Django Unchained

My review at Critics at Large.

Shooting Off Your Mouth

In a much-commented-on National Review post earlier this week, someone named Charlotte Allen argued--not that she's blaming the victims!--that the real culprit in the shootings at Sandy Hook is the feminization of our culture, which has made men reluctant to display the kind of manly, aggressive traits that come in hand when villains need to be tackled. As Allen sees it, the school itself had become a dangerously testosterone-free zone. "There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred... There didn't even seem to be a make janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza's legs." She also compared what happened at the school to the take-charge heroism displayed about United Flight 93. Doing his part to help this shit go viral, David Weigel called it "the stupidest thing anyone has said about Sandy Hook," and wrote:

Kevin Anzellotti, the head custodian at Sandy Hook, is a man. Theodore Varga, a fourth grade teacher, also possesses XY chromosomes. I just did the research Allen didn't do, and it took all of fourteen seconds. Beyond that, though -- why does no one who writes this way look into the circumstances of other massacres? The second person shot by Jared Loughner was Gabe Zimmerman, an aide to Gabby Giffords who, hearing the gunshot that would cripple her, turned and stepped toward Loughner. The gunman shot Zimmerman in the head. The fourth person shot by Loughner was Giffords's aide Ron Barber, who survived shots to the cheek and groin. He was saved by John Roll, who lunged at the aide and was shot fatally in the back. Loughner did all of this in less than six seconds. Grown men in good health were cut down, because bullets move faster than people do...  

The terrorists on Flight 93, as I thought everybody knew, were armed with box cutters. The people who tackled them had a long time to plan their counterattack, ducking behind seats and whispering. This is obviously inapplicable to any situation involving semi-automatic weapons. Who thinks like this?

In her response to her critics, Allen concedes that, okay, the part about there being no adult males at the school when the shooting started may not be factual, or maybe it was; she doesn't know if those employees were there that day. (And, you can almost hear you whispering in a Homer Simpson voice, there is no way that anyone can ever know!) But she makes no acknowledgement of the point about how no one slower than Superman could have been anything but defenseless against the weapon the shooter was using. (Meanwhile, she doubles down on her main point, reminding us that, even as we waste our time talking about this gun-control crap, Hanna Rosen is out there threatening to poison a thousand Christmases by urging parents to consider buying their sons Easy-Bake Ovens.)

This imperviousness to attempts to introduce common sense and factual accountability to her method o reasoning underlines the fact that the answer to Weigel's question is: people think like this when they think they always know how things should go down in real-life situations, not because they're informed about what actually did go down and how, or because they've worked hard to imagine what they might have done if they were there, but because they know how similar situations were handled in the movies they wish we were all were living in. Allen doesn't know anything about automatic weapons, or about the likeliest result of heaving a bucket at the legs of someone firing one. (She doesn't even know anything about boys, if she thinks that teaching them to cook at an early age makes any of them less masculine. What it mainly does, if the boys turn out to have any talent for it, is set them up for life, on a planet where a hell of a lot of women think being able to cook is sexy. But maybe Allen is trying to demonstrate just how high her bar for manliness is set, by implying that she thinks Gordon Ramsay and Anthony Bourdain are sort of girly.)

But she knows how you take care of a nut with a gun, because she's seen Clint Eastwood do it. Clint's never come up against a gun he couldn't get to in time, so if a nut managed to kill 26 people, the only explanation that makes sense is that they're not making heroes the way the did in Clint's day and age, and the femi-Nazis must to be blame. (The most poignant moment in her comeback piece may be the part where she boasts about how flattered she is to be compared to Megan McArdle, by Charles Pierce, who intended it as an insult. Me, I decided that I'd read enough of McArdle after she wrote about how surprised she was that the Iraq War hadn't gone better, because part of the problem seemed to be that the ignorant natives were less than thrilled to have Americans invade their country and start shooting and randomly imprisoning and torturing their family members. She wrote that she had assumed the war would go swell, because she figured the savages would be delighted to have us take charge of their lives for them and decide which ones got to spend the night entertaining Lynddie England; no other possibility ever crossed her mind. This, too, reflects a mindset that superimposes old movies on real life, but the movies are those Cold War propaganda films that no one over 60 has ever watched recreationally, and McArdle isn't even 40. Does she go to sleep at night and achieve some kind of mind-meld state that locks her imagination to Dick Cheney's Netflix queue?)

NRA master blaster Wayne LaPierre clearly uses the same Technicolor filter. In his delayed-reaction press conference about the Sandy Hook shootings--or, rather, the bad press that hardcore Second Amendments doorknobs have suffered as a result of the shooting--Lapierre said that "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" and asked when "gun" became "a dirty word." This kind of prattle is the end result of coming to believe America became the country it is not through laws and infrastructure and global diplomacy, but because John Wayne and Gary Cooper had guns they could use to free us from the tyranny of Lee Marvin and Walter Huston. So it's a little weird that LaPierre used the occasion to blast Hollywood and "the media" for making people do violent things, by filling their heads with violent fantasy. Maybe nobody can see the nihilism of computer games so clearly and indignantly as an old guy who actually believes that cowboys built America. (Of course, he also thinks that the solution to guns in school is, duh, more guns, but he's because it took him a week to decide that his hair was finally TV-worthy, he was way behind the curve on that. Louis Gohmert, of my home state of Texas--the anchor baby guy--was on Fox News two days after the shooting, saying that he "wish[ed] to God" that the school principal "had had an M-4 in her office." Louis might have more reason that most to be offended at the way LaPierre, in his press conference, spat out the phrase "mentally ill," as if being crazy was synonymous with being a son of Beelzebub. Of course, Louis, whose brain is certifiably not of this world, has never physically harmed a child, because no child has ever tried to get between him and a TV camera.)

"Handguns are made for killing/ They ain't no good for nothing else/ And if you like to drink your whiskey/ You might even shoot yourself/ So why don't we drop them, people/ To the bottom of the sea." That's from "Saturday Night Special," a song not by the Roches, or even Crosby, Stills, and Nash, but the greatest Southern rock band of all time, the high-testosterone, unapologetically white-trash Lynyrd Skynyrd. It dates from a time, which is a lot more recent than the glory days of John Wayne, when responsible gun owners didn't want to be associated with the nuts who thought they had a need of, or a right to, guns whose only purpose was to wreak destruction on other people, let alone armor-piercing bullets and automatic weapons that could do things Ronnie Van Zandt never lived to imagine. That song is less than forty years old, but the mindset behind it now seems like something from another world; that's how successful the NRA has been at pushing the idea that any attempt to draw the line at what kind of killing technology American citizens can buy would be a slippery slope that inevitably leads to the gummint confiscating every gun owner's last peashooter, would would in turn lead to... hell, I don't know, find a moron and ask him. So gun lovers who've gone along with this have no answer to gun anarchy except to demand that everyone in the country be armed, so that gun violence can be a matter of "individual responsibility"; presumably, once we're all packing heat, the onus for any future Sandy Hooks will be on those who were present at the scene but let the killer get the drop on them. (And a lot of gun lovers are Fox News conservatives, which means we can now look forward to the listening to people who think teachers are paid too damn much demanding that the money be found to staff all schools with trained marksmen and self-defense instructors.) Maybe everybody sometimes wishes they could be living in the movie utopia of their dreams, and by encouraging the move to a paranoid America where we're all one fruitcake away from being in the middle of a shootout to the death, the NRA and its supporters have had more success at most in changing the country to better suit their fondest daydreams.

Borklash

Before the 1980s, Republicans tended to identify themselves as the serious realists who were wiling to make unpopular, hard choices and who cared too much about ideas and rational argument to be distracted by bright, shiny objects. For many years, every Republican's favorite teachable moment from recent history was the story about how people who listened to the Kennedy-Nixon debate on the radio, instead of watching it on TV thought Nixon was the clear winner. This was supposed to prove that Kennedy was perceived as the winner by TV viewers only because they were indifferent to the substance of the arguments and just tuned in to bask in Big John's well-tanned charisma. (I think it was Louis Menand who finally offered the counter-argument that Nixon's positions just sounded better to the kind of person who, as late as 1960, didn't have a TV.)

That all changed when Republicans found themselves in possession of a White House standard-bearer who was considered beloved and bullet-proof because he knew how to work it on television. But in 1987, things weren't going so well for Ronald Reagan. The Iran-Contra scandal had broken, his approval ratings were down, and Reagan, as we now know, was so confused and embarrassed by this that, after his first attempts to explain it all away didn't go as hoped, he simply disappeared from the public eye for a long stretch of time, rather than subject the American public to the sight of him looking red-eyed and pouty. But things started looking up during the Iran-Contra hearings, when Oliver North's televised appearance caught the public's fancy. By the weekend, any talk that Reagan's presidency had been imperiled or even seriously tarnished dried up, and people like Robert Novak started going on TV to proclaim that North had "cleaned the clock" of the Senate investigators.

How had he done this? By making a devastating case for the rightness of his actions, one that turned public opinion around on the issue of secretly funding the Nicaraguan Contras? No; basically, North threw Reagan under the bus, while simultaneously boasting about his willingness to take whatever punishment he had coming to him for having broken the law and waving his immunity deal around. And there was no more support for American intervention in Nicaragua after he shut his mouth than there had been before. But people seemed to like his TV image more than they did the Senators', and that, according to the new rules that Republicans had wholeheartedly endorsed, meant that he and his side had "won." A few months later, when Reagan nominated Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, and Democrats and civil rights and women's groups, as well as the ACLU, expressed their determination to shoot it down, there was a little electric current running through the conservative media. Bork was urged to get onto TV and dazzle the electorate with his wit, wisdom, and sparkling personality. It would be like Oliver North all over again, but with quotes in Latin in place of the fruit salad.

Writing in Slate yesterday on the occasion of Bork's death, David Weigel noted that "in hindsight, what happened to Bork"--his nomination was, of course, voted down, with six Republicans chiming in against him--"was unprecedented, and unfair." Republicans were furious at the time, but I remember thinking that a lot of their fury had to do with the fact that they'd convinced themselves that for TV to do one of their own more harm than good was an impossible violation of nature. (By the time Reagan left office, they'd convinced themselves that it was a violation of nature for a presidential election to not go their way, and so both Democrats elected President since then have had to start their terms listening to screaming about the "illegitimacy" and tyrannical nature of their reign.) Bork went down partly because the views he'd expressed over the course of his career, but I don't think the Democrats woudl have been able to deny Reagan the appointment he wanted if Bork himself hadn't gone on TV and looked and sounded like an arrogant ogre, exactly the sort of person you'd imagine would deny gays protection from harassment because he did not recognize a right to privacy and who would believe that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was based on "a principle of unsurpassed ugliness," which would appear to mean that the idea of black people's right to vote being accorded legal protection was more stomach-churning than his beard. Republicans soon settled down and elected to remember Bork as a martyr, the greatest Supreme Court justice that never happened. But at the time, the mood was accurately reflected by a Saturday Night Live sketch in which Reagan (Phil Hartman), angry that the charmless, despised judge declined the chance to spare the White House a shaming defeat by simply withdrawing his name from consideration, beat him to death with a baseball bat, a la Robert De Niro's Al Capone in The Untouchables.

