Bring Back Double Features

28 May 08
“If you didn’t catch it in the theater, or rent it, or see it someplace else, we’ve got it, on the Blockbuster channel!” – Blockbuster Channel Announcer

The summer movie season is now officially upon us. I thought Ironman was tremendously fun and Indiana Jones was a steaming pile of dogshit. There are, of course, dozens of other big budget pictures in the pipeline and they’re all coming soon to a theater near you. Speaking personally, I’m seriously excited for Batman, enough so that I’ve already made plans for a midnight screening. At the other end of the spectrum from Batman, however, are movies that interest me, but that I’m not willing to go out of my way to see. It because of those films, probably a majority of all films, that I’d like to see the return of the double feature.

There is a famous quote, I’ve seen it in various forms attributed to both Will Hays and Jack Valenti, that goes like this, “Every man in America has two businesses, his own and the movies.” Mindful of that, I’ll admit right here that the movies are not my business and I don’t pretend that they are. If first run double features returned I do not know what the revenue sharing would look like, or how many massive egos would need to be assuaged, or how many lawyers would be involved to draw up the agreements. But speaking strictly as a movie fan it would be a tremendous improvement and, this is the important part, might get me to spend more cash on movies than I do at present.

The movie industry is caught in a bind and they are very cognizant of the technological ruin that befell their music industry compadres. I, for one, see movies a lot less than I used to. Part of that is that I’ve now passed out of the prime movie going demographic, but another part of it is that it’s expensive to go to a theater, and once you get there the concessions can bankrupt you and you’ve got to sit through interminable commercials before the show even starts.

More than anything else though, what has destroyed my willingness to get up and go to the googolplex is Netflix. I have a very nice surround sound system and the high definition television to go with it. Combine those with the ability to add movies to my Netflix queue months before they’re available and the threshold for me to actually go out to the movies is a lot higher than it was a few years ago. I’m happy to wait it out because the difference between my couch and the theater isn’t worth it. Cinephiles may speak of the love of screen but most movies simply don’t deserve that kind of devotion.

What’s needed is a little extra kick, an incentive to get me out of the house. Back in December a friend and I did a double feature of Alien vs Predator 2 and I Am Legend. Basically we bought tickets to the first and when it finished we walked across the hall to the second. It was dishonest and I guess I owe Will Smith eight bucks, but I don’t think he’s going to collect on it and I don’t feel all that bad about it. As an entertainment experience though it was marvelous.

We didn’t like the first movie, but as we sat through the interminable ending we weren’t disappointed or feeling any buyer’s remorse; we still had the second one. While we waited for the second movie to begin we could discuss the first one and after both we had plenty to talk about on the ride home. We spent a good four hours at the theater, had a great time, and made plans to do it again when the opportunity arose. You can look at that and say that what we did was stealing, and from one point of view you’d be right. On the other hand, we went to the theater, had a great time, and planned to return to spend more money later.

Now, obviously this type of thing isn’t going to work for overly long movies, and it’s unnecessary for highly anticipated films. But if a movie is flagging financially a few weeks after its release, why not pair it with another one in a similar situation? The theater owners would only need to clean the theater half as much, there’d be a nice intermission in which to sell concessions again and everybody wins. Combine actions and comedies, or do a chick flick with a guy flick and pander to the dating crowd. The possibilities are enormous and it might get more people to the theater, which can only be a good thing for business.

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Stuff Educated, Urban, Liberal People Like

25 May 08
“Krusty’s autobiography was self serving with many glaring omissions.” – Bart Simpson

I’ve been sitting on this post for awhile; for no particular reason I wanted to wait until “Stuff White People Like” got to 100 things. It’s a funny site, well written and incisive, and it has rocketed through the cultural phenomenon stages: it got popular, it spawned numerous imitations, then it gained mainstream exposure, then the backlash articles came, and now it’s a pop culture reference that will eventually fade and become uncool. What’s on display though is not white people in general, it’s a very specific subset of white people. Christian Lander, the guy primarily responsible for it, is aware of that and it’s sort of the point.

Reading the site for the first time I felt more provincial than I think I ever have in my life. My feelings of displacement can be summed up in a single, glaring omission: Cabelas. If I were starting a list of things white people like, Cabelas would probably be number one. It covers all the rural (if you’re being kind) or redneck (if you’re not) stuff that Stuff White People Like completely misses. This includes big things like hunting and fishing and smaller niche stuff like camping and off-roading.

Let’s just briefly go over some of the things I’m talking about here. Jesus and the Bible are nowhere to be found. A search of the word “Jesus” turns up one thing (Religions that their parents don’t belong to) and a search of the word “Bible” yields zero. Even the near ubiquitous WWJD acronym brings nothing, not even a derisive post about the ironic poseurs who’ve thoroughly mocked the overly zealous morons who started the trend in the first place. Better known redneck fare like NASCAR and country music are omitted as well. Even the recent revival of Johnny Cash hasn’t been enough to crack the list (when there’s a Merle Haggard revival, then I’ll be impressed), though “Pretending to Care about Country Music” might make a good addition.

What makes all this funny, at least to me, is that many of the things currently on the list are being mocked for the way they let one subset of white people (the urbane sophisticates) distance themselves from other white people they mostly don’t want to be associated with (the diesel engine set).

For example, microbreweries (23) and wine (24) are on the list, but Bud Light is nowhere to be found. Also, marijuana (33) makes the cut, but methamphetamines don’t. Are you fucking kidding me? Marijuana is the most pan-racial drug there is! With the possible exceptions of huffing glue and paint thinner, meth is the whitest of ways to kill brain cells.

Check out Living by the water (51). The following activities are listed as reasons white people live by the water: “swimming, kayaking, canoeing, sailing.” Not one of those involves an engine. Then there’s this telling passage, which I will quote in full:

On the west coast, all white people want to live as close to the beach as possible. One look at the demographics for Manhattan Beach, Santa Monica, Hermosa Beach, Newport Beach, and Laguna Beach will reveal this fact through tangible numbers.

On the East Coast, many white people dream of owning ocean front property in New England, where they can make their lives as close as possible to a J. Crew catalog.

And in the landlocked states, the dream of lakefront property is alive and well.

“And in the landlocked states”. Except even there the geography is incorrect because the post completely ignores the Gulf Coast (home of the Redneck Riviera) and the southern Atlantic coast where power-boating is a lot more common than “sailing”.

I make no claim to rural authenticity, I’m quite certain that there is no such thing. But I did attend a high school that had a corn field next to it (we used to hide in there when we’d go outside for gym class) and I’d be willing to wager that half of my graduating class wouldn’t understand a damn thing on the current list as anything but ways rich kids looked down on them.

And that’s the gag, Public Radio (44), The Sunday New York Times (46), and The Wire (85) can be used as exclusionary devices, to separate educated, liberal white people from the majority of white people. You can, of course, head over to Free Republic or Town Hall any time you like and find plenty of white people who don’t fit any of these caricatures. Those white people are as far removed from White People as it’s possible to get, nevertheless it is as White People that white people are perceived in most of popular culture.

Maybe that’s because popular culture largely comes from big cities where most white people act like White People. But maybe it’s indicative of something larger, apparent here only because white people constitute the largest ethnic group in the country. It’s not a cleavage between liberals and conservatives or red states and blue states; it’s a cleavage between the connected and the disconnected. Disconnected minorities, of whatever skin tone, ancestry or cultural affiliation, just don’t have the numbers to make their absence from popular culture easily noticed.

Stuff White People Like is a blog that makes fun of the kind of white people who often write blogs. It’s soon to be a book that makes fun of the kind of white people you’ll find in a Borders or a Barnes & Noble. That gives it an aura of universality, “Oh, that’s just what white people are like.” Except that it isn’t what white people are like, it’s not even what most white people are like; mostly it’s just the ones who happen to live in cities and spend a lot of time on-line. Which in turn raises another question, what else are we all missing? What else is being obscured by auras of universality, not only around White People, but any other group you care to name? That’s the joke I want in on.

For all I know someone’s doing that already, sadly though a Google search for “Stuff Redneck People Like” yielded nothing.

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Thrown Off the Bus

21 May 08
“It’s just a little slimy, it’s still good, it’s still good!” – Homer Simpson

In the last week John McCain has purged – there’s no other word – his campaign of a number of key staffers who have had past or current lobbying ties.  Near as I can tell the whole thing got started when Michael Isikoff wrote this article for Newsweek, in which one of McCain’s campaign staff was revealed to have done consulting work for the military government of Burma.  The timing, post-Cyclone Nargis, couldn’t have been worse.  Things snowballed from there and four more campaign staff (so far) have now been let go for being lobbyists.  The revealing point here is not that McCain, a man who has been in Congress for a quarter of a century, knows and counts as friends a lot of lobbyists.  The revealing point here is that McCain’s sterling image of incorruptible reformer is already being investigated and sullied, and it’s only May.

(This morning’s Politico has a succinct run down of the whole thing and it’s chock full of gory quotes from pissed of lobbyists suddenly wondering why no one will dance with them anymore, “Aren’t we still pretty!?”.)

McCain’s hopes for November rest on that image though.  He needs to be seen as above the usual politics-of-Washington clusterfuck, otherwise people might associate him with the current Administration and every other deeply unpopular thing that’s happened in the last eight years.  His campaign’s reaction to the lobbyist disclosure was an attempt to restore that idea.  They had their own people fill out disclosure forms about past and current lobbying work and then canned the most egregious offenders.  But, as anyone who has ever been through abstinence-only sex-ed knows, once your virginity is gone you’re ruined forever.

McCain could’ve tried to take the high road like Hillary Clinton did at the YearlyKos convention last August.  He could’ve defended lobbying as an unpopular but legitimate part of the process of governing.  She got booed for it, but that was in front of a bunch of liberal bloggers; McCain’s people might be more receptive, in fact he could even spin it as straight talk.  “It’s unpleasant, my friends, but it’s necessary . . .”

Instead he tried to sew his lobbying hymen back together and pretended to have been at church on Friday nights.  That approach is, needless to say, doomed from the start.  Anytime Barack Obama or one of his minions wants to sully McCain’s reformer credentials they need only raise the issue.  A coherent attack isn’t even required, McCain’s halting explanations will do most of the damage for them.  And that’s a best case scenario, it assumes McCain’s purge was completely successful in ridding his campaign of embarrassing lobbying ties and there won’t be more.  The odds of that are pretty slim.

What’s worse, the reporters now have the taste of blood.  One little Newsweek story cost McCain five high level staffers.  That’s a very dangerous precedent for a candidate who openly depends on his warm and fuzzy relations with the press.

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

It’s a Mystery

18 May 08
“Don’t ask me how the economy works.” – Homer Simpson

I have a long standing theory that no one really understands how the economy works, not the government grandees in New York and Washington D.C., not the well dressed predators of lower Manhattan, not the economics professors, not the citizen day-traders, not even the money bunnies on cable television.  I don’t mean to cast aspersions on their individual professions; it’s just that the economy of this country, and of the broader world, is incomprehensibly vast, even if prompt and accurate data were available – which it isn’t.  Serious economists can do amazing analysis after the fact, but even the most reliable indicators and astute computer models can only guess at what’s just happened, much less take a stab at what’s going on right now, and as for three months from now, best of luck pal.  But somehow, some way, it all keeps chugging along, people work jobs to earn income, store shelves have goods available for purchase, and life goes on.

We just don’t know how it works; or, more precisely, we don’t know the specifics of how, just the broad outlines.  The system is too complex to be reliably predictable, but that doesn’t change the fact that there’s money to be made in predicting it.  So when something big happens some people look like geniuses for having expected it and some people look like fools for having said that Big Thing X will never happen.  But the people who were smart and correct the last go round won’t necessarily be smart and correct the next time, and vice versa.  That’s why all those goofy investment ads have to have that marvelous disclaimer: Past performance is not a guarantee of future results.

(This will never end either.  Last year it was real estate, this year it’s oil prices.  Does the current high price (by historical standards) of a barrel of oil reflect a new level of supply and demand, or is it being driven up by speculators?  To take a nice, internet safe example, Paul Krugman thinks the former, Jon Taplin thinks the latter.  One of them is closer to correct than the other, but they’re both smart, honest guys and we don’t know which one of them is missing something vital.)

The last year and a half have seen a great credit crisis brought on by a bust in American real estate.  Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) have come in for a lot of blame because they have somehow allowed mortgage defaults in the United States to cause a global financial panic that threatens to melt down huge banking institutions.  My understanding of CDOs is admittedly very limited, but this article in a recent issue of The London Review of Books contains some eye popping information.  It does an excellent job of explaining an extremely complicated subject and I heartily recommend the whole thing, though you should know going in that it is a slog.

No summary here could do it justice, but I did learn some extremely interesting things that support my theory that no one really understands how the economy works.  First, and most surprisingly, CDOs are a very recent invention.  The first of them were only put together in 1996.  I had long assumed that CDOs were one of those financial instruments that had been around forever but hadn’t really exploded in popularity until recently.  Not so, they’re only twelve years old; so if there is ever serious political fallout from this you can take it to the bank that making CDOs illegal will be one of the first things proposed.

The second really interesting thing I learned is that CDOs and the indices created to value them are so complicated in their structure and in their holdings that the markets that sprung up to trade them operate almost completely in the blind.  In order to properly value debt you need to be able to asses the odds of default.  But assessing the risk of default on such diverse holdings is almost impossible; the only way to do it is with extremely complicated computer models and a faith-based amount of guessing.

The resulting programs require so much computing power that it actually strains municipal power systems and has forced hardware manufacturers to begin thinking about “performance per watt”.  That right there should be an indication that you’re in over your head; trading, which is mostly done by guys who are not Ph.D.s in Mathematics, should not require enough computers to simulate nuclear explosions.  The calculations are based in part on guesses and the rest is Greek to everyone without a doctorate in math, which means that the numbers the computers spit out each morning are impossible to verify, which in turn means that no one really trusts them, which at long last means that when something goes wrong (e.g. higher than expected mortgage defaults) the models stop working and no one can trade anything because there’s no way to evaluate relative worth.

That is, as best I can tell, what’s going on, though I still recommend the LRB article in full if for no other reason than you’ll learn about “end-of-the-world insurance”.

In real terms what it all boils down to is that if the financial systems we all depend upon can be nearly toppled by something as innocuous as a few over-extended Americans missing mortgage payments then there are serious problems that need to be addressed by serious people.  The key word in that last sentence is “nearly”.  The system didn’t collapse and while we’ll probably never know just how close it came the important thing is that it didn’t.  It’s a mystery how it keeps working, but it does.  Prudence nevertheless requires that some kind of reform be undertaken.

After all, if you’re pleasantly driving a car down the highway with one hand lightly on the wheel and then, without warning, the car begins to swerve violently and requires ten white knuckles just to maintain control you don’t go back to a feather touch when the swerving stops and simply trust your reflexes to save you if it happens again.  You pull over and get the car examined and, if necessary, fixed.

Nobody knows what’s going to happen economically in the future, but we can examine the past and, at the very least, not repeat our mistakes.  The bailouts of Bear Sterns and Northern Rock are generally seen as necessary, if distasteful, interventions of last resort; in other words, as white knuckle driving.  But market systems are supposed to work by punishing failure and rewarding success.  If we cannot allow one bank to fail out of fear of what that will do to the other banks, we might want to get the system checked out.  The economy will continue to work somehow, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do to help it along.

Leave a Comment » | CDOs, Economics, Institutionalized Stupidity, Print is Dead, Systems Analyst, The London Review of Books | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Whatever the Opposite of a Victory Lap Is

14 May 08
“And I contend that those tourists were decapitated before they entered the Krustyland House of Knives.” – Krusty the Klown

Starting today Bush the Younger will spend the next five days traveling to Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.  He’ll also meet with the leaders of Afghanistan and Jordan.  No one seems to expect much of anything to come of the trip – not foreign policy experts, not pundits, not other world leaders – and the White House isn’t doing much to make anyone change their minds.  There are no grand treaties to be signed; there are no stalemated negotiations which a President may be able to progress; there aren’t even any newly elected leaders to congratulate.  The region is in terrible shape, far worse than it was when Bush the Younger took office, and the trip has no discernable purpose.

During this Administration the United States has seen its involvement all over the Middle East deepen and neither they nor us are better off for it.  Just for kicks let’s take a quick look around the Middle East and see what’s happened in the last eight years, shall we?

Afghanistan – When Bush the Younger took office the civil war that had gone on in Afghanistan more or less uninterrupted since the Soviet invasion in 1979 had reached a relative stalemate along long established ethnic lines.  The Taliban controlled most of the country and the Northern Alliance, a group of warlords aligned against the Taliban, had a small but relatively secure strip of the north.  After the 2001 attacks in America, a NATO led coalition, working with the Northern Alliance, deposed the Taliban.  It was hailed as a new dawn for a forgotten land.

The international community promised that Afghanistan would no longer be neglected.  It wasn’t done out of sheer kindness though.  Failed states, areas where no government held sway, were suddenly seen as threats to the existing international order on account of the fact that rogue, non-state groups could use them as secure bases of operation.  Today, Hamid Karzai, the appointed and then elected leader of post-Taliban Afghanistan, is derisively referred to in the international community as the “Mayor of Kabul” because, get ready for it, much of Afghanistan is not under the control of any government.  Oh yeah, and the Taliban is still a potent force within the country and their leader, Mullah Omar, remains at large.

Egypt/Jordan/Saudi Arabia – Even in a post comprised largely of simplifications this one is particularly gross, but since I’d like to keep this to less than 5,000 words I’ll just point out one thing.  These countries have pro-western autocratic governments which have largely put off their own reckoning with their natural instability because the United States needs them to continue on their present course, no matter the future consequences.

Iran – In 2001 Iran, a theocratic democracy, had re-elected a relatively reform minded President and had, with the exception of suspicions about complicity in the Khobar Towers attack, enjoyed a relatively peaceful run of relations with its neighbors and the rest of the world.

Today Iran has considerably more economic influence thanks to record oil prices and has strengthened its hand in Iraq thanks to an American led overthrow of its implacable enemy and his replacement with Shiites long friendly to Tehran.  The empty bluster which for so long has exclusively comprised our policy towards the Islamic Republic has allowed the government in Tehran to enjoy this newly enhanced international position while seeing its most hard line elements bolstered, its pro-Western reformers given a bad name, and a bombastic demagogue elected President.

In short, during the course of Bush the Younger’s presidency the government of Iran has become less friendly and more powerful.  Bravo.

Iraq – This is, obviously, well covered ground, but it bears remembering that while Iraq was ruled by a murderous despot at the start of this Administration he was a weak murderous despot who was well contained and had, for more than a decade, respected the unwritten international rule that you’re allowed to do whatever you want to your own people as long as you don’t involve your neighbors.

Today the country is bogged down in a civil war that may end up tearing it apart, it is probably the most dangerous place on earth in terms of per capita violent deaths, it has spawned a refugee problem that burdens the entire region, and it has undergone violent multisided ethnic cleansing that will, when all is said and done, rank it right up there with Rwanda in 1994.  American troops are direct participants in the civil war, to dubious benefit, and the war will – conservatively – end up costing two trillion dollars.  Just a quick reminder, that’s two million million dollars.

Israel/Palestine – Again this is largely well covered ground, and we’ve got to be fair to Bush the Younger by remembering that the situation wasn’t exactly promising when he took office, the second Intifada was already four months old at the time.  He did not step into a situation where peace was at hand and blow it up.  However, in 2008 both sides are demonstrably further from their stated goals than they were in 2001.

Israel, whose stated goal is to be secure and at peace with its neighbors, is more vilified, both in the region and internationally, than it has likely ever been.  Bush the Younger’s all but undisguised favoritism caused the Israeli government to get carried away with policies that have been disastrous.  These include, but are not limited to, the unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, which has done nothing to improve the security situation; the bankrupting and crippling of the Palestinian Authority, which has resulted Hamas’ rise to power through legitimate democratic elections; and the 2006 war in Lebanon which failed to achieve its purpose, degraded Israel’s already low international reputation, and was positively catastrophic for the perception of Israeli military superiority.

The Palestinian’s stated goal, a viable and internationally recognized state, is no closer than Israel’s.  Thanks to the callousness are carelessness of the Bush Administration’s policies the Palestinians are now not only required to bear tremendous humanitarian burdens, but they’ve also lost the ability to field a single government with the authority and legitimacy to negotiate credibly.  As if that weren’t bad enough they are no longer even the most aggrieved people in the region.  That unfortunate title, and much of the attention that comes with it, has been diverted to the Iraqis by way of American fiat.

The Israelis and Palestinians continue, together and with the full support of the United States, along their path of mutually reinforced misery.

Lebanon – A state one trumpeted by the Bush Administration as a success story – ignoring the fact that the Syrian withdrawal had almost nothing to do with American actions – has continued along its bumptious course of occasional violence and non-stop instability.  It remains, as it has been since the Reagan Administration, almost completely impervious to American influence of any kind.

This is an incomplete picture and a simplification, but it’s also fair and accurate as far as it goes.  While I could go on about the many other foreign policy fiascos of Bush the Younger it seemed only fair to limit myself to the countries and topics that will likely be on his agenda for his little trip.  No American President can or should be expected to solve all the problems of any region, much less one as chronically chaotic as the Middle East, but at the very least we ought to expect that on the whole things aren’t worse at the end of an Administration than they were at the beginning.  Alas, for this President that is an inescapable conclusion.  He has taken a number of bad situations and made them worse, and while it is easy to dwell and focus on his preeminent failure in Iraq, it’s worth remembering that there are plenty of others as well.

Leave a Comment » | Afghanistan, Bush the Younger, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, Sophomoric Imperialism | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

John McCain Enters the Octagon

11 May 08
“The Martin Prince you made a deal with no longer exists!” – Martin Prince

Why is John McCain running for President?  It’s a deceptively tricky question.  We know why Barack Obama is running for President, he wants to end the Iraq War and repair the damage Bush the Younger has done to the federal government.  We know why George W. Bush ran for President in 2000, he wanted spend the budget surplus on tax cuts.  We know why Bill Clinton ran for President in 1992, he wanted to get the economy going.

By contrast, we’re still not sure why Bob Dole ran for president in 1996, something about not liking Bill Clinton and it being his turn.  Substituting Bush the Younger for Bill Clinton John Kerry ran for pretty much the same reasons in 2004 as Dole did in 1996.  Al Gore ran for President because he was Bill Clinton’s Vice President but he never articulated much of a reason beyond keeping the White House Blue.

So, why is John McCain running for President?  Because he wants to keep the White House Red and he wants to keep the Iraq War going.  If there’s more to it than that he hasn’t done much of a job explaining it.  Eight years ago John McCain ran for President, he did it because he thought Bush’s tax cuts were irresponsible and he didn’t think much of Bush personally.  After Bush the Younger was in office McCain spent the next couple of years sulking, apparently very publicly.  He flirted with becoming a Democrat in 2001 and did nothing to tamp down rampant speculation that he might be John Kerry’s running mate on some kind of half assed national unity ticket in 2004.  After that election McCain sold himself down the river and began positioning himself for 2008.

Unfortunately for him 2004 was a very bad moment to begin a political realignment.  At the time there were loud whispers of a “permanent Republican majority” and George W. Bush ruled the world.  Those frightening notions have since been proved the height of foolishness but McCain’s journey was already underway.  He cozied up to the right wingers who had previously despised him.  He wrapped both arms around the War on Terror and George W. Bush.  Now, eight years after he first set his sights on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he is his party’s standard bearer.  He is their champion.  And his timing couldn’t be worse.

All of this was on display earlier this week when McCain went on The Daily Show.  The first part of the interview is McCain at his best.  Jon Stewart, like many other media titans, has made a lot of bread off McCain in the past and McCain is comfortable with the format.  They’re horsing around, joking about McCain having Secret Service protection now, quoting Chairman Mao and generally doing what talk show hosts and guests do.  As they go to commercial Stewart says, “When we come back, you and I, pleasantries over; we enter the Octagon.”

You couldn’t sum it up any better.  McCain is no longer a fun talk show host who can get away with saying unorthodox things because he’s a Senator for Life.  Now he is a candidate for the presidency and the horseplay he’s so good at gets put away.  The second segment of the interview starts with Stewart bringing up McCain’s tortured relationship with Bush the Younger and gets worse from there.  Despite Stewart giving him plenty of opportunities to get out of it, McCain sticks by his slimy assertion that Hamas wants Barack Obama to be President.   He repeats a macho-tough-guy talking point, that even he doesn’t seem to quite believe, about him being terrorists’ “worst nightmare”.  And he finishes it off with a joking reference to The Office that’s literally scripted.

The likeable McCain, the one from eight years ago who wasn’t a Republican robot, the one in whom independents and even Democrats found a lot to admire, is on display in the first segment.  But that is not the McCain who is now running for President.  That McCain is the one in the second Daily Show segment, the one who implies that Obama is a terrorist, who reads jokes he doesn’t understand off of index cards, whose only response to questions about Bush the Younger is to pretend to walk off stage.

That is the John McCain that Barack Obama is running against.  That is the John McCain who will soon find his media friends turning on him.  That is the John McCain of 2008.  It is a sad transformation, but he has a lot of company.  John McCain may be the last person ruined by George W. Bush.  Let’s hope so.

Note:  I am/have been traveling this weekend.  I thought I’d try the new delayed posting feature on WordPress.  If I haven’t screwed it up, then this post went up automatically at 6:00 am on Sunday.  If I have screwed it up, then this post went up around 11:00 pm on Sunday when I got home and saw that it hadn’t updated.

Leave a Comment » | 2008 Election, John McCain, The Art of the Possible, Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Children of a Greater God

7 May 08
“We leave you the kids for three hours and the county takes them away?” – Homer Simpson
“Oh bitch, bitch, bitch.” – Abe Simpson

There was much hubbub a couple of weeks ago over an extremely dumb incident in Michigan.  The facts are not in dispute and here they are.  A guy took his seven year old son to a Detroit Tigers game.  Not knowing that it contained alcohol, he bought his son a Mike’s Hard Lemonade at the concession stand.  Security saw the kid drinking it, the cops showed up, the kid was taken to a hospital(!) and then placed in the custody of the state – away from his father and the rest of his family – for a couple of days.  Eventually, and with the help of some very heavy lawyers from the University of Michigan (where the parents are professors), the boy was returned.  The story made a few local papers and then became internet famous as various people decried the lunacy and stupidity of the authorities.

I’m not going to disagree with any of that, but let’s not kid ourselves here, this is how child protective services works: badly.  The only reason that this particular story merited any kind of attention is because it was one of the rare instances where a respectable middle class family was caught in the trappings of the state’s bureaucracy.  The scary part is that no one in this chain of events had the authority and the common sense to simply put a stop to it.  Setting aside everything else what that tells us is that the system is stressed and broken.  In this particular instance no serious harm was done.  The family was mightily, and unjustly, inconvenienced but there aren’t any real lasting effects.  What’s disturbing about this story is that it raises frightening questions about how the system deals with other, less able, families.

A child is wrongly taken and real harm is done because the parents lack the resources to ably contest it, or a child is rightfully removed from an abusive environment and placed in the care of an obviously sick bureaucracy, either way there’s no reason to believe that the right things are being done as often as possible.

This article from the New York Times two months ago is about the trouble the city has hiring and retaining child service workers and it highlights exactly what I’m talking about.  According to the article the average caseworker in New York City lasts less than two years on the job, including five months of training.  The work is so unpleasant and screwed up that the average caseworker is only able to carry on for a year and a half!  The work is doubtless very stressful and very depressing (dealing with kids in awful situations has to be), but police officers and hospital workers have to deal with many of the same things and they last a lot longer than two years.  That should tell us something.

While I’m sure there are differences between Michigan and New York, the rapid rate of personnel turnover goes a long way toward explaining something as preposterous as a child being confiscated over a harmless mistake at a baseball game.  If the frontline people get replaced every two years it’s no wonder that no one had the confidence to just give the boy back to his father.

The inescapable conclusion is that the system is fucked and it’s going to stay that way until it gets sustained high level attention from political leaders and the public.  Of course that isn’t going to happen anytime soon for exactly the same reason that the story out of Detroit was news.  Middle class people aren’t often affected by the broken system; it’s a poor people problem.  That “poor” is often synonymous with “not white” goes almost without saying.

Long established state bureaucracies generally only get serious attention in one of two ways, either they fail spectacularly or they start costing too much money.  In the case of child services the spectacular failures are usually along the lines of the state ignoring egregious abuse that results in death.  In this case the system failed without killing anyone and while the easy reflex is to point and laugh at dumb civil servants it doesn’t do any good.  Those people are all well intentioned (who would be doing that work otherwise?), what they need is better support.

The blame is not on them, it is on the rest of us, for allowing the system to decay and for allowing the perpetual problems of children to fester – out of sight and out of mind.

Side note:  This has nothing to do with the story at hand, but one of the articles linked above originally appeared in the Detroit Free Press.  It is no longer available free on the Free Press website though; it has been moved to an archive and if you want to read it you’ve got to buy it.  The WZZM (which is a television station on the other side of the state) link I used is still live though.  Just another little example of the bind newspapers are in when it comes to on-line content.

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Grand Theft Attention

4 May 08
“I must taste blood.” – Penny Tompkins

Grand Theft Auto IV was released for two different video game consoles this week; the prior popularity and notoriety of the series means that its release merits the broadest kind of attention. As a cultural spectacle, in terms of written articles and television stories, the game’s debut was up there with the biggest movies, the most bestselling of bestselling books and Nielsen dominating television programs. This is an honor rarely accorded to a video game, but this is the second time in less than a year that it’s happened, Halo 3 received similar attention last September.

What makes the whole thing fascinating and absurd is that the game is a niche product, it is an extremely popular niche product, but it’s still just that. Anyone can go out and see a movie just as anyone can purchase a book or watch a television program. But games like Grand Theft Auto and Halo require something more from their customers and that makes them impossible for an outsider to really understand.

First and foremost is the obvious financial cost. The game retails for sixty dollars but in order to play it you also need to have a three hundred dollar (or more) video game console and a relatively recent television.

In addition to the finances there’s the fact that in order to really experience the game you need to be a somewhat competent video game player. That may seem like a quibble, but take someone who’s never (or only rarely) played a game that requires you to maneuver a character in a three dimensional environment and see what happens. It’s a difficult mental state in which to put yourself and plenty of people just don’t find enough appeal in it to make learning it worthwhile.

Compare that to something like a book or a television program. Any literate person can open a book and immediately know what to do. Any person, literate or otherwise, can sit in front of a screen and pay attention. But only a segment of the population can really get into any video game, much less one as complicated as Grand Theft Auto.

There are a lot of ways to render accounts or descriptions of the gameplay, video of someone else playing the game can be captured, or someone can play the game and then write an account of what it was like. But to really experience what the creators of the game intended one needs to be able to play the game, and for games as vast and varied as Grand Theft Auto that requires both a lot of time and a very specific skill set.

What that means is that any outside discussion of the game is rendered completely absurd. A common frame of reference is needed for any meaningful information about the game to pass from one party to another. Games like Halo and Grand Theft Auto are popular and lucrative enough to generate mainstream media attention, but with the exception of reviews (which serve the purpose of informing potential players whether or not the game in question is worth their time and money) any story or article about the game is telling a hopelessly incomplete tale to anyone who hasn’t spent some time in Liberty City or on a Halo ring.

Is Knocked Up sexist? Or is The Passion of the Christ anti-Semitic? There is no absolute answer, but you can gain all the information you need for an informed opinion by watching them. Is The Da Vinci Code anti-Catholic? All you need is an eighth grade reading level and a few spare hours to find out for yourself. The same cannot be said for Grand Theft Auto or any other large, complex video game. If you want to know what you’re talking or writing about you need to play the game (extensively); and if you haven’t done that then no one who has is going to take your opinions or conclusions at all seriously. Nor should they.

Leave a Comment » | Grand Theft Auto IV, Systems Analyst, Video Games | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos