Ta-Nehisi Coates

I haven't been blogging about The Wire, and I won't be blogging about the season finale. I know, as a native Baltimorean, I should something to say. But I don't right now--except this: The Wire is one of the most painstakingly detailed works of art that I've ever seen. It seems deeply wrong to offer up any level of instant McAnalysis of what it all means. I know, I know. It's what I do on this blog all the time. But for The Wire, somehow, and I don't know why, it just seems wrong.

So since I have a memoir coming out in May, I felt extra qualified to talk about the temptations of fakery and fraud. Tried to get this published, but you know how it is for the kid--every day is hustle when the Man is trying to keep you down. So I'm taking it to the streets, check it out:

When news broke that Margaret Seltzer had concocted an entire life for her memoir, Love And Consequence, I thought about calling up my editor and telling him that my own upcoming memoir was a fake. I imagined him going through several stages of panic, and this made me laugh a little, but only a little and in a really uncomfortable way. The truth of the matter is that whenever I hear about another Jayson Blair/J.T. Leroy/Stephen Glass I shudder just a little. So much of what any nonfiction writer does occurs out of the line of sight of any supervision, and plagiarism and fabulism are always there as tempting possibilities. This isn’t like the deliciously mind-fogging temptation of say, adultery, but more like the self-destructive madness that makes you wonder what it would feel like to shoplift.

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In a much-needed, but flawed retort to Charlotte Allen's foolish piece on why women are so foolish, Katha Pollitt represents for Grey's Anatomy fans the world-over:

Oh, gag me with a spoon. Sure, girly culture can be silly -- but what does that prove? It's not as though men spend their evenings leafing through the plays of Moliere. Susie whips up doggy treats, Mike surfs porn sites; she curls up with the Friday Night Knitting Club, he watches football. Or maybe the two of them watch "Grey's Anatomy" together -- surprise, surprise, about half the show's audience is male. If you go by cultural preferences, actually, you could just as well claim that women are obviously smarter than men -- look around you at the museum, the theater, the opera house, the ballet, the concert hall. Women read more than men, too, especially fiction, which men tend to avoid. (A story about things that didn't happen? How does that work?) Women even read fiction by men and about men, further evidence of their imaginative powers -- while men, if they do pick up a novel, make sure it's estrogen-free. Who's really the dim bulb, the woman who doesn't see the beauty of "Grand Theft Auto," or the man who thinks Tom Clancy is a great writer?

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say Katha Pollitt doesn't know what she's talking about. She's basically sinking to Allen's level and using the same methodology of hasty generalizations. It's not enough for Pollitt to simply dismiss Allen's thesis on its merits--an easy enough task. She has to argue that it's actually women who are smarter than men, via a highly dubious series of markers of intelligence--opera, theater, ballet etc--and ignorance--video games and football. Does Pollitt even understand football? Has she ever played Grand Theft Auto? The problem with Allen's article wasn't that she argued the wrong side, it's that she reduced really complex observations into a grab-bag of overstatements and employed to make a transparently false argument.

Pollitt ends by asserting that "misogyny is the last acceptable prejudice." Great, the good old "Whose More Opressed Than Who" contest which the left so delights in. Hey Katha, I know a lot of Muslims, Asian-Americans and Latinos who would love to get in on that. I'm glad Pollitt took on Allen for her stupidity--but I wish she had have been more disciplined about it. Instead what we got was piece that was almost as problematic as the article it sought to refute.

That's just my view though. I will say that one my favorite blogs thought the piece was great.

Bonus LOL of the day via Gawker. This thread is classic. Enjoy.

...but here is a dire prediction:

What I think this misses are the cultural and social consequences of beating Obama (or McCain) this way. I don't mean beating Obama because the Clintons' message is more persuasive, or because the Clintons' healthcare plan is better, or because she has a better approach to Iraq. I mean: beating him by a barrage of petty attacks, by impugning his clear ability to be commander-in-chief, by toying with questions about his Muslim past, by subtle invocation of the race card, by intermittent reliance on gender identity politics, by taking faux offense to keep the news cycle busy ("shame on you, Barack Obama!") and so on. If the Clintons beat Obama this way, I have a simple prediction. It will mean a mass flight from the process. It will alter the political consciousness of an entire generation of young voters - against any positive interaction with the political process for the foreseeable future. I'm not sure that Washington yet understands the risk the Clintons are taking with their own party and the future of American politics.

Generally, I agree with that statement, but there is one problem with it. Hillary can only win this way --barring an unlikely move by the super-delegates--with the consent of the voters. I really have been thinking a lot about this lately, and I think we need to remember that old quote about the people getting the government they deserve. If we, as Democrats, are prepared to send Clinton back to the White House again, then I'll have to do some heavy thinking about politics. I'll know for sure, then, that I'm not a Democrat--the Democratic presidential nominee who I've seen who and liked the most in my life-time was John Kerry. Yeah, I know, not saying much. Bill was amoral, and there was something really cowardly about Gore's 2000 campaign--his hedge on Elian still irks me. But I'll also have to do some thinking about my own place in this country, which I no doubt, love. I will just need to assess what that means.

When all else fails, go to old Daily Show clips. I actually missed this one. It comes courtesy of my Mormon brother, Colby Poulson. Check it out

Nice piece and he's got a point:

Clinton's path to the nomination, then, involves the following steps: kneecap an eloquent, inspiring, reform-minded young leader who happens to be the first serious African American presidential candidate (meanwhile cementing her own reputation for Nixonian ruthlessness) and then win a contested convention by persuading party elites to override the results at the polls. The plan may also involve trying to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations, after having explicitly agreed that the results would not count toward delegate totals. Oh, and her campaign has periodically hinted that some of Obama's elected delegates might break off and support her. I don't think she'd be in a position to defeat Hitler's dog in November, let alone a popular war hero.

I was really thinking about it, but this latest bit tears. Only a power-hungry fool--and yes a Democrat--would imply that the Republican opponent was more qualified than their fellow Democrat. I know I live in New York and it doesn't matter, but on GP, there's no way I can, in good conscience, vote for this craven fool.

Not bad advice at all. I am especially in favor of this one:

4. Make a speech about the Internet slurs. Stop ducking them. Confront them. Talk about your Christian faith and your childhood exposure to Islam. Tell people about your parents. Debunk that idiotic pledge of allegiance meme. Grab the flag pin issue by the lapels. Do it all at once undefensively. Yes, it will raise the profile of every single slur. But if you rebut them candidly, gracefully, calmly, you will defuse them. You can run but you can't hide from Internet crapola. So confront it; defeat it. Right now, on these issues alone, the Obama camp is actually captive to the politics of fear. Don't be.

You said you would go right at them brother. Well, don't talk me to death.

Heh. Nice list over at Radar. Half of these movies I never saw because the sexism oozed off the trailer. Generally I hate listacles, but this is worth a look.

Pretty awesome reporting job here by Anne Kornblut and Peter Baker. Screw the dumb analysis. Here is a pretty comprehensive accounting of the past few months. I've been burnt out on this stuff since Tuesday, but this was too hard to resist. I salute them both.

I thought I told you that we won't stop...

I want to say up front that it was stupid for Obama to deny this happened, when it in fact did. The "I was dealing with the facts as I knew them" defense doesn't cut it. Bush would say the same thing about Iraq. What I've loved so far about Obama's campaign is the cat's willingness to, as we say in the old country, Man Up. I hope he continues in that tradition and takes responsibility for his mistakes, and remains willing to

Now that that's out of the way, it also seems clear that Obama was basically set-up. Here's a piece in TNR on Canadian conservatives attempts to influence the election:

First and foremost, the U.S. media has identified his chief of staff, Ian Brodie, as the leaker of the diplomatic cable written by the Chicago consulate reporting on the Goolsbee meeting. Harper's domestic political foes are advancing a narrative that has already angered Democrats, and would be bad news for bilateral relations: that Harper was trying to do a favor for the GOP by tossing a piece of political dynamite in front of Obama's train as it was barreling down on Ohio.

"They will do what is necessary to help Republicans. They're a nasty, unprincipled bunch, who are incompetent to boot," Bob Rae, foreign affairs critic and member of the opposition Liberal party, wroteasked on his blog. "Is it possible that the prime minister himself knew about this information and authorized the leaks in order to discredit the campaign of Mr. Obama for president of the United States?" New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton

And also from Talking Points Memo:

Seems the NAFTAgate leak started with -- surprise, surprise -- the Chief of Staff to Canada's conservative PM Stephen Harper. Only the first hint wasn't about stuff the Canadians had heard from the Obama camp. It was about reassurances the Canadians got from the Clinton campaign. According to a reporter who heard the original conversation, Brodie said "someone from (Hillary) Clinton's campaign is telling the embassy to take it with a grain of salt. . . That someone called us and told us not to worry."

Only somehow this evolved into a story about the Obama campaign giving such reassurances. 

Nasty stuff. But Obama better get used to it, and fast.

Well Obama got creamed last night. There's just no way around that. But Marc Ambinder points out that, even after her big ones, the math of Hillary come back is still really hard to see:

It is a sad irony or perhaps cosmic justice: just as Hillary Clinton succeeded in reforming her coalition -- older voters, working class women, self-identified Democrats, Latinos, the less affluent, the less educated -- just as she's succeeded in raising doubts about the presumptive Democratic nominee, the claws that are the Democratic rules tightened, perhaps inescapably -- in that she cannot escape from them. Forget about momentum. Or press coverage. Or arguments. Or moral claims to this or that. Forget about the external things that all of us in the media normally cover.

As the calendar progress, the reality is that the rules have become the controlling legal authority. When folks say "this ain't over for a while," they don't have a predicate. Perhaps the scrutiny on Obama will increase and that he will crash and that 30% of his superdelegates will crash and that 30% of his pledged delegates will defect and that 60% of the remaining superdelegates delegates will go her way. That could happen, but it is still not that likely to happen. I suppose that if we discover that Obama has a second family in Idaho...

Heard this today from my good friend Ed Park. Gygax, outside of my parents, may be the single most important factor in me becoming a writer. It's hard to explain to people today--hell it was hard then--what it meant to create an entire world inside your head with only some paper, weird dice, and rule-books. But, oh man, that world was so real to me. I later went on to MMORPGS like EQ and WoW, but in truth, nothing that any programmer does could match the limitless possibilities of conjuring a world in my head.

My sessions of Dungeons & Dragons were the most fun I ever had as a child, bar none. And it wasn't like I was the stereotypical geek with a pack of weird friends (really though, who was?). I was a relatively popular, if somewhat awkward black boy attending the public schools of West Baltimore. My brother Malik, who introduced me to D&D, was a similar dude--though a hell of a lot smarter.
The great thing about D&D though, was that as fun as it was, it really pushed your abstract thinking skills. I think that abilityto conjure a complete picture, based only on skeletal details stayed with me, and has really helped me as a writer.

And so now I look at my seven-year-old son, who has seen some of my rulebooks and wants me to teach him. What will I do? I was seven when I started. And yet, it's been so long since I've played. I wonder whether it will still feel the same. Time, I guess, to dig out my old gem dice...

Be still my heart. Man I can't take it--we got killed in Ohio and ambushed in Texas. I don't think I have the heart to even begin to try to analyze what any of this means yet. I think I'm with a lot of folks my age who just feel that we'll just die if we have to endure a smackdown of Hillary in the primary--that's what will happen--and then another four years of Republicans running this in D.C. Add that to the fact that I just don't see Barack Obama making another run for president after this.

I read somewhere that he really needs to take the gloves off and start hitting her hard. But I don't want to see that. I don't want him to become a win-at-all-cost Clintonite. I want him to draw a line in the sand about what the future means, and then force the Democrats to make a choice over embracing it, or rejecting it out of fear. All of that said, I'm with Andrew Sullivan tonight guys:

I just had a Jager shot, and hope to get drunk very soon.

OK, so maybe only in spirit. I still gotta get the boy to school in the morning...

Nice hit piece here on the inanity of Yes We Can and other campaign rhetoric. Hitches, as always, siffs out the b.s.:

Pretty soon, we should be able to get electoral politics down to a basic newspeak that contains perhaps 10 keywords: Dream, Fear, Hope, New, People, We, Change, America, Future, Together. Fishing exclusively from this tiny and stagnant pool of stock expressions, it ought to be possible to drive all thinking people away from the arena and leave matters in the gnarled but capable hands of the professional wordsmiths and manipulators.

He ends with a rather uncharitable jab at his now ex-friend Sid Blumenthal:

How well I remember Sidney Blumenthal waking me up all those years ago to read me the speech by Sen. Biden, which, by borrowing the biography as well as the words of another candidate's campaign, put an end to Biden's own. The same glee didn't work this time when he (it must have been he) came up with "Change You Can Xerox" as a riposte to Sen. Obama's hand-me-down words from Gov. Deval Patrick.

TNR argues that the press is finally turning on Obama. I gotta say, even as a supporter, I'm glad to see that happening. First of all, it's good for him--if he's going to be any sort of candidate in the general, or any sort of president, he better get used to answering tough questions. Second, it's good for all of us. I just hope he doesn't slouch into the same whiny press-bashing that the Clinton campaign has.

When I started The Beautiful Struggle, I refused to read any other memoirs. With the exception of Walter Bernstein's lovely Inside Out, I kept that promise. My reason for such a weird decision? Stories like this:

In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.

The problem is that none of it is true.

Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed.

I flipped through a few memoirs when I was writing my proposal, and while I didn't get the impression that they were completely fabricated, I was amazed at the level of detail with which people could recall events. I'm talking about memories of attire and weather on specific days from, like, age five. And not just once, but all across the book. I felt like I couldn't trust any of it. To my mind, memoir is supposed to be true.

When I wrote mine, I struggled with even the idea of recreating dialogue. Ultimately I came to the conclusion that I couldn't write the book without doing that. I'm still not sure that was the right decision, and my discomfort is reflected in how little dialogue is actually in the book. OK, I'm getting off-track here. My point is that editors are going to have to start fact-checking mo-fos. They don't have to fact-check everything, because as I understand it, that would be prohibitively expensive. But maybe an audit system where they randomly fact-check books, and fact-check ones that raise the B.S. alarm. I think a white chick claiming to have grown up gang-banging in South-Central qualifies. Man, a few phone calls would have revealed the fraud...

Nice take down in The Nation by Jon Weiner of the Times' foolish "Obama and the Jews" story.
Here's an interesting note:

Of course there are lots of other reasons why Jews support Obama. Jews have been the religious group most opposed to the war in Iraq. Jews are overwhelmingly liberal Democrats. The American Jewish Committee poll last November asked American Jews to pick their most important campaign issue. 23% named the economy and jobs, followed by health care (19%), the war in Iraq (16%), and then terrorism and national security (14%).

At the bottom of the list: support for Israel, at 6 percent.

That wasn't in the New York Times, either.

I find that fascinating because it mirrors a lot of what I see in black folks. People somehow think that reparations or Affirmative Action are voting issues for black folks, when in fact it's same stuff that other Americans worry over--the economy, the War, and health-care.