Skepticism vs. Religion -- but Mainly vs. Capitalism

For about five centuries now, the “enlightened” humanists have been railing against religion (fine), tradition (perhaps that’s hasty), and capitalism (dead wrong), lumping far too many issues into one basket and making it difficult even for an atheist-anarchist like me to give them more than one cheer.

As I’ll likely note in my introductory comments at tomorrow’s momentous Debate at Lolita Bar on the infinitely important question “Does Religion Make People Better?” one of intellectual history’s greatest ironies has to be the fact that the very founder of (post-classical) utopian thinking, Sir Thomas More, was (by twentieth-century right/left standards) a paradoxical mix of rigid Catholic orthodoxy, boldly innovative criticism of government, and complete opposition to property rights — this last being a point he makes as explicitly as Rousseau or Marx, forever earning this anti-divorce, Catholic-conservative martyr a place in the pantheon of socialist visionaries.

Though the survival of freedom has often hinged on playing intellectual forces such as church and state against each other — whether in the Middle Ages or the Cold War — I think it may be high time we found the courage to lump both church and state together and be rid of both, even if it means risking having no allies at all for a time. With rampant government spending and religious-fanatic terrorist armies (and authoritarian regimes) loose in the world, it would be nice to hear more people admit that a combination of atheism and unfettered markets might be a comparatively moderate and pleasant way to live.

(On a related note, Jacob Levy mentions a lecture by Joan Scott arguing that despite appearances, secularism has not always aided women, since restricting religion to “the private sphere” has sometimes given it free reign precisely where oppressive males do the most damage. This is similar to the premise of tomorrow’s anti-religion debater, Austin Dacey, in his book The Secular Conscience — reviewed positively in the new issue of quasi-rival magazine Skeptic — that restricting religion to the private sphere simply delays and retards arguments about religion’s real merits or flaws. Tomorrow’s debate will haul the topic back out into the public square, at least for a couple hours.  In Jacob’s post after the Joan Scott one, by the way, he briefly mentions our bet about whether Obama will grow government more than Bush.)

•••

It is no surprise to me, by the way, that despite the left’s pretense of being the “rational” ones, they often end up giving a religion-like veneer to their messianic political crusades. Witness witless “Rev. Billy” Talen, a New York City comedian/street performer whose whole shtick is just pretending to be a preacher while ranting in revivalist fashion against capitalism and consumerism — and against Starbucks coffee that uses milk from hormone-treated cows (as seen in the last John Stossel special I worked on, Tampering with Nature, in the summer of 2001, before moving on to defend similar high-tech practices at ACSH).

Rev. Billy is like those annoying, repetitive Robin Williams bits where Williams slips into sounding like a southern preacher for no good reason, except without jokes and without veering into any other characters or modes at all. And because, as Hayek warned us, the worst rise to the top in politics, he’s also — yes — your 2009 candidate for mayor of New York City, if you have the misfortune to be affiliated with the morally misguided and economically ignorant Green Party (which at least makes us libertarians look sane). But hey, I’ve vowed not to vote for term-limits-busting Bloomberg, even after being a guest in his apartment once, so maybe I need to give this faux-preacher fellow a second look.

It’s a complex, multifactorial world. And if, after all the above, you need a nice dose of just-plain skepticism, my friend Chuck Blake recommends this profile of eccentric and brilliant scientist Freeman Dyson from the New York Times. For more about greens, come back tomorrow for my April Fool’s Day Book Selection(s) entry.

EU vs. U.S./UK

We live in Bizarro Socialist World when Continental Europeans are telling the U.S. and UK to stop pushing big-government spending on the world (maybe the day will come when they’re more religious than us as well — but we can discuss that on Wednesday at Lolita). It’s crucial to remember that a proper pro-market utilitarian’s loyalties lie with whoever’s discouraging government spending, not simply with “America.” This, then, becomes a valuable test to see (a) whether socialists and anti-G20 (or G8 or G7 or G9 or what have you) protestors know when to stop cheering for Europe over the U.S. and (b) whether our own conservatives know when to say we really ought to be listening to Europe.

My loyalty is to the productive, information-revealing, preference-fulfilling process that is the market, not to the U.S. per se, and if I have to keep saying that more stridently as our situation deteriorates and risk looking like a traitor in the process, so be it. I helped produce a John Stossel hour a decade ago that said Hong Kong is in many ways superior to the U.S. (or at least was, though Communist meddling may yet change that). We have a lot to learn, just not from East Germany or 1970s Sweden or Paul Krugman.

In the current bailout frenzy, it’s not so much Germany’s Merkel vs. the UK’s Brown that fascinates me, though (given their relatively minor differences over spending and tax tweaks). It’s Obama and his big-spending push being chastised by a Czech prime minister — in a weird historical reversal, those who lived through socialism the first time know better than Americans do to be wary of it. Likewise, some of the most ardent young capitalists I’ve met are brainy folk from Central and Eastern Europe who’ve come to NYC to escape the poverty-inducing mistakes of the generation that preceded them — and I hope for all our sakes that they will.

