Tuesday, November 28, 2006
John Updike's "Terrorist" and a Terrorist Op-Ed in the Times
The op-ed in question is this.
It's a prime example of how irritating space constraints are--and that ends my charitable analysis, because otherwise it's one of the most pernicious things I've read in some time. It's frustrating to me the way the Times pompously interpellates its readership as sensible moderates who are above the political fray, detached from these weirdo hippie bloggers and the fat Christians who live somewhere vaguely west of Morristown. I have no idea who Richard Shweder is, but he's doing a fine job proving everything conservatives about the "liberal media" already think while dissociating himself from facts.
First, people who write things need to realize that by virtue of publication, their words are part of the media; one time contributors aren't ghostly visitations upon the op-ed page just because they don't have a regular, twice-a-week column. It would also be helpful for their naivete to dry up and recognize that no matter how much they strive to present themselves as prudent, cautious skeptics and as adults, there will always be archconservative flameouts because the O'Reillyites who think Christmas is under siege by a secular cabal will continue to regard both freedom of speech and the left's right to exercise it as an indulgent nicety we can and ought to dispense with once the risks to our security become too great--and indeed, according to the Little Green Footballs school of thought, they already did five years ago. So self-described moderates can try their hardest to win converts to the mainstream cause by pillaging the sophomores they see all around them, all those bearded Critical Mass riders supporting Howard Dean's 50-state strategy and protesting the war(s), but it's not actually working.
People who care about politics are either liberal or conservative. People who don't really care, who don't really pay attention, and who make up their minds who to vote for the day before an election are not exactly a constituency. The right writes for right-wingers, and they pillory moderates as the hardcore left, a group that is basically adrift and authorless. CNN doesn't want to be the liberal alternative to Fox; they want to be the Empathy Network (witness the rise of Keith Olbermann on the plucky little MSNBC). The New York Times doesn't want to be a liberal standard-bearer. They want to retain credibility, advertising dollars and the cachet of being the Newspaper of Record (which they actually disavow, explicitly, having forfeited telling us about Peruvian cabinet reshufflings and the monetary policy of Bhutan decades ago). They want to position themselves as moderates because they hope, as the Paul Begalas and James Carvilles continue against all logic to be paid to say, they can sweep the amorphous mass of ill-informed adults who define themselves against hysterical anti-abortion Minute Men on the one hand and some angry Daily Kos diarist on the other.
That said, the actual op-ed was an atrocity because it basically treats the scientific method as just another ideology, equal to Pentecostalism or utopianism. While in a Derridean sense that's largely true, I don't think it's fair to lump them together because at the very least, empirical analysis reveals arduous and well-developed modes of self-correction, something which religious certitude doesn't want to imitate.
Then there's the resilient canard that the 20th century's biggest evils weren't the products of religion at all. I guess that means Nazism and Communism, aka the 10th grade Catholic's tactics for rebutting Nietzsche. Since it's just weak and condescending to say "that bullshit argument doesn't deserve an answer," let's say that fascism's alliances with religion are well-documented, that Communism-as-practiced was grotesquely compromised from its inception, that it was ushered in by megalomaniacs in societies that were far too poor and unstable to withstand the subsequent opposition of the capitalist West, that the left long ago moved away from top-down solutions that pay attention only to class as an axis of oppression, and that the pyramidal structure of 20th century totalitarianism (Nazism in particular) involved psychological sublimations of the Godhead (or somesuch) in a way that exalted the leaders as alternative gods. I just don't see a comparison between, say, a Maoist revolutionary and a subscriber to the New Yorker who doesn't pray.
The very idea that "the West" can be regarded as monolithic and secular is dangerously oversimplistic. The United States might not be a Christian nation in its governing principles, but the historical applications of its policies (up to and including this afternoon) definitely are. And even then, there isn't even unanimity among atheists. There are lots of atheists with terrible politics--Sam Harris, for one. (He manages to support Guantanamo Bay, that fucker). To say, loftily, as Shweder does, that atheists and the religiose live in mutual miscomprehension is smug and irritating. The entire trope of dividing the entire world along one simple axis, installing oneself in the very center, and measuring the stupidity of everyone else by how far they deviate from that center (which just happens to be where one holds court in one's infinite wisdom), is singularly anti-intellectual and dishonest. It's also the basis for Thomas L. Friedman's entire career.
This brings me to Updike. I'm just going to give away the ending, so know that now. Frankly, I can't decide if his latest book is a cop-out or if its cautious optimism might be right after all. In short, it's the story of an 18-year old biracial Muslim convert, Ahmad, raised by a single mom in a city that's obviously Paterson, NJ. His shaikh gets him a job with a furniture company run by people who are funding a terrorist plot, and his guidance counselor (a vaguely self-hating Jew [sorry, I really, really hate that phrase] who's sister-in-law is an undersecretary for homeland security, and who took an 11th hour interest in his well being) attempts to persuade him to go to college and not blow up the Lincoln Tunnel. In the end, Ahmad doesn't do it.
Essentially, the underlying theme is the rootless waste of modern American life. There's adultery too, like in every Updike book, but Ahmad (who has unconvincingly precise diction and intuition for a messed-up teenager) is excruciatingly sensitive to how ugly, meaningless and unhealthful Christians make the world. But as a zealous adherent to the Abrahamic tradition, he scorns the body's urges and detests infidels. There isn't an apocalyptic tension the way there is in Left Behind, as Ahmad's act of terrorism isn't aiming to set in motion a chain of events leading to a nuclear holocaust or anything; he just wants to strike at the enemy. But Updike goes on an on describing postindustrial urban North Jersey, and he makes guidance counselor Jack Levy a spent shell who tosses out one lengthy, depressing diatribe after another about what a waste life is.
There is a scene, the day before Ahmad's supposed deed, where he takes the time to pick up a beetle that has landed on its back, only to see it take two tiny steps and then die anyway. Ahmad's encounter with insignificance, his spiritual equivalence with a dying bug, is painful and sad. So how can it be that literally everyone who isn't a hollow moron, everyone sensitive or intelligent, comes to the exact same conclusion--that the United States embodies a terrible, ugly void and wants to reproduce it everywhere--yet diverges so dramatically over what to do about it, i.e. kill lots of people on behalf of a God, or recognize that no god exists and do your best to reformulate everything around that cruel, central axiom?
This is why I think the Times's op-ed is essentially terrorist in nature. It's a poorly thought-out fig leaf designed to give them moral cover from some fellow citizens, fascists awaiting a more serious national crisis, who wish them to be shut down, jailed or hanged. The Times is, de facto, the periodical of choice for a large number of secular cosmopolitans, a small and educated caste--some of whom make a shitload of money, to be sure--who are neither persecuted nor taken seriously, and among whom (although not exclusively) there is a subset of people who have abandoned metaphysics entirely.
In Terrorist, the government infiltrates the homegrown Islamists' inner circle and their informant is beheaded. This information is the only thing that nudges Ahmad to reconsider. It's coincidence alone that prevents his suicide-homicide bombing. The holy moderates of punditry are doing their part to keep things together for now, but their reach isn't global and the false moral equivalance they foist on the left and the right can't last forever. More and more people grow disenchanted with globalization, consumerism, and the values of the self-purifying market all the time, but most of those people are kept from thinking critically about it, and are driven into the irrational, nationalist myths of their respective cultures.
It's a prime example of how irritating space constraints are--and that ends my charitable analysis, because otherwise it's one of the most pernicious things I've read in some time. It's frustrating to me the way the Times pompously interpellates its readership as sensible moderates who are above the political fray, detached from these weirdo hippie bloggers and the fat Christians who live somewhere vaguely west of Morristown. I have no idea who Richard Shweder is, but he's doing a fine job proving everything conservatives about the "liberal media" already think while dissociating himself from facts.
First, people who write things need to realize that by virtue of publication, their words are part of the media; one time contributors aren't ghostly visitations upon the op-ed page just because they don't have a regular, twice-a-week column. It would also be helpful for their naivete to dry up and recognize that no matter how much they strive to present themselves as prudent, cautious skeptics and as adults, there will always be archconservative flameouts because the O'Reillyites who think Christmas is under siege by a secular cabal will continue to regard both freedom of speech and the left's right to exercise it as an indulgent nicety we can and ought to dispense with once the risks to our security become too great--and indeed, according to the Little Green Footballs school of thought, they already did five years ago. So self-described moderates can try their hardest to win converts to the mainstream cause by pillaging the sophomores they see all around them, all those bearded Critical Mass riders supporting Howard Dean's 50-state strategy and protesting the war(s), but it's not actually working.
People who care about politics are either liberal or conservative. People who don't really care, who don't really pay attention, and who make up their minds who to vote for the day before an election are not exactly a constituency. The right writes for right-wingers, and they pillory moderates as the hardcore left, a group that is basically adrift and authorless. CNN doesn't want to be the liberal alternative to Fox; they want to be the Empathy Network (witness the rise of Keith Olbermann on the plucky little MSNBC). The New York Times doesn't want to be a liberal standard-bearer. They want to retain credibility, advertising dollars and the cachet of being the Newspaper of Record (which they actually disavow, explicitly, having forfeited telling us about Peruvian cabinet reshufflings and the monetary policy of Bhutan decades ago). They want to position themselves as moderates because they hope, as the Paul Begalas and James Carvilles continue against all logic to be paid to say, they can sweep the amorphous mass of ill-informed adults who define themselves against hysterical anti-abortion Minute Men on the one hand and some angry Daily Kos diarist on the other.
That said, the actual op-ed was an atrocity because it basically treats the scientific method as just another ideology, equal to Pentecostalism or utopianism. While in a Derridean sense that's largely true, I don't think it's fair to lump them together because at the very least, empirical analysis reveals arduous and well-developed modes of self-correction, something which religious certitude doesn't want to imitate.
Then there's the resilient canard that the 20th century's biggest evils weren't the products of religion at all. I guess that means Nazism and Communism, aka the 10th grade Catholic's tactics for rebutting Nietzsche. Since it's just weak and condescending to say "that bullshit argument doesn't deserve an answer," let's say that fascism's alliances with religion are well-documented, that Communism-as-practiced was grotesquely compromised from its inception, that it was ushered in by megalomaniacs in societies that were far too poor and unstable to withstand the subsequent opposition of the capitalist West, that the left long ago moved away from top-down solutions that pay attention only to class as an axis of oppression, and that the pyramidal structure of 20th century totalitarianism (Nazism in particular) involved psychological sublimations of the Godhead (or somesuch) in a way that exalted the leaders as alternative gods. I just don't see a comparison between, say, a Maoist revolutionary and a subscriber to the New Yorker who doesn't pray.
The very idea that "the West" can be regarded as monolithic and secular is dangerously oversimplistic. The United States might not be a Christian nation in its governing principles, but the historical applications of its policies (up to and including this afternoon) definitely are. And even then, there isn't even unanimity among atheists. There are lots of atheists with terrible politics--Sam Harris, for one. (He manages to support Guantanamo Bay, that fucker). To say, loftily, as Shweder does, that atheists and the religiose live in mutual miscomprehension is smug and irritating. The entire trope of dividing the entire world along one simple axis, installing oneself in the very center, and measuring the stupidity of everyone else by how far they deviate from that center (which just happens to be where one holds court in one's infinite wisdom), is singularly anti-intellectual and dishonest. It's also the basis for Thomas L. Friedman's entire career.
This brings me to Updike. I'm just going to give away the ending, so know that now. Frankly, I can't decide if his latest book is a cop-out or if its cautious optimism might be right after all. In short, it's the story of an 18-year old biracial Muslim convert, Ahmad, raised by a single mom in a city that's obviously Paterson, NJ. His shaikh gets him a job with a furniture company run by people who are funding a terrorist plot, and his guidance counselor (a vaguely self-hating Jew [sorry, I really, really hate that phrase] who's sister-in-law is an undersecretary for homeland security, and who took an 11th hour interest in his well being) attempts to persuade him to go to college and not blow up the Lincoln Tunnel. In the end, Ahmad doesn't do it.
Essentially, the underlying theme is the rootless waste of modern American life. There's adultery too, like in every Updike book, but Ahmad (who has unconvincingly precise diction and intuition for a messed-up teenager) is excruciatingly sensitive to how ugly, meaningless and unhealthful Christians make the world. But as a zealous adherent to the Abrahamic tradition, he scorns the body's urges and detests infidels. There isn't an apocalyptic tension the way there is in Left Behind, as Ahmad's act of terrorism isn't aiming to set in motion a chain of events leading to a nuclear holocaust or anything; he just wants to strike at the enemy. But Updike goes on an on describing postindustrial urban North Jersey, and he makes guidance counselor Jack Levy a spent shell who tosses out one lengthy, depressing diatribe after another about what a waste life is.
