It has always been my assumption that people who become deeply involved in drug legalization campaigns are people who hate having their recreational addictions criminalized. Sure, they have a point that society is hypocritcal to condemn one harmful preoccupation while permitting the promotion of others, and is incoherent in celebrating individual liberty while actually enforcing limits on what you are alllowed to do to yourself. But the real effects of drug legalization are incalculable, and the least significant of these is that suburban kids could get someone to buy their pot at a state store or a licensed coffeehouse. The main effects would ripple out of the black markets that a legal drug trade would shutter. Consider this remark in a New York Review of Books article about the recent rioting in French housing projects: “Drugs are big business in the American ghetto; they are not that big in France. The crimes of the French ghetto are robbery and shoplifting, stealing mobile phones, stealing cars for joyrides, burning them afterward to eliminate fingerprints, or burning cars just for the hell of it, as well as robbing middle-class students in the city and making trouble on suburban trains, looking for excitement.” Would it be wrong to assume that were the drug trade taken away from inner-city youths who are barred from most other labor markets and have little else to do, that we wouldn’t see a similar increase in petty crime here? (I probably need statistics from somewhere like Amsterdam to make this argument). Not only would ex-dealers potentially embrace other rackets, but the rise in drug addicts inevitable from increased availability is also likely to create a new breed of petty theives supporting their habit. Perhaps those college kids smoking bongs at those NORML rallies should consider whether their weed access is worth a mugging and several menacings here and there.

—Rob Horning

Thankfully I am not flying anywhere this Thanksgiving, or this Christmas. (And luckily I’m not driving to Washington D.C, where I-95 is currently on fire.) But everytime I fly and I am standing in one of those absurdly long lines shuffling along with my shoes off and my pants falling down, I think thoughts likethese recently shared by an Australian senator. Of course the security-check system is meant to put travelers at ease, not serve as a deterrent, which is perhpas why most of them aren’t apoplectic at the whole situation. But whether the system prevents any malfeasance is questionable at best. Those “determined to strike” will analyze the existing sitation and exploit its weaknesses, just as hackers, spammers and virus writers do in real-time on the Internet every hour. And countless exposes have demonstrated how easy it is to get knives and such past the checkpoint.

So the checkpoint is really a form of theater in which passengers duly play their part, and are perhaps flattered by the attention. But really they are the audience for this spectacle, and the security personnel are the performers. This may be why they are so surly; they may have been instructed that this brusqueness adds conviction to their performance, makes the whole charade seem more important. Of course, much of our security and orientation in society relies on performances like these, that convey conviction in certain values if not actually forcibly imposing them.

—Rob Horning

File-sharers are generally regarded as crafty theives when the media reports on them (when they are not lamenting the “war agianst Christmas” and other such critical breaking news), but I’m always stunned by how generous people can be with their time and effort and bandwidth (and, in some cases, alas, with other people’s intellectual property). Think of all the time it must take to rip and upload the CDs out there on the newsgroups, day after day after day. Why do they bother? Surely it can’t merely be the hacker/anarchist thrill of subverting governing morms of private property. There’s authentic altruism mixed in there somewhere too. The Internet, in thiese cases, serves to aggregate small bursts of good intentions, like a thousand points of light—Bush Sr. would be proud. And consider this site, which is home to rips of obscure vinyl salvaged from thrift stores and out-of-the-way record shops. And then consider all the links this page can direct you to, many offering a wealth of MP3s gratis. I’m never sure if it’s a good idea to publicize these things—too much attention could probably overwhlem these small kindnesses, which are distributed all over the Internet if you have the patience to search for them. these things exist happily at the margins, operating independently of the dominant profit-driven models for accomplishing things, for achieving a level of impact. If enough attention was sent their way, they would become more prominent and intolerable to the “powers that be,” and more likely to be squelched or assimiliated. But then, what I’m doing here is just another small gesture as well, subsumed by the exponentially expanding amount of information out there.

By the way, here is a review of the results of a study of the impact of file-sharing on the music industry. Twenty to forty percent of the decline in sales may be linked to file-sharing, but file-sharing leads to more sales of the bottom three quarters of artists in poularity, while adversely affecting only the quarter most popular. In other words, file-sharing has a leveling effect, tending to lessen the leverage of the major labels and their strategy of hyping a few superstars to maximize profits with two or three megahit albums. Is this good for the music consumer? It depends on whether you think people need megastars, to give them the vicarious thrill of seeming to participate in a trend as big as the world, or whether people are suffering under the yoke of the bad music being forced on them. (I think a bad album by someone hugely famous is more interesting than a good album by an unheralded artist—not better, not more pleasant to listen to, just more interesting in the sense of being relevant culturally.) The studies also determined (how I’m not sure, but the raw material is there for follow-up) that “file-sharing on average yields a gain to society three times the loss to the music industry in lost sales.”

