Just a pair of painfully funny Daily Show / Colbert clips from last night.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Baracknophobia - Obey
comedycentral.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Better Know a District - New York's 25th - Dan Maffei
comedycentral.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

“Watchmen,” like “V for Vendetta,” harbors ambitions of political satire, and, to be fair, it should meet the needs of any leering nineteen-year-old who believes that America is ruled by the military-industrial complex, and whose deepest fear—deeper even than that of meeting a woman who requests intelligent conversation—is that the Warren Commission may have been right all along. The problem is that Snyder, following Moore, is so insanely aroused by the look of vengeance, and by the stylized application of physical power, that the film ends up twice as fascistic as the forces it wishes to lampoon. The result is perfectly calibrated for its target group: nobody over twenty-five could take any joy from the savagery that is fleshed out onscreen, just as nobody under eighteen should be allowed to witness it.

Professional curmudgeon Anthony Lane reviews Watchmen in the New Yorker. Spoiler alert: Lane's so insanely aroused by textual vengeance and by the stylized application of critical power that he goes out of his way to spoil the surprise ending—the fascist.

Zizek is a believer in the Revolution at a time when almost nobody, not even on the left, thinks that such a cataclysm is any longer possible or even desirable. This is his big problem, and also his big opportunity. While "socialism" remains a favorite hate-word for the Republican right, the prospect of communism overthrowing capitalism is now so remote, so fantastic, that nobody feels strongly moved to oppose it, as conservatives and liberal anticommunists opposed it in the 1930s, the 1950s, and even the 1980s. When Zizek turns up speaking the classical language of Marxism-Leninism, he profits from the assumption that the return of ideas that were once the cause of tragedy can now occur only in the form of farce. In the visual arts, the denaturing of what were once passionate and dangerous icons has become commonplace, so that emblems of evil are transformed into perverse fun, harmless but very profitable statements of post-ideological camp; and there is a kind of intellectual equivalent of this development in Zizek's work. The cover of his book The Parallax View reproduces a Socialist Realist portrait of "Lenin at the Smolny Institute," in the ironically unironic fashion made familiar by the pseudo-iconoclastic work of Komar and Melamid, Cai Guo-Jiang, and other post-Soviet, post-Mao artists. He, too, expects you to be in on the joke. But there is a difference between Zizek and the other jokesters. It is that he is not really joking.

Adam Kirsch in The New Republic takes Žižek seriously "just once" and concludes he is a fascist.

There is a name for the politics that glorifies risk, decision, and will; that yearns for the hero, the master, and the leader; that prefers death and the infinite to democracy and the pragmatic; that finds the only true freedom in the terror of violence. Its name is not communism. Its name is fascism, and in his most recent work Zizek has inarguably revealed himself as some sort of fascist. He admits as much in Violence, where he quotes the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk on the "re-emerging Left-Fascist whispering at the borders of academia"--"where, I guess, I belong." There is no need to guess.

Zizek endorses one after another of the practices and the values of fascism, but he obstinately denies the label. Is "mass choreography displaying disciplined movements of thousands of bodies," of the kind Leni Riefenstahl loved to photograph, fascist? No, Zizek insists, "it was Nazism that stole" such displays "from the workers' movement, their original creator." (He is willfully blind to the old and obvious conclusion that totalitarian form accepts content from the left and the right.) Is there something fascist about what Adorno long ago called the jargon of authenticity--"the notions of decision, repetition, assuming one's destiny ... mass discipline, sacrifice of the individual for the collective, and so forth"? No, again: "there is nothing 'inherently fascist'" in all that. Is the cult of martyrdom that surrounds Che Guevara a holdover from the death worship of reactionary Latin American Catholicism, as Paul Berman has argued? Perhaps, Zizek grants, "but--so what?" "To be clear and brutal to the end," he sums up, "there is a lesson to be learned from Hermann Goering's reply, in the early 1940s, to a fanatical Nazi who asked him why he protected a well-known Jew from deportation: 'In this city, I decide who is a Jew!'... In this city, it is we who decide what is left, so we should simply ignore liberal accusations of inconsistency."

Judith Butler urges caution in the face of Obama exuberance. Via Larval Subjects. An excerpt:

Very few of us are immune to the exhilaration of this time. My friends on the left write to me that they feel something akin to "redemption" or that "the country has been returned to us" or that "we finally have one of us in the White House." Of course, like them, I discover myself feeling overwhelmed with disbelief and excitement throughout the day, since the thought of having the regime of George W. Bush over and gone is an enormous relief. And the thought of Obama, a thoughtful and progressive black candidate, shifts the historical ground, and we feel that cataclysm as it produces a new terrain. But let us try to think carefully about the shifted terrain, although we cannot fully know its contours at this time. The election of Barack Obama is historically significant in ways that are yet to be gauged, but it is not, and cannot be, a redemption, and if we subscribe to the heightened modes of identification that he proposes ("we are all united") or that we propose ("he is one of us"), we risk believing that this political moment can overcome the antagonisms that are constitutive of political life, especially political life in these times. There have always been good reasons not to embrace "national unity" as an ideal, and to nurse suspicions toward absolute and seamless identification with any political leader. After all, fascism relied in part on that seamless identification with the leader, and Republicans engage this same effort to organize political affect when, for instance, Elizabeth Dole looks out on her audience and says, "I love each and every one of you."

My good friend Ryan—always one to stop and think—has been sounding the alarm on this point as well.

Like many utopian visions that someone is crazy enough to attempt to realize, modernist architecture has always contained an element of fascism. It wasn’t just that a cuckoo notion like Le Corbusier’s “radiant city,” those celery stalks of lone skyscrapers surrounded by a verdant wasteland, was meant to simplify life, but that it was in some basic sense meant to replace it.

