Problems in applying the Prime Directive

From an article on Star Trek's Prime Directive, from the Toronto Star:

[Queen's University's Kim Richard] Nossal warns, however, against adhering too closely to anything like the Prime Directive. Taken to its extreme, he says, it can be a justification for both isolationism and ignoring the needs of other countries under the guise of respecting their territorial integrity.

That kind of thinking, he says, is what allowed the genocide in Rwanda to go unheeded, an outcome now roundly seen as a failure by the international community to act when needed.

I'm sure that Nossal is a fine and rigorous academic, but it's this sort of sloppy work on pop culture that reflects poorly on all of the rest.

The first problem, and one that Nossal seems keenly aware of, is that the Prime Directive is an ideal that isn't at all applicable to any inter-cultural meetings or exchanges in the 21st century - colonialism and globalization have seen to it that there no society can exist without some awareness of and relationship with the West/Global North. (But maybe he was pressed to try anyway...)

The second, and more egregious problem, is that his example of Rwanda is a hideously inappropriate one. We could maybe cite examples retrospectively, and maybe even try applying the directive to contexts where the exposure to Euro-American influence has not already been disastrous. The problem with the Rwandan Genocide example, though, is that the situation was itself created by colonialism and overdetermined by it. The Tutsi and Hutu populations which constituted the opposing sides in the civil war, for example, were only 100 years ago class-distinctions that became hard-and-fast ethnic classifications when Germany and then Belgium took control. (The Belgians and Roman Catholic church went so far as to invent socio-scientific definitions and give out cards.) While the UN's non-interference in 1993/94 was a problem, it's useless, and dangerous, to discuss it - much less use it in a discussion of Star Trek's Prime Directive - without acknowledging that it couldn't have happened in the first place without European interference.

Really, though, I'm quite confident Nossal knows all of this. So what is it about pop culture applications of theory and politics that seems to cause writers to lose their critical edge?

8 quick thoughts on Scott Pilgrim

1. The latest volume, "...vs. The Universe", was an improvement over the previous one. (Which I kinda disliked.) Scott was less grating, perhaps because this issue was less emo in its pretentions and so I was less critical of the preposterousness of his relationship with Ramona. But also because...
2. This issue made it clear that, whether intentionally or because O'Malley - like me - is more interested in her, Ramona has become the central character in (what is ostensibly) Scott's story. At this point, there is little that is novel, provocative, or mysterious about Scott - and, luckily, Ramona supplies those things to an excess. Tellingly, she's also been featured on more covers than the title character himself. When she disappears, I want to know why and what will happen next. To her. Not to Scott, so much. Which is unfortunate, because the book closes in following the wrong character.
3. The film adaptation by Edgar Wright has been shooting here in Toronto for a short while, now, and Wright just posted a vlog of the first day of shooting. Some personal connections: One of the stand-ins visible in the first 15 seconds or so is a guy I took a grad class with a couple years ago. Which is not as weird as it seems, given that I know some of the real people that various characters in the series have been modeled on. (I also e-interviewed O'Malley, who once played in my friend's band, when the first book in the series came out. I don't typically advertise the results, though. It was a much... stranger exchange than I expected.)
4. Clever casting, one: The series' mastermind and villain, Gideon, was first seen in shadow, then given a fuzzy cameo in the penultimate issue, and won't actually be revealed in full until the last one. Appropriately, then, the identity of the actor playing Gideon is officially secret. (But unofficially, we know that it's Jason Schwartzman. Which is a pretty cool choice.)
5. Clever casting, two: Chris Evans and Brandon Routh are playing two of the evil exes that Scott must defeat. Given the series nominal status as a superhero series, of sorts, it's incredibly cool that they've cast guys who are most famous for playing superheroes. Only this time they're playing bad guys.
6. Clever casting, three: And Ramona's female ex? She's being played by Mae Whitman - Ann from Arrested Development. So Michael Cera, as Scott, will be fighting George Michael Bluth's ex-girlfriend.
7. Clever casting, four: I said it's 'nominally' a superhero series because it's actually something of a hybrid - it mixes and matches bits of superhero convention with copious video game references, teen drama more befitting an indy title (or hour-long TV serial), and a manga inspired visual style. It's bizarrely appropriate, then, that the very first evil ex is played by Satya Bhabha - son of Homi Bhabha, the post-colonial theorist who writes of, among other things, the political potential of hybridity.
8. Clever casting, five?: I can't actually find anything on the two remaining exes, the twins. But I hope that they don't disappoint, either.
   

QLC and the unending crisis of young adulthood(s)

I wrote a bunch of responses (not viewable outside Facebook, unfortunately) to Jen's blog about the Quarter-Life Crisis (QLC) phenomena and how acutely she feels it. Unfortunately, I think my tone sounded a lot more belittling than I intended. (Or, rather, it sounds belittling, and I didn't intend for it to sound belittling at all.) That said, I have, I think, some very legit problems with the logics of QLC, which are maybe easier to express if my text is detached from particular personal narratives of QLC.

The first problem is that the idea itself is hopelessly ambiguous, to the detriment of people who claim ownership of it. A pop article that Jen linked me to describes it as "[u]nrelenting indecision, isolation, confusion and anxiety about working, relationships and direction", which is so vague, varied, and multiple as to make confronting the problem, much less dealing with it, pretty much impossible. How can this possible be described as a phenomena - singular? It has all the specificity of your horoscope. And, it seems to me, provides an equally meaningful self-diagnosis.

The second is that it invokes a state of exception that is not actually exceptional. Young people in North America prior to World War II were similarly filled with anxiety and confusion and pined for a stable career and purpose; after World War II, the same demographic group - their kids - were dissaffected with lives that locked them into a singular purpose when adulthood commenced, an ironic effect of the stablity that their parents had wanted; the baby boomersacted on the dissatisfaction they inherited from their parents but struggled - and often failed - to break free of the roles they had learned from them; and their children have absorbed that anxiety and seem to be pining for that stable career and purpose. And following logically from that...

My third problem is that QLC is nostalgic for an era of securing and assuredness that doesn't deserve the affection. That security and purpose? That desire to, as the article put it, "know who [you] are"? That's exactly the limitation that your parents or grandparents either rejected or felt acutely on some level should be rejected. The complaint that you're indecisive because you can "be anyone [you] want"? That's exactly what they thought would solve their dilemma. So maybe they were wrong. But how does it follow that reinstating the conditions of their moment of crisis will solve this one?

And the last - and least obvious but most interesting, I think - is that it echoes other late-capitalist discourses of privileged self-victimization. Like the article says, these are typically "people in their mid-twenties to early thirties who are usually urban, middle class and well-educated" - people who have are more privileged than most and upset, in part, because they don't seem to go as far as they once did. And what's more, as Michael Kimmel - who is no stranger to discussions of the ways in which men situate themselves as victims - notes, this particular iteration of generational crisis is, in fact, an "anticipatory crisis". I'm inclined to agree - we're being prepped to be dissatisfied with being unsatisfied, trained to have a pathological need for some grand accomplishment. (And have it before 30!) We're victims of the fear that we'll become victims.

I don't want to give the impression that I'm somehow outside of this. I've felt alienated from my work at times; the first job I held after completing my MA was at a bookstore for minimum wage; my academic production has never been monetarily recognized or rewarded; I feel incredibly envious of the accomplishments that some of my friends can list off. Life is maddening. But this is not necessarily, and not always, a bad thing. And it's certainly not a new thing. It's simply a thing.

(I should also volunteer that I enjoy a certain extra privilege that complicates my relationship with QLC - I'm thrilled with my home-life, with my new baby, which makes things challenging on a daily-basis, makes them exhausting and anxiety-inducing but with the added benefit of being simultaneously comforting and secure. But it's not as if, by contrast, everyone who self-diagnoses themselves with QLC is without any interpersonal comforts, right?)

Two more readings of BSG's finale: a recuperation and a rebuttal

1. I complained in my original response to BSG's finale that it seemed horribly irresponsible to advocate forgetting as a means of healing - that joining together as one big community, following decades of animosity and multiple attempts to commit genocide, fails to adequately address (and even avoids or brushes aside) the themes that the show has been trying to tackle and the actual conflict that had underpinned it.

That isn't to say that it's an incoherent conclusion, though. To quote Agamben, one could argue that the finale "affirms the site of bare life as the route through which, and by which, redemption occurs. It is an affirmation of the redemptive value of extreme degradation." Bare life, in this case, is the decision to not only forget but to cast the ships into the sun and start over with nothing. And in the face of such an overdetermined history and a conflict which offers no clear or easy solution, perhaps this is the only viable means of attaining redemption.

2. Of course, it's worth asking whether attaining redemption is actually a worthwhile, or ethical, aim. Redemption is rarely an unproblematic process - especially racial or national projects of redemption, which is what the humans' effort to affirm their existence most resembles - and they're often motivated by guilt and selfishness. Too often, redemption manages to situate the vicitimizer as the victimized: the humans enslaved the Cylons and must conveniently forget (or diminish the importance of the fact) that they supplied the Cylons with the means and motive to destroy them. Redemption can also deflect or displace guilt on to a sort of sacrificial lamb, a figure deemed abnormal who is ejected from the whole (again, forgetting that he or she was produced by and within that whole in the first place) so that the whole can be recuperated: Baltar is the ideal figure, here, but Cavil also becomes a scapegoat for the Cylons.

Aimé Césaire's notion of "bourgeois shock" brings this critique of redemption into conversation with Agamben's bare life in a really nice way, offering the term as a way of characterizing the realization by Western Europeans that the methods of dehumanization and violence which commonly employed in their colonies could be turned against them and deployed within Europe itself. (Nazism is the prototypical example of such strategies turned inward, though 9/11 is also an excellent one - and both are often applied allegorically to BSG.) The redemptive reading of BSG through Agamben, then, is undone if we can read it as an expression of reactionary "bourgeois shock" - as a moment in which the self-important subject of history and bearer of civilization is shaken from its complacency and its assuredness that it could never be made the object of its own violence.

A quick thought on Lost

Just as there was back when we were trying to figure out what made certain survivors "special" in the minds of the Others, there's a lot of discussion now about why Jack, Kate, Hurley and Sayid were cast into 1977 while Sun, Frank, Ben, and Locke ended up in 2007. Surely, the discussion goes, there must be a good reason - having to do with the recreation of the original crash, with their personalities or actual physical bodies, or perhaps (and this one is my favorite, since it implies some new mysteries) because they're already present on the island in 1977.

What I suspect, though, is that the most obvious answer will be the right one - that it's simply that The Island wanted some of them in 1977 and others in 2007 in order to complete some sort of job. This is better than revealing that it's totally random, but only barely. I'm reminded, again, of the first season of Lost, when people were trying to figure out what the common bond among the characters was - that they were all in need of redemption, that they had all killed someone, that they had all cheated death, etc. - so as to explain why they ended up on that island. But as the show goes on, it seems increasingly likely that the only reason we'll ever get is 'because they were supposed to end up on the island', which is really just another way of saying 'because The Island wanted these specific people'. And that's just disappointing.

The BSG finale

This show left me feeling confused. And not a good-confused.

I felt happy, i suppose, for the characters, but my actual emotional response to characters usually diminishes within minutes of a stories end and the narrative and thematic elements are the ones that ultimately resonate. And that being the case, it felt like a waste.

I mean, I liked the build to the final battle, I liked Baltar's decision to stay, and I was even a bit struck by the cuteness of this Earth being the real Earth and the other Earth not really being Earth - BSG has been filled with revelations that contradict previously accepted truths, so it didn't seem so unbelievable. I found Adama and Roslin, and Baltar and Caprica's, endings sweet and appropriate, even if I didn't really understand why Adama, the character, would resign himself to years of solitary life, and I didn't really buy Baltar and Caprica's reunion. (The latter, at least, had a certain logic to it within the larger format of the show. Which, it turns out, makes it pretty exceptional. Except that they should have been raising Hera, too.)

I disliked Kara's sudden disappearance and the show's refusal to explain just how she came back from the dead and just what she came back as. I also found it ridiculous that they could have so easily infiltrated the massive Cylon base, found Hera, and had so few casualties. Suicidal Final Battles need to show that the good guys have paid a price. This one didn't.

And I hated a bunch of things.

• What about the Cylon 'plan'? We were told from episode one that 'They Have A Plan', and then one was never actually revealed? Was it simply that they were torturing the 'final five'? Because that's as near as I can get to a 'plan'. And that sucks.
  
• Religion had always been used as way of critiquing societies for justifying their banal existence by way of laying claim to an exceptionalism that we should rightly be wary of. And how we're told that there is a god and the whole series has evolved according to his plan. ...say what?
  
• We also have Lee deciding, unilaterally, to break up human and Cylon civilization and banish them to the various corners of the world. His rationale is that if they start over with a blank slate, they won't make the same mistakes. Except that this contradicts every bit of accepted wisdom on remembrance, redemption, and humanity's ability to learn from the past and imprve themselves - actively forgetting the sins and ignoring the oppressions of the past is the surest way to ensure that they would fall into those patterns again. I mean, for fuck's sake, wasn't that why the 'final five' travelled to the 12 colonies in the first place? To warn them because they had forgotten and would commit the same error? I wrote in a previous post that BSG has a troubling aversion to communalism and collectivism, and it seems that it pertains, too, to a collective memory. But collective memories are the best weapons against exactly the sorts of abuses and oppressions that this show ostensibly opposes. So this is a terrible lesson.
  
• And what about that fucking awful ending? Here's a show that has tried (with varying levels of success) to push the human-Cylon conflict as a metaphor for WWII, for the War on Terror, for Israel-Palestine. And at the end, we find out that it was actually a metaphor for... well, actually, it wasn't a metaphor at all. It's message was the most literaly one possible - it was a warning about treating our robots well, because, you know, they might decide to turn against us and kil us. Are you fucking kidding me? Not only is it ham-fisted and absurdly preachy in its delivery, but it's also insultingly stupid. It is possibly the worst closing scene to a series that I have ever watched. Ever.
  

Geoff asked over on his blog how other people would've ended the series. Given that one of the few consistent thematic threads on the show was the need to prove that humanity deserved to survive and continue, I suggested that the show should not have properly ended at all - that the quest to prove your own worth is an ongoing one that will never be resolved, and so to will the fleet never actually find a home. (At least, not in the finale.) Most of the major characters should have died in the battle to give it some actual resonance and to allow the characters least fit to usher in this new existence the opportunity to redeem it. Baltar, Caprica, and Hera, at least, could have survived to return to the fleet, thus allowing one storyline to run full-circle from start to finish and provide satisfaction and assurance that they knew what they were doing all along. Maybe Roslin could ironically out-live Adama, only to die as they resume their search for a new home - and so Roslin's death, in closing the prophecy, signals that it is space itself that is their new home. It wouldn't even necessarily be depressing - there are plenty of ways to put some sort of optimistic spin on it, to give some small hope, or at least to make it seem like this society is one worthy of survival, even if it never finds a permanent place to lay down roots. Something like that.

But my god - what we were left with? It boggles the mind.

BSG: On symbolism, politics, and the triumph of individualism

There's a quite thorough political analysis of the allegorical message of Battlestar Galactica at this blog, though I would stop short of recommending that anyone bother to read the whole text. (It's long and rambling. But I suppose that I'm about to post a long and rambling response to it. Still, I don't think this is hypocritical - I'm trying to save you from having to read two long, rambling blogs.)

But there's also some very good, and very apt, points in there that are worth repeating. For instance:

"it’s kinda dishonest when the great defining symbol of this culture-clash, the narrative linchpin of your ideological conflict, binds conceptually not to 9/11 but rather to the Holocaust."

"that very act of symbolic hyperbole articulates, I think, something about 9/11, about how Americans in particular, but by no means only Americans, responded to it emotionally, ascribing it a grossly-exaggerated import. That narrative misstep of a dubious analogy is revealing of the degree of faith, the depth of the fall, the jawdropping level of… well… self-importance necessary to place an albeit horrendous act on that level."

Whether or not the show's politics and message are reduced to incoherence, as Hal Duncan suggests, by this sloppy symbolism is almost beside the point. The show's juxtaposition of 9/11 and the Holocaust suggests that we're meant to understand the two as equivalent, and while this is hugely problematic, I think that what it says about American nationalism and identity is tremendously too interesting to dismiss because it makes for bad writing. We might even have to debate whether it necessarily leads to bad writing - while he and I might find the juxtaposition of these events distasteful and ludicrous, I think that the narrative manages to merge the two quite effectively for the purposes of storytelling. But regardles - even if it might be a narrative failure, that failure shouldn't preclude a discussion of it as a telling artifact of its time.

But in defense of the narrative - I do think that Duncan is pouring it on too hard. If the historical resonances are multiple and contradictory, then in fairness you have to point out that it's even more varied and confused than this. Duncan admits this when he notes that the humans' internment on New Caprica reads instead like it is actually occurring in the Middle East, but this time with the Israeli/American role being played by the Cylons and the Palestinian/Iraqi spot by the humans. But the Cylon-human conflict, with the Cylons determining to wipe out their creators and former masters, doesn't fit terribly well into either any of these metaphors, nor does Cylon society (despite the fact that it is radical and monotheistic, sure) fit the usual associations of racial and religious Others with barbarism and incivility as would befit a 9/11 metaphor. So this stuff doesn't fit the above real-world references without ignoring huge and important parts of the story and so reducing them to absurdity.

"even the inherent tension in the basic dichotomy of militaristic autocracy versus democratic bureaucracy is dissipated quickly as Adama and Roslyn prove to be pretty much of a mind."

"The result is a sort of thematic vagueness, where the show doesn’t really dramatise the ideological issues it’s pretending to deal with. It seems unwilling to really come down on one side or another and risk alienating viewers who might find such a stance challenging."

Along the lines of 'thematic vagueness' - it seems clear to me that BSG is trying to do and say something about militarism and nationalism more generally (or, rather, within a plurality of specific references that is so varied that any attempt to limit the field just doesn't work), that it's trying to work additional metaphorical angles that resist placement among those major touchstones because they're not trying to speak to any event in particular over the course of the entire series. Whether this is a good or effective strategey is, of course, totally up for debate. And so while I agree that the show has reached a point where its thematics have become nonsensical - and I've admitted as much in past blogs - I think this has less to do with the ridiculousness or wrongheadedness of a hybrid 9/11-Holocaust metaphor and more to do with the too many references to too many sources that have accrued over four seasons.

If I were to try and pin down an over-arching political message, I would probably push BSG's contradictory messages about autocratic militarism and democratic process aside and focus on its affection for heroic liberal individualism of a hegemonically masculine sort. If anything is consistently villified, it's the sense of collectivism premised on altruism that ostensibly underlies Cylon culture (and is eventually revealed to be rotten at the core and under the fascistic rule of Cavill/John), that is implied by the consensus-based approach of the Quorum of Twelve (who are shown to be spineless and completely ineffective), and which is attempted by various insurgencies (the union under Tyrell, but more aptly the mutiny as it is engineered by the hypberbolically crippled Gaeta and self-appointed man-of-the-people Tom Zarek) that find the autocratic rule of Adama and Roslin untenable.

If it's not already clear from my bracketed commentary, collectivism is always a sham or ploy in the BSG universe. What's curious, of course, is that while autocrats like the Adamas and Roslin are privileged, those sham collectives are usually being manipulated by their own - albeit evil-as-all-hell - autocrats. So maybe the difference is a qualitative one - the autocrat that rules transparently and unapologetically as opposed to the autocrat that rules by sleight of hand and claims, disingenuously of course, to not want to be the dictator that he is. Admiral Cain confuses this distinction because she clearly falls into the former category, and so would require us to make an additional and totally arbitrary distinction between good and bad Caesars, as it were. But her singularity makes it easier to consider her the exception that proves the rule, I think. Salvation is can only be achieved under the leadership of the right ruler. The problem is, aside from their transparency I'm not sure what makes the Adamas and Roslin so self-evidently 'right' in the minds of the show's producers.

Of course, with only a few episodes left, there's still time to up-end the apple cart.


P.S. I should probably also note that, yes, there is a racial subtext to an individualism/collectivism oppositionality. However, given the muddled political analogies that already confuse the ostensible real-world race correlates, I think that adding this additional layer would just make things messier and, so, doesn't contribute a whole lot to the discussion. Unless, of course, I want to argue that this is where the 'real' race politics of the show emerge...


Two final notes:

1) Ronald D. Moore - BSG's head-honcho and also one of the guiding voices on Deep Space Nine - seems to like muddying the politics of his lead characters to the point of unreadability as a rule. Look, for instance, at how Sisko changes on DS9. At some points, he's the fundamentalist protector of democratic process opposed to those who would violate the Federation's principles in order to preserve them - "Paradise Lost", 4.12 - and at others a Machiavellian schemer not unlike the characters he had previously opposed - "In the Pale Moonlight", 6.19. They're unreconcilable positions within the narrative logic of the show, which posits Sisko as civilization's saviour.

2) DS9 also showed a healthy mistrust for collectivism (the Founders) and shadowy autocrats (the admiral that Sisko takes down in "Paradise Lost"). And this might, in fact, go some way to helping us make sense of Sisko - he can get away with being an assassin and schemer because he doesn't desire to cheat his way into more power and influence. Likewise, he turns against that same admiral despite the fact that it costs him power and influence. There's something to be said in the DS9 and BSG universes for getting ahead the right way. Of course, what's right according to Ronald Moore and what's right to some of us in the audience isn't necessarily one and the same.

Facebook and the end of privacy

About a year ago, I blogged about Facebook and the impossibility of either not friending or de-friending someone on it, especially after you've succumbed to that initial urge to friend as many people as possible and learned that everyone you know knows at least two dozen other people that you know.

I use the word "impossibility" here not in the sense that it can't be done, but rather in the sense that you'll be viewed as a weirdo, jerk, or asshole if you do so. Because if everyone you know seems to know someone else that you know, then everyone you know will learn what you've done. And then everyone you know will be angry with you for one of two reasons: either they're angry because there's an unwritten understanding that you just don't do that, or they're angry because they wish they could de-friend people too (but don't feel that it can't be done).

And this means that, for all intents and purposes, it can't be done.

So you probably know where this is going. After a couple years where I accepted friend requests from pretty much everyone I'm related to, that I know, that I have known, only vaguely knew, met once, or never actually met, I realized that my friends list was full of people who aren't actually, well, my friends. Barely even acquaintances, really. And if Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is to be believed, this was intentional. He claims that "one day everyone would be able to use it to locate people on the web - a truly global digital phone book."

But a listing in a the 'truly global digital phone book' is not what I signed up for. So I started defriending people: a few dozen of the people that I really never talk to, then a few more that I couldn't foresee having reason to contact over Facebook, and eventually I cleaved off about half of my list - about 150 people. And then I made myself invisible to everyone who wasn't still on my list. To say it was cathartic would be something of an understatement - only when I closed the door to the fridge and put a pad-lock on it did I realize that it felt as if people had been raiding it for years.

Zuckerberg's comment causes me to suspect that privacy and intimacy have not been valued by Facebook for some time, and it shows in the evolution of the space, its rules of ettiquette, and our friends lists. But, really, all I want is to be able to post a status update asking if anyone is free for coffee or wants to see a particular movie that Victoria would never see - and to not have to worry about who might respond.

Catching up with TV: BSG and Lost

[Warning: spoilers abound for those who aren't up to speed on the only two TV shows I'm currently watching]

I have but love to share for the pacing and content of Battlestar Galactica's final half-season. With only 10 episodes to go, an entire mythology to unpack, and a home to finally discover, Ronald Moore and crew saw fit to spend the first four on a mutiny plot that, apparently, had absolutely nothing to do with the show's most pressing issues. And as if to add insult to injury, they followed four episodes that offered no new revelations with a single episode that overflowed with them, many of which were the product of memories triggered completely by accident.

In fact, it seems as if all of Season 4.5 to this point has been poking fun at the show's mythology: the much anticipated reveal of the 5th member of the "final five" cylons was so compoundingly disappointing that I can only suspect that, having realized that outing Adama or Roslin or some other important character would seem a) predictable, and b) nonsensical, the show's creators decided to instead undercut every expectation we may have in increasingly hilarious fashion:

• our final cylon, Ellen, is already dead and has been for some time, and so the anxiety about her identity was a total non-issue
  
• she was an incredibly marginal character anyway, and it's hard to imagine a character that we would have suspected less or a reveal that would have made even less of an impact
  
• the "final" five is revealed to be something of a misnomer, since they're actually the first humanoid models
• they're also 2000 years old and completely disconnected from the cylons who rebelled against humanity, which muddies the underlying conflict
  
• Ellen's not even the last mystery-cylon, as we've now learned about Daniel's existence

All of which also appears to undermine what we were meant to understand as the thematic premise of the show: namely, that the hubris of the human race in thinking themselves gods has led to their own destruction. Rather, the eradication of the human race now appears to be part of a larger scheme orchestrated by one cylon to humiliate and break the final five, the parents who he has grown to resent and hate. Humanity's culpability in their own destruction is no longer even all that obvious.

I'm sure that all this has ruined the show for some people, but i like the move away from the mythology. Rather than acting out of, in varying proportions, a sense of guilt and/or destiny, the characters seem newly self-motivated to find a home and redefine themselves because they want to, not because they're supposed to. In the pilot, Adama asked whether humanity deserved to survive, a question that Athena shot back at him when she first landed on the ship. And if the mutiny hadn't have happened, if the fleet continued to press on only because they were supposed to, that question would still be hanging in the air.

(On a totally separate note - anyone have any good guesses as to who Daniel will turn out to be? The creator of the 12 Colonies' cylons, as revealed in the Caprica promo stuff, is named Daniel. And it's been pointed out that Starbuck's unnamed, unseen dad was an musician, which might be important given that Daniel is said to be artistic. I think it's important to point out, though, that the number of each Cylon model appears to indicate, roughly, their human age. Since Daniel is number 7 and is sandwiched between two women who appear to be in their late 20s or early 30s, wouldn't it make sense that he'd be the same age?)

* * *

On the flip-side, I think that Lost's fifth season is only now finding its feet. Among many others, I've complained that the structuring of the episodes has felt a bit off, that the absence of true flashbacks and flashforwards - which had always been tied to particular characters in each time-frame, if not particular themes as well - was making it difficult to enjoy the show. Not only were the events on and off the island totally separate and disconnected, (with certain, rare expections like Desmond and Daniel's meeting) but the fact that the groups had to share screentime meant that very little happened in each episode.

All of those problems seemed to be rectified in this latest episode, at least. It begins - and ends, though we don't know that initially - with the moment that Jack, Kate, and Hurley find themselves back on the island, implicitly promising us that while they begin the episode in LA with little hope of reconciliation or return, this is where they'll end up by the end of the hour. With the flashback/forward having been more or less abandoned this season, this was an unexpected surprise and it was nice to see it return - and for so much to happen in this one episode, too.

Which isn't to say that we're totally done with LA - given the mysterious and unexplained circumstances that led to Sayid, Kate, and Hurley ending up on the plane - and Ben's injury and visit to the marina, where we might guess Desmond and Penny are docked - we have plenty of interesting material for future flashbacks. But the creators have rightly guessed that we've seen enough of the real world for a while and that we'd much prefer to see everyone back on the island where they belong.

Added on Feb. 20: Come to think of it, this episode is how season 5 should have started - with Jack waking up, finding Kate and Hurley, then gradually finding everyone else and establishing the new status quo. How did they get there? Well, that's what the flashbacks would have shown us.

The X-Men and identity politics #2: Xavier's man Friday

[An exchange on Geoff's blog a couple weeks back with someone who didn't like my X-Men paper had me thinking that I need to start writing about mutants and race (and, obliquely, all aspects of identarian politics) again. For those few people familiar with the old paper, some of this will seem like a retread. But since that paper is long and, by virtue of being written with an academic audience in mind, not accessible enough. Which was one of the reasons I started this series in the first place.]

A paraphrased defense of the X-Men's politics: 'Focusing on fighting other mutants does not make the X-Men anti-mutant, assimilationist, or conservative. Those mutants are evil and would make relations with humans worse, and it's that working relationship which they're trying to build and preserve.'

My short response to this is an unequivocal 'sorry, but I don't buy it'.

The sort of assimilationist practices (and their rationalizations and justifications) that the X-Men engage in are at least as old as the novel format itself, so maybe it would help to historize them. Remember Friday, the slave-turned-servant to Crusoe in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe? Friday is the model non-white citizen of European colonialism - a savage who is so grateful that the white man has undertaken the burden of educating and saving him that he devotes his life to serving that same white man. Quite the opposite of encouraging us to embrace difference or form equitable relationships premised on mutual enrichment and growth, Defoe's story proposes an entirely unilateral transmission and unidirectional relationship. Friday is only worthy of notice because he recognizes his master's superiority and assumes an entirely deferential position relative to him. To do otherwise - to challenge Crusoe's authority or assert an equal standing - would be to threaten the natural order of the world and situate yourself as an enemy to it.

Appropriately, one of the tag-lines for the 2000 X-Men movie was "Trust a few. Fear the rest." And, sadly, the X-Men have participated in a similar politics for much of their publication. Like Defoe, the X-Men's publishers would have us believe that the only mutants who deserve to live in peace with normal humans are those mutants who would unquestioningly protect all of humanity. Yes, even those who would rather see all mutants jailed or dead are more deserving of the X-Men's protection than are the mutants who fight back because they don't want to be jailed or dead. These mutants who reject their oppression and the moral authority of those who oppress them are, at best, ignorant to the natural order and, at worst, evil. Like the hyperbolic island cannibals whose only function is to supply a contrast as the evil Other to Friday's good one, these evil mutants are often made to seem insane or power-hungry, and so undermine the standing of any mutant who objects to the X-Men's approach. Even when an 'evil' mutant, like Magneto, poses legitimate ethical and political concerns, those same concerns are undercut by unnecessary displays of violence and mutant supremacist language - as if these things are ultimately inseperable.

Bryan Singer, echoing the common refrain, suggested that Professor X is a Martin Luther King figure and Magneto was Malcom X. But if it weren't already clear, then I'll make it explicit: if the X-Men comics are meant to be read as any sort of metaphor on the politics of race, then we have to consider that Professor X is actually Crusoe's man Friday.

White male masochism and The Wrestler

Over on his blog, Geoff Klock is reading David Savran's Taking It Like a Man and pulled the following quote from the book: "[film] heroes remonstrate against a culture made uneasy by traditional machismo by proclaiming themselves victims, by turning violence upon themselves and so demonstrating their implacable toughness, their ability to savor their self inflicted wounds". Geoff illustrated Savran's point with reference to the Crank movies, which prompted Scott McDarmont to suggest that the same can be said of The Wrestler. Which got me thinking that The Wrestler is actually a much better example of the white male masochism that Savran describes.

Like Crank and Crank 2, The Wrestler celebrates a lead character whose defining trait is his ability to endure, and find pleasure in, absurd amounts of physical pain. But Savran isn't actually talking about literal physical pain - if he were, we would have to consider that these characters don't so much "proclaim themselves victims" since they actually are victims: their suffering is objectively marked by the savage beatings and physical trauma they endure, to say nothing of the always imminent threat of death as a direct result of these wounds. It's one thing to chastise someone for proclaiming himself the victim when it is otherwise unobvious, but something else entirely when he has one hour to live (as in the Crank films) or could have a fatal heart-attack at any moment (as in The Wrestler). They are, in a sense, beyond criticism - and employing that sympathy-generating strategy is itself deserving of critique.

Rather, Savran asks us to read these characters and their physical wounds and masochism allegorically. That's something of a stretch for the Crank movies, which are banal and superficial productions - the more interesting reading of these films would involve asking how and why this plays so well to the white male audience, who arguably find some catharsis in watching Jason Statham proposely get the shit kicked out of him and come out on top as a direct result.

But we don't even need to infer an allegorical level to the lead's physical pain in The Wrestler - Randy "The Ram" Robinson's entire life is a catalogue of emotional and existential pains. All three of the film's major plotlines lend themselves to Savran's critique.

1. The washed-up wrestler plot, which features his failure to recapture the fame, glory, and money he once enjoyed as a wrestler and the realization that he doesn't know how to do anything else
2. The absent father plot, where we learned that he abandoned his daughter as a child and that he continues to be unabile to put her first
3. The romantic plot, which shows us his difficulty in forming lasting relationships with women and his preference for the easy high (whether that be a one-night stand, drugs, or wrestling) instead of something harder and less certain

Conveniently, from the perspective of the masochistic white male victim, each of these can be figured as either/both the result of Randy's own failings or the fault of a society that doesn't understand him and has no place for him. He's too old to be a pro wrestler and unqualified for the world outside of it, a world that requires he talk to people; his daughter just doesn't understand how hard he's trying and is too much of a hard ass to give him a chance, a personality trait that is not-so-subtly reinforced by Randy's realization that she's a lesbian (and so, naturally, must be averse to masculine men); Randy's only on-screen sexual relationship is with a woman he picks up at a bar and smokes coke with, and he finds himself rejected by the woman he actually likes for no obvious reason - until the very end of the film, when it's too late.

Randy's moment of triumph, such as it is, comes at the end of the film, when he comes out of retirement in order to wrestle one last time - a match that he's been assured will probably mean his death. Not that we actually get to see that happen. Randy stumbles, gets light-headed, and climbs to the top of the ropes to perform his finishing move - against the advice of his opponent - as the crowd cheers him on. The film ends as he leaps into the air, poised to win the match on his own terms and according to the code of honor by which he's always performed. And that final image allows him to figuratively transcend his pain, to shout a silent 'fuck you' to everyone that wronged him, even as we realize that he would fall to the ground in a heap and die if the film were to continue. It's the sort of victory that's only possible in a film, and one which can only seem sincerely proud or empowering if we refuse to acknowledge its stupidity and our ostensible hero's culpability in his own death - a recognition that, while delayed by the sudden ending of the film, ultimately cannot be denied.

If the pleasure in white-male masochism exist where it allows us to "savor [our] self inflicted wounds", then I think it makes sense that the dead bodies need to be hidden from view. They're not exactly in a position to be savoring much of anything.

2008's Music retrospectacular

A brief look at the stuff from 2008 that surprised, disappointed, and impressed me. (See my 2007 list here.)

Two Surprises

2. Katy Perry - One of the Boys
This is surprisingly endearing and ironic album. After listening to "UR So Gay", one would guess that "I Kissed a Girl" is supposed to be comedic - that it doesn't sound like it's funny is probably the album's biggest failing.
1. Scarlett Johanssen - Anywhere I Lay My Head
The high-water mark for celebrity vanity-projects - because it doesn't sound like a vanity project.

Four Disappointments

4. Destroyer - Trouble in Dreams
I am a huge fan of Dan Bejar and loved the previous two Destroyer albums. But one or two songs aside, this one left me absolutely bored.
3. No Age - Nouns
For weeks, I was reading and hearing that this album was fantastic. After three listen-throughs, I found myself totally incapable of remembering even one melody from it.
2. Of Montreal - Skeletal Lamping
I recall hearing that this album was conceived of as a series of one-minute long songs. And it shows - it's jarring, abrasive, and at times feels as if it were made intentionally unlistenable on a structural level.
1. Guns n Roses - Chinese Democracy
Axl sounds old and tired. And his self-importance was only interesting when it was paired with a musical exuberance that subtly undercut his earnestness. The music for this album just sounds bloated and pained.

Twelve Favorites

12. Friendly Fires - Friendly Fires
A dance-rock explosion.
11. Jason Collett - Here's to Being Here
In a year where nearly everything I liked was propelled by a beat that demanded you move to it, Jason Collett slips through the middle with an acoustic guitar and an affected country-twang.
10. Portishead - Third
A grower, for me. I expected another Dummy or Portishead. It took time for me to accept that they weren't going to go there again.
9. Deerhunter - Microcastle
I immediately want to compare this album to Yo La Tengo. Which is weird, because I've never really been a fan of Yo La Tengo, and I like this so much more than anything YLT recorded.
8. TV on the Radio - Dear Science
I've never found TV on the Radio affective or moving. But this album, at the very least, makes me want to move. And if you can do that well enough, well, that's enough.
7. Goldfrapp - Seventh Tree
Goldfrapp moved away from glammed up electropop to this pastoral, electric folk just as the former was being taken up by people like Britney Spears. A canny move - and a great move for one of pop music's great voices.
6. Fleet Foxes - Ragged Wood/Sun Giant
So totally unlike everything else. It sounds like it's emerged from somewhere not just in the past, but somehow outside of time. I'm also a sucker for great harmonies.
5. Hercules and Love Affair - Hercules and Love Affair
Best disco album I've ever heard. And I'm not a fan of disco.
4. Black Kids - Partie Traumatique
If nothing else, these kids manage to write and record music that perfectly captures the immediacy and constantcy of absolutely having-to-hook-up-right-now-at-this-very-moment. Which is just a little bit precious and a little bit awesome.
3. Santogold - Santogold
I like Gwen Stefani, but she's a bit too poppy for my tastes. I like MIA, but sometimes find her music grating. But Santogold sounds more than a little like both, and seems to provide the perfect balance.
2. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
I will admit to being mostly ignorant of the afro-pop influences that these guys are cribbing. I just know they make for some fantastic music.
1. M83 - Saturdays=Youth
A shoe-gaze album by a 26 year-old fuelled by nostalgia for his teens and grounded in 80s synth-pop, it sounds as if the past is speaking through the music itself - present but forever at a remove. Young enough that he's still a romantic, but old enough that he's forgotten just how unromantic it is to be a teen.

The 'democratization' of news sites

I'm pretty sure that when media theorists praised the democratic potentials of the internet a decade or more ago, they didn't have the comment sections of major media news websites in mind. As my union's nearly three-month long strike lurches to an end - with a whimper, as the government is legislating us back to work - I'm continually depressed at the way in which comments threads are filled with old information, misinformation, or just plain old propaganda - ideas from which the newspaper can distance themselves insofar as they didn't write them, but all of which they nonetheless allow to be said, read, and repeated without any critical filter.

And as if this weren't enough of a problem, The Toronto Star takes the exercise to an additional level of absurdist faux democratic process by allowing people to click 'agree' and 'disagree'. (As you can see here, for instance.) By way of a click, a couple dozen readers of any online story can vote on what politicized interpretation of the news - which the newspaper could not explicitly endorse for reasons of politesse, factuality, or legality - most closely aligns with their own. It isn't an effort in the exchange of information, which is ideally what it should be, but rather a sort of mob forum. (Which, I suppose, simply reduces the standing of mainstream 'legitimate' media to the level of the rest of the internet.) And a quick look at the actual agree and disagree tallies are telling - readers will click to 'agree' with an insult or 'disagree' when a commenter lists information that corrects or casts doubt upon info offered by the paper or another commenter.

For instance: The Star was repeatedly a couple weeks behind in reporting our union's wage demands and were misleadingly suggesting in every update that the university was offering us 'increased benefits', when the 'increase' was only relative to their massively concessionary first offer. But when the 'increased benefits' were compared to the benefits available to each member when our previous contract was signed, it wasn't even close - hence, it was no increase in the sense that most of us would use the word. And every time that I posted corrections in the comments, more people 'disagreed' with me than 'agreed' - on a topic that, one would like to think, is beyond 'disagreeing'. I'm hoping that this will be revealed to have been part of a secret sociological experiment.

The curious case of the poet

Like pretty much everyone I've spoken too, I was bored stiff by the poem read by Elizabeth Alexander at Obama's inauguration. It was an awful poem - filled with clichés and trite or just plain boring imagery. It was also read in the most wooden manner. It wasn't good, but it was made several magnitudes worse by the poet's own recitation.

Which causes me to ask - why is it that we always expect poets to read their own writing? That expectation seems non-existent for most other varieties of professional writer: lyricists don't have to sing (and singers don't have to write their own lyrics); playwrights and screenwriters aren't expected to be actors; novelists or writers of non-fiction sometimes read selections, but it's hardly given the importance of a poet's reading - and the book-on-tape is rarely read by the author. So why the different standard?

Atheism, feminism, and Obama - briefly

Actual exchange, while Victoria and I were making lunch during Obama's inaugural address:

Obama: "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers."
Me: "So 'atheist' is a dirty word?"
Victoria: "It would be like saying 'feminist.'"

I get the sense, actually, that all the debate over Obama being a feminist has actually lent feminism a mainstream legitimacy that it hasn't enjoyed in decades - for better or worse. But atheism? Not so much.

It wasn't the internet that changed...

I'm still on strike, but some recent developments have it looking like the strike will soon be over. So I decided to see what the anti-strike contingent (which consists mostly of inactive undergraduate students and some very active anti-union grad students and faculty) was saying. This was a bad idea, as it seems that I somehow forgot how the internet worked - particularly that part of the internet where a) everyone thinks you're wrong, and b) they're mad as hell about it.

Things that I should have kept in mind when entering Hostile Internet Territory (the HIT):

1. "Logic", like moral authority, is based entirely in consensus. Whenever I'd try to explain a position point-by-point, it was declared illogical. Never was my ostensible mistake explained, though it was often illustrated by means of an analogy that made absolutely no sense. But it didn't matter because everyone else in the thread agreed that the analogy was perfectly apt.
2. Keep it short.The more I would write, the more often respondents would seize on the parts of my response that a) I felt were least important, ignoring the key bits, b) were the most poorly developed and ripe for attacking, and c) contained misspellings. Engaging an opponent in the HIT should be like running into the Romulans along the Neutral Zone - don't deviate from the course, don't make eye-contact, and say as little as necessary.
3. Keep it clear. This is not unlike the last point but deserves its own entry. I would use expressions like "I think it's fair to assume" or "my best guess", thinking that they expressed an appropriately casual and open-minded position. But I'm not one to write in a deferential or cautious manner, and so the specificity and strength of what followed those undercut my position. I should have remembered that people's memories in the HIT generally only extend back to the last thing that made them angry, and so the speculative element should have been reinforced.
4. Keep it serious. Never, never, never try to be sarcastic or ironic in a forum full of people who have previously told you that they hate you. (And who have written death-threats to your co-workers.) It might seem like quite the clever and good idea in the moment, but it never is.
   
5. Emasculate, emasculate, emasculate. Being called a "bitch", or some derivative thereof, is the ultimate put-down and sexism - even, as baffling as it seemed, when it's a woman challenging the masculinity of a man by way of comparing him to a woman - is par for the course. I was, at first, shocked to see this kind of thing being written by the people with whom I might some day find myself working or teaching. And then I remember that this is the HIT, where the enemy isn't really regarded as people and so things like sexism aren't really sexism.

(Note: I'm going to be trying to get back into the habit of blogging, though I can't really make any promises. But I'm also going to aim for shorter posts, more speculative and less concerned with carefully articulating and proving a point. Here's hoping.)

Search strings

I've been trying to get back into the swing of doing academic work - I'm still on strike, and have been for more than 6 weeks, now - but thought I'd try working myself back into the blogging habit by way of a frivolous posting: taking inspiration from Jen, here's a short collection of the funny and strange searches that bring people to my blog (which only brought people here once, unless otherwise noted):

• "hetero man crush" (3 unique visits!)
  
• "pictures taken of herself"
• asshole kevin dicus
• naked divas on play boy
• politicization of teenage pregnancy
• we are writing to register our displeasure and....
• x-men rape (2 visits)

On a less funny note, there are also something like 50 different searches that include the word 'masculinity', which is something of an accomplishment, I think.

The most clicked on page on my blog? You'd think that the index page would be the obvious answer, but it isn't - due to Google searches relating to The Dark Knight and Google image searches for Heath Ledger's Joker, it's actually my hysterical joker/hobo batman posting. (My very first post on the Joker promo pictures is #4.) The top-five is rounded out by a blog about Miley Cyrus and the ridiculous expectation that pop starlets should be entirely asexual, and my most recent blog about Canada's coalition crisis - it's been getting about two direct hits a day, which seems impressive for a discussion of constitutional politics. (Some credit goes to Facebook for that one - I posted a link there, which was then picked up by at least one other person and recirculated.)

Canadian constitutional politics - an FAQ

Canadian politics have been interesting this past week or two - the newly re-elected Conservative party returned with a slightly larger minority share of the seats, but in its first few days rushed to present a budget that 1) could very well bankrupt at least 3 of their 4 major competitors, and so 2) was something that the majority of Parliament would never accept. It also offered basically no movement on the economy. (The funding was the first item dropped when it became clear that the budget wouldn't pass, but the opposition still pressed to defeat the governing party. For the cynical, the economy issue provides a good cover to reject the more important threat to party funding; for the idealistic, the refusal to move on the economy is reason in and of itself to reject the budget.)

But to make a long story short for those who don't follow Canadian politics... our Conservative Prime Minister invoked a power usually reserved to enter into recess after a session of many months, and will hold on to power at the very least until late January, when Parliament will resume with a new speech and budget that may or may not see the minority Conservative government lose the confidence of the other parties (a euphemism meaning that the other parties would vote to remove them from power) and either force a new election or compel the Governor General to ask the remaining parties to form a coalition and replace them. (In fact, it was a coalition agreement between two parties, and the signed support of the other, that made it appear that the Conservatives would be out of power at this very moment had they not prorogued Parliament.) And yes, that's the short version.

Anyway... the ridiculous amount of disinformation that's been flying around his past week made me feel that it's necessary to write some sort of Canadian Parliamentary Boondoggle FAQ, with a focus on the most popular and fallacious statements that are being bandied about by Conservatives and their supporters. This is decidedly unlike most of the stuff I post here, but it needs to be posted somewhere.

The key myths

The coalition agreement between the Liberals and NDP (with the signed but unofficial support of the Bloc Quebecois) that would see the coalition replace the Conservatives as Canada's governing party is illegal

The governing party in Canada's Parliament governs only so long as they maintain the confidence of the House - that is, when a majority of Members of Parliament vote to pass major pieces of government legislation. When they lose that confidence - when the other parties reject a major piece of legislation - the Governor General either dissolves Parliament and calls an election or asks the remaining parties if they can form a governing party that can garner the House's confidence. The coalition agreement that was signed anticipated a budget vote that would have seen the Conservatives lose confidence and was meant to indicate to the Governor General that yes, another governing party would have the House's confidence. It's not just legal - it's part of the procedure.

The coalition agreement is undemocratic

Given the amount of negotiation and political reorganization described above, this charge is more understandable. Insofar as it may distort the will of the people that elected these folks in the first place, sure. But given that Canadians don't live in direct democracy where our political will is directly accessed, the same complaint can be made of our entire system: our vote only elects a representative who may or may not follow through on his or her promises. A representative who might even leave the party they were running for when you voted for them and join one that you despise. Or who may decide to remain a member of their party but work with the members of other parties. That's just how the system works - and if the coalition is undemocratic, then so is the entire system.

The coalition agreement is unprecedented

It's rare, but not unprecedented. PM Borden ran a coalition government for a number of years during WWI, and a coalition government ran the country in the years immediately preceding the formation of Canada.

The coalition taking power would effectively be a coup d'état

I'd like to think that this sort of hopelessly idiotic remark could only come from someone who doesn't actually know what a coup is or means. Was the constitution violated by the proposed change in leaders? Was Parliament taken by force? Was the government ejected by self-appointed military leaders? No? Then it wouldn't be a coup.

The 'Parliamentary system 101' stuff

A coalition that would install either the Liberal leader (previously Dion; potentially Ignatieff) or NDP leader as Prime Minister is illegitimate because they weren't elected Prime Minister in the last election - Stephen Harper was

Strictly speaking, nobody but the voters in Stephen Harper's own riding voted for him. Like I said above, we don't actually even vote for a particular party - we only vote for our local representative. In turn, he or she typically throws their support behind their own party leader, which is why the party with the largest plurality within a minority Parliament tends to govern. (Again, this isn't necessarily the case - though European Parliaments serve as a far better example.) That said, those same representatives are the only folks who actually choose the Prime Minister, and they're entirely within their rights to change their mind.

The coalition has no moral authority to govern because the Liberals and NDP were rejected by Canadians in the last election

Well, given that no one party received even 40% of the vote, we can fairly say that every party was rejected by most people in the country. That said, the coalition rightly points out that, combined, they received more votes than the Conservatives. And since no one is actually able to vote against a party or its leader, that's all we have to work from in determining who was 'rejected'.

The coalition itself is illegitimate because no one actually voted for it

No one actually voted for any specific party - you elected a representative, who in turn is a member of a party. But they could switch allegiances and keep the seat that you elected them to, which is the surest indication that you didn't actually select a party when you voted. Members of parliament do this infrequently, of course, but switching parties or becoming an independent operates according to the same principle - your elected official decides to alter their allegiance, which in this case would see the NDP and Bloc members decide to select the Liberal leader as their Prime Minister rather than implicitly selecting their own.

The coalition itself is illegitimate and lacks moral authority because it can only function with the support of the separatist Bloc Quebecois

This point usually has to do with the Bloc being a separatist party that wants Quebec to secede from Canada - it suggests that a nationalist governing party should have no part in seeking support from a separatist party. That said, the Conservatives discussed working with the Bloc in 2004 to remove and replace a minority Liberal government, and recently admitted that they that they would accept Bloc support to protect the Liberal-NDP coalition from toppling them. So this is apparently only an illegitimate move if it isn't executed by the Conservatives. Which reveals that it's just contradictory bullshit.

The more obscure stuff

The PM's request to prorogue was legitimate and the Governor General had to agree to it

It was legitimate, insofar as it's within the PM's power to request prorogation at pretty much anytime. Conventionally, though, these sorts of recesses are only called at the end of a session of Parliament (usually lasting many months) or before an election. Certainly, requesting a prorogue after only a throne speech and before any legislation is actually passed is unprecedented. It's also unclear whether the request had to be honored by the GG. While a Governor General of Canada has never denied this particular kind of request, previous GG's have denied other sorts of requests - most famously in 1926, when the Governor General refused the Liberal Prime Minister's request for an election and instead inquired as to whether the Conservative Official Opposition could replace them as the governing party. This said, an unelected official's refusal to grant the requested of an elected official probalby wouldn't look good on that whole issue of 'democracy'.

The cut to the public funding of Canadian political parties was a legitimate cost-cutting measure

The cut would've amounted to about $30 million, or about 0.01% of the total budget. Tiny, targetted cuts of this sort are almost always self-serving or purely a p.r. move. The cut itself might be a perfectly legal one, but the underlying motivations were hardly pure

The cut of public funding of Canadian political parties was legitimate because taxpayer money shouldn't be used to fund political parties

In fact, nearly every Westernized country subsidizes elections with public funding - John McCain, for instance, used more than $80 million of it in the American election. The idea, naturally, is to allow any party with popular appeal a fair chance at electing members, rather than limiting access to political power to only those parties that can afford to hire people to fundraise - and who can only afford to hire them because their previous fundraising efforts were so successful, and so the cycle goes. Simply, the system of public funding rewards parties for winning support for their policies by translating every vote into money, where a system devoid of public funding would reward parties for being able to wring the most money out of the most people. I may be an idealist, but it's not hard to see where one system can easily go most horribly wrong.

Pop music divas, gender play, and empowerment

1) Beyoncé's "If I Were A Boy" (embedding has been disabled by Youtube, so I only have a link)

The video for this song, off of Beyoncé's new album, features an incredibly serious and surprisingly subtle inversion of typically masculine and feminine stereotypes. It then surprisingly inverts them near the video's end in a way that could rightly be criticized as heavy-handed or obvious, though I would suspect that it's also a case of Beyoncé understanding that her intended audience might need more than a mere hint to get the point.

One of the reasons that this point - a statement on male privilege, where Beyoncé takes her boyfriend for granted, cheats on him, and laughs off his concerns - might need the explicit twist at the end is because the video's inversion doesn't totally work. Rather than becoming "a boy", her masculinized self has had masculinity grafted or added on to her femininity rather than replaced it. The inversion works for the most part during the exchanges with the boyfriend, but falls apart in public (her attractiveness is still coded in typically female ways - tight pants, hourglass figure) and in her interactions with other men, who stand above and behind her in conventionally familiar ways. One imagines that even the masculinized Beyoncé would not be immune to charges of being a whore, as little sense as that may make in the context of her song, because her "boy" character might be just as easily read as "ice queen" or simply "bitch".

All that said, this stuff probably constitutes the least important details of the video. Part of the lesson appears to be price of becoming like the boys - namely, the double-standard that exists when you fail to transition from the rules governing girls to a category of rules governing boys and are instead trapped inside both, subject to adhering to both at once. And the sudden transition to a stereotypical relationship between the two characters near the end also goes a ways to illustrating the tentativeness of women's masculine power, too - that is, even if you can hold a degree of masculine and feminine power at once, it's an anxious balance that's easily stripped away by those who wield more, and more secure, holds on that same privilege. And so the video fails because it's an exercise in realism.

