PIPA

A bunch of websites, including Wikipedia, Reddit, BoingBoing, Craigslist, ICanHazCheezeburger (is that the right number of Zs?) and others have either shut down or done something else visible today to protest SOPA and PIPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act (as it is called in the U.S. House of Representatives) and the Protect I.P. Act (as a similar, complementary act is called in the U.S. Senate). Here’s the video that’s been going around—by the creator of the brilliant series Goodie Bag and Everything is a Remix that takes a stab at explaining it.

If passed by both bodies and signed into law by the President, these bills, along with similar government actions that are lining up in other countries, would, like Armageddon and Deep Impact, deliver profound, expensive, and oddly symmetrical shock waves to the Internet, both in the United States and around the world. That includes Overthinking It.

But, also like Armageddon and Deep Impact, people disagree on just how bad or crassly commercial they are. Votes are coming up, so now is the time to take action if you want to take action, whether you are of the Bruce Willis or Morgan Freeman schools of asteroid-stopping or asteroid-coping.

A lot of us here at Overthinking It have strong feelings about SOPA and PIPA. We try not to use the site to endorse specific political positions or candidates, so we did not shut down today. Still, without Wikipedia, we have no way of producing new content. So we decided to make this neutral official statement on behalf of the site and save our personal opinions for the comment thread.

SOPA

So let’s open the conversation to our writers and readers! What do you think about SOPA and PIPA? What do you think about copyrights? Who do you think should be responsible for identifying lapses or wrongs on the Internet, and what powers should they have to address them? What does our large international readership think of this American issue?

For example, why does the Rdio terms of service care if I make a derivative work of Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” which would not usually be covered by copyright? Do they think it would be commercially viable if I did? Should I make it anyway? Would “We Found Love In a Homeless Place” be inappropriate?

We’ve been thinking of adding forums around here for a while, and this seems like the perfect test case for whether our notoriously civil community can manage to discuss something controversial without being jerks, like the rest of the internet. So sound off in the comments!

FURTHER READING

The Stop Online Piracy Act — H.R.3261.IH — introduced in House

The Protect I.P. Act of 2011 — S.968 — introduced in the Senate

Write Your Representative, from the U.S. House of Representatives

How to Contact U.S. Senators, from the U.S. Senate

“We Found Love,” Rihanna

Related Posts

• Open Thread for November 18, 2011
• Best of NY Comic-Con 2011
• Open Thread for June 3, 2011
• Episode 135: 2 True 2 Gritty
• Think Tank: The Princess Bride and The Dread Pirate Roberts

We’re taking the day off from posting, but please enjoy a smattering of Presidential overthinking, now chiefly of historical interest.

The 5 Hottest Presidents of the United States

5 Presidential Firsts Hollywood Hasn’t Tried Yet

The Worst Speech in Political History: the Tragedy of The American President

This Is What Happens When You Let an Amateur Run the Government: How Hollywood Is Ruining America

And, in honor of our current commander in chief: Obama Accepts Matrix of Leadership

Related Posts

• 5 Presidential Firsts Hollywood Hasn’t Tried Yet
• McCain goes REALLY negative on Obama
• The Worst Speech in Political History: the Tragedy of The American President
• The Five Hottest Presidents of the United States
• Episode 18: Erection Fever

Today, enjoy this guest post from Trevor Seigler.

With the 2008 election of Barack Obama, change came to America, especially in Hollywood. The speculative “black president” genre was just getting started when President Obama’s election rendered such fanciful depictions as 24’s President Palmer and Head of State’s Chris Rock irrelevant. But future screenwriters need not worry; there are plenty of options left for “what-if” presidencies if you have the creativity to make it happen.

Before we start the list, let’s lay down some ground rules: animals might be able to make free-throws using their paws or teach Matt LeBlanc to connect with his teammates, but they’re legally ineligible for the nation’s highest office. However cute the prospect of “MVPP: Most Valuable Primate President” is, it’s best left to the dustbin of history. And while the notion of Arnold “Governator” Schwarzenegger in the White House is a marriage of pop-culture and Republican wish-fulfillment, his role as governor of California has had mixed reviews and not enough box-office to justify a sequel. So now that we’ve established some boundaries, let the presidential possibilities commence!

Female President

This one seems like cheating: what with Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton’s roles in the 2008 election, the notion of a female president isn’t necessarily so “out there” as it once might have been. 24 had a female head of state, and Geena Davis starred in a short-lived show built around the premise on ABC. With Mama Grizzly Palin as the “popular girl who makes out with you to win your vote” Republican 2012 hopeful, the window of opportunity to make a film around the concept is rapidly closing.

Pros/Cons: What screenwriter couldn’t squeeze dramatic gold out of the premise of a working mother as the world’s most powerful leader? She has to deal with the pressures of home life—with unruly adolescent kids whose sense of entitlement comes less from their Secret Security detail and more from their job at Hot Topic—while also trying to prevent terrorists from upsetting the groundbreaking Middle East conference that will finally settle that whole pesky “Israel vs. Palestine” issue. Though, to be fair, such issues could take a back seat to the complaints of the “First Dude” about how emasculated he feels (because he’s referred to as “First Dude,” for starters). It’s the sort of role that Angelina Jolie could both excel in and ruin simply because her presence destroys the willing suspension of disbelief.

Possible scenario that would work: Let’s aim a little older than the typical “soccer mom” contingent of the audience, while also acknowledging the multiethnic future of the POTUS. Tyler Perry’s Madea character is an omnipresent cultural phenomenon, a pot-smoking, feisty, but ultimately moralizing grandmother figure who owns every room she walks into (often to the detriment of anyone else in the scene). It’s frankly shocking to me that Perry hasn’t made Madea in the White House yet (subtitle: Diary of a Mad Black President), but give him some down time in between “House of Payne” and “Meet the Browns” and he’ll knock it out before you can say Why Did I Get Married III: No, Seriously, Why the Hell Did I Get Married?. Madea would have a field day back-talking the incoming Republican majority (led by snooty Richard Dreyfuss), and she’d tell the terrorists what’s what. Plus, she’ll have time to toke up with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Method Man while steering young orphan Willow Smith to the Lord. It’s what those of us in the business call “box office gold.”

Home Alone, White House Edition: President Kid

Remember how I said animals and Austrian bodybuilders are off the table for possible presidential hopefuls in popular culture? That rule doesn’t apply to kids. Everyone loves kids, until they grow up and become sullen adults or Lindsay Lohan. If a kid can travel back in time to save King Arthur’s court or pitch for a major league team (granted, it’s the Cubs, so it doesn’t really count), they can run the free world. What could possibly go wrong?

Pros/Cons: What could possibly go wrong is everything; think about the last time you ever dealt with a kid who felt empowered because he wore a nametag or had a driver’s license. Think how big of an attitude he’s gonna have when he has the title of “president” backing him up. Sure, the kid starts out all cute, but then he hits puberty and suddenly he goes from “adorable” to “asshole in training.” Some child actors transition well from innocence to experience gracefully; not every former Mouseketeer is headed straight to rehab. Sure there’s the whole constitutional amendment about having to be in your thirties before you can even sniff at the Oval Office, but as the younger presidents (Teddy Roosevelt, JFK, Obama) have shown, you have a lot more energy if you’re on the right side of fifty.

Possible scenarios that would work: Justin Beiber has the world at his feet; he’s a multi-platinum pop star and (wait for it) his dad is president. But when President Beiber suffers a bump on the head and loses his memory, a little-known clause in the Constitution says that little Justin has to take over (bypassing the whole structure of government). Vice President Sam Waterston is super-pissed, of course, and so is the Congress, led by oldster Betty White. But Justin’s cool, and he starts off not taking it seriously but events take a dramatic turn when he falls for the daughter of the Secret Service chief (played by adorable gum-chewing Miley Cyrus).  Oh, and he has to do something about that buzzkill called the “recession.” Will President Justin save the day? If this film is aimed at the teen market, of course he will (though, to keep the girls interested, Miley has to go down in a haze of gunfire. That way, Prez Beiber Fever runs wild with the hope that anyone could be his First One Less Lonely Lady).

Your Budget Does Not Compute, Dave: Replicant President

In science fiction, nothing says “cool premise ruined by the presence of a Baldwin brother” like a robot- or alien-invasion-themed film. Ever since Metropolis, the cinematic fascination with robots in particular has led to some interesting films. HAL, C3PO, Robocop, Ashley Judd: robots make for compelling figures in a film. You never know when they might go off the program and start going nuts on puny humans. I’ll leave the “alien as president” for someone else to ponder; basically you’re looking at Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets The Manchurian Candidate (with a little The Thing thrown in), and who wants to see that? Okay, I might want to see that, but let’s stick with the programmable life forms from our own galaxy.

Pros/Cons: Robots can be tricky to render as realistic; For every Blade Runner where Rutger Hauer is one badass killbot, there are a million bad “I am a robot because I have halting speech” portrayals on film and in television. But as artificial life catches up with the imaginations of filmmakers, it’s only a matter of time before the idea of a robotic leader of the free world sounds plausible (hell, Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000, and he’s pretty convincing as a human-cyborg hybrid). Who would be programming our robot-in-chief? Would the need for war clash with his mandate to “do no harm to fleshy, humanoid others?” Would he commit a faux pas at the state dinner by ingesting only motor oil and declining caviar?

Possible scenarios that would work: Robin Williams has played both a robot (Millennium Man) and a presidential candidate (Man of the Year), so asking him to suit up as both would be a comedy bonanza (unless he’s bearded; if he sports facial hair, you know it’s a “serious” Robin Williams film). If he’s unavailable, Vin Diesel is pretty monotone and in need of work; there’s only so many Fast and Furious sequels to make. A robotic president doesn’t necessarily have to exclude major ass-kicking from his daily agenda, especially if his opponent is someone classy and British like Alan Rickman or Alfred Molina. It would be Robocop White House just in time for Christmas.

I’d Run Against You If I Could: Siamese/Conjoined Twin Presidents

Our two-party governmental process is a fairly new innovation; back in the early days of the Republic a man like George Washington could run unopposed, with no one “swift-boating” his war record. Multiple parties sprang up over the courts of the nineteenth century, but we basically became a blue state/red state of mind in the years after the Civil War. And since then, no one has dared asked the question of what would happen if a candidate ran for the nomination…for both parties.

Pros/Cons: Conjoined (or “Siamese,” after the first documented such case, Chang and Eng Bunker) twins are a fascinating medical anomaly, and the idea of forever being tied to another human being with whom you share your body has served as the grist for many notable films and TV shows (as well as the possible inspiration for three-legged sack races). But what if one twin ran for the Republican nomination and the other ran as a Democrat? How would the campaigning work? I can see the attack ads now: one twin’s attempts to distance himself literally and figuratively from his twin failing miserably because the other candidate just happens to be in the shot and offering a rebuttal. Either way, one wins and one loses, but who really holds the reins of government? Would a president whose opposition leader shares his bed be able to push through his agenda? Could surgeons separate the twins, and would it only make things worse? Would the Farrelly Brothers be willing to revisit this territory?

