You have to be pretty much a deaf-blind hermit to have never heard of American Idol.  It’s become one of those TV phenomena that defies criticism because it really doesn’t matter what I or anyone else says about it, the public will still tune in and watch as pop star wannabees warble in front of crazed family, friends, and fans-a-million.  Further down the dial is another competition show that pits pairs of people who know each other in a race around the world.  The Amazing Race is every bit as engaging and fun, but while the stage-bound Idol is predictable and trite, the Race is unpredictable and fluid as the audience goes along on a fun and furious trek to exotic locales while discovering a little about the world and human nature.  

For all its plastic veneer, Idol isn’t just a talent show but a reflection upon the essence of what makes us American.  Oh, of course the show’s roots are British and the concept franchised in numerous countries around the globe, but that’s exactly why it is quintessentially American — Idol is the McDonald’s of television — full of idealism, hope, and the idea that with diligence and hard work, you can become successful.

It also represents the less attractive aspects of American culture — arrogance (see Simon), celebrity, obsession, and a disdain for those who may not fit our idea or image of success.  It’s also glitzy, processed, easily digested, and only satisfying to a point — much like a certain food product that sits on a sesame seed bun.  

What makes Idol popular is its adherence to classic theater, almost attune to the Roman arena. The intrigue isn’t just in the trenches but in the stands as the audience participates in the outcome of these singing gladiators who dodge the barbs of sometimes-harsh judges.   I must admit that I enjoy patronizing McIdol, but I’m also glad that it only lasts a few months because you can only take so much Ryan Seacrest in one season.

The Amazing Race is a different story.  At least for me, it is one of those shows that I can’t wait to watch each week and curse the TV when Phil Keoghan (the host) finally gives the bad news (most of the time) to the last players to arrive at the pit stop because it means it’s the end of the episode.  Race’s premise of not only pitting couples against other racers but against each other has helped the show win Emmy after Emmy, but it’s also the only show of its kind that ordinary Joes like you and me could realistically compete in and have fun at the same time — it is this empathetic probability of success that I believe is the reason people like watching Race.  There are physical and mental challenges along the way that can be quite scary, but they’re never over the top and many not-so-physically-fit racers over the years have proven that, when the adrenaline is pumping, you can do things you normally would never do, like bungee jumping or begging for money in a foreign land.

Like Idol, Amazing Race is theater but more like an off-Broadway play in a small Greenwich Village basement that holds twenty chairs.  You’re up close and personal as witness to the story of two individuals and how they keep from driving each other crazy. You have couples whom are married, dating, cohabitating, sisters, college buddies, father/daughter, etc.  They each bring baggage with them, and I don’t mean luggage, which, of course, makes the drama more interesting.  Though the reality of all these shows is somewhat tainted because the players are aware of the cameras and can’t help but play to them, the chaos and franticness of Race probably makes it the only show where it’s conceivable that the players actually forget that they’re being taped to be broadcast to millions of people.  You get a great sense that these folks are acting pretty much like they do during their everyday lives, and that’s refreshing.  My only advice to the producers is to put the Travelocity gnome to rest and find a less irritating tie-in sponsor, just not McDonald’s.  

Both American Idol and The Amazing Race are in the middle of their seasons, but it’s not too late to try them on for size.  You may feel guilty liking Idol, and the Race will find you pining for the overseas trip you’ve always dreamed of taking.  Oh, on the battle of the hosts, Phil Keoghan wins hands-down because anyone who can stand for hours next to some bizarre local representative waiting for racers to make it to the pit stop deserves praise and the paycheck that goes with it.

Rich Burlingham

Way back in 1994, before I sadly left behind the Pacific Ocean for a grayer life on the Atlantic Coast, I lived in Los Angeles.  It seems hard to remember, but back then California had Republican governor Pete Wilson, memorialized in the Disposable Heroes cover of the classic Dead Kennedys song.

1992 had been the first year that California had gone Democratic since the 1964 Johnson landslide. Prior to that, it had been mostly a Republican state.  With the Republican dominance under threat, Wilson backed Proposition 187, an anti-immigrant political stunt that even the official state election guide described as a bad idea.  It won handily, as did Pete Wilson.

