I’ve been watching my screeners for the second half of Eureka‘s fourth season (thanks, Syfy!), and I think it’s crystallized something I’ve been thinking about for the last couple of weeks. While I know that science fiction inevitably contains elements of magic and fantasy when it ventures ahead of things we can reasonably extrapolate or predict from existing scientific knowledge, I think it’s time we do away with — or at least take a break from — time travel stories in science fiction with an exception for Doctor Who.

My irritation stemmed from my attempt to get through all of Torchwood before Miracle Day launches on July 8 (I’m almost done with season two and on my way to Children of Earth). The show’s tagline, in all of its variations, lays out an interesting premise: “Torchwood: outside the government, beyond the police. Tracking down alien life on Earth, arming the human race against the future. The twenty-first century is when everything changes. And you’ve got to be ready.” The problem is, despite that stated premise, Torchwood’s theoretically located over a rift in time, which means that the show spends at least as much time dealing with time travel stories as it does with any major changes in human society as a result of contact with aliens. And frankly, those time travel stories are exhaustingly repetitive.

Often, they’re a way to reinforce the general angst of the series, whether it’s Jack going back to meet the man he stole his name from and making out with him in an act of sexual repentance and charity; Owen learning to love a woman who will inevitably leave him as payback for his aversion to attachment; Tosh falling for yet another person who is unavailable to her because he has to return to his own time. For a show that’s supposed to be more adult-oriented, in that the characters actually have sex and tell each other to fuck off on a fairly regular basis, there’s a general melancholia and pessimism about sex and relationships that has an oddly puritan streak to it.

And the focus on the time rift means the show doesn’t really grapple with a theoretical new order in the 21st century. Sure, there are episodes about whether an alien mist might cause someone to get promiscuous, or about whether a woman you start dating in a bar might turn out to be an alien with problematic intentions (more with the anxiety about sex), or about whether disaffected urban men might start a fight club pitting themselves against vicious aliens, or whether men might make a business out of harvesting alien meat. But there’s not a coherent analysis of a shift here, a sense of why the aliens are showing up—is Earth a convenient waystation? is there something uniquely attractive about humanity? something destabilizing happening elsewhere in the universe? — or whether humanity’s developing in a way that makes it more receptive to accepting the idea of a populated universe.
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There’s been a lot of discussion on political blogs about the way folks react to allegations of racism when they do something like call Obama a “food stamp president,” or dramatically misquote Attorney General Eric Holder. So it’s interesting to see Neda Ulaby take on (the blog post has the story embedded) the expansion of “that’s racist” as a meme in popular culture. Whereas in politics, people insist that there’s nothing that can be properly described as racially motivated, Ulaby suggests that in comedy, tossing around “that’s racist” as a catchphrase rather than as an actual argument waters down the accusation to the point of meaninglessness. Obviously, the scene she cites from Community is funny because it actually is about stereotypes — it starts with Jeff implying something white people probably shouldn’t say about black people, that they’re naturally athletic, and ends with Troy saying something about African-Americans that may not be true, but that he can get away with saying because he’s black:

Similarly, the first-season 30 Rock episode she cites is funny precisely because it’s about Liz Lemon tipping too far over the liberal white lady precipice, and getting so invested in what she thinks is her understanding of a broken educational system and poverty that she comes to the conclusion that Tracy can’t read. It’s funny because it illustrates the reach of racism, that it’s not just a matter of thinking, say, that black people are stupid, but that because people grew up in certain kinds of circumstances, they must be a certain kind of victim.

In other words, I think racial humor that maintains some actual sting, some actual revelation, is probably going to be funnier than a gif of a little kid, or newlyweds on Parks and Recreation tossing off the idea that sorting laundry is racist.

Mac McClelland’s account of how she’s dealing with her post-traumatic stress disorder is powerful and important and warrants a close read. For me, some of the toughest things in it to read were on the larger professional context:

I realize now that I was undone. Journalists put themselves in threatening situations all the time, but they rarely talk about the emotional impact. It’s not easy to complain about the difficulties of being around trauma when you’ve chosen to be around trauma for a living, and it certainly isn’t cool. When CBS correspondent Lara Logan went public that she was raped in Egypt five months after I returned from Haiti, most people reacted with the appropriate amount of horror. Some, though, blamed the reporter for putting herself in a risky situation, and for being reckless enough to enter one when she’s so hot. No wonder it’s a rarity for correspondents to discuss their pain, and practically unheard of when it regards sexual harassment or assault. The handbook of the Committee to Protect Journalists didn’t even mention it—until 20 days ago, when the organization published an “addendum on sexual aggression.”

…

“Why don’t I get some real problems?” I asked her. The shocking lack of sympathy I got from some industry people I talked to about my breakdown was only compounding my concerns that I didn’t deserve to be this distraught. “Editors are going to think I’m a liability now. What kind of fucking pussy cries and pukes about getting almost hurt or having to watch bad things happen to other people?”

“Dude,” she said. “Marines.”

That the CPJ could just…not think to address that sexual assault is a form of harm journalists face in conflict zones or other dangerous situations says pretty much everything about the dominant assumptions about the kind of work women can do in journalism (and an odd myopia about the fact that men can get assaulted, too).

It also puts paid to the idea of journalistic objectivity — as did Greg Marinovich when I interviewed him earlier this year about working as a combat photographer. Maybe at some level, we can ask journalists to be detached, but for the big issues, we need folks who are able to draw conclusions about right and wrong from their reporting, and it’s insane to expect that people won’t be affected by the things they cover — we really need that, in fact. Journalism is a form of bearing witness, and part of supporting journalism is supporting people in going and seeing the things we can’t and bringing back moral testimony.

Having spent some time in 1960s Minnesota with A Serious Man, it sounds like the Coen brothers are headed to the big city to make a movie about Dave Van Ronk, the guitarist and political activist who helped define the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene. I really enjoyed I’m Not There, particularly the Jack Rollins section, which I thought did a concise if somewhat opaque job of tracing Bob Dylan’s role in the civil rights movement and his impulse to blow up his affiliations with the folks who wanted to use him as a symbol and a vehicle for message delivery:

So it’ll be interesting to see how the Coens approach Van Ronk’s politics, his music, and his role as a connector and mentor to folks in the scene. I imagine that last piece will be key to how the movie turns out. Van Ronk was an interesting guy in his own right, enough of a sci-fi fan to write for fanzines (an issue of eI is dedicated to him), one of the folks who got arrested at the Stonewall Riots, which he apparently sort of meandered into, a host of dinners for musicians, and wildly ecclectic when it came to the music that he loved. He was also, if his music is any indication, a fun guy to be around:

So the movie can focus on him, which I think I might find more interesting (and which might be more explicitly political). Or his perspective can be the lens through which we see an array of no doubt very accomplished actors impersonating everyone from Suzanne Vega, to Janis Ian, to Odetta (who apparently was the person who got him performing). If they go that route, I wonder how you cut Dylan down to size enough to fit, to be part of the context, to be someone Robert Christgau believes was influenced by Van Ronk rather than the mountain casting a shadow over a half-century of American music that he eventually became.

A programming note: I’m experimenting with moving this links round-up to semi-midday as a lunch break. And let’s make it an official open thread, up for discussions of whatever, requests, etc. Take it away, folks. And really do check out the last item on this list. It’s gorgeous.

-I demand an adorable gay White Collar wedding.

-Modest Mouse + Lizzy Caplan = Winning

-Win a month at the museum, minus Ben Stiller’s perpetual sourness and the inconvenience of having to hide from guards a la The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.

-The expansion of Neville Longbottom into an Astaire-like, war-scarred badass is one of the best things about the Harry Potter movies.

-The new Gillian Welch is very good.

In the inevitable election-year clash over a Republican presidential candidate using a progressive singer’s music as a campaign theme, Tom Petty is apparently sending Michele Bachmann’s campaign a cease-and-desist letter blocking Bachmann from using Petty’s “American Girl” on the campaign trail (Jackson Browne sued John McCain in 2008 to stop him from using “Running On Empty” in a campaign ad). The first verse of the song about “an American girl / raised on promises” contemplating “a great big world / With a lot of places to run to” is actually decent campaign music before it gets into the whole sexual desperation thing:

But mostly, the whole kerfuffle is a reminder of how hopelessly cheesy it is for the super-square people who run for president to try to score a hugely choreographed and unspontaneous process with popular music. Unless, of course, Jon Stewart is DJing:

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Since Michele Bachmann’s insisting that she wants to live in John Wayne’s America rather than John Wayne Gacy’s, I wouldn’t be doing my job as ThinkProgress’s resident culture nerd if I didn’t take a look at what it might be like to live in the Duke’s Good Old U.S. of A. Among other things we can expect from President Bachmann’s tenure:

1) The U.S. will go back in time, tough it out, and win the Vietnam War through musical theater:

2) Education professionals will be highly respected, even school bus drivers — especially if they can beat trains in cross-country races:

3) The FBI will vigorously protect Hawaii from the scourge of Communism and loose women:

4) Rich industrialists who want to pursue dangerous construction projects because they’re more expensive will be regarded as scoundrels.

5) The war on drugs will continue:

Hot Coffee, Susan Saladoff’s documentary about the corporate fight to limit individual citizens’ access to the courts and to justice from the courts through caps on damages, influence on judicial elections, and clauses in contracts requiring that employees and consumers give up their rights to sue companies and arbitrate disputes, is a pretty good movie. Seeing Stella Liebeck’s burns from the McDonald’s coffee that injured her, or hearing Jamie Leigh Jones talk about being raped by her Halliburton colleagues is useful and powerful. The problem is, the lies about Liebeck’s case in particular are so ingrained in our culture — the documentary opens with scenes from Seinfeld of Kramer getting excited about suing somebody and Bart Simpson writing “I will not file frivolous lawsuits” on his classroom blackboard — that it’s hard to imagine how to push back this late in the fight.

An intriguing alternative presents itself in Hot Coffee, though, when John Grisham shows up to talk about his novel The Appeal. The book is inspired by the case of Oliver Diaz, a Mississippi judge who fought off an election challenge from a Chamber of Commerce-backed opponent, only to find himself the target of an ethics probe. (In the documentary, he insists it’s meaningless, though the relationships in question looked improper.) For a long time, Grisham was an incredibly powerful critic of corporate power. He was absolutely over the top, a melodramatist who wasn’t shy about alleging that companies would murder Supreme Court justices or rig juries to secure successful verdicts, and his novels don’t really have any ambivalence about whether his plaintiffs have been injured in a way that demands redress.

I don’t know if he got bored by telling similar stories, or if he just succumbed to the lure of CIA stories (his CIA director, Teddy Maynard, is a fairly boring manipulative genius), but I would love to see Grisham bring back his scrappy young lawyers and his flawed but appealing victims. And if I were Grisham or a liberal studio head, I’d be riding the wave of the downturn and the financial crisis and pushing to get every damn corporate malfeasance story I’d written but that hadn’t made it to the screen sold and adapted. Washington stories are hot at HBO, so sell The Street Lawyer to them as a miniseries or to a movie studio. Maybe convince someone to do The Appeal as a Wire-style Appalachia story about Massey Energy, and mining, and Don Blankenship. This is a great market opportunity for Grisham — if he can shift his audience’s attention in what happens to be a politically useful direction.

I tend toward suspicion on remakes in general, but when it comes to WarGames, I actually think it makes a lot of sense. Even if nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction no longer hold pride of place in our foreign policy challenges (though they’re hardly irrelevant), the Internet’s obviously become much, much more important in a more direct way, whether it’s Egypt cutting off the internet during the revolution earlier this year, the perceived importance of Twitter in getting information out of and supporting protest in Iran, Chinese hacking into American institutions, or the Obama administration’s efforts to create internet and cell phone networks it can make available to dissidents that won’t be vulnerable to shutdowns by their government.

So the interesting thing is who the intrepid teenage hackers encounter out there, and what the consequences of their actions are. Maybe they make contact with budding dissidents somewhere in the Middle East without being aware they’re real and, pretending to be agents of the U.S. government, promise support they don’t actually think they’ll have to deliver, only to find themselves on the hook for a revolution that’s actually taking place? There’s a lot to explore there about responsibility and identity on the internet now that it’s a social and widely-used tool.