Atlas Sold (but Did Not Sell Out)

About a week and a half ago, the Ayn Rand Institute proudly noted that different editions of Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged have lately filled multiple spots on Amazon’s top ten classics list and top ten U.S. Literature and Fiction list.  Despite my subtle philosophical differences with Rand, I think this is great news (and as for whether Rand was on the right track with her militant atheism — well, that’s something we can discuss this Wednesday night at Lolita Bar, obviously).  For all the complaints people make about Rand’s psychologically-flat characters, I don’t know that any novel besides Atlas has really tried to capture the economic context of a society collapsing under regulation in such convincing detail.

In particular, much as people like to make it sound as if her work is all about evil politicians and heroic industrialists, she does a wonderful job of capturing how widespread selling out to the government is among corporations.  Why face the uncertainty of market competition when you can cozy up to the state and get bailouts or monopoly-granting licenses and government contracts that less well-connected businesses lack?

This is all the more reason to abolish government, though leftists love to make the non-sequitur argument that if the ranks of businessmen are filled with hypocrites and cronies of the state, it’s somehow an argument against the free market.  At this alarming juncture in economic history, I don’t think I can let that one slide to keep the peace at parties anymore, yea, even though I risk becoming once more as annoying as I was in college.  We’re in big trouble, and a lot of people — including some with Nobel Prizes and New York Times columns — badly need to learn the basics of free-market economics immediately.

Speaking of collapsing systems, I’m pleased to see at least two columns pointing out that Natasha Richardson might have had a fighting chance for life after her skiing accident if not for the Canadian healthcare system — and specifically the even more socialistic Quebecois system, which is bad enough to inspire tragic films like The Barbarian Invasions.  Not that this will stop Michael Moore, Nancy Pelosi, and others for pushing to make us more like low-on-scanning-machines Canadians.

Already, politicians like Democratic House Majority Leader Rep. Hoyer are saying that health “insurance” reform should include the option for citizens to enter government-run health programs.  For a time, healthcare will retain a private element, but once people become convinced that, due to having been taxed for it already, they can only get their money’s worth by utilizing “free” government healthcare or health insurance, the private health sector’s days will be numbered, and the U.S. will take one more giant leap toward being a de facto part of Europe, and not in the good wine-drinking way.

The insurance companies’ response to it all?  Rush to become a government entitlement and bask in the stability of being part of the state, as noted in yesterday’s entry.  Time to shrug — but henceforth, be careful you don’t dislocate anything in the process.

I Cannot Has Fail? Also: Risk-Averse Megan McArdle

Something I always thought would signal the economic end of the world has come to pass: We are on the verge of seeing the abandonment of the very idea of insurance.

I always thought one of the most alarming things about the Clintons was their belief that insurance companies should stop charging people higher premiums if they’re in higher risk categories (such as possessing pre-existing conditions). No one ever wants to pay a cent more for anything, of course, but the whole point of insurance is that each party in the transaction is making a bet based on risk assessment, and without that — and the wonderful, socially-beneficial incentive effects it creates (such as discouraging being a smoker) — insurance really does not exist at all. Welfare, maybe. Disaster relief. But not insurance.

Well, pressured by the government, a group of insurance companies, in typical self-destructive cowardly corporate fashion, is now offering to preempt further government regulation by “voluntarily” ceasing to charge riskier, sicker people more. Of course, that just means having to charge everyone more to compensate, which you’d think would cost the insurance companies some business. Ah, but they’ll only stop the risk-rating if government goes forward with Obama’s plan to mandate health “insurance” for all, the government presumably subsidizing it for those who can’t afford it. In other words, the insurance companies have decided to become a form of welfare (and thus an arm of the state) instead of a form of risk-rating hedging, as long as they’re guaranteed to come out of it with more customers.

Pathetic — and to me, particularly sad, since I’ve long said that insurance actuarial tables are the single most rational thing about the human race: real probabilities instead of wishful thinking, paranoia, hunches, prejudices, or egalitarian pretenses. (And Mom is a former insurance office manager, I admit.) This news about not charging anyone more, then, is a bit like the stock market announcing that by legal fiat (and through government subsidy) there will no longer be losses — great news for about five minutes, and then reality crushes civilization like a deranged bug. (Not to be confused with a gold bug, which is probably what the survivors will have been.)

•••

Not everyone sees the tidy connection between actuarial thinking, risk-taking, markets, and the moral responsibility to pay for your own messes that I do, of course (and if you assume I do see a tidy chain of connections there, it makes a lot more sense of my combination of robotic rationalism and conservative moralism, for anyone who still finds that confusing). Megan McArdle is lazily thought of as more-or-less-libertarian but has, I think, a much stranger and more complex underlying philosophy of risk than the one underlying this humble blog post.

You may have noticed she was an early proponent of a banks bailout (though not quite of the sort that came to pass), is keener to take measures against global warming than most libertarians, favored mandatory health insurance purchases before it was cool, thinks the industrial revolution never would have happened without the principle of limited liability, likes sumptuary laws believe it or not, yesterday even suggested that capital moving around the globe might be too destabilizing (I mean, heck, having an economy is a risk, too), and in general is more sympathetic than most libertarians to macroeconomics-influenced (and business school-inculcated) notions about there being optimal levels of investment and risk-taking for society as a whole that may not jibe with individuals’ own preferences.

