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Thursday, May 11, 2006

Three things for Thursday

Thing the First: Stanley Cup Playoffs

I’ll keep this part (relatively) brief, because I know only four or five of you are going to bother with it.  Everyone else can skip down to Thing the Second.

Right now, it looks like my predictions for the second round are not going to pan out.  Sure, the Devils and Senators could win their next four, and then my predictions would be fulfilled to the letter.  But that’s not gonna happen.  So where did I go wrong?

First of all, I picked the two top seeds (after tempting fate by picking the top four in the first round, against all odds), thinking that Ottawa’s first line was literally unstoppable and that Brodeur would make up for New Jersey’s offensive shortcomings and grievous Scottlessness in the defensive corps.  But Brodeur is playing like a mortal man, and all mortal men die, being mortal.  Perhaps he realized, upon skating to the bench after giving up six goals on his 34th birthday, that it would be a formidable task indeed to carry the Devils into the conference finals.  If that’s the case, then that’s one task he can cross off his To Do list for May.  The Hurricanes’ forechecking has been relentless, and, as I’ve been saying since April, the Canes can play much better defense than they’re usually given credit for.  That’s the real trick to these predictions, by the way—pick one team, but throw in a lot of praise for the other team, on which you can fall back in such a way as to suggest that you weren’t really all that wrong in the end.

Which brings me to the Sabres.  Look, both these 3-0 series leads are absurd.  The Sabres and Canes simply aren’t that much better than the Sens and Devils.  They’re just playing this much better in every single game—and actually, I’m not convinced that the Sabres have actually outplayed the Senators in all three.  But before you Ottawa folk jump all over your poor backup G, Ray Emery, look again at the game tape: the Sabres are out-forechecking you.  Even after game one, when you decided to stop giving the Sabres the puck in your own zone just to see what they would do, the Sabres have created all the turnovers they need.  And while you’ve got four or five truly terrifying scoring threats in Spezza, Alfredsson, Heatley, Havlat, and Fisher (who has played brilliantly), the Sabres have about ten.  Connolly may be out for the count, but Hecht is back, and now I’m hoping the Sabres become the dominant paradigm for New NHL® teams (pay attention, Calgary front office): three offensive lines of potential scorers, each of whom accounts for 50-80 points per year.  The Senators simply haven’t been able to let down their guard: after one wave of Sabres storms the blue line, another one comes along 45 seconds later, and eventually their crisp passing and dogged cycling wears ‘em down.  And did I promise you a fierce-skatin’ series, or what?  Almost every damn shift is exciting, and when these two teams play 4-on-4, it’s like watching Frictionless Hockey end-to-end.

So yeah, I blew my picks.  And I’m very happy about it.  I have my thoughts about how the conference finals will go, but I will keep them to myself, so as not to jinx the good people of the City of Lights.

In the West, what can I say about the Ducks except I told you so, Scott Lemieux?  This 3-0 lead is more indicative of the actual play on the ice than the two Eastern series, though—the Avs are simply outmanned and outclassed.  Up north, late last night (I went to bed at 2:30), the Sharks spent most of game three watching the Oilers skate by them, but managed to drag the game into triple OT despite being outshot 15-2 in the first period and 58-34 overall.  Still, the Oilers will need to win game four as well, or the West is going to be an all-California conference final.  I’m still thinking the Sharks are going to the final finals, but my goodness, those Ducks look scary good.

One last thing.  I have kept my remarks focused on the actual play of the game, but there are other considerations here as well.  Most important, it is critical that the Hurricanes not play another series against a team whose jerseys are just a slightly different shade of red than their own.  These Canadiens-Canes and Devils-Canes series are hurting my eyes, and if I were forced to watch yet a third (Sens-Canes), I would go out and get myself a black and white TV with a channel knob and a UHF button.  Second most important, the Ducks have taken a step in the right direction and gotten themselves third jerseys that are suitable for adults (if a bit dull), but those other two jerseys make one wonder why a bunch of 13-year-olds are playing in the NHL, and where’s Emilio Estevez?  And that nasty coach of the evil Iceland team?  A name change would help, too.  Also moving out of Anaheim and into a real city as opposed to a zoning complex.  I hear Quebec City would like a replacement for their Nordiques.  Otherwise, all good.

Thing the Second: Richard Cohen Aftermath

The United States is not necessarily a better place today because the left blogosphere has ridiculed poor Richard Cohen.  But there a couple two-three serious points to be made here.  One is that (as lots of people seem to have forgotten) the question was never, “was Stephen Colbert funny?” There’s really no way to legislate that one, now that Richard Pryor has passed on and the world lacks a Universal Humor Meter.  The question was whether Colbert was newsworthy.  Now, it’s no secret that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are culture heroes to much of the left blogosphere, because we tend to look upon them as oases of smart snark in a vast desert of Timmehs and Cokies on TV and raving lunatics on AM radio.  So when the press, having been skewered by Colbert, brushed off his performance and spent all its time the next day on Bush’s lighthearted self-parody, the blogs smelled a rat (yes, a critical mass of blogs can have an aggregate sense of smell), and they rallied around the snark.  Then, when the Clueless Wanker Contingent sniped back at us, we believed that they had made Colbert’s point for him just beautifully (though Colbert had done quite well on his own), and we went into full mockery and denunciation mode.  But Peter Daou’s original point still stands: “The AP’s first stab at it and pieces from Reuters and the Chicago Tribune tell us everything we need to know: Colbert’s performance is sidestepped and marginalized while Bush is treated as light-hearted, humble, and funny. Expect nothing less from the cowardly American media.” If not for the blogswell of outrage and general WTF, Colbert’s routine would simply have disappeared from public view.

Now, it’s true that blogs can be silly things.  At their worst, they work precisely the way mass media do—in Jon Stewart’s immortal words, like a bunch of kids chasing the soccer ball all over the field—except that they do it in fast-forward, so that you see a bunch of kids chasing the soccer ball in these comically jerky, hyperkinetic motions, and you want to have a brisk ragtime piano score for a soundtrack.  (Have I participated in these soccer games myself?  Sure, every now and then.  Sometimes they’re kinda fun in a hyperkinetic kinda way.) But at their best, politics - and - culture - commentary blogs have demonstrated something remarkable: there really are a lot of talented writers and critics out there in the English-speaking world, and some of ‘em are smarter and more talented than Richard Cohen or Joe Klein or Howard Fineman or David Broder or . . . you get the idea.  Accordingly, the print-media pundits, some of whom have occupied their perches for decades and are not used to discursive competition from another medium, are trying to dismiss bloggers as indiscriminate ranters.

Greg Sargent’s recent column gets this just right:

This fight doesn’t really have anything to do with the “tone” of the blogosphere at all. Rather, it’s actually about the efforts of bloggers to establish the legitimacy of their medium, and about the reluctance of major news organizations and their employees to recognize that legitimacy.

The unhoodwinkable Gene Lyons thinks we’re seeing the end of the Era of the Celebrity Pundit, but that’s probably going a bit too far—and in the wrong direction, too.  (Before we get too cheerful, remember, Instaguy and the Powertools can still be found in mass media.) What we might be seeing—I hope, I hope—is the end of the era in which invertebrates and inside-traders like Klein and Cohen serve as the official representatives of liberalism in the literate public sphere.  Liberals and progressives from Eric Alterman to Tom Tomorrow have spent a decade and a half decrying mass-media “debates” that pair wishy-washy centrist/liberals (in the patented Mark Shields “patient and deliberative” mode, bless Shields’s heart) against fire-breathing avatars of Goebbels, and Hannity & Colmes is merely the self-parodic terminus ad quem of that phenomenon.  The faux-liberal routine has simply got to stop, not least because it has now reached its Late-Roman Decadent Phase in which faux-liberal aspirant Peter Beinart gushes embarrassingly all over faux-liberal eminence Joe Klein:

Another great strength of Politics Lost is that, whether by accident or design, it models the kind of political discourse Klein would like to see. Against the neutered, white-washed language that dominates contemporary American political life, Klein counterposes his own edgy, raw and often hilarious rhetorical style. Again and again, he uncorks one-liners so good that the reader stops to savor. Carter was “as serious as cancer and as colorful as cement.” “The 1970s were the 1960s for nerds.” Dukakis “hailed from the National Public Radio wing of his party.” In their obsession with the minutiae of environmental policy, Democrats “had trouble seeing the forest for the tree huggers.”

There’s your fighting faith, my liberal and progressive brethren and sistren.  (And thanks to Bob Somerby for a mess of wonderful posts on Politics Lost.) And there’s your really brilliant writing, too, brought to you from the world in which the sparkling witticisms of Richard Cohen are teh funny.  The forest for the tree huggers!  Guffaw, guffaw!  That one really slayed ‘em at the Leadership Institute seminar, let me tell you.  Edgy, raw, hilarious!

But why should we take out after Klein and Cohen and their ilk, when George Will continues to bloviate into his eleventh decade as a pundit and John Tierney carries on the proud tradition of making shit up?  Because the faux-liberal routine really does produce all kinds of political pathologies in our national discourse, that’s why.  It leads conservatives to think of liberals as meek, squishy little creatures who cannot help but start every paragraph with “on the one hand” and end it with “but on the other hand, Russ Feingold / Howard Dean/ Nancy Pelosi has clearly led the party into the spider-hole of McGovernism.” And then, when these complacent conservatives run up against a reasonably vertebrate and articulate progessive-liberal writer, they scream in horror at the horrible incivility and the radical Symbionese Liberation Army far-leftism of the Dangerous Digby and the Terrible Kos.  And thus the “far left” gets redefined as “supporters of Al Gore,” and the center gets moved to the capital of McCainia.

