BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: April 2009
Monday, April 27, 2009
Movie Review: Resident Evil: Degeneration
I'm posting this after 7 straight hours of fiction writing, followed by 2 shots of Goldschlager and a fried egg on toast; eaten when I realized I hadn't had any food since midnight, and that I wouldn't sleep very well in my usual (of late) 8am-2pm slot, if my tummy were rumbling. Don't expect too much, in other words.
Fortunately, the review below was all but finished a few weeks ago, typed up shortly after I saw the movie it discusses. It sucked. (The movie, not the review. In theory.) I just added a few bits to it now, and yes, the shots and the small glass of white wine I'm now sipping to help bring me to an REM-ready state helped free my tongue (fingers) to add some appropriately critical remarks, about this rather execrable semi-film. This is the kind of thing Ebert watches to reinforce his "games aren't art" theories, even though this is a movie that's based on games. And even though the experience of playing the game would almost certainly be more art-like than this shitty CG film.
In other news, too much work and typing and writing and thinking lately.
You ever read Catch-22? Probably. If not, go back to high school and kick your English teacher square in the nuts. Even if she's a she.
At any rate, one of the crazy characters in that ultimate masterpiece of satire was obsessed with his apparent longevity. He had a theory about how time flies and our lives slip past, and his method to fight that fact was to spend as much time being as bored and unhappy as possible. So he associated with the most boring, awful people possible, and did nothing but unpleasant, time-wasting things. In this way he'd find himself counting the minutes as his life passed, and would always remember what he'd done on a given day or during a given week or year.
That sort of fractured logic is what propels Catch-22, but like most of the brilliantly insane things in the book, it sort of makes sense at the same time. Being too busy and active really does make your life seem to fly past. I'm sure my experience of that is dwarfed by that of new parents and others who have lives that are totally crammed full of activities. Raising a baby, working full time, and going to night school = you start working in August, and the next thing you know it's December 23th. Three years later.
I'm not at that stage, and I hope I never am. But for me, the past few weeks have been a blur. I've been working on website stuff, doing some freelance GMAT test prep work, and spending 4-8 hours a day on fiction, as I engage in a Herculean effort to finish a rough draft of the wine mystery novel I'm writing with my dad, before May 15th, when I'm off to Hawaii for a blessed week's vacation.
Said week was almost a lot more blessed, since the IG was going to accompany me, until she had to back out thanks to losing her main job and having issues finding a replacement. My mom/stepdad have a time share in a luxury resort there; huge suite with a master bedroom, a side bedroom, and a living room/kitchen. The IG and I were going to share a bed, and no, we're not having sex. Though I thought a week snuggling in bed and romping around white sand beaches in a bikini (her, not me) would be the next best thing. Or would at least give me plenty of insight into some sort of advanced blue balls study.
But she's not going, so now I'll just be there with family, and we'll do the same beach stuff and snorkling and hiking and all the rest. I'll just get less "rub some suntan lotion on my back and legs" time with a gorgeous young woman with a size zero booty.
In any event, I want to have a rough draft done before I leave, though that's looking unlikely the way this book is expanding in length. Like all of my writing expands in length. The fiction, especially. It's not gratuitous either; I'm sticking to the quite detailed plot outline Dad and I worked out in advance; there's just a ton of events, and I write very detailed characterizations and events, so it takes a lot of words to do it justice. In any event, the book will be finished in May, even if I've got to do the last chapter or few after I return from paradise.
My day to day experience is slipping a lot, even with just this much activity. I frequently get online in the early afternoon, thinking I'll work on website stuff until dark, and then get something to eat and hit the gym, then have a big dinner and relax a bit before doing fiction from 12-6 or so. So I start working, and the next thing I know it's 9:30pm, when I had meant to leave for the gym @ 8. And I haven't had a bite to eat all day, and I need some energy for the gym, and after PB/honey toast I end up cutting my gym time short since I want to get home and do fiction, and I start that at 2am after gorging on something in a post-gym famine, and the next thing I know it's getting light outside and I'm left wondering where the last 18 hours went.
Repeat until death. Alone.
That said, I'm going to bed now. Here's the review.
This is a review of an animated movie, but it's not anime. It's all CG, and produced for the DVD market, without a theatrical release (AFAIK). It's called Resident Evil: Degeneration, and is a movie set in the FPS game series, which has already spawned several B-movie quality live action features, most or all of which starred Mila Joviovich.
I downloaded it out of curiosity, and watched it with some high hopes. I didn't expect a masterpiece, but I thought it would at least have some good zombie blasting/battling action, nice action pieces, and maybe some scary scenes with monsters lurching out of the darkness as the heroes ran for their lives. You know, the same crap every action/horror movie offers. I expected the special effects and visuals to be good, since it's a fully 3D, CG movie. It's animation, so the normal limitations of special effects, makeup, numbers of extras, etc, don't apply. They can turn zombies inside out, have 5000 of them running up at once, put the camera's POV inside the barrel of a gun as it spits forth zombie death, etc.
Sadly, none of this was done. This is a really depressing film, since it's so lacking in imagination, intelligence, or ingenuity. There's nothing here that couldn't be in a crappy direct to video movie with live actors and action. Even the "special effects" weren't very good. I'm quite firm in my opinions on this one, and while I'll point you to the 4/5 star average (From 110 reviews!) on Amazon.com, I can't explain it. This movie sucks, it's very poorly made, and it squanders a great opportunity to use the technology to further the craft. Anyone who would give this piece of shit a 5 star review has either never seen a decent movie in their lives, thought they were voting on a 10 star scale, or made massive allowances for the shit-quality acting, directing, dialogue, action, and plot since it was animated.
I'm scoring this one like a real movie, rather than giving allowances for the fact that it's animation. After all, animation is just a tool or a means of presentation, like B&W or 3D; it's not a genre or style. That's especially true in this film, since it's exactly like any other bad action/horror film. A bit worse than most, but there's nothing that actually takes advantage of the fact that it's animation.
It's a weird approach. If you somehow didn't know that this was animation, and thought it was film of actual human beings, there's nothing that would seem unusual or out of the ordinary, compared to any other B-quality action movie. You wouldn't even think it had especially good special effects. The awful acting and leaden dialogue and cliché-filled script is impossible to miss, but there's nothing about the story or presentation that couldn't have been done with live actors, and some amount of post production CGI. Humans mutating into huge zombie things, a few big explosions and a plane crash, a building self-destructing... all fairly standard action movie fare.
The overall low quality of the story, horrible dialogue, and unimaginative plot and events makes me wonder about the creation and writing process. I can understand and sort of sympathize with bad movies, especially bad action movies, that cut corners. Explosions and special effects and huge sets and lots of extras cost money, and films often have to skimp on those elements for economic reasons. The same goes for good actors, which is why most action films have wrestlers or rappers or body builders or models; people who look the part, and whose acting ability is an afterthought.
Most action movies have really lame dialogue and flat, two-dimensional (or one-dimensional) characters. They don't change during the film, they tend to be types, etc. Some element of that has to be that the films play to the audience's expectation. There are genre staples of horror movies, after all. And of zombie movies, and action movies. And this one is all three.
So it's not totally an indictment of the film that every character is stamped out of some "generic action movie character" cookie sheet. There's the frightened female victim panicking as monsters come in. There's the hot-headed Rambo idiot cop. There's the corrupt and scheming politician. There's a deceitful mad scientist. There's a little girl in danger who must be rescued. There's the mysterious and cool special ops guy who comes to save the day, and the tough female cop he bonds with during the course of the action. And that's literally... every single character in the movie. Everyone with a speaking role is a total stereotype. Instantly reminiscent of some other movie (generally a bad one).
The dialogue and acting and plot is much the same, but it's actually maddening. I spent most of the first 30 minutes of this movie cursing aloud and wishing the "heroes" would die, since they were all, continually, constantly, repeatedly, so stupid. It was impossible to root for them, since they did nothing that wasn't dumb and predictable. I think (hope) it was written that way on purpose, as a sort of genre obligation. Of course the heroes have to freak out and stand in stunned horror when they see the zombies stumbling towards them. Of course the small group of survivors has to move through the heart of the monster infestation instead of just staying in the safety of the back hallways. Of course the dumb macho cop has to ignore all the orders he's given and get himself killed. Of course the female hero has to throw herself into danger to save a little girl she doesn't even know. Etc.
The most annoying thing with this one is that everyone, repeatedly, constantly, sees danger coming and stands there watching it. Civilians when the zombies first appear, sure. But the trained experts who have fought these zombies in the past? Why are they surprised? Why aren't they running like a bunnies to get to defensible terrain? Why do they go into combat with a single handgun when they know there are hundreds of zombies in the area? Why don't they wear any sort of armor when the zombies are slow and weak and only capable of hurting you/spreading the zombie infection by biting?
It's literally impossible to watch this film and not spend the first hour rewriting the "plot" as you watch it, since every scene is so predictable and cliched, and every character is so dumb and slow to react, and every police/army action is so hare-brained and inept.
And that's where my confusion comes from. That's all sort of expected of a live action movie, since they have budget concerns and bad actor and are in a time crunch, etc. But a lot of that doesn't apply to this film, since it's all animated. The voice actors were pretty bad, especially the weird, overly sincere and emoting voice of the main male hero special ops guy, but it wouldn't have mattered since their dialogue was all so dumb. On top of that, the events are all ripped off from other movies, the hero characters are perpetually so stupid and annoying that you actively hope they'll die. So were there no writers for this film? Did they just give the game programmers a week to come up with a hundred minute cut scene and go into the laborious animation process without considering how lame the story was?
I dunno. I found it very disappointing and very stupid, since it could so easily have been a pretty good movie. After all, having the full freedom of animation should be awesome with zombies and action scenes. The heroes can be like super Jackie Chans in their nimble mobility, the monsters can be totally bizarre and grotesque and inhuman, rather than just a guy in a rubber suit, or some obviously green screen CGI thing. Moreover, the cinematic technique are where animation can really come to life, since scenes can be shown from any angle, any direction, etc. This movie does a few slow motion shots with bullets moving, but they don't even rise to the level established in The Matrix, more than 10 years ago. Perhaps for technical reasons, the vast majority of shots are done with a stationary camera, while the principles run around in front of it. Good anime imitates good cinema, with the "camera" view moving behind the actors, the "camera" view shaking up and down to simulate explosions and motion, zooming in and out for excitement, etc. Resident Evil: Degeneration does none of that, and I have to put that on unimaginative, unskilled directors and producers and writers.
For the sake of comparison, check out the scene in The Incredibles when the missiles hit the plane with ElastiGirl and the 2 kids inside. The camera moves in with them, pops outside of the plane, goes from the missiles' PoV, cuts from the cockpit to the kids in the back, etc. After the missiles hit the camera is falling with the Incredibles as the plane blows up above them, turning side to side, etc. All things no real camera could do in a live action movie, (at least not without enormous amounts of special effects) and all to great effect. Nothing like that ever happens in RE:D, and there are plenty of times it could. People fall, things blow up, monsters attack, and throughout most of it the camera just stands back at a distance and watches, like a freshman shooting his first student film in the quad one afternoon.
In a weird sort of (bad) way, this film might be a kind of breakthrough. It shows just how exactly an animated action/horror movie an imitate and emulate all the lamest things that real action/horror movies do. Almost as if it's bridged the gulf between live action and animation, but in the least inspiring way possible. Way to do absolutely nothing to take advantage of your technical opportunities, guys.
Other than that... oh what the hell. It's a shitty zombie movie with predictable double crossing mad scientists and corporate greed. Though I've never played them, I'm sure all of the games in the series have 10x the intelligence and plot twists of this "movie." It's just a misbegotten, untalented, waste of money all around. Ugly, stupid, unexciting, and not fun. Frankly, my scores might be a bit too high, as much barrel bottom as this one scrapes and as many opportunities as it squanders.
I don't recommend it, but if you're curious, here's a link to download it in very high quality. You need to get all 3 parts and join them with HJ Split, and that will yield you a 1.5meg avi, which you'll get about 10 minutes into before you start wondering why the hell you wasted all afternoon downloading this piece of shit in the first place. And don't you come crying to me.
Actually, the post title should be "gods" but I typed "dogs" on the first draft, and thought it was funny enough to leave as is. At any rate, this is a video of a scientific presentation from a recent atheist conference, in which Andy Thompson makes a presentation about the evolutionary, biological factors that predispose humans to supernatural beliefs. I saw the link on Pharyngula, who saw it on Dawkins' site, where I would have seen it myself, in a day or two.
Thompson isn't an especially moving lecturer, and he's certainly no tent revival evangelist (so to speak), but his information is very thorough and clearly presented. I think it would serve as an excellent introduction to the issue, if you've not done much/any reading/research on it previously. I'd heard most of the material previously; Thompson repeatedly cites Simon Baron-Cohen's work (which I reviewed here), and a lot of his other content is familiar to me from Pascal Boyer's very dense book, which I read and took many notes from, but have not yet refined into review/discussion form.
My caveats aside, it's a good presentation which I enjoyed listening to whilst preparing lunch. If you've got 45 minutes to fill and want to learn something highly useful about human psychology and the evolution and purpose of religions, give it a listen.
Perhaps the most thought provoking thing I heard in it came right at the end, during the Q&A. I don't recall the question, but Thompson segued into a discussion of past US court trials about teaching evolution and creationism, and how science/evolution has won every time. He then pointed out that it's only a matter of time until some high school teacher begins instructing a class in material similar to that which he covered in this lecture. It's not philosophy or atheism, after all. It's cutting edge brain science/psychology, informed by MRI studies and human genetics and anthropology. Eventually text books will catch up to this evolving field, and when they do, you know some Christian fundamentalist parents are going to file a lawsuit, trying to keep their little Johnny or Debbie from learning that the human brain is evolutionarily predisposed to be susceptible to the sorts of memes and anthropomorphic depictions of the world that all religions provide. (Which is, quite obviously, why all successful religions provide them.)
The publicity from that sort of trial will, more than anything, give scientific field a huge boost into the public discourse and consciousness. And that might actually start to change some things, at least or people bright and open minded enough to actually process the data.
Blood, the Last Vampire. About the best made, as well as one of the most enjoyable Anime movies I've yet seen. It's a perfect example of what Brad Bird, director of The Incredibles and Ratatoille says about animation. That it's not a genre, it's a medium. You can tell any sort of story with animation; we just have a skewed view in the US since here, in the last few decades, it's been ghettoized into children's entertainment.
Blood, the Last Vampire is certainly not children's entertainment. It's like a really bloody short by Hitchcock. Very suspenseful and horrific, with a few gory action moments, but only a few. The bulk of the short film is very commonplace scenery and events, that are given a creepy, ominous, suspenseful vibe by the direction, visuals, sound, and other elements. The story is quite simple, but the style with which it's executed elevates it into a little gem of a horror classic. I watched it late one night, marveled at the quality and technique, and immediately watched it a second time, while cursing the brevity of it.
To the scores:
Blood, the Last Vampire, 2000 Script/Story: 6 Characters: 8 Action: 8 Eye Candy: 8 Fun Factor: 7 Replayability: 7 Overall: 9
I think this is the highest score I've ever given any anime. I'm sure it's the highest score I've ever given any horror movie, though Silence of the Lambs and Aliens would be right up there. Not that either of those are straight out suspense/horror films.
I don't have a score for direction, or style, or mood, or intangibles, but this film hits very high on all of those, which is why the overall score is higher than an of the individual ones. I happened to watch this a few hours after struggling to sit through the interminable 90 minutes of Resident Evil: Degeneration, (castigating review to come) and even before the opening credits were through, I knew Blood was going to be a far superior film.
The quality of Blood is almost independent of the great animation and fascinating, engrossing, unexplained world fiction. This is just a really well made movie. Animated or otherwise. Inspired direction, involving camera angles, great presentation of events, instantly interesting and memorable and unique characters... yes, it's a cartoon, but it's got such a sense of character and place and mood and style that it feels perfectly real and grounded.
The direction and editing is really what makes it work, since the events of the story are very sparse, and a lot of the brief run time is taken up by shots of background images, characters milling around, outdoor scenes, sunsets, planes taking off/landing, etc. But it's very film noir in mood and tone, so everything sets the scene and adds to the atmosphere; rather than just feeling like filler. There's tension in almost every frame, and a real force of emotion and character from the hero, and an unearthly, creepy horror from the demons she's hunting.
The animation is great as well. Very sparse of detail, but rich in character. I've included a few stills from the film in this review, just to give some examples. They're not great examples; I wasn't motivated enough to take my own screenshots, so I had to make due with what I found online. And I couldn't find any shots of some of the most memorable images in the movie. I'm not sure they'd translate all that well to still photos anyway; most of them are awesome in how they're presented, with eerie music, often with altered lighting, from odd "camera" angles, seen in slow motion, etc. It's not the still image, it's what leads up to and occurs after it. But the stills do give you some idea of the color scheme, and the strong faces and stylistic appearance of the people in this film.
The faces especially are what works. They're not that detailed in the depiction; but they have strong profiles and are very distinctive, and the eyes are great. The monster hunting female lead is a young woman who wears a school girl outfit the whole time, but she's not cute. She's actually kind of ugly, with her puffy lips and prominent brow. And those intense, dangerous, staring eyes.
The animation is all 2D, with richly-textured backgrounds and great use of color and light. A few of the backgrounds and panoramic shots are 2D, but they're blended nicely and are usually long views of cities, an airbase, etc, so they do enough blending and add sfumato to soften the harsh, too-clear aspect of 3D visuals that often makes them not blend well with 2D.
What really works are the movements and poses and postures. It's reminiscent of Miyazaki's animation, where the actual artistry and image quality is just adequate -- and it's the way the characters move realistically and interact with solid physical presence that makes it shine.
That's what most 3D animation fails at; the bodies are obviously wireframes, and they're fine standing still, but when they move, especially when the fall or crash into things they don't have any weight or impact; they seem to bounce instantly, without any compression or recovery. On the contrary, there's a scene in Blood where one of the demons, still mostly in human form, gets sliced on one shoulder. It looks like a young girl with one arm dangling limpy, as she throws herself sideways into a door, bounces off, grabs the door handle, pulls it open, and hurls herself through into the hallway.
I watched that little three second sequence about 5x in a row, simply to study how realistic the movements and motions were, while trying to figure out why it looked so great in this cartoon, even with the relatively low FPS rate. I don't have an answer and the movie doesn't have any secret tricks. It's just very well drawn, with a lot of attention to detail and study of the human form. People move like real people; when they turn their shoulders move first, then the hips pivot to follow, etc. So the sword fighting and the running and falling are all slightly hypnotic, as they're so real and believable; like watching someone stylized to the point of perfection as they fall down in real life.
The plot, such as it is, involves an (apparently) young girl who is said to be a vampire, the "last of the true bloods." She never does anything vampire-ish, though. She walks around in the daytime, she never drinks any blood or menaces any humans, nor does she do anything supernatural. She just uses a katana to kill demonic monsters, who look like humans until they throw off their disguise and transform, like hairless werewolves, into horrible monsters. She gets assistance from some guys who look like the Agents from the Matrix films, who are part of some government organization that's tracking down the demons and sending the girl in to finish them with the sword. Guns don't hurt them; only a greatly desanguinating traumatic injury can finish them. Hence the katana. Why the girl's a vampire, how she's related to the demons, where they come from, who the organization is, why the agents are white or black Westerners while the girl's Japanese, with everything set in Japan... none of that is explained at all. It's just part of the cool back story, and it makes the world feel very developed and real; the principles aren't the stars of the entire world, video game/bad movie style. They're just doing their own thing amidst the larger reality around them.
As for the demons, they appear to be very strong, and they have massive claws and jaws, and one can fly, but they don't talk or say anything about their goals, and they don't seem to be all that eager to savage humans. They were awesomely designed, I must stress. I'm seldom impressed by monster design, so trust me when I say that the demons in this movie are legitimately unnerving. Weird elongated horse-like jaws over fangs, with great gnarly clawed hands and glowing red pin point eyes. Shuddery. They are palpably evil and lurking, without being especially murderous or destructive. They're more reminiscent of demons in a Clive Barker story than something out of an American slasher film; the body count is negligible in Blood, since the demons aren't especially interested in murder. They are almost like tourists or casual visitors, passing amongst the human herd without any great involvement, and more interested in keeping themselves a secret and not being killed than in wreaking the sort of havoc they're well equipped to wreak.
I was motivated to download and watch this Anime, since I've recently seen promos and the trailer for a live action movie version of the story. The trailer isn't very effective, IMHO. It looks derivative and cartoony; hot school girl with a katana battles demons with the aid of comically-fake wire fu. (Which is ironic, since the actual anime isn't cartoonish at all, and doesn't have any sword duels or wire-fu style movements. ) Here's the trailer, courtesy of YouTube.
The anime film is a one-off. It wasn't taken from an ongoing manga, and it wasn't part of an anime series. It did inspire a 50-episode anime called Blood+, which I'd lke to get into, but haven't found the time to get started on yet. It's not a true sequel, since it takes place more in the modern day (the movie is set in 1966, for no apparent reason.) and doesn’t feature the same characters. It's more of a companion work, set in the same world fiction. They must have done a lot of work to flesh it out, since as I've said, there's lots of interesting tidbits in the film, but just bits and pieces of concept, without any sense of the over-riding world state or mythology. I assume the live action film is based on the anime movie (several scenes in the trailer are exact recreations of scenes from the anime), but incorporates elements from the continuing fiction as well.
I really wish my laptop battery lasted longer; I'm going on a weeks' vacation in Hawaii in mid-May. (Mom and stepdad have a timeshare they had to use or lose, and I'm going to meet them there.) The 5 hour flight over would be a perfect time to blast through some of the huge backlog of quality anime I've got stacked up. Sadly, my laptop battery is only good for about 2 hours of video before it's dry, and planes are lacking in wall sockets. At least back in economy class. I'd look into another battery, but I so seldom use the laptop anywhere without a plug that it's kind of a waste.
I could, I suppose, watch this film version of Blood 2.5 times, before the laptop went to sleep. I doubt I will, but happily for you guys, you can, if you wish. There are numerous places to download all anime online, including this film. Here's a low quality version in one handy, 105m file. A bit better quality comes in an annoying 8 parts, which you have to zip back together. HSBSiztez.com has lots of additional download options for it, and you can find just about any other anime you've ever heard of through their search function.
I highly recommend this one, even if, especially if, you're not an anime fan. And as you know if you've read some of my past movie reviews, I seldom recommend anything. So you know this one is good. Or at least weird, but weird to my personal specifications.
Since I'm finding no time/interest to write blog entries lately, while spending many hours a day writing website and wiki content, and several more hours working on the wine-themed mystery novel, and since I've got a ridiculous backlog of half-written book/movie reviews, I'm just going to start posting one a day, for the foreseeable future. Finishing up these gives me a decent way to wake up my writing thoughts before I move into more serious work, and provides something for the blog. Two birds, one metaphorical stone!
Today's review is for a book I read at the gym this week, and will have forgotten completely by the weekend.
This book has much better potential and plot ideas than execution, a fact this review will belabor painfully. It's a modern day medical thriller, in which a crazy toxicologist is breeding new plagues and spreading mysterious diseases of his own creation, in a re-enactment of the ten plagues Moses inflicted upon the Egyptians, in Biblical lore. The hero is an eccentric disease researcher who stumbles onto the case about the 6th plague, quickly realizes what's happening, and starts trying to unravel the earlier cases, predict the upcoming plagues, and figure out who is perpetrating it.
It sounds like a good story; medical intrigue, brilliant doctors scheming and cat-and-mousing each other, pandemics cutting swathes of death through the general public, the FBI and other government agencies stumbling around not sure who to go after, Biblical metaphors and inspiration, clues found in ancient Hebraic scrolls, etc. Unfortunately the novel is very poorly written, with no sense of pacing, a terrible plot delivery (the reader is immediately told who the bad guy, what he's doing, and why, which sucks almost all of the intrigue and suspense out of the novel), boring cliché characters, clumsy flashbacks, unnecessary and silly sexual deviancy, etc. The science was pretty solid, but the rest of the book felt slapped together and disjointed.
To the scores:
The Eleventh Plague, by John S. Marr, MD, and John Baldwin Plot: 4 Concept: 9 Writing Quality/Flow: 4/5 Characters: 4 Fun Factor: 4 Page Turner: 3 Re-readability: 5 Overall: 4
Of the two authors, the doctor got top billing, as the book tries to push its medical credentials to make the future plague scenario believable. I assume that he contributed some general character sketches and lots of scientific and medical info, and the co-author, John Baldwin fleshed it out and made it a novel. I assumed Baldwin was a hired hand, some novelist who hasn't had much success with his own material, who makes ends meet working as a hired pen.
That's basically the case, judging by his extensive Amazon.com bibliography, but his credits are not what I expected. And they give a clue to the lacking presentation of this novel.
Baldwin's not a novelist! Almost all of his titles are non-fiction, and on almost all he's a co-author. It's a very eclectic selection; lots of history books, but also human sexuality, science, various Biblical studies, the Idiot's Guide to Acting, books on business, human psychology, and many more. The guy is clearly stays quite busy polishing and finalizing other people's books, and must have a fairly broad field of knowledge. He might be a great non-fiction writer; I haven't read any of his other books, so I can't say. But he's not any good as a novelist, neither structurally or creatively, and that's what brought down The Eleventh Plague.
I've never heard of either author, and I didn't read their bios or the blurb before I started the book (which I got at a library giveaway years ago, and finally got around to reading at the gym this week) but I did notice that it was by a doctor and another guy, and from that I assumed the doctor came up with the science and disease stuff and probably had some character ideas, and the writer whipped it into shape. I still assume that's true, but I wonder if the doctor had more involvement than that... since so much of the book was dry, dull, methodological, etc. And yet there were scattered through it bizarre and jarring bits of weirdness.
The bad guy is largely targeting conservative Christians with his plagues, since he was doing brilliant disease research, but his masterpiece drug could have been used to cause abortions , since it would attack any foreign substance in the body, including a foetus. It seemed an unsatisfactory plot twist, but at any rate, the conservative funding his cancer research flipped out at that and cut him off, then worked to destroy his larger career. For no apparent reason. That embittered the guy, and he eventually started having schizophrenic delusions in which he thought God was talking to him and telling him what to do to take revenge.
(On second though, I don't believe the book ever actually says "God." I think the bad guy always refers to it as "the voice" he hears that tells him what to do. That seems especially gutless, on the part of the authors, in retrospect. Like they couldn't even have their madman murderer psychopath think he was being guided by God. When obviously he would have, given that he was recreating Biblical sourges at the direction of an omniscient directing intellect.)
So he starts brewing up various clever poisons and toxins, and how he makes them and spreads them is some of the more interesting material in the book. Growing deadly algae to create a red tide, engineering anthrax, incubating a tapeworm in order to plant its offspring into people, etc. But that's not enough for the authors. So they have to give him an insanely abusive, devoutly religious mother who tortured him and drove him to bizarre sexual hang-ups. Which play no part in the book except for occasional mentions of his overlarge penis and his inability to ejaculate with a woman, a liability somewhat compensated for by his ability to ejaculate without any physical stimulation, a trick he learned since his mother beat him and burned his hands constantly as a child since she suspected him of masturbating.
More fundamentally, the book is just poorly plotted and paced. The hero doctor finds out about the plagues around #6, and figures out the previous plagues with miraculous speed, partially thanks to the bad guy hacking his computer with magically-disappearing anonymous messages (a talent used just that one time as a plot device, and then never referred to again). But then nothing happens for weeks, until plague #7. And then nothing happens for weeks until plague #8. Etc. There's finally sort of a chase scene and some excitement as the doctor and an FBI agent catch onto what plague #10 will be and rush to try to stop it, but even that's poorly handled.
The structure would have required some considerable re-juggling to turn it into a thriller. It would have been much easier to make it suspenseful though, simply by not revealing the identity, motivation, methodology, and ultimate goals of the madman on like, page 15. It's not meant to be a mystery, and ultimately it's not, but the main hero doctor thinks it's a mystery as he tries to figure out who's doing it (while battling suspicions that it might be him, and skeptics who think he's crazy for trying to fit random events into this Biblical plague framework). But since the reader knows who it is, and we know nothing's going to happen until about the time of the 10th plague, it's kind of pointless to read all the hero doctor's investigative work to uncover facts we knew 50 pages ago.
I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
It's not a very good book, but it did keep me occupied during my hour of cardio 3 or 4 days in a row. I don't recommend it, but it's far from horrible. It's actually of more interest to aspiring writers, since it's instructive in where things can go wrong. The ingredients for a good (not great) book are clearly here, and as you read it you can't help but think how much better the material might have been presented, by a more expert writer.
I kept envisioning the co-author doctor reading over the rough drafts and checking to be sure his scientific and medical info was accurately presented, while scratching his head at the weird and pointless sexual deviancy here and there, and yawning while he wondered if this was as boring and non-suspenseful as he thought. Before ultimately deferring to the published writer, who, after all, must know what he's doing. (Ironically, while the bad writing is mentioned in numerous of the generally over-starred Amazon.com reviews, there are numerous comments about errors in the dates of events, medical mistakes, language problems with the Hebraic quotes, etc.)
The irony that I'm currently co-writing a mystery novel set in the wine industry, for which my dad is providing almost all of the technical/wine/industry details is not lost on me, as I write this review.
And the Secure in his Masculinity Award Goes To...
...my downstairs neighbor, who just drove up and parked his broke ass blue '94 Tercel on the street corner. While blasting Mariah Carey or Whitney Houston or some other breathy female vocalist yowling through one of those sappy, slobbering ballads that routinely make grown men flee doctor's waiting rooms, supermarkets, and discount clothing stores.
And it was loud! I'm talking volume usually associated with gangster rap, 17 y/o wiggery-looking white guys, and Mustangs. All the windows down, just so everyone passing by could get that "stuck in an elevator with the worst music in history" feeling.
The neighbor? He's about 55, black, beefy, and he smokes a lot of pot, usually with a very truck-stop looking 45ish white woman, out on his back patio late at night. The stink is annoying at times, but from now on I'll know to count my blessings; at least they do so without musical accompaniment.
This MSNBC piece brought, as they say, the lulz. I have no idea who the news guy doing it is, but bonus points for him keeping a straight face throughout, what with the constant mentions of "tea bagging" and "Dick Arm(e)y" and so on. Even the title illustration is great, with the dual tea bags going in for the dunk, with one (naturally) hanging a bit lower than the other.
It also provides a very concise description of the fundamental absurdity of the whole tea-bagging movement. Vast majority of tea baggers are getting tax cuts this year to less than they paid under Bush. Marginal tax rates for the wealthiest Americans are shooting up to... 10% lower than it was under Reagan. Taxation with representation. Etc. And it's very funny, in a juvenile, talking dirty sort of fashion. Naturally, it's essential that you know what "tea bagging" is slang for, but I think we're all sex slang aware adults here, eh?
(The real question is, do some of the self proclaimed tea baggers not know? I've been half giggling for weeks as this fringe movement has been astroturfed by the right wing media and the term "tea baggers" keeps being thrown around. After all, the inclusion of "bag" is not essential. Tea didn't come in neat, disposable bags once upon a time, when the colonists so legendarily tossed crates of it into Boston Harbor.)
I've never seen or heard of this, but according to PZ it's a common evangelist party game. They construct an absurdly leading scenario, along the lines of, "What if God made everything in the world for you to enjoy and made you live and made you happy and made things beautiful... wouldn't you owe him your thanks and praise?" And you're supposed to be a good sheep and say, "Yes. Yes I would." Apparently there are several redundant questions of that type, and at the end they say you've just accepted Jesus into your heart. Or something like that.
It seems a fairly farcical practice; if you're stumped by it just imagine substituting Zeus, or Allah, or Little Green Men, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, for "God," and see how much sense it makes. Better yet, you could directly challenge the the scenario itself. It's non-representative of the real world, it's selectively and misleadingly presented, it's Biblically illiterate, etc. That's more or less what Christopher Hitchens does when a radio talk show presents it to him, and as he dissects the premise (with his usual line of anti-theistic attack) the radio guy insists on sticking to the utterly failing script, and it becomes almost Monty Python-esque in its absurdity.
Paraphrasing:
Radio dude: But if God created you and made you healthy and happy and successful in the world he made for you to live in, wouldn't you owe him thanks and obedience?
Hitchens: No. Do children owe their parents thanks for creating them? No slave should praise his master. And under your scenario, does that mean that sick and weak and broken people don't owe thanks to your god?
Radio dude: That's not the way the game works. Here's the next question that's exactly like the first three, but phrased slightly differently!
I almost felt sorry (And might have have, if he didn't use that annoying, patronizing, game show host voice the whole time. That made it all too easy to imagine his smirking chimp face.) for radio guy by about the 4th question, since his little ambush scenario was being utterly demolished. And yet he kept gamely on, trying to use these idiot questions on one of the most articulate, anti-theistic, and verbally-nimble men alive. It was like watching elementary school children trying to tackle a full grown man in a quick game of rugby. Except that in this case, the full grown man wasn't being nice and gentle and playing along. He was simply running over the little tots.
When I watch basketball highlights (which I do fairly often, since I semi-follow the NBA and don't watch TV, hence online replays are the way to go) one of the things I most enjoy is when a player makes a great play at the end of the floor that his team is sitting on. It's fun since the bench leaps up and celebrates, especially if the play involves someone on the other team getting "posterized" with a huge facial dunk, or there's a huge collision, or someone on the other team gets humiliated, faked out, knocked sprawling, etc. (Or all three, as in the example below.)
I'm often disappointed in highlights when the vagaries of the game flow (teams switch ends at the half) result in a great play taking place on the wrong end of the court, where the excited teammates can't be seen.
I thought of this, and the general phenomena of the guys on the bench getting hyped up by a great play, while watching this collection of great Michael Jordan dunks that NBA.com put together for his recent election to the basketball hall of fame.
Amazing dunks, but there's one big difference between those and ones from the modern era. His teammates on the bench hardly react. Apparently back in the 80s and early 90s the guys on the bench weren't demonstrative? Look at #4 and #3 especially. Both unbelievable dunks, massive contact and crushing finishes, right in front of Chicago's bench... which reacts as if someone had missed a twenty-footer. In today's NBA those guys would be up and screaming, slamming down towels, chest bumping, etc.
For the other extreme, watch the Lakers leap up, throw towels, and literally fall all over each other laughing when Kobe leaps out of the building to drop this one on Ben Wallace.
This was from about 1997, so clearly something had changed in the culture of the NBA in less than a decade. Or perhaps Jordan was so intense and scary that his teammates were afraid to leap up and celebrate for fear of breaking his concentration and getting killed in practice the next day? There are also extenuating circumstances. That Lakers game is a preseason exhibition, so the bench is relaxed and looking for something to be amused by. They'd have celebrated that great a play in a regular season game, but there would have been an intensity, rather than a jovial "hanging at the barbershop" type of vibe to their reaction.
I tripped over this tonight while looking for something on google video to listen to while I made dinner, and found it fantastically entertaining. It's an interview by Dr Michael Shermer of Dr Georgia Purdom. Shermer is a noted atheist, libertarian, and Darwin scholar. Purdom is the "scientific" Director of the Creation Museum in Ohio. As you might expect, they agree on nothing, but it's a fascinating discussion to hear this intelligent, university-educated young woman "explain" Biblical literalism. She's a literalist (about the pseudo-scientific and geological stuff, at least. She fudges massively on all cultural and ethical issues.) on the current interpretation of Genesis. The earth is 6000 years old, created in six 24-hour days, there is no ongoing evolution, etc.
Shermer is very gentle in the interview, letting her answer as she sees fit and never growing exasperate at the logical fallacies she uses, and she's quite game, not outright dodging any of the questions. I highly recommend it, though whether you find it hair-pullingly frustrating, or LOL psychological insight into mental bifurcation (as I did) will depend on where you are in your personal journey of philosophical and scientific understanding.
I could pull a great quote from just about every minute of this thing. I think my favorite part was when Shermer pointed out that almost every Christian was pro-slavery 200 years ago, and that they all had clear justification for it in the bible. And she said that they were interpreting the bible wrong since modern genetics has proven that there's no biological basis for race. Shermer asked how their interpretations were wrong while hers was right, and she said she didn't interpret. There is no interpretation of the Bible, since it's the truth that God wrote. So Shermer asks what will happen in 200 years when Christians all have different cultural and social values and think everyone today was wrong in their intrepretation. And she said that wouldn't happen, since there's only one Bible and it's the truth.
So everyone for the first 6000 years of existence was reading the Bible wrong, even as they were writing it, I mean recording God's dictation of it. But how people view it today is right, and will forever more remain unchanged and correct. Srly?
This is far from the most impossibly contradictory belief this woman holds, but I literally can not imagine how she does it. That's the most shocking example of hypocrisy and relativism I think I've ever heard. It's utter solipsism, the mental failing that Christopher Hitchens often points out is strongly encouraged by religion.
It's a requirement that any one who really believes in their religion is solipsistic, since they think whatever they believe in is true and right and that every other religious and irreligiuos person is wrong. Arguing with such people is like taking on a stubborn 8 y/o who won't take a bath, or eat his vegetables. But this woman takes that a bit further. Not only is every Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, Catholic, etc, wrong... but so is every other Christian! Unless they happen to agree with her understanding of the Bible. (Not interpretation, since there is no interpretation. And I'm sure her Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek are flawless, so she can read the original scrolls, rather than relying on subsequent translations and modifications.)
Another enjoyable moment was when Shermer points out that there were thriving human civilizations more than 6000 years ago, and these dates are attested to by numerous methods; tree rings, ice cores, archeological evidence, Carbon dating, etc. The woman isn't even phased. "Well obviously those dating methods are wrong, since we know the earth was created 6000 years ago, since it says so in the Bible, which is true."
Shermer never asked the core question, "Why do you think the Bible is true, when the only thing that testifies to its truth is the Bible itself?" (An argument most think is rather undermined by the hundreds of obvious contradictions and errors in the text.) I'm sure that question would do nothing to shake the woman's blind faith, and that she would have had a ready reply to it, but it would have been fun to hear how she parsed it.
She'd firmly established her view that the Bible was true. God's word. Inerrant. And that any counter evidence was therefore wrong. Shermer did bring up the two differing creation myths in Genesis, and she breezed right through that one. According to her, one was the big picture of overall creation, while the other was a more specific, detailed account of just the creation of man. Shermer didn't follow up, but I'd have been unable to resist. After all, the book clearly lists 2 very different recipes for human existence. One says that man and woman were created at the same time from dirt, while the other says man was first and then woman was made from his rib. And this is like, one chapter apart. Right at the beginning of the whole tale. But there aren't any contradictions or errors, cause it's all true... Right, k then.
Now obviously there's no arguing with a fanatic, but this one was so plain spoken and grounded in reality (relatively speaking) that I enjoyed hearing her utter these nonsensical tautologies. That interview could have gone on for hours, before I grew weary of it.
What's interesting in particular about the militia mindset, however, is that its narrative sources are very different from those of left-wing radicalism. People who believe in violent revolution and the murder of American soldiers and policemen generally, if on the left, appeal to basically anti-patriotic attitudes. Which is about what you would expect from advocates of the violent overthrow of the established political order. But the militia crowd exhibits much more the attitudes one would expect from a coup leader -- a Franco or a Pinochet who's actually appealing to the concepts of patriotism and nationalism as justification for violent revolution.
I suppose there are some different ways of characterizing the asymmetry, but the underlying issue seems to be that rule by conservatives is integral to the right's conception of the United States of America. This is part of the rhetoric of the "heartland" and "real America" -- a period of political victory by a coalition grounded in the coasts and Greater Chicago is a period in which America has ceased to be herself.
This doesn't quite get into the psychology of today's right wing radicals, but it's a nice analysis that rings fairly true. I'd say it's an indictment, but I don't think the people this applies to would deny it. Conservative white Christians are fairly open and plain about their desire to rule and be ruled by people like themselves. That's what all the "values voting" is about, and it's what spurred all of the various "Barack Hussein Obama the uber-liberal Muslim terrorist was born in Africa" snipe hunts during the campaign season.