Possible scenarios that would work: Tom Selleck and Ted Danson are joined at the hip…literally! Born to a poor sharecropper in post-WWII Tennessee, the two are diametrically opposed when Tom can’t help but spy on Ted’s secret Young Communists meetings because he’s there as well (Ted has to attend Tom’s “Junior McCarthy Witch-Hunt Pals” meetings in turn). The brothers couldn’t be more different, with Ted protesting our involvement in Vietnam while drawing fire as Tom tries to lead his platoon through the Mekong Delta. In their presidential runs, both struggle to define their own identity, all the while supported by conjoined twin spouses (Mary Steenburgen and Ann Coulter). One wins, the other loses, but they try to share the Oval Office’s newly refurbished “twin chairs” and “double desks.” If we’re shooting for an Oscar, serious questions of political importance must be tackled; if not, hilarity ensues.

You Are the Presidential Loser, Goodbye: Reality-Show Commander in Chief

Reality shows are a lot like presidential campaigns: you start with a wide field of choices, gradually winnowed down through eliminations when candidates fail to meet standards such as attractiveness or believability, until you’re stuck with two “lesser of evil” choices, neither of whom is really much of a choice when you get right down to it. Why not make it a little more interesting and admit that it’s all a giant reality show, with the ultimate prize being the White House?

Pros/Cons: Interactive reality shows like American Idol and Are You Smarter Than George W. Bush? have led the way in getting viewers to participate in the basic concept of democracy, i.e., voting for who you want to win so that you can bitch about them later. More people vote for Clay Aiken or Jordan Sparks than vote for Obama or McCain. The moral and ethical problems of opening the presidential election to popular vote instead of the electoral college could seriously re-shape our government into one where populism trumps the reasoned and deliberate approach of modern bureaucratic government. (And that’s a problem because…?)

Possible scenarios that would work: You know about The Jersey Shore, right? Bunch of greased-up stereotypes live together until they get drunk and have a fight…and then fill out the rest of the season doing much of the same. Granted, participatory viewership isn’t encouraged, but for the purposes of our movie you can now vote for the cast member you feel is best able to deal with the serious problems of the modern presidency. Does Snooki have the right idea about tanning Iran into the Stone Age? Does “The Situation” understand “The Dilemma” in North Korea? Can Pauly D find New Jersey on a map? Each contestant tries to advance, using common political practices (attack ads, Tea Party protests, their fists) until one is left as the ultimate winner…and suddenly realizes how hard this all is. Classic reality shows like The Real World were cast with the idea that the young people would have to work together under the premise of a business venture that depended on them not drinking and partying so much…so of course each business failed. If the business in question is the United States of America…god help us all if Vinnie fist-bumps us into Armageddon.

Have a presidential first you’d like Hollywood to try out? Tip off the screenwriter-in-chief in the comments!

Related Posts

• Overthinking It Celebrates February Bank Holiday
• The Worst Speech in Political History: the Tragedy of The American President
• Episode 18: Erection Fever

The crowd leaned slightly to the left.

I spent the weekend at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear with my sister in Washington DC. While I don’t usually talk too much about politics on Overthinking It, I figured the event warranted some discussion, because, in addition to being politics, it’s pop culture, it’s important, and it’s illustrative of its cultural moment. Like Lee did for ComicCon, I’ll add more, better pictures in a future entry — expect more talk about my experiences here, because it was a really complex event and fun to think and talk about.

I want to start with Jon Stewart’s keynote speech, because it’s packaged in such a way that it’s easy to talk about, which will create the impression in history that it was also the most important part of the rally, so let’s go with that reading for the moment (thanks to chapterofmylife for posting in good quality, if it stays up long enough for everybody to see it):

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ntvifshfWg

Stewart has long ground this specific axe as his most urgent and sincerely political position — through the 24 news cycle and journalotainment (my word, but if he can use “conflictinator,” indulge me) the press manufactures alarm and choreographs conflict while overlooking substance and responsibility. The press serves an essential function in a democracy — Stewart refers to it as our “immune system.” So, when the press falls asleep at the wheel or turns on its duties (one could say when it “shirks” its duties, but in my opinion this ascribes less systematic malevolence and corruption to the much of the press than is accurate), the results are bad for the country and the world.

It’s the same thing Stewart talked about way back on the now-defunct-but-quaint-by-comparison-to-today’s-propoganda-horrors Crossfire six years ago, when he came into his own as a political force:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE

More on Stewart’s avowed politics, the politics of the rally, and the politics of art and festivals (because, despite not being seen as such by many, this was a comedy and arts festival), after the jump –

The uphill battle

Jon Stewart and his posse hosted a big rally where they got people together for reasons they don’t entirely understand. This much is clear. It is also clear that Stewart’s most deliberate intention in all of this – the fire in his belly that got this whole thing going – was to demonstrate opposition to the destructive tendencies and dereliction of duty in contemporary popular media. Unfortunately, and I’d wager as a comedian Stewart understands this, because comedians understand more than most the futile demands of the sane mind — he almost certainly isn’t going to win.

This is very important for how the rally functioned and what I think it means, so I’ll go into it a bit, at risk of being too political. I apologize if my ranting is discourteous to any of our readers in their own political commitments.

Actually, I’ll remark on that for a second, because this was very obvious at the rally if you actually went rather than read the half-pre-scripted coverage in places like the New York Times. This was very much not a Democratic rally. Stewart never talked about the midterm elections. The big guests were not politicians, but musicians. There was no call to action involving getting out the vote. There wasn’t even an endorsement of one political party over another by the people running the rally (the attendees, well, we’ll get to that). Anybody who expected this to be some sort of October Surprise for the Congressional Democrats must have been sorely disappointed.

The media organization bashed the most by the rally itself was not Fox News but NPR, for its overreaction to Juan Williams’ rude but harmless comments (more than one person I talked to found the references to it more than a little conspicuous — so it isn’t just me).

Media outlets widely seen as liberal were given the first Medal of Fear by Steve Colbert for their unwillingness to cover the rally so as not to appear biased, which casts light on the media outlets’ own self-conscious political machinations that interfere with their objectivity and ability to do their jobs.

If the rally was driven by Democrats, it wasn’t very nice to its supposed friends.

I think the issues Stewart and Colbert discussed are somewhat party-neutral. Yes, there is conspicuous alignment between Republican leadership and the media outlets it controls, but that leadership doesn’t speak for all Republicans, and not all the people voting Republican on Tuesday are willing to call themselves Republicans. It’s unfortunate what will happen to the agenda of fiscal responsibility once the election is over and the Republican semi-dependents realize the people who control their party aren’t really very conservative in their economic and fiscal policies, but, hey, you can’t blame them for trying to change things, and metadiscourse doesn’t inherently prefer one tax policy over another.

If I were a conservative — though I confess I’m not on balance, even if I am on some issues — I think I’d want a free and independent press that felt responsibility for accurate reporting and some dignity and perspective rather than self-destructive, nonstop myopic hysteria.

I’d want to know what was really happening so I knew how to adjust to it and help formulate and work toward constructive, responsible, low-cost solutions  that didn’t impinge on people’s liberties too much, or so that I could work toward solutions to problems through the institutions I believed were appropriate for addressing them. The need for a free press isn’t diminished whether you prefer social policy to charity or the military to the State Department – it’s something the members of both parties should be interested in, and a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma, where it has become a dominant strategy to destroy it that has resulted in a net negative for everybody.

(The previous example, of course, relies on the extent to which knowing what is “actually happening” is possible, but seeing that I am a conservative in this scenario, I’m probably not going to invoke Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation while watching the news).

Back to Stewart’s uphill battle

Okay,  so, we’re still talking about Stewart’s speech at the rally here (writing thousands of words about 15 minutes of a daylong rally, yeah that’s overthinking), and really just the salient points at the heart of it. The two-party system isn’t put forth as a solution. The media certainly isn’t put forth as a solution. Stewart doesn’t say “keep listening to me and watching my show and I will fix this.” Stewart articulates a problem, but the solutions he proposes are the sort that people don’t tend to do on their own — like being good friends and neighbors, turning off their TVs and going outside, and calming down and being adults about things. It’s like telling somebody they really should eat healthily — yeah, they should, and some will, but most won’t, because the economic fundamentals are too strong.

The rally isn’t going to solve Stewart’s problem with the press — it’s not even going to come close to solving the problem. The economic fundamentals are too heavily stacked against it. The profit motive for media organizations to keep going the way things are dwarfs what they can make just producing news. They can make a lot more money — for their own books, for their own pockets, and through various complex business relationships — selling de facto editorial control of news outlets to private companies (that will turn profits by influencing government policy) than they can make selling time to the Pine-Sol lady and the Scooter Store.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCzOaEqxi_Y

The older media model.

It turns out the market has been undervaluing control of the government (mostly in terms of short-term payouts in taxes and contracts – not really thinking about the long-term health of the economy, because hey that stuff is CRAZY, amirite?) at a time when media is relatively cheap and easy to produce and distribute and media professionals are suffering a ton of underemployment, a big influx of new skilled workers, a nosedive in the cost of basic technology and downward wage pressure. These sorts of adjustments – where prices move and shift buying and selling patterns, are notoriously difficult to fight or reverse. The markets are very very powerful.

As a result, formally private institutions that are virtual arms of government entities heavily influence what is said on the news through a series of think tanks, astroturf groups and PR organizations. Those same organizations overtly fund the television stations and other media outlets by becoming a major source of ad revenue (one of the few growing ones). In turn, being free of the responsibility to produce news in line with journalistic integrity (which is expensive) lets them operate with skeleton crews of underpaid staff while making only sensationalist stories, which people will gravitate toward watching.

It’s win win win win … until it’s lose.

To give you a sense for the extent of this media/political machine Stewart is calling out, they even channel funding and influence to sites like Overthinking It through institutions like Google Ads, which we can’t control and have no better alternative to at our scale and level of operations (with our whopping zero full-time employees and reliance on donations to keep our servers going even with advertising all over the place).

For example, while the people at OTI are of varying political persuasions, we all have gay friends (mutual ones, whom we pretty much all know and care about their rights), and we didn’t want to show you ads that tell you to oppose gay marriage or be scared of gay people back when Prop 8 was kicking around. But we didn’t really have much of a choice – we can’t censor the ads on our sites, and there are no other advertisers that work for us at our current level of sophistication and readership.

The people that control the media, whom Jon Stewart opposes, make us show them, so we have to. Thankfully, our mandatory political advertisers don’t really care if we insult them to their faces; we’re not important enough. So, when a particularly pernicious issue comes up, we come out and say on the site – “Hey guys, we’re sorry about that one, don’t pay attention to it, those people are jerks” and that makes me a little more comfortable with the whole rotten business.

Still, every time I see another one of those goddamned push polls on the site I grind another layer of enamel off my molars.

But yeah, I understand why Jon Stewart hates this kind of media, but I don’t think this rally is really going to do much to stop it, or even slow it down. And I don’t think that’s why we all gathered on the mall in Washington, either.

A Magical Gathering

And by all, I mean at least 200,000 people. Funny story – Fox News went with an estimate of 60,000, but Fox’s own DC affiliate quoted at least 200,000 just based on the excess DC Metro traffic alone. If it were only 60,000 people, they each must have ridden the Metro at the Mall 8 times on Saturday. DC residents I talked to all confirmed that the attendance at this rally crushed attendance at Glen Beck’s rally.

