Ed Rendell, Governor of the Commonwealth of Pennselvania is backing Senator Clinton in the primary. Let me say up front that I think it is important to differentiate the campaign from its surrogates. If a high-level supporter of a politician says something, it doesn't necessarily translate that the politician agrees with that statement.
Gov. Rendell said today that students who support Obama "drink the kool-aid of a wonderful speech" (h/t kid oakland).
Aside from being incredibly insulting--the only thing he could really mean is that Obama supporters are brainwashed cultists--it's politically stupid. Considering the youth vote is already pretty reliably pro-Obama, having a high-level surrogate insult excited, energized college-kids is just going to piss them off more.
But, hey, since this is most involved college kids have been in recent years, it is a good idea to insult them.
Also, KY, tomorrow your money will be mine. There's no way HRC gets 59%. For what it's worth, I'm predicting 54-45.
I'm going to play a little game: let's see how long I can resist writing about politics. A friend of mine (hi, N___) told me I've been getting a little "ranty," hence the game.
I've done quite a bit of reading in the last few days. But let's start with Warren Ellis's new series Anna Mercury, which I read quite a bit back. As best I can tell, this is Ellis at his sci fi prime. It took until the end of the first issue to get there, but it isn't what I though it was going to be: another "hot chick fights bad guys" flick. Plus, it's with Avatar, so, while it's a dollar more expensive, it doesn't have ads. Also, the art is spectacular. If you have a pull list, add this to it. Issue two doesn't come out for a week or two, so try to get your hands on the first one. Here at Oberlin, that means asking the kind folks at Infinite Monkey to order it for you.
Also of note, Ex Machina, which just gets better and better. It's on a sixty-issue clock, and we're at issue 35, so there's still time to start it and collect the last issues in pamphlet form--if you're a nut for that kind of shit like I am. I reviewed it once, here, and, as I mentioned before, it might get made into a movie (Fellow Oberliner, Bubblegum Aesthetics has a post up on Vaughan, the author, here).
Really, though, it's top-notch work, and yet another example of how--even within the superhero genre--the medium of comics can tackle a wider variety of topics, with success, than you'd think.
I'm up to date with it, so if you'd like to borrow the first trade (five issues), let me know.
Lastly, 100 Bullets. Wow. The first trade isn't great, but it's necessary, and if you stick with it, you'll get bowled over pretty quickly. My friend Marc! told me that if he could only get two comics, he'd get Cassanova and 100 Bullets. I can see why. Plus, the shit's is more addicting then Lost.
It's on a 100 issue clock, and has 90 out right now, so it's coming to an end, but, frankly, with a scope as broad as this one, and with a plot as addictive as this one's is, I would have lost my mind if I had to read it a month at a time.
I know I said I'd stop talking about the debate/Biter-gate!!!111/Our relentlessly stupid media, but I couldn't help but notice this (via Dday at Digby, here). It's a GAO report titled "The United States Lacks a Comprehensive Plan to Destroy the Terrorist Threat and Close the Safe Haven in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas."
Here's my point. Yesterday's debate featured questions on why Obama doesn't wear a flag pin. McCain, as has been pointed out here, sometimes doesn't wear a flag pin. This is an issue for Obama not McCain. The only reason is that there is a perception in the media that Obama's patriotism--as a Democrat--is already in question whereas McCain's isn't. Why? Because, as Glenn Greenwald told me in a phone interview a couple of weeks back:
[I]f you oppose American wars, as Democrats have sometimes done—much more than Republicans—then it means that you’re afraid to fight, you’re unwilling to fight, and you don’t think the country is just in its fights and that makes you both weak and unpatriotic.
While the media is obsessing over its own, empirically inadiquate narrative, the GAO released a report saying that we have no strategy to fight Al-Quaida. So, basically, flag pins are important for showing toughness on National Security (if you're a Democrat), but actually fighting terrorism isn't (if you're a Republican).
I'm sorry, I lied when I said I wasn't going to write about this stuff; I can't help myself. But then again, neither can the media.
New comics came out yesterday, and I picked up the latest issue of DMZ, which was, of course, terrific as usual. The arc is being called "Blood in the Game," and it follows Matty (our intrepid journalist/protagonist) as he covers the mayoral race in the NYC demilitarized zone. He's become attached to one candidate in particular, and he's considering becoming their propagandist. This is what I have to say about that:
Seriously, though, this arc is certainly giving Matty some more depth. He's being pulled in one direction by his role as The Journalist of the DMZ and pulled in the other by Delgado, the charismatic, populist (and possibly terrorist) candidate for mayor. Delgado says:
I've seen journalists before, Matty. They came in early on, sort of strutting around like they're above it all. That notion of objectivity or whatever... it's a fucking coping mechanism... It helps them cope with not giving a shit.
Journalists are the luckiest motherfuckers... they have a built-in excuse to do what everyone else wises they could just go and do--see people suffering and not feel bad about it.
We got to see this theme at play earlier on, when Matty's lover, friend, and fellow journalist got in some hot water for taking a picture of a dying child instead of helping her. What is the role of journalists? of journalism? Is Delgado correct? He tells Matty:
Shit like ethics and impartiality and neutrality... all that shit just goes out the window when the bombs start falling. ... People start blowing up, people start getting shot and dying right in front of you, and you pick a side. period.
In his words, I hear President Bush's administration encouraging war cheerleading from America's journalists. In his words, I hear the angry and tired communists I hung out with in high school. In his words I hear that old relativistic bullshit that should have no place in our media today.
Either we believe that ethics are ethics, or we don't. Wartime isn't a carte blanche. Camp X-Ray and Abu Ghaib and My Lai and Dresden and Hiroshima and--hell, pick your military atrocity--aren't magically justified in wartime. It isn't justified to lose one's journalistic integrity either.
None of this is to say that the news actually is objective. Rather, it is the duty of journalists to have some degree of impartiality. To report what they see, and do their best to (1) remain objective and, failing that (2) acknowledge their partiality.
This brings me to my second point: last night's presidential debate. I didn't watch it, as I was holed up, copy editing for The Grape, Oberlin's "alternative" student newspaper (read: they publish porn, drink in their office, and implicate professors in drug use scandals).
I have had the opportunity to peruse some of the more... um... interesting questions, and, suffice it to say, I'm disappointed, but not that surprised. Bitter-gate, lapel-flag-gate, tuzla-gate--it was like being run over, very slowly, by a traveling freak show of our favorite asinine media narratives (to paraphrase Stoppard).
Talk about an aborted sense of the role of the media. Obama has a pretty good, if somewhat catty, response, which might actually turn this Bitter-gate bullshit into an our-media-is-fucked-up-gate. I like that. Here's what he said:
Hunter, over at Dailykos, has yet another terrific post up on the subject. He writes:
It says something truly impressive about the press that a few statements by a presidential candidate's preacher bear far more weight to the future of our nation than the challenges of terrorism or war. It is truly a celebration of our own national collapse into idiocracy that we can furrow our brows and question the patriotism of a candidate, deeply probe their patriotism based on whether or not they regularly don a made-in-China American flag pin, but a substantive discussion of energy policy, or healthcare, or the deficit, or the housing crisis, or global climate change, or the government approval of torture, or trade issues, or the plight of one-industry small American towns, or the fight over domestic espionage and FISA, or the makeup of the Supreme Court -- those were of no significance, in comparison.
If a media organization set out to intentionally demonstrate themselves to be self absorbed and ignorant, they could not have accomplished it better. It was not just a tabloid debate, but the tittering of political kindergardeners making and lobbing mud pies. It was politics as game show. The moderators demonstrated that to them and their supposed "news" organization, the presidency of the United States of America is about the trivialities of politics, which were obsessed over ravenously, not about the challenges of American governance, which were fully ignored. [emphasis his]
Glenn Greenwald, as usual, has something pretty remarkable to say as well. He writes:
Last night was a perfect microcosm of how our political process works. The Right creates stupid, petty personality-based attacks to ensure that our elections aren't decided on issues (where they have a decisive disadvantage). Media stars -- some due to sloth, some due to ideology, some due to an eagerness to please the Right and convince them how Good and Fair they are -- eat up the shallow trash they're fed and then spew it out relentlessly, ensuring that our political discourse is overwhelmed by it, our elections dictated by it. That happens over and over. It's how our media and our elections function. Last night was just an unusually transparent and particularly ugly expression of it.
