Below is the promotional spot for a new show that is being co-produced by Salon and IFC. Salon film critics Stephanie Zacharek and Andrew O’Hehir will join IFC news host Matt Singer every Thursday to talk about independent film trends and news. The series premieres Thursday on IFC and will also appear here, on Salon.
Grover Norquist, conservative general, explains it all. (Credit: Jeff Malet)
On Friday evening, conservatives and Occupy forces talked trash outside the Conservative Political Action Committee conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C. To my right stood two Occupy soldiers, Michael and Mo, both African-American, shouting slogans about the 1 percent. To my left, a cluster of jacket-and-tied CPAC men shouted sound bytes about freedom In between them stood a line of grim-looking, blue-suited officers of the Metropolitan Police Department, both white and African-American, quite possibly thinking, These people are nuts.
Both sides came equipped for a war of words. Michael is a young Iraq war vet from Alaska who once admired George W. Bush, and is now an Occupier par excellence. He offered the high-decibel insight that “The system has failed!” Standing next to him, Mo, a big guy and a regular at the now-evicted OccupyDC camp, shouted “The 1 percent are using you guys.”
“The 1 percent?” a CPAC man volleyed back. “God bless ‘em. What’s wrong with making money?”
Another CPAC-er tossed this verbal firecracker: “Just because you’ve failed, doesn’t mean the system’s failed.”
That was rich, the Occupiers thought. Michael had done a tour of duty in Iraq — probably one more than the CPAC man had done. Mo was personally offended. “I haven’t failed,” he said, his face crinkling up at the insulting assumption. “I have a job.” He shook his head and turned away like: There’s no talking to these people. And the CPAC gang turned away, no doubt thinking: There’s no talking to these people.
The CPAC cluster hungrily took up the chant of “Steak! Steak! Steak!” Occupiers replied with a mocking chant of “White power! White power! White power!” And so the confrontation dissolved.
“Truth on our side”
But inside the big hotel, there was no such failure of communication. Several thousand energized, if anxious, conservative activists launched themselves into the 2012 presidential campaign with a display of divisions — but also an unmistakable resolve to end the presidency of Barack Obama by any legal means necessary. Their mood was upbeat, and barely shaken by the falling unemployment rate and the president’s recent uptick in the polls.
“You ever notice how liberals always have a scowl on their face?” asked Jim Jordan, a Tea Party congressman from Ohio. A four-time high-school wrestling champion, Jordan did not look like a 1 percent type of guy. He spoke from the podium without a jacket. He was all big ears and muscles to go with his five o’clock shadow and yellow tie. “Conservatives are more positive because we’ve got truth on our side,” he said with a smile.
But here’s the truth: the assembled activists were having a devil of time trying to figure out who should lead their cause against Obama, the mild-mannered former law professor whom these people tend to regard as a tyrant. On the first day of the conference, my sense was that a plurality favored former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum for president. Almost as many touted Mitt Romney as the most electable candidate; Newt Gingrich partisans were harder to come by. (The Ron Paul campaign decamped to the Maine caucuses, which Romney won Saturday in a squeaker.)
In a panel discussion in the main ballroom, respected conservative elders spoke frankly. “How many of you out there have mocked President Obama’s call for hope and change with a friend or in your group,” ask pollster Scott Rasmussen. “Come on, how many of you have done that?”
A lot of hands went up.
“Well, that’s stupid,” he barked. “In the last three elections, people have voted against the party in power; voters are looking for hope and change in 2012 as much as in 2008. You ought to be encouraging Republican candidates to offer that positive step forward.”
This was a crowd unified by the incantation of Ronald Reagan’s name and an inexhaustible fondness for Obama teleprompter jokes. They overwhelmingly favor cutting government spending, oppose any kind of taxation, reject abortion and, I get the impression, favor limiting the availability of birth control.
They are most divided on the issue of illegal immigration. The one moment of true anger I saw during the conference came during an immigration panel discussion when a libertarian speaker asserted that undocumented immigrants were as law-abiding and hard-working as Americans. There was booing, and someone in the crowd shouted, “That’s bullshit!”
One of the panel speakers was Robert Vandervoort, the executive director of a group called Pro-English. As Salon reported last week, Vandervoort was one of three invited CPAC speakers with a history of white supremacist activities. He restricted his remarks to the cause of making English the official language of the United States.
A third speaker on the panel was Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach, an adviser to the Romney campaign and the author of anti-illegal immigrant laws recently enacted in Arizona, Alabama and South Carolina. Kobach told me afterwards that he “abhorred racism.” Just because he appeared on a panel with Vandervoort, he said, didn’t mean that he shared his views.
When it came to immigration policy, Kobach said he had no problem with Romney’s oft-derided use of the term “self-deportation.” He said that Romney, if elected president, would pursue a policy of “attrition through enforcement” that would make life so unpleasant for the undocumented and their families that they would voluntarily leave. Kobach said he was not satisfied with the Obama administration’s deportation policy that has removed a million people from the United States in three years. A “sensible” immigration policy, he said, could reduce the resident population of 11 million undocumented immigrants in American by 50 percent by 2016.
A pledge to forcibly remove 5.5 million people, most of them Latino, from their homes may not be the most attractive election-year message for the fastest growing demographic group in the American electorate, but it seems that is now the Republican frontrunner’s declared position.
When Brad Bailey of Nassau Bay, Texas, overheard Kobach’s recommendation, he scoffed “That guy never met a payroll.” Bailey is one of those pro-immigration Republicans whose views are heard less often these days. He says he has employed dozens of immigrants at his two seafood restaurants over the last 25 years and regards them as hard-working and God-fearing people. Of the undocumented workers in America, he said. “They’re not going home. America is their home.” Bailey says the anti-illegal immigration groups should not be trusted because they are in cahoots with Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club.
But, for all these hints of nativism, I did not discern an obvious racial animus among many attendees. “Is this a racist crowd?” I asked African American talk radio host Pudgy Miller. “No,” he said. I put the same question to Kevin Daniels, who runs a black Christian conservative group called the Frederick Douglass Foundation in North Carolina. His left eyebrow rose about a millimeter, and he shrugged. “I just don’t see it.” (I was going to write that Daniels was positively Obama-ian in his self-control, but he might not take it as a compliment.)
The bottom line is that the willingness of CPAC leaders to invite the likes of Vandervoort indicates a tolerance for racist discourse. And Daniels’ reading of American politics (“liberal government as the new slavery”) strikes me as a profound misreading of African-American history. But when I saw the crowd cheering Herman Cain as he proclaimed yet again the virtues of his budget-busting 9-9-9 plan, it seemed to me that “racist” is not a useful term for describing the CPAC rank and file.
“Severely conservative”
Perhaps hottest topic of conversation was the Obama administration’s decision last week to require that birth control be part of the basic coverage provided by any health insurer under the Affordable Care Act. When they spoke at CPAC on Friday, all three of the leading presidential candidates denounced the decision as an attack on the religious liberty of Catholic institutions that have non-Catholic employees. All pledged to repeal the national health insurance scheme they call “Obama-care.”
The most revealing remarks came in the candidates’ respective pitches to the assembled. When Santorum asked, “Why would an undecided voter vote for a candidate who the party is not excited about?” he said what a lot of people in the room were thinking.
“I’m the only candidate who has never worked in Washington,” Romney boasted two hours later. In promising to be “severely conservative,” he drew repeated applause and refuted the cruel observation of National Review’s Jonah Goldberg: “A Romney speech is like Mr. Spock reading a love letter.” At CPAC, Romney sounded more like Captain Kirk reading a love letter.
Later in the day, Newt Gingrich arranged to be introduced by his overly enthusiastic wife Callista — a big mistake in this venue. “Home wrecker,” hissed more than one woman in the crowd as Gingrich’s well-coiffed mistress-turned-wife sung the praises of the man she hopes to propel to the Oval Office by sheer force of hairdo. Her husband honked out his pitch that he would be the “paycheck president” who could beat the “food stamp president.” He drew some cheers, but a serial adulterer was not going to wow this straight-laced crowd.
Deep in the hotel’s hospitality suites, Santorum mobilized what might be called the Republican counter-establishment. These are the evangelical and Tea Party leaders who are struggling for control of the Republican party with its traditional moneyed elite, now led by the likes of Karl Rove and Roger Ailes of Fox News (who arguably embody the power of the 1 percent more than the CPAC crowd).
The candidate huddled with conservative movement leaders at a private luncheon hosted by ConservativeHQ.com chairman Richard Viguerie, according to the Wall Street Journal. Viguerie, a prolific fund-raiser and one of the founding fathers of the American right:
…set the tone of the meeting by reminding the attendees that, based on who had won what in the Republican primaries so far, one of four people was going to be president after November 2012: Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum, and that of the four, Rick Santorum was the one reliable conservative left in the race.
By the end of the three-day conference, Santorum’s supporters dominated the hotel lobby where the partisans of the various candidate handed out signs and talked up their heroes. Becky Barker, a 20-year-old college student from Gaithersburg, Md., who hopes to become a historian and stay-at-home mother, told me she was excited about the prospect of working on a Santorum campaign in the fall, mostly because of his pro-life views. “If it comes down to Romney,” she allowed, “I’ll hold my nose and vote for him.”
“Santorum is not a reluctant conservative,” said Tim LeFever, a real estate broker and evangelical leader active in campaigns against gay rights in California. “Ideally we would combine his strength with the infrastructure of Romney with the debating ability of Newt.”
This was defensive crowd, touchy about the slights of the “lamestream media” and irked by the Occupy movement’s claim that they are somehow part of the 1 percent. When I asked Rusty Humphries, a popular talk-radio host from Atlanta, what he thought the conservative movement’s biggest problem was going into 2012, he shook his head, “Our image. They’re doing a very good job with that 1 percent thing. It’s all lies but it works.”
In his podium appearance, Andrew Breitbart, the movement’s brash, factually challenged guerrilla videographer, said he wasn’t worried by the lack of agreement on the best presidential candidate. “Ask not what you can do for your candidate,” he shouted. “Ask what you can do for your candidate. That’s the Tea Party.”
Breitbart went on to tell a funny story about having dinner with former radical activist Bill Ayres (“He’s an excellent cook”) which mutated into a less-than-convincing conspiracy theory about how the real purpose of the anti-Vietnam War movement was to deliver Barack Obama (then an 8-year-old living with his mother in Indonesia) into the White House where he could betray America and steal your money. It was more entertaining than persuasive.
“Put them in plastic bags”
The conference closed on a more substantive note Saturday afternoon when Grover Norquist, the anti-tax crusader and conservative movement’s most influential strategist, took the stage. More than any other person, Norquist is responsible for the no-tax orthodoxy of today’s Republican party. Looking and sounding like a football coach offering a pep talk to his team before a big game, Norquist mixed unabashed confidence with realistic talk about the difficulties of achieving victory. He used both data and violent imagery to rally his team against what he called the “coercive utopians” of the Obama administration.
Norquist boasted that only five of the 50 states raised taxes in 2011, and he talked tough about how to deal with those who oppose the conservative agenda. “As for the trial lawyers,” he said, “let’s put them in plastic bags and take them down to the river.”
That unfunny remark crystallized a thought I’d had for three days. If the CPAC army is strong on authentic conviction, they are weak on democratic self-awareness. Based on what I saw and heard at CPAC, an undecided voter might conclude that American conservatives in 2012 oppose taxing the rich to reduce the deficit, seek to limit women’s access to birth control, promise to forcibly expel 5.5 million mostly law-abiding people from their homes, and are led by a man occasionally talks like Tony Soprano. Some Americans might be attracted to that package. But even some conservatives will pause. And the center? It’s not just liberals who may be put off by that agenda.
But none could doubt the movement’s swagger when Norquist fine-tuned his newest talking point about Mitt Romney. He predicted that the leadership of the conservative movement for the next 20 years will emanate from Congress, not the White House (a likely development for which Democrats seem unprepared).
“We’re not auditioning for someone to tell us what to do,” he declared. “We know what to do. We just need a president who can sign the legislation that the Republican House and Senate pass. … We don’t need someone to think. … We need someone who knows how to hold a pen.”
Warming to the idea of Mitt Romney as their obedient servant, the CPAC crowd gave Norquist a standing ovation.
Then came the much-anticipated straw poll results. The crowd gasped when it was announced that Romney won 39 percent of the votes of 3,400-plus conference participants, edging Santorum (who had 31 percent) and leaving Gingrich far behind (20 percent). The Romney contingent cheered mightily while Santorum’s supporters brayed in dismay.
“Romney dodged a bullet,” Tony Katz, a Los Angeles talk-radio host with a stylish L.A. haircut, told me in the hotel bar afterwards. “If Santorum had won, he would have capped off an unbelievable week where he won three states he wasn’t expected to win, and he raised $3 million. If he won the straw poll, he would have had talking points until the Arizona debate [scheduled for February 22]. Now Romney has the talking points.”
There was one notable footnote buried in the poll data. While the straw poll of CPAC participants found 99 percent disapproval of Obama’s job performance, a national poll of self-identified conservatives conducted by CPAC last week found a remarkable 19 percent approve of the job President Obama is doing.
Is it really possible that one in five conservatives nationwide thinks Obama is doing an OK job as president? If that finding is not an outlier, the conservative highlights of the Obama’s presidency—the reliance on Wall Street executives, the faith in bipartisanship, the killing of Osama Bin Laden—may be winning him undetected support deep in enemy territory.
The conference closed with an address by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, now the spiritual den mother of the conservative movement. As she bleated her way through a predictable speech lamenting that President Obama transformed “the shining city on a hill” to a “sinking ship,” a group of college students stood up in the darkened ballroom and started shouting “mic check!” They were immediately drowned out by booing and a Palin-led chant of “USA! USA! USA!” As the security men hustled the kids out through the hotel’s marble lobby, they held up fists of solidarity while bystanders shouted “Loser!” and “Get a job!”
On the sidewalk outside, the group of 15 fresh-faced students from American University, Georgetown and other local colleges, resumed their mic check. Jacob Hope, a history and politics double major, read excerpts from the Occupy DC’s statement of principles calling for “a more democratic just and sustainable world.” Aiming his remarks at the people inside the hotel, he added, “Before you vilify, hear our declaration.”
The students’ mic check included the claim, “We have been captives of a corrupt economic and political system for far too long,” a sentiment voiced by many CPAC speakers. But what is the source of the corruption of American democracy? That is the question that divides America into its red and blue territories.
For the CPAC crowd, that corruption originates exclusively with secular liberals and anyone else who believes in governmental action for the common good. For the Occupiers, the corruption originates mainly with a dominant financial and political elite, now known as the “1 percent,” whom the CPAC crowd reveres, defends and aspires to join. These two movements barely know how to talk to each other but by the time the conference ended on Saturday night, it was clear their polar positions define the current political spectrum.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks at a caucus, Saturday, Feb. 11, 2012, in Portland, Maine. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty) (Credit: AP)
The fact that Mitt Romney scored two straw poll victories over the weekend is not, by itself, bad news for his campaign. But the fact that the entire political world knows he did is.
If things were going the way Romney and his campaign wanted them to be going (and the way they believed they were going until about a week ago), the straw votes at CPAC and in Maine on Saturday would have been campaign footnotes, two more lay-ups for a candidate well on his way to uniting the Republican Party. Instead, they made for headline news, two desperately needed and somewhat surprising victories for a feeble front-runner.
When February started, the assumption was that Romney would win every primary and caucus scheduled for the month, a streak that would lift his standing in national polls to new and previously unimaginable heights and cement his image as the GOP’s inevitable nominee. Romney would then be positioned to finish off Newt Gingrich once and for all on Super Tuesday in early March, at which point it would finally be safe to pivot to the general election.
As expected, the first domino fell in Nevada two Saturdays ago, with Romney posting a lopsided victory, Gingrich barely staving off Ron Paul for second place, and Rick Santorum showing no hint of life. But then, out of nowhere, came Santorum’s stunning sweep last Tuesday – wins with 55 percent in Missouri, 45 percent in Minnesota and 40 percent in Colorado. And just like that, Romney had lost three of the first four February contests and gained a new and potentially more formidable chief rival in Santorum.
