Suffering With a Purpose

Posted on September 25, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

In the 70s, rape/revenge turned into a genre based on feministsploitation. Films like I Spit On Your Grave, Lipstick, and Ms. 45 presented rape as part of the structural oppression of women, and female revenge as a way to overthrow, and often literally castrate, the patriarchy. Even rape/revenge films that did not specifically use feminism as a lever, like Last House on the Left, spent significant time placing viewer identification with the women suffering violence. The film’s were certainly prurient and exploitive, but they also presented sexual violence as important,and its victims as not just sympathetic, but worthy of a privileged point of view and narrative place.

This is not the case for the Last House on the Left’s direct inspiration, The Virgin Spring. Ingmar Berman’s 1960 classic is a rape/revenge in terms of plot; set in medieval times, it is about a young girl who is raped and murdered by bandits on her way to church, and whose father then kills the murderers. But where the 70s rape/revenge films put feminism, Virgin Spring puts God.

Karin (Birgitta Pettersson) does get screentime in the first half of the film, it’s true—but her character amounts to little more than assurances that she is the perfect, perfectly innocent rape victim. She oversleeps and is a little spoiled, perhaps, but she is kind, loving, full of life, and trusting—she feeds the bandits her lunch because she wants to help strangers before she realizes they mean her ill.

All the depth, soul-searching, and internal conflict in the film is reserved for Karin’s friend and parents—and especially for her father, Tore, played by the even-then celebrated Max von Sydow. As far as the film is concerned, Karin’s assault is important less for its place in her life, than for its effect on her father and his relationship with God.

Since it’s a Bergman film, that relationship is fraught and dramatic. Tore chastises himself with branches before he goes forth to slay his daughter’s sleeping killers. In the final scene, after finding his child’s body, he staggers off to the side of the clearing, and looking away from the camera addresses the deity directly. “God, you saw it! God, you saw it!” he declares. An innocent died and God did nothing. Like Job’s, Tore’s loss is an object lesson in the problem of faith and evil. And then, after Tore pledges to build a church as expiation for his sin of violence, a spring miraculously begins to flow from the ground beneath Karin’s head. God did see, and Karin, we’re surely meant to believe, is in heaven. Karin’s death is first a dramatic moment in Tore’s internal life,and then a dramatic moment in God’s narrative of suffering and redemption.

The cinematography throughout emphasizes the sense of a cold, but beautiful order beneath, and gazing upon, the tragedy. The dramatic image of Sydow standing beside, and then wrestling, with the tree serves as a metaphor for Tore’s isolation—and for the fact that God (the tree, the eye watching the tree) is there even in the bleakest landscape.

There’s no question that Virgin Spring is a striking film to look at. And it deals with big, important themes—God, justice, mercy, violence, the place of man in the cosmos. But still, the very elevation of theme and vision can start to seem unseemly, built as it is on the torture and death of a person whose suffering is decidedly tangential. When Sydow goes the full ham Shakespeare route and gazes at his hands to let us know that he’s disturbed about murdering the thugs the staginess becomes almost insupportable. We get it Mr. Bergman. We are watching something profound. How can Karin have suffered in vain if she lets us contemplate the beauty that is Sydow in full stricken emoting?

In comparison, the later rape/revenge exploitation, acknowledging its prurient investment in both sex and violence, seems relatively honest—and certainly less grandly distanced from the trauma. In the 70s rape/revenge, the camera is not at some perfect remove, but often chaotically close to the action, trying to keep up, or get out of the way (as in the still below from Ms. 45).

Exploitation films are often criticized for having no higher purpose; for being exercises in sleaze, stimulation, and unpleasantness for their own sake. Virgin Spring makes me wonder, though, whether a higher purpose can in its own way be more indecent than sensationalism. Better to suffer for no reason, than so that God and dad and the filmmaker can be profound, and reconciled.