—Rob Horning

I am always quick to condemn convenience as a value, so I am especially prone to its corollary, the reactionary celebration of the slow and the inaccessible things in our culture as inherently worthy. This was crystalized for me at the Indian restaurant where I had lunch—not only was I supposed to enjoy my Masoor Dal from the buffet because it had been “carefully slow-cooked over an open flame” (probably for several days, as it lingered on the buffet table) but a tablecard instructed me to order an Elephant beer because it is “slow brewed for the connoisseur.” Slowness implies a kid of dedicated concentration that is enviable, in short supply in our hyperaccelerated, adult-ADD society. As we become less able to focus, we prefer that what we consume somehow contains focus, concentration within itself, in reified form.

Since convenience and expediency have become core mainstream values, it’s inevitable that the slow and the difficult will become signifiers for an elite class and their patience and enlarged understanding. Of course, the elite have more time and money to spend to access and process difficult works, to linger over non-essential matters—Bourdieu calls this culural capital and links it to the habitus that separates old money from new. But it trickles down, so that anyone seeking class distinction can appeal to their appreciation for turgid, baffling instances of pop culture: for example Gus Van Sant’s Gerry (or any of his recent films). It means rejecting the facile Franz Ferdinand for something like Lightning Bolt. Or this pursuit of slowness as a class marker can manifest as a preference for antiquated modes of communication—a rejection of cell phones and email. Technology breeds a never-ending series of privileged anachronisms.

—Rob Horning

I followed a link from Atrios to this post, which provides a list of a few well-received movies this film professor hates, along with—what I found especially interesting—a defense of negation for its own sake. At the end she half jokingly proposes a social network a la Friendster in which you list not what you like but what you ardently dislike, forming a community of the wary and unconvinced. Is it possible to found a community on negation, or does that soon flip to being a group united by affirmation of common hatreds? I’m not sure, but I think that in our blandly affirmative culture, which tends to reduce all possible desires to promotional endorsements, a “yes” to some purchase, negation requires more energy to sustain, and as such, may lead to a more vivid and forceful expression of an individual personality, or better, it may lead to preventing something so reified as a “personality” from ever materializing. Negation—unsubstantiated and undefended pure rejection—may be a form of pure resistance, a way escaping traps of rationality that support systems of domination that play out at the seemingly innocuous level of popular culture. (I offer my thoroughly unreasoned and purely visceral rejection of all condiments and pickles as an ennobling example.)

That being said, I agree with every selection on her list of hated movies with the exception of Grease 2, which I think is brilliantly bad, while exposing and sending up all the phony nostalgic sentiment of the original.

And I also agree with many of the films the commenters appended below, the ones I’ve seen, anyway. Especially worthy of hatred: American Beauty, the praise for which I’ll never understand. Wow, middle-class life in suburbia can be so phony! We should probably smoke some weed. And I would add another insipid Oscar winner, A Beautiful Mind, an egregious example of a bad genre, the biopic, which always pushes the “great man” theory of history while forcing simultaneously all lives to fit the same cliched patterns exemplified by VH1’s Behind the Music and its rise/fall/redemption formula.

—Rob Horning

What sort of workers would refuse tips offered to them? If we accept George Orwell’s account of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War in Homage to Catalonia, any worker who has thrown off the chains of servility to breathe the free air of a society stripped of class distinctions. It’s a point he returns to several times, the fact that he knew he was in the midst of revolution when he noticed tipping was prohibited and workers were adamantly insulted by their being offered. The first thing liberated workers do, Orwell suggests, is abolish tipping which makes workers appear as bootlickers. Tips imply the most craven sort of dependence, that you must hope for the good graces of your betters and suck up to them to earn the right to exist, to draw a wage at all for the work you do for them. Post-revolutionary workers, presumably, are working for themselves. Tips generally serve to delineate class boundaries, to cloak the system of ranks in an air of phony gratitude. Orwell knows the revolution in Spain has failed when he returns to Barcelona from the front and sees workers taking tips again.

Workers are not the only ones to suffer by tipping customs. Read any etiquette column and you are bound to see rules for tipping, which are always in a state of flux and apparently cause no end of anxiety to those bourgeois who feel called upon to pass out gratuities to every service provider they encounter. (I came across another “How and What to Tip” roundup in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.) Tipping customs serve to keep arrivistes off-balance, to make every instance in which they invoke their class privilege (every time they purchase some service from lower-class workers) poisoned with fear of making a gaffe. Tipping is the bane of the insecure, a veritable tax on insecurity, and what can be more insecure than being member of an interstitial class, being petit bourgeois, or upper-middle class, even. Tipping is a way of making sure the wrong sort of people, the people prone to worrying about what those beneath them think about them, don’t get to accustomed to the exercise of privilege.

—Rob Horning