Splice Today

I Can't Wait to See Levi Johnston's Johnson

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:55:14 -0500

I don't normally read Playgirl, but you know I will when the Levi Johnston issue hits the Internet. His is sure to be the cock seen ‘round the world. Recently, I nearly died when I read his New York magazine interview. The reporter just had to ask how big his piece was. Levi: "A lot of people ask that, but you're just going to have to wait until next week when the magazine comes out. You will have to wait and see. I'm sorry, you're going to have to." What did the reporter expect him to say?: "It's big, it's beautiful, and you're gonna love it"? Levi may not be the smartest hunter in the forest, but you gotta hand it to the man - from obscurity to Palin Family Pawn to Kathy Griffin, Oprah and Playgirl—this dude knows how to hoe himself out.

And what could be more American than that?

It amuses me that conservative politicians and their BFFs still believe that Americans are all about values, chastity, family, the sanctity of marriage, etc. Remember Palin's whole performance piece during the elections? She was all: "Look at how pious I am."

But who actually cares about piety? What people really want is scandal. Excitement. Newness.

The Internet nearly exploded when a sultry photo of Meghan McCain appeared on her Twitter account. My favorite Republican lets her hair down and holds up an Andy Warhol book right next to her very big boobies, which are all hanging out. Ferosh! The pic was staged, natch. And the message she's delivering is: Hey, I'm young, sexy, hot—and I like Andy Warhol! I'm the Lady GaGa of Republicans. Meghan sure knows how to give Americans what we want: sluts! I'm not saying Meg's is a slut—I'm saying she knows celebrity sluts start the engines of publicity.

That's why I'm so excited about Levi's Playgirl debut. Not because I really want to see his stuff—he's not that hot. Whether he knows it or not, Levi totally captures what being American is all about. Here's a fairly good-looking dude from out-of-nowhere Alaska who the Internet is now obsessed with, and whose dick is gonna be available for all to see. Only in America can you be a celebrity because of your dick.

The funny thing is that now if you read an interview with Levi, he talks up how he wants a career in Hollywood, wants to take acting classes in LA. Oh god, save us all. From farm boy to soft porn to fame whore—it's funny what a little national spotlight will do to you. Oprah is not enough. Kathy Griffin isn't either. Fame's an addictive drug—that much we know from Lady GaGa.

But will our formerly obscure hero's fame last for long? It's hard to tell, right now, when almost everybody is famous. Levi's C-List fame is a reality television celebrity because he was a nobody who is now possibly gonna be a somebody. Nobody knew who he was until a sudden, very public exposure. The thing that keeps Levi down, though, is that he's super dull. As in, not very interesting, can't stand on his own. I don't know that I would go see a movie he was in. But then again, wouldn't I???

I guess that's the value of being in Playgirl: total exposure, exploitation, and you don't even have to talk. Just get hard, and we'll do everything else. Remember Mark Wahlberg? He showed us his stuff in Playgirl, and now he directs television shows. What if Levi Johnston is the next Mark Wahlberg? I know Mark's got a role for him somewhere—maybe on an episode of Entourage?

In some ways, it doesn't really matter what happens to Levi after Playgirl. We will be living with this dude for a little while. Because today, you can be anybody if you understand the engines of publicity. It doesn't really matter what you do—just make a spectacle. I imagine Levi's next gig to be celebrity endorsements of rifles. But so what? He will now be infinitely richer than your or me. Andy Warhol—the most American of us all—did tell us he didn't care what people said about him - he only measured it in inches. Levi doesn't care what we say about him, either. He's just giving us all his inches.

In On the Stupid

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:29:38 -0500

Like it or not, The Twilight Saga is no longer just a story about sparkly vampires making the texting-since-they-could-spell generation swoon—it's become a mirror for preteens that everyone wants to scrutinize as if it were the Rosetta Stone. GQ and Esquire ran rival essays about just what the newest vampire mythos represents, while Gawker promptly disagreed and Rolling Stone had the balls to admit the soundtrack wasn't half-bad. But whether or not Twilight represents fag hags wanting "Glee"-hour nooky or accidental, morbid PR for the American pastimes of baseball and motorcycling, it's necessary to ask just how seriously teens take it. Sure, they divide themselves into team Jacob (werewolf) and team Edward (vamp), but it's important to note that the most prominent reaction at the latest installment of the saga, New Moon, was the same as that at the first: laughter. More than anything, kids think Twilight is funny.

But first, a short look at the plot. This time around, Bella (Kristin Stewart) gets a paper cut at a birthday party thrown by her vampire friends, rendering Jasper (who looks like the candlestick in Beauty and the Beast) helpless to resist her purportedly jasmine-scented blood. Edward, her vampire mate (who she can't sleep with for fear of being eaten) realizes he doesn't want to give Bella a life without sex and birthday cakes and decides to flee the scene. After she stares out the window like a lobotomy patient for three months, Bella starts to hang out with the slightly-younger Jacob (Taylor Lautner) and his posse of oddly hairless, Teen Beat-centerfold werewolves. But before Bella can nuzzle her new suitor, she has to jaunt to Europe to participate in what is the mellow climax of the film, and also its sad attempt at a tribute to vampiredom's origins in the decadent, Catholic annals of Europe.

New Moon found Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke replaced by Chris Weitz, who wrote the screenplay and directed About a Boy and the produced Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist; the screenplay is once again adapted by Melissa Rosenburg (of Dexter and Party of Five—talk about an across-the-board, erratic resume), and little has changed in the tone of dialogue. The special effects that were slightly over-used in the last film (at one point, Edward told Bella to "hang on tight, spidermonkey," and then zipped up a tree) are thankfully reduced a fair amount, although there are plenty of human apparitions and CGI wolf expressions that will less-than-likely impress the Twitter generation. But the biggest tragedy of the series remains: horrible casting and makeup. The only person who isn't wearing an obscene amount of makeup and hair extensions is Kristin Stewart (her eyebrows are all the accessory she needs), while the vampires walk around with honey-brown contacts with pupils that don't expand or contract. The character of clairvoyant vampire Alice seems to have been developed after extensive studies of Clarissa Explains it All and Lizzie McGuire, resulting in a spiky bob cut and lots of carefree jumping over the bottom few stairs. And then there's Taylor Lautner who, despite claiming trace elements of American Indian heritage in his principally European descent, is probably not the most appropriate choice to be representing reservation-dweller Jacob Black—but since he packed on 30 pounds of muscle for the role, he should get at least a nod.