Lego System

Posted on September 24, 2015 by Philip Smith

I first encountered Zbigniew Libera’s LEGO concentration camp kits (1996) when I was writing on Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Both Libera and Spiegelman, famously, used a medium typically associated with children in a self-effacing attempt to depict the Holocaust. Libera’s work offered an interesting counterpoint to Maus because, despite the apparent conceptual similarities, while Spiegelman’s masterpiece has been almost universally celebrated, Libera has been called an anti-Semite, has been asked to withdraw his work from exhibitions, and has been accused (perhaps correctly) of offering a glib pop-culture commentary on the largest and genocide – the most terrible event – in human history. I wanted to examine the two texts beside one another in order to work out what made them different and how each reflected the politics of Holocaust representation. Ultimately, as inevitably happens, the work took a different shape and when the time came to submit the final draft of my manuscript I had said everything I wanted to say about Maus but Libera had been reduced to a footnote and, finally, removed entirely. The Lego System kits still bother me, though, and I would like to explore why they bother me here.

Libera worked with the LEGO Corporation of Denmark to produce three kits, each made up of seven boxes of Lego. Each box contains all of the materials needed to construct a Lego simulacra of some aspect of a Nazi death camp. Boxes include buildings, a gallows, inmates, guards, and barbed wire. The scenes depicted include a lynching, the beating of an inmate, medical experiments, and corpses being carried from the gas chambers.

One way we might read Libera’s work is as a hyperbolic form of historiographical metafiction, a term coined by Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics of Postmodernism to describe works which show ‘fiction to be historically conditioned and history to be discursively structured.’ By adopting an abstract form and a demonstrably impossible alternative history, certain texts, Hutcheon argues, point implicitly to the failure of any representation to capture the ineffable reality of historical events. The impossibility of articulation is doubly true of the Holocaust which, as many, many critics and writers have argued, defies our capacity for either imagination or expression. If we were to read Libera’s Lego System in such a vein then we would understand his use of a toy to depict the Holocaust as (like Spiegelman’s Maus) demonstrative of the failure of any means of articulation to approximate to the torture, humiliation, and murder of millions.

I understand this line of argument but I can not subscribe to it as a blanket excuse for every ironic or self-consciously inaccurate attempt to depict the Holocaust. Concessions made to the concept of historical accuracy with regards to the Nazi killing project are in danger of offering a degree of legitimacy to more extreme revisionist perspectives. Under the umbrella of representational impossibility Libera’s work unnecessarily distorts what occurred; his commandant, as Stephen C. Feinstein argues, bears more similarity to the Soviet gulag than the Nazi death camp and the entry gate lacks the well-known inscription. He appears to see the historiographical metafiction argument as license to abandon any form of historical accuracy.

Even if full representation is impossible, I can not help but feel that where we can offer accuracy we have a moral obligation to do so. The ‘how’ of the Holocaust, Robert Eaglestone argues, should never be neglected in favour of artistic license. Inaccuracies (of which there is a wide spectrum from allegory to outright lies and denial) are dangerous to understanding. To foreground a fundamental responsibility to historical truth in Shoah art and literature is to echo the final line of Levi’s introduction to If This Is A Man: ‘[i]t seems to me unnecessary to add that none of these facts are invented’. After the terror inflicted during the Holocaust, the Nazi’s attempts to destroy the camps and remove evidence of what had gone on, and subsequent attempts in some quarters at revisionism and denial, an earnest attempt at fidelity, even if true representation is impossible, is, I can not help but feel, imperative. It is here, incidentally, where Libera and Spiegelman part ways – while Maus articulates a failure to represent the Holocaust, Spiegelman went to great pains to research and, where possible, accurately depict his subject.

It would be easy, then, to simply dismiss Lebera’s Lego System as an ironic, transparently provocative, and deeply offensive play on, what is for others, an earnest and hard-fought attempt to bring some understanding to the worst event in human history. While I stand by my earlier assertions, I find it hard to dismiss the Lego kits as entirely vapid. I find the fact that the kits were built using existing Lego parts (modified slightly using paint in some cases) as an unsettling assertion of Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument that rather than being an aberration in an otherwise rational society, the anti-Semitism which informed the Shoah had roots in the pervading logic of pre-World War II European cultures. The component parts of genocide, the Lego kits could be read to assert, not only pre-date the Holocaust, but continue into modern society. The Holocaust did not occur in spite of, but relied upon the industrial model which built, and continues to build modern civilisation (the factory, trains, timekeeping, coordination, a drive toward efficiency). The reproducibility of the Lego medium (Libera made three sets but some people asked if they would become commercially available) suggests, terrifyingly, that the events (loosely) depicted can not be safely confined to history, but can easily be reconstructed from those apparently innocuous elements upon which modern society has been built. As Spiegelman asserts ‘Western Civilization ended at Auschwitz. And we still haven’t noticed.’

