Tynan's Anger

Dear Maureen Dowd,


Allow me, on my humble little handmade soapbox here at Tynan's Anger, to explain to you why your paper has lost the audience of anyone except white people over the age of 45, and what your recent "opinion piece" about William Safire may or may not have had to do with it. There are a few facts about the dearly departed Mr. Safire that can be found on any quick check of Google or Wikipedia. One, he was a Nixon flack, the man who invented the modern flackery that you derided oh so brilliantly when Clinton and Bush were in the White House. His contemporaries on the Nixon flack brigade included Ben Stein, who has recently exited sanity stage left, and Peggy Noonan, the only other female op-ed columnist who rivals your status, and whose penchant for insincerity is already legendary in online media coverage.

It doesn't take a brilliant journalistic exposé to realize that you are operating in a small circle, one that blurs the lines of hackery and flackery, depending on who you and your circle are writing about, what personal or political behavior annoys you at this particular moment, and what gives you whatever appearance of authority you like to have. In fact, if I decided not to click on the nytimes.com link but the slate.com link in my search for William Safire remembrances, I would find a spellbinding list of egregious behaviors and lies Safire engaged in over his lifetime. The biggest of all were the flimsy ground on which Safire held his skills as a wordsmith—the skills you and just about every other hack have vaunted in your various memoria. It may be easy to hide to older readers that you have gone from hack to flack for a man who went from flack to hack; those who know what words to type into a search bar are less easy to fool.

Lest you think there is no escape from this endless flack-hack cycle, Maureen, I would beg to differ. To dismiss Safire's credentials as a language maven would not require a degree in linguistics, but access to a best-selling book from 1994 from a person who does have such a degree. In fact, in The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker spent a good 10 pages pointing out Mr. Safire's inherent shortcomings as a language maven, and the rest of the chapter on his lesser maven imitators. The Language Instinct is a more popular book than any book Mr. Safire ever published, whether about language, politics, or the malleable line between the two that Safire exploited throughout his life. Those with fond memories of Safire's columns must have either not read The Language Instinct, not have heard about it, or not have known that a popular book that thoroughly dismisses Safire's respectability as a wordsmith. The Language Instinct, it should be pointed out, has been in paperback since most people graduating with college degrees today were in grade school. 


If they do not know to question Safire's maven status, or even if it can be done, it is more of a fault of loyalty to your "colleague in columny," and to an entire generation of hacks that confused columny with camaraderie.

Which leads me to the actual content of your column. The details with which you embellish your "working relationship" with the dearly departed Safire would be considered "TMI" and irrelevant to the legacy of anyone actually writing a memoriam with any sense of detachment, historical perspective, or ultimately, respect for the dead. Your charming allusion to Mad Men—a classy show about flackery on what your generation until very recently dubbed the Idiot Box—cannot hide the fact that Safire's allusions to thongs, panties, and other undergarments for his female colleagues seem repulsive to anyone born after 1975. The historical context you provided with Barbara Walters' statement is true to life, but pointless. You are talking about people who are still very present in the public memory. We can't laugh off chauvinistic behavior with Safire like we can with, say, Henry VIII. There's a generational gap, but not that big of a generational gap.


Of course, even if this column were a complete lie, there would be no way for any of us to know, and why should we? You're a well-paid op-ed columnist for the New York Times; surely we can trust you to tell the truth as accurately as possible, and we can trust that if you were ever to skew the truth at all, it would be for "poetic license" of your Op-Ed that your fact-checkers have been trained to overlook. Even in an opinion column, we'd like to have a guarantee that what we are reading is based on truth, especially in a column in the Paper of Record by the person who has shaped our opinions of the Executive Branch of the United States Government for the better part of 16 years. Perhaps that's why David Brooks, lacking any reasonable evidence to support the Republican party, has to use his jogging route as evidence for the crux of a column about politics for all of America, a column that caused Charlie Pierce to comment:

Never in my long career as a professional cynic have I seen an spasm [sic] of Beltway bubblehood so far removed from the actual concerns of people's lives--so far removed that, last weekend, we had a gathering of the politically halt, lame, blind, and crippled in Washington, gathered for the sole purpose of petitioning various oligarchs to keep screwing them with their pants on.