2) Britney's "Womanizer" (again, embedding disabled)

But even if we found more to dislike than like in "If I Were A Boy"... well, thank god for Britney Spears, who lends some perspective by reminding us that while Beyoncé's video is flawed it could have been sooooo much worse.

Britney's various characters are also asserting some sort of power, a sort of campy masculine domination over an ostensible "womanizer" that's wronged them. But it's a wholly fantastical power, as the video's cheeky delivery undermines empowerment of these women in its joking presentation. This is the sort of thing that women might dream of doing, but it's not the sort of thing that any woman would actually do.

It's even sadder when we consider that the video's version of this woman's fantasy actually seems quite a bit more like a hegemonic man's fantasy. When the womanizer is being mobbed, we could be forgiven for wondering whether we should actually feel sorry for him - at times, it's not even entirely clear whether his punishment (?) is sex or... well, I'm not entirely sure what else it could be. Throw in the shots of a gratuitously nude Britney, with the womanizer seemingly showering in the background, and the audience can only be reasonably left with one conclusion: fantasy or not, being a womanizer is hot.

Things I Don't Get

• Pro-Lifers. I don't get why pro-lifers appear to value unborn human life more than, well, born human life. They seem to go to often ridiculous lengths to protect fetuses but, for the most part, are the same people who oppose a secure welfare net and reliable public health care system that would see those same babies safely into adulthood. Or maybe this is why they simply call themselves pro-life rather than pro-good life?
  
• Lynda Barry. I find Ernie Pook's Comeek neither funny nor insightful.
  
• Why no one does anything about price fixing. Everyone knows that the price of gas is fixed. Everyone knows that it's bullshit when they explain that it will take 90 days to refine, process, and ship the oil that is now selling for half what it was only a few months ago, and so we'll only see the price drop 3 months from now. But no one seems willing to point out the contradiction when, in advance of a storm that is merely expected to reduce production, the price of gas anticipates the next 3 months rather than waits for them to pass and jumps dramatically.
  
• How to take a compliment from the other team in sports. I always think they're mocking me, even when they compliment me after I've done something good. I was traumatized as an undersized child, evidently.
  
• Why the news - on TV, on the internet, in the paper - is incapable of staking out a critical position outside of the occasional editorial. A timely example: Now that Christmas is approaching, we're met with a barrage of tips about bargain-hunting and getting the best deal. Some even pretend to be exercising a pseudo-criticality by making token mentions of "the economy" and charity. But why is it that no one is will to critique the quest for "bargains" as an ultimately futile one, to note how short-sighted and self-defeating this strategy is when it encourages us to spend money on businesses that aren't locally (or even domestically) owned and whose profits leave the country, who don't buy or produce their products locally or invest locally (or, again, nationally), and who don't produce sustainable jobs at a living-wage and thus create the need to find "bargains" as a means of surviving on one's meager earnings?*
  

*This distress about news-discourse is also a more personal one that's connected to the media's inability to make sense of my union's positions throughout the strike - that, yes, continues. Once you start talking about 'restoring "real" wages to 2005 levels' and 'indexing increases to the benefit funds to membership growth', the media - and so the public at large - stop paying attention. In response, I've pushed the need to develop a strategy of 'sexy sound-bites'. I'm not entirely certain that it would work, but it seems that PR wars can't otherwise be waged through mass media.

Apologies...

I've been on strike since the middle of last week, and it's sapped a lot of my energy - both physically, with respect to waking up at 5:30 in the morning to picket, and mentally, in terms of worrying about when it's going to end and about stressing out over its reception by undergraduate students. I have plenty of things to write about, but I've been lacking the desire to write about them. I'll try to remedy that some time soon.

"Hetero man-crush"

One of my very favorite expressions to use is "hetero man-crush", in part because it always gets a laugh from people who've never heard it, and in part because it's almost always perfectly apt. I use it to describe non-sexual-but-more-than-platonic attraction to other guys, though it seems to be used by most other guys to exclusively describe an attraction to male celebrities or other guys that they don't actually know. (I suppose it's somehow safer or less anxious if it's confined only to people you'll never meet?)

I can't recall when I first started using it or who/where I got it from, though the very oldest reference to "hetero man crush" (as opposed to simply "man crush") that I could find on Google is in August of 2005, which uses it "to denote a man that [one] admires, to the point of wanting to get to know that person more, admiring that person to the point of thinking about them often and wanting to be like them." In fairness, though, that definition seems to fit "man crush" more accurately than "hetero man-crush", the latter being a bit more ironic and cute about the way that it self-reflexively asserts the heterosexuality of the speaker/writer. (And, in that assertion, also winks knowingly at the anxious and tenuous construction of that heterosexuality.) There has to be some admittance that you want to be too much like them, that your fandom (in the case of celebrities) approaches a discomforting level or your interactions with them (in the case of people you know) are already ambiguously gay. No definition of "hetero man-crush" works without the inclusion of those levels.

As for specific examples of my own? George Clooney as Danny Ocean is maybe at the top of the list, and I suspect it has something to do with both his overwhelming coolness and my love of Clooney's hair, given that I'm getting a number of grays and hope sincerely that my gray hair will somehow eventually be like his. It's incredibly unlikely, sure, but just maybe...

"Nick and Norah" and genre

I watched Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist with some friends two weekends ago. 15 minutes in I knew that it was going to make for an interesting discussion - not because the movie was particularly good or bad, but because it I knew it was distinctly cruder than some of the people I saw it with were expecting.

Briefly, then: two of our group found the film discomforting, with their main complaints relating to the unrealistic handling of Norah's drunk friend and Nick's ex-girlfriend's interest in Nick. Why, they asked, was the film so casual - or, rather, irresponsible - in its failure to address the risk of sexual violence posed to the drunk girl, wandering the bars and streets of New York, and to the ex-girlfriend, who Nick abandoned while she was stripping in a parking lot? And why the hell would the ex-girlfriend have wanted a nerd like Nick in the first place, much less want him back?

Good questions, both. And also, I countered, somewhat unfair. What they should have been critiquing, rather than the film, I suggested, was its genre - because Nick and Norah is a genre film in the now-familiar (well, evidently not that familiar to my two friends) American Pie/Apatow model in which young people do ridiculous and self-destructive things, discover important stuff about themselves, and rarely pay any sort of consequences. And it makes as much sense to criticize these films for their failure to address sexual violence as it does to criticize, say, an action film for misrepresenting the accuracy of handguns and failing to address the real danger of getting shot and bleeding profusely. (A la the old 'it's just a flesh-wound' joke.) There's a sort of apoliticism at work in both forms that seem to ask that we don't take them all that seriously, that we recognize there's a sort of fantasy at work and that it's not really like real life.

That's not to say, of course, that the absence of sexual violence in the former genre and death of the hero at the hands of gun-fire in the second is not problematic. Quite the opposite, in fact - that genre fiction of any kind misrepresents real life for the sake of narrative ease and intelligibility (I mean, we couldn't laugh at the movie or want Nick and Norah to get together if Nick's abandoning his girlfriend led to her sexual assault) is totally something that we should acknowledge and discuss. And if we start to mistake their genre fantasies for real life, well, that's also hugely problematic - which is why I go to the trouble of asserting Nick and Norah's genre-pic status in the first place. But is it ultimately fair to ask for that kind of self-reflexivity of a genre pic, to expect it to address these issues and asks these questions of itself? No more fair, I think, than it is to ask Die Hard to explicitly disclaim its own ultra-violence as needlessly sensational. It's not individual action films or romantic-comedies that ruin people - it's their refusal to see these films as action films or romantic-comedies.