Tuesday, 21 February 2012

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Conservative women are more than just "hotties in tube tops." (But hopefully, they're that too.) Somehow I missed the fact that a group of C-List conservative bloggers turned on themselves over the issue of propriety at CPAC. At the same event in which this high-minded little event took place, it was reported that the female attendees “looked like two-bit whores.” That’s according to Dr. Melissa Clouthier, who feels the need to remind everyone she’s a doctor, presumably because her elevated diction might convince folks otherwise. Dr. Clouthier continues: I was at another service-oriented gathering of young women where the girls were in tight bandeau-skirts — you know, the kind of tube-top skirts that hookers wear on street corners. I’m fairly certain I know what she means here: conservative women shouldn’t dress in ways that make them look like “hookers … on street corners.” However, that point was contested by Dan Riehl—last spotted cowering in fear from some black toddlers who were “technically thugs”—who declared that he did, in fact, want to see conservative women dress like “hookers on the street”: In my opinion, CPAC is about politics, not parenting. If it takes hundreds of new folks with perhaps more libertarian, than traditional, leanings to infuse a more powerful right in America, I’ll take it. And if some number of them are hotties in tube tops, I’ll find a way to endure because I love America just that much. The more “hotties in tube tops,” Riehl argues, the more powerful the right will become, because nothing builds a stronger coalition more quickly than objectifying and diminishing half the people who might want to join it. To use the conservatives objection to gay marriage as a model of argumentation, first conservative women will be allowed to dress like hookers; then they’ll be required to dress like hookers; then they’ll be required to be hookers. And as Robert Stacy McCain—the man most likely to declare himself the winner of a Hunter S. Thompson prose-alike contest—pointed out, this process has already started: No one can responsibly disagree with [Dr.] Melissa [Clouthier]’s argument against the super-short and super-tight party dresses which some Republican coeds seem to consider de rigeur for a night on the town. Also, the bare cleavage—c’mon, guys, testify for me here—makes it quite difficult to concentrate on anything else except the bare cleavage. Conservative are already being required to dress like hookers! Moreover, look at the effect it’s having on family-oriented conservatives like McCain: not only is he incapable of diverting his eyes from the buffet of cleavage present at CPAC, he’s incapable of imagining a world in which conservative men possess the wherewithal to do anything other than stare at their compatriots’ breasts. Riehl isn’t some sexist exception—he’s just honest enough to admit that if women flaunt their wares, he’ll gladly gawk at them while pretending to agree with whatever they happen to be saying. What are they saying? Who cares? So long as the lungs pushing those words out reside beneath a bosom being amply displayed, Riehl and McCain will keep on nodding. How can...
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Time can be rewritten. And will be. Try to keep up. (This will be the second-to-last Who-related visual rhetoric posts for a bit. It concerns the complicated conclusion of the fifth season, which is why it's the second-to-last. It's also a sequel of sorts to this post, though I reserve the right to introduce new material and present spoilers so inscrutable to the casual fans that unless you've watched the series three times through they won't even register as such.) At the conclusion of "The Pandorica Opens" we learned that all of the Doctor's old enemies had formed a committee and decided the Doctor was responsible for the universe unwriting itself. They weren't wrong. As I noted in the post on "Vampires of Venice," the Doctor tells Rosanna: He may have even wanted to believe this at the time, but he changed his mind in the next episode, "Amy's Choice," after vicariously experiencing the death of Rory Williams through Amy Pond, who asked him quite the cutting question. If you can't go back and change time, At the time, the only answer he could provide was that he someone becoming accustomed to either causing mass extinctions or standing idly by while entire species are wiped from existence. The former may be a more morally reprehensible action, but the passivity of the latter brings him no glory. In order to redeem himself—and I'm going to insist that this season is, among other things, a redemption narrative—he needs to rethink his relation to universe he tends. Which is precisely what happens in the episode "The Big Bang." He discovers that the point of him is that he can change time, so writer and showrunner Steven Moffatt and director Toby Haynes proceed to do exactly that. "The Big Bang" opens with a repetition of the slow tracking shot from the first episode of the season, "The Eleventh Hour": Just as in the beginning of "The Eleventh Hour," the camera slowly glides through Amelia Pond's garden before jump-cutting to a shot of her praying to Santa for help. Her confession in "The Big Bang" is identical up to a point. Cut back to "The Eleventh Hour": In "The Eleventh Hour," she turns to her window and spies this: Which elicits this response: Only in "The Big Bang," there's no TARDIS crashed in the yard and her fervent wish ended up in the same dustbin Santa's missives always do. In other words, from the opening scene of "The Big Bang," the audience isn't merely aware of the fact that the Doctor's changed his mind about the possibility of rewriting time, he's embraced the endeavor. Not by his own choice, mind you, but given what happens later in this episode, the indication is that even if this decision weren't a consequence of his imprisonment, he'd choose revision nonetheless. Speaking of his imprisonment, I should note for casual fans why the Doctor's currently manipulating time behind the scenes. Remember that great speech he gave to the "WHIRRING AND THRUMMING" alien armada intent on capturing him? He did an...

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