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.

American Stranger has a long-form take on the question he posed the other night in my living room: What have been the great cultural innovations since the 1990s? Are there any?

Question of the night (hat-tip: Ryan): What have been the great cultural innovations since the 1990s? Are there any? We struggled for an hour tonight to find something more noteworthy than "YouTube" or "text messages/status updates." These are platforms more than cultural forms.

"Blogs" (as cultural form, not platform) come closest, but even these really originate in the homepages of the '90s...

Opening scene of the Ferris Bueller TV show. Don't miss the world's worst theme song.



Oh, 1990. How I miss you.

As I was saying yesterday it's a little strange to find oneself in a post-Conan universe, even if it's been nearly a decade since I watched an episode. Between his work on The Simpsons and his early work on Late Night, he's definitely something like a saint for my particular demographic.

Huffington Post has some highlights from the final show.

Everybody and their mother is gushing over this profile of a young Barack and Michelle Obama in The New Yorker. I am no different.

Nick Beaudrot at Cogitamus has an eliminationism reality check: as bad as McCain/Palin have been the last few days, they haven't quite reached the fever-swamp heights of the Republican Party of the 1990s. That's...comforting. I guess.

The good news is the McCain camp really does seem to be pulling back from the brink on this, with news today that Sarah Palin's stump speech is now Ayers-less. Perhaps this is partly a result of heightened media attention on their rallies; Biden and Obama spokesman Bill Burton were both asked about the rabid crowds on TV today.

In other Sarah Palin news, via Washington Monthly, David Brooks has called the vice-presidential candidate "a fatal cancer to the Republican Party," echoing my statement earlier today that if Republicans have any sense they'll put Palin permanently out to pasture on November 5:

[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he'd rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn't think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

What better topic for the thousandth post on this blog (and nearly 7000th post overall) than jwz's in-depth discussion of the number of times Bill Murray has to repeat the same day over and over again during the early-'90s cinematic classic Groundhog Day? The answer surprised me—like many people who haven't given that movie with the careful, dedicated study it deserves, I figured the cycle lasted for a few months at most. jwz's estimate is four years, and in an update to the post she cites director Harold Ramis's claim that the loop lasted ten years. And most interesting of all:

... though the original script had February 2 repeating for ten thousand years."

In this case I'll suspend my usual revulsion for remakes: I'd really like to see that version. I think it would be fascinating.

In the comments from last night's "Ugh" post, Mike Young makes a point I wanted to follow up on:

I'd vote Mccain before Clinton. A lot of my under 30 friends would probably vote an independent Ron Paul ticket or Bloomberg before Clinton. I've never met any passionate political participant who grew up in the 90s--liberal, conservative, religious, agnostic, blonde, or tall--who likes or even doesn't despise Hillary Clinton. She'd probably still win the general (they're the Clintons, dummy) but she'd do it by setting fire to the future of the Democratic Party.

I've think I may have met a few here and there, but it's definitely not the overwhelming sentiment. I was thinking about this today in connection with reports that even party bigwigs like Ted Kennedy and Rahm Emanuel are now calling on Bill to reign it in. Of course he won't. When has he ever been persuaded to reign any of his excess in?

I'm reminded of a pair of columns I wrote back as a undergrad for the student newspaper in January and February of 2001. The first one tried to come to peace with Clinton, with whom I always had a rocky love-hate relationship with while he was president. It starts, "I like Bill Clinton. I haven't always," and goes on to talk in generally pro-Clinton terms about my conflicted feelings about the Lewinsky scandal. Just two weeks later, I was moved to write this fiery excoriation after yet another indignity and betrayal—the pardon scandals, remember those? We'll get the mother of all replays exactly one year from today—from the man who was a master of the form:

Conservatives are falling over themselves to point out the “hypocrisy” in Democrats; you loved him while he was president, they ask, so why don’t you love him now? The answer is that this infraction is of a darker character than the other scandals — and the answer is also that this is the last straw. We could forgive the man for Whitewater, for Monica, for all the petty and insignificant scandals trumped-up by Clinton’s enemies in the right wing. We could forgive the man for causing embarrassment to the Democratic Party and to the country, for allowing his own personal foibles to overshadow the governing of a nation, and for failing to back up his acclaimed status as “Best Politician Ever” with substantive reforms and meaningful acts. We were content to look back with a wry smile on the Clinton years and wonder what might have been, as George Stephanopoulous does in his memoir, “if the President had been a better man.” Clinton may never have been remembered as a great president, but he probably could have been remembered as a good one.

The pardons change all that. The pardons are a parting shot at everyone who ever supported him during the trumped-up impeachment and years of Republican-sponsored scandals. The eleventh-hour abuse of the pardon power, for no reason that he could readily cite, to benefit a man who has indirectly pumped a significant sum of money into Clinton’s hands, is more than just the latest in a series of scandals; it is the definitive scandal. It is the final proof that William Jefferson Clinton cares about no one but himself and no thing but his own immediate advantage. It is the abuse of power for its own sake.

It’s over, Bill. Pack up your things, leave your key on the table, and get out of my house. I don’t want to see you anymore.

