The Young Curmudgeon

Oh, That Liberal Media, Parts 682 and 937

Speaking of liberal misinterpretations of popular texts and of liberal simplistic hyper-moralism, both are going to neatly dovetail at a multiplex near you soon. Hollywood has enlisted hipster, it-director Alfonso Cuaron to direct the next Harry Potter movie, and he seems to be interpreting the source material in a slightly different way than I would. Newsweek reports:

Cuaron’s outspokenness is also new to the franchise. Does the evil wizard Voldemort still remind him of George W. Bush, as he said recently? “In combination with Saddam,” he says. “They both have selfish interests and are very much in love with power. Also, a disregard for the environment. A love for manipulating people. I read books four and five, and Fudge”—Rowling’s slippery Minister of Magic—”is similar to Tony Blair. He’s the ultimate politician. He’s in denial about many things. And everything is for the sake of his own persona, his own power. The way the Iraq thing was handled was not unlike the way Fudge handled affairs in book four.”

Duuuuude! You're blowin' my mind. This is just, like too heavy, better let the great one respond:

Let's review. Bush: supported legislation that wanted to open up an obscure distant corner of caribou country for oil production. The legislation failed; the drilling has not occurred.

Saddam: drained the entire southeastern marsh of his nation, diverted the water, ruined wetlands and the Ma’dan, the people who lived in that ecosystem. One could call it Ethnic Cleansing. One could even call it a Hate Crime.

Well, the water is flowing into the marshes again. Saddam flooded them to hamper the invasion. Yeah, that worked well, eh? Now the villagers are returning; now they’re fishing again.

Of course, this was not the objective of the war; hardly. But it’s happened. And it’s irrelevant to the finely-tuned political minds of our culture’s artists. If Bush had called Saddam “a real-life Voldemort” they’d have spit out their tea and laughed themselves silly - such simplistic Hollywood drivel; what else would you expect from an example of doltus Americanus?

But should a director of moving pictures call Bush a real-life Voldemort, and twin him with a fascist who gassed a village for research purposes - ah, there’s a canny lad. There’s a piercing mind.

This director’s movie will open nationwide on 3,000 screens, and it will make hundreds of millions of dollars.

Tell me again about the crushing of dissent. But speak up! The TV is rerunning Baghdad reaction to the death of the brothers, and the celebratory gunfire is deafening. Their political misgivings about American intervention aside, they actually seem happy.

So, to sum up, when George W. Bush refers to mass murdering dictators as evil he's being a simple-minded, religious right buffoon who thinks he's on the horn directly with God when its really Paul Wolfowitz playing with the microphone, but when the august members of our cultural elite refer to George W. Bush as evil they are brave truth tellers. And, when members of the cultural elite produce works which could be construed in any way to support the War on Terror, other members of the cultural elite must either decry the danger of our simple-minded enjoyment of these messages, or simply change the message into its opposite.

But you see, as a conservative, I'm the one who thinks all my ideological opponents are evil. No matter what I might say, I'm just like anorexia and Tourette's sufferer Ann Coulter. The reason I pretend I can't stand her is because she's just like me, and I won't want anyone to know the dirty secret. How do I know? Because I read this piece by one of my former favorite journalists, Sam Tanenhaus. There's no real argument in the thing. Its pretty much a piece of Ann Coulter-like name calling and lumping itself. The funniest bit is when he strains to say that we all agree with her post 9/11 comment that we should go into Muslim countries, "kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity." He opines:

This met with an outcry that was, again, loudest from the right. Within days, National Review online dropped her column. (And Horowitz, to his credit, picked it up for FrontPage.) But no one, to my knowledge, has bothered to point out that her formulation was prescient—right up to the eerie moment in April when Ari Fleischer was dodging questions about the evangelicals camped on the Iraqi border, poised to Christianize the Muslim infidels.

What Christian evangelicals, who ply their trade wherever in the world they possibly can, and have no
connection whatsoever to the US or British government, have to do with Coulter's vision of a new crusade, I'm not sure, nor am I sure how this fits in with the complaint that the Bush White House is in effect ruled by a small gang of predominantly Jewish neocons. Also, its been ably explained by non-Partisan experts in the area that the evangelicals' primary goal is to go after the "low-hanging fruit" of the small population of Iraqi Coptic and other Christians, and convert them to their sect of Christianity, and not to convert Muslims.

Yes, someone is going to have to do a better job explaining why Ann Coulter is repudiated by all thinking conservatives while Tourette's Cases like Eric Alterman and Michael Moore are given McArthur genius grants, Academy Awards, etc.

