A thing I really like about NBC's "Parks and Recreation"

By Jonathan Bradley in Sydney, Australia

6 February 2012

In American film and television, the Big City is always New York or Los Angeles. Cities in the flyover states, even ones with metro populations of one to two million, are considered podunk towns in the same way everywhere in the flyover states is considered a podunk town. This is probably because film and television people usually live in New York or Los Angeles, and conflate “smaller than my city” with “small city.”

I've discussed before my fondness for NBC sitcom "Parks and Recreation," which easily holds the title of funniest program on American TV right now. A small detail I appreciate about it: On this show, Indianapolis is always the Big City. The citizens of the show's fictional Midwestern small town of Pawnee, Indiana never talk about it as anything other than a major urban center, one with all the attributes connected with major urban centers: fast-paced lifestyles, cosmopolitan outlooks, au courant chic. I don’t know much about Indianapolis, though I do know it has a metropolitan area of 1.8 million people, making it slightly smaller than Brisbane. I expect it really does feel fairly urban.

Skyline of Indianapolis

Apparently it has “swanky lofts and modern wine bars” in some part of downtown, and today's Super Bowl has led to a construction boom:

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Thanks at least in part to the Super Bowl, people in Indianapolis will wake up to the football off-season next week with a newly expanded convention center, a new central civic space, a newly revitalized low-income neighborhood, even a new downtown skyline. The Super Bowl, in short, has done more to catalyze change in Indianapolis than it does in most cities — and all of this has taken place over the course of a recession.

Anyway, I really like that Parks and Rec treats Indianapolis, with absolute seriousness, as a significant urban center. It shows it cares more about its characters’ point of view than that of its writers.

(Also, I really like the sense of American grandiosity that led to the country giving its cities names with the Greek suffix -polis, a geographical manifestation of the young nation’s fascination with classical thought.)

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President Knope

By Jonathan Bradley in Sydney, Australia

14 October 2011

Parks and Recreation, the current holder of the title of best comedy on US television right now, seems intent on disproving my rash contention that its appeal doesn't rest on its ability to satirise American government. After opening its fourth season with a plot line parodying disgraced ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner, last week's featured the show's main character, Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler), facing an Obama-esque birther conspiracy. (She was rumoured to have been born not in the show's small town focal point of Pawnee, Indiana, but in the tony neighbouring burg of Eagleton.) And this week's episode, I'm told, contains an homage to the Bill of Rights in the form of a puppet show. I don't need my sitcoms to contain geeky references to American politics or history, but it helps!

Caption of President Barack Obama on Fox News with a quote from Parks and Recreation character Leslie Knope

And the show's government theme has inspired my favourite new Tumblr: Obama is the New Knope, which captions images of the President with quotes from the show. Highly recommended!

(If you have no idea what I'm talking about, those of you in the US can catch this gem on NBC at 8.30/7.30c. For those of us in Australia, unless we're willing to use, um, non-traditional means, Channel 7 is currently airing the show's third season at 11.10pm on Tuesday nights. For all the American media we get on our shores, some of the smartest and most innovative is irritatingly difficult to track down.)

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Weiner's sitcom epitaph

By Jonathan Bradley in Sydney, Australia

5 October 2011

I'd like to tell you to watch the great NBC sitcom "Parks and Recreation" because it's a marvellous satire on American politics and government, but I don't actually think this comedy about a department in an Indiana small town's city council reveals much about the workings of civic institutions. That said, parks department director Ron Swanson is the embodiment of libertarianism's coming out in popular culture:

The show's fourth season began on NBC last month, and it did include some political satire, which, somehow, went completely over my head. The episode featured one character, Ann, receiving lewd photographs in her email. Ann's a nurse, and after she notices symptoms of mumps in the offending photograph, she finds herself subject to an avalanche of offensive snapshots from men throughout the city government eager for a free check-up.

Then I read this article about the show's writing staff: 

Schur wants to keep incorporating ideas that seem "zeitgeist-y," and they discuss how to do their own take on the Anthony Weiner scandal.

Congratulations, former Congressman Weiner. You've been immortalised the best way American pop culture knows how: As a gag on a sitcom. 

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Weekend update

By Jonathan Bradley in Newcastle, Australia

24 July 2011

House Speaker John Boehner and President Barack Obama in negotiations over the debt ceiling

House Speaker John Boehner and President Barack Obama still haven't reached an agreement on the debt ceiling, but they both guarantee* this Weekend Update is full of great links.

*not a guarantee.

At this point, there are three serious options on the table. A $4 trillion deal that includes some revenues, a $1 trillion-$2 trillion deal that’s all spending cuts but leaves much of the job until after the election, and a deal in which Republicans don’t come to a negotiated agreement with President Obama but they grant him the authority — and let him take the blame — for raising the debt ceiling. Those are our three options, and Congress needs to pick one.

But it’s worth appreciating the fact that Obama only won half the battle, and in the larger context, it’s the half that doesn’t matter as much. The White House line — Congress has to do the right thing, and must adopt a responsible, balanced approach — won the day politically. But on Aug. 2, the United States will have exhausted its ability to pay its bills. Winning the public-relations fight is encouraging, but from Obama’s perspective, it doesn’t remove the looming threat that’s just 11 days away.

Today, we have taken the final major step toward ending the discriminatory ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ law that undermines our military readiness and violates American principles of fairness and equality. In accordance with the legislation that I signed into law last December, I have certified and notified Congress that the requirements for repeal have been met. ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ will end, once and for all, in 60 days—on September 20, 2011.

After the jump, Tim Pawlenty's great expectations, as well as two types of economics: biblical and stand-up.

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  • Via Ilya Gerner, here's Yoram Bauman, the Stand Up Economist. He may not be comedian-funny, but he’s definitely economist-funny," says Gerner. I disagree; I think he's hilarious.

Bachmann’s stance on the debt limit is not unlike Sarah Palin’s opposition to the Federal Reserve that I wrote about here in November 2010.

Both are rooted in what I described at a "theocratic reading of the Bible, arising out of the nexus between (Ron) Paul (and now his son, Senator-elect Rand Paul), Howard Phillips and his Constitution Party, and Gary North and the Christian Reconstructionists."

Sign from a supermarket in Virginia featuring Ron Swanson advertising bacon

An all-cuts deal sounds bad, but it contains some real advantages. It clearly positions Obama in the center, and assuages centrist fears that he's a big government liberal (fears I don't share, but the political power of which I concede.) It makes a large step toward medium-term fiscal correction without taking the choices off the table. Having taken a large step, voters in 2012 will decide the next one — higher taxes on the rich, or deep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid? That's a good set-up for Obama. If he think he can "take the deficit issue off the table," then he's also taking off the table the priority contrast that offers the strongest basis for his reelection.

The real trouble is that on 9/11, I guess, or around then, Hitchens started making statements like, "Only a complete moral idiot can believe for an instant that we are fighting against the wretched of the earth. We are fighting [...] against the scum of the earth." ("It's a Good Time for War," Boston Globe, September 8, 2002.) This obtuse self-certainty represents the dead opposite of the original Hitchens way of going about things, at least as I understood him. Suddenly he was all, we smart people will figure it out for you little people!

  • Two tunes for this week. First, Kanye West and Jay-Z team up over an Otis Redding sample for "Otis," which features Hov expressing solidarity with illegal immigrants:

Driving Benzes, with no benefits;
Not bad, huh, for some immigrants?
Build your fences: we digging tunnels
Can't you see we gettin' money up under you?

  • Secondly, Pusha-T hooks up with young Los Angeleno provacateur Tyler, the Creator for "Trouble on My Mind," and presents the president as gangsta examplar:

Obama went the back route:
Kill bin Laden — 'nother four up in the Black House

Pusha, let's not get ahead of ourselves. He needs to keep the economy from falling apart before that's even an option.

