exact wrong choice that my generation made when it went “libertarian” as the fake-alternative to Democrat liberalism and Republican conservativism: going it alone.
And that’s why I’m taking this post-Kennedy moment to break up with you, The Left. I don’t want to talk about how I want America to change. I want the inevitable changes that mark American’s great march toward freedom for everyone to be manifested by my individual actions-by everyone’s individual actions.
What’s the point in being a voice in a crowd that’s screaming so loudly that no one has any idea what everyone’s saying? (Even if it’s a crowd I agree with!)
Like a petulant whiner, she wants things to happen without getting her ego dirty. Going it alone is the least-dangerous choice for someone whose politics are driven by vanity, but like the fashionable libertarianism of my generation, the most dangerous choice of all when you consider that politics is all about power struggles over how to order a particular civilization, what to prioritize, how to allocate, and so on. If the ruling class has enormous amounts of money and power and collectivizes in a variety of billionaires’ unions and special interests unions, and your answer is, “I’ll go it alone, at least I won’t look stupid” then you’re just fucking stupid.
It all becomes grotesquely clear with her zinger-conclusion, which equates the Left with “That Lame Guy” whom college wits would always make fun of:
Someone who comes to mind, The Left, is Bob Dylan. (See, I told you we’d still agree on things!)
You know what you’re like? You’re like the people who booed him when he went electric. You’re the pouting kid demanding more “protest songs,” when they’re all protest songs,
And who the hell boos Obam-I mean, Bob Dylan-anyway?
At this point, the Gen-X/Gen-Y stance becomes downright depressing. This is how far we’ve declined: a Gen-Y privileged hipster can’t even muster a zinger from her own era, so she reaches back to some barely-talented rat-cunning jerk from the 60s as her idea of a real cultural hero, if only because he’s managed to avoid being savagely mocked—and then she pulls her zinger from that generation’s “moment,” which was mocked by the next generation, and recycled by her generation…Cultural stagnation is the underlying theme of this whole mess, and that’s what leads back to the Rally to Restore Sanity. America and Liberalism have stagnated and decayed so much that they have to pull their zinger references from 40-year-old put downs that predate E. A. Hanks’ birth. And it still works–because the people who booed Dylan for going electric–their biggest sin is that they “took Dylan too seriously” and made fools of themselves for decades to come. That is her devastating evaluation of how the Obama movie went bad. That’s the lesson–bail out of anything that threatens to make you look lame. The big zinger is borrowed from a hipster put-down so old it predates Ms. Hanks birth—citing an old mockery-favorite like this. But everyone got it. And everyone agreed with her.
You see, this is why so many cool Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers were so jazzed up about going to the Stewart rally–by definition, they were guaranteed not to look stupid by going to it, because it’s not really a rally. They’re not putting anything on the line. They’re just going to chant the equivalent of that annoying Saturday Night Live Update skit “Really?” No generation ever looked so cool so late in their lives as my generation. We did it! We achieved our dream! We don’t look as stupid as the hippies did when they were in their 40s! Woo-hoo! We still mock ourselves and we’re still self-aware, but best of all, we don’t look stupid by devoting ourselves to ideas or movements that other people might one day laugh at. We won! We won the least-stupid-looking-generation competition! Let’s gather together in an ironic, self-aware way, and celebrate how we’re not really rallying or laying anything on the line–not even now, not even when the whole fucking country is collapsing. What’s our prize, Don?
Meanwhile, behind Door Number 1, the country is in two losing wars and the worst economic crisis in 80 years, behind Door Number 2, over 40 million Americans are on fucking food stamps, behind Door Number 3, millions are being land-transfered out of their property like landless peasants in a banana republic–yeah, it’s bad, whatever dude, it’s always been bad, nothing ever changes much, don’t have a cow, deal with it…
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say a few things that might sound stupid, but bear with me:
1. Collective action is the only possible way to change shit. Large numbers of collectivized nobodies rallying to demand what they want–a better cut of the pie, and a better world to live in. It’s the only thing that power-elites fear and the only way to get them to negotiate. There must be thousands of billionaires’ unions—whether the Chamber of Commerce or the gazillions of libertarian networks—and the only thing they hope and dream about and invest their effort into is planting a seed into your vain Gen-X brain that makes you think it’s lame to collectivize. That’s it, that’s the only thing they care about while they’re plundering away. You’ll have to stomach being around people who are lame, and who say lame things, and you’ll feel lame—so you’ll have to decide which is lamer: the fear of being lame, or forming an alliance with people lamer than you in order to struggle against people far meaner, far more greedy and destructive than the lame people you hate—people who have no qualms about being lame when they collectivize, so long as they destroy you and grab everything they want. Tough choice, I know.
2. The problem with the Left wasn’t that they were too fixated on proving they were right, or that they didn’t make enough noise before the war about the lies that led us into that war…the problem is that the Left doesn’t stand for anything Big because it’s not guided by a vision or an Ideal. What does the Left stand for? Let me suggest a few things in people’s own personal interests in these decaying times that the Left should stand for: first, people need money. Then if they have money, they need Life. Then they might be interested in “ideals” set out in the contract that this country is founded on. Ever read the preamble to the Constitution? There’s nothing about private property there and self-interest. Nothing at all about that. It’s a contract whose purpose is clearly spelled out, and it’s a purpose that’s the very opposite of the purpose driving Stewart’s rally, or the purpose driving the libertarian ideology so dominant over the past few generations. This country, by contract, was founded in order to strive for a “more Perfect Union”—that’s “union,” as in the pairing of the words “perfect” and “union”—not sovereign, not states, not local, not selfish, but “union.” And that other purpose at the end of the Constitution’s contractual obligations: promote the “General Welfare.” That means “welfare.” Not “everyone for himself” but “General Welfare.” That’s what it is to be American: to strive to form the most perfect union with each other, and to promote everyone’s general betterment. That’s it. The definition of an American patriot is anyone promoting the General Welfare of every single American, and anyone helping to form the most perfect Union—that’s “union”, repeat, “Union” you dumb fucks. Now, our problem is that there are a lot of people in this country who have dedicated their entire lives to subverting the stated purpose of this country. We must be prepared to identify those who disrupt and sabotage our national purpose of creating this “more perfect union” identifying those who sabotage our national goal of “promoting the General Welfare”—and calling them by their name: traitors. You who strive to form this Perfect Union and promote General Welfare—You are Patriots.
3. Anytime anyone says anything libertarian, spit on them. Libertarians are by definition enemies of the state: they are against promoting American citizens’ general welfare and against policies that create a perfect union. Like Communists before them, they are actively subverting the Constitution and the American Dream, and replacing it with a Kleptocratic Nightmare.
4. A slogan, a line from Blade Runner: “Then we’re stupid, and we’ll die.”
Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.
October 30, 2010
THE RALLY TO RESTORE VANITY: GENERATION X CELEBRATES ITS HOMERIC STRUGGLE AGAINST LAMENESS
By Mark Ames
Maybe what’s happening in America today will seem funny to some other culture in some future time—how it happened that in the depths of America’s decline, Liberals, the great opposition to everything mean and ruthless in this culture, couldn’t muster up a get-together for anything better than a mock-in. Led by a clown.
I confess, I couldn’t hack it. I came to the rally–saw those two pastry chefs from the Mythbusters show get all the Liberal Elites to hold a post-modern human wave, an ironic human wave allowing all the self-conscious Liberal Elites to play like Real America, while salvaging their vanity because it was all ironic and post-modern… And to make sure that everyone knew they were not really human-waving but rather meta-human-waving, the Mythbusters duo deconstructed the human wave. And all the Liberal Elites smiled and laughed knowingly, because all 150,000 were in on the biggest inside-joke wankathon in American history. And that was it for me–I was outta there.
