I really can’t believe that Nevermind is 20 years old. I’ve mentioned that I grew up fairly oblivious about pop culture, but my cousin Eliza, bless her, hooked me up with a lot of Nirvana, Beck, and Hole, and Kurt Cobain was definitely the first rock star I ever admired, even if I didn’t really get the depth of what made him magnetic and tragic. But there’s no question that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” really informs how I consume culture, and who I am as a critic:

I always loved the juxtaposition of the way Cobain turns “I feel stupid and contagious / Here we are now, entertain us” into a reject’s rallying cry, and then the mumbling backing off of “Oh well, whatever, nevermind.” This isn’t straightforward revenge of the nerds stuff: there are steps forward and steps back, and defeats just when you need victories. I’m the worst at irony: too invested, and excited, and vulnerable.

GamePolitics points out this interesting discussion about whether video game designers should unionize, a question prompted by disputes over how the folks who helped develop L.A. Noire were treated during the six years the game was under development. Michael Pachter says they shouldn’t:

It’s a thoughtful analysis, but also one that I disagree with. I think Pachter is right that game development is not a punch-in, punch-out kind of job, that gamer developers and designers have more autonomy than people on assembly lines, that their workplaces are not necessarily places where you’re in danger of being maimed, and that if you’re in game development, you are almost certainly paid a solidly middle-class wage, and have the potential for future earnings from profit pools. And I think those facts lead Pachter (who describes himself as a Democrat) to a fairly common conclusion about the proper and limited role of unions:

I think unions are in business to protect workers from, I think, dangerous working conditions and unfair and predatory labor practices. So dangerous, yeah, if you work in a factory and you can lose a finger, then the union has to make sure you have steel-toed shoes and the right kind of gloves…if you work in a sweatshop where they’re hiring children and not paying a minimum wage, absolutely you need a union to make sure there are fair labor practices. We’re talking about a games industry where the average compensation is well above $60,000…I just don’t think people who make $100,000 need a lot of protection because they might have to work overtime…I think sports unions like the NBA and the NFL make no sense at all…Once you get up to a certain wage level, you’re charged with being able to take care of yourself, and if you can’t handle it, don’t work there.

A couple of thoughts. First, the idea that just because you’re well-paid for doing a job you like means you can’t be abused isn’t really true. The reason that players in the National Football League need a union is that even though average player salaries are higher than the average game developer’s salary, they’re not necessarily high enough to pay for long-term care if you get a traumatic brain injury and leave money behind for your family if you die young. You’re probably not going to get a traumatic brain injury working in game development, but you can get treated badly and pressured by your boss, you can get sick from working too many hours. Taking a good salary doesn’t mean trading in your right to dignity.

Second, I actually think issues like being included in credits (one of the issues Team Bondi developers had with the L.A. Noire project) are, for folks working in the artistic industry, worth going to the wall for in the same way wages, benefits, and workplace salaries. Having your name on your work is absolutely critical to your ability to secure future work. The Visual Effects Society has raised similar issues about the crediting (as well as taking on common problems like extended crunch times) of folks who do visual effects work for movies. This is the kind of thing that I think often is treated as if it’s not a core union issue, or that it’s lower-level, the kind of thing that can be dealt with by a guild, or an informal complaint.

This is a huge challenge for unions, right? If you’re fighting a rearguard action for your survival, it’s really easy to justify your existence by pointing to the hugely vulnerable people you protect from the most abusive employees. But that can be easily turned against unions to narrow the public’s sense of the appropriate space for unions to operate in: if Don Blankenship isn’t burying you in a collapsed coal mine while laughing maniacally, you don’t really need a union (and maybe not even then). If game developers (and I’d love to hear from those of you in comments who are among that number) don’t want union representation, that’s one thing. But that seems like it’s an issue for them to decide, rather than a category for analysts to suggest they don’t belong in.

Since we’re going to be reading a book about some of the ways faith is lived in America (and how that affects how deities spend their time on the continent), I thought it was worthwhile to pull in some actual facts on the state of American religion. So I called on my long-time friend and resident theologian Chris Ashley, a Ph.D. student at Union Theological Seminary who works on, among other things, the relationship of gay people to evangelical faith, and who is particularly qualified to comment on this particular subject because he carried Neil Gaiman’s luggage at one of the book signings on the American Gods tour. Denominationally, we differ on our preferences in monotheism, and our baseball teams (he is a benighted Cubs fan), but he’s a great guy (some of you have met him in comments) and I’m grateful to him for pulling this together.

By Chris Ashley

The premise of American Gods is plausible because everybody knows Americans are highly religious, especially when we’re compared to the world’s other wealthy and powerful nations. But how religious are we, exactly, and how is that landscape changing?

Americans overwhelmingly identify with some form or descendant of Christianity. As of 2007, the figure was about 79 percent. (All numbers, unless otherwise cited, are from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s Religious Landscape Survey.) Within Christianity, the three largest subgroups are evangelical Protestants (e.g. Southern Baptists, Pentecostals), Roman Catholics, and “mainline” Protestants (e.g. Methodists, Lutherans). Evangelicals are just over a quarter of the population, Catholics just under, and the mainline just under a fifth.

After Christians, the single largest religious group, and the fastest-growing one, is the unaffiliated, at just over 16 percent. This statistical construct includes avowed atheists and agnostics, as well as those who simply have no identification. The latter, some 12 percent of the United States as a whole, is larger than any single denomination other than the Catholics. There are approximately as many self-identified atheists as Jews or Mormons (1.6 percent for atheists; 1.7 percent for the others). The unaffiliated are a more exact cross-section of America than any other religious group, matching income and ethic proportions of the population as a whole very closely. Among other major world religions, there are about as many Buddhists as Muslims and slightly fewer Hindus (0.7 percent, 0.6 percent, 0.4 percent).
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Matt is, of course, correct to note the self-awareness fail that is the Republicans’ decision to psych themselves to cut a lot of social services by watching a) a movie about bank robbery, b) by a director who maxed out to Obama — Affleck spoke up today to note that he thought his recession drama, The Company Men, would be more appropriate viewing for the Republican Caucus. Dave Weigel has some joking suggestions for alternatives. Here are five serious ones:

1. Henry V‘s Saint Crispin’s Day speech is so obvious that I’m almost embarrassed to include it. But it’s an awesome whip speech, whether you’re riding into battle against the French, or telling people what you’ll do to them if they don’t vote with you. I mean, seriously, do you want to have these lines directed at you if you don’t get behind the Boehner plan? “He which hath no stomach to this fight, / Let him depart; his passport shall be made, / And crowns for convoy put into his purse / We would not die in that man’s company / That fears his fellowship to die with us.” Bonus points for insulting the manhood of cowards, dissing the constable of France, and for the debt-ceiling applicable “Come thou no more for ransom, gentle herald: / They shall have none.”:

Or, if you prefer your Shakespearean brutality in straight gangsta mode, go with Exeter rather than Harry:

2. Okay, so, the debt ceiling isn’t the dividing line between the Borg and humanity. But if you’re going to silence doubters, or haters, Captain Picard’s bust-plate-glass-then-take-a-stand move is an awesome formula:

3. It’s unfortunately not available as a clip, but Harry Dean Stanton’s “Credit is a sacred trust, it’s what our free society is founded on,” lecture seems appropriate. Might have to cut it off before the “I don’t want no commies in my car. No Christians either,” line, though.

4. Barack Obama is so totally the Sheriff of Nottingham, what with the taxing, and the employment of deeply unpleasant sorceresses. Allen West can play Azeem if he’s just aching to put a hurt on someone, and help lead the fight against increasing revenue as part of a deal. Also, serves to argue that you don’t have to be a rich industrialist to go Galt:

And of course, if we just watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for advice on raising rapidly approaching ceilings, especially one with spikes, we could solve this mess in a jiffy:

Okay, it’s not exactly The Office, but The Ministry looks pretty similar, and delightfully biting.

I usually say that the reason The Office should end is that Jim and Pam got together, solving the main problem of the show, and the rest of the characters are so mired in stasis that the show is kind of miserable to watch if it’s just constantly rehashing their foibles. But I also think The Office came to America at a time when pop culture was fairly comprehensively addressing the miseries of cubicle life in works that ranged from Office Space to Dilbert. While characters like Ryan, whose spectacular rise and flameout illustration the hollowness of corporate ambition, occasionally exist to illustrate larger issues, The Office primarily exists to remind watchers that their workdays and coworkers could be less bearable than they are.

The Ministry clearly is going to do that, too. Afghanistan may have very specific problems, but fights over office supplies are universal. But because the office in question is at the intersection of a bunch of larger questions, ranging from the competence of the military, to the blind eye toward drug trafficking, to government corruption, The Ministry looks like it’ll have a lot more bite than The Office ever did. It’s easy to treat something like corruption in Afghanistan as miasma, but I can’t imagine what it would be like to be idealistic and end up working in a totally dysfunctional government agency.

-People who are developing daytime talk shows: Anderson Cooper and Kevin Smith.

-The importance of geography, economics, and legal regulation to arts criticism.

-Debunking the myths of the 1961 baseball season.

-Wesley Snipes could have been Geordi La Forge, and boy would that have been strange.

-Because more brass in pop music is always a good thing, this is my track of the day:

I’m a big Kevin Fallon fan, but I’m appalled that he left Buffy the Vampire Slayer out of his analysis of television shows that had to deal with their core cast graduating from high school part of the way through the run. The Sunnydale seniors’ fight against the town’s mayor, who turns into a giant monster midway through his graduation speech to them, is one of the all-time best metaphors for both the dangers of the real world and the challenges of taking up the mantle of adulthood. As their parents run screaming from the scene, the entire graduating class, prepped by the Scooby Gang, take up arms against the demon, defending the people who have previously defended and sheltered them. It’s fantastic, but I guess it’s not a reusable solution — as dearly as I wish he would, and as much as that show pulls out anything and everything from the grab bag, Ryan Murphy is probably not going to have Lea Michele and Corey Monteith devoured by a beast of legend at the end of the next season of Glee.

But much more important is what comes after. Buffy‘s comfortable, as almost no shows are, with treating college as if it’s not the right option for all of its characters, without treating Xander, who doesn’t join Oz, Willow, and Buffy at UC-Sunnydale, as if he’s stupid. The show is honest about the fact that it takes him a while to land on his feet, but once he does, the show treats Xander’s work as a carpenter and construction crew leader with a lot of dignity — in a sense, the show is an inheritor to the mixed-class casts of classics like Cheers. Similarly, Season 6 of Buffy‘s a tough look at what it’s like to try to support a family without a college degree and without skills other than poking vampires with the pointy end of sharpened stakes. Obviously, episodes like “Doublemeat Palace,” in which Buffy works at a hamburger joint that turns out to be a ripoff of Soylent Green but with a demonic twist, are a bit overdramatic, but the show really respects Buffy’s frustration, her sense that because she was forced to drop out of school, she’s out of synch with everyone else in her life. The episode “As You Were,” where she imagines life with her ex-boyfriend Riley, who has moved on from her, and from Sunnydale, to a successful career and a fulfilling marriage, is one of the most emotionally realized and piercing hours in the show. And even Willow, the character who’s theoretically most on the right track, in college with a loving girlfriend, isn’t immune to addiction. I don’t love the Evil Willow storyline (though I do love that Xander gets to save the world), but it’s a useful reminder that people on all sorts of tracks have problems.

That commitment to showing that people do different things after high school but that there’s no guaranteed safe path to adulthood may be the most reliable way to go may be the smartest bet for high school shows (or college shows, like Community) that have to move their characters forward but want to keep the gang together to spin out emotional threads and comparisons. It’s easier to keep folks together in a town like Sunnydale or New York City than it will be in Dillon or Lima, but it’s not impossible.

Adam Serwer thinks that I’m wrong on Captain America: The First Avenger‘s optimism about American institutions because Peggy Carter, Cap’s girl, has been rejected elsewhere*:

Peggy Carter, Cap’s love interest, alludes to institutional sexism briefly in one of her first conversations with Steve Rogers, saying that she knows what it’s like to have “doors slammed in her face.” It’s easy to see how a similar scene could be constructed to explain the presence of Gabe Jones in Cap’s elite unit, something along the lines of Cap insisting that he be included because he knows what it’s like to have “doors slammed in his face,” alluding to his earlier conversation with Carter. That would be entirely in keeping with the narrative context of the movie itself, and even Cap’s character, without requiring a lengthy tangent on segregation in the armed forces during World War II.

My assumption was those doors were British ones — Peggy is, after all, a U.K. transplant to an American unit. And it’s true that Col. Chester Phillips can be skeptical of Peggy’s judgement out in the field as part of a larger skepticism of what Cap, who up until his arrival in Europe has been a war bond-shilling show pony, can actually accomplish that’s of military value. But she’s entirely accepted as a partner by Howard Stark and Dr. Abraham Erskine, and she gets to shuck that pencil skirt and put on some pants to fight Hydra on the ground. (Erskine’s top secret lab is guarded by a lady with a shotgun, too.)

In a sense, that fact that Peggy gets to hit the front lines and defend her man is just as cheery and dismissive of actual history as the suggestion that World War II units were racially integrated. Women in both the WACS and the WAVES were kept out of combat (something that actually occasioned prejudice from men who thought they’d be taken out of combat and sent to the front lines), and the WAVES were confined to the continental U.S. and Hawaii. The names of both units signaled that they were meant to be temporary units rather than to pave the way for women’s long-term service in the military. Somebody may have shut a door on Peggy Carter somewhere, but in Captain America, it sure wasn’t the U.S. Army.

*He also notes that the Marvel universe as a whole has some nicely skeptical storylines about the American government. This is indisputably true. But they have chosen a more optimistic story for their major movie venture, leaving Sony to produce the more pessimistic X-Men arc. That was all I meant.

I tend to be skeptical of strands of feminism that claim that if ladies were just in power wars would end, we’d renew Gaia, and all that jazz. That said, if Matthew Weiner promised me that Mad Men* would end up with Joan, Betty, and Peggy joining the same consciousness-raising group, figuring out that their relationships with the men of Sterling Cooper were shaped by broader assumptions about gender and power, and founded a collective where they raised their own food, raised kids their kids together, and supported themselves with their hit book, Our Ad Men, Ourselves, I might actually be tempted to watch it:

*I know, I know. I should give Mad Men another shot. I promise I will catch up before the next season starts.