Facing Off on Fascism

January 19, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston   

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey got himself in the news by calling Obamacare “fascism.” NPR asked him about his earlier view that it was socialism.

Technically speaking, it's more like fascism. Socialism is where the government owns the means of production. In fascism, the government doesn't own the means of production but they do control it. And that's what's happening with our health care program with these reforms.

In a way, it’s refreshing to hear “fascism” used by someone on the right.  That term has usually been a favorite of the left.  LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, Bush – if you dwelt among the left, it was commonplace to hear them and their policies labeled as fascist.  The right seems to prefer “Nazi.”  Or Obama and his jackbooted thugs (why are conservatives so concerned with footwear?). 

Mackey, as the excerpt shows, was not name-calling or shouting the epithet in some irrational, emotional way.  Instead, he was being “technical,” giving a calm, reasoned definition and categorization.  If the government makes a company do something, that’s fascism.  Social Security contributions, minimum wage, non-lethal working conditions, etc., and now health care* – all fascism.

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* And, if you’re Newt Gingrich, restrictions on child labor.

More Guns, Less Data

January 17, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

As part of his new policy on guns, President Obama signed a directive allowing more research on gun violence and death.  For nearly twenty years, the gun lobby has shut down federally funded research on their favorite objects.   What seems to have gotten them upset was a study that concluded that a gun in the home was far more likely to kill a family member than to prevent a crime (a NY Times story from two years ago is here). 

Brad Plumer at the WaPo WonkBlog posted this chart showing how these Congressional restrictions have affected research at the National Institute of Justice.

Still, sometimes data leaks out.  Peter Norlander on his Academic Envy, Thoughtful Rage blog, posted this county analysis of gun ownership and gun deaths in New York state.

What was true for homes was true for counties. Should it come as a surprise that where there are more guns there are also more gun deaths?  Oh, right.  Guns don’t kill people. More guns, less crime and all that.

No wonder the gunslingers have tried to stop access to this kind of information. Maybe, with this new directive, more data will be coming out of the closet.

Butt Rising

January 16, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

“I nipped that in the butt.” 
“Don’t you mean bud?”
“I’ve been saying butt my whole life.”

A friend posted that conversation with her husband on her Facebook page.  The original metaphor is clear - you nip the bud before the problem can grow any larger.  But the husband’s version also makes sense – you give the problem a little bite in the ass as a warning to stop.*

The Easy Aces, in their 1930s radio show, specialized in this sort of  logical malapropism.  “You could’ve knocked me over with a fender,” and “They’re having trouble making ends neat,” were two that my mother remembered. 

Butt seems to be growing more acceptable, so it’s not surprising that it’s displacing similar-sounding words in these idioms.  The one I’ve noticed most is “butt naked” displacing “buck naked.”  What the hell does “buck naked” mean anyway?  By contrast, “butt naked” evokes an image you can immediately visualize.

(Click on the graph for a larger, clearer view.)

N-grams shows that buck is still kicking butt, at least in books.  But even there, the trend is buck down and butt up. 

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* Many years ago, a student in my class wrote that someone was “cool, calm, and collective.”  I chuckled, but the meaning of the “correct” word, collected, isn’t readily obvious.   I still think of this phrase when I read people like George Will fretting about Obama (a much-mocked example is here).

“This is 40" – Guilty Pleasures

January 14, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

In “This is 40,” the recent Judd Apatow movie, Pete and Debbie (Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann), married with two daughters, run off to a luxury hotel in Laguna for a romantic weekend. Stoned on a marijuana-laced cookie, they have room service bring them, among other things, a tableful of pastries. 

The sight of the couple stuffing their mouths with pastries reminded me of a similar scene from the 1975 French comedy “Cousin Cousine.”  In both films, the overload of desserts is a guilty pleasure, but in the French movie the emphasis is almost entirely on the pleasure, while the American film focuses on the guilt. The French lovers slowly feed each other one dessert after another; the scene is almost erotic. But Pete and Debbie seem like children, giggling and trying to eat as much as they can before they get caught. Both scenes mingle sex and pastry, but in the French movie the common theme is sensuality; “This is 40” plays both for laughs. (See the entire scene here.)

Pete and Debbie have other guilty pleasures that the movie grinds into laughs.  Pete sneaks off to the bathroom when he wants to play games on his iPad.  Debbie sneaks outside for a few desperate puffs of a cigarette.  Pete secretly eats the cupcakes he’s ostensibly throwing into the garbage.  Debbie browbeats and humiliates a thirteen-year-old boy to the point of tears.  All these scenes revolve around the question of guilt – will they get away with it? – rather than pleasure.  Add to that their Protestant Ethic regimes – Pete on his bicycle, Debbie with her demanding trainer – and the soundtrack might as well be a repeated loop of “I can’t get no satisfaction.” 

Married people in American movies and TV rarely have sex.  In the old days, married people were portrayed as asexual beings; they lived in a world swept free of sexual urges. In “This is 40,” sex makes frequent appearances, but something always happens to spoil the pleasure. Kids interrupt, or one of the two adults does something to deflate the other’s mood. The film begins with Pete and Debbie having passionate birthday sex in the shower until Pete reveals that he had taken Viagra for the occasion. Debbie stops and gets out of the shower.

PETE:  What’s the matter? DEBBIE: You just took a Viagra to have sex with me? PETE: I thought it would make it better. It was better. It takes some of the pressure off. DEBBIE: Because you can’t get hard without a Viagra? Is it because you don’t think I’m sexy? PETE: I thought you’d think it was fun for me to supersize it for once. DEBBIE: That is the worst birthday present you could ever give someone.

There’s much more to be said about “This is 40” and about the popularity of Judd Apatow films – the scarcity of real grown-ups, for example, and the general ambivalence about being a grown-up.  This movie is about becoming forty, but Pete especially seems like an 18-year-old who has awakened to find himself in the body of a forty year old man.  But today’s post is not about aging; it’s about pleasure, and “This is 40" does have one unconflicted pleasure – laughter. The film is a comedy, and as the hotel scene makes clear, Pete and Debbie’s real pleasure is not sex or food or music but laughter. What holds them together is their shared humor, their ability to laugh at themselves.