Luckily for Robert Pattinson, his character plays a fairly small part in New Moon. It's almost as if writer Stephenie Meyer anticipated that Edward Cullen could only be played by an awkward heartthrob with a dopey American accent better suited for voicing a friend of Winnie the Pooh or a sad cloud in a Pixar film. At one point, Kristin Stewart says, "I can't do this alone," and it's hard to remember she's not talking about the film. Not that her acting ever reaches beyond lots of gulping, blinking and nervous laughter, but her social-phobic personality takes the movie from bland tomato juice to mediocre bloody mary.

Inevitably, New Moon will boil the blood of all gender studies grad students and simultaneously ignite the hormones of girls in training bras. Bella's accident-prone meagerness gets worse as she obsessively calls her dark beaus and screams at night in their absence, but in place of an Amazonian heroine are two studs that are a far cry from the typical middle-school boy who plays Super Smash Brothers and sits on AIM asking girls what color their nipples are. The fans of Twilight know the films are a far toss from reality, but that doesn't mean they're not in on the joke. In Edward's first scene in New Moon, generic rock music is cued and wind blows his button-up shirt away from his chest, and the girls in the theater laugh. They know it's stupid, and they like it.

Black Money in India

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:37:56 -0500

I hate getting screwed by taxi drivers. I've been to two countries where battling cabbies for accurate fares is a regular part of life and, unfortunately, I'm living in one of those countries right now: India (the other was Morocco). I don't know why this bothers me so much; maybe I just hate when people try to take advantage of me—especially based on my nationality. Maybe I just hate dishonesty in simple business transactions.

It certainly isn't the price that bothers me about India's cab situation. Converted to dollars, an average auto rickshaw ride—about 15 minutes—in Delhi costs about 80 cents. Morocco was a bit more expensive at about three dollars per ride, but still, we're not talking about big bucks here. In Morocco, the constant fight was convincing the drivers to turn on their— mandatory—meters. An unmetered ride, even with negotiations, often cost as much as four times the actual price of the ride.

I was a bit surprised to find that the prices from Delhi's auto drivers—or "taxi wallahs"—generally weren't nearly as outrageous as their Moroccan counterparts. At most, prices may be doubled—in tourist areas they can get a bit higher than that—but typically the taxi wallahs quote you a price about 30 rupees (60 cents) above what the ride should actually cost. In my five weeks here, I've had a single driver agree to use the meter. This was pretty frustrating, but about a week after arriving I noticed that despite agreeing to a price with my driver, he had left the meter on. I was able to watch and figure out exactly how much the ride would have cost if I had paid by meter. And—surprisingly—the meter price was higher. I've now gotten more than a few discounted fares by opting for bargaining instead of the meter.

Simply put, by not running the meter the driver keeps the transaction under the table. The first time I got take out from a posh local restaurant chain, I thought they were trying to rip me off when my total was higher than the prices listed in the menu. I stood, waiting for my food, stewing about the situation, assuming I had been handed a foreigner tax. Then I looked at my receipt—which came with my food—and realized that I hadn't paid a foreigner tax at all, I'd paid actual, legitimate taxes, a 12.5 percent tax that's supposed to be universal.

This was a bit of a shock. The delicious Chinese food cart swarming with locals, the stalls at markets, and even the upscale local grocers all provided their wares tax-free. At an average pharmacy/grocery the owner pulls out a pad of paper, does some math, tells you a number, and puts your cash in a drawer. If the fried rice has 55 rupees written next to it, then you're paying exactly 55 rupees at the Chinese stall.

India's GDP (http://flagcounter.com/factbook/in) calculation can't be close to accurate. The informal market here is off the charts. I have a friend who works with a combination of individuals and multinational companies (for reasons about to become obvious, I can't really say which field). He makes an upper-middle-class income, especially considering he only claims his work with the multinational companies on his taxes. Everything else is, as he calls it, "black money." He estimates that the government is only aware of about 20 percent of actual income-the "white money." Before he began working with the large corporations, his business was entirely black money. He says the 80/20 split between black and white money is common among the upper-middle class, and other people I've talked to say the same. For the middle- and lower-class merchants and drivers, I imagine the split to be even more in favor of black money.

It's bizarre managing my finances here because everything exists in cash. I can calculate about how long it takes to spend a withdrawal, but I don't have the paper trail of restaurants and stores that I could find on my credit card bills before leaving America. My infrequent credit card use isn't due to lack of desire. Indeed I'd much rather limit the horrid foreign withdrawal ATM charges and hoard small bills—without which life becomes increasingly difficult because, apparently, I'm the only one with change in the entire country. Unfortunately, the only places that accept credit card are nicer restaurants-generally overpriced to begin with, and then you have to add the taxes—and multinational chains like Reebok or United Colors of Benetton, whose prices compare to those in the West. If you're paying with a credit card, you're not getting a good deal.

The Indian government would benefit from steering people toward credit card use. Without the paper trail of credit card use, the government is losing out on a ton of tax dollars—especially from the upper-middle class. Everyone I know that started a business here did so without a bank or credit loan and strictly on accumulated capital from their family. These businesses operating outside the bank-backed white money market are a built-in advantage that hurts the lower classes that will never be able to acquire enough raw capital to start their own business without the help of a bank.

One of the primary jump-starters for the Indian economy in the last 20 years was the tearing down of the License Raj, the red tape and bureaucracy that held Indian business hostage for decades. The Indian government, in my opinion, ought to find a way to steer the middle and upper classes toward credit card use, though by avoiding the diktat of regulation. Perhaps the answer is a series of tax breaks for upstart local—or even large multinational-credit card companies to help increase their presence in the country. The lower-middle and lower classes are probably not yet in a position to benefit or utilize credit cards, but reining in some of the upper-middle class's black money would do wonders for the government and be a major step in the long process of bringing greater transparency to the business world at large.

The Unrealized Legend

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:10:51 -0500

I relish the four hours every Sunday afternoon I get to watch the New England Patriots, the team to beat for the better part of the decade. I suppose the Patriots appeal to me because I grew up in the Commonwealth, or because Tom Brady is the single most charismatic athlete on the the planet, or because Wes Welker gets me all nostalgic about my own days on the field.

However, the on-field appeal of the offensive juggernaut of Brady to Welker is not the only reason the Patriots hooked me. I am more attentive to how Head Coach Bill Belichick acts in the interest of his own legacy and how this response will ultimately effect it.

