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America Shoots Itself In The Face

November 1, 2010 by Eric Rasmussen

We’ve heard all the complaints about the current state of Washington: a new president has broken his promises and pursued a far left agenda, reneged on promises to get us out of Guantanamo, continued to employ Bush-era policies on surveillance and signing statements. Conservatives say he has quadrupled the deficit spending and forced an unpopular health care bill down the throats of American taxpayers, one that will force Americans to buy health insurance, a mandate that might possibly infringe their Constitutional rights. He has had the government take control of vast parts of our auto and banking industries. At the same time he and the progressive caucus in Washington are steering us toward tax increases at the worst possible time–when we are still suffering the withering effects of a recession and crippling unemployment that continues to hover around 10%.

Americans, angry about the state of the economy, their unemployed neighbors and perceived loss of freedoms, are very susceptible to these arguments and have taken the only course they know–they’ve lashed out and tilted right, vowing not only to vote in Republicans, but those approved by the libertarian-minded Tea Party.

Americans, in other words, are about to shoot themselves in the face.

I’m sorry, that doesn’t seem strong enough. What other aphoristic or pithy phrases could I use to get people’s attention? What if I said Americans are going to shoot their children in the faces? Or kill their own dogs? Or disembowel their family members?

It seems hard to choose the right violent imagery to describe how Americans are about to get it so entirely wrong on November 2–when they send to Congress people who loudly cried for a new Great Depression. Who rail against unemployment insurance when 10% of America is unemployed. Who scream against federal tax increases that haven’t actually happened.  America is about to elect people whose biggest argument is that unemployment is still 10%, therefore we should have elected a government that did nothing to help save the economy in the first place. President Bush shouldn’t have kept banks solvent with a bailout (you do remember it was Bush who did that, right?) and President Obama shouldn’t have injected stimulus into the economy. The Tea Party argument? We should have let the economy crash and burn and unemployment go to 26% or 30%.

Shooting. Yourself. In the face.

We are about to punish Barack Obama for saving the economy from a new Great Depression. It’s as  simple as that. We are about to thump the Democrats for keeping the car industry and several venerable financial institutions from imploding. We are about to body check a Democratic Congress for their part in making sure 95% of Americans have health insurance by the end of the decade. We are going to head butt Nancy Pelosi for making sure health insurance companies can’t turn away children for pre-existing conditions. We’re going to sucker punch Barack Obama for dragging the last combat battalions out of Iraq. We’re going to rabbit punch Congress for giving the middle class a tax cut (and even offering to extend it). We’re going to bitch  slap Barney Frank for trying to police Wall Street, to stop the promiscuous mixing of bank deposits and speculative investments and stop excessive risk taking by banks  that helped lead to the financial crisis. It was this free-market biases, deregulated, Wild West Wall Street that in 2008 led to people to lose their savings, their hedge funds and their faith in the meaningless pieces of paper that are the foundation of capitalism. We have short memories in America. We have decided Barack Obama is now responsible for all of that.

Shooting. Ourselves. In the face.

And what are we going to trade all this all in for? A group of people with no real agenda other than to hate government spending — at least if it is not spent on them. People who say the market takes care of itself. People whose only stated virtue is their anger. People who at worst make schizophrenic connections between Joseph Stalin and Nancy Pelosi and who at best are actively calling for the conditions that led us to financial ruin in the first place. Mainstream Republican leaders complain about the skyrocketing U.S. deficit on the one hand but refuse because of rigid ideology to do the one thing all economists agree would need to be done to balance the budget: control spending, yes, but also increase taxes, especially on the top 2% of the wealthiest Americans. The Tea Party is worse. They show little agenda but vanity and petulant conviction in categorically untrue things. They think cap and trade is a redistribution scheme. They think illegal Mexican immigrants are destroying the middle class. They think Medicare is a private company. They show no policy imagination but instead flaunt their ignorance as if that, like their anger, were somehow a virtue. These are not people who have not ever learned or cared about how policy affects real people like your grandparents and your poor neighbors but instead have learned only to smugly curl their lip and deride people who spent their lives in public service (whether it be Democrats or Republicans). It’s the kind of knowing smile you often see on people who know nothing at all–a popular gambit with teenagers who haven’t done their homework. We laughed at “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” when Jeff Spiccoli “cruised” history. Now Sarah Palin is the one cruising history. She’s gotten a free pass for knowing nothing. She makes dummies feel secretly wise.

These are the people you are about to entrust your economy to. Shooting. Yourself. In the face.

The problem with electing people who have no respect for government and no real policy agenda is that when they get elected, they are incredibly weak and susceptible to the new accouterments of their power. They will find themselves agreeing with more aggressive people who do have strong policy agendas. Lobbyists. Think tanks. The insurance industry. The military industrial complex. News Corp. And make no mistake–the real agenda of many alpha Republicans is a gutted government at home (one that pays, it seems, for nothing but Medicare) and an expanded empire abroad. Were Republicans to take power today in both Congress and the White House, they would not only ignore the ailing economy (since they believe it’s government’s job to do nothing), but they would try to get you to ignore it too by refocusing your attention on Iran, which would once again take center stage in our national discourse. A Congress of weak-minded Tea Party hacks would suddenly shed their “leave me alone” philosophy, which is not their real philosophy at all, and go along with the nationalistic, sloganeering patriotism that characterized the Bush era. Need proof? They already did. The Tea Party already failed the libertarian test by showing up late for the real executive power grab–and dressed for the wrong party.

This is perhaps the biggest danger of what we’re about to do. One of the biggest reasons that America is about to shoot … itself … in the face.

Often when you hear people on the far right complain about the government, they will tell you in a nice, clear, concise and short epigrammatic prose all you need to know about the economy: you have to cut taxes, deregulate and get out of the way. This is an article of faith for people who don’t realize how complicated economies really are. Macroeconomics is not the type of thing that easily gives itself over to the platitudes of the left wing or the right. The fact is that the economy, like your father, is more complicated than that. Ask almost anybody, even Republicans, what ended the Great Depression and they’ll say the Second World War, but they won’t work through the logic–government spending saved the economy. Ask them why Ronald Reagan was a great president and they’ll say he helped save the economy by cutting taxes and deregulating. They won’t talk about his huge military buildup–in other words, how government spending helped save the economy.