I'll add my own two cents, if you don't mind. This is from an upcoming article in The Wilder Voice:
[The meida] only produces absurd coverage when it is fed absurd values. Unfortunately, the media has digested something poisonous, something that causes stories about Obama’s bowling score and Edwards’s metrosexuality to spew forth. What’s more, our self-aggrandizing, narcissistic media is too busy fetishizing its own objectivity to notice its spurting, infectious diarrhea.
I'm still looking for a title, so if anyone has any bright ideas, let me know. Something about narrative bias in the news... I don't know. You let that stew. At any rate, I'm not going to say anything more on the ABC debate, you'll have to go check it out yourself, if you think you can stomach it. And, I must say, I've been doing my best to be happy with Senator Clinton, but I found her parroting of Republican talking points rather ridiculous. Ayers? c'mon. Farrakhan? please. Wright? sweet mother of god, Senator Clinton. Okay. I'm done for real.
Via Meida Matters, Jon Decker, a Washington corrispondent for Reuters said on MSNBC:
[L]et's not forget Barack Obama bowling. You know, this cuts to "is this person real? Do they connect with me as a voter?" You know, for someone who's in a bowling league in northeast central Pennsylvania, in Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, they can't identify with someone getting a 37 over seven frames.
The good news is that I'm writing a paper on our Ionescoesque media, and they are just handing me evidence. The bad news is, we're still talking about Obama's bowling score.
In other good news, Decker correctly said 37 over seven frames, so at least he's being factual in his blatent disregard for anything coming close to common sense. Also, I think if Obama's biggest demographic problem is with people in the Scranton area who play in bowling leauges, he doesn't have much to worry about...
My first reaction was the sensible one: to pray to God to please kill me, immediately. Preferably by meteor. But one of the defining characteristics of my life is that God just isn't that into me, and/or all the meteors are already spoken for, so it never works.[...] Yes, there are uninformed, dull-witted voters in the world, people who will decide who to vote for based on choice of beer. But why--why, in the name of all that is holy, and several things that are not--would the political media itself, presumably the group of people most informed about the actual issues of governance riding on each election, choose to celebrate that lack of substantive information and instead wallow in the meaningless?
Hunter gets this right--the media is celebrating this meaningless non-issue. And, as I pointed out before, the way they are able to do this is by cloaking their essentially normative value--good bowlers make good presidents--in a positive cloak--the people think that good bowlers make good presidents. Why do they do this? They believe that if they report on something, it is necessarily true that the public finds it interesting. The more they report, the more the public cares. But, of course, this isn't necessarily true.
If you have no idea what I'm talking about, see here, here, and here.
In other news, I finished Murikami's Kafka on the Shore. I just couldn't put it down last night, so, I'm friggin exausted and have much work to do before class starts again.
The Holy Lance Church in Armenia Photo from English Russia
Some quickies from my Adventures in Procrastination(TM) today:
First up, Kathy G., over at The G Spot coins a word, and makes me wish I had thought of it first. She decided to cover BITTERGATE!!!111. The post is "What's the Matter With Pennsylvania"--a pretty clear reference to the book What's the Matter With Kansas, which makes the argument Obama was making in San Francisco (if you have no idea what I'm talking about, see my previous coverage here and here.) Here's what she says:
I'll outsource my commentary on the whole mind-bogglingly inane, bad-faith "oh my godz Barack Obama is a latte-sipping elitist!" imblogio to Tom S., Pennslyvanian [sic] and proprietor of the splendid new blog, Rust Belt Intellectual.
Imblogio--fucking brilliant.
