The Accidental Nihilist

Posted on February 3, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

“They had dug coal together as young men and then lost touch over the years. Now it looked like they’d be meeting again, this time as lawman and felon, Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder.”

That’s the first paragraph of Elmore Leonard’s “Fire in the Hole” and the premise of FX’s Justified, which has entered its sixth and final season. The New York Times calls the show a “crime drama,” but the cowboy hat on Timothy Olyphant’s head says Western to me—that and the fact the actor had recently finished playing sheriff on HBO’s Deadwood when he took up the role.

Olyphant’s U.S. Marshall is named Raylan, but he borrows his DNA from another Leonard short story, “How Carlos Webster Changed His Name to Carl and Became a Famous Oklahoma Lawman.” Michael Chabon included it in the Thrilling Tales issue of McSweeney’s he edited in 2003, infusing a much needed dose of pulp into the quite realms of literary fiction. I assigned Leonard’s and a half dozen other Thrilling Tales to my advanced creative writing class this semester. The Justified writing team must have a copy too. Olyphant voiced Carl’s dialogue on the pilot: “I want to be clear about this so you understand. If I pull my weapon I’ll shoot to kill. In other words, the only time Carl Webster draws his gun it’s to shoot somebody dead.”

Which Rayland Givens does too. Many many times in the past five years. It’s his character’s most charming superpower, that good-natured indifference to moral quandaries. Raylan never hesitates before shooting and he never second guesses himself afterwards. The cocky smile never changes either. As Marshall Webster’s father says: “My Lord, but this boy has a hard bark on him.”

That’s standard gunslinger M.O., a cold-blooded willingness to step over the line and do whatever needs doing to keep the good folks of his community safe and sound. Or, as Richard Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation says of frontiersmen:

“Through this transgression of the borders, through combat with the dark elements on the other side, the heroes reveal the meaning of the frontier line (that is, the distinctions of value it symbolizes) even as they break it down. In the process they evoke the elements in themselves (or in their society) that correspond to the ‘dark’; and by destroying the dark elements and colonizing the border, they purge darkness from themselves and the world.”

So Raylan’s job is darkness-purger for the crime-swamped frontier of modern Kentucky. And he was doing a pretty good job in season one, and even better season two (one of my all-time favorite 14-episode arcs of any TV show). But then things started to shift. Not his smile, not his pistol grip, those are unflinching as ever—which, oddly, creates a kind of change in his character: the inability to change.

When E. M. Forster read Moby Dick, he saw “a battle against evil conducted too long or in the wrong way.” Captain Ahab—a once-valiant knight sailing in the service of good—devolves into the evil he thought he was fighting. That’s Raylan’s problem too. A hero can only spend so long in that darkness before he sinks in too far. Instead of purging the darkness, Raylan is wallowing in it.

His first two season, he at least theoretically was trying to complete his Ahab mission and retire into the domestic bliss of marriage and fatherhood. But then he watched his true love stroll off camera while he battled the next round of Kentucky gangsters. He picked up some more girlfriends, but his unflappable indifference applied to them too. After three more seasons of random acts of love and violence, Raylan’s emotional range never inched off the glib meter. Instead of a man with a well-armored moral center, all that manly bark looks like a facade papered over an abyss.

Boyd Crowder, however, has aged much better. Sure, actor Walton Goggins’ receding hairline is undermining the character’s crazy hair look, but otherwise Boyd is as paradoxically loveable as ever. I would call him an anti-hero, but he’s more a heroic villain, a guy of deep but unpredictable passions in struggle with his inner darkness. Unlike Raylan, he doesn’t know himself, and so each season has been a chaotic and inevitably corpse-ridden quest for self-discovery.

Frank Miller, the villain that provides Marshall Webster his origin story and plot closure, is as two-dimensional as his Batman-writing namesake (comics artist Howard Chaykin, even more coincidentally, illustrates the tale). The Boyd Crowder of “Fire in the Hole” is just an oddball Nazi thug there to give his Marshall Givens a character-revealing moral dilemma: can you put down a man you once dug coal beside? The answer is, of course, yes, and so the story has its ending. Justified, however, has been stringing out that last paragraph for five years, only now in the final season promising to complete the stand-off.

Both characters are caricatures of American masculinity, sharing the absurd ur-trait of psychopathic violence, but they spin that violence in opposite directions. Boyd’s search for meaning is almost proof enough that such meaning is possible. A universe of destructive hope pumps just under his skin. Raylan is nihilism personified. Peel back the bark, and the black hole of his heart would suck the world dry.

