Simple questions, simply answered.
That’s all it would take to lay to rest this foofooraw of how the federal government is or maybe isn’t spying on our public libraries, or might could start spying if we all don’t sit down and shut up about it. —Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act allows the government broad powers to request the reading lists of individuals from the libraries they frequent, over and above powers already in place, and makes it illegal to inform anyone that such a request has been made; US Attorney General John Ashcroft, under fire, pitched a hissy fit and then insisted via a memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller that no libraries, bookstores, or other businesses had yet been requested to turn over any such lists; libraries have asserted that they have been requested to turn over such lists, though what with the gag order and the other laws on the books it’s terribly unclear whether this was under the ægis of the USA PATRIOT Act (thereby rendering Ashcroft a bald-faced liar) or not.
So: here’s the questions to ask your elected representatives to ask the Bush administration:
If these new powers are needed to fight terrorism, why aren’t they being used?
If these new powers aren’t needed to fight terrorism, why do you have them? And why did you misrepresent your reasons for seeking them?
If these powers have been used, why are you lying to us now?
That’s all we need to know, really. —Further reading: links via the invaluable librarian.net (home of the ever-popular signs that have contributed to Ashcroft’s froth); Lis Riba is on the case, like, hardcore, with another possible misstatement from our beloved attorney general; and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is among the many people lining up to kick Jonah Goldberg’s sorry, ignorant ass.
Sputtering, frothing rage.
Which is about all I can muster at the moment:
KIDNAPPED AT FEDERAL PLAZA
Immigrant Families Expecting Greencards & Citizenship Get Deported Instead
WHAT:
Immigrant families are facing a deportation crisis. In the last month immigrant advocates have received emergency calls from New Yorkers whose loved ones—on the road to obtaining a greencard or citizenship—were deported from Federal Plaza after responding to government appointment letters. Others who are not being deported immediately are being shipped away as far as Louisiana without seeing a judge. Devastated and enraged, the relatives left behind will return to the site to speak out against the rapid-fire detentions and deportations that have broken apart their homes.
WHO:
MARIANA TAPIA, cousin of 19-year-old Juan Jimenez, who was deported to the Dominican Republic 16 hours after reporting to Federal Plaza for citizenship.
GEORGIANA FACEY, U.S. citizen whose husband was deported to Jamaica. She is left to raise 4 children alone in Brooklyn.
Many others…..
Watch TalkLeft for the changes. Read up on how our utterly disgraceful immigration system has acquitted itself in the past. Start making phone calls. Start writing letters. Start sharpening your votes.
In April, in response to the unprecedented cultural destruction that attended our invasion of Iraq, Secretary Rumsfeld had this to say:
The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, “My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?”
Let this become their mantra—or a variation of it. Tomorrow, when the phone calls come in. Next week, as the email piles up. Next year, when the votes are counted, and this entire benighted administration, this foul and unspeakable blot on our liberal, inclusive, democratic history has been kicked to the curb. I want them—all of them, from Rumsfeld to Rove, from Rice to Powell, from Bush himself to Ashcroft, at whose feet this latest particular outrage can be laid, I want them all sitting back, dumbfounded, their heads in their hands, staring at the mailbags and ballots, muttering to themselves.
My goodness. Were there that many decent people? Is it possible there were that many decent, humane people in the whole country?
Couldthisbereal.com?
Good lord, of course not. And for a myriad of reasons beyond how hard it might (must? might?) be to hack such a secured line in the first place. But don’t let that stop you. (As ever, stay for the comments; they’re half the fun.)
A riot of manliness.
Kevin’s spouse Jenn (no web presence) has this thing she hollers whenever some asshole in a sports car or SUV pulls a lame-ass highway stunt to squeeze his vehicle just ahead of hers or cuts a corner too impatiently or runs a red light or just in general drives like a get-out-of-my-way-you-insignificant-speck megalomaniac: “Sorry about your dick!” she cries. Try it sometime: it’s surprisingly cathartic—and with a sufficiently advanced and fluid concept of gender, works just as well on female get-out-of-my-way-you-insignificant-speck megalomaniacs. (Badda-bing, to coin a phrase.)
Jay Nordlinger, Managing Editor and Impromptuiste for the Corner-hosting National Review, undertook on the Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Page to explain the gender gap in American politics. (Thanks, Roy!) Really, honestly, this thing must be seen to be believed. Calling Rumsfeld a “riot of manliness” (sincerely!) is but the tip of the rhetorical iceberg. Thrill to his implacable defense of Cheney’s chickenhawkery! Shiver at Giuliani’s (exceptionally) manly flirtation with drag! Delight in untangling the coded insults! But please, don’t drink coffee while reading this. I can’t be held responsible for your keyboards, but I’d hate to see something happen to them.
Oh, and, Jay? Mr. Nordlinger?
Sorry about your dick.
Tanner, rested, ready.
So all this twitterpating about K Street and all I can think of is Tanner ’88.
Movie Madness has the run. The Film Snobs might object, but I remember enjoying it a hell of a lot more than not.
(Also: it has a listing in the Female Celebrity Smoking List.)
Team Micropayments!
Actually, Dirk Deppey has some very sensible things to say about Clay Shirky and Scott McCloud and Joey Manley and paying 25 cents for comics on the web, and his good sense doesn’t preclude a guarded optimism about the idea.
Have no idea what this is about? Do anything creative with your spare time that you could post to the web for others to see or read or listen to or download? Enjoy buying more beer than not? Get up to speed on the pros and cons; you’re going to want to figure out where you stand. —A handy guide to debating the issue: if someone says, “Would you pay a quarter for MetaFilter?” they’re missing the point entirely. No one would pay a quarter or a dime or a penny a hit for MetaFilter or BoingBoing or Plastic—or Electrolite, or Daily Kos—or wood s lot, or Ftrain, or Brad DeLong’s semi-daily journal—some of the value they bring to the table is quick and frequent and easy to access and free free free. (Though we might pay for Bellona Times. Or D-squared. I’m just sayin’.)
What we’re (to plant my flag) talking about is paying a quarter for Wary Tales or The Right Number or Apocamon. Or Babe the Blue Ox, say, the best band in the goddamn world, who wandered into the wilderness out of a nasty recording contract, and who now post MP3s and ask you to send them a buck a song for the privilege of downloading, when you get around to it—wouldn’t you rather click a button and give them a buck right there and then than write a check and fill out an envelope and dig up a stamp?
That’s a hint, y’all.
Micropayments will never be the only way content is supported on the web. But it is a way. One with a lot of plusses and a few minusses, but one that shows a great deal of promise in putting not just the opportunity to speak up in more hands than ever before, but the nickel-and-dime ability. It will never drive free content off the web—but it isn’t trying to. No one will ever pay nickels for blog entries and portal links—but no one is expecting them to. It may never make anyone stinking rich—but so what? Making art for money has always been something of a crap shoot; anything that smooths out the contingency and rates a better-than-even chance of making a steady stream of beer money would itself be a miracle, and deserves as fair a shake as we can give it.
Your mileage may vary, of course. But you will want some mileage on this one. I don’t think micropayments are going to dry up and blow away any time soon.
Thank you, Professor Krugman.
Required reading. It’s that simple.
Information wants to be free, fine—but art isn’t information.
Clay Shirky, an information and technology guru who’s written some really interesting and insightful stuff, has a mad-on against micropayments. For whatever reason, he doesn’t like the idea of charging users a small amount for content delivered over the web—his essay, “The Case Against Micropayments,” has been the go-to piece since it was written in 2000 for the camp that insists information wants to be free, and paying for content over something as immediate as the web will never work. Of course, no workable micropayment system has emerged since then—certainly nothing to match the grandiose dreams of 1998—so there’s been no need to say anything more on the subject.
