Happy Birthday, Malcolm X

Melissa Harris-Perry: Happy Birthday, Malcolm X (MSNBC)

Today is the birthday of Malcolm X. He would have been 87 years old.

Malcolm rarely receives the kind of mainstream press attention that his better known counterpart, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. does. And perhaps that is best. Unlike King, Malcolm has been not been subjected to the ahistorical nostalgia machine of American hero-making. His radicalism remains intact.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley by Malcolm X

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Marable Manning

James Buchanan: Our REAL first gay president

I have no adjectives to describe the latest cover of Newsweek, which declares Obama “the first gay president” after he personally endorsed same-sex marriage.

I’ll just let the rainbow halo speak for itself.

Usually this is where I’d post a picture of said cover, but I refuse to perpetuate that crap. Google it if you haven’t seen it already and you want to feel sad about American print media.

On a less disappointing and more historical note, George Mason University’s History News Network just ran an illuminating article about the real first gay president of the United States. (Hint: it is not Barack Obama)

Our real first gay president (History News Network via Salon)

There can be no doubt that James Buchanan was gay, before, during and after his four years in the White House. Moreover, the nation knew it, too — he was not far into the closet.

Today, I know no historian who has studied the matter and thinks Buchanan was heterosexual. Fifteen years ago, historian John Howard, author of “Men Like That,” a pioneering study of queer culture in Mississippi, shared with me the key documents, including Buchanan’s May 13, 1844, letter to a Mrs. Roosevelt. Describing his deteriorating social life after his great love, William Rufus King, senator from Alabama, had moved to Paris to become our ambassador to France, Buchanan wrote:

I am now “solitary and alone,” having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them. I feel that it is not good for man to be alone; and should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick, provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection.

Despite such evidence, one reason why Americans find it hard to believe Buchanan could have been gay is that we have a touching belief in progress. Our high school history textbooks’ overall story line is, “We started out great and have been getting better ever since,” more or less automatically. Thus we must be more tolerant now than we were way back in the middle of the 19th century! Buchanan could not have been gay then, else we would not seem more tolerant now.

This is a great, great article. Read it!

And if you needed any more convincing that Newsweek has in fact degenerated into a vulgar peddler of sensationalistic tripe:

The Most Controversial Newsweek Covers [Slideshow] (Mediaite)

Good lord.

ROUNDUP: Campaign Finance, The Civil War, LGBT Rights

The Political One Percent of the One Percent

In which 0.01% of Americans wield a hugely disproportionate influence among elected officials:

Unlike the other 99.99% of Americans who do not make these contributions, these elite donors have unique access. In a world of increasingly expensive campaigns, The One Percent of the One Percent effectively play the role of political gatekeepers. Prospective candidates need to be able to tap into these networks if they want to be taken seriously. And party leaders on both sides are keenly aware that more than 80% of party committee money now comes from these elite donors.

Should there be limitations on campaign/political donations? Or is money the same thing as speech? When campaigns and political parties are bankrolled by a small, wealthy elite, does that devalue the votes of the other 99.99% of Americans?

The Aspartamed #Roundup

Highlighting notable current events and journalism.

Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?

In which The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that the real story of the Civil War has been replaced by a narrative that is comfortable, untrue, and white:

The 20th century, with its struggles for equal rights, with the triumph of democracy as the ideal in Western thought, proved Douglass right. The Civil War marks the first great defense of democracy and the modern West. Its legacy lies in everything from women’s suffrage to the revolutions now sweeping the Middle East. It was during the Civil War that the heady principles of the Enlightenment were first, and most spectacularly, called fully to account.

In our present time, to express the view of the enslaved—to say that the Civil War was a significant battle in the long war against bondage and for government by the people—is to compromise the comfortable narrative. It is to remind us that some of our own forefathers once explicitly rejected the republic to which they’d pledged themselves, and dreamed up another country, with slavery not merely as a bug, but as its very premise. It is to point out that at this late hour, the totems of the empire of slavery—chief among them, its flag—still enjoy an honored place in the homes, and public spaces, of self-professed patriots and vulgar lovers of “freedom.” It is to understand what it means to live in a country that will never apologize for slavery, but will not stop apologizing for the Civil War.