The Man from Flint

Its clear that the worst excesses of the far Left and the far Right bring out the worst excesses in me. While my betters are able to respond to their provocations with calm, clear reasoning with humor, or, in the case of the greatest among us, with both, I am most often reduced to a state of apoplectic, inarticulate rage that results in my attaining a positively Homer Simpsonian level of wit and nuance. Those sick souls who crave the titillation of watching one of these breakdowns in action need only check out some of the more asinine Hit and Run comment threads I've been a part of (Warning, not for those of delicate sensibilities -ed.). Given these facts, and the fact that I can barely afford the therapist bills I'm paying now, it goes without saying that I approach a prolonged discussion of Michael Moore with the same degree of relish I approach, well, Michael Moore. Thank God, there are those who have the stomach for the task, which is about as appealing as touching one of his sweaty trucker hats at the end of a hard day of fulminating.

Kay S. Hymowitz of the great City Journal wrote the definitive refutation of Moore for the next quarterly issue of City Journal, and it was published in WSJ's Opinion Journal yesterday. The piece is witty, restrained, and impeccably researched and argued. While she makes what in a sane world should be the final, airtight case against the methodology he applies in his "documentaries", summarizing neatly all of the most important lies in his films, if you haven't heard what they all are yet, Hymowitz also gives the final word on his simplistic, she says "Manichean," ideology, and despicable, hypocritical personal and business dealings. Beyond this she manages to give a good and deep explanation for his continuing popularity and critical success, that it's based on his playing a relatable and sympathetic fictional character, "The Man from Flint," if you will.

She describes what this character is and how he operates like this:

But if the copious charges of lies and distortions don't make a dent, it's because Mr. Moore's fabrications are the very source of his appeal. Not only has he created an enormously clever fictional character whose name is Michael Moore--a contemporary Will Rogers, able to channel Noam Chomsky via Chevy Chase; a working-class, truth-telling schlub in a trucker's hat who shuffles out of his La-Z-Boy to seek answers to folksy questions from the high and mighty--he has also conjured up a fictional America that seductively taps into long familiar populist resentments that have their most recent incarnation in the rage of the antiglobalization left.

This last part to me is the salient point. I started this post talking about the far Right and far Left, and I'm now convinced that their gradual convergence during the 90's antiglobalization protests, if it wasn't completed with the Lenora Fulani/Patrick Buchanan Reform Party ticket, is absolutely, totally, and utterly complete now. I've followed with great interest the recent blogosphere debates about needing new political terminologies, and if doesn't show that we need them I don't know what does. And, I also know someone who has some great ideas.

If you want to see the far Left/far Right convergence described beautifully, read on:

Mr. Moore's image of Flint makes him the ideal poet of the Naderite left. The city symbolizes the sadness and populist outrage over a world lost to the New Economy and its voracious global corporation. In "Roger and Me," the camera lingers on block after block of boarded-up houses, and Mr. Moore interviews desperate people, some being evicted from their homes. The fallen landscape is for Mr. Moore a symbol of a lost world, in which people like the laboring men of Flint made real stuff--steel, cars, trucks--before being swept away by the flabby and artificial postindustrial economy.

Though not without its appeal, Mr. Moore's vision oozes with more 1950s nostalgia than a Loretta Young fan club. There's hardly a hint of the mechanical repetition endured by the men and women who bolted thingamajigs to widgets on the assembly line; one of the workers interviewed in "Roger and Me" says he is happy to escape "the prison" of the GM factory floor, even though he's taken a cut in salary, but the director does not seem to notice. And while it is true that the UAW was integrated, Flint was hardly an Eden of racial harmony. As Jim Lawrence, a black labor activist at a GM plant in Dayton, Ohio, describes it, during the 1960s "the union gave foremen a blank check to mistreat blacks and keep them out of the high-rate machine jobs and the skilled trades."

But if this unctuous longing for a mythical, white blue-collar past isn't enough, don't forget the Pat Robertson like, good vs. evil ideology:

The other key to Mr. Moore's appeal is his simple Manichaean moral system, the kind that populists traditionally invoke to stir up easy resentments, as with today's alienated left. Mr. Moore's world comprises two groups: stupid but powerful white guys in suits, like Roger Smith; and decent but powerless ordinary folks, like Michael Moore. For Mr. Moore, this is not some kind of comic-book schema; it is as real as sin itself. Nike CEO Phil Knight is "the face of evil." President Bush, today's incarnation of the evil plutocrat in Mr. Moore's mind, is "capable of anything." "The other side [the rich]--what they believe in," Mr. Moore said in an Internet interview, "is in their own kind of sick Darwinism that says only a few shall survive to have the American dream. And they spend their time trying to enact laws to guarantee that the majority won't." Downsizing and welfare reform, which Mr. Moore calls "inherently evil," are both examples of "terrorism" committed by malevolent rich men.

