The key question really is, who is telling them they are shlubs, telling them they are being cheated (true!), and then pointing their ire in the wrong direction? We know who, but unfortunately, they don't.
I mean, conservatives have been filling Joe Sixpack's ears with poison for decades based on false accusations, it's not like metrosexuals and hipsters travel out to the suburbs on weekends to point and laugh. But while Joe has been manipulated by the Right, I'm not comfortable with negating his own agency. We really, really can't dismiss the subliminal feeling of power being white, being male, being straight, being Christian confers on a lot of people. It's a feeling of privilege they aren't even aware of until they start to feel it may be taken away.
I had no idea what you were talking about (having ditched my last tv about 35 years ago, and essentially just ignoring alla national mags, web-based news, daily papers...have I left out anything? Anyway, never saw that ad before just now googling (and yes, my eyes ARE googly – why do you ask?) Ahem. Ok, where was I? Ah, pajama dude. A guy wearing pajamas, planning to think about maybe gettin' health care insurance. Yeah, just the sort of activity that would make right wing heads explode.
I think "point and laugh" is the key here - I hear a LOT of "they're LAUGHING AT YOU!" from dorks like Tucker and Alex and their ilk, and it seems to be the message that even if they're not laughing out loud in your presence, they're doing it elsewhere, and the mere idea of such impropriety engraved the chudosphere.
For that matter, Alex has been spending years playing The Imperial March as bumper music, and repeating lines from Darth Vader and Baron Harkonnen.
We got a shitload of this stuff during the Scott Walker years, how "liberal elites in Madison are laughing at the hard-working folk of Rural Wisconsin." When the truth was we never gave them much thought at all (aside from wanting them to have decent health care and good pay and a secure retirement, not because they're special for being rural, but because all human beings should have these things.)
But then I admit I did give them quite a lot of thought once they started sticking us with asshole Governors, but believe me, I wasn't laughing then.
Being poorly informed is shared regardless of party affiliation. Shouldn't take any great knowledge this cycle to have gotten off the ass and vote to block Republican wins but D voters couldn't manage. So, you know, MAGA-class stupidity there.
As for the MAGAts' love of the bad guys: the system's rotted and, circling back to the limited knowledge of most voters, the only solution is blowing it all up. (Maybe mandatory: Democrat voters who felt the same simply didn't vote apparently.) Meanwhile, the ideal Party of Trump Man is Hegseth. I mean, come on, y'all know he is. (Gaetz was the parody of one.)
I don't agree with all of it but he is very much on to something. And given all that, sure, bastards willing to act no matter how destructively, is attractive. More than -- again -- defenders of a rotted system.
I suppose I should add that when liberal democracy (a term that's so insensible that one would assume it's yet another conservative perversion of language but apparently not), the way is paved for fascism. So sure, of course, only natural that there's an audience for fascistic characters and stuff.
Not to mention the pathetic depictions of what stupid fascists think liberal democrats are like (ie feckless, brie-loving, vegetarian, rules-adhering, effeminate, pencil-necked geeks).
I realize that in our personal experiences we are all limited by our geography, and the social spread we are knowledgeable about within it. That acknowledged, the people I work with who probably voted 5 to 1 for Trump are not just working class, but highly educated mechanical and electrical engineer types as well, and neither class much resembles the stereotypes described in the leftish media. For one thing they don't have declining incomes, quite the opposite. The people I know with declining incomes mostly don't vote and only have a dim idea who's running for president and no idea whatsoever who's running for anything else. And as far as who is looking down on them. Well, there's us. And for good reason.
Although resentment is a powerful factor, I think the rightward turn really has a lot more to do with fashion on one level and the inability to "graduate" high school on another. By "graduate" I don't mean the paper diploma, but the clique-ish resentments that for too many never go that far away. And by "fashion" I don't mean Walter White's hat or Tony Soprano's car, but what the cool guys in their circles are saying and doing. Those are tougher nuts to crack, so to speak.
Of course with comments like these I'm falling into the trap of discounting the concentrated and highly effective efforts by powerful forces to brainwash the softer minds among us, which is the main cause of the problem.
To go one step further in characterizing the income-downers, what I am hearing is a sense that not only do those folks not want to be bothered with the political nonsense, they do not want there to BE anything political – rather, they want it all to just go away, via whatever strongman manages to git 'er done.
For a while - specifically a few weeks before the catastrophe - I speculated that these apolitical folks might actually like a President who just did the damn job without needing to be the constant center of attention, might appreciate a President who didn't see a need to constantly set us one against the other, so that politics and argument infects every aspect of our lives. Might be nice, if you're not into politics, to see politics occupy less space in our culture.
Anyway, they may have appreciated that, but not enough to go out and actually vote for it.
"historical gold reserve of our civic tradition and national narrative”
When I was in 7th grade, we read" The Frontiersman" by Allan Eckert. Eckert was a local author, and my 7th grade teacher knew him personally. I guess that's why he thought the book would be okay reading for a bunch of seventh graders even though the book is unbelievably violent.
(I think that Cormac McCarthy was very much influenced by Allan Eckert when he wrote Blood Meridian.)
The book gave me nightmares. But you know, I have no problem a picturing Americans as gleeful, genocidal scalp hunting maniacs. That's what I think of when I hear about the proposed bill in Missouri legalizing and organizing bounty hunters to assist with the rounding up and deportation of brown people. A lot of people feel at home in the new regime.
Their leader, the leader of the party bitching about moral degeneracy, is a convicted rapist.
Oddly enough, bounty-hunting is hard work. The folks who advocate for it seem for the most part to be bounty-assumers, just waiting for god and Elon to dump it on them.
Interesting that the Reich seems prepared to eradicate the smallest mention of sexuality that a child might be exposed to, but I haven't heard them say jack and/or shit about explicit violence in entertainment. Hmmm! 🤔
Ah. Hadn't thought of that. And the military parades.
So yeah – it's inevitable.
And you are correct – it WILL be fun! Mine will be soaked thru 'n thru with red dye (as a man of discernment, I always order the Nº4), with a huge pile of meringue tinted to look like pus, oozing everywhere.
There was always something seedy about bounty hunters in classic westerns. (Henry Fonda’s character in The Tin Star is the only heroic one that comes to mind.). It wasn’t till the spaghetti western of the 60s—to be exact till For a Few Dollars More— that bounty hunters really made it big. Nowadays, of course, you can’t have a western without one. Not surprising that Trumpists would want to apply that solution to a nonexistent problem. But what can you say about men who seem to have taken Liberty Valance as some sort of role model?
Conservatives looking at Tony Soprano or Judge Dredd as inspiration or role models? In a way, this points to the central nub of the entire problem: Soprano and Dredd are FICTIONAL CHARACTERS!
Conservatives can no longer distinguish fantasy from reality. Is it any wonder that they "do their own research" and discover that Ivermectin cures everything, that the moon landings were faked, that the weather is being controlled by a secret government, that Democrats mobilized an armada of 10,000 busses to move illegal immigrants from state to state to vote illegally?
Spot on. We see the same with Pete Hegseth through his ghostwriter no doubt mentioning Mordor in one of his diatribes. These morons mix metaphors and easily switch between fiction and fact because their psychology has made them fearful and anxious. Why? Because if real AND imaginary problems.
They prefer to live in the imaginary because they have more control there. Real problems take real action. Policy and such? That's for sissies! Like laundry and dishes, purely women's work. I'll just drink beer, fart, and yell at the TV, sports or news it's the same.
Let's get football coaches and NASCAR drivers for generals! Yeah!
Hence, the Maestro's offering a few months ago on the fashie/fundie love for AI art.
I remember back in 2001 or whatever, when the Sopranos had that Columbus Day episode & thinking not that this was dangerously ill-intentioned but that it wouldn't age well (not to mention irritatingly irrelevant). Here we are, more than 20 years later &....
Hey GM - is my intro to this remotely accurate? I remember as I wrote it thinking- "What I really need to do is to run this by a medievalist - I'm just a dumbass horticulturalist!"
Great observation. The narratives we create for ourselves are largely imaginary. And all the more when we feel insecure.
We create myths and latch onto secret explanations which help us regain a sense of control.
I recall seeing one of the Rambo movies in Santa Barbara with a friend who is now a successful screenwriter. We were watching the movie purely as silly entertainment. There was an older white couple who kept expressing different feelings about how Rambo was taking out his enemies one at a time, as if this were a reality of how it gets done.
That couple multiplied by the millions is what we have come to!
Those folks have suffered NO 'decline' in media literacy. It's the media generally whose literacy (not to mention moral compass, and purpose generally, other than profiteering) has 'declined' (read: driven off a cliff) and the worst elements of it are drilling straight into the brains of those folks morning/noon/night. I've noted for some time that when state-sponsored media are abandoned, the corporate media, being all that's left, assume the position of state media. In this instance the corporate media have expanded to envelope all the apps, 'social' sites, even the cat-video mongers.
Yes, it's all very true. But what's your alternative?
I've been worrying about this lately on a very personal level, as a 65-year-old gay white male who is becoming increasingly fascinated by Westerns. I know, Westerns are inherently racist and sexist and corny and the real Westerners are beyond fed up with Western mythology. But the Western hero at least offers a model for a nontoxic masculinity that isn't just standing around speaking up for women and minorities and expressing one's feelings like anything, but actually risking one's life and limb for a cause, and acting brave and gallant and resourceful and stoical and standing up for what's right, without having to quip at length the latest opinions about martinis or Mrs. Humphrey Ward or whatever to be admitted to the Kool Kid's Klub. That's something we haven't really seen since the late 60s, when (in a muddled attempt to emulate European modernism) Hollywood went full out on gangsters and rogue cops and other antiheroes. I grew up back then with guys who mistook villains for heroes just as Trumpists do today. (Meanwhile, while the antiheroes went villianous, the villains became wimpy killer psychos or perverted masterminds like Dr. Evil; homophobia at work.)
So what models of masculinity did I have growing up? The highly glorified gangsters of mainstream Hollywood who still I would argue dominate what it means to be a man in America today. Against that what did progressive American culture have to offer, particularly after postmodernism made retreat into high culture (my solution as a kid) impossible? On the one hand, I could become a progressive prig, denouncing white male domination in all its forms (but never to the point of actually doing anything, because I wouldn't want to be accused of being a white knight and besides we're all good pacifists here) and never behaving in any way that would earn the opprobrium of women and minority activists anywhere; I had too much of a sense of humor and too much of a love for high culture for that. On the other hand, as a gay man I could become a bitchy sassy queen with fabulous taste just like the queers on TV, throwing shade at my enemies in all directions. But I soon discovered, whether online or in person, I couldn't any more quip my way out of a situation and throw shade on cue than I could outdraw a Hollywood gunslinger; every confrontation I had with a vicious queen had me ending up like Elisha Cook, Jr. confronted by Jack Palance in Shane. Not to mention that the fabulous taste of those bitchy sassy queens, when it was not out-and-out tacky, inevitably resolved itself into the fusty gentility of a MGM costume drama.
Frankly, caught as I am between the gangster, the humorless prig, and the bitchy queen, Gary Cooper starts to seem pretty attractive, and perhaps even possibly attainable by mortal man. (Unlike superheroes--the nerdy alternative, and I grew up ten years too early for nerddom--who by definition aren't.)
Somehow I managed to avoid the 'models of masculinism' dopiness. I think I felt then as now that models of humanity are more to my liking.
But I eventually stepped off the train of this culture of televidiocy when it occurred to me (well, more likely some media maven knocked it into my enthickened skull) that commercial culture is death, and when you get the vids for free then YOU are the product being marketed to the corpos.
But, to be fair, Gary Cooper was always an unattainable ideal. Little wonder that so many men looked at "strong, silent type" and decided they couldn't hack it, and flocked to "loud whiny type" when that became available.
"Now if you notice, this bookshelf (crammed as it is with theoretical glop), has inches of dust atop the whole mess. We at UDSI take the term 'Upscale' seriously, and what that means in the real world is Jordan Peterson and JD Vance books are stacked to the ceiling every morning, and fly out the door all day. Doesn't get any more upscaled than that."
The Iliad and the Aeneid (not to mention Beowulf and Le mort d'Arthur and Orlando Furioso) are hardly without racism and sexism. Heroic and chivalric narratives, which exist in almost all cultures, generally have some dodgy history in back of them. (And in any case, I was repeating conventional wisdom; there are plenty of westerns with no Native American characters at all--which make them about as racist as Citizen Kane or Bringing up Baby--and even a few female characters who aren't the usual drips or hussies.)
Agog at the egregious Jonah G's Goldfinger metaphor. Considering his inability to tell the difference between fascism and communism, he must have been scratching his head at a movie like Stalingrad. So, if the liberals are irradiating the Fort Knox of our national valor, where does 007 fit in. And who or what does Oddjob represent, the continuing threat at South Korea's border?
I see no reason why someone who likes Trump - who he is, his history of grift and crime, his narcissism and petulance, his high school teen sense of entitlement and vengeance - would not think villains are heroes. Like one, like the other. What I’m still struggling with is how amoral you have to be to like Trump. That level of amorality has no class or educational distinction, apparently, which is the most disturbing thing about America politics. That it dates back to the Founders’ acceptance of slavery and the country’s unwillingness to reject it except through a terrible war doesn’t provide much reassurance that this too will pass. Somehow cultural analysis is even more depressing than the political news, which is currently focused on the morons poised to take over the executive and legislative branches (joining the judiciary).
Caesar Catiline sounds like the cool linear park in the upper reaches of the vatican and across the various structures of ancient Rome. Imagine them toga-dudes strolling along, literally looking down on the little people. Like the High Line.
This is brilliant but the game is still afoot, homey. Let's add to it the results from a recent psych study. Adolescent boys were told their scores on fake gender test were more like girls than boys. The older guys got defensive and changed their behavior and responses not only to stereotypical masculine but also to more violent and aggressive answers/behavior.
Socio-economic status was a factor. Parental expectations were explicitly part of the study. What their parents would think of the boys if they behaved or turned out to be less masculine.
Having a breadwinner naterially successful lifestyle figured in the desired identity.
We might as well go all in here, since we're being more anecdotal than scientific.
Humans are not entirely the same as other primates. We behave in far more complex and contradictory patterns.
But the baboon is alive and well in part of our thinking. Our hierarchies still have the undertone of a baboon troop.
The profile Roy has sketched also matches the men I know who are openly fascist and do want to kill people or see them killed. Their grievances demand a sacrifice. Animal death for the meat on which Caesar feeds is no longer enough.
Today the world could use a good therapist, an understatement. Even Tony Soprano knew he needed help.
What we are seeing is a mass displacement of identity, who am I in this brave new world, and simultaneously a manipulation of humanity to interpret its estrangement as existentially bad calling for extreme actions. Too few are savvy enough to realize and do not ask when to say no.
Walter White in particular is a case of the slow boil the frog never feels. We wake up one day and the dystopia we imagined when things were anything but has become our national reality.
North Korea seems to be the place these folks have us headed. They are already there psychologically and don't know it.
But if we're going to be scientific, there's some sampling error here, isn't there? Trump wins, and we go and seek out people who support him and hold them up to the light, subject them to the minutest scrutiny, record their every word and thought, as a sign of where America - hell, all of humanity - is headed. Meanwhile, the half of the voters who didn't vote for Trump receive no examination at all. Half the country, but they can't be an indication of where our country is headed because there were about 350,000 fewer of them in the key states.
I thought we were limiting this to the white males with toxic masculinity insecurity. Are there macho shitheads on the left, too? Holy smokes! Give that boy a cigar! C'mon, boys! Money for nothing and the chick's for free!
I will not have the shitty-metaphor-writing GENIUS of Thomas Friedman so casually overlooked.
Let's NEVER forget this is a man who, looking at the monstrous clusterfuck of the Iraq war, came up with, "When you find yourself in a hole, you're gonna need a lot more shovels."
No, I don't know what he meant, nobody did, like I said, GENIUS.
"a normal person can enjoy the Joker or Richard III without idolizing and posting fan tributes to them"
There's another issue Serwer could have talked about, an inability among conservatives to separate aesthetics from morality. Richard III is fun! (I had a problem with Dark Knight, though, because it took itself so seriously; the wickedness of the protagonists including the fascist Batman was so unrelieved, and Joker was so tormented—it's a better story when he's having fun. Richard III is also a ham role, but you're never asked to pity him for the trauma he's experienced.)
It works in the other direction, too, when a wouldbe film critic like Goldberg or Douthat is complaining about some movie where the decent people are portrayed as liberal, like the recent items in the Star Wars franchise where the fascism in the Empire and the diversity in the Rebellion, left implicit in the older shows, is really in their face and they can't enjoy it at all. If they like it, they have to be able to tag it as "good" in some sense, and if ideology compels them to tag it as "bad" they can't like it.
“But comics, TV, and movies have been around for decades and, until recently, casual readers who were not mentally ill could tell the bad guys from the good guys just by instinct.”
Given that multiple comic book characters pop up in this discussion, it’s possibly worth nothing that “recently” goes back at least 40 years now, as a not-insignificant amount of this nonsense can be laid at the feet of Frank Miller and “The Dark Knight.” For those not familiar with a four-issue miniseries from the mid-80s, TDN is a satirical take on Batman in which an aging Bruce Wayne come out of retirement, kills the Joker, beats Superman almost to death, then fakes his own death to lead a vigilante army, allegedly in the cause of justice. Unfortunately, most readers, including Hollywood director Zac Snyder, missed the satire part and just lapped up the whole “fuck yeah Batman kicks Superman’s ass and kills people now! That’s so cool!” part.
This lead to first comic books and then pop culture in general being inundated with antihero versions of former heroes. Everything had to be grim and gritty grimdark. And people, especially men who didn’t want to stop reading their favorite comic books but also didn’t want to be seen as immature, ate it up. If you want to know what soured the soul of so much of genX (my generation, to be clear) to where they now gleefully embrace Trump, you could do worse than looking here.
It's not exactly just a recent issue: the Iliad,* foundation of western civilization to hear some tell it, and one of seemingly stark differences between the sides. Now we're programmed by more than 500 years of textual reception to take the side of the Achaians as well as believing that any ancient poem about war celebrates war. So when you come in to actually reading it, you find out that every single one of the Greek generals are repellent in some important way & that the imagery and rhetoric repeatedly show warfare to be futile, violent, and brutal.
There's like two admirable characters: Hektor, of course, champion of the Trojan side; and Thersites, a low-born soldier, who in Book 1 mouths off about the common soldiers doing most of the dying but not getting any loot out of it. He gets beaten by Odysseus for that bit of truth-telling.
If only we could insult people with impunity by calling them "f-gg-t" and "r-t-rd," all the factories would return from Asia and the multi-billion dollar companies would happily pay a fat wage to men with high school diplomas (who somehow still only read at an 8th grade level).
And also, that waiter at Denny's should remove her nose ring, stop dying her hair, and let me smack her ass when she walks by. This is still AMERICA, damn it.
And then when their YOOGE ELECTORAL LANDSLIDE doesn't change the culture to their liking (because culture isn't determined by elections, duh) they'll get EVEN ANGRIER.
The key question really is, who is telling them they are shlubs, telling them they are being cheated (true!), and then pointing their ire in the wrong direction? We know who, but unfortunately, they don't.
I mean, conservatives have been filling Joe Sixpack's ears with poison for decades based on false accusations, it's not like metrosexuals and hipsters travel out to the suburbs on weekends to point and laugh. But while Joe has been manipulated by the Right, I'm not comfortable with negating his own agency. We really, really can't dismiss the subliminal feeling of power being white, being male, being straight, being Christian confers on a lot of people. It's a feeling of privilege they aren't even aware of until they start to feel it may be taken away.
Exactly.
The downfall of society began with pajamas man in the Obamacare ads.
I had no idea what you were talking about (having ditched my last tv about 35 years ago, and essentially just ignoring alla national mags, web-based news, daily papers...have I left out anything? Anyway, never saw that ad before just now googling (and yes, my eyes ARE googly – why do you ask?) Ahem. Ok, where was I? Ah, pajama dude. A guy wearing pajamas, planning to think about maybe gettin' health care insurance. Yeah, just the sort of activity that would make right wing heads explode.
So yeah, version 82 of Chris is correct.
I think "point and laugh" is the key here - I hear a LOT of "they're LAUGHING AT YOU!" from dorks like Tucker and Alex and their ilk, and it seems to be the message that even if they're not laughing out loud in your presence, they're doing it elsewhere, and the mere idea of such impropriety engraved the chudosphere.
For that matter, Alex has been spending years playing The Imperial March as bumper music, and repeating lines from Darth Vader and Baron Harkonnen.
We got a shitload of this stuff during the Scott Walker years, how "liberal elites in Madison are laughing at the hard-working folk of Rural Wisconsin." When the truth was we never gave them much thought at all (aside from wanting them to have decent health care and good pay and a secure retirement, not because they're special for being rural, but because all human beings should have these things.)
But then I admit I did give them quite a lot of thought once they started sticking us with asshole Governors, but believe me, I wasn't laughing then.
So true, but "they're shaking their heads sadly at you" just doesn't have the same bite somehow.
Guilty as charged (h/t autocorrect)
Being poorly informed is shared regardless of party affiliation. Shouldn't take any great knowledge this cycle to have gotten off the ass and vote to block Republican wins but D voters couldn't manage. So, you know, MAGA-class stupidity there.
As for the MAGAts' love of the bad guys: the system's rotted and, circling back to the limited knowledge of most voters, the only solution is blowing it all up. (Maybe mandatory: Democrat voters who felt the same simply didn't vote apparently.) Meanwhile, the ideal Party of Trump Man is Hegseth. I mean, come on, y'all know he is. (Gaetz was the parody of one.)
