An "embarrassed" Ben Affleck admitted Tuesday that he asked producers of the PBS documentary show "Finding Your Roots" to edit out the discovery that one of his distant ancestors owned slaves... He said he spoke with show host and Harvard scholar Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, and lobbied him to take out his scandalous family history. "Skip agreed with me on the slave owner but made other choices I disagreed with," Affleck wrote. "In the end, it's his show and I knew that going in. I'm proud to be his friend and proud to have participated." -- NBC News.
"I don't know how to tell you this, but... Do you know about Nathan Bedford Forrest?"
"The founder of the Klan? Wait a minute -- are you saying one of my ancestors -- was Nathan Bedford Forrest?"
"No."
"Thank God. That would have been terrible. You have no idea how much I despise that man."
"No, I'm saying that Clayton Sykes -- who wrote a book in 1962 called Nathan Bedford Forrest: The Greatest American, and who actively petitioned to get Forrest's face on Mt. Rushmore until he died in 1975 -- was your paternal grandfather."
"This cannot possibly be made public."
"I don't know why not. It isn't your fault, after all."
"Let me put it another way: I cannot possibly allow this to be made public."
"I see."
+ + +
"But my parents were decent people from Asdofel, Missouri."
"Perhaps you've heard of the Monster of Asdofel, a deranged white supremacist who over six years raped several black women in western Missouri, leaving politically charged notes behind. One of his victims was your mother, whom he took for an African-American, probably due to his astigmatism. Though it was hushed up, documentary evidence proves that you are the child of their union."
"I'm torn here. On the one hand I'm related to a monster, on the other I'm related to his victim. Hang on, let me call my agent. [calls agent.] He says the men who are about to burst through the door should seize and destroy your notes."
+ + +
"So you're saying your have evidence that every single member of my family from 1945 onwards, including my little nieces and nephews, are neo-Nazis?"
"I'm afraid so."
"There's only one course of action left for me, Gates. Prepare to -- dammit, what's wrong with this thing? Oh, I see; it's got one of those trigger locks. Well, would you accept a bribe?"
+ + +
"Your great-grandfather, it seems, was Adolph Hitler."
"Dr. Gates, please! My fans must never know! Name your price."
"All right: No more Deuce Bigelow films."
At National Review, Charles C.W. Cooke has advice for the Republican Party. Along with the usual ObamaHitler schtick, we get this:
...it should by now be obvious to conservatives that the last American Golden Age obtained not during George W. Bush’s rather disappointing tenure, but in the mid- to late- 1990s, when the Republican party ran both houses of Congress and Democrat Bill Clinton ran the executive branch...
Sure, Jeb Bush is an impressive man. But to nominate him at this moment would be to push Republicans in the wrong direction and to force them into doing something that they should really not want to do: namely, re-litigating – and perhaps even defending – the political decisions that were made between 2000 and 2008... If they are offered a choice between “Clinton” — a name that evokes peace and prosperity — and “Bush” – a name that has been rather run through the mud – [voters] will almost certainly choose the former...
So: If they remind voters of their record and their opponents' record, the GOP is in deep shit. Sounds right.
Cooke's advice is almost as funny. He says the Republicans will "need to work out what exactly it is reacting to within the country’s soul." What might that mean? From the article, a hint:
Exactly who can will hinge upon where the country finds itself by the end of the year. If by early 2016 it has become clear that America is tired of Barack Obama’s celebrity; that Hillary’s status as a permanent member of the elite class is beginning to grate; and that Washington is seen as an out-of-touch club for the rich and the famous, then the Republican party might consider borrowing a slogan from a century ago and offering the public a 1920s style “Return to Normalcy.” With his homespun tales of one-dollar sweaters, his quiet Midwestern roots, and his down-to-earth everyman appearance, Scott Walker would do well running such a campaign — as, indeed, might a John Kasich or a Rick Snyder.
Scott Walker ain't like them rich folks nohow! Lookie this sweater! That'll set the hustings aflame. Elsewhere Cooke writes, "In an ideal world, our elections would be held on paper..." I don't think they can even win the Rotisserie Presidency with material like this.
UPDATE. Commenters remind me that the notion of Scott Walker as a humble People's Friend is made extra hilarious by his recent participation in the "Koch Primary" for the financial support of the libertarian kazillionaires. Also, I see Walker has decided to outflank Bush and Rubio by going full anti-immigrant, which I guess is supposed to be part of the "Return to Normalcy" program Cooke mentions; it must be a great success because Walker's already got people like Rich Lowry whining on his behalf ("Scott Walker, Over the Target, Taking Flak").
Mathis is now my new favorite character, too bad he’s [SPOILER] fired. First of all, his inept use of Don’s line gave me my first belly laugh of the season. (His foul mouth, which Don also mentions when he fires him, is one of the tiny cracks starting the avalanche of obscenity that would be the 70s and ever after.) Second, Mathis got to something profoundly important about Don that no other male on the show has been willing to approach. (Which reminds me: Don’s supposed to be a genius but he’s nothing but glib; Ginsburg was supposed to be a genius but he was just nuts. Mathis the hack is the only “creative” on this show with any insight on actual human beings.)
Mathis gets to Don partly because he talks back to him, which is something Don never has to take from subordinates. But the lack of respect for his talent and position is nothing compared to the slap about him being nothing but handsome, and Mathis’ relay of the story that Lucky Strike scion Garner was in love with Don and wanted to jack him off. That hits Don where he lives; earlier, when Cutler called him out for his hyper-masculinity (“a bully and drunk… a football player in a suit”) it was just ridiculous, but hearing about how Don’s sexuality affects men really pisses him off. It suddenly lights up all the gay stories in the show, and also Don’s much-discussed history as a victim of sexual abuse. For a moment we and Don have to face that his behavior is compulsive, that his fetish for objectification comes from being objectified, a reaction to the real story of his past…
…which Sally brings up, come to think of it, at dinner later as a way of peeling Don off her nubile classmate. Here too both Don and we get the benefit of the insight: Sally sees the desire to please “just comes oozing out” of Don. She’s hip enough to get that, but too young to know what it comes from. She knows about the poverty (the last time she showed any admiration for her dad was when he finally shared that with her) and she knows (or says she knows) something about sex, but she doesn’t know how deep and twisted it can get. Don’s send-off is as honest as it can be and as hopelessly square as it has to be: “You’re a very beautiful girl,” he tells her – how many other girls has he told that? – “It’s up to you to be more than that.” That’s a pretty open brief. Hey, maybe she’ll join Baader-Meinhof! Or The Runaways!
The Joan-Rich Cracker story was cute, and gives more room to Christina Hendricks’ great Season 7b performance, but it’s inconsequential except as a counterpoint to Don’s alleged big question – “What do you see for the future?” – to which everyone at SCP has transparently bad, short-sighted answers. That kind of cable-zen garbage gives me the itch, but so does the hoary story of monsters of ambition reaching beyond their busy schedules to find true love. If this season ends with Joan having a baby with Rich Cracker in his penthouse, may the shade of Douglas Sirk strangle Matt Weiner with his ectoplasm.
I have to say I approve of all the kids on Mad Men behaving sort of like they’re in a Bresson movie; it really makes them seem a different species from the grown-ups. The funny thing is, Betty has always acted a little like that too. (It’s one of the reasons why she was so fearless with the East Village hippies – she regarded them as less successful child-adults.) But Betty is not really a child, and her handling of Glenn when he spills about his enlistment looks very gentle and correct till you remember she’s been emotionally manipulating him since he was a little boy and she doesn’t even have a clue that it’s fucked up to do that to minors (though maybe the psych classes will help). “Don’t tell me that” was a great preface to “you did this for me” because the thing Betty really wants is not to be told.
Sally’s understanding of Vietnam is on a par with her understanding of her father: she doesn’t know much except it stinks. How I wish we could have a Sally spin-off and follow her through the days of Johnny Rotten and Ronald Reagan.
I can't even tell if they're kidding anymore. Paula Bolyard at PJ Media:
What is it going to take for voters to turn on Hillary? I suspect it’s not going to be Benghazi, Filegate, Travelgate, Whitewater... But fear not, all is not lost. I do think there is one thing that would be guaranteed to sink Clinton in our shallow, cult-of-celebrity culture: Pictures of Hillary doing those “yoga routines” she said were in the emails she deleted from her servers.
Imagine a picture of a sweaty, haggard-looking 67-year-old Clinton in yoga pants appearing on every Facebook feed, mobile device, and news outlet in the country. It would be a devastating blow to her campaign. (Think I’m exaggerating? See: Dukakis in the tank, Nixon in the first televised debate, and Howard Dean’s Rebel Yell for other examples of campaign-ending memes.)
But this raises some questions. If you were in sole possession of the hypothetical picture of Hillary in yoga pants, would you leak it to the press and/or her opponent’s campaign? Is all fair in love and war — and campaigns?...
I just can't tell. It has some of the characteristics of irony, and it's possible the is-it-moral question is Bolyard's way of tipping us off that she's not serious. Or maybe it's only morality she's not serious about, because at the end she solicits reader input, and gets the sort you (and doubtless she) would expect ("You don't need yoga pix. The ones on the beach are just as good..").
It is difficult to escape the conclusion, uncharitable as it is, that her premise is actually, boy if we could get our hands on those yoga pictures that would be the end of Hitlery Klintoon!
Elsewhere at the same site:
For the time being I'm going to assume they're not in control of any rhetorical apparatuses, and are just free-associating ancient slurs in a kind of Tea-Party Tourette's.
UPDATE. Yeah, I know, if I go collecting lame anti-Hitlery stories we'll be here all day, but I am compelled to note this entry from William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection:
Hillary has an Elizabeth-Warren-Like Family Lore Problem Contrary to stump speeches, only one of Hillary’s grandparents was an immigrant.
Gasp! It's #Gen-ghazi! Heritage is a big deal for Jacobson: You may recall his whole ugh-how-woo-woo-woo campaign against his previous hard-on, Elizabeth Warren. During Warren's 2012 Senate race, Jacobson was constantly frothing over her claims to Native American heritage. Warren somehow overcame this brilliant strategy, but Jacobson sticks at it to this day: See his April 6, 2015 post, "Jeb Bush is more Hispanic than Elizabeth Warren is Indian." (I think he just likes to take any excuse to think and talk about her, which may be why he was telling his presumably perplexed readers last December that Warren was a shoo-in to beat Clinton for the nomination.)
Really, if you're throwing the kitchen sink 18 months before the election, what will you have left to throw next fall?
I've been saying that the essence of libertarianism is the elevation of "them that has, gets" to the level of holy gospel, and hey, here comes David Boaz of the Cato Institute to prove it. Boaz likes those check-off boxes that let you devote a few bucks of your taxes to different funds and wonders, why can't the whole thing be like that?
Why not take this one step further? Why shouldn’t taxpayers make direct decisions about how much money they want to spend on other government programs, like paying off the national debt, the war in Iraq or the National Endowment for the Arts? This would force the federal government to focus time and resources on projects citizens actually want, not just efforts that appeal to special interests.
They're all "a republic, not a democracy" until it comes to money -- and of course Boaz isn't for letting the moochers use the tax system to loot the makers (as they do now -- ask Mitt Romney!), but rather for the makers with the most bucks to decide what services will be available to the little people:
Entitlements would be the biggest problem. About 60 percent of the federal budget now goes to entitlement programs. Medicare and Medicaid make up more than 20 percent of spending, and most of that comes from general revenues. Should taxpayers be able to withhold their hard-earned dollars from such programs? In a free society, they should. So how do we handle a shortage of funding? Congress could change the spending parameters to fit what the taxpayers are willing to supply.
The more money you have, the more dollar-votes you have on this. Like it is now, in other words -- but with no need for subterfuge, because that's the difference between libertarians and conservatives: Libertarians don't feel shame, so there's no need to be sneaky about it. (h/t Brent Cox.)
I haven't said anything about the douchebags who've already declared because a.) the prospect of a Ted Cruz presidency fills me with dread, not humor; it's like, "Haw, Hitler is 30 miles outside Paris!" b.) Even if she wins 50 states the Hitlery Klintoon candidacy will never be anything but sad to me -- sad in the way Robert Downey Jr. doing one more fucking Avengers movie is sad, and of course sad for the nation, but mostly sad because there cannot possibly be anything human about it -- even if she were suddenly struck with enlightenment or the seventh degree of concentration, even if she became luminous with self-knowledge, her campaign of necessity would be this big lumbering thing that demands attention for burritos (and gets it mainly from agents of arghblargh). Plus I may have to vote for her. c.) C'mon, Rubio's not old enough to run for President!
But this Pataki announcement blows the game wide open. Wait'll the kids get a load of the Pride of Peekskill! He's lawn-order, and he knows the rent is too damn low! He's every awful thing they want without the distracting layers of marketing that make the real candidates so extra loathsome.
David Brooks will go along with body cams for cops but he won't be happy about it, because it will interfere with the citizen's naturally cozy relationship with officers of the law:
Cop-cams chip away at [privacy]. The cameras will undermine communal bonds. Putting a camera on someone is a sign that you don’t trust him, or he doesn’t trust you. When a police officer is wearing a camera, the contact between an officer and a civilian is less likely to be like intimate friendship and more likely to be oppositional and transactional.
When a traffic cop pulls him over in this brave new world, Brooks will have to fold the hundred-dollar bill more tightly before he tucks it under his license so that the camera won't pick it up.
Cop-cams will insult families. It’s worth pointing out that less than 20 percent of police calls involve felonies, and less than 1 percent of police-citizen contacts involve police use of force. Most of the time cops are mediating disputes, helping those in distress, dealing with the mentally ill or going into some home where someone is having a meltdown. When a police officer comes into your home wearing a camera, he’s trampling on the privacy that makes a home a home. He’s recording people on what could be the worst day of their lives, and inhibiting their ability to lean on the officer for care and support.
I imagine some Harry Guardino sort of tough detective crying, "Dammit, you're turning us into a bunch of babysitters!" You don't call cops for social services, you call them because you wish to expose a crime to the state -- which is pretty much the opposite of seeking privacy.
Cop-cams insult individual dignity because the embarrassing things recorded by them will inevitably get swapped around. The videos of the naked crime victim, the berserk drunk, the screaming maniac will inevitably get posted online...
Oh no, oh no come on, he can't be that --
... — as they are already.
My God, he pulled a Goldberg -- that is, he refuted his own point but didn't bother to rewrite the passage! Goldberg usually emits a cloaking fart of irrelevancies to cover for himself -- let's see what Brooks does:
Because Mad Men has such a moody house style, it was hard to recognize at first that this episode is a farce -- bitter, a little sluggish, and with some dark shadows, but with appropriately outsized comic premises. (Funnily enough I was just reading something about Kafka reading early pages of The Trial to friends and how he had trouble getting through because everyone was laughing so much.) The sad story of Diana the waitress tugs the heartstrings, but look at it from Don's perspective: He basically gives away a million dollars because he thinks this mystery woman is going to take away his pain -- and it turns out pain is what she's after. Then he discovers his furniture is missing.
Okay, so it's not A Flea in Her Ear. Maybe it's because the principals are now sufficiently comfortable (financially and dramatically) that I can't worry about them, or maybe it's the dank smell of the approaching end that's encouraging me to detach, but whatever it is I'm not inclined to take the suffering in this episode very seriously. And there is suffering, copious suffering. Even Pretty Megan, usually associated more with insufferability than suffering, has her nerves convincingly flayed; she has moved past gentle, make-believe separation into the hard reality of divorce and, worse yet, it's shoved her right back into the maw of her family, and I may be dense but I only realized when Megan's sister was blubbering about having to fly back to *Paris all by herself that she and the old lady aren't charming gallic goofs, they're horrible, self-centered monsters and it's understandable Megan would be freaked out that Don won't be around anymore to rescue her from them.
Or from scumbags like Harry Crane. It's perfect that the one thing ringing in her ears after that humiliating encounter is "I can't believe Don threw you away... you don't think he could have helped you?" -- as is made obvious by her bitterness at the lawyer's meeting (with no lawyer), and by the writers making the implicit callback to Campbell's and Sterling's bitter speeches about bitter divorced wives. It begins to seem that the writers share my feeling that no one on this show is going to learn anything.
But hey, comedy! We have Mimi Rogers as a boss dyke artiste who can also approach a problem from, as it were, the other direction, leading to some beautiful one-upgirlship between Peggy and Stan ("She tried the same thing with me -- but she didn't get as far"). That was good enough by itself, but then showing Stan at home with Elaine, showing only the tiniest glimmer of awareness that losing a power struggle wasn't the worst thing he did, was even better. Warm fandom may be a bad perspective from which to watch this show; the picture's clearer from farther away.
*UPDATE. Commenter shortstop points out that the Calvets are from Montreal. In fairness to myself, that is an easy thing to miss. sundaystyle makes a good point:
I don't care about Diana, Waitress of Death, or Pima swanning around out-butching the guys... if Weiner's going out on a note of existential despair, I hope the remaining episodes focus more on Peggy, Don, Pete, Joan, Sally, Betty and Roger. They're the characters we've been watching since the beginning.
Yeah, the more comfortable I get with this being Just a TV Show rather than a deathless work of art, the more I want to see character payoffs, too. If you share my tedious preoccupation with Mad Men, you might enjoy Matt Zoller Seitz's recap; good catch, Jeff Strabone! (But isn't it weird that Don's record library still has Martin Denny in it?)
Thanks to Chuck Gilligan I finally saw the Mountain Goats this week.
Liked it all, but this song really jumped up and grabbed my throat.
• Charles C.W. Cooke takes me to task -- rather gently, considering how abusive I've been toward him -- for my review of his column on the Walter Scott video. Let me try and return the favor. I thought that column showed him resistant to the lessons of a long and depressing trend of which Scott's killing is a part (notwithstanding Scott's is less likely to go unpunished since someone took video of it):
...I think that [Michael Graham] is confusing conviction for humility. Pace Roy Edroso, I am not at all “sure” what happened in the cases of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin. On the contrary: I have written repeatedly that I do not — and I cannot — know what happened in those instances, and that, in all likelihood, nor can a jury...
He then goes on about Blackstone and the presumption of innocence, as if my argument (and those of the others) were for a presumption of guilt in murder cases. Let me clarify, then: that is not what I'm arguing for at all. I'm arguing instead for an acknowledgement that cops (and would-be cops) sometimes treat black citizens differently from white ones, and not in a good way. This is not just the fantasy of "those among us who are convinced that the United States is an irredeemably racist nation," as Cooke described us in his original column, but a judgment based on years of bitter evidence. I'm arguing this not to begin any bogus race "conversation," nor to agitate for some quota of cop convictions. I'm arguing this because it's a plain fact that some folks seem committed to ignoring and to slurring other people for noticing, and that's one of the big reasons why, 150 years after Appomattox, this country remains totally nuts about race.
• With his latest on the death penalty, Jonah Goldberg not only keeps up with the worst-thing-ever-written pledge I made on his behalf some time ago, he actually outdoes himself. First, he argues, that Tsarnaev bastard deserves the death penalty, doesn't he, and if you don't think so, what about that cop who shot that black guy 'cause you love black guys when the cops shoot them:
Wait, before you answer that, consider Michael Slager. He’s the North Charleston, S.C., cop who shot Walter Scott in the back as he was fleeing and then allegedly lied about why he did it.
I don’t have to say he allegedly shot Scott because Slager admitted that much.
Huh, what about that, libtards? The smarter libtards take a seat and wait, and sure enough Goldberg starts pee-dancing around:
Legally, it’s harder to argue that Slager should get the death penalty if convicted. Not all murders are equal before the law. It’s unclear how much premeditation, if any, there was in this case. Presumably Slager didn’t know Scott before he pulled him over for a traffic stop.
Still, I think you could make a case for the death penalty in cases like this.
[Libtards light cigarettes, read Elizabeth Bruenig on their phones.]
The analogy that comes to mind is the wartime military.
[One libtard looks up expectantly.]
There are capital offenses for crimes other than murder because the integrity and effectiveness of the armed forces is a priority. We are not a martial society, but I could make a similar argument about police officers who murder and lie about it. Faith in the fairness of the justice system is simply indispensable to a democracy and social peace. Lack of such faith may be why Scott ran from Officer Slager.
[By now all the libtards have turned their attention to him.]
If so, his mistrust was tragically well placed.
[The sneering laughter comes but is soon drowned out by the most insidious weapon in Goldberg's flatularium, the Cloaking Fart.] Sometimes I think Goldberg is a gift from the muses.
4/6/15, 10:42 am: The gays are oppressing us Christians. 4/6/15, 2:02 pm: Buy my book. 4/6/15, 5:35 pm: The gays are oppressing us Christians 4/7/15, 12:05 am: Facebook and the gay drag queens are oppressing us Christians. 4/7/15, 5:08 am: Buy my book. 4/7/15, 12:45 pm: The gays are oppressing us Christians (and after Ross Douthat was theoretically so nice to them!). 4/7/15, 10:57 pm: I know many of you must be sick and tired by now of my posting so heavily on the gay rights vs. religious liberty question, but the gays are oppressing us Christians. 4/7/15, 11:51 pm: The sex liberals are oppressing us Christians and Muslims. 4/8/15, 8:50 am: The sex liberals are close-minded about abortionmurder, and are oppressing us Christians. 4/8/15, 11:14 pm: Buy tickets to my festival. 4/8/15, 11:45 pm: Buy my book. 4/9/15, 4:26 am: The gays are oppressing us Christians, and Jews too I bet. 4/9/15, 8:52 am: The sex liberals and the gays are oppressing us Christians but we will go Benedict and outbreed them and then they'll be sorry. 4/9/15, 10:38 am: Buy my book.
UPDATE. Thanks, commenters, for letting me know I had the wrong dates at first -- this is not speculative fiction, but American History X-for-Jesus! Also thanks, commenters, for comments -- for rahab's "TL;DReher," for Jay B's "Imagine something being shoved down one's throat repeatedly, forever..." for Ted the slacker's "50 Rods of Gay," and so much more.
NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — One day after a South Carolina police officer was arrested in the shooting death of an unarmed black man, the victim’s family said Wednesday that no charges would have been filed if not for a video of the encounter — which showed the officer firing eight shots at the man as he ran away.
“It would have never come to light. They would have swept it under the rug, like they did with many others,” Walter Scott Sr., the father of the victim, said Wednesday on NBC’s “Today” Show.
A number of journalists have been making the point that without the fortuitous video, Scott would be dismissed as another lawbreaker who got, if not quite what he deserved, then at least no more than he had a right to expect, for reasons that I don't have to tell you. But none makes that point better on purpose than Charles C.W. Cooke at National Review does by accident.
Cooke admits that "the initial witness reports appear to have been wholly incorrect" in Scott's case and, based on the footage, "Scott's death at the hands of a police officer appears to be entirely unjustified." This, he says, is "an argument for more cameras," though he doesn't say how these would be put into practice; I can't imagine he wants the gummint to use precious taxpayer money on them; maybe he foresees Burkean "little platoons" of black folk recording cops, in shifts.
But one thing, Cooke makes clear, this case doesn't mean is that white cops are sometimes overeager to shoot and kill black people -- that's just gush from "those among us who are convinced that the United States is an irredeemably racist nation." And the apposite citation, for him, is a couple of dead black guys:
All in all, this seems to be the case that we have been hearing about for a long, long while now — that much-previewed-but-never-quite-forthcoming case in which the white cop unnecessarily guns down the unarmed black man who is trying in earnest to get away. This is that case in which the 80 percent white police force takes a life from the 47 percent black city; in which the small infraction leads to the fatal consequence; in which there are no wrinkles to complicate the complaint. This, in other words, is what the shootings of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin were not.
Are you wondering why he's so sure about Brown and Martin, even though "witness reports" can be "wholly incorrect"? I'm not.