And, of course, the utter hypocrisy and horrid personal behavior, which is only relevant because his work is predicated on a sense of him being the ultimate arbiter of truth and justice:

So does that mean that Mr. Moore's career as the pied piper of union workers is also a lie? The best that can be said is . . . not entirely. Mr. Moore appears to give a good deal of money to unions and charities. But on the road he often stays at the Ritz or Four Seasons, like other movie millionaires. (And he is always on the road: though he loves to describe himself as a slacker, he endured a 47-city book tour for "Downsize This," a tour he made the subject of his disastrously narcissistic movie, "The Big One," and he hit scores of cities for "Stupid White Men.") Former employees have accused him of trying to stop them from joining the Writers Guild and, according to interviews conducted by The Weekly Standard's Matt Labash, of creating working conditions that resemble a "sweatshop" and "indentured servitude." In fact, there are plenty of indications that Michael Moore is not a compassionate, big-hearted man dedicated to social justice; he just plays one on TV. When asked by a reporter from the Arcata (Calif.) Eye in 2002 why he wasn't speaking at independent bookstores rather than at corporate chains, he exploded in a tirade that revealed his willingness to have his principles--in this case, his distrust of corporate power--take a backseat to his personal vengefulness. "You know in my town the small businesses that everyone wanted to protect? They were the people that supported all the right-wing groups," he ranted. "They were the Republicans in town, they were in Kiwanis, the Chamber of Commerce--people that kept the town all white. The small hardware salesman, the small clothing-store salespersons, Jesse the Barber who signed his name three different times on three different petitions to recall me from the school board. F--- all these small businesses--f--- 'em all. Bring in the chains."

As they say, read the whole thing.

What do you Call That Thing That's Above the Subtext?

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix concerns a war between civilized, free, democratic and pluralistic wizards and witches and "Death Eaters" who seek to expunge Muggle blood and influence from their society and undo all of its liberalizations and are trying to acquire the ultimate weapon in order to acheive their dark vision. The governing bodies established to deal with such threats are either blind to them or are corrupt. Therefore wizards of conscience are forced to subvert the bureaucrats and act extra-legally in order to defend their civilization. The bureaucracy minimizes that threats the Death Eaters pose and favors a policy of appeasement. They use the mainstream press to paint those who wish to combat the Death Eaters as fanatical lunatics.

The first two installments of Peter Jackson's film version of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings portray an all-out war with a multi-ethnic multi-national army who have chosen to put aside their past diffences to defend their civilizations from tyranny on one hand, and an army of mindless fanatics serving a power mad master, an army whose ranks include a suicide bomber, on the other. It is pretty clear where these two texts stand on matters of appeasement or action, neccessary war or phony peace. Its even more clear when you consider that J. K. Rowling has said that the period between the two World Wars is the model for her series of books. I think its all absolutely wonderful. The two most popular epics of our day are both beautiful allegories for the war on Islamo-fascism that get it absolutely right. In the age of Sean Penn and Michael Moore our greatest, most widely-known popular culture is affirming and celebrating the values of our civilization in a way that hasn't been seen since World War 2.

So what will the left-wing commentariat do about this obviously unacceptable situation? Either ignore it, or somehow twist it to conform with their own preconceptions of course. Every review of The Order of the Phoenix either didn't mention this fact, or went through some sort of tortured oppositional reading to show Rowling was either just a middle-of-the-roader or still a right-thinking liberal like them. A good example is this hilarious Breakfast Table segment on Slate, where David Edelstein and Polly Shulman discuss the book. Its fun to read the whole thing to see how they dance around the issue and to see how Boomer liberal guilt suffuses seemingly everything that these middle-aged lefty bores do. Early on Edelstein begins a sentence like this:

Although I'm a little sick of the emphasis on war in our big pop-culture sagas—Harry Potter, Star Wars, and The Lord of the Rings

Yes, enough with this sooo played out war theme. Let us have stirring, sweeping epics on themes more acceptable to liberal movie critics like say organic farming or prescription drug benefits. That'll sure get the asses in the seats (or at least Al Gore's). Never mind that we're talking about the popular epics of Western Popular Culture here, which means a tradition starting with The Iliad (warrrr!!!!) and more or less continuing in that vein today. We still have to pull out our good liberal credentials and say how this is all so troublesome before we can enjoy a martial popular epic on its own terms.

