Politics Television
Kevin Hilke
U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has been roundly accused of judicial bias in matters of race. Comparative analyses of “judicial bias,” even ones that give somewhat reliable comparative measures of various jurists’ work, operate by postulating a spectral fixed point of neutrality against which the scrutinized is measured. But where is this point? What constitutes it? What allows us to say that the contingent result of Sotomayor’s intellectual collaborations with dozens of individuals, absent Sotomayor’s views as such, constitutes a universal norm? Why should we presume that the average of the biases of multiple others represents a default lack of bias?
Politics Television
Kevin Hilke
The New Adventures of Old Christine, Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s surprisingly but deservedly successful two-camera, nineties-redux sitcom, now halfway through its fourth season on current ratings behemoth CBS, constantly tackles political issues—especially those related to “family values”—but does so in a way that subsumes political contention beneath traditional, comfortable, two-camera sitcom plots. The series takes up and comments on political questions inveterately, but in a formal and familiar conventional-sitcom environment in which all antagonisms are represented as pressing problems for individual people. Even when the show’s political message is so obvious as to seem artless and tactless, that message is articulated in political terms for neither the audience nor the characters. If these characters are playing politics, we must say that it is a peculiarly personal politics. The particular problems they face are baldly political, yet the sphere of real-world political problems does not substantively concern them.
Television
Kevin Hilke
Between the influence of received stereotypes and the restrictions of censors, gays who did not fit rigid, popularly assimilable molds had little place in nineties network comedy period. NBC’s programming, especially, suffered from this sort of stereotyping, culminating in the unabashedly stereotype-perpetuating, and thus user-friendly, Will & Grace. Now, fifteen years after Jerry’s outing, NBC’s offers us The Office’s Oscar Martinez, a gay member of Dunder-Mifflin Scranton’s three-person accounting department whose character debuts as ostensibly straight. Oscar is revolutionary in network TV comedy not because he defies outmoded stereotypes, which he does, but because his homosexuality—along with what his culturally insensitive boss, Michael Scott, terms his “Mexicanicity”—is kept consistently incidental to his character.
Culture Politics
Kevin Hilke
Rallying supporters to a political cause, rallying supporters of a team, rallying the adherents of a faith, and rallying oneself to make a romantic commitment all take this form: pretending that we know something (usually about the future [i.e., "We will beat Cal"], but often about the past [i.e., "Christ died for our sins"] or the present [i.e., "The American people want change"]) that we do not and cannot empirically know. In the romantic sphere, as in political sphere, the distinction between lying and failing applies: a divorce due to marital issues does not mean that the parties lied when they said “Till death do us part”; it means that they decided, gradually or suddenly, that fidelity to the truth of their everlasting love has proved unfounded.
