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“Though this be madness, yet there is method in ’t.”–Polonius. William Shakespeare’s Hamlet Act 2, Scene 2.

In an interview with Sean Hannity, Trump once again complained about the Saturday Night Live sketches mocking him:

“It’s a failing show, it’s not funny. Alec Baldwin’s a disaster, he’s terrible on the show and, by the way, I don’t mind some humor but it’s terrible.”

People have again expressed amazement at how thin-skinned the guy is.  And he is, but there’s actually a bit more going on here besides that.

SNL isn’t exactly the only shop in the Trump-mocking business. Making fun of the President isn’t a niche or novel concept, and Trump is currently very unpopular. Lots of comics and satirists are mocking him. MAD magazine mocks the hell out of him, and I’ve yet to hear him complain about it.

If Trump were just hellbent on responding to everyone who mocks him, he’d never do anything else. No, he singles out SNL.

Why?

I have a theory: NBC, which broadcasts SNL,  is also the network that aired Trump’s show The Apprentice. I suspect Trump has some feud with the upper management at NBC, and so is fighting a proxy war against them by attacking one of their shows.

Another frequent target of Trump’s wrath is CNN, which he repeatedly attacks as “dishonest” or lately, “fake news”. But CNN isn’t the only news organization to report negative stories about him–CBS does that too, as does ABC.  And PBS does too. (Yes, I know he plans to shut that down, but that’s a standard Republican wish-list item. I don’t recall him tweeting about it.)

It makes more sense once you know that the President of CNN is one Jeff Zucker, who had been President of NBC until a few years ago.  In fact, Zucker originally signed Trump for The Apprentice. I don’t know all the details, but it seems likely that Trump had some sort of falling out with him.  I hear Trump can be temperamental, believe it or not.

My point is, Trump isn’t just randomly lashing out at any group that insults him.  Rather, he is deliberately lashing out at specific organizations tied to people whom he most likely personally dislikes.

Read Richard Branson’s account of meeting Trump–it indicates that Trump has personal animosity towards specific individuals. Most of the people Trump personally knows, whether as friends or enemies, are wealthy men like himself. So I’m guessing that when he starts attacking something, it’s usually because it’s owned or managed by some personal foe of his.

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“Denial” (Image via Wikipedia)

Denial is a courtroom drama about the libel lawsuit filed by author David Irving (portayed by Timothy Spall) against Prof. Deborah Lipstadt (portrayed by Rachel Weisz). Irving sued Lipstadt for calling him a “Holocaust denier” in one of her books. Because Irving brought the case in England, the burden of proof is on the accused, and so Lipstadt and her legal team are required to prove Irving knowingly lied in denying the Holocaust.

As part of the research for the trial, Lipstadt and her lawyers go to Auschwitz, where her barrister, Richard Rampton, asks a series of matter-of-fact questions about the camp and the methods of killing. This makes Lipstadt very uncomfortable, but Rampton argues it is necessary to build their case.

As the trial begins, it is clear that Irving is a master of public relations.  He acts as his own lawyer, against Lipstadt’s well-financed legal team, to cast himself as an underdog and create a “David vs. Goliath” image.

As part of their strategy, Lipstadt’s lawyers don’t allow her to speak at the trial, or to the press.  They also refuse to allow Holocaust survivors to speak, even after Lipstadt is approached by one, pleading with her to allow their voices to be heard.

Lipstadt is greatly distressed by this. But as Rampton explains, these are the sacrifices they must make. “It’s the price you pay for winning,” he tells Lipstadt. The goal is to make the trial not about the Holocaust, but about Irving himself.

The strategy works well, and gradually they begin to expose Irving as an anti-Semite, and his “historical errors” as deliberately calculated to paint Hitler in the best possible light.  Ultimately, their strategy succeeds, and Irving is ruled to have knowingly lied to deny the Holocaust.

The victory is satisfying, but Irving remains a genius at the dark art of “spin”–after the verdict is announced Lipstadt watches as Irving is interview on television saying that he obviously beat Lipstadt’s legal team, but was just not forceful enough to convince the Judge.

Although the ending of the film is as upbeat as one could expect, given the subject matter, there is a certain subtext that suggests Irving may have lost in court, but will use his skills as a showman to win with the press.  I’m not even sure if the filmmakers intended this, but Irving is portrayed as a shrewd and manipulative man, and the implication seems to be that he–and others like him–could continue to trick uninformed people.

The acting is terrific throughout. Rachel Weisz is brilliant as Lipstadt, right down to her Queens accent. Timothy Spall plays Irving as a man of intelligence and a veneer of “old English gentleman” charm masking a core of hatred. Every performance is excellent.

The script is not bad, but at times tries too hard to be clever and snappy (a common flaw in dramas nowadays), and too often has characters blatantly stating exposition or background information for the benefit of the audience.

The annoying wordiness of the script is compounded by the fact that some of the film’s most powerful scenes are the ones where the characters don’t speak. The scenes at Auschwitz are every bit as powerfully haunting as they should be, without any words being necessary.

Of course, a courtroom drama is bound to have some talking, and the script is certainly good enough when it needs to be. The trial scenes are riveting, even knowing the outcome.

It’s a dark film, and not only because of the Holocaust subject matter, but also because of its depiction of how the bigot Irving advances his agenda with lies and clever manipulation of the press and public alike.  The concept of truth itself comes under attack from Irving, and Lipstadt is forced to confront the possibility that to even respond would be to lend him legitimacy.

Overall, a very good and interesting film. I recommend it. It prompted me to do more research regarding Irving, the lawsuit, and the subject of Holocaust denial generally.  I have a lot more to write on those topics, but that will be a separate post.

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Scott Adams, the creator of the comic strip “Dilbert”, has been getting attention for his numerous blog posts praising Donald Trump’s persuasion skills.

It’s hard to argue against it. Trump has persuaded millions of Republicans to vote for him, despite never holding political office, and despite running a campaign that few political experts even took seriously ten months ago.

Trump has indisputably had more political success than most pundits expected. So, whatever your opinion of him, I think most people can agree he is very persuasive.

But is he really as good as Adams claims? I am skeptical.

Trump is good at commanding media attention. And he is good at leveraging that media attention to get what he wants.

But he also constantly makes a critical mistake: he complains about–and therefore draws additional attention to–bad press about himself.

For example, recently the New York Times published some accounts of Trump’s mistreatment of women. Trump responded by tweeting repeatedly that it was a false “hit piece”. The result was that for a time, if you went to his Twitter page, all you saw was a bunch of denials that he had done bad stuff.

Trump says bad publicity is better than no publicity. Maybe so, but good publicity is better still, and since Trump has full control of his Twitter page, he should seek to fill it with good publicity. When people come to the homepage for your brand, you do not want them to know that negative opinions about it even exist.

But Trump is so thin-skinned that he can’t help it. He has to respond to the NYT, even if it makes no sense to do so.

The irony is that even as Trump attacks the Times for “failing” because it is losing readers, he is unintentionally helping it by drawing attention to the article. How many Trump followers would have never even heard about the NYT article if he hadn’t brought it up?

Note that I am not even discussing the issue of which is more reliable: the New York Times or Trump’s tweets. That’s because in the world of persuasiveness, truth is a secondary concern. Trump has never really claimed to be 100% honest; rather, he has campaigned on his ability to sell stuff. He is now selling himself based on his ability to sell himself. It is the ultimate confidence trick.

But he is not even as good at marketing as he thinks he is. He makes plenty of PR mistakes. The only reason he has gotten as far as he has is that the other politicians are even worse at selling than he is.

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They’d been advertising this movie “The Interview” constantly during the football games–otherwise I’d never have heard of it.  But now that Sony caved to pressure from threats of hacker attacks, it’s going to get a lot more publicity.  Personally, I wasn’t planning to see it before, and even if they do figure out some way to release it, I won’t see it then. I don’t go see many movies.

My first question on hearing about this was: since when does North Korea have hackers? I honestly didn’t realize they did cyber-warfare–I thought they spent all their money on bombs.

My second question was: why are they all upset about this, and not about that one movie with the marionettes that came out about ten years ago mocking Kim Jong-il?  Is it just because this is live action?

And now even the President has said Sony made a mistake, saying “I wish they (Sony) had spoken to me first”–and I guess he is in a better position than anyone to assess the level of the threat. Still, even that in itself smacks of censorship in a way–are all movies now going to have be run by the government to see if they pose a security risk every time hackers threaten them?

All in all, I think this is kind of a bad omen–it’s just going to embolden every hacker to threaten every movie to see if he can get it banned.  The trolls are running the show now.  That said, I was getting sick of seeing the ads for the movie, so I guess I can’t complain that they’ve been pulled.

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Everyone is concerned about the impact of big money on political elections.  I am concerned about it, as evidenced by this recent satirical poem I wrote on the subject. And then along comes this fellow Dave Brat, beating the House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a gigantic upset in the Republican primary, despite Cantor’s campaign having spent more than 40 times as much money as Brat’s campaign.

Obviously, for any plutocrats looking to buy elections, this would have to be a bit troubling.  If Cantor couldn’t win despite having such a massive financial advantage, then is any election safely bought and paid for?  And it wasn’t like they had caught Cantor in some giant scandal right before the primary either, which is about the only way one could normally imagine this happening.  Everyone was just assuming Cantor would win.

Apparently, the Cantor people didn’t pay for accurate polls, which might have told them how much dire trouble they were in, and gotten people scrambling to do something.  They just wandered into their defeat without understanding what was going on.

How did this happen?  How did people even find out Brat was a guy they wanted to vote for?  Was it just a matter of a bunch of Republican voters wandering in to the polls, seeing “Eric Cantor v. Random Other Guy”  on the ballot and thinking to themselves “well, Cantor’s bound to win, but I don’t like him being such a stuffed-shirt Washington insider, so I’ll vote for the other fellow as protest,”  never thinking he might actually win?

I keep hearing that it’s about “grassroots opposition to immigration reform”.  I’m skeptical of the impact of “grassroots opposition”. Ordinarily, grassroots opposition and $2.95 will get you a cup of coffee in Republican primaries.  The Republican establishment crushes grassroots opposition to things all the time.  What made this different?

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Some time ago, eurobrat had a post about how the radio program Coast-to-Coast AM had transformed from a show about the paranormal to another conservative talk-show.  I wrote about it at the time, and the other day, for various reasons, I found myself reading up on the program again.

It seems there has been something of a falling-out between the creator and original host of Coast, Art Bell, and the current host, George Noory. Bell himself was upset with the show’s newly-political tone under the Noory regime, and subsequently there has been some back-and-forth and even some competition for the same guests between Noory’s Coast and Bell’s (now defunct) new program Dark Matter.

It’s a good story of the protege who has turned against his mentor–it’s practically the stuff of High Drama.  I don’t know how much stock to put in the Wikipedia articles on this (Noory’s Wiki page in particular does not follow the Wikipedia guidelines for how an article should read) but the Coast article claims:

The Commonsense show [Don’t know what that is–has Thomas Paine got a show now?–MM] has described Noory led Coast to Coast by the following: When Art Bell relinquished control of his program to corporate interests, Premier and ultimately Clear Channel, Coast to Coast was never the same as the show took a turn and became reflective of “the corporate message”

I have no idea if this accusation is true, but the program is definitely owned by Clear Channel Communications, which syndicates, through its subsidiary Premiere Networks, shows like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck.  (Interestingly, Clear Channel itself is owned by Bain Capital–Mitt Romney’s old company. Like any good Coast-to-Coast conspiracy theory, this one has a trail you can follow pretty far up!)

My point, though, has less to do with the political machinations, real or imaginary, that may or may not lie behind the change in the program’s focus.  Rather, I want to revisit eurobrat’s original point that Coast now “sounds like everything else out there”.

As I alluded to in my other post on this topic, “Diversifying” is generally considered a sound strategy, and yet the logic here seems to have been “homogenizing”.  But more and more, I realize how common this is, and to some extent this transformation does suggest Clear Channel is responsible, because it’s exactly the sort of thing a big company does when it takes ownership of something.  It’s sort of like what I wrote about regarding the saga of Electronic Arts and BioWare’s Mass Effect: they acquire something unique and successful just to turn it into a knock-off of something else.

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In a strange coincidence with Thingy’s post, there was some kind of Jimmy Stewart marathon on TV yesterday. I saw the end of Anatomy of a Murder and then Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I won’t comment much on Anatomy, since I didn’t see the whole thing, but what I did see was superbly acted.

The same was true of Mr. Smith. I knew the basic plot going in: A naive everyman goes to Washington and ends up fighting corruption in the Senate. The details are that the naive everyman is a Boy Scout Ranger leader who wants to establish a “Ranger”  camp on a piece of land in his state.  but the land is reserved for a graft scheme being run by Senator Joe Paine, Smith’s mentor, and the powerful political interests in his state.

As the political interest groups try to destroy Sen. Smith, Sen. Paine and the rest of the political machine fabricate evidence to have him expelled from the Senate.  It culminates in the famous filibuster scene, where Smith talks for nearly 24 hours to hold up the bill. (Aside: How different would the current political scene be if Senators had to abide by the strict filibuster rules that Mr. Smith did?)

Finally, Senator Paine is so overwhelmed by Mr. Smith’s last impassioned plea before collapsing on the Senate floor, that he admits to the whole corrupt scheme and Smith is vindicated.

As I said, the acting is excellent. Jimmy Stewart is naively earnest without ever being annoying, and his exhausted speech at the end and witty comments throughout his filibuster are quite good.  Jean Arthur is excellent as the cynical but  good-natured Senate secretary who helps Smith learn the inner-workings of Washington.

Harry Carey is very likeable in the minor role of the bemused President of the Senate.  Edward Arnold is excellent as the jolly-but-heartless corrupt political boss. (Interestingly, Wikipedia says Arnold was actually considered as a possible Republican Senate candidate in the 1940s.)

But the best performance I think is that of Claude Rains.  I’ve written before about what a great actor he was,  and he is excellent as Senator Paine. He does a great job being both a corrupt career man who tries to rationalize compromising his principle, while still showing some genuine fatherly affection for Mr. Smith, that sets up his admission a the end.

The Senate was apparently not terribly thrilled with the movie when it came out.  They felt it would cause people to lose faith in the institution.  I’m guessing the most stinging part for wasn’t the over-the-top villainy of Boss Taylor, but rather Paine’s melancholy speech to Smith about how, in order to serve and do good for their state, he had to “compromise” certain things.  It’s a good speech, because he clearly means it as honest advice, but at the same time, it’s almost like he’s trying to persuade himself.

Ever since the movie came out, various politicians tried to paint themselves as “the real-life Mr. Smith.”  The “earnest outsider” card has been played too many times to count.  But the thing is, the whole fantasy of the movie is that someone like Smith could ever get to Washington.  (It requires a coin flip landing on “edge”.)

But the truth is, there are no Mr. Smiths in Washington–just endless, competing Senator Paines.

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Football season is starting, and that means, among other things, a lot of commercials that I’ll have to mute in order to better ignore them.  Many of these commercials will be for beer and, since I am a teetotaler, will be wasted on me.  Of course, the commercials rarely show much of the drink they’re supposed to be selling.  Generally, the drink is only a background element to the key motifs of these ads, which are

  1. Women in swimsuits
  2. A bunch of “cool dudes” hanging out together.

See my post about whether advertising is a waste of money.

But the types of beer advertising are many and varied. Yesterday I discovered one that seemed calculated to attract even my attention–of course, it was almost 50 years old.  It was a book of lyrics, written to Gilbert and Sullivan tunes, in praise of Guinness beer. (The G&S Archive has it here.) To quote from the Archive’s description: “In the 1960s, Guinness produced a series of books adver5tising [sic] their products to be put in doctors’ surgeries (on the basis that ‘Guinness is good for you’)”

This makes it especially amusing to me that the first page of the book features an illustration of Jack Point, one of only two Gilbert and Sullivan characters to “die” onstage, holding a glass of Guinness.  Come to think of it, why didn’t they include the other one, John Wellington Wells?  Did they feel that the character of a dishonest seller of magical potions and diabolical brews wasn’t quite right for the ads?

I laugh at it, but the truth is that this is a far more creative and ingenious bit of advertising craft than the “get a model in a bikini and have her tell people to buy our product” method.    Still not sure about the “Guinness is good for you” business, especially the song about the Heavy Dragoon who builds muscle by drinking beer, but still, an “A” for effort.

I think the English/Irish beer advertising seems to be very creative.  There was a television ad for Whitbread Beer (which I’ve never even heard of otherwise) that featured a parody of the song “Abdul Abulbul Amir“. It’s the catchiest advertising jingle I’ve ever heard.

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I just finished reading the novel In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck.  It is about a strike by fruit pickers in 1930s California. The two main characters are Communist revolutionaries who organize and lead the striking workers.

It is instructive to compare the book with Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which I analyzed earlier this year. That book is socialist propaganda, cut and dried.  The perspective of In Dubious Battle is also sympathetic to the communists,  but Steinbeck is a much more nuanced writer than Sinclair, and so he is able to give more thought to the philosophical issues underlying the strike. The character of the Doctor alone is more interesting than anybody in The Jungle, and his ambivalence about the strike raises legitimate questions that Sinclair would never consider.

What I find interesting is that, even though it is a much better piece of literature than The Jungle, it’s not nearly as well-known, or as effective a tool for social change.  Perhaps good literature is bad propaganda, and vice-versa.

Like the other Steinbeck book I have written about, Of Mice and Men, there is an undercurrent of misogyny in this book.  The only major female character is sweet, but very dim.  Other female characters are mentioned only in passing as background elements.  It’s definitely a book about men and stereotypically “manly” things—Steinbeck always describes cars in loving detail, for instance.

I’m not going to give many more details because, well, basically I already have given you the plot summary—it is about a strike.  It’s more about the behavior of the participants than about any specific events in the strike.  I recommend reading it, and forming your own opinion. I will say that it explores the idea of charisma as a force for motivating groups of people, something I love to write about.

Lastly, a bit of trivia: In Dubious Battle is one of President Obama’s favorite books, according to this article (Via Wikipedia).

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My mention of Ayn Rand in my post about The Jungle and Patrick Prescott’s comment about it set me thinking: what if Ayn Rand’s efforts to ridicule socialism went further than anyone realized?  What if the style of her books, with their interminable preaching and sprawling, momentum-killing speeches detailing various points of philosophy and economics, were meant as a deliberate counterpoint to socialist novels that did the same thing?

Look at some of the covers of Rand’s books, especially this edition of Atlas Shrugged, and notice how much it looks like Soviet propaganda art.  The structure and marketing of these books was ironically basing itself off of socialism’s propaganda.

Even Rand’s “fan club” called itself “the Collective”–again, a joke, since they were a collective of radical individualists.  They were always mocking socialist ideas and terms, so why not in the very style of the books themselves? And, most interesting of all, what if the increasingly totalitarian bent of “The Collective” was just an elaborate satire on how socialism itself went from being a theory-based social movement to a fanatical, quasi-religious cult based on the worship of idols like Marx and Lenin.

Maybe Rand was pretending to be as much of a zealot as the collectivists she hated.  Maybe she was the Sacha Baron Cohen of her time, deliberately playing a certain role to reveal something about her audience.  Like Orwell’s Animal Farm, she was showing how the principles of an idealistic revolution give way to less rational behavior in the end.

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