Blocks of DC were packed with people all around the event. Comedy Central’s biggest mistake was underestimating the size of the crowd — the sound systems were woefully inadequate. A lot of the people there couldn’t hear much of what was said by the performers, or any of the musical guests, and “Louder! Louder!” was the most common chant in the crowd – you could hear it move around the rally as the limited speed of sound created phasing problems over the long distances involved. The Comedy Central website supposedly got hit by 4 million requests for the stream when it started.

But yeah, as somebody who was there, I can tell you this thing was a really big deal that touched the lives of a lot of people.

But focusing on that is the kind of sensationalism Stewart decries, so I’ll move on.

Hard times, not end times

The important takeaway is that the money finds its way downhill, and since there neither the political will for a strong federal government authority to police and counterbalance abuses, nor a framework for doing so that works within the constitution, nor an economically efficient model that does things any differently short of state-controlled media paired with a sovereign wealth fund and all that jazz — and since this coalition now controls the Supreme Court, is able to block any congressional or presidential priority it chooses to block through influence on both sides of the political aisle, is about to take more formal control of Congress (after which they will promptly nudge the Tea Parties that got them there out of meaningful policymaking circles), and will probably take control of the Presidency in 2012 due to nigh-limitless unregulated resources in an unprecedented surge in legal public corruption –

Well, because of all these things, the current dynamic with the press is probably going to keep working this way for a while. But, as Stewart said, “These are hard times, not end times.”

This problem isn’t really that urgent or that bad. It’s a meaningful problem, to be sure, but this wasn’t just him marshalling opposition to it. There is time. And hey, maybe it’s an economic or social trend that will be with us for a while. There is more you can do in relation to a problem than solve it. Reframing it and understanding it in new ways can be a powerful thing.

As far as I can tell, there is no totalitarian regime knocking down Jon Stewart’s door and making him stop. He just had an enormous show of force on the steps of the Capitol. The opposition Stewart presents isn’t really that threatening to the social order, and the social order doesn’t really threaten Stewart that much. That’s why we can all afford to be sane, and why it’s important to divorce this rally from other shows of force. It is such habit to think of these political events as thrusts in the direction of an immediate goal – this was an act of creation and an act of patience.

While it may appear as if Stewart is casting off the robe of satirist and becoming a pundit himself, he’s a still a satirist speaking truth to power. Maybe the ideas will germinate and create some sort of adjustment in attitudes or change down the line. That’s of course not what a satirist is, but it is a big part of what a satirist does — pursuing the idea, not the political objective. Acting as an artist first and a political person far afterward.

This is why, for example, some people still read “A Modest Proposal” in school (an essay by satirist Jonathan Swift about solving overpopulation and Malthusian poverty by eating babies), despite the fact that the explosive fecundity of the Irish is no longer a social problem of great perceived importance. It’s not just about what gets done around the issue – it’s about how we think about the issue.

And hey, really, the press isn’t that different from how it’s always worked. Stewart’s way of talking about it, his common sense approach and his attention to specificity, his particular take on journalistic integrity – these are rarer things that we might like to admit in this business. The popular press has long by one mechanism or another been controlled by wealthy private interests and used for the exercise of political power and corruption of the state. This is just the way they happen to be doing so now, and it’s just a little sad that we don’t get to exercise the willful ignorance of it that our parents and grandparents got to exercise. But hey, ignorance isn’t bliss, it’s just ignorance, right?

The information saturation and availability promoted by the Internet makes thinking about a lot of things in new ways not only possible, but necessary. The criticism Stewart is offering is of something that is perhaps newly apparent, but not new at its core, and structurally a big part of how media functions – Stewart himself is even part of it from time to time, which he appreciates and makes fun of, because he doesn’t take up the mantle of journalism that he so often accuses others of wearing falsely because he doesn’t want to be dishonest about something that is so important and elusive.

That’s a pretty complex relationship there — a lot of things Stewart is able to help us think about in how the dynamics of media play out these days. But yeah, it doesn’t solve the problem. The difference is how we think about it. When we choose to think about it – you know, when we have the time to think about it and are not like the mom with two kids in the car Stewart talks about who can’t really think about anything else right now.

Ad Absurdum

People wonder how this rally is appropriate for a comedian — is Jon Stewart no longer a comedian, but something else? Looking at the landscape of the problem and the absurdity of how he has approached talking about it, I come down very firmly on the side of the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear being very much an art object and a comedic and satiric piece, and not a crossover political rally by a bunch of comedians.

It is absurd to rally 200,000 people on the national mall to a giant speech where you’re going to tell them to chill out and not worry too much. It’s absurd to get together a giant coalition to address a problem you don’t really think can be solved right away that’s very complex, to offer some platitudes and general principles around it but not use this giant group of people to do anything about it, and then have everybody go out drinking and to Halloween parties.

But absurdity serves a very important role in helping us think about and create meaning around problems. It helps us broaden our perspective around issues that are difficult to grasp. It’s like a Zen koan – that’s a great example of a concept that Western people generally grasp more easily by conceiving of it as foreign or exotic when really it’s quite common in their own culture – thinking about something that is incomprehensible in some way broadens your mind and makes it possible to think in a different way.

You don’t have to be serious while you’re doing it, and your end goal doesn’t have to be enlightenment. Pondering and articulating the absurdity of relationships and ways of thinking is an important mechanism in satire and social change in western societies as well. Pointing out the absurdity in a situation isn’t just about making fun of somebody or taking them down a peg. It’s about understanding complex relationships in a way that our usual discourse makes difficult.

By creating this rally, Stewart (and really everybody else involved in it, I’m speaking about his posse synechdochally), are challenging us to expand the way we think about discourse. But they also creatied a venue that the people attending the rally used to their own ends. And these ends were in many ways a lot more creative, insightful, complex and elucidating than the rally itself.

I’ll save some of that for my next entry, when I have more pictures compiled and can share the broader experience. For now, I’ll give you a bad picture of the poster I carried with me during the rally with my bad phone camera used poorly:

All day, I kept decribing the guy here as "Crazy-Eyes Thomas Friedman"

I’m not the world’s biggest Paul Krugman fan in the world (although his Nobel Prize winning economic work is awesome and legit, according to people I’ve talked to who know about that sort of thing – even if it doesn’t have much to do with the columns he writes for the New York Times), nor the biggest Shepard Fairey fan in the world, but I love a good “five percenter” joke (this one was probably more like one percent).

But I can’t really let any of this pass without mentioning the signs. The signs were so awesome – a big part of the entertainment of this event. A lot of them were political, but most of them weren’t – I’ve already conversed on Twitter with JessicaHusseinObama, or @vdaze, who made the “I LIKE ICE CREAM” sign:

I loved how so many signs at the rally stated things that were true - it was an intuitive but subtle play on how so much that is on rally signs is so obviously false.

And, I really loved how there were certain topics that seemed to be on a lot of people’s minds. One of the cool things about artistic events and festivals — and you could have easily thought of this whole event as a signmaking festival, as many people pointed out with signs that said such things as “GRAPHIC DESIGNERS FOR SANITY” or “I OWN STOCK IN A POSTER SUPPLY COMPANY” or the many “MY ARMS ARE GETTING TIRED” and “THIS IS A SIGN” signs. One topic that popped up on a few signs struck a chord with me:

Did you say "Ire" or "Aiur?"

Or

The mainstream media is afraid to report on patch 1.1.2.

I saw the sign

Okay, this is getting way long, but I’ll write a little more about the signs. The signs at the rally were largely ironic or self-referential, and a lot of them were funny and unrelated to politics. In my opinion, the signs were a mutual statement of awareness of metadiscourse.

People were coming together to say, “Yes, you, like I, am trapped in a senseless mill of media misinformation guided by agendas that are obscure to the point where they sometimes seem totally random. Let’s acknowledge this without coming out and saying it, because if we come out and say it, we will be too verbose and nobody will listen to us.” The absurdity of the signs reflected the absurdity of political discourse, and showed that the people holding them were savvy enough or clever enough to either know directly or intuit that political propaganda is constructed and mostly the product of somebody else’s imagination.

The signs also tended to reflect the perspectives of individuals – what they care about, what they like, what they find funny – and showed just how alien to the immediate, sincere human experience it is to be consumed by a political agenda.

Compare, say, a sign that says “GOD HATES FAGS” to one that says “I LIKE ICE CREAM.” Putting aside for a moment the contexts of these signs, which one of these makes more sense for a person to be proclaiming on a sign? One of these signs reflects something the person knows for certain, cares about, and is involved in personally. That same sign also gives pleasure to the person holding it because that person wants to share this knowledge with others in a way that creates possibilities. One of them seems a lot more actionable than the other – one of the signs points to something that you can and probably want to really do something about once you’ve read the sign. One of these signs inspires you to do something you probably want to do too. I’ll let you pick which one you think it is for you – as for me, I’ve always prefered ice cream to the attitudes that celestial or omnipresent beings have for other people as a focus for spending my time.

I mean, I know people have a lot of different attitudes about stuff, granted. But ice cream is delicious.

Eh, who am I kidding – I just really like it when people say things that are true, especially when it’s unexpected. It’s the same spirit that inspired my “10 Easiest Things Dance Songs Ask of You” article – the secret thought that every time you see something said, it’s being said to you on purpose for a reason, as opposed to arbitrarily or to nobody or as a product of a cynical agenda divorced from individual experience.

The political points most commonly made of signs were hatred of Glen Beck, which I think was largely symbolic or motivated by rivalry, opposition to certain specific political positions of Christine O’Donnell (Boy, did she screw up when she spoke out against masturbation! It turns out that a lot of taxpaying voters really like to masturbate. Don’t try to take away harmless things that provide people with a great deal of pleasure in their lives; it’s bad politics.), and various caricatures of Sarah Palin, who at this point seems to have become a politicotainment figure somewhere between Carla Bruni and Lindsay Lohan.

One notable thing about these three people? Almost nobody at the rally was going to be in a position to vote for or against any of these people in an actual election any time soon. This event was much more about media and discourse than about party politics. People care about what is being said to them a great deal. It matters. Also – it’s not fair to locate it all in Washington – so often people speak of “Washington” as the center of politics, but as politics and media intertwine further and further, that location seems less and less relevant. Important yes, but not exclusively so.

Oh, and I’ll link to this video – I don’t think it’s necessarily a representative sample, but it gives you a general sense. This video also includes a reference to the coolest moment of the rally, which was when Yusuf Islam a.k.a. Cat Stevens made a rare and amazing performance playing “Peace Train” (it was really awesome – gave the crowd chills), but was interrupted by Ozzie Osbourne playing “Crazy Train” and then in turn the Ojays singing “Love Train.” A great medley for sure:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1i9EUVtPRQI

Actually, I’ll link to a home video of that sequence, because it was just that damned awesome, and because I think it’s important to shift the perspective a bit from the people who threw the rally to the people who participated in the crowd – that’s where a lot of the real action happened.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PuEAV8saMo

Man, that moment where Steven Colbert interrupted Cat Stevens was intense. So in character, but you really had to have some guts to do that. And it was a hugely redemptive moment when everybody realized Ozzie Osbourne was out there. A real rush.

To Sum Up For Now

So, taking this away from Jon Stewart’s speech:

The goal here isn’t really to win. Jon Stewart has been fighting this battle in public for six years, the destruction wrought by it is obvious on both sides of the political aisle (see the recent CBS affiliate Alaskan scandal or anything done by Fox News ever), any thinking person who steps back from self-interest for half a minute has got to agree with him, and this situation of the crumbling, derelict, frenzied, hateful, captured press just keeps getting worse. For now, the trend seems inexorable. For now. Certainly not something that can be fixed by a rally.

