I don’t know how new this is, but Joe Allen, a restaurant in Manhattan’s theater district, has created an online exhibit of posters of Broadway flops, including excerpts from reviews. I’ve seen some of these, going back to Carrie, Nick & Nora, and What’s Wrong with This Picture?, and quite a few more in recent years.
[via MUG by way of the New York Times]
Homer said in a comment on my last post, about why the tea-partiers don’t like Barack Obama:
You forgot to mention Obama is black. That is really the problem. All the rest of the crap is just sorta random whining and sound bites. The tea partiers “Want our Country Back†because they never, ever imagined one of the black guys would be running it.
Actually, I think it’s more complicated. They don’t dislike him because he’s black, or at least not just because he’s black. They dislike him because he defies categorization. He has a white mother but a black father. And his father wasn’t an American but a Kenyan. And he lived in Indonesia for much of his childhood. And his first name has origins in Swahili and (OMG) Arabic. And his middle name is Arabic and is the same as the last name of that guy who Bush said had WMDs. And his last name doesn’t sound ‘merican.
Kenyan father, Indonesian childhood, a name with multiple foreign origins. What do they do with all of that? At least “Jesse Jackson” is pronounceable, and his ancestors were American slaves. They know what box to put him in. They know all about black people — they have generations of stereotypes about black people to fall back on. But what about that Obama guy? What box do we put him in? How are we gonna stereotype him if we don’t know what box to put him in? Obviously he must be hiding something. Kinda shifty and suspicious! At least black people are American. This guy doesn’t even seem American!
That’s the mentality, as far as I see it.
I have to admit, I’m a little confused as to what the tea partiers want. They blame Obama for bailing out the banks even though Obama wasn’t the president who bailed out the banks. And they blame Obama for doing this while at the same time they call him a socialist. So I guess he’s not a socialist, exactly; he’s… a corporatist-socialist? He’s in cohorts with American big business, while at the same time he wants to destroy it?
There’s an unresolved love-hate relationship with capitalism going on here. It’s been like this ever since the American Puritans decided that working hard and becoming financially secure was the only way to show that they had been saved by God, while at the same time issuing jeremiads against the prosperity they themselves had created.
Capitalism’s great, but along with the good stuff, there’s some not-so-good stuff, too. Ultimately, capitalism is about money, not morality, as the Puritans might have hoped. If you have capitalism, you will have Family Guy and wardrobe malfunctions, because people like to laugh at dirty jokes and look at boobs and that’s what sells. In fact, the people who like to laugh at dirty jokes and look at boobs are — gasp — the very same people who say it’s bad to laugh at dirty jokes and look at boobs. No wonder we’ve got a problem. People don’t know what they think about something as personal as sexuality; how can they know what they think about capitalism?
People want to live in a world where they have the freedom to get rich, and then they get mad when other people get rich instead. That’s why they can simultaneously believe that Obama both loves and hates big business; it’s because they do, too.
In the war of Big Evil Government versus Big Evil Corporate Banks, whose side do they take? Thinking about this would make their heads explode. But it’s not even that simple. Sometimes Big Evil Government is on the same side as Big Evil Corporate Banks, and sometimes not. Because sometimes what’s good for the big corporations is good for the little guy, and sometimes it’s not.
There are no clear “sides” here. There’s a spectrum. And Obama is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. He doesn’t want to destroy the capitalist system; he just wants to soften its rough edges. There are so many people who don’t seem to understand this. They prefer a simpler world where they can have enemies.
It’s frustrating to listen to all the ranting.