Although the merger is expected to be ratified (more the result of apathy and resignation than exuberance), there is still some trepidation among SAG’s rank-and-file, because they know that “bigger” isn’t always “better,” and that sometimes “less” is “more.” If you want to win a track meet, you find one guy who can jump 7-feet, not seven guys who can jump 1-foot.

Like so many unions that opted for ill-advised “convenience mergers”—and then came to regret those decisions—these SAG members fear that by merging with AFTRA they will become marginalized and diluted to the point of ineffectiveness. There’s a time-honored axiom in organized labor: The bigger and more diverse a union, the less chance of it going out on strike.

I asked a well-placed and knowledgeable SAG insider for his views on the proposed merger. Because of a “non-disparagement” agreement that forbids union board and committee members to speak negatively about the proposal (How’s that for old-fashioned freedom of speech?), and because getting acting jobs in Hollywood is tricky enough without sacrificially identifying yourself as a “malcontent,” he requested anonymity. Here is his overview:

My biggest concern with the merger is the unknown impact it will have on SAG’s pension and health plans. A 2003 study suggested that merging SAG’s plans with AFTRA’s would result in the diminution of SAG’s overall package. A comprehensive study is imperative before we vote on this proposed merger.

SAG and AFTRA have been negotiating together since 1981. Some might say that the weaknesses that exist in key areas of our respective contracts today demonstrate that so-called ‘leverage’ doesn’t count for much if there is little evidence of a willingness to use that ‘leverage’ when needed.

I hope both unions agree to send out an objective ‘pro’ and ‘con’ statement included in the merger referendum. And I hope they agree to commissioning a feasibility study prior to the vote. Members should have access to all of this information prior to voting. From what I’ve read and what I know, this merger will not provide members with either what they are demanding or what they are expecting.

Historically, SAG, which has about 125,000 members and represents mainly actors, has been the stronger, savvier and more prestigious union. In addition to actors, AFTRA (which got its start in radio and has about 70,000 members) also represents emcees, hosts, comedians, television news personalities, DJs, sports and entertainment announcers, singers, dancers, professional pitchmen, etc. Approximately 40,000 people belong to both unions.

Both SAG and AFTRA negotiate with the AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers), which means that the team of negotiators that sits across the table from the union at a contract bargain represents the interests of the producers. So it’s actors vs. producers. Artists vs. bean-counters. Guild vs. Alliance. Management vs. Labor. Surfers vs. Ho-dads. Any way you cut it, it’s your classic adversarial showdown.

Except for one detail. Some of the most influential card-carrying union members in Hollywood (Tom Hanks, George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin, Robert DeNiro, et al) happen to be producers themselves. Nothing against any of those men—they’re good guys and excellent actors, every one of them—but such an arrangement is bound to raise questions about a conflict of interest.

Another troubling detail: Agents who represent professional actors are allowed to have equity in the projects being discussed. In other words, an agent who’s paid to get an actor a fair fee for a role in a movie is allowed to be a profit-taker in that same movie. He may be one of the movie’s producers. Again, that raises questions about a possible conflict of interest.

These and other anomalies are what make Hollywood labor relations so difficult to navigate. And not to whine about the media, but they haven’t been helpful. In fact, they’ve been an impediment. In 2008, the media unfairly characterized SAG’s Membership First negotiators as “hard-liners,” which was not only inaccurate, but, sadly, indicative of the depths to which people’s expectations have sunk. Apparently, we’ve reached the point where all it takes for workaday actors to be labeled “hard-liners” is to request that wealthy producers give them a fair shake at the bargaining table.

It’s now obvious that unions across the country are being assaulted, and that the middle-class is being systematically dismantled. And it’s equally obvious that Hollywood—glamorous and fabled as it is—has jumped on that bandwagon. What those Membership First officers were trying to do in 2008, despite a decidedly labor-hostile environment, was provide SAG membership with the best contract they could possibly deliver. And isn’t that the job of a labor union?

If this were a big-time industrial union, those Membership First folks would be regarded as nothing more or less than your garden variety union negotiators. Management pushes, they push back Only in the movie industry would they be depicted as subversive. Yet, given Hollywood’s unique labor dynamic, maybe none of this should surprise us. Maybe it should be expected. In fact, maybe it comes with the territory.

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

Although the headquarters is still near Atlantic City, where it originated in 1921, the pageant—don’t call it a beauty contest—has been a part of the Las Vegas entertainment scene for eight years. Apparently, the Las Vegas motto of “What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas” wrapped itself around the pageant as well, with TV viewership dropping lower almost every year.

ABC-TV divorced Miss America in 2004, claiming irreconcilable differences. Viewership had fallen from a peak of 26.7 million in 1991 to an all-time low of 9.8 million, barely enough to keep a prime-time show on the air. The pageant’s CEO, trying to preserve what dignity was left, stated “We needed to find a better partner, one that better understands our values.”

Apparently better understanding Miss America’s values was Country Music Television (CMT). However, that marriage didn’t last, and Miss America then hooked up with the The Learning Channel (TLC). By 2007, only 2.4 million viewers tuned in to watch who would be the next beauty queen to want world peace, save the whales, and “do her country proud.”

Treating its demotion to the minor leagues as a chance for rehabilitation, the pageant made a few cosmetic changes, began playing with new ways of scoring, including viewer participation, and slowly brought its ratings back to about 4.5 million in 2010.

That’s when ABC-TV and Miss America, after a six-year divorce, fell in love again. Apparently, CMT and TLC “values” (and money) weren’t as good as a major network’s. Promising eternal faithfulness—as long as the ratings increased—the two lovebirds were seen by about 7.8 million.

Now, it may seem that only TV executives and advertisers should care about ratings, viewer demographics, and selling fluff. But the contestants are well-trained actors in the made-for-TV show, complete with celebrity judges, most of whom are there solely because they are—well—celebrities.

About one-third of all contestants say they want to go into communications. As in almost every pageant for the past four decades, several want to go into television. Miss Delaware and Miss Nevada both want to be talk show hosts. Miss Louisiana wants to anchor the “Today” show; to get to that lofty goal, she plans to first get a master’s in health communication. None of the contestants wanting to go into journalism have expressed any interest in first covering city council meetings, the courts, police, or Little League games. They plan to take their beauty and pageant poise, make up their hair and face, and stand in front of a camera to emphasize the reality that broadcast journalism has diminished to the point of style over substance.

Miss New York wants to be the editor of a fashion magazine. Miss Idaho wants to write for a health and fitness magazine. Miss Hawaii wants to be a film director; to do that, she plans to first get an MBA. There is no evidence she plans first to be an actor, set designer, writer, cinematographer, or in any of several dozen crafts.

Miss Utah says she wants to be an interpersonal communications presenter (whatever that is) and also a college dance team coach. Miss New Hampshire, who probably dressed Barbie dolls in corporate suits, says she wants to “own a large and prestigious advertising firm.” It’s doubtful she’ll want to modify the gibberish of the organization that, with all seriousness, says it “provides young women with a vehicle to further their personal and professional goals and instills a spirit of community service through a variety of unique nationwide community-based programs.”

A few contestants say they want to be “event planners,” as if there already aren’t enough people wasting their own lives by planning the lives of others.

Not planning to go into communications is Miss California who is earning a degree in something called “social enterprise.” That could be anything from learning how to use Facebook to mixing the drinks at upscale parties. Miss West Virginia says she wants to go into the military, and then become secretary of state. Perhaps one day she might work for the 2011 Miss America, whose goal is to become president.

Several contestants plan to get MBAs, but almost everyone wants to use that degree to go into—prepare yourself!—a non-profit social service agency.  It sounds good, and maybe they all mean it. But, dangle a six-figure salary, stock options, extensive perks, and a “golden parachute,” and most of them will run over the Red Cross so fast it’ll need blood transfusions.

Mixed into the career goals are some contestants who plan to be physicians, pharmacists, speech therapists, physical therapists, and others in the caring professions.

Miss America doesn’t have to worry about a job or college for a year. Along with a paid chaperone, she will tour the country to sign autographs and give inspirational speeches about whatever her platform is—and, of course, to promote the Miss America Organization.

From the “toddlers and tiaras” stage to the stage at the Planet Hollywood Casino, beauty contestants are told how to look, act, and talk, even what to say or not say. The Miss America Organization—which makes the Mafia look like a second rate fraternity—doesn’t tell contestants they must attend college. But, every one of the state winners is planning to be a college graduate.

There is a definite bias against those who don’t think attending college is important at this stage of their lives. And so, we don’t see talented actors, singers, dancers, and musicians who are bypassing college to attend specialized non-degree-granting schools and enter their professions. We don’t see contestants who, although beautiful and talented, are planning to be plumbers, electricians, or firefighter/paramedics.

We don’t see contestants who want to be gardeners, floral arrangers, or chefs. And, we most assuredly don’t see women who are bypassing college to be part of major social movements.

There have been a number of books written about this underground press. The granddaddy of them all is most certainly Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press by retired Northwestern University professor Abe Peck, who began his journalism career as a member of Chicago’s groundbreaking Seed. More recent endeavors include John McMillan’s Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America and the just-released On the Ground: An Illustrated Anecdotal History of the Sixties Underground Press in the U.S. Edited by Sean Stewart, On the Ground is essentially an oral history that features the recollections of several people that were involved with underground papers from around the United States. Unlike McMillan’s work which runs toward the academic side of things, Stewart’s text has a populist feel to it. The recollections are straight from the speakers’ mouths; sometimes angry, sometimes humorous and always honest.

The best part of the book are the graphics. As I read through the memories of the folks Stewart spoke with for On the Ground I was repeatedly surprised at how well I remembered various illustrations and photographs Stewart reprinted throughout the text. Like the papers his interviewees are remembering, the most striking thing about On the Ground is the layout. Even though I know the book was composed on a computer screen, the book looks as if it were laid out via the old cut and paste method by folks possibly stoned on weed and a day or two with minimal sleep–just like many issues of almost every paper Stewart discusses.

Being in the Movement and the counterculture was generally an upbeat experience. So was being in the Sixties underground media. Most folks were young and full of hope and those that were not necessarily young in years were where it counted–in their approach to life. Reporters did not cover stories as much as they took part in them and then wrote about it afterward. As Abe Peck says about working at The Seed: “We were very determined and unless something terrible happened–like [the murder of] Fred Hampton–up, just pretty upbeat.” Politics was omnipresent, whether it was at a very political paper like The Black Panther or a paper that had a more countercultural bent like The LA Free Press. This was because, as far as the authorities were concerned, everyone involved with the underground press–writers, printers, cartoonists, sellers and readers–were on the wrong side of the law and had to be watched. Sometimes, they were dealt with by methods legal and otherwise. This meant things like the stores selling papers being harassed by police and vigilantes; the withdrawal of advertising because of pressure from the FBI and other agencies; and assaults against persons involved by cops and others.

When Richard Nixon took over the White House in 1969 the repression of the Movement and counterculture intensified. Naturally, this meant that the media that represented these phenomena would be under greater attack. Black Panther papers were destroyed enroute to cities across the country and even to military bases overseas. Storefronts that newspapers worked out of were firebombed by vigilantes and shot at by police. Obscenity charges were brought against newspapers that then tied up the papers’ funds in court costs. High school underground press writers were thrown out of school and administrators suspended students selling and reading those papers. Although the reasons given for the expulsions usually had to do with attendance and other disciplinary infractions, the reality was that high school disciplinarians resented the threat to their authority and power. A friend of mine in Montgomery County, Maryland was suspended from the progressive John F. Kennedy High School for selling The Washington Free Press on campus. The issue in question featured a cartoon of a judge that had been involved in efforts to shut down the paper. The drawing showed the judge masturbating. Underneath the drawing was the phrase (made popular by the TV show Laugh-In) “here com da judge.” The cartoon was a response to a series of rulings made by the judge forbidding the distribution of the Free Press on high school grounds. These rulings and the school board decisions that preceded them were being challenged by the ACLU.

As the 1960s turned over into the 1970s, many folks that had been on the front lines began to retreat for the sake of their sanity. Others just fell into the trap of individualism and self-satisfaction–an easy trap to fall into in the US of A. By 1974 or thereabouts, the curse of identity politics had taken over much of the political discourse on the left and effectively limited the reach of the Movement as people separated according to their gender, sexuality, and ethnic origins. Intentionally or not, this trend hastened the demise of the underground press and the movements it was a part of. However, its legacy remains. There are many websites and even some print journals that are more than observers of the protests and movements they report on. Journalist Alice Embree notes that “The underground press was the connective tissue; it spread the news …” When the papers began to fail, the connectiveness was lessened. The underground press was a vital part of what happened in the sixties. Sean Stewart’s wonderfully edited text On the Ground lets the reader know how and why that remains true. The striking graphics and compelling recollections in this text are at once a popular history and an inspiration.

The last time I’d heard about a coordinated cultural event like this was when there were over a thousand productions of Lysistrata, an anti-war satire by the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes, taking place across the US and around the world on a single night—in March 2003, as the US was preparing to invade Iraq. Such events are hopeful in themselves: they invoke something primal and positive, the power of certain narratives, illuminated by the imagination, to persist and unite us in something other than hatred, clannishness and war—in fact, their opposite–across enormous swaths of time and space. They are a form of resistance, because they represent the survival of things most power structures would rather we be without: intelligence, consciousness, dignity.

The Facebook page for the much smaller rolling flash mob of ICHH readings (there were apparently about twenty-five across the US) has comments on the surprising relevance that many who attended them discovered in the seventy-five year old play. I was at the reading organized in San Francisco by the San Francisco Mime Troupe, one of the country’s oldest self-described political theater companies, itself founded just over fifty years ago.

It gave me pause the next day to realize that as a small group of us sat in the Mime Troupe’s darkened rehearsal space in the Mission District, across the bay in Oakland, police from eighteen different local law enforcement agencies (yes, you may well ask why there are that many to begin with, much less why they were all were involved) must have been mapping out a pre-dawn assault on the Occupy Oakland camp that would end up being one of the most violent in the nation so far. Hearing the Mime Troupe read Lewis’ play gave me lots of food for thought, but most of it was in the form of questions on just exactly what kind of relevance we’re talking about—or not—right now.

It Can’t Happen Here was modeled on the dispatches about Hitler’s rise that Lewis’ wife Dorothy Thompson, a prominent journalist, filed from Europe in the early 1930s. Its setting is mostly a fictitious small town in northern Vermont. The time period for the action is described, tellingly, as: “very soon, or never.” The title is obviously ironic.

While Euro-fascism is the frame, Lewis’s Buzz Windrip, the good ol’ boy in ICHH who rides his “Corporative” Party to power, is based largely on Louisiana governor and US Senator Huey Long, with a dose of the aw-shucks cornball humor of popular radio comedian Will Rogers thrown in. Long was actually (certainly by today’s standards) a left-wing populist, who frequently attacked the Roosevelt administration for not going far enough to restrain the greed of banks and redistribute wealth. He had a tendency to long oratory and fiery rhetoric. He did build a formidable political machine that eventually allowed him to control most of the political and economic deal-making in his state. In 1935 he was assassinated on the steps of the Louisiana state house, as he was preparing to launch a presidential run to challenge Roosevelt the following year.

ICHH, like a lot of Sinclair Lewis’ work, is steeped in his disgust at anti-intellectualism and the ease with which great numbers of what he perceived as the US’s unsophisticated and socially isolated people—Lewis called them “the booboisie”—can be swayed by rhetoric that appeals to their prejudices and base instincts, like opportunism and fear.

And in many portrayals, he did get something about that patented all-American blank stare of utter ignorance and simultaneous infinite self-importance dead-on correct. It’s a toxic combination that never seems to die in our culture, where publicly, these days, it seems mainly endemic in the political right. There are some comments from clueless characters in ICHH about how the youth of today (once again, this is the 1930s) don’t really want to work, have had everything given to them, don’t know how to do anything for themselves and are just a bunch of lazy whiners… and you can hear Rush Limbaugh bellowing to his ditto-heads as he tries to dismiss the growing numbers of Occupy-ers in just that way. One of the play’s worst villains is Shad Ledue, a brutal, lumpen goon. Interestingly, he is the only member of the lower classes among its main characters, and he is mainly characterized by resentment and envy of the well-meaning middle class characters who have patronized him, on whom he revenges himself as he rises in Windrip’s ranks.

But these bitter portrayals of a certain kind of US lowest common denominator stop short of any real understanding of the economics that underlie the culture, the skeleton under the skin. Like most of the liberal intelligentsia right down to today, Lewis mostly faulted personality types, not material conditions, for the evils that men do. It’s not that personal psychology is irrelevant, by any means (and it sure is dramatic, too), but if you’re going to take on political subjects, you have to realize that character defects alone do not explain why wars are fought, or millions of people lose their homes or jobs, or crucially, where and when and why dictators take power.

Rather than much of ICHH itself, it’s the social context of the 1930s that may be most relevant to the 2010s: a time of financial collapse, fear, unemployment, scapegoating, dislocation, and severe ecological stress. There is a lot of history that seems to be repeating itself these days, a sure sign that we have not learned its lessons. But history follows neither a straight line nor a circular path, maybe something more like a spiral, so that when certain phenomena reappear, they always reappear in a context that has changed, and those phenomena are, in turn, altered by their time and place.

What isn’t like the 1930s? The US is no longer an isolated, fortress republic, but deeply enmeshed in a global financial system in hyper-drive that is whipping not just its people but most of the world around like a rabbit in the mouth of a wild dog. And it now also has a hugely expanded global military presence to maintain, and a series of resource wars that aren’t serving as middle class-building public works programs with high moral objectives, like Roosevelt’s war, but only as venal and vicious corporate welfare boondoggles offering the deadly job of cannon fodder to the poor. It’s now 75 years since the Works Progress Administration put 8.5 million Americans directly to work (almost 13,000 of them in the Federal Theater Project) and there’s no sign of the possibility of anything like that in a political system that’s marked by a crawling servitude to private money in both major political parties, and has even granted corporations the legal status of persons in just about every significant respect (except serving time for crimes, apparently).

I started to think that many of Lewis’ stalking horses have already gone galloping out the barn door, since the beginning of the Reagan revolution at least. And so what we have is a situation where the kind of totalitarianism he feared now actually seems superfluous. Power and wealth have continued to concentrate in ever fewer hands, the spectrum of discourse to be narrowed, and dissenters to be functionally silenced by marginalization, without the need for formally suspending the constitution, disbanding parliament and declaring anyone president for life to make it so. “It” hasn’t happened here, because something else did: a kind of stealth coup, carried out over decades.

In fact, most people really didn’t seem to know why their lives were so out of their own control until recently, when the little Toto of the Occupy protests began to pull back a curtain and show how the men at the levers of the spin machine were wildly pulling them to blow smoke and bellow, while their promises and their threats were equally empty, because the real problem is not drugs, terrorists, immigrants, or homosexuality, and the real solution isn’t either of those bizarrely entwined American fantasies, the Free Market or Jesus. And who’s wielding the power is not a dictator, not any single person, benign or malign, but a percentage: the 1% who control more than 40% of the nation’s wealth, and have basically succeeded in rigging its political system to preserve and increase that share, at the expense of the rest of the population and the natural world. Sinclair Lewis may have imagined tyranny; he never foresaw oligarchy.

After the reading, my husband and I talked with R.G. Davis, who founded the Mime Troupe in 1961, and left it in 1970. It was something of a surprise to see him there: he has long been critical of what he considers the Mime Troupe’s loss of political acuity, and also its reliance on formulaic melodrama to produce its annual message plays, both of which unfortunately put it in tune with Lewis’s work here. Davis thought the only way ICHH could be considered relevant to what’s happening in the US right now is if you radically altered it in a way that would basically undermine both the play’s structure and its ideology. He talked about the “creative misreadings” that can sometimes produce a new interpretation that’s fertile in a different context and a completely different way than was intended by the author. Apparently the French students who carried out their own version of an Occupy movement in May 1968 had read Mao in such a creative way—so maybe anything is possible.

On the way home from the reading, we drove past an enormous police sting at the Valencia Gardens housing project: a whole block filled with squad cars, lights flashing, officers surrounding a group of black and brown young men on the steps of the complex, that looks for all the world like a minimum security prison. The next day, after an Iraq vet at Occupy was hospitalized with a cracked skull from a police projectile, and tear gas filled the streets of Oakland, the Washington Post had a picture of a cop petting a cute stray cat in the ruins of the Occupy Oakland camp. In other words, business as usual in 21st century America. “It” happens every day.

I just don’t seem to get to movies much anymore; it’s truly not even much of a temptation. We have a local theater, though, with cushy velvet seats, homemade cookies and oatmeal stout beer so sometimes you have to give in to all that and just buy a ticket. A movie about neolithic cave drawings, of all things, came up at the theater so I opted to see that one. I’m sure I’ve never seen a movie about that!

In other venues the film was offered in 3-D which sounds terribly hokey, but I guess it was used to nice effect showing the stony undulations of the cave wall surface.  Anyway, my theater has beer, as I mentioned, but no 3-D. A technological trade-off, I suppose.

It’s called “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” and it’s a lovely film, allowing the viewer a glimpse of this world that will never be fully opened to the outside (for its own protection — other caves have had mold issues from the breath of tourists).

The drawings found in Chauvet cave were of such exquisite quality that when they were discovered in the 90s, it was originally thought that they represented the very pinnacle of the art, so would likely be newer than the known caves, but when the dating came back it shocked everyone, as the work is evidently much older than the examples in places like Lascaux, in the realm of 30,000-35,000 years old.

It cast my mind in a painful direction, however. I immediately felt queasy, acutely aware of the ugly grid where we reside, everyone with fears, but hard to battle creatures. All in the presence of unsatisfying agents pressed together as facsimiles of nature and shelter. It’s all so terribly ugly, especially here in North America where the strip malls scream loudly, even though they are half empty most of the time. I want to close my eyes when I see them, but I don’t since I’m driving. And I want to vomit if they house businesses that leech off the unfortunate, and that’s most of the time. I don’t think there’s any place left to just be, as many of the Occupy movement participants have found out. They want to legislate away the strays. In all of this your mind must be as a blueprint, easily read as you pull into your allotted spot, if you are fortunate enough to have one.

Would anyone find beauty in our reproductions, our factory pressed wheels with no creator beneath? Or at least not a creator we dare consider — probably a soft spoken young person in a sweatshop of sorts in a far flung place.  This cave is in also in a far flung place. (I say that about every place I’m not). It’s a valley in the South of France with little but vineyards in the immediate vicinity. The area used to be home to every animal Maurice Sendak could imagine. Modern humans walked with them as did Neanderthal man. Chauvet Cave was hidden for such a time due to a rock slide; the depictions of long gone species have this one place they still can live.

I wonder if we could all draw with such fluid strokes if we weren’t so trapped by highways and right angles? Was he unique, that man who did so much of the work in the cave? If I were there, I’d hold his head in my hands, peering past the eyes to figure it out.  Why did you do this? But I’m pretty sure I know the answer.

But the reason wouldn’t have words any more than those drawings do, just a compelling pull.

One of the bison has eight legs. I’m sure in firelight it looks like he is running. Everything is beautiful seen in the glow of a fire; fluorescent light might give you a seizure.

That one artist stands out because his hand prints are literally everywhere, and you know it’s him because of the crooked — maybe once broken –pinkie finger. I’d like to have tasted the red ochre off that live finger, old dust even 30,000 years ago, made of all manner of earth, the heavier flakes from the furnace of a star. I wonder if they felt that original source in the ochre, even if they didn’t have words to describe it. I don’t have words to describe it either.

But always, the broad, sweeping strokes.  I think they are still alive, more than our over-duplicated forms, copied yesterday, and always from hard lines. We don’t ever seem to use anything else.

I hope he made these images because he wanted to show he was part of the world of carnivores as well as massive grazers, a frail but clever participant who had no need to destroy anything, just to give them a spot to run. I don’t think the images would be so beautiful if the mind behind them wanted dominion. That’s what our world carries and demands, always more than what it really takes to survive.

I want to see a world with softer lines that blur into the incorporeal, not the cages we sit in and pass the time with anxiety and clutter. How did we come to this unnatural place? There’s no words for that either and I don’t know the reason.

The things that can cross your mind when the hard lines start to dissolve.

At a very young age, Lindsay Lohan was thrown by her parents into the Hollywood meat grinder that chews up and spits out many thousands of desperate young hopefuls every year. Author Jake Halpern described in his excellent book, Fame Junkies, how so many American children are completely deprived of a normal childhood in the quest to become the next Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga. Their families drag them out to California, often taking on huge debts to enroll them in academies that are supposed to prepare them to be the next big superstar in movies, television or music. These kids spend their whole waking lives taking singing, dancing and acting lessons in between being dragged around from audition to audition where the competition is absolutely cutthroat. A lucky few get their big break and achieve what they are seeking. Most, however, are broken by the system and return back to where they came from having had their youth squandered by their stage parents.

Initially, Lindsay Lohan appeared to have won the fame lottery. She was already modeling at the age of three, and by age 11 was cast to star in her first featured film, the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap. By all accounts, despite appearing in Disney-produced, teen-oriented fluff, young Lindsay actually did have some natural ability as an actress and a singer. This could explain why her career soared to such meteoric heights during her adolescent years.

Unfortunately, instead of nurturing her burgeoning talent, our celebrity-obsessed culture placed her on a pedestal—throwing countless millions of dollars her way while the media stalked her incessantly, all at an age when the biggest worry for most girls is whether anyone will ask them to the prom. Lindsay could scarcely step out in public without her every move becoming a major headline. Seriously, how many of us could ever hope to stand up to that kind of scrutiny, especially at that age?

Sure enough, as the bright lights of fame turned into a white-hot, unending glare, Lindsay’s life began to spiral out of control. She became a habitual user of narcotics, which was bad enough, but then began to commit a series of petty criminal acts for which she’s been repeatedly arrested. And it is here where all of the hypocrisy and class-based injustice of the American legal system has been put on full display.

Because she is a famous Hollywood actress and not a single welfare mother living in a public housing complex, Lindsay’s drug busts have always resulted in her being allowed to go to cushy rehab centers rather than being sent to prison. I would argue that non-violent drug offenders SHOULD be given treatment rather than punishment, but they only are if they have the money to hire top notch defense attorneys. Even more telling is how the actress has so far avoided serious jail time for her other infractions, including twice Driving Under the Influence, driving with a suspended license, misdemeanor theft and repeated probation violations. In one notorious instance, she spent exactly 84 minutes in jail to fulfill her sentence on one of her DUI arrests.

Throughout it all, the paparazzi have continued to stalk her, gleefully documenting her many court dates and her rapid physical decline, which has become red meat for hungry tabloid readers desperately seeking an escape to feel better about their own crappy lives. If there is anything idiot Americans love more than breathlessly following the lives of celebrities, it’s heaping scorn and derision upon them should they prove to be frail and all-too-human. It’s even better when the celebrity is a young woman whose sexual exploits, both real and imagined, are the grist for endless speculation and gossip and she can then be condemned as a slut and a whore.

All of this stuff —celebrity worship, media irresponsibility, a broken criminal justice system and insane drug laws–is bad enough, but to top it off like a cherry on a shit sundae comes the unfortunate Lindsay’s parents to display another quintessentially modern American trait: an utter lack of responsibility for one’s own actions. Here’s a quote from a recent interview with her father about her most recent arrest:

I hate seeing my daughter in cuffs. She belongs in rehab! Why don’t they institute drug testing? Get drug testing involved! Keep her straight! Make sure she’s in an outpatient program. They need to put a sober coach with her! A no nonsense sober coach! I’m sick of this, when she wants to be honest with herself and live up to her responsibility she’ll turn her life around. But she has learned too much of the opposite from her mother,” says Michael.

Even though Michael is known about town as being low-key crazy and has willingly appeared on Celebrity Rehab, for some reason he seems to think he’s knows what’s best for Lindsay.

My mission is to get rid of all the people in her life that are kicking her down. I’m going to eliminate them from her life. I’m going to do all I can…not physically but I’m going to put them in a position where they can’t be around her.

Not to be outdone, here is her mother in a separate interview:

I blamed her friends, her career and her handlers for an (sic) newfound lifestyle of partying excessively. Drinking, drugging and behaving irresponsibly became Lindsay’s way of daily living–and it tore me up inside.

How could I deny my daughter the chance of a lifetime? How could I hold Lindsay back from her dream of becoming an actress? So, I listened to others and sent my daughter to Hollywood with a few pieces of luggage and a chaperone.

Do those quotes not make you want to grab these two clueless morons and slam their heads together? Really, it was Lindsay’s conscious choice to become a model when she was only three years old? For much of her professional career, Lindsay Lohan was a minor, and therefore raising her was their responsibility. They were perfectly happy to cash the big fat checks and bask in the reflected glory of their young movie star daughter. But actually being parents to her? Why, that’s way too HARD, don’t you know.

Despite having international fame and more money than most of us will ever earn in our lifetimes before she was even old enough to vote, Lindsay Lohan’s life is a complete wreck at the tender young age of 25. It will be a shock if she actually lives to see 30. When she does inevitably succumb to that final fatal overdose, you can bet moralists everywhere will be wagging their fingers while National Enquirer readers gleefully soak up every sordid detail of her death. The cable news shows will feature extended career retrospectives and her record label will no doubt release a posthumous album in order to cash in on the publicity. The funeral will be widely televised, and plenty of teary-eyed mourners who never even met her will say how sad her passing is, even if not one of them would have ever deigned to lift a finger to help her while she was still alive.

So there you have it, America. Lindsay Lohan: the perfect poster girl for the type of deranged society we’ve become. She is literally giving her life to keep you entertained and distracted so you won’t have to open your eyes and see how completely screwed you really are. Appreciate her now—revel in her transgressions, laugh at her misfortunes, speculate about who she’s sleeping with, embrace the feelings of moral superiority that come over you when you look at her mug shots—but be sure to do so soon before it’s too late.

In the first paragraph of an article published this week in the academic journal Pediatrics, Angeline S. Lilliard and Jennifer Peterson set up their study with a pick-and-choose somewhat slanted view of television. According to these psychologists, “correlational studies link early television viewing with deficits in executive function . . . a collection of prefrontal skills underlying goal-directed behavior, including attention, working memory, inhibitory control, problem solving, self-regulation, and delay of gratification.” Translated into English, we conclude that psychologists don’t speak English.

To make sure no one misreads the study as anything but pure empirical science, they toss in “covariant assessment,” “covariate,” “posthoc analyses,” “backward digit span,” “encoding,” “cognitive depletion,” and something known as the “Tower of Hanoi,” not to be mistaken, apparently, for the Hanoi Hilton, or the Tower of Babel, which this study seems most likely to emulate.

For their subject group, they rounded up four-year-olds from “a database of families willing to participate.” Three groups of children were given the same four separate tasks. Those who watched a truncated version of a “SpongeBob” cartoon, which has scene changes an average of every 11 seconds, fared worse in the measurements than did the groups that watched a more “realistic” and “educational” PBS cartoon (“Caillou”) that had an average scene change of 34 seconds. The third group (known as a “control” group) drew things and participated in all the tasks. On all four tests, “SpongeBob” lost. The fact the researchers labeled “Caillou” as educational could reveal pre-conceived bias; even a cursory look at “SpongeBob,” although primarily entertainment, reveals numerous social and educational issues that could lead to further discussion.

The pre-schoolers were mostly White, from middle-class and upper-class families. Thus, there was no randomly-selected group, something critical in most such studies. The researchers do acknowledge this, as well as a few defects in the study itself. Possibly salivating over future grants, they tell us that “further research . . . is needed.”
The reality may not be that four-year-olds who watch “SpongeBob” and similar cartoons had developmental defects but that they are far more interested in the cartoon than in other activities and temporarily suspend those “good quality” activities while they remember the cartoon and think of other events or issues that SpongeBob and the cast got into. The researchers measured the students’ responses shortly after watching the cartoons; perhaps measurements a few hours or a week later might have given different results.

Nevertheless, the researchers—hung up on standard deviations, regression analysis, and Cronbach’s Alpha, among other empirical tests—didn’t do the most basic of all research. They didn’t ask the children what they thought about the cartoons, nor any questions leading to why the children who viewed “SpongeBob” may not have performed as well the other two groups on tests that may or may not be of value. It’s entirely possible that watching fast-paced well-written tightly-directed animated cartoons may be more fun—and more productive—than watching slower-paced educational cartoons. But we don’t know because the research was quantified.

The wounded response by Nickelodeon, which airs “SpongeBob Squarepants,” isn’t much better than the academic study. Squeezed into a sentence, the comment is that the cartoon is for 6–11 year olds, not the four-year-olds who were tested. The Nick PR machine wants us to believe that even if everything the researchers said was true, it doesn’t matter because the cartoon isn’t aimed at four-year-olds. Apparently, even if older siblings are watching “SpongeBob” or their parents are watching horror, adventure, or war movies it doesn’t matter because those forms of entertainment aren’t for four-year-olds.

For more than eight decades, animated cartoons have come under fire by all kinds of academic researchers and certain “we-do-good” public groups. From 1930 to 1968, the Hays office, ensconced in Puritan ideals of morality, censored films and cartoons for all kinds of reasons. By the 1960s, academic researchers began questioning the violence in cartoons, focusing primarily upon the Warner Brothers characters. For a few years, television programmers, either believing themselves to be great pillars of morality or afraid of losing sponsors, forcibly retired many of the most popular cartoons from the screen.

At least half of the studies concluded that watching violence could be one of the factors that lead to violent acts. Another group of studies showed little correlation. But, stripping away the academic verbiage, the most logical conclusion of all the studies that denuded a small forest was that persons pre-disposed to violence may become violent if exposed to violence in cartoons. Certainly, watching Roadrunner/Wile E. Coyote cartoons won’t cause a Quaker to go out and mug Baptists.

The mugging that SpongeBob (and other characters in quick-sequencing action) got is another attempt to quantify life by exorcizing a small part of life, running tests, and trying to explain human cognition and development without understanding humans.

At the age of sixty, David visits a British military cemetery in Israel. For the first time in his life he is about to call upon the grave of his father Ralph who was blown up in 1947 at the age of twenty five by the Jewish Stern Gang.

The play is a unique encounter between David, a middle-aged Englishman, and his dead father Ralph, a young English Corporal at the time of the British Mandate. It is a meeting through which we, the audience, can ‘witness’ six decades of Israeli brutality, through the eyes of a dead British Corporal buried in foreign soil along side thousands of his peers. The play is a cleverly constructed dialogue between a sixty year old son: a man who grew up in post WWII Britain, an indoctrinated gentleman and a liberated dead father who is free to call things what they actually are.

The play is a journey into the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It dares to look into the role of the British in the creation of yet another endless war. It is also courageous enough to review and assess the cruelty of Jewish terror-groups towards the British military. It goes deeper than most political commentators and academics, for it is brave enough to look honestly at the imaginary distinction between Jews, Israel and Zionism. Ralph is obviously impervious to political correctness — he sees Zionists and Israelis for what they are — namely, Jews. Initially, David couldn’t agree less, insisting that Jews are kind and compassionate people. He would contend, that it is merely the Israelis and Zionists who may be slightly problematic.

As the play evolves, David witnesses Israeli brutality for himself. And once he has visited a Palestinian home he falls in love with Palestine, immediately empathising with the Palestinian plight. Overnight, David is transformed into a Palestinian advocate. He then meets Israeli soldiers at a road block and he encounters the arrogance of an MIT lieutenant, a new Jewish-American immigrant who claims ownership of someone else’s land. He also meets a Romanian female sergeant who teaches him a lesson in Israeli rudeness.

These events are enough to transform David into an anti-separation wall activist. Needless to say that by that time, the old school English tie is replaced by a Palestinian scarf, hung loosely around his neck.

As the the play unfolds, we witness a continuum of six decades of merciless vengeance enacted by new comers, people who do not belong to Palestine. You can call them Israelis, or Zionists, or Jews — in fact it doesn’t really matter — whoever or whatever they are, they must be stopped.

The play is on for another week. If you happen to be in or around London, you don’t want to miss it. The play once again reaffirms my view that art and beauty are leading the journey towards justice, for art excels precisely where academia, politics, activism, journalism and the so called Left have failed so miserably.

Untill Monday 6 June 2011

Tuesday to Saturday at 8:30pm
Saturday & Sunday at 4:45pm

Tickets
£16 (Concs £14)

To Book

0870 033 2733

That’s what “60 Minutes” has been doing for over forty years (since 1968) — broadcasting slick, misleading, quasi-informative entertainment pieces disguised as “hard news.”  You could say that “60 Minutes” is to journalism, what Velveeta is to cheese.