Not unrelated to my point (but to the post):
https://eladnehorai.substack.com/p/the-deeper-reasons-democrats-lost?r=1443i&triedRedirect=true
I don't agree with all of it but he is very much on to something. And given all that, sure, bastards willing to act no matter how destructively, is attractive. More than -- again -- defenders of a rotted system.
I suppose I should add that when liberal democracy (a term that's so insensible that one would assume it's yet another conservative perversion of language but apparently not), the way is paved for fascism. So sure, of course, only natural that there's an audience for fascistic characters and stuff.
Not to mention the pathetic depictions of what stupid fascists think liberal democrats are like (ie feckless, brie-loving, vegetarian, rules-adhering, effeminate, pencil-necked geeks).
Looks like some insecurity or projection there.
Arguably fascism is BASED on insecurity.
... based on daddy issues, really
Coupled with a steadfast refusal to admit that control is an illusion.
Cosmic.
Don't look at ME – I wear a turtleneck at all times!
I realize that in our personal experiences we are all limited by our geography, and the social spread we are knowledgeable about within it. That acknowledged, the people I work with who probably voted 5 to 1 for Trump are not just working class, but highly educated mechanical and electrical engineer types as well, and neither class much resembles the stereotypes described in the leftish media. For one thing they don't have declining incomes, quite the opposite. The people I know with declining incomes mostly don't vote and only have a dim idea who's running for president and no idea whatsoever who's running for anything else. And as far as who is looking down on them. Well, there's us. And for good reason.
Although resentment is a powerful factor, I think the rightward turn really has a lot more to do with fashion on one level and the inability to "graduate" high school on another. By "graduate" I don't mean the paper diploma, but the clique-ish resentments that for too many never go that far away. And by "fashion" I don't mean Walter White's hat or Tony Soprano's car, but what the cool guys in their circles are saying and doing. Those are tougher nuts to crack, so to speak.
Of course with comments like these I'm falling into the trap of discounting the concentrated and highly effective efforts by powerful forces to brainwash the softer minds among us, which is the main cause of the problem.
To go one step further in characterizing the income-downers, what I am hearing is a sense that not only do those folks not want to be bothered with the political nonsense, they do not want there to BE anything political – rather, they want it all to just go away, via whatever strongman manages to git 'er done.
For a while - specifically a few weeks before the catastrophe - I speculated that these apolitical folks might actually like a President who just did the damn job without needing to be the constant center of attention, might appreciate a President who didn't see a need to constantly set us one against the other, so that politics and argument infects every aspect of our lives. Might be nice, if you're not into politics, to see politics occupy less space in our culture.
Anyway, they may have appreciated that, but not enough to go out and actually vote for it.
"historical gold reserve of our civic tradition and national narrative”
When I was in 7th grade, we read" The Frontiersman" by Allan Eckert. Eckert was a local author, and my 7th grade teacher knew him personally. I guess that's why he thought the book would be okay reading for a bunch of seventh graders even though the book is unbelievably violent.
(I think that Cormac McCarthy was very much influenced by Allan Eckert when he wrote Blood Meridian.)
The book gave me nightmares. But you know, I have no problem a picturing Americans as gleeful, genocidal scalp hunting maniacs. That's what I think of when I hear about the proposed bill in Missouri legalizing and organizing bounty hunters to assist with the rounding up and deportation of brown people. A lot of people feel at home in the new regime.
Their leader, the leader of the party bitching about moral degeneracy, is a convicted rapist.
Oddly enough, bounty-hunting is hard work. The folks who advocate for it seem for the most part to be bounty-assumers, just waiting for god and Elon to dump it on them.
calling in a tip and getting $1000 is pretty easy
Say what you want about this country, but we *love* our bloodshed.
Interesting that the Reich seems prepared to eradicate the smallest mention of sexuality that a child might be exposed to, but I haven't heard them say jack and/or shit about explicit violence in entertainment. Hmmm! 🤔
Wait til they make the day Tubby got nicked in the ear a national holiday.
Not a chance. Queens Man be sayin' "WTF?! I didn't get the day off!"
Not that you loser worker-drones will get an actual day off, but there will be the mandatory Wearing Of The Ear Bandages, and won't that be fun!
Ah. Hadn't thought of that. And the military parades.
So yeah – it's inevitable.
And you are correct – it WILL be fun! Mine will be soaked thru 'n thru with red dye (as a man of discernment, I always order the Nº4), with a huge pile of meringue tinted to look like pus, oozing everywhere.
You?
There was always something seedy about bounty hunters in classic westerns. (Henry Fonda’s character in The Tin Star is the only heroic one that comes to mind.). It wasn’t till the spaghetti western of the 60s—to be exact till For a Few Dollars More— that bounty hunters really made it big. Nowadays, of course, you can’t have a western without one. Not surprising that Trumpists would want to apply that solution to a nonexistent problem. But what can you say about men who seem to have taken Liberty Valance as some sort of role model?
Periodic reminder that the slave state Dred Scott was trying to avoid being sent back to. . was Missouri.
Showed HIM!
Conservatives looking at Tony Soprano or Judge Dredd as inspiration or role models? In a way, this points to the central nub of the entire problem: Soprano and Dredd are FICTIONAL CHARACTERS!
Conservatives can no longer distinguish fantasy from reality. Is it any wonder that they "do their own research" and discover that Ivermectin cures everything, that the moon landings were faked, that the weather is being controlled by a secret government, that Democrats mobilized an armada of 10,000 busses to move illegal immigrants from state to state to vote illegally?
