Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

by Jillian Butler, Ampersandology


NOOOOO!

Rahm, don't cry! Please don't cry! IF YOU CRY IMA CRY!

Video via Talking Points Memo. 

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Downfall of the House of Rahm

by Jillian Butler, Ampersandology

The Daily Beast reports Obama’s chief of staff may leave any day now. 


Say it ain't so, Rahm! How can I pretend the Obama White House is on The West Wing if you, the integral Josh Lyman-lite, leave the narrative?!?

Josh Lyman would never desert his troops in the thick of the battle! What about what Leo said, Mr. Lyman?



Won't someone think of the children? And by children, I mean my personal amusement.

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Sorkin vs. Sorkin: The West Wing and The American President

by Jillian Butler, Ampersandology

In the pantheon of great American films, The American President might place. You know, if Network was sick that day and took all its friends just out of spite (it's something Network would do, we all know that). But it's a pretty good way to spend a Sunday afternoon: a smart, semi-political romantic comedy that at least pretends it's aiming itself at adults. The idea is simple: Andrew Shepard (played by Michael Douglas) is the President, and a widower of three years, who meets and begins to date a lobbyist (Annette Bening, aka the legs that made Warren Beatty stop running). In turn, they have to deal with the vicious media onslaught who are only too happy to speculate on the effect this development has on the family values of the nation en masse. 


Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin was still a strugging playwright and script doctor when he penned The American President, working under contract to Castle Rock Entertainment. It was his last script for the studio and, in a move that surprises no one familar with Sorkian dialogue, was butchered down to a reasonable running time from an initial 385 page draft. It was a coup for the then-unproven Sorkin, a critical and commercial success that likely made it easier for networks to swallow his subsequent networks pitches. 


So it's a success that stands on its own legs. But having watched the film very recently, I can't help but see the entire movie as training ground for his magnum opus, television series The West Wing. For those not familiar with the series, first of all, what's wrong with you? Go here, I'll wait.


And second: the first four seasons are a masterwork of political opera, with very few missteps; the last three, while shaking from withdrawal pangs from Sorkin's departure, is still generally very strong when placed near its competition (such as the 2006 winner of the Nielsen ratings, Desperate Housewives). It too follows the presidency of one man: Josiah (Jed) Bartlet. But the two Sorkin projects share more than a screenwriter and a couple of set pieces; I'm pretty sure if movies had family, they'd at least be cousins. Identical cooooousins. 

*

The first thing that I've noticed is that Aaron Sorkin likes his friends. He likes to give them work. I don't blame him for this; Hollywood does seem like the kind of place when if you possibly can, it seems wise to surround yourself with people you trust. It also has a long tradition in Tinseltown, with the Apatow gang rotating comedic duty these days, the Brat Pack bascially sopping up all viable roles for young people in the 80s...even as far back as Scorsese and De Niro in the 70s or Hitchcock and his famous Blondes. 


But Sorkin likes to take this to a new, adorably extreme level. In fact, if you look at the IMDb page for The American President at the right angle, it reads more like a pre-pre-pre-audition reel for The West Wing. Here are but a few: 

Aw, look, it's Dr. Nancy McNally, National Security Advisor to President Bartlet! But..why does she have that awful nineties hairdo? And why is she doing CJ's job? I'm so confused.

Hey, Martin Sheen got a promotion! He goes from Chief of Staff in 1995 to President in under a decade! You must admit, that's impressive. Also, his taste in ties has vastly improved! Way to be a winner, champ.


It doesn't end there;  Nina Siemaszko (Ellie Bartlet) and Joshua Malina (Will Bailey) also appear. And take it from me: it's incredibly confusing to see President Bartlett pretend to not be President and call someone else 'sir.'


Michael J. Fox's unbalanced but passionate Lewis Rothschild  is but a pale foreshadowing of the unrelenting wunderkind Josh Lyman. Oh and Sorkin? Don't think I didn't notice the casual name-drop of a Senator Stackhouse, whose namesake would later be used for the eponymous senator in my favourite episode, season two's "The Stackhouse Filibuster." As far as I'm concerned, anything that sends me back to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is a good thing in my books.

