More on Lena Dunham

I'm finding the Lena Dunham controversy much more interesting than I would have thought.

The dust is settling and the opinions are forming; the majority are not in Dunham's favor.

Only a small part of the majority echo Williamson's contention that Dunham is more alien than artist. Most are satisfied to say that Dunham's ongoing manipulation and sexual play with her sister was abusive and leave it at that.

Certainly, this is more grist for the culture war mill. It shouldn't be a surprise that the women-of-color faction of feminism were quick to disown Dunham but another rift in the solidarity rose to the surface. Many feminists, it appears, found their ideology because it's the loudest voice against sexual abuse; Dunham's confessions struck a chord with them.

As for myself, I've kept an eye on Dunham over the last few years because I always pay attention when a new "genius" is introduced to the culture. As I've written about many times before, the arts and entertainment field--particularly the journalism covering it--has been dominated by progressives for years. Dunham, in particular, came to us anointed as, at least, a potential "voice of a generation." But what had she done to deserve it?

A Redditor linked this article, "Falling Down the Rabbit Hole of NYC’s Lena Dunham Obsession," published last January, before her book was published. It's a compendium of Dunham mentions in the NYC press.

Here's the thing:  It goes back to 1998. Dunham was born in 1986. Not even a teenager, here she is in Vogue (!):

Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham's eleven-year-old daughter, Lena, has a street edge that could leave even Miss Schnabel feeling momentarily inadequate. 'I tried to model this after Helmut Lang,' says Lena, showing off a shift she sewed herself. Her fashion pronouncements are something you'd expect from a woman (at least) three times her age: 'I tend not to go for trends. You can only wear them for two weeks . . . . I really like Jil Sander, but it's so expensive.... I find Calvin Klein really hard to respect because he's everywhere. I view him as a clothesmonger . . . . Manolo is really classy.'

This particular excerpt has stuck with me because it shows a real disconnect between the real world and the insulated NYC elite. Dunham here smacks of the most irritating type of precociousness, the kind in which she affects a sophistication which she couldn't possibly claim. She finds Calvin Klein "really hard to respect" because he's a "clothesmonger?"

Most adults would recognize this as creative mimicry. The child has heard this type of discussion and is more or less pretending to be an adult discussing adult things in an adult way. Kind people will listen with gentle tolerance but take very little stock in what the child is saying.

Apparently, if one is a member of the artistic-literary-publishing NYC elite, one hears a precocious heiress and decides that she must be a brilliant young thing, worthy of quoting in an international publication. Truly we must be a special breed, the thinking seems to be here, otherwise, how else would we have such remarkable children?

At fifteen, the NYT quotes her discussing a hangout that her fellow classmates frequent:  " I have a friend who's 36 who went to St. Ann's, and she used to go to U.T.B." She goes on to wax poetic about the spot, but two things are more important. One, a fifteen-year-old has a friend who is 36? Second, a fifteen-year-old making her second appearance in the international press?

When she was sixteen, the NYT sent a reporter to cover her vegan dinner party. The article points out that only she and a friend are actually vegans, though Dunham proudly decides to enforce her gustatory ideology by making everyone remove their shoes on the premise that they are probably leather. They denounce/listen-ironically to Justin Timberlake and Dunham tells the reporter, "I go to one party every five months. I watch everyone get drunk and I'm really freaked out. I enjoy it, but then I don't want to see it again for five months."

By this time we can see that Dunham's precociousness has not only gone unchallenged but encouraged. We can also see what kind of person she is becoming, using intellectual positioning and "enlightened" self-absorption as a way to assert status.

The beginning of Dunham's public profile as a creator came at 21 in the NYT for a series for Nerve Video (Remember Nerve?) in which she films herself in Spanx, has unappetizing sex and then has her partner insult her. Sound familiar?

From then on, everything Dunham did got attention from the NYC press and, thus, international exposure. She followed the Nerve series with another web series that featured well-known NYC art and fashion figures, then the film Tiny Furniture, followed by full-bloom national status and Girls.

Three things:

First, is there a better example of how the entertainment market is broken? Dunham's talent isn't even an issue here--she could be twice as talented or half as talented and have the exact same career. More importantly, her work could be entertaining, but how can one believe that her tiny and insular experience could give her anything important to say? Looking at her history, it appears that she was groomed to be a media darling.

Second, like I discussed the other day, a serious, disinterested look at Dunham's public persona reveals not depth but narcissism. Her "courage" for displaying her average naked body and her willingness to look pathetic, her inability to create vehicles that don't star herself, all point to a desperate need for attention. She would have taken Paris Hilton's path if she had the looks for it. Since she didn't, she took the role of the smartest person in the room. Since the room was full of the children of editors and artists and fashion designers, they thought she was very smart, indeed--smart enough to better the world.

Finally, Kevin D. Williamson's original intention in his review of Dunham's book was buried under the "molestation or not?" controversy, but I think that he's introduced a valuable technique to our arsenal. The Dunham who comes across, in her own words, is alien. Her priorities, her experience with the difficulties of life and her coddling by the national press are all light-years away from the lives of her audience. We should be doing more of this.

Three Thoughts on Lena Dunham and Kevin D. Williamson

I

To say Kevin D. Williamson's article about Lena Dunham last week was about exposing her as a child molester--which has been the takeaway--is to miss the myriad subtleties in the piece.

I recommend reading it, if only to show how much craft can be put into something so short. Williamson takes Dunham's month-old memoirs and eviscerates her public persona. It's a worthy task because Dunham is well-versed in the Millennial tricks of making her points without having to stand her ground.

For example, he discusses how she has her character on Girls announce to her parents that she is the "voice of her generation," which she qualifies 1) by having her fictional character say it, 2) by having that character be intoxicated as she says it, and 3) by undercutting it with a joke afterwards. Yet Dunham herself is more than happy to allow others to call her that.

Dunham's artistic cowardice isn't as important as what it says about her real-life statements. She's willing to have everyone believe something she's not brave enough to say unequivocally. Williamson takes great offense to her discussion of a "rape" she experienced while at Oberlin College. Thankfully, he doesn't take the bait that the media in general did when the book was published--he doesn't fall into the argument of whether the murky incident was consensual or not.

Instead, he takes issue to Dunham's abuse of her stature in the context of her refusal to take a definable stand. As for the latter, she doesn't call the experience "rape"--she has others say that for her. As for the abuse of prominence, he points out that it took him two minutes to track down a "Barry" who was a campus Republican at Oberlin during her time there. Since Dunham tells us that this Barry also raped a woman so viciously that blood spattered the walls, she paints a very ugly picture of an identifiable man who has no comparable platform to defend himself and who was only accused indirectly.

As for the allegations of Dunham "molesting" her younger sister, framing her as an abuser doesn't seem to be Williamson's intent:

If there is such a thing as actually abusing a child through excessive generosity and overindulgence, then Lena Dunham’s parents are child abusers. Her father, Carroll Dunham, is a painter noted for his primitive brand of highbrow pornography, his canvases anchored by puffy neon-pink labia; her photographer mother filled the family home with nude pictures of herself, “legs spread defiantly.” Self-styled radicals from old money, they were not the sort of people inclined to enforce even the most lax of boundaries.

What Williamson makes a case for is that Dunham's parents, with their post-tradition liberality, created an excessively sexualized environment for their children and that the sexual interaction between Dunham and her sister comes from that. This point has been obscured as the right has pounced on the fact that Dunham's self-reported behavior could be labelled as abusive and her supporters (and Dunham herself) label it childish experimentation. Williamson's article shows that Dunham is a very disordered person, which should force us to question the value of her work.

I wonder if the controversy will have a lasting effect on Dunham's career. Even her supporters have to reckon with the emotional snapshots she's given them. Her sister is six years younger than her--the power dynamics of an older sister bribing her with candy in exchange for long kisses and employing "anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl" certainly force one to look at her as something of a manipulative bully. Williamson points out that in an episode of Girls, Dunham's character tells an employer that she will punish him for his harassment by writing an essay about him and using his real name. Rumors about her on-set behavior problems have circulated from the very beginning, mostly centering on her utter self-absorption at the expense of everyone else.

The mystique of irony and ambiguity is difficult to pull off in the long term; eventually most people figure out what is being obscured. She's beginning to come across as a woman who feels she's always justified in doing whatever she's done, no matter what others' feelings may be. Viewers might come to see that, underneath the labels of "irony" and "satire," Dunham's characters are really accurate depictions of their creator.

