The Corsair
The Corsair Pirate Awards, Part IV. The Best and Worst of Media, Culture and Politics, 2022
Most Looking Forward To in 2023: Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem. Chinese writer Cixin Liu’s novel Three Body Problem comes to Netflix in 2023 with David Benioff and D.B. Weiss of Game of Thrones show-running fame giving it wings to soar. The first novel of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy is difficult to explain, so vast is its scope and literary ambition. Science, politics, History and philosophy are all covered in this relentless monster of a sci-fi/existentialist/horror novel set initially during the Cultural Revolution. “Liu touches on the Gedankenexperiment (thought experiment) of what happens if social evolution progresses, but technological developments are substantially halted (by, say, an extraterrestrial species’ trans-dimensional weapons or something of the like),” explains Fillipo Real in The Sociological Review. “This is a specifically interesting sociological counterfactual to the contemporary dynamics of what has been identified as innovation society.”
No one in contemporary world literature does worldbuilding quite like Cixin Liu, which leads to the exciting cinematic and streaming possibilities from his work. But will even David Benioff and D.B. Weiss be able to do such vast material justice?
Campaign of the Year: Raphael Warnock’s Second Senate Runoff. Finally, after essentially four elections (two elections and two runoffs) in two years, Senator Raphael Warnock has earned a first full term. That having been said, the constant running in a purple state makes Warnock an automatic national contender for Vice President or even President in the near future. And the Warnock campaign won those races largely through positivity, offsetting the significant registered Republican voter advantage in the Peach state. But the demographics, it must be noted, are changing.
The Warnock campaign’s most hard-hitting and viral ad, “Ridiculous,” used honey — not venom — to make the closing argument to voters. Veteran campaign man Adam Magnus, the lead media strategist for the Warnock campaign, put the ad together. While many of the Warnock campaign ads these four cycles have been charming, cute and even cheeky, “Ridiculous,” as the final closing argument against Herschel Walker, stood out. “The production of the latest ad was purposely bare bones,” Marquise Francis writes for Yahoo! News. “None of the people featured in it were paid, according to Magnus, and each participant entered a plain conference room with a camera pointing at them and they were asked to react out loud to what they saw. The result, he says, speaks for itself.”
Mayor of Hell: Kevin McCarthy. Will Kevin McCarthy ever get to 218 votes and, if so, how much of his heiny he have to compromise with his hard-line caucus? 2022 was supposed to be the year Kevin McCarthy, the man who sorted red and pink Starbust fruit candy's for then-President Trump, finally achieved his dream — Speakership of the US House of Representatives. But then, on election night, as it appeared that his "majority" would be four or maybe five seats at most, his midterm party at the Westin Hotel simply fizzled.
"He's the Mayor of Hell," political operative Mike Murphy declared on the Hacks on Tap podcast. And it so clearly fits. Our guy Kevin spent over $23 million to basically become a servant of the Tea Party caucus’s whimsy. And threats from the Tea Party caucus can never, ever be taken lightly. Eric Cantor, the former Republican House Majority Leader, lost a Spring primary in 2014 against a candidate from the Tea Party. “You’re not there because people see you as a tough guy or because they see you as a strategist or as brilliant,” Norm Ornstein told The New Yorker. The members of McCarthy's coalition, he told Jonathan Blitzer, “are happy to have a Speaker who’s this weak.” Being a weak Speaker of the House beholden to a feral right wing caucus that already has the blood of Cantor on its silverware is, essentially, being the Mayor of Hell.
Will She or Won’t She? Liz Cheney. Liz “Lady Vader” Cheney is being talked about quite a bit as a possible replacement Speaker of the House (not very plausible) and also as a Presidential spoiler in the Republican party in ‘24 (more interesting). Elaine Kamarck of The Brookings Institution makes the argument that Cheney, a woman at the relatively young age of 54, might break through against older, male Trumpists in the early states. “The generational split in the electorate is also about nativist values with younger voters being much more tolerant of the ‘other’ and older voters being much more fearful,” she writes. “‘Mike Hais, Doug Ross and Morley Winograd make the point that it is ‘fears of white displacement and of new cultural values that are undermining the perceived essence of ‘Americanism,’ not economics…’ and that these fears are held by older voters rather than younger voters.” Plus, she is tailor-made for the independent New Hampshire primary.
Grotty, Libertarian Hellscape: Twitter. I miss the old, pre-Musky days when a viral Twitter video of a bull escaping the slaughterhouse captivated everyone’s attention during working hours. Good times. Now, we get an unprecedented rise in anti-semitism and bigots citing the n-word. I prefer the older, better days. We have now achieved, under Elon, what can only be properly construed as peak “grotty, libertarian hellscape.” Isn’t “free speech” unfettered by the rules of civility just sooo spectacular? Go, Libertarians! (Averted Gaze)
Most Compelling, Impactful TV of the Year: The January 6th Committee. If Andor is the best TV show of 2022, then the hearings of the January 6th Committee were the most compelling and ultimately impactful TV of the year. They led voters to reject election deniers in key states, despite the all-crime-all-the-time fearmongering of hyperlocal press and inflation worries. From The American Prospect:
Claims that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” gave rise to nearly 300 election deniers appearing on the ballot of nearly 60 percent of voters in the 2022 midterm general elections. The Center for American Progress’ analysis of the outcomes of those races suggests that Americans in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona ultimately shunned election denialism when voting for offices with a responsibility to administer or oversee elections. Ticket splitting by voters in some states especially underscores this, as do polls showing that concern over the “future of democracy” was among the top reasons voters turned out to cast their ballots, with 44 percent of voters saying it was their primary concern.
The work of the Committee concludes this week, going out in a blaze of glory. Our democracy, up for referendum during the midterms, survived. Monday the Committee approved criminal referrals to the DoJ. And today, their final day, the House Jan. 6 committee is expected to unveil its formal eight-chapter report summarizing its investigation. Thank you, January 6 Committee.