*

I'm not really surprised by any of these staff overlaps; it also occurs, in smaller doses, on Sorkin's other projects (Sports Night and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, are your ears burning?). It may seem like I'm treating this overlap as a bad thing...a kind of creative cherry-picking that Sorkin falls back on rather than brainstorm new ideas.

But it's just the opposite: it makes me happier than ever that Sorkin got the opportunity to expand on the themes he could only briefly touch on in a major Hollywood film designed to appeal to a much larger audience. The American President is the teaser trailer to what The West Wing would later accomplish: they both feature a Democratic President, and the short sonnet for liberal ideals written for Shepard's staff in 1995 is turned into an epic poem during The West Wing's seven year run. 

The show, I proudly report, was nicknamed the "Left Wing" for it overwhelmingly liberal stance. It is, without question, the bastard offspring of the Stuff White People Like set: a bunch of like-minded, well-educated people are put in a position of power and actually try to do good, damn it. It's the fairy tale I imagine I'll tell to my kids someday: "Once, there was the Bartlet White House, and it was a wonderful place, filled with people who zinged with impossible witticisms and were also smart-people pretty..."

The interpersonal connections also deepen. In The American President, A.J. (played by Sheen) is the longtime best friend to the President, and was the force that got him to run several years before. There's really only one scene that explores what itmeans to be second in command to the most powerful man in the free world AND his BFF:




President Andrew Shepherd: Is the view pretty good from the cheap seats, A.J.?
A. J. MacInerney: I beg your pardon?
President Andrew Shepherd: Because it occurs to me that in twenty five years I've never seen your name on a ballot. Why is that, A.J.? Why are you always one step behind me?
A. J. MacInerney: Because if I weren't, you'd be the most popular history professor at the University of Wisconsin.




A fine scene, but it's an idea that Sorkin returns to with President Barlett and his Chief of Staff Leo McGarry, only this time he has six plus seasons to complicate the relationship. Bartlet bridles at Leo for always behind the man behind the President, and never running for office himself; Leo is frustrated when he's unable to tell Jed exactly what he needs to hear to make the right choices, no matter how politically incorrect.





But the loyalty never falters.


Sorkin also takes every argument the Conservative Right has thrown at various Democrat leaders over the past two decades-- that he doesn't have a history of military service; that he's Ivy League educated and lives out his days in a hypothetical Ivory Tower; that his elitist tendencies put him at a loss for the needs and desires of the "common people."


From this blueprint, Sorkin builds a magnificent, often pigheaded, but always so gosh darn noble President, a man who is intelligent without apology and nerdy without abandon. It's as if Sorkin was writing Jed Bartlet as proof to all the haters that a Democratic presidency doesn't mean weakness, pandering or simple elitism. Sorkin built a candidate that would make most sensible people sigh over their popcorn and wish for a President like Jed Bartlet to pave the way for future generations.


(All of this applies to Michael Douglas' President Shepard, of course, but it gets lost in translation when facing the black hole of Michael Douglas' smarmy good looks.)


But most importantly, Sorkin gets to come full circle and complete the philosophical and idealogical inquiry he began in 1995. He didn't have the time or freedom to delve into the taxing nature of working for the White House, let alone the moral quandaries a staffer can stumble into daily grind of the White House. In The American President, Sorkin starts a conversation about the merits of a widely-accepted military strategy when faced with the destruction of a low-level foreign base:

A. J. MacInerney: Sir, it's immediate, it's decisive, it's low-risk, and it's a proportional response. 

President Andrew Shepherd: Someday someone's going to have to explain to me the virtue of a proportional response. 

