Author: odd man out

Cynical coda of ‘Mad Men’ finale: Coke is the real thing

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment

An acquaintance of mine posted this question on Facebook last week: “Does anybody else find Mad Men‘s writing to be vapid, direction glacial, acting somnambulatory, and the cultural references boring?”

I asked my friend Swamp Rabbit if he’d like to respond, knowing he’d had plenty of time to watch TV while in rehab these past few months. “You jokin’ me?” he said. “I got a life, Odd Man. Got no time for TV.”

So I posted an answer of my own: Yes, I suspect most discerning viewers who followed Mad Men noticed that some of the plotting sagged and that many of writers’ references to the cultural milieu of the 1960s were laughably superficial.

So what? TV is a diversion. The most you can hope for in a TV series — in this case, a TV serial — is writing that’s good enough to occasionally generate scenes that illuminate the human condition. The same is true of most long novels. Viewers will encounter a lot of filler, no matter how good the writing, but they continue watching a serial for the same reason readers persevere with a long novel. They become emotionally invested. They stick around for the story-telling and, in particular, to witness how their favorite characters behave at critical moments.

I didn’t watch all of Mad Men, not by a long shot, but I was a fan. The show had an unusually charismatic lead character — Don Draper, played by Jon Hamm — a quirky supporting cast, and a thoughtful head writer, Matthew Weiner, who focused on the world of commercial advertising to dramatize the socio-economic forces that metastasized into contemporary American culture, such as it is.

Weiner and his co-writers juggled a lot of sub-plots, some compelling and some not so much, and they seemed in early episodes of the final season to know how to successfully resolve most of them. But give Weiner a lot of credit for how he handled what looked like the total crackup of his enigmatic anti-hero. In the final show’s final scene, Don Draper, after hitting bottom, is shown having an epiphany while chanting “Om” in a meditation group at some New Age-y spiritual retreat. His epiphany involves conceiving what will become a famously insipid TV commercial (circa 1971) that uses touchy-feely cliches to sell Coca-Cola, “the real thing.” Mad Men ends with the showing of the actual TV commercial.

I’d thought Don might kill himself or be killed in some sordid way, or maybe even to find redemption in a good cause. Instead, he is reborn as a sleazier version of his former self, selling a nutritionally empty icon of a spiritually bankrupt culture. The real thing.

Not bad for a TV show.

Rate news analysts according to track records

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment
Friedman. You scored Minus 15 on Iraq alone. You're fired.
Friedman. you scored Minus 15 on Iraq. You’re fired.

The New York Times recently issued a “Libya is falling apart” editorial. As Glenn Greenwald noted, The Times failed to mention it was an enthusiastic supporter of U.S. air strikes that helped topple Moammar Ghadafi and destabilize Libya to the point where ISIS now has a foothold there. In fact, after Ghadafi fled, The Times went so far as to publish a front-page news analysis headlined “U.S. Tactics in Libya May be a Model for Other Efforts.”

Swamp Rabbit read Greenwald’s story and chuckled. “Glad them Times analysts are on the case. Without ’em, we might know what’s really goin’ on in the world.”

He scratched his mangy hide and added, “‘Scuse me fer askin’, but how come they don’t own up when they’s wrong?”

Good question. You would think The Times would not only own up to colossal errors of judgment but also fire the people responsible for such judgments, or at least demote them to the SundayStyles beat. But you would be wrong. Bill Keller, Thomas Friedman, the editorial board and so on are still going strong.

It seems the only real sin you can commit on the news side at The Times — at least when it comes to U.S. foreign policy — is to refuse to blindly accept the government’s version of events. Inaccuracies are acceptable, especially when a story is breaking. Corrections are made later, sometimes, after the bombs are dropped and thousands are dead and the government’s rationale for its large-scale act of destruction has been exposed as fraudulent. This is true not only at The Times, but at all mainstream news outlets.

We talked solutions. The rabbit proposed a self-policing system for the media run by some semi-reputable rag, maybe the Columbia Journalism Review. Stories written by Times staffers would automatically link to their other stories on the same subjects. The staffers would gain and lose points according to how accurate their stories turned out to be. Their ratings would be listed next to their bylines. For example, a reporter or pundit who was wrong on WMD in Iraq and U.S. tactics in Libya would merit a Minus 2. He or she could gain back points by admitting, in print, to previous errors. Anyone who fell to Minus 5 would be fired.

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Who’s going to stick his neck out writing a report that might get him fired?”

