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I know people who fear and condemn “socialism” in government and claim to be all for individual liberty and laissez-faire, yet who, in their role as sport enthusiasts, have no problem being infuriated at a “selfish” athlete who refuses to subordinate his own success to that of the team. Is that not socialism as well?

Most people who follow American football, for example, will tell you that a team full of “humble guys” who work well together can beat a team full of showboating superstars. Or at the very least, they will pull for that team to do so, even if their chance of success is low.

Is this a contradiction, or merely a legitimate difference between two completely different social activities? I have no clue.

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As I mentioned in this post, and as you can probably divine by reading this blog, I am by nature a critic and an analytical sort of person, particularly when it comes to art and literature.

Many people I know are not this way; and they think that my criticism of an artwork, especially movies, is an indication that I don’t enjoy them. As a result, people don’t like to see movies with me. Many people, I have (finally) realized, enjoy movies in a different way from myself; a way that apparently involves less analysis of them.

The truth is, though, that I like analyzing and criticizing things. I really do enjoy seeing a film that I consider “bad”, and not in a “camp”, “so-bad-it’s-good” sort of way, either. I really do take pleasure in saying “that film is flawed in the following ways”, or “this scene is bad because [whatever]”. It doesn’t bother me in the least to take in a work I dislike, if only I get to think about it afterwards.

But some people who know me–understandably, when I think about it–don’t understand this. They assume when I say “that was bad”, it equals “I didn’t enjoy it”. And I suppose, in some sense I didn’t, but for me it’s still worthwhile if I can criticize it.

I guess I have no real point here, it’s just something I figured out today.

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One of the things that always impresses me in a drama or tragedy story is the injection of humor. This is a remarkably difficult mixture to achieve, and this is all the more reason to value it.
You may well ask: “Why look for humor in non-humorous works? That’s why they have comedies.” Well, this is undoubtedly true—although the comedies I like are typically darkish comedies—but I have noticed that a really effective serious, tragic story often requires a dash of wit to make it believable.
Consider, for example, the film which I consider the best I’ve ever seen, Lawrence of Arabia. It has a rather depressing ending, and yet the penultimate scene ends on a line from Claude Rains to Alec Guinness that I always laugh at—and while it is a sardonic line, I can’t help thinking that most screenwriters would not have had the courage to put it something so drily funny in at such a moment. Yet, it works.
Another favorite film of mine is Chinatown, which has one of the darkest endings ever. But it also has some very witty lines an amusing scenes early on. The writer for that film, Robert Towne, described it as a“tunnel at the end of the light.”
I don’t deny that this mixture is extremely difficult to pull off. This is all the more important because trying to do it and failing leaves a much worse taste in the audience’s mouth than steering clear of it all together.
The movie Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (keep in mind that this is my favorite of all six Star Wars films)  fell into this trap a bit in the first third of the film. I suspect George Lucas was aiming to provide a “tunnel at end of light” effect, but what he ended up with was a lot of comic business with R2-D2 that didn’t fit with the dark tone of the film. (This is Lucas’ biggest flaw as writer in my opinion—he cannot do wit, he can only do jokes.)
This same concept of mixing humor with a grim overall story seems to apply in other media as well. It’s one of many, many reasons I adore the video games of Chris Avellone, which usually contain both considerable wit and  deep, dark philosophy, impeccably mixed together.
Of course, there is an alternative way of achieving this mixture: the black comedy. I tend to feel that dark subject matter lends an “edge” to humor, although the difficulty is that one man’s dark humor is another man’s appalling perversity.
That’s the danger with dark humor, that the converse—what I’ll call humorous darkness, awkward though the term is—does not have.  Inject too much humor in to something that is at its core serious and people will just not take it seriously. Inject too much darkness into something that is supposed to be a comedy and people will think you’re sick. 

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According to this CNN article by Jacob Soboroff, American students have been doing poorly in the subject of American history. The article concludes, as such articles usually do, with the idea that history needs to be taught in such a way as to make it interesting to the students.

Personally, I can’t recall a time when history was not interesting purely for its own sake to me, but apparently there are those who do not share my interest in the subject.

It occurs to me that perhaps the best way of arousing interest in the subject is to begin by talking about issues in the present day–ideally some sort of problem which affects the audience–and through this prompt them into asking why the problem exists. In general, for all fields outside of the hard sciences, the answer to “why” often involves a history lesson in some way.

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Courtesy of Ta-Nehisi Coates, a New York Magazine article which quotes Dinesh D’Souza saying:

“For Obama, the radical Muslims are on the right side of history — that’s why he is so unnaturally solicitous toward them.”  

Judging by what we’ve seen of Obama’s handling of radical Jihadists, I would have to say that D’Souza must be using a new definition of the word “solicitous”.

Even if we ignore this, Obama’s track record on fighting terrorism is better than that of his last two predecessors. But this is not the first time D’Souza has ignored key counter-evidence in trying to press his charges of “anti-colonialism” against the President.

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Last week, Sady Doyle wrote an amusing satirical counterfactual article, which illustrates how J.K. Rowling might have written a more feminist-friendly wizardry series. What I find interesting is not so much the article itself as it is the comments. There are several comments on the article along the lines of: “you are in no position to criticize, for you have not written a book.” [I’m paraphrasing here–read the actual comments.]

It is true that it is harder to create something than it is to criticize; I have no doubts about this. However, since I am primarily one who criticizes and not one who creates, I feel compelled to defend the practice. Criticism is vital in order to improve upon things the next time.

I concede that a critic, like me, will probably never create anything good on his own. Like filmmaker David Lean remarked: “I wouldn’t take the advice of a lot of so-called critics on how to shoot a close-up of a teapot.” And so he shouldn’t. As someone once said, critics rarely actually offer a better alternative; rather, they merely point out the flaws.

This is not as simple as it sounds. It can be very hard to figure what the actual problem with something is–as opposed to the simple reaction “I don’t like it”–and I suspect it is often necessary that the critic pointing it out not be a creator. The outsider’s perspective, as we all know, is often useful for seeing flaws.

In short, the best a critic can hope to do is correctly diagnose the problem; it will fall to some genius in the field to actually solve it. But both professions are needed for advancement in the field.

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Andrew Sullivan has a great post about what he calls the:

“Nixonian achievement [that] has turned the GOP into the party of the South – a minority country within a country. With no ability to communicate within the Democratic party to bring the South and the rest of the country together, we have stalemate. Recall that the map of the 2008 presidential election was almost identical to the map of the states in the Civil War, with now Northern-infiltrated Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida the only exceptions.”

I’m going to write a post on this subject myself when I have time, but read Sullivan’s post and also the articles he links to; they’re very interesting.

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Every now and then, I like to write critiques of fiction genres. I felt the urge to write such a piece today, but quickly realized I had said pretty  much everything I wanted to say about the horror genre already. And about the epic adventure genre, which I also like, I had nothing interesting to say. Same goes for mystery and comedy.

So I thought I’d change things up a little. I’m going to write about a genre I have very little familiarity with: romance. And by “romance” I mean of course “love stories”. (There is an older definition which means something more like “adventure”.) The only thing even close to being a romance I can remember actually liking is Jane Eyre, which I read earlier this year. This shows how ignorant I am of the genre.

Now, it’s certainly true that almost all of my favorite books, movies, video games, etc. include at least one romantic sub-plot, but that does not mean they are of the romantic genre; they merely feature elements from it.

I think this is because an actual romance story is very hard to do, because a proper romance involves two people who get along well. And as the adage says “the essence of drama is conflict”, and therefore a successful  romance is necessarily devoid of conflict for the most part. This is–or might be–interesting because while a “horror” story derives its conflict from something horrible, and an “adventure” derives its conflict from adventuring, a “romance” needs some external conflict.

A popular source of conflict is that there are social or familial bars against the romance. This is probably the most common. Another one is to write it so the couple acts like they don’t like each other until they fall in love. (I have never liked this one.)

 I suspect this why romances today, at least in film, tend to be romantic comedies. Comedies don’t really need to have terribly plausible conflict, because they are comedies. So if you’ve got a romance in search of a conflict,  you can make it a comedy and invent one pretty easily.

Lastly, although I’ve never written fiction of any genre, it seems to me that romance must be much harder to write than, for example, horror and adventure. Very few people have ever seen or thought they’ve seen ghosts, or been sent on a quest to defeat “The Dark Lord”. Whereas most people probably have fallen in love at some point. As a result, the audience for a romance story is in a better position to spot false notes in the story.
 
Again, these are the observations of someone who does not actually read or watch much in the genre, so they may all be wrong. I am largely extrapolating based on second-hand knowledge and what I see in romantic sub-plots in works in of other genres.

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Conservatives fret
About raising the debt;
Yet they haven’t a plan to raise taxes.
The ceiling, they praise it
Saying “if we don’t  raise it,
Well, Earth will still spin on its axis.”
Disaster they court
Obama to thwart,
So take what they say with some salt.
I’ve got a feeling
We must raise the ceiling
Or else Limbaugh will “win by default”.

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Via Krugman, an excellent post by Amanda Marcotte on the power of the Republicans in controlling the negotiations on the debt. Basically, her point is that whatever you think of Obama, the reason the debt struggle goes poorly for liberals is, unsurprisingly, the Republicans.

Democrats who are upset at Obama—like Krugman himself—puzzle me. Many liberals demand to know why he doesn’t demand more left wing policies. Much the same complaint, as Marcotte notes, was directed at Bill Clinton.

 If we use my crude materialist/nationalist/cosmopolitan model, we get the following: Obama, like most Democrats, is cosmopolitan. That means, essentially, he is out to improve the world, promote multiculturalism and human rights across the world, increase tolerance, increase economic and social equality, and so on.

The Republican party is a coalition of materialistic business interests, who promote laissez-faire capitalism (when it suits them) and in general pursue the philosophy of maximizing material wealth, and of nationalistic groups who demand that strict traditional social roles and values be upheld.

Like most triumvirates, this model has resulted in two ganging up to defeat the other one. Obama, like Clinton before him, is therefore completely at the mercy of the Republican party when it comes to economic issues.

One thing that will be noted by anyone who examines the phenomenon is that the Nationalistic wing almost never gets its way on social issues. Note, for example, that under Obama gays have been allowed to serve openly in the military. (Again, this had been something Clinton had also taken steps towards achieving.) The Republicans allowed this, by not fighting with nearly the same fury they put into the debt deal.

Almost all of this is quite obvious, and I am hardly the first to notice any of it. (For an excellent description of how this system works, read Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas.)  
So, in short, Democrats get to win on social issues—sometimes—as long as they do not tamper with the business interests. If they attempt to, the business interests will remind the nationalists that the Democrats put all this social liberalism into effect, and the Dems will promptly be voted out.

Again, this is where Thomas Frank is excellent: he points out that this scheme has been going on for decades now, and apparently the nationalists refuse to see it. 

It’s impossible to overemphasize that business interests and nationalism are almost completely opposed by nature. Nationalists have no use for businesses that know no national loyalty, and business has no use for non-materialistic bounds on where it may build factories or whom it may hire. Nationalists are not natural allies of the rich businessman who swears allegiance only to profits.

The alliance, therefore, ought to be fraught with incredible tension. That it isn’t is almost shocking; that it is considered the more stable and ordered of the two parties verges on miraculous—or supernatural, at any rate.

I suspect the price they pay for this shocking discipline is the number of… shall we say…”colorful personalities” they seem to attract. Paul Graham once pointed out that Democrats seem to be “earnest, but dull” compared to Republicans. I think this is because it’s impossible to honestly believe all of the things in the Republican party line without being a rather confused person. At least, I don’t see how you do it.

That’s not to say it makes no sense to have this strategic alliance between the nationalists and the materialistic groups—that’s what politics is all about, after all—but it is bizarre that it is regarded as completely natural.

This, by the way, is why they make attacks like this against the President. The constant “he is not one of us” drumbeat may play to racial issues, but it’s more than that. Almost every Democratic candidate Presidential candidate faces an allegation of not being “American” enough for some reason. 

It is absolutely necessary for the survival of this coalition that the nationalists remain convinced that the government itself is anti-American, or at least run by people who are when they make any attempt to regulate business.  If they don’t believe that, the greedy interests will not have the clout they currently enjoy. Until that day, Liberals will have to content themselves with the Obamas and Clintons of the world–people who do what they can with a bad hand.