THE RATIONAL ANIMAL'S SYSTEMS: Judge Jackson says the truth still matters!

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2020

We don't know if Maddow agrees: Famously, Mr. T pitied the fool.

Way back in 1968, Bob Dylan said he pities Trump.

("That man who with his fingers cheats, who lies with every breath...Who falls in love with wealth itself and turns his back on me.")

For ourselves, we pity the poor American citizen to whom the most obvious question occurs.

Within our tribalized journalistic system, such questions will routinelgo unaddressed. Information is no longer the coin of the realm. Tribalized narrative is.

Consider the question which occurred to us after the perpetually ludicrous Roger Stone was sentenced to forty months in prison. Our question shaped up like this:

On Monday, February 10, the Justice Department originally recommended a sentence of 7-9 years for Stone (more precisely, 87-108 months) The next day, that recommendation was amended.

Attorney General William Barr had been involved in this switch. This new, amended recommendation included these statements:

AMENDED SENTENCING RECOMMENDATION (2/11/20): The defendant committed serious offenses and deserves a sentence of incarceration that is “sufficient, but not greater than necessary” to satisfy the factors set forth in Section 3553(a).

Based on the facts known to the government, Mb and unwarranted under the circumstances.

Even in the amended recommendation, the DOJ said that Stone "committed serious offenses and deserves a sentence of incarceration." However, the amended recommendation said that a sentence of "far less than 87 to 108 months’ imprisonment would be reasonable under the circumstances."

At one point, the amended recommendation suggested that a term of 37 to 46 months might be "more in line with the typical sentences imposed in obstruction cases." That said, the amended recommendation "ultimately deferred to the Court" without specifically recommending a specific term of imprisonment.

As of February 11, so the matter stood. In the days which followed, Barr was raked over the coals for his role in this amendation. On cable, we liberals were told that Judge Amy Berman Jackson wouldn't be swayed by such conduct.

But then, how strange! When Judge Jackson sentenced Stone, she sentenced him to 40 months. The recommendation which came from Barr was pretty much where Jackson came down!

Our question: Why did Jackson's sentence seem to align with the amended recommendation? Did this mean that the heroic Barr had been right all along? Was Jackson somehow required to defer to the general drift of the amended recommendation?

Why did Stone's sentence fall short of the initial recommendation? Inquiring minds wanted to know, but liberal news orgs didn't rush to explain.

If you watched Nicolle Wallace yesterday at 4 PM Eastern, you saw a lengthy discussion of this matter. But no one ever noted the fact that Jackson's sentence largely aligned with Barr's amended recommendation.

If you watched Rachel Maddow last night, things seemed to get much worse.

Did you watch Maddow last night? To our ear, she seemed to say that the mustachio-twirling Barr had recommended that Stone get no prison time at all.

That's what Maddow seemed to say, and Maddow tends to be like that. In the course of an endless treatment of this matter, here's the way her second segment started:

MADDOW (2/20/20): How would the court deal today with the crisis around this case, right? The president publicly demanding that the sentencing recommendation from prosecutors should be thrown out, that Roger Stone was being treated unfairly and that he shouldn't get any prison time.

The attorney general then apparently acceding to that request and getting himself into that case personally, overruling the prosecutors who had brought the case to instead ask for lenience for the president's friend, for Roger Stone.

That's the way the segment started. It almost sounded like Trump had said that Stone should get no prison time, and that Barr had then said the same thing.

Plainly, that isn't what happened. But that's almost the way it almost sounded as Maddow's segment began.

Later in this same segment, Maddow seemed to make this claim more clearly. As part of a lengthy oration, she explained what happened after Barr had engaged in the conduct described below:

MADDOW: ...William Barr hears that public criticism from the president and intervenes and rescinds the sentencing recommendation from the prosecutors running this case and instead says, "No, no, no! I, William Barr, instead insist that instead we have a revised sentencing recommendation in which Roger Stone gets off."

You can watch the full oration yourself. As she continued, Maddow suggested, one more time, that Barr had said that Roger Stone shouldn't have to "go to jail."

In that presentation, Maddow seemed to say that Barr had recommended that Stone should "get off"—shouldn't go to prison at all. To our ear, Maddow had seemed to say that at the start of the segment. Now, her account of the matter seemed clear.

For ourselves, we were still wondering why Judge Jackson's sentence had come down as it did. Even in the course of endless monologues on a favorite subject, people like Maddow don't waste their time explaining such matters to you.

As our journalistic systems continue to crash and burn, people like Maddow paint tribally pleasing pictures and tell tribally pleasing stories. In 2017, Janet Malcolm seemed to praise this pseudo-journalistic process when she profiled Maddow in the New Yorker:

MALCOLM (10/9/17): “The Rachel Maddow Show” is a piece of sleight of hand presented as a cable news show. It is TV entertainment at its finest. It permits liberals to enjoy themselves during what may be the most thoroughly unenjoyable time of their political lives.

Maddow's show lets us liberals enjoy ourselves! Weirdly, Malcolm seemed to approve of this service. To us, Malcolm's description captures the way our information systems are increasingly falling apart.

Over on Fox, Tucker was telling millions of viewers last night that Judge Jackson has been behaving like an authoritarian. We haven't been able to review his whole segment yet, but our own tribe is involved in so much nonsense at this point that his segments are often highly persuasive without even being inaccurate.

Rachel and Tucker are extremely well paid to ladle comfort food to the tribes. Information and explanation play second fiddle to the process of novelization which now lies at the heart of this corporate project.

Can a continental nation function this way? We'd say the answer is no.

Last evening, an irate Maddow seemed to say that Barr had recommended that Stone get no prison time at all. Obviously, that isn't true. Just consider what readers were told in this morning's Washington Post, though only if they read all the way to paragraph 32:

WEINER ET AL (2/21/20): This week, those close to Barr said the attorney general has told Trump advisers that he has considered resigning over the president’s tweets. But Trump continued to tweet about the Stone case. This week, he suggested his friend deserved a new trial—just as the Justice Department, with Barr’s blessing, made clear it had opposed Stone’s request on that front. Like prosecutors, Barr has called Stone’s prosecution “righteous” and added, “I was happy that he was convicted.”

Say what? Barr has called Stone’s prosecution “righteous?” Barr has said, “I was happy that he was convicted?”

Well actually, yes he has. He said those things to ABC's Pierre Thomas in an interview last week. Maddow's viewers have never been told that Barr said those things.

Barr said Roger Stone should go free? Maddow talked and talked and talked and talked about this topic last night. It seemed to us that's what she said, but with multimillionaire novelists like Maddow, the viewer can never be sure.

This too from Nicolle: Wallace and her "favorite reporters and friends" didn't attempt to explain the way Jackson's sentence turned out. Along the way, she once again repeated a claim which she knows is false.

We refer to her repeated claim that the Mueller report charged Trump with ten instances of obstruction of justice.

In the past, Wallace has said, on at least two occasions, that she knows this statement is false. But she says it, she has explained, because, "as a political communicator," she makes inaccurate statements which put her opponents on the defensive.

Increasingly, this is the way the tribes are allowed to enjoy themselves. Along the way, our systems fail. Increasingly, things fall apart.

Roger Stone gets forty months!

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2020

Now he belongs to the ages: We'll admit that we're never glad to hear that someone is going to prison.

That said, Roger Stone has been sentenced to forty months, pending a possible retrial or pardon. Now it falls to our tribal tribunes to explain why his sentence was so light.

For what it's worth, Stone has always seemed a little bit nutty. He has a tattoo of Nixon on his back, and things go sideways from there.

Almost everyone seems to be crazy now. But long ago, long before crazy was cool, Stone was already like this.

Originally, the Justice Department recommended a sentence of 7-9 years. On cable, this made our liberal hearts glad.

One day later, the DOJ scaled that back, suggesting 3-4 years. On cable, we were told this was much too soft, and that Judge Amy Berman Jackson was a strong-willed, non-nonsense judicial performer.

Now, the no-nonsense performer has given Stone a sentence which lands right in the middle of that amended range. Our tribunes have some explaining to do, though they'll surely be up to the challenge.

In this matter, as in everything else, whatever you've heard has almost surely been narrative. It's all tribal talking points now. We can't tell you where to go to get an unbiased, information-based perspective on this or on anything else.

We haven't read Jackson's full statement yet. For now, we'll offer what follows.

According to the Washington Post, Jackson said the following in her statement today:

WEINER, ZAPOTOSKY AND JACKSON (2/20/20): In a lengthy speech before imposing the penalty, Jackson seemed to take aim at Trump, saying that Stone “was not prosecuted for standing up for the president; he was prosecuted for covering up for the president.” She also appeared to call out Attorney General William P. Barr, whose intervention to reduce career prosecutors’ sentencing recommendation she called “unprecedented.” But she said the politics surrounding the case had not influenced her final decision.

If that report is accurate, Jackson said Barr's conduct was "unprecedented." But in this morning's Washington Post, George Terwilliger seems to say something different:

TERWILLIGER (2/20/2020): I served in the Justice Department for 15 years, half of that time as a career prosecutor. From time to time, I was overruled on decisions involving my cases. My judgment was better for the benefit of oversight and supervision, including from the politically appointed U.S. attorney. Whether direction came from even higher authority is unknown to me, but if it did, I would see it no differently. That is how a chain of command must work.

I also served in a Republican administration as deputy attorney general and acting attorney general. In that capacity, I recall no one decrying interference when I overruled the recommendation of line prosecutors and the department’s criminal division that a then-sitting U.S. senator should be indicted. He was a Democrat. I also approved the prosecution of another sitting senator. He was a Republican. Those matters came up through the bureaucracy because they were highly visible and politically controversial.

[...]

The decisions of the dedicated professionals who are the heart and soul of the department merit respect and a substantial degree of deference. But those decisions must also be subject to review. The higher the profile of a case, the more deserving it is of high-level attention, because the public will measure the department by its actions in such matters.

Terwilliger goes on from there. Overall, he seems to offer quite a bit of detail.

Is there an actual disagreement here, or just the appearance of same? At this point, we can't say. We can offer this embarrassing fact:

Jackson's decision put her in agreement with Barr's amended recommendation, not with the original recommendation which he overruled.

We can't tell you if Jackson and Terwilliger actually disagree on this matter. We can tell you this:

Whatever you hear on cable today will be sifted through the tribal blender. Almost everything you hear at this point is narrative all the way down.

Stone has always had a screw loose. Barr's amended recommendation said he deserved imprisonment.

It's also true that you're being propagandized almost any time you dial up "cable news." A lot of product is being sold as you're told that the cable talkers are a collection of "friends." Beyond that, a lot of the people you see on your screen are living inside some political, professional or social bubble.

Especially on MSNBC, everyone will agree on every point. Alternate viewpoints will almost never be heard.

Stone has always seemed to have a screw loose. The larger question we face is this:

How did our liberal team ever reach the point where we could lose an election to Donald J. Trump? Also, how does the world actually look to the 63 million people who voted the way we didn't?

More on that last question tomorrow. For tonight, let the tribal framing begin!

THE RATIONAL ANIMAL'S SYSTEMS: The Hill kicks Solomon to the curb...

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2020

...several decades later: How broken are our nation's journalistic systems?

Consider a current bit of too little, (several decades) too late. The report in question appears in this morning's Washington Post.

Paul Farhi's report in the Post concerns a decision made by The Hill, an insider Capitol Hill publication. Roughly one year too late, The Hill has decided to renounce a large chunk of influential published work concerning Candidate Biden:

FARHI (2/20/2020): In a lengthy and damning review of former columnist John Solomon, the Hill newspaper ripped Solomon—and itself—for publishing misleading and poorly attributed articles last year that asserted corruption by Joe Biden in his dealings with Ukraine during his time as vice president.

The columns, published in early 2019, set in motion President Trump’s demand that Ukrainian officials announce an investigation of Biden and his son, Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. Trump’s demand, and his withholding of military aid to Ukraine, led to the House’s impeachment of Trump and his subsequent acquittal in the Senate.

Trump and his allies, including his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and his son Donald Trump Jr., promoted Solomon’s Hill columns via Twitter, and Solomon made several appearances on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program to promote his conclusions, which were that Biden, then considered Trump’s top 2020 challenger, had ousted Ukraine’s top prosecutor to head off an investigation into the company that had hired his son.

That allegation has never been proved; indeed, the former Ukrainian prosecutor has recanted it.

In effect, the Hill said Solomon amplified an inaccurate and one-sided narrative about the Bidens and Ukraine that was fed to him by Giuliani, “facilitated” by businessman Lev Parnas, who was working with Giuliani at the time, and reinforced by Solomon’s own attorneys, who also represented clients embroiled in U.S.-Ukraine politics.

Oof. Roughly a year too late, The Hill has decided that Solomon's work about Candidate Biden was grossly misleading.

The Hill's review of Solomon's work is quite lengthy. We found dark amusement in the highlighted parts of this passage:

THE HILL (2/19/20): While Solomon's columns on Ukraine were labeled as opinion, they largely read like news stories. Adding to the potential confusion between opinion and news, Solomon was identified as "an award-winning journalist" in his column tagline. When appearing on television to discuss his Ukraine columns, Solomon was not typically labeled an opinion writer by the broadcast programs. The Hill did not contact television producers to label Solomon as an opinion columnist. It should have.

Lending further support to an impression that the columns were more like news stories, rather than opinion columns, Solomon’s Ukraine columns were longer than typical opinion pieces, in many cases contained what could be viewed or was identified by him as original reporting, and stuck to one general topic. This may have suggested to many readers it was an investigative series, which normally resides in the news department, rather than opinion. Solomon’s subsequent appearances on Fox News where he was often identified as an investigative journalist further potentially blurred the distinction between news and opinion in the minds of some readers.

In our view, the most comical terms in modern journalism are "award-winning journalist" and "expert." Beyond that:

According to The Hill, the presentation of Solomon's work tended to blur a distinction which is amazingly blurry in the mental world of modern journalism—the distinction between "news" and opinion. But so it endlessly goes among us, the rational animals.

Could Candidate Biden ever have been a successful opponent of President Trump? We have no idea.

Might he still be the Democratic nominee? Everything is possible!

That said, Solomon's work jumped from The Hill over to Fox, where millions of people were watching. Almost surely, the barrels of bluster involved in this attack on Biden harmed the candidate's reputation of all sides of various aisles.

We suppose we ought to give The Hill credit for conducting this review of Solomon's work. That said, Solomon has been producing work of this type for a very long time.

We've been puzzled by his peculiar work going all the way back to the fall of 2000, when he was working for the Associated Press and writing about the Gore campaign. Back then, of course, his weird reports about Candidate Gore made him a part of the overall herd.

It was very hard to draw distinctions between the mainstream and the right-wing press when it came to the coverage of Candidate Gore. The press corps' two branches had come together in a very unusual way, forming an assault which eventually sent Bush to the White House.

That said, The Hill had had twenty years to wonder about this star reporter turned opinion columnist. His work has been challenged and criticized every step of the way, but our journalistic systems have been on the brink of collapse for the pasts several decades.

For that reason, Solomon sailed from the AP to the Washington Post, then on to the Washington Times and eventually to The Hill, where they finally decided to check his work roughly twenty years too late.

People who saw Solomon's segments on Hannity didn't necessarily know that his claims possibly shouldn't be trusted. Similarly, people watch Rachel Maddow on MSNBC without having any real way to know how shaky her work often been—in our view, shaky bordering on a diagnosis of "trusting viewer abuse."

Is it all tribal reinforcement now? Is it all tribal entertainment? Is it all tribal pleasure?

In October 2017, Janet Malcolm published a lengthy profile of Maddow in the New Yorker, a well-known Bible of the self-impressed upper-end very smart left.

Malcolm was highly experienced and had been frequently celebrated. Now, though, she was writing these pensees about "the current liberal sweetheart of cable TV," and the New Yorker had put them in print:

MALCOLM (10/9/17): Maddow is widely praised for the atmosphere of cheerful civility and accessible braininess that surrounds her stage persona. She is onstage, certainly, and makes no bones about being so. She regularly reminds us of the singularity of her show (“You will hear this nowhere else”; “Very important interview coming up, stay with us”; “Big show coming up tonight”). Like a carnival barker, she leads us on with tantalizing hints about what is inside the tent.

As I write this, I think of something that subliminally puzzles me as I watch the show. Why do I stay and dumbly watch the commercials instead of getting up to finish washing the dishes? By now, I know every one of the commercials as well as I know the national anthem: the Cialis ad with curtains blowing as the lovers phonily embrace, the ad with the guy who has opioid-induced . . . constipation (I love the delicacy-induced pause), the ad for Liberty Mutual Insurance in which the woman jeers at the coverage offered by a rival company: “What are you supposed to do, drive three-quarters of a car?” I sit there mesmerized because Maddow has already mesmerized me. Her performance and those of the actors in the commercials merge into one delicious experience of TV. “The Rachel Maddow Show” is a piece of sleight of hand presented as a cable news show. It is TV entertainment at its finest. It permits liberals to enjoy themselves during what may be the most thoroughly unenjoyable time of their political lives.

Is it all tribal enjoyment? Malcom went on to offer these thoughts about the cable star's carefully planned "performance of the Rachel figure:"

MALCOLM: Maddow’s TV persona—the well-crafted character that appears on the nightly show—suggests experience in the theatre, but Maddow has had none. “I am a bad actor. I can be performative. But I can’t play any other character than the one who appears on the show. I can’t embody anyone else.” To keep herself in character, so to speak, Maddow marks up the text that she will read from a teleprompter with cues for gestures, pauses, smiles, laughs, frowns—all the body language that goes into her performance of the Rachel figure. “My scripts are like hieroglyphics,” she said. I asked her if I could see a page or two of these annotated texts. She consented, but then thought better of it.

In fairness, these are Malcolm's impressions of Maddow's show. But is it all performance now? Does little else remain?

According to leading anthropologists, we humans have never enjoyed being told that we aren't enormously sharp. But Malcolm was saying that the Maddow Show is "TV entertainment" designed to let us liberals enjoy ourselves, and she seemed to be praising Maddow for providing this service.

She herself was so mesmerized that she had "dumbly" memorized the commercials. So it has gone as partisan cable and the partisan Net have melted our skill sets down.

Solomon had been at this forever, but The Hill was still printing his work. When he appeared on Hannity, viewers had no obvious way of knowing that they were perhaps being misled.

One hour earlier, watching Tucker, they may have seen one of Carlson's persuasive segments featuring our own tribe's imperfection. So it went last Friday night when Tucker sent in the clowns—the folk who had been mesmerized by Stormy Daniels and her lawyer, a fellow who, that very day, had been convicted of various crimes.

Stormy shook a candidate down for cash. In this way, she became our flailing tribe's feminist hero.

While this was going on, Malcolm was memorizing the ads. So it went inside the New Yorker as the center failed to hold and our systems went into collapse.

Tomorrow: Recalling Monday's examples

The only stain on Clinton's shirt!

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2020

Our own tribe's criminal cluelessness: We're going to postpone our review of Dana Goldstein's account of "the reading wars."

Instead, let's consider our liberal tribe's remarkable cluelessness concerning the basics of recent political history. More specifically, we refer to the decades of political history which put Donald Trump where he is.

Sarada Peri was a speechwriter for President Obama. Yesterday, she published a piece in the Atlantic concerning President Trump.

