I’ve been hanging onto this all weekend, because it’s a real Monday morning bit of hilarity. It’s also a good indicator of how the concept of the boycott, wielding so powerfully when used strategically by the civil rights movement, has really devolved into a temper tantrum that’s less about effecting change and more about the boycotter preening over her moral superiority. Observe Rachel Ray’s outfit in a new ad for Dunkin Donuts:

To ordinary people, this is an example of someone wearing the confusing combination of a lightweight summer shirt and a scarf. There are two major possibilities here. One is that this is yet another example of the fashion trend fascists trying to push a stupid idea on the public to see who buys into it. Considering that said fascists have successfully convinced a handful of women to dress like this:

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I suppose we should have seen this coming, but still: Oh my god. (Hat tip.) The headline is pure scare tactics.

‘Sex and the City’ Fiend: Show Turned Me Into Samantha

I’ve never understood the nation’s paranoid obsession with that show. Well, I do, but I also don’t. This headline really gets at it—there’s a real fear that women across the nation are going to watch the show and start getting ideas about how it’s not only okay not to get married and start having babies fairly young, but that being single and living independently is fun and exciting. Because no matter how some of us feminists wrung our hands because the characters on “Sex and the City” weren’t empowered enough (i.e., two of them openly yearned for marriage and one was somewhat disorganized and compulsive in her life choices), there’s no denying that the show did really portray single women with independent incomes as exciting, fun people. (With flaws, of course, but good lord, if every show portrayed all women as pillars of strength at all time, they’d be too damn boring to watch.) From the point of view of some of us who’ve tasted the life of independent living, we don’t see what the fuss is, but the show was wildly popular with women who went straight from the home to perhaps a college/young adulthood situation with roommates to marriage without ever having that part of your life where you answer to no one but yourself. And it’s those women that are feared might get ideas.

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SPOILAGE.

Tired of the movies, where women barely exist onscreen at all, and when they do, they’re treated like imbeciles or cardboard cutouts? The assumption in the movie industry is that men make the vast majority of the movie-seeing decisions, and that women are therefore a niche market that only needs a couple of intelligence-insulting bones thrown for a twice-annual girl’s night out.* But TV is another story. For whatever reason, it’s beginning to be understood that shows with fully realized female characters that have more going on than being fuckable and having babies do quite well on the small screen, thank you very much. And TV meets a variety of entertainment gaps that weren’t being filled. You have your fantasies of female empowerment that still aren’t realized in the everyday world—like on “Battlestar Galactica” or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, and you have shows that address women’s lives in an honest way, patriarchal warts and all, like on the comedy “Ugly Betty” and the drama “Mad Men”, which is a show that we power-chugged last week, watching most of the first season flying to and from New York.

The first season of “Mad Men” is set in 1960, which means it’s an exceedingly relevant program for modern times, because it’s this turning point in time that all culture war madness turns off of. When conservatives talk bitterly about the 60s, it’s because they romanticize the 50s as the ultimate moment of the American patriarchy, and to varying degrees, also the last gasp of blatant white supremacy, a utopia of white male dominance that was cruelly snatched away and needs to be restored through government intervention.

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Carr2d2 has a post up at Skepchick examining whether or not “Battlestar Galactica” is propaganda-through-subterfuge, luring fans into Mormonism against our wills. She’s responding to emails and websites that reference the show’s peculiar history to make the leap into arguing that it’s propaganda. But calling the show Mormon propaganda is a strained argument on its surface, as carr2d2 explains. The premise of the show—taken from the original, which was created by a devout Mormon writer—does resemble the Book of Mormon, particularly the central importance of the Lost Tribe of Israel (Earth on the show). But beyond the bare bones of the mythology, there’s no reason to think the re-imagined version that is so popular today is promoting a particularly Mormon point of view. As carr2d2 points out, if anything the show (as it currently stands) seems to argue for religious pluralism coupled with heavy doses of tolerance to keep the peace. It’s worth waiting to see what evolves from the struggle between polytheists and monotheists that’s emerged in recent episodes, though. (I haven’t seen last night’s episode—we were at Harold and Kumar, which I probably should review—so maybe something changed.) She also argues that the show’s remarkably non-judgmental attitudes towards drinking, sex, and swearing discourages the Mormon propaganda reading. I would strenuously add that women have more power, freedom, and access to public roles in the 12 colonies than Mormonism would allow. Changing some major male characters on the original show to female characters (notably Boomer and Starbuck) is a big raspberry to the religiosity of the original.

But what really bothers me about the “OMG MORMON” thing is touched on in this part of carr2d2’s post:

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You can see the rest of the video at the BSG website.

The long hiatus of “Battlestar Galactica” has sent fans into a speculation frenzy, and I think that’s going to cause some inevitable disappointment when the first episode of the last season airs tonight, and only a little bit of the various mysteries is revealed. I’m sure we’re going to have to wait until the end to find out what’s up with Starbuck and who the last Cylon is. And above all, what is the Cylon plan? Are there different Cylons with different plans? We won’t be much wiser come Saturday morning, which is something to keep in mind. Unfortunately, there’s going to be a hiatus between the first and second halves of the season, due to the writer’s strike, as well. This is going to be a slow tease.

Ten songs at random from your MP3 playing device.

1. “Gimme Danger”—Iggy Pop
2. “Hock It”—The Blow
3. “Toothpaste”—The Martial Arts
4. “Nightclubbing”—Iggy Pop (my iPod has a preference today)
5. “I Believe In A Woman”—Sly Williams
6. “Send Me A Postcard”—Shocking Blue
7. “I Want You Back”—Jackson 5
8. “Melody Day”—Caribou
9. “Do The 45″—Ryan Shaw
10. “Cottage For Sale”—James Brown

Do not let this band’s name—the Ting Tings—distract you from how fucking awesome they are.

The Shocking Blue:

I’m digging the ladies with the rocking voices this morning.

While I agree with the notion that some well-placed, demoralizing-our-enemies humor is just the thing liberals need to embrace, this essay is all wrong about “South Park”. When they get political for the libertarian-right on “South Park”, their entire sense of humor flies out the window. I watch every episode until some person—usually a child or a member of disempowered minority—starts to sentimentally parrot some bullshit libertarian concept that’s not been thought through on any level past the bumper sticker stage, and I shut it off. It’s the same trick that “Day by Day” pulls by putting evil conservative ideas in the mouth of a hip young black man. The problem with that show, and it’s appeal to right wing morons, is not that it’s irreverent. It’s that it’s reverent, and of the most asinine shit ever.

Other than that, though, the show is damn funny.

With just two weeks to go until season 4 of “Battlestar Galactic” starts, this picture is being circulated all over the internet (hat tip):

The story is that there’s all sorts of spoiler hints in the image as to what we’re going to learn in the last season. Theories as to what’s going on in the image? The missing Cylon is supposedly hinted at. And there’s two number 6s, which I think means we’re going to find out that 6, being the first Cylon model after the first 5, may have more going on than we think.

The person missing correlates to Judas in the original painting, but the most obvious example of a Judas in the show is Baltar, who’s at the table.

Sorry to be a bit late in the posting; I’ve been at UT watching David Simon receive a communications/journalism award and talk about, what else, “The Wire”. It was a productive hour and a half of discussion, which is somewhat surprising, since they opened the floor to questions, which is usually an invitation for a bunch of assholes to pretend that everyone showed up to hear them talk instead of the speaker. There were a couple of people who asked questions where the question was a minor pretense for them to bloviate, but on the whole, the question askers were respectable and the questions were good. Perhaps the show functions as a bullshit filter or something. I did not ask a question, but Marc asked about the inspiration behind the character of Clay Davis, so our little corner of the world got some representation.

I almost have to wonder if Simon isn’t wearing a little false humility when he expresses surprise—as he did tonight—that a show so entrenched in the particulars of Baltimore would resonate with so many people around the country. I suppose every city is different, but the ways that we differ from each other are kind of the same—Baltimore has scrapple, but we have breakfast tacos, for instance. The crime problem in Baltimore may not resonate in a city like Austin that has so little crime you can all but walk down the street at 2AM counting a wad of cash, but most city dwellers relate to the larger themes of “The Wire”, the interconnectedness of the mini-world of a city and the problems of braindead bureaucracies. Most shows and movies nowadays take place in specific cities, and try to capture something of the local flavor in them, but very few shows really tackle the idea of the city as an entity the way “The Wire” did. It really filled a hunger that the urban dwellers of America have to see this experience of the city reflected back at them. Simon said that this idea of place above all was his motivation. That every American city has its own character and if you really dig in and get to know a place and call it home, even if it’s not exactly the greatest city in the country, you’ll love it. Since I have roots in El Paso, I can relate to the sentiment—it’s an armpit, but it’s our armpit and really, it’s not that much of an armpit once you get to know it and find out what’s to like. Of course, I don’t have to defend Austin as a loveable city with its own unique character—lately, a lot of us are wishing that was a better kept secret, especially after having to wait in line for a breakfast taco during SXSW. But I digress.

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The last season of “The Wire” is now over, and while there were a lot of doubts about how well the final season would cap off the series, I think that the final episodes proved that even with a truncated number of episodes, David Simon was still able to finish off what is probably the best TV show ever with aplomb. Throughout the series, the show has wrestled with two large issues, the failure of institutions and the promise of individual excellence, and this final season clarified the themes, drawing a complex conclusion that might very well have taken 60 hours of TV to draw out. The show has been known for its blistering critique of institutions, showing time and time again how common sense and bright individuals both get eaten up by The System, and at times it veered close to coming off almost as an Ayn Randian simplistic denouncement of institutional power altogether. This season offered a corrective, slicing up Simon’s point about institutions into a finer one.

The newspaper storyline was widely considered, from the get-go by many writers and critics, to be the weakest yet, because you could smell David Simon’s vendetta against the industry behind it. I’m not sure I feel a need to get on board with this criticism—you can smell David Simon’s vendetta against the complacent Democratic party, the War On Drugs, and the suburbanites with their heads up their asses who elect Republicans that ring the cities are considered so much beneath contempt that you barely see them. (Though you get the impression that the management at the Baltimore Sun might be of that particular tribe.) The vendetta against the newspaper seemed more personal, but that’s because absolutely everyone knows that Simon used to work there; it’s hard to say how much that colored impressions of his vendetta. The newspaper storyline was miserably brief, but for that I blame the fact that this was the shortest season by far, but had to wrap up the most storylines.

