Help me out here - why does my daughter insist on eating cat food?
Oh, and for those of you who don't speak Swedish - well, that's actually too bad, because My Lovely and Talented Wife Who Is Smarter Than Me™ is saying some really funny stuff there.
I came across something interesting in David Denby's review of Iron Man - it seems that at one point in the movie, Iron Man gets waterboarded:
In any case, the freelance fanatics, or whatever they are, waterboard Tony Stark, which, considering what some American interrogators and their surrogates have done to suspects recently, is enraging to watch. Such are the ways of pop: we cast our sins onto others. The complaint sounds a little wan, but it’s worth noting that, possibly, more Americans will see this dunderheaded fantasia on its opening weekend than have seen all the features and documentaries that have labored to show what’s happening in Iraq and on the home front.
I'm not sure Denby hasn't missed the point here; Jon Favreau, the film's director, is a pretty smart guy and I'm certain that if he decided to show Islamic extremists (or caricatures thereof) waterboarding an American billionaire arms dealer there's a reason for it - and I don't think it's because Favreau was rooting for Captain America during the Civil War story arc.
On the other hand, while I think it's a bit unfair to assume that the creative team behind Iron Man threw waterboarding in there simply to make the bad guys seem worse, Denby's point about Iron Man reaching a larger audience than, say, Standard Operating Procedure or Taxi to the Dark Side is a potentially valid one, given that they've decided to update Iron Man's origin story so that it now features scary brown people rather than scary yellow people. Is there a chance that certain less-informed moviegoers might have some of their negative racial stereotypes reinforced by the waterboarding sequence? Maybe. Does that mean Favreau shouldn't have included it? Well, maybe.
Pardon my equivocation, but I'm genetically unable to tell other artists what they should do with their work - which probably explains why David Denby is reviewing movies for The New Yorker and I'm reviewing his review. But if it were up to me, I'd go for it and waterboard as many superheroes as I could. You can't craft your work hoping the dumbest segment of your audience doesn't miss whatever point your trying to make; eventually you end up resenting your audience and once that happens your work starts to suck. Someone who doesn't know that the United States is waterboarding prisoners is probably clueless enough to think that Barack Obama really is a terrorist sleeper agent - that viewer's opinion of Muslims isn't likely to get much lower. Also, as I've written before, most people don't really know what waterboarding entails. If this scene gets just a few people thinking a little bit more deeply about what's happening in America today, then I'm for it.
Besides, Iron Man is a tool. Never liked him anyway.
Today, Mel Cooley is thinking, "Well, I guess since you're not America's Mayor anymore, we can tell you how we really feel."
Today, Mel Cooley wants you to remember to never trust a man who drops his pants and says, "Look how tiny my johnson is!"
(Hat tip to My Lovely And Talented Wife Who Is Smarter Than Me™ and everyone else who e-mailed me this story. Exactly why did you all think I'd be interested in a story about penis theft, anyway?)
I swear, I did NOT Photoshop this:
I was channel surfing the other night when I stumbled across this. I know live coverage of the Pope's visit played havoc with everyone's schedules, but heck, you'd think The Prayer Channel would have been a little bit more attentive...
(x-posted at Pax Americana)
The epidemic of suicides among veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts appears to be reaching a crisis point, as testimony is set to begin in a class-action lawsuit against the Veterans Administration for failing to provide more and better psychiatric care. Internal VA e-mails obtained by the plaintiffs say an average of eighteen veterans kill themselves each day. A RAND Corporation study found that an additional one thousand veterans attempt suicide every month. Clearly, the system currently in place simply can't deal with the sheer numbers of veterans whose psyches have been torched and gutted during their service in our mismanaged war in Afghanistan and our completely elective mismanaged war in Iraq. Returning veterans must navigate an incredibly labyrinthine process in order to claim any benefits; I've been clinically depressed myself (obviously, not to the degree that these returning veterans are) and I can tell you that paperwork is the last thing you're capable of dealing with when you're in that state. That's something I plan on writing about in more detail later on.
Right now, I want to touch on something I've written about before: human beings are simply not designed for war. I'm way too much of a misanthrope to have any illusions about human nature; it's clear that the default setting for much of our race is 'douchebag.' But 'douchebag' is a far cry from ruthless killing machine.' We have to be goaded, perverted into a warlike state, with promises of wealth or increased social status or threats of being cast out from the herd. One of the stated goals of military training is to tear down the recruit, to short circuit his human nature so he becomes able and willing to commit violence against strangers on the order of another stranger. Of course, the enemy too is dehumanized to the soldier (and, via propaganda, to the citizen) in order to make his death more palatable and less troubling. Arguably, this is done to make the soldier better able to survive the nightmare that is the modern battlefield.
The only problem is that it doesn't seem to work. Thich Nhat Hanh, no stranger to the reality of war, writes that military training designed to strip both the soldier and the enemy of their humanity will necessarily result in atrocities like Abu Ghraib, because "Preparing for war and fighting a war means allowing our human nature to die." But our human nature can't die as long as we remain alive, and it seems to come squirreling out of us from the weirdest places and in the weirdest ways and the next thing you know you've woken up in a cold sweat holding the gun you keep under the pillow and holy shit when did you start keeping a gun under your pillow?
Eighteen people a day lose the struggle to reconcile what they've become with what they once were. Another twelve thousand people each year succumb as well, but for the grace of whatever they believe or maybe only because of dumb luck they survive to struggle on. There are no half-time show salutes to honor those who survive their PTSD and the ones who die are not counted among the honored dead and their names will never be carved on a monument. Remember this the next time anyone tells you to be "realistic" and accept that war is "inevitable" and it's all just "human nature."
According to Yahoo!, today's top searches are:
Jenna Bush
Brigitte Bardot
90210 Spinoff
Polygamist Retreat
I'm off to the airport to catch the next flight to L.A. - because that is the greatest sitcom pitch ever.
Today, Mel Cooley is thinking, "Well, there's only one way to settle this. Cindy. Giada. Iron Chef. LIVE!!"
Man, I hate it when giant rats burst from a flaming hellmouth and try to devour midtown Manhattan...
Pic via my crappy camera phone.
Today, Mel Cooley is thinking that the Food Network needs to pick up this show right away.
Why, yes, that is a gas mask he's wearing as a jock strap. Why do you ask?
