Author Archives: Tom Crippen

More About Culture 11

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Noah wrote for them and marked the site’s passing. At Balloon Juice, DougJ links to a Washington Monthly article about the site and adds his own thoughts.

The Monthly article says that one of C11’s founders was inspired by Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic,” the famous piece in which Wolfe tore into Leonard Bernstein and friends for holding a fund-raiser to benefit the Black Panthers. The C11 founder felt that this sort of approach was missing from conservative writing, the approach being (as the co-founder saw it) storytelling, the presentation of people doing things. He felt that conservatives leaned instead on the William F. Buckley approach of persuasion via argument.

At Balloon Juice, DougJ points out that a whole lot of conservative rhetoric comes down to exactly what Wolfe did in that essay. Conservatives paint a picture of the sort of person their opponents are; then they turn to the audience and say, “That person isn’t you. Don’t you hate him?” And very well they do it, but that is not well-honed argumentation; it’s persuasion via caricature.

I would add that, when it comes to the specific target of Wolfe’s “Radical Chic,” the MSM had already beat him to the scene. The essay describes Bernstein’s embarrassment and anger on reading a mocking, sneering, cutting satirical account of his Black Panther fund-raiser … in the New York Times. Of course Wolfe then came along and did a better mocking, sneering, satirical account of his own, because he’s a better writer than the Times has ever employed. But no conservatives at all were needed to spot the absurdity of the fund-raiser and deal with it accordingly.

You Know Something? Fuck You

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Privileged teenagers at one middle school are learning to empathize this year, whether they like it or not.

A teaser from the New York Times for this article here. From the article:

Many Scarsdale parents praise the empathy focus, but some students complain that the school has no business dictating what they wear or how they act in their personal life.

Hey, good point.

Others say that no matter what is taught in the classroom, there is a different reality in the cafeteria and hallways, where the mean girls are no less mean and the boys will still be boys knocking books out of one another’s hands.

Another good point. I had to put up with teachers for many years. Most of them concentrated on history, math, reading, science, and so on. Some of them were good, not many. But there was one teacher, one special teacher, who stood out. She was my 8th grade social studies teacher and she believed in something called values clarification. It involved listening to her talk and taking part in small-group exercises that resembled checklists from Psychology Today. What I learned from her is that the windier the subject, the less interested a teacher is in results. The point is for the students to create a Potemkin Village where the teacher can be mayor.

Of course one teacher might not be enough to support such a conclusion, but this one made an impression on me.

Bad Sentence by Martin Amis

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Imagine the mass of the glove Stalin swiped across your face; imagine the mass of it.

Bad writing can make you disagree with sentiments you know to be true. For the time spent reading that sentence, I’m convinced the Soviet Holocaust was not really such a big deal. It’s an odd state of mind but one I can reenter whenever those sixteen words are before me.

The sentence is from Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, a brief historical work in which Amis squared his shoulders and looked the Soviet disaster straight in the kneecaps. The book reveals that Kingsley Amis, Martin’s father, was a Communist Party member until 1956. I find that incredible. It means Lucky Jim (published in 1954) was written by a Communist, which means that the funniest person in the world was a Communist. Then Khruschev had to go spill the beans and Amis senior abruptly gave up Communism; he also gave up being funny, but more gradually and without conscious intention.

Another surprise: Christopher Hitchens was a Trotskyite. I knew he was left, but I assumed that meant New Left. In America nobody looked toward the Russian Revolution for much of anything after the Port Huron Statement. But in ’70s London a bright young person, or at least Christopher Hitchens, could still pick a favorite Bolshevik and take him seriously.

Amis’s trick of turning the reader against beliefs the reader holds is known as the Friedman Effect in honor of Thomas L. Friedman. The effect springs into action when a writer not only does a bad job technically but also gives the impression that a belief is especially beholden to him or her for subscribing to it.

Childish

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The Onion, by way of Daniel Radosh:

STOCKHOLM—In recognition of her groundbreaking work treating life- threatening diseases of the privates, renowned hoo-ha specialist Dr. Victoria Lazoff was awarded the Nobel Prize in Lady Medicine this week.