A century-old ideological movement, Liberalism: once devoted to impossible causes like ending racism and inequality, empowering the powerless, fighting against militarism, and all that silly hippie shit—now it’s been reduced to besting the other side at one-liners…and to the Liberals’ credit, they’re clearly on top. Sure there are a lot of problems out there, a lot of pressing needs—but the main thing is, the Liberals don’t look nearly as stupid as the other guys do. And if you don’t know how important that is to this generation, then you won’t understand what’s so wrong and so deeply depressing about the Jon Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity.
That’s what makes this rally so depressing and grotesque: It’s an anti-rally, a kind of mass concession speech without the speech–some kind of sick funeral party for Liberalism, in which Liberals are led, at last, by a clown. Not a figurative clown, but by a clown–and Liberals are sure that this somehow makes them smarter and less lame–and indeed, they are less lame, because they are not taking themselves too seriously, which is something they’re very, very proud of. All great political struggles and ideological advances, all great human rights achievements were won by clown-led crowds of people who don’t take themselves too seriously, duh! That’s why they’re following a clown like Stewart, whose entire political program comes down to this: not being stupid, the way the other guys are stupid–or when being stupid, only stupid in a self-consciously stupid way, which is to say, not stupid. That’s it, that’s all this is about: Not to protest wars or oligarchical theft or declining health care or crushing debt or a corrupt political system or imperial decay—nope, the only thing that motivates Liberals to gather in the their thousands is the chance to celebrate their own lack of stupidity! Woo-hoo!
It’s the final humiliating undoing of Enlightenment Idealism that made Liberalism possible–imagine if Jefferson, Diderot, Montesquieu, Madison et al reduced the entire Enlightenment’s struggle against the old feudal order to “I’m against the monarchy because the monarchy’s stupid…but then again, Rousseau makes a fool of himself with his Romanticism, and Tom Paine is so serious with his ‘Rights of Man’, the Revolutionaries are just as crazy as the Monarchists, so rather than join either side and risk opening myself to mockery, I’m just going to stand back and laugh at them all and say, ‘Really? Independence? Everyone is created equal and has the right to pursue happiness? Really, TJ? You sure you want to say that about Bluebeard? Really?” [LAUGH TRACK]…
It’s not Stewart’s or Colbert’s fault, let’s be clear on that—they’re the only ones doing their job here. They’re the only ones fighting this battle, and the only way they’re surviving is by elaborately pretending they’re not really fighting anyone’s battle over anything, they’re just having a laugh—it’s the same rationale that jesters used in medieval times, and Stewart and Colbert play the same role as the jesters did then…and we’re also playing our role as powerless peasants reduced to self-mockery and snickering at our Masters behind their backs. It’s not their fault that Liberalism today has as its highest priority not looking stupid—and that its premiere rally is framed in such a way that everyone who came to this rally is somehow indemnified from looking foolish precisely because it’s not really a political rally, it’s more like a mockery of a political rally—in a self-consciously smart sort of way. And the Daily Show Democrats who gathered celebrated themselves for this amazing achievement: that they didn’t make fools of themselves standing for something that some other guys could then use to mock them. That’s the biggest sin of the other side, the Tea Partiers especially, at least as the Daily Show fans see it: they look silly, and worse, they’re not shamed into suicide from looking silly, the way Liberals would be shamed into OD’ing on Ambien if they opened themselves up to that sort of mockery.
It was this same lack of ironic self-awareness (or rather, this absence of any sort of mockery-avoidance technology) that led my generation to pillory the hippies and progressives–that’s why we were South Park Republicans before we were Daily Show Democrats: because back then, standing for liberal values meant something, and that made you look lame. Only now, when Liberal ideals have vanished into mythology and all they stand for is “not as crazy or stupid as Republicans” is it safe to camp out with the Democrats. They put nothing on the line ideologically, which perfectly jibes with this generation’s highest value. And that makes it perfectly safe to go to something like a large political rally like Stewart’s—you side with a hollow movement stripped of ideology or purpose, and then you gather to celebrate your own hollowness at a rally whose one promise is “You won’t open yourself up to mockery if you attend this rally” and whose goal is to show how not-stupid “we” are compared to the mockable activists on both the right and the left–the Beckites and the Code Pinkers.
I’ve come to the conclusion that this has been the Great Dream of my generation: to position ourselves in such a way that we’re beyond mockery. To not look stupid. That’s the biggest crime of all–looking stupid. That’s why they’ve turned Stewart into a demigod, because he knows how to make the other guys look really stupid, and if you’re on the same team as Stewart, you’re on the safe side of the mockery, rather than dangerously vulnerable to mockery.
In fact, I think this is why so many Gen-X/Yers turned against Obama: because he made them look stupid. They made themselves vulnerable to looking stupid by believing in him–and he jilted them. That’s how they see it–not that politics is a long ugly process that has nothing to do with self-esteem and everything to do with money and brawling–it was more like an “indie” consumer choice: They bought into the Obama brand, wore it, and suddenly discovered that the label wasn’t as cool as it seemed at the time, especially after the sentimental high of electing a half-black president wore off to the hard slog of what came after… so they threw the Obama jeans away and went to work trying to salvage their coolness creds for having made that fashion mistake. It’s captured best in this Awl essay by Tom Hanks’ daughter–E. A. Hanks, of all people: “Dear The Left: A Breakup Letter” which begins with her reaction to the special Senate election that Scott Brown won:
Dear The Left,
It’s interesting that you couldn’t keep Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat. I’m taking it for granted that you understand that I don’t mean “interesting” at all, but rather “detestable.”
So little Miss Hanks is not joking in her title for the essay–it really is written like a breakup letter. Leaving aside for now the question of “What the fuck is Tom Hanks’ daughter doing talking as if she and ‘The Left’ ever had a deal?”–or the other issue of “Why does your father make shitty Romantic comedy movies that turn decent people into anti-American suicide bombers?”–because we’ll get nowhere if we try answering those…anyway, leaving that aside…By framing her disillusionment as a breakup letter, she reduces the political struggle to a kind of frivolous private-school irony for 20-something Heathers, indemnifying her against Gen-X/Y reader suspicions that her break with Obama might mean she’s one of those Lefties who “have a cow.” She’s not–she’s cool and ironic and has a “Scott Brown? Really? You lost to Scott Brown? No, Really?” attitude, just like all the people who read her have.
Keep in mind that this E.A. Hanks “break-up letter” wound up becoming a hugely popular, heavily-e-forwarded article earlier this year among all the Daily Show Democrats, as embarrassment swept across the Liberal egosphere following Scott Brown’s surprise victory in the Senate race. She is the voice of the Rally today.
So now ask–who writes breakup letters? What’s the point of that? If you’re breaking up with a lover whom you just want to get away from, you won’t publish a breakup letter, you just want it to go away. But if you’re breaking up with a lover because s/he humiliated you, or you’re worried somehow how this will affect your reputation among the cool crowd (the obsession of Gen-Xers and –Yers), then you DO write a letter and publish it, so that you make HIM look like the fool, you transfer the mockery and humiliation out of your hurt little feelers and restore your public image as someone who is cool, who is self-aware, who never gets too excited about things but this one time you did and you got burned and that sucks dude….It’s an elaborate Gen-X/Y rhetorical strategy to abandon a movement or a trend that’s in serious danger of making its fans look stupid. And it’s even worse than that—there’s something very 1950s about her peevishness and selfishness, a kind of Ayn Rand cheerleader dumping the QB because he lost the Homecoming game—all the while she waited it out beneath the bleachers to see who’d win, but she’d foolishly placed her bets a bit too early with the new black QB…
What E. A. Hanks didn’t realize–what no one at the Rally today celebrating their coolness realizes– is that this isn’t about cheerleading for the sentimental favorite and getting rewarded for it by some kind of Liberal Hollywood God—she’s supposed to fight a long dreary battle that goes on and on, long after the credits roll. But that’s not what she signed up for: She saw it as Obama escorting her to the Prom after he made all those hard-hearted Randian cheerleaders weep into their pom-poms at how he overcame adversity and realized the American Dream…only it turned out he can’t win the Big Game, he’s got no Red Zone O. I mean, like, where’s my The Blind Side black man? If Christians can have their Blind Side, why can’t we have our Liberal Blind Side too? The idea that Ms Hanks and the Gen-X cheerleaders looking over her shoulder are supposed to help win the game by any means necessary is as far from her petulant thoughts as possible here.
Instead, as the wounded party, what’s first on her mind is making sure she’s the first to dump, the easiest way to restoring her cool credibility:
Which is to say, we’re over. Yep, sorry. We’re through.
It’s not even that I don’t agree with you, because I do, on all the big ones, at least: Teddy Kennedy’s legacy, gays, abortion, endless wars for the profit of private companies, drowning polar bears, the works. I’m not running off to declare nonsense as truth like, “Health Care Will Kill Us All!” or anything like that.
But, you know what? I don’t think you’re good for me. Or for America, for that matter.
Here’s where something much more sinister about what passes for “Liberal” in my generation is revealed: the totally-selfish Ayn Rand activist, the petulant Libertarian protagonist who has a brand manager’s understanding of what it means to be “Liberal” or “Left”. It is this brand manager’s disillusionment with the brand that is fuelling the Jon Stewart rally—by identifying herself so closely with something that turned out to be not nearly as cool as the buzz claimed, she made herself vulnerable, and mockable. Which may seem frivolous to you old folks out there, but for her and for Gen-X/Yers, exposing yourself like that is the equivalent of a decade of marching for Civil Rights and against the war, getting arrested, beaten, jailed, negotiating with authorities, teaching, etc….here is the Gen-X/Y equivalent of “laying it all on the line”:
There was a moment, after the inauguration of Barack Obama as our 44th President (the one you take credit for) when there was an in-coming wave of people singing.
As the noise got closer, those words made famous by Bananarama became clear and rang out, golden over the Mall: “Na Na Na / Na Na Na / Hey Hey Hey / Goodbye!”
Countless people were waving up at the sky, and when I craned my neck back I could see Marine One was taking the previous President away, forever. His time was done.
I started to wave and sing too, but before I could really give it my best, I burst into tears, The Left. You would have been proud.
When I looked up to try to chip off the frozen snot and salt water from my face, I noticed something: the 100 people in my immediate vicinity were also crying.
And I don’t mean quiet, private, attractive tears.
People were sobbing, really going for it. There was more choking and heaving than a seventh grade girl’s bathroom.
I caught an evanescent understanding of the meaning of catharsis.
It’s not a pleasant, tidy emotional process, wherein one gets closure by having neat conversations that make you feel okay-it’s the violent purging of the cancer that’s been pulsating wetly in your guts for eight years.
Now you might be thinking here, “Hey wait a minute, this sounds just like something Meg Ryan would say, straight out of Sleepless in Seattle or You’ve Got Mail!” Except that it’s worse: like so many disillusioned, spurned Daily Show Dems, she’s flustered that it didn’t all turn out the way a movie would—Obama got her all hot ‘n’ wet, and then somehow things got messy and ugly, it didn’t follow a 3-act dramatic plot. It just turned into work, with no credits ever rolling signifying the end, period. Work is supposed to be compressed into a 30-second montage because work is boring and lame—fuck this shit! It’s the purest expression of a profoundly hollow mindset, devoid of ideology, devoid of purpose beyond protecting her brand.
Why couldn’t Obama be more like him?
Hanks’ “break-up letter” wouldn’t matter here if it hadn’t been so popular, and such an early expression of the same mentality fueling the Jon Stewart rally. Somehow, far, far poorer Liberal Elites from the coasts identified with the far richer, privileged Hanks girl because everyone’s stuck in the same rhetorical rules and mindset that were formed in a more prosperous era, when being petulant and frivolous and ironic made a bit more sense, economically speaking. Now we’re fucked, and we’re incapable of adapting to our own desperate, declining circumstances with a more serious rhetorical style that matches our desperation and decline—we’re stuck rolling our eyes like we did in the good ol’ days, but rolling our eyes now is just plain bizarre for everyone but a privileged, selfish crypto-Randroid like Hanks. And not only have we learned to talk and act like celebrities, but we have absorbed the stupidity of their stock plots, in which a happy ending like the Obama Rally stays happy after the credits roll—nothing changes or gets complicated or ugly, it’s just over—over, goddamnit, like in the movies! That’s just not fair, you’re not supposed to cut to a new set of struggles after the happy ending—what kind of movie is that?
So even though we’re jobless and on food stamps, we’re afraid of coming off looking stupid complaining about it–whatever dire situation we’re in, the main thing is not to look stupid when complaining about it. the best way not to look stupid is to blame the guy who made you look stupid:
But I standing [sic] on the National Mall, crying in the arms of that stranger from Georgia, I realized that the anger I had for President Bush gave me was nothing in comparison with the rage I felt for The Left.
The Left.
DailyKos and MoveOn and CodePink and yes, that other one, too. Grand-standing Congresspeople, bandana-ed prostesters and pontificating talking heads.
So much talking! So much feeling! And yet… nothing changed!
Yes, where’s that permanent change! It’s not supposed to be an ongoing struggle—change happens, it’s over, you get up and leave the movie theater. It’s not supposed to be like this! Fuck you, Code Pink!
Like Stewart, she hates on CodePink as much or more as the crazies on the right. That’s been misinterpreted by earnest Lefties as false equivalency–”How can you compare the war crimes and the tens of thousands of deaths caused by one side to shrill protests by CodePink on the other side?” they cry. But you see, that’s not what the Daily Show Democrats are talking about when they equate the two–what makes them equally bad is that they’re equally lame. And siding with either side makes you siding with lameness. That’s worse than any alleged war crime, by my generation’s standards.
You focused so much attention on beating Fox! All of your energy was spent on seeing who could win the spin war, and suddenly we were all shouting “You’re wrong! You’re wrong! You’re wrong!” together, to the point where we were just as hysterical and terrified as the other side! Probably even more!
In other words, “you” started to become effective. Not in the way a petulant Gen-Xer wanted it to be though, because one had to look lame to be effective. One had to be like CodePink–and CodePink isn’t cool. Gen-X/Y didn’t sign up for lame, they signed up for Obama, the sentimental favorite!
And then of course comes the requisite Gen-X self-awareness and self-mockery, preventative-mockery, the most popular rhetorical strategy of my Generation:
And yet here I go, changing everything between us. If I’m being honest, our relationship was all about placating my ego. All of it: the marches, the sit-ins, the phone trees, the whole shebang.
It was about glorifying my personal beliefs, and convincing myself that I was more against the war,more for gay rights, more serious about securing abortion rights, than anyone else.
If you think about it, it was pretty nifty thinking: It’ll look like I’m selflessly placing myself in harm’s way to make a point about how fucked up things are! Then everyone will know how serious I am, how serious I take things. Everyone will be super-impressed.
The only word I can think to describe it is masturbatory. My relationship with The Left was masturbatory.
The only purpose this part of the essay–and it’s the most important part of her argument–is that it serves to bolster what rhetoricians call her “ethos”: She’s establishing herself as self-aware and cool enough to mock herself in-advance, because only lame people or people who take things too seriously or weirdos are incapable of self-mockery. It’s a reverse-helix trick that answers the reader’s inevitable question: “Wait, is she just whining because she got dumped first? Because if she got dumped first, then someone’s a-gonna make fun of her…But no, she must be the one doing the dumping, because she’s showing that she can laugh at herself, and that means she’s not in any sort of emotionally-committed state. She’s not very mockable, which is exactly where I see myself.”
