The Daily Drew

"Deceit"

2013-04-07T11:00:00.000-04:00

The New Adventures

By Peter Darvill-Evans
April 1993
Virgin Publishing

"Take Arcadia apart if you have to."

The middle of the twenty-fifth century. The Dalek war is drawing to an untidy close. Earth's Office of External Operations is trying to extend its influence over the corporations that have controlled human-occupied space since man first ventured to the stars.

Agent Isabelle Defries is leading one expedition. Among her barely-controllable squad is an explosives expert who calls herself Ace. Their destination: Arcadia.

A non-technological paradise? A living laboratory for a centuries-long experiment? Fuel for a super-being? Even when Ace and Benny discover the truth, the Doctor refuses to listen to them.

Nothing is what it seems to be.

At the time this book was published, Peter Darvill-Evans was pretty much in charge of the New Adventures. As I understand the history, he was the driving force behind the creation of the NAs in the first place, and he had spent the last two years shepherding them into existence. And by any measure, he was impressively successful. It's easy to forget, or just not to notice, how daring the NAs were. No one had ever done an ongoing series of original "Doctor Who" novels before, and these weren't just your typical TV tie-in merchandise. These books were intended to continue the development of the series in print. And they were successful enough to go from one-every-two-months to one-a-month.

In the afterword to this book, Darvill-Evans explains that he wanted to subject himself to the same strict rules he imposed on other writers, partly as a learning experience, to get a better sense of how those rules operated. He also wanted to tie together concepts from several previous books to create the baseline for a future history of Earth. And, of course, there was the small matter of reintroducing Ace. In addition to all of that, the book also has its own story to tell (which is why it is so obvious even by sight that "Deceit" is the longest NA yet).

The story is the weakest and least memorable aspect of the book, in my view. It has interesting elements here and there, but there's a lot of mess to get through along the way. It's extremely slow to develop, and looking back on it, not much really happens. The Doctor, Benny, and Ace all make their way by various routes, with various supporting characters in tow, to the confrontation. It's drearily linear, and it's lacking in suspense and excitement. It doesn't help matters that the villain's plan is shown to have been ill-conceived from the start.

So let's focus on New Ace. She's responsible for carrying a large chunk of the story, including pretty much all of the violent action stuff, and that seems to be her role now. She's been away from the TARDIS for three years now, and she's spent that time as a soldier in Spacefleet. One novel is not a lot to go on, but New Ace seems both shallower and narrower than before, which seems a real shame. On the other hand, it makes for a very new dynamic on board the TARDIS. Sadly, the regulars spend very little time together in this book, so it remains to be seen how that will play out.

What I find disappointing about the reintroduction of Ace is precisely that she spends so much time on her own, with her own supporting characters. That's fine, but I always felt that the best way to get a sense of how Ace has changed would be to examine how her relationships have changed, which is precisely what this book doesn't do. It also doesn't do much to address the circumstances surrounding Ace's departure in "Love and War". The result is that this looks like what it is: an awkward attempt to radically reinvent Ace into something better suited to the kinds of stories the NAs intended to explore. That's fine, but it needn't look as calculated as it is.

I don't have much to say about the themes of the book, none of which seemed particularly well-developed or integrated into the story. There's was also a great deal of sex in the book, and not healthy, happy, emotionally well-adjusted sex. Ace uses the promise of sex to scam her way into the story, and later is very nearly raped. One character spends most of the book subjecting another to a long line of unspecified sexual degradations, and the victim grows to enjoy her torture. It's very, very ugly stuff, and it doesn't really need to be here at all.

Constitutional Wankery

2013-03-28T10:49:00.001-04:00

In law school, my favorite subject was Constitutional Law. Not only was Con Law my favorite subject out of the core 1L curriculum, but it remained my favorite subject throughout. Partly this was because my Con Law professor was awesome, and partly because she seemed to be very impressed with me. But mostly it was because Con Law dealt with incredibly weighty and significant issues of national and political importance. And because the debates you have in a Con Law class often cut to the very core of our fundamental notions of how things ought to be, exposing the irreconcilable differences that drive basically every political issue there is.

This is going to sound odd, but I think what I liked about Con Law was basically the same thing I liked about geometry in high school and symbolic logic in college. There are rules and there are facts. You apply the rules to the facts, and there you go. Of course, because Con Law doesn't have the luxury of staying within the highly abstract worlds of Euclidian space and formal logic, in practice it's not nearly as mechanical as I've made it sound. For one thing, just about everything is a matter if debate. The Pythagorean Theorem applies to all right triangles. No one's going to come along and argue that it shouldn't apply to this particular right triangle because it's bigger than most, because it's made up of green lines rather than black lines, or because it's gay.

Still, the mechanistic form of the arguments was appealing to me. A federal law seems to discriminate against a particular class of people. Is it a protected class? If not, then it's okay as long as there is some rational basis for the law. If so, then the government needs to show that the law serves a compelling state interest and is as minimally discriminatory as possible.

In the years since law school, I've really soured on Con Law. A big part of this is because I've soured on the Constitution itself, but that's a topic for another day (in fact, this post is sort of laying the groundwork for subsequent posts I want to write about how the Constitution either causes or prevents us from solving a large portion of the political problems we face as a nation). But it's largely due to a growing frustration over the application of these mechanistic rules.

There is no better example of this than the debate over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA, aka "Obamacare"). Specifically, how much of that debate revolved around broccoli. The argument was that if the government can't mandate that everyone should buy broccoli, which it has no reason to do, then it also cannot mandate that everyone should buy health insurance, which is a crucial component of reforms designed to expand coverage to tens of millions of people who would not otherwise have it. I don't want to get too far into the policy nitty gritty, but the basic idea is that we need to get young, healthy people into the risk pool so that insurance companies can afford to cover older, sicker people.

Arguing about broccoli is a frankly stupid way to resolve such a crucially important issue as this. And the outcome of the case suggests to me that Chief Justice Roberts may have realized that. While he agreed with the conservative wing of the Court on pretty much everything, Roberts found a bizarre and implausible rationale to allow him to avoid invalidating the individual mandate.

And then there's the hypocrisy. Because even as these cases are being decided on absurdly irrelevant grounds, everyone treats the whole process with exaggerated reverence, as if this isn't a fundamentally bizarre method of resolving some of the most important questions we face as a nation. In his confirmation hearing, future Chief Justice Roberts talked about "calling balls and strikes". Not only is this a really bad analogy for what the Jusicial branch (especially the Supreme Court) actually does, but it was also a nakedly self-serving lie. Justices don't call balls and strikes. They manipulate the strike zone more or less at will to achieve the results they desire.

Most people will tell you that this is precisely what judges must never do, but I disagree. It's precisely what they should do, but they should be open about it, rather than devising elaborate legalistic justifications which just end up creating the bizarre mechanistic rules which will be used to evaluate the next important issue. Look at Bush v. Gore. Five Justices wanted George W. Bush to be president, and the legalistic rationale they came up with to support that conclusion was so bad that they had to explicitly say that it was never to be cited as precedent in any subsequent case.

Now the Court is considering same-sex marriage and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). In oral arguments in the latter case, Justice Kagan cited the House report, which explicitly stated that the purpose of that bill was to express moral disapproval of homosexuality. They attorney hired to defend the law said (paraphrasing) "If that's enough for you to strike down the law, you should strike down the law, but that shouldn't be enough." Really? Is there anything more relevant than that? Congress itself said that they passed this law because they hate gays, and they wanted the gays to know that. That shouldn't be enough to strike down the law? No, because there are all of these complicated, abstract, mechanistic rules that need to be carefully considered.

I'm confident that the portions of DOMA currently being challenged will be struck down. I'm confident that same-sex marriage will be legally recognized across the country, without exception, sooner or later. And these are important wins for gay rights, for civil rights, and for the vision of America as a land of opportunity for all people. But the bizarre and irrelevant arguments on which these decisions will turn should be seen as an insult. We should recognize same-sex marriage because it's the right thing to do, because it will make us a better country and a stronger people, and because anti-gay discrimination is shameful and can no longer be tolerated. Not because it just catches the inside corner of an arbitrary and ever-shifting strike zone.

What is Required for Moral Responsibility?

2013-03-25T11:25:00.001-04:00

Ever since I first encountered it, I've been fascinated by the philosophical issue of Free Will. My views on the subject have changed quite a bit over the years, but I've always been interested in it.

As a undergraduate philosophy major in the late 1990s, I once wrote a paper and delivered a lecture on the topic. Since then, neuroscience has taken some big leaps forward, and we know a lot more now than we did them about what's happening in our brains when we make decisions. And the more we learn about that process, the harder it is to sustain a belief in free will. But then discussions of free will inevitably descend into tedious semantic wrangling over what is meant by "free will". So I want to come at the problem from a different direction. What sort of free will do we need to have in order to make sense of common notions if moral responsibility?

What must be true in order for a person to deserve praise or blame for her choices? What does it take for a person to be responsible for his actions? Let's think of some cases where people aren't typically held responsible, and see where that takes us. We can start with obvious cases. If you've a gun to your head, you do what you're told, and you're not responsible for that. You're also not responsible for involuntary actions, or actions you were somehow powerless to prevent. Along the lines of the insanity defense, you're not responsible for actions taken when you're incapable of exercising reason or judgment. Just from these few simple examples, we're beginning to get a picture of what responsibility requires.

We generally consider people to be responsible for the conscious decisions they make without duress while in their right mind, and that seems like a pretty good rule of thumb. Certainly that's how legal responsibility tends to function. Moral responsibility isn't quite the same thing, though. I think moral responsibility requires more, and that's where our growing knowledge of the functions if the brain poses serious challenges.

At the level of the brain, choices are the end result of a chain of physical causes stretching back as far as you care to go, of which we are not consciously aware and over which we have no control. Not just out choices, but also our desires, inclinations, and moods. Suppose I offer you a choice between vanilla ice cream and chocolate ice cream. You prefer chocolate, so you choose chocolate. If you had preferred vanilla, you would have chosen vanilla. Can you be responsible for choosing the option you prefer if you're not responsible for preferring it?

Among contemporary philosophers, the battle over free will largely breaks down into compatibilists (who think that free will is compatible with determinism) versus incompatibilists (who think determinism rules out free will). Compatibilists often seek to revise our unsophisticated, "common sense" notion of free will into something that fits comfortably in a deterministic universe. But my question is always whether this revised version of free will is enough to rescue moral responsibility, to make sense of notions like praise and blame or pride and shame.

I plan to revisit the issue of free will quite a bit. Like I said, it fascinates me. I also happen to think it's important, but I'll make that case in a subsequent post.

The Best SecDef

2013-03-20T11:00:00.000-04:00

Cover by Adi Granov

I'm a member of Marvel Unlimited, which is a subscription service which allows me to read lots of Marvel comics online at no additional charge. The problem with comic books, it seems to me, is that they are obscenely expensive. Consider a six-issue story line, which seems to be a pretty common format these days. That's gonna cost you $12, and what are you getting for that money? Compared to pretty much any other format of fiction, comic books give you pretty much the least bang for your buck. A subscription service changes that analysis tremendously.

Anyway, lately I've been reading from a pretty broad rotation of Marvel titles (including just about the entire Ultimate universe), and moving chronologically forward little by little. I'm currently reading books from late 2003/early 2004. The story I read most recently was "The Best Defense" (The Invincible Iron Man 73-78, December 2003 to May 2004) written by John J. Miller. The story involves Tony Stark getting himself nominated to be Secretary of Defense, which means having to face hostile questioning from the US Senate while also dealing with a rogue Pentagon official making dangerously unauthorized use of Stark weapons technology. (It's worth noting that the Pentagon is a complete shambles at this point, as the previous Secretary of Defense, Dell Rusk, turned out to be the Red Skull in disguise.)

It's a pretty good story, all things considered. It's a bit predictable (the Senate rejects the Stark nomination, until Tony heroically averts a disaster in the final issue of the story-arc, causing the Senate to reconsider and unanimously confirm him), but I always appreciate superhero stories that involve more than just beating up bad guys, and this one certainly does. But there's one aspect of the story that bothers me greatly. The story uses the likenesses of Bush and Cheney for President and Vice-President. They even get lines and everything.

The story isn't overtly political. Stark refuses even to say whether he's a Republican. But thinking about this story in the context of what was going on at the time it was released, how could it not be political? In late 2003, early 2004, it was gradually becoming clear to everyone that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. President Bush was under pressure to fire Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who showed disastrously poor judgment over every aspect of the war.

"The Best Defense" doesn't get into any of that, of course, and I'm not suggesting that it should have. But reading it now, on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War, is disturbing in a way that the writer never could have anticipated. And there's something vaguely off-putting about depicting a fictional version of a real president. In this story, for example, Bush is not a feckless rube completely under the sway of Dick Cheney and his neoconservative cronies. While I have no reason to believe that anyone at Marvel was deliberately trying to prop up the president, that's what they're doing.

I understand the desire to refer to current events in stories. It helps ground the story in real life, which can be an important asset. But there's a downside to that as well. For one thing, those aspects will quickly make your story seem dated. For another thing, it means opening up your story to new and unintended interpretations driven by subsequent events. Neither of those problems are fatal, but I'm of the opinion that superhero comics should probably avoid incorporating real political figures into their stories.

War as Last Resort

2013-03-15T08:49:00.001-04:00

It seems that everyone agrees that war should be a last resort, to be pursued only when all peaceful options have been exhausted. At least, that's what everyone says. And it's easy to see why. It takes only the most superficial appreciation of the horrors of warfare to conclude that war is to be avoided whenever possible. But it also takes only a superficial knowledge of US Foreign Policy to realize that no one in a position of power actually believes this. Has any US war since World War II been a true "last resort"? Even after 9/11, was it absolutely necessary to launch a military invasion of Afghanistan? No. And the fact that the US is still occupying Afghanistan in what has become the longest war in American history strongly suggests that war was probably not the best option either.

The problem with the "last resort" formulation is that it's too vague. It doesn't seem vague on the surface. It seems abundantly clear: do not resort to war unless there is no other option. But it leaves out any weighing of policy goals. "No other option" to achieve what?

President Obama said in an interview which aired on Israeli television yesterday that Iran is one year away from developing a nuclear weapon. He apparently did not explain how he knows this, and as we commemorate the ten-year anniversary of one of the most disastrous of America's many unnecessary wars, it pays to be skeptical. But for the sake of argument, let's assume both that Obama has reliable intelligence supporting the claim, and that the claim is true (the failure to make this distinction lay at the heart of the US media's complicity in selling the Iraq War). Let's also assume, for the sake of argument, that we have good reason to believe that invading Iran is the only way to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. Would that satisfy the "last resort" rule?

First, notice how incredibly unrealistic these assumptions are. The nature of intelligence gathering is such that you can't ever really be sure about these things. In addition to the liars and scoundrels in the upper echelons of the Bush Administration, there were also lots of people who really believed that Iraq had WMDs and that the US had strong evidence of this, neither of which was true. There's always going to be a degree of uncertainty. But let's overlook that for now.

Second, notice the counterfactual at the heart of the analysis. How do you know that war is the only way to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons? You can try other means and fail, of course, and that's not nothing. But there's still some built-in uncertainty involved. Saying that there is no other way means that any other way you might try will fail, and that is inherently speculative. There's really no way to know when you've actually reached the point of "no other way". But again, let's overlook that for now.

Third, let's make explicit the unspoken assumption that invading Iran will in fact prevent Iran from developing nukes. No one ever seems to question this, which strikes me as highly problematic, but once again, let's just accept it.

Now, notice how thoroughly we have stacked the deck in favor of invasion. We have stipulated that Iran is one year away from developing nukes, that invading Iran is the only way to prevent this, and that invading Iran actually will prevent this. Given these assumptions, I think we've built a far stronger case for war than any case which could conceivably be built by the Obama Administration or anyone else. Does this case satisfy the "last resort" test?

No. Because acquiescence is also an option. It's not a very attractive option, I grant you. As a matter of policy, the United States has very good reasons for wanting to keep Iran nuke-free. But then war with Iran is also not a very attractive option. Iran is not Iraq or Afghanistan. It would not be an "easy" war (and yes, those two wars, which together have taken two decades to wage, have cost hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, one of which continues to this day and is not going at all well, were "easy").

That's the piece that is always left out of the "last resort" analysis. Some things just aren't worth going to war over. Even some very serious things aren't worth going to war over, because war is awful! I would prefer Iran to have a nuclear weapon than for the United States to invade Iran. That's my own personal view, and there's loads of room for reasonable disagreement, but I think that's the conversation we need to have. We need to recognize that war with Iran will carry a tremendous cost, and as we've seen from Iraq and Afghanistan, a cost that is very difficult to predict in advance. We've also learned (or should have learned) that wars are far easier to begin than they are to end.

I don't know where Obama is on the issue of Iran. I believe that he and his administration would prefer to avoid war, but I don't know if they're willing to accept a nuclear Iran in order to do that. If I was president, I wouldn't say out loud that I'm not willing to go to war over this. I would say exactly what Obama is saying: all options are on the table. The trouble is, there are political pressures involved, and the US electorate really loves war (as long as other people, and other people's kids, are the ones fighting it). As soon as it appears that there is no other way to prevent Iran from developing nukes, the political pressure will increase enormously.

Although I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, I did not vote for him in 2012. I had many, many reasons for making that decision, but one of the bigger ones is that I don't trust Obama to keep us out of Iran. When he voted against the Iraq War in 2002 as an Illinois state legislator, Obama said that he is not anti-war, but anti-dumb-wars. And Iraq certainly was a dumb war. But looking back over the history of American wars since World War II, it's hard to miss how many of them have come to be seen as either utter disasters or just not worth the costs involved. I think we need a hell of a lot more anti-war voices in government, because we've got a clear and unambiguous record of being insufficiently reluctant to start wars.

Depression

2013-03-12T18:31:00.001-04:00

I don't want to get too personal here. I may be narcissistic enough to suppose that people might be interested in my opinions, but even I don't expect anyone to be interested in me. I think my opinions are the most interesting thing about me. Otherwise, I'm quite dull.

I suffer from depression. I dislike this way of putting it, because "suffer from" seems to be a phrase that has somehow been drained of any meaning it might otherwise have. "I suffer from depression" is really just a way of saying "I have depression, which is an ongoing medical condition, as opposed to just the mood I happen to be in right now because of something that happened recently which made me sad." That's an important distinction to make, and the "suffer from" construction makes it economically. It just seems forced and unnatural to me.

Depression is often a difficult thing for people to understand if they don't have first-hand experience of it. This isn't a huge problem as long as people realize that they don't understand. I don't understand alcoholism. I've never in my life felt compelled to have a drink, so I really can't imagine what that's like. But I understand addiction more generally, so I don't assume that refraining from drinking is as easy for everyone as it for me. People who don't understand depression and who also don't realize that they don't understand often assume that coping with a "bad mood" should be as easy for everyone as it is for them. It's not.

For one thing, when people who don't have depression feel depressed, there's often an identifiable cause. That doesn't necessarily make the depression any easier to deal with in the moment, but it can often lead to productive ways of responding to the feeling by addressing the cause. When there's no identifiable cause, or when the emotional reaction is disproportionate to the trigger which produced it, that's not always very helpful.

