Gettin Serenity With It

A washboard. Of course

Kulturkrieg

The Blue Meanies lost this election.  After the delicious Schadenfreude and gloating, well-meaning liberals have been admonishing conservatives that we all would benefit if they learned from their errors.  This is the civic-minded, Gallant thing to say.

I don't want them to learn anything.  These people fear modernity, and they fear complexity.  Their entire philosophy is grounded in keeping the mass of humanity in a perpetual state of fear, ignorance, and cruelty.  They are not going to turn to each other and say, "I always knew there was solid evidence for climate change," or "It doesn't affect me if other people form a same-sex marriage or get an abortion."  At most, they'll swallow hard and claim that America welcomes all hard-working immigrants (particularly if they're Catholic).

The notion that a polity requires "two healthy competing ideologies" is a conceit of those who profit from presenting the spectacle of this "competition."  Compromise junkies like Obama look on decades of reactionary obstructionism and conclude that—this time—accommodation will be met with reconciliation.  In fact, despite fleeting moments of clarity, cultural conservatives are preparing to bury their heads even deeper up their own hateful asses, and hoping they will learn anything other than to be more adroit liars is fruitless.

Demographically, they are doomed.  The sooner they become an electoral irrelevancy the better.  For all of us.

Please remember Veterans Day.

G.O.P. Split Over Whether to Emphasize Misogyny or Racism

“In politics, you’ve got to dance with the one who brung you.”

The Meat Planet

Rarely is astrophysics so mouth-watering.

Autumnal Equivent

The morning when you change the default setting on your car's environment from blue to red.

Liberty

Just bought a bottle of Irish at 7:30 am on Independence Day because I could.

Moonrise Kingdom

Wes Anderson remains his own best parodist, so I'm uncertain whether the pride of place he awards to Benjamin Britten in Moonrise Kingdom is a newfound enthusiasm or just escalation.  I'm getting tired of comparing Anderson's films to Cornell boxes, but the labored set design of Summer's End, the mid-Sixties holiday retreat of the Bishop family at one end of New Penzance, an island halfway between Montauk and Martha's Vineyard, claws at the eye.  Weathered trimming, desultory board games, and kitschy oil paintings aggressively crowd the frame to draw in this curator of summer cabin aesthetics.

Kingdom is as wry and diverting as previous Anderson outings, but it doesn't carry quite the dread of mortality that stalked, say, The Royal Tenenbaums or The Darjeeling Limited.  This is probably due to the focus on adolescents Sam and Suzy; the adult A-listers' roles are respectfully muted.  Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman are delightful discoveries, although I couldn't help imagining Jason Schwartzman coaching them off-camera.  I suppose it is gluttonous of me to have wished for a scene between the Camp Lebanon's conniving Supply Master (Schwartzman) and Commander Pierce (Harvey Keitel's mustache).

I hope Ed Norton becomes a permanent addition to Anderson's collection.  The alarm that Norton's Scout Master Ward displays when he learns that Sam is an orphan poignantly illustrates the potential of Anderson's declamatory dialogue style.  I am Jack's bottomless well of wistfulness.

The Submission

Like The Mirage, Amy Waldman's The Submission engages in a bit of alternate history:  What if in 2003 a jury selected a design for the memorial to the victims of 9/11 only to discover afterwards that the designer was an American-born, non-practicing Muslim named Mohammad Khan?  Waldman gives us a number a perspectives on the controversy, but ultimately they all revolve around that of Claire Burwell, the only representative of the victims' families on the jury and initially the strongest advocate for Khan's design.

With its parade of types gleefully misunderstanding one another, The Submission recalls nothing so much as The Bonfire of the Vanities (which Waldman herself invokes digressively in a character portrait).  As in Wolfe's farce, Deeply Held Principles are incinerated and crushed by Unintended Consequences, and the only relationships that preserve their meaning are personal.

Reading The Submission during the controversy over Anne-Marie Slaughter's unintentionally anti-capitalist essay reinforced the sense of privilege that admitted Claire to the jury in the first place and affirms her role in bringing the narrative to its conclusion.  All other players are too freighted by their class and cultural baggage to empathize with anyone else.  The closure Waldman affords to Claire is not available to anyone else, and Waldman never suggests it should be.

The Mirage

Matt Ruff's The Mirage presents itself as an alternate history in which a hegemonic "United Arab States" is attacked by Christian fundamentalist terrorists on 11/9/2001, hijacking airliners and flying them into the Tigris & Euphrates World Trade Towers in Baghdad and the Arab Defense Ministry in Riyadh.  As an alternate history, it is shoddy at best.  The Mirage functions much better as a satire on the War on Terror and Aughts pop culture.  The novel's chief delight is anticipating the roles played by public figures in the alternate world before Ruff reveals their names.  Most of these are clever, but Ruff's genius stroke is how he alternately resolves the Second World War and where he locates the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel.