Archive Listing
April 21, 2013 - April 14, 2013

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

NBC KNOWS WHAT IT THINKS IT KNOWS.  I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this. I'm just tired of hearing that spanking is child abuse.

Here's how it went down when I was a kid, more than 50 years ago.

My dad would tell me that the next time I did something (he was specific), I'd get a spanking. Then I would do it. My mother was a notorious snitch. But not as bad as as my sister. My dad would tell me I was going to get the promised spanking. We went into the bathroom. He sat on the toilet. He wasn't angry, just resolved. I bent over his lap. He didn't pull my pants down. He smacked me three to four times. It hurt (a lot) but it left no bruises. He was making a point. It was judicial. Sentence carried out, he was not angry; he was my father. Afterwards, we were cool. Think about it. No simmering resentment. All done. A transaction carried out,

I always knew that I deserved the spankings. He stopped administering them when he could do worse with words. Which was, even then, never about yelling, profanity, or name-calling. He expressed his disappointment. Which was far far wose than spanking.

What I'm tired of:  the term 'spanking' used as a synonym for thwacking kids on the butt out of instantaneous anger, using belts or paddles or worse on their bare buttocks, and actual beatings.That's not spanking. It's violence.

News for the idiot generation. Little boys need spankings. The kind I've described above. If they don't get them, they become slovenly, ungovernable little assholes who eventually get shot by the cops.

Sorry if that interferes with your green tea break. Truth.

As you were.

Monday, March 19, 2012

Political versus Personal Civility:

IF NOT YOU, WHO? I'm not telling anyone else what to do. I'm just asking a question. And reporting on my own emotional state. I'm fully prepared to lose friends over politics this year.

I get the feeling that a lot of other people aren't. They have liberal friends and so they avoid arguments by remaining silent or tactful or noncommital in their responses. I used to be live and let live on this point, but no longer.

I think people who voted for Obama in 2008 committed a mortal sin. They can be forgiven if they confess and make atonement. People who still defend and support Obama are actually evil. I cannot be their friend on any level, and there is no excuse -- be it ignorance, folly, or miseducation -- that can possibly make it right.

People, particularly on our side, tend to be personally generous. Yes, they have some bad ideas but I care for them and they have always cared for me about the truly important life matters, the state of our lives, children, marriages, health, and careers. I have always cared for them in the same way and I will be lesser if I default on this most intimate of human contracts.

Not along ago I did a "Little Round Top" post. I said there are times which rarely announce themselves when everything is on the line. To my mind, this presidential election year is one of those times. When the personal is subordinate to the big picture. The Civil War was one of those times. Ambrose Bierce wrote his best and most powerful stories about this rare phenomenon. Brothers killing brothers. Sons killing fathers. Why, in fact, he wrote his scorching masterpiece The Devil's Dictionary. Because he knew both the value and the danger of ideas. One could argue it made him the first American nihilist. But it was also clear that there was a level of stupidity that could earn his contempt regardless of the claims of human affection.

Where we are. Everyone knows I'm obsessed with the holocaust. So it won't be any surprise that I continually ask myself what was happening among middle-class German friendships between 1933 and 1938. "We love Gunther and Ingrid, and their kinder have played with ours for years. We know they're good people, so should we say anything when they sound so supportive of the new National Socialist regime? Should we? We don't want to offend them unnecessarily. We're still planning our vacation together come spring. Nothing really terrible can happen, can it?"

Yes. This time the intended victims are ordinary hard-working Americans who don't think they owe more to the past and the federal government than they owe themselves and their own families. What monsters. Except monsters are (supposed to be) good at fighting back. But whenever you stay silent or overlook their bile, they're turning you into this:


Little Round Tops can be personal too.

In Germany the war began in 1933. We're at war here right now. Where do you stand? When and where will you make your personal stand?

Sunday, March 18, 2012

THE DAY. Well, Urthshu asked me to review Bruce's new album, and as I thought about it, he was right. It's at least possible that someone still cares about the rock performer named Springsteen. Never mind his world-class toupee and the little vulva beardy thing under his lower lip. Isn't he a poet of the plight of Jersey, the eternal, er, carer-in-chief, about all of the losers of life's lottery in the Garden State? Didn't he mount a huge campaign tour in 2008 to deliver us all into the hands of Obama and trash everyone who had a different idea because the only wisdom on this earth is the wisdom of the blue collars who do the work while the rich parasites bleed the rest of us dry to fuel their own greed and opulent tastes? The new album is called Wrecking Ball and it just couldn't be more anthem-tastic.

Yeah, there's going to be YouTube. How could it be otherwise in this day and age? (Urthshu? Are you sure anyone really cares?)

Okay. I'll trust you're right this matters. One YouTube from the new album:


Really? The dropout motorhead from Asbury Park is now a pan-celtic poet with twinkly, plinky instruments witnessing for all oppressed humanity? Really? Or is he instead simply an exhausted plagiarist of his own youthful works?


All right. Enough of the ambiguity. Springsteen was once an exemplar of disadvantaged New Jersey youth. (Who wouldn't have existed at all without Van Morrison.) Most of his fans grew up enough to be able to afford tickets to his concerts (a considerable economic achievement). Including the current governor of the state, whose adulation of Springsteen should cause many to take a second look at his level of maturity.

But it's St. Patrick's Day, which was once a holy day, not an excuse to get drunk and careen all over the place. I'm thinking of making a holy day contribution here. The sainted Springsteen is a fake. His whole identity as a rock star was rooted in his commonness. But he ceased to be common ast the age of 21 when he appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek in the same week. Since then he's become a tycoon. Yet he's continued to pretend that he's the voice of the common man. Not a Johnny Cash voice -- I'm weak, I'm a sinner, maybe the Lord can save me from the sins I've committed in my ambition and greed. No. Springsteen has always been the impenetrable medium of lesser souls. He tells stories about losers he knows. Never, ever about himself. He's always been, well, a commentator, a politician arguing the costs of human loneliness, an actor above the fray. Why he became such a perfect sucker for political propaganda. Which is all he now he is.

And because of that, he's also a five-star hypocrite. He wants you to think that he's still wailing in pain from Freehold and Asbury Park, NJ. Fat chance. He lives in Rumson, NJ. (One of many advantages of living in NJ. You get to see them how they are. And oh so many of them are from NJ. Whitney Houston anyone?)

Exhibit I:


Exhibit II:


So he pretends that we all take care of our own. He's from New Jersey. He has blue laser lights and cunt hair on his chin. He's a rock god. But this is Camden, NJ, the part of the state we're supposed to be taking care of because "we take care of our own," right? Right?


Maybe you need another look at Rumson, where St. Bruce lives:


What is he taking care of? What is he asking all of us to take care of and why? Because it's our job and not his? You tell me. And who's the poet of the worst parts of New Jersey? I mean, the poets who don't own the blue lasers.

Come to think of it, Urthshu was wrong. There was never any need for a review of this, uh, star. Sorry.

But when you've had a great saint's day, you have this compulsion to live up to it. At least I tried.

P.S. So I didn't give you enough of this record to judge for yourselves? I'll correct that now with an additional bit of info from Laura Ingraham (who called it a truly terrible album): Bruce's daughter has a $500K jumping horse. Kewl. But on to the anthem-tastic cuts I alluded to without providing:


But there's got to be something about the USA or America or something, doesn't there? Something the governor could nominate for a new state anthem, right? Abracadabra:


Unless it's more important to be grim and sorrowful about how nobody can get ahead in a country where there's no hope but for Rumson zoning laws:


Enough. I hope so. That last mournful bit of self-indulgence put me to sleep too.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

I GOT ANOTHER T-SHIRT OUT OF IT. So it's all over now. The ESPN announcers all got to say "Hovvid" with a smirk, and the SEC champion beat the Ivy champion convincingly if not without a few moments of concern. Interestingly, the hottest three-point shooter in the game was the president of the Harvard Lampoon, and I'm pretty sure from the following Associated Press preview, Harvard wasn't the only team with genuine college students on the court [boldface added]:


In a year when the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill -- one of the nation's premiere academic universities -- is facing major penalties for academic fraud and providing undue access to professional sports agents for its middling football team,  it's refreshing to see two clean athletic programs play a clean game -- no fights, no hard fouls or other thuggery, no coaches throwing chairs on the sidelines, just, uh, basketball. Vanderbilt's team is better than Harvard's, so they won. How things ought to be.

Sport lends itself to absurdities, which is probably the best explanation of the nonsense Latin in Harvard's age-old fight song.

I know we'll see better basketball in the next days and weeks, but I enjoyed the hell out of tonight's game, even though we lost. Congratulations to Vanderbilt for winning and to both teams for getting to the Big Dance the hard way. By playing the game with honest-to-God students.

A trend that could catch on? I doubt it. But something to hope for. Best of luck to Vanderbilt against leviathan Wisconsin.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

NOTHING BUT NET. Yeah. I know. Won't happen. But think about it. Aren't you surprised nobody's mentioned it? Cowards. I used to compare his corruption to Lyndon Johnson's, but he's even worse. He's not the President of the United States. He's just the crooked mayor of hell. Endless dirty deals to his fundraisers, kneecapping the economy with failed marxist fantasies of social justice, killing the energy industry stone cold dead, selling out the Bill of Rights through his bitch at the Department of Justice, and betraying ally after ally in what we jokingly refer to as a foreign policy. "Hey, Israel. Don't bomb Iran until after the election and I've got an offer you can't refuse." (Don't think that's in the constitution somehow.)

In just three years, he's come very close to destroying the world as we know it. He's actually on record as despising the constitution he swore to defend. But the Republicans running against him are more alarmed about one another than the end of the republic. And O'Reilly is still trying to be fair, while Hannity keeps drumming up new idiots for his Great American Panel to instruct in the spelling of "s-o-c-i-a-l-i-s-t." Hotair? Still parsing the definitions that distinguish 8.3 percent unemployment from 15 percent unemployment and 41 percent approval from 49 percent approval. I mean, it's all in the weighting of the data, bro. While Obama keeps cornholing the United States like a con with a new teenage cellmate.

This guy could, and should, be impeached on a dozen charges. But nobody cares that much. The Dems hate the constitution anyway, so they certainly don't see violating it in every way possible as "high crimes and misdemeanors." The conservatives are way too busy building their New Media empires to regard this jerk as anything worse than good copy. (Ever tried to find the email addresses of top conservative bloggers? Uh, No. Forget it. They don't want to hear from you. They're too important, and they have a plane to catch.)

I'm only saying this because it's so out of the question that I forgot to mention it before. But if he were anyone but The One, we'd already be knee deep in the details of Obama's doomed defense in the Senate. Just saying.

You know what I'm saying? I mean, you know what I'm saying? (That's right. Pretend this is all NCAA tournament commentary on Talk Radio. That'll help.)

Sure you do. But the man knows his brackets, right? World going down the toilet and he's writing neatly with sharpies on whiteboards about fucking basketball. All we really need from the President of the United States. I guess.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

IT'S THE MEDIA, STUPID. Breibart's gone and that's a huge blow. His last bequest is a twofer: 1) a belated effort to vet  Barack Obama, and 2) a radical remake of his cluster of websites, including Breitbart, Breitbart TV, Big Hollywood, Big Journalism, Big Government, and Big Peace. I've held off commenting on either because I sense the forlorn among his colleagues wanted to strike hard and early against his passing. Which I understand. But it's time to share my thoughts on Big Hollywood.

I should explain, I suppose, that I was a faithful visitor to the original Big Hollywood site, which I simultaneously loved and despised. To my mind it was infinitely more important than the other Breitbart sites, which might seem counterintuitive. My reasoning has a lot to do with all those polls and man-in-the-street interviews which continually demonstrate that the electorate doesn't care about the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, or Fox News and if pressed have a hard time identifying the name of the Vice President of the United States or their own senators and congressmen.

In this context, the three other more important-sounding BIG sites were just variations on a righty blogosphere that tends to preach to the choir while the more effective propaganda issues from somewhere else. World Net Daily hasn't exactly taken the world by storm, has it? Its talent for hysteria and hyperbole have even caused it to overlap uncomfortably with the new media efforts of Alex Jones. Who should be locked up. (Kidding. Sedated is more like it.)

But Big Hollywood was a heroic attempt to unmask the multifarious ways in which the movies and television are working a political agenda every bit as concentrated in its messaging as the dead-tree media and its network and cable news vassals.

It was part of Breitbart's genius that he even conceived of it -- and conceived of it the way he did. He wanted it to be (gasp) entertaining, a source of show biz news, reviews, and gossip people might actually want to look at every day, while insistently bringing home the horrifying fact that entertainment has become an incredibly powerful tool in converting us subliminally to ideas we'd reject if we knew how coldly and calculatedly they were being packaged for our consumption.

The real attack on Christianity, for example, isn't from Washington politicians and the courts, at least not in terms of gaining mindshare. It's from popular TV shows like Glee, Law & Order (all of them), Harry's Law, and the brand new entry GCB (Good Christian Bitches.) Not to mention a whole generation of movies -- from romcom to horror splatterflick -- that equate Christian religiosity with racism, sexual oppression, and an infinite variety of psycho killers. Sorry. Have to add this too. Sitcoms. How many don't celebrate promiscuity, homosexuality, single-parent families, general debauchery, constant sexual innuendo, and a screw-you attitude to anyone who might object? But they're just comedians, right? Sure they are. But if the sum adds up to a pattern that seems suspiciously like a generalized insult to half the national population, are we allowed to notice? I think so. What Big Hollywood, I think, had in mind from the outset.

Too much to do? Of course. The Breitbart signature. He thought big. And that was also his weakness. Big Hollywood used some of the same tools that made the Huffington Post succeed, but used on our side they were far more concerning and even debilitating. He was careless about execution in both instances. Conscripting amateurs as bloggers or columnists extended the range and experiential base of the subject matter. We read the views and autobiographical accounts of actors, producers, fans, and decidedly amateur critics of both media and policy. And there was a deliberate attempt at diversity. There was no single party line everyone had to adhere to. Big Hollywood could give you two reviews of the same movie on the same day, one laudatory and one incensed by smuggled-in political content. The reader got to browse without feeling that he was locked in an airless brainwashing cell.

But the copy-editing sucked. Big time. And that's a sin I insist no right-leaning website can afford. It makes the best ideas dismissible by the citation of one badly written excerpt. It also results all too often in reviews and commentary that are nearly unreadable. A lede paragraph that has no idea where it wants to go is a turn-off that rarely propels the reader past the obligatory graphic or YouTube incentive that follows.

All in all, the typical Big Hollywood contributors were too young and unschooled, too old and out of touch, or too much Hollywood insiders to provide necessary context for their opinions. Hardly any of them were skilled as writers. (Important exceptions: Andrew Klavan and Kurt Loder.) I had the sense of a lot of slop being thrown at the wall, in hopes that some of it would stick. Even screenwriters aren't necessarily gifted at writing clear and compelling prose. They're used to waiting for someone else to clean up the final. Which no one was doing.

The real -- the huge -- story of an entertainment industry that was defying its own economic well being to play politics with the American public was present but distressingly buried in words that just didn't quite work. Why I loved it and despised it.

Now comes version 2.0, and my first impressions were all bad, to be honest.

Suddenly, the whole thing is much much BIGGER. Visually, I mean. Looking like the internet incarnation of a London tabloid gossip rag isn't necessarily progress. Worse, you can't go straight to Big Hollywood. The old address takes you to the more expressly political locus of "Breitbart." You can click on Big Hollywood from there, but everything is just as BIG and some of the videos won't run at all because they're so screen-fillingly ginormous. Never mind the fact that videos are not a substitute for writing but an adjunct or illustration.

But I waited before saying all this. I understood that the "vet Obama" mission was necessarily going to change the balance, perhaps more in the early going than later. I was suspicious of the circumstance that all the BIG headlines seemed to be leading to very short pieces of the sort that characterize the Huffington Post. Not much to say, but look at that giant font in the headline.

Today, though, I saw two promising signs. The first by a young writer named Ben Shapiro, who seems to be playing an expanded role in 2.0. He is the first I have seen to do a well researched but eminently readable summation of "Critical Race Theory." If this is how Breitbart intends to flesh out its "vetting Obama" mission, I'm on board. Read the whole thing. (otoh, since I first discovered this piece it's no longer on Big Hollywood. Moved to Big Journalism. Confusing.)

Second, Big Hollywood editor John Nolte has finally resurrected the most compelling daily feature of Big Hollywood, the one that most cleverly combines politics with highly entertaining general interest content. Read all of this too.

Still. The original Big Hollywood barely scratched the surface of the depth of political infiltration in our entertainment media. If the new version is going to subordinate entertainment to pure politics in perpetuity, this experiment and the site will ultimately fail. The new headlines seem provocative and argumentative rather than seductive. It looks like a lot more is being left on the table than before.

There is a huge opportunity to apply more than personal experience and opinion rhetoric to the media landscape. The mission should be investigative journalism interleaved with review, opinion, and anecdote. How does PBS set about exploiting popular tastes in its fundraising programming and then turn relentlessly toward leftist programming when it's time to spend all the money garnered from those $100 Andrea Bocelli and Celtic Women CDs?

What's really behind the nexus of Discovery/History/Learning/A&E/Green channel programming that not only fills our screens with endless varieties of apocalypse but repeatedly reruns 10-year-old shows whose science has since been debunked or thrown massively in doubt?

What of the new trend of ID (the Murder Channel), now being copied by Oxygen and OWN, of focusing so intently on sick families split, it seems, almost evenly between sybaritic marriages riven by debt, drugs, and infidelity, and sociopathic Christian preachers whose congregations had no idea they were succumbing to debt, drugs, and infidelity? Is this really a 50-50 proposition? Or is one group being singled out for special delighted disdain. I don't know. But I'm curious.

Is there anyone who can explain the proliferating number of awards shows in which half-educated stars feel quite at home insulting half their audience with superfluous political comments? To whom in the business of show business does this make economic sense and why? What do the producers have to say?

What of the reality shows whose (theoretical, I admit) agendas are so subtle it almost takes a paranoid imagination to discern that there's something seditious about their whole intent that's invisible even to the participants? "Platinum Weddings" so excessive that anyone watching might begin to buy into the thought of income redistribution. Or "Say Yes to the Dress," where touching, lovely, and deserving brides have a $1200 budget and pure bitches married to professional athletes or sired by daughter-whipped fatcat fathers turn down dress after dress in the $15,000 range. Or worst of all, southern anomalies like "Toddlers & Tiaras" in which it's impossible to escape the impression that mothers from Arkansas and Tennessee are out of their minds and setting up their daughters for Jon-Benet style sexual violence. Are such things conceived of truly as entertainment, or are we being belittled and laughed at for watching -- and receiving a lesson tailored expressly for our tiny intellects? Don't know, but doesn't it bear looking into?

Note that I haven't mentioned all the reality show entries in the "invitation to feel superior to the dentally challenged of the deep deep south" represented by shows like "Swamp People," "Swamp Loggers," "Call of the Wildman," and most hilariously, "My Big Fat Redneck Wedding." Well, okay. I did mention them. (People I personally would rather break bread with than Chris Matthews or Lawrence O'Donnell.)

What I haven't mentioned is BBC America. Which is pretty much an ongoing and unutterably depressing lesson in how our cultural and intellectual superiors in the Old Country no longer believe in anything at all.

Big Hollywood will keep covering movies like Avatar, Iron Lady, and Game Change. Fine. And the nakedly hypocritical condescensions of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Soledad O'Brien, and Bill Maher. All well and good. But the poison goes a lot deeper than that. It's everywhere. All the time. If you think I'm wrong, try to count the number of times in the last week you've been watching supposedly general audience fare and seen the F-Word simply silenced so the kids won't hear it. Like they haven't learned how to read lips from their parents... We're being trashed culturally as a nation. No way our children won't be foul-mouthed sophisticates if we allow them to look at any television at all. Is that what you grew up with? And is it really okay that the mavens of contemporary child-rearing don't seem to mind?

But maybe we shouldn't go there? It's not polite, is it, to mention the fact of grossly accelerating cultural coarseness in public? Especially given that so many of us fair-minded conservatives have been rigorously trained to give the benefit of the doubt to people who look down on us as much as they hate us. They're only trying to be amusing. In spite of all our reactionary qualms. Of course. They're simply the most creative among us. Or, more charitably, they know not what they do. Being comedians and all. I get it. I really do.

But please remind me again why Louis CK should get a pass...

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