What I find so devastating about depression is the enormous impact it has on a person's lived experience. Even those of us who have twigged that depression is a medical problem consider it to be a relatively minor one, and in most cases I think that's fair. However, our conscious moment-to-moment experience of our lives is in a very real sense all we have, and for a person with depression, it's degraded. Most medical conditions are bad to the extent that they impair us in some way, either by cutting our lives short or by otherwise undermining our ability to do the things we enjoy. Depression, on the other hand, has a direct impact on our conscious experiences. There's no such thing as asymptomatic depression.

And then, of course, there's suicide. Because suicide is the result of a person's conscious decision to end his life, we tend to think of it differently from deaths caused by other ailments. People with cancer die of cancer. People with depression kill themselves. There is an undeniable intuitive appeal to this distinction, but I think it's an illusion, and at the very least an unhelpful one. Whether a disease causes death by triggering organ failure or by inducing someone to swallow a bottle of sleeping pills, the result is pretty much the same.

I don't mean for this blog to get too personal, but I do suffer from depression. When I feel depressed, I don't want to do anything. Sometimes I can distract myself with something I enjoy, but depression for me often means that I don't enjoy the things I normally enjoy. As an experiment, I'm going to try to write about depression when I'm feeling depressed. I don't have any particular goal in mind. I just thought it might be a useful thing for me to do.

Looking Back in Anger: Introduction

2013-03-07T08:00:00.000-05:00

I expect I'll be devoting several posts in the coming weeks to the Iraq War, the tenth anniversary of which is approaching later this month. MSNBC recently aired (and will soon rerun) an hour-long documentary about the efforts of the Bush Administration to drum up public support for the invasion. The documentary was based on "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War" by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, which I've just finished reading. It's an invaluable resource for anyone who wants a comprehensive, detailed understanding of the complicated story of how so many people could have fucked up so badly.

Unfortunately, I don't feel that we've really learned any of the lessons of the Iraq War. The same people who convinced us to invade Iraq are now trying to convince us to invade Iran, and they don't seem to have lost any of the undeserved credibility they were afforded before. More worryingly, none of the people who demonstrated the wisdom, foresight, and courage required to oppose the Iraq War from the outset have gained any credibility. Even today, the range of acceptable views on foreign policy runs from John Kerry and Chuck Hagel on the left (people who were initially wrong about Iraq, but eventually realized they had been wrong) and John McCain on the right (who still thinks that Iraq, and every other real or hypothetical war he's ever imagined, was a really good idea). If you were right about Iraq from the beginning, you're just as much of a crackpot as you were in 2003.

One of the most depressing things about "Hubris" is the total lack of accountability. The power to go to war is the most awesome power the government has, and it must always be exercised with maximum care, with the utmost caution, and only with the greatest reluctance. But the political reality is that it will always be safer, easier, and far more comfortable to support war than to oppose it. This means that the crucial political checks that should constrain the use of military power in a democracy failed to function. Part of this was because the Bush Administration deliberately made it politically awkward to oppose the war by scheduling a key Congressional vote just weeks before the 2002 midterm elections, but mostly it's because Americans really like war.

Lately, I tend to see the problem as a failure of our political systems. We all know that there are circumstances which make war justified (or perhaps just unavoidable) and circumstances where war is not justified, but our political systems cannot reliably tell these circumstances apart. While it is certainly helpful that we now have a thoughtful, intelligent, and rational president, that may not be enough, and it won't be the case forever. We need to rethink the process by which the decision to invade another country is made.

Just Stop Discriminating

2013-03-05T11:44:00.001-05:00

The US Supreme Court drives me nuts. It has a crucially important role to play in our society, but it goes about its business in a manner that strikes me as absurdly, even perversely disconnected from reality. And the case challenging the constitutionality of Sec. 5 of the Voting Rights Act is another fine example of what I mean.

One thing that the Voting Rights Act does is it establishes a set of "covered jurisdictions", which are states or parts of states with a demonstrated record of recent racial discrimination in the area of voting. If any of these covered jurisdictions want to change their elections laws, rules, policies, or procedures, they have to run their proposed changes by the Department of Justice to make sure that the changes will not have a discriminatory impact. If the changes will have a discriminatory impact, intentional or otherwise, they're blocked before they even take effect. This is called pre-clearance. Outside the covered district, there is no pre-clearance requirement.

Based on media reports, oral arguments before the Justices focused on a lot of trivial issues. This is often the case. Justices wanted to know if the South was more racist than other regions of the country, for example. I don't know what it means for a political/geographic region to be "racist". If I answer the question "yes", what am I really saying? Am I saying that more people are racists in the South, or that they're more racist? Am I saying that everyone in the South is racist, and everyone outside the South is not? Does any of that stuff even matter?

What I'll say instead is that, according to the factual record compiled by the United States Congress in 2006, when the Voting Rights Act was renewed and extended for 25 years following 21 hearings over 10 months which produced 15,000 pages of evidence, the covered jurisdictions represent 25% of the total US population, but account for 80% of cases of proven discrimination in election law. Does that make the South (where most, but not all, of the covered jurisdictions can be found) more racist? I don't know. Does it even matter? The important thing is that the VRA is designed to target discrimination where it happens, and it happens most in the covered jurisdictions.

But forget about the legal arguments for a minute. Never mind the precedents, or the historical record, or the text of the 14th Amendment, or the original intent of the 14th Amendment. Forget all that nonsense and just decide what you think we should do.

It's important for you to know that a county or state can get itself removed from the list of covered jurisdictions by not trying to discriminate against minorities for ten years. If Shelby County, Alabama wants to get out from under the thumb of the DoJ, all it has to do is stop discriminating. Lots of jurisdictions have gotten themselves excused for good behavior, so to speak. If there was no racial discrimination in voting anywhere in the country for a span of ten years, then Sec. 5 would be effectively repealed. There would be no more covered jurisdictions.

The fact that Shelby County, Alabama can't get itself out of the covered jurisdictions (because it keeps trying to pass discriminatory voting changes) should be all the reason anyone needs to continue to support the law.

Seder vs. Alter

2013-03-04T20:30:00.000-05:00

My favorite political podcast is The Majority Report with Sam Seder. It's perfect for people who are interested in politics, but primarily motivated by public policy. Sam is a comedian, so he does spend a fair amount of time making fun of Republicans. That would be enough to make the podcast an enjoyable one for me. I like Sam, and I like making fun of Republicans, and I really like it when people who are funnier or better informed than I am make fun of Republicans. Bill Maher and W. Kamau Bell are funnier than I am. Sam is funnier and better informed.

On today's program, Sam interviewed Jonathan Alter of Bloomberg about a column Alter published last Thursday, February 28, called "Why Democrats Must Get Smart on Entitlements". Alter is a self-described liberal Democrat, so you might think that a liberal podcast would be welcome territory for him. Not in this instance. Alter has been irritating other self-described liberal Democrats quite a bit recently. Both last Thursday's column and today's interview with Sam (which I've embedded as a series of YouTube videos) demonstrate why.

The first weakness of the column is that Alter neglects to explain why Democrats must get smart on entitlements. For a column called "Why Democrats Must Get Smart on Entitlements", it's a doozy of a weakness. Alter gestures vaguely in the direction of an explanation when he does a quick run-down of a few projected economic statistics. To my way of thinking, this should be the meat of the column, but it's barely there. He trots out a couple of scary-sounding factoids divorced from any sort of context which might make sense of them. But he doesn't identify the assumptions that these projections are based on, and he doesn't talk much about other means of averting those terrible consequences. And even that assumes that those terrible consequences really will happen and that they really will be terrible.

He doesn't both much with actual math (or at least, he doesn't show his work), but his argument basically consists of projecting Social Security and Medicare costs into the future, taking into account increasing healthcare costs and the fact that the elderly population in this country is going to skyrocket with the Baby Boomers. He's not wrong about that. But he assumes that the total size of the budgetary pie will remain roughly the same, so if we're spending more on Social Security and Medicare, we must therefore be spending less on something else. And he's worried about that something else, and he's not wrong about that either. But he does pretty much ignore the possibility that taxes will be increased.

Arguably, it's safe to assume that taxes won't be increased because the Republican Party is currently refusing to even go after greater revenue by other means. But that presumably can't last forever. Also, Alter overlooks the fact that the Affordable Care Act was designed to slow the rate of increase in healthcare costs, and early indications suggest that it may be working to some extent. A fundamental problem with trying to anticipate future economic conditions is that the factors which will determine those future conditions have themselves yet to be determined. For example, what will the US Federal Budget deficit be in Fiscal Year 2030? We could look up official government projections, but then we'd have to see what assumption were baked into those projections, and we'd have to ask ourselves if those assumptions were optimistic, pessimistic, or realistic. The real answer to the question is that the US federal budget deficit in Fiscal Year 2030 will be total revenue minus total expenditures, and both of those variables depend upon everything Congress does between now and then. So we really just don't know. If we have 15 years of dynamite economic growth, tax revenue in 2030 will be a lot higher than if we have feeble growth and another two or three recessions over that period. And if Obamacare is particularly successful in slowing the growth of healthcare costs, the burden of the Baby Boomer generation may be lighter than we think.

So that's Strike One, as Alter simply fails to make his case. Strike Two comes when Alter suggests how we should approach entitlement reform. He says that we need to take a look at how programs like Social Security and Medicare were designed to operate. This sounds sensible, but it isn't. Those programs were designed decades ago to address situations which were current at the time. That doesn't mean the programs are obsolete now, but it does mean that we should be more interested in what we need those programs to achieve today, rather than what President Roosevelt or President Johnson needed those programs to achieve at the time. When Social Security was introduced, it was supposed to be one leg of a "three-legged stool" of retirement security, along with private pensions and personal savings. These days, not a lot of people have private pensions or much in the way of personal savings. A program adequate to meet the retirement security needs of 1933 won't be adequate to the needs of 2013, even if we do adjust for inflation and population growth. Social Security has a bigger and more important role to play today than it did 80 years ago. We should not allow ourselves to be guided by, much less constrained by, this rather strange sort of "policy originalism".

