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Grouse!

Because I wasn’t the guy who got shot, I think the Cheney hunting accident is pretty funny. Maybe not as funny as Bobby Knight plugging a buddy while grouse hunting in 1999, nor beating up his son on another hunting trip (broken nose, dislocated shoulder), but still pretty good.

What I like is that it brings us to a bygone era, when the post of vice president was treated as a national joke. Chevy Chase built a career on stumbling over stuff as Gerald Ford. Bush Sr. was regarded as an imbecile (until he turned out to be a lot craftier than anyone expected from a former head of the CIA). And Dan Quayle . . . well, I’m not even going to venture there.

What I’m saying is, since I was a kid, the vice president was either a joke or an afterthought. It was only with Clinton-Gore that we got the “Team USA” treatment from the Pres/VP tandem. With the 2000 election, that morphed into the “America, Inc.” campaign, where Bush’s strength was supposed to be in his ability to assemble a great “upper management” for the country. Of course, when his HR director named himself as the best guy to be chief operating officer, a light-bulb should’ve turned on.

Still, after all the mistakes, I hope this accident is a sign that the role of VP is heading back to irrelevance. After all, it’s not like it helped Gore in 2000.

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In a barrel

Nice post by Andrew Sullivan, ripping up Stanley Fish for “post-modern claptrap”:

Yes, Fish has read Nietzsche, hence his homage in the sentence: “The first tenet of the liberal religion is that everything (at least in the realm of expression and ideas) is to be permitted, but nothing is to be taken seriously.” But this is a distortion of liberalism, as Nietzsche’s was. The defense of free speech is not a frivolous exercise, as Fish argues. In the context of a continent where artists and writers have been threatened with death and murdered for their freedoms, it is a deadly serious task. And maintaining support for the difficult restraint that liberalism asks of us — to maintain faith if you want, but to curtail its intolerant and extreme influence in the public square — is, pace Fish, not an easy or platitudinous path. It is the difficult restraint liberty requires in modernity. Fish, however, like many postmoderns, is skeptical of such ideas of liberty and, in a pinch, seems to prefer the Taliban’s authenticity to societies where writers dare to challenge religious taboos.

This cultural jiu-jitsu put me in mind of a passage from George Orwell’s great essay, Inside the Whale. I don’t think I’ve written about this passage before. Orwell has been discussing political trends among British writers: the modernists of the 1920s — whom he characterizes largely as fascists — and the Comintern-supporting writers of the 1930s. Since I can’t write anywhere near as well as Orwell, let’s just go with an extended passage:

[W]hy did these young men turn towards anything so alien as Russian Communism? Why should writers be attracted by a form of socialism that makes mental honesty impossible? The explanation really lies in something that had already made itself felt before the slump and before Hitler: middle-class unemployment.

Unemployment is not merely a matter of not having a job. Most people can get a job of sorts, even at the worst of times. The trouble was that by about 1930 there was no activity, except perhaps scientific research, the arts, and left-wing politics, that a thinking person could believe in. The debunking of Western civilization had reached its Climax and “disillusionment” was immensely widespread. Who now could take it for granted to go through life in the ordinary middle-class way, as a soldier, a clergyman, a stockbroker, an Indian Civil Servant, or what-not? And how many of the values by which our grandfathers lived could not be taken seriously? Patriotism, religion, the Empire, the family, the sanctity of marriage, the Old School Tie, birth, breeding, honour, discipline — anyone of ordinary education could turn the whole lot of them inside out in three minutes. But what do you achieve, after all, by getting rid of such primal things as patriotism and religion? You have not necessarily got rid of the need for something to believe in. There had been a sort of false dawn a few years earlier when numbers of young intellectuals, including several quite gifted writers (Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Hollis, and others), had fled into the Catholic Church. It is significant that these people went almost invariably to the Roman Church and not, for instance, to the C. of E., the Greek Church, or the Protestants sects. They went, that is, to the Church with a world-wide organization, the one with a rigid discipline, the one with power and prestige behind it. Perhaps it is even worth noticing that the only latter-day convert of really first-rate gifts, Eliot, has embraced not Romanism but Anglo-Catholicism, the ecclesiastical equivalent of Trotskyism. But I do not think one need look farther than this for the reason why the young writers of the thirties flocked into or towards the Communist Party. If was simply something to believe in. Here was a Church, an army, an orthodoxy, a discipline. Here was a Fatherland and — at any rate since 1935 or thereabouts — a Fuehrer. All the loyalties and superstitions that the intellect had seemingly banished could come rushing back under the thinnest of disguises. Patriotism, religion, empire, military glory — all in one word, Russia. Father, king, leader, hero, saviour — all in one word, Stalin. God — Stalin. The devil — Hitler. Heaven — Moscow. Hell — Berlin. All the gaps were filled up. So, after all, the “Communism” of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.

But there is one other thing that undoubtedly contributed to the cult of Russia among the English intelligentsia during these years, and that is the softness and security of life in England itself. With all its injustices, England is still the land of habeas corpus, and the over-whelming majority of English people have no experience of violence or illegality. If you have grown up in that sort of atmosphere it is not at all easy to imagine what a despotic régime is like. Nearly all the dominant writers of the thirties belonged to the soft-boiled emancipated middle class and were too young to have effective memories of the Great War. To people of that kind such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial etc., etc., are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism.

Update: I zapped this post to Andrew Sullivan, who liked it enough to riff on it as his second Quote of the Day, and extend me a hat-tip! Much appreciated! New visitors: Enjoy the site!

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Cola War on Terror

Last week’s reading in the Official VM Book Club Of One was The Other Hollywood; this week it’s The Substance of Style, Virginia Postrel’s book on the value of aesthetic value, as it were. I just finished the third chapter, “Surface and Substance,” which ends with this passage:

When terrorists slammed two passenger jets into the World Trade Center on September 11, 200, Michael Bierut had his own moment of Nazis-to-Pepsi self-doubt. He was in London and returned home to Manhattan a few days after the attack. “As a designer,” he wrote me, “I am still reeling from the images of 9/11.” The act had been horrifying, but the images it created could not have been better designed: “The timing of the collisions, the angle of the second plane, the colors of the explosions, the slow-motion collapsing of the towers: could the terrorists ever dream how nightmarishly vivid this would be to the vast viewing audience?”

Amid the trauma of mid-September, this terrible juxtaposition — striking images in the service of death — recalled all the attacks ever made on surface for its own sake, and on the designers who create surface appeal. If an event so awful could look so vivid, even beautiful in a purely formal sense, how could we trust aesthetic pleasure? How could designers like Bierut justify their work, except when surface serves some grander substance? The attack, wrote Bierut, “makes me put meaningless content into beautiful packages. I will not approach my work the same way from now on.”

He knew better. The destruction of the World Trade Center was not a carefully composed movie scene, designed to around pity and terror within the same frame of fiction. It was the all-too-real muder of thousands. It was entirely substance. The attack was not packaging, not surface, not performance art. It had both meaning and political purpose. The striking images produced led viewers not to praise but to condemn the attackers who created them. Only those who embraced the murderers’ cause rejoiced in those images. Aesthetics did not prove a superweapon, justifying slaughter. To the contrary, the media images that followed were attempts to capture the events — and the horror and grief — of the day. Those images were valuable because they could say more than words. But the images were not the act itself.

In the horror of the moment, Bierut had forgotten the meaning and value of his work, falling into the puritanical mind-set that denies the value of aesthetic pleasure and seeks always to link it with evil. To wrap meaningless, as opposed to vicious, content in beautiful packaging does no harm. To the contrary, such creativity enriches the world and affirms the worth of the individuals whose pleasure it serves. Colas are not genocide.

Bierut soon had second thoughts. “One of the signatures of any repressive regime,” he wrote the following day, “is their need to control not just meaningful differences — the voices of dissent, for instance — but ostensibly ‘meaningless’ ones as well, like dress. It will take some time for people to realize that creating the difference between Coke and Pepsi is not just an empty pastime but one of many signs of life in a free society.” The Afghan women who risked the Taliban’s prisons to paint their faces and style their hair in underground beauty shops, and who celebrated the liberation of Kabul by coloring their nails with once-forbidden polish, would agree. Surface may take on meaning, but it has a value all its own.

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Good Bad Books

A few years ago, I met up with a buddy from my freshman year of college. Over a bunch of drinks, he said to me, “Y’know, you gave me a list of books back when we were at Tulane, and I still have a stack of them sitting on my desk. But I’m gonna get through ’em someday.”

I blanched. “Oh, God. Paul, please just throw them out. I don’t know what books they are, but I can just about guarantee that you should toss ’em. Just please don’t tell me what books they are. I’ll even give you a new bunch of books to replace them.”

I’m pretty embarrassed by whatever I recommended when I was 18 (books, music, movies, etc.), but I’m shameless enough that I’m willing to include that roster in the list of all the books I’ve finished since 1989.

In that vein, ourgirlinchicago has a nice post about selecting what to read next. She wrote previously about calculating the number of books she could expect to finish reading based on the average lifespan, which was pretty depressing in and of itself. Now she wonders what proportion of those books should be devoted to fluff:

[W]hat percentage of that terribly finite amount of reading do you feel should be earmarked for incontestably Great books, and what percentage of fluff — elegant, witty, and delightful fluff, needless to say — are you comfortable including? I’m thinking a full 50%. But I have another wrench to throw into the machinery: how many of your 200 or 500 or 1,000 books will be books you’ve already read? For most of us, I’m guessing, this will be a non-negligible number.