Bork didn't deserve to be pilloried and publicly humiliated for being untelegenic, any more than North deserved forgiveness and a book deal for it. But is it really so bad that he was denied a lifelong appointment to the highest court in the land for what was known about his views on the most important issues of the day? The scar that doesn't heal in Bork's case is supposed to be the line delivered by the monster from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy, about how

Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy ... President Reagan is still our president. But he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice

Intemperately put, I suppose. But if you're aware that, before Roe v. Wade, women were forced into back-alley abortions, I don't know why you'd think that overturning Roe v. Wade wouldn't bring that back. Similarly, if you have a problem with using the courts to end racial discrimination, it doesn't seem that much of a leap to assume that segregated lunch counters is a price you're willing to pay for your precious "originalism." One more piece of context: the year before, the famously silly Chief Justice Warren Burger had stepped down from the Court in order to focus on what he imagined would be his great legacy, overseeing the national celebrations of the bicentennial of the U. S. Constitution--how'd that work out for ya?--and Reagan had offered William Rehnquist as his replacement.  Rehnquist, who had been on the Court since 1971, once wrote a memo defending legal segregation, in which he argued that

To the argument ... that a majority may not deprive a minority of its constitutional right, the answer must be made that while this is sound in theory, in the long run it is the majority who will determine what the constitutional rights of the minority are.

In his confirmation hearings, Rehnquist chose to shit on the memory of Justice Robert Jackson, insisting that, for reasons unknown, he had actually written the memo in an attempt to described what he assumed Jackson probably thought. During the 1986 hearings, it also came up that as an enthusiastic young participant in the democratic process, it had been Rehnquist's habit to hang out at polling places and intimidate blacks who threatened to try to vote. It seems safe to say that Rehnquist was on the same level as anyone else who ever had any role in trying to maintain some kind of legal dividing line between people based on skin color--which is to say that he was an excremental stain passing as a human being, garbage wrapped in skin. But there was no real possibility that, in 1986, having been obscenely wrong about the most obviously clear-cut moral issue of his lifetime was going to keep him from getting a promotion when he'd already been on the Court for 15 years--not a time when unrepentant, known racists like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond were powerful Senators, and the President himself had used the occasion of the signing of the bill declaring Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday to imply that he himself wasn't convinced that King hadn't been a Soviet agent. Bork was just as wrong on that hard-to-be-wrong-about issue, and had been Nixon's butt-boy at the Saturday Night Massacre to boot. Republicans may see Bork getting his own words read back to him in a less-than-respectful tone as an unprecedented outrage. But unless you're obtuse about racial justice and have never heard of karma, it's easy to see how Kennedy and some of the other people who'd been unable to put a dent in Rehnquist's imperial armor might have felt that it was high time to lay down the law about a few things.

Of course, the people who see Bork as a martyr don't feel that way. In fact, their historical memory doesn't extend to 1964, which must be why they're unaware that plenty of other Supreme Court nominees, from Abe Fortas to G. Harrold Carswell, got shot down because they were racist, ethically compromised, or someone just didn't like the cut of their jib. Writing in The New Republic, Jeffrey Rosen sees karma flowing the other way, and argues that, by daring to find fault with Bork's views, Kennedy and the other inquisitors were responsible for "the beginning of the polarization of the confirmation process that has turned our courts into partisan war zones, resulting in more ideologically divided opinions and less intellectually adventurous nominees on the left and the right. it led to the rise of right-wing and left-wing judicial interest groups, established for the sole purpose of enforcing ideological purity and discouraging nominees who have shown any hint of intellectual creativity or risk-taking." For backup, Rosen cites actual sane person Joe Nocera, who a year ago wrote a New York Times op-ed piece claiming that the "Bork fight, in some ways, was the beginning of the end of civil discourse in politics."

I assume that Nocera is referring here to such phenomena as the Whitewater hoax, the Wall Street Journal op-eds accusing Bill Clinton of literal murder, Michele Malkin suggesting that it was up to John Kerry to prove that he hadn't faked the wounds he suffered while fighting for his country in Vietnam, the birther movement, etc. (You can throw the Bush-era Truthers in there too, if you want to be all bipartisan about it.) You may notice that all these things are 100% bullshit that some scumbag pulled out of his ass, while the attacks on Bork were related to his actual record, even if Nocera and Rosen think they were so exaggerated that it's okay to now pretend they were based on nothing at all. Nocera argues that it was wrong for anyone to pretend that Bork was some kind of radical conservative who was out of step with mainstream America on abortion and civil rights, because, well, other justices shared his feeling that it was wrong to take the legality of abortion away from the politicians and decide it through a court case. Yes, and those who were in step with mainstream America still saw Roe v. Wade as the law of the land and weren't itching to overturn it; even Rehnquist made his peace with things he'd disagreed with, in that regard. Bork came across as someone who never made his peace with anything he disagreed with, and neither that nor his choice of opinions were Ted Kennedy's fault.

