A Second Hand Conjecture

British lesbians rate Rachel Weisz as their top celebrity sexual fantasy. It’s a fine choice in my opinion, particularly in her 1930s bob-cut incarnation as Greta Szabó in one of my favorite movies, the Hungarian historical epic Sunshine.

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The American Left is about to blow a collective gasket at having Barack Obama’s celeb novelty instantly antiquated and cast aside in favor of Sarah Palin. Lots of posts are appearing all over the web damning not her record, views, or experience, but merely the fact of having to be subjected to obsessive reporting on her. They deserve every excruciating minute of it after subjecting the nation to mindless Obamania for two years. Sit in it and burn, says me.

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(Photo: Alice E. Backer | blog)

Andrew Galasetti at Lyved is an extremely devoted admirer of Obama. While fanatical devotion can blind — Galasetti thinks for instance that the McCain celebrity charge backfired, when the polls suggest a different picture (last week Ras had +6 Obama, now it’s +1 McCain) — it can also be a benefit when you’re looking for someone to find hidden advantages in faults. Often there are adantages, particularly foreign policy advantages, wrapped up inside domestic political vulnerabilities.

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Uh-oh, Paris doesn’t like John McCain. But wasn’t that sorta the point? It’s amazing how McCain has cheapened the process through involving her though. However…perhaps not entirely for the bad. The 10% of the world that wasn’t paying attention to this election just started watching.

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Obama might be giving McCain more ammunition for the contention he is a condescending elitist. Denouncing Republican attacks on his energy plan as lies, he countered that “these guys take pride in being ignorant.”

Huffington Post and the leftblogs are naturally eating it up (boom, boom, boom, boom). But it probably won’t play as well with Middle America, where partisan conceit of this sort is typically unwelcome.

Or perhaps anywhere where the allegations of ‘Paris Hilton celebrity’ –which could be described as a combination of vanity and vacuity in itself– have done real damage to Obama. Obama’s suggestion might have a certain flavor of irony there.

At any rate, behold a nastier campaign of a very old sort. Credit goes to both men.

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(photo: dgeuzen)

John Riley at Newsday is criticizing John McCain’s “Celeb” ad on the grounds that “anyone knows” Britney Spears and Paris Hilton just aren’t celebrity enough. Points for novelty at least.

To reinforce his argument, he cites the Forbes Celebrity 100 as proof positive of this. Where are they in the list Mr. McCain? Not there! Tsk. Clearly they’re not celebrities.

Ah, but if that wasn’t enough for you, Riley isn’t yet finished. Reaching deeper into whatever depths the above point came from, he detects a sinister gender and racial subtext informing ad:

[T]hey didn’t pick other big celebrities, who were either men, or black, or married. What they picked was two sexually available white women.

But it must have been a coincidence, because we know John McCain wants to run an elevated campaign focusing on the serious issues that America faces.
(Newsday)

You know, it’s honestly hard to imagine typing something that ludicrous. I’ve typed plenty of bad analysis in my time, don’t get me wrong. But this is cringe inducing.

If you’re against the McCain campaign or even just its marketing strategy, is it really so difficult (or far from the truth) to dismiss the ad as empty, trite, and needlessly cheapening of a very serious debate? By elevating a frankly rather irrelevant ad to the level of a harmful racist conspiracy, Mr. Riley’s only reducing himself far below it.

Nietzsche’s injunction that one should be careful not to become a monster when fighting one, might be shrunken here. One should be careful not to become a very petty mouse, when fighting mice.

(H/T: Blake Hounshell | Foreign Policy)

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photo: Dave Morris

Garance picks up on the neologism “drunkorexia.” It’s a fittingly ugly word for the ugly habit of combining your eating disorder with alcohol abuse. Garance attributes it to the evolution of the “Gawker mindset,” which I suppose in this context might be defined as a fascination with the personal implosions of psychologically disturbed young celebrities, leading to a self-destructive urge toward emulation. I’d merely say that wealthy countries have to create their own problems. Can you imagine trying to seriously explain this preposterous phenomenon to a poor woman in Madagascar, where 70% of the population suffers from involuntary malnutrition?

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What’s worse, having to be asked questions like this, or having to ask them? Perhaps there’s little difference.

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