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Busy day today, and not that much time for blogging. I’m driving up to San Antonio for the ACLU conference, and after that, I’m hosting a book salon on This Common Secret at Firedoglake. Drop by the book salon this afternoon/evening if you have a chance.

In the meantime, I’m tickled that Margaret Cho is going to have a reality show on VH1. The long march of reality show subjects has mostly been a bunch of uber-sexist rock stars, either just being themselves or, in the case of Brett Michaels on “Rock of Love”, turning the sexism flame up to high by parading women in front of him like a dog and pony show to see who will win the chance to date him. Cho will be a breath of fresh air.

Thanks to Liz for sending me this excellent article from the writers of “The Wire” about the War On (Some Classes Of People Who Use) Drugs. I’m going to write a piece on the show’s themes for Monday morning, after the last episode airs. In the meantime, I want to fall over myself gushing the writers with praise for being brave enough to talk about what citizens who know the War On Drugs is bullshit can do to resist it. No, not use drugs. But avail yourself of a right that few people are aware they have.

But this is what we can do — and what we will do.

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun’s manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren’t fictional.

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So the current show that’s the focal point of our household obsession with watching TV shows on DVD is “Deadwood”. The show caught a lot of praise and flack for the amount of cursing on it, but I haven’t seen much in the way of in-depth criticism about how the rampant cursing works, just some standard titillation. What I’ve noticed about it is that it’s part of a larger trend on the show of overlaying anachronistic stylistic touches to signal to the viewer that this show is about the idea of the 19th century West, not a direct historical show, and that we the audience are meant to read modern meanings into plotlines that are in fact mired in the semi-historical world of Deadwood. The profanity-laden dialect on the show has more in common with the way people talk now than it would then, and some of the phrasings they use would have probably been meaningless even to the most rough-languaged 19th century Americans. There’s other stylistic choices that point to this—a prostitute wearing lipstick, another one smoking a cigarette (which was probably rare to non-existent in the 1870s), terms like “dope” and “junk” to refer to opium, and I think even some of hymnals they sing were written after this time period. It’s deliberately unrealistic—the Wild West is as realistic in a lot of ways on “Deadwood” as it is on “Firefly”.

Which is why I think a lot of the discomforting behavior on “Deadwood” is less about making the audience feel superior to 19th century Americans, and more about, yes, holding up a mirror to ourselves. But it’s surprisingly subtle in that project; the allure of believing that you’re watching a world much different than your own sucks you in. The anvils are admirably sparse on the show. Which is why I was glad to have read this quote:

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Last night I theorized that Frank Luntz and Sean Hannity were singing the “unity” song in an attempt to maintain power for Republicans in the face of electoral losses. Now, there’s another reason that the Fox News crew might want to play nice—the network is facing up to ratings losses, as well. I’m with TRex. That article was just fun to read. I’m actually somewhat surprised that Fox News is losing ratings in the wake of the GOP losing esteem, because I always assumed that the audience for Fox News was the 25%-ers, the stable wingnut population of Republican loyalists that would probably go fascist under the right circumstances. The staff at Fox News apparently thought that, too, since they were pushing for Giuliani, who I’d assume was the favorite candidate of the 25%-ers.

But apparently the Fox News net was cast wider, which makes sense if you really think about it. They capitalized on the national sense of paranoia that rose up in the wake of 9/11. For a time, a lot of usually normal Americans went wingnut. But mass panics have a shelf life, you know? As people start waking up from the terror dream, the Fox News style of overwhelming the audience is losing its appeal. Seriously, even the stylistic choices of color, editing, and the relentless overblown graphics make you feel, when you’re watching Fox News, like the nation is in a constant state of panic. Apparently, that fit a lot of people’s moods for a long time. (I’m still sort of amazed at the people who really did live in constant fear of a terrorist attack. The stress-levels-to-probability ratio is completely out of whack on that.) Not so much anymore. I remember the last time I had to go get my picture taken for a new driver’s license years ago and how all the TVs in the waiting area were tuned into Fox News, and how much that got on my nerves. I’d be curious to go to the Department of Public Safety and see if they’ve changed their favorite station.

I’m not going to overindulge the schadenfreude, though. The media is all too willing to have really short memories about GOP failures, while of course they cherish Bill Clinton’s blow job as if it were a family heirloom to be dragged out as often as possible. With that big assist, I fear that Americans will quickly forget how much we fuck ourselves over when we elect Republicans. After the Democrats do even a half-assed job of cleaning up the mess that’s been made of this country, we’ll probably elect another Republican who will probably get right to business trying to destroy the middle class and bankrupt the federal government.

Season 5 really got underway last night, but I’m not saying anymore lest I spoil it for those who haven’t seen it. I’m still trying to decide if I buy the event that happened at the end. Thinking back to McNulty in the first season, I’m thinking yes. Instead of spoiling too much, I’m going to jot down some thoughts and predictions about the characters that really show why people want to reclassify “The Wire” as literature more than TV, even though it’s obviously TV. Omar and Bubbles.

