Tag: America

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Culture Media Politics

Day 1722 and The Remake of The People versus Larry Flynt Sucks

I have not watched Jimmy Kimmel in his current incarnation as broadcast late night variety show host. But I did watch some episodes of the Man Show so I’m not entirely unfamiliar with the man’s career.

This guy is into beer, boobs and being turned down by ABC

That one unremarkable but sort of likable dude can jump from hosting segments about girls on trampolines to a national broadcast host with political opinions is somewhat impressive and also bleak.

If I had to give mono-causal explainer as why millennial women seem split into two distinct political camps when it comes to modern American politics, absolutely over it or absolutely irate, I think the continued existence of Jimmy Kimmel’s career would be as fine an explanation as any other.

This guy gets promoted over and over for just being the worst and what do we get? We get scolded no matter what we do. Of course some women are screaming banshees and the rest are like mmm shrug. Who has freedom and who has responsibility has always been a polite fiction.

Being subjected to years of increasingly sexualized entertainment featuring bouncing boobies, mentally unstable underage pop stars and the men who were paid to ogle them professionally probably had some downstream influence on our current political climate and the shitty state of entertainment.

The backlash to the backlash to the backlash as it were has happened and we just don’t care anymore. I’ll fight for your right to be perverted but I won’t lie to you and say it hasn’t negatively affected me in anyway.

I’ve always been acutely aware of where popular culture derived a women’s value. Jimmy Kimmel had a career and Britney Spears had a breakdown. And now you want me to fight to keep this twerp on the air because of our proud democracy and its culture of promoting speech and expression? Fuck off.

I genuinely believe girls on trampolines has inherent entertainment and artistic value. Almost everyone has an appreciation for the female form.

I’m unclear if warmed over political takes on broadcast television delivered by a middling broadcaster at midnight is more or less valuable an art form or as political expression. Maybe the FCC needs an overhaul for this new era or maybe we get pirates wires.

I’m neither a satirist nor comedian. I watched the Man Show because I had a boyfriend in a fraternity but I am not watching Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue now and neither are you.

And that’s all that matters to the business of entertainment. Slapping speech and politics on it is a reach that now middle aged millennials can’t manage. Maybe if we spent more time on trampolines.

Elite competition skirmishes over who controls the airwaves of broadcast television are barely interesting except to the absolutely irate. And these days we are all too busy to remain irate unless we’ve got luxury signaling to do. Which I don’t need to do because no one is coming for my blog.

I don’t see how anyone can turn a microwaved soggy ready meal remake of the people versus Larry Flynt out of Jimmy Kimmel.

Who wants to fight for that? Hustler had some inherent entertainment value and Larry Flynt had “readers.” It was speech and it wasn’t on public airwaves with a boss in Washington DC. Maybe you didn’t like what he did but were you prepared to fight for it? Lots of people were. Who wants to fight for Kimmel?

Oliver Stone has always been kind of a shitlib

Jimmy Kimmel was never anything more than the guy who read cue cards between the dopamine hits of girls on trampolines. Stuffing your politics into his pie hole doesn’t really change that.

Bob Iger knows it. I know it. The guy had dwindling ratings, an expensive contract and not nearly enough common sense to keep his mouth shut if one of his staffers was out of touch. If I were in charge of Disney that would be my excuse and I’d dump that Jimmy for literally anything else. I bet a swearing parrot would test better. Hell I know it would.

That’s why it’s so damned exhausting to care about the free speech that literally nobody asked to be said. Does anyone who genuinely cares about free speech feel like they can rally the cause to a bobble head spouting opinions that aren’t even his own? Doubtful. I’d sooner fight for Illinois Nazis. Shame about the ACLU innit?

Americans would rally for boobs though. If someone wanted to get the FCC to allow the return of the Man Show and place it on ABC after dark maybe then we’d have a worthy sequel to Larry Flynt.

But nobody is going to bat for Jimmy Kimmel unless it’s backed up with boobies. And there isn’t a perky tit in sight. No one is going to make a political meal out of this. I doubt even the Swanson’s heir could heat this frozen turd.

Categories
Aesthetics Reading

Day 1718 and The Abyss Stares Back

The glory of the first few weeks of fall in Montana, indeed most of the mountain west, is under appreciated.

We advertise the powdery snow & bright sunshine of our winters and the long temperate days of our summer for tourism, but I love the precious few middle days of transition as we approach Michaelmas season.

The harvest wraps, the fall begins in earnest with frost ever ready, and we prepare ourselves for darker days ahead.

I personally try to be outside as much as possible in this transitional period. Throwing on sneakers and a vest is much easier than snow boots and a parka.

Rambling across county pastures, over makeshift bridges across streams and across neighboring fields in the morning sets the tone for a positive day.

Someone acquired a new piebald

Once I’d returned home, the abyss of the open internet was there to stare back at me as I looked too hard upon it.

The prayers I had uttered in thanks for the glory of our mountains, the brightness of the sun, and the mercy granted to the living was pushed back by the darkness of greyzone algorithmic memetic warfare.

I am still recovering from travel so weak enough that I have little desire to self censor. The ebbs and flows of conflicting constructed realities are fighting for purchase on the American mind and it’s not pretty. God given inalienable rights are not on anyone’s mind when there are others to blame.

I hardly knew if I should pick up Heidegger, Nietzsche or (shuddering at the thought) Schmitt to make sense of apoplectic displays of poorly harnessed power being thrown about by competing and angry egregores.

What could I possibly do or say or read to make sense of anything? I suppose that’s how the abyss gets you. The Nothing only needs you to stand idly by as you are absorbed into the abyss. Michael Ende and Madeleine L’Engle may be better places to go to understand the abyss than Nietzsche. Lest we lose our sense of wonder in the horror.

Die unendliche Geschichte – 1979 Michael Ende

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Politics

Day 1712 and Rome Didn’t Collapse In A Day

This is one of the strangest weeks of the year for Americans. Labor Day marks the end of summer but it takes a bit to shake off the remains of the dog days.

Every day can jarring these days as whole world can narrow to a pinpoint with personal pain. Death will be stalking millenials as their parents age and die even as the money seems tilted in their favor with healthcare spending.

But as debts go up, investors price in risk and the state grapples with the turn and spend. It’s jarring to live as usual as change plays out in the personal and geopolitical.

I say Rome didn’t collapse in a day because anyone rushing for the exits doesn’t realize that change has surprising ways of reorganizing attention and power.

The week of 9/11 reminds Americans in particular. But the US Open closes and fashion week opens in New York and life finds a way.

It’s already playing out and we are all rearranging our lives and interests and families as we see whose time is sunsetting and who might be clever enough to ascend. I myself hope to thrive in the churn

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Politics

Day 1477 And I May Be Right, I May Be Wrong

We are just a few days away from the inauguration of President Donald J Trump for his second term. Celebrity Boss, Interrupted if you will. I’m astonished to find myself optimistic about the possibilities of the next four years. 

I feel like a fool in many ways. I’ve not done a long “what I got wrong” post about the last decade or so, but it seems clear to me that I was naive about too much. My belief in our institutions ran into too many conflicting realities  

I have been a libertarian most of my life. I tended to view myself as a small conservative libertarian but that meant in practice supporting left leaning politicians as they restricted policies that would have given the government power over my body and my rights.

I feared erosion of church and state as I am a Calvinist myself. America is filled with religious refuges fleeing both church and state. 

Like many of the small-l libertarians, I am fearful of all forms of populism overtaking the state. Carefully constraining the Leviathan of the state is required. We citizens have granted it a most singular power: the monopoly on violence. Similarly we know the tyranny of a majority. The less we enable Leviathan the safer we will be.

Yet I was slow to notice that the neoconservatives and theocrats searching to spend and extend the state were not the only evils lurking in the swamp.