We need the risk-takers even when their risk-taking is irrational from an individual cost-benefit perspective, I think she’d argue, a position that could even logically lead to “subsidizing entrepreneurship” in some cases, absent an accompanying fear of government bungling. (This is not so unlike Adam Smith’s view in Theory of Moral Sentiments, by the way, that entrepreneurs are often crazy or emotionally dysfunctional people but ones for whom the rest of us should be very, very grateful. Really, he said that, I swear.)

Add to all this the fact that Megan admits to being a bit neurotic and hypochondriac (I’m not badmouthing, just summarizing), and you get a picture of someone with almost a “precautionary principle” approach to economics and other big systemic issues, at least as compared to most of us rootin’-tootin’, let the chips fall where they may, laissez-faire libertarians, if I’m understanding it all.

But without going as far as my girlfriend Helen Rittelmeyer, who sometimes suspects we’d be better off if we simply stopped using statistics (a radical view you can discuss with her after you hire her to be your best assistant editor), I’m more and more inclined to think, in anarchist fashion, that any talk at all about what the social system as whole “should” do is a formula for disaster or at best disappointment (I for one wasn’t surprised the real bailout was a stupid one — were you?). The optimal savings rate — or the optimal level of health insurance — is probably whatever the hell happens when society becomes libertarian enough to stop talking about “what everyone else should do” in some broad macro sense, because that always ends badly. Doesn’t logically have to end badly. Just always does.

Joker's Bonus Crimes

While I have no strong feelings one way or the other about the bonuses paid to AIG employees — a drop in the bucket compared to the larger crime of the government bailing out AIG and other firms in general (not to mention every other thing government pays for) — I was pleased to see that esteemed law professor Richard Epstein, in a Wall Street Journal editorial this week, shared my fear that the government just keeps getting more and more comfortable with what once would have been considered bills of attainder, those unconstitutional (yet now rampant) cases where laws are fashioned to punish specific individuals on a “make it up as we go along” basis instead of as broad, general rules applying to all citizens and all cases (the basic idea behind the phrase “general welfare,” though no one remembers that anymore either, of course).

If the law’s so bendy it gets refashioned anew with every discovery of a reviled exec (or kid who falls down a well, or one-in-a-million garden tool mishap, or freak storm), we may as well give up on law and have the current crop of potentates rule by arbitrary decree, in keeping with the swinging mood of the crowd.

All the same, nice to see John Carney likening the wasteful AIG folks to the Joker setting a big pile of money on fire in Dark Knight.  This sort of thing will make the populist revolt against both government and its big-business cronies that much easier.  The time is fast approaching, I think.

WAGER: Does Obama Make Government Bigger?

Gov. Bobby Jindal, in turning down “stimulus” spending for Louisiana, noted with some fear the fact that the strings attached to stimulus money put big-spending programs in place permanently in the states that accept the money, mandating that the states pay for it after the initial influx of federal cash. Obama may be using the excuse of the financial crisis to stealthily rewrite American law in an even more big-government fashion, though it’s very encouraging to see the mounting wariness about this even in the mainstream press.

I asked Jacob Levy — who thinks Obama is in some sense more libertarian than Bush — whether he was still interested in doing the change-in-size-of-gov’t bet about Obama he once proposed — that is, that Obama would, in Jacob’s opinion, increase the size of government less than Bush, low standard though that is for any president. I initially declined the bet simply because who the hell knows what circumstances and events may occupy the President — not to mention Congress, which could always switch parties — in the years ahead or how amenable the voters will be to expansionism.

But it seems pretty unlikely now that Obama has any intention of pleasantly surprising us by shutting down Cabinet departments and that sort of thing, so I’ve taken the bet — in three parts, as suggested by Jacob: change in government spending in Bush’s first term vs. Obama’s first term, (1) at the federal level as a percentage of GDP, (2) at all levels as a percentage of GDP, and (3) in constant dollars. I’ll avoid discussing the precise terms so it doesn’t sound like there’s, y’know, gambling going on here.

I’ll readily admit that neither of us knows what the future holds, that it’d be nice for America if I lose the bet (though even Eastern Europeans and Chinese are now warning us we’re spending too much), and must caution in any case that it would be empiricism of the most myopic kind to think modern liberalism were vindicated as a philosophy or conservatism refuted if this one test goes in Obama’s favor — but Jacob thought this a valuable test, and I think I’ll win, so why not? Keeps life interesting, while we endure.

•••

Whence some people’s strange confidence, though, in this terrible, capitalism-bashing demagogue, Barack Obama, who seems to inspire the same sort of statist reverence as did the dictatorial FDR?

On a non-economic front: despite the switch in terminology on “enemy combatant,” you’ll notice that, as some predicted, Obama’s made no actual legally-relevant changes in the Bush security procedures (the administration quite emphatically declined to do so despite judges repeatedly asking whether any tweaks in the law would be forthcoming). So does that make Democrats “the party of torture” now, to use the phrase Jacob once applied to the Republicans and even gave as one reason to avoid voting for (torture opponent and torture victim) McCain?

Or are the Democrats to be thought of as our friends throughout for reasons that I, in my stubborn, faith-like blindness, fail to perceive? Are they making us “freer” in some complex, metaphysical, perhaps Continental-philosohy way that I’m too bourgeois, literal-minded, and materialistic to grasp? Is being taxed and regulated by Democrats just holier than being taxed and regulated by Republicans, perhaps because Democrats talk pretty? Is that it, the talking pretty part? And with Obama, we get one-party rule to boot, something regarded as a bad thing by many limited-government proponents only the day before yesterday, it seemed.

All I know is that I see a lot of Republicans and libertarians at those mounting “American Tea Party” protests around the country, opposing the government’s “stimulus” spending — and while these people may not succeed in winning our freedom, to push against them or deride them as populists while they are fighting the good fight would not be honorable. If this nation’s epitaph is written in the near future, I hope it will not say that any libertarians sided with our destroyer.

DEBATE AT LOLITA BAR: Does Religion Make People Better? (plus: Hire Helen Rittelmeyer!)

Wed., April 1 (8pm):

Rabbi Simcha Weinstein (author of Up, Up, and Oy Vey! and Shtick Shift, about Jewish comics and Jewish comics, respectively) arguing yes

vs.

Skeptic Austin Dacey (Center for Inquiry rep, Skeptical Inquirer contributor, and author of The Secular Conscience) arguing no.

A (real) April Fool’s Day social-philosophical smackdown, hosted by Todd Seavey and moderated by Michel Evanchik.

Free admission, cash bar: basement level of Lolita Bar at 266 [NOTE TO TOXICPOP READERS: NOT 466] Broome St. at the corner of Allen St. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one block south and three west of the Delancey St. F, J, M, Z subway stop (assuming the J and Z lines still exist in one week).

•••

As some of you know, this topic is of great personal interest to me, due to my religious girlfriend, Helen Rittelmeyer — who is scheduled to have articles in a staggering five major conservative publications already this year, from NationalReview.com to Weekly Standard, and is clearly, as one conservative writer put it, going to take over the world — but WHO NONETHELESS COULD REALLY USE A NEW JOB, if some editor out there is smart enough to hire her. By all means e-mail me leads, such as they are in these troubled times, whether from conservative organizations or not (she’s more or less libertarian as well and just fond of reportage, too, as her recent NRO piece suggests, despite one tiny geography error in there that NRO hasn’t gotten around to correcting despite her request).

I’m telling you, let her get a foot in the door, and then we all ride her coattails to success. Don’t miss the opportunity.

But a funny thing about Helen: she doesn’t think religion makes people better (it sure doesn’t eliminate her fondness for violence in various forms), whereas I — an atheist — think it just might make people better. “Behave or go to Hell” is a pretty powerful motivator for some people, love of God an incentive to charity for many, and without question “Thou shalt not steal” one of the most important libertarian memes of all time (such thoughts are what make me able to tolerate the religious right and even have some sympathy for the Straussians — remember the Straussians? — with their belief that atheists should defer to religion to maintain social order). Still, those beneficial impulses might exist to roughly the same extent, albeit with different philosophical glosses, in a world without religion. It’s a tricky question, but luckily Dacey and Weinstein can work out the details while I listen.

And Helen and I have managed to keep the peace for six months now, if you start the counting (perhaps a bit early) from the Echo and the Bunnymen concert we went to back on October 1. And counting from that day lends extra weight to April Fool’s Day, so why not make that a night of both combat and celebration, the way Helen likes it? Be there in one week.

•••

A few other random thoughts about religion as a mixed blessing (so to speak):

•One of my fellow ABC News veterans (not anyone I knew) was murdered this week in the midst of gay rough sex with a reportedly Satanist-anarchist teenager he met through Craigslist, which is about as tawdry an end as one could come to, I’d say — and somehow when I first heard the victim’s neighbors being reported as saying how nice he was to total strangers, I had a feeling it’d be something like this, though not quite to this extreme. To plenty of Americans, of course, this incident would be proof that we need to be on guard against Satan, anarchists, gays, and New York media personalities, though I can’t help thinking every time something bad happens involving a self-proclaimed Satanist that there’s only one place, ultimately, that people learn Satanism, and that’s from Christianity. You don’t see materialists like me trying to summon demons or expecting magic from goat sacrifices.

•I had brief fallings-out with two, count them two, very political Catholic acquaintances, right-wing Dawn Eden and left-wing Sander Hicks, years ago over Lolita Bar merely hosting a speech about Pinochet’s good points (there are some). The guy who gave the speech wasn’t too happy with the whole ruckus, either, nor, most likely, with my JOKING suggestion that we scrap the controversial planned speech in favor of a defense of Hitler. It’s hard to keep everyone happy when they think eternity or the historical dialectic is at stake, or both at the same time. Sander’s gone on to become something of a conspiracy theorist — but he also hates the banks bailout, so by the time the revolution comes, we may yet see all the interesting people fighting on the same side, which will be nice. (Our debates moderator, Michel Evanchik, is also Catholic, as it happens, and for a “moderator” he’s pretty opinionated himself.)

•Michael Malice has joked that people he prays for (just as an experiment) seem to get cancer, as in the cases of a man who was hoping to give Dawn Eden a job and then later Dawn herself — and though Dawn is doing fine now, I can’t help noticing that she just mentioned her fellow religious author (and our fellow New York Press veteran) Mark Gauvreau Judge also having cancer. Best that Malice not pray for him, I think. Coincidentally or not, both Howard Stern and director Vincent Gallo have also joked (?) that they suspect themselves of having the power to give people cancer — specifically to give Roger Ebert cancer, in Vincent Gallo’s case (for Ebert’s harsh review of Brown Bunny). And there are undeniable personality commonalities among Stern, Gallo, and Malice. Not that I’m suggesting any actual supernatural forces at work here (or anywhere), of course.

