The Czabe links to Saturday Night Live’s take-down of Stephen A. Smith. It’s funny and cutting, but I suspect that the only way this will be read, anywhere that matters (read: in media executive suites in Manhattan and Bristol) as anything but a total confirmation that Smith is a cross-over cultural figure who transcends sports and carries with him enormous cache. It basically makes him un-fireable. You know who SNL parodies? Famous people. You know what the most precious commodity is for a TV “personality”? Fame.

However!

I’d argue that the media-executive love affair with Smith is probably misguided. I could be wrong, but my guess is that Smith keeps leaping from failure to failure, with a new job always waiting, because executives see him as a guy who “moves the needle.” Sure, people may mock him (and not just on SNL) but he’s a personality they love to hate. He’s like J.R. Ewing. Or Roddy Piper. Heel heat is a good in all walks of show-biz, not just wrestling.

But I wonder if Smith isn’t really an example of X-Pac heat—which is when the crowd doesn’t enjoying “hating” a character so much as they’re just annoyed by him, and wish he would go away.

Because wrestling writers are pretty clear-eyed about their business, they can typically smell the difference between genuine heel heat and X-Pac heat. The guys who make the HR decisions in sports-entertainment “journalism” may not be so sophisticated.

Galley Friend Mike Russell’s brilliant Sabertooth Vampire is included in this month’s issue of Dark Horse Presents (#12)–on sale at your local comic book shop as of yesterday. Treat yourself.

Joel Engel goes yard.

Green Lantern Alan Scott may be DC’s Great Gay Hero.

I may not be able to give you a firm definition of porn, but I know it when I see it.

File sharing is probably piracy. I don’t want to get Santino all worked up, but I say “probably” because there are some important legal and philosophical distinctions involved. What if the peers in the P-2-P know each other and are not anonymous? What about the legal protections for analog copying established by the Audio Home Recording Act? What about the philosophical parallels suggested by Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction?

So let’s just side-step all of this by saying that file-sharing is, at best, a legal gray-area and a minor sin and, at worst, a crime and a major sin. Either way, it’s on the wrong side of moral neutrality.

But part of the reason so many people revolt against the piracy argument is that the people making it are often absurd. To wit: RIAA has been embroiled in a lawsuit with file-sharing service Limewire for several years. RIAA has now announced how much they seek in damages. The number?

$17 trillion.

That’s more money than the recording agency, collectively, has made since the invention of audio recording. The wealth of the entire world is estimated at $60 trillion, meaning that RIAA is asking a court to award them 28 percent of all the money on the planet to make them whole.

No wonder people are so willing to downplay the problems inherent in file-sharing. What jury would convict a petty thief caught ripping off a mafia don?

Update: Galley Friend A.W. writes that this is all old news:

There’s something odd about that Lime Wire story.  Your AV Club news story is based on NME and ComputerWorldstories.  The NME story actually just points over to CW.  And the CW story . . . is over a year old.

More importantly, the RIAA and Lime Wire eventually settled the whole case, in May 2011, for $105 million.

It’s anyone’s guess why NME and AV Club suddenly resurrected the whole story.

My Daily column this week looks at Mitt Romney’s very good May, and wonders what if this is as good as it gets?

And in the Weekly Standard Newsletter (which you should sign up for, because it’s all-new essays, not just repackaged content) I put forth a modest proposal for gay marriage. Excerpt:

Conservatives have two big practical concerns about gay marriage. (We’re going to put aside all of the philosophical objections and worries about unintended consequences for the moment.) The practical concerns are these: (1) Would the expansion of the marriage contract stop with homosexual couples, or would it be pushed further? And (2) Would religious institutions be compelled to recognize and/or perform gay marriages?

You can tell a lot about the gay marriage debate by the way proponents of gay marriage address these concerns. Instead of trying to reassure conservatives on these points so as to persuade them, the people who want same sex marriage ignore or mock them.

For instance, in New Hampshire, Rick Santorum suggested that if gay marriage were made legal, it was difficult to say why polygamy wouldn’t be next. He was jeered and ridiculed for linking the two.

But where did Santorum get the “crazy” idea in the first place? It turns out that there’s an entire movement of gay marriage proponents who have already started advancing the legal ball toward polygamy. In 2006, a group of liberal academics, legal scholars, and activists got together to think about what the future of marriage should be after same sex marriage was legalized. The result of their work was the Beyond Marriage Project, which proposes a radical expansion of the marriage contract so that, among other things, there would be legal recognition for “households in which there is more than one conjugal partner.” Which is the polite way of saying “polygamy.”

Since the Beyond Marriage Project launched, hundreds of liberal thinkers have become signatories to its proposal. Some of these supporters are folks from organizations with names like “Unitarian Universalists for Polyamory Awareness.” But many of them are quite respectable. One of them, for instance, is Chai Feldblum—an impressive legal theorist from Georgetown Law School who is now serving as the head of President Obama’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Feldblum isn’t crazy in the least. What would be crazy would be to dismiss her thinking as part of some fringe.

So conservatives aren’t making this stuff up. Now maybe most of today’s gay marriage advocates would never support polygamy. But maybe not. Forty years ago, lots of liberals said the same thing about the notion of “marriage for gays.” And look where we are now.

Then there’s the matter of religious freedom. If same sex marriage were legalized, would churches that reject the idea be forced to recognize it—or even perform gay marriages? No one really knows. Yet consider this: Supporters of same sex marriage often argue for it by saying that years from now, we’ll look back on this moment as a civil rights episode equivalent to the rebellion against anti-miscegenation laws.

Well, once anti-miscegenation laws were repealed, all of America had to comply—even non-profit groups. The most prominent institution that still recently banned interracial dating was Bob Jones University. And in order to keep this ban in place, Bob Jones had to give up its non-profit tax-exempt status. (The university dropped the policy in 2000.) If America legalizes same sex marriage and, say, the Catholic church refuses to marry gay couples, would the church lose its tax-exempt status, too? Most supporters of gay marriage insist that it wouldn’t, but the truth is, no one really knows.

There is an obvious solution. If gay marriage supporters really believe that the redefining of marriage will stop at same sex couples, and that institutions of civil society will be allowed to retain their own views on the subject, then they could propose a constitutional amendment.

In 2002, a group of conservative Democrats and Republicans proposed a Federal Marriage Amendment, the goal of which was to build a constitutional ban on same sex marriage. There’s no reason supporters of gay marriage couldn’t craft their own amendment. A “Federal Gay Marriage Amendment” could set out three principles: (1) that marriage is between two, and only two, individuals; (2) these individuals can be of any sex; (3) religious groups retain a conscience exemption in the recognition of any form of marriage.

Such an amendment would provide a constitutional guarantee to gay couples while also taking polygamy off the table and providing protection for churches. Many, though not all, conservatives might be inclined to support it. (As a bonus, it would take the issue out of the courts—finally giving gay marriage popular legitimacy, too.)

So ask yourself: If their goal isn’t to keep pushing the boundaries of marriage and to coerce religious institutions into agreement, then why haven’t advocates of same sex marriage argued for such an amendment?

There are only two answers. The first is that they just haven’t gotten around to it—and that if public opinion continues to evolve in their direction they eventually will.

The second is that, despite their reassurances to the contrary, the mere legalization of same sex marriage is not the movement’s final destination but just a weigh station on the path to even bigger changes.

Santino had some very smart thoughts about the big summer movie failures a couple days ago. I’m not sure I’m totally convinced–it seems possible that the real lessons of the three big failures so far are (1) Don’t let auteurs make giant, expensive, personal-mission movies (John Carter, Dark Shadows) and (2) Don’t make giant-expensive movies out of board games (Battleship). Both of which are lessons Hollywood has been taught in the past (Heaven’s Gate, Clue).

All of that said, the thing which is still blowing my mind is this:

The general unease is caused not only by the fate of Battleship but also the recent battering of other expensive films: Disney’s John Carter, which prompted a $200 million write-down and led to the ouster of studio chief Rich Ross; Warner Bros.’Dark Shadows, which sources say cost more than $150 million but opened to less than $30 million domestic; and Paramount’s The Dictator, which the studio says cost $65 million but multiple industry sources say really ran to more than $100 million after reshoots. [emphasis added]

The Dictator cost $100 million? Are they kidding? Woody Allen isn’t my cup of tea, but he could have shot that movie for $12M. Jim Cameron would have done it for $50M. This might be the most insane waste of studio money I’ve ever seen. Forget the box office results: Whoever greenlit the movie at that budget should lose his job on general principle.