Until BitPass. This simple system, still in its beta test, is gathering steam and making noise, so Shirky has updated his stance with an essay entitled “Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content.” Here’s the entirety of his argument against BitPass:
BitPass will fail, as FirstVirtual, Cybercoin, Millicent, Digicash, Internet Dollar, Pay2See, and many others have in the decade since Digital Silk Road, the paper that helped launch interest in micropayments. These systems didn’t fail because of poor implementation; they failed because the trend towards freely offered content is an epochal change, to which micropayments are a pointless response.
The failure of BitPass is not terribly interesting in itself. What is interesting is the way the failure of micropayments, both past and future, illustrates the depth and importance of putting publishing tools in the hands of individuals. In the face of a force this large, user-pays schemes can’t simply be restored through minor tinkering with payment systems, because they don’t address the cause of that change—a huge increase the power and reach of the individual creator.
He then goes on to say some interesting and insightful things about blogs and news, but almost nothing at all about art, and artists, and the power of fandom.
Shirky’s argument fails ultimately because he seems to see an audience’s need for art as a hole that can be filled by any old content: and if you can fill it with free content, why on earth would you pay? Sure, blogs will (rarely) be important enough to inspire their audience to plop down a dime for every entry—but a Firefly fan isn’t going to just as happily sit down and watch Fastlane just because they want some entertainment on a Friday night.
Luckily, Scott McCloud and Joey Manley are both there in the clench, with eloquent, powerful rebuttals. Dirk Deppey says he’ll have something to say on Monday. —But I’ve got to go to work at my day job right now, so that’s all you’re going to get from me at the moment.
More than a clue.
My oldest, bestest buddy Barry—or Ampersand—has one of the best blogs going with his cohort Bean: Alas is smart, it’s committed, and if the comments section gets a little raucous sometimes, the rollicking, bare-knuckle noise never overwhelms the signal.
Today, Barry posted in its entirety a comment from regular poster PinkDreamPoppies. It’s a moving encapsulation of PinkDream’s views on women and men and how they’ve changed—where he’s been and what he didn’t know he didn’t know and where he’s on his way to—and all from talking, to women he knows, and comparing what he learns with his own mental models, and kicking ideas around in online debates at Alas and places like it.
It works, is what I’m trying to say. Talking works. Arguing works.
All too easy to forget, sometimes, out here in the Islets of Bloggerhans. (Why, yes. It is ironic.) —But this isn’t as important an insight as what PDP has to say, so go on already.
Looking deep within.
On the one hand, you could get a quote on the value of your soul. Just fill out the questionnaire and click! (Me, I’m worth GBP£15,584, or USD$24,795.42 at today’s rates.) —Getting a quote in no way entails an obligation on your part. Or so I’m assured.
Or: you could flip through the astounding Head 2 Heads flipbook. Jenn picked up a copy at Powell’s; “Look at this!” she beamed, flipping through the stop-motion layer-by-layer coronal and sagittal cross-sectionings of a human skull for me as I was cooking dinner. (I oohed and ahhed. It really is quite keen.)
Cakewalkmongering.
Via DefenseTech, a great coffee-break blog, this chunk of perspective on the Cakewalk in Iraq:
With $166 billion spent or requested, Bush’s war spending in 2003 and 2004 already exceeds the inflation-adjusted costs of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish American War and the Persian Gulf War combined, according to a study by Yale University economist William D. Nordhaus. The Iraq war approaches the $191 billion inflation-adjusted cost of World War I.
Or perhaps this number will resonate a little more?
To put it in perspective, Bush hopes to spend more in Iraq and Afghanistan than all 50 states say they need—$78 billion—to finance the budget shortfalls they anticipate for 2004.
He thinks he’s won.