Then comes the ending of her essay, in which she winds up making the exact wrong choice that my generation made when it went “libertarian” as the fake-alternative to Democrat liberalism and Republican conservativism: going it alone.
And that’s why I’m taking this post-Kennedy moment to break up with you, The Left. I don’t want to talk about how I want America to change. I want the inevitable changes that mark American’s great march toward freedom for everyone to be manifested by my individual actions-by everyone’s individual actions.
What’s the point in being a voice in a crowd that’s screaming so loudly that no one has any idea what everyone’s saying? (Even if it’s a crowd I agree with!)
Like a petulant whiner, she wants things to happen without getting her ego dirty. Going it alone is the least-dangerous choice for someone whose politics are driven by vanity, but like the fashionable libertarianism of my generation, the most dangerous choice of all when you consider that politics is all about power struggles over how to order a particular civilization, what to prioritize, how to allocate, and so on. If the ruling class has enormous amounts of money and power and collectivizes in a variety of billionaires’ unions and special interests unions, and your answer is, “I’ll go it alone, at least I won’t look stupid” then you’re just fucking stupid.
It all becomes grotesquely clear with her zinger-conclusion, which equates the Left with “That Lame Guy” whom college wits would always make fun of:
Someone who comes to mind, The Left, is Bob Dylan. (See, I told you we’d still agree on things!)
You know what you’re like? You’re like the people who booed him when he went electric. You’re the pouting kid demanding more “protest songs,” when they’re all protest songs,
And who the hell boos Obam-I mean, Bob Dylan-anyway?
At this point, the Gen-X/Gen-Y stance becomes downright depressing. This is how far we’ve declined: a Gen-Y privileged hipster can’t even muster a zinger from her own era, so she reaches back to some barely-talented rat-cunning jerk from the 60s as her idea of a real cultural hero, if only because he’s managed to avoid being savagely mocked—and then she pulls her zinger from that generation’s “moment,” which was mocked by the next generation, and recycled by her generation…Cultural stagnation is the underlying theme of this whole mess, and that’s what leads back to the Rally to Restore Sanity. America and Liberalism have stagnated and decayed so much that they have to pull their zinger references from 40-year-old put downs that predate E. A. Hanks’ birth. And it still works–because the people who booed Dylan for going electric–their biggest sin is that they “took Dylan too seriously” and made fools of themselves for decades to come. That is her devastating evaluation of how the Obama movie went bad. That’s the lesson–bail out of anything that threatens to make you look lame. The big zinger is borrowed from a hipster put-down so old it predates Ms. Hanks birth—citing an old mockery-favorite like this. But everyone got it. And everyone agreed with her.
You see, this is why so many cool Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers were so jazzed up about going to the Stewart rally–by definition, they were guaranteed not to look stupid by going to it, because it’s not really a rally. They’re not putting anything on the line. They’re just going to chant the equivalent of that annoying Saturday Night Live Update skit “Really?” No generation ever looked so cool so late in their lives as my generation. We did it! We achieved our dream! We don’t look as stupid as the hippies did when they were in their 40s! Woo-hoo! We still mock ourselves and we’re still self-aware, but best of all, we don’t look stupid by devoting ourselves to ideas or movements that other people might one day laugh at. We won! We won the least-stupid-looking-generation competition! Let’s gather together in an ironic, self-aware way, and celebrate how we’re not really rallying or laying anything on the line–not even now, not even when the whole fucking country is collapsing. What’s our prize, Don?
Meanwhile, behind Door Number 1, the country is in two losing wars and the worst economic crisis in 80 years, behind Door Number 2, over 40 million Americans are on fucking food stamps, behind Door Number 3, millions are being land-transfered out of their property like landless peasants in a banana republic–yeah, it’s bad, whatever dude, it’s always been bad, nothing ever changes much, don’t have a cow, deal with it…
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say a few things that might sound stupid, but bear with me:
1. Collective action is the only possible way to change shit. Large numbers of collectivized nobodies rallying to demand what they want–a better cut of the pie, and a better world to live in. It’s the only thing that power-elites fear and the only way to get them to negotiate. There must be thousands of billionaires’ unions—whether the Chamber of Commerce or the gazillions of libertarian networks—and the only thing they hope and dream about and invest their effort into is planting a seed into your vain Gen-X brain that makes you think it’s lame to collectivize. That’s it, that’s the only thing they care about while they’re plundering away. You’ll have to stomach being around people who are lame, and who say lame things, and you’ll feel lame—so you’ll have to decide which is lamer: the fear of being lame, or forming an alliance with people lamer than you in order to struggle against people far meaner, far more greedy and destructive than the lame people you hate—people who have no qualms about being lame when they collectivize, so long as they destroy you and grab everything they want. Tough choice, I know.
2. The problem with the Left wasn’t that they were too fixated on proving they were right, or that they didn’t make enough noise before the war about the lies that led us into that war…the problem is that the Left doesn’t stand for anything Big because it’s not guided by a vision or an Ideal. What does the Left stand for? Let me suggest a few things in people’s own personal interests in these decaying times that the Left should stand for: first, people need money. Then if they have money, they need Life. Then they might be interested in “ideals” set out in the contract that this country is founded on. Ever read the preamble to the Constitution? There’s nothing about private property there and self-interest. Nothing at all about that. It’s a contract whose purpose is clearly spelled out, and it’s a purpose that’s the very opposite of the purpose driving Stewart’s rally, or the purpose driving the libertarian ideology so dominant over the past few generations. This country, by contract, was founded in order to strive for a “more Perfect Union”—that’s “union,” as in the pairing of the words “perfect” and “union”—not sovereign, not states, not local, not selfish, but “union.” And that other purpose at the end of the Constitution’s contractual obligations: promote the “General Welfare.” That means “welfare.” Not “everyone for himself” but “General Welfare.” That’s what it is to be American: to strive to form the most perfect union with each other, and to promote everyone’s general betterment. That’s it. The definition of an American patriot is anyone promoting the General Welfare of every single American, and anyone helping to form the most perfect Union—that’s “union”, repeat, “Union” you dumb fucks. Now, our problem is that there are a lot of people in this country who have dedicated their entire lives to subverting the stated purpose of this country. We must be prepared to identify those who disrupt and sabotage our national purpose of creating this “more perfect union” identifying those who sabotage our national goal of “promoting the General Welfare”—and calling them by their name: traitors. You who strive to form this Perfect Union and promote General Welfare—You are Patriots.
3. Anytime anyone says anything libertarian, spit on them. Libertarians are by definition enemies of the state: they are against promoting American citizens’ general welfare and against policies that create a perfect union. Like Communists before them, they are actively subverting the Constitution and the American Dream, and replacing it with a Kleptocratic Nightmare.
4. A slogan, a line from Blade Runner: “Then we’re stupid, and we’ll die.”
Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.
Friday, October 1, 2010
Colbert's through-the-looking-glass moment in Congress
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/tv/la-na-immigrants-colbert-20100925,0,898110.story
Colbert's through-the-looking-glass moment in Congress
Taking political satire to a new dimension, the comedian testifies before a House subcommittee in character as a right-wing commentator. The topic: migrant farm workers' rights.
Matea Gold, Tribune Washington Bureau
September 25, 2010
Reporting from Washington —
At 9:37 a.m. Friday, a man in a navy suit bounded into a packed committee room in the Rayburn House office building wearing the wide grin of a politician. Surrounded by a scrum of clicking photographers, he marched over to the witness table, plunked himself down on a leather chair and smoothed back his hair.
Stephen Colbert, cable TV political satirist-cum-political activist, was ready to testify.
"I certainly hope that my star power can bump this hearing all the way up to C-SPAN 1," he said.