I suspect that Nocera's piece, which was written at a time in very recent history when a number of thoughtful, liberal-minded people were beginning to feel that we all needed to make nice with the Tea Party so that, in a year's time, President Rick Perry would be forgiving towards us, is an attempt to split up the blame for the shit hole our public discourse has become, because thoughtful, liberal-minded people have some deranged notion that people with 'WHERE'S THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE!?" buttons on their lapels will come to their senses if liberals just say to them, "Hey--mistakes have been made on both sides." The oddest thing about both his and Rosen's articles are their tender regard for the damage down to Bork himself. Not just his career, but his soul psyche and brain. After being rejected by the Senate, Bork became a professional right-wing crybaby, celebrating his own martyrdom, and putting out a series of cranky books in which he bewailed the destruction of America and Western civilization itself, at the hands of a bunch of liberal Commie weirdos who arrived here via spaceship sometime in the 1960s. There's not a sentence in any of them that Ann Coulter wouldn't be proud to call her own.

You might see his post-nomination career as proof that Bork was  a man best not left with his hand on the lever of history. But as Rosen sees it, it was not making it to the Supreme Court that turned Bork into "an angry partisan, determined to seek ideological revenge for years to come." Actually, that's his description of Clarence Thomas, but he seems to think that it applies to both men. (What happened to Thomas--who was chosen, post-Bork, precisely because he was the very definition of a "less intellectually adventurous nominee" with no paper trail, bears no resemblance at all to what happened to Bork, but let it pass. I'm more curious to know, if he thinks that liberal Dr. Frankensteins are responsible for the "transformation" of these guys, how did Antonin Scalia, who sailed through his confirmation hearings, get that way? Did Nina Totenberg step on his foot or something?) 

After electoral defeat, Jimmy Carter and Al Gore threw themselves into good causes close to their hearts; Bill Clinton seems to have bounced back from that whole impeachment thing pretty well. If Bork and Thomas were really good-humored, non-ideological wits and deep thinkers who turned into gargoyles, does that really say more about the toxic nature of the attacks made against them than it does about the people they always were, on some level? Both Rosen and Nocera talk a good game about Bork's staggering intellectuality, which, they basically admit, he never shared with the public; after his nomination was rejected, he quit his job in a huff and devoted the rest of his life to writing bad books and giving snotty speeches. No doubt we're supposed to be consumed with regret for what we missed out on, but it's our fault: we failed to appreciate Bork when we had the chance, so he had no choice but to take his big ol' fucking brain and go home. Oliver North, meanwhile, was so devoted to using his newfound celebrity to campaign for the things nearest and dearest to his heart that he wound up snagging a recurring role on JAG. Such is the afterlife of the Republican martyr.

Goodbye, Larry

Not all actors are celebrities, not all celebrities are stars, and not all stars are actors. Larry Hagman was all three. But he was a celebrity for quite a while before he became a star. The role of Major Tony Nelson on the sitcom I Dream of Jeannie made him famous, famous enough to receive fan mail or appear at a grocery store opening, but it didn't make him iconic or give him industry clout or bestow upon him that wondrous thing that the nice boy Tom Hanks once described to a New Yorker interviewer as "fuck-you money." After Jeannie folded, Hagman's subsequent attempts to land a successful sitcom (The Good Life, Here We Go Again) didn't go anywhere, and his directorial debut with Beware! The Blob --the director's cameo begins at the 47-minute mark--didn't lead anywhere. (That movie, whose making was later immortalized in an issue of the oddball DC Comic Wasteland, was later re-released with the tag line, "The Film J. R. Shot.")

Meanwhile, he burrowed into his character parts in mostly undistinguished movies (Stardust, Mother, Jugs & Speed, The Big Bus), focused on honing his skill. (He also appeared in Peter Fonda's directing debut, The Hired Hand, in a scene that was cut from the theatrical version and then, inevitably, restored for the TV airings.) His best movie, and most remarkable performance, was his brief appearance as Art Carney's son in Harry & Tonto, a sweaty yet smiling depiction of hopeless resilience and good-natured self-delusion. But at a time when TV celebrity put a ceiling on an actor's ability to sustain and extend a movie career, Hagman was in constant competition with his younger self: Jeannie turned out to be a juggernaut in syndicated reruns throughout the 1970s. Hagman didn't get residuals from it, of course, and that must have made it feel especially sweet when the role of J. R. on Dallas finally gave him the power to grab ahold of the people who signed his checks and twist a little. 

A few years after Hagman first made headlines for wresting more money and control of the show from his employers by threatening them with his absence from the set, his co-star, Patrick Duffy, made a fool of himself by quitting Dallas to pursue the movie career that wasn't waiting for him, then had to humbly ask to return. It was a mistake that Hagman wouldn't have made. A show biz kid--his mother was Mary Martin, Broadway's Nellie Forbush and Peter Pan--he understood the realities of the business, and he waited until he was in a position of power before he started swinging his weight around. Dallas was unthinkable without him, and the show's producers had themselves to blame for that as much as they had him to thank. Other TV stars were resented for the demands they made, but I think most Dallas fans enjoyed the way that Hagman and the role seemed to merge, so that his public duels with the bosses were just another chapter in the entertaining saga of J. R. Ewing, Reagan-era wildcatter. When J. R. is first seen at the start of the recent Dallas reboot, he's apparently been feigning senile catatonia for years, as if he could fins no reason to say or do anything if there's nobody watching.

It worked in the other direction, too. There's a shared understanding among makers of potboilers that the villain roles are the good roles, but a lot of actors in flamboyantly villainous, scene-stealing roles have failed to make an impression. Hagman imbued J. R. with some of the fear and nervy drive of a working actor of a certain age who's worried that he may have made as big a splash as he's ever going to make. J. R. wasn't as young or pretty as his virtuous younger brother, and as a corporate shark, he didn't have the romantic cowboy aura of his father. So he worked, hard and ruthlessly, and though you might recoil in disgust at his methods, he earned everything he had. When Hagman denounced George W. Bush as a "sad," uneducated little man who was "leading the country towards fascism," you could hear the voice of Hagman the show business hippie merging with that of J. R., the striver who had nothing but loathing for the rich punk who'd had everything handed to him, proven himself incompetent, and then been handed more stuff.

Hagman gave a few more remarkable, non-J. R. performances after Dallas ceased production the first time in the early '90s, especially in the movie Primary Colors. But it was even harder for him to be seen as someone other than J. R. than it had been for him to be someone other than the guy who used to be Major Nelson. (In Nixon, Oliver Stone cast him as a mysterious Texan oil millionaire, in a sequence whose point seemed to be that J. R. was one of the several thousand people Stone thinks was in on the conspiracy to kill President Kennedy.) But it's also possible that he acted a lot less in his last couple of decades because he didn't need the money and was having too good a time just being Larry Hagman. I'm glad that he got to come back to the role of J. R. in his last year, and that the makers of the Dallas revival had sense enough to treat him as its rightful star and prime attraction. It was like coming home in a way. But he also enjoyed being a celebrity like few others, and he treated being a good celebrity the way a good actor tries to balance his career: a little do-gooding, some honorable, non-preachy advocacy for legal marijuana and campaigning against cigarette smoking, some touch-up work on the image, and the occasional honest job. Compared to some of the celebrities we have now, he was a great argument in favor of celebrities who are famous for having actually done something.

Black Friday Weekend iPod Shuffle: What I Listened To Instead Of Buying Anything

1.    Cannonball Adderly, "Work Song"

2.    Bo Diddley, "Who Do You Love"

3.    Merle Haggard, "Hungry Eyes"

4.     Elvis Presley, "Suspicious Minds"

5.     The Go-Betweens, "You Can't Say No to Forever"

6.     K. McCarty, "Walking the Cow"

7.     Prince Paul, "Every Beginning Must Have an Ending"

8.     Al Green, "You've Got the Love I Need"

9.     Credibility Gap, "Kingpin"

10.   Asylum Street Spankers, "My Favorite Record"

11.   Billy Joe Shaver, "You're Too Much for Me"

12.   Harry "Sweets" Edison, "On the Trail"

13.    The Isley Brothers, "Shout (Parts 1 and 2)"

14.    Dan Hicks & the Hot Licks, "Carol for the Bells"

15.   Of Montreal, "Famine Affair"



16.    Willie Nelson and Hank Snow, "Caribbean"

17.     The Savage Rose, "Lightly Come Lightly Go"

18.     Pylon, "No Clocks"

19.    Ry Cooder, "I Can Tell by the Way You Smell"

20.    Lynyrd Skynyrd, "Down South Jukin'"

21.    Mitch Hedberg, "Frogs and Bears"

22.     Dramarama, "Right on Baby, Baby"

23.     Fats Domino, "I'm Ready"

24.     John Prine, "Nine-Pound Hammer"

25.     Sonny Sharrock, "Ghost Planet National Anthem"



26.     Blaqsrtarr, "Rider Girl"

27.     Joe Lovano Nonet, "Charlie Chan"

28.     Big Baby Gandhi, "What U Think"

29.     Telekinesis, "Country Lane"

30.     Gene Vincent, "Bop Street"

31.     Joe Cocker, "Dear Landlord"

32.     Robyn, "Do You Know (What It Takes)"

33.     Parliament, "Sir Nose D'Voidoffunk"

34.     Dave Edmunds, "We Were Both Wrong"

35.     Charlie Rich, "Raggedy Ann"



36.    The Lovin' Spoonful, "Pow!"

37.    Homeboy Sandman, "Soap"

38.    X, "Beyond and Back"

39.     Mary J. Blige, "Real Love"

40.     Robert Klein, "Substitute School Teacher"

41.    Otis Redding and  Carla Thomas, "When Something Is Wrong with My Baby"

42.     Jens Lenkman, "Friday Night at the Drive-In Bingo"

43.     Meat Puppets, "What to Do"

44.     Elvis Costello & the Attractions, "Pills and Soap"

45.     Black Box Recorder, "May Queen"

46.     J. B. Hutto & the Hawks, "Hawk Squat"

47.     Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, "Rebel, Rebel"

48.     Ornette Coleman, "Call to Duty"

49.     Laurie Anderson, "Neon Duet (for Violin and Neon Bow")

50.     The Time, "If the Kid Can't Make You Come"

Rob Liefeld Body Count Update: Draw-Your-Own-Conclusions Department

From Sean Howe's Marvel Comics: The Untold Story:

Before [Mark] Gruenwald left for his weekend home on August 9, he grabbed a preview copy of Rob Liefeld's Captain America #1, It was Gruenwald's favorite Marvel character; until a few months earlier, he'd either written or edited every issue since 1982. On Monday morning, rumors strated flying around the offices, confirmed by an 11 a.m. email from Terry Stewart. "It's with my deepest and most profound regret that I inform you that Marl Gruenwald passed away unexpectedly early today at home," the note began. The cause of death was a heart attack.