Coates unapologetically reframes the Civil War—not as a monstrous tragedy based on a failure to compromise—but as a Second American Revolutionary War that finally, decisively, and thankfully affirmed the democratic principles upon which the country was built.

As he points out, 3 million Americans were “freed” from Britain after the Revolutionary War, but 4 million were freed from slavery after the Civil War. Why do we celebrate one with fireworks and flag-waving, but mourn the other with somber recollection?

Coates exposes the radical historical revisionism that began immediately after the War (in both the North and the South), and explains how even today the popular, politically correct narrative discourages black students and scholars from discussing one of the vital events in U.S. History.

For that particular community, for my community, the message has long been clear: the Civil War is a story for white people—acted out by white people, on white people’s terms—in which blacks feature strictly as stock characters and props. We are invited to listen, but never to truly join the narrative, for to speak as the slave would, to say that we are as happy for the Civil War as most Americans are for the Revolutionary War, is to rupture the narrative. Having been tendered such a conditional invitation, we have elected—as most sane people would—to decline.

…

For realists, the true story of the Civil War illuminates the problem of ostensibly sober-minded compromise with powerful, and intractable, evil. For radicals, the wave of white terrorism that followed the war offers lessons on the price of revolutionary change. White Americans finding easy comfort in nonviolence and the radical love of the civil-rights movement must reckon with the unsettling fact that black people in this country achieved the rudi­ments of their freedom through the killing of whites.

This article, which is the highlight of The Atlantic’s fantastic 150th Anniversary Commemorative Civil War Issue, is a truly important piece. A must-read.

VIDEO: Secretary Clinton Addresses the UN Human Rights Council on LGBT Rights

In which the Secretary of State makes a compelling argument that LGBT rights are really just human rights:

The third, and perhaps most challenging, issue arises when people cite religious or cultural values as a reason to violate or not to protect the human rights of LGBT citizens. This is not unlike the justification offered for violent practices towards women like honor killings, widow burning, or female genital mutilation. Some people still defend those practices as part of a cultural tradition. But violence toward women isn’t cultural; it’s criminal. Likewise with slavery, what was once justified as sanctioned by God is now properly reviled as an unconscionable violation of human rights.

This is perhaps the best defense of gay rights that has ever been articulated on the world stage. It is simultaneously a sober assessment of the poor state of affairs for LGBT people everywhere (the U.S. included), a logical explanation of the necessity of gay rights, and an impassioned call to action for human rights advocates everywhere.

Yet some questions remain: As the saying goes, talk is cheap; how will Clinton’s speech translate into meaningful action? Does the U.S. really have the credibility to lead on this issue, given our own questionable record on gay rights? And if this is really the defining issue that Clinton says it is, why isn’t she also giving this speech to an American audience? Or more importantly, if this issue is so important, why isn’t President Obama making this same argument for LGBT rights to the American public? (Answer: it’s an “important” issue that is too divisive and politically costly to tackle in an election year—but don’t worry, gay people, it’ll still be important in 2013.) 

Journeys with George

It’s hard for me not to feel preemptively fatigued by the 2012 Presidential election which has already been well underway for months. These election cycles, which seem to get longer every year, are often a painful illustration of American politics at its most shallow.

Not knowing what politicians will turn out to be the winners and losers of this current election, I can guarantee one thing with certainty—over the next year our leaders are going to ask you to turn a critical eye on each others’ policies and ideologies (and manufactured outrages). Emotional manipulations aside, they will do their best to appeal to your sense of duty as an American citizen. They will argue that it is your solemn, patriotic responsibility to shrewdly evaluate the content of their ideas and vote for the best candidate.

As they should.

But Journeys with George isn’t about all that.