II

Ace of Spades asks the right question about the Dunham uproar:  "So Did the Media Miss Lena Dunham's Hair-Raising Stories About Her Sister, Or Did They Bury It?"

Ace supports the theory that the press intentionally suppressed Dunham's childhood revelations, rather than the theories that the press either didn't actually read her book or found the stories unremarkable.

Of course, it's probably a bit of all three but Ace doesn't consider that her book was published by a pillar of the media, Random House. If the media thought that what she had to say was something to be suppressed, how did it get published in the first place?

What I think is that this is a matter of Dunham's mystique working in her favor. The artist's reputation precedes her, so any work that's produced is pre-qualified as Art. The problems of the work can be deemed "challenging" and mistakes are examined as if they are intentional.

Dunham came to Girls with a couple of well-received indie works but, more importantly, an of-the-moment personal package. In the incestuous world of New York media, she fit right in as a wealthy scion of a Mayflower-Jewish marriage, educated at progressive schools, with an artistic family. She spoke the same language as the media elite--how hard do you think it was for her to raise funding, cast actors and recruit a talented crew? Consider, as well, that Girls had a great deal of attention even before it premiered, despite Dunham's negligible profile.

Add to this Dunham's apparent narcissism. One trope one reads in critiques of our culture is that narcissism is, to some extent, an advantage. The self-confidence and assertiveness of a narcissist initially seems to be a positive in a competitive environment. In my own life, I've been amazed at how easily people accept others' self-aggrandizement. It's easy to imagine that Dunham's belief in her own exquisite taste convinced her more-submissive colleagues.

Dunham is also of-the-moment in the public sphere:

A great deal has been made of Lena Dunham’s weight, not least by Lena Dunham. She may be Hollywood fat, or Manhattan–below–125th Street fat, but she is in fact an utterly ordinary specimen of American womanhood, and she would not be thought of as fat in Magnolia, Ark., or Craig, Colo., or even in the less rarefied sections of Brooklyn.

Dunham's physical appearance is, in reality, an advantage. She can be pointed at as an example of a "real woman," while still having enough beauty and youth to carry off a layer or two of makeup in a fashion magazine.

For an example of how her unconventionally-conventional body has benefited her, look at last spring's attack on a low-level entertainment reporter. At a panel, he asked her to explain her frequent nudity on the show. Girls producer Judd Apatow immediately berated the man as if he had told her she wasn't attractive enough to be naked on HBO; the think-pieces published for the next week took the same tactic. However, nothing the reporter said indicated that his question was about how unattractive he thought she was; his question was about her artistic choice--specifically, one scene in which she was playing ping-pong topless for no apparent reason. (However, this was dangerous territory. Asking why she was naked on screen for no good reason might make one think that she is a narcissist who wants all the attention, any way she can get it.)

Dunham also gets a lot of mileage out of the current feminist moment. She is the actor/writer/producer of her own show. She's not a Hollywood beauty. She brags about the wide variety of sexual encounters she's had. She's willing to pontificate about whatever the female/progressive issue of the day is and always comes to a vague pro-SJW opinion about it.

All that is to say that Dunham--through inheritance and inclination--has the right package to warrant the attention of the media. She is an Important Artist.

Being an Important Artist, we are to automatically accept her expressions even if they are off-putting to our tiny minds. She is the one with the fine-tuned sensibility, not us, so we can assume that her "cute" stories about sexual shenanigans with her much younger sister are as morally-insignificant as she says they are.

I think that those critics that read her book weren't sure what to make of those confessions. Chances are, they thought their own reactions were "problematic," that they'd internalized society's sex-negativity. Dunham is anointed and no one wanted to look out of step by appearing to be confused by her statements.

There's something even more sad about the lack of coverage. Was there no single journalist in the media who at least thought he could make a name for himself by denouncing her? Is the media now so monolithic that we can't even rely on their self-interest? Say what you want about the viciousness of reporters--at least their lust for exposing people can keep you honest.

III

Finally, when Dunham is occasionally discussed on a right-leaning website, one can play an overdose-inducing drinking game by reading the comments. Take a shot for every comment in which a reader brags about not knowing who Dunham is or asks why the site is covering someone so worthless.

This tiresome pose is the reason why the right has been completely left behind culturally.

In the ongoing politicization of everything, the loss of the culture was the watershed. The right started acting as if arts and entertainment wasn't good enough to pay attention to and lost generations.

Culture, pop and otherwise, is the communal representation of what we value. By turning our backs on this fundamental part of the human experience, conservatives have lost their ability to contribute to this representation.

I've mentioned this before:  One of the struggles of the Catholic Church in modern times is that it answers questions we can no longer articulate. How can it explain the value of suffering in a world that defines people as monkeys hitting dopamine-release buttons? The reason that these questions and answers are lost is because conservatives have given up all interest in the means of understanding--our artistic culture.

Our culture has told us that Dunham is an Important Artist--at the very least, conservatives should be interested in whether she is or not. To think otherwise is to put one's head in the sand.

The Atlantic Report: The Renegade Nurse

I wonder what progressives would say if Kaci Hickox, the quarantine-defying nurse, told the press that she refused to be isolated because:  1) It violated her civil liberties and 2) There were too many Mexicans among her medical staff.

If the progressive reaction to ebola confuses you, it's helpful to think of the differences between where conservatives and liberals believe our threats lie. Conservatives are cautious about external threats while progressives keep their focus on their internal rivalries.

Most zombie movies eventually rely on one trope:  The individual who is less concerned with the ravenous horde outside than sticking it to his compatriots. (One of the reasons Night of the Living Dead is lasting is that it complexifies this trope by making the dissenter's plan the right one.) Even though this character is always depicted as a villain, progressives seem to think he's the hero.

Russell Berman has the report here.

At the heart of [Hickox's] protest is a belief that authorities in the two states were confining her out of fear–both political and irrational–rather than medicine. She has no fever and feels fine, and as public health officials have stressed repeatedly in recent weeks, Ebola can't be transmitted unless a person is symptomatic.

So far, the media has restrained themselves. They haven't come out and said that they support her, but they're willing to keep a spotlight on her.

It appears they're being wise, but I doubt it. The progressive foot soldiers that have been raiding the comments sections all have a similar refrain:  Science has proved that we're safe.

Has it? There's a lot of speculation but surely the powers that be don't have an interest in making it look safer than it is.

Anyway, ebola is a good example of what I call the Nuclear Energy problem. Nuclear fission, as far as I can tell, is our best source of energy. It's even safe--except for one thing:  when it isn't safe it's really, really bad.

You are faced with a big prize wheel. You have a 45% chance of winning $10 a day for the rest of your life and a .5% chance of having your home burn down to nothing with all your family inside. Do you play?

That's what ebola is. What's the latest death rate? 70%? I've heard 90% in the past. It's a horrible way to go, as well. As for how easy it is to catch, well, the information has been so politicized who knows who to trust? Not to mention the fact that diseases can mutate without warning. The wisest decision is control what we can because the alternative is horrifying.

Hickox's defiance toward the quarantines and the progressive support for her are exceptionally short-sighted. Sure, she's within her rights, but what happens if she turns out to have it and transmits it to someone? Those rights will be gone for everyone else because she will have proved their danger. Conspiracy theorists would argue that this is all part of the plan--"prove" how civil liberties endanger the public in order to strip them.

It reminds me of a slogan I use as a manager:  "If everyone acts reasonably, we won't have a lot of stupid rules." While New Jersey's tent in a parking lot was a really dumb move, if Hickox had compromise between the public's concerns and her feeling of imprisonment, a happy medium could have been reached. By insisting that only her happiness was important, she's added more fuel to the prog-con battle.

Why It Took Nearly Two Decades for Hollywood to Succeed with Superheroes

Thanks to Kevin Smith, the legend of a Nic Cage-starring, Tim Burton-directed Superman movie is always at the edges of contemporary Hollywood history. The project, developed in Burton's heyday in the 90s, came very close to being made but eventually fell through.

Smith was not the only screenwriter who worked on the project. Dan Gilroy, whose Nightcrawler just opened, worked on it, too. Here's his synopsis of the project:

So poor little [Superman], when he winds up on earth, he has no freaking idea where he came from. His biggest fear is that he's an alien. Our Superman was in therapy at the beginning of the film. He's in a relationship with Lois Lane and he can't commit. Or he was maybe in couple's therapy. But he can't commit because he doesn't know who he is or what is going on with him. He's hoping that he has some physiological condition that gives him these powers but that he's still human. It becomes very apparent, though, early in the script, when Lex Luthor uncovers the remnants of the spacecraft, he suddenly realizes – "Oh my god, I'm an alien." It was all about the psychological trauma of it.

This is why Hollywood just couldn't make superheroes work for so many years:  the industry's arrogance. Who would want to watch that Superman movie?

Even though there had been hundreds of stories and story arcs for Superman over the years, and time had proven some to be much better than others, Gilroy, Burton and producer Jon Peters thought, Nah, we'll just make some stuff up.

The Atlantic Report: Rise of the Feminist Tinder-Creep-Busting Web Vigilante

Much of the reason that mainstream media reports are so infuriating is not because they are biased--that's obvious--but the condescending journo-speak that writers believe masks their bias.

Case in point, Olga Khazan's "Rise of the Feminist Tinder-Creep-Busting Web Vigilante." The title is representative of another online trend:  the article is about 5% creep-busting vigilantes and 95% examples of boorish behavior.

“We can't win,” [Alexandra] Tweten told me recently. “If we don't respond, they come back and say, ‘you're a whore.’ If we do respond, we get yelled at and called names. I hate that men think they can talk to women like that. They should be publicly shamed.”

It's time to be honest. The proliferation of online dating is about expanding one's potential dating pool with minimal costs. One of those reduced costs is danger; it's much safer to hang one's shingle on the net and entertain offers than it is to, say, wander streets with a sign around one's neck reading, "Looking for Love."

Because that's what an online dating profile is about, isn't it? It's flipping a pink light above one's front door announcing one's willingness to engage in a romantic relationship. One can even specifically describe the type of relationship one is looking for, from sexual preferences to intensity of feeling.

I don't know what's going to be the watershed, but there's no doubt that flogging the "online harassment" horse is going to end. Like Gertrude Stein's Oakland, there's no "there" there. We hear quite a bit (unconfirmed) that the "FBI is investigating" but we never hear any results.

It's typical semantic trickery, just like the nudging of "rape" over to vagaries of "consent." Any random woman online can claim "death threats" and, at the phrase, we are to respond as if a man in a trenchcoat is standing outside her door with a survival knife. What this article is really talking about is men being rude and angry in a medium that not only allows blocking but can be turned off entirely.

The Internet may not be a "civil" place but it's really not a "dangerous" place unless one is sensitive beyond all proportion. As Seanbaby said many years ago, being offended on the Internet is like seeing "Fuck you" written on a bathroom wall and thinking, "Fuck me? How dare they!"

But even that overblown phenomenon is not what is at issue here. Instead, it's the near-criminalization of being a jackass of the male variety.

Bombarded by all these "admirers," many women feel overwhelmed and leave scores of messages unreturned. One blogger recently ran an OkCupid experiment for which he set up five fake male and five fake female profiles. After a week, all of the women had received at least one message, the most attractive women had received hundreds, but several of the men remained un-contacted. This kind of rejection, day after day, can foment a kind of deep resentment among the male daters. 

“They're trying to make us feel bad about making them feel bad,” Tweten said. “They're just trying to strike at whatever our insecurities are. You were just interested a second ago, and now you're saying, ‘you have a fat ugly nose.’” 

The shift from a "marriage market" to a "sexual marketplace" has altered standards for men a great deal and the new standards are much more stringent. Attractiveness, cockiness and suavity are less achievable than loyalty, reliability and virtuousness. It's no wonder that men online would rather play the numbers game with an overt sexual goal--it's easier to be diligent than artful.

The boorishness is also a result of the phenomenon I discussed here:  Red Pill attitudes--being the leading set of rules that "work" in the sexual marketplace--are creating an arms race between the sexes. Men affect that they are not impressed with women. Because the average man is, well, average, he is clumsy at feigning the mystique the Red Pill promotes. The blase, take-no-crap attitude is supposed to be challenging, but that's very near hostility, and hostility is pretty easy to achieve after sending message after message with no response.

The article represents another cycle in the environment that produced the Red Pill. Men are lectured to be "respectful" but being respectful doesn't get the results they want--it only filters out the "nice guys," who, it should be said, are simply listening to what they've been told. One can make an argument that saying one thing but wanting another is feminine coyness but logical males don't see the difference between this and lying. Being lied to makes most people angry.

Let's be honest:  women want the men to whom they are not attracted to disappear. For every man who is shamed on one of the sites the article discusses, there are probably about twenty who sent a simple, "Hi," and were ignored as if they never existed. A man singled out for being especially crude is at least acknowledged.

The Atlantic Report: Young Adult Fiction Doesn't Need to Be a 'Gateway' to the Classics

We're on the last week of my series on The Atlantic and I think I can make one summarizing statement:  It's boring.

Its politics and foreign policy coverage is all Monday morning quarterbacking, which is why I haven't done much with it. Everything else is meandering prog-center gibberish.

But, I soldier on. Our friend Noah Berlatsky dribbles, "Young Adult Fiction Doesn't Need to Be a 'Gateway' to the Classics." Why does he favor his ten-year-old reading the Percy Jackson series over "classics?" The answer, dear reader, may make you yawn:

As just one example, most of the classic children's literature books—Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Narnia, Treasure Island—look very dated today by virtue of their overwhelming whiteness, their time-bound, helpless inability to imagine that people come in more than one skin color.

What a buffoon. Does he not see that the books he listed are all about children entering a strange and fascinating new world? Young readers identify with the perspective of being astonished by their new environments, not because Wendy introduced the Lost Boys to mayonnaise and Wonder Bread. What does "whiteness" have to do with it?

I like to laugh at Berlatsky because he straight-facedly questioned why we don't identify with Skynet's goal of exterminating the human race in the Terminator series, but that argument makes sense, considering his perspective. He's not human--at least, he wishes he wasn't.

He'd rather float over the human world, understanding everything through the power of his amazing mind. No wonder Treasure Island and the others leave him cold--the protagonists are placed within worlds that are bigger than them, worlds that they have to discover and figure out.

Really, though, the article is about the old lament, "If people read junk, then they won't read good stuff!"

That ship has sailed. Anyway, if a kid reads enough, he or she will naturally become more sophisticated. Of course, that doesn't mean that the next stop is The Corrections or Gravity's Rainbow.

However, there is something troubling about modern children's media:

[Ruth] Graham tentatively suggests that the Percy Jackson books are too beholden to their own time, and timelessness or universality is, of course, often used as a measure of quality. But it's not a very convincing measure.

It's not Berlatsky's sneer at timelessness, as if something that resonates across generations is no big deal. The problem is that children's entertainment is such an industry that kids grow up in a bubble unconnected to anything but their present time and culture. Every stage of development, from toddler to teen, has brand-new media focused directly to them and reinforcing what they already know.

Even something as silly as old Tom and Jerry cartoons are snapshots of different eras and attitudes. Being exposed to them opens up the world to children the way Alice in Wonderland opens up their imagination. Portraying Greek gods as wisecracking moderns may be fun, but only in contrast to our understanding of their original incarnations. Berlatsky is fine with amputating the context.

Transcending the "Basic" Through Politics--As Usual

In yet another scathing critique of the language the chattering class uses among themselves, Buzzfeed's Anne Helen Petersen tells us "'Basic' Is Just Another Word For Class Anxiety."

According to our current definition of “basic” — a shortening of “basic bitch” — a “basic” is a millennial who is inescapably predictable. She (and it is always a she) cherishes uninspired brands — a mix of Target products, Ugg boots over leggings, and Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Lattes (the ultimate signifier of basicness) — and lives a banal existence, obsessed with Instagramming photos of things that themselves betray their basicness (other basic friends, pumpkin patches, falling leaves), tagging them #blessed and #thankful, and then reposting them to the basic breeding grounds of Facebook and Pinterest.

I recommend reading the whole thing for its exquisite misery. But, before you do that, read this:

[T]he “autonomous self,” who is savvy to all the techniques of society and appropriates them according to his or her discriminating tastes, whether it be learning consciousness-raising, consumer advocacy, political activism liberal or conservative, saving whales, TM, TA, ACLU, New Right, square-dancing, creative cooking, moving out to country, moving back to central city, etc. The self is still problematical to itself, but it solves its predicament of placement vis-à-vis the world either by a passive consumership or by a discriminating transaction with the world and with informed interactions with other selves.

This, of course, is Walker Percy, who I've been referencing quite a bit lately. To paraphrase, again:  lacking a religious and spiritual sense, mankind is unable to form a self-definition. One may either transcend through science or art--make oneself an angel looking down on oneself--or one can sink into immanence--become an animal in an environment. The autonomous self is sort of a "smart" animal, like a bird who chooses only the brightest and most colorful bits of string to decorate its nest.

