by The Awl

Nothing would be better for our nation than to have America’s Mayor™, Rudy Giuliani, throwing his hat in the ring for the Presidency for next year’s election. He brings a major benefit to any serious political moment: the principle of chaos. His proximity to any political race, in fact, brings a mad destabilizing power. In New Hampshire in January of 2008, Rudy flew in to take 9% of the Republican primary vote, narrowly beating Ron Paul. (It should also be remembered that John Edwards nearly got twice that, in the Democratic vote.) The Gulianimentum threw everything into disorder, from the moment he arrived, flanked endlessly by state troopers. It skewed votes, bent minds, and opened up a special vista into the political process, namely: that any schmuck could run, thereby exposing the other candidates to serious scrutiny: are these people just “any schmuck” too? By and large, they were. (To be fair, Chuck Norris being constantly beside Mike Huckabee didn’t help that cause either, let’s not forget.)

But it’s true: after I signed on for a day following around the Giuliani campaign, and filed a few little stories, my editor had to write back to tell me we couldn’t just publish mean things about him. And I was like, but that’s all there is! It’s just him, walking down the street, getting yelled at by homeless people, and cutting people off in town halls, and being rude and sarcastic to people, and bumbling around like a rich fish out of water! You’d never seen a press corps so delighted and aghast. David Corn looked like someone had pasted a three-foot smile over his face.

And now? It has been a long recession. (Less so for Giuliani, as his outfits have spent the time lobbying for drug companies and charging Mexico City millions of dollars for telling them to get rid of “squeegee men” and so on.) We’ve been through tough times as a country!

And so the editorial staff of this publication would like to remind all of America that we must remember the healing power of laughter. Run, Rudy, run. We beg. Also now that you mention it, a Rudy Giuliani-Chris Christie ticket would be a dream come true — like a top-notch Abbot and Costello movie, but where they’re both dicks.

Things they don’t teach you in journalism school: Reporters in Austin are taking concealed handgun classes so they can use the express lane when they need to enter the Texas Capitol. “The theory, apparently, is that people licensed to pack heat have undergone a thorough background check and can be waved right through.” (You will also learn why some Texans carry more than one gun at a time.)

by Mike Barthel

Talk show hosts: grr! We hate them! They are so inauthentic and trashy! They are poisoning our culture and so on! But now here it is 2011 and we are sorta-kinda mourning the retirement/evolution of two of the biggest: Oprah and Larry King. Larry aired his farewell on New Year’s Eve, counting down the 25 most important moments in his show’s history, which at first seems to validate all those old criticisms. Seeing Deep Throat next to Bette Davis and Marlon Brando next to Obama’s inauguration sure does make it look like talk shows have no sense of importance. Larry is making serious things less serious, and America is still anxious enough about its own cultural importance that we dislike this. But maybe all of these things are equally serious. And maybe talk shows have become a kind of vital democratic institution.

In furtherance of all this, I could point out how the list includes some important political events from the 90s (Ross Perot! NAFTA!). But to focus on these as a way of validating Larry is to just fall back into the seriousness trap. It’s like talking about Murrow’s McCarthy takedown as a noble deviation from his celebrity interviews rather than as simply another kind of celebrity piece, a first draft of “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” It’s like only paying attention to Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck’s political stuff while ignoring the jokes, like pretending John Ziegler’s anti-Arab tirades have nothing to do with his OJ fascination. It is to pretend that politics, as the vast majority of us interact with it, is in a separate realm from culture, rather than fundamentally intertwined with it. It is to flatter ourselves that we get different things out of talking about Michael Jackson and than we do from discussing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It is to miss the very important thing talk shows’ success has shown us.

Intellectuals are repulsed by talk shows because they flatten the serious and the frivolous, making Important Things base and blowing up personal issues into communal dramas. But this early distaste has turned out to be on the wrong side of history. Talk shows have moved beyond their roots as trash to become entirely respectable. Oprah’s endorsement of Obama was a big deal, and for better or for worse, talk shows are where political news gets made now. Anderson Cooper, former host of “The Mole,” has become an arbiter of national grace, and our Walter Lippmann is probably Jon Stewart, not Paul Krugman. Maybe you want to view this development as a sure sign we’re going to hell in a handbasket, but this seems awfully self-centered. We all like to think we live in important times, even if those times are disastrous. I tend to think, rather, that the success of Oprah, Larry and their ilk at becoming respectable displays how well the TV talk show format was able to model the way we think about politics.

We want, for some reason, to think of talk show hosts as journalists (or male talk show hosts, at least; the ladies are just klatching up a storm, I guess, GAB GAB GAB, you know women, when aren’t they talking), tasked with pursuing the public interest through research and careful questioning. But that doesn’t seem particularly helpful to me. If you want to include all the things talk show hosts do, rather than just the respectable bits, we could think of them less as journalists and more as referees of our collective values. Citizens of a democratic society (that’s us!) have to make our values FITE every once in a while, because we believe in tolerance and a multiplicity of views but ultimately have to have shared standards to judge how we’re going to proceed in our collective pursuits, blah blah blah.

And that’s the purpose talk shows really serve. That’s the thing that unites Karla Faye Tucker and Deep Throat, or Johnny Cash and Ross Perot: they are important less because of what they did and more because what they did gives us an opportunity to debate what’s important and what’s praiseworthy, and what’s not. This embodiment of a particular value position is what makes the discussion of culture more than an idle pursuit, and what makes discussion of politics far more idle than we prefer to think. There’s no real reason for people who don’t work in fairly high-level government positions or who don’t devote their time to political activism to pay attention to political news on a regular basis. We do so anyway not because we are particularly noble, but because we believe that the actions of our government are indicators of what we as a society believe. Repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was important for lots and lots of people who would never have any interest in serving in the military because the existence of the policy indicated all sorts of bad things about how we as a society view homosexuals, and being able to overturn it indicates that the tide has turned significantly enough that our representatives are willing to stand up and say that it is not true that having openly gay servicemembers will be bad for morale. That was great, but the political system has a limited capacity. On a day-to-day basis, we need to turn to the smaller-scale democratic mechanism of talk shows to enact these debates in a public space.

With that in mind, here are the collective cultural values I think Larry King was affirming in some of his top 25 moments:

• Death of President Reagan, 2004. Despite the disagreements we may have had with Reagan, we can now see he was a decent person who tried to do the right thing.
• Marlon Brando, 1994. Excessive self-regard leads a man to become foolish.
• Rabin, Hussein and Arafat, 1995. While other cultures are immoderate and irrational, we are reasonable people only interested in peace.
• Johnny Cash, 2002. Despite the divisive nature of some country artists, traditional values can be expressed in a way that they are agreeable to everyone, especially if they are expressed by old people.
• Ross Perot talks presidency, 1992. Anyone can run for president, and the mass media has an interest in giving reasonable candidates a fair chance.

You will note that not all of these values are ones I would agree with, or are even true. But that is the thing with cultural values: they are ideas that some large group says they agree on, not ideas we act on. The point is not so much to discover the truth as it is to do a little dance that stitches together the disparate scraps of reality in a way that flatters our self-regard. And this can only be done convincingly by someone who seems neutral. The entertainment business’s relentless market orientation makes it a perfect venue for this dance because it doesn’t seem to have any interests beyond pleasing the audience.

In some cases, this setup might result in more of a debate, a confrontation between clashing values that affords some sense of resolution. But that wasn’t Larry’s mandate. He was more of an affirmer, the kind of guy that let guests come through in all their glory rather than challenging them. He left that up to us, because he knew us. He knew what we would think well enough that he didn’t have to nudge us in the ribs with excessive value cues.

When he interviewed someone, it was simply to give wide recognition to something we all already believed anyway. By seeing it said publicly, we might feel a little less alone. By knowing that other people agree with us, we might feel assured enough to go forward with a particular line of thinking. By constituting the public, Larry King made our opinions concrete enough to have a force in the world. That’s what talk shows can do, and whether they do it with celebrities or politicians is immaterial. The formation of a democratic public is like a minyan: for the rite to be effective does not require a certain consecrated location or a certain sanctified officiant, but simply a minimum number of people. We just need enough witnesses to make it real.

Mike Barthel isn’t afraid to talk about it with you.

The dining demographics at the Charlie Mom Chinese restaurant in the Village: “Who comes here?, I asked my waiter. ‘Old man. Old woman,’ he said with halting English and stunning frankness.”

“The reason for Heidi’s crossed eyes is unclear, but zoo officials speculate that it might be because of fat deposits behind her eyes, caused by a bad diet early in life. The eyes might look off, but they cause the animal no pain, and don’t affect her ability to get around, according to the zoo. She is, aside from her looks, a normal opossum. But those looks are the key to her new-found fame. As the song written in her honor predicts: ‘Our Heidi is no model, and doesn’t need blond hair, but she is already famous and soon will be a superstar.’”
 — Oh, man. It’s totally going to turn out that those fat deposits behind Heidi’s eyes contain more than 77 times the approved level of dioxin. With more than 3,000 farms closed in a contamination scandal, German agriculture looks to be in for a rough 2011.

“Thousands of dead turtle doves rained down on roofs and cars in an Italian town in the latest in a growing spate of mass animal deaths across the globe. Residents in Faenza described the birds falling to the ground like ‘little Christmas balls’ with strange blue stains on their beaks.” But, you know, not to worry.

• Have you previously and intentionally seen at least three of the following films: Ghost Rider, Knowing, Inkheart, National Treasure: Book of Secrets or Centurion?

• Would you describe yourself as extremely bored and lonely?

• Are you wearing a shawl right now, and do you empathize overly with women in ancient times who were burned at the stake?

• Do you smoke marijuana more than twice a week on average?

• Have you had major dental surgery this morning?

If you answered yes to four or more of these questions, you are actually going to see this insane Nicolas Cage Crusades-era vehicle, the highlights of which seem to be that it includes “real castles” in its locations and also is not Country Strong

. But that still doesn’t mean that you’re going to like it.

Recently I was talking with Paul Graham, of genius startup incubator Y Combinator, for a story, and, while on a tangent, he made a case to the tablet-adverse folks like me. “The tablet, I believe now it’s pretty safe to say, is the next model of computer,” he said. “I think twenty years from now, kids will say, ‘What’s a computer?’ And we’ll say, ‘Oh back before you used an iPad or an Android device for browsing the web, you had to use this thing with a keyboard and a big monitor.’” And I was like, really? (People like me, who use computers for text, find this idea slightly scary.) And he was like, yeah, dummy, basically: “It’s still risky! But I’m pretty much ready to call it at this point.” He also noted that, of startups he has seen, that “five years ago, everyone was starting a web startup. And now they’re all — well, not all — they’re starting things that build upon tablets.” Believe it. So I’ve tried to pay particular attention to tablets during this CES. There’s a ton of them! And I guess I’d better get used to loving them. Actually they’re not so scary!

While we wait for the supposedly iterative iPad 2, there is, for instance, the BlackBerry Playbook. There are tons of tablets coming down the pike in various stripes — the Samsung Galaxy Tab (it should be a Mario Kart competitor with that name, maybe?), for instance — and none of them really feel dominant but what’ll happen is that they’ll all rise together. And you know what? Even the Apple fanboys like the Playbook, mostly.

And actually? I like its scale, compared to the iPad. What’s also happening is we’re getting everything in every size: the Samsung Infuse 4G phone is like… almost a tablet? Like a phone-sized tablet?

And the Motorola Xoom, even? Yeah, there’s a ton! The HuffPo actually did something useful with a slideshow comparing 11 tablets at the show. Enjoy those pics, some of those you’ll never see in the wild, because, what, gosh, hmm.

So in a sense, with all this wild market diversity, I think we can start to see how devices will be devices — phone-tablets, pad-phones, all kinds of things — particularly if we end up with bendable and transparent screens, yes please. And also? They’re gonna be so cheap.

As far as everything else, what people love are the smart little things. Like Yorbuds, the world’s ugliest and maybe-best in-ear headphones. And? I mean, why didn’t this exist already: the iPad game joystick! That is a huge “duh.” Possibly you could build it yourself for $3 at the hardware store? But who among us will! Frankly I would also enjoy snow goggles with an HD video camera, because, why not? Totally ludicrous, but rich people need hilarious things too.

Of course, the one thing that gets people of all stripes excited, for whatever reason, is a beautiful TV. People are predictable in this fashion! So it’s not surprising to hear things like this:

PUT THIS IN MY LIVING ROOM NOOWWWWW. http://gizmo.do/gZrCM8 I WANT TO SLEEP ON IT AND EAT OFF IT.Thu Jan 06 01:36:41 via Tweetie for Mac

Sam Biddle
samfbiddle

Well? Yes. Sony can do that from time to time. I mean… yes.

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Seriously, with all the technological advances we’ve made in the last two decades, how come no one has invented an “unsee” button? Anyway, if I have to know about this, so do you. We’re all in it together. [Shudders.]

“Newly discovered documents have revealed a bizarre footnote to the history of the Second World War: a Finnish mutt whose imitation of the Hitler salute enraged the Nazis so deeply that they started an obsessive campaign against the dog’s owner.”