Warmest regards.

It’s really funny watching people shift their position on the issue of whether the senate should need sixty votes in order to wipe a drippy nose. George Will has been one of the more flagrant examples, and that’s why I laugh when people tell me what a Serious Conservative Intellectual he is, with his magic ability to use the same Gladstone and Chesterton quotes in column after column. But, in fairness, if I had been a famous liberal columnist in 2005, I’d probably have written words then that I’d be eating now. The filibuster is something people don’t really think about until it’s pointed at their own personal onions.

I’m going to state a position now and I’m going to try to be consistent about it when the Republicans retake one or both houses of Congress this fall: You shouldn’t need 60 votes just in order to, um, hold a vote. Also, if people want to filibuster something, let ‘em actually get up there and read the phone book till they’re all hoarse. Voters deserve to have some idea of what the legislative agenda they have empowered actually looks like, what it actually leads to. The supermajority-just-to-hold-a-vote requirement prevents us from getting any such idea. We finally got a health care bill, but it’s incredibly watered-down, and, if you consult the list of projects Democrats were talking about in early ’09, they’ve managed to actually do almost none of it. We were going to get prison reform, sentencing reform, an end to detainee abuse, a public option, further-reaching financial reform than we actually got, a stimulus big enough to do more than keep the patient alive, a climate bill, more aid to states, DADT repeal, civil unions, and shoulder-mounted jetpacks … am I missing anything? If Dems had been able to give voters even half of this, then the 2010 election would be about what the electorate thinks of Democratic policy ideas. Instead, it’s about what the public thinks of the kind of elitist Liberalism Lite that makes four or five centrist Democrats (plus Scott Brown) comfortable. And of course the public hates that, as anybody would. Likewise, if the Republicans gain control of Congress once again this fall, the public deserves to be reminded what their ideas look like in practice. Let them pass the Hookers and Blow Act and the Resolution To Burn Extra Oil Just To Piss Off Liberals. Let them throw taxpayer money at pro-Confederate thinktanks. Let them give BP’s executives a bailout and then call it “job creation.” Let them make drooling morons of themselves so the electorate knows what’s at stake. To know what the two parties are really about now, under these circumstances, you have to be a total politics junkie, and the millions who have to work two jobs just to stave off bankruptcy and childhood anemia are understandably unable to commit their two minutes of daily leisure time to The New Republic.

2. The Adverts, an early punk band who have always figured highly in Greil Marcus’s list of the top five percent of the class of 1977, deserved to. Some of it is rather conventional and murky, but I really love “Bored Teenagers” and “New Church.” The Adverts actually sound more like what you’d imagine a punk band, stripped of accidentals, would sound like than do, say, the Clash (too much musical competence), the Buzzcocks (too tuneful), or the Pistols (too metal, at least on record, where Steve Jones uses multitracking to turn his meager guitar into Voltron). They’re bored, the themes are basic, the songs are done in under three minutes.

3. A person can make it to age 32 without regular immersion in the two-disc Brunswick Records singles collection, but it’s a mistake. It starts with Jackie Wilson exhorting us “Higher and Higher,” and then, unbelievably, does so.

I have, obviously, a fatal attraction for badly-aged science fiction TV and film. When I try to defend this stuff, I think of a remark I once read in a music review, to the effect that bad funk is like bad pizza: it’s still pretty good. Decent science fiction offers Inception-style brainteasers and a chance to consider, even in the absence of convincingly conceived human characters, some fairly fundamental philosophical issues: What Else is Out There, It’s Funny What Perspective Can Do To Things, What Is the Nature of Reality, Where are the Boundaries Between [Important Thing 1] and [Important Thing 2]. (The same can be said of horror, if you can somehow navigate that genre’s forest of misogyny.) The mid-level stuff, if even slightly old, offers a glimpse into all the abandoned, aborted futures humankind has conceived for itself, the contemplation of which has its own melancholy satisfactions, like reading about old urban planning. I’ll never give a shit about any of the Star Wars characters qua characters again, now that I’m done being ten, but the original trilogy especially offers six hours’ worth of exactly this pleasure, and is more than held up by it. Bad science fiction, finally, still offers bits of both these pleasures, and is also funny. In sum, with this genre, it’s impossible to lose. Or, at least, it’s harder for me to lose than with many “serious” Oscar-bait films about “real people.” 