The misery Petersen describes is entirely of the autonomous self. Percy points out that the problem with this kind of self is that it devours its environment's significance and leaves it empty. Talk to someone who waited in line for a new iPhone six months after he bought it; the ecstasy is gone and he dreams of the next release.

How long ago was it that Ugg boots were all the rage? That Target was the savior of those unhappy with WalMart? That pumpkin-spice coffee was the most delicious thing ever? The joy of those has been sucked dry, and those that continue to pursue them are thought be leading a "banal existence."

Petersen is simply, in her way, an early-adopter of autonomy. But it hurts. Consider this:

[Older "basics"] just consume in feminized (and thus readily dismissible) ways appropriate to their generations: my mom, who lives in northern Idaho, is so basic that she drinks decaf single-shot lattes at Starbucks, shops online at Chico’s, and posts pictures of her heirloom vegetable garden to Facebook. She drinks slightly more expensive white wine and goes to a slightly more erudite book club than the basics half her age, but she too is basic.

Do you hear her pain? Her mother is trying to avoid being basic, by reading better books and drinking better wine, but she's hopeless. Petersen doesn't want to look down on her mother but...Starbucks?

Petersen loves her mother--she might even admire her--but the definition she's chosen autonomously makes her, well, better than her mother.

But she isn't better than her mother and she knows it. So, how does one resolve this situation?

Percy and E.F. Schumacher fans already know--by going up.

“What is the best method of education?” presents, in short, a divergent problem par excellence. The answers tend to diverge, and the more logical and consistent they are, the greater is the divergence. There is “freedom” versus “discipline and obedience.” There is no solution. And yet some educators are better than others. How does this come about? One way to find out is to ask them. If we explained to them our philosophical difficulties, they might show signs of irritation with this intellectual approach. “Look here,” they might say, “all this is far too clever for me. The point is: You must love the little horrors.” Love, empathy, participation mystique, understanding, compassion-these are faculties of a higher order than those required for the implementation of any policy of discipline or of freedom. To mobilize these higher faculties or forces, to have them available not simply as occasional impulses but permanently, requires a high level of self-awareness, and that is what makes a great educator.

By operating from a transcendent remove, one can resolve divergent points.

It should be pointed out that the two authors aren't talking about the same thing. What Schumacher encourages is an operational position--one should be acting out of love. What Percy describes is an intellectual perspective--the human escape from incongruities of the self. But both ways describe going up to resolve crises.

Petersen has to resolve the tension between a definition that she is better than her mother and her knowledge, intellectual and otherwise, that she is equal with her mother, and she resolves this through the only transcendent avenue available to her:  politics.

And like all stereotypes, we fling ["basic"] at others in order to distance ourselves from them. These people are this thing; therefore, I am this other thing. Stereotypes are deployed most fervently — and with the most hostility — when the group wielding them is most anxious to distance itself from another group that, in truth, isn’t so distant after all...By calling someone “white trash,” a certain segment of white consumer person distinguishes themselves from another segment of white consumer, thereby bolstering their position within the capitalist hierarchy.

... 

So what are those who make fun of basics actually frightened of? Of being basic, sure, but that’s just another way of being scared of conformity. And in 2014 America, the way we measure conformity isn’t in how we speak in political beliefs, but in consumer and social media habits. We declare our individuality via our capacity to consume differently — to mix purchases from Target with those from quirky Etsy shops — and to tweet, use Facebook, or pin in a way that separates us from others.

... 

[T]o be excited about the September arrival of the Pumpkin Spice Latte isn’t an indicator that that student has no taste as much as it’s about how there are few other outlets accessible to her.

... 

Unique taste — and the capacity to avoid the basic — is a privilege. A privilege of location (usually urban), of education (exposure to other cultures and locales), and of parentage (who would introduce and exalt other tastes). To summarize the groundbreaking work of theorist Pierre Bourdieu: We don’t choose our tastes so much as the micro-specifics of our class determine them. To consume and perform online in a basic way is thus to reflect a highly American, capitalist upbringing. Basic girls love the things they do because nearly every part of American commercial media has told them that they should. 

Sure, her mom's wine, books, and coffee are all a little embarrassing, but it's not her fault--it's capitalism's fault, it's 2014 America's fault, it's our commercial media's fault! At last we've come to a definition to describe why we're so much better than our moms--privilege.

Petersen seems to believe that the cutting edge of being an autonomous self should be universally available. Does she propose we ship every rural citizen into city centers so that they can enjoy the benefits of bodegas and independent coffee shops? Or should the government begin a hipness subsidy program, allowing trendy individuals to open small-town boutiques?

What Petersen hasn't considered is that maybe these things aren't all that important. Certainly one can derive pleasure from wine and coffee and boots but that's altogether separate from deriving definition from them.

What's tragic about this article is how completely modernity has trapped Petersen. There she is, torn by the demands of the autonomous self, yet she doesn't see that the whole charade can be abandoned. She could reexamine the priorities she's created; she could ask what exactly she gets out of her coffee that she can't get out of Starbucks'. Instead, she turns her attention to politics--a vague politics that buzzes with "capitalism" and "privilege"--not realizing that she's only replaced one tension for another.

---

What's funny is that, in some ways, the better America she seems to want--where everyone has access to cool stuff--is similar to what I think is best. I dislike the proliferation of WalMarts and Starbucks and Ugg boots made in China, not because they're "basic" but because I'm against the domination of our country by centralized corporations.

Most of America looks like "Bank of America's Soviet Russia"--communism with corporate sponsors. Most small towns look like interstate exits, with interchangeable boxes labelled "McDonalds" or "Target." The regional distinctions are being rolled over by sensibilities designed thousands of miles away.

But that's only the cosmetics. More importantly, who can compete with WalMart? Who can compete with the overseas manufacturers who supply WalMart? Opportunity in modern America is the opportunity to be huge--if one isn't interested in dominating the nation, then you'd better get a job working for someone who is.

Some of what contemporary autonomous selves like Petersen are enjoying is living life at a human scale. If she's gratified buying the same coffee from an independent coffee shop instead of Starbucks, it's because everyone in the building is an individual. It's someone's business, not a revenue center. It has employees, not labor costs. She buys their coffee; she isn't purchasing units.

Unfortunately, the autonomous self gets its satisfaction from being the type of person who goes to independent coffee shops, not from what the shop itself offers.

---

It should also be mentioned that there is the typical Buzzfeed #solidarityisforwhitewomen problem:  The term "basic bitch" comes from black slang, an insult between black women which has a slightly different meaning.

Petersen plays social anthropologist in order to justify what is--on Buzzfeed's own terms--clearly appropriation. "Yes, yes, black people used to say this among themselves," she seems to say, "but I want to talk about how white women use it."

This goes over in the comments about as well as one expects.

The Atlantic Report: The Gary Hart Renaissance

I don't have the inclination to do it but it would be enlightening to the public to have some sort of weekly report detailing what trends and figures pop up, seemingly randomly, only to become firm Subjects of Discussion.

Case in point, "The Gary Hart Renaissance:"

But less than a month after a new book thrust him back into the news, Hart has a new job, and it comes courtesy of a fellow member of the semi-exclusive club of presidential losers, John Kerry. 

The secretary of state announced Tuesday that he was sending the former Colorado senator to Northern Ireland as his "personal representative" to the new round of talks to resolve political issues and secure a long-term peace deal there.

Apparently, now we are to believe that Hart's reputation has been "reformed." We aren't to think of him as a philanderer who stupidly carried on with bikini models on board the Monkey Business in the middle of his presidential campaign. No, he was a hero--almost certain to become a statesman on the level of our Founding Fathers--who was cut off at the knees by a craven Miami Herald reporter.

It certainly seems to have worked on The Atlantic's commenters. Paul Galvin says this:

[Herald reporter] Mr. Fiedler "monkeyed" with the timeline of The New York Times story to spice up his unprecedented stake-out of a presidential candidate's private residence, wearing hoodies and sunglasses at night in the summer! Yes, good question indeed; what kind of "Monkey Business" is this - for the Herald to act as the decider of what should be the voters' ultimate decision? Now that's some mean "Monkey Business."

bobtube says this:

You can go back and wallow in the mud with snarky remarks about his aborted 1988 presidential campaign if you like; it mainly reflects shallow thinking more appropriate of Entertainment Tonight or some such drivel. In all my reading of American history, I've yet to figure out how marital fidelity or infidelity made any president a better or worse president. There seems to be no connection.

