cheese it, the cops!

mmmm, foxy

this gleefully publicized notion that people who watch fox news know less than people held in an isolation chamber is just ridiculous. honestly i don't care what your poll shows. tell you what, tonight watch special report with bret baier and fox report with shepard smith, then tell me they didn't cover the day's news. you'll get more or less the same info as you would on wolf blitzer or abc nightly news, with plenty of overlap with tomorrow's new york times and news hour. there might be a few symptoms of rightwingedness; maybe they'll find a little anti-christmas story from florida or something. but they will cover the news.

hacked by barney

sesame street site hacked: replaced by porn videos. attack of the disgruntled toddlers, no doubt. and who could blame them? sesame street is the most painfully earnest pc propaganda ever inflicted on unformed brains. its greatest accomplishment is counting to ten 18 billion times. that's edutainment!

unbelievably, abc has canceled all my children and one life to live, though general hospital (my on-and-off addiction since the 70s) survives for now. i'd be sorry to see the long era of the soap at at an end. here's a gallery of actors who got their start in those soaps. elsewhere: demi moore was a luke love interest on gh and the lovely robin wright was kickin ass on santa barbara, the great soap from the 80s.

 

watching cnn or msnbc in the daytime is disturbing. a few moments on libya, then exhaustive coverage of charlie sheen. a number of times every day, cnn puts up a psychiatrist to diagnose charlie sheen, as the network sifts in detail through his every utterance. now i feel that the 'lifestyle' and celebrity-culture emphasis of these networks in the daytime reflects the fact that they think their audience is mostly female. that is something they would know. but either they horrendously misconstrue what women are interested in or the whole thing is a devastating indictment of the gender for extreme superficiality.

a few notes on the grammys:

obviously we are in a very gay, second-coming-of-glam era. feel liberated or irritated, as the case may be.

still i'd scrub off the women: miranda lambert's face was invisible behind a make-up mask, e.g. gwyneth paltrow used to be a really interesting looking woman; now she's indistinguishable from faith hill, a wasp kewpie doll.

and surely we've gone as far as we can in the direction of extreme eyelashes. cf aguilera and katy perry. people take drugs now to make their eyelashes grow. 

speaking of gay, that 'bieber loves usher' man-boy interracial love thing was rather unedifying. usher supposedly told him, after meeting him in a parking lot, 'if it's meant to be, we will meet again.' and be subject to arrest.

i was tired of usher before he was born.

the initial tribute to aretha was very excellent. aguilera actually threw down something worthy of the queen, but they were all really good.

i actually was grooving on muse. at least it had a touch of rock and was political. sorry!

lady gaga is insufferable, and 'born this way" didn't slay me. but fame monster is a great pop album.

eminem is the best rapper that ever lived, even sober. i hope he stays alive.

at least that whole dylan and young alt.country thing didn't feature prosthetic horns or plexiglass bubble skirts. i didn't see any evidence that dylan is swallowing pills to extend his eyelashes. on the other hand, it didn't sound good either, and i kind of like that in music.

oh you ain't gonna do too much better than jagger doin solomon burke's "somebody to love" (covered first by the stones on one my fave albums ever), the rolling stones, now!

alright i guess that's it! i was too busy texting with my daughter to liveblog.

 

al gore and keith olbermann will be quite a team. keith can simulate emotion while al simulates intellection.

i ragged on cnn for giving us a big old dose of charlie sheen yesterday as the world changed. however, let me say this: their coverage has been amazing in many dimensions. the reporters they have on the ground - ben wedemen, nic robertson, and arwa damon, for example - have been exemplary, and they know arabic. so while some people thought that the folks in the square were celebrating when mubarak announced he wouldn't run for re-election, arwa knew they were enraged. the analysis too: they're working with fouad ajami this evening: about as clear and eloquent as could be imagined. this is exactly why 24-hour cable networks can make sense, and no one does it even close to as well. the hosts are a mixed bag, but wolf blitzer, for example, is smart and steady as hell.