•Meanwhile, I see Rabbi Shmuley Boteach (or “bee-otch,” after his drubbing in debate with Christopher Hitchens a year ago) is battling one of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in a public debate, or rather a former Power Rangers actress who has just written her second pro-libido book on being a “Hot Chick.” Strange world. As it happens, I recall that shortly before my time at ABC News, there was a John Stossel special about gender differences that illustrated the concept of males being willing to do embarrassing things to gain power by showing Newt Gingrich shaking hands with people dressed as the Power Rangers at some event. Reality seems so very distant at times.

•And this week, anyone keen to show the social benefits of religion must contend with the fact that a horde of Orthodox Jews here in New York — for all their admirable sense of community and traditionalism — went berserk and attacked a deli owner for accidentally selling them non-kosher hotdogs. You know, Jonathan Swift was one of my early inspirations to be a writer, and even when I was young and more enthusiastically and simplistically anti-religion, I thought his characterization of religious disputants as akin to people fighting over which end of an egg to eat first was unfair. Yet in my ostensibly modern and cosmopolitan city, a food vendor was just reduced to using an electric carving knife to fend off an angry mob that thinks God hates their hotdogs. Maybe Jonathan Swift had the right idea after all.

But again, you can discuss that with us on April Fool’s Day (really) — and chat with Helen before hiring her, if you want to kill two birds with one stone.

Revenooers vs. the Moonshine

Is it hopelessly populist of me to say that I think we could use a lot more of this — defiant, lawbreaking moonshine-makers — and a lot fewer regulators and central economic planners?

And don’t get me wrong — I’m not knocking material prosperity when I praise this guy’s backwoods lifestyle.  On the contrary, I think his attitude does more to increase wealth than does the bean-counting of the regulators, and that’s a good thing.  In addition, though, as Brian Doherty once observed, having a population full of ornery drunks, as America did to a much greater extent two centuries ago than it does today, may be the easiest route to keeping us ungovernable and thus free.

To get back to economic prosperity for a moment, though: I often wonder how much freer we’d be today if not for the unfortunate fact that the creative types got it into their heads sometime around the early twentieth century that material wealth is at odds with, rather than conducive to, creativity and intellectual activity.

I notice that the episodic play Penny Dreadful, which ends this coming weekend, appears to borrow from the Grant Morrison comic book The Invisibles the idea that the flapper vibe of the early twentieth century is tied via time travel and a sense of imminent cultural transformation to the year 2012, which some of the mystics, hippies, and apocalyptics of our day have decided to treat as the next  epochal turning point (per ancient Mayan propechy, blah blah blah).

Mystical nonsense aside, though, economic optimism tends to encourage not just money-making but other beneficial forms of culture-making as well.  (Does anyone really think the current financial climate is as conducive to optimism and creativity as, say, the end of the Cold War or the days of the dotcom boom?)

So, if you want to put a spring in your step, poets, abolish the Fed (source of our boom-and-bust business cycles), privatize currency production, deregulate, un-tax, shut down the government leaving only a residuum of privately-enforced property law, and watch the human race and its arts flourish like never before.

That may sound as nutty as the propechies of a flapper-era spiritualist to some, but tough — my patience has run out, and I’m no longer interested in any philosophy’s gradualist half-measures leading nowhere.

"Indoctrinate U" and "Ghost Breakers"

Evan Coyne Maloney’s documentary Indoctrinate U is showing tomorrow (Tue. the 24th) at 6pm at Village East Cinema at 2nd Ave. and 12th St. It’s a rare case of media looking critically at left-wing political correctness on campus — including the double standards routinely used to silence right-wing groups while giving left-wing groups the keys to University Hall. A private institution can run itself in any idiotic way it wants short of treating its customers fraudulently, of course, but it’s pretty obvious these institutions also serve as training grounds — and even models for society — in the totalitarian minds of the political activists, student and professor alike, who populate them. So thank goodness someone’s looking at them skeptically.

One college professor sympathetic to this cause, a co-founder of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), Prof. Alan Kors forwards (via Sarah Federman) a video clip from the old Bob Hope movie The Ghost Breakers that’s a thirty-second reminder media weren’t always as incapable of using humor and irony against the leftist powers that be as they generally are now. (Of course, these days we instead have Sacha Baron Cohen, seen in the photo above as Bruno, who it suddenly occurs to me looks a tiny bit like Sarah Federman and like the Fixx’s lead singer, Cy Curnin — not sure what to make of that, and I don’t mean to insult any of them.)

That Bob Hope clip is from 1940, the height of the New Deal, and a simple reminder (which should not be necessary) that comedy is obviously braver when directed at the powers that be (hint: Obama) than at the powers already ousted and defeated (e.g., Bush).

Eternity vs. the Changing Seasons, Decades, and Debates

Ah, springtime at last, when (perhaps due to time travel problems like the ones mentioned in my Wednesday entry) snow flurries hit NYC, neopagans celebrate the renewal of life, a man plans an 80sa 50s costume to complement his lady’s 50s costume for a “decades”-themed party hosted by a Brown alum, and a copy of the March/April 2009 Brown Alumni Monthly arrives in your mailbox to remind you what once was — and make you think about comic books.

For you see, the new BAM — the same one that has a cover story about a Brown student spending a semester at the late Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University and managing to get along with the Christians — has letters from my friends Scott Nybakken and Ali Kokmen reacting to a prior issue’s error-filled article by Lawrence Goodman about Jews in comics (though in Ali’s case, they used the positive-sounding parts of the letter). You can sense the love of the medium in both the bad-cop and good-cop half of this team, a DC Comics editor and Del Rey manga promoter, respectively.

And just to make my world seem smaller, whereas Scott was one of our debaters last time at Lolita Bar, making the case that sci-fi should avoid getting mired in nostalgia, one of our debaters for next time — Rabbi Simcha Weinstein — is mentioned in the letter below Scott and Ali’s, since he’s not only our “yes” man in our April Fool’s Day debate on the question “Does Religion Make People Better?” — he’s also the author of Up, Up, and Oy Vey!, a book about Jews in comics.

The important issues have a tendency to be intertwined — you know, like issue #137 of Uncanny X-Men and issue #150 of New X-Men. Just a joke! Or is it, really?

Battlestar Galactica, the U.N., and the Mormons

The universally-praised — and particularly wonk-beloved — Battlestar Galactica ends tonight. Please don’t give anything away, because I’ve only seen an episode or two, as with Heroes, Arrested Development, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, The Sopranos, Lost, Alias, David Tenant as Doctor Who, Dollhouse, and Robot Chicken. I’ve been busy for a decade or so, really, and I apologize for losing touch and being behind schedule.

In any case, I gather the cast and crew of Battlestar Galactica gave a talk to the U.N. this week, partly to share thoughts on the show’s political themes and partly just to get the U.N. some cheap press attention (if there were any press available aside from the horde waiting like vultures outside the hotel on West 67th between Broadway and Columbus, where I suspect grieving Natasha Richardson relatives may have been stashed).

I hope some of the U.N. assemblage noted that Battlestar Galactica’s robotic villains, the Cylons, are religious fanatics, that the series sympathetically depicts humans meant to be analogous to the tribes of Israel (a nation the U.N. seems to spend half its time selectively condemning while several of its other members sponsor terrorism and endorse totalitarianism), and that the original 1970s series was created by a once-persecuted minority, namely the Mormons (on whose Book the basic plot is modeled).

As it happens, on April Fool’s Day (really) at 8pm, our next Debate at Lolita Bar, on the question “Does Religion Make People Better?” will feature as one of its debaters Austin Dacey, who is the Center for Inquiry’s atheistic official representative to the U.N., trying to promote secularism and tolerance around the globe. Be there.

•••

Being Mormon — knowing that if you’re good (and male), you’ll get your own planet to rule in the afterlife — seems to incline people toward sci-fi, since Mormons not only gave us Galactica and the comparably epic Ender’s Game but presidential candidate Mitt Romney (who I voted for in the New York presidential primary, for strategic reasons now lost in the mists of history — and whose government health-insurance plan in Massachusetts is already projected to be bankrupt within a decade), who strangely said his favorite novel is Battlefield Earth, a sci-fi tome by (Scientologist) L. Ron Hubbard.

Now, you’d think the poor Mormons would already be wary of being mixed up with the Scientologists, so was that just a very impressively honest, unguarded answer from Romney? Or is there more affinity between the two creeds than we realized? Is it just the Mormon love of sci-fi manifesting? Might it be, as my friend Jonathan Leaf half-jokingly suggests, that Romney picked a book by a Scientologist to remind America that there are creeds even weirder than Mormonism? I don’t know.

I do know that my friend Michelle Boardman was a legal advisor to the Romney campaign — and that during her stint at the Justice Department, she also said that after giving testimony to the Senate about the constitutionality of signing statements (one of countless things Obama criticized about Bush but continues to do, incidentally), she wishes she’d worked in the phrase “So say we all” from Battlestar Galactica. Wonks love Galactica.

Dead or Alive -- But Definitely Manly

We didn’t quite get around to it, but Helen and I considered seeing Taken on St. Patrick’s Day, which would have seemed somehow fitting, since the Irish star of the film, Liam Neeson, apparently lost his wife, Natasha Richardson, to a skiing accident that day, with reports of her finally being taken off life support at a hospital here in NYC just a block south of me. According to Scott Nybakken, Neeson’s character is delightfully old-fashioned and patriarchal in the film, as a man willing to kill to rescue his daughter. (Helen likes old-fashioned, as her article on NRO that day suggests.)

As if I didn’t already feel some conservative pain from hearing about the man who played a vengeful patriarch in Taken (and a loving patriarchal lion named Aslan and a Jedi and Rob Roy, etc.) lose his wife — the same week we lost Democrat-turned-hawk Ron Silver — I felt at least a twinge of nerd sadness upon hearing that Darth Vader has prostate cancer (though he seems to be doing well, and prostate cancer often progresses very slowly) and punk-influenced sadness upon hearing that the lead singer of the (fittingly named) New Wave band Dead or Alive, the Captain Harlock-like Pete Burns, is suffering double kidney failure (and is less able to get a replacement due to government’s evil ban on organ sales, I might add). Grim week.

Coincidentally, the man with whom Helen and I did spend part of St. Pat’s — my friend Joe Brennan, visiting from England, who has been an airplane pilot, lawyer, DJ, businessman, bus driver, chronic film extra, and reality-TV contestant among other things — happened to mention Tuesday night that he’d met Burns (due to trying out for England’s Big Brother), without even realizing that the news of Burns’ kidney troubles had just been reported.

Speaking of drinking with Joe, I often recall him discussing one of his drinking buddies: a war vet with an injured hand who’d also worked as a professional shark hunter until having to sell his boat to bail his son out of jail and subsequently becoming a hard-drinking, cash-strapped, sadder man. That’s amusingly, stereotypically manly, I’d say, and rather cinematic.

Ron Silver vs. TimeCop

One of Scott Nybakken’s complaints in our last Debate at Lolita Bar was overuse of time travel, with all the absurdity it tends to introduce.

It’s hard enough keeping track of geek things that are aiming for some sort of tidiness and logic, like Terminator, but when time travel is depicted by people so interested in art and emotion that logic just goes out the window, really kooky things start happening — and I don’t just mean the implausibly convenient fading/unfading photo from Back to the Future, which at least has the excuse of being comedy.

Witness the ludicrous final fate of Ron Silver — not in real life, in which the actor/activist was sadly taken from us just this week, but in the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie TimeCop. The film clearly establishes at the beginning that time travelers are not transformed along with the timestream when they alter the past — but then has the whole climax hinge on the villainous Ron Silver character’s confidence that if he travels to the past and gets blown up there, it won’t matter because the event will alter the timestream, changing the future and him along with it.

To top it off, when a paradox is finally produced, he doesn’t confront himself or vanish into the fourth dimension but instead…turns into green ooze. Yeah, OK. To quote the name of the Kryptonian god of reality fluctuation who I just made up: What-Ev. (One bright note in the morass of TimeCop: the Smithereens’ upbeat cover of “Time Won’t Let Me.”)

Rare examples of convoluted and possibly incoherent but nonetheless satisfying time-gymnastics can be found in (1) the great indie film Primer about yuppie Wall Streeter types inadvertently creating a time machine and (2) Donnie Darko, the latter a case where the aesthetics/psychology works so well that even we nerds walk away content, despite realizing days later that the underlying “Philosophy of Time Travel” at work in the film was so complex that the director actually had to write a book by that title explaining it all.

That film also worked a sort of retroactive magic upon the 1982 Tears for Fears song “Mad World,” since to a lot of people — especially Darko-loving millennials — the haunting, fragile version performed by the composers of the film score probably sounds more like the “real” version of the song than the original does, even though almost anyone asked to name the song’s performer would say Tears for Fears, much as everyone knows the English version of “Der Kommissar” but attributes it to Falco (even though the cover is in fact by After the Fire — not that I begrudge the late Falco being remembered).

•••

But getting back to time travel: I’m keen to see what happens next month when, unless ratings improve, the series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles may end on April 17, I’ve heard (think of that as Judgment Day, two years early…or five years later, or twelve years later, or whatever).

Will they politely clear the decks of the series’ accumulated non-John-Connor characters and set things up for the following month’s Terminator Salvation movie? Will they perhaps even reconcile the series continuity with Terminator 3? Will the nuclear war arrive? Might it even be prevented? Will there be a satisfying ending at all? An “open” ending in case of a renewal of the series?

I’m flexible — I swear — but curious. A simple solution might be some sort of “time” bomb going off (you know, something involving tachyons, like in Watchmen) that returns all the time-displaced cast members to their temporal points of origin. John experiences T3 after all, and then circa 2018 becomes…Christian Bale (as we’ll see on May 22, 2009, of course).

T4 will also introduce new, giant-size Terminators, apparently, but I’m confident Batman will be able to save us from the Transformers, so to speak.

P.S. Nybakken also noted that one audience member that night, his co-worker Jared, is a big fan of Steven Seagal (not to be confused with Jean-Claude Van Damme), who apparently has been quietly churning out about two or three action movies per year lately, sometimes direct to video. The list of titles and one-line plot summaries in Seagal’s Wikipedia entry is amusing.

Here’s another public figure quickly being turned into a cartoonish badass, by the way: Let the hurling begin.

P.P.S. And if sci-fi and fantasy deserves to be parodied, by the way, it’s nice to see Comedy Central doing it with umlauts — and the greatest subtitle in TV history. Next, perhaps they should adapt Bill O’Reilly’s novel (which they’ve already parodied on The Colbert Report).

P.P.P.S. And while I’m noting parodies and the like, I wish the eco-green-ified versions of Schoolhouse Rock noted here by my friend Maura Flynn were a joke — but they aren’t. And another piece of my memory and my culture dies.

Whores, St. Patrick's, Brown, Feces, and the Watchmen Squid (plus: Rorschach for New York Times columnist!)

