I have a lot more time for Ralph Nader than most people I know who’ve given money to the Barack Obama campaign. I don’t have any intention of voting for him, and I find a lot of what he’s about to be personally distasteful, but I’ve never begrudged him his right to run for President, and I’d like to see him invited to participate in the debates. Especially this year, when there are five scheduled (including one sponsored by Google, who can break the old media stranglehold on the process that everyone’s been complaining of for so long), there’s no reason why at least some of them can’t include candidates from smaller parties.

It works to the strategic advantage of those who’d like to see the most progressive possible Democrat elected to the office (accepting the reality that the only options are a Democrat and a Republican) to include Ralph Nader in the debates, too. Obama’s always been at his best when he’s got a foil that forces him to run to the left- when John Edwards was in the race, we saw him do things like recruit Lawrence Lessig to write his technology platform; when Clinton was still around, he pledged that his first action as President would be to investigate all of Bush’s signing statements for their legality; even right now, it’s hard to imagine he’d have been so willing to talk down to his base as he endorsed the FISA bill if the primary were still going on.

Nader’s presence in the debates would force Obama to address things that wouldn’t otherwise be brought up, in order to contrast more sharply with McCain. Nader’s candidacy in general is an opportunity to keep Obama from pulling too far to the right (within certain parameters- the Naderites who will never vote for him under any circumstances don’t really have much influence, as politicians are never going to feel beholden to people who won’t vote for them), and for that alone, we should remember that he’s a useful tool.

But.

That shit stops sounding so compelling when he drops his bizarre race-baiting nonsense about how obama talks white. That’s the point at which you remember who Ralph Nader really is- the guy who sold out the Greens in 2004 because he preferred the individual power in running as an independent, only to demand they drop their own candidate and endorse him so he could have ballot access in more states, the one who continued campaigning in Florida in 2000 rather than focus on states where he could better achieve his stated goal of getting the 5% of the popular vote that would secure the party federal matching funds in 2004… Ultimately, he’s a guy who isn’t above a sleazy cheap shot with potentially divisive ramifications if it’ll get him on the news.

Ralph Nader has no business determining what a non-white way to talk is. There are some privileges white people don’t have, and one of them is determining the way leaders of color ought to present themselves. I’m going to go ahead and assume that, based on the context of the quote, that he meant Obama should be talking about issues the way Jesse Jackson does, not that, like, he should be holding press conferences where he sounds like Omar from the wire. But even then- how condescending and absurd is it for Ralph Nader to pretend that he better understands the authentic black leadership experience than a grown black man who’s lived in America his whole adult life? Nader is hardly an authority on what the real black experience is, and for him to presume that this is a line of attack with any validity at all would be a lot like me declaring that Obama’s an Uncle Tom because he looks like a character from the boondocks. All of this the number one thing a black politician should be bullshit is a sleazy way to claim an authority that he never earned, because shit like this is the only way Nader gets on the news. Either he knows that he’s got no credibility here and is saying it because he wants some attention- in which case he’s another politician saying whatever shit he has to try and score points- or he honestly thinks he knows more about the experience of being a black man in America than Barack Obama does. Either one of them proves an important point.

ralph nader is a worthless judas goat with no moral compass. - Hunter S Thompson, 2004

Like I said- I’ve defended Nader a lot in the past. No candidate for office is entitled to run without challengers, and his presence serves as a reminder to people running for President that they have to work to earn the votes of his supporters, rather than expect them as a given simply because there’s a lack of other options. But I was thinking about this quote after Nader’s racist bullshit fell out of his mouth so casually, and there’s a sublime phrasing here that reminds you exactly how skilled a writer HST was. Because he may or may not have a moral compass- though his treatment of the Greens raises the question. He’s certainly not worthless. But judas goat… Man. The precision of that description is downright surgical.

A judas goat is an animal used in slaughterhouses; basically, they train a goat to associate with cattle and then have it lead them from the stockyard to be slaughtered. The goat’s then returned to live the good life until the next batch of animals need to be led to their doom.

