It’s the End of R.E.M. As We Know It and I Feel Fine (something from my archives)

(NOTE: I wrote this in 2011 for Andrew Lawton at the Landmark Report, but their archives seem to have been scrubbed, and I wanted to make sure it got a second life online.)

SEVERAL YEARS AGO I WAS UNOFFICIALLY BANNED as a guest on a radio show on our national public broadcaster. I learned later that the host was so scandalized by an offhanded remark I’d made that he’d repeated it with dismay to the production staff after I had left. He was so offended, apparently, that my semi-regular status on the show ended abruptly, and with it the much-appreciated honorarium cheques that came with it, which were paid for by taxpayers, in any case, and which I’d come to regard as a sort of tax refund.

What had I said? Was it a sexist remark, or an opinion so bigoted that it required that I be banned from the nation’s airwaves?

Nothing like that; all I had done was mention, in passing, my firm belief that – were such a thing possible – all rock bands should be discouraged from making more than two albums. That was it. The host – a onetime musician whose novelty a cappella band was briefly popular up here in Canada – took exception to my remark as soon as it was out of my mouth, listing all the bands who would, in his opinion, never have recorded their best work. “What about the Beatles?” he demanded, as if that trumped my opinion with finality.

“What about them?” I replied. There are enough great tunes on their first two records that we’d probably still remember them fondly, and in addition to sparing us “When I’m Sixty-Four,” “Revolution 9” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” would have freed up four talented musicians to do something else. Imagine the groups Starr, McCartney and Harrison could have formed with Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Colin Blunstone and Keith Richards after they’d been freed early from their obligations to Cream, Traffic, the Zombies and the Rolling Stones. And besides, you can’t miss something that never existed – any pretentious sophomore philosophy major will tell you that.

Mostly, though, my wishful edict – expressed more as speculation than a demand for legislation to enforce it (“There oughta be a law!” etc.) – comes from bitter experience as a music fan and rock critic back in the ‘80s, that most heartbreaking of decades, with a small group of bands that I’d followed passionately, all of whom let me down. One band, however, disappointed more than any other, and after recording thirteen albums more than my (only slightly) arbitrary two-album limit, finally called it quits last week.

I’m talking about R.E.M., who sold 12 million copies of their 1991 album Out Of Time, which featured the single “Losing My Religion,” a song not explicitly about losing your religion, apparently, but which became the de facto anthem for insufferable atheists for years afterward. This, in all likelihood, is the R.E.M. most people know and love, but it’s a band I did my best to ignore during their popular zenith, with a bitterness that can only come from betrayal and the curdled idealism that only a young person should feel.

The announcement of the band’s break-up prompted me to revisit their early records, which I found myself able to listen to again for probably the first time since Iran-Contra. These were the records R.E.M. put out when they toured in a van driven by their manager, as they graduated from clubs to halls, before moving on to arenas and stadiums. They were the work of a cult band from a southern college town, playing music clearly influenced by the angular sound of British post-punk, embellished with touches of folk and psychedelia and prone to an artiness that was a pleasant break from the rigidity and rules that afflicted American hardcore, the only other viable underground music happening at the time.

They were the template for what would be known as college rock, and since I was in college when I discovered them, they were a perfect fit. An article about the band in a local music monthly nudged me into becoming a rock critic – a piece where the writer got on R.E.M.’s tour bus and followed them to a couple of gigs, portraying them as refreshingly candid music nerds not unlike their audience. I ended up writing for that magazine, living on the writer’s couch for a couple of months, and finding my place in a community of music nerds, most of whom were fans of the band or at least respected them for creating an alternative to an increasingly tinny and bombastic mainstream.

It was a musical movement that was easy to ignore, mostly because its fans – people my age, most of whom were part of the post-Boomer “Baby Bust” that gave us the dismal common experience of being children in the ‘70s – were a small demographic, of no practical value to marketers. Our bands were a diverse bunch, with a stew of influences that we excavated in used record stores. “There was no stylistic bandwagon for the media to latch on to,” recalls Michael Azerrad in Our Band Could Be Your Life, his history of American ‘80s indie rock, “so the record-buying public had to find things there on a band-to-band basis, rather than buying into a bunch of talk about a ‘new sound.’”

While we were also fans of idiosyncratic bands like Husker Du, the Replacements, the Minutemen and Black Flag, R.E.M. occupied a special place, mostly because they had an air of mystery, enhanced by the recondite presence and indecipherable lyrics of singer Michael Stipe. Over the course of an EP and two albums released between 1982 and 1984, they created a version of southern rock that was more Flannery O’Connor than Black Oak Arkansas, a chiming, blurred musical landscape that owed a lot to Peter Buck’s 12-string guitar and Stipe’s suggestively incoherent singing.

