Wax Banks

Bored obsessives and another run at Juno.

From Diablo Cody's script to Juno, which I reread yesterday in a weak moment:

INT. LORING HOUSE - MARK’S SPECIAL ROOM - DAY

Mark is seated at the computer, surfing a horror movie
website. He has the blank expression of a bored obsessive.
The doorbell rings.

'The blank expression of a bored obsessive.' That hurt, even more than remembering Cody won the Oscar for Juno.

I'm that way with blogs and RPG rulebooks. They don't give me nearly as much pleasure as you'd think, given the amount of time I pay in. Why do I bother? Why do I read The Valve, for instance, when I'm irritated by nine out of every ten posts? Why read Grognardia when the subject line and illustration alone are almost invariably enough to tell me what the guy's gonna say? (Most politics blogs fail for the same reason.) If I know I don't want anything in particular from Pandemonium Books & Games, why walk in and allow my buying compulsion free reign? (For that matter, what difference does my conscious desire make?)

I know I'm a slave to very strong desires, the satisfaction of which gives me no pleasure. I know I'm precisely the 'bored obsessive' mentioned in the scene. Man, I didn't care one way or the other about Juno screenplay, I just happened upon it in my ~/Downloads folder; the description of Mark's expression hit me so hard precisely because I was wearing it as I read!

Why are my healthy habits so much harder to keep up than my destructive ones?

OK, so let's indulge my defense mechanisms and talk about what's wrong with Juno, because why else would I have a blog? Why would anyone?

The problem with Juno is precisely that it's a clever bit of writing. The dialogue's stagey and self-conscious in an adolescent way, the characters are largely one-dimensional, Cody substitutes cutesy affectation for real individuality (e.g. specifying Juno's brand of lip balm - 'Dr. Pepper Lip Smacker' - instead of, say, exploring what in the world she and her insufferable one-dimensional best friend actually have in common or what could possibly motivate their relationship), etc., etc. But those problems do seem to share DNA with the film's writerly success, which is that its whisper-thin pregnancy narrative is primarily a smokescreen for the film's double-headed story about (1) Juno and Bleeker's obviously-perfect-for-eachother romantic wish fulfillment, and (2) how being a grownup is more complicated than the smug, self-satisfied, ignorant Mary Sue Juno can possibly understand, even though in the end her naïve fantasies are encouraged by the people around her who know better.

So Juno's pregnancy acts as metaphorical misdirection; its main function is gonna be to pull her closer to her Miraculous Boyfriend, Cody's Y-chromosomal take on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl beloved of indie film jerks everywhere. (Hello Garden State. Hello Amelie. Hello, ironically, Fight Club.) But the relationship between the two is more suggested than depicted, in strokes so broad they start to look like handwaving. In fact the film's dual climax begins with Juno's realization that she loves Paulie, an epiphany so dramatically unmotivated that she must explain her feelings at excruciating length and cuteness in the scene at track practice (page 102 in the shooting script, for those reading along at home).

The actors in Juno also do incredible work, turning delicious lines into something like human communication. Jennifer Garner is so heartbreaking as Vanessa that you forget that her job in the film is to be a perfect angel for Juno to Recognize Afresh, in Dramatic Fashion. The role of Mark is a nice little turnabout - he's a jerk who's arguably doing the right thing by leaving Vanessa, maybe, and Cody's nonjudgmental style works well in his scenes. But there's not much of a story there, and it veers out of believability. (The first guitar-nerd scene is wholly out of place and wrong - a farcical intrusion into a realistically-scaled sequence and story.) And Michael Cera is obviously skilled at playing, in essence, the only part he's played as an adult - so skilled that you forget to be annoyed at how thin and artificial the role is. The adults around Juno are fantastic, Ellen Page is spectacular, and Jason Reitman helps everyone do a convincing imitation of life in the midst of this maddening, hermetic plot.

But it all feels like an achievement - or rather, like we're obligated to call it one, like a script and a film begging for attention. The character of Rollo the store clerk (page 2!) is the script's most obvious misstep:

This is your third test today, Mama Bear. Your eggo is preggo, no doubt about it!

...

You’re not a lion in a pride! (to himself:) These kids, acting like lions with their unplanned pregnancies and their Sunny Delights.

...

That ain't no Etch-a-Sketch. This is one doodle that can't be undid, homeskillet.

