Oliver Wills wrote of President Obama, “Obama’s strategy everywhere before entering the White House was one of omnidirectional placation. It had always worked. Why would he abandon, at this point, a method of such proved effectiveness? Yet success at winning acceptance may not be what is called for in a leader moving through a time of peril.”
He was the wrong guy for the moment. The oligarchy pulls no punches. They will press their advantage in this crisis/opportunity to buy federal assets at dimes on the dollar. And they will. The fire sale will really take off under President Romney in 2013. Then what?
Well, between now and 2016, progressives need to convince the public that Obama was not liberal. During Romney’s first term, progressives need to harp on Obama as having been not liberal. Because maybe, just maybe, in 2016 we’ll have one last chance to replace President Romney with a new FDR.
I don’t know who that is. Dean Baker, Elizabeth Warren?
The Coolest New Website on the Internet
By Eric Klinenberg, Sep-2010
The creators of the networking site itsasickness.com are betting our obsessions will be the Internet’s next big thing. Behind the scenes at Departures’ photo shoot, the three founders—including actor Alan Cumming—discuss their own “sicknesses” and why our fixations are what make us most interesting.
“This is how we use the Internet already—we just don’t admit how wonderfully weird and funny it is,” says Barnaby Harris, referring to his new website, itsasickness.com, a portal for anyone who’s obsessed with something and wants to “geek out” about it online. “We encourage people to acknowledge their sickness,” Harris says, “and help them see that other people have it, too.”
The expression “It’s a sickness” has been following Harris around, in different contexts, for years. A veteran Broadway stage manager, he realized at some point about eight years ago that nearly everyone he knew had become obsessed with yoga. “I got caught up in it, too. Then one day I stepped back and saw that most of these people were just as hostile and bitter as the rest of us. But they were so sanctimonious; they carried their mats around New York City like they were Torahs. What’s that about?”
Harris, a puckish 44-year-old, didn’t need long to come up with an answer. “It’s a sickness,” he says. “We’re a sick people in an obsession-based culture.”
The yoga scene, Harris thought, was both silly and humorless, and he decided to say so. He made a T-shirt that said F**K YOGA (this is a family magazine, but you get the point) and wore it for 39 days straight. “Everywhere I went, people asked me how they could get one. I even did a spread for GQ!” Energized, he opened a store called F**k Yoga, in lower Manhattan, where he sold the shirts. To his delight, the Tony Award–winning actor Alan Cumming became a huge fan. “I loved how the shirt made people gasp,” says Cumming.
Wanting to push the concept further, Harris began selling other products printed with the logo—flip-flops, skateboards, even yoga mats—and started targeting other obsessions, notably one of America’s most famous architects. After his F**K FRANK GEHRY shirt got a write-up in The New Yorker, Harris and Cumming considered doing something bigger: a theatrical piece, maybe, or a TV show or radio interviews. Ultimately they decided that the project belonged where the daily drama of our obsessions already unfolds: on the Internet.
Object networking, a phrase that Harris says may have been invented by the itsasickness team, is about establishing deeper ties to the things that we obsess over, and in the process recognizing that our relationships with these things—favorite foods, TV shows, political causes, you name it—help define us. Social networking, as anyone who’s spent time on Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn knows, is about making more (and usually more shallow) connections to people. Itsasickness is built on the counterintuitive premise that focusing on objects, not interacting with people, is a more intimate and pleasurable way to spend time online.
Fred Gooltz, the young chief operating officer who learned about using social networks for online organizing while working for groups that supported Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, has a blunt way of contrasting the two kinds of sites. “There’s nothing more disorienting than a social-networking site,” he says. “We hardly know most of our ‘friends’ these days. And how much do we really care what they just ate for lunch?”
“Sickness” is a loaded word for the enterprise. There’s a history of stigma attached to obsessive behavior, including fandom (think of Trekkies). Harris wants to play on this idea but also evoke the more contemporary meaning of the term. “ ‘That’s sick’ is what kids in California and surfers and skiers say when something is intense or incredible,” he says. “It’s not something to be ashamed of—it’s cool.”
In fact, itsasickness is designed to encourage participants to show they are the sickest. “You get status, like a crown, for being a leader on a topic,” Gooltz explains. “We want to identify and engage the most hardcore people,” Harris adds. In one video on the site already, member Joe Plummer discusses the mystery of Shakespeare’s true identity; in another video, musicians Adam Schatz and Jeff Curtin sing songs they wrote about episodes of Lost.
The chance to prove the depth of one’s passion may well draw people to itsasickness.com. So might the site’s hip, professional design, high-quality videos, and celebrity-generated content. (Zoe Kravitz’s obsession? Costumes! Jason Bateman’s? Classical music.) But attracting eyeballs and keeping them there is the great challenge for every Internet start-up, and itsasickness faces stiff competition for our attention. Sports junkies, for example, already have ESPN.com, SportsIllustrated.com, CNN.com, and the countless sites covering their favorite teams.
Harris, who describes himself as an evangelist for the project, says his faith stems from his view that the phrase “It’s a sickness” is the perfect expression for the moment. “It’s going to be the next ‘Just do it,’ ” he says, “but for everything, not just sneakers.” Another plus is the fact that the site’s content is generated by genuine enthusiasts. “We’re not some big media company with an ulterior motive for creating community. The experience we offer is authentic. Even the ads, when we get them, are going to be authentic, and we’re going to offer specific products geared toward people’s obsessions.”
Of course they also have to find a way to sell companies on partnering with them, but Gooltz believes their business plan can succeed. Unlike social-networking sites, which are notoriously difficult to monetize, a successful object-networking site—but only a successful one—would be an obvious draw to advertisers. If Kindle users flock to itsasickness, might Amazon want to follow them? Whether the more specialized and obscure “sicknesses” like asparagus, No. 6 clog boots, and the Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki, which make up the majority of the site, will have a similar appeal is just one of the project’s many unknowns.
As they approached the final launch date set for this fall, Harris and Cumming were already scheming their next step. “I really shouldn’t tell you this,” Harris says, “but we’re working on an itsasickness TV show, with Alan as the MC and, most likely, the sickest people from the website providing content.” Some of us, at least, can never get enough.
Facts
Itsasickness obsessions include argyle, bubble wrap, Estonia, hurdy-gurdies, molé, Peter Lorre, Rooibos tea, and Savile Row tailors.
In Alan Cumming’s itsasickness video about his obsession with his dogs, he confesses that they have their own publicity photos.
Obsessions
Alan Cumming: True oil, gay rights, Caledonian MacBrayne ferries, seventies Scottish child-star singer Lena Zavaroni, luxury travel, Flip video, his dogs
Fred Gooltz: Seventies movies, Conan O’Brien, Led Zeppelin, Motown, Shakespeare, World Cup soccer, Porsche 911
Barnaby Harris: Hawkeye Pierce (Alan Alda’s character on M.A.S.H.), seventies TV and movies, Apple products, overuse of paper towels
Every lefty’s favorite Slovak philosopher looks into the WikiLeaks story and knocks it out of the park.
First he dissects The Dark Knight movie in a way that basically seconds the general thesis of my Wild West script about media and theatre:
The Joker wants to disclose the truth beneath the mask, convinced that this will destroy the social order. What shall we call him? A terrorist? The Dark Knight is effectively a new version of those classic westerns Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which show that, in order to civilise the Wild West, the lie has to be elevated into truth: civilisation, in other words, must be grounded on a lie. The film [The Dark Knight] has been extraordinarily popular. The question is why, at this precise moment, is there this renewed need for a lie to maintain the social system?
Which leads to his understanding of why we’re being told to fear Assange.
What WikiLeaks threatens is the formal functioning of power. The true targets here weren’t the dirty details and the individuals responsible for them; not those in power, in other words, so much as power itself, its structure. We shouldn’t forget that power comprises not only institutions and their rules, but also legitimate (‘normal’) ways of challenging it (an independent press, NGOs etc) – as the Indian academic Saroj Giri put it, WikiLeaks ‘challenged power by challenging the normal channels of challenging power and revealing the truth’.[*] The aim of the WikiLeaks revelations was not just to embarrass those in power but to lead us to mobilise ourselves to bring about a different functioning of power that might reach beyond the limits of representative democracy.
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one’s opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it. Political predictions are usually wrong. But even when one makes a correct one, to discover why one was right can be very illuminating. In general, one is only right when either wish or fear coincides with reality. If one recognizes this, one cannot, of course, get rid of one’s subjective feelings, but one can to some extent insulate them from one’s thinking and make predictions cold-bloodedly, by the book of arithmetic. In private life most people are fairly realistic. When one is making out one’s weekly budget, two and two invariably make four. Politics, on the other hand, is a sort of sub-atomic or non-Euclidean word where it is quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously. Hence the contradictions and absurdities I have chronicled above, all finally traceable to a secret belief that one’s political opinions, unlike the weekly budget, will not have to be tested against solid reality.”
Looking back through my old blog posts here, it’s clear that those times where my predictions were wrong it was because I naively miscalculated the Democratic Party’s ability to do anything correctly. In short, they are not a trustworthy vessel for our wishes. They are screwups, incapable of learning anything. They keep playing the game by the old rules and they refuse to learn the new ones. Their failure is a tragedy.
And those times when my predictions were right, it was when I was driven by my fear of what lows Corporate Democrats and the Republicans would sink. My deeply cynical opinion of the mendacity and destructive power of Republican Party is nearly never wrong.
It’s that time already. A lame duck President brings the silly season sooner.
I bet my wife $10 that the GOP would run against Obama with American Exceptionalism as a main narrative. She’s always so logical and sensible that she took the bet. Adorable. I’ll spend my winnings on her.
If the GOP’s entire argument is that America is the Best. Country. Ever. then all of the other fallacies stem from, and reinforce that main one.
Sarah Palin’s writer set out the following trial balloons in the new book with her mug on the cover:
+ Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party think “something is wrong with our country and what we value. So they are hell-bent on changing it.”
+ Some people believe America that is a fundamentally unjust and unequal country, and “Barack Obama seems to believe this, too,” Ms. Palin writes, raising repeated questions about his love for his country. She also recalls Michelle Obama’s comments during the 2008 campaign, saying Mrs. Obama “never felt proud of her country until her husband started winning elections.”
+ The president’s tendency to apologize to foreign leaders is suspect, Ms. Palin writes: “I think that Americans are tired of Obama’s global apology tour and of hearing about what a weak country America is from left-wing professors and journalists.”
+ “When President Obama insists that all countries are exceptional, he’s saying that none is, least of all the country he leads.”
All they have to do is conflate the most liberal voters in America with Obama himself. Then there’s nothing stopping them from saying that it was only by the strength of the GOP obstruction that we’re not all wearing berets and sipping bordeaux.
Pathetic. It’s pathetic because Obama is not liberal at all.
The last week of GOTV election time always makes me think of the song that was playing on a loop in my head while I worked politics in the field at the end of 2004. It was the second part of this track. God, what a nightmare. No, I don’t miss politics.
Things go in cycles, like circles around – then down – a drain. I think that where we are right now with our hapless, timid Obama is at the same point in the cycle that I described for Carter’s liberals, just 32 years later – and deeper down the drain.
As it should be painfully clear now that Obama is Carter-redux, what should we expect in 2011? Which of 1979′s atrocities will find an analogue in 2011?
Here’s an easy one that Obama just announced today: Solar Panels. Carter installed his in June of his 3rd year – Obama will install his in the “spring of 2011″ – his 3rd year.
“Our suffering comes from the fact that we are attached to the outer form that something assumes in a given instant rather than the movable conversation that stands behind it. Keeping up with what is occurring rather than lagging and getting caught in things that no longer exist, is one of the the great disciplines of life.” ~David Whyte, The Three Marriages
“So enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable did the Slave Trade’s wickedness appear that my own mind was completely made up for Abolition. Let the consequences be what they would, I from this time determined that I would never rest until I had effected its abolition. Until, as they would, my opposition in Parliament called me a cruel monicker in the news-broadsheet, whereupon I immediately backed-off so as to not ‘overreach’ or seem radical.”
