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

The training in narcissism begins early. The Wall Street Journal today has an item about parents buying dolls designed to look exactly like the children they are given to—“one of the hottest niches in the doll business” (how many niches are there?) and presumably the natural development from those build-your-own dolls that rose to prominence over the last ten years. The build-your-own dolls, though, at least encourage the child to try to exercise some creativity. These creepy new look-alike dolls send the message that what the child looks like is far more important than anything that goes on inside their imagination. Why be creative when you can simply bask in the wonder of you? Why entertain the possibilities of learning about the world beyond yourself, or reaching out to that world with the play of your imagination when you can just stare at yourself and aggrandize everything you can think to do? What better way to make sure your little girl knows she is just an object in this world to be manipulated by others than to give her a doll that lets her do the maniupulating? Then she can be like a third-wave feminist and participate in her own exploitation and call it liberty!

In truth, these dolls may be less for the kids than for their parents, and their fantasies of total control over their children: “While Shannon was visibly shaken bby seeing her face on the doll, her mother laughed and said, ‘It’s my kid. What’s not to like?’ “

—Rob Horning

This article about RateMyProfessors.com featured this quip:

And, while the student comments on RateMyProfessors.com may be akin to scrawlings in the library stacks, that doesn’t mean students don’t have anything useful to say or that you should take your cues from Stanley Fish, the dean at the University of Illinois in Chicago, who writes about throwing his student evaluations, unopened, into the trash.

I found this reassuring, because it is exactly what I would do with evaluations when I was a teacher. Nice to see I was unwittingly walking in the footsteps of one of the “greats.” (His work on Milton is great, anyway.)

No offense to my former students, but as I would usualy tell them during class, if they had something to say about my work as teacher, I’d much appreciate it if they would have the courage to tell me directly at some point—I didn’t go into hiding after the final exam, my office and my e-mail address was pretty much the same every year—and not hide behind some university mandated evaluation form and force me to look at all the non-education-related insults directed at me: the comments about my stupid hair or my stupid jokes. My female comrades in composition instruction told me they never got a batch of evaluations that didn’t demean or humiliate them in some way, reducing their effort to how much makeup they wore or how revealing their clothes were. What used to drive me crazy, and what helped drive me out of the education racket, was the thought that my performance would be evaluated in part according to these student evaluations and possibly my pay would be affected by them. At that point, it seemed to me that the lunatics were running the asylum, and that only a masochist would want to be a teacher.

—Rob Horning

It’s the time now when people are asked to choose their benefits packages for the upcoming year, which means many more will likely be railroaded into the so-called consumer-driven health-care plans, which do little for consumers except drive them to avoid using medical care. They save employers and insurance companies money though by forcing employees to pick up more of their expenses if they happen to be unfortunate enough to get sick. The idea behind is to give customers incentives to scrimp on health-care-system usage, to start wondering if they really need that CT scan or that endoscopy, and to bargain shop for cheaper services—because there’s one thing we all want to do and that’s go to the bargain doctors. Right after we get bargain brakes for our car and get bargain child care from the daycare center.

These plans, which have cheaper premiums, are nice if you are invulnerable, but they punish those who happen to be subject to illness. They way it was sold to me was that preventive care was completely covered. What that really means, though, is you are punished for becoming sick. And this encourages you to try to goad your doctor into recording a visit as preventive even if you, say, slipped and broke your arm. “Hi, doctor, just a routine physical—what? My shoulder’s dislocated? I hadn’t even noticed! Good thing I came in for this preventive checkup!” The consumer-driven plan tries to dump on customers some of the insurance company’s own thorny and dubious decisions—it forces the customer to try to game the system and misreport things and shop around and pressure doctors into more inexpensive care choices and medicines rather than the insurance companies gaming doctors, and vice versa, as was typical under old-fashioned coverages. Rather than the insurance company tell your doctor not to prescribe brand-name drugs, it forces you to have the conversation. It short, it makes everything about being sick that much more stressful and upsetting, and it sets you even more at odds with your doctor than you might already be, making it more obvious that you are at cross-purposes economically: The doctor profits from your illness, you suffer and pay.

The last insult about this system is the “health-care savings account” which allows you to spend tax-free dollars on your health-care needs. Not only is this system a bureaucratic boondoggle, impossible to understand and burdensome with the various claims that the consumer must file to get her own money, but you lose the money you don’t spend. So, unless I haven’t understood it properly (and considering how byzantine medical insurance is in the US, the chances are high) there are incentives to discourage you from spending it by those tasked with facilitating your medical coverage. And what’s so great about spending money tax free on something that once cost the customer nothing at all? You don’t have to pay taxes on it, because the government is reneging on responsibilities it once needed tax income for. Tax-free spending accounts are simply the government’s way of offloading what it once served to regulate onto you, to fend for yourself amongst the predators who feed on the weak, the ill.

As Jonathan Cohn points out in a recent New Republic article, HSAs are meant to allow the healthy to keep more of their money while those unfortunate enough to become sick end up in deep debt. It’s only fair, right?

Follow-up (11/22/2005): Economist Tyler Cohen has an interesting analysis of the defective health care market here.

—Rob Horning

I had never seen anyone wearing something so absurd as what looked to be a fat man’s pair of woolen trousers cut off at the knees to serve as ersatz formal shorts. That is until yesterday, when I saw no fewer than six women wearing the embarrassing garment I’ve since been told are “gauchos.” That they are a hideous and soon-to-disappear fashion trend along the lines of Ugg boots goes without saying. But how is it that the gauncho sentiment could be invisible and then all of a sudden be beyond the tipping point all in one day? Were the marching orders for these women beamed out over the weekend on some scrambled channel that sane people can’t recognize or hear, a kind of dog whistle for fashion victims? How was this orchestrated? Obviously it has been an organized conspiracy that was going on for some time. For all I know, women could show up on Fifth Avenue all wearing tinfoil hats. I wouldn’t be all that surprised.

—Rob Horning