2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 61,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Apocalypse Fatigue, the Holiday Spirit, and the Battle of Stalingrad

Yet Another Failed Apocalypse

 

Like the inevitable outing of virulent homophobes, we have yet another example of a failed apocalypse. The problem is not necessarily the apocalypse itself, but the frequency of these failed apocalypses has become so grating that even the jokes have become predictable and flat. In 2012 alone, we had Howard Camping’s multiple declarations of impending doom as well as the famous Mayan “apocalypse.” (Ironic air-quotes because it is a classic misunderstanding of a non-Gregorian calendar system by hysterical nutjobs. In December 2012, the Mayan calendar ends. What happens when you reach December 31, 2012 in your household? Most people usually get a new calendar.)

I won’t bother listing the failed apocalypses. Here’s a link. It’s a really long list. And in the future there will be more non-apocalypses added to that list. But people will still be hysterical, declaiming the end of the world, and getting everyone worked up over nothing. Another after-effect of all these failed apocalypses is that apocalyptic rhetoric has lost all meaning.

Image by Allison Morris

Apocalyptic rhetoric has been trotted out whenever a poorly written cash-in reaches the New York Times bestseller list. (Because that never happens.) Until the next sub-literate hack gets a choice book deal and struggling authors continue to struggle in obscurity. All this talk of cultural apocalypse because the author of Fifty Shades of Grey sold some books seems a bit overheated. The wealth of Hollywood wasn’t built on good movies either. The apocalypse is fast becoming meaningless the same way terms “indie” and “edgy” have been eroded to vacuous buzzwords.

Do not misinterpret this post as some snarky smug “religion is dumb, hooray science!” diatribe. (The Internet has plenty of those.) I was raised in a Lutheran household and apocalyptic rhetoric wasn’t in the conversation. Yes, the theological basis for Lutheranism includes the Apocalypse, but there wasn’t any ham-fisted close readings of the Book of Revelation like certain denominations, sects, and cults do. (For examples, tune in to your local religious networks, except EWTN, since the Catholic Church isn’t apocalypse-happy as Kirk Cameron’s flock.) The Apocalypse was part of Lutheran theology, but believers were taught not to presume to know when it would happen.

Presume is the key word here. As with other things, God will determine when the Apocalypse will happen. Hence the constant empty blathering of failed prophets. This goes hand in hand with the phenomenon of the Antichrist of the Week. So many people have been charged with being the Antichrist that it gets comical. Cracked.com, the reliable barometer of American opinion, published one of their most hilarious articles saying “Obama is the least efficient Antichrist ever.”

Not to belabor the point, but naming someone the Antichrist has become as politically expedient as calling someone a Hitler. The same people using the same rhetoric have called everyone from the Ayatollah Khomeini to Saddam Hussein to Barack Obama the Antichrist. One doesn’t need a PhD to see what’s going on. Label the political opposition the Antichrist and the flock will follow accordingly. And since Obama was re-elected, American is in a state of moral depravity and God will smite us. Or something. (I live in Minnesota and the state recently voted down the Traditional Marriage Amendment. I’m still waiting for the being-caused-by-gays earthquakes and hurricanes. We did get a snowstorm on the day of the Mayan Apocalypse … in Minnesota.)

The same people who label the President as the Antichrist are the same people who allege there is a War on Christmas. Which leads us to …

The Holiday Spirit

August to December 25^th annually, depending on the retailer

“First-nighters, packed earmuff-to-earmuff, jostled in wonderment before a golden, tinkling display of mechanized, electronic joy!”

A Christmas Story (Bob Clark, 1983)

I enjoy the holiday season. I get to home to Wisconsin, be with family, open presents, and generally have a good time. Again, this is not some garden variety anti-religious screed. Those are boring. This post is exploring the issue of fatigue. Along with apocalypse fatigue, the commodification of Christmas inevitably gives way to fatigue. Since free market capitalism is based on the premise of an ever-expanding market, the Christmas season has been incrementally expanded into more of the calendar year. While retailers and businesses are right to exploit the reason for the season, this can have an unintentional blowback effect.

Christmas is fine. Shopping is fine. But I don’t need to see Christmas trees in retailers in August! By the time Black Friday rolls around, I’m already sick of Christmas. To put this another way: I like chocolate cake, but I don’t want to eat chocolate cake for every meal every day for three months. What is happening to me and fellow shoppers is the retail equivalent of diabetic shock.

Ironically, I see myself as a traditionalist here. Christmas season should begin on Black Friday and end on Christmas (with some overlap for New Year’s). The relentless drive to have us shop, shop, shop til we drop has extended the holiday season way too far. The Holiday Season has become a calendar-eating amoeba, devouring everything in its path.

Christmas, the best seven months of the year.

The Battle of Stalingrad

July 17, 1942–Feb. 2, 1943

Nikita Khrushchev: [addressing a roomful of Soviet political officers] My name… is Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. I’ve come to take things in hand here. This city… is not Kursk, nor is it Kiev, nor Minsk. This city… is Stalingrad. Stalingrad! This city bears the name of the Boss. It’s more than a city, it’s a symbol. If the Germans… capture this city… the entire country will collapse. Now… I want our boys to raise their heads. I want them to act like they have balls! I want them to stop shitting their pants! That’s your job. As political officers… I’m counting on you.

Enemy at the Gates (Jean-Jacques Annaud, 2001)

The Battle of Stalingrad was one of the pivotal battles of World War 2. Thousands died, thousands more were killed, and it was an ideological wrestling match between two totalitarian superpowers. I only mention this because, as a punchline, I have likened the annual Christmas season to the Battle of Stalingrad. It is a Stalingrad-like battle of enforced cheer and omnipresent Christmas songs. I’ll leave you with a clip of Christopher Hitchens likening the holiday season to living in North Korea. Is it really? Let me know your opinion in the comments section.

Happy 4th of July from a Canadian and a Brit

Happy Canada Day!

Happy Canada Day!  Let’s go to the mall … today!

CCLaP Fridays: On Being Human: Battlestar Galactica and Caprica

This week, I continue my ongoing series “On Being Human” with “Battlestar Galactica” and “Caprica,” two Syfy TV series that explored the struggles between humanity and the machines that rebelled. |

CCLaP Fridays: On Being Human: Warhammer 40K Space Marines

I continue my CCLaP essay series “On Being Human”, this week exploring the dark world of Warhammer 40K and the Space Marines.

Of Muscles and Men: Essays on the Sword & Sandal Film, edited by Michael Cornelius

“Hercules!  Table for eight!” one of the bots says on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.  The feature ripe for riffage stars Steve Reeves, has sub-par dubbing, and copious shots of Reeve’s chiseled torso.  Of Muscles and Men: Essays on the Sword & Sandal Film explores the history, interpretation, and sexual politics of the sword and sandal film.  Michael Cornelius editorial acumen brings together numerous academic essays focusing on this particular film genre.  The first set of essays focus on the sword and sandal film (also known as the peplum, the name of the short skirt-like garment wore by the muscle-bound heroes).  These essays investigate the peplum film’s development and history.  The second set of essays focus on specific pop cultural products in the peplum genre, ranging from film to TV series to animation and parody.  The essay collection functions simultaneously as a précis and a convergence of numerous disciplines (film history, gender studies, pop culture studies, classical studies, literary theory, and others).  One can hope to see a more thorough investigation of the peplum genre that build off this initial essay anthology, either in the form of monographs or a tighter anthology refracted through one of the various aforementioned disciplines.

This Barthesian excursion into a much-maligned genre seeks to revivify it through reconnections with its classical roots and older waves of peplum films.  The genre originated in Italy with the Maciste films (one even had proto-fascist poet and adventurer Gabriele d’Annunzio as a screenwriter), being a modification of the “strong man” film genre.  The connection to d’Annunzio is further complicated by the Second Wave peplum films, those produced in the Fifties and Sixties with American bodybuilders as the “Hercules” figures and financed by Italian production companies.  (Also those routinely skewered by MST 3K.)  Maria Elena D’Amelio’s essay “Hercules, Politics, and Movies” posits that American stars and Italian funding helped viewers negotiate with the Fascist past.  As evidenced by plots involving the musclebound hero liberate an oppressed populace from a tyrant.  The peplum hero also works in a similar way to American Westerns, in that the liberator does not become the ruler, only as a means to restore the political status quo.  While Westerns have the White Hat Hero riding off into the sunset, the peplum usually has the hero heading back to his farm and reuniting with his wife and child.

Heteronormative fail.

