A Tiger divided against himself ...

The rumor goes something like this, give or take a few sordid details:

The Great Athlete, flush with success and fame, sees a beautiful woman from across the room at a swanky party. The woman, who recognizes the Great Athlete, is flustered and nervous. But the Great Athlete is confident and full of brass. He approaches, she waits – What will he say? What will she say? He arrives, looks her in the eye, and asks, “What are your hopes? What are your dreams?” The woman is surprised by this line, even finds it ridiculous, but after all this is a Great Athlete and she’s always wanted to meet him – to bed him – and so she indulges the conversation. After 20 minutes, the Great Athlete gives her a card with a number on it, the number that when called will summon his driver. And with that, the Great Athlete disappears. After the party, she calls the number, and sure enough a driver comes and picks her up and takes her to an apartment building, where she takes the private elevator to the penthouse suite, where on a bed lies the Great Athlete, shirtless. He politely but firmly informs the woman that they are going to have sex, and they do. Quick, business-like sex, the woman will report later: functional and to the point. The next morning the Great Athlete has his driver take the woman back to her home. Tryst complete.

Punchline:

Several months later that same woman is at another party and sees the Great Athlete from across the room and he sees her and walks over with that same confidence and brass, and she smiles this time, less nervous, ready to reminisce about the evening they spent together, ready to rekindle. And what does the Great Athlete say when he arrives? “What are your hopes? What are your dreams?” The woman is surprised but decides to play along; surely he is just being coy. But wouldn’t you know it, after 20 minutes of conversation, the Great Athlete is handing her a card with a number to call that will summon his driver, who, sure enough, at the end of the evening takes the young woman to that same building with that same private elevator that leads to that same penthouse, where – sure as you’re born – the Great Athlete is lying on his bed shirtless. They proceed to make quick, business-like love, and in the morning, the Great Athlete’s driver takes the woman home. At no point does the Great Athlete give any indication that he has any idea the two of them have ever met, much less done this peculiar mating dance – step for step – once before.

Ladies and gentleman, that great athlete: Derek Jeter.

That’s right: The captain of the world champion New York Yankees, the Sports Illustrated 2009 Sportsman of the Year, the man who’s honor and decorum the likes of Michael Jordan and 60 Minutes‘ Ed Bradley have lined up to celebrate. Hell, even  legendary writer Gay Talese once wrote, “[i]n this era of boorish athletes, obnoxious fans, greedy owners and shattered myths, here’s a hero who’s actually polite, and that has to have come from good parenting. You can’t compare him to Joe DiMaggio, for DiMaggio didn’t have bad manners — he had no manners. Where have you gone, man with manners? Here you are, Derek Jeter.”

But then look at the stream of self-affirming moralist rhetoric that was spun in the direction of Tiger Woods this week, post-automobile incident. Those same sportswriters and society pundits who for years have been falling all over themselves to praise Woods’ playing and his work ethic and his character turned on him with the fanaticism of the newly converted when they learned he had cheated on his wife, peppering him with the condemnation, luxuriating in their disappointment, and waiting patiently for the inevitable public apology.

And that might be the lesson that we should take from all of this: Woods and Jeter are both sports starts of gigantic proportions — men being supermen, larger than life, yet excelling at an activity that, in its basic form, extends back to humanity’s primitive days in the caves and that speaks directly to the most basic breeding instincts at the center of our reproductive process. The difference? Tiger tried to deny his place in the world and settle for family life … and the eventual (and perhaps inevitable) fall from grace that so many public alphas have had to endure. Jeter, on the other hand, inoculated himself against the ethical quibbling and criticisms of the mortal chattering class — in this case, the sportsfan blogosphere and celebrity gossipmongers — by simply being that thing that they would all hope to be had they been born with his … talents.