Ah, lassie, ’tis St. Patrick’s Day (a perfect day for my girlfriend, Helen Rittelmeyer, to have a piece about the Boston Irish on NationalReview.com), and much as I admire tradition, ’tis a day that makes me wonder about the eternally-ambiguous dividing line between (a) raucous activities made better — almost sanctified — by the surrounding traditionalism and ritualism, and (b) mere barbarism with tradition as a figleaf and excuse. You know, the same dilemma created by “conservative” college fraternities.

Speaking of which: there has to have been some conscious, significant change in policy at Brown University regarding alumni relations, because last week I received an e-mail inviting me to alumni events involving “casino night” and, perhaps more shockingly, a night of wine with a lecture on the use of wine as an instrument of “seduction.” These things are not only at odds with the e-mails I used to get from Brown, inviting me to panel discussions on nonsense topics like “sustainable development” (considerably less fun and therefore likely less well-attended), but probably at odds with some explicit rule in the old Tenets of Community Behavior.

I mean — wine as a tool of seduction? Didn’t they threaten to expel people for that? Wasn’t half the campus culture aimed at convincing us that men are natural-born rapists even when everyone’s sober? (By contrast, no need to worry about underage drinking in Arkansas on St. Pat’s or any other time — my legislator friend Dan Greenberg reports that his fellow state reps there have worded anti-alcohol laws so strictly that they’ve inadvertently outlawed taking communion.)

•••

Speaking of tools of the patriarchy, Tracy Quan mass-e-mails a link to her article about madams threatening to reveal all their customers in tell-all memoirs. Quan thinks this a shocking breach of madam traditions, as no doubt it is, but it’s an amusing arena for concern about traditional etiquette. Of greater interest from my philosophical perspective, though, is the fact that she worries that madams doing this to get book contracts may be evidence of the over-marketization of the world of prostitution. Now, the obvious response would be to say that worrying about the market intruding on prostitution is even more absurd than being surprised at anti-traditionalism in prostitution — but I’d say the problem here, as usual, is not enough of the free market.

First of all, in a true free market, prostitution would be legal, and the madam would not be able to violate the contractual privacy agreements her clients would then be able to make and enforce with laws and lawsuits (in much the same way prostitutes could more easily bring charges against abusive johns or pimps if the profession were legal). Perhaps more important from the perspective of traditional morality, though, many of the clients wouldn’t likely be clients in the first place in a world where contracts were taken seriously enough that marriage contracts could contain “you cheat, you go to jail (or suffer some other serious punishment)” clauses if the spouses so chose — and don’t you suspect that eventually a lot of spouses would so choose?

•••

Of course, some would say these sorts of moral problems can only be solved by religion — something we can discuss on April Fool’s Day (8pm) at Lolita Bar at our “Does Religion Make People Better?” debate. In the meantime, you might want to recapture the era when the Catholic Church reigned supreme by reading a book pointed out to me by medieval historian Christine Caldwell Ames, namely Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics. Or you may not.

In other how-far-can-tradition-bend news, I was delighted to read a Newsarama article about the calculations that went into deciding whether or not to remove the Lovecraftian fake space squid from the climax of the Watchmen movie — a decision that I’m pleased to see has the backing of Watchmen co-creator Dave Gibbons. I dare not consider writer Alan Moore’s thoughts about it all.

Perhaps a conversation between him and director Zack Snyder about it all would have sounded a little something like this:

MOORE (to Snyder): The squid stays in the picture.

SNYDER (to space squid): Ar, I’ve nothing against ye, Squiddy. I just heard thar was gold in your belly.

And by the way, if we really want to see some conservative moralism reinjected into the culture — interesting pick though Ross Douthat is to replace William Kristol — let me be the first to recommend Rorschach from the Watchmen as a columnist for the New York Times. That would liven things up. And no one knows better than Rorschach that this city’s sewers will eventually scab over, drowning us all in our own blood and filth. Someone who has a way with words should be there to chronicle it.

Kirkpatrick Sale = Sideshow Mel?

= ???

On The Simpsons, Sideshow Mel once popped up to second a comment by Thomas Pynchon, referring to him as “my fellow Cornell alumnus!”

I don’t know if Mel believes the theory, propounded three decades ago by a writer named John Calvin Batchelor, that “Pynchon” was simply a pseudonym for J.D. Salinger.

But in reading about that now-debunked controversy, I learned that Pynchon and America’s most prominent Luddite writer, Kirkpatrick Sale (who ends his speeches by literally smashing a computer), were Cornell classmates and co-wrote a musical there (Is it mere coincidence that Sideshow Mel once had his buttocks frozen with liquid nitrogen and smashed with a hammer?).

I saw Sale speak once (at the old Libertarian Book Club at one time run by scientist and political activist Robert Goodman — who could use a job, if you’d care to contact him at robgood[at]bestweb.net). However, now that I think about it, I’ve never seen Sale and neo-primitivist Sideshow Mel in the same place at the same time. Could this be the real case of double identity?

And then, of course, there’s that Shakespeare/Bacon theory. Mmmm — Shakespeare-bacon…

Sorry. Helen’s been talking about making chocolate-covered bacon, inspired by ThisIsWhyYoureFat.com. So I’ve got bacon on the brain — but I’m not the only one. I once saw an interview with a guy who was searching for the Loch Ness Monster by dropping bacon into the Loch. His sophisticated scientific reasoning? “Everybody loves bacon.” I guess so.