Jason Zinoman, who has a new book out about horror movies out, suggests in a series of posts for Slate that a reluctance to deal with current events might be part of the problem with today’s scary movies:

In the golden era, films went for the throat and then worked their way down. Part of the strategy was to tap into potent fears about random urban crime, war, the Manson killings, and the other topical concerns. We have our own phobias today, and if anything they’re even more deeply felt in an era when criminals and terrorists are only as far away as the nearest cable news channel, but the horror genre hasn’t caught up with the times. Why hasn’t a movie made us as petrified of the Internet as Jaws did of the ocean? Where is the great horror movie about Sept. 11? Is that in bad taste? Perhaps. But audiences don’t see horror movies for moral improvement. They go to be scared out of their wits.

I think some of that is true, though I’d be curious to see what Zinoman thinks of Drag Me to Hell, a horror movie rooted in the idea that it’s a poor idea to foreclose on a gypsy. But I think part of the problem is the juxtaposition between the common American fears of today and of the ’70s. Most of the things Zinoman listed that Americans were afraid of in the golden age of horror were things that suggested a dark side to the familiar: city streets and our own teenagers. Fears of terrorism, for example, have definitely spawned unfortunate suspicion of American Muslims, but if a group of al Qaeda-trained fighters successfully carried out an attack on an American city, nobody would be exceptionally shocked that such a thing had happened, or would have their preconditioned assumptions about al Qaeda challenged. Similarly, I don’t think anyone who uses the Internet thinks of it as an entirely benign institution, so it’s hard to think that anyone would profoundly upset if something bad happened as a result of people being online. What we need is something genuinely surprising: people who are attacked by the houses they took out adjustable-rate mortgages to purchase, or something that similarly upsets our assumptions about what’s safe and desirable.

Combat Hospital, a Canadian show that’s airing simultaneously on a network in that country and on ABC here is not an astonishingly good show. But it is a very interesting one. The show, which follows an international group of trauma surgeons at a base in Kandahar, is the only show I know of to treat our involvement in Afghanistan as so much of a long-term given that it can be the basis for an ongoing television show.

Art about military doctors, which lies at an interesting intersection between medical dramas and military dramas, isn’t new. M*A*S*H is the obvious, and superior, predecessor to Combat Hospital, but that show was set in the Korean War even as it was an analogy for the conflict in Vietnam, and it’s an interesting thought experiment about whether M*A*S*H would have drawn an astonishing 106 million viewers for its first-season finale if it had been directly rather than metaphorically about the conflict at hand. So there’s something audacious about setting Combat Hospital in a conflict that’s still ongoing, and in treating that conflict both as a moral drama and as the set of limitations that determine how people date, handle pregnancy scares, and conduct other parts of their social and personal lives. Relationships are limited by rotations in and out of the base or the fact that one half of a potential pairing’s in Special Forces, a positive pregnancy test may mean losing your job, and throwing a party requires cutting deals with other units. Soldiers and Afghan translators alike are united in their attempts to keep a laptop working so the translator can get online and get a picture from a girl he’s been chatting with online, and a photographer who is taking advantage of a war zone to cheat on her husband ends up hurting a young doctor who thinks of himself as a dashing womanizer.

The show makes pretty good use of the medical setting, too. Not only are the characters dealing with life-and-death issues, but they’re dealing with them in circumstances where decisions about whether to continue surgery are based on the capacity of a limited base blood bank, and where running a women’s clinic requires balancing a patient’s need for surgery with that same patient’s need to be seen as abiding by her fathers’ orders. There’s the typical medical drama nonsense, like a terrifying and mysterious virus that strikes the trauma center, but no acts of House-like genius to mysteriously solve either odd illnesses or resource problems.

And I think most interesting to me, the show’s one of the most prominent depictions other than Doonesbury’s recent arcs, of the experiences of women in combat zones. Michelle Borth’s Rebecca can be entitled and unwilling to adapt to the realities of resource limitations, but the show is honest about her difficulties adjusting, and I think that’s useful. Despite its depictions of surgery under stressed conditions, of men in foil blankets, Combat Hospital isn’t about the gritty realities of war, and that’s particularly true of her character: I don’t really think she’s going to be one of the 19,000 servicemembers who were raped or sexually assaulted in 2010. That’s not the pretty or attractive kind of gritty that American audiences get excited about (they’re okay with seeing female doctors get raped in some circumstances, but I doubt they’d stand for a plot arc that implicated members of the armed forces or law enforcement), even though it is a reality women in the American military face. But then, not everything needs to be The Wire either, and Combat Hospital is reasonably amiable fluff that also happens to serve the useful purpose of showing women being competent in difficult military situations—and acknowledging that our involvement in Afghanistan isn’t something we’re likely to wrap up neatly or soon.

Given Joe Arpaio’s general lack of decency and genius for performance art, I’m not remotely surprised that Arpaio is going to have one of his chain gangs picking up trash outside next week’s Major League Baseball All-Star Game. Arpaio strikes me as generally beyond shame, and as much as I wish the proposed boycott of the game by an Arizona human rights group that aims to protest Arizona’s draconian immigration policies more generally would materialize, I don’t have much faith that it will. But if not a single player traveling to Arizona for the weekend has the gumption to say something, I will be disappointed.

Ten of the players on the American League All Star roster and seven members of the National League side were born in countries other than the United States. The immigration system works for them, making it possible for them to come to the U.S. and make very large amounts of money. There’s no question that there are abuses in Latin American baseball academies, people who prey on the dreams of families who hope that years of training in a low-paying developmental league will translate into wild success in the States, just as folks prey on people who just want to get to the U.S. period. But if you make it to the United States and into a secure job in the Major Leagues, you’re one of the most visible and one of the most protected immigrants in America. And those 17 players will be in the ballpark long before Joe Arpaio sets up his ghastly spectacle outside of it. It would be tremendous value if one of those 17 spoke up to point out that what folks will see Arpaio doing — and what Arizona is doing as a whole — isn’t just embarrassing, or silly, it’s deeply wrong.

Thanks to Faith in Public Life’s Nick Sementelli, who pointed me to this article which suggests there’s neurological evidence that disseminating positive images of minority groups can help rewire the brain’s shortcuts:

Neuroscientists have found, after strapping people to fMRI scans to measure changing levels of fear that images of out-groups elicit, that stereotypes are very malleable and capable of changing rapidly. Early theorists of stereotypes knew this all along, such as Walter Lipmann when he pointed out that stereotypes are the result of individuals conforming to situational demands and social customs, and not necessarily the result of deep hostilities held toward a particular “out-group.” Stereotyping is an emotional response to a perceived threat to the buildup of stress.

Importantly, neuroscientists have found that the introduction of positive images of “out-groups” does indeed lower levels of fear of the other, and it reforms the hardwired automatic processes. In one study conducted at a predominately white college, students were inundated with a flood of negative images of African Americans seen in ghettos and in gangs. Researchers found a spike in automatic stereotyping toward the entire category of African Americans. The researchers then introduced hundreds of positive images of African Americans seen at churches and in family and professional settings. The introduction of these images resulted in a lowering of fear and a significant drop in the level of stereotyping the students experienced toward African Americans on the whole.

While it’s one thing to show people a lot of images as part of a study, pop culture’s probably the quickest way to flood the average American’s zone with any kind of images and to show folks images (positive or negative) of people who are different from them in a sustained way. The piece cites the Muslim anthropologist on Bones, which has actually done a really nice job with its rotating crew of interns, of portraying not just Muslims, but African-Americans and working class folks as brilliant scientists. In any case, it’s nice to have scientific validation of the idea that pop culture can matter. Now, we just have to figure out how to use it in the causes of progressivism without sacrificing good stories.

The weather’s deeply insane in Washington, and I’m spending a bunch of the day inside a theater watching Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II (the sacrifices I make for this job). So in honor of the brain-melting heat and to keep you amused while I’m gone, a playlist of gender-flipped covers, where the singer of the cover is different than the gender of the person who originated the song.

1. Xiu Xiu’s awesomely creepy-sounding cover of Rihanna’s “Only Girl (In the World),” which inspired me.

2. Nothing beats the fragile version of “God Only Knows,” that the Beach Boys laid down on their “Live in London” album. But Petra Haden’s version has a lovely serenity to it:

3. And where Haden brings calm to the Beach Boys, Dolly Parton adds a nervous energy to the Beatles’ “Help”:

4. While in turn, Sisters of Mercy turn “Jolene” into a horror movie (HT: Zack Stentz):

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With arts and public broadcast issues percolating on the edge of the race for the 2012 presidential race, I thought it made sense to look at where the declared and prospective candidates for president have stood on arts issues throughout their careers. Their views on everything from arts education to support for local artistic traditions say a lot about how they value culture—but also about how they think about the role of government.

As U.S. Trade representative, governor of Utah, and ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman’s limited work on the arts prefigure some of the moves his colleagues in other states are making today, without some of the ideological edge — as with much of his record, it demonstrates why he’s an intriguing but almost totally improbable candidate for president in this cycle. But he’s also got a long, and interesting, record on copyright and intellectual property.

1993:As ambassador to Singapore under George H.W. Bush, Huntsman said IP rights would be an ongoing concern for the United States as it expanded trade with Asia.

1996: It was a concern that continued when he returned to the private sector. Huntsman was concerned about the risks to intellectual property of doing business with China, warning Plastics News that ”The Chinese hold technical seminars and invite anyone with new technology … pick your brain completely for what you know and implement it themselves.”

2001-2003:And when George W. Bush appointed him U.S. Trade representative, he oversaw a trade agreement with Vietnam that was meant, in part, to protect IP issues; met with Thai officials about the country’s IP enforcement, especially after American entertainment companies said they’d go after Thailand if the country didn’t step up its efforts; engaged with trade talks in Korea that involved IP issues at a time when Korea was one of the world’s largest exporters of counterfeit goods; and helped set up a trade council with West African nations that took on issues like IP protection.

2005: Much like governors ranging from Democrat Dannel Malloy in Connecticut to Republican Brian Sandoval in Nevada are trying to do or doing this year, Huntsman moved the Utah Arts Council from its status as a fully independent agency to part of the Department of Community and the Arts. While reorganizations can be a bad thing if they’re done essentially to eliminate government work on the arts, they can reduce administrative costs or improve opportunities to do joint agency projects. Huntsman justified his reorganization on the latter grounds, saying, according to U.S. States News, “Utah’s population is becoming more heterogeneous, reflecting a need for more attention to certain government services. It made sense to create a department that could focus on the unique ethnic communities in the state, as well as the services that strengthen the community.”

That year, the Scripps Howard News Service reported that Huntsman was part of a plan by Western governors to promote trade between their states — one of the concerns he cited was intellectual property enforcement in China. He also praised a company that moved to Utah to develop medical software, saying, “Without the development of the intellectual property here in our state and the nurturing that it took over those years, we wouldn’t have anything to offer.”

2006: Huntsman tapped a Democrat, former Salt Lake City Mayor Palmer DePaulis, to run the Department of Community and the Arts. DePaulis ended up working on everything from interagency oral history projects to streamlining digitization systems in the different divisions under his purview, and he’s since risen to be executive director of the Utah Department of Human Services.

2007: Utah stirred up the internet community when it passed and Huntsman signed a law preventing advertisers from placing ads based on keywords if those keywords were trademarked. The bill was meant to prevent businesses from competitors who might riff closely on their names and place advertising on those businesses websites, but companies like Google and Yahoo were seriously displeased.

2009: That attention to organization doesn’t mean Huntsman made the arts a priority, especially when faced with tough budget choices. Despite outreach efforts, Huntsman didn’t stop cuts that decimated the Utah Arts Council’s Folk Arts Program. The program is now hoping a new public-private partnership model will keep its work going.

2011: It’s still not entirely clear how Huntsman will handle questions about his service as President Obama’s ambassador to China, but in that role, Huntsman pressed China on intellectual property questions and lent vocal support to artists and writers who have been powerful advocates for reform in China, declaring that the administration “will continue to speak up in defense of social activists, like Liu Xiaobo, Chen Guangcheng and now Ai Weiwei, who challenge the Chinese government to serve the public in all cases and at all times.”

Huntsman may hope to distance himself from fellow Mormon and presidential rival Mitt Romney as much as possible. But they’ve both thought about where art fits in government’s work, and both have recognized a role for government in art. If I were to guess, I’d predict Romney might tack more towards an eliminationist position on government support for the arts, but that’s more in keeping with his general approach to campaigning than anything I know about his specific convictions.

I have absolutely no idea what Russell T. Davies’ new project for Showtime is about other than that it’s called Cucumber and it’s about gay men, but I’m pretty much prepared to be excited about it on that basis alone. Davies can be wildly uneven, as I think Torchwood indicates (though tune in for Miracle Day, about which I will write much, much more tomorrow — it’s an astonishingly political show and very, very interesting). But Queer as Folk was a genuine accomplishment and a truly important creation, even if it became a more extensive franchise in the U.S. than the 10 episodes that aired in the U.K. Davies, of course, has gone on to create a lot of shows with gay and bisexual characters fairly seamlessly integrated into the mix, but if he’s planning to tackle a subsequent generation of gay life, Cucumber could be not just representationally useful, in that it’ll get more gay characters on screen, but important in a zeitgeisty kind of way, something that’s got a bit more pop than the portrayal of placid gay monogamy on Modern Family. And yeah, it’ll probably conflict with his Game of Thrones commitments, but man would I love to see some premium cable network find a great, juicy starring role to give Aidan Gillen — it’d be cool to see him reprise familiar territory more than a decade later.