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Author Archives: Tom Crippen
We Do?
Liberals say there’s no justification for repressing sexual behavior.
One suspects one is not familiar with the terms of the debate here. Ordinary words are taking on meanings unique to the context of the argument. I suppose.
Anyway, Linda Hirshman has grave doubts about Jezebel, one of the Gawker web sites. From what she says, it’s about feminism as practiced by young women who drink a lot and wear dresses of a flimsy nature. Hirshman says she’s heard all about being called judgmental: “Judgmental! Judgmental!” Hilzoy says Hirshman belongs to that class of people “whose heart is two sizes too small, who have no more empathy than your average tin can.” Warning: At issue is what one of the Jezebel writers should have done after a sexual assault. Hirshman left out the reasons the writer gave for not telling police.
This Fucking Dream
Years ago there was a tv comedy star named Red Skelton, most likely forgotten now. His show was in its last years when I was a kid. I used to watch it, though not with much interest. Still, he was an appealing sort of fellow, with a gentle, sad-funny air about him. I remember him as having a long face with almost flaring cheekbones and a sandy trace of hair hanging on to the crown of his head. If you clicked the link just above, you’ll have seen that this memory is not completely accurate.
Last night I dreamt that I had wound up in a midsize French provincial city down toward the south. I was trying to fit in with the city’s crowd of wealthy American retirees, a very aged crowd, and was happy to seize on Mr. Skelton for a moment at the crowded party thrown by one lady in her musty apartment. He was in his 70s or 80s but had lost none of his vitality. The week before he had made a small international splash by showing up Olivia de Havilland and a venerable French comedian at a televised bout of t’ai chi, or what was supposed to have been a bout of t’ai chi but ran entirely counter to that quiet discipline’s spirit. Skelton interposed himself in the business, sitting cross-legged between the two, who were also sitting cross-legged, and flourishing with mock grandiosity a tiny pair of ivory boomerangs that implicitly mocked the whole travesty of t’ai chi that the proceedings represented.
The coup de grace came when he seized the French comedian’s shoulders and simply lifted. It turned out the French comedian had smuggled himself inside a false set of shoulders and head. Skelton pulled them off so deftly that they appeared to sail thru the air. Revealed beneath was pretty much the same aged French comedian as before, but far smaller; his bald head stared out from the shell of his body like one Russian doll nested inside another.
The t’ai chi, or “t’ai chi,” event ended there. It could not continue. Skelton had made his point and brought a measure of needed sanity to the carnival atmosphere that had overtaken the world’s most beloved physical discipline. In fact the French comedian and Olivia de Havilland bore him no ill will. Perhaps they were grateful to be freed from the pretense they had got up to. Only the event’s presiding impresario, a wizened party from Asia, had been embarrassed.
Standing at the party amid all the ancient elbows and wattle, I congratulated Skelton on his feat. I did so with the relief and warmth one feels on being able to offer heartfelt praise. He responded graciously and with honest pleasure; a showman, no matter how advanced in his career, feels the success of one of his coups.
I suppose the dream reflects how I feel about getting old. But there was a lot more to it, hours’ worth, involving a film festival at a giant shopping mall in Connecticut, a pair of stand-up comedians’ debut as indy filmmakers, the role of Tony Roberts (Woody Allen’s old sidekick) in their film, my well-taken but much-resented remark during the comedians’ presentation of the film, and the hunt for a mens room in the shopping mall, which had a women’s room on the ground level and then another women’s room when you traveled down the long route to the lower level. The lower of the two was besieged by a crowd of frustrated women waiting for one neurasthenic party to stop hyperventilating and step out of the stall, which more properly resembled a telephone booth and was being used in that spirit.
Other parts of the dream: me and Candice Bergen and Jane Fonda getting high and going to the season premiere of Jean Doumanian’s edition of Saturday Night Live, me getting stuck on camera (thru no fault of my own) and having to hold still while the camera whirled about thru the show’s razzle-dazzle opening imitation of a Folie Bergeres show in Third Republic France, Candice and Jane laughing cattily at a humorous film that parodied the eccentric but brilliantly gifted comic actress Penelope Gilliatt.
So, something to do with women, I guess. But the fucking dream went on and on and on, and I never want to dream again.
Violent Women of the Golden Age
Of related note: the latest in Noah’s posts on the first thirty issues or so of Wonder Woman.
