Month: April 2013

“Nothing Would Become His Reign Like The Renunciation Of It”

The Enthronement Of The 105th Archbishop Of Canterbury Justin Welby

Thomas Mallon offers advice to Prince Charles:

What, one wants to whisper into his still endearingly jug ears, have you got to lose? If you insist on waiting it out, why not kick over the table once the jackpot is finally yours? If Charles I gave the British regicide, and Charles II gave it restoration, why shouldn’t you, at the moment of coronation, give it at long last a republic? Why not take the crown from the archbishop’s hands—not to set it on your own head, à la Napoleon—but merely to set it aside, a simple and grand refusal? And why not do some advance colluding with your eldest son, who by all accounts quite genuinely loves you, so that, when everyone’s eyes turn in his direction, he simply shakes his head and refuses it, too? At that point, the whole flyblown confection of monarchy will collapse.

The Scots may by then have disappeared over the Highlands, into independence, depriving the United Kingdom of its adjective. Charles could take the king out of the kingdom, the scepter from the isle. He could smash the strongest pillar of his people’s magical thinking and subconscious self-hatred. Then, if he really seeks to restore the greenness of his green and pleasant land, he could—enhanced rather than diminished—jolt the country into taking desperate measures.

I post this secular blasphemy for purely provocative reasons.

(Photo: The Most Reverend Justin Welby speaks with Prince Charles and Camilla after his enthronement at Canterbury Cathedral on March 21, 2013 in Canterbury, England. By Chris Ison – WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Tax Inequality

Caleb Crain studies his and his husband’s tax returns:

Simple arithmetic shows that in 2011, we paid $5,675 more than we would have if the federal government had recognized our marriage, and in 2012, $4,250 more. (I benightedly write for a living and my husband, though he also writes, has a proper job; couples like us with a significant income disparity usually come in for a marriage bonus, not a penalty, when paying taxes.) There’s something a little sordid about these dollar amounts. Whatever the cost of being gay in America may be, they don’t correspond to it. But I find their perspicuity, however petty and inadequate, somewhat fascinating. Numbers are so definite, even when their meaning isn’t.

Class On The Silver Screen

Alyssa is looking forward Elysium, created by District 9 director Neill Blomkamp, because she likes how his films show how “technological advancements will not be distributed equitably or universally, and in fact, that technology may be used to provide an escape hatch for the most privileged people in society”:

In [District 9], someone went from the privileged side of the divide to the underprivileged one and discovered that he couldn’t go back again, that there are strict rules for who you have to be to live in a comparative paradise. It looks like Elysium is flipping that divide in having Matt Damon crash the gates of a heaven near to earth, surprising the residents of that gated community with his capacity to get inside. I can’t wait to see what happens when he gets there.

The Right Kind Of Recycling

David Roberts interviews Bill McDonough, co-author of The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability – Designing for Abundance, about the failures of recycling:

We often talk about recycling, but we’re actually not. We are downcycling. Take a plastic water bottle. If we recycle it into a park bench, it’s actually downcycling, from a quality perspective. I’ve reused the molecules, so that’s recycling polymer. But I’ve reduced its qualities, because I mixed it with other things, hybridized it, let’s say, with other polymers and various dyes and finishes. The flower pot I made it into is going to a landfill, or potentially an incinerator. It’s downcycling, cascading down in quality, from cradle to grave, or cradle to crematorium.

Now, if I take something that’s problematic, like soft PVC, that contains plasticizers, alloys, endocrine disrupters, materials that are gassing and become dioxins that could cause cancer, and I recycle that — is that recycling good? No.

Recycling’s a process; the product is good or not depending on human values. It’s sort of like efficiency. If I’m a terrorist, and I’m efficient, it’s worse. So if I’m recycling, that’s great, but if I’m recycling things that have become carcinogenic, is that great?

Upcycling is about increasing the quality as it goes to its next use. So, that water bottle. There is a residue in the bottle from a catalytic reaction involving very low levels of antimony, which is a heavy metal. Although it may not be dangerous when you drink water out of the bottle, it is something that’s suboptimal from a cradle-to-cradle perspective. If I burn the bottle as fuel, I get anti-trioxide in the atmosphere. Not a good thing. Why would I want a system of polyesters contaminated by heavy metal, when I’d like to use them forever, again and again, safely?

Upcycling means that we’d get that bottle back and take out the antimony. It gets better. That’s what we mean by upcycling: the idea that things get better when humans touch them.

Throwing More Money At Students Won’t Help

Josh Barro points out that, as “of 2008, we were spending more per pupil on primary and secondary education than every Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development country except Luxembourg, Switzerland and Norway”:

When the subject is health care, liberals have drawn the right lessons from the last 40 years of cost growth, understanding that more money doesn’t necessarily mean better outcomes. They should apply that same lesson to education: In a cost-bloated sector with poor quality improvement, we should be figuring out how to spend money better, instead of spending more of it.

The Daily Wrap

usgs_line.phpToday on the Dish, Andrew drew attention to the state of America’s veterans, sunk his teeth into the new budget offer, and gave Rand Paul some credit for attempting outreach to black Americans. He extolled Maggie’s sensible position on Israel, described Thatcherite counterculture from his youth (underlining the vitriol of her enemies) and yet noted that critique of her relationship with Augusto Pinochet is totally valid. Later, Andrew saw the end of gay culture watch and explored the possibilities of monetizing blogs.

In political coverage, we checked in with the upcoming consequences of the sequester, gathered reax to the trials of the bitcoin, and pointed to the next possible push for marriage equality. Waldman was skeptical of the gun control bill in the Senate, readers continued to hash out the right to bear arms, and pushed back against Goldblog on silencers. Nate Cohn remained positive that the Republicans are facing demographic trouble as we revisited Brown Vs. Board of Ed and heard an anecdote on Thatcher’s modern attitude toward same sex couples. Readers countered the idea that only women are objectified in politics and the New York Times made a Freudian slip.

In miscellanea, Chris Oates spotted a reflection of the British Empire in Doctor Who, Noah Berlatsky rebutted Alyssa’s critique of Romeo and Juliet, and Jeffery Overstreet pondered the Cohen brothers’ theological streak. We found more tributes to David Kuo, awed at the reality TV flooding over Alaska, and readers sounded off on the novelization of the small screen.

Later we saw a super secret social network, readers weighed the nutritional value of guinea pig and Seth Rogen went Breaking Bad for a Cool Ad Watch. Finally, we got a taste of summer movies in the MHB, visited Banner Creek, Alaska for the VFYW and recognized a chubby control freak in the Face of the Day.

­B.J.

“Clay Hunt Was A Casualty Of War”

A recent 60 Minutes profile of an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran who committed suicide after suffering years of PTSD:

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Some more context on the crisis:

About 20% of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are thought to suffer from PTSD, though many do not report their problems. Instead they try to dose themselves. A VA study found that veterans suffering from PTSD or depression were about four times more likely to have drug or drink problems. Too many end up in the same desperate place as Eiswert. The VA reported that, on average, 22 veterans committed suicide each day in 2010. Last year more active-duty soldiers took their own lives than were killed in combat. …

In war, it is said, there are no unwounded soldiers. Bombs that shatter bones also batter brains. Even on the periphery, war afflicts men with aching joints, ringing ears and psychological damage. Imagine, then, the human damage wrought by over a decade of battle.

The Novelization Of TV, Ctd

A reader quotes Alyssa:

“In a book, you can stay within the medium and flip back and forth if you don’t remember who a character is…” She goes on to contend that you can’t stay within medium with a TV show if you need to “remember” something.  I agree to an extent, but people are increasingly moving away from the traditional model of watching a TV show when the network broadcasts it.  Because of HBO’s crazy protection of the product, those unwilling to pay for a year of HBO for one series are going online to view Game of Thrones.  The medium for those folks is not “television” but rather the Internet, complete with wikis and fan pages, etc.  Also, because this particular show is already a popular novel, there is a different medium that is actually inseparable from the TV show.

Another reader:

Novelized TV series on American television are not a new thing.  The best example may be Babylon 5, a sci-fi series that ran for five seasons from 1993 to 1998.  The show’s writer, J. Michael Straczynski (JMS to the show’s fans), planned it as a five-season show from the start, describing it as a “novel for television” with a defined beginning, middle, and end.  It featured the ensemble cast and multiple story arcs that characterize the current generation of novelized TV.

