At least that’s my take on Chris Christie’s insistence on never knowing about the GWB shenanigans, after reading this strong piece of granular reporting from the NYT. The public seems to be slowly seeing that as well:
44 percent believe that Christie mostly is not telling the truth. By comparison, 42 percent say he’s mostly telling the truth.
We should withhold judgment until the investigation is complete … but this, in my judgment, is close to fatal for a potential presidential candidate.
In a deep-dive profile of the Bishop of Rome in Rolling Stone, Mark Binelli has some choice new details about Francis’ mindset and leadership stye. There were some nuggets that were new to me. On the famous “Who am I to judge?” interview, Binelli explains what Bergoglio specifically said:
What he actually says is, “Mah, who am I to judge?” In Italian, mah is an interjection with no exact English parallel, sort of the verbal equivalent of an emphatic shrug. My dad’s use of mah most often precedes his resignedly pouring another splash of grappa into his coffee. The closest translation I can come up with is “Look, who the hell knows?” If you watch the video, Francis even pinches his fingers together for extra Italian emphasis. Then he flashes a knowing smirk.
His sense of humor also comes through more potently in this profile. It has an appreciation of the absurd – and a propensity to self-mockery:
An interviewer once asked if he was a good cook, to which Bergoglio responded, “Well, no one ever died.” …
And this struck me as something you cannot imagine Benedict XVI or John Paul II ever doing: after the bruising fight over marriage equality in Argentina,
a private letter [Bergoglio] wrote describing gay marriage as “the total rejection of the law of God” leaked, bruising his image, though Vallely argues he wrote the letter as a strategic means of currying favor with the conservatives. Marcelo Márquez, a gay-rights leader in Buenos Aires, delivered Bergoglio an angry note – and received a call an hour later. “He listened to my views with a great deal of respect,” Márquez told The New York Times. They met on two occasions. Márquez told the future pope about his marriage plans, and departed with a gift: a copy of Bergoglio’s biography.
Francis has also developed ways to evade the Curia’s meddling and to keep the old (mainly Italian) guard off-balance:
While past popes maintained detailed public schedules, Francis handwrites his own agenda in a private datebook. “This is unheard of,” a senior Vaticanisti who wishes to remain anonymous tells me. “Aides who’d ordinarily know what’s going on have to piece things together by talking to other people.” Confirms Father Lombardi, the Vatican press secretary, with the hint of a sigh, “Before, I was in contact with the Curia and could ask them what the daily agenda is. Now, we have to discover what the agenda is. He is very free in organizing it.”
We also discover that Francis has few friends. He is at peace with the many and alone:
Vallely’s book describes a man who, when not out among the people, leads a solitary monklike existence in which “he looks after his interior life and doesn’t really have a social one.” Those are the words of one of his closest aides in Buenos Aires, who adds, “If you define friendship as having fun with people, then he has no friends. Friendship is a symmetrical relationship. His relationships are not like that. People believe they are his friends, but he never goes to dinner at their homes.”
Read my Deep Dish essay on Francis here.
(Photo: A mural by Italian street artist Maupal depicts Pope Francis as a superman, flying through the air with his white papal cloak billowing out behind him and holding a bag bearing the word “Values” in downtown Rome near the Vatican on January 28, 2014. The image, created by Italian street artist Maupal, was tweeted today by the Vatican communication twitter account, @PCCS_VA. By Tiziana Fabi/AFP/Getty Images.)
The words Obama used most last night:
Beinart was struck by how little the president mentioned the deficit:
Last night, instead of devoting paragraph after paragraph to America’s debt, Obama quickly doffed his cap to the importance of “bringing down our deficit in a balanced way,” and then pivoted hard. Now that congress had “finally produced a budget,” he declared, politicians were “freer to focus on creating new jobs.” And that’s exactly what Obama did. He didn’t just devote more time to subjects he had touched in on years past: making pre-K universal, raising the minimum wage, supporting manufacturing, building an infrastructure for clean energy. More importantly, he didn’t undermine those calls, either rhetorically or substantively, by also promising to freeze or slash government spending. It was as if the politics of austerity had suddenly ceased to exist.
He sees this decision as “yet more evidence that the Democratic Party is moving left”:
Instead of merely being the party that does austerity more humanely, Democrats from Bill de Blasio to Elizabeth Warren to now Obama himself are arguing unapologetically for expanding government in order to expand prosperity to those Americans who haven’t experienced it.
