Would Molly Ivins Have Written about the Missing Comma?

She's dead at 62--an age that seems younger to me all the time. She should have lived out the current pres-O-dency. She deserved that. But can you think of a more galling time to die? The democrats are poised to win the White House in 2008, and already there are three "Howard Dean's Scream" moments in the press coverage. There's Obama's madrassa; there's Clinton's bad joke about her experience with evil and dangerous men; and now there's Biden's misleadingly transcribed remarks about Obama being the first mainstream African-American candidate. Articulate, clean, etc. (Hard to take Biden seriously; maybe he was channeling Neil Kinnock again.)

It's a sign of the hollowness of our politics that these isolated sub-rhetorical moments get so much attention. Molly Ivins (and for a time the blog-O-sphere) insisted that we focus our attention on more serious things, like class and cultural values. Well.

Will the new Congress make it harder for employers to bust unions? That's what any serious progressive should be talking about. Not whether Biden's a fool. Which of the candidates are especially friendly to organized labor, and why won't they headline that commitment? That's what the people who police their utterances should be probing for. Oh well.

From today's NYT article about controversy over labor issues and management heavy-handedness at the Santa-Barbara CA News-Press:

When asked why Mrs. McCaw has consistently chosen legal action when she has felt wronged, rather than engaging in dialogue with readers or her news staff, he said, “A cease-and-desist letter is a form of dialogue.”

No comment.

Here's a gem.

From today's NYT article on cutbacks at Time inc., which will mean the end of lavish team reporting but a return of authorial voice (I'll believe that when I see it):

Larry Hackett, managing editor of People, said the new reporting model would not preclude putting several correspondents on one piece when the news warrants it, as it often does these days with the peripatetic Ms. Spears.

Yes, Britney Spears often merits multiple reporters from a single magaz. That's the state of the news media.

Oh well, they are following their market. I can't deny it. When you sit in a doctor's waiting room and check out what people are reading, it's not Parents or BusinessWeek or Golf Digest or US News and World Report. So let them eat Britney.

But shouldn't there be some way for the Britney interest to subsidize something more useful to public discourse? Not with the tyranny of the click, apparently.

Media Reform

means many things. This is one of the blandest possible points to make about this past weekend's big media reform conference in Memphis. The attendance figure given by the organizers was upwards of 3000, and that was no exaggeration. These 3k activists, scholars, and interested citizens assembled into a very cool audience, and I was happy to be among them.

I'm fortunate to be an insider and an outsider at the same time. I know a lot of the insiders, enough to pick up on the vibe, but am unentangled, and hence don't care that there are tensions between positions and that people can be pissed off about their relative share of the program.

So when a friend told me that he thought "the people are to the left of the program," I could see his point. The attendees tend to be younger, hipper, and more radical than the folk they're listening to. At the same time, it hardly seems that the organization is turning into PBS--that is, an official grown-up culture that means to impose itself on ordinary folk. Of course, there's the Bill Moyers of it all. And he did begin his keynote by urging the movement to avoid schisms. It's not that any of the hiphop activists in the crowd didn't agree with him, but I can't imagine they were all very interested. And there is an asymmetry between the crowing over stopping the legislative abolition of network neutrality and the anguish over Iraq and Katrina. It's like we asked for a brain and we got a diploma.

But it's all about the direction of change. It's grand that Bill Moyers and the hiphop artists are moving in the same direction.

I left Memphis with the feeling that things WERE beginning to move in the right direction. It'll take a few weeks of avoiding cable news for that feeling to take root. I'll also have to ignore the lack of attention that the whole affair received outside the bubble of progressive media. There was an item in USA Today, but it was on the business page, it was short, and it concerned only the release of studies questioning the need for cross-ownership when the profitability of newspapers and broadcast stations is secure.

The Last Three Movies I Watched

were Blood Diamond, Children of Men, and Casino Royale, in that order. These are very similar movies--you might say they're all the same movie. They feature three very manly actors playing deeply scarred characters who come to struggle against global domination. Now Susan Douglas and others have made the point that generic characters and plots usually don't come out of thin air. Douglas pointed this out in connection with early 1960s television, in which suddenly lots of sitcoms featured women with supernatural powers whose husbands/male partners wanted them to hide them. (The three that come immediately to mind are The Flying Nun, I Dream of Jeannie, and Bewitched.) At the same time, sitcoms like Gomer Pyle and Hogan's Heroes featured goofball hijinx in the US Marines and Nazi POW camps. Surely these commented in an obscure (ideological?) way on feminism and the war in Vietnam.

The War on Terror speaks to me through these movies. All three of them express reservations, on the surface, about the world order that the War on Terror is being fought to protect; all of them, in fact, see terror as a fiction of the inequalities in that world order. The Children of Men is most impressive in this regard, with the seige of a refugee camp in Britain filmed as if it were in the West Bank, with sympathies fully arrayed on the side of the nonwhite population of the camp. (I wonder if this sequence will be perceived as a comment on the Palestinian situation?) Likewise, though Blood Diamond showcases demonically cruel black guerillas and mercenaries, these are clearly epiphenomenal to the international diamond cartel that bankrolls them. Casino Royale's mad bombers--there are two great action sequences in which Bond tangles with unspeaking and almost superhuman mayhem artists--are the pawns of international capitalists. So it is the War on Terror's rhetoric upside down, as it were--it's not that fanatics that threaten us, but the money power or the establishment.

But this terror comes, at a deeper level, out of the very vortex of globalization. All of these movies are about a stateless world and the manly men who must police it. In each case, the hero is thrown back into a state of nature. Women, of varying degrees of constancy and usefulness, are there to accompany them, but in the end the men must prevail through blood and sacrifice. Now I must not give away any of the endings of these movies, but not all the good guys make it out alive, this despite dodging an awful lot of bullets.

Bond, of course, does. He must recur as a character, even as he mutates as an actor. Bond is essentially comedic, though. At the end of each episode, the status quo is restored with a mating. This one ends a bit differently than the usual, but that's because it's a prequel. It breaks with formula in another way, though: it lacks the smirk, or the camp, of previous Bond movies. This is the War on Terror. The Cold War could go campy. From Russia with Love, indeed. The War on Terror is no laughing matter, or at least no giggling matter.

It's by now redundant to point to the phallic significance of 9/11--the felling of two stationary penises by two flying ones. What stands out in the rhetoric after is the wholesale transference of the performance of victimhood from women and nonwhites to the white male nation in the form of the Pres-O-Dent. The movies I've recently chanced to see--certainly this is no representative sample of current cinema--comment wrily on all that jazz, but don't have sufficient irony at their disposal to shake free of the gender politics of 9/11. And two of em are British. Imagine that. Then again, I saw them while Tony Blair was hanging out in Miami with one of the Brothers Gibb--his own "BeeGee Rebozo," if anyone old enough to get the pun reads this. Happy new year.