Many years ago I wrote an article critical of a “60 Minutes” story on India.  I used to live in Punjab, and while I was no expert, I knew enough about the region to be stunned at how weirdly slanted the 16-minute story was.  I received a letter from a reader whose father had spent his career at NASA, complaining of the same thing.  He said his dad was “sickened” by how careless and misleading a segment on the space program had been.

And that’s how the show gets away with it, by depending on the viewing audience not knowing enough about the topics to judge their accuracy.  To a layman, all this fancy talk about liquid fuel, pounds of thrust, etc. is not only fascinating and informative, it seems downright educational.  But to a NASA scientist who knows what’s what, it comes off as slickly packaged bullshit.

There’s a seven and a half minute YouTube video making the rounds that demonstrates just how committed to Show Biz the program is, and how little it cares about the tedious business of presenting the news.  The video shows segments from previous “60 Minutes” episodes where the person being interviewed (e.g., a national or world political leader) abruptly removes their mic and walks off the set in anger or disgust.

The correspondents who conducted the interviews — Leslie Stahl, Steve Croft, Mike Wallace, et al — positively beam with pride at the outcome.  It’s as if getting a person to blow off an interview is not only a journalistic badge of honor, but proof that they are indeed hard-nosed reporters homing in on the Truth (instead of celebrity correspondents looking to increase the show’s ratings by creating conflict).

But all you have to do is examine the questions to see that they aren’t exactly trolling for deeper meaning.  For example, Stahl got Boris Yeltsin to terminate the interview when she asked a question about his mother, and she got President Sarkozy of France to leave when she asked a question about his wife.  Really?  Questions about their mommies and wives?  Wow, there’s some real journalistic digging for you.

Steve Croft got Senator Daniel Moynihan to walk off in disgust by asking him a loaded question about government bloat, attributed to a comment made by Robert Gates.  The overall impression you get from these walk-offs isn’t that we’re watching hard-nosed reporters doing their job, but rather that we’re watching well-oiled show biz performers taking their cows to market.

Evidence that “60 Minutes” was always more interested in entertainment than news was provided way back in the late 1970s when the program got caught using “inserts.”  Resident tough guy, Mike Wallace, would ask a guest a question, and get an answer.  Then, after the guest had left the studio, Wallace would be re-filmed asking the same question, and it was this second version that was “inserted” into the interview unbeknownst to the audience….or the guest.

But in this second version, Wallace has adopted an aggressive, finger-pointing, take-no-prisoners manner, in order to demonstrate just how tough and uncompromising the show’s correspondents were.  These CBS reporters weren’t just asking questions; they were demanding answers!  Pure show biz.

No more internal power struggle;
We come together to overcome the little trouble.
Soon we’ll find out who is the real revolutionary,
‘Cause I don’t want my people to be contrary.

— Bob Marley, “Zimbabwe”

March 3rd marked the fifth annual “Music Freedom Day.” Associated with Danish artists’ rights organization Freemuse, it’s designed to bring attention to the repression and exploitation of musicians around the world.  Over 30 events were held in a variety of countries, including, notably, some in North Africa and the Middle East, whose nations have recently been gripped by uprisings and revolutions.  Egypt and Jordan were both among those counties whose Music Freedom Day took on a whole new meaning.

And so it was in Zimbabwe.  This year’s event took place in Harare’s Book Cafe, featuring performances from three of the country’s best-known political artists.  The really impressive act, however, came from the 2,000 artists who ordered the state-run Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation to observe six hours of silence.

According to Albert Nyathi, musician and head of the Zimbabwe Music Rights Association (ZIMURA), the demand came as a protest against the rather brazen ripoff of Zimbabwe’s artists.  “The ZBC owes musicians more than $300,000 in unpaid royalties and this is unacceptable,” said Nyathi.  “We have tried in vain to have that money paid, but ZBC have not given us a firm commitment…”

The vicious, tyrannical and corrupt practices of President Robert Mugabe are by now common knowledge among human rights, labor and solidarity activists.  Once a major figure in the country’s leftist liberation movement against white rule, he is now a leader who has made his peace with the lash of austerity.  During the most recent General Election in 2008, when Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party suffered serious defeats, Mugabe engaged in widespread intimidation, assaults and arrests to maintain his rule.

Perhaps it’s no surprise then that Mugabe cares little for the nation’s rich and varied musical traditions, or their deep connections to popular struggles.  In fact, if Mugabe had his way, that connection would be severed at the root.

There are no obscenity laws in Zimbabwe,  Rather, says US writer and filmmaker, Banning Eyre:

A climate of fear affects composers, singers, DJs, journalists and writers alike, muting and even silencing many artistic voices.  Broadcasters are closely watched and often scripted to avoid any criticism of the state.  Some have lost their jobs when they were judged to have crossed the line.

The ZBC – whose four channels are the only legal stations in Zimbabwe – maintains nothing less than a blacklist of artists who dare to speak out.  Countless artists, including some of the country’s most famous, have complained of having their most political songs denied any airplay whatsoever.

To make matters worse, the Zimbabwe Music Corporation and its subsidiary, Gramma, run what is basically a monopoly over all domestic or foreign music released within the country’s borders.  “Apart from the ZBC not playing us, the recording companies are also refusing to release our music,” says artist Leonard Zhakara.  “I have albums that are ready but the record companies are afraid to release them.”

The consequences of this censorship aren’t mere trifles.  During the 1980s and 90s, when the HIV/AIDS epidemic was reaching disastrous proportions in Zimbabwe, artists who even mentioned the diseases had their songs banned on the grounds that they might offend conservative values on sex.  It was only one aspect of a full-fledged state refusal to acknowledge AIDS. Today, the HIV infection rate in Zimbabwe hovers somewhere around 40%.

Then, there’s the toll that the state takes on the musicians, themselves.  Artists who write political songs risk harassment and even violence.  Fans of their music or concert attendees have been assaulted by gangs identifying themselves as “veterans” of the war for liberation.  Thomas Mapfumo, the famed “Lion of Zimbabwe,” innovator of Afropop, who once toured with Bob Marley, has faced such harassment for his anti-Mugabe views that he was forced to flee the country in the late 90s.

Now, with a wave of revolt sweeping down the African continent, Mugabe’s repression only appears to be intensifying.  On February 19th, forty-five activists and members of Zimbabwe’s International Socialist Organization were arrested and detained on charges of “treason.”  Their crime?  Watching videos of the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. The activists have been tortured, denied medical care, and currently face the death penalty if convicted.  The severity of punishment they face speaks to how much Mugabe and the Zanu-PF fear such a revolt in their own borders.

It’s been said that one can measure the freedom of a society by the diversity of its art.  At one point, Mugabe’s cronies appeared to believe this.  In 1972, when the Zanu-PF was still struggling against Rhodesian apartheid, it publicly stated:

In a free, democratic, independent and socialist Zimbabwe the people will be encouraged and assisted in building a new Zimbabwe culture, derived from the best in what our history and heritage has given, and developed to meet the needs of the new socialist society…

Compared to the present reality, those words ring hollow. For the Zimbabwean people, their country isn’t free, democratic or independent.  It most certainly isn’t socialist.  Like countless other tyrants on the continent, it’s time for Mugabe to face the music.

When the recital started, he performed some perfunctory turns and flashed his mastery in a few signature aerials. Then he grabbed a chair and abruptly sat down facing his audience.

Njinsky glared at them. Time passed but the audience was silent. More time passed and still Njinsky stared. The audience sat motionless.

After several minutes, Njinsky rose. He took rolls of black and white velvet and made a giant cross the length of the room. Then he stood at the head of it with open arms and said: “Now I will dance you the war, with its suffering, with its destruction, with its death. The war which you did not prevent and so you are responsible for.”

And then Njinsky erupted across the room, his monumental gestures filling the space with horror and suffering. The audience was breathless, fascinated and petrified. Njinski’s movements and expressions suffused the room with twisted, contorted bodies and savage explosions. He took his audience to the trenches, the front, and the body-strewn aftermath. He was ethereal and violent; a perfect embodiment of tragic, terrible humanity.

His audience was discomfited, but undeniably moved. His recital was intense, brilliant and compelling.

If you go to the neighborhood library or check Wikipedia, you may find Njinsky as a historical figure or a physical genius. But you will hardly find the spirit of the phenomena he represented. And it’s even less evident on the TV channels and radio stations and art galleries we frequent. They are devoid of urgency and sadly lack the cogent, poetic ferocity that comprised Njinsky’s St. Moritz performance.

Contemporary pop culture is virtually bereft of real relevance and depth and the corporate architects who promote it go to extraordinary lengths to keep it that way. Taylor Swift is as challenging as a lukewarm bath. Lil Wayne is as evocative as a mustard burp. And Justin Bieber is as meaningful as bread crust crumbs in mayonnaise.

Sure, there’s a Sinead O’Connor tearing up the Pope’s picture here and there or a Sharon Olds addressing “The Solution” we seem to have chosen for ourselves. And now and then we hear a Rage Against the Machine; but the Bob Dylans are desperately missed. There’s no future in banal Beyonces, toothless Labeoufs or spineless Twilight and Harry Potter sequels.

There’s no edge to our art anymore because it’s filled with entertainers instead of artists and the few artful souls that do unintentionally get featured usually lack awareness or philosophy.

Kurt Vonnegut used to say that artists were like canaries in a coal mine. That they were super-sensitive and “keeled over” due to toxic conditions long before normal folks even sensed they were in danger. Vonnegut envisioned art as an indispensable herald, a critical means of alarm.

But despite the unparalleled toxicity of our times and our complicity in the systems that endanger us, artists aren’t sounding the alarm. There are as many doom-impending calamities in the world now as there are countries, but most artists are hardly even sentient, much less super-sensitive.

Albert Camus went further than Vonnegut. He plainly stated that “the time for irresponsible artists is over” and that in any troubled era, it was every legitimate artist’s role to create dangerously.

We are involved in one war and one quasi-occupation, but no performer on any significant stage or medium is dancing the war for us or compellingly conveying the shabbiness or shame of the occupation. Our socio-economic system is exposing us to a catalogue of environmental perils, but our creative communities spend more time cashing in on the system than condemning it. Our technological dependence is rendering an inestimable number of our natural, physiological capacities obsolete, but more artists are turning to the new, dehumanizing technologies than disputing their real, long-term merit.

Art for art’s sake was fine when there was nothing at stake, but when everything is at stake artistic expression demands courage and accountability. So if you fancy yourself a literary or filmic or singing sort and your muse isn’t telling you to dance our inhumanities or paint our self-destructiveness or pen our vainglorious insanities, please ignore it and find another pursuit among the uninitiated throngs. We already have enough artists who create safely and serve no purpose.

Looking for internships or jobs, America’s children learn that no matter how much they studied or worked, it was the boss’s niece or a boss’s friend’s son who was hired. Sometimes, the reason for rejection could be as simple as the boss thought the best candidate was intellectually superior or that the applicant had curly black hair and he liked only blondes.

Later, on another job, while the boss bought yet another vacation home, the worker was one of dozens laid off, their jobs going to Mexico, China, or Pakistan.

It’s not fair that reality TV “stars” and pro athletes make 10 to more than 100 times the salaries of social workers and firefighters. But Americans seldom protest.

The owner of a mid-sized carpentry shop loses a contract to a large corporation, not because of a lack of quality work but because the corporation cut deals with suppliers. It’s not fair; it’s just reality.

One person driving 65 m.p.h. in a 55 m.p.h. zone is stopped by police; another, doing 80, speeds along. It’s not fair. But it happens.

It probably wasn’t fair that Bristol Palin, 20-year-old unwed mother with no discernible job skills, was selected over thousands of other celebrities for ABC-TV’s “Dancing With the Stars.” It had nothing to do with fairness or her ability; it had everything to do with a reality that Palin’s presence on DWTS would bring in ratings, and ratings bring in advertising income. The first show brought in 21 million viewers who watched 30-second commercials from companies that paid almost $190,000 each, among the highest on all television—broadcast or cable.

To assure that Palin had  a chance to stay on the show for at least a couple of weeks, the producers gave her a special advantage — her professional dance partner was Mark Ballas, DWTS champion twice in the previous 10 seasons.

