"Did you forget your glove?"

"I finded it!"



"Nooo! I was gonna find it!!!"

Comedy is when a white man falls into an open sewer and dies.

Jack Hamilton has a piece in Slate subtitled "Forget Walter White. Eastbound & Down is the most original, disturbing, wrenching show on television. (And it’s hilarious, too.)"

If we live in a golden age of great television shows, the vast majority of these shows have featured angst-ridden white male protagonists. This shift from heroes to anti-heroes has been frequently and rightly characterized as a broader interrogation of masculinity itself, one occasioned by crises of its creators, crises of culture, or both. But while current prestige-magnets like Mad Men and Breaking Bad might offer revisionist takes on white maleness, they also offer their audiences renewed fantasies of the same. Young men buy suits cut to look like Don Draper’s; aggrieved Internet communities close ranks in protection of Walter White’s right to be the One Who Knocks.

So what's great about Eastbound & Down is that it deprives the beleaguered white male of hope.

Eastbound & Down isn’t so much a show about white masculinity in transition or decline as it is a biting send-up of male fantasy itself. Powers fancies himself an alpha dog, gunslinging, rock ’n’ roll outlaw, a fiction he believes to be reality, and to which he believes himself to be entitled. Kenny Powers’ problem, in a sense, is that he’s watched too much TV. If Mad Men is a drama about the encroaching demise of a certain white male dominance, Eastbound & Down is a satire of its vacancy, and its bankruptcy. The latter is a whole lot funnier, and often more daring.

Because hopeless, pathetic decline is hilarious. To paraphrase Mel Brooks: Tragedy is when a woman or person of color feels disrespected or bullied. Comedy is when a white man falls into an open sewer and dies. (Here's the disemparaphrased Mel Brooks quote.)

I quoted the subtitle of the article above — because it made the content of the article clearer— but now I see enough additional meaning to make me want to quote the title. It's "Breaking Ball." That's not just a play on "Breaking Bad" and a reference to crushing testicles, it's an allusion to the show's milieu, baseball. Eastbound & Down shows baseball as "gross and debauched, a morass of juiced-up players, abusive fans, godforsaken locales, bored and boring spectacle."

Many of the actors on-screen... boast hilariously unathletic physiques, and seem to have last donned a glove back in the days when home plate came with a tee. It’s the ugliest depiction of the game in recent memory, a hilarious and welcome desecration of one of the old white America’s favorite civic religions.

Take that, white America.

CORRECTION: This post originally ended with this parenthetical:

(And can golf ever catch a break? It's the most coolness-resistant activity on earth. It's the sport most associated with Obama, and the man most associated with the sport is Tiger Woods, and yet it's still the domain of the old white guys — fat old white guys.)

Meade proofreads and corrects my inference that "tee" was a joke about golf. I guess that says something about the connections in my brain. Running down the out-of-shape, declining white males led me to thinking about golf. The reference is to the children's game of tee ball. I don't think children playing tee ball wear a batting glove. That's what threw me off. But obviously, they do wear a glove to play defense in tee ball.

ADDED: Meade reads my correction and informs me that children playing tee ball do wear batting gloves. I'm surprised. There's so much more gear these days, what with helmets to tricycle and knee pads to roller skate. And then as I'm writing this, Meade interrupts to inform me that the author of the article meant a fielder's glove, which I know, but my point is, when I'm reading and words are used to call up an image in the mind, and I see "tee" and "glove," I picture a person at a tee wearing a glove, and that takes me to golf, not tee ball. Or is that how the female brain works?

"It was a lighthearted moment in the midst of a grim few days for the White House..."

But Obama's comical stylings didn't play as well this week as they have in the past. I'm reading "Obama puts Marines on umbrella duty, irking conservatives" only because I'm interested in figuring out why it's #1 on the "most popular" list in the sidebar at The Washington Post. Something cute about the headline, I thought. But reading it — and looking at that photograph of Obama intentionally clowning with the white-gloved Marine — I'm seeing something tragic. The old ways — that made us love him — don't work anymore. The gentle, slow-talking, stalling with "uhs" for Woody Allen-like timing:

"Uh I am going to go ahead and ask, folks, why don’t we get a couple of Marines — they’re going to look good next to us — just 'cause uh uh — I wanna — I’ve got a change of suits but I don’t know about uh uh uh our prime uh our prime minister. Uh there we go. That’s good. [To the reporters:] You guys, I’m sorry about but but let let let uh uh mmm uh let me uh uh uuuuhhh make sure that I answer a specific question...."

We see the rain failing on his dark suit, and maybe we think about how, yes, that's the White House in back of him and he does have his closets in there, full of suits... empty suits... skeletons in the uh uh uh... But he cares about Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who came all the way from Turkey, probably not to hear Obama grilled with uh uh uh specific questions. He's probably got another suit or 2 in his uh uh suitcase. Heh ha... suitcase... suits in suitcases... it's like gloves in the glove compartment... do you put gloves in the glove compartment... heh heh... Who puts gloves in the glove compartment? I mean... really... Gloves in the glove compartment! What an idea, am I right? Come on! That's funny,  people, come on, but but let let let uh uh mmm uh let me uh uh uuuuhhh make sure that I answer a specific question....

