Friday Night Lights: The New "The Wire?"

WORK WITH ME ON this analogy for a moment: the United States as a microcosm of the entire globe. In this scenario, New York, with its major city, its British connections, and its chilly Atlantic climate would be England. California, with its long coastline, its wacky culture, and its obsession with technology, is Japan. So, which state is America? The ostentatiousness of Texas, its brashness, its bigness, its sense of self-regard, is the United States.

Even without this silly comparison, Texas is, perhaps the most American of states, and the last eight years of the Bush presidency have essentially made Texas America's state. The problems of Texas are the problems of our country; the obsessions of Texas are the obsessions of our country. To understand Texas, then, is in large part to understand America.

You can't understand Texas without understanding two interdependent pillars of Texas culture--the small town and football, and no contemporary text explores these two concepts better than Friday Night Lights.

Now that The Wire is no more, Friday Night Lights has emerged as the best hour-long drama on television.

Like The Wire, FNL concerns itself with a setting at the forefront of America's consciousness. For whatever reason--maybe Sarah Palin--this country's attention has migrated, gradually, from "the inner city" to "rural America." The "ghetto" used to be white culture's dramatic scapegoat, the scene against which America's problems got played out. Now, though, the small town has supplanted the ghetto as the most interesting pop culture setting.

For liberals, small towns are places where lynchings still exist, where polygamy happens, where males who go on shooting sprees are bred, and where evolution is kept out of schools. For conservatives, small towns are where America's family values are not just enacted but protected. Friday Night Lights takes an agnostic view of the small town; the fictional Dillon is neither romanticized nor lampooned.

It is, however, presented as a round place, full of complex social norms, stratifications, racial boundaries, and religious expectations. Unlike many independent films, who look at small towns the way an anthropologist might, FNL opens up the small town experience, making easy interpretations and facile paraphrasings pointless.

Less about football than about the role rituals like football, church, and family gatherings play in small town cultural life, FNL does an amazing job of making the everyday, the quotidian, the mundane, riveting.

If you haven't seen the show--and even if you don't like football--try an episode, then try a second. You'll be hooked.

Conservatism: So Simplistic, A Child Can Master It

ON MORE THAN ONE occasion, William Buckley performed the miraculous. He made conservatism both palatable and charming. Smart and snarky (in a buttoned-up New England sort of way), he married intellectualism with common sense rationality. In his nasally, skeptical voice, conservatism could actually sound adult.

This is less the case with Jonathan Krohn, the 14-year old child actor from Atlanta, whose recent book Define Conservatism has landed him on talk shows across the country. His study, whose title sounds like a command a teacher might give student or a challenge a game-show host might hurl at a contestant, tells us less about this ambitious teenager and more about the vacuousness of conservative ideas. It's an accidental expose--it reveals just how simplistic the basic tenets of conservatism actually are.

In his tract, Mr. Krohn defines a conservative as someone who believes in

1. Respect for the Constitution
2. Respect for Life
3. Less Government
4. Personal Responsibility

These are great notions. I would probably agree with all of them. In fact, most of us would. I mean really, who wants a government thinking it's big enough to tell us what marriage is?

The ease with which Mr. Krohn enumerates, defines, and distills conservatism remains both that movement's strength and weakness. On one hand, the ability to circumscribe a comprehensive belief system in four concepts and twelve words lends conservatism a certain ease. It's comfortable like soft slippers. It is reassuring. Black and white. Seemingly concrete. It is this aspect of conservatism that allows a 14-year old to articulate the concepts of an entire political party with confidence and ackknowledgement. It is also why conservatives have an easier time talking about their ideas than progressives. It's why Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity move from real issues to righteous indignation all in the span of a single commercial break.

But as America matures, conservatism's simplicity starts to look more and more like naivete. If conservatives actually stuck to the denotative meanings of the four ideas enumerated above, it could be a viable system. But, instead of being about denotation, conservatism is about connotation. Mr. Krohn's list is simply a litany of cliches, buzz words that mean something quite different from what they say. For example, "less government" really means "less taxes on the wealthy." "Respect for life" doesn't mean "we respect all living people," it means "no abortion."

America, like the world, is complex. It is full of gray areas. There are situations, evolutions, struggles, resentments, eventualities, and misunderstandings that require nimbleness, agility, open-mindedness, compromise, and nuance. As the world gets more complicated, simplistic political ideologies become less pertinent. It's like trying to repair a computer with a rock and a stick. Advanced issues need advanced ideas. Real-world problems need solutions commensurate with their difficulty. Hard conundrums can't be solved with easy platitudes. Complexity often requires complexity. Conservatism has been a lot of things, but complex has never been one of them.

And complexity and nuance are almost always hard to get worked up about. They engender emotions of patience, thought, and consideration. Black and white ideas, on the other hand, lead to emotions of anger, outrage, and offense. Hence the talk shows, hence Rush Limbaugh's inability to be anything but a disc jockey, hence Sean Hannity's bulging neck veins.