These aren’t the characters Elmore Leonard created. I’m not sure the writers of Justified created them either. This is just what happens when you drop short story characters into an open-ended serial form, extending their timelines far beyond the closure points they were designed to inhabit. As Forster says of Ahab, they get “warped by constant pursuit.”

World’s Best Cinecomic

Posted on February 2, 2015 by Julian Chambliss

The return of Arrow and The Flash from their midseason break continues the love-fest each program has enjoyed with fans. The CW’s dynamic duo (sorry) has sparked hopes of a DC cinematic universe by bridging the gap between diehard fans and casual viewers. Nothing illustrates this point more than this season’s semi-crossover event. Skillfully executed and action packed, each character visited the other’s show. Oliver Queen’s darker persona coming into contact with the “brighter” world inhabited by Barry Allen (and vice versa) reminded fans of World Best Comics #1 (Later World Finest Comics) that featured Batman and Superman in 1941. This comic hinted that Batman and Superman lived in the same world. Ironically, it was only the covers that placed the heroes together; they did not actually appear in the same story until 1952. Embellishing episodes that are already deeply informed by decades of stories and developed and produced by the same creative team, Arrow and The Flash deliver a better experience.

World Best Comics Vol. 1 #1 (March 1941)

The shared universe idea that developed from the 1940s onward grew more complex drawing in fans and accommodating new characters and worlds. Creators hope this legacy means fan engagement with these cinematic adaptations will impact engagement on other platforms. Yet, as recent research about the transmedia idea explains whatever the technological tools and industrial alignments shaping storytelling, these products cannot escape the sociocultural context informing the audience experience.[1] While Arrow and The Flash are satisfying action adventure serials, this season’s crossover also highlight the historical burden linked to the superhero genre.

DC Comics characters inform the popular imagination about the superhero. For years adaptations of DC characters have served as vehicles for generational discourses. Batman’s 1960s television series and Superman’s 1970s film highlight this tradition. The Batman television series leveraged the Pop Art Movement to create an “exaggerated cliché” that delighted children and amused adults.[2] At the same moment, Roy Lichtenstein blurred the boundary between high culture and commercialism using comic book panels in his images.[3] Derided at the time, his work, like TV series, resonated with the public reflecting societal tension with the postwar conformist message in America. By the time Richard Donner’s Superman graced the silver screen in 1978 the United States had been disabused of its global preeminence by failures abroad and domestic politics splintered by protests from the left and the right. Americans were uncertain and as Jimmy Carter famously explained, a crisis of confidence casted a “…growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives” and the “unity of purpose for our nation.”[4] Donner’s Superman offered an affirmation of American ideas. Not surprisingly, Carter lost his re-election campaign and adjusted for inflation Superman remains the highest gross adaptation of the Man of Steel on film.[5]

Showcase Vol 1. #4

The circumstances that shaped the pro-social mission in the original Superman and Batman reflected depression struggles and wartime triumphs. In a similar manner, the superhero comic book revival associated with Barry Allen’s debut as The Flash reflected the postwar experience. Created by Robert Kanigher, John Broome, and Carmine Infantino in 1956, Allen was the second Flash and sparked a superhero renaissance that re-imagined 1940s characters for the atomic age. Allen’s earnest commitment to family and community along with his civilian identity as a “police scientist” affirmed the moral standard established by The Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA). The CMAA’s regulatory arm, the Comic Code Authority worked to eliminate corrupting images and ideas critics linked to comic books. Famously articulated by Dr. Fredric Wertham, comic books became seen as central cause of juvenile delinquency in the early 1950s. The resulting hysteria led to Congressional hearings investigating comic publishers in 1954.[6] Recent work by Amy Kiste Nyberg does an excellent job of demonstrating how Wertham was as much a symptom as a cause of Americans’ suspicions. The confluence of Cold War tension, postwar affluence, and youth culture provided ample opportunities for parents to worry and children to rebel. Those kids endangered by comics would embrace the disruptive rhythm of rock ‘n’ roll music and go off to college and protest…everything.

As comic book publishers strove to keep this dynamic youth engaged, they continued to revamp their characters to reflect changing time. Green Arrow, created in 1941, was more “Batman-lite” than an iconic character until Neal Adams and Dennis “Denny” O’Neil re-designed him in 1969. Oliver Queen had been a rich man with a teenage sidekick who employed trick arrows and worked from secret headquarters called the Arrow Cave (with an Arrow Car of course). The “new” Green Arrow lost his fortune, discovered his ward was a drug addict, and in the classic series paired with Green Lantern travelled the country in the early 1970s confronting crimes rooted in “real world” concerns like racism and environmental damage.[7] The link to ‘relevance’ in superhero comics has never left Green Arrow, but arguably his frustration with authority has shifted in recent years from the ardent liberalism of the 1960s to a disillusioned libertarianism today.

In Arrow and The Flash this history informs the narrative world we see on the screen and shapes the shared universe they inhabit. Allen’s Flash and Queen’s Arrow approach their mission differently, a point made clear when each hero applies their methods in the other’s city. Allen retains the expectations and aspiration associated with postwar America, but slightly modernized. Despite the tragic circumstances he has faced, he is committed to making his world better. Arrow has taken Green Arrow’s social justice narrative and re-oriented it with a criminal justice lens. Like the country as a whole, his grievance with “the system” has grown at once more and less complex. He struggles with morally questionable actions in his past as he pursues a heroic future. Informed by contemporary culture, both adaptations are a prism on values inscribed in each character. As Arrow and The Flash continue to create a richer world, the evolution of their narrative legacy provides a roadmap of how the contemporary audience’s concerns about security and community contend with changing millennial realities. The popularity of the shows makes sense as a catharsis exercise. That the superheroes will triumph is not the question. Instead, how they win and remain heroic becomes the key. Queen’s Arrow doesn’t want to be a killer that relies on torture to protect those things he loves and Allen’s Flash doesn’t want to be so afraid he is unable to act. For all the fantastic excesses linked to superheroes, the broader questions they are in dialogue with matter to us all.
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[1] Carlos Scolari, Paolo Bertetti, and Matthew Freeman, Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), viii–viii, http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/transmedia-archaeology-carlos-scolari.

[2] Judy Stone, “Caped Crusader of Camp,” New York Times, January 9, 1966.

[3] Peter Sanderson, “Spiegelman Goes to College,” PublishersWeekly.com, April 23, 2007, http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/1-legacy/24-comic-book-reviews/article/14675-spiegelman-goes-to-college.html.

[4] “WGBH American Experience. Jimmy Carter | PBS,” American Experience, accessed December 26, 2014, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/carter-crisis/.

[5] “Superman Moviesat the Box Office – Box Office Mojo,” accessed December 26, 2014, http://boxofficemojo.com/franchises/chart/?id=superman.htm.

[6] “1954 Senate Subcommittee Hearings into Juvenile Delinquency (Comic Books),” accessed October 26, 2013, http://www.thecomicbooks.com/1954senatetranscripts.html.

[7] Jesse T. Moore, “The Education of Green Lantern: Culture and Ideology,” The Journal of American Culture 26, no. 2 (2003): 263–78.

The Iraq War as Blogging Psychodrama

Posted on February 1, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared at Splice Today.
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I Was Wrong: A Real Time Chronicle of the Iraq War, 2001-2008, Andrew Sullivan’s recently released ebook, is a compilation of his blogging on the Iraq war. As such, it begins with a post on September 11, 2001, a few hours after the attack on the World Trade Center. “When our shock recedes,” he writes in that first entry,

“our rage must be steady and resolute and unforgiving. The response must be disproportionate to the crime and must hold those states and governments that have tolerated this evil accountable. This is the single most devastating act of war since Nagasaki. It is the first time that an enemy force has invaded the precincts of the American capital since the early nineteenth century. It is more dangerous than Pearl Harbor. And it is a reminder that the forces of resentment and evil can no longer be appeased. They must be destroyed – systematically, durably, irrevocably. Perhaps now we will summon the will to do it. “

Sullivan’s initial reaction, is, then, a narrative — and a familiar one. It is a story of evil revenged, good triumphant, and violence unleashed. World War II is summoned up, through references to Nagasaki, Pearl Harbor, and appeasement. The accuracy of these past allusions (Saddam’s chemical attack on the Kurds in 1988 caused more deaths than September 11, to name just one post-Nagasaki example) is less important than the future they point to. That future is just war, and a new greatest generation, of which Sullivan (through that collective “we”) will be a part

Of course, it didn’t work out that way. I Was Wrong is the story of a story gone awry; it’s about how Sullivan thought he was in a book about good defeating evil, and instead discovers himself in a different tale altogether. The arc of that tale is traced clearly enough in the chapter subheads of the ebook: “Trauma”, “Doubt” and “Regret.” Shocked by 9/11, Sullivan hoped for, demanded, and was finally thrilled by the reality of war. As the Iraq quagmire deepened, and the extent of Bush’s “feckless” mendacity became clear, he began to re-examine his support. And finally, with the revelations of Abu Ghraib, he realized that the war should never have been waged, and that he had been complicit in an atrocity. “Those of us who supported this war cannot wash our hands of the blood of tens of thousands of innocents it has now claimed,” he wrote in October 2006. And he adds, in an epilogue, “Although my intentions were good, I feel ashamed of some of the sentences in this book.”