Even with one of the best professional ballroom dancers as her partner and coach, Palin was still at the bottom of the judges’ ranking four times, and near the bottom most of the other times. According to the scoring system, each of three judges give each contestant pair— a celebrity and a professional — a score of 1 to 10. A perfect score is 30. But, viewers can vote by phone, website, or by texting. Their vote is worth half the total score. Neither Sarah nor Bristol Palin made any special requests of the viewers that we know about. They didn’t have to. Hundreds of conservative blogs and talk show hosts did it for them, urging their flocks to vote. Many may have even scammed the system. At least one viewer told the Washington Post he not only had used fake emails to vote hundreds of times, he also told others how to do it.

Willing accomplices and accessories, of course, were the producers who made sure that Mama Palin was seen on several shows—sometimes with speaking roles, sometimes with as many as nine cutaway shots. The audience did as they were told. For nine weeks, Bristol Palin, one of the weakest dancers in the show’s 11-season history, defeated celebrity teams who had near-perfect and perfect scores.

The week before the finals, it finally seemed destined that Bristol Palin would be off the show, having again placed at the bottom of the judges’ scores. But it was Brandy and professional dancer Maksim Chmerkovskiy, who had done near-perfect routines, who were voted off. Shocked, the audience began booing. It didn’t matter. Palin was now one of three celebrity finalists.

The first of a two-part final the following week drew an audience of 23.7 million, highest for any entertainment program this season. However, this time, it was Jennifer Grey and Derek Hough, who had finished at the top of the judges’ lists several times, who finally won. Second were actor Kyle Massey and Lacey Schwimmer; Palin and Ballas finished third.

It makes little difference if numerous celebrities weren’t selected for Dancing With the Stars because the producers gave the slot to the less talented Bristol Palin. It doesn’t even matter that more talented celebrities were eliminated from the show because a cult of the home audience voted for Bristol Palin. In the American election system, the best candidate, for any of a thousand reasons, including blatant lies and distortion by the opposition, often doesn’t win an election.

It doesn’t seem fair. It’s just the way it is.

But portraying this decade as socially and culturally stunted not only misses the point, but wildly misrepresents what really happened.  Defining the American 1950s in terms of consumerism, Dwight Eisenhower and Senator Joe McCarthy is tantamount to defining Oklahoma in the 1990s in terms of  J.C. Watts, Sooner football, and Timothy McVeigh.

Indeed, not only were the 1950s not an era of anti-intellectualism and mindless conformity, they were the diametric opposite.  Even a cursory examination reveals that, culturally, socially and politically, the 1950s stand as one of the most innovative decades in U.S. history.

Arguably, the 1950s were what the Baby Boomers thought the 1960s were.  Everything the Boomers thought happened for the first time during their turbulent coming-of-age years actually happened a decade earlier….and in a more disciplined, presentable and elegant fashion.

The critical difference was that these phenomena didn’t affect the masses or spill out into the streets until the mid to late 1960s. [Note: I say all this as a Boomer myself, one who was a bit too young to have appreciated most of what occurred in the Fifties.]

The list of cultural mindsets and social movements that began taking shape in the 1950s is staggering:  the drug scene, the free love scene, the music scene, the modern art scene, the civil rights movement (Brown vs. Board of Education, 1954), feminism, the peace movement, the anti-nuke movement (SANE was founded in 1957), the environmental movement.

Paul Krassner’s influential counterculture magazine, The Realist, was launched in 1958, and  Rachel Carson, the patron saint of American environmentalism, was cranking out her nature material (The Sea Around Us was published in 1951) well before the Boomers and Time Magazine got around to officially “discovering” her.

The Fifties weren’t socially conscious?!  Please. It was during the Fifties that organized labor reached its peak membership (at nearly 35-percent of the American workforce). Unions were not only widely respected, they were acknowledged as a reliable means by which working people could enter and remain members of the affluent middle-class.  During the 1950s, union welders lived next door to college professors and accountants.

Hard as it may be for a modern audience to believe, but union leaders like John L. Lewis, Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Harry Bridges, and Walter Reuther were mentioned prominently in high school civics textbooks.  These labor leaders were treated not only as visionaries and social reformers but as true patriots.

The U.S. underwent a tremendous artistic and intellectual enlightenment in the 1950s, fueled largely by the enthusiastic embrace of Europe:  the existentialist philosophy of Sartre and Camus, the unconscious mind deconstructed by Freud and Jung, the Theater of Absurd represented by Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, and Jean Genet.  There was the poetry of T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas, the films of Bergman, Fellini and Luis Bunuel, the plays of John Osborne and Terence Rattigan.  These were the Fifties.

Of course, America had its home-grown phenomena as well: Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Margaret Mead, Jackson Pollack, the Jazz Renaissance, the Beat Generation, Keuroac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Stan Freeberg, Jules Feiffer, J.D. Salinger, Gore Vidal, Eudora Welty, and the Golden Age of television (Playhouse 90, Paddy Chayevsky, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Rod Serling, Sid Caeser, Ernie Kovaks, Edward R. Murrow, Dave Garroway, et al).

And people dare call this decade — this hothouse of creative expression — bland?? Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick, Stanley Kramer, Elia Kazan, Mary McCarthy, Budd Schulberg, Saul Bellow, Hannah Arendt, Sylvia Plath, John Updike, Nelson Algren, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer — they all more or less came of age in the Fifties.

Marijuana was already being used by hipsters — jazz musicians, beatniks, artists — 15 years before it became the coolest thing on campus.  Oh, yeah, something else was invented during the “boring” 1950s, something that’s managed to stick around a while:  rock and roll.  The Fifties introduced the world to Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Little Richard.

Moreover, the Fifties marked the first sustained attacks, satirical and otherwise, on such cultural phenomena as subliminal advertising, Madison Avenue, (think Vance Packard, David Reisman and Mad Magazine), herd mentality, consumerism, suburbs, the organization man, keeping up with the Joneses, split-level Hell, and the evils of plastic.

Seminal sociological works like Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run?, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and Notes of a Native Son were written in the Fifties. Simone deBeuvoir may have been “discovered” by women in the 1960s, but her classic treatise on feminism, The Second Sex, was published in America in 1953.

We could go on and on because the list is endless.  I’m reminded of that quote from the movie Flashback, where the Dennis Hopper character says to the FBI agent, “When we get out of the Eighties, the Nineties are going to make the Sixties look like the Fifties.” A clever line….but inaccurate and misleading.

We bask in a certain reflected glory from the newspapers we read. To “take” The Times is to be far more intellectual, far more highbrow, than someone who takes the Mail. To read the Mail is to be far more responsible than someone who gawks in the Mirror. A Guardian reader is highbrow with a human face: intellectual, aware, like other “broadsheet” readers, but with a much greater commitment to making the world a better, fairer place. Independent readers share the same commitment, perhaps a little less earnestly.

Because we locate some of our identity in what we read — some sense of who we are as intelligent, caring people — we may react with rage when the newspapers we take are criticised. To suggest that “my” newspaper is biased and superficial can seem to imply the same of “me” and “my” beliefs about the world.

A similar glow of pride reflects on us from cinema screens. How we love to declare our appreciation for the latest thoughtful, sensitive, challenging movie. Again, we may reinforce a sense of ourselves as smart and caring from the films we watch. Of course we don’t like the gung-ho rubbish, but we do believe there is a certain satisfying stream of liberal, even leftist, movies challenging power: think George Clooney, Oliver Stone, Tim Robbins, and a few others. Matthew Alford, author of Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy (Pluto Books, 2010) does not agree.

In his book, Alford sets the charges for a controlled demolition of the myth that there is any kind of serious challenge to US foreign policy coming out of Hollywood. By the end of the book, not just Stallone, not just Schwarzenegger and Willis, but the entire edifice of liberal credibility has collapsed into its own footprint. Alford writes:

One of the recurrent themes of the body of films in Reel Power is that even many of the most politically sophisticated of them assume the essential benevolence of US foreign policy, even when they express tactical concerns over using force. To suggest that foreign policy is the result of deeper, more unseemly economic and political interests is virtually unsayable.

Over the last couple of weeks we have been e-chatting with Alford about his book.

David Edwards (DE): Life was awful in the old days — cinema-goers were subjected to propaganda masquerading as entertainment. We all know how German filmmakers boosted Hitler’s fortunes in the 1930s and 1940s. And between 1948 and 1954, Hollywood made more than forty anti-communist films with titles like I Married A Communist and I Was A Communist For The FBI. Happily, today, we can all go to the cinema relaxed in the knowledge that we are watching completely open, independent, uncompromised versions of the world. We’re not propagandised to believe anything in particular — it‘s just entertainment. That’s right, isn’t it?

Matthew Alford (MA): It’s curious that we can easily accept there was propaganda in the distant past, under dictatorships and during former wars, but we shy away from the idea that there are parallels with our own modern societies. Still, these days — and especially prevalent since the 1980s — there is a sizable body of national security cinema that glorifies US power systems and the use of extreme force against official enemies across the world. Imbued with a blinkered sense of fear and American victim-hood, products like Rules of Engagement, Amerika, and 24 are frequently not ‘just’, even if they are, ‘entertainment’. More liberal products like Hotel Rwanda, Charlie Wilson’s War and Munich are more subtle but at least as dangerous, as the book details.

DE: So why, in our time, +do+ the big corporate studios consistently make films that glorify the US war machine? Many people may find this counter-intuitive, thinking, ‘Well, a movie studio just wants to make movies that are popular with huge numbers of people — they couldn’t care less about the politics of the message’. Can you succinctly spell out for our readers why a US corporate movie system would produce such a biased, pro-military result?

MA: Corporate Hollywood has no imperative to tell the truth or act responsibly, except to the extent audiences can compel it to do so. The six major studios that control the industry “breeds a kind of person who is invested completely in power and money, and human considerations and concerns are secondary”, as producer Jon Avnet put it. Or, as Julia Phillips, author of the industry classic You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, remarked: “Hollywood is a place that attracts people with massive holes in their souls.”

In such an environment, it becomes very easy in cinema to demonise official enemies, dismiss indigenous populations, make heroes of the US military/government, and tidy up the world with a spectacular series of nice explosions and shootings. This is especially the case when the national security apparatus is involved in productions, making it impossible to step out of the ideological madhouse, even for those who are uncomfortable in their straitjackets. The Pentagon and CIA routinely offer advice, people and equipment to production sets and, in exchange, film-makers are obliged to toe their line.

So, for instance, the Pentagon provided Black Hawk Down with eight helicopters and 100 soldiers. The film rewrites a controversial history of US intervention in Somalia, providing a depiction of American suffering and innocence that is extreme even by Hollywood standards, juxtaposed with an evil or otherwise worthless enemy population. One of the specific changes the Pentagon requested was the identity of one of the US soldiers because in real life he had been sentenced to fifteen years in jail for statutory rape. Not good PR.

DE: In your book you cite Major David Georgi, one of the US Army’s on-set technical advisers, as saying: “If they don’t do what I say, I take my toys and go away.” Terrence Malick’s film, The Thin Red Line, was denied cooperation from the Pentagon because of ‘its depictions of cowardly soldiers, callous leaders and alcohol abuse on the battlefield’.

So the US military subsidises pro-war films, just as advertisers subsidise mainstream newspapers that provide a conducive ‘selling environment’. But there are also direct links between companies making films and companies making weapons. Can you tell us about some of those?

MA: Yes, the parent company of Universal studios is General Electric — one of the biggest multinationals in the world with an appalling environmental record and which at least until the early 1990s was making nuclear weapons for the US government. There are also various people I name in the book who simultaneously sit on the boards of major studios and defence contractors.

Iron Man — absurdly dubbed a ‘pacifist’ picture — thanks the aerospace giant Boeing for its on set assistance in its end credits. Recently, the defence contractor Raytheon showed off their new invention – a motorised robotic suit intended to endow soldiers with superhuman strength – at an event specifically timed to coincide with the DVD release of Iron Man 2. A good reason not to buy pirate DVDs is that you’re helping buy weapons for violent gangs. It’s hard to see why this principle shouldn’t be applied universally.

DE: I loved the quotes from the big stars in your book. Bruce Willis made a public offer at a concert for US troops in Iraq to give a million dollars to anyone who captured Saddam Hussein and allowed him “four seconds” with the Iraqi leader. Willis had to back-peddle when Saddam was actually captured! When Arnold Schwarzenegger visited Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany in 2004, he told US troops: “Do you know how they translate ‘Ramstein’ in the English language? It means ‘We’re gonna kick some ass’.” Have you get any more gems like these?