You've pulled all my irritations of this morning into clarity...nay, stark relief.
2 marks for doing what my befogged mind is apparently incapable of today.
I need to get outta here and take a bike ride.
Edit to add: Nice ride, thanks.
If your resentments focus on fantasy enemies, you may not be too astute at interpreting fantasy characters in pop culture.
And since their "intellectuals" got nothing, their Pop Culture is Conservative bit is out to prove the same about America.
And hey, how about when fictional characters counsel those with real power, e.g., Scalia citing Jack Bauer to justify torture.
Spot on. We see the same with Pete Hegseth through his ghostwriter no doubt mentioning Mordor in one of his diatribes. These morons mix metaphors and easily switch between fiction and fact because their psychology has made them fearful and anxious. Why? Because if real AND imaginary problems.
They prefer to live in the imaginary because they have more control there. Real problems take real action. Policy and such? That's for sissies! Like laundry and dishes, purely women's work. I'll just drink beer, fart, and yell at the TV, sports or news it's the same.
Let's get football coaches and NASCAR drivers for generals! Yeah!
For some reason these dopes have a big obsession with The Lord Of The Rings, especially the techbros. Remember Peter Thiel and Palantir.
One might also mention Lumpy Shit Führer's constant references to Hannibal Lecter on the campaign trail.
The movies of LOR were hugely popular. Film not print. Vivid for the dim- minded.
On that note, The Onion should just pack it in.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sauron-launches-worlds-most-advanced-home-security-system-302325673.html
Presshusssss!!!
What has it got in its pocketses?!
Let's look at the security videos.
Oof. Forgot that one.
Hence, the Maestro's offering a few months ago on the fashie/fundie love for AI art.
I remember back in 2001 or whatever, when the Sopranos had that Columbus Day episode & thinking not that this was dangerously ill-intentioned but that it wouldn't age well (not to mention irritatingly irrelevant). Here we are, more than 20 years later &....
Hey GM - is my intro to this remotely accurate? I remember as I wrote it thinking- "What I really need to do is to run this by a medievalist - I'm just a dumbass horticulturalist!"
https://open.substack.com/pub/brawlatthepoetscafe/p/the-story-is-told-of-a-mule-which?r=insr&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I don't recall this incident from Chaucer but it definitely has a medieval ring.
Don't make me invoke Gollum again.
Great observation. The narratives we create for ourselves are largely imaginary. And all the more when we feel insecure.
We create myths and latch onto secret explanations which help us regain a sense of control.
I recall seeing one of the Rambo movies in Santa Barbara with a friend who is now a successful screenwriter. We were watching the movie purely as silly entertainment. There was an older white couple who kept expressing different feelings about how Rambo was taking out his enemies one at a time, as if this were a reality of how it gets done.
That couple multiplied by the millions is what we have come to!
Nope.
Those folks have suffered NO 'decline' in media literacy. It's the media generally whose literacy (not to mention moral compass, and purpose generally, other than profiteering) has 'declined' (read: driven off a cliff) and the worst elements of it are drilling straight into the brains of those folks morning/noon/night. I've noted for some time that when state-sponsored media are abandoned, the corporate media, being all that's left, assume the position of state media. In this instance the corporate media have expanded to envelope all the apps, 'social' sites, even the cat-video mongers.
Why can't it be both?
Fair question. I guess it can be true that irrespective of how bad the media get, there are those who will never catch up to it.
Yes, it's all very true. But what's your alternative?
I've been worrying about this lately on a very personal level, as a 65-year-old gay white male who is becoming increasingly fascinated by Westerns. I know, Westerns are inherently racist and sexist and corny and the real Westerners are beyond fed up with Western mythology. But the Western hero at least offers a model for a nontoxic masculinity that isn't just standing around speaking up for women and minorities and expressing one's feelings like anything, but actually risking one's life and limb for a cause, and acting brave and gallant and resourceful and stoical and standing up for what's right, without having to quip at length the latest opinions about martinis or Mrs. Humphrey Ward or whatever to be admitted to the Kool Kid's Klub. That's something we haven't really seen since the late 60s, when (in a muddled attempt to emulate European modernism) Hollywood went full out on gangsters and rogue cops and other antiheroes. I grew up back then with guys who mistook villains for heroes just as Trumpists do today. (Meanwhile, while the antiheroes went villianous, the villains became wimpy killer psychos or perverted masterminds like Dr. Evil; homophobia at work.)
So what models of masculinity did I have growing up? The highly glorified gangsters of mainstream Hollywood who still I would argue dominate what it means to be a man in America today. Against that what did progressive American culture have to offer, particularly after postmodernism made retreat into high culture (my solution as a kid) impossible? On the one hand, I could become a progressive prig, denouncing white male domination in all its forms (but never to the point of actually doing anything, because I wouldn't want to be accused of being a white knight and besides we're all good pacifists here) and never behaving in any way that would earn the opprobrium of women and minority activists anywhere; I had too much of a sense of humor and too much of a love for high culture for that. On the other hand, as a gay man I could become a bitchy sassy queen with fabulous taste just like the queers on TV, throwing shade at my enemies in all directions. But I soon discovered, whether online or in person, I couldn't any more quip my way out of a situation and throw shade on cue than I could outdraw a Hollywood gunslinger; every confrontation I had with a vicious queen had me ending up like Elisha Cook, Jr. confronted by Jack Palance in Shane. Not to mention that the fabulous taste of those bitchy sassy queens, when it was not out-and-out tacky, inevitably resolved itself into the fusty gentility of a MGM costume drama.
Frankly, caught as I am between the gangster, the humorless prig, and the bitchy queen, Gary Cooper starts to seem pretty attractive, and perhaps even possibly attainable by mortal man. (Unlike superheroes--the nerdy alternative, and I grew up ten years too early for nerddom--who by definition aren't.)
Couple things you've reminded me of:
Somehow I managed to avoid the 'models of masculinism' dopiness. I think I felt then as now that models of humanity are more to my liking.
But I eventually stepped off the train of this culture of televidiocy when it occurred to me (well, more likely some media maven knocked it into my enthickened skull) that commercial culture is death, and when you get the vids for free then YOU are the product being marketed to the corpos.
Thanks no thanks.
Bern, my thoughts exactly.
Yoicks! Does this make me a guru? [shudder]
This is a fascinating account of the issue, fam. And it plays out in lots of ways for male-type people from many walks of life.
But, to be fair, Gary Cooper was always an unattainable ideal. Little wonder that so many men looked at "strong, silent type" and decided they couldn't hack it, and flocked to "loud whiny type" when that became available.
Whatcha got in middlin'-muscled occasional blogpost scrivener?
"Mr. Bern will be your tour guide here in the Upscale Department Store of Ideas."
"Now if you notice, this bookshelf (crammed as it is with theoretical glop), has inches of dust atop the whole mess. We at UDSI take the term 'Upscale' seriously, and what that means in the real world is Jordan Peterson and JD Vance books are stacked to the ceiling every morning, and fly out the door all day. Doesn't get any more upscaled than that."
But the Western hero at least offers a model for a nontoxic masculinity
How can this be true when, as you say, the Western is inherently racist and sexist?
The Iliad and the Aeneid (not to mention Beowulf and Le mort d'Arthur and Orlando Furioso) are hardly without racism and sexism. Heroic and chivalric narratives, which exist in almost all cultures, generally have some dodgy history in back of them. (And in any case, I was repeating conventional wisdom; there are plenty of westerns with no Native American characters at all--which make them about as racist as Citizen Kane or Bringing up Baby--and even a few female characters who aren't the usual drips or hussies.)
Agog at the egregious Jonah G's Goldfinger metaphor. Considering his inability to tell the difference between fascism and communism, he must have been scratching his head at a movie like Stalingrad. So, if the liberals are irradiating the Fort Knox of our national valor, where does 007 fit in. And who or what does Oddjob represent, the continuing threat at South Korea's border?
Oddjob is simply product placement by the desperate remnants of the haberdashery cartels.
Big Hat needs to be sued for anti-trust violations.
Well, I sure don't trust 'em!
Shoutout for the BHNCA – the Big Hat No Cattlemens' Association.
The man could wear a hat!
Yeah, why don't men wear hats anymore? I blame the Democrats.
Alla Big Climate scientists are obviously democrats and thus anti-hat. QEbloodyD.
I see no reason why someone who likes Trump - who he is, his history of grift and crime, his narcissism and petulance, his high school teen sense of entitlement and vengeance - would not think villains are heroes. Like one, like the other. What I’m still struggling with is how amoral you have to be to like Trump. That level of amorality has no class or educational distinction, apparently, which is the most disturbing thing about America politics. That it dates back to the Founders’ acceptance of slavery and the country’s unwillingness to reject it except through a terrible war doesn’t provide much reassurance that this too will pass. Somehow cultural analysis is even more depressing than the political news, which is currently focused on the morons poised to take over the executive and legislative branches (joining the judiciary).
Not only do rich guys break all the rules, rich guys SHOULD – nay MUST – break all the rules. Otherwise, what's all that money for?
From John Galt to Caesar Catiline to your mouth
Caesar Catiline sounds like the cool linear park in the upper reaches of the vatican and across the various structures of ancient Rome. Imagine them toga-dudes strolling along, literally looking down on the little people. Like the High Line.
Wait, now – I just realized – you want me to EAT that?
That level of amorality has no national or racial distinction, either. Hitler and Stalin had plenty of enthusiastic supporters.
This is brilliant but the game is still afoot, homey. Let's add to it the results from a recent psych study. Adolescent boys were told their scores on fake gender test were more like girls than boys. The older guys got defensive and changed their behavior and responses not only to stereotypical masculine but also to more violent and aggressive answers/behavior.
Socio-economic status was a factor. Parental expectations were explicitly part of the study. What their parents would think of the boys if they behaved or turned out to be less masculine.
Having a breadwinner naterially successful lifestyle figured in the desired identity.
We might as well go all in here, since we're being more anecdotal than scientific.
Humans are not entirely the same as other primates. We behave in far more complex and contradictory patterns.
But the baboon is alive and well in part of our thinking. Our hierarchies still have the undertone of a baboon troop.
The profile Roy has sketched also matches the men I know who are openly fascist and do want to kill people or see them killed. Their grievances demand a sacrifice. Animal death for the meat on which Caesar feeds is no longer enough.
Today the world could use a good therapist, an understatement. Even Tony Soprano knew he needed help.
What we are seeing is a mass displacement of identity, who am I in this brave new world, and simultaneously a manipulation of humanity to interpret its estrangement as existentially bad calling for extreme actions. Too few are savvy enough to realize and do not ask when to say no.
Walter White in particular is a case of the slow boil the frog never feels. We wake up one day and the dystopia we imagined when things were anything but has become our national reality.
North Korea seems to be the place these folks have us headed. They are already there psychologically and don't know it.
