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Conservative publisher Adam Bellow thinks conservatives need to produce more popular art: beach fiction, TV shows, comedy routines, etc. Paul Waldman thinks he’s got an uphill battle:
As I’ve noted before, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report work as well as they do because they’re not shows written and performed by professional liberals who happen to be comedians, attempting to use humor to score political points; rather, they’re shows written and performed by professional comedians who happen to be liberals, using politics to produce comedy. It’s a really important distinction.
The same distinction applies to other mediums. If you set out to write an explicitly conservative novel, it’s likely to suck. If you set out to write a novel, and it has a conservative worldview because you happen to be a conservative, it will probably do a lot better. Unfortunately for conservatives, if you take this approach you’re likely to end up writing little more than an establishment-friendly novel, not an overtly pointed takedown of liberalism.
That said, conservatives could produce perfectly good books and TV shows if they took Waldman’s advice. But comedy is a special problem. Conservative comedy just doesn’t seem to work very well, and I’d guess there are two big reasons why:
The material: Liberals are, generally speaking, opposed to the establishment. Poking fun at the establishment is easy to do, so liberals have lots of ready-made material. Conversely, poking fun at the little guys just seems mean. It’s not impossible to get good comedy out of, say, the more ridiculous aspects of the Occupy Wall Street folks at Zuccotti Park, but it’s a lot harder and the material is a lot thinner.
The audience: I’ve never quite understood this, but liberals just seem to like political comedy more than conservatives. Conservatives simply don’t consider this stuff a laughing matter. Especially recently, they’re convinced, deep in their marrow, that liberals are literally out to destroy America, and how do you find the yuks in that? By contrast, mocking conservatives is a popular liberal pastime. Is this because liberals accept conservatives as an inevitable part of the scenery, to be fought but not really hated? That doesn’t seem quite right. Still, it’s true that the establishment, by definition, is always with us, and always working in its usual way to preserve itself. You might think it’s a malign force, but you don’t think of it as something new that’s suddenly emerged to wreck the country.
I dunno. I’m just guessing here. Age probably has something to do with this too. In any case, conservatives are great at outrage, while liberals who try to emulate them almost always fail. Liberals are great at comedy, and conservatives who try to emulate that fail as well. In the middle ground of books and movies, I imagine both sides could do well, but since most artists are liberals, there’s just more to choose from along the liberal spectrum.
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Google! It’s a company. Big one! Real big. Important too! The employees who work there work super hard, probably. Long hours, one imagines. Now let’s not overdo this. It’s not like they’re Chilean coal miners, but I think it’s fair to assume that they spend a lot of time away from their families. The children of Google engineers probably spend a similar amount of time wondering, “Why does daddy care more about the internet than me?” or “Why did mommy miss my recital? I understand that Google+ was down, but who would have even noticed? I’m her child for God’s sake!” Anyway, one way of remedying this would be to run away to an orphanage and live some sort of 21st century Dickens novel. And, yes, life would be tough but in the end, say come Christmas, you and all the other orphans would gather around a fire and there’d be turkey and apple cider and you’d speak in a Cockney accent and “another year in the books, governor! Things have been better but at least we’ve got each other!”
If you don’t want to go the orphan route, you could follow the example of Katie, a little girl whose dad works at Google. She wrote to his boss, Daniel Shiplacoff, and asked for daddy to be given a day off.
Here’s the super adorable letter:
It’s a bit hard to make out but it says: “Dear google worker, Can you please make sure when daddy goes to work, he gets one day off. Like he can get get a day off on wednesday. Because daddy ONLY gets a day off on saturday. From, Katie. P.S. It is daddy’s BIRTHDAY! P.P.S. It is summer, you know.”
Shiplacoff responded with a letter of his own:
Now Katie’s dad gets a whole week off to spend with his daughter. Presumably he will in fact spend it with her. That would be awful, right? If he didn’t? If he went and spent a week with his secret family in Hawaii? Not that he has a secret family. I don’t know him. He probably doesn’t. But if he does, he should make that secret family write an adorable letter if they want to see him. This is Katie’s time.
(h/t The Blaze)
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Best Daughter Ever Gets Father Off Work With Adorable Letter
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This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed
By Charles E. Cobb Jr.
