This just in: a Los Angeles Times essay, pegged on former White House flack Scott McClellan’s memoir, about the transformation of politics into a branch of special effects, and of the White House into a Hollywood backlot. The restless shades of Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays haunt the West Wing. But beyond this obvious point, […]
Where were we? Right, the blowback from my Los Angeles Times editorial (“Wimps, wussies and W.: How Americans’ infatuation with masculinity has perilous consequences,” May 3, 2007). I learned a few tough-love lessons from My Dream Date with Bill O’Reilly.
First there was this (“Wimps, wussies, and W. : How Americans’ infatuation with masculinity has perilous consequences,” in The L.A. Times). It features the following choice morsel, calculated to turn the nearest right-wing shark tank into bloody chum: SO THERE’S a smoking crater where Don Imus used to sit. That’s fine with those of us […]
Cleveland billboard, “liberated” by unindicted co-conspirators inspired by POPaganda: The Art & Crimes of Ron English. A documentary about billboard bandit and agit-pop artist Ron English by filmmaker and media activist Pedro Carvajal, POPaganda played to a sold-out house at The Cleveland International Film Festival. (Image courtesy Pedro Carvajal.) By my lights, Ron English’s work […]
Last night, a funny thing happened on the way to a Seinfeld re-run: I grazed past the PBS Newshour and got sucked into a report on the god-botherers’ latest incursion into America’s classrooms. Usually, watching the Newshour‘s fair and balanced roundtables of pale, male thinktank flacks, national security hawks, and below-the-beltway practitioners of Kissingerian realpolitik […]
Why blog? First problem: the word, second only to org in its mortifying dorkiness. (Speaking of which, isn’t an “org” one of those seafaring enclaves formerly headed by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, who hightailed it to the high seas “to continue his research into the upper levels of spiritual awareness and ability,” far from […]