How 'Poker Face' Recaptures that '70s Spirit
atma.thebulwark.com
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On this week’s episode, Sonny Bunch (The Bulwark), Alyssa Rosenberg (The Washington Post), and Peter Suderman (Reason) discuss Scott Adams’s decision to commit reputational suicide by Twitter Cops. Then they heap praise upon Poker Face, the show worth subscribing to Peacock for. Make sure to swing by Bulwark+ on Friday for a deeper discussion of movie and TV detectives. And if you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend!
How 'Poker Face' Recaptures that '70s Spirit
Re Scott Adams, I agree with Peter Suderman in that I don't want to use the Adams example as a data point on cancel culture. Scott Adams knew exactly what he was doing.
It reminds me (just a bit) of the example of sculptor and potter (even painter) Charles Krafft who did images that were considered darkly ironic - so of Hitler, also of a Luger. But then it was found out that he was active in white supremecist sites and was a holocaust denier.
So in the end, Adams was holding it all in and in the end he just had to get it out. He was always the bitter racist.
I am a bit older than Adams and so dealt with issues that he talks about. He mentions that he could not get a promotion because he was white. Well such was real - I remember leaving graduate school with my MFA in 1976 and only the women and the one black kid got offers of jobs right after school - we only had 13 graduates in our small MFA program. A few year later one of the guys who found an academic job after a longer search was recommended for tenure by his college (Ohio State - the Arts college) but at the University level, he did not get tenure. So he moved on. Left academia. The understanding was that it did not fit the goals under affirmative action.
The difference with many of us who faced affirmative action and Scott Adams is that we also remember that blacks had been entirely excluded from so much, so it is hard to know what else would have moved America along other than affirmative action.
Adams is 6 years younger than I am. I ended up fine. He did too. I wonder why he retained the bitterness? Even the hate.
I thought Sonny’s comment re online communities was really important: I think the Bulwark, and more broadly, Substack have done a remarkable job of creating online communities in which people start with enough in common to create communities that actually engage in thoughtful and actual, if occasional, interactive communication online. So much of what happens on Twitter, for example, feels to me to be broadcasting and then trolling of that broadcast that it seems to have become a 2-strategy universe: tell people about something whose content is really someplace else or STIR THE POT TO GET ATTENTION. The latter now dominates and gets the most attention and, to the degree that it creates what Noah Smith recently called “vertical community,” it is a ‘community’ of people who don’t really want anything like the mutuality that makes for real communication or relationships. It is the world of the same non-negotiable, non-executable declarations that pervades some “political” arenas these days: all pronouncement, no real participation! Like Alyssa, I’m not sure I’d miss Twitter if it collapsed entirely, but I sure would miss the Bulwark and some of my other Substack neighborhoods 😊