How technology has changed the landscape of fiction:

Occasionally I’ve wondered why there’s such a vogue, in fiction, for historical novels and pastiche. From Matthew Pearl’s “Dante Club” to Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain” to Kurt Andersen’s “Heyday,” why should writers choose the past over the present? I’m sure it’s possible to come up with all sorts of serious, literary-theoretical explanations, but I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if, upon asking the authors themselves, they said it was because there were no cellphones back then.

Using the royal “we,” Al Sharpton proclaims himself the judge and jury of what will be permissible in and from the American media [e.a.]:

“We will not stop until we make it clear that no one can denigrate based on sex,” said Sharpton, after the CBS announcement. “We need to open up the media world. There are far too many media companies where there are far too much exclusion of women and people of color… We don’t have to be misogynist and racists to be creative in this country.”

Sharpton said he was planning a rally for Saturday, adding that he would sooner go to jail than back down from an issue he felt passionately about.

“We are going to be looking around the television and music industry; there is no one that gets a pass here,” Sharpton continued. “Women should be respected, blacks should be respected, and whites need to be respected.”

Are we all comfortable with that?

Once upon a time, I was a huge Scorsese fan, so I don’t know why I was so surprised that The Departed turned out to be an excellent film. But I was.

By far the biggest surprise was Leo ***, who has grown into his talent. Nice.

Also: this was Matt Damon’s best performance since Good Will Hunting, which is a sentimental fave of mine. Damon and Affleck, born and raised in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, were familiar types for me—from the press reports, their families seemed like counterparts to my New York cohort. It was fun to watch them get famous. I saw Good Will Hunting at the Angelica, and the audience was full of Damon’s friends. They yelled: “Matty! Matty! Matty!” It was down home and sweet: local boys who made good.

The Miramax magic is no more, however. The Weinstein brothers no longer have their finger on the pulse of America. Or, rather, the America they once catered to (Clinton’s America, and Tina Brown’s New York-L.A. corridor of sizzle and buzz) is gone and buried. Tina herself says that London is now the center of the universe and the capital of cool. New York, she claims, hasn’t gotten its mojo back since 9/11.

Ya think?

——–

In his Titanic days, when he was trying to escape the media mob and work off some steam, Leo used to hang around in the West Village with his friend Vince looking for pickup basketball games. I know because my son played basketball with them.

Leo was very low-key, my unimpressed 17-year-old son said. When my daughter heard about it, she burst into tears. She was 12. That’s okay. I read that even Susan Sarandon turned into a slobbering mom on behalf of her daughter, Eva, who was also in love with Leo back then. (Our daughters took gymnastics together, when they were three, at the Sutton gym. Susan was quite the stage mom. Tim was a doll. Boy, that seems like it was a long time ago … )

Power corrupts. This time that truism is most disappointing, because from afar Paul Wolfowitz seemed like an honorable and capable man. Now it’s his turn in the spotlight. Austin Bay tells it like it is:

Overweaning arrogance and lack of self reflection are weaknesses of the Wolfowitz-Hadley-Libby-Feith crew. As a group they were well-suited for Beltway political wars — the kind of Beltway congressional and executive agency infighting that Rumsfeld (and Cheney, Libby’s boss) thought they would face in their battle for Pentagon reform and reorganization. 9/11 changed the mission. Instead of a figurative battle in the Beltway’s arena, the civilized world faced a long war with barbarism, a long, bloody war that placed a preimum on strategic clarity, personal courage and perseverance, not the contacts on your Rolodex. After 9/11 the entire lot should have been eased out in favor of experienced, genuine war fighters — real war fighters instead of Beltway Clerks.

World Bank employees believe Wolfowitz has compromised the institution’s integrity. They certainly have a case.

Anyone hear any good news lately?

Ezra Klein says that Andrew Sullivan has transformed into “something akin to a lefty.”
I wouldn’t know (and don’t care) about whether Sullivan is on the left or the right. I’m much more concerned about his having become a proponent of the notion of perpetual white guilt and moral relativism [e.a.]:

I think it’s legitimate to criticize both Imus and hip-hop, while recognizing that the color of the speaker does make an obvious difference in impact and intent, with respect to hate speech. When black culture deploys its own n-words about itself, it’s a form of self-abasement as well as self-defense. It’s sad and ugly, but it’s different than perpetuating contempt for minorities from a position of majority power and privilege. Neither is defensible, but one is less defensible than the other. …

[S]ince whites still enjoy vastly more cultural power than blacks, Sharpton’s bigotry is more defensible than Imus’s.

What a load of pandering PC bullshit.

Then Sullivan, having claimed that Sharpton has the moral high ground, has the nerve to insinuate, in a post titled “Who’s Next?“, that he disapproves of Media Matters’s newfound witch-hunting fervor:

CEO Leslie Moonves announced that CBS — which owns both the radio station that broadcast Imus’ program and Westwood One, which syndicated the program — has fired Imus and would cease broadcasting his radio show. But as Media Matters for America has extensively documented, bigotry and hate speech targeting, among other characteristics, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and ethnicity continue to permeate the airwaves through personalities such as Glenn Beck, Neal Boortz, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, Michael Smerconish, and John Gibson.

What a fucking nightmare.

Radar outs the Imus “Loyalists” and “Defectors” … and then updates with the news that CBS dumped him.

I guess we know the real name of the game now: Gotcha!

Compared to this, Ann Althouse has had it easy with only five or six episodes of Bloggingheads devoted to her one-minute reaming-out of Garance Franke-Ruta.

Knowing that I am virtually alone, I’ll go on the record and say that I sympathize with Ann, because the same thing happened to me recently … except that it happened in real life. With a friend, who recoiled. Literally.