Meanwhile, overseas, another government has shown that throwing a trillion bucks in stimulus into your economy can make a great difference: the Chinese government has thrown about as much money into its sagging economy in the last two years as America has. Unlike we Americans, however, the Chinese forced their banks to lend. Of course, they suffered some overheating speculation in property, but their GDP has run circles around ours. In part this is because China is going online with its own major consumer demand–a huge engine of growth as the country urbanizes. But without a doubt, government stimulus saved it from plunging into the morass. Unlike Americans, the Chinese have no strange and self-defeating bias against a government helping its people against the depredations of capitalism gone out of control.

Tea Partiers do. They are so wedded to their beliefs, in fact, that they would let the economy fall apart and our society plunge into Malthusian chaos before they gave up on these beliefs. You don’t need proof for this belief. They have said it out loud. The Republicans poised to take over in the House of Representatives, not Tea Partiers, by the way, have said that if they takes over in the next session, they won’t be able to work with the president unless the president concedes that government spending doesn’t help the economy. In other words, Barack Obama will have to believe in the Easter Bunny if he wants Republicans to work with him.

Our banks should have been allowed to fail, say Tea Partiers, and the consequences be damned, even if it’s the average American who would have suffered the most. Theirs is a millenarian philosophy, a law of the jungle. “Creative destruction” means that if capitalism eats itself and mass unemployment results, so be it. Has any member of the Tea Party talked about what it would take to bring jobs back other than cutting taxes? Do you honestly think the real problem is that taxes weren’t cut enough? They were already at historic lows, as were interest rates, and that’s when rampant, crippling, stupid risk taking took place at almost every level of the economy, from subprime home borrowers to hedge fund managers. Look at the balance sheets of American companies and look at the record amount of cash they are sitting on, in an environment where taxes continue to be low, and then ask yourself if you can still be wedded to your obnoxious faith in economic libertarianism. It’s a bit like starving your baby by not giving up your belief in veganism. The reason unemployment is still high is that American companies find spoiled Americans with their luxury goods and their iPhones too expensive to hire. It has nothing to do with anything Barack Obama has done.

And yet it’s people who are crying about high taxes that you are about to hand your economy to. People who don’t even know their taxes haven’t increased. Shooting. Yourself. In the face.

Of course, it’s important to ask when government should be involved in the economy and when it should back off. Instead, the discussion has been hijacked by free market fundamentalists who make up in vitriol they lack in real economic insight. Centrists, Blue Dog democrats and even reasonable conservatives are afraid of these people. For some reason, when nobody seems to know what to do, we are always impressed by the people who have the most conviction of spleen.

You can definitely criticize Obama’s deference to these people. Deference to enemies somehow only gets the blood of your enemies up even more. I can’t think of any president in recent years so hot to cooperate with the party across the aisle and who for that quickly got Hitler mustaches painted on his effigy.

For that we’re going to hand at least one house of  Congress back to the Republicans next week. Some are even talking about impeaching the president. For what? Starting an illegal war? Codifying water boarding? No, just for being, in their minds, a communist.

You can dislike the state of the nation. You can be unhappy, from either side of the aisle, with what Barack Obama has done or hasn’t done. But if can’t vote for him, then it’s important to know this Election Day that there is definitely somebody you should be voting against: extremists. The Tea Party is a dangerous movement of crackpots, at worst racist and at best willing to destroy the middle class and wreck the economy because of a reductionist, idea fixe. If there is a group of reasonable Republicans who want to discuss how misplaced liberal good intentions hurt the middle class, I’ll be happy to listen to them. But that is not who we are about to elect. We’re about to elect the people of Jonestown. Cultists. Crazies.

Shooting. Yourself. In the face.

Posted in Politics | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments »

What’s On TV Tonight, Oct. 24

October 24, 2010 by Eric Rasmussen

4 NBC

A man is forced to eat his own entrails. If you can write a plot around this idea, then you’ve got a job at “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”

24 E! Entertainment Television
Steal, strip, sex your way into fame.

13 PBS
If Oscar Wilde were on Facebook, his status updates would be so witty they would shame you from ever making another one yourself … and other observations by Bill Moyers.

25 MTV
“Hell is Other Guidos”: The Situation, Snookie, Pauly D and JWoww are all stuck together in a room they can’t get out of. And you are paralyzed watching them.

27 The Food Network
Mystery Movie of the Week: The secret sauce is daddy!

36 ABC Family
An innocent squeeze on the cheek cannot be taken at face value in this Anne Sexton biopic.

13 PBS
Anne Sexton: “A woman who loves a woman is forever young.”

24 Lifetime
This lifetime movie on Anne Sexton skews toward women age 30 to 50.

14 CNN
The woman who loves Larry King is forever young.

28 Fox News
A woman who loves Rush Limbaugh is forever quiet, because he can’t hear a word she’s saying.

28 Fox News
Reporter Juan Williams was fired from NPR just for going on Fox News, reports Juan Williams on Fox News.

28 Fox News
A woman is stabbed in Idaho. Coming up: six hours of uninformed conjecture about what it might mean.

28 Fox News
Why it’s unconstitutional to force people to buy health care insurance, car insurance, home owner’s insurance, Social Security, postage stamps or access to the New Jersey Turnpike.

30 CNN
In this latest episode of Crossfire, David and Maddie finally kiss.

31 Current TV
Because of a music rights legal dispute, this biopic on Kurt Cobain features the music of the Dwarves, Zeke, and the Theater of Sheep.

36 Health Network
If you feel as if you can’t concentrate, focus on daily tasks, meet mental challenges, organize your thoughts or retrieve your perspicacity, then the best thing you could possibly be doing right now is watching television.

