Gay Leading Men

On Deadline Hollywood Nikki Finke quotes Rupert Everett counseling young gay actors to stay in the closet if they prioritize their careers over their happiness. A long comment thread ensues. Here's one of the more interesting contributions (not mine, though our voices are oddly similar - who is this person?):

with Twilight being the most recent piece of evidence, heterosexual women (more masculinized by the day) seem to be transfixed by gay-seeming, soft, twinky young men conflicted by sexual aggression. Japanese manga now has a massive audience of young women addicted to reading stories of teen gay male romance. As gender continues melting, guided by quite gay, but family friendly corporate parents like DisneyCo, eventually young gay male romance movies will take off with a niche audience of odd, rapt, hormonal young American women. Stereotypes and florid acting will mark the style of these films, and gay young men will find fame imitating and parroting the needs of their captive, chubby audience. Look to the East…Comment by huh — December 2, 2009 @ 9:44 pm Reply to this post

Opinions Concerning Undeclared Intentions

Tonight from West Point, Obama will offer his prescription for Afghanistan. On the data-driven driven left, there's lots of dissatisfaction and ennui. The pundits of the Slate Political Gabfest (which I love) moped and moped about Obama's 'McKinsey War' and its convoluted, mixed-message approach: that we want metrics for success, that we are committed to the region, and that if our benchmarks aren't met we'll leave.

Obviously Obama inherited a difficult situation. Recognizing that there's no perfect solution to a problem-set like Afghanistan, I'm prepared to accept Obama's decision to temporarily escalate as appropriate, and to greet it with the enthusiasm due any well-reasoned high-stakes decision.

Often the Washington press corps is criticized for focusing on the 'optics' and 'strategic considerations' of policy decisions, at the expense of scrutinizing the merits. In this case, I think the press is ignoring the layers of strategic interests tied into Afghanistan: ours and our Allies', the Afghan people's, Pakistan's, and of course our enemies', alongside Obama's own political capital, and the implications his move here has for his larger agenda. Underlying that is the anxious relationship long extant between Democratic presidents and the military.

In my view, a limited, temporary escalation is a defensive chess move, albeit one with offense-ive characteristics. What it won't do is rapidly resolve the situation in Afghanistan. What it aims to do is recalibrate, if not reset, US policy in the region, setting the stage for more decisive options in the future - without worsening the instability in Pakistan, without giving Republicans loud talking points to discredit Obama on defense, without wholly alienating the base. Meanwhile, General McChrystal's seemingly well-considered strategy will be partially funded and given a chance, and options for various eventualities in the theater refined and expanded. (Sounding neat on paper, it will be messy in practice, but messy is the state of our world)

In this respect, Obama's decision on Afghanistan resembles his recent trip to China: a seemingly inauspicious event that functions as part of a larger, long-term plan, the specifics of which are not necessarily established, but which aims to be locally responsive and fact-based.

I think I'll like it, not because it will bring about an elegant outcome, but because I believe it is the first step in a reasonable way forward.

Kumbay yo yos and Aarrgh

In America Glenn Beck says
He wishes we could go back to the days when
It was Better,
There was Order,
The lives of White Men like the lives
Of princes, if not Kings.
(Billy Joel sings a song called Allentown)

'Kinged' by a Colorful Man,
Beholden to Markets,
But worse Regulators,
And worst of all Taxes which grow and grow like cancers of the lung
When all he wants from his world is
That It Stay the Same,
The man in the camo hat nods.

In Brooklyn,
At computers in Palo Alto or Adams Morgan,
Fit men and women read Think Progress,
They read Glenn Greenwald about Glenn Beck,
They read TPM and nod,
Reminding each other that
In Fact
They are the Unjustly Taxed Colonists,
For the Senate is
Beholden to lands
Where few live but animals,
Never counted
On the local rolls.

They have no guns.
They have guns.
They and they and they.

Nodding we read,
Nodding we watch,
Nodding we act and sleep.
This is called Pax,
Though we all have indigestion sometimes,
So we all buy Tums.

King on Carver, Dissing Lish

In the Times, Stephen King has a review of a new bio of Raymond Carver. My familiarity with Carver's work is limited, but I find problematic King's hostility to Gordon Lish's famously minimalistic edits. Yes, we all love warmth and decency and Carver's originals were more sympathetic. But the work we know Carver for was the work edited by Lish. Leaving aside the 'poisonous' dynamics of the author/editor dynamic and the question of Lish's attitude toward Carver, I think the Lish versions are tighter, stronger, and more evocative.

The Slate Audio Book Club just did an interesting look at stories pre and post Lish edits; it's worth the time. For a fictionalized account of Carver's life in the 70s, see Pitt prof (and Wonderboy's Grady Tripp model) Chuck Kinder's novel The Honeymooners (edited down from thousands of pages, I believe, by Scott Turow).

Block and Tackle

Bill Simmons has an intense column on the merits of the Patriots decision to go for it on 4th and 2 on their own 20 against the Colts the other night. This is the future of sports journalism: violent arguments about statistics and indeteriminancy. Actually a pretty interesting epistemic place for sports to go.

Here's his column's best bit, from a side-bar he titles 'The Great Call of the Week':

I spent the past four weeks traveling to promote my book. During that time, I stayed in nine different hotel rooms. All of them had wireless. In three of the rooms, I noticed a strange phenomenon -- my connection would be fast during the day, but at night, it became so spotty that I could barely load box scores or watch even short highlight clips....