Rollo's not a person, of course, he's a Push Button To Enjoy One Line of Diablo Cody Dialogue! machine. Cody might well know someone who speaks like this, but it doesn't matter; 'believability' is not strictly a function of concordance-with-reality, it's a measure of dramatic coherence and contiguity. Rollo isn't believable even if his dialogue was dictated by Cody's local 7-11 worker. His function in the drama is actually impaired by his relentless zing! and zip! and yuk-yuk-yuk! Casting (the spectacularly funny) Rainn Wilson in the role was a misstep, I think; he's so weird-looking, and the design and art direction in his scene are so obsessively quirky, that their ironic function (contrast w/the seriousness of Juno's task, i.e. pregnancy testing) gets lost. Cody is so busy tap-dancing across the surface of her Big Indie Topic that she manages to deflate it into one more element of the script's all-consuming Cody-ness.

Well, there's your problem. The cost of Juno's neat tricks, particularly its coming-of-age misdirection, is that its powerful human moments (the note on the wall! Vanessa and her bassinet!) can only float along in parallel with its endless quippery and twee-teen self-satisfaction. They don't seem to come from a unified human impulse. Juno's empathy is schematic but its condescension feels absolutely lived-in and real; it's a hostile film (and script), dripping with contempt that its let's-get-together message can't obliterate or outbalance. I wish I could say this was surprising, but mainly it's deflating and familiar. After all, it's the sad loners (like Juno herself) who harbor the darkest anger, and the contemptuous 'norms' who feel the deepest sadness. The script again, page 94:

Bleeker and Juno KISS, oblivious to the gawking track team guys in the background.

In the distance, near the school entrance, we see STEVE RENDAZO (the kid who always TORMENTS Juno) regarding the makeout session with a sad, envious expression.

I think Cody really believed she was just paying off a joke here (the setup is on page 11: 'The funny thing is that Steve Rendazo secretly wants me. Jocks like him always want freaky girls'), but this is dumb revenge, and no less contemptuous or pathetic for being visited on the dumb spiteful jock. Bleeker is a figure of fantasy in the story as surely as Juno is for Steve Rendazo, and this reads like a bit of 'punk' acting-out. But Heathers would already've knocked that shit out of the park if The Breakfast Club hadn't done it first. Must the jock's main function in the story be to settle authorial scores?

But then that's exactly the sort of thing Hollywood writer types go for, hahaha, and so the Oscar goes to...

In response to Grognardia, Gygax on D&D: 'a non-game.'

Commenting on this thread, which overflows with the kind of silly bullshit you'd expect from argumentative nerds. The topic is the bundle of seeming contradictions and weirdly dismissive/negative/myopic claims in Gary Gygax's public statements about the hobby that he and Dave Arneson founded in the mid-70's.

Unless you are a very, very serious goddamn RPG geek, do not read the rest of this post. Its narrowness of vision and concern embarrasses me, though I'm glad that after thousands of pages of insufferable RPG reading I can now talk about the shit with at least minimal familiarity. Yes, I did paying work earlier today, why do you ask?

* * *

How to talk to a climate skeptic.

From here(!) I got here(!!) and it's a hell of a resource.

Witness.

Go read Roger Ebert right now.

Brasyl by Ian McDonald (2007).

[Update, a few weeks removed: I find myself longing for the sheer carnality and ecstatic polychromatic perversity of Brasyl's Brazil(s). This review doesn't give the book enough credit for its powerful atmosphere, which may be a little touristy or cinematic (vs. historical/realistic) but goddamn was it nice to dwell in that world for a while.]

I was swept up by Brasyl and took just a couple of sittings to read its 'cinematic' second half, in which McDonald's tripartite somewhat-cyberpunk narrative begins to pick up speed and answer questions. I recommend it, and if that's all you need then go get 'em, tiger.

[Spoilers follow.]

But this I confess: I never did manage to put aside the frustrations that crept in during the opening chapters. The science in the fiction is a little rickety, and 'quantum' is used as 'magic' might be in epic fantasy; that's par for the course, I suppose, but as the book builds to its grand climax(es) you'll find yourself peering into some worrisome plot holes. You (and McDonald) can get by on atmosphere and energy for most of the book, but it's hard to escape the feeling of anticlimax that settles in during the final 2033 section, when it becomes apparent that the book's great ontological revelation slips by almost unremarked, rendering the final 1733 segment (the book's most action-packed) almost...unnecessary. The multiverse has ended? We're a simulation cooked up by the will-to-live of embodied information? A plucky band of heroes has learned how to escape the Matrix and fight the Agents (excuse me, admonitories) with ninja skills? The outcome of the final battle doesn't particularly matter, since its key metaplot function is to show that the hero has learned how to travel between universes, which revelation occurs off the page? Well, so what: on with the cinematics.

