“The real insult to those who died on 9/11 is not a mosque that Ground Zero visitors won’t even know is there, but how long it’s taking to rebuild the WTC — an affront that can’t be blamed on Islam at its most maniacal.”
-Steve Cuozzo, who is occasionally called upon to play the role of adult at the New York Post, addresses the “controversy” over plans-thus far unfunded and theoretical at best-to build a mosque downtown. You would not know this from reading Cuozzo’s piece-headlined “Oh, stop this inane hysteria already!”-but most of the “controversy” has been whipped up by the Post itself. Still, credit where credit is due: It’s nice to see that Cuozzo’s hatred of the city’s Landmarks Preservation Committee is strong enough that it outweighs his own paper’s stance about all Muslims being conspiratorial terrorists who want to blow up New York.

Idaho gubernatorial candidate Rex Rammell is the playful fellow who suggested that he might enjoy hunting President Obama. This campaign ad won’t help his chances, although it does pay tribute to the fact that we live in an age where the best thing you can do for your run is to release a crazy-ass video on the web and hope it goes viral. Sadly, it is just not crazy enough, although it does accurately convey his tough stand on wolves. I am not even sure if this is an authorized effort from the Rammell campaign, because it seems a little too polishedly sloppy, but either way, I applaud anything that helps to further disassociate Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana from the soundtrack to The Doors.

Oh, guess what exists? TOM SCOCCA, THE SLATE BLOG. Come for the logo of the hobbyhorse, stay for the way his child makes fun of Mickey Kaus! Surely there will be recipes too.

Late last month, it very nearly ended: a meme that had, weirdly, endured for years. When the copyright notices finally came to YouTube, and some of the videos were removed — well, they came far too late, and too few. Many of the videos survived, further extending the life of a joke that was never that funny to begin with.

If, as Mark Twain contended, nothing can stand against the assault of laughter, then the “Hitler Reacts” meme was tantamount to poking a dead horse. And yet, for years, everyone felt compelled to pick up their poking sticks and get to work on it. The conceit is one of shallow dissonance: scenes from 2004’s Downfall, a carefully researched German-Austrian film depicting Adolf Hitler’s final days/meltdowns, are re-”translated” such that a rant about, say, the ineptitude of academy-taught generals can be recalibrated as a fiery condemnation of Kanye West. The onslaught of bad news in Berlin in the spring of 1945 became a recognizable torrent of web-based gossip, in-jokes, opinion and backlash. Adolf, in a groaningly meta moment, has even railed against the popularity of his own meme. That iteration lands with a thud, as do the rest, no more than spasms of neuroticism and insecurity among online subcultures. Of course our digital ephemera matter-even Hitler is aware of this stuff.

This analysis assumes that we’re not simply seeing a shadow of ourselves in Hitler’s juvenile apoplexy over being banned from Xbox Live, or the animating of an argument that is better crystallized in Louis C.K.’s formulation that “everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy.” Our angst concerning an item as objectively miraculous as an iPad is a mystery worth plumbing, sure, but the modified Downfall clips can only regurgitate the phenomenon itself, their satiric mojo wholly contingent on a perverse fascination with the 20th century’s most reviled mutant. Moreover, it would take an uncommon finesse to turn a sincere and nuanced portrayal of the man into a worthy one-sided joke.

To date, no YouTube artist has proved equal to the task.

Not that it needed doing in the first place. We’ve been laughing at Hitler since we realized there was a Hitler to laugh at. Around the time Fritz Lang was forced to encrypt and allegorize the contagion of Nazism in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), a spazzed-out, homicidal and consistently foiled Führer was popping up in Warner Brothers cartoons. But with Chaplin’s infamous first talkie, The Great Dictator (1940), Adolf Hitler (or “Adenoid Hynkel,” in a cuttingly Hebraic approximation) became more than a joke for stateside audiences, worse than just some fussy, furious buffoon: he was now a racist, megalomaniacal, influential buffoon who danced sincerely with an inflatable globe to Wagner.

Its controversy-sense atingle, United Artists panicked halfway through production; Chaplin held fast to his aims, adamant that Hitler be lampooned without mercy. Harry Hopkins, a top FDR adviser, showed up to encourage him. The U.K. first moved to ban the film in keeping with an appeasement policy, then welcomed it as propaganda. It became Chaplin’s highest-grossing picture and an enduring demolition of anti-Semitism-though he would later insist that had he known of the genocide then unfolding, he could not have made it.

Ernst Lubitsch had no such qualms in filming the all-time greatest send-up of Nazism, To Be Or Not To Be (1942), at a time when people were far less willing to accept fascists as clowns. The film’s suspenseful/farcical plot, which hinges on a Polish actor’s ability to imitate Hitler, drew the same charges of trivialization that Spielberg would levy against Roberto Benigni’s bittersweet Life Is Beautiful (1997) in arguing that no good Holocaust movie should come across as funny, or indeed entertain at all. Need I bother throwing this hypocrisy back in his face? To lose sight of Hitler and his minions as amusing grotesques is to miss the verifiable truths upon which Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1968) turns: laughter is a subversion of the otherwise impenetrably serious-watch a couple minutes of Valkyrie (1998) to see what I mean-and comedy grows through the cracks of tragedy like a weed.

It’s no accident that these seminal films play with the idea of Hitler doppelgängers, Hitler as performance, Hitler being not so much a man as a body of symbols and gestures and twisted rhetoric that galvanized a humiliated nation. While weak Hitler comedy relies on shock, frivolity and invention, strong Hitler comedy acknowledges tension, takes real risks and pulls on a thread of extant silliness until the whole uniform unravels: The forelock of hair always loosened on cue by his vigorous nods. The overripe, overrehearsed rhythms of his speeches. Chaplin’s dictator, to drive the point home, speaks a frothy Teutonic gibberish that is then ‘translated’ into too few English words-the missing 90%, we can safely assume, is filler spectacle.

The “Hitler Reacts” meme essentially mangles that gag while never getting so much as a toehold on the trending topic du jour. It doesn’t help matters that inane 21st-century setbacks find no harmony when layered onto the trauma of World War II. Even while those minding the copyright said otherwise, Downfall’s director, Oliver Hirschbiegel, sanctioned these videos, in spite of their failure as pop-cultural commentary. “The point of the film was to kick these terrible people off the throne that made them demons, making them real and their actions into reality,” he said. “I think it’s only fair if now it’s taken as part of our history, and used for whatever purposes people like.”

You can’t blame him for being diplomatic; most artists welcome wider exposure. Still, I wonder if he actually believes that an effort to de-mythologize a mass murderer is in any way compatible with a movement to make him the official mascot of fanboy ire.

RATINGS 
(characteristics rated on a negative to positive scale of -10 to 10):


Flexibility: -4.8

Insight: -9.1

Aesthetic: 1.7

Redundancy Potential: -10.0

Confusing To Outsiders: -5.3

Final Meme Score: -27.5

Miles Klee is on your Internet.

“A few months ago I started getting press and now I’m what you’d call perhaps a ‘public figure,’ though a minor one. The problem is that I ‘read the internet’ and come across comments about me being ugly, unattractive, etc…. What is the best strategy for not letting this get to me?”

Speaking of ATMs, John Shepherd-Barron passed away earlier this week. Sheperd-Barron is credited with having invented the machines.

Shepherd-Barron had been infuriated that he could not always gain access to his money when he needed it, especially over the weekend, when banks were closed. “It struck me that there must be a way I could get my own money, anywhere in the world or the UK. I hit upon the idea of a chocolate bar dispenser, but replacing chocolate with cash.”

Shortly afterwards, by chance, he bumped into the chief general manager of Barclays Bank, who was about to have lunch. “I said, over a pink gin, ‘Give me 90 seconds’. I told him I had an idea that if you put your standard Barclays cheque through a slot in the side of the bank, I will deliver standard amounts of money around the clock.”

Barclays bit, once again proving that almost every improvement society has seen has been hashed out over a drink.

John Shepherd-Barron was 84.

There are so many lists about “Lost” now, with the show finally creaking and/or screeching to a halt this weekend. But how do you know which “Lost” list you have time to skim? Here, we rank the top ten lists about “Lost” in order for you.

10. Top 10 WTF? Moments on LOST

9. 50 Questions Lost Really Does Need To Answer

8. The Five Things We’ll Miss Most About ‘Lost’

7. Top 25 Lost Guest Stars: Where Are They Now?

6. Lost’s Top 10 Love Scenes

5. Lost’s Top 8 Most Shocking Deaths

4. The Lost Reading List: 13 Books That Helped Mold the Series

3. Here’s Why I’m Not Approaching The ‘Lost’ Finale With A List Of Demands

2. 23 Questions About Lost Episode 616, “What They Died For,” Answered!

1. Ten Questions That Lost Needs To Resolve in the Series Finale

“He is a force for good. He communicates effectively with children and families around balanced, active lifestyles. He does not hawk food.”
—McDonald’s CEO Jim Skinner, when asked if the fast-food chain’s made-up mascot Ronald McDonald would be forced to hang up his really big shoes anytime soon. An advocacy group has levied criticisms that the friendly redhead “is a pied piper drawing youngsters all over the world to food that is high in fat, sodium and calories” — the burger equivalent of the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel — and that he, to borrow a phrase, deserves a break. Forever!

Today Google announced its plan to worm its way inside the living rooms of Americans, which will be known as, sigh, Google TV. (It’s like WebTV, but branded!) The Google guys claim that their innovation will marry the power of the Internet and the high-resolution screens of America’s televisions, with a Google-developed search engine that will cross the boundaries of live TV, recorded TV, and online TV and an Intel-manufactured chip that will go into TVs produced by the likes of Sony. At this afternoon’s big splashy launch event, the word “seamless” was apparently used a lot. (So was the term “open source,” which will surely butter up the geekoisie.) But those proclamations of seamlessness didn’t stop some seemingly important connectivity issues from cropping up!

Not only was there a bit of video lag when the demo-ers tried to pull up NBA highlights, the wireless keyboard that the Google TV people were using during the demo apparently went, pardon the pun, haywire. Perhaps because of all the in-room cellphone action?

More demo problems — not an auspicious beginning for Google TV. There appear to be issues with the remote. Meanwhile we are seeing a news report from MSNBC on “Nicolas Cage’s animal sex diet.”

Lots of apologies from Mr. Chandra and a request for everyone to turn off their cellphones, which seem to be interrupting the connection between the remote and the TV. Time for Plan B?

The idea would seem to be that one wouldn’t need to use their cell phone to Tweet and update their Facebook status with running commentary on whatever was on TV at a given moment — that the integration of everything within the screen would take care of that (and, one presumes, chop the screen up into tiny bits). So the user at home could turn off their cell phone and surrender to the keyboard? That, of course, assumes that said user is actually going to want to have one burning up their laps while trying to lounge on the couch.

More:

It’s also interesting that the big problem with this demo stems from the fact that Google is trying to use a wireless keyboard to control the television, and it keeps going on the blink. Of course, almost no one uses a keyboard to control their televisions, and surfing the Web with a regular remote control will be tough. (Google says its partners are working on new kinds of remotes.)

There was also discussion of how WebTV was “ahead of its time,” which is funny to me because I feel like all the attempts at turning the Internet into TV are actually an effort to bring things back — back to an era where content consumption was top-down, where choices were more limited, where audiences were more passive, where executives understood underlying economic models in such a way that they weren’t inspired to flail around. And having a tiny Twitter window in the corner of American Idol is not really going to change my perception that any attempt at bringing the Internet and TV into a single entity is a logistical nightmare that invites itself to bad user experiences all around. (Check out Verizon FiOS’ attempt to integrate Twitter into its offerings, which makes posting a Tweet into an arduous process that can only be described by 140 characters of expletive-replacements. Brad Stone also brings up the general clunkiness of the interfaces shown off in the demo — and he and I are pretty experienced Internet users.)

Also? There was no talk of how much this brave interconnected world would cost your average everyday consumer. Which I’m going to take as a sign that it’ll be “too much.”

Pee-Wee Herman’s stage show, which was revived earlier this year in Los Angeles for a bit, is coming to Broadway this fall with a six-week run of performances at the Stephen Sondheim Theater. The run begins Oct. 26 — there’s a presale going on now, with the “secret word” being, of course, “scream” — and you’d better believe I am already figuring out ways to see Pee-Wee, Chairry, Conky, et al. (I hear Reba the Mail Lady is free these days, too!)