EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is Jonah Goldberg’s weekly “news”letter, the G-File. Subscribe here to get the G-File delivered to your inbox on Fridays.
Dear Reader (especially those of you feeling unsatisfied by the lack of a Dear Reader gag),
As the Dingo let loose in the petting zoo said, “Where to begin?”
I’ve had a very rough week. Rough like sharkskin. Rough like the stubble on Michael Moore’s once dasypygal buttocks after the Brazilian wax wears off.
(I wonder how many readers I lost with that image alone?)
Where was I? Oh right, rough like the morning after the Georgia special election at the DNC. How would you like to be the guy or gal or non-gender-conforming person who talked all that money out of George Clooney or Barbra Streisand who now has to field phone calls from people peppering their diatribes with “But I read in Salon!” and ” . . . but Rachel Maddow said . . . !”
I have no hot takes about all that. Or if my takes were hot, they’ve now cooled to that of flan left out overnight.
Everything Fades
Indeed, the most remarkable thing about the whole Ossoff–Handel brouhaha is how fast its half-life is. Yesterday, I started two of my favorite podcasts (other than GLoP of course). Both The Editors — put out by National Review (now containing up to 75 percent real editor) — and the gang over at Commentary began their conversations talking about the Georgia race, and it already felt old to me.
It feels like so much of the news these days is like that. What would once have been huge events — terror attacks on American soil, outrageous/bizarre/unfathomable statements from the president or Johnny Depp or Elizabeth Warren, announcements by the Russians that they might shoot down our planes, etc. — vanish like a Polaroid picture un-developing before our eyes. If Ossoff didn’t have a name that lent itself to puns (“I’m laughing my Ossoff,” “Shearing Michael Moore’s Ossoff,” etc.) most of us would already be forgetting the guy’s name.
I’m sure there are all sorts of big-think or pundity explanations for why this is so. Twitter accelerates the news. The president is like a squirrel rancher with an infinite supply of varmints to distract the dogs circling his presidency. The Orb has issued a charm of forgetting. It’s almost like our collective attention span has been crippled to the point that we can barely finish a sent . . .
Nancying Around
Oh, there is one point I want to make about Nancy Pelosi, other than the fact that she always looks like she just left a Ludovico treatment session and her eyes haven’t readjusted. Last night on Special Report, I’m not sure I made a point the way I intended (I’d check the video, but my Internet connection in the BWI parking garage is less than ideal and I got a late start, and I’m lazy). What I was trying to say is that Nancy Pelosi’s brand outside of solidly liberal districts is worse than the GOP’s. The reason I think I said it wrong, is that the lovely and talented A. B. Stoddard corrected me by pointing out that Democrats do better on the generic ballot than Republicans do. That’s certainly true.
But Nancy Pelosi is not generic. She’s literally a San Francisco Democrat and a known quantity. When you say “Democrat” to people, they might think of Pelosi, but they also might think of John F. Kennedy, or Bill Clinton, or “not Donald Trump,” or “not the GOP.” But when you say, “Nancy Pelosi,” even many independents react like the guys at Delta House when Flounder’s picture appeared on the screen. They think of the smug, condescending, social-engineering side of the Democratic party. That’s why Handel could so effectively use Pelosi against Ossoff. A vote for him was a vote to get Pelosi one step closer to running the House of Representatives.
If the Democrats were smart, they’d give her a gold watch and some eye drops and get rid of her. I doubt her replacement would be any better, given the ideological homogenization of the Democratic party that occurred under Obama and Pelosi, but simply having a fresh face would give the Democrats breathing room. They could elect an unknown to her left, and he or she would still help the party because it would take a while to figure out what was B.S. and what wasn’t.
If the Democrats were smart, they’d give Pelosi a gold watch and some eye drops and get rid of her.
Two weeks ago, I wrote in this “news”letter about how politics is becoming “lifestyle-ized.” Everyone talks about how everyday life is becoming politicized, but the reverse is true, too. Politics is becoming a lifestyle choice, a fashion, in ways it never has before. And last week, I wrote that people are starting to follow politics like it’s entertainment. The two ideas complement each other. So much TV these days, from streaming-video shows to cooking-competition shows to DIY programming, is about lifestyle. Politics is too.
But the hitch is that once you start watching politics like it’s entertainment, you constantly crave novelty, freshness, new laughs, and drama. That’s part of the genius of the Trump presidency. As a philosophical or ideological affair, it’s a train wreck. But as entertainment, it’s really quite brilliant. According to the old playbook(s), Trump’s tweeting and all the rest looks like Sideshow Bob or Barnyard Dawg walking into a sea of garden rakes. But as TV entertainment, it’s gold.
The Perils of Over-Thinking
This creates problems for Trump supporters and critics alike. For instance, if you saw my gobsmacked expression on Special Report last night as my friend Mollie Hemingway was making the case — as well as it could be made — that Trump’s “tapes” tweet was actually strategically brilliant, it wasn’t induced because I think it’s such a compelling argument. Rather, I think it’s a very strange one (even though, as of this morning’s Fox & Friends interview, it is now official party dogma). The idea that Trump had gamed-out all of the possible scenarios when he tweeted that thing about maybe having tapes of his conversation with Comey is, frankly, unfathomable to me.
It’s a plausible argument only if you look at that one tweet in isolation and do a reverse analysis of the events that unfolded afterwards. It’s kind of like the Whig interpretation of history in miniature.
Everything we know about how Trump tweets, and talks, and acts, tells us that he lives in the moment. He even brags about it. His one concession to the future is his insatiable need to keep his options open, not in policy terms but in a personal one. I don’t want to waste everyone’s time by documenting the rich history of Donald Trump’s Twitter account, never mind his countless aphasic asides in interviews, but it seems obvious to me that whatever good the “tape” tweet did for Donald Trump, it was blind luck.
Everything we know about how Trump tweets, and talks, and acts, tells us that he lives in the moment.
Conversely, just as Trump supporters should probably give up trying to connect the tweeted dots in order to paint a picture of some grand strategist, so should Trump’s critics on the left and, to some extent, on the right. Bannon may be a Cylon with a nefarious plan for world domination. Trump certainly doesn’t have one. For good or ill, the man is not a composer of multi-part symphonies, he’s improvisational jazz all the way down. Some love the tune. Some hate it. But no one should mistake it for something else.
Wonder Woman
So, for three weeks I’ve been avoiding reviews, Twitter storms, and podcasts that might spoil Wonder Woman for me. Of course, it was impossible to hide completely from the spillover. And I should say the hype nearly ruined it for me. Nearly.
At times, I sat in the theater wondering if I was at the right movie. It was a perfectly fine superhero flick. But it was hardly any grand statement on anything. It fit the usual tropes of superhero movies (with great power comes great responsibility, man is flawed but worth saving, Look! Explosions! Etc.) It executed better than most examples of the genre. But even as an example of a woman-led action flick, it isn’t nearly as good or important as Sigourney Weaver in Aliens.
Nonetheless, I have notes!
First of all, to state the obvious: Gal Gadot is really very nice to look at, more so than your typical woman hot enough to shave Superman’s beard. She has a thing that makes you stare at her beyond normal sex appeal.
What I find hilarious is the idea that she shouldn’t be hot at all. Ms. magazine ran an unintentionally hilarious article asking, “When Will Wonder Woman Be a Fat, Femme Woman of Color?” (For those of you who don’t know, “femme” is a flavor of lesbian). Slate offered a variant of the same complaint.
Wonder Woman won’t be a fat, lesbian woman of color for many of the same reasons Dom Deluise’s Captain Chaos never became a major franchise.
The Ms. magazine writer celebrates that Wonder Woman is no longer a crusader for American “imperialism” but she concedes that this is “likely more about wanting to capture global audiences than politics.” She’s obviously right. One of the worst things about the globalization of Hollywood is the corrosive effect it has on American patriotism. Superman is a super-powered Diogenes now, a citizen of the world not a champion of “truth, justice, and the American way.” When you’re trying to sell movies in Asia and Europe, one of the first things the prop department collects is your giant foam “USA Is No. 1!” hand-thingamabob. Even Captain America is little more than Jason Bourne in tights. I made this point in what I believe was my first article for National Review on Dead Tree two decades ago.
But if Americana doesn’t play as well in foreign markets, you know what does? Explosions. And violence. And sex. It’s a well-established fact that people all around the world prefer to look at beautiful people. Sure, standards of beauty vary — for women and men. But they don’t vary that much. (I don’t recall a lot of horse-faced paunchy men in The Avengers and Jonah Hill will never be cast as Superman). Also, even going by the most generous estimates of how many homosexual people there are in the world, you’re not going to get around the fact that most people aren’t gay (you can look it up). So, if you’re trying to appeal to the broadest market possible for what is nothing more than a summer popcorn flick, casting a stocky lesbian in overalls as Wonder Woman is probably not the way to go.
