A critique of Sesame Street from 1971. Some people are never happy.

Late Sunday links.

* Rachel Maddow kicks ass on another visit to Meet the Press. They should just give Rachel Meet the Press; I hope eventually they do. It's the only version of the show I could imagine actually watching.

* The networks are apparently afraid of SF; Day One has apparently been downgraded to a miniseries and the V remake is rumored to be forbidden to use the world "alien."

* Octavia Butler's papers will go to the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA, joining Christopher Isherwood's, Charles Bukowski's, and Jack London's.

* Playgrounds of the 1970s. A version of the Officer Big Mac at right was active in Ledgewood, NJ, well into the 2000s. (Is it still there?)

* Judith Butler: Save California's universities. My only quibble is that she appears to be writing in the wrong country's newspaper.

* More Nate Silver: That the conservative intelligentsia reacted giddily to news of the Americans losing is telling. It's telling of a movement that was long ago knocked off its intellectual moorings and has lost the capacity to think about what people outside the room think about. Flagged by Bitter Laughter. More thoughts along the same lines from Cogitamus and Contrary Brin.

* My happiest time was after Mao came into power. Our social status improved. People were allowed to express their views. Before, people had no right to speak out. After the founding of new China, the first parade, I was on the front row during the first parade. Foreign journalists from America and the Soviet Union took lots pictures of me. I was carrying a flower basket, walking down Huaihai road, it was very festive, and there was much excitement. I went out during the parade every year for many years, rain or shine. Why the Chinese support the Communist party.

Late night links.

* The 1990s are back! My hometown paper, The Star-Ledger, reviews DVD releases of The State and Parker Lewis Can't Lose.

* John Scalzi rates science fiction films by the only rubric that has ever made sense, their explosions. There seems to be some grade inflation at work here.

* Grist has a new feature called "No, there’s not a debate about the science of climate change," debunking denialist memes currently in circulation.

* The Atlantic investigates the elusive green economy.

In 1977, the country appeared poised on the brink of a new age, with recent events having organized themselves in such a way as to make a clean-energy future seem tantalizingly close at hand. A charismatic Democrat had come from nowhere to win the White House. Reacting to an oil shock and determined to rid the country of Middle East entanglements, he was touting the merits of renewable energy and, for the first time, putting real money into it— $368 million.

But things peaked soon afterward, when Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House. “A generation from now,” Carter declared, “this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken—or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people; harnessing the power of the sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.”

Oh, Jimmy.

* And MetaFilter investigates how to fall out of a plane.

I guess I'm doing some AIG blogging today. A few more links for people looking for background and commentary on this.

* Good background on the collapse of Wall Street and the shady and/or illegal practices that have characterized the behavior of these large firms over the last few years can be found in Michael Lewis's piece for Vanity Fair from December.

That’s when Eisman finally got it. Here he’d been making these side bets with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the BBB tranche without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to make the bets. Now he saw. There weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product. The firms used Eisman’s bet to synthesize more of them. Here, then, was the difference between fantasy finance and fantasy football: When a fantasy player drafts Peyton Manning, he doesn’t create a second Peyton Manning to inflate the league’s stats. But when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. “They weren’t satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn’t afford,” Eisman says. “They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that’s when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?”

Here's an interview with Lewis.

* Eliot Spitzer, hilarious national joke though he may be, says the real scandal is "that AIG's counterparties are getting paid back in full."

But wait a moment, aren't we in the midst of reopening contracts all over the place to share the burden of this crisis? From raising taxes—income taxes to sales taxes—to properly reopening labor contracts, we are all being asked to pitch in and carry our share of the burden. Workers around the country are being asked to take pay cuts and accept shorter work weeks so that colleagues won't be laid off. Why can't Wall Street royalty shoulder some of the burden? Why did Goldman have to get back 100 cents on the dollar? Didn't we already give Goldman a $25 billion capital infusion, and aren't they sitting on more than $100 billion in cash? Haven't we been told recently that they are beginning to come back to fiscal stability? If that is so, couldn't they have accepted a discount, and couldn't they have agreed to certain conditions before the AIG dollars—that is, our dollars—flowed?

The appearance that this was all an inside job is overwhelming. AIG was nothing more than a conduit for huge capital flows to the same old suspects, with no reason or explanation.

(Via Vu.) Spitzer also speaks about the (misdirected) "populist rage that is metastasizing very quickly," which is a topic I just finished writing an email about. My interlocutor had a good line I'll just go ahead and quote:

Every problem we have is met with demands for a kind of vengeful series of recriminations instead of a focus on what public policy should focus on - the institutional framework that allows/encourages people to behave in a certain way and that leads to disastrous results.

Obama needs to channel this rage into a movement for systemic reform of capitalism, not just pump capital into institutions that have been broken for not years but decades. Otherwise, he and we will find ourselves in this same place soon enough, with all same players crying "Oops!" again.

* Dan Hind has a somewhat similar take, via Lenin's Tomb, though it must be said that both links are instructive examples of how difficult it can be to divide justice from vengeance in times like these. What I like about Hind in particular is the way he traces the crisis to what I agree is a major point of origin, the explosion of public and consumer debt beginning in the early 1970s, which didn't "just happen" but which was, again, the result of a system of incentives instituted by those in power. The credit crisis is a symptom of a much larger disease; Obama needs to think much bigger than he seems to be.

* Dr. Bluman has some thoughts about legality and fraudulent conveyance in the comments to a post I keep pushing down the page.

The pursuit of freedom, as defined in an age of consumerism, has induced a condition of dependence on imported goods, on imported oil, and on credit. The chief desire of the American people is that nothing should disrupt their access to these goods, that oil, and that credit. The chief aim of the U.S. government is to satisfy that desire, which it does in part of through the distribution of largesse here at home, and in part through the pursuit of imperial ambitions abroad.

Retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich talks to Bill Moyers about the consumerist origins of American foreign policy, what Charles Maier called the 'empire of consumption.' Of course, once again Carter comes up::

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I would be one of the first to confess that - I think that we have misunderstood and underestimated President Carter. He was the one President of our time who recognized, I think, the challenges awaiting us if we refused to get our house in order.

BILL MOYERS: You're the only author I have read, since I read Jimmy Carter, who gives so much time to the President's speech on July 15th, 1979. Why does that speech speak to you so strongly?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, this is the so-called Malaise Speech, even though he never used the word "malaise" in the text to the address. It's a very powerful speech, I think, because President Carter says in that speech, oil, our dependence on oil, poses a looming threat to the country. If we act now, we may be able to fix this problem. If we don't act now, we're headed down a path in which not only will we become increasingly dependent upon foreign oil, but we will have opted for a false model of freedom. A freedom of materialism, a freedom of self-indulgence, a freedom of collective recklessness. And what the President was saying at the time was, we need to think about what we mean by freedom. We need to choose a definition of freedom which is anchored in truth, and the way to manifest that choice, is by addressing our energy problem.

He had a profound understanding of the dilemma facing the country in the post Vietnam period. And of course, he was completely hooted, derided, disregarded.

More immediately important, though, is this about Obama, McCain, and general election 2008:

BILL MOYERS: ...Do you expect either John McCain or Barack Obama to rein in the "imperial presidency?"

ANDREW BACEVICH: No. I mean, people run for the presidency in order to become imperial presidents. The people who are advising these candidates, the people who aspire to be the next national security advisor, the next secretary of defense, these are people who yearn to exercise those kind of great powers.

They're not running to see if they can make the Pentagon smaller. They're not. So when I - as a distant observer of politics - one of the things that both puzzles me and I think troubles me is the 24/7 coverage of the campaign.

Parsing every word, every phrase, that either Senator Obama or Senator McCain utters, as if what they say is going to reveal some profound and important change that was going to come about if they happened to be elected. It's not going to happen.

BILL MOYERS: It's not going to happen because?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Not going to happen - it's not going to happen because the elements of continuity outweigh the elements of change. And it's not going to happen because, ultimately, we the American people, refuse to look in that mirror. And to see the extent to which the problems that we face really lie within.

We refuse to live within our means. We continue to think that the problems that beset the country are out there beyond our borders. And that if we deploy sufficient amount of American power we can fix those problems, and therefore things back here will continue as they have for decades.

It's a truly exceptional interview. Read the whole thing. Via MeFi.

I was pretty productive this morning until I caught a link to this Yearbook Yourself site; now I've gone and wasted half the morning playing with it.