The rabbit spit on the frozen swamp and said, “That’s the point, you dummy. How else you gonna keep liars and fools out of the news business?”

Friday the 13th valentines

~ odd man out

mirror

It was Friday the 13th, a good day to play it safe. But the sun glared through the leafless trees and into my shack, urging me to greet the day with good faith. “Go out and slay dragons,” Swamp Rabbit said. He was hungry and out of bourbon. There were supermarkets and liquor stores to rob. There was money to be made, if I could find a place to sell magic electricity.

“It’s a bad-luck day, but I feel like I’m stagnating here,” I told the rabbit.

“Of course you stagnatin’,” he said. “You live in a swamp, Odd Man.”

So I jumped into my rusty Honda and hit the road. A black cat crossed my path before I was even out of the swamp. Then I sideswiped a parked car on Chemical Road, breaking its side mirror. But my luck seemed to hold. I set up my table at a popular emporium on the Main Line, where the buildings are less tacky and the people more hip to the eco-benefits of magic electricity.

But the shoppers were grumpy old men and housewives seeking air freshener and hipsters staring at their phones as they walked, as if taking directions from an unseen taskmaster. Everyone had to run a gauntlet of heart-shaped holiday balloons. They ignored me or said things like, “I have ADD, my wife handles the bills” and “Talk to my husband, I can’t wrap my head around that stuff.”

I called it a day and somehow ended up driving west on City Avenue, straight into the low-hanging sun, looking for a SuperFridge. I found a Shop-Rate, which is even better. You can usually count on them to have cameras that don’t work.

Back at the shack I unloaded fruits and greens and canned beans from my overcoat. The rabbit was happy when I pulled out a bottle of Wild Turkey, but then he twitched his whiskers and made a face.

“Ain’t no balloons or candy for my valentines,” he said. “You goin’ out again?”

I thought of former valentines and shivered. “I do Friday the 13th but not Valentine’s Day,” I said. “Don’t want to push my luck too far.”

If you can’t do this exercise, you’ll die!

~ odd man out ~ 2 Comments

blonde exercising

You gotta love online news features, especially when they come from TV. This is from Fox 8 News in Cleveland:

It’s being called the exercise test that can predict your death. A physician in Brazil used something called the sit/rise test to show his aging patients the risk of losing strength and flexibility. The study found strength and balance are pretty good indicators of longevity.
Dr. Marc Gillinov, a Cleveland Clinic cardiologist, said the sit/rise test is a simple way to measure your overall health. “This is what we call an observation study, which means it’s not of highest level of medical evidence, but I believe it to be true…”

A scoring system for the sit/rise exercise indicates how fit you are. If you do the exercise and score 8-10 points, you’re in great shape. If you score 0-3, “you’re 6.5 times more likely to die than those who scored high.”

I asked Swamp Rabbit what the latter statistic means. He said, “It means what it says, I guess. If you score high, you ain’t likely to die.”

“That’s a relief,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to be immortal.”

Jon Stewart, the Rodney King of TV pundits

~ odd man out ~ 3 Comments
Can we all just get along?
Can we all get along?

Elias Isquith on Jon Stewart:

It’s the shallowness of Stewart’s politics that leads to his other notable weakness as a political pundit… his tendency to fall prey to the trap of blaming “both sides.”

Absolutely. Stewart will end his run as host of “The Daily Show” this year, but he lost Swamp Rabbit and me back in 2010, during his “Rally to Restore Sanity,” an event based on the false premise that extremists on both sides “here [Washington, D.C.] and on cable TV” were to blame for government gridlock and the sad state of political discourse in America.

It was all very lofty and self-promotional, and willfully ignorant of the fact that Republicans were blocking halfhearted efforts by Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress to pull the country out of the Great Recession. They were doing then what they’re still doing, except they now have a majority in both houses of Congress and are up against a lame-duck president. (OK, he was pretty lame to begin with.)

The point is, Stewart was and is a master of false equivalence, which our ostensibly centrist media uses to avoid the hard work of evaluating the information they gather. As Paul Krugman noted, long before Isquith:

America, it goes without saying, has a powerful, crazy right wing. There’s nothing equivalent on the left — yes, there are individual crazy leftists, but nothing like the organized, lavishly financed madness on the right.
But centrists have a very hard time acknowledging this asymmetry; they love to assert that both sides are equally wrong — and often seem to feel the need to invent extreme positions when they don’t actually exist.