Omar

Omar wouldn’t be out of place in a short story by Flannery O’Connor, though she tended to invest in her moral outlaws a little less morality. Movies and TV shows about gangsters usually have the fatal flaw of romanticizing the gangster figure, which is true even of movies that are admittedly classic films like “The Godfather”, but “The Wire” manages to keep the audience grounded, even at the heights of film noir-esque story-telling (like the Avon vs. Stringer ending). The show is doing something different with the gangster narrative, and Omar really shows how it’s different.

For one thing, he’s not a gangster. He’s a bottom-dweller in their eyes, a man who lives by robbing drug dealers. And he’s so awesome, so weirdly moral, so well-written, and so interesting that he takes his place in the annals of romanticized literary criminality with ease. But it’s not romanticizing immoral lawlessness, really, because Omar targets people who deserve it on one level or another. Which is why it was so critical that Bunk got him out when he was pinned for killing a civilian, because Omar doesn’t kill civilians. If you find yourself on the end of his gun, you’ve made some choices that got you there. Imagine an angel of death who killed from the sinners randomly, and you have Omar. If you sin, you may not die, but if you die, you have sinned.

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David Simon shows up at Matt Y’s place to argue about “The Wire” with him. My two inclinations about the show from the beginning were a) that it’s wildly influenced by existentialist thought and b) that it’s built on the observation that individuals are the product of their environments are both touched on by his comment. Here’s the quote:

Writing to affirm what people are saying about my faith in individuals to rebel against rigged systems and exert for dignity, while at the same time doubtful that the institutions of a capital-obsessed oligarchy will reform themselves short of outright economic depression (New Deal, the rise of collective bargaining) or systemic moral failure that actually threatens middle-class lives (Vietnam and the resulting, though brief commitment to rethinking our brutal foreign-policy footprints around the world). The Wire is dissent; it argues that our systems are no longer viable for the greater good of the most, that America is no longer operating as a utilitarian and democratic experiment. If you are not comfortable with that notion, you won’t agree with some of the tonalities of the show. I would argue that people comfortable with the economic and political trends in the United States right now — and thinking that the nation and its institutions are equipped to respond meaningfully to the problems depicted with some care and accuracy on The Wire (we reported each season fresh, we did not write solely from memory) — well, perhaps they’re playing with the tuning knobs when the back of the appliance is in flames.

Does that mean The Wire is without humanist affection for its characters? Or that it doesn’t admire characters who act in a selfless or benign fashion? Camus rightly argues that to commit to a just cause against overwhelming odds is absurd. He further argues that not to commit is equally absurd. Only one choice, however, offers the slightest chance for dignity. And dignity matters.

All that said, I am the product of a C-average GPA and a general studies degree from a state university and thirteen years of careful reporting about one rustbelt city. Hell do I know. Maybe my head is up my ass.

If The Wire is too pessimistic about the future of the American empire — and I’ve read my Toynbee and Chomsky, so I actually think a darker vision could be credibly argued — no one will be more pleased than me as I am, well, American. Right now, though, I’m just proud to see serious people arguing about a television drama; there’s some pride in that. Thanks.

There was some interesting discussion in the prior thread about how the show really focuses on the difference between craft/dedication and mediocrity as the real moral grounds the show is working. Freamon’s dedication to his toys is a good example, but it permeates the show. (Plenty of examples here.) The concept of “natural police” is best described as this willingness to do the job right, to find meaning in what’s basically an uphill battle against crime by being very good at what you do. The detective wakes are a powerful thing; the songs and the ritual emphasize the point that these people contextualize the beauty of American citizenship as the right to struggle.

I wish I’d seen that before I wrote my review of season 4. So very cool.

It’s going to be so hard to watch the last season of “The Wire” as it comes out, one episode at a time, at least after getting to watch the previous 4 seasons on DVD. That’s the bad news. The good news is that multi-episode marathons that last into the night aren’t good for my sleep schedule. Maybe now that I’ll have to watch it week by week, I’ll appreciate even more the subtle way the writers create cliffhangers.

Spoilers from here on out.

As you can guess, we finished out watching the 4th season of “The Wire” last night, which just happened to coincide with my discovery that Barack Obama admits to being a fan of the show when asked the fluffy taste questions. The season was centered around the schools, and because the show centered around four 8th grade boys, this season had something of a slightly less cynical flair. Slightly, mind you, because the show doesn’t abandon it’s realistic and hardened view; there’s not much in the way of happy endings for these 4 young men in their last year of being able to stand in the realm of possibility for their lives, before the world conclusively moves them onto paths that will determine their future. I don’t think the show has caused me to tear up as much as it did during these last couple of episodes, where you see 3 of the 4 boys get eaten up by the system, with only one escaping the grind out of a sheer stroke of luck. But even with that objectively sad ending, I felt that there was something of a lightness to this season, that the small sprays of hope that people cling to during the entire season might be a tad more substantial than usual. It was more a tone issue than a plot issue—as usual, nothing seems to work out for the fictional residents of Baltimore we’ve grown so affectionate towards—but still, I smelled a small sense that somewhere, somehow, something might work out for someone. Cedric Daniels seems to be doing alright, at least. Are David Simon and Ed Burns setting us up for a fall in season 5? I wouldn’t bet against it.

How glad was I that they showed that when schools “teach to the test”, it’s only natural and understandable that the kids reject that by refusing to take the tests seriously? I’m torn between wanting to see more of Bunny Colvin and not wanting to see him suffer any more frustrations with the ass-covering, refuse-to-get-shit-done aspects of bureaucracy.

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I hadn’t seen this before, either, probably because I’m averse to any and all questions about presidential candidate taste, because it’s a silly question most of the time and even if it weren’t, it becomes silly because the candidates will make super-safe picks 99.9% of the time. But for once, a candidate did not make a safe pick—when TV Guide asked the candidates about their favorite TV shows, Clinton picked “Grey’s Anatomy”, Edwards picked “Law & Order”, and Obama picked “The Wire”.

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One of the worst series of the 1980s was Knight Rider. However, NBC has decided to revive that flaming pile of camp crap as a two-hour movie. BTW, David Hasselhoff will make a cameo in the NBC TV extravaganza, billed as a “special guest star.”

NBC has set Feb. 17 as the premiere date for its two-hour “Knight Rider” revamp and announced that Will Arnett (“Arrested Development”) will provide the voice of the new KITT car. NBC also has released official images of the crime-fighting super-vehicle (thankfully, NBC’s latest product placement-mobile is a Ford Mustang, not a Nissan Rogue).

The movie stars Justin Bruening (“Cold Case”), Deanna Russo (“NCIS”), Sydney Tamiia Poitier (“Grindhouse”) and Bruce Davison (“Close to Home”).

The new KITT car (more pics here) will have some “Transformers”-like shape-shifting abilities (the story’s scientific explanation: “nanotechnology”). Thus, three cars will be used: The “KITT Hero” (a Ford Mustang Shelby GT500KR playing the “everyday Hero car”), the “KITT Attack” (a high-speed version of the Hero car) and a “KITT Remote” (a driverless version). Dave Bartis (“The O.C.”) and Doug Liman (“The Bourne Identity”) serve as executive producers.

You may disagree with me as to the level of suckitude of Knight Rider, so I’ll post this:

Q of the day - what was the worst popular TV series in the 1980s? (Supertrain doesn’t count because it was a flop (and aired in ‘79 — I’m obviously dating myself here).

We wrapped up watching “The Wire” season 3 last night and am happy to see that the fourth season is out on DVD, so we’ll be able to watch all that before it starts the fifth and final season on HBO. (Watching shows in real time? I’ll be doing that for both “Battlestar Galactica” and “The Wire”, which will be a novel sensation for me. Shows on DVD has spoiled me; if you’re left on a cliffhanger, you can always watch the next episode.) The theme of the third season was reform, and of course the impossibility of it; more than the prior two seasons, this season really made the case that institutions have a life and logic of their own that railroads the people functioning inside them.

From early on, it was clear that the stories of Major Colvin and Stringer Bell were going to parallel and echo each other. Both men, for very different reasons, were dissatisfied with the way The Game was being played and sought to change the rules in their little corners of the world in ways that would reduce the violent crime rate (and for Bell, increase profits). It was obvious from the beginning that both men were going to fail wildly, and it’s a testament to the show’s writing that the predictability of that particular ending didn’t in any way detract from the suspense of the show. And the payoff was worth it; the writers didn’t have Colvin or Bell fail in the predictable way. I figured Bell would eventually cross Barksdale to the point where a hit was taken on him and the Colvin, when he was discovered, would come across so much internal bullheadedness that he didn’t even get a fair hearing.

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Portly Dyke has an interesting post up about the reluctance of white people to talk about racism, a subject that Pam’s written about before a few times here, and in it she had a quote that turned me into That Guy, the one who offers nitpicking criticisms.

*Now, just to be perfectly clear about that whole “whitey/honky” thing? When I’m talking about Racism, I’m talking about the cultural oppression of racial minorities by racial majorities. If you’re white and American, you are part of a 75% racial majority, and regardless of what anyone has told you, Racism is not an Equal Opportunity Oppressor.

She’s referencing white people who make like they’re victims of racism if anyone calls them “honky”, which is a claim that makes me scoff when I hear it. (The “but someone called me honky!” claim, not her claim that some white people hide behind it.) That word has fallen so far out of the general usage that it was a joke in the 1970s, and is now like the term “politically correct”, used exponentially more by conservatives erecting a strawman than anyone else.

Anyway, I agree with her that racism is not an equal opportunity offender, and that’s why the word “racism”, like “sexism”, sometimes makes me uneasy; the older terms “white supremacy” and “patriarchy” are useful for a reason, since they indicate the systematic nature of the problem and who the top dog is. It gets it out of the realm of sniffing around for hate in hearts (which can come back on prejudiced racial minorities, creating a chaotic distraction from the real problems), and it also creates that situation where white people can talk about racism, as Portly desires. One of the pitfalls for progressive whites talking about racism is the tension between the hate not in our hearts and the privilege we nonetheless hold.