If you can ignore the commercials on every page, it's good fun. As you'd expect, the funniest results seem to cluster around the 1970s and '80s...



1974



1976



1978



1980



1982



1984



1988

I was born too late.

Never say Hollywood can't learn from its mistakes. The producers have figured out how to please everyone: maintain earnestness regardless of the inherent absurdity of the genre, be 'topical' by way of empty allegory, be spectacularly violent, never stop moralizing. Meet these requirements, and a great deal of variety is possible: one has free reign to be jokey or serious, bright or gloomy, undisguisedly sexist, racist, homophobic, or none of the above, 'critical,' or 'wish fulfillment.' Or all of the above. These labels are simply not the creator's responsibility. Restore the superhero's propaganda function, in short, and in so doing prove Sontag's thesis that "pure camp" is always so for the future and not the present.** The comic book-loving nerds of my generation are now faced with the dubious realization of our pubescent dreams: the nerds have taken over Hollywood, and the responsibility thus falls to the Figure of the Superhero to 'teach us' something about the "human condition."

Good news for culturemonkeys: Ryan has a great post on superhero cinema over there. (And here too.) It's more or less the definitive post on Dark Knight. But a few quick thoughts. First, I think Acephalous's attempt to rehabilitate the film from attempts to understand it solely as a "balls-out obvious apolog[y] for the authoritarian, repressive 'excesses' of global capitalism" is instructive, and definitely worth reading.

Second, Ryan writes that we are currently experiencing the"repetition-as-farce of the '50s"—but this doesn't strike me as a new phenomenon. Isn't it more the case that post-war American culture is perpetually returning to the '50s as a site of degrading, doomed unity?

This is to say that Jameson's claim that WWII is the moment of highest American nostalgia par excellence is, I think, fundamentally correct, with the revision that it's more the period from Dec. 1941 to August 29, 1949, the day the Russians exploded their first atomic bomb. The '50s are the memory of "the good '40s" combined with and juxtaposed against the reality of 8/29/49—they are the dawning but perpetually unfinished recognition of how it all will go / is going / has already gone wrong. In other words, the '50s themselves were a repetition-as-farce the first time around of the ideologically unacceptable, apocalyptic shock at the end of the previous decade—and we find ourselves going back to the '50s for answers whenever we get shocked again.

That's why, when 1973 is the year of disaster for American capitalism, Happy Days premieres in January 1974.

More intergenerational warfare: On July 15, 1979, Jimmy Carter gave his famous malaise speech. How much better would the world be today if we—by which I mean they—had just listened to him then?

Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this Nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our Nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny.

In little more than two decades we've gone from a position of energy independence to one in which almost half the oil we use comes from foreign countries, at prices that are going through the roof. Our excessive dependence on OPEC has already taken a tremendous toll on our economy and our people. This is the direct cause of the long lines which have made millions of you spend aggravating hours waiting for gasoline. It's a cause of the increased inflation and unemployment that we now face. This intolerable dependence on foreign oil threatens our economic independence and the very security of our Nation.

The energy crisis is real. It is worldwide. It is a clear and present danger to our Nation. These are facts and we simply must face them...

Instead we they elected a guy who tore solar panels off the roof of the White House for no reason at all.

One day in the summer of 1971, my parents held hands, closed their eyes and jumped out of their conventional marriage into something strange and new. I was 9 years old at the time, and we were camping at Betsy Lake in the High Unitas Wilderness with another family of five. We were halfway into the camping trip when the six of us kids realized our parents had mixed and matched: My father was in the tent with their mother, and their father was in the tent with my mother.

Laird Harrison at Salon has an interesting article about life inside a polyamorous group marriage.

Tom Tomorrow's Short Attention Span Theater presents "A Brief History of Gasoline Consumption in America."

Six forgotten science fiction films of the 1970s.

'Utopianism betrayed by commerce': Rock 'n' roll in the '60s and '70s.

In December 1969, on the same day that police arrested some “nude hippies” – members of Charles Manson’s murderous “family” – in Death Valley, California, Mick Jagger held a meeting in London with the Rolling Stones’ business adviser, Prince Rupert Lowenstein. They were trying to find ways to keep the revenue from hits such as Street Fighting Man from the taxman.