For years, America has lacked a true constitutive “other”—the sort of competing entity that can represent everything we are not and thus help us agree on what we are. Yes, the Muslim world has played the role of Enemy of the State for the past decade, but the varied, decentralized and complex nature of that entity has prevented anything approaching a consensus among the American populace. What we have missed is the simple (and, of course, oversimplified) Soviet—a militarized, soulless Ivan Drago to our informal, scrappy Rocky Balboa.  And while that pre-millenial foil is gone forever, the Sochi Olympics has brought us something perhaps even better.  The unending string of hilarious #SochiProblems and daily stories of government gluttony filling our Facebook feeds have positioned Russia not so much as America’s polar opposite, but instead as a sort of shadow version of the American Way of Life.

In putting on the Sochi winter games, Russia has expended an absurd amount of resources—about $50 billion worth—with the expectation of fundamentally repositioning the country’s place in the global imagination.  And although much of the media coverage surrounding Sochi has focused on the tremendous amount of graft and waste it took to ring up such a bill, the Russian government is unlikely to view the event as anything but a success.  Above all, President Vladimir Putin wanted to use the Sochi spotlight to disrupt the unipolar, American-centric geopolitical map that has emerged since the fall of the Soviet Union.  And in some small way he has.  It takes a terribly powerful man to waste such a terrible sum of money.  The cost may have been surrealistically high, but for Putin it was a one-time-only opportunity to demonstrate that he has the surplus of power and the utter lack of conscience one needs to make a play for international hegemony.

The United States, however, has gotten a much better deal, at least in terms of buying an improved sense of national identity. Russia, in no small part due to Sochi, no longer embodies a set of virtues—extreme discipline, ideological orthodoxy, etc—that we choose to reject.  Instead it has come to stand in for all of those vices that we fear we may have but would rather not face.  No longer Drago, Russia has become America’s drunken Uncle Paulie, a bumbling, wasteful reminder of what we could become but never will.  Whenever Rocky is down, he can always look to Paulie’s blubbery ineptitude and realize he’s not in such bad shape.  And now, whenever Americans fear their government may be dolling out favors to corporations or spending money on all the wrong things, well, at least we don’t build Dadaist toilets when the whole world is watching.

This narrative received a wholly unexpected boost last Sunday with Michael Sam, a mid-level professional football prospect, announced that he is gay.  The reaction from the National Football League has been predictably tepid, with nearly every team echoing the standard neo-liberal take on gay rights.  Discrimination cannot be tolerated if it is going to get in the way of profits or, in the case of an NFL team, winning football games.  Of course, America in general and its sports culture in specific still have a long way it to go when it comes to eliminating discrimination over sexuality.  The discussion should be less the sports media’s preferred “where will Sam be drafted?” and more “why does only one player feel safe enough to be open about being gay?”  However, in comparison to our Other Russia, America looks positively enlightened.  When faced with the medieval anti-gay laws and mockable public statements (“We don’t have [gays] in our town”) on display in Sochi, it’s easy to give America a pass.  Russia’s backwardness on the issue provides the perfect backdrop against which to avoid asking truly tough questions about ourselves.

The Washington Post’s Max Fisher has called for Americans to avoid the temptation of Russophobia when engaging in discourse about Russia.  It can be all too easy to mock a population that has long been the target of so many stereotypes and Internet memes. In general this is good advice.  However, it by no means suggests that we should hesitate to condemn the authoritarianism and corruption that Putin’s Russia has put on display in its effort to make the world it seriously. Just as important, however, is that we use the opportunity as a means of interrogating the weaknesses of our society, not as an excuse to ignore them.

However, by the time baby boomers reached middle-age, economics had taken on an outsized role in shaping the cultural relevance of collecting. The cards of the 1950s and ’60s, based largely on their original use as disposable playthings, became scarce, fetishized objects and grew in value at fantastic rates. Squares of cardboards bought for pennies in 1952 became multi-thousand dollar status symbols by the mid-1980s. As Bloom notes, this increase in value played a crucial part in making the return to youthful, pre-pubescent hobbies socially acceptable for a generation moving towards the peak of its social, cultural and economic power. The impressive price tag of a Mickey Mantle rookie served as economic cover for adults wishing to reengage with a child’s activity.

Unfortunately for those of us born a generation later with aspiration of living the good life off the profits from our collections of ’80s and ’90s cards, things have not worked out the same way. Exactly because everyone thought they would become valuable (and thus no one threw them away), virtually every baseball card produced from the late-70s to mid-90s is worthless. The few that aren’t maintain relatively modest values and, as such obvious exceptions, only serve to emphasize the fact that our painstakingly curated boxes and binders of cards are more useful as kindling for fire than in economic exchange. But, yet, for many Gen Xers and Yers, this has done little to diminish the yearning to return to the pleasures of a past free from work deadlines or romantic desires.

The Internet is now home to thousands of blogs dedicated to collecting but, in a significant turn, relatively few focus on baseball cards in economic terms. Some of the most powerful and culturally relevant sites, in fact, offer entirely new conceptions of ownership or eschew cards as commodities altogether. The first such site, and still one of the most popular, is Ben Henry’s The Baseball Card Blog. Started in 2006 when a Google search for “baseball cards” brought little beyond eBay results, The Baseball Card Blog began with a scanner and closet or two full of cards hardly worth their weight in cardboard. Whereas so many hobby magazines and books are dedicated to objects people dream about owning, The Baseball Card Blog revels in items that most collectors consider burdensome chaff. Nonetheless, the site quickly found an audience both among card enthusiasts and the mainstream press, making appearances in Entertainment Weekly and Bill Simmons’ ESPN column.

Most posts on the site consist of an image of a card that is owned by hundreds of thousands of people and available for pennies, alongside a few paragraphs of ironic, occasionally nostalgic comedy. In employing this approach, The Baseball Card Blog exchanges conventional forms of ownership for one that emphasizes the importance of creativity in cultural practice.

The site not only recasts objects of the past through the reframing capacities of new technologies; it also quite literally recreates the past, taking denigrated bits and pieces of 1980s culture and refashioning them into items even rarer than a 1952 Willie Mays. The Baseball Card Blog produces cards of which zero (actual) copies exist.

Site creator Ben Henry and artist Travis “PunkRockPaint” Peterson have collaborated on a variety of projects in which they take iconic card templates from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s and adapt them. Some are simply baseball cards that don’t exist, but would be fun to have if they did. Others embrace what scholar Henry Jenkins describes as the nomadic nature of fans, taking the forms of old baseball cards and infusing them with other elements of childhood play ranging from Super Mario Bros. to The Muppets to Star Wars.

The impulses behind these projects, I argue, are rather similar to those described by Bloom in his discussion of the baseball card boom of the 1980s. Now blessed with economic resources (in time and technology, if not necessarily cash) and burdened with the realities of adult life, there is a strong desire among many children of the 1980s not only to reengage in childhood play, but also to assert control and ownership of it. This is not, of course, an act of true resistance to a corporate-run industry. But it is, nonetheless, an excellent example of how creativity can serve as a satisfying replacement for traditional economic incentives if we only allow it to.

The Middle East Today (BBC News)

Two competing forces shape mass media. On the one hand, there is the creativity of writers, directors, journalists and editors who transform ideas into content. On the other, there is structure. Despite the infinite creative capacity of producers, their work is inevitably circumscribed by the economic imperatives, technological limitations and ideological biases inherent in the business of media. The careful media critic thus aims to give credit (or blame) when due, but also keeps a close eye on the factors that shape authorial control. It is an imperfect science, but it is also what makes the study of media so fascinating.

Thus, this series aims to provide a dual perspective on one of the most controversial areas of new media production. Focusing on blogs about contemporary Middle Eastern politics, The Middle East: Inside, Outside and Online pairs together a blogger with an academic critic. The bloggers have been charged with providing insight into the way they work.  The academics have been asked to analyze the site for which the blogger works, drawing attention to factors beyond the realm of pure authorship. It is not a point/counterpoint and the authors have not read each other’s pieces. Instead the two pieces are meant to provide distinct but intimately related perspectives.

This first pairing is one certain to provoke strong feelings in readers. Emily Hauser blogs for Open Zion on The Daily Beast. Professor Helga Tawil-Souri studies media in the Palestinian territories and Israel. Certainly there is much to say about the politics of each contributor. But, just as importantly, these two essays come together to help paint a deeper and more nuanced picture of Open Zion and online media.

Writing for Open Zion
By Emily Hauser

I’ve been writing commentary about Israel/Palestine since 2002, and while the world of opinion publishing has changed dramatically in the ensuing decade, I believe that the writing itself has not (or at least, not much). I was a reporter out of Israel and the Palestinian territories for a big chunk of the 1990s (having moved to Israel in 1984), and then pursued my masters degree in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, graduating in 2001. These facts had enormous bearing on the writing I did for the op/ed pages of newspapers, and continue to have enormous bearing on the writing I do for blogs.

There are, after all, a lot of opinions out there about Israel/Palestine, much of it ill-informed or informed entirely by ideology. While my blogging certainly reflects my politics (pro-two-state, anti-occupation, anti-settlement), I try very hard to make sure that I’m building a case and can source it, so that readers come away feeling not just supported in their own opinions (or angered by mine) but having learned something in the process.

I don’t believe, however, that it’s my job to convince my ideological opposite numbers, nor is it my job to prove them wrong to the n-th degree (two things I’ll never be able to do). My job is to advocate for the shared humanity and dignity of Israelis and Palestinians, support political solutions that I believe will promote that humanity and that dignity, and provide readers with a few more tools to reach their own conclusions and do their own advocating. What this means is that it’s not enough to say that occupation is bad – I have to provide facts and figures. It’s not enough to say that Palestinians are people, too – I have to sketch that humanity.

Likewise, it’s not enough to say “Israel is wrong” – Israel is many things (not least, the many Israelis who advocate for a just peace every day) and if I really want to have an impact on policy and behavior, I have to focus on the policies and behaviors that contribute to the conflict. It’s not enough to say “occupation is bad for Israelis, too” – I have to demonstrate why, and why that matters.

All of this largely because the audience I see myself writing for is primarily those American Jews who feel somewhat or mostly uncomfortable with Israeli policy, but don’t know how to articulate that discomfort, or feel unequipped to do so. This is where sourcing comes in, and it points to one of the changes that’s taken place in the actual writing process since 2002: Whereas once I essentially had to say “look, trust me on this, I’ve seen the numbers,” now I can embed links and folks can continue the discovery process on their own.

The other audience for which I imagine myself writing is Palestinians. Palestinians are so infrequently given a platform in the West, particularly in the Jewish community, that to the extent that I can channel their stories, I feel compelled to do so. Indeed, many American readers immediately discount any opinion attached to an Arab name – my hope is that with my by-line, a few more people will read a little more about what conflict and occupation mean for the Palestinian people. (And the fact that I’m Israeli-American who’s an active member of a Conservative synagogue and identifies as a Zionist doesn’t hurt).

Finally, the speed with which information now spreads and with which bloggers have to produce copy must, inevitably, have an impact on the writing itself. The challenge is to write quickly but not in haste, and to trust that the extra five or 30 minutes spent nailing down sources or clarifying language is ultimately more important than posting as quickly as possible. At the end of the day, commentary writers (which is what most bloggers are) are chipping away at the outermost edges of public opinion. If we want to be effective, we have to use best tools we can find. Facts and unabashed humanity are pretty powerful tools.

Open – and close – Zion
By Helga Tawil-Souri

Open Zion seems at first glance a clever play on words: in techno-legal terms it alludes to the shift towards open source software, creative commons, and invitation for non-expert digirati to share opinions. That is not the case however. Content is copyrighted and most conversation is between the blog’s editor, Peter Beinart, his commentators, and scholars who have written reviews or responses to Beinart’s publications. Perhaps the title alludes to an ideological opening of Zion and Zionism? Yet, as the site states, OZ seeks “an open and unafraid conversation” based on a belief “in a two-state solution in accordance with the liberal Zionist principles articulated in Israel’s declaration of independence.” Certainly Zion (i.e., the state of Israel) is not being opened here, and taking a two-state solution and liberal Zionist principles as axiomatic doesn’t strike me as openness either.

One way to understand OZ then is as an attempt on the part of journalism and a journalist to remain significant in a technological-media landscape which renders ‘traditional’ journalism’s future uncertain. OZ is part of The Daily Beast, the companion website to Newsweek, which will cease its print publication in 2013 and become all-digital. OZ underscores the challenges of maintaining profitability in an environment when news no longer follows a daily, let alone a weekly, cycle, and an environment in which news readers are likely to land on an article through a friend’s Facebook post or Twitter feed without necessarily caring where it is being published.

Politically, Open Zion is an echo of Beinart’s own perspectives – even if commentators come in different flavors. OZ does not add complexity to an understanding or a critique of Israel or Zionism or “the Jewish future” but simply – albeit fastidiously – describes their contemporary political landscapes from the perspective of an individual embedded in American Jewish political institutions. Thus OZ fails at an extremely important level: the recognition that neither the US’s, nor Israel’s, nor Palestine’s purposes and futures can be understood or decided through only an American Jewish lens. Yes, Israel as it stands is the state for the world’s Jews – and so American ones too – but that ‘borderlessness’ or openness (for only some) of Zion should itself be opened for discussion.

Beinart is most often labeled a ‘center-left’ American Jew; despite also being called a ‘radical’ by Israeli ambassador Michael Oren after Beinart argued that products from Israeli settlements should be boycotted. The moniker of ‘center-left’ however needs to be problematized and connected to an open and unafraid conversation about ‘liberal Zionism.’ I certainly recognize Zionism and liberal Zionism’s successes and appreciate their ideological borrowings from socialism, Liberalism, the valuing of human rights and freedom. There is nonetheless an inherently colonial and racist core to (liberal) Zionism itself and the creation of the modern state of Zion. The Israeli Declaration of Independence cannot be divorced from historical actualities of what happened to Ashkenazi Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Muslims, Christians, Palestinians, and others – in 1948 as well as before then and thereafter. These realities, histories, narratives and perspectives should be what are opened to conversation. That’s what the notion of open(ing) Zion should suggest – and while we’re at it, we can also drop copyright and trademark notices.

When historical creations are framed as intrinsically liberal, without addressing their illiberal and oppressive aspects, the result is a closing off of new perspectives and futures – Jewish and otherwise. This sleight-of-hand is what allows Beinart, OZ, and others, to make a two-state solution axiomatic: Palestinian statehood is supported only insofar as it permits the sanctity of a Jewish democratic state. Such an equation does not in actuality rest on the belief of human rights and freedoms for all, and certainly does not open a critical conversation to be had of why democracy and Jewishness continue to be framed in sync. As such, OpenZion purports a kind of friendly Zionism, as oxymoronic as ‘compassionate capitalism’ and as self-righteous as ‘civilizing mission.’

If I end up at an OZ story through a Facebook post, so be it. But I won’t purposefully open OZ until real openness takes place. There’s much better analysis on the web already – whether you think the Palestinians never existed, or the threat in the Middle East is Israel, or a new state ‘Isratine’ should be created.

Bill James did not invent the analytic study of baseball. He did, however, introduce sports fandom to the key principles of what is now known as SABRmetrics, a half-acronym inspired by the Society for American Baseball Research. And if you read through James’ early work from the 1980s, one clear intellectual project emerges: the destruction of dogma. James wanted to show that the insiders who thought they knew baseball best were handicapped by decades of collective “wisdom.”

For example, everyone knows that Runs Batted In (RBI) are a key measure of a player’s offensive ability. The only problem, James showed through mathematically informed analysis, is that it really isn’t. The statistic, it turns out, is highly contextual and if you pick your players based primarily on their RBI totals, things could go wrong in a hurry. The point of it all was to let reason and evidence lead the way. Baseball’s lore was often valuable, both for its authentic insights and its seemingly endless supply of straw men for sabrmetricians to tilt at on weekends. Dogma, however, needed to go.

Bill James is still around but, as is the case with all developing technologies, baseball analysis has moved too fast for any one person to stay on top of it all. Now the Internet is littered with people doing studies of all sorts, ranging from intense video analysis of every pitch to obscure simulations of bygone seasons.

But, according to Kevin Goldstein, perhaps not all of this change has been for the better. Yes, more people are doing, or at least following, advanced baseball analysis. But they have, as Goldstein implies in the interview below, forgotten their aims (to learn the truth about the game of baseball) and redoubled their efforts (to show that baseball insiders are generally wrong).

Goldstein is particularly attuned to this situation. His primary employer, Baseball Prospectus, is the best-known proponent of the statistical study of baseball. Most of his colleagues spend their days pouring over equations. But Goldstein studies and writes about prospects. He needs to give informed opinions on 18-year-old athletes from rural high schools whose statistics, as you can surely imagine, only tell part of the story. So Goldstein, much to the horror of the more orthodox sabrmetricians, doesn’t just look at stats. He also calls insiders–exactly the sorts of people whose persistent wrongness gives the sabrmetric community its raison d’être.

On episode 93 of his popular podcast Up and In: The Baseball Prospectus Podcast, Goldstein bemoaned the current state baseball analysis–the rant starts at 24:45 and is worth those who study fandom of all sorts. In the wake of the podcast, we exchanged a few emails on the subject:

Matt: You are clearly not the old curmudgeonly sportswriter who’s afraid of change. But you don’t seem to love Internet analysis.

Kevin: Well, just because I’m not an old curmudgeonly sportswriter doesn’t mean I’m going to embrace every change that comes about. Look, the Internet is a wonderful thing, and I wouldn’t have this career without it, but while it levels the playing field it also opens the door to a lot of garbage out there. What disturbs me is the amount of dogmatism, where basically the attitude is “I’m here and I know stats and every manager/GM/player is stupid, and here’s why.”

Look, being dogmatic is easy. What’s hard is to see something and say to yourself, “That LOOKS stupid at first glance, and maybe it is. But maybe there is something I don’t understand.” To look for that takes effort. It might even take talking to somebody else, which again, forces you to admit that maybe you don’t know everything. I’ve always said that my greatest advantage, one of the reasons this whole thing has worked out for me so damn well is that I’m willing to pick up a telephone with the hope of talking to someone.

Matt: Can you give an example?

Kevin: It happens all the time with everything. Every trade is stupid, every signing is stupid, every tactic is stupid. There’s a team right now and they have a player. Fans of that team want that player in the lineup every day. When he’s not in the lineup, they all scream “stupid stupid stupid.” But you know what? Turns out that team wasn’t playing that player for a reason.  Reporter needed to actually ask someone to get the truth.

Matt: Does the dogma crowd out the good journalism?

Kevin: Well, that’s the thing. Like I said during the little rant on the podcast, maybe I’m the asshole here. I think the signal-to-noise ratio is worse than ever, but people sure seem to like the noise.

Matt: So the Internet democraticizes but it also dogmatizes?

Kevin: Well, it’s two sides of a coin, really. The Internet is great because it levels the playing field. I’m here. I’m successful. I didn’t go to college and I have no journalism background. I was able to learn on the fly (still learning) and get an audience. The Internet is also awful because it levels the playing field and anyone can pretend they are doing what others do. It puts much more pressure on the audience when you think about it. Before, you had just journalists. You had TV and newspapers and those people actually providing the news were already vetted. Now, there’s a sudden onus on the audience to say “hey, who is this person writing this and why should I trust them?” And it’s pretty clear that not enough people are taking the step back to ask that question.

Chuck Klosterman is a tricky character for a cultural studies professor such as myself.  On the one hand, it’s fantastic that there is someone out there getting paid really well to make smart observations about popular culture.  On the other, it’s disappointing that it’s not me.  On a third, slightly more serious hand, Chuck brings into sharp relief a difficulty embedded in the academic field of cultural studies.

As a discipline, cultural studies is committed to the breaking down of boundaries between high and low culture.  It is founded on the principle of blurring the binaries that can so easily allow taste preferences to serve as proxies for the politics of privilege.  And yet, at the same time, the structure of the profession of professing requires the maintenance of a variety of sharp borders that seem to stand in direct opposition to these commitments.  A journal is either peer-reviewed or it is not.  A conference, generally, is either properly academic or it is something else.

Klosterman’s work not only blurs things that us cultural studies professors celebrate by taking “low” culture seriously, but also in a way that inevitably makes us nervous.  We are employed to talk about popular culture because an institutional vetting process has branded our thoughts, opinions and research as serious.  Everyone has thoughts about The Hunger Games.  Students pay to hear mine because I’ve persuaded a variety of well-regarded universities and journals that my opinion is worth hearing.  Klosterman subverts that process, going instead to the court of public consumption for approval.  His work is taken relatively seriously because, well, lots of people seem to enjoy taking it relatively seriously.  For some in our field, this may feel like a threat.

Of course, it shouldn’t.  Culture can and should be interrogated from a variety of approaches and methodologies.  And we should be happy to have our categories pushed, prodded and occasionally penetrated by authors like Klosterman, who writes with an honest interest in understanding the workings of popular culture.   His approach to criticism threatens our binaries in just the right way, forcing us to question our goals and limitations as scholars and cultural critics. It offers an object, ideally one among many, against which to compare the work being produced by institutionalized cultural studies.  It’s a chance to reflect on what’s we like about the field and what might bear improving.  For example, we could, perhaps, write a bit more lucidly and, as much as it will hurt, be a bit more considerate with the use of jargon.  We could even try to use a few fewer commas.

The discussion between me, Klosterman and Seth Vannatta posted here addresses some of the issues discussed above and whole bunch of other stuff as well.  It is also, I warn, a bit of a commercial for Chuck Klosterman and Philosophy: The Real and the Cereal, available at all the obvious on and offline places you might think it would be.

But, you know, when Parker and Stone want to do something interesting, they really do it.  And that is why I find myself consistently wanting to chronicle what makes South Park a truly unique television program.  Last week’s episode “Jewpacabra” is just the latest in the program’s intermittent efforts to use their medium to introduce otherwise silenced elements of society and culture into the public sphere.  Though packaged in exactly the sort of silliness and Jew jokiness that the title implies, the episode actually features one of the most interesting and, dare I say, authentic discussions of Judaism I can ever remember on TV.

If you’ll allow me to generalize – an ironic courtesy to grant, given what I’m about to say – most television discussions of Jewish life and thought have focused on facile, often Christianized understandings of what it means to be Jewish in America.  By far, the most common topic is that of intermarriage which, though important both religiously and culturally, is in fact a rejection of traditional Judaism.  Programs from Bridget Loves Bernie to thirtysomehing to The OC have devoted lots of time to discussing how Judaism can or can’t be blended into secular (but really, secular-Christian) American society.  These issues are well worth debating, considering and even theorizing. But they are not discussions of Judaism itself and certainly do not engage with the religion on its own terms.

Yet, somehow, South Park puts forth just this sort of debate, and in an episode in which Cartman makes up a monster called a “Jewpacabra” in an inscrutable scheme to win an Easter egg hunt, no less.  The plot is not of central importance and I’ll spare you the semi-sensical details. Suffice to say, Cartman ends up in Egypt on the night leading to the Jews’ exodus from slavery and escape from the Pharaoh.  In a truly interesting TV moment, Cartman asks Kyle how he can be sure that the Pharaoh won’t change his mind, let the Jews go and thus spare the Egyptians the final and most gruesome plague – the death of all first born males.  Kyle, more or less accurately, responds that G-d has “hardened” Pharaoh’s heart, thus ensuring that he won’t change his mind.  Cartman is taken aback, wondering how G-d could do such an unfair thing and exclaiming that it cannot be true because “G-d is not a dick.”

Now, the word “hardened” is not quite right here as the verse Kyle is referring to (Exodus 9:12) uses the Hebrew “Khazek,” which really means strengthened- a far from trivial difference.  However, Cartman’s question is an excellent one that is debated throughout Jewish texts from the Talmud to today.  How and why can G-d, who Jews believe prizes the free will of humanity, take an action that at the very least compromises Pharoah’s ability to do what he wants?  There are a lot of answers and South Park doesn’t really offer any of them; this is perhaps too much to ask.  I, for one, would argue that strengthening one’s will is something we often ask for help with and that does not, in general, mark a compromise of freedom.

But, in any case, Cartman does pose a serious question and one that I believe forces the conscientious observer to embrace one fundamental truth about Judaism: the Jewish G-d is not, in fact, a perfect model of liberal Western thinking.  Why G-d should be is a bit of a mystery to me, but most televisual portrayals of the religion tend to point in just that direction.  Little if any attention is paid to the admittedly irrational (Judaism rejects the idea that irrationality is inherently bad) strictures of the religion, in favor of the very real elements of Judaism that focus on universality, social justice etc.  But, in the long run, Judaism does not believe in a G-d we can all agree about.  This is one of the many (and perhaps the best) reason there are only 14 million of us on earth.  Cartman, throughout the episode, comes to see that the Jewish understanding of G-d is a complex one that does not match nearly so well with Christianity as defenders of our “Judeo-Christian Culture” would like to think.

Parker and Stone perhaps seem to have a problem with Judaism’s embrace of the possibility that G-d can seem to be acting like a “dick.”  And that’s fine by me.  They have every right to say what does and doesn’t make sense to them about my religion or anyone else’s.  What’s important is that they make some effort to understand what the religion in question actually says.   Now, I’m not about to recommend them for a scholarship in Talmudic Law Studies.  They have missed as much as they have found in their exegetic egg hunt.  However, they get a B+ for effort –  better than most other TV, and quite impressive for television producers so often noted for laziness and cynicism.

The levels of passion and scrutiny that scholarship on this area of the world attract is probably unequaled, a fact that can either foster or stifle the production of knowledge, depending on the context of the discussion and the dispositions of the interlocutors.  There are platoons of people inside and outside of the academy ready to label every article, book review and blog post as either “pro” or “anti” their side. A single word can set off a firestorm and seemingly insignificant statements can become snowballs imposing enough to crush, or at least nicely dent, reputations.  Often these responses are the result of authentic reactions to injustice, but that fact provides no reassurance that they are fair. It’s a challenging, important area to study but it’s not something I’m tempted to go on record about without some serious foresight.

But I will share a bit of my experience.  It’s impossible to say what it’s like to study media in the Palestinian territories because it is a place where who you are defines where you can be.  For example, I’m an American so I’m allowed to travel between Israel and “Area A” spaces that are controlled by the Palestinian Authority yet still under the military occupation of the Israeli government.  I’ve been working in the West Bank for awhile now so I’m comfortable using the buses and taxis there, none of which are dangerous but many of which can fluctuate in price heavily based on your perceived nationality.  My Arabic is fair, which helps, but most everyone speaks enough English, particularly my friends, many of whom work for the very media organizations that I research.  The roads are awful, the people aren’t punctual and if you can’t at least hold a cigarette and stomach a half dozen strong coffees a day, you won’t fit in.  But it’s manageable.  I spent approximately six hours a week waiting at checkpoints to go from Bethlehem or Ramallah in Israeli-controlled Jerusalem, which is enormously annoying but more than anything serves to underscore the freedom of movement that most of the people I write about don’t have.  Without special permission, the majority of them cannot enter Jerusalem, a city that serves as the center of Palestinian national aspirations.

But even though that experience is not one that can be simulated, there are moments where you get just a little, tiny taste. One morning I had a meeting scheduled for eight a.m. at Post Office Square in the town of Arram.  This is a very specific place, not terribly big, located a little bit south of Ramallah, the administrative capitol of the Palestinian territories.  I was supposed to meet with someone from the Norwegian Representative Office to the Palestinian People, the equivalent of an embassy but for a place not yet a country.  The NRO had funded a film version of an anti-domestic violence play that I’d been researching for months and after a few dozen emails I was invited for a visit. I thought I’d go in, work the early conversation around to most of my small Norwegian vocabulary, then let the inevitably tall, blonde women in charge of the NRO’s side of the project give me some facts and figures.  I’d be back in Jerusalem by dinner.

Buses from the Israeli side of the concrete barrier that fences in most of the Palestinian West Bank are virtually never checked.  All security is on the way out.  So I took the bus in, called up a friend and asked him to give me a ride to the address of the NRO.  We drove to Arram, looking for the “World Bank Building” in Post Office Square.  Soon enough, signs for the building appeared, pointing us this way and that, around corners and over hills.  We stopped to ask some people where the World Bank Building was.  There was nothing but blank stares.  But yet, the signs persisted.  Three or four arrows later, we discovered the problem.  The last sign said “World Bank” and pointed directly at a 25-foot concrete wall with barbed wire across the top and three languages worth of notice that getting too close would be very bad for my health.  After a moment we realized what had happened.  In building the separation wall Israel had placed the barrier right down the center of Post Office Square, leaving half the town on the side contiguous with Israel and the other half, well, not.  Longish story short, I was in the wrong Arram.  My tall blonde Norwegian film funder was only yards away, but it would take me hours of traffic and security checks to get there.  She waited and found my broken Norwegian vaguely charming.  I got my information but didn’t quite make it back for dinner.  It may take time, but at least I can go wherever I want.

If this sounds like a challenge for the study of media, you can perhaps begin to imagine how it impacts productions.  Keeping shooting schedules is hard enough under perfect conditions.  For producers in the West Bank things are never perfect.  For a scholar, for better and for worse, that’s part of the story.

Next question:  Had it worked? Had ESPN’s Bill Simmons, champion of all things Boston, succeeded in organizing a series of live fan-chants during the game?  It turned out that he had, at least in part.  Via his twitter account “CelticChants,” Simmons suggested three taunts that the Boston crowd might hurl at the visiting Cavs.  The first one, “New York Knicks! New York Knicks!”, aimed at Lebron James and his aforementioned free agency, had in fact taken hold.   As the superstar took his first free throws, much of the crowd shouted in unison, an act the announcer Mark Breen described as “creative.”  Simmons’ other two suggestions were met with middling results.  But, unquestionably, the first one was a hit.

My reaction to this result is unambiguous. I don’t like it for a gamut of reasons ranging from the aesthetic to the (mildly) philosophical.  For one, it strikes me as kind of lame.  There was a sense of corporate supervision in the suggestions, with the second chant of “Rondo’s Better,” being particularly uninspired.  Yes, I’m somewhat relieved that the previously mentioned idea of yelling “Precious, Precious” at the terribly overweight Shaquille O’Neal didn’t take hold in a Boston crowd whose racial sensitivity is sometimes questionable.  However, to me, if there’s an essence to crowd activity, it’s organicism, or at least home-grownness.  I’m not interested in anything that Robert Iger has potential say in.

Secondly, if the experiment is to see if such a thing can work – if new media can succeed in stirring this brand of collective action – then, well, it’s not a very well controlled inquiry.  Simmons, with access to all the mass audience Disney can muster, isn’t much of a test case.  It reminds me somewhat of Kim Jong-Il heading out to the golf course with an army of assistants to see if the game’s as tough as everyone says.  What do you know, beginner’s luck.  This isn’t the end of the world, but it strikes me as both a blurring of lines and really vain.  I’d feel better if Simmons had skipped the ESPN.com promotion of the idea or, even better, if a true “everyday fan” had given it a shot.

That said, Simmons and his unique power to turn commentary into real life action did bring me a great deal of joy this weekend.  I finally picked up David Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game, a book that had been out of print for ages and still would be, were it not for Simmons’ repeated recommendations.  It’s a fantastic, truly important sports book that thousands would be missing out on if not for the Sports Guy.  So perhaps I’ll give him a pass on the chant thing. But my weekend certainly brings into sharp relief the power of an Internet star and some of its potential abuses.

Last week Moyers wrapped up his PBS program The Journal, this time, it seems, for good.  He has left and returned twice previously, but, at 76, Moyers seems done with weekly TV. He will be missed.  The Journal was, quite simply, outstanding public affairs television.  It combined long-form documentaries with in-depth interviews and, uniquely, it succeeded in discussing ideas without forgetting the people they impact.  This, more than anything, is Moyers’ true virtue.  He’s a public intellectual who places equal emphasis on both the adjective and the noun, a populist in the best possible sense.

Although moving from network to public television left him with a relatively small audience, Moyers’ recession from public life nonetheless marks a major loss for liberal America.  No, not every television liberal is either self-righteous or ironic bordering on nihilistic, but a lot are.  Moyers is never either. For him truly believing in things is neither a show nor a quaint old-fashioned gesture; it’s the only way he can make meaning out the endlessly complex times his life and career have spanned.

A minor example: during the Obama-Reverend Wright controversy, Moyers was the only interviewer and commentator I heard who really, truly cared to understand Wright’s theology and its related politics.  He thought that his viewers should understand what the man believed and why he believed it before making an evaluation.  It wasn’t enough to break things down on party lines, call the Republicans racist and/or make a joke.  He wanted us to really see the ways in which Wright’s Christianity and social experience shaped his controversial view of American life.  It was the part of the story that no one else seemed to have the forum (a commercial free hour broadcast into a huge number of American homes) or interest in pursuing.  The Stewarts and Olbermanns of the world have their places but I hope there is also room for another Moyers and that, sooner than later, we find someone to fill it.

Which brings me to the program’s recent two-part, 200^th episode spectacular, creatively entitled “200” and “201.”  The episodes, which are kind of a mess in terms of narrative, will be best remembered for being South Park’s first engagement with the issue of Islamic Sharia law and its potential conflict with free speech principles.  In 2001, the episode “Super Best Friends” featured a portrayal of the prophet Mohammed alongside Jesus Christ, Buddha, Joseph Smith and a host of other religious figures and no one really seemed to care.  This was, however, well before the violent, painful controversy that erupted over Jyllands-Posten publishing a set of cartoons of Mohammed.  Although there were clear differences between the earlier South Park imagery and that of Jyllands-Posten, which portrayed Mohammed as a terrorist, the essence of the controversy applies equally.  There are those who believe that the prohibition against depicting Mohammed applies universally and the threat of violence hangs over all those in defiance. Even Jytte Klausen’s academic book The Cartoons that Shook the World was published without the titular cartoons, giving many the impression that this issue was being controlled either by excessive cultural sensitivities, fear of violence or a combination of the two.

“200” tries to take this issue head-on.  The citizens of South Park, blackmailed into bringing Mohammed to town, attempt a debate over whether or not this can be done without causing offense or getting the town blown up. The discussion goes nowhere, developing neither the plot nor the satire.  The townspeople, much like Parker, Stone and most of us, don’t know how to debate this issue because, as currently framed, there’s very little to debate.  If one accepts the principle that the rules of one religion, either due to respect or fear, ought to be followed by those outside the faith, then it seems like picturing Mohammed is totally off limits.  If not, it’s an act of cowardice to redact Mohammed’s image.  In any case there’s a double standard.  The argument in “200” and “201” is something along the lines of “if the Buddhists can handle Buddha snorting coke in front of a group of forth graders, then a cartoon of Mohammed fighting crime shouldn’t be cause for death and destruction.”

It kind of makes sense, but at the same time it doesn’t seem to address the real issue.  This is largely because South Park’s strength is in parodying the how of publics debate, not the what.  The program’s satire is one of exaggeration, where a small absurdity is isolated and magnified.  So long as they stay within the world of discourse, playing the role of media critics, they’re very, very good.  This debate pulls them out of their comfort zones, forcing them to contend with embassies that really got burned down and people for whom sacredness is in no way metaphorical.  Comedy Central was forced to censor “201” fairly heavily due to these real concerns, giving Parker and Stone something to complain about but also reinforcing the extent to which this particular debate is not yet ready for their form of satire.  The answer, in practical terms, is “need more information,” even if our our philosophical instincts say otherwise.

The episode, has, however, served the important role of reinvigorating public discussions of the issue, providing some hope that we will, one day, understand the underlying principles well enough for blunt-edge satire to be a productive tool.  For example, CNN here puts forth a refreshingly not-hysterical discussion of the issue.   Of course there have also been calls to violence and free-speech responses that, while politically coherent, seem a bit juvenile.  But, undeniably, the public discussion has been enhanced by South Park.  The episodes themselves may not quite hit the target, but one way or another debate has improved, if not quite in the more forceful manner Parker and Stone intended.