Look, folks, I’ve been around this block a few times myself.  Fifteen years ago, when I first noticed that the academic left was no match for a hostile pack of journalists, I decided to try to write me some things for magazines and newspapers.  And you know, while it’s true that some of us academic liberal-lefties write rather obscure prose, on the grounds that strategic obscurity is both a negation and repetition of itself, and that, more importantly, it effectively stages the suturing of the self-differential subject by interrupting and interrogating the subject’s ethico-enunciative position in the project of modernity, thereby obscuring—or “de-scribing”—hegemonic Western narratives of homogeneity and clarity (you know, that old shtick), there are lots of us who can write rather clearly and effectively, too.  But weirdly, as I point out in Rhetorical Occasions, we “rarely respond to these routine charges by pointing out that the vast majority of us are quite capable writers—certainly as capable, on balance, as the great mass of journalists, not all of whom are exemplars of precision, clarity, or Kemptonian élan.” The point is all the more obvious when it comes to the best political bloggers.  The secret is out: it’s not all that hard to write a couple of smart, well-crafted columns every week.  Plenty of bloggers do it all the time, and some of ‘em are the sharpest crayons in the Internets box.

In a weird way, the left end of the blogosphere (again, much of which consists of people who like Al Gore and Russ Feingold and Wesley Clark more than, say, the International Committee to Keep Defending Slobodan Milosevic Anyway and/or the Symbionese Liberation Army) is now making the same “army of Davids” argument often associated with the Pajamas Right.  But you know, there always was something deeply ludicrous about that crew and its bizarre self-representations.  Think of it this way.  The past five years have witnessed the ascendancy of a truly radical right in the United States, and along come a bunch of allegedly conservatarian bloggers to say we rebel against the stale orthodoxies of our era!  Now is the time for a full-scale revolution in public discourse, in which the brave souls of the Resistance stand up to parrot everything the Bush Administration tells them!

Now, that’s funny.  Almost as funny as the Powertools turning to Dungeons and Dragons masters for military advice.

Whereas your local liberal-left bloggers really do constitute an alternative news- and- commentary source, and some of them could step up and replace the Beltway Boys tomorrow.  Gene Lyons cites “Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, the inimitable Digby, Glenn Greenwald, Billmon, Atrios and many others,” but these are only the most obvious, public-wonk figures.  Don’t get me wrong; I heart them all with many hearts.  But among those “many others” I could add Jane, Chris, Amanda, PZ, Lindsay, and Lance, just off the top of my head (and with apologies to everyone who is currently residing in the lower layers of my head).  I don’t know if any of them would actually want to work in the politics- and- culture- and- sex- with- squids section of a major daily paper, but they could, is all I’m saying.

Which brings me to

Thing the Third: a Special Announcement!

Having said all that, I have to announce that I’m stepping down, taking a break, handing over the reins for a while.  I’m burned out.

I realize that I hit the blogburn on a regular basis every six months, so it must be seasonal.  Last year at this time, when I was thoroughly tired of my own writing and turned over the blog to John McGowan (who wrote a series of wonderful posts on the Republican assault on democracy, well worth revisiting today), I promptly found myself in the emergency room, having an appendectomy in which the offending appendix was so uncivil as to burst as they were removing it.  (That last link takes you to my unprecedented live-blogging of the appendectomy itself!)

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(Graphic NSFW pic courtesy of Elayne Riggs).

In the end, I was out of commission for about a month.  I don’t know how long I’ll be on hiatus this time (not longer than that, I hope), but I can’t wait to find out what kind of emergency surgery is waiting for me this year!

So I’m going to turn off the computer now and go outside, where, they tell me, the weather has been quite nice lately.  I might even start writing my next book soon.  But not just this minute.

In the meantime, please welcome two guest bloggers whom I’ve never met, but whose work I’ve come to know and love in the past two years.  The infallible and gracious Amanda Marcotte will start things off tomorrow with something arbitrary yet fun, the contents of which I cannot predict any more than I can foresee the winners of the Stanley Cup (hem, hem), and the inimitable and generous Lance Mannion will join her on Monday with whatever is on his mind and at the tips of his fingers.

My sincere thanks to both of them for being so kind as to take over this little blog while I rest my weary soul. 

Posted by Michael on 05/11 at 01:59 PM
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