Sullivan’s recognition of his errors, and his willingness to admit them, are both extremely admirable. Yet, there are unsettling ways in which the story he thought he was telling in the beginning and the story he ends up telling fit together almost too well. In his second post on the day of 9/11, for example, Sullivan writes:

It feels – finally – as if a new era has begun. The strange interlude of 1989 – 2001, with its decadent post-Cold War extravaganzas from Lewinsky to Condit to the e-boom, is now suddenly washed away…. The one silver lining of this is that we may perhaps be shaken out of our self-indulgent preoccupations and be reminded of what really matters: our freedom, our security, our integrity as a democratic society.

In this story of 9/11, the fall of the towers becomes an awakening; a traumatic shock that erases the past and leads to moral and spiritual renewal. Though the specifics are somewhat altered, isn’t that also the story of I Was Wrong, with its path from benightedness to revelation to knowledge, awakening, and renewal? Sullivan here, waxing lyrical about America and freedom and democracy, doesn’t sound so very different from Sullivan at the end of the book endorsing Obama and “a new direction, a new statement that the America the world once knew and loved is back.” We always seem to be regenerating in one way or another, always involved in a never-ending American apotheosis of purification and renewal.

This is, perhaps, just another way of saying that Andrew Sullivan is still Andrew Sullivan; he may have reversed his opinions, but he’s still the same excitable, starry-eyed blogger in 2008 that he was in 2001. From this perspective, the most important part of the title I Was Wrong is not the “Wrong”, but the “I”. In his afterword, Sullivan says that “a blogger writing daily…has nowhere to hide,” by which he means that he can conceal nothing. But it also seems to suggest that he, himself, conceals everything — that he’s so close to the camera that you can’t see past him. Thus, September 11 becomes his revenge fantasy. Thus, I Was Wrong turns the Iraq war and its aftermath into the confessional, spiritual journey of one, Andrew Sullivan.

Blogging as a form explains a good deal of this self-absorption. You read Andrew Sullivan for news to get not just Andrew Sullivan’s take, or opinion, about the news, as you might find in an op-ed. Rather, you read Sullivan’s blog, or Sullivan’s book, to get Andrew Sullivan’s story of the news — an ongoing narrative about the world, filtered through his particular perspective. The fact that the Iraq War ends up being about Andrew Sullivan isn’t because Andrew Sullivan is a navel-gazing narcissist; it’s simply a genre default. In superhero comics, the superhero wins; in romance novels, the girl gets the guy; in blogging, the blogger is front and center. If you don’t like the trope, you read something else.

Whether you like them or don’t, though, tropes have meaning. In this case the narrative impulse to turn piles of dead bodies into a story by, and/or about, this one guy watching seems like it has more than a passing relationship to American policy. The invasion of Iraq, as Sullivan’s book painfully shows, was about a desire for revenge and for American renewal and goodness — it was about us, first and last, in other words, rather than about the WMDs that weren’t there, or about human rights which Abu Ghraib showed we didn’t much care about in the first place. Sullivan can change the story about himself from revenge to regret, but he can’t stop making it about himself. One way or another, for us the meaning of Iraq is not Iraq, but us. The real moral error in I Was Wrong is not believing Bush or miscalculating the costs of war, but treating a country full of people as characters in one’s own psychodrama. That’s called imperialism. As this book shows, even for someone as honest and thoughtful as Andrew Sullivan, it’s a hard vice to break.

The CTA and Reverse Racism

Posted on January 31, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on Splice Today.
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My wife is white, and she was taking the train to the Southside where we live. The train was crowded, almost entirely with African-Americans. One black man saw her sitting, and harassed her for the entire 20-minute train ride. How dare you be here when you know that this is a black train going to the black Southside, he told her. “Here’s this white women taking a seat. Are there any black women who need a seat? Or any black men. Or anybody?” He talked at length about how white people disrespect black people. He kept repeating, “You think you don’t have anything to do with it, but you have to pay.” It was that “you have to pay” that my wife found especially worrisome. Other people on the train punctuated his dialogue with laughter or shouts of encouragement.