one of my little projects over my break has been to try to learn the history of jazz. so one thing was the ken burns series from 2001: twenty hours of astonishing material. i am learning a lot of course. wynton marsalis, who is a producer and probably the main talking head, is a supremely articulate person: so profound but so sincere, and of course so knowledgeable. stanley crouch is the most feet-on-the-ground of the interpreters: he says 'look, you've got to understand that sidney bechet started a gunfight in paris at rush hour. usually you want your gunfights to be as late as possible, so that people will not see you." the gunfight supposedly was with another musician over whether d-flat really was the right chord.

but let me say what i think goes wrong. we need our legends and our heroes and our coherent narratives. and we need our interpreters, including intellectuals. but what you don't want to do is lose the reality, the humanness, the music. everything has to be almost insanely important i guess to attract viewers etc and everything changes america forever, was like nothing anyone had ever heard before. gerald early gives you the impression that armstrong was carefully reading the essays of emerson so that he could embody america in all its profusion. every note is the suffering and transcendence of some national actor or something. matt glaser gives a nice example, speculating that werner heisenberg was in the audience when louis played oslo and then saying: armstrong gives us a new theory of time and space and man's place in the cosmos. shit man in your anxiety to legitimate this stuff - which has already been so utterly legitimated - you really just lose the whole thing. man he's blowing that horn so people will dance and stuff! geez. to be great music, to be be deep and delightful music, to be new music: let's start with that. it's plenty!

marsalis says so many beautiful things about armstrong: he combined the deepest human feeling with the greatest musical skill. right! but the mythmaking just gets to be too much: marsalis basically speculates that little louis didn't have to learn or practice: the first time he picked up a cornet at the colored waifs home he sounded great. well it's the same kind of myth of a jackson pollock or something: he just is. but then you're really in danger of losing that human connection, not to mention the hard work. look i guess i'd much rather do this with armstrong or duke ellington than some of the crazy candidates (beatles or dylan, e.g.). but let's keep louis armstrong here, with us. a person, a finite real person, did these things. louis does very interesting things with time, but he does them literally in time with actual time, and he is at play. the music is great enough. it sounds so deep, but after the thirtieth repetition you sort of realize that embodying the very essence of america doesn't actually explain anything. 

watcha watchin, crispy? 10-year-old jane is really into the next generation of animated tv series: cartoon network's adventure time and regular show. anticipated by chowder and misadventures of flapjack, these shows are characterized by a kind of humble, hand-made, emphatically 2-d, not-beautifully-drawn animation that still manages to do many interesting things. they're constantly surreal, happening in worlds with seemingly arbitrary physical laws, etc. the scripts are often hilarious, filled with clever sortofjokes and incongruous or arbitrary observations. they're transgressive here and there and are not designed for young children, although maybe your kindergartner would dig it on her own level.

adventure time is particularly charming, from the basic concept to the theme song to the drawing-style to the characterization. it has an amazing real innocence and a thousand knowing meta-ideas. it's about a kid - finn the human - who lives in a fairy-tale world that seems to be created to make him into a hero who can date a princess. plus he's got a completely matter-of-fact magic dog buddy to keep his feet on the ground, and an awesome hat.

regular show has a bit of a darker edge; the two main characters (a blue jay and a raccoon) are worst enemies as well as best friends, and sometimes the whole plot is just kind of pitiful and everybody is very much no hero. still it is mordantly funny once you find the rhythm. and in comparison to sponge bob or looney tunes or ren and stimpy (the classics of their eras), these shows are remarkably quiet; they have a very slow rhythm; that's surprising if you think communication has to always get faster; it's kind of a relief though. the very opposite would be something like fairly oddparents: just excruciatingly screechingly loud and idiotically fast throughout. anyway you'd have to give a lot of credit to the cartoon network for getting these on the air; they are initially very unprepossessing and they take (well they took for me) a while to sink in or to it takes awhile to start feeling the jokes. you probably can get adventure time and regular show in on demand-type services on cable and satellite.

if i were the operations coordinator for al qaeda or the greek anarchists or a fringe right-wing militia, or indeed for the pta of the local elementary school, i'd work on devoting the next few years - or as long as it takes - to erasing the oprah winfrey network. suicide vests, truck bombs, airbuses loaded with high explosives, dirty bombs, anthrax, sarin, beams of anti-matter, etc: i'd try them all, then start in again. then i'd devote myself to removing every trace of oprah from the cultural record: mention that name and you will be tortured just short of death, then sent crawling back out into the world, so that your horrendous disfigurement can serve as a warning. one good thing about this approach: you might get bono too.

cultural hippopotami, they bellow bigger than you and i, or even you and me; but what they bellow is meaning-free.

right now on animal planet: "A study of Michael Jackson's tight bond with his pet chimpanzee, Bubbles."

nytimes rushed to post its little sunday interview with olbermann. on the equivalence between fox and msnbc, pointedly asserted by jon stewart, he responds as follows.