BASIC BOOKS
In this challenging book, Charles Cobb, a former organizer, examines the role of guns in the civil rights movement. Looking beyond the conventional narrative (“Rosa sat down, Martin stood up…”), he finds that the nonviolent struggle against Jim Crow was often backstopped by armed supporters keeping the threat of white violence at bay. The title paraphrases a Mississippi farmer’s admonition to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who turned the other cheek in public while keeping guns at his home after it was bombed. Cobb’s thesis may thrill Second Amendment enthusiasts, but he argues that truly standing your ground means scaring off white thugs in hoods—not gunning down a black teen in a hoodie.
This review originally appeared in our July/August issue of Mother Jones.
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Quick Reads: "This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed" by Charles Cobb
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Hey! Rick Perlstein’s final (?) volume in his account of the rise of the modern conservative movement, The Invisible Bridge, is coming out on August 5. How did I not know this until now?
In any case, this is good news. I’ll have something good to read in August. And so will you.
UPDATE: I just got an email from Rick:
not final….
Just signed contract to write fourth and final volume taking story through 1980 election.
Hmmm. This is sounding very Game-of-Thrones-ish. It keeps expanding. When volume 4 is released, will we learn that Rick decided the 1980 election really deserved a book 5 all of its own?
In any case, I’ve long felt that that the 70s are one of the most underrated decades. An awful lot of what’s happened since was germinated in the froth of the 70s. It was a decade in which a lot of things—political, cultural, and economic—were in flux; and whether we knew it or not, we were making choices that determined which direction we were going to take over the next few decades. I’m looking forward to Rick’s take on this.
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Mother Jones
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Mother Jones senior editor Daniel Schulman joined Chris Hayes on MSNBC to discuss his new book, “Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty.” We published a scintillating excerpt from the book here and posted a rare Koch family home video from the 1940s depicting the boys fighting with boxing gloves here.
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Chris Giles of the Financial Times has been diving into the source data that underlies Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, and he says he’s found some problems. The details are here. Piketty’s response is here.
Is Giles right? Experts will have to weigh in on this. But Giles’ objections are mostly to the data regarding increases in wealth inequality over the past few decades, and the funny thing is that even Piketty never claims that this has changed dramatically. The end result of Giles’ re-analysis of Piketty’s data is on the right, with Piketty in blue and Giles in red. As you can see, Piketty estimates a very small increase since 1970.
Now, if Giles is right, and there’s been no increase at all, that’s important. But it’s still a surprisingly small correction. The fundamental problem here is that the difficulties of measuring wealth are profound enough that it’s always going to be possible to deploy different statistical treatments to come to slightly different conclusions. There’s just too much noise in the data.
In any case, I’m not taking any sides on this. The data analysis is too arcane for a layman to assess. But it’s worth keeping an eye on.
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The Dylanologists
By David Kinney
SIMON & SCHUSTER
It seems like everybody and their dog has a book about Bob Dylan, but The Dylanologists turns the spotlight on his most obsessive fans instead. Journalist David Kinney takes us into a world of zealous collectors who will snap up anything the great man has touched, nerds who obsessively trade and catalog bootleg recordings, and code breakers who pore over every quote and lyric for meaning. We learn about the travails of dedicating one’s life to an inaccessible hero and the emotional toll of having that hero regularly reinvent our favorite parts of himself. Through it all runs a tension between the Dylanologist’s compulsion to understand the “real” Bob and the artist’s steadfast desire to remain an enigma.
This review originally appeared in our May/June 2014 issue of Mother Jones.
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Army lieutenant general Daniel Bolger, who recently retired from the service after multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, has written a book called Why We Lost. Long story short, he says we never had a chance:
“By next Memorial Day, who’s going to say that we won these two wars?” Bolger said in an interview Thursday. “We committed ourselves to counterinsurgency without having a real discussion between the military and civilian leadership, and the American population —‘Hey, are you good with this? Do you want to stay here for 30 or 40 years like the Korean peninsula, or are you going to run out of energy?’ It’s obvious: we ran out of energy.”
….“We’ve basically installed authoritarian dictators.” The U.S. wanted to keep about 10,000 troops in Iraq post-2011…and a similar sized force is being debated for Afghanistan once the U.S. combat role formally ends at the end of 2014. “You could have gone to that plan in 2002 in Afghanistan, and 2003 or ’04 in Iraq, and you wouldn’t have had an outcome much worse than what we’ve had,” Bolger says.
