Month: November 2006

[mediawatch] Rilstone on the Daily Express

International treasure Andrew Rilstone has been writing regularly on the dire UK paper the Daily Express. He has a particularly good line in dissecting the rhetoric to get at the transactional impact underneath.
In this post, which I’ve been meaning to link to here for several weeks, he digs into the 2006 installment of that hardy Christmas perennial in UK journalism, Political Correctness Has Gone Mad And Is Stealing Our Christmas. It is a classic example of Rilstone’s biting, deadpan analysis and bitter humour, but then it goes the extra mile in quite a surprising and splendid way and puts the whole thing in a broader context. Check this out:

I think that the Express is engaged in a pretty transparent attempt to radicalize the White community. It is systematically running news stories which conflate Christianity with Englishness;and that equate Islam with foreign-ness. If the English can be persuaded to use Bibles, Stamps, Prince Charles, Silver Crosses and very occasional church-going as signifiers of national identity, then they will start to perceive themselves as part of White Community. If they perceive themselves as part of a Community, then they will also perceive themselves as different from members of the Veil-Wearing Community. If ‘England’ is defined as ‘a Christian Country’ and dark skinned people are defined as ‘Muslims’, then dark-skinned people are outsiders, full stop.

If you are in the UK, go read the whole post, and then bookmark Mr Rilstone and read him regularly. You won’t regret it.
(If you are not in the UK, you really should do exactly the same thing. It’s just that good.)

Review: Borat

I watched Borat with Cal on the weekend. Borat, to those one or two reading this who don’t know, is a comic character created by Brit comic Sacha Baron Cohen. Borat is extravagantly anti-semitic, sexist and racist, and his eager expression of these views sometimes draws similar sentiments out of his victims.
I was expecting a whole lot of this in the Borat movie, but it was not to be. TV Borat excelled at exposing the nasty prejudices beneath the surface of his targets, even if sometimes he seemed blind to the social pressures at work in the situations he engineered (classic case: the astonishing visit to a country bar where he engaged the whole room in singing along with ‘Throw The Jew Down The Well’ – hilarious and terrifying, to see a room full of good ol’ boys happily singing such a horrible song – but it would be simplistic and misleading to conclude that all those singing actually agreed with the sentiment).
Movie Borat does a bit of this, most memorably in a shocking chat with a rodeo producer which worked as effectively as the Borat creation ever could. But mostly, Borat was played for cringe humour, and the laughter came when you saw what horrible situation he would foist upon his next targets. A lot of people fooled by Borat have begun legal action against Baron Cohen – but with only a few exceptions they come out looking good.
To be honest, I was expecting a more cutting satirical exploration of what is going on in American culture, and what I got was a comedy of manners explored through the device of an idiot. My recommendation: wait for video.

[mediawatch] Curmudgeons

International readers will be in ignorance of the interesting week in NZ politics. Don Brash, the leader of our right-wing opposition party National, resigned. (To my immense satisfaction; I’ve sent hate in his direction before, more than once, mostly for his eagerness to deploy racial division as an election strategy.) His resignation was clearly a pre-emptive response to the pending publication of a book he had tried to suppress, and which was widely expected to bring down his leadership. Brash claims the events are unconnected, of course.
(Aside: claiming the events are unconnected is an interesting demonstration of the Bush-junta style of spin – just come up with an alternative explanation, no matter how unlikely it may be; the objective isn’t to actually convince anyone, it’s to give a narrative to people already on your side. If you already have a narrative, you resist a damaging counternarrative much more easily.)
The book, indie journo Nicky Hager’s ‘The Hollow Men’, does appear to contain much damning revelation about activities within National. What first intrigued me, however, were the accusations leveled at Michael Bassett, an ex-politician and newspaper columnist, that he was secretly advising and stagemanaging many of the things Brash did that he would then put over in his newspaper columns as evidence of supreme common sense. Hager’s accusation is that Bassett was claiming to be an independent and impartial analyst of current events in his column, when secretly he was hip deep in the political machine.
Even if true, I’m not sure how damaging a claim this is. (The fact that Bassett denies it strenuously suggests that it is quite damaging.) Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to going over the accusations in a bit more detail and I’m childishly excited by the possibility that Bassett will get slapped down, hard.
I don’t like the man, not at all. He’s a horrific example of the ‘curmudgeon’, that species of opinion writer so beloved of New Zealand’s/the world’s print media. And this event gives me the motivation to dig up and present a blog post begun but left unfnished back in February or so. Here it is:

Curmudgeons. Why do newspapers have these people? You know, the grumpy old male right-wing voice of ‘common sense’, whose opinions often turn on thinly veiled bigotry and usually amount to no more than that?
Karl du Fresne’s column in the Dom Post is even named ‘curmudgeon’. He’s not the worst offender – Michael Bassett and Frank Haden both fill the same role in the same paper on different days. Bassett even had a full day’s editorial piece devoted to defending him from criticism after he wrote an incredible column about the lower class’s habit of irresponsible breeding. He ‘asks the tough questions’ or some such nonsense.
(Aside: Tired curmudgeonry is never a ‘tough question’. It plays to people’s stereotypes and bigotries. Anything that encourages reaction without reflection is the very opposite of a tough question. The liberal movement in society in the last few centuries has been built on asking the actual tough questions. The banalities of curmudgeons and right-wing pundits the world over can only be spun as ‘tough questions’ because they are so out of step with the difficult, complex, intelligent questions at the heart of liberalism. What they perceive as horror at asking a question so challenging is in fact horror at the degree of wilful and damaging ignorance on display.)
Okay, I know why newspapers have these people. They get people reading. They get grumpy curmudgeons to say, “hah! That’s telling it like it is!” And they get idealistic lefties to say, “oh noes! Why is he brimming with such hatred?” And so everyone reads. And no, I don’t want all newspapers to become voices of the One True Liberal Way, etc etc. But the reification of the grumpy old man columnist to become the Grumpy Old Man Columnist Position is, I think, of note. There’s a self-awareness to it that didn’t used to be there when Frank Haden was pissing me off ten years ago.
Newspapers have created these little performance spaces, and the curmudgeons are more than eager to throw a little moronic bile around to live up to their billing. It’s a vicious cycle in action, and it makes me a bit sad.

And, yes, it does make me a little sad. There is a lot of prominent media space given to the curmudgeon voice; precious little given to any other voice than the grumpy old white man. (The presence of Tze Ming Mok in one major paper is so unusual that it only serves to show up how pervasive this trend is. That the only other prominent young woman with a voice is the curmudgeon-in-a-mini-skirt Cactus Kate rather undermines the whole enterprise, too.)
Oh, for a world where the barmy curmudgeons would be fenced in with all the lunatics in the letters to the editor, where they rightfully belong.

Thinking About Work

I have been thinking through a lot of tricky writing stuff lately.
Currently writing issue 6 of Amazing Triple Action, the superhero roleplaying game zine released by Adamant Entertainment. It includes a bunch of fairly tricky character set-ups, in terms of the rule systems I need to master to represent them right. It’s kind of pleasing to find that, where I’ve encountered grey areas and other difficulties, tracking down the word of the original designer usually confirms my suspicions. It’s good to be solving problems the same way as the joker who set the whole ball rolling – suggests that I know my oats on this stuff. It does get pretty technical.
It’s also just stupidly fun to sit around riffing off comic books – inhaling that pop culture subgenre so intensely through my childhood has given me the beef for it, that much is clear. Issue 6 will feature some very silly stuff indeed, and I love it to pieces.
Also working hard on Ron the Body – well into the actual writing now, as opposed to the preparing-to-write phase that took so damn long. I have become much more sensitive to the shape of the book, the way narrative rises and falls and takes the reader along, the way mysteries are suggested and questions are answered and tensions heightened. I was stuck on a particularly tricky Chapter 8 for a while, which seemed to be doing everything the plot needed and wanted but just felt way, way off. Then I realised, in one of those moments of sudden comprehension that you get, that Chapter 8 was actually mostly still Chapter 7. So now I have a beefed-up but well-shaped Chapter 7 and a Chapter 8 that doesn’t feel like it’s doing too many things at once. That’s fun, that is.
And yesterday while on the train home from netball I scribbled the final page of script for issue 3 of The Beast, a comic story I’ve been working on at odd moments all year. It’s six issues, each 16 pages of story, about a bunch of friends who start organising a series of late-night parties that begin to get out of hand. The final page of issue 3 is the mid-point twist, and I enjoyed writing it – I have the entire series broken down into page-by-page plot development, so it was cathartic to finally hit that point. Now I just need to find someone who wants to draw it…
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By the way, those who missed Billy’s comment, there was a followup to the V at the White House article, with photos of many Vs. Cool.