The scene, more or less, ends there. But in the third episode of The West Wing, he gets to finish the conversation, when Bartlet finds himself sitting in the Situation Room facing a similar dilemma:

Bartlet: What's the virtue of the proportional response?
Admiral Fitzwallace: I'm sorry?
Bartlet: What is the virtue of a proportional response? Why's it good? They hit an airplane, so we hit a transmitter, right? That's a proportional response. They hit a barracks, so we hit two transmitters.
Admiral Fitzwallace: Yes, that's roughly it, sir.
Bartlet: This is what we do. I mean, this is what we do.
Leo: Yes sir, it's what we do. It's what we've always done.
Bartlet: Well, if it's what we do, if it's what we've always done, don't they know we're going to do it? I ask again, what is the virtue of a Proportional Response?
Admiral Fitzwallace: It isn't virtuous, Mr. President. It's all there is, sir.
Bartlet: It is not all there is.
Admiral Fitzwallace: Just what else is there?
Bartlet: The disproportional response.




So Sorkin gets to flesh out the obvious passion that drove him to write The American President in the first place, in that first 385 page draft. And thank the Powers that Be that Sorkin got the chance. He still hasn't outdone the work he put into the first four seasons of The West Wing, and it'll likely go down as a high-point in a generally strong career. But really, as far as days of glory go, I reckon you could do a whole lot worse than having this stand as your legacy: 





"Break's over."

"Roll 212!": Jon Stewart's Vaudeville Thrill

“Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.”- Clay Shirky , professor of New Media at New York University

Something interesting has fallen on my ears of late, and I've hesitated to comment on until I could really wrap my brain around it: is Jon Stewart our modern day Edward R. Murrow?

James Fallows of the Atlantic (along with Eric Alterman of The Nation) sure thinks so. And no doubt, it's certainly a tidy way to package Stewart's role in the pop culture pantheon, with the bonus of reinforcing media's need to loop history into endless repeat. And comparison is not new to The Daily Show under Stewart's run: as he climbed to his current place in the hearts of White People everywhere, he's been likened to a "skinnier Letterman", or a "Jewisher Conan." (I'm as guilty of this as anyone: in my opinion he's the closet thing to an everyman the intelligentsia will ever nab). I guess someone like Stewart, who usually eschews convention by pointing out how he conforms to it before the other guy can, typically needs such helpful contexts.

What really got the Stewart/Murrow ball rolling was the now-infamous Jim Cramer interview from March 12th, compared endlessly to the Murrow/McCarthy showdown of the 1950s. It's risen to near-mythic status, and not only online: a quick YouTube search will reveal all the mentions the interview garnered in the major news networks (including Cramer's --CNBC). The Cramer interview will probably be one of those things pop culture will look back and say marked the beginning of an end for Stewart's dodge of journalistic heft.

Until recently, Stewart had seemed determined to stay safely seated at the kid's table of broadcast journalism. But, as many have noted, Stewart's style is starting to change. During the 2008 election coverage and, more recently, as the knowledge we had about the tangled underbelly of the financial crisis deepened, he slowly peeked out from behind his puppet lead in and lowered his hands from their trademark "I'm just the funny guy!" shrug. He called the media out for their blatant theatrics, their manipulation of facts, and their partisan coverage. Maybe what the Cramer interview marks is the shift of Stewart's mea culpa. He's long held the place of David to the Goliath-reach of the McNews outlets: when the occasional politician, journalist, or news anchor cornered guest on the hot seat would throw back the idea of journalistic responsibility in Stewart's face, his long-suffering defense was that his lead-in was a show about talking puppets.

But what he demanded from these guests was responsibility in the public sphere, whether it be through journalism or even government, a responsibility he himself avoided by the nature of his comedy-based program. But as more and more young people are turning to Stewart et al. for their news coverage (so much so that the University of Indiana recently did a study on the substance behind the Daily Show program), it was becoming irritating (especially for long-time fans) to see Stewart using that humor to merely disarm rather than detonate.

But watch the Cramer interview again. What do we see? A funny guy who's too pissed to crack jokes. The humor here isn't flippant anymore. It's almost morbid. By mid-March, the news had become a daily rotation of headlines that had some kind of surrealist twist to them, something that The Daily Show always thrived under.

And of course, you have a guy who came prepared. Who knows what Cramer thought it was walking into; you can see the uncomfortable ease that he tries (and fails) to pin on the opening strains of the interview. But Stewart guides the interview to the exact pinpoints to deflate everything Cramer and his ilk stand for. The precision with which he conveys how distasteful he finds the financial freewheeling that in large part landed the American economy smack dab in a recession is summed up in two little words: "Roll 212."

