There’s something physically sickening about Drew Friedman’s depiction of the Donald Sterling incident. The incident itself, not at all unlike Donald Sterling, peaks at number 18 on this year’s MAD’s 20 Dumbest of 2014. It’s right near the bottom, it’s the hand from the grave in the last seconds of the movie, reminding you that, “Yes, monstrous and violent as I am, I’m still here, and I’ll plague you forever.” The last-ditch swipe from a horror that is equal parts disgusting and terrifying.
Look at that parody cover of “Sports Segregated” long enough, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll want to run for the safety of the Foo Fighters: Sonic Highways trailer and watch it over and over again in an attempt cleanse your soul. In an attempt to recapture, repeat, to capitalize on that promise of America inherent in Sonic Highways—we’re stronger because of our diversity, and our diversity itself is made stronger by expansive geography.
Look at Drew Friedman’s parody cover long enough and you’ll know exactly why you need that soul cleanse. It’s that ghastly, fecal-matter brown-easily reminiscent of the kinds of things we’re evolutionarily encoded to avoid. It’s Donald Sterling himself—just ruined by the sun and time and all the good things that would keep us together—striking his best dealmaker pose. It’s that wag of Sterling’s finger, it’s that phone held casually to an ear.
What Friedman is able to parody so elegantly here, his the degeneration of the kind of image that would easily have inspired us decades ago. Just imagine that dealmaker pose on Aristotle Onassis, or back in the ‘80s on a real estate tycoon or Wall Street wizard who would be the king of New York. But on Sterling, the pose just seems sad, and Sterling himself seems small, hunched over, compacted, limited. And that’s the power of Friedman’s parody. That it can implicate our own ambitions, to a degree, in Sterling’s monstrous racist rant. That Sterling exists as a perversion of our natural inclinations to want better for ourselves, to want to be able to be central enough to execute deals on our own behalf. Friedman couldn’t have made a more perfect parody of Sterling’s racism—it caricatures the odiousness without defanging it.
And it’s in this sense, that there maybe is something to running for cover behind Foo Fighters: Sonic Highways. You don’t confront and disable racism with social programs and government vouchers—you empower racism’s opposite. And Dave Grohl’s journey (and it really is a journey) into American music is also a journey into the power of the American Dream.
Probably Greil Marcus said it best when, at the beginning of his chapter on Robert Johnson in Mystery Train, he wrote: “It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to and then to learn something of the value of those limits. But on the surface, America takes its energy from the pursuit of happiness from ‘a love of physical gratification, the notion of bettering one’s condition, the excitement of competition the charm of anticipated success’ (Tocqueville’s words); from the conviction that you can always get what you want, and that even if you can’t, you deserve it anyway.” And later in that same chapter, “No one ever captured the promise of American life more beautifully than Fitzgerald did in that passage. That sense of America is expressed so completely—by the billboards, by our movies, by Chuck Berry’s refusal to put the slightest irony into ‘Back in the U.S.A.,’ by the way that we try to live our lives—that we hardly know how to talk about the resentment and fear that lie beneath the promise. To be an American is to feel the promise as a birthright, and to feel alone and haunted when the promise fails. No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple; it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes.”
This is the twilit land where MAD’s “20 Dumbest” always succeeds so admirably well—the land between the promise and the failure of our “shadowy, shared hopes.” At its heart, the idea of American Government is the same as the idea of corporations (globe-spanning, industrial giant corporations or simply the homely, Mom & Pop corporate enterprises that many Americans trust in more than a 401k); it’s the idea that institutions matter and that they help shape us.
It’s exactly this that that Sonic Highways trailer is getting at when it takes you into the studios of Boston, of Chicago of New York, takes you into Preservation Hall in New Orleans, when the voiceover cues us in: “Cities are changed by the people that go there, but the cities change the people as well.” And it’s this exactly, the idea that while institutions ought to help us—help shape us, help ensure greater freedoms, help us to prosper—sometimes they do break down, that makes MAD’s “20 Dumbest” such an important institution. Because it’s into this gap where the things we rely on to support us—to enhance our lives, to ensure our plenty—that the “20 Dumbest” go rushing into each year. Underlining the idea that even though the institution may have hit the skids, it could easily be righted, or if needs be, reinvented.
But with the issue of racism, and particularly an incident as repulsive as the Sterling recording, has MAD’s “20 Dumbest” come up against something it cannot dispel?
While Ferguson burned for a second time this year, during the Fall, I found myself wading knee-deep into James Ellroy’s newest offering, the first novel in his “Second LA Quartet,” Perfidia. The novel is, in Ellroy’s own words, “a marcohistory” and a “microhistory” both, it traces events surrounding an LAPD murder investigation into the possible homicide of a Japanese family on the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
It’s easy enough to recognize the racial slurs hurled by the passerby characters, what must have scanned back then as “ire” at Japanese Americans, what today can be easily and correctly understood as racial hatred. So I don’t get caught up in that, that’s part of the world Ellroy’s portraying in Perfidia. Similarly, it’s easy enough to identify the open racism of a character like Dudley Smith, the “Dudster,” who was revealed to be the chief villain of the original “LA Quartet.” Smith is far more charming, more vivacious, less world-wearied, than in the earlier Quartet. He slings racial epithets with brio and enthusiasm. Responds to the world from an ideological structure that recognizes race as either limitation or opportunity. It’s easy enough to dismiss a character like Dudley Smith for exactly what he is.
What’s hard about Perfidia is watching singular characters like William B. Parker (the legendary LAPD Chief, in 1941 still only a Captain) and Hideo Ashida, core protagonists both, grudgingly concede the radicalized thinking of the LA landscape circa December, 1941. It’s the ordinariness with which non-racist LAPD officers fall into thinking about “the Japanese” (an ethnicity wielded as you would a collective noun, even this becomes racist in the charged atmosphere). Part the way because of external pressure from the Feds, part the way because of tensions internal to LA. It’s disgusting to have to hear the Mayor and the LAPD Chief and the FBI discuss the practicalities of Japanese internment. More so than to read the racist thinking of Dudley Smith musing on how he might profit from exactly that situation.
Ellroy is a staunch voice against exactly the kind of banality of racism that Donald Sterling (from media around the leak of the recording, and the recording itself) seems to think we’re all heir to. And it doesn’t take a “20 Dumbest” entry to figure that out. But sometimes, having an institution like MAD have our back, sometimes that helps.