There is a scene, the day before Ahmad's supposed deed, where he takes the time to pick up a beetle that has landed on its back, only to see it take two tiny steps and then die anyway. Ahmad's encounter with insignificance, his spiritual equivalence with a dying bug, is painful and sad. So how can it be that literally everyone who isn't a hollow moron, everyone sensitive or intelligent, comes to the exact same conclusion--that the United States embodies a terrible, ugly void and wants to reproduce it everywhere--yet diverges so dramatically over what to do about it, i.e. kill lots of people on behalf of a God, or recognize that no god exists and do your best to reformulate everything around that cruel, central axiom?
This is why I think the Times's op-ed is essentially terrorist in nature. It's a poorly thought-out fig leaf designed to give them moral cover from some fellow citizens, fascists awaiting a more serious national crisis, who wish them to be shut down, jailed or hanged. The Times is, de facto, the periodical of choice for a large number of secular cosmopolitans, a small and educated caste--some of whom make a shitload of money, to be sure--who are neither persecuted nor taken seriously, and among whom (although not exclusively) there is a subset of people who have abandoned metaphysics entirely.
In Terrorist, the government infiltrates the homegrown Islamists' inner circle and their informant is beheaded. This information is the only thing that nudges Ahmad to reconsider. It's coincidence alone that prevents his suicide-homicide bombing. The holy moderates of punditry are doing their part to keep things together for now, but their reach isn't global and the false moral equivalance they foist on the left and the right can't last forever. More and more people grow disenchanted with globalization, consumerism, and the values of the self-purifying market all the time, but most of those people are kept from thinking critically about it, and are driven into the irrational, nationalist myths of their respective cultures.
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Matewan and M
So the John Sayles movie from 1987 and the Fritz Lang movie from 1926(?) sort of remind me of one another. They have nothing to do with one another, although the actual plots are roughly contemporaneous: a coal miners' strike in 1920s West Virginia and a child-murderer (played by Peter Lorre) in Weimar Berlin.
The former involves the incorporation of a foreign body (Joe Kenehan, a labor organizer and ex-Wobbly played by Chris Cooper) into a tight, suspicious, mountain village reeling from the deaths of several miners and the coal company's punitive response to the strike. The latter relates to modernity's (or, better yet, the Modern(ist) state) attempting to capture the criminal and dispense with him according to the rule of law before the mob finds him first and tears him to pieces.
In Matewan, a local shop owner named Lively is revealed to be an agent provocateur in the employ of the coal company. Interestingly, his store had accepted company scrip as payment for goods at the rate of 2 to a dollar. So while appearing to be an admired paternal figure, a success in spite of the company's harsh actions, he was not only gouging the impoverished miner families but actively working behind the scenes to keep them down. Lively seeks to discredit Kenehan by convincing a dimwitted girl who's in love with him that Kenehan had made fun of her to all the other strikers, but winds up having to leave town when his subterfuge comes to light, carrying only his glasses as he fords a river that's deeper than he is tall.
He, the heart of the community, is rejected and Kenehan is grudgingly welcomed, and proceeds to admit, forcibly, African Americans and Italians into the union. Appreciative of the benefits of solidarity, and preferring not to be scabs, those two outsider groups's assimilation is awkward and incomplete, but nonetheless the cobbled-together coalition holds long enough for the union to endure, and at the end, one of the greatest shootouts ever kills off the corrupt and powerful strikebreakers. Here, an ambiguously utopian though straightforward premise--that there is power in a union, and workers' material lives will improve immeasurably if they can form one--propels a tiny, backwoods community to recognize its own heterogeneousness as a precondition for its continued survival. The polity must incorporate the Other to last.
In M, by contrast, two groups with the same ends in mind pursue a wanted felon for the purposes of plucking him out, expunging him like a contaminant. The "M" itself, attached to the murderer's coat, resembles the "A" in the Scarlet Letter in that Lorre's character is convicted of sin in the court of public opinion well before his actual trial; one group treats him as a murderer, the other as a suspect.
Shot after shot of desk drawers, files, charts, urban planning maps (all in that immaculate and ornamental Germanic typeface I associate with Oktoberfest) drive home the point that Germany just before the rise of Nazism self-consciously considered itself a young state with something to prove. M is in essence a film about the consolidation of the State's monopoly on violence. It's anti-fascist in its mistrust of the mob, in cheering on the orderliness and well-oiled sense of procedure that good cops and a good bureaucracy bring to bear on the pursuit of justice and retribution. The decadence affixed in hindsight to the Weimar Era may be celebrated (as in Isherwood's "Berlin Stories") or despised (as by conservative harrumphs that Nazism was only possible because of the fragile Republic's tolerance and effeminacy), but Lang might have wanted to do for Germany what the young Kurosawa wanted to do for Japan in Stray Dog: boast a little about its maturity. Barely half a century old (as a unified nation) and carrying all the blame for WWI, Germany-as-State had to prove it was as capable as Britain, France and Italy, and the equal of Germany-as-a-people as a standard bearer for high culture.
The former involves the incorporation of a foreign body (Joe Kenehan, a labor organizer and ex-Wobbly played by Chris Cooper) into a tight, suspicious, mountain village reeling from the deaths of several miners and the coal company's punitive response to the strike. The latter relates to modernity's (or, better yet, the Modern(ist) state) attempting to capture the criminal and dispense with him according to the rule of law before the mob finds him first and tears him to pieces.
In Matewan, a local shop owner named Lively is revealed to be an agent provocateur in the employ of the coal company. Interestingly, his store had accepted company scrip as payment for goods at the rate of 2 to a dollar. So while appearing to be an admired paternal figure, a success in spite of the company's harsh actions, he was not only gouging the impoverished miner families but actively working behind the scenes to keep them down. Lively seeks to discredit Kenehan by convincing a dimwitted girl who's in love with him that Kenehan had made fun of her to all the other strikers, but winds up having to leave town when his subterfuge comes to light, carrying only his glasses as he fords a river that's deeper than he is tall.
He, the heart of the community, is rejected and Kenehan is grudgingly welcomed, and proceeds to admit, forcibly, African Americans and Italians into the union. Appreciative of the benefits of solidarity, and preferring not to be scabs, those two outsider groups's assimilation is awkward and incomplete, but nonetheless the cobbled-together coalition holds long enough for the union to endure, and at the end, one of the greatest shootouts ever kills off the corrupt and powerful strikebreakers. Here, an ambiguously utopian though straightforward premise--that there is power in a union, and workers' material lives will improve immeasurably if they can form one--propels a tiny, backwoods community to recognize its own heterogeneousness as a precondition for its continued survival. The polity must incorporate the Other to last.
In M, by contrast, two groups with the same ends in mind pursue a wanted felon for the purposes of plucking him out, expunging him like a contaminant. The "M" itself, attached to the murderer's coat, resembles the "A" in the Scarlet Letter in that Lorre's character is convicted of sin in the court of public opinion well before his actual trial; one group treats him as a murderer, the other as a suspect.
Shot after shot of desk drawers, files, charts, urban planning maps (all in that immaculate and ornamental Germanic typeface I associate with Oktoberfest) drive home the point that Germany just before the rise of Nazism self-consciously considered itself a young state with something to prove. M is in essence a film about the consolidation of the State's monopoly on violence. It's anti-fascist in its mistrust of the mob, in cheering on the orderliness and well-oiled sense of procedure that good cops and a good bureaucracy bring to bear on the pursuit of justice and retribution. The decadence affixed in hindsight to the Weimar Era may be celebrated (as in Isherwood's "Berlin Stories") or despised (as by conservative harrumphs that Nazism was only possible because of the fragile Republic's tolerance and effeminacy), but Lang might have wanted to do for Germany what the young Kurosawa wanted to do for Japan in Stray Dog: boast a little about its maturity. Barely half a century old (as a unified nation) and carrying all the blame for WWI, Germany-as-State had to prove it was as capable as Britain, France and Italy, and the equal of Germany-as-a-people as a standard bearer for high culture.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Ted Kennedy Wins Re-Election! And other amazing facts about the election!
1. a 51-49 Democratic Senate is insanely cool and far beyond what anyone thought possible. For some delicious proof that conservative pundits have their heads up their asses, check out the National Review's haughty predictions. Seriously. They're delicious.
2. There remains but one New England Republican congressman, Chris Shays of Connecticut--and he probably won only because Joe Lieberman drove so many Connecticut Republicans to the polls in the wealthiest district in the region. There are 22 Democrats representing New England. To see what a truly historical occurrence that is, look at the electoral map of 1936.
3. For the time being, the momentum appears to be pushing the Southern Strategy to its logical conclusion: the Republican Party as a regional party, limited to the South (minus Northern Virginia, South Florida, the NC Research Triangle, SW Texas, Arkansas and a few urban pockets), a few rich suburban districts, racist evangelical-heavy spots in the Midwest, and Southern California.
4. Time to flush them out of Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan. New York State can still stand to shake itself free of one or two more, even though the Republicans hold the smallest percentage of seats here since the New Deal.
5. However, the last time the Democrats won big--1992--the GOP destroyed them two years later, and 2004's talk of a Republican 'perpetual majority' seemed dispiritingly convincing at the time, but look where we are now.
6. Yet in 1933, there were only 25 Republicans in the Senate and 103 in the House, so why not aim high?
7. It's funny when well-paid smart people on tv cover their asses by inferring from the victory of Heath Shuler in rural North Carolina that the entire class of freshman/-woman Democrats are conservatives (some forty people) when only days ago they were being tarred as leftists. But oh no, Jon Tester opposes gun control!
8. Nancy Pelosi's grim visage might have motivated some flagging GOP stalwarts to go out and vote, but no one seems to have stopped to think about what super-secret ultra-lefty agenda she's supposedly be thinking about. Getting troops out of Iraq, halving student loan interest rates, ending earmarks, investigating the Bush Admnistration's googolplex of errata, making health care affordable, responding to climate change, reducing the alternative minimum tax for the middle class, not being corrupt as shit...not much room for the mandatory priest-goat weddings or the abolition of Christianity, really.
9. If nothing else, 2006 is significant because libertarians (whatever that means) left the Republicans for the Democrats in significant numbers. Arizona and Colorado will be blue states by 2012. Most people prefer government to stick up for them against terrorists and predatory corporations, but they prefer that their government treat them as adults when it comes to making personal decisions. I seriously can't believe Arizona voted down the anti-gay marriage amendment. This is the same state with the Minutemen and the Israel-style fence against Mexico. Then again, it was Barry Goldwater who said "You don't need to be straight to shoot straight" (not that I advocate for gay people wanting to be xenocidal myrmidons).
So here, a bold prediction: if the Democrats don't stick together or Lieberman defects and the Senate is lost (good probability of that), and the GOP tastes blood in the water, the Republican 2008 primaries will propel a reliably Bush-like (though comparatively isolationist) conservative to the fore, because I don't think they're going to bet on Giuliani or McCain. (McCain already lost and the GOP hates losers; at some point it's going to come out that Rudy lived with a homo couple after his wife divorced him and kept Gracie Mansion).
So if they repudiate Iraq but essentially stick to what's going on now, and they lose again, we're going to see some serious shit. I think that by 2012--the election-after-next--the evangelical crowd will no longer be driving the party, and, as they did from 1925 till the early 1970s, they will essentially forego politics as a tainted dominion not worth getting tangled up in, especially since the Rapture will be really, really imminent by then.
But yea--the Democrats!
2. There remains but one New England Republican congressman, Chris Shays of Connecticut--and he probably won only because Joe Lieberman drove so many Connecticut Republicans to the polls in the wealthiest district in the region. There are 22 Democrats representing New England. To see what a truly historical occurrence that is, look at the electoral map of 1936.
3. For the time being, the momentum appears to be pushing the Southern Strategy to its logical conclusion: the Republican Party as a regional party, limited to the South (minus Northern Virginia, South Florida, the NC Research Triangle, SW Texas, Arkansas and a few urban pockets), a few rich suburban districts, racist evangelical-heavy spots in the Midwest, and Southern California.
4. Time to flush them out of Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan. New York State can still stand to shake itself free of one or two more, even though the Republicans hold the smallest percentage of seats here since the New Deal.
5. However, the last time the Democrats won big--1992--the GOP destroyed them two years later, and 2004's talk of a Republican 'perpetual majority' seemed dispiritingly convincing at the time, but look where we are now.
6. Yet in 1933, there were only 25 Republicans in the Senate and 103 in the House, so why not aim high?
7. It's funny when well-paid smart people on tv cover their asses by inferring from the victory of Heath Shuler in rural North Carolina that the entire class of freshman/-woman Democrats are conservatives (some forty people) when only days ago they were being tarred as leftists. But oh no, Jon Tester opposes gun control!