The possibility that the Clintons will return to the White House and inflict their narcissism and neuroses on the country and on the left for another 4-8 years is still too much to contemplate. It's honestly hard for me to say—and I say this as someone who more than once in the past has railed against not voting for the Democratic candidate, whoever it is—whether a return to Clintonism would really be better for the left in the long run than four years of McCain followed by the election of an actual progressive (Obama! Gore!) in 2012. Maybe I'm right and Obama is the Democratic Party's Reagan, but it's 1976, not 1980; maybe things still have to get even worse before people finally wise up.

At least there's only a few more weeks of this before I know whether or not I'm going to be knocking on doors or holding my nose come November.

After eighteen months of anticipation, I found Consider the Lobster to be entirely anti-climatic, if not exactly a disappointment. It's just that these essays are old. They were old in 2005 when the book came out and they're old now—and the book's still not out in paperback for another month. John McCain's 2000 primary bid? A book review of Updike's Towards the End of Time from 1997? Was anyone anywhere crying out for this material to be anthologized?

If you like David Foster Wallace, as I do,¹ these aren't bad essays—they're really not—but frankly at this point the 1990s are a half-remembered dream. Doesn't DFW have anything relevant to say about George Bush's America, or about anything that's happened since 2001?

For the sake of a link, though, here's the original version of "Authority and American Usage" from Harper's, a long treatise on language (even longer in the book) that's a pretty good read, if often quite wrong. For instance:

It probably isn't the whole explanation, but, as with the voguish hypocrisy of PCE [Politically Correct English], the obscurity and pretension of Academic English can be attributed in part to a disruption in the delicate rhetorical balance between language as a vector of meaning and language as a vector of the writer's own resume. In other words, it is when a scholar's vanity/insecurity leads him to write primarily to communicate and reinforce his own status as an Intellectual that his English is deformed by pleonasm and pretentious diction (whose function is to signal the writer's erudition) and by opaque abstraction (whose function is to keep anybody from pinning the writer down to a definite assertion that can maybe be refuted or shown to be silly). The latter characteristic, a level of obscurity that often makes it just about impossible to figure out what an AE sentence is really saying, so closely resembles political and corporate doublespeak ("revenue enhancement," "downsizing," pre-owned," "proactive resource-allocation restructuring") that it's tempting to think AE's real purpose is concealment and its real motivation fear.

This is plainly true of some (okay, potentially many) academics writers, but not of the genre as a whole—and not true (say) of Duke's own Fredric Jameson, whom DFW singles out by name for attack in the book version.

And, needless to say, even Wallace must know that he of all writers really can't get away with criticizing obscurantist language.

Or take this:

Childhood is full of such situations. This is one reason why SNOOTlets tend to have a very hard social time of it in school. A SNOOTlet is a little kid who's wildly, precociously fluent in SWE (he is often, recall, the offspring of SNOOTs). Just about every class has a SNOOTlet, so I know you've seen them — these are the sorts of six- to twelve-year-olds who use whom correctly and whose response to striking out in T-ball is to cry out "How incalculably dreadful!" etc. The elementary-school SNOOTlet is one of the earliest identifiable species of academic Geekoid and is duly despised by his peers and praised by his teachers. These teachers usually don't see the incredible amounts of punishment the SNOOTlet is receiving from his classmates, or if they do see it they blame the classmates and shake their heads sadly at the vicious and arbitrary cruelty of which children are capable.

But the other children's punishment of the SNOOTIet is not arbitrary at all. There are important things at stake. Little kids in school are learning about Group-inclusion and -exclusion and about the respective rewards and penalties of same and about the use of dialect and syntax and slang as signals of affinity and inclusion. [35] They're learning about Discourse Communities. Kids learn this stuff not in English or Social Studies but on the playground and at lunch and on the bus. When his peers are giving the SNOOTlet monstrous quadruple Wedgies or holding him down and taking turns spitting on him, there's serious learning going on ... for everyone except the little SNOOT, who in fact is being punished for precisely his failure to learn. What neither he nor his teacher realizes is that the SNOOTlet is deficient in Language Arts. He has only one dialect. He cannot alter his vocabulary, usage, or grammar, cannot use slang or vulgarity; and it's these abilities that are really required for "peer rapport," which is just a fancy Elementary-Ed term for being accepted by the most important Group in the little kid's life.

There's something to this, too, of course—yes, sometimes social misfits bring their ostracization upon themselves!—but this gleeful valorization of bullies from a onetime victim strikes me as actually deeply sad. And once I noticed it I found echoes of it everywhere in Consider the Lobster: the tagalong wails of the geek still desperately trying to prove that he fits in, that he really is cool after all.

This was a much more harsh-sounding review than I intended to write. Really, the book is okay, even good—it just feels much very out of its time, and suffers for it. The Adult Video News essay that starts off the book in particular is notably good, and used to be online, though it unfortunately seems to have been taken off. The title essay, on the other hand, is still up, and is also good, if lobsters are indeed something you feel like considering.

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¹ Sometimes.