Why the Obama school kids song isn't really a big deal

While I was in Chicago for Mike and Erika's wedding over the weekend (great fun!), I had the opportunity to watch the last 15 minutes of Hannity on Fox News. The topic of discussion was a story that I hadn't been exposed to yet, but has apparently blown up on the blogosphere and on Fox News (it was being discussed on Greta Van Susteren immediately after Hannity signed off). In a nutshell, a video was uncovered of some New Jersey public school students in the classroom led by their teacher in the singing of a song praising Barack Obama. The singing apparently took place in February as part of the class's Black History Month celebration. The discussion on Hannity revolved mainly around what a horrifying act of 'indoctrination' this is. Tucker Carlson, whose numerous embarrassing failures as a prime-time cable talk host have apparently led him to abandon his dream of being the next George Will in favor of being the next Michelle Malkin, compared it to something the Khmer Rouge would do, prompting this priceless takedown from Gawker's Foster Kamer (be extra-sure to click through to his piece if you don't know who the Khmer Rouge were). Never one to pass up the opportunity to leap on a passing bandwagon, RNC head Michael Steele has sent out a fundraising email comparing the occasion to both Stalin's Russia and Kim Jong-Il's North Korea.

Three things come to mind here. First, it's important to consider the context. If the initial reports are to be believed, this was an activity meant to celebrate Black History Month, not a daily ritual that had to be completed before the kids could get their afternoon box of chocolate milk. As the first black president, Obama is a not-inconsiderable figure in the annals of black history. Yes, Obama is 'controversial' in the sense that there is political opposition to his legislative agenda. However, during Black History Month, the children doubtlessly learned glowing facts about the greatness of Martin Luther King, Jr, who was widely considered in his day to be a Communist subversive bent on destroying American civil society, and engendered more controversy than Barack Obama ever will, the efforts of Hannity, Steele, and Carlson notwithstanding. It's no secret that American primary and secondary education tends to present a watered-down and colorless version of history that actively seeks to avoid any trace of contemporary relevance, lest someone be "offended." The fact that public school history is so boring is a big contributor, I believe, to the fact that even fairly well-educated Americans have a shamefully poor grasp of the subject.

Secondly, the actual content of the offending song bears examination. Here are the lyrics, copied directly from Fox News' addendum to their story on the matter.

Mm, mmm, mm!
Barack Hussein Obama

He said that all must lend a hand
To make this country strong again
Mmm, mmm, mm!
Barack Hussein Obama

He said we must be fair today
Equal work means equal pay
Mmm, mmm, mm!
Barack Hussein Obama

He said that we must take a stand
To make sure everyone gets a chance
Mmm, mmm, mm!
Barack Hussein Obama

He said red, yellow, black or white
All are equal in his sight
Mmm, mmm, mm!
Barack Hussein Obama

Yes!
Mmm, mmm, mm
Barack Hussein Obama

You'll doubtlessly notice that there's actually very little political content in the song. Nowhere does it mention nationalized healthcare, marginally increasing the income tax on top-bracket earners, cap and trade global warming legislation, or the withdrawal of overseas troops. Instead, it lists off a bunch of vaguely defined grade-school civics pieties that could probably be cut-and-pasted into a song about any politician that's run for any office in the past twenty-five years. Taken on its merits, I can't see what there is to get offended about. Unless, of course, one were to conclude that conservatives are opposed to civic-mindedness, fairness, racial tolerance, and equitable employment policies. Which would be clearly absurd.

Finally, I think that people who are pushing this 'indoctrination' line are confused about the function and purpose of indoctrination. For that argument to be taken even remotely seriously, one would have to demonstrate a widespread and coercive effort to expose a cross-section of American youth to only one particular political viewpoint. 18 kids singing a dopey song about Barack Obama one time doesn't meet the criteria. Even if the dreaded song had a more regular and extensive presence in American schools (which I think would clearly be inappropriate), kids have a remarkable tenacity against official indoctrination. Witness the abject failure of D.A.R.E., which, despite being a near-universal presence in public schools, has been categorized as meeting the criteria for 'Does Not Work' by the U.S. Surgeon General's Office.

Let's go further and ask why, exactly, Barack Obama would want to indoctrinate a bunch of third-graders into a cult of personality. If I may call your attention to the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, you'll soon figure out that none of these kids can vote for Obama in the 2012 election. Nor will they be able to vote for whomever the Democratic nominee for President will be in 2016. Is this song really magical enough to not only instill liberal values in these children, but maintain them single-handedly for the next 11 years? Or give them the ability to hypnotize their parents into participating in a letter-writing campaign in support of Obama's legislative goals?

The kids that sang that song, like kids everywhere, are going to be exposed to a wide variety of political opinions as they grow up. George H.W. Bush was President when I was 8 years old. I remember getting a Presidential Fitness Certificate with his mimeographed signature in gym class, and then later hearing my parents bitch about him around the kitchen table. The kids in this makeshift choir will have similar experiences. In fact, depending on their parent's political inclinations, they might already have been given a T-shirt such as this:

Or this:
In the end, this 'controversy' actually does, in a sense, wind up being about indoctrination. However, it's not about schools brainwashing kids, it's about parents who believe that the principles of democracy are little more than a permission slip allowing them to drill their social and political views to their children unchanged and unchallenged. That's why the school administrators are now reportedly being deluged with death threats. Which do you think is the real threat to freedom?

What the left misses about the new right

One of the more vexing things about watching the current political situation in this country is that I think the organization and momentum behind the anti-Obama Tea Parties and similar political statements on the right is, in some real ways, a genuine shift from what one would expect from that side of the spectrum based on recent history. As an self-identified man of the left, it frustrates me a tad that I've seen very little serious consideration of the shifting nature of the opposition from "my" side of the aisle. Here are three major themes that I see popping up in left-centered analysis of the New Right (as I'll call it for the purposes of this post), and why I believe they're misconceptions.

#1: They're gullible pawns of Republican politicians/Glenn Beck: This is the big one. The idea that voters or activists on the right are brainwashed by charismatic but evil figureheads is probably one of the foundational assumptions of liberal political analysis since at least the 1990s. It's false. The reason why is simply that it's very difficult to convince one person, much less a large group of people, of something that they don't already at least somewhat implicitly believe. Leaders of movements typically don't invent a whole new way of thinking and convince others to follow them; they cannily summarize an already occurring shift in the zeitgeist in a way that resonates with people. The idea that Republican leadership is orchestrating the Tea Party protests is fairly ridiculous. Republicans are attempting to capitalize on them, certainly, with mixed success. But don't believe for a minute that anybody, anywhere would take to the streets on orders from the likes of Michael Steele and John Boehner. Another clue to this is the meteoric rise to prominence of Glenn Beck and the role his radio and television shows have played in the recent right-wing rallies. If the vast right-wing conspiracy wanted to anoint an avatar of right-wing populism, why would they pick the manic and ridiculous Beck rather than Rush Limbaugh, who commands a larger audience and was even specifically targeted by the Obama White House earlier in the year? Which leads me straight into another misconception...

#2: This is just Republican business as usual: It's very, very tempting, given the ridiculousness of tactics such as the constant cries of 'socialism' to say that this is the same ad-hominem song and dance that we've gotten from the American right for the past decade-plus. Look a little closer, though, and you'll notice one big difference: the rallies and street-level rhetoric are all about government spending and taxation. What you're not seeing is a great deal of heated accusations about abortion, gay marriage, and the other religious-right hot buttons. It's hard to underestimate what a sea change this is; since the Clinton years, the most vocal and loyal right-wing Americans were motivated primarily by a desire to promote Christian fundamentalist social views. I'm sure that most of them were also opposed to budget deficits and government regulation of the healthcare market, but economic issues weren't what got them out of bed and to the phone banks on Election Day morning. What happened in the past three months to change their minds?

I'm not entirely sure anything did, by which I mean that I don't think that there's an immense amount of overlap between the vanguards of George W. Bush and those of the Tea Party movement. Rather, I think that what we're seeing now are the fruits of the 07-08 Ron Paul primary campaign. As you may or may not recall, Paul ran for the Republican nomination preaching a sort of crypto-libertarian line against government interventionism, with his signature issue being his opposition to the Iraq War. Being as the Republican primary in its early stages was essentially a three-way argument between McCain, Giuliani, and Romney about who had the most enthusiasm for bombing, torturing, or indefinitely detaining people of Middle Eastern descent, this was, to say the least, an atypical view. However, Paul built a surprisingly vocal grassroots campaign, setting what were at that time (and may still be, although I'm not sure) single-day fundraising records. I think that what we're seeing right now is a devoted core of libertarian-leaning Ron Paul types attracting the 'anybody but Obama crowd' on the more conventional hardcore right behind the artifice of opposing government spending. I doubt this coalition will ever do much besides protest Obama (there are large philosophical differences between libertarianism and modern Republicanism, which are nearly always minimized or ignored by liberal commentators), but the enthusiasm they're showing at present is undeniable.

#3: Attacking their motivations is the best way to discredit them: A large part of the debate over the past week or so has been about whether or not Joe Wilson, the grassroots opposition to Obama, or some combination thereof are motivated by racial animosity. I generally agree with John McWhorter's excellent article on the topic (short summary: probably somewhat, but it's not the key political issue that it's rapidly becoming). Underlying motivations are always complex and ambiguous, and invoking them tends to function better as a litmus test for existing political beliefs than as an argument to the unconvinced. There are very good reasons for the implemented and proposed increases in spending as of late; the stimulus and bailouts were designed to stop the skid of the economy and keep Americans out of soup lines (the jury is still out on how well it's worked, and likely will be for some time now) and healthcare reform is a past-due necessity to curtail the cost of medical care, which has been rising out of all proportion to other expenses for some time now.

Perhaps the best argument of all is simply to state that Obama won the election and is now attempting to do some of those things that he promised to do while he was running. Of course, this is going to engage the ideological opposition and cause some of them to wonder "what happened to my country?" That sentiment was practically running in my head on a tape loop from 2002-2008, and I was hardly alone. If he's successful, his popularity and the popularity of his party will rise or fall based on how well people like the results. And that, rather than the size or fury of protests or accusations of racism, will be the real test.

Why protests don't work

The conservative protests in Washington, D.C. on April 15 and September 12 of this year are an interesting reversal in that mass protests have been almost exclusively the province of the left for the past 40 or so years. The protests have been enthusiastically lauded on the right and have even sparked a mini-controversy between the cable networks over a chest-beating Fox News ad in the Washington Post. What's most remarkable to me about the whole situation is how similar the protests themselves and the atmosphere surrounding them are to the various liberal and left-wing protests of the past ten years. It should go without saying that except for a few news cycles worth of coverage and favorable reception from ideological allies, none of those demonstrations made much of a discernible impact on public policy. I think that these conservative protests will wind up much the same and for much the same reasons. Here's why:

1. Nobody can tell what's actually being protested
I honestly have very little idea what the 9/12 protesters are actually protesting or what they hope to accomplish. The most commonly cited reason I've heard for the movement is opposition to "government spending" which could mean about anything (although I can't recall any signs decrying the military budget). Reading Glenn Beck's 9/12 Project Mission Statement actually makes things less clear. Rather than mention specific grievances or areas of concern, it traffics in the vaguely paranoid existential malaise that is Beck's unique stock in trade; anyone who reads the news and feels "an empty pit in your stomach... as if you're completely alone" is invited to join.

This is a problem that left-wing protests have suffered from for years and years. Even in the case of the protests against the Iraq War, which would seem to be pretty straightforward, there were always vocal contigents who seemed to think that the gathering was a stellar place to advocate for eradicating racism, freeing Mumia Abu-Jamal, or ending U.S. dependence on foreign oil. If the goal is to convince your fellow citizens of something, it's pretty important to decide on a concrete message first.

2. It's impossible to tell how many people actually show up.

The U.S. Parks Department used to provide official estimates of crowd size for large events in Washington, D.C., but after estimating the crowd for 1995's Million Man March as being considerably less than a million, they were threatened with a lawsuit by the organizers and subsequently decided that crowd estimating was too politically charged of a practice to continue. Since then, there's been a predictable response to any protest, where the supporters of the rally make a wildly overinflated turnout claim and ideological opponents counter with a lowball estimate. 9/12 is no exception, with conservatives at one point putting the count at 2 million (which would be larger than the turnout for the Obama inauguration) and some liberals placing it at 50,000. The back and forth over size and turnout often gets as much or more play as the reason for the protest itself. Since the notion that bigger is better is implicit in the notion of a largescale protest, the lack of a definitive size estimate can be problematic in terms of making the case to the undecided.

3. The crazies always soak up most of the attention.

Whether the protest is focused on issues of the left or right, most of the attendees are probably fairly mainstream in their beliefs, albeit more politically involved on certain issues. Unfortunately, protesting takes a lot of energy, which means that the crazier and angrier people are, the more likely they are to show up and taint everyone else by association. Even when only a small majority of a well-meaning crowd are on the fringe, extremism will always command a disproportionate amount of attention. Again, this has been a huge problem on the left for approximately forever, whether it's with the involvement of Maoist front groups in protest planning or signs like this one:


Needless to say, this isn't any less of an issue when conservatives protest. A sampling from the 9/12 turnout:




Image you're Sally Swingvote from Ohio, and you're a bit nervous about the dollar amounts being tossed around with the stimulus and the healthcare debate. You hear about the protest through the news or online coverage, and you see Birthers, racists, and advocates of armed revolt. What's the net effect on your political beliefs going to be? It's hard to have an effective protest when the people doing the protesting are scarier than the thing that's being protested.

For your consideration...

Ghostface Killah's verse from 'Gihad' off of Raekwon's surprisingly excellent Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Part II, which the printed word can hardly do full justice to:

Yo, but on the other side of town it's Tony, laid up/this white chick wanna gargle my nuts/I put the Bailey's down, tapped the blunt out/grabbed her by her hair, watched blondie love whip my dick out/spit drippin' down my balls, she slobber me/that's right, suck that dick, get it hard for me/Pyrex in one hand, large amounts of grams in it rocked up/and she pregnant, my lil' man got her knocked up/he popped up, oh shit/I'm like a crooked cop, Richard Gere/Big smirk on, getting my cock sucked/He pulled the joint out, a bullet spun out/But it was too late/Already nutted on the side of her mouth/Side of her face and hair like Something About Mary/I can't front, my son gun look scary/Chill, she's a whore/You knew it from the time we ran trains on her/And you still fucked her raw/C'mon son, gimme the gun/You gonna kill me over this bum-ass bitch you can't resist?/Remember Vell had her in the 'telly, takin' the fist?/Watch how you aimin' that shit/You should be aimin' at Trish/She take a bone like a rib-eye steak at Ruth Chris/Yo, be easy on the trigger son, you squeezin' the fifth/I only did it just to show you she's the easiest bitch/He came close, had to duff him, ni**a, gimme that shit!

A few points here:

• I'm nearly certain that Ghost means 'son' as in 'my biological offspring,' not 'a slang term for my close friend'
• If so, this would be the second song in the Ghostface Killah oeuvre that makes reference to Ghost and his son 'running trains.'
  
• Never have I so fervently hoped that that a rap narrative isn't depicting an actual event that has occurred. This includes all of the approximately ten thousand rap songs that describe murder and also that one Notorious B.I.G track where he says that his friend kidnaps kids, fucks them in their asses, and throws them off bridges.
• The way Ghostface weaves a surrealist bend into standard gangster rap tropes (referencing the obscure 90s Richard Gere vehicle Internal Affairs to describe getting caught in the middle of a blowjob?) is a big part of the reason he's my favorite rapper. He's totally on fire throughout Cuban Linx Part II.
  

The greatness of Batman: Arkham Asylum

I might not have wound up playing Batman: Arkham Asylum if is wasn't for the confluence of a three-day weekend, my first paycheck in ages, and the Internet collectively flipping its shit for the game. Lucky thing for me, then, because Arkham Asylum is an amazing game, one of the best of the year and probably one of the best of this console generation.

One of the things that separates video games from other forms of entertainment is that gaming places less of a premium on creativity and innovation and more of a premium on execution. It's why game sequels are more often than not improvements on the originals, while sequels in other mediums are generally watered down cash-ins. Games borrow ideas, techniques, and entire gameplay mechanics more or less shamelessly from one another with little penalty incurred from the critical or consumer communities as long as the execution is solid and the game is compelling. Simply put, a large part of Arkham Asylum is one of the best examples of creative borrowing that video games have yet produced.

Breaking Arkham Asylum down into its constituent parts probably illuminates the game better than any straightforward description. The game adopts BioShock's hybrid of free-roaming yet linear gameplay and Art Deco environments (obviously, the Art Deco aesthetic is also woven into the DNA of the Batman mythos, but the execution and the fact that both games use Unreal Engine 3 graphics really accentuates the comparison). It incorporates Crackdown's joyfully kinetic character movement and liberal reward of exploration. It also adopts the techno-gadgets and balance between tense stealth gameplay and multiple viable routes of attack found in the better Splinter Cell games (i.e. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory). To top that off, it blends in a truly satisfying hand-to-hand combat system; which it sort of like the one in Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, only much better.

For those of you who didn't understand a damn bit of that previous paragraph, let me sum it up thusly: Arkham Asylum takes many of the best parts of many of the best action games made in the past five or six years. The truly special thing about it, however, is that rather than playing like some Frankenstein's monster, Arkham Asylum pulls together a cohesive experience that really does make you feel like you're Batman. So when you're fighting six thugs hand-to-hand, rather than deal with clumsy and awkward controls or fall back on the dreaded Quick-Time Events, the game autotargets for you and chains together smooth animations as you time your attacks and counters, pulling off all sorts of really cool looking moves as you go. If this were to be explained to you by a helpful Australian with visual aids, it would look like this:

Batman : Arkham Asylum "Free Flow Combat" Gameplay Trailer
by FrenchGamers

The stealth gameplay is also obscenely well-done, and logical within the context of the gameplay. Essentially, whenever you come across a gang of armed henchmen, you can't allow yourself to be spotted, or they will shoot you and you will die. There's a ton of very cool stealth-attack options, such as gliding down from a height into a kick, rappelling upside down from your grappling hook and snatching up the bad guy, or the stealth-game mainstay of grabbing a patrolling guard and flinging him off a ledge. Arkham Asylum does an excellent job of recreating the warehouse scene for Batman Begins across a variety of scenarios in gameplay and making it fun, and enough new gadgets and twists are introduced that the conceit stays fresh throughout. There are plenty of little touches of user-friendliness, such as the option to grapple out of accidental falls without dying, that make the game feel more fun and less frustrating.

The storyline and presentation of the game are also worth applauding. Arkham Asylum takes its cues from Batman: The Animated Series (which I haven't seen, but I understand is quite good), a gutsy move when one considers the financial allure of aping Christopher Nolan's mega-popular "realistic" Batman movies. It pays off, though, by opening up the gameplay and plot into more fantastical avenues. The story has an appropriately dark and adult tone without becoming tedious or obtrusive, and the voice acting is excellent, especially Mark Hamill as The Joker, who absolutely nails the character. As a plus, there's tons of Batman trivia in the game in the form of discoverable character biographies, which are remarkably comprehensive, especially for Batman novices such as myself. I learned from Arkham Asylum that the Batman universe has a truly ridiculous number of villains (side note: who the fuck is Calendar Man?).

I basically can't imagine anybody not enjoying Batman: Arkham Asylum, even people who aren't particularly fond of Batman or fond of video games. It's likely going to be remembered as one of the signature games of the 360/PS3 era, and it's already a massive hit. If you have the opportunity to play this game, take it.

Some bonus entertainment by way of closing: the Zero Punctuation review of Arkham Asylum, which I think summarizes the game nicely and with trademark wit. Enjoy:

RIP Jim Poullion, the perfect figurehead for the anti-abortion rights movement

Having lived in the rural Midwest as much as I have, I've had my fair share of run-ins with professional Christian protesters. I remember one time in college, this guy came on campus carrying two signs about repentance and started yelling at everyone passing by the student union about how they were all going to hell, presumably for fucking outside of marriage. Predictably enough, some girl with cropped hair showed up maybe 20 minutes later with a handmade sign bearing some quote from Charles Bukowski about how he doesn't like God, and the two of them screamed at each other for a while. I read later in the school paper that this guy apparently travels all over Missouri to do this, and he pretty much hits every college campus in the state over the course of a given year.

On Friday, James Poullion, an anti-abortion protester in Oswesso, MI was killed in a drive-by shooting while waving placards outside the local high school. Predictably enough, anti-abortion rights groups were quick to issue press releases declaring his martyrdom for the cause and some commentators are noting the lack of outrage in the media in comparison to the response to the murder of Dr. George Tiller in May. I'm sure that somebody soon will point out that before yesterday, approximately nobody had ever heard of the town of Oswesso, MI, much less the name James Poullion, whereas Tiller was a nationally known figure who was a frequent target of vitriol on Bill O'Reilly's highly rated nightly TV commentary show and had already survived a previous shooting.

Nobody's going to care about that, though. The narrative is going to be pro and anti-abortion rights groups dropping bodies in a national turf war. Expect the typical hyperventilation (op-eds from representatives of NARAL and Operation Rescue in the Times, Post, and Wall Street Journal, cable-TV shouting matches galore, an episode of Law and Order) that permeates every aspect of the Kabuki theater we know as "the abortion issue." Every aspect of this has become ridiculous, from the abortion rights crowd's insistence on labeling themselves "pro-choice" (as if the other side wants to revoke your right to take the Pepsi Challenge) and the anti-abortion rights crowd's adoption of "pro-life" (like abortion rights activists are advocating mass slaughter of the nation's grandmothers, the fulminations of Sarah Palin aside).

James Poullion didn't deserve to die for his beliefs or for exercising his First Amendment rights to express them, nor does anybody else in the anti-abortion rights movement. That disclaimer aside, let's not beat around the bush here: based on the facts of his life as they're being reported right now, James Poullion wasn't a holy warrior doing the Lord's work; he was a crusty old asshole who lived to piss people off. For the last 20 years, he's been camped out on various sidewalks in Oswesso on a daily basis, waving pictures of bloody fetuses and screaming at people. He spent so much time outside the high school doing this that the students nicknamed him "Sign Man," which I take as an indicator that Oswesso High School isn't likely to produce the next H.L. Mencken anytime soon. He also apparently hung out in front of the local Cadillac dealer waving his signs around for years, as if people were going to stop in to cop the car note on an Escalade before heading to the clinic. The owner tried to have a restraining order taken out on him and lost. He even picketed a local church, presumably because they spent more time singing hymns and enjoying fellowship over coffee and donuts than raining fire and brimstone on the community.

He did all of this day after day, year after year in a town of just over 15,000 people. Let's estimate that about half of that population is female, and maybe two-thirds of the women are of childbearing age. That's about 3, 750 people. Poullion probably could have fucked around and protested outside of T.J. Maxx on Saturday mornings and reached as many of them as he did by treating protesting like a full-time job. There's other stuff he could have done instead. He could have started a blog or a newsletter. He could have gotten an AM radio show. He could have even set up one of those phony crisis pregnancy centers that people of his ideological persuasion are so high on.

The fact that he chose a method of protest that is arguably the least effective and certainly the most irritating isn't a coincidence. In fact, if Poullion becomes a national figurehead for the anti-abortion rights movement, as he probably will for at least the next three months or so, it'll only be fitting. You see, the anti-abortion movement isn't really interested in formulating cultural or policy changes regarding human reproduction. What these junior Ceauşescus care about is getting all up in your shit about things that are your own personal business and using your reaction as the sum total of your moral worth. And if you pissed off at them for it, so much the better for them. Nothing is more appealing to a these people than the opportunity to feed their ravenous persecution complex. I'd hazard a guess that if there is an afterlife, Jim Poullion is looking down on us completely delighted that his violent death will nab free national airtime for the likes of Randall Terry in the coming days.

Follow-up to last week's Kurt Cobain post

Courtney Love is apparently now threatening to sue Activision for putting Kurt Cobain in Guitar Hero 5. Via Twitter, she writes "For the record this Guitar Hero shit is breach of contract on a Bullys part and there will be a proper addressing of this and retraction. WE are going to sue the shit out of ACtivision we being the Trust the Estate the LLC the various LLCs Cobain Enterprises."

Which I'm assuming means that some lawyer for Activision offered her a free bag of heroin if she signed the contract without bothering to read what was printed on it, and any lawsuit she brings is going to get thrown out of court post-haste. You know she needs that Guitar Hero money ever since her dog walker conned her out of half her Cobain bucks.

This Fall In Bizarrely Conceptual Xbox 360 Shooter Ads

This ad seems to pick up the baton from the improbably arty spots for last year's brilliant Gears of War 2:






If Halo 3: ODST's Firefight mode winds up being a credible facsimile of Gears 2's Horde mode, and I can't imagine Bungie screwing that up, that alone will probably be worth the game's asking price.

On Further Viewing...Fight Club

With the end of the decade rapidly approaching, I've been thinking more and more about how the last ten years have affected my outlook and taste. Since I've amassed a pretty decent collection of DVDs dating from the early 2000s, I've decided that it would be fun to revisit the movies that I liked back around the beginning of the decade to get a critical look at how well they've held up. This is the second of the series.

The movie: Despite being a money loser theatrically, Fight Club achieved a sort of instant cultural ubiquity among my early 2000s demographic of late-adolescent college males. Fight Club's reception and cultural legacy, which I'll discuss it more below, is at least as interesting as the film itself.

My reaction at the time: When I saw Fight Club in the theater, I liked it quite a bit but had mixed feelings about the third-act twist (again, more below). By the time it came out on home video, though, I had become a full-fledged member of the cult of Fight Club. It was one of the first movies I bought on DVD (by the way, early '00s DVDs look terrible on modern HDTVs), and I've seen it who-knows-how many times, although when I watched it this evening, I hadn't viewed it since probably 2004.

On further viewing: Fight Club is one of the best movies of the 1990s, and from an artistic and thematic standpoint, is one of the most singular American films ever made. After re-watching it, I'm fairly convinced that the late 90s is the only historical period that could have produced Fight Club; the violence and subtle thematic complexity would have been toned way down if it were made five or ten years prior, and no post-9/11 studio movie would ever end with the protagonist watching a landscape of collapsing skyscrapers.

Beyond the content concerns, a good deal of Fight Club's themes are difficult to separate from the cultural context of the late 1990s. Fight Club was made in the late-Clinton years, when the Dow Jones was valued at roughly 90 trillion points, the national unemployment rate was at 4%, and the most pressing political issue of the era was the president copping a blowjob on the side and then lying about it. As a result, Fight Club deals largely with the ennui the characters experience as a result of the fact that they live in a culture that is unprecedentedly safe, predictable, and homogenous, which was for the most part, the way life was in that era.

Ten years on, that's not the culture we live in anymore. When a significant portion of young America is serving in one of two foreign wars (or dealing with the aftermath), the angst and displacement of the comfortable are necessarily far less pressing issues. Even for those not in the military, American culture in the last seven or eight years has been defined far less by safety and comfort and far more by combativeness and stridency, to the point where the president of the United States can't give a boilerplate speech about responsibility to schoolkids without sparking a political firestorm. I don't know if 18 year old kids today connect with Fight Club the way they did in 1999 (maybe they do -the fact that it's #19 on the user-rated imdb top 250 has to mean something), but I think that a big part of the immediacy Fight Club held then has been lost in the post-9/11 shift.

This isn't to imply that Fight Club can't be appreciated by first time viewers today. I love Citizen Kane, and I wasn't born until more than 40 years after William Randolph Hearst's stranglehold on American print media ended. (And yes, I did just compare Fight Club to Citizen Kane, and I'll do it again in a couple paragraph's time.) Fight Club's exploration of heady topics like radicalism and masculinity don't come with an expiration date. Beyond that, the movie's plain fun to watch; it's got a wicked, sly sense of humor, a distinct visual style, and two great lead performances by Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. Pitt's iconic Tyler Durden gets the lion's share of the attention, but Norton is the linchpin of the movie; he has to serve as the audience's surrogate for the experience of being involved with Tyler Durden without coming across as a bland or blank character, and he pulls it off so masterfully that one can almost miss the fact that his character in the movie doesn't even have a name.

It's impossible to engage in a discussion of Fight Club without noting that it's one of the most widely misinterpreted movies ever made. A substantial proportion of Fight Club viewers, including both detractors and many of the film's most devoted fans, see the movie as being on some levels an endorsement or approval of Tyler Durden's pseudo-anarchist philosophy. Roger Ebert's 1999 negative review, which underrates the film substantially in my opinion, is nonetheless extremely prescient in predicting this. The most amazing thing about how widespread this point of view is that it requires one to literally disregard the entire third act of the film after it's revealed that (spoiler alert, but come the fuck on, you've seen this movie) Tyler Durden is actually the narrator's alternate personality and the narrator embarks on a frantic quest to undo everything that he's spent the entire movie setting up.

The fact that Fight Club will probably be forever tarred with inspiring the kind of nihilistic idiocy and pedantic radicalism it critiques is unfortunate, but it serves to highlight one of the film's greatest strengths. Fight Club understands that Tyler Durden's "fuck society" mentality is tremendously seductive, particularly for young men still in the process of establishing their social identity. Rather than watering this fact down to set up the narrator's eventual enlightenment for the easy win, the film goes for broke in ensuring that the audience has the same reaction to Tyler Durden that the narrator does. The fact that Tyler is played by a notorious Hollywood hunk at his absolute physical peak is not a minor detail, and thematically speaking, the character-reversing twist is completely necessary. Maintaining Tyler Durden as a separate character would turn Fight Club a movie about peer pressure, rather than one about responsibility and moral identity.

The unfortunate side effect of the character split is that it makes for a jarring shift in tone that leads to somewhat of a dip in the initial experience of watching the film's climax. Even though the Tyler-narrator duel is thematically resonant, it's admittedly pretty goofy to watch Edward Norton beat himself up from the perspective of a parking garage security camera. By the time the narrator finally defeats Tyler Durden by shooting himself in the mouth (and surviving), someone less favorably disposed to the film than I am could credibly claim that Fight Club has ditched narrative coherency in favor of psychoanalytic fuckery. It's here that I bring in Citizen Kane for the second time to point out that one could make the same argument about 'Rosebud' being a sled, with the obvious caveat that this reveal in Kane came five seconds before the credits rather than thirty minutes.

If a central message of Fight Club can be identified, it's this: if you want to make radical choices, be careful that the alternative isn't the same thing or worse. This point is hammered home again and again over the course of the movie: Tyler Durden's individuality-seeking disciples become drone-like "space monkeys", the fight club is conceived as a rejection of touchy-feely support groups and winds up with the same hugging and crying, and the narrator's alternating attempts to reject and attract Marla Singer always wind up having the opposite effect. It's a message that in some respects, one needs to grow into; I have to confess that when I first saw Fight Club as a senior in high school, I thought Tyler Durden was awesome and that the ending of the movie was sort of confusing and disappointing. Looking back now, I find it somewhat comforting that the Tyler Durden-quoting campus radical might one day revisit his (you know that this person will invariably be male) favorite movie and find that there's more to it than initially met the eye.

Still worth seeing? Most definitely. Just please don't start beating on your friends or vandalizing Starbucks stores afterwards.

The Worst Cult Movie Ever Made Gets A Sequel

Although you'd hardly know it by reading this blog, I'm a reasonably tolerant person when it comes to other people's questionable preferences in entertainment. If I'm talking to somebody who's a fan of, say, Crash or latter-day Family Guy, I'll be disappointed and maybe roll my eyes a bit, but I generally understand that people like those things, even if I don't.

There's one movie, however, that I nearly have to physically restrain myself from biting off my tongue when I hear someone say how much they love it. And it's a problem, because I've heard it praised or spoken of respectfully quite often, including by people who I admire and whose taste I respect. That movie is The Boondock Saints, which I'm writing about today because a trailer for the sequel just came out online in the last day or so.

Before I get to that, let's deal with the original movie. The Boondock Saints essentially went straight-to-DVD in 1999. Troy Duffy, the writer and director of the film, claims that if it didn't get a wide theatrical release because of post-Columbine blacklisting of violent movies; I find it more plausible that the studio realized that they'd lose a ton of money marketing it and decided to dump it off onto home video. It should also be noted that Troy Duffy is, by all accounts, a tremendous asshole, so much so that there's a feature-length documentary film entitled Overnight about how much of a dick he is. Despite these factors, The Boondock Saints, which should have been consigned to the dustbin of history, became a genuine word-of-mouth cult hit on DVD.

Stylistically speaking, The Boondock Saints is an artless blend of the stylized character banter and narrative trickery of Quentin Tarantino, the Catholic imagery of Martin Scorcese, and the intellectual and attentional deficits of fetal alcohol syndrome. The plot follows the exploits of a pair of Irish fraternal twins who decide that they have a religious duty to exact vigilante justice upon the miscellaneous ethnic stereotypes that populate Boston's criminal underworld. They're pursued by a gay FBI agent played by Willem Dafoe, whose investigations of the aftermath of their shooting sprees are edited in parallel action with the sprees themselves in the film's only interesting touch.

The Boondock Saints is relentlessly profane, violent, and sprinkles in needless expressions of bigotry throughout (one of the first scenes with the brothers involves them getting into a fistfight with a butch lesbian who takes offense to some vaguely non-P.C. comment one of them makes, there's an extended exchange that revolves around a character telling a racist joke to one of the mob-boss villains, and two female characters are described as 'consummate junky sluts' in the shooting script). None of these are things that I typically object to in a movie, but The Boondock Saints is different, and the reason why has everything to do with the moral context that the film sets forth.

Essentially, the protagonists of The Boondock Saints are antiheroes. With regard to the plot of the movie, their primary characteristics are their disdain for the ability of law enforcement to uphold social norms and their satisfaction at dispensing violent justice to those they feel deserve it. Again, there's nothing particularly wrong with that; the antihero is a storied trope in American cinema, especially in the action/crime genre that The Boondock Saints slots itself into. Any narrative that centers around an antihero, however, has to deal with the moral relationship between the antihero(es) and the context in which they operate. There are several ways in which this is typically done. The most common is to set up a sort of moral relativism where the main character's violent or sadistic actions are judged entirely against the norms of a particular subculture rather than society at large (for instance, how The Godfather normalized murder and criminal activity by focusing almost entirely on characters within the Mafia culture) or judged as being flawed or wrong, but less wrong than the actions of the antagonist (any of the myriad films where a violent character is tasked with defeating an even more violent character). The other alternative is to embrace straight-up nihilism and make a movie that's essentially a cartoon (for instance, recent movies like Shoot 'Em Up and Smokin' Aces, the latter of which I particularly enjoyed).

The Boondock Saints ignores all of this entirely. Fans of the movie might be inclined to argue that the actions of the twins fall into the second example of moral relativism I describe above, but that sort of setup requires some acknowledgment that the protagonists possess perceptible character flaws or that their actions are in some way morally questionable. In this case, there is literally no intended irony in the use of the word 'saints' in the title; the brothers are portrayed as jovial, unfailingly loyal, religiously devout, fluent in at least five languages, and tactically brilliant. They have the Latin words for "truth" and "justice" tattooed on their hands. It's practically a show of restraint that the film's script doesn't credit them with the invention of the cotton gin. Nor is there any questioning of the appropriateness of their actions from without; on every single occasion a character learns of the brother's crusade of religious murder, they are instantly converted to their cause with a minimum of deliberation (most ludicrously in a scene where Willem Dafoe's FBI agent and a Catholic priest come to a mutual approval of retributive murder). And after all this, the movie has the sheer balls to conclude over the credits with staged TV news 'man on the street' interviews debating whether or not the 'saints' are good for society, as if this question were in any meaningful way part of the narrative. I have a feeling that Troy Duffy is the type of person who, after seeing Taxi Driver for the first time, walked away thinking about how much of a total badass Travis Bickle was.

It's instructive to compare The Boondock Saints with The Way of the Gun, a similar pseudo-Tarantino crime riff that was also released around the new millennium. The Way of the Gun, which I wish had even half the vocal cult following of The Boondock Saints, is every bit as violent and profane as Duffy's film, if not more so. It begins with a gloriously over-the-top sequence in which Ryan Philippe threatens to "fuckstart" Sarah Silverman's head, and later contains the musing "Don't you think it's funny that if I grab a woman's ass and she punches me, she's fighting for her rights, but if a faggot grabs my ass and I punch his lights out, I'm a homophobe?" And yet, partly because the antihero protagonists of The Way of the Gun are obviously low-level transient fuckups chasing a ridiculous pipe dream of a criminal scheme, that film comes off as the enjoyably cheeky genre provocation that it was intended to be. By contrast, The Boondock Saints' steadfast insistence that its leads are paragons of religious virtue plays like Reservoir Dogs as told by Mel Gibson 15 beers into the evening, and marks it as one of the most explicitly fascist American films in recent memory.

So here's the trailer for the second one:



I'll be brief: obviously, the bar isn't set too high for this movie, considering how many people love the first one despite the fact that it's terrible. It looks like this one is a revenge story, where the brother declare holy war on a mob boss that killed their priest, and possibly also stole their Lucky Charms. The trademark ham-handed religious imagery is still here, but it's kind of shunted aside in favor of more shots of the brothers holding guns and pointing them at the camera, which seems to be roughly 90% of the content in the trailer. Willem Dafoe obviously isn't having any trouble making his mortgage payment, so he's been replaced by his "protege," aka some woman, who appears to have all of the same mannerisms that Willem Dafoe did in the first. Based off of the tone of the original, I wouldn't be surprised to learn if this character is actually Willem Dafoe's character from the first movie after a sex change (after all, gay people and transsexuals are totally the same thing, right?). The twin's father, Seamus McImprobable, appears to have a much expanded role. There's roughly ten soundtrack changes over the course of two minutes. Judging by the inclusion of "Everyone loves you guys!" as a line of dialogue, I'm guessing that there isn't going to be much of a change from the moral non-ambiguity of the first movie.

Boondock Saints fans are clearly going to eat this shit up with a spoon, which I find vaguely depressing.

Teenage Angst Has Paid Off Well

If you haven't seen it already, this video of Kurt Cobain as an unlockable character performing various non-Nirvana songs in Guitar Hero 5 has been making the rounds on music and gaming blogs over the past couple days:



The user who created the video tagged it with "spinning grave" and "courtney love is fucking bitch." I think that watching the virtual Kurt aping Flavor Flav at the beginning of the video is the most jarring, but the creator of the video seems to focus mostly on Bon Jovi's "You Give Love A Bad Name." That's understandable, not only because it's a sort of clever fingering of Courtney Love, who controls the right's to Cobain's likeness and is almost certainly the responsible party for him being a playable character in this game, but also because Bon Jovi essentially epitomizes the 80's stadium rock aesthetic that Nirvana is so often portrayed as being the antithesis of. I have a feeling that the real insult to the Cobain legacy contained herein is having "him" front "Comedown" by Bush, a shameless, talentless grunge also-ran that ranks among the more inexplicable bands to achieve popularity in the early to mid-90s.

When I first started to become a music fan as a kid, Nirvana was one of the first bands I gravitated towards. I was too young to be aware of Nevermind when it blew up and conquered the world, but I flipped for "Heart Shaped Box" when it came out on the radio. I talked my parents into getting me a copy of In Utero on cassette for an Easter present by claiming that "Rape Me" was an instrumental track. Kurt Cobain committed suicide around a month later. So my visceral reaction to this Guitar Hero video was to cringe in disbelief at this affront to his legacy. If you clicked on the video above, you probably did the same.

But that's a dangerous reaction. And it's one that, if we knew what was good for us, we probably shouldn't be having.

Generation X, the cohort of 1990s teenagers and young adults for whom Kurt Cobain will perpetually be identified as a patron saint, was never more united in anything than it was in rejection of baby boom generation in general and their romanticization of 1960s culture in particular. Gen X saw the baby boomers as a stifling hegemony of deluded narcissists bent on enshrining their salad days as the perpetual sine qua non of American culture. They pointed out the baby boomers were still blithely celebrating 1960s social rebellion even after they'd all gotten corporate jobs and elected Ronald Reagan twice. Generation X's message to the baby boomers was that their values were bullshit, and their heads were too far up their asses to even realize it.

And they were right, and they're still right. But the march of time is a motherfucker, and in 2009, we stand in serious danger of history repeating itself. There's been a push toward establishing 1990s "classic rock" as a radio format. There's been a barrage of reunions and tours over the past five years, from the Pixies to Rage Against the Machine to Smashing Pumpkins (kind of). Lollapalooza came back in 2003, albeit as a festival rather than a tour, and Lilith Fair is returning next year. Looming in the foreground is Weezer's 2001 reunion and subsequent recorded output, which stands as a case study in "be careful what you wish for, because you might get it."

I don't begrudge any of this; Perry Farrell's heroin isn't going to buy itself, and I'm sure Sarah McLaughlin can't cover her mortgage by licensing music to the SPCA. Clearly, there's a demand for 90s nostalgia, and there will be supply to meet it. That's OK.

What isn't OK is taking a moralistic and self-righteous stance about the values of the 1990s, "selling out," and all the rest of it. That ship has already sailed. We've already seen Liz Phair reinvent herself as an aging-hooker version of Avril Lavigne and Billy Corgan putting "Today" in a Visa commercial. Even Kurt Cobain's been worked over: we can buy a collection of his personal journals (which I'm ashamed to say that I own, having been given them as a gift - I've flipped through it but never read it cover to cover) and he's even showed up as an angel in heaven to sell us Doc Martens:


But you know what? None of that changes the fact that In Utero is an amazing album (I prefer it to Nevermind by a considerable margin, and am in fact listening to it as I write) and none of it dishonors or invalidates anything about the 1990s. The past is always with us, but it's the past for a reason, and we don't have to let a romanticized version of it dictate how we see the present. It's easy and seductive to believe that Kurt Cobain would never have let himself be put into Guitar Hero 5 to sing Bon Jovi and Bush. Maybe he wouldn't have. Then again, maybe he would. We won't ever know for sure, because Kurt Cobain perforated his head with a shotgun on April 5, 1994.

I was 11 years old when that happened. Now I'm 27, and two weeks older than Kurt Cobain ever lived to be. I'll be widening that gap, day by day, as I live my life. And it's got me thinking that perhaps idol worship and nostalgia aren't all they're cracked up to be.