You know, for a holiday that’s about the beginning of America, and that’s celebrated with lounging, parades, delicious meats, and low-grade explosives, there are a lot of anxiety-ridden songs about the Fourth of July:

1. Martina McBride’s 1993 reminder that liberty and justice for all can be a sick joke:

I’m genuinely curious about this: to what extent is not charging sales tax the source of Amazon.com’s advantage? The company obviously thinks that being forced to charge sales tax is a dealbreaker, which is why it’s fighting laws that would require it to do that in New York and California, suing in the former and cutting ties with brick-and-mortar affiliates in the latter. But even if it was forced to pay sales taxes, it still seems like the volume of Amazon’s sales would let it be competitive with smaller retailers or retailers with physical locations.

And more than that, hasn’t Amazon shifted the market enough to ensure itself a long-term, if not permanent advantage? By putting pressure on smaller retailers, particularly on bookstores, Amazon has created a marketplace where it’s often the only place you can get certain items, and get them in a reasonably expeditious fashion. Now, a competitor would have to match that infrastructure and volume to match Amazon on base price and beat Amazon’s two-day shipping silver bullet, or find some other competitive advantage to really threaten their market share — and they’d have to operate under the same requirements to pay sales tax that Amazon’s probably going to be forced to accept. If I’m wrong, I’d love to know why, but Amazon’s tactics here feel like they’re fighting over a few meters of territory when they’ve already won the war.

Spoilers through the first six parts of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars in this post; if you want to spoil beyond that, please label your comments accordingly. And for next week, let’s read the section called “Senzeni Na.”

I.

After the heavy science and economics of the previous sections, “Guns Under the Table” feels like a real diversion, though a long-awaited one. Finally, we get to see Frank Chalmers from inside his own head for the first time since he engineered the murder of his oldest friend, his oldest enemy, the late John Boone. To a certain extent, Frank’s the Raskolnikov of the First Hundred, a murderer motivated by his commitment to shaping an ideal society who is unable to execute his grand plans, though in Frank’s case, there are larger forces against him than his own weakness (though that’s not an immaterial factor). But Frank’s also uniquely a product of American politics, and “Guns Under the Table” is a striking portrait of the emptiness of the politician.

I love the description of how Frank spent John’s first night on Mars in part because it’s such a typical DC scene. John Grisham could have written it in The Street Lawyer, if not for the Mars thing:

Still, on that historic night he found himself in a foul mood. He went back to his apartment near Dupont Circle and then went out and lost his FBI tag and slipped into a dark bar and sat there watching the TV over the bartenders’ heads, drinking bourbon like his father, with Martian light pouring out of the TV and reddening the whole dark room. And as he got drunk and listened to John’s inane talk his mood got worse and worse. It was hard to focus on his plan. He drank hard. The bar was noisy, the crowd inattentive; not that the landing hadn’t been noticed, but here it was just another entertainment, on a par with the Bullets game that one bartender kept cutting to. Then blip, back to the scene on Chryse Planitia. The man next to him swore at the switch. “Basketball’s gonna be a hell of a game on Mars,” Frank said in the Florida accent he had long ago eradicated. “Have to move the hoop up, or they be breaking their heads.” “Sure, but think of the jumps. Twenty-foot dunks easy.” “Yeah even you white boys’ll jump high there, or so you say. But you better leave the basket alone, or you got the same trouble you got here.” Frank laughed. But outside it was hot, a muggy D.C. summer night, and he walked home in a plummeting foul mood, blacker and blacker with every step; and coming upon one of Dupont’s beggars, he pulled out a ten-dollar bill and threw it at the man, and as the bum reached for it Frank shoved him away shouting “Fuck you! Get a job!” But then people came up out of the Metro and he hurried off, shocked and furious. Beggars slumped in the doorways. There were people on Mars and there were beggars in the streets of the nation’s capital, and all the lawyers walked by them every day, their freedom-and-justice talk no more than a cover for their greed. “We’re gonna do it different on Mars,” Frank said viciously, and all of a sudden he wanted to be there immediately, no careful years of waiting, of campaigning — “Get a fucking job!” he shouted at another homeless man.

That paragraph tells you everything you need to know about Frank and his limitations: even before he gets to Mars, he’s a hollow man, the limited creation of a system where there are only a few overvalued prizes to win. And it’s worse after he kills John, after he gets what he thinks is the position he wants, that of the most politically powerful American on Mars. In fact, the murder makes it worse, because it makes Frank’s whole life, not just his political work, a performance: “The subject of the treaty began to come up, and so Frank said, ‘How I wish John were here now. We could use him.’ And then: ‘I miss him.’ This kind of thing would distract Maya instantly. She put her hand over his; Frank scarcely felt it. She was smiling, her arresting gaze full on him. Despite himself he had to look away.”
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Given how crude and ugly Frank Miller’s politics have become, I was already deeply uneasy about the prospects for his superhero-beats-al-Qaeda comic Holy Terror, slated for release right around the tenth anniversary of Sept. 11. Hero Complex’s interview with Miller doesn’t make me feel one whit better. Really, it’s this one line: “We’re living in a terrifying time and it’s changed us.”

This, to me, has always been the defining difference between progressive and conservative responses to Sept. 11. For (some) conservatives, Sept. 11 revealed that we were profoundly vulnerable, but also that we had the fortitude and the power to respond to new threats, that we were unafraid neither of outside threats nor of our own dark capacities. For progressives, Sept. 11 was a successful al Qaeda operation precisely because it opened up American values to question and lured us into a response that’s been a financial and moral drain on the country. It’s not that the murder of thousands of Americans didn’t demand a response, but Osama bin Laden would have been even more defeated than he is today if that response had been keeping with the American national character.

And that’s part of what makes Miller comparing his inspiration for Holy Terror to Jack Kirby’s creation of Captain America so irritating:

I’m a comic book artist first and foremost; as I got into this I felt probably something close to what Jack Kirby felt when he created Captain America. There’s a gut-level intensity to the work but there’s also levels where it needs to be entertainment. And this is propaganda. I think it’s a much abused word. I think most things I read on the Internet and in newspapers is propaganda. Everyone from the New York Times to Rupert Murdoch has a point of view and is putting forth their own propaganda. They’re stuck with the facts as they are but the way they interpret and frame them is wildly different.

There’s no question the United States made decisions during World War II that were injurious to the national character, most shamefully the internment of Japanese-American civilians. But there was a sense in everything from propaganda, to efforts like Liberty Gardens, to the movement of women into the workforce, that the response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the rise of Nazi Germany needed to be a reaffirmation of American strengths, not about entirely reevaluating what they were. Captain America embodies that spirit, an art student who cares so much about defending his country that he’s willing to go through a dangerous experiment to do it, who both fights on the ground himself and supports the troops through USO shows, and in an interesting parallel to the use of drones in our current conflicts, is frozen and loses his sidekick in an effort to shut down a dangerous experimental drone plane. The only thing I can imagine Miller’s new effort and Captain America having in common is that they’ll fulfill a deep desire to see someone KO Hitler or bin Laden. The thing is, we don’t really need a superhero to do that to bin Laden. Americans got him already, and for real.

Apologies for getting this up late. My flight was delayed and airport wireless is the worst.

-Looks like Google might buy Hulu.

-The definition of failing upwards.

-Looks like Brad Pitt’s poker lessons from Ocean’s 11 worked a little too well.

-Marvel’s found something that actually tempts me to buy DVDs for the extras.

-I so dislike having to agree with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on anything.

This post contains spoilers through the second episode of the second season of Louie.

One of the things I find most compelling about Louie it’s the show that most makes me feel like I’m actually getting a sense of how men see the world, and not in a Cosmo-style, “what he’s really thinking” kind of way. And I think it’s because Louis C.K. is a very particular person rather than a type of guy—a bro, a nerd, a master of the universe—that his perspective actually ends up feeling useful and broadly applicable. It’s fully coherent, shaded in at the edges, idiosyncratic but internally consistent, and the fullness of that view of the world feels more useful than trying to extrapolate what men think about certain topics from tropes.

And it really is different. There were three anecdotes in last night’s episode that made me feel sort of off-kilter, and it was only after thinking about them for a while that I was able to decide how I felt about them, precisely because they were experiences that I’ve had, but that Louis reacted to in ways I wouldn’t have.

The first was Louis’ opening monologue. I’ve long thought questions of male body image and self-confidence are weirdly underaddressed in our popular culture, and the opening bit aimed squarely for that uncomfortable space. “It’s weird to live as an average-looking guy,” Louis explains, describing his usual M.O. when he has sex. “I’m always on my back, and that’s for her benefit. I don’t want to make a woman see this. It’s just not fair. She’s so nice to let me fuck her. There’s just no way I’m going to put her through that. And I always gotta have my shirt on, too [because his stomach and chest are like] a mother dog.” It’s the kind of thing I think it would be hard for a female comedian to say in a sitcom without all sorts of hedging, or sarcasm, or the promise of a journey of self-improvement and transformation to follow, and as such, it’s kind of refreshing to hear, even as I have a hard time parsing that kind of self-criticism divorced from an action plan, which is the logical pop-culture follow-up.
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Seriously though, if life was like the movies, it would be really easy to avoid hardship. Police officers could save up their sick leave so they wouldn’t have to go to work in the days leading up to retirement. Brides could suffer severe wedding jitters and be reasonably sure they could still chase down their grooms. Women with gambling debts would be avoided at all costs, as could Garden State-esque hipsters, easily identifiable by their permanent residence on the hoods of cars. We’d be able to defeat alien invasions with comparatively little initial bloodshed. Zombies still might overwhelm most of the general population, though.

This post contains spoilers through the second episode of the fifth season of Burn Notice.

Early in this episode, Fiona explains to a real estate agent who’s showing her and Michael an apartment that “That man doesn’t really focus unless an international conspiracy is threatening to ruin his life.” And therein lies the problem with the fifth season of Burn Notice. Michael Westen qua Michael Westen isn’t actually that interesting. He eats a lot of yogurt. He doesn’t know what Frogger is. He interprets his entire life through the lens of operational doctrine, which when it’s applied to something like dirt bike racing with Fiona, feels more than a little pretentious. What’s intriguing about him is the collection of people who have become loyal to him over the years, and his zeal to get back to the CIA. Now that he’s reinstated, the show needs a new conflict to animate Michael, to make him more than a man in a sharp suit and a blank expression.

It appears that the central conflict is going to be about whether government work is exciting enough to engage Michael’s interest — and whether he can do more good work inside the CIA or outside of it. This week, that question comes in the form of Michael’s official assignment — babysitting a physicist with a lot of access to secrets and an infinite capacity for alcohol and women — and the help someone outside the government is asking him for — saving 20 girls who are being trafficked in from Asia by a Yakuza gangster. That’s a little too on-the-nose for this particular choice to seem like a real one. If the CIA’s going to keep him doing make-work, then obviously Michael will be back to running his own outlaw operation by the end of the season, and there’s no dramatic tension. More to the point, it’s not a critique of the CIA and of the government more generally that any reasonably intelligent viewer can take seriously, especially not with constant promos for Covert Affairs airing in commercial breaks.

The more interesting part of last night’s storyline involves the ongoing problem that Sam, Fiona, and most importantly, Michael’s mother, have grown to like working as part of Michael’s unofficial agency. And when Michael brings in his mother to take care of an injured gangster, a role that requires her to play a coerced nurse, they end up playacting the trauma of her violent marriage — and Michael’s violent childhood. Watching him take on the role of his father in abusing his mother is genuinely uncomfortable*. You know he doesn’t mean to hurt her, but the episode’s very clear that what’s happening between them isn’t meaningless pretend, either. The moment when she tells him “It’s not like I haven’t been hit before” is a reminder of both her power and her weakness. She couldn’t stop Michael’s father from abusing him when he was a child, but she can make the choice to be hit now if she thinks it’s necessary. “You can play your father in there, but not out here,” she tells Michael. And that’s the exciting and scary thing about what would happen if Michael chose to walk away from the CIA: he’d have to accept Sam, Fiona, and his mother as full partners, people who are no longer engaged in the temporary project of rescinding his burn notice, but in the more permanent enterprise of working together to make up for the limitations of government. That would require a significant shift in the balance of power, and that’s where interesting stories happen.

*I’m watching Luther right now, and so thinking a lot about intimacy and violence. Longer post to come next week.