Postmodern Conservative.

OMFG, Hold the OMG

If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring rain on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison scum right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. -- Hunter Thompson

So it shall pass that Gossip Girl ads will be re-run, in original "look, teens doing it" format, but with new and improved taglines: the peals of frustration, disgust, and contempt that have poured in like so many baggies of private-school coke from around the Decent Media World. Yes, you puritan ingrates, we want to destroy you: by internal madness, by the steadily tightening and irreversible recognition that we are in control and we are taking your children away from you...no one can resist the spectacle of people their age, only twenty-nine times as hot, bedecked in haute couture and blundering faux-unknowingly into abusive threesomes in sprawling Manhattan penthouses and beach compounds overlooking the steel blue wastes of the Northern Atlantic Ocean...and certainly not if they know it's bad, if this is a pleasure that you -- because you're even older, uglier, and more poorly-dressed than they are -- want to deny them...

What a creepy, degenerate, cynically perverted way to make a living. I know exactly the kind of freaks responsible for conceiving, producing, and marketing this cheesy Caligulan madness, and as bad as the real kids are in the barren-souled regions of NY and LA providing inspiration for the latest round of mass-media mass profits, the hollowed-out hags and third-rate pimps who film their fictionalizations in today's version of black mass for vampires are five hundred times more hideous, and dangerous. Sharpen your stakes, melt down your flatware. No one is safe from their fangs and claws.

Uncle Sam gets something right

by John

Four hours ago, the whole buy-a-fancy-box-to-get-yourself-some-fancy-TV-or-the-lights-go-out-on-2/19 thing was really getting my luddertarian goat. Then I bought the damn box, plugged it in, and watched me some basketball.

And I could see it. No more fiddling with the rabbit ears every time the winds change. No more putting the rabbit ears on the floor (inexplicably the best spot to pick up ABC) and fighting with my son when he tries to eat them. No more squinting and shifting and being unable to make out jersey numbers. No more bright colors making the TV get angry. Just crystal clear picture, impeccable reception, and DOZENS OF (admittedly unwatchable) CHANNELS I HAD NOT KNOWN ABOUT.

Never again will I criticize our noble despots for spending billions of dollars of taxpayer money to subsidize the purchase of luxury goods. Never again will I question the virtues of the new and shiny. And never - NEVER - again will I doubt The Sude.

Is Broadcast TV Dead?

Megan thinks maybe yes. My first instinct would be to herald this as a great victory. Not because I hate the picture quality or because it's more 'sanitized' than cable...but because its programming expresses the notion that the public really desires and loves what's on network TV. Now yes, in a twist they actually do seem to love a lot of it. But no great popular cry for a celebrity dancing show triggered, or even presaged, celebrity dancing shows. You can see where I'm going with this. Except for Jeopardy!, cartoons, and public TV, network television is a disaster that seems to fail and fail but never die, at least in its current incarnation. Turning a corner in this regard would be a positive development.

They Don't Know Jack

I rarely go here, but Isaac Chotiner points to this must-comment scenario:

On May 31, the show's head writers went in for a meeting at the studio to present their first big idea: sending Jack to Africa. In various incarnations, Jack would begin the season digging ditches, building houses, tending to orphans, providing security for an embassy or escorting around a visiting dignitary. "One of the themes we discussed was penance, that Africa was a place Jack had gone to seek some kind of penance. Some sanctuary too, but also penance for things he's done in his life," Mr. Gordon says.

Ms. Walden and Gary Newman, chairmen of 20th Century Fox Television, were receptive but believed it was too much of a departure. "It felt like we were throwing the baby out with the bathwater," says Ms. Walden. The Africa plot also had several glaring problems, the first of which was that at some point Jack would have to fly back to the U.S. The writers proposed that for the first time ever, "24" would break from its real-time conceit; the show would skip the period when Jack was on his 14-hour flight.

The writers agreed to work on the plot. Just three weeks before they were due to start shooting the first episodes, Messrs. Gordon and Surnow joined fellow head writers Bob Cochran and Manny Coto for a pancake breakfast at an IHOP to talk through the elements of Jack-in-Africa that still weren't working. Jack was too far away, they felt, both from the immediacy of domestic terror and from the character he had been in prior seasons. -- WSJ

Predictably, some people are outraged by this turn of events. But these people are not Creative Writers, like this blog correspondent, and they apply political criteria to an (admittedly politically-filtered) literary problem. How to keep Jack in exciting, fresh adventures? My friends on the right who shudder to see 24 'go liberal' (though see MBD's dissent...of sorts) would do well to recognize that sending Jack to Africa is a fine idea. Anyone who's even flipped through their Conrad knows there's a ripe old patch of heavy drama there. Even penitence makes for a rich theme, though, of course, building eco-friendly homes for Nigerian shanty residents does, er, not.

But what really kills me are these Hollywood creative types paid not to be dull who can't wrap their minds around how to make a 14-hour trip to Africa dramatic. "He's on a plane," they shrug. "We'll have to junk the only gimmick that worked for the show since its debut episode." Hey smart guys: put him on a boat. Out of Miami. A nuclear sub. That an erstwhile club owner trapped in the '80s wrangled in a middleman transaction between the Russian mob and the Colombian drug lord of your choice. Jack commandeers the sub, encounters pirates off Brazil, puts down a coup in Equatorial Guinea, and beaches the thing on the coast of Namibia just in time to prevent a second massacre of the Herero. All in 24 hours. Are you bored yet? And the Africa arc has just started.

Every person on every side a dogmatic, unthinking bozo? Check. Good storytelling loses? Check. I know this is TV we're talking about here, so prepare to settle for less, but when it comes to the small screen, may the strike never end.

The Revenge of the Therapeutic

When I saw the headline announcing "Behar Sez Saints Sick" or something, me, I sez to myself, Thou shalt not click. That I even know what a Behar is counts as a strike against me in my own good book. But 'fortunately' Andrew's gone and posted the text of the Behar's remark, so I may as well. Thus:

"I think that the old days the saints were hearing voices and they didn't have any thorazine to calm them down. Now that we have all of this medication available to us, you can't find a saint any more."

Well. There are three separate layers of irony to lift away. First of all, you can read these two sentences as a claim that the state of affairs described is good news. But you can also read it as a winsome little bit of 'adult' atheist nostalgia -- the kind of moral kitsch involved in romanticizing the beautiful stupidity, ignorance, and folly of youth, taken and historicized into the comfortable senescence of humanity's bourgeois, disenchanted maturity.

But then you can read it, without Behar around to parse comment, as an utterly un-ironic statement made on behalf of spiritual redemption and the eternal possibility of faith incarnate.

Yet the way I want to read it is, contrary to any of those interpretations, and certainly to what I imagine Behar actually had in mind, as fundamentally mistaken about our ability to hear voices on meds. Therapy -- even pharmacologically speaking -- is in no way incompatible with religion. Marx and Nietzsche both hated the intimate relationship between Christianity and alcohol; a New-Age Buddy Jesus -- or Jesus the gay eunuch child of the Earth Mother -- seems to me to go even better with the rosy glasses of a Soma haze than the Heavenly Father went dazzled and doused in gin.

UPDATE: Rod drops some gnosis:

The View says Joy is a Catholic who lurvs joking about her faith, as she was here. So they say.

Bad Meta-Messages; or, What's Wrong with Katherine Heigl?

Yglesias seems to think Heigl's relieving his lingering discomfort with Knocked Up:

Like a lot of people, I found Knocked Up to be both funny, and somewhat disquieting in its apparent message. These issues got discussed a bit and then the whole thing was forgotten in our fast-paced internet-age culture. But Jessica Valenti points out a really good new Meghan O'Rourke essay on the film inspired by Katherine Heigl's recent remark that the movie was "a little sexist."

And of course, in have-cake-eat-too land, the rank contradiction between being paid for a big break that makes you uncomfortable and revealing your intimate discomfort from the interview chair is to be celebrated on precisely those terms:

It's her unfiltered voice that makes her dynamic and edgy, so what if she occasionally comes off as a raging she-beast? Embrace it! And just because Heigl scored her big-screen breakthrough in Knocked Up doesn't mean she has to worship her character, or agree wholeheartedly with the film's portrayal of women. What's more, who would really want to read an interview where she did? -- Gretchen Hansen, Entertainment Weekly's Popwatch

Aha! Watching celebs squirm over the emotional costs of splitting their selves up for sexy perks and cash prizes creates frisson for entertainment consumers! It's all so obvious now. Surely part of being an artist calls for a certain kind of courage to strain yourself artistically. But Heigl's no tortured artiste. She's a professional player of parts that make her feel, like Yglesias himself, lingeringly guilty and kinda dirty. But at least Yglesias, like myself, is only a critic, who has to contend, like it or not, with things that register on the Attention Meter of popular public opinion. Heigl is a serial psychomasochist -- in addition to this, on the Grey's adultery...

"That was kind of a big change for Izzie, wasn't it, after she was so up on her moral high ground," muses the actress. "They really hurt [Callie], and they didn't seem to be taking a lot of responsibility for it. I have a really hard time with that kind of thing."

...there's this, on The Fall of the House of Usher (!):

"Ann is a young woman who had been encircled by this history (of her lineage) her entire life, so it's already kind of there, the mystery of that big old house she's living in. The odd relationship between her and her brother, that Poe vibe is already around her, I think she is used to and almost likes that creepy feeling that prevails throughout the film." [...] "Ann isn't twisted, but she has a complex sexuality," says Heigl. "She likes the macabre." And here Heigl draws a clear distinction between herself and Ann. "There are things that I was very uncomfortable with. The whole incestuous theme was very uncomfortable for me. Reading it I was trying to shake it off. But that is what Poe is so brilliant at doing. Those things happen, those are the darker sides of humanity that people won't talk about so much, but those are the real horror stories."

Yeah, okay, I get it, but that's one weird yet characteristic-of-the-age pattern to get yourself into and ritually confess. Fame and its side benefits would appear to be inadequate therapy, which of course makes us love our stars even more. They're anxiety-ridden about their 'complex' sexuality and about hurting people and not taking responsibility -- just like us! Now that's incestuous. And guess what: we're used to it and almost like that creepy feeling that prevails throughout our lives.

The Apple Martini's Biological Clock

I know this image can be converted into some kind of Sex in the City-related metaphor about the doom facing aging urban female professionals stuck on the singles circuit.

Total Absolute BS

Of course Yglesias loves Dexter, a show I have diligently resisted discussing. Oh, how very clever that his name is the noun for 'dexterity.' We just have to be able to make sociopathic serial killers as sorta loveable as we can make everyone, anyone else. The power of ironic self-referentiality must extend everywhere. Our ability to interpose an artificially intimate critical distance between ourselves and the radical heteronomy of evil must be plumped up and stroked at literally every opportunity. Oh what a house of cards will collapse around someone's head when they discover suddenly that they are being murdered while chuckling snarkily and so very semi-uncomfortably along to Dexter. Critical masturbation in the alloted hall of mirrors portion of the house of horrors is the new whistling in the dark -- a self-gratifying distraction worked up in full knowledge of what knowledge of the real we're so actively repressing. And therapeutically we learn to withstand longer and longer sessions before an ever-more-extensive array of mirrors, longer and longer expeditions within an ever-more-gaping house of horrors. Channel that urge to recoil into the ability to calculatedly pose curling around. Demonstrate that death and insanity and the abyss are no more and no less than casual acquaintances, visages safely slotted as several among million Facebook friends. Every lesson American Psycho was ever supposed to teach us has been laughed out of the assembly by Dexter, and, yes, I do know this without having seen even one clip from one episode of the show. I detest that smug little studiously affected prep mug, and I bristled with animal instinct every time I glimpsed him on Six Feet Under. Boy next door indeed. Patrick Bateman never had it so good: his hall of mirrors was still a howling torment, and he could only masturbate himself safely into a torpor by staring out the window at a model on a billboard. How primitive. What advancements we have made. He still warned the occasional hooker -- meaning, truly, himself -- that something horrible was about to happen. How long until we can replace the palsied laughter at Bateman's poetry -- "black man is de...debil?" -- with the perfect imitation of real laughter (adequately contextualized, of course)? Neo-nazi humor: the final frontier. Already unembarrassed pedophile humor seems within our grasp, and that reality show about busting 'net pederasts brings us to the doorstep. Laugh at the would-be child rapist stumbling fat, old, and naked across the lawn as the Man brings him down. Oh, were he only not fat and old! That would be true entertainment. Wait for the hip, sexy Neo-nazi. Who 'happens to' desire youngish children, perhaps sixteen-year-old Catholic school girls. She has needs too, we must admit. Everyone knows hot sixteen-year-old Catholic school girls are hot, and some of them even want to have sex. Maybe even slightly...transgressive sex. The act of painting ourselves into a corner of relativist, cosmopolitan justification, therapeutically suggested to be something other than a response to the guilt at our own flight from fact, reality, and truth, slides swiftly, imperceptibly, into fantasy, human nature's final comment and trump card against the arrogance, the hubris, the pride of denial. No, I do not suppose that the venomous spittle I am spraying here in the faces of the hip pop culture establishment ethic is nothing more than old-fashioned reactionary falangist puritanism, and yes, one can be a moralist these days without also being the most awfully laughable of all laughably awful monsters: a cross between Michael Medved and John Brown.

* * *

I do recognize this is an intemperate screed. But consider: I had thought about how to do it quite patiently before typing this out and I could not come up with any other possible way of conveying the opinions and judgments set out above with an amount of conviction and force that would justify the exercise, either by your standards or mine, or by those of the Great Magnet. At moments like this I see no point, given the stakes, in shying away from the risk of absurdity, of going clear over the top. True horror is already absurd; its antidote, the re-learning of the proper reaction to it (true horror), must push out from madness, newly recognized as such, in order to recover the senses of the light of day. Incidentally I also think this is the lesson of the better zombie movies, especially George Romero's color remake of his Night of the Living Dead.

Pop Culture + Philosophy = Pop Culture?

The track record for this sort of edutainment is dodgy and its future unclear. I remember, for example, curators at the Field Museum, in Chicago, once telling me that they had brought recent traveling exhibits about Harley-Davidson motorcycles and chocolate and couture jewelry and Jacqueline Kennedy's dresses in hopes that visitors would come to see the flashy stuff but then wander over to the more substantive permanent exhibits, too. The curators also spoke of sugar and medicine. Careful analysis of the foot traffic, however, revealed that visitors came for the candy and exited the museum straightway — no additional nutrition was ingested. -- Stephen Asma, CHE

Read the whole dodgy business. There's nothing wrong with using some pop culture as an explanatory level for philosophy, international relations, or any other brainy discipline. Necessarily. One problem arises at once, however: the same intellectual snobbery wherein philosophers think of themselves as on a higher plane than the peons in the cave applies to things of the cave, too; so I think The Simpsons is really quite genius while Seinfeld is horrible, dull, and pedestrian in every way. (Those early-90s clothes! That plonking, white-man-jazzy bass! Gahhhh!) What happens when philosophy degenerates into particularly erudite camps of pop culture partisans?

This seems the inevitable result of an attempt by officers of high culture -- or as Arendt would call it, culture -- to use low culture as a hook, Polonius style, to catch a carp of popular enthusiasm for works that transcend popularity with the bait of schlock and dross. I like me a Harley, don't get me wrong, but the Bodyworlds exhibit suggests just how coyly overt the technique can be: who wants to see the amazing scientific nature of life-sized dissected bodies preserved in plastic -- the ostensibly edifying point of the exhibit? People want to see skinless dead dudes with their heads exposed three layers deep playing football. People want a quick gawk, no deep contemplation, save that for our memorial ponds, thanks.

Pop culture is sugar -- fast tasty blasts -- but philosophy ain't no medicine, something you can gulp down like a shot of NyQuil and be done with. It must be savored, rolled around in the mouth, swished, spit out, tested against other sippings, and so on. When you get down to it, the use of pop culture as a heuristic by philosophy isn't a question of substance, but of format. Whatever's inside, the average person -- i.e. the person who isn't a philosopher -- seems more and more likely these days to exit the museum straightaway.

Therapolitics and Labor Losses

We wonder how 'losers' get radicalized and then we make big-budget jokes about our own thrown-over workingmen with Super Bowl fanfare and a long, long shelf life. In the last newslet I will bite this week from Peter Lawler, Patrick Deneen of all people has a blog, and has had one for several months now, and he's posted, of all topics, on robot mental health, with the analogy to our own malfunctioning selves not out of robo-arm's reach. He's posted, in other words, on that cute, sad GM robot commercial.

The track record of Georgetown political theorists deconstructing TV commercials is pretty good already. And it's interesting here -- in a way I would've jumped on right after the Bowl, had I not been transfixed by the moral courage of that kissing-blue-collar-guys Snickers ad -- to see therapy intersect, in its cynically unserious way -- with politics, in this case labor politics. In fact, you could see that spot and the Snickers kiss spot as twin attacks on a certain kind of American male -- rhetorical attacks on his identity, and you could wonder, along with me, whether the Democratic Party will succeed in finally killing off this portion of the electorate as a force able to keep Hillary Clinton trapped at 30%. The despairing populist populace needs, cries out for, a candidate, any candidate, and that guy, if he can break through somewhere along the line here, is obviously John Edwards. (Or Ron Paul.)

Leading me to this question: Could anyone -- anyone on Earth -- beat an Obama/Edwards ticket? I'm asking you, Hillary.