Revolution, on Television and in Real Life

There ought to be a word for the kind of irony that attends a culture convulsing over the massacre on the latest episode of Game of Thrones just as a blossom of real-life political dissent is appearing in Turkey, don’t you think? (Which isn’t even to mention that yesterday and today are the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.) One doesn’t want to scold people for paying attention to pop culture—as a person who writes about it, I would be a giant hypocrite if I did. But the way these two things have met in time at the very least raises the question: Why don’t we care, in quite the same way? I somehow doubt it’s because Americans haven’t the heart for real political conflict. Nor do I think the whole explanation is that Americans feel powerless. It’s not like any of us could have stepped in front of the sword that ran through Robb’s gullet on Sunday night.

It’s a problem of culture not guns

With Monday night’s brazen shootout in east Scarborough, we can expect the chorus at City Hall to waste more time debating stricter gun penalties. This is an obvious way to go, but it won’t mean anything to the majority of young guns who don’t weigh the consequences when they decide to start packing.

Council needs to attack the general culture and ideology that infect teens in areas where violence and intimidation are idolized instead of condemned.

I grew up and frequented Scarborough’s Tuxedo Court, Mornelle Court and Galloway, among others, and unfortunately have subscribed to this culture, too. I remember walking my high school hallways or streets like Morningside, Ellesmere, Lawrence, Eglinton and Kennedy and being ready for confrontation with young thugs hoping to impress their peers. Sometimes they wanted money, other times just to make an example of you. It’s like high school bullying only the stakes are higher.

Losing Face: Why China Can't Stop Squandering Its Soft Power

China has had a tough few months in managing its image. As if police chief Wang Lijun's attempted defection and the ouster of his boss Bo Xilai weren't damaging enough, Chen Guangcheng's dramatic escape and the expulsion of an American journalist capped off a season of political revelation and regression. The supposedly airtight lid on the Chinese system turns out to be rather porous. To the outside world, an impression has formed of a political system that remains peculiarly insecure and knotted in contradictions. Even worse, for all the official Chinese rhetoric warning that the U.S. is undermining China's sovereignty through its crafty ways, Chinese officials and citizens alike seem to prefer U.S. sovereign territory in times of trouble.

That these recent episodes embarrass the Communist Party is probably an understatement. The party's fear of general "instability" is perhaps matched only by the disdain it holds for the airing of dirty laundry. This is in part informed by a cultural psychology at the micro level that manifests in macro political behavior: The ugly stuff and internal bickering get sorted out in the privacy of an inner sanctum, while for the appearance of outsiders, all is well and please don't poke around.

Liberals Started the Culture War, and We Should Be Proud of Continuing It

Ed Kilgore writes a post today mocking right-wing fear of betrayal by an insufficiently dedicated conservative, a brand of paranoia that got its start with Eisenhower's appointments of Earl Warren and William Brennan to the Supreme Court:

    These disasters (from a conservative point of view) were hardly isolated. Richard Nixon appointed Roe v. Wade author Harry Blackmun; Gerald Ford's brief presidency produced long-time Supreme Court liberal John Paul Stevens, and Poppy Bush put the ultimate Stealth Liberal, David Souter, on the High Court, an act for which the later nomination of Clarence Thomas was a very loud apology. Worse yet, St. Ronald Reagan was responsible for Sandra Day O'Connor, and depending on where Anthony Kennedy lands on a series of big upcoming cases, his appointment, too, could wind up earning a conservative Day of Infamy.

    You'd have to say everything about Mitt Romney makes him suspect as the kind of Republican president who might make an insufficiently right-wing Court appointment. And this is precisely why I'd bet the farm (if I had one) that by the time November rolls around the Federalist Society wing of the conservative movement will have extracted so many private and public blood oaths from Romney on the subject that should he even think about a less-than-orthodox nominee, Satan would appear in the West Wing and snatch Mitt right down to hell.

Umberto Eco: 'It's culture, not war, that cements European identity'

Outside Umberto Eco's office window in Milan looms the intimidating mass of Sforzesco castle, a reminder, with its towers and blackbirds, of various continental wars. Here once stood the 14th-century Castrum Portae Jovis – the Porta di Giove fortress – which was destroyed by the short-lived Aurea Republic of 1447. Between these walls, Leonardo Da Vinci and Donato Bramante once laboured; these very buttresses were conquered by Napoleon. And just beyond the moat – an area now invaded by tourists who have come to visit Michelangelo's La Pietà Rondanini – Marshall Radetzky's Austrian troops bombed the rioting city in 1848.

"When it comes to the debt crisis," says Eco, "and I'm speaking as someone who doesn't understand anything about the economy, we must remember that it is culture, not war, that cements our [European] identity. The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other. Today, we've been at peace for 70 years and no one realises how amazing that is any more. Indeed, the very idea of a war between Spain and France, or Italy and Germany, provokes hilarity. The United States needed a civil war to unite properly. I hope that culture and the [European] market will do the same for us."