Surnow has willfully evaded criticism even from Army generals on the portrayal of the utility of "coercive interrogation", and even posits that he disagrees with professionals who have evaluated such things firsthand. He knows better, apparently, because he's tight with Rush Limbaugh, gets quoted by John Yoo and Michael Chertoff, and is ingratiating himself rather quickly with the neoclown shitterati. Good luck with all that, Chief; the reviews thus far of Surnow's lame conservatard knock-off of The Daily Show have been uniformly withering, even from fellow neoclowns.
Dollard, while not (yet) having the rightard pedigree, because even they blanch for a second at welcoming drug-addled porn monkeys to the tribe (except, of course, in the case of Fred Barnes), has certainly outdone Surnow in the "creepy sociopath" department. Whether it's sticking up a pharmacy and doing lines of coke on the side of an armored troop carrier (in Iraq, with American troops), making a film of himself smoking crank and ass-fucking his roommate's girlfriend (with the roommate himself doing the play-by-play), or turning his Iraq odyssey into a snuff-film montage (featuring lovely scenes such as a marine holding a stick with an Iraqi's head impaled on it) explicitly designed (in Dollard's own words) to desensitize Americans to the horrors of war, there is at least no mistaking whatsoever just what Dollard is all about.
See, when I read about people like that, especially at this stage of the game, when even staunch conservatives have given up on Fredo's Folly, I draw a certain conclusion about what these individuals' psychological motivations might be, that they express and project their issues in such a fashion.
Our good friend DoughBob Load Pants™, always looking for the elusive edge on the rhetorical bowling ball, draws an entirely different conclusion to the now-infamous New Yorker profile on 24 creator and Oxycontin Limbaugh BFF Joel Surnow.
THE NEW YORKER reported this week that the dean of West Point took it upon himself to help put an end to abusive — i.e. torturous — interrogation techniques. He and some of his leading interrogation experts and instructors flew to La-La Land to talk to the producers of Fox's hit show, "24." Army Brig. Gen. Patrick Finnegan told the show's creative team that his students were learning terrible lessons about the utility of brutal violence in interrogations. "The kids see it," Finnegan complained to the article's author, "and say, 'If torture is wrong, what about 24?' "
It didn't take long for the predictable mockery to start. "This controversy is perhaps the most off-the-wall example of the 'power of television' we've ever heard," chortled the editors of Broadcasting & Cable.
Ah, they "chortled", did they? The dean of the pre-eminent military academy of the United States comes to a Hollywood set, with professional associates who have first-hand knowledge of what they speak, to sit down with the writers and producers of an inexplicably popular TV show, to brief them specifically on how seriously they feel members of the armed forces are taking their breathless exhortations to extract information by any means necessary -- and the PR arm of the network owners "chortled"? Well, of course they did. Guess General Killjoy was talking out his uniform then. I, for one, am chastened by such "chortling". I think we all needed a hearty guffaw.
But of course, Jonah's real point is almost never in the logline. It becomes clear very quickly that the hilarious twist in his (to put it charitably) argument is that this is all just another example of librul hypocrisy. I know, I know. You rub your eyes, reread that, and say, "What the hell?". I sympathize.
This is a bit of a reversal from the pre-9/11 kulturkampf. Complaints about the coarsening of the culture used to come mostly from the right. Bob Dole even staked much of his 1996 presidential bid on the promise to eradicate the "nightmares of depravity" parading across the nation's screens.
In response to such criticism, Hollywood liberals threw up clouds of rhetorical fog. One retort was that movies and TV shows can't really influence people all that much. This strikes me as a bizarre position for an industry that makes so much money from advertising and product placements and whose self-described artists see themselves as "raising awareness" about everything from AIDS to the snail darter.
Another response — favored by former Motion Picture Assn. of America President Jack Valenti — was populist dudgeon. "Who are you to tell America what's good for them?" they'd squeal, making fun of the prudes and scolds. We saw some of this after Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction." "You've never seen a breast before?" they'd titter.
Pretty slick, huh? Because Dole and his fellow pecksniffs tried to rope the Cletus vote with their "fambly valyews" trope, warning ominously of the dire onslaught of nudity, sex, and naughty, naughty language back in the innocent Clenis era, it is hypocritical for people to say "what the fuck" when Keifer Sutherland breaks some asshole's fingers to get him to talk, or some swarthy villain breaks out the Makita. During the "family hour", mind you. Oh, won't someone please think of the children?
I actually appreciate the existence of doofuses like DoughBob; he makes our jobs so much easier. He iterates quite clearly that a transgression on decency is a transgression on decency, across the board. Thus we can show arthroscopic cameras chasing bullet patterns, and hear graphic, excruciating detail of various bodily fluids splattered all over crime scenes on the eighty-four current CSI franchises, but the world comes apart when our impressionable chilluns catch a quarter-second glimpse of a side-shot of Janet Jackson's titty.
Or more specifically, her nipple. This is what is so arbitrarily moronic about our network broadcast code. You can show big bouncing titties, as scantily clad as you like (and believe me, I like). You can show nipples, as long as they're male nipples, which may appeal to the censorious prudes, but not me. But you cannot show the identical protuberance on a woman's chest, not even for a split second, or all hell breaks loose and Congress actually shows up to work to grandstand for six weeks. You can show Dennis Hastert with his shirt off (shudder), but not Heidi Klum, even though Hastert's tits are bigger. Great priorities.
Anyway, Pantload continues to muck up the issue with his "hypocritical libruls suddenly loves them some censorship" bullshit:
Yet the most effective response from Hollywood was to raise the specter of censorship. "Censorship" is arguably the second-most-powerful scare word in the nation today, after "racism."
But the joke's on all of us because we're all in favor of censorship; we just get clever about what we call censorship. For example, unless you think profanity, violence and hard-core sex should be legal on broadcast television during the after-school time slot, you're for censorship. We're also all for criticizing bad behavior, bad language and the rest.
Actually, despite how extensive my previous two posts are on Surnow and Dollard and their respective artistic contributions, it never even occurred to me to utter the C word, nor even to suggest boycotting such ugly drivel. I still naïvely believe that knowledge is power, that the more people know about these thugs and what they're putting out there, the more they'll come to resent it.
The odds are against that, of course; it's always easier to incrementally desenstitize people to awful things than it is to rouse them to meaningful action. I always refer to the behavioral doctrine that people will only change their habits when they understand that the cost of not changing is greater than the cost of changing. That holds true here as well, unfortunately. But I have seen no liberal blogger advocating either censorship or boycott, just facts. Silly us; if we were neoclown authoritarians, calling for such things would come as naturally as Jonah going for thirds at the Hometown Buffet.
Here's one thing Goldberg is actually spot-on about -- but again, because he's got the wrong end of the stick in the 24 debate to begin with, it's a whole 'nother discussion:
But because we don't want to think of ourselves as scolds or censors, we make ourselves feel better by calling our positions "common sense."
The problem is that the definition of "common sense" is a moving target. What was once verboten is now commonplace and vice versa.
For example, Marc Cherry, the creator of ABC's "Desperate Housewives," told an interesting story to a gathering of TV critics recently. Cherry had screened a scene for a network censor in which the character played by Eva Longoria beds her 17-year-old gardener. Afterward, she enjoys a post-coital cigarette. Cherry said the censor asked, " 'Does she have to smoke?' And I went, 'So you're good with the statutory rape thing?' "
And the answer is "yes." Hollywood is good with the statutory rape thing. But it's not good with the smoking thing. And yet if I were to criticize Hollywood for the statutory rape thing, the Hollywood crowd would whine about how I'm a prude, a scold and, ultimately, a censorious enemy of free expression. If I were to complain about the cigarette? They'd say "good for you."
I agree that this is utterly stupid, that censors are more up in arms about smoking than about predatory milfs. But again, it's a matter of degrees, and a 17-year-old is not even statutory rape in every state.
And that is still an argument about the very arbitrary nature of broadcast censorship. I've seen and read many moviemakers talk about how they deliberately loaded their first cuts with extra material that they knew would be deemed offensive, to use as bargaining chips with the censors to keep in other things that the filmmakers knew would be offensive also, but seen as comparatively less so. The South Park movie, an underrated classic, is a prime example of this; Trey Parker and Matt Stone hit every talk show relating how the censors actually ended up letting them keep quite a few bits (including Saddam Hussein's penis) in the film that they had assumed would have no chance.
Again, none of it matters. While not as dyed-in-the-wool authoritarian as some of his more strident colleagues, DoughBob is above all a herd animal, an easily led ruminant who cares no more about the overall issues of censorship than he cares about changing his underwear regularly. It's just another hobby horse, lame right from the gate, with which Our Hero can once again joust at the imaginary libruls under his bed, while the constitution of his beloved country gets rendered meaningless, and the real authoritarian goofballs compete to become the worshipful chroniclers of madness.
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