Thanksgiving/ Wedding Anniversary iPod Shuffle

1.   The Gladiolas, "Little Darlin'"

2.    Miranda Lambert, "Gunpowder and Lead"

3.    Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Bad Moon Rising"

4.    The Knife, "Pass This On"

5.     Wayne Kramer, "Back When Dogs Could Talk"

6.     Michael Hurley, "You Gonna Look Like A Monkey"

7.     Geraldo Pino & The Heartbeats, "Let Them Talk"

8.     John Coltrane, "Theme For Ernie"

9.     Toots & The Maytals, "Pressure Drop"

10.   Harmonica Frank Floyd, "The Great Medical Menagerie"

11.    Dale Hawkins, "Suzie-Q"

12.    Willie Nelson, "I Been to Georgia on a Fast Train"

13.    Al Kooper, "Childhood's End"

14.    Bjork, "Joga"

15.    The Magnetic Fields, "You're My Only Home"

16.    Bob Dylan & The Band, "Down On Me"

17.     Girl Talk, "Play Your Part (Pt. 2)"

18.     Howard Tate, "It's Your Move"

19.     Foreigner, "I Want to Know What Love Is"

20.     David Bowie, "Word on a Wire"

21.     Dave Douglas, "Deluge"

22.     that dog, "In the Back of My Mind"

23.     Joe King Carrasco and the Crowns, "Mañana"

24.     Nirvana, "About a Boy"

25.     Jerry Lee Lewis, "Jambalaya"

Linkin'

Oliver Stone likes his ideas about U.S. history the same way Julie Brown likes her men: big and stupid. In the first couple of episodes of Stone's Showtime series about the history of America, the secret hero of the '40s and '50s was Henry Wallace, FDR's sometime Vice President and the Presidential candidate of the Progressive Party in 1948. Stone refers to Wallace as a forgotten man, which isn't entirely true: he lives on in the writing of Dwight Macdonald, who pilloried him in his magazine Politics (and the book Henry Wallace: The Man and the Myth) as a limp. demagogic "corn-fed mystic," Stalinist dupe, and speaker of "Wallacese." Macdonald's hilarious, white-hot takedown of an ineffectual man who accomplished virtually nothing of lasting import has the electric charge--the catching-lightning-in-a-bottle quality--that Stone probably wants to achieve in his "political" historical movies. He usually can't, because he lacks too things that Macdonald had in spades" honesty and genuine commitment to his subjects. (Stone seems to have stumbled across Henry Wallace in his "research" and decided to glorify him as arbitrarily as he once decided that Jim Garrison was a great American.) For the kind of Hollywood fantasist that Stone is, it probably helps that Wallace never made any real mark on the history of his country; it makes it easier for him to celebrate such great qualities as his having never had any truck with your hoity-toity Washington salons and his having been a "spiritual" man (which means that, like the Stone of The Doors and Natural Born Killers, he exhibited a hard-on for the romantic myth of the Native American as mystical savage.) If he'd done anything worth doing, he'd have been that unclean thing, a successful politician.

Steven Spielberg's last movie, War Horse, was the kind of thing Henry Wallace might have been impressed by. It took a stylized theatrical adaptation of a stylized children's book and gave it a lavish, naturalistic staging, with the result that the horrors of war came down to watching bad things happen to a beautiful horse. At first, Lincoln, which Spielberg directed from a screenplay by Tony Kushner, seems to be pitched at about the same level. You see Mr. Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) in the field, listening to the complaints of a hotheaded young black soldier, while an older black man standing next to him expresses embarrassment over the intemperate tone of the impatient youngblood. But then the movie settles into the halls of power and becomes all talk, and it slowly becomes monumental. Lincoln has just been re-elected, and he wants to get the Thirteenth Amendment passed, like, yesterday. He wants the slavery question settled once and for all, and it can't wait for the swearing in of the new Congress. 

With the Congress he has, the votes are almost within reach--and Lincoln doesn't want to take any chances that the war might end before the measure comes to the floor, in which case people might be willing to let the thing go as part of a peace agreement. Your first sense of how strong and unusual a movie this is may come when Lincoln, alone with his cabinet, delivers a very long monologue explaining his haste. He knows that slavery is a wrong--it's not a debatable moral issue, it's a fact. And, secure in that knowledge, he has bent and maybe broken laws, taking advantage of his special situation as a wartime president, to do what had to be done to make things right. But his special circumstances are about to change, and he won't be able to impose his will on the people anymore, just to force them to recognize what is clearly right. There has to be a law--because the people, good as they are, will not accept "because it is right" as reason enough to change a way of life that has been working for them.

Lincoln is about what a good man who wants to do what's obviously right has to do in order to have his way when he can't simply tell the voters, "This is how it's going to be." Those with long memories--by which I mean, as long as four whole years, and the election results seem to indicate there are more such people out there than Mitt Romney was counting on--may flash back to the weeks when Barack Obama was lining up the votes for health care reform, and Fox News correspondents and virgin-souled liberal Obama voters alike were all aswoon, recoiling in horror at the mounting evidence that the President had sunk to employing political tactics to get the votes for something the country needed badly. That was the start of Fox News routinely referring to the rough-and-tumble criminal enterprise known as "Chicago politics," because Obama comes from Chicago and so did Al Capone, and so it seemed catchy. Lincoln himself was a resident of Illinois when he was elected President, but when he makes it clear that he'll take the votes he needs however he can get them, his Secretary of State, Henry Steward (David Straithairn), shivers and announces his intention to bring in some men "from Albany." The film's three grafter stooges--John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson, and James Spader, whose performance is so perfectly, unglamorously skeevy that at first, I thought he was Rob Schneider--are the movie's Greek chorus, completely disreputable yet hard-working and loyal to their noble cause.

It would be hard to overstate how smart Spielberg was to cast Day-Lewis as Lincoln--not just because he looks the part and can act it (which he does, superbly), but because, as George Clooney admitted in a panel of Oscar nominees a few years ago, even other actors tend to be a little in awe of Day-Lewis. As an actor, he fleshes Lincoln out and grounds him, so that he seems human, but as a personality, he stands apart from the rest of the world, so he effortlessly conveys the distance between Lincoln and mere mortals of his own time. The hero audiences may better be able to relate to is Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens, a figure who, whether by his own name or under aliases (as in The Birth of a Nation), has been used as a villain in earlier Civil War dramas, especially those of the "pity the poor South, treated so shabbily by cruel Yankee conquerers during Reconstruction" variety. Stevens shares Lincoln's certain knowledge that slavery is evil, but he has no shyness about not just denouncing it from the rooftops but insulting the brains and morality of anyone who disagrees with him. His devotion to the truth, and his Tommy Lee Jones-like manner of expressing it, has made him a lighting rod for anyone trying to depict abolitionists as acid-tongued elitists, as well as extremist nuts who think black people are just as good as white people. The movie's big suspense scene, in what may be a first for a Hollywood political drama, comes when Stevens, for political reasons, has to force himself to heroically lie and insist that he does not believe in racial equality.

Speilberg has made some terrific movies that didn't find an audience (like 1941) or that were criticized for being too violent or scary (like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom),  and he has duly apologized for these missteps and accepted the higher wisdom of the mass audience's judgment. You don't expect him to make a movie that basically argues that democracy depends on a few intellectually and morally superior people outwitting and outplaying their opponents, in order to move society forward in ways that most people don't feel ready to embrace yet. But he is living in our world; he did take notice of the rise of the Tea Party, and anything he missed, I'm sure Tony Kushner could brief him on. Stevens, the most outspoken advanced thinker in the movie, reminds his allies that no matter what is right or how much good is in their hearts, the mass of white people look at all those black people on the verge of being liberated and just see a threat, people coming to crowd in and demand a share of their goodies. The faces of the average Americans in Lincoln belong to a white, middle-class couple who have come to Washington to show their support for the amendment. They want it to pass because Mr. Lincoln says that if it does, the war will stop. But when pressed, they admit that, if the war stops tomorrow without the amendment, they would rather the slaves aren't freed, because they don't want some niggers jumping their fences and stealing chickens from their backyard. They don't say jumping the borders and trying to steal their jobs, because the thought of a non-white man taking a white man's job is inconceivable to them, which is one way to measure how far we've all come. 

Fruit Salad Shredders

Three years ago, a man tried to blackmail David Letterman over an extramarital affair Letterman had with one of his employees. Letterman notified the police, then addressed the matter on his TV show, thus rendering the blackmailer powerless while neutralizing the situation before the tabloids could get ahold of it. It's been more than a week now since the country found out that David Petraeus had an extramarital affair with his biographer, news that Petraeus decided to break to us by resigning his post as Director of the CIA. One might have supposed that there had to be more to it than that, and that the General wasn't just bailing on the President, a few days after an election when there would be many more slots to be filled, just because he fucked someone he wasn't married to. He didn't seem to have committed a criminal offense, and since the world now knew what he'd been up to, he was in no danger of having anyone hold it over his head. A week later, it's still not obvious why this should have struck anyone as an occasion for falling on one's sword. Maybe Petraeus had just been so over-idolized by politicians and the media that there was no way his reputation could take the tiny ding that comes with being revealed as a fallibly human and not just totally collapse. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered so much if this scandal hadn't linked him to the tackiest goddamn people on the face of the Earth. Nothing degrades a Shakespearean ham actor's brand faster than being caught pitching cubic zirconium on QVC.