The video clips of Cramer from his earlier, pre-CNBC career are particularly damning, acting as a kind of nosy elephant in the conversation. You see Cramer trying to reason with the host, resorting to a flaccid self-deprecation that Stewart shoots down, time after time, with a simple command to his video guy. Their clipped presentation, one after the other, almost without commentary, is damning: Stewart has finally figured out that some news stories don't need a punchline. Emily Nussbaum of NYMag nailed it when she called the "thrilling moral vaudeville" of seeing Stewart so mercilessly exploit his fact-checking.

Much like Murrow, then, Stewart's finally figured out that television's greatest power is its scope: just as Murrow had to learn to marry the medium's pictorial focus with his own preoccupation with ideas, Stewart had to figure out that jokes can be used to point out the absurdities as well as they can soothe their sting.

But maybe the comparison is trite: The Daily Show isn't about to become the next See It Now. Maybe the truth is, our world has evolved past the need for an Edward R. Murrow. Maybe what we really need now is another Jon Stewart.

(image via)

From Here to Fraternity

The Politico Dreamboat of the Week is none other than...

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo!!!1!! OMG!!

How did this dreamy dreamboat end up nabbing top prize away from the House of Rahm? Ooh, that's an easy one: he almost single-handedly exposed the shady AIG bonuses, using the resources of his own office to investigate and uncover the sneaky dealings. 

And then he wrote everybody a letter! 

No, seriously. Like, everybody. With all the stamps Cuomo's been laying down, the Upper West Side was starting to feel like a Jane Austen novel (you know, the one with all the letter writing! Oh wait, THAT'S ALL OF THEM).  I literally could not wait until another Cuomo letter was released. 

In fact, if you didn't receive a letter from Andrew Cuomo, you should probably start to feel really bad about yourself and your place in this world. I got mine yesterday! He doesn't like my parallel parking, which he calls "short-sighted" and an "insouciant disregard of yellow lines" but he signed it with a little picture of a fire hydrant and a kitty! GIRLS! He's also a pretty good drawer, which means he's sensitive and probably reads poetry. 

Listen to him smack talk those bailout suckers and fall under his dreamboat spell! Part of his letter to AIG  included a numbered list (clearly the bitchiest kind) which really wants to know "whether, as you claim, such individuals are truly required to unwind AIG Financial Product's positions." WHA! Oh Andrew, you did NOT go there! But he did! 

And what did those other letters say? Oh, well, they were well-worded and very professional...but bitchy to the core. He was all, "$165 mil? NO DEAL, AIG!" And Edward Liddy was like, "awwww, guys, but we hafta!" And then Cuomo was all, "Oh yeah, you think so? Hey, AMERICAN PEOPLE? GUESS WHAT." He was raised in Queens, yo. When you don't have something nice to say, you SAY IT LOUDER. 

It gets better! "Last week," he wrote in a March 17th letter to Rep. Barney Frank, "AIG made more than 73 millionaires in the unit which lost so much money that it brought the firm to its knees." In other words, you got some 'spaining to do, AIG! So consider Andrew Cuomo the motherflippin' Spanish Inquisition. 

He's been on the case since late February, way before it got trendy to be outraged. He forced Merrill Lynch to fess up on their own bogus bonuses, Now he's seeking to find and publish every last AIG bonus recipient--relentless in his pissed-offness, just like a true New Yorker should be. Cuomo was one of the front runners for Hillary Clinton's empty Senate Seat and was described by the New York Times as "whip smart but often abrasive." Those two points may seem unrelated, but any Dreamboatologist can tell you, they are practically the SAME THING.

He also hangs out with Tina Fey!!! That's like, a Democratic litmus test for being hip! Look, they are having a whisper party!

BREAK DOWN OF SAMPLE HEADLINES:  

Seizing the Moment: AG Cuomo hits AIG bozos (Newsday) 

The Cuomo Challenge (Artsvoice)

Andrew Cuomo Carries Big Stick on Health Reform (Wall Street Journal)

I have yet to read a story about Cuomo that does not use this forceful, dreamboat language! He cannot help it. Cuomo simply brings that out in people. 

