I want to like Lupe Fiasco’s “Bitch Bad,” on the grounds that I like Lupe Fiasco himself, and because I, like many female hip-hop listeners, would be happy to find articulate male allies in the genre:

There are a lot of things that are off about the song. Its chorus hook, “Bitch bad, woman good / Lady better, they misunderstood,” sounds like remedial English, which whether it’s directed at women who apply the word to themselves or the men who sling it around, sounds exhaustingly condescending. In The Atlantic, Mychal Denzel Smith has a terrific breakdown of the song’s problematic gender politics, from the simplicity of that core heirarchy, to its unwillingness to assign men responsibility for their judgement of women.

But what irritated me about “Bitch Bad” is its desire to get credit for bringing up a provocative issue without the accompanying responsibility for calling anyone out. “Disclaimer: this rhymer, Lupe, is not usin’ ‘bitch’ as a lesson,” he rhymes, “But as a psychological weapon / To set in your mind and really mess with your conceptions / Discretions, reflections, it’s clever misdirection.” But the only meaningful discussion between “lesson” and intellectual provocation is the responsibility the speaker has for making a point at the end. Given how heavily the rest of “Bitch Bad”‘s lyrics rely on media psychology—in the verse about how girls consume media, he might as well be cribbing from the Parents’ Television Council—he’s on particularly shaky ground in terms of declaiming having any particular message. Watching him dig deeper on that insistence that he can’t be taken too seriously, telling Rolling Stone “I’m not trying to say this is what’s going to happen, or potentially what’s going to happen. Because you don’t know, the characters are fictional, based on true events. I know personally what has affected me, but that’s me personally,” is irritating.

The thing is, as a woman, Lupe Fiasco’s personal experience with the impact of the word “bitch” is nice to have on record, but his willingness to take an actual stand would be a lot more useful. I’m not really in a mood to give him credit for calling out misogyny in hip-hop if he doesn’t actually want to be seen as calling out misogyny in hip-hop. Fiasco told Rolling Stone that the album from which this song comes was inspired by James Baldwin because “he was such a powerful figure. He was a homosexual, he was an atheist, he was black, he was a writer, he was a down brother, he lived in Paris and grew up in the slums of Harlem. And he was a preacher. So he had all these things that made him Public Enemy Number One, but he was also loved and adored by the public at the same time.” But part of what made Baldwin powerful is that he took action, in his life and his art. He moved to Paris in part to escape discrimination, and wrote bluntly and frankly about discrimination against gay people in Giovanni’s Room and about American racism in essays like The Fire Next Time. His work was powerful in part because it was explicitly, courageously political, something Lupe Fiasco is apparently afraid to be.

I’m tired of this. I thought I was tired enough after watching Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, a perfect encapsulation of how Nolan manufactures credit for alluding to big issues while preserving a critical incoherence about politics that let him avoid offending any potential customers. And I’m even more tired after a stint at the Television Critics Association where people said repeatedly that the shows they’d created had no politics. By that, they mean that their shows are not partisan, which is something I can see legitimately avoiding (though having politicians on television have no party affiliation or fake party affiliation is disingenuous). But they end up implying that they’re afraid to claim their own ideas instead. It’s okay for pop culture to have ideas. In fact, it’s necessary. And pop culture can be deeper, and riskier, and more exciting, the action and the relationships it portrays can have higher stakes, when those ideas are about how the world should be run, about what conditions are necessary for equity, and stability, and justice.

“Don’t underestimate him,” former Secretary of State Bill Russell (John Larroquette) says towards the end of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, after he throws a wrench in his party’s convention and elevates an unknown to the presidential nomination. “Men without faces tend to be elected president.” It’s the kind of biting sentiment that would apply equally well to Mitt Romney’s flip-flops as it did to the politicians of 1960, when Gore Vidal’s biting play The Best Man, about a party divided by competing visions making a critical decision not on the merits but through a scandal-mongering arms race, was first performed on Broadway, where it snagged six Tony nominations. The production currently on stage at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater in New York is full of excellent performances. If you have a choice, seeing it live—or reading Vidal’s play or watching the 1964 movie adaptation—is likely to be a vastly more edifying experience than watching any of the official proceedings staged at the Republican convention in Tampa this week.

Much of what’s revealing about watching The Best Man is its reminder of the longevity of some of the least attractive facets of our political climate. “Yes, he was fired from the City College of New York,” Russell remarks of one of his intellectual influences. “But only for moral turpitude, not for incompetence as a philosopher.” The former, of course, is what most of the people covering the campaign and observing it care about. Bill’s campaign manager Dick Jensen (Mark Blum) warns him “Not a word of Darwin. Evolution is out of bounds.” Bill bemoans the rise of smear tactics in politics, observing with an air of exhaustion that “In the South, a candidate for sheriff once won election by claiming his opponents’ wife had been a thespian.” Representing the budget mendacity of the current Republican party is Bill’s opponent, the young Senator Joe Cantwell (played here with nerve and snake oil by John Stamos). “So you think we can increase defense spending while eliminating the income tax?” a reporter asks him. He pivots away from the question flawlessly. His wife Mabel (Kristin Davis) tells a number of other political women “I’m against any artificial means of birth control. Unless it’s a matter of health. Maybe.” “We are all interchangably inoffensive,” says Russell’s wife Alice (Cybill Shepherd).