I am, of course, not the first writer to find myself grappling with these questions when it comes to Holocaust representation, and in many ways I find myself treading already well-worn pathways. I find myself simultaneously recoiling from the apparently glib treatment of the Holocaust in Libera’s Lego System, while simultaneously wondering if the confinement of the Nazi killing project to history (of which the argument for Holocaust exceptionalism is a component) is a way for us to avoid confronting the possibility of its reproducibility.

Legion of Two vs. Sonic Youth

Posted on September 23, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

These reviews ran way back when at Knoxville Metropulse; I think they’ve since gone off the web.
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Legion of Two
Riffs
Planet Mu

I have to admit that cranky, middle-aged rock-critic me is not completely up-to-the-minute on this dubstep stuff the kids are so crazy about. Still, as a fan of black and doom metal, I felt right at home in Alan O’ Boyle and David Lacey’s trudging apocalypse. Sure, here the zombie Vikings have been replaced by giant, digitally controlled cement mixers crushing you beneath their inevitable tread, while the gutteral squawls of tortured werewolves have given way to hissing jets of infernal steam and the occasional free jazz ensemble being quietly and painfully assimilated in the background. And, yes, I’ll admit that there are a couple of nods to electronica’s blissful leanings, as at the beginning of “Turning Point,” where the swirling synths head for lighter, more Enya-friendly territory and the live percussion loosens up into a funkier stut.

Not that I have anything against that sort of thing.

Still, I was pleased when the last track demonstrated once and for all that the duo really do have as bleak and blackened a pair of hearts as any metalhead could ask for — “Cast Out Your Demons” descends into a hissing, howling ambient sludge, where even the ominously heavy percussion is swallowed up by ghostly shrieks and gaping despair. It kind of brings a tear to my aging eyes to realize that, even after all this time, the youth today still want to drown the world in its own boiling filth.

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Sonic Youth
The Eternal

The last Sonic Youth album I spent any time at all with was Washing Machine from way, way back in 1995. The Eternal picks up exactly where we left off though…and that’s kind of a problem.

If any band was about sounding up to the minute, that band was the aptly named Sonic Youth. They were dissonant, they were cool as shit, and, most of all, they were surprising. Even on the post-classic period Washing Machine they seemed to be trying new things, as when they buried the album’s best pop hook in the 19 minute swathe of noise that was “The Diamond Sea.”

For an avant-band like Sonic Youth, that kind of “fuck-you” isn’t a bug; it’s the whole point. You’re there to have them set you back on your heels, either with the uncompromising but earthy squall of their early albums, or with the way they turned sneering political protest into breathy celebration and back again on Dirty’s “Swimsuit Issue.”

All of which is to say that The Eternal is the one thing that a Sonic Youth album should never be. It’s predictable. Not that it’s a Metallica-level embarrassment — “Leaky Lifeboat” has a pretty, almost classical picked motif; “Antenna” is catchy as hell. But the music doesn’t do anything the band wasn’t doing already fifteen years ago. Merle Haggard can get away with that sort of thing because his music is about tradition and fidelity. But Sonic Youth is about something else. And if you can’t stay young, “The Eternal” starts to sound like a very long and very tedious slog.

The Talented Ms. Highsmith

Posted on September 22, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

Before meeting Alfred Hitchcock on a train to Hollywood fame, Patricia Highsmith wrote comic books. It was 1942, the height of the Golden Age boom, and a pretty good first job for an English major fresh from commencement. She started at the now largely forgotten Standard Comics but graduated to Timely (AKA Marvel) before leaving the field in 1948—when superheroes were dropping faster than Tom Ripley’s murder victims.

When she published The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1955, the comics market had been bludgeoned to near death by Congress and the Code. She had not been called to testify before the Senate because she had killed off the fact of her first career with a splatter of white-out. Comic books? What comic books? If outed by some sleuth of an interviewer, she might admit to having dabbled with Superman or Batman, but she had probably climbed no higher up the superhero pantheon than the Black Terror, a skull-and-bone chested knock-off since abandoned to public domain.