The characters, meanwhile, are mired in type and trope: one Japanese scientist is referred to more often by her 'manga eyes' and dye-bright hair than any other feature or quality, while the castrating career-bitch Marcelina of course falls into syrupy love for her secret lover, realizing it (of course) at the last moment before entering Cosmic Warfare, and of course she's a self-proclaimed 'superhero' with capoeira skills worthy of The Matrix (Brazil Edition) (not an idle comparison, that). Plus her job and circle of friends ('alt dot family,' sigh) come off as unsuccessful attempts at satire, pointed as a TiVo recording of last week's sitcoms.

Never mind that Luis Quinn, the book's clearest authorial fantasy figure, seems to have emerged from The Name of the Rose, stopped off at a showing of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, and then, on his sea voyage to Brazil, picked up some infodumping and unbearably-tacky-'cute'-anachronism tips from Neal Stephenson and every steampunk poseur ever born. McDonald's attempts at humanizing and psychologizing Quinn (the metal-tankard story) seem hamfisted, as does the sub-Aubrey/Maturin friendship between Quinn and the less detailed Falcon.

McDonald's canny choice of Evocative Central Cultural Event - Brazil's loss in the 1950 World Cup final - makes for a fine point of narrative departure, but its role in his tale of quantum-historical divergence smacks of nation-scale psychobiography; nor is it the book's only such feature. How very Great White Male of him, if you like that whole critical-paradigmatic thing. And the fact that the book ends up being about multiverse-spanning conspiracies of comic book heroes and villains, some of whom happen to be Brazilian, doesn't actually ironize the book's closing epigraph (de Gaulle: 'Brazil is not a serious country') as McDonald presumably intends. All of which makes the unevenness of Brasyl's modern-day narrative thread difficult to take.

Then you've got the book's sometimes-overheated prose, weird lapses of taste (a bisexual transvestite hero does not make the book's depiction of sex, particularly women's sexuality, any less tacky), and as-depicted-in-the-movies imagery. It'd be easier to ignore the innumerable resonances between Brasyl and Philip Pullman's equally fast-moving but more self-consciously literary His Dark Materials trilogy if McDonald's main creepytech prop weren't a subtle knife capable of cutting holes in the fabric of the universe.

Yet I was totally involved in the book: snowed under by its sheer velocity, McDonald's obvious love of his various Brazilian settings and figures, its alt-urbanity contrasting nicely with the neo-Tokyo variations beloved of near-future writers. Its shortcomings bugged me, but I found myself wondering despite myself, What happens next? And McDonald keeps delivering the goods, sentences swooping this way and that, moving between scenes with a dancer's dexterity, liberally salting the whole mix with Brazilian slang and just-this-side-of-hip technofetishism. (It helps that the book's topical and cultural concerns are wired directly to my pleasure center, too.)

It took me a while to get through Brasyl, but that's not the book's fault, or not entirely. I kept getting distracted by boring stuff: work, family, pregnancy (not mine, strictly speaking), trips to the library to read about the science that McDonald was obviously not quite doing justice to. Life stuff, in other words; nothing as ecstatically garish and exotic as his titular southern wonderland. What a shame.

And yet I enjoyed the book - and I can't separate the pleasure it gave me from my complaints about its shortcomings. That they didn't ruin the book for me is perhaps McDonald's neatest trick, and I'd like to see him do it again. River of Gods is on the to-read list (as Brasyl should be on yours), but it is very definitely not next. How's that for a recommendation, Reader(s)?

Biden on Palin.

Despite its lurid subject line, this post means only to deliver this considered, mild-mannered comment from Joe Biden, who seems like a stand-up guy and whose tendency to put his foot in his mouth only makes his lucidity and good nature seem more compelling (because less artificial). Seems like the sort of person I'd enjoy disagreeing with. Hopey-changey, here ya go:

Game set match to Sullivan, I suppose, but the past isn't even past...

Andrew Sullivan has got some very, very serious problems as a writer and a thinker, and I think you can make a case for run-of-the-mill racism and misogyny in his writing, never mind his constant dimwitted equivocation about that Dangerous Collectivist Left which must be staunchly opposed by all right-thinking freedom lovers. But he's no anti-semite, whatever the hell that term means today among the dimwitted equivocators at The New Republic.

That said, Sullivan's lengthy self-defense against Leon Wieseltier is a bit of a mess. Sullivan is candid and canny about his own writing career, admitting that his shortcomings are exacerbated by his torrential writing output and tendency toward grand histrionic rhetoric. (Please understand that I use the phrase 'drama queen' with real affection.) Sullivan calls blogging 'provisional truth,' which is an ill-chosen phrase, but I know what he means: as long as he works his way toward right thinking and his work serves a purpose in the meantime, isn't he doing something like good? It's not journalism but it's something and I've gotten a lot out of his writing these last (oh my god) eight years.

On the other hand, Sullivan writes this shit:

Leon then drags out some of my more hysterical and emotional posts during and immediately after the 9/11 attack. He does not refer to my considered takes on what it all meant in the NYT Magazine here or my essay, "This Is A Religious War." Yes, I confess and have often apologized for the excess of some of my rhetoric at the time. It was a traumatizing time and I was horrified and my emotions got the better of me at times. I wasn't the only one, of course, in a country still polarized by the 2000 recount, but it's still no excuse. He even brings up my infamous sentence in a 6,000 word piece in the days after 9/11 about a "a fifth column" among some far leftists. He omits to note that I regretted that phrase - and its misleading implications - days thereafter, and pledged never to use it or anything like it again. More recently, I wrote

'In the emotional days after the destruction of the World Trade Center, there was at least as much heat as light. I myself wrote a sloppy throwaway sentence effectively accusing such "enclaves" on the far left of being a virtual and potential "fifth column" in the coming war. I regret that ugly coinage and said so days later.'

This is odd because these sentences appeared in a review I wrote for the New Republic's literary section, edited by Leon Wieseltier. And what on earth has this to do with my alleged anti-Semitism? Seriously, is he this intent on throwing everything but the kitchen sink at me?

Sullivan did not write a 'sloppy throwaway sentence' accusing anyone of 'being a virtual and potential "fifth column."' He's lying, flat out. He did not in any way qualify his language. This is what he actually wrote:

"But we might as well be aware of the enemy within the West itself - a paralyzing, pseudo-clever, morally nihilist fifth column that will surely ramp up its hatred in the days and months ahead."

He also wrote this, which you'll have a hard time tracking down because he cravenly changed the text in his blog archives to qualify his language:

"The middle part of the country -- the great red zone that voted for Bush -- is clearly ready for war. The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead -- and may well mount a fifth column."

That quote appeared in Sullivan's 9/16/01 essay in the Times of London.

These are the terms in which he's always seen the world. Sullivan's 'conservatism of doubt' rhetoric gives way, at the drop of a hat, to apoplectic finger-pointing and compensatorily macho rhetoric - and he loves this shit about the cosmic struggle between good and evil (sin and grace, say). Sullivan only ever halfway apologized for his 'fifth column' rhetoric. It's not that abject terror pushed him to say things he didn't believe; rather, he said what he felt, and spent the better part of a decade tying himself into knots as a result. He knows his honesty has gotten him into trouble in the past, which is (I suspect) why he takes such pains to brush aside talk of his past (e.g. humiliating revelations of socially unsanctioned libertinism) and assiduously avoids responsibility for his stupidest, crudest missteps (e.g. his championing of, and continuing support for, Charles Murray's The Bell Curve, which I believe flattered much more than his intellectual curiosity and professional/political self-regard).

I think Sullivan is one of the handful of essential bloggers. His nuanced and insightful readings of the Obama campaign/myth were ahead of their time, though they stand in stark contrast to his shrill and ugly denunciations of Hillary Clinton; his takedowns of 'tea party' conservatism are self-aggrandizing but a hell of a lot deeper (to my mind) than the plodding left's dismissively univocal reaction. And he's easily got the better of Wieseltier this round. But he has and will always have much to answer for, which he never quite gets around to doing. Not all the way. Not ever.

Yet part of his appeal as writer and public figure is that he won't remove himself from the business of reading, writing, and arguing long enough to let these matters sink into the past. Sullivan's public persona is the sum of all he's written; being part of process by which that persona was formed, watching him become his recent self in realtime, has been and continues to be a loopy, educational, entertaining experience.