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I dug out some scans of comic book covers, all from Fiction House comics. One lesson you can draw from the sampling is that, if you wanted to be an action-oriented woman on a Fiction House cover, it really helped to have some wildlife to beat up on. But another woman would also do, just no men. Inside the comic things might be a bit different, possibly because of plot requirements.
Firehair 1. Per Wikipedia, the issue was dated Winter 1948, the series lasted 11 issues, and Firehair first appeared in Ranger Comics 21 (1945) and showed up in every issue until 65. Sorry, I don’t know who drew the cover.
Planet 47. Heritage Galleries says it came out in 1947 and that the cover was drawn by Joe Doolin. Planet did cover after cover of women and creatures, usually but not always with a guy there to rescue the woman.
Jumbo 105. Heritage says it came out in 1947 and notes “Matt Baker and Jack Kamen art,” but I think that’s just for the inside, not the cover. You’ve heard of Sheena; everybody has. The woman’s she fighting is colored the odd shade (cobalt slate, possibly) that Fiction House often used for inhabitants of Africa.
At Least Two Angry Agnostics (formerly “One Hell of an Angry Agnostic”)
UPDATE: Yeah, me and Taibbi. We’ve got a head of steam up.
Another title possibility: “Agonistic Agnostics.” The back-and-forth in Comments drove me to Merriam-Webster’s. There, while looking up everyone’s word of the day, I stumbled upon “agonistic,” which primarily means “of or relating to the athletic contests of ancient Greece.” But I like the second part of the definition better: “2: ARGUMENTATIVE.”
Fucking agnostics, the shit we get up to. Thank God no souls or church revenue is at stake. We’d have a non-afterlife-oriented St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre every weekend.
Cole, if you’re listening, no hard feelings. But I wasn’t a philosophy major and I’m going to stick with our two favorite words the way the dictionary and I like to use them.
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I thought Matt Taibbi was an atheist because he gets so pissed at believers. But no. Dig the windup to this blog post laying into Terry Eagleton and Stanley Fish:
They seem to think that if one doesn’t believe in God, one must believe in something else, because to live without answers would be intolerable. … But there are plenty of other people who are simply comfortable not knowing the answers. It always seemed weird to me that this quality of not needing an explanation and just being cool with what few answers we have inspires such verbose indignation in people like Eagleton and Fish.
Taibbi uses “weird,” so you’d think he was bemused. But no, he’s angry. You don’t let loose the following with a quizzical shrug:
… a recent book written by the windily pompous University of Manchester professor Terry Eagleton, a pudgily superior type, physically resembling a giant runny nose, who seems to have been raised by indulgent aunts who gave him sweets every time he corrected the grammar of other children.
Yow!
Most of the post is about lectures Eagleton gave on faith vs. nonbelief. The excerpts do sound woolly and dumb, a lot of vapid bluff written in jocose academese. But does Taibbi get this mad at atheists? In the post he charges Richard Dawkins with being “humorless” and of trying to make atheism into a religion of its own. But he doesn’t get worked up about him. For the record, I saw Dawkins on the O’Reilly show and he seemed like fun. That’s a nice argument he has about the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But like any atheist or believer (really an atheist is also a believer, in God’s nonexistence, but I’m using shorthand here) he’s left with the problem of trying to settle an infinite question by using finite means.
Of course I had no idea that Eagleton and Fish cared anything about religion. I thought they dealt in some sort of advanced (at least for 1975) French school of heavy literary analysis. Maybe they’ve kind of eased into religion over the years.
Lead Sentences That Say It All
Empathy
President Obama says he wants a Supreme Court justice who is empathetic. He himself is quite empathetic, as one realizes in reading his memoir, Dreams from My Father. The book has its faults, but there’s a lot in there about learning to see the world as other people see it. His “bittergate” remarks were an exercise in empathy: he wasn’t denouncing the honest people of rural Pennsylvania for their views on guns, God, and foreigners, he was explaining how anyone, in their position, might have those views.
Now Mr. Empathy is president. Aside from him, I can’t think of any big figure in modern American life for whom empathy is the keynote. Certainly not Oprah and Dr. Phil. They’re not about understanding others, just understanding how others should live and telling them.
Remember: sympathy is when you feel bad for someone else, empathy is when you imagine how the world would look to you if you were in their place.