On a similar note, several essays explore the problematic sexual politics of the peplum film.  The most notorious film, the recently released 300, had obvious heterosexual cheerleading and made the villains into gay caricatures.  (As one blogger snarkily put it, turning Xerxes’s armies into “a gay pride parade from Mordor.”)  Another essay, by way of counterexample, explores the intentionally problematic sexual politics of Pasolini’s Medea.  Pasolini received short shrift from contemporary film critics because of his status as a gay Catholic Communist filmmaker and poet.  The connection between heroic heterosexuality and conservative politics makes 300 a popular film among American conservatives, but also, predictably, at least given the clockwork-like predictability of Republican gay sex scandals, one of the most unintentionally gay films released in recent years.  However, film fandom operates in strange ways, perhaps giving rise to a resurgent gay fandom for 300.  The film’s ham-fisted sexual politics beg for audience mockery and derision.

The author is a child of the Eighties and grew up playing with and watching the Masters of the Universe TV series.  Michael Cornelius writes an essay finding parallels between the Masters of the Universe franchise and the gay clone subculture (e.g. The Village People, Tom of Finland).

In an overall worthy collection, it is the final essay that disappoints.  Daniel O’Brien’s essay investigating The Three Stooges Meet Hercules in terms of parody within the pepla genre fails not in content, but in execution.  The serious tone of academic writing clashes with the film’s comedic content.  Visual gags and the crazy plot get explained, but the ill fit occurs when O’Brien’s prose belabors the obvious.  Understanding parody and burlesque is instrumental in understanding the pepla genre, since it is another aspect of pepla’s multifaceted nature.  In the end, this reviewer kept uttering the phrase, “Well, duh,” while reading O’Brien’s anodyne explanations.

Despite the final essay’s shortcomings, Of Muscles and Men offers a variety of analyses into the pepla genre and its attendant pop cultural significances and problematic sexual politics.

The Hunger Games

Warning: This is not a traditional movie review, but an exploration of politics and pop culture within the Hunger Games movie universe.  Spoilers ahead!

 

“The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.” – Guy Debord

Hunger Games fever is sweeping the nation!  Catch it!  The film adaptation, directed by Gary Ross (Pleasantville, Seabiscuit), focuses on the story of Katniss Everdeen, a coal miner’s daughter from District 12.  Through an act of selflessness, she volunteers to go in her sister’s place to the 74^th Annual Hunger Games.  At the Hunger Games, children between the ages of 12 to 18 fight to the death in front of a national audience.

While this represents only the bare bones of the plot, the film itself offers a unique take on the collisions of politics and pop culture.  The nation of Panem had a nasty civil war where the poorer outlying districts fought against the richer central districts.  When hostilities ceased, a Truce was signed.  The Truce stipulated that two young children be selected from each district to fight to the death.  (A nostalgic film is played on a massive public screen in District 12.  This commemorative film eerily echoes Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia(1938) with its chiseled heroic youths holding swords and striking sculptural poses.)  The process by which the children are drafted is named The Reaping, a term with agricultural and religious connotations.  During the opening text crawl, it is explained that the Reaping and Hunger Games are “penance” the former rebellious districts must pay to the victorious districts.

Susanne Collins vision is fascinating because she shows how a political ideology transformed into a pop cultural phenomenon.  After 74 years, what was once a weighty political ritual has become an empty sports spectacle, complete with sponsors, an opening ceremony, and betting.  Gary Ross is a nice fit for director, since his previous effort, Pleasantville, offers an analogous situation, with Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon trying to escape, then eventually trying to liberate, an entirely mediated space.  The Tributes fight in a similar mediated space, since personnel associated with the Head Gamemaker can easily manipulate its environment.

Akin to the modern-day Olympics, the Hunger Games seeks to depoliticize a painful political event.  Instead of killing each other for political or territorial control, the contestants kill each other in order to become victorious.  Prior to the actual game, the draftees are treated as media superstars, each getting interviewed by the Emcee Caesar Flickerman.

Manners are important.

