Satire is Dead

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Satire is DeadI’ve shut off comments here for a number of reasons, the most important being that there just isn’t a critical mass of readers. The only articles here that generate a lot of comments are those on Kory Stamper, which probably speaks to the fact that the writing here is too eclectic. But while I did accept comments, I accepted them all and deleted the spam.

Brad DeLong posted an article by Owen Thomas about limiting commenting to “experts.” I find the idea offensive in a number of ways, but mostly I just wonder if such people realize that their readership would fall through the floor if they did so.

A commenter, Cawley, wrote:

Speaking as someone who is neither an expert or particularly well informed or well reasoned, it strikes me that your comment threads seem to be populated by the expert and the merely well informed and well reasoned to a remarkable degree. And, although I’ve had a couple (admittedly snarky and potentially ad hominem) comments moderated out, you seem to accomplish this with a fairly liberal moderation policy. (After all, I get through it regularly.)

I could not help myself. I replied to the comment:

That should be “nor,” you dolt! Stop embarrassing yourself.

:) <== Satire is dead.

And what did DeLong do? He proved my point by refusing my comment. What a dolt! He should stop embarrassing himself.

Update

Comments are back on, but I am moderating them.

Rats Are Great Pets

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Pet RatWhen I was in graduate school, I watched the movie The Abyss with three of my poet friends: Rebecca Davis, Jim Haining, and Gerald Burns. For what are probably obvious reasons, the character Hippy reminded them of me. Hippy is the guy with the rat.

I couldn’t find a really good scene from the movie—one that featured Hippy’s rat in a good way. There are a number. In particular, there is a scene where Hippy saves his rat (who is never given a name) by sealing her in a ziploc bag. Here she is being tortured by Ensign Monk:

As a result of The Abyss, my friends held a bake sale and raised the two dollars necessary to buy me a pet rat. This was not a terribly welcome gift. For one thing, I spent much more on food for my new pet the first week than they had on buying him.

But things turned out well. I had no place to put him, so he lived the first couple of weeks in my jacket sleeve. This included an airplane ride from Portland to San Francisco and back. (They didn’t check you before getting on a plane in those days.) At that time, I was crazy for the Coen Brothers’ film Barton Fink, and so I named my rat Barton.

The thing that surprised me about Barton was how he was nothing like a hamster. When I was young, many of my friends had these vicious rodents. They were not social and as likely to bite you as anything. Barton, on the other hand, was social, curious, and never bit. He was also very clean. And most of all: he ate with his hands; that was just too cute.

What I have since learned is that Barton was in no way unusual. Rats are great pets: much better than birds and certainly as good as cats and dogs. What’s more, they make great first pets.[1]

[1] People who buy rats to feed to reptiles? They are sick. Feeding a fellow mammal to a reptile is like feeding a fellow human to a bear. I know that snakes and bears have to eat, but we shouldn’t directly facilitate them in this way. It is wrong. Really.

Conservative Arrogance and Willful Ignorance

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I’ve talked before about David Harvey’s excellent Marxist critique of our current economic crisis. HowTheWorldWorks presented a response video titled Crisis of Capitalism, The Critique. It is offensive in its ignorance or disingenuousness. Noscman1 then presented a response to that video titled “The Critique of the Crisis of Capitalism Critique by HowTheWorldWorks.” It is rather good and provides most of what you need to know about the HowTheWorldWorks video [Sadly, it is no longer available. -FM]

The main argument in the HowTheWorldWorks video is: Marxism bad; capitalism good. At least 50% of what he says is simply, “Well everyone agrees this is just wrong.” As noscman1 points out, it’s just all the people committed to HowTheWorldWorks’ ideology who believe that. If you are going to attack an argument, you really need to argue and not dismiss out of hand the argument.

There is one major point that noscman1 misses. HowTheWorldWorks contends that wages in the United States have increased substantially since 1980. Noscman1 counters this by saying that although wages have increased in the United States, they have not worldwide. This is not true. The problem with HowTheWorldWorks’ claim is first that these wages he presents are not in inflation adjusted dollars. More important, however, is that the wages given are averages. We all know that over the last 30 years there have been huge increases in total wealth. The point that those on the left make is that all those increases have gone to the wealthy. The middle and lower classes have seen very small (and even negative) wage growth.

Conservatism has weathered this financial crisis with a combination of arrogance and willful ignorance.

Pee on Me

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Tinkle on meYesterday, I was talking to Andrea and the subject of trickle down economics came up. I said that it should really be called “tinkle down economics” because it is all about urinating on the poor. She countered with something that I don’t even like to think about, so I certainly won’t repeat it here. (She was having a bad day.)

I thought that phrase was pretty clever, but like anything clever I come up with, I was sure it wasn’t original. So I performed an internet search, and it turns out to be a fairly uncommon turn of phrase. But Jim Hightower beat me to the punch. (That’s not bad; I don’t mind following in the footsteps of someone as wonderful as Hightower.) Last tax day, Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher of The Nation Magazine, wrote about this in an article title End ‘Tinkle Down’ Economics.

For thirty years, we’ve been treated to the big whopper that cutting taxes on the rich creates jobs. Let’s get real. Trickle-down—or, as my good friend Jim Hightower likes to call it, tinkle-down economics—hasn’t worked. Case closed. After George W. cut taxes for his rich pals, far fewer jobs were created than after President Bill Clinton raised them in the 1990s.

Then in December, the Obama-GOP deal extended the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy at a two-year cost of about $70 billion a year. Now Congress is making $40 billion in painful budget cuts this year. Meanwhile, President Obama, Representative Paul Ryan and others are battling over budgets and tax plans for the next decade and beyond. For the most part, what’s been missing from these suffocatingly narrow discussions is an easy source of income: taxing investments like ordinary income.

The folks over at Responsible Wealth believe not only that the Bush tax cuts on upper-income folks should be ended but also that money made from money (i.e., capital gains and dividends) should be taxed like money made from work, not at the preferential 15 percent rate. They have a simple calculator that calculates your tax savings using just three numbers from your tax form (or from your head), and an interactive graph with videos of people talking about their taxes. It’s worth checking out at responsiblewealth.org.

Taxing capital gains and dividends at regular income rates would save $84.2 billion in 2011 alone, twice the amount we’re cutting from this year’s budget.

Don’t let the rich pee down on me.

“‘Cause you’re just like Hillary”

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Game ChangeLet’s suppose that I didn’t have HBO, but really wanted to see Game Change. I know I can’t get an online subscription to HBO, because I’ve tried. And I don’t have a TV. That would leave me with two options: find an illegal copy online or go visit a friend who has HBO. Let’s just assume I went to visit a friend.

The film is really good; in its way as good as Primary Colors. But unlike Primary Colors, I will never watch Game Change again; it’s just too painful. The first half of the film made me really sympathetic toward Sarah Palin. I had forgotten that before running for Vice-President, she had only just started as governor of a small state, whose only real experience was as mayor of a place too small to comfortably call a town. And she isn’t that smart. The film does an excellent job of showing just how out of her depth she was. After about an hour, it really does look as though she is going to have a nervous break down. But she rallies and turns herself into something much worse.

The first we see of this is after Palin’s catastrophic interview with Katie Couric. She is on her cellphone, raging at her advisor, Nicolle Wallace, saying, “Now I understand what Hillary meant when she said she had to find her own voice.” Wallace pauses. “Yeah,” she says. “‘Cause you’re just like Hillary.”

It is only after the debate that Palin completes her metamorphosis into the rogue who ate the campaign. It is hard to say for sure, but the film indicates that she believed that she had done so well in the debate[1] because she had done things her way and not by listening to her advisors. From then on, she is uncontrollable. The high point of the movie comes on election night when Palin wants to give a concession speech. Steve Schmidt, McCain’s senior campaign strategist, has been itching for a fight with Palin ever since Nicolle Wallace bailed on her after the “Hillary” speech. He tells her angrily:

Governor, this country has just elected the first African American President in the history of its existence. And it is the concession speech that will legitimize his secession as Commander in Chief. It is a serious and solemn occasion, and John McCain, and only John McCain, will be giving this sacred speech. This is how it has been done in every Presidential election since the dawn of the Republic. And you, Sarah Palin, will not change the importance of this proud American tradition.

From a technical standpoint, the film is professionally done. Everyone involved helped to create a really well told story. Talk of Emmy Awards seem a little much, even though the film will doubtless garner some. The one thing that stood out to me was the special effects that allowed Julianne Moore[2] as Sarah Palin to debate the real Joe Biden.

If you have a “friend” with HBO, I highly recommend watching this film.

[1] My recollection is that she did not do well at the debate. Expectations for Palin were by that point so low that all she had to do was show up and not drool. The main thing I remember is that she refused to answer the questions and just said things from her speeches. And no one countered her, because, you know: she wasn’t drooling.

[2] Here is Julianne Moore in Neil Jordan’s filmed version of Not I in Beckett on Film:

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Dehumanizing Iranians and Jews

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Meir DaganOn 60 Minutes tonight, Diane Sawyer interviewed Meir Dagan, former Director of the Mossad. The reason for the interview is that Dagan believes it would be a mistake for Israel (or the United States) to attack Iran regarding its alleged nuclear weapons program. At the beginning of the interview, Dagan stated that he believes the Iranians are rational. “Really?!” Sawyer responded, as though he had just told her he had been anally probed by space aliens from Alpha Centauri.

This is a common belief in the United States: the Iranians are different from other countries; they are insane. The fact that we have heard the same thing many times before (most recently Libya and Iraq and North Korea), only to discover: my God! They’re rational actors; it’s just that they have different goals than we have for them.

Watching the consistently terrific Up With Chris Hayes today, I was struck by a comment that Rula Jebreal made. Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi had said that the Iranians were not rational actors. Jebreal countered this, but went further. She pointed out that for hundreds of years, this is exactly what people have been saying about Jews. The fascists, for example, claimed that the Jews were not like the rest of Europeans because they were all part of some worldwide network of Jews. Even in the United States, people have put down Jews for being more loyal to Israel than the United States.

That was a shocking observation that should send a chill down the spin of all those who want to bomb Iran.

Moe’s Waiting for THE Man

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Moe TuckerThere was one really important band in the 1960s: The Velvet Underground. Sure, there were other great bands like The Beatles at times and The Mothers of Invention for the first three albums. And there are lots of other bands of that period that I still enjoy. Today, I would rather listen to Creedence Clearwater Revival than any other band of that time. But none of these bands were as relevant as The Velvet Underground. My first listen to The Velvet Underground & Nico was transcendent. As Mozart says, ironically, in Amadeus, “I never knew music like that was possible.”

Without a doubt, the greatest song The Velvets ever did was I’m Waiting for my Man. It describes the experience of scoring heroin in New York City in the middle 1960s. And it does it with no sentimentality or romance. It is rare in its power and honesty.

Strangely, the song is listed on the album as I’m Waiting for the Man. Many people use this title to this day. This is madness, of course; “the man” is the authorities—the ones who are going to kill your buzz, not the one who is going to get it going.

The drummer for The Velvet Underground was Maureen “Moe” Tucker. She isn’t very good but then, no one in the band is. Even the supposedly classically trained John Cale sounds like he’s struggling (perhaps he was high). But like everyone in the band, I’ve always liked her, and I will always honor her for bringing me so much joy. But…

I looked her up on Wikipedia today, and found that she has been a big Tea Party supporter. So what? She’s old. A lot of people lose their minds when they’re old. And old hippies have a special problem, being anti-authoritarian; they often confuse who is really on their side. But I was struck by one thing she told the Riverfront Times, “To be honest, I never paid attention to what the hell was going on. My always voting Democrat was the result of that. My philosophy was and is all politicians are liars, bums and cheats.”

This sentiment is very common. But it is very common almost exclusively on the right—among Republicans. My question is: if all politicians are liars, bums, and cheats, why is it you always vote for the party with the worst liars, bums, and cheats?

Moe also said that she was “furious about the way we’re being led towards socialism.” (She is 67 years old; I have little doubt she is on Social Security.) This makes me wonder if she didn’t have a different idea about the song all along. Maybe she thought is was the man. It seems unlikely, though; she almost certainly was doing heroin with the boys way back then.

Update (18 August 2012 1:06 pm)

I’ve decided to disable comments on this article. It isn’t because people keep yelling at me. The problem is that I think most people who comment skim through the article and then yell at me. I am very willing to interact with people on any subject at all. Slean, for example, disagreed but had a reasonable exchange with me. Pretty much all of the others are people who can brook not even the slightest criticism of a band that I too love or people who don’t like my politics but who can’t engage with me about them. So I’m just not interested any more. However, people who think I’m a parasite can send me email. Given that they will no longer be anonymous, I don’t expect to get any. (I will, of course, use stupid and ignorant email messages as fodder for articles that will be read by thousands of people.)

Image licensed via Fair Use.

Jeopardy!

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Jeopardy!It is hard for me to watch Jeopardy![1] The problem is that I’m pretty good at it. The number of answers I can easily spit out would put me above the average player, and the number of answers that are on the tip of my tongue would likely put me among the best.

Of course, Jeopardy! is not exactly a hard game. Final Jeopardy tonight was something like, “The back-to-back Tony award winning musicals in 1987 and 1988 that were set in Paris, France.” I had no idea. But then I thought, “What musicals have there been recently that took place in Paris?” Immediately, one of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s tuneless musicals came to mind: The Phantom of the Opera. But that’s all I could think of. For a second. And then, of course: Les Misérables.

So I spend just about every show thinking, “I should really try out for this show.” I can and do even make the case. I work well under pressure and in front of a crowd. I would probably do a lot better on the show than I do at home.

But finally sense comes to me: “Are you fucking crazy?!” The truth is that I would almost certainly not win if I went on the show. That means I would get, at most, $2000 and a lifetime’s supply of Rice-A-Roni. But even if I did win, it would be something between $10,000 (the winner tonight won $9,201) and $25,000. Is that really acceptable compensation for all the money I would be making for Sony Pictures Television?

What’s more, is that enough money to compensate for the potential that I would humiliate myself? All my family, and my more foolish friends, think that I’m smart. At this point, it is about all I’ve got. Ten grand is not enough to destroy their (And my!) illusions on this matter.

[1] My friend Mark Neville used to live with his grandmother who had dementia. She really liked Jeopardy!. In order to occupy her in as painless a manner as possible, he recorded 6 hours of Jeopardy! and showed her the tape every day. She couldn’t remember the day before, so she was perfectly happy. Although I thought that Mark was brilliant, I also thought there was something very wrong with what he was doing. I still can’t say what.

A Late Valentine

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Haunt of Fear No. 12When I was a kid, I thought comics sucked. The only mainstream comic I ever read was Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth. It was written and drawn by Jack Kirby. But it definitely wasn’t the art I liked. Kirby is a really important comic book artist. He more or less created Marvel Comics as we now know it. And his style was totally new: extreme perspective implying lots of motion. But it was Kirby the storyteller that I liked. (Stan Lee is overrated.)

What I liked about Kamandi is that it is a post-apocalyptic story about a kid on his own. The stories were interesting, unlike the stupid stories about Spiderman and the Fantastic Four. I’m just not into superheroes. But something like Kamandi, though rare, was interesting.

Then in 1971, East Coast Comix started publishing reprints of the EC Comics from the 1950s. They focused on the horror comics—Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and The Haunt of Fear—but published other things like their western and war titles. I was in love!

To start, these comics were really well drawn by people like Jack Davis and Ghastly (Graham Ingels). Davis is (still alive at 87) just great, but Ghastly: he was, well, ghastly. When you read comics he drew, you try not to touch the pages for fear the ink will come off. No one could draw someone’s heart being ripped out of their chest like Ghastly!

What was most important about all the EC comics was how well they were written. Unlike superhero comics, you didn’t know how they were going to end. Sure, EC had its cliches. In particular, they loved revenge stories—especially in the horror titles. I remember one from Haunt of Fear No. 12 (This is probably not exactly right—I haven’t read it for 30 years!):

There is a nice old widower garbage man. During his work, he grabs broken toys and such. Then he repairs them and gives them to the local children, who understandably love him. Two evil real estate types (think: Mitt Romney) want his house for some development deal they are cooking up. But the old man refuses to sell. So the evil duo go about setting the town against him. They spread rumors that he is a terrible person and that he lives in filth. On valentines day, they get all the people to send him vicious cards. The old man disappears. Finally, the authorities break into his house and find that the old man has hanged himself, but they are surprised to see what a nice tidy place he has. A year goes by and the old (dead) man claws his way out of his coffin. He finds the younger of the evil men and kills him. He then sends the man’s heart to the other as a valentine.

Great right? At least for a ten-year-old.

Maybe the stories weren’t so great. There’s no doubt they were much better than all the other comics of the time. But I suspect they were great. William Gaines and Al Feldstein (still alive at 86) pulled stories from a lot of great sources. I first read H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, and Oscar Wilde in the pages of EC Comics.

What’s more, EC Comics introduced me to a whole world of comic books that were more than the popular tripe of the day: from Bernie Wrightson[1] and Vaughn Bodē[2] at that time to so many talented artists today. Just the same, I wish comic books were not called “graphic novels” and that they weren’t sold in Barnes & Nobel.

Here is the story of EC Comics, a video made for the Horror Hall Of Fame awarding publisher William Gaines:

[1] Some of Bernie Wrightson’s work:

Bernie Wrightson

[2] Some of Vaughn Bodē’s work:

Vaughn Bodē Schizophrenia

$57,000 Per Day

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According to Think Progress, Mitt Romney’s wife Ann, told Fox News, “We can be poor in spirit, and I don’t even consider myself wealthy, which is an interesting thing, it can be here today and gone tomorrow.” The couple’s total income last year was $20.9 million dollars (they have a total wealth of about a quarter billion). This is over $57,000 per day. It’s a miracle they’re getting by.