Plenty is being said about the new New Yorker cover that features Barack Obama in Muslim dress amidst plenty of anti-American symbolism.

The New Yorker is defending it as satire — a mockery of the right-wing distortions of Obama’s background and political leanings.

Obama’s camp is calling it “tasteless and offensive.”

Unfortunately neither side is putting the cultural power of this cover in its full context.

And satire is all about context.

David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, actually said in his defense: “The idea that we would publish a cover saying these things literally, I think, is just not in the vocabulary of what we do and who we are.”

This statement sums up for me why, in fact, the cover is somewhat indefensible. Sure, for subscribers of the New Yorker — they get it. They don’t think the New Yorker is trying to undermine the Obama campaign. They’ve read the “Talk of the Town.”

But in the postmodern age, any responsible publisher in any medium needs to know that their images and words, especially the provocative ones, will disseminate to diverse audiences. That doesn’t mean they should avoid satire — but they should make sure their satire works on a broader levels.

Some have suggested they might have shown the images on the cover coming out of bubble above John McCain’s head or being painted by Rush Limbaugh.

Okay, that might work. But this is an extraordinary case. The rumors of Obama’s religious and national leanings are so insidious, so consciously constructed, that to throw the cover into that cesspool without a more direct refutation of that subtle, viral campaign can’t help but perpetuate the mess.

It all reminds me of John Kerry’s inability to see the power of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. With apologies to Marshall McLuhan — in the present political environment, the image or the soundbite is the message. Trusting in the ability of your audience to just “know” the truth isn’t enough anymore.

The following is a personal reflection on the meaning of George Carlin by David Masciotra, published in the “impressions” section of PopPolitics magazine:

How does one make a 14-year-old who hates high school excited about language, learning and politics? One way guaranteed to be effective is to make the entire process painfully funny.

At one point I was that kid, awkwardly stumbling through adolescence, bored by conventional classroom tactics, attempting to determine what interested me as a student and what spoke to me as a human being. Somewhere in the midst of that exploration of self-discovery, I was introduced to counter-cultural comedian George Carlin.

Continue reading “Remembering George Carlin.”

I posted last week about on the power of rumors in this year’s presidential campaign — about how this old-fashioned tactic has taken on new meaning in the digital age. Two subsequent articles have done a great job of explaining the reasons why and how rumors work.

In a New York Times op-ed, Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, experts on how the brain processes memory, discuss how a false rumor — such as that Barack Obama, a Christian, is a Muslim — is very hard to get out of your mind, even after you have been presented with and recognize the truth. Scary stuff:

The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer’s hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man’s curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally. For example, you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don’t remember how you learned it.

This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.

It’s a mind-opening read.

And from another angle, Matthew Mosk of the Washington Post discusses the latest work on political rumors by Danielle Allen at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton (yeah, it’s the free-wheeling genius think tank that was once the research home of Albert Einstein). Allen, an expert in the “the way voters in a democracy gather their information and act on what they learn,” became obsessed with how the rumor of Obama being a Muslim — specifically, the chain e-mail about it that became viral — began and spread.

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The Clinton campaign resorted to race baiting early and often in this election season. And lately they’ve moved on to fear mongering.

But, after reading Orlando Patterson’s New York Times op-ed today, I might have to coin a new phrase: racial fear mongering baiting. OK, that phrase isn’t going anywhere — but Patterson’s analysis of the racial undertones in Clinton’s now infamous “3 a.m.” ad should:

I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad?s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.

This reading shouldn’t have surprised me — pandering to America’s racial prejudices and manipulating America’s fears, of course, have never been mutually exclusive. But I did miss it on my first, cursory viewings of the ad — maybe because I quickly saw and dismissed its evocations of early LBJ and Mondale fear-based ads.

With this perspective, the fact that many voters in Ohio and elsewhere might have fallen for it makes me even more depressed that I already was.

One sign of hope, though, might be that the sleeping white girl that is the initial focus of the ad (the opening sequence is actually old stock footage) is a big Obama supporter — and is letting everyone know it. She’s not sleeping anymore, it seems.

My broader hope is that Americans are not buying this stuff anymore. In this media-saturated political age, in fact, Americans have — maybe unwittingly — become fairly sophisticated viewers of all of these verbal and visual machinations. The initial race baiting, after all, came back to bite the Clintons.

The media will need to help, though. They’ll need to make a bigger deal out of Clinton’s “as far as I know” response to a question about Obama’s religious background.

And they’ll need to jump all over Geraldine Ferraro’s latest series of comments about how Obama is only winning because he’s a black man and she’s only being criticized for thinking that because she’s white.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who thought it rather weird that in between two of the usual thumbs-up reviews in a recent newspaper ad for the “Golden Compass” was a glowing review from … the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops:

“The Golden Compass” Is An Exciting Adventure Story, Entirely In Harmony With Catholic Teaching.

This is not a joke.

Considering the controversy surrounding the film’s release, it should be an encouraging sign for the Conference of Catholic Bishops to make such an unequivocal stand. But as one looks more closely at their full review, it becomes clear that they appreciate the film precisely because it has excised the theological complexity of Phillip Pullman’s novel:

The good news is that the first book’s explicit references to this church have been completely excised with only the term Magisterium retained. The choice is still a bit unfortunate, however, as the word refers so specifically to the church’s teaching authority. Yet the film’s only clue that the Magisterium is a religious body comes in the form of the icons which decorate one of their local headquarters …. Whatever author Pullman’s putative motives in writing the story, writer-director Chris Weitz’s film, taken purely on its own cinematic terms, can be viewed as an exciting adventure story with, at its core, a traditional struggle between good and evil, and a generalized rejection of authoritarianism.

This back-handed compliment of a review brings me back to Donna Freitas, a Catholic theologian who I previously noted defended the film as deeply spiritual.

Freitas, in a recent essay on Salon, argues that the continuing uproar over the film (calls for banning the entire “Dark Materials” trilogy from Catholic libraries, for example) — far from scaring Catholics away from the story — will scare them away from Catholicism itself:

Who is really endangered by all this Pullman hysteria? I worry that the species actually at risk of losing their faith as a result of all the mud being slung about Pullman’s exquisite rereading of the biblical book of Genesis are those Catholics who have read the trilogy and adored it, or (God forbid) had already given it to their kids. I worry that these lovers of great literature now feel like they sit on a dirty little secret that, if revealed, might make them persona non grata in the Catholic world they call home. But, since when are believers supposed to choose between their faith and their imagination? Between the joy of reading and the joy of sects?

As Freitas goes on to explain how her Catholicism, steeped in feminism and liberation theology, is able to see and find inspiration from Pullman’s vision, you can’t help but want the old Catholic guard to get back in touch with their inner child.

Adults don’t get it.

As I look at all the hullaballoo over the new “The Golden Compass” movie (based on the first novel in Philip Pullman’s fantasy trilogy “His Dark Materials“), I am reminded of the Ursula Le Guin pro-fantasy manifesto: “Why Are Americans So Afraid of Dragons?”

In that 1974 essay, Le Guin indicts a general cultural conservatism that sees the freedom and imagination inherent in fantasy literature as a threat, even as American children’s appetite for it seems to be insatiable.

That conservatism apparently still holds some sway today, even if it didn’t mind co-opting C.S. Lewis’ Narnia as a straightforward Christian allegory (which, I’ve argued before, distorts that wonderfully complex world). Conservative Christian groups of many colors are calling for a boycott of the newest potential fantasy juggernaut.

The best response I’ve read so far comes from an unexpected source: a Catholic theologian. Donna Freitas writes in the Boston Globe:

These books are deeply theological, and deeply Christian in their theology. The universe of “His Dark Materials” is permeated by a God in love with creation, who watches out for the meekest of all beings — the poor, the marginalized, and the lost. It is a God who yearns to be loved through our respect for the body, the earth, and through our lives in the here and now. This is a rejection of the more classical notion of a detached, transcendent God, but I am a Catholic theologian, and reading this fantasy trilogy enhanced my sense of the divine, of virtue, of the soul, of my faith in God.

The book’s concept of God, in fact, is what makes Pullman’s work so threatening. His trilogy is not filled with attacks on Christianity, but with attacks on authorities who claim access to one true interpretation of a religion. Pullman’s work is filled with the feminist and liberation strands of Catholic theology that have sustained my own faith, and which threaten the power structure of the church. Pullman’s work is not anti-Christian, but anti-orthodox.

When someone like Freitas so clearly exposes the true motives behind all the fear-mongering, it makes our job easy.

We’ve posted a new article in our online magazine: “Brewing Globalization With a Local Flavor” by Allen McDuffee.

McDuffee writes,

It would seem like a real blunder, maybe even cultural insensitivity, for Starbucks to market a new food product just for the month of Ramadan — the month Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset. But Starbucks executives seem to think this caffeinated version of “think globally, act locally” strikes the right marketing balance.

Read the full article here.

We’ve posted a new article in our online magazine: “Virtual Victories: Hezbollah’s “Special Force 2” by Allen McDuffee.

The article discusses the controversial new video game, which recreates — from Hezbollah’s perspective — last year’s July War between Israel and the Lebanese Shia militia group. It also compares Hezbollah’s efforts to the U.S. Army’s efforts to market itself through the “America’s Army” online game and commercial efforts such as “Full Spectrum Warrior.”

Read the full article here.

I appreciate Michelle Tsai, the “Explainer” last week at Slate, attempting to explain how and why the late former televangelist Tammy Faye Messner became an unlikely gay icon. Tsai attributes it to Tammy Faye’s “perseverance” and her “unique style.” It also helped that she talked about AIDS before it was popular for conservatives to do so and that she ultimately befriended the gay community.

But, to me, that sells the gay community a little short. Randy Shulman, an editor of a gay newsweekly in Washington, D.C., told Neda Ulaby of NPR a few years back that Messner falls into “a tradition of divas in distress who aggressively market themselves to gay men.”

While I wouldn’t be that cynical — and testimonies abound to the genuineness of Messner’s compassion and connection to the gay community later in her life — I do think that her appeal is a little more complicated … and problematic.

The commenters on the article, in fact, do a great job of pointing out the reductive nature of Tsai’s piece. Many of them are offended by the very concept of a “gay icon” — asserting that any assertion of a unified “gay culture” with identical tastes is based more on stereotypes than reality.

But ecoX84 has the most enlightening point:

Women like Tammy Faye and Liza Minnelli become “gay icons” because their larger-than-life femininity draws attention to gender as a performance. Their representation of self is so over the top that it begs imitation from drag queens, and when a drag queen performs Tammy Faye, femininity is exposed as a construction that can be performed by anyone.

In that sense, Tammy Faye is adored less for her own personality and beliefs and more for her initially unwitting intervention into a world of rigid gender expectations.

That’s not to say that some members of the gay community didn’t make a personal connection with her — although many others probably were never able to get over her connections with the evangelical movement that has, quite literally, demonized them.

Looking at the broader cultural context of her appeal, however, it’s important to make the distinction between the performance and the person.

Hey everyone,

I wanted to direct your attention to an article I just published in “American Theatre” magazine about a theater company called The Civilians. In February, I lived with them for a week in Colorado Springs, Colorado, observing their creation of a documentary-style musical about the influence of Evangelical Christianity on the local community.

Hope you enjoy!

(If you’d like to see the story in print, you can find the piece in the July/August 2007 issue)

Trojan condoms has unveiled a new advertising campaign that both CBS and Fox networks have refused to air — apparently because pregnancy prevention is not a good enough reason to promote condom use.

Andrew Adam Newman writes in The New York Times:

Both had accepted Trojan’s previous campaign, which urged condom use because of the possibility that a partner might be H.I.V.-positive, perhaps unknowingly. A 2001 report about condom advertising by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found that, “Some networks draw a strong line between messages about disease prevention — which may be allowed — and those about pregnancy prevention, which may be considered controversial for religious and moral reasons.”

Representatives for both Fox and CBS confirmed that they had refused the ads, but declined to comment further.

In a written response to Trojan, though, Fox said that it had rejected the spot because, “Contraceptive advertising must stress health-related uses rather than the prevention of pregnancy.”

In its rejection, CBS wrote, “while we understand and appreciate the humor of this creative, we do not find it appropriate for our network even with late-night-only restrictions.”

“It’s so hypocritical for any network in this culture to go all puritanical on the subject of condom use when their programming is so salacious,” said Mark Crispin Miller, a media critic who teaches at New York University. “I mean, let’s get real here. Fox and CBS and all of them are in the business of nonstop soft porn, but God forbid we should use a condom in the pursuit of sexual pleasure.”

While Fox and CBS are being criticized for their decision, the commercial itself is drawing mixed reviews.

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The movie “300” has already had its day in the sun, but I just ran across this belated assessment by M. Duss at Alterdestiny.

Duss avoids seeing the film through the simplistic swords-and-sandals/freedom-vs.-tyranny lens through which most critics, whether they liked or not, have viewed it. Instead, he believes it is “as good an illustration of Edward Said’s ideas about Orientalism as I ever expect to see on film”:

I find Said’s work most compelling when he focused on the use of literature and art in the production of knowledge and the maintenance of Western popular assumptions about the Orient. 300 could function as Exhibit A in this regard. The Greek (rational, well-organized, frequently bathed, and white) and Persian (prone to magic, a horde, much less frequently bathed, non-white) ethnic and cultural stereotypes are so blatantly offensive that they come very near subverting themselves. There were parts of the film that really made me wonder if the filmmakers were indeed winking at the audience, such as the Spartans’ “Before we sally forth in defense of reason, let’s consult the Oracle!” bit, but I don’t think so.

[...]

I find it interesting that quite a few people I’ve spoken to have criticized the movie’s representation of the Persians in terms that that I can only describe as Saidian. That is, they recognize the role that popular culture plays in reinforcing assumptions about the Other, and the way that these assumptions service certain political ideologies. The fact that some tech dudes at a party, who had never heard of Edward Said, were casually pointing these things out to me between tequila shots can, I think, be seen as a victory for the better parts of Said’s work.

I’m a sucker for a good allegorical reading.

The last 10 days or so has seen a convergence of seemingly unrelated events which illuminate or cast a dark shadow around the subject of gender and sport. The most high profile of these events was the announcement by former NBA player John Amaechi that he is gay, an announcement tied to the release of a book. As it turns out, the revelation is only one occurrence in a cluster of discreet moments related to the topic of gender and sport and sexuality, a subject that is seldom dealt with in a graceful manner in our society.

The series of stories was presaged by a Feb. 1 story in The New York Times quaintly titled “At Home With Rene Richards” which appeared in the Home Section. Richards, while playing on the Women’s Tennis Tour in 1976, revealed that she had once been a man, Dr. Richard Raskind. Some of you will remember the initial outrage that followed the announcement, and then the endless discussions of Richard’s sexuality and whether she was truly a man or a woman, and if she should be allowed to compete on the tour as a woman. In retrospect the entire tempest was archaic and something out of a lost civilization. Or was it?

The Super Bowl and the Snickers Ad would suggest otherwise. Several reactions surfaced over this commercial. First, there were objections that were voluminous enough for the Snickers people to pull the ad from further airplay. The complaints seemed to have been in two broad categories: those who objected to a “kiss” by two men on moral grounds, and those who objected because it made them uncomfortable. Either way it opened a window on the homophobia to be found in television land on the receiving side of the camera.

But wait there’s more. In the days since the Super Bowl there has been a rush to the Snickers website, an increase in traffic of 16 times the pre-ad traffic. The reactions have varied with descriptions of the ad as “stupid,” “homophobic,” and “homoerotic.” Whatever it may be, it certainly reveals some confusion among Homosapiens Americanus.

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Blogging for The New York Times, Jennifer Michael Hecht discusses New Year’s resolutions and the history of self-denial in the name of self-improvement.

Go discover the history of Graham crackers. And don’t forget to toast the New Year, preferably with red wine.

Shortly after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter announced,”It’s the end of the age of irony” — just one of many proclamations that augured a more somber cultural landscape.

The effect of 9/11 on pop culture is chief among the angles used to contextualize today’s five-year anniversary. Interested readers may want to start with a visit to the Boston Globe website, where in addition to reading a package of stories on how the arts world has responded — including theater, music and books — you can listen to the newspaper’s television, film and pop culture critics discuss the differences between television and movies’ handling of 9/11 and its aftermath.

The Philadelphia Inquirer looks back at how quickly life returned to “normal” after 9/11 in an article titled, “A more serious country? Get serious.” Case in point: Within six months of 9/11, “Fear Factor” aired the Playboy-centerfold edition.

“Those irony pronouncements were coming from people who profoundly misunderstood the nature of American popular culture,” Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture and television at Syracuse University, tells the Inquirer. “No matter how horrific the event, to expect an entire culture to change in one day is like going on a diet and expecting to lose 100 pounds in one day. Cultures absorb events like 9/11. American culture is a powerful solvent.”

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