Year: 2013

Denby turns up his nose at the new Les Misérables:

The music is juvenile stuff—tonic-dominant, without harmonic richness or surprise. Listen to any score by Richard Rodgers or Leonard Bernstein or Fritz Loewe if you want to hear genuine melodic invention. I was so upset by the banality of the music that I felt like hiring a hall and staging a nationalist rally. "My fellow-countrymen, we are the people of Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin! Cole Porter and George Gershwin, Frank Loesser and Burton Lane! We taught the world what popular melody was! What rhythmic inventiveness was! Let us unite to overthrow the banality of these French hacks!" (And the British hacks, too, for that matter.) Alas, the hall is filled with people weeping over "Les Mis."

McArdle pushes back:

The reaction of Denby et al seems perilously close to dismissing the movie precisely because it’s the sort of thing that really resonates with ordinary people—those sentimental fools. I find it interesting that in his piece, Denby speaks admiringly of the musical comedies of yesteryear—he endorses the music as more innovative, and its pleasurable escapism as somehow more authentic. Did Denby’s historical counterparts praise all that musical innovation and pure escapism when it was new? Or does middlebrow entertainment become appealing only when it has aged into a minority taste?

TPM helpfully adds some context to Chuck Hagel's remarks about the "aggressively gay" nature of James Hormel. Now I'm not defending the remarks or approving them. But it's worth noting one concern of Hagel with respect to Hormel being an ambassador to a very Catholic country, Luxembourg:

Hagel also told the World-Herald he has seen tape of Hormel at an event by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a San Francisco-based performance and activist group comprised of gay men in drag as nuns. “It is very clear on this tape that he’s laughing and enjoying the antics of an anti-Catholic gay group in this gay parade,” Hagel told the paper in the 1998 interview. “I think it’s wise for the president not to go forward with this nomination.”

Let me just say that I am on record as being bored by the lazy, tired, smug bigotry on display in the video seen above. "Hunky Jesus Day" was designed to mock those of sincere faith – and is held on Easter Sunday. I wouldn't be standing around clapping and laughing. In San Francisco, anti-religious bigotry is apparently the one hatred that is still allowed. How else do you interpret the opening remarks:

Are you ready to piss off some Christians?

Now imagine if they opened a performance with "Are you ready to piss off some Jews?" Or: "Are you ready to piss off some Muslims?" Now imagine if a Phelps-type group did a performance piece reducing gay people to various crude sexual acts, and began the act by announcing: "Are you ready to piss off some homosexuals?" Somehow I think the Sisters would object.

In their defense, they have done a great deal of work for charity, safer sex education and the like. That's important context and you can read more about them here. And they have absolutely every right to blaspheme against anyone's faith. But I do not think it's nuts or bigoted to think they are not exactly the model of diplomacy.

On Hagel, I wrote that “Goldblog made the calculation, staying politically neutral (which is itself a political decision for him to retain access with both the Obama administration and the American Jewish Establishment).” Goldblog objects:

What calculation did I make? I simply stated yesterday morning that it didn’t seem likely that AIPAC would be making a cause of defeating the Hagel nomination. (Later reporting, by Eli Lake and others, confirmed this.)

What political decision did I make? I had already written in favor of Chuck Hagel’s nomination for secretary of defense — I even wrote that his straight talk could be good for Israel to hear. “Maybe, at this point, what we need are American officials who will speak with disconcerting bluntness to Israel about the choices it is making,” is what I wrote, to the displeasure of some in Andrew’s “American Jewish Establishment.” How is this neutral?

I could quibble about the manner and tone of Goldblog’s writing on Hagel, but he’s basically right on this. I was too hasty and unfair. I apologize.

Mike Bebernes shares what it's like:

I hate my meds. They cost me sleep, give me headaches and stifle my appetite. Ritalin, Adderall, and other ADHD pills are classified alongside opiates, methamphetamines, and cocaine as schedule two drugs. Prescriptions can only be written for a maximum of 30 days with no refills allowed. Every time I move, I’m interrogated by a new shrink. I have to wade through the assumption that I’m just going to sell my pills to some overachieving high schooler who’s scared of the S.A.T.

And I do need the medicine. It’s what I hate most of all. Without my pills I am an amputee without his prosthetic. Tedium becomes torture. Ikea becomes Abu Ghraib.

He worked from 1993 to 1999 for the president with the worst legislative gay rights record in history – if you count Clinton's signature on Don't Ask, Don't Tell, DOMA, and the HIV travel and immigration ban. Yet now he preens in the New Yorker as if he is a longtime gay activist who always spoke truth to power. A comparable figure, Bob Hattoy, quit in disgust as he observed Socarides' serial betrayals of gay rights on the inside.

We also have the following memo from Socarides providing talking points for the Clinton administration's war on gay marriage and gay servicemembers – who were fired at rates far higher under Clinton than before. Here are some choice passages from a September 3, 1996 memo, co-written by Socarides and the other member of the Clinton administration whose job it was to screw over the gays and then ask us for more money, George Stephanopoulos:

The President has long opposed gay marriage based on his belief that the institution of marriage should be reserved for unions between one man and one woman. The President strongly believes that gay and lesbian individuals should not be subject to unfair discrimination, which is why he has endorsed legislation outlawing discrimination against gays and lesbians in the workplace. But he does not believe that the federal government should promote gay marriages.

It was the HRC and Gay Establishment's line at the time: "marriage" is a nightmare issue; let's aim for protecting workplaces instead. Two decades later, we have marriage in several states, a critical court ruling looming, and … no employment non-discrimination act. But the point was purely to protect Clinton and the Democrats.