My nitpick—which I shared in comments, and to which Portly immediate agreed—was that the majority/minority model also needs to be abandoned since it ignores the prevalence of apartheid systems like that used to be the law in South Africa, where a minority race rules over a majority race. Or, in a lesser degree apartheid, a minority race is still privileged over a majority race, which is unfortunately still the case in South Africa despite the formal end of apartheid, because of economic compromises the ANC made with the white government that was on its way out that protected the white financial control over the nation.

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Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers.

We’ve wrapped up watching the second season of “The Wire”. (Aren’t DVDs of TV shows the best?) Before we started to watch this season, I had a whole post written in my head about how the cops are existential heroes, but the struggle of being a cop was downplayed in this season compared to last, so I’m going to set that aside for now. This season did drag a bit compared to the first one, but it’s still totally addictive, compelling TV.

As the season was wrapping up, I kept thinking that Nicholas Sobotka would be the final murder as The Greek cleaned house, having seen all their muscle thrown in jail, Ziggy Sobotka sent to jail for murder and having killed Frank Sobtka, but as it came closer to the end, I decided that he was going to live. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, except to say that the script had it set up for The Greek to be hauling ass without much concern with what he left behind. But after we finished watching the last episode, with the parting shot on Nick Sobotka walking on in despair, I realized why he had to live: In a classic tragedy, you leave a man standing to bear witness to the tragedy.

Which is how I came to the conclusion that the season two interlude about the docks and Frank Sobtka was written as a classic Shakespearean tragedy, with Frank as the tragic hero, the Hamlet of the story. In fact, it’s a lot like Hamlet, because Frank is a genuinely noble person saddled with a responsibility that threatens to overwhelm him, which is management of the union in face of declining fortunes for stevedores. Switching out an icon of the working class and the embodiment of working class values for a more traditional hero, who would be a nobleman with a nobleman’s values, isn’t exactly a subversive maneuver so much as a nod to the fact that our society has different values and different heroes than Shakespeare’s.

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Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers.

There are a number of factors that have fed the renaissance of good television, from the proliferation of cable networks to surge in internet discussion forums that encourage people to get invested in and support good television. But the practice of putting out entire seasons of TV on DVD after the show has aired feeds the renaissance as well; it’s become quite the past time to rent or buy entire seasons or even series on disc and gorge on the show. Take all these factors together, and it’s created an incentive for TV writers to start smarting up shows, for lack of a better term. In the past, it couldn’t be assumed that the audience watching episode #4 in season 2 had seen all the episodes leading up to it, so writers had to make sure that any viewer walking in with little to no prior knowledge of the history of the characters and the plots could still get the gist of it enough to be entertained and tuned in. Now you can write shows specifically to an audience that will follow the entire show, so that you can build on each episode. Not that one-off shows aren’t still dominant—”Law And Order” and tons of sitcoms that trade on comfortable types instead of real characters aren’t going anywhere—but shows that are better able to make use of the amount of time TV gives you to tell a story are growing in number and popularity. Traditional TV shows are more like a series of short stories, movies are like novellas, and a show written in the format I’m describing can read more like a novel.

I bring that up, because we’re started watching The Wire on DVD after hearing all sorts of raving about how good it is, and hearing specifically from the friend who lent us the DVDs that each season reads like a distinct novel. The first season (which we just finished watching last night) bears this out; like a novel, it starts slow and gives you time to get to know the characters before really getting deep into the exciting parts of the plot. It’ll be interesting to see if TV shows can revive that kind of storytelling in light of the fact that old-fashioned novels don’t sell like they used to. The plot of the show is something that’s usually relegated to being only the first half of a single episode of “Law and Order”, which is the police procedural development-of-case plot. A special task force drawing from the narcotics and homicide divisions of the Baltimore PD is put together to shut down a drug dealing operation that’s stacking up an impressive body count of silencing murders in West Baltimore, and the show follows them and all the drug dealers they’re trying to shut down throughout the entire length of the case.

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The feminists meet monthly to run the world.

From Roy, it looks like the Anchoress is grinding away at that odd conspiracy theory that we radical feminists run the world through a secret cabal. Indeed, I expect one day that the website Mens News Daily will be remembered as a weak 21st century version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

In fact, it was when Buster was about 2 or 3 years old that I turned off Sesame Street because nearly every episode had some Muppet carrying on about how “women can be anything.” I realized that my generation was preaching to a generation that did not need the conditioning or the indoctrination - they were not being raised with the same reality as my generation’s, or the ones before, of women being held back by gender expectations. This generation is being raised differently, already has the female scientists, doctors, astronauts, journalist, newscasters and politician role-models, I thought, so who are these puppets singing for - the little girls and boys who have never heard of gender discrimination and therefore do not need the lecture, or for the women who cannot stop defensively “celebrating” themselves, like an old scratched record that can’t move past a skip?….

The first commercial had the Stupid Spoiled Father stamping his feet and holding his breath (literally) outside of a Subway because he wanted the meat-and-cheese whatever. The Insufferably Sensible Mother said, “no, honey, we have to take Chris to his soccer game.” When Stupid Spoiled Father began whining and holding his breath, Superior Life Form Child said, “yeah, Dad, grow up!” I’m paraphrasing, but you get the gist of it. The whole commercial was appallingly insulting and had me muttering that if I did eat Subway sandwiches, I’d have to stop because of those ads.

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I feel almost sheepish after watching the final episode of the 3rd season of BSG that I had to get hit over the head with an anvil before I realized that one of the reasons the show is so compelling is it’s a long, often elegant (but occasionally clunky) dismantling of the hazy concept of free will. As much as I hated the set-up of Lee Adama’s speech (why bother with the mistrial crap and not just let it be his closing arguments?), I found the speech itself very compelling—to allow yourself to pass judgment on Baltar, you have to believe that anyone else in his position would have done the right thing, or followed the rules, or whatever you think he did wrong, and deep down inside you know that’s bullshit. And the reason it’s bullshit is because over and over on the show, people have done “wrong”, but been forgiven because in the tight circumstances, it’s easy to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and see why they made the decisions they did—and how other decisions might not be possible.

Most sci-fi examinations of AI robots go at it with the sense that free will is part of being human, and thus the tension in the story is what happens when robots get smart enough to have free will. And this series started off that way, with all the struggling of Boomer over her various urges, but then at a certain point, the writers appeared to realize that to create the tension around the question of how to tell robot from human, it was more interesting to examine not how robots could have free will—but how humans cannot. I put the time the show changed focus to the episodes involving the Pegasus, where you really see how the Admiral was a product of her own personality and circumstance, and how Starbuck at least grasped that there was no way the Pegasus’ journey could have ever been different.

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Spoilers through Season 3, of course.

So, finally watched the last bit of season 3 of “Battlestar Galactica” last night—there were some slow episodes in there, but I’m pretty forgiving of any show that is laden with pious nonsense and still keeps me captivated. (It helps that both the Cylon and human religions are validated as “true”. As myths that point to a culture’s values and sense of self, religion is true in the way any fiction is true.) I knew Starbuck couldn’t be dead; her death was too abrupt, and she hadn’t done anything that seemed to fulfill her purpose.

So obviously, the big questions at the end of Season 3 are: Who’s the final Cylon? Where are the final five (other than the ones functioning as sleepers on Galactica) hiding? What’s the plan?

I decided to start by looking up the song that was playing from Earth (I am about 90% sure that Starbuck was sending it out over and over as a signal to the Cylons) to wake up the sleepers—”All Along The Watchtower“. The song is an apocalyptic song based around the rantings of Isaiah, concerning a wish list of horrors to descend on the hated Babylonians. You could take that a number of ways, the most unpleasant being that humanity is Babylon and needs to be destroyed completely.

Of course, there’s also the strong possibility that just the lyrics themselves, without reference to what they’re referring to, are the important thing.

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Update: Reading 3 Bulls, I find out the slanderous anti-internet crap is even worse than I thought.

How about “Cable news watcher becomes serial killer”.

Message: Unless you’re all for child molestation, it’s better to throw out the computer and go back to your old habits of just feeling alienated and disempowered in front of the TV news.

Sometimes I think that if it weren’t for clips on Crooks and Liars, I’d probably never see a minute of cable news in my everyday life, which sets me up to be really appalled when I do watch it for any length of time. Yesterday was no exception. I was sitting in an airport watching “American Morning” on CNN and occasionally reading a novel, and a story about a pedophile caught lurking around daycares came on. I wasn’t too interested in the story, except for being annoyed that what seemed to me to be strictly a local interest story was being elevated to a national platform for sensationalist reasons, until they mentioned that the guy had chronicled his obsession online. At this point, I tuned in with interest, because I knew that somehow, someway, they were going to use a story about a guy who conducted himself in what you might call the traditional pedophile method (hanging out where children are, hoping to snag one) to raise some more brainless hysteria about the evils of modern technology.

Being innocent, though, I thought that surely they wouldn’t go further than fuss over the fact that pedophiles use online tools to distribute child pornography to each other, instead of using the mail as they probably did in the past. When it comes to the vile nature of cable news, though, I am but a babe in the woods and so was genuinely shocked and pissed when they instead made the rest of the segment about the danger your child faces from pedophiles because she chats online with her friends and has a MySpace page. They threw out a lot of statistics about how many kids use social networking tools and implied that the major threat comes from here, all in a fairly brainless manner, probably figuring that the audience is already familiar with “To Catch A Predator”.

In other words, they used a story about a guy who is accused of lingering near schools to grab little girls—no computer technology on hand—to warn against the dangers of letting your kids use computers. Who cares if the story has nothing to do with social networking software? The main thing is driving home the point that the internet=pedophiles through repetition, regardless of the facts. I swear, if they showed the movie “M” on TV now, they’d make sure to add some scenes (using computer technology, oh the irony) where the pedophile is shown whistling while he cruises MySpace, because we all know there’s no way that pedophilia existed before the modem was invented.

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I challenge you to look at Iggy Pop’s moves

and NOT say that this guy used Iggy as his inspiration.

(FWIW, I love Iggy and the Stooges.)