On the surface, Journeys with George is a lighthearted documentary that takes place behind the scenes of George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign—a playful chronicle of the path that leads a Texas governor with a famous last name to the highest office in the country.

But underneath that surface, this film has an important message about the strange relationship between the media and American politics.

The documentary is filmed by Alexandra Pelosi, daughter of Democratic Congressional Minority Leader (and former Speaker of the House) Nancy Pelosi. Embedded for over a year in the the traveling press corps that follows the Bush campaign around the country, Pelosi builds a unique rapport with the man who would become President of the United States.

I suspect that many reading this may feel less than enthusiastic about revisiting the contentious figure. During his presidency Bush enjoyed both record-high and record-low approval ratings, and left office as one of the most unpopular commander-in-chiefs.

But I encourage you to keep reading. Journeys with George is, in my opinion, one of the more fascinating documentaries I’ve seen. Its effect is especially powerful when viewed with the luxury of hindsight.

One of the most striking parts of the film is how Bush himself is portrayed. Pelosi seems to capture him uncensored, before he passes through the filter of her fellow press corps folks who, unlike Pelosi, are tasked with grinding out daily articles and reports and images that will whet the appetite of hungry media consumers. And the image we see is a far cry from the bumbling, unintelligent, inarticulate, and humorless “W” that predominated the Decade of Bush.

Bush comes across as genuine, witty, and charismatic. He is clever and funny. In short, this W seems incredibly likable.

Maybe this incongruence is to be expected. Especially with a left-leaning press corps that does very little to hide their own smug indifference toward the Republican candidate. But this weird disconnect between person and persona isn’t the only frustrating revelation in Journeys with George. 

Pelosi’s backstage pass gets us behind the scenes of the biggest political theater of the century—and theater it is. As the general election heats up and the stakes get higher, we watch as the photo-ops grow more elaborate, the staged “town hall” events become more artificial—we even learn that all of those quaint red-white-and-blue hand painted campaign signs sporting folksy slogans like “Love Ya, Dubya” are in fact produced en masse by the Bush people and handed out to photogenic supporters to wave at television cameras. (As one Fox News producer in the Bush press corps quips, “The Man made these signs.”) Most importantly, Bush gets a thorough polish. As election day nears we see less and less of that charismatic, affable Southern governor, and more of the smoothed-over, calculating statesman that I guess we’re all supposed to want in the White House.

It’s all a show, a machine, and everyone—everyone—knows it. Especially the reporters in the press corps:

This is the worst place to find out what the country is thinking, inside The Bubble. We all know that. We haven’t seen real people, we haven’t talked to real people. The “real” people we see … are handpicked and screened … So we have no idea.

A well-informed press should be a vital part of any democracy. We rely on unbiased investigative reporters to keep our leaders accountable. One can’t help but wonder if this system is broken when the very people we trust to inform us and protect us are only cogs in the perpetual message machine.

What is most upsetting is how little these journalists seem to care. They know they’re being manipulated and they respond with apathy.

Is it really a mystery why most Americans are so apathetic towards politics? With so little substantial journalism going on in the mainstream media, those of us with opinions tend to react more with emotional knee-jerks than anything else. Being well-informed is too much work, what with the mediapeople so willing to abandon the job.

At the beginning of the documentary, a year out from the election, Pelosi addresses a fellow journalist from the Financial Times, who happens to be the only non-American in the Bush press corps. She asks him, “What do you make of these Americans?” He responds:

What amazes me is how many of them turn up to these events and they have no real interest in politics. It’s like, you talk to them and you say, “What do you like about George W?” and they go, “Uh, I just like him.”

But by the end of the election the same British reporter has changed his tune. Pelosi asks, “Sum up the year for me.”

So much of it has been a kind of pack journalism. Everyone’s got to make sure to get it the same as everyone else. And I’ve just got this nagging feeling that the pack wasn’t always doing the right thing. The Gore press corps was all about how they didn’t like him, how they didn’t trust him, and that filtered into the stories. And over here we were writing about trivial stuff because he charmed the pants off of us.

The fact is, we can’t blame the politicians for using the news media to advance their agendas. But we can and should expect more from the journalists and news agencies who agree to play by the politicians’ rules, then act bewildered when they didn’t get to write the story they wanted to write.

It’s difficult to know how to feel after watching Journeys with George. Most documentaries conclude with a neatly-packaged coda that instructs us on exactly how to respond to the issues presented. Alexandra Pelosi never offers us a moral to her story.

Journeys with George is a lighthearted documentary, a playful diversion, and an odd reminder of a political world now over a decade past. It is also a fascinating character study of the man who, love him or hate him, will probably be remembered as one of the single most influential architects of early 21st Century history—captured from an unlikely, unfiltered perspective on the eve of his ascendance.

But I think this film also exposes the inadequacy of our mainstream media—a system that largely serves the politicians, employs the reporters, and leaves the rest of us ignorant.

Follow @Aspartamed/Politics

I’ve curated a Twitter list of about 80 government agencies, politicians, news outlets, reporters, and independent bloggers, from liberal to conservative, with the hope of capturing a wide range of coverage and opinion

This list is an work-in-progress—if you think I’m missing someone that should be on it please @reply or message me @aspartamed

In the eleven years since Journeys with George was filmed, the landscape of American news and politics has been rocked by the arrival of social media. Now anyone with an internet connection can tweet or blog. We’re looking at a new era of accountability, for government and press alike, fueled by the rapid decentralization of information. Hopefully this democratization through technology will improve information access and quality.

Exhausting as this most recent election has been, selecting our next president is one of our most important jobs as citizens.

Hopefully we can learn to be as discerning with our consumption of news.

Watch the first part of Journeys with George below. See the rest of the documentary after the break.

Read More

Rise of the Retronauts

Salon recently published an article titled Will Nostalgia Destroy Pop Culture?  It’s interesting reading, but a brief summary might go something like this:  For reasons not entirely clear, the current generation of young people is increasingly obsessed with rehashing and repurposing retro culture—a trend which threatens our capacity for innovation.

At first glance this article (which promotes author Simon Reynolds’s new book Retromania) is the same “we’ve reached the end of history” story we’ve all heard many times before.  In fact, there are some excellent arguments being made which support the idea that almost nothing is original.  But it seems like Reynolds may have a point.  Since reading this article a week ago I can’t help but see retro everywhere I go (see gallery below).

There is another startling aspect to pop culture’s current obsession with the past as well.  Never before in human history have science and technology progressed so rapidly.  Technologically, we are living in a golden age of innovation with no end in sight.  So why are we living in the past?

Reynolds offers one possible reason which makes a lot of sense to me:

The past has taken the place of the future in people’s imagination. That might have something to do with politics as well … No one can quite picture a future that seems positive or exciting. At one time the future seemed to suggest grand projects. Now the space shuttle program has been shut down. If I look at what young people are watching on TV and at the movies, when they’re looking for heroism and romance, they’re watching quasi-historical fantasies, it’s not future fantasies. It’s “Game of Thrones,” “Harry Potter,” and that kind of thing, as opposed to going to outer space or the year 3000.
Speaking as a young adult struggling to enter the professional world in the Great Recession, I can report that it is much more comfortable reminiscing about an idyllic past than wondering where my next first paycheck is coming from.  It is no marketing accident that Nickelodeon is promoting its heavily publicized 90s throwback programming block (“The 90s Are All That”) with the slogan “Remember When Life Didn’t Suck?”

Reynolds also points to the 1960s—the cultural yardstick we’ve been using to gauge progress for the last fifty years—to illustrate all the momentum we’ve lost:
In terms of how it was covered and how it was felt at the time, the ’60s was just a long period where there was a sense of hurtling forward. It was happening on multiple fronts simultaneously — the beginning of feminism, civil rights, the space race, the Beatles and all that. In the early-to-mid-’60s, there was a lot of very modernistic space age-looking fashion. On every cultural front, people were breaking down barriers. In pop music, it’s the decade the other decades have all defined themselves against. Punk was the inversion of the ’60s in a lot of ways, but it still kept a little of that idealism and the belief in change. The ’80s were defined in a lot of ways as a repudiation of ’60s ideas, and ’90s rave culture was a return to drugginess and all that.
And as turbulent as that decade surely was, maybe there was an optimism then that we lack now.