“They should have been limited incursions and then pull out — basically like Desert Storm,” he adds, referring to the 1991 Gulf War that forced Saddam Hussein’s forces out of neighboring Kuwait after an air campaign and 100-hour ground war. The U.S. wasn’t up to perpetual war, even post-9/11. “This enemy wasn’t amenable to the type of war we’re good at fighting, which is a Desert Storm or a Kosovo.”
Hmmm. It seems to me that we had endless discussions about the difficulties of counterinsurgency and the fact that the United States is really bad at it. Books were published, reports were written, and David Petraeus became famous as the guy who finally got it on the counterinsurgency front. For several years it was the hottest topic in military circles, bar none.
Still, late to the party or not, Bolger’s conclusions are welcome. America’s modern track record in counterinsurgencies is terrible. The track record of every developed country in counterinsurgencies is terrible. I don’t know if anyone will remember this the next time we’re thinking about fighting another one, but the more experienced voices we have reminding us of this, the better.
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Retired Army General Explains Why We Lost in Afghanistan and Iraq
Mother Jones
What makes a food trend? In his new book, The Tastemakers: Why We’re Crazy for Cupcakes but Fed Up With Fondue, out May 27, journalist David Sax sets out to discover the hidden forces behind our diets. From a cupcake stop on the Sex and the City tour in New York to the board rooms of the McCormick spice company to the apple orchards of Ontario, Sax talks to the people who decide which foods become popular and when. Along the way, he learns that few fads spread on their own. Most are the result of well orchestrated marketing plans—like how the pork industry engineered the bacon trend to help sell less popular pig parts. I spoke to Sax about the Chipotle-fication of Indian food, how Sex and the City made cupcakes sexy, and how the dawn of the HIV/AIDS epidemic hastened the demise of the fondue-party era.
Journalist David Sax, author of The Tastemakers: Why We’re Crazy for Cupcakes but Fed Up With Fondue Photo by Christopher Farber
Mother Jones: Your book opens on a Sex and the City tour bus. Why?
David Sax: The book opens on this Sex and the City hotspots tour, which has been running in New York for ten years or so. They stop at the Plaza Hotel, they go by Tiffany’s, they show clips on the bus. The halfway point of the tour is in the West Village, kitty corner from Magnolia Bakery. Most of the people on the tour went right for Magnolia. It was this edible icon of the show and everything it stood for. That encapsulated so much about the cupcake trend. There were people from Sweden, Australia, Middle America. They all wanted to go to Magnolia because this place was the shrine that symbolized so much more than a little cake.
MJ: So is Sex and the City responsible for the cupcake trend?
DS: That was the tipping point. That imparted the cupcake with something entirely above and beyond. It was no longer just about, this is a delicious thing and you should have it. It was about this is a symbol of femininity, sexually liberalized, capitalist feminism. This is the stiletto, the cosmo, the Rabbit vibrator equivalent. It gave cupcakes a storyline. It changed their identity. This is not a child’s treat anymore. This is, ‘You go girl. You get your cupcake.’ The Virginia Slim of the 21st century.
MJ: So that’s one way a food trend can happen, through pop culture. But the way you tell it, the story of bacon was completely different.
DS: This was an industry-driven trend. It was the result of a concerted effort by the pork industry to revive this cut of meat—pork belly, which is what you make bacon out of—that had been so demonized in the 1980s by the low-fat, low-cholesterol diet trend that was so incredibly popular. They spent money to get pork producers and smokehouses to develop round, pre-cooked slices of bacon that would fit on a hamburger, so then they could go to Burger King and Wendy’s and be like, listen, here is the money to help you to develop new burgers. We really want you to try them with bacon. The fast food companies are always looking for something else to sell. So the bacon trend—unlike most trends, which trickle down because chefs are doing it, or some cool bakery in New York is doing it, and it works its way down through Cheesecake Factory to TGI Fridays and Costco—it started in fast food and worked its way up to something that chefs were tossing with Brussels sprouts. And then it hit its cultural moment.
The coffee trend is another example. There is a Swedish tradition of a coffee break called fika in the afternoon. Maxwell House was looking to increase coffee consumption in the ’30s and ’40s, and they happened upon this thing that they put in their ads and marketing. It became such a big thing that it was in union contracts. And that triggered the growth of coffee consumption.
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