montcalm's Open Salon Blog

New and Worth Reading

Tue, 1 Sep 2009 01:09:36 -0400

Since there's nothing else to write about and the 5 remaining paid journalists in our Best Country on Earth are clearly smarter than I am (they have figured out how to get paid for journalism), here are some things that they are saying that I think are smart because I agree with them and have been thinking similar thoughts for quite some time.

SO:

"But for those whose sense of identity has been premised on a raced, masculinist, conservative Christian hierarchy of American power, the world must seem even more emotionally terrifying than any actual facts would indicate.

So reversal is key to understanding what's going on. It's not just "lies"; it's the expressive angst of people whose felt power relations have been turned upside down. It's not factually accurate, but this is how they feel. Obama is Hitler! Health insurance for all means euthanasia for me! "My" country is suddenly "their" country." (The Nation. Yea who had that story covered a whole day earlier?)

AND:

"After many months of conservative claims that Barack Obama and the Democratic Party are determined to engineer a "government takeover" of the private sector in order to "redistribute" income, Steele is upping the ante to suggest that Obama wants to redistribute healthcare – and perhaps even the opportunity to take another breath – as well.

This should be familiar to any political observer over the age of 30 as a new version of the old "welfare wedge": the emotionally powerful conservative argument that Democrats want to use Big Government to take away the good things of life from people who have earned them and give them to people who haven't." (Salon.)

In conclusion, now we can all agree that welfare is a relevant lens through which we can understand the current situation, and it's important to take seriously the experiences and perspectives of town hall protesters.

Health Care: Narrative, Ideology, and Progressive Failure

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 01:08:20 -0400

Kru-bear wonders how anyone can be swayed by anti-government arguments against the health care plan after the failure of capitalism. Never send an economist to do the job of a highly trained student of culture!

What's the problem? Why can't progressives seal the communication deal? The way the health care debate is going, it's as if in a municipal discussion about the best way to collect garbage one side said "pick it up on Thursdays" and the other said "I object to garbage pickup on principle." One side is arguing policy, the other is arguing ideology.

Let's do an extreme example! Say you're in Nazi Germany participating in a debate on the most efficient way to kill some Jewish people. Your friend the Nazi recommends firing ranges. You argue that shooting Jewish people is wrong. Your Nazi friend might be confused that you don't see the efficiency and cost effectiveness of his suggestion. He argues that you are an irrational and crazed nihilist who refuses to seriously consider solving the Jewish Problem. You do not agree that Jews are a problem. The debate is going nowhere and your Nazi friend will never win you over.

Taking the Hitler-Obama sign carriers seriously means considering that they might be experiencing a similarly bewildering scenario. To them, the health care plan is a victory for the Soviet Union while progressives are talking about what a great solution it is. They haven't even convinced these folks that there is a problem and here they are arguing solutions? How did this communication disaster happen?

The problem is that progressives (for convenience we can lump Obama and his folks in this category) have approached the health care debate the way they have miserably approached every other issue - they discuss the merits of plan A and continuously fail to adequately challenge the ideology that underpins the conservative position.

Conservatives have been creating and nurturing their narratives and myths since Reagan. Progressives have not engaged in large scale narrative-building since the Civil Rights era. So when conservatives brand health reform as a "socialist, big government giveaway" it plugs right into a neat logic that Americans have heard for the last 30 years: Obama will take your hard-earned dollars and use them to create a bumbling and wasteful giveaway to the lazy poors, blacks, and immigrants. At first it was welfare queens and now it's health care. Reading Martin Gilens' Why Americans Hate Welfare really provided a great deal of insight into the dynamics of the current debate.

If progressives had spent the last 30 years countering "government is evil," "taxes = theft," and "poors, blacks, and immigrants are lazy," they might not be facing such easy stirrings up of anti-government sentiments. Instead congresscritters have spent the last however long trying to prove that they're not with the terrorists, that they're tough on crime, and that they too are willing to screw the poor. Instead the spectacular market failure of ought eight has been swept under the rug a mere six months later and we're back to arguing whether the government can ever be useful.

I wish that Kru-Bear were right and that we could all just convince the Hitler-Obama people that the public option is the way to go with CBO projections and evidence of state-by-state monopolies and proof of success in other countries, but if in your world view those without insurance should just make more money and buy some and government intervention in the mythical free market of insurance is socialism, it just won't do.

Ideally Obama would make the easy case that we're all in this together (literally, in an insurance pool) and that insurance companies hate all of us (which they do). There are progressive narratives out there ready for the tapping in to. They're populist and anti-corporate. Unfortunately it's all uphill. Democrats and high profile liberals have failed to promote progressive narratives for the last thirty years and as a result have yielded worldview creation to conservatives. Let's spend the next thirty years reframing the debate and promoting progressive values.

Hello!

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:08:36 -0400

Hello from sunny Oakland, CA. Drove across the country with two cats, started the new job, got an apartment, and three weeks later ---- internet!

And boy howdy have things been going on while I didn't have internet.

Anyway, I have many exciting and original thoughts on the issues of the day and will share them with all of you very very soon.

"Moon" and the History of Futurism

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:07:57 -0400

Hit "play." Ok now you can read.

We recently watched the new "thoughtful" sci fi movie Moon. It's a good movie for those of us who enjoy a nice, serious sci-fi movie now and then. It's also good for one of my favorite activities - comparing things! This is a long post, so to road map a little, the first part is going to have some detail comparisons, then we'll look at villain tropes in sci fi movies, and then finish with a really strong conclusion that ties it all together! This is going to be very rewarding for the strong few who make it to the end!

2001 was such an obvious dead father that the movie can hardly stand on its own. I once heard a Flickr theorist say (correctly I think) that images on a Flickr stream do not exist on their own but instead only make sense as part of a photo narrative. Same goes for this movie - it really doesn't make sense outside of a certain history. Let's look at a few obvious comparisons.

I liked the dirtification and messification of the living quarters. It was not only a nice humanizing touch but a larger comment on how the idea of "Future" has changed - it's no longer a sparkling clean perfect world but a rickety and messy world. This has obviously been dealt with in other movies, but here the forced comparison with 2001 was really effective.

I really liked the harvesters. Those wide shots of the bovine harvesters with their slo-mo cloud of dust were my favorite shots in the whole movie. I guess this isn't a comparison.

I did not like GERTY. GERTY is like opposite-HAL. The terrifying red eye has been replaced by a silly emoticon face. He's easily cowed, emotionally vulnerable, and so pathetic that he's got a "kick me" sign on his back. What a putz. (And he's not even a funny putz. Let's face it, he's no Bender. Futurama in general has great robots. I particularly love Hedonismbot and Tinny Tim.)

While I enjoy comparing details, themes can also be compared! While the 2001 villain is "technology zomg," the Moon villain is "corporations zomg." Both are on the short list of popular sci-fi enemies:

the government (also empire, totalitarian leader, or shady ruling cabal)
the other (aliens, mutants, monsters, demons)
technology
corporations
ourselves! (preferrably said with an anguished cry)

Clearly technology and the government are on the out. Corporations are on the rise. Aliens never go out of style.

We can see the trend just by looking at TV shows. My beloved X-Files with its government/alien conspiracy has given way to watered down corporate villain fare like Dollhouse and Fringe. My precious Lost has many villains, but the DHARMA Initiative is the evilest and shadowiest one.

Even the nerds at shameless fanboi site io9 (which I never visit) overwhelmingly agree: corporate control is the name of the game. They've even got a handy list of 15 evil sci fi corporations. So even though the corporate villain is nothing new (Lex Luthor first appeared in Superman in 1940), the rise of the corporation as villain in recent years is interesting because of some larger truth about anxiety related to globalized late capitalism blah blah blah.

But we already knew this. So we can understand Moon as offering an update to generic sci-fi tropes, of taking the pulse of sci fi trends and coming up corporate. If 2001 is iconic because it so perfectly captures everything amazing about 1960s futurism, then Moon might be iconic because it captures something about 2000s futurism. It's a dingy futurism where technology is more bumbling than scary and where biotech and corporate abuse are the real sources of anxiety.

Considering the hoopla around the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, Moon's only interesting update might be to the idea of American attitudes toward space exploration. In 2001, space exploration is dangerous (the dreaded technology zomg!) yet offers total reinvention of humanity as a prize. In Moon, space exploration is only useful to fuel life back home. Easy travel to the moon is so uncompelling in this future that they can only get one dude to stay up there. For all the space program nostalgia that's going around, this is one update to the sci fi trope trove that seems interesting and original.

And at the end of this bumbling review which I will now consider "New Yorker-esque," I leave you with another video. This one is so meta it'll blow. Your. Mind. And if your strong suit is video game/music/youtube cognition, these two videos will basically sum everything up.

RE: Le Hiatus

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 15:07:00 -0400

hello dear reader(s?),

i've been absent for quite some time and i apologize. the invisible hand leaves no stone unturned and after some upheaval i have a lot more free time on my hands. i also moved recently. a few other things are looming on the horizon, but i am planning to start giving this blog the attention it deserves once again. it's just a shame that personal issues cropped up right as i began an ambitious daily update regimen. that failure deserves a hearty /facepalm:

anyway, i'll be back to posting regularly asap. in the meantime, you can check out two exciting new tumblr ventures that i started with big dreams of tumblr book deals. literally. i had a dream that i got a tumblr book deal. so one of the tumblrs is spam photography and the other offers a hearty criticism of food blogging, food porn, and la dee da food culture. i imagine both blogs will be of limited interest to anyone who reads this one.