Wednesday Linky

Things from the net that have diverted me of late:
An epic, troubling memoir from a woman who worked in the comics field for the last decade – comics geeks will know exactly which company she’s talking about, but you don’t need to be a comic geek to relate to her nasty experiences. Start here.
Some rules for writing. It begins:

If you use adjectives in your prose, do not use nouns. If you use nouns, you must not use verbs. If you use verbs, try to avoid verbs that specify a particular city.

An article from author China Mieville about government lies that aren’t even meant to deceive us.
Hilarious, mind-breaking seven-minute clip show splicing together the final lines from every CSI Miami precredits sequence. David Caruso’s delivery becomes something hilarious, and then something magical. This is perilously close to art.

No, seriously!

The post I made yesterday – it isn’t a wind-up. It is, though, a bit of a troll.
But note what I’m not saying. I’m not saying the issues are being addressed – I’m just saying we have won the argument about whether they should be. (To draw a very useful comparison, Scott brings up the feminism and racism issues – those arguments have been well and truly won, but as Scott points out the implementation of this victory is far from complete.)
I could have phrased the post more simply, as this: ‘public opinion has shifted about the Iraq war and about climate change, and is now in line with what the progressive movement has been saying for some time’. I am also saying, sorry KiZ, that the shift in public opinion is irrevocable. It’s a judgment call, of course, but I’m making it. The jury is in on both issues, just like it came in on the racism/sexism issues some time back.
Still, making any claims about public opinion is automatically dodgy territory – by what right do I proclaim on such a construct? By what evidence can anyone know public opinion? What, in fact, does public opinion mean?
Those questions are interesting, but you know what? Don’t matter to me. I’m making a claim. It might be premature, but I’m making it. (And I think it’s the right call, and I’ll talk about that in a sec.) But…. all those details I provided – the personal narrative, the allusive ‘evidence’, the invocation of the recent election – they were all far too flimsy to be an argument, right? Yeah, I didn’t post an argument, I posted a narrative. A mythology. So here’s another line of inquiry: what on earth was I trying to achieve?
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So, given that I just said that defending my claims is unnecessary, I’d better get on and do just that. The two examples I used aren’t really equivalent. They talk about different scales of public opinion, and different kinds of argument, and different kinds of change. I address ’em both here in their different ways.
Iraq
I claim that public opinion on the Iraq war has shifted. Specifically, that It is no longer in dispute that [the military removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime] was not the right thing to do, and [the invasion of Iraq] wasn’t the way to do it.. In response, Liz commented:

The Democratic victory was in response to much short sighted discontent including changing opinions on Iraq because it’s taking too long with too many American deaths, not that the decision to go to war was itself wrong.

