I Say We Take Off and Nuke the Entire Site from Orbit

It's the only way to be sure.

Band of Thebes, where I got this clip, asks, "Do the bullies run completely unchecked in feral packs?" Of course they do. Parents and teachers and administrators stand by and do nothing; sometimes they join in. I've written before about this.

Reading Pascoe's account of what she calls "the rape paradigm," or remembering the Speakers Bureau volunteer who tells how once a month, in his high school in the 1980s, the cool kids would wear t-shirts that read "SILLY FAGGOT -- DICKS ARE FOR CHICKS", I find myself asking a question I never thought would pass my lips:

Where were the adults?

Where were the adults when Pascoe's Ricky was being harassed and beaten up, or when Keith was jamming a drumstick into another student's crotch and yelling "Get raped"? (Standing back and watching it happen, she says.) Where were the adults when those t-shirts were being worn in the halls, classrooms, and cafeterias? (Doing nothing, or chuckling at the wit of it all.) Even the word "dicks," which I'd have thought a punishable breach of decorum, didn't bother the administration. Considering that political messages or other attention-grabbing slogans are verboten in so many school dress codes, I find it incredible; but antigay bigotry is uncontroversial and apolitical. Their high moral standards, their obsessive concern with a docile student body, can be forgotten for the right cause.

As Anderson Cooper says in the clip, religious bigots claim that anti-bullying programs "encourage homosexuality." This needs to be fought more effectively. Kids like Jamey Rodemeyer shouldn't have to do it themselves. As Dan Savage has said, gay advocacy groups are kept out of schools by the bigots. But why should it be necessary for outsiders to do this? Parents should be the leaders in these matters; don't they care about their own children? Of course it won't be easy, but finding your child hanging from a rope because he couldn't stand his life anymore is presumably harder.

The gay community can set an example, and needs to clean its own house. As I also wrote before, there's a lot of hostility to effeminate boys and masculine girls (under the euphemism "stereotypes") among gay people who fancy themselves respectable, the kind of people I call Homo-Americans.

And if it's destructive to bad-mouth people, if speaking negatively about someone in their presence can drive them to suicide, something needs to be done about gay people who complain about the bad homosexuals who Fit the Stereotype and made it seem that they couldn't be normal Homo-Americans like they wanted to be, scaring them back into their closets for years. It's those Stereotypes who get beaten up regularly and are more likely to kill themselves; it surely doesn't help them to hear themselves denounced as scary, malevolent queer demons who ruin everything for normal homos. It's telling that many respectable gay people think it's proper to demonize them. (And like the straight homophobes, the image people never think about the the impact of what they're doing on real people.)

Then there are hip, radical straight boys (they never will be missed!) who want to rehabilitate the word "faggot," because on their account it doesn't really mean "homosexuals," it means people "who take a knee," who "choose to lose, because the alternative bears too heavy a cost." (This is especially funny, really, because the blogger who wrote it later whined, when IOZ playfully urged defiance of TSA groping at airports, that he couldn't do it, because he had his kids with him and it would just get him in trouble for nothing. Faggot.*) Or who, in their ideological purity, don't want class issues to be sidetracked by trivia like racism, sexism, and homophobia.

We've got our work cut out for us.

*Bear in mind, I don't think he should have defied TSA at the airport. I'm just pointing out that he fits his own definition to an F, so maybe he should be a bit less judgmental about other people's little capitulations. The faggot.

I Say We Take Off and Nuke the Entire Site from Orbit

It's the only way to be sure.

Band of Thebes, where I got this clip, asks, "Do the bullies run completely unchecked in feral packs?" Of course they do. Parents and teachers and administrators stand by and do nothing; sometimes they join in. I've written before about this.

Reading Pascoe's account of what she calls "the rape paradigm," or remembering the Speakers Bureau volunteer who tells how once a month, in his high school in the 1980s, the cool kids would wear t-shirts that read "SILLY FAGGOT -- DICKS ARE FOR CHICKS", I find myself asking a question I never thought would pass my lips:

Where were the adults?

Where were the adults when Pascoe's Ricky was being harassed and beaten up, or when Keith was jamming a drumstick into another student's crotch and yelling "Get raped"? (Standing back and watching it happen, she says.) Where were the adults when those t-shirts were being worn in the halls, classrooms, and cafeterias? (Doing nothing, or chuckling at the wit of it all.) Even the word "dicks," which I'd have thought a punishable breach of decorum, didn't bother the administration. Considering that political messages or other attention-grabbing slogans are verboten in so many school dress codes, I find it incredible; but antigay bigotry is uncontroversial and apolitical. Their high moral standards, their obsessive concern with a docile student body, can be forgotten for the right cause.

As Anderson Cooper says in the clip, religious bigots claim that anti-bullying programs "encourage homosexuality." This needs to be fought more effectively. Kids like Jamey Rodemeyer shouldn't have to do it themselves. As Dan Savage has said, gay advocacy groups are kept out of schools by the bigots. But why should it be necessary for outsiders to do this? Parents should be the leaders in these matters; don't they care about their own children? Of course it won't be easy, but finding your child hanging from a rope because he couldn't stand his life anymore is presumably harder.

The gay community can set an example, and needs to clean its own house. As I also wrote before, there's a lot of hostility to effeminate boys and masculine girls (under the euphemism "stereotypes") among gay people who fancy themselves respectable, the kind of people I call Homo-Americans.

And if it's destructive to bad-mouth people, if speaking negatively about someone in their presence can drive them to suicide, something needs to be done about gay people who complain about the bad homosexuals who Fit the Stereotype and made it seem that they couldn't be normal Homo-Americans like they wanted to be, scaring them back into their closets for years. It's those Stereotypes who get beaten up regularly and are more likely to kill themselves; it surely doesn't help them to hear themselves denounced as scary, malevolent queer demons who ruin everything for normal homos. It's telling that many respectable gay people think it's proper to demonize them. (And like the straight homophobes, the image people never think about the the impact of what they're doing on real people.)

Then there are hip, radical straight boys (they never will be missed!) who want to rehabilitate the word "faggot," because on their account it doesn't really mean "homosexuals," it means people "who take a knee," who "choose to lose, because the alternative bears too heavy a cost." (This is especially funny, really, because the blogger who wrote it later whined, when IOZ playfully urged defiance of TSA groping at airports, that he couldn't do it, because he had his kids with him and it would just get him in trouble for nothing. Faggot.*) Or who, in their ideological purity, don't want class issues to be sidetracked by trivia like racism, sexism, and homophobia.

We've got our work cut out for us.

*Bear in mind, I don't think he should have defied TSA at the airport. I'm just pointing out that he fits his own definition to an F, so maybe he should be a bit less judgmental about other people's little capitulations. The faggot.

Believing What You Know Ain't So

I just finished reading Bruno Latour's On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Duke, 2010), and am still stirring it around in my head. Latour is (in)famous as an anthropologist of science, whose fieldwork consists of observing the savage scientist in his natural habitat, the laboratory. I haven't yet read any of that work; all I'd read before was We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard, 1993), whose title signaled to me that the author was someone whose ideas would make sense to me; and so it proved.

Here's a nice passage from the newer book, which caught my attention after I listened last night to three people on the community radio station talking about ancient astronauts and the like. None of them believed that the Great Pyramid was built by extraterrestrials, because that wouldn't be scientific; yet I got the impression that they believed that extraterrestrials had crashed at Roswell and been sequestered at Area 51.

Does the only example of naïve belief we have, then, come from a naïve belief on the part of researchers that ignorant people believe naively? Not quite, for ignorant people do exist who quite resemble the picture that researchers would like to paint of them. Photographers of flying saucers, archaeologists of cities lost in space, zoologists tracking the Yeti, people who have been contacted by little green men, creationists fighting against Darwin – all the sorts of people that Pierre Lagrange studies with a collector’s passionate interest – are all trying to pin down entities that seemingly display the same properties of existence, the same specifications as entities that, according to the epistemologists, come from laboratories. Curiously enough, these people are called “irrationalists,” whereas their greatest fault comes more from the reckless trust they display in a scientific methodology, dating to the nineteenth century, in order to explore the only mode of existence they are able to be imagine: that of the thing, already there, present, stubborn, waiting to be pinned down, known. No one is more positivistic than creationists or ufologists, since they cannot even imagine other ways of being and speaking than describing “matters of fact.” No researcher is that naïve, at least not in the laboratory. This is so much the case that, paradoxically, the only example of naïve belief we have seems to come from the irrationalists, who are always claiming that they have overthrown official science with stubborn facts that some conspiracy had hidden away [44].

The last section of the book is a sermon on the relation between science and religion, and even though I disagree rather vehemently with a lot of what he says there, he still raises valuable questions and points to important problems. And I appreciate the almost Wildean paradoxes he plays with, which (as he admits) catch him in his own contradictions.

What would happen to me if, in criticizing the critics, I was simply trying to create another scandal? What if this essay, in its pretension to re-describe iconoclasm, was nothing but another boring iconoclastic gesture, another provocation, the mere repetition of the endless gesture of the intelligentsia’s most cherished treasures? We don’t know for sure [88].

And:

… it is science that reaches the invisible world of beyond, that ... is spiritual, miraculous, soul-fulfilling, and uplifting; it is religion which should be qualified as being local, objective, visible, mundane, un-miraculous, repetitive, obstinate, and sturdy [111].

And:

What I have argued in this lecture is very different: belief is a caricature of religion exactly as knowledge is a caricature of science. Belief is patterned after a false idea of science, as if it were possible to raise the question “Do you believe in God?” in the same way as “Do you believe in global warming?” except the first question does not possess any of the instruments that would allow the reference to move on, and that the second is leading the interlocutor to a phenomenon even more invisible to the naked eye than God, since to reach it we have to travel through satellite imaging, computer simulation, theories of earth atmospheric instability, or high stratosphere chemistry [121].

I'll probably have occasion to refer to Latour again, but for now it's time to hit the sack.

Believing What You Know Ain't So

I just finished reading Bruno Latour's On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Duke, 2010), and am still stirring it around in my head. Latour is (in)famous as an anthropologist of science, whose fieldwork consists of observing the savage scientist in his natural habitat, the laboratory. I haven't yet read any of that work; all I'd read before was We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard, 1993), whose title signaled to me that the author was someone whose ideas would make sense to me; and so it proved.

Here's a nice passage from the newer book, which caught my attention after I listened last night to three people on the community radio station talking about ancient astronauts and the like. None of them believed that the Great Pyramid was built by extraterrestrials, because that wouldn't be scientific; yet I got the impression that they believed that extraterrestrials had crashed at Roswell and been sequestered at Area 51.

Does the only example of naïve belief we have, then, come from a naïve belief on the part of researchers that ignorant people believe naively? Not quite, for ignorant people do exist who quite resemble the picture that researchers would like to paint of them. Photographers of flying saucers, archaeologists of cities lost in space, zoologists tracking the Yeti, people who have been contacted by little green men, creationists fighting against Darwin – all the sorts of people that Pierre Lagrange studies with a collector’s passionate interest – are all trying to pin down entities that seemingly display the same properties of existence, the same specifications as entities that, according to the epistemologists, come from laboratories. Curiously enough, these people are called “irrationalists,” whereas their greatest fault comes more from the reckless trust they display in a scientific methodology, dating to the nineteenth century, in order to explore the only mode of existence they are able to be imagine: that of the thing, already there, present, stubborn, waiting to be pinned down, known. No one is more positivistic than creationists or ufologists, since they cannot even imagine other ways of being and speaking than describing “matters of fact.” No researcher is that naïve, at least not in the laboratory. This is so much the case that, paradoxically, the only example of naïve belief we have seems to come from the irrationalists, who are always claiming that they have overthrown official science with stubborn facts that some conspiracy had hidden away [44].

The last section of the book is a sermon on the relation between science and religion, and even though I disagree rather vehemently with a lot of what he says there, he still raises valuable questions and points to important problems. And I appreciate the almost Wildean paradoxes he plays with, which (as he admits) catch him in his own contradictions.

What would happen to me if, in criticizing the critics, I was simply trying to create another scandal? What if this essay, in its pretension to re-describe iconoclasm, was nothing but another boring iconoclastic gesture, another provocation, the mere repetition of the endless gesture of the intelligentsia’s most cherished treasures? We don’t know for sure [88].

And:

… it is science that reaches the invisible world of beyond, that ... is spiritual, miraculous, soul-fulfilling, and uplifting; it is religion which should be qualified as being local, objective, visible, mundane, un-miraculous, repetitive, obstinate, and sturdy [111].

And:

What I have argued in this lecture is very different: belief is a caricature of religion exactly as knowledge is a caricature of science. Belief is patterned after a false idea of science, as if it were possible to raise the question “Do you believe in God?” in the same way as “Do you believe in global warming?” except the first question does not possess any of the instruments that would allow the reference to move on, and that the second is leading the interlocutor to a phenomenon even more invisible to the naked eye than God, since to reach it we have to travel through satellite imaging, computer simulation, theories of earth atmospheric instability, or high stratosphere chemistry [121].

I'll probably have occasion to refer to Latour again, but for now it's time to hit the sack.

Fashionable Stubble and Cocaine Fueled All-Nighters

Last weekend I wrote about an article at Onion's AV Club that complained about the treatment of Christians in independent cinema, and also about Weekend, a new movie about two gay men that has been getting good reviews. This week the AV Club has a review of Weekend by Allison Willmore, the same writer who cried a river about Christians in movies.

The review is highly positive, but it isn't terribly insightful.

But while it’s accurate to describe it as a “gay film,” that label needlessly condemns it to a niche when it deserves a wide audience, or at least as wide an audience as a drama that features frank, unabashed man-on-man hookups can manage. Weekend is, simply, a great indie romance.

I guess this could be worse. Willmore recognizes that the problem is homophobia and niche marketing, not anything inaccurate about the "gay film" label. (And when you think about it, did the "gay cowboy" label -- which was used by just about everybody except the filmmakers and their marketing department -- really hurt Brokeback Mountain?) It would be nice if straights (and probably many gays) could reach the point where they took for granted that a gay movie would be about something other than homosexuality, but I don't expect to see that in my lifetime. And since so many heterosexuals are squicked out by same-sex romance on the screen, it's probably just as well: better they should be forewarned so they don't have to throw tantrums in the theater.

Back in the 90s, impelled by the realization that most gay people I knew hadn't seen any of the significant gay and lesbian films that had been released to that point, I ran a one-semester film series in the dorm where I was working. The turnout was gratifying, and included straights as well as gays in the audience. Later a young straight man who'd attended most of the showings told me that he was surprised to find the films had so much intrinsic interest, that they told meaningful and interesting stories above and beyond same-sex romance and relationships. That made me happy, because it was exactly what I'd hoped people to take from the films they saw: that they'd have been worth seeing even if the characters had been straight.

If you read my post on Weekend from the weekend, you'll recall that I was bothered by what I can only describe as the filmmaker's narrow-mindedness: he complained that previous gay films he'd seen had "never represented how I felt about being gay, ever ... I haven’t got muscles and I don’t live in West Hollywood." By his logic, I shouldn't bother seeing Weekend, since I don't live in England, I don't maintain a fashionable stubble on my face, and I've never had "a cocaine-fueled all-nighter": therefore it doesn't represent how I feel about being gay.

Despite this, I still plan to see Weekend if it ever comes near enough. Why? Because I don't expect art to show me only myself. One reason I read and watch movies is to find out how other people see the world, how they live, what is possible and imaginable in human conduct and relationships. I can't think of any gay movie that was about a person like me. (Many of my favorite gay films have been about lesbians, in fact.) Yet there have been a good many gay movies I've seen that I enjoyed, that spoke to me, that represented at least part of how I felt about being gay.

I remember how some straight women athletes I knew reacted to Personal Best, Robert Towne's 1982 film about two bisexual women athletes: "People will look at this," they wailed, "and think all women in sports are lesbians!" This despite the fact that the two leads are the only women athletes in the film who aren't heterosexual: they're surrounded by peers who are quote vocally interested in men. Still, that is how a lot of people think, if "think" is the word. They'll look at Weekend and think that everybody in Nottingham is gay and does cocaine! The only way to avoid such reactions is not to make movies, I guess. But I expect more intelligence from critics, and from filmmakers -- even though I don't get it nearly often enough.

Fashionable Stubble and Cocaine Fueled All-Nighters

Last weekend I wrote about an article at Onion's AV Club that complained about the treatment of Christians in independent cinema, and also about Weekend, a new movie about two gay men that has been getting good reviews. This week the AV Club has a review of Weekend by Allison Willmore, the same writer who cried a river about Christians in movies.

The review is highly positive, but it isn't terribly insightful.

But while it’s accurate to describe it as a “gay film,” that label needlessly condemns it to a niche when it deserves a wide audience, or at least as wide an audience as a drama that features frank, unabashed man-on-man hookups can manage. Weekend is, simply, a great indie romance.

I guess this could be worse. Willmore recognizes that the problem is homophobia and niche marketing, not anything inaccurate about the "gay film" label. (And when you think about it, did the "gay cowboy" label -- which was used by just about everybody except the filmmakers and their marketing department -- really hurt Brokeback Mountain?) It would be nice if straights (and probably many gays) could reach the point where they took for granted that a gay movie would be about something other than homosexuality, but I don't expect to see that in my lifetime. And since so many heterosexuals are squicked out by same-sex romance on the screen, it's probably just as well: better they should be forewarned so they don't have to throw tantrums in the theater.

Back in the 90s, impelled by the realization that most gay people I knew hadn't seen any of the significant gay and lesbian films that had been released to that point, I ran a one-semester film series in the dorm where I was working. The turnout was gratifying, and included straights as well as gays in the audience. Later a young straight man who'd attended most of the showings told me that he was surprised to find the films had so much intrinsic interest, that they told meaningful and interesting stories above and beyond same-sex romance and relationships. That made me happy, because it was exactly what I'd hoped people to take from the films they saw: that they'd have been worth seeing even if the characters had been straight.

If you read my post on Weekend from the weekend, you'll recall that I was bothered by what I can only describe as the filmmaker's narrow-mindedness: he complained that previous gay films he'd seen had "never represented how I felt about being gay, ever ... I haven’t got muscles and I don’t live in West Hollywood." By his logic, I shouldn't bother seeing Weekend, since I don't live in England, I don't maintain a fashionable stubble on my face, and I've never had "a cocaine-fueled all-nighter": therefore it doesn't represent how I feel about being gay.

Despite this, I still plan to see Weekend if it ever comes near enough. Why? Because I don't expect art to show me only myself. One reason I read and watch movies is to find out how other people see the world, how they live, what is possible and imaginable in human conduct and relationships. I can't think of any gay movie that was about a person like me. (Many of my favorite gay films have been about lesbians, in fact.) Yet there have been a good many gay movies I've seen that I enjoyed, that spoke to me, that represented at least part of how I felt about being gay.

I remember how some straight women athletes I knew reacted to Personal Best, Robert Towne's 1982 film about two bisexual women athletes: "People will look at this," they wailed, "and think all women in sports are lesbians!" This despite the fact that the two leads are the only women athletes in the film who aren't heterosexual: they're surrounded by peers who are quote vocally interested in men. Still, that is how a lot of people think, if "think" is the word. They'll look at Weekend and think that everybody in Nottingham is gay and does cocaine! The only way to avoid such reactions is not to make movies, I guess. But I expect more intelligence from critics, and from filmmakers -- even though I don't get it nearly often enough.

No One Who Puts His Hand to the Plow and Looks Back Is Fit to Serve in the Obama Campaign

There's been a fair amount of reaction to Melissa Harris-Perry's accusation that white liberals are "abandoning" Obama because they're racist. She admits that she's talking about "a more insidious form of racism," though, since she names no specific culprits nor any specific examples of racist practice or discourse. What her complaint boils down to that Obama has suffered

a swift and steep decline in support among white Americans—from 61 percent in 2009 to 33 percent now. I believe much of that decline can be attributed to their disappointment that choosing a black man for president did not prove to be salvific for them or the nation. His record is, at the very least, comparable to that of President Clinton, who was enthusiastically re-elected.

David Sirota took Harris-Perry down on that last point:

President Clinton was not "enthusiastically re-elected," as Harris-Perry well knows. When Clinton triangulated against his liberal base with NAFTA, welfare reform and "don't ask, don't tell" (among other issues), he faced just as vociferous liberal criticism as Obama does today, and in the very journals like the Nation for which Harris-Perry now writes.

As a result, America saw the opposite of "enthusiasm" in 1996 -- that presidential election, in fact, saw unprecedentedly low turnout. Additionally, Clinton -- after dissing his base -- won a meager 49 percent of the vote in that election, despite running against one of the weakest, least charismatic Republican presidential nominees in recent memory. In short, just as many white liberals were dissatisfied with a white president for abandoning the Democratic Party's base back in 1996, so too are many now dissatisfied with a black president for doing the same -- or, in many cases, worse.

(For the record, in 1996 I voted for Nader. But then, I'm not a liberal or a Democrat.)

Sirota shows how Harris-Perry ignores numerous important differences between Clinton and Obama, unemployment and a staggering economy not least among them. It doesn't help that Obama's approval rates among African-Americans have also taken a nosedive, which I suppose is also because of racism. Or maybe it's because, as Obama himself claimed during his repellent performance before the Congressional Black Caucus, blacks are lazy and demand everything handed to them on a platter: "Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying." (This is not a new theme in the Obama show, of course.) I seem to remember another distinguished African-American leader saying essentially the same thing a few years ago: "Bitch, bitch, bitch, moan and moan, whine and whine." He also claimed that he was picked on because of his race, and suffered a "high-tech lynching" which climaxed in his elevation to the highest court in the land.

Harris-Perry exhibits behavior we've seen before, by Republicans during the Bush years: she's just regurgitating White House talking points, from her touting all those lovely laws that were passed under Obama - quantity trumps quality, you see -- to claiming that his critics are "disappointed" because he didn't save the world in forty-eight hours. (The writer Pearl Cleage posted a status with the same basic content today.) From his lips to her keyboard! Especially so soon after the debt-ceiling debacle, you wouldn't think an Obama loyalist would want to remind her readers about her leader's record, but let her have her will. We're going to see a lot more of the same as the campaign drags on.

I went back to C. P. Snow's response to personal attacks in The Two Cultures, a good all-purpose approach.

However, the problem of behaviour in these circumstances is very easily solved. Let us imagine that I am called, in print, a kleptomaniac necrophilist (I have selected with some care two allegations which have not, so far as I know, been made). I have exactly two courses of action. The first, and the one which in general I should choose to follow, is to do precisely nothing. The second is, if the nuisance becomes intolerable, to sue. There is one course of action which no one can expect of a sane man: that is, solemnly to argue the points, to produce certificates from Saks and Harrods to say he has never, to the best of their belief, stolen a single article, to obtain testimonials signed by sixteen Fellows of the Royal Society, the Head of the Civil Service, a Lord Justice of Appeal and the Secretary of the M.C.C., testifying that they have known him for half a lifetime, and that even after a convivial evening they have not once seen him lurking in the vicinity of a tomb.

Such a reply is not on. It puts one in the same psychological compartment as one’s traducer. That is a condition from which one has a right to be excused.

One reason why accusations of racism can be so effective is that the United States is a racist country: no one can honestly claim that his or her opinions are utterly free of it. But just for that reason, unless you can point to specifically racist elements of someone's practice or talk, saying that an American is racist is like saying that they're breathing. One could just as accurately claim that white liberal supporters of Obama are racist, and continue supporting him because they're trying to overcompensate for their prejudice. Either move is a distraction from the issues, though of course that's normal in a political campaign. Obama's going to need a shitload of distraction to throw in the voters' eyes during the coming thirteen months, though his Republican would-be opponents are doing their best to make it easy for him.

Meanwhile, Obama should be challenged when he demands support for harmful policies, which is what he was doing with the Congressional Black Caucus. If they resist voting for bills that will harm their constituency, they're doing their job, not shirking it.

And what an irony: one similarity between Clinton and Obama that Harris-Perry overlooks (not too surprisingly) is that they both lost control of Congress in midterm elections because their right-wing policies alienated their base. This undermines her case, because she depends on a postulated "double standard" that let a white (but still America's first black) president get away with things a black president can't.

No One Who Puts His Hand to the Plow and Looks Back Is Fit to Serve in the Obama Campaign

There's been a fair amount of reaction to Melissa Harris-Perry's accusation that white liberals are "abandoning" Obama because they're racist. She admits that she's talking about "a more insidious form of racism," though, since she names no specific culprits nor any specific examples of racist practice or discourse. What her complaint boils down to that Obama has suffered

a swift and steep decline in support among white Americans—from 61 percent in 2009 to 33 percent now. I believe much of that decline can be attributed to their disappointment that choosing a black man for president did not prove to be salvific for them or the nation. His record is, at the very least, comparable to that of President Clinton, who was enthusiastically re-elected.

David Sirota took Harris-Perry down on that last point:

President Clinton was not "enthusiastically re-elected," as Harris-Perry well knows. When Clinton triangulated against his liberal base with NAFTA, welfare reform and "don't ask, don't tell" (among other issues), he faced just as vociferous liberal criticism as Obama does today, and in the very journals like the Nation for which Harris-Perry now writes.

As a result, America saw the opposite of "enthusiasm" in 1996 -- that presidential election, in fact, saw unprecedentedly low turnout. Additionally, Clinton -- after dissing his base -- won a meager 49 percent of the vote in that election, despite running against one of the weakest, least charismatic Republican presidential nominees in recent memory. In short, just as many white liberals were dissatisfied with a white president for abandoning the Democratic Party's base back in 1996, so too are many now dissatisfied with a black president for doing the same -- or, in many cases, worse.

(For the record, in 1996 I voted for Nader. But then, I'm not a liberal or a Democrat.)

Sirota shows how Harris-Perry ignores numerous important differences between Clinton and Obama, unemployment and a staggering economy not least among them. It doesn't help that Obama's approval rates among African-Americans have also taken a nosedive, which I suppose is also because of racism. Or maybe it's because, as Obama himself claimed during his repellent performance before the Congressional Black Caucus, blacks are lazy and demand everything handed to them on a platter: "Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying." (This is not a new theme in the Obama show, of course.) I seem to remember another distinguished African-American leader saying essentially the same thing a few years ago: "Bitch, bitch, bitch, moan and moan, whine and whine." He also claimed that he was picked on because of his race, and suffered a "high-tech lynching" which climaxed in his elevation to the highest court in the land.

Harris-Perry exhibits behavior we've seen before, by Republicans during the Bush years: she's just regurgitating White House talking points, from her touting all those lovely laws that were passed under Obama - quantity trumps quality, you see -- to claiming that his critics are "disappointed" because he didn't save the world in forty-eight hours. (The writer Pearl Cleage posted a status with the same basic content today.) From his lips to her keyboard! Especially so soon after the debt-ceiling debacle, you wouldn't think an Obama loyalist would want to remind her readers about her leader's record, but let her have her will. We're going to see a lot more of the same as the campaign drags on.

I went back to C. P. Snow's response to personal attacks in The Two Cultures, a good all-purpose approach.

However, the problem of behaviour in these circumstances is very easily solved. Let us imagine that I am called, in print, a kleptomaniac necrophilist (I have selected with some care two allegations which have not, so far as I know, been made). I have exactly two courses of action. The first, and the one which in general I should choose to follow, is to do precisely nothing. The second is, if the nuisance becomes intolerable, to sue. There is one course of action which no one can expect of a sane man: that is, solemnly to argue the points, to produce certificates from Saks and Harrods to say he has never, to the best of their belief, stolen a single article, to obtain testimonials signed by sixteen Fellows of the Royal Society, the Head of the Civil Service, a Lord Justice of Appeal and the Secretary of the M.C.C., testifying that they have known him for half a lifetime, and that even after a convivial evening they have not once seen him lurking in the vicinity of a tomb.

Such a reply is not on. It puts one in the same psychological compartment as one’s traducer. That is a condition from which one has a right to be excused.

One reason why accusations of racism can be so effective is that the United States is a racist country: no one can honestly claim that his or her opinions are utterly free of it. But just for that reason, unless you can point to specifically racist elements of someone's practice or talk, saying that an American is racist is like saying that they're breathing. One could just as accurately claim that white liberal supporters of Obama are racist, and continue supporting him because they're trying to overcompensate for their prejudice. Either move is a distraction from the issues, though of course that's normal in a political campaign. Obama's going to need a shitload of distraction to throw in the voters' eyes during the coming thirteen months, though his Republican would-be opponents are doing their best to make it easy for him.

Meanwhile, Obama should be challenged when he demands support for harmful policies, which is what he was doing with the Congressional Black Caucus. If they resist voting for bills that will harm their constituency, they're doing their job, not shirking it.

And what an irony: one similarity between Clinton and Obama that Harris-Perry overlooks (not too surprisingly) is that they both lost control of Congress in midterm elections because their right-wing policies alienated their base. This undermines her case, because she depends on a postulated "double standard" that let a white (but still America's first black) president get away with things a black president can't.

In the Room the Bottoms Come and Go

I'm reading Jeffrey Escoffier's history of gay porn, Bigger than Life (Running Press, 2009), and it's a good, informative read, but things keep catching my attention. Like this, describing the filming of a famous early hardcore feature, Boys in the Sand:

There was no top, no bottom -- indeed those rigid distinctions had not yet evolved among gay men ... [98]

Then, a few lines down on the same page, about the same film and the same period:

An old friend was present when the casting was being discussed and said to Poole, "I've got the perfect person for you. He's blond, six feet tall, and handsome. He's got a nice dick, a beautiful ass, and he does everything."

"He does everything." This is a nod to the fact that there were tops and bottoms in those days, though the terminology was somewhat different. A real man was a penetrator only (what would now be called a total top), while a queer was penetrated. In fact, the usual line among orthodox post-colonial Foucauldians is that sexual versatility is a modern and probably cultural imperialist development, while the active/passive dichotomy is traditional, indigenous, and natural. Of course, just like today, the boundary between those categories was highly permeable. In Barry Reay's New York Hustlers, which I discussed here a couple of months ago, he describes a gay male milieu built on a rigid distinction between Queers and Trade, while admitting that occasionally Trade got into being penetrated by Queers, but it still didn't mean the penetrated Trade were closeted Queers, only that being "pedicated ... merely enlarged his sphere of enjoyment and did not make him ‘queer.’"

I've noticed myself that as a post-AIDS development, the "top" is a fairly unstable category, held together with spit and tissue paper. I've been informed by several self-identified tops that they refuse to be penetrated because they don't want to contract HIV. (I haven't been able to get out of them why they think other men allow these "tops" to penetrate them; I suspect the question is too threatening to entertain.) An identity built on fear is not a very reliable one; I suspect that at least some of these "tops" will get drunk from time to time and allow what they never allow, probably without a condom. You don't have to be an essentialist to believe that refusing to be penetrated for fear of HIV is not the same as genuinely not enjoying or wanting the experience -- just like refusing to have sex with other men for fear of Hell doesn't make you straight.

But I digress. Here's another passage that snagged me, this time a quotation from Edmund White's States of Desire.

San Francisco is where gay fantasies come true, and the problem the city presents is whether, after all, we wanted these particular dreams to be fulfilled -- or would we have preferred others? Did we know what price these dreams would exact? [quoted by Escoffier, 118]

One reason I didn't get around to visiting San Francisco until I was nearly 50 (and even then it was because a friend bought me a plane ticket -- otherwise I might never have made the trip) was precisely that I wasn't all that attracted by the "particular dreams" it represented. When I've visited gay neighborhoods closer to home I haven't felt their siren call, because I've never wanted to be surrounded only by other gay men. That was why I chose to be openly gay -- admittedly, in a relatively gay-friendly college town -- because being isolated from straight people was never my "particular dream." I wanted straights to make room for the gay people who already lived beside them, not to let them have a gay-free environment. Besides, when I saw the spaces that gay men constructed according to their own dreams, I realized that once again I was a misfit, and I wasn't going to try to assimilate.

The final quotation (for today, at least). From the New York Times Magazine, January 3, 1971, quoted on page 117:

What distinguishes San Francisco from any place else is the style with which porn is marketed, its practitioners' attitude towards it and the tolerance most square citizens display concerning the whole question. The basic assumption, it would seem ... is that a "mature adult" is entitled to get his kicks any way he can, provided decent citizens don't have to witness the process and nobody gets hurt.

What stuck to me in this one was "decent citizens." Of course, if there's one thing we have learned in the last forty years, it's that "decent citizens" always keep porn, sleaze, and homosexuality at arm's length, and never avail themselves of these products, services, and practices -- right? Stop laughing. But it's amazing that this assumption is still so common. What is known, though it's hardly news, is that many "decent citizens" need the Red Light District out there so they can sneak away to it when they crave release from the straitjacket of "decency." One of the many problems with Scott Herring's "slumming" model is that he pays too little attention to the people who live in the slums: they're still the Other for him, no less than they were for the respectable folk he wrote about with such smug disdain.

What progress we (that is, gay people or GLBTQ+π if you prefer) have made is the emergence of respectable, "decent" Homo-Americans, gay people who also present themselves as above the sleazy, gives-us-a-bad-name behavior of some ghetto homosexuals. You won't find them gyrating drunkenly in backless chaps on a Gay Pride Float, or cruising around toilets and highway rest stops. Until they themselves get caught doing it, of course.

Escoffier has more sense than the Homo-Americans, of course; I'm not including him with the likes of them. He recognizes, chronicles, and even celebrates the parts of our history that many gay people would prefer to forget. It just seems to me that at times he leaves the dividing wall up from the other side.

In the Room the Bottoms Come and Go

I'm reading Jeffrey Escoffier's history of gay porn, Bigger than Life (Running Press, 2009), and it's a good, informative read, but things keep catching my attention. Like this, describing the filming of a famous early hardcore feature, Boys in the Sand:

There was no top, no bottom -- indeed those rigid distinctions had not yet evolved among gay men ... [98]

Then, a few lines down on the same page, about the same film and the same period:

An old friend was present when the casting was being discussed and said to Poole, "I've got the perfect person for you. He's blond, six feet tall, and handsome. He's got a nice dick, a beautiful ass, and he does everything."

"He does everything." This is a nod to the fact that there were tops and bottoms in those days, though the terminology was somewhat different. A real man was a penetrator only (what would now be called a total top), while a queer was penetrated. In fact, the usual line among orthodox post-colonial Foucauldians is that sexual versatility is a modern and probably cultural imperialist development, while the active/passive dichotomy is traditional, indigenous, and natural. Of course, just like today, the boundary between those categories was highly permeable. In Barry Reay's New York Hustlers, which I discussed here a couple of months ago, he describes a gay male milieu built on a rigid distinction between Queers and Trade, while admitting that occasionally Trade got into being penetrated by Queers, but it still didn't mean the penetrated Trade were closeted Queers, only that being "pedicated ... merely enlarged his sphere of enjoyment and did not make him ‘queer.’"

I've noticed myself that as a post-AIDS development, the "top" is a fairly unstable category, held together with spit and tissue paper. I've been informed by several self-identified tops that they refuse to be penetrated because they don't want to contract HIV. (I haven't been able to get out of them why they think other men allow these "tops" to penetrate them; I suspect the question is too threatening to entertain.) An identity built on fear is not a very reliable one; I suspect that at least some of these "tops" will get drunk from time to time and allow what they never allow, probably without a condom. You don't have to be an essentialist to believe that refusing to be penetrated for fear of HIV is not the same as genuinely not enjoying or wanting the experience -- just like refusing to have sex with other men for fear of Hell doesn't make you straight.

But I digress. Here's another passage that snagged me, this time a quotation from Edmund White's States of Desire.

San Francisco is where gay fantasies come true, and the problem the city presents is whether, after all, we wanted these particular dreams to be fulfilled -- or would we have preferred others? Did we know what price these dreams would exact? [quoted by Escoffier, 118]

One reason I didn't get around to visiting San Francisco until I was nearly 50 (and even then it was because a friend bought me a plane ticket -- otherwise I might never have made the trip) was precisely that I wasn't all that attracted by the "particular dreams" it represented. When I've visited gay neighborhoods closer to home I haven't felt their siren call, because I've never wanted to be surrounded only by other gay men. That was why I chose to be openly gay -- admittedly, in a relatively gay-friendly college town -- because being isolated from straight people was never my "particular dream." I wanted straights to make room for the gay people who already lived beside them, not to let them have a gay-free environment. Besides, when I saw the spaces that gay men constructed according to their own dreams, I realized that once again I was a misfit, and I wasn't going to try to assimilate.

The final quotation (for today, at least). From the New York Times Magazine, January 3, 1971, quoted on page 117:

What distinguishes San Francisco from any place else is the style with which porn is marketed, its practitioners' attitude towards it and the tolerance most square citizens display concerning the whole question. The basic assumption, it would seem ... is that a "mature adult" is entitled to get his kicks any way he can, provided decent citizens don't have to witness the process and nobody gets hurt.

What stuck to me in this one was "decent citizens." Of course, if there's one thing we have learned in the last forty years, it's that "decent citizens" always keep porn, sleaze, and homosexuality at arm's length, and never avail themselves of these products, services, and practices -- right? Stop laughing. But it's amazing that this assumption is still so common. What is known, though it's hardly news, is that many "decent citizens" need the Red Light District out there so they can sneak away to it when they crave release from the straitjacket of "decency." One of the many problems with Scott Herring's "slumming" model is that he pays too little attention to the people who live in the slums: they're still the Other for him, no less than they were for the respectable folk he wrote about with such smug disdain.

What progress we (that is, gay people or GLBTQ+π if you prefer) have made is the emergence of respectable, "decent" Homo-Americans, gay people who also present themselves as above the sleazy, gives-us-a-bad-name behavior of some ghetto homosexuals. You won't find them gyrating drunkenly in backless chaps on a Gay Pride Float, or cruising around toilets and highway rest stops. Until they themselves get caught doing it, of course.

Escoffier has more sense than the Homo-Americans, of course; I'm not including him with the likes of them. He recognizes, chronicles, and even celebrates the parts of our history that many gay people would prefer to forget. It just seems to me that at times he leaves the dividing wall up from the other side.

Whatever the Market Will Bear

It's true, I'm a hateful, bitter, cynical negative old man. What would I be without brand recognition? (Speaking of which, I was accused of cynicism and negativity in alicublog's comments again the other day. Which, as I pointed out, is like being chided for incivility by Ann Coulter fans.)

Another one of my Facebook friends posted a link to a Lakota-dubbed version of The Berenstain Bears. I've never seen the series myself, but fine with me. I'm all in favor of preserving the pre-Columbian languages of this hemisphere.

My friend, however, made this remark about the link:

Self-reliance is more fun than being consumers. Living languages are more satisfying than assimilation.

Oh, my. Oh, dear. I posted this comment:

Wait a minute -- isn't English a living language? And who am I assimilated to?

It could be that I've misunderstood my friend's comment, because it doesn't really make much sense. It could be that she objected to dubbing a bland commercial product into Lakota, hiding niche marketing behind cultural preservation and diversity. The Berenstain Bears are very much a consumer product despite (or because of) the show's PBS provenance: "As of 1983, the Berenstain Bears had been licensed to approximately 40 companies for more than 150 types of products, with projected annual sales of $50 million", extending to "clothing, Happy Meals, cereal, chocolate, crackers, greeting cards, puzzles, embroidery kits, and notepads." But that has nothing to do with "living languages." No matter how socially concerned the owners of the franchise may be, they're not likely to dub the Bears into Latin. (Maybe they should: The Berenstein Bears Go to the Gladiatorial Games ! Grandpa Berenstain Bear and the Slave Boy! There are real possibilities there.)

Assimilation, of course, is relational, not absolute. Children who don't assimilate to one culture (call it Tele-American) assimilate to another (Lakota). Learning your "native" language is a major part of assimilation to your "own" culture.

And where does "self-reliance" come in? Traditional cultures are not self-reliant, they're built on interdependence. My friend's first sentence seems to staple Ayn Rand to Ralph Nader. (Admittedly, the thought of a cage match between the two is intriguing.) The second appears to embrace an essentializing nativism. The comment is no more incoherent than those of my RWA1, but that's exactly the problem: it's setting the bar too low.

Whatever the Market Will Bear

It's true, I'm a hateful, bitter, cynical negative old man. What would I be without brand recognition? (Speaking of which, I was accused of cynicism and negativity in alicublog's comments again the other day. Which, as I pointed out, is like being chided for incivility by Ann Coulter fans.)

Another one of my Facebook friends posted a link to a Lakota-dubbed version of The Berenstain Bears. I've never seen the series myself, but fine with me. I'm all in favor of preserving the pre-Columbian languages of this hemisphere.

My friend, however, made this remark about the link:

Self-reliance is more fun than being consumers. Living languages are more satisfying than assimilation.

Oh, my. Oh, dear. I posted this comment:

Wait a minute -- isn't English a living language? And who am I assimilated to?

It could be that I've misunderstood my friend's comment, because it doesn't really make much sense. It could be that she objected to dubbing a bland commercial product into Lakota, hiding niche marketing behind cultural preservation and diversity. The Berenstain Bears are very much a consumer product despite (or because of) the show's PBS provenance: "As of 1983, the Berenstain Bears had been licensed to approximately 40 companies for more than 150 types of products, with projected annual sales of $50 million", extending to "clothing, Happy Meals, cereal, chocolate, crackers, greeting cards, puzzles, embroidery kits, and notepads." But that has nothing to do with "living languages." No matter how socially concerned the owners of the franchise may be, they're not likely to dub the Bears into Latin. (Maybe they should: The Berenstein Bears Go to the Gladiatorial Games ! Grandpa Berenstain Bear and the Slave Boy! There are real possibilities there.)

Assimilation, of course, is relational, not absolute. Children who don't assimilate to one culture (call it Tele-American) assimilate to another (Lakota). Learning your "native" language is a major part of assimilation to your "own" culture.

And where does "self-reliance" come in? Traditional cultures are not self-reliant, they're built on interdependence. My friend's first sentence seems to staple Ayn Rand to Ralph Nader. (Admittedly, the thought of a cage match between the two is intriguing.) The second appears to embrace an essentializing nativism. The comment is no more incoherent than those of my RWA1, but that's exactly the problem: it's setting the bar too low.

Did You Know There Was, Like, an Adoration Chapel Around the Corner There?

There's a strange new article at the AV Club this weekend. Well, it's really strange because it's at the AV Club, whose writers generally show more sense.

Writer Allison Willmore begins "What If They Just Plain Believe?" by describing the reception of Kevin Smith's "religion-baiting" new movie Red State at Sundance earlier this year. Red State, however, "was just one of a crowd of films there to feature broad villainy in the name of fundamentalist or evangelical Christianity", and Willmore lists a few. Then she writes,

It’s not as though someone decided, “This will be the year of the abusive evangelical!” But taken together, these titles were enough to make some—to make me, certainly—squirm in discomfort at the easy targets they set up and then knock down. They invite the question: Are indie films unfair to Christianity?

Whoa! That's a bit of a leap, to put it gently: from "fundamentalist or evangelical Christianity" to "Christianity," full stop. It's the kind of equivocation that evangelicals themselves love to use in debate. When they're on the defensive, they remind you (as Willmore does) that "around 75 percent of Americans [identify] themselves as part of a Christian denomination." When they're on the offensive, they attack most of those 75 million for not really being Christians, because they aren't evangelicals. And that intellectually dishonest move drags down Willmore's article, culminating in

If faith only shows up as a means of keeping people down or as a way for someone to hide an underlying cruel/greedy/lying/delusional nature, if the idea that a character can be sincere in his or her beliefs and get something from them is impossible, then indie film becomes the equivalent of the smug belligerent atheist kid on campus who’s always trying to organize debates about the existence of God with Christian groups, and who ends up coming across as just as annoying as any sanctimonious proselytizer. Personally, my hopes are pinned to the recently announced The Book Of Mormon adaptation: Trey Parker and Matt Stone may be experts at skewering the preposterous aspects of organized religion, but they’re also willing to admit that out of faith can come positive things.

(N.B. I added the link to the cartoon there.) Personally, I think that Parker and Stone are a good example of what is really wrong with most outsiders' view of conservative religion. They fasten, no less than Smith apparently did in Red State, on easy targets: homophobic fundamentalists, child-molesting Catholic priests. Then they turn around and sentimentalize clean-cut, wholesome Mormons (you know, the kind of people who worked hard for Proposition 8) or gesture vaguely at Jesus and Love and why-can't-we-all-get-along. Even hard-core atheists can go along with this, quoting with approval Gandhi's "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians" line, and asking why fundamentalists are so un-Christian, unlike that nice Mr. Jesus, who only taught hellfire and damnation and plucking out your eye to avoid sin, and depart from me ye cursed into everlasting fire -- Die! Die! Die! You know, the true meaning of Christian love.

Willmore also complains:

So one could argue that films like the ones listed above are critiques of the dominant culture—though not the dominant culture of cinema, given that most multiplex movies, the ones that are seen by the broadest audiences, avoid religion entirely unless it’s of the ancient Greek or Norse variety and will enable some kickass slow-motion fight scenes. And it’s hard to imagine any other religion, even Islam, taking it on the chin so regularly in the media, being used as shorthand for hypocrisy and repressed rage without provoking protests of cultural insensitivity.

This is also a common complaint among conservative Christians, and just as dishonest when they do it. The trouble is partly that evangelical Christians want a very specific kind of Christianity depicted in media, and so they're dissatisfied by the watered-down version that makes it into product aimed at "the broadest audiences." I don't believe media people when they claim that they are just giving America what it wants, but they might be right that even most American Christians are put off by a movie character taking time out to a commercial for evangelical Christianity. (For a detailed, informed, and very sensitive discussion of this issue, I recommend Heather Hendershot's excellent Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture [Chicago, 2004].) And that leaves aside the detail that "the broadest audiences" Hollywood wants to reach are more than ever international audiences, who might not be Christian at all, but when they are, are even less likely to be American-style fundamentalists.

But even in the multiplexes, the story is more complicated than Willmore admits. Surely she's heard of this recent hit The Blind Side, which starred Sandra Bullock as a very Christian Southern white lady who adopts a poor black kid and makes him a football star. I haven't seen it and don't watch much multiplex fare anyway, but what I have seen over the past few decades fits the pattern I mentioned above: it does depict religious bigots as villains, but pays nonsectarian lip service to Christian charity and niceness. This understandably bothers a lot of conservative Christians, and I can understand why they want antigay bigots, racists, and anti-choice fanatics to be presented as positive characters, but the fact remains that such figures are embarrassments in real life and not representative of "the dominant culture." Many conservative Christians want commercial entertainment (borrowing Willmore's words) "to run with [fundamentalism] as the primary characterization of the religious affiliation of the majority of the nation", but only as long as it's presented positively.

To repeat: fundamentalists are not equivalent to Christianity. As I've said before, no single type of Christian is representative of Christianity. It's as invalid to judge Christianity by Martin Luther King Jr. as it is to judge it by Pat Robertson. I judge it by Jesus, so of course it comes up wanting. Even people who might privately share such views don't like what they look like from outside, so of course they blame the messenger. (I see a similarity here to men who complain about negative depictions of men as violent brutes in commercial media: they don't object to depictions of violent men per se -- quite the opposite -- but they do mind violent men being seen as villains. Men who aren't violent, who like women, children, and domesticity -- these are the men they want to see demonized.)

Using "abusive" Christians as negative characters isn't limited to non-Christians, by the way, or even to today's commercial entertainment. Such types show up in nineteenth-century popular fiction; I believe there were such characters in Oliver Twist, and the fanatic has always been a convenient boogeyman for those who want to look and feel moderate. (The worst thing about Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church, to my mind, is that they make almost any other Christian seem moderate by comparison, and many bigots take advantage of this.) I wonder if The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which actually is an anti-Christian book, could be published today. Twain, however, fit the pattern I described above: "If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be – a Christian," he once wrote.

A number of commenters named films that treat Christianity, or religion generally, with more nuance and sympathy; I could name more myself. But that would bog one down in disputes about how adequate they are, or if there are enough of them. That's not really the issue anyway; I think it's more important that Willmore relied on this convenient confusion between one strand of Christianity and the whole tangled skein. This is why I was startled to find Willmore's polemic at the AV Club; it really belongs on a hardcore conservative Christian site.

Did You Know There Was, Like, an Adoration Chapel Around the Corner There?

There's a strange new article at the AV Club this weekend. Well, it's really strange because it's at the AV Club, whose writers generally show more sense.

Writer Allison Willmore begins "What If They Just Plain Believe?" by describing the reception of Kevin Smith's "religion-baiting" new movie Red State at Sundance earlier this year. Red State, however, "was just one of a crowd of films there to feature broad villainy in the name of fundamentalist or evangelical Christianity", and Willmore lists a few. Then she writes,

It’s not as though someone decided, “This will be the year of the abusive evangelical!” But taken together, these titles were enough to make some—to make me, certainly—squirm in discomfort at the easy targets they set up and then knock down. They invite the question: Are indie films unfair to Christianity?

Whoa! That's a bit of a leap, to put it gently: from "fundamentalist or evangelical Christianity" to "Christianity," full stop. It's the kind of equivocation that evangelicals themselves love to use in debate. When they're on the defensive, they remind you (as Willmore does) that "around 75 percent of Americans [identify] themselves as part of a Christian denomination." When they're on the offensive, they attack most of those 75 million for not really being Christians, because they aren't evangelicals. And that intellectually dishonest move drags down Willmore's article, culminating in

If faith only shows up as a means of keeping people down or as a way for someone to hide an underlying cruel/greedy/lying/delusional nature, if the idea that a character can be sincere in his or her beliefs and get something from them is impossible, then indie film becomes the equivalent of the smug belligerent atheist kid on campus who’s always trying to organize debates about the existence of God with Christian groups, and who ends up coming across as just as annoying as any sanctimonious proselytizer. Personally, my hopes are pinned to the recently announced The Book Of Mormon adaptation: Trey Parker and Matt Stone may be experts at skewering the preposterous aspects of organized religion, but they’re also willing to admit that out of faith can come positive things.

(N.B. I added the link to the cartoon there.) Personally, I think that Parker and Stone are a good example of what is really wrong with most outsiders' view of conservative religion. They fasten, no less than Smith apparently did in Red State, on easy targets: homophobic fundamentalists, child-molesting Catholic priests. Then they turn around and sentimentalize clean-cut, wholesome Mormons (you know, the kind of people who worked hard for Proposition 8) or gesture vaguely at Jesus and Love and why-can't-we-all-get-along. Even hard-core atheists can go along with this, quoting with approval Gandhi's "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians" line, and asking why fundamentalists are so un-Christian, unlike that nice Mr. Jesus, who only taught hellfire and damnation and plucking out your eye to avoid sin, and depart from me ye cursed into everlasting fire -- Die! Die! Die! You know, the true meaning of Christian love.

Willmore also complains:

So one could argue that films like the ones listed above are critiques of the dominant culture—though not the dominant culture of cinema, given that most multiplex movies, the ones that are seen by the broadest audiences, avoid religion entirely unless it’s of the ancient Greek or Norse variety and will enable some kickass slow-motion fight scenes. And it’s hard to imagine any other religion, even Islam, taking it on the chin so regularly in the media, being used as shorthand for hypocrisy and repressed rage without provoking protests of cultural insensitivity.

This is also a common complaint among conservative Christians, and just as dishonest when they do it. The trouble is partly that evangelical Christians want a very specific kind of Christianity depicted in media, and so they're dissatisfied by the watered-down version that makes it into product aimed at "the broadest audiences." I don't believe media people when they claim that they are just giving America what it wants, but they might be right that even most American Christians are put off by a movie character taking time out to a commercial for evangelical Christianity. (For a detailed, informed, and very sensitive discussion of this issue, I recommend Heather Hendershot's excellent Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture [Chicago, 2004].) And that leaves aside the detail that "the broadest audiences" Hollywood wants to reach are more than ever international audiences, who might not be Christian at all, but when they are, are even less likely to be American-style fundamentalists.

But even in the multiplexes, the story is more complicated than Willmore admits. Surely she's heard of this recent hit The Blind Side, which starred Sandra Bullock as a very Christian Southern white lady who adopts a poor black kid and makes him a football star. I haven't seen it and don't watch much multiplex fare anyway, but what I have seen over the past few decades fits the pattern I mentioned above: it does depict religious bigots as villains, but pays nonsectarian lip service to Christian charity and niceness. This understandably bothers a lot of conservative Christians, and I can understand why they want antigay bigots, racists, and anti-choice fanatics to be presented as positive characters, but the fact remains that such figures are embarrassments in real life and not representative of "the dominant culture." Many conservative Christians want commercial entertainment (borrowing Willmore's words) "to run with [fundamentalism] as the primary characterization of the religious affiliation of the majority of the nation", but only as long as it's presented positively.

To repeat: fundamentalists are not equivalent to Christianity. As I've said before, no single type of Christian is representative of Christianity. It's as invalid to judge Christianity by Martin Luther King Jr. as it is to judge it by Pat Robertson. I judge it by Jesus, so of course it comes up wanting. Even people who might privately share such views don't like what they look like from outside, so of course they blame the messenger. (I see a similarity here to men who complain about negative depictions of men as violent brutes in commercial media: they don't object to depictions of violent men per se -- quite the opposite -- but they do mind violent men being seen as villains. Men who aren't violent, who like women, children, and domesticity -- these are the men they want to see demonized.)

Using "abusive" Christians as negative characters isn't limited to non-Christians, by the way, or even to today's commercial entertainment. Such types show up in nineteenth-century popular fiction; I believe there were such characters in Oliver Twist, and the fanatic has always been a convenient boogeyman for those who want to look and feel moderate. (The worst thing about Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church, to my mind, is that they make almost any other Christian seem moderate by comparison, and many bigots take advantage of this.) I wonder if The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which actually is an anti-Christian book, could be published today. Twain, however, fit the pattern I described above: "If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be – a Christian," he once wrote.

A number of commenters named films that treat Christianity, or religion generally, with more nuance and sympathy; I could name more myself. But that would bog one down in disputes about how adequate they are, or if there are enough of them. That's not really the issue anyway; I think it's more important that Willmore relied on this convenient confusion between one strand of Christianity and the whole tangled skein. This is why I was startled to find Willmore's polemic at the AV Club; it really belongs on a hardcore conservative Christian site.