To present all this as the same is both unfair and injurious to the political system at the moment. One of the big flaws now is that there is all this noise on the right. When I yell there is a reason for it. There is a political and factual discernment behind it. I am not doing it gratuitously.

well this is a wacky self-delusion. who knows whether it is really sincere? but of course o'reilly or beck might say exactly the same of themselves, and they do, actually: beck in particular, though beck can also pull back into humility mode, which does not appear entirely sincere either. but what it should make you think is precisely the opposite of what it asserts. some people are almost obsessed with self-praise. almost every word out of their mouths has a self-congratulatory function. i guess maybe they get a good response to this, but the only plausible response is just to take it as discrediting their every assertion. or really, looking at it generously, the right response is pity. it's sad: it reveals the deepest insecurity, an insecurity so profound that it has swamped the whole personality, actually interrupted the person's contact with reality in a profound way: every sentence is a strategic attempt to impress you; the words have lost contact with truth in a way that deprives them even of their apparent meaning. 

people in this mode are kind of self-esteem monsters. they spend all day patting themselves on the back. they're profoundly damaged. i'd say that what they need isn't self-esteem, but self-reflection. they are under the impression that they have to praise themselves to feel good. but i don't think that the cure for their condition lies in that direction. self-esteem is of no value in itself, and one should seek not to esteem oneself, but to deserve to esteem oneself. but this strategy of always in a sheer way asserting your own wonderfulness, i believe, actually has the reverse effect. it makes you less deserving of your own esteem. you're always putting up this desperate external show. somewhere inside you are also doubting, maybe even cringing at the person you have actually become.

but in this case it only redoubles the validity of the charge. so entirely partisan is keith olbermann that he is under the delusion that he is merely reciting facts. so completely bent by partisanship is he that he has lost all sense of the idea that he is even advocating anything at all; in the context where he's constantly spouting his own opinions, while claiming constantly merely to be representing the objective facts, he simply asserts that there can be no rational dialogue. that is a very extreme example of exactly what stewart is talking about, the degree absolute of bent partisanship and self-delusion. describing this as megalomania and mental illness is not too strong. 

also it is a pandering move. it tells you that if you agree with olbermann - which his audience does of course - you aren't actually advocating controversial opinions which would oblige you to think about what your opponents are saying: you are merely reciting the objective facts and anyone who disagrees is an irrational monkey, hardly human at all. so the audience feels better about itself too: it's really aimed at their need to esteem themselves. you speak for reality; your opponents self-evidently for delusions. you don't have to think to yourself: right i think they're wrong. but how did they get to that opinion? how did i get to mine? the disturbing thing is that you got to it in order to feel superior to them, that you served not the truth but only a desperate internal need. after that, to represent your position as some sort of bastion of rationality is just to double down on the ultimately pitiful desperation to feel good about yourself. trying to have a political argument in that context is just ridiculous. what's driving them is their inner child, who is curled up deep inside, hugging himself, rocking back and forth and crying.

i guess what amazes me about the strategy of self-praise quite in general is that it actually appears to work. people actually believe that you are what you say you are as you just keep circling around to the theme of how great you are. it's exactly like believing, without thinking, the advertising claims of some corporation: surely you have to filter the information on the grounds that it serves the self-interest of the advertiser/self-praiser. it ought just to disqualify someone as a truth teller after awhile, but it often seems to have the opposite effect. i say this is profoundly unfortunate.

if, when people engaged in self-praise - especially when (gonna say it) like a few people i actually know, they did it all the time, at an ever-greater pitch of intensity - everyone reacted not by believing them but by cocking an eyebrow or snickering at them - if people reacted to individuals praising themselves as they routinely react to advertising - skeptically - this would devastate them for the evening. but in the long run it would serve their interests; it would force them back to the question of who and what they actually are and what they actually deserve. when people respond to someone's self-praise by being impressed, they just reinforce these people and they spin out of control; they become worse and worse as they assert of themselves that they're getting greater and greater. the external appearance detaches itself ever more from the internal reality. they aren't going to feel better about themselves in the long run; they are going to loathe and devour themselves.

