An excellent essay on Polanski

This came across Salon early this year: Bill Wyman's review of Wanted and Desired, a whitewashing documentary about the Polanski case.

The basic facts are not in dispute, but seem to keep getting softened. Here, let Wyman remind you:

If Polanski is Byron, the judge is an Oliver Hardy or a Billy Gilbert, all but twiddling his tie in a series of ever-more-comical photographs. He actually kept a scrapbook about the celebrities who came through his Santa Monica courtroom. He had two girlfriends.

Now, that's one way to portray those two men -- and one that Polanski's current lawyers would prefer. But there's another way, too: You could show one as a child-sex predator who drugged a 13-year-old girl with quaaludes and champagne; lured her to pose for naked photographs; ignoring her protests, had sex with her; and then anally raped her.

[...]

Polanski accepted a plea bargain and pleaded guilty to the formal felony charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor; he and his lawyer knew he could face prison time. Polanski also stood in front of the judge and admitted what he did and that he'd known what he was doing.

In the wake of that, Rittenband was trying to figure out how to make sure Polanski was punished; he was apparently concerned that the director would act contrite, get a short prison term and then assemble a pack of legal wolves to get him out of trouble. And the film makes a decent case that Rittenband ultimately went off the rails.

I think that prosecutorial and judicial misconduct are very serious issues, as is the fact that American prisons are, frequently, torture factories. But jumping jesus on a pogo stick, we're talking about drugging and raping a protesting 13-year-old. If, as his probation report said, "the film director, imprisoned in Auschwitz by the Nazis during World War II, was repelled by the thought of possibly serving more time behind bars", then maybe, just maybe, he should have given some extra thought to not drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl.

Always beware of simple explanations

, especially if they feed into unexamined moralisms and half-cocked accusations.

Amanda Marcotte pointed to a Matt Yglesias postabout "the orgy of consumption", the narrative that tells us that people in the 2000s are living beyond their means because they spend too much on electronic gizmos like iPods and giant TVs. Matt examines numbers from someone named William Galston, who fulminates over the fact that "personal consumption", which had been stable as a portion of the USA GDP at 62% for the thirty years leading up to 1980, rose to 69.8% of GDP by 2008. Matt points out that almost all of that increase occurred in the 1980s--up 4%--and relatively little in the 2000s--up less than 1%.

Amanda pointed out that Galston's characterization of the "orgy of consumption"* is a sharply moralistic, and stupid, narrative.

It's interesting to me, because a lot of the discourse about who is "deserving" and not that always pops up when something like health care becomes a national issue focuses on resenting lower income people for having small luxuries like iPods, cable TV, or good shoes. But dwelling on consumer electronics is an increasingly stupid tool to stir up this sort of resentment, because these electronics are really cheap in the scheme of things, and give people a lot of return on their money. Really, if people have a TV and video game system that keeps them in with their friends, that's a lot cheaper in the long run that hitting the bars. Hell, it's cheaper even if they're still drinking the same amount while they play video games. Buying this sort of at-home entertainment is exactly the long term economic thinking that lower income folks are often accused of not displaying. The ugly truth is that an iPod is rarely going to be the difference between whether you can keep paying rent or not, and it has no impact on your ability to pay outrageous medical bills, if you get sick.

*Let me just say, if I do ever go to an orgy, I don't want it to be with TB sufferers. No offense.

As she says, this is a narrative that comes up again and again. Poor people shouldn't have televisions or cell phones because... well, they just shouldn't. Never mind that a television is a great investment--a one-time expense that delivers free (if frequently crappy) entertainment and (usually crappy) news into one's house. Of course, a computer can be even better, but in most places, a really useful computer requires an ongoing expense--network connectivity. (It shouldn't surprise anyone that I favor the various free wireless networking for all proposals.)

Anyway. One of the things people love to do is pathologize other people. People who have spent themselves into bankruptcy over medical bills, or house payments, aren't by that fact undeserving of some of the luxuries that people lucky enough to still be solvent enjoy.

ETA, 30 Sept: Professor Krugman makes some of the same points in a post today. He rags on David Brooks for taking precisely the moralizing tone I described. He says:

David points out, correctly, that something changed around 1980 -- that consumers started spending a larger share of national income and that debt began increasing. ...

Reagan did it... the surge in household debt can largely be attributed to financial deregulation. So what happened? Did we lose our economic morality? No, we were the victims of politics.

If this is your future

(I'm catching up on some things in my Google Reader account before they expire from the active lists. Since I can't read Pandagon at work, I tend to fall behind on it.)

Pam Spaulding posted briefly about an incident from a few weeks back in which Hank Williams, Jr. continues to prove that while skin color might be heritable, talent and basic human worth are not, because he got the first one from his father and not the others.

No surprise at all: Hank Williams, Jr. tries cute racial “code”

FAIL. Sorry, Hank, but the "code" isn't fooling anyone ... During his government "Don't Tread On Me" blather, he launches into "Ain't too many things my beautiful people can't do...." (gesturing to look at his hands and his face).

She includes video, which I'm too delicate to watch.

Statements like Douchebag Jr's remind me of my reaction the first time I heard "The Fourteen Words" ("We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children", an American fascist slogan): "If you're the exemplars of the white race, the world is better off without it."