But for a highbrow author trying to bury her lowbrow past, Ms. Highsmith planted a lot of clues. Tom Ripley’s first victim (of tax scam, the murders come later) is a comic book artist who, Tom therefore assumes, “didn’t know whether he was coming or going.”He even knows that the artist’s “income’s earned on a freelance basis with no withholding tax,” making him an easy mark. Tom’s single real friend, Cleo, doesn’t draw comics, but “painted in a small way—a very small way”; her “imaginary landscapes of a junglelike land” were “no bigger than postage stamps” (like panels in a Thrilling Comics adventure perhaps?). Even Dickie, Tom’s first murder victim, is a painter, albeit a “lousy amateur,” though Tom pictures his pen-and-inks of ships as “precise draftsman’s drawings with every line and bolt and screw labeled.” Tom even takes up a brush himself, imitating Dickie’s mediocre smears.

As far as superpowers, Tom is an old school master-of-disguise. When defrauding that comic book artist, he becomes General Director of the IRS Adjustment Department, drawling “like a genial codger of sixty-odd” years. He wields an eyebrow pencil and a bottle of peroxide wash too, but knows a touch of putty on the end of his nose would be too much. The art of impersonation is a matter of mood and temperament, adopting just the right facial expressions and gait. Besides, he’d always “wanted to be an actor,” and after beating his would-be BFF with a boat oar and stealing his identity, he gets his chance. He even adopts Dickie’s flawed Italian, and of course his signature (“seven out of ten experts in America had said they did not believe the checks were forged”).

Highsmith is a mistress-of-disguise too. Comics were the least of the skulls and bones in her closet. After Hitchcock made her name by adapting her first, 1950 novel, Strangers on a Train, she published The Price of Salt as alter ego Claire Morgan. I’ve not read it, but I think Dr. Wertham and his buddies in the Senate would have cited Ms. Morgan’s sexual proclivities as further evidence of the unwholesomeness of the comics industry. Claire, like her creator, was bisexual, and, worse, dared to end her lesbian romance on a note of hope for her unrepentant protagonists.

Mr. Ripley has the same origin story. He’s stalked by the specter of his own homosexuality, repeatedly labeled “pansy” and “sissy” and “queer.” As a result, he can’t embrace any sexuality. “I can’t make up my mind whether I like men or women,” he jokes, “so I’m thinking of giving them both up.” But where does all that smoldering energy go? Blunt objects. His second murder weapon is an ashtray. The victim is a “selfish, stupid bastard who had sneered at” Dickie, “one of his best friends—just because he suspected him of sexual deviation.” When Tom was alone in a boat for the last time with Dickie (oh, don’t even start on the oar-sized penis jokes), he realized he could have “hit Dickie, sprung on him, or kissed him, or thrown him overboard.” The thwarted sexual impulse is steered into violence. For that tentative reason, I’m not appalled at Ms. Highsmith for ending her crime novel on a note of triumph for her unrepentant protagonist. Like Claire, Tom goes unpunished.

Or at least not legally punished. The damage he commits on himself is deeper. When forced to abandon his socialite existence as the gentlemanly Dickie, he “hated becoming Thomas Ripley again . . . as he would have hated putting on a shabby suit of clothes.” His former self, “Tom Ripley, shy and meek,” becomes just another performance—like the one a certain superpowered alien from Krypton adopts. He decides to “play up Tom a little more . . . He could stoop a little more, he could be shyer than ever, he could even wear horn-rimmed glasses and hold his mouth in an even sadder, droopier manner.” When Highsmith said she wrote Superman and Batman, she meant Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne, the yin and yang of her shapeshifting murder’s Tom and Dickie duality.

Superman and Batman make an appearance too. Yes, Tom fits the standard orphan model (“My parents died when I was very small”), but Highsmith pulls back her superhero mask even further as Tom stands aboard a ship, all but certain he’s finally to be arrested: “He imagined strange things: Mrs. Cartwright’s daughter falling overboard and he jumping after her and saving her. Or fighting through the waters of a ruptured bulkhead to close the breach with his own body. He felt possessed of a preternatural strength and fearlessness.”

In another, less homophobic universe, Mr. Ripley might have saved himself by using his considerable talents for good. Instead, he bludgeons the Comics Code established the year before he was published:

Crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal

No comics shall explicitly present the unique details and methods of a crime

Criminals shall not be presented so as to be rendered glamorous or to occupy a position which creates the desire for emulation.