The thing is, Maureen, you still see yourself as the public defender against the egos of the politicians and power brokers who shape this country for personal and partisan gain in equal measure. I completely understand how you still see yourself that way: if you don't do that job, who else will?

But let's take a look at the facts, Maureen. You worked with William Safire, the original flack/hack hybrid, for the better part of 20 years. You consider him your mentor. You educated him on the linguistics of lady's undergarments; he educated you on the proper use of pseudo-Yiddishisms. Well done. If not for the wonders of modern technology, it would take more than 10 seconds to discover that your mentor, for whom you have just provided a rather lavish pseudo-obituary, was instrumental in developing the brand of political flackery that you have built your reputation upon lambasting.

By just about any definition, this would count as hypocrisy, Maureen. I know you don't want to admit it, and your bevy of career experiences and accolades probably prevent you from ever fully realizing it. Considering your accolades, I'd be willing to give most columnists of your stature a pass for a cheap hypocrisy. The only problem is that it's not a cheap hypocrisy, and it cannot be easily dismissed. His Girl Friday came out in the '30s, Maureen. Things have changed since then. You have access to a job that puts you in the company of the world's movers and shakers, which has granted you access to the salary, lifestyle, and parties that would now be impossible for any aspiring Maureen Dowd to obtain. You have been a long-time critic of confusing the personal and the political, and yet you have come to prominence in an era when it is easier than ever to see through your own confusion on that front.


Maybe that's bad timing on your part, Maureen. Maybe that's just bad luck. There was no way for you to see it coming, Maureen, and I understand. Nonetheless, you've fallen victim to the same trap Safire's old boss fell into: you've willingly recorded your sins for history to judge.

Labels: flacks, hacks, maureen dowd, new york times, richard nixon, tynan's letters, william safire

Each month, I will be unrolling a top 10 list regarding English-language drama this decade. Last month, I revealed the best lines from English-language plays this decade [Part One] [Part Two] [Part Three]. This month, I will be unveiling the best characters to emerge in Engish-language drama this decade. Because of the complications of such a list; I have broken it into three categories

1. Original Characters
2. Historical Characters (a.k.a. characters based on real life people)
3. Reinterpreted characters: Characters Who Are Fictional But Have Appeared in Other Plays or Media Previously.

On Monday, I listed the Top 5 Reinterpreted Characters in English-Language Drama This Decade. Today, I am continuing with the top 5 historical characters.

---

5. Willy Brandt (Democracy, Michael Frayn)

   Before there was Clinton, there was Willy Brandt, and in his case, the stakes were exponentially higher. In Michael Frayn's tale of conflicting allegiances in East and West Germany, where for all his flaws, Brandt was exactly the politician both sides of the Iron Curtain needed, Brandt's accidental, almost farcical political self-destruction is made all the more more frustrating.

4. George W. Bush (The Strangerer, Mickle Maher)

   Depicting the almost universally reviled (in the theater-o-sphere) current President as an existential anti-hero is about as daring as political playwriting got this decade, but the almost tragic resulting consequences for our opinions of Bush, America, and the theater couldn’t have worked without that kind of risk-taking. The sense of adventure that is celebrated in Chicago predictably confused audiences in New York, but Mickle Maher and Theater Oobleck twisted current events and universal human strife by playing to experimental theater’s greatest strengths.

3. Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (I am My Own Wife, Doug Wright)

   Every heroic political and culture figure inevitably has some dirty laundry in their closet, and in the still somewhat underrated 2004 Pulitzer Winner, a pre-Little Mermaid Doug Wright knew that the ostensible hypocrisy that shocked post-Unification Germany was much more offensive than anything about Charlotte’s sexuality. I Am My Own Wife, aided by a deadpan performance by Jefferson Mays, turned Charlotte von Mahlsdorf's story into a reflection of the audience's own struggles with ethical consistency, all while still keeping Charlotte hopelessly sympathetic.

2. Orson Wells (Orson’s Shadow, Austin Pendleton)

   Backstage plays appeals to theater nerds first and foremost. Pendleton avoids this problem by taking Wells, one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, one who Kenneth Tynan would flatly say is a better artist than Laurence Olivier straight to the ego-maniacal Olivier’s face, and putting him in the exact moment when his reputation fully disintegrates. Orson's Shadow a stunning examination of how not even the greatest artists know how to cope with their own genius, and, more generally, how no one, not even Orson Welles, could get by on talent alone.

1. Richard Nixon (Frost/Nixon, Peter Morgan)

   There’s not much that can be said for the role that hasn’t been said already, so let me just list the number of people Frank Langella beat out for the Tony award: Live Schreiber in Talk Radio, Boyd Gaines in Journey’s End Brían F. O’Byrne is Coast of Utopia, and Christopher Plumber in Inherit the Wind. Any one of those actors could have won the Tony any other year in one of the most stacked awards categories of any kind in recent memory, but Langella beat them all, with all the help from Peter Morgan’s savagely honest portrayal of Nixon that didn’t downplay his sins in the least (it may have even amplified them), but also depicted just how addictive presidential power can be to everyone who surrounds it. For someone who has seen nothing but Nixon parodies, Langella made it believable that a man that corrupt and with that little personality could command that much respect. Even with one of the worst presidents of the 20th century, there were a lot of good things about America that died with Watergate, and many of them were inherent to Morgan and Langella’s Nixon, bringing Frost/Nixon closer to The History Boys than anyone ever thought imaginable.

Labels: charlotte von mahlsdorf, Democracy, Doug Wright, Frank Langella, Frost/Nixon: A Play, George W Bush, Michael Frayn, Orson Welles, Peter Morgan, richard nixon, the strangerer, Willy Brandt

I walked into Watchmen particularly nervous that it was going to suck. In addition to being a fan of the comic (though not as blindly devoted as some of my friends), I had defended 300 upon its release more than I probably should have, going so far as to call it one of the best movies of 2007. Back then I was responding to cries of fascism by 40-something critics who couldn’t detect the light-hearted, comic book framing of deep political issues that eventually overshadowed the excellent if imperfect qualities of that film.

Yet, from the moment I saw the spoof of the McLaughlin Group in the opening scenes of Watchmen, through the opening credits which focused on a mix of historical and alternate historical footage to the backdrop of “The Times They Are-A-Changin’,” I could immediately sense that director Zack Snyder was not just making a cool comic film, but was tapping into something artistically culturally significant that I could have in no way anticipated before seeing the film. Rather than meticulously reproducing a dated piece of literary history, Snyder was exposing a crucial and almost farcical element of our culture that no one who lived through the 1980s could appreciate. For the generation currently in their 20s, those who have college degrees and adult wits but never lived through the height of the culture wars, Snyder was reducing one of the seminal texts of the culture wars to what people of my age perceive it as: a comic-book, fairy tale story they’ve seen in passing. For people who didn’t live through the culture wars, they may as well have been the Persian Wars. 

The reviews of Watchmen have been decidedly mixed. They were similarly mixed with 300, but that film’s supporters were eventually drowned out by the film’s fiercest critics who saw the film as a fascistic, right wing, Iraq War-supporting vision of ancient Greece (and Frank Miller, 300’s creator, certainly held those beliefs). Those complaints have followed director Zack Snyder to Watchmen, but both movies proved to be remarkable box office successes. What was less expected among Hollywood types, and caused Snyder's detractors to be even more aghast, was that not only did young people go see the two films en masse, but more often then not, they also liked it. A lot. That the opinions of people in their 20s differs so much from those 20 years older is as good a sign of any of a generational divide in taste, as well as how they treat the American cultural imagery of old.

To give you an example: for leftists who remember Nixon as a president, the prospect of an unchallenged essential President-for-Life Nixon is utterly terrifying. I can sort of sense why that would be, but keep in mind my first experience with Nixon was a picture book of American presidents I read when I was six, and my parents pointed out on the Nixon page that he was a very bad man whom everyone in our family hated. Later, my experiences with Nixon imagery came solely through films like Dick and Frost/Nixon, and, less directly, in his spoofed image on shows like The Simpsons and Futurama. Currently, the strongest image of Nixon in my mind is the head of Nixon attached to a monolithic robotic body terrorizing Earth after winning the year 3000 election in Futurama. That’s a depressing thought to those who followed Watergate, but an almost inevitable one among the generation who didn’t; I’m sure the number of people who have the same primary image of Nixon in their brain is larger than you’d think.

But even if I were to study every piece of  newsreel footage and objective documentary on Nixon with the same fervor I consumed The Simpsons, the effect would essentially be the same; Nixon would not be a danger to my life, he’d just be an intellectual curiosity — a relic from the past that seems baffling to me today. The imagery that comes from the culture wars is no less absurd to viewers of my age: Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, Patty Hearst, and Stokely Carmichael seem too ridiculous to believe. As Adam Sternberg noted in his point-perfect rebuttal of David Denby’s Snark, the real generational issue is not the tone our generation takes, but the fact that the people we see on TV seem completely preposterous and insincere, and the popularity of The Daily Show and Wonkette display a growing appreciation of the undressing of the punditry’s façade. 

Watchmen is probably more popular today than it ever was. The core audience of the film is not people who appreciated the comic upon its 1986 release, but those in their 20s who read the comic in high school. For some, inevitably, the main appeal of the comic is the Nietzchean nihilism expressed either with The Comedian’s Bill Hicks-like sense of humor or Rorschach’s humorless vigilantism. The view of the world as a dark, senselessly violent, hopeless enterprise with no God to save it has attracted millions of adolescents over the past century, and a few legitimate fascists as well.

But the sources of Rorschach’s nihilism — crime-ridden streets and moral depravity — are not what people live to in today’s word where New York is comparatively crime-free and Girls Gone Wild is a cultural institution. Today, the more pressing depravity in New York is among the urban developers who claim they are doing good for the neighborhoods they are kicking poor people out of. Thee also include the hypocritical crooks like Madoff, Spitzer, and, at the highest level, Bush and Cheney. The audience is the same as those who laugh at the cries of the stimulus bill as “turning America socialist” (a reference that also elicits laughs in the Watchmen movie) and who have no idea why Bill Ayers would matter to anyone.

The larger issue with the coverage of 300 has now come to fruition in Watchmen: while the culture wars from 1964-2004 saw American society as a battle between the far left and the far right, the main conflict in American society today is not ideological, but generational — between those who lived and felt the culture wars and those who didn’t.

The biggest complaint about the movie, even (or perhaps especially) among its supporters, was its use of music. The score featured every clichéd '60s rock song you can think of, from “The Time They Are-A-Changin’’” to “Sound of Silence” to “All Along the Watchtower.” Snyder is too slick a filmmaker to be blind to the ineffectiveness of his use of soundtrack. My best explanation is that Snyder was intentionally introducing a disjointed element into the film to point out, however crudely, the larger significances of the era of Watchmen, and, more importantly, the younger generation’s cultural consumption of the era of Watchmen. If in the end the soundtrack hurt the film, it ended up depicting Snyder as a more astute auteur and cultural commentator than even I had previously given him credit for.

In the press leading up to the Watchmen movie, Snyder has depicted himself as an utterly devoted fanboy, obsessively detailed in his rendering of Alan Moore’s vision, down to the brand of coffee. But though Snyder, 43, lived through the 1980s, his overgrown 15-year-old boyish tendencies have incidentally given him more significance with millenials than few people over the age of 30 can properly understand. Moore’s denouncement of the film is not so much a rebuke of Snyder as a reflection that the vantage point of Moore, one of the most deeply cynical cultural figures of the 1980s, cannot be reconciled with the fact that Snyder is presenting an era that drove people to paranoia to people who see that paranoia as comical.

