Confession of a Childhood Archie Reader

Lest anyone think that there's no place for white men in the majestic progressive future, have no fear. Life with Archie tells us that there is--sacrificing our lives to prevent the deaths of gun-controlling homosexuals.

I won't go into a discussion about it because it's already been beaten to death and it's last week's news. I'll just mention that Life with Archie isn't exactly "canon" Archie. It's an ostensibly adult-oriented comic set in Archie's future and has been pathetically SJW-pandering from its inception.

Besides, I can't do any better than Kathy Shaidle at Taki's. This, however, caught my eye:

There are three things that I do not understand: the success of Al Jolson, the popularity of Milton Berle, and the appeal of Archie Comics.

I can't offer much about the first two but maybe I can shed a little light on the last one.

As one can imagine from the content on this blog, I've long been an enthusiast for a million things and a devotee of very few. Archie comics were grist for the mill in my effort to consume everything that looked the tiniest bit interesting.

For me, and the ubiquity of them suggests others, the appeal was in their digests. These were books, slightly bigger than a quarter of a magazine page, that were available at every supermarket's check-out lane. They were cheap and stuck right in kids' faces just as they were the most bored. Formulaic and inoffensive, they are remembered as nostalgically as Ring Pops.

They were stuffed full of stories from Archie's vaults. Stories from the fifties were alongside stories only a year old. Obscure characters from the past appeared frequently, most often Katy Keen, a model whose comical stories were at odds with an art style more consistent with dramas.

Reading old comedy has an unexpected benefit:  it gives us a snapshot of the culture that we can't get otherwise. In seventy-five years, will a Monica Lewinsky joke land like it did in 1999? The Kardashians, for example, will probably not be recorded in the annals of history but an episode of "The Soup" preserves the public attitude toward them.

Here's an article describing Archie-as-snapshot from the AV Club.

Since the first story about Archie Andrews and his Riverdale High chums appeared in 1941, the series has stealthily ripped everything rank and transitory about youth culture and passing fads, from the jitterbug to slam-dancing. As a result, anyone itching to do a cultural history of the United States might as well start with the seven volumes of the Archie Americana Series, which cover the '40s through the '80s.

Did anyone ever laugh at an Archie gag? I doubt it. It's appeal was the same as those execrable sitcoms on Nickelodeon and Disney--a bunny slope for the next generation of  pop culture consumers. The only difference is that Archie's products offered us a picture of how our media developed.

The Nature of the Bureaucratic Beast

A great article on Zero Hedge around five months ago:  "Why Is Our Government (And Deep State) So Incompetent?" by Charles Hugh-Smith. I'll be pursuing Hugh-Smith's work, I think, because he operates from the same principle as I do:  "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity."

1. That which is cheap and abundant will be squandered until it is no longer cheap or abundant.

More or less the Tragedy of the Commons--but I like this better. It's true and trying to explain why it's true is a waste of time. We've reached a point in history where we can say, "This is what almost always happens. Let's stop thinking we can prevent it and start thinking how we can manage it."

2. The prime directive of any bureaucracy is to eliminate all accountability. The raison d'etre of bureaucracy, the very reason for its existence, is not to manage complex affairs but to dissipate accountability into a formless cloud so that no member of the bureaucracy will ever face any consequences for his/her actions.

 This is what I was getting at in my discussion of monarchy. The most contemporary example of this is the ongoing investigation of the IRS's Lois Lerner. It's extraordinarily difficult to pin anything on her because of the dissipatory nature of bureaucracies. When Tea Party groups are harassed, when evidence goes missing, everyone in the department just shrugs--"I don't know how that happened."

However, it's a major shift in our bureaucratic development that Lerner hasn't fallen on her sword to shelter the President's administration. Consider the chain of resignations after Watergate; each resignee announcing that he was responsible, not his superiors. Lerner is an administrative lifer and she's decided she's not going anywhere, no matter what her department did.

This is why it's important to consider a bureaucracy as an entity of its own, with particular traits like any creature has, a colony of ants or, more appropriately, kudzu. It's always going to grow and there is no single spot from which the growth originates.

3. Bureaucracies are intrinsically prone to group-think

What I'm  most interested in, regarding group-think, is the power of the disruptive member. The need for harmony within the group is obvious--no one wants to make unnecessary enemies--so the member who is the most willing to cause division can effect the most change.

This principle--group-think and its weakness for internal loudmouths--explains the increasing PC irrelevancy of our mass culture. Looking for maximum agreement, group members offer concessions to their most disgruntled members.

5. One systems-level consequence of tightly connected, interactive complex systems is that they generate routine failures known as "normal accidents," catastrophes that result from seemingly small miscalculations and miscues that cascade into systemic crises. When accountability has been lost, there are no feedback loops left to correct these "normal accidents," so the damage piles up within the organization until it collapses in a supernova model of accumulated incompetence.

In my experience, this is concentrating on fixing problems and not preventing them.

This I see in my day job at a small business, my first dealing with business-to-business matters. After about three months on the job, I said, "If everybody here and out there did their job correctly, half of the country would be out of work."

At least in private enterprise the money wasted on fixing mistakes has a cap--once operating expenses exceed revenues, something has to be done. It has to be worse in government bureaucracies.

6. The moral-hazard-riddled leadership of bureaucracies will choose whatever short-term politically expedient fix reduces the immediate political pain (also known as "kicking the can down the road") rather than risk shaking up the organization by imposing accountability and clearing out the deadwood.

Something I've been saying in private for years, but have never had occasion to say here:

Democracy is the theory that an infinite number of short-term solutions equals a long-term solution.

P.T. Anderson: Professional Bunter

Blowhard at Uncouth Reflections asks, "Is there a more overrated mainstream director than P.T. Anderson?"

Anderson is definitely a strange case. Like all of moviedom, I was excited when Boogie Nights came out. I remember that the theater was packed on opening night, an indication that my college town's hipoisie were tuned in.

Here's what I felt when it was over:  dissatisfied and feeling like I had no grounding to be dissatisfied. Somehow it would have been improper to express my disappointment. Maybe I had been wrong to expect it to be funnier and more compelling. I definitely felt that the great film that could have been made from the 70s porn milieu wasn't on the screen.

Then Magnolia came out and I hated it. It was much too self-serious and I couldn't help but see it as a depressing Bollywood movie. In Indian films, it seems that every single character gets a scene in which they cry. There was even a musical number in it!

It was all too showy and luxuriated in misery. One of the critics I used to like, and whose name has been lost to me, said, "As much as I like Magnolia, I could never like it as much as Anderson does."

I was in the minority, though. Magnolia was praised almost unanimously. I didn't like it but I had to agree that it avoided being a bad movie.

But that made me eager to see what was next. I was sure that Anderson was going to finally make the misstep he had been flirting with. He was going to overreach and his next big, bloated film was going to look as ridiculous to everyone as it did to me.

But Punch Drunk Love wasn't that movie. It was as if he had hedged every bet. The film was small and ostensibly a love story. By presenting Adam Sandler in a dramatic role, he had ensured the financial return of a sideshow--people were going to check it out as an oddity at the very least.

It was then I figured that, whatever was wrong with Anderson's films, he was good at playing the critical game. He never attempted so much that he failed but his films seemed like artistic statements.

I puzzled over There Will Be Blood for a few days after seeing it. I couldn't figure out what the hell it was supposed to be about. It wasn't good storytelling and it didn't seem to be experimental storytelling. There seemed to be no reason why he presented the scenes he did.

I chalk the praise up to the Faulkner effect. By forcing the audience to figure out the film, they grow more attached to it. One is satisfied and proud when one completes a jigsaw puzzle even though what it's supposed to be--a picture--is lumpy and distorted.

That's where my interest in Anderson ended. He had gotten away with whatever he was doing for too long. The audiences come into his films expecting to see an Important P.T. Anderson film and, as long as he continues to be obtuse and indulgent to his actors, that's what they'll see.

Logical Castles in the Sky

Earlier this week, I listened to a back-catalog interview with Phil Hendrie on Rick Overton's podcast. Somewhere in the second part, Overton starts spilling gobbledy-gook. Back in the hunter-gatherer days, he said, men did the killing. As Rick imagined it, killing another creature would be traumatizing--the hunters would naturally sympathize with the death throes of their dinner. To prevent them from being too distraught to feed their clan, men developed capacity for compartmentalization. This, of course, explains why men are able to commit heinous acts and then go on about their business.

Several years ago, I had a customer at my bar educate me, "You know, man is made to crave sugar and fat," because of energy needs out in the wild. He gestured down his overweight, slack body. "You see where these cravings get you."

Likewise, the article I discuss here had a detour tracing the origins of jealousy back to "caveman" times.

Theories based in evolutionary psychology--as least as practiced by the chattering class--are simply science fan-fiction. They take whatever trait they'd like to endorse and trace it back to an imaginary situation in which that trait would be an advantage. Thus, we are hard-wired to have that trait. Thus, we must accept that trait unconditionally.

Overton himself is a great example of this attitude writ large. He's a funny person and his discussions of comedy, improv and performance are always interesting. There's no doubting his expertise and passion for these subjects but he insists on inserting his smart-guy-liberal opinions into everything.

One subject he returns to is his theory that education has been intentionally dumbed-down by the powers-that-be to prevent another uprising of intelligent youth as they had experienced in the 60s. Because clearly those in charge are descendants of Barry Goldwater, only more nefarious. And because clearly our educational system is tightly controlled by a handful of people and not a sloppy mess of bureaucrats, loan officers and those-who-can'ts.

We see this again and again among smart-guy-liberals. They may be decent thinkers but they never, ever examine their first principles. Was the youth activity of the 60s really the result of a bunch of kids using the full capacity of their minds? Did they really, as Overton insists, "stop the war?"

When one starts making arguments from incorrect premises, one might as well start discussing the rules of order for the Hogwart's teachers' union. It has just as much relation to reality.

The Atlantic Promotes Polyamory Some More

Around twenty years ago, Penthouse Magazine was struggling. The swelling of pornography’s home video market, coupled with the rise of the Internet, meant the public had little need for a more erotic Playboy. Bob Guccione decided to double down on his brand’s image of sensual exploration by pushing a new kink into the mainstream:  urination.

Nearly every layout featured at least one photo of the model squirting a golden stream, so golden that it indicated either devoted color-correction or incipient dehydration. “All the real hedonists love nothing more than the sight of a lovely women excreting her waste,” the magazine seemed to say.

The number of urine fetishists remained exactly the same as it ever had, but the concept of pushing a kink on its readers must have had a great influence on The Atlantic. The formerly WASP-intellectual outlet has been beating the drum for polyamory.

The latest was published last week:  "Multiple Lovers, Without Jealousy," by Olga Khazan.

The worst part of the article is not that the magazine has a bizarre mission to normalize the practice, nor is it that, like Penthouse, it is out-of-step with its colleagues, who are trumpeting transgender theory. The worst part is that it is so horribly written.

Try this sentence:

Despite lingering disapproval, there’s some evidence that Americans are growing increasingly accepting of open relationships. 

Oof. I’ve published more than my share of these tin-ear clunkers, but I’m not scrutinized by the editorial board of a magazine close to two centuries old.

And this:

Increasingly, polyamorous people—not to be confused with the prairie-dress-clad fundamentalist polygamists—are all around us. By some estimates, there are now roughly a half-million polyamorous relationships in the U.S., though underreporting is common. Some sex researchers put the number even higher, at 4 to 5 percent of all adults, or 10 to 12 million people. 

First, the polygamists of the prairie are generally Mormons, and schismatics at that, not “fundamentalists.” “Fundamentalists” usually means Sola Scriptura Christians and the sole scripture they read ain’t the Book of Mormon. Also, the appellation “fundamentalist” is banned in many stylebooks as being non-descriptive and stereotypical--the name of the specific denomination is preferred--so how did it get into The Atlantic? (And the estimation of five hundred thousand to twelve million estimation is so wide as to be useless.)

But most jarring is Khazan’s repeated substitution of “envy” for “jealousy.” We’re used to seeing the word “jealous” used when one means “envious,” as in, “Look at my prestigious writing job in the Northeast. Aren’t you jealous?” The opposite is not common usage at all:

I initially expected the polyamorous people I met to tell me that there were times their relationships made them sick with envy. After all, how could someone listen to his significant other’s stories of tragedy and conquest in the dating world, as Michael regularly does for Sarah, and not feel possessive?

The usage only pops up three times but each instance is like a cymbal crash. Admittedly, there aren’t a lot of synonyms to “jealousy,” but it’s surprising that no one tossed the article back to her for a rewrite. Ms. Khazan, when someone else is making love to your partner, you are jealous of your partner--you want him all to yourself--and you are envious of the other participant--you want to be in her situation, getting his attention. This is the type of thing that English-major sophomores congratulate themselves for knowing.

To her credit, Khazan doesn’t over-emphasize the three hallmarks of polyamory articles, showing strength that other journalists don’t have. The first element is a congratulatory tone describing the polyamorists’ uniqueness:

Both of them say they knew from a young age that there was something different about their sexuality. “Growing up, I never understood why loving someone meant putting restrictions on relationships,” Michael said.

…

“I feel that this whole polyamorous lifestyle is the avante [sic] garde of the 21st century,” [Morning Glory ]Zell [author and “ High Priestess of the Oregon-based pagan Church of All Worlds”] wrote.

The second, even more lightly touched upon, is the incessant conversation that polyamory requires, lauded as that panacea of emotion, Communication:

[Terri] Conley, the polyamory researcher, has noted, “polyamory writings explicitly advocate that people revisit and reevaluate the terms of their relationships regularly and consistently—this practice could benefit monogamous relationships as well. Perhaps a monogamous couple deemed dancing with others appropriate a year ago, but after revisiting this boundary they agree that it is stressful and should be eliminated for the interim.”

… 

Josh and Cassie talk over and negotiate everything—“a lot more than other couples do,” they think.

Avoided almost entirely is the trope of male emasculation. No men wearing skirts here, nor a crew of runners-up calling themselves “The Man Harem.” The closest is a man who declares himself “heteroflexible” in the only chronicled relationship that doesn’t feature female bisexuality.

The same old fallacies of polyamory show through. The core concept is that human fulfillment is a matter of checking off a list of desires:

Even many devout monogamists admit that it can be hard for one partner to supply the full smorgasbord of the other’s sexual and emotional needs. When critics decry polys as escapists who have simply “gotten bored” in traditional relationships, polys counter that the more people they can draw close to them, the more self-actualized they can be.

... 

Why didn’t the wife just ditch the [husband] for the [new lover]? “She gets stuff from the [husband] that she doesn’t get from [the lover],” Sheff explained. “They do fun things together, and the [lover] is too needy for her. She doesn’t want him all to herself, because he would be too much work.”

How sweet life must be for that second man! And how wonderful for her, free now to use another human exactly as she wishes without indulging his “neediness.” And to think, it all started because the husband wanted to spend more time at BDSM dungeons!

Another couple, Cassie and Josh, also have specific needs for self-actualization:

They’ve since had several committed triad relationships lasting from a few months to several years...Cassie always hopes that it’ll be a fellow horror-movie lover, while Josh keeps his fingers crossed for an anime fanatic.

Just what the poets talked about.

Self-actualization is exactly what doesn’t happen here. Growth requires sacrifice--life may be a smorgasbord but the size of one’s plate is limited. Polyamory is the lie that one will never have to sacrifice one’s desires, no matter how insignificant. Your wife doesn’t like watching anime? Get a second one who does!

There is one desire that polyamorists despise, however:  the desire to keep one’s lover all to oneself. To them, jealousy is a demonic force that must be beaten down by rituals of semantics:

But it became clear to me [Khazan] that for “polys,” as they’re sometimes known, jealousy is more of an internal, negligible feeling than a partner-induced, important one. To them, it’s more like a passing head cold than a tumor spreading through the relationship.

… 

People in plural relationships get jealous, too, of course. But the way polys get jealous is unique—and possibly even adaptive. Rather than blame the partner for their feelings, the polys view the jealousy an irrational symptom of their own self-doubt. 

… 

“I think everyone feels jealous,” Josh said. “Us and the people we’ve dated and most of the people I know feel jealous. But when I think of jealousy, I think of it more as it’s another emotion we express as jealousy. You’re not actually jealous; you’re feeling loss.”

Jealousy is negligible, like a head cold. It’s an irrational symptom of one’s own flaws. It’s got nothing to do with one’s partner. It’s “kinda silly.” It’s not even jealousy--it’s something else entirely.

[I]n some ways, polyamory is a more humane way to love.

Jealousy isn’t exactly the most pleasant emotion but there’s no denying it exists, unlike polyamorists’ made-up antonym, “compersion:”

Bill says watching his wife have sex with another man is anything but unsettling. Instead, it sometimes induces compersion—the poly principle of basking in the joy of a partner’s success in romance, just as you would with his or her success in work or sports.

What kind of fool believes that seeing his partner receive sexual attention from another is the same as seeing that same partner get a promotion? The kind of fool who has his home confiscated and congratulates himself for contributing to the socialist future.

I like to think about polyamory because it’s the “avant garde” innovation that’s the most clearly delusional. Polys are like engineers who keep crying, “But the design is perfect!” as they stand amid the rubble. They exhibit modernity’s inability to deal with reality as it is--everything can be altered through logic, study and communication. Nothing shows this better than their endless theories regarding jealousy.

I think that maybe I should add another trope of polyamory articles. Jealousy may be semantically corralled as irrational or negligible but the repressed will have its revenge:

Cassie and Josh had been dating a woman—let’s call her Anne—for about a year and a half when all three went to a diner together. Josh, who doesn’t like tomatoes, ordered a burger. Cassie went to the bathroom. When she came back, the burger had arrived and Anne was eating Josh’s tomatoes. 

Cassie loves tomatoes—and she always eats Josh’s tomatoes.

“They were my freaking tomatoes,” she said. “I had experienced the loss of my tomatoes, and that was a unique thing for me.”

Yes, it was the tomato distribution that was the problem.