Charles Taylor considers contemporary architecture and its "starchitects" in the context of the controversy surrounding Frank Gehry's latest and largest project, the planned Atlantic Yards stadium in Brooklyn for the New Jersey Nets.

Gehry might have taken The Life and Death of Great American Cities as an anti-text. With its interior “public space,” its super-blocks, its potential for creating what Jacobs called “border vacuums” and the attendant crime that always accompanies such areas, in the way it cuts itself off from the neighborhoods around it and cuts them off from each other, Atlantic Yards represents the sort of thinking Jacobs discredited nearly fifty years ago.

Atlantic Yards is the largest project Frank Gehry, now seventy-eight, has ever undertaken. And if it proves to be his last large project, it will be a fitting capstone to a career utterly blind to the public function of architecture. For how better to assert your dedication to personal expression over context than to have your distinct visual style serve as the emblem for the death of two Brooklyn neighborhoods?

Even the liberal Jonathan Chait at even the liberal New Republic hates Naomi Klein. Here he is in TNR bashing The Shock Doctrine, accusing Klein of monocausotaxophilia:

And then came September 11. The Islamist attack on the World Trade Center may not have "changed everything," as so many Orwell-wannabes declared, but it, and the ensuing war with secular Iraq, certainly changed the orientation of the left. The locus of evil in the world, even more than during the Cold War, was once again American military power and its use beyond our borders. The new American adversaries were not corporations but individuals--George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz. And they were motivated not by profit, but by ideology. This was not a problem that could be addressed by making the streets of Seattle run brown with Frappuccinos.

But Klein was intellectually unfazed. Rather than re-think the economicist premises of her recent radicalism, she set out to synthesize her old worldview with the post-9/11 world. "I felt it emotionally," she told The New York Times, "before I understood it factually." Doggedly connecting the dots, she discovered that the Iraq war was--guess what?--part of the same economic tissue that connected Nike and the World Trade Organization. Klein is nothing if not a totalistic thinker. Everything always adds up, and darkly.

The result, he says, is "perfect nonsense." Really? She makes a lot of sense to me, especially in comparison to a guy still gushing over John McCain:

Liberals tend to view the press's love affair with McCain as a wildly unfair act of bias. They have a point. On the other hand, they should take some heart in the fact that McCain obviously cherishes the approval of the mainstream (and even liberal) media. His accessibility to the press and public is something small-d democrats should cheer. McCain has conducted interviews with very liberal publications like Grist. He's promised to undertake an American version of "Prime Minister's Questions," whereby members of Congress could spar with him.

Does McCain spin and dissemble? Of course. But the current administration's practices go far beyond mere spin. In Bush's Washington, critics are enemies to be dismissed rather than engaged. A McCain presidency would promise to dismantle the whole Rovian method that has torn open such a deep wound in the national psyche.

Beneath his wildly fluctuating ideological positions, McCain is an establishmentarian Republican. Unlike Bush, he cares about elite opinion. He is comfortable sharing power in the traditional postwar style rather than monopolizing it. He might not be another Teddy Roosevelt, but right now another Gerald Ford doesn't look so bad.

This is what we're up against in November, guys, what Atrios always calls the Village: an entrenched class of professional morons who can be bought this cheaply, and who won't go quietly.

As with so much else, there's a perfect Douglas Adams quote for this.

J.G. Ballard talks to Joseph Campbell at the Guardian. Here he is on my obsession of the moment, soccer:

Ballard's conversation, like his writing, is regularly punctuated with inventories of the liberating spirit of technology. But with scarcely a twitch to indicate a change of direction, he explains that his most recent novel, Kingdom Come (2006), "posed the question: could consumerism turn into fascism? The underlying psychologies aren't all that far removed from one another. If you go into a huge shopping mall and you're looking down the parade, it's the same theatrical aspect: these disciplined ranks of merchandise, all glittering like fascist uniforms. When you enter a mall, you are taking part in a ceremony of affirmation, which you endorse just by your presence." Consumerism "has to a large extent replaced art and culture in this country. The principal entertainment industry nowadays is soccer which, with its marching supporters' groups, is not that far removed from fascism."

Could consumerism turn into fascism? Shouldn't we be asking if it ever could have not?

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously." He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

Meanwhile, in George Bush's America, bad things continue to happen. More at MetaFilter and ThinkProgress.

The prize for understated gallows humor goes to the very first comment at the article itself:

I find it very difficult to believe that Dick Cheney would be part of anything that was not in our best interest.

Posted by: escoBam on May 20, 2008 12:22 AM

Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

Rudy Giuliani doesn't understand what freedom is, as Bitter Laughter duly reports. For more information on freedom being slavery and ignorance being strength, please consult your local library. For more on America's Vice Principal, and the massive amounts of anti-gravitas he seems able to spontaneously generate, there's always this week's New Yorker profile.

When, on a campaign trip to Florida, he was asked whether he supported the controversial 2005 intervention in the Terri Schiavo case by the President and Congress (then controlled by Republicans), Giuliani couldn’t quite say. “I believe I did,” he responded. “I don’t, I—it’s a while ago and I think I said that I thought every effort should be made to keep her alive. I don’t know that I supported the whole thing to the very end, but I am not sure now.”

This Rudy Giuliani, with his new wealth, his new wife, and his new, natural haircut (replacing the familiar comb-over), seemed plainly unready for the mission he had undertaken. At the first Republican debate, held in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, in California, with Nancy Reagan in the audience, the ten Republican candidates were asked whether it would be “a good day for Americans” when Roe v. Wade was overturned. All the respondents answered that it would, except Giuliani, who said, “It would be O.K.” He said that it would “be O.K. also if a strict-constructionist judge viewed it as precedent.”

Clown is right.