rowland manthorpe dot com

Further proof, if any more were needed, of the uncanny paralells between the Obama administration’s and the West Wing. Ryan Lizza reports on Peter Orszag’s first week at work:

… he lit a fire, unaware that the chimney had been sealed. Smoke billowed into an office on the fourth floor, setting off alarms, and the building was evacuated.

Sam and Josh do exactly the same thing in WW series 2, setting up the immortal line

Mr President.. you know how you told me not to wake you up unless the building was on fire…

Classic.

Controversy in the States this week about a beauty queen with – shock horror – breast implants. HuffPost reveals that the magnificently-named Carrie Prejean, had her surgery paid for and organised by Miss California Pageant officials.

There are several sides to this story, not least Prejean’s vocal opposition to “unnatural” same-sex marriage. The almost as well-named Brian Normoyle neatly skewers the contradictions of this position.

What’s particularly interesting to me, however, is the defense offered by Pageant co-Director Keith Lewis for the decision to procure Prejean a boob job. He says:

We want to put her [Prejean] in the best possible confidence in order to present herself in the best possible light on a national stage.

On YourTango, Julie Andrews picks up on this comment:

Hold on a sec. Did he really utter the word confidence, and imply that going under the knife for a bigger bust size gives a woman more confidence? More attention, sure. More cleavage stares, we can’t deny that. But real self-confidence? … Don’t think so.

I agree with the spirit of Andrew’s remarks. But I can’t agree with their substance. His line of thinking is no doubt highly disengenuous, but I find myself forced to agree with Lewis on this:

…for me, it’s not a personal choice that I would recommend. But at the same time, I know so many women that have done the procedure and feel better about themselves and the way they present themselves.

I think that’s the question is, whether or not, when you’re looking at that procedure as an option, am I going to feel better about myself?

I’ve argued before that, however much we might want to believe that confidence comes solely from within, it can’t be divorced from the way people see you. Breast implants are particularly dubious, to my mind, because of the possible health risks involved (althought these are far from certain). But what about getting braces or having your ears pinned back? Most people would accept that those procedures can improve your self-confidence.

I’ve also argued that there’s no such thing as “real self-confidence”. There are competing definitions, but no right answer, no “true reality”. Opposing one idea of confidence to another is to enter into an argument without hope of resolution.

My prediction: that we’ll see more and more of this – in politics as well as marketing. In fact, it’s already on its way.

Confidence politics are the new identity politics. Just as dangerous. And just as hard to argue against.

Yet still strangely absorbing. A sign of the times:

UPDATE: I can’t seem to get the video to play, so you’ll have to make to do with what the those in the trade misleadingly call the “ad story”:

A young woman is shown having just brushed her teeth, running her tongue over them and practising her smile. A carton of Macleans toothpaste is shown and the narrator introduces the new Macleans ‘Confidence’ with Iso-Active technology for superior whitening. A screen message advises that ‘be ready’.

Just practising her smile. She’s so normal.

Follow the link above for the live-action special.

UPDATE 2: From Jitendra Sheth (Jake):

The tennis player knows what to thank for his recent form:

“I’m really happy with the shape I’m in in this moment. Confidence is really important in this sport, in any sport. Right now I think I have good confidence”.

I like comics and I like books about Jews, so perhaps it was inevitable that a novel about Jews and comic books would appeal to me. But I never expected to be as amazed as I was by Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which I finished reading this morning. No Parisian patisserie was ever so ripe and sweet, so gorgeously lush, so ultimately filling.

The comparison between Kavalier and Clay and E. L. Doctorow’s equally brilliant Ragtime has been made before. I also saw a link to another superb book dealing with the relationship between history and narrative, Robertson Davies’s Deptford Trilogy. Strange that all three feature appearances from one Harry Houdini.

Houdini’s story is in many ways the perfect allegory for America in the first half of the 20th century. Not merely his celebrity or his immigrant status, but also his art, epitomises the forever-out-of-reach American Dream, constantly in the process of reinventing itself: “he was buried and reborn, buried and reborn”, as Ragtime’s narrator puts it.

Reading an academic comparison between Ragtime and Kavalier and Clay, I was also struck by the similiarity of Houdini’s work to comics. In an escape, the essential action takes place unseen. The audience only witnesses two static shots: the beginning and the end. So it is with comics. Scott McCould gives an excellent explanation of this in his ingenious Understanding Comics, and there’s a lot more to it than you might think. But the basic principle is this: that everything happens between the panels. Just as in Houdini’s miraculous escapes.

It’s a long time since I read The Deptford Trilogy, and I can’t remember exactly how Davies uses Houdini. In Ragtime he is a tortured figure struggling to find meaning in his life. For Doctorow, he seems to embody the painful transition to modernity, in which live action is replaced by images on a screen. Yet he remains ignorant of what is happening: “unaware of the design of his career, the great map of revolution laid out by his life”.

Chabon has a less tragic vision of Houdini. Rather than concentrating on the demise of the escapist’s art form, he prefers to see its motivations living on in other forms of creativity, most notably of course in comic books. It is a fundamentally optimistic vision.

Ragtime depicts human beings powerless to resist history’s forces. The heroic attitude is that of Coalhouse Walker, who recognises that defeat is inevitable, yet still continues to fight his hopeless battle. Chabon’s characters in Kavalier and Clay are equally powerless. Yet they still have hope: hope of a miracle; hope of an escape.

At the end of the book, Josef Kavalier describes a Halloween visit to Houdini’s grave made by a group of magicians:

… waiting for the spirit of the Mysteriarch to appear, as Houdini had promised that, should such a thing turn out to be feasible, it would. At the break of dawn on All Hallows’ Day, they had joked and whistled and pretended to be disappointed at Houdini’s failure to show, but in Joe’s case at least – and he suspected it had been so for some of the others – the show of disappointment had only served to mask the actual disappointment that he felt.

Revisiting the grave, Joe is rewarded with a vision. “Go home”, it says, and Joe does. Reading it, I thought: now that’s magic.