if people routinely believed advertisements, we'd have incredibly shitty products. when we believe people who praise themselves, we get extremely shitty people. if people believe that bill o'reilly is a partisan but keith olbermann is engaged merely in factual discernment - or vice versa, for that matter - they get incredibly shitty television: smug, dishonest, with seething weirdness or gaping emptiness just beneath the surface. 

 

olbermann had his moment, and i was actually moved by his outrage on guantanamo and abu ghraib. but i would say the outrage paled: hard to do that every night for years. and he was just as outraged at bill o'reilly as he was at cheney, which is absurd. but he kept it going night after night, which had no effect at all except to make o'reilly seem very important. bill-o was the worst person, you know, 600 times: it was just boring and it attributed to o'reilly a preternatural power. plus i must say from the get-go that i got a smarmy vibe from him (he has that in common with his nemesis); i just sort of doubted that he was the outraged moralist he pretended to be. anyway, he was great on espn: he invented the rocking home run call, doing highlights: "yahtzee!" the golden age of sportscenter. maybe he'll show up in a gig like that again.

as readers of this blog know, i don't really like keith olbermann. but his suspension raises some interesting issues. now it is pretty funny that he was doing what he was criticizing fox for doing. on the other hand, msnbc is to a large extent an advocacy operation, and surely no one can be surprised that olbermann supports democratic candidates. no one in their right mind can think something like that compromises his objectivity: ain't got none, nor is he (really) pretending to. i think both fox and msnbc have to face squarely the question of whether they are news sources or advocates of particular positions. if the former then a ban on political contributions is (sort of) sensible. but if the latter, then not. really both these networks are hybrids; they maintain a sense of objectivity on some shows and at some moments, abandon it entirely at others. for example, andrea mitchell is a reporter/news anchor. rachel maddow (who i'd much rather watch than olbermann) is, of course, not. shepard smith is-ish, not hannity, obviously. but anyway, they need to decide what they are as they make policies about what their employees can do!

speaking of cnn, watchin this parker/spitzer thing tonight, especially because kathleen parker (who won the pulitzer for commentary at the washpost this year) can be really interesting. however, there are problems. obviously they are anything but live, maybe for good reasons: each session with studio guests was cut, clumsily, over and over. it just can't have gone smoothly. the set is garish and extremely distracting, with like giant images moving around behind everybody. spitzer's speechifying is already tiresome, twenty minutes in. 

i watch a lot of cnn. now i don't think i would have fired rick sanchez for that particular conversation. but rarely have i sensed more of a preening narcissist on the air. you got the feeling that if a thousand people just died in a mudslide, it was all about rick sanchez. you'd watch him ragging to his audience about his own staff when they didn't instantly put up the graphics he suddenly demanded, etc. last week he did an interview with colombian(/french) former presidential candidate and six-year hostage ingrid betancourt. i wish i could find it on youtube or something. he just kept pressing her on sexuality, as in 'you were a young, attractive woman when you were kidnapped' (that approach is not going to go over too well with the middle-aged female, i think, though he meant it as a 'compliment') 'and you were manacled to a tree with a metal collar around your neck. what happened next?' etc etc. truly it was a bizarre interview with someone who could have, you know, talked about what's going on in colombia, or about her trauma and survival, which wre not necessarily all that sexy.

kathleen parker is right that there's twelve-step stuff behind beck, including a basic stance of kind of desperation for god's help. but there are also many ways and reasons that what beck is doing is bad 12-step practice, however excellent it may be in other directions, or not. one thing to say: twelve-step programs have no leaders, no one who owns the ideology. the principle of anonymity means that aa, e.g. has no spokespersons, and they constantly emphasize "principles, not personalities." i do think beck presents himself in many ways that are immediately incompatible with 12-step practice. 

