Parabasis

The Rise of Self-Help Rock

By Isaac Butler

Here in Minneapolis, we have a station run by our local NPR affiliate called "The Current."  The Current mainly plays up-to-date indie rock. They play a lot of local bands (including, unfortunately, Minnesota rap) and some classics, but their focus is on up to date offerings fromt he poppier side of indie rock.

And I've noticed lately the rise of something that I can only call Self Help Rock, and I was wondering if anyone else has noticed this too. Unfortunately, I can't provide a lot of specific song names, as they rarely have the DJs cut in to tell you what you've been listening to, and by then I've forgotten the order and so on.

Self Help Rock tends to have soaring music with pounding drum beats and lots of arpeggios a la Coldplay or U2. The songs tend to be epic. And the lyrical content is overtly preachy (and generally optimistic) and about how you should seize the day. And they're almost always in the second person.  The best example of this I can remember is this awful Death Cab For Cutie song "You Are A Tourist":

 

I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, or if it's just the DJs at the Current, but this must be stopped. We cannot allow indie rock to become the musical equivalent of Eckhardt Tolle. 

Unconscious Bias and Trayvon Martin

By Isaac Butler

Philip Atiba Goff drops some (literal) science about how subconscious processes affect our views of the other:

This results from what we refer to as the "cascade of suspicion," the waves of psychological errors that can warp the perceptions of otherwise reasonable individuals. For instance, in a series of psychological studies, Jennifer Eberhardt, colleagues and I found that merely thinking about crime causes individuals to attend to Black male faces and ignore White ones -- a kind of subconscious racial profiling. Similarly, race can also literally shape what we see when looking at Black men, with research by other researchers demonstrating that both civilians and law enforcement are more likely to "see" weapons in the hands of unarmed Black men than unarmed White men.

In my own recent research, these same biases can cause even otherwise gentle individuals to literally perceive Black children as less than human -- mentally associating them with apes and seeing them as far older than they actually are. Importantly, in each of these bodies of research literature, a bigoted heart is not required to "see" suspicion in Black faces. Just as importantly, these psychological processes affect the vast majority of individuals -- and not just "those people" outside of our social circles. That is, many of us with genuinely non-racist hearts still make these mistakes. Our minds are colored by race -- and there is no running from it. Without knowing the science, every Black parent understands what that means for Black boys: making someone else afraid can be deadly.

RTWT here. I've found I have to force myself to pay attention to the Martin case. Not because it doesn't matter. It matters. A great deal.  Rather, I find I have to force myself to pay attention because I find it so unbelievably  heartbreaking. And just the same way that Obama thinks about his hypothetical son, I think about my real life older brother, and am thankful that he grew up in a city that's predominantly African American and one with gun laws so strict they were eventually ruled unconstitutional.

 

Critical Responses

by 99 Seats

This morning I read this at the Onion A.V. Club, and then I read this at Flavorwire. Both pieces look at work that was terribly reviewed in its time, but has since gone on to not only long life, but great importance and critical acclaim. It started me thinking: why doesn't this seem to happen in theatre?

I'd thought about it a few weeks back, when I caught the Signature's production of The Lady From Dubuque by Edward Albee. As is well known, the play was a massive flop in 1980, part of Albee's "lost" period of failure and alcoholism. The new production has faired far, far better. Personally, I enjoyed it greatly as a play and a production, and it felt like something that would be perfectly at home on Broadway (and still might make it back there).

But I can't really think of any other work that received terrible reviews in its first run and has gone on to become a major work. Can you? It often seems like the original critical response is either treated as gospel or gets lost down the memory hole entirely. And I'm not talking about plays that received bad reviews and have gone on to commercial success. Look at the movies on the Flavorwire list: there are bona fide film classics on there. Same goes for Devo (and there's always that rumor about Rolling Stone's first review of Nirvana's Nevermind). These are considered cultural touchstones now.

Why doesn't this happen in theatre? A bad play is considered a bad play, seemingly forever. Do we simply allow our critics more power? Does the rare chance of a remount of a failure feed into it? Or are our critics somehow better, able to critique a work in its bones? Or are the bad reviews disappeared by future success? I heard this story once: when Albee had his play The Zoo Story read at the Actors Studio for the first time, the initial audience response was pretty negative. (If you know the Actors Studio, that's not necessarily surprising.) After a few minutes of people giving pointed criticism to Albee, Norman Mailer, who'd championed the play, spoke up. He said, "I think this is the best one-act play I've ever heard." At that point, the tenor in the room changed and everyone fell over themselves to praise the play. Sometimes I wonder if this dynamic works on a larger scale in theatre. When one person, deemed important enough by the community, makes a pronouncement, it has the weight of fact. And we all hop in line (with a few contrarians taking the opposite position just because). And once it's a fact, that's it: this play is good. This play is bad. There's no argument, no rediscovery.