Maureen Dowd, somewhat unfairly, said that Cuomo was the only Democrat truly interested in transparency--unlike Obama and crew!!! OMG. Now Maureen, I don't blame you for getting as little flustered, maybe saying things you don't mean: Andrew's studly dreamousity makes a gal lightheaded. 

Congrats, Cuomo. Way to uphold the ultra-sekrit Democratic handshake. Some people wait their whole lives for this kind of honour. 

OMG. Has the White House Been READING MY DIARY?

THIS JUST IN: Josh Lyman based on real-life, AWESOME person. 

I KNEW IT. 

Remember back when Bush was president and things were really bad, but you could always watch the West Wing, and pretend, at least for a few hours, that Martin Sheen was president? The show is off the air now, but one of the characters is now in the real White House: Bradley Whitford's character, Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman, was based on Rahm Emanuel, back when he was special adviser to the Clintons.

Congrats, Brad Whitford. Your character's perpetual spot on my top five list (a spot that guaranteed me making the joke "I'd like to be the Chief of HIS staff" at least once) just got threatened by your real-life White House counterpart. Usher in the House of Rahm!

Fig. 1

APPARENTLY THE SAME PERSON AS...

Fig. 2

Can't you tell by the moody, Sorkin-esque lighting?!?! And the sexy authoritative stance, playful yet disciplined? 

Fact: NUMBERS DON'T LIE.

As far as I'm concerned, Obama just got himself re-elected.  

A hill of beans in a crazy world.

The presidency of George Walker Bush: eight years in eight minutes.

 

I wonder what history’s memory will name these days, after the snow fills in the footprints.

BREAKING, EPIC NEWS!

From Ny Mag's Daily Intel: 

Venerated media columnist Howard Kurtz has thrown himself headlong into the biggest elite-newspaper squabble of the year thus far. (Okay, so we're only two weeks in. Still true.) In his column today, Kurtz tackles the disgusted report from the Times' Helene Cooper that a throng of what may have been Post reporters cheered Obama's arrival at their office. "There was no standing ovation," he writes. The paper's "grizzled journalistic veterans ... stood and, well, stared," save for the shriek of a lowly "clerical employee." But Kurtz steps it up a notch, too, throwing Cooper's sass back at her and then some. Referring to Cooper's description of the "soviet-style" Post building, Kurtz responds, "All right, it's no architectural prize, but at least we haven't had to mortgage our headquarters like a certain Manhattan-based newspaper." Snap! Someone has to stop this rivalry before it escalates into a back-alley brawl, or, considering the participants, a back-alley subtle-belittlement free-for-all.

Honestly, there's only one thing I can say: This. Is. Out-standing.  

The best part is that the insults have all the subtle restraint of largely-inked initials on the wall of a high school bathroom. A "certain Manhattan-based newspaper," Kurtz? You're not even trying to be nice anymore, and I LOVE IT, QUITE FRANKLY. And that ghost of a comparison tying the Post headquarters to a gulag? THAT is the stuff hyper-reactive, over-educated dreams are made of. Who came up with that? I want to be their BFF. 

The only way--and I mean the ONLY way--this could get better is if the entire Times staff started communicating only in finger snaps and jive talk. 

Yes. That would be the only way. 

The Times vs. Washington Post Spat Gets Cattier (Daily Intel)

"Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how well it turns out."  -Vaclav Havel

The Elephant Graveyard

"Democracies die behind closed doors.”

-Judge Damon J. Keith

 

 

Warning: This writing contains spoilers for Soylent Green (1973) which if you haven’t seen, shame on you!

  

I’m a reasonable person: while the amount of patience I have for stupidity trickles out rather quickly, I’d like to think my composure steps in as a graceful buffer against railing every fifth person to the wall and screaming, “Stop being stupid! BE MORE AWARE.”