But should we doubt his libertarian bona fides? I say no, but that's because I don't think much of libertarian bona fides in the first place. Attend Matt Welch of libertarian flagship Reason: Sure, he says, the holy-rolling is a little bit much, but --
Like his father, former Libertarian Party presidential candidate and Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, Rand has never hid his religion under a bushel basket when courting libertarian voters because he doesn't have to. Arguably alone among large swaths of the American electorate, even atheist libertarians tend to respect the ways in which religious organizations and communities fill vital roles in civil society. Indeed, even as outspoken an atheist and libertarian as Penn Jillette is quite open to the ways religious groups benefit society.
He's got a point. As I've noticed before, libertarians who'll go to the mat and paint their faces blue for legal weed and raw milk suddenly get all big-tentish (or downright conservative) when the subject is abortion. (Or women's rights in general.) And we've been seeing libertarian-fundamentalist fusion lately over the sacred Constitutional right to refuse service to gay people looking for wedding cakes -- from William McGurn of the Wall Street Journal, for example, who does us the favor of explaining in his "Indiana’s Libertarian Moment" article why fundalibertarians feel as they do:
In 1964, when the Supreme Court upheld the Civil Rights Act’s requirement that hotels serve African-Americans, blacks, especially in the South, effectively had their ability to travel restricted by the possibility they couldn’t secure lodging. In contrast, no one today suggests gay couples can’t find a baker or photographer for their weddings.
If they can get you to buy this, expect them to come back in, oh, a nano-second to ask, "Hey, why do black people need this so-called Civil Rights Act anymore either? They have hotels.com!"
Some of you may conclude from this that libertarians are max-freedom except when it comes to people they don't resemble. I'm sure that's true for a lot of them, but the thing to keep in mind is this: the apparent contradictions of libertarianism disappear when you consider the true goal of its advocates is not greater personal liberty at all, but to devolve all government power to for-profit companies -- to privatize prisons, highways, and even natural resources once thought to be the birthright of all people, so that everything becomes that highest end of human effort: a revenue stream for the rich. In other words, what conservatives try to disguise about themselves, libertarians proudly own. I leave it to you whether that's a point in their favor.
(Yes, we're back toMad Men recaps. Patience, we don't have many to go.) Don Draper's arc is beginning to look like Tony Soprano's, and I don't expect a better end for him. Tony had some glimpses of a better way that he turned out unable to benefit from (I still recall him contemplating nature and being grateful for life while Paulie was breaking some guy's leg); Don gets so many messages from the great beyond that I expect William Burroughs to start talking to him, yet he doesn't seem to get anywhere either.
The flashbacks to Rachel Katz and (implicitly) Midge Daniels make sense in the same way that Don's season-6-ending whorehouse monologue made sense: Don is too intelligent not to contemplate the past (his past, anyway), but not enlightened enough to react to it in a constructive way. But that Hershey meeting flash-bang is really beginning to look like a misdirection, not to say a con. Is Don really just a charming zilch? So far in the interrupted season 7 we've seen him act slightly nicer than previously to the people he loves, but everyone else he seems puzzled by. (He reacts to Cosgrove's monologue with the same bewildered expression he gave Cosgrove's tap-dance in "The Crash.") It's getting so the sordid sequelae of his sexcapades are just another of Mad Men's guilty pleasures -- fun to see the coupling, fun also to see the regret and/or horror afterwards. As regret/horror go, Rachel's sister at shiva and the waitress really delivered. But what's any of this ever going to make Don feel except sad, and do except drink? For a guy who reads Dante at the beach, Don's not really a heavy thinker.
I realize season premieres, or half-season premieres, are mostly set-up, so there's no reason to be disappointed by the lack of significant action in this episode. The most interesting thing to me about Cosgrove is that, delicious as his vengeance is ("Shit" -- Pete Campbell), it also means he's not going to write that novel. And Peggy's drunk date is charming because she's charming, and it's nice to see this poor messed-up Draperstein's Monster relax a little, and her date isn't (or hasn't yet been revealed as) a programmatic Mad Men sexist scumbag -- unlike the McCann creeps in the Peggy-Joan meeting whose hair-raising misogyny is dialed up so high I thought it might be a dream sequence, or that Allen Funt would jump in to pull the plug. Joan's reaction to that scene -- bitterness toward Peggy, and highly unsatisfying retail therapy -- is, given what we've learned about Joan, no less depressingly expected than the Don reactions I've been complaining about. But thanks in large part to the brilliant Christina Hendricks, whose elevator scene bears watching without dialogue, I now find Joan more interesting.
One of the funniest things by two of the funniest people of all time.
• It is axiomatic that Jonah Goldberg can make anything worse, and the Indiana RFRA case is no exception. Here he shows evidence of having been crammed with some libertarian revisionism: Goldberg argues that the pre-"clarification" RFRA was not like Jim Crow because Jim Crow was really about economic oppression -- because everything is! -- and had nothing to do with anything so gauche as violent prejudice against a despised minority, and still less to do with political power:
Of course, the more infamous Jim Crow laws were aimed at barring blacks from being able to vote. But there was a pernicious logic to such efforts. Denying blacks the vote, even in states where they were the majority of citizens, guaranteed that they couldn’t overturn racist state economic regulations.
In fact, says Goldberg, Confederate businesses loved serving black people, but because a flood of emancipated black workers caused a labor shortage (forget it, he's on a roll), both blacks and black-loving shopkeepers were Jim Crowed into submission not by the Klan nor by the White Leagues, but by Big Business -- you know, the people conservatives worshiped as gods until Tim Cook said he was gay. "Ultimately," says Goldberg, "the federal government had to use just coercion to crush unjust state-government coercion," without mentioning that his own magazine was against that "just coercion" every step of the way; they affect to feel sorry about that now, and one would like to think that they'll apologize for their absurd attitude toward gays fifty years from now (if they and the nation last so long), but alas, Goldberg shows that they haven't really learned a thing:
In Indiana, the most vocal and arguably the most powerful voices against even the perception of anti-gay discrimination have come from the business community. And, one suspects, there are plenty of people in the wedding-planning industry eager for such business.
We could impose a fine on recalcitrant religious wedding photographers. But the market already does that, every time they turn away paying customers.
They still think Title II is an injustice and don't want it applied to anyone else.