In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds.

And most importantly:

Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at or portrayed. Violent love scenes as well as sexual abnormalities are unacceptable.

Sex perversion or any inference to same is strictly forbidden.

It’s enough to twist even Batman and Superman into sociopathic serial killers.

Hitchcock is the Birds

Posted on September 21, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

The usual symbolic interpretation of the deadly massed birds in Hitchcock’s 1963 film is that they’re a sign of the terrifying feminine, and/or grasping maternal. Melanie drives out to Bodega Bay to get her grasping playgirl claws into Mitch; Mitch’s mom freaks out much like the birds. The clash of terrifying female desire around this one good looking guy results in a nature freak out and violent squawking.

It seems like there might be a more direct way to read the birds though. In particular, Tippi Hedron has said that Hitchcock during the filming essentially stalked her; he made sexual advances, insisted on separating her from the rest of the actors, and was generally a crazed controlling jerk. He also famously in the attic scene actually tied birds to her to get the right shot; some of the blood on her you see was apparently real. She suffered multiple cuts and broke down in tears at one point. This is in the interest of the film, rather than in the interest of his being a creepy stalker, supposedly, but it seems like at some point the two stop being especially distinguishable. Hitchcock as stalker blurs into Hitchcock as perfectionist director; he gets to hurt and control Hedron wearing either (bird) hat.

The birds then are Hitchcock’s catspaw; he ties them to Hedron in an excess of jealous vindictiveness, to show her who’s boss. And if the birds function that way in that scene, why not throughout? Apparently Hitchcock warned Rod Taylor (who played Mitch) to stop cuddling Hedron as soon as Hitchcock yelled “cut”; there seems to have been some jealousy there. And similarly, the birds seem set up to punish Melanie for her sexual desire. The first attack occurs as she’s coming across the bay and about to meet up with Mitch for a potentially romantic chat. The escalating violence seems designed to prevent the further development of their relationship. Rather than excess maternal force, you could see the birds as an enactment of the paternal law; proscribing sexual activity in the jealous name of the father/director. As in all those slashers, the girl who has sex must die.

The Birds work well as a meta-patriarchal avatar precisely because their in-film motivation is so poorly defined. Why do the birds attack? The characters say repeatedly they don’t know, and no reason is offered. But of course there is a reason why the birds attack. It’s because Hitchcock tells them to. The fakeness of the birds (many of them were puppets, and you can tell) only adds in this reading to their symbolic resonance. Hitchcock has created these birds out of wholecloth for his sadistic purpose. That purpose is control, violence, order—the striking birds’-eye view shot of Bodega Bay with a street afire nicely melds the rage for order and destruction, or for destructive order, each person dying in agony in his or her place.

The birds then aren’t a symbol of inhuman mystery so much as they are a sign of a particularly human glee in fucking with other humans. Melanie and Mitch tease and play practical jokes on each other, but the biggest, meanest, most remorseless practical joke is the film itself, which flagrantly reaches into the romantic comedy that seems to be underway and fills it with bloody beaks and death just because it can. The birds are Hitchcock’s remorseless, bitter, bitterly excessive way of making sure yet another of his icy blondes gets what she deserves. Those long, sharp beaks aren’t maternal; they’re misogynist.

Utilitarian Review 9/18/15

Posted on September 19, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Qiana Whitted on blues comics.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates of comics from mid 1947.

Chris Gavaler on discovering desire via Frazetta.

< href="https://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2015/09/purity-culture-with-fangs/">Me on the film Teeth, and purity culture with fangs.

Me on spaghetti westerns, men, women, and guns.

Me on Andrew Breitbart and his eulogists.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Broadly I wrote about how criminalizing midwives hurts women and babies.

At Quartz I wrote about Amber Batts and how criminalization hurts sex workers.

At Playboy I wrote about how there is no evidence of a Ferguson Effect.

At Splice Today I wrote about

—how a Breitbart writer accidentally palled around with a terror suspect.

—how campaign finance reform isn’t a very exciting platform for Bernie Sanders.

At Ravishly I reviewed the Perfect Guy, which is pretty good if you think all men are evil and should die.

At the Reader I wrote a little review of the great Japanese goofball rockers Mugen Hoso.

Other Links

Jay Gwaltney on text sex games.

Fascinating interview with Timothy Snyder about the Holocaust and state institutions.

Sarah Nyberg on being a troll, and changing.

Molly Smith on decriminalizing sex work in Scotland.

Aaron Bady on Taylor Swift and colonial fantasy.

Andrew Breitbart and His Eulogists

Posted on September 18, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on Splice Today.
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Rush Limbaugh made an ass of himself last week, as he often does. In consequence, the death of Andrew Breitbart had a half-life short even by the standards of the Internet news cycle. There’s apparently only room on the web for one right-wing pundit spat at a time. You can opine on Breitbart’s legacy or sneer at Rush’s misogyny, but doing both at once is too soul-killing for even the most soulless pundit.

The speed with which Breitbart’s communal eulogy has effervesced into its respective Internet archives is a strikingly neat self-refutation of its own main thesis. That main thesis is that Breitbart’s death was an event that should be of actual importance to some range of people who were not his friends or family. David Frum insists, “It is impossible to speak nothing of a man who traced such a spectacular course through the contemporary media,” and goes on to lament that “It’s difficult for me to assess Breitbart’s impact upon American media and American politics as anything other than poisonous.” Conor Friedersdorf characterizes him as “a singular figure unlike any other in American politics or Web publishing.”

Andrew Sullivan goes even further in his quest for meaning, arguing that Breitbart’s early death is a sign of the intense pressure faced by the new media blogocracy. Constantly checking Twitter and site stats, barking 24-7 after the latest culture war blip, Breitbart was, apparently, crucified upon the cruel cross of his Blackberry.

“Human beings were not created for that kind of constant unending stress, and the one thing you can say about Andrew is that he had fewer boundaries than others. He took it all so seriously, almost manically, in the end. The fight was everything. He felt. His anger was not feigned. He wanted to bleed and show the world the wounds. He wanted to scream. And he often did. And when you are on that much, and angry to that extent, and absorbed with that kind of constant mania, and obviously needing more and more validation, and on the online and real stage all the time, day and night, weekends and weekdays… well, it’s a frightening and dangerous way to live in the end. He is in that sense our first new-media culture-war fatality. I fear he won’t be the last.”

The title of Sullivan’s post is “Breitbart—And Us.” It’s a telling phrase. Because… who is that “us” exactly? When you first read it, it seems like it’s supposed to mean, you know, “us”—everybody and their siblings.

But by the end of the piece, it’s clear that we’re not talking about a universal “us.” Surely I can’t be the only one on the planet who doesn’t own a Blackberry. In fact, when Sullivan says “us,” then, what he actually means is “us, the really successful new media pundits.” Breitbart’s death is significant to Sullivan not because it offers some sort of universal warning about the human condition, but because Breitbart and Sullivan are (despite differences in politics) basically a lot alike. They’re extremely successful people in the same industry. It’s not exactly a revelation that driven people obsessed with their jobs are in danger of heart attacks. But it hits Sullivan close to home because Breitbart was a driven person not just in any job, but in the same job Sullivan has.

It’s natural enough to be interested in, and to want to talk about, your colleagues. It’s water-cooler gossip; everybody does it. But since pundits do so much talking in public, I think it can be easy for them to forget that their water-cooler gossip isn’t necessarily transcendentally important. I can’t say I followed Breitbart’s career closely. But you read his eulogies, and what do you get? A personally charming and generous muck-raking journalist with shoddy standards and a big mouth, who managed to land a big story or two, slander some innocent people, and mostly generate a lot of hot air. It’s a character that was hoary in 1951 when Kirk Douglas played it in Ace in the Hole. The fact that Breitbart was one of the people to bring the archetype into the digital era is of interest primarily to those in the industry. To everybody else, it’s just the latest iteration of a familiar truth; e.g., whatever venue you find them in, journalists are scum.

Andrew Sullivan likes to tout the digital media’s escape from the hidebound orthodoxies and navel-gazing of traditional media. But if the rapidly evaporating Breitbart furor shows anything, it’s not that the man was a visionary pioneer, or that he epitomized the decline of our culture, or that our age is more stressful than any other. Rather, it’s that online journalists are every bit as self-obsessed as their print forbearers.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon