A lighter note.

The great and wonderful Pia Savage has posted her second Psychology Today piece. In it, she describes her first panic attack, which took place during notebook inspection day in the second grade.

As someone to whom notes were superfluous and taking them was like trying to throw with my off hand, I personally appreciate her sharing her own experience.

I'm going to go ahead and assume that if anyone reading this doesn't already know what's going on in Egypt right now, they can damn well find out on their own and I don't need to speak on it with an unearned air of authority.

I will say this. During the day while I was taking a break from rather dusty housework, I was glued to twitter. among the tweets about the clashes between protesters and brownshirts, something hilarious happened.

The National Organization for Marriage linked this cartoon from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal  on their blog.

Naturally, they didn't get the joke. For thinking people, culture shock is a source of humor and/or discomfort. For Defenders of Marriage, it's evidence that something is well and truly wrong with the Universe.

SMBC is authored by Zach Weiner, who in addition to having a surname uncannily appropriate for the brand of humor that he has elevated near to the level of High Art, is about the last person who is going to let you get away with subverting his work to fit your message of hate. The thing about hotlinks is that you only control the name of the file that they display. Usually, that's enough.  However...

For me it was a welcome break from hearing about how Anderson Cooper, Katie Couric, Brian Williams, Richard Engel, Nicholas Kristoff, and all of the other reporters out there whose names I can't immediately bring to mind but who are no less worthy of mention are in real danger. Some have said that the attention they've gotten is a distraction, but I disagree.

I warrant that there's a danger of people from the West focusing their sympathies on the people who look like them who came late to the nightmare rather than the people who have lived their whole lives under the conditions that created this crisis, but that's not the only force at work These are the people we invite into our homes every day to get a better understanding of how the world is working. In the United States, their efforts are routine; expected. In Cairo, during this time of crisis, it gives some cause to threaten their lives. If we think only of the faces we know, then we indeed have missed the point.

I am infinitely grateful both for the reporters who shine a light on the darkest moments of human history, and the smart, funny people who make those dark moments easier to bear. Double points for each if they can manage to stand up for the powerless while doing so.

Because I can't seem to fit it in the narrative of the post, I hope everyone had, is having and/or will continue to have a merry and fruitful holiday season

There is a hierarchy of gifts.

The best gifts make one blush at the sheer heft of the expense(of time or money)/consideration/effort/personal significance (usually multiple items from said menu) involved. Some highlight the extent to which the giver knows you. Either they've crafted something that vibrates at a similar pitch to your soul, or they've managed to find something that you'd never thought about owning but find no end of use or enjoyment. Or maybe they've given you something that speaks to the bond shared by the two of you.  In any case, even if you've taken to e-mail or the phone for your thank-yous these days, these ones will have you digging for the stationary and a nice pen.

On a slightly lower level are gifts that are evidence that the other person cares enough about you to pay attention. At some point since the last customary occasion for gift-giving, you mentioned something you needed or lusted after, and they held onto this bit of knowledge until it was time to use it. Bonus points if they went to special effort to keep tabs on whether or not you'd managed to aquire it on your own while simultaneously deflecting any anticipation you may have of what it is.

Then there are those humble tokens that are, at their best, merely neat.  You didn't need them or particularly want them, but all the same it's pretty cool that you have them now.

Each of those tiers has its Platonic ideal, imperfect efforts to achieve that ideal, and backfires("You spent HOW MUCH money so that you could be one of those fuckwads who buys a luxury sedan with a bow on the top as a Christmas gift with no prior consultation with the person who's supposed to be your PARTNER?"), but generally speaking, if you've given a gift that falls into one of those three categories, you've acquitted yourself.

You might say that that's an odd turn of phrase to use to describe giving a gift, but for some people, gift-giving is a part of their job description, as is gift receiving. Witness Hillary Clinton as she sits for an interview with a couple of Australian knuckleheads.



An aside:  You see that part at the very end?  Where the host marvels at the fact that our Secretary of State-- our representative on a world stage littered with the bastard children of the Cold War-- even freaking exists?

That right there was a quick hit of American Exceptionalism, for those of you who may have been jonesing.

A born diplomat can, for the purposes of a discussion, stitch their corner of the world with yours without paying mind to the seam, earnestly dissuading other parties from even noticing that it's there. We should cherish this talent wherever we find it, even if it's possessed by someone about whom we've said and thought fairly mean things in the past (whether or not we would take them back if given the choice). That here the world she's entered is one where a gorilla suit is more likely than a three-piece suit is immaterial.  Even when confronted with fairly odd questions, and there are some more, she responded honestly and in a way that offers unexpected insights.

Personally, I'd like to know how Secretary Clinton would receive a Lamborghini ballcap that doesn't fit and was most likely obtained freely from the sort of confab one goes to if they're the sort of person who might ever buy a Lamborghini-- and, for the purposes of this hypothetical, she isn't, and wouldn't be even if she could afford it-- which was clearly given as a means of keeping up appearances, by someone from whom you expected nothing and whose prior behavior lends one tho believe that they think that this minuscule window into the world of ostentatious motorfuckery, offered to someone who can't afford a used 4-banger, is of value in and of itself.

You know, hypothetically.

It's often been said that it's the thought that counts.  It is far less often noted that this too can be damning.

The Aftermath

Editor's note:  This post has been altered to reflect the fact that maybe not everyone can watch the clip (hi, Google Buzz!)

I wasn't going to say a word about the "Rally to Restore Sanity/Fear" here because anything I'd say about it was likely to have been said by somebody else already.  For instance, somebody has already said this

I have two things to say about Jon Stewart's speech. One: bravo. And two: bravo.

I know this wasn't a political event, but I am a liberal -- a capital-L liberal and a small-L liberal -- and that 'you go, I go, you go, I go' principle, I believe it, and I'm really happy that in my country, over 200,000 people turned out to cheer that.

And there have also been some who have criticized the rally's "pox on both of their houses" message as constituting an oversimplification at best, and false equivalence at worst, clips of which are seen here on yesterday's Daily Show:


For the record, I wouldn't even bother saying any of this if I weren't a huge fan of Jon Stewart.

The boxing gag is brilliant.  But as for the rest?

My intention was not to make no moral judgment between competing arguments... It was to suggest that we be perhaps more judicious with our blanket slander

I'm sure anyone who's watched as much Boston Legal as I have knows this:

IF IT'S TRUE, IT ISN'T SLANDER.

I know that he doesn't literally mean slander, the crime, but given the context of the argument being made against him-- that he's equating actual slanderers to people who say mean, true, things-- the words were poorly chosen to say the least.

Right before that quote, Stewart passive-aggressively exclaimed, "Well, I guess the rally was a massive failure."  Which is funny, because the only person  in those clips who thought that the rally was a massive failure was Bill Maher.

If you were going to say that there was a left-wing equivalent of Bill O' Reilly, you'd be wrong, but if you squinted a little and turned your head, you could be forgiven for mistaking Bill Maher for that fictional entity.

So Bill Maher said that your rally wasn't about anything.  He also said that there's no reason to get a flu shot.

The person who I quoted up above there?  It was Rachel Maddow, who didn't even say a word about the rally on the air outside of that quote, and yet a segment in which she voiced her support of her colleague Keith Olbermann appeared on The Daily Show, for reasons passing understanding.  She was talking about how Keith's suspension on the grounds of private donations he made to three Democratic candidates reflects on the narrative prevalent in the media--some of which is driven by Jon Stewart, but most of which isn't-- that there's no real difference between Fox News and MSNBC.  The full transcript can be found here.  That song, as Stewart once told Jim Cramer under similar circumstances, wasn't about him.
 
As for Keith?  Jon took clips from a segment the Monday after the rally in which Keith made the case that Stewart, in putting clips of Countdown alongside those of Glenn Beck in his blame-the-media mashup, was equating sticking up for the powerless with sticking up for the powerful.  That one of those clips was him using the phrase "un-American Bastard" to refer to a man who'd said "Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims," and who'd utterly refused to admit that he was wrong in doing so (though all that was shown was "un-American Bastard) is I think instructive.  In any case, here's what Keith had to say in the segment preceding that one on Countdown that night:

The overall message that the tone needs to change, that the volume needs to change, was not lost on any of us. The anger in this news hour was not an original part of it, nor was it an artifice that we added to it. It was a response to a threat to this democracy posed by Mr. Bush, and now by his lineal descendants. The anger happened, it will still happen. It is not for ratings and it is not "get angry first and find a reason later."

But there is an institutionalization of it that may no longer be valid. That is "The Worst Persons in the World" segment, which started as a way -- of all things -- of defending Tucker Carlson. It's satire and whimsy have gradually gotten lost in some anger, so in the spirit of the thing, as of right now, I am unilaterally suspending that segment with an eye towards discontinuing it. We don't know how that works long-term. We might bring it back. We might bring back something similar to it. We might kill it outright. And next week, we'll solicit your input.

But I suppose showing that-- or Rachel's statement in support of Stewart-- would ruin the bit.  Which one could say is fair, for a comedian  But in his inveighing against the problems concerning cable news, he seems to be vigorously co-opting at least one of them:  The tendency to pull quotes out of their original context and arrange them in whatever way most fits your own narrative.  Which he doesn't need to do to make his point, and he doesn't need to do to be funny.

Ok, so I saw that clip from The Daily Show this morning, and wrote most of this post on notebook paper while I was riding the subway into Boston to try and get enrolled in Massachusetts' public option.  The last sentence was going to be:  "Instead of what I embedded here, Stewart should have had one of the three people in the video on his show to discuss what bothered them.  Surely, that would have been more in keeping with the spirit of the rally."

And then, I got home, logged in to twitter, and saw this:

Well, there we go.  Everything else I've said still stands though.  And I'd very much doubt that Rachel's appearance in that segment didn't come up in the back-and-forth before the interview was confirmed.

There's No Good News! Only Bad News and Weird News. (Part 1)

ED-- Halfway through writing this I realized what my thesis was, and as it turns out, it's going to take either one or two more posts of this size to flesh it out. They should be finished somewhat more quickly, because I'm no longer trying to condense my thoughts into one easily digestible post.

It's about the beauty of failure. It's about that failure happens to all of us... Every character is not only flawed, but sucks at what they do, and is beautiful at it and Jackson and I suck at what we do, and we try to be beautiful at it, and failure is how you get by. It shows that failure's funny, and it's beautiful and it's life, and it's okay, and it's all we can write because we are big fucking failures.

-Doc Hammer, co-creator of The Venture Brothers 

 That just about everyone who ever believed what they were told about what the future would look like was sold on a bill of goods is hardly a new observation, but the Jet Age took it to the extreme.  Affordable space flight, moon colonies, jetpacks, a cure for cancer, super-efficient Science Farming that would allow us to put an end to world hunger...  All this and more at the turn of the New American Century.

Yeah, about that...

The Venture Brothers is about the hangover that came after the Jet Age bender.  While the title refers to the young adventurers Hank and Dean Venture, the show arguably focuses more on their father,  Dr Thaddeus S. "Rusty" Venture.  The family lives and works in the Zeerust-y Venture Compound built by Rusty's father, Jonas Venture, whose parenting skills were inversely proportional to his propensities in the nebulous field of "super-science,"  Rusty was more or less forced into the life of a boy adventurer a la Johnny Quest-- not even allowed long pants until he left for college, constantly menaced by improbable monsters and costumed freaks... you get the idea.  As for the mark it left on him, imagine a former child star raised by a combination Denny Crane/Captain Kirk who instead of going to camp each summer got kidnapped by ghost pirates.

It's hard to say which Venture is the worse parent.  While Rusty recycled the subliminal learning beds his father used to justify keeping him isolated from the parts of the world not infested with lizard men, disposable henchmen, and superpowered rock stars, he at least seems capable of communicating with his sons.  Jonas, on the other hand, never seemed to be able to turn off his Saturday morning cartoon hero voice.  And while Rusty is a total asshole to his kids, he doesn't hide it under any Rockwell-esque veneer of fatherly pride, which means that when he sends them into mortal peril on a regular basis to stroke his own ego, they don't feel betrayed.  It's just another weekend with their total prick of a father.  He's also taken the precaution of keeping dozens of clones of both boys that he can upload their memories into in the case of disaster.

Ok, so that one can go either way.

In addition to the clones, the Venture Brothers have an additional layer of safety in Special Agent Brock Samson of the Office of Secret Intelligence.   He is, quite simply, the baddest motherfucker on the planet.  Brock didn't want the job at first-- OSI assigned him to Operation Rusty's Blanket as punishment for an op that went south-- but he's come to embrace the job and see the Venture family as his own.  He picks up a lot of Rusty's slack as a father, which has perhaps given Hank and Dean a sliver of hope that they might not wind up quite as fucked up as their dad.

It's hard to say, ultimately, what the damage done to the titular Venture Brothers has been.  They're still works in progress.  It's far easier, however to assess the original Dr. Venture as a father.   Because while he never knew it, he had another son.

 Jonas Venture Junior never met his father because his brother unwittingly swallowed him whole while still in the womb.  He lived undetected in his brothers gullet for forty years. He escaped his brother's gullet at the end of the first season, and immediately set about building a robot battlesuit in order to take his vengeance, which would have succeeded if not for Brock's intervention.

Never exposed to his namesake's unique parenting methods or any of their debilitating side-effects, Jonas Jr wasted no time earning the name he claimed for himself.  The scientific, academic, and philanthropic communities of the world are happy to accept this shiny new Doctor Venture, and didn't bat an eyelash when he opened a museum dedicated to his father where any reference to Rusty was scrubbed and replaced with his own likeness.  Even though the former stars of the Rusty Venture Show were in attendance and selling autographs.

While his skills are sufficient to keep him on the radar for the odd military contract, international summit, or costumed supervillain, it's no secret that he doesn't have the chops his father had.  Hell, he doesn't even have a real doctorate.  Which isn't to say that he has no game.  He's managed to re-animate a corpse,  cobble together a closet-sized VR pleasure chamber out of spare parts-- including some that were a bit... unorthodox-- and build a device capable of projecting sonar back in time allowing one to track anything from any point in space it once occupied to its final destination, which he used  in an attempt to salvage a prototype aircraft of his father's that was scrapped after a test pilot crashed it into the sea in an extended Bowie reference.  But he's never managed to escape the shadow of the original Doctor Venture.  Indeed, it's hard to tell how many of Rusty's inventions were originally Jonas Venture designs left incomplete by his untimely demise.  What else is the genius son of Jonas Venture to do, when the world is expecting, well, the genius son of Jonas Venture?

What else could Willy Loman do but get back in his car and try to sell whatever the fuck it was he kept in that suitcase?  I mean, besides killing himself.

If Rusty is to the the Jet/Golden Age what Willy Loman is to 1940s America, the pint-sized Jonas Venture Junior is a dead ringer for Willy's mysteriously wealthy brother Ben.  Both come into outrageous fortune effortlessly, and are total dicks about it.  JJ's first day out in the sunlight was the same day that Hank and Dean Venture were killed in a tragic homage to Easy Rider.  Distraught (which is confusing in retrospect), Rusty took a one-month sabbatical from Venture Industries, during which Jonas Jr. earned two doctorates, and pulled the rug out from under his brother on every military contract his brother was working on, save for an mostly-finished teleporter that wound up malfunctioning and sending Rusty's body to three random points on the Earth.

Never fight fair with a stranger, indeed.

So Rusty soldiers on, now not only living in the shadow of his father's accomplishments, but also dealing with the unprecedented success of this jerkass who breezed in and pulled his birthright out from under him while the crowd went wild.  And it's not like he has many other career options.  His resume consists of weapons design (for which he isn't qualified on paper), getting kidnapped by costumed weirdos, and getting his kids kidnapped by costumed weirdos.  Will our hero ever, you know, get a life?

Stay tuned.