Mark Hemingway

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The carnival is God

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Despite remarkable popularity and obsessive fans not seen since the head Deadhead died, Insane Clown Posse manages to attract little attention from music critics or cultural commentators. (For the uninitiated, look upon their wikipedia, ye mighty, and despair.) But despite the amazingly off-putting profanity and sexual imagery of Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope’s horrorcore lyrics, clearly these two rappers have a powerful ability to connect with what I think it’s fair to characterize as an alienated and disaffected fan base. I think the ICP phenomenon is probably a lot more complex than and interesting than it appears, even though cultural elites seem to disdainfully regard it as something unfortunately endemic among the lower classes like the musical version of methamphetamine. (Then again, there’s probably a lot of overlap on the ICP fans and meth users venn diagram.)


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The naked tea partiers

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For reasons known only to New York Times editors, Kate Zernike is continually given free rein to write about the Tea Party. There have been a litany of complaints about her coverage, perhaps most notably when earlier this year she accused Human Events editor Jason Mattera of speaking in a “Chris Rock voice” and using “racial stereotypes” to mock Obama. Mattera was born and raised in Brooklyn, and Zernike didn’t realize that was just how he talks. Not content with the amount of racial phrenology she’d employed to date, she wrote a piece about race and the Tea Party pegged to the Glenn Beck rally that contained this immortal sentence:


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Have I got a monastery to sell you

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I have read a lot of Michael Lewis over the years — at least five of his books that I can remember, not to mention countless articles. His real gift as journalist is a knack for pure, unadulterated readability. The fact he’s able to write about esoteric subjects such as baseball statistics and credit default swaps and make them both understandable and wildly popular is no mean feat. Believe me, I’m envious.


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Good reporting vs. bad faith arguments

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Few would disagree that the debate over same-sex marriage is more charged than usual. Charges of bad faith and bigotry abound. Honest reporting can help cooler heads prevail. Many of the arguments in this debate have been badly mangled, and that’s why I was so pleased to see this Religion News Service piece by Daniel Burke on “Why Prop 8 ruling scares religious conservatives.”


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There's a pony in here somewhere

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When I saw that the New York Times magazine had an 8,000(!) word piece on the “The New Abortion Providers,” my heart sank a bit. This is an otherwise interesting publication that doesn’t just seem obsessed with churning out pro-abortion propaganda, it has a history of wildly botching stories on the topic and refusing to correct them.


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Orthodox 'fundamentalism' and obscenity

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Apparently, a major religious obscenity trial in Moscow has been going on. I only know this thanks to a New York Times story, the Times being one of the few papers left these days that has the resources to do its own foreign coverage:


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A political 'truce' on abortion?

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He hasn’t exactly reached Sarah Palin levels of media saturation, nor is he about to host his own syndicated talk show like Mike Huckabee — but Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels is generating quite a bit of excitement within the ranks of the Republican party. Based on his stellar gubernatorial track record, more than a few people want to see him run for President. (I should confess that, having written a cover story for National Review on the governor last year, I’ve played a minor role in spurring the chatter around Daniels.)


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Twilight of the Mormons

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The smartest piece I’ve read so far about the Twilight phenomenon, was Caitlin Flanagan’s essay for The Atlantic. To date, I haven’t read the books or seen the movies, but my Mormon upbringing has made me somewhat attuned to a subject that otherwise is primarily of interest to adolescent females. Anyway, here’s Flanagan’s take on the books’ religion and morals:


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The ‘Indian’ religion?

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There’s been a lot of political coverage lately of Nikki Haley and the South Carolina gubernatorial primary. That race has been rife with religious ghosts ever since a state senator called Haley, a former Sikh who converted to Christianity, a “raghead.” Ever since then, supporters of her primary opponent Gresham Barrett have been trying to raise the issue of her religion in a rather slimy fashion.


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