Or maybe I'm wrong and missing a whole chunk of theatre history. What say you all?

Some Good News In The New Play Sector

By Isaac Butler

The Lark is administering a brand new grant from the Jerome foundation that will pay out to winners something $40K over two years.  The twist? It's for early-career writers and definition of early career is actually quite reasonable and generous:

The Jerome New York Fellowship is open to applicants who are New York City or Minnesota state residents as well as citizens or permanent residents of, and eligible to work in, the U.S. Fellows must commit to maintaining residency in New York throughout the fellowship period. Applicants must make a case for how they qualify as “emerging” playwrights, and how they would use the resources of the fellowship. Applicants may not have had more than two different works professionally produced at the time of application, i.e., works produced on professional Actors Equity contracts or the equivalent (Equity showcase/waiver productions are not included).

This is really exciting. The grant provides $25K in the first year and $15K in the second, giving writers actual space and time to write. What's more, early-career playwright grants are really risky from a funding perspective. You run a much higher chance of funding people who will eventually leave theatre, or who show promise they cannot make good on or who never reach a career height, despite their talents, that makes the grant look good on a report to board members. The Jerome Foundation and The Lark are to be commended for taking this risk and commiting to playwrights before it's clear when they'll be successful or not. 

I have mixed feelings, I will admit, about the grant being based in and requiring residency in New York, where you already can't swing a dead cat without hitting someone writing a play. Living here in Minneapolis, I have seen first hand how a local communtiy of playwrights can be formed out of grant money and institutional support-- many writers move here for the Jerome and stay or develop roots here that last.  At the same time, having a community of playwrights (including several with a national presense) and the wonder that is The Playwrights' Center and one of the more literate and culture-friendly populaces in the United States has not created or sustained a new play producing scene here in the Twin Cities, something Cory Hinkle documents in this HowlRound post. This is not unrelated to the point Dorothy Fotenberry makes about DC (which does have a New Play scene)  in her interview with Adam Szymkowicz. 

Still, this is good news, and to be celebrated.  

Xander, Buffy and Feminism

By Isaac Butler

The Hooded Utilitarian has an interesting essay up about Xander's role in the Buffyverse and how this challenges the idea of Buffy The Vampire Slayer as a feminist show. It's an interesting piece that raises some good points (like the rest of this post it's filled with spoilers and thus hard to excerpt).

I've found Buffy's claims towards feminism to be a lot more complex than it's more die-hard fans will cop to. (I've also only watched the series once, and it was a year and a half ago.)  Certainly, it falls within the general canon of "Male Feminist Entertainments" where the way a woman is empowered is to be physically a bad ass. But unlike other projects that adopt the Female Badass solution and leave it there, trudging on unquestioningly through the writer's male gaze (see Molly Million in Neuromancer as a good example) Buffy tried regularly to probe deeper within these issues. Rather than simply make a powerful female character by making Buffy Summers talk and act like a man, Buffy struggled with the tension between the traditional feminity she aspired to and the badass destiny she couldn't escape*. The problems she faced were also particular to her being a young woman and she seemed convincingly a woman, rather than a male character in drag.   

That said... the show was not without its more problematic moments, particularly as related to Faith, who often felt like a thinly drawn bad girl slut, designed for men to both get off on and disapprove of. And in particular the way the show treated Xander, and the way that treatment changed over time got increasingly problematic.

When Xander first shows up in the Buffyverse, he's harmless and abusrd.  Yes, his constant hitting on Buffy is annoying and tiresome, but the show treats it as annoying and tiresome (or, occasionally, endearingly pathetic). But, particularly in his long-terms relationships, Xander is the proto-typical Nice Guy Asshol; rather than critique this, the show grows progressively more fond towards him as a character as it goes along. It also becomes harder to stomache Xander's behavior as he moves out of high school. 

The HU post highlights what for me is a major turning point on these issues: When Riley issues Buffy an absurd ultimatum that she is correct for turning down (I'll just leave it at that) and the show uses Xander as a voice of wisdom chastizing her for doing it. My guess in this case is that the story's need to have Buffy be tormented trumped writerly concern for Buffy's empowerment, but it's still an awful moment.  