Face it, Ann. They’re just not that into you. If they read me, they wouldn’t be into me, either. Fuck ‘em.

Speaking of Ann, she’s got this right:

Imus fired, ushering in a new era, where racist talk will no longer be tolerated in mainstream entertainment media.

I am heartbroken. Our very own Basil Fawlty ***has gone medieval on Anderson Cooper.

Get the gay-baiting details at ETP. Because that’s what this is. Keith Olbermann is a political hack and moral scumbag posing as a moral crusader. He is also a chickenshit. He never invites political opponents to his show to debate them. Instead, he rants and raves from his MSNBC bully pulpit—yes the same network that just got on its high horse about Don Imus. Capus said he got a lot of complaints from inside NBC about Imus’s racism and sexism. Let’s see how many complaints he gets from inside the network about Olbermann’s gay-baiting.

Meanwhile, I’m willing to bet good money that Cooper, who, admittedly is a big fave in my household so I’m waving my Team Cooper colors, is going to come out of this like the effortlessly classy guy he is.
Good breeding still has its merits (GWB notwithstanding). From a 1991 review of Richard Brookhiser’s Way of the WASP:

“The way of the WASP” consists of six closely related values or character traits–conscience, civic-mindedness, industry, success, use, and anti-sensuality. The most important is conscience–”the great legacy of Protestantism.” Conscience is not the modernist way of paradox and ambiguity; “it is the inner light that shows us self-evident truths … the source of whatever freedoms WASP society enjoys.” Civic-mindedness is the “operation of conscience in social relations.” Honor, family, group take a back seat to the good of society. Conscience mandates–and civic-mindedness sanctions–industry, which results in success. By “use,” Brookhiser means asking what things are good for, a kind of practical Aristotelianism. Finally, the WASP suspicion of sensual pleasure is not a morbid turning away from the body, but an application of the test of use: sport, food, even art, are valued because they’re “good for you.” It is the only WASP trait he seems to regret: “The Chinese work hard; so do the Italians. Yet they both know how to cook.”

————–

*** The last time I fulminated about Olbermann was in this post:

What is most objectionable about Olbermann is that he’s, as Olbermann Watch’s Robert Cox says,

a political hack posing as a journalist and abusing the trust implied in the NBC brand to get out a political message.

Here’s Sally Jenkins, who understands not just the concept of freedom of speech but its great benefits and advantages—namely, that speech leads to dialogue, which often leads to improvement and progress (a lesson that seems to have been lost on that great constitutional scholar Barack Obama):

It serves no purpose to call for Imus’s job; that’s mere harsh vengeance and we’ve had enough undue harshness. If you shut down Imus’s show, silence him, the conversation ends there. What’s needed in the Rutgers-Imus affair, and on the subjects of racism and sexism in general, is not silence but talk, lots of it …

The Scarlet Knights … have a chance to get something more meaningful from him: a full-fledged conversion.

Jenkins really drills down to our everyday reality [e.a.]:

But regardless of what anyone thinks of Imus, you don’t cure prejudice by curbing speech. Clearly, as a society we’ve made the uneasy decision that censorship is more dangerous than sensitivity, otherwise Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh wouldn’t get work. Words are hurtful, but for the most part they’re inactive. Censorship is an action. As columnist John Leo succinctly put it, “No insults means no free speech.”

And, most painfully and honestly, Jenkins describes the cost of this incident for the young Rutgers players [e.a.]:

You can argue about whether Imus “scarred me for life,” as Ajavon maintains, but he left a mark. The Rutgers kids assumed that the winner’s circle was colorless and genderless, and Imus disabused them, abruptly, of that notion with one harsh sentence. He cost them that ideal. To a certain extent, he hardened their hearts …

Yes indeed.

Here are a few other athletes whose ideals have been lost, and who have had their hearts hardened.

Seligmann said he wondered how other innocent suspects, who did not have well-to-do-parents to hire high-priced lawyers, could prove their innocence while pursued by an aggressive prosecutor. “This entire experience has opened my eyes up to a tragic world of injustice I never knew existed,” he said.

I think about this a lot—how brutal our culture has become, how thick a hide we all have to have. And also about how the culture of political correctness is a big lie that leaves people unprepared to contend with reality—to the detriment of the very people that political correctness claims to “protect.”

As I keep saying: the world is upside down.

And here’s the latest: Imus struck back at Al Sharpton today. And he says he has apologized enough.

But the Super Cousins’ Club (aka the “media elite”) is trying to evade the wrath of the PC monster it created and sustains, as Romenesko made clear yesterday with its featured headlines:

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 11, 2007

Newsweek doesn’t want to “rush to judgment” about Imus

Washington Post | Slate
Newsweek staffers frequently apppear on Don Imus‘ show, and now the magazine has its brand to consider in deliberating whether to allow its people to joust once again with the embattled radio host, says Sridhar Pappu. “We don’t want to rush to judgment,” says editor Jon Meacham. “At the same time, he’s on serious probation here. It’s a very big deal. We take this seriously. Imus appears genuine about changing the tone, but if there’s any backsliding, then it’s over as far as we’re concerned.”
> Advertisers spent $11.3M last year on his show at just one station (USAT)
> Staples, Bigelow Tea, P&G will no longer advertise on Imus’ show (WP)
> Advertisers’ reaction suggests fallout over remarks could persist (WSJ)
> FAIR: Media elite have “gentlemen’s agreement” not to bash Imus (LAT)
> “I would prefer not to see him driven off the air,” says Osnos (NYT)

Posted at 10:47:52 AM

Kurt Vonnegut, dead at 84:

NEW YORK (April 12) - Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan.

R.I.P.