Pond.

[From the same writing exercise night as the previous post ('Philbert'). The prompt was to write a passage involving three objects: a ladybug (dead), a minnow (living), and hand creme (neither). I find this sort of thing stupid and annoying until I'm doing it, at which point it's so obviously a good useful idea that I have to invent new words to describe how annoying I find myself.]

* * *

She wants to ruminate, or inquire, or peer deeply - or to 'philosophize' or cogitate. Or even just to know what 'cogitate' means, or have a clearer idea what it would feel like, whether a poet's afternoon seems longer than a stock clerk's, and does it break cleanly across 4:30pm like hers, into 'working' and 'alone.'

But she just stares. The duck pond is supposed to be beautiful and serene, but serene feels disappointingly like 'boring,' and it looks like beautiful means basically 'expensive.' The clouds are not castles or infants' faces, but they're not clouds either, or not the 'fact' of clouds. They don't hang or float lazily, don't even move, they're just...noise. Visual noise, like bunched fabric. Spots where the wallpaper has peeled back.

The pond isn't exactly a carnival either. There are minnows happening about. They look like accidents of light instead of fish. She rubs hand creme on her burn and the smell of it seems like an imposition, no less than the heat. There is movement but no objects, or colours but no movement. The fish are there, pointless, then the image changes and they're a few inches on, or gone.

This is even worse than him leaving. Arriving at a rerun of a better day, known how it ends.

The upturned shell of a ladybug spins across the water without direction or destination. The lady has vacated the premises, it seems. Probably looking like all the other bugs now, beneath an unfinished sky in rerun. Some drama would be nice, she thinks. Some something. Not this...'beauty.'

Philbert.

[Wrote this as an exercise at a writing-group meeting last month. Assignment: write around the sentence beginning 'In the armchair there sits...']

* * *

Philbert! Do not tarry, boy. Witches make their coven here. Witches! What are witches? Lucky lad, to have lived a baker's dozen years and - excuse me, eight years - and not met a witch. Wizards, my boy, wizards who menstruate no less, and - well I'll explain when you're - if your parents haven't told you it isn't my place to - well -

Witches! Eye of news, Philbert, and ear of...newt...or salamander. Ears and other parts taken before their time from defenseless amphibians who knew nought but peace before the devil-women did their...oh, you do? A frog? Philbert, I - well don't cry, lad. What's your frog's name? Philb - you named him after yourself? No, that's a perfectly fine frog name, I -

Philbert! WITCHES, damn you! Hell-slatterns, foul warlock-spawn - it means 'sluts,' boy. Ask your father. He's known a few in his time, heh - ask him when your mother's not around, though.

Where was I?

LOOK there, boy! Philbert! Close your eyes and imagine - well, look with your eyes closed. Just...do it, OK? Picture it, lad. Close them. Good.

A full moon, Philbert. Demon dogs howl on the tor, demon cats - indistinguishable from normal cats - rub against Satanic calves and ankles. MAGIC. Vile ichors drip from the ceiling about a bubbling cauldron. The light is sickly purple, indigo, puce...viola...rembley...other colours unknown to man. An uncanny sounds seems to thrum in the fetid bowels of the earth. You - no, 'bowels.' Your pipes, boy. The pipes in the back. LISTEN! PHILBERT! The sky splits. The smell of candy-coated death dipped in chocolate BILE fills the cottage. Yes, we'll get lunch after this, I'm actually peckish myself, WITCHES, and blood fills the sink in place of soapy water, spoiling the dishes that the witches would never do anyway because they're WITCHES. And in the chair, curled like a question mark...in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh - a woman about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. She's gone to seed, Philbert, at Satan's command. SATAN.

Don't get married, Philbert. Trust Grandpa on this one thing.

Oh.

When you clasp your hands in prayer you are making contact, skin to skin, hand in hand, with someone who needs your help.

Schemata.

Diagrammatic maps, class hierarchies, multiplication tables, vector fields, interpretive schemes, occult taxonomies, historical timelines, the Order of Battle, the Ladder of Creation, the Phish setlist file, the rules of Nomic, a summary of Gödel Escher Bach, the fearful symmetry of LISP code: the appearance of complexity and reassurance of its digestibility are drugs to me. I've lived wholly in abstraction for so long, and am narcotized by infographics and categorization schemes. (Multiplication tables and equation sheets give me tingles.) Hence the blush of Pynchon/Joyce love, Coltrane, Discordia, self-taught calculus as dream-cartography...schemata keep life orderly - i.e. not life. I'm learning.