Strike Three is perhaps not really a strike at all. It may be more of a foul ball, but that totally messes up the metaphor. Alter takes issue with a common liberal argument against means testing, but he once again fails to make a very strong case. The argument that he takes issue with is that we shouldn't means test these earned benefits, because then they'll only get paid out to low-income people. When that happens, the high-income people who run this country will start to view them as forms of welfare, and they'll start to reduce benefits and attach onerous conditions, just like they did to actual welfare under President Clinton. Alter simply doesn't think this prediction is credible, and he could be right. It's hard to be very confident, though. After all, even before we've done much means testing, the high-income people who run this country have already decided that we need to cut back on Social Security and Medicare benefits. Alter's assertion is that even if A happens (means testing), it won't lead to B (benefit cuts), even though the reality is that we're already pursuing B despite the fact that A hasn't happened yet.

In his conversation with Sam, Alter wasn't able to do much to strengthen his argument. Several times he pooh-poohed an alternative offered by Sam as politically impossible, without ever acknowledging that his own recommendations are also politically impossible in an atmosphere where Republicans steadfastly refuse to accept any deal. He also seems to assume that if a good policy fix is unavailable, a bad policy fix must be sought instead. That's not necessarily true. Any policy fix will have consequences, and it's entirely possible that the consequences of reforming entitlements the way Alter wants could be worse than the consequences of doing nothing at all.

Ultimately, the debate comes down to how much of a long-term budget problem you think we have. The conventional wisdom is that were cruising blithely toward a looming catastrophe, and if we don't do something fairly drastic fairly soon, we're going to be in big trouble. That is the case with climate change, but it's not the case with budget. The mainstream view among economists is that we do have a long-term budget problem, and the long-term health of Social Security and Medicare are threatened by that problem, but it's not entirely clear how serious that problem is going to be, and in any case, there's no particularly need to address is right now. But there's also a view that says we don't even have a long-term budget problem, which gives added weight to the wait-and-see approach. Alter doesn't seem to be aware, or at the very least fails to acknowledge, that the future calamity he's earnestly trying to solve many never happen at all.

Update: This article has been edited to correct one teeny tiny inconsequential little oversight. Ok, so I got confused between Jonathan Alter and Jonathan Chait. It was just a typo. Just an honest spelling error. Every single time.

The Necessity of Rules

2013-03-04T19:00:00.000-05:00

I've been an enormous fan of "Up w/ Chris Hayes" since it premiered in September, 2011. It's simply the best political talk show I've ever seen. It's not one of those "paid flacks shouting at each other" shows. Chris Hayes assembles a panel full of knowledgeable, insightful people, and they proceed to discuss issues more deeply and more thoroughly than anywhere else on television. I can't recommend this show highly enough, and you can watch it online at your convenience. If you have any interest in politics or public policy, you won't regret it.

This weekend, Hayes spent some time on the Voting Rights Act, which is currently being challenged before the US Supreme Court. In the midst of a long and fascinating conversation which approached the issue from several different perspectives, Hayes made one point in particular that struck me. He challenged the assumption that the goal of any civil rights legislation is to make itself obsolete. He challenged the assumption that the day will come when racism has been eliminated and we will no longer need laws protecting minority interests. This assumption is not often stated, and it's even more rarely challenged. And it needs to be challenged. There is no better illustration of this than the fact that Shelby County, Alabama argued before the Court last week that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is no longer needed. (I'll have more to say about the legal issues in a subsequent post.)

This all reminds of a brief exchange in a "Doctor Who" episode from the sixth series. In "A Good Man Goes to War", the Doctor challenges Madame Kovarian's characterization of him as a good man. He says "Good men don't need rules. Today is not the day to find out why I have so many." I've always hated that line. It's faux-macho, it's clunky, and it's totally wrong. It suggests that good people don't need rules because they're naturally good. They'll be good with or without rules. It's this same intuition that tells people civil rights legislation is just a temporary corrective that won't be needed forever.

These are two very different examples of the same erroneous assumption. The assumption is that being good is somehow a state of being, when it is actually more like a way of doing things. A good person does need rules, but more in the sense of heuristics than a set of proscriptive admonitions. We need heuristics which allow us to anticipate or evade mistakes which we know we're likely to make. Look at criminal law, for example. In the United States, we have a heuristic that says you can't be incarcerated for a crime unless you're found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The reason that heuristic is important is that it's all too easy to imagine a situation where "everyone just knows" that the defendant is guilty, but "everyone" happens to be mistaken.

There will never be a point where we outgrow concepts like the presumption of innocence and the burden of proof. We will never become so morally enlightened that such concepts can be dispensed with. The measure of whether a verdict is good is whether those heuristics were adhered to. This is important: the test isn't whether the guilty are convicted and the innocent acquitted (although that is what we hope will happen most of the time). If the heuristics were properly applied, then in a certain sense, whatever result you get is a good result. We will always need rules like those. Similarly, we will always need rules against voting discrimination. There will never come a time when it ceases to be a good idea to make sure election rules don't racially discriminate. Even if our society one day becomes so enlightened that racism ceases to exist, even that would only protect us from intentional discrimination. But for all practical purposes, unintentional discrimination is just as bad. We'll always want to be on the lookout for that.

Just as the rules of evidence are constitutive of a good verdict, and therefore a good criminal justice system, so the standard rules governing human interactions are constitutive of personal morality, and therefore good people. Let's take a closer look at the Doctor's situation. The Doctor is angry that Kovarian has targeted his friends to get to him. Kovarian says she's not concerned about his anger, because he's a good man, and good men have rules. She means that he won't kill her for revenge, despite being sufficiently angry to do so. Despite the Doctor's denial, Kovarian is exactly right. The Doctor has a rule against killing, generally. Because he has a rule against killing, he won't kill Kovarian even when angry and tempted. And because he won't kill Kovarian even when angry and tempted, he is a good man. His goodness comes from the fact that he has these rules, this way of doing things which says that in moments of high emotion when you're least inclined to act with restraint are the moments when it's most important that you do act with restraint. To bring another TV show into the discussion, this is also the answer to President Bartlet's question "What is the virtue of a proportional response?" The doctrine of proportional response is a heuristic. Adhering to that heuristic is how you know that you haven't gone too far.

"The Pit"

2013-03-03T11:00:00.000-05:00

The New Adventures
By Neil Penswick
March 1993
Virgin Publishing

For two weeks now it has been the same message again and again, and it’s getting stronger; death and destruction, the end of all things, ARMAGEDDON.

In an attempt to lift the Doctor out of his irritable and erratic mood, Bernice suggests he investigates the mystery of the Seven Planets – an entire planetary system that disappeared without trace several decades before Bernice was born.

One of the Seven Planets is a nameless giant, quarantined against all intruders. But when the TARDIS materializes, it becomes clear that the planet has other visitors: a hit-squad of killer androids; a trespassing scientist and his wife; and two shape-changing criminals with their team of slaves.

As riot and anarchy spread on the system’s colonised worlds, the Doctor is flung into another universe while Bernice closes in on the horror that is about to be unleashed – a horror that comes from a terrible secret in the Time Lords’ past.

This novel long had the reputation of being the worst "Doctor Who" novel ever. Of course, when this book was published, there were only eleven other "Doctor Who" novels (give or take). One of them had to be that worst, right? Now, there are hundreds of "Doctor Who" novels, and predictably, there is now a great deal of competition for that particularly dubious "honor". This book is still frequently cited as a contender, however.

My own views of the novel have developed considerably over the last twenty years. I don't mind telling you that much of the book seems to be over my head. On my latest reading, I've managed to catch quite a few references which I missed as a younger reader. Thanks in large part to Wikipedia, I now know that William Ashbless is a fictional 19-century poet. In the novel, a book of his poems is a prominent MacGuffin which turns out not to be a book of poetry after all. That's a not-real book of the poems of a not-real poet. A real poet, William Blake, is a character in the novel. I can't pretend to to have derived any special insights from having noticed this, but there's clearly a lot more going on with this book thematically than I've ever noticed before.

The involvement of Blake, which otherwise seems entirely arbitrary, is also in keeping with the heavily religious themes of the story. The story unfolds mostly in the seven planets of the Althosian system, a former Earth-colony which achieved independence some time ago and has been slowly falling apart ever since. The people there follow a religion quite clearly evolved from the Judeo-Christian tradition. They believe that the physical world is a kind of battlefield between the Prime Mover and the Form Manipulator. There's also an ancient cult working to open the way for a Lovecraftian horror which will devour the universe.

A lot of it sounds like fairly typical stuff for "Doctor Who". The ancient cult and the Lovecraftian horror fit the bill, certainly. There's also a series of grisly I solved murders, a scientist who makes an unbelievable discovery which costs him his life, and a team of android killers on the trail of a pair of shape-changing aliens who have stolen a devastatingly powerful nuclear device. With all of these elements, you might wonder where the Doctor and Benny fit in. That's the problem. They really don't need to be here at all. This story is about General Kopyion's ancient battle against creatures from another universe. The Doctor just happens to be present. He really doesn't play any kind of decisive role in the events of the book at all.

As a matter of fact, that's pretty much the point. Kopyion is a ruthless anti-hero willing to do anything to prevent the Yssgaroth (hideous monsters) from returning. Not only is he behind the murders, but he seems to be orchestrating most of the novel in one way or another. The Doctor's role is to figure out what's going on just in time to not do anything about it. The end result is that the universe is presumably saved, but only thanks to the destruction of the entire system, and the loss of billions of innocent lives. Not a good day for the Doctor.