Writing at The New Yorker, Amy Davidson flirts with the "anyone who'd have an affair that the press is sure to find out about," and especially anyone who uses email to do it, must be too stupid to be entrusted with a position of power. ("We can have a separate discussion about what the standards should be—they are not fixed—but Petraeus surely knows what they are. His recklessness and whatever combination of narcissism and clumsiness that lay behind it are open to question.") I remember when this argument was used in the early days of the Clnton-Lewinsky scandal, mostly by people who seemed to be straining to give themselves a legitimate excuse to give a rat's ass about something as trivial as a competent President's bed-hopping. When most of the country failed to get in lockstep with this argument, things settled down into a general recognition--either proud or baffled, depending on one's ideological persuasion--that the American people were able to perceive the difference between personal morality (does this man honor his wedding vows?) and public morality (who cares how pure his marriage sheets are, is he a fucking war criminal?) Because Petraeus is a general who started his affair in the field, the better comparison may be with General Eisenhower and his relationship, during World War II, with Kay Summersby. As Davidson sees it, times have changed, which is one reason Petraeus needed to lose his job over a transgression that didn't seem to impair Eisenhower's ability to do his:

Eisenhower would have been at the command of a military in which women are the indispensable ones. Women make up about fifteen percent of the military, and twenty per cent of new recruits. Without those numbers, we could not sustain an all-volunteer force. Although there are formal limits on sending them into combat, those have been increasingly ignored in practice: these are women who fight in battles, rather than “cat-fights.” They are, more and more, bearing the burden of our wars—and they are bearing, too, the burden of fellow-soldiers and superior officers who treat them with a sense of sexual privilege or even violence. Stars and Stripes noted, in a story Monday on the challenges facing female veterans, that one in three were estimted to have been subject to some sort of sexual abuse while serving. That is unacceptable, and part of why Petraeus’s behavior was so damaging.

What does all the talk about how a general deserves a mistress say to a lieutenant facing unwanted advances from a superior officer, or a specialist who has been assaulted in her barracks? (One of Petraeus’s former aides has said that the affair began after he resigned form the military, but his relationship with Broadwell, who is an Army reservist, was such to cause unease even in Afghanistan.) For that matter, what does it say to military families struggling to keep marriages together in the face of multiple deployments? The same week that Petraeus was exposed, a woman who is now an Army captain testified at a hearing in a preliminary court-martial hearing for Brigadier General Jeffrey Sinclair. She said that she had been pressured to continue an affair with him; in the beginning, “I was extremely intimidated by him. Everybody in the brigade spoke about him like he was a god”; by the end, she said, he was threatening to kill her if she didn’t perform oral sex on him. According to press reports, when prosecutors asked if he could tell that she was unwilling, she said, “Yes, I was crying.” Not every story is about a halter-topped starry-eyed counterinsurgency groupie. The archetype Broadwell’s case and clothes are meant to bolster is not only insulting and distracting; it is more often useless.

What will make the Army stronger is its ability to stand by young women at every stage of their military careers, not our willingness to defer to the prerogatives of generals who are on the front pages of newspapers. The real question is not what Petraeus saw in Broadwell, but whether he and his fellow generals see the potential and abilities of the women who have committed their lives to the military—and may, and the sooner the better, themselves be the great generals our country really needs.

For me, the logic here breaks down. What does one general's rape of a subordinate have to do with a different general's consensual affair with a reporter? They only seem to be linked if you believe that any sexual interest that a man in a position of power develops in a woman has to have grown out of hostility. Fred Kaplan, who knows a lot more about General Petraeus than I do, argues that he was drawn to Paula Broadwell intellectually, because he saw her as mentoring material and a valuable asset to his personal circle. The fact that he was wrong--her book about him was an instant punch line even before it was the payoff to a dirty joke--may make the relationship ridiculous, but it doesn't make it especially sordid, much less sexist. Maybe the idea that's really at the root of this is the notion that a man who has sex with lots of women much be a misogynist, or at least, is, at his core, so disrepsectful of women as a group that he cannot occupy a position where he would have a say in their fates. That was the idea behind a famous article about Ted Kennedy by Susannah Lessard back in 1979, and it got an airing during the Clinton scandal too; many conservatives who didn't believe it themselves got quite a thrill out of accusing feminists of hypocrisy if they didn't drop the President like a hot turd.

I'm afraid I think that's bullshit, myself. Both Senator Kennedy and President Clinton were womanizers who definitely caused a great deal of pain to the women in their lives to whom they'd vowed to remain faithful. How much do I think that reflects their respect for women as a group, and their devotion to the cause of equal rights for all? Somewhere, I suppose, between absolute zero and less than that. I think that someone's belief in, say, abortion rights or equal work for equal pay comes from deeply held, carefully chosen principles. Someone's feeling a dirty thrill out of feeling attracted to another human being and deciding to go for it, no matter who it's going to hurt, comes from somewhere else, and I don't see much ground for overlap. I also think the inverse is true: Mitt Romney, who sees the promise of affordable health care and contraception for women as a squalid, corrupt "gift" offered in the spirit of payola to freeloading moochers, famously picked out one commoner who had fallen ill and helped out with his cancer treatments. Yet I can't help but feel that Romney's official positions on policy that affects us all says more about him as a potential leader than his generosity toward one person in need, just as I think Clinton and Kennedy's public positions on certain issues reveal more meaningful respect toward gender equality than I expect from several politicians who'd probably stick their dicks in the garbage disposal if it were the only way to keep themselves from cheating on their spouses. As for Petraeus, I feel that I barely have a dog in this race, whether we're talking about his career, its collapse, or his sorry-ass sex scandal. But I do think he managed to do the country a disservice by doing his small, pathetic part to keep alive the idea that adultery is reason enough to be exiled from public life.