She got home safely and was none the worse for wear. And nothing like this has ever happened to her before; she doesn’t feel unsafe taking the train as a rule, and not infrequently chats pleasantly with fellow riders. Still this incident was obviously very uncomfortable, and more than a little frightening. It also shows, I think, that the liberal default claim that “there is no reverse racism” is not entirely accurate. My wife was harassed, threatened, and told that she should not be allowed to use public facilities because of the color of her skin. It’s hard to imagine how you could define racism in such a way that her experience wouldn’t qualify. Certainly, if the reverse had happened—if on a train full of white people going to the Northside, a black person had been singled out and harassed on the basis of her race while other white onlookers cheered—it would be considered racism, and rightfully so.

There are a couple of possible takeaways here. First is the obvious point that black people, like white people, can be hateful if given the chance. That hatefulness can take a number of forms, but one is racial prejudice.

Racial prejudice doesn’t exist in a vacuum though. And in this case, the context, or the possibility, of black prejudice against white people is predicated on the context of white prejudice against black people. What happened to her only makes sense because of black history.

I don’t mean that the history of white oppression is an excuse for what happened to my wife. There isn’t any excuse for it, and treating people as if the sin of their skin color trumps who they are as individuals is simply a restatement of racism, not a mitigation of it. Rather, what I’m saying is that the black-on-white racism directed against my wife was made possible by the structural white-on-black racism that has shaped Chicago.

My wife’s assailant said that the train to the Southside was a black train. But it wasn’t African-Americans who decided that the Southside would be black. It wasn’t African-Americans who decided that Chicago should be the most segregated city in the country. For that matter, it wasn’t African-Americans who decided that people in the US should be categorized first and foremost on the basis of race in order to morally justify and practically facilitate slavery. My wife was visible as a white person going to a majority-black section of the city because her country and her city had made a systematic, centuries-long effort to mark and segregate black people. Without that history of racism, the reverse-racism my wife experienced would be impossible.

In a recent piece at Counterpunch, Tanya Golash-Boza argues that racism harms not just black people, but white people as well. She points out, for example, that when qualified people of color are passed over for advancement, less qualified white people get the jobs, so that “mediocre white people are teaching our children, leading community businesses, and fixing our telephones.” She adds that the structural concentration of wealth in the U.S. goes, not to all white people, but to a select few, so that racism is part of a system in which most black and white people “are fighting over the crumbs.”

My wife’s experience could be seen as another, even more direct way in which structural racism against black people can, in particular circumstances, result in harm to white people. The creation of racial difference and of segregation results in categorization on the basis of race.

Golash-Boza concludes: “Once we see the harm that racism causes all people in our society, it will be easier to form multi-racial coalitions to eliminate racism.” I’d like that to be true. But I think that when pointing out the harm that racism does whites, it’s important to realize that those harms are accidental—a kind of gratuitous fall-out of the hate and misery intentionally targeted at black people.

My wife’s story is the story of Chicago’s Southside, which is the story of America, which is in a lot of very important ways the story of racism. Doing a cost-benefit analysis on how and whether racism hurts white people can elide the uncomfortable fact that racism is entwined with the very existence of “white people” as a category, and for that matter with American (and certainly with Chicago) identity and history. Wanting to get rid of racism, then, isn’t so much about cost-benefit analysis. Rather it’s about no longer wanting hatred to be what we live with, day in and day out, what we see in the faces around us, and what we come home to every night.

Everyone Tell Jonathan Chait to Shut Up

Posted on January 30, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Last summer, I wrote a piece for the Atlantic in which I argued that Orange Is the New Black (OITNB)fails to effectively critique prison as an institution because prison as an institution in the United States is directed mostly at men, and OITNB presents prison as bad because it victimizes women. The piece went semi-viral as a hate read, and was widely denounced. Jezebel wrote an article with the very Jezebel title “Writer Doesn’t Understand Why Show About Women’s Prison Has So Few Men.” Music critic Brandon Soderberg called me as a “clueless cracker pedant” on Twitter. Folks I liked and respected told me in no uncertain terms that what I had written was unfeminist and generally awful. There was a massive comment thread with people lining up to tell me I was stupid and should shut up. The left, the damn left, in all its insular self-righteousness, would not tolerate brave dissent such as mine.