Last Sunday, against the Indianapolis Colts, Belichick made a call that puzzled pretty much everyone. Winning by six and facing fourth down and two yards to go on his own 24-yard line with just about two minutes left in the game, against the league's most potent offense, Belichick went for it. Conventional, conservative, old-school football says punt the ball and force the Colts to drive 70 yards to win. Advanced statistical analysis actually favors Belichick's call, claiming that going for the first down provided greater odds of victory. Belichick himself said he was trying to put his team in the best position to win, but he sounded and looked disingenuous probably because he was. In that moment, Belichick did not see the best opportunity to prevail or home-field advantage in the balance as much as he saw his an opportunity to secure his own legend. The criticism of Belichick's call exhaustively focuses on his hubris and the perception that he is an egotistical maniac, but the only person that can really understand that call is not Trent Dilfer or Tom Brady or Peyton Mannning.

It is his friend Bon Jovi.

About a week before the Pats-Colts game I spent a Saturday night channel hopping with my roommate; we finally stumbled on When We Were Beautiful, the rockumentary of Bon Jovi. When We Were Beautiful is an intimate, depressing look at Bon Jovi's obsession with his own legacy, his neurotic and compulsive need for control, and why he probably hates Bruce Springsteen. More than all of that, When We Were Beautiful reveals the stress that Bon Jovi experiences in the unromantic world of commercialized rock. Bon Jovi's says his legacy will be to touch more people than any other musician, ever. His desire to touch people is actually the extrinsic manifestation for his intrinsic necessity to control everything. At one point in the film, a panoramic shot shows Bon Jovi in the foreground of about 100,000 people at a concert in Munich as he draws their arms right to left with the neck of his guitar. What Bon Jovi wants his legacy to be—an empathetic connection with his audience—and what it actually is—the ability to literally and emotionally control his audience—stands in contrast to the progressive drive of an artist to create.

But Jon Bon Jovi and Bill Belichick have never really created anything. And if you want to be a Legend, you need to create something. You learn nothing about a man based on his success alone. Without creation Bon Jovi is just some guy who sings some songs that are played at bars and Belichick is just that guy who found Tom Brady and won a bunch of games.

The last legendary coach to pace the sidelines was Bill Walsh, the inventor of the West Coast Offense and coach of the San Francisco 49ers. Walsh developed an offense that revolutionized the game and launched the careers of two Hall of Fame quarterbacks. It also won him three Super Bowl rings. Legend is creation, not control.

This is why Bon Jovi and Belichick are friends. They think they can control their legacies. Belichick saw an opportunity to seize it, or at least part of it, by preventing some Sony/Sprint/Taco Bell spokesman named Peyton Manning from touching the field when the game was on the line. How Bill responds to his self-imposed fiasco I suspect is quite predictable; his grip will tighten, he will control more. Bon Jovi will continue to wave his guitar back and forth, hoping that he'll touch more people with 'I'm a Cowboy' than Springsteen's 'Born in the USA' or 'Thunder Road.' While Bill Belichick will one day have his bust enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame and Jon Bon Jovi already sits in the Rock n' Roll Hall, their legends are unrealized. They still need to create them.

The Comfort of Ignorance

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:29:32 -0500

The Right has been hard pressed-though not completely unsuccessful-at finding political gain as President Obama brings historic health care reform closer to reality; education reform into the realm of the possible; and a greater respect for the US on the world stage. Cries of death panels, birth certificates, dithering, supplicating-all stoked by the fires of umbrage-umbrage over every conceivable issue, large and small.

Earlier this year, visual arts professor and contributor for The American Prospect Sharon L. Butler characterized the growing enthusiasm within the art community for what an Obama Administration would mean to this country's cultivation of the arts and humanities:

As Obama tries to steer the country back on track, visual artists and the curators who select and organize their exhibitions are likely to be energized both by a new sense of inclusion and patriotism and by a quieter, more down-to-earth confidence born of the administration's pro-arts policies.

But as for the hope that "the ‘culture wars' that erupted in the 1990s between the arts community and the Christian right will be buried once and for all," the Right has reached for an old standby-the arts as something demeaning, something weak.

Loyal conservative soldiers launched two distinct broadsides against the Obama Administration recently focusing first on the National Endowment for the Arts and then the First Family's art selections for the White House.

Patrick Courrielche, writing for Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood, reported at length on a conference call involving NEA officials and dozens of players in the arts community, a community long undervalued if not ignored outright. The highest charge leveled by the Administration's critics alleges the NEA, a government institution, has used its relationship with a rabidly pro-Obama demographic for political gain. As Courrielche put it, "The making of a machine appeared to be in its infancy, initiated by the NEA, to corral artists to address specific issues."

The issue, fully covered by the Los Angeles Times' excellent culture beat, centers on NEA Director of Communications Yosi Sargent, who worked with Sheppard Fairey (now in a whole heap of trouble completely of his own making) and the "Hope" poster campaign. In the conversation's transcript, Sargent explicitly asks the artists commit their energies to rallying support and volunteers for the Administration's agenda. Later, when asked for specifics, Sargent stayed mum, saying there were legal issues in such explicit instruction.

Did Sargent cross a specific linguistic line early on in the conversation? Sure. He then dialed down the rhetoric. And then he was demoted. And then he resigned knowing full well the conservative avalanche of umbrage would not abate. Remarkably—or not—not a single conservative critic had the presence of mind or a sense of relativity to consider the Bush Administration's firing of Department of Justice officials for blatantly political reasons. One way to put this in perspective is budgetary: The DOJ is a $27.7 billion agency—the NEA a $155 million one. Nor did the disastrous Valerie Plame issue come up in conversation, nor did President Bush's taxpayer-funded ($2.2 billion) White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives which funded such bland, non-inflammatory or apolitical groups such as the Abstinence Education Program. The Right was given a free pass to drool all over this issue.

But this is not to say the NEA was faultless—indeed, it took immediate and thorough actions to quell the situation and restore the agency's impartiality. It is difficult—impossible—to recall a single instance during the Bush Administration when a Republican agency director responded quickly and diligently to an uproar from the opposition. Indeed, Scooter Libby was the top of a mountain of lower-level Bush Administration officials who enjoyed the full weight of an Administration that never admitted wrongdoing' the length and breadth of that Administration's politicization of various departments utterly trivializes Courrielche's hysterical "fear regarding the arts becoming a tool of the state." 1984 this ain't.

As for the arts community being so vehemently pro-Obama, it wouldn't have hurt if anyone had noticed that the chairman for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Jim Leach, was a Republican congressman for 30 years. He voted to impeach President Clinton; investigated him and the First Lady during the Whitewater controversy; voted against military intervention in Iraq; and opposed Newt Gingrich's bid for the Speakership. The fact that this even has to be pointed out is galling.

Though this issue surrounding the NEA initially held the smallest of kernels of truth before it precipitated congressional Republican chest beating and conservative blogospheric histrionics, the second broadside from the right strikes closer to Obama's home.

At issue are two paintings, the first Alma Thomas's "Watusi (Hard Edge)." Michelle Malkin happened upon a small-time blogger's astounding realization that Thomas' piece is, once rotated on its side, a near mirror image (excluding color) of Matisse's "L'Escargot":

I have been on a rant about this for three days. But I mean, really. Look up both images on Google, turn Thomas' 90 degrees to the left (right?) and you tell me if this work should be included in the new White House Collection of American Art, not to mention how the ____ did it ever get chosen for the Hirshhorn in the first place? Can anyone say plagiarism? American art? I don't think so!"

The blogger's misbegotten notion of artistic plagiarism fuels this response from Malkin, "I know, I know. Cries of ‘RAAAAACIST' in 3, 2, 1..."

The sounds she's hearing are not cries, but a collective slapping of the forehead. Thomas' painting is obviously—obviously—based on the Matisse. In fact, that is the point. Art has a rich tradition of defining its present iterations through the lens of the past, and in the mad rush from the right to condemn, to shoot the moon with every perceived flaw, the notion that such a genre of art is, well, conservative is simply missed.

Charades like these only deepen liberals' hateful condescension-both cultural and intellectual-toward conservatives. Another rubber bone for the Right to froth on involves Ed Ruscha's "I Think I'll ... "—which is a cloud of phrases like "Maybe"; "I think I'll"; "Maybe ... no." You can already hear the heavy breathing; perfect example of Obama's waffling, dithering and indecision. And, again, your hand meets for your forehead:

But back to the Ruscha and its purported embrace of indecision. In fact, what it conveys perfectly is not waffling, but thinking. Like so much of the work the Obamas have chosen, it highlights a central difference between two states of mind, the progressive and conservative. "I Think I'll ... " effortlessly and efficiently transmits a psychic inclination that accepts paradox and allows that the world is not only good or evil. The hallmark, so far, of Obama's administration has not actually been indecision, or Clintonian triangulation. It's been a hanging back, waiting till all the facts come in, and for all the ideas to be floated, and then making a (decisive) move. This painting embodies that inclination, and it's not the only one in the collection that does so.

No, the Right certainly isn't alone in its harping; the Left found plenty of fun in President Bush's malapropisms and wayward grammar. (For some reverse bathos, check out Slate's compendium of Bidenisms.)

What pulls at my oil-and-canvas, swinishly liberal heart is how much the Right glorifies in the muddying of nuance, the huge-pile-of-bird-shit-on-the-windshield politics. With aplomb the Right sinks its teeth deeper into the ankle of intellectualism and congratulates itself for taking down the elites. History has never been kind to the consciously ignorant, and if conscious ignorance is all the Right has got—its Becks and Palins—then history will continue to repeat itself.

Schrödinger's Rapist

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:53:45 -0500

Every day on the subway and on the street I'm confronted with the ugly reality of life as a woman in Ne w York, which is this: on the subway, on the street, or in any other public space, women are not safe.

In the four months since friends and I moved from our small, suburban college campus to Manhattan, we have all had to adjust to this reality. We've had experiences that caused fear, frustration and, in some cases, sheer rage. We've been followed, we've been catcalled and we've been groped on the subway. One of my friends dealt with the catcall culture shock by blogging about it. Another bought herself a can of pepper spray. The move to New York forced me think more seriously than ever about the lengths to which I'll go to protect my personal safety.

Last Friday night, on the subway platform at Bryant Park, a man was watching me. When the train arrived, he got into the same car as me. I sat down, observing that he chose to stand about six feet away from me, staring all the while. With every subsequent opening and closing of the subway doors, he edged closer until finally he was within arm's reach, standing over me as I sat resolutely staring straight ahead. Too uncomfortable to stay put, I got up and moved to another part of the car, and he continued to watch. When I got out at 145th St., he got out too, walking behind me as I made my way up the stairs to ground level. Reaching the top of the stairs, my heart was pounding with adrenaline and fear, and I made my way straight to the station manager's booth, babbling incoherently about a fictional problem with my Metrocard, watching out of the corner of my eye as the man made his way out of the station.

Was I in any danger? I can't say for sure. Did I overreact? It's possible. Would I do anything differently, given the chance? Absolutely not. The choice between overreacting and appearing paranoid, or under-reacting and risking danger, is--for me, at least--a clear one. But it's one I wish I didn't have to make.

Dealing with sexual harassment in the form of catcalling, groping and more on a daily basis has been one of the more confronting parts of life in New York, and we're not alone. This is a challenge that women all over New York and the world over face every time they step outside. But even more upsetting than the daily reminders that, as a woman, you're always vulnerable, is the effect that this knowledge has on how a woman sees the world and how she relates to the men around her.

Perhaps the man last Friday night was no threat to me. But that's not a chance I can afford to take. Every day women in New York face sexual harassment of varying degrees and those experiences have taught us to be wary. They've taught us that safe is better than sorry. And they've taught us to assume the worst of the men we meet. The pseudonymous blogger Starling, writing at Shapely Prose, put it best when she wrote:

When you approach me in public, you are Schrödinger's Rapist. You may or may not be a man who would commit rape. I won't know for sure unless you start sexually assaulting me. I can't see inside your head, and I don't know your intentions. If you expect me to trust you--to accept you at face value as a nice sort of guy--you are not only failing to respect my reasonable caution, you are being cavalier about my personal safety.

It is entirely possible that the man on the subway was a nice sort of guy who had no intention of intimidating me, let alone harassing me or, God forbid, raping me. Is it fair that he, or any other nice sort of guy, should be viewed with suspicion or fear that they've done nothing to earn? Of course not. Is it fair to make assumptions about a person based solely on their gender? Of course not. But in a city and a culture where women face sexual harassment and the threat of sexual violence every day, fear and suspicion aren't just understandable. It's plain common sense.

My encounter left me shaking and anxious and awfully glad to get home and close my front door firmly behind me. It also left me feeling deeply saddened. Don't get me wrong: I know that no one is ever perfectly safe anywhere, let alone in New York City. But I don't want to have to view every strange man I encounter as Schrödinger's Rapist. I want to feel safe--we all do--but more than that, I want to be able to trust in the kindness and goodness of strangers. I want to exercise a right I believe all women, and all people, should have: the right not to live in fear of our fellow citizens.

Your Native Tongue is a Crime Against the State

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:49:13 -0500

I am sitting on a bus in the no man's land between Lithuania and the Belarussian border, trying not to look overly shady. I don't know if its working—its been a few months since I've spent any time in a barber's chair, and my izro is getting pretty untamed. Before getting on the bus I wrapped a sweatshirt around my journal and stuffed it into the bottom of my bag—the guy I'm going to visit in Minsk tells me the guards are not overly friendly toward journalists. To the best of my knowledge, all of my documents are correct, a privilege which cost me about $130 at a travel agency near the Vilnius bus-station. Up till this point in the journey I've barely even had to flash my passport, slipping across international boundaries with nary a care in the world.

But then a lot of things about Belarus seem a few ticks out of step with the rest of the world. Composed of that portion of Russia which was under control of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a half-millennium during which the Belarusians developed a language and culture which is slightly, although distinctly, different than their big brother to the east, Belarus suffered in the customary way during the length of communist rule, and their history post-1989 hasn't been any better. A brief period as a republic gave way in the 90s to the reign of President-for-Life Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko, a mustachioed, buffoonish dictator whose rule has been marked by the rapid and continual devaluation of the currency and general, widespread corruption. His attempt to steal the 2006 presidential election resulted in a massive protest in the center of Minsk, the so called 'Jean' or 'Denim' revolution, a revolt which disintegrated when state police intervened in riot gear, subduing the dissidents and jailing the leaders of the opposition. The intervening years have seen little improvement in the life of the average Belarusian, and the economic collapse hit them as hard as hard as it has the rest of the world. In short, it is not a place where one would expect an entry-fee to be required.

Back on the bus my fellow passengers are lining up to disembark, and I follow them in the way I have come to follow anyone who seems to have some vague idea what they're doing. The whitewashed customs building we walk into appears to have been built with the expectation of accommodating a radically higher tourist population than the nation now enjoys-of the 20-odd official checkpoints lining the walls only one is open, lit with a flickering bulb, the rest of the building kept dark to conserve energy. As I stand in the queue my hands are getting sweaty, and long-held images of soviet border crossings flit through my head, bearded men shaking through my bag for kopecks, hours spent in concrete cells for perceived infractions. All of these are dashed when I finally make it to the front of the line and meet the customs official, a Belarusian girl in her mid-20s who would go from being merely pretty to dramatically beautiful with about $2000 worth of dental work. She smiles at me like she knows she shouldn't, helps fill out the one part of my entry visa I messed up on and waves me through.

This proves an excellent introduction to the two most compelling part of Belarusian life-the existence as the last police state in Europe, and the almost inconceivable beauty of their female populace. I have a sneaking suspicion that this last is the reason for the first, that the Belarusian powers-that-be got together and, recognizing the 200-proof purity of their feminine gene pool, conspired to keep any of the native talent from leaving, and set the walls coming in as high as possible. Whatever the reason, Belarus is a fascinating place, mixing Soviet-era totalitarianism with a modernized population playing World of Warcraft and watching bootlegged South Park reruns. My host, Alaksaiel, is a fairly amazing character, the sort of person you could only imagine running into in Eastern Europe. Loscha, 23, has survived cancer and the attentions of the secret police, due to his support of the opposition. After a night spent in a cheap hotel to get my visa registered (and let me tell you, cheap hotel means something different here in the former Soviet Union than it does in the US) we meet at October Square in the center of the city, and he takes me on a tour of his hometown.

Minsk (Mensk) is a prettier city than I expected. Even by the standards of Eastern European capitals, it suffered quite thoroughly during WWII, to the point where virtually nothing exists from before the Soviets came in, and the 'Old Town' might more accurately be described as an 'Old Block and a half'. Still, the rebuilding has a certain pleasant Stalinesque grandeur. The boulevards are wide and tree-lined, a break from the congested alleyways of the Baltic metropolises. The streets are immaculate, Scandinavian clean, and on weekdays legions of school children can be found sweeping debris from parks and sidewalks (an activity, I was not shocked to discover, which is a government-mandated part of the day's curriculum). Also, there are basically no churches in Mensk which, while I wouldn't go so far as calling a good thing, saves me the trouble of walking aimlessly into every cathedral I pass, confirming that, yes, this one has a lot of crosses in it.

But what is most interesting about Mensk is indissolubly bound with what is rather terrible about it-the constant, aggravating presence of the Great Leader, shoved into every aspect of the city. Everything is infused with it—trios of guards (for some reason, in Belarus, they always come in threes) patrol every thoroughfare and avenue, and picture taking is, if not outright forbidden, likely to draw unwanted attention. Like every other Slavic capital it is choc full of monuments to the soldiers of WWII, but Mensk also has a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the original head of the Cheka, the precursor to the KGB, a cuddly Leninite responsible for some tens of thousands of deaths.

The newest and most absurd manifestation of Lushenko's obsession with grandiosity is the national library, a massive, hideous structure several dozen stories high (the exact number is impossible for an outsider to determine, as there are several secret floors lodged within the walls) that looks like nothing so much as if some vengeful god took a vaguely cube-like shit on top of an office building. All tourist information insists, utterly incorrectly, that the library's center is diamond-shaped, as if the viewer, and indeed the entire population of the country, is unaware what a diamond looks like. At night it is illuminated like a Lite-Brite, hundreds of thousands of colored bulbs flashing through the evening sky, rendering the edifice (which, during the day, is imposing if not pretty) almost inconceivably tacky.

The natives are uniformly unimpressed with most of what their pseudo-dictator does, and the whole country has a curiously clownish feel-the cracks in the facade are so large as to be impossible to ignore. Never having visited the U.S.S.R. pre-fall, I cannot say whether this is a characteristic unique to Belarus or if all police states seem so silly. I suspect it is some combination of the two. A dictatorship of this sort thrives on dishonesty, and there are always people who refuse to play along, insisting on looking behind the curtains regardless of what it costs them. But on the other hand it probably becomes a lot harder to blind yourself to the madness when the rest of the planet has moved on and you're still operating as a Soviet time capsule.

Still, this paper tiger can bite, and most people in Mensk have lost a finger or two to its maw. Many of Loscha's friends have spent time in jail (15 days is the usual sentence meted out to those wheels which squeak too loud) and the magazine his girlfriend, Kazia, used to work for as a photojournalist has been closed because the government perceived it as pro-opposition (it has since reopened under a related name-the secret police are apparnetly not hip enough to have put the connection together).

It is axiomatic that all actions in a police state are, by definition, political, but I never quite realized what that meant until I made it to Mensk. Rather than pro- or anti-Lukashenko, the populace might better be divided into active and inactive. In a state where, as one Belarussian I met explained to me, "Everything is lies, everything they tell you is lies," interest in anything exposes the vibrancy of the outside world, and the weakness and stupidity of the regime. As a result all activity becomes defiant—either you sit on your ass drinking beer and watching piped-in, pre-censored Russian television or you spit in the eye of the government.

Alaksaiel is a good example of this—he's not a died-in-the-wool revolutionary; there are no Che posters above his bed and he doesn't spout Bakunin. He'd be quite content to put in his eight hours as a customer service representative at the b2b he works for, go home and eat sushi, mess around on Google Wave and go to bed. But such modest desires are impossible in Belarus, or at least they bump up against the will of the government. Alaksaiel's courage, and the courage of his compatriots, consists in, very simply, living their life as they would prefer to, without regard for the will of their would-be masters. It is impossible not to admire them, not to respect their refusal to be worn down to an automaton. In a nation where the very act of speaking your native language marks you as a rebel, and the consequences for rebellion are real, their fortitude is inspiring.

On the train to Kiev I am considerably more nervous than I was coming in. It occurs to me that entering a police state is not nearly as important a step as getting the hell out of it, and unlike on the bus to Mensk I have violated the terms of my visa in at least three ways, anyone of which would be enough to get me stuck. The guard who walks quietly through the corridor is an unpleasant contrast to the bombshell who stamped me in, closer to my initial image of state security. He takes my passport, runs it through a machine and begins to bark something at me. I adopt my idiot foreigner pose and after a few minutes he gives a tired sigh, hands me my back my documents and moves on. Twenty minutes later the train starts rolling again, pulling us into the promised land of the Ukraine, and I bid a final farewell to Belarus, its beautiful woman and brave populace.

Interview: Opera Chic

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:12:14 -0500

Opera suffers from a dusty popular reputation, something having to do with inherited images of Viking horns and breaking glass. Part of the problem is the unapproachable expense of going to performances-decent seats at the Metropolitan Opera in New York rarely cost less than $100-and scarcely less affordable recordings, usually between $25-50. Yet the melodrama and beauty of the form continues to inspire devotion; singers like Luciano Pavarotti and Maria Callas enjoyed huge popularity in the 20th century throughout every socio-economic class, and contemporary singers like Renée Fleming still sell out venues around the world. And the fact remains that, from Mozart's ethereal The Magic Flute to Britten's spooky The Turn of the Screw, opera contains some of the most vital music ever performed.

Opera has managed to keep itself in the headlines in the Noughties, from Woody Allen's staging of a Puccini opera in Los Angeles last year to David McVicar's controversial 2001 production of Rigoletto in London, which featured an incredible amount of nudity and reset the opening scene from a royal court to a whorehouse. In September, the gala opening of the Met's season got a lot of publicity when audiences booed and walked out of Luc Bondy's production of Puccini's Tosca. One member of the audience, blogger Opera Chic, unapologetically chalked up the controversy to the mediocrity of the director and the audience:

Only in New York, seriously, a half-a$ed minimalist like Bondy could be depicted as some sort of deranged Calixto Bieito by an audience eager to preserve (in amber) Franco Zeffirelli's stagings for all eternity (and obviously Frengo, for all his by0tchyness, does well what he does -- his old Bohème and Tosca and Aida and more than a few other stagings are indeed well thought out and worth seeing -- but, really, how many times? Like, forever?).

That's right. Franco Zeffirelli, who directed the classic 1968 film of Romeo and Juliet, is a byotch, and clearly not the institution Opera Chic wants to live in. A self-described "young, American, classically-trained musician" living in Milan, Opera Chic has made a name through her gossipy, incisive, very funny writing that treats her subject as something too few writers do nowadays—something alive. Her blog occasionally features Perez Hilton-esque MS Paint doodles over pictures of performers, but has also broken serious news, including the Baltimore Opera Company filing for bankruptcy in December 2008. This has led to interviews in Classical Music Magazine and praise from The New Yorker's Alex Ross, for her "fearless, funky-fresh reporting." Splice Today caught up with Opera Chic somewhere between New York and Milan to talk about, among other things, why emo kids should like opera and why only listening to recordings is like so much masturbation.

Splice Today: How do you go about explaining to your hipster friends that it's okay to listen to opera when they give you That Look?

Opera Chic: I don't have any hipster friends (I don't live in Brooklyn). And anyway, opera is so emo it should sell itself to that crowd.

ST: I guess that was more about me, but anyway. It's a very broad question, but how is the state of opera right now?

OC: Hans Werner Henze is still working. It's all good.

ST: You have called Henze "the greatest living composer." What makes him so?

OC: I always call him that-even before Stockhausen passed away, there was no one else like Henze, his accomplishments speak for themselves, all due respect to Dutillieux and Glass and Carter and Sciarrino and Adams and Reich and Saariaho and Knussen and Lindberg et al. Henze represents the victory of music-of warmth-over mid-20th century dogma. He represents serialism with a human face. And his opera output has no peer since, well, Strauss.

ST: This brings up an interesting point: You mention Hans Werner Henze, whose work is frequently overtly political. American composer John Adams' operas—Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, Doctor Atomic—are also very political. You just did a great interview with the poet J.D. McClatchy, who has written a libretto for Giorgio Battistelli's opera based on An Inconvenient Truth. Is contemporary opera more topical than earlier opera, and to what end?

OC: Well, sometimes it makes reference to events that are nearer-19th century Italian censorship for example did not allow that so references could not be that topical. It's more direct because we have more free speech, period. It also became cooler to be liberal, these last couple of centuries.

ST: Your blog is different from much other opera writing because it comes from a young person's perspective. In your experience, are younger people going to the opera?

OC: Sadly, no. Can't blame them, really, it's expensive, it's badly marketed, there's no public education to speak of to introduce kids to classical music anymore. And, frankly, a sizable chunk of opera aficionados don't really make one want to join them in the opera house.

ST: Do you consider yourself to be part of that chunk of the opera audience? I guess it rests on a wider point—should opera be as approachable as pop music?

OC: It can't be as approachable; it's a different beast. It's OK.

ST: The recent reconfiguration of the opera scene in Baltimore (written about in detail by Washington Post's Anne Midgette here)—the flourishing of small, semi-professional companies after the closure of the Baltimore Opera Company last year—has been interesting to watch. Do you think this could become a trend, with larger opera companies becoming unsustainable?

OC: Well, after I broke the news of Baltimore Opera Company filing for bankruptcy, I asked a few contacts what would happen then, and they all pointed out that the opera experience would reconfigure itself in the city, but opera wouldn't disappear. It doesn't mean it didn't suck that the company went under, but opera, like life, always finds a way.

ST: Do you see a future for opera more in smaller chamber settings—or art spaces, like new music ensembles in New York and elsewhere—with fewer of the grand houses like the Met and La Scala?

OC: In smaller cities, yes. Funding dries up, audiences get older, so yes, I think we'll see fewer big companies, and the provinces will have to figure out a different game plan.

ST: You have attended many performances on both sides of the Atlantic. This is a huge generalization, but are there any notable differences between American and European audiences? Does it vary by city?

OC: Well the Italians are about as conservative as we are. The Germans are insanely, almost reflexively radical. But they truly don't seem to understand Verdi's sound. I like the Austrians, the Swiss too.

ST: What's the wildest thing you've seen at a radical German performance?

OC: Appalling abuse of the cimbasso in a Traviata performance. The cops should have stopped them.

ST: The readers will have to imagine what strange and wonderful things can be done to low-brass instruments onstage ... Anyway, as shown by the recent controversy over Luc Bondy's production of Tosca at the Met, there seems to be a divide in opera enthusiasts between more traditional stagings—like those by Franco Zefferelli—and iconoclastic ones, like the minimal, overtly sexual productions by directors including Graham Vick and David McVicar. To go beyond that controversy a bit, what do you think makes a really good opera production?

OC: The problem is that Bondy is very conservative and at the Met he got treated as if he's Calixto Bieito. Which is funny, and sad. Not much sex in Vick, actually, thank goodness, but I get your point. What makes a good opera production was explained much better than I ever could by Vick himself:

A great performance speaks to everybody ... If you put at the heart of an opera company the desire to serve the art form, and genuinely make it available and invite in the complete cross-section of society, then everything that company does comes somehow or other under the heading Education ... the skill to be taught in these programmes, throughout an opera house, to every audience and every sponsor, the skill we are in danger of losing, and the biggest threat to our own art form, is listening. It's the only door you need to open: how to listen.

ST: With "overtly sexual," I was thinking of David McVicar's production of Rigoletto a few years ago at Covent Garden in London, in which they reset the opening scene from a court to a whorehouse. Last spring, one critic called Bieito's Berlin production of Mozart's The Abduction from Seraglio an "inhuman carnival of sex and death." Do you think this sort of reinterpretation does more help or harm to opera's position in contemporary culture? It certainly raises its profile.

OC: It doesn't really raise its profile, it makes normal people think we're nuts. But they won't be coming to the opera anyway, so it doesn't really matter. That Rigoletto [in Berlin] was actually quite good; haven't seen Bieito's Seraglio but his Rake's Progress is a masterpiece. His Wozzeck is very good also. He's no charlatan.

ST: To change subjects—how did you start listening to opera?

OC: At home, my parents' CDs. Then the Met. Juan Diego!

ST: It sounds like it was the live performance that really made you into an addict.

OC: It's the real thing.

ST: Is there a good starting place for listening to opera, or should people just start listening indiscriminately?

OC: I think La Bohème is the perfect gateway drug. As a live show, it's a great introduction to opera. It's witty, it's fun, it's moving, it's easy to follow, the music's very, very catchy. It's memorable.

ST: You have written that it is vital for people to go to opera performances, rather than just listening to them on CD. Why is that?

OC: The unamplified voice-nothing like it, ever. YouTube and HD simulcasts have created this impression that opera is best enjoyed from afar, it's not true, the true visceral experience is there in the opera house, and it always will be. It's the difference between having sex and watching a porno. It's sad that one has to point this out.

Forget the Bourgeois

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:54:44 -0500

Precious has arrived! For anyone following the film world, the push for Precious, at first titled Push, began months ago, in the beginning of the year. It has been a long haul. Some of us are tired.

Now it is here and is bound for Oscar greatness, unless you take Armond White seriously. Precious is brilliant and moving, entertaining and important; you should see it, and keep your eyes on Mo'Nique. While there might be some backlash as a result of the Oprah and Tyler Perry hype, I imagine critics will still lavish it with enough praise to carry it to the Academy Awards in fine shape.

Back to Armond White. White, the enfant terrible of film criticism, finds in Precious a kind of bamboozle. White:

"Not since The Birth of a Nation has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as Precious. Full of brazenly racist clichés (Precious steals and eats an entire bucket of fried chicken), it is a sociological horror show. Offering racist hysteria masquerading as social sensitivity, it’s been acclaimed on the international festival circuit that usually disdains movies about black Americans as somehow inartistic and unworthy."

White wants to revise black film history to include lowbrow schlock that nonetheless portrays black people as happy deviants, not real deviants—or something like that. The truth is his argument isn't very good. His criticism of Precious is old and predictable, even though he masks it under the guise of going against the mainstream.

The truth: Precious is just one film in a long history of black movies that go against "responsible" images of black people.

The tradition of portraying black life as raw, honest, bleak or resistant really began in earnest in the 1960s. According to Donald Bogle, author of the classic review of black cinema, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, writes that the 60s brought a challenge to assimilationist and watered-down stories: "No longer were sad-eyed black people trying to prove their worth in order to fit into white worlds. No longer were submissive, patient Negroes pleading for acceptance. Instead, the headstrong militants appeared."

Bogle documents a lengthy history of 60s cinema, from the relatively reserved Raisin in the Sun (1961), with its sober portrayal of black anger at injustice, to the more openly radical Up Tight (1968) and Slaves (1969), both depicting revolution, modern and historical.

Yet it's the 1970s that was commonly thought to change black cinema, and no one gets more credit than Melvin Van Peebles and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. In truth, Van Peebles has done other, subtler movies, like the complex and fascinating La Permission (Story of a Three-Day Pass), but Sweet Sweetback is so shocking—even today—it absorbs the lion's share of his acclaim. Van Peebles' depiction of the renegade black men, violent and sexual but noble still, resonated with black audiences—male and female—who wanted an image of themselves as active and resistant. Blaxploitation films with female leads like Pam Grier as Foxy Brown provided similar catharsis. The 1970s were a fruitful time for black cinema, too vast for an essay this short.

Still, blaxploitation was fantasy, escapism. It provided an image of black America that, while feasible under some circumstances, was difficult to sustain.

Resistant images took on new forms in 1980s, though perhaps some would characterize it as a lull. Yet it impossible to talk about Precious without noting The Color Purple. Purple's Celie is in many ways the 1980s equivalent of Precious. Like Precious, Celie is a victim of rape, impregnated by her father at a very young age. The movie delves into the dysfunctions of black families in ways that have "similarities … to past films that have portrayed black people disparagingly," Jacqueline Bobo writes in Black women as cultural readers. Yet, for all the criticism levied on the film, black audiences, particularly black women, according to Bobo, identified with the film's characters. Showing black people, and really black women, as survivors, even when it doesn't look "nice" to the rest of America, was a ballsy challenge.