The first website I ever operated (which would have been a blog if there had been blogs back then) was dedicated to reviews of these "Doctor Who" novels. My gimmick was to solicit comments from any authors with publicly available e-mail addresses. One of those was Neil Penswick, who very kindly provided feedback to my "review" of this novel. I'm embarrassed to think of this today, because my review was a real hatchet-job, and it must have been glaringly obvious to Penswick (though it wasn't obvious to me) that I didn't understand the book at all. I still don't, but at least I realize that now.

Introduction

2013-03-01T19:44:00.000-05:00

"Welcome aboard! I'm the Doctor..., or will be, if this regeneration works out."

It's odd, I admit, to publish an introductory post on a blog that's approaching its (holy fuck) fifth anniversary. Most of my long-time readers have probably gleaned a lot about me over the years. I often tried to use posts which were ostensibly about an episode of a TV show as a jumping off point for other topics, and those other topics are among the things I want to spend more time on going forward.

As the quote above indicates, I'm viewing this as a kind of regeneration for the blog. And, like the Doctor's fourth regeneration, this is gonna be less like an event and more like a process. This isn't something that has happened or will happen. It is happening, and the ultimate result is not yet entirely clear.

The previous post, "Republican Apologetics", is offered as an example of where I see things heading, but no single post can be representative of eclecticism, and eclecticism is a big part of what I'm shooting for. US politics is just one topic I intend to cover, and that one post isn't even representative of that. In addition to longer essays like that, I expect I'll have lots of shorter posts covering some of the day-to-day political controversies. I love staking out positions on issues of public concern. It's like a hobby.

It shouldn't surprise anyone to learn that I'm coming very much from the left in my approach to politics, but I'm no partisan. Lately, I've been a harsh critic of President Obama, whom I did not vote for last year. But when I attack Obama, I attack him from the left, so you're not going to see any Birtherism or racial resentment on this blog. You will see a lot of angry denunciations of national security policy, among other things.

You're also going to see a lot of support for progressive economic policies. I'm not an economist, but I have strong opinions. For one thing, I think that the economic debates taking place between the White House and Congressional Republicans are almost totally divorced from the reality of the economic situation we're facing. Economic policy is generally made for the benefit of the wealthy, because the wealthy have outsized political influence. And the wealthy are worried about deficits, not jobs, so Washington is worried about deficits, not jobs. This is a catastrophic failure of leadership, and it isn't entirely the fault of the Republicans.

Speaking of Republicans... despite the previous post, there probably won't be as much Republican bashing on this blog as people who know me might expect. I don't really see a lot of point in it. The Republicans in Washington are just ridiculous, and I'm sure no one needs me to point that out. One day, the Republican Party will either get its act together or cease to exist. When this country once again has a Conservative party worth taking seriously, I will take it seriously, but there's no evidence of that happening any time soon.

I'm also very much interested in philosophy, especially moral and political philosophy. Not only do I find philosophy to be very interesting, but I also think it's important. I think that the things we believe about the world, and the things that we believe about ourselves, really matter. I think that even abstract, complex ideas like morality connect in a fundamental way to facts about the world. I think issues like whether or not there is a god, whether people have immortal souls, the nature of consciousness, and especially the issue of free will, have practical consequences for us individually and as a society, and I'm interested in exploring these connections.

Related to that, I'm very interested in science, because our beliefs about how the world is are fundamental to and inseparable from our beliefs and assumptions about pretty much any issue you care to name, and science is by far the most reliable method we have for learning about how the world is. I tend to construe "science" very broadly to include any area of knowledge that is based on empiricism and logical reasoning. That includes social sciences and even some philosophy. It's not just test tubes and white lab coats. Economics is a science. Unfortunately, it's also a complete shambles.

Finally, I expect the blog will be more personal than it was before, and this post is an example of what I mean. I don't mean that I'm going to describe the intimate details of my private life. That would bore even me, and I'm an unbearable narcissist. No, I mean that it will be personal in the sense that it will relate primarily to me. It will be a record of the kinds of things I spend time thinking about, and as a result, it will inevitably be even more reflective of my personality than it was before. But don't be alarmed... I have very little personality.

Over the weekend, I plan to experiment with the layout and the visual style of the blog as part of the regeneration process. I have no idea how that will turn out. "That's the trouble with regeneration. You never know what you're going to get."

Republican Apologetics

2013-03-01T06:00:00.000-05:00

I've been an atheist since I was about 14-years-old, which is well over half my life. But it was only within the last few years that I discovered the wealth of atheist resources on the Internet. It all started with Richard Dawkins.

At first I was only dimly aware of Dawkins. I was aware of books like "The Selfish Gene" and "The Blind Watchmaker", but I didn't know what they were about or why they were significant. I also knew that Dawkins was married to Lalla Ward, who played the second Romana on "Doctor Who" and was previously married to Tom Baker. But then I started seeing threads popping up on Outpost Gallifrey (OG), the now defunct "Doctor Who" web forum where I used to hang out. I then discovered that Dawkins was a hugely divisive and controversial figure, but I also noticed that almost none of his critics on OG had a valid point. I can't tell you how many times this happened, but again and again I would wander into a Dawkins-bashing thread, find out what the inciting event was, and invariably conclude that Dawkins was being egregiously misrepresented by his critics. Eventually it occurred to me that this probably meant he had something worthwhile to say, so I began looking him up on YouTube and watching lectures, speeches, documentaries, and debates in which he featured.

It was the debates which I found particularly interesting, and it was through these debates that I became acquainted with Christian Apologetics for the first time. The quickest way to grasp the concept of Christian Apologetics is to YouTube any debate between any atheist and William Lane Craig. The goal of Christian Apologetics is to concoct rational arguments in support of the tenets of Christianity and to debunk rational arguments against Christianity. And Craig is a master at it. But I quickly realized that there is a disingenuousness at the heart of what he was doing. No one (or practically no one) actually believes in the divinity of Christ on the basis of rational arguments or evidence-based reasoning. This is no accident. The goal isn't really to rationally convince people that Christianity is true. The goal is to convince people that Christianity is intellectually respectable. To be even more cynical about it, the goal is to convince people that reason and evidence can't decide the matter, and that there are good arguments on both sides.

Republican Apologetics is similar. Like Christian Apologetics, it starts with its conclusion and then employs logic, evidence, and reasoning cynically and selectively to convince people that this conclusion is correct. It doesn't follow where the evidence leads, but emphasizes and de-emphasizes evidence strategically to get where it wants to go.

An especially clear example is the sub-category of Libertarian Apologetics. Libertarians often argue that the free market, without interference from government regulations, will achieve liberal policy goals better than the mixed economy approach favored by liberals. But practically no one is a Libertarian because they want to achieve liberal policy goals and they genuinely believe laissez-faire economics will do this. They do genuinely believe that laissez-faire economics will do this, but that's not why they support it.

Libertarianism comes down to a political theory of what the government may and may not legitimately do. It is not primarily concerned with the consequences of this theory. Consider, for example, the Civil Rights Act. Libertarians generally think that the government has no business outlawing private racial discrimination. If a restaurant owner wants to ban blacks, he's a racist asshole, but he has a right to be a racist asshole, and the competitive pressures of the free market will punish him in due course, which will deter others from following his example. That sounds good. It even sounds plausible if you've never gotten beyond Econ 101. But suppose the competitive pressures of the free market don't punish him? Then what? In my experience, Libertarians will either squirm and dodge at this point, or they will fall back on their absolutist position: freedom trumps. It is simply wrong for government to interfere in private commercial transactions, regardless of what consequences this may have.

The thing about reason and empiricism and critical thinking is that it isn't simply meant to persuade others. It's not just a tool for constructing good arguments and identifying bad ones, although that's extremely important too. The most important thing is that our beliefs should be determined by reason and evidence, and we should hold them with a level of conviction proportionate to the strength of that evidence.

This may look like a lot of intellectual masturbation in service to a fairly obvious point, and perhaps it is. But examples of people missing this point are all around us, and the consequences can be severe. President George W. Bush started an unnecessary and disastrous war in Iraq because his administration misused evidence to support a pre-ordained conclusion. Senate Republicans recently tried to suppress a study that found no relationship between high-end income tax rates and economic growth. It doesn't matter what the data says about climate change if you're already convinced it's a hoax. This stuff really matters.

One final example: the gun debate. To be fair, there's apologetics and shoddy reasoning on both sides of this debate. To be even more fair, that is often the case. Nevertheless, there's every reason in the world to think that simple measures like strengthening background checks, limiting magazine size, and yes, banning certain categories of weapons, will reduce gun violence. No one claims that gun violence will be eliminated, but then, laws against murder haven't eliminated murder either, so I think that sets rather too high a standard. Opponents of gun regulation (I think this is a better construction than "gun enthusiasts" or "2nd Amendment supporters", since many gun enthusiasts and 2nd Amendment supporters also support gun regulation) have arguments at the ready to push back against an assault weapons ban. The term "assault weapon" is vague. The law makes arbitrary distinctions between weapons that are practically identical. People will just use other weapons, so what's the difference? None of these are good arguments because they don't lead to the conclusion that the assault weapons ban would be ineffective at reducing deaths due to gun violence.

Instead, they just muddy the waters. They're a smokescreen, convenient for hijacking any discussion of gun policy and steering it into a useless rhetorical cul-de-sac. As soon as you refute one argument, another one pops up to take its place, and before you know it, you're just going around and around in circles. The thing to notice is that these aren't evidence-based arguments reflective of a genuine desire to find the most effective means of reducing gun violence, which is the argument we should be having. They're just efforts to move the discussion onto anything else but guns.

Update

2013-02-28T20:51:00.000-05:00

I haven't really done much of anything in terms of thinking about this blog, much less writing it, since my hiatus began. I've been busy, yeah, but for the most part, I've been enjoying doing other things. And thinking about other things. I have a lot of interests that don't relate specifically to TV shows and movies.

I've talked about this before, but I still want to start incorporating a broader range of topics. I watch news shows, listen to podcasts, and read websites that often introduce me to new ideas or prompt me to think about something in a new way. Usually when this happens, I'll send an email about it to my friends, talk about it with co-workers, or share it on Facebook. Lately I feel like I need more of an outlet, and hey look I've got this blog!

So where does that leave the TV shows and movies? Well, that's a toughie. I'm just not sure yet. TV shows and movies are definitely one of the things that I enjoy talking about with people, so they're not going away. But they will cease to be the main focus, and I may have to rethink the episode-a-day format. Instead, I'm expecting this blog to feature "essays" on various topics from time to time. Topics like politics, philosophy, atheism, science, and whatever catches my fancy. I'll be posting one later today. I also expect there will be lots of links to things I hope people will find interesting, with some commentary attached. These could be links to other blogs or websites that I read, an interesting TED Talk I just watched, or maybe some quick and dirty book recommendations. I don't all. It's all a work in progress.

I hope long time readers will continue to find this blog interesting. If anyone has any ideas and suggestions, let me know. I'm pretty much making things up as I go along at this point, and it never hurts to entertain other people's ideas.

Lolita (1962)

2013-02-10T11:00:00.000-05:00

James Mason, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers
And Introducing Sue Lyon
Screenplay by Vladimir Nabokov Based on His Novel
Produced by James B. Harris
Directed by Stanley Kubrick

I consider myself fortunate to have read Vladimir Nabokov's novel before seeing this film. I can't imagine what people who haven't read the book make of this. I can't imagine what I would have made of it, anyway. In some ways, I think the film relies on the viewer having some prior knowledge of the source material. Based on the trailer included on the DVD (with the tag line, "How did they make a movie of Lolita?), the notoriety of the novel was the major selling point. This is important for a number of reasons, but most of all because of the rather severe censorship which seriously constrained what could be depicted in the film.

But before I get into that, I want to clear up a common misconception about the novel. "Lolita" is not an erotic novel. It's a novel about the vile sexual obsessions of a tragically deluded man. This description reflects two important points. First, the story is about Humbert, and not about the young Dolores Haze with whom Humbert becomes obsessed. Second, the story pushes us into a complex and nuanced view of Humbert by making him simultaneously sympathetic and irredeemable. No effort is made to excuse Humbert's inexcusable behavior, but as the point-of-view character, it's difficult not to develop certain sympathies for his plight, particularly when we understand just how self-deluded he really is.

As with all of Kubrick's film adaptations, the great director puts his own stamp on the material. Some of the changes were necessitated by the change in format. The novel takes the form of a sort of memoir (or confession) written by Humbert. This means that our view of the girl he calls "Lolita" is at all times mediated for us through Humbert's unreliable perspective. The film can't do that. But the changes go beyond that. The character of Clare Quilty is expanded significantly from the role he plays in the novel, and expanded in such a way as to make use of Peter Sellers's particular talents. Unlike in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, Sellers is not literally playing multiple characters. But since Quilty is literally playing multiple characters, it largely amounts to the same thing.

As is often the case for Kubrick, he gives us a situation and doesn't give any hint of how we're supposed to feel about it. It is what it is, and we can make our own judgments. Given the subject matter, it's very important that we do. As with Alex from A Clockwork Orange, the "hero" of this story is a moral monster, but he's similarly the victim of an even worse monster, and benefits enormously from the comparison. That makes it incumbent upon the audience to remember that this man is a monster, and not to be fooled by ordinary dramatic conventions into seeing him as a kind of hero. Ironically, the strict censorship of the day makes this task harder, since the film is entirely unable to portray Humbert's true villainy.

Lolita is an interesting character in her own right. Her final scene troubles me. Her confrontation with her "step-father" (a literally true but totally misleading description) seems disturbingly like a kind of unearned redemption. The implication is that Humbert truly loves Lolita while Quilty was simply taking advantage of her. Again, familiarity with the novel is helpful. The book makes clear that Humbert is barely even aware of the real Dolores Haze, who remains a complete mystery to him throughout, and instead has conflated her with his own memories of a long-lost love.

Spartacus (1960)

2013-02-09T11:00:00.000-05:00

Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Jean Simmons
Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov, John Gavin, Tony Curtis
Screenplay by Dalton Trumbo
Based on the Novel by Howard Fast
Produced by Edward Lewis
Directed by Stanley Kubrick

This is something of an odd film. It's reputation is, appropriately enough, as one of the great films, particularly one of the great epics. They just don't make epics like this anymore. For one thing, the nature of spectacle in movies has changed drastically in the half-century since this film was made. By the standards of its day, this was a gloriously spectacular film, and spectacle was achieved by filming thousands of extras from very far away, thus achieving a sense of scale and proportion which, these days, can be painted in with computers. And there's definitely a qualitative difference. Even when modern CGI is as realistically as you could ever expect, it still doesn't look the same, because it's used to depict things that would never have been done practically, if you see what I mean. In a sense, the spectacle in this movie is even more impressive because it is, compared with modern films, less elaborate. There's something really powerful about seeing giant flaming logs rolling toward soldiers frantically running away when you know that this was achieved by setting giant logs on fire and rolling them toward some stunt men.

Of course, a spectacular film requires a massive production, and the production for this film was famously troubled. The original director, Anthony Mann, was fired shortly after shooting began, and replaced with Stanley Kubrick at the insistence of star and Executive Producer Kirk Douglas (who had worked with Kubrick previously on Paths of Glory). More than anything, it's Kubrick's involvement that makes this such an odd film. All of Kubrick's films are odd in one way or another, but that's not what I mean at all. This particular Kubrick film is odd in that it really doesn't resemble a Kubrick film. For a director with such a famously diverse range, maybe that doesn't sound weird, but all of Kubrick's other films are emotionally and thematically challenging in a way that Spartacus simply isn't. Which is not to say that Spartacus is shallow, but that it fits more or less comfortably into the company of other major Hollywood studio sword-and-sandal epics, and as a genre, they are not known for the kind of disturbing and uncomfortable explorations of the dark sides of human nature that Kubrick became known for.

The story is almost exceedingly simple. Spartacus is a slave who is sold into the hands of Lentulus Batiatus, a man who trains slaves as gladiators to be sold on to Rome. Spartacus ends up leading a slave revolt, first trying simply to escape Rome, and then marching against Rome herself once escape was made impossible. Spartacus's principle enemies are the Roman Legions arrayed against him, but the film spends surprisingly little time on battle. The true villain of the film is Roman Senator Marcus Licinius Crassus. A prominent subplot involves Crassus using the crisis of the slave revolt to establish for himself a dictatorship over Rome. These political aspects of the story are certainly no accident.

Indeed, the film's politics have in many ways eclipsed the film itself, which is something of a shame. Kirk Douglas famously insisted upon crediting the script to blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo, rather than using a pseudonym. This open defiance of the blacklist was a momentous event in the history of Hollywood, and it is reflected in various ways in the story of the film. On the other hand, there were significant debates raging behind the scenes over the script. Kubrick was put off by what he saw as the script's simplistic moralizing (for better or worse, another prominent feature of Hollywood epics), while Trumbo was most interested in relating the political and moral themes of the film to contemporary American social and political issues. And that was only the beginning of the tensions surrounding this film. In addition to changing directors after shooting had begun, the cast was also stuffed with extraordinarily accomplished actors who were directors themselves, including Olivier, Laughton, and Ustinov, all of whom had very strong ideas about how they thought the story should be presented (and all of whom had initially been shown altered versions of the script which emphasized the importance of their own characters).

The movie does a lot to bring out the class distinctions between wealthy Roman elites like Crassus, Gracchus, and Batiatus, and the simple slaves struggling for their freedom. Each side has its own kind of nobility, but their views of the world are simply incommensurate. Spartacus wants a world free of slavery, where the dignity of every man is recognized and respected. Crassus and Gracchus are both in love with Rome, but they see it very differently from one another. For Crassus, Rome is not simply a petty and corrupt city sitting at the head of a vast, unwieldy empire. Rome is an idea, an ideal, and a symbol for civilization itself. For Crassus, the idea of Rome must always be protected against the base and shortsighted interests of the mob. For Gracchus also, Rome is a symbol of civilization, but the purpose of civilization is to serve the people. Unfortunately, Rome has been built on slavery, and while Gracchus (and, to a lesser extent, Batiatus) may be considered a "good guy" relative to Crassus, he's no hero.

Undoubtedly this is much to do with my own preferences, but I find myself far more interested in the Roman politics side of this story. The political maneuverings between Crassus, Gracchus, Glabrus, and a young Julius Caesar are fascinating, whle the other side of the story, though more excited, is far less interesting. Kirk Douglas plays Spartacus like a legendary hero, which is appropriate to the genre, but makes Spartacus an extremely shallow character. And perhaps this is just an expression of bias, but Olivier, Laughton, and Ustinov give vastly more interesting, nuanced, and enjoyable performances (playing, to be fair, vastly more interesting characters) than Douglas, Simmons, and Curtis.

"The Highest Science"

2013-02-03T11:00:00.002-05:00

The New Adventures
By Gareth Roberts
February 1993
Virgin Publishing

Sakkrat.

Many legends speak of this world, home of an ancient empire destroyed by its own greatest achievement: the Highest Science, the pinnacle of technological discovery.

When the TARDIS alerts the Doctor and Bernice to the presence of an enormous temporal fluctuation on a large, green, enremarkable planet, they are not to know of any connections with the legend.

But the connection is there, and it will lead them into conflict with the monstrous Chelonians, with their contempt for human parasites; into adventure with a group of youngsters whose musical taste has suddenly become dangerously significant; and will force them to face Sheldukher, the most wanted criminal in the galaxy.