Read the whole thing, but get back to me about this question of hers. Since my list of books is in spreadsheet format, it’s quite easy to put a check-box next to every book that we consider fluff. . .

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From Buttman to Superman

VM contributor and all-around good guy Tom Spurgeon recently posted a neat review of a Superman comic on his comicsreporter.com site. I don’t read much in the superhero genre anymore, but I’ve been a comics reader since I was a little kid. I’ll flip through issues on the newsstand, trying to figure out what happened to characters I used to read about, but that’s about it.

What I found interesting about this review was Tom’s discussion of writers’ tendency to approach superheroes from an ‘adult’ viewpoint. As he puts it:

I’ve long wondered if the problem with Superman is that his creators, going back to John Byrne twenty years ago, have written from what intrigues them about the character as adults rather than what might have interested them as a child. [. . .]

I think of all the big, iconic characters, Superman might suffer most for that now decades-old shift in approach. The other popular, franchise-bearing superheroes — Batman, the X-Men, Spider-Man — at their conceptual core all traffic in emotional states that are of interest to teenagers, to those who fail to outgrow the teenager’s worries and concerns, and to those who don’t mind revisiting them. Beyond the spectacle he provides, Superman’s appeal rockets past adolescence to more of a little kid’s boundary-driven view of the world. Superman is the strongest. He’s the fastest. He’s the toughest. Kids grasp at Superman for the reason they read biographies about LeBron James and Alex Rodriguez and wish to visit the observation deck of the Sears Tower. Superman is the best, and the world gets filled in between what we know about ourselves and what we can figure out about him. It’s a much longer trip to see things from point of view starting out in our adult world than it is to get to the teenager’s insecurities and feelings of omnipotence. This may be one reason some of the best Superman stories are almost automatically written, or, as legend has it, penned by those working through some basic issues in therapy.

I think this is a nice companion to the Stagliano piece below. Go visit Tom’s site somedarntime.

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Island of Misfit Sex Toys

A few days ago, I finished reading The Other Hollywood, an oral history of the porn industry, by Legs McNeil & Jennifer Osborne. If you’re into the subject, it’s a pretty impressive book, even though the 1990-present era receives short shrift.

The quotes selected by the book go a long way to avoid the heavy moralizing that most people bring into their views on the industry. The worst example of that tendency was in Martin Amis’ porn article for Talk Magazine a few years ago. That piece went with the “those poor, manipulated girls” angle, in what I assume was an effort to shame porn-consumers. This isn’t to say that McNeil & Osborne portray the women in the industry as happy-go-lucky. The book has all sorts of horror stories, with self-delusion and self-destruction duking it out.

One of the aspects of the industry that’s always intrigued me is the issue of how performers deal with the day-to-day. I mean, a lot of life in one’s 20’s and 30’s is at least partly devoted to finding a person to have sex with. So, when your “job” is getting laid, exactly how does you balance the rest of your time? What do you do, exactly, when your mental approach to sex is that of an occupation? Where do you find intimacy? (I don’t mean this in a “those poor girls” way; I’m more curious as to what substitutes for sex in that currency)

All of which gets me to the strangely profound closing quote of the book. It’s by John Stagliano, known for his Buttman gonzo video series. Following the death of his girlfriend Kristi Lynn in a car wreck, Stagliano went into a deep depression, and ended up going down to Brazil and almost deliberately getting himself infected with HIV (the details are in the book).

Subsequently, he and an HIV-positive performer fell for each other, got together, and went on to have an HIV-negative child. It’s an oddly touching story, an island-of-misfit-toys romance in an environment where romance is in short supply. Stagliano, as I said, gets the last word, and it’s a doozy:

I was getting f***ed-up the other night watching porno movies. And I thought, this is how you write a movie: You set up this whole scenario where some guy’s doing drugs, he’s about to go too far and OD, and just before he does, he looks at the camera and says, “F*** you, people! You live by a whole different standard than I do! I have this life in front of me that inspires me. Every one of you has done something at some point to f*** up your life — get a little too drunk, do too much cocaine. That’s life, right? And you’re judging me?”

I used to judge these people, and I never knew what was going on inside them.

You know, they’re experiencing life in a certain way that I don’t know about, but I need to know about. We want to push ourselves to experience life and to enjoy it: to be a race car driver, or do drugs, or get f***ed in the ass and risk getting HIV — it’s all the same fucking thing. Pushing yourself to experience life to its fullest necessarily involves risk. And if you sit in your room and never do anything — like my mother wanted me to do because she was worried that if I left the house I’d get hit by a car — you’ll never know what it’s like.

Maybe it’s genetically programmed, like women holding back sex. We’re genetically programmed to say, “Wait a second — oh, it feels good to go around that curve really fast, but I’m gonna crash.”

You know, like Kristi Lynn did.