The Corsair
The Corsair Pirate Awards, Part III. The Best and Worst of Media, Culture and Politics, 2022
Most Overrated Politician: Mitch McConnell. Granted, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was instrumental in delivering a conservative Supreme Court. And, in 2022, that Court delivered conservative verdicts. A series of 6-3 supermajority decisions this year — in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District; in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization; in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. — owe themselves to McConnell's robbing then-President Obama of his rightful Supreme Court pick.
But when you gaze carefully at McConnell’s actual hands on leadership in the Senate in 2022, he is more Scaramouche than Machiavel. The red wave, despite historical winds at their back, never materialized. In fact, Democrats gained a seat in the Senate, until they lost it once again. “And in terms of whether or not he’s been able to win the Senate back, hold a majority when it seemed very clearly possible that Republicans could have won majorities in the 2010s and going up now until 2022, given how strong the Republican advantage should be in the Senate, the fact that Democrats have held the Senate as often and as long as they have speaks to some failures in the Republican strategy,” notes Ezra Klein in his podcast. And saying I-told-you-so about candidate quality is not a good look for leadership.
Celebrity We Will Most Miss: Sidney Poitier. Monarchists will maintain that the death of the Queen was the biggest loss of 2022. At the other end of the spectrum, someone working class and rural might argue that the biggest loss is Loretta Lynn. But the death of Sidney Poitier at the age of 94 is for me the biggest celebrity loss of the year.
Poitier’s activism — towards the equality of human beings — played out on the big screen, with its transformative power to alter and evolve the viewer’s heart. In every role Poitier sought to quietly explode the way that black people had been caricatured for hundreds of years as somewhat less than human. Poitier’s quiet revolution was to persuade viewers otherwise through the strength of his performance.
I employ the modifier “quietly” here because although each role was revolutionary, they were constrained by the characters he portrayed and the films in which he chose to participate. His revolutionary explosives were in his performance. “The word revolution suggests noise,” writes Rick Hutchins. “People will do a lot to draw attention to their cause; yelling and shouting is usually the least of it. But some revolutions happen quietly, peacefully, inevitably. All Sidney Poitier had to do to change the world was to be Sidney Poitier.”
That was the Sidney Poitier project and that is why he will be so missed.
Sour Grapes: Kari Lake. If you listen carefully to the warm southwesterly winds blowing our way you can hear the cool, authoritative television voice of Kari Lake, onetime Gubernatorial candidate from the state of Arizona, ranting about how her pronouns are “I” and “Won,” like her Master before her. Covered in loser-dust. And as she recedes into the background noise of history, feel free to smear a little Vaseline onto the rearview mirror.
Music Force of the Year: The Swifties. Atlas, Shrugged. That unstoppable force — Ticketmaster — met, in 2022, an immovable object, namely: The Swifties!
For more than a decade, activists have tried in vain to break the double-barreled stranglehold that the Beverly Hills-based monopoly has held over ticket sales and distribution in the United States. “The entertainment company merged with Live Nation in 2010 to create the parent company Live Nation Entertainment, and, since then, there have been concerns about how dominant it is in the space,” explains Arwa Madavi in The Guardian. “Last year, for example, five Democratic House representatives sent a letter to the justice department asking it to look into Ticketmaster and Live Nation.” It all, however, came to naught.
It was not until some fourteen million Swifties spat fire at Ticketmaster’s abject incompetence in dealing with bots that all hell broke loose in the music industry. The lack of alternatives revealed, to Swifties, the degree of the monopoly. $2,500 per antitrust violation, to be exact, is what they want for their pain. Go, Swifties!
Most Underreported Story: The Wagner Group’s Big, Evil Africa Year. Honey, we need to talk about mercenaries in the Motherland. What are Russian killers doing in Africa? The Wagner military group — a big, evil private paramilitary group with close ties to Vladimir Putin — had an ambitious year in 2022, essentially turning human beings into fertilizer for Beelzebub.
First, in Ukraine they added 35,000 recruits that were convicts, under threat of death. Imagine, if you will, the utter absurdity of a Zambian prisoner fighting and dying in a quixotic Ukraine war.
Then they focused on killing Africans while the West was watching the Ukraine. The Wagner Group, named after the German composer, sent over 1,000 stormtroopers to destabilize the Central African Republic. Then they looked to Burkina Faso. “Speaking about the growing violence linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group in the west African region, (Ghanian President) Akufo-Addo alleged that Burkina Faso allocated a mine to the Wagner Group as a form of payment for its deployment of fighters in the country,” writes Kester Kenn Klomegah in the Eurasia Review. The President retracted the statement later, because, you know.
The Wagner also operates in Libya, Sudan, Yemen, Mali and Mozambique. More to come in 2023, unless the West gets their act together. Moscow seeks to create military dependencies — by doing the “wet work” of murdering rebels — in exchange for Africa’s natural resources. Charmed, I’m sure.
Best TV Show: Andor. Philosopher Hannah Arendt spent three hundred pages arguing on the banality of evil and Andor, particularly Maarva Andor’s stirring funeral speech, is an excellent visual companion to the text.
Even if you are not a fan of the Star Wars universe you will love the exquisite melancholy of Andor, a narratively rich prequel to the best Star Wars prequel, imho, Rogue: One. It is a complicated slow burn on authoritarianism. It is character-driven and not CGI-focused. It asks big political questions. How do the corruptions of authoritarianism erode the individual soul? What makes a person want to throw in with authoritarians? What is gritty day-to-day life like under the boot of an authoritarian government? How does one speak truth against such a hideous strength? It is a profoundly meaningful, timely and serious show that just happens to be backed by fantasy and CGI — although that never overwhelms the narrative. It is a show that is wholly without imperfection.