The Super Bowl ads are making me ashamed of my country, my sex, my race, every goddamn thing.

What a parade of craven despicable assholes marches across the TV screen between plays: terrified of women, homosexuals, art, foreigners, everything! What a bunch of cowards we look like. Jesus.

Good game though.

Films.

Assorted, unordered, provisional: Gilliam, especially Munchausen. Magnolia. Blade Runner. Fight Club. Serenity. Spirited Away, unnervedly. Southland Tales, not David Lynch. Last Crusade, unembarrassedly, and Temple of Doom's opening scene. (Spielberg almost always.) Empire with a soft spot for Jedi. Donnie Darko. Gambon. Yes Rushmore, no Tennenbaums as I recall. Children of Men. Crouching Tiger. Passionately, Eternal Sunshine; any Kaufman actually. Without a Clue. Ghostbusters. Not Repo Man. Burton's Batmen. Christian Bale nearly always. Hedwig, always. Punch-Drunk Love. A Mighty Wind. Big Trouble in Little China plus DVD commentary. With all my heart, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Monsoon Wedding.

Evolution.

Knowing and accepting are different. No gorilla 'rose up' to become human; homo sapiens isn't the 'end product' of anything. Many people 'know' humans evolved from lower primates, but what does that really mean? Undirected, nontelic, ongoing process; essential interspecies commonality; pure existential contingency. You're an accident, not even a 'you,' and your species doesn't 'deserve' to consume every imaginable natural resource. If natural selection produces only local optimizations and human consciousness is a biological phenomenon, then our relentless anthropocentrism is sinful, if anything is. Evolution should scare you a little. It undercuts exceptionalism, not dignity. That's no small thing.

Code.

MIT disabused me of my 'I'm a programmer!' notion, among others. I like code, not coding; syntax mastery feels good but I've neither patience nor taste for it. Still, its schematicism and order are appealing; I like the cleanliness of code, the promise of power. Ruby's speechlike idioms agree with me, and Perl's nutball arcana; of course LISP is perfect-of-its-kind. But I need spoken English's assumptions to be comfortable. Code's hermeticism gets a bit much, hyperspecification doesn't comfort me. I've got the wrong spectrum disorders for the hacker lifestyle. I did get a B+ in 6.001 though. Not without help.

We've all had days and nights like this.

Fallows on the impossibility of bipartisanship.

If you read only one Atlantic Monthly blogger it should probably be James Fallows, who's got a lot of years on Coates and a lot of sense on Sullivan. (Surely you don't think I can in good conscience recommend the laughable Megan McArdle...)

Fallows's latest is vital, but he wrote almost none of it. No matter! Still vital!

Bipartisanship in the American sense means compromising on legislation so that a sufficient number of members of Congress from BOTH parties will support it, even if (as is typically the case) a few majority party members defect and most minority party members don't join. Bipartisanship consists of getting ENOUGH members of the minority party to join the (incomplete) majority in voting for major legislation. It can't happen if the minority party members vote as a block against major legislation. And that can happen only if the minority party has the ability to discipline its ranks so that none join the majority, which is the unprecedented situation we've got in Congress today.

"The way parliamentary parties maintain their discipline is straightforward. No candidate can run for office using the party label unless the party bestows that label upon him or her. And usually, the party itself and not the candidate raises and controls all the campaign funds. As every political scientist knows, the fact that in the U.S. any candidate can pick his or her own party label without needing anyone else's approval, and can also raise his or her own campaign funds, is why there cannot be and never really has been any sustained party discipline before -- even though it is a feature of parliamentary systems.

"The GOP now maintains party discipline by the equivalent of a parliamentary party's tools: The GOP can effectively deny a candidate the party label (by running a more conservative GOP candidate against him or her), and the GOP can also provide the needed funds to the candidate of the party's choice. And every GOP member of Congress knows it. (Snowe and Collins may be immune, but that's about it.)

Etc., etc., etc. Give it a read.

Devastatingly elegant: this is how you change minds.

Slacktivist addresses the Tea Partiers. (Read the comments too.)