The translation of young ideas from humorless paranoia to a cynical but strangely astute optimism is fully expressed in the revision of Watchmen’s ending, which I will introduce with the very millennial term SPOILER ALERT. In Moore’s comic, written before the Cold War ended, it seemed the only way to end the cultural bickering of people who fundamentally and irrevocably hated one another was either the annihilation of the human species or a happy accident that tricked humans into realizing their common bond of humanity. In Snyder’s version, the fear of Dr. Manhattan, who, among other character traits, is seen as the human personification of a soulless, nuclear military-industrial complex, was enough to do the trick. Ozymandias doesn’t resort to an otherworldly creation to scare humans into getting along as best as humans can, but instead uses the very entity that had been at the center of political and military strategy for decades.

In real life, what ended the Cold War was the realizing that no one wanted the world to end, and after a decade and a half of subsequent bickering, people are beginning to realize that Cold War mentalities have little place in the modern world. The world still has enormous problems; the economy is worse now than it was even in Watchmen’s '80s, and though no nuclear bombs have struck, New York and Moscow have both been victims to horrible attacks that have killed hundreds needlessly between 1986 and now. But, as corny as it sounds, the persistence of the human spirit proved to be larger than any nuclear weapon, and what those who only see Cold War paranoia in hindsight see as the most important tool in getting through today’s problems.

In Moore’s world, as in Snyder’s, even the Nietzchean übermenschen of Rorschach, of the Comedian, have moments where they break down and realize the redeeming qualities of humanity. Rorsarch and The Comedian represent the adolescent vision of Nietzche, the one that fills the seats in the movieplex, but the same kind that is so crude that it only appeals to bad followers of Nietzsche of all ages and levels of education. The most significant legacy of Nietzsche is not his nihilism, but his breakdown of a world of absolute truth, where perfect objectivity was impossible, and where the word of no God, philosopher, or political leader could be universally upheld.

That’s the legacy that became most apparent in the culture wars, and that’s the kind of good Nietzchean understanding that Moore works with in Watchmen. Just about all of the central characters in Watchmen have strongly-held viewpoints — the nihilism of Rorsach and The Comedian is no less fiercely maintained than Dr. Manhattan’s lifeless astronomical philosophy or Ozymandias’s Alexanderian vision of lateral thinking and a New World Order. Yet, while all of these viewpoints are hopelessly impossible to understand by their peers who disagree, they are all mostly internally consistent, with the inevitable contradictions of an all-encompassing worldview. But yet they all live together, and, even at some point in their lives, can be considered friends.

o;s all-encompassing viewpoint on others. Ozymandias’s view of a unified humanity resulted in him being as much of a mass murderer as Hitler, Stalin, or Genghis Khan. But the voice of reason comes from Dan and Laurie, who represent the voice of Generation X and every generation that has come since. What they can’t understand is the zealotry of their peers when their philosophy flies in the face of so much to the contrary. While Dan and Laure are by no means perfect or ethically sound, they do recognize their own individual flaws and try to live by as much of a code as they can. 

That kind of acceptance of disagreement and welcoming of those who disagree — reaching across the aisle, if you will — is increasingly becoming the political narrative of an era where the majority of people no longer remember the '60s. More and more, Americans care less about insincere extremism and universal consensus and more about the greatest good for the greatest many. Could Watchmen be the first film of the Obama era? History will judge, but if you can’t help but laugh at the blowhard talking heads and misplaced paranoia that come when watching the film but not from reading the comic book, don’t be alarmed. To paraphrase Watchmen at the rise of a similarly baffling new generational trend, this indicates only that you are still sane.

This was originally published on Blogcritics

Labels: 300, 60s, alan moore, comic book movies, culture wars, radicals, reactionaries, richard nixon, watchmen, zack snyder