Or at least, that’s the conclusion I would come to if I were Jonathan Chait. Chait has written a long article for New York magazine in which he bemoaned the return of political correctness and the toxic culture of the left. Chait points to Hanna Rosin, who wrote a book about the current plight of men, and was ridiculed with a hashtag; he also singles out an invitation-only Facebook group where people argueloudly with each other. My experience could be another data point for him, yet one more example of how “swarms of jeering critics can materialize in an instant” terrifying the heterodox leftist or liberal into silence.

There’s a couple of problems with Chait’s thesis, though. First of all, there’s just nothing in his article or in his examples that makes a case that discourse on the broadly defined left is somehow nastier than discourse on the right, or in the center, or out in directionless space. The first controversial piece I wrote for the web was for The Comics Journal. I reviewed Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers and my piece was headlined “In the Shadow of No Talent.” TCJ readers lost their shit and at least one person wished for the death of me and my family. It was exactly the sort of intemperate lashing out at dissent that Chait denigrates — but it didn’t have anything to do with political correctness or a culture of Marxist intolerance. It had to do with comics fans not wanting to hear me tell them that the thing they liked wasn’t any good.

Since then I’ve been told that I am stupid and that I should shut up by lots of Men’s Rights Activists, some feminists, some romance fans, many comics readers, fans of Breaking Bad, fans of The Hobbit, some leftists, and many right-wingers. I’ve even been abused by a fair number of supposedly free-speech-loving liberals and libertarians, who, when it comes to online behavior, aren’t any more tolerant of dissent than anyone else as far as I can tell. In a recent discussion of Charlie Hebdo, one First Amendment lover told me that if I didn’t like America, I could leave it — because free speech means exiling folks who say things you don’t like. Maybe, as Gawker’s Alex Pareene says, the liberal Chait is especially thin-skinned when it comes to criticism from his left. But one thing’s for sure: In terms of yelling at each other online, there are no red states and no blue states. There are only states of intemperate ire, and lots of them.

Chait is right, I think, that social media has changed the way social pressures work when it comes to speech. It used to be that conversations in the public sphere were limited and controlled by institutions. What you could say was controlled by what magazines (like, say, The New Republic, where Chait used to work) would print. That’s still true to some degree. But it’s also true that social media has made it possible for people who didn’t have a platform to speak loudly, astutely, randomly, continuously, profanely, violently—and often right there, just under an author’s prose, in the comments section. The roar can be deafening, and sometimes frightening.

I use the word frightening advisedly. Chait in his piece does that odd thing free-speech advocates sometimes do, and downplays the importance, or dangerousness of talking and expressing opinions. ” Mere expression of opposing ideas, in the form of a poster, is presented as a threatening act,” Chait sneers, denigrating an academic who found a pro-life sign on a college campus offensive. But speech is threatening, often, and aggressive. You could argue that a professor physically grabbing a sign from a student is an escalation, and I’d agree with you. But it’s not an escalation from zero

Chait is telling people on the left that they’re totalitarians; I’m telling him that he’s a fool. The intent, in both cases, is to cause a reaction, to disturb, to mock, to change the world, in some small way. If speech were utterly inconsequential, if it had no power, there wouldn’t be any point in defending it. The argument for free speech, surely, has to be built on the notion that speech does in fact have power. It’s because speech is worth listening to that you defend it, not because it isn’t.

And the cacophony of the internet is, contra Chait, often worth listening to. It’s given a voice to many folks who didn’t have one before. Chait takes a swipe at the 1990s’ anti-sex work policies of Catherine McKinnon, but he doesn’t mention that the social media he sneers at has been a huge boon to sex workers themselves, who can finally create their own platforms after decades of being silenced by both the right and the left.

Similarly, black women and other women of color have a major presence online, and are able to talk back to folks like Chait (or like me) in a way that wasn’t possible even twenty years ago. Chait doesn’t always like what these people tell him — he seems particularly disturbed by Brittney Cooper’s argument that reason is not always a useful tool against racism. But that’s how free speech works; people will sometimes say things you don’t like.

There are downsides to all this roiling speech, too. Chait seems to think the most serious problem is that white men and white women are sometimes told that their whiteness disqualifies them from speaking. “Under p.c. culture, the same idea can be expressed identically by two people but received differently depending on the race and sex of the individuals doing the expressing,” Chait moans.

And sure, as a white person, I find it unpleasant when my brilliant, beautiful ideas are dismissed because I’m white or male. But that problem pales (as it were) next to receiving actual death threats, being doxxed, or having SWAT teams sicced on your house — none of which Chait mentions, because none of those things are regular occurrences on the left. But other communities haven’t been so lucky. Being white on the internet may be a hard, sad, road, but it’s nothing compared to being a feminist video game developer. For that matter, being white on the Internet is not generally anything compared to being black on the Internet. As Ferguson activist Deray Mckesson told me, “the death threats aren’t fun. They put my address out there, that’s not fun. I get called a nigger more than I’ve ever been called that in my entire life. I’ve blocked over 9,000 people, so I don’t personally see it as much anymore, but my friends do.”