Later on Shulman asks Edelstein what he thinks of the Rowling's politics. He begins by saying:

Despite the fact that you and I put in some years at the Village Voice, I don't think either of us has ever been too comfortable viewing works like Harry Potter through the prism of the author's politics.

Ha! I know nothing about Shulman, but I've reading Edelstein’s work for years, and he's had no qualms injecting his Voiceian politics into reviews. You could be charitable and look at the qualifier "works like Harry Potter" but I've seen him bring politics into sundy reviews of all sorts of ostensibly non-political books, so why the reticence now? Oh, I see:

I might detect in Order of the Phoenix a certain vexation on the subject of the UK's left-wing peaceniks, who would deny the threat of racial and religious supremacists in the shape of [fill in your favorite Middle Eastern Voldemort], and who would seek to limit money spent on Defense [Against the Dark Arts/aka WMD]. It is only because Harry and his fanatical brigade have trained unlawfully and in secret that they can take on the Death Eaters. But I'm obliged to point out that a smart reader, John Hubbard, takes the opposite stance: He sees Umbridge as representing "the power of closed government unchecked" and Minister Fudge as "our own president believing only what he wants to." Hubbard is on firmer ground, I think, when he writes that "Rowling eloquently shows how our current discourse isn't a debate of ideas, but rather a constant questioning of the morals and propriety of individuals." That's in line, too, with Rowling's distrust of the establishment press: It's a sick joke that one is more likely to read the truth in the dotty tabloid Quibbler than the Pravda-like Daily Prophet.

Yeah, its a sick joke that one is more likely to read the truth in the dotty tabloid New York Post than in the Pravda-like New York Times but here we are. Its also sick joke that Edelstein's gut leads him to the obvious (and correct) interpretation, and he has so much trouble talking himself out of it that he has to outsource that work to a "smart" reader, whose "analysis" amounts to nothing more than a UK left-wing peacenik's Hitler/Bush protest sign.

The side of the fence on which Jackson's version of Lord of the Rings places itself is so unmistakable that reviews almost universally ignore the question. Its an immensely respected work within the commentariat, as it should be, but I've never seen the question of its political implications addressed, except for once. It was in the Village Voice end of the year movie critic round-up thing, where they get all the lefty critics from alternative papers together to discuss the previous year's films. Mark Peranson said this:

The true ideological con job of the year is The Two Towers. War films are by their nature delicate enterprises, but how irresponsible is it in this climate of saber-rattling to present one where good and evil are so clearly demarcated? One in which the faceless hordes of ultimate evil—there's even a suicide bomber in their midst!—are fended off by our motley crew of racially mixed, unquestionably pure heroes, who engage in a running tally of how many lowdown dirty Orcs they've felled with a mighty video-game swoop?

At least the guy's honest. He forthrightly admits that any acknowledgement of such things as good and evil, and any acknowledgement that America and our allies are more closely associated with the former, simply give him the willies, unless, presumably they switched things around and made W the bad guy somehow. He at least recognizes the old-fashioned, patriotic message that is the unfashionable but unmistakable core of the work's appeal. Everyone else just ignores it, realizing that they'd either have to make a statement like the one above, which will place them on the level of contempt reserved for people like Michael Moore by society-at-large, or admit that they actually enjoy the pro-War on Terror themes of the work, which probably would result in no longer being invited to fashionable parties.

These readings of these works are glaringly obvious, but it's interesting to see how much they're ignored. It also makes me wonder about Rowling, Jackson, and others involved with these projects, themselves. To what extent are these meanings intentional? And, if they are, do those creating these works actually espouse these views? We probably will never know. As workers in the entertainment industry they have a vested interest in appearing to be politically correct. I just want to say to them, "Bravo" and "Keep it coming."

P.S. If you want to see some real myopia in readings of these works, you can never go wrong checking out doctrinaire, big L, Libertarian writers. Julian Sanchez, as usual, doesn't disappoint. In this piece he rightly recognizes Orwellian and Arendtian themes in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix without acknowledging the 500 pound gorilla; that the book counsels war as the way to combat totalitarian, fascist evil.