We love Derek Jeter because he acknowledges who he is (a superstar) and what he is (a philanderer) and acts accordingly (Hopes, anyone? Dreams?), while we resent Woods for desiring normality, breaking vows he probably never should have taken in the first place, and apologizing to millions of people he’s never even met, much less wronged, when he got caught. The same way we loved the lecherous, hard-drinking, cocaine-using politician Charlie Wilson and hate mealy-mouthed family man Governor Mark Sanford. The same way we celebrate George Clooney for brazenly taking 52 models a year to his seaside Italian villa and attack Jude Law for furtively cheating on his fiancee with only one nanny. We like our stars brazen and brave, convinced that society’s conventions don’t apply to them and celebrating the fact that they are beyond the need for explanation or apology.

Otherwise, they’d be just like us.

Photo by judhudson via Flickr

This morning, the New York Times reported that “Republican leaders are circulating a resolution listing 10 positions Republican candidates should support to demonstrate that they ‘espouse conservative principles and public policies’ that are in opposition to ‘Obama’s socialist agenda.’” What’s more, reported Adam Nagourney, anyone found to be in disagreement with anymore than two of these principles “would be penalized by being denied party funds or the party endorsement.”

Now why, exactly, would any self-respecting intransigent apparatchik want to be associated with a colleague who could pass their purity test by a margin of only 80 percent?

‘Cause Ronald Reagan said so, of course.

Quoth Nagourney: “The resolution invokes Ronald Reagan, and noted that Mr. Reagan had said the Republican Party should be devoted to conservative principles but also be open to diverse views. President Reagan believed, the resolution notes, ‘that someone who agreed with him 8 out of 10 times was his friend, not his opponent.’” In other words, these principles are the Ten Commandments according to the Gipper — except that, in these tough times, eight, apparently, is enough.

So here you go, young conservatives (again, courtesy of Nagourney and the Times). Remember, you can only ignore two:

(1) We support smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama’s “stimulus” bill;

(2) We support market-based health care reform and oppose Obama-style government run health care;

(3) We support market-based energy reforms by opposing cap and trade legislation;

(4) We support workers’ right to secret ballot by opposing card check;

(5) We support legal immigration and assimilation into American society by opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants;

(6) We support victory in Iraq and Afghanistan by supporting military-recommended troop surges;

(7) We support containment of Iran and North Korea, particularly effective action to eliminate their nuclear weapons threat;

(8) We support retention of the Defense of Marriage Act;

(9) We support protecting the lives of vulnerable persons by opposing health care rationing and denial of health care and government funding of abortion; and

(10) We support the right to keep and bear arms by opposing government restrictions on gun ownership.

None of the items on the list is surprising in itself, but the intent here did catch us more than a little off guard. After all, Chairman Mao sent his red guards against any citizen deemed to have suspect or wavering beliefs.  Josef Stalin engaged in regular violent purgings designed to purify the so-deigned disbelieving sections of his communist party. More recently, the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran has engaged in a wave of purifying executions, which, when viewed in context with this past summer’s civil unrest, can be seen as a sort of come-to-god-moment for any stray opposition members. The Saudis still execute homosexuals in what looks like an attempt to keep the race pure; in ancient Israel, the punishment for improper speech was isolation, etc., etc.

So, looked at historically, this brand-new G.O.P. purity effort could be seen as nothing out of the ordinary for a strong central power looking to consolidate its interests — but that’s something that should be completely anathema to any true Republican.

Of course the real issue for Republicans may just be who to worship. There may not be any specific mention on the purity list about the need to be Christian, but everybody knows you’ve got to be one to get anywhere in the party. But, at the same time, you also have to be a devout Reaganist. The G.O.P. has become the servant of two masters, the follower of two different sets of 10 commandments. You don’t just have to say you support the Reagan approach to Republican policy, you have to believe in the man himself.

After all, his off-the-cuff comments are now being sanctified and hammered into stone tablets, just like hundreds of religious figures before him; his aside hath become dogma. But it’s a wishy-washy kind of dogma, one that goes easy on sinners and fallen acolytes. What can one say about an ideology that allows even its would-be apostles to subvert its ideology 20% of the time?

And that begs the question: Why have a purity test at all? Why not just let anyone in? Sure, Jesus said, “blessed are the meek” and “blessed are the poor,” but didn’t he also say that “the meek aren’t necessarily blessed given such circumstances that  the legitimacy of one’s meekness has been called into question and public opinion finds that peacemakers and the pure at heart are more in favor currently and should therefore be granted easier access to blessedness, vis a vis those who hunger and thirst after righteousness or are weeping, who, it has been decided by this committee, are no longer eligible to receive blessings”?

4000 years ago, Moses came down from Sinai with 10 Commandments, and now the Republicans have come up with 10 of their own. Only difference is, Moses expected you to follow all of his, whereas the GOP is fine with 80%.

Maybe it’s time for a new spin on the old spiritual: “If it’s good enough for Reagan, then it’s good enough for me.”

If only Fatty were alive today

This past Sunday, Michael Richards and Larry David illustrated just how far the world of modern celebrity is from the one the rest of us are living in. On the latest episode of David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, Richards, playing himself, is about to use the n-word in public when he realizes he’s surrounded by onlookers with video phones. This is, of course, a reference to Richards’ much-YouTubed 2006 on-stage rant that led to the total collapse of the previously beloved cultural icon.

Now, if you or I had done what Richards did, our only hope for expiation would have been something along the lines of a 12-step racism-expungement program — which, for the record, Richards did have to go through (let’s not forget Letterman, and those three years spent wondering in the outer darkness of industry indifference), but that’s where the similarities end. Richards also has the option to go on HBO, turn his sins into a performance piece, and move on, burden removed. Which is to say that the rise of self-referential comedies combined with the continued (and ever-deepening) obsession with celebrity gossip now allows for this kind of paid, (sort of) scripted absolution. After all, why apologize on Letterman when you can go on Extras or SNL and get yourself some laughs for playing the guy you should be apologizing for being in the first place?

This kind of ironic performative mea-culpa is both new (Fatty Arbuckle never made any one-reelers about sodomizing women to death) and available only to celebrities (if you get caught cheating on your wife, you don’t have the luxury of being able to extricate yourself from the situation by performing a one-act about a guy who cheats on his wife), and it raises an interesting issue: Are there still crimes so heinous that not even this approach will make up for them? Or, to put it into more self-reflective terms: Are we willing to let a celebrity off the hook for anything, provided he or she is clever enough to make us laugh about it?

What, for example, would Chris Brown have to do on camera to get us to forgive him for abusing Rihanna? Would it be enough for him to go on Saturday Night Live and play a kooky R&B singer who beats up any woman who makes him angry — a back-up dancer who misses a step, a back-up singer who misses a note, a waitress who brings him his eggs scrambled rather than fried, Sonia Santomayor, Hilary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Mother Earth, his mother, your mother, and so on and so on, ad infinitum, SNL-style,  until the stage is covered in female cast members? Would we forgive him then?

Or how ’bout Michael Vick? What if he went on Conan and electrocuted Triumph the Insult Comic Dog until the puppet was ready to take a chunk out of Andy Richter? Might that be enough to get the former star quarterback a fresh multimillion dollar contact? And could Roman Polanski find redemption for both himself and Woody Allen by playing a lecherous old film director in Allen’s latest, most personal, film? If Allen could make Polanski funny, in other words, would it be enough to wipe away his sins?

Sure, art needs to imitate life — otherwise David, Richards, and everyone else connected with Seinfeld would still be working the stand-up circuit — but when art is employed as a purgative for egregious personal missteps, it forces the offendees (namely, society as a whole) into the role of unwilling, if amused, accomplices. And who needs that from television?

This is why we were so excited to see Inglourious Basterds. From the time we took in the first trailer – the one that premiered about six months ago, with Brad Pitt recruiting Jewish soldiers for his special team of Naaazi-killing, Naaazi-scalping modern-day Macabees — we thought, Finally, someone has made the movie we’ve been playing in our heads since we were little, a movie about righteous Jews purifying the earth of Nazi brutality with brutality of their own, saving innocents and redeeming our people from that feeling that we were bullied badly 60 years ago and did little to stop it.

So yesterday, your Unfit co-editors, Mike and Josh, went to see how Quentin Tarantino’s Jewish revenge fantasy stood up to the one we’ve been concocting, editing, morphing, and perfecting in our heads for … our entire lives. Our hopes were high, even as our expectations were a bit muted. Our main concern? Could the man behind Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, and other bits of enjoyable-but-frivolous cinephile fluff do justice to the greatest calamity of the 20th (and possibly any other) century? Which is also to ask: Could this American master of film stack up to the elaborate yet emotional fantasizing of two Jewish freelance writers with no filmmaking experience but tons of free time, imagination, and inherited historical bitterness?

The short answer is No. The long one we’ll call: The Five Crimes of Quentin Tarantino (As Perpetrated Upon and in the Name of the Jewish People):

1. False Advertising – The premise for Inglourious Basterds aligned perfectly with our best fantasies: An elite group of highly trained, highly motivated Jewish soldiers are dropped behind enemy lines to bust German skulls. Simple and beautiful. Problem is, that really isn’t what Inglourious Basterds is about. Aside from one early scene where we watch a man nicknamed the Bear Jew beat one officer to death with a baseball bat while surrounded by the dead, scalped bodies of an entire Nazi platoon, most of what we know about the Basterds’ operations comes from descriptions and narration – exposition sans action. The rest of the movie follows the adventures of a sadistic German officer and a young Jewish woman who escaped from his clutches and is now devising a plan to massacre the Nazi high command in a Paris movie theatre. Though this is all, admittedly, entertaining, we were promised a whole lot more viscerally redemptive entertainment.

2. Salvation From Without – The leader of the Basterds, played by Brad Pitt, isn’t a Jew but a southern bootlegger from the mountains of Tennessee. Now, we like Brad Pitt as much as the next guy, and he’s as good at sticking out his chin and garbling his way through a Great Smokey accent as any minor actor in a Coen Brothers movie could ever hope to be. But what self-respecting Jew ever had a dream about killing Nazis that involved taking orders from a Gentile? The whole point of the Jewish revenge fantasy is that we get to do the whole thing on our own, eradicating the Nazi hordes in the name of all our brothers and sisters who couldn’t do it for themselves. This odd bit of character development on Tarantino’s part sucked the motivating juice right out of his story: If you want your cinematic Nazi-killing done right — with the perfect blend of historical catharsis and unhinged malice — you’ve got to send a group of Jews to do it. (Or maybe Frenchmen. Or perhaps Poles. Could also be Russians, we suppose. Oh, or Gypsies. Maybe the English. Anyway, not a broad-shouldered blond guy from bluegrass country.)

3. Salvation vs. Vengeance – In any anti-Nazi Jewish revenge fantasy worth the name, the heroes shouldn’t simply treat their prey with the relative abandon of, well, Nazis; they have to be violent with a better eye trained toward the virtue of saving innocent people. Return to our example from the beginning of this story and you’ll see that when we allow ourselves to dream, the fantasy’s main feature is our swooping in at the last moment to provide relief for the suffering and defend the helpless. Just running around and killing Nazis willy-nilly (say, when they first wake up in the morning or when they’re writing letters to their mothers) pushes one’s actions into the realm of the callous, the brutal, and the morally suspect, divorced from any sense of heroism or salvation … not to mention eliciting audience sympathy for the wrong side. After all, the worst thing you could do when fighting Nazis is become a Nazi yourself. Which is what you do when, like the Basterds, you ambush a group of soldiers randomly in the woods, pound their heads in with bats, and take their scalps … hooting and hollering as you go. If your fantasy doesn’t involve saving the persecuted, if it lacks humanity as a motivator, if it celebrates violence for violence’s sake, you run the risk of becoming no better than the monsters you’re out to destroy.

4. Tarantino Being Tarantino Pt. 1 – For all of Quentin Tarantino’s well-advertised love of old westerns and kung-fu movies, he actually has little or no interest in the strong, silent man-of-few-words type. Think about Christopher Walken in True Romance or Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction or Woody Harrelson in Natural Born Killers; those characters never stop talking, right up until the moment (and even after the moment) they’ve killed the folks whose ears they were talking off. In fact, if Tarantino has a trademark as a filmmaker, it’s his unabashed and unapologetic love of words. And because he loves words and the people who love words, he gives his favorite characters the most words to speak.

Inglourious Basterds is no exception. Its greatest creation is the “Jew Hunter,” Hans Landa, a man so loquacious he’s able to ramble in no fewer than four languages. Or take Pitt’s Aldo Raine, who revels in the sound of his own exaggerated southern drawl. Or the Basterds’ comrade from the OSS, a Brit who, in his speech, signifies all the best of old-Europe British formality, absurdly out of place in the brutal world of 1940s Nazi-occupied France.

So what does it say that Tarantino gives the Jewish characters in the movie almost nothing to say at all? In scene after scene, in forests and darkened garrets, Raine yaks it up with Englishmen and German actresses-cum-double-agents while the Jewish members of the Basterds sit quietly behind him, portraits of tough guy stolidity in sleeveless undershirts. How can you be Quentin Tarantino – Hollywood’s greatest lover of words – making a movie about vengeful Jews – perhaps the talkiest people in the history of civilization – and not give them anything to say? In a proper Jewish revenge fantasy, the Jews don’t just kill the Nazis and save the day, they also deliver lectures, mock and chastise their prey — deafen them at great lengths, assault them with wit as well as weapons. We Jews weren’t born to play the heavies standing threateningly behind the brains of the operation; we were born to use words. And Tarantino was born to tell stories about people who were born to use words. So what gives?

5. Tarantino Being Tarantino Pt. 2 – Inglourious Basterds has been a long time coming. Which is to say, cinematic Jewish revenge against the Nazis has been a long time coming.

The Nuremberg Trials, Simon Weisenthal’s Nazi-hunters, the State of Israel: For some, those things were adequate to quell their desire for vengeance. But many Jews of a slightly more creative, slightly more passive bent, have waited for the movies (that most American, that most “new world” of all the arts) to give us the catharsis we’ve been looking for. And now, after all this time, we finally get a movie about Jews exacting revenge on the Nazis and – serves us right – we get a film fetishist to make it.

Quentin Tarantino may be an expert craftsman capable of creating sublime cinematic moments, but he is incapable of telling a story that isn’t shot through the lens of his rampant cinephilia. There’s no moment in Inglourious Basterds that doesn’t relate somehow to his encyclopedic knowledge of film. From the Ennio Morricone soundtrack to the blaxploitation references to the inclusion of Emil Jannings, Basterds is, like all Tarantino flicks, a movie about the movies, or rather about the way we see the world through movies. So what should have been two hours of high emotional release becomes an exercise in film fandom and technical wizardry. Basterds, in other words, was made with movie nerds, not vengeance-inclined Jews, in mind.

Indeed, every time Tarantino makes a winking reference to a favorite Spaghetti Western or some long-dead German director, he sucks just a little bit more psychological honesty out of his story, which should be full of pathos and raw emotion. Instead, his movie is full of moments that refer to other moments in other movies that were full of pathos and raw emotion. By constantly jumping into his viewers’ faces to announce his presence as a filmmaker, Tarantino takes away from their ability to empathize with his characters and feel along with them the ups and downs of a life spent mourning losses and trying to get someone to pay for them. This has always been the knock on Tarantino; that his love of craft has kept him from becoming an artist, that even his best work is two steps removed from actual human emotion. But with Inglourious Basterds it also keeps him from creating a world connected to the reality he’s paraphrasing, a world full of brutality and pain and misery but one also capable of providing its characters and its viewers a shot at catharsis, maybe even a little redemption. And that is all we, two nonviolent American Jews given to moments of inherited malice, are dreaming of every time we drift away into the 1944 Paris that lives on in our fevered minds.