The thing is, Lady Medicine would be a good name for an Alan Moore superheroine.

UPDATE: Thought of another: Alterity Girl

And another! High Horse. That could be a superhero based on Moore himself, since he’s a big, long-legged fellow who likes to get high and who enjoys the occasional fit of moral dudgeon.

Best Cynical Interjection

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It’s by David Horowitz, a right-wing publicist who gets impatient with his side’s “over-the-top hysteria” about the red reign of Chairman Obama:

I have recently received commentaries that claim that “Obama’s speeches are unlike any political speech we have heard in American history” and “never has a politician in this land had such a quasi-religious impact on so many people” and “Obama is a narcissist,” which leads the author to then compare Obama to David Koresh, Charles Manson, Stalin and Saddam Hussein. Excuse me while I blow my nose.

Bonus pleasure: Brendan Nyhan, the very earnest left-of-center moderate who linked to the post, cannot figure out the “blow my nose” bit.

The Kathy Kane Syndrome: FCR 6

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It took Batman his whole life to become Batman. That’s the point of his story: to do what he does, you have to spend your whole life getting ready. But Kathy Kane became Batwoman because she felt like it. She used to be a circus performer and that was pretty much all the prep she needed. Maybe she had some refresher trampoline sessions and bouts of microscope study (“criminology”). But it wasn’t a lifetime’s training. The same with the new Kathy Kane-Batwoman. From what I saw, she chose the career on a lark and maybe took some kickboxing lessons.


Batgirl was a librarian who just decided she’d be a superhero. Catwoman at least was a jewel thief and trained to sneak in and out of buildings, but then Frank Miller made her a dominatrix. Wikipedia says Catwoman’s latest version has some gymnastics in her background and a sensei who teaches her martial arts; make him a hell of a sensei and maybe  you’ve got something. But it took a while for her to reach this point. In Batman Returns a secretary gets to become Catwoman just because she goes crazy. She’s able to jump from roof to roof, and this is right away, as a given of her new status.

Robins always get trained pretty hard. It isn’t enough that they have a circus background; they also get put thru the mill by Batman. The point of being Robin is that you’re trained this way, trained by the one fellow whose life is crimefighting. But then there’s a girl Robin and she doesn’t get trained so hard. I mean Carrie Kelly in The Dark Knight Returns. How much prep does she get before her first battle? Stephanie Brown, per Wikipedia, is another just-decides-to character. 

This pattern — boys, hard training vs. girls, no training — continues from decade to decade in the franchise, from comics to movies. Girls are always stuck into the Batman series as a gimmick. The first Kathy Kane was a beard, the new one is a hot-chick lesbian, but either way you get the idea.

I guess what surprises me is how the same rule keeps getting broken year after year. Setting aside all that Batman training is a pretty big gimme, bigger than deciding this person and that person also happened to survive Krypton. It’s more like deciding that superness had nothing to do with Krypton, that Supergirl could fly because she was perky. (To me, the equivalent to the lone-survivor tampering would be to decide that the Waynes’ murder wasn’t just a random act of criminality, that it involved some larger machination. Probably the Batman people have done this at some point or other.)

You Know What’s Good About the Watchmen Movie?

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As noted here, there are a few bright spots (scroll down). Another is this: Apollonia Vanova as Silhouette, specifically the bit in the credits sequence where she steps up to a girl and scoops her in for the great Times Square V-Day kiss.Watching Vanova’s five seconds, you get the idea she actually could beat up people for fun; she seems exactly like a piss-elegant, fighting superheroine.  She’s got a tiger’s stroll, like somebody in Doc Savage. 


 I thought Vanova might be a runway model just doing the sort of walk the trade calls for, but it says here she’s a mezzo soprano and sculptress and competes as a fitness model (which means working out but not getting bulky). What she wants on her tombstone: “She lived for art.”

UPDATE: edited because I didn’t like the original