But this rally wasn’t really about winning. Jon Stewart doesn’t need to win. He’s political, but he’s not a politician, he’s an artist. Anybody there could feel in the air that the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear wasn’t a political rally of the sort meant to whip everybody up into a frenzy and leverage some demagoguery to get some specific agenda item accomplished. I’d wager spare few people left that rally thinking, “Man, we sure have those guys on the ropes!”

Could Voltaire have comprehended the political affect of his writings over the scope of history? Of course not. Did Milton’s Areopagitica lead in an expedient way to a basic freedom of the dissemination of information? Of course not. Did Jefferson’s vaunted writings on liberty at the founding of the United States actually offer most of the people who lived in the United States the rights it held so essential? Of course not.

But I detest the idea that these things are worthless if they don’t accomplish what they are looking to accomplish right away – or if they are marked by hypocrisy, as Stewart is because his bills are ultimately paid by Viacom and doesn’t take upon himself the mantle of seriousness he criticizes others for not wearing. Despite all this, the writings still matter. The art objects still matter.

HOPE

They help frame future ways of thinking. They give us hope for a new way of living – and not the kind of hope where the feeling matters but doesn’t come with anything actionable – like the kind of hope you get from watching Willow. The hope that a magical little person can overcome all odds and save a baby from a wicked witch in a magical land far away where nobody has to worry about paying an electric bill.

No, the kind of hope where you get something actionable that seems frustrating and futile until the moment it isn’t, even if that moment is a hundred years or two after the art object was created. The hope of a good idea.

The sense I got on the ground at the Rally to Restore Sanity is people left feeling relieved, not because we were making progress, not because the Tea Party (the universal villains of the rally, even if the Democrats were definitely not the heroes) was going to be diminished by it, but because the whole exercise made us all feel a little less crazy. It helped us in the critical and difficult at of thinking – of imagining what exactly the opposition to this frenzied press paradigm might look like – and making thinking easier is a very pleasurable thing.

And because it presented a liberating absurdity that helped us consider our world in new ways, while at the same time feeling confirmed in that consideration by the presence of so many of our countrymen and countrywomen (and a lot of Canadians too, for some reason. One fun poster I read said, “I Came All the Way from Toronto to Take My Country Back!”).

The rally was an artistic event that created meaning and context — an intellectual and cultural touchstone — for a subject that is complex, hard to talk about, and harder to cope with and internalize. It will be a long time, I’d wager, years if we’re lucky, decades if we’re not, before we find a way to make its values work in the world on a large-scale practical level. In the meantime, it can serve as a “teachable moment” for people who are a little lost in how to proceed.

In the meantime, things are not so bad that we cannot associate with one another, and there has been a powerful group identified here that has the potential for future action – and it’s tied in to a number of other organizations with a lot of social capital (the one I noticed everywhere were from reddit).

In the meantime, the big X factor is innovation in media. If people really do shift away from mainstream media outlets sufficiently, if news organizations keep shutting down or stripping away resources, maybe you’ll see an alternative model rise up in its place, and the press will have to adapt. It’s not a coincidence that a lot of the people at this rally are consumers and producers of alternative media – a lot of redditors, a lot of farkers, a lot of niche people who have their own sources of information. There are a lot of people for whom The Daily Show is the closest they watch to “news.”

I think the real action associated with Stewart’s philosophy will come as that paradigm comes into its own, because there is a massive group of people on board with it, and the market fundamentals seems such that it won’t be somebody like NBC or CBS leading the way.

But that’s just what I saw from 150 feet behind a row of vans the day before Halloween.

Related Posts

• Episode 122: Pancakes and Politics
• Episode 132: Written by Writers
• Open Thread for October 22, 2010
• Gamer’s Guide to Everything Else: In-game vs. Out-of-Game Resources
• Episode 169: Zone 4 Now Boarding

To the unemployed victims of the Gulf oil spill, it must seem like the government simply can’t or won’t help them.  It’s up to pop culture to save the day.

James Cameron and Kevin Costner have actually tried to help, but the only realistic solution is a team of highly trained criminals with hearts of gold who are willing and able to fulfill our government’s half of the social contract.

In the last few years, we’ve seen the proliferation of a type of movies and television shows that I call the “Merry Men” genre.  Echoing the team that Robin Hood built, these shows feature a mastermind who puts together a team of incredibly competent outlaws and uses their specific and illicit talents to fight for the little guy when the government can’t.  To follow the nomenclature of the most recent example, TNT’s Leverage, each team generally features individuals who fit into one of five types: Mastermind, Grifter, Hitter, Hacker, and Thief.

A hacker would have been significantly more useful than the white mage.

Merry Men isn’t a new genre and it borrows from a lot of different traditions.   Homer’s Odysseus, Robin Hood, the Magnificent Seven, the Dirty Dozen, and crew on Serenity – we’ve seen similar things before.

In modern pop culture however, the first and greatest example is the A-Team.  Building on the “pulling a team together” motif of the original Mission Impossible series and adding a post-Vietnam mistrust of government, from 1983 to 1987, the A-Team was the group of super-criminals that the hopeless could turn to when no one else could help.

In 2001, Ocean’s 11 reinvigorated the genre.  The first third of the film consists entirely of the recruitment of the perfect team for the perfect job.  Remembering the first time I saw this, I couldn’t wait to see who was next – each member adding to my anticipation for the plan that required him.  These guys weren’t robbing from the rich not to give to the poor, but at least they had the relatively noble goal of making a bastard pay for his bastardry.  The subsequent sequels followed the same basic structure.  They weren’t as fun, but they kept the genre moving until the end of the decade.

And that’s when the genre really got moving again with two solid shows.  In June 2007, the criminally negligent USA Network brought out Burn Notice, in which a disgraced spy, a drunken former Navy SEAL and an Irish terrorist help the helpless in Miami. In December 2008, TNT debuted Leverage, in which five master criminals pull a job that both sticks it to the man and makes them all insanely rich.  They had such a good time that they subsequently devote themselves to helping the little guy.   Leverage really epitomizes the genre.

(Note: I understand that both the late-aughts show Prison Break and the new Human Target have similar setups, but I’m not familiar enough with them to write about them.  Feel free to do so in the comments.)

Something is different these days – the role of the US government and of the business world.  In the Magnificent Seven and many episodes of the A-Team, the battle is fought in a lawless land outside the reach of the government.  It’s not that the government doesn’t want to help the poor Mexican peasants of either the Magnificent Seven or the A-Team pilot episode – it’s just that it’s outside of US jurisdiction.

Leverage and Burn Notice, however, take place in Boston and Miami, respectively, and consistently demonstrate that the government can’t be trusted to protect its own citizens on its own soil.  On top of that, villainous corporations have become a more frequent villain than the drug cartels of the 80′s or the terrorists of the early part of the decade.  Corporations step on the little guy and the government is powerless to help.  Welcome to Louisiana.

Leverage in particular routinely portrays the government as either too weak to make a difference, too bound by red tape to be effective, or too corrupt to care.  The main character, Nathan Ford, had been a brilliant insurance investigator before the insurance company he worked for refused to pay for treatment for his son, leading to his son’s death.   Now he helps the little guy take on the corporate titans that the government can’t, or won’t, hold accountable.

Army reservist who was injured by a corrupt government contractor in Iraq?  Why call the VA when you know the Leverage guys?

Giant food company selling salmonella tainted frozen foods?  Screw the FDA, call Leverage.

Corporate prison company buying off judges to send innocent people to jail as part of a racket to utilize prison labor?  Let Leverage be your check and your balance.

Etc.

So what have we learned?   If you’re in serious trouble anywhere outside the United States, you better know some gunslingers or the A-Team.  If you’re in the states and you’ve pissed off an all-powerful corporation, you better buy a ticket to Boston or Miami.

Which brings us back to the Gulf of Mexico.  Television, our source of goodness and information, suggests that if the government can’t help, it’s time to call in the criminals.   Let’s take a brief look at how the A-Team, Ocean’s 11, and the Leverage crew would deal with the Deepwater Horizon spill.

Click through for the A-Team vs the Oil Spill

THE A-TEAM

Chuck Thibodeaux, a shrimp boat owner from the Louisiana coast is about to lose his boat because his insurance company claims that they’re only liable for damages that are reported within 80 days of a disaster.  Since the oil didn’t reach the area Chuck shrimps until day 81, the company won’t honor his claim (this will actually start happening to people today, July 8, 2010).  He’s tried to make some trouble in the press and now the insurance CEO, T. Preston Daughtry, has sent thugs to threaten his family unless he shuts up.

The A-Team arrives.  While BA secures Chuck’s family, Face pretends to be a low level accountant in the insurance company who has discovered a serious error in the company’s books and shows up at Daughtry’s waterfront mansion.  Seconds later, Hannibal shows up as an agent for the Louisiana insurance commission and offers Daughtry an choice: give Face a $100,000 bribe or he’ll launch a full investigation of his company’s practices.  Daughtry brags about his new speedboat, tells him that $100,000 is easy money, and makes plans for a hand off.

Meanwhile, Face seduces the man’s surprisingly hot and conscientious daughter.

The plan is to take the money, give it to Chuck, then disappear. Unfortunately, Daughtry, who had already bribed the insurance commission, smells a rat, and at the handoff, catches the team off guard, ties them up and throws them into Thibodeaux’s boathouse along with the since-captured Thibodeaux family (they got the drop on BA).  Departing in his fabulous speedboat, Daugtry tells his men to burn down the boathouse once he’s back at home with an alibi.

Fortunately, all of Thibodeaux’s tools are in the boathouse.  Cue welding montage.

Just as the henchmen get the call to light up the boathouse, the shrimp boat, newly covered in armor and powered by two propellers from those awesome bayou airboats, blows through the doors and surprises the guards.  Machine guns are fired.  Nobody is hit.

I ain't gettin on no airboat, Hannibal.

The shrimp boat, it turns out, is also equipped with a number of hoses connected to the new HVAC system that Thibodeaux had ordered.  As Murdoch drives it (it has propellers, so he gets to drive instead of Mr. T) madly to Daughtry’s mansion, it sucks up the layer of oil that coats this section of the bayou.  Reaching the mansion, the armored shrimp boat crushes Daughtry’s speedboat to splinters, bringing Daughtry and a number of other men running to the waterfront.

Hannibal says something snarky, then hits reverse on the HVAC and spews out all the nasty oil onto Daughtry and his friends.  The shrimp boat pulls away right as the cops and the media show up.

It turns out that the hot, conscientious daughter had told Face that all of the local insurance bigwigs were meeting at the house to illegally conspire to withhold payments to victims of the oil spill.   The bribed insurance commission agent was there with them and they had documents on them that proved all of it.  Slipping and sliding in the oil, they couldn’t hide them when the police showed up.  They’re all going to jail and their companies will have to pay all the claims.

Hannibal loves it when a plan comes together.

THE END

Click through for the Leverage plan

LEVERAGE

Nathan Ford really hates corrupt executives, so when the BP spill happens and CEO Tony Hayward goes on the news wishing that his life could return to normal, Nate’s mad.  When it becomes clear that nobody from BP is going to jail over the spill, Nate mumbles something about “repeat offenders” and sets his plan in motion.