Next up, a funny joke relating to my private reading paper on Intelligent Design and scientific demarcation. Here it goes, stolen shamelessly from Scott F. Gilberet's article "The Aerodynamics of Flying Carpets" in the book The Panda's Black Box, edited by Nathanial Comfort:
Three engineers were arguing about what type of engineer God is. The first, pointing to our ability to walk, talk, swallow, and type claimed that God must be a mechanical engineer of the highest order. The second engineer countered, "That’s child’s play compared to the central nervous system." Invoking our capacities for cognition, memory, and emotion, he proposed that God must be the archetypal electrical engineer. The third engineer shook his head, and said, "No, God is a municipal engineer, and not a very good one." The other engineers were shocked. "How could you say this?" they demanded. The third engineer looked at them and answered. "Who but a lousy municipal engineer would put a toxic waste disposal duct through prime recreation area?"
You might remember the earlier coverage of BITTERGATE!!!!!11111 here at Oberliner. If you missed it, here’s what Obama said:
You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Well, Time Magazine’s Joe Klien weighed in at their political blog Swampland. Klien writes:
This Obama controversy[…]is the sort of thing we journalists blow up into massive gas, mostly because we really don't want to get down in the weeds about the things we need to get down in the weeds about.
Truer words, Mr. Klien, have never been spoken. What I find interesting about his post is how he first recognizes the “Obama is elitist” attacks as being off-base—largely a media creation—but then speculates on how Sen. Clinton might be able to turn “build” the narrative:
We've seen some evidence of non-populism in the past from Obama. Early on, he talked about the high price of arugula at Whole Foods. Shoulda been iceberg at Kroger's. And clearly, if there ever was [sic] an upper middle class family, it is the Ivy League Obamas.
So, in short, we have Klien—perhaps the best example of a mainstream media personality—chastising the media for its role in creating this empirically unfit narrative (Obama-is-elitist), then blithely pointing out how Sen. Clinton could continue it—ignoring, of course, the ridiculousness of Sen. Clinton (worth millions of dollars) and Sen. McCain (with that folksy, charming, massive mansion in Sedona) calling Sen. Obama elitist.
It’s yet another example of Klien somehow being able to get it and entirely miss the point. Instead of making any kind of substantive, normative argument, he makes a speciously positive argument (a normative argument in positive clothing).
Sure, in a sense he’s commenting only on the way things are, but, in ignoring his own normative judgments, he’s giving tacit approval to the very media narrative he spoke against. This narrative—Obama is elite—is grounded in bowling scores and a preference for orange juice. It’s grounded in simplistic readings of nuanced statements and even more simplistic ways of contextualizing these readings.
But, Klien, rather then pointing this out, talks about the ways Clinton could continue this narrative in the media (of which, Klien is certainly representative). Yes, gentle reader(s), this is our Serious and Responsible media at work.
This narrative just won’t die, will it? Our nihilistic, circle-jerking media just won’t let it.
First and foremost, Kathy G., over at The G Spot, has a terrific post up explaining monopsony. It gives words and coherent thought to a lot of my intuitions (which I couldn't ever hope of articulating as I don't understand Econ) about the neoclassical model of labor competition. Check it out here.
While on the subject of The G Spot--I am pleased to tell you that it is now a group blog, and, while it remains pretty econ heavy, it also discusses feminism, foreign policy, and a whole host of other things. It's rapidly becoming one of my favorites.
Next up, you may have noticed a distinct lack of blogging on my part. This is due to the distinct uptick in work I've had to do. The Wilder Voice (Oberlin's magazine) is coming out on the first of the next month, so, obviously that's been taking up a lot of time (I'm an editor and I do layout and I'm writing an article...). Furthermore, I've have papers and projects due in two of my classes. Blah blah blah.
Enough of that.
Ihave done some reading, however. You'll note the addition of Vaughan's Ex Machina, Lapham's Young Liars, and the latest Scalped. I'll try to get to Young Liars, in particular, later today or tomorrow. Don't change the channel. Also, if you've been following what the wingnutosphere has been calling BITTERGATE!!!!1111 (a good primer is here), you might enjoy this video. It's Obama's on point response to Sens. McCain and Clinton's attacks.
There's a terrific story--"The Aria of Chris Matthews"--up at The New York Times. And it asks what I think to be one of the more pertinent questions with "the rain man": "whither the cable blowhard?" To quote Matthews:
ha!
ha!
So not sorry about the lack of posts and the brevity of this one. I've been very, very busy.
