This one-star review of The Force Awakens contains a Trumpean “sad”

By Dan Brooks in Rhetoric 0 Comment
Racist

An example of today’s bias against white males wears a storm trooper outfit.

Donald Trump is bad, but so far we have understood him to be bad and special. He is particularly shameless demagogue, and because we live in interesting times, desperate millions have fallen under his spell. But we don’t imagine those people are emulating him. The Republican Party is not full of voters who are like their nominee. The country may be in the grips of Trump mania, but at least the symptoms of our Trumpomaniacal episode do not find us mimicking his behavior. Unless:

Sad

This review of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, collected by Amazon Movie Reviews on Twitter, appears to contain a Trumpean exclamation. Granted, there’s no exclamation mark. But it nonetheless ends a declarative statement by ejaculating a single adjective that tells you how to interpret that statement, in the style established by Trump himself. Similar!

At the risk of introducing an element of conjecture, this Amazon customer also seems to echo some of Trump’s themes. In declaring Star Wars “just another anti-white male movie,” he participates in the conceit that America’s dominant ethnic/gender identity is under attack. That notion is absurd—if Hollywood really cared about males, it would have put more of them in its seventh goddamn Star Wars movie?—but so is the reviewer’s ability to reserve for white people cultural touchstones that don’t have much to do with race.

I was not aware that Star Wars was for little, specifically white boys. I guess you can understand it not as the tale of a farm kid called by destiny to grapple with the powerful forces in the universe and himself, but rather as the tale of a white farm kid called by destiny to et cetera etc. But who thinks like that? I heard the funniest joke from a white bartender today. Richard Nixon was the only white president to resign. White people who need white people are the luckiest white people of all.

Anyway, that’s why you see white dads wearing shirts with pictures of Chewbacca on them and black dads wearing Webster. Either that or both Trump and this Amazon movie review reflect the decades of rhetoric that actually did, in the words of the reviewer, make diversity a code word for anti-white male. Since the Southern Strategy, the Republican Party has articulated policies against minority groups not in terms of their inferiority, but in terms of the rights of those who would dominate them. Gay marriage undermines straight marriage. Every black stormtrooper is a white dude who wasn’t. When the sixth sequel to the movie about the brave white boy features a girl and a black man who doesn’t betray us, it’s anti-white males

Like the Trumpean exclamation, that is a trope people can understand. They might even believe it, the same way they might come to believe that blurting out an emotion is how you keep your audience with you. I wrote you this poem for Valentine’s Day. Romantic! To us, these manipulations are transparent rhetoric. But they are ideas to the people who get caught up in them. Politics does not just rally votes. It teaches voters how to think. Probably, we should all get a little more scared and serious soon.

Stamey defiant, Combat! blog must serve community

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 2 Comments
Absconded treasurer Valerie Stamey

Absconded treasurer Valerie Stamey

When last we spoke of Valerie Stamey, she had finally been located in South Carolina, the very state whose civil judgments she escaped to come to Montana. If you’re going to flee a second lawsuit, be careful to choose a third location instead of returning to the site of your original fraud. By committing this rookie mistake, Stamey has allowed our neighbors in Ravalli County to at last serve her with their lawsuit for neglecting her duties as treasurer. Unfortunately, because Ravalli County is in Montana and Stamey is in South Carolina, our district courts have no jurisdiction. Stamey schooled county attorney Bill Fullbright on this point of law in a letter she cc’ed to the Ravalli Republic. I quote their report:

In the letter to Fulbright, the former treasurer called the summons “constitutionally invalid” and said the district court did not have jurisdiction over her because she now lives out of state.

“This letter serves notice to you that if you continue in this action against me, I will seek legal remedies,” Stamey’s letter read. “I have made you aware of the flaw in your continuing to waste tax dollars to try and illegally serve me.”

Stamey has not responded to the summons otherwise. Needless to say, you still have to respond to a lawsuit even if you leave the state where it was filed. Any lawyer will tell you that, although conservative patriots may disagree. Isn’t it strange how the same lay readings of the constitution that endeared Stamey to a certain faction of Ravalli Republicans also justify her serial dodging of lawsuits? No consequence that befalls this lady is constitutional. She’s a scamp, and I’d love to write about her all day, but I’ve got to help Lagan unload windows at his house. Windows are pretty light, right? They’re mostly sky. We’ll be back Monday with hopefully unsevered tendons in our hands.

Amid budget cuts and enrollment collapse, UM president wins award

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics 0 Comment
University of Montana president Royce Engstrom

University of Montana president Royce Engstrom

During the five years Royce Engstrom has served as president of the University of Montana, enrollment has fallen by almost a third. Last week, the College of Humanities and Sciences announced cuts of 30% to its teaching budget and 50% to its operations. The last five years have seen a federal Department of Justice investigation into the university’s handling of sexual assault, the publication of a book titled Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town, and the payment of a $245,000 settlement to former quarterback Jordan Johnson. Meanwhile, the Montana Associated Students has named Engstrom its 2016 Administrator of the Year.

At first I thought they were being cruel. But MAS really means it: they gave Engstrom the award for how well he has handled the process of “realigning the workforce so that the budget reflected the institution’s current enrollment.” Essentially, he has been publicly commended for overseeing the collapse of the university.

That collapse may not be Engstrom’s fault, but it has coincided with his tenure. Enrollment was at a record high when he took office. He may have inherited many, many scandals related to sexual assault, but he also was in charge during the botched investigation for which the university just paid Johnson a quarter million dollars. If Engstrom is the best administrator in the state, who was the second best? And what meteor were his students crushed beneath?

You can read smart remarks such as these in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. I don’t want to be too hard on Engstrom, because many of the problems that have blossomed during his administration were planted in previous ones. Still, we should not pretend that the University of Montana is in a good position right now. Nor should we tell ourselves that it is being run well when it continues to fall apart.

Ways to lose to Donald Trump: Call people stupid for supporting him now

By Dan Brooks in Ways to Lose to Donald Trump 0 Comment
Enough votes to cancel out everyone you know

Enough votes to cancel out everyone you know

Donald Trump is the worst major-party candidate in modern history. He stops spouting nonsense only to lie, and his lies contradict one another. You’d have to be stupid to vote for him, which is weird, because he obliterated 15 other Republican candidates in the primaries. But that was the GOP, where the stupid enjoy a plurality. Now that we’re basically into the general, Trump’s idiot supporters are overwhelmingly outnumbered by those of us who look down our noses at them. That’s why Hillary Clinton enjoys an insurmountable two-point lead in the polls. It’s also why this satirical report by Andy Borowitz, Stephen Hawking angers Trump supporters with baffling array of long words, is so hilarious.

Agreed that “baffling array” is an inherently funny phrase, which is probably why it verges on cliché. I suppose it’s also funny to dismiss Trump voters as morons who don’t understand the sophomore-level vocab words we do:

Speaking to a television interviewer in London, Hawking called Trump “a demagogue who seems to appeal to the lowest common denominator,” a statement that many Trump supporters believed was intentionally designed to confuse them. Moments after Hawking made the remark, Google reported a sharp increase in searches for the terms “demagogue,” “denominator,” and “Stephen Hawking.”

Ha! Those stupid assholes look up the meanings of words they don’t know. Can you believe they didn’t know them already? Wait, I feel weird. It seems the path of our satire has intersected a swifter vehicle.

If you want Clinton to beat Trump in November, a person who currently thinks he would make a good president is like someone who doesn’t know what the word “demagogue” means. You can laugh at him for not knowing and thereby convince him it’s the kind of word assholes use. Or you can hope he looks it up—even encourage him to do so or, if you really consider yourself a deft hand, explain to him what it means. Then maybe he will start using “demagogue” too, instead of voting for the billionaire who talks like an ordinary guy hating you.

Saying Trump appeals to stupid people is not the first step to winning over his supporters. Hillary already fights the impression that she’s smug, living a life ordinary people cannot imagine, and married to a president. Two out of those three are true. Perhaps the best way to counter the popular appeal of a charismatic huckster is not to work the “you rubes” angle. That’s how you play the heel in Memphis.

I do think Trump appeals to common denominators, and I don’t want him to win in November. I sure would feel better about the slim lead standing between me and President Trump if it were larded by a few points—possibly one or two percent of Trump supporters. I guess we can hope to lure them with our disdain.

Against “because [noun]”

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 3 Comments
Because this

Because this

Let’s talk about the construction “because [noun]” and how it became the bitter non-joke in this Slate tweet, shall we? Click here for hardcore pornography instead. Okay—the “because [noun]” construction affronts me here for two reasons:

  1. It substitutes a formula for wit.
  2. It implies contempt for the noun “America.”

Reason (1) is subjective. I submit that “because [noun]” is not funny anymore, if it ever was. It was pleasing at first as a kind of audacious shorthand. But audacity disappeared with novelty, and now the construction is mainly used to imply wit where none exists. You can’t jump to the moon because gravity. The Senate refuses to confirm Merrick Garland because politics. This baby is smoking because Florida. None of those is clever, but they all convey a certain sardonic attitude, and they all presume the reader knows enough about [noun] to skip the other words.

Which brings us to reason (2). In the sentence “Two-thirds[sic] of U.S. schools have ‘active shooter’ drills because America,” the fraction of schools that practice for mass shootings is the news part. The “because America” construction is the ‘tude. We are to understand that active shooter drills are bad, both by the scare quotes and by it being news that two thirds of schools have them. A two-thirds majority of schools having fire drills isn’t news. And why have the schools come to this sorry pass, where they must practice for mass shootings? Because America.

Bro, that’s unpatriotic. It is true America experiences many more mass shootings than any other developed nation, and that is surely a judgment on our national character. But shit, man, has our contempt become so settled? Am I to read “because America” and smile ruefully, recognizing the byword for morbid hypocrisy? This sentence assumes the reader will read in “America” both the widespread fear of death by shooting and the cynically embarrassed failure to do anything about it.

Anyway, thanks to the magical “because [noun]” construction, Slate can communicate that whole vexed idea with the same smug laziness as a Garfield cartoon. I’m not getting out of bed because Monday. School shootings because America. Nah—school shootings because gun lobby and mental health system. School shootings because us. Whole blog about Slate tweet because personality disorder, but still. We should retire the “because [noun]” construction, lest it tempt us to hack our way through—as we all do from time to time—without considering the occasion.

Willy set me off on that entire jag with this tweet. You should probably follow him.