What do you do in the wake of a crushing political defeat?

If you’re Jeff Goldstein, you declare yourself to be way cooler than everyone else; if you’re Darleen Click, you draw a cartoon in which the President rapes a woman, then tells her that he and friends will be back to rape her again later. In the clinical sense, Click is the more interesting case because she thinks that the only problem with her cartoon is that it’s racist. I repeat: she drew a cartoon in which the punch line is a gang rape and the only potential problem with it she can see is that it might be racist. Don’t misunderstand me: it’s plenty racist—plays into tropes as old as slavery and everything—but the punch line is that the President and his associates are going to gang-rape the Statue of Liberty with, I kid you not, immigration reform.

In service of the cheapest of laughs, Click asserts that the statue that symbolizes America’s commitment to the tired, poor, huddled masses of the world is about to be raped because of the President’s commitment to those selfsame masses-yearning-to-be-free. Talk about your industrial grade ideological incoherence—and I would, except for the fact that Goldstein, never one to be upstaged on his own blog, told a woman that the only way she would ever be cool was if someone raped her with an icicle. That’s not true, though. Goldstein never said that. What he said, and I quote, was:

For instance, here’s Nishi, whose only hope of ever really touching cool would be to pay somebody to fuck her once with an ice dong.

Such are the depths to which Goldstein sinks to maintain the illusion that he’s cool, which is sad, you know, because he’s a middle-aged man worried about whether people think he’s cool. Then, in yet another example of just how over me he is, he declares me to be the exemplar of uncool.  Far be it for me, a 32-year-old blogger who sports a backwards Mets cap and is currently writing a scholarly book about comics, to complain when someone says I’m not cool, because honestly, I’m not cool. I grew up, got a job, and am working for the Man; however, forty-something bloggers who alternate between whining about how poorly jobs they don’t have pay and writing 10,000-word-long semiotic screeds about Alinksy and catch-wrestling? Not cool. Doesn’t matter how many people whose favorite film is Mr. Smith Goes to Washington say otherwise, because them? Also not cool. But you know what really, really isn’t cool? Unsubtle threats of politically motivated violence against women:

I predict Nishi will look very surprised the first time she’s knocked down by someone who doesn’t much like the glee she takes in the losses of freedom we’re undergoing.

I predict Nishi won’t have as much fun playing the griefer game once it becomes obvious that while she’s playing a game, many of us are not.

I predict that Nishi doesn’t know who she’s fucking with.

I predict Nishi will soon find it best not to post here anymore.

I predict that I don’t much care about “blogging” anymore; I care about my family and my family’s future, and I see barren narcissists like Nishi as threats to my family—all because they get their kicks seeing how much they can connive their way into control and power.

I predict having such an attitude as Nishi’s will turn out badly.

I’m sure my pointing this out will result in a cool discussion about the coolest of abstruse literary theories—intentionalism—and about how I don’t get what Goldstein intended there, and I’d care, you know, but whatever.

Update. Surprisingly for someone who is so over me, Goldstein just devoted an entire post to refuting my argument—I kid, I kid.  He makes fun of my beard and completely ignores the fact that, as Jay and Rich noted, the rape of Lady Liberty trope is so tired that the Onion uses it as a running [insert scary minority here] gag.  He also refers to Click's depiction of the moments after non-consensual sex as a "metaphor," which it would only be were it not actually a depiction of the moments after non-consensual sex.  A picture of a cute puppy isn't a metaphor for a picture of a cute puppy, it is a picture of a cute puppy for the simple reason that things can't be metaphors for what they are.  Click produced a very literal depiction of what might otherwise be a metaphor, but it's not a metaphor: it's a drawing of a callous rapist informing his victim that he's coming back from more.

Update II. By request, as a few of you mistakenly believe that Click can experience shame and will take down her cartoon shortly, I'll report it here:

See how that's a "metaphor" for a violent rape, and not a depiction of the aftermath of one?  Of course you do.

Comments

[tomemos]

Bob: You're right, that is strange. Kennedy long regretted rejecting Nixon's proposal, and apparently he was right to reject it; we lost more than 30 years.

However, if you think what you said contradicts my point about healthcare reform being a Democratic priority for sixty years, you're mistaken. The Democrats rejected Nixon's proposal because they thought they could get something better. That doesn't change the fact that Democrats have been working on this issue since Truman, whereas Nixon is (as far as I know) the only Republican President who has made an attempt to solve the problem in that time.

[tomemos]

I'm sorry: that should be, "Apparently he was right to regret it, not "reject it."

