The Fake's Progress

It's worthwhile to compare the other "iconic" Vanity Fair cover

Woman

with Caitlyn's curious spread

Man

From the ultimate image of womanhood to its ultimate caricature. 

Moore's deliberately immodest cover offered pregnancy as a feminist provocation: you can't do this.

Caitlyn's celebrants, twenty four years later, would be outraged.

In seizing immediately upon socio-political platitudes, Moore's defenders missed the point in the same way Caitlyn's evade it today. She was not, for instance, showing us a pregnant woman can still be "sexy"--quite the opposite! (The controversy is perhaps difficult to appreciate after the last quarter century of delirious Progress, but it was that a pregnant woman was striking a sexual pose--and on the cover.) Pregnant Demi was a parody of lithe and desirable pre-pregnancy Demi. The real defiance lay in the fact it's decidedly not sexy; her state stops men in their always lusting tracks. She's off limits, dammed-off, "knocked up." She's  there to thwart and mock the searching male "gaze".

Pregnant Demi is woman having conquered; having captured a man's seed and bearing a complete soul in a belly swelling like the earth.  Man's paltrier conquest is over and done, and is only complete if he escapes; otherwise, the pregnant woman represents his capture and the tyranny (and uncertainty) of paternity and domesticity. 

Woman's power lies in her possession of her children, and she never possesses them more--or suffers more by them--than when with child. Still women remain the most sympathetic audience the trans community has and I find this curious. Why are they--if indeed they are--so fully on board with redefining womanhood into oblivion?

Hoary theory about male privilege--as if patriarchy were a trick played upon the girls, rather than the obvious result of primitive necessity originating in, there it is again, pregnancy--is depressing and dull. Birth is anything but, especially for those capable of it; so maybe that explains feminism's cavalier attitude toward the co-optation of femininity. Dissuading pregnancy has become a necessity by implication for a feminist movement driven by yuppie women lobbying for greater advantages in employment. The necessity to deny biological origins for behavior, to create the illusion of imposed inequality, has taken down motherhood. The times are sinister.

Tied in Knots

"Ban the box" is a movement to outlaw employers asking applicants if they have a criminal history, motivated largely by the disparate impact it has on non-Asian minorities due to their higher rates of incarceration. According to the Guardian link above, it's necessary because of "research suggesting that three-quarters of employers admit to using a criminal conviction to discriminate against an applicant." Somehow different from discrimination on the basis of poor references, lack of relevant skills and giving a lousy interview, which only screens out the merely incompetent, not the physically dangerous.

But Britain's Labour Party is now pushing for a "blacklist"  to "warn" those same employers about those convicted of "hate crimes" and "tackle the UK’s soaring rise in antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia and abuse of people with disabilities." It appears to be part of a larger campaign to purge social media, such as Twitter, of the wrong kind of speech. So employers aren't allowed to protect themselves from, say, a convicted sex offender working in a shop, but must be vigilant against such as Britain's "Tube Racist" lady (convicted to 21 weeks in jail for a "racist rant").

Ephemera

Chris White

Chris White. His name was Chris White. The name returned to me "out of the blue" as they say--in fact it I was gazing on a gnarled grey sky, up to which ghostly ringlets of steam escaping my shower ascended like released souls returning to a primordial mass. The name only occurred to me at first, a dissociated orphan. Who was Chris White? Then the image appeared, like a spectral holograph sliding into place and animating this dead form.

Chris White was my first enemy. He must have predecessors long forgotten, but Chris White was the first person I identified as my enemy. And that he remains. One of my earliest memories is of ignoring my mother's half-pleading, half-threatening imprecations, to clamber over our back fence into Chris White's backyard and answer his dare. I don't remember the fight, but to this day I can still call up, however faint, my umbrage at the effrontery that he should challenge me.

Thus began our border war. Plundering raids, incursions, bottle rocket attacks, dried dog shit terror bombings; it could get ugly. Greater powers might intervene on occasion--teachers, parents, older kids--but never to finality. It was no use; ours was a conflict that went deeper than territorial integrity or clashing interests. We hated each other and that was all we needed to know. It was as if this hatred preceded all else. Mutual hatred was the Aristotelian prime mover of our hostility.

Peace was never sought much less declared. We remain technically at war, like North and South Korea. Hostilities ended only when they became impracticable due to his family moving away--relocated to make way for a freeway. If I saw him tomorrow and somehow recognized him, I would not be surprised if we resumed our contest without preliminaries.

Chris White was the first person I rejected on principle, that is, simply for being Chris White. To live, to not throw yourself off a building or simply starve yourself to death, after all, is to declare yourself worthy of the greatest gift. To live is to assert: this is what a human is, this is what he does. We are all really just competing versions of Man; even if we don't choose our version. We see it in the satisfaction of superiority we feel before the degenerate and the ridiculous, in the cruel human habit we have of seeking out the base for ridicule and disdain. Likewise, that same disdain indicates our recognition that shared humanity means shared shame. We're all relatives, however distant. To me Chris White was a foul ideology incarnate, and every breath he took a desecration.

