For the 1999 philosophical thriller Being John Malkovich, the eponymous actor decided to accept credit for his role in the film as “John Horatio Malkovich” rather than “John Gavin Malkovich,” his real name. His justification for this quirky little gesture is understandable: in building emotional distance from his doppelgänger, he was able to wink at the audience and preserve his identity. But even if he hadn't done it, Malkovich still wouldn't have been required to perform his citizenly duties as an absurd caricature of himself; he only had to play one on TV. In contemporary American politics, the conservative has not been so fortunate.
This disaffected person certainly cannot in good faith cast a ballot for either the Republican or the Democratic Party; neither represent his ideological interests. But alas, he also cannot help but feel that his vote and time are equally wasted proselytizing for faceless, nameless third-party candidates who haven't the slightest political purchase. So unlike Malkovich, the conservative actually is compelled to answer to the bastardization of his own name, and face misjudgment. The end effect of such brutal disenfranchisement is that although he might pull the lever as he has always done, he can now only do so with angry disinterest. (It might surprise you, however, or it might not, to know the type of people for whom he's lately been pulling it.) The conservative has lost both his home and the language to protest it.
But not for much longer, I suspect.
The disclaimer, of course, is that I don't speak from the personal experience of any kind of conservatism; my preference is strong for the Left, I find my political beliefs refreshingly well encapsulated by Senator Obama, a liberal Democrat, and I have no fetish for the traditional institutions, especially when they confound societal progress. But a simple observation cannot be denied: the marginalization of conservatism in this country, the metamorphosis of libertarianism into authoritarianism, has been an incredibly destructive force. Our fiscal policy offers corporate welfare egregious enough to turn Marx over in his grave; our civil liberties have been seized, without much of a struggle and without collateral; religious fanaticism and proud ignorance have cleared their throats and claimed seats at the round-table. As ideologically divided as we are, the juxtaposition of such partisanship with the likely results of this election season does not merely suggest a slight change in the zeitgeist, it suggests widespread dissatisfaction with the GOP from the left and the right. (In what kind of universe does Christopher Buckley endorse a Democrat?)
If the GOP wishes to survive, they must make several paradigmatic changes, and they must make them now: they must leave evangelical pretenses to fringe parties, lobbyists on the White House lawn, and interest groups. They must regain moral jurisdiction on the economy, the arena they might have ideologically in their favor. They must start behaving a lot more like Bob Barr, and a lot less like Rick Santorum. They must fight to reduce the sprawling hand of government everywhere, not just in the arena of social welfare. They must abandon neo-conservative foreign policy, and rejoin the global diplomatic community. In other words, they must abandon the silly cult of Ronald Reagan, and return to Barry Goldwater. It's astonishing how few people see it, but it was Reagan, through both his personality and his politics, who provided the foundation for this collapse. Thankfully, the demagogic faction in his wake is in its final throes, and I suspect that within the next ten years or so, we'll see either a collapse or a return to roots. Conservatives—and everyone else, for that matter—had better hope so.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
An American Tragedy
Not a single night in Aggieville elapses without the occurrence of at least two kinds of culinary injustice: consider the person in a crowd who edges meekly up to the bar, requests a “Bourbon County Stout” and is denied, and also consider everyone else at every other bar, slamming their fists upon the counter and accepting or even demanding some horrid, yellow swill. The sin is not in the denial or acceptance itself, but rather in the mechanism by which this travesty comes to pass.
I'm not “writing one on corporatism,” so to speak; Sierra Nevada, one of the biggest craft brewers in the country, produces in a factory in California several world-class brews. Craft brewery market leader Boston Beer is continually adding new and exotic varieties to its extensive stable, and its famous flagship “Samuel Adams Boston Lager” is available nationwide. Goose Island, out of Chicago, seems unable to produce anything but excellence and its offerings are available to most of the Midwest. These breweries and many, many others produce superb products, ship them all over, and do so at only trivially higher prices. No, craft beer commands only a four-percent market share for a different reason: because of our credulity and susceptibility to slick propaganda. Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors don't really even try to argue, and historically have responded by quietly swallowing up the smaller breweries like whales and minimizing them in their stomachs. They always win, and we always lose; this isn't a meritocracy, it's hegemony.
These shameless profiteers have intentionally contributed to the erosion of our faculties of discrimination, and they have succeeded both in the way we conceive of our beer, and the way we conceive of ourselves.
We are wont to describe beer—as my former roommate and I half-facetiously observe—as possessing only four characteristics: “light,” “heavy,” “bitter,” and “smooth.” No wonder so many are convinced of their distaste! In this does, in fact, lie a good indicator: if these terms are sufficient to describe a given beer, you've learned everything you need to know about it. But this set of adjectives is hardly complete; a quality beer doesn't just have a laundry list of characteristics, it has an entire dynamic landscape to be explored. A pale ale is not just a “beer with more hops,” it's a prickly frolic in a sunny, summer orchard, an India pale ale doubly so. At the other end of the spectrum lives a dance of a different kind, the stout; dark and sometimes brooding, it's a midnight ballet deep in a forest of oak, sherry, and dark chocolate. The Oktoberfestbier sings breezy notes of toffee and autumn, the nut brown of roasted malt and molasses, the golden ale of bubbly and velvet and the ballroom waltz. Our palates should have to rise to meet the imaginations of the brewers, not the other way around.
Equal dysfunction lies in the careless invention of “beer snobbery.” This notion is misleading, for there need be nothing exclusionary about it; the term “beer geek” is more precise. After all, nobody thinks the burgers served at McDonald's are as good as the ones at So Long Saloon, do they? And furthermore, does making this observation require any kind of real elitism? The subtleties begin to become more readily apparent, between different species of beers and eventually between brewers themselves. But one can never forget that Joycean epiphany; that first sip, the thoughtful emergence of that understanding.
To paraphrase: let the brewers of yellow beer tremble at a revolution. We have nothing to lose but our chains. We have a world to win. BEER CONNOISSEURS OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE!
I'm not “writing one on corporatism,” so to speak; Sierra Nevada, one of the biggest craft brewers in the country, produces in a factory in California several world-class brews. Craft brewery market leader Boston Beer is continually adding new and exotic varieties to its extensive stable, and its famous flagship “Samuel Adams Boston Lager” is available nationwide. Goose Island, out of Chicago, seems unable to produce anything but excellence and its offerings are available to most of the Midwest. These breweries and many, many others produce superb products, ship them all over, and do so at only trivially higher prices. No, craft beer commands only a four-percent market share for a different reason: because of our credulity and susceptibility to slick propaganda. Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors don't really even try to argue, and historically have responded by quietly swallowing up the smaller breweries like whales and minimizing them in their stomachs. They always win, and we always lose; this isn't a meritocracy, it's hegemony.
These shameless profiteers have intentionally contributed to the erosion of our faculties of discrimination, and they have succeeded both in the way we conceive of our beer, and the way we conceive of ourselves.
We are wont to describe beer—as my former roommate and I half-facetiously observe—as possessing only four characteristics: “light,” “heavy,” “bitter,” and “smooth.” No wonder so many are convinced of their distaste! In this does, in fact, lie a good indicator: if these terms are sufficient to describe a given beer, you've learned everything you need to know about it. But this set of adjectives is hardly complete; a quality beer doesn't just have a laundry list of characteristics, it has an entire dynamic landscape to be explored. A pale ale is not just a “beer with more hops,” it's a prickly frolic in a sunny, summer orchard, an India pale ale doubly so. At the other end of the spectrum lives a dance of a different kind, the stout; dark and sometimes brooding, it's a midnight ballet deep in a forest of oak, sherry, and dark chocolate. The Oktoberfestbier sings breezy notes of toffee and autumn, the nut brown of roasted malt and molasses, the golden ale of bubbly and velvet and the ballroom waltz. Our palates should have to rise to meet the imaginations of the brewers, not the other way around.