This was the band whose fans dubbed it – in fond parody of a slogan that once dogged The Clash – as “The Only Band that Mutters,” a band whose first album was called Murmur and featured a sepia cover photo of a kudzu-covered landscape, as forthright a description of the contents within as if the Rolling Stones had titled their debut long-player Fake Menace and illustrated it with a copy of Mick Jagger’s tax return.

I listened to Murmur and its follow-up, Reckoning, constantly, and struggled manfully through their “difficult” third record, Fables of the Reconstruction, coming to appreciate it as a creative statement, even if I couldn’t embrace it as fondly as its predecessors. It was their fourth album, Lifes Rich Pageant, that was the watershed. Critics called it a return to form, and it hit the stores suffused with the burnished glow of its first single, “Fall On Me.” Looking back, the song is the predecessor to “The One I Love,” “Losing My Religion” and “Man On The Moon,” a melancholy anthem that plays equally well on earphones, on radios, and booming over packed stadium crowds. It was the sort of song that would propel R.E.M. to international stardom, and while I still love it today, it was also the point after which the band would become the mirror image of everything I once adored.

At some point between Fables and Lifes Rich Pageant, Michael Stipe decided he had something to say, and that he wanted to say it in language we could all understand. On the fourth record, his voice moves up in the mix and his enunciation improves, and the video for “Fall On Me” consists of dizzy, handheld footage panning wildly over rocks, trees and sky while Stipe’s lyrics are superimposed on the screen in boldface capital letters. Thankfully Stipe still retained his love of the sound of words over their meaning, and the song’s lyrics (“There’s a problem, feathers iron/Bargain buildings, weights and pullies/Feathers hit the ground before the weight can leave the air”) are as baffling as anything on Murmur.

But Stipe was explicit in interviews and live shows that “Fall On Me” was about air pollution, and the then-headline issue of acid rain in particular. At a London show on the Fables tour, the band introduced an early version of the song by telling that coming from America was “nothing to applaud,” before Stipe launched into the most comically simple description of acid rain imaginable; captured on tape and now available on YouTube, it’s a pitiful example of a band condescending to their audience, and marks the point at which Stipe and his band transform themselves from entertainers into scolds. As with almost any other instance of pop music pressed into the service of an issue, it seems like Stipe isn’t aware that he’d have a hard time finding anybody who’s in favour of air pollution.

And from here the long lineage of R.E.M. issue songs emerges, with songs like “Orange Crush,” “Stand,” “Exhuming McCarthy,” “Everybody Hurts,” “Bad Day” and “Until The Day Is Done.” One whole album, Green, was explicitly tied to the resurgent environmental movement, and the band seemed to take up causes with every album, though by this point I’d completely lost interest, my indifference pushed along by hits like “The One I Love,” “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” “Losing My Religion” and “Man On The Moon.” All the richly evocative mystery that R.E.M. cultivated on their first two albums dissipated in a see-saw between stabs at commercial appeal and retreats into experiments, with occasional fumbling and half-hearted attempts at evoking their early sound.

In 2001, guitarist Peter Buck was arrested after what was described as a “drunken rampage” on a British Airways flight to London, during which he turned over a flight service cart, threw yogurt on flight attendants, and had to be restrained from opening an exit door mid-flight. He claimed it was the result of a bad combination of prescription drugs and too much wine, and was acquitted after a trial that saw U2 singer Bono act as a character witness. I wondered at how little this resembled the personable record geek who I’d chatted with at a house party after a Toronto date on the Life's Rich Pageant tour, so many years before.

What it sounded like was a man with some serious self-hatred issues, on the long slide down from the moment he woke up and realized that, instead of being a member of one of the coolest bands in the world, he was now the guitarist in the group that recorded “Shiny Happy People.”

Just a few years earlier, the band had an apparently rancourous split with Jefferson Holt, the longtime manager who’d been described as their fifth member. After that live performances of “Little America,” a song on Reckoning, swapped the lyric “Jefferson I think we’re lost” to “Washington I think we’re lost.” It was a trite attempt to inject politics after the fact into a song that old fans had cherished and – like all fans do – embellished with personal meaning and individual interpretation, like the YouTube commenter who wrote that “Fall On Me” was their “9/11 song.”

“Little America” is the last song on Reckoning, and “Jefferson I think we’re lost” is the last line Michael Stipe sings. I can’t help but imagine how perfect it would have been if the band had simply called it quits then, and not twenty-seven years later, after a career that, while probably successful beyond their wildest dreams, degenerated into the too-familiar story of a band that strove for relevance and ended with little.

Eight years ago, writer Chris Suellentrop opened a Slate article about R.E.M. with the observation that “R.E.M.'s fans have been saying ‘R.E.M. sucks’ since 1984.” There was always a high water mark somewhere in the past, whether you were an early fan who loved Murmur or a latecomer who thought Automatic For The People was their best record. “Maybe it's easier to bear the cross of middle-aged rock stardom when a good chunk of your fan base has been accusing you of being washed up since before you were 30,” Suellentrop writes.

He even quotes Michael Stipe back at himself: “That would be my worst fear,” Stipe told Rolling Stone in 1992, at the height of their success, “that we would turn into one of those dumb bands who go into their second decade and don't know how bad they are and don't know when to give it up.”

Imagine all that decline and disappointment never happened. Two unique, intriguing, classic albums by a band that didn’t sound like anyone else, casting a long shadow and influencing bands whose members were still in grade school or not even born. In 1993, as R.E.M.’s zenith was starting to ebb and alt-rock was flourishing in the aftermath of grunge, critics’ darlings Pavement recorded “The Unseen Power of the Picket Fence,” a loving appraisal of R.E.M.’s first two albums in song. It’s a charming relic of record nerd devotion, but it isn’t a particularly great song, just as nothing Pavement recorded is as evocative, mysterious or catchy as R.E.M. at its best, on those two albums.

Now go back almost a decade, to Michael Stipe singing “I can’t see myself at thirty,” before describing “Another Greenville, another Magic Mart,” and asking “Who will tend the farm museums?” No, I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about either, but I can pick out a phrase, a few words here and there, and piece together my own version of whatever “Little America” is all about. But even if I didn’t know who Jefferson was, I recognized a young man’s anxiety about the future and his own decisions in the words “I think we’re lost.” There really wasn’t much more to say and, in hindsight, it would have been no great loss if there wasn’t.

Exactly

Daniel Pipes is an expert on the Middle East, which means that when he tries to say something correct about that part of the world, he gets called all sorts of nasty names. That would be what we call an occupational hazard, like carpenters getting splinters, or hockey players losing teeth.

He occasionally writes on other topics, about which he's usually just as correct, and this week he wondered aloud just why the Republicans managed to lose an election running against an inept president and his groaning platform of destructive policies. He came to a conclusion that's hardly new, but which probably sums up the whole mission statement of this blog:

Myself, I subscribe to the "politics is downstream from culture" argument. While conservatives sometimes prevail in policy debates, they consistently lose in the classroom, on the best-seller list, on television, at the movies, and in the world of arts. These liberal bastions, which provide the feeders for Democratic party politics, did not develop spontaneously but result from decades of hard work traceable back to the ideas of Antonio Gramsci.

I'd never heard of Gramsci until - surprise, surprise! - college, and what I understood I didn't much like, but presumed that it was worth ignoring, as it had little relationship to life as it seemed to be lived. Another thing I was wrong about; while upbringing and temperament made me largely immune (in the long run) to Gramsci's project of cultural denaturing, other people - something like a majority, or so it would seem - weren't so protected. As Guy Somerset wrote this week, in a column about things to worry about in the new year:

Why does anyone care what Al Sharpton or Shaneequa at the supermarket thinks about their racial beliefs? In some cases such as employment, it’s obvious; but to say most people are obsequious in order not to get fired is a canard. Most are simply indoctrinated. They would rather be raped than be racist. It wasn’t always this way. In fact, until recently it wasn’t this way.

One of the sobering spectacles of my adult life is watching people act against their own self-interest. When you're young and confused, it's hard to divine just what your self-interest is, particularly. Time and common sense eventually make it self-evident, but the shocking moment comes when you look around and see people actively, proudly agitating for causes nakedly inimical to their livelihood and beliefs, like feminists supporting Islamists, Catholics voting for Obama (twice!) or rich people endorsing Marxists.

It takes a while to realize that these people have come to the conclusion that there is no other option, and you start wondering just what they were taught that made them believe that they have no alternative except to invite into their house the person who has said that they will betray their confidence, conspire against their liberty, and even make them a pauper.

Nobody reads Gramsci, but his ideas have had an influence utterly out of proportion to their popularity. Like so many ideologies we consider either sinister, ridiculous (or both,) we've ignored what were once outlying sensations on the academic left like Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, even as they slowly became the mainstream there and spread into the arts, where they're considered self-evident truths by people who have never heard of Theodore Adorno or an obscure Italian communist.

I doubt if William F. Buckley ever thought to take on Adorno or Gramsci with the same fervor that he used to debate Gore Vidal. I don't imagine Gramsci's name ever appears in five decades of Buckley's writing, though I may be wrong. It's only now that conservatives have realized just how deeply these arcane, usually ill-expressed ideas have penetrated the culture, and have begun fighting what is, I'm afraid, a wholly defensive, rear-guard action.

