Month: August 2016

These are halcyon days for conspiracy theorists. It's possible that with the help of the internet such theories will propagate exponentially forever and we'll look back on 2016 as a more innocent time, but I don't relish the opportunity to live in a world where a wider range of conspiracy theories are more gleefully embraced than they are today.

Conspiracy theories are appealing for two reasons: they make the world seem more interesting and exciting than it really is ("Hillary stole the nomination" is a much better hook than "It was unlikely that a 74 year old Vermont socialist who isn't a member of the Democratic Party was looking at an uphill battle to win the Democratic nomination, and honestly if there was a conspiracy against him he wouldn't have come nearly as close to winning as he did") and they allow people to shift responsibility. We didn't lose, we were cheated. I'm not a failure, the (Jews, Unions, Liberals, feminists, immigrants) stole what I deserve. Both of these things make conspiracy theories inherently appealing, and for valid reasons.
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Nobody likes being bored or having to blame themselves for the things they aren't happy about.

Not all conspiracy theories enjoy equal acceptance, though, and the most plausible ones – the ones that seem like they have enough circumstantial evidence to make them true-ish – have the upper hand. You don't hear anyone but the most fringe unstable types talking about chemtrails, but large numbers of people believe, for example, that global warming or the price of gasoline are the products of conspiracies. Identifying a group of people who could benefit (Scientists! Environmentalists! Liberals!) a theory seems more plausible, and identifying individuals or groups who seem to have control over a fluctuating commodity (OPEC! Obama! The Saudis! The Jews, because it's always Jews!) allows people who don't care to bother with the details below the surface to take comfort in having found the answer.

I do not for a moment endorse the conspiracy theory that Trump is tanking this election on purpose to ensure that his supposed close buddy Hillary Clinton wins – Look, they stood next to each other in a picture in 1994, what more evidence to you need? What other explanation could there be for the First Lady and a famous rich person to have been in the same room together? – but the past three weeks have made it perfectly clear why so many people have latched onto it. I don't believe it, because there is no evidence to support it.

But Trump has melted down so completely and seems to be going so far out of his way to think of what he can say that will finally get his acolytes to stop cheering for him that it's only logical for people who are cynical and pay limited attention to politics to seize upon this as an explanation for his otherwise inexplicable behavior. Trying to make sense out of nonsense is normal.

The truth, as usual, is more mundane: the man has a personality disorder, and an attention-craving narcissist who relies on shock value has to continually up the ante in order to keep achieving the same effect (think Howard Stern, Marilyn Manson, etc.) And once you've attacked a dead US Army soldier's parents and asked Russian agents to steal classified information to help your campaign, I guess the only way to increase the shock value from there is to make "jokes" about your supporters killing Hillary Clinton.
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That's why it seems like this is playing out to a script, like each week brings a calculated increase in the extent to which Trump seemingly goes out of his way to get people not to vote for him.

I don't believe Trump cares about anyone but Trump, or that he is trying to help Clinton win. I do understand how people could look at this shitshow and come to that conclusion, though. The popularity of that theory is the best testament to just how bad he and his campaign are.

We're witnessing something historic here. Think of how badly a team would have to lose the Super Bowl, for example, before it would enter your mind (and seem plausible) that they were losing on purpose to help their friends on the other sideline.

Of all the places a person could look for happiness and fulfillment, I can't think of one more likely to produce constant disappointment than the American electoral process.

Studying elections for a living has taken most of the shine off of them for me. As a kid they seemed like the most important thing in the world, and the process of voting was an almost mystical expression of rights inextricable from lofty concepts like freedom and justice. Maybe political science has reduced the moving parts involved to numbers, formal models, and abstract data points, but over time I've developed an outlook toward voting that is no different than paying the electric bill. It's a thing we do for practical reasons. You don't have to pour your heart and soul into it. It's not a goddamn spiritual quest; it's an election.

This presidential election appears to be bringing out the worst in the electorate in so many ways. One is the habit we have as Americans of thinking that our feelings are important in a process that is a practical and means-to-end oriented. My view is that the primary process is the time for big ideas, for hopes and dreams and attempting to steer the ship, so to speak. Once the primary process is over, voting becomes no different than picking a cable company.

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You pick the one that gives you the most of what you want at the lowest cost. And, like with cable and internet service, you usually have a very narrow range of choices. And you usually don't like any of them.

Now that I think about it, picking a cable and internet provider is more like American presidential elections than anyone realizes.

I didn't vote for Hillary Clinton in the primaries, where she was my second preference in a field of two. Now that process is over, and I have two choices. There are about four things about Hillary Clinton that I like and the rest crap. Trump is not merely 100% crap, he is the actual diametric opposite of everything I like. So, being a rational person who understands how elections work and that the rules of our process virtually ensure that only one of the major party candidates can win, I pick the one who gives me more of what I like. I could punish myself by writing in someone who isn't going to win (to extend the analogy, that would be choosing HughesNet satellite internet, which, for the record, is the most expensive and ludicrously bad internet service since the obsolescence of the 26k modem) but what would that accomplish. In the din of 100 million-plus people voting this year, the "message" of staying home or throwing away a vote on a joke candidate isn't going to be heard.

"But I don't like either candidate" is the background refrain of this entire election, and my reaction (at least internally) is always the same: Who cares? How often in life are you really making choices among great options? The mechanical process of choosing who will represent us in the various elected positions of power in the United States is important, but it's hardly a place to look for fulfillment and self-expression. You don't have to go down into the Fuhrerbunker because you don't like either the Americans or the Russians. You pick one to surrender to (probably the one that isn't going to shoot you on sight or ship you off to the Gulag) and go from there. In the end, too many people are simply too invested in a process that is not designed – not in the slightest – to fluff your self esteem and sense of self worth.

If you can't make a choice in a practical decision-making process without invoking your integrity, pride, and self esteem, that says more about you than it does about the process.

Rarely am I ever interested in following internet pissing contests – especially when they revolve around identity politics and pop culture phenomena that will be forgotten almost immediately – so I paid very little attention when the brief hysteria erupted in 2014/2015 about remaking Ghostbusters with a female cast. It seemed plausible from afar (having seen the trailers and read no more than a few articles about it) that the strong backlash against the movie might have been explained by the fact that it looked like garbage, a cynical cash grab even among the dozens of other nostalgia mining projects of recent years. Maybe the outrage among people who care about such things wasn't a result of the decision to go with a female cast.

Then I thought about all of the other cynical, shitty remakes, reboots, and soulless franchise products that have been churned out over the years without any similar reactions. If these fans / critics really were upset because the movie looked like it would suck, then the reaction to Ghostbusters 2016 would not have stood out as exceptional. So, it seems impossible that a demographic of teenage boys and adult losers that line up gladly to pay to see the 25th reboot of Spider-man or some other obviously idiotic comic book-turned-movie could really be so upset about the perceived poor quality of Ghostbusters. It's pretty obvious they were just really pissed off that they made the characters women.

The movie did well at the box office despite the negative pre-release publicity, so here we go: "Replace male character with female" is going to be the next gimmick, starting with (yet another) remake.

The mediocre 1991 live-action Disney film The Rocketeer is getting remade – in itself a good sign of how the bottom of the barrel is being scraped for source material – with a female lead. As if that makes the concept of making the same movie a second time somehow fresh or interesting.

I had no intention of seeing Ghostbusters not because the cast was female, but because almost nothing in the landfill of sequels, comic / video game adaptations, reboots, remakes, and other recycled ideas interests me. If I have a hankering to see Ghostbusters I'm sure I could find a way to watch the real one. Ditto The Rocketeer. Ditto every other idea currently in the process of being turned upside down and shaken until no more money will fall out. I find changing characters from male to female irritating not because I don't want to see women playing the roles, but because I don't want to see anyone playing the same goddamn roles over and over again. And replacing the (describe original character) with (some kind of person not identical to the original) is the kind of cheap, lazy thinking ("Wow, a female Rocketeer?
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What a twist! When can you start?") that passes for creativity these days.

It's the kind of thing dumb people think is clever.
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You could remake Patton with RuPaul in the title role and you're still remaking Patton. Only so much can be done to cover the stale odor of making a movie that has already been made.