The Internet makes it possible for more people to speak more effectively than ever before in history. That also means it allows more people to issue death threats, shout obscenities, and harass others than ever before. Free speech, and for that matter democracy, has always been a balancing act between the polis and the mob — between unleashing speech to empower people, and trying to figure out how to prevent the power of speech being used to oppress, to terrorize, and even (through that call to the SWAT team, for example) to kill.

The Internet, and social media, have exacerbated these tensions; they increase the potential of speech, for good and ill. Those are problems we have to wrestle with. Jonathan Chait isn’t up to the task, in part because his obsession with the left leads him to focus on ideologies rather than methods; on who he wants to shut up, rather than on figuring out which kinds of speech, whatever the content, should be allowed, which shouldn’t, and how to deal with the difference. Fortunately, the Internet is full of talking people who, civilly and less so, can tell him where he’s wrong, and that he should shut up.

Early 21st Century Popularism

Posted on January 29, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

There I’ve named it. Centuries from now, fans and scholars will look back at this past decade as the birth of Popularism, the movement that stamped the coffin lid on postmodernism.

I attended the Modern Language Association conference in January, and according to the “What’s On” section of The Vancouver Sun I read over my first breakfast, the city was more “erudite” than usual that weekend. Imagine 8,000 English professors converging on one city block. And yet this year’s star speaker was Sara Paretsky, “best-selling mystery writer” of the “revolutionary novels” featuring detective V. I. Warshawski. I’d spied some of her paperbacks in airport bookstores on my trip over. That’s not evidence of an academic bastion. That’s collapsed rubble.

My complimentary Sun also included an article on the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra; “the old days of new music” were “a tough slog for general audiences” but now “are over.” Instead, Jocelyn Morlock, VSO’s composer in residence, is emphasizing “pure fun” and “party atmosphere.” “To a large extent,” she explains, “new music has become more attractive to audiences because the attitude of composers themselves have changed. Composers want to connect with their audiences rather than baffling or alienating them.”

Compare that to composer John Harbison’s 1960s studies with Milton Babbitt, who New York Times Magazine editor Charles McGrath dubbed “the reigning prince of atonality.” Harbison’s “reluctance to abandon melody,” McGrath wrote in 1999, “made him an outcast. He still remembers a moment when one of his grad-school classmates turned to him and said, ‘You’re really just a tune man, aren’t you?’’” The tune man went on to win a MacArthur “genius” award, while being labelled a New Romantic, a term he hated: ‘I think ‘Romantic’ is just a cover for whether or not people like something.’”

Harbison also likened operas to literature: “there’s the literary novel and the novel that’s sold in airports. Opera is in the same place where the literary novel is.” A decade and a half later, the literary novel is nowhere near opera. It’s hanging out with those airport paperbacks now. The infectious beat of genre fiction has gone highbrow. Since winning a 1999 Pulitzer for a novel about comic books, Michael Chabon has been rehabilitating the words “entertainment” and “pleasure” as the not-so-erudite goals of literature.

In the art world, the equivalent to a catchy melody is representational painting, something Mt. San Jacinto College professor John Seed would like to see more of. In a 2013 Huffington Post blog, Seed listed 40 representational painters (culled from 135) who he’d like to see in the Museum of Contemporary Art. “Like other leading American and European contemporary museums and galleries,” writes Seed, “MOCA has narrowly defined contemporary to mean works that have their roots in Duchamp, Warhol and postmodern theory.” Instead, Seed wants the museum to “woo back the respect of its public” by acknowledging that “Postmodernism officially expired.”

That death means all airport reading can discard the “Romantic” covers. Even academic scholarship wants public respect now. The NEH announced in December a new agency-wide initiative, The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square, emphasizing that “the humanities belong to all the people of the United States.” Their new “Public Scholar” grant wants scholarly books “accessible to general readers” and “conceived and written to reach a broad readership.” University presses, the reigning princes of academic atonality, are joining the common people too. Last year, an acquisition editor at the University of Iowa Press contacted me to ask if I would be interested in adapting my pop culture blog into a “crossover” book designed for a general interest audience, what the press predicts will play “an important role in the future of university publishing.” As a result, On the Origin of Superheroes: from the Big Bang to Action Comics No. 1 will be out in fall 2015.

