Sunday July 11, 2010

THE CONSERVATIVE REVIVAL, PART 43,899. At The Corner, Mike Potemra thinks he's seen another sign of American revival:

I had no idea, until seeing this commercial, that there was a roller-derby league centered in Manhattan. I went online to see when the next match was; turns out it’s Saturday night at the Hunter College gym. Tickets, unfortunately, are sold out. You read that correctly: The Saturday-night roller-derby match is sold out, in 2010, on the Upper East Side. The limits of the possible are changing in this country, continually, and not just in politics. If you stop and think about it, every day should be the Fourth of July.

No one warned this poor dork that the Gotham Girls roller derby shows, which I had the pleasure of watching last year, are more modern, punk rock, and girl-powerish than your average conservative culture cop could countenance. "This probably isn't a family-friendly entertainment," warns comrade Daniel Foster. "... the girls of the league have handles like 'Surly Temple' and 'Angela Slamsbury.'" (This is where Mom drops the meatloaf and Dad angrily rustles his newspaper.)

Foster also quotes from his own coverage of Gotham Girls as "a cub reporter writing arts & culture for a New York weekly," in which role he observed,

At what point did Gen-X’s fervent commitment to irony become indistinguishable from Gen-Y’s earnest enjoyment of kitsch?

You can see why National Review snapped this guy up.

Comrade Potemra is on the spot: Admit doubleplusungoodness, or attempt to defend the aggressively-named warrior princesses? He takes the coward's way out:

You mentioned both irony and kitsch; maybe roller derby succeeds in working at different levels simultaneously? And, come to think of it, maybe it always did? Quite coincidentally, I was reading yesterday a Franciscan religious tract from 1951...

Go ahead and read it all if you dare, but I warn you: it's the sort of thing at which even Ross Douthat might throw up his hands and cry, "Oh barf."

I wonder which of these boy geniuses will be the first to write about how hypocritical it is that he was refused admittance to a lesbian bar.