A superhero who fights against tyranny and for American-style democracy is apparently gross.
But here’s the funny part. If Hollywood listened to the writers of Ms. magazine and went all-in on an Andrea Dworkinized Wonder Woman and distributed it globally, you know what the right term for that would be? Imperialism! Specifically, cultural imperialism.
A superhero who fights against tyranny and for American-style democracy is apparently gross. Who are we to impose our values on the minions of the Kaiser, or for that matter, Hitler? Thank Gaia, Wonder Woman doesn’t do that anymore! (Even though a fair reading of the movie is that she kinda does). But wouldn’t it be awesome if Hollywood went all-in on spreading the pet notions of the Bryn Mawr women’s-studies department!
Other random observations: For all the talk about how empowering Wonder Woman is, it’s worth noting that in one sense she’s not a woman. Oh, I don’t mean anatomically, thank God. But a lot of people failed to notice that she’s not really a human. There’s a lot of dialogue about “men” in the universal sense of “mankind” which includes both sexes. The Amazonians were created to protect humans, but they aren’t humans themselves. And Wonder Woman isn’t even an Amazonian but a god or demigod (it remains unclear which). She is no more a normal woman than Thor is a normal man. She may mirror norms of gender and sex, but she’s better than an actual human woman.
And on this point, let me say on behalf of my outraged daughter, the movie is a hate crime against traditional Greek mythology. Zeus didn’t create humans, Prometheus did. Zeus, if memory serves, was quite chilly on the subject of humankind.
Last, and crucially, what the Hell was an armadillo doing in Themyscira?
Various & Sundry
Canine Update: So, my wife is in Alaska for grim family business, my daughter left this morning for camp, and I am alone with my canine Amazonians. Not only does this mean that I will have to renew my membership in the International Association of People Who Eat Over The Kitchen Sink — which is fine by me — but our trusted daytime dogwalker is on vacation, which means I have to perambulate the beasts at least three times a day (it’s usually more) right as D.C. transforms into a swampy miasma reminiscent of an obese shut-in’s sweat-pant fog.
Yesterday, amidst a chaotic day of camp prep, column writing, and Gymkata practice, I had to take the Dingo to the vet. She has a bad rash in her nethers, and while I’m sure this comes as a surprise to no one, discussing canine feminine hygiene with two lady vets and a female technician comes as naturally to me as discussing health-care policy comes to Republicans. The trip to the vet was stressful in other ways. Zoë detests the vet more than most dogs, which is saying something. She has a fight-or-flight protocol that is also beyond that of any dog I’ve had. So, when flight was not an option, she made it clear to every beast in the waiting room that entering what she calls her “zone of death” is a very bad idea. She’s going to be fine, thanks in part to ministrations that will probably cost me a hand, but the vet says that Zoë does have to lose some weight (she’s 72 pounds now!).
The problem here is that she, unlike sweet Pippa, has the means to remedy hunger by living off the land as it were. If you see hundreds of squirrels carrying luggage out of Northwest Washington, it’s because news that the Dingo will be perpetually hungry and on the lookout for between-meal snacks has gotten out. Meanwhile, the crows are arming-up.
ICYMI . . .
In my column today, I attempt to put a positive spin on things.
Calling Shenanigans on Jake Tapper’s Superman-Haircut Theory
If speech can inspire good actions, it can inspire bad actions, too (BTW, this column was inspired by last week’s episode of The Editors.)
My contribution to the Commentary Symposium on the Threat to Free Speech
One-and-a-Half-Cheers for the New York Times
A Reality Check about What Handel’s Win Means
Free Speech Isn’t Always a Tool of Virtue
My appearance on Special Report discussing the GOP health care bill
And now, the weird stuff.
The golden age of airplane food
What the underside of an iceberg looks like
Man commits crime to get away from wife
Maine woman drowns raccoon attacker
“Fearless Girl” was supposed to be bronze cow
Inside the coffin homes of Hong Kong
Renaissance paintings of food people
D.C. Bonsai that survived Hiroshima
Kung Fu mantis vs. jumping spider
What Europe would look like if every secessionist movement had their way
Dog photobombs street view of entire South Korean island
Humanity’s changing origin story