Conservatism is nostalgic. It's one dimensional. It's the poster of the Van Gogh. Not the Van Gogh.

Jonathan Krohn is a good kid with a big heart and a devotion to civic duty that is admirable. Pretty soon, I suspect he'll realize that if he really wants to ensure his four concepts find full and actual implementation into public policy, he's hitched his wagon to the wrong elephant.

The Bachelor Ethics: Molly, Memoirs, and Machinations

THE AFTER THE FINAL ROSE Ceremony on ABC's The Bachelor made for great, if inexplicable, TV.

As most know by now, the bachelor--the earnest and self-satisfied Jason Mesnick--breaks things off with Melissa Rycroft on national television just six weeks after an emotion-laden marriage proposal amidst ferns. That proposal came on the heels of a teary-breakup when Jason ended things with Molly Malaney. How teary? I've never seen a dude cry so much.

But, who said Reality TV has ever been about subtlety?

Breaking up with Melissa on national TV is, on its own, high camp. But, on the same program, within minutes of putting the former Dallas Cowboy cheerleader up for free agency, he admits he's been wanting to be starting quarterback for Molly's team all along.

Ah, the old switcharoo. Most of us can't get away with that. Can ABC? Maybe, maybe not.

"Reality Steve," a blogger who claims to have an in with the network, has been writing for some time not simply that the scenario outlined above would happen but that it has been entirely scripted by ABC and the show's producers--from the beginning. According to him, it was clear a few days into taping this season's episodes that Jason and Molly were The Bachelor's Brad and Angelina. Faced with a dull, predictable series of shows (and no twins), they made Jason a deal--you can eventually choose Molly, but you have to propose first to Melissa.

Conspiratorial? Sure. Great TV? You bet? Moral? Less clear.

My interest here is not necessarily judging the ethical decisions of Molly, Melissa, and Jason but rather, if Steve the prose-impaired blogger is correct what this says about the ethics of ABC and the reality of reality TV. In the past, I have written about fake memoirs in these virtual pages and elsewhere, and my wife, who is smarter than I am about most things, challenged me last night post-bachelor to distinguish between fake memoirs and fake reality TV.

Why, she queried, do I get all worked up by invented memoirs but not un-real reality TV?

It's a good question, for which I have no good answer.

But, let me start here. For one, we're not sure just how scripted this season or the past few episodes of The Bachelor actually were. We do know, on the other hand, the many things James Frey or Margaret P. Jones made up to make their memoirs more fabulous. That said, I do believe a great deal of what Reality Steve proposes, and a reporter for the newspaper in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where Molly is from, has also agreed that this scenario makes sense.

So, going from there, I would say that the distinction is that we expect an authored book that markets itself as "autobiography" or "memoir" to adhere to "reality" more than reality TV. Perhaps because books have no actors, no producers, no advertisers, no need for weekly Nielsen ratings, and no sense of the episodic, we grant television liberties we don't grant authors; perhaps because we know a week of hanging out on an island with a bunch of other people cannot--under any reasonable circumstance--be edited down to 42 minutes with any real degree of accuracy.

I also think that we still expect something of books. This might be old-fashioned, but I believe we hold reality books to a higher standard of verisimilitude than reality television, which has become a kind of oxymoron.

We have--for better or worse--a different moral compass for high and popular culture.

This is good for books but maybe not so good for us, since far more people make television part of their identity than literary texts. But, both share the public push for narrative drama and emotional tension, and who among us has not been tempted to skew reality, transpire events to make our stories more readable?

ABC absolutely was involved on some level in determining the course of events with the show. The question is, with willing participants and an eager audience, did they do anything wrong?

Totally Looks LIke

I'VE BEEN A FAN of Totally Looks Like for some time now, but the Whitman/Gandalf pairing has officially nudged out Brown/Jackson as my favorite brotherhood.

A-Rod, Banned Substances, and the Nobility of Sports

SPORT IS NOT A virtue.

It may be embodied by virtuous people and have as some of its goals the betterment of humanity, the goodness of human potential, and a team ethic over individual excellence, but sport as a practice or an endeavor is not itself a good. Of the many annoying aspects foregrounded in the doping case of Alex Rodriguez, the most annoying has got to be the ongoing discourse of sport nobility.

Lovers of sport tend to invoke words like "pure," "ideal," and "natural" when describing what they think sports should be. Fans feel "wounded," "disappointed," even "heartbroken" when they hear their favorite athlete cheated--as though it were their wife or girlfriend who broke the faith.

These aficionados make the great mistake of seeing sports as a democracy. They think sports should be "fair," and that athletes should be on a "level playing field," and no one should get an advantage. They think sports should be about the game, and integrity. They believe that sport, through its nobility, rewards those with a true heart, those who work the hardest.

But, sports are not democratic. Sports are capitalistic.

Sports are about acquisition, accumulation, and defeat. They are about getting the most land, points, runs, yardage. They are about triumph. They are about victory. They are not, nor have they ever been about equality. They have always been about winning and doing pretty much whatever is necessary to win--building better training equipment, hiring the best coaches, amassing the stronger team, developing the most impressive work-out regimen, creating the best diet, constructing the best strategy.

