Month: April 2007

Here’s an interesting review of "300":

"300" celebrates the male bonding that is found in most war and sports movies.   What gives those films their homosexual subtext is less the sweating, shirtless males working together for victory. Rather it’s the unstated assumption that unlike the men, none of the women in these men’s lives will ever really grasp this singularly important, defining experience. Whatever these men and their future wives share, the women will just never "get it." However, in war and sports films, the men still hunger for a life of normalcy – settling down and raising a family with their female soulmate. But that fantasy of living happily ever after with your true love has little emotional resonance in contemporary buddy films and  romances: think The Break Up, Failure to Launch, Old School, Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle, American Pie.   

It wasn’t always so. In ’50’s and ’60’s films, the emotional relationship that men craved was with a woman. Then two films undermined that assumption. For the artier crowd, "Diner" depicted male friendships as deeper than anything that a man could share with a woman. For the mass audience, the same message was abundantly clear with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. No woman could ever be as perfect for Redford or Newman as they were for each other.

In that sense, Brokeback Mountain wasn’t so much about being gay; it was about being male, in ways that women can never understand. Maybe the chick flick has produced its mirror image: the dick flick.

His website celebrates his money bonanza. There are donor stories, photos, videos, and blogs. Again: the guy’s a pro. And the campaign is beginning to feel like an RFK 1968 re-run (and I hope his security detail is top notch). If you fall into the Anyone-But-Clinton camp, and I’m afraid I do, this is good news.

(Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty.)

They’re coming:

"You open up a magazine, there’s a small plastic thing in there, and you rip it open. It looks like a cheeseburger, tastes like a cheeseburger, it’s made from all organic ingredients."

Blech.

(Hat tip: Kottke.)

Michael Kelly – unplugged, from a month and a half before he was killed in Iraq. I really really wish Mike were alive. Not just because he was Mike and was loved and had a wife and kids. But because I’d love to know what he’d have made of the last four years, where he would have ended up on this war, what he would have said about Abu Ghraib, the occupation, the failure to find WMDs and any other number of topics. But we will never know, and, knowing Mike, we’d be fools to guess as well.

Was there a deal done behind closed doors with Tehran? Scott Horton picks up on some signs.

We’ll have to see what actually happened behind the scenes in the welcome release of British soldiers before we can figure out who blinked and when. But the spectacle today is one of Ahmadinejad milking the moment for all its worth. The public apologies by the sailors, the choreographed television shots, the use of the word "detainee" to describe the Brits, and the Easter "gift:" this is all propaganda for the Tehran thugocracy. Ahmadinejad has used the Revolutionary Guards to buttress his domestic support with this spectacle, but he may have had to make some concessions internally. We’ll see. But I don’t see how the U.S. benefits from this fiasco in any way. Tehran successfully weaned Britain away from its ally, the U.S., and its EU partners, proved how alienated the British public is from the war in Iraq and the U.S. administration, managed to look more humane in prisoner treatment than the U.S. and distracted from the growing international pressure on Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. That’s a pretty shrewd set of moves, though it pains me to say so.

The only downside for Ahmadinejad was his ugly, stupid statement about women servicemembers. But it may go down well with the D’Souzaite masses in the Middle East. It’s infuriating that this little religious nut-case is running rings around the West in p.r. But that says more about the failures of the West in this war than about the brilliance of the mullahs in Tehran.

(Photo: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad meets with a British sailor (left) following his press conference in Tehran, where he announced the release of the 15 British sailors, 04 April 2007. Ahmadinejad met the sailors as they were released at the presidential compound, wishing them success for the future, state television pictures showed. Amid smiles, cheerful conversations then followed between Ahmadinejad and four sailors who were filmed queuing up to shake his hand. By STR/AFP/Getty.)

Even JPod can see the damage Bush has wrought to Republican prospects.

Here’s an interesting study of how black and white relatives feel about biracial children. Opposition to inter-racial marriage – much more intense in the 1950s and 1960s than opposition to gay marriage today – is based primarily on the issue of the children. Isn’t it "selfish" for an interracial couple to have children? The linked study finds that this attitude, while common before marriage and kids, tends to melt with the actual arrival of a multiracial child. When the abstract becomes concrete and human, the prejudice dissolves. The same is true, I think, of gay parenting. In the abstract, some people have issues. When confronted with the reality of gay parenting, when you get to see and meet the actual children, so much fear and prejudice melts away. Of course this doesn’t mean that multi-racial kids are the solution to the problem of racism. They’re human beings. They’re not a solution to anything. They just are.

His explosion shows just how sensitive the issue of the Geneva Conventions is becoming. It is simply very difficult for the US – especially the pro-Bush brigades – to invoke the Geneva Conventions in the British-Iran case after the contempt they have shown for Geneva these past few years. This is blowback time. It was always going to come, and now we see it. O’Reilly should not be angry at someone defending Geneva; he should be furious that the Bush administration has handed the enemy such an obvious propaganda coup.

A reader writes:

It is easy enough to drag out the PC punching bag to make a point about those too-sensitive Europeans whose mis-guided sensibilities will only harm themselves. Another (and to my mind equally compelling) reading of the phrase "terrorists who abusively invoke Islam" is that it is strategic: it creates another Islam, a Reformationist Islam, that rejects murder and terror as an arm of religious identity. The phrase isolates the actors, the terrorists, and what they want the most, to speak for Islam itself. "Terrorists who abusively invoke Islam" highlights what they are: thugs and murderers. It makes explicit what they do to justify their thuggery: abusively invoke Islam. It is a phrase that looks forward to a time where the Islamic Enlightenment has taken hold and a moderate Muslim would bristle at an Islam of terror. The phrase isn’t PC. The phrase describes a world that I hope we all want to see come into being.

And, by the way, that is true of Christianity in the West and US Christianity in particular. If only it were the case that the US public understood that "Christian opposition to gay marriage" wasn’t at core Christian. If only we lived in a world where the marriage rights for US citizens who are lesbian and gay could be debated in a way that the opposition was understood to be abusively invoking Christianity – not to mention a routine abuse of the document that should guide every citizen’s life. And it’s not the Bible. It’s the Constitution.

I take the point. The question, though, is whether this makes the phrase Orwellian – an attempt to promote a view of the world that isn’t yet the case. If that obscures reality, then language isn’t doing the job it should.