Those conspiracy theories never got any mainstream traction because most people (defined as the majority of votes who elected Obama) laughed at them, but furthermore, most people didn't care. Countless right wing blogs and publications devoted countless hours to delving into the "born in Africa" story, because to them, that was a checkmate level allegation. The ultimate sign of the "other."
When the mainstream heard about it, they were bemused, both because of the wild-eyed nature of the accusers, and because well... who cares where he was born? Everyone knew Obama lived in Kenya and Indonesia during his childhood, and that he had a wild phase in his teens, before he got serious and worked like mad to turn himself into a successful politician and inspiring leader. What mattered to voters was what he'd done with his life and where he (said he) wanted to take the country. Where he'd been born (Hawaii, by all credible accounts) was entirely irrelevant. But to the immigrant-fearing right wing, the thought of someone from another country, especially a scary black country in Africa, was anathema.
That's why it was an utterly ineffective rumor; because it sounded crazy, was delivered by fringe, crazy-sounding people, and even if it had been true it wouldn't have registered in the decision making process of most voters. It was an electoin, not Astrology. The location and time of a presidential candidate's birth is irrelevant; as is (for the most part) what they did as a child. It's what they did with their life once they were old enough to make their own decisions that mattered.
Yes, there's a technicality in the Constitution about presidents having to be natural born US citizens. But most people don't know about that, and I doubt they would care if they did. Even had Obama been born in Africa, he was born to an American mother, and he lived in the US for all but the first few years of their life. Besides, it would be pretty dumb to DQ the best candidate for president based on an arcane technicality written 250 years ago, when the US was newly independent from England and on guard against any English sympathizers coming to power.
Returning more directly to the quote, the unsaid aspect of that post is a pretty big element. The fact that there are no such leftist radicals in the US. Well, "none" is probably an exaggeration. There were some in the 60s, Republican campaign punching bag William Ayers for one, but that was 40 years ago, and most young liberals of the time agreed with their manifesto, if not their violent enactment of it. The fact that tens of thousands of their peers were being drafted and sent off to die in Vietnam for what most Americans came to see as an unjust and pointless war had the effect of radicalizing pretty much everyone of a draftable age. But today? The best the right wing can do for leftist radicals are outspoken celebrities like Michael Moore, or obscure junior college professors, none of whom are actually hording weapons, calling for assassinations or direct violent action, or fulminating anything stronger than the occasional poorly-attended protest march.
Meanwhile on the other side of the coin, there are numerous national politics and media figures with nationwide radio and TV shows regularly calling for rebellion, urging gun hording and armed resistance (with tactical advice for killing uniformed police officers), calling the president a fascist and a communist, and so forth.
I think Yglesias was probably wise not to broaden his post to those areas. Including them would have let dissenters nitpick the exact statements and their context, thus avoiding the core argument about the violent leanings of the rightest right wing, and their fascist, authoritarian, foundational motivations. Not every blog post can cover every element of everything. A lesson I'd do well to learn, as I struggle (unsuccessfully) to keep my word count down and my discrete topic focus up.
As far as I can see, there's nothing factually inaccurate in this article. It's competently-written and relevant and topical. And yet it so frustrated me that I had to blog it. Briefly. The nut:
Pixar's Art Leaves Profit Watchers Edgy
Pixar Animation Studios has never released a movie that was not a commercial and creative triumph, and its 10th feature, "Up," is looking to be no exception -- at least artistically.
To the extreme irritation of the Walt Disney Company, however, two important business camps -- Wall Street and toy retailers -- are notably down on "Up."
The film, about the adventures of a cranky 78-year-old who ties thousands of balloons to his house, features dazzling animation that evokes the work of Hayao Miyazaki, the refined Japanese filmmaker and anime master. Like Pixar's Oscar-winning "Wall-E," there are stretches without dialogue. A few scenes are rendered in black and white.
...Richard Greenfield of Pali Research downgraded Disney shares to sell last month, citing a poor outlook for "Up" as a reason. "We doubt younger boys will be that excited by the main character," he wrote, adding a complaint about the lack of a female lead.
The article goes on to detail toy sales and product tie ins from other Pixar films, an effort that reached its pinnacle (so far) with Cars, a property that moved over $5b in merchandise. Cars is also distinguished by being the worst fucking Pixar movie ever!
Seriously, Mister NYT article writer... fuck you. Fuck investors. Fuck Wall Street. Fuck toy retailers. It's a sad, impotent sort of arm flailing, but I feel the need to flail nevertheless. Flail at this cruel reality. By this bottom line logic, movie studios are better off churning out utter shit, so long as it's got cute characters with stupid lines that will momentarily hook the strobe light attention of toy-begging 6 y/os. You know, like every shitty Dreamworks cartoon.
Picture unrelated, but I saw it a few days ago, long before I read this anti-Up article, and sensing the underlying truth it revealed, I saved it at once. Never suspecting I'd have the opportunity to regurgitate it on my blog so soon. Click to see it full size and legible.
Inexcusably few posts lately, and no idea when that's going to change. I've been working a ton of the D3 website and wiki, spending a couple/few hours a day working on the mystery novel with my dad, working part time on some paid writing/editing, sporadically dating, spending fun time with the IG, indulging in some spring gardening, filling my hard drive with anime downloads (though I limit myself to watching no more than an hour a day), and more or less keeping up with my news/politics/info web browsing.
Blizzard Entertainment is proud to present its first global writing contest. If you enjoy the Blizzard Entertainment universes and have the drive to pen fantasy fiction in them, here’s your chance to shine.
Whether you conjure stories in your free time or write for a living, you’re encouraged to participate. This contest is open to entrants from around the world, and will be judged by Blizzard Entertainment’s own writers and masters of lore.
To enter, submit a 3,000 to 10,000 word story written in English and set in the Warcraft, StarCraft, or Diablo universe by April 12 and earn your chance to visit the Blizzard Entertainment headquarters and meet the writers and staff behind the lore seen in the games and books.
I don't really care about the prizes; Irvine is a hellhole, and I've been to Blizzard HQ and met Blizzard guys often enough that I'm not overawed by the visit. I don't care about autographed copies of the books either, (the first 2 I read in the Diablo series were awful) though I do need to read them all at some point to help get the lore sections of the wiki up to snuff.
I still want to win though. For the fame and glory? It would be a nice resume boost too, I suppose. After all of the Diablo fan fiction I've written for fun, Halloween and holiday stories galore, I'd be a fool not to enter this contest. Plus, the rules are quite favorable. 3000-10000 words is very generous; I don't think any of my Diablo short stories have been much more than 5000 words, and if I'd had to guess at the size limits on this contest I'd have expected that to be the upper limit. With just 3-5k words to work with, not too much can be done, in terms of spinning a real yarn. 10k words though? That's a lot. That's enough length to do just about anything, with a short story. And if it's not enough length, the fault is with your story trying to become a novella.
I don't think I'll win, no matter how cool an idea I come up with and how well I execute it. Just about every short story contest I've ever seen has chosen something quirky and weird. Some Memento-type thing where it's all told backwards, or has a dual meaning, or is some strange experiment with an unreliable narrator. Stories that freak you out when you realize what's going on, but that don't have any real lasting value, beyond their animating gimmick. And yes, maybe I'm still bitter about some short story contests in college that let poets judge and therefore wound up with ridiculous, incoherent, metaphorical artsy-fartsy crap winners. *cough*
I don't think anything that wacky would win this contest, but I do think it'll be something 4th wall breaking. Some sort of real world cross over with Orcs and Taurens in Times Square, or real people pulled into the World of Warcraft where they must use their knowledge of medicine and technology to survive. I'm not going to write one of those, since they don't interest me, so I'm not going to win. I do want to at least score one of the book collections though, and more importantly, I want to write something I'll feel proud of. To that end I'm trying to think up something more creative than my usual "start at 11pm on October 31st" Halloween action/horror story.
I want to use the length allotment and delve into something more deeply and creatively than I have previously. My initial thought was to trace a character's whole life. Start with a young boy as he enters the Paladin training academy, or a Barbarian lad surviving some kind of Sparta-like upbringing. I'd have written it with vignettes; a page or two every few years, hitting on some key moment in his (or her) life, and leading up to graduation and then going out into the real world. Maybe continuing through a whole life, until defeat or dwindling in old age. I might still do that for some sort of ongoing website fan fiction feature, but I don't think I'll do it for this contest.
My current thought is a "sympathy for the devil" sort of approach. Write something from the PoV of one of the demons, and humanize them thorough it, without breaking the world fiction. The demon would still be basically evil, but he would have his own goals and ideals and worries, and would be working to accomplish those, instead of just existing as a monster to pop up and be killed by the human heroes. My favorite part of the LotR movies were the scenes of the Orcs living in their own societies and interacting without human interference. I'd love to see that done in the Diablo world. What's it really like in Hell? The game fiction talks about civil wars and demon factions battling and political strife, but only in very general terms. It's very undeveloped, undiscovered territory. (Unless some of the later Diablo novels delved into those topics. Demonstrating once again that I really should have forced myself to read them all, given my online job description.)
Whatever I do, I've got to get started soon. The deadline is this Sunday.
As for the lack of blog post here, besides all of my real life business, I've got another problem. I can't seem to squeeze out a BlackChampagne.com post that's under 2000 words. Every time I think of some topic I want to address here, the post turns into an essay-length article that usually requires tons of links and research. (This one probably will too.) Even though I type very quickly and seldom rewrite or edit these entries, I still spend an hour or two, as I get distracted reading this and that during the research/link-hunting phase. I'm not lacking for blog interest or inspiration, I just feel like I'd rather not post at all than do a half-assed job on something I want to discuss.
Which is my excuse for more or less dumping this next bit, without really discussing or analyzing it.
It's getting very interesting to observe the hysteria and conspiracy theorizing that's coming out of the right wing these days. There's that looney bomb thrower of a congresswoman from Minnesota, every sub-Rush radio ranter, Glenn Beck on FOX TV, etc. Beck is my chief motivation for this post, since he seems to make the blogosphere every day with another unhinged rant. I defy you to watch this clip without questioning his sanity. Colbert's satirizing antics are over the top, but at least he's clearly joking. Beck... dunno? He's either a jester or a madman. And I don't mean that rhetorically. If some random dude unleashed an equally sobbing, slobbering, rambling diatribe on a public street, he would be arrested and remanded to undergo psychiatric evaluation.
I don't know if Beck's crazy antics that gets quoted online are representative of his overall content, and I feel he must be, Ann Coulter-style, playing the fool for publicity and career-gain. But it's worrying, since he (and she) are such monomaniacal fools that would happily march their viewers over the brink for more book sales and higher rating. Plenty of normal, sensible people watch them for various reasons, but there's a smaller core of disenfranchised, unemployed, frightened, gun-hording nuts who are, increasingly, beginning to act on the paranoia the constant rabble-rousing and conspiracy theory-spreading right wing media creates.
The guy with the machine gun who ambushed those cops in Pittsburgh is a perfect example. Young, dumb, white, paranoid, gullible, neo-Nazi racist, lacking real friends or family or a career, unable to adapt to the changing world, and feeling totally powerless with the anchors of his lack of education and fossilized social views. He was consumed with paranoid terror over crazy stuff no normal person takes seriously. (To our great peril!!! *cough*) State sovereignty, UN one world governments coming to take our guns, (And wimmen. And jerrrrrrbssssss!) etc. And he was able to obtain a great deal of firepower, so when he eventually snapped he took others with him. It's fortunate that he was a loser without the ambition to get all Columbine on his office or some local school.
That's just one case. Read any random every blog post by David Niewart, an author who monitors the racist right wing fever swamps. I can't read most of his stuff, since it's just too depressing and scary. The amount of dangerous, gun-hording, useful idiot, neo-Nazi maniacs in the US, reading conspiracy theory craziness online, ditto'ing at Rush and Hannity and Malkin, buying every lie they're told, and trying to work up the courage to go out in a blaze of ignoble glory may well be approaching some sort of breaking point.
They're self-perpetuating and caught in a feedback loop. They're terrified that Obama, who was a center-left politician in Illinois, campaigned for the highest office as a center-left politician, and has governed from the center-left as president, is a fascist or a communist (not that they have any idea what those words mean, but they sound scary) and they think of the government coming to get them. So they horde guns and stockpile food and refuse to pay their taxes and break lot sof laws and harass their neighbors, which leads to complaints being filed, which leads to police intervention, which leads to the discovery that they're gun nuts with illegal weapons, which leads to... the government coming to get them. They're slacker Randy Weavers heading for their own private Ruby Ridges.
The great irony is that during the previous presidential administration, the government really was disappearing people (innocent and otherwise), spiriting them off to secret military prisons and international gulags, where they were stripped of all legal rights, tortured, held in solitary confinement, denied legal recourse, etc. But that was okay, since Bush only did that to terrorists. And we know that decent white Americans are never terrorists.
A lot of writers and bloggers are doing what I'd do about it, if I had the time and inclination to study the phenomena more closely. Try to figure out the psychology motivating this craziness. What's setting them off now? There are lots of factors; economic distress, cultural changes, a black president, etc. Anything and everything is adding up, I suspect. Plus, most of this kind of behavior is motivated by feelings of fright and paranoia, and it's easy to feel paranoid when the vast majority of Americans think you're crazy and your politicians have been overwhelmingly repudiated in the last two elections.
I'd go on... but this is one of the short posts, remember?