Along with Paul Cornell and Mark Gatiss, Gareth Roberts is the third author to write his first novel for the New Adventures before eventually going on to write scripts for the new series. This novel introduces the Chelonians, the memorably vicious giant cybernetic tortoises. On the heels of the previous two novels, this one looks a bit unambitious, but I've always had a soft spot for it.

The story is built around a couple of rather clever gimmicks, and I'm a sucker for that sort of thing. First of all, we get the ingenious concept of the Fortean Flicker, a strange space-time phenomena that results in bizarre, inexplicable coincidences. Roberts uses this concept to populate his novel with a strange mishmash of characters. The Cheloniabs, of course, and the mysterious Eight-Twelves, who turn out to be commuters on the 8:12 train to London out of Aldgate. There's also a trio of young men who were on their way to the Ragasteen Music Festival, who discover that the lyrics of their favorite pretentious prog band relate eerily to their present circumstances. Finally there's Sheldukher, a ruthless criminal psychopath who has come in search if the fabled Highest Science.

Not all of these elements are strictly necessary. The human commuters, for instance, are fairly incidental to the rest if the story, and the music fans are basically there to give Benny something to do. There's also disappointingly little interaction between these groups of people. But the story moves along quite nicely, in part because there are so many balls in play that there's always something interesting happening somewhere. On the other hand, it means that there's a lot of unnecessary plot to get through before reaching the real resolution.

The story owes more than a little to "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". Sheldukher's plan to find the fabled planet of Sakkrat is quite similar to Zaphod's plan to find the fabled planet of Magrathea. And while the resolution does a good job of explaining all the events of the story in a more or less logically consistent way, the story basically amounts to an absurdly over-complicated scheme to recover stolen property.

Once again, Benny isn't especially well served. In "Transit", she spent the bulk of the novel under an alien influence. This time, she becomes addicted to an intoxicating soft drink called Bubbleshake, which affects her memory and her personality. She's more herself in the latter chapters of the book, and Roberts does a nice job of making use of her "future archaeologist" background. But Benny is still very much the new girl, and she hasn't yet had the opportunity to make much of an impact since her debut.

Up until this point, the New Adventures were published at a rate one every two months. Presumably, the range was selling pretty well, because Virgin decided to double the pace starting with "The Pit" by Neil Penswick in March 1993. From now on, we'll be getting (at least) one new "Doctor Who" novel every month for a long, long stretch.

Black Narcissus (1947)

2013-02-02T11:00:00.000-05:00

Deborah Kerr, David Farrar
Flora Robson, Sabu, Jenny Laird, Jean Simmons
Adapted from the Novel by Rumer Godden
Written, Produced and Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

There are many different ways to watch a movie, which is to say, there are many different aspects of a movie that we might choose to concentrate on. For someone who endeavors to discuss quality films intelligently, I am shockingly ignorant about a great deal that goes into the production of a film, and even more ignorant of the basics of critical film theory. I tend to focus on things relating to the narrative: who are the characters, what do they want, how are they in conflict, how are those conflicts resolved, etc. I tend to overlook things like production design, cinematography, music. That makes this film something of a poor fit for me.

The story is very simple and also very vague. It involves five Anglican nuns sent to establish a convent high in the mountains of India. Headed by the capable, determined, but rather inexperienced Sister Clodagh, the nuns set up a dispensary and a school to serve the needs of the locals. The combination of the locale, the altitude, the isolation, and the "primitive" culture of the native population, the nuns find that everything they hold dear is being challenged. At the end of the movie, the nuns admit defeat and abandon the convent.

What ultimately forces this retreat is an assault of sensualism and (especially) eroticism, but the standards of the day meant that this had to be approached somewhat obliquely. In other words, this story couldn't be told with just the straightforward use of characters, dialogue, and plot. Michael Powell was forced to take a more impressionistic approach in order to get across the intense melodrama of the situation. That's what makes this a poor fit for me.

Fortunately, the beauty of the cinematography is not lost on even a simpleton such as myself. I even managed to catch the striking contrast in the use of color, with the drab, off-white habits of the nuns standing out against the colorful location. Although, when I say "location", I mean "studio". I never would have guessed it myself, but this film was shot entirely in England, and almost entirely in the studio. The usual way to do a film like this, even if you don't want to send the entire production to an exotic (and therefore expensive) location, would be to at least get establishing shots on location and try to match the studio sets to the location as best you can. But Powell insisted on having complete control over the look of the film, and you can't get that control on location. Thanks to some outstanding model work and a few extraordinary matte paintings, the illusion is amazingly convincing.

Except for the fact that English actors are used for several Indian roles. That certainly spoils the illusion somewhat. The worst offender is Jean Simmons in dark make-up with a jewel in her nostril.

The story was taken from a novel published in 1939, and the story is set in that year. In 1947, when the film was released, the British Empire was crumbling in the wake of World War II. That must have colored how contemporary audiences received the film. As far as I am able to tell, I think this film gives Indian culture a reasonably respectful portrayal, all things considered, but there is an element of condescension. Part of this is inevitable. No matter how Indian culture is portrayed in the movie, its role in the story is to be alienating and strange to the nuns. Also, any story about the colonization of India told from the perspective of the colonizers is bound to include some condescending attitudes. Colonialism is impossible without condescension.

The Avengers (2012)

2013-01-26T11:00:00.000-05:00

Robert Downey, Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth
Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Mark Ruffalo
With Clark Gregg and Samuel L. Jackson
Produced by Avi Arad and Kevin Feige
Written and Directed by Joss Whedon

What I think about this movie seems to depend a great deal on how I think about this movie. There are a number of different ways to approach the film, after all, and each way of approaching it comes with a different set of expectations against which to judge the final product. The Avengers is 1) the third highest-grossing movie of all time, 2) an adaptation of a comic book property with a long and rich history, 3) the culmination of Phase 1 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) Master Plan, and 4) a film written and directed by Joss Whedon.

I remember when the trailer for this was released. A large portion of the Internet (and quite a few of my friends) went nuts with anticipation. Something about that trailer obviously worked, but not for me. The trailer made the movie look like just another mega-blockbuster to me. It featured a handful of amusing or dramatic lines, plus lots of brief, tantalizing shots of incredible action sequences. This sort of trailers has become so common that they all basically look the same. Suppose you had to decide whether The Avengers or The Transformers was the better movie based only on the trailers (and assuming the trailers didn't identify each film's director). Could you do it? I couldn't,

Fortunately, The Avengers is the much better movie. It has a lot of the same weaknesses that plague many recent blockbusters. The story is muddled, the plot is a mess, and the action just goes on and on. What lifts this movie above other summer spectaculars is the focus on the fractious relationships among the major characters, and I think it's this element in particular that made Whedon a brilliant choice to handle this movie. One of the major themes of Whedon's television work is the idea of characters who construct their own families. He's spent most of the last fifteen years exploring the many ways in which diverse groups of people can work together effectively, or fail to. He's always great at finding and exploiting the divisions between heroes ostensibly on the same side, and that makes him a perfect fit for a movie about a dysfunctional team of elite super heroes.

For my tastes, however, the movie was far too heavily weighted toward action. But as it's the highest-grossing movie ever that wasn't directed by James Cameron, I'm reminded once again that catering to my peculiar tastes is not how Hollywood makes money. It does leave the film feeling extremely shallow to me. The script relies more than it should on the previous movies. With so much spectacle, none of the characters gets enough attention (except maybe Stark), which makes the interpersonal conflicts look arbitrary. They don't arise organically out of the characters because there's just not enough room for character here at all.

I'm still amazed that this ambitious project has made it this far, and has been as successful as it has been so far. It's gotta be tricky to take several different super hero franchises, all with different creative teams behind them, each with a distinctive style, and pull them all together into one big team-up movie. I have a few small complaints about how it was all done, but I'm frankly in awe that it was done at all.

Status Report

2013-01-24T09:11:00.001-05:00

Ok, so what's going on here? Why no new content since Monday? First, let me make it perfectly clear that I'm not quitting the blog. I have a well-earned reputation for just walking away from previous blogs with no notice, but that is not what I'm doing now. I think I'm just a bit burned out.

I've been barely keeping up for the last several months. In the past, it was common for me to write posts two or three weeks in advance, but lately, that advance time has whittled away to, in some cases, barely more than an hour. As of now, I still haven't written Tuesday's post, so my advance time has fallen sharply into negative territory.

I haven't yet decided when and how I'm going to resume. Perhaps I'll come back with some kind of further reduced schedule, I don't know. I have a couple of ideas, but I still have a lot to think about first. In the meantime, I will maintain the weekend schedule of movies and "Doctor Who" novels, and you never know when I might have a thought that strikes me as worth sharing.

So please be patient, and keep checking in from time to time. As you know, I have a weird thing about titles, and I can't tell you how much it bothers me to have a blog called "The Daily Drew" which isn't currently operating on a daily basis. I don't know how long it will take, but that will be rectified. Thanks as ever for your interest and support.

Delay

2013-01-22T07:32:00.005-05:00

Not quite sure when the next post will go up, but it will go up, and the schedule will resume.

"Shaggy Dog, City Goat"

2013-01-21T08:00:00.000-05:00

Homicide: Life on the Street - Season Six

January 16, 1998
Richard Belzer, Andre Braugher, Reed Diamond
Michelle Forbes, Peter Gerety, Clark Johnson
Yaphet Kotto, Kyle Secor, Jon Seda, Callie Thorne
Created by Paul Attanasio
Written by Eric Overmyer Directed by Kyle Secor

Title notwithstanding, this episode has nothing to do with dogs or goats. Although the title is opaque and rather clunky, I love it, because it refers separately to the A-story and the B-story. That's hardly unheard of, but you don't see it done all that often. The real question is why something like that would impress anyone, but I've got a thing for titles. Don't judge me.

