As we wait for Barack Obama to announce his vice-presidential running mate, everyone is having a bit too much fun with the fact that anyone can sign up to be “the first to know” — through a text message (text “VP” to 62262) or e-mail sent directly from the Obama campaign.

Our friend Deanna Zandt over at GRITtv introduced me today to the concept of “rickrolling” (as in Rick Astley — you gotta follow that link) and the variety of fake Twitter and text messages that purport have The Answer.

And Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune confesses that the whole process is making her feel like she is back in high school:

I think it would be totally awesome if John texted me his vp choice too. But John has made minus-zero effort to court me the newfangled way.

Is it my fault John doesn’t text? He’ll probably name his vp at something totally 20th Century, like a news conference. Don’t blame me if he’s not a good communicator.

Barack, see, he understands my needs. He makes me feel special. He let me know he wanted my cell number. Wanted it bad. I was, like, totally flattered.

And after I texted him my info—btw, his number’s 62262—he texted a reply:

“Welcome to Obama Mobile. You will now be one of the 1st notified when the VP candidate is selected. Text HELP for help. Std charges apply. Please forward.”

Charges? I was not thrilled to see this relationship was going to cost me $$ but whatever. Life is not a freebie Valentine. At least he wrote back.

So who is it going to be? John Lumea over at Huffington Post argues for some unconventional VP wisdom.

This election year, instead of dreaded “swiftboating,” the chief Republican campaign tactic is rather old-fashioned: rumors. Granted, rumors take on a whole new meaning in the digital age, but they work by the same word-of-mouth method they always have.

I was heartened by the fact that the Obama campaign saw this new/old reality and decided to enter the fray, instead of hoping it all goes away. They created a website — Fight the Smears — that attempts to counter every “smear” with “the truth.”

Unfortunately, the site is rather lame. It should be a daily blog that acts as a watchdog of the media coverage, but instead, its static feel and lack of updated content gives interested readers no reason to return.

Better to rely on independent sources such as Michelle Obama Watch — which has the grassroots type of energy that the Obama campaign has, until now, displayed itself.

Or, maybe take the satirical advice of Christopher Beam at Slate, who lists a series of alternative rumors that he thinks the Obama campaign should actively encourage. Here’s some of my favorites from the fairly long list:

Barack Obama goes to church every morning. He goes to church every afternoon. He goes to church every evening. He is IN CHURCH RIGHT NOW [...]

Barack Obama’s skin is the color of AMERICAN SOIL.

Barack Obama buys AMERICAN STUFF. He owns a FORD, a BASEBALL TEAM, and a COMPUTER HE BUILT HIMSELF FROM AMERICAN PARTS. He travels mostly by FORKLIFT.

Barack Obama says that Americans cling to GUNS and RELIGION because they are AWESOME.

Our latest pop culture round-up is up at the Britannica Blog.

It includes some new commentary on Hollywood’s version of Jane Austen, the influential yet controversial legacy of “American Bandstand,” and Hallmark’s latest cultural appropriation — an example of which is featured here.

You can also check out my other post on the world’s largest music lesson — which I witnessed first-hand Tuesday night. Nothing like seeing close to 1400 guitarists strumming Woody Guthrie.

Brian Van Holt as Butchie Yost, Ed O’Neill as Bill Jacks and Austin Nichols as “John from Cincinnati”

In this case, it’s really television off the radar. David Milch’s “John from Cincinnati” (Sunday nights on HBO) is so bizarre at times — so frustratingly murky and unstable — that the fear isn’t really that it will fail to reach a wide audience. There is clearly no chance of that ever happening. The real anxiety is that it will alienate even the most avid David Milch fans, who are still mourning the loss his last, truncated masterpiece, “Deadwood.”

And in a cruel twist of fate, it actually might come down to a choice between another season of “JC” or fulfilling a promise that Milch and HBO made to wrap up “Deadwood” in two two-hour movies.

Right now, the choice would seem to be a no-brainer. While “Deadwood” was challenging in many ways — from putting poetic language into the mouths of frontier ruffians to presenting moral conflicts that would tear characters and the audience apart — it was grounded in an historical reality and a novelistic sense of character and plot development. Its allegorical power also became fairly clear as the series developed: this frontier town in the 1800s was going through political and communication revolutions that were remarkably resonant with our present-day.

The extreme nature of its violence, sex and language (poetic and otherwise) assured it a marginal place at best on the pop culture spectrum, but it was still a story you could enjoy retelling to friends, while cajoling them to rent the first season.

“JC,” on the other hand, is almost done with its first season, and the audience has little idea of the nature of even the most basic forces propelling the narrative. Yes, a family of surfers — the Yosts — is sorting through a complicated history of dysfunctional relationships, drug abuse, and celebrity. Other that their situation, however, nothing else is clear.

The mysterious and mystical title character has taken on a larger role as the season progressed, moving through many of the characters’ lives simultaneously, displaying superhuman abilities. Whether he’s a “shape-shifter” (which is how one character sees him) or a Christ figure (which his initials and his persistent references to his “Father’s words” imply), the audience is given very few clues.

Some critics, who have otherwise been sympathetic to adventurous TV, have had enough. Heather Havrilesky of Salon has already called it a “wipe-out“:

All of the stuff that worked on “Deadwood” — the odd speech patterns, the strange non sequiturs, the quirky interactions of the community at large — don’t work here nearly as well. When people speak strangely and say absurd things, sometimes, they’re just seem like weirdos. And hey, I’m all for weirdos. But an entire town full of freaks who mill about, without any clear motivations or goals beyond upsetting each other?

But many others are doing what Milch wants them to do: letting go of our traditional expectations of a linear, goal-oriented narrative and appreciating the show on its own, logic-defying terms.

Before I discuss those celebrating the show, though, you might be asking how I know what Milch wants the audience to understand. Well, let me in on the big secret that shouldn’t really be a secret.

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A Virtual Moral and Spiritual Crisis: Mitt Romney’s latest campaign ad identifies video games as part of “a cesspool of violence and sex and drugs and indolence and perversions” in which “our children now swim.” Matt Peckham of PC World (yes, PC World) correctly tags Romney as just the latest in a long line of politicians that have fomented a “climate of fear” to create a more malleable populus.

By the way, is gambling “indolence” or a “perversion”? In either case, Romney will probably be happy to know that the producers of Second Life have outlawed gambling in their virtual world — which is beginning to feel like a “ghost town,” according to ValleyWag.

On the other hand, evangelizing is making a much smoother move into that same world — at least for the Jesuits. Father Antonio Spadaro tells the Financial Times: “This virtual Second Life is becoming populated with churches, mosques, temples, cathedrals. synagogues, places of prayer of all kinds. And behind an avatar there is a man or a woman, perhaps searching for God and faith, perhaps with very strong spiritual needs.” (Thanks, Lede, for the lead)

And whether it’s Second Life, MySpace or Facebook, Henry Jenkins, building off of Danah Boyd’s research, wants us to consider the “participation gap” among online users.

Drawing Well: Tim Cavanaugh of the Los Angeles Times is surprised to learn that sales of comic books have been increasingly steadily for the last five years. He’s been used to hearing only of the impending death of the genre:

If it’s striking how many movies are based on comic book properties these days, it’s even more striking how few of those properties were minted within the last decade or so … A favorite sport of industry watchers is figuring out just how the form went from being something youthful and dynamic to becoming something fearful, risk-averse and cramped.

He sees some hope in — you guessed it — the web, where sites like PvP and Modern Tales are pushing the envelope and turning a profit.

Comic books, of course, have always been a strange mixture of regressive and forward-looking ideologies. Lyle Masaki at AfterElton is sure to spark a conversation with his list of “ten of the coolest gay superheroes you (probably) haven’t heard of.”

Adhir Kalyan as Raja in “Aliens in America”

Aliens in Hollywood: Lisa de Moreas, whose laugh-out-loud columns make me feel like she’s a stand-up comedian in a television critic’s body, is having her usual fun at the summer press tour in Beverly Hills. But the story she tells in the second part of this column is both funny and revealing.

De Moreas loves the upcoming CW sitcom “Aliens in America” — in which a Pakistani exchange student finds both friendship and prejudice in America. She sees it as the next coming of “Freaks and Geeks” (and from the hilarious trailer, I’m probably going to agree).

Other critics, though, took great offense at its portrayal of a bigoted Middle America. De Moreas’ transcription of the critics’ confrontation with “Aliens in America” producers could be the basis for a sitcom itself.

Black is Intellectual: African American public intellectuals are not a rare breed — the incestuous mainstream media just make it feel that way, according to David A. Love’s insightful analysis in The Black Commentator.

Mark Anthony Neal’s defense of Michael Eric Dyson in PopMatters makes a similar point from another direction. Dyson, according to Neal, has been the source of scorn both for his popularity and for presenting too reductive and celebratory a picture black life: “This widely circulated and decidedly worn ‘poverty pimp’ thesis has been applied to figures as diverse as Reverend Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, and the current cadre of hip-hop generation intellectuals, who supposedly, as the critique goes, wallow in victimization and refuse to hold the black rank-and-file, particularly black youth, accountable for bad behavior.”

But Neal says we should show praise Dyson and others who have “leveraged the appeal of popular culture” — whether that’s television, hip hop, etc — to fight the good fight. Neal brings up BlackProf.com and Professor Kim’s News Notes — which we have been long fans of here at PopPolitics — as examples of how black intellectuals have harnessed the blogosphere.

Finally, Cornel West himself reinforces both Love’s and Neal’s perspective in a recent interview with the Washington Post, where he defends Dyson and his own forays into music and other modes of cultural expression.

I Want My Culture Back: David Browne and Alan Riding, from two very different perspectives, are lamenting the demise of serious culture — art that challenges us, both intellectually and politically.

Browne, in his “Anti-Cheese Manifesto” for the Huffington Post, admits his own obsessions with low-brow pop culture but refuses to celebrate them: “The danger in perpetually embracing the awful is the way it trivializes sincerity and makes earnestness seem mawkish and old-fashioned. It says: Don’t take it all so seriously, since nothing matters … Perhaps it is simpler to chuckle than invest genuine feeling in anything, since that can be too chancy, too uncool, and too emotionally risky.”

And Riding, in a column for the International Herald Tribune, writes from a more nostalgic perspective, recalling the way the arts in the past have directly challenged corrupt and repressive governments. He sees recent spectacles like Live Earth as symptomatic of a culture that values performance over action.

Viva Ruth Frankenburg: Speaking of intellectuals, culture and political engagement, it’s worth reading some of the homages to the recently deceased Ruth Frankenberg, a ground-breaking British-born sociologist. Donna Haraway, an exemplary intellectual in her own right, wrote the obituary for the Guardian, in which she praised her feminism and anti-racism — and her nuanced exploration of the complicated intersection between the two. Dana Goldstein has a more personal response to Frankenburg’s work on her blog, Une flâneuse.

Our latest pop culture round-up is up at the Britannica Blog. It includes some new commentary on the recent YouTube presidential debates, which I found a “refreshing” example of Politics 2.0 at its best, and on Barbie’s new website, which is not very refreshing at all in its homage to consumerism.

We will be expanding on those topics and others at PopPolitics in the next few days.

Paris Hilton votes! Oh, wait, she just pretends she does. Does it matter?

The conventional wisdom says that we are in the middle of a political revolution. Politicians are hitting every stop on the information superhighway, and the public can’t get enough of this new-found intimacy with politicians — or at least the parodies of them.

OK, I realize it’s not the type of revolution you were hoping for. No regimes are toppling. No war is ending. And, until an election proves otherwise, young people still don’t like going to the polls.

But earlier this week I could get a live stream of Chris Dodd’s campaign headquarters … for free!

Ah, the more things change, the more the political process finds a new way to bore us out of our minds — and our desire to make a genuine difference.

By the way, you can still get politics on TV — although truth, unless you’re watching C-SPAN or the Colbert Report, is a little harder to come by.

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Update at 4:00 p.m.: Sources from “The Obama Girl Team” have informed me that their new video is a musical parody of Brandy and Monica’s 1998 hit ‘The Boy Is Mine.” The video itself is loosely based on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” Both of them I’m familiar with — but neither of them have been on my radar for awhile. (Lisa Tozzi, writing for “The Caucus” blog at the New York Times, and others amazingly seem to have figured out both of those references all by themselves).

But I must say that I do appreciate the attempt (and look forward to future ones). The Obama Girl Team’s irreverent intervention into mainstream media’s political discourse — whose obsession with image is always ripe for ridicule — is refreshing.

In a world where pole-dancing and going to “babe chain restaurants” like Hawaiian Tropic Zone are considered “empowering,” using scantily-clad women as sources of satire is near-impossible, especially if your point is to criticize a culture that revels in objectifying its women.

Stephen Colbert, our present-day master of satire, pulls it off. But it should come with a warning that the kids shouldn’t try this at home.

Enter the latest video from the creators of Obama Girl: “Debate ‘08: Obama Girl vs Giuliani Girl.” The satire in the new video, unfortunately, is neither funny nor poignant — if it’s even there at all.

Last month I was one of the few voices who thought there was a real satirical point to the original “I’ve Got a Crush … on Obama” video. I didn’t think it was a tremendously nuanced point, but I also didn’t think it was a harmful one — for a campaign or for women.

The power of the first video had to do with the freshness of its ridicule. No one up to that point had gone that far to mock the intersection of politics, celebrity and the web’s homegrown culture (while at the same time effectively parodying the classic moves of female singers in hip hop videos).

The new video, however, feels more like an exploitative stunt than a political commentary, however tepid. Unlike last time, of course, it’s getting plenty of mainstream press from the beginning — just like “Hott 4 Hill,” an inferior Obama Girl parody.

Once the novelty wears off, though, let’s hope we hold them all up to higher standards.

OK, who am I kidding? Read to the end of the New Yorker’s interview with the owner of the new Hawaiian Tropic Zone. When it comes to representations of women, we’re still digging ourselves out of the stone age.

You know when you’re a kid and you always dream of writing the ultimate Encyclopaedia Britannica entry? OK, maybe we didn’t share the same childhood ambitions — but you can nevertheless understand why PopPolitics is proud to announce that we have begun publishing over at Britannica’s dynamic blog.

Bernie’s first entry is a “Heard ‘Round the Web” digest of recent cultural news and criticism. This pop culture round-up is a new bi-monthly feature for Britannica. We’ll also periodically chime in with original analysis.

We are proud to be part of very impressive group of bloggers at Britannica — academics, journalists and authors whom we have long admired. The correct pop culture allusion at this point would be the quote Garth: “We are not worthy!” But we are going to do our best to pretend we are.

Since I should have had this up on Friday, you get double the pleasure:

Molly Parker as Alma Garret in “Deadwood”

Best Best: We’ve said it before, but we think Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune is one of the best TV critics around — so who better to go to for a list of the best performances of the just-concluded 2006-2007 TV season. Ryan has so far created three lists: best leading actresses in dramas, best leading actors in dramas, and best leading actors in comedies (not really sure where the funny women are — but we’re sure they’re coming soon).

The performances that made the lists shouldn’t come as surprises — but they probably will for many people, since so few sources of television criticism focus purely on quality and ignore popular appeal. Where else, for example, will we find much-deserved recognition for Paula Malcomson, Molly Parker and Robin Weigert — the triumvirate of women who unassumingly provide the driving force between HBO’s “Deadwood” — a show that on the surface should be all about the guys.

Before Hillary: For a broader look at “women in film and TV (and a book) who have served in the highest (or second-highest) office in the land,” check out this growing list and discussion of “Women Who Rule” at AfterEllen.com.

Crazy Representations: Film and television can’t seem to get enough of psychiatric disorders — whether it’s the schizophrenia in “A Beautiful Mind, ” OCD in “Monk,” mood disorders in the “Sopranos,” or the endless string of serial killers on the big and small screen. Carla Di Fonzo of the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal explores both why audiences are so fascinated by them — and which representations impress real psychiatrists. Suffice to say, “Me, Myself and Irene” doesn’t make the cut.

YouSopranos: If you check-in regularly at YouTube, this won’t be news — but several creative souls who were not satisfied with the Sopranos’ finis interruptus have decided to create their own ending.

Emilie Ullerup as Ashley Magnus in “Sanctuary”

Wow … They Have TV on Computers Now: I’ve checked out several webisodes of an online-only sci-fi series “Sanctuary” — and I’m impressed. What will strike you first is how gorgeous it looks, but what might keep you hanging around is the better-than-average acting (from a few semi-familiar faces — at least to fans of sci-fi on TV) and the nuanced writing. The real reason it’s noteworthy, though, is that it’s charging $1.99 for each 15-minute webisode. Will this new content model work? John Doyle of the Globe and Mail thinks it has a good chance.

Atheists Love You: Greta Christina is our new favorite atheist — and it’s not just because she can break down the allegories in “Angel” and “Buffy” (the Jasmine story arc in “Angel” is a damning critique of theocracy, by the way). She frequently makes insightful points about representations of athiesm across the pop culture spectrum — and she’s directed us to the Carnival of the Godless — a periodic wrap-up of all things atheism online. Kudos as well to The Friendly Athiest for using our beloved Cubs as a narrative device for the latest Carnival.

Contrarian of the Week: Props to Gregory Rodriquez of the Los Angeles Times for daring to suggest — in the middle of Parismania — that celebrity-watching is good for me. Not that I believe him, but I appreciate someone who goes that far against the conventional wisdom. Citing British researchers from a few years back, he argues:

Celebrity-watching — if it doesn’t become an all-out obsession — can be a healthy part of adolescent development and bonding. A survey of English schoolchildren revealed that “celebrity attachments” serve as “pseudo-friends” who become the subject of gossip and discussion among their real friends. The kids’ fascination with celebs not only helps them bond with classmates but to become more autonomous from their parents. Meantime, those children who do develop unhealthy fixations on the lives of stars were likely to be lonely and lacking strong bonds with family and friends.

Even if I don’t buy it, Rodriquez is certainly right to decry the “righteousness handwringing” against the “tyranny of infotainment” — much of which comes from the very same hypocritical purveyors of it.

Belly Dancers, Billionaires and Bombers: William Booth of the Washington Post simultaneously reviews, interrogates and praises the new documentary “Reel Bad Arabs” — which “makes the case that Hollywood is obsessed with ‘the three Bs’ — belly dancers, billionaire sheiks and bombers — in a largely unchallenged vilification of Middle Easterners here and abroad.” The documentary centers around the work of Jack Shaheen, a retired Southern Illinois professor who painstakingly has cataloged decades of representations of Arabs on film. Ultimately, Booth explains, Shaheen is simply calling for balance — and a recognition of humanity: “Hollywood still shows black pimps and Latino gangbangers, but pop culture has also made some room for Will Smith and ‘Ugly Betty.’ ‘I’ve seen the Arab hijacker, but where is the Arab father?’ Shaheen says. What we need, he says, seriously, is a sitcom called ‘Everybody Loves Abdullah.’”

A Comical Cultural Divide: “Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean” is the very enticing title of an upcoming book-length analysis of the comics genre by Douglas Wolk. Serious comics criticism is, of course, much-needed and long overdue. Interestingly, though, the excerpt from the book on Salon is a pretty take-no-prisoners attack on a comics culture that is unnecessarily divisive: “The medium’s new enemies are internal: the much less casual snobbery of the commercial mainstream and the art-comics world toward each other, and cartoonists’ nostalgic yearning for the badness of the bad old days. Reading only auteurist art comics is like being a filmgoer who watches only auteurist art cinema, but more than a few art-comics enthusiasts wouldn’t dream of picking up a mainstream comic book, even as entertainment.”

YouWho?: Kathleen Parker of the Orlando Sentinel has a noteworthy response to all the YouTube political madness of late:

For a candidate little known outside of Alaska, for which he served two terms as a U.S. senator, Internet buzz about his weird videos beats no buzz. But has it really come to this? Presidential candidates making spoofy-goofy home movies to win votes?

To be fair, candidates are as much victims as benefactors of the YouTube age, trapped between two dimensions of reality that are fundamentally in conflict. One reality pertains to Americans who have neither the time nor the urge to “get” the latest hip thing. The other concerns the very real phenomenon of a parallel universe where younger, more technologically attuned Americans preside.

Candidates can’t afford to ignore either, but ultimately they’re forced to present two different faces to two different audiences — the plugged and the unplugged, the hip and the un-hip.

The question is: Which is the true face? Which persona will lead the nation? Come Election Day, it may not be so cool to be so cool.

That last question, of course, is a timeless political question — and one that requires a critical thinking electorate to answer.

YouInsurgency: While we might want to rachet down the “Internet buzz” on the presidential campaign trail, the mainstream media would like us to be very scared of how terrorists are manipulating the online world: “Al Qaeda and other terrorist factions are have all the media niches covered. The battle for hearts and minds has gone online and multimedia — and the more the rest of us know this, the better,” reports CBS. Apparently, the terrorists don’t actually see themselves as we do — in grainy, distorted streaming video. What a surprise.