The good intentions of liberal and progressive ambition sent the rhetoric of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness into a litany of rights “to” things. I mistook equity for equality in the rhetorical advocacy of progress.

In my own eagerness to welcome more people to the social mobility offered by free enterprise and the American dream, I missed my own freedoms being twisted into facsimiles of justice.

People secured rules and regulations to ensure their own desires and interests were paid for by someone else, while always being sure the rules benefit them. I enjoyed the comfort of many in-group benefits without realizing where it would head.

Regular people and their businesses were strangled by the growing morass of the regulatory burden everywhere. “I can’t breathe” applies everywhere the bureaucratic boot presses down on necks both literal and metaphorical. Americans cannot breathe under anarcho-tyranny.

Palate Cleanse

Ever wonder about the different layers of the ocean’s ecology? Biologist Bethany Kolody found a passion for oceanography circulation and wondered what the genetics of the different microbial biomes might reveal differences in the vast depths. What kind of genomes might we find at different depths?

You can read the preprint if you are interested but the Twitter thread linked above is worth a read for lay readers like myself. She even made a cool Microbial Ocean Atlas for Niche Analysis. It’s fascinating how little we know of our own oceans

Categories
Community Media

Day 1281 and Independence Day

On day 915, which was last year’s 4th of July I wrote about the aspirational America as an idea. It involved blowing shit up. It seems like each Independence Day I find a way to praise Roland Emmerich’s fine science fiction film.

I haven’t watched it yet today but hopefully I’ll at least put on a few clips to enjoy fighter pilots, aliens, inspirational Presidential speeches and fireworks.

The backdrop of drama in the media about Joe Biden is in some ways an ideal way to recall the fractious American community. A continent held together not by ethnicity or religion but by entirely abstract ideals is going to constantly tested.

The theory of print capitalism posits that capital sprung from the solidarity of nationalism presented for the first time in mass media. The common cause of one’s countryman makes it easier to levy for taxes for conflict.

We are far beyond print in our media now. It’s almost cheap to call out media climate “totalizing” an it undersells the experience. Social media makes the experience of Americanness so fluid it ranges from aesthetic choice to the anarcho-tyranny of ailing power.

And yet we try to do better as the general temperament of the nations. America is a place where the founding mythos is that anyone from anywhere can become one of us.

The nationalism of belonging in America has nothing to do with meeting a check box of criteria. Though we are trying to make it more so with bureaucracy. The ideal is that free country sets the condition so anyone succeed. Liberty is a hard fought thing. You can celebrate it in a manner that’s pleasing here. Namely fireworks.

Happy 4th of July everyone. I’m as committed to the American project. The frontier is in our souls and we search it out together in freedom.

Categories
Culture

Day 915 and Independence Day

The 4th of July is one of my favorite holidays. I’m proud to be an American. I am a patriot. I genuinely believe in the aspirational ideals of the United States of America.

I’m fully aware of the many millions of ways in which we’ve not lived up to founding ideals across the centuries. But I’ll be damned if I let the worst of us take away the aspirational ideals for the rest of us. The freedom to live up to our higher selves rests in each one of us. And fuck anyone who tells you otherwise.

I like to watch Roland Emmerich’s classic disaster porn cinematic masterpiece Independence Day every July 4th. The speech Bill Pullman delivers as humanity unites to fight the invading hordes of alien locusts is as inspiring a bit of cinema as I can imagine.

In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest aerial battle in the history of mankind. “Mankind.” That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can’t be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it’s fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom… Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution… but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: “We will not go quietly into the night!” We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on! We’re going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!

Independence Day

Now we don’t seem to be any nearer to humanity uniting behind an American plan for much of anything but I think to think one day we Americans might contribute to something as grandly aspirational as uniting our species. We can barely unite fifty states but we’ve not given up yet. And I personally intend to be here to keep fighting for our ideals. Happy 4th of July.