The first part of the title refers to a shaggy dog story, a long, rambling, and implausible story with an anticlimactic conclusion. Anyone who has seen The Aristocrats is familiar with the shaggy dog story. My favorite shaggy dog story can be found on the special features of the DVD for that movie, and it involves an epic quest for peach cobbler, if I remember correctly. Anyway, the shaggy dog story in this episode is based on a well-known but apocryphal story which also shows up in the movie Magnolia. It involves a man trying to commit suicide by jumping off the roof of an apartment building, only to be accidentally shot on his way down. It's told via flashbacks as Dr. Cox tells the story to a bunch of fellow medical examiners. But she keeps getting interrupted by the B-story, which takes place in the present.

Before we get there, I want to say how nice it is to see Kellerman out on a case for the first time since the second episode of the season. Once again he's partnered with Munch, and once again they are hilarious together. It's also nice to see him not acting like a complete asshole for a change. I really like that killing Luther Mahoney has had an impact on him, and I love that it's had such a profoundly negative impact, but I miss the old days when Kellerman was honest, incorruptible, and likable.And things are still only getting worse. This episode reveals that Georgia Rae has filed a civil suit for wrongful death against Kellerman, Lewis, Stivers, Cox, Giardello, the Baltimore City Police Department, and the City of Baltimore, which provokes Lewis into a pointless confrontation with Mahoney that results in his indefinite suspension.

But we were supposed to be talking about the B-story, and that isn't it. The B-story involves a sociological phenomenon specific to Baltimore. "City Goats" are hillbillies from Appalachia who come into the city looking for work. It's always nice to get a story that touches on something unique about Baltimore, but as far as I can tell, this story is really just there to burnish Gharty's credentials as the new Bolander. He's an older white man, someone who has lived his entire life not noticing (or just not questioning) the privileges that come with being a straight white man in this world. This difference is that Bolander was a kind-hearted man who didn't mean anyone any harm. Gharty isn't a bad guy, exactly, but there's something a bit more pointed about his attitudes.I feel like Bolander went along with straight white male privilege because he didn't quite have the moral imagination to conceive of any alternative (without assistance from younger, more liberal co-workers like Munch). Gharrty, on the other hand, seems to have endorsed majority privilege as if it really is the way that things really ought to be, and he seems to be trying to pull ballard down with him.

Hamlet (1948)

2013-01-19T11:00:00.000-05:00

Laurence Olivier
Norman Wooland, Jean Simmons, Terence Morgan, Basil Sydney
Screenplay by Laurence Olivier and Alan Dent
Based on the play by William Shakespeare
Produced and Directed by Laurence Olivier

This is the second of three Shakespeare adaptation starring and directed by Laurence Olivier, one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of the 20th century. The first was Henry V, which we've previously discussed. This is a very different film of a very different play, and it serves a very different purpose. Henry V was an epic war film, shot in spectacular color, and designed to boost British morale during the Second World War. Hamlet, by contrast, tells a far more complex story in a far simpler way.

Hamlet is I believe the longest play written by William Shakespeare, and of the countless film adaptations it has amassed over the years, only Kenneth Branagh's 1996 star-studded behemoth retained every line of every scene (and clocked in at just over four hours as a result). All other adaptations, this one included, have trimmed the play in one way or another. The inevitable result is that some Shakespeare purists will condemn the film for what it does not contain (Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Fortinbras). And one might reasonably take issue with the theme Olivier chose to explore, announced in prologue as "the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind". But the important thing to recognize is that Olivier has a specific theme in mind, and the cuts he made to the text were designed to sharpen and clarify that theme.

In line with this idea of focusing more on the character of Hamlet than on the story, this film has none of the daring directorial choices of Henry V. It's shot in crisp, clear black and white, which befits the melancholy, contemplative tone of the film. All of this makes the film, I think, less welcoming of general audiences than Henry V. There's not a lot of action in the story, and certainly nothing like those elaborate battle sequences..

At the risk of seeming obsessed, I want to talk about the religious themes of the play. Well, I say "themes", but what really interests me is the way that Christianity functions within the plot. While Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech is not explicitly Christian, it basically boils down to fear of an unknown afterlife as the ultimate barrier to suicide. This is reflected in the treatment of Ophelia following her death, which was believed to have been a suicide. Finally, the scene where Hamlet comes upon Claudius in prayer gives the most concrete example. Hamlet does not take his revenge at that moment because, he says, Claudius would go to Heaven absolved of his sins, while Hamlet's own father died with his sins still upon him. Leaving aside the absurdity of an arrangement whereby the fate of one's immortal soul depends upon such contingencies as this, it's rare and striking to see Christian metaphysics play such a concrete role in a character's motivation.

"Sins of the Father"

2013-01-18T08:00:00.000-05:00

Homicide: Life on the Street - Season Six

January 9, 1998
Richard Belzer, Andre Braugher, Reed Diamond
Michelle Forbes, Peter Gerety, Clark Johnson
Yaphet Kotto, Kyle Secor, Jon Seda, Callie Thorne
Created by Paul Attanasio
Teleplay by Darryl LeMont Wharton
Story by Julie Martin & James Yoshimura
Directed by Mary Harron

When I rule the world, using "Sins of the Father" as an episode will be severely punished. I suppose it's used so often because it's a well-known expression and it's flexible enough to cover lots of situations. Also, there's just something about stories that connect the present to the past that seems to be appealing. This episode is all about that connection, so I have to admit that the title is appropriate.

You can't really grapple with the issue of race in modern American society without dealing with history, and you can't deal with the history of race in America without dealing with slavery. There are two major attitudes that people tend to have about this, both of which are reflected in this episode, and both of which contain important truths. On the one hand, no individual now living carries any personal responsibility for slavery. On the other hand, some people now living are better off because of slavery. This episode involves the murder of one such person.

The connection is a bit complicated, but it's worth spelling out. Before the Civil War, a female bounty hunter named Patty Ridenour (a fictionalization of an actual person) kidnapped escaped slaves and free blacks to sell into slavery. One of her victims, a free man by the name of Rigby, owned a 600 acre farm which Patty stole. Nearly 150 years, Ridenour's descendant is a wealthy and successful ad executive, and Rigby's descendant is a bookish black radical out to send a message. Lewis and Falsone are on the case, and the script uses these characters to explore the tension between those attitudes.

It has to be said that the story is pretty contrived, but it's worth it not just for the way it sets up the themes, but also because watching Lewis piece together this strange historical mystery is an interesting variation on the usual format. Let's face it, realism is great, but it also has its limitations. Besides, one thing that is incontrovertibly true about real life is that truly bizarre and improbable things happen all the time, so it makes sense for an otherwise realistic show to have a truly bizarre and improbable story once in a while.

Speaking of realism, I love that Pembleton is totally mystified by Bayliss's social life. I haven't talked much about this, but over the last few episodes, Bayliss started and ended a brief relationship with Dr. Cox, had dinner with a gay man, and is now getting pretty friendly with Det. Ballard. All this leaves Pembleton scratching his head, and I'm right there with him. I've never had much facility for casual flirting, and I haven't done much dating. Bayliss's social life... his whole approach to his social life, is totally alien to me.

"Closet Cases"

2013-01-17T08:00:00.000-05:00

Homicide: Life on the Street - Season Six

January 2, 1998
Richard Belzer, Andre Braugher, Reed Diamond
Michelle Forbes, Peter Gerety, Clark Johnson
Yaphet Kotto, Kyle Secor, Jon Seda, Callie Thorne
Created by Paul Attanasio
Teleplay by Christopher Kyle
Story by Julie Martin & James Yoshimura
Directed by Leslie Libman & Larry Williams

This show is just ticking off the hot button social issues one by one. On the one hand, that's terrific. One of my main goals with this blog is to use TV shows as a springboard for broader discussions about society and culture, and episodes like this, that make the social and cultural themes explicit, make my job easy. More importantly, I think it's inherently good for popular entertainment to address these issues in some form. That's part of the process of social development and cultural evolution. On the other hand, it starts to look a little but contrived. Episodes should address issues, but "issue episodes" are to be avoided. It's a fine line.

Anyway, yesterday's episode dealt with AIDS, but it was very careful to establish that it was nothing to do with homosexuals. This episode deals with homosexuals. Specifically, it deals with homophobia. More specifically, homophobia among the police. Once again, this episode looks dated, but that's the price you sometimes pay for relevance. The script is making all the right points about combating prejudice and discrimination, but at the same time, there are no gay characters on this show except when there's a gay-themed episode, and even then, all gay characters are portrayed in a totally de-sexualized manner. If a Martian were to watch this episode, he would understand that gay people are a minority group struggling for equal recognition from a majority which is, at best, indifferent, and at worst, hostile to their cause. He'd also conclude that it has something to do with men dancing together. But from what's presented in this episode, he would have no idea that it has anything at all to do with sex.

This is largely due to the constraints of network television at the time, of course. The script can afford to be vague because it's not Martians who are watching, and the real audience can draw on cultural background knowledge to infer everything the show cannot deal with directly. This also contributes toward dating the episode, but the most glaring thing is the language. One cartoonishly homophobic character (who possibly seemed more credible at the time) uses the terms "corn muffin", "candy ass", and of course, "fag", and that's just one scene.

The B-story for this episode once again involves the killing of Luther Mahoney. I'm still enjoying this story, but I'm getting more and more frustrated by the fact that Kellerman hasn't had anything else to do this season since the second episode. Anyway, in this episode we find out that Georgia Rae Mahoney was just bluffing about having a video tape of Luther's death. That's also pretty frustrating. She says she lied about it in order to find out for sure whether or not it was a clean shooting, and that makes a certain amount of sense. But it feels like she was just stringing them along in order to create six or eight episodes of drama for Kellerman and Lewis. And now where are we? Georgia Rae now knows that Kellerman killed Luther. So what? She has no evidence, and she obviously didn't need to know that for sure when she had Junior Bunk taking shots at Kellerman, Lewis, and Stivers way back in the season opener.