Category Archives: Blog

Empathy

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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. 

A Question I Could Not Have Answered

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Hilzoy is back, this time quoting Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine:


 Later the same day, Powell came back to [Cabell Chinnis Jr., his law clerk] and asked, “Why don’t homosexuals have sex with women?” “Justice Powell,” he replied, “a gay man cannot have an erection to perform intercourse with a woman.” The conversation was especially bizarre not just because of its explicit nature but because Chinnis himself was gay (as were several of Powell’s previous law clerks.)”

Powell didn’t know that Chinnis was gay, or the previous law clerks, or anyone else he had ever met. “I don’t believe I’ve ever met a homosexual,” he told Chinnis. This was in 1986, when Powell and the rest of the Supreme Court were deciding whether Georgia could keep gays from getting it on in the usual ways. As it happens, Powell and four other justices decided, sure, Georgia could do that. Hilzoy figures Powell might have decided differently if gay existence weren’t such a big blank spot to him.  No word on Justice Byron “Whizzer” White, who also ruled with the majority and had got his start with that swinging Kennedy crowd, the fellows who were in the know about everything.
Powell, I expect, was highly intelligent, and he had certainly been out and about in the world, a president of the ABA, a lawyer with big clients. But the question he asked Chinnis is one I cannot imagine answering. That the answer appears to have satisfied him (we’re not told that he said, “Okay, but why can’t they get an erection?”)  suggests that Powell wasn’t at sqaure one, he was at square zero. He was at the level of (made-up quotes) “What, they don’t like the feel? They want to stay close to their college buddies?” “Well no, sir, they can’t get an erection with women.” “Oh.“
When I was a kid, we thought of the pre-1960s crowd as being prehistoric, before the dawn of modern consciousness, trapped in the era when nobody knew anything about sex, race, or whatever else had bubbled up during the great upheaval.  Then a few more years passed, various references in old books and movies forced their way into my awareness, and I realized that the old-timers, when young, had been on to more than I thought. Now I’m reminded that being on to more than I thought has its limits. The past, like the poet said, is a fucked-up place. I guess the present, as a past in the making, is too. 

Do young people like Star Trek?

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My tv viewing and other anecdotal evidence led me to think that Star Wars was the favored brand for Gen X onward. After all, the last Trek tv show was kind of a fizzle, the last Trek movie wouldn’t even put the Enterprise in its poster. But yesterday I heard a boy and girl, both about 20, discussing the new Trek movie, and today I’ve seen a few posts about it popping up on blogs by people a lot younger than I am.

I suppose young people could prefer Star Wars but still take an interest in Star Trek. Anything is possible.
UPDATE:  Looks like the new one’s getting good reviews. Yeah, Trek!
UPDATE 2:  Ward Sutton has watched a lot of Star Trek.
UPDATE 3:  Obama wants to see the movie. ( I hope Politico misquotes his reference to “lithium crystals.”) Nimoy talks about Obama and other topics.
UPDATE 4:  I just took a look and confirmed it: the new movie’s name is simply Star Trek, as if it were named after the franchise. That seems kind of postmodern to me.

Rancid Cheesecake

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I’ve got an article up at Comixology about super-heroine cheesecake. Here’s a quote:

Which brings us to the last and perhaps most important point. Super-heroine cheesecake is often offensive just because it’s so thoroughly incompetent. Star Sapphire’s costume, for example, goes right past sexy and on into ludicrous. For the Marvel Divas cover, the artist couldn’t even come up with more than one body type – and he can’t even draw the one he’s got. As I already intimated, Black Cat’s top and bottom look horribly mismatched; similarly, Hellcat seems to have borrowed her breasts from Giant Girl. All of them look like toys, not people. And that Justice League cover starring Supergirl’s chest…why would you even do that? How is it sexy to have a disembodied bosom flapping about your foreground? And as if that’s not bad enough as Katie Moody says in comments on the Beat; the artist seems to have accidentally left out our heroine’s ribcage. Or maybe it’s deliberate; did Supergirl lose her skeletal structure during one of the post-Crisis reboots? I must admit I haven’t been following the continuity that closely….