Isegoria

I can’t help but think that the popularity of HBO’s Big Love spurred the New York Times to print this article. Boys Cast Out by Polygamists Find Help:

Over the last six years, hundreds of teenage boys have been expelled or felt compelled to leave the polygamous settlement that straddles Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah.

Disobedience is usually the reason given for expulsion, but former sect members and state legal officials say the exodus of males — the expulsion of girls is rarer — also remedies a huge imbalance in the marriage market. Members of the sect believe that to reach eternal salvation, men are supposed to have at least three wives.

State officials say efforts to help them with shelter, foster care or other services have been frustrated by the boys’ distrust of government and fear of getting their parents into trouble.

Network, from 1976, has a reputation for being eerily prescient, depicting reality television and news-as-spectacle long before it reached its modern form.

I finally watched Network for the first time last week, and it is chock full of memorable quotes, including this news patter that starts the story rolling:

Howard Beale: I would like at this moment to announce that I will be retiring from this program in two weeks’ time because of poor ratings. Since this show is the only thing I had going for me in my life, I’ve decided to kill myself. I’m going to blow my brains out right on this program a week from today. So tune in next Tuesday. That should give the public relations people a week to promote the show. You ought to get a hell of a rating out of that. 50 share, easy.

Beale — who later says, “This is not a psychotic breakdown; it’s a cleansing moment of clarity” — goes on to earn his own show, where he “articulates the rage” being felt by common Americans:

I want you to get mad! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot — I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad.

You’ve got to say, “I’m a human being, God damn it! My life has value!” So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

Some of the easiest targets of satire come from the TV programming department:

Barbara: These are those four outlines submitted by Universal for an hour series. You needn’t bother to read them; I’ll tell them to you.

The first one is set at a large Eastern law school, presumably Harvard. The series is irresistibly entitled “The New Lawyers.” The running characters are a crusty-but-benign ex-Supreme Court justice, presumably Oliver Wendell Holmes by way of Dr. Zorba; there’s a beautiful girl graduate student; and the local district attorney who is brilliant and sometimes cuts corners.

The second one is called “The Amazon Squad.” The running characters include a crusty-but-benign police lieutenant who’s always getting heat from the commissioner; a hard-nosed, hard-drinking detective who thinks women belong in the kitchen; and the brilliant and beautiful young girl cop who’s fighting the feminist battle on the force.

Up next is another one of those investigative reporter shows. A crusty-but-benign managing editor who’s always gett…
[Diana cuts her off]

I’ve been meaning to buy and read security-expert Bruce Schneier‘s Beyond Fear for some time. A couple days ago I perused a copy at the bookstore and stumbled across this passage:

Hollywood likes to portray stagecoach robberies as dramatic acts of derring-do: The robbers gallop alongside the fleeing horses and jump onto the careening coach. Actually, it didn’t happen that way. Stagecoaches were ponderous vehicles that couldn’t negotiate steep hills without everyone getting out and pushing. All the robbers had to do was find a steep hill and wait. When the defensive systems — staying inside the coach, being able to gallop away — failed, the robbers attacked.

Then, yesterday, I caught a showing of 3:10 to Yuma — in which the robbers gallop alongside a careening ironclad coach. A careening ironclad coach with a mounted Gatling gun. I guess that hurt the film’s credibility for me.

I haven’t seen the 1957 version, but I understand that it added its own twist to the original Elmore Leonard story.

Modern Britain is a strange island, if you’re a Vanuatuan native:

In March this year, a British TV company invited a small tribe called the Kastam, from the tiny South Pacific island of Tanna, to send a delegation to England, a country none of its people had ever visited before. They spent a month living here, learning our customs, and making a film about the way the strange and alien inhabitants of a modern western democracy live.
[...]
The five reverse anthropologists are engaged in nothing less splendid than fulfilling a religious prophecy: that the Son of God will one day meet with them and agree to return to live with his brothers in the South Pacific. The men believe, to adapt a song from the football terraces they have visited (to study sporting culture) only days earlier, that the Duke of Edinburgh is finally about to be coming home. Watching a group of Kastam come to terms with our customs is both instructive and very, very funny. Many of the things you’d expect to leave them flummoxed duly do: at meal-times, for example, the group struggle to cope with sitting at table, and using plates, knives and forks (they are used to dining with their hands, cross-leggeed on the floor). In one early scene, when they attend a dinner party, Yapa tucks into the contents of the butter dish, with some gusto. He is either too polite, or too confused, to stop until the entire slab is finished.

In another, the group attends a rural pub on a Friday evening, which they describe as the white man’s version of the “nakamal”, or village meeting place. They are perturbed by how noisy it is. JJ remarks that the white man’s fire-water (Adnams bitter) makes everyone behave in a strangely boisterous manner. Yet although the Kastam are uncomfortable with drunkenness, they turn out to be extremely handy at another English pub tradition: darts.

Evidently Stephen DeStefano is one of the cartoonists working on Venture Brothers Season 3 — and he helped put together these teaser images of Brock Samson in the 80s.