’60s “Doctor Who,” especially during the Hartnell and Troughton years (the first two and most elderly Doctors), rarely offers the Day-Glo design that captivates a contemporary viewer of, say, “UFO,” “Star Trek,” or (the best of its kind, then and now) “The Prisoner.” Its visual style is rather chaste, compared with these programs and with its own 1970s iterations. What it does have is a wonderful knack for dreamlike juxtaposition: the Doctor’s Victorian cape as against the hyperfuturist Daleks as against cavemen as against … The very first ten minutes of the show, in 1963 (“The Unearthly Child”), take us into a junkyard, full of slightly spooky shadows and dead mannequins; the effect is as pleasantly strange as such chance agglomerations always are: a superfluity of incompatible signs, making discordant music with each other. Early “Doctor Who,” junky as it always is (with its unsayable dialogue, its single-take filming schedules and William Hartnell’s frequent linefluffs), also has the eeriness of the junkyard to which, at its worst, it belongs.

(The new show totally rules. As of now, it’s science fiction of the top tier. It will gracefully age into the middle tier as we live with it and stick our fingers through all its plot holes, which are many, even in the merciful absence of extravagant former showrunner Russell T. Davies. But that’s another series of posts.)

I can’t say much about the other missing persons, whose last names, at most, I recognize. (Same for the pilot, Jerry Freed, who was, thank God, found alive.) So I won’t, and this is not intended as a slight. But I do know that my family owes a lot to Dr. James Hall, who sat up most of the night with my father when my mom was hospitalized with mystery chest pains in 1985. Hall was a pillar of the community, active in everything, loved by everyone; what counts most to me is a bit of unpaid human kindness he showed a terrified man twenty-five years ago. God bless them.

If she loved me, that Thursday evening in my first month of college as I stared past her arched neck at the heat register and thought So this is what it feels like to lose your virginity, I never knew it.

The problem is, if the speaker is concerned about the lack of love in the world, why is he staring deadly across the room and thinking self-conscious thoughts during a sexual encounter? He seems to blame her for a problem they both share. Now, come to think of it, that might make a good story in itself, but it’s not the one I feel like telling at the moment. So out it goes.

I’m glad that he apologized to that poor woman who got fired because she had a racist thought (unlike all those white people with government jobs who look into the eyes of blacks and Latinos and just see Jesus’ third cousins) and then felt like a jerk about it and did her job. Sheesh, even Glenn Beck defended her, in his inimitable, performance-artist-on-meth kind of way. (If she’d been kept on, he’d be using her as Example One of how much Obama hates white people, but that’s another morning’s rant.) Given how quickly Vilsack fired her for fear of, precisely, a Glenn Beck attack, I’ve got to wonder about the soundness, in his case, of the body part that forms his last name’s second syllable.

(Incidentally, one of my favorite students got harrassed by the cops last week for half an hour for … nothing in particular. He’s black, but I’m sure that had nothing to do with it.)

But, y’know, as with most political scandals, we’re talking about people when the actual scandal, if any, is policy. Like, Tom Vilsack should be wrestling out loud with his conscience about accusations that he’s an ethanol whore. Can we waste a week talking about that, please, just sometime?

The people who have been laid off and cannot find work are generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities. I say “generally” because there are exceptions. But in general, as I survey the ranks of those who are unemployed, I see people who have overbearing and unpleasant personalities and/or who do not know how to do a day’s work. They are people who create either little utility or negative utility on the job. Again, there are powerful exceptions and I know some, but when employers are looking to lay off, they lay off the least productive or the most negative.

—The guy whose “utility” is best exemplified by his ability to host stupid game shows and say “Bueller” over and over again

PS: I love, love, love the bit about him “surveying the ranks of the unemployed.” Does he have a vast underground telescope that doubles as an attitude assessor? I just picture millions and millions of out-of-work Americans (we’re way into the double-digits when you consider all those who’ve given up looking) walking past some giant sci-fi eyeball hooked up to Ben Stein’s optic nerve, and, after a moment, Stein’s electro-modulated monotone yelling “USELESS. NEXT.”

But I’m sure there’s serious research behind this vast, hateful generalization; it’s not like anyone with such a secure perch in the right wing media would just pull things out of his ass.