Coming to the end of watching season 2 of “Battlestar Galactica”, I have to admit I was somewhat surprised how much the show doesn’t remind me of the Iraq War, at least until the very last scenes of the final episode, even though I’d read on various blogs that there are parallels, particularly if you imagine that the humans are stand-ins for the Iraqis and the Cylons are stand-ins for Americans. The writers are definitely using the “pulled from the headlines” method of writing, which is cool, but they are mixing up who does what in the real world and the show, making things much more complex and interesting. But it feels, so far at least, as if there’s an over-arching theme to the basic conflict on the show and finally I figured out what it is. The battle between humans and Cylons is not a stand-in between America and Iraq or the East and the West or anything like that. It’s the battle between the fundamentalists of all stripes and the rest of us. The key is looking at all the elaborate work put into detailing out the two cultures’ religions and practices and how they conflict. The Cylon religion doesn’t parallel with Christianity or Islam so much as it does the fundamentalist stripe of both, in various important ways.

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The downside to the series of tubes being all clogged up for me for half the day is that I didn’t come up with news items to blog about. The upside is I took this opportunity to clean the apartment. But it’s all good, since it’s Friday night anyway and much more fun to talk about the cultural side of life. Barring some unforeseen change in plans, I’m going to finish up watching the second season of “Battlestar Galactica” tonight, and so I’ve got a half-written post for tomorrow about my read on the central conflict so far. So, tune in, as they say. In the meantime, I’ll confess that I used to be one of those dinosaurs that harbored hostility to TV and generally thought it inferior to the movies as a rule. Until I got into “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and had to admit TV could be some good stuff. Of course, now that I’m into blogging, I’m a big champion of the work-in-progress format.

What occurred to me today while going about my cleaning business is that a lot of anxiety about TV or comic books or even serial novels* is just that, that they’re serialized. The ancient rule of storytelling is mostly that stories have a beginning, middle, and an end, and while most novels and movies follow this format, serials flout it. Even now, people tend to trot out the theory that great TV shows like “The Sopranos” must have had their ending planned ahead of time, because it’s sort of an unspoken rule that someone who’s making it up by the seat of her pants can’t be doing as good a job of telling a story as someone organized. For a story’s themes to make sense, it helps if the storytelling is tight, without a bunch of stray shit happening that can goof up the whole thing.

And there’s something to that—we all know TV shows that overstayed their welcome, after all. But perhaps the key was not having a plan from the beginning so much as knowing the secret to quitting while you’re ahead. Or maybe TV is getting better in a lot of ways because writers have learned to play with the serial’s possibilities.

It’s all a matter of how you look at it. Making a TV show could be described as “making it up as you go along”, or from another perspective, it’s drawing the audience closer to the creative process. After all, you’re releasing your work unfinished, and as such, “showing your work” a little more. One thing that serials invite is speculation, which is basically just close reading with a sporting element to make it more fun. To be good at speculation, it helps if you’re good at all those boring literary skills of understanding themes and plots, all of which helps you predict where the story is heading. It doesn’t get better than that, in my opinion. You get to talk about narrative and you get the opportunity to “win”.

Of course, the downside to all this is that when a show comes to an end, as all good things must, there’s a huge letdown and people take it out on the show. I predicted a mile away that a lot of people would hate the ending of “The Sopranos” no matter what, even though I don’t watch the show, because the endingness of the ending casts an unpleasant pall over final episodes. One of the many reasons a lot of people consider “Freaks and Geeks” to be the best show ever is that it ended so abruptly, more than most great shows. It has an air to of it of a half-finished painting or a demo tape that never made it to the production studio. The pleasant sense of expectation that good shows give you pervades even the last episode, and after watching it, you can’t help but start speculating what happened next. I mean, there’s a million other brilliant things about the show, but the fact that they didn’t even bother to wrap it up upon getting canceled—oh, they put up a semblance, but they didn’t really wrap it up—feeds the mystique.

I won’t even get into how the open-ended nature of television or any serial format invites the audience to make up their own stories about the characters, though that is in itself an interesting and fun thing.

*Yes, Dickens wrote them. But this fact is often treated as the exception that proves the rule against serialization.

I do get to the show eventually.

Well, I feel stupid. I got duped by a concern troll. I mean, I didn’t get duped into taking Melinda Henneberger’s “concerns” seriously, but I took on good faith her presentation of herself as someone who’s generally supportive of the pro-choice position and was actually arguing that we needed to back off for electoral reasons. Well, I was wrong.

She’s an anti-choicer who’s arguing in bad faith. Or, what Digby said. And Jeff, for that matter.

Henninberger is anti-choice, and would like the Democratic party to be as well. She’s allowed her opinion. But simply arguing against choice is not going to convince Democrats, and so she framed it in the way things have been framed for two decades now, by interviewing a few (unidentified, you may note) people, using them to bolster her own arguments, and then arguing that This is Why Democrats are Losing.

I don’t think it’s wrong to argue that the Democrats would do better if they agreed with you more on issue X, at all. But make it clear to your audience where you’re coming from and back that up with some evidence. I’m genuinely hurt and irritated; I thought Henneberger was probably pro-choice, if only because the long Saletan-esque tradition of writing articles advising the Democrats to pander to the right a little more on this issue generally comes from pro-choicers who are just misguided on this and suffer alarming amounts of sympathy with the anti-choice view of women as morally inferior to men. I didn’t want to slur her good name and accuse her outright of trying to get abortion banned.

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