The show also loses some of the complexity w/r/t its point of view on Xander as it goes along, and this tracks with (although I think it's just a correlative relationship not a causal one as the HU post seems to indicate) a number of other problematic elements, like Faith, or the powerful-woman-goes-mad-with-power-and-must-be-stopped plot line with Willow or everything having to do with the female half of the brother-sister God duo that comes to Sunnydale to find the Key. 

My point here is not to knock Buffy for being insufficiently feminist, but simply to point out that this shit is hard to do, particularly when you're playing with genre tropes that have sexism hard wired within them. Joss Whedon, for example, is one of the few male screenwriters who is clearly thinking about these issue at great depth and with seriousness, and his record on this issue-- one in which he's increasingly identified from project to project-- is still mixed and complex, even in a show with a powerful woman at its core and a slate of female writers. 

 

----

*(I'm not suggesting that for a female character to be convincing, she must be feminine. The four friends in Sex & The City are plenty feminine, but for the first couple seasons, they are written as stand-ins for gay men (the writer's have discussed this overtly over the years) and do not actually behave or talk like any woman I've ever met, even on the Upper West Side. I simply mean that the tension between traditional male power-- like being great at killing people in hand to hand combat-- and traditional female gender roles is not a problem that men have to navigate). 

New Essay Up at PANK!

By Isaac Butler

My new essay, "In The Heart Library" has been published by PANK!.  You can read it here.

I'd excerpt it, but it's very, very short (under 400 words) and thus excerpting feels a little silly. 

Happy St. Patrick's Day

By Isaac Butler

 

Copy. Right.

by 99 Seats

I find copyright/copyleft issues kinda endlessly fascinating, so I was pretty psyched to read to Isaac's HowlRound piece on it. You should definitely check it out; it's a great, comprehensive overview of the issues, a great starting place to kick off the important part: what does this have to do with theatre?

At first glance, there isn't a lot of overlap, in strict terms of production and development. The copyright to plays are held by playwrights, rarely, if ever, by theatres or corporations. Plays are generated by original ideas (or sometimes adaptations). Our copyright issues, in terms of generation, are pretty cut and dried. There are, though, special cases where we bump up against the thorn bush that is modern copyright. Isaac mentions one, Elevator Repair Service's production of Gatz, using The Great Gatsby as its text. Another, from a few years back, was the play Dog Sees God, which uses thinly veiled Peanuts characters. "Thinly veiled," of course, to fend off copyright infringement claims from UPI and the estate of Charles Schulz.

Some theatre practitioners, such as Chuck Mee, Caryl Churchill and Mike Daisey, have touched on open access for their work (though Mee is different from the others; I'll talk more about him in a second) and made their work available via the web and encouraged not just unlicensed performances (Suzan-Lori Parks has done that as well), but for revision and alteration. Because, of course, one way that copyright does affect theatre  is in terms of licensing. This is often tightly controlled to maximize profit, just as it works in the world of corporate entertainment. Loosening this understanding would have an obvious benefit to theatre as a practice, allowing productions to happen wherever. Obviously, though, that benefit comes at a distinct drawback for playwrights, since someone else would be getting rich off of our work while we got nothing (how exactly this is different from a fair amount of theatre, in practice, is another matter for another day).

When I think about copyright issues, though, I think we're talking about two, different, but parallel issues, one concrete, the other philosophical. There are laws and precedents and legal ramifications of the conversation and of advocating a move towards greater open access to works of art. But underneath, I see a conversation about the nature of creation and collaboration. In my view, theatre is always a collaborative process. But we exist in a culture that generally recognizes only one creator. I've been fairly busy of late, rehearsing a lot, usually under the gun. My actors, hard-working, unpaid, awesome souls that they all are, ask me often about how I feel about paraphrasing. I've been using the same line, "Say what I wrote. Unless you say something funnier. In that case, say that. And I'll take credit for it." Which is true. I will. And we say that's okay. If an actor mis-speaks or mis-remembers a line and makes it better, I'm going to rewrite my play to use that. Why the hell not? But then I become the sole owner of that line. Or if there's a great bit of physical comedy and I put that in the stage directions. This is how we work. I always get frustrated when I hear actors talk about not being "generative" artists, because they are. They just don't get credit for being such. I think copyright/left issues can be a door to that discussion, to digging into how we think about creation.

They can also open up our minds in other ways. I've long admired Chuck Mee's (re) making project. Chuck has posted full texts of most, if not all, of his work online, with the following directive:

Please feel free to take the plays from this website and use them freely as a resource for your own work: that is to say, don't just make some cuts or rewrite a few passages or re-arrange them or put in a few texts that you like better, but pillage the plays as I have pillaged the structures and contents of the plays of Euripides and Brecht and stuff out of Soap Opera Digest and the evening news and the internet, and build your own, entirely new, piece--and then, please, put your own name to the work that results.

This is how current copyright laws and current creative thinking cuts off a whole layer of innovation from playwrights. Imagine if all the works of Beckett or O'Neill or Williams were similarly available to work from, to mix-and-match, to mash-up, to shake up. It takes nothing away from the original, but it allows for the possibility to truly discover something new. Remix culture is more than about coasting on someone else's creation, but working, in dialogue, both with the audience and with the original work to say something, to create a wholly new piece of art. Without that option, I do think art will stagnant. One of the oldest saws of writing is that there are only seven stories in the world. Having to start from scratch each time, you're going to wear 'em out.

As we look to the future, to the next waves of playwriting and theatremaking, to finding new audiences and conversations, it does us well to explore all of the options. Particularly the options that were a part of theatre for centuries.

"Nourishing The Commons" Up at HowlRound

By Isaac Butler

A short essay by yours truly on intellectual property and theatre is up at HowlRound. You can point your browsers this-a-way to take a gander. The essay is more a laying out of general principles and beliefs rather than a blueprint for application of those beliefs, but I think you'll find it interesting nonetheless.

The Live And The Ripped

By Isaac Butler

I'm currently making my way through Greg Kot's Ripped, which is a history of the internet's effect on the music industry organized roughly into chapters on various bands (Bright Eyes, Wilco, Arcade Fire etc.).  One point that is tacitly made for the first 100 pages (and then overtly made afterwards) is that ripping rebrithed the live. With major labels being a hyperconglomerated, consumer-suing shitshow, a new business model of making songs available for free (or cheap) as a way to build audiences for albums and (especially) touring.  The thing that separates, say, Arcade Fire from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is that the first was a great live band from the start and the second definitely wasn't. Prince sold his later albums for a song in part to juice audiences for a reinvigorated live career. Etc. and so forth.

As always, I'm thinking about the effect these things have on theater. And it seems to me that an environment in which the live is becoming special again is a good environment for theater. However, we lack one essential component. We have no equivalent to the free song given away on our website. And there is no way to create it.  The audience whose butts we want in the seats isn't going to read a play. Hell, many artistic directors don't like reading plays, so we can hardly expect youngish audiences today to go for it. And trailers for plays are terrible.

This gives the lie to statements like "Well, ticket prices aren't a problem because people will spend sixty bucks on a concert." People don't spend sixty bucks to go to a concert of a band they don't know.  They go to experience something they already know. They already know they like it and they already know a great deal of what it's content will be. We don't have that luxury.

The question it seems to me is not what is theatre's equivalent of the free download? The question is what do we do given there can't be a theatrical equivalent of the free download?

A Dog Playing The Piano

By Isaac Butler

My own dear hound Ramona has some kind of stomach ailment that is necessitating an appointment-less trip to the vet.  So, in lieu of posting today, I give you a hound dog playing the piano and singing.  Insert jokes about avant garde composition here.:

  

From The Hood

by 99 Seats

Chuck D famously said that rap is CNN for black people. I do not consider this hyperbole. I'm not a huge rap fan, but one thing that I find constantly interesting about most rap is how much information is packed into the rhyme, the long list of, yes, brand names and status symbols, but also metaphors, descriptions, stories of life, heartbreak, struggle and success. It's often simple and straightforward, plainly stated. At the top of "Welcome to the Jungle," a track from the Jay-Z/Kanye West collaboration Watch The Throne, Kanye raps:

I asked her where she wanna be when she 25.

She turned around and looked at me and said, "Alive."

Boom. Kanye is a millionaire, a major celebrity. You have to imagine his encounters with the truly desperate are rarer and rarer these days. I don't think he's describing a recent experience. There is a strand in rap music about being down, no matter how much money you make or success you have. I don't think Jay-Z can get through an entire song without reminding us that he used to sell crack, over a decade, and several platinum albums, ago. But there's more to this than just boasting about thug life. There's witnessing happening.

Black people need a CNN because CNN so rarely tells our stories. A few weeks back, there were ads going around for a new show, hosted by S. Epatha Merkerson, focusing on missing black children, "our" children, as Epatha entoned in the ads. That's the story, though, isn't it? Black stories don't get told by the news media, or even most of the mainstream media. So somebody's got to represent.

In New York, Katori Hall's Hurt Village is that representation. In a little more than 2 hours, it does more than a month of those serious "Life In Black America" specials that pop up on CNN maybe once every couple of years. Set in the final days of the Hurt Village housing project in Memphis, Katori lays it all out: the pain of desperate poverty, the effect of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, the war on drugs, the war over drugs, gentrification, gender inequality. You name it, it raises its head. But this isn't a documentary or a harangue. It's a pretty well-built, passionate, funny, sometimes shocking, ultimately heartbreaking play. A living, breathing, rampaging beast of the stage.

It's the kind of play that features Yo Mamma jokes, R. Kelly jokes, lyrical descriptions of crack trips, stunning monologues and soap opera intrigue, all nearly at the same time. It contains multitudes. It also captures a slice of American life, particularly African-American life that, as far as I can see, we don't really see on stage, not all the much. We see it on screens, large and small, but the modern black life of theatre is largely absent. We get periodic updates, from Katori or Tarell McCraney, but that's it. It was encouraging to see it, to see a very mixed audience witness this.

As StageGrade noted, the critical reaction to this play has been...well...difficult to pin down. I read through the reviews after I saw the show and I can't put my finger on exactly what happened. But they clearly didn't see the show I saw. Some of the criticisms are completely legit: the actors talk furiously fast and loose and in a southern accent/patois that is sometimes hard to decipher. To Katori's credit, there's no glossary or anything in the program. She just expects you to catch up. That's a good thing. But it seems to left some critics out in the cold. Even the critics who liked it seem to struggle with the play, comparing it to plays that it bears only the most superficial resemblance to...or rather, comparing Katori to playwrights that she bears a superficial resemblance to. I was glad to see that one critic mentioned The Lower Depths, which seems more apt. Another play leapt to my mind: The Cherry Orchard. Katori is giving us a snapshot of a world that's about to change, and probably not for the better, at least for the characters we see. In the face of looming, inevitable change and loss, they struggle to carry on. It's a pretty basic human story. And still powerful.

Run and see it. It's a wonderful thing.

And I'll just leave you with this. Ice Cube, before he got all cuddly, dropping a little bit of knowledge on you.

Song For A Slow Sunday

By Isaac Butler

 

Needed: Better Arts Press Corps (WaPo Edition)

By Isaac Butler

Thanks to the handy dandy Google Alert I have on this ole blog, I found a recent WaPo article about the drastic increase in top ticket prices at DC area nonprofit theaters thanks to their adoption of Dynamic Pricing models. 

People who've been reading Parabasis for awhile might remember that we got into an extended online dialogue/tussle about this very issue a little over a year ago (the Guardian wrote it up here, if you're curious and want the Cliff's Notes). High top ticket prices are a controversial issue. Yes, the conventional wisdom is that charging people more is a Bold New Innovation, but there are still a vocal minority who believe that this is a betrayal of a nonprofit's duty towards access and the public good, and that this represents yet another step towards nonprofits acting like commercial producers with access to an extram revenue stream of donations. And given the massive tax-code subsidies and labor deals nonprofits get, we bristle at this behavior.  

Anywhoo, that's not the point of this post.  The point of this post is that in this long article about DC ticket prices, this is the sum total representation of that aforementioned viewpoint:

But are such high prices counter to the not-for-profit theater’s mission of accessibility? It’s an old predicament, yet an Occupy mentality has taken root lately, with prices as one of the flashpoints.

Naysaying has flared in the Twitterverse and blogosphere (follow on Howlround, 2AMt, Parabasis, Jumper). Not-for-profit’s moral crisis — bottom-line pressures and corporate behavior — has been the subject of such recent cage-rattling works as ”Outrageous Fortune,” the much-discussed book about playwrights left in the institutional cold, and writer-performer Mike Daisey’s solo-show indictment, “How Theater Failed America,” recently at Woolly Mammoth).

That's it.  Not only is this incorrect-- the anti-high-ticket-prices energy predates Occupy by over a year, and ticket prices are a minor part of How Theater Failed America-- but the article contains no actual articulation of what those opposed to these practices believe. Nor, thanks to its referencing of twitter handles and absense of links, does it provide any way for readers to go find this information out on their own. Also, as the conversation about ticket pricing happened mostly over a year ago, finding any discussion of it on twitter would be virtually impossible, or at least enough of a pain in the ass as to not be worth anyone's time, even mine, and I'm one of the participants.

