UniBrow

The image above (click on it to enlarge) is a nighttime photo of the Korean peninsula taken by a U.S. Defense Department satellite. You will notice, no doubt with a shudder, the unrelieved darkness of the top half of the peninsula. That, of course, is the slave state of North Korea, where it’s curfew and lights out after dark. I first saw this photo a couple of years ago in The New Yorker; it accompanied a jaw-dropping account of life in North Korea as told by someone who managed to get out. (I’d link to it if I could, but I’ve searched the site and can’t find it.) I keep this image on my computer and look at it every once in a while because it freaks me out. May it henceforth unto kingdom come freak out thee and thine as well.

Just a small addendum to yesterday’s post about Alec Baldwin:

Faithful UniBrow readers will recall our analysis of the Beetlejuice straightman’s fatuous March 28 tractlet at The Huffington Post. We last saw him there sweating out an accusation of elitism. Baldwin had, it was alleged, made disparaging remarks about construction workers during an infantile call-in radio exchange with Sean Hannity. It turns out that this–according to more than one ear-witness commenting at HuffPo–is what A.B. actually said when challenged by Hannity to appear on the latter’s tv show: ”Why would I want to come on the show with a no-talent, former construction worker hack like you?”

Got that? The pride of the Baldwin acting dynasty settled Hannity’s hash with “no-talent” and “hack.” “Construction worker” wasn’t part of the put-down–okay? Chill out. 

Well, apparently the Mississippi dad whose atheism weighed against him in his child-custody proceeding has a lot of company. So much for my hope that his experience, reported on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, was an aberration. A later post by Sullivan supplies the lurid details. You can even get to a PDF of a law article that dishes the dirt on similar cases all over these United States.

This is really too easy. I’m a little ashamed of myself. Ordinarily I’d be content just to roll my eyes and move on from something as incoherent and hilariously self-involved as Alec Baldwin’s March 28 post on Arianna Huffington’s blog, The Huffington Post. But I think the berth Baldwin has at HuffPo, and his unearned presence in Democratic politics generally, is symptomatic of a larger problem. It’s usual to hear people on the right ridiculing the political pretensions of cosseted Hollywood liberals. Baldwin shows–as if we really needed him to at this late date–that it’s time for left-of-center people to join them.

Baldwin apparently guest-co-hosted a radio show in New York recently. During the broadcast, reactionary tv gasbag Sean Hannity called in and, according to Baldwin, “demanded to be heard.” Hannity was joined by Mark Levin. Him I’ve never heard of, but I guess he’s another right-wing firebrand. When in due course Levin made a disobliging remark about Baldwin’s divorce, the actor took a powder. Here’s how he put it:

I turned to [Brian] Whitman [the show's regular host], who knew that I was due to depart the show no later than 8:30 PM New York time anyway, and told him I had to go. I thought that Levin … had crossed a line and I was under no obligation to continue in that vein.

Hannity … spent most of his on-air day gloating that he had put me in my place and indicating that I had slurred construction workers with my call for him to return to that (his former) profession.

Whether Baldwin did or did not disparage construction workers depends on what he actually said, of course, and we don’t get that from his account. What we do get is a portrait of a deeply confused person with a bruised ego and absurd pretensions of political acuity trying to settle a personal score. So much will be obvious to even the hurried reader. But other pleasures await those more at leisure, such as this tiny masterpiece of special pleading:

I’ve worked construction myself, in the past, as have my brothers and other members of my family, and I live in a community steeped in year-round home renovation (Eastern Long Island) that puts more construction workers on the roads there every year than you can imagine. To say that I would ever slur those folks, many of them my neighbors, is inaccurate and unfair. … Shame on you, Sean Hannity, you poor, ignorant fool. Everyone who knows me, and a wealth of people who actually don’t, would never believe that characterization.

Where does one begin? How about Baldwin’s claim of solidarity with labor because he once worked construction himself? Well, gosh, I’m convinced. When I took any of the various manual-labor jobs I held in high school or during breaks from college, it wasn’t because I needed the money and took whatever job I could get. It was because I loved the workers. And were I now one of Baldwin’s gilded Long Island neighbors, I’d have battalions of laborers continually aggrandizing and embossing my gaudy palace for the same reason: because I am their brother. Sounds like Republican trickle-down to me, but what do I know?

And then you have to love that last claim. It’s not only the people who know him, but also “people who actually don’t” know him–indeed, a “wealth” of them–that would dismiss any suspicion of elitism on Baldwin’s part. The supporting player of Along Came Polly is too modest here. We must go further. Surely people who have never even heard of Alec Baldwin would get right up in your grill if you hazarded any such slanders upon the star of The Hunt for Red October. The Archbishop of Ulan Bator, for example; the inhabitants of Gamma Trianguli.

But none of this deeply special material quite prepares you for this paragraph. It’s like a toilet that sets the water sluggishly spinning when you push the handle, but never quite flushes.

Pornography is the lurid and detached exploitation of something that is essentially good, even necessary, in order to make money, while simultaneously shaming and disgracing all of those who are involved. Instead of the basic force of sex, “political pornographers” exploit the good and necessary love of country that men and women seek to express and exercise on both sides of the aisle. Hannity is such a pornographer. He taunts and goads his listenership to express their political views in lurid, yet detached, ways. They do it in anonymity. They stress themselves to reach out and touch people in their lurid and detached way who they do not even know. Like pornography, they exert themselves to reach a state that gives them the release that they consciously avoid through a healthier, more personal involvement. Like pornography.

Couldn’t have said it better myself, for sure. But in case you missed the key phrase, it’s “lurid and detached.” Give the guy credit for one thing: he obviously wrote this thing himself. More’s the pity if he’s paying someone for it.

If–I should probably say when–I see Baldwin on a stage alongside Hillary Clinton or John Edwards or Joe Biden or Evan Bayh during the 2008 campaign, when I see him retailing this muddled and shallow blue-state complacency with the full imprimatur of the Democrats he is supporting, you will permit me to hold it against them.

But in the meantime, does Arianna Huffington actually think this tripe is enlightening anyone?

John Jay, a somewhat lesser-known Founder (knock yourself out on his Wikipedia entry), wrote only five of The Federalist Papers, having fallen ill just at the time of their appearance. He probably wouldn’t have managed even that many had he not front-loaded them as he did. He gets four of the five out of the way starting now, with No. 2, a mainly emotional appeal calculated to awaken or at least reinforce feelings of fraternity and common destiny among his countrymen.

Jay immediately contrasts the enlightened partisans of union with their exploitive careerist adversaries. The ”best and wisest of our citizens,” he declares, have always favored union under a single federal government–but now a plague of self-seeking “politicians” (a potent epithet then as now) has slithered into view to “insist that this opinion is erroneous.” The slight (and sly) modesty of this remark is worth noticing: for a quivering moment Jay claims for his position nothing more than the status of opinion, but then he immediately confers on it the sanction of Nature by making a chthonic argument for union: the geographic character of America’s birthplace is itself a verdict in favor of the oneness of the American people. “[I]ndependent America was not composed of detached and distant territories,” he says. On the contrary,

one connected, fertile, widespread territory was the portion of our western sons of liberty. Providence has in a particular manner blessed it with a variety of soils and productions and watered it with innumerable streams for the delight and accommodation of its inhabitants. A succession of navigable waters forms a kind of chain around its borders, as if to bind it together …

The ties of history and culture succeed and complement those of lake and loam: a people bound by common ancestry and language, of nearly identical religious and political outlook–a people who planted liberty in American soil “fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war”–can’t be splintered into ”a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties” without perverting the natural order and disputing will of Providence.

Emerging from this common patrimony were the men who, keeping faith with the earliest wishes of “the people at large” to preserve Union, drafted the Constitution. And while not omitting an account of the remarkable qualities and unique suitablity of these men for that “arduous task,” he won’t let them seem a superior class. As Hamilton was in the preceding paper, Jay in this one is at pains to remind Americans that, as free citizens exercising reason under self-rule, final authority and responsibilty are theirs. No master stands above them. They and they alone will decide the fate of the Constitution.

Admit, for so is the fact, that this plan is only recommended, not imposed, yet let it be remembered that it is neither recommended to blind approbation, nor to blind reprobation; but to that sedate and candid consideration which the magnitude and importance of the subject demand, and which it certainly ought to receive.

Jay concludes by proposing, in the papers to come, to reveal the “great and weighty reasons” for Union.

For a take on the Iraq War unlike any you will find anywhere, see Slavoj Zizek’s Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (Verso, 2004; here’s a description). A senior researcher at the Institute for Social Studies in Ljubljana, Slovenia (his native country), Zizek is a furiously productive Lacanian-Hegelian and (more or less) Marxist theorist who manages about a book a year while traveling the globe giving lectures and agitating for his political causes. He is a volcano of theoretical analysis and argumentation, sifting everything from Schelling to St. Paul to de Sade to Hitchcock to Dubya through his theoretical nets. I’ve seen him lecture a couple of times; it’s an experience not to be missed. There is even a new film about him–called Zizek!–that I’ll finally be able to see, as it’s apparently coming to a theater near me at long last. If you go here, you can see the trailer and the dates and locations of upcoming screenings.

Here’s an extract from The Borrowed Kettle:

Apropos of Freud, Theodor Adorno claimed that what we observe in the contemporary “verwaltete Welt” and its “repressive desublimation” is no longer the old logic of repression of das Es and its Triebe, but a perverse direct pact between das Uberich (social authority) and das Es (illicit aggressive drives) at the expense of das Ich. Something structurally similar seems to be occurring today at the political level: a weird pact between postmodern global capitalism and premodern societies, at the expense of modernity proper. It is easy for the American multiculturist global Empire to integrate premodern local traditions–the foreign body which it cannot actually assimilate is European modernity. Jihad and McWorld are two sides of the same coin; Jihad is already McJihad.

So deal with that. Zizek is most fun to read, in my opinion, when he’s dealing with popular culture, and he’s written a great deal about Hitchcock. See especially Looking Awry (MIT Press, 1991) and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (Verso, 1992), a multi-author volume that he edited.

On his blog this past week, Andrew Sullivan had occasion to note that religious freedom is meaningless in practice unless it includes the right to believe in no god at all–that if the government “screws with the rights of atheists [it] is screwing with the rights of believers as well.” Amen. Anyway, this is one of the messages Sullivan received in response. I found it pretty chilling.

My ex-wife and I recently had a nasty custody dispute. In this dispute, I recently came very close to losing serious ground in my ongoing battle to be a central part of my son’s life. The entire case for the opposing side had nothing to do with how I am as a parent; in fact, every witness for the other side could say nothing but good about my son’s psycholigical health and good about my parenting. Instead, the entire objective of the other side was to smear me in court for being an atheist, or at the very minumum, not attending church regularly. 
To make a long story short, the judge took away Sunday visitation from me permanently (I have my son every other week rather than every other weekend, so the change could have been much worse), so that the child “could get the religious instruction he needs” via my ex-wife. Similar verbiage actually appears in the court order. The repulsion I felt about all of this can never be described coherently. I was verbally lambasted by a judge in the United States of America for my religious beliefs, and suffered punishment for it (or perhaps, my son did, depending on viewpoint)… This happened in Mississippi, and I know better than to fight it–given that the original lawsuit aimed to reduce my visitation to every other weekend, I could have fared much worse, and the judge rightly guessed I would not wish to appeal and risk losing more ground when the case is sent back for reconsideration. But still, I have never, never felt so violated.

Sullivan wonders if more of this goes on than we know. Let’s hope not–but if the above is true, this judge’s continuation on the bench is a mind-blowing scandal.