(HT: Blazing Catfur & 5 Ft. of Fury)

New Column: Rich

I have a new column up on the Interim website - a review of the documentary The Queen of Versailles, which is one of those time capsule artifacts that we might want to use to commemorate the last four or five years of fiscal incontinence. Here's a quote:

The moral writ large over The Queen of Versailles is that the Siegels aren't terribly different from Westgate Resort’s customers – regular people who went in over their heads in pursuit of a conspicuous luxury that they could ill afford. David keeps complaining that the banks got businessmen like him addicted to “cheap money,” as if they were victims, addicts deprived of willpower and discretion. 

It’s also a story of shamelessness, and that might be the larger moral Greenfield’s film could give to its audience. Despite the less-than-flattering picture the picture paints of her, Jackie has been an enthusiastic supporter of the picture, showing up at premieres even as her husband sues the filmmaker for defamation. The Siegels, to be sure, are guilty of a lot of social misdemeanors, but pretension and self-consciousness certainly aren't among them.

 As I've confessed before, there hasn't been a lot that's tempted me into movie theatres lately, but the documentary genre remains stronger than ever. It's also the one least likely to be a major player in the economics of movie exhibition these days, which is another reason never to leave the house.

Buy it at amazon.com

Violence

Everybody has an opinion; that's why they might be the least valuable thing in the world. (Their lack of value - relative or concrete - might be the strongest argument against "hate speech" laws.) It's not surprising then that, in the wake of a horrible crime that took the lives of innocent children, everybody has something to say. Unfortunately, the first people we go to for their valueless opinion are celebrities.

Jamie Foxx has a role in Quentin Tarantino's imminent Django Unchained, which is supposed to be one of the director's most violent films. Foxx recently told the Associated Press that he thinks there's a definite connection between cinematic bloodshed and the real thing:

"We cannot turn our back and say that violence in films or anything that we do doesn't have a sort of influence," Foxx said in an interview on Saturday. "It does."

While I appreciate Foxx's concern about the violent murder of children by a lunatic, I wonder if he might like to back up his very public show of moral concern by making a call to his agent and insisting that he not be shown any more scripts with scenes of violence. Because if he sees any "sort of influence" that connects witnessing violence in entertainment with acting violently in real life, he can't in good conscience take roles that perpetuate it any longer. Because the children.

If he wishes to make his point more firmly, he can begin negotiations with the involved principals to block the further re-release or exhibition of Collateral, Miami Vice, Jarhead, Stealth, The Kingdom, Law Abiding Citizen and Ali, and insist that White House Down and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 be either shelved or taken out of production.

Because if he isn't this serious about the damage that he obviously believes onscreen violence is wreaking on society, he's just a concern troll who doesn't need a comments section.

Ruin

Dear Detroit: This is why you can't have nice things.

(h/t: End Of Your Arm)

Infamy

I probably watched this every year from the moment it became a staple of TV programming around the beginning of December - those "movie events" that the networks would advertise as if it were a really big deal that a movie, a real movie made for a lot of money with stars that showed in theatres and everything, was actually going to be on your TV! On Saturday night! Brought to you by Ford!

Sure it's a bit plodding, and the battleships look like miniatures, and it's lit like every interior scene happens in rooms that they just happen to test klieg lights in, just behind the camera. It was made barely thirty years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, but everyone involved - many of whom probably fought in the war - thought it a fine idea to ask the Japanese to get involved, and even direct the scenes showing their part of the attack themselves, in a way that gives them actual dignity and human culpability. Next to the Marshall Plan, it might just have been one of the most magnanimous gestures a victor has shown the defeated.

Along with Patton and The World At War, Tora! Tora! Tora! taught me nearly everything I knew about the war my father and his brothers fought in, at least until I was allowed into the adult half of the library. We knew how it was going to end, but we still watched it with the hope that, maybe, someone would pick up the phone or get the telegram in time or figure out what that big signature on the radar screen was, but every time it ended with So Yamamura as Admiral Yamamoto intoning his grave fear that maybe they'd bit off more than they could chew, while the camera dissolved to the Pacific Fleet in flames (in miniature.)

I know I'm not the only person who's complained that popular culture - and movies in particular - have gotten much worse in the course of my lifetime, but when you're asked to give an example, it's almost as if there are too many. It's like somebody is asking you why you're making such a big deal about some giant radioactive lizard destroying your city, as they stand with their back to the crushed tower blocks and jets of fire and sparking high tension wires and Godzilla roaring away, rolling their eyes at your hysterical overreaction.

If I needed an example, though, it's worth pointing out that, just thirty years after they released Tora! Tora! Tora!, Hollywood made this:

Instead of Kimmel and Stimson and Genda and Halsey and Nomura, we got an insipid love triangle, historical figures played by a collection of prosthetics, and hypertrophied special effects that made you miss the toy boats in the big swimming pool. It's not like the actual war wasn't dramatic enough - the people behind this hideousness needed to make shit up, with that witless, Gump-like strategy of imagining that the same two fighter pilots who got their planes into the air and fought back on December 7th made sure they were flying Doolittle's bombers for some payback.

Thirty years after Pearl Harbor, men and women who lived through the actual war were confident enough in their ultimately victorious cause to show their side at the lowest ebb of defeat, prostrate after a humiliating surprise attack. Thirty years after that, people who'd only lived through Tora! Tora! Tora! thought it would play much better if they added another act and an extra hour to imagine what was really only a preemptive gesture as both historically apt and dramatically satisfying. It's no wonder that, having been subject to another ambush, in the opening years of a war that will probably be fought for generations, so many people have either decided to either pretend it's not happening or preemptively prepare to surrender.

There's a part of me that wonders, as I try to figure out why the movies - and the culture - have gotten so much worse, whether it's just the people who make the culture who are to blame. Maybe, just maybe, it's also the people who watch them.

Buy it on amazon.com

Buy it on amazon.com.
On second thought, don't - it only encourages them.

UPDATE: Welcome PJTV readers - thanks, Ed!

Bohemian

In a chapter on the middle class in his new book, The Tyranny of Cliches, Jonah Goldberg made an assertion that I had to stop and re-read a couple of times to make sure I understood what he was saying. Not because I didn't think it was true, but because it rang so true, and has (I think) escaped serious analysis.

He begins with a quote from Nancy Pelosi, defending Obamacare as a boon to the creative classes:

"We see it as an entrepreneurial bill, a bill that says to someone: 'If you want to be creative and be a musician or whatever, you can leave your work, focus on your talent, your skill, your passion, your aspirations because you will have health care. You don't have to be job locked.'"

As an appeal to voters, it's curious - the number of people whose creative urges would compel them to throw over their job to pursue their muse is surely tiny, but I suppose Pelosi is casting a wider net, at the sort of people who, Walter Mitty-like, daydream about doing such a thing, and the larger number of liberals who, although they have no intention themselves, think it would be an altogether wonderful world if this were possible. And these are the people who call their politics "reality-based."

Goldberg isn't convinced that there's any plausible link between socialized medicine and enterpreneurialism  - it's beside the point, of course, when you're trying to sell a fantasy - but goes on to take the Democratic notion behind this to its logical end:

"The larger point is that the liberal vision of an advanced society is one where it is finally rich enough to liberate the middle class from their comfortable bourgeois lifestyles and to subsidize their conversion to bohemian ones. If you want to be a 'musician or whatever' it's okay, because we'll tax the rich enough so that you don't have to worry about life's essentials (like health care or housing or food or your kids' education) anymore. In other words they are going to win their centuries'-old war on the middle class by subsidizing the bohemian lifestyle to the point where it no longer pays to be bourgeois. It probably won't work in the long run. But in the short run, it will bankrupt us all, not only financially, but morally as well."

What resonates for me is how much of this I've already seen transpire up here in Canada, where the arts-supporting government bureaucracy is probably a few years more advanced than in the U.S. I've known plenty of creative people who, before they even finished their degrees, figured out that there were institutions in place to subsidize their creative ambitions, and did their best to tailor their life - and work - to maximize their potential as clients of this bureaucracy.

There were classes of grants, from the municipal to provincial to federal level, that they could apply for, in addition to grants for travel and housing. There are government-subsidized co-op apartments in many major Canadian cities built for the express purpose of housing the creative. (And not-so-creative: The late leader of our socialist federal opposition party lived in one for many years when he and his wife were municipal politicians.) Every now and then I would hear someone I knew express fatigue with their workaday life and a longing to express their creative ambitions, which would inevitably lead to them musing aloud about working on a grant application.

Arts grants exist in the U.S., of course, but many of them - including the most generous - are maintained by private foundations. In Canada, however, private arts funding is far more minimal, as the government has had a virtual monopoly on arts funding for decades. But what Pelosi is talking about here isn't a subsidy structure based on applications and deadlines and juries, but an expansion of current social welfare to include not just those who can't work (for a variety of reasons, some valid, some not,) but those who won't work because of the demands of their muse, or the shortage of truly suitable work for those of creative temperament.

I assumed that this sort of thing making headway in the U.S. would be at least a few years in the future, but a Salon article from over two years ago (h/t SDA) suggests that it's already happening:

Mak, 31, grew up in Westchester, graduated from the University of Chicago and toiled in publishing in New York during his 20s before moving to Baltimore last year with a meager part-time blogging job and prospects for little else. About half of his friends in Baltimore have been getting food stamps since the economy toppled, so he decided to give it a try; to his delight, he qualified for $200 a month. 