Then we got Spike Lee. Now the most celebrated black filmmaker living today, perhaps ever, Lee began his career with a small movie about a black woman looking to take control of her love life in She's Gotta Have It. The film has admirers and detractors, but it can be said that no film like it ever preceded it. In some ways the anti-Color Purple, it shares with that film a certain in-group dialogue, the idea that this story is about black people managing their own lives.

But it’s Do the Right Thing, inaugurating a second moment of revolutionary black films that gets credit for upsetting norms and challenging the status quo. As much controversy as the film engendered, its popularity within the black community again stems from its defiance, both in the way it is shot and the narrative it tells. Yes, this was "black people behaving badly," and it wasn't supposed to make white people or upstanding black people feel comfortable (though the bourgeois really like it), but it is nonetheless remarkable in its daring. (And, in my opinion, more ambivalent and nuanced in its ending than it gets credit for).

The hood movies are the early 1990s and the Spike Lee's Bamboozled—again, controversial—took up, with varying degrees of artistry, where Do the Right Thing left off. These films are recent enough to need to no explanation. Now there are whole host of films—and I'm not talking Tyler Perry—which embarrass and upset the black bourgeois.

Despite Armond White's insistence that Precious will destroy either the pristine image of the downtrodden-but-noble black person in the eyes of white liberal America or stoke the fires of bigotry in the eyes of conservatives, the truth is the long history of black cinema, which I've only touched on here, has done that many times before. And it will do it again. It is an important political and artistic project and, really, in the end, wouldn't we be bored otherwise?

Sarah Palin's Media Enabler

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:54:57 -0500

There’s no pleasure in criticizing a journalist whose work is, by and large, admirable, but recently I’ve felt like a rubber-necker at the scene of a nasty car accident as Matthew Continetti, associate editor at The Weekly Standard, has publicly auditioned for a key role in Sarah Palin’s likely 2012 presidential campaign. It’s my hope that the GOP will dodge the Palin bullet, sooner rather than later, as she embarks on her much-ballyhooed book tour promoting the score-settling Going Rouge and the former Alaska governor inevitably makes a series of gaffes that will relegate her to the status of a really, really popular reality TV show star—but I suppose it’s too early to discount any candidate, no matter how discredited.

The 28-year-old Continetti, whose The Persecution of Sarah Palin was just released, has, in a Nov. 16 Standard cover story “The Palin Persuasion” and Nov. 13 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Can Sarah Palin Make a Comeback” laid out a very thin case for Palin inspiring a populist movement in the United States that, on behalf of “average Americans,” will topple the elites that rule both the Democratic and Republican parties. It’s a bit strange that Continetti, a prolific writer who works in Washington, D.C., and is a graduate of Columbia University—therefore a de facto elitist (or at least part the political/media establishment he derides)—is making the case that Palin is an heir to the populism of Andrew Jackson, Williams Jennings Bryan and Ronald Reagan, but there are worse ways to put bread on the table.

Leaving aside Jackson and the thrice-failed presidential candidate Bryan, where Continetti’s argument falls apart is in his comparison of Reagan and Palin. In the Standard he wrote: “Cosmopolitans detested [Reagan in 1980] because he represented the provincial folkways of small town America.” While it’s true that liberals scoffed at Reagan’s supposed lack of intellect when he ran against the hapless Jimmy Carter in 1980 (a year before Continetti was born) and that the 40^th president didn’t attend an Ivy League college, he was no stranger to the powerful, and elite, individuals and institutions that Continetti hopes Palin and “the folks” can beat back with her alleged surfeit of “common sense.”

Palin didn’t even finish her first term as governor of Alaska, resigning earlier this year with no coherent explanation. By contrast, Reagan was, by the time he ran against Carter, a well-known Hollywood figure, television spokesman for General Electric, two-term governor of California and came close to defeating the incumbent Gerald Ford in the ’76 GOP presidential primary. He wasn’t so much a populist as a hardline conservative—the deserved beneficiary of Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful but extraordinarily influential ’64 campaign against Lyndon Johnson—who also had the fortune to run against a Democrat hobbled by a miserable economy and the Iran hostage crisis. Reagan had been collecting Republican chits for years before his ’80 victory and unlike Palin (and Barack Obama, for that matter) was a well-known political commodity. Last year, Palin was inexplicably plucked from obscurity by a befuddled John McCain (a blot on the Arizona senator’s legacy that might be worse than his crusade for campaign finance “reform”); Reagan governed California for eight years.

At least Continetti admits that Palin has yet to articulate a conservative agenda that will compete with Obama’s indecisive liberalism, although he made me gag by writing that the Alaskan, “has an intuitive faith in builders and traders, in hockey moms and plumbers.” I’m not making this up. He ups the ante even further, with perhaps unintentional condescension, saying that while “bankers drive economic policy, Joe Six Pack is left out in the cold.” He also writes, “Palin has Jacksonian instincts, but she still hasn’t forged her own political persuasion. Time to add flesh to the bone.”

And that’s what Continetti does, suggesting various stances Palin could take on health care, energy, punitive regulation, the folly of “green” band-aids, the bailouts of corporations and “let[ting] new businesses replace the old.” In his Journal article, Continetti is even more blatant in his unofficial role as Palin’s aide/cheerleader by offering the mooseburger chef advice for talking points on her book tour. While acknowledging that Palin’s favorable rating in an October Gallup poll was an abysmal 40 percent and an electorally impossible 48 percent unfavorable tally among independents—the key to any election, as Democrats found out to their horror in New Jersey and Virginia earlier this month—Continetti’s confident she can turn that around.

Conceding that “Alaska trivia” isn’t enough to constitute a platform, Continetti writes:

She might mention … that the Democrats’ health-care plan would hike taxes, raise the cost of doing business, and lead to rationing down the line. She might point out that, on top of health care, the stimulus and bailouts, President Obama’s 2010 budget will further bury the United States in debt. Every time the media [which admittedly had great sport ridiculing Palin in 2008, often unfairly, although she provided plenty of ammunition] try to shift the conversation to personal gossip or past mistakes, Ms. Palin should pull it right back to how the Obama agenda will hurt the middle class. Oprah will be aghast. The Democrats will be outraged. But independents will be listening. And the rehabilitation of Sarah Palin will have begun.

I happen to agree with most of Continetti’s economic views, but he’s signed on to the wrong candidate, a woman who’s so politically damaged, so close to a national punchline, a joke, that it’s inconceivable, as he insists, “independents will be listening [to her].” Granted, Continetti has carved out his journalistic niche as a Palin advocate, and I wish him the best on his book sales, but if he has as much common sense as the “average American” he extols, he’ll sock away the profits since being tied to Sarah Palin isn’t the wisest career path.