While Hardison hacks into the National Geological Survey, Parker breaks into the Boston office of ExxonMobil dressed as a cleaning lady.  She plants electronic devices on the security systems and on the computers in the conference room, then applies an unknown spray to the keyboard of the computer in the office next door.  The office’s owner, Bob, walks in right as she’s walking out.

Sophie, meanwhile, meets Haywood at a fancy cocktail party for the American Petroleum Institute and introduces herself as Elena Campion, the new head of the Boston ExxonMobil office.  She invites him to stop by to talk about the proposed sale of a Saudi oil field.

When Haywood arrives at the Exxon offices, paramedics wheel Bob out the door.  They mention a peanut allergy.   Spencer sits at front desk (we see two guards unconscious on the floor next to him). He sends Haywood straight to Ms. Campion’s office, which just happens to be next to the conference room.  On the projector screen in the conference room is a geological survey image of a newly discovered oil pocket in southern New York state along the Delaware River.   It’s huge and he’s shocked.

When Sophie tells him that she’s unhappy at ExxonMobil, Hayward sees an opportunity and asks about the Delaware River deposit.  Sophie plays coy but lets slip that, because the site is close to the river from which 15% of Americans get their drinking water, they had trouble getting permits.

Hayward gets back to his office and checks the National Geological Survey data, finding Hardison’s planted files.  The survey concurs – this is a bonanza of oil right in the middle of the Northeast – easy to drill, easy to ship.  BP’s going to make a fortune.  He wants this property, calls Sophie and invites her to join BP at a huge raise if she’ll help him steal this property from ExxonMobil.  She tells him that she’s already negotiated the deal, but that he can buy it if he can do so in the next 24 hours.

We next see Nate, dressed as a farmer, telling Hayward and Sophie that he won’t sell unless the permits and the drill team are ready to go.  He’s getting paid a royalty from the oil that comes out of the ground and he wants it as quickly as possible so that he can move to Beverly.  ExxonMobil is ready to go.   Hayward says he can have drillers there tomorrow, but that the permits are going to be impossible.  Sophie asks about the permits and tells him she’s familiar with the local EPA administrator.

This time, Parker breaks into the local federal building, helping Harbison in through an elevator shaft.   A faked emergency call from a local chemical plant empties the EPA office, so that Hayward and Sophie arrive to find Hardison acting as the local administrator.  He accepts a bribe to get the permits moving.  They go back to Nate and sign for the property.

The next day, drillers start putting up a platform and getting ready to drill.  Hayward is there to check their progress. Then the media, police and real EPA arrive. It turns out that just months after the Gulf disaster,  BP has just attempted to set up a secret, unpermitted drilling platform on the Upper Delaware Scenic and Recreational River.  This US National Park not only protects the drinking water of 17 million Americans but also houses a number of endangered bald eagles.

For a foreign company like BP, killing bald eagles is really a PR nightmare. Bald eagle chicks? That much worse.

America gets furious. Congress throws a fit. Hayward goes to jail.

THE END

Click through for the Ocean’s 11 plan

OCEAN’S 14

Brad Pitt’s family business, renting umbrellas and beach chairs on the Mississippi coast has just gone under.  They’re hurting and they want revenge.   Pitt calls Danny Ocean and the two of them come up with a plan.

For 30 minutes, we check in with the gang, finding out what everyone’s been up to since they destroyed Al Pacino in 2007.  There is also an incredibly beautiful geologist that they bring on board.

Then we find out the plan.  Turns out that Tony Hayward from BP has just set up a new super-drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico.   A normal platform costs about $500 million, but they’ve spent $10 billion on this one because it houses a new horizontal drilling technology that will let BP drink up oil for a hundred miles in every direction.  They’re going to put their competitors out of business.  Drink their milkshakes, if you will.

This drilling technology is so important that security on this rig is incredibly tight.  Not only that, it’s in the middle of the ocean.  Danny makes a pun about this.  So what’s the objective?   We’re going to steal the oil first.

The plot is full of twists and turns but it boils down to this:  Matt Damon is in disguise as a nebbishy government regulator. Saul pretends to be a German insurance magnate who is willing to insure the rig.   Bernie Mac gets hired on as a roughneck.  Reuben buys them a boat.  Brad Pitt stands on said yacht, eats and looks cool.   Then he has the moron twins paint it to look like a Coast Guard vessel and uses it to take control of a just emptied supertanker in the port of New Orleans.

The moron twins get to drive the supertanker and a miniature submarine. Livingston hacks into the GPS system to hide the supertanker from the world. Yen has to climb down a mile deep oil pipeline to connect to a secondary pipeline that feeds the supertanker.  Basher has to use that giant drill from when they dug the Chunnel, this time underneath the Gulf of Mexico.  Danny shows up, is immediately recognized as a con man, and yet is allowed to walk around unimpeded for the rest of the film.

The drill starts going.  As it reaches the depth at which they expect to find oil, Bernie Mac manages to cause an accident that stops the drilling.  Yen, snuck on board hidden in Matt Damon’s scientific equipment, starts climbing down the pipe.  He only has one hour.  When he gets to the bottom, he helps attach a secondary pipe that leads to the stolen supertanker through a diagonal hole that Basher has been drilling (presumably for several months).  The two of them set a few small explosive charges around the drill bit, leave the Chunnel drill running on auto, then take off in the mini-sub.

When the drill restarts, the explosives go off, sealing the well from the platform while breaking through the final feet of rock, leaving the team’s diagonal pipe the only one able to access the oil.  As the BP platform makes repairs, the team siphons oil into the Supertanker.  Just as the tanker fills up, the Chunnel drill hits one of the supports for the platform which experiences what feels like an earthquake before sinking into the water.

On his helicopter circling the sinking rig, Tony Hayward calls his insurance agent only to find that Saul had no connection to the German firm.

The gang meets on the supertanker.  They’ve sealed their pipe, so there’s no oil leaking anywhere.  BP just went bankrupt and as soon as they can sell their tanker full of oil to the North Koreans, they’ll all be filthy rich.   They stand by the railing, watching as the burning oil rig sinks into the ocean.  Sinatra plays.

THE END

To my mind, these scenarios are far more satisfying than anything we’ve seen from the government so far.  Clearly, criminals are the way to go.  What heroic outlaws would you like to see take on BP?   How would they do it?

Related Posts

• USA v. USA Network: When they watch Burn Notice, the terrorists win.
• The Biggest Mistake in the History of NASA
• On May 21, Join the T-Party… the Mr. T Party!
• Sarah Palin: A Hero’s Journey
• Mr. T Party Recap

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia responds to the defendent's Free Speech argument.

But so far, we’re not the ones who have to worry.  It’s the USA Network and the guys who make the show Burn Notice who are really in trouble.

Burn Notice, currently in its fourth season, is the story of Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan), a former covert intelligence agent who has been forced out of his job (“burned”) and forced to live in Miami.  Like the A-Team before him, he uses the skills he learned from Uncle Sam to help the helpless in Miami stand up to a variety of murderers, gangster, spies, drug dealers, biker gangs, etc.

Michael is assisted by two sidekicks: Sam Axe (Bruce Campbell) is a former Special Forces operative with extensive connections in Miami’s law enforcement community, and Fiona Glennanne (Gabrielle Anwar) is a former hit-person/explosives expert/general badass for the Irish Republican Army and Michael’s sometime girlfriend.

The show’s overarching plot is about Michael’s attempts to get his old job back by finding out who burned him and why, but the joy of the show is in the team’s application of spy-craft and well-trained violence to the criminal underclass of Miami.  Often going undercover, Michael generally works to get the bad guys to make mistakes that will either get them arrested by the authorities or killed by some other bad guy, getting the client of the week out of a jam.

The last few episodes are on Hulu, so take a look, especially if you’re at work right now.  It’s a light and implausible show – a modern cross between the A-Team and MacGyver with a lot of establishing shots of girls in bikinis – but it’s one of the most entertaining things on summer TV.

Or it was.

Consider this:

Namibia: No extradition treaty with the US and great swimming on the Skeleton Coast.

The Supreme Court just upheld the conviction of the Humanitarian Law Project for offering “material assistance” to terrorists in the form of “expert assistance.”   What was HLP doing?  They were working with the Kurdish People’s Party, a group seeking to set up a separate Kurdish state in eastern Turkey, to teach this group how to achieve its goals through non-violence by engaging with the United Nations.

In the court’s majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts argues that teaching this group non-violent ways of achieving its goals is a crime because “Such support frees up other resources within the organization that may be put to violent ends.”

If making the means of non-violent protest available is now enough to convict HLP of a crime, then Jeffrey Donovan and the producers of Burn Notice better start filming in a country without an extradition treaty.

Throughout each episode of Burn Notice, Donovan’s voiceover offers how-to’s on whatever particular spy-technique he’s using at the moment.  These deadpan bon-mots are the single best part of the show and offer all sorts of helpful advice.  They’re so popular that they’re used as promos for the show.  There’s only one good one on YouTube, but you can see the others here.  I recommend the ones on Turkmenistan and brake failure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Avrgb1f9Ng

That one may seem relatively benign, but check out some of these others pieces of advice from Mr. Westen:

“When you’re being watched, what you need is contrast. A background that will make the surveillance stand out. An FBI field office is full of guys in their forties. At most South Beach business hotels, it would be tough to tell which middle-aged white guy was watching you. So you stay in the place where everyone is a Jell-O shot away from alcohol poisoning. If you see someone who can walk a straight line, that’s the Fed.”

And

“Freon is available at most computer stores. Buy a can of screen duster, turn it upside-down, and you’ve got it in liquid form. It’s cold enough to crystallize the metal in many commercial locks. A hammer can take care of the rest.”

And

“Need to go someplace you’re not wanted? Any uniform store will sell you a messenger outfit, and any messenger can get past a security desk.”

And

“With everyone X-raying and chemical testing their mail these days, a box of wire and pipe and batteries sprinkled with chemical fertilizer is a great attention-getter.”

And

“Military firebombs are typically white phosphorus or chlorine trifluoride. These are remarkably effective, but they are also unstable, lethally toxic, and hard to find at the grocery store. The main ingredient in a homemade firebomb, on the other hand, is Styrofoam.”

And

“The sticky bomb was originally developed in World War II for mining tanks. For the homemade variety, tile adhesive works best – sticky, water-proof, and it comes in an easily portable plastic bucket.”

And

“The longer you run from the police, the more certain you are to get caught. There’s a small window of time after a chase begins, before backup arrives, before helicopters are deployed. If you want any chance of getting away, you’d best use this time to find some place secluded… and bail out.”

There are dozens more.

The first seven chapters (of 200+) of the Anarchist Cookbook are 1. Counterfeiting Money 2. Credit Card Fraud 3. Making Plastic Explosives 4. Picking Master Locks 5. The Arts of Lockpicking I 6. The Arts of Lockpicking II 7. Solidox Bombs

Basically, the whole show is a TV adaptation of the Anarchists Cookbook, the how-to manual for all sorts of nastiness that many of us bought when we were 13 year-old-boys and fully expected to be badass action heroes in the near future.

Every Thursday night for the last four years, the USA Network has offered explicit expert advice to everyone, making the secrets of American spy-craft available to our nation’s closest friends, its most sedentary citizens, and its bitterest foes.