And the fall of 1996 was when Clinton actually ran radio ads in the South (see here for the text) bragging of his opposition to gay marriage as part of a defense of "American values". Initially, Joe Lockhart insisted that the ads would keep running, only to pull them after major protest from gay activists. If I were the gay liaison to a president running ads attacking gay people, I'd quit, wouldn't you? The memo even explicitly threatened that Clinton would sign a bill banning marriage equality – which became DOMA.

While Socarides was the gay liaison, the Clinton administration also stabbed us marriage activists in the front as we walked into Congressional hearings by announcing that morning that they had no qualms at all about the constitutionality of DOMA. And here's what Socarides wrote about the core civil rights issue of our time:

The president believes that raising this issue now is divisive and unnecessary and is calculated only to score political points at the expense of this community. The president believes it is an attempt to divert the American people from the urgent need to confront our challenges together… the President does not believe that the federal government should recognize gay marriage [and] he does not believe it is appropriate for scarce federal resources to be devoted to providing spousal benefits for partners in gay and lesbian relationships.

Now, look: I'm glad that Richard Socarides has evolved from his channeling this contempt for gay relationships. I would just ask of him what he has asked of Chuck Hagel: a public apology for the damage he helped do to gay people and people with HIV as he defended Democratic party power against the lives of gay people and their spouses.

Morgan's interview with Jones has been making the rounds:

I watched it with some disbelief and recognition. In Jones, you have so much rage you have to wonder where it comes from. The rage is about an abstract issue – the ideology and rationales that have sprung up to defend the availability of assault weapons for "hunting" – but that doesn't make it any the less horrifying. The entire interview is laced with the threat of violence, and the ugliest of nativism. More interesting: Jones has absolutely no control over himself. TNC reflects on the exchange:

I think the fact that Jones responds to a disagreement over government policy by telling his interlocutor "well how 'bout we take this outside" is illustrative. Jones spends much of the interview ranting about the evils of government use of force, without much attention to the kind of individual violence with which he threatened Morgan. More accurately, Jones believes that the only answer to such violence is more — presumably defensive — violence, though his pose makes him a poor advocate for such a position.

That's putting it nicely. After watching the interview, Rod Liddle dubs Morgan the "best interviewer in the world." Really? For just sitting there and allowing this lunatic to mouth off at the top of his lungs about Mao and Hitler? Allow me to agree with Weigel:

Morgan implies that Jones is simply ignorant — "Do you understand the difference between 11,000 and 35?" But the two men are talking past each other. Jones's job is to blow up and shame a buffoonish foreigner. Morgan's job is to make an example of the worst possible advocate for gun rights, and he doesn't even pull that off. And if he thinks this gimmicky crap is going to advance a gun control debate, then it's possible — horrifying, but possible — that we've been overrating his intelligence.

This was a ratings stunt which in no way engaged Jones or even interviewed him. If such a person acts in such a way on a television interview, you end the interview. Allahpundit defends Morgan's approach:

Dave Weigel says the segment was actually proof of how lame an interviewer Morgan is since he failed to really challenge Jones at any point. I dunno. The segment was designed to be a freak show that would hopefully alienate fencesitters from the gun-rights cause. Why interrupt the star attraction during his performance?

Because Morgan is a journalist and an interviewer, not the impresario of a freak show?

Hearing, according to Seth Horowitz, author of the new book, The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind. Molly Webster summarizes it. She notes that individuals "can recognize a sound in 0.05 seconds":

Why this need for auditory speed? It's our evolutionarily-shaped emergency response system. It let our ancestors hear a twig snap in the woods at night, when all was supposed to be quiet and they couldn't see. Yet, for most of us, we're wired to tune out non-essential sound, so the world doesn't feel like a sensory overload.

And noise directly affects human behavior:

Did you know that when you are in a bar, all the noise — the clash of glasses, yell of a bartender, and couple fighting in the corner; the jokes of friends, slam of the door, and music jamming from the jukebox — activates our body's flight or fight system? In response to that, the body wants to do something, anything, to manage the adrenaline that's pumping through its veins. In this case, that means spend money. Eat more. Get another round.

Waldman asks the apologists to provide one:

Can you give a definition of torture that wouldn't include waterboarding, stress positions, and sleep deprivation? I have no idea what such a definition might be, and I have to imagine that if they had any idea they would have offered one. Because here's the definition of torture you'd think everyone could agree on: Torture is the infliction of extreme suffering for the purpose of extracting information or a confession. That's not too hard to understand. The point is to create such agony that the subject will do anything, including give you information he'd prefer not to give you, to make the suffering stop. That's the purpose of waterboarding, that's the purpose of sleep deprivation (which, by the way, has been described by those subjected to it in places like the Soviet gulag to be worse than any physical pain they had ever experienced), and that's the purpose of stress positions. The "enhanced" techniques that were used weren't meant to trick detainees or win them over, they were meant to make them suffer until they begged for mercy.

Exactly. Torture is defined as breaking someone in order to get information. Cheney's torture program bragged of "breaking" people. John Yoo even bragged of crushing a child's testicles if necessary – which would, in his view, be perfectly legal for a president to authorize. The minute you apply mental and physical suffering sufficiently severe to force someone to "break", it's torture. Of course it is. And remember that the Convention Against Torture that Ronald Reagan signed (what a brutal betrayal of Reaganism were Cheney's war crimes!) made it clear that it was not just banning torture as defined, but anything that came even near torture. This was the America Cheney threw away. Because he panicked.