It's my belief that certain hotels scramble their wireless at night to discourage guests from surfing for porn. Why? So they will order adult entertainment from the hotel's pay-per-view system. I know ... it's dastardly. But if you're the hotel, why give the milk away for free when you can make people pay for the cow? More importantly, would you really put it past them? This is the same business that built motion detectors into mini-bars; they're going to give up the in-room porn business without a fight? It's evil, it's desperate, it's despicable and brilliant. The Porn Jammer is my Great Call of the Week.

Bill Simmons, ladies and gentleman: author of the best-selling 'The Book of Basketball: and the Id of the Middle-class American Male.

In Defense of Factory Farms

Hello. It's been too long since we sat down before the blogger template and disgorged some words.

Animals and greenhouse gases, vegetarianism, humane farming, and the economics of food.

Food politics is a broth of these. Lately I've been thinking about the intersection between animal density and emissions. Here's Johnathan Safran Foer offering what I think is a fallacy: he conflates factory farming (or high density animal operations) with animal emissions.

The World Watch just released a report that showed that they thought animal agriculture was responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gases, but it turns out it's 51 percent. So to talk about the environment and not talk about this is not to talk about the environment. This conversation has to be totally mainstreamed. There has to be a consensus behind it that factory farming is bad and we're not going to support it and we're done with it. And it has to be unacceptable either to pretend these problems don't exist or not to actively engage with them. I'm not saying everybody has to reach the same conclusions, but they do have to agree on the common enemy.

I'm not certain he's wrong. It's possible concentrations of animals and manure result in greater emissions than the more even spacing offered on 'traditional' farms. On the other hand, economies of scale on high density operations should offer much quicker payback on and more widespread adoption of energy producing methane digesters, solar panels, wind generators, and other costly but foot-print reducing investments.

Concerning transport emissions: Higher-density operations lead to fewer distribution trips, leading to a smaller per-unit emissions output. I realize factory farming involves other transport inefficiencies: animal farms require corn and other feed grains in great quantities, and those must be harvested and transported. Again, the math on transporting grain vs. transporting heavier end products is unknown to me. If it's more efficient to transport grain longer distances (in many cases by train) than end products shorter distances by truck and car, then, again, it might be advantage big farm. (Regardless of farm size, crops must be harvested, and that's gonna burn carbon; the 32 row planters and giant choppers they use out in Iowa happen to be more efficient per acre (and also newer) than the 12 or 16 row planters used on much smaller farms back East).

Then there's cost: Spending less on meat, dairy, and eggs means more money to invest in emssions-reducing alternatives (only valid, obviously, if factory farming is on net carbon neutral relative to traditional farms.)

Finally: land use: because factory farms are denser, they're leaving more land available for preservation (tree-plantings around large-scale animal operations are increasingly common). Grass-fed dairy, beef, pork, lamb, etc, while undeniably tasty, requires clear-cut pasture for grazing. I haven't done the math on this (and more to the point, I couldn't), so let me offer it as a question: if meat, egg and dairy consumption in America remains constant, and if it falls by %1 annually for the next 10 years, how much grazing land would be required to subsidize that appetite? If it requires considerably more land than currently available, transitioning would get pricey fast.

Having said all that, I realize that reductions in meat consumption will result in reductions in emissions and I consider it worthy goal (though in the interest of consistency shouldn't we seek to be less avid consumers of all highly processed products: eg. cheap shirts from Thailand, meals at fancy restaurants, chic and shitty furniture from Ikea?). I acknowledge the ethical concerns of those who object to high-density animal operations: I think they are real concerns (and where animals are uncomfortable I think their quality as food suffers too). Without tooting the family horn too loudly I think operations like my father's offer a sustainable model, where large numbers of uncaged animals are raised in barns on vegetarian feed without antibiotics or hormones. Likewise, at the right price-point, traditional farms are sustainable, and I'm amenable to the argument that traditional farms become more affordable if one cuts meat consumption but keeps total meat spending more or less constant, getting smaller amounts of a higher quality.

If a carbon or fuel tax ever gets passed (or some version of cap and trade), it will help us understand the environmental price of various products. I will be interested to see what impact this has on food prices (and clothing prices and cruise prices...) and I wouldn't be surprised, especially under cap and trade, if high-density operations, employing sophisticated energy-saving products, do better than we expect.

(Full disclosure: I realize this post contains several big Ifs and I'm prepared to accept that if on net factory farms are bigger emitters and polluters, and not just higher-density emitters and polluters, then they should be discouraged)

I Like Ike

Back in Lancaster Co, PA for a short visit. In my parents sunny kitchen I read a few chapters of Michael Korda's biography of Dwight Eisenhower, not enough to have a clear sense of what Ike was like or take any kind of measure of his career, but enough to have gotten my interest caught.

The most affecting bit I read concerned the influence of 'know-nothing' right-wing politics in Eisenhower's Republican party in the 1950s. It's easy to fixate on the 'unhingededness' of today's mouth-pieces, the Limbaughs, the Bachmans, the Glenn Becks. What can be lost is the cultural history of the movement. It runs, I suspect, all the way back to Andrew Jackson. The ideas embodied in Sarah Palin and promulgated by conservative think-tanks have been chugging along for generations. They are not new, they are not unpredictable. They were simply dormant. As long as a large percentage of a population lacks exposure to the give and take of the global condition, and exists in a bubble of local concerns, these ideas will continue to hold sway, and we will all have to reckon with them.