But this approach, while it keeps friends, has an adverse side effect. Keeping mum sort of makes you feel like the only one who saw the Emperor naked: sure, you’re intellectually honest but you’re the only one dancing at the party. I bet Kevin Bacon never danced alone! Eyes open means being flooded with the kind of incredulous disbelief that only comes when what seems obvious to you remains a mystery to everyone else. Whedonist simplification: on Buffy’s fifth season, after what feels like an hour of reiterating that Ben and super-god Glory are one and the same to a magically amnesiac Scooby Gang, Spike gives up and deadpans, “Are you all very high?” That’s exactly what this election season has felt like. America (or at least the 23% of Texans, for example, who still think Obama is a Muslim): are you all very high?

When I, as usual, fail to find an answer and my aggravation bottlenecks, and only two words come to mind: Soylent Green.

A bizarre, half-finished mantra to be sure, but it’s gotten me through this election season by giving me that much-needed cultural reference point. (see also: dancing alone, Kevin Bacon) It contextualizes my thought process so I don’t have to!

Allow me to expand. For those in the cheap seats, Soylent Green, of course, is the 1973 magnum opus that gave us a rare glimpse of Charleston Heston as the voice of reason. HESTON and REASON—together at last. Playing Agent Robert Thorn, Heston is at the center of a hi-tech dystopian future (though is there other kind these days?) wherein food has become a rarified commodity—a jar of strawberry jam goes for hundreds of dollars and nutrition is provided through ‘ration wafers,’ the newest version of which is called (ding ding, we have a title!) Soylent Green. These wafers are as disgusting as they sound. But that’s life, right? SO THINKS THORN, until predictably, he digs deeper. People die, secrets are revealed! Basically—and don’t read on if you haven’t seen it and thus deprive yourself of one of the greatest in-jokes of all time—Charleston Heston discovers the awful truth: Soylent Green is people! The mega-corporations turned to cannibalism as the earth’s food sources first dwindled then disappeared. For those keeping track, shit just got real. Heston, badly wounded, gasps the truth to nearby ears and we fade to black.

Some may question why my brain goes there; that’s fair, and for the record, always a sound practice. But there is a link between Heston’s mad yowling and modern American politics…even if it’s only in my pop culture ravaged mind.

I’ve been reading non-stop for months—experiencing the up and downs of the political track meet anew with each passing day. I usually pass through 17 varieties of joy, fear, hope, despair in my daily Huffington Post visit alone. But it was this piece in Rolling Stone—two years old and only rolling past my eyeballs now—that finally did it: it broke my brain. It’s not full of revelations…no, far from it. The Republicans, for lack of a nicer word, stole the 2004 election, but this is not new information and barely even shocking at this stage. What this article IS full of is specifics: places, names, stats. In other words, the pieces of the puzzle. For instance:

In heavily Democratic areas around Youngstown, where nearly 100 voters reported entering "Kerry" on the touch screen and watching "Bush" light up, at least twenty machines had to be recalibrated in the middle of the voting process for chronically flipping Kerry votes to Bush.

 WHAT.

Traditionally, anyone in Ohio who reported to a polling station in their county could obtain a provisional ballot. But Blackwell decided to toss out the ballots of anyone who showed up at the wrong precinct — a move guaranteed to disenfranchise Democrats who live in urban areas crowded with multiple polling places.

 No, seriously, WHAT?

 An analysis by voter advocates found that all but three of the thirty wards with the best voter-to-machine ratios were in Bush strongholds; all but one of the seven with the worst ratios were in Kerry country.

 I dare you: say WHAT one more time.

There’s more. Like, 11 pages more. So here’s the Soylent Green of the matter: that is ri-goddamn-diculous. There’s no way that such overt, almost flamboyant political maneuvering could be true; but then, it’s so ludicrous a plot twist it kind of has to be. These days, politics (and by extension, political reporting) feels like one long episode of Punk’d, except it doesn’t end and we all end up speaking the President’s English.

Not all of the dirtiest dealings of the GOP were so explicit, and it’s these that make me most angry. For instance, the downright ingenious method of allocating less voting machines to the weakest Republican districts—ensuring long lines, more waiting and increasing the likelihood that citizens would get discouraged and leave. Honest to God, and this is almost with a kind of sick admiration: that’s the stuff of evil genius.