I discussed the NYT article that preceded the book here.

I mentioned there that the assertion underneath the Hart reformation is that a politician's infidelity doesn't matter. bobtube above seems to have gotten that message very clearly.

Does this mean there is some morally-lax Democrat being prepped in the wings for 2016?

 

The Atlantic Report: The Grisly, All-American Appeal of Serial Killers

Julie Beck logs in another of The Atlantic's pointless, meandering articles, this time ostensibly about the American interest in serial killers.

The article is launched by a new book, Scott Bonn's Why We Love Serial Killers, but doesn't draw much from the author. Beck instead believes that her own excellent reporting will carry the day.

So we get the typical left-media tropes--"we" (meaning you, the stupid American, not Beck) classify serial killers "neatly in [our] mind-cabinets" as white males, even as 40% are black. Minority victims of serial killers don't get as much attention. Americans may be fascinated by serial killers because of our high tolerance for violence. Ted Bundy is described as a "Republican operative" and not "suicide hotline counselor." There is a discussion of how we make serial killers an other by labeling them "evil" or "monsters," and we know how much The Atlantic hates to side against an other.

As usual, what's actually interesting is missed. For one:

Many of the serial killers who become cultural legends are white men. Dahmer, Bundy, Gacy, and Berkowitz were all white, as were Gary Ridgeway (the “Green River Killer”), and Dennis Rader (“Bind Torture Kill”). The Zodiac killer, while never caught, was described as a white male.
...
It’s been many years since any new serial killers were added to the canonical group... [N]one of these recent criminals have attained true celebrity status. There is no modern John Wayne Gacy.

One element not pointed out: the "canonical" killers listed in the first sentence were active from the early 70s to the mid-80s. My guess is that this says something about the decline of the middle class, which was cresting during this time. Bundy and Gacy in particular operated in that world, which made their savagery all the more striking.

But more important is that serial killers are most accurately depicted in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer--that is, as scummy, rootless individuals who pick off isolated and vulnerable victims without a lot of planning. Ted Bundy's fake cast and rigged Volkswagen, drawing cute brunettes from public places--all that is not the norm and novelty is what makes "canon."

Probably the best way to think about serial killers is as predators. Not as wolves who pick off the sheep, as serial killers themselves like to think of themselves, but as hyenas who scrounge for the weakest.

And, anyway, the serial killer ship has sailed. Jeffrey Dahmer was the last "famous" killer and the public's interest in the phenomenon peaked in the early 90s. Beck is correct in saying that the archetype has become mainly a trope in fiction.

I think that America's "fascination" with serial killers is hardly different from our interest in other famous criminal cases or disasters. They are horrible, unique and, one hopes, rare.

Spotified in the Cosmos

Dan Brooks tells us that "Streaming Music Has Left Me Adrift:"

To care about obscure bands was to reject the perceived conformity of popular culture, to demand a more nuanced reading of the human experience than Amy Grant’s “Baby Baby” and therefore to assert a certain kind of life. That assertion was central to my identity as a young adult, and I found that people who shared it were more likely to agree with me on seemingly unrelated issues.

For those looking for an insight into the "autonomous self" Walker Percy discusses in Lost in the Cosmos, look no further. Brooks waxes rhapsodic about his taste in music--a little--and how that taste made him feel special--a lot.

Percy discusses how autonomous people--probably the majority of people in America--find their definitions through their choices, be they consumer or lifestyle or otherwise. Thus, a die-hard conservative participates in a Chik-Fil-A day and a hipster grows out his beard.

Brooks spells it out, while discussing the change that streaming music has brought to the music industry:

Consuming music, an act central to my being for as long as I can remember, has changed forever. Who knows how that will change me?

This is probably the most spiritually hollow, narcissistic perspective to take on the subject.

Maybe this is a better one:

My history as a cult movie buff sounds like it was contemporaneous with Brooks'. My friends and I spent a lot of time combing mom and pop video stores for rare movies, often traveling out of town, as well as ordering bootlegs from the back of Psychotronic and other zines.

One of those films was Last House on the Left, Wes Craven's first film. For a long time, it had a reputation as being one of the nastiest films of the 70s. It's still occasionally remembered for its trailer's tagline, "Keep repeating to yourself, 'It's only a movie, it's only a movie.'"

Because its director went on to become one of the most successful horror directors of all time, it is not especially obscure. But, in the early 90s, before Scream and during a real low in Craven's profile, it wasn't easy to find. When I did discover it, I was excited because I had heard about it for years.

A dozen years later but before the Hollywood remake, a much younger woman asked me, "Have you ever heard of Last House on the Left?"

I told her that I had. "I just bought it," she said.

"You bought it? Where?"

"At Target."

At Target? I couldn't believe it. Something that had been only words on a page to me for so long, something I had to keep in mind just in case I might find it, something that I'd only stumbled upon when I did find it--that something was being sold out of a bin at big-box stores across the nation.

Had something been taken from me? Not really. I still had my whole personal history with the film, from the trailer highlighted on late-night television to all the information about it that collected in my mind before seeing it to the moment I found it in the video store, with its crappy VHS box and terrible print.

I still had the experience. All my friend had was the movie, which really isn't very good and looks very dated to younger viewers, if they can get past the amateurishness.

This is what's lost in the digital age, not some aging Gen-Xer's self-image. From an individual's standpoint, the joy of discovery needs to spring from a search. We can call up Last House on the Left anytime we want to--but playing it is no different than playing Hart of Dixie on Netflix. The only experience left around digital media is the surprise of really loving the work or really hating it.

Also, think of how Crispin Glover personally tours with his film What is It? and won't release it for home viewing. Digital media strips the work of its context. Last Year in Marienbad is just a boring foreign movie that can be switched off the moment one is tired of it, while when it was released, critics believed that true cineastes had to come to terms with it. Today, it's as accessible as Turner and Hooch.

I like having so much more at my fingertips. I miss the age of discovery but I don't fool myself about how much energy I wasted in its pursuit. For every Last House on the Left I thought was...okay, there were five that bored me to tears. For every one that I truly loved, twenty that I struggled to watch, hoping in vain for one standout moment.

Then again, I didn't end the movies by finding someone to brag to, either.

The Atlantic Report: TV's Renaissance for Strong Women

Son of Brock Landers at 28 Sherman recently rolled his eyes at this season's exceptionally feminine TV schedule. Kevin O'Keefe gives us a round of cheer-and-fear with "TV's Renaissance for Strong Women Is Happening in a Surprising Place."

"Cheer-and-fear?" That's the static low-grade panic the left has to maintain in the face of triumph. We progress--yay!--but we may still regress at any moment--shiver. I discussed an example here.

The days of female movie stars retreating to cable—HBO, Showtime, FX—to find good work are coming to a close. Now, by the grace of, well, something, actresses can find plenty of exciting leading roles to play on the big four networks. What was once well-worn territory feels fresh again, a place to push boundaries. How did that happen?

It takes several paragraphs before O'Keefe reveals the big secret why women are coming to dominate network television:

But a quick look at numbers offers an obvious explanation: Women viewers dominate broadcast ratings. There are exceptions, of course, and it's hardly a bit of wisdom exclusive to the modern era, but in the past few years it’s become clear that for a majority of American households, women control the remote. They also enthrall advertisers; adults 25-54 remain the most attractive demographic, with special focus on the women that can be hard for advertisers to hit.

Oh, women are the ones watching network TV? That's all?

The Atlantic, I've come to discover, bolsters its intellectual reputation by dotting its clickbait with charts and graphs. Take a look at these, presented in the order given:

Science? You're soaking in it.

O'Keefe rolled up the sleeves of his lab coat to crunch these numbers himself. His choice of the phrase "strong roles" is puzzling--not because it's inaccurate but because he sneers at the term earlier:  "Strong Female Character—the unintentionally humorous title Netflix bestows on any television woman who stands tall at the center of her own show."

Finding that Netflix's description is probably the best one possible, O'Keefe uses it to describe roles "either be the obvious main one or a dominant force even among other leads," as well as " shows with multiple strong characters of the same gender." He does allow that "[t]his is an unscientific analysis," but I think he might have just misspelled "useless."

But numbers don't lie--women are falling behind! From 53% of the strong roles on television in 2011 to a paltry 50% today! By the end of the century, we will surely have returned to Elizabethan times and all female roles will be played by men.

The most insidious, reactionary trend is the growth of strong male roles on cable--a staggering 9% increase! And this, when only a single strong female cable role has been added. It's enough to make one stop making up arbitrary definitions and give up bean-counting in despair.

What O'Keefe finds heartening about the feminine TV landscape is that, at long last, strong female characters are allowed to be flawed. At least, flawed in the exact same way male anti-heroes are; references to emulating Walter White comes up three times.

He quotes associate professor Amanda Lotz, who says, "As a culture, we may still be a little bit squeamish about depicting women in anything less than a positive way."

That's not what Tumblr's been telling me.

Gamergate Isn't Meaningless

I suppose that if Gamergate is going to drag out this long, I might as well explain my perspective.

Gabriel Malor at Ace of Spades HQ gets it wrong:

Gamers (that is, the people who actually play the games) are grieved because game critics (that is, people who write about games for a living) and some online game discussion community administrators, do not like the same games that they do. These game writers and administrators think (or are accused of thinking, anyway) that mainstream games and gamers suffer from misogyny or racism or one of the many other -isms that dominate our modern grievance culture. There are also allegations of nepotism or corruption and generally a lot of bad behavior all around. 

The bottom line is this, however: gamers think that these game critics and community administrators are bad people who are trying to stop them from having fun. And these game critics think gamers are bad people who support misogyny or racism or whatever.

He goes on to make a point about the irrelevance of critics, a point which is irrelevant itself.

What's interesting and perhaps significant about Gamergate is that it isn't reducible to a principle or two. Zoe Quinn's sexual relationships with gaming journalists weren't matters of quid pro quo--orgasms in exchange for good reviews. Her liaison with her married boss wasn't protested in defense of traditional marriage. Her storied rendezvous with "five guys" isn't denounced because of adherence to monogamy.

The uproar is about the situation. Quinn is a type. She is a social justice warrior who has achieved her position--such as it is--because of her vocal opposition to her own industry. Rather than being an influential or prolific producer within that industry, she is an agitator, aggrandizing herself as a moral watchdog. Her status outweighs her contribution.

Video games have been a part of American life for over thirty years but the idea of a gaming community is still relatively new. The introduction of the first Playstation was the real beginning of consumers playing games as their primary form of entertainment. The concept of a game player being a "gamer" is even newer; most people that purchase video games probably don't label themselves as gamers.

What we're seeing in Gamergate is the Long March Through Institutions making a misstep. Gaming is not an institution yet. A major entertainment industry, yes, but not an institution. The community that identifies with it is still small enough to be sensitive to outsiders.

They are all the more sensitive because gaming's appeal has very little to do with meaning. It's only the lack of physical exertion that keeps gaming from being classified a sport. To most video game enthusiasts, the presence of a Zoe Quinn or Anita Sarkeesian criticizing and making demands based on the entertainment's messages are tangential. More than that, they are unwelcome.

And at the same time, Quinn also fits right into the red pill awakening. A not-especially-attractive woman, she cheated on her boyfriend with multiple men, only expressed regret once she was caught and has deflected responsibility.

Video gaming is also an immersive and time-intensive pursuit--just the entertainment for the not-very-social. The not-very-social are also those for whom the red pill is prescribed; it's them that are most susceptible to feminine manipulation.

It's not hard to imagine that a large percentage of male gamers have a Zoe Quinn in their pasts. Read Reddit's Red Pill forum or the comments on any similar website; most die-hard converts came from relationships of just the kind that Quinn's boyfriend described. His descriptions of tickle-truths and lack of accountability probably rang true to many.

The outrage of Gamergate is seeing a script play out in real time. A woman known more for attacking the industry than contributing to it is discovered to have engaged in personal and professional misconduct. She defends herself in just the way the red pill describes. The powers that be, out of cowardice or ideology, circle the wagons to protect her, just as the anti-SJW reaction describes.

But because the world of gaming is still so small, a large portion of gamers can cry out "Not in my backyard!" They've been inoculated, whether by the non-mainstream media, the red pill or just their own eyes, and can see that it is a script.

Zoe Quinn, in her actions and her position, doesn't represent an injury to the world of gaming, localized and isolatable. She represents an infection. It's the same infection that's spread all throughout Western civilization, a lack of personal accountability and an adherence to ideology over reality. Your average gamer, like the rest of us, can't change the world, but he can fight for his little corner of it.

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.

Quick Review: Maleficent

A few weeks back, I wrote about the shift in perspective our culture has taken; that is, that our narrative point-of-view is with the outcasts and the "others." The Atlantic article I cited flew to absurd heights when the writer lamented The Terminator's lack of sympathy for Skynet, the computer determined to wipe out all humans.

Maleficent--Disney's reworking of Sleeping Beauty--has the same attitude; the first three minutes makes a clear distinction between the wonderful, magical kingdom of the "Moors" (not moor-like in the least, or is there a hint of pre-Reconquista nostalgia?) and that of the horrible, all-male world of the humans. Make no mistake, they are called "humans," rather than by the name of their kingdom or whatever, and, like all humans, they wish to conquer the Moors for no good reason. The usual human bloodlust, I guess.

Adding to the outsider sympathy, Maleficent herself, when in her powerful glory, looks awfully Luciferian with her horns and enormous wings topped with claws. I suppose they had to square the circle to make a villain into a hero, but it left me saying, "Look, I don't want to become an Illuminati conspiracy theorist but you're making it really hard not to."

Aside from the asinine perspective, it really is a bad movie. It's one of those Hollywood products that was obviously chopped down to the bare minimum; things happen with no explanation, no doubt left on the cutting room floor.

Even the bad reviews praise Angelina Jolie's performance but I just don't see it.  All she did was stand around, sometimes with a small smile, sometimes with with a frown, and talk in that irritating British accent she used in Tomb Raider. She barely interacts with any other characters and it looks like she could have filmed her scenes in three days. In my opinion, she's one of the most overrated actresses around and her beauty has dried into freakishness--the Lady Gaga-style faux cheekbones don't help.

It's all too stupid to talk about. Every change to the Sleeping Beauty story is made arbitrarily just to be different or anti-human. The effects are ugly and unimpressive. The climax is the most hackneyed action-movie trope:  Maleficent is in a position to kill the evil king but she releases him. She turns her back and, like all humans, he attacks her from behind. She defends herself and he falls off the tower.

My girlfriend, who is no critic and loves the story of Sleeping Beauty, kept saying, "Why?" and concluded, "Who is this movie for?"

LA Weekly Tries to Convince Us that Tom Cruise was Railroaded

If there's someone in your life who can't understand how the media misleads, LA Weekly has offered the bunny slope of media skepticism: "How YouTube and Internet Journalism Destroyed Tom Cruise, Our Last Real Movie Star."

Writer Amy Nicholson should really have written this and then locked it in a vault for fifteen years. You see, she's writing revisionist history about events we just recently lived through and it's a ham-handed class in selective fact-picking and obsequiousness to the subject.

Her thesis is that Tom Cruise's public meltdown in 2005 was entirely fabricated, a combination of his inexperienced and less-powerful new publicist (his sister) and the rise of Internet celebrity gossip. The recurring motif is her contention that Cruise never jumped on a couch during his interview with Oprah Winfrey.

The comments on the article are excellent--immediately catching on to all the tricks Nicholson is pulling to make her meaningless point. Most importantly, he did jump on the couch, twice, but the writer would like us to believe that "jumping" means "jumping up and down." Since he only hopped onto the couch, and didn't act like a child on his parents' bed, she wants us to accept her contention that he didn't jump at all, as if he had stood on a couch in dignified, mature manner.

The story she constructs is that Cruise was placed before a thrilled audience and fed on the energy as a performer does, matching it with his own. A few of his for-the-crowd mannerisms were distilled into a video that made it look as though he were attacking her. This video, she says, is the source for the meme that he had gone crazy, which was amplified by the entirely new world of in-the-moment Internet gossip.

An example of her strain to spin the facts is in her off-hand mention of another appearance:

For two decades, Cruise had tried to keep the spotlight on his work. Now, it was fixated on him. Even the old guard — after years of chafing under his publicity restrictions, and finally freed from the need to appease the powerful [former publicist] Pat Kingsley — happily spun everything to fit the new narrative: Cruise was crazy. 

Guided by his sister's inexperienced hand, Cruise could only oblige, proposing to Katie Holmes and then debating the use of antidepressants (which Scientology opposes), specifically by a postpartum Brooke Shields, on The Today Show with Matt Lauer. 

Kingsley never would have let the Today footage air. But, of course, Kingsley wasn't there. "Afterward, I remember the PR people coming in and saying, 'Well, none of that stuff on Scientology and Brooke Shields, that's not going to be on the air,' " says Jim Bell, then executive producer of Today. "I started laughing and I said, 'That's probably going to be on a promo in about 30 minutes. It's going to be airing in a loop to get people to watch tomorrow morning.'"

Here's an alternative thesis, one that most people have already accepted:   Cruise has always been a nutball and Kingsley's tight control over his image prevented the public from seeing it. Let out of his cage, he showed the world that the intense characters he's played (and they're always intense) were a mirror of his own personality. But rather than being angered by lawerly misconduct or driven to succeed as a sports agent, his passion was for the tenets of Scientology.

Scientology was the third prong of his weird year. The Tom Cruise that appeared on the leaked internal Scientology video was exactly the same as his more public appearances, overly intense when serious, manic when happy and, as he called Matt Lauer, glib--he could speak paragraphs to any question he was asked.

What Cruise's "breakdown" indicated was not that the media was out to get him but that the real and unfiltered Tom Cruise is strange. Nicholson would have us believe that the previous lock-down on his private life was because he wanted the press to focus on his work. And while the media is ravenous when a weakness appears, the truth is that Cruise needed to be hidden away, lest his eccentricity sour the public.

Nice try, Nicholson, but you gave the whole game away.

"Modern Family" - Is It Modern Enough?

The title of this Indiewire article should tell you everything:  "Is 'Modern Family' Still Making an Impact After Five Seasons?"

Oh, is that what it's supposed to be doing?

To start, the series, as many others have in the past and will likely do so in the future, has lost some of its initial luster. The luster referred to here, of course, was originally derived from the inclusion of minorities as central characters on a network sitcom -- particularly the Colombian (played by Sofia Vergara) and, more notably, the gay couple (played by Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Eric Stonestreet) raising an adopted Asian baby. While the cast consists primarily of non-minorities, the combination of the two made for one of the most unique ensembles in television comedy. Not only that, but the first season's ratings showed that such a refreshing notion of family was in fact welcomed by audiences, with the show's ratings increasing quite well over the following two seasons. (my emphasis)

One can hear the wind whistling through the portion of writer Ziyad Saadi's brain that is devoted to forming his own thoughts. Using his logic, the most popular show on television would be an exhibit of all the flavors of ethnicity and sexual persuasion.

Modern Family is falling behind in the race to "break ground:"

[W]hile the show started out riding a tidal wave of critical and ratings success, the last two seasons have dwindled on both those fronts, which leads to the question of 'why?' To answer that, one would need to dissect the ground which "Modern Family" was bold enough to break
...
[W]ith shows such as "House of Cards," "Game of Thrones" and above all else, "Orange Is the New Black" all prominently featuring minorities and/or strong independent women, the hit ABC sitcom seems quite tame in comparison. "Black" even has a male-to-female transgender as a significant member of the ensemble and has developed the character in ways that are unprecedented.

This is the gold standard of media reporting these days:  "Are there minorities?" "Are there enough minorities?" "Are they portrayed as brilliant, sexy saints?" "Are they brilliant and sexy and saint-like enough?"

I point these out not because they should surprise anyone but because these social justice warriors have ruined cultural criticism. I like reading about the arc of a sitcom. I just don't think that Modern Family's (apparent) problems have anything to do with "breaking ground." In fact, it sounds as though the decline is because of a willingness to kowtow to those activists who have decided that the show isn't doing enough:

The writers seem to be making the attempt to mend these issues this season. In regards to the women on the show, Claire is being groomed to take over her father's business while Gloria's working class roots have been revealed and credited with justifying her reward of a more comfortable life. Even Cam and Mitchell's relationship is headed for a grand wedding in the season finale, with the dissolution of California's Prop 8 being worked into the season five premiere. But the chances of the characters' situational improvements ultimately reviving the show's image seem increasingly bleak.

Is it really that complex? A good sitcom, like a good film or any other television show, is a combination of good acting, good writing and good execution, with a sprinkle of unforeseeable magic mixed in. If it were as simple as violating norms, I Love Lucy would have ended its run with a Mestizo transgender furry as Lucy's best friend and neighbor.

Even Saadi knows that he's bullshitting:

Ultimately, it may very well be the fact that "Modern Family" no longer breaks new ground or causes a stir that proves the biggest testament to its iconic nature. A show that, five years ago, shocked viewers is now barely making them flinch. It's become increasingly apparent that people have accepted its unconventional nature and presently view it merely as "the norm."

I don't remember anyone being "shocked." If anyone noticed at all, they rolled their eyes; "Network television presenting an alternative family? That's the last thing I would have expected of Hollywood."

Incidentally, Modern Family used its "ground-breaking" status as a cover. How many shows portray their female characters as arrogant and irrational and, Heaven forbid, often even wrong?

The Philosopher's Stone Part Two: The Dimensions of a Cloud

As discussed in Part One, Esther Vilar has the markings by which we recognize feminists. Her “misogyny” can be more easily explained as envy of more romantically successful, less intelligent women. Her theory looks like a plan to turn the world upside down in the service of a single Argentinian-German writer.

And what she wants appears so minuscule compared to what she damns as the problem. While “Slut Power!” feminists want society to change so they can gain access to many men, Vilar wants a revolution so she can have a monogamous, jealous and faithful relationship with just one man.

Though I believe her arguments are weak, though I believe the whole of her vitriol is not in defense of men but in service to herself, I still recommend The Manipulated Man to nearly every man under forty.

The reason is this:  nearly every man would benefit from its perspective. TMM paints the relationship between a man and a woman as the cold exploitation of a pathetic fool. We should all spend a little time asking the question, “Am I a pathetic fool?” Especially so when it comes to women--nowhere does the male tendency towards idealization do as much personal damage.

A few might agree but I’m getting the impression that more would be puzzled at my recommendation. “Why would you tell someone to read a book based on flawed thinking?”

E-PRIME, abolishing all forms of the verb "to be," has its roots in the field of general semantics, as presented by Alfred Korzybski in his 1933 book, Science and Sanity. Korzybski pointed out the pitfalls associated with, and produced by, two usages of "to be": identity and predication. His student D. David Bourland, Jr., observed that even linguistically sensitive people do not seem able to avoid identity and predication uses of "to be" if they continue to use the verb at all. Bourland pioneered in demonstrating that one can indeed write and speak without using any form of "to be," calling this subset of the English language "E-Prime."

When Robert Anton Wilson first introduced me to E-Prime, I didn’t see its value. Everyone knows that language is a metaphor, right? I didn’t see a need to remind people that to say, “The apple is red,” is to say, “The apple absorbs the full spectrum of light and reflects only that wavelength that we agree to call ‘red.’”

But Wilson was right and I was wrong. We do need to be reminded that “the map is not the territory,” and often.

I recommend Vilar’s theory not because it is the capital-T Truth but because it is an enlightening perspective. Vilar, on the other hand, is quite sure that she has found the Philosopher’s Stone that makes all of the male/female problem comprehensible.

The philosopher's stone is a legendary substance, allegedly capable of turning inexpensive metals into gold. It was sometimes believed to be an elixir of life, useful for rejuvenation and possibly for achieving immortality. For a long time, it was the most sought-after goal in Western alchemy. In the view of spiritual alchemy, making the philosopher's stone would bring enlightenment upon the maker and conclude the Great Work.

My statement is this:  There is no Philosopher’s Stone, in any arena of human knowledge. 

E-Priming that statement, we should assume that there is no Philosopher’s Stone and that every theory that comes along should be thought of as a description and not a definition.

We see the folly of believing that we have created a definition--that we’ve pinned reality to a display board--in Vilar’s The Polygamous Sex.

Two of her assertions reveal that she hasn’t discovered the Philosopher’s Stone. The first is her analysis of biological imperatives. The second is her definition of love.

Vilar told us in TPS that humans have three drives:  to preserve one’s own life, to reproduce and to raise the offspring until they are independent.

The whole of her theory, from the first book to the last, rests on her assertion that the last two drives are entirely distinct from one another. But are they really?

Speaking biologically, one doesn’t rear offspring unless one has had sex. The mentor-protege relationship, as Vilar characterizes parenthood, is inextricably connected to sex.

I’m sure that Vilar has thousands of words available explaining why this connection is illusory, but that connection explains the development of the traditional monogamous family. It explains it more simply, too, than asserting that the family is only a female trick upon men.

Since Vilar is telling us--in so many words--that she has the Philosopher’s Stone of romantic relationships, just arguing the distinction makes her whole argument false. Truth is the absence of the false; she tells us that she has the truth.

If she had stopped writing at The Manipulated Man, that work may have become more than what it is now, which is a footnote to a footnote. If she had said, “Look at your love life from this perspective,” its value would be more obvious.

Instead, she tells the married man that he is being deceived by the one he loves, that he is a slave and, worst, that he is committing “pseudo-incest” each time he enjoys the marital bed. Not only that, she says she can prove it, as she pulls out a list of definitions.

But we have thousands of years of personal and theoretical descriptions of marriage. Our civilization (at least until the last few decades) has concluded that a monogamous marriage between a man and a woman is a net positive for everyone.

In response, Vilar waves her Philosopher’s Stone and cries that she has seen the Truth.

Vilar tells us that the reason that men commit infidelities is because their primary relationships are incestuous. Deep in their hearts, men are disgusted by this and turn to other women, seeking the pure sexual love Vilar describes.

That’s certainly one way to look at it. Our current accepted wisdom is that men are biologically driven to spread their seed far and wide because that is the best evolutionary reproductive strategy. Infidelity is natural and monogamy is unnatural.

Anonymous Conservative tweaks this theory. The urge to have sex with as many women as possible stems from an r-selected reproductive strategy. With abundant resources, the organism’s best path is to create many offspring and invest little energy raising them. The alternative is K-selection, in which organisms mate with fewer partners and devote more energy to raising offspring. This brings us back to the concept that the sex instinct and the nurturing instinct are linked.

At the very least, we can return to our original quibble with Vilar and say that, while raising offspring is completely linked to sex, the reverse is only occasionally true. The loose correlation of sex to children allows room for interpretation, but the two drives are definitely linked. Vilar looks at it and decides that they aren’t linked at all.

If our concern is to pinpoint Truth, we cannot accept Vilar's argument. Her distinction between the sexual and the nurturing drive is false. Since the rest of her argument hinges on this distinction, we must pronounce that it isn't True.

One antidote to Philosopher’s Stone thinking is the phrase, “For the sake of argument.” We accept that Vilar has severed the sex instinct with the nurturing instinct not because it is true. We accept it to see what doing so can tell us.

Vilar, however, believes that she’s found Truth, so she aims for a definition of love based on her assumptions. Love--sexual or romantic love--has been perverted into pseudo-incest by stupid and lazy women. What, then, is love when it is uncorrupted?

To explain, she relies on her ex-husband’s ontological theories. Note that she feels no need to prove his theory. We are to accept it as valid.

What I’ve gleaned is that it begins with a basic thought experiment.

Imagine a black box.

You may have imagined the box resting on a surface. If not, you may be assuming the box surrounded by air. If not air, then surrounded by nothing.

The one thing you can’t picture is the black box as its own “system,” as Vilar phrases it. If the universe stops where the box stops, it’s not a box. A box has sides; if there is no “outside the box,” there is no “inside the box.” The edges are where the box stops being and starts not-being.

The conclusion is that objects are defined by other objects. A box is not air. A box is not nothing. A box is not the surface it rests on.

Okay. We don’t know how useful that line of thinking is, but we’ll accept it. Vilar then says that the individual is no different, that a person is defined by other people.

Putting it mildly, this skips over a lot of philosophy. Vilar says, in effect, that that entity that we have called the psyche, the soul, the self, or consciousness--that entity which we have discussed for millennia--is simply an object like a black box. We can know the self only by defining it through others.

Here, even the most indulgent of readers has to take pause. Q:  If a person lives alone in a forest, does he exist? A:  Why would you think he doesn’t?

The arguments against this idea are more complex than a simple, “I think, therefore I am,” but it does not matter. Vilar simply asserts that we somehow don’t exist until we are defined by others.

What I mean to say is that it’s a little hard to swallow.

Her next leap is to assert that the best definition of the self comes from having only a single definition. Her argument is that multiple definitions create the possibility of contradiction.

This is a remarkable statement. She has been playing the ruthless logician throughout the book, but yet she places the highest value on a perspective that does not eliminate inaccuracy, but eliminates the evidence of inaccuracy. She will not allow a second definition because it may not agree with the first definition. This is like covering one’s ears to avoid hearing what someone is saying.

The PDF that Crowley linked contains commentary by an unspecified “KJ” at this point. This KJ has very little respect for Vilar’s arguments--at least in this portion of the book, because he doesn’t show up elsewhere. He pokes enough holes that I won’t waste any more words on it.

Vilar’s whole definition of love is a tangle of questionable assumptions and bizarre logic. It’s all in service of proving that love--sexual, romantic love--is monogamous, jealous and faithful. (Note--by “monogamous,” Vilar is saying that an individual has one partner over a lifetime, not that he sleeps with only one person at a time. Otherwise, it’s redundant to include “faithful.”)

Armed with the Philosopher’s Stone of reason, she believes that she has established that any relationship that doesn’t have these qualities is not love.

On the other hand, the Western tradition has concluded that monogamy is the best way to unite a man and a woman, because faithfulness manages the natural feeling of jealousy that sex partners have for one another.

In other words, that…mess above was created to prove what we’ve already believed for centuries. Yet, Vilar tells us that marriage, the monogamous institution that manages jealousy by demanding faithfulness, is a ruse to trap men.

[In fairness, some clarification:  Vilar is telling us that once we experience real love, we will automatically be monogamous because we are emotionally compelled. She is sex-positive and anti-virginity, so I assume that she believes that sexual restrictions get in the way of finding that love. That is, we won’t know that it’s love until we have sex, so take off your pants and go mix it up.

It’s actually a more restrictive concept than traditional marriage. Tradition tells us that we will be tempted to stray but we must resist. Vilar tells us the temptation is proof that the union is not real love and must be abandoned.]

How does this prove the folly of the Philosopher’s Stone? We don’t need Vilar to drag us through a brier patch of argument to get to her conclusions; we can just take the path that was created by the millions of husbands and wives before us. It’s no unique insight to conclude what most others have concluded.

When Vilar discusses our biological drives in respect to the power dynamics of romance, she is giving us the height, length and width of a cloud. But the cloud is not a rectangular box; it rises here and it stretches there. Her measurements may be true but they tell us very little that’s useful.

However, her description of a man enslaved by a woman who cares nothing for his interests, humors him enough to get what she wants, and allows him to work himself into an early grave for her benefit--that’s a useful description. She’s taken a snapshot of the cloud and drawn lines to show the dimensions. We can see more than just her assertions and we can see how her ideas fit into the whole.

Philosopher’s Stone proponents wish us to abandon everything we’ve understood and accept only their interpretation. They demand this because they believe that their stone has explained everything there is to explain.

Is it possible that someone will crack the code of romance and we will gain a complete understanding of it? Anything’s possible, I guess, but it is better to assume that the code will never be broken completely. Once a true Philosopher’s Stone comes along, we’ll deal with it then.

We should resist believing in a Philosopher’s Stone because that is the first step in believing that it has been found. In the field of relationships, we have seen one Philosopher’s Stone after another in the past couple of decades:  The Rules; Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus; He’s Just Not That Into You; Act Like a Woman,Think Like a Man. Each of these set a fire in the self-help world and each one died out because they weren’t the Final Answer.

Malcolm Gladwell has made a career out of uncovering Philosopher’s Stones. The most famous TED talks are almost always about a Philosopher’s Stone. Marxism, Objectivism, progressivism--they all say, “One formula to rule them all!”

To explain romance by way of biological imperatives, or to diagnose the poor as victims of either the wealthy or of vice--any argument like this is reductive.

Reduction is necessary. Without it, we couldn’t say, “The apple is red.” We’d have to show the apple and figure out a way to indicate the color itself. But we have to remember that, like sex is to childbirth, our reductions should be attached to reality but reality is not attached to our reductions.

The lack of a Philosopher’s Stone does not mean that we can’t know anything. What it means is that we have to accumulate descriptions.

Vilar gave us one picture of romantic relationships. Plato gave us another. So did Shakespeare. So did Love Story. So did your parents.

Vilar tells us that a single definition is best. I say that each new description brings us closer to accuracy, if even if by being completely wrong.

The Enlightenment put to rest the search the alchemical Philosopher’s Stone, only to replace it with the search for a rational new one. Our age is one that believes that all is knowable, that what is unknown now will be known soon, and that everything can be reduced to a formula.

In E-Prime:  Attempting a complete understanding produces very little value. In English:  Seeking a Philosopher's Stone is to view the world precisely as it is not.