***

Adam: Matt Yglesias had a good post talking about the oddness of the Republican line that the Democrats were betraying the will of the American people, as if they had voted in a plebiscite rather than giving an opinion in a telephone poll—an opinion that seems to be extremely mutable, like most opinions are.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Adam, your bafflement at what's going on is -- to bring this back something else that I've actually been thinking about on and off -- part of what made Yellow Blue Tibia not quite work as intended for me. (Is it weird that I'm still thinking about an SF book, which is presumably disposable? Well, can't think of anyone else better suited to take it seriously.) The characters are confronted with inexplicable-to-rationality mass belief, and they argue about it rationally. I really enjoyed the "Truth" series on the Valve that you did a while back, but it was enjoyable precisely because unusual. YBT somehow didn't capture the atmosphere of living in a place where rationality has gone by the board.

And then, of course, the characters are authorially given a rational basis that justifies belief. It's as if someone looked at the U.S. and said, wow, the whole opposition party in the country is up in arms about Death Panels. So if I write a story about that time, I'd better put in actual death panels -- otherwise this whole thing is inexplicable. But maybe they're sort-of-death-panels that only exist because people believe in them.

I should write more about YBT. There are interesting contrasts to be drawn with _Icehenge_, a Kim Stanley Robinson book that's fundamentally about elite vs mass knowledge, and with the Lensman series, if you can imagine such a thing. You go from the 1980's, where Robinson can still talk about a hoax as if there is such a thing as a hoax, to the turn of the century, where the whole category has pretty much decayed. But, you know, I do most of my writing in comment boxes. Don't know when I'll get to it.

[Ahistoricality]

the most sweeping domestic legislative accomplishment in at least the last four presidencies

If you only consider positive accomplishments, yeah. I'd consider the USA PATRIOT Act in more or less the same league in terms of scale, sweep, effect, but almost entirely detrimental to the body politic. I still don't understand how anyone who voted for it is still considered a Democrat.

That is, perhaps, the best equivalent, at least in terms of the apocalyptic rhetoric coming from unhappy opponents.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Karl, I don't really understand the problem with my (quoted) use of "anthropomorphized". In this case, the Statue of Liberty is anthropomorphized as an actual human being who can be raped. To grab the first Web definition Googled from answer.com: "Attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena." It's not just whether something is human-shaped.

For that matter, I don't understand Scott's bit about metaphors either. Surely the rape cartoon is a visual metaphor -- the literal rape of Liberty as a person is supposed to metaphorically stand for what Obama is doing to the country. It's a racist, sexist, stupid, and trite metaphor that is sort of the visual equivalent of Godwinning, but it's a metaphor. I don't know why you're arguing that part, other that than arguing with stupid people has bad effects on your writing.

[Fritz Hemker]

If you only consider positive accomplishments, yeah. I'd consider the USA PATRIOT Act in more or less the same league in terms of scale, sweep, effect, but almost entirely detrimental to the body politic. I still don't understand how anyone who voted for it is still considered a Democrat.

Do you mean Pelosi, Murtha (RIP), Slaughter, Stupack, and Waxman?

Just to compare, but I think you'll find that Bush had more bipartisan support for the Iraq war than Obamacare received (39% of Democrats). Bush had the support of 70% of Democrats in the House and all but one of the Democrats in the Senate (or two depending on what you do with Landrieu) for the USA Patriot Act.

Obama lost 13% of his own party in the House on what is a defining issue for his party.

As far as the problems with opinion polls and public opinion, that's why we need to wait until November, and by extension 2012, to determine whether or not this was a political defeat for Obama.

[tomemos]

"Bush had the support of 70% of Democrats in the House and all but one of the Democrats in the Senate (or two depending on what you do with Landrieu) for the USA Patriot Act."

Can anyone think of a circumstantial reason why that might have been the case?

[Karl Steel]

Fritz, Republicans have increasingly tended to vote as a block. Any given Bush policy is going to have had more 'bipartisan support' than any given Obama policy precisely because the Republicans, by and large, refuse to vote for anything the Democrats propose. I thought that was obvious.

I also find your swerving of the discussion towards political effects and away from policy effects a bit tedious.

[Fritz Hemker]

Karl,

Interesting hypothesis. I know that the parties have become more polarized since the 60's, but since the last Dixiecrat left, I though that Democrats were about as likely to vote with their party as Republicans (controlling for all the stuff that you normally would control for). Do you have any particular study or data set in mind? The reason I ask is that legislative behavior really isn't my field.

In any case, to here Obama tell it, I would have thought that health care reform was of such paramount importance, and so crucial to the Democratic coalition, as to wash out all the petty differences that would cause deviation in normal circumstances.

[all the thor you'll never be]

You mean in the cartoon that's the Statue of Liberty.

I thought that character to be a weeping post-rape Darleen Click.

Slimy green, horned head, the unpaid whore's tears of regret, it's Darleen Click I tell ya!

[Fritz Hemker]

Karl,

Found some interesting data. Were Democrats in the House of Representatives more likely to vote with their party during the following Congresses?

111, Yes (Bush, G. W.) Dems. Majority
110, Yes (Bush, G.W.) Dems. Maj
109, No (Bush, G. W.) Dems. Minority
108, No (Bush, G. W.) Dems. Min
107, No (Clinton) Dems. Min
106, No (Clinton) Dems. Min
105, No (Clinton) Dems. Min
104, No (Clinton) Dems. Min
103, Yes (Bush, G. H.W.) Dems. Maj
102, Yes (Bush, G. H.W.) Dems. Maj

It's almost like which party is in the majority matters more in determining whether a member will vote with her party than anything else. What do you think?

[Caio]

Fritz, I'm having trouble parsing the meaning of your data. I also couldn't find it in its original context. Could you post a link to the page?

It also seems like what you posted deals only with Democrats, when the claim was about Democrats in comparison with Republicans. My impression is that Karl is correct, and Republicans have voted as a bloc by enforcing far more party discipline in recent years, aided by the increasing polarization of the discourse, while Democrats have tended to seek a more conciliatory route. I could be wrong about this; I'm just not sure how your data demonstrates that I am.

[Fritz Hemker]

Caio

Congress #

Democrats More Likely to Vote as a Block?

(President)

Democrats Majority or Minority?

So, in the 111th Congress, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to vote as a block, G. W. Bush was President, and the Democrats were the majority party in the House.

I didn't include any data for the Senate.

It's interesting that Democrat's block voting (always in reference to Republican block voting, because this is a "more or less" score) tracks to whether they're the majority party more than the party of the President. That surprised me.

The Link (according to the Washington Post). They call it "Members voting with their party" or "voting wiht party":

These scores represent the percentage of votes on which a lawmaker agrees with the position taken by a majority of his or her party members. The scores do not include missed votes. All lawmakers who served during this congress are included.

[Karl Steel]

In any case, to hear Obama tell it, I would have thought that health care reform was of such paramount importance, and so crucial to the Democratic coalition, as to wash out all the petty differences that would cause deviation in normal circumstances.

The Washington Post data doesn't distinguish between important votes and, say, Roll Call 990 for the 111th Congress. To get a better sense of your argument--which is what?--you would need to demonstrate that party polarization increases during important votes, or a trend of this occurring, or something. Quick check of data that shows up if I google house voting party polarization demonstrates that a chief longterm determiner for polarization was the passage of civil rights laws in the 60s. With that, the D's split into Northern and Southern varieties. It took until the mid-90s for southern D's to become southern R's, but until that happened, southern D's did tend to vote with R's, unless I misread the data.

BTW, to get the conversation back on track, if you head over to Lawyers Guns and Money, you'll see in the comments thread that someone has quoted a delicious piece from Jeff G, who more or less blames SEK for his travails when a former writing teacher asks that his name be taken off Jeff G's website. It's not the fantasies of sexual violence, of course, whether his own or Darleen's, that caused this.

[John Emerson]

The Republican Party of today is a murderous, imbecile cult, and I'll never forgive Obama for spending a year pretending that the Republicans are good-faith players whom it is possible to do business with.

There! Overton window moved!

[JPool]

John,
On the one hand I agree with you and think that there's been a lot of time wasted. Politically, however, I think this dithery year may prove to have been necessary. When Dems reject bipartisanship it's seen as high-handed, while the Rs are seen as prinicipled. Of course a large segment will always see it that way and the Rs are trying their best to paint that picture, but I think it's clearer to the center now that the Rs were never bringing anything but obstruction to the table.

[Fritz Hemker]

The Washington Post data doesn't distinguish between important votes and, say, Roll Call 990 for the 111th Congress. To get a better sense of your argument--which is what?--you would need to demonstrate that party polarization increases during important votes, or a trend of this occurring, or something.

Fair enough. And there's a ton of literature on that. Morris Fiorina is a good name to start with (not because of his conclusions, but because this is his patch and he's likely to have footnoted everything relevant). What the literature I've glanced at doesn't show, and the point I was making, is whether Republicans in particular are more or less likely to vote as a block.

Even if you could demonstrate that one party was more or less likely to vote as a block, irrespective of important conditions such as whether they're in the majority, party vs. member vs. presidential preference points, the defection of the Dixicrats, etc..., you still leave open the normative question. Ought members of the House vote as a block? If they're in a unified government, pursuing the defining issue of their party, and urged on by a world-historical and transformative President? I would say yes, they ought. A 13% defection rate isn't necessarily good news.

Of course, to offer the other point of view: the fact that President Obama could LBJ these guys into voting against their manifest electoral self-interest, with absolutely no bipartisan cover whatsoever, is impressive. Which is why I liked Peter Beinart's piece mentioned earlier. Will Obama go down in history as a tactical genius who stood up for liberals' core beliefs or a fool who "scared the bear"?

[Adam Roberts]

Rich: you're probably right that my comment on this thread (and, I daresay, Yellow Blue Tibia too, as a novel) is probably too archly naive in the face of all this brute social-cultural bellowing. A simpler explanation might be, as a notional Republican might put it: 'we had eight years of our people in power and got used to getting our own way, dammit. Now, for once, we haven't got our own way. We don't like it.'

Or maybe it is a little more complicated. Maybe Republicans get intimations of hindsight, see that Bush will be remembered by posterity for two very big fuck-ups (wrecking the economy, and pouring trillions of dollars into a pointless war -- though I suppose there may be some who still insist that the economy is not wrecked and the war not pointless) even on the offchance that e.g. sleeping at the steering wheel on 9-11, or Catriona, should be forgotten. I'm sure that knowledge is an uncomfortable thing for true-believers. It doesn't take complicated Freudian analysis to see that such a state of affairs might manifest in transferred aggression.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Where it really becomes science fictional is that this is the exact moment at which action on global climate change is becoming paramount. That's why Kim Stanley Robinson is such a good comparative author. He did his series on current-day climate change politics, the one starting with Forty Signs of Rain. And wow, was it a failure. (I have another whole blog post to write somewhere about why sf depictions of near-future ecological crises are always failures, but will probably never write that either.) But in short, one of the big plot points in his series is that Washington DC has a -40 degree winter, and that everyone is so impressed by this that political action on climate change becomes possible. Isn't that really funny? Of course, in reality, when DC had an unusually snowy winter (not the same thing, but you see what I mean) everyone on the right jumped up and down saying that global climate change if true meant that there would be no snow, and look, snow!

It's really somewhat different than old-style attempts to create reality. Stalin, in your book, decides to create a fiction that will control the people. It's very much a central command process, and the movers of it, while they justify it as good, are still aware that they are writing fiction and not truth. In the current day, although there are still any number of interests purposefully creating what they know to be propaganda, there isn't the sense that anyone is supposed to pick up the narrative wholesale. Instead, they rely on the sense that everyone creates their own truth -- that if a right-winger says that snow means no global climate change, that's just as valid as a climatologist saying that snow is quite consistent with climate change.

Kim Stanley Robinson's recent fiction seems to me to have crashed and burned on the rocks of this societal change. He's still stuck in the beliefs of a liberal era, in which truth and rationality supposedly had the ability to convince people. That contrasted his work with the earlier, authoritarian SF ethos, in which technocrats didn't convince people so much as do whatever was needed to take control of them for the greater good. (Remember the elections in the Lensman series? The "wrong" party wasn't just wrong, they were actually tools of the Boskonians. And after that distasteful episode in which the proto-Lensman had to fool around with electoral politics, no more is ever heard of it. They win forever.)

Perhaps archly naive is a good description of the problem I had with YBT. There are a whole lot of signifiers of literary postmodernism in it, which is well and good as a literary phenomenon. But literary postmodernism maps quite tragically into political postmodernism. It has the qualities of play, satire, non-seriousness, which politically become something like laughing along with Jon Stewart while not wondering why the most trusted news in the U.S. now has to be dispensed by a comedian. The whole idea of "Look, there's snow! Global warming is fake!" is inherently comic, or tragi-comic. At the end of YBT, the main character is really trying to convince the public that the aliens exist. And, if I've read the book rightly, they really do exist. But they are simultaneously rather like the villains in a Bond movie (you mention the book's use of action movie tropes). You can't take the Bond movie villain's weather control plot entirely seriously. Even as he's creating tornadoes and hurricanes, it's somehow stuck in the comic mode.

Is there anything wrong with that kind of archness? No, not inherently. It's just that it goes along with the current political moment in the U.S. badly. Look at this little mini-episode as a tiny example. A winger draws a cartoon about the President raping Liberty, and the conversation is about cheap laughs, senses of humor, who is cool and not cool. It's the dumbest conversation ever, wholly divorced from any sense of reality about policy and what's going on. The wingers are, obviously, totally detached from reality, incoherent even when they try to address it or their own terms. And the response is ... laughter?