Terrorist cells with access to basic cable, Hulu, or one of those illegal download sites (the ones that OverthinkingIt.com so strongly discourages) have now learned how to:  recognize and avoid FBI surveillance, break through locks, get past security desks, build firebombs, stick them to things, and escape from the police.  Burn Notice has planned an entire operation for them.  Moreover, the show even implicitly endorses the use of terror tactics, making one of its main sympathetic characters, Fiona, a former bomb-maker for the IRA (which, though not on America’s list of terrorist organizations, is still on the UK list).

And lest you think this is silly, that the bad guys aren’t watching and learning from TV, allow me to share a brief anecdote.  In 2007, I was living in Las Vegas in a big group house.  One night, we got home to realize that the house had been burglarized and that my roommate’s car had been stolen.  The LVPD doesn’t usually send the CSI guys for a burglary, but when the police subsequently found the car a few blocks away, on fire, the crime became arson and the CSI truck showed up.  It turned out that the guy they sent had been one of the advisors to Anthony Zuiker when Zuiker first started reaserching on the first CSI show.  As he dusted every surface in the five bedroom house (that dust is really, really hard to clean up, btw), he expressed regret that the show he helped create was making it much harder to do his job, as now every criminal knows what the CSI guys look for and knows, for example, that wearing gloves while committing crimes is probably a good idea.

It wasn’t just this one guy – recent studies have shown that this is a serious problem.

So believe me, the bad guys are watching Burn Notice and they’re learning.  According to the reasoning of the Supreme Court, the USA Network is clearly in violation of the law for providing “material assistance” to terrorist organizations.

US Department of Justice, send those bastards to Gitmo.

Michael and Fiona await sentencing at an undisclosed location.

PS: In putting this post together tonight, I’ve Googled “terrorist,” “terrorist organizations,” “anarchists cookbook,” “PATRIOT Act,” “IRA,” “Kurdish People’s Party,” and “countries without extradition treaties.”  I’ve also clicked on links for white phosphorus and chlorine triflouride.

I’d like to welcome to OverthinkingIt.com the National Security Agency staffer who is now assigned to subject me to a level of scrutiny I probably don’t deserve.  Thank you for your service to our country. We hope you enjoy the site.

Related Posts

• Who best to clean up the oil spill? Fictional criminals.
• We ARE out of touch with America: OTI’s POPULAR Popular Culture Survey Results
• The Biggest Mistake in the History of NASA
• Sarah Palin: A Hero’s Journey
• Episode 132: Written by Writers

That’s why, this May 21, we’re calling for a MR. T-PARTY, to celebrate the 58th birthday of the illustrious Laurence Tureaud, a.k.a. Mr. T!

He’s a man for whose work we are all grateful—a performer whose trademark meta-character tackles our culture’s central ironies and speaks to the better B.A. nature in all of us.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwQoV407vJY

How can I join the MR. T-PARTY?

Watch a Mr. T movie, video or television show. Drop a quick note about it on your blog, Facebook, or Twitter (#mrtparty). Send the results to mrtparty at overthinking it dot com—we’ll post the best stuff on our site.

Get some friends together. Use our Facebook event or create your own. Mr. T is all about people and communities respecting and taking care of each other. Have your own MR. T-PARTY. Either get together and watch some of his work, or make some pro-T picket signs and hang out out in a public place. Take some pictures—and send those our way too!

Wear your gold chains, shave yourself a mowhawk, throw people rather than shoot them, drive a GMC custom van, fight Rocky, refuse to get on a plane, the possibilities are endless.

Spread the word. Like all social moments, the more the merrier. We all have our contributions to make. The MR. T-PARTY invites everyone, welcomes everyone. Except fools.

Above all, BE POSITIVE. Mr. T has done a lot of work to support communities, help kids, motivate people, and teach positive values, and to do it in a unique, B.A. way that gets people fired up all over the world.

There’s enough hating going in the world.

May 21, 2010. Cut the jibba jabba. Got that, fool?

Hey, Clubber, any predictions for your birthday?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJnKm6ftPu0

Watch for more updates on the MR. T-PARTY here at Overthinking It!

Related Posts

• Who best to clean up the oil spill? Fictional criminals.
• A Brief History of Fool-Pitying: Origins of the Phrase “I Pity the Fool”
• USA v. USA Network: When they watch Burn Notice, the terrorists win.
• Mr. T Party Recap
• The Biggest Mistake in the History of NASA

of race?

Early on, I noticed something that made me start Overthinking. The band is diverse, made up of African-American will.i.am, Filipino-American Apl.de.ap, Mexican/Native American Taboo and Mexican/Scottish/Irish/Native American Fergie. Looking around at the sold-out crowd of 22,000 at the Wachovia Center, I saw that the crowd echoed the band and that I was standing in the most diverse group of people I’ve ever seen, including the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Black, white, Asian, Hispanic; children, teens, adults, seniors; gay, straight, trans; rich, poor, middle class – EVERYONE came to this show.

And, it seems, EVERYONE was listening at home too.

From Wikipedia: “In 2009, the group became one of only eleven artists to have ever held the number one and two spots on the Billboard Hot 100 at the same time with their singles “Boom Boom Pow” and “I Gotta Feeling”, from the album The E.N.D., and the singles also topped the chart for an unprecedented 26 consecutive weeks combined in 2009. The album later produced a third Hot 100 number one with “Imma Be”, making them one of the few groups to ever place three number ones on the chart from the same album.”

Clearly, this band has done something special. They’ve appealed to an incredible demographic range and made an extraordinary amount of money doing it. As I sat there in the crowd, Voodoo rapping above my head on his light cycle, I wondered if it Black Eyed Peas might not represent a truly post-racial band and if that was the secret of their success.

This image is not from the Tron remake. This is Voodoo rapping on a flying light cycle.

Fergie’s a big part of that success. Great voice, astounding dancer, fun personality, lots of presence, sings about lovely lady lumps while caressing said lumps in a very provocative way. The fact that the band spent eight years in relative obscurity before taking off in 2003 when Fergie joined certainly points to the Fergie theory, but that’s not the whole story. She’s got the moves, the looks and the talent to be a big success, but so do a lot of other singers who don’t have three singles hit #1 off a single album.

If not Fergie, than it must be will.i.am, who does most of the talking both on and off stage. Five minutes into the concert, it was clear that will.i.am was the soul of the group and  the aesthetic force behind the music and the show.

As I was thinking about this, the lights went out and something wonderfully strange happened. Out of the darkness a massively autotuned voice asked the crowd: “do you mind if I turn this arena into a nightclub?” The crowd responded in an indecipherable howl. Then, up from the floor rose will.i.am on a hydraulic saucer, dressed a lot like Robocop, lasers shooting from the sides of his head.

will.i.robot

For the next 20 minutes, will.i.am mixed a dance party and the crowd went wild. The songs he played weren’t Black Eyed Peas tunes. They didn’t come from his roots in the LA hip-hop scene or even from modern pop. Nope. Instead, this African-American man dressed as a robot sent this multi-ethnic crowd into fits of joy with the greatest hits of white America from the 70s, 80s and 90s. On the set list: Guns ‘n Roses’s “Sweet Child of Mine,” Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and the Eurythmics’s “Sweet Dreams (are made of this).”

Staring up in wonder and joy, I was immediately reminded of the “post-racial” America that the news media has talked about since President Obama won the caucus in the 95% white state of Iowa. I wondered whether this particular scene served as evidence for or against the idea that America is no longer particularly concerned about race.

“Where’s the Love?”

So, on the “yay, we’re post-racial” side of the ledger, we have a multi-racial band with a diverse audience promoting non-discrimination and tolerance in its lyrics. will.i.am has proven an unusually engaged and thoughtful member of the celebrity class, dedicating himself to progressive causes. He and the band are working with a number of environmental organizations to promote recycling and to build support for the upcoming Clean Energy/Global Warming bill in Congress.

Moreover, with his famous “Yes We Can” video during the 2008 campaign, he tied himself to the primary subject of the “post-racial” discussion, Barack Obama.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsV2O4fCgjk

Supporting the hypothesis of a post-racial will.i.am was this piece from early in the show. Text messages from the crowd scrolled up on giant screens and will.i.am worked them into his rap, become the living voice of the multi-racial multitude. It was cool, impressive and, as I’ve learned from watching videos from a number of different cities, genuinely impromptu.

The other piece of support for the post-racial thesis was that, at the end of the show, will.i.am personally recognized every dancer and musician on the stage and thanked the backstage crew. He thanked dozens of people and, frankly, killed the momentum of the end of the show, but I was impressed that he took the time to do it. While not technically about race, it suggests the band’s appreciation of the contributions of everyone involved. Failure to appreciate each others’ contributions is one of the underlying causes of America’s racial and political tensions.

The full title of this article is "You'll Own Slaves by 1965"

On the “America is still pretty damn racial” side of argument lies the fact that will.i.am seems to have felt the need to hide himself inside a full-body robot costume in order to play Journey songs at a bunch of folks from Philly and southern New Jersey. His face was covered with a robot mask while his voice was so autotuned as to be inhuman. Something just felt a little weird.

will kept the mask on for a while. Fergie, the hot white girl, wore no mask, or, for that matter, pants, for most of the show.

The word “robot” was introduced by Czech playwrite Karel Capek in his 1921 play Rossum’s Universal Robots. Capek’s robots were made of flesh, but were literally built by the Rossum Corporation (for which Joss Whedon named the villainous corporation in Dollhouse) to serve as a servile caste for human beings. Like their predecessor, the Golem of Prague, Capek’s oppressed robots rebel and bring an end to humanity.

In fact, most robot stories are stories of slave revolt. From the Cylons to the Replicants to the I, Robot robots to the machines in the Matrix, popular culture often warns us of the danger of subjugating a conscious race. It’s an old story, one that goes back to the Spartans and their Helot slaves or the Romans and Spartacus.

I’m in no position to judge anything or anyone and I respect will.i.am as an artist and as an activist, but it does seem strange to me that the politically aware African-America front man of the most popular band in the world would dress as the modern cultural equivalent of a slave.

When I first started talking about this concert, Fenzel introduced me to Afrofuturism as a potential explanation of will.i.am’s performance. Afrofuturism, as defined by Wikipedia, is “an emergent literary and cultural aesthetic that combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy and magic realism with non-Western cosmologies in order to critique not only the present-day dilemmas of people of color.” When Sun Ra puts on the shiny metallic crest of the Pharaohs or when George Clinton goes up to the Mothership, that’s Afrofuturism.

Afrofuturism also gave George Clinton the power to funk in a vacuum.

But in those cases, neither man covers his face and both artists are being taken up in one way or another. Afrofuturism is about the ascendance of African Americans and about seeing their history and traditions through new lenses. Sun Ra styles himself after a god ascending to the heavens, but it’s still Sun Ra. George Clinton is getting up for the down stroke with higher beings, but there’s no mistaking that George Clinton is doing the funking. will.i.am, meanwhile, hides his face behind a mask, putting forward the public face of an artificial being created specifically to serve others.

Looked at this way, it’s hard not to believe that race played a major role in this costume choice, making the concert a counter-example to the concept of post-racialism.

I don’t have an answer here. I don’t know what will.i.am intended with this costume, but I do believe that he intended something.