• One Bob & Ray thing isn't enough: Enjoy this bit -- first four minutes of this clip from the Letterman show, but the rest is okay too -- in which "Barry Campbell" talks about his disastrous opening in the play "The Tender T-Bone."
• From the Weird Reaction file: You may have seen the fascinating story of a suitcase full of photos, receipts, and diary entries chronicling a German businessman's extra-marital affair forty-five years ago that has been revived as a gallery show. Most of us find it interesting or creepy or a spur to reflection. Ole Perfesser Instapundit, however, reacts thusly:
IT WASN’T AN AFFAIR, it was performance art. Bow down and don’t criticize, philistines!
Most of the time I think Reynolds is just putting it on for the rubes, but sometimes it seems he really is that weird mix of Babbitt and Nathan Bedford Forrest he plays on the internet.
• Speaking of the arts, I went over to Acculturated to take in the latest by Mark Judge, or Mark Gauvreau Judge or Gark Jauvreau Mudge or whatever he calls himself these days. He's sighing over a 1954 Sports Illustrated cover showing a pretty girl in a modest one-piece bathing suit largely obscured by sea spray. As you may have guessed, this inspires a meditation on how much sexier things were before sideboob.
In our culture today, pornography has excelled at titillating the masses, but is poor at capturing the soul. And no matter what our sex-drenched society tells us, sex is sexier when the soul is involved.
Every single one of the poses named above comes with a link, so Acculturated readers can decide whether they want to beat off to contemporary or vintage pin-ups -- which I guess is how some people measure cultural seriousness. Chacun à son gout is very very true...
• Still speaking of the arts, this is from a report on wingnut intellectual George Nash's speech to the Philadelphia Society last month:
“Many conservatives, of course, including many in this room, are laboring valiantly and effectively in the realm of cultural renewal,” Nash said. “But as a historian I am constrained to note that the ‘progressives’ in this country continue to predominate in the production of culture, and in the manufacture and distribution of prestige among our cultural elites. As long as this imbalance continues, the fate of post-Reagan conservatism will be problematic.”
Do remember this, dear reader: You may think of novels, plays, ballet, music, etc. as works of art that illuminate the human condition, but to the great minds of the conservative movement they are merely widgets in "the manufacture and distribution of prestige among our cultural elites." Their policies are inhuman, that is, because they don't really relate to humanity.
I'd like to forget about Indiana, but it keeps exponentiating stupidity like some kind of Moron Collider. Some jerks menaced an anti-gay-marriage pizzeria, and the brethren declared this the fault of the reporter who revealed they were anti-gay-marriage. PJ Media's Scott Ott claimed the reporter "fabricated" the story "out of nothing" (that is, she accurately reported what the pizza people said); then people started menacing the reporter.
By the way, does anyone here approve of pizza shops getting death threats? I didn't think so. I suppose if you really did, you'd have adopted the successful gamergate model and I'd be hearing how the threats were just satire. But the big story in rightwing circles is that you, me and Ted Kennedy have the pizzeria pinned down with Kalashnikovs.
"The left doesn’t care who gets hurt, so long as they get what they want," raved Ott. "Leftists use Gay people as blunt instruments to hammer only Christens," agreed Samuel Gonzalez at Right Wing News. "They don’t have the guts to go after Muslims who literally throw Homosexuals off roofs in the Middle East." (I don't normally bother to say this, but all rightblogger spellings/capitalizations are verbatim.) And of course the Daily Caller's resident drama queen Jim Treacher cranks it to eleven:
The social-justice bullies of the modern left got what they wanted. Gay marriage is legal in Indiana. But that’s not enough. Nothing will ever be enough, because they need to think of themselves as victims.
That last line must be some sort of inside joke.
...Exit question for gay-marriage enthusiasts: If you’re so sure you’re right, if your stance is so strong, why do you feel the need to destroy anybody who so much as dissents from it?
Why do I what? I don't remember calling in a death threat to the pizza parlor -- but Treacher's not talking to me or you, he's declaiming to the galleries as he plays the lead in The Tragedy of the Victims of Big Gay, and hams it way up. That's what all these guys are doing. If they can get enough people to buy their martyr act, they seem to hope, they might get them to think American Christians are actually being ground under the heel of homosexuals. It's win-whine!
The bad news, for those of us on the suddenly victorious side of the gay marriage debate, is that too many people are acting like sore winners, not merely content with the revolutionary step of removing state discrimination against same-sex couples in the legal recognition of marriage, but seeking to use state power to punish anyone who refuses to lend their business services to wedding ceremonies they find objectionable. That's not persuasion, that's force, and force tends to be the anti-persuasion among those who are on the receiving end of it.
Like Title II of the Civil Rights Act. Well, I expect they'll get rid of that soon enough. (Welch quotes Rod Dreher in support of his argument, which is just perfect.)
Some of the libertarians are getting very worked up over this Indiana thing. Makes sense; after all, the real issue behind all the cake-and-florist agitation is public accommodations as a civil rights issue and, as you may remember from Rand Paul's spirited if temporary stand against the Civil Rights Act, libertarians have never fully accepted the justice of making white people do business with black people, so making straight people do business with gay people must seem to them a gruesome flashback.*
Religious liberty is the terms of surrender the Right is requesting in the culture war. It is conservative America saying to the cultural and political elites, you have your gay marriage, your no-fault divorce, your obscene music and television, your indoctrinating public schools and your abortion-on-demand. May we please be allowed to not participate in these?
Gays, abortion, jungle music -- the injustice never stops.
But no. Tolerance isn't the goal. Religious conservatives must atone for their heretical views with acts of contrition: Bake me a cake, photograph my wedding, pay for my abortion and my contraception.
This will make a great schtick for pride parades: Big Gay puppets lumbering down Fifth Avenue hissing BAKE ME A CAAAAKE!
But for sheer entertainment value you can't beat the religious maniacs. The Anchoress claims she's been busy with some holy shit and after a brief Indiana post scuttles back to it, but in between riddles us this:
There is a staggering amount of hysteria and outrage being spewed about Indiana’s RFRA by many of the same people who — just mere weeks ago — were spewing in hysterical outrage about the nation’s growing so-called “rape culture”, and this despite disputed claims that 1 in 5 women are raped on college campuses, and a highly dubious accusation of gang rape on a college campus.