Babylon 5 also pioneered integrating television with what we now call social media.  JMS kept up a continuous dialog with viewers through the pre-web USENET, GEnie, and CompuServe forums.  More than once JMS wrote jokes, names, or other references from these online discussions into the show as a salute to online fans.  It was a very Dish-like participatory atmosphere.

Another:

Japanese anime has been doing things this way for decades.

Most anime TV shows (the good ones anyway) shoot for a single season, maybe two or three, and then proceed to tell an overarching story epic, with episodic digressions strategically paced throughout.  This allows for a story-driven experience over the whole of the series, instead of each episode being self-contained as in many sitcoms and dramas, and creates the same incentives for binge-watching, including being able to keep track of a sprawling, diverse cast (“Fullmetal Alchemist” is a great example).  It also allows the creative minds behind the show to plan ahead for a proper resolution and conclusion to the series, instead of it dying a slow death or being cancelled outright.

Recent American television shows have finally been taking a page from the same book, notably Joss Whedon’s “Firefly” and “Dollhouse,” as well as many of the USA original series, like “Burn Notice” and “White Collar.”

Another:

It’s not clear to me that “Game of Thrones” has so path-breaking a model (not to say that it’s not good, it’s just a question of how new it is). Korean prime-time dramas have been doing it this way since the 1990s anyway, with a series lifetime of from 12 to 24 episodes mostly, generally airing two episodes a week. Prime-time historical biodramas may go into the 150-episode ballpark, airing twice a week, but they have a lot of outlay on sets and costumes to make back. Even their “daily dramas”, comparable to US daytime soap operas, don’t go on “forever” – 100 to 150 episodes is about the range. (Although I remember one that went 350 episodes. But still, that’s not a full two years.) All these dramas including the “daily dramas” generally have a clear dramatic arc.

I’m not familiar with Latin American “telenovelas” but I know that they aren’t “endless” either. Actually I suspect that the old U.S. primetime TV ideal with an “endless” series, a static cast and environment, and episodes that could be aired in any order really – like “Perry Mason” or “The Dick Van Dyke Show” – have been pretty much an exception in the world scene.

Furthermore that model was never really been so universal even in U.S. 3-network TV. Daytime serials had histories, and when the format was transplanted into evenings – “Dallas” or, before that, “Peyton Place” – you started to have to follow the action to know what was going on. There were also the World War II-based dramas like “Combat” and “Gallant Men” – the episodes were pretty self-contained, but you knew they couldn’t slog through France and Italy forever the way Marshal Dillon could police a timeless town. Then there were dramas like “The Fugitive” which at least held out the prospect of “dramatic resolution” of the whole series even though there wasn’t much in the way of story development from one episode to the next, barring the finale.

I suggest that the real path-breaker was “Roots” including the “Next Generation”. The only difference between that and our current series arcs was that its “seasons” were each jammed into a week of intense viewing. The miniseries format went on from there. Meanwhile other more conventional dramas, like “St. Elsewhere” and “Hill St. Blues”, and comedies like “Roseanne” and probably some earlier ones I’m missing, incorporated multi-episode plots and season-long story lines involving the personal lives of their characters. With the thirty-nine-episode season for a drama program now down to 22 for broadcast TV and 12 or fewer for cable, the “series” and the “miniseries” have now sort of converged in the middle.

The Deity Abides

Jeffrey Overstreet contemplates the role of religion in the Coen brothers’ films:

I think the Coens’ work disturbs audiences because it reminds us that, contrary to so many Hollywood messages, “being good” isn’t the answer. Being good is good, but—as Bill Murray says in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom—it isn’t enough to fix things. Their movies “ring true” when they remind us that there is a “wrath that’s about to set down,” as Rooster Cogburn says. If that wasn’t true, it wouldn’t strike such a resonant chord in audiences. The Lone Biker of the Apocalypse in Raising Arizona is coming, and there’s something elemental and true about him. We ourselves have unleashed him, as H.I. declares. In No Country, we’re warned that we “can’t stop what’s comin’.” There is a moral code, yes, and we violate it in countless ways. We’re screwed.

But their work doesn’t stop there. It engages and encourages us by leaving us with moments that transcend all of that doom, all of that destruction. Their suggestion of the possibility of grace is not so much a sermon proclamation as a desperate hope. And it wouldn’t move us so deeply if the anticipation of grace weren’t built into us somehow. It moves us because, on some level, we know it’s true.