parker by the end says that 12-step programs proselytize, or are "evangelical." i'd say this is a complete misunderstanding. the twelfth step inculcates "carrying the message to the alcoholic that still suffers." and helping others recover is presented as an essential dimension of one's own recovery. but this means one at a time, helping particular people who need and want help find help by sharing your story. it has absolutely nothing to do with ranting for hours on national television, or getting up on the steps of the lincoln memorial and gesticulating. at the heart of the program is a severe and serious cultivation of humility. i'm not sure that beck's declarations of his own humility are entirely sincere

glenn beck, let's say, is the opposite of bill w., who didn't even want to give his name, who never presented himself in public as a leader or spokesman: there are no leaders or spokesmen. i was perfectly serious when i said that it's likely that beck's twelve-step sponsor basically thinks that all he's doing is courting a relapse. well, we'll survive glenn beck's relapse, and twelve-step programs have a survived a thousand distortions/appropriations by a thousand egomaniacs, a thousand attempts to profit or to promote oneself.

Tradition Eleven—Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films.
Trad Twelve—Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our Traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities

glenn beck does have a maniacal or is-he-insane edge. today he's really ranting the apocalypse. get that ass behind the shield of god! the time is nigh, bitch! etc. so that's definitely part of the entertainment value, and if he has nervous breakdown or goes to rehab one of these days (like maybe a week from tomorrow), that will itself be a reality show. let's say that appearing on television all day every day making pronouncements about recovery and what god is saying to us is probably not what his 12-step sponsor is recommending.

on individual/collective salvation i give you below a quote from kierkegaard's concluding unscientific postscript, if nothing else to show that glenn beck didn't invent this problem.

For example, what does it mean to be immortal? Socially the question cannot be answered at all, because socially it cannot even be formulated, since only the subject who wills to become subjective can grasp the question and rightly ask, Am I immortal? You know, people join up with each other in various matters. For example, several families can join together for a box at the theater, and three single gentlemen can join together for a riding horse, so that each one rides every third day. But I cannot become immortal taking turns with two other gentlemen. People who have dabbled in this and that, who have been every different thing, one day ask the pastor whether they will actually remain the same in eternity, after in this life they have not been able to stay the same for a fortnight. Immortality would admittedly be a peculiar metamorphosis if it could transform this human centipede into something with an eternal identity.

[you could find this in the hongs's translation on pp 175-176, vol. 1; i have messed about with it a bit, partly to reflect my preference for the lowrie/swenson translation, which i don't have at hand for some reason. also i've omitted some ellipses. the postscript is my usual answer to the question: what's your favorite book, asshole?] 

Beck made the remarks in answer to a question about his previous accusation that Obama was a "racist" who has "a deep-seated hatred for white people." He contended that that statement "was not accurate" and that he had "miscast" Obama's religious beliefs as racism.

i swear i am not obsessed with glenn beck, and i will soon leave this zone entirely. but i would think perhaps some of the people who have pulled that quote out every three columns for a year would acknowledge this retraction. according to morning edition this am, beck has asserted that obama's theology is neither christian nor muslim. steve innskeep's remark: he provided no evidence for that. it's like beck was putting forth some birther-type theory. well, his argument is that christianity (and i guess islam, according to beck) preaches individual not collective salvation. he holds that the latter is an innovation and is incompatible with the main thrust of christian teachings.

now this is a remarkable critique that engages the whole history of individualism and collectivism, reaching to the heart of many political debates over the last 250 years. i imagine that proponents of collective salvation within christianity have a whole theological framework; i bet the debate is incredibly rich and complicated. but you know beck has actually been trying to do the history too, and he appeals to a certain vision of protestantism, one that among others we ought to associate with kierkegaard and emerson, figures to whose philosophy, putting it mildly, i am attracted.

but really we have quite a rich, fundamental, historically-oriented critique of obama's politics by way of his spirituality. just dismissing it as wacky birther paranoia is...not an adequate or honest actual response. it would be bizarre and amazing to see actual individualism (as opposed merely to self-seeking etc) arise again as a viable option, theologically or politically.

one thing about beck: he can talk for hours on end and say almost nothing. really it remains in the vaguest terms: follow god's will and do what we know is right. course i'd quibble even with that, but really you can see him shying away from controversy in an almost insidious way: i actually wonder what the audience thought of the parade of minority spokespersons.