See, you and your gay friends are all liars. Rape liars!
Rape, of course, is an indisputably heinous act; because it forces a woman to engage in something she does not want to do, it must always be roundly decried and despised by all sane people.
That's kind of a strangely mild description of rape, isn't it -- "forces a woman to engage in something she does not want to do"? Makes it sound like dusting, or going to her boyfriend's office party. Eventually we see why Thee Anch portrayed it thus:
But, that being the case, what shall we make of the fact that, for the most part, the very same entities who (disputed “rape culture” claims aside) quite rightly insist that a woman should never, ever be forced to engage in acts against her will, have pivoted toward Indiana to demand that “other” people be forced to engage in acts against their wills?
Should governments, or new agencies, or pundits for that matter, really be positioning themselves over people and telling them that if they do not submit to what is demanded of them — and engage willingly — then they will be forced to take it, and like it?
This is the real War on Women: dusting, rape, and gay cakes.
Doubtless someone will say, “these two issues are not at all the same.”
Wow she's pyschic!
I’d argue that to the people being shoved down, they look exactly alike.
I’m going back to my project. Comments remain closed.
SLAM! When she comes back, watch out for the spraying hot chrism.
UPDATE. Normal comments policy is, when we delete a troll, we also delete comments in response, but I must say those comments are still pretty funny out of context, so carry on and good job all around.
UPDATE 2. * That's why Ramesh Ponnuru is so calm about the nearly-even split in public opinion over this issue. In the context of the fake story these guys have been pushing -- evil libtard homos versus Christianity -- this would be a disturbing result, since it would suggest America is divided over "religious liberty." But in view of the real goal -- which is to trim back our traditional understanding of civil rights -- it's actually an advance.
Shorter Mollie Hemingway: RFRAs are for letting Indians get their eagle feathers back and cute little kids wear their hair long, and not for the don't-wanna-serve-gays stuff for which this one's obviously tailored (and which I usuallyendorse but am keeping mum about until this whole thing blows over).
UPDATE 2. Speaking of signaling, here's neo-neocon:
I’ll also add that I wonder if the forces driving the anti-Indiana campaign would be interested in making an exemption for devout Muslims who run businesses and don’t want to be forced to be part of gay marriage ceremonies. Somehow I think they might.
'cuz you liberals luvvv gays but you luvvv Muslims more I bet. The brethren seem to think this is some sort of team sport that you win by projecting as hard as you can.
UPDATE 3:Ross Douthat is Just.. Asking... Questions!
4.) In the longer term, is there a place for anyone associated with the traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic view of sexuality in our society’s elite level institutions? Was Mozilla correct in its handling of the Brendan Eich case? Is California correct to forbid its judges from participating in the Boy Scouts? What are the implications for other institutions? To return to the academic example: Should Princeton find a way to strip Robert George of his tenure over his public stances and activities? Would a public university be justified in denying tenure to a Orthodox Jewish religious studies professor who had stated support for Orthodox Judaism’s views on marriage?...
What if a Muslim didn't like gay people, would you not like the Muslim -- oops, I see neo-neocon had already covered that; okay then,
6) Should churches that decline to bless same-sex unions have their tax-exempt status withdrawn? Note that I’m not asking if it would be politically or constitutionally possible: If it were possible, should it be done?
Also, what if Superman fought Batman on a red-sun planet? Who would win? Who would win in a fight between Bon Jovi and a blade of grass? Just asking questions, here. Finally, what if we could make everyone get gay-married because you love gay people so much? You wouldn't like it? AHA HYPOCRITE! Off to the club to celebrate a great rhetorical victory with the rest of the fuzz-chinned pipe-suckers.
UPDATE 4. Dana Houle points out that some of the wingnuttier wingnuts used to consider Mike Pence a statist trimmer. This suggests that he hopes the new law will shore up his base. It sure has worked on Rod Dreher, who wails that opposition to the law means we're in "post-Christian America" and pledges allegiance to the GOP:
Because religious liberty is the most important political issue to me, it is hard to imagine sitting out the 2016 presidential election, as I have done the past two times because I couldn’t stomach the Republican nominee. It is impossible to imagine voting Democratic in 2016, because the Democrats are actively committed to legislating contempt for traditional Christians like me...
Voting Republican is no guarantee that religious liberty would be strengthened in SCOTUS rulings in the future, but there is some hope that a GOP president would nominate justices sympathetic to religious liberty concerns. With President Hillary Clinton, or any conceivable Democrat, there is no hope at all.
UPDATE 6. Yeah, it appears "You and your fag friends are the Real Oppressors" is today's Shorter Entire Right-Wing Universe. Among others, Ben Domenesch portrays homosexuals as crafty demons who acted all needy and cuddly and then suddenly ass-raped Uncle Sam:
The notable thing about Culture War 4.0 is its consistent rejection of tolerance in favor of government enforced morality. Remember your Muad’Dib: “When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.”...
It was all well and good when tolerance was about conservatives and religious types swallowing their objections and going along with things – but now that the left is being asked to do the same thing? Forget about it.
So, I guess gay people are in charge now! At least our het concentration camps will be tastefully designed.
Song's been going through my mind for some reason. Weep, sad freaks of a nation.
• I guess 2012 was the last year I paid attention to "Human Achievement Hour," the annual chest-thump in which the Competitive Enterprise Institute says Fuck You to the World Wildlife Fund's Earth Hour by asking True Sons of Liberty to burn up as much energy as possible in celebration of the stinking shithole we've made of the earth, I mean progress. The event remains hilarious. Got some links from a CEI publicist to "Human Achievement of the Day" posts about how guitars only exist because of capitalism and so forth. My favorite is about bitcoin:
These are still very early days, and bitcoin is still thought more as a volatile store of value rather than an emergent system of property rights, but the prospects for this particular human achievement are incredibly bright, if regulators do not find a way to stifle it (by regulating people rather than the system, for example).
