=>Time Magazine - The Antagonist's 'Obituary of the Year' honoree
Setting aside the question of whether there is any longer a place in the sun for any news weekly magazine, what has happened to Time is particularly sad. It used to be the fount of conventional wisdom alright, but at least it was of an experienced journalistic elite with the ear of the political elite. Now its as if some teenage hacker has broken in and taken over-only worse, its a wannabe teenage hacker. So you get a Notebook full of doo-dad news assembled by ivy league journalism school victims pretending to be skatin' surfin' cyber-savvy whiz kids. Most of this drivel is now signed at Time. I miss the old Time where the reportage was unsigned. But that stuff was edited and written by professionals. And professionals are now few and far between.
The most curious recent Time fiasco was their attempting to handle David Horowitz and his new book, "Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes." On August 30, regular columnist Jack E. White, sought to dispose of this most inconvenient critic of the left in a column titled, "A Real, Live Bigot." Horowitz is particularly inconvenient for those left trying to sustain their radicalism by sleepwalking through the everyday evidence strewn around them that their ideas are fundamentally wrong. Horowitz was born red and was one of the few rigorous engines of the sixties American left. This same rigor now applied on the left as it remains in the academia and media is, one might imagine, quite uncomfortable. Horowitz is one of the best at delineating how vanity and hatred are served by the ostensibly selfless, social concern of the left. So they feel his heat as something unfair, and for David it is a little like shooting fish in a barrel.
So Mr. White, who is of course black, has been hired by the hip posturers at Time to be the one humorless voice of stock black outrage-if it doesn't fire from the pages of Time it would fire at them. Their wise-guy exertions come to a screeching halt at Jack's page, though even he tries, "So many racists, so little time!", at risk of tipping his hand-damn four flusher. So anyway, he calls David every name- well, the two names in the book, and concludes, "I think we'd all be better off if he'd just shut up." This triggered by DH's salon.com piece, "Guns don't kill black people, other blacks do," which characterized the NAACP's lawsuit against gun manufacturers as essentially a bait-and-switch at the black community's expense.
According to Insight magazine (Nov. 22), "Time magazine's editorial board apologized to Horowitz about the August 30 column denouncing him as a bigot." And then in the Nov. 22 issue of Time the apology appeared publicly in the form of a positive review of Horowitz's book by Lance Morrow. Certainly Morrow wouldn't be caught appreciating such a bigot in a signed Time piece unless he meant it, but its phrased awkwardly as if written by an ombudsman, or a teacher attempting to explain an inconvenient truth to five-year olds. It's a minefield shooting fish in a barrel, eh Lance? "Shut up." Yes boss.
=>The Progressive attempts parody. Hundreds feared dead!
Let me try to explain something. I'll write very slowly; read accordingly. Humor is reactionary or its not funny. Human nature is reactionary and funny only if the comedian offers himself as an object of knowing fun. The self-absorbed comic offers himself selflessly to his audience while he models recognizable human failings. It's not as if Jack Benny thought being cheap was cool. Bob Hope played the cowardly song-and-dance man his whole career and graciously offered that character in person to the U.S. military in the field for decades. Woody Allen modeled himself on Hope but succumbed to various pretensions. His self-absorption took over when he decided the job of the comedian was too confining, and thus he became a less generous artist, especially as he has failed to deliver on his pretensions.
So Chase Madar not only attempts parody in the October issue of the Progressive, "Camille as never before," s/he attempts it of Camille Paglia! It's the expenditure of a lot of energy when all s/he really wants to say is "Shut up." And ridicule is not parody. And whoever you are, you're out of your depth or you wouldn't want the Paglia to shut up. You'd have to appreciate Camille Paglia to parody her properly. I think maybe the late Andrea Martin could have performed a parody of her. A friend of mine, after first seeing Paglia on television wondered what it would be like to fuck her. It hadn't occurred to me to wonder that. But I first read her, then heard her addressing a University lecture hall full of idiots, before I saw her on television. Then I thought she had something of a little man complex. Hillary does too though she uses it to fuel delusions rather than to prod her to deliver better (taller) than anyone else as Paglia does. Chase Madar also has a little man complex-Paglia's public profile seems particularly offensive to her/him. For the damage her ideas do the progressive project? That's the story.
Another alleged progressive comic, ?, in November's Z takes on Pat Buchanan but then unable to suspend being progressive he decides Pat is so patently dangerous that humor would be unconscionable. Did you ever see Moe's Adolf? ?, you're no Moe.
=>MTV blames lameness on audience!
Billboard (Nov. 13) reports on the MTV/Youth Intelligence Music Trendsetters Study, and Carla Hay quotes MTV Senior VP of Research and Planning, Todd Cunningham, "MTV is a slave to our audience. We are so committed to research in a number of ways and in giving our audience what they want." Dude also explains that they don't tell the people polled that they are MTV because "when people are told that they're part of a study for MTV, they act differently. We wanted answers that were real." Let me get this straight, MTV is a slave to its audience but that audience will lie if told the questioner is MTV itself. That means that MTV must pretend to lead tastes while aggressively following them. It's like a pretentious American Bandstand only without the music.
If told they were talking to MTV these 55% Caucasian, 20% Black, 15% Hispanic, 10% other would tell them to can all of the shows they're embarrassed they watch and to play more videos. Or they could get violent as they did at Woodstock-MTV's overbearing presence was the most underreported provocation there. Anyone willing to put up with the routinely awful conditions provided for live rock music in this country would certainly have long abandoned MTV to its endless new season of Lifestyles of the Young and the Pseudo. (MTV VJ Dave Whosis interviewed Britney Spears last summer and volunteered that if she ever got sick of music, being a VJ is great.) For music fans to see MTV glomming onto the mother of all live music rip-offs incited the first missile launches from day one, set one.
An accompanying Carla Hay piece chronicles the declining production of rock band music videos. Essentially, a band must be a commercial radio hit for the necessarily major label and band management to agree to fund a video. MTV has begun yet another channel, this one MTV "X," available nowhere but rapidly closing in on M2, still available hardly anywhere. M2 is ostensibly for any and only music videos but in practice means a lot of old early eighties crap mixed with abstract techno videos they have no other place for; MTVX is supposedly a rock channel. Right. Programmed by which NYU intern?! I'm predicting MTVXXX - the barely legal porn channel that is so hip only bi-sexuals can get engorged while watching. Parental Indiscretion Improvised.