But why did this happen? No, HOW? Their conduct was grossly illegal and morally repulsive (Soylent Green?). Any collection of people who would sink to these depths obviously doesn’t deserve any power beyond a curbside lemonade stand (Soylent Green). And yet a large percentage of the country still intends on voting this party into power, standing by unawares as their society devolves: SOYLENT GREEN. What am I afraid of? That all this will happen again, and events will be caught up in an endless cycle of bad behavior. Those plot-happy Republicans should be where they belong: in the elephant graveyard, PUN EMBRACED.

Maybe anyone can stand on top of a soapbox and dismiss statistics, anecdotes, EVIDENCE—fine, whatever. But you don’t need to look any further than the desperate mewlings of the McCain campaign in the last two weeks to see exactly the depths to which the GOP can—and have—sunk. Hell, extend that back further and you can encompass the singular pony trick that is the McCain/Palin ticket.

I care about this election, way too much to believe it will turn out okay. It’s much greater than which side will win; it’s representative of the greater, more tenacious problems I have with North American truisms. I see November 4^th as a litmus test – if the American public doesn’t choose correctly NOW of all times, then they probably deserve whatever economically unsound, tax-addled, ration wafer Joe Plumbertopia they get. 2000 was the bad judgment of one drink too many. 2004 was the drunk dial to the ex. But 2008 is the last chance for rehab.

So there you go: Soylent Green as part cautionary tale and part Democratic bedtime story. Yes Virginia, there is a whistleblower and there’ll always be people who speak up against the Bad Things—even in the psycho-scary future where we eat our neighbors! Then, to arrive at the end of my Soylent Green metaphor, I remember that Thorn is seriously—possibly mortally—wounded. He only whispers the truth on—we don’t ever find out how far that truth spreads.

I watch Barack, and my heart breaks. Not because I think he’s hasn’t got a chance—the polls soothingly tell me the opposite. It’s that this awful, old white guy world has taught me to view his progressive vision of change as something this world has to learn to appreciate. What have we gained, as a political culture, if the kneejerk reaction to earnest progress is to Scully his every move? Really, I’m Fox Mulder all the way: I want, so badly, to believe.

Blurgh. Stupid world. To console myself, I think I’ll play The Venture’s “Telstar” over and over again and make believe the super-shiny, automated promise of the Atomic Age is still twinkling in the distance. 

"It's like Buffy, but with secret agents. And more science! And it's set in the future! So maybe it's not like Buffy at all."

THIS WEEK IN CYNICTASTROPHE:

Further Proof that We’re Staring into an Intellectual Apocalypse.

1. On the set of Dollhouse, Joss Whedon is fighting off creative interference from the network. What network, you may ask, if you'd been living in space for the last ten years? Well, it's a real shocker: it's Fox. Gosh, I feel like I’ve been here before…OH WAIT. I HAVE. It was called 2003 and the cast was only slightly different. 

2. Charles Barkley will be running for Governor. In related news, Dan Brown has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and Jerry Bruckheimer bought the Oscars. Thus cementing the notion that prestige is just a dirty word elitists use to make real Americans feel bad.

3. You know what I could do? I could pepper this Sarah Palin incident with some scathing commentary. I could chalk it up to the latest steak thrown on the barbeque media and cry for three more days. But I won’t. Instead, I’m letting this speak for itself: behold, the Sarah Palin war on fruit flies.  

4. On an actual related note, tell me this is outlandish. I will call you a liar.

5. Damn it. DAMN IT. I was always afraid this day would come, but I viewed it as more of a cautionary tale. I knew I had the capacity to do this! To turn pop culture ire into some kind of begrudging appreciation! It happened with the Rock, after all: I watched Walking Tall and found myself A) not hating it and B) actively enjoying myself (albeit with a Manwich-sized dose of irony). And yet, I didn’t learn the real lesson from that experience: not even my hate cannot burn forever, despite being fuelled with the passion of some pretty stubborn conviction. So now the worst is true—I want to see a Ron Howard film.  

 

Please, tell my integrity I loved it well, if not wisely.