Ruminatrix
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Monday, May 19, 2003
Who Won the Culture Wars?
Frank Rich's essay Tupac's Revenge... is a surgical dissection of the GOP "moralist" Bill Bennett, explaining why he deserves public scorn: for his hypocrisy and cynical fear-mongering; for his contemptible attitude toward public funding for the arts; for the selectiveness exhibited in his chosen targets (ignoring the faults of political allies); for his relentless pandering to racism and homophobia. But the most interesting paragraph is the polemical last one:
To say that Mr. Bennett lost all his culture wars as decisively as he lost his $8 million would not be an overstatement. Hip-hop is the dominant youth culture of the land, and a number of its top acts, including Eminem and 50 Cent, are at Interscope. The entertainment companies Mr. Bennett testified against in Congress are bigger than ever. The federal humanities and arts endowments he helped maim are being supported, not undermined, by the Bush administration. Rick Santorum, spewing Bennettesque ignorance about gay people, seems to have disappeared into the Dr. Laura witness protection program. Larry David, whom Mr. Bennett attacked for a supposed "Christian-bashing" joke in 2000, is a smash hit on HBO. Mr. Bennett's afternoon talk-show nemesis, Jerry Springer, is not only still on the air but is contemplating running for the Senate. Should Mr. Bennett reemerge in public to campaign against him, Mr. Springer just might win.The culture wars over? Conservatives lost? Who knew?
Saturday, May 17, 2003
Quarantine or Panic?
The main effect of China's SARS outbreak on America thus far: a slowdown in business travel to Asia, (and cheap fares for those willing to go) and a temporary halt to the adoptions of Chinese infants. Now the Latest SARS Victim is Clothing Industry, due to fear of infection from fabrics, tanned hides, zippers or buttons, combined with the slowdown in travel noted above. Some 40% of America's clothing imports come from the Far East.
From personal observation, the main effect of SARS-phobia on New York's Chinatown is empty seats in normally packed dim sum parlors and restaurants. All of the above are quite impressive for a disease that has so far claimed fewer than a thousand lives worldwide.
Update: according the UK Gurdian's Victor Keegan (link courtesy F-Train) China's current annualized growth rate of 9% makes it a potential "engine of global economic recovery." But all bets are off if it can't export its goods due to fear of SARS, justified or not.
Friday, May 16, 2003
National Insecurity
This week's bombings in Saudi Arabia, timed to coincide with Secretary of State Colin Powell's visit, prompt NYT columnist Paul Krugman -- who usually focuses on budgets and taxation sleight-of-hand -- to ponder: Did the war on Iraq provide a respite for Al Qaeda to regroup?
The central dogma of American politics right now is that George W. Bush, whatever his other failings, has been an effective leader in the fight against terrorism. But the more you know about the state of the world, the less you believe that dogma. The Iraq war, in particular, did nothing to make America safer — in fact, it did the terrorists a favor.
How is the war on terror going? You know about the Riyadh bombings. But something else happened this week: The International Institute for Strategic Studies, a respected British think tank with no discernible anti-Bush animus, declared that Al Qaeda is "more insidious and just as dangerous" as it was before Sept. 11. So much for claims that we had terrorists on the run.
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Wilkommen, Bienvenue...No Comment
Would the US Department of State care to comment on this?
CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuela's government on Thursday sharply criticized U.S. Ambassador Charles Shapiro for hosting an event at his official Caracas residence during which an impersonator used a puppet to ridicule President Hugo Chavez....Or perhaps Ambassador Shapiro is pioneering a new cultural trend: political drag cabaret hosted in American Embassies around the world and boadcast on local TV, no less. If so, bravo, sir!
Shapiro hosted an event at his residence on Tuesday marking International Press Freedom Day during which he criticized what he called a deterioration of press freedom in Venezuela.
The event was broadcast on local television and was attended by several anti-Chavez media personalities. It ended with the appearance of a male comedian dressed as a Venezuelan female media broadcaster and carrying a large puppet wearing a red beret representing the Venezuelan president.
Shapiro planted a mock kiss on the comedian's cheek.
"As a citizen and a diplomat, I am surprised and horrified by this media witches' sabbath held at the home (of the ambassador) of a friendly country in Caracas," Venezuelan Foreign Minister Roy Chaderton said in a statement from Russia...The ambassador and U.S. Embassy officials were not available for comment.
Thursday, May 15, 2003
Admit All
I admit everything. There's something rather sad about this confessional culture gone terminal: "I am the Mimi". Here's hoping Deep Throat never gets the urge to "feel a great weight lifting from his (or her) shoulders".
Vat-language
Adam Gopnik's New Yorker piece on the movie Matrix Reloaded has already been referenced on the tree. I don't mean to steal a link here and have yet to see the movie -- but Gopnik's essay isn't really a movie review and has little to say about the sequel. (Anyway, isn't the middle third of any trilogy likely to have inherent weaknesses?)
His subject is the metaphor of the Matrix as a political and cultural motif of this wired age. He mentions Zizek, Baudrillard and Phillip K. Dick. (I read Phillip Dick's novels voraciously as a college student and loved his prophetic vision, the dark humor, which hasn't really been touched on in any of the movie versions. Later I found out that Dick's amphetamine-fueled writing binges severely aggravated a tendency to acute paranoia. Back then I would have found that very cool.)
Others, including the philosophers Hilary Putnam and James Pryor, have also been fascinated by the "who-controls-reality" question -- though Gopnik ignores the Situationist Guy Debord, who coined the notion of the "society of the spectacle," which surprised me.
For Gopnik the Matrix is an image of our current powerlessness to change our society, of constraint on human agency on the outside world. He quotes James Pryor:
"If your ambitions...are relatively small-scale, like opening a restaurant or becoming a famous actor, you may very well be able to achieve them. But if your ambitions are larger -- e.g. introducing some long-term social change -- then whatever progress you make toward that goal will be wiped out when the simulation gets reset..."Matrix-like social control is evident in the "vat-language" (the term is Putnam's) exhibited by our monopolized media (especially TV), of corporate public relations-speak and advertising. It subverts language, makes us feel unable to feel that we can act upon the world, to change reality.
The other matrix is the one we are linked to right now, through code. The Web (a synonym for matrix after all) does have a liberating/exploratory potential, and enables us to stay remotely linked. But it does have a more malign aspect -- the "enforced" passivity of being consumers, viewers, watchers of the spectacle, the way it makes us fear being "unplugged", "out of the loop" if we leave.
To me The Matrix (the movie) was a wry vision of the entertainment industry itself, its ability to create shock and awe out of makeup and cardboard and plywood and computer graphics, all with the goal of getting the customers not to care very much about anything other than "what's on next?" or "where can I buy that?" Nothing illustrated this better than all the discussion of The Matrix's "ground-breaking" stop-motion special effects, which were almost instantly integrated into a series of TV ads for the Gap clothing stores, showing the seamless interface of entertainment and retailing.
Maybe local actions are the only ones which can be undertaken today. As I write, I hear that the 33% fare increase on New York's network of subways and buses -- which had been pushed through against public opposition by bureaucrats using fixed budget numbers -- has been overturned in the courts. Small victory, but a step in the right direction.
Tuesday, May 13, 2003
New Yorker cartoon
Man in suit to woman at cocktail party: "Well maybe we haven't found any weapons of mass destruction, but you can't deny that we've destroyed a massive amount of weapons."
"No Disincentive Not To"
The NYT's Paul Krugman is not the first to note that this country privately-owned media often behave like "state-run outlets", whereas the state-owned BBC (or the Israeli press) feel obliged to question their governments' policies to prove their editorial independence. Why? The US government rewards such compliance by weakening existing regulations on "cross-ownership" and other oligopolistic practises.
One media group wrote to [FTC Chairman Michael] Powell, dropping its opposition to part of his plan "in return for favorable commission action" on another matter. That was indiscreet, but you'd have to be very naïve not to imagine that there are a lot of implicit quid pro quos out there.And Fox News' parent News Corp, fearlesslessly censors stories to appease the government in Beijing.
And the implicit trading surely extends to news content. Imagine a TV news executive considering whether to run a major story that might damage the Bush administration — say, a follow-up on Senator Bob Graham's charge that a Congressional report on Sept. 11 has been kept classified because it would raise embarrassing questions about the administration's performance. Surely it would occur to that executive that the administration could punish any network running that story.
Meanwhile, both the formal rules and the codes of ethics that formerly prevented blatant partisanship are gone or ignored. Neil Cavuto of Fox News is an anchor, not a commentator. Yet after Baghdad's fall he told "those who opposed the liberation of Iraq" — a large minority — that "you were sickening then; you are sickening now." Fair and balanced.
We don't have censorship in this country; it's still possible to find different points of view. But we do have a system in which the major media companies have strong incentives to present the news in a way that pleases the party in power, and no incentive not to.
Monday, May 12, 2003
Twiggy
A new twig on the tree will be posting from the same machine as me. The third member of our household prefers to go unwired and unquoted. Theo's looking forward to posting and feedback and soon we will put some images up too. We went over some basic HTML tags on the subway to school today.
We have been taught to login and out (thanks Jim), but anyway I'm sure that at some point one of us will forget to log in/out properly and inadvertently post as the other. Thought I'd let you know ahead of time....
Sunday, May 11, 2003
More Research Required
One of my favorite album covers ever was the chimp sitting at an old-fashioned Remington typewriter on The Mekons' 1979 album The Quality of Mercy is Not Strnen. So I'm very disheartened by this story from BBC News:
A bizarre experiment by a group of students has found monkeys cannot write Shakespeare. Lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth wanted to test the claim that an infinite number of monkeys given typewriters would create the works of The Bard.
A single computer was placed in a monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo to monitor the literary output of six primates. But after a month, the Sulawesi crested macaques had only succeeded in partially destroying the machine, using it as a lavatory, and mostly typing the letter "s".
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