That made Saturday an unexpectedly pivotal day for Romney. Before Santorum’s rise from the dead, only two CPAC straw poll outcomes seemed plausible: (1) A Romney victory that would confirm his campaign’s superior organization, its success in marginalizing would-be conservative rivals, and the party base’s readiness to finally look at him and say, “OK, good enough”; or (2) a Paul victory that would be dismissed as meaningless. But when Santorum hit the jackpot last Tuesday and followed it up with a well-received CPAC speech on Friday, he became the favorite to win the straw vote, an outcome that would have accelerated the Mitt-in-freefall narrative.
The same was true in Maine, a state Romney comfortably won in 2008. This time around, he was facing a well-organized challenge from Paul, whose forces hoped to capitalize on the state’s absurdly low caucus turnout to produce an outright victory. But such a result would have been easy for Romney to dismiss as a nuisance – until last Tuesday, when his three-state meltdown turned Maine into a must-win event. Otherwise, the media – and his opponents – would have been able to spend the rest of February pointing out that he was in the midst of a four-contest losing streak. (The next primaries aren’t until February 28, in Arizona and Michigan.)
So Romney dodged two big bullets on Saturday, beating Santorum by seven points at CPAC and Paul by three in Maine. Not surprisingly, there have been cries of malfeasance, with Santorum arguing that Romney rigged the CPAC straw poll by busing in supporters and paying for their tickets, and Paul’s campaign noting that caucuses in a Paul-friendly county in Maine were postponed because of snow that was forecast for Saturday.
“A prediction of 3-4 inches – that turned into nothing more than a dusting – was enough for a local GOP official to postpone the caucuses just so the results wouldn’t be reported tonight,” Paul’s campaign manager wrote in an email to supporters.
The reality, as FHQ’s Josh Putnam explained on Sunday, is that the Maine result is very unlikely to change even when that county (along with two others that also weren’t included in Saturday’s count) holds its caucuses. So a repeat of Iowa, where an apparent Romney victory was reversed weeks later, probably isn’t in the cards. And Santorum’s griping about CPAC doesn’t add up to much; buying up tickets and busing in supporters for straw polls is a common enough practice (though it is noteworthy that Romney’s campaign previously downplayed the significance of straw polls).
The bottom line for Romney is that he did what he could do this weekend to keep the meltdown narrative from intensifying. But even as he was winning at CPAC and in Maine, a new national poll from PPP that put him 15 points behind Santorum was released. And on Sunday, PPP teased a forthcoming survey that will likely show Santorum ahead by double-digits in Michigan. So while things could be worse for Romney as this week begins, the rest of February sill promises to be far more trying for him than it was ever supposed to.
Steve Kornacki writes about politics for Salon. Reach him by email at SKornacki@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @SteveKornacki More Steve Kornacki
Adele poses backstage with her six awards at the 54th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday, Feb. 12, 2012 in Los Angeles. Adele won awards for best pop solo performance for "Someone Like You," song of the year, record of the year, and best short form music video for "Rolling in the Deep," and album of the year and best pop vocal album for "21." (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill) (Credit: AP)
The Grammys have always trod the line between dull veneration of industry success and outrageous celebration of rock-and-roll excess. But this year, with the losses of Etta James, Clarence Clemons, Gil Scott-Heron and Amy Winehouse, the show had an even tougher time finding the right pitch than Coldplay’s Chris Martin did.
The specter of death would have hung heavily over the proceedings even if Whitney Houston hadn’t died suddenly the day before. But the singer’s untimely demise Saturday gave an unavoidable air of sorrow to the proceedings, a grim dose of reality that couldn’t help crashing into the fantasy realm of Lady Gaga scepters and Nicki Minaj eyelashes. That’s why the most memorable aspects of the broadcast weren’t just the loudest or the tackiest. They were sad, they were weird, they were sometimes awful; sometimes, they were even fantastic. And they were dominated by two big-throated ladies – the troubled diva from Newark and Adele, the whiskey-voiced British blonde. And though we loved The Civil Wars’s one-minute of perfection and were baffled by Rihanna’s “When Harry Met Sally” hair and got weepy over Paul McCartney and company’s poignant and timely “Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight,” these are Salon’s top-10 biggest moments of the night.
With all his trademark energy intact and backed with a massive string section, the Boss — who lost his longtime collaborator Clarence Clemons last year – kicked off the evening with a rousing version of “We Take Care of Our Own.” It was soulful, spirited and just the right touch of mournful.
LL Cool J
Admitting that “There is no way around this — we had a death in our family,” the night’s host then announced “the only thing right is to begin with a prayer… for our fallen sister.” Depending on your philosophic perspective, watching the audience solemnly bow its collective head while Cool James invoked our “heavenly father” was either a moving tribute or a sudden reminder of why having an atheist like Ricky Gervais host awards shows is a cool idea. But when he cut to clip of Whitney blowing the roof off with a live performance of “I Will Always Love You” at the Grammys a generation ago, it set a bar for vocal performance that would be damn near impossible to match for the rest of the night.
Alicia Keys and Bonnie Raitt
Honoring the late, great Etta James, two knockout performers of different eras and genres gave a stripped-down version of “Sunday Kind of Love.” It was one of the few pairings of the night that worked, a stunning moment of sincerity and finesse in an evening that often veered heavily to schmaltz.
Chris Brown
It’s not that we can expect the music industry to ignore chart topping, domestic-abusing, frequently terrible Chris Brown. He’s had a huge year, and on Sunday’s broadcast, he even managed to pick up a Grammy. But aside from his historic awfulness, there’s another reason to ponder whether it was really necessary to subject America to two separate performances. Decked out in his preppy “I’m not dangerous, ladies!” varsity jacket, he jumped around lip-synching “Turn Up the Music” and “Beautiful People” with a posse of bat winged, masked performers in a performance apparently inspired by the old video game Q*Bert early in the night, then came back near the end for a dead-behind-the-eyes “tribute to dance.” At least he managed to prove that he doesn’t need his abusive record to be reviled – feel free to shun him just because he sucks.
It took the powerhouse Jennifer Hudson — who two years ago performed Houston’s most successful smash for the woman herself at the BET Awards — to take “I Will Always Love You” back from the place of power ballad clichés where it’s lived the last two decades and make it ache like new. No big crescendo, no sappy orchestration, just a clearly emotional Hudson belting her heart out. Beautiful.
Foo Fighters
In an intense performance outside the Staples Center for the regular folk, Dave Grohl and company – a gang whose own experience of tragedy was brought home by that audience member thrashing around in a Nirvana shirt — howled through a fiery rendition of their “never wanna die” anthem “Walk.” Later, picking up the Grammy for Best Rock Performance, Grohl admitted “We made this one in my garage with some microphones and a tape machine,” eloquently pleaded for “the human element of music” and promised, “It’s not about being perfect.” It was a shining example of old-school authenticity, only slightly undercut by the appearance, immediately after, of Ryan Seacrest.
Glen Campbell
Lifetime-achievement award winner Campbell, who last year announced he was facing Alzheimer’s and would release a final album and do one last tour, is not going gently into his disease. After The Band Perry shouted uncomprehendingly through “Gentle On My Mind” and Blake Shelton did a serviceable “Southern Nights,” it was Campbell himself who rocked the house. Looking undeniably unwell but in remarkably stronger voice than the likes of fellow Grammy performers Carrie Underwood or Paul McCartney, he staunchly belted out “Rhinestone Cowboy,” enthusiastically coaxing the entire audience to sing along. It was by the far the greatest exhibition of bad-ass, rock-and-roll indominability of the night.
Katy Perry
Aw, remember when Katy Perry did the Grammys gently swaying in a trapeze swing, showing off home movies from her wedding? Sure you do; it was last year. Post-Russell Brand divorce Katy seems to have decided to go for a different vibe. Performing her new song “Part of Me,” she was all about shattering glass, engulfing ice effigies of men in flames, and declaring, “You can keep the diamond ring, in fact, you can keep everything.” Katy, you blue-haired, pissed-off little minx, you know what? I believe you.
The Catholic Church hasn’t taken this much of a beating since Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” era. In a performance of “Roman Holiday” that topped even Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro,” Minaj went through a confession gone wrong, an exorcism, and wound up surrounded by dancing monks getting groped by hot leather babes – all while “Oh Come All Ye Faithful” took on a whole new meaning. Did we mention she levitated? It was the closest the Grammys has even come to turning into a Ken Russell movie.
Taking the stage after vocal surgery in November, the night’s biggest winner was clearly not in as forceful voice as in her Royal Albert Hall performance of last year. But she was but so clearly enjoying her triumphant night of multiple wins, pointing at herself while snarling, “You could have had this all,” she personified bittersweet awesomeness. When the audience thundered to its feet, Adele’s mastery of simultaneous heartbreak and victory was not just in powerful evidence, it was conspicuously infectious. And when, later, she tearfully picked up the final award of the night for Album of the Year, she copped both to an inspiring “rubbish relationship” and to fending off “oh my God, snot.” And that is whyyyyyyyy we will always love youuuuuuu, Adele.
Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams
A few years back (2003 to be exact) I wrote a story in Print on The NSK State, created in 1992 by the Slovene arts collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), which included the groups Laibach, IRWIN, Noordung, New Collectivism and the Department of Pure and Applied Philosophy. Their trope was needle-sharp parody of Communist and Fascist symbols and language.
NSK was founded in Ljubljana in 1984 as socialist Yugoslavia began to return to prewar borders and age-old ethnic disputes. As an art and satire movement The NSK State is conceived as a utopia, which has no physical territory and is not identified with any existing national state. It is inherently transnational and describes itself as “the first global state of the universe.” It issues passports to anyone who is prepared to identify with its founding principles and citizenship is open to all regardless of national, sexual, religious or other status. It now has several thousand citizens across numerous countries and all continents.
The NSK State has opened temporary Embassy and Consulate events in Moscow, Ghent, Berlin and Sarajevo. And earlier this month they issued passports at MoMA (Mezzanine, The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building). MoMA states:
Organized in conjunction with the exhibition Print/Out, Print Studio is an interactive space that explores the evolution of artistic practices relating to the medium of print.
Originally founded by a collective of artists, musicians, and philosophers, the NSK State in Time (Neue Slowenische Kunst) came into being in 1992 shortly after Slovenia’s independence from the Yugoslavian federation. This declaration of existence was accompanied by the issuing of passports at various temporary embassies which operated alongside NSK exhibitions and events. Led by the Slovenian artists’ collective IRWIN, Print Studio will host IRWIN, NSK Passport Office, New York for three days and issue a limited number of passports. A concurrent series of presentations, discussions, screenings and a culminating NSK State Citizens’ Congress offers a forum to engage the public with ideas central to the NSK State and what it means to be a citizen of this state in time.
A limited number of passports will be printed during IRWIN’s NSK Passport Office, New York.
The “Time for a New State” billboard below is in Lagos where approximately 4000 citizens only have NSK passports (Thanks to Mirko Ilic).
Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.
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Why should you, an adult, bother with a novel intended for an audience aged 14 to 18? If you’re among the ever-growing adult readership for YA (young adult) fiction, you’re probably not even asking that question anymore. And no doubt John Green, whose most recent YA novel, “The Fault in Our Stars,” became a bestseller on Amazon even before he finished writing it (pre-orders were enabled when he settled on a title), doesn’t especially need readers with the legal right to vote. But if you were to skip “The Fault in Our Stars” — or another new novel, by YA luminary Meg Rosoff, “There Is No Dog” — because you assume that such books are less intelligent, well-written or emotionally complex than their adult counterparts, you would be most miserably mistaken.
Both of these novels ask questions as difficult as those posed by any serious writer: Why do we suffer, why must we die, and what meaning can be found in any of it? More important, they are not afraid to respond to these questions unflinchingly. These books are often — very often — funny, but they aren’t frivolous. I can think of a dozen acclaimed contemporary adult novelists who blunder through this territory, wallowing in sinkholes of sentiment, tangling their narratives in thickets of saccharine fabulism. It makes no sense that the maudlin goo that is “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” should be classified as a work for adults, when “The Fault in Our Stars,” a far more mature rumination on the same themes, is regarded as a children’s book. Likewise, why should grown-ups be subjected to the cutesy “The Life of Pi” while teenagers get to revel in an astringent fable like “There Is No Dog”?
“The Fault in Our Stars” is told in the first person, with the sort of fresh, irreverent voice that inevitably gets compared to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. This story, however, comes from a character infinitely more appealing than Holden. Her name is Hazel Lancaster, and she is dying. The thyroid cancer that will eventually kill her is being held in abeyance by an experimental drug, but she still needs an oxygen tank, and she spends a lot of time worrying that she’s an emotional “grenade” for her parents. “There is only one thing shittier than biting it from cancer when you’re 16,” she observes, “and that’s having a kid who bites it from cancer.” She’d prefer to limit the damage.
And yet, who could help but love her? Certainly not Augustus Waters, a survivor of osteosarcoma with a replacement leg he calls Old Prosty. The two meet at a support group, where they are suitably skeptical about the inspirational mottoes and the covert competition to end up among the 20 percent who’ll still be alive in five years. A tender, bookish, wisecracking romance ensues, fueled in part by the couple’s shared enthusiasm for a novel, “An Imperial Affliction,” Hazel’s favorite, yet something she mostly “can’t tell people about, one of those books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.”
“An Imperial Affliction” ends in the middle of a sentence, and while Hazel thinks she knows why, she still wishes she could find out what happens to its characters. The author, who has written nothing else, lives reclusively in Amsterdam. The two young people hatch a plan to visit him and extract the answers to Hazel’s questions. It’s a quest complicated by the difficulty of traveling with oxygen tanks and prosthetics, but enabled by the sort of favors Hazel sardonically refers to as “cancer perks.” There will be grenades, but not in the places where you expect them.
The sparkling, satirical “There Is No Dog” extrapolates from a clever premise: If this world — “not just full of suffering” but “full of perversity, of things that go horribly wrong more or less at random. For the hell of it” — has a creator, the only deity messed up enough to have made it must be a teenage boy. His name is Bob, and he’s petulant, self-absorbed and hormone-addled. Most of the actual work gets done by the middle-aged Mr. B, a put-upon administrative second banana who spends his time frantically trying to limit the damage caused by Bob’s moods and negligence.
Bob got punted this job (“miles off the beaten track in a lonely and somewhat run-down part of the universe”) by his feckless mother, Mona, who won it in a celestial poker game. His initial efforts at creating light consisted of “fireworks, sparklers and neon tubes that circled the globe like weird tangled rainbows,” all of which Bob regarded as “very cool” even though they didn’t work. (The functional aspects of the solar system were executed by Mr. B while Bob napped.) Creating humanity in his own image (“one big fat recipe for disaster”) is this creator’s crowning misdeed and results in a long history of Bob falling in love with mortal women, an emotion whose agonizing ups and downs trigger bizarre weather and other natural disasters. “There is No Dog” begins just as a lovely assistant zookeeper named Lucy comes to Bob’s amorous and catastrophic attention.
Rosoff gets an impressive amount of mileage out of what might otherwise seem like a joke. This is largely due to a lively extended cast of characters who include Lucy’s mother, the dispirited vicar who pines for her, Mona’s terrifying poker buddy and his thoughtful daughter, Estelle. There’s also Bob’s neglected pet (“I don’t ignore him! Just last night I made him bring me some food!”) the Eck, an endearingly hapless “penguiny” creature, the last of his kind, in danger of being eaten by Estelle’s father.
It’s debatable whether Rosoff’s shrewd, trim prose might not occasionally fly just over the heads of teen readers. (Lucy’s mother is memorably described as “having the air of an expensive pony — sturdy, alert and well-groomed.”) But it’s rather thrilling to know that stylists of her caliber have dedicated themselves to writing for young readers, and that it doesn’t even seem to occur to her to pander to them. Not much in today’s culture inspires hope for the future — or at least not credibly so — but I count the knowledge that so many teenagers read and love books like “The Fault in Our Stars” and “There Is No Dog” as one of the bright spots.
Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller
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