4 KFOR Oklahoma City
My sister was on this channel the other night! Really! She sat on the journalist panel for the Oklahoma gubernatorial debates.

4 KFOR Oklahoma City
Unfortunately, you have to hate Barack Obama, health care reform, the federal government, roads, bridges and people who get sick if you want to be governor of Oklahoma.

82 Bloomberg
You are unemployed because American companies find you too expensive, and don’t want to waste their vital cash reserves on you and weaken their earnings per share. So if you are smart and can put two and two together, you will vote against the Democrats in two weeks.

54 AMC
“Mad Men” is over for the season, which means it’s best just to turn the television off altogether.

Posted in Film & TV | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Deconstructing the Juan Williams Controversy

October 22, 2010 by Eric Rasmussen

Longtime political analyst Juan Williams was fired by NPR this week after he told Bill O’Reilly on Fox News that he gets nervous when he sees Muslims on airplanes, especially when they self-identify as Muslims. He then declared that it made him no bigot.

What are the many different ways we can look at, break down, deconstruct or reverse engineer this episode?

–*We could say Juan Williams made a bigoted remark and should have been fired.

Or

–*We could point out that if a white man said he gets nervous around black men, it would anger Juan Williams, so he should know better.

Or

–*We could say that the sentiment itself wasn’t as bad as the insistence that it wasn’t bigotry and Williams’ refusal to apologize for it.

This means he might have gotten away with saying the first part, but not the second part. We think. This is where we need lawyers to come in and break it all down for us and tell us when, in fact, he became bigoted. Unfortunately, all we have are his defenders, Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, who are probably as qualified to parse language as they are to teach us the linguistic roots of Sanskrit.

Or

–*We could point out Juan Williams said something that quite a few Americans feel, even if it’s wrong. In other words, he was dumb enough to say out loud what Anderson Cooper, Brian Williams, Christiane Amanpour, Katie Couric and Regis Philbin might well feel but wouldn’t dare say.

Or

–*You could say it doesn’t matter, because evincing his own personal feelings is not his job as a reporter.

Or

–*As the song goes, “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist.” Maybe sometimes we should say what’s on our minds or in our hearts, even if it’s bad, to examine what it’s about. But now Williams and others are on notice to hold those feelings in so that they never go examined. We are not allowed to make a safe place for discussion about the things we feel even though it might help us know what our problems are.

Or

–*Juan Williams could have made that same statement with more sensitivity and still said something newsworthy: “I know it’s wrong, but I feel nervous around people in Muslim dress on airplanes, and that’s important to say out loud,” because this is something important we ought to know about the very large non-Muslim community in the U.S.–they fear people who are not like them.

Or

–*We could acknowledge that if a Muslim went on TV these days and told us he gets nervous around non-Muslims, we’d probably see his point and we do want him to feel free to express himself right? If a lone woman, for that matter, got nervous walking when surrounded by strange men, we’d probably see her point, too. It’s not always rational. Does that make it illegitimate?

Or

–*We might get angry that Juan Williams lost his job for something relatively minor when a week ago Bill O’Reilly said “Muslims killed us on 9/11,” which is much more outlandish and insipid, not to mention ungrammatical–and O’Reilly has never once feared for his job. Rather than creating a nursery of dissenting voices, NPR seems secretly determined to drive decent reporters to the Wild West town of slander that is Fox News, where they can more comfortably say uncomfortable things.

Or

–*We could notice to our shame that liberals close ranks against heretics just as blithely as George W. Bush does. What we couldn’t do to O’Reilly, we’ve decided to do to a much more reasonable guy.

So

–*We notice that liberals like Juan Williams must fear for their jobs if they go outside the bounds of political correctness, while right wingers never need fear it. That means we risk putting more reporters like Juan Williams on Fox News’ payroll and continuing to polarize the United States.

Or

–*We might point out that Juan Williams and Rick Sanchez, two journalists with relatively reasonable centrist viewpoints, have both recently been fired for making racially inflammatory remarks that were totally out of character for them. This means soon we will all be reading from scripts, and hewing to our party lines all the time. There will be no free-associating, no counterintuitive arguments, no alternative premises, no synthesizing of paradoxical statements, no free marketplace of ideas. Everybody will sound like Barney the Dinosaur.

Or

–*We could say that NPR is trying to hold the line for objective journalism and that everyone with an opinion can feel free to go express it on Fox, where there is nothing but opinion and precious little news 24 hours  a day.

Or

–*We could come up with a conspiracy theory that Juan Williams and Rick Sanchez were likely fired for backstage intrigues we know nothing about, because there is lots of infighting in the competitive world of broadcast journalism that is bigger than any one red herring racial comment. It might sound like a conspiracy theory, but Williams said that NPR didn’t like him being on Fox, so they found a reason to 86 him, and that doesn’t sound so far-fetched.

Or

–*We could just say Juan Williams got fired because he was black.

Yes, it’s a stupid thought. It may sound like the most ludicrous argument of all. But think about it–why does everybody get to be a bigot but Juan Williams? Is it because we think he should know better since he’s a black man? Well who says that?

I don’t want to defend what Juan Williams said, but I think there’s too much readiness by some news organizations to fire good people for 1) obvious brain farts and 2) a failure to adhere to orthodoxy. I know when I free associate, stuff comes out of my mouth that I regret later. So maybe I should never be on broadcast news. But then I ask, who should?

Posted in Film & TV, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Stephanie Speaks on DigitalChickTV.com

October 20, 2010 by Eric Rasmussen

My wife Stephanie, producer and star of the our Web series The Retributioners, recently penned an article for Digital Chick TV (DigitalchickTV.com) about the joys and horrors of making a Web show from scratch in our living room.

Digital Chick TV is run by another ce-Webrity, the amazing Daryn Strauss, the writer/director/producer of Downsized. Check out both our shows.

Stephanie would also probably like it if I showed off this head shot of her. I like to show her off, and besides, we can probably depreciate the photo expenses for accounting purposes.

Posted in Comedy, The Web, Web series | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Lexicon

October 18, 2010 by Eric Rasmussen

As we count down the days until the 2010 midterm election, we’re likely going to be treated to a swelling, tumescent heightened political rhetoric on television and in newspapers, as loud debates echo through student union arcades, in town hall meetings, on the steps of state capitals and in the dankest of Red State outhouses. Many lies will be told. Many ribs will be eaten. Your gay friends will be used as political fodder for people scoring cheap points. Thanks, gays!

As you careen through this veld of poison poppies, you are likely to feel sometimes like other people control the terms of debate, leaving you speechless and/or helpless to raise your own concerns and objections. Many memes and buzzwords will be used, like electrical shunts, to skirt you around the troublesome ideas underlying them. You will hear some of your older friends, for example, say things like “I am not politically correct,” as a shorthand way of saying, “Actually, I still don’t like black people.” You will hear phrases like “Barack Obama thinks I’m trash because I’m white,” which actually means, “I am actually trash, and I hate successful people who remind me of that fact, even more so if they are black.” You will hear some Democrats say President Obama’s critics are racist, but really they just hate being unemployed.

The best way for you to fight back against word games played by partisans is to try to drill down into semiotics and try to figure out the code. Here are some of the words you will hear a lot of in the next few weeks:

Elites: this refers to somebody who corrected you when you got something wrong.

Maverick: somebody who doesn’t look things up.

Going rogue: failing to finish a sentence

Socialist: to most of us, this word is pretty clear. It has given us Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps, home loans, student loans and everything else that buttresses the American middle class and keeps the streets free of homeless mendicants and the other signs of blighted pre-revolutionary France. But if you think of it instead as robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, then you are undoubtedly not a fan of childhood favorite Robin Hood.

Unemployment: depending on who is using this word, it either means the natural result of socialist tendencies (which is a complete contradiction in terms) or the natural result of corporations finding American workers too expensive (which is so true that saying it out loud will get you pelted with eggs).

Obamacare: legislation passed in early 2010 that has already resulted in many of your friends and family members being sent to euthanasia camps. (Really! It checks out on Snopes!)

Nanny state: a nanny is somebody who doesn’t let you eat a dog turd off the ground. Anti-union, anti-minimum wage, pro-restaurant lobbyist Rick Berman reminds you: “Don’t listen to the nannies, kids. You go ahead and eat that turd.” You don’t have to be mollycoddled by government when you’ve got corporations looking out for your best interests with absolutely positively no agenda of their own.

Middle class: Both sides will use this phrase liberally over the next few weeks, and you’re sure to be confused, because both sides will claim they are protecting it and blaming each other for its disappearance. I’m sure that both liberals and conservatives on the Titanic would have blamed each other for it sinking, too. So let’s just stay there’s a hole in the boat and nobody knows how to fix it. The Democrats onboard will blame the Chinese for the disaster and the Republicans will declare war on Iran. “Nearer My God to Thee” in the key of F major, please.

Racist: anybody angry about the bank bailouts

Racist: Anybody who doesn’t fully support the beliefs of the Honorable Clarence Thomas.

Bigot: Anybody who doesn’t believe Jesus was two substances brought together in hypostatic union and now lives at the right hand of God in a milky ball of interstellar gas like the Bible says. (Checks out on Snopes!)

Racist: anybody who believes in a progressive income tax, which hurts rich black people

Racist: Anybody who supports abortion rights, which is really a black genocide scheme.

Racist: Anybody who supports unions, which use black members’ money only to support Democratic causes, which is not fair since some of those black people are probably secretly Republican.

Racist: Anybody who Rush Limbaugh says is racist, and by the way, he also says poor black people getting subprime loans caused the recession, not overly leveraged Wall Street banks. (Checks out on Snopes!) Anybody who blames the overly leveraged Wall Street banks and not the black people is just a racist.

Racist: President Barack Obama, who, unlike white people, is a member of a “race.” (Checks out on Snopes).

Purple: This word is politically neutral. You are free to have no opinion on it.

Multiculturalism: The auspices under which black racists will take over our country.

Libertarian: somebody with a strict, prescriptivist adherence to the Constitution as it pertains to the WASPs who wrote it.

WASPs: These people are still in charge. So you will not likely hear this word at all.

Posted in Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

How Come Bigots Are Always So Sexy?

October 10, 2010 by Eric Rasmussen

A lot of people, journalist Ron Rosenbaum probably the most prominent, have questioned how someone like Adolf Hitler could rise to power in a country as culturally sophisticated and technologically advanced as Germany was in the 1930s–a country where there was almost no illiteracy. A country where there was political plurality and a free press. A country that, we should all remember, voted Hitler into power in a fair, democratic process.

I submit to you that maybe it was Hitler’s private collection of himself in beefcake poses.

Fast forward to the United States in 2010 and I give you Pamela Geller, a woman who has risen to fame almost entirely for hateful diatribes toward Muslims and her bikini photos. No matter how long you write, no matter how long you study, no matter how much thought you put into a subject, no matter how many credentials you collect or peer reviews you receive, it still seems as if the best way for you to get attention and to snag a bit of celebrity for yourself, even in a “good” society like America, is to do it just as you did in high school: find the person who is not like anybody else and then go to town on him. In high school, you gave wedgies or beat somebody up in the locker room. Today you get on a Web site and bash foreigners.

Geller even calls herself a bigot racist as a joke. It just makes her that much cuter, and we’re supposed to laugh her off. I suggest we create a new line of racist Barbie or Bratz dolls–“Give Us A Squeeze,” says the box.

Ann Coulter led the way when she learned that the more provocative you are, the more beloved you are by people with no self-esteem and no imagination. It’s led us directly to Geller, a person who might even chagrin Coulter (who has recently tried to rehabilitate herself a bit by cuddling up to gays).  It’s always been pretty easy to call Coulter an attention whore. For Geller, it seems too nice a phrase.

Of course, the U.S. is not Nazi Germany, and I don’t mean to suggest that it is. I make the comparison to show how bigotry, which we were all taught to watch out for in school, is even today an aphrodisiac with a sexy hint of taboo.  This woman uses a lot of meretricious rhetoric appealing to those with wounded pride. It could be she appeals to people who are too nationalistic. Those who are out of work and need someone to blame. Or more likely it’s those whose lack of intellectual confidence turns them into “joiners.” It sounds insipid to say out loud–that there’s a group of Americans who’d be swayed by a pastiche that is so transparent–and yet this woman mobilized thousands (millions?) against Park 51, an Islamic center in downtown Manhattan whose symbolism makes it somehow unacceptable, even in an area that already has mosques in it.

Geller called the center a “victory lap” for America’s enemies. You can’t argue with buzzwords like that. They’re so small, you can’t get an editorial in edgewise.

As a proud atheist, I dislike all religions, and would definitely challenge some of the points of Islam–the treatment of women in some corners (though not all) and the iconoclasm of certain sects that denies the bigger imperative of free speech (something I’m a bit of an absolutist about). I’m as angry as anybody that an American cartoonist, Molly Norris, was forced to go into hiding for her satiric idea that we should have an “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” (an idea that wasn’t even serious, but that grabbed the attention of extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and got the poor woman put on a hit list). If we can’t get past the ephemeral (and totally inconsistent) picture-drawing ban by Muslims, then how might we ever drill down into their even more troublesome ideas?

But criticizing Islam in its cultural confrontation with the West is a far cry from dehumanizing all Muslims. I interviewed several Muslims myself for a book a few years back, and what I discovered is that there are plenty of competing philosophies and reflections and ways of reconciling the sacred and profane within Islam as there are anywhere else. I was most impressed by a Sufi adherent who said that the religion he knew didn’t believe in mullahs or burkas but was only obsessed with the spirit and what nourishes it. He didn’t see Islamic teaching as incompatible with a Western upbringing. You might say he’s not representative, but then you might ask who is a representative Christian. A Crusader? Torquemada? Jerry Fallwell? Larry Flynt in his born again period? An atheist who just thinks it’s right to turn the other cheek? We say that we hate Muslim strictures on female clothing, but what about the rules of certain Christian faiths that girls must wear skirts and nobody can dance? This is usually where arch-conservatives write in that Christians don’t blow up buildings. I feel unable to defend myself against a person who can’t count the billion or so non-building-destroying Muslims out there. It’s like arguing with a pelican.

I’m a bit depressed that The New York Times had to give this lunatic coverage, even under the pretext of responsibly keeping tabs on her. I just hope it doesn’t give her some kind of legitimacy.

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Remembering Icons and Iconography

October 5, 2010 by Eric Rasmussen

I was walking down First Avenue in Midtown Manhattan one fall day about 15 years ago. The city was still a little bit dangerous then (the Guiliani reforms had not reached their full effect) and a homeless guy I was passing turned to me in full confrontational attitude and declared, “I fucked Tony Curtis in the ass!” Imagine John Lovitz saying it in his liar voice, and you’ll get the flavor of the encounter.

Now, lots of people brag about famous people they’ve slept with (I’ve heard Montgomery Clift stories that were more believable) but I never forgot this anecdote, and not because I think the guy was telling the truth. More impressive was the fact Tony Curtis’ gay icon status was so well understood that even a homeless guy in Turtle Bay was culturally savvy about it.

I don’t say this to belittle the actor’s more awesome achievements. He worked with Billy Wilder and Stanley Kubrick and tried hard to be taken seriously when he didn’t have to be. He seemed determined to constantly reinvent himself, even coyly flirting with the perception that he might be gay because it was more fun than spewing hate about it (the fact that he had an overactive interest in females ought to disprove it, though). I ask you to compare his attitude with Tom Cruise’s. I don’t think Cruise is gay either, but he’s always reacted to the charge with haughtiness and disdain and absolutely no sense of humor, which makes calling him gay ever so much fun for a lot of people.

Curtis’ career blossomed in the era of the Hays Code, when people were not permitted to kiss for more than a few seconds at a time on screen, nor were they allowed to share beds or ever even refer to homosexuality. Contrary to popular belief, people were still having sex during this period, including gay people. Our desires and drives did not disappear. Instead they turned into codes. Symbols. Fetish objects. When Stanley Kowalski raped Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, we saw not the rape but a spewing fire hydrant. When Peter Lorre played a gay character in the Maltese Falcon, he constantly put his cane handle in his mouth to show you what he’d rather be doing. There are countless examples, and I invite my readers to go find some late period Alfred Hitchcock films and not find lots of dick jokes (there are almost as many as in Shakespeare). I secretly wonder to this day if there is a fire hydrant appreciation society bouncing around in some chamber of the BDSM demimonde.

Curtis died on Wednesday, of course, and it’s sad for many reasons, not the least of which is that he was an icon, gay or otherwise.

But another screen legend died last week as well–Arthur Penn, the director of the “The Left Handed Gun,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Night Moves” and “Little Big Man.” And though he’s not as well known in households, he’s a key figure in the Hollywood New Wave of the 1970s, an age that for good or ill ushered out age of chiseled stars like Curtis and ushered in the age of everyman types like Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino, introduced cinema verite techniques and realism into our cinema.

Penn was a genius for many reasons that better paid people at The New York Times have chronicled in the past week or so–mainly that he introduced French New Wave ideas into Hollywood. But what I most remember about him is the stories he told in the book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. Penn was also a master of iconography, and to him, Bonnie and Clyde, the film that ushered in the New Hollywood, was more than a glorification of simple hoods, but a masterpiece of image making. Imagine how iconic Bonnie’s beret and cigar became. Penn said that he wanted Clyde Burrow’s death in a hail of gunfire to remind people of the Kennedy assassination. He also dared shoot scenes of shocking violence, including a blast to the face. While that might seem tame by today’s standards (consider this year’s Machete, where the hero uses somebody’s small intestines to rappel down the side of a building) it was quite shocking in 1968, and in my mind, meant to remind you that you were watching a movie. The medium was the message, Penn said, quoting Marshall McLuhan.

It was also genius because you have to realize that the moral codes were part of the film vocabulary, and with the new permissiveness, that vocabulary had to be reinvented. Penn, finally unleashed from the Old Hollywood handcuffs, had to create new ways of using the medium to tell stories now that there was a new frankness. Within a few years it would be OK to show sex and drug use and orgasms and homosexual acts and even deep throating (if you went to the right theaters).You didn’t have to use a fire hydrant or show a guy sucking off his cigar or hold a cat to refer to your vajayjay. When you do that today, it’s usually an homage to more repressive days (as when Philip Seymour Hoffman sucks on his pen in Boogie Nights.)

And though it’s definitely better to live in a world of free expression (free of prudery), at the same time, film used to be very powerful because of these codes, because film is a medium more perfect for fetishes than nylon. All the really great filmmakers take advantage of it–Bunuel, Scorsese, Altman, Hitchcock all love focusing on objects and investing them with intense emotional energy, sexual or otherwise.

When I made my own first good film in film school, “S&M Queen For A Day,” I only intended to make a few jokes about perversion, but I noticed that just for storytelling purposes, it was effective to show my wife zipping up her big leather boot very slowly, not once but twice. I knew vaguely that this was good storytelling and kind of a joke, but I had no idea how much it would resonate with people in the “community,” who wrote to me to express their great appreciation and fondness and to say hello as a fellow traveler (I am not, by the way into the S&M life.)

I realized then that film and storytelling isn’t about giving us what we want. It’s about withholding it for as long as possible. Tony Curtis understood this as an icon and Arthur Penn understood this as an icon maker. Desire is something better prolonged, withheld, embraced for its own sake. Getting what you want never seems to be as much fun as wanting it. I’d like to think that somewhere, Tom Cruise will suddenly figure this out.

Most critics will say that Penn ushered Curtis out, that Curtis was from a bourgeois liberal time in Hollywood, and Penn had true radical ideas and helped foment the deluge. I think maybe they were just artists working different sides of the same street. They both peddled in image-making, and sometimes failed to sell their stuff. Arthur Penn reimagined the American Indian as a colonized race with its own contradictions and sins in Little Big Man and reframe the death of the Indian culture as the death of the American spirituality. Tony Curtis tried to hack up his own image by playing the Boston Strangler. Both efforts failed to win much acclaim, fairly or unfairly (I think Little Big Man is a perfect movie, actually). And yet both guys were trying to take images and values and people you were comfortable with and shake them up a little, using the tricks of their trade. In an age where we are so inundated with stimulation, it’s almost quaint now to remember that Bonnie Parker’s beret used to mean something.

Posted in Film & TV | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments »

A New Look

September 30, 2010 by Eric Rasmussen

I was scanning my blog for typos the other night and started to get a big headache, and it occurred to me suddenly, “Wow, I wonder if white letters on a black background are hard for others to read, too.” I’m worried that my poor design choice is putting off readers.

This is embarrassing, because once upon a time, for about five minutes, I actually made money in a graphics department. Not that I can draw, but I had enough of a design eye that the owner of a very tiny advertising company in Austin, Texas asked me to come work for him. His firm marketed but three things: salsa, strippers and country artist Rick Trevino. (If that doesn’t sound like the makings of a hot Texas orgy to you, then you obviously have no feelings.) Sadly, I could not draw pictures of salsa. When I tried, it looked like a lot of blood. I failed again when I was put in charge of a tiny advertisement for the local strip club, and was given a picture about two inches across with five girls in it. I decided it was better to focus on one so I could balance her body with the text and give readers something visually compelling, rather than five tiny strippers in miniature. All due respect to the miniaturists of the world, but tiny strippers are not sexy. Strippers, if they are far enough away, look just like red ants in Spanx.

Well, all my work was re-edited by my boss, and the five girls were all put back, probably because I had violated the rules of strip club diplomacy by featuring only one. Obviously I had not seen the HBO documentaries on strippers yet and didn’t know how intensely competitive they are. I don’t know if I made anybody angry, but I do know that I was discharged after about a month. Somewhere on an Austin, Texas backup server there sits idly a picture of a lonely bowl of chips awaiting marriage with its salsa in heaven. I think maybe there is also a picture of a molcajete that is the worst picture of a molcajete ever drawn by Anglos or Aztecs.

So why did I turn my page black in the first place? I’ve always liked the moody approach to content, probably after reading “The Medium is the Massage,” by Marshall McLuhan too many times. I wanted my readers to know that this is a place where I regularly delve into my subconscious and evince from those attic boxes of the spirit things that are forgotten, unremembered or repressed. I wanted to give you a really evil Happy Meal in a dark box.

Of course, I could probably come up with more interesting approaches to packaging, the way the McSweeney’s crowd does. But I’m already too busy being creative in other areas to spend an inordinate amount of time on visual design these days. I’ve also hit a wall with technology. I don’t know how to make Word Press do what I want graphically without spending hours of time. Stephanie, my beautiful wife, has more patience for figuring out Web design programs, which is why “The Retributioners” page looks so much better than this one.

Anyway, I’ve decided for the time being to offer you a clean attack. My logo is the same: a seraph looks to heaven for guidance as he would in a Caravaggio painting. (Or perhaps he’s just looking at the ceiling for water damage; I like to think the sculptor understood the marriage of sacred and profane.) In any case, I hope this version of my blog is a little bit easier to read and gives you no headaches and that it also marries the sacred and profane in a way that doesn’t give you an epileptic fit. You deserve no less. I don’t believe you came here in the first place, actually.

(If you have, though, please check out my music on the right hand side! I really think I’m getting better at this. If you’re a fan, I’ll even give you a name: A Salo Head!)

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I Am A Brand

September 28, 2010 by Eric Rasmussen

I just returned from a business and economic conference in San Diego, which is one of the reasons for the sparse posting this week. It was a fun conference. Valerie Bertinelli showed up for some reason I can’t quite figure out (I think she was betrothed to a businessman, but I’m too lazy to look it up). But even though she used to be married to a rock star, the real rock stars at this conference were people with names like William Sharpe, a Nobel laureate in economics, and Todd Buchholz, an economist and author. Over the next few days, I’ve been thinking this would be a good place to talk a bit about their economic insights.

But then I thought: “Do you care?” You might be asking, “Eric, you write a lot about stuff that’s not very funny considering you’ve always advertised this as a funny blog. Aren’t you being kind of a pretentious asshole? Or more succinctly, aren’t you diluting your brand?”

Maybe.

Stephanie and I have a good friend named Jessica who specializes in branding people and products. It sounds like one of those absurd non-jobs, but it actually plays an important role in our daily life. It helps turns the wheels of our society in secret, like those companies that create the smell of our “food.”

Everything is branded, from President Obama to raisins, to the Gap, to the outstanding hit Web comedy show “The Retributioners,” which, of course, you can see preserved in the amber of eternal Internet glory. Our brand is so strong that Stephanie and I are being told by everyone that a new season of “The Retributioners” is in order. If you are one of our fans, you have probably noticed that the show has been dormant for a year or so. That’s not because we don’t like you. We’ve just had a bizarre and sometimes tragic year, which I’ve written about elsewhere.

We wondered if perhaps the brand of the show might be strong enough that we can branch out to a new show with new characters that I’ve written, perhaps keeping the link and continuity between the two series. We’ve even got some great actors in mind. But our friends in the branding world say “no!”

Wait, that’s not strong enough. We must say it in German: “Nein!”

If you are, like me, more artistically inclined, this goes against your grain. I am a person who is led more by my inspiration than logic or branding demands, which is why I have carved out this little blog space here, “Beauty is Imperfection,” my playhouse, and repository for whatever I feel like doing whenever I feel like doing it. This page has a different “brand” than “The Retributioners” has. It is based more on Eric Rasmussen and his artistic whims, political obsessions and smart assery. This is also a place where, as you can see on the right hand side of the page, you can find lots of music I’ve written, none of which my wife would allow on “The Retributioners” page. She’s very careful about branding. Also, she’s a horrible bitch and practically deaf. (Just kidding about one of those things, honey!)

So I have to ask myself, what is the Eric brand? Well, first:

–*Eric is inconsistent. Sometimes he’ll blog 30 days in a row. Sometimes he stops for months. This reflects his artistic temperament. It does not reflect on you his readers, whom he loves very much. But how do I brand this? Perhaps I should show up on the cover of a men’s magazine without my shirt on and admit in the cover blurb, “Really, I’ll screw anything.” Sounds like a lovably inconsistent guy, right? Even better if I can pull off this persona in a British accent.

–*Eric is moody. Goes with being inconsistent. For that we need dark colors and a lighting scheme designed my Michael Mann. Envision me, if you will, in shadow. I’ve got deep pains I don’t want to show you. Come on, girls, don’t you like that shit?

–*Eric likes “dark sounds.” One of my favorite essays is by Garcia Lorca, and it’s called “Play and Theory of the Duende,” the duende being a little ghost who is the evil version of a muse, a demon who not only inspires but harasses. He provokes those artists haunted by him to create not only things of beauty but things that are beautifully ugly. You can hear his presence when you hear a guitar really out of tune in a good way, a poet who is raw and whose verse whose ragged but whose insight is profound, and I guess in just about anything by Thomas Pynchon or William S. Burroughs. So cue the dark music. Velvet Underground, please!

–*Eric is pretty liberal. Sometimes I think I could turn conservative. The best conservatives are cautious and skeptical about wrongheaded idealism, yet also optimistic that we can innovate our way out of trouble rather than tearing up dearly loved beliefs and institutions. At least that’s what I read somewhere. So I’m not sure why the ones I see on television are all greedy, racist, superstitious, warlike, hateful and conformist. Until they change, cue the color blue!

–*Eric cannot dress. That’s right. I couldn’t in 1984 and I can’t today. I like jeans and t-shirts and whenever I try to do anything with more style than that, it blows up in my face and I end up looking like something Carmen Miranda’s dog barfed up and then ate again. I’ve just decided to deal with it. Cue some jeans and a black t-shirt.

–*Eric is stubborn. Cue nothing!

–*Eric is obsessive compulsive. By day, I am a copy editor, which means I spend my time hunched over pages full of tiny fonts, my eyes flitting about looking for misbegotten commas, poor syntax and diction so bad it might give the paper Dutch Elm disease. I’m not sure whether I’m a good copy editor because of OCD or whether I got OCD from being a good copy editor. Since I tend to stack everything in neat little rows and always triple check the door to make sure I’ve locked it … you would probably agree with my sister that it’s just baked in. So my brand definitely includes some bleach and other kinds of disinfectant (a warning, though, when creating your brand, don’t mix bleach with ammonia! You will totally blow right the fuck up!)

–*Eric has a dirty mouth. Cue the word “ffffff…udge!”

–*Eric has too many hobbies. Like Madonna, I have created lots of books, movies and music. For some reason, she can tie it all together into a career and I can’t. So, cue bustier.

–*Eric is funny. I will try to remember that even though it has not been a funny year, and even though the only thing that has moved me to write lately are the horrible political and economic times. If I’ve got to talk about the alternative minimum tax again, I promise, I will make a fart joke out of it if I can. You deserve the best.

So reader, what would your brand be? What are the most important words you would use? What emotional affects and effects would your brand require? Are you known for your personal integrity? Are you environmentally friendly? Do you offer grits with that? Does your brand make people think of a comfortable home and hearth or uncomfortable Mid-Century Moderne furniture from Denmark?

If this little essay has done anything, maybe it has allowed you to benefit from my bad examples. If you don’t have a goal in life, maybe you could create the brand first and the goals would follow. The world is yours. Take it from me. Or don’t.

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Tea Party Literacy Drive Started

September 24, 2010 by Eric Rasmussen

As the Tea Party movement gains strength and raises its national profile, thousands of students and tutors across the country, in town halls and public plazas, libraries and convention halls, have fanned out to bring vastly needed reading and spelling skills to millions of Tea Party movement members.

“Are governmint is trying to take are money,” railed Tea Party protester Max Bonhof, a resident of Fort Wayne, Indiana who has been attending the party’s events since early 2009 and struggling to communicate his basic frustrations with the role of government in his life. “This soshialism has to stop rite now.”

What began as a few spottily organized demonstrations over the last few years has grown into a nationwide movement with a proven ability to win elections, all at a time when the Democratic leadership in Washington seems unable to cure crippling unemployment. Now that Tea Party members might actually move into leadership roles, pundits and analysts on both sides of the political spectrum agree: the movement badly needs book learning and spelling skills.

“We’re talking about a seismic upheaval in American politics,” says Jay Rundson, a Republican pollster. “These people are going to sweep into office on waves of dissatisfaction with the direction of our country. They will be tackling items like the environment and the alternative minimum tax, and I’m just horrified, with blood rising to the surface of my skin, that most of them don’t know what the AMT is and can’t even spell ‘alternative.'”

“President Obama is a muslin,” said Ruth Gabel of Carlsbad, Calif., trying to refer to the religion of Islam but instead referring to loosely woven white cotton fabric originating in the Middle East. “Liberals wont report the truth.”

As the frustration with Washington reaches critical mass, the Tea Party movement, bereft of basic understanding of politics, statistics, science and spelling, has turned to problematic candidates with little understanding of the political process or the mechanisms of legal procedure.

The Republican primary winner for the U.S. Senate seat from Delaware, Christine O’Donnell, has in the past criticized masturbation and reportedly used campaign contributions to pay her rent, and is considered so unelectable that even Karl Rove, the Republican political strategist and senior adviser to George W. Bush, has called her “nutty.”

“As the winds of change whip through the neoclassical white peristyles, arcades and hallways of Washington, we need to be prepared, just as we were not for Hurricane Katrina, to deal with this onslaught of poorly read, even more poorly skills-tested people reaching the pinnacles of political power,” said moderate Republican Abe Hochstein. “They are about to put their hands on the levers of government. They not only don’t have the instructions, but they probably wouldn’t understand them if they did.”

“We’re at a crossroads in America,” said President Barack Obama. “We face a different set of challenges than our ancestors did. Social Security could be put on ice. Deep sea oil wells are going to rupture or explode. Carbon emissions will change the composition of our skies. Americans are frustrated. So frustrated they can barely articulate their rage. And when I say barely articulate, I mean, they can’t put it into coherent sentences, linear arguments or even understandable grammar.”

Laura Franklin, a grade school teacher from Pensacola, Fla., has been tutoring Tea Party members for the last year or so to help give them better language and speaking tools to get their points across.

“These are people with lots of feelings and strong convictions,” says Franklin. “Things are happening that they don’t understand, and when a person feels disoriented and disenfranchised, at the mercy of political forces he can’t fathom, then he makes self-defeating mistakes out of anger and has a compulsion to repeat them. What I want to do is get these people reading some books and learning something about the forces affecting them. That will help them better focus this awesome energy they have … or, better yet maybe they can peaceably leave the tea party if they wish.”

“I’m through with the taxes and the bailouts and the government messing with Medicare,” said Rosemary Grothe, of Lubbock, Texas, repeatedly contradicting herself.

Jerry Rathskiller, however, of Eureka Springs, Arkansas, was more sanguine after working with a tutor for a few months.

“I used to be a birther,” said Rathskiller, “But after my tutor Shelly taught me what the concept of scientific falsifiability was, I realized how much I don’t know and thought I better shut my mouth before I start to look any stupider.”

An important thing to do with tea party members is to teach them strong verbs, says Franklin.

“They tend to do poorly with these. Usually what you see in tea party members is strings of nouns with no correlation to each other: ‘bailouts,’ ‘Obamacare,’ ‘Acorn,’ ‘Socialist,’ ‘Communist,’ ‘Palin,’ ‘taxes,’ ‘liberal media.’

Franklin says that verbs used with these words and phrases might illuminate them better.

“When a man says ‘Obama is a socialist,’ that doesn’t tell us much,” said Franklin to one of her students. “Maybe you explain with a strong verb what he has done that makes you think that. Perhaps you could make a more concrete statement such as ‘Obama will not let the alternative minimum tax expire.'”

The student stared into his notebook perplexed. Franklin shook her head.

“Patience,” she shrugged. “That’s the hallmark of a good teacher. John Maynard Keynes was so smart he could argue mathematicians like Bertrand Russell under the table. Now we have all these people on the Internet calling Keynes ‘stupide.'”

“I remember the very first things crossed off the “to do” list of our emboldened leaders,” said O’Donnell* speaking at a Family Research Council conference in a barely coherent jumble of hot-button words with no diagrammable structure. ” … They started talking about Obamacare and the bailouts. One industry after another. And our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Confusion everywhere with chatter about withdrawal dates. Plans for closing Gitmo and trying terrorists in Manhattan. And looming Supreme Court vacancies.”

“Reading is fundamental,” said Rove. “I don’t want to bash anyone. All I can say is that I’ve gotten a lifetime of joy out of reading, and although I have preached to dummies all my life, I can finally say that it has come back to bite me in the ass and I sure wish now that we could send an army of brigadistas out to explain some basic ideas about science, math, statistics and meteorology to the tea party movement. If we don’t, we may be surely lost.”

*Most of the quotes here are fictional. The O’Donnell comments are unfortunately not.

Posted in Politics | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments »

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