8. Nancy Pelosi's grim visage might have motivated some flagging GOP stalwarts to go out and vote, but no one seems to have stopped to think about what super-secret ultra-lefty agenda she's supposedly be thinking about. Getting troops out of Iraq, halving student loan interest rates, ending earmarks, investigating the Bush Admnistration's googolplex of errata, making health care affordable, responding to climate change, reducing the alternative minimum tax for the middle class, not being corrupt as shit...not much room for the mandatory priest-goat weddings or the abolition of Christianity, really.
9. If nothing else, 2006 is significant because libertarians (whatever that means) left the Republicans for the Democrats in significant numbers. Arizona and Colorado will be blue states by 2012. Most people prefer government to stick up for them against terrorists and predatory corporations, but they prefer that their government treat them as adults when it comes to making personal decisions. I seriously can't believe Arizona voted down the anti-gay marriage amendment. This is the same state with the Minutemen and the Israel-style fence against Mexico. Then again, it was Barry Goldwater who said "You don't need to be straight to shoot straight" (not that I advocate for gay people wanting to be xenocidal myrmidons).
So here, a bold prediction: if the Democrats don't stick together or Lieberman defects and the Senate is lost (good probability of that), and the GOP tastes blood in the water, the Republican 2008 primaries will propel a reliably Bush-like (though comparatively isolationist) conservative to the fore, because I don't think they're going to bet on Giuliani or McCain. (McCain already lost and the GOP hates losers; at some point it's going to come out that Rudy lived with a homo couple after his wife divorced him and kept Gracie Mansion).
So if they repudiate Iraq but essentially stick to what's going on now, and they lose again, we're going to see some serious shit. I think that by 2012--the election-after-next--the evangelical crowd will no longer be driving the party, and, as they did from 1925 till the early 1970s, they will essentially forego politics as a tainted dominion not worth getting tangled up in, especially since the Rapture will be really, really imminent by then.
But yea--the Democrats!
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Ghastly
This is such bullshit.
First of all, this crosses a major line with me when so-called progressives, who define themselves against the insular and complacent powers-that-be, cozy up to market logic as a way of trumpeting the Democratic party's credentials. What a fantastic conservative talking point that's become unquestioned wisdom: "the market." Referring to the dynamics by which multinational corporations do what they do as if it were akin to a few fishwives hawking halibut in some quaint village in the Maritimes. "The market." DailyKos has revealed its founder's openly Republican origins by critiquing the DLC-style 'New Democrats' (Clinton, Lieberman, Harold Ford, etc) yet suckling at the same font of bullshit that granted those self-styled adults their legitimacy circa 1992 when, like Blair's New Labor, they abandoned their principles after losing 3 presidential elections.
I can't believe anyone would buy the idea that presidents control the economy. People don't want a centrally planned economy but hold their leaders accountable when a 'free' 'market' resists top-down management by the federal government. Clinton did not give birth to the internet age, and if his policies made it happen a certain way, we have all seen what happened to that bubble even before Bush took office. Yes, balanced budgets are probably a smarter choice--but that was hardly liberal/Democratic dogma in the days of Truman, Johnson or Carter. A lot of the industrial landscape has changed since 1945, and since there is certainly no inherent or historically constant 'Democratic' way of shepherding economic growth, it's total bullshit to use this metric as a means of demonstrating one side's superiority. Plus, if Humphrey had won in '68, or McGovern in '72, the oil crisis of 1973 would almost certainly have happened anyway, and then who would be laughing?
Finally, I wish someone with a bigger mouthpiece than I've got would just own up to the fact that conservatives almost certainly create more aggregate wealth, and liberals, more sensitive to the grotesque inequalities conservative ideas breed, vacillate between fitful crusades for social justice and their default stance of silencing the left wing that favors a fair redistribution of resources and pleasures, even if it means alienating the corporations that underpin the system which no one else questions as long as times are good.
First of all, this crosses a major line with me when so-called progressives, who define themselves against the insular and complacent powers-that-be, cozy up to market logic as a way of trumpeting the Democratic party's credentials. What a fantastic conservative talking point that's become unquestioned wisdom: "the market." Referring to the dynamics by which multinational corporations do what they do as if it were akin to a few fishwives hawking halibut in some quaint village in the Maritimes. "The market." DailyKos has revealed its founder's openly Republican origins by critiquing the DLC-style 'New Democrats' (Clinton, Lieberman, Harold Ford, etc) yet suckling at the same font of bullshit that granted those self-styled adults their legitimacy circa 1992 when, like Blair's New Labor, they abandoned their principles after losing 3 presidential elections.
I can't believe anyone would buy the idea that presidents control the economy. People don't want a centrally planned economy but hold their leaders accountable when a 'free' 'market' resists top-down management by the federal government. Clinton did not give birth to the internet age, and if his policies made it happen a certain way, we have all seen what happened to that bubble even before Bush took office. Yes, balanced budgets are probably a smarter choice--but that was hardly liberal/Democratic dogma in the days of Truman, Johnson or Carter. A lot of the industrial landscape has changed since 1945, and since there is certainly no inherent or historically constant 'Democratic' way of shepherding economic growth, it's total bullshit to use this metric as a means of demonstrating one side's superiority. Plus, if Humphrey had won in '68, or McGovern in '72, the oil crisis of 1973 would almost certainly have happened anyway, and then who would be laughing?
Finally, I wish someone with a bigger mouthpiece than I've got would just own up to the fact that conservatives almost certainly create more aggregate wealth, and liberals, more sensitive to the grotesque inequalities conservative ideas breed, vacillate between fitful crusades for social justice and their default stance of silencing the left wing that favors a fair redistribution of resources and pleasures, even if it means alienating the corporations that underpin the system which no one else questions as long as times are good.
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Who Gives a Shit What I Think, But...
...remember having to hear stupid people on tv point to a county-by-county map of the US, awash in a sea of red jurisdictions with fewer residents--to say nothing of actual voters--than a small commuter college?
Remember how the 51-48 Bush re-election was a mandate (i.e. the smallest margin of victory for a second term since pre-stroke Woodrow Wilson in 1916) that would cement the Republican Party's power as the future of America? Or whatever bullshit hauteur Tom DeLay uttered that I dimly remember and can now but quasi-paraphrase.