The Revolution has not been Televized (and hasn't happened yet)

It's clear that here big media collectively doesn't give a flying rat fuck about the Iranian anti-theocracy movement. The only way for an American to hear about it is through the blogosphere, or through "conservative" media outlets such as The National Review. There are a number of factors at play here, all of them ugly and predictable, and recounting them only serves to make me depressed and discouraged. As the Don of the blogosphere astutely asks,

Why is this stuff getting so little big-media attention? Is it the Eason Jordan effect?

This is part of it. Ever since all journalism adopted the entertainment journalism model of trading favorable coverage for "access" the big media have been more than willing to cozy up to dictators and give them favorable notices, in exchange for the privilege of their company and their interviews. CNN gave about as much tough scrutiny to Saddam Hussein as People magazine gave to Charlie's Angels 2: Full Throttle, so why should we expect them and their ilk to do any better here?

But beyond the near universal adoption of the "access journalism" model, journalists in big media have long had a friendly relationship with tyranny, from Walter Duranty on through to Peter Arnett. It seems to be a constitutional, cultural phenomenon, one I can't really explain. Part of it may be the fact that most big media journalists range from center-left to loony-far-left and the left has a long and well-documented affinity for totalitarianism and brutality that continues unbroken to this day, with the left's willful ignorance of Castro's abuses. Along side the left's fixation with totalitarian forms of government, there is the general idea that for one who believes the American system is the worst sytem possible, and that US is the most evil nation in history, as Michael Moore and Jimmy Breslin do, just to randomly name a couple of well-known radical leftists, any entity that is an enemy of America, or especially one that has done violence to America, is at least partially right, hence the radical chic attached to groups and figures ranging from Che Guevara to the Viet Cong to Palestinian Terrorists. See how this stuff makes me end up sounding like Ann Coulter? That's why I didn't want to get into it, but, well here we are. I'll tough it out, I'll avoid being baited into total kookery, somehow, next paragraph . . .

I imagine it must be quite the conundrum for the left, after all this is a government that took scores of US citizens hostage and put them through a brutal, over a year long ordeal, so they must be doing something right. Its also a government that was brought about through one of the left's favorite types of movements, a "popular uprising" (see Riots, Rodney King) against a ruler that was a US puppet, a brutal monarch to be sure, and that we supported the Shah is further prove of our infinite perfidy. A bizarre subset of big media, libertarian media, has been especially provocative on the last point. To begin with, their coverage of the Iranian Student Movement itself has been . . . non-existent. Let's take a spin: Reason Magazine? Nothing. Matt Welch? Nothing. Julian Sanchez? Virginia Postrel? Jesse Walker? You get the idea. In fact, this entire little clique within the big media dipped their toes into these waters only once, when Reason published this piece, a bit of memoirish rambling totally atypical of the magazine, but which generally brought home the idea of how bad life under the Shah was. This piece was published on July 3rd, 2003, interesting timing to say the least.

Just as I wrote that I found that Matt Welch posted this on Hit and Run. I wrote a comment asking why there has been so little coverage thus far, and now only coverage after the fact. No response yet, hopefully something in the future. Keep in mind that these libertarian outlets operate some shadowland between big media and nano media, the overwhelming willful ignorance of the situation by the major networks, major newspapers, and CNN is what's truly appalling, and sadly predictable.

UPDATE: I did what any self-respecting crank would do and hit and ran over at Hit and Run regarding Reason's apparently ignoring the Iranian democracy movement. What's great about that site, despite the fact that I disagree with roughly 90% of what any of the writer's there think, is that they are willing to crawl down into the muck of the comment box and wrestle around with us cranks. The responsiveness, the democracy, the egalitarianism, this is what we love about the new media! Try that at the NYT and see the difference. "We get 40,000 letters to the editor a week and publish 4. Don't tell us were not accountable! And, you get this nice letter on Times letterhead. Oh wait, you don't even get that anymore. Sorry."

Help came, as it most often does, in the form of the always estimable Jesse Walker. As I hoped, the timing of the piece about the Shah was coincidental. It had been published in the paper edition of the magazine long before and accepted for publication long before that. As for Reason's coverage and libertarian coverage of the issue in general, it seems it really was a simple case of not having time to do everything you want to do, and he pointed me to some really nicely pieces on Iran written by him and by Charles Paul Freund. I suspect that their relatively minimal coverage of Iran was also a result of libertarians' isolationism.

The big media downplaying this story, and covering the conjoined twins or the IAEA’s visit instead is still truly disgraceful.