Amidst the multi-year media onslaught that our presidential election process has become, I’ve had to adjust my critical thinking filter to an even finer sieve than before. Sometimes it occurs to me that at least the news media is flooding the landscape with an issue that matters to people’s lives. At other times, though, the campaign overkill reaches such a level of absurdity that I wonder if perhaps these press hacks aren’t qualified to tell us about anything more important than Anna Nicole’s baby daddy, so maybe they should stick with that.
Consider for example this AP/Yahoo News poll and writeup published yesterday, which concludes that John McCain is the candidate of choice among pet owners.
Even in this era of with-us-or-against-us partisanship, I never cease to be amazed at the neocons’ mendacious, irresponsible, utterly illogical denial of the escalating environmental crisis. You can arm yourself with Coby Beck’s excellent syllabus, but what can you ultimately do about people who are shallow enough to play politics with the habitability of the planet?
I have beaten my head against this particular wall in far too many conversations, so today, I’m sending in the cavalry.
You know that poker movie Lucky You that came out a few weeks ago? I was all but certain it was going to suck based solely on its preview, although as a poker enthusiast I genuinely wanted to be wrong. Apparently I wasn’t. The always-insightful critic Mike D’Angelo not only explains why, but describes the overall problem with dramatizing poker on film.
I’ve been a fan of Mike’s writing since I first encountered him on the now-defunct Cinemarati.org about six years ago, when I believe he was writing reviews for Time Out New York. Unsurprisingly to me, he has since progressed to become regular columnist for Esquire, as well as a contributor to Nerve.com and the Las Vegas Weekly. At least, that’s as much of his resume as I can discern from his web site, which is where I go to keep up with his latest output.
I was just listening to an episode of the reliably interesting radio show This American Life called “Quiz Show.” The second of the episode’s three segments was about the MIT Mystery Hunt, an annual event where teams of intimidatingly brainy puzzle geeks race each other to the solution of a puzzle concocted by the previous year’s winning team. The following passage about what the reporter calls “‘A-ha!’ moments” traveled the boomerang path of irony to cause me an “A-ha!” moment of my own:
Are absolute Answers a human construct, while the underlying Truth in nature is not knowable in such terms? I was immediately reminded of the works of filmmaker David Lynch, in particular his briefly brilliant TV series Twin Peaks, which aired in the early 1990’s.
A typically atypical Twin Peaks scene.
As many will recall, the plot of the show concerned the question of who killed Laura Palmer, the high school homecoming queen in an obscure northwestern logging town. The ABC network promoted Peaks by following the “Who Shot J.R.?” paradigm, and did so quite effectively - at the outset. Lynch was in no great hurry to resolve the Laura Palmer case, sticking instead to his own general style: the seemingly straightforward narrative meandered through a landscape of imagery as strange and disturbing as it was visually striking. Perhaps inevitably, the series soon proved to be as daunting a challenge for network publicists as it was for viewers (apart from a small number of die-hard fans, of which I was one).
One could look at Twin Peaks as a continuous series of “whys,” and indeed, many have. Why the dancing midget, and why was his dialogue recorded backward and played back forward? Why didn’t Agent Cooper’s susceptibility to bizarre visions of midgets and giants disqualify him from becoming an FBI agent? Why does the log lady carry a log around, and is it always the same log or does she have, like, a collection of them? As much fun as these “whys” are, they are incidental to the overall purpose: the series as a whole represents one big Why.
The following paragraph contains a SPOILER. If you are planning to watch the Twin Peaks DVD set and don’t want to know who killed Laura Palmer, consider yourself alerted.
When the murder’s resolution confirms the presence of supernatural elements, the Sheriff comments, “I’ve lived in these old woods most of my life. I’ve seen some strange things, but this is way off the map. I’m having a hard time believing,” the mystical Agent Cooper responds, “Is it easier to believe a man could rape and murder his own daughter?” Satisfying though these lines were, they were also uncommonly pedantic for David Lynch. They were not at all uncommonly pedantic for prime time network television; in fact, I’d lay odds that pressure from ABC forced Lynch to plainly spell out something that his best work would only imply. Finding out WHO killed Laura Palmer is incidental to the essential mystery of why she was killed.
When puzzles like the ones in the MIT Mystery Hunt are solved, that’s it. Done. It’s solved. Completion feels good, which is why there are puzzle junkies, why the spongy psychological term closure has become popular, and why TV networks don’t like unresolved murders. I’m no different in this sense: I like having all the loose ends tied up as much as the next guy. Ultimately, puzzles and TV shows provide frameworks for delivering little completion fixes. We seek them out because out in the day-to-day world they just don’t happen too often. You will almost surely never know why you didn’t get into grad school ten years ago, or why the thieves picked your car. But when you solve the Sunday crossword, it helps. It reminds you that answers exist, and you do sometimes get them. However, when a TV show cops out and spoon-feeds you an answer it helps less, because the answers most often seem unsatisfying. Good dramatists of any medium know that questions are more compelling than answers, and that the only worthy answers are ones that lead straight to more questions.
Pictured below is the Lightsaber of Democracy: my satellite TV remote. Subtly highlighted is the “skip forward” button, which allows the viewer to jump ahead in 30-second increments while watching recorded programming. The practice of skipping over commercial breaks, normally a mere convenience, in pre-election months becomes absolutely vital for the prevention of Autumnal Voter Disgust Syndrome.
A VoterShield 1000, and its mighty "Skip Fwd" button.
Campaign advertisers are a crafty predator. They’ll often position their ad as the last one to play before resumption of the TV show, meaning that even skillful ad-skippers will see their final slogan as it fades to black. This year’s slogan I most often saw in this manner was the phrase “No on 87.” Noticing this trend, each future occurrence prompted me to think “Wow, somebody is spending a ton of money to defeat Proposition 87. Eh, I’ll probably end up voting ‘Yes.’ ” Flippant? Sure, a bit - but allow me to explain my rationale.
I’ve noticed that like nearly every aspect of American politics, ballot initiatives are by and large about money. Initiative campaigns that churn out a lot of TV advertising are about A LOT of money - specifically, either a promotion of or an impediment to someone making a lot of money. To discern what a given ballot measure proposes to put into effect, a voter needs only to find out what interests are pouring money into the respective “No” and “Yes” campaigns, and then connect the dots through critical thinking. Read the rest of this entry »
If you’re like me, you may be wondering “who the hell is this dude?” Well, I’ve got a page that’s meant to address that very question: check my About out, and without a doubt, give me a shout and tell me what you think about About.
If you’re like me, you may be wondering “who the hell is this dude?” Well, I’ve got a page that’s meant to address that very question: check my 
