Month: October 2010

Socialite Populism

by digby

Yesterday I had the misfortune of watching distinguished Lyndon Johnson historian Robert Caro and prize-winning populist historian Charles Postel get lectured to by two smug, dishonest, wingnut welfare elites on Fareed Zakaria’s show on CNN. It was enough to make me turn off the computer and head out to the local drinking establishment.

With her usual smug church lady croon, Noonan insisted that the tea party is a populist movement that will appeal to centrists because everyone knows that the government is too big and failing everyone. Both Caro and Postel, being historians and all, pointed out that it wasn’t populist, but rather conservative and in many ways, contradictory to populism with its sympathy to big business and antipathy to social justice.

Noonan corrected the two historians on that in a New York socialite minute:

NOONAN: Bob, are we confusing populism and the populist tradition with progressivism and the progressivist tradition?

I don’t hear anybody in the Tea Party saying do away with social security.

POSTEL: (INAUDIBLE). Everywhere.

NOONAN: All right.

POSTEL: Everywhere.

NOONAN: In every movement there are some people. They —

POSTEL: No, no.

NOONAN: They are absolutely not saying social security should not exist.

POSTEL: They are (ph).

NOONAN: They are saying reform the entitlements. They are saying change the way it’s set up, and they are seeing —

POSTEL: This is what you would like them to say.

NOONAN: It is what they are saying, and saying to me.

Now, they may be saying something different to you, but it is a nation of 305 million people. You are describing something that I’m not seeing, and so it leaves me confused.

This is a broad — the Tea Party Movement is broad and evolving. Nobody’s in charge of it. Nobody’s telling it what to think.

POSTEL: The Tea Party Movement is a very well-organized, very disciplined movement, in my view. It has very important centers of power. The role of FOX News, Glenn Beck, is very important in this. It’s not — he’s not just a — a figure. He’s just not one of the figures. He is a very important mover and shaker in the Tea Party Movement.

And what I’m describing is the stuff about — about —

BROOKHISER: Free press. Terrible.

POSTEL: I’m all for the free press, but this —

BROOKHISER: [As long as] they’re not having an effect.

POSTEL: I’m all — I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it, but we should recognize that the — that the — that the FOX machine plays a fundamental role in the organization of the Tea Parties. And Glenn Beck is one of these people who’s saying that — that Obama is leading us — or is a socialist, and leading us to —

BROOKHISER: The National Review Institute —

NOONAN: Charles, I think it’s more interesting than that.

BROOKHISER: So the National Review Institute took a — a poll about the Tea Party and — and related phenomena, and of the respondents who said they had been to Tea Parties, one-fifth of them said they voted for Obama.

Postel is correct, of course. (And he didn’t even discuss the recent co-option by the religious right — and neither did Noonan, for whom this would be terribly inconvenient.)

Noonan sounds like she’s been listing to Beck rant about progressivism. (And you have to admire her intellectual confidence in challenging Charles Postel on his definition of populism.) But as you can see, both Noonan and Brookheiser were defensive and dishonest in that exchange, Noonan in saying that the tea party isn’t hostile to Social Security and Brookheiser in citing a poll that has no relationship to reality. All other polls have shown that the Tea Party is a right wing conservative movement a vast majority of whose members are Republican. If this National Review poll showed something different it was an outlier. And by the way Brookheiser said it, he knew it too.

Meanwhile Noonan tells Postel the tea party is “more interesting” than the fact that this so-called grassroots movement is being led by a multi-national media corporation, in the most condescending tone possible (and nobody can be more condescending than Noonan.) I honestly don’t think there’s anything more interesting about it than that although Brookheiser also scoffed at the notion that there was anything significant about it, interjecting a ridiculous non-sequitor about free speech as if anyone was questioning that.

And then it got worse:

Zakaria: Bob, let me ask you another element to all of this, because at some level the Tea Party does seem similar and in a very vague sense to movements that you see around the west and that they all seem to have a kind of populist, nativist, nationalistic feel to them.

CARO: Yes.

ZAKARIA: How much — and if you listen to Tea Party on issues like immigration or the Islamic center at Ground Zero, they are very, very passionate about that.

CARO: Yes.

ZAKARIA: How much of this is about nationalism/nativism/race? After all we do have the first black president in office.

CARO: It’s a very perceptive question. Because as you say, to me, that’s what’s at — that’s what at the bottom of a lot of this. I mean like I’m writing — in the book I’m writing about Lyndon Johnson, he is passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. At that time, blacks could hardly vote in any significant numbers. In 11 states, they weren’t really a political force like they are today. That was 1965.

This is 2010, which even by my math is 45 years. You know, that’s in terms of history, Fareed, that’s a blink of history’s eye. Forty-five years ago, African-Americans were not as nearly as significant a force in American political life and today an African- American sits as president in the United States — in the Oval Office.

You say that has happened so fast. I think that in a way, it takes time for people to absorb that. I happen to believe that race does play a factor in everything in American life, even those of us who would like to pretend and hope that it doesn’t, and I think that what you ask is at the bottom of a lot of what’s happening today.

ZAKARIA: So if Obama were a middle aged white man do you think there’s many people would be saying he’s taken the country away from me, he’s — he’s not an American, things like that?

POSTEL: Well, I — I think that my own view is that if Hillary Clinton were president, we would have — we would have the same billionaires funding protest movements against her that we have against Obama. The Koch Brothers were just as passionate against Clinton as they are against Obama, and we would be, if she had pushed health insurance, we would be having the same cries of socialist dictatorship that we have today.

I don’t think there’s a difference. There’s no question that the Tea Party is tapping into racist — racist feelings.

ZAKARIA: I’m guessing you don’t totally agree.

BROOKHISER: Well, I just want to back up and, you know, yes, race is a dark and bloody ground throughout American history and we should acknowledge here that many of the populists were awful racist. So there was a lot of, you know, this bad baggage appears on the right, on the left. It appears from elitists, it’s appeared in populist movements, sticking up for the little guy, as long as he was the white little guy. So let’s not have any “Not me, lord.” It’s that public.

You cannot fully imagine the nasty, aggressive tone he used to deliver that statement. I frankly don’t see his point, unless he’s saying that since populists in the past were racists that this somehow means that Postel and Caro are racist too — or something. But it was some kind of accusation, that’s for sure.

And then he came back to this nonsense:

ZAKARIA: However, what about the Tea Party movement of 2010? Is it — is there an element of racism?

BROOKHISER: Look, I’ll just repeat the statistic I gave you. We found that one-fifth of people who had gone to Tea Parties had voted for Obama. So if they were, they’re very odd racists is that’s what they are. I’m not buying it.

Again, total bullshit. I’d be surprised if even 1% of tea partiers really voted for Obama. It’s irrational that they would have done that and then joined the tea party within the same two year period, so if they did they are idiots and their opinions must be discounted as meaning anything about the movement at large.

Then Noonan decided to take control,being the voice of the peeeeple and all, and took the opportunity to lecture these pointy headed academics about where they’ve gone wrong with all their book larnin’ and telling them they need to see what’s going on in Real America:

NOONAN: Guys, every time the left gets obsessed with FOX News, I know they’re starting to lose. Get your mind off that. Talk to the Tea Party. Get out there with the folks, not just the people who e- mail you and declare themselves to be John Birch Society members, but forget that stuff.

Everybody’s got a mike in America, everybody. What matters is the message that’s going into it. Don’t look at shiny, sparkling things. There are things below that that are more interesting. Glenn Beck is a shiny, sparkling thing.

He’s a bright shiny thing who, along with his comrades in the pulpits, on Fox and on talk radio, are writing the messages of this so-called movement. Legitimate polls have been done proving this. Noonan and Brookheiser obviously are embarrassed by the clown who are leading their little revolution, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t leading it and at some point they are going to be forced to publicly reconcile themselves to that fact.(Recall Noonan’s “real” opinion here.)

Robert Caro got the last word and I think he is right:

CARO: I would say it’s something that’s been — you know, I would say it’s a battle that’s been going on in western civilization for a long time, and this is a moment of a real clash. I would put the clash differently than you. I would put the clash about issues of social justice. You would put the thing about, you know, government, economic issues and the — and the crisis, but I don’t think we can ignore the fact that right now, during the Obama administration, is a very climatic moment for democracy in America.

I think so too. These people coming to the fore and taking over one of the two American political parties at a time of great stress and global transition is certainly a climactic moment for democracy in America. It might end up just being a blip and we will laugh about it ten years from now. Normally I’m fairly sanguine about these things and assume we’ll find some equilibrium. But this time, I’m not. As Caro says, this is a moment of real clash and I don’t know how it’s going to come out.

Noonan and Brookheiser were agitated, hostile and defensive. The conservative intelligentsia is nervous, and it shows, despite their efforts to be good soldiers and carry on. They are about to reap what they have sown over the past 30 years and I think it scares them too.

Update: Crooks and Liars caught some of this exchange.

Baby Doc Paul’s War On Mothers, Children and Old People

by digby

Here’s the latest in the “Rand Paul doesn’t know what he’s talking about” series:

Rand Paul, a candidate for the U.S. Senate from Kentucky, caused a stir last week when he argued that too many births in Kentucky are paid for by Medicaid, the joint federal-state insurance program for low-income Americans. According to Kentucky’s Cabinet for Health and Family Services, Medicaid pays for about half of the state’s 57,000 annual births. Paul is quoted by the Associated Press as saying that “Half of the people in Kentucky are not poor. We’ve made it too easy.” In reality, paying for a pregnancy can be anything but easy. According to the March of Dimes, maternity care costs more than $8,800, on average, and these costs can quickly escalate into the tens of thousands of dollars if complications arise (for instance, in the case of a premature birth). That’s why having insurance coverage is so critical. Employer-based group plans usually have good maternity care coverage, but most low-income women don’t get insurance through the workplace. And the National Women’s Law Center has documented that in the individual insurance market, few plans include maternity care coverage at all.

Rand is against the health care bill, of course, which would have mandated that insurance policies cover maternity care in a basic plan. Paul’s teabagging sister in arms, Sharron Angle, has a problem with that too.

No word on whether insurance should cover the maternity care for the pregnant rape and incest victims Angle and Paul insist should be forced to give birth.

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Do What They Say

by digby

I guess they aren’t electrocuting enough mentally ill people to death:

Five NYC police precincts are testing a new type of taser today after a the department’s standard-issue taser failed to subdue a knife-wielding suspect and led to a fatal shooting Sunday morning.

On Sunday, police responded to a 911 call from 24-year-old Emmanuel Paulino. Paulino had told the 911 operator he was “ready to kill some cops,” so they, um, dispatched some cops to his home in the Bronx. Police tried to subdue the knife-wielding Paulino with a taser, but he managed to pull one of the weapon’s prongs out of his body and wound up being shot down after he continued to approach the officers.

The new taser model — which NY1 says “can even penetrate two inches of clothing” — is lighter and more powerful than the ones cops currently carry.

It’s time for a heart to heart talk. If you are confronted by a police officer give yourself up immediately, do nothing at all to make him angry or believe that you are being uncooperative. Don’t argue or fail in any way to follow his orders to the letter. They have permission to electrocute you for any reason and nobody will do anything about it. You have no rights in practice, only in theory, as long as this is true.

And if these new tasers are more powerful than the old ones then there’s no telling how many more people are going to die. You can’t know ahead of time if you have an underlying heart condition or some other physical impairment that might led itself to “excited delirium” the medical excuse for killing with tasers. (And some people have no underlying condition at all — just an adrenaline rush, which any of us might have in a situation in which we are being threatened with death.) Don’t let yourself be one of the casualties. It’s not worth it.

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Rational Decision Making

by digby

Washington Post poll:

So naturally, the polls also tell us that the Republicans are about to win a landslide election.

This country is either stupid or crazy. Or both.

I blame bloggers.

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Exceptionalism Gone Wrong

by digby

The right wingers love to talk about American “exceptionalism.” We’re different than other countries, you see (we’re good ‘n they’re evil) and so the normal rules don’t apply. It’s the price we pay for being so darned great.

Well … there are exceptions to our exceptionalism. it seems that in some cases there are some very fine examples of proper national behavior that we would do well to emulate.

From my email box:

SEE IF I GOT THIS RIGHT!!! IF YOU CROSS THE NORTH KOREAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU GET 12 YEARS HARD LABOR.

IF YOU CROSS THE IRANIAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU ARE DETAINED INDEFINITELY.
IF YOU CROSS THE AFGHAN BORDER ILLEGALLY, YOU GET SHOT.
IF YOU CROSS THE SAUDI ARABIAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU WILL BE JAILED.
IF YOU CROSS THE CHINESE BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU MAY NEVER BE HEARD FROM AGAIN.
IF YOU CROSS THE VENEZUELAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU WILL BE BRANDED A SPY AND YOUR FATE WILL BE SEALED.
IF YOU CROSS THE CUBAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU WILL BE THROWN INTO POLITICAL PRISON TO ROT.
IF YOU CROSS THE U.S. BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU GET !!! A JOB, A DRIVERS LICENSE, SOCIAL SECURITY CARD, WELFARE, FOOD STAMPS, CREDIT CARDS, SUBSIDIZED RENT OR A LOAN TO BUY A HOUSE, FREE EDUCATION, FREE HEALTH CARE, A LOBBYIST IN WASHINGTON BILLIONS OF DOLLARS WORTH OF PUBLIC DOCUMENTS PRINTED IN YOUR LANGUAGE THE RIGHT TO CARRY YOUR COUNTRY’S FLAG WHILE YOU PROTEST THAT YOU DON’T GET ENOUGH RESPECT AND, IN MANY INSTANCES, YOU CAN VOTE.
I JUST WANTED TO MAKE SURE I HAD A FIRM GRASP ON THE SITUATION!!!

All those links lead to fantastic lies and distortions, of course. But it is a matter of faith that undocumented workers aren’t working and paying taxes, but are rather sponging off welfare and taking hard earned money out decent Americans’ pockets.

They are also all believed to be primitive illiterates who can’t speak English, so it’s amazing how well they are able to traverse the government bureaucracy which all decent God fearing Americans complain is too complicated and unresponsive. Evidently, it only works for illegal immigrants, which is pretty amazing considering how much they live in the shadows. Millions of people hiding from the authorities walk into welfare offices and submit themselves to scrutiny every day, veritably begging to be exposed and deported. That’s bold. No wonder these right wingers are so frightened of these people.

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Peas In A Pod

by digby

Bush henchman Michael Hayden was on Candy Crowley’s show today and had (mostly) nice words for President Obama. Crowley pointed out the recent carnage and ill feelings in Pakistan and wondered about the dangers of inadvertently causing a Pakistani uprising.

Crowley: Do you think these drones have been excessive and do you think they’re always helpful?

Hayden: As you know I’m not here to confirm or deny any specific activity. But I do know that taking the fight to the enemy, that being able to take the senior leadership off the battlefield, and that began in about July of 2008 in the current effort, has been, I think, the single greatest factor in keeping America and our friends safe. I know all activity that we do to take the enemy off the battlefield is done very carefully and with great precision, high confidence in the intelligence, so I think it is an appropriate course of action. In fact, in good conscience it would be very difficult for any administration to stop doing it.

Crowley: You sound as if though you believe that president Obama is doing a good job on the terrorism front.

Hayden: there are somethings I disagreed with and I disagreed with publicly …

Crowley: such as?

Hayden: making the CIA interrogation memos public. Stopping the CIA interrogation program and not really replacing it even to this date. But by and large there’s been a powerful continuity between the 43rd and 44th president and I think that reflects the reality that both President Obama and President Bush faced in terms of the threat and the tools that are available to them.

So other than the fact that he blew the cover off the torture regime and refused to publicly endorse waterboarding and putting prisoners in coffins with poisonous bugs crawling all over them, he and Bush are two peas in a pod. You’d think the right would be ecstatic.

There’s a lesson in this: Democracy generally doesn’t apply to warmaking. Until the last weeks of the 2008 campaign, it was dominated by the differences in approach to war and foreign policy between Barack Obama and George W. Bush and many of my friends told me that the main reason the preferred Obama over all the other candidates was his bold stand in that arena.

That was election talk. It’s been that way my whole life. Obama and his people figured out early on that they share power with the Military Industrial Complex and they had little desire to use political capital to exercise what they have. What they didn’t figure out is that (since 1968, anyway) Democratic presidents get screwed regardless. The MIC knows it has the place locked up — at this point it’s about the spoils, and they get slightly fewer goodies and more petty political hassles under Democrats. (Plus there’s the macho Jesus factor.)

I don’t know what to do about it. I guess you have to hope that Democrats who run like Obama ran in 08 will want to at least make some changes around the margins that will hold over time. But that’s about the best you can hope for as long as America is the world’s dominant imperialist power. Until that changes — and it will, because it’s unaffordable — we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking we are voting for people who will do these things differently, regardless of what they say on the stump. There are other differences between candidates and parties that can make a difference — this isn’t one.

Change on this will come from something other than democratic action. Unfortunately, dead eyed robots like Hayden don’t make you feel very secure that this change won’t be the result of a cataclysmic mistake. After all, we know for a fact that “careful” and “precision” aren’t words you can reasonably apply to what’s happening at the Pakistan border right now.

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Zombies Love Tea

by digby

Dave Weigel is attending the tea party convention and reports that yet another 90s wingnut zombie has emerged from the crypt, none other than ex-secret service loon Gary Aldrich, last seen accusing the Clintons of hanging pornographic Christmas ornaments on the White house Christmas tree:

“This is a typical liberal,” said Aldrich at his morning session, pointing to a slide of Hannibal Lecter. “They’re some of the nastiest people you could possibly imagine.” He switched up the Lecter photo with photos of enemy reporters, like Chris Matthews, “perky”Katie Couric, and Rachel Maddow, pausing briefly to make fun of Maddow’s haircut. And on the way into the room, he said, he browbeat a reporter for filming an interview with a goofy-looking tea party activist who was carrying a gun. “That’s what’s going to show up on the nightly news,” he said. His audience nodded their heads knowingly.

And so Aldrich’s advice to activists fit cleanly under the heading of “ways to seem paranoid.” Don’t travel alone, he said: He himself had advised a prominent Tea Party leader to stop traveling solo around the country. Choose friends wisely, because allies can betray you and leak to reporters. Demand conditions from the media before agreeing to interviews. Also, learn to use a gun, especially if you live in an open carry state. (The friction between this and his previous statement was not noted.)

I thought he had finally been vanquished, but I turned over another rock recently and found Aldrich slithering underneath as a member of the Council for Nation Policy:

[O]over the weekend, TPP [Tea party Patriots] leaders met with members of the Council for National Policy to try to raise some money. CNP is a secretive and powerful club that has worked to make the Republican Party more socially conservative. Founded in 1981 by Tim LaHaye, the evangelical minister, political organizer, and author of the Left Behind books about the coming apocalypse, CNP’s board reads like a who’s who of the GOP’s evangelical wing.

According to the group’s 2008 IRS filings, board members include Elsa Prince, a wealthy contributor to religious right causes, particularly anti-gay marriage efforts. (She is perhaps better known as the mother of Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater.) Joining her is the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, Phyllis Schlafly, direct mail king Richard Viguerie, and Becky Norton Dunlop, the vice president for external relations at the conservative Heritage Foundation. By-invitation-only members of the group have included: Sarah Palin; the American Family Association’s Don Wildmon; former FBI agent Gary Aldrich (now a TPP board member) who’s famous for writing a book claiming that the Clintons hung sex toys on the White House Christmas tree; and former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, the chairman of FreedomWorks.

It looks like all the zombies are joining together for one big teabag extravaganza.

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Witchypoo

by digby

Poor Christine. All she’s going to get is a lucrative career as a right wing spokesmodel, author and motivational speaker. She might even get her own show. It’s all worth it:

Mainstreaming Insanity

by digby

The NY Times profiles a new American hero for our times:

It is in this genteel setting that Ms. Geller, 52 and a single mother of four, wakes each morning shortly after 7, switches on her laptop and wages a form of holy war through Atlas Shrugs, a Web site that attacks Islam with a rhetoric venomous enough that PayPal at one point branded it a hate site. Working here — often in fuzzy slippers — she has called for the removal of the Dome of the Rock from atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem; posted doctored pictures of Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court justice, in a Nazi helmet; suggested the State Department was run by “Islamic supremacists”; and referred to health care reform as an act of national rape.

Ms. Geller has been writing since 2005, but this summer she skyrocketed to national prominence as the firebrand in chief opposing Park51, the planned Muslim community center she denounces as “the ground zero mega-mosque.”

Operating largely outside traditional Washington power centers — and, for better or worse, without traditional academic, public-policy or journalism credentials — Ms. Geller, with a coterie of allies, has helped set the tone and shape the narrative for a divisive national debate over Park51 (she calls the developer a “thug” and a “lowlife”). In the process, she has helped bring into the mainstream a concept that after 9/11 percolated mainly on the fringes of American politics: that terrorism by Muslims springs not from perversions of Islam but from the religion itself. Her writings, rallies and television appearances have both offended and inspired, transforming Ms. Geller from an Internet obscurity, who once videotaped herself in a bikini as she denounced “Islamofascism,” into a media commodity who has been profiled on “60 Minutes” and whose phraseology has been adopted by Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin.

She’s just so darned colorful. The fact that she’s a twisted, genocidal maniac is just part of her charm, I guess. In fact, she’s just an old-fasioned girl, much like one of those cute anti-communist housewives during the Mad Men era.

I was surprised to learn that her hatred and bigotry is grounded in scholarship and study. Although her rejection of the lunatic neocon Daniel Pipes was most unexpected — until I read the reason.

IT was 9/11 that drove Ms. Geller to her keyboard. She had barely heard of Osama bin Laden, she said, and “felt guilty that I didn’t know who had attacked my country.”

She spent the next year educating herself about Islam, reading Bat Ye’or, a French writer who focuses on tensions over Muslim immigrants in Europe; Ibn Warraq, the pseudonym for a Pakistani who writes about his rejection of Islam; and Daniel Pipes, whom she ultimately rejected because he believes in the existence of a moderate Islam.

Ms. Geller commented prolifically on Web sites focused on Islamic militancy, like Little Green Footballs. “She was always one of the first ones to start going way out there,” said Mr. Johnson. (Ms. Geller, in turn, dismissed him as “a reviled figure” who had abandoned his principles.) …

During the Lebanon-Israel war later that year, Ms. Geller video-blogged from an Israeli beach, flicking water at the camera, arching her bikini-bared back provocatively and equating Palestinians with Hamas…

And then she really went nuts:

The next turning point for Ms. Geller, a few months later, was a “counter-jihad” conference in Brussels. It threw her — and Mr. Spencer of Jihad Watch — together with anti-Islamic Europeans whom even some allies considered too extreme, like Filip Dewinter of Vlaams Belang, an offshoot of a Belgian party banned that was for racism and was allegedly founded by Nazi sympathizers.

Mr. Johnson of Little Green Footballs, a former comrade, attacked Ms. Geller and Mr. Spencer — whose interest in Islam began with family lore about a Greek great-grandfather killed by Turks — for meeting with “neo-Nazis.” They insisted they were not responsible for the views of everyone who stands in a room with them (though they have lobbed similar guilt-by-association accusations at Muslims, including the people behind Park51).

Ms. Geller went on to champion as patriotic the English Defense League, which opposes the building of mosques in Britain and whose members have been photographed wearing swastikas. (In the interview, Ms. Geller said the swastika-wearers must have been “infiltrators” trying to discredit the group.) And she formed a lasting partnership with Mr. Spencer.

It is partly philosophical: They and the anti-Islam movement in Europe share a fear of Muslim takeover. And it is partly practical: He helps her raise money and source some assertions; she helps him spread his ideas and, he said, “get results.”

I don’t even want to know what “results” she hopes to get next.

I’ve been following Atlas Shrugged since 2005. If anyone would have told me then in five years she’d be heading a national anti-Muslim movement and would be profiled in the NY Times, I would have thought it was a joke. She was always at the very fringe of the hysterical war bloggers, set apart from the worst genocidal hatemongers only by her pulchritudinous crudity. In this insane political period, she’s thoroughly mainstream. Wow. Just wow.

h/t to bb

Saturday Night At The Movies

Don’t ask, don’t tell: The Freebie

By Dennis Hartley

This is so perfect. Any thoughts on how we can sabotage it?

Men and Women stoop to conquer
Men and Women stoop so low
Men and Women filled with doubt
They scream about what they don’t know

-from Myn and Wymnyn, by Uncle Bonsai

The tagline for the romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally triggered a flurry of unisex panel discussions around the water cooler back in 1989 with a simple rhetorical question: “Can two friends sleep together and still love each other in the morning?” In her 2010 directorial debut, The Freebie, actress Katie Aselton (The Puffy Chair) ups the ante by asking “Can two lovers award each other a mutual pass to sleep with someone else for one night…and still love each other in the morning?” Perhaps the bigger question is: “Are human beings even wired in any way, shape or form to remain truly monogamous?”

Aselton casts herself as Annie, one half of an attractive, happily married thirty-something L.A. couple (no kids). Well, at least on the surface, it would appear that Annie and her Jackson Browne lookalike hubby Darren (Dax Shepard) are a fun-loving, happy-go-lucky pair. In fact, they are so goddamned good looking, textbook compatible and in tune with each other’s feelings that you just want to throttle them. Well, not literally-but I think you catch my drift; especially if you’re as bitter and disillusioned as me (and isn’t everyone?).

However, you know what they say about that dreaded “7-year itch” (and I’ll let you guess how many years Annie and Darren have been betrothed). The first harbinger of trouble in paradise arrives one night, following an awkward (if amicable) mission abort on a lovemaking session. Before any uncomfortable conversation can ensue, Darren quickly suggests a “race” to see which one of them can first complete a minute crossword, and Annie eagerly agrees to this whimsical distraction from the elephant in the bedroom (I was reminded of the classic scene in Annie Hallwhere Woody Allen is ranting in the middle of the night to his significant other about the JFK assassination, and she suddenly blurts out with “You’re using this conspiracy theory as an excuse to avoid sex with me.”). But of course, That Conversation does occur a few nights later, when Darren can’t sleep. While talking, they have a mutual epiphany that they haven’t made love once in “this calendar year” (my favorite line in the film). They can no longer deny that, despite their continuing, genuine commitment to each other, their sex life could use some sprucing up.

This is the point in the film where you may feel compelled to start yelling at the screen (something along the lines of “No! No! Don’t do it-BAD idea!”). So, what is this brilliant idea? Darren and Annie agree to give each other a “free pass” for one evening; in short, mutual “permission” to have a one night stand outside of the marriage, with a few “don’t ask, don’t tell” caveats. The theory is that, by allowing each other to sow some wild oats for an evening, this will assuage any sublimated desires to stray that may be lurking in either partner’s libido, and in turn this will strengthen their love and trust in each other. This is an interesting idea, in theory, I suppose-but if you know anything about human nature, as I said, you may be yelling at the screen at this point, begging them not to do it.

They do it. God help them. Why do people always tinker? It’s never perfect enough, is it? Is anyone ever truly happy and content, no matter how good they’ve got it? Silly creatures. There are unanticipated consequences, natch. Still, you will be compelled to stick with these two idiots, to just see how it all plays out (in for a penny, in for a pound).

Actually, I probably would have been doing even more yelling at the screen, had this been one of your typical, assembly-line Hollywood hack-produced rom-coms (undoubtedly starring Sandra Bullock and Matthew McConaughey), but, much to the benefit of the viewer, it is not. Aselton has delivered a well-acted, refreshingly realistic look at the complexities of love and modern relationships; it’s warm, touching, funny and engaging without having to lean on gimmicky or hackneyed plot contrivances. I liked the fact that there is no pat denouement, wrapped up and delivered with a bow; because real relationships (and our lives in general) rarely play out that way. I understand that many of the scenes were improvised; this gives the film a naturalistic Cassavetes vibe at times (with a breezy running time of 78 minutes, though, it’s very “un” Cassavetes, in one respect). Because this is a low-budget indie, with limited distribution, I realize that it’s not destined to set the world on fire, but it’s such a rare treat these days to discover a perceptive film for grownups that has something substantive to offer, without wearing out its welcome. Kind of like a perfect relationship-and if you’re lucky enough to be in one, dear reader, it would behoove you to heed the film’s message-if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

What were they thinking? Modern Romance, New Age , Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, She’s Gotta Have It, The War of the Roses, Husbands and Wives, Don’s Party, The Ice Storm, Reds, Henry & June.

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