‘Taking too long with too many American deaths’ is exactly what the progressive movement foretold. All other reasons for the wrongness of the invasion aside, this was foreseen. Also foreseen was the other, unspoken, side of this comment: there were no WMDs. There was no urgent need for war. This response doesn’t contradict my statement – it is evidence for its veracity. To think otherwise is to misunderstand what the progressive movement was actually saying in 2002/2003. Of course, there has been continual misrepresentation of what the movement was saying, so that sort of confusion is understandable. Tony Blair in particular repeatedly answered any and all criticism with ‘Saddam is a monster’, as if that was ever in dispute. No, I stand by this one, for sure.
Climate Change
I claim that public opinion on climate change has shifted. Specifically, It is no longer in dispute that climate change is real and caused by human activity. Several people took me to task, but I stand by this claim.
I think public opinion has passed the tipping point on this in the last six months. Maybe not in the US, but in the wider global “public landscape of ideas”, it’s a done deal. Sure, there’ll still be arguments. Sure, lots of key people (e.g. the Bush administration) will continue to deny it or to stall. But I think we’re over the hump on this one. The jury has come in, and word is spreading. That’s my perception. Yours might be different. S’cool.

Now We Have Won

The progressive movement has won two major arguments in the last six months. One, sadly, much too late to do much about it. The other, perilously close to the same.
The war in Iraq should never have happened. The invasion of Iraq should not have been undertaken. There were undoubted merits in removing the Hussein regime, but not in those circumstances, not in that way.
I walked on several peace marches in 2003, in Glasgow and in Edinburgh, protesting against the coming war. (The one I speak of I wrote about here.) I vividly remember crossing North Bridge in Edinburgh and seeing a man, forty-ish and spectacled and ordinary, standing with his arms folded and making eye contact with the marchers and shaking his head. Endlessly, slowly, shaking his head. You Are Wrong. This war is the right thing to do, and this is the way to do it.
It is no longer in dispute that it was not the right thing to do, and that wasn’t the way to do it. Public opinion has settled. We have won that argument.
Climate change is now on the agenda. A major group of articles in the local newspaper this weekend focused on climate change, with not a word devoted to whether it exists or not. New Zealand’s business-friendly National party made a huge and public u-turn on green issues in general and climate change in particular. Giant icebergs are floating past the NZ city of Dunedin, in sight of shore.
I remember at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2003 I went to an incredible presentation on ecology and social responsibility by Scottish writers Alastair Macintosh and Roger Levett. (I wrote about it here.) Sure enough, at the end of the presentation came a question doubting the existence of global warming and climate change.
It is no longer in dispute that climate change is real and caused by human activity. Public opinion has settled. We have won that argument.
The public landscape of ideas has shifted irrevocably to accommodate these two victories. The victory for the Democratic party in the US congressional elections has canonised these outcomes. All over the world, media and elected officials are falling over each other to align themselves with the new public opinion. Now that we have won the arguments, what are our concerns?
We must recognise our success. This means two things.
First, do not waste energy relitigating the argument. We’ve already won. Those who disagree are the minority now; ignore them. Either they will eventually be convinced by the simple prevalence of our ideas – or they were always beyond our reach. Either way, don’t waste time on them. Let them have their letters to the editor and their curmudgeonly comment columns. These people do not matter.
Second, push forward. We have won the argument; this does not mean the problems are solved. Far from it. Politicians are quick to claim adherence to a new common sense, but actual change in behaviour is slower to manifest. We must pressure our politicians and other leaders to engage with these issues in a productive way.
Winning the argument wasn’t even the first step on the road – it was only, for the first time, pointing people in the right direction. That is a significant achievement, and we’ve earned the right to say “I told you so”, but we better not get too enamoured of our success. There is a long journey ahead, and much work to do.

In Hiding

It has been over 66 hours since I encountered another human being.
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Some revisions on my sidebar, prompted by the need to add a link to Gametime, a new groupblog discussing RPG subjects. It’s a good spot, and I’m enjoying the conversations that seem to be sparking there.
Took the opportunity to add some other regular stops on my internet rounds – Billmon, George Monbiot and Michael Ventura. All are worthy of your clickthrough explorations.
(It occurs to me that all those attempts to make portals catch on in ’00 have succeeded in an unexpected way – a person’s blog is their portal. It is for me, at least.)
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Still have a cold.