Well. Fuck. Those. People.
Here's my prediction: a 50-50 Senate and a House safely ensconced in Democratic hands at 234-201, a 31-seat shift. (I don't really care about governors that much; if there's one spot you have to have a Republican, you want him or her there, where they don't vote with others to determine national policy. Thus speaketh my closet federalism).
I think the Democratic Senate candidates will win in Rhode Island, Montana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and barely squeak out in Missouri, while hanging on in New Jersey (easily) and Maryland (way tighter). Tennessee is a loss and Arizona was never in play, but after Colorado it remains the Western state with the greatest potential for purplization. (As a sidenote, should Jim Talent defeat Michael J. Fox in Missouri, that would basically mean that Tennessee has fucked us twice in six years: Harold Ford, right-wing Democrat and he of the so-called "perfect campaign" is hardly someone I'm going to weep for, but who deserves to win, and if Al Gore could have just won his home state in 2000, we wouldn't be anywhere near where we are now, although that's like pondering what happened before the Big Bang).
(-)(-)(-)
In the House, Democrats will pick up:
2 of the 3 in Connecticut (Farrell over Shays and Courtney over Simmons, but not Murphy over Johnson, thanks to Joe Lieberman)
3 in New York (Massa over Kuhl, Gillibrand over Sweeney and Arcuri over Meier in the open seat vacated by Sherwood Boehlert, but not the ghastly Peter King, who called the AARP a radical organization and whose name sounds too much like mine; not Vito Fossella, the only Republican to represent a part of NYC--Staten Island [duh, of course] and grossout-townie Brooklyn; and not Tom Reynolds, enabler and go-between in the whole Foley matter. It would be delightful if Hall beat Kelly, but I'm skept)
3 in Indiana (Hill over Sodrel, Donnelly over Chocola, and Ellsworth over Hostettler...take that, throbbing red heart of America)
3 in Ohio (Wulsin over Schmidt, Space over Padgett and Kilroy over Pryce)
3 in Pennsylvania (Sestak over Weldon, Murphy over Gerlach, and Carney over Sherwood)
2 in Florida (Mahoney over not-Foley aka Negron, and Jennings over Buchanan for the seat held by Katharine Harris, archfuck who's destined for defeat in her Senate race. It's possible for Klein to prevail over Shaw, but I'm skeptical)
2 in Colorado (Perlmutter over Beauprez, and Paccione over Musgrave; the only race I'm obscenely optimistic about is Marilyn Musgrave, who is so insanely homophobic that I hope her dog dies, her couch collapses and her sons, should she have any, get raped by Ted Haggard)
1 in Iowa (Braley over Whalen)
1 in Illinois (Duckworth over Roskam...this might be too optimistic. WTF, Illinois?)
1 in New Mexico (Madrid over Wilson)
1 in Texas (Lampson over Sekula-Gibbs)
1 in California (there's no God, but please God let it be x over McNerney over Richard Pombo, the most staunch anti-environmentalist in the universe)
1 in North Carolina (Shuler over Taylor)
1 in Virginia (Kellam over Drake)
1 in New Hampshire (Hodes over Bass)
1 in Minnesota (Wetterling over Bachman, but Gil Gutknecht will hang on)
1 in Wisconsin (Kagen over Gard)
1 in Idaho (Grant over Otter)
1 in Kansas (Boyda over Ryun)
1 in Arizona (Giffords over Graf)
1 in Kentucky (I don't know which, but losing all 3 would be tough)
1 in Wyoming (Trauer over Cubin)
Regrettably, we will likely shed a seat in Georgia (which against all mathematical possibility somehow seems to be growing more Republican) and not pick up seriously good chances in Washington (two), Virginia, Texas, Illinois (two), Colorado, California (two), Illinois (two), Nebraska and New York (for the last, as stated above). As I look back, this is optimistic by 3 seats (Musgrave in particular...but what a cunt!). Although, in the best case scenario, New York and New England will have a mere 4 of their 51 combined seats in the House held by Republicans. That's particularly amazing if you look at the election of 1936.
A lot of these winners will lose in 2008. That's for certain (I'm thinking Trauner, Grant and most of all, Lampson). However, there are a couple more things to note: first, Howard Dean will be vindicated as a total genius for pursuing the 50-state strategy when the conventional wisdom is that Democrats aren't, weren't and could never be competitive in a vast number of districts, some of which they are going to win. The Democratic establishment hates Dean--fine. They hate the bloggers--fine. Their fear of students/hippies/moms/critical thought borders on the pathologically self-destructive--fine. But they at least had to recognize the shrewdness of fielding so many people-funded candidates, if only to spread the GOP's resources thin. Many a Republican rep grew soft and complacent, many beleaguered Democrats in vermillion districts grew into their disenchantment, and in less than two years the alignment is about to undergo a seismic shift--thanks to Dean. The end result is that in ten years, 'conservative' should be as generally embarrassing as 'liberal' is now, and Nebraska will have a functioning Democratic party on the ground. The ultimate electoral point is to isolate the GOP within the South...and Southern California. Second, Ohio, Michigan and New Jersey are the states to pummel in 2008, at the local level. Among them, they have 26 Republican-held seats (11, 9 and 6, respectively), and are bluer than they appear. Rumors about New Jersey's succumbing to the Red Death are greatly exaggerated, as much as they were after the GOP convention in '04.
And finally, something needs to be said about poor Ned Lamont, who will lose and retire from being a known commodity. I really like Ned. I made the girl who sits next to met at work vote for him in the primary. To say that Joe Lieberman is an asshole is seriously boring, but as for my provocative prediction of the cycle, I think he'll have the decency not to defect in the 50-50 Senate (although I think a couple Republicans will quietly switch sides in the House, and a lot of retirements will suddenly pop up in '08--I'm thinking of you, Mike Castle of Delaware), when the Republican party circles its wagons to lay the ground for making 2006 a monstrous aberration, they will demand that Donald Rumsfeld be fired and they will install Joe Lieberman. CT Gov. Jodi Rell will appoint a GOP to fill Lieberman's term, and the Senate will be 51-49 for the GOP, or 51-48-1 as long as Bernie Sanders is alive.
Remember how the 51-48 Bush re-election was a mandate (i.e. the smallest margin of victory for a second term since pre-stroke Woodrow Wilson in 1916) that would cement the Republican Party's power as the future of America? Or whatever bullshit hauteur Tom DeLay uttered that I dimly remember and can now but quasi-paraphrase.