MA: I enjoyed Arnie’s other comment, when he inspired US troops in Iraq with a rousing “You are the real Terminators!” Criticising the military is meant to be this great taboo but here’s the Governor of California comparing them with time-travelling killer robots.

DE: So the corporate giants have deep ties to the arms industry, are subsidised by the Pentagon, and are ideologically aligned with a similarly soulless US war machine. But still dissent +does+ get through. I recently (a bit late!) saw the film Avatar by James Cameron. It clearly is intended as bitter criticism, not just of the genocide perpetrated by European colonists on the indigenous peoples of America, but also of the war in Iraq. One of the few things I felt was missing from your book was this comment by the hero in the film, Jake Sully, a former US Marine. He says:

“This is how it’s done. When people are sitting on shit that you want, you make ‘em your enemy. Then you’re justified in taking it.”

To me, that was James Cameron using his power, success and celebrity to get away with summing up the Iraq war, because that‘s exactly what happened. Aren’t people like Cameron forced to play the industry like a piano — saying one thing in public, for example, “I am very pro-America. I’m pro-military”, as Cameron did — and then sneaking in what they really believe in disguised form? Can you discuss any other examples of that?

MA: The starkest case is Starship Troopers, where maverick director Paul Verhoeven deliberately made a Chomskyian critique of US empire whilst selling it as a dumb-ass shoot ‘em up.

In the case of Avatar, we’re really talking about a cosmetic form of dissent. Rupert Murdoch, the notoriously right wing ultimate owner of Avatar, reportedly ignored the film’s politics and focused on the utility of its 3D technology for football matches. I wonder if he would have felt differently had Cameron taken the film’s philosophy to its logical conclusion. One ending I heard proposed would have had the US military personnel uniting and turning on their own masters in a show of peaceful resistance to tyranny. How about that as a political statement, drawing on Spartacus and V for Vendetta, with an Iraq War twist? No way.

So what did we see instead? A deus ex machina — the wildlife suddenly join the Na’vi’s fight against the invading Marines. Now, in my professional role I don’t usually judge movies on their artistry but, I mean, isn’t this the kind of story twist that we ALL wrote at school when we were 6 years old? Maybe the final scene should have been Jake waking up and it was all just a dream… or was it?

DE: Yes, and it was appalling that it was a former Marine who saved the day.

MA: Well, if there’s got to be a hero I don’t think it should always be Buddha armed with a joss stick. But yeah, Avatar wasn’t exactly the great triumph of imagination it was billed to be.

DE: What are the latest examples of national security cinema?

MA: Two of the most breathtaking cases in this half of 2010 are Unthinkable — Samuel L. Jackson endorsing the very extremes of torture, and Red Dawn — China invading the United States. The mind boggles.

DE: How has Reel Power been received?

MA: It only went on sale worldwide in October but we’re getting excellent responses so far. Liberal commentators have seemed less able to understand the point that Reel Power advocates creative (and, by extension, political) freedom, rather than advocating one system of beliefs over another.

DE: What are your plans now?

MA: A sequel to Reel Power is on the cards. I also recently unearthed a ‘lost’ autopsy report that said Hollywood screenwriter Gary Devore was murdered — not the victim of a bizarre traffic accident, as the authorities spun it. As part of a small team working in L.A, I am putting together a documentary, novel and screenplay about Gary’s disappearance and death. Did Devore discover too much about CIA black ops/ drug running? If anyone wants to invest in this multi-faceted project we are open to offers.

DE: Many thanks for taking the time to answer our questions about your book. Very best of luck with those projects.

The author can be contacted directly here.

A short-list of Alford’s on-line work.

Let’s be clear:  No one is suggesting that HBO doesn’t deliver the goods.  Indeed, when television is being done well, nobody does it better.  All one has to do is examine the record — The Wire, Sex in the City, John Adams, Band of Brothers, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Angels in America, et al — to see that HBO has an extraordinary history.

Not only does HBO dare to take on original and provocative subject matter — and hire top writing and acting talent to get the job done — but, as a subscription channel, it has the additional virtue of not inundating us with those infuriating commercials.  We get to enjoy these programs without interruption, which, alone, is almost worth the subscription fee.

But when television isn’t being done well, when television is overwrought or forced, or is being done weirdly or insincerely or self-indulgently (e.g., Big Love, John From Cincinnati, How to Make It in America, Carnivale, Mind of the Married Man), the case can be made that no one is more pretentious, preening, or self-referential than HBO.

Understandably, critics and producers tend to conflate HBO’s nudity, sexual explicitness and profanity with artistic achievement, as if the startling lack of censorship is, by itself, evidence of a gushing fountain of creativity.  But shows don’t require raw exhibitionism to hit their mark.  Consider:  West Wing, Seinfeld, 30 Rock, and The Office were/are outstanding network shows, even with the censor’s boot on their necks.

Yet, you hear comedians open their HBO comedy specials by enthusiastically stoking the audience with, “This is HBO, right??  That means we can say Fuck, right?!”  And, of course, they’re greeted by delirious cheers from the crowd, as if the word “fuck” was, even at this late date, just about the coolest thing anyone had ever heard.

A particularly annoying feature of HBO is the number of promos it runs.  Granted, all networks, regular and cable, run promos for their upcoming shows, but HBO ramps it up several notches.  Because they have no paid commercials, they can put on anything they want without having to worry about finding sponsors willing to pay for the spot.  The air time belongs to them.

As a consequence, we’re barraged not only by promo after promo, but by these self-aggrandizing “The Making Of….” presentations, where we’re shown a behind-the-scenes look at how HBO programs get made.  It’s like going on a date with a woman and having her show you a video of the steps she took to get ready.  No commercial sponsor would dream of paying for such inbred tripe.

HBO recently subjected viewers to an endless string of promos (as well as a “Making Of….” supplement) for its newest series, Boardwalk Empire, a splashy, prohibition-era drama set in Atlantic City.  There were so many promos for this thing, by the time the show finally debuted (Sunday, September 19), we felt that we’d already seen it.

And, of course, the critical response was predictably over the top.  After only one episode the cultural pundits were already referring to the series as a “landmark” in television history, as “one of the best shows ever made,” etc.  Really?  They could extrapolate all this from one show?  Remarkable.

The premiere was decent, but hardly ground-breaking; the same can be said for the following episode.  In truth, this modest, period-piece gangster story is suspiciously similar to other period-piece gangster stories.  That’s not a criticism, merely a simple observation about a genre.  Despite the attractive sets and Steve Buscemi’s excellent acting, gangster movies happen to be a well-traveled road.

But who’s to say?  Given time, Boardwalk Empire may evolve into another outstanding HBO series.  But we shouldn’t be jumping the gun.  People are already comparing this thing to the Sopranos, which is absurd.  Shouldn’t we pace ourselves a bit, catch a few shows — maybe the first full season? — before christening it a “television classic”?

Again, no one’s claiming that HBO doesn’t offer excellent television fare.  But even Babe Ruth didn’t hit a home run every time at bat.  And neither does HBO.  John From Cincinnati and Carnivale proved that.

(Lance Boyle turns from facing the camera to Miriam Kale. They are sitting in high-backed upholstered chairs across a black coffee table. All around are enlarged stills and posters of the new Hawaii Five-O.) Miriam, the pilot of the new Hawaii Five-O was easily the most hyped show this September. Did the hype live up to expectations?

Miriam Kale: “That’s a tough question, Lance, because I didn’t know what sort of expectations I was supposed to have. The original series that ran on CBS from Sept. 20, 1968, to April 4, 1980, is one of TV’s most famous and beloved police dramas. The things that made it work, that made it so memorable, are unique to the show and the time it ran. Any remake would have to be seen as a cynical move to exploit a cultural institution to pander to an increasingly illiterate and undemanding audience.”

LB: “So, your answer is ‘no,’ I take it.”

MK: “You ever hear of the term ‘jumping the shark’?”

LB: “Of course. That’s when a bad episode signals the beginning of a successful TV show’s slide into mediocrity or oblivion.”

MK: “Well, the new… I can’t even say it…I’ll call it ‘H5O’… it signifies the moment that TV itself jumped the shark!”

LB: “But TV has been cannibalizing and recycling shows for years, if not decades. The New Addams Family, the remount of Beverly Hills 90210, not to mention the proliferation of CSI, and Law and Order clones. (to the TV monitor) Larry, do you agree with Miriam and what did you think of the new Hawaii Five-O pilot?”

Larry Levy: “I appreciate Miriam’s affection for the old Hawaii Five-O, but her attack on the reboot is off-base. Television isn’t the same medium it was in the ’60s, ’70s or even the ’80s. It now has to compete with video games and the Internet for audience share, so reinventing a successful series is a safe way for a producer to appeal immediately to both old and new audiences. It’s all about risk-management.”

MK: “Larry, are you conceding that TV is creatively bankrupt and that the bastardization of successful shows is justifiable in the name of financial expediency?”

LL: “Creativity costs money and profit margins today are razor thin, so why should a producer risk failure on being creative when a sure thing like a reboot is available? Believe me, you’re going to be seeing a lot more remakes and spin-offs. Take the two Charlie’s Angels movies starring Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu. They aren’t anything like 1970s TV series.”

MK: “Bad writing, bad directing, bad acting, choppy editing and pointless action…I guess that’s how success is defined in your world. (Larry Levy tries to interrupt) Speaking of worlds, I guess we should be thankful that the Internet wasn’t around in 1980 because we wouldn’t have had Magnum, P.I.”

LB: “How’s that?”

MK: (to Lance) “After Hawaii Five-O wrapped, CBS wanted to keep its Hawaiian production facilities so it jumped right into another series, one that turned out to be arguably the most creative, and best-written PI show. There was even a hint of continuity because the show made passing references to Steve McGarrett and Five-O. But pre-Internet requirements like good casting, thoughtful writing, and believable, long-term character development are now expensive frills, according to Larry.”

LL: “Character development?! Please! The old Hawaii Five-O had no character development. Everyone was a stereotype. Chin Ho and Kono, especially, were little more than errand boys for McGarrett. This new series, with younger actors, will give these characters real dimension.”

LB: “He does have a point, Miriam.”

MK: “A small one. It’s true that Chin Ho and Kono were badly underwritten, and Kam Fong and Zulu, respectively, were often reduced to uttering wooden banalities like ‘Sure, Steve,’ ‘Right, Steve,’ and ‘You got that, bruddah.’ Sometimes, James MacArthur’s Dan Williams didn’t fare much better. The fact is, Hawaii Five-O was really the Steve McGarrett show, and Jack Lord carried it. We can argue that the writing and character development could have been better, but I can’t accept Larry’s superior attitude toward H5O since it suffers from the same problems.”

LB: “For example.”

MK: “To begin with, Alex O’Loughlin’s version of Steve McGarrett is horribly inept. In fact O’Loughlin should be in the running for the worst actor on television….”

LL: “That’s going too far!”

LB: “Let her finish, Larry. I’m interested in seeing how Miriam backs this up.”

MK: “First of all, Steve McGarrett is supposed to be a former commander in the U.S. Navy. That implies a certain level of maturity, discipline and dignity. Jack Lord had that in spades. O’Loughlin gives us a callow, violent, glib youth who looks like he learned military discipline from PS3 video games. He spends most of his time glaring menacingly and talking tough, as if he were trying to channel his inner psychopath. There is nothing intelligent or believable in O’Loughlin’s McGarrett, which just proves that slapping a uniform on an Australian pretty boy, sticking a gun in his hand, and making him spout macho clichés does not make him an actor.

“In fact, I could argue that the show isn’t even written, because writing implies the meaningful use of language. H5O consists of a series of violent action sequences and macho posturing held together by a thin adhesive of clichés, leaden banter and perfunctory dialogue. Just look at that dreadful early scene, when the governor asks ‘McGarrett’ to head up a new task force. We’re forced to watch him go through a predictable, time-wasting refusal (we know he’s going to accept), and spout combative banalities.”

LL: “Look, O’Loughlin is not trying to be Jack Lord! He is giving us a completely different McGarrett, one for the 21st century.”

MK: “We don’t need one, and that goes for the other B-list actors, none of whom was credible.”

LB: “None?”

MK: “Grace Park’s main function is to be eye-candy. In her only substantial scene in the pilot she took off her dress. In the next episode she got into a brawl in a swimming pool with a female member of an abduction ring. What is this: Charlie’s Angels meets Xena: Warrior Princess?!” Scott Caan brings an aloof blandness to Dan Williams. We’re supposed to accept McGarrett and Williams as quarreling buddy cops but his rapport with O’Loughlin is non-existent, and the byplay between them is truly painful. Starsky and Hutch were more realistic.”

LB: “How about Daniel Dae Kim?”

MK: “He also glowers well, and his Chin Ho promises to be equally generic and unremarkable. One more thing: Kim and Park are both Korean, and look nothing like Hawaiians. The fact that Kam Fong and Zulu were Hawaiian gave Hawaii Five-O cultural credibility.”

LB: “Is the lack of Hawaiians on the show a problem for you, Larry?”

LL: “ Not at all. We go with the people who do the best job.”

LB: “Larry, earlier you said we need a new McGarrett for the 21st century. What does that mean?”

LL: “We live in an age of terrorism, and a state security agency, even a fictitious one, needs to focus on that. The old McGarrett dealt with murders, kidnappings, robberies, blackmail, smuggling and some international espionage, but he couldn’t be expected to cope with something as sophisticated as cyberterrorism and exercise the kind of law enforcement it requires. That’s why comparisons with the old show are not relevant.”

LB: “But terrorism is generic, amorphous and subject to political definition. It has no substance, no local or cultural definition, and that makes the location of Hawaii distinctly irrelevant. You could situate this show anywhere, and that’s a problem for me. There’s nothing identifiably ‘Hawaiian’ about it.”

MK: “Excellent point, Lance. Watching H5O reminded me how unremarkable it was, and how the plots could easily be recycled from dreck like NCIS. However, Larry is absolutely correct in one regard.”

LB: “What’s that?”

MK: “The kind of law enforcement in H5O would never have be seen in Hawaii Five-O, and the reason is obvious: McGarrett, Williams and the rest were police officers, who served the law; they weren’t callow vigilantes who treated the law with contempt. In Hawaii Five-O, the villains, even the worst ones, were recognized as people who had civil rights under the law. In H5O, villains are reduced to evil stereotypes, devoid of any understandable motive, and so whatever is done to them is perfectly acceptable.”

LL: “I suppose you want them to show sympathy for terrorists? If it were up to you, McGarrett would be a boy scout.”

LB: “I don’t think that’s what Miriam meant.”

MK: “You’re right. My point is that, unlike Hawaii Five-O, H5O dehumanizes people and makes torture and aggression palatable. For example, in the fourth season of Hawaii Five-O the episode “Is This Any Way to Run a Paradise?” centred around a radical anti-pollution activist who calls himself “Kahili,” after the Hawaiian god of battle. He stages pranks and acts of sabotage against Hawaii’s worst polluters, and he draws up a hit list of the heads of the state’s five worst polluters.

Without condoning Kahili’s acts, Kono expresses understanding of his motives, thereby presenting Kahili as a rational being. The ‘innocent’ polluters came across as exploitative and callous, justifying their disregard of the environment in the name of stockholder greed. This episode not only managed to be entertaining, but provoked an intelligent debate about corporate self-interest and destruction of the environment, and it’s still relevant!

“No such sophistication is possible in H5O, since it’s designed to short-circuit thinking in favour of violence-worship in the name of national security.

LL: “I hate to break this to you, Miriam, but we live in violent times, and if you don’t want TV to reflect this fact that’s your problem.”

MK: “Violence, I can deal with; raising it to the level of acceptable police conduct, I can’t, and one scene above all that demonstrates it. Toward the end of the pilot, O’Loughlin’s character is standing over a suspect who has just been whacked across the head by Caan’s character. The suspect asks: ‘What kind of cops are you?’ O’Loughlin’s McGarrett answers: ‘The new kind.’

“Think about that for a minute. What’s ‘new’ here? Cops beat suspects in the past, so beating, per se, isn’t it. A clue to the answer lies in the suspect’s question. As reprehensible as he was, he expected the police to act within the law. After he was struck, he was genuinely shocked. To him, McGarrett and Williams weren’t cops; they were like him. This is Larry’s 21st-century H5O: a gang of vigilantes that act under the cover of authority, and isn’t that just what the Department of Homeland Security is?”

LB: “Do you think you’re reading too much into the show Miriam? I doubt that the producers went out of their way to make a Hawaiian version of The Wild Bunch.”

MK: “Possibly, but in a world where the cult of terrorism is used to justify persecuting dissenters, demonizing Muslims, and normalizing Israel’s genocide of Palestine, shows like H5O breeds the sort contempt for law that makes people rationalize and condone such acts. A venerable show like Hawaii Five-O should not have been bastardized to inculcate lawlessness in the name of national security.”

LB: (turns to camera) “On that note, I’d like to thank my guests Larry Levy, CEO of Redundancy Entertainment, and Miriam Kale for joining me. See you next week in The Cutting Room.” (Closing theme music comes on and Lance Boyle turns back to face Miriam Kale and they continue talking over the closing credits.)

The power of good comedy rests in its ability to expose human foibles and to reveal the silliness of cultural norms that we seldom question. The show I attended that night mastered both of these objectives. For example, the audience erupted into laughter during a skit that featured a conceited Mayor Daley trying to woo the Olympic Committee into choosing Chicago as the host city for the next summer games. Later, the audience giggled in amusement during a sketch that portrayed a husband too distracted by his Iphone to converse with his wife. From start to finish, the show was peppered with jokes that ridiculed arrogant public figures (such as Daley and Blageovich), and mocked America’s infatuation with technology or other cultural absurdities.

A number of the skits also focused on another pervasive aspect of American culture: unconscious racism. For example, in one skit a teacher and her students talk about the new president Barack Obama—but whisper every time they say the word “black”. The one black child in the classroom is confused, never gets called on, and is finally shouted at for not raising his hand. The skit makes fun of whites for their discomfort with talking about race and their misguided attempts to seem politically correct. This kind of humor, which jibes at the subtler aspects of racism, is popping up all over American comedy. It was perhaps first popularized on The Office where main character Michael Scott refers to collard greens as “colored greens” and plans a “Diversity Day” where he forces all of his employees to act out ethnic stereotypes.

After watching the show at Second City, I reflected that discussions of race in popular comedy have evolved quite a bit over the past decade or so. As I remember, mainstream white comedians and sitcoms during the late 90s and early 2000s (such as Seinfeld and Friends) tended to ignore the subject of race altogether. Only irreverent black comedians such as Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle were brazen enough to talk about racism and to make fun of white America. Both comedians were masters of transforming some of the most serious, controversial and taboo topics into something funny. For example, one sketch on the Chappelle Show included a mock documentary of the first black man to poop in a “white’s only” toilet.

It seems that Rock and Chapelle’s brand of defiant comedy has now faded. The new trend in race comedy is much subtler and gentler. Racial stereotypes are reversed, and racism is portrayed in the form of misplaced comments and Freudian slips. For example, in one classic moment on The Office, Michael Scott offends his employee Oscar by suggesting that the term Mexican is an offensive ethnic slur rather than a nationality. Characters with unintentional racial bias (such as The Office’s Michael Scott) are portrayed as ignorant, silly, obnoxious—but also harmless and ultimately forgivable. It strikes me as interesting that modern comedy chooses to portray racism so often as a deeply embarrassing and unintentional social faux pas.

However, this new kind of race-conscious comedy does reflect an evolving awareness that racism is a nuanced, complex, and intractable phenomenon. We find it funny precisely because it exposes reality. We live in a society deeply confused about race. (Should one say Black or African-American? Hispanic or Latino? White or Caucasian?) As a culture, we fumble to bridge our differences, struggle to disguise our prejudices, and worry secretly that we might “say the wrong thing”. It is no surprise that today’s comedians have begun poking fun at our generation’s discomfort with the topic of race.

It is striking to me that while American comedy and pop culture remain obsessed with the topic of race, the subject of class-based prejudice is largely invisible in both these mediums. Class-based bias (unconscious or deliberate) also permeates many aspects of our culture and everyday lives—and yet this phenomenon is rarely recognized.

The Second City Show I attended clearly conveyed the message that racism is distasteful. However, the show was much less sensitive to the subject of class. A number of the short sketches unashamedly ridiculed lower class or ethnic whites. One skit captured a conversation between two white, Chicago bike cops with exaggerated blue-collar accents. The theater rippled with laughter when one of the cops describes his recent “commuter vacation” where he and his wife took a week off from work and commuted to the casinos in Hammond, Indiana—because they could not afford to travel to Las Vegas. Later, the audience roared when a hairy-chested, mafia-esque Italian character delivered a monologue that advertised his low-cost health insurance (an obvious scam). In another sketch, the audience snickered at an ambiguously foreign cab driver who, refuses to change the ethnic radio station in his car for passengers.

When I left that show that night, I agreed with my friends that much of what we had seen was funny. Yet, I felt uncomfortable with the degrading depiction of lower-class people in many of the jokes. I also felt uncomfortable with the writers’ implicit assumption that its audience members were all a part of the upper middle class. The show’s depiction of lower-class whites seemed so incongruous with its commentary about race. The show’s insinuation that lower class whites are somehow silly, stupid, trashy, and un-American left me very uneasy.

However, it would be wrong to blame Second City for my uneasiness. Comedy only mirrors the attitudes of larger society. And while making racist jokes is rightfully taboo in today’s society—making fun of poor or ethnic whites is culturally permissible and seems to go largely unnoticed.

Our socioeconomic status can in many ways unfairly shape our educational and career opportunities—but Americans seldom acknowledge this fact. I’m not sure whether America’s absence of class-consciousness is a triumph of capitalism or a consequence of long-standing racial and ethnic rivalries. Perhaps our belief in the concept (or myth) of American meritocracy makes it difficult for Americans to acknowledge that class divisions do exist in our society, and that socioeconomic status is a barrier to equal opportunity for many. At a time where a college education is both prohibitively expensive and essential for entry into a middle-class profession—the “rags to riches” American dream is far less common. As many of you are probably aware, the past twenty years has seen the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the middle class get smaller. The Second City Show I attended suggests that we live in a divided society, where the upper-middle class has little compassion, understanding or interest in the lives of the poor and uneducated. The worst part of all of this is that Americans use our belief in meritocracy and individualism to deny that we make judgments about people based on class.

The fact that class prejudices are not discussed in mainstream American comedy (which is perhaps the medium where controversial issues can be discussed with the most honesty) does not mean that these prejudices do not exist. It only means that Americans are largely oblivious to our prevailing attitudes about class and the damage these attitudes might cause.

We live in a highly materialistic and consumerist society where the cars we drive, the shoes we wear, and the houses we live in are often mistaken for badges of our self-worth. And now we are in the midst of the Great Recession, where more and more middle-class people are slipping into poverty. I hope that more artists, songwriters, writers, comedians and others who help form American culture will take this time to reconsider America’s obsession with wealth, disdain for poverty, and discreet class prejudices. It is time that Americans begin to approach the topic of class with some of the same seriousness, interest and insightfulness with which we have begun to think about race.

Jewish campaigners say they have “no objection to the paintings, but have reacted with anger at a series of talks given to accompany them.”

The man behind the exhibition and the talks is Rod Cox, 62, who visited Gaza and the West Bank a few times in recent years. The exhibition, Loss Of Innocence, has been on tour since September, visiting universities, town halls and, most recently, Manchester Cathedral. It was taken to a Quaker venue in Marple, Stockport, on Monday evening and plans are under way to take it to schools in the north west.

Manchester Rep Council President Lucille Cohen said: “Rod Cox is disseminating hatred. His talk and text accompanying his exhibition either indirectly implied or overtly conveyed a number of unsubstantiated assumptions about Israel. I am astounded that Christians of good will would seem willing to become a party to this.”

I guess that Lucille Cohen better read the Goldstone report. The list of Israeli war crimes against humanity is totally and overwhelmingly substantiated. As it happens, the Jewish community leaders who rush to assist the Jewish state give a clear message of Jewish collective support of Israel and its crimes. It is also almost amusing to read Zionist Lucille Cohen trying to tell Christians what the meaning of ‘good will’ is all about.

Zionist Federation co-president Joy Wolfe said: “If the pictures had been allowed to speak for themselves most people, myself included, would have found little reason to criticise the concept of the exhibition. But they weren’t. They were accompanied by Rod Cox’s captions which demonised Israel and invented some truly remarkable allegations.”

The pictures obviously speak for themselves and as for the Palestinian cause, slowly but surely, it becomes a universal cause. Someone also should remind Zionist Wolfe that the children of Gaza live in a siege, neither they nor their picture can travel around unless Mr Cox kindly delivers. God bless Mr Cox for his activism.

I would suggest that Britain do itself a great favour if it proceeds with the idea of comparative literature and combine the teaching of Anne Frank with the story of Gaza children. At the end of the day, history is meaningful once it is put in perspective.

Something’s wrong somewhere.

– Clifford Odets (Golden Boy, 1937)

Something’s wrong somewhere.

– William Saroyan (My Heart’s in the Highlands, 1939)

It’s unlikely that Michelle or Barack Obama have read or given much thought to American playwrights Clifford Odets and William Saroyan. Both men found their soaring voices during the Great Depression—great grand-daddy of the “Great Recession.” (Frankly, I prefer to call it what it is, “Great Depression II.”) Then, as now, it took gutsy artists to cut through the rich-slime world of Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers Hollywood fantasies, to announce that the Emperor and Empress were wearing nothing but their vanity.

Perhaps it was easier then! Americans still read and the informed and urbane actually went to see plays with bite and social relevance. There was a labor movement, and men would stand up in their union halls and they learned how to hone their truths with hard-edged words about “bosses” and “the working man.” Women would read Hans Christian Andersen’s fables to their kids, and teach their children frugality and compassion for the less fortunate. They told the old stories–folk tales about right and wrong, monsters, and decency. Poets like Edna St. Vincent Millay took up the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti when they were scape-goated as anarchists. One of the most popular men in the country was Will Rogers, who would spin his lasso over the floor, and wryly comment that he only believed what he read in the papers—and everyone knew that meant he didn’t believe a word of it—and neither should they!

No one twirls the lasso anymore; Americans may be the most de-contextualized people on the planet. About a month ago I caught a TV glimpse of Mother Michelle down on a beach on the oil-slicked Gulf of Mexico, urging her countrymen to come on down: enjoy the water, gulp the gumbo, support the economy! A couple of weeks later, there she is in low-cut evening wear—nice cleavage, First Lady!–trying to out-cougar Naomi Campbell! Seems there’s a gala at the White House, starring billionaire beetle, Paul McCartney. Flash-forward a couple of weeks, and there she is with 10-year-old Sasha at the most expensive hotel in Spain. Word is the First Family is picking up the tab for their “personal expenses,” but tax-payers are out at least $375,000 for fuel for Air Force 2, expenses for accompanying Secret Service, staff, etc. (A mere $6500 per night for the hotel—not counting room service!)

Hey, what’s a lousy $375,000 these days?—chump-change for a little mom-daughter bonding. Ask the unemployed oyster-shuckers on the Gulf Coast what it’s worth. Ask Mr. and Mrs. Dispossessed American, losing their house to the bailed-out banks.

Just don’t ask the Clintons. Apparently, they’ve no problem shucking $2,000,000 for daughter Chelsea’s wedding. Remember when Hillary’s failed presidential bid ran up a huge debt? The Dems boo-hooed: Help poor Hillary pay back her stiletto-heeled dupes! Remember the Haiti earthquake of 6 months ago? There was Bill and new pal, George Warmonger Bush, doing their soft-shoe routine in the rubble of Port-Au-Prince, holding out their hats for American kids to send their pennies to the starving kids of Haiti.

Last I heard, there’s still a lot of starving kids in Haiti, and a whole lot more of them in Iraq since the American invasion and occupation. How many kids could $2,000,000 feed?

Moscow is choking, Pakistan is drowning, Gaza is withering, war clouds gather over Iran and Korea… dead zones in the oceans… but, rejoice! Chelsea has married her investment banker!

Something’s wrong somewhere!

Nine years after 9/11, and no one has bothered to build scale models of the twin towers and shoot scale-model jets into them to show how such a free-fall collapse could or could not have occurred! We’re lost in the spin machines, “science” and “truth” serve the state and money, and we can laugh with Bush over missing weapons of mass destruction—and missing limbs on Iraqi kids!

We have no context for the hurrying images of our post-modern, technological existence: merely a fading mythological memory of Herculean heroes—Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln—all of whom, on closer inspection, had feet of clay. The long-sustaining, post-war vision of the future—the dream of a brave and independent people creating lives of fulfillment and security—recedes as we approach, and we find ourselves in a hell-hall of mirrors with nothing but distorted images of corrugated figures of “the working man,” “blue-collar,” “professionals,” “progressives,” “conservatives,” “man,” “woman”—and looming over all, like gods, giants and the Biblical Nephilim—our “celebrities,” the Colossi of fame and fortune whom we love and fear and worship, for they possess the power of life and death.

Perhaps if we had a literary history, perhaps if we were still a people who read and thought, and supported activist theater… perhaps then we would be a people who could learn and grow in maturity and depth of vision. Then we might understand plays like Odets’ and Saroyan’s, and Eugene O’Neil’s The Hairy Ape—poem-dramas about the dignity, even heroism, of “the little people.” Then we might be wide-angle people with some comprehension of the breadth of human history; even our own–short, blood-drenched, and syncopated with acts of courage. We could meet and tell each other our stories. We’d gear our education, and evaluate it, not on the sham of No Kid Left Behind programs, and the equal sham and shame of Bush-era test-oriented “teaching,” but on how well we told our stories, how well we acted under pressure; and the core, humane values we shared.

But we have no literary sense of ourselves. We do not see the great plays of the past acted on our wide-screen HDTVs, with their endless sports, killings, canned-laughter, packaged news and commentaries, unreality shows. We have Law and Order re-runs and spin-offs to teach us of the dangers of our streets and our sole salvation in the surrendering of self to official—and, increasingly officious and intrusive—authority. Mindless sitcoms demean life and trivialize the struggles of the “common folk” (actually, the majority). We no longer know how to talk to one another, to hear the simple eloquence of truth and moral character. We’re a nation of pretense—hollow men and women, parading like mannequins in the malls of our children’s nightmares.

I know that the past can acquire rosy hues. I don’t bemoan any loss of the worst of it—the waste, ignorance and abuse. But… what cataracts have we grown that we can’t even see through the glitterati who possess and oppress us now?

Spoken by the inimitable character of Samantha Jones, this is the dubious moral message of Sex and the City 2.  The movie has been justly disparaged for its absurd plotline, crass materialism, shallow feminism and palpable Orientalism.  But here’s a point the movie’s numerous critics have missed:  what’s really worrying about Sex and the City 2 is not its Orientalism or crass materialism, but how easily this seemingly benign bubble-gum flick ends up fighting a very macho war of global one-upmanship on the bodies of women and gay men.  Let me elaborate.      

The movie is clearly inferior to the HBO series, which – within the parameters of crass materialism and shallow feminism – at least offered up some punchy writing during its seven-year run from 1998 to 2004 (in 2007, Time magazine honoured it as among the top 100 TV shows of all times).  Beyond this obvious difference in quality, however, movie and series share an interesting trait: each speaks to a uniquely American moment. If the series reflected the self-assuredness of the late 1990s, the movie is the face of post economic meltdown America – a country that’s struggling to cope with the loss of its once-unquestioned status as economic and cultural superpower. 

The series, at its core, was a celebration of American strength and the ideal of individualism, albeit with a “girl power” twist that was regretfully mistaken for feminism.  The four central characters were independent women who could do anything they put their minds to; who wanted men, but didn’t seem to need them (Samantha famously rejected a lover because of the “funky” taste of his cum).

It was also a tribute to the modern, affluent American metropolis as a site of economic dynamism and self-discovery, where one could transcend the parochial ties of class and background, along with the small-mindedness of racism, ageism and homophobia. It wasn’t an accident that we knew little of the girls’ pasts and that Carrie’s favourite drink was ‘the cosmopolitan.’ The city was portrayed as an incubator of ‘progressive’ values – the kind that was thought to make America truly great, and New York City even cooler than Paris.  This wasn’t rocket science, but it was breezy, all-American oomph.   

In the movie, there’s deflation all around.  Manhattan’s avant-garde chic is reduced to boxed Chinese take-out, a gloomily lit apartment and bad, reality TV.  The girls are vulnerable and grasping, desperate to hold on to their depleted youth, vitality, and money.  There are multiple references to the miserable state of the economy.  One can’t help but feel sorry for these fallen icons, saddled as they are with stressful jobs, screeching children and clunky husbands (who, in one scene, haplessly gape the braless breasts of Charlotte’s Irish nanny). 

It’s no wonder that when the girls finally do find relief, it is outside the city – and country – when a wealthy sheik offers Samantha a PR job in Abu Dhabi. The girls tag along as Samantha sets off on an all expenses paid trip to the “Middle East,” where Carrie anticipates “desert moons, Scheherazade, magic carpets.” 

But the “new Middle East” far exceeds such standard Orientalist fare.  While there are camels, harem pants and picnics on the desert, there are also fleets of Mercedes, seven star hotels (with suites priced at $22,000 per night), and posh nightclubs populated by professional soccer players and other jetsetters. 

Abu Dhabians are depicted as having a jolly good time, despite their “layers and layers of tradition.” The women, covered up though they are, have lavish, leisurely lives: they wear couture, eat French fries by the pool, and airily chat on bejewelled cell-phones.  This is no backwater, this “Abu Dhabi” (the film’s actually shot in Morocco).  In fact, in what seems to be the new global epicentre, Carrie casually bumps into ex-flame, Aidan, who’s out on a business trip. 

Critics riled up about the film’s Orientalism should reconsider.  Though unwittingly, Sex and the City 2 actually challenges ethnocentric and colonial stereotypes of the world order, and the expectation that knowledge, goods and power will always flow from a (Western) centre to a (non-Western) periphery.

If anything, the film reflects the self-serving auto-Orientalism of new Arab capitalism, which markets cities such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi as enviable hybrids of mystical traditionalism and cutting-edge cosmopolitanism; where one can enjoy a romantic Arabian Nights lifestyle while achieving mega business success.  Not surprisingly, parts of the film roll have the feel of an ad for Emirates Airlines, and we’re also presented with a ‘purity’ that Americans apparently lack. There’s Carrie’s genteel butler, a migrant worker from India, who cherishes whatever little time he spends with his wife, and a kind-eyed shoe salesman, who returns Carrie’s misplaced passport while graciously refusing her cash reward.  An Australian financier, whom Samantha wants to bed, acknowledges that he finds the veiled sexuality of Arab women most alluring (he says so while she’s groping his crotch in public!).

In the end, the movie sets itself up for a culturally anxious question. Why should the girls return to their sagging lives in stale old Manhattan? What is America’s U.S.P.?

The answer, of course, is sex – loud, in-your-face sex, and the right of women to have it. 

American cultural and moral superiority, it seems, boils down to its women’s ability to fill their purses with condoms, drop their panties in the office, and simulate oral sex at parties.  Abu Dhabi may be a paradise filled with peacocks and Lamborghinis, but it’s a “backward” land of sexually silenced women.  America may have had its butt kicked by this parvenu of globalization (symbolically, the girls are evicted from their plush hotel after Samantha’s arrest for indecent behaviour), but it’s where women run bra-less and free, wear tuxes to gay weddings, and radiantly sing Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” at karaoke bars. 

Though overstated and caricatured in the movie, the message is one with tremendous appeal among American liberals and self-defined ‘social progressives.’  Director Michael Patrick King, who knows his audience, has shrewdly tried to cash in on it.  But if women’s rights and gay rights are a means of renovating America’s troubled identity, we should be very, very worried. 

Don’t get me wrong. I celebrate the America of same-sex marriage and unapologetic, ageless libido.  However, turning hard-won sexual rights and gender equality into badges of national honour and smug patriotic pride is not only pitiful, it is dangerous.  Especially when one considers how easily doing so is exploited by, and for, power.

Colonial regimes have routinely used the “liberation of women” as a justification for imperial intervention and expansion.  Predictably, the bombing and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan have been repeatedly legitimized along these lines.  Parts of Sex and the City 2 could believably have been scripted by a George W. Bush (in one of his more lucid moments) or a Bibi Netanyahu – an eerie quality that’s made this rather idiotic, forgettable movie stick in my mind.