The idea that shape-shifting lizards from Alpha Draconis are secretly controlling humanity is not precisely a new conspiracy theory, or even new to American politics. Louis C.K. once asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to confirm or deny that he was actually a lizard:

A ballot in the Senate race between now-Sen. Al Franken and then-incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman was challenged when the man who cast it, Lucas Davenport, wrote in “Lizard People” as a candidate. But it’s one that gains new resonance with the word that Jamie Weinstein, a senior editor at the conservative website the Daily Caller and his colleague Will Rahn, the DC deputy editor, are publishing The Lizard King: The Shocking Inside Account of Obama’s True Intergalactic Ambitions by an Anonymous White House Staffer.

If it was written by anyone else, the idea that President Obama is actually a 12-foot tall reptile would be a genius satire of the conspiracies theories that argue Obama is everything from a secret Muslim to an obvious socialist driven by an anti-colonialist agenda. It may be easier to suggest the latter than to prove that Obama is not actually human (maybe he’s a Skrull instead), but possessing either theory says vastly more about the person who is desperate to see Obama as a deceptive enemy of the American public than Obama himself. But instead, The Lizard King will be coming to us people from a publication that’s consistently peddled misinformation about the Obama administration, even if they were never sufficiently possessed of the chutzpah and tabloid drive to sales to suggest that the president is an alien from outer space. That’s really too bad, because a killer satire of those conspiracies would be a real tonic for our current political climate. Maybe Weinstein and Rahn will rise to the occasion. But this seems more like a jab the people who, rightly, deny that Obama is a conspiratorial enemy of freedom, than the people who spin wild fantasies about him.

Someone knows how to get my attention with a meme:

That said, the entire Tumblr this poster is from, RomCom 2012, is brilliant both as a deconstruction of Romney’s troubles on the campaign trail and of romantic comedies. Romney’s essential unlikability is the core liability of his campaign in the same way that romantic comedies always start with a man and a woman who dislike each other for some reason. In screwball comedies, it’s often because the guy is a sap, like beer heir in The Lady Eve, or the naive movie producer in Sullivan’s Travels. In contemporary romantic comedies, it’s often because the guy is a man-child, as in Apatown movies like Knocked Up or Forgetting Sarah Marshall, or hiding his essential decency behind a facade of distaste for women like the misogynistic radio hosts epitomized by Gerard Butler in The Ugly Truth. The movie turns when the woman involved discovers that the sap is sweet, the man-boy is capable of growing up, the woman-hater is wounded. In Definitely, Maybe, a man who switches identities along with girlfriends figures out what kind of man he wants to be, and which woman he wants to be with. That’s a dilemma that should land with analysts who have watched Romney run for president over the last two cycles.

And Mitt Romney’s problems reveal both the problem with his candidacy and the weakness of romantic comedies. Some guys are never going to shuck off the nerdy professor aura and be miraculously attractive to women. Some man-boys are not going to be suddenly inspired, and find it easy to assume a semblance of adulthood. Some guys genuinely hate women. And some candidates are genuinely stiff rich guys who, at 65, are not going to spontaneously develop a capacity for empathy or an understanding of what it is to struggle.

The bridge is yours.

-Crazy Salad is coming back into print, and everything is wonderful.

-Part of what apparently once made Mitt Romney an eligible bachelor was that he painted watercolors.

-Lacey Rose’s big story on Modern Family is really good.

-It’s amazing it took this long for tech companies to form a big Washington association.

-Ahhh, teen Southern Gothic:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a recent speech about Burma’s democracy movement, noted that a leader in the struggle once told her that the country’s activists were educating themselves about the way democratic governments work by watching The West Wing:

All of which got me thinking: what lessons are the political shows we’re airing now teaching people about democracy, American or otherwise?

1. Yelling safeguards the health of the political culture (The Newsroom): America may be the greatest country in the world thanks to an intern Will McAvoy shouted down in the season premiere of Aaron Sorkin’s latest and hired in the finale. But stupid is universal, as is the need to speak truth to it. Hopefully other free journalists in newly-minted democracies will spend their time hollering at actual people in power instead of beauty queens.

2. Niceness and integrity can win the day if you work very, very hard, and your opponent is a transparent idiot (Parks and Recreation): If we want to export democracy, can we mail a lot of Parks and Rec DVDs overseas? Leslie Knope may handle sister city delegations poorly—Viva Mayor Walter Gunderson!—but if she can take down the Man From Sweetums (or Glee‘s Burt Hummel can beat Sue Sylvester’s dirty campaign), maybe upstanding candidates fighting against the tide in corrupted elections everywhere can have a chance.

3. If niceness fails, kitchen sink disposals handle human ears nicely (Boss): Mayor Tom Kane is a Chicago strongman, a reminder that elections can become formalities when you couple machines with a lack of term limits. He’s a useful warning that sometimes the strength of democracy is its inefficiency, and the desire the bulldoze through the process for the sake of getting things done can be an awfully dangerous compulsion, one you can’t indulge once and walk away from.

4. If you’re a sucker for demagoguery, sometimes you get the jerks you deserve (Homeland): William Walden (Jamey Sheridan), the vice president Nicholas Brody almost assassinated in the finale of the first season of Showtime’s Homeland is a blowhard, but an effective one. He’s very good at talking tough about the threat of terrorism, and he’s rising towards the presidency on the strength of his pedantic oratory. And he’s a warning about following the person who makes you feel best, rather than the person who has the best to offer you.

5. Even the lead of the free world can be a sentimental idiot (1600 Penn): This horrendously awful sitcom from Jon Lovett, who used to write speeches for President Obama, starts airing on NBC in January. On a meta level, it’s a reminder that the people behind democratically elected leaders aren’t always visionaries who are upholding the highest ideals of their political systems. And the show itself, about a President who can’t resist indulging his dumb, frat-boy son, is a cautionary tale against seeing the people who represent the people as avatars of the ideals we invest in them.

Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, which won this year’s Orange Prize for fiction, is a retelling of a very old story, the rise of the Greek warrior Achilles to immortality through his feats at Troy. Its innovation, however, is that the person who tells the story is Achilles’ companion Patroclus, a shadow by the hearth of myth, and to make the love story between the two young men explicit rather than inferred. Miller does a magnificent job of balancing antiquity and a sense of the modern. And in doing so, her novel highlights some of the profound limitations contemporary storytelling about LGBT people and relationships between people of the same gender has placed on itself.

In response to decades of popular culture that framed same-sex desire as a condition that could only lead to isolation, misery, and death, movies, television, books, even music videos responded with narratives that framed homophobia, whether externalized or internalized, as a powerful and deadly force, and a significant driver of stories. While the stories have been powerful tools in changing attitudes—Vice President Biden cited Will and Grace as a factor in changing his mind about equal marriage rights—they have something in common with the stories they pushed back against: both sets of stories treat homosexuality as a source of problems. As we imagine a future destination for gay-friendly popular culture, in other words, maybe what we should be dreaming of is stories that look like those from the distant past Miller summons back into existence, rather than anything from the recent past.

In The Song of Achilles, Achilles and Patroclus’s relationship is doomed not because they are men and love each other, but because their relationship is tied up in the warp and weft of history and the forging of legend. Throughout the novel, their relationship is presented as erotically emotionally fulfilling, and both men fight for their relationship and live it in public as a point of pride. Achilles claims Patroclus as his husband. Warned that in Troy, their relationship could cause comment because they are beyond the age when Greek boys stop having sex with each other and begin having sex with women, they choose to live publicly together anyway. They don’t even necessarily break because Patroclus is mortal and Achilles is half-human and half-god. Patroclus summons his courage to insist to Thetis, Achilles’ divine mother, that he is a worthy lover of her son, and ultimately, she comes to believe him. Ultimately, their love founders because Achilles ultimately chooses his fame over their relationship.

It’s a vision Patroclus sees early in his arguments with Thetis, who urges Achilles to come with her, away from his human father and his education. “She would feed him with the food of the gods and burn his human blood from his veins,” Patroclus worries. “She would shape him into a figure meant to be painted on vases, to be sung of in songs, to fight against Troy. I imagined him in black armor, a dark helmet that left him nothing but eyes, bronze greaves that covered his feet. He stands with a spear in each hand and does not know me.” In Troy, Achilles slowly becomes the sum of his fame. Walking through the camp and realizing that Patroclus knows many more of the men than he does, Achilles tells Patroclus “There are too many of them…It’s simpler if they just remember me.” And when he and Agamemnon clash, it becomes clear that Achilles is in love with the promise of his legend as much as Patroclus. “‘My life is my reputation,’ he says. His breath sounds ragged. ‘It is all I have. I will not live much longer. Memory is all I can hope for.’ He swallows, thickly. ‘You know this. And would you let Agamemnon destroy it? Would you help him take it from me?’” Their tragedy is Achilles’ romance with his own death, a self-destructive, immortalizing urge that has nothing to do with self-hatred over his love for Patroclus.

It’s exactly the kind of story that we need more of: depictions of relationships between men and women as sources of passion, emotional support, and pride that serve as the basis for characters who have other entanglements with the world, other triumphs, other tragedies. This is not to say that we should eliminate stories about the power of homophobia, given that it remains a powerful force in American society and the world at large. Coming out, self-hatred, family rejection or surprising family acceptance, and displays of societal homophobia, from verbal intolerance to violence, are both reliable dramatic fulcrums, and powerful mobilizing tools against hateful attitudes. And making those experiences central to gay characters’ identities and story arcs is also a way of acknowledging that straight audiences, when encountering gay characters, may foreground those characters’ sexual orientations, and may have as their central experience of those characters either grappling with their lingering assumptions about LGBT people or congratulating themselves for embracing characters wholeheartedly, even if the fictional people in those characters’ lives do not.

But if the only thing gay characters are allowed to do is be a vehicle for straight people’s revelations, or for conversations about the state of society, we’re replacing stereotypes with sainthood and the burden of social utility. And after a while, if the only or biggest problems characters have stem from the fact that they aren’t heterosexual, the lingering collective message is that homosexuality or bisexuality are a problem, even if one of society’s making and to society’s shame. It may be an inversion of old Hollywood narratives that portrayed gayness as a reason to be depressed, miserable, or suicidal. But it’s still a striking limitation to place on characters if the goal of such shows is to defy cramped visions of gay life and to present gay characters as fully human. Joy matters. As Daniel Mendelsohn writes in a piece for the most recent issue of Out about growing up without gay television, “Who hasn’t learned how to kiss from the movies? What I was desperate to see in the mid-’70s, when I was 14 and 15 and 16, was precisely what the pop culture wasn’t ready to show me — the images that all my straight friends had been casually absorbing all along: what desire and sex, kissing and lovemaking, happy coupling actually looked like.” What we need is not to render homophobia invisible, and swap one dominant narrative for another, but more stories overall, and more diversity in their narratives.
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It’s less amazing to me that Elizabeth Hurley pitched these bikinis as appropriate for girls as young as age 8 than it is that there are enough parents who would put their kids in the suits to make them marketable:

As of this writing, Hurley’s site supporting her swimwear line appears to be down, presumably crashed by the volume of response to these and other items in the line. But according to Huffington Post, the copy for the pink swimsuit described it as “for girls [ages 8-13] who want to look grown up.” But the thing about little girls who play dress-up is that the way they go about it often emphasizes their lack of sexual maturity (and to a certain extent, the artifice of womanhood), be it the hilariously ill-fitting shoes they purloin from their mother’s closets or lipstick that wanders far outside the boundaries of their lips. These swimsuits are cut to fit—and to reveal—these girls’ bodies. They’re less for girls who want to feel grown-up, than for parents who think it’s amusing or cute to dress their kids like adults, even if that means sexualizing their children far beyond their years. Parents are supposed to moderate their children’s impulses, not expose them to all the consequences of them.