But if we're going to be scientific, there's some sampling error here, isn't there? Trump wins, and we go and seek out people who support him and hold them up to the light, subject them to the minutest scrutiny, record their every word and thought, as a sign of where America - hell, all of humanity - is headed. Meanwhile, the half of the voters who didn't vote for Trump receive no examination at all. Half the country, but they can't be an indication of where our country is headed because there were about 350,000 fewer of them in the key states.
Tricky...
I HATE tricky...
America must become all one thing, or all the other, a house divided against itself cannot stand, yadda yadda.
T's okay – plenty chairs to go around...
I thought we were limiting this to the white males with toxic masculinity insecurity. Are there macho shitheads on the left, too? Holy smokes! Give that boy a cigar! C'mon, boys! Money for nothing and the chick's for free!
Thanks for reminding me what a gift Goldberg has for writing the world's sh&*tiest metaphors.
Sharting out the worst since some time ago I do not give a shit enough to look up
"He is sharting out the vintage where the Grapes of Derp are stored. . ."
His troof is slouching off!
I will not have the shitty-metaphor-writing GENIUS of Thomas Friedman so casually overlooked.
Let's NEVER forget this is a man who, looking at the monstrous clusterfuck of the Iraq war, came up with, "When you find yourself in a hole, you're gonna need a lot more shovels."
No, I don't know what he meant, nobody did, like I said, GENIUS.
[Roy Scheider startled voice]
"I think you're gonna need a bigger hole!"
"a normal person can enjoy the Joker or Richard III without idolizing and posting fan tributes to them"
There's another issue Serwer could have talked about, an inability among conservatives to separate aesthetics from morality. Richard III is fun! (I had a problem with Dark Knight, though, because it took itself so seriously; the wickedness of the protagonists including the fascist Batman was so unrelieved, and Joker was so tormented—it's a better story when he's having fun. Richard III is also a ham role, but you're never asked to pity him for the trauma he's experienced.)
It works in the other direction, too, when a wouldbe film critic like Goldberg or Douthat is complaining about some movie where the decent people are portrayed as liberal, like the recent items in the Star Wars franchise where the fascism in the Empire and the diversity in the Rebellion, left implicit in the older shows, is really in their face and they can't enjoy it at all. If they like it, they have to be able to tag it as "good" in some sense, and if ideology compels them to tag it as "bad" they can't like it.
Evergreen meme: "Are we the baddies?"
Almost more like "Do we care if we *are* the baddies?"
Alla same, might be wise to hide the insignia with the death's head and swastika on it..at least until we get outta Tel Aviv.
“But comics, TV, and movies have been around for decades and, until recently, casual readers who were not mentally ill could tell the bad guys from the good guys just by instinct.”
Given that multiple comic book characters pop up in this discussion, it’s possibly worth nothing that “recently” goes back at least 40 years now, as a not-insignificant amount of this nonsense can be laid at the feet of Frank Miller and “The Dark Knight.” For those not familiar with a four-issue miniseries from the mid-80s, TDN is a satirical take on Batman in which an aging Bruce Wayne come out of retirement, kills the Joker, beats Superman almost to death, then fakes his own death to lead a vigilante army, allegedly in the cause of justice. Unfortunately, most readers, including Hollywood director Zac Snyder, missed the satire part and just lapped up the whole “fuck yeah Batman kicks Superman’s ass and kills people now! That’s so cool!” part.
This lead to first comic books and then pop culture in general being inundated with antihero versions of former heroes. Everything had to be grim and gritty grimdark. And people, especially men who didn’t want to stop reading their favorite comic books but also didn’t want to be seen as immature, ate it up. If you want to know what soured the soul of so much of genX (my generation, to be clear) to where they now gleefully embrace Trump, you could do worse than looking here.
Interesting coincidence that the most right-wing revisionist comic book artist should share his name with the chief bad guy in High Noon.
Coincidence theory!
It's not exactly just a recent issue: the Iliad,* foundation of western civilization to hear some tell it, and one of seemingly stark differences between the sides. Now we're programmed by more than 500 years of textual reception to take the side of the Achaians as well as believing that any ancient poem about war celebrates war. So when you come in to actually reading it, you find out that every single one of the Greek generals are repellent in some important way & that the imagery and rhetoric repeatedly show warfare to be futile, violent, and brutal.
There's like two admirable characters: Hektor, of course, champion of the Trojan side; and Thersites, a low-born soldier, who in Book 1 mouths off about the common soldiers doing most of the dying but not getting any loot out of it. He gets beaten by Odysseus for that bit of truth-telling.
* unconvincingly attributed to Homer
I thought everyone knew that the Iliad was written by Edward de Vere.
Nice
Yogi, Shirley.
The main issue seems to be arguing over ownership of a sex slave.
Exactly! But you watch that Troy movie with Brad Pitt & you'd think Akhilleus was in love with her
There was a development late in that film that would have startled Aeschylus, I imagine.
"Just boys being boys" actually means any kind of rape that isn't accompanied by a full out assault by a stranger.
If only we could insult people with impunity by calling them "f-gg-t" and "r-t-rd," all the factories would return from Asia and the multi-billion dollar companies would happily pay a fat wage to men with high school diplomas (who somehow still only read at an 8th grade level).
And also, that waiter at Denny's should remove her nose ring, stop dying her hair, and let me smack her ass when she walks by. This is still AMERICA, damn it.
Obviously you're not on Xitter, where "we" are very much using those words.
"America went down the drain when we could no longer say 'n****r' in public."
And then when their YOOGE ELECTORAL LANDSLIDE doesn't change the culture to their liking (because culture isn't determined by elections, duh) they'll get EVEN ANGRIER.
This post is oddly...specific...
Anything else you wanna get off yer chest?