Equal dysfunction lies in the careless invention of “beer snobbery.” This notion is misleading, for there need be nothing exclusionary about it; the term “beer geek” is more precise. After all, nobody thinks the burgers served at McDonald's are as good as the ones at So Long Saloon, do they? And furthermore, does making this observation require any kind of real elitism? The subtleties begin to become more readily apparent, between different species of beers and eventually between brewers themselves. But one can never forget that Joycean epiphany; that first sip, the thoughtful emergence of that understanding.
To paraphrase: let the brewers of yellow beer tremble at a revolution. We have nothing to lose but our chains. We have a world to win. BEER CONNOISSEURS OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE!
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
The Implosion of the GOP
In the span of only a single tumultuous month, the entire landscape of the election has been transformed. Following the Republican National Convention, John McCain found himself enjoying his first lead in the popular vote since before the end of the primaries and basking in the meteoric glow of his new lieutenant. The two were able to finagle victories on the issues of offshore drilling and the Surge, and amidst all the flying rhetoric, it seemed that the GOP might grab yet another election from the jaws of defeat. The battle cry was sounded, and the base, as they say, was energized.
But now, only a month later, the senator finds himself in a dark political wasteland: he has earned himself an insurmountable deficit in the polls, an even larger massacre scheduled for the Republicans in Congress, an economy rushing swiftly toward bankruptcy, and a running mate whose hypocrisy and utter ineptness have embarrassed her into silence. In short, I can only reiterate a position of mine from about six months ago: Senator Obama will almost certainly win, probably by about five points.
Mind you, the GOP hasn't exactly been left shaking its head, just trying to understand this sudden spate of misfortune; they already know what happened. Kathleen Parker certainly does, as does Karl Rove. This recent rapid erosion of support was not simply a natural abatement of euphoria following the RNC, but rather, a distinct and discrete phenomenon. In my reckoning, the blame can be approximately divided down the middle: half for Sarah Palin, half for the economy.
The economy's role is obvious: when a country's finances go south, the sitting bureaucrats always take the blame. The fault on the side of the governor, however, yields more tragedy, because it could have been so easily mitigated.
Troopergate is a good example: the controversy rests entirely on the fact that she shouldn't have used every avenue available to her to rescue her family and the public from an armed, psychopathic civil servant. (Whether or not this is actually a fair appraisal makes little difference, because a base credulous enough to accept her at face value usually doesn't bother to beleaguer how issues come to be framed.) But since she was evasive, disingenuous, and outright obstructive about it, rather than being given an overwhelmingly sympathetic and charitable response by the public at large she is going to be left only with some kind of ethics demerit.
Her aloofness with the mainstream media is another: she has tried to paint their obviously innocuous behavior as “gotcha” journalism, and thanks to Tina Fey and Saturday Night Live, has managed to become a literal self-parody in the process. Her lack of intellectual curiosity is stunning—this is a woman who could not name a single Supreme Court case with which she disagreed, and who seemed unaware of the particulars of the Bush Doctrine, the overarching philosophy that has for the past decade guided the foreign policy of her own party. And she seems unable to answer even the simplest questions in a straightforward way; one must ask, when an interviewer asks which newspapers one reads or has read, what kind of person answers, without irony, “all of them?”
She did, of course, channel a few badly needed volts through the far-right base—which I'll admit I simply didn't predict—and they continue steadfastly optimistic. But thankfully, her idiocy has not gone uncondemned, and in pandering to the gullible, anti-intellectual faction of the electorate, McCain and Palin are not only losing, but losing for all the right reasons.
But now, only a month later, the senator finds himself in a dark political wasteland: he has earned himself an insurmountable deficit in the polls, an even larger massacre scheduled for the Republicans in Congress, an economy rushing swiftly toward bankruptcy, and a running mate whose hypocrisy and utter ineptness have embarrassed her into silence. In short, I can only reiterate a position of mine from about six months ago: Senator Obama will almost certainly win, probably by about five points.
Mind you, the GOP hasn't exactly been left shaking its head, just trying to understand this sudden spate of misfortune; they already know what happened. Kathleen Parker certainly does, as does Karl Rove. This recent rapid erosion of support was not simply a natural abatement of euphoria following the RNC, but rather, a distinct and discrete phenomenon. In my reckoning, the blame can be approximately divided down the middle: half for Sarah Palin, half for the economy.
The economy's role is obvious: when a country's finances go south, the sitting bureaucrats always take the blame. The fault on the side of the governor, however, yields more tragedy, because it could have been so easily mitigated.
Troopergate is a good example: the controversy rests entirely on the fact that she shouldn't have used every avenue available to her to rescue her family and the public from an armed, psychopathic civil servant. (Whether or not this is actually a fair appraisal makes little difference, because a base credulous enough to accept her at face value usually doesn't bother to beleaguer how issues come to be framed.) But since she was evasive, disingenuous, and outright obstructive about it, rather than being given an overwhelmingly sympathetic and charitable response by the public at large she is going to be left only with some kind of ethics demerit.
Her aloofness with the mainstream media is another: she has tried to paint their obviously innocuous behavior as “gotcha” journalism, and thanks to Tina Fey and Saturday Night Live, has managed to become a literal self-parody in the process. Her lack of intellectual curiosity is stunning—this is a woman who could not name a single Supreme Court case with which she disagreed, and who seemed unaware of the particulars of the Bush Doctrine, the overarching philosophy that has for the past decade guided the foreign policy of her own party. And she seems unable to answer even the simplest questions in a straightforward way; one must ask, when an interviewer asks which newspapers one reads or has read, what kind of person answers, without irony, “all of them?”
She did, of course, channel a few badly needed volts through the far-right base—which I'll admit I simply didn't predict—and they continue steadfastly optimistic. But thankfully, her idiocy has not gone uncondemned, and in pandering to the gullible, anti-intellectual faction of the electorate, McCain and Palin are not only losing, but losing for all the right reasons.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Karma: O.J.'s 100th Problem
June 17th, 1994—I shall never forget it.
I was only a little boy, but the memory is electrically vivid: my family had taken a weekend jaunt to Omaha, and through the fuzzy television set in our hotel room we joined the rest of the country in watching the “slow-speed chase,” the opening narrative of a thriller so surreal and excessive that it parodied parody itself.
It began conventionally enough: a woman and her close friend had been the victims of a grisly double homicide, and the perpetrator—a scorned-lover-turned-cold-blooded-killer—was preparing to strike himself from the record in grand fashion. The main characters themselves were a perfect exercise in archetypes, too, the murderer a powerful and sinister black man, and his victims a beautiful, wholesome white couple. After having left behind something of a suicide note, he had summoned a close friend and together they tried to flee Los Angeles on the freeway. (Famously, of course, this silly little getaway only proceeded at only thirty-five miles an hour, drawing the annoyed relief of the authorities and the amusement of their audience.) But very best of all, the murderer was a famous football hero and public icon! Could we possibly ask for more?
Apparently we could, because the ensuing trial soon metamorphosed into a high-profile theater for hucksters, thrill-seekers, attention whores, and other opportunists. Between camera flashes and via the front pages, more characters became distinct: the prosecution, the woefully under-prepared, unqualified and overwhelmed antagonists; the flamboyant defense, a legal “Dream Team” with a plethora of charisma and a thousand alibis to spare; Mark Fuhrman, the disgraced detective whose stupidity and thoroughgoing racism damned the prosecution; Kato Kaelin, the irrelevant idiot jester who never saw a couch he wasn't willing to crash on; and the hapless Judge Ito, the only member of the circus who seemed to have less control of the court than the prosecution. And what of our protagonist? O.J. himself sat quietly for the duration of both trials, smugly chitchatting with his lawyers and occasionally grinning.
This was a marvelous and grotesque epic, perverse enough to enthrall even the hardened American imagination; it had sex, violence, voyeuristic intrigue, socioeconomic and sociopolitical commentary, comic relief, celebrity fetishism, boatloads of theatrics and melodrama, and a pair of heartbroken children trapped in the middle. Rightly so it was dubbed “The Trial of the Century,” but in hindsight, we were the ones really on trial. And although American tribalism was acquitted, our national dignity still ultimately found itself at the scaffold, because everyone knows what happened next.
The astonishing acquittal handed down from the exasperated jury sent a shock wave through our culture and gave us a collective judicial midlife crisis. How could our system have failed us so miserably? How could we—through the proxy of twelve of our own—have allowed ourselves to be distracted by and give sanction to the defense team's outrageous dog-and-pony show? And how else could we view such a situation, other than as yet another embarrassing snapshot in the photo album of American race relations?
The latest (and hopefully last) chapter in this drama almost seems like a hasty afterthought, doesn't it? Last Friday—on the thirteenth anniversary of his acquittal, coincidentally—he was convicted for kidnapping and armed robbery in connection with some shady memorabilia dealings, a crime for which he might just spend the rest of his life in prison. To label this anticlimactic little epilogue “karmic” is to betray my opinion, but schadenfreude aside: justice needn't be poetic to be satisfying.
I was only a little boy, but the memory is electrically vivid: my family had taken a weekend jaunt to Omaha, and through the fuzzy television set in our hotel room we joined the rest of the country in watching the “slow-speed chase,” the opening narrative of a thriller so surreal and excessive that it parodied parody itself.
It began conventionally enough: a woman and her close friend had been the victims of a grisly double homicide, and the perpetrator—a scorned-lover-turned-cold-blooded-killer—was preparing to strike himself from the record in grand fashion. The main characters themselves were a perfect exercise in archetypes, too, the murderer a powerful and sinister black man, and his victims a beautiful, wholesome white couple. After having left behind something of a suicide note, he had summoned a close friend and together they tried to flee Los Angeles on the freeway. (Famously, of course, this silly little getaway only proceeded at only thirty-five miles an hour, drawing the annoyed relief of the authorities and the amusement of their audience.) But very best of all, the murderer was a famous football hero and public icon! Could we possibly ask for more?
Apparently we could, because the ensuing trial soon metamorphosed into a high-profile theater for hucksters, thrill-seekers, attention whores, and other opportunists. Between camera flashes and via the front pages, more characters became distinct: the prosecution, the woefully under-prepared, unqualified and overwhelmed antagonists; the flamboyant defense, a legal “Dream Team” with a plethora of charisma and a thousand alibis to spare; Mark Fuhrman, the disgraced detective whose stupidity and thoroughgoing racism damned the prosecution; Kato Kaelin, the irrelevant idiot jester who never saw a couch he wasn't willing to crash on; and the hapless Judge Ito, the only member of the circus who seemed to have less control of the court than the prosecution. And what of our protagonist? O.J. himself sat quietly for the duration of both trials, smugly chitchatting with his lawyers and occasionally grinning.
This was a marvelous and grotesque epic, perverse enough to enthrall even the hardened American imagination; it had sex, violence, voyeuristic intrigue, socioeconomic and sociopolitical commentary, comic relief, celebrity fetishism, boatloads of theatrics and melodrama, and a pair of heartbroken children trapped in the middle. Rightly so it was dubbed “The Trial of the Century,” but in hindsight, we were the ones really on trial. And although American tribalism was acquitted, our national dignity still ultimately found itself at the scaffold, because everyone knows what happened next.
The astonishing acquittal handed down from the exasperated jury sent a shock wave through our culture and gave us a collective judicial midlife crisis. How could our system have failed us so miserably? How could we—through the proxy of twelve of our own—have allowed ourselves to be distracted by and give sanction to the defense team's outrageous dog-and-pony show? And how else could we view such a situation, other than as yet another embarrassing snapshot in the photo album of American race relations?
The latest (and hopefully last) chapter in this drama almost seems like a hasty afterthought, doesn't it? Last Friday—on the thirteenth anniversary of his acquittal, coincidentally—he was convicted for kidnapping and armed robbery in connection with some shady memorabilia dealings, a crime for which he might just spend the rest of his life in prison. To label this anticlimactic little epilogue “karmic” is to betray my opinion, but schadenfreude aside: justice needn't be poetic to be satisfying.
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