Critical Apprehensions & Intemperate Discourses

Kip Manley, proprietor

“Supergirl could really use some Scott Pilgrim.”

True that. Hell, we could all use a little Scott Pilgrim.

—From Project Rooftop’s recap of the best and brightest of the Draw Supergirl meme; this one’s by Chris Haley, with April Steel and Diana Nock for the assist. I’m also awfully fond of Joel Priddy’s (Supergirl, like all of us, could also use a little Hicksville), but my favorite super-girl this week at least has to be Mary Marvel in Jeff Smith’s Monster Society of Evil.

—Filed 6754 days ago to Sequentualities; Comment.

That’s one! One Galbraith! Ha ha ha!

When I heard our “torture guy” Attorney General was giving a press conference, I immediately tried to remember what those things were called, and wondered whether Gonzales would start racking them up. —I agree with Henry; this:

Let me just say one thing. I’ve overcome a lot of obstacles in my life to become attorney-general. I am here not because I [pause] give up. I am here because I learn from my mistakes, I accept responsibility, and because I’m committed to doing my job. And that is what I intend to do for the American people.

is indeed just that: a Galbraith Score of one.

—Filed 6757 days ago to Squawkbox; Comment.

Anatomy of a slur.

Astoundingly enough, Ann Coulter appears to have been a mite too subtle with the English on her invective.

Here’s what the noted bigot and plagiarist said, this weekend over at the CPAC:

I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word “faggot,” so…

The ellipsis, of course, placeholding for the enormous roar of approval from the punters. —And a number of people here at the sinistral end of the Islets of Bloggerhans have said any of a number of insightful things about the remark and its fallout, among them the irreplaceable David Neiwert:

Coulter’s mockery in this case is aimed, of course, at the “political correctness” that conservatives love to inflate as a sign of liberal hypocrisy and stupidity, and perhaps overweening authoritarianism. In Coulter’s world, calling someone a “faggot” requires rehabilitation or “reeducation.” Pity the poor schlubs, she’s telling us, who just want to call a faggot a faggot.

In the real world, of course, calling someone a faggot isn’t cause for forced rehab—though it is the kind of ugly, hateful remark that may indicate a deeper problem (such as, say, substance abuse) that does require rehab. Coulter herself may want to look into this. She can ask her pal Rush for pointers, though I don’t think he’ll be much help.

David obviously doesn’t have a boss enamored of Grey’s Anatomy, or he’d know what it was Coulter had in mind:

Grey’s Anatomy star Isaiah Washington has entered a residential treatment facility in an effort to quell the controversy surrounding his anti-gay remarks—and save his job, Life & Style has learned exclusively.

According to an insider, Isaiah, who issued an apology for his statements on Jan. 18, agreed to undergo a psychological assessment after talks with ABC executives.

[...]

“ABC has told him he must enter a program to examine why he would say such hateful words,” the insider says.

So while there’s something so-last-month declassé about Coulter’s remarks, it’s not (just) a fevre-dream of reëducation camps pulled from her festering imagination. —Now, the various nuances of apologetics and instarehab culture in a creative community running on a speed-of-light spin cycle are beyond the scope of my current level of interest, but the context is something you’ll have to keep in mind when you’re mindful of this latest low-water mark in conservative rhetoric. (A back-of-the-envelope Google comparison would seem to indicate maybe one in ten are making the link.)

Of course, it doesn’t take an appreciation of nuance or even more than the average helping of insight to figure out what’s coming next: a chorus of straight conservatives wailing how they all call each other faggot, so why can’t we, I mean what’s the deal, it’s just a word, capped by Jonah Goldberg pretending to be bewildered by how pissed off people get when he cops an old Andrew Sullivan routine: “The faggots have got to go. I love gay people but I hate faggots. I am tired of faggots. Tired, tired, tired.” —Can’t you take a fucking joke?

—Filed 6766 days ago to Squawkbox; Comment [1].

Woke up strange.

Meant to note this earlier, but what with one thing or another. —Dreamed last night (and while I’m sure I dream as much as the next fellow, I don’t often remember my dreams, so) that I was headed to Michigan to meet someone I can only assume was Lindsay Beyerstein so we could spend the next three months tooling up and down the East Coast, following Michael Bérubé on a book tour. I can only assume it was her because I’ve never actually met Lindsay Beyerstein; I have not, to my immediate recollection, even spoken with her via chat or email. But she had short blond hair and when I asked for something warm to put on (it was cold, you see, in Michigan), she gave me a jet-black hoodie.

Lindsay: I have to apologize for how strangely cold I became. The handwritten note that was slipped under the door when neither of us was looking, the one I grabbed and wouldn’t let you see? Whatever I read there made me suddenly distrust you. But just because I could read it in the dream has nothing to do with whether or not I could actually read it, and some of the questions I was starting to rather belligerently ask were really just me getting frustrated with how much of a jerk I was being and trying to figure out what was really going on. Since I wasn’t telling myself, see.

—We never did get to the East Coast, which is fine, since I’ve never met Bérubé before either, and I’d have no idea what to say to him. Maybe this is why I don’t too terribly often bother to remember my dreams.

—Filed 6815 days ago to Indulgences; Comment [5].

Tipping their hand.

Red is the boldest of all colors. It stands for charity and martyrdom, hell, love, youth, fervor, boasting, sin, and atonement. It is the most popular color, particularly with women. It is the first color of the newly born and the last seen on the deathbed. It is the color for sulfur in alchemy, strength in the Kabbalah, and the Hebrew color of God. Mohammed swore oaths by the “redness of the sky at sunset.” It symbolizes day to the American Indian, East to the Chippewa, the direction West in Tibet, and Mars ruling Aries and Scorpio in the early zodiac. It is the color of Christmas, blood, Irish setters, meat, exit signs, Saint John, Tabasco sauce, rubies, old theater seats and carpets, road flares, zeal, London buses, hot anvils (red in metals is represented by iron, the metal of war), strawberry blondes, fezes, the apocalyptic dragon, cheap whiskey, Virginia creepers, valentines, boxing gloves, the horses of Zechariah, a glowing fire, spots on the planet Jupiter, paprika, bridal torches, a child’s rubber ball, chorizo, birthmarks, and the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church. It is, nevertheless, for all its vividness, a color of great ambivalence.

—Alexander Theroux, The Primary Colors

Red state, blue state: it’s divisive bullshit, an accident of history barely six years old, it’s a goddamn eyeworm, an honest-to-god meme that won’t get out of the way, a map that warps the thing it maps. It’s magic, is what it is. All this business, George Lakoff and his frames, George Bush and his backdrops, David Brooks capitalizing random nouns in a desperate attempt to bottle that Bobo lighting once more, the hoarse, fierce shadowboxing around “surge” or “escalation” that would be grotesque if it weren’t already so weirdly disconnected—it’s all magic, groping for the emblem or rite, the utterance or name that will when written or shown or repeated often enough bring about that change in accordance with will. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t; as usual, it’s the stuff nobody’s trying to make work that works the best. Psycohistory’s still an art, not a science. (Hence: magic.)

—Digby points us to the latest effort of some apprentices to the art: Applebee’s America: How Successful Political, Business and Religious Leaders Connect with the New American Community. Written by a former Clinton strategist, a former Bush strategist, and a former national political writer with the AP, it purports to tell us:

Political commentators insist that the nation is a collection of “red states” (Republican) and “blue states” (Democrat). The reality is that America is a collection of tribes—communities of people who run in similar lifestyle circles irrespective of state, county, and precinct lines.

And there’s some stuff about Navigators (“otherwise average Americans help their family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers negotiate the swift currents of change in twenty-first-century America”) and how fundamental political decisions are made with the gut and not the head and how the authors have cracked the twenty-first century code with their “LifeTargeting” [sic] strategies, etc. etc. —But at least they’ve abandoned red-state blue-state, right? Faceted their analysis into tribes? Brought some nuance into the picture, beyond those two drastically simplified tribes, red and blue?

Yup. There’s three.

Red. Blue. And Tippers.

No. Not otherwise entertaining Second Ladies with an inexplicable mad-on against explicit pop music. People who, like, tip, from red to blue. And back. Get it? Tippers?

—If you’re curious as to how you’d rate in this 2004-level political analysis, there’s a quiz. I scored as a member of the Red tribe. (Apparently, Dr. Pepper, Audis, TV Guide, and bourbon are all more Red than Sprite, Saabs, US News & World Report, and gin.) —I’m thinking their “LifeTargeting” maybe needs to go back to the drawing board for a bit.

Now, I’m not knocking dualism. Dualism isn’t always bad; like any tool, sometimes it’s useful, sometimes it isn’t. With a book like Applebee’s America, there are, indeed, two tribes: those the authors (and the publisher) are trying to reach, and those they couldn’t care less about. A quick scan of the website makes it clear who’s us and who’s them in this particular case:

Their book takes you inside the reelection campaigns of Bush and Clinton, behind the scenes of hyper-successful megachurches, and into the boardrooms of corporations such as Applebee’s International, the world’s largest casual dining restaurant chain. You’ll also see America through the anxious eyes of ordinary people, buffeted by change and struggling to maintain control of their lives.

This isn’t political or sociological analysis. It isn’t even pop sociology. It’s an I’ve Got Some Cheese book. “Applebee’s America cracks the twenty-first century code for political, business, and religious leaders struggling to keep pace with the times,” says so right on the website. —And if you see yourself as a political, business, or religious leader in this twenty-first century, looking out on the ordinary people from behind the scenes in the boardrooms, well, they’ll gladly hand you a neatly bound stack of printed paper in exchange for your money.

—Nor am I knocking the idea of tribes, or guts. Psychology Today has a mildly interesting follow-up to the “Crazy Conservative” study of mumblety-mumble spin-cycles ago, and really, the basic idea that conservatism stems from fear and uncertainty, that liberalism and tolerance are best nurtured by stability and confidence, these are hardly controversial ideas, when you stop and think about it. (In the terms I’ve chosen, yes. Hush.) —For those who want something boiled a wee bit harder, there’s the work of Mark Landau and Sheldon Solomon, on page 3, which gets interesting about here:

As a follow-up, Solomon primed one group of subjects to think about death, a state of mind called “mortality salience.” A second group was primed to think about 9/11. And a third was induced to think about pain—something unpleasant but non-deadly. When people were in a benign state of mind, they tended to oppose Bush and his policies in Iraq. But after thinking about either death or 9/11, they tended to favor him. Such findings were further corroborated by Cornell sociologist Robert Willer, who found that whenever the color-coded terror alert level was raised, support for Bush increased significantly, not only on domestic security but also in unrelated domains, such as the economy.

Old hat, yes, to anyone who’s been paying any attention at all, but how many of us really do? —You have to turn to page 5 for the punchline.

If we are so suggestible that thoughts of death make us uncomfortable defaming the American flag and cause us to sit farther away from foreigners, is there any way we can overcome our easily manipulated fears and become the informed and rational thinkers democracy demands?

To test this, Solomon and his colleagues prompted two groups to think about death and then give opinions about a pro-American author and an anti-American one. As expected, the group that thought about death was more pro-American than the other. But the second time, one group was asked to make gut-level decisions about the two authors, while the other group was asked to consider carefully and be as rational as possible. The results were astonishing. In the rational group, the effects of mortality salience were entirely eliminated. Asking people to be rational was enough to neutralize the effects of reminders of death. Preliminary research shows that reminding people that as human beings, the things we have in common eclipse our differences—what psychologists call a “common humanity prime”—has the same effect.

Ask us to consider carefully. Remind us of the things we have in common. It’s apparently that simple. Which doesn’t mean it’s easy. And any book that was actually about how to lead and build and make the most would talk about how to do that, and how to keep on doing that.

Anything else is magic, and as any real magician will tell you, magic’s a great way to make some money—but it’s a lousy way to chop wood and carry water.

Blue is a mysterious color, hue of illness and nobility, the rarest color in nature. It is the color of ambiguous depth, of the heavens and of the abyss at once; blue is the color of the shadow side, the tint of the marvelous and the inexplicable, of desire, of knowledge, of the blue movie, of blue talk, of raw meat and rare steak, of melancholy and the unexpected (once in a blue moon, out of the blue). It is the color of anode plates, royalty at Rome, smoke, distant hills, postmarks, Georgian silver, thin milk, and hardened steel; of veins seen through skin and notices of dismissal in the American railroad business. Brimstone burns blue, and a blue candle flame is said to indicate the presence of ghosts. The blue-black sky of Vincent van Gogh’s 1890 Crows Flying over a Cornfield seems to express the painter’s doom. But, according to Grace Mirabella, editor of Mirabella, a blue cover used on a magazine always guarantees increased sales at the newsstand. “It is America’s favorite color,” she says.

—Alexander Theroux, The Primary Colors

—Filed 6821 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment [1].

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