This is what Grover Norquist, an American for Tax Reform, had to say about Governor Riley’s attempt to shift the tax burden from folks making $4,600 a year to out-of-state timber companies:
No one’s life is a complete waste. Some of us serve as bad examples. And Governor Riley is going to serve as a bad example. Years from now, little baby Republican governors will be told scary stories late at night, around the campfire, about the sad fate of governors like Riley who steal a billion dollars from their people.
The referendum was voted down by droves of lower-income voters who stood to gain from it. And Norquist is thrilled:
This is a shot across the bow for next year’s decision-making. Every Republican governor who thinks of raising taxes next year will walk past Traitor’s Gate and see Bob Riley’s head on a pike. The voters of Alabama have saved taxpayers from California to Maine billions of dollars.
He thinks he’s won. Let him. He thinks we’re on our way back to the grand old days of William McKinley. We may very well be. We may have forgotten how bad they were, and hard the world can be without the safety nets we fought so hard to put in place so many years ago. Well, we’re going to start remembering, make no mistake: that’s the only “waste” to cut out of state budgets from California to Maine; from Oregon to Alabama.
But we fought our way up and out of those dark days once already, and if we never managed to make it to that shining city on the hill where no one gets left behind, not even the least of us, still. We came up with a pretty good nation, for the most part. We can do it again.
And this time, it won’t be so easy to forget. No one’s life is a complete waste, after all; some of us serve as bad examples. We will tell our children about Grover Norquist, and his disdain for public service, his loathing of the commonweal, his grotesque and brutal selfishness. We will tell them about how he laughed at the idea of seizing the government that makes so much of this pretty good nation possible for us and drowning it in the bathtub. And they will be better people for it, and we will have a better world. We’ll get a little closer to the shining city, and we won’t be so quick to turn our backs on ourselves again.
Gosh, Mr. Norquist. Thanks.
Sweet Home Alabama.
Today’s the referendum on Governor Riley’s ambitious plan to restructure Alabama’s state tax plan. Here’s how the New York Times summed up the situation a few months ago:
Alabama’s tax system has long been brutally weighted against the least fortunate. The state income tax kicks in for families that earn as little a $4,600, when even Mississippi starts at over $19,000. Alabama also relies heavily on its sales tax, which runs as high as 11 percent and applies even to groceries and infant formula. The upshot is wildly regressive: Alabamians with incomes under $13,000 pay 10.9 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes, while those who make over $229,000 pay just 4.1 percent.
A main reason Alabama’s poor pay so much is that large timber companies and megafarms pay so little. The state allows big landowners to value their land using “current use” rules, which significantly lowball its worth. Individuals are allowed to fully deduct the federal income taxes they pay from their state taxes, something few states allow, a boon for those in the top brackets.
Governor Riley’s plan, which would bring in $1.2 billion in desperately needed revenue, takes aim at these inequalities. It would raise the income threshold at which families of four start paying taxes to more than $17,000. It would scrap the federal income tax deduction and increase exemptions for dependent children. And it would sharply roll back the current-use exemption, a change that could cost companies like Weyerhaeuser and Boise Cascade, which own hundreds of thousands of acres, millions in taxes. Governor Riley says that money is too tight to lift the sales tax on groceries this time, but that he intends to work for that later.
Things don’t look good. Despite the desperately needed restructuring of the inhumane tax burden on the poor, and despite the dire straits of Alabama’s public school system, and despite the heroic efforts of conservative Christians compelled to do what Jesus would do, the plan is being sold as nothing more than a tax increase—and that just won’t do in Grover Norquist’s bathtub. And lower-income voters, black and white, reeling and punch-drunk from decades of broken promises and fire-sale government, just don’t trust the state when it genuinely tries to hold out a helping hand: polls show 38% of Alabamians making $80,000 or more favor the restruction, but only 21% of those making less than $20,000 a year. (Remember: in Alabama, you pay income tax on an annual income as low as $4,600.) —Alabama’s new polling regulations will doubtless add to the anxiety and consternation.
The Right Christians will be covering the vote all day today. (A Minority of One, sadly, closed its doors.) In the meanwhile, read this American Prospect piece (thanks, Making Light); management humbly offers up these previous posts, with some links that are worth your while.
Mistah Zevon, he sleepin’ tight.
The rains came yesterday, and I’m in a chipper mood. They started coming Saturday night: we stood on the balcony, rudely startled out of character, as a callithumpian band went rattling away down the street a block away from the one that had the fair, and I was startled to note that the air was chilly. The heavy heat was gone and the leaves began tossing restlessly in a rising wind, and I wanted to wrap up in something. Yesterday, it actually fell: the gutters overflowed and there was lightning and thunder, too, which almost never happens around here. I couldn’t stop grinning and I kept leaking squiggly little dance steps. (You ever try not moving to the boogie-woogie Ben Folds gets going in “One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces” when you’re in a mood like that?) Tonight I’m wearing a sweater and I’m drinking a cup of hot tea. Fuck you, summer; the new year’s begun.
I’ll be moderately upfront, since I haven’t been yet: I don’t know if I’ll make the (charitably loose) September deadline for getting City of Roses off the ground. Rather, I know I can make it: what I don’t know is if we’ll be in October and already muttering about how reruns have started. It somehow fits the generally feckless air of the whole enterprise thus far—cobbled together, catch-as-catch-can, and yet. It’s still more than it isn’t. I’ll take it as a good sign, I guess. Better than the alternative.
I have a new article up at Comixpedia: interviewing the spouses of webcartoonists and asking them about that Cyril Connolly quote about the pram in the hall, and what it was like being married to an artiste. It’s all terribly tongue-in-cheek, on everyone’s part, even if Ivy doesn’t think she said “What a load of crap!” —I was wryly amused to discover when I’d jotted down a shortlist of interviewees, I’d come up with a wife, a husband, a fiancé (as opposed to fiancée), and a long-term girlfriend (long-time companion?); this I took as a sign that something or other is better now than it ever has been before, so I ran with it.
Bruno’s back, and I owe Chris and Bethanne email. They’re in Olympia now, former home of Sleater-Kinney; wave hello as you zoom up I-5 past Evergreen State, the Oberlin away from Ohio, as some of us old Obies knew it. —While Bruno was gone, Chris was running several weeks of his new project, his latest attempt to pan for gold in the mines of syndicated commercial dailies: Little Dee, which I hope I do not diminish in your eyes by pointing out that, of all his attempts up and out, it’s the most likely to succeed—fiendishly cute, with enough of the wicked cynicism of necrophagic humor and the judicious schmaltz of an adorable moppet to deftly walk the fine line of entertaining the jaded while remaining perfectly apropos for refrigerators everywhere. Hie thee hence, and then bounce back out to the main page: after all, Bruno’s back.
While we’re discussing that fine line and those who walk it, might I also encourage you to check out Sheldon, the pig who can’t stay put? (An egg-shaped pig, a robin pulling a Casey Stengel, and rabbits. How can you lose?) —Also, I would be so thoroughly remiss if I didn’t point out that the Pants Press crew has gotten Wary Tales up on the web: the latest product available under the BitPass beta test. Which is going swimmingly, so far as I can tell; so much for the barrier of mental effort. (The soft bigotry of low expectations?) (And do note I’m knocking wood as I so smirkingly take someone who’s so much less of a dilettante to task.)
And it’s been long days at work lately, which is maybe why I stood over the latest copy of The New Yorker today after I got home for what felt like ten minutes: on the left-hand page, a full-color, full-page ad for Ruth’s Chris Steak House. “Life’s too short to eat anywhere else,” says Ruth. On the right, a sixth-page vertical black-and-white for Warren Zevon’s last album; “Includes performances by Billy Bob Thornton, Bruce Springsteen, David Lindley,” and so on (in alphabetical order by first name, you see). Both of them in the middle of an advertising circular for The New Yorker Festival (September 19, 20, and 21, 2003). The whole thing had a nagging oracular quality to it, that presque vu that I usually cherish, that I spend a great deal of time not so much chasing as hanging out in places where we’re likely to run into each other: but today it was just annoying. It was trying to tell me something, but what? —That I’d been at work too long. Next question!