And when you think about Nader’s message- the one he hammered home in 2000, and then again in ‘04 after John Kerry hurt his feelings- that there’s no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, that it doesn’t matter who’s in charge. Well,tell that to kids who joined the National Guard for the promise of some college money and ended up in Iraq; tell that to the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay; tell that to the people in New Orleans who lost everything when anti-government ideologues were put in charge of FEMA… I don’t blame Nader for those things, but it underscores something important- it’s easy for him to say it doesn’t matter who’s in charge, because to him, it doesn’t. At the end of the day he’s an old white millionaire, and old white millionaires do not usually have much to expect in the way of suffering no matter who’s in charge. He’ll return to the pen, safe and well-fed, no matter what happens. Like a judas goat.

But I don’t mean a hatchet job on the guy. No, seriously. Because he can be important, and he can be useful. But as long as he continues to say and do whatever it takes to get on the news, just like a regular politician, then I’ll write about him like he’s a regular politician. And those people are fucked up.

It’s Saturday, and everybody pretends that they don’t use the Internet on weekends for some reason, so I’ll bash out one of those posts about books and things, since nobody cares much about those. This is part of the ongoing project of recording all of the books I’ve read this year, so everyone can know how fucking smart I am. Or something. Mostly because I’d been telling myself for years that I would track these things, and never did.

Anyway, two down this week- end zone by Don DeLillo and the gonzo way by Anita Thompson.

the gonzo way is a slim book, less than a hundred pages, by Hunter S Thompson’s widow about the lessons she learned from her husband. They married when she was in her late twenties and he was 66. The book collects a lot of anecdotes about Thompson that were in his previous books, but it provides a context for them that had always been missing, to some extent- because he was a teacher in a lot of ways, but his audience was never exactly his student. So his wife’s perspective on these things is fascinating, because she writes as both a student of the man’s life, which only makes sense given the age difference, but also as someone who understood him better than most. Couple that with a pervasive sense of loss and grief that connect the book to a broader set of circumstances, and you get about as complete a reading experience in ninety pages as you can hope for.

  end zone, though, is wacky. Most early DeLillo is kinda wacky. The characters don’t have any real internal motivation, and their external actions and choices are therefore sorta random. The novel is about the nuclear war-obsessed fullback for a small West Texas college football team, but all of the players are ciphers, more or less interchangeable. Even the narrator could easily be substituted for any of the other characters in the book, even the teachers or coaches or girlfriends (this is DeLillo, mind you, so girlfriends are never going to be particularly well-considered characters). They all talk in these absurd speeches about things that are the opposite of naturalistic or even logical- it can be really tedious to read until, at some point, you cross a threshold and then it isn’t. I don’t know how he does it, and it makes me want to go back and re-read all of his other early books to figure it out. Because there’s a point at which all of these characters talking relative gibberish suddenly takes on a flow and carries you throughout the book. It has no ending- it just stops- and no plot, either. No conflict, no arc, no protagonist or antagonist of any sort- all of the things that you know a story needs to be a story is missing, and when the babble suddenly becomes coherent, it doesn’t matter even a little bit.

Throughout the book, DeLillo drops lines like this out of nowhere-

‘anatole, i think you should forget your diet. you’d be a better football player at two seventy-five. but a greater man at three hundred plus.’

‘i don’t know squat about football. i’m an indoors man. but i know the whys and wherefores of the entertainment dollar. people want spectacle plus personality. i’ve handled country rock freaks. i’ve handled midget wrestlers. once i handled a song stylist named mary boots weldon who had her goddamn throat removed because of cancer and kept right on singing out of the little voice box they put in their, croaking out these tearful ballads and drawing bigger crowds than ever. mary boots weldon. jesus, what an act.’

‘i don’t know how people can chew just one stick of gum,’ george dole said. ‘i chew all five.’

in my room later i became depressed. no american acepts the deputy’s badge without misgivings; centuries of heroic lawlessness have captured our blood. i felt responsible for a vague betrayal of some local code or lore. i was now part of the apparatus. no longer did i circle and watch, content enough to be outside the center and even sufficiently cunning to plan a minor raid or two. now i was the law’s small tin glitter. suck in that gut, i thought.

‘i’ve never punched or slapped a woman,’ he said. ‘i like to body-check them instead, like a hockey player.’

It’s like a dadaist episode of the office where every character is played by Creed. But then at some point it isn’t, and it becomes powerful and sad.

DeLillo is an interesting writer. I had thought I was done with him, but I saw this book at the Islington North library, where it caught my eye- it’s an import, as books that focus on American football, even by writers with as much international acclaim as Don DeLillo, don’t tend to get published in the UK. There’s a lot to learn from him, and I may have to sit down with great jones street and americana and try to break them apart and see what exactly makes them work. It’s something I can’t quite put my finger on.

Huh- a quick look at the book at Wikipedia informs me that there’s a film version in development now. The plot summary section at IMDB makes it seem like an entirely different monster than the book. Maybe they just really like the title and the character names?

Speaking of terrible film adaptations, here’s something- you know that movie wanted that just came out? Boy, does it suck.

 wanted is based on a graphic novel by Mark Millar and JG Jones. The comic is weird and creepy and really mean-spirited; it’s kind of generally unlikable, but in a way that has such a sense of wild fun to it that you can forgive the fact that you’re reading about horrible people and see where it takes you. You’re never asked to directly sign-on to all of the terrible shit that happens- you’re expected to be horrified when the ostensible hero of the piece starts killing and raping indiscriminately because he’s learned he can get away with it. But what the book pulls off well is that it never offers redemption, or even consequences for these things- it’s not a moral story, and it succeeds because it avoids ever trying to be one. There’s no pretense that maybe they’re doing the right thing by killing people for no good reason at all, just the steady awareness that it’s all a comic book and we’ve spent decades reading stories about the good guys, and maybe it was time to see one where the bad guys win. Not only win, but do so easily, without anyone else even putting up a fight. When Wesley, the protagonist, successfully stops the worse guys in the end, he learns no lessons about himself or the world in which he lives, and he never gives a shit about anyone other than himself. It’s all kind of unpleasant and immature, but it’s no worse than fight club. It’s just a story of bad people- think of it as what might happen if Celine wrote superhero comics. It ends with Wesley directly addressing the reader, telling you how much he hates you. The closing words are this is my face while i’m fucking you in the ass.

So you know what you’re in for when you open the book. That’s kind of the whole point.

The movie’s got none of that weird, creepy, mean-spirited fun to it. In fact, it’s got nothing in common with the book at all, except the title, a couple of character names, and Wesley’s backstory. The result is a super-confused picture in which bad guys who aren’t really bad go off and do bad things for vague reasons, and then Wesley becomes kind of a good guy for no reason, and there are big, dumb speeches throughout. I honestly have no idea why they bought the rights. It’s not like wesley gibson and the fox are such spectacular character names that they couldn’t have given them different ones and not bothered with an adaptation, and it’s not like based on a graphic novel by mark millar published by top cow studios ensures box office gold or anything.

But I suppose it comes from the same place as adapting a thirty-five year old novel about the fear of nuclear war and turning it into a romantic comedy. What the hell?

I just got really excited after checking my Wordpress stats, which tell me, among other things, which search terms lead people to dansolomon.com. This is how I discovered that, if you google rkelly pees on girl, my website is fifth(!) on the list. Which is awesome, and something anyone would be proud of. It was short-lived, however, because I quickly noticed that it was a typo- there’s no space between the r and the kelly. If you google the more correct r kelly pees on girl, however, my site doesn’t turn up until the second one down on page eighteen. It’s a little heartbreaker, and if you, friend or casual reader, would do me the great service of posting a link to either this entry or www.dansolomon.com generally with the link title r kelly pees on girl so I can boost my ranking on that particular search, it would validate way too much of my existence right now to be healthy. I would receive a similar thrill to the one I felt upon the initial discovery, but with the added bonus of knowing that y’all made it happen. Is this a strange thing to ask? I am but a simple boy, after all, and my joys are equally simple.