This puts me in mind of Hearst on the trail of The Color in Deadwood, except Hearst's psychosis was not the type that kept him in his parents' basement. Murder and dismemberment were more his thing -- the sort of activities in furtherance of capital that the CEI pencil-necks are more likely to dress up in purty language than directly perform.
• In the high-decibel world of wingnut blowhards it's tough to rise above the din, but in a column about the Bowe Bergdahl prosecution at PJ Media Michael Walsh amps it up: In addition to standard-issue slur-slinging -- "the Coward-in-Chief and his deliberate thumb in the eye to the honor of the American military," "pathetic little pansy Bergdahl," "painfully stupid Jen Psaki," aargh, blaargh -- Walsh bellows:
...it’s a rare instance of the military finally asserting itself against a rogue commander who is imperiling the nation and insulting it as he goes. Unlawful orders do not have to be obeyed, even from Fearless Leader; that’s a principle the U.S. clarified at Nuremberg.
One imagines Walsh parachuting into Fort Bragg, a cigar in one hand and a pearl-handled revolver in the other, crying PATRIOTS! NOW IS THE TIME! Or maybe not: see, everyone's a disappointment to Walsh:
John McCain and Mitt Romney should both be hanging their heads in shame. They could have defeated him, and they chose not to. But that’s America in the 21st century — it never saw a fight it wanted to finish.
Maybe Walsh can stake out a little corner of his mental ward and declare that The Real America. I'll have to read Walsh more often; I haven't seen anything like him since the heyday of Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters.
• The composer John Adams recently remarked at Avery Fisher Hall that Rush Limbaugh exercises "casual brutality toward women" -- which, really, is about as close to an incontrovertible statement as you can get -- and to National Review's Jay Nordlinger this is Hitler plus Big Brother:
To this remark, the audience responded with sustained and robust applause. In 1984, Orwell writes of the two-minute hate. The applause in Avery Fisher Hall did not last for two minutes, but it went on long enough...
You’re never supposed to analogize anything to the Nazis. That’s the rule. But sometimes I break the rule. And I believe I got a whiff — just a tiny whiff — of Nuremberg in Avery Fisher Hall tonight. Collective hatred, and self-satisfied hatred, based on damnable lies.
At The Federalist, Georgi Boorman gives us the usual rightwing schtick about ISIS (i.e., Obama's a pussy let's get our war on):
Despite Boko Haram’s purported pledge of fealty to ISIS, apparently neither organizations’ bloody rampages have reached the level of egregiousness that stirs the executive branch to crush the evil gobbling up Iraq and surrounding territories. President Obama has told us repeatedly that there will be “no boots on the ground” save for “advisers, trainers, and security personnel.” Regardless of whether the advisory missions happen to put those advisers in a combat role, the goal, apparently, is to keep us “out of another ground war.”
Whether this be on principle of non-interference or sheer ignorance of an organization that will, if unchecked, eventually threaten global stability, the result is inaction (save for a few airstrikes).
By "a few airstrikes," Boorman of course means over 1,300 as of December 2014. At The Federalist, bullshit walks and talks!
The U.S. military wears a heavy boot, but at the moment it does nothing more than cast a shadow over the growing terrorist threat.
With a prose style like that Boorman will go far in the movement. But she still has to thread the needle: something that looks like a solution to ISIS but doesn't come with blinking QUAGMIRE tags all over it. Her Big Idea: Bring back privateers!
“Privateers” were given letters of marque permitting them to capture and plunder enemy ships; an admiralty court adjudicated on the legality of the capture...
To fight war tourists like Jihad John, hire some guns! Maybe they'll be dashing, shiver-me-timbers young libertarians looking for adventure! Or Somali pirates fresh out of prison! (Probably, though, they'll be petty criminals and navy rejects with nothing left to lose.)
Some will rightly point out the potential for abuse, as there almost certainly will be, as with all social and governmental institutions. However, the U.S. government would be holding accountable a much smaller group of individuals, whose scope of operations are far more limited than the expansive U.S. military. If abuse were to be found, processes for investigation and prosecution would be in place to swiftly bring to account and deal punishment for violations, as they had in the past.
Some less rational factions will undoubtedly hail this as a crazy right-winged conspiracy to privatize the military. But Founders did not design a Constitution with powers that undermine other powers. If letters of marque were a tool of privatization, what good would it have been to include provisions, just a few lines below this, “to raise and support armies” and to “provide and maintain a Navy”?
I dunno -- the Post Office is also in the Constitution, but conservatarians want to privatize that, too. Self-evidently, their dream is to strip the federal government for parts and empower privateers to handle all its former functions. Of course, the ones who would be fighting ISIS for us would be flying no flag but the Jolly Roger, and if it should turn out that someone else is offering better pay than Uncle Sam, there's nothing to stop them from turning their guns around. That's what happens when you love the market more than your country.
This pops up in the middle of a Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke rant about how PC is intimidating professors and you liberals who think Ted Cruz looks like Joseph McCarthy are actually The Real Joseph McCarthy:
But the truth is that if Arthur Miller were writing The Crucible today he would likely be less interested in effusive senators from Texas and more interested in the more modern pathologies that the Cruzes of the world tend typically to disdain. Presumably, Miller would look at our universities and our media, at our malleable “speech codes,” our self-indulgent “safe spaces,” our preference for “narrative” over truth, and at our pathetic appeasement of what is little more than good old-fashioned illiberalism, and he would despair.
It seems never to have occurred to Cooke that if his analogy is sound, then The Crucible is already about speech codes etc. -- because it's not a news report but a work of art, which pertains to the universal, and resonates with anyone who has experienced mass hysteria and its attendant repression in whatever form. Other people know that; that's why the play is always getting revived. Audiences get the connection. Cooke might get a theater company together to alterna-stage The Crucible to look like Oleanna if he likes.
I suspect that Cooke's not interested in universals, though: What he wants is an already-famous property that's about how college students are oppressing conservatism -- or, failing that, to get people to believe that the dead author of the famous property was really a rightwinger and just didn't know it. You know, like they do with George Orwell and many others, to avoid the hard work of making (or even seriously engaging with) any art themselves.
UPDATE. Jonah Goldberg tells his colleague: You say McCarthyism like it's a bad thing.
