Reading through President Obama’s proposed budget for fiscal 2013, with a few exceptions, it looks to be a decent year for government support for the arts:

-The administration plans to achieve $25 million in savings by consolidating the Education Department’s arts education programs under a larger umbrella.

-A slight increase in the funding request for the National Endowment for the Arts. For fiscal year 2012, President Obama had asked for $146 million for the NEA, down from $168 in fiscal 2011. This year, he’s requesting $154 million for fiscal 2013, a small increase.

-A similar increase for the National Endowment for the Humanities, from $146 million in fiscal 2012 to a $154 million request for fiscal 2013.

-A $24 million increase in the funding request for the Smithsonian Institution, from $636 million for fiscal 2012 to $660 million for fiscal 2013.

-Continued funding in the amount of $85 million for the construction of the National Museum of African American History and Culture as part of a $186 appropriation for facilities planning, construction, and revitalization of Smithsonian Institution facilities.

-A slight downward tick in funding for the operations of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, from $23,200,000 in fiscal 2012 to $22,379,000 in fiscal 2013.

-A $6 million increase for the National Galleries of Art, from $114 million to $120 million.

Now, just because Obama is asking doesn’t mean he shall receive—that certainly hasn’t been the case in the past. But it’s nice to see the President treat long-term investment in the arts as a worthwhile cause. It’d be a real shame in particular if we lost the chance to get the National Museum of African American History and Culture during the first term of the first African-American president.

This post contains spoilers through the February 12 episode of Downton Abbey.

As part of the ongoing debate over Downton obsession, Reihan Salam’s theorized that we like the show because it gives us elites who have higher aspirations than the ones we’ve got today. After this episode, I’d amend that somewhat and suggest that Downton Abbey is satisfying because it puts characters who seem to have earned reprimands in their place through the lens of class. The show actually exploits our ingrained class prejudices by aligning them with character development.

Take Thomas, for example. I am not any particular fan of everyone’s manipulative gay former servant, but I thought what happened to him this week was genuinely tragic. I’m with O’Brien that going into the black market is an awfully risky move, but I sympathize with Thomas to a certain extent. What legitimate enterprise would let him get to a place where “I should have enough to go into business properly”? As progressives, our instincts should be to support Thomas in his attempts to rise above a position he believes he’s too clever for—something he may have legitimately proved in his management of Downton Abbey during its period as a convalescent home. When he finds out “I been tricked. I been had. I been taken for the fool that I am,” that ought to be a moment of profound sympathy. Because Thomas has never been given the tools to make his way in legitimate business, he’s particularly vulnerable to such deception. And yet, the show suggests that having concrete ambitions just made Thomas worse. “You made such a point of not being a servant anymore, our ears are ringing with it,” Carson grouses, when Thomas asks if he can stay longer at Downtown. His redemption comes when Carson is felled by Spanish flu, and Thomas takes up his duties, acting as—and retreating into the role of—the perfect servant. The show provides a double message: service is Thomas’s place both because he’s born to it and not to anything else, and because he’s been awful in the past it’s proper penance.

And while I don’t think it’s as overt—or perhaps even as intentional—there are more examples of that kind of setting people back in their proper position, but in a way that suggests it’s more the result of their character than the constrictions of class. Ethel, after busting her way into lunch with the grandparents of her child, can’t come to an accommodation with them that would allow her to stay in her son’s life while also getting financial support for him from them. Cora falls ill with Spanish Flu shortly after she announces she’s going to help Isobel out with her refugee project. Anna stands up for herself with Mr. Bates, telling him “If she can do it, so can we. I have stood by you through thick and thin. Mr. Bates, if we have to face this, than we will face this as huband and wife. I will not be moved to the sidelines..denied the right even to be kept informed. I will be your next of kin. You will not deny me this.” But she’s rewarded for her persistence by seeing her newly-minted husband hauled off to jail. Lavinia, who’s always been more of a plot device than an actual person, is dispatched in a properly ladylike fashion, dying of a broken heart.

The only people who are allowed to transcend class boundaries are Branson and Sybil. And then he’s allowed to move one step up, from chauffer to journalist, a limitation in keeping with our sense that he’s a bit pushy, while she’s required to move many steps down—Lord Grantham is clear that he’ll only help them a little. Because we wouldn’t want to incentivize nobly born young ladies to embrace the idea that things are better when they’re independent and have meaningful things to do with their lives, or as Sybil puts it, ” I don’t want to get used to it. I know what it is to work, to have a full day, and be tired in a good way,” now would we? Violet’s explanation at the end that “The aristocracy have not survived by their intransigence,” and the solution that follows, is the epitome of Downton Abbey’s politics: Branson can be ennobled in character, but not in substance. The nobility may change styles, but their grip on their privilege remains quite firm, thank you.

The first half of Atlas Shrugged did not exactly demonstrate that there is a giant untapped pool of Objectivists, or at least, people who are so bought into the dream of business success that they’re valorizing withdrawal from society, who are not being served by the entertainment industry. And the ads for the second half of the movie, due to come out around Election Day this year, don’t seem to be doing much new to turn on that audience, if it in fact exists, or failing that, preaching to the unconverted to make a buck:

Ultimately, there’s just a limit to the extent to which you can get people to consume entertainment by telling them that it’s good for them. It was true for Red Tails, which did only okay box office—it hasn’t paid off its production costs, much less started eating into its advertising budget. And I think it’s true here, too. I will probably go see Act of Valor, that movie starring a bunch of Navy SEALs that’s being hyped by conservatives as the second coming because the action sequences look reasonably cool, I’m curious about how the non-actors will turn out, and it’s February, people—it’s this or The Vow. But it would be very, very heavy lifting to get me to see Atlas Shrugged were it not for my professional interest in it, and telling me that it supports things that are an anathama to me are not a way to get me into the theater and maybe have my mind changed.

This goes back again to that eternal question of whether you trust your values to be compelling. Conservatives, I think, tend not to trust that their values are going to win out in the wider market. There’s a reason you see niche releases of heavily Christian movies while a company like Walden Media focuses on something like the Narnia adaptations, which clothe Christian values in a heavy coat of familiar fantasy storytelling, a tactic that lets the faithful tune in for a reaffirmation of their faith while letting everyone else get excited about Tilda Swinton dressed up in a variety of special effects. It’s a bait and switch that lets some audiences ignore the message rather than making it go down easier.

Something like Avatar, by contrast, is much more confident. All of the special effects in the movie are aimed at making the Na’vi look cool—gorgeous trees! flying dinosaurs!—and amping up the danger posed by the RDA Corporation, whether by giving them bigger, badder earth-moving equipment or fighting exoskeletons. Now, James Cameron is not exactly a retiring or insecure filmmaker, but I appreciated that the movie didn’t really give viewers an out. Even if you didn’t walk out of the movie a committed environmentalist, for the couple of hours you spent in the theater, it was totally clear who the villains were and why they were so destructive.

And I think that contrast is why you often see a conservative response to media that’s oriented towards shutting things down. What happens if straight folks play as gay characters in video games and then, in evidence that gayness isn’t catching or corrosive, return happily to their real-life relationships? What happens if kids hear a single brief obscenity on a television broadcast, or see a human nipple, and return to their lives unscarred? Conservatives don’t want these test cases because they don’t want to see the results, which would suggest that the narratives they’re selling aren’t compelling or coherent. Similarly, sticking with a niche market isn’t proof that you’re oppressed—if Mel Gibson can turn torture porn like The Passion of the Christ into a hit, it ought to be easier to sell things that aren’t so much with the anti-Semitism and the public beatings—it’s a sign you’re not confident enough to venture out and sell people on the quality of your narrative.