And at a time when a stunning contempt for women’s issues has been at the forefront of much of this year in politics, the women of The Best Man may be relegated to drawing rooms, but their role is vital, and the double-standards they face persistent. Bill describes Mrs. Sue-Ellen Gamadge (Elizabeth Ashley) as “The national committeewoman, the only known link between the NAACP and the Ku Klux Klan”—drawing rooms sometimes have connecting doors that go where the official hallways don’t. But her connections don’t prevent men like Jensen from condescending to her. “Talking to you is like talking to the average American housewife,” he says. It doesn’t help that Sue-Ellen has as much to say about style as substance. “Of course, Mabel Cantwell dyes her hair. But she does such a bad job, the women feel sorry for her,” she declares at one point, then pivots to say, “Don’t do too much, like Mrs. Russell. The women don’t like that.” Alice and Mabel may not think much of Sue-Ellen as a self-appointed spokesman for “the women,” but they aren’t above to making the same kinds of judgements that she does. “Even with no chin, I still look better than Alice Russell,” Mabel bucks herself up while getting dressed for a dinner. “My is she a chilly-looking woman.” And Alice, frustrated both by Bill’s infidelities and her role at the convention, declares “I must say I’m beginning to like politics. Especially when Mrs. Gamadge told me I’m an inspiration to American women, in my way.”
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Butter is coming out on October 5, with the clear intention of capitalizing on the presidential election with its portrait of a clueless Midwestern butter-carver married to a philandering politician, who finds herself throwing down with an adorable African-American orphan (aided by Rob Corddry and Olivia Wilde playing a stripper) to retain her title. It’s not the only movie flirting with the campaign season. The Campaign, with its satire of the Koch brothers’ influence on local elections went first, and Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s Osama bin Laden movie, was moved until after the election to avoid any sense of undue influence in favor of President Obama’s reelection. But while Zero Dark Thirty is historical fiction, and The Campaign is a movie that’s largely sympathetic to all of the politicians involved, Butter has a distinct air of disdain for one side of its conflict:

Now, there’s nothing wrong with contempt for ideas that do real damage to people. Rep. Todd Akin’s views on sexual assault are contemptible and ignorant, as are his attempts to redefine rape. But the idea that a butter-carving contest is important isn’t an idea that does anyone any harm (the idea that an African-American girl is using race to swing that contest in her favor is somewhat more harmful). It’s worth distinguishing between those cases, and between ideas it’s important to push back against, and ideas folks sometimes feel it’s fun to dismiss.

After all, binging on condescension is a lot like overdoing it at the state fair. The individual mouthfuls taste delicious. You can feel sort of luxurious and indulgent, even proud of yourself for venturing where other people in your cohort dare not tread a la David Foster Wallace. But that doesn’t mean that you’re doing yourself, or the ideas you represent, any favors. Assuming the people you disagree with are merely stupid or underinformed actually understates the depth of political difference, and the ease of convincing people to agree with you. Laura doesn’t need Will McAvoy to tell her about the evils of the Tea Party. Not all conservative, Midwestern politicians are brought down by their proclivities for cheating on their wives. Sometimes, you’re going to have to actually muster evidence and respect in an argument. And sometimes, you have to beat people in elections.

Memo to Brian De Palma, and folks who want to follow in the footsteps of Darren Aronofsky. Sometimes, when women have competitive or power-imbalanced relationships, we solve them in ways that don’t involve making out with each other in highly aestheticized settings!

There is something really weird about the assumption that women who are rivals work that ish out by hate-banging each other. It’s almost as if men think we don’t have other skills or resources to deploy on each other, or on them.

I’m going on vacation next week, but we’ll start up again with the first three episodes of Season Three of The Wire on September 11. There’s also a spoiler for this week’s episode of Breaking Bad in this post.

After watching this week’s Breaking Bad, I’ve been thinking about moments that are not precisely suicidal, but when characters approach death or the possibility of it, even if they don’t acknowledge that’s precisely what they’re doing. There’s a lot of that in Mike’s trip down to the river in Breaking Bad, in Frank Sobotka’s rendezvous with Vondas and The Greek, in Nicky’s attempt to murder his old self with his shooting of George Glekas, in Omar’s plan to kill a man and reckoning with the responsibility of using that power according to his code. In the Steve Earle song that closes the third season, the singer promises to “bring you precious contraband / And ancient tales from distant lands,” but for all that the lyric is a way of encapsulating that this is about the shipping business, and for all that this is another season that ends with the limitations of federal prosecution and local resources, the local’s reelection of Frank is both a political manuever and a reckoning with that larger question: it’s a form of suicide.

Ziggy’s act of murder is the clearest act of self-destruction in these violent final three episodes. “We had a deal motherfucker. A deal. You listen to me. It was my fucking ass out there on the line,” he tells George, who has cut the percentage he’s paying the younger man for stolen cars. “You don’t play me like that. You don’t.” But he does, of course, and because Ziggy can’t kill the part of himself that gets played, that gets talked into fighting Maui and that buys a duck and then can’t keep it alive, he kills George instead. “I got tired,” he tells his father in jail. “I got tired of being a punchline to every joke.” Murder may not have freed Ziggy of that tendency, but it’s given him a permanent role and a uniform, an orange jumpsuit instead of a leather coat, his hands behind his back instead of flailing at windmills.

For Brother Mouzone, killing itself is his identity. Cheese makes the mistake of assuming it’s Islam, asking “You slingin’ bean pies up in hear or something?” But Mouzone clarifies quickly that it’s the instruments of his trade, the plastic bullet he shoots Cheese with first, “what’s seated in the chamber now,” the “nine at close range” that Omar shoots him with, leaving a relatively clean wound. He may talk about the dangers of “a nigger with a library card,” and complain about his magazines, but these things are not what Mouzone is. And he and Omar recognize each other in the moment that Omar shoots Mouzone on the basis of bad information from the Barksdale crew. Omar’s insistence that “See, that boy was beautiful. Wasn’t no need for y’all to do him the way you did,” may be sentimental, but his decision to call 911 is in keeping with those articulated ethics. Death and violence are powerful tools. They shouldn’t be wasted or misused, and if they are, the mistakes, if at all possible, should be corrected.

Frank and Nicky are men who think they understand force and violence up against men who truly do. Nicky may have the car and a roll of cash, but he’s child in certain fundamental ways, living in his parents’ basement, retreating to the playground and a childhood friend and a bottle when Ziggy ruins his life. When he threatens to kill the Greeks after Frank’s death, it’s a child’s threat, wheeling arms and shouting, rather than actual plan of attack. He reaches manhood when he has the sense to fear Vondas and the Greek, to take them down from a police station rather than under a bridge. It’s a good thing. Sergei may be in jail, still complaining about being nicknamed Boris, but he’s a man who explains matter-of-factly that a shepard broke the rules he needed to traffic women successful, the product died, and he needed to be killed to close the circle. Sergei may not be a killer in the way that Omar and Brother Mouzone are killers, but he walks the same line they do. It’s Johnny Cash singing that line about love at the beginning of the first of these three episodes. But in the world of The Wire, death is what needs to be finessed, even more than life and all its possibilities.

Recent reports that the National Basketball Association’s Sacramento Kings were considering — and set to announce — an imminent move to Virginia Beach, Virginia appear premature. The report, which came initially from Inside Business, sent shockwaves around the sports world, given that Virginia Beach has never appeared on the list of possible destinations for the Kings, a franchise that has listed nearly every other city in North America as a potential suitor.

Virginia Beach, as Matt Yglesias noted, may not be a bad future destination for an NBA franchise. Connecting the dots in the roll-out of this story, however, makes it look like little more than a coordinated attempt to get Virginia Beach’s city council to finance an expensive arena project for a hypothetical NBA franchise that may never come to the city.

There are the corporate giants who want a new arena in Virginia Beach and already had a plan in place to build one — they were so excited by the “news” that the Kings were considering Virginia Beach, they were able to schedule their pitch to the city council for tomorrow, less than a week after the initial report. They have already enlisted a respected economics professor from a local university to study the economic impact an arena would have on the city, an element any good pitch needs.

What the corporations were missing were the major franchise they promised would move. Enter the Kings and their billionaire owners, the Maloofs, who are so desperate to extort a state-of-the-art arena from someone that they seem willing to move virtually anywhere on Earth to do it. And the “news” was mutually beneficial: it sent Sacramento, the city that promised the Kings a new $391 million arena only to watch the Maloofs walk away, into a tizzy.

The way it has all played out would seem enough to make Virginia Beach take a step back and realize that it is a pawn in the corporate welfare chess match that has become professional sports, but it wasn’t. So lest Virginia Beach think it has an exclusive date to the arena-extortion prom, a quick reality check: the Kings have reportedly considered moves to at least three cities, including Anaheim, San Diego, and Las Vegas, and at least three others — Louisville, Seattle, and Kansas City — have been widely mentioned as potential landing spots if the franchise decides to move. A few of those cities already have a taxpayer-financed arena, others, like Virginia Beach, would have to shell out public money to build a modern-day Colosseum that is enough to satisfy the Maloofs, at least for the next decade or so.

Virginia Beach could certainly use an infusion of taxpayer dollars into its economy, though they’d be better spent if the city were to restore the millions of dollars in education cuts that jeopardized junior varsity sports, the jobs of hundreds of teachers, and the futures of thousands of students earlier this year.

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R), an ardent opponent of government stimulus that actually works, is now throwing his weight behind corporate welfare that doesn’t, using a spokesperson to say that the arena will “benefit the local and state economy and spur job creation in the region.” Recent studies, however, have shown that NBA arenas don’t create jobs and don’t provide a path to economic development; in fact, it’s likely they do the opposite, diverting government resources from projects that would actually help local economies to provide a massive corporate welfare check to billionaires like the Maloofs and corporations like Comcast-Spectacor, the $30-billion-a-year behemoth that wants to build the Virginia Beach arena.

That diversion has taken place in cities like Atlanta, where public schools are weathering millions of dollars in budget cuts even as the National Football League’s Atlanta Falcons are asking for a new stadium. And it would happen in Virginia Beach, which slashed its public education budget this year, jeopardizing the jobs of hundreds of teachers and the futures of thousands of students.

There’s only one piece missing from the typical arena story, and that is that the Maloofs will eventually get their Taj Mahal, whether from Sacramento, Virginia Beach, or another city willing to sign its taxpayers onto an arena project that will leave them drowning in debt without any of the promised economic prosperity. And then, while that city isn’t looking, it will become tomorrow’s Sacramento: a town doing everything it can to help greedy billionaires who are looking for their next handout from any city that will give it to them.

The bridge is yours.

-The idea of a national hip-hop museum is a pretty good one, especially if it aims to be a comprehensive video and audio archive.

-Gorgeous breakdowns of the Willow comics covers.

-And speaking of the Buffy-verse, Marti Noxon is developing a show for Showtime.

-The idea of the CW airing a political fixer show is the funniest thing I’ve heard in ages.

-On the other hand, I really can’t wait for The Girl:

About a month ago, I wrote about young adult author Cassandra Clare’s insistence that a character in her The Mortal Instruments series, Magnus Bane, whose Asianness is a major part of his identity be played by an Asian or Asian-American actor. Now that Taiwanese-Canadian model Godfrey Gao’s been cast in the role, actor Edward Zo’s made a video about the significance of the casting (the key parts run from about 1:10 to 7:00):

Of the points he makes, I think two are particularly critical. First, is that young adult fiction is a particularly important place to set standards and expectations. Readers or viewers who grow up invested in romances between gay characters, or who see non-white people as sex symbols, create markets for both broad categories of characters and specific actors. Sometimes, those attachments can be overwhelming, and unfair, as has been the case with Kristen Stewart, when she diverted from the insane expectations fans had placed on her. But if it means getting an Asian actor work, and work on an entirely different set of terms, that could be a powerful force for good.

And that leads to the other point Zo’s making: that the terms on which Asian men are given work needs to change, given that the hypercompetence they’re often granted can be as much a straightjacket as a display of awesomeness. Rational nerds get stripped of their sexuality. Ninjas get stripped of all of their other personality components. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon‘s Li Mu Bai was the rare Asian warrior character to reach a mass American audience who also got to love a woman passionately, his repressed desire playing out as a grand, Jane Austen-style tragedy. Asian actors—as do actors and characters of all races—deserve a chance to be more than one thing at once, to be smart as part of their desirability, to be competent in pursuit of deeply-held goals, and to screw up without being pathetic.

As my colleague Igor Volsky noted yesterday, one of NBC’s Utah affiliate has decided not to air Glee creator Ryan Murphy’s new sitcom, The New Normal, about a gay couple who decide to have a child by surrogate because, ““For our brand, this program simply feels inappropriate on several dimensions, especially during family viewing time.” This doesn’t actually strike me as particularly surprising. But I think the channel might have made the decision for different ones than we might expect.

I’ve only seen the pilot of The New Normal, but other than the fact that the show depicts a gay couple in a partnership who want to have a child, it’s not a particularly challenging depiction. The couple conform to butch-femme stereotypes. They don’t have much in the way of sexual chemistry. People who dislike gay couples will not enjoy a show that insists in the most obvious possible terms that they’re here, they’re conforming as quickly as possible, get used to it. But I think it’s less challenging, at least thus far, than something like Glee, which equated a gay teenaged couple losing their virginity with a straight one, or even The Wire, which gave a lesbian couple on the baby track an actual erotic life.

But what I think is narrowly effective about The New Normal, and that might make the affiliate’s audience most uncomfortable, is that it shows bigotry as directly hurtful to the people in range of it. For most of the pilot, Jane (Ellen Barkin), an older divorced woman, is an outrageous caricature of a biased person, who speaks aloud what for most people is subtext or subconscious fear, rather than having her anti-gay views and her racism subtly inflect her thinking, bubbling up in surprising ways that leave everyone around her on edge. But the people around her do a nice job of acting out the pain her outrageous statements cause them. She acts as a roadblock in her daughter Goldie’s (Georgia King) efforts to better herself the one way she believes she can—Goldie is a young single mother—by carrying another couple’s child for a large, one-time fee that would allow her to attend law school. Jane is mean to the gay couple (Justin Bartha and Andrew Rannells) who choose Goldie to be their surrogate. Even when she doesn’t mean to, Jane inadvertently ends up coming across as racist to one of the men’s assistant (Nene Leakes). Jane’s views are more disruptive and hurtful than the act of two men building a family together.

And that, I think, is the real reason conservative viewers might be uncomfortable with The New Normal. It’s one thing to find gay couples distasteful or upsetting, but if you believe that gay people and the people who accept them are aberrant and easily confined to places that are far away from you, they don’t represent much threat. But if your views make you the dangerous, damaging, abnormal person, then it’s much more reasonable to feel threatened and upset.

This post contains spoilers through the August 26 episode of Breaking Bad. I’ll be on vacation and may not have the ability to watch next week’s episode, though if I do, I’ll blog it.

Earlier in this season of Breaking Bad, Jesse asked Walter White if a meth empire was really something to be proud of. At the beginning of this episode, Walt’s belief that it was gave him a powerful tool to extract respect from the kind of men he once feared. By the end of it, he was beginning to realize the limitations of the thing he is the best at.

“I’m the man who’s keeping it,” Walt told Mike’s contact. “Yours is just some tepid, off-brand generic cola. What I’m making is Classic Coke…Do you really want to live in a world without Coca-Cola?…You’ve got the greatest, no, the two greatest meth cooks in America right here…You all know exactly who I am. Say my name…I’m the cook. I’m the man who killed Gus Fring.” All of these things are absolutely true: Walt’s meth is powerful, and pure, only he can make it, many people want to buy it, and he is a killer. But while Walt’s narrowed his universe to match that set of facts, and to construct circumstances in which those facts override all other considerations, not everyone has decided to join him there. If he’s Satan, he’s rebelled without being sure of his legions in his war on God, and conventional morality, and Grey Matter.

There’s Skyler, who is collaborating, but not shutting up. “Walt. What is this?” she asks him when he and Jesse come to stash the chemicals at the car wash. “Why are you hiding it here?…Who are you hiding it from? From the police? Or someone else? Someone who would kill for it?” Walt tells her to go back into the office, but her appearance there is marked by a subtler and more potentially important exchange: the first moment when Skyler and Jesse have been in agreement. “Hey, Mrs. White,” Jesse tells her, including her in the courtesy he’s always extended to Walt. Noticing her looking at the truck, he reads the name of the company: “Vamanos.” “I wish,” Skyler tells him, relying on a literal reading of the word. I’ve long wanted to see an alliance between Skyler and Jesse, who are both deeply entangled in Walt’s affairs, both increasingly angry at him, and who, between them, could paint the most complete portrait of Walt’s affairs of any characters who remain living.

But if that’s to happen, Jesse will need to extricate, root and branch, the hold Walt has on him. And as their bond slipped this week on the way to the events that must surely sunder any sympathy Jesse has for his former teacher, Walt resorted to an accusation even uglier than the ones that he’s made about Skyler. “Look at you. What have you got in your life? Nothing. Nobody. Oh, wait, yes. Video games and go-karts,” Walt told Jesse. “And when you get tired of that, what then? And how soon will you start using again? Look. Look I know how upset you are about what happened to this boy. I am just as upset as you are…Do I have to lock myself in a room and get high to prove it to you?” That Walt’s turned cooking meth into Jesse’s program of recovery is a sickeningly beautiful example of his inversion of conventional morality.
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I don’t normally pass along public service announcements, but I was really struck by this spot Amy Poehler cut for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which represents nannies, housekeepers, and caregivers, and aims to win them the recognition the same recognition available to employees who work outside household settings:

There’s something exceedingly refreshing about seeing the kind of woman who’s held up as a model mother state frankly and without pretense that there’s no way to work the way fully employed actresses do and also keep house to a high standard without paid help. And this ad, and the campaign it’s in support of, are a reminder of a bizarre double standard that treats work done in the home as if it’s not work at all, whether it’s performed by the women who occupy those homes, or the women who are paid for the duties they perform in the homes they visit.

With the National Football League season just a couple weeks away, the league’s officials still haven’t returned to work. Fans have undoubtedly noticed the low-quality officiating that has filled the preseason, but they haven’t noticed the plight of the every day officials who have been locked out by a league that wants to strong-arm them back into work before the season begins.

ESPN’s Jeff MacGregor took fans to task in a tremendous column yesterday. You should read the entire piece, but I wanted to highlight MacGregor’s main point here:

But where’s the pushback? Where’s the solidarity? When did we stop calling replacement workers scabs?…And where, Mr. and Mrs. America, are you? Maybe we could get your attention if commissioner Goodell threatened to outsource the work to Guangzhou or Matamoros or Bangalore. [...]

You know that your leisure to watch an NFL game on Sunday was argued and bargained and fought for by unions, right? That the wages you spent on that game-day flatscreen were argued and bargained and fought for by unions, right? That your standing as a member of the American middle class was argued and bargained and fought for by 200 years of collective effort and sacrifice and blood on the part of folks just like you, right?

And then comes MacGregor’s pitch-perfect walk-off:

Next kickoff, maybe think of it this way: That referee, that back judge, that stranger down there on the field running as hard as he can to keep up with the millionaires but falling farther behind with every step? Maybe that’s us.

I’d go a step farther than MacGregor — it’s not just disheartening that fans don’t care about the officials, but also that fans rarely, if ever, take an interest in sports’ labor fights in general. Sports are, for better or worse, one of the only industries now where such fights are front-page news, and where the existence and outcome of those fights both matters to and affects the average American in a way he or she notices and cares about. And yet, we still forget to care, even as we sit at home watching games on weeknights because of the eight-hour workday or on weekends because of the 40-hour work week that unions made possible.

Dismissing labor fights in sports as disputes between millionaires and billionaires misses the point that those fights, fundamentally, are no different than any other labor dispute: these are workers, albeit highly paid ones, fighting for their rights against a corporate class of owners that wants to take them away. These fights matter, not just for the athlete or official, but for the fan who will return to a business on Monday that, at some point, will come asking for extra hours without overtime pay, a bigger contribution to a health care package, or the elimination of a pension or retirement program. It should matter to the worker who will go to work next week at a factory that doesn’t care about safety, doesn’t allow a lunch break, that pays its executive an exorbitant salary while denying yearly raises to its employees.

These fights, whether they involve well-paid football players, part-time referees, or workers at Con Ed or Caterpillar, are our fights. They are fights that are still necessary today, in an America where stagnant wages created the “worst decade in modern history” for the middle class even as corporate profits soared through the roof. These are the fights that built our middle class, that made the American Dream something more than a faraway myth. They matter because when one group of workers wins a labor fight, it is good for all workers.

In America right now, workers are losing far too many of these battles. The biggest loss, though, is that too many people who have a stake in the outcome don’t even notice that the fight is taking place.

It’s depressing and profoundly revealing that Mitt Romney thinks that insinuations about President Obama’s citizenship pass for aww-shucks campaign trail humor, which certainly seemed to be the subtext of his remarks in Michigan today, when he noted “Nobody has ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that I was born and raised.”

The existence and persistence of birtherism is the terrible, ugly joke here, not the substance of that conspiracy theory. As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in a long essay for The Atlantic this month, “The goal of all this is to delegitimize Obama’s presidency. If Obama is not truly American, then America has still never had a black president.” The lengths people will go to delude themselves in service of that backwards wish have a horrible humor to them, magnified by the actual drain on public resources and the president’s time they’ve occasioned. If Leonard Wibberley, author of Cold War satire The Mouse That Roared about a small country that goes to war with the United States in hopes of being badly defeated and then given the kind of development aid that Japan and Germany received after World War II, only to accidentally win, was writing for the age of Obama, he might have come up with a variation of birtherism.

That Romney thinks it’s funny to play into this mass delusion speaks either to his discomfort with humor, or a conviction that nasty pandering is the clearest road to a November victory. Either way, it reflects poorly on his character. And a man whose deepest liabilities concern his foreignness from the experiences of the people who he would like to have as his constituents, from his offshore bank accounts to his wealth to the unfortunate treatment of his faith as a cult, might want to think carefully before entering into a contest with Barack Obama about whose life is more deeply rooted in the American tradition.

By Tony Palumbi

Every so often I get a twitching in the long finger of my right hand. It’s happened enough that I know the reason and the cure: Bayonetta, released in 2010 by the wild-and-wacky Platinum Games. Fast-paced Japanese action games have always been a personal favorite dating back to Devil May Cry on the PlayStation 2, and Platinum, helmed by DMC creator Hideki Kamiya, has built a reputation for action titles with personality. Bayonetta was successful on release—reviews praised its kinetic combat system, its visual design, and mind-blowing boss battles. At the same time, they scratched their heads at the confusing plot and uneven dialogue. Many frowned at the hyper-sexualized protagonist: Bayonetta has two pistols strapped to her stiletto heels and carries another pair, contorting into sexually gymnastic poses or finding conveniently phallic objects to pole-dance around while she deals hot death to her foes.

Lead designer Kamiya didn’t help matters, admiring Bayonetta’s sex appeal and declaring “women are scary” with a mix of misogyny and adolescent confusion that’s not uncommon in Japanese gaming culture. Bloggers pounced, taking strident issue with the poses, the orgasm sounds released by certain female enemies, and the lollipops that grant temporary power-ups. They really hated the lollipops. What’s the difference, the critics asked, between this and a thousand other sexpot gaming characters? Mocking condescension of the hapless male lead and relentless violence does not a feminist make. Lara Croft was always more than the guns (I refer to her pistols, but take “guns” in that sentence however you like). Given the flimsy story and dialogue, isn’t Bayonetta just a brunette Barbie with leaner proportions? Opinions differed, but from my perusal of the debate a solid consensus emerged: Bayonetta is a really excellent video game, but it’s too exploitative for the feminist label.

I knew all this going into my most recent binge. But it didn’t ring true to me. Maybe it’s my good fortune to grow up surrounded by amazing women, but I just couldn’t see Bayonetta as a victim. The critics, I felt, were wrapped up in a confining vision of the liberated female: one where sex needn’t define any part of a woman, and flaunted sexuality is inherently a concession to the male gaze. Which, it seems to me, still appropriates sex as something controlled by men. As somebody whose fiercely independent sister takes the stage in rock bands dressed like (I mean this in the best way) a tart, I felt this was wrong. But I needed to play the game again to figure out why it was wrong.

Writers suffer from a very particular arrogance: we believe we control the world. Not the world of reality and cold sores, but the worlds we build ourselves. Wielding the power of creation, we can make something amazing or something terrible and own it completely. It’s tempting to apply this to fictional forms like games; Tom Bissell has written extensively about his frustrations in the industry. Writers hear the cringe-inducing dialogue in video games and question the missing links in their plots. We could do better, they always think. But video games crush this special writerly arrogance more than any other fictional form. Games succeed when they cede control back to the player. Tiny details of design, hammered out through relentless testing, have powerful impacts on the audience without words and within moments—achieving subtle narrative feats in spaces so small even Kafka would have thrown down his pen.

Which is to say that for the purposes of my critique, the plot isn’t terribly important. Sun-themed male Lumen Sages oppose the Moon-themed female Umbra Witches, a child is conceived in forbidden love, and Bayonetta is the product. She plows through the patriarchy like a wrecking ball, teaming up at the end with a fellow witch to summon a demon that punches God into the Sun. These things are feminist in the same way that pole-dancing animations are misogynist: superficially.

I posit that Bayonetta is an unsurpassed experiment in radical empathy, the ultimate act of putting yourself in another’s shoes—absorbing their feelings, experiences and desires. You become another person, if only for understanding’s sake. It seems to be what most feminists really want from men: to think for a moment about the female experience as lived by women. Bayonetta achieves this kind of radical empathy in a way nobody could expect and I’ve never seen articulated. Through colorful moments and flawless mechanics, it locates the player inside Bayonetta’s physical person and unlocks her weird, wonderful personality. There are no moral lessons here, just good fun—.
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I know. There aren’t a lot of competitors for the mantle. But I’ve been catching up on SyFy’s Alphas, a show about people with remarkable abilities, the people who want to exploit them, and those in their number who want to declare independence from humanity, and I’m increasingly impressed by its political savvy. While at first blush, Alphas might seem like a rip-off of X-Men, it’s turning into a deeply thoughtful meditation on extremism, equality, and the profound difficulty of achieving political consensus.

Many science fiction or fantasy franchises have a range of villains who stand in for a series of big ideas, like Magneto’s representation of mutant superiority in the X-Men, or the Lizard’s advocacy of evolution beyond humanity in Spider-Man. Alphas has one big question—how people with abilities can live in a world where they are a minority—and a lot of people who believe they have the correct answer to it.

Dr. Rosen believes that integration, including channeling his charges’ abilities in service of law enforcement and helping them manage the manifestation of their abilities so they don’t do damage or make other people uncomfortable, is the best way to go. Red Flag, the terrorist organization the advocates for Alpha dominance, isn’t a monolithic organization. The first member of it we meet, Anna, an autistic woman with the ability to translate languages and invent them, believes that Red Flag is necessary as a way to force a truce with normal humanity. If humans had their way, she believes, they’d prevent people like her from being born, both because they’d see her autism as a defect, and because they find her gifts threatening. Later, Brent Spiner played Dr. Kern, an Alpha who went a step further, sowing active DNA in prenatal vitamins in the hope his experiments on non-consenting women would result in the birth of more of the people he sees as a miraculous improvement on humanity’s base state. And lately, the show’s been spending time with Stanton Parish, an apparently unkillable Alpha who’s murdered more moderate members of Red Flag.

It’s a fascinating approach, turning a villain-of-the-week formula into a more deeply nuanced exploration of a question that deserves that kind of sustained interrogation. Gary, an autistic member of the core team, complained in an episode in the first season “Why do we always have to fight people with abilities? It’s annoying.” It’s a question that almost anyone who cares about politics has asked themselves at some point, wishing it was easier to get it together to win an election or a legislative vote. But the answer is that the big questions aren’t resolvable quickly or easily. It takes time to reach a consensus, and even then, there will likely remain people outside of it. Alphas is the rare science fiction program smart enough to understand that, and it’s making for fascinating television.

I’m traveling today and tomorrow so posting will be somewhat lighter than usual. Talk amongst yourselves. And tell me here which television shows you’re getting excited for.

Pro tip, for the guys out there who might be contemplating an Axe purchase as a way to improve their dating prospects:

If you’re seeing women as disembodied breasts rather than actual humans, changing that attitude is way more likely to help you successfully interact with women than any one hair-care item or body spray. Just a thought.*

*To Axe’s credit, there’s an extent to which this ad may be trying to make that point, but I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call it successful.

I was happy to hear yesterday that Kat Dennings will be back in Thor 2, and that apparently, her role, as a research assistant to Jane Foster (Natalie Portman, absent from The Avengers) and Dr. Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard), will be expanded. While I’ll never give up on wanting female superheroines to get equal billing in the Marvel Universe, at their best, non-powered female characters have already contributed a great deal to the franchise, mostly by injecting a healthy dose of sarcasm into a genre that could easily collapse under its own weight.

I think it’s no mistake that Iron Man‘s been the most fun character in the core lineup so far: he’s skittery, grandiose, and a combination of sophisticated and enormously immature. Alone, he might be hugely irritating, a nerd-bro fantasy. But Pepper Potts’ presence means that Tony Stark’s most ridiculous behavior is constantly being called out as utterly ridiculous. He’s charming in spite of, not because, he is a rude, reckless womanizer. In The Avengers, Gwyneth Paltrow does Barbara Stanwyck proud when Agent Coulson comes to call, as Pepper points out that Tony’s immature attempts to avoid the man aren’t just childish—they act against the interest of Tony’s own curiosity. Part of Tony’s arc in the movie is to the recognition that Pepper saw Coulson’s worth more clearly than he did because she bothered to pay attention and get to know the man. He doesn’t just lose a colleague when Coulson dies—he loses a man who might have been in his friend.

