Harold Meyerson’s upset by the prospect of a Chinese government-owned bank buying a stake in the Los Angeles Dodgers:

In their defense, the Chinese certainly have plenty of money to put into the team if they see fit. But if it was harder to root for the Dodgers under Murdoch than under the O’Malleys, and harder still under McCourt than under Murdoch, imagine rooting for a team owned by an authoritarian government that jails its citizens for organizing unions or worshiping the wrong gods, and depresses its currency to decimate what remains of American manufacturing.

Over the last 30 years, the financial whizzes who dominate this country have sold off our industry to China in return for some quick and huge returns, never mind that they were wiping out the American middle class in the process.

It’s too late to stop the sale of our industrial might, but the proposed sale of a team in which millions of fans have invested their dreams for decades may be the moment when Americans say they’ve had enough — that the claims of the many, which matter so little in the normal conduct of American big business, should at least this time outweigh the interests of the few (particularly when that “few” is really just Frank and Jamie).

I’m not sure I can get quite as irritated by this as Harold is. It’s not like the Dodgers would be the first team to be under corporate ownership, or even under foreign corporate ownership. The Seattle Mariners are owned by Nintendo of America, the Atlanta Braves are owned by Liberty Media, and the Toronto Blue Jays are owned by Rogers Media. Individual owners are entirely capable of doing noxious things. When Ted Turner owned the team, he tried to nickname a player with the same jersey number as one of his stations Channel as an effort in cross-promotion. In the National Football League, Dan Snyder is a poster child for both poor management of a franchise and general terrible person-ness. It’s a bit of an odd hierarchy that we prefer ownership by fabulously wealthy individual Americans to ownership by corporations to ownership by foreign corporations.

To paraphrase Annie Savoy, baseball may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time, but it’s also a big, big business. There have been long-standing efforts to spark interest in baseball in China after Mao’s ban on the sport expired, and in 2003, the Chinese government asked Major League Baseball for help—the league actually pays the coaches for China’s national baseball team. And if we’re going to treat baseball as a major symbol of American democracy (which may be a sentimental overstating of the case but none the less an appealing myth), maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to stoke Chinese interest and emotional in a quintessentially American game. Either way, the ownership of the Dodgers may be an important symbol, but it isn’t necessarily a substantive intrusion of corrupting capitalism and foreign influence into a game that’s already plenty impure.

The always-awesome Hugh Laurie (I am watching may way through Jeeves and Wooster right now, which makes me wish we had a stronger buttling tradition in America if only for the comedic value) is predictably correct on one of the major problems with American entertainment:

After parking, Laurie cut through the studio lot’s New York street set and discussed the differences between British and American TV. “I think good-looking people seldom make good television,” he said. “And American television studios almost concede before they start: ‘Well, it won’t be good, but at least it’ll be good-looking. We’ll have nice-looking girls in tight shirts with F.B.I. badges and fit-looking guys with lots of hair gel vaulting over things. So at least we’ll have achieved that base standard of entertainment.’ ” He shook his head. “I think that’s hugely misguided. The glory of American television is Dennis Franz.”

We often treat tropes like the Girl Who Takes Off Her Glasses and is Suddenly Miraculous as if they’re the product of bad writing, which frequently, they are. But they’re also a product of exceedingly lazy casting (and sometimes, bad wardrobing). A story about a woman who becomes more comfortable in her body and more sexually confident can be legitimately interesting and empowering if it’s presented in a plausible way rather than a cheap one — these kinds of stories are not inherently unengaging or irritating. And it’s just true that casts that are not filled with people who look different are more interesting to look at than those staffed with tiny variations on a single, established theme. Richard Belzer’s mix of goofy, menace, and vulnerability help make Det. John Munch so amiably, if minorly, immortal. Patricia Belcher is good at acting impatient, but her lidded eyes and wide line of a mouth also help her play perpetually exasperated.

My colleague Alex Seitz-Wald spent his vacation at the Telluride Film Festival in Telluride, Colorado. He’s been kind enough to file some dispatches — this review will be the first of several. -Alyssa

In a way, Into the Abyss, Werner Herzog’s new documentary about Death Row, is perfectly titled. It takes you down into a dark world without any clear lightness, redemption or purpose. Indeed, Herzog himself said before its premier here Friday that many of his films could be bear the title. But in trying to navigate such a wide berth around pounding the viewer over the head with a message about a subject that lends itself to Michael Moore-style didacticism, the film loses sight of the message entirely and ultimately says almost nothing.

The formula for semi-political documentaries dealing with emotionally difficult themes is pretty well established by now — devastate the audience with the severity and urgency of the problem, then give them just a little glimmer of hope at the end so they walk out of the theater wanting to take action, instead of just throwing their hands up and slouching towards the living room. The fantastic Bitter Seeds, a narrative doc about an epidemic of farmer suicides in India and the American biotech company behind it, which also premiered here, did this brilliantly by having the audience identify with the main character’s personal achievements, and setting those events against the larger public crisis.

But Into the Abyss leaves viewers without away forward, ending with the execution of its main character and no hope for reform of the cruel and absurd system the film is supposedly about. One could chalk this up to Herzog being Herzog, refusing to adhere to formula and striking out on his own, but the final act of the five act film is literally called “A glimmer of hope.”
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When I walked out of a screening of A Good Old Fashioned Orgy a couple of weeks ago, I was convinced I didn’t like the movie. The story about a group of friends who decide to hold an orgy to celebrate the end of their run of summers at a house in the Hamptons that’s being sold out from under them initially struck me as overly crude, yet another entry in Jason Sudeikis’ torpedoing of his own likability. But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since, and I think I’ve decided there’s something refreshing and vulnerable about this crude, funny little movie that’s continued my thinking about male fantasies.

There’s no question that A Good Old Fashioned Orgy is vulgar and sometimes bro-ish in a way that can be off-putting. It’s not really much fun to watch a grown man speculate about what it might be like to receive oral sex from a high school girl wearing what he assumes are snap game bracelets, musing that “I bet she unhinges her jaw like a python.” Similarly, treating a guy who worries about HPV as if he’s stupid to worry about cervical cancer because “you don’t have a cervix” or mocking a man who doesn’t mind a girlfriend with pubic hair as some kind of hippie seem like unfortunate instances of beating up on men for acting like decent human beings. And when one character tells the core cast at a “White Trash Party” they’re hosting “I don’t find the notion of mocking the American underclass as amusing as you and your friends do,” I was pretty much in agreement.

But there’s something intriguing about the central insecurity that drives the characters to the idea that an orgy is a good idea: a sense that folks in their late twenties and early thirties lost some of their sexual self-confidence to the AIDS crisis. “It scared the shit out of all of us,” Sudeikis’ character Eric explains, making the pitch for the orgy to his friends. “Kids these days are freaks. This is our chance to take back what’s been taken from us.” I don’t think that the advent of an age of safe sex and realistic concerns about sexually transmitted diseases is a tragedy—it’s precisely the opposite, of course. But an ideal world is one where people can balance responsibility with the ability to ask for what they want. I was talking to Jaime Weinman, the television critic at Maclean’s about this over the weekend, and he pointed out there’s a definitive decline in the number of lotharios on television in the late eighties and early nineties that’s been followed by a resurgence of the type in recent years. The characters in A Good Old Fashioned Orgy aren’t all men, and they’re not necessarily aspiring to be Sam Malone, but despite the crudeness of the movie’s first half, the second is actually reasonably sensitive and thoughtful about exploring the characters’ desires.
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This post contains spoilers through the Sept. 4 episode of True Blood.

I would abjure True Blood, just to honor what felt like one of the only decently-acted scenes in Sunday’s episode and this increasingly dreadful season, but I do feel an obligation to make it all the way to the end of this season, even if I never come back. So I’ll save going all teary-eyed-but-clear Alcide on Alan Ball until later in the month.

I did actually think that moment in the show was handled well, with some real emotional grounding and force. Alcide’s efforts to stay with Debbie have been one of the most consistently-rendered storylines this season, each time bringing Alcide closer and closer to his limits. First, he’s joining a new pack, even if he’s not particularly comfortable with the people in it, as a way to try to help Debbie stay clean. He’s resisting Sookie, even though she might be an easier partner. And he’s stood by Marcus up to the point when it became clear that his packmaster wasn’t man enough to do his own fighting, much less enough wolf. But Debbie’s infidelity, her role in stealing someone else’s child, are too much, and True Blood made us feel the force of Alcide’s ritual without explaining it into the ground.
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The bridge is yours.

-Which network do we think will be the first to offer Joe Arpaio his own show when he quits being sheriff?

-Are there too many 9/11 anniversary specials?

-Sometimes, thought experiments come to pass.

-Smartphones have a new security weakness: the Great Old Ones.

-The women of Wild Flag watch the clock:

I wrote back in May that I thought one of the core problems with Bones is that the show doesn’t know how to do a Big Bad — more specifically, the kind of Big Bad that would require the extended efforts and concentration of a bunch of highly trained and highly paid crime-fightin’ federal scientists who, as we know, actually have other day jobs. So I’m glad to see that the show is at least going to give that sort of effort another shot with a case that is set up to bring out big core emotions in everyone’s favorite ruggedly handsome teddy bear, Seeley Booth.

This season, the main target will be a hacker who, as a form of misguided activism, shuts down Defense Department communications systems, putting American troops deployed overseas in danger. Obviously this will make our good friend Booth apoplectic, particularly at a time when he’s coping with the stresses of being a new dad. But it also seems like a cleverer-than-usual way to strip some of the complications out of the Bradley Manning case so we can debate some of the issues suggested by it in more usefully abstract terms. We can, and should, and are having debates about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, detention conditions, and speedy trials all inspired by what we’ve learned of Manning and of how he’s been treated since he was caught leaking material to WikiLeaks.

But I think it’s worthwhile for pop culture to do some thinking about the circumstances under which we think it’s OK for people to break or bend the law, and I hope Bones will provide a scenario for discussing that by setting up a villain who is convinced what he’s doing is worth the collateral damage, and has clear malign intent. Our cop shows routinely condone the idea that it’s OK to use violence against suspects as long as the people who are employing violence as a tactic are a) officers of the court, b) have pure intentions, c) will feel bad about it afterwards. Bones spends a lot of time justifying Booth’s use of violence to protect Brennan and other members of the lab, usually when he has to kill a suspect or threaten someone who has made Brennan less safe. Our pop culture also suggests that we’re okay with aberrant and aberrational behavior if it’s in defense or service of family, and that we’re excited to sympathize with anti-heroes who employ violence fairly regularly as long as they’re quirky or relatable in some other way.

But mainstream shows and movies, not surprisingly, tend to treat people who betray the government or employ violence against state actors as if they’re insane, misguided as to the tactics that will be effective, or at minimum, totally deluded in their political beliefs. I’m not saying I sympathize with the decisions that Bill Ayers made when he joined the Weather Underground, or that U.S. should have ended the war in Vietnam on the grounds that Mark Rudd was outraged by it to the point of insensibility (the war was wrong for much sounder reasons) but I do think it’s a little strange that there’s a reluctance to acknowledge that the American government can make decisions can make people feel panicked and powerless and urgent. It would be worthwhile to have slightly more than zero television shows and movies that actually took the time to explore the root motivations of people who do powerfully anti-social things. And more than that, good storytelling should have villains actually test your resolve to side with the hero.

I’d been intrigued earlier in the year by the news that AMC was working on a reality show that would be set in the upper levels of the Department of Homeland Security, and feature Janet Napolitano as a key character. It struck me as a move that was basically insane for DHS, but that a partnership with AMC or a similar premium network probably offered the best chance at a show that was simultaneously substantive and entertaining. Now it seems that AMC’s decided not to move forward with an order of the show.

I’m not really surprised by this. As interesting as it would be to see what the decision-making process in a security-oriented agency actually looks like, as opposed to the fictional panics of 24 or even the more realistic inter-agency bickering of NCIS, there’s no way the show ever would have captured genuine candor by top officials. There’s no way we’re going to see Janet Napolitano getting stuck halfway up a mountain, Sarah Palin’s Alaska-style (even if past jaunty expressions while wielding a gun indicated she would be awesome if let off the chain), much less saying anything trenchant and genuinely interesting.

And there are two real-world political developments that made this already-improbable idea even less viable. First, as the immigration reform debate’s heated up again this summer, it would be hard to do the show without at least alluding to the administration’s review of pending deportation cases and thinking on larger structural changes to the administration system. And second, Rick Perry’s entrance into the race for the Republican presidential nomination, and ultimately the presidency, makes those issues particularly salient. If Obama’s going to have to run against a border state governor who served in the Air Force, that means his administration needs particular control over its messaging on immigration and security issues. And even if the department had script and final cut approval over the show, the simple fact of the show’s existence would have risked misinterpretation and censure. AMC may have made the decision to pull the plug on Inside DHS on its own, but if that’s the case, they made a good decision on the department’s behalf, and on behalf of the cause of entertainment.

This post contains spoilers through the Sept. 4 episode of Breaking Bad, “Hermanos.”

I’ve written in the past that Breaking Bad‘s attitude towards the war on drugs, which runs from neutral to positive, makes the show somewhat conservative. So it was interesting to see the show back up and give us an origin story of Gus’ rise in the drug trade at the same time that it’s arguing that the Drug Enforcement Agency is bought off, unable to properly investigate the threat that he poses to them.

After he aces his interview with the DEA and the Albuquerque Police Department, organizations that are already inclined to believe him because of his record as a strong record as a supporter of law enforcement, not withstanding Hank’s trick question that “there’s no record of Gustavo Fring ever having existed in Chile, which I find strange,” Gus is essentially off the hook as a suspect. But Hank continues to track him even though as Mike explains, “from what I hear he’d be committing career suicide,” that without the backing of an agency, Hank’s little more than “Miss Daisy with binoculars” and Walt as his driver. Certainly the outward message is one of, if not the outright corruption of the DEA, its weakness and inability to think creatively and to see what’s in front of it. But is the deeper message that even though Hank is chasing the right man in Albuquerque, even he can’t see the larger picture?

It’s fascinating to see a young, vulnerable Gus pitching meth to Don Eladio, the man who apparently holds the end of the string that’s tied around Don Salamanca’s trigger finger. “This product is the drug of the future,” he rhapsodizes, explaining that’s why he’s been handing out samples to Eladio’s thugs in hopes of scoring a meeting. Instead, his entrepreneurialism gets his partner shot as the man desperately tries to defend Gus, his monologue a parallel of Walt’s constant entreaties on Jesse’s behalf. “The only reason you are alive and he is not is that I know who you are,” Eladio tells him, which raises an interesting question about what lessons Gus learned from that fatal meeting. Clearly, he didn’t stick to chicken, and the cartel followed his lead. But did Gus find out that cooks are dispensable? That protecting your partner can only get you killed? Or that if you’ve got two men making a business proposition, you do your research and then split the difference?

It’s still not a deeply-developed dynamic, but this is as close to an organizational critique of the drug trade and the people who chase it as Breaking Bad‘s come. It’s hard for men to escape the grip of organizations, to live as islands. Gus and Hank might have been able to play a cat and mouse game in another era, another moment in the West. But it’s not clear they’ll be able to do it now.