That’s Stewart, always lambasting the obvious knaves on the right and straining to find their counterparts on the left. Always disingenuously echoing Rodney King’s plea that “we all get along.” In the end, the message of Stewart’s cutesy style of comedy and his fake news is hey, they’re all knaves, you’re better off just sitting on your asses watching my mildly amusing TV show than taking an active stance against the people who are wrecking your country.

It takes a village of ‘experts’ to craft Hillary’s spiel

~ odd man out ~ 2 Comments
Swamp Rabbit explains Hillary's quandary regarding income inequality
Swamp Rabbit ponders Hillary’s income inequality quandary

The headline — “Economic plan is a quandary for Clinton ’16” — was provocative. The lede was downright bizarre:

With advice from more than 200 policy experts, Hillary Rodham Clinton is trying to answer what has emerged as a central question of her early presidential campaign strategy: how to address the anger about income inequality without overly vilifying the wealthy.

“She’s betwixt a rock and a hard place,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Ain’t gonna be easy to solve that there quandary.”

“The poor are being cheated because of laws that are too favorable to the wealthy,” I said. “At this point, the wealthy should understand this. It doesn’t take 200 experts to state the obvious.”

I wondered why I felt so worked up about Hillary’s campaign strategy. Then I remembered I’m one of the poors, living in a shack in the Tinicum swamp with an alcoholic rabbit. It galls me that she is trying to successfully mimic Elizabeth Warren’s call to correct income inequality, but without endorsing any of Warren’s remedies for the problem.

“She’s just another Democrat trying to win without changing the status quo,” I said. “She’d rather alienate millions of poors than risk alienating her hard core of wealthy campaign contributors.”

The rabbit shoved some twigs in the wood stove and looked at me funny. “What’s so odd about that, Odd Man? If wealthy people quit givin’ her money, how’s she gonna afford all them experts that tell her how not to piss off the wealthy?”

Icelanders say, ‘Gimme that old-time religion’

~ odd man out ~ 4 Comments
God id dead, but Odin is back!
God is dead, but Odin and his gang are making a comeback.

Many Icelanders have had their fill of the enfeebled Christian deity and are feeling the nostalgic pull of the old Norse gods:

Asatruarfelagid, a neopagan organization, plans to start construction next month on the country’s first Norse temple since Christianity arrived in the island nation roughly 1,000 years ago…
…While the temple will be dedicated to ancient Norse ideals, the leader of Asatruarfelagid said the context is a bit different in modern times.
“I don’t believe anyone believes in a one-eyed man who is riding about on a horse with eight feet,” Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson, a musician who is also high priest of Asatruarfelagid, told Reuters. “We see the stories as poetic metaphors and a manifestation of the forces of nature and human psychology…”

Swamp Rabbit read the news and said, “Thanks for statin’ the obvious, Hilmar.”

He meant that all religious stories are “poetic metaphors” unless you literally believe in Noah’s ark and so on. And that it’s no surprise some people feel consoled by pagan rather than Christian metaphors, which lost most of their remaining allure in the 20th century.

“All them one-god religions is dead,” the rabbit said, “except to fanatics.”

Not quite. A few non-fanatics still wring spiritual meaning out of the one-god religions, but most people in our time put their faith only in rituals and myths that attend to the pursuit of wealth.

“Neopagans don’t make a religion of money,” I said. “They want people to stop fouling up nature to feed their greed. Their gods are aspects of nature. Christians made their god anti-nature.”

The rabbit twitched his nose and sniffed at me. “What you say to them that says people was savages till they swapped old-time pagan religions for the one god?”

“I say Christian civilization gave us two world wars, the Holocaust and the atom bomb. Give the old gods another chance.”

He pondered that one and said, “Ain’t you never heard of Götterdämmerung?”

Hemingway does the Super Bowl, files late

~ odd man out ~ 2 Comments

hemingway

This year there were many victories. The Patriots captured the big town beyond the frozen lakes where the Vikings sail and there was a victory over the Chiefs on a great plain and the Pats went back East and crossed the bay to a fort with a field of false grass near a large building with a restaurant on many floors in a village called Foxborough. The town was very nice and the fort was very fine. There were more victories and the townies toasted the Pats in the cafes and bawdy houses.

The leaves fell and a cloud rolled off the bay and suddenly the Pats were in it and it was snow. The winter took hold and the town was different. The war was changed too. The Pats broke camp and flew south and west to a bawdy house in the desert for the final battle. The day was clean and cool and the night was even better. The Pats and Seahawks fought till they were weary and left the field.

