Lesson #1 for agenda-driven interviewers: don’t fuck with Matt Damon. If you do, it’ll probably end up on YouTube. Case in point: Damon took time out from making a film to fly to Washington D.C. and give a speech at the Save Our Schools March on July 30, 2011. He was introduced by his mother Nancy Carlsson-Paige, a professor of early childhood education. Among the media covering the event was a libertarian outlet called Reason.tv, whose reporter and cameraman made the ill-advised choice to (you guessed it) fuck with Matt Damon. The result:

That, my friends, is what they call getting pwned. Even the jarring cut to the context-less moment from Good Will Hunting doesn’t diminish Damon’s (pardon the pun) schooling of microphone chick and the shitty cameraman.

As some readers already know,¹ I am the son of two teachers. I suppose I could therefore argue that my passion about our society’s devaluation of teachers is one teacher greater than Matt Damon’s; kidding aside, I’m very pleased that his celebrity, combined with his wit and eloquence on the subject, prompted this video to go viral on YouTube. As another actor (albeit a considerably less well-known one) born of educators, I’ll indulge the interviewer’s clunky comparison of the acting and teaching professions in another way.

The renowned actress and acting teacher Uta Hagen had the thesis that our society in general does not respect acting as a legitimate occupation. Acting is perceived as something which more or less anybody can do, but some people just have more talent for it than others. Everyone has played make-believe games as a kid, so everyone considers himself a valid critic of acting. It’s my contention that popular attitudes toward teaching have become disturbingly similar to this casual disregard for acting.

Everyone has to go to school, the perception goes, and everyone knows from experience that some teachers are more effective than others. It is thought that pretty much anyone who has graduated from school could teach, since there will always be at least a certain number of teaching jobs. Hence, everyone considers himself a valid critic of teaching. Don’t think so? Listen to microphone chick in this extended version of her Matt Damon encounter, in which she claims that having attended school in the L.A. Unified District qualifies her as an teaching expert equal to Damon’s mom.

The key difference between the acting and teaching professions is, of course, that public school teachers are paid with public money. To the libertarian/Tea Party crowd, “public money” is a hex. It’s their “Lord Voldemort.” With the ideal of eliminating essentially all taxes, these every-man-for-himself fanatics took aim in new, more pernicious ways at public school teachers during the year 2011.

Setting the tone was Republican Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who interpreted his 52-47% victory in the 2010 election as an overwhelming mandate to eliminate the collective bargaining rights of his state’s public employees. Not all his state’s public employees, mind you — just the ones who weren’t policemen or firefighters.² That leaves what, about 95% teachers and 5% janitors and DMV clerks.

Fortunately Governor Walker’s anti-teacher budget touched off a substantial backlash. The most immediate reaction was a protest in and around the State Capitol that went on for months, at its height involving about 100,000 demonstrators. After the budget was passed, Walker’s Tea Party allies pursued their stated intention to recall Democratic Party State Senators who had fought against the measure. This plan backfired when the eventual vote resulted in the recall of only two State Senators from office, both of them Republicans.

The situation with regard to teachers and education policy is still crucially important, of course. It calls for more Matt Damon-style pwnage, whether or not it comes from Matt Damon himself. The countryside is still crawling with ignoramuses who think that the economy sucks because some teachers are getting tenure… as opposed to, say, too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks taking advantage of their industry’s deregulation to create securities out of bullshit, crash the global economy and stick us with the bill.

A few longtime readers may recall the time I had this blog’s reading level gauged by a web-based tool. The less-than-flattering result was “Junior High School level.” Less than a year later, that particular website evaluator no longer existed.

Despite that experience, I seem to have retained a masochistic urge to be graded. Spurred on by the example of MaryAnn (a.k.a. The Flick Filosopher — see my blogroll), I rashly submitted this blog to the scrutiny of Hubspot’s Website Grader. Following her lead, I focused on Section I, letter E of the report:

Hey — that means I graduated up a level in only three years! Although… oh yeah, junior high school is only three years. D’oh! Well, at least it didn’t say I’m still in junior high. Being ages 12-13 was plenty traumatic the first time around.

To my distinct non-surprise, the Website Grader Report as a whole is all over the map — enough so to put a considerable dent in its credibility (aw, nuts). It gave me a very high Website Grade of 93, but a very low blog grade of 21. Clicking through to the separate Blog Grader Report, C&B’s blog grade changes into a merely mediocre 61.

The Website and Blog graders disagree in many other places as well. The Website Report says I have too many images on my page,¹ which causes it to load slowly. The Blog Grader Report says I have an average of zero images per post, and recommends that I throw some in to liven things up a little.

Most mystifying of all is the Blog Grader Report’s Section V, “Blog Content.” Aside from the zero-images-per-post number, it also wildly miscalculates my average post length (30 words) and average number of links per post (zero). Its only accurate statement is that I don’t post often enough, a piece of data that might better be listed under another section called “No Shit, Sherlock.”

The moral of the story, as I see it: to evaluate the merits of Cheek and Bluster with any insight, it really helps to be a person.

Sex advice sage and blogroll mainstay Dan Savage devoted the first ten minutes of his latest podcast episode to a passionate and astute rant about the Anthony Weiner kerfuffle. I should clarify that Dan’s commentary was recorded and released two days ago, on June 14; in it he refers specifically to Weiner’s confessional press conference, which had taken place a week earlier. Weiner’s resignation from congress didn’t occur until this morning, but it doesn’t make Dan’s argument any less relevant.

Dan Savage (photo: Flickr/mattoly)

Of course, the full effect is only available by hearing Dan speak his words. Nevertheless, here are some highlights for the benefit of those unable to listen (or who simply prefer to read):

My favorite question [at the press conference] was this: “Why would you do this after you were married?” Because Lord knows, nobody goes online and flirts — or masturbates, looks at [or] downloads porn, or creates through the interactive-ness of the web their own porn moments — no married person does that. The worldwide web is just this big jack-off-a-thon for single people.

You know what? Members of congress, like members of the press, get horny sometimes. And sometimes male members of congress, like male members of the press, think with their dicks. And sometimes married men rub one out with an assist from the worldwide web, my media colleagues! Film at fucking 11!

Weiner was horny and went online and flirted and beat it a few times, like millions of Americans have done and will continue to do, every damn day, forever.

Another reporter asked Weiner if he had a drinking problem. Because you know, only a man who was drunk or on drugs could get caught up in something like this. Do reporters know what men are like? And lots of women too? This desire to pathologize behavior that isn’t sick — that is really common, and human, and completely and instantly understandable — that itself is pathological.

Weiner does not have a “problem.” Weiner has a computer. It is the same problem that all Americans these days have: we have computers, and sometimes we make fools of ourselves on them. Think of your own life: think of the shit you’ve done online. If all of it was dragged out into the public eye, as this has been dragged out into the public eye, would your relationship survive? Would your professional life survive? No.

Everyone’s talking about “what Weiner did.” You know what? Something was done to Weiner.

I realize I’m shouting now… I just get upset when I see everyone pretend to not know what they do know about human sexuality and the way it works. And this sort of willful obtuseness on the part of the media, that plays into American sex-phobia and hypocrisy about sex. And this posturing.

Everyone is talking now about Weiner like, “He’s a congressman, and he had to know that this could happen — that these pictures could surface and be made public — and that was reckless, and displayed a kind of bad judgment that we can’t have in congress.” We wouldn’t want bad judgment in congress, not now, not after 200+ years of a bad-judgment-free congress.

Congress 20 years from now, 30 years from now, is going to be solely comprised of people who have taken pictures of their junk and put them online. Every teenager in America is online, is flirting, dating, putting up internet profiles, looking for love… is sending pictures of their junk! Sexting!

Soon, we will have a congress that is entirely Anthony Weiners. What are we going to do then? Are we really saying that the only people who are fit to serve in the U.S. Congress are the people who have never gone online and done anything inappropriate? Because what we’re really asking for, then, is to be ruled by the Amish.

In the early part of 2009, American TV airwaves were polluted by a particular commercial that became known as the “Gathering Storm” ad. Made by a group calling itself the National Organization for Marriage, it was a clumsy, mendacious message of anti-gay fear-mongering. I don’t care to put the original ad here on my own blog, so if you haven’t seen or don’t immediately recall it you can fill yourself in by clicking this link.

The ad could have been a milestone of unintentional comedy were it not for the fact that so many Americans actually buy its central falsehood that same-sex marriage could impose anything whatsoever onto heterosexual marriages and families. Needless to say, the ad’s overblown, portentous bigotry practically begged to be parodied. I made calls to a few filmmaker friends with a mind toward producing one myself, but to do it right ended up being logistically impossible.

Fortunately, the popular comedy site Funny or Die soon rolled out their version, which more than filled the comedic void. Entitled “A Gaythering Storm,” it comes in at number six on my list of the top ten videos of 2009.

Quite a cast, huh? As a fan of Scrubs, I knew Sarah Chalke was funny. Conversely, I was caught off-guard by Jason Lewis, the the super-good-looking guy in the dark sweater, who connected squarely on the kind of punchlines that weren’t in the offing for his role as Smith, Samantha’s lover on Sex and the City. I got a kick out of George Takei’s just-campy-enough riff on his old Sulu-style declaiming, and I don’t recall seeing Alicia Silverstone be this funny (or indeed, even in a comedic role) since Clueless, the role that made her a star all the way back in 1996. But what really made the whole thing for me was the hilariously cloying “there is hope” conclusion delivered by one of my favorite comic actors, Jane Lynch.

Jane Lynch

My earliest recollection of Lynch is in Christopher Guest’s 2000 dog show mockumentary Best in Show. Since then, her unaffected comic élan has laid me out laughing in A Mighty Wind, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, and the first season of Party Down, a little-seen comedy series on the U.S. pay-cable Starz network (and in Canada on Super Channel) which I recommend.¹ Now Lynch appears to have broken through to a new, well-deserved level of fame as the overly-intense cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester on Fox’s hit series Glee: earlier this week her performance in the role earned her a Golden Globe nomination as Best Supporting Actress. Go Jane!

Day six of Iran’s post-election uprising, and all we can do is watch. Or at least, all we will — and indeed should do is watch.  Not until Tuesday, four days after the Ahmadinejad government released its incredible tally pronouncing its own reelection by a 63-34 margin, did President Obama comment on the situation. And very measured comments they were, with an emphasis on honoring the will of Iranian voters rather than condemning the ruling faction.

Even these mild pronouncements were immediately seized upon by the beleaguered Iranian incumbents, accusing the U.S. of fomenting the massive unrest they now face.

This can’t come as a surprise to the Obama administration. The White House is aware of America’s status in Iran as a convenient boogeyman, earned by our history of meddling in matters of Iran’s leadership. Nevertheless, the Ahmadinejad/Khamanei junta’s tone-deaf attempt to start a “Death to America” stadium wave betrays its own panic (has invoking the U.S. become the Islamic fundamentalist equivalent of reductio ad Hitlerum?).  Panicky finger-pointing  is not the kind of behavior one expects from a party that supposedly just received a nearly two-thirds mandate.

Photo: Flickr/misterarasmus

In a curious inversion, the Iranian regime’s denouncement of the U.S. for its alleged interference on the side of the Mousavi supporters contradicts the statements of Obama’s political opponents here at home.  John McCain, apparently seeking to cement his own irrelevance, accused the President of  not supporting the protesters enough.  Neocon wingnut punditiots took it a step further, declaring that the dastardly Obama actually wants the uprising to fail. I’m looking forward to their upcoming expose of how Obama is a Hezbollah sleeper agent whose campaign money actually came from Khamanei. And how he’s having the White House raised off its foundation and rotated so that the Oval Office points toward Mecca. I’d think up more of this ludicrous bullshit, but those clowns don’t need my help.

Plus, what could be funnier than the case of Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI): in light of Iranians’ use of Twitter to successfully circumvent their government’s blocking of internet and other channels of communication abroad, Hoekstra proved himself equally and inversely clueless by tweeting:

Iranian twitter activity similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House.

The rest of Twitter, to its credit, promptly trained a fire hose of derision upon Rep. Douchebag.