In doing so, though, the Republicans cemented their image as a reactionary and hateful party.  California flipped. It is now one of the safest Democratic states in the country.

The national Republicans seem like they are on the same course.  Cooler heads are trying to slow it down, but they still may pass an idiotic and cruel law.  At the very least, they are stepping up as the anti-immigrant party.  It may help them in the 2006 election.  Regardless, any law will almost certainly be ineffective, and the more vicious provisions will be struck down in the courts.  

If the Democrats play it right, which is always an iffy proposition, they have a chance to pull a California nationwide. With an anti-gay, anti-immigrant message, the Republicans place a whole number of close states at risk. Colorado, New Mexico, Florida, Ohio, and Nevada were battleground states in the 2004 election.  Have you been to these places?  Is bigotry really a good long-term strategy?

Keep your Alabamas, your Mississippis, your Idahos, and your Dakotas.  But watch out Texas, we’re coming for you.

Pete DeWan

Abdul Rahman, the Afghan Christian convert who was supposed to stand trial for apostasy — the penalty for which is death, according to Islamic Sharia law — has been freed on the basis that he is mentally unfit to stand trial. Rahman, a Christian for 16 years, converted in Pakistan while he was working as an aide worker and lived in Germany prior to returning to Afghanistan in 2002.

While he was deemed mentally unsound for trial, the Afghan authorities who arrested him two weeks ago would have struggled to put his case to trial under the glaring light of international scrutiny. Rahman may be mentally unsound, but the decision to declare him unfit for trial was probably the only way that the Afghan authorities could placate the international community while still maintaining its legitimacy.

A slew of nations expressed their revulsion and horror at the prospect of Rahman’s pending execution, with a glittering list of dignitaries pleading for his release, including Australian Prime Minister John Howard, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Pope Benedict XVI, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik.

While Rahman has escaped standing trial, it is likely that vigilante justice will now resolve the issue unless he successfully and immediately seeks asylum abroad. He was, after all, turned in to the authorities by his family, following a dispute. If the law refuses to execute Rahman, then the clerics will ensure that he gets his just dessert. Cleric Abdul Raoulf told his followers at  the Herati Mosque: “God’s way is the right way, and this man whose name is Abdul Rahman is an apostate.” According to Raoulf’s sermon, Rahman had “committed the greatest sin” in his conversion and ought to be executed.

The courts have effectively set a precedent, since this was possibly the first case of its kind in Afghanistan. While the legal decision that he is unfit to stand trial is interesting, what will be more interesting will be the reaction of the millions of ordinary Afghans. While Rahman has survived his first hurdle, the second — of religious conviction and vigilante justice — will certainly be harder to overcome.

Mimi Hanaoka

“[It is] the death of the sisterhood… An end to the millennia during which women of all classes shared the same major life experiences to a far greater degree than men…. In the past, women of all classes shared lives centred on explicitly female concerns. Now it makes little sense to discuss women in general. The statistics are clear: among young, educated, full-time professionals, being female is no longer a drag on earnings or progress.”

— Alison Wolf, a professor at Kings College London and author of “Does Education Matter?,” a contentious article in Prospect magazine in which she contends that the emergence and success of elite women in well-paid jobs has essentially tolled the death knell for feminism and “female altruism” and is proof that women have finally broken through the glass ceiling. Educated women, she argues, will earn as much as men and slightly less then men if they have children. Women, according to Wolf, have been lured by career success away from careers in fields that have a caretaker component, such as teaching. The temptation of a successful career acts as a disincentive to having a family, which has led to “grave consequences,” including a decline in birth rates.

Critics of Wolf’s argument point to structural and financial mechanisms that suggest that the glass ceiling has yet to be broken through, at least properly. Significantly, women are typically the beneficiaries of long-term maternity leave.  Meaning, effectively, that even the “elite women” that Wolf highlights must choose between a career and a family at some point since women are still typically saddled with child-rearing duties. Even financially successful women are asked to bear the brunt of parenting duties, should they choose to have children, and thus bear a double burden. If such women choose not to have children, they are accused of forsaking parenthood and held responsible for a declining birthrate. Either way, successful women seem to lose.  

Jenny Watson, chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission in the UK, cites reduced promotion, less pay, a dearth of women in higher-ranking posts, and a lack of flexible work opportunities as proof that women with children suffer, on balance, compared to their male counterparts.

The glass ceiling, then, still looks pretty much in tact.

Mimi Hanaoka

Russ Feingold’s censure resolution is going to be debated in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

There’s been an ongoing debate in the blogosphere about the effects of the resolution.  Right Blogsylvania claims it will help Republicans by rallying their base.  Left Blogistan claims that the Republicans are scared.

It looks to me like the Republicans are trying to split the difference.   They aren’t squelching the debate, so maybe they think it will help with the more committed members of their base.  However, they did release the news as a one-sentence statement on a Friday evening and are holding the hearings on a Friday as well.  Getting bad news out on Friday afternoons is a traditional way of mitigating the impact since fewer people follow the news on weekends.

Will this be the scandal that finally sticks, so we can start to recover from our permanent Constitutional crisis?  Or will it disappear like torture and rendition and suspending habeas corpus and ignoring the Geneva Conventions and lying about Iraq’s weapons and outing CIA agents and setting up secret prisons and I had better stop this list if I want a blog entry and not a research paper.

Make your bets now and take a look at Glenn Greenwald once a day for ongoing developments.

Pete DeWan

I don’t have anything clever to say here, but why is the Pentagon releasing a report accusing Russia of having moles in our military and giving troop plans to Saddam?  They’ve apparently had the report for a while and have just decided to declassify it.

Taking the most optimistic view, I could imagine that they are trying to back Russia off so they can flip Lukashenko out of power in Belarus.  Sometimes the national interest and moral principles are not contradictory, even for the Bush administration.

A more pessimistic view might be that it has something to do with the “Great Game” of getting pipelines across Central Asia.

Who knows, though?  It might just be a poke in the eye by old Cold Warriors like Rumsfeld and Cheney with a visceral distrust of Russia. Sometimes their diplomacy seems to be driven by nothing more than childish spite.

It’s hard to guess with these people.

Pete DeWan

It was to one man’s credit that, after more than 40 years, the Rolling Stones are still censored on national television and still rein as one of the top touring bands in the world.  That man is Brian Jones, who founded the band in 1962, only to be kicked out five years later after becoming the poster boy for the ‘60s experimentation with hard drugs and free love.  He passed on in 1969 at the age of 27, found dead at the bottom of his pool on the rural estate, Cotchford Farm, once owned by Winnie the Pooh author, A.A. Milne.  Even though toxicology reports showed only traces of drugs and alcohol in his system, the coroner deemed his death that of misadventure.  Murder rumors were rampant with several conspiracy theories including those implicating Jones’ band mates, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, and Bill Wyman.  Several books have been written about Jones and his death, even one by one of those present at the house at the time and featured in the film, Anna Wohlin (Tuva Novotny).  All the theories forge into one in the new indie film made of Jones’ life, called Stoned.

Stephen Woolley, producer on films such as The Crying Game and Interview With A Vampire, took ten years to get the film produced, and he was so engrained in the subject that he decided to also direct the film himself.  He, along with writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (Billy Elliot, The Italian Job, Die Another Day), smartly kept the film as raw as Jones’ life and music and creates a ‘60s morality play with Jones (Leo Gregory) as a sort of Othellian fallen king with an Iago in the form of a builder, Frank Thorogood (Paddy Consdine), who is given a job more as watchdog than craftsman and who becomes Jones’ pet but one treated more like a mongrel than companion.  Thorogood slowly becomes intoxicated and addicted to Jones’ lifestyle, even trying drugs, but when he is finally sacked because he’s really not that good a builder, he turns on his lord to knock him off his throne.

They say that there is a fine line between genius and madman, and unfortunately Brian Jones couldn’t keep the madman in check.  At the end of the film, the character, either in a post mortem state or as flashback, reveals that what he didn’t like about being happy was that it was boring. This sums up his life — he was never one to be bored and would do almost anything to prevent it. Woolley smartly tells a story of this genius/madman and not the Rolling Stones; even the music featured is not Stones songs but those reflective of Jones’ taste, his life, or the era. Woolley also uses Jones as an allegory to the rise and fall of the flower power movement.  Jones was not only a remarkably talented musician but also a visionary who set fashion trends and pushed rock music into a new era.  The film nicely captures the frenzied, drug- and sex-filled era by its visual style, music choices, and chaotic editing, cutting between the last three weeks of Jones’ life and the rest of his tumultuous past.  

Musically, Jones’ was a fan of American soulful blues, especially that of the legendary Robert Johnson, who also died young.  He wanted the Rolling Stones to take rock and roll to a new bluesy direction, and he succeeded.  But when his hedonistic lifestyle took over, with drug convictions preventing him from touring in the U.S. and his addictions saddling his ability to play at recording sessions, other powers took over and he was kicked out of the band.  The Rolling Stones kept their bad-boy image and blues-based music but ventured more towards a pop sound in their post-Jones era.  

I think Stoned will be used in film and history classes as a tutorial in ‘60s youth culture.  It captures the era better than other similar films have done before, such as Oliver Stone’s The Doors or Bette Midler’s Joplinesque portrayal in The Rose.  To Woolley’s advantage, he wasn’t dealing with big icons like Janis Joplin or Jim Morrison and was able to show a very honest and balanced portrayal of Brian Jones who, as in real life, could easily be loathed and loved at the same time.

The British cast, mostly unknown to Americans, are all quite good, and even those playing Richards and Jagger capture the essence of their young legendary characters without trying to mimic.  Of all the famous souls in the film, Keith Richards, as portrayed by Ben Whishaw (HBO’s Rome, Layer Cake), comes away the most sympathetic as the one band member always sticking up for Jones and his desire to keep the band seated in the blues and his protection of Jones’ lover, Anita Pallenberg (Monet Mazur), who finally became fed up with Jones’ abuse and selfishness and moved on to Richards.  It’s a stark contrast to the walking corpse image we see today, and it’s refreshing knowing that these “boys” were once young, passionate, and hungry with desire to explode onto the world’s chaotic stage.

Stoned is in limited theatrical release at Landmark Theaters across the country beginning March 24th.  Go to www.landmarktheaters.com for more information.

Rich Burlingham

“The film is meant for people not yet in Holland to take note that this is normal here and not be shocked and awed by it once they arrive.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Somali-born member of the Dutch Parliament, speaking about  To the Netherlands, an educational film released by the Dutch government and targeted at potential immigrants who must take the new entrance exam in order to enter the country.  The film contains images of gay men kissing and of a sunbathing topless woman; there is an edited version for people in countries, such as Iran, where possession of such images is illegal.  The 15-minute exam that went into effect March 15 is administrated at 138 embassies worldwide and tests applicants for rudimentary Dutch language skills and information about Dutch law and culture.  Potential questions include whether hitting women and female circumcision are legal and where Crown Princess Maxima is originally from (Argentina).

Opponents decry the measure as a naked attempt to discourage immigrants from Muslim countries. Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk — known as “Iron Rita” — has recently spearheaded the campaign for more stringent immigration requirements. Immigrant advocate Abdou Menebhi, who is Moroccan-born, stated: “They are trying to find every pretext to show that people should not come to the Netherlands because they are fundamentalist or not emancipated. They confront people with these things and then judge them afterwards.”

The more restrictive immigration policies were implemented partially due to the controversy sparked by the murder of Theo van Gogh (great-great-grandson of the painter) as a result of his controversial 10-minute short film Submission about the abuse inflicted on Muslim women. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who wrote the film, also received death threats. Van Gogh planned on making a three-part series about the subject. The second film was to be a treatment of the same issue from the perspective of Muslim men.  

Mimi Hanaoka