Stay classy, Sony. According to the Guardian, after Whitney Houston’s death, her label raised the price of at least one of her albums to take advantage of the immediate spike in sales:

The music giant is understood to have lifted the wholesale price of Houston’s greatest hits album, The Ultimate Collection, at about 4am California time on Sunday. This meant that the iTunes retail price of the album automatically increased from £4.99 to £7.99. Houston’s The Ultimate Collection, originally released in 1997, was the second top-selling album on iTunes on Monday morning. Apple returned the album to its original price late on Sunday.

It seems like it ought to have been enough for Sony to privately enjoy the revitalization of an album from its back catalogue: Houston was years away from her peak selling potential at the time of her death, which sent The Ultimate Collection to the top of the iTunes charts. A move like this may be strategic from a business perspective, but it looks impressively greedy. Given how hard the content industry is pushing to sell the public on the idea that they’re only acting in the best interests of creators in pushing for stronger copyright protections, profiting off a dead artist is decidedly off-message.

If you’re not watching Key & Peele, the half-hour sketch-and-standup show that airs on Comedy Central at 10:30PM on Tuesdays, you’re doing yourself a disservice—particularly if you find yourself missing Chapelle’s Show, Dave Chapelle’s short-lived but legendary exploration of race in America. Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, both biracial themselves, have nailed comedy for the age of Obama. It’s not just that Peele has the best Obama impression in the business. In their exploration of code-switching, whether it’s in conversations between black people and white people, men and woman, or people of different classes, Key and Peele have identified an essential element of our changing American landscape. I spoke with both men last week. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

One of the things I’ve found interesting about many of your jokes is the way they explore code-switching. It’s not just that you find the humor in the way that people of color adapt to white society, but a lot of these sketches suggest that white people need to learn to switch codes, too.

Keegan; It’s funny, we were just talking about that recently. I think that this climate we’re in nowadays, code-switching can be thought of as a positive. Being a hybrid is not necessarily something to hide, but something to celebrate. Code-switching, depending on the code, is something that happens in humanity. We shine a light on it in African-American culture more than anything else. But we have Caucasian friends who are from Arkansas or Alabama, and all of sudden, there was a twang explosion. And it’s a phenomenon that exist in the human condition…It’s very Pauline in a way. I’m a big fan of Paul in that regard. It doesn’t matter if you’re Sippian, or Greek, or Hebrew, I’m giong to speak to you where you’re at without judgement…One of our executive producers, he always says, we spend our existence as organisms trying to stay comfortable. And I thought that was very astute…The hardest thing in the world is to step out of our box or let our unique light shine.

You mentioned that you’re a fan of Paul. What are your religious backgrounds?

Keegan: I’m actually quite a spiritual Christian. I’m fascinated by spiritual thought across the board. I was raised a Christian, and I studied a little Buddhism and maybe a dash of Hinduism, but i’m fascinated by Hebraic culture, and how our culture has been informed by Hebraic culture. I’m fascinated by the fact that we practice a Near-Eastern religion in a super-Western society, and how our faith has changed. There are volumes of books written about how if you met a Christian from first-century Palestine, you’d say, um, that’s not a Christian. I was raised Catholic, and then I spent a good deal of time in the Charismatic church, and now I’m in the Disciples of Christ.

Jordan: I am not [religious]. I feel just very devoted to comedy. And I believe that is the way that I’m meant to take in the world, and that’s the way I’m meant to affect the world as well.

Keegan: Do you think that your gift is something that is divine? Or do you think it’s something that just through life and evolution you’ve become the being you are through nurture.

Jordan: I think that when somebody laughs, genuinely laughs, that something is happening within them that is special. I think it’s a revelatory thing. If you can laugh despite yourself, you can get into a giggling fit at a funeral of a loved one for some reason. It’s something that needs to happen for our minds, or our souls, emotionally, it’s a release. it forges the conversation. When something happens in comedy that sort of strikes a chord, [people] talk about it. I’m a big fan of discussion. I think it’s the best thing that we have for ourselves. I think comedy is just a special, special thing. It’s our favorite thing to do in the world.
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The bridge is yours.

-Those adorable Chipotle pigs appear to be the real big winners of the Grammys.

-Any day with more Andre 3000 in it is a good day.

-Is NBC to the ’10s what CBS was to the ’90s?

-If you like my blog and boats, you should read Robert Farley’s new series on seapower in culture!

-Oh Kirk Cameron. I miss the wackiness of Listen to Me in comparison to this:

Anthony Paletta has an interesting, though I think not wholly convincing, essay in National Review arguing that liberals don’t like vigilante movies because we don’t want to see people use force on criminals:

What, then, is the problem? A closer look at these criticisms seems to suggest that a core objection is to the justification of any violence against criminals, or the presentation as crime as something without empathetic roots. It’s one thing to point out that some villains in these films are cartoonishly evil; it’s another to object that this portrait lends undue justification to violence. Vincent Canby, after sneering at the simplistic portrait of criminals in Death Wish, notes that it “sometimes succeeds in arousing the most primitive kind of anger.” Christopher Orr, in his The Brave One review, tires of the usual litany of “Big Apple baddies” and says that the film “unambiguously endorses vigilante killings.” The principal objection, in each case, seems not aesthetic, but moral; the offense is to create one-dimensional criminals that one need not regret seeing handled with summary force, with nary a glance at their broken homes, or hungry children, or kindness to animals. It’s tut-tutting not unlike wondering just how many maidens are actually tied to railroad tracks by top-hatted brutes each year, and whether this really justifies sending them over waterfalls without due efforts at rehabilitation and legal counsel.

I do think that the liberal and conservative approaches to criminal justice are different. But artistically, there’s something else going on here. Vigilante movies and television shows tend to lay out a solution to a problem: criminals are punks who need executing or something short of it, and if only our police officers could act in accordance with our emotional revulsion, we’d clean up our streets in a hurry; or, if only men were men, punks who want to rape and torture women would get a nasty surprise; or whatever variant of the week you prefer. Such a worldview seems to assume that crime is inevitable and can only be dealt with after the fact and through deterrence.

Anti-hero stories tend to be ways of explicating problems, rather than offering solutions. Futzing around with criminals’ backstories is an act of sympathy, but it’s also an attempt to figure out why crime happens in the first place and to consider whether we could have prevented it. Breaking Bad isn’t an argument that we should tolerate Walter White being a dreadful human being who sells drugs, watches people die of overdoses, misleads his family, and induces old men to act as suicide bombers. It’s a question about whether if Walter White had adequate health care coverage, a decent pension, and life insurance, he’d have done terrible things anyway, or if he’s a small, angry man who turns to evil because he wants to be recognized by the universe. The Wire isn’t a story about how we should substitute Inspectors General for putting Omar Little in the witness stand and being generally amusing. It’s an explication of how ridiculously difficult it is to build a safety net and put the right incentives in place to help people keep from using drugs and to encourage them to work legitimate but less-remunerative and less-reliable jobs and to build legitimate businesses. It’s a simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic perspective on crime: a belief that we can stop it before it starts, but that it’s very, very hard to do so and requires considerable investment.

I also think Paletta underestimates the extent to which vigilante fantasies are really fantasies when it comes to cops who use more force than their departments want them to. We’ve got a vigorous public debate going about the right to videotape incidents of the police using force on suspects precisely because the police use considerable force on suspects in public often enough to be uncomfortable about having it documented. In the 1990s, police brutality cases were expensive enough to spark a debate about whether they were worth the bite they took out of city budgets when the money could have gone towards hiring more beat cops. People who want to be entertained by the prospect of an unfettered police force battering criminals into submission can find plenty of real-life examples.

At the end of the second season of Homeland, Showtime’s compelling drama about a Marine who had become a terrorist and the bipolar CIA agent desperately trying to stop him, two significant questions remained. First, how could Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), whose obsessive pursuit of former prisoner of war Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) had gotten her drummed out of the CIA and sent her to memory-erasing electroshock therapy, continue to investigate him without the resources of her office or the memory of her prior research? After his attempt to detonate a suicide vest failed, will Nicholas Brody continue to run for Congress? And if so, what role will Abu Nazir, the man who held him prisoner, converted him to Islam, and convinced him to become a terrorist, play in Brody’s run?

Some second-season casting news could clarify both of those plot points: David Marciano, who plays Virgil, Carrie’s friend and assistant in some of her freelance investigations, and Navid Negahban, who plays Abu Nazir, have both been upped from recurring roles to series regulars.

When I talked to Marciano during Homeland‘s first season, he emphasized how close Carrie and Virgil are, especially given that Carrie’s mentor, Saul, turned Virgil down for a CIA job:

Virgil was an outsider as a kid. And he grew up in a neighborhood in New Jersey where it was brawn over brains, and Virgil was a little bit of a tech nerd. And he was a brainiac and he had a sharp tongue, and you take a few beatings. You take a few shots to the ego and shots to your manhood, so to speak. And therefore, when you get older, you want to take care of people who are being abused or being ostracized. So it makes sense that Virgil would look after [Carrie], because she is an outsider, she is an outsider in this community. Also, everyone had someone to answer to. Saul has to answer to someone. Estes has to answer to answer to someone. Virgil has her back. Virgil’s going to look after her and take care of her. He doesn’t want what happened to him to happen to her.

Given that dynamic, it’ll be interesting to see what happens now that Carrie and Virgil are both outsiders, and both have things to prove to a CIA that rejected them. Will Virgil be a voice of moderation as Carrie recovers from the dual shocks of her medical procedure and her firing? Or will the two of them, freed from the constraints of needing to avoid getting Carrie fired, push the boundaries even further?

Similarly, while we don’t know what role Abu Nazir will play in Brody’s life now, the fact that he’ll be a full cast member means he’s not going away—far from it. It will be fascinating to see if he and Brody come up with a new plan, or if Brody resists Nazir. Whatever the dynamic is, I think the idea of a prominent American and a prominent terrorist in ongoing conversation is a wildly thought-provoking, if totally unrealistic scenario. We assume that there can be no conversation with the people who hate us. But it’s certainly intriguing to imagine what those conversations would look like if they happened at all.

When rapper Nicki Minaj took the stage towards the end of last night’s Grammy Awards, she delivered a performance that must have been long in the making. Channeling The Exorcist, flanked by faux-stained glass windows, and accompanied by a troupe of dancers dressed as members of the Catholic clergy, it was far and away the most outrageous spectacle in a night that featured a series of stripped-down performances, particularly in tribute to the late singer Whitney Houston who passed away on Saturday. Watch it:

The routine would have made headlines at any time—Minaj, a talented rapper, might have been dinged in another year for stealing a page from Madonna’s Catholic-tweaking playbook. But Minaj’s performance capped off a week when the Catholic heirarchy was elevated in the media in a way it hasn’t been in years after President Obama announced, and then amended, a rule that would have required religious organizations to offer insurance that covered contraceptives to their employees. And as a result, Minaj is likely to get more than the usual media buzz out of her appearance on the red carpet with a man dressed like the Pope and her turn as a victim of demonic possession, and Catholics have yet another piece of evidence that they’re targets.

But on closer examination, it’s hard to see Minaj’s performance of “Roman Holiday” as particularly sacrilegious—and even harder to see it as a progressive jab at the church. Roman, the alter ego Nicki takes on in a number of her songs, and who she was claiming to exorcise tonight, is supposed to be a gay man. And the performance, which was not exceptionally salacious as these things go, could be interpreted at minimum as suggesting that demonic possession is real, and at most, that gayness is something that can be driven out of a person with the appropriate spiritual intervention (it’s not entirely clear that said intervention worked on the Grammy stage). Minaj occupies an interesting space in hip-hop: she’s appeared on the cover of Out, and been coy about her sexual orientation and deployment of her Roman persona in a way that’s allowed her to build a strong following among LGBT hip-hop fans, who are not exactly rolling in out artists to support. But it says something about the complexities of that position that Minaj may have simultaneously embodied a gay man last night, and suggested that you can pray away the gay.