Was it a comment on technology and the way it can break down traditional barriers to create a post-racial society?

Was he portraying the end of the usual robot story, when robots have lifted themselves out of slavery and taken over?

Or was it just a cool costume?

Let us know what you think in the comments.

PS: For another look at music and robots, check out Sheely’s post about Kanye West and Robocop

PPS: One of my favorite things that ever happened was the CNN coverage of the 2008 election night. Around the country, they set up tents with dozens of cameras inside so that guests could appear as a 3D hologram in the studio to talk to Anderson Cooper. Millions were spent so that we could watch news anchors have 3D conversations on our 2D TV screens. will.i.am appeared as one of those guests. He missed an incredible opportunity to become the personal hero of geeks like us by ignoring Anderson’s questions and repeating over and over: “Help me Obi-Wan, you’re my only hope.”

will.i.am gives Anderson Cooper the plans for the Death Star.

Related Posts

• Episode 19: Ought White Boy to Play That Funky Music?
• Overthinking Battlestar Galactica: The Miniseries
• The 10 Easiest Things Dance Songs Ask of You
• Episode 53: Chekhov’s Bag Of Peas
• Boardwalk Empire: The Old World and the New

The theme of the amateur “fixing” Washington is so pervasive in fiction that the things we look for in real-life politicians have changed.   Where once we looked for larger-than-life heroes: champions of the battlefield, the courtroom, or the legislative process, today we’re looking for someone we’d like to have a beer with.  Most pundits agree that this phenomenon was the key to Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992 and (with a little help from the Supreme Court) George W. Bush’s victory in 2000.

From gravitas to glamour shots.

That’s not to say that applying a little folksy charm and a common touch is new to politics.  Andrew Jackson did invite the public in to the White House for a big block of cheese, but he was also the nation’s biggest military hero.   Julius Caesar slept in the same tents and ate the same food as his legions, but he also conquered France, Germany and the Roman republic.

The Hollywood myth took that small dose of the common touch and made it central to our idea of what a politician should be.  It didn’t happen instantly – as recently as the 50’s and 60’s, America looked to its Presidents as exemplars.   Eisenhower beat Hitler.  Kennedy’s Camelot was what America aspired to become.  But then Nixon went down, the Presidency lost a bit of its shine, and we stopped voting for statesmen and started voting for people like us.  (Note: Mr. Frost has already picked on him enough, but it’s worth noting that Nixon’s 1952 Checkers speech was a big first step down the road of  “I’m just like you.”)

That’s not a good thing.  We, as a people, are probably not qualified to be President.  On average, we’re not smart enough.  We’re not diplomatic enough.  We don’t work hard enough.  We don’t think strategically.  I’m not suggesting that the Presidency should be the exclusive domain of rich Ivy League grads, but it’s not a job that anybody can do.

So while it’s great that social studies teachers tell us that anyone in this country can become president, it’s not in our interest for just anyone to get the job. But cultures run on stories and the story that Hollywood is selling is that the only thing we need to fix this country is a good, old-fashioned average American at the helm.  A look at some of the people running for Congress this year shows that we’ve bought it.   A peek into the reality behind Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Dave and Independence Day tells us what we might be in for.

Let’s start with Frank Capra’s 1939 film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Jefferson Smith is the leader of the Boy Rangers.  In a fit of good timing, one of his unnamed Western state’s Senators dies just as Smith performs a heroic rescue of some endangered scouts.  Smith is duly appointed to replace that Senator.  As he takes his place in the Senate, he’s taken under the wing of Senator Paine, a senior Senator in an unnamed leadership position.  Paine, it turns out, is also in cahoots with the crooked political boss of their state, Big Jim Taylor.

When Smith introduces a bill to buy land for a national boys’ camp, it turns out that the land he wants is already part of a corrupt Taylor/Paine scheme to build a dam on Willet Creek.  The bad politicos frame Smith, suggesting that he will personally profit from his camp bill. Faced with expulsion, Smith is forced to filibuster to convince the Senate that he’s right.  It’s a famous scene.  Watch it.   After a day of impassioned filibustering, Smith passes out from exhaustion.  Seeing him go down, Paine has a fit of conscience, attempts suicide, then confesses his crimes on the floor of the Senate, demanding that the body expel him rather than Smith.  It would have been nice of him to exonerate Smith before attempting suicide, but a Senator with a crisis of conscience can’t be expected to act rationally.

This group of clips is more than you probably need, but it manages to cut the whole two-hour movie into 9 minutes:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GD-lFCsYOPs

So imagine you’re a citizen of Smith’s state in 1939, ten years into the Great Depression.   There are two options on the table.  One is a boys’ camp, a wilderness area that may create 10-15 jobs for local people (FDR’s CCC will probably ship people in to do most of the work).  The other is a dam project, which, graft or not, is likely to employ hundreds of local people in construction and provide cheaper power to local communities.  If it’s a really rural state like New Mexico or Nevada, it may bring power to these communities for the first time.  Which bill are you likely to support?

Meanwhile, it’s 1939 and Smith has got Franklin Roosevelt as President and the leader of your party.  (In 1939, all but two of the twenty Senators from Western states were Democrats, so we’ll assume that Smith and Paine are as well).    People are still blaming Republicans for the Depression and Roosevelt will probably win reelection, even to a controversial third term.  Still, it’s coming up on an election year and Senator Smith has just destroyed the Democratic political machine in his state.  He may have just cost Roosevelt 6 electoral votes and a couple of friendly seats in Congress. Think he’s at the top of Roosevelt’s list of callbacks?

When someone asks you to write a letter to your Senator, do it. It works. They get really agitated.

Moreover, he also cost his state a senior Senator who is clearly good at bringing home federal cash.   In two years, the Japanese are going to bomb Pearl Harbor and military spending is going to go through the roof, putting a final end to the Depression.  Wouldn’t it have been nice to have a Senator who could ensure that some of that money came to your state?  Instead, you’ve got Senator Jefferson Smith, who may be popular with reporters and voters, but who is morally opposed to wheeling and dealing and who the other Senators are hesitant to deal with.  So while the boys are enjoying the Jefferson Smith National Boys’ Camp, the new $200 million munitions factory and its 1,200 jobs go to the state next door.

Remember the Dream Team of pro basketball players that went to the Olympics in 1992?   Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippin, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley, et al.    They won, because that’s what happens when pros play amateurs (or pros from Croatia).

Which brings us to 1993’s Dave.

Dave is a movie about a Presidential look-alike who gets brought in to run the country when President Bill Mitchell has a stroke and goes into a coma (while having sex with a “Patriotic Secretary”).  The tagline: In a country where anybody can become President, anybody just did.

In short order, Dave’s common decency, extensive knowledge of musical theater and can-do attitude remake Washington, put America back on track, expose corruption at the highest levels, and win the heart of the now widowed First Lady Sigourney Weaver.  It’s a great movie.

So Dave calls in Murray, his CPA friend (note: with April upon us, I am currently in the market for a CPA friend, if anyone’s interested), and the two of them spend a night and the next day doing just that.   We don’t see a lot of the cuts that he makes, but the ones we do see are a $40 million program to promote the American auto industry and a reduction in payments to military contractors whose programs are behind schedule.  Dave saves the homeless shelters.  Everyone claps, except for the hundreds of Senators and Congressmen who have defense contractors in their districts, Congressional leaders who generally like to be consulted on little things like the budget (the Constitution gave them the purse strings, after all), and basically everyone in Michigan.

The 2010 Federal Budget in its most distilled form is 192 pages long and takes months to produce.  The list of people who worked on from the Office of Management and Budget is four pages long, three columns, and lists four people whose last names start with Z.  Ali A. Zaidi, Jeff Zients, Gail S. Zimmerman and Rachel Zinn, we thank you for your hard work.

Posing for pictures with babies is one facet of leadership in which both professionals and amateurs excel.

In 1993, the Federal Budget was $1,409,392,000,000 with a deficit of $255 billion.   Dave and Murray have just derailed this carefully prepared budget, alienated a significant percentage of Congress, and spent two full days on this fix, which amounts to 0.045% of total spending.  There are probably better uses of the President’s time.

Next up, Dave proposes a program to end unemployment.  James Tobin and John Maynard Keynes may agree with him that this is a good idea, but both of them would also note that it’s not going to happen without massive government spending.  We’ve already seen what it takes for Dave and Murray to get a piddling $650 million together, where are they going to come up with the billions that this program will take?

Given that Dave has admitted to illegal actions on the part of his Administration and pissed off Congress, the chance of getting this program through is effectively nil, even if he leaves it in the hands of the squeaky clean Vice President Nance.   Great intentions, great movie, great performance by Kevin Kline, but this is an idea that’s going absolutely nowhere.

That’s because Dave and Murray are amateurs.

Finally, let’s talk about 1996′s Independence Day.

While not an overtly political movie, Independence Day features an amateur President who can make a mean speech but can’t do much with policy.

This is what happens when you vote for amateurs and/or James Madison.

When we meet President Thomas J. Whitmore, his advisers are telling him that despite his service as a Gulf War pilot, his poll numbers are slipping because he can’t get anything done.   “They elected a warrior and they got a wimp,” says the woman who starts as a powerful adviser to the President and ends the film as Jeff Goldblum’s powerless girlfriend.

Cut to the end of the movie.  It turns out that having a fighter pilot President may be a good thing – someone’s got to shoot down this spaceship before it blows up Area 51.  (No worries that every metropolitan area larger than a military base in northern Nevada has already been destroyed.)   President Maverick is up there, the shields are down, he’s ready to take out the ship and his Fox 2 missile fails to fire.   If not for the incredible sacrifice of Randy Quaid, the last vestige of American government would have been destroyed and the aliens would have won.

What if, instead of a fighter pilot, we’d elected a former Governor or a pro from the Senate Armed Services Committee, someone who knew how to manage a government bureaucracy?

Fox 2! Missile failure!?!? If only Dave had paid those military contractors!

Perhaps that person could have held defense contractors accountable and ensured that the missiles on America’s fighter planes would actually fire.  Perhaps instead of the sniveling Secretary of Defense who failed to mention the fact that we had access to alien technology until after LA, NY and DC were obliterated, a professional President would have appointed a SecDef with some sense of what “need to know” actually means.

We chose wrong, America, and Randy Quaid paid the price.  Never again.

(Note: Fenzel had a different take on Whitmore in his ID4 piece last July.  Anyone who’s listened to the podcast knows that when Fenzel and I disagree, he’s usually right.  Not this time.)

So in November, when you go into the voting booth, don’t let Hollywood lead you astray.  Don’t vote for the person with the slick ads that talk about sharing your values.  Don’t vote for the Boy Scout, the small businessman, or the fighter pilot.  Don’t vote for the guy/gal you want to have a beer with.

Will you be better off voting for the career politician who actually knows how this stuff works?   You betcha.

#30#

PS: In my last article, I took Aaron Sorkin to task for writing the worst political speech in history.  Today, I’d like to praise Mr. Sorkin for being alone in Hollywood for grasping this concept.  45 minutes of searching didn’t find me the exact quote, but in an episode from the third of fourth season of the West Wing, Sorkin has Toby or Josh present the idea that, somewhere along the line, America forgot that it takes someone extraordinary to run the world’s most powerful country.  Help me out in the comments if you know the quote!

Related Posts

• The Biggest Mistake in the History of NASA
• Political coverage no longer exists. Instead, we have electoral process fanfic
• Obama-Biden: The Buddy Cop Movie
• Milkshake etymology
• SOPA-thinking It

Me: (muttering, staring into space) Pew pew! Pew! Pew!

Her: Are… are you imagining sniping everyone on this subway?

Me: …

I have considered hiring somebody off of Craigslist to come to my apartment and give me Modern Warfare lessons, so I can finally overcome my crippling fear of multiplayer mode.

But I have to say, I was a little surprised by how grim the main campaign turned out to be. This is a game in which America finds itself impotent in the battlefield, despised by the rest of the world, invaded, betrayed, and generally having a miserable week. In this article, I’m going to look at the plot from a nationalistic perspective. (Pretty much ALL the Modern Warfare 2 spoilers in the world follow, so proceed with caution if you’re a gamer.)

Still here? Okay, we’re oscar mike…

Modern Warfare looks depressingly like 2003 warfare.

The first mission takes place in Afghanistan, where a group of Army Rangers is trying to train some locals, without much success. “No offense,” says the Sergeant (voiced by Keith “STOP ASKING ME TO PUT ON THE GLASSES, RODDY PIPER!!” David) to the Afghans, “but I see a lot of you guys firing from the hip and spraying bullets all over the range. You don’t end up hitting a damn thing and it makes you look like an ass.” Keep in mind that this is supposed to be 2016. I don’t know what’s more depressing—that we’re still in Afghanistan after 13 years of war, or that we still can’t get the locals to take control of their own security.

The Rangers roll into a town in a convoy of Humvees, but everything quickly goes FUBAR. Militia attack from the rooftops, and the trucks scatter in a desperate attempt to escape. At this point, nothing you do can help you. No matter how skillful you are with the minigun, your vehicle is going to get shattered by an RPG, and you’re going to have to fight your way out of the red zone on foot. This is typical of the game—even though you personally may kick ass and take names, the mission as a whole is a bloody disaster. All you can do is salvage a bad situation. This is what you fight for in Modern Warfare 2: not victory, but a chance to limit the scope of the defeat.

Stanley Milgrim, please pick up the white courtesy phone.

After you fight your way to safety in Afghanistan, you meet General Shepherd, a leathery stereotype voiced by Lance Henriksen. He’s got a special task for you, and it’s so controversial the game actually gives you the option to opt out of playing it. You probably heard about the infamous “No Russian” mission when Modern Warfare 2 came out back in November. Your character goes undercover with the notorious terrorist Makarov. You follow him and his men out of an elevator into a Moscow airport, and watch them open fire on hundreds of screaming civilians. It’s up to you whether you participate, but shooting the terrorists isn’t an option (I tried).

Some people thought this level was a cheap publicity stunt. Others thought it was a masterstroke. “It was the most powerful emotional experience any video game has ever given me,” Chris Sullentrop wrote in Slate. “I don’t know that I cried, but I was knocked off balance by emotions that I thought I had tucked away.”

Personally, I was just confused. Isn’t the whole point of embedding someone with the terrorists so that they can warn people before airport massacres? Presumably, your character has a way of contacting his superiors. “Hmm,” I imagine them saying in some Pentagon bunker. “The terrorists are planning to slaughter hundreds of people? Maybe we should prevent that. Then again, it would be a shame to blow our cover.” A cynical person might think that the Americans don’t give a damn about preventing a terrorist attack that’s not on their own soil. Shame on you, cynical person.

Wouldn't it be very easy to kill all the terrorists right now?

In any case, not only do the Americans allow the attack to take place, NOT ONLY do they allow one of their own soldiers to participate in it, but as the terrorists are making their escape, they SHOOT you, revealing that they knew you were an American all along. By leaving your body at the scene, they effectively frame the United States for the atrocity. Or so the game claims–I’m not actually sure how this was supposed to work. Did your character have a wallet with a U.S. drivers license on him?

In any case, both the missions you’ve played as an American soldier have been ginormous disasters, and the second one was morally reprehensible. The U.S. Army isn’t look great. But you know who IS looking great? The British.

In between the missions you play as the American, you step into the shoes of “Roach,” part of a special forces unit called Task Force 141. It’s supposed to be a multinational group, but its three main members (Soap, Ghost, and Captain Price) are all Limeys. (Thanks to the faceless, voiceless nature of the character you play, it’s an open question what nationality Roach is.) These Brits accomplish their missions with brutal effectiveness. They infiltrate a Russian airbase to recover a downed satellite module, escaping in true James Bond fashion via snowmobile. In the wake of the airport fiasco, the 141 heads to Brazil to hunt down an associate of the terrorists. Naturally, they get their man.

Semper fries.

Meanwhile, America is going the full Red Dawn. It turns out that before the British recovered the satellite for us, the Russians used it to hack our NORAD early warning system. Now Ivan is parachuting into Northern Virginia, and the local strip mall is suddenly a war zone. You’re playing as another Army Ranger, also under the command of Keith “I Was In The Chronicles of Riddick” David. Once again, this is another mission where, no matter how well you play, it can only be perceived as an embarrassment and disaster of  epic proportions for the United States. There are MIGs bombing I-95.

Not only do the Russians manage to sneak attack us from the other side of the world, they do so with remarkable success. “The Russians are burning through our defenses and our intel,” says General Shepherd at the beginning of the next mission. The General wants you to fight your way into what was until recently a ritzy suburb, to rescue a “High Value Individual.” Given that these are American soldiers, you can guess how this mission goes. You make it to the HVI’s house, only to discover that he’s already dead. End of mission. Somehow, victory in this game doesn’t feel so victorious when you’re an American.

'Ello guvnah! Fancy a pretentious monologue before your mission, do ya? Spot on!

Meanwhile, the Brits are speeding from success to success. In Brazil, they find out that Makarov’s arch-enemy is locked up in a Russian gulag. They seize control of an oil rig, freeing some hostages in the process. Then they assault the gulag and free the mysterious prisoner… who turns out to be Captain Price, your mentor from Modern Warfare 1. So all in all, everything is going awesome for the Brits.

Cut back to the United States. You’re in a bunker that’s being absolutely pummeled. The fluorescent lights are falling off the ceiling, showering the concrete with sparks. Wounded and dying soldiers lie on cots. There’s a row of black body bags lined up along a wall. Keith David leads you up the steps and into a trench. You round a corner… and there’s the Washington Monument. You’re on the National Mall, and it’s about to be overrun with Ruskies. You fight your way into the Commerce Building and blow up a few enemy tanks with rocket launchers. But since this is Modern Warfare 2, and you’re an American, this can’t end well. Your helicopter goes down, and the mission ends with you trapped in the wreck, down to your last clip, waiting for the inevitable.

And guess who saves your godforsaken American life? Yes, those unstoppable badass Brits. Captain Price, despite having spent the past five years in a Russian gulag, turns out to be not merely battle-ready, but able to launch and control a nuclear warhead. He purposely explodes the bomb in the atmosphere, creating a giant EMP.

Help us, Keith David. You're our only hope.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, your American character is saved as every helicopter suddenly falls out of the sky, creating enough chaos for your squad to escape. Fighting your way through the office buildings, you come across a bunker with a very familiar seal on it. The other soldiers speculate this must be the President’s secret bunker. Someone pries open the door and… any guesses? Anyone? Bueller?

Everyone is burnt to a crisp. The President is dead. End of mission.

There’s only one more mission you play as an American in this game. You, Keith David, and what’s left of your unit emerge from the bunker to find yourself in front of “Whiskey Hotel,” which sounds like fun, but turns out to be the regular old White House. After fighting your way into the press room, you overhear a radio saying that D.C. is about to be leveled by the American air force, unless they see green smoke from the roof in two minutes. (I don’t think the similarities to The Rock are coincidental. Hans Zimmer, who wrote the score to that Michael Bay classic, also composed the main themes to this game.)

Oh no! Not our national phallic symbol!

All your experience playing this game leads you to believe that you’ll fail to make it to the roof on time, the air force will kill you and blow up the capital, and Russians will rape cute puppies in front of your corpse. But in what counts as “winning,” you just barely avert the airstrike. The last you see of the Americans, they are looking out over their destroyed capital, talking about the inevitable counterattack on Moscow.

Let me repeat this: no matter how well you play the game, you’re still participating in the worst day in American history, in which we just barely manage to avoid fire-bombing our own capital into dust. All in all, it’s a pretty grim view of America’s military capabilities (and a pretty complimentary view of Russia’s).

But it’s not over. Not even close.

In the next mission, the British soldiers of the 141, under the command of General Shepherd, are going after Makarov at his safehouse. They want revenge on behalf of the Americans, because clearly the Americans can’t get anything done on their own. Makarov isn’t there, but the Brits collect a ton of intel and bring it back to Shepherd. And then… are you ready for this?… Shepherd shoots them, and American soldiers light them on fire. In turns out the American General was the bad guy all along, in league with the terrorists.

I was a little sketchy as to why Shepherd is doing all this, so I consulted the Modern Warfare Wiki. I guess the idea is that he feels that starting World War III is the best way to strengthen America’s military and power in the world. Certainly, it’s a good way to get your defense budget increased.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPw3pJYfBu4

In the next mission, the game ups the ante on anti-Americanism: it actually puts Americans in your crosshairs. The surviving British commandos are being hunted down by Shepherd’s men, and they have to return fire to escape. Technically, these soldiers are “Shadow Company,” a black ops unit answerable only to Shepherd. Still, they’re Americans, and you’re a Brit killing them with a sniper rifle. Think about the arc this game puts the player through: you start as a Ranger in Afghanistan, and you end up realizing that the American military is behind all the evils of the world and must be destroyed. In the end, there’s a final showdown between you and the ultimate bad guy, who also happens to be the Supreme Commander of the American military. I won’t tell you how it ends, but let’s just say that if you’ve been paying attention to how Americans fare in this game, and how Brits fare in this game, it won’t be a surprise.

Okay, what’s going on here? How come Infinity Ward made a game in which America is portrayed as incompetent, ineffective, and finally villainous? The boring marketing answer is that video games are an international product now. MW2 sold nine million copies in the U.S., and almost 3 million in the U.K. The rest of the world, as you might have heard, currently doesn’t have the highest regard for the United States, and especially its military. Making the 141 a multinational task force gives the game a wider appeal. If you don’t believe me, just asked Paramount Pictures. When they made the movie version of G. I. Joe, they changed the team from an American group to an international one.

But the more interesting interpretation is that it’s not just Europeans who have their doubts about the United States military. Americans have seen our armed forces struggle to win two endless wars, and search in vain for Osama Bin Laden. The name of the game is Modern Warfare, and modern warfare is all about frustration–not having the right intel, resources, or geopolitical clout to get the job done. The game reflects a real fear that the military isn’t able to protect us from danger. Even though our soldiers can demolish any enemy in a one-on-one fight, they will always be too slow to stop the fight before it happens. The remarkable thing about this game is that no matter how well you play, Washington is still in rubble at the end. That’s what victory looks like in Modern Warfare 2.

Related Posts

• Episode 176: In A Gunny Sack behind The Bus Boy
• The Underserved Market for Video Game Personal Trainers
• The Ethics of First-Person Shooters
• HE can’t handle the truth
• Gary Gygax fails his saving throw against abdominal aortic aneurysms