Well. Fuck. Those. People.
Here's my prediction: a 50-50 Senate and a House safely ensconced in Democratic hands at 234-201, a 31-seat shift. (I don't really care about governors that much; if there's one spot you have to have a Republican, you want him or her there, where they don't vote with others to determine national policy. Thus speaketh my closet federalism).
I think the Democratic Senate candidates will win in Rhode Island, Montana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and barely squeak out in Missouri, while hanging on in New Jersey (easily) and Maryland (way tighter). Tennessee is a loss and Arizona was never in play, but after Colorado it remains the Western state with the greatest potential for purplization. (As a sidenote, should Jim Talent defeat Michael J. Fox in Missouri, that would basically mean that Tennessee has fucked us twice in six years: Harold Ford, right-wing Democrat and he of the so-called "perfect campaign" is hardly someone I'm going to weep for, but who deserves to win, and if Al Gore could have just won his home state in 2000, we wouldn't be anywhere near where we are now, although that's like pondering what happened before the Big Bang).
(-)(-)(-)
In the House, Democrats will pick up:
2 of the 3 in Connecticut (Farrell over Shays and Courtney over Simmons, but not Murphy over Johnson, thanks to Joe Lieberman)
3 in New York (Massa over Kuhl, Gillibrand over Sweeney and Arcuri over Meier in the open seat vacated by Sherwood Boehlert, but not the ghastly Peter King, who called the AARP a radical organization and whose name sounds too much like mine; not Vito Fossella, the only Republican to represent a part of NYC--Staten Island [duh, of course] and grossout-townie Brooklyn; and not Tom Reynolds, enabler and go-between in the whole Foley matter. It would be delightful if Hall beat Kelly, but I'm skept)
3 in Indiana (Hill over Sodrel, Donnelly over Chocola, and Ellsworth over Hostettler...take that, throbbing red heart of America)
3 in Ohio (Wulsin over Schmidt, Space over Padgett and Kilroy over Pryce)
3 in Pennsylvania (Sestak over Weldon, Murphy over Gerlach, and Carney over Sherwood)
2 in Florida (Mahoney over not-Foley aka Negron, and Jennings over Buchanan for the seat held by Katharine Harris, archfuck who's destined for defeat in her Senate race. It's possible for Klein to prevail over Shaw, but I'm skeptical)
2 in Colorado (Perlmutter over Beauprez, and Paccione over Musgrave; the only race I'm obscenely optimistic about is Marilyn Musgrave, who is so insanely homophobic that I hope her dog dies, her couch collapses and her sons, should she have any, get raped by Ted Haggard)
1 in Iowa (Braley over Whalen)
1 in Illinois (Duckworth over Roskam...this might be too optimistic. WTF, Illinois?)
1 in New Mexico (Madrid over Wilson)
1 in Texas (Lampson over Sekula-Gibbs)
1 in California (there's no God, but please God let it be x over McNerney over Richard Pombo, the most staunch anti-environmentalist in the universe)
1 in North Carolina (Shuler over Taylor)
1 in Virginia (Kellam over Drake)
1 in New Hampshire (Hodes over Bass)
1 in Minnesota (Wetterling over Bachman, but Gil Gutknecht will hang on)
1 in Wisconsin (Kagen over Gard)
1 in Idaho (Grant over Otter)
1 in Kansas (Boyda over Ryun)
1 in Arizona (Giffords over Graf)
1 in Kentucky (I don't know which, but losing all 3 would be tough)
1 in Wyoming (Trauer over Cubin)
Regrettably, we will likely shed a seat in Georgia (which against all mathematical possibility somehow seems to be growing more Republican) and not pick up seriously good chances in Washington (two), Virginia, Texas, Illinois (two), Colorado, California (two), Illinois (two), Nebraska and New York (for the last, as stated above). As I look back, this is optimistic by 3 seats (Musgrave in particular...but what a cunt!). Although, in the best case scenario, New York and New England will have a mere 4 of their 51 combined seats in the House held by Republicans. That's particularly amazing if you look at the election of 1936.
A lot of these winners will lose in 2008. That's for certain (I'm thinking Trauner, Grant and most of all, Lampson). However, there are a couple more things to note: first, Howard Dean will be vindicated as a total genius for pursuing the 50-state strategy when the conventional wisdom is that Democrats aren't, weren't and could never be competitive in a vast number of districts, some of which they are going to win. The Democratic establishment hates Dean--fine. They hate the bloggers--fine. Their fear of students/hippies/moms/critical thought borders on the pathologically self-destructive--fine. But they at least had to recognize the shrewdness of fielding so many people-funded candidates, if only to spread the GOP's resources thin. Many a Republican rep grew soft and complacent, many beleaguered Democrats in vermillion districts grew into their disenchantment, and in less than two years the alignment is about to undergo a seismic shift--thanks to Dean. The end result is that in ten years, 'conservative' should be as generally embarrassing as 'liberal' is now, and Nebraska will have a functioning Democratic party on the ground. The ultimate electoral point is to isolate the GOP within the South...and Southern California. Second, Ohio, Michigan and New Jersey are the states to pummel in 2008, at the local level. Among them, they have 26 Republican-held seats (11, 9 and 6, respectively), and are bluer than they appear. Rumors about New Jersey's succumbing to the Red Death are greatly exaggerated, as much as they were after the GOP convention in '04.
And finally, something needs to be said about poor Ned Lamont, who will lose and retire from being a known commodity. I really like Ned. I made the girl who sits next to met at work vote for him in the primary. To say that Joe Lieberman is an asshole is seriously boring, but as for my provocative prediction of the cycle, I think he'll have the decency not to defect in the 50-50 Senate (although I think a couple Republicans will quietly switch sides in the House, and a lot of retirements will suddenly pop up in '08--I'm thinking of you, Mike Castle of Delaware), when the Republican party circles its wagons to lay the ground for making 2006 a monstrous aberration, they will demand that Donald Rumsfeld be fired and they will install Joe Lieberman. CT Gov. Jodi Rell will appoint a GOP to fill Lieberman's term, and the Senate will be 51-49 for the GOP, or 51-48-1 as long as Bernie Sanders is alive.