I watched the second half on a flat screen at a galleria and ate spicy Doritas and drank Asti with Miss Barkley. “Call me Catherine,” she said. The galleria was very nice and Catherine was very fine. We held hands. Katy Perry lip-synced “Firework” and sailed around the field on a boom crane and shouted “God bless America.”

The troops fell into line and trotted back onto the field. The Seahawks brought up trench mortars and blew a big hole in the Pats’ front line. The Pats regrouped and counterattacked. The Seahawks held the line and attempted a coup de main. It failed and the Pats prevailed.

I was on assignment but the night was young. I told Catherine her hair was very beautiful. We drove for hours and jumped into a boat and rowed to a hotel in Switzerland. “And you’ll always love me, won’t you?” Catherine said.

In the morning I rolled out of bed to write my story. I stared at the blank page until I remembered the details of the game. The players wore splendid uniforms and butted heads often and were very brave. In a few weeks I won’t even remember who played. I filed my story and put on my coat and walked out into the rain.

Editor’s note: Last year I sent Virginia Woolf to cover the game, but she made a mess of it. It was a boring affair, so she left early and filed something about a lighthouse.

A ‘fiery sex scandal’ for a slow news day

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment

Engine 4 & Rescue 1

Swamp Rabbit and I were arguing again. The primary goal of mainstream news organizations is to scare people, he said. Fear sells. Just look at the huge response to news coverage in PA, NJ and NY of the “monster snowstorm” that never hit those states.

“You’re wrong,” I said, showing him the front-page story in Wednesday’s Philadelphia Daily News:

A fiery sex scandal threatens to burn up multiple firefighters’ careers, including some top brass, according to former Fire Commissioner Lloyd Ayers.

Ayers told the Daily News today that the investigation into a young paramedic’s claims of sexual misconduct began shortly before he retired in June.

The paramedic filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging misconduct against another paramedic. Soon after, rumors surfaced that she had sexual encounters with numerous firefighters, paramedics and supervisors in firehouses while on- and off-duty all around the city.

“The goal is to is titillate,” I said, using one of my favorite words. “The story can be a monster storm, a sex scandal, a murder on Main Street. It doesn’t matter, so long as it titillates.”

“Use whatever fancy word you want, Odd Man. News stories is to scare people. Will I git snowed in? Is my husband screwin’ around? Will I get murdered on my way home from the SuperFridge?”

I told him we were both saying the same thing. News venues — tabloids, so-called broadsheets, TV news shows, whatever — exist to dish out infotainment, not news, especially now that they’re fighting Internet sites for people’s attention.

“The snow stories scared me,” I said. “But it’s fun to read about firefighters having sex. What would you do with all that down time, hold Bible classes?”

The rabbit sniffed at my wood stove and said, “Wait till this here shack catches fire and all them firemen are off gettin’ laid. Have fun with that.”

I unlocked the cabinet near the stove and handed him a bottle of Wild Turkey. “Here,” I said. “You’re a real drag when you’re sober.”

Apocalypse now? No, just another dumb forecast.

~ odd man out ~ 2 Comments
It's the end of the world again!
What John Bolaris reads instead of tea leaves

“What we got here is a failure to communicate,” I told Swamp Rabbit, quoting from an old movie but referring to Philly-based John Bolaris, one of the many talking heads paid by the media machine to make weather forecasts.

Bolaris was on the radio, explaining why the “monster storm” predicted for us barely touched PA and NJ before rolling over New England, where storms in the East usually land. It seems he and his fellow weather swamis on TV had to choose from a number of possible computer-generated storm “models,” meaning scenarios. He and they chose wrong, but better to be safe than sorry, blah blah.

“What a bozo,” I said. “People in the real world get fired for being that wrong.”

The rabbit said I was the one who was wrong, that the local weather guy did great. “His job ain’t to inform people, Odd Man. It’s to scare ’em, like them horror movies do. People like being scared. The more scared they is, the more they watch the TV news show. Ain’t you learned that yet?”

“What a blowhard,” I said. “I spent the whole night worrying that the roof of this shack might cave in from the snow that never came.”

“Well there you go,” the rabbit replied. “The man done his job, didn’t he?”

Footnote: Too bad the mainstream media would rather hype winter snowstorms — they’re so unusual! — than inform people about long-term climate change.