Peri warns that Donald J. Trump may well willing to cheat to win re-election. We can think of more possible examples than she does, but much of her essay makes perfect sense. The highlighted part of this remarkable passage seems to make no sense:

PERI (2/18/20): Lying, of course, is only one challenge. The Democratic nominee will also have to contend with cheating. After the 2016 election, the journalist Katy Tur offered an applicable analogy. She said that what made covering Trump as a reporter and running against him as a candidate so difficult was the way that scandals stuck—or didn’t stick—to him. Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state was like a stain on her shirt that people couldn’t get past, because it was the only mark on an otherwise clean shirt. But Trump had so many stains that “you couldn’t tell if it was a stained shirt or if it was just supposed to be that way.”

Peri goes on to enumerate some of the ways Trump might be willing to cheat. We direct you to her remarkable claim about the reason why Candidate Clinton was damaged by the reports about her email server.

According to Peri, the Emailgate matter hit Clinton so hard "because it was the only mark on an otherwise clean shirt." The cluelessness displayed by that statement is very hard to compute.

In fact, the email matter hit Candidate Cinton so hard because it was the ten millionth scandal or pseudo-scandal the press corps had laid at her feet. For many voters, it reinforced a set of negative associations which dated back to 1992.

Peri seems to be roughly 40. (She graduated from Tufts in 2001.) Especially by modern press corps norms, that almost makes her "old."

Still, that means that Peri was still in middle school when the sliming of Clinton began. Almost surely, it was this constant prior sliming of Clinton which made the email matter hit so hard with a whole generation of voters.

Beyond that, it was almost surely the constant prior sliming of Clinton which explains why newspapers like the New York Times pursued the topic at such massive length. Let's take a (truncated) look at the record:

Peri would have been in a freshmen in high school when Rush Limbaugh suggested on his radio program that Clinton was involved in the death of her friend, Vince Foster.

She still would have been in high school when Jerry Falwell began selling a videotape called The Clinton Chronicles, a crackpot film which attributed an array of mysterious deaths to Clinton and Clinton.

The story starts before that. Peri would have been in 7th grade when the "Presidential Bitch" t-shirt caper began. Briefly, we'll quote Gene Lyons:

LYONS (7/13/16): Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear: specifically to September 1992, when Attorney General William P. Barr, top-ranking FBI officials, and—believe it or not—a Treasury Department functionary who actually sold "Presidential Bitch" T-shirts with Hillary Clinton's likeness from her government office, pressured the U.S. Attorney in Little Rock to open an investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton's Whitewater investment.

The never-ending Whitewater pseudo-investigation sprang from those seamy roots. For more about the selling of the "Presidential Bitch" t-shirts, read Lyons' 1995 book, Fools For Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater.

Peri would have been an undergraduate in 1999, when Chris Matthews began sliming Clinton as "Evita Peron" and "Nurse Ratched." That said, Matthews kept it up right through the Democratic primaries of 2007 and 2008, along with many others.

Perhaps Peri may not remember the early episodes which formed the foundation upon which the email claims took root. But Obama was already in the White House when Bob Schieffer and John McCain helped touch off the endless and bogus Benghazi narratives which dogged Clinton from September 2012 right through the 2016 election.

Was Emailgate "the only mark on an otherwise clean shirt?" On its face, the claim seems astoundingly clueless, but it betrays an ugly fact about the way our liberal tribe has played the game these many long hapless years.

The wars against the Clintons and Gore were largely conducted from within the mainstream press corps. These wars were often based on the flimsiest logic and evidence; many claims were simply made up.

The claims against these figures were endless. That said, a code of silence surrounds these events, and Peri's essay seems to extend it. It's astounding to think that a person of Peri's status could have written the passage we've quoted. Even sadder is the fact that the Atlantic chose to put the passage in print.

What explains the mainstream press corps' war against Clinton, Gore and Clinton? The question has never been answered, mainly because the question has so rarely been asked.

What happened within the mainstream press corps has stayed there. Careerist children agreed not to rock the boat. Dearest darlings, use your heads! Careers hung in the balance!

Did the Emailgate matter hit Clinton so hard "because it was the only mark on an otherwise clean shirt?" Almost surely, the Emailgate matter hit Clinton so hard with many voters because it was the extension of decades of pseudo-scandals aimed at both Clintons and Gore.

Routinely. these pseudo-scandals were invented and pushed by the mainstream press, not by the right-wing machine. This pattern obtained through November 2016, with the New York Times extending its decades of crackpot enmity in various ways.

Careerist liberals have agreed that these stories must never be told. If Peri's as clueless as that passage makes her seem, it may be because she's simply never heard these stories.

At any rate, that ridiculous claim in the Atlantic captures an era of willed self-defeat. The liberal world ignored the misogyny and the pseudo-scandals every step of the way, except to the substantial extent that liberals produced the abuse.

We were then shocked by Clinton's defeat! Has any tribe in political history ever been more pathetic than we are?

THE RATIONAL ANIMAL'S SYSTEMS: Rachel was all about Stormy again!

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2020

The way Tucker played that same card: Last evening, the crying and wailing from our youthful analysts extended through the full hour.

The cable star had started her program by "selling the car"—in this case, the company car. Tonight's debate is on NBC and MSNBC, so she spent her first five or six minutes exhorting us rubes to watch.

Her sales pitch didn't exactly make sense. Five minutes in, she said this (no transcript available):

MADDOW (2/18/20): The Democratic primaries are entering into a fascinating phase. If you haven't been paying close attention to the Democratic race yet, or if you haven't yet been trying to make up your own mind about about who you might vote for when the primaries or the caucuses in your state roll around, this would be a good time to start tuning in.

It is getting super-interesting, super-unpredictable. Honestly, you don't want to wait till after Super Tuesday to start paying attention and start thinking about your own equities in this race. A lot of these candidates are going to have their gooses cooked by then. This is the time to watch.

"Honestly," the cable star said, this is the time to start watching. As she did, she offered a sales pitch which didn't exactly make sense.

What was wrong with the cable star's pitch? For starters, if a lot of these candidates are going to "have their gooses cooked" after Super Tuesday, wouldn't it make better sense to start tuning in after that?

Of course, if you wait until after Super Tuesday, the primaries and caucuses will already have rolled through eighteen of the fifty states. If you live in one of those states, making up your mind wouldn't matter a whole lot after that.

The cable star skipped that point. She was transparently "selling the car"—in this case, the company vehicle. Tonight's debate will be on her owners' stations, and so she was selling it hard.

She used the word "honestly" as any salesperson would. So it goes when transparently shaky individuals are paid millions of dollars—you aren't allowed to know how many millions—to play journalists on cable TV.

As the evening proceeded, the star cut quite a few factual corners. Most horribly, she overstated what "the FBI" (that is, James Comey) had done to Candidate Clinton during the 2016 race, while failing to note the fact that her own program had aggressively taken Comey's side after the first of his two attacks on the candidate.

For several years, this cable star would periodically pose beneath a big, absurdly misleading DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS sign. In part as a result of such acts of misdirection and branding, our nation's informational system has completely fallen apart.

On last night's show, the cable star returned to a tired old topic. The bulk of her show was built around the notion that other figures should have been prosecuted and sent to prison because of that "hush money" payment to Stormy Daniels.

Funny that! Last Friday night, Tucker had played a different side of that very same card. In truth, he'd played it quite convincingly for his millions of viewers.

Uh-oh! Last Friday, Stormy Daniels' heroic lawyer had been convicted of a string of criminal offenses. This fact wasn't mentioned on Rachel's show, but Tucker played it hard.

How did Tucker play this card—the Michael Avenatti card? With the help of videotape, he recalled the way our liberal thought leaders had swooned for this transparent fraudster in the days of yore.

Question: Was anyone ever more transparently phony than Avenatti was? That said, Daniels herself was a piece of work, though our failing, flailing side was completely unable to see that.

According to Daniels, she'd had sex with The Donald on one occasion, back in 2006. This one (1) act had been completely consensual—but ten years later, she wanted to get paid.

(She could have "told her story" at any time. She was seeking cash, as an election neared.)

On Fox, viewers were eventually told, rather convincingly, that Daniels had been involved in an act of extortion. She was shaking down a candidate for a big sack of cash as Election Day neared.

That's what viewers were told on Fox, on programs hosted by Tucker. On our own ridiculous cable channel, people like Rachel never let us ponder this possibility.

Instead, within our own ridiculous tribe, Stormy became a "feminist icon," a "feminist hero." That's how ridiculous our own team now is!

Stormy wanted to get paid for one alleged act of consensual sex which had happened ten years before. Meanwhile, the lawyer who ended up selling her case on TV was so transparently reptilian, so transparently fraudulent, that he was practically wearing a sign to that effect.

That said, our failing team was by now totally tribal. Stormy was a feminist hero; Avenatti was her knight.

How bad did it get on our pseudo-progressive cable news channels? Last Friday night, Tucker rather convincingly reminded his millions of viewers.

For the record, Tucker has never referred to Avenatti by name. He calls him "Creepy Porn Lawyer."

We wouldn't call him that ourselves. But, just as a matter pf fact, he may have been the world's most obvious fraudulent man.

Last Friday night, Tucker let viewers remember these facts. First, he played tape of Avenatti's appearance on his own program back in September 2018.

On that occasion, Tucker had assailed him for exploiting his client. Tucker played some of that tape Friday night. In part, that re-aired tape went like this:

CARLSON (9/13/18): You're exploiting her and you know that. Why aren't you paying her some of what you're making?

AVENATTI: Sir, this is absurd.

CARLSON: But it's my question. Why are you rich, and your client is working in seedy strip clubs?

AVENATTI: I am not—sir, do you have any idea how much money I've earned?

CARLSON: You're on every cable show. You're running for president!

AVENATTI: You have no idea. You have no idea.

CARLSON: Well, I know that you haven't paid your taxes. Like so many lawyers, you were taking advantage of her, and you pose as a feminist hero because you are shameless and the others let you get away with it, but you're an exploiter of a woman and you should be ashamed of it.

That was part of the way it went back in 2018, when Avenatti went on Tucker's program.

Last Friday night, Tucker played a longer chunk of that tape, but then he stuck the knife in. He let his viewers recall the way our own tribe's stars had lionized this transparently fraudulent man:

CARLSON (2/16/20): Just two years ago, like Napoleon before Waterloo, he was a Colossus of American public life. Cable news producers trembled when they said his name, which we have never said in the show, not one time.

They put him on television almost daily for months on end. They couldn't stop themselves. They loved him.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ELISE JORDAN: He's a beast.

EDDIE GLAUDE: He's a beast. He keeps popping Donald Trump and all of these folks in the mouth. Jon Meacham says he may be the savior of the republic.

STEPHANIE RUHLE: I owe Michael Avenatti an apology. For the last couple of weeks, I've been saying, "Enough already, Michael. I've seen you everywhere. What would you like to say?" I was wrong, brother.
(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: No, you don't owe [him] an apology. You owe America an apology for promoting a guy you knew was filthy at the time, but because he hated the same person you hate, you made him seem like a hero.

Jordan, Glaude and Ruhle are all major figures on MSNBC. We wouldn't assume that they "knew [Avenatti] was filthy," but they swallowed him hook, line and sinker.

Avenatti was going to save the republic. On CNN, it got this bad:

CARLSON (2/16/20): We saved all the tape, especially this one. Here's Jeff Zucker's marionette over on CNN telling you that Creepy Porn Lawyer actually is a presidential contender.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BRIAN STELTER: Looking ahead to 2020, one reason why I'm taking you seriously as a contender is because of your presence on cable news.

AVENATTI: I've got 20 years of experience at a very high level. As an attorney, I understand how governmental regulations are passed, how laws are passed, how the Supreme Court works. I have an extreme depth of knowledge.
(END VIDEO CLIP)

As far as we know, Brian Stelter isn;t Jeff Zucker's marionette. But Avenatti actually was being hyped as a presidential contender! That's how bad—how unbelievably stupid—it got on our own cable channels, where our informational system has thoroughly fallen apart.

It's hard to know what was dumber—treating Daniels as a "feminist hero," or treating her transparently phony lawyer as a White House contender. But the people we trust to interpret the news aggressively purchased both notions.

Meanwhile, Rachel's show aggressively took Comey's side against Candidate Clinton when he launched his first attack on her in July 2016. As best we can tell, she's never explained why her program took that astounding approach. (Steve Kornacki was guest hosting.)

For herself, Rachel never so much as mentioned Comey's name until late October 2016, when his second attack occurred. Last night, she was overstating the number of attacks "the FBI" lodged against Clinton, even as she forgot to cop to what her own program had done.

Last night, Rachel was selling the car concerning tonight's debate. She then devoted the bulk of the program to her desire to see more people sent to prison concerning Stormy's extortion demands.

Why do millions of people think we liberals are world-class fools? In part, because we plainly are. In part, because they've watched Tucker down through the years, airing convincing segments like the one he aired Friday night.

Thing fall apart, Achebe claimed. If you doubt that, just watch Rachel on cable news any night of the week. Also, read our
tribe's thought leaders as they explain why they fell for Avenatti so hard.

Several essays of that type have emerged in the wake of Avenatti's convictions. We'll link you to those essays tomorrow, and look at some Tucker-style piffle.

Tomorrow: Tucker accepts what he's told

Links to Rachel: As we type, MSNBC has posted no transcripts for Rachel's shows since last Wednesday night.

The channel tends to function that way. It's a heavily slacker "news org."

A very familiar type of illogic!

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2020

Plus, "the reading wars:" The star of a British reality show recently took her own life. We were struck by a bit of (very familiar) illogic on the part of a British observer.

Can Britain's grisly tabloid press be blamed for this woman's death? In this morning's New York Times, a British media columnist is quoted as he indulges in a very familiar, very obvious type of illogic:

MARSHALL (2/28/20): “This is one of those great hypocrisies of the British public, that they indulge in reading, and often writing, about these celebrities and then when things go wrong, they turn on the media and say it’s all the media’s fault,” Roy Greenslade, a media columnist for The Guardian, said in a telephone interview. Greenslade once worked at The Sun and was also editor of The Daily Mirror, another tabloid.

This is an extremely familiar bit of illogic. What reason is there to think that the people complaining about the tabloids are the same people who were gulping the tabloid coverage before this death occurred?

On its face, Greenslade's presentation doesn't make any sense. But it appears in the Times without comment or challenge. We've encountered this familiar type of illogic many, many times.

We humins donnt reezun reel gud! Nor do we devote large chunks of time to learning to reason better. We expect to have much more about this topic in the weeks ahead as we finally start describing our perilous journey, when just 17, into the ultimate Lair of the Rational Animal.

(It's an entertaining tale.)

We humins donnt reezun reel gud, but how we do split into tribes! This fact was brought into stark relief by Dana Goldstein's front-page report about "the reading wars."

Goldstein's report appeared in Saturday's New York Times. Until today, we couldn't force ourselves to read it.

This morning, though, the Times published excerpts of Goldstein's comments on Twitter about her front-page report. These excerpts appear on page A3, in print editions only.

After reading Goldstein's comments, we finally read her report about "the reading wars." Our initial comment would be this:

What tribalists we mortals be!

We human beings don't reason real well. We do love to split into tribes.

We split into tribes, then we march off to war. "Aristotle's error" to the side, this is basic anthropology pretty much all the way down.

We'll ponder Goldstein's remarks about these "reading wars" tomorrow. In our view, her Twitter comments are quite instructive, though perhaps unintentionally so.

THE RATIONAL ANIMAL'S SYSTEMS: Rachel says she just can't sleep!

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2020

Tucker recalls Avenatti: BREAKING! Even the anthropologists have started to say it:

It's all comedy now!

As American systems fall apart—as the sensible center can no longer hold—we're left with nothing more than the possibility of amusement as we await whatever will come, "as on a darkling plain."

As our systems crash and burn, is it really all comedy now? Consider what millions of viewers were handed by Rachel and Tucker last week.

Concerning Rachel, the high-rated "corporate progressive" has apparently been struggling with her sleep. We know this because she told us so, last Wednesday night, on her "cable news" program.

In her lengthy opening monologue, Maddow cited an article by Masha Gessen. The article appeared a few days after Donald Trump's 2016 election win.

According to Maddow, the article "is remembered for the set of rules [Gessen] went on to lay out for how to survive and preserve your sanity in a country that is shedding its democratic foundations and is shedding the strictures of the rule of law."

Stating the obvious, Gessen's article isn't remembered at all. What's being discussed on cable news is 1) the useless results of the latest polls, and 2) whatever Donald J. Trump may have said ten minutes ago.

Critiques like Gessen's go undiscussed. Analyses like that are hard.

That said, all roads on the Rachel Maddow Show lead to Rachel Maddow. For that reason, the cable star was soon telling us this:

MADDOW (2/12/20): Rule number one, first on her list of rules, was the memorable one, one that still wakes me up regularly to this day.

Rule number one, quote, "Believe the autocrat. He means what he says."

That rule still wakes Rachel up. It does so regularly, right to this very day!

Already, the analysts were screaming and crying; several were tearing their hair. The youngsters sensed what was coming next, and sure enough! We were soon offered this:

MADDOW: And he published this book right at the time of the inauguration of Donald Trump. And in the book, very short book, goes on to lay out 20 lessons from the 20th century for Americans to consider today. And some of these lessons, some of these rules keep me up too.

The cable star was now discussing Professor Snyder's first, shorter book about the way democracies die. By the cable star's own admission, his book still keeps her up too!

The analysts maintained their red alert when the long monologue ended—and sure enough!

Later in the program, Rachel was speaking with Candidate Klobuchar. In accord with the deathless rule of three, the cable star now said this:

MADDOW: Let me ask you one seemingly sort of technical thing, but it's starting to loom. A lot of things are waking me up these days. Every third or fourth day, this is the thing that wakes me up.

Rachel raised the possibility that the Democrats may arrive at their convention without a clearcut nominee. This possibility wakes Rachel up every third or fourth day. It even makes her cringe!

By now, our analysts were shouting such claims as, "One of the ways democracy dies involves the ascension of people like Maddow to the role of progressive thought leader!" Nothing could brake their roll.

However we assess the analysts' claim, Rachel kept it up last night. In minute 4, she assured her millions of viewers that she'd "had a great weekend." But she also told us, twice, that she "was a little haunted this weekend" by an interview on this same subject she'd conducted last Friday night.

Question: Do you believe that Rachel Maddow is awakened, every third or fourth night, by the prospect of a brokered convention? Do you believe that Gessen's first rule still wakes her up regularly, and that some of Snyder's rules keep her awake at night too?

We're disinclined to believe those claims, though they could always be true. To out ear, they seem to be part of Maddow's "performance of the Rachel figure," the peculiar phrase Janet Malcolm employed in October 2017, in a peculiar profile of Maddow published in the New Yorker.

Tomorrow, we'll revisit that peculiar profile, encouraging you to remember that it's all comedy now. For today, we'll turn to what Tucker was saying on Fox last week, even as Rachel was explaining the ways we now live in "a banana republic."

In essence, Tucker was saying the very same thing, though his analysis had a different twist.

Last Friday evening, starting at midnight Eastern, we flipped back and forth between these two "cable news" programs. Rachel was saying that we now live a a banana republic.

It's a fairly imprecise claim, though it's increasingly common. Over on the competing channel, Tucker and his guest, Michael Caputo, were making an equal but opposite claim, saying such things as this:

CARLSON (2/14/20): The left doesn't want criminal justice reform. If they did, they'd be on Roger Stone's side. No. What they really want is to send their political enemies to jail and that's what they're trying to do.

Former Trump campaign adviser, Michael Caputo has watched this whole thing from the beginning, and he joins us tonight. So it's hard not—

Michael, thanks so much for joining us, I should say, it's hard not to compare and contrast the treatment of Andrew McCabe and Roger Stone. What do you make of this?

CAPUTO: Obviously, it's a two-tiered justice system. We've always wondered about that. But in the wake of Donald Trump's election, in 2016, it became more and more obvious that there's one level of justice for Hillary Clinton, Andrew McCabe, James Comey, John Brennan—the list goes on—and another level of justice for Roger Stone and George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, J. D. Gordon, and there's no [INAUDIBLE] between them.

The fact of the matter is, we know now, just by the things that they've exposed accidentally, with the prosecutors manipulating guideline enhancements to drag it up to seven to nine, with the jury foreman revealing that she is a lieutenant in the resistance—you know, there's enough corruption, malice and ulterior motive here for the president to pardon Roger Stone immediately.

According to Caputo, prosecutors had "manipulat[ed] guideline enhancements to drag [Stone's recommended sentence] up to seven to nine" years. Watching Maddow last night, a viewer might have gotten the impression that William Barr is attempting to eliminate imprisonment for Stone altogether.

In fact, the Justice Department's amended recommendation holds that Stone does deserve imprisonment, but only of three to four years' duration. Neither Tucker nor Rachel has been spelling that out. As our systems fall apart, clarity has become a rare commodity.

Is Rachel jerking awake at night? Or was that just the latest example of her "performance of the Rachel figure"—her pursuit of something resembling a cult of personality?

We have no idea. But in this era of tribalized "cable news," clarity has given way to the arts of tribal persuasion. And as we've often told you, our own team is routinely so inane at this point that Tucker routinely engages in types of persuasion in which he doesn't have to toy with facts at all.

On Friday evening, the gentleman built one such segment around a new criminal conviction. He started his program as shown:

CARLSON: Good evening and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight.

Sadly, it's the end of the road for one of CNN's top presidential picks. Sadly, he's not dropping out. He's behind bars.

The presidential pick to whom he referred was Michael Avenatti. Avenatti "was convicted today on a long list of felonies," Carlson accurately said. He went on to offer some tribal persuasion which was sadly persuasive. Videotape was involved.

Last Friday night, Rachel and Tucker were basically making the same claim. Each cable host told millions of viewers that we're living in a banana republic in which the courts have been, or are being, largely corrupted.

In Lincoln's immortal words, North and South once "prayed to the same God." Now, these cable stars lodged the same complaint. They only disagreed on which of our two warring tribes is currently getting shafted.

Rachel's audience won't be told about what Tucker is saying. Tucker'd audience isn't told about what Rachel says.

In fairness, only Rachel claims that she is being awakened, and kept awake, on a regular basis. Do you believe her when she says that?

Tomorrow, while remembering that it's all comedy now, we'll revisit the peculiar things Malcolm once said. We'll also discuss what cable stars said on Tucker's videotape.

Tomorrow: “The Rachel Maddow Show is a piece of sleight of hand presented as a cable news show. It is TV entertainment at its finest."

Remember, it's all comedy now. On the whole, our systems have failed.

THE RATIONAL ANIMAL'S SYSTEMS: Political systems fall apart!

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2020

In search of what Credico thought: Just think how different the landscape would be if our (ridiculous) presidential primary system had been ridiculous in a different way in this particular year.

Within our current (ridiculous) system, the caucus/primary nomination system starts in Iowa, then moves on to New Hampshire. After that, it's on to Nevada. South Carolina comes next.

Imagine a different system this year. In this different (ridiculous) system, South Carolina would have gone first.

What would have happened had South Carolina gone first? Let's make a sensible guess:

Almost surely, Candidate Biden would have racked up a win, possibly by a strong margin. Inevitably, the nation's pundits would then have staged one of their standard stampedes, hailing the way the candidate had enhanced his pre-existing front-runner status.

As the children staged this stampede, polling results in Nevada, Iowa and New Hampshire would perhaps have started to change in Uncle Hoe's direction. Biden's numbers in those states would have improved, further fueling the pundit stampede.

Almost surely, this is what would have happened if our (ridiculous) nomination system had been ridiculous in a different way this year. None of this would have made any sense—and yet, this is us.

Our primary system makes little sense. The same is true of other leading political systems which have started to fail.

Over the course of our last five elections, our electoral college system has sent two candidates to the White House who lost the popular vote. There's little sign that this emerging pattern is necessarily going to change. It may already be "the new abnormal."

Other systems are failing to hold at this point in time. Our system of "Senate math" is becoming increasingly ludicrous, giving the smallest, least populous states an inordinate amount of power. Here's Gerald Seib in the Wall Street Journal, just a few years back:

SEIB (11/21/17): David Birdsell, dean of the school of public and international affairs at Baruch College, notes that by 2040, about 70% of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest states. They will have only 30 senators representing them, while the remaining 30% of Americans will have 70 senators representing them.

Thirty percent of the nation's people will hold 70 percent of the Senate's seats. So that system keep trending.

As for our two-party system, that system is failing in a somewhat comical way, with each party struggling to nominate presidential candidates who belong to the party in question!

There's a comical element to these breakdowns, but they suggest that our political system may be coming apart. That said, the largest ongoing breakdown may involve the system by which we the people receive information, advice and guidance from the press corps and the academy.

Everyone knows what the press would have done had South Carolina gone first with Joe Biden scoring a win. They would have staged one of the famous stampedes. They do such things every four years.

That said, does any system lie in shambles the way our information system does? In the past few days, we found ourselves asking this question again and again and again.

We think of what we saw last Friday night, as Rachel and Tucker each told millions of viewers that we're living in a banana republic, with their own tribe getting the shaft as the breakdown continues.

We'd had the same reaction that morning when we read the latest column by the Washington Post's Monica Hesse. The essay is a parody of political analysis, but it's standard fare at the Post.

Perhaps most strikingly, we were struck by the journalistic breakdown when we read Michelle Goldberg's most recent column in the New York Times.

The column appeared in yesterday's Sunday Review. It concerned the kind of question which can now divide our warring political tribes. The question at issue was this:

Should Roger Stone be sentenced to 7-9 years in prison, as the Justice Department originally recommended? Or should his sentence be only 3-4 years, as Justice is now recommending?

In our view, Stone has resembled a crackpot throughout his adult life. On the other hand, viewers of Carlson's Friday night program were told that Stone is currently the victim of "a two-tiered justice system."

We'll review what Carlson's viewers were told as the week proceeds. Yesterday, Goldberg considered this matter. Here's how her column began:

GOLDBERG (2/16/20): Randy Credico is the witness from Robert Mueller’s investigation whom Roger Stone, Donald Trump’s longtime adviser, has been convicted of threatening. A few months ago, Credico texted me, “If Stone goes to jail I’m a walking dead man.” On Thursday, after the president’s intervention to get Stone a lighter sentence convulsed the Justice Department, I spoke to Credico, a left-wing comedian and activist, and he elaborated on what he’d meant. “The guy goes to prison and I’m to blame, and you’re being called a rat, you’re worried about somebody with a red hat, a MAGA hat, doing a Jack Ruby on you,” he said.

His fear has national implications, because a central question in the Stone sentencing is whether Credico truly felt endangered when Stone promised to cause him harm. Despite what the administration’s defenders say, the answer is yes.

For the record, we once knew Randy a tiny tad too. Back in the 1980s, we hired him to perform at Baltimore's award-winning Charm City Comedy Club.

Did Randy "truly feel endangered when Stone promised to cause him harm?" Goldberg assured her readers that the answer is yes. We were struck by the frustrating way she tried to establish this point.

Goldberg is a very high-ranking journalistic thought leader. Watching Tucker and Rachel, and reading Hesse, we were truck, as we often are, by the way our information/opinion systems are falling apart.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but our intellectual skills are quite slight. We have a much stronged drive toward tribal belief. We'll examine this system all week.

Tomorrow: Listening to Tucker and Rachel

Also this: Did Goldberg start with a factual error? We tried to fact-check the point yesterday, but we still aren't sure.

Louisa May Alcott in a war zone...

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2020

...alongside Girls Learning to Skateboard: Like Tinseltown's other adapters before her, Greta Gerwig made many changes in Louisa May Alcott's most famous book.

Most comical, but also just sad, would have to be the change which followed a reported declaration. "You know we can’t actually have [Jo] marry Professor Bhaer,” Gerwig is said to have said.

Too funny! This seems to have led to the complexified ending of Gerwig's film, which has fanpersons debating whether the pair actually got married or not.

Has anyone ever made this "adaptation" before? As far as we know, no one has.

That's the most comical of Gerwig's ch-ch-ch-ch-changes. The larger change is an adaptation which has been widely performed in the past, involving that school for those kids.

In the final chapter of Alcott's novel, Jo March and Professor Bhaer get married, then open and operate a school for destitute boys. Jo doesn't write a book. Instead, she's wasting her time doing this:

ALCOTT (chapter 47): It never was a fashionable school, and the Professor did not lay up a fortune, but it was just what Jo intended it to be—"a happy, homelike place for boys, who needed teaching, care, and kindness". ...Very precious to Jo was the friendship of the lads, their penitent sniffs and whispers after wrongdoing, their droll or touching little confidences, their pleasant enthusiasms, hopes, and plans, even their misfortunes, for they only endeared them to her all the more. There were slow boys and bashful boys, feeble boys and riotous boys, boys that lisped and boys that stuttered, one or two lame ones, and a merry little quadroon, who could not be taken in elsewhere, but who was welcome to the "Bhaer-garten", though some people predicted that his admission would ruin the school.

Yes, Jo was a very happy woman there, in spite of hard work, much anxiety, and a perpetual racket. She enjoyed it heartily and found the applause of her boys more satisfying than any praise of the world, for now she told no stories except to her flock of enthusiastic believers and admirers...

Five years have flown by as the novel ends. The married couple is still engaged in this tedious work. This includes the fellow who's too stout, and too unromantic, for the modern progressives of Vox.

As far as we know, no adapter has taken much interest in this, the actual ending to Alcott's book. Tinseltown has tended to substitute a closing adventure in which Jo publishes a book, an exciting event which doesn't occur at the end of Alcott's novel.

In these adaptations, we see Jo gain the applause of the world. Modern thought leaders still want this!

Unless you've been alive for the past many years, you might be inclined to think that we modern progressives could take interest in Alcott's fictional school for those fictional destitute kids. Like other adapters before her, Gerwig largely blew past those events, substituting a thrilling adventure which doesn't occur in the book.

That said, how intriguing! Last Sunday night, in Hollywood, a female director won an Oscar for a film about a school for impoverished kids! (For the full list of winners, click here.)

The director in question is Carol Dysinger. She won the Oscar for Best Documentary (Short Subject) for a 39-minute film with a beautifully poetic title:

Learning to Skateboard In a Warzone (if you're a girl)

Dysinger's 39-minute film is built around the students and teachers of Skateistan, a school for low-income kids found at an undisclosed location in Kabul. We strongly advise you to find a way to watch it, perhaps through this site at A&E.

You'll come, perhaps, for the novelty. You'll stay for the youthful desire, for the reflexive smiling and laughter.

Skateistan serves girls and boys. Dysinger's film is about the girls. Its opening chyron says this:

17 years after the Taliban fell, Afghanistan is still one of the wort places in the world to be born a girl.

Also, Afghanistan is still a war zone. The film takes over from there.

We won't try to list the many things you can see in this film. In our view, the film contains multitudes. We think you should try to watch it.

We were struck, on Oscar night, by the contrast between the demeanors of the little-known documentary winners and those of the Tinseltown stars. For Dysinger's occasionally acerbic acceptance speech, you can just click here.

Later, we were struck by an irony:

The female director we've been instructed to love could find no interest in Alcott's school for destitute boys. The female director who will go unmentioned built her film around a school—a school in a war zone—for low-income, out-of-school girls who hope for a chance in the world.

In Dysinger's film, beautiful children are learning to skateboard in a war zone. The one film touched off a tribal stampede. The other will stay unnoticed.

Alcott in a war zone: This morning, we reread one chapter in Susan Cheever's 2010 book, Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography.

The chapter in question is Chapter 6. It describes the time Alcott spent in a war zone during our Civil War.

In 1863, Alcott went to Washington to serve as a nurse in a Union hospital. Cheever's account is built upon the letters Alcott sent home—letters which were later published under the title Hospital Sketches.

Cheever's account is riveting. Eventually, we get to this:

CHEEVER (page 156): One man who stood out in the ward of dying men was a Virginia blacksmith named John Suhre. He had never married but devoted his life to helping his mother and family. Now he lay dying with a musket ball lodged in his lungs, but since his wound was in his back, he could hardly believe the pain he felt or understand his peril. Tall and extremely handsome, he was dying without complaint or remorse, and Alcott spent as much time with him as she could...

Suhre wanted to know if he was dying. The surgeon charged Alcott with the task of telling him he was.

"This exchange brought the two of them even closer," Cheever writes, "and both waited for a letter that might reassure him that his mother and younger sister might be taken care of."

This was part of Alcott's time in a war zone. Cheever continues with an account of the night Suhre died.

"Alcott sat grieving by his bed" in these last few hours, Cheever writes. "After John Suhre's body finally failed," Alcott needed help to pry his fingers away from her own.

That was life in one of our war zones. Five years later, Alcott wrote Little Women.

Today, people are helping children learn to skateboard in a different war zone. You've never heard of the director who created a "love letter to the brave girls" of the country where these efforts are taking place. On the other hand, we've all been barraged with routinely illogical complaints about the heinous way the famous, upscale director allegedly got snubbed.

We'll be watching Dysinger's film again. More than anything else, we were struck by a mystery it contains—the mystery of youthful energy and desire, the mystery of where laughter and smiling come from.

Within our own tribe, Professor Bhaer was too fat for Jo to marry and destitute children are boring. These have been our values for a very long time.

Hollywood groans beneath these values. Does everyone know this but us?

THE RATIONAL ANIMAL'S FICTIONS: No Mandated Tribal Claim Left Behind!

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2020

Trump comes for Gerwig's "values:" It seems that no one actually reads Little Women any more.

In her interesting 2018 book, Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters, Anne Boyd Rioux delivers the data. According to a 2012 survey, "only 0.08 percent of the 7.6 million American students surveyed had read Little Women the previous school year," Rioux reports at one point.

With math known to be hard, let's spell it out. That means that eight kids out of every ten thousand had read Louisa May Alcott's book in the previous year.

That doesn't mean that Americans kids were no longer reading the book at all. But Rioux's book includes data from various surveys, in Great Britain and the U.S., which indicate that very few contemporary kids ever read Little Women.

It isn't hard to understand why the famous book goes unread. In many ways, the highly influential book is now substantially dated. Just consider a few events the reader is asked to accept:

Jo March, the heroine of the book, marries a man who is stout. (When they meet, he's almost 40!) "Why would [Alcott] do such a thing to us?" progressive expert voices now cry.

Jo's husband is old and stout, but things get even worse. At the end of the book, the pair have opened, and are running, a school for destitute children! Modern progressives can't be expected to find their ground in such tedious conduct. Who then will recommend this tired old book to those who are young?

Sardonics aside, Alcott's text may be hard to follow for modern readers in general. Consider an event which makes Jo admire Professor Bhaer despite the fact that he's fat.

As Jo is getting to know the professor, a third party invites the pair to attend "a select symposium, held in honor of several celebrities." For the record, these are intellectual celebrities, and, despite her "reverence for genius," Jo is thoroughly "disillusioned" by what she sees and hears.

(By way of contrast, we modern progressives will always repeat whatever er see or hear.)

At any rate, in the part of the evening described below, the philosophers start to showcase their wares. Alcott reports what happened:

ALCOTT (chapter 34): Before the evening was half over, Jo felt so completely disillusioned, that she sat down in a corner to recover herself. Mr. Bhaer soon joined her, looking rather out of his element, and presently several of the philosophers, each mounted on his hobby, came ambling up to hold an intellectual tournament in the recess. The conversations were miles beyond Jo's comprehension, but she enjoyed it, though Kant and Hegel were unknown gods, the Subjective and Objective unintelligible terms, and the only thing 'evolved from her inner consciousness' was a bad headache after it was all over. It dawned upon her gradually that the world was being picked to pieces, and put together on new and, according to the talkers, on infinitely better principles than before, that religion was in a fair way to be reasoned into nothingness, and intellect was to be the only God. Jo knew nothing about philosophy or metaphysics of any sort, but a curious excitement, half pleasurable, half painful, came over her as she listened with a sense of being turned adrift into time and space, like a young balloon out on a holiday.

She looked round to see how the Professor liked it, and found him looking at her with the grimmest expression she had ever seen him wear. He shook his head and beckoned her to come away, but she was fascinated just then by the freedom of Speculative Philosophy, and kept her seat, trying to find out what the wise gentlemen intended to rely upon after they had annihilated all the old beliefs.

Jo is troubled because a bunch of philosophers are rolling their eyes at religion. Why did she come to admire Professor Bhaer despite his age and his girth? Skillfully, Alcott explains:

ALCOTT: Now, Mr. Bhaer was a diffident man and slow to offer his own opinions, not because they were unsettled, but too sincere and earnest to be lightly spoken. As he glanced from Jo to several other young people, attracted by the brilliancy of the philosophic pyrotechnics, he knit his brows and longed to speak, fearing that some inflammable young soul would be led astray by the rockets, to find when the display was over that they had only an empty stick or a scorched hand.

He bore it as long as he could, but when he was appealed to for an opinion, he blazed up with honest indignation and defended religion with all the eloquence of truth—an eloquence which made his broken English musical and his plain face beautiful. He had a hard fight, for the wise men argued well, but he didn't know when he was beaten and stood to his colors like a man. Somehow, as he talked, the world got right again to Jo. The old beliefs, that had lasted so long, seemed better than the new. God was not a blind force, and immortality was not a pretty fable, but a blessed fact. She felt as if she had solid ground under her feet again, and when Mr. Bhaer paused, outtalked but not one whit convinced, Jo wanted to clap her hands and thank him.

She did neither, but she remembered the scene, and gave the Professor her heartiest respect, for she knew it cost him an effort to speak out then and there, because his conscience would not let him be silent. She began to see that character is a better possession than money, rank, intellect, or beauty, and to feel that if greatness is what a wise man has defined it to be, "truth, reverence, and good will", then her friend Friedrich Bhaer was not only good, but great.

Professor Bhaer had been willing to stand and fight on behalf of religious belief. Weirdly, Jo "began to see that that character is a better possession than...beauty."

According to Alcott, Jo's belief that Bhaer was not only good, but great, "strengthened daily." It is at this point that Professor Bhaer tells Jo that he disapproves, as a general matter, of lurid "sensation stories."

According to Professor Matteson, this imposition of the masculine gaze causes Jo a great deal of pain, and she reacts with "indignation." Inevitably, Professor Bhaer is "largely oblivious to the depth of the pain" he has caused.

That isn't what happens in the actual book. This doesn't stop it from taking place in modern professorial fictions.

Can we talk? Modern-day 12-year-old kids would be unlikely to find their footing in events like the ones we've described. Changing intellectual and societal frameworks have almost surely made Alcott's famous text hard to track in the present day.

This may explain why modern kids aren't rushing to read Little Women. That said, the famous book, with its famous characters, can still make a profitable movie, if you just change its characters, events and values all around, while pretending to do no such thing.

With that, Hooray for Hollywood and for its endless array of graspers, hustlers and climbers! Tinseltown has made major adaptations of Alcott's text in 1933, 1949, 1994 and 2019. Those adaptations survive.

Two earlier films, from 1917 and 1918, have apparently been lost. A 2018 film adaptation crashed and burned at the box office and among the bulk of the critics, to the extent that it was reviewed at all.

Along came Gerwig's 2019 adaptation. Within our flailing progressive world, the Greta Gerwig memorial t-shirt would perhaps say this:

I made the greatest Little Women yet and all I got was this lousy $225,000 gift bag!

Poor Gerwig! For whatever reason, rightly or wrongly, her film was largely passed over in the early awards season, both by the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild.

Given current tribal fictions, only one conclusion was possible—their misogyny had been showing. There followed a progressive stampede in support of the film which might be said to have run by this watchword:

No unfounded conclusion or logical bungle left behind!

How dumb is our modern progressive tribe—the tribe that is currently well on its way to losing the world to the disordered man our haplessness helped elect? This is how transplendently dumb we are and have been for a long time:

Right around Christmas time, three (3) men told the New York Times' Janet Maslin that they didn't want to see Gerwig's film. This touched off a wave of furious claims that "men" were avoiding the film.

(Hint: No film has ever been seen by all men. Also, no film has ever been seen by most men. Attendance by gender has always fluctuated based upon the subject matter of various films. Everyone understands such facts—everyone but us, Over Here, within our failing tribe.)

Rightly or wrongly, Little Women was getting scorched early on. But when Oscar nominations were announced, Gerwig's film was nominated for Best Picture. Also, Gerwig's chronologically jumbled script received a Best Screenplay nomination.

That said, Gerwig didn't receive a Best Director nomination. This "snub" was widely attributed to the Academy's sexism/misogyny, even though the same directors guild had nominated her for a Best Director Oscar just two years before.

Puzzling logic of this type would guide our stampede throughout. How outrageous was this obvious snub? With no inanity left behind, we were offered such logic as this:

We could tell that Gerwig had been snubbed for Best Director because her film had been nominated for Best Picture. We weren't told that nine films got Best Picture nominations this year, while the Academy only allows five nominations for Best Director.

We could tell that Gerwig had been snubbed for Best Director because her film had received six nominations in all. (Did the Academy think the film had directed itself?)

We weren't told that only one of the nine Best Picture films had received fewer nominations than Little Women's six. We weren't told that four of the Best Picture films had received ten or eleven noms.

We knew in our bones that this snub was a case of discrimination. We never saw anyone suggest an alternate possibility—the possibility that Gerwig, who became an official member of Hollywood royalty with Lady Bird, was being cut a break by critics and pundits because of her standing in Tinseltown.

Is it possible that Gerwig was actually being favored by critics and Tinseltown voters? Of course it is! With this, we direct you to A. O. Scott's review of the film for the New York Times.

As every critic found a way to do, Scott praised the chronological slicing-and-dicing which some viewers found quite confusing. ("It’s as if the book has been carefully cut apart and reassembled, its signatures sewn back together in an order that produces sparks of surprise and occasional bouts of pleasurable dizziness.")

Of course, one person's "pleasurable dizziness" is another's rank confusion. All three times that we've seen the film, we've been struck by how confusing it is. Then too, we've never had to issue an amusing correction like this:

Correction: Dec. 23, 2019
An earlier version of this review misidentified Beth as the youngest of the March sisters. The youngest is Amy, not Beth.

As we've noted before, we thought the casting added to the muddle. We thought the oldest sister looked like the youngest, and the youngest sister seemed like the oldest.

Scott may have been misled by the casting too! At any rate, like everyone else, Scott found a roundabout way to praise Gerwig's chronological jumbling. Perhaps in thrall to Hollywood's pecking order, he also offered this obvious nonsense:

SCOTT (12/23/19): Without resorting to self-conscious anachronism or fussy antiquarianism, Gerwig has fashioned a story that feels at once entirely true to its 19th-century origins and utterly modern.

According to Scott, the story Gerwig fashioned "feels entirely true to its 19th-century origins." And it's true—the story may feel that way to an upper-end reviewer who can't even identify the youngest sister is in a very old, very well-known story.

At any rate, the fact that the story feels that way doesn't mean that it is that way. Fawning to celebrity and bowing to power, Scott ignores the wholesale way Gerwig changes Alcott's story and values while retaining the commercial advantages conferred by the famous name of Alcott's book and the famous names of her characters.

Does Gerwig's story "feel entirely true to its 19th-century origins?" What suggestion could be more absurd? To cite one minor example:

As we've watched Gerwig's massively modernized film, we've missed the part of the story where Jo, true to her 19th century values, comes to admire Professor Bhaer because of the way he supports religious values in the face of assault from the swells.

In fairness, that's the tiniest alteration Gerwig makes to Alcott's famous text. Her most ridiculous alteration involved the statement her producer reported in an interview with the Times:

"You know we can’t actually have [Jo] marry Professor Bhaer,” Gerwig is said to have said.

We can't have her marry Bhaer! In the actual 19th century book, Jo does, in fact, marry Bhaer. They then open that school for those destitute children.

Gerwig doesn't just hurry past the school; true to her sillybill Tinseltown values, she even tries to obscure the marryin'! Instead, he has Jo publish a book, an event which doesn't occur in Alcott's original text, and she has her outfox a male editor to get the best business deal.

Along the way, Bhaer rudely criticizes her lurid tales—no, this doesn't occur in the book—and Jo hotly tells him where to shove it. That too doesn't occur in the book. In fact, Gerwig's whole film is a silly, cartoonized tale designed to give us "progressive" fanpersons a story so simple, so scripted and so tribally dumb and even we can follow it.

Plus, she casts a handsome hunk to be the professor. Yum!

For the record, one female director did win an Oscar this year for making a film about a school for destitute children. Predictably, no one has said a word about that. We'll tell you about it tomorrow.

Gerwig, a member of Tinseltown royalty, made a film which is quite different. Like Aaron Sorkin before her, she drafted behind the commercial advantage lurking within a famous title while making a tribally pleasing modern fairy tale.

She made the greatest Little Women yet and all she got was her bag of swag! Our tribe is now so hopeless, so empty, so dumb that we can spend several months having a breakdown about this horrible act of injustice conferred on a Tinseltown star.

Warning:

Donald J. Trump is coming for Gerwig's status and values. Does a tribe as simple-minded and dumb as ours have any real chance of prevailing?

Tomorrow: Woman creates film about destitute kids! But who gives a fig about them?

Klobuchar-on-Buttigieg crime!

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2020

Extremely familiar behavior: Last Friday night, six Democratic presidential candidates staged their New Hampshire debate.
At one point, Candidate Klobuchar saucily said this to Candidate Buttigieg:

KLOBUCHAR (2/7/20): We had a moment the last few weeks, Mayor. And that moment was these impeachment hearings. And there was a lot of courage that you saw from only a few people.

There was courage from Doug Jones, our friend from Alabama, who took that tough vote. There was courage from Mitt Romney, who took a very, very difficult vote. There was courage, as I read today, about Lt. Col. Vindman being escorted out of the White House.

What he did took courage. But what you said, Pete, as you were campaigning through Iowa—as three of us were jurors in that impeachment hearing—you said it was exhausting to watch and that you wanted to turn the channel and watch cartoons.

It is easy to go after Washington because that’s a popular thing to do. It is much harder—as I see Senator [Jeanne] Shaheen in the front row, such a leader—it is much harder to lead, and much harder to take those difficult positions.

Because I think this going after every single thing that people do, because it’s popular to say and makes you look like a cool newcomer—I just, I don’t think that’s what people want right now. We have a newcomer in the White House, and look where it got us.

Imagine! Buttigieg has been trying to look just as cool as a newcomer!

As so many others were showing their courage; as Klobuchar was valiantly doing her job; Buttigieg was parading around the state of Iowa, knocking Washington and saying he'd rather watch cartoons than the impeachment trial!

He was doing the popular thing while Klobuchar was doing her job!

We were puzzled by Klobuchar's presentation as we watched the debate that night. As you can see in minute 28 of this tape, Buttigieg raised his hand, seeking recognition, when he was criticized. But George Stephanopoulos went elsewhere, and Klobuchar's peculiar statement was never addressed.

Poor Klobuchar! As she was doing her duty in Washington, Buttigieg was parading around Iowa saying he'd rather watch cartoons. Except that isn't what Buttigieg said, according to this report by Slate's William Saletan.

As we've noted before, Klobuchar's apparent loathing of Buttigieg has been disappointing. That said, if we might borrow from The Last Picture Show, we've been writing about this kind of trashy behavior for the past twenty-five years.

Most dramatically, Candidate Gore was mugged in similar ways, for quite a few years, by the vast bulk of the mainstream press corps. His remarks were endlessly paraphrased in endlessly ridiculous ways. This went on for twenty straight months before November 2000, and then for quite a few years after that.

As we watched the debate that night, we found it hard to believe that Buttigieg had made the stupid statement Klobuchar put in his mouth. Aside from that, we thought Klobuchar was quite good that night.

It looks like Buttigieg actually didn't make those stupid remarks! But go ahead—read Saletan's report. We've been writing about behavior like this for the past many long years.

From The Last Picture Show: Here's Ben Johnson, scolding the kids in 1971. They'd been mistreating a mentally challenged kid. Finally, Johnson says this:

Now you boys can get on out of here. I don't want to have no more to do with you.

Scaring a poor, unfortunate creature like Billy just so you could have a few laughs. I've been around that trashy behavior all my life. I'm getting tired of putting up with it.

Now you can stay out of this pool hall, out of my café and my picture show too. I don't want no more of your business.

You can watch the scene here. We well remember the first time we saw it.

Don't get us wrong! We could end up voting for Klobuchar in the primary; we'd definitely vote for her in the general. But just how badly does she want the nomination?

Somebody ought to ask.

Full disclosure: We used to write reports like Saletan's. After more than twenty years, we realized there was no point.

Anthropologists contacted us at that point. They offered some fresh new ideas.

THE RATIONAL ANIMAL'S FICTIONS: Sorkin, Matteson run off the rails!

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2020

The Atlantic speaks up, though too late: Was man [sic] ever "the rational animal," as we've long been told?

In recent months, The Atlantic has bravely begin to challenge the ancient dogma. In our view, attention ought to be paid.

First, the journal published a strikingly strange discussion involving its own David Sims and the well-known Aaron Sorkin. The discussion concerned Sorkin's Broadway "adaptation" of Harper Lee's well-known novel, To Kill A Mockingbird.

Strangely, Sorkin and Sims excitedly claimed that the famous novel ends with a murder—the murder of Bob Ewell. Since you'll assume that we're making that up, we'll again post the passage in question.

This is what the fellows said. The bracketed material is all found in the original:

SIMS (12/17/19): I had forgotten that To Kill a Mockingbird also ends with a crime—the [murder] of Bob Ewell [by Boo Radley, trying to protect Scout]—being covered up!

SORKIN: Isn’t it amazing? I had forgotten about it too, and I couldn’t believe it!

SIMS: It’s a story about the greatest lawyer of all time—Atticus—and he’s complicit in this crime!

SORKIN: This novel ends with, as Scout said, “the most honest and decent person in Maycomb” covering up murder with a judge and a sheriff. Why didn’t that ever come up in my eighth-grade class? I saw that and thought, Well, I can tell this exact same story...

According to Sorkin, Lee's novel ends with Atticus Finch covering up a murder with a judge and a sheriff. Excitedly, Sims agrees with this extremely peculiar reading.

You have to be on the crazy juice to read Lee's novel that way. To its credit, The Atlantic was willing to print that instructive exchange.

And then, just two weeks later, the magazine did it again! The Atlantic published an essay by Professor Matteson in which the Pulitzer-winning Alcott biographer inexplicably told readers this:

MATTESON (1/1/20): ...A considerable source of pain in Alcott’s world is the disapproving masculine gaze, so often clad in the guise of moral judgment, that can bruise a woman’s self-esteem and steal her self-expression.

Alcott’s novel presents two powerful instances of such criticism. Laurie chides Meg for her attire at a party, which she considers beautiful and he deems immodest; and Professor Bhaer arraigns Jo for publishing lurid stories that he regards as a waste of her talent and that he fears will subvert her readers’ morals. In the novel, these scenes occur far apart, with no obvious linkage. Gerwig has heard the similarities between them; her film makes the two moments rhyme thematically and lingers on the hurt and indignation that the two men heedlessly cause.

What makes Gerwig’s take so notable is that she sees both sides of the situation with equal conviction. Laurie and Bhaer speak in good faith, yet are largely oblivious to the depth of the pain they are causing...

According to Matteson, Alcott's novel includes a "powerful" episode in which Professor Bhaer "arraigns Jo" for "publishing lurid stories." (In the language of the era, these lurid tales are referred to in the book as "sensation stories.")

According to Matteson, Professor Bhaer "heedlessly causes" "hurt and indignation" by subjecting Jo to the "disapproving masculine gaze" in this way. According to Matteson, Professor Bhaer is "largely oblivious to the depth of the pain" he has caused. He seems to have bruised Jo's self-esteem and stolen her self-expression by his heedless behavior.

So Professor Matteson wrote in this sequel to the peculiar Sorkin-Sims exchange. In fact, nothing dimly like that actually occurs in the relevant chapter in Alcott's book, Chapter 34.

There is no indignation on Jo's part. It's clear that Jo agrees with the professor's assessments. It's clear that she already held the views in question before the professor spoke—and no, the professor has never read any of Jo's stories.

In truth, Matteson's account of Alcott's text may be even nuttier than the Sorkin/Sims account of Lee's widely-read novel. What has become of the "rational animal" we were long rumored to be?

We salute The Atlantic for raising this important question, even if the magazine's intercession comes many years too late. According to experts, these peculiar accounts of these famous novels illustrate the truth about our flailing, war-inclined species:

We humans were never "the rational animal" at all, these highly credentialed scholars despondently insist. Instead, we were always the tribal animal, these future anthropologists say—the creature that ran on standard group "fictions" (Professor Harari), on novelized tribal tales.

According to these future scholars, this wiring has always provided the type of fuel which powered the recent strange accounts published by The Atlantic. To see how deep this wiring runs, let's set the popularizer Sorkin aside and focus instead on Matteson.

By any normal standard, Matteson is a fully credentialed thought leader. The leading authority on his life provides this overview:

John Matteson (born March 3, 1961) is an American professor of English and legal writing at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his first book, Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father.

Born in San Mateo, California, Matteson is the son of Thomas D. Matteson (1920–2011), an airline executive jointly responsible for developing the theory of reliability-centered maintenance, and Rosemary H. Matteson (1920–2010), who worked as a commercial artist before becoming a homemaker.

...[Matteson] earned an A.B. in history from Princeton University in 1983, a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1986, and a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University in 1999...He has written articles for a wide variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New England Quarterly, Streams of William James, and Leviathan...His annotated edition of Little Women was published in November 2015.

Matteson is a former treasurer of the Melville Society and is a member of the Louisa May Alcott Society's advisory board.

Full disclosure! We were an eighth-grader in San Mateo on the very day the professor was born. On that basis, we find ourselves recalling the words of noble Nestor, the seasoned charioteer, as he addresses the headstrong Diomedes not far from the walls of Troy. Homer jotted them down:

THE ILIAD: Few can match your power in battle, Diomedes,
and in council you excel all men your age
But you don't press on and reach a useful end.
How young you are—why, you could be my son,
my youngest-born at that, though you urge our kings
with cool clear sense: what you've said is right.
But it's my turn now, Diomedes.
I think I can claim to have some years on you.
So I must speak up and drive the matter home.

Except for the part about being right, that's what we thought when we read Professor Matteson's recent peculiar account.

According to the acknowledge experts with whom we now routinely consult in the early morning hours, Matteson's account of Alcott's text is a perfect example of the power of tribal script.

He's telling the story in such a way as to conform to prevailing mandated tribal narrative. In fairness, he's also telling the story as it unfolds in Greta Gerwig's widely-praised "adaptation" of Alcott's extremely old novel—an adaptation which changes all kinds of events to make a commercially viable novel conform to modern tribal tastes.

No, Cassandra, daughter of Hecuba and Priam! There is no "indignation" on Jo's part in the relevant part of Alcott's novel. In the actual novel, Professor Bhaer doesn't "arraign" Jo in the oddly blunt way we see in Gerwig's film.

Jo doesn't indignantly tell the professor off, as Gerwig has her pleasingly do. And the pair don't part on bad terms. As they part, Jo is hoping that he will be her friend for the rest of her life.

Matteson is describing events which occur in Gerwig's film. Plainly, he isn't describing what happens in Alcott's actual novel. Beyond that, you'd pretty much have to be out of your head to think that Harper Lee's famous novel ends in the ridiculous way Sorkin and Sims excitedly describe.

Why in the world are these ranking figures offering such peculiar accounts? We'll try to finish our story tomorrow, though we're willing to say this today:

Ridiculous conduct of this type has rarely ended well. At long last, The Atlantic has started to sound an alarm. Experts say the magazine's efforts are coming much too late.

Tomorrow: A remarkable, chastening episode of the past several months

Merrily we get snubbed along!

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2020

What the Hollywood Hills can be found in a word? Who should have been nominated for Best Director this year?

Like most people you see discussing this question, we have no earthly idea. That said, we do have a thought about this headline, which ran at Slate:

Natalie Portman’s Oscar Cape Was Embroidered With the Names of Eight Female Directors the Academy Snubbed This Year
By MATTHEW DESSEM / FEB 09, 2020 9:09 PM

Did the Academy really "snub" eight female directors this year? We ask because the Academy only gives five Best Director nominations in all.

Can you really "snub" eight people if only five slots are available? In Dessem's transplendently scripted piece—it's the kind of piece which writes itself—he listed the eight snubbed directors, along with the films for which they were snubbed:

The eight snubbed directors:
• Lorene Scafaria, Hustlers
• Lulu Wang, The Farewell
• Greta Gerwig, Little Women
• Mati Diop, Atlantics
• Marielle Heller, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
• Melina Matsoukas, Queen & Slim
• Alma Har’el, Honey Boy
• Céline Sciamma, Portrait of a Lady on Fire

We've only seen one of those films. We thought it had several major problems, but others disagreed. It was very favorably reviewed.

That said, some other films on that list of eight weren't gigantically well reviewed. At Metacritic, Atlantics and Hustlers were rated as the 24th and 25th best reviewed films of the year, according to the site's subjective rating system.

Queen & Slim, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and Honey Boy didn't rank that high. As you can see in Metacritic's compilation, very few critics, male or female, put these films on their "ten best" lists.

All eight films were professional films, directed by professional directors. But does it really make sense to issue one of our typical bleating headlines saying these people got "snubbed?"

Our liberal/pseudo-progressive world is awash in Grievance Culture. Complaints about discrimination (and about "snubs") have become sacramental.

Such complaints are now widely said to be our failing tribe's only toy. We rarely leave the playroom without it, according to expert scholars who serve as top figureheads.

Just on a semantic basis, can you really "snub" eight people if only five slots are available for honors? As his automatic writing ended, Dessem wasn't worrying about that:

DESSEM (2/9/20): Whether you share Portman’s anger at the Academy overlooking so much great work this year, or aren’t too worried about it (presumably because you didn’t see any of these movies), Portman has laid out a pretty good alternative guide to the year in film. Happy viewing!

Can you "overlook" eight films if only five slots are available? Inquiring minds want to know! What the hills are alive with music can be found in a word?

This sort of thing has become sacramental within our deeply scripted tribe. This often makes us look dumb to The Others. Sometimes, The Others may not be totally wrong.