yo glenn beck is delivering a real stemwinder, and this is his third speech: the man can talk all day; he's like castro or chavez.

one thing you have to say about large media conglomerates as political leaders: they know how to combine image, word, and music, like the semi-sincere tribute to king they're now playing.

that sarah palin is a gifted speaker.

of course the theological stuff is potentially pretty disturbing. but on the third hand, there really is a social justice component too as when one of the speakers decried the destruction of the "first nations" and made it a "call to repentence."

so i've defended the grassrootness etc of the tea party, but obviously this beck thing isn't that. it's interesting to think about how political leadership is shifting, think about it as a problem, for one thing. so here's a radio-television host, with really newscorp machinery behind him among other resources. go to his site and there he is shilling for goldline and other corporations, as well as marketing his own products. he is a for-profit outfit. i don't think we could say the same of king. is it possible to be in this stance and be a leader? well, if not, exactly why not? but it's a bit hard to think about a for-profit political movement. on the other hand say there are 100,000 on the mall today...

i'm surprised there isn't a pay wall to access the live stream. 

i will say this though: there is no point framing this glenn beck thing as a civil rights rally. nothing there but mere provocation or, really, mere yapyap. nor do i find the phrase "restoring honor" all that redolent or resonant myself, but it's hard to say how people are reading it. anyway, if i get a chance between starting classes and editing "the practical anarchist" i'll blog the rally or whatever.

the part of beck that i don't like is the red-baiting and the paranoid style, where he's mapping the vast conspiracy etc. on the other hand, the american polity, which emerged in a pointedly individualist tradition, has moved steadily toward collectivism and squishy totalitarianism (one name for that might be 'socialism'): a move that often appears to be unquestionable, the inevitable direction of history, etc. anything that interrupts that narrative is in my opinion a good idea. the specter of anti-communist witch hunts etc makes me shiver too. but though mccarthy was wrong about just about everything - especially freedom - he was right about one thing: the actual nature of communism, which is the actual nature of the left in a continuum from genocidal tyranny to well-meaning merger of economy and polity into one infinitely huge bureaucracy, caring for you like you're in daycare or an assisted living facility for your whole life.

you know, this beck phenomenon is pretty interesting. the left condemns him in every column and soundbite using one or two quotes, presumably because they can't bear actually to watch him, which i can understand. (robinson, yesterday: "Beck has called President Obama a "racist" and accused him of having a "deep-seated hatred for white people": how many times have columnists written that precise sentence? christ find a new quote or something. ) and it's easy to look at him emoting, shaking his head, throwing down the hyperbole etc and just think this is ridiculous. well, it's highly eccentric, that's for sure. 

but take last night's show. he spent the whole hour with a panel of clerical historians discussing american christianity of the eighteenth century. i mean the discussion was far more cerebral and far longer than anything you will ever see on the news hour, e.g. really i think that if you believe that tea party types or whomever are mere illiterate idiots led by buffoons you ought to really watch a few of these shows. 

now of course the panelists all agreed, more or less, with beck, and they told sort of one side of the story. well: it's a polemic. but i think after awhile you're going to have to admit that it's an interesting polemic, and an informed polemic.

not only that, but it framed the issue in fundamental terms with regard to individualist and collectivist traditions within christianity and within the american polity. i think asking the very most general and fundamental questions is something that basically does not happen in our political discourse. essentially, beck does that every night. 

or when was the last time you heard someone on television trying to state the essence of the sermons of jonathan edwards? beck himself sort of pretends not to be an intellectual, but in some ways the closest parallel to his show on a good day would be something like the documentaries of ken burns: let's take enough time and actually come to grips with our own history. and if you don't think ken burns's documentaries are themselves polemical, try to see them from a point of view that is not your own.

you may not be surprised by this, but i hate glenn beck less than my friends do. he's quite the spectacle at times, and i was just listening to a rant about the radical protestant beliefs at the heart of the american conception of liberty. well, he was right about that anyway. it's a mixed bag of course. 

then he unfolds it with the concept of collective salvation (as opposed to the individual salvation offered in 18th century protestantism) in obama's speeches and jeremiah wright's church. well you know this is kind of a complex set of of historical moves for the merest demagogue.

ok and then he and the panel are going further into the origins of american abolitionism. well, this is right.