Not quite. Colbert's role as a witness on migrant farm labor before a House Judiciary subcommittee only rated C-SPAN 3. But his appearance in character as a bloviating right-wing talk show host quickly made the rounds on the internet, and marked a permutation of the brand of humor that he and fellow Comedy Central host Jon Stewart have honed. No longer content with parodying politicians, they are extending the joke into the very halls of government that they mock.
The two comedians have built large followings, especially among liberals. They will step further into the arena they satirize on Oct. 30, when they hold twin rallies on the National Mall. Stewart bills his as a "Rally to Restore Sanity" to political discourse, while Colbert counters with a "March to Keep Fear Alive." Both events are intended as send-ups of a rally led Fox News commentator by Glenn Beck last month. But for participants and viewers, the line between joke and advocacy appears to be getting thinner.
Friday's subcommittee meeting was a through-the-looking-glass moment for Colbert. The two-hour hearing resembled a surreal version of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," if Mr. Smith were a comedian playing a bombastic TV commentator fielding thorny questions about immigration reform from members of Congress.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose), the subcommittee chairwoman, had asked Colbert to testify after they spent a day together picking beans and packing corn as part of the United Farm Workers' Take Our Jobs campaign, which invites Americans to try their hand at field work. The comedian turned it into a bit that aired on "The Colbert Report" earlier this week.
"His actions are a good example of how using both levity and fame, a media figure can bring attention to a critically important issue for the good of the nation," Lofgren said as she opened the hearing into a bill that would legalize undocumented field workers.
When it came time for his testimony, Colbert offered to submit a video of his colonoscopy into the congressional record as evidence that produce is "a necessary source of roughage."
As for the labor pool, "this is America," the comedian said. "I don't want a tomato picked by a Mexican. I want it picked by an American, then sliced by a Guatemalan and served by a Venezuelan in a spa where a Chilean gives me a Brazilian. Because my great-grandfather did not travel across 4,000 miles of the Atlantic Ocean to see this country overrun by immigrants."
Still, "after working with these men and women picking beans, packing corn for hours on end, side by side in the unforgiving sun, I have to say — and I do mean this sincerely — please don't make me do this again," Colbert added. "It is really, really hard."
"Maybe this ag jobs bill would help," he concluded. "I don't know. Like most members of Congress, I haven't read it."
Irritated Republicans spent much of the hearing trying to disarm Colbert with a combination of jokes and pointed questions.
"Does one day working in the field make you an expert witness, do you think?" Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) asked scornfully.
"I believe one day of me studying anything makes me an expert on something," Colbert replied confidently.
"Is that to say it's more work than you've ever done before, right?" Smith followed.
"It's certainly harder work than this," the comedian deadpanned.
For all the jokes, however, it appeared Colbert was there for more than comedy. When asked by Rep. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park) why he was interested in farm workers, the comedian suddenly turned serious.
"I like talking about people who don't have any power," he said. "And it just seems like one of the least powerful people in the United States are migrant workers who come and do our work but don't have any rights as a result. And yet we still invite them to come here, and at the same time ask them to leave."
Colbert, a practicing Catholic who occasionally teaches Sunday school, quoted the biblical passage about helping "the least of my brothers," adding: "Migrant workers suffer and have no rights."
matea.gold@latimes.com
Colbert's through-the-looking-glass moment in Congress
Taking political satire to a new dimension, the comedian testifies before a House subcommittee in character as a right-wing commentator. The topic: migrant farm workers' rights.
Matea Gold, Tribune Washington Bureau
September 25, 2010
Reporting from Washington —
At 9:37 a.m. Friday, a man in a navy suit bounded into a packed committee room in the Rayburn House office building wearing the wide grin of a politician. Surrounded by a scrum of clicking photographers, he marched over to the witness table, plunked himself down on a leather chair and smoothed back his hair.
Stephen Colbert, cable TV political satirist-cum-political activist, was ready to testify.
"I certainly hope that my star power can bump this hearing all the way up to C-SPAN 1," he said.
Not quite. Colbert's role as a witness on migrant farm labor before a House Judiciary subcommittee only rated C-SPAN 3. But his appearance in character as a bloviating right-wing talk show host quickly made the rounds on the internet, and marked a permutation of the brand of humor that he and fellow Comedy Central host Jon Stewart have honed. No longer content with parodying politicians, they are extending the joke into the very halls of government that they mock.
The two comedians have built large followings, especially among liberals. They will step further into the arena they satirize on Oct. 30, when they hold twin rallies on the National Mall. Stewart bills his as a "Rally to Restore Sanity" to political discourse, while Colbert counters with a "March to Keep Fear Alive." Both events are intended as send-ups of a rally led Fox News commentator by Glenn Beck last month. But for participants and viewers, the line between joke and advocacy appears to be getting thinner.
Friday's subcommittee meeting was a through-the-looking-glass moment for Colbert. The two-hour hearing resembled a surreal version of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," if Mr. Smith were a comedian playing a bombastic TV commentator fielding thorny questions about immigration reform from members of Congress.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose), the subcommittee chairwoman, had asked Colbert to testify after they spent a day together picking beans and packing corn as part of the United Farm Workers' Take Our Jobs campaign, which invites Americans to try their hand at field work. The comedian turned it into a bit that aired on "The Colbert Report" earlier this week.
"His actions are a good example of how using both levity and fame, a media figure can bring attention to a critically important issue for the good of the nation," Lofgren said as she opened the hearing into a bill that would legalize undocumented field workers.
When it came time for his testimony, Colbert offered to submit a video of his colonoscopy into the congressional record as evidence that produce is "a necessary source of roughage."
As for the labor pool, "this is America," the comedian said. "I don't want a tomato picked by a Mexican. I want it picked by an American, then sliced by a Guatemalan and served by a Venezuelan in a spa where a Chilean gives me a Brazilian. Because my great-grandfather did not travel across 4,000 miles of the Atlantic Ocean to see this country overrun by immigrants."
Still, "after working with these men and women picking beans, packing corn for hours on end, side by side in the unforgiving sun, I have to say — and I do mean this sincerely — please don't make me do this again," Colbert added. "It is really, really hard."
"Maybe this ag jobs bill would help," he concluded. "I don't know. Like most members of Congress, I haven't read it."
Irritated Republicans spent much of the hearing trying to disarm Colbert with a combination of jokes and pointed questions.
"Does one day working in the field make you an expert witness, do you think?" Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) asked scornfully.
"I believe one day of me studying anything makes me an expert on something," Colbert replied confidently.
"Is that to say it's more work than you've ever done before, right?" Smith followed.
"It's certainly harder work than this," the comedian deadpanned.
For all the jokes, however, it appeared Colbert was there for more than comedy. When asked by Rep. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park) why he was interested in farm workers, the comedian suddenly turned serious.
"I like talking about people who don't have any power," he said. "And it just seems like one of the least powerful people in the United States are migrant workers who come and do our work but don't have any rights as a result. And yet we still invite them to come here, and at the same time ask them to leave."
Colbert, a practicing Catholic who occasionally teaches Sunday school, quoted the biblical passage about helping "the least of my brothers," adding: "Migrant workers suffer and have no rights."
matea.gold@latimes.com
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Lowest Rated Oscars. Ever.
http://www.eonline.com/news/article/index.jsp?uuid=63999149-9c68-40dd-9867-b8dfdc0d5d01
Lowest Rated Oscars. Ever.
By Joal Ryan
The Oscars made history Sunday night. But not the good kind.
The three-hour-plus ABC telecast averaged 32 million viewers, the smallest crowd on record—ever, per Nielsen Media Research estimates.
The show "topped" the 2003 ceremony, which, with 33 million viewers, was Oscar's previous low.
Even worse, if possible, the show was a shadow of its 2007 self, shedding more than 8 million viewers, or one-fifth of its audience, from last year to this. Even in an age where everything is the lowest rated something ever, that's a significant blood loss.