Similarly, in Thor, Darcy was a fabulous reminder of how ridiculous it would actually be to end up babysitting an extremely handsome, exceedingly disconcerted man who wanders around trying to buy pets to ride, smashing coffee mugs, eating all the Pop Tarts, and talking like he stepped out of summer stock. When she zapped Thor with a taser or complained that she was being asked to do an awful lot for six college credits, Darcy punctured the occasionally stifling atmosphere Jane’s literal and metaphoric starry-eyed approach to Thor. Part of what’s fun about superheroes—and an appropriate thing to point out as a way to question their power—is their overwhelming incongruity. I don’t want to see Darcy as a buzz-kill if she and Jane take a jaunt to Asgard in Thor 2, but her sense of the absurd, deployed correctly, is another very funny way to express wonder.

Captain America was, tonally, a very different picture, but one of its most fun moments was Natalie Dormer’s brief turn as a gal in uniform who wants to get at Cap. The Marvel movies have essentially hewed to fairly traditional ideas about their heroes and true love—part of Tony’s hero’s journey is his move away from being a womanizing cad. Dormer’s minx was a reminder that you can tell stories about superheroes as catnip for the ladies, too, and the juxtaposition of her clear desire with Cap’s innocence was something that might be useful in a more extended exploration of Steve Rogers’ integration into modern life. Similarly, I think the two recent attempts at Hulk movies have suffered badly from the big-eyed dewiness of Jennifer Connolly and Liv Tyler’s performances as Betty Ross. If Hulk movies do go into production, it would be a lot of fun to see a Betty who can banter with Bruce, even needle him the way Tony did in The Avengers. It’s awfully dull to have a Hulk who’s simply afraid he’s going to hurt this delicate woman he loves, and it would be more fun to have a woman who’s a foil, whose very engagement with Bruce is a risk for him and an incentive to get himself in check.

I’m bored by movies where women reform men, or act as prizes for low-level good behavior. But at their best, Marvel’s managed to give us women around our heroes who at least nod in the direction of the screwball tradition. The men may have the superpowers, but the women are the ones who are grown all the way up, and seeing around corners without even the benefit of enhanced eyesight.

Our pop culture loves talking about the music of the sixties of the Vietnam War, but tends to be exceedingly uncomfortable talking in a substantive way about sixties radicalism, which is too bad, given the impact it has on our political discourse. There are documentaries like The Weather Underground, of course, but scripted explorations of radical movements are exceedingly rare. Which is why I’m excited that Chicago 8, which looks like it will focus substantially on Bobby Seale’s trial for conspiracy to incite a riot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, is finally making it to theaters:

Wherever you stand on the question of Seale’s guilt or innocence in the murders of Black Panthers Alex Rackley and Fred Bennett, the former of whom was suspected of being a police informant (he said he was, though his so-called confession was obtained through torture), the latter of whom may have gotten Seale’s wife pregnant, there’s something terrifying about the prospect of gagging a man at his own trial and sending him to prison for four years for contempt of court. There’s no question that Seale was disruptive during his trial, but he was also both denied a trial date that would have allowed his counsel of choice to represent him and the opportunity to represent himself. Judge Hoffman undoubtedly inconvenienced Seale more than being called a honky and a racist substantively inconvenienced Hoffman. But Hoffman, unlike Seale, had the power in that interaction to silence and entomb the things that made him uncomfortable.

When a group of pre-teen Ugandan baseball players arrived in Williamsport, Pennsylvania for the Little League World Series early this month, they couldn’t believe what they saw: nice uniforms, brand new cleats, an immaculately-kept field with shiny green grass and a capacity of 40,000. The Ugandans, the second African team to qualify for the World Series and the first to actually make it to Williamsport, played their home games on a dusty field in the central part of the country — they had never played in front of a crowd and sometimes practiced or played barefoot.

That all changed last week in the team’s first game against Panama. The team from Lugazi, Uganda lost, and they would lose again two days later to Mexico, meaning the first team to arrive in Williamsport was one of the first teams eliminated. All wasn’t lost: Uganda became the first African team to win a LLWS game Tuesday, when it beat a team from Oregon in a consolation game. The team’s on-field results, however, will pale in comparison to what it achieved just by making it to Williamsport.

Baseball, long popular in the Americas and East Asia, was a late arrival in Africa. There are no specific participation numbers for the continent’s youth, but six countries have joined the African Baseball League and others have teams in the developmental stages. The game has also been used to help bring awareness to the public health fights that consume swaths of the continent. South Africa and other countries have pushed baseball as a way to fight and prevent AIDS and other health epidemics, attracting young players to the game to “Strike Out AIDS.” In Ugandan schools, baseball is fast encroaching on soccer’s popularity as students flock to the game.

Despite that growth, the challenges facing baseball in Uganda and other African countries are immense. Many children use balls made of paper and improvised bats. Gloves are rare, and games are often played barefoot on dusty fields with little or no grass. Even the Ugandan schools where baseball is popular struggle to find places to play.

Charities and other organizations, however, are working to fix that. Right To Play, a humanitarian organization, raised $100,000 to fund a game between Uganda and Canada earlier this year; some of the money will also go to building a new stadium in the country. Uganda’s appearance in Williamsport will undoubtedly raise the sport’s profile in Africa, and, hopefully, it will bring even more money in to help kids play.

The Ugandan team may not have won the Little League World Series, but just by making it to Williamsport, they made history and progress for their country and their sport. And as one of the players told Al Jazeera English, their dreams don’t stop in Williamsport. “My dream will be to play baseball,” he said. “Major League Baseball, in America.”