Sports have been about one-upmanship since they began. And, even in college, sports has become primarily about money, making its philosophical and structural links to capitalism hard to ignore.

There seems to be a myth that in the good ol' days, men were men and fought fair, played honest, and upheld the rules. Nothing could be further from the truth. Evidence abounds that players threw games, clawed for unfair advantages, and played fast and loose with rules. Early pitchers used to drink cocktails of goat semen thinking it made them throw harder.

There are no level playing fields. There is no parity in sports. There are only humans competing. And no two humans arrive in the ring or on the course equal. They only arrive as humans who want to win.

And, winning, at least in the capitalist arena, has never been fair, nor noble.

If we want sports to be honest, then we need to change the discourse of sports. We need to start talking about it for what it is--not what we wish it should be. As long as we expect different behavior from baseball players than stock brokers, sports will always disappoint, and they will always be fake.

Inaugural Poem Re-Mix

BACK IN 2004, NEW JERSEY'S WFMU did a fabulous re-mix of the Republican National Convention. Republicans had never been so funny.

This year, WFMU is back with an inaugural poem re-mix contest. Posted on the site are 51 different versions of Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem sent in by listeners who were encouraged to make Alexander's poem their own. Sped up, set to music, funked up . . .it doesn't matter.

David Lynch fans will thrill to incantatory rhythms of the Log Lady from Twin Peaks version, while Beavis and Butthead loyalists will appreciate this locker room version.

Though the contest is a bit of a stunt, it also raises fun questions about the degree to which art is democratic. Is the poem Alexander's or ours? Is it disrespectful to turn the most watched poetry reading in the history of the world into a log lady chant? Is Alexander being mocked, or is this an homage?

From our perspective, any time people interact with a poem with this much attention to detail, it's a good thing for poetry--and a great thing for listener-supported radio.

Interview with Elizabeth Alexander

OVER THE WEEKEND, I received an email from Dave Rosenthal, who writes for the Baltimore Sun's book blog, alerting me to a recent interview he did with Elizabeth Alexander. He asks her a series of questions about the experience of writing and reading the inaugural poem, and he also talks with her about the reaction to the poem.

You can read excerpts from and listen to the interview here.

What Would You Order for Your Last Meal?

SAN FRANCISCO ARTIST AND ACTIVIST Richard Kamler has long been involved in advocating for the rights of those on death row. Some of his best work is The Waiting Room series which looks at the accoutrement of capital punishment.

For this project, Kamler fashioned lead versions of last meal requests from 17 inmates in the state of Texas. Etched into each tray is the name of the inmate and their date of execution. Each tray is 11" x 17" and weighty--both literally and metaphorically.

A new blog, The Last Meal, asks readers what they would order for their last meal.

So far, there are only ten comments, but I suspect that will grow. I wonder also if the gravity of the site will temper the otherwise uncontrollable urge of glibness.

We'll see . . .

First 100 Days Poem Site

POEMS FOR THE FIRST 100 Days is a very smart new blog begun by Rachel Zucker and Arielle Greenberg just a few days ago. It is slated to publish a new poem every day for the next 100 days about the new administration.

This may be the most exciting conflation of contemporary American poetry and contemporary American politics in a long time.

More on Elizabeth Alexander's "Praise Song for the Day"

SINCE TWR'S POST ABOUT Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem, "Praise Song for the Day," I've been fielding emails that say things like: "I disagree with you. I liked Alexander's poem."

I'm not sure why readers thought I disliked the poem. Even the part of my reading that appeared in the Times highlighted what I thought worked well.

For the record, I, too, liked the poem. It's a good poem--humble and quiet, elegant and introspective. Cadenced well and dotted with some lovely internal rhymes, the poem is more than competent. When she writes, "Say it plain," she's talking both to us and herself, giving us an indication of the work she wants her poem and her voice to do.

My main observation about the poem--and this is not a critique--is that it lacks ambition. To be sure, it's nearly impossible to write a poem commensurate with the spectacle and significance of a presidential inauguration. Especially this one. But, I would say that the poem didn't stretch as much as it might. It tried hard to be accessible and poetic at the same time, and it succeeded. Ultimately, it may have been more effective than memorable.

This would be in keeping with Alexander's writerly ego. It seems obvious to me that she did not want to detract from the importance of the event, to out rhetoric the new president, himself so poetic. She indicates as much in her funny interview with Steven Colbert:

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Elizabeth Alexander

Colbert at Christmas
Colbert Christmas DVD

Green Screen
Bill O'Reilly Interview

Miller Williams' poem for the second Clinton inaugural has not emerged as a particularly memorable poem, though it was also a strong effort. We'll have to see if Alexander's poem rides the waves of history like his or Angelou's. What is most important, though, is that her poem, like Obama's speech, is call for action, attentiveness, and answerability. She did a great job of showing why poems can and should be part of America's political and cultural discourse.