We want to get people arguing, discussing and talking about all the things that wind us up and which we think need a good slap - and that’s not just Guardian Comment pieces. If you read something that pisses you off then email it to us and we can submit it to be Fisked in the comments boxes.
We want constructive conflict between commenters, slowly but surely forming opinions that can withstand interrogation, attitudes that are sound and an outlook that is not afraid to acknowledge its own flaws.
We hope that Fisking Central will become a centre for discussion and a source of criticism for everything that is badly researched, poorly articulated, half-baked, unbalanced or just plain daft.
sounds like funÂ
The departing editor of The Economist offers a look back at global politcial events in his 13-year tenure and, putting Iraq in that context, outlines the stakes:
The incompetence of the state-building exercise in Iraq since 2003 does, however, leave not only Iraq in a dangerous state but also the world. Its failure so far to provide either security or legitimacy has turned Iraq into a cause célèbre and a training ground for violence. Worse, it has made the world’s only available policeman look weak, which encourages other troublemakers, and has undermined the cause of international engagement in both America and Europe. And the very principles that Mr Bush says he is fighting for—democracy, human rights—have been undermined by the appalling injustice of Guantánamo Bay and other extra-judicial detentions.
The juxtaposition described in this editorial, of economic progress with political fractiousness and conflict, could lead to a sanguine conclusion. Even the war in Iraq, even oil at $60-70 a barrel, cannot halt the march of globalisation. But that would be wrong. Globalisation, and the progress against poverty that it brings, will be halted if politicians decide that the costs of openness exceed the costs of isolation. A failure in Iraq, and with it the spread of conflict elsewhere in the Middle East, could tip that balance. An even more decisive tipping would come from the use by terrorists of some form of WMD, supplied by someone emboldened by Iraqi chaos. Another candidate could be a miscalculation by a bigger country elsewhere—China, say, over Taiwan—of the opportunities provided by American weakness and transatlantic divisions.
I hope we will hear more rational voices like this.
Our celebrity culture is dead–so says sometime celebrity chronicler Kurt Andersen. (It’s a two-part article; the second part is here.):
The Nielsen ratings for this year’s Oscars were down 8 percent, and for the Grammys 11 percent. During the last half of 2005, the Enquirer’s newsstand sales were down by a quarter and Entertainment Weekly’s by 30 percent. The American OK! is said to be unwell, the magazine Inside TV was launched and killed last year, and a magazine called Star Shop was killed before it launched.
Like other American social tides, the fascination with celebrities has been cyclical, and after several decades of rising (as it also did from the twenties through the forties), perhaps it will now (as in the sixties) ebb. However, one difference this time is the fractured nature of mass culture: Because Americans no longer all watch the same TV shows and listen to the same music, they may feel a more desperate need to immerse themselves in the private lives of a few, almost arbitrary pseudo-superstars (Jessica Simpson?)—to feel the glamour by stalking the performers, since the performances don’t matter so much anymore.
I’m surprised it took Andersen this long to get around to noticing it, or to writing about it. It’s the most noticeable and least noted fact of contemporary life (certainly in New York): the total absence of glamour. Of any kind. (I’m not bemoaning it; I’m only remarking on it.)
It has been perfectly obvious for several years–indeed since 9/11, though the trend may have begun even earlier– that after a long period of national fawning over the impossibly beautiful, impossibly rich, and impossibly glamorous, Americans have turned their collective attention toward reality rather than manufactured illusion in the person of celebrities.
To be sure, there is still an interest in luxury and wealth and, of course, fame–but Hollywood hasn’t been the locus of interest for a long time. (The collapse of Tina Brown’s Talk magazine more or less signaled the end.) Besides, the only “celebrities” celebrated in the last four or five years (apart from Ben and Jen and Ben and Jen II, and Brangelina and TomKat–and those couples had to go totally tabloid on themselves in order to get any kind of attention at all for whatever movies they were peddling) were a bunch of trashy-looking young women (indistinguishable from one another in name and face) that no one over 30 can identify–or wants to identify with.
And certainly it’s different variants of “reality” (including that which is partially true and partially imagined) that we’re turning to as we turn away from fiction of all kinds–including the fiction that we can (or should want to) attain the stars’ exalted status.
Dramatic new “facts on the ground” (i.e. terrorism, including the beheading of American journalists and civilians; war and its attendant hardships and miseries; a highly partisan, not to say poisonous, political atmosphere; the collapse of huge corporations under the weight of the greed of their owners; the ups and downs of the economy; the ravages of nature; etc.) have all contributed to this change in our pop culture.
Reality has so often trumped fiction in the last years that no cultural observer should be surprised by our turning our attention toward varieties of the real.
I’ll be writing more about this.
