Tag: YouTube

Remembrances of March Madnesses Past

Mark Sample

With my hometown team in the Sweet Sixteen, I thought I’d dig through the archives of a long-defunct, long-offline version of Sample Reality and repost the only thing I’ve ever written about the NCAA. It begins with this Nike advertisement from 2000, a fantastic little commercial produced by Wieden & Kennedy (Portland, Oregon), which illustrates Marx’s idea of the commodity as a “social hieroglyph” better than, well, better than Marx ever did.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMjt6IsODEk]

Quite simply, what we find in the advertisement above is the fantasy that Nike shoes literally grow on trees. They are not the products of human labor, but the produce of the earth, nourished by the sun and sold at a farmer’s market in sleepy Bracketville, a fictional town created by Nike during the 2000 NCAA championship.

Bracketville, where “dreams grow on trees,” is the fanciful antipode to Indonesia and Vietnam [and now, in 2008, China], where most of Nike’s shoe production actually occurs. Dismal working conditions are disavowed, by both Nike and its customers, and replaced by pleasant images of sunshine and plenitude. Women and children factory workers, whose labor is congealed in every pair of “Air Flight” shoes, disappear, leaving behind no trace. The factories disappear as well. Indeed, Nike itself vanishes. In the corporation’s place we find only the friendly local farmer, selling his home-grown shoes to eager American customers. In a bizarre twist of logic, $1.20 worth of labor becomes a $90 pair of shoes, which in turn becomes an abundant crop sold by the basket-full. [The shoe-fruit, as I say above, is a social hieroglyph, by which Marx meant a commodity whose origins are obscured, its means of production veiled, and any traces of human labor, hidden.]

Speaking up for Jerry Falwell

Mark Sample

Last week I posted a video clip of Jerry Falwell in 1998 delivering a sermon about the potential apocalypse of Y2K. In the clip, Falwell tosses off a weird aside about how he used to teach billy goats to “do what they’re best at.” It was a funny clip, especially out of context. In a similar vein I had prepared another clip, from the same series of sermons. In this clip, Falwell means to be talking about natural disasters, but he goes off on a tangent about boxing:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDDSKUouQ6Q]

Again, a funny clip, especially out of context.The first clip has been viewed several thousand times (helped no doubt by its mention on BoingBoing). I was pleased so many people watched the video, but I was unprepared for the kinds of comments people left on YouTube. A few were innocuous, a few were clever, but most were simply hateful. Far more hateful than anything Falwell himself ever said. And that’s saying a great deal, considering Falwell was a close-minded bigot peddling fear and willful ignorance based upon an uninspired and incompetent interpretation of the Bible.But the things you people said. They were just mean. Whereas my clips are examples of ironic juxtaposition (say, a homophobic preacher revealing that he likes to watch big sweaty men “get with it” in the boxing ring), the comments on YouTube were spiteful, vengeful, and punctuated extremely poorly. Most were gleeful that this man had died. And most wished that in death, Falwell was due for worlds of pain, usually involving hellfire, and usually involving defilement by one or more farm animals.

I deleted the offensive comments and closed off the page to any more comments.

I don’t see this as censorship so much as good taste. However poor his grasp of biblical scholarship, however provincial his worldview, Jerry Falwell was, I believe, at heart a decent man. By all accounts he was not a moral hypocrite, as so many other famous televangelists and preachers have turned out to be. So, I say, it’s a case of hate the sin (ignorance, antisemitism, xenophobia, etc.) but love the sinner.

And that’s coming from someone who doesn’t believe in either heaven or hell.

Jerry Falwell on Y2K and Goats

Mark Sample5 Comments

In September 1998, Jerry Falwell delivered a series of sermons about the impending social collapse soon to be delivered to a wicked nation by the “Millennium Bug” — that is, the disaster that never disastered, Y2K.

In the sermons, Falwell likens the Tower of Babel to Y2K, and prophesizes that “God may use Y2K to crush us and prepare us for revival.” And oh, yeah, he talks about goats too.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPoItVbNels]

KUBARK on 24

Mark Sample

Jane Mayer, an uncompromising journalist who’s become a thorn in the side of the Bush administration (for her reporting on current U.S. torture tactics and the method of “extraordinary rendition”), has written a New Yorker profile of Joel Surnow, one of the creators of the hit television show 24. Her profile focuses on Surnow’s support of torture and his show’s over-reliance on what security experts call the “ticking time bomb scenario”—a hypothetical situation used in 24 to justify torture, but which has never occurred in real life.

In her article, Mayer reveals that “several copies of the C.I.A.’s 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual can be found at the ’24’ offices.” I find this simply amazing. The KUBARK manual, which I mentioned in an earlier post on the CIA , is infamous for its straightforward tips on how to conduct coercive interrogations. Even more amazing, the lead writer for 24 admits that most of the torture scenes in 24 are not inspired by the CIA. Gordon tells Mayer, “for the most part, our imaginations are the source. Sometimes these ideas are inspired by a scene’s location or come from props—what’s on the set.” Gordon goes on to say that he (and reportedly Kiefer Sutherland, who plays Jack Bauer) are running into torture “fatigue.” They’re getting tired of it.

Maybe they should, as U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan (who also happens to be the dean at West Point) suggests, “do a show where torture backfires.” Because in real life, that’s what happens. Not only is torture illegal and unethical. It simply doesn’t work.

Here is Mayer herself, talking about torture in 24: