This seems appropriate to begin Independence Day:
This being Independence Day, you wouldn’t think there would be many music anniversaries today. I love this one, though: WOWO radio in Fort Wayne, Ind., celebrated the nation’s 153rd birthday by burning its transmitter to the ground.
Independence Day 1970 was not a holiday for Casey Kasem, who premiered “America’s Top 40”:
The headline, of which everyone should know the source …
… is the only possible headline for what IJ Review reports:
A generation of
obviously warped and dementednow-functioning adults can remember laughing at Wile E. Coyote being blown up by TNT over and over again before magically reappearing, as though there were no consequences to violence. A writer at Slate, though, believes that:To modern sensibilities, of course, the gun violence is especially startling—particularly the blasé approach to gun suicide, a rampant problem across the United States.
Murder and suicide is sure a problem among animated wabbits, ducks, and hunters, and I’m sure today’s kiddos aren’t capable of figuring out that “Looney Tunes” is fake. I mean, you run into talking wabbits all the time.
In any case, isn’t the blasé approach to carjacking and murder of innocent citizens in “Grand Theft Auto” worse?
I don’t doubt that most children in America are constantly exposed to violence on TV that’s far more disturbing than anything in Looney Tunes. But no kids’ show today would ever treat firearms or gun deaths so lightly, with such zany exuberance, as Looney Tunes once did.
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That jaunty disregard of the consequences of violence is part of what made the show so bizarrely delightful. In a post-Newtown world, however, what was once strangely funny now registers as appallingly macabre.
Entertainment has long been filled with “macabre” stunts – anyone remember “The Three Stooges”? Oh wait, they’re probably next on the outrage list.
Someone put together a compilation of the horrors of which Slate wrote …
… and someone on YouTube observed: “When cartoons were funny and liberals were the minority.”
James Lileks believes those liberals have it all wrong:
Somehow Slate came up with a piece called “Looney Tunes cartoons were more brutal than you remember,” which concludes:
But no kids’ show today would ever treat firearms or gun deaths so lightly, with such zany exuberance, as Looney Tunes once did. That jaunty disregard of the consequences of violence is part of what made the show so bizarrely delightful. In a post-Newtown world, however, what was once strangely funny now registers as appallingly macabre.
Yes — if you’ve had your sense of humor surgically removed, and replaced with an oversized gland that produces chemicals responsible for compulsive frowning. Otherwise you might continue to find them strangely funny, oddly funny, audaciously funny, or perhaps just hilarious. There are still some, I hope, who can smile at the sight of Daffy’s beak blown clear around to the other side of his head after Fudd loosed a blunderbuss blast. There is no pain involved; only irritation and annoyance. He readjusts his beak with an audible squeaking sound, and stomps off to yell at Bugs, instigator of the incident.
But that very episode — “Duck! Rabbit, Duck!” — contains messages that should hearten the heart of a Slate writer, for it contains a very modern message about identity. As you may recall, the plot concerns Fudd’s confusion over which season it is: Wabbit, or Duck? The signage is confusing. Daffy self-identifies as a duck, and this being the ’40s, he is locked in a fixed identity, a product of a culture that says if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck it is a duck. But as we now know, “species” is as fluid as any other form of identity.
And that’s something Bugs reveals in a very subversive sequence. Daffy uses colloquial expressions to describe his mood, noting that he feels like a goat. Whereupon Bugs produces a sign that says it is Goat Season. Fudd unloads accordingly. It may look like violence. But it’s really acceptance. If Daffy says he is a goat then he is a goat. He may suffer the consequences, but Fudd has affirmed his statement of identity. Over the course of the cartoon Daffy identifies with various species, and in each instance Bugs has an appropriate placard to nudge Fudd toward accepting the fluid spectrum on which Daffy may choose to locate himself.
Half a century before Facebook’s 57 genders, Warner Brothers was laying the groundwork.
It’s not an isolated example of progressive themes in Looney Tunes. “Hillbilly Hare” contains a wealth of sociological insight. The main characters are two rural archetypes mired in poverty, wandering the backwoods shoeless, engaged in a pointless blood feud. You could almost call it “What’s the Matter with the Ozarks,” for instead of concentrating their enmity against the 1 percent that has exploited their labor and resources, they are pitted against each other in a pointless struggle.
Into this world comes Bugs, who draws their attention by dressing up as a seductive female rabbit — a transgressive statement that manages to lampoon heteronormative behavior (transgender Bugs feigns interest in the males) and reinforces the worst sort of cross-dressing stereotypes, as female-identified Bugs is all lipstick and hip-cocking sashay exaggeration. But for the time it was groundbreaking. To a youth who sat in the theater in 1948 it may have said, Yes, it is possible to break the confines of biological gender, and to do so with such confidence and style that people who would otherwise fricassee you for supper would follow your every suggestion.
And what a suggestion! In a hilarious set piece, Bugs calls a square-dance tune whose instructions aren’t the usual do-si-do, bow-to-your-left, but consist entirely of commands to inflict escalating levels of retributive violence. The men, socially and culturally conditioned to follow any command the square-dance caller makes, are not only helpless to assert their own will, they end up dancing with each other. This redefines the courtship ritual of the dance — a means of channeling and controlling sexual energy — into a fiercely homoerotic ballet. Watch:
“Hit ’im again, the critter ain’t dead.” It’s safe to assume Bugs is talking about the stifling hand of religious intolerance and centuries of marriage inequality. With a tidy couplet he brushes away the pope’s objections: Promenade like a bride and groom, he calls, and that they do.
Not to say Bugs wasn’t capable of typical male behavior, but it was often done to reveal the dangers of an ungoverned male libido. In “Ballot Box Bunny,” Yosemite Sam has hauled a cannon to the porch of Bugs’s election HQ, and tied the trigger to the doorknob. Mere seconds later, he opens the door himself. One may assume he is decapitated by the impact, although he recovers quickly enough; the ephemeral nature of injuries in Warner Brothers cartoons can be seen as a comment on the shameful nature of World War II domestic propaganda, which shielded the public from the horrific nature of war wounds.
But that’s not the main point. How did Bugs get Sam to open the door? He said that “Emma from St. Louis” was at the front door, and the promise of sexual favors instantly wiped all other thoughts from Sam’s brain. If a man cannot be trusted with his own well-being, certainly he cannot be trusted with anyone else’s. Or it’s a message for a seven-day waiting period for cannons; interpretations vary.
There’s no mistaking the ending of “Hair-Raising Hare” for what it is, though: a devastating critique of men’s relentless objectification and unthinking response to the female form:
So it’s mechanical! So what! It’s hot! It is not another person Bugs seeks, but a shape, a form, an object he can control. His mimicry of the mechanical robot will be familiar to any woman whose mate seemed to be what she wanted at first, butturned out to be adopting a persona in order to gain sexual favors.
The cartoons are full of political messages — Speedy Gonzales the Undocumented Mouse, the endangered Road Runner escaping the depredations of industrialized warfare. It is unfair to regard their messages as macabre, when the underlying lessons of Warner Brothers cartoons contain remarkably progressive insights into human sexuality and economic interactions. Sometimes the messages are subtle, as with Tweety Bird; it lived in a gilded cage, pursued by a hungry, homeless cat who lacked the class consciousness to realize that Tweety’s owner — a symbol of inherited wealth who did not work but lived off the accumulation of capital — was the real enemy. But there are impermissible elements. The regrettable adventures of Pepé Le Pew combine male privilege with miscegenation panic — the female skunk is actually a cat, zut alors — and xenophobic attitudes toward Gallic hygiene. These should be banned, or at least preceded by a trigger warning.
As long as we’re at it, people who have been mauled by large feral cats might want a Tigger Warning before viewing some Winnie the Pooh cartoons. Piglet is also offensive to some cultures. Eeyore does tend to minimize the ravages of depression. When you think about it, Christopher Robin probably grew up to be a property developer, subdividing the Hundred Acre Wood for cul-de-sac housing, forgetting entirely the lessons Pooh taught him about the heedless pursuit of honey.
I’m sure the Slate writer thinks of himself as …
The sequel to my Friday post about covering tornadoes is this week, when I got to talk to the most seriously injured survivor, whose house basically disintegrated.
And of course you have to opine, in part because you did one week earlier, in both cases hopefully saying something, instead of the usual Wisconsin daily newspaper approach along the lines of “Tornadoes: We oppose them!”
One thing from the column bears repeating. There was no tornado warning before Platteville’s two tornadoes, because none of the trained, veteran weather spotters saw the tornadoes (the bigger of which formed right outside the city), nor did anyone else, nor did weather radar until after the fact. Weather radio and weather sirens have useful purposes, but there is no substitute for using your own brains. Ultimately you are responsible for your own safety.
An interesting anniversary considering what tomorrow is: Today in 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Federal Communications Commission ruling punishing WBAI radio in New York City for broadcasting George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words. (If you click on the link, remember, you’ve been warned.)
Birthdays begin with Fontella Bass:
Damon Harris of the Temptations:
No, this is not about Gov. Scott Walker’s chances of being reelected in 2018.
The soccer World Cup ended, from the U.S. perspective, yesterday with Team USA’s 2–1 extra-time loss to Belgium.
Keith Olbermann was his usual snarky self on ESPN2 last night, but if you ignore the snarkiness, he makes some valid points about how to increase Americans’ interest in soccer. Click here for the video, but here is the outline:
One unfortunate thing about Tuesday’s loss is that it may well be the final World Cup match for Tim Howard, who might have been the only reason the U.S. was in the game. Howard made a World Cup-record 16 saves, and his work in goal prevented a bloodbath. Howard is 35, and it’s not clear that a goalkeeper pushing 40 is likely to be in the 2018 plans, though finding a goalie as good as Howard seems unlikely, at least today.
The loss suggests that the U.S. remains far, far away from being a World Cup contender. In hockey, teams occasionally decide to be hyperaggressive on offense, and leave their goalie to be essentially the entire defense. That’s how goalies sometimes accumulate a huge number of saves, and sometimes give up a lot of goals; it’s a tradeoff to try to generate more offense, and it’s certainly fun for fans to watch. That’s not what the U.S. did — their offense is anemic, and so they played a defensive style, and yet Howard was still required to singlehandedly save the American bacon for the 90 minutes of regulation.
So for one game, the Americans were bad on defense, and for the entire World Cup, they weren’t very good on offense. Yes, they scored five goals in four games, but that’s in a World Cup that had a record number of goals in group play, and goal number four came after the U.S. was in desperation mode.
So how does Team USA get better than this? Or is this the best that can be expected of Team USA?
Assembly candidate Jay Schroeder contributes his two cents to a state Senate race:
It is an idea that Gov. Scott Walker says he is interested in considering. Congressman Paul Ryan thinks it would be a great change for the state, and state Sen. Alberta Darling likes the idea as well. GOP leaders in Wisconsin have lately voiced their support for eliminating the state’s income tax.
But eliminating the income tax is not something a pair of Republican candidates running for state Senate in southeast Wisconsin agree on. Jonathan Steitz and Van Wanggaard last week debated each other on a myriad of issues at a forum hosted by the Racine Taxpayers Association.
“Yes,” was Steitz’s quick response when asked if he believed the state’s income tax should be eliminated. “I think that the income tax, more than anything else, is what suppresses economic development,” the conservative financial advisor said.
“There are many states that do very well, better than most states in the country, that have no income taxes,” Walker told a gathering of business leaders last fall. Throughout year-end interviews last December, Walker reiterated to numerous media outlets his openness to eliminating the income tax.
“I think he should. I think it’d be great,” said Congressman Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, when asked by the MacIver Institute about Walker and eliminating the income tax. Ryan explained that states that have no income tax and rely instead on other taxes have thriving economies.
“I think that’s fantastic if we could do that here,” he said.
“Oh, I would love that,” state Sen. Darling said of the idea. Darling is the co-chairperson of the legislature’s powerful Joint Finance Committee.
Seven states currently do not have income taxes, and 2 more states do not tax wage income. Wisconsin’s income tax is the second oldest in the nation; it was enacted in 1911.
According to research at the Kansas Policy Institute:
“States without an income tax have significantly better growth in private sector GDP (59% versus 42%) over the last 10 years. They increased the number of jobs by 4.9% while jobs in the rest of the states declined by 2.6%.”
Job growth is a big topic for this election as candidates tout their respective ideas for encouraging private sector job creation.
The Heartland Institute’s Matthew Glans argued in January of this year that eliminating Wisconsin’s income tax would be a good thing.
“Income taxes are among the most disruptive factors affecting economic growth. They discourage capital from flowing into a state and hinder the creation of new jobs. Eliminating Wisconsin’s income tax would be a strong step toward making the state more competitive and attracting new business.”
Schroeder’s take: “I look FORWARD to working on eliminating the state income tax to make the “Morning in Wisconsin” even brighter.”
Neither Stietz nor Schroeder nor Glans nor anyone else has explained how this would work in Wisconsin. Walker so far has declined to actually cut state government, and it seems unlikely many Wisconsinites, who have grown up on the assumption that more government is always better, would be happy with, say, a one-third cut in the size of government. (They would be wrong, of course, but yesterday’s progressive is today’s socialist.) No proponent of eliminating the income tax also has laid out which taxes should be increased to make up for the income tax revenue loss. (The most unpopular tax in this state historically isn’t the income tax, it’s the property tax, relief for which the income tax and the sales tax were created.)
This is not sufficient at all. Candidates who propose eliminating the income tax need to spell out exactly what they propose.
Today in 1969, Leslie West and Felix Pappalardi created Mountain:
Birthdays today start with Paul Williams of the Temptations:
Roy Bittan of the E Street Band, which played mostly, but not exclusively, with Bruce Springsteen:
Joey Puerta of Ambrosia:
The Milwaukee Bucks’ new owners scored public relations points early by saying all the right things upon their introduction and by drafting Duke’s Jabari Parker.
Then came the trainwreck of the firing of coach Larry Drew and hiring of Brooklyn Nets coach Jason Kidd as their new coach/majordomo of basketball.
It’s kind of a given that professional athletes will be buttheads, particularly in the National Basketball Association, where the main off-court hobby seems to be fathering multiple children without bothering to marry their mother. It is generally expected, however, that the adults in the locker room will act like adults. This apparently has not been the case with Kidd, who had domestic abuse and alcohol issues during his playing days. There is not much evidence that, unlike former coach Scott Skiles, Kidd has actually grown up and stopped acting as if his age was his uniform number.
As bad, on a different level, is how Kidd engineered his exit from Brooklyn. Following one season as coach, when the Nets did well during half of the season, Kidd apparently decided he deserved more authority and campaigned with management to be moved above the Nets’ general manager in the hierarchy. Management declined, and so Kidd started talking with his friends the Bucks owners.
The Sporting News contributes this:
There is a certain decorum with which a coach in the NBA — and, indeed, a coach in most any major pro sport in the country — is expected to carry himself. Safe to say that, in the last few days, recently departed Nets coach Jason Kidd has violated several of them. Or, at least, the one that matters most.
“I think the one thing you know not to do as a coach is to talk about another job while it is still occupied,” one veteran NBA coach told Sporting News. “You just don’t do that. This is a tough business, there are only 30 jobs and no matter what you think of a guy, every one of us puts his heart and soul into what we do every day. And so you learn to respect your colleagues. But nothing is more disrespectful than gunning for someone’s job while he is still in it.”
What’s worse is that Kidd appears to have done this three times in a matter of days. First, Kidd attempted to usurp the general manager’s role with the Nets from Billy King, having seen Stan Van Gundy get the same broad powers in Detroit and Doc Rivers granted that title with the Clippers. But Brooklyn team ownership, led by Mikhail Prokhorov, had no interest in giving Kidd that level of power.
New Bucks owners Marc Lasry and Wes Edens then came into play for Kidd, receiving permission from the team to speak to him last week — Lasry was a former minority owner with the Nets, and knows Kidd personally.
That’s when Kidd attempted to sell the Bucks on an arrangement by which he would both run and coach the team. Problem is, the Bucks have two people doing those jobs already — coach Larry Drew and general manager John Hammond.
King. Drew. Hammond. That’s three employees Kidd attempted to oust. Kidd eventually came away with the job as Bucks coach, with Milwaukee sending 2015 and 2019 second-round picks to the Nets, Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports first reported. Drew was never informed of the negotiations with Kidd.
What’s worse, it appears that one of Kidd’s motivations was resentment over the bigger financial packages awarded to Steve Kerr in Golden State and Derek Fisher in New York, each of whom reportedly got five-year, $25 million deals. Both of those coaches, like Kidd, are former players who have never been on a coaching staff before — not only as a head coach, but not even as an assistant. …
The coach also pointed out that this is one of the perils of hiring a coach with no experience — he has no sense of paying dues, no sense of how hard some coaches, like Drew, have worked to get where they are. Kidd is acting like a spoiled brat, perhaps because he never had to earn anything in the coaching business.
I’ve argued here before that the positions of general manager and coach need to be separate, at least in pro football. That more likely than not is the case in other pro sports as well. General managers acquire players by draft, trade or free agent signing; coaches coach them. Those are two full-time jobs, and given that Kidd apparently isn’t necessarily a candidate for Mensa, to think he can do both jobs seems optimistic at best.
Kidd supposedly wants to become the Bucks’ answer to Phil Jackson, possessor of several NBA championship rings and now president of the team he played for, the New York Knicks. Jackson was a role player on two NBA championship teams, but apparently while he wasn’t playing he was paying attention to what coach Red Holtzman was doing. Additionally, unlike Kidd, Jackson learned how to coach by coaching in the Continental Basketball Association (as did former Bucks coach George Karl). One season is really not a large enough sample size to determine if someone can coach.
The supposed upside here is Kidd’s supposed ability to get free agents to play in Milwaukee because he was able to get a couple to come to Brooklyn. (Which might be an indictment of Kidd’s coaching ability since the Nets didn’t start playing well until the second half of the season.) Milwaukee is not Brooklyn, and whether Kidd can duplicate that feat remains to be seen. Moreover, Kidd eventually will run out of player contemporaries who he supposedly can attract to Milwaukee to play.
None of this should be viewed as a defense of former coach Larry Drew (who is being paid handsomely to have read that he was about to be replaced) or general manager John Hammond. The Bucks deserved their record as last season’s second worst team in the NBA, and I saw little evidence of improvement. (Teams should never tank to improve their next-season draft position.) But I’m not sure at all that Kidd represents actual improvement.
The Wisconsin State Journal’s Tom Oates reinforces my point:
Kidd, who has alienated people throughout the NBA over the last 20 years, was available only because his own power play had been rebuffed by Nets ownership. He tried to oust general manager Billy King — the man who hired him despite his complete lack of coaching experience — and gain control of all basketball decisions in Brooklyn, but the Nets instead seemed eager to let him move on. That should have told the Bucks owners something right there, but apparently they weren’t listening.
The way [Marc] Lasry and [Wesley] Edens handled this entire matter — especially interviewing a prospective coach when they already had one under contract — shows either a lack of character or an amazing amount of naivete. It was cutthroat or clumsy or both, all of which bodes poorly for a franchise that is coming to the plate for its final at-bat in Milwaukee and can’t afford to make mistakes.
The immediate response to the Kidd news was that these are the same old dysfunctional Bucks. They still have owners who think they know more about basketball than they actually do and like to meddle in decisions they’re not qualified to make.
And speaking of unqualified, there is nothing in Kidd’s resume that would qualify him to run the basketball operations in an NBA franchise. He was a point guard for 19 seasons and a coach for one, but he’s never spent a day in an NBA front office.
Still, the Bucks’ starstruck new owners seemed willing to hand their franchise over to him. Perhaps they should have asked why the Nets’ owners, who are more familiar with the NBA and know Kidd better than anyone, weren’t willing to give him that control. …
But just because Kidd was hired only to coach the team doesn’t mean this story is over. His desire to make personnel decisions likely hasn’t changed and, given the clout he carries with the new owners, it’s only a matter of time before he has both jobs. …
Of course, if Kidd has success as a coach, much of this will be forgotten. But it seems like only a matter of time before Kidd is in control of the team’s basketball decisions, and that ought to scare everyone.
The Associated Press’ Raf Casert explains why the U.S. will lose to Belgium in the World Cup later today:
TOUGH DEFENSE: Belgium didn’t concede a single goal in open play during the group stage. Talk about a hermetic seal. It has Thibaut Courtois, at 22, already one of the top goalkeepers around. He anchored Atletico Madrid to the Spanish league title and also the Champions League final. Playing ahead of him is Vincent Kompany, who led Manchester City to two of the last three Premier League titles. And amazingly at 36, Daniel Van Buyten is still one of the standout defenders at the World Cup.
“KAMPFSCHWEIN” COACH: If you are looking for fighting spirit, coach Marc Wilmots fits the bill. Such was the toughness of his attitude and the challenges he made as a player with Schalke in the Bundesliga, the working class fan base immediately took a liking to him and called him Kampfschwein — which translates as fighting boar. Now aged 45, that determination survives. As a coach, he goes looking for victories at the World Cup whether they involve beautiful football or not. His team’s three one-goal victories have so far proven it to be the right strategy.
EDEN HAZARD: The playmaker has huge expectations to live up to. At 23, he is already among a handful of European players with global appeal. He is now the creative genius at Chelsea and is seeking to emulate that for Belgium at the World Cup. So far, the results have been mixed. He has been decisive in both matches he played in, providing the winning assist late in the game each time, in a 1–0 win over Russia and a 2–1 victory against Algeria. But he has yet to take the mantle of leadership in the team and this is what Wilmots will be looking for against the United States.
SPOILT FOR STRIKERS?: Don’t be fooled by the measly four goals from three games, Belgium does have its share of good strikers. Christian Benteke was supposed to be the first choice for Wilmots, but the Aston Villa striker ruptured his Achilles tendon in April. No worries. There’s also Romelu Lukaku, the Everton forward. Despite a sterling preparation campaign and key goals in qualifying, he has been a bitter disappointment so far in Brazil. Wilmots went looking for an alternative, and found one. Divock Origi, at 19, has been crucial. He scored the winner against Russia and provided the shot which allowed Jan Vertonghen to tap in the winner against South Korea. Now, Origi is a fan favorite to start against the United States.
Soccer fans: Do you really think the U.S. can compete against that?
Today in 1963, the Beatles recorded “She Loves You,” yeah, yeah, yeah:
Four years later, the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” reached number one, and stayed there for 15 weeks:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 