Oscar's main trouble seemed to be female trouble: Based on ratings of the show's prime-time hours, it struck out with the chicks.
Last year, with host Ellen DeGeneres at the helm, the Oscars was up across the board with women viewers.
This year, with male Jon Stewart dealing, the show looked to be down, a lot, in all the major female demographics.
The show's disconnect with its target audience might have stemmed not so much from Stewart, who generally won good reviews, but from the top nominees, a pack of films with nary a female touch, led by Best Picture winner No Country for Old Men, that Stewart himself jokingly described as "psychopathic killer movies."
Another ratings challenge cropped up when Hollywood's biggest night turned into another continent's crowning glory.
For the first time since the 1965 Oscar ceremony, all four acting awards went to residents of Europe. Perhaps not surprisingly, the '65 show, honoring the international likes of Zorba the Greek, suffered the ceremony's third smallest audience share of the 1960s.
For whatever reason, this year's Oscars repelled viewers as it went on. What began as a show that averaged 32.3 million viewers in its first half-hour, devolved into a show that averaged 25.4 million in its final half-hour of prime time.
Stewart, who previously presided over the 2006 Oscars, now goes down as the host of two of the three lowest rated Academy Awards in TV history. And in defense of Steve Martin, who hosted the 2003 misfire, that ceremony competed for attention with the start of the Iraq War. Stewart, thusly, stands alone as the lowest-rated host of relatively peaceful Oscar nights.
ABC did its best to turn its frown upside down, noting that Sunday's telecast was far bigger than the rest of this year's crop of low-rated award shows, including NBC's Golden Globes debacle.
The network said the show rated highest in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, West Palm Beach, Florida, and Oscar's hometown of Los Angeles.
Stewart's notices were another bright spot. From Britain (the BBC called him "sparkling") to Los Angeles (the L.A. Times found the comic "cool and loose"), and back to Missouri ("Second time's the charm for Stewart," headlined the Kansas City Star), Stewart won over critics.
Unlike the show.
The telecast, both a celebration of the ceremony's 80th anniversary and, as the Hollywood Reporter pointed out, a reminder that Stewart's writing staff was only recently back from the picket lines, was dinged for being clip-heavy.
"This wasn't an Oscars," wrote Deadline Hollywood's Nikki Finke. "This was a slightly longer version of the Golden Globes announcement."
The Washington Post's Tom Shales said the show went "clip-clip-clipping along." "This is not a good thing," he decided.
Shales chided the telecast for waiting to get to the acting categories, and for waiting to present presenter Miley Cyrus until the unfriendly kid hour of nearly 10 p.m. ET.
Riffing on Oscar's birthday, Time's Richard Corliss said the ceremony "had the tone and pace suitable to an octogenarian's temper."
(Originally published Feb. 25, 2008)
Lowest Rated Oscars. Ever.
By Joal Ryan
The Oscars made history Sunday night. But not the good kind.
The three-hour-plus ABC telecast averaged 32 million viewers, the smallest crowd on record—ever, per Nielsen Media Research estimates.
The show "topped" the 2003 ceremony, which, with 33 million viewers, was Oscar's previous low.
Even worse, if possible, the show was a shadow of its 2007 self, shedding more than 8 million viewers, or one-fifth of its audience, from last year to this. Even in an age where everything is the lowest rated something ever, that's a significant blood loss.
Oscar's main trouble seemed to be female trouble: Based on ratings of the show's prime-time hours, it struck out with the chicks.
Last year, with host Ellen DeGeneres at the helm, the Oscars was up across the board with women viewers.
This year, with male Jon Stewart dealing, the show looked to be down, a lot, in all the major female demographics.
The show's disconnect with its target audience might have stemmed not so much from Stewart, who generally won good reviews, but from the top nominees, a pack of films with nary a female touch, led by Best Picture winner No Country for Old Men, that Stewart himself jokingly described as "psychopathic killer movies."
Another ratings challenge cropped up when Hollywood's biggest night turned into another continent's crowning glory.
For the first time since the 1965 Oscar ceremony, all four acting awards went to residents of Europe. Perhaps not surprisingly, the '65 show, honoring the international likes of Zorba the Greek, suffered the ceremony's third smallest audience share of the 1960s.
For whatever reason, this year's Oscars repelled viewers as it went on. What began as a show that averaged 32.3 million viewers in its first half-hour, devolved into a show that averaged 25.4 million in its final half-hour of prime time.
Stewart, who previously presided over the 2006 Oscars, now goes down as the host of two of the three lowest rated Academy Awards in TV history. And in defense of Steve Martin, who hosted the 2003 misfire, that ceremony competed for attention with the start of the Iraq War. Stewart, thusly, stands alone as the lowest-rated host of relatively peaceful Oscar nights.
ABC did its best to turn its frown upside down, noting that Sunday's telecast was far bigger than the rest of this year's crop of low-rated award shows, including NBC's Golden Globes debacle.
The network said the show rated highest in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, West Palm Beach, Florida, and Oscar's hometown of Los Angeles.
Stewart's notices were another bright spot. From Britain (the BBC called him "sparkling") to Los Angeles (the L.A. Times found the comic "cool and loose"), and back to Missouri ("Second time's the charm for Stewart," headlined the Kansas City Star), Stewart won over critics.
Unlike the show.
The telecast, both a celebration of the ceremony's 80th anniversary and, as the Hollywood Reporter pointed out, a reminder that Stewart's writing staff was only recently back from the picket lines, was dinged for being clip-heavy.
"This wasn't an Oscars," wrote Deadline Hollywood's Nikki Finke. "This was a slightly longer version of the Golden Globes announcement."
The Washington Post's Tom Shales said the show went "clip-clip-clipping along." "This is not a good thing," he decided.
Shales chided the telecast for waiting to get to the acting categories, and for waiting to present presenter Miley Cyrus until the unfriendly kid hour of nearly 10 p.m. ET.
Riffing on Oscar's birthday, Time's Richard Corliss said the ceremony "had the tone and pace suitable to an octogenarian's temper."
(Originally published Feb. 25, 2008)
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Grand Oscar night for 'No Country'
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/env-oscarpbp,1,4585549.story
Grand Oscar night for 'No Country'
The iconoclastic filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen won three Academy Awards, including best picture.
By Susan King, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
It was a golden night for the Coen brothers.
The iconoclastic filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen won three Academy Awards -- and made history Sunday evening -- with their wins for best picture, director and adapted screenplay for their gritty contemporary Western, "No Country for Old Men."
It also won an Oscar for supporting actor for Javier Bardem, who plays the merciless paid assassin at the center of the film.
Though "No Country for Old Men" is a quintessentially American movie -- and based upon the novel by Cormac McCarthy -- the 80th annual Academy Awards had a distinctly international flavor: All four acting winners were from Europe.
As predicted, Brit Daniel Day-Lewis won an Oscar for his gripping performance as a greedy oilman in "There Will Be Blood." The actor had won practically every major accolade this awards season for his audacious turn.
Frenchwoman Marion Cotillard was something of an upset, winning lead actress for her transcendent performance as France's tragic Little Sparrow -- chanteuse Edith Piaf -- in "La Vie En Rose." Going into the evening, the betting money was on veteran British actress Julie Christie for "Away From Her." Cotillard -- who transforms throughout the film from a gorgeous young girl to a frail, ailing woman -- also made history of sorts. She's the first actress to win this award for a performance in a foreign-language film since Sophia Loren did it for 1961's "Two Women."
Cotillard was clearly overwhelmed as she held the statuette aloft: "You rocked my life, you truly rocked my life," she said as she thanked the film's director. "Well, I'm speechless now. Thank you, life; thank you, love. It is true there are some angels in this city. Thank you so much."
Until Cotillard, the show's biggest surprise was Tilda Swinton upsetting favorites Amy Ryan and Ruby Dee for supporting actress for "Michael Clayton."
The shock was clear on Swinton's face: "Oh, no," she said. Looking down at the Oscar, celebrating its 80th anniversary, she added, "Happy birthday, man."
The British actress said she would be giving her Academy Award to her American agent, who is the "spitting image" of the Oscar.
Bardem's was one of the evening's first major awards. "This is pretty amazing," the Spaniard exclaimed, adding that he wouldn't hold it against the Coens for putting "one of the most horrible haircuts in history on my head."
He then broke into rapid-fire Spanish to thank, among others, his mother, who was also his date.
Diablo Cody could do no wrong this awards season.
The 29-year-old former-stripper-turned-screenwriter capped off her fairy-tale awards season by winning the Oscar for original screenplay for her bittersweet coming-of-age comedy, "Juno."
It was almost a fait accompli after she won a slew of other awards this season, including the Writers Guild of America and the Film Independent Spirit Award.
"What is happening?" asked Cody, who strode onstage in a billowy animal print dress with a thigh-high slit that she had to hold closed as she walked up to the stage. (But to be fair, it did showcase nicely that tattoo of a girl in a bikini on her right shoulder.) "This is for the writers," she said.
It was also an enchanted evening for the little Irish drama-with-music "Once," which took home the Oscar for original song for "Falling Slowly."
The song was written and performed by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, who star in the film about two lonely souls who meet by chance on the streets of Dublin and quite literally make beautiful music together.
It was the evening's little tune that could: It was pitted in this category against three songs from the Disney hit film "Enchanted" as well as a song from "August Rush."
"What are we doing here?" Hansard asked as he and Irglova accepted the award, noting that the film cost about $100,000 to make and was shot in three weeks. "It's been an amazing thing; thank you for taking this film seriously."
"Atonement," the sweeping romantic drama, had seven nominations, but it has received one Oscar: original score for Dario Marianelli.
"There Will Be Blood," an epic about greed, ambition and oil, went into the evening with eight nominations. It was passed over except for Robert Elswit, who won for cinematography, and Day-Lewis.
"The Bourne Ultimatum" also had a big night: The spy thriller won three Oscars. Granted, they came in technical categories of editing, sound mixing and sound editing. But still. Three Oscars.
Presenter Tom Hanks had help introducing the nominees in the documentary short category from members of the nation's armed forces in Iraq. Soldiers read out the names of the nominees and the winner, "Freeheld," about a dying police detective who is trying to get her benefits for her life partner. The statuette for feature documentary went to "Taxi to the Dark Side," about torture practices of the U.S. overseas.
Past Oscar winner Nicole Kidman presented veteran production designer Robert Boyle, 98, an honorary Academy Award for contributions to cinema, which include "North By Northwest," "Marnie" and "Mame."
Austria's Holocaust drama "The Counterfeiters" won in the foreign-language film category. It was that country's first film to win such an honor.
Earlier in the evening, the bloody musical "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" was honored with an Oscar for art direction. Italian production designer Dante Ferretti and his wife, set designer Francesca Lo Schiavo, shared the honor.
"The Golden Compass" also led to an Oscar for visual effects.
"Thank you!" whooped the winners, including Michael Fink, Bill Westenhofer, Ben Morris and Trevor Wood.
Moments earlier, a rat named Remy scurried off with the Oscar for animated feature.
Writer-director Brad Bird won his second Oscar in this category for the Disney-Pixar blockbuster "Ratatouille," about a French rodent who dreamed of becoming a Parisian chef.
The French theme continued into the evening as "Le Mozart des Pickpockets" won for live action short film, and the makeup award went to Didier Lavergne and Jan Archibald won for "La Vie En Rose."
The Oscar for animated short film went to "Peter & the Wolf."
That gave way to Amy Adams, who starred in the Disney hit "Enchanted," performing one of the film's three Oscar-nominated tunes, "Happy Working Song." Without the birds, rats and other critters whirling around her as they were in the movie, her performance seemed rather flat.
The 80th Annual Academy Awards got underway beneath gray skies and drizzles at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood with a montage homage to Hollywood. There were scenes from such films as "North by Northwest," "Aliens," "Lawrence of Arabia" and "The Terminator."
The first Oscar of the evening went to Alexandra Byrne for costume design for the historical epic "Elizabeth: The Golden Age."
"These past 3 1/2 months were very rough," host Jon Stewart began, referring to the bitter work stoppage caused by the Writers Guild strike. "The fight is over. So tonight, welcome to the makeup sex."
He then took aim at the slate of "psychopathic killer movies" nominated for Oscars, among them "No Country for Old Men," "Sweeney Todd" and "There Will Be Blood," and asked: "Does this town need a hug?"
"Thank God for teen pregnancy," he quipped, referring to "Juno."
Academy Awards ceremonies may have been postponed, but the show has gone on despite wars, assassinations and the fickleness of Mother Nature. This year, the writers strike threatened to cancel the show, but a settlement was reached and the show went on as scheduled.
susan.king@latimes.com
Grand Oscar night for 'No Country'
The iconoclastic filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen won three Academy Awards, including best picture.
By Susan King, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
It was a golden night for the Coen brothers.
The iconoclastic filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen won three Academy Awards -- and made history Sunday evening -- with their wins for best picture, director and adapted screenplay for their gritty contemporary Western, "No Country for Old Men."
It also won an Oscar for supporting actor for Javier Bardem, who plays the merciless paid assassin at the center of the film.
Though "No Country for Old Men" is a quintessentially American movie -- and based upon the novel by Cormac McCarthy -- the 80th annual Academy Awards had a distinctly international flavor: All four acting winners were from Europe.
As predicted, Brit Daniel Day-Lewis won an Oscar for his gripping performance as a greedy oilman in "There Will Be Blood." The actor had won practically every major accolade this awards season for his audacious turn.
Frenchwoman Marion Cotillard was something of an upset, winning lead actress for her transcendent performance as France's tragic Little Sparrow -- chanteuse Edith Piaf -- in "La Vie En Rose." Going into the evening, the betting money was on veteran British actress Julie Christie for "Away From Her." Cotillard -- who transforms throughout the film from a gorgeous young girl to a frail, ailing woman -- also made history of sorts. She's the first actress to win this award for a performance in a foreign-language film since Sophia Loren did it for 1961's "Two Women."
Cotillard was clearly overwhelmed as she held the statuette aloft: "You rocked my life, you truly rocked my life," she said as she thanked the film's director. "Well, I'm speechless now. Thank you, life; thank you, love. It is true there are some angels in this city. Thank you so much."
Until Cotillard, the show's biggest surprise was Tilda Swinton upsetting favorites Amy Ryan and Ruby Dee for supporting actress for "Michael Clayton."
The shock was clear on Swinton's face: "Oh, no," she said. Looking down at the Oscar, celebrating its 80th anniversary, she added, "Happy birthday, man."
The British actress said she would be giving her Academy Award to her American agent, who is the "spitting image" of the Oscar.
Bardem's was one of the evening's first major awards. "This is pretty amazing," the Spaniard exclaimed, adding that he wouldn't hold it against the Coens for putting "one of the most horrible haircuts in history on my head."
He then broke into rapid-fire Spanish to thank, among others, his mother, who was also his date.
Diablo Cody could do no wrong this awards season.
The 29-year-old former-stripper-turned-screenwriter capped off her fairy-tale awards season by winning the Oscar for original screenplay for her bittersweet coming-of-age comedy, "Juno."
It was almost a fait accompli after she won a slew of other awards this season, including the Writers Guild of America and the Film Independent Spirit Award.
"What is happening?" asked Cody, who strode onstage in a billowy animal print dress with a thigh-high slit that she had to hold closed as she walked up to the stage. (But to be fair, it did showcase nicely that tattoo of a girl in a bikini on her right shoulder.) "This is for the writers," she said.
It was also an enchanted evening for the little Irish drama-with-music "Once," which took home the Oscar for original song for "Falling Slowly."
The song was written and performed by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, who star in the film about two lonely souls who meet by chance on the streets of Dublin and quite literally make beautiful music together.
It was the evening's little tune that could: It was pitted in this category against three songs from the Disney hit film "Enchanted" as well as a song from "August Rush."
"What are we doing here?" Hansard asked as he and Irglova accepted the award, noting that the film cost about $100,000 to make and was shot in three weeks. "It's been an amazing thing; thank you for taking this film seriously."
"Atonement," the sweeping romantic drama, had seven nominations, but it has received one Oscar: original score for Dario Marianelli.
"There Will Be Blood," an epic about greed, ambition and oil, went into the evening with eight nominations. It was passed over except for Robert Elswit, who won for cinematography, and Day-Lewis.
"The Bourne Ultimatum" also had a big night: The spy thriller won three Oscars. Granted, they came in technical categories of editing, sound mixing and sound editing. But still. Three Oscars.
Presenter Tom Hanks had help introducing the nominees in the documentary short category from members of the nation's armed forces in Iraq. Soldiers read out the names of the nominees and the winner, "Freeheld," about a dying police detective who is trying to get her benefits for her life partner. The statuette for feature documentary went to "Taxi to the Dark Side," about torture practices of the U.S. overseas.
Past Oscar winner Nicole Kidman presented veteran production designer Robert Boyle, 98, an honorary Academy Award for contributions to cinema, which include "North By Northwest," "Marnie" and "Mame."
Austria's Holocaust drama "The Counterfeiters" won in the foreign-language film category. It was that country's first film to win such an honor.
Earlier in the evening, the bloody musical "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" was honored with an Oscar for art direction. Italian production designer Dante Ferretti and his wife, set designer Francesca Lo Schiavo, shared the honor.
"The Golden Compass" also led to an Oscar for visual effects.
"Thank you!" whooped the winners, including Michael Fink, Bill Westenhofer, Ben Morris and Trevor Wood.
Moments earlier, a rat named Remy scurried off with the Oscar for animated feature.
Writer-director Brad Bird won his second Oscar in this category for the Disney-Pixar blockbuster "Ratatouille," about a French rodent who dreamed of becoming a Parisian chef.
The French theme continued into the evening as "Le Mozart des Pickpockets" won for live action short film, and the makeup award went to Didier Lavergne and Jan Archibald won for "La Vie En Rose."
The Oscar for animated short film went to "Peter & the Wolf."
That gave way to Amy Adams, who starred in the Disney hit "Enchanted," performing one of the film's three Oscar-nominated tunes, "Happy Working Song." Without the birds, rats and other critters whirling around her as they were in the movie, her performance seemed rather flat.
The 80th Annual Academy Awards got underway beneath gray skies and drizzles at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood with a montage homage to Hollywood. There were scenes from such films as "North by Northwest," "Aliens," "Lawrence of Arabia" and "The Terminator."
The first Oscar of the evening went to Alexandra Byrne for costume design for the historical epic "Elizabeth: The Golden Age."
"These past 3 1/2 months were very rough," host Jon Stewart began, referring to the bitter work stoppage caused by the Writers Guild strike. "The fight is over. So tonight, welcome to the makeup sex."
He then took aim at the slate of "psychopathic killer movies" nominated for Oscars, among them "No Country for Old Men," "Sweeney Todd" and "There Will Be Blood," and asked: "Does this town need a hug?"
"Thank God for teen pregnancy," he quipped, referring to "Juno."
Academy Awards ceremonies may have been postponed, but the show has gone on despite wars, assassinations and the fickleness of Mother Nature. This year, the writers strike threatened to cancel the show, but a settlement was reached and the show went on as scheduled.
susan.king@latimes.com
Monday, January 21, 2008
Saturday, December 1, 2007
Carson Daly About to Defy Writers Strike
Carson Daly, Entertainment Douchebag of the Month
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8T6F7HO0&show_article=1
Carson Daly About to Defy Writers Strike
Nov 28, 2007
By FRAZIER MOORE
AP Television Writer
NEW YORK (AP) - NBC's "Last Call with Carson Daly" is about to become the first late- night talk show to defy the writers strike and resume production.
Daly, who is not a member of the Writers Guild, will begin taping new episodes of his Burbank-based show this week for airing next week, an NBC spokesperson confirmed Tuesday.
The half-hour "Last Call" airs at 1:35 a.m. EST weeknights, but whether Daly's first new episode would air next Monday or Tuesday was initially unclear. No guests were disclosed.
"The Writers Guild of America, East joins our colleagues of the Writers Guild of America, West in expressing our profound disappointment with Carson Daly's decision to return to work," the guild said in a statement that also commended other late-night talk show hosts for showing solidarity with their writers. "We thank them and hope that Mr. Daly will reconsider his decision, including the soliciting of scab writers to provide material for his program."
Daly is not the first talk-show host to go back into production. Ellen DeGeneres, who is a member of the union, has continued taping her daytime syndicated talk show after shutting down the first day of the strike. But "Last Call" becomes the first to break ranks among the late-night shows, which all had chosen to air repeats rather than tape new shows without their striking writers.
It was unclear what effect, if any, the return of "Last Call" would have on other late-night talk shows, which include NBC's "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" and "Late Night with Conan O'Brien," CBS' "Late Show with David Letterman" and "Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson," and ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" Comedy Central's late-night news-and- commentary spoofs, "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report" with Stephen Colbert, have also been in reruns.
There was no immediate word on when any of those shows might follow suit and return with new episodes.
On Monday, contract talks with the studios resumed for the first time since movie and TV writers went on strike Nov. 5. The Writers Guild is seeking more money for material distributed over the Internet and cell phones.
___
NBC is owned by General Electric Co.
___
On the Net:
http://www.nbc.com/
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8T6F7HO0&show_article=1
Carson Daly About to Defy Writers Strike
Nov 28, 2007
By FRAZIER MOORE
AP Television Writer
NEW YORK (AP) - NBC's "Last Call with Carson Daly" is about to become the first late- night talk show to defy the writers strike and resume production.
Daly, who is not a member of the Writers Guild, will begin taping new episodes of his Burbank-based show this week for airing next week, an NBC spokesperson confirmed Tuesday.
The half-hour "Last Call" airs at 1:35 a.m. EST weeknights, but whether Daly's first new episode would air next Monday or Tuesday was initially unclear. No guests were disclosed.
"The Writers Guild of America, East joins our colleagues of the Writers Guild of America, West in expressing our profound disappointment with Carson Daly's decision to return to work," the guild said in a statement that also commended other late-night talk show hosts for showing solidarity with their writers. "We thank them and hope that Mr. Daly will reconsider his decision, including the soliciting of scab writers to provide material for his program."
Daly is not the first talk-show host to go back into production. Ellen DeGeneres, who is a member of the union, has continued taping her daytime syndicated talk show after shutting down the first day of the strike. But "Last Call" becomes the first to break ranks among the late-night shows, which all had chosen to air repeats rather than tape new shows without their striking writers.
It was unclear what effect, if any, the return of "Last Call" would have on other late-night talk shows, which include NBC's "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" and "Late Night with Conan O'Brien," CBS' "Late Show with David Letterman" and "Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson," and ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" Comedy Central's late-night news-and- commentary spoofs, "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report" with Stephen Colbert, have also been in reruns.
There was no immediate word on when any of those shows might follow suit and return with new episodes.
On Monday, contract talks with the studios resumed for the first time since movie and TV writers went on strike Nov. 5. The Writers Guild is seeking more money for material distributed over the Internet and cell phones.
___
NBC is owned by General Electric Co.
___
On the Net:
http://www.nbc.com/
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