Saturday, November 04, 2006
Borat
I'd like to write something along the lines of "Everything that happened till this point is stupid" with respect to 'Borat.' Because not only is it the funniest movie I've ever seen, it comes closer to satisfying my demand that given the resilience of marketing strategies and cultural conservatism, the only thing worth doing is to make fun of the bad guys in the most contentless possible way. That way you can't just be picked up and absorbed into the litany of so-called liberals whom half the population will simply not pay attention to at all. No one will include Sasha Baron Cohen in the roster of Michael Moore, the Dixie Chicks, Harry Belafonte, the ACLU, etc. 'Borat' is new in that it absolutely skewers 'the US and A' without giving off the impression that he's some quasi-sophisticated filmmaker who plugs at it until he finally stumbles on the fattest, most racist old lady who's excited to be caught on camera prattling about how it's God's will that George W. Bush be in office, etc etc.
Cohen basically hates America. He shows only its worst aspects: assholes on the subway, racist store owners, Pentecostals speaking in tongues, politicians proclaiming the US as a Christian nation, terrifyingly homophobic and anti-Muslim rodeo people, the orgy of martial interpellations that is sports. The fact that his character hails from a country that only 30 Americans can name the capital of makes him virtually create it from scratch, with all the attendant Communist-era imagery, spectacular anti-Semitism, vulgarity, and a hilarious accent. Kazakstan, member of the coalition of the willing, fairly recent addition to the 'free' 'west,' proves a superb foil to the bloated hyperpower that is us.
Borat's over-the-top anti-Semitism is supremely fucking funny, and it provides him cover not only since Cohen's Jewish (duh) but because it's such an offensive thing to have in your movie, so unlike what a moralist would do, that no one can just label him a liberal. And you know what happens when you get called that. Bill O'Reilly puts you on his enemies list and then you find yourself preaching to the choir and hanging out with Cindy Sheehan. Making Borat technically repellant but still endearing is just ingenious, and it's all in the service of muddying up the agenda. Cohen isn't trying to de-elect Bush or urge us to believe that patriotism somehow has nothing to do with the military-industrial complex. This is the best political humor ever created. He doesn't make you afraid that legions of earnest hippie sophomores are going to elbow Chomsky aside and deify him as their hero. Nor will National Review write recuperative paeans in his honor as they love to do for Sprinsteen. This is a good-natured Fuck You, America. It's perfect pitch.
And scenes such as the extended destructive naked hotel wrestling with the fatass producer--I mean, how can you not flinch? It might be the funniest thing that ever happened. Usually these things are tainted with at least a little homophobia or racism, but it just isn't. This just isn't a guilty pleasure, as you might be able to argue Dave Chappelle kind of is. He's not really pointing out homophobia as much as exploiting the discomfort everyone feels when they see a hairy guy mimicking butt sex with a fatter, hairier guy as they shatter mirrors and upend furniture. The scene looks totally spontaneous. Almost nothing in the whole movie comes off as staged.
Maybe Cohen really did shoot hundreds of hours of film, searching for the most comically wretched people to fool. But apparently Ali G just scored every time, with Ralph Nader, with Andy Rooney, with Pat Buchanan. I prefer to think his genius, as Borat, comes from perpetual, film-worthy character development with every single encounter.
*****
Cohen basically hates America. He shows only its worst aspects: assholes on the subway, racist store owners, Pentecostals speaking in tongues, politicians proclaiming the US as a Christian nation, terrifyingly homophobic and anti-Muslim rodeo people, the orgy of martial interpellations that is sports. The fact that his character hails from a country that only 30 Americans can name the capital of makes him virtually create it from scratch, with all the attendant Communist-era imagery, spectacular anti-Semitism, vulgarity, and a hilarious accent. Kazakstan, member of the coalition of the willing, fairly recent addition to the 'free' 'west,' proves a superb foil to the bloated hyperpower that is us.
Borat's over-the-top anti-Semitism is supremely fucking funny, and it provides him cover not only since Cohen's Jewish (duh) but because it's such an offensive thing to have in your movie, so unlike what a moralist would do, that no one can just label him a liberal. And you know what happens when you get called that. Bill O'Reilly puts you on his enemies list and then you find yourself preaching to the choir and hanging out with Cindy Sheehan. Making Borat technically repellant but still endearing is just ingenious, and it's all in the service of muddying up the agenda. Cohen isn't trying to de-elect Bush or urge us to believe that patriotism somehow has nothing to do with the military-industrial complex. This is the best political humor ever created. He doesn't make you afraid that legions of earnest hippie sophomores are going to elbow Chomsky aside and deify him as their hero. Nor will National Review write recuperative paeans in his honor as they love to do for Sprinsteen. This is a good-natured Fuck You, America. It's perfect pitch.
And scenes such as the extended destructive naked hotel wrestling with the fatass producer--I mean, how can you not flinch? It might be the funniest thing that ever happened. Usually these things are tainted with at least a little homophobia or racism, but it just isn't. This just isn't a guilty pleasure, as you might be able to argue Dave Chappelle kind of is. He's not really pointing out homophobia as much as exploiting the discomfort everyone feels when they see a hairy guy mimicking butt sex with a fatter, hairier guy as they shatter mirrors and upend furniture. The scene looks totally spontaneous. Almost nothing in the whole movie comes off as staged.
Maybe Cohen really did shoot hundreds of hours of film, searching for the most comically wretched people to fool. But apparently Ali G just scored every time, with Ralph Nader, with Andy Rooney, with Pat Buchanan. I prefer to think his genius, as Borat, comes from perpetual, film-worthy character development with every single encounter.
*****
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Scanners
Awesome movie. Cronenberg's obsession with flesh, with creating new orifices and exposing the interior of the body, isn't sexual as it is in Existenz, which surprised me given the possibilities of the physicality of telepathy. Seeing the head of what looks like Representative Henry Waxman of California explode is fucking nasty. Seeing Michael Ironside (who is basically a older, rougher, better Hugo Weaving) duel with...the other guy at the end was seriously horrific and tense. The art direction was great: shots of the company headquarters, a combination of the midcentury corporate office tower and the contemporary bioresearch campus, in winter dawn with a few exposed trees and othing else around, is vaguely unsettling. Corporatized science carries such a heavy unease quotient, and the image of bodily fluids contaminating an antiseptic room comes off as inevitable and appropriate. The gas station explosion scene was a little cheesy, and you have to suspend your disbelief over any discussion/illustration of computers pre-1995 (with the exception of Blade Runner), but otherwise this was about as good as horror gets. Even if the audio didn't always align with the video and the Netflix sleeve gave an important detail away.
****2/3
****2/3