While I'm On the Subject ...

Band of Thebes has a post today about a new gay film from the UK, Weekend. It's been getting a lot of good press, such as this review by admitted heterosexual Andrew O'Hehir of Salon, so I mean to see it when I get the chance.

But I was put off by some of the statements in BoT's post, especially some made by the filmmaker as quoted in the New York Times by Dennis Lim:

“Weekend” is the exception that proves the rule: As gay experiences have become more varied, and as the conversation about being gay has evolved, gay films have largely failed to keep up. A wide swath of so-called gay cinema “never represented how I felt about being gay, ever,” Mr. Haigh said. “I haven’t got muscles and I don’t live in West Hollywood.” Often overlooked are the subtle complications that have come with progress. “People are accepting you but perhaps not fully,” he said. “And do you want to be accepted fully?”

Have gay films "failed to keep up"? For that matter, have "gay experiences become more varied"? This is misleading in so many ways. "Gay experiences" have always been varied; to claim otherwise is to declare one's (willful?) ignorance of our history. From the descriptions I've seen of Weekend, it contains no themes that couldn't have been covered in gay films at any time in the past forty years. For that matter, they have been covered in gay films.

BoT calls Lim's account of gay cinema "a wide-ranging think piece"; I don't think so, though I don't think it pretends to be. It skims far too lightly over the subject, and exhibits very little thought along the way, if any at all indeed. After derisory summaries of Parker Tyler's 1972 opus Screening the Sexes and Vito Russo's 1981 survey The Celluloid Closet, Lim writes:

As gay liberation took root, the most prominent gay films were sincere romantic dramas like “Making Love” and “Personal Best” (both 1982), which strove to validate same-sex relationships by presenting them in a nonthreatening light, and the films grew even more somber as AIDS entered the picture (“Longtime Companion,” “Philadelphia”). Gay characters now turn up regularly in Hollywood movies, as comic sidekicks or diversity tokens, but usually take center stage only if they are martyrs (“Brokeback Mountain,” “Milk”).

I wouldn't connect Making Love or Personal Best to gay liberation, which was pretty much dead and buried by 1982. As so often, Lim and the Times confuse gay liberation with commercial gay male culture, ignoring the eclipse of gay liberation (which never sought to "validate same-sex relationships by presenting them in a nonthreatening light") with the avowedly assimilationist gay-rights movement that dominated the scene by the late 1970s. (That's not necessarily a putdown: the assimilationist gay-rights movement is, for better or worse, representative of American gays as gay liberation never was.) Those two films are also Hollywood product with all the limitations the term implies, so Lim is ignoring (as I suppose he must) everything that happened in gay cinema outside that paradigm. As for gay characters turning up "regularly in Hollywood movies as comic sidekicks or diversity tokens," that was a feature of Hollywood's treatment of queers long before gay liberation, as Russo showed exhaustively in The Celluloid Closet. The main change has been the substitution of "diversity tokens" (another Hollywood staple from way back, where minorities are concerned) for the fag- or dyke-villain-killers who were Hollywood's other preferred queer stereotype before Stonewall.

I also like that bit about "sincere romantic dramas", as though heterosexual cinema never bothered with such trivia.

Lim writes as though gay cinema is a purely American and possibly a post-Stonewall phenomenon, though the earliest examples of gay cinema I know of (defined as films made from a gay viewpoint, by gay or gay-friendly filmmakers) are European, made between the World Wars. Gay criticism has come a long way since Tyler and Russo too, but Lim shows no knowledge of figures like the Brit Richard Dyer, the Canadian Thomas Waugh or the American Alexander Doty, the Americans B. Ruby Rich and Judith Mayne, among many others. Since the 1970s or so, a lot of the most interesting gay films have come from outside the US, and critics writing about gay cinema had to pay a lot of attention to those films if they wanted to have anything to write about, because so little was coming out of America. but to acknowledge that would violate the sacred principle of American exceptionalism: we're the first, the best, and the only significant country in the world.

As for that bit about "Gay characters ... usually take center stage only if they are martyrs", we know whose fault that is, don't we? I mean, Hollywood is out there begging for something else -- something fresh, something different -- but all Teh Gey will offer them are gay martyrs. It couldn't possibly be because Hollywood prefers to depict gay people that way ...

Lim continues,

In the indie sphere the brief flowering of the New Queer Cinema of the early ’90s identified a new niche audience. Gay-theme movies, festivals and distributors proliferated, capitalizing on the epiphany that gay films, and in particular romances, could be as formulaic as straight ones.

There was also a brief flowering of independent gay films in the mid-1980s, as floundering Hollywood companies discovered that they could make more money by buying and distributing films they hadn't produced, whether made independently in the US or by various producers in the UK and Europe. As with the New Queer Cinema, such films benefited (as did their audiences) from the lack of Hollywood's terror of doing anything too interesting or (buzzword) "transgressive." Most of my favorite GLBT films were not made by Hollywood, which labors mightily to produce one or two minor gay-related works (marketed as world-historical breakthroughs) every decade. It's Hollywood, not gay cinema, that has "largely failed to keep up" with gay life, and only someone who equated Hollywood to cinema would make such a mistake.

So, back to director Andrew Haigh (the most useful thing I learned from Lim's article was that the surname is pronounced with a hard G, to rhyme with "vague").

Accordingly, the question of whether “Weekend” is a gay film is probably best answered: yes and no. “The root of the film for me is two characters trying to work out who they are and what they want from life, how they’re going to fit that into the world around them and show the world that they are those people,” Mr. Haigh said. “These issues aren’t just about being gay. They’re about how you define yourself, in public and in private.”

Once again I must wonder: what, according to Dennis Lim, is a "gay film"? Does he think that a gay film is only and completely about "being gay" -- whatever the hell that means? It only makes any kind of sense if you believe that to be gay is not to be human, and that our concerns are totally alien to those of "universal" real people. I don't entirely blame Haigh for answering a stupid question, I blame Lim for asking it.

A wide swath of so-called gay cinema “never represented how I felt about being gay, ever,” Mr. Haigh said. “I haven’t got muscles and I don’t live in West Hollywood.” Often overlooked are the subtle complications that have come with progress. “People are accepting you but perhaps not fully,” he said. “And do you want to be accepted fully?”

That's all very well -- after all, one way to see a movie you like is to make it yourself -- but come now. I can't think of many "so-called" gay films I've seen that were set in West Hollywood. Several have been made, no doubt, because a lot of gay filmmakers went there to build careers, ended up having to make their own movies, and couldn't afford to go on location anywhere else. That's part of what being "independent" means. Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss, presumably one of Haigh's and Lim's offenders, was made in West Hollywood by a transplanted Hoosier, who thought he was courageously breaking stereotypes. Go Fish wasn't made in Chicago because the filmmakers wanted to escape West Hollywood hegemony, but because they lived there and made the film on a shoestring. I could name any number of gay films that weren't set in Hollywood and don't feature hypermuscled men, so I think Haigh's complaint reflects his own tunnel vision and fantasies rather than an actual failing of "so-called gay cinema" -- all the more so when you remember that he's English, and very few English gay films out of the many that have been made were set in West Hollywood.

BoT also approvingly quotes Haigh's “I was always frustrated, and angry sometimes, about the stories that people were telling, which were either coming-out stories or frothy, sexy comedies which weren’t funny or sexy.” Oh, and heterosexuals aren't interested in coming-of-age stories either, but again, there have been enough glbt films that were neither coming-out stories or frothy, sexy comedies that I wonder who was restricting Haigh's film viewing so cruelly for so long. ("No, Andrew, you can't see Querelle or Law of Desire or Apartment Zero -- they aren't set in West Hollywood!" "Awwwww Mum!")

(Incidentally, Lim reports that for his next project "Mr. Haigh plans to shoot in Los Angeles with a male lead." Stereotype!) So, can such an intellectually dishonest filmmaker make an artistically honest film? I'll find out when Weekend comes close enough for me to see it myself.