Category Archives: entertainment and popular culture

Who You Callin’ “Conservative”?

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One quick follow-up to yesterday’s “Not Funny” post — today all manner of people are scrambling to disown Don Imus and blame his reign of (rhetorical) terror on their ideological enemies. For example, rightie Brian Maloney says some people (identified as “key leftists”) are calling Imus a “conservative.” Maloney writes, “That’s despite his endorsement of John Kerry in the 2004 presidential race and past tirades against the Bush Administration from a decidedly leftist perspective.” Maloney doesn’t explain what he means by “decidedly leftist perspective.”

Maloney provides one example of Imus being called a “conservative,” from a Media Matters press release quoting David Brock, who says,

“More and more Americans are coming to understand the damage done by major news organizations providing a platform for bigoted commentary and other conservative misinformation, and they are demanding change. MSNBC’s decision is an important step in the right direction.”

Maloney provides another example that purports to be of a “key leftist” calling Imus a “conservative,” but the word conservative doesn’t appear anywhere in his example. The quote is from Air America founder Sheldon Drobny, who complained that some “idiot commentator” had called Imus a liberal, which is absurd. I’m not sure what point Maloney thought he was making by highlighting this quote. He either thinks it is self-evident that Imus is a liberal (which is absurd), or that saying that someone is “not a liberal” is the same thing as calling him a “conservative.”

Actually, it’s very common for people to be neither liberals nor conservatives in any meaningful sense of those words, and I’d say Imus is a good example. I think David Brock misspoke when he used the word “conservative” in conjunction with Imus. True conservatives are an endangered species in America these days. George W. Bush isn’t one, and I doubt Brian Maloney is, either. Most of the critters one bumps into these days who identify themselves as “conservatives” are really pseudo conservatives, per historian Richard Hofstadter. Imus doesn’t fit into any category neatly, but I’d say he’s closer to being a pseudo conservative than anything else.

Instapundit and Moe Lane of RedState chime in and express outrage that anyone would dare call Imus a “conservative.” Lane writes,

Not much else to say, except: frankly, you can keep him, guys. He ain’t one of us (although I fully expect the first round of duckspeakers claiming otherwise within the next twenty four hours); he’s your problem, so you deal with him. I don’t particularly feel like catering to your side’s delusion that all sin comes from the Right, so I shan’t; and I encourage my compadres to do the same.

The only links provided by Instapundit and Lane link either to each other or to Brian Maloney. So, basically, these fellas found one example of someone using the word “conservative” in a press release about Imus and they’re whining about all “leftists” everywhere. A number of other rightie blogs are joining this circus, and it’s possible one of them has come up with another example, but frankly I’m not terribly interested in sniffing this out any further. As I said, I wouldn’t call Imus a “conservative.”

At the same time, support for John Kerry in 2004 is hardly proof of anyone being liberal. By 2004 the two or three genuine conservatives left in America had abandoned George Bush. And since the principle and bedrock value of American liberalism is equality, a hard-core bigot like Imus cannot be a “liberal” any more than a cold-blooded critter that lays eggs can be a “mammal.”

Digby spoke to this “ideological confusion” yesterday.

I just had a conversation with a wingnut in which I was held responsible for Imus because the so-called liberal media were his strongest defenders so therefore, they are racists, which makes me a racist also. Did you get that logic? That’s where they’re going with this, folks.

I have written before about my pet peeve that people believe the mainstream media represent liberalism, particularly the alleged liberals of the punditocrisy. (Think Richard Cohen.) And because of this, they also don’t have a clue what “liberals” really believe in since politicians babble in politico speak and these sanctioned pundits and talking heads are so incoherent that they rarely make any sense.

Regardless of their designated perch on the media political spectrum, the fact is that these people are part of a decadent political establishment, which has almost nothing to do with liberalism anymore (if it ever did.) But the successful conflation of “liberal” and “media” has brought all the disgust at the pompous clubbiness of the media gasbags down on our heads and I resent the hell out of it.

Digby goes on to explain that she doesn’t particularly feel like catering to the rightie delusion that all sin comes from the Left. Amen, Digby.

Update: See also Pam of Pam’s House Blend.

Not Funny

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[Update: MSNBC dropped Imus altogether. Maybe they’ll do something really outrageous and put a real news program on in that time slot? I’m not holding my breath.]

[Another update: Don’t miss the Steve M. smackdown (figuratively speaking) of Little Lulu.]

Some time in the mid to late 1970s I was working for a small book publisher in Cincinnati. One of the contracted authors was a professional after-dinner speaker; this guy made a living traveling around the country entertaining Kiwanis and Lions and Elks. He was especially prized as a humorist, and my employer was publishing a collection of his tried-and-true jokes.

So there I was reading his manuscript, but I wasn’t laughing. Mostly, I was appalled. At least half of the “jokes” were aggressive and nakedly hostile put-downs of women. There was a whole section devoted to Ugly Wives, for example. And then I came upon an anecdote about a fellow buying a fishing rod. The punch line revealed he was buying the rod to beat his wife.

I blue-penciled that puppy out of the manuscript faster’n you can say “male chauvinist pig.”

The author complained to the managing editor, saying that I had no sense of humor. The managing editor, also a woman, read the “joke” and backed up my decision. It stayed out.

The truth was, if I’d deleted everything in that manuscript I found offensive there wouldn’t have been enough material left to fill a moderately sized pamphlet, let alone a book. (As a junior staffer, I didn’t have the authority to request the amount of revision I desired, which involved stuffing that manuscript someplace where the sun don’t shine.) But at the time, most of this “humor” was representative of much “humor” we’d all seen on television and in movies. It was mainstream stuff, in other words, although less so in the 1970s than it had been in the 1950s and 1960s.

I often wish someone would research the stand-up comedy routines presented on such venues as the Ed Sullivan Show and analyze how much of it amounted to complaining about women. Mothers-in-law, women drivers, nags, and of course ugly wives were the meat and potatoes of comedy in those days. A comedian — always male, of course — had only to say “my mother-in-law!” or “women drivers!” and roll his eyes, and the audience would howl. Thanks in large part to second-wave feminism, by the late 1970s television comedy had mostly moved on to other topics, but our author from the rubber chicken circuit was still telling the same jokes he’d been telling for twenty years.

And if he’d published his joke collection a decade earlier, the fishing rod story would have stayed in, and it’s unlikely anyone would have had second thoughts about it.

By now you’ve guessed I’m going to talk about Don Imus. Yes, but I also want to look at the use and abuse of put-down humor generally.

For some reason, in the years after World War II American society went on a woman-hating binge. You might remember that in The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan cataloged considerable differences in the way women were portrayed in popular culture in the 1950s to early 1960s (Mystique was published in 1963) compared to the 1930s. Women in the 1950s were seen as considerably dumber (remarkably, even women’s magazines were “dumbed down” in the 1950s) and more helpless. About the same time it became trendy among psychiatrists to blame all manner of pathologies on bad mothering and to declare that a woman who wasn’t interested in being a housewife and mother must be neurotic and needed psychiatric help.

I honestly don’t know why this was happening, but I remember it well. And as I remember it, second-wave feminism began as a backlash to the postwar put down of women and only later expanded to challenge sexism throughout human history. It’s also clear to me that the pervasiveness of misogynist humor in those years helped keep women “in their place.” Believe me, the wife jokes you might have heard the late Henny Youngman or Rodney Dangerfield tell were mild compared to what was common fare in the 1950s, and those two gentlemen — Dangerfield in particular — usually told their jokes in a way that made the joke on themselves as much as their allegedly ill-favored wives. (Dangerfield sample: “My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met.”) The jokes of the day carried the subliminal message to women that we’d better not be ugly, or shrews, or nags, or assume competence in anything but cooking and housecleaning.

This morning I googled “psychology of humor” and came across this book, big chunks of which are available for reading online. Humor is a social phenomenon, it says, that can be employed to many ends, both beneficial and malicious. It’s common for people to express genuine hostility in the form of teasing, for example. “Some of the social functions of humor can also be quite aggressive, coercive, and manipulative,” it says at the bottom of page 17.

Some researcher in the 1930s made the brilliant discovery that Jews found anti-Jewish jokes less funny than did non-Jews (page 51). On the other hand, the text continues, a survey done in 1959 claimed that an audience of blacks laughed at anti-black jokes as much as a white audience did. (It doesn’t say if a black or a white comedian was telling the jokes; seems to me that would make a big difference on how the audience perceived the humor.) And I see on pages 51-52 that some guy named Cantor in 1976 “found that both female and male college students showed greater appreciation for disparagement humor in which a male had the last laugh at a female’s expense, as compared to jokes in which a female disparaged a male.” Somehow I suspect that wouldn’t be true now.

But I think that illustrates the damage put-down humor can do. Women (or a racial minority) raised in a culture in which women are pervasively ridiculed are likely to internalize that ridicule and see themselves as worthy of ridicule. And those women in college in 1976 had been raised in a culture that had relentlessly ridiculed women. I don’t doubt that generations of vicious racist humor had a psychological impact on African Americans as well.

Like my author from years ago, Imus probably thinks some people have no sense of humor. But there’s a big difference between Imus insulting the political and media elites who are guests on his program and calling the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy headed ho’s.” If he and his defenders can’t see that, there’s something seriously wrong with the lot of them.

It’s a plain fact that expressions of malice are often disguised as humor. I found this in a Psychology Today article:

This aggressive type of humor is used to criticize and manipulate others through teasing, sarcasm and ridicule. When it’s aimed against politicians by the likes of Ann Coulter, it’s hilarious and mostly harmless. But in the real world, it has a sharper impact. Put-down humor, such as telling friends an embarrassing story about another friend, is a socially acceptable way to deploy aggression and make others look bad so you look good.

When challenged on their teasing, the put-down joker often turns to the “just kidding” defense, allowing the aggressor to avoid responsibility even as the barb bites. Martin has found no evidence that those who rely on this type of humor are any less well-adjusted. But it does take a toll on personal relationships.

The author of this piece and I disagree on the alleged hilarity of Coulter. Coulter’s “humor” is about as close to pure hate speech as “humor” gets. Real humorists don’t wish for people to be poisoned or assassinated, for example. There may be a fine line between “poking fun” and hate speech. But when you go from, say, Bob Hope’s “Carter wants to go to Washington. He’ll feel right at home there – he was raised on a nut farm” to Coulter’s “We need somebody to put rat poison in Justice Stevens’s créme brulée,” I say you’ve crossed that line.

There is no question much hostile rhetoric is being flung from all partisan sides these days, and some of this rhetoric is in the form of humor. Bob Geiger puts together a wonderful selection of political cartoons every Saturday morning, which I usually link to. I’m sure righties find many of these cartoons offensive; frankly, some of them aren’t the least bit humorous, even to me, but they make valid points. It’s also true that much humor is in the eye of the beholder. But I think political cartoons should be judged by the point they make. Is the point true? Or is it just about mocking someone the viewer doesn’t like?

I love the way Mike Luckovich draws George W. Bush — a furious, strutting little man with big ears (here’s another example). Luckovich captures the essence of the inner George Bush, IMO. On the other hand, now that Nancy Pelosi has been labeled Public Enemy Number One by the Right, the righties are going all out lampooning her. Here’s an animated GIF making the rounds today. It’s not just hateful; it’s also dishonest. The point it’s trying to make is a lie. Righties might drop by here and call me a hypocrite for approving Luckovich but not the dumb GIF. I don’t think so, but that’s me.

This is a huge topic that would take a lot more blog posts to full explore, and I’ve gone on way too long. To close, I give you Colbert —

Update: Well, I thought I was done, but I guess I have to keep writing — Today’s question is if what Imus said about “ho’s” is bad, isn’t it just as bad coming from rapper?


Kevin Drum gets it:

A slur aimed at specific people is obviously different than a generic slur in a rap song, but it’s not that different. If one is offensive, so is the other, and it’s hard to argue that the cesspool of misogyny in contemporary rap has no effect on the wider culture. It’s not that this excuses what Imus did. It’s just the opposite. If we’re justifiably outraged by what Imus said, shouldn’t we be just as outraged with anybody else who says the same thing, regardless of their skin color?

Exactly. On the other hand, Fontana Labs writes,

Data point: the thought police of the academy have managed to mold my psyche to the point where Imus’s remark is genuinely, viscerally unpleasant to me, both in its stupid racism and the way it pollutes what should have been a moment of enjoyment and pride for the Rutgers team. On the other hand, I can listen to mainstream hip-hop without cringing at, or feeling indignation toward, the sex and the violence. What explains this awkward conjunction of attitudes? One hypothesis: I’ve accepted, at some level, the presence of lyrics like these as features of the genre, and in doing so I ignore them.

Back in the 1960s we talked a lot about “consciousness raising.” We’d lived in a culture in which sexist and racist rhetoric was ubiquitous, like air. We read and heard things all the time that would be shocking now, and thought nothing of it. It took a lot of work and a lot of courage on the part of civil rights and feminist activists to get people to realize how bleeped up that was, and how damaging it was. Essentially the rhetoric was being generated by a dominant group to keep subordinates “in their place.” And I don’t see what’s different about sexist rhetoric in rap music. Ignoring this stuff isn’t necessarily a healthy sign.

Update2: A rightie blogger is calling TBogg out for writing this of Condi Rice:

Oh oh….looks like a pouty Brown Sugar is going to ask Daddy to buy her another pair of Ferragamos. Or invade another country.

Racist? Or just a fair slam of Condi Rice? The rightie argues,

… of course, Ms. Rice not being authentically black or even authentically female, she’s just getting what she deserves, because the Rules of PC only apply to the Right. The Left, regardless of who is in power, is *always* speaking truth to power and therefore exempt from any such considerations.

But Tbogg doesn’t say she isn’t “authentically black or even authentically female.” The “Ferragamos” remark reminds us of Condi’s shoe shopping while New Orleans drowned; that’s a fair slam. “Invade another country” is a fair slam also, given the role Condi played in stampeding the nation into Iraq. The question is, is it racist per se to mention Condi’s skin color in any way? I would argue the “brown sugar” remark is more sexist than racist, because it implies that Bush is her “sugar daddy.” But I think calling her “brown” is only an insult if you think there’s something wrong with being brown. If Condi were caucasian would mention of her red hair or blue eyes have been an insult per se? I don’t think so. Maybe I’m wrong, though.

Shocked Jocks

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As I remember it, the “shock jock” phenomenon started ca. 1980, about the same time the Reagan Administration started. Actually shock jocks had been around for awhile, but it was about that time mainstream pop culture took notice of them, and they became the rage. (Coincidence? I wonder.) Radio stations all over the nation hired their own pubescent pottymouths to attract attention and listeners. I never found any of them to be the least bit amusing, so I tuned out.

Apparently it’s a Big Bleeping Deal that Don Imus was suspended for two weeks. I wouldn’t miss him if he disappeared entirely, but that’s me. Never once having listened to Imus for more than five minutes at a stretch — and that maybe twice a year — I have absolutely no idea why he’s popular. Nor can I imagine on what planet it is funny to call the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy headed ho’s.”

Sometimes there can be honest disagreements about what constitutes racism, but I don’t see room for disagreement on this. Nor was calling Gwen Ifil the “cleaning lady” anything but racism. Sometimes offensive speech is defensible, but in this case, it isn’t. And for the life of me I can’t comprehend how anyone could defend it. Yet they do.

On an almost related note — in the early 1980s (possibly longer) there was a morning radio host on WLW am radio in Cincinnati who was genuinely funny without ever being vulgar or mean. I still think about him sometimes and chuckle, even though I haven’t listened to his program since 1983. His shtick was receiving phone calls from a cast of demented recurring characters (played by himself). Is there anyone reading this who knows who I’m talking about and can remember his name? I’m drawing a blank.

Al Wins!

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If you’re watching the Oscars, by now you know Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” won in the best feature length documentary category. If you missed it, you can watch Al’s acceptance at Crooks and Liars.

Be sure to see William Booth’s article in WaPo, “Al Gore, Rock Star.” Sample:

Take the Cannes Film Festival: Al Gore was mobbed. By French people. He was a presenter at the Grammy Awards, alongside Queen Latifah, where he got one of the biggest welcomes of the night. “Wow. . . . I think they love you, man. You hear that?” the current Queen asked the former veep. Earlier this month, the ticket Web site at the University of Toronto crashed when 23,000 people signed on in three minutes to get a seat to hear Gore do his thing on the oceanic carbon cycle. At Boise State, Gore and his slide show sold out 10,000 seats at the Taco Bell Arena, reportedly “faster than Elton John.”

That popping sound you hear is the exploding of rightie heads.

Bye, Art. It’s Been Fun.

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I remember being an Art Buchwald fan while I was still in elementary school, which was about two centuries ago. We were both a lot younger then.

Art Buchwald died yesterday at the age of 81. He kept working right to the end; there’s an archive of recent columns here. If anyone can find some of his older work online, let me know.

    “Whether it’s the best of times or the worst of times, it’s the only time we’ve got” — Art Buchwald, 1925-2007

Update: More from the Library of Congress.

Cute Animal News

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Off the whackjob charts — Media Matters reports that the Christmas warriors have taken cartoon penguin hostages.

Not content with their annual discussion of a supposed “War on Christmas,” conservative talking heads have taken on a new issue this season: environmentalist propaganda in children’s movies. CNN Headline News’ Glenn Beck and Fox News’ Neil Cavuto recently spoke out against Warner Bros.’ new animated children’s movie Happy Feet; criticizing the film for its alleged pro-environmentalist content. Media Matters for America spokesman Karl Frisch responded to the criticism, lambasting the conservative talking heads for their return to holiday-season absurdity.

“The idea that anyone would make such comments against a children’s movie about a tap-dancing penguin shows just how low the bar has dropped for what the media consider real news,” Frisch said. “Conservatives seem to have abandoned their traditional coverage of the supposed ‘War on Christmas’ for a ‘War on Penguins.’ “

Full disclosure: My daughter and I saw Happy Feet this weekend at the local IMAX cinema. My daughter is 26, btw. Except for the excessive number of rugrats in the audience, we had a fine time. Good animation, catchy music, Hugh Jackman doing an Elvis impersonation. What more could one want?

…in a November 17 entry on his Townhall.com weblog, conservative talk-show host Michael Medved referred to the film as “Crappy Feet,” and said it was the “darkest, most disturbing feature length animated film ever offered by a major studio.”

I take it Medved never saw Dumbo.

From the November 20 edition of Fox News’ Your World with Neil Cavuto:

    CAVUTO: Well, those cute little penguins in Happy Feet winning at the box office, earning more than $42 million. Now, in the movie, the penguins are starving, the fish are all gone, and it’s clear that humans and big business are to blame. Is Hollywood using kids films to promote a far-left message? Entertainment critic Holly McClure says yes and it’s wrong. Holly, so you thought it was over the top?

    McCLURE: Well, I did, Neil. I tell you. First of all, I went watching this movie thinking, “OK, great. A lighthearted, fun film. Love these animated pictures, and it’s interesting how realistic it looks.” And you get in there and you’re enjoying all the fun and frivolity, and, yes, it’s kind of a takeoff of the penguin documentary, and then along comes the subtle messages. And one by one they come in, and I felt like I was watching Dirty Dancing, penguin-style.

Perhaps McClure was watching a different penguin movie.

    CAVUTO: Well, you know, Holly, I saw this with my two little boys. And what I found offensive — I don’t care what your stands are on the environment — is that they shove this in a kids movie. So you hear the penguins are starving, and they’re starving because of mean old man, mean old companies, Arctic fishing, a big taboo. And they’re foisting this on my kids who, frankly, were more bored that it was a nearly two-hour movie, and they’re kids!

    McCLURE: Well, I’m just kind of curious. Were your kids scared or kind of bothered at all by the big walrus?

There was no walrus.

    Because I thought there were some pretty intense scenes. I don’t call this a toddler — a little-kid-friendly movie.

The penguins are chased around by leopard seals and killer whales, but nobody dies. (Unlike in Bambi.)

    … McCLURE: Well, what’s even more objectionable is the fact that they present all these things about man being mean, and taking the fish away, and the — you know, killing the wildlife and fish and penguins. And then furthermore, which, I don’t want to ruin anything for anybody, but to see penguins in an aquarium situation. OK, are we supposed to tell our kids then it’s not right to go to San Diego Sea World, or it’s not right to go to your local zoo, or it’s not right to have animals where you can go observe them? Should they feel guilty, then? I think the message is, “Yeah, we subtly put it in there.” But where does it stop? It doesn’t give you any solutions. So our kids should feel guilty, then, for enjoying to see wildlife, you know, in man’s environment?

My daughter commented after we left the theater that it was nice the humans in the film were not bad, meaning that they were not deliberately mean to the penguins. They just didn’t realize there were all these singing and dancing penguins that didn’t have enough fish to eat. (Should I post a spoiler alert? Oh, who am I kidding …) At the end people came to make a film of the singing and dancing penguins, the humans stopped taking all the fish, the hero penguin (Elijah Wood) gets the girl penguin (Brittany Murphy; not sexually explicit), and even the grumpy old penguin who didn’t approve of dancing (Hugo Weaving) was happy.

I suppose PETA could complain that the film says animals are only worth saving if they are entertaining.

On reflection, I suppose one could say the film makes fun of religion. The penguins have a penguin religion that venerates a mystical giant penguin. And a penguin character named Lovelace (Robin Williams) is depicted as a cross between a television evangelist and New Age guru. (The main penguin characters go on a heroic quest to get one of those plastic six-pack ring holders off Lovelace’s neck. I won’t reveal how that turned out.)

You might also argue that the film promotes family values, since the penguins’ highest purpose in life is producing chicks. This is why righties got off on March of the Penguins, which is about penguins producing chicks. Jonathan Miller wrote for The New York Times (September 13, 2005):

“March of the Penguins,” the conservative film critic and radio host Michael Medved said in an interview, is “the motion picture this summer that most passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing.”

Speaking of audiences who feel that movies ignore or belittle such themes, he added: “This is the first movie they’ve enjoyed since ‘The Passion of the Christ.’ This is ‘The ‘Passion of the Penguins.’ ”

In part, the movie’s appeal to conservatives may lie in its soft-pedaling of topics like evolution and global warming. The filmmakers say they did not consciously avoid those topics – indeed, they say they are strong believers in evolutionary theory – but they add that they wanted to create a film that would reach as many people as possible.

“It’s obvious that global warming has an impact on the reproduction of the penguins,” Luc Jacquet, the director, told National Geographic Online. “But much of public opinion appears insensitive to the dangers of global warming. We have to find other ways to communicate to people about it, not just lecture them.”

OK, but Happy Feet didn’t say a word about evolution, and I don’t recall anything about global warming. And Medved is OK with films that push his political ideas.

But if Medved was offended by Happy Feet, this news story ought to make his head explode:

Cetaceans, the group of marine mammals that includes whales and dolphins, have demonstrated remarkable auditory and communicative abilities, as well as complex social behaviors. A new study published online November 27, 2006 in The Anatomical Record, the official journal of the American Association of Anatomists, compared a humpback whale brain with brains from several other cetacean species and found the presence of a certain type of neuron cell that is also found in humans. This suggests that certain cetaceans and hominids may have evolved side by side. The study is available online via Wiley InterScience at http://www.interscience.wiley.com/journal/ar.

Could humpback whales be smarter than Michael Medved? Hell, there are goldfish smarter than Michael Medved.

Facts and Fictions, Part II

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Following up the last post — what got me started on righties and reality was this TAP article by Brad Reed.

As the midterm elections approach, many conservatives are feeling betrayed by one of their most important allies in the war on terror: Battlestar Galactica.

To which I thought, WTF?

I just recently got into Galactica. I’ve been following season 3 while catching up with seasons 1 and 2 through Netflix. It’s entertaining. However, it has never occurred to me to incorporate Galactica into some inner political fantasy life. I keep real current events and television fiction in separate boxes, thanks.

I guess I just don’t think like a rightie.

In the series, a fleet of space ships carrying about 50,000 humans is fleeing evil killer robots, called Cylons, after the Cylons massacred most of the human species. Apparently righties came to identify with the fleeing humans and to associate Cylons with the dreaded Islamofascists.

National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, who writes regularly about Galactica’s politics on NRO’s group blog, The Corner, also picked up on parallels between the show and the war on terror. Goldberg took particular glee in attacking Galactica’s anti-war movement, which he said consisted of “radical peaceniks” and “peace-terrorists” who “are clearly a collection of whack jobs, fifth columnists and idiots.” Goldberg also praised several characters for trying to rig a presidential election. “I liked that the good guys wanted to steal the election and, it turns out, they were right to want to,” wrote Goldberg. Stolen elections, evil robots, crazed hippies … what more could a socially inept right-winger want from a show?

I must not have gotten to the part about the anti-war movement. Season 2 did have a storyline about a couple of Cylon prisoners who were subjected to Abu Ghraib-type abuse, but otherwise in the first two seasons I didn’t see much resemblance to the Global War on Terror. At the very beginning of the series the Cylons, with huge technological and military advantages over the humans, won a total war over humans. The few humans who escaped are trying to haul their butts out of harm’s way, but the Cylons keep catching up to them. An intriguing twist is that the humans lived in a distant star system, and they are trying to get back to Earth, which they know about only from religion and myths. And that’s the series. That doesn’t seem to me much like our current asymmetrical war against Muslim extremists, particularly if you assume humans = Americans and Cylons = terrorists. (But what does it tell us that righties associated America with characters who are already defeated and helpless to do much but flee their more powerful enemies? Hmmmm?)

Brad Reed continues,

But alas, this love affair between Galactica and the right was not to last: in its third season, the show has morphed into a stinging allegorical critique of America’s three-year occupation of Iraq. The trouble started at the end of the second season, when humanity briefly escaped the Cylons and settled down on the tiny planet of New Caprica. The Cylons soon returned and quickly conquered the defenseless humans. But instead of slaughtering everyone, the Cylons decided to take a more enlightened path by “benevolently occupying” the planet and imposing their preferred way of life by gunpoint. The humans were predictably not enthused about their allegedly altruistic rulers, and they immediately launched an insurgency against them using improvised explosive devices and suicide bombers.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think the screenwriters set out to make Galactica an allegory of the war on terror, one way or another. I think they set out to tell a good story. (Of course, I’m also one of those purists who insists The Lord of the Rings is not an allegory of World War II.) It is worth noting that the series is based on an earlier (and dreadfully boring, as I remember) series produced in 1978. Certainly the screenwriters have added elements from current events — torture of prisoners, suicide bombings — and some storylines do seem allegorical. But interpreting the overall series as pure allegory just doesn’t work, whether you are rooting for the humans or the Cylons.

Anyway, “Galacticons” like Goldberg and John Podheretz are mourning the program’s betrayal of their fantasies. And a rightie fan named Michael who has dedicated a blog to Galactica wrote:

Has this show jumped the shark? The writers are using current events in the Middle East as the source for their material, but putting the humans in the position of being the terrorists. The humans even resort to suicide bombings.

Terrorist tactics only work against the United States and Israel because we’re too good to wipe all of them out. The Cylons, on the other hand, had no problems with destroying twenty billion humans, why wouldn’t they destroy the remaining fifty thousand?

Terrorism also requires that the side being terrorized cares about dying. But the Cylons don’t care if they die. They just get reincarnated into a new body.

Why are people so pissed if the Cylons “massacre” two hundred humans? Hello McFly! The Cylons already massacred twenty billion.

I don’t think this storyline works at all.

I think somebody needs a more active social life. I also think the season 3 storyline works fine, if you aren’t married to the idea that the program is an allegory of the war on terror and can just enjoy it as science fiction. But that’s me. (BTW, if you’re familiar with the series, this post will amaze you. Not in a good way, however.)

Brad Reed documents a number of other recent connections between rightie politics and popular fiction, and concludes,

The most notable thing about the Galacticons is that even when they aren’t directly referencing science fiction, they still sound like total space cadets when discussing American military power. As they understand it, America is an omnipotent level-20 Warmage with 19 Strength and 20 Charisma who can wipe out entire armies of mariliths, gold dragons, and goblinoids with the flick of a wrist.

During a recent debate on Meet the Press, Tim Russert asked former GOP House Majority Leader Newt Gingrich if having 130,000 of our troops stuck in Iraq had reduced our ability to deal effectively with Iran and North Korea. “Only in our minds,” Gingrich replied. Glenn Reynolds, the prominent transhumanist conservative blogger, once wrote that the problem with Bush’s approach to the war on terror wasn’t that he got our military stuck in an Iraqi civil war, but rather that he “hasn’t been vigorous enough in toppling governments and invading countries in that region.” And William Kristol, one of America’s preeminent sci-fi foreign policy thinkers, said in the aftermath of Israel’s failed bombing campaign against Hezbollah that American should take the opportunity to launch a preemptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “Why wait?” asked the dweeby Galacticon sage. Such fantasies of military conquest are particularly galling since the Galacticons really don’t seem to think that waging multiple preemptive wars would have any adverse consequences. The world, it seems, is their Risk board.

Of course, it’s easy to talk tough about invading multiple nations if you’re not the one doing any of the work. The thrill the Galacticons get from watching the Iraq war on their TVs is the same thrill the typical Mountain Dew-swilling reject feels watching Battlestar Galactica; it’s only fun for them because they’re not going through it themselves. But this is sadly what characterizes much of Bush’s approach to the war on terror, which has been less about real sacrifice than cheap voyeuristic thrills and empty feel-good platitudes — combined with foolhardy notions of American omnipotence in the world. While the outright buffoonery of the Galacticon jingonauts is certainly amusing, the overall Galacticazation of American war policy is anything but.

Many have remarked on the rich fantasy lives of chickenhawks. See, for example, this Think Progress post and my comments on a Mark Steyn column. Digby wrote awhile back that many righties seem to be living a vicarious fantasy life of war-movie glory through the troops:

We are dealing with a group of right wing glory seekers who chose long ago to eschew putting themselves on the line in favor of tough talk and empty posturing — the Vietnam chickenhawks and their recently hatched offspring of the new Global War On Terrorism. These are men (mostly) driven by the desire to prove their manhood but who refuse to actually test their physical courage. Neither are they able to prove their virility as they are held hostage by prudish theocrats and their own shortcomings. So they adopt the pose of warrior but never actually place themselves under fire. This is a psychologically difficult position to uphold. Bullshitting yourself is never without a cost. …

… Playing laptop Pattons at full volume, supporting the president and the entire power structure of the government is their only way of proving to themselves that they are warriors. They are damaged by their own contradictory past and as a result they cannot see their way through the haze of emotional turmoil to seek out and find real solutions to the problem of terrorism. They lash out with trash talk and threats and constant references to their own resolve because they are afraid. They’ve always been afraid.

I’ve read that children like to pretend they are superheroes because it calms their fears. They can pretend they are not small and helpless. Some psychologists say that a retreat into superhero fantasies feels good to adults, too:

Legendary sociologist Norbert Elias suggested that in an increasingly structured society, fantasy books, games and movies create arenas for the “controlled decontrolling” of emotions. It’s not socially acceptable to duel that surly human resources director with a stapler gun at 20 paces, and destroying a castle with a trebuchet isn’t an option for the average white-collar worker. Instead, against a backdrop of magic and myth, heroic fantasy allows us to prove our mettle by saving some parallel world from easily identifiable bad guys.

But which bad guys? Let’s go back to Brad Reed for a moment:

Last year, a Star Trek rerun inspired Minnesota Star-Tribune columnist and warblogger James Lileks to concoct a plan that would eliminate any liberals who opposed abusing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. “It’s time to institute Disintegration Chambers in our major American cities,” wrote Lileks, referring to a Star Trek episode that featured two tribes who preferred to fight wars by disintegrating their own people rather than sending them into live combat. Even though the episode was actually an allegory about the perverse methods governments use to shield their people from the brutal costs of war, Lileks took quite a fancy to the idea of forced disintegration, especially for his ideological foes.

“Here’s the deal,” he wrote. “We decide what constitutes torture, and identify it as the following: insufficient air conditioning, excess air conditioning, sleep deprivation, being chained to the floor, and other forms of psychological stress … Those who disagree with these techniques must sign a record that registers their complaints. When a terrorist finally spills the details on a forthcoming attack on, say, Chicago, the people who signed the register and live in Chicago are required to report to the disintegration chamber.”

Lileks probably believes this column was humorous. But it isn’t. As David Neiwert has documented in this and many other posts, eliminationism has become “a dominating feature of right-wing rhetoric.” I infer righties spend a lot of time fantasizing about suppressing, ejecting, or terminating us. In truth, righties have little faith in the processes of democracy; they want control.

And why do they want control? Is it because, deep down, they are fearful little weenies who feel helpless and weak, and who want a superhero to save them from the scary Cylons and Muslims and liberals?

* * *

Sorta kinda related: At Slate, William Saletan (who, truth be told, has had his own problems separating fact from fiction) discusses the fantasy world of Rush Limbaugh.

I once had a friend who listened to Rush Limbaugh three hours a day. He was a Republican operative. He sat in my apartment, wearing headphones, while I worked. He swore that if I put on the headphones for 10 minutes, I’d be hooked. So I put them on.

Inside the headphones was another world. Everyone in this world thought the same way, except liberals, and they were only cartoon characters, to be defeated as though in a video game. In the real world, my friend was unemployed and had been staying with me, rent-free, for two months. But inside the headphones, he could laugh about welfare bums instead of pounding the pavement.

Somebody said recently that the whole point of Rush Limbaugh is to help righties avoid reality. You can say that about the entire VRWC echo chamber, of course. But Saletan documents that Limbaugh has a hard time separating real life from stuff he’s seen on TV. Seems to be a common affliction.

Righties Can’t Read

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I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again; righties have the reading comprehension skills of a turnip. Today’s example:

There’s a profile of Jim Webb in today’s Washington Post that plays up Webb’s southwest Virginia roots. It begins this way:

About a year ago, before he was running for the Senate, James Webb took a colleague to the mountains of southwest Virginia to do some research for a movie they were working on.

Rob Reiner , meet my cousin Jewel and her husband, Buck. Jewel made a home-cooked meal for Webb and his producer-director friend. She pointed across the way to a nearby hollow and said:

“Ah wuz bawn rat ovah theyah.” That’s Reiner on the phone from Los Angeles, doing a mountain accent.

At night, Webb took Reiner to a rustic auditorium. There was bluegrass and flatfoot dancing.

“Incredible experience,” Reiner says.

Nostalgia kicked in as soon as I read this. I had a Great-Aunt Jewel who lived with Great-Uncle Carl on a little farm in the mountains, and I recall a dance — I’m not sure of the venue, but it might have been a church basement — where there was old-time fiddlin’ and clog dancing. It was explained to me once that the “clog” style common to the Ozarks is more Celtic — think Irish dancing — and the “flatfoot” style of the eastern mountains comes from English country dancing. I’m not going to swear that’s the truth, but it could be.

There may be few places in the country more foreign to Hollywood than Gate City, Va., and much of Webb’s livelihood has been to translate one culture for another. His dad’s family came out of these hollows, though Webb grew up on military bases all over the country. Over the course of his career, in books and more recently in screenplays, Webb, 60, has been writing about the dignity of his people — the gun-loving, country-music-singing, working-class whites of Scotch-Irish descent who fight in wars, staff the nation’s factories and shop its Wal-Marts.

“This people gave our country great things, including its most definitive culture,” Webb writes in his most recent book.

He knows that some folks might call his people rednecks. We pity those folks if Jim Webb is around when they say that.

The profile, by Libby Copeland, continues to describe Webb’s career in the Marines and in the Reagan Administration, where he was Secretary of the Navy. He is also a prolific writer; among other works he has published six novels and a book of nonfiction about Scotch-Irish culture. He has done some screenwriting as well, which the Allen campaign has tried to exploit by tying Webb to the “culture of Hollywood.” (And Ronald Reagan wasn’t tied to the “culture of Hollywood”?)

The funny thing is, Webb — a Democrat who became a Republican in the ’70s and a Democrat again in recent years — has been a largely conservative force both in movies and on the printed page. At various times he has eviscerated liberals, feminists, elites, academics and those who protested the Vietnam War. He has criticized Hollywood for its treatment of his people.

“His people” being the small-town and rural folk of southwest Virginia, note.

The project that took Webb and Reiner to the hills of southwestern Virginia is a script they’d been working on for a movie about this very subject. “Whiskey River” centers on an Iraq war soldier who hails from a world much like Gate City, Va., and what Reiner calls the “culture of service” this soldier comes from. It is also, Reiner says, about the fundamental unfairness of a war in which “only certain people have to sacrifice.”

The notion of his people’s sacrifice in wartime is a theme Webb has returned to again and again in his writing. In his 2004 book, “Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America,” Webb writes that the Scotch-Irish “have fed dedicated soldiers to this nation far beyond their numbers in every war.” In interviews, he recalls starting law school in 1972 and discovering that others were in “ethnocentric retreat.” Everyone else knew who they were and where they came from, everyone else had ethnic pride, but the identity of Webb’s own culture had been lost. He says his peers labeled him a white man of privilege, a WASP.

This is something I relate to, big-time. First, hillbilly culture — I should say “cultures,” because as the dancing styles illustrate there are distinctions — has never been properly recognized as a culture. And now the distinctions are mostly gone, and mountain cultures have dissipated to become nearly indistinguishable from small-town and rural cultures throughout most of America. That didn’t used to be so.

And I hate being mistaken for a WASP, even though I pass for one most of the time. I function in WASP culture (I think) because over the years, by trial and error, I learned to do so. (I had the advantage of being able to speak standard English. Nothing more clearly separates hard-core hillbillies from middle-class white folks than noun-verb agreement.)

In the decades since, Webb has studied the migrations of his people, exulting in their fighting history and puzzling over their entrenched poverty.

Entrenched white poverty is mostly rural and hidden away where most folks don’t see it. There are parts of the Ozarks in which families have been on welfare since they invented welfare, and whose residents can no more function in standard middle-class white culture than they can fly.

Then the profile describes Webb’s novels. I haven’t read his work, but I take it from the description that Webb uses fiction to explore the moral ambiguities and brutality of war. Naturally the Allen campaign is combing through his work, looking for anything he’s written they can twist around to use against him.

We’re getting to the punch line.

In a recent interview in the back of his campaign RV, Webb talks about how Hollywood has lampooned the Scotch-Irish. He says he is sick of this story line. For too long, he says, poor Southern whites have been one of the few groups it’s still safe to make fun of.

We are now more than 30 paragraphs into a story whose theme, restated over and over, is Jim Webb’s quest to bring respect to the lives and culture of “his people,” a group often disparaged as “rednecks.”

“Towel-heads and rednecks — of which I am one. If you write that word, please say that. I mean, I don’t use that pejoratively, I use it defensively. Towel-heads and rednecks became the easy villains in so many movies out there.“

Obviously — obvious if you have standard reading comprehension skills and take in the context of the entire profile — he’s saying that he hates the way filmmakers sterotype Middle Easterners and the subset of white Americans identified as “rednecks,” whatever that is these days. And naturally some rightie bloggers twisted this quote into meaning something else. Here we have Idiot #1:

“Towel-heads?” It’s on Page 3 of this Post story. I think that’s what they call a buried lede. I’m eagerly waiting the 188 Post stories on this slur. You know, the one that doesn’t require knowing a foreign language or finding three anonymous witnesses from 1972 to corroborate it. Yeah, I won’t hold my breath, either. Yeesh, if you’re gonna get your ire up about these things, I demand even-handed ire.

Idiot #2:

In August, Democrats and even some Republicans called upon Senator Allen to apologize for using the term “macaca”, a word with no meaning to the majority of Virginians but one that some took offense to. Senator Allen personally took it upon himself to quickly publicly apologize for the comment and even call the gentleman he directed it towards.

James Webb has now used a well known term that derides an entire ethnic group not just in Virginia or America but the world. I am willing to grant that he mis-spoke. That deserves not excuses but an apology.

Idiot #3:

I’m the last person who wants to be the PC language police around here, but can anyone imagine the media’s reaction if George Allen said something like this? As Tim Graham points out, the number of Post articles, news stories and editorial features with the word “Macaca” in them is up to 92!

Can we take up a collection and send these people somewhere for remedial reading classes?

Hate Speech and Its Consequences

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Michelle Malkin is on the warpath, literally, because YouTube is pulling what she calls “anti-jihad” videos from its servers.

She presents one such video, of which she is clearly proud, on her site. I say it’s not so much “anti-jihad” as “anti-Muslim.” The point of the video is to present Muslims as murderous, violent people who must be “stopped.” As I watched I noticed a photo in which a protester held up a sign calling for the beheading of anyone who insults the Prophet. At least the jihadists are upfront about their intentions. Malkin fervently stirs up hate and fear and says jihadists must be “stopped,” but doesn’t follow through with explicit proposals for how to do the “stopping.” The clear implication of the video is “kill them before they kill us,” but Malkin lacks the intellectual honesty to say that and will, I assume, deny that’s what she meant.

That’s why I say the video is not “anti-jihad.” More accurately, it is “counter-jihad,” albeit with the punches (or beheadings, if you will) pulled. An “anti-jihad” video would be one that proposes peaceful and rational solutions.

As the Buddha said, hate is never appeased by hate, but by metta (loving kindness; Dhammapada 1:3). Jesus had an opinion on this matter also:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. [Matthew 5:43-48, King James Version]

Is that not clear? Is there some other passage in the Gospels where Jesus threw in qualifiers (e.g., Thou mayest make hateful videos and post them on YouTube) that I’ve missed?

Awhile back Malkin threw a fit over alleged insults to Christianity. At least she’s speaking out for a religion other than her own, since she clearly isn’t a Christian herself. But let’s go on …

[Update: Right-wing columnist Jeff Jacoby says Jesus was wrong.]

Malkin also alleges that YouTube is being inconsistent with its standards, because videos posted by Islamic jihadists are allowed to remain. I’m going to take her word on that, as I’m not terribly interested in spending the next several hours checking out the content of YouTube. I’m all in favor of consistency in applying standards. However, “they get to do it, so why can’t we do it too?” is not a compelling moral argument.

Sharing of web content — text, music, photographs, or videos — brings up a number of issues touching on intellectual property, fair use, copyrights, and free access to information. I don’t want to get into most of those now, except to say that lots of people have some fuzzy notions about “rights” and “fairness.” As of this morning YouTube is, still, a privately owned company, I believe. It may be aquired by Google soon, which would make it part of a publicly owned company. What it isn’t is a public utility. That means nobody has a right to post whatever they want on YouTube. The owners are perfectly within their rights to restrict content to that which works well with their business model and doesn’t get them into legal trouble.

I feel the same way about blog comments. This blog is my property, I pay for the bandwidth, and I get to decide what stays and what goes. To anyone who gets pissed because I delete their comment, I say: Get your own blog. I am under no obligation to disseminate “information” that I believe is false or opinions with which I do not agree.

Which is pretty much what Tbogg says to Michelle:

Now Michelle could post her videos at her own site or at Hot Air but doing so indicates a lack lack of revolutionary zeal, not to mention that the cost of bandwidth would come out of her own mom pants pocket…. so I won’t mention it. This might cause the Great Leap Forward to become a mere Stumble on the Sidewalk-Crack Forward and those revolutions take way too long and then the proletariat masses get bored and they wander back inside to watch Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and wonder if they could afford one of those refrigerators that has the TV in the door because that would be really cool and besides, if you want money for people with minds that hate, all I can tell is brother you have to wait.

Shooby-do-wah.

Offensive speech was one of the issues discussed at the Clinton Global Initiatives conference, such as in this panel discussion. The discussion was interesting but not entirely satisfactory. For example, at one point Farheed Zakaria asked why protests in the Muslim world about speech — for example, over the Danish cartoons and recent comments by the Pope — so often turn violent, even murderous. Queen Rania of Jordan responded by calling for “more interreligious and intercultural dialogue between all of us,” which is nice, but it doesn’t answer the question. However, in another part of the same discussion she described how violence begets violence —

I would like to say for example, like two months ago, before the war in Lebanon began. Here’s Lebanon, which is made up of a group of people that are peace-loving. They are very moderate and open and modern by nature. They are the natural allies to the global community. Then this war took place. And innocent civilians were seeing, on a daily basis, bodies of babies being put into plastic bags. The vital infrastructure was destroyed. A quarter of the population was displaced. And I can say that over the course of two months, the Arab public became much more radicalized. Because they saw this injustice. They saw this grief. And even the moderates, what we thought was a moderate majority started to shrink, and you can see this shrinking taking place. And the extreme voices came out as the victorious ones. And you could see that the voice of moderation, the voices that called for peace and diplomacy and engagement, they are losing currency. They are being marginalized.

So, if you want to strengthen the moderates, we have to see ― people have to see the dividends of moderation. They have to see the dividends of peace. And now, they are not seeing them. So again, I just want to say that if we want to gain the moderates, if we want to increase ― it’s almost percentages, you know. The percentage of extremists to moderates. If you want to increase and strengthen your moderate block, then people have to really feel an important difference in their lives. They have to see justice. They have to see ― and as I said, an honest engagement and an interest in their cause.

As I explained in this post, at the CGI conference several speakers said we shouldn’t be talking about a war on terrorism, but about a war on extremism. And fighting extremism with military aggression is a bit like using heavy machinery to re-arrange a china shop. The china may indeed be re-arranged, but the end results may still be unsatisfactory.

Further, you can’t reduce extremism with counter-extremism, but with moderation. That’s why we as a society need to discourage extremism in our own midst, just as we wish moderate Muslims would speak out more forcefully about extremism in their backyards. I’m not calling for censorship. I’m just saying, one private citizen to another: The counter-jihadist videos are not helping any of us.

I mean, what is the point? As I say, Malkin doesn’t provide strategies for dealing with Muslim hate and anger; she’s just interested in stirring up hate and anger against Muslims. Does she think people need to be warned about Islamic terrorism? Are we not, in fact, perpetually and robustly being warned about Islamic terrorism?

As an eyewitness to the collapse of the WTC towers, and as someone who spends time in New York City and its public transportation and other infrastructures (likewise my children and friends), believe me, I don’t need to be warned about the dangers of terrorism. I am genuinely worried about train and subway bombings, à la Madrid and London. I worry that eventually we’ll be plagued by suicide bombers in our major cities.

There’s free speech, and there’s irresponsible speech — yelling fire in a crowded theater, and all that.

It seems to me that the video Ms. Malkin is so proud of serves no other function than to fan the flames of hate. If she presented information that is not already very public, or provided some kind of strategy for dealing with Islamic jihadism, that would be different. But she doesn’t. The video is nothing but hate speech, IMO.

Back during the Danish cartoon flap I mused over whether American news outlets were right not to republish the cartoons. Malkin was heading up a crusade to get those cartoons re-published all over America, saying that not publishing the cartoons was giving in to terrorists. I said in the earlier post that solidarity with the free speech of Danish newspapers was certainly a compelling stand.

But then I looked at the cartoons, and for the most part they were crude and hateful and conveyed no other message than Muslims are bad. They were not cartoons most American news editors would choose to publish without the controversy. And it’s not like the cartoons were hidden, as they were all over the web. So what do you call it if newspapers allowed themselves to be bullied by righties into publishing something they didn’t want to publish? Is coercion ever acceptable?

One of the commenters wrote, “Sorry, but I can’t see how cultural sensitivity and respect (which are good) should EVER trump a fundamental value in our own culture.” I respect that. On the other hand, the fact is that news media self-censor themselves all the time for the sake of cultural sensitivity. Racist, sexist, anti-semitic, and other bigoted expression once common in the American press are pretty scarce now. This self-censorship is inspired mostly by marketing — publishers don’t want to drive away readers by offending them. Ah, the magic of free markets …

Freedom of speech is a fundamental value in the West. Yet it has never been absolute, even here in the Land of the Free. The German Opera of Berlin was slammed recently for canceling a production of Mozart’s Idomeneo in which Jesus, Mohammed, and the Buddha are decapitated, a scene not in the original opera. Police had warned the opera company management that the production might incite violence. As a matter of principle I think the production should have been performed, even though (as an opera buff) most artistic revisionism of standard repertoire annoys me. Just get the best singers you can get and put them in pretty costumes and perform the damnfool opera, I say.

But it’s also realistic to assume that few if any opera companies in the U.S. would have scheduled that production at all. That’s because grand opera is so expensive to produce that opera companies cannot support themselves with ticket sales. This is true even of Big Shot companies like New York’s Metropolitan Opera, which consistently sells out performances even though the tickets ain’t cheap. The Met draws more than 800,000 attendees every season, their web site says. Yet the Met seems to be in perpetual telethon mode; I get solicited for donations at least once a month. In fact, this report says the Met gets more of its funds from “contributions and bequests” than from the box office.

I don’t know about the Met, but most opera companies in the U.S. depend in part on government grants to stay afloat. If you care to study it, here’s a financial statement from the Los Angeles Opera Company, for example.

That’s why I doubt any opera company in America would even consider mounting the Idomeneo production that was bounced in Berlin. Beheading Jesus might piss off too many contributors, corporate and private. Forget about selling ads in the program. And as for government grants — the wingnuts still get worked up about the photograph “Piss Christ” that was exhibited in bleeping 1987. They’ve been on a rampage to reduce or eliminate public funding of the arts since, in spite of the fact that public funding underwrites preservation and exhibition of traditional sacred art and objects (including Bibles) and uncounted performances of Handel’s Messiah.

Take also reactions to the Terrence McNally play, “Corpus Christi,” which depicts Christ and the Apostles as gay men living in Texas. These include death threats against actors and arson threats against theaters. What’s not documented are the number of theater companies that might like to produce the play but wouldn’t dare touch it with a ten-foot pool.

I’m rambling on longer than I intended to. My general point is that we’re real good at pointing out the logs in others’ eyes when we’re not so quick to notice the logs in our own (Matthew 7:1-5, sorta). And, really, nobody needs counter-jihadist videos on YouTube.

Update: Reuters reports:

Danish state TV on Friday aired amateur video footage showing young members of the anti-immigrant Danish Peoples’ party engaged in a competition to draw humiliating cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad.

The video images have surfaced little more than a year after a Danish paper published cartoons of the Prophet that sparked violent protests worldwide.

The images, filmed by artist Martin Rosengaard Knudsen who posed as a member of the party for several months to document attitudes among young members, show a number of young people drinking, singing and drawing cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Mohammad.

The faces of the young people were blurred in most of the footage. One cartoon appeared to depict the Prophet Mohammad as a camel, urinating and drinking beer. The competition took place in early August, according to Danish media.

Another cartoon strip aired in the partly masked footage on state TV seemed to show the prophet Mohammad surrounded by beer bottles and included an image of an explosion.

The news story is titled “Danish TV shows cartoons mocking Prophet Mohammad,” but it appears Danish TV was not mocking the Prophet but presenting a news story about young people mocking the Prophet, which is somewhat different.

Some of the children on the blosophere — by which I mean some rightie bloggers — have embraced the cartoons as their newest cause célèbre and are posting as many bits and pieces of the broadcast as they can get their virtual hands on. This is done in the same spirit of concerned interest that you find in any gang of eight-year-olds with a purloined Hustler magazine.

Somebody, please call their parents …