It Wasn’t a WMD, After All: This one’s is a little dated — but we’d still like to give Mark Simpson the final word on “The Gay Bomb” (news of which we previously unearthed here): “The Gay Bomb is here already and it’s been thoroughly tested — on civilians. It was developed not by the U.S.A.F. but by the laboratories of American consumer and pop culture, advertising, and Hollywood. If you want to awaken the enemy to the attractiveness of the male body, try dropping back issues of Men’s Health or GQ on them. Or Abercrombie & Fitch posters. Or Justin Timberlake videos. Or DVDs of 300.”

Consider me an enthusiastic backer of Personal Democracy Forum’s challenge: “Who Will Be America’s First Tech President?” Here is their preliminary list of qualifications:

1. “Declare the Internet a public good in the same way we think of water, electricity, highways, or public education.”
2. “Commit to providing affordable high-speed wireless Internet access nationwide.”
3. “Declare a ‘Net Neutrality‘ standard.”
4. “Instead of ‘No Child Left Behind,’ our goal should be ‘Every Child Connected.’”
5. “Commit to building a Connected Democracy where it becomes commonplace for local as well as national government proceedings to be heard by anyone any time and over time.”
6. “Create a National Tech Corps”

And they are keeping tabs on where the presidential candidates stand on tech issues at TechPresident.com, where they also happen to keep a ticker that lists the rise and fall of each candidate’s Facebook supporters, MySpace friends and YouTube stats (which might not be very revealing but sure is good fun).

Whether or not politicians want to face it fully, though, technology is transforming politics. Or, maybe more appropriately, technology at its best is allowing politics to get back in touch with its roots.

Dave Denison of the Boston Globe recently wrote about how various imaginative new tech projects might just save the bastion of true democratic politics: the traditional New England town meeting.

Having attending town meetings as a citizen of a Vermont small town, I know how precious and powerful face-to-face group decision-making can be. Yet I also know that part of my adoration of this intimate political forum develops from a certain unrealistic idealism. As Denison points out, the town meeting, especially for larger towns, is becoming logistically untenable.

Enter such cool ideas as Virtual Agora and UnChat that attempt to provide visual representations of the participants during online collaborative communication — among other strategies — to attempt to make virtual meetings more personal.

In the end, though, maybe the most promising solution will be something like America Speaks — which doesn’t abandon real face-to-face interaction. It attempts to enhance it:

In such meetings, hundreds or even thousands of people are recruited (selected for demographic balance) to attend a meeting in a large hall. The meeting is “electronic” in that all participants are equipped with wireless communications, linked to a central computer system. Yet it is more intensely face-to-face than a traditional town meeting because people are arranged at round tables to facilitate small-group discussion.

They are given briefing materials and randomly assigned to tables of 10, where they discuss the issue at hand. Working with laptop computers and handheld keypads, each subgroup reports its opinions to a “theme team” that distills the collective judgment of the meeting.

If we can’t find a way to sustain town meetings in the 21st century, after all, how will Vermont ever be able to secede?

Reflecting on the end of “The Sopranos,” critics have spent a great deal of time over the past few weeks reminding us of all the show’s “firsts,” all the ways it broke new ground in television — and in storytelling, in general.

What I haven’t heard anyone mention, though — and what David Chase’s brilliantly provocative finis interruptus emphasized once again — is how “The Sopranos” is one of the first narratives to be embraced by the digital age.

And I use the passive voice in that last sentence consciously. Much of what made the show so compatible with new technologies could not have been anticipated or planned — even though, as the series grew older, David Chase and others behind the creation and marketing of the show became expert manipulators of its digital relationships.

And, when I say “digital,” I’m not simply talking about the fact that the Sopranos was one of the first television series to present itself unabashedly in widescreen format or that, from the beginning, it had a killer website that welcomed both casual visitors and simultaneously gave a forum for the avid fans.

On a more profound level, “The Sopranos” needed the digital world.

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As a high school English teacher, I am speaking from the frontlines of what can only be classified as a war against plagiarism. Teachers at this very moment are putting suspicious phrases from their students’ papers into Google — and more often than you’d like to believe, they are finding a match.

From a teacher’s perspective, this is the dark side of the information revolution. It is now much easier for students to cut and paste lines and whole passages into their “own” essays, as quality sources are only a click away. What is much more disturbing, though, than these acts of plagiarism (which, after all, are only new in form, not substance) is that the ease of it actually makes many students believe that it’s not really wrong.

In this context, I have taken great interest in the debate sparked by Jonathan Lethem’s ingenious article — “The Ecstasy of Influence” — in the April issue of Harper’s magazine. Lethem ultimately defends plagiarism — or at least many forms of it — on the grounds that it is often performed for the public good.

Bob Thompson of the Washington Post nicely summarizes Lethem’s main point:

Listen to Jonathan Lethem hold forth long enough and you’ll come to understand that he sees the question of literary borrowing as part of a larger dialogue between private property and “the commons.” He thinks that artists who take an absolutist position on copyright are complicit in “what is essentially an attack on the public good” — the privatization of things “that should belong to everyone.”

He’s talking about copyright-obsessed corporations like Disney, which Lethem likens to a creative roach motel (”cultural debts flow in, but they don’t flow out”). He’s talking about environmentally essential wetlands paved for private profit. He’s talking about private fortunes exempted from estate taxes because they were supposedly amassed independently of the social fabric surrounding them

What Lethem doesn’t reveal until the end of the Harper’s article is that he has himself plagiarized his entire argument. He concludes the article by revealing the sources of all of his best lines.

After giving props to Lethem for that brilliant manuever, however, I can’t help but feel that his perspective shows a slight naivete. Ultimately, he doesn’t recognize the key role of academic honesty in the educational process. It’s one thing for a creative artist to make something new out of something old, but it’s another thing for someone still learning how to articulate her or his thoughts in writing — to construct an original voice — to avoid the learning process by using the words of someone else.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of what Lethem calls “good plagiarism” — something which the Creative Commons, among others, does a great job of promoting.

And I also recognize that the very concept of “originality” is being redefined in the 21st century. “AhhWoo,” a commenter on the Washington Post article, makes a very valid point: “I’m surprised this article managed to get by without a nod in the direction of YouTube and the mash-up. It seems like to a large extent, Gen Y is defined by its liberal ‘plagiarism’ of popular culture. If there’s a generation gap, it’s that.”

I just believe that my students need to learn about the line between dishonesty and creative adaptation before they cross it. And they need to practice constructing their own voice — which is ultimately the most difficult part about writing and creativity, in general.

They may never write “one true sentence” (which was famously Hemingway’s only goal) — a sentence that comes purely from their own mind. That’s probably impossible — and maybe, to accept Lethem’s premise somewhat, not that desireable in the end. But understanding, through the attempt, that they themselves have something — however mashed-up — to add to the cultural conversation is essential.

Alanis Morissette always seemed more than a little smarter and self-aware than your average pop star — especially when we put her up against the likes of Kelly Clarkson (see end of post).

But even the fact that she’s a big fan of “Curb of Enthusiasm” (for which she provided a cameo in Season 3) did not prepare us for her stunningly satirical take on the Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps,” itself a stunningly brazen act of self-objectification.

You just have to watch it. But first you probably want to re-familiarize yourself with the original before you see the parody:

Are you back from your shower? Okay, here’s Alanis:

At first, I had some obvious questions: Why that song? Why now? And what exactly are she and her “boys” doing? But even before I could gleefully proclaim, “Who cares?” — Mark Blankenship (on his I Totally Hear That blog) decided to explain it all:

My god. Brilliant.

Because not only is Morissette mocking the ludicrousness of “My Humps,” she’s also mocking herself. The fact that she recorded this song in the “Morissette style,” with the haunting piano and angsty wailing in tact, proves that she knows she can sometimes seem like a drippy flower child. And it’s not like when Tori Amos records silly songs in her freak-out-fairy style. A Tori video of “My Humps” would be filled with symbolic images of mountains melting or something. Like when she covered that Eminem song. That shit was scary. Yes, Tori offered a strong critique of Eminem, but she never seems to do the same for herself.

The fact that Alanis copies the images of “My Humps” but changes the sound only points out how over-the-top both she and the Black Eyed Peas can be. It can all be an artifice, she’s saying. Everything hurled at us on the radio or television or movie screen can be an artificial attempt to seem totally authentic, but sometimes it’s all just silly posturing.

And it’s good to be reminded of that.

Plus, remember yesterday when I was saying Pink didn’t manage to criticize the objectification of female sexuality in “Stupid Girls” without becoming the very thing she supposedly opposed? Well, Alanis found a way.

If that kind of wit, intelligence, and humility is in her next album, I’m buying it.

Thanks, Mark. That’s the type of analysis that proves that cultural criticism can actually make culture-watching more fun than it already is.