1.  Lisa

“Well, he has great hands,” is what she told her friends when they asked why she put up with it.  The endless weekends at the bar, watching the band abrade through yet another jangled song.  The long Tuesdays and Thursdays on the plaid wool couch in the garage, feeling the nubbles scratch through her tights as the boys tried to pull together a hopeless tangle of chords.  He liked it when she came to the practices, for some reason, and so she went, sitting dutifully on the couch (though the iron bars of the pull-out bed pushed at her through the disintegrating cushion foam, though there were winter nights when the snow-bit air soaked through the cracks in the walls, and numbed her feet through three layers of socks.)  Sometimes, she did homework; sometimes, she braided her hair into a hundred tiny snakes; and always, she tried not to flinch at the countless moments when they lost the plot and the music clattered to the floor.

There were other things, too.  He wouldn’t go to any of Donna’s parties, because Donna’s boyfriend “wore polo shirts.”  Every week at the end of their shift, Donna asked her over, and every week, it got more awkward for Lisa to say no.  It was starting to drive a wedge.  Finally, one rain-strewn Friday evening, Lisa skipped the gig and went to Donna’s by herself.  She spent half the night shoving an increasingly drunk Tony Montello off, culminating in a terrible kitchen scene where he ripped the collar of her blouse (and it was a lace collar, too.)  Panicked, she called T.J., and he came to pick her up