He was big and ungainly, with broad hips and narrow shoulders, with dull brown hair and a face without features due to an excess of subcutaneous fat. This physique wouldn't have mattered if it wasn't so true to the personality it hosted, which seemed to me unfortunately feminine--not to say effeminate, which would have inspired in me at least condescending sympathy, for the hostile attention it would have brought him. But Chris White was mediocrity incarnate, and mediocrity has its advantages in the crab bucket that is elementary school. I may not have been anything special, but I had a knack for attracting unwanted attention.

Chris White had the unfortunate combination of a poor sense of humor and a keen sense of propriety. He took offense easily and protested shrilly. Thus I suspect the initial casus belli of our war was something I said, probably in jest. My mouth was getting me into trouble from an early age. We were ideally suited to hate each other. Chris White was the first in a long line of people, usually male, who commit the unforgivable sin of not getting Dennis Dale. Chris White rejected me on principle too. How dare he.

But it was he who managed to draw me into an early disgrace the memory of which I cannot shake despite, or maybe because, of its petty nature. Queued up on the school blacktop for some purpose or other, we found ourselves in close proximity. It wasn't long before we were taunting each other. Holding a windbreaker, I whipped him across the face with it, cutting him with the zipper. I was marched off to the principal's office by a horror-stricken teacher. In an instant I was transformed from a well-behaved student to a problem child. My mother was mortified.

The Whites moved out and their home remained behind for years, vacant and boarded up, as various lawsuits attached to the freeway construction worked their way through the snake of the legal system. A root from an oak tree cut down from our backyard sprang up in the White's backyard in the form of a great, ugly bush. One summer Japanese beetles appeared around it. I had never seen them before and took them to be some hideous form of bumble bee. I took to hunting them with an old tennis racket; the lumbering fliers came over the fence like lobs over the net that I would smash back over it, looking to achieve distance or height. Eventually they cut the house from its foundation and carried it off.

I can't help cherishing even the hated things from my past. It wouldn't be my past without them, after all. So yes, I miss Chris White. But I do not like him.

 
Ulrich Schnauss, Suddenly the Trees are Giving Way

Thanks for Everything, F--- You

The Nazis and the old Soviet Union assigned political officers to military units to enforce ideological conformity. The Stasi was legendary for getting civilians to inform on each other for the slightest breaches of ideology--what we would call political correctness.

Needless to say, we would never do any such thing. We don't need commissars to keep us in line. The elite polices itself and us, without prompting, and their purview, as they would have it, extends to everything. There's a whole genre now in journalism dedicated to denouncing any found "lack of diversity"; not just in a given field or organization, but in our hobbies and associations (even bird-watching is under watch).
 Of course it isn't homogeneity but whiteness that bothers them. Spike Lee once said America is so racist we think three black guys standing on a corner constitutes a riot. That was a long time ago. Now we're so anti-racist we think three white guys working in the same room constitutes a hate crime in progress (but not everything is changed: the brothers are still on the corner and white guys still do the bulk of the work).
A related sub-genre was created by an enterprising writer in analyzing the effectiveness and aesthetics of that now familiar entertainment, the public apology. He should have quite a career ahead of him.

So it's unsurprising that an Intercept scribe interrupted his anecdote about how the late Washington Post editor Bill Bradlee gave him a break when he was a young ambitious reporter to question the man's integrity in doing it and genuflect to diversity from graveside:

 I am sure my cause was helped by the fact that I was young and white and male, the kind of object that older editors who are white and male tend to have a biased soft spot for. This is why it’s good we don’t have as many Ben Bradlees these days; the mirroring and replication of a dominant culture is weaker now. Which doesn’t mean we’re in a universally better place; we have a lot of editors who are more cautious than they should be (patriarchy replaced by management culture), and a large number of top slots are still filled with guys (yes, including at The Intercept). It’s hard to believe that gender played no role in the firing of Jill Abramson at The New York Times.

A Moment of Silence, Attended by Fanfare

Derangement meets cynicism. From Politico, President Obama and the politics of kitsch:

Tuesday morning, a peculiar announcement trickled out of the White House press office: President Barack Obama would be holding a moment of silence for the victims of the Boston bombings. At the White House. By himself.
No press or other intruders allowed. Except the White House photographer. 

Nothing more than the president's sentiment is necessary, because nothing can exceed it. Perfection cannot be perfected. The tragedy is less significant than the great one's recognition of it. We're way beyond kissing babies in this country. This is getting weird.
So I guess it's inconceivable anyone will sit the One down to explain to him the whole point of a moment of silence is, well, silence. I wonder: what would an Oval Office intervention look like, anyway?

People are going to have to think less about themselves and think more about me, Fareed Zakaria...

Fareed Zakaria was born into an elite Indian Muslim family and made his way into the global elite via Harvard and Yale. He's edited Foreign Affairs, Newsweek and Newsweek International; now he's a host on CNN. As you can imagine, this expertise and background have given him unique insight into the inexplicable horror of the Boston Marathon bombing by two young Muslim men whose family was welcomed into United States as refugees when they were children. Mr. Zakaria has had a whole week to apply his keen intellect and experience to the problem. What has he discerned? That we haven't done enough to "embrace" Muslims, and should take Europe, with its much larger, more hostile and separate Muslim communities, for our model:

Over the past two decades...European countries have recognized the dangers created by their indifference and have sought to integrate Muslim migrants. Governments at all levels have engaged with Islamic communities, taking steps to include Muslims in mainstream society but also to nurture a more modern, European version of Islam. In effect, many governments are now dealing with Islam as they have other religions, creating Islamic councils, providing funding for cultural activities, representation in public forums and being mindful of religious practices and holidays.

Note the use of "integrate" in place of "assimilate". This is a long-time trend that has been gaining steam as assimilation has failed due to the sheer number of newcomers, our regnant system of identity politics and the progressive elite's assault on the concept itself. Assimilation of immigrants is now considered either too ambitious or just so, I don't know, last millennium in its backwardness.

Of course I'm forgetting the most important question following the bombings. How does this affect the prospects of Fareed Zakaria and his progeny? Without a separate community (and the threat of violence and general social degradation coming therefrom) Zakaria cannot claim to be our diviner of intention, and his rougher poor relations ("Muslim leaders") cannot appropriate the role of intermediaries. All this talk of "fear" in the elite media--the average American wouldn't know he was in its throes if the Washington Post didn't tell him--is just wishful thinking. Your fear is desired, necessary even, and will be presumed whether you like it or not. The lad(ies) doth protest too much. This is all  leaving aside that Zakaria is nearly as alien to the average Muslim immigrant as Barack Obama is to the urban black.

Fareed goes on to reassure us that if we legitimize separate Muslim communities as such and deal with them through a new generation of Muslim political leaders, occasionally somebody will rat out the terrorists before they strike:

The lesson from Europe appears to be: Embrace Muslim communities. That’s a conclusion U.S. law enforcement agencies would confirm. The better the relationship with local Muslim groups, the more likely they are to provide useful information about potential jihadis.
An attack — apparently inspired but also perhaps directed by al-Qaeda — was foiled recently in Canada for just this reason. An imam in Toronto noticed one of his congregants behaving strangely and reported the behavior to the police, who followed up and arrested the man before he could execute his plan. Before briefing reporters on their collaboration, Canada’s top counterterrorism authorities invited Toronto’s Islamic leaders to a meeting and thanked them for their help. “But for the Muslim community’s intervention, we may not have had the success,” said the official, according to one lawyer invited to the meeting.

Of course a moratorium on immigration from Muslim countries is inconceivable. What would become of Fareed's CNN gig then?
Wait a minute, I think I've seen this bit before:

Resourceful Satirical Magazine Finds Americans Not Stereotyping, Ridicules Them For Their Ignorance

Via Steve Sailer, here's The Onion engaging in accidental self-parody:

Majority of Americans Not Informed Enough To Stereotype Chechens

The peoples' calm tolerance goes into the media's Narrate-o-Matic and voila, out it comes as popular "ignorance." The average American just can't win--must be why the elites think he's such a loser.

 Of course the real irony here is this failed bit acknowledges a certain amount of information is necessary for "stereotyping"; likewise the ongoing media campaign of obscurantism surrounding Boston (of which this piece is a part) reveals tolerance often requires a certain amount of ignorance. But that's getting way too complicated for the typically all-knowing twenty-something a couple of years out of Harvard. Easier (and safer) to just to fire away at the usual targets, because as you know, anyone who runs is a vc...

 

Tweeting the Revolution

On Twitter, Mr Sock-it-to-the-Man Chris Rock is angry he's been denied the opportunity to grow up in a mud hut in what is now Angola:

Happy white peoples independence day the slaves weren't free but I'm sure they enjoyed fireworks

The powerful have made the elevation of Rock's inept and untrustworthy relatives (the mocking of whom has made him rich) an impossible standard of justice. Detroit is in ruins. Hip hop has gone from coarse to bloodthirsty. And Chris bleats away in between tweets about the Knicks. On Independence Day. Well and safely removed, you can bet, from the ghetto blacks he lampoons. What a dick.

Could it be that Chris Rock doesn't understand the nature of his success? That, after all this time, he still doesn't get they joke? That he doesn't understand the consequences of his observations?

(Upon having his epiphany, fellow millionaire minstrel Dave Chapelle fled to Africa to consult with Lauryn Hill. Ms Hill is probably the least funny person on earth--but one of the few black Americans to actually give Africa an honest try; Chapelle went as if to be exorcised of his talent, and it may have worked.)

I think that over time every good Chris Rock joke will come back to haunt him, if he only has the awareness to catch on. I recall his take on the hyped token Colin Powell from 1996:



He's so busy taking exaggerated offense at white condescension he misses the real insight. Will Chris Rock ever acknowledge how comically wrong he was here? The irony--Chris bellows that despite this condescension white America would never elevate this man (Powell, who would be obscure if he were white; but "edgy" Chris ain't going there!) to the presidency; and then along comes Barack Hussein Obama (who himself thought his political career would be derailed by 9/11). And what is the mantra? "Oh he speaks so well." Rock mimicked the language of condescension perfectly, but understood it less--no mean feat--than the whites who originated it. They meant it. Rock missed it. That should be in the act. Imagine him pacing and shouting like he does, admitting:

"Not only did I get it wrong, but Barack Hussein Obama! Motherfuckin' Hu-ssein, Oh-fucking-Bah-ma! Colin Powell just came off too normal! I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about or white people have just gone crazy!"

He nailed the critique of Obama before Obama, but poor Chris doesn't know, because once Obama showed up Chris became one of the mewling patsies he excoriates.

It's remarkable how universal is the convention that everything must be hedged by the myth of white racism and the denial of black agency. The right-thinker has to compartmentalize aspects of the black American condition in ways he wouldn't when considering other questions, deliberately or subconsciously avoiding inferences he would be allowed if the question wasn't so loaded. Segregation is key!

So when the right-thinker sees, for instance, racial disparity in the professions he can only see discrimination by employers. He forgets that five minutes before he was condemning (with even less authority) the unfair racial disparity in educational achievement! No matter; the existence of a great, stifled class of black professionals, milling about outside the gates, is presumed; just as universities are cut no slack for the sorry state of black and brown high school achievement.

A cynical progressive has to appreciate the durability of disparity--an endless source of demagogy. Even as the earnest among them search out the source of minority underachievement like explorers seeking the source of the Nile (they're somewhere below pre-school by now; see Steve Sailer's Stolen Generation) progressives are conceding nothing. Where there is black failure there is white malice. Anything less acknowledges black inadequacy. When that happens, the scam is up.

But the unsubtle and incurious easily adopt the habits of faith over logic. So it's entirely possible that Chris Rock has been these many years chronicling black buffoonery yet taking it to be of no real consequence and anyone who says it is for a bigot! And because this attitude has been mandated by the convention of our dishonest age, Rock's tepid half-truths pass for coruscating honesty.

Comments Elsewhere, Edited and Expanded

Regarding John Derbyshire's instantly (in)famous The Talk: Nonblack Version piece in Taki's (contrasting the faddish meme "The Talk"* and its hoary assumptions about racial hostility, with the reality of the known world), Mr. Josh Barro in Forbes steps into the town sqaure to deliver the King's writ as he sees it ("National Review Must Fire John Derbyshire"), and helpfully remind conservatives of their priorities, as such (no higher calling than Republican branding, for the "serious"):

And this is the problem for Lowry and other conservatives who want to be taken seriously by broad audiences when they write about racial issues.

"taken seriously by broad audiences"?
This is called selling out.
I understand why the aspirational individual seeks this; for the life of me I don't understand why he encourages it in others. How does one sleep at night knowing he is both pimp and prostitute for a great lie? Your affected enlghtenment isn't enough? What will you do if and when you've routed the racists? Who's next in providing you with the opportunity to prove your religious devotion?

"The Talk" as black Americans and liberals present it (to wit: necessitated by white malice), is a comic affront--because no one is allowed (see Barro above) to notice the context in which black Americans are having run-ins with the law, each other, and others. The proper context for understanding this, and the mania that is the Trayvonicus for that matter, is the reasonable fear of violence. This is the single most exigent fact here--yet you decree it must not be spoken. You admit the reason for taking the topic off the table is that it offends. In your logic the one necessarily follows the other. Rarely does anyone in your well-heeled (and easily brought to heel) mob address points of fact; rarely do you make a pretense of showing where this argument is wrong. Your "acceptable discourse" is defined by an appeal to consequences.

But you're right, of course. Our discourse is not a search for truth; it's a battle--not of ideas, for they aspire and are vulnerable to the truth--but for power.

Shame on you. People are dying. Worse still, you bore us. Good for Derbyshire.

*

Steve Sailer in same thread:

I'm proud to stand with Josh Barro and the Atlantic's Elspeth Reeve and Matt O'Brien. Simply because somebody is playing the role of a "public intellectual" doesn't give them a license to write about ideas. Yes, they should feel relatively free to think private thoughts as they wish. But the vibrant tapestry of our current public discourse -- which ranges from Trotskyist anarchy on the Left all the way to SWPL Portlandia on the Right -- can only be damaged by the voicing of divisive notions.

Another commenter:

Strongly disagree that Derbyshire's article was "appalling". I thought that word was reserved for ninnyish liberals who overheard someone defend George Zimmerman.

Personally I find the core values of NR--lowering taxes on the wealthy and spilling American blood for Israel--personally repugnant, even "appalling". So I'm non-plussed by your take on Derb's honest, intelligent Taki piece. Looking forward to the decline of National Review as a mouthpiece for pseudo-conservatism.

*The supposedly routine "Talk" about the danger of racist white cops. You've seen it on TV: solemn black parent, wearing the dignity of hundreds of years' suffering, tells doe-eyed children you got to look out for the Man always and be on your best behavior, because white folk just mean ("Mama, why do they hate us so?").
See Skip Gates (“All the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, and I realized that I was in danger");
Tyler Perry ("it took a black cop to realize I was a Celebrity and allowed to drive my car in any damn direction I please! Can you imagine the indignity?");
and Chris Rock.

It also occurs to me that we cannot trust that black parents actually are sitting their children down to instruct them in safe police protocol. After all, it doesn't seem to be working very well. Hatred of police is a jealously guarded romance in black American life. Who's to say young blacks aren't more often told by hard-headed elders not to take any shit from cops, or whites, or hispanics (or white-hispanics).

Righteous Constipation

Truth dons the Hoodie. You are sir, to paraphrase Epictetus (and parody you), a big ego carrying about a small man.

A Belated Introduction to Your President

New and improved, 10/4
Updates below

The hits just keep coming for the Wonder Brother.

I discount the president's more explicit race-baiting; he's never more full of shit than when he's adopting that phony gospel intonation for such as the naive souls at Trinity United. Sinister as it is, the president's fervor is depressingly dull. He remains the void he set out to be--only we no longer project onto His Blankness the illusion of--whatever it was the liberals were on about--but now its disillusion. The former magnified his image, the latter reduces it. And still we ask--who is this man? His life has been about contriving an identity--now he has none.

The world's been turned upside down: now for advantage one assumes a black rather than white identity. But it's still true that you can pass but you cannot hide. Your life is a loop, you come from a mother and return to one. That's the inexorable pull that draws us to authentic origins--religion, ethnicity, family--as we age. To where will you return, Mr. President? Will there be anything there?

There is nothing exceptional behind that visage, other than a yearning ego, a sort of psychological greed. Obama never expected to do what his acolytes took for granted: to reconcile black and white America. He wasn't here to change anything, but to keep the movement on track, tightening the cordon around the white boys. That's what we get for being so good to him in Hawaii--perhaps we should have bullied him like the Indonesians. He took to the White House the plan and model he'd had for Chicago: the implementation and solidification of a permanent non-white regime, maintaining power by distributing your wealth throughout a network of identity-advocacy groups in league with corrupt business interests. What an asshole.

The president and his attorney general are small men (preceded by small men) who cannot see far. Whatever imagination they have is spent on their private psychodramas. But Holder and Obama's aggressively racial-political Justice Department letting those buffoons off for their voter-intimidation stunt* looks more enticingly actionable than ever. Darrell Issa just lost control of his bowels.

*update: that is in light of these new allegations of one "Malik Shabazz"* signed in as a visitor to the White House. Imagine what a Nixon meets Elvis moment that might have been. I'll pay good money to any reporter who'll ask: "Mr. President, did Mr. Shabazz wear the fascist get-up for his tour?"

*correction: not new at all, and previously explained by the White House as "another" Malik Shabazz, along with another Bill Ayers, when releasing the logs as a transparency gesture (presumably a separate visit--I mean, if you brought too many of the more ferocious elements of Obama's base together at the same time it'd resemble the bad-guy casting call in Blazing Saddles, complete with scowling reconquistos declaring their contempt for the rule of law).

That voodoo you do. BHO exhorts the multicultural minions of Project Vote: "To stamp out runaway decency in the West..."

I wonder if anyone has seen the actual signatures, which might be subjected to verification--because if even the absurd appellation M. Shabazz can belong to anyone now (I mean how far can you take this: "Oh, that's another Bernie Madoff"?), then the gesture's transparency only reveals it to be hollow.

"Log book? We don't sign no steenking log book!"

D'uhccuse...!

He's just saying there's nothing wrong with that.

Well, they look like a white crowd to me. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but it is pretty monochromatic up here. No surprise in terms of the ethnic nature of the people showing up. Nothing wrong with that. But it is a fact. I think there's a tribal aspect to this thing, in other words, whites versus other people. I think [Sarah Palin]'s very smart about this.
--Chris Matthews, television journalist

Chris Matthews' self-awareness is notoriously suspect. His analyses of the national psyche, to the extent they are coherent, typically reveal more about him than to him, and often. His random digressions branch off one after another, shedding the pungent, overripe fruit of his personal Tree of Knowledge. Around him his fellows navigate with care, watching where they step, casting nervous glances upward at the slightest sound.

Perhaps they feel some embarrassment at one of their own speaking too freely in front of the help; what's revealed is not just one man's coarse intellect, but the prejudices and delusions of an entire class. Chris Matthews can't maintain the ruse because he doesn't know it's a ruse. Still, he perpetuates it. Chris Matthews has managed to dupe himself, if no one else. Chris Matthews lacks situational awareness.

Not long ago, his undisciplined emotionalism would have been discouraged as a feminine preference for impulse over reserve; it would have been deemed unmanly. In that light Matthews' notorious masculinity fetish is neither homoerotic nor misogynist, but an honest fascination with a foreign point of view. His sexual boorishness is a failed interpretation of masculinity, lapsing into caricature. His visceral reaction to Hillary Clinton, catty.

But no one deliberately sets out to make himself a fool--unless he does it on television. Of these there are two kinds, the actor who plays the fool for our amusement and the fool who is lured before the camera, for our amusement. The most common form of the latter is the reality show participant.
Reality television democratized, ergo de-mythologized, celebrity. Distinctions are blurred in the ensuing chaos. In the post-revolutionary order professionals have ceded some local narrative control to the audience. Indeed, the spontaneous narrative that Reality television, and now "viral" Internet material, attempts is not a foreign product introduced to the people, but is generated from within them, performed by them and consumed by them. The author is the hive. Production is superfluous.

The viewer has grown used to (if not the reality, the conceit of) providing his own narrative. He is increasingly adept and accustomed to this. This is one tough crowd.
Thus the industry of television is confronted with a transfer of expertise to the audience, a sort of purchasing power; "media personalities" have less control over their media personalities. Television journalists used to be the gatekeepers of the information flow, now they are deluged along with everyone else in the flood. They have lost their monopoly on reality.

Its individuals must adapt to the new evolutionary environment; "redefine" themselves, in euphemism. The desperate scramble produces new, grotesque hybrids; shape shifters alternating between, and sometimes straddling, traditional and Reality television. No one yet understands what is happening. Reality TV aspires to surveillance of the individual by the mass; multiple raw feeds strategically located. It's a medium-specific tyranny of the majority. Professionals, once mystical creatures, have lost their former privilege. Everyone is fair game.

Matthews, like Tyra Banks or any other regular on The Soup, is a media personality less sophisticated than his audience and less aware of the nature of his performance. Chris Matthews is reality television.

The audience is no longer helpless and docile. It rebels against kitsch and manipulation. Anything introduced into the veg-o-matic of popular culture is now broken down, sampled and pilfered, recombined. The artist loses control over his work once it's released into this wild. Television's non-fictional performers are subject to this as well. The audience crafts additional or alternative narratives; unearths unintended subtexts; improvises parody of inferior work. These are defensive strategies. If we're not to be rid of them we are obliged by a sense of decency to ridicule a Tyra Banks or a Chris Matthews. One must marvel. One must not take some people seriously.

But he must consider them seriously, as symptoms of the human condition. After all, the joke is ultimately on us.
Reality television is the gallows humor of a culture self-slated for execution. The greater part of its appeal is not, as first glance suggests, the sugar-rush ridicule of one's inferiors; it's the bitter acknowledgement they are, after all, our fellows, countrymen, kin even. They are us.

You complain: Reality television shows a perversely select group. Yes; but it does not necessarily follow they're a meaner lot than the whole. After all, some are too wretched even to make it past first cut at For the Love of Ray J. How great is their number?

We may yet know. Commerce ensures new contrivances for luring their basest natures into the electronic square are even now being worked up by some of our sharpest young minds. Decent kids every one, no doubt.

Reality television has only begun charting the depths of human greed. By "greed" I mean also greed for love, status, attention. Like it or not, reality television is a valuable artifact of the present. But the ever-shifting lineup of "reality's" global community theater all manage to delude themselves in the end into thinking they are stars.

Reality TV is a living document of our decadent end. It was, after all, the poet-cum-charlatan-cum-"satanist" Aleister Crowley who declared

Every man and woman is a star

and began his "Book of the Law" with

Do what thou wilt will be the whole of the law
(commerce, I presume, necessitated a book-length addendum to this perfectly concise, all-encompassing statement of principle).

Reality television has never been more succinctly defined. You're the star; do what you will. Here it is prefigured before television. It just as neatly sums up current popular convention. "Reality", a long time latent, has been released into the atmosphere we all share. Its intrusive nature interrogates high and low. Its endless iterations are unforeseeable. The confused persona we know as "Chris Matthews" is one measure of its progress.

Lone Wolf Tickets

A question. Has anyone yet attempted to leverage yesterday's tragedy at Fort Hood into a defense of the Patriot Act's "lone wolf" provision? Maybe the question is not if, but when. I'm thinking of starting a pool.
Of course it may not be necessary. Yesterday* the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to extend three provisions: roving wiretaps; section 215, or the "libraries provision" diminishing privacy rights; and the "lone wolf" provision, which should probably be renamed the "pack of wolves" provision, for its potential (arguably inevitable) future misuse against political "radicals", as defined by whatever pack is in power.

[*correction: the House Judiciary Committee voted on Nov. 5 to allow the LW provison to expire; the Senate Judiciary voted last month to extend all three]

update: Speaking of grassroots terrorism, if the Seattle police are right, a man now in critical condition who was shot and arrested earlier today for the assassination-style killing of a Seattle police officer was waging a terrorist campaign of his own (with at least one accomplice) against the city's police department. According to police, Christopher Monfort, an Obama-lookalike with a similar biracial background, is also a suspect in an arson case involving the torching of several police vehicles at a motor pool. The arsonist left a note promising to kill police officers. Monfort is a University of Washington graduate and sometime activist:

Monfort received a bachelor's degree from the UW in March 2008, according to the university's degree-validation Web site. His major was in Law, Societies and Justice.

Last year, Monfort belonged to the McNair Scholars Program, part of the university's office of Minority Affairs and Diversity. The program aims to steep undergraduate students in sophisticated research, preparing them for graduate work.

Monfort provided this title for his project with the McNair program: "The Power of Citizenship Your Government Doesn't Want You to Know About: How to Change the Inequity of the Criminal Justice System Immediately, Through Active Citizen Nullification of Laws, As a Juror."

In an abstract of his project, Monfort said he planned to "illuminate and further" the scholarship of Paul Butler, a law professor at George Washington University. Butler is a proponent of jury nullification, a controversial principle whereby jurors feel free to disregard a judge's instructions and acquit a defendant no matter the strength of the evidence.

Butler has argued that such nullification may be particularly appropriate in cases where black defendants are charged with nonviolent crimes.

"It is the moral responsibility of black jurors to emancipate some guilty black outlaws," Butler wrote in a 1995 Yale Law Journal article, adding: "My goal is the subversion of American criminal justice, at least as it now exists."

update II: Seattle police now claim to have found bomb-making materials and more evidence linking Monfort to the arson and the murder, and have declared him a "domestic terrorist."

update III: After initially speculating that Monfort acted with one or two accomplices, they are now saying he acted alone

The Business End of Empathy

McClatchy is reporting that liberal advocacy groups are going after the lead plaintiff in the Ricci case, who is expected to be called to testify at this week's confirmation hearings for supreme court nominee Sonya Sotomayor:

On Friday, citing in an e-mail "Frank Ricci's troubled and litigious work history," the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way drew reporters' attention to Ricci's past. Other advocates for Sotomayor have discreetly urged journalists to pursue similar story lines.
Specifically, the advocates have zeroed in on an earlier 1995 lawsuit Ricci filed claiming the city of New Haven discriminated against him because he's dyslexic. The advocates cite other Hartford Courant stories from the same era recounting how Ricci was fired by a fire department in Middletown, Conn., allegedly, Ricci said at the time, because of safety concerns he raised. The Middletown-area fire department was subsequently fined for safety violations, but the Connecticut Department of Labor dismissed Ricci's retaliation complaint.

Sotomayor's confirmation is an all but forgone conclusion. The point now is to obscure or discredit, after having failed to bury, Ricci, something Sotomayor attempted as an appellate court judge. Despite the White House's later attempt to portray Sotomayor's vote there as admirable judicial restraint, the true nature of that decision--dodging a constitutional question in fear of its consequences--was exposed at the time in Jose Cabranes' dissenting opinion (PDF). A judicial advocate of a certain interpretation of law welcomes the opportunity to make that interpretation--if it can be made without looking foolish or inept, thus later precluding such as a supreme court nomination. Luckily for Justice Ginsburg, she has no such worries (or shame).

Aside from the fact that Frank Ricci's history has no bearing on the legal question presented by Ricci v DeStefano, and liberal critiques of the ruling have depended on ignoring or mischaracterizing the actions of New Haven's mayor (in collusion with--or under threat by--an openly bigoted, convicted felon community organizer), PAW, in its desperation to obscure the corrupt machine politics arising from, and the legally unsustainable basis of, "disparate impact" as a model for anti-discrimination law (indeed, the fundamental conflict between "disparate impact" and "disparate treatment" which this case exposes), wants you to deplore Frank Ricci (and the lawsuit that bears his name) for (1) having the temerity to file a discrimination lawsuit, and (2) having once been fired.

The irony of a "liberal" effort to discredit someone for filing a discrimination lawsuit and losing his job, possibly for "whistleblowing", is further proof that fiction cannot compete with reality. "Bleeding Heart Liberals", we hardly knew ye. Whether PAW is oblivious to, or merely takes for granted, the legal reality that who is entitled to legal protection from discrimination is a matter of some discrimination, I cannot decide. But it's either sublime confidence or sheer nerve, provoking the public's habitual skepticism toward discrimination litigation in what is ultimately an attempt to preserve its current foundation. That very skepticism is what PAW and others typically identify as racism, reaction, ignorance, etc.

The open disdain of some for certain classes of people, including those who dare challenge quota hiring, is the flip side of a certain philosophy that, in this debate, falls under the shorthand term, empathy. If the word is not merely superfluous twaddle (and we have to assume it is used for some purpose), and has meaning, it must assign relative values of moral worth, holding other values constant, to classes of persons; these values must then bear upon the application of law. Minority trumps majority, female trumps male, poor trumps rich, etc. Of course this is nothing more than current "liberal" convention plainly expressed, which is precisely why some seize on the president's coded invocation to expose that convention. "Empathy" here is a euphemism for "favor."

The oblique and muted liberal critiques of Ricci have featured just this sort of reasoning, by people too steeped in their conditioning to recognize it; is it not empathy for the "white firemen" after all, to find in their favor? Categorically, no. They earned the decision by virtue of being right. Why, some have asked, are the Republicans calling Frank Ricci to testify? Is it not because he is sympathetic? Yes--but the confirmation process is a political process. The valid political counter-argument to Ricci's testimony would be to call Mayor DeStefano, for instance, to testify; this would also be a means of putting our "empathy" to work for us in deciding who deserves it more. It would further be an expression of confidence in the logic and justice of this faction's position.

Both sides on the Ricci divide were citing a political factor when describing the plaintiffs as "sympathetic." The best defense of "empathy" thus lapses into absurdity: it doesn't mean anything specifically, just that we should be good. When your best defense is irrelevance, it's time to concede.

A faction laying claim to "empathy" or any other virtue (think "patriotism", for instance), would make a talisman out of a word. It's not the enlightenment arising from meaning but the obscurity of emotion they invoke. Otherwise empathy is meaningless, as its defenders here have ably demonstrated.
The law is there to to limit power and just the sort of demagogy that invariably invokes such words as empathy. In the Ricci case the law served just that purpose. Watching the knives come out for Mr. Ricci, we see the ruthlessness upon which an unyielding claim to virtue is dependent. What is the law before virtue itself, after all? Empathy, like the classic liberal ideal, has been distorted by the political reality of modern America into its opposite.

Shill.He.Is

The single most distressing result of Barack Obama's election is not the looting of your grandchildren's economic prospects to pay for the new administration's Great Lurch Forward into insolvency. It isn't the accompanying loss of liberty. Nor is it the mass decampment of "anti-war" leftists now silent or openly supporting the escalation of the war in Afghanistan (so that's what they mean by "MoveOn"). No; it's the ascendance of shameless kitschmeister Will.I.Am of the Black Eyed Peas, whose "Yes We Can" video on behalf of the Obama campaign took the cliched political cant that is rap's tertiary stock-in-trade (after gangsterism and narcissism) to surreal and sinister levels, putting it directly in the service of power. The natural process of his passing down through the Dante-esque circles of celebreality television into ultimate obscurity is now delayed by at least four years.

Witnessing Bob Dylan's participation in Pepsi's cloying, Super Bowl-launched ad campaign ("every generation refreshes the world") alongside Will was like finding a beloved elderly family member working as a carnival geek. To a remixed "Forever Young" a sixties-era Dylan passes the baton (in the form of a pair of wayfarer sunglasses) off to Will. If this was a true representation of the state of popular music, the g-forces induced by such a sudden drop in iconic quality would cause the culture to pass out. Don't panic--it isn't. The raw material of humanity hasn't been left out overnight to spoil, and there are as many talented young people as ever, in and out of hip hop. Just don't tell Mr. Dylan. Like his early eighties "conversion" to evangelical Christianity, the less said of this embarrassing interlude the better. Let's give the president a pass too. Let him think that Puff Daddy and The Black Eyed Peas are relevant, that Wanda Sykes is funny (if that woman has ever said anything funny, it was surely an accident). There are too many meaningful delusions of which he will have to be disabused, by argument and circumstance, over the next four years, to worry about the trivial.

Now I learn from the blog Where Hip Hop and Libertarianism Meet (only to find they have nothing in common, I'm sure--no worries, Big Man Fascism, your muse still only has eyes for you) that Will.I.Am will be caddying the carpet bag for Terry McAuliffe (who Will identifies as his "closest political mentor") as he stumps for the governorship of Virginia. It's going to be a long four years.