BBS Revisited: Starship Troopers

Upholding my promise to Pearce, I watched this for the first time since ’97 the other day. I did my best to approach it with an open mind and to set previous feelings aside. Sorry, dude, but my opinions are essentially unchanged. Some of this stuff brings serious deja vu from BBS discussions in ’97.
It still doesn’t work for me as satire. It’s a big, tongue-in-cheek over-the-top war movie and the subversive elements (the media guy who suggests the bugs are only attacking because we’re colonising their territory, the Nazi costume designs of the Military Intelligence dudes, the way all the characters come to believe in the transcendent power of warmaking, the celebration at the bugs’ fear) just don’t add up to much. You have to do far too much joining-the-dots in order to find an anti-war movie in SS Troopers; it’s much easier to find a (tongue-in-cheek) pro-war movie in there, the kind of ‘gentle mockery’ that actually reinforces the legitimacy of its target.
I was, at least, thoroughly entertained by the first half of the film – the kids in school, the boot camp sequences, even Carmen’s training – all of that was gripping. Once the film actually goes to war, though, it seems to run out of ideas, substituting ‘new bug threat’ for any meaningful character crises. Even the action sequences left me pretty cold. It goes through four (I think) iterations of Carmen/Rico thinking the other is dead; it has about eight instances of important secondary characters dying in Carmen’s/Rico’s arms imparting final words of wisdom. It’s par for the OTT course, but it didn’t keep me interested.
The effects are still amazing. The bugs hold up incredibly well, with the sole exception the big fire-spitting dudes, who look a bit too CGI – otherwise, the mix of CG and physical effects is astounding.
And Dizzy is still waaay hotter than Carmen.

Sea Town

I’m housesitting for a week in Seatoun, up on the hill. My workspace holds a commanding view over the eastern side of Wellington harbour, including the channel out to the the Cook Strait and the hills of the Wairarapa. Clouds are eating the whole horizon as I type, so the the view proceeds from perfect white sky down to release a short tumble of bush-clad hillside before striking the shoreline. It is very still.
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Getting lots of writing done. This is a very good thing. Feel like I’m making progress with the Ron the Body writing, in that I’m genuinely expressing the tale at its core in an effective way. I’ll see how much Ron I can get done this week, but it feels like I’ve finally found some momentum on this. Writing long-form works is all about momentum, and it can be damn hard to take hold of that.
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Have nosed through house-host’s shelves and, feeling myself coming down with a cold last night I pulled out and read a Batman comic collection, ‘A Death In The Family’. This is the infamous storyline where Batman readers were invited to call a 900 number and vote for whether Robin would live or die. The vote came out narrowly on ‘die’, and having read the crappy character of this Robin for the first time, I’m not surprised.
As a comics geek I’ve known about this story for two decades but I’ve never known that the whole storyline is set in the Middle East. (Which apparently includes Ethiopia, but there you go.) Batman and Robin go into Lebanon and fight terrorists. And what really astonished me, as in I had to check I wasn’t dreaming, was the bit where Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeinei appears in Ethiopia and offers Batman’s homicidal maniac arch-villain the job of Iranian ambassador to the UN.
So the final chapter has the Joker wearing Saudi-style ‘Arab dress’ and ranting at the UN about how Iran is really like he is and then trying to kill everyone in the General Assembly with a deadly gas. Batman and Superman team up to stop him, while berating the evils of diplomatic immunity, Iran-Contra, the American Embassy hostage situation in Tehran, and the obvious wickedness of Iran.
(Side note: the only good character in the whole story, apart from the core cast, is an Israeli agent.)
It was quite ridiculous. Wikipedia notes: “The story arc was panned by many as implausible, and some have accused Starlin’s depiction of the Middle East as racist…” which at least confirms this really happened. Weird.
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I can find no update on the V situation. Can anyone else uncover a follow-up?