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Weekend update

By Jonathan Bradley in Newcastle, Australia

26 June 2011

The Empire State Building is lit up with rainbow lights as New York legalises gay marriage.

  • The big news of the moment is the New York State legislature passing a bill legalising gay marriage. Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the act, and same sex couples can begin marrying as of late July. Commented Senator Mark Grisanti, a Buffalo Republican:

I cannot deny a person, a human being, a taxpayer, a worker, the people of my district and across this state, the State of New York, and those people who make this the great state that it is the same rights that I have with my wife.

The story of how same-sex marriage became legal in New York is about shifting public sentiment and individual lawmakers moved by emotional appeals from gay couples who wish to be wed. But, behind the scenes, it was really about a Republican Party reckoning with a profoundly changing power dynamic, where Wall Street donors and gay-rights advocates demonstrated more might and muscle than a Roman Catholic hierarchy and an ineffective opposition.

One day when I was 16, I rode my bike to the nearby D.M.V. office to get my driver’s permit. Some of my friends already had their licenses, so I figured it was time. But when I handed the clerk my green card as proof of U.S. residency, she flipped it around, examining it. “This is fake,” she whispered. “Don’t come back here again.”

After the jump: How Obama could lose in 2012, whether Rick Perry will run, and exciting adventures in fictional desserts.

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The Welches, an Ohio family of five who live in a schoolbus

Obama no longer has national security as a deficit. He's answered the 3 a.m. call. But health care is still a vulnerability. The deficit is a huge vulnerability. Unemployment is a huge vulnerability. The whole economy is a huge vulnerability. If he doesn't get re-elected, it will be because someone really taps into one or more of those four vulnerabilities.

Our normally reliable Republican source reports that Mr. Perry has surveyed the field and decided to get in the race later this summer, perhaps around the time of the national prayer meeting that Mr. Perry is hosting on August 6 at a Houston football stadium. Our source also reports that Mr. Perry is aiming to compete in the Iowa Straw Poll, even though it occurs just a week later, on August 13.

To be sure, Huntsman is no Republican In Name Only; his positions on abortion and gun control still hew quite closely to the Republican line. But he sees himself within a broader GOP tradition. "[Republicans] forget sometimes what Lincoln taught us about individual dignity and equal rights, what Roosevelt taught us about the environment and big stick diplomacy, about American power abroad and how we project it," he says, folding his hands beneath his chin and staring out his window. "We have Nixon who created the EPA, for heaven's sake. People forget that."

Whatever one thinks of the death penalty, the accounts of those who would seek to conceal the results of their theory should be closely checked. If only for that reason, the prospect of Governor Perry as commander in chief induces a chilling nostalgia. Indeed, choosing a leader of the free world from the ranks of those who sport a self-serving incuriosity is a habit, like crash landings and cock-fights, best cultivated in strict moderation.

[S]ince Annie‘s supposed to be a universal American story, I would really like to see a simple, uncomplicated statement that African-Americans, and particularly black men, can be the vehicles for that story. If we can have Jay-Z in gruff mogul mode having his heart melted by a gawky, adorable Willow Smith without having a debate about the state of black fatherhood, or hedging his right to parent her in any way, I think there would be something lovely about that.

Ron Swanson's tub of All The Bacon And Eggs You Have Ben & Jerry's icecream

  • Ice cream flavour of the week is this sadly fictional delight inspired by "Parks and Recreation" character Ron Swanson. [By PanicBasket. Explanation here.]

Over the next 10 years, switching to chained-CPI raises about $300 billion. About two-thirds of that comes from Social Security and other retirement programs. The remainder comes from higher taxes. This reform has a certain amount of support from center-left policy wonks — though they recommend using some of the savings to boost benefits for the poor — but as you’d perhaps expect, AARP and many Democrats don’t like that very much.

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