The Dish

I have to say I’m amazed at the fact that almost all the obituaries for Susan Sontag omitted her primary, longtime relationship with Annie Leibovitz, the photographer. Of 315 articles in Nexis, only 29 mention Leibovitz, and most of them referred merely to their joint projects. Leibovitz was unmentioned as a survivor in the NYT and Washington Post. It’s striking how even allegedly liberal outlets routinely excise the homosexual dimension from many people’s lives – even from someone dead. But perhaps it is reflective of Sontag’s own notions of privacy and identity. She championed many causes in her day, but the gay civil rights movement was oddly not prominent among them.

THE BLOG EXPLOSION: Jeff Jarvis has a great post on what has happened. As what might now be thought of as an “old-timer,” I have to say that my own experience in the blogosphere has changed. I used to be able to keep some kind of grip on a lot of what’s out there. But it’s hopeless now. Even Glenn can’t manage it. Our little village is now a fast-growing exurb. I’m not complaining. But I’m trying to adjust. And the decentralized nature of blog-world can make that harder.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY I: “I’d much rather be doing this than figthing a war,” – helicopter pilot Lt. Cmdr. William Whitsitt, helping the survivors of the south Asian tsunami. Earth to Whitsitt: you’re a soldier.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY II: “[‘Desperate Housewives’] has nothing to say about the vicissitudes of the average or even the well-to-do American stay-at-home wife; it is neither feminist, nor pro-feminist nor proto-feminist nor post-feminist. Feminism has as little to do with Desperate Housewives as it did with Sex and the City. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine in either case what outright misogynists would have done differently.” – Germaine Greer, in the Guardian.

A journalists’ standing ovation for an anti-Bush tirade by Norman Mailer.

The Cornerites are taking a whack at Christie Todd Whitman’s assertion that “Bush’s three-percentage-point margin in the popular vote is the lowest of any incumbent president ever to win reelection.” Does this mean much? Well, it’s better than being beaten, as some have remarked. But it is also indicative of the fact that the voters didn’t weigh up the incumbent this time around and come to the conclusion that he fully deserved re-election. Most of the time, that’s what they do with incumbents up for a second term. Remember Eisenhower’s, Nixon’s, Reagan’s and Clinton’s re-election margins? Bush didn’t win a big majority; he remains much less popular than most re-elected presidents; if he’s smart, he’ll understand this. But he is smart and seems intent on a major go-for-broke two year legislative agenda that both assumes the fragile public support he has and utilizes his institutional power in a one-party government. Same as the first term, actually. And since he doesn’t need to get re-elected again, less risky for him. As for the GOP, their interests may not be so well aligned with the president’s. That’s the plot-line for the next two years, I’d say. The high water-mark for unified conservative dominance has already happened.

MURDER IN AMSTERDAM: The New Yorker had the brilliant idea of sending Ian Buruma to investigate the van Gogh murder and its ramifications.

A word of deep thanks to Reihan, Steve and Ross for doing such a fantastic job while I was in blog de-tox for a week or so. Hard to find a more enthusiastic, brilliant or unpredictable trio of young thinkers. Don’t forget to check in on them in their own forum, The American Scene, in the coming days and weeks. And thanks again, guys. I had a wonderful time off – lazy, lazy, lazy. In trying to get a handle on the time-management issues a blog inevitably entails, I may be blogging a little less frenetically in the new year. I have a book to write, and my New Year’s resolution is to finish it by the end of this year. My other, post-CPAP resolution is to get up each day by 9.30 am and not to stay up so late. No, I’m not following John Derbyshire’s advice. But my boyfriend deserves a little better than being a blog widower; and evenings are better spent than in front of a computer screen. Of course, I’ll probably break all these resolutions soon enough. Just watch.

THE FINAL TALLY: This blog contained around 522,000 words in 2004. Maybe six big books. Just for the record. And 2005 will be the fifth year that this blog has been around. Thanks to Blogads and you for the support to keep going.

BUSH AND MORAL VALUES: Here’s a simple question: isn’t it a matter of morals not to fiddle the books? The Bush administration has made some promising noises about reducing domestic spending in the last couple of months, but this news is not encouraging:

To show that President Bush can fulfill his campaign promise to cut the deficit in half by 2009, White House officials are preparing a budget that will assume a significant jump in revenues and omit the cost of major initiatives like overhauling Social Security. To make Mr. Bush’s goal easier to reach, administration officials have decided to measure their progress against a $521 billion deficit they predicted last February rather than last year’s actual shortfall of $413 billion. By starting with the outdated projection, Mr. Bush can say he has already reduced the shortfall by about $100 billion and claim victory if the deficit falls to just $260 billion.

How can anyone take this administration’s fiscal intentions seriously when it engages in this kind of flim-flam? We’re now used to the fact that the administration doesn’t count the war in its fiscal calculations (what’s a few hundred billion when it’s other people’s money?), but that doesn’t make it any the less preposterous. And the strong case for partly privatizing social security is undermined by the president’s inability to concede that it will require serious short-term borrowing. All of this is as much a moral failure as an economic one, which is why I’m still befuddled by the anemic conservative outrage. Or is sex the only area in which Republicans care about morality?

MOVIE WRAP-UP: When I read this A.O. Scott piece on the over-rating of the movie, “Sideways,” I was relieved. I wasn’t nuts, after all. It’s great to see a reviewer finally copping to reviewers’ own biases – in favor of movies celebrating older, dweeby, neurotic characters who unsurprisingly resemble … many critics. Don’t get me wrong, the movie was far better than most – and was superb at times. Charles wasn’t crazy. But it was too long, a little too precious, and the halleluia chorus greeting it far too loud. (It also reaffirmed my own pet peeve with many movies: that male characters are almost always far less attractive then the women they date and/or marry. Again: that’s surely a function of the fact that many movie producers and directors are aging neurotics and movies are their way of reversing reality.) Maybe the encomia for “Sideways” are primarily a function of just how truly terrible most movies now are. But I’m glad to see this little film knocked down a few pegs. Still, compared to “National Treasure” … I did, however, finally get to see “Garden State” on video. Maybe it’s a generational thing, but it was one of the few movies last year that seemed to me in touch with reality. The reality I see around me anyway.

Cass Sunstein has written eloquently and persuasively on the dangers posed by emerging media technologies. Specifically, Sunstein fears that elaborate sorting mechanisms will allow consumers of news “to wall themselves off from topics and opinions that they would prefer to avoid,” to create a personal echo chamber tailored flawlessly to one’s own prejudices and predilections. Despite the proliferation of ever-angrier partisan news outlets, I’m optimistic on this front. The greatest thing about Andrew’s blog, for me, is that readers come spoiling for a fight. The blog infuriates readers, and yet they come back to get enraged all over again. They come to be surprised and engaged and challenged, not to be patronized or coddled. I find that pretty inspiring. Taking the reins these past few days has thus been a humbling, and at times bumbling, experience. We’re very grateful.

— Reihan

Actually, I’ll make it short (I’m sure Reihan will offer a suitably phantasmagorical sendoff later on today). Thanks so very much to Andrew for the opportunity to hang out here, and with any luck we haven’t abused his hospitality too much. For everyone who enjoyed reading us, I hope you’ll stop by The American Scene from time to time in the coming year (and maybe swing by your local bookstore come March). And for everyone who’s been desperately counting the days till Andrew comes back full time, well, cheer up! Our reign of terror is about to come to an end.

Happy New Year, either way . . .

— Ross

John Lahr’s Tony Kushner profile in this week’s New Yorker isn’t available online, unfortunately — but this interview with Lahr provides a pretty good idea of his attitude toward Kushner’s work, and particularly toward Angels in America, which Lahr holds up as a modern American “masterpiece.”

After reading the Lahr profile, I found myself revisiting Daniel Mendelsohn’s NYRB review of the HBO production of Angels, which offers (to my admittedly biased mind) the most evenhanded look at the artistic strengths and weaknesses of Kushner’s magnum opus. Mendelsohn readily acknowledges the play’s many artistic high points, but he also notes:

. . . much of what seemed crucial about the play [in the early ’90s] seems artificial or even dated now . . . you realize how much the play depends on a cozy kind of politically correct goodwill and the easy prejudices of its audience, and so you realize, too, how often it makes its points not through dramatic logic or motivational coherence, but by means of emotional gimmicks and dramatic fudging.

I think this is right (though I should add that I’ve only seen Angels in the television medium, and presumably many of its weaknesses, particularly the stagey quality of much of the dialogue, would drop away were I to see it as it was originally produced). As Mendelsohn writes, Kushner’s plays has “the bones of a much grander and more important work” — but it never quite achieves greatness, not least because of Kushner’s tendency toward self-congratulation, and his inability to avoid stroking his own, and his audience’s, sense of moral superiority.

THE AGITPROP PROBLEM: This comes across most obviously, Mendelsohn points out, in the case of Joe Pitt, the play’s closeted Mormon Republican:

Indeed, of all the desertions that Angels depicts, none is as striking as the desertion of Joe by his creator. Angels presents many images of suffering . . . [but] each of these characters is, by the end of the play, healed, comforted, or forgiven . . . Of all the sufferers in Angels, only Joe is left alone at the end, the only character who is neither forgiven nor redeemed in a way that conforms to Kushner’s sense of “Perestroika” as a “comedy.”

Why is this? When you look over the cast of characters in Angels and think about whom we’re supposed to sympathize with, and who gets forgiven, you can’t help noticing that the most sympathetic, the “best” characters are either ill, or women, or black, or Jewish. Looking over this rather PC list, it occurs to you to wonder whether, in the worldview of this play’s creator, the reason why Joe Pitt, who alone of the characters is the most genuinely and interestingly torn, who in fact seeks love the hardest and suffers the most for self-knowledge, can’t be forgiven by his creator, and is the only character who goes unredeemed in some way at the end of the play, is that he’s a healthy, uninfected, white, Anglo-Saxon, male Christian. This in turn makes you realize how much of the second part of this play depends, from the in-joke of San Francisco as Heaven to the closing scene in which Prior addresses the audience and in a valedictory blessing vapidly declares us all to be “fabulous creatures, each and every one,” on a certain set of glib, feel-good, politically correct gay assumptions about the world, assumptions that in the end undercut the ambitions and, occasionally, the pretensions of what has come before . . .

It’s this inability not to pander to his audience (or to his own prejudices), I think, that leaves Kushner stuck halfway to true artistic greatness, unable to go the rest of the distance. You can see a similar limitation at work in Kushner’s election-time play-in-progress, in which Laura Bush confronts first the ghosts of dead Iraqi children and then, in another scene, Kushner himself. A bad left-wing playwright (Tim Robbins, anyone?) would have simply made the First Lady a cackling villain or a pathetic dupe, but Kushner is better than that — his Laura Bush is clever and witty and sharp and interesting, his Laura Bush quotes Shakespeare and Dostoevsky and is even allowed to get the better of Kushner, for a moment or two, in their face-off, and you can feel the character almost slipping away from Kushner, almost departing the stale agitprop routine he has devised and becoming someone real, someone full-fledged and interesting in spite of being white and Christian and Republican and all the rest of it . . . and then Kushner snaps her back into place, pulls the scene back into harness, and it ends with a monologue in which the actress Kirsten Johnson imagines the UN General Assembly (that great embodiment of suffering humanity, as we all know) rising up against Bush, “ablaze with Life’s revulsion at Death and at Death’s astounded, clueless little minion.”

Which is to say, it ends in polemic, in choir-preaching, and in the expression of ideas perfectly tailored to the prejudices of Kushner’s audiences (the Laura-Tony confrontation first played out at a MoveOn.org benefit). Which is where Angels in America ends, ultimately, with its one Republican, Middle American, Christian character abandoned and everyone else safely “fabulous.”

And which, I think, is where Kushner himself ends (at least in his work to date), trapped somewhere between Tim Robbins and Dostoevsky, his artistic aspirations tangled hopelessly in the nets of his politics.

— Ross

“The fact that you make me so angry only increases your hotness, quite frankly.” More feedback on the Letters Page.

STILL EMERGING: Don’t get glib, Republicans. Judis and Texeira are righter than you think about “the emerging Democratic majority.” Mark Schmitt offers one way to get there.
— Reihan