Most of the rest of the article is given over to Chad Bauman-- who helped bring the over-$100 ticket to Arena-=- so that he can talk about what a wonderful idea dynamic pricing is and how it's always win-win etc. 

This isn't journalism.  Mike Daisey is a pretty easy guy to get ahold of. So am I. So is 99Seats. So are most of the other people involved in this conversation. It doesn't take a lot of work to actually interview one of us and find out what the issues are. 

I'm not asking that the article be changed to reflect my opinion and not Chad's.  And Chad, as one of the chief architects of this pricing model in DC, should be featured.  But this isn't balance, and this isn't journalism. 

UPDATE:  Over on the twitters, Jason Zinoman says that my rehtoric in the above post goes a bit too far in callin the WaPo article "not journalism." I've thought about it and he's right. The rhetoric is more heated than I'd like.  Frankly, it sounded/felt good to write and it's easy when angry about something to get sidelined by the nice-feeling declarative sentence.  

While I do think the article is heavily slanted away from considerations of the ethical issues invovled-- or to put it another way, sees those issues as resolved except for a few cranks-- Jason is right that articles about the raising of ticket prices are rare and that there's important information about the issue within the article.  Thus, calling it "not journalism" (or, as I called it on twitter "an embarrassment") is  overblown and uncalled for. 

My ire was initally raised by the aritcle's reduction of what are to me very serious ethical problems as merely a PR problem. I still find that aspect of the article problematic. But it combined with my anger over this issue in general and I put the WaPo article on blast in a way it did not deserve. But it does other things of value and is not wholly uncritical.  Because part of blogging is not substantively rewriting what you've written to make yourself look better, I'll leave this post as it is, but I do think it's more than a little over the top and I wish I had written it differently. 

Both Sides Do It!

By Isaac Butler

 Andrew Sullivan-- or one of his crew of uncredited ghostwriters-- has a pair of posts up today. One is called "The Sickness On The Right."  Immediately following it is a post called "The Sickness On The Left." It's a telling moment, one that exposes exactly how the "both sides do it" false-equivalence-masking-as-balance within the media works.

First, you have a formal device establishing that the two things being discussed are of equal weight. The blog posts are the same length. They have parallel titles with one word difference ("Right" and "Left") that imply that the subject matter is a sign of a particular problem within the community being discussed.  The problem is the comparison doesn't work. 

Why? Well, first off, because the things being compared aren't of the same scale.  Drawing an equivalence between them doesn't work (morally, ethically, politically) because their effect and real world consequences are different.  The Sickness of the Right that Andrew Sullivan Inc. is writing about is the tolerance of racism from powerful political figures. In this case, a Chief US District Judge (That would a Presidentially apointed, Senate-confirmed jurist) sent a racist joke about Barack Obama's mom having sex with a dog over e-mail. The Sickness of the Left, meanwhile, is that some people said some really nasty things about Andrew Breitbart after he died on Twitter. Here's the article it links to. Besides Matt Yglesias, almost none of the people quoted have any influence on "the left" at all, and not a single Democratic elected or appointed official is quoted.

These are not the same things.  There is no equivalence here.  A Federal Judge has vast amount of influence on any number of issues including the life or death of people who appear in his or her courts.  Matt Yglesias writes about the economy for Slate.com. The fact that the former sent out a racist e-mail has a great deal of bearing on his job, the fact that the latter sent out some callous tweets does not.

Furthermore, the problem of sending out ugly tweets after someone dies is not a sickness of the Left. We are not uniquely callous and predisposed to pissing on the graves of our enemies. Why, a Right Wing journalist was recently fired for actually advocating we piss on the graves of our enemies. And here's what Andrew Breitbart himself had to say about Ted Kennedy on twitter right after Kennedy died.

This is how the game always works. A scientist lying to a think tank to surrepticiously gain access to documents showing how that think tank deliberately spreads misinformation about global warming to help its corporate clients is somehow morally equivalent to that think tank.  The Tea Party-- which amongst other things spent a summer openly celebrating and inviting armed insurrection against a sitting President-- is the same as Occupy Wall Street because, uh, puppets?  Obama is the same as Republican politicians because he pointedly criticizes their proposals while they infer that he's not a natural born citizen of the United States. These things are not the same. Part of the game is pretending they are so that the considerable faults of one side can be excused away.