If you don’t follow Tom Edsall’s columns in the NYT, you’re missing some of the best deep-dive policy pieces on the web. When Ezra Klein speaks of integrating context into news, it sounds a little luftmenschy in the abstract. But Edsall does it all the time in a simple column. His latest is a must-read on a new, and potentially debate-changing book on the accelerating rise of inequality around the world. The book is Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, due out in the US this March, but already a sensation in France. Piketty talks about his book here.
What Piketty is proposing is that the twentieth century was an anomaly in the history of global capitalism:
The six decades between 1914 and 1973 stand out from the past and future, according to Piketty, because the rate of economic growth exceeded the after-tax rate of return on capital. Since then, the rate of growth of the economy has declined, while the return on capital is rising to its pre-World War I levels.
“If the rate of return on capital remains permanently above the rate of growth of the economy – this is Piketty’s key inequality relationship,” Milanovic writes in his review, it “generates a changing functional distribution of income in favor of capital and, if capital incomes are more concentrated than incomes from labor (a rather uncontroversial fact), personal income distribution will also get more unequal — which indeed is what we have witnessed in the past 30 years.”
Edsall provides a variety of expert judgments on the book. I have a profound proclivity for exciting ideas that suggest we’re all doomed – so take my interest with a pinch of salt. But the book powerfully suggests a rather determinist view that capitalism constantly sows the seeds of its own destruction, by gradually and inexorably increasing social and economic inequality in such a way as to undermine the legitimacy of democratic politics that undergirds its existence. Let’s just say that Tom Perkins and Paul Ryan – as well as unreconstructed liberals who think government can truly defeat accelerating inequality – should read it.
It’s easier said than done:
It is hard to imagine a Republican President giving a pay cut to hundreds of thousands of minimum-wage workers. Along similar lines, an executive order banning federal contractors from discriminating against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender employees—which gay-rights groups and some congressional Democrats are pushing Obama to issue—probably wouldn’t be reversed by a future President (unless that President is Rand Paul, in which case all bets are off, and the only protection any workers will have is sharpened sticks). Some executive orders are best left in place, whatever a President might think of them. In 2001, President Bush sparked a backlash when he suspended a Clinton rule reducing the acceptable amount of arsenic in drinking water. We might like a little lemon in our water, maybe a little mandarin orange; arsenic, not so much. Bush eventually had to backtrack.
Public opinion isn’t the only obstacle. Some orders can’t be reversed without litigation or extensive public hearings. Others prompt changes in markets and behavior that are too complex, and become too ingrained, to unwind. Still others—for example, orders under the Antiquities Act, setting aside federal land as national monuments—can be undone only by an act of Congress.
A reader continues the thread:
As a 36-year-old gay man who came of age in the ’90s, and who also happened to be interested in independent film, I was left so cold by cinematic portrayals of gay men in that era. And yeah, don’t get me started on Jeffrey. I once dated a guy who just raved and raved about how much he loved that movie, and when he finally convinced me to watch it with him, I nearly broke up with him right on the spot. How could he and I possibly have anything in common? I drifted towards the edgier stuff, which, somehow, while angrier, was also less overtly gay (more like coded gay). Gregg Araki, Todd Haynes, that sort of thing. I liked it because of what it wasn’t (Jeffrey), but try as I might, I couldn’t get past the fact that most of those movies were just bad.
I was a programmer for a gay and lesbian film festival for a few years in a major city in the early 2000s, and the state of gay cinema depressed the hell out of me.
One in every 30 movies had anything at all I could grasp onto as being interesting, or in any way related to me, but I also soon came to see that’s just art in general. Most of it is bad, aimed at the middle of the road, and not meant to ruffle feathers or be offensive in any way, or worse, have a point of view.
I used to rail against Will & Grace. It perpetuated nasty stereotypes, it was de-sexualized, etc etc. Then I started watching it on syndication a few years ago at night during a particularly rough period of insomnia and realized it was actually hilarious. Karen and Jack are a scream, while Will and Grace, ironically, are both deadweights to that show, totally uninteresting. But comedy and stereotypes are always how minorities have ingratiated themselves into society. If you can get past how utterly stereotyped it actually is, you might allow yourself to be amused by it.
The older I’ve gotten the less and less I want anything to actually be about being gay. I much more readily appreciate entertainment that skillfully weaves a gay perspective into something else. As another reader pointed out, both Six Feet Under and The Wire had wonderfully and fully realized gay characters that were realistic, complex, and banal all at the same time. I think that speaks far more powerfully to the gay experience than any show that purports to be about the gay experience. My life as a gay man is not about being gay. It’s about all the interactions I have with all kinds of people and contexts everyday. I just happen to be a gay person doing it.
Another with experience in the area:
Thank you for your discussion about gays and films, as I find it very fascinating. Perhaps I can add some perspective on the issue as I was the operations manager for a gay and lesbian film festival here in Washington for almost 10 years.
I agree, many of the films we showed were cringe worthy, stereotypical or had ridiculous plots. Often times the acting was worse than wooden, in the direction amateurish. Nonetheless, over a ten day period, we would sell over 20,000 tickets. Partly that is because audiences were so hungry to see images of themselves on the big screen. Remember, it wasn’t until the late ’90s where regularly saw gay and lesbian characters in mainstream movies and TV. Where else could we find ourselves anywhere and be able to watch them in a safe place? For decades, gay characters have been presented as evil, perverted, or ended up dead. You cannot underestimate the importance of seeing our stories being told by our people on the big screen, especially for people who’ve been fed a steady diet that they are perverted or unwanted.
For minorities within the gay community this was even more important. If we showed a film that featured primarily black actors I can assure you the audience would be packed filled with blacks, and often times that was the only film they would come out to see. Movies from Asia were seen primarily by Asian audiences. Lesbians flocked to movies about lesbians.
Furthermore, there were indeed some films that were actually very done. Some of the very best films we ever showed were documentaries, and these told our stories in moving ways. If you missed those docs you really missed a major cultural impact, and I’m sure you missed important moments in our histories.
Our filmfest, along with the dozens of other filmfest held across the United States and the world, provided opportunities for up-and-coming filmmakers. Without our filmfests, there would be almost no opportunities for their films to be shown anywhere. We created a market for gay and lesbian films where there was none before. By creating that market we encouraged and nurtured young directors and filmmakers, who otherwise had no outlets for their talents. You have to start somewhere and we gave many filmmakers that critical boost early in their career.
Over the years the quality of the films dramatically increased. If you think the films are bad today you should’ve seen what was being shown in the early ’90s. Back then, there was very little to choose from and what was out there was poorly done. I believe that the role of these gay and lesbian film fests around the world played a significant part in increasing the general level of filmmaking.
If you want better filmmaking as an art form then you have to become a patron. It’s always easy to sit on the sidelines and criticize that no one is doing good work. But I can assure you, if no one supports an art form, no good work will ever arise. We need audiences and we need people to support the art, or else it will surely never improve. This is a virtuous cycle, and by being a patron you can be a part of it. Just being part of the audience helps these from the filmmakers immeasurably. If you can take on the role of being a true patron of the arts then quality filmmaking will be happen even faster.
“No, no, you’re not man enough, you’re not man enough. I’ll break you in half. Like a boy,” – a highly testosteroned congressman Michael Grimm, to a NY1 reporter asking him a question about a campaign finance investigation.
Long, silly … but it gets going after a bit.
Frank Rich digs into the demographics of Fox News:
All three cable-news networks are hemorrhaging young viewers (as are their network-news counterparts) in an era when television is hardly the news medium of choice for Americans raised online and on smartphones. But Fox News is losing younger viewers at an even faster rate than its competitors. With a median viewer age now at 68 according to Nielsen data through mid-January (compared with 60 for MSNBC and CNN, and 62 to 64 for the broadcast networks), Fox is in essence a retirement community.
Derek Thompson thinks this largely explains Fox’s success, because the “entire cable news industry relies on building a product for ages 60 and up”:
[F]undamentally, Fox News is at an unassailable advantage on its turf because it’s selling a conservative political product to an older audience, which tends to be more politically conservative, anyway. Over the last three general-election cycles, the 65+ group voted for the GOP presidential candidate by an average of 9 percentage points.
In an interview, Jennifer Greenburg discusses how the “American Dream” factors into her photography project, Revising History, in which she inserts herself into old photographs:
I look at casual pictures that I have taken and I notice that the more I look at an image of an event, the more I begin to remember that event differently. Something happens to the memory. It becomes translated into something else — something better than it was in the moment. Suddenly, I remember having the time of my life! Even if, in reality, I had been quite bored at that moment.
With this in mind, I then wonder if the concept of the American Dream was simply crafted by photography: is it simply an ideology made by editing key moments together, releasing them into the culture, thus re-writing our cultural memory? I think so.
And that is my idea behind Revising History: I take over someone else’s moment to call my own, but, I also go on to comment that I am not sure that the original moment was any more real than my fabrication.
(Photo caption: “My dreams came true the day I did hair for a fashion show,” 2013. By Jennifer Greenburg)
The Dish 