“I’m sort of a foodie, and I’m not going to do the ‘living off ramen’ thing,” he said, fondly remembering a recent meal he’d prepared of roasted rabbit with butter, tarragon and sweet potatoes. “I used to think that you could only get processed food and government cheese on food stamps, but it’s great that you can get anything.”

I might be reading too much into Goldberg, but I think his point about the current motivation for the "centuries'-old war on the middle class" is an abiding distaste of progressives for the sumptuary comforts that the bourgeoisie have gained with the success of capitalism, and their pride in being able to afford them. (Not to mention the ill-concealed elite horror at their persistent bad taste.) Diminishing that - or "liberating" the creatively stifled bourgeois - and they'll see the straitened circumstances and love of small creature comforts that come with the bohemian lifestyle as a feature, not a bug. At least for a while, anyway.

So - government-subsidized roast rabbit with sweet potatoes but no savings, delayed plans for a family and little choice in education for kids when you have children, reliance on public transit and renting but not owning: A twentysomething student or recent arts graduate might not regard these as real hardships, but if they can be sold to at least a measurable minority of the citizenry, they'll certainly ease the burdens on a government committed to programs that necessarily hobble a healthy economy. I know that sounds like a conspiracy, but when you've already produced a generation notable for its sense of entitlement, it's never too early to transform them into a voting demographic reliant on its entitlements.

Buy it at amazon.com

Confounding

Here's a fact: Obama won in eight of the ten wealthiest counties in the U.S.

Anyone who can figure out just why that happened might unlock the key to this whole period in history. All I know is that the world became much easier to understand as soon as I gave up on the idea that rich people are essentially social or cultural conservatives.

Echo Chamber

Holy shit. It wasn't a landslide. It wasn't even close. And we can keep calling it "a victory without a mandate," but that's just something we say to comfort our side. I'm sure Barack Obama won't see it that way, and neither will the people who voted for him. As we'll see.

I'm a Canadian, so the results of the U.S. elections are, as I keep saying, just fantasy football for me. Except that it affects the world and its future, so there's that. You'll forgive me if I take my conservative prerogative and use the royal "we" for the rest of this post since the defeat of the Romney/Ryan ticket is a kneecapping for more than just the people who could exercise their franchise yesterday.

It was a serious ass-kicking, and not just because we were so woefully off in our predictions. Allan West lost, as did Mia Love. Scott Brown lost handily to Elizabeth Warren, which kind of sours all the chuckling we did over the Fauxcahontas jokes, doesn't it? Fifty per cent of the popular votes, and 303 electoral college seats. It wasn't as broad a victory as Obama's win in 2008, but it didn't have to be. We were imagining the exact opposite, and I can't imagine that the other side is going to let us forget it.

Obummer. Obozo. Teleprompter-in-chief. The One. Urkel. Barry Hussein. The Kenyan. The Choom Prince. The Fresh Prince of Bill Ayers. Bam-Bam. Obamadinejad. The Light Bringer. The Empty Chair. O-socialist. Obama bin Laden. We've called Barack Obama a lot of names in the last four years, some of them pretty damned clever. (I'm partial to Fresh Prince of Bill Ayers, myself.) But the fact remains that he is, and remains for the next four years, President Barack Obama, and every name we've called him has diminished our ability to take him seriously enough to imagine him actually winning a second term.

If you thought his performance in the first debate would sink him, you were wrong. If you thought young voters were disappointed by the first four years and were going to sleep in, you were wrong. If you thought that the dismal economy had swung the undecided to Romney, you were wrong. If you thought that every stirring YouTube video and damning blog post detailing the disasters of the last four years were one more nail in his coffin, you were so very, very fucking wrong.

If you thought that Benghazi and the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his staff was a fatal, Watergate-sized blow, you were so wrong that you should get up and try and find a mirror right now, because there's a 50-50 chance you put you underwear on over your clothes this morning.

Yes, we've all seen the video of the young Obama supporters at a campaign rally at Ohio University, admitting that they'd never heard of Stevens or Benghazi. It made you laugh and shake your head, but the truth is that they probably voted, and Ohio was the tipping point that won Obama the electoral college. Sure, they sounded stupid, but that doesn't stop them from voting, does it? Shit, not even death can do that anymore.

We've been complaining that the media carried water for Obama, but if these kids hadn't even heard of what happened in Libya, the fact is that they probably don't pay any attention to TV or newspapers in the first place. Which might be good news, depending on how you look at it.

And sure, we can shake our heads at "stupid Democrats" or "stupid kids" or "stupid Americans" (if you're not one.) But it's a numerical certainty that there are probably just as many idiots on the Republican side of the political dodgeball game. They just don't have blogs.

I can say "you were wrong," but the truth is that we were wrong - I was wrong - because I let myself believe that Obama didn't stand a chance. A few weeks ago I had lunch with a friend from New York. He's also a Canadian, and a conservative, but when we talked about the election, he was sure that Obama would win. I did the usual exasperated stammering - "...comeonman economyBenghazi jobsChina WisconsinIranSolyndra..." - but he was right and I was wrong. We were wrong. We were so fucking wrong.

We accuse the media and liberals and academics and practically everyone else not on our side of living in an echo chamber, but the fact is that we've built our own echo chamber, and it was just sturdy enough to last until around midnight last night. And it would be a big mistake if we went about trying to build it again.

So I don't have a lot of advice for my American friends, except that if you know about any voter fraud committed yesterday, you should pursue it even if it makes you look like sore losers. Because after all, that's not the worst thing you're going to be called. And let's be honest - your electoral system is an absolute fucking mess. It would be more accurate if you all stood in a field and yelled "yea" or "nay."

In any case, you can give up on stopping Obamacare. You'll probably end up going broke in about a year or so, and there's a pretty healthy chance you might have to deal with a few more terrorist attacks, perhaps on your own soil. And forget about jobs; the people who make those will be going to earth for the next four years, since they're going to be asked to pay for a lot of free stuff - about a business week's worth, actually. Everyone else will be on the hook for the rest of the year. Good luck with that.

Me, I'm a Canadian. We'll muddle through somehow, probably by doing more business with China, while that lasts. As for jobs, it's irrelevant to me - I made the mistake of working in the only business that's going to keep declining no matter who's in power. Another year of this and my best hope is finding a gig as one of those middle-aged guys in the orange aprons at Home Depot who tells you where to find the galvanized washers. I love you guys and I'd love to worry more about you, but I have my own shit to deal with just at the moment.

Red Herring

The absurdity of the idea that a few scenes from an unseen movie polemic were the spark that ignited a global incident was summed up in a headline by Australian columnist Tim Blair: “Four dead in film review.” Some Christians, recalling the indifference and even derision that met their protests against films like Hail Mary, The Last Temptation of Christ, Dogma and Life of Brian, could be excused for wondering if they might have been taken a bit more seriously if they’d thrown a rock or two.

I wrote this column for the Interim over a month ago, and it already feels like ancient history, even if the current U.S. administration is still wholly unwilling to acknowledge that a really bad, obscure film had nothing to do with what amounts to an act of war - the murder of one of their ambassadors and three of his American support staff in Libya, a country they were nominally supporting.

Come on - you've got to remember this. No?

Certainly no one is talking about The Innocence of Muslims any more, even if the filmmaker remains in legal custody, out of sight and mind until his hearing three days after the upcoming U.S. election. Basically, though, I started this column as a way of expressing my almost complete lack of interest in any of the movies that have been released in the last year or two, and what amounts to an existential crisis for someone, like myself, whose job description is "TV and movie critic."

For myself, I have to admit that my enthusiasm for moviegoing is at an all-time low in the nearly three decades I’ve been writing about films. At the beginning of the year, anticipation for Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s prequel to his 1979 breakthrough film Alien, was making me frantic for the summer to arrive, but by the time the film actually premiered to lukewarm reviews in early June, I found myself willing to wait till it came out on disc. Nothing tempted me out to the theatres all summer, and apparently my apathy wasn’t unique. 

The point is that the 2012 time capsule, if it's at all honest, will have to include a copy of this execrable movie, for the simple reason that nothing else that hit the theatres (and I use that phrase very loosely) was as important. And that if I were in any meaningful way involved in the movie industry, that would make me very worried.

Why I Don't Take Libertarians (or Young People) Seriously

In the interest of openness, Reason magazine has polled its staff to see who they were voting for in the upcoming U.S. elections. The results remind me of why hanging around libertarians reminds me of college.

Also, pot makes you stupid, and "smart" people generally aren't as smart as they think they are.

I was a big fan of Peter Bagge back in the heyday of Buddy Bradley and Hate! comics, but it's sad to see it re-confirmed that he votes like he's throwing a tantrum.

Who did you vote for in 2000, 2004, and 2008? 

Matt Welch: Ralph Nader, largely because of my support for campaign finance restrictions, a subject on which I have since totally changed my mind, but also as a protest against bipartisan civil liberties abuse; John Kerry (to fire George W. Bush); and no one (would have been Bob Barr if I had completed the paperwork in time). 

Jesse Walker: Harry Browne, Michael Badnarik, Bob Barr. 

J.D. Tuccille: If I remember correctly, I voted Harry Browne in 2000, to sleep in and skip the process in 2004, and Bob Barr in 2008. I consider voting non-essential, but excusable as a defensive act and form of expression. Honestly, I sometimes half-complete a mail-in ballot, then toss it. 