Over fifty books in comics studies were published last year—including from Oxford and Cambridge—but I’m the only person on my campus who fields the question: “Oh, are you the comic book guy?” Unlike Harbison’s graduate-school snobs though, my colleagues ask it with a pleased grin, followed by an admission of a similarly lowbrow interest of their own. As a result, I keep stumbling into interdisciplinary projects. Cognitive psychologist Dan Johnson and I have begun a second round of studies exploring the so-called division between “literary” and “popular” fiction.”Atin Basu, a professor of economics next door at the Virginia Military Institute, and I are applying game theory to zombie movies. Nathaniel Goldberg, a Washington and Lee colleague in Philosophy, and I are thinking about Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and philosopher Donald Davidson’s Swampman. Our Art department’s Leigh Ann Beavers is teaming up with me to design a new spring course on making comics—though we may go with the more erudite title Graphic Narratives. None of these projects may be “revolutionary,” but they are “pure fun.”

A major in my English department is writing her senior thesis on Fifty Shades of Grey. And why not? It’s a cultural object worth analysis. This invasion of the popular into the serious worries some folks though. Last year, Adam Brooke Davis warned in the Chronicle of Higher Education about “the overwhelming weight of pop culture,” after discovering that his advanced creative writing students were more likely to have read The Hunger Games than short stories by Annie Proulx or Ha Jin. That was a surprise? Isn’t that the definition of “popular”? I’m not a particular fan of Suzanne Collins or E. L. James or Sara Paretsky, but I don’t object to their book sales. It’s just something else to study.

By mid-century I predict the aesthetic pendulum will start slicing back in the opposite direction. Until then, I’m enjoying the party.

The Marvellous Miss Take

Posted on January 28, 2015 by Shonté Daniels

The Marvellous Miss Take is one of the best stealth games I’ve played in a long time. I should be honest and note that the game was released on Steam and GOG back in November, so I’m really late to the party. However, I don’t think Miss Take received as much praise as it deserves, and I want to spend some time to acknowledge how simple and enjoyable it really is.

The story revolves around Miss Sophia Take who is on a mission to reclaim her late great aunt’s collections of paintings that were stolen from Sophia and placed in different galleries all throughout London. With the help of Harry Carver, an ex artist and expert thief, and Daisy Hobbs, a seventeen-year-old loner who can pickpocket anyone in seconds, the group (two women, one person of color, all playable to boot!) becomes the foxiest bunch of thieves in the city.

The Marvellous Miss Take is all about stealing art in the most collected way possible. The game breathes composure. Nothing feels better than sauntering over to a painting after avoiding suspicious guards, stuffing the art into your pocket and slowly walking away as if daring the security to watch you exit through the fire escape. Even the music sways in a combination of smooth jazz and trip hop that contradicted the amount of anxiety I felt hiding behind a pedestal hoping not be seen. If you’re caught, all serenity is lost, and the game ends.

The harder it gets (more police men, more cameras, more guard dogs), the more the game requires silence, patience and thought. Unlike other stealth games, like Splinter Cell or Hitman, violence is never an option in The Marvellous Miss Take. There were multiple times where I wished I could choke the guards into unconsciousness, or shoot the cameras until they broke, or anything to speed through a level without any threats. These were useless wishes, yet it was refreshing to not have them granted. Violence is incredibly common in popular games today; having no trace of violence felt like an innovation.

The most enjoyment lies in the game’s balance. Miss Take rewards players for finishing a level quickly, but also punishes them for going hastily. Running, for example, is tricky because the sound of running can alert guards to a thief’s location and reveal their hiding spot. But running can also help evade security by forcing them in one direction while the player tip toes in another. The key is to always be a few steps ahead of your enemies. Successful heists feel like a game of chess that results in a satisfying checkmate.

As challenging as it is, the game doesn’t come without a few flaws. For instance, I had a guard get stuck in a doorway, making it impossible for me to get out without getting caught. But those issues rarely occurred, and don’t outweigh the enjoyment I had for playing a stealth game that won’t let you leave a gallery after a successful heist without Sophia’s signature, chic sun hat.

The Marlvellous Miss Take is a wonderful game that felt like a brainy puzzle game. It’s combination of chill music, nonviolent action and cool characters created a stylish environment unlike many games before it. At the end, having collected all of Sophia’s aunt’s paintings, I felt as if I really did bring righteousness back into a previously unhip world.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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