You know you’re on a Foreign Exchange to America When... You Feel Like a Dirty Red.

In recent weeks I have noticed a disturbing trend. It started with subtle policy differences but has ended with blatant racial slurs. There are connections to the radical 60s and a dictatorial governmental system whose communist ideals are slowly but surely creeping into America.

Duck ‘n’ cover, keep the kid’s away from the windows, the British are coming! (Back!)

Look at the evidence: A single party government in power for over ten years with a new leader recently installed without election, a large percentage of workers pay taken to benefit the masses, a national TV station paid for by the people without the comforting capitalist intrusion of adverts and not one plumber called Joe. Stick a big mustache on the queen and we are mid century Russia!

All this used to be a joke within my group of American friends. ‘Kate’s a Communist! Ha, ha, ha!!’ (Coming from Chicagoans, a city clearly now proven as the crucible of radicalism on this continent, it seems a little pot-kettle-blackish.) But it wasn’t until Wednesday night’s debate that I realized what a threat we’d become.

During a discussion on health care McCain accused Obama of putting patient choice in the hands of bureaucrats. “If you want that then you can go to England or (worse) Canada”. He spat out the names like they were poison, red poison. This attitude, that somehow a national health system is the gateway to totalitarianism, stems from the 50s (we actually went commie in 1946) and particularly a 1961 recording by the Gipper condemning national health as a socialist “foot in the door” conspiracy. Watch out! The Reds are on the way and they’ve got stethoscopes!

By association with this insidious plot to put American workers (including Joe the Plumber) in the Gulag, Obama and the Democrats have now been tarred with the scary socialist brush, you know, the one actually made out of Lenin’s nose hair? They keep it in the glass coffin with him so it’s covered with those rampant ‘power to the people’ germs. This lunchtime I watched as Glen Beck, a ‘journalist’, visited his sister station, the ‘unbiased’ home of ‘the best political team on television’, CNN to proclaim “They’re all Marxists!” when asked to give his opinion on the Democrats. But higher taxes and socialized medicine won’t make America Communist. It’ll just make you British.

Obama is being vilified for his promise/threat to ‘spread the wealth’ and his successful trip to Europe was seen more as a joke than an asset to his foreign policy experience. But if the only alternative to this is a self-proclaimed maverick and a hockey mom with an unqualified plumber as their figurehead then maybe it’s time you guys did look towards us for some influence. And come November if you continue to decide that even mildly social policies a too stronger pill for America to swallow, send our brother Obama back over. We’ll be glad to have him.

Diablo Cody: Honest To Blog

“Cody is a fad writer - she will disappear in a poof of smoke and sulfur odor when her 15 minutes are up. Like the writer of Reality Bites, which was simmilarly oh-so-hip 15+ years ago. Do you remember her name? Exactly.”

This was a comment on Diablo Cody’s first Entertainment Weekly column in December 2007. It is one of many ‘hater’ comments left condemning Cody as, among other things, “phoney”, “self-indulgent”, and “pretentious, completely unoriginal, and singularly pointless.” Cody retorted the only appropriate way, in a blog.

“I am middle-class trash from the Midwest. I'm a competent nonfiction writer, an admittedly green screenwriter, and a product of Hollywood, USA. I am "Diablo Cody" and if you're not a fan, go rent Prospero's Books again and leave me the fuck alone.”
Is the stripper turned blogger turned Hollywood darling over the hill already? Or is it yet another example of humanity’s inability to deal with another’s sudden success?

There is no doubt that the last couple of years have been incredibly lucky for Cody. In fact, turning to the skin trade as a form of income (a job that for most people is a slippery slope to further degradation) after becoming bored with her day job may well have been the best move she could ever make.

Born Brook Busey, a name she describes as “so not heavy metal”, Cody led an uneventful childhood in suburban Chicago and graduated from Iowa with a Media degree. She claims to have had an epiphany while typing copy for a Minneapolis ad agency. “This sucks. I’d rather be naked.” So she signed up for amateur night at a local strip club. Within a matter of weeks she had given up her day job and started blogging, with accounts of both her private life including cameos from then boyfriend Jonny and her new “anthropology” project, documenting her new chosen career path from stripper to peepshow object to phone sex operative.

This occasionally pornographic but surprisingly mundane diary is punctuated with sharp criticisms/glorifications of pop culture, a passion for which Cody uses as the basis for most if not all of her subsequent writing. The blog, now provocatively titled ‘Pussy Ranch’, would swing wildly between these subjects throughout the collection of stories told that day. On December 19th, 2003, for example, she first chastised Kid Rock for hooking up with Pamela Anderson, then described an uncomfortable situation during a peep show and later ran through her favorite music videos of the day.

The real power of this period of her writing, and I suspect why she was plucked from obscurity by Mason Novick, her manager who managed to secure an autobiography for her at the age of 24 after discovering the blog while surfing for porn, is her ability to show the reality of life as a stripper. Instead of being an erotically charged, glamorous lifestyle, Cody’s account is more akin to the hyper reality of ‘The Office’ than the fake glorification of ‘The Girls Next Door’.

Of course, the reason Cody is able to cast such a critically witty eye over her life is that she has chosen to enter that life. Unlike most of the other girls working the bars, she is more than capable of moving on, a future most of the others have little chance of. Her descriptions of other strippers, such as the aptly named Tassle, only accentuate her own detachment. She is studying them and hence herself and her own desire to be part of what they can never escape from. Through this self examination she becomes the poster child for generation X, someone desperate for rebellion but finding only boredom and disappointment and ‘normality’, whatever world she inhabits. She is most successful in her writing when she strikes at the very heart of these fears. “I'm trying to figure out why (how?) some people hit their twenties and automatically begin cultivating roses, making polenta, committing fully to jobs and functioning” (Pussy Ranch July 30th 2003).

The problem now is that her recent fame has taken away the normality of the different she was so able to comment on. She now has a new reality, that of a fully fledged Oscar winner, celebrity and journalist. Perhaps before blaming her for being successful we should allow her obvious talent to realign with her new life and see if she can once again bring an objective eye to another life few of us will ever live.