Jacob Sullum: Harry Browne, Michael Badnarik, Bob Barr. I admit I had to look up the first two, although giving Jacob Sullum someone to vote for may be the Libertarian Party's most important function. 

Peter Suderman: In 2000 I tried to vote for Bush, but mostly out of sheer laziness never got around to returning my Florida absentee ballot. In 2004, I voted for Bush, which in retrospect was pretty stupid—perhaps even as stupid as voting for Kerry would have been. In 2008, I held my nose and took the trash out of my apartment on election day. But I didn’t vote. Taking out the trash was more satisfying, and more productive. 

Scott Shackford: Ralph Nader (sorry), John Kerry (sorry), Bob Barr (sorry). 

Damon W. Root: I voted for Michael Badnarik in 2004. I didn’t vote in 2000 and 2008. 

Mike Riggs: Nobody, nobody, and nobody. 

Anthony Randazzo: The first time I voted for president was in 2004. I voted for George Bush as a protest vote against John Kerry. I voted for Bob Barr in 2008 (see above reasoning for Gary Johnson). 

Garrett Quinn: I was too young. 2004: Kerry because he was from Mass. 2008: Bob Barr. 

Charles Oliver: No one. 

Terry Michael: Gore, Michael Badnarik, Obama. The 2000 vote was purely pragmatic, as I held my nose voting for the anti-Bush. In 2004, I couldn't be "pragmatic" when the empty suit Kerry said he would have voted for the war resolution even if he had known there were no weapons of mass destruction. And the 2008 vote was an enthusiastic vote for Obama, because I thought he was telling the truth about being anti-war and because I thought he would end identity politics and because I believed he was telling the truth about no health care mandates. I was fooled. But not this time. 

Dierdre McCloskey: The Libertarian candidates, whoever they were. Hmm. Can't bring them to mind. 

Katherine Mangu-Ward: Didn't. 

Tibor Machan: Libertarian candidate (again, to keep libertarianism in the news). 

Ed Krayweski: I was too young to vote in 2000 but I was actually a campus field coordinate for the Gore campaign in northern New Jersey. In 2004 I ended up voting for Michael Badnarik and in 2008 for Obama. 

Rob Kampia: Harry Browne, Michael Badnarik, and Bob Barr. 

A. Barton Hinkle: This space intentionally left blank. 

Steven Greenhut: To my shame: Bush, Bush and Obama. I voted for Dubya in 2000 because he promised a humbler foreign policy. We see how that turned out. I voted for him again in 2004 for reasons that I forget, but temporary insanity is the only excuse I can muster now. As I wrote in my newspaper column at the time, I voted for Obama because of my belief that John McCain should not be anywhere near a nuclear trigger given his hot temper, which he displayed during a newspaper editorial board meeting. I argued that a McCain/Palin administration would pursue policies not that much different from Obama, except that the GOP would be behind him as he pursued bigger government. I argued that an Obama administration would at least spark a backlash, and the Tea Party movement suggests I was correct on that point at least. 

Nick Gillespie: The Libertarian Party candidate in each, though often without much enthusiasm. 

Matthew Feeney: In November 2000 I was in the seventh grade and had only been living in New Jersey for three months. I had no idea who these Bush and Gore people were. In 2004 I was slightly more politically aware. Had I been of age and an American citizen I would have voted for John Kerry. In 2008 I would have voted for Obama, but I was not an American citizen so could not vote. I was a liberal in 2008 and I liked Barack Obama. An added incentive for my support for Obama was the Republican 2008 vice-presidential nominee.   

Brian Doherty: I have never voted, and don't expect to. 

Shikha Dalmia: I wasn’t a citizen in 2000. I voted for Bush against Kerry in 2004 and didn’t vote for either Obama or McCain (or the Libertarian Party nominee Bob Barr) in 2008. 

David Boaz: I tend to think that think-tank officers should keep their ballots secret. But I am generally guided by the fact that in 40 years of voting I've never encountered an election in which my vote would have made the difference, and by the principle that it's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it. 

Ronald Bailey: Bush, Bush, Obama. 

Peter Bagge: Harry Browne, John Kerry (whom I despised, but I really wanted to see Bush get fired), and Bob Barr (the worst Lib candidate ever, but still much preferable to McCain or Obama).

Debate

No, I'm not watching it tonight. Even if I had cable, there's no way I could bear the possibility that Romney won't be able to hit a single one of the barn-sized targets his opponent has presented him. Dear Americans: Seriously, I love you guys, but how did you ever let it come to this?

I have a documentary on Carroll Shelby and Ferrari that I couldn't finish watching last night. At least I know that has a happy ending.

UPDATE: No, I didn't watch it, but did he really say he'd defund PBS? Whoa.