The Hunger Games offers a fascinating blend of right- and left-wing authoritarianisms.  Like North Korea or Nazi Germany, there is mass spectacle.  Everyone watches the Games, the same way everyone listens to Big Brother’s instructions via television in Orwell’s 1984.  The economic gap between the districts has echoes of France’s ancien regime and the Occupy movement’s nefarious 1%.  The wealthy districts has a dolled-up citizenry with facepaint, make-up, and outrageous hairstyles.  (Cf. Jean-Paul Gaultier’s futuristic costuming in the Fifth Element).  The film is to be commended for making Elizabeth Banks ugly (she plays Effie Trinket).  Not ugly in the sense of Quasimodo or someone with physical deformities, but someone whose artificiality, arrogance, and unawareness make her simply vulgar.  The largest breach of decorum with her is not the televised murder or economic chasm between district, but “manners!”  In the end, manners are rituals and codes one must follow in a certain socioeconomic group.  Katniss is a threat to Panem, not because of her adept archery skills, but because her intelligence bespeaks a knowledge of codebreaking.  She is victorious as both a tenacious fighter and one who “games the system.”  (We live in an age where school shootings are commonplace, alongside stories of teenagers hacking formidable computer programs.  No wonder this movie and novel trilogy speaks to so many young people.)

When hope isn’t contained.

As the games hit their dramatic peak, someone from a wealthy district kills Rue, a young girl from District 11.  This causes a riot in District 8 that boils over into other districts, creating a tense political situation.  During the ensuing debacle, President Snow talks with the Gamemaker, saying to the effect that “a little hope is good, but too much hope is dangerous.  Contain it.”  When I first heard those lines, I recalled last year’s Arab Spring.  For too long, the United States has spooned out hope in tiny portions to the peoples of the Middle East.  The United States would make constant promises about freedom and liberty, and then simultaneously prop up brutal dictatorships because of either their natural resources or their geopolitical position associated with the Cold War and/or War on Terror.  The Arab Spring was something the United States could not control and it scared us as much as an Osama bin Laden videotape.  One recalls how the United States simultaneously talked about supporting freedom yet made constant associations between Arab Spring protesters and Al-Qaeda.  Freedom and liberty are fine, control and commodities are more preferable.

It is not often that a Young Adult novel can so presciently capture the zeitgeist and offer up such lacerating commentary on our brutal, hyper-mediated culture.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day from Detective Jimmy McNulty

Discovered this wonderful fake whiskey ad on Youtube.

Note: Bushmillls is not endorsed by Protestants.

“It’s Always Sunny in Pyongyang”: A Tribute to Kim Jong-il

Dictatorships: Leading an Insane Clown Posse of One’s Own

Late last year, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il died.  Along with Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and global supervillain Osama bin Laden, Kim Jong-il (1941 – 2011; Supreme Leader, 1994 – 2011) joined an esteemed list of rat bastards no one will miss.  At least no rational person.  That’s the rub, since the Supreme Leader of the People’s Democratic Republic of North Korea has been perceived as a crazy lunatic nutjob.  Everyone from David Letterman’s writing staff to the writers on Cracked.com have made a cottage industry from the simple equation: Kim Jong-il = Crazy!

As illustrated in the clip from 30 Rock, Kim Jong-il acts like a hyper-positive weather man, asserting that North Korea is “always sunny all the time.”  In a gonzo performance, comedian Margaret Cho turns the dictator into a goofy clown with absolutely no connection with reality.  (Which makes him totally different from our esteemed political leaders.  Right, guys?)

Critiquing dictators is nothing new in pop culture.  The most prominent historical example is Charlie Chaplin’s the Great Dictator (1940).  What is new is the twist given to this critique, that of insanity.  Its usefulness shouldn’t be underestimated.  With an accusation of insanity, a critic does not need the obligation of taking the target seriously.  The critic also comes from the privileged position of “sanity.”  Unlike other people who are labeled “insane” or “mentally disturbed” (the homeless, the elderly, etc.), Kim Jong-il possessed a massive concentration of military power and the unswerving obedience of the Party machinery.  When not making ridiculous claims, saber-rattling North Korea’s neighbors, and living in obscene opulence, he came across as threatening as an Elvis-coiffed garden gnome.

The charge of insanity made it easier for Internet comedy writers, but was it actually useful or effective?  It is hard to quantify in real foreign policy terms.

The Political Aspects of Insanity

Thus far, we have taken insanity as a given.  If you’re a North Korean despot who claims to have invented the cheeseburger, the charge of insanity seems firm.  However, insanity itself is a slippery concept.  Like the words “reality” and “culture”, insanity can become a loaded term.  How does one define “insane”?  Who defines the term?  What power do they have?  What are the political aspects of insanity?

Insanity is a different breed of affliction than, say, high blood pressure, asthma, or tuberculosis.  One can point at a chart, an X-ray, or read-out and come to an agreed upon conclusion.  The term itself (“insane”) has become the cultural shorthand for the different and maladjusted.  This should not be confused with those who suffer from brain defects or neurological disorders.  Unlike a severe cranial trauma or brain deformation, insanity has as much to do with medical knowledge as with political consensus.  Kim Jong-il was such a real-life caricature of state terror, that is was easy to label him insane.  Kim’s father, Kim Il-Sung, represented a very dangerous threat to national security and his totalitarian rule was nothing to laugh at.

Today charges of insanity usually arise on Internet discussion boards when one voices doubt in the inherent durability of the American two-party system.  Because the economic and global situation has become so bad, it would be utterly insane to vote for someone other than a Republican or Democrat.  (Because these same two parties and the same people in power have done such a bang-up job, I should keep them in power.  Now who’s being insane?)

Because the first step to being different is thinking different, insanity has been used as a regulatory measure to control one’s family life, sexuality, and personal associations.

“Only an insane person would like _______” (Pick what you detest most.)

A. Gay people marrying.

B. A literal interpretation of the Bible.

C. Kim Jong-il.

D. The Atlas Shrugged, Part I movie.

What becomes dangerous about the definition of insanity is it becomes the psychiatric tool of political consensus.  Attacking the opposition by characterizing them as insane lunatics has caused the usual heated American political discourse to become completely abandoned.  Since the Occupy member thinks the Tea Party member is crazypants, then it’s no use even talking to them.  (The reverse is also true.)  Both sides need to abandon the hyperbolic rhetoric and realize they are missing the forest for the trees.  (Obviously, both those groups are insane.  Hey, isn’t that no-account, corrupt, adulterous sleazbag up for re-election in my district.  I need to keep him or her in office for another term to fix things.  To the voting booths!)

Insanity: That’s so Gay!

The political uses of insanity have had real consequences, damaging to individuals and their families.  The fields of psychology and psychiatry buttressed and refined what was formerly the province of religion.  Religious persecution of homosexuality is a given with examples, modern and ancient, too numerous to recount.  Adding fuel to the fire was the psychiatric community’s assertion that homosexuality was a form of insanity.  Like other forms of insanity, it was seen as something “curable”.  In a peculiar twist that shows the circular relationship between religion and psychiatry, certain religious organizations make routine claims that they can cure homosexuality.

Only in 1973 was homosexuality removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).  Its presence in the DSM made homosexuality easier to criminalize and prosecute, since persecuting homosexuality on religious grounds violates First Amendment protections.  (While the First Amendment guarantees free exercise of one’s own religion or non-religion and not getting taxed by an established religious authority, the amendment does have its limits.  These include human sacrifice, bigamy, and violent persecution of another group.)

Consensus can become a dangerous weapon, especially wrapped in the garb of the scientific rhetoric used in psychiatry.

Occupy North Korea

One of the predictable criticisms of the Occupy movement is that Communists run it.  But this is a critique too boring and too predictable to comment on.  What naïve leftists within the Occupy movement need to realize is that free market plutocracies aren’t the only places with an oppressive One Percent.  It takes many forms, usually dynastic.  One sees this with the Saud Family’s financial mismanagement, monumental corruption, and radioactive hypocrisy in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Two despots, one car: The Rolls Royce of Czar Nicholas II and Lenin.

North Korea also has its One Percenters.  And like the United States, it asserts it is a democracy run by the people.  (Don’t believe me?  It’s in North Korea’s name.)  The upper echelons of the North Korean Communist Party and military apparatus sport huge waistlines and live in grandiose mansions.  A North Korean Party hack represents the average North Korean the same way an overpaid, multiple-married, pill-popping AM talk show host represents “the Real America.”  Faux North Korean Communism is as real as Faux Conservative Populism.  Both are hard to take seriously and both are manufactured and targeted at rubes too dumb or too scared (or both) to think for themselves.  “If those Democrats are elected, then Obama’s gay Muslim abortionists will take my Bible away!”  “If those Republicans are elected, they will ban abortion, bomb Iran, and make us all Protestant!”

And Kim Jong-il invented the cheeseburger.

In the words of self-styled exercise guru Susan Powter, “Stop the insanity!”