Reynolds also suggests that our stagnation (too strong a word?) may have something to do with the very same technological innovation which is juxtaposing our backwards looking culture:
It was gradual, but with the arrival of the Internet, and broadband access, and the rise of this kind of strange collective archiving thing, [looking backward] became irresistible. Now people put stuff on YouTube because it feels like they’re doing something worthwhile and this enormous archive has developed … Now all the records in the known universe are basically accessible at the click of a mouse … I remember living in a culture of cultural scarcity.
Perhaps our collective pessimism combined with our unprecedented access to all things passed is too tempting for today’s youth—why live in the depressing present when it’s so easy to re-experience the twee trends of yesterday?

I’ll admit that there is an abundance of nostalgia nowadays.  I consider myself as guilty of perpetuating retro culture as anyone—recent blog posts have covered snacks of the 90s, Jim Henson, Mad Men, and I Love Lucy, not to mention my weekly-ish series of classic cartoons.  But I’m not sure I buy Simon Reynolds’s conclusion, that our fascination with the past is going to corrupt our future.  Some might argue that never before has a generation of people been so aware of their roots.  And isn’t that something to be proud of?

The Atlantic responded to all the retromania with The ’90s Are All That’ and the Ever-Accelerating Nostalgia Machine, a sound rebuttal to cautionary voices like Reynolds, arguing that the latest wave of affection for the near past is nothing new.

What are your thoughts?  Are we too obsessed with the past?  Too afraid of the future?  Or are we just as creative (and nostalgic) as we have always been?

For more, you can check out my visual diary of retro culture after the jump.

Gallery: Rise of the Retronauts

Retro is everywhere.  Here is a collection of cultural time travelers that I’ve noticed in the past week alone.


“Aw, here it goes…”  Nickelodeon’s midnight to 2am flashback block is the latest—and most successful—retro offender.  (This is me wishing I had cable.)


Reminding us how cool the 60s were (at least for white guys).


Launching this fall, ABC’s new show seems like it’s trying to cash in on the success of Mad Men.  But probably with less drinking and smoking and sex.


And here is NBC’s new glamorously 60s show.  The Playboy Club has already caused a stir, mostly over whether the show is going to be a historically accurate (and gratuitous) portrayal of the objectification of women, or a revised, much more comfortable (and gratuitous) portrayal of the objectification of women.  Tune in this September to find out!


Maybe Adele’s chart-topping album 21 owes some of its success to the retro-soul vibe which sounds so distinctly un-2011.


Pop genius Cee Lo Green’s latest single “Cry Baby” is retro on a couple of levels simultaneously—there’s the  infectious 60s street-dancing thing, and then there’s this guy. 


The cast of Glee goes Gaga for an episode every season, but many of the show’s hits are cleverly repackaged oldies that reintroduce music from the last few decades to a younger generation—artists covered include Madonna, Queen, Fleetwood Mac, Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson, The Beatles… oh yeah, and Journey.


Sure, the smartphone in your pocket may be several times more powerful than that clunky pink Macintosh you used in high school, but can it take retro lo-fi photos circa 1965?  Popular smartphone apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic give your digital pics the nice washed out look that oozes nostalgia for a time many of us younger folks weren’t around to enjoy the first time.


Need I point out the irony in the poster for this year’s remake of Footloose?  ”This is our time.”  Hmmm…


You can surround James Franco with an army of damned dirty apes, but will you ultimately do anything more than remind us of the 1968 classic we can’t seem to leave behind?

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Did I miss any good examples of retro culture?  Leave comments below!