There's something so sad about that picture. The gloved Marine answering the call of duty from the Commander in Chief, performing the duty with crisp precision, even as Obama's outstretched hand adjusted his elbow position, even as he knows it violates Marine Corps uniform regulation for a male Marine to carry an umbrella. I know that regulation from reading the WaPo's #1 most popular article. The same rule applies in all branches of the military, and always only for males, not for females:

An attempt to change the policy in the 1990s failed, with some suggesting that there was something effeminate about umbrellas.

“They seem to be very nervous what constitutes unmanly behavior,” said Cynthia Enloe, a professor at Clark University who researched military uniform codes in the book “Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives.” 

Isn't it unmanly to be very nervous, especially about being unmanly? But who were these "some" who suggested carrying an umbrella is "effeminate"? And who were these "irked conservatives"? WaPo only cites an email from the conservative Move America Forward PAC, but that's not so much expressing irritation at misuse of the Marines for umbrella duty as it is using that umbrella-holding duty as a symbol of the failure to act during the Benghazi attack. The email read — we're told — "Rain: 'Hold My Umbrella.' Benghazi: 'Stand Down.'"

If umbrella-holding conveys a message of unmanliness, it is a vivid image of impotence. It's a symbol.

Purchase of the day.

From the April 29, 2013 Amazon Associates Report:

Victorinox Cutlery PerformanceShield Cut Resistant Glove, Large

By using the Althouse portal, you can buy things you want, pay nothing extra, and make a contribution to this blog. We notice. We appreciate it. And only if the glove fits will we know it's... you.

The Althouse Amazon portal: comfortable, flexible, durable, not USDA disapproved, AND no paper cuts.

"I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-That’s..."

"... and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: 'Are you going to the Ordways'? the Herseys'? the Schultzes'?' and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands."

That other sentence — "At the hookah bar, Jordan and Emily Wernet, a 25-year-old freelance illustrator of comics and tattoos, joked about the grotesqueness of a hand appearing inside a belly and about 'parasites,' 'popping one out,' and 'horrible little grubs' in the midst of more serious conversation about their fears of relinquishing sole ownership of one’s own body" —  made some readers feel that there was a "Gatsby" sentence gestating somewhere inside the womb of my Blogger account, so I thought I'd better pop out this post. I hope you don't find it grotesque, this string of words that F. Scott Fitzgerald, in full possession of the autonomy of authorship, determined to be, in fact, a sentence, worthy of a place in the pages of "The Great Gatsby."

And I hope it's not horrible that I ripped it out of his context and put it in my context as I, clasping tightly to my bloggerly autonomy, decided that this — this! — is a blog post. It is not for the professors, journalists, and literary critics to resolve the difficult question of when some quotes from this-or-that tossed together with some connective prose amount to a blog post. It's enough to say there's a divergence of thinking on this most sensitive and difficult question, and therefore it's up to me to decide what is worthy of publication here. My blog, my choice.

This "Gatsby" sentence has a simple structure. The subject is "I" and the predicate is "remember." How many sentences in the history of humanity begin "I remember...."? There's no end to where you can go from there (especially if you're not hung up on nonfiction and truthtelling). So string along the memories — the memorabilia, the "things... worthy of being remembered."

I remember the Michael Jackson memorabilia, the Bruce Lee memorabilia, the Martin Luther King Jr. memorabilia, Malcolm X memorabilia, the Jimi Hendrix memorabilia, the $43,350 Rolex watch, the fur capes and parkas....

I mean... I remember the fur coats.... They — the girls returning from Miss This-or-That’s — weren't wearing their fur in cape or parka form back in 1922.

Things remembered: fur coats, chatter, hands waving, matchings of invitations, and long green tickets. These remembered things give the reader a sense of the incompletely delineated human beings. Who are the unnamed girls and who are the "we"? There's the overspecificity of the people offstage, Ordways, the Herseys, and the Schultzes. There's the silly half-specificity of Miss This-or-That. These people — or, really, places (hence the possessive) — are, like fur coats and gloves, appurtenances to the human beings we are trying to see in this picture.

This is a mass of faceless humanity, cluttered with hands, waving and clasping. Hands appears twice in the sentence — the grotesqueness of a hand appearing — first, waving (connecting with others), and second, clasping a ticket (intent on getting to one's predetermined destination). The hands of the others reaching out are grubby and horrible and we've got a fear of relinquishing sole ownership of our long green tickets.

Purchase of the day.

From the February 13, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report.

Pentalic Sketch Book, Hardbound, 8-1/2-Inch by 11-Inchby Pentalic (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $1.10)

 Honorable mentions:

BILT Tornado Waterproof Textile Motorcycle Gloves - 2XL, Blackby Bilt (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $1.20)

Nautica Cologne by Nautica (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $1.06)

"Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day" [Paperback]Jonathan Bergmann (Author), Aaron Sams (Author) (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $1.09)

... and 62 other items purchased — at no additional cost to the buyer — that all just seem to keep Althouse... in the mood.

Gift idea.

Slippers!

AND: Hat.

AND: The Official Althouse Gloves (for when it's not that cold).