(I never did get a new pair of seersucker pants.)
The rains are back. Grey skies and wind from the west, extra blankets on the bed, sweaters and tweed and whiskey in the tea, and the cats are that much friendlier. —Virgos everywhere, with their innate love of order (and here you have to imagine me looking around the jumbled wreck of my office to get the joke), look back fondly on the incipient order of the new school year (or, granted, ahead, with no small amount of fondness amidst the teeth-gnashing): the new velcro and zip-up binders, the untrammelled packs of paper, the complete sets of colored pens, the waveform of all those perfect schedules and plans that has yet to collapse into all those discretely messy particles. (Usually by two weeks into it it’s all a lost and hopeless cause: contingency is king.) But between that and their birthdays, and the change in the weather, it’s not hard to see why Virgos might consider September to be the start of something new: the high hot timeless haze of summer’s gone, and with it the beastly heat; the air is crisp again, and something wicked will be along in about a month or so. Time to finally get some work done.
So: happy new year, and presque vu. Raise one to whomever; kick up a callithumpian moment. And then let’s roll up our sleeves and get down to cases.
Other oracles—
When Dylan Meconis has her voice recognition software on, and she closes her desk drawer, it records the sound as “Knopf.”
When Scott McCloud has his voice recognition software on, and he drives down the highway, this is what it makes of the ambient driving noise.
Where the hammer meets the nail.
Atrios is a minor god. I mean, you knew that, right? But when he kicks out the jams with one of his all-too-rare longer pieces, the jams stay bloody well kicked. Read his definitive statement on identity politics, then wake the neighbors and tell the kids.
Rising again.
Can we add “Utterly incompetent” to Fox’s new motto of “Wholly without merit”? I’m talking about the entertainment division, here, not the news division—though Lord knows there’s hardly been a difference, really. (Surely the only value derived from the Fox News Channel is a jagged, adrenaline-laden form of entertainment? Calisthenics for one’s rage? Like being chased by a pit-bull on one’s morning jog…) —After a couple of years of pre-empting Futurama at the drop of a second-string quarterback’s helmet, running new episodes unannounced in the dead of summer, at a 7 pm (or was it 7.30? No, wait, it’s 7 again. I think) timeslot that fit it about as well as its usual companion show, King of the Hill (a fine enough show in its own right, but what was the rationale? That they’re both cartoons?), after showing it so infrequently that the final season was stretched out over two broadcast years, Fox finally decided Futurama just wasn’t going to cut it. So they canned it.
The Cartoon Network picked it up. Showed reruns at the same time on a regular day. Promoted it. It’s a huge hit for them. Re-runs on TNT ain’t doing too shabby either. The DVDs are selling like hotcakes. “I think we came in ninth place twice in the past few weeks on just a random rerun at 11 pm on Cartoon Network,” said executive producer David Cohen to TV Guide recently. “And this is including broadcast TV. It’s astounding what a little promotion and regular airing will do for you. Maybe Fox is feeling a twang of remorse. Hopefully.”
Perhaps moreso, now that the Firefly movie is good to go.
Sci fi (and I use the Ellisonian bête-noir advisedly) is in a slump on television right now; westerns (horse-operas? oaters?) are non-existant. So the times perhaps weren’t auspicious for a sci-fi–western hybrid, for all that it came from the pen of (little director’s viewfinder-thingie of?) fanboy god Joss Whedon. Nonetheless, that’s precisely what Fox put out last year: and then they shelved the original pilot, ordering Whedon and his partner Tim Minear to whip out a Great Train Robbery riff instead, over a long weekend; then they proceeded to pre-empt episodes at the drop of a baseball glove, showed them out of order, skimped on promotion, and when they decided the ratings just weren’t impressive enough, they killed it with three finished episodes yet to air.
Firefly has since become a hit in Canada and England (and Mexico, and Denmark, and Australia, and South Africa, and…). The DVD collection of all 14 filmed episodes hasn’t officially gone on the market, but available pre-orders have sold out at Amazon—where it was apparently no. 3 on the sales ranking chart for a while. And there is the aforementioned movie deal. Over at Universal, instead of Fox. Cue Nelson-esque “Haw haw!”
I’m of two minds on the subject. On the one hand: yay. Firefly was just about the best SF television had produced in, well, a hell of a long time—only Farscape can give it a run for its money, but it took Farscape a year to hit its stride, and Firefly only got 11 (aired) episodes. (Deep Space 9—far and away the best of the Treks—had trouble sustaining runs of good shows, and only occasionally hit Firefly’s mark, much less the mark of Firefly’s potential. —Being unable to stomach wooden acting and leaden Arthurian parallels, yr. humble correspondent cannot adequately assess Babylon 5’s impact. Though he will allow as how those two alien ambassador guys had their moments.) The look of the show was a bracing mix of soleil noir—sort of what The Fifth Element was trying to do to Blade Runner—spaghetti-lite western, and Alien’s lived-in industrial æsthetic. Whedon’s ear for dialogue (and, by extension, that of his usual stable of thoroughbreds) proved as adept at folksy westernisms (in space!) as it had at his patented whip-smart teenspeak. And the ensemble cast did an impressive job of keeping the nine main characters and their interwoven relationships sharp and clear. (Unless, of course, muzzy ambiguity was called for. Which it was.) The episode “Ariel” was an engagingly messy look at betrayal and its consequences; “Objects in Space” had some truly impressive stream-of-consciousness treatments of murky psionic powers (or madness?); “Out of Gas” is just triumphant; and that pilot Fox shelved, casting a pall of doom about the whole enterprise before it ever got out of the gate—I already said something about the best SF television has produced?
But at the same time, I worry that it’s a television idea, not a movie idea. For all that the details weren’t carefully worked out—were there hundreds of colonizable planets circling a single star? Or hundreds of star systems with a never-specified faster-than-light drive?—it was a world to be explored. The ship itself was a world: those nine interwoven characters require a broad canvas to have some give and take; someone is going to get short shrift in a mere feature-length movie. And Whedon was edging up, in his usually sneaky, self-deprecatory, junk-culture kick-ass way, to a Really Big Idea.
Whedon has cited in a number of interviews the effect his professor Richard Slotkin had on him at Wesleyan, and Slotkin’s book, Regeneration Through Violence. With Firefly, I think he was starting to play directly with those ideas in an edgily dicey manner. —Set 500 years in the future, the show’s political setting was a none-too-subtle recreation of our own post-Civil War Reconstruction: the Alliance of rich, industrialized central or core worlds had fought a war to quell the rebellious, rural, economically disadvantaged outer planets. The rebel “brown coats” had been put down, the frontier overwhelmed, the Union cemented, and now all our heroes can do is scrape by from job to job, keeping a low profile. It’s a standard western setting, troped up into the future, yes—but that doesn’t account for the chill that went down my spine when, in the (second) pilot, as our heroes engineer their last-minute getaway, Mal (the captain of the ship, a former rebel who still defiantly wears his brown coat), smiles and tosses a bon mot at the villains of the set-piece: “Oh,” he says, “we will rise again.”
Jesus, I thought. Does Whedon know what he’s playing with here?
After all, playing by the rules of the metaphor, Mal maps onto the Confederacy—the rebellious, rural, economically disadvantaged butternut-coats that lost. And he’s stubborn, proud, independent, self-reliant, a rugged, gun-totin’ he-man, whose moral gut regularly outvoted the niceties of his ethics, and who nicely filled out a tight pair of pants. He is, in many ways, the sort of ideal idolized by reactionaries and conservatives, and his beloved brown-coat rebellion was everything the neo-Confederates claim of the poor, put-upon, honorable South.
“Oh,” he says. “We will rise again.”
But! Mal was also rather explicitly something of an antihero. Whedon calls his politics “reactionary”—oh, heck, at the risk of derailing my sputtering argument, let me quote him at length:
Mal’s politics are very reactionary and “Big government is bad” and “Don’t interfere with my life.” And sometimes he’s wrong—because sometimes the Alliance is America, this beautiful shining light of democracy. But sometimes the Alliance is America in Vietnam: we have a lot of petty politics, we are way out of our league and we have no right to control these people. And yet! Sometimes the Alliance is America in Nazi Germany. And Mal can’t see that, because he was a Vietnamese.
And there’s the world Mal and his crew and fellow travelers play in, where the folksy talk is peppered with Cantonese slang. Women work as mechanics and fight in wars. The frontier isn’t romantic; it’s hardscrabble, nasty and brutal. The Alliance isn’t Evil, just banal, mostly—and what conflict and oppression we see is driven not by race or religion or (admittedly homogenized) ethnicity, but class and economics, pure and simple.
Whatever it is that’s going to rise again, it sure as hell doesn’t look like the neo-Confederate dreams of the South.
The last batch of westerns—Peckinpah, Leone, et al (and yes, I know morally ambiguous began with John Ford, at least; let’s keep this simple)—rather famously took the straight-shooting archetype of the morally upright western hero: the cowboy, the marshal—and turned his independence and integrity and self-reliance rather firmly inside-out. And that was a good and even necessary thing to do, and anyway it made some kick-ass movies. But in savaging the happy macho myths America had told itself back in the 1950s, in trying to cut away the swaggering pride and racism and cocksure aggrandizement that landed us in Vietnam, among other things, we went too far. Hokey as it might seem, there was a baby in that bathwater. And what I think Whedon was doing with his SF western was very deliberately walking up to the other side of the kulturkampf and taking their idea of a good man—the independence, the self-reliance, the folksy charm, the integrity (cited more in breach than practice by the Other Side, whose idea of self-reliance means I got mine, screw you—but I grow partisan, I digress)—he was taking that idea of a good person, a person capable of doing good things, and giving it back to us.
And that sort of dramaturgical working is big enough you want the long wide canvas of a TV show, you know? Not so much two hours at the multiplex. Which is why I worry.
(On the other other hand, the relative luxury of a filming schedule, as opposed to the hurry-up-and-on-to-the-next-week schedule of television production, could prove a boon; I’m keen to see what Whedon can do when he really stretches himself.)
There was more, but it’s late. I was going to point out the episode where Mal fights the duel for Inara’s honor on the planet with the swords and the courtly manners and the genteel chivalry and how that plays into all of this, but it deals with the weak point of Inara and my brain’s muzzy, and anyway the ep while zippy and fun wasn’t one of Jane Espenson’s finer moments. So I’ll end with a smattering of links: here’s the Nielsen site. It’s hard to say what part the noted deficiencies in their methodology might have played in undercounting Firefly’s audience; they weren’t facing a language barrier, after all. But there are stations revolting, and viewers as well, fed up with the damage wrought by the admitted shortcomings of their monopolistic methodology. (Yr. humble correspondent had at one point considered a comparison of the beleaguered television fan, unable to watch the shows she loves, with the beleaguered voter, unable to vote for the candidate she needs. This will, perhaps, be left for another day.) —And I’ve saved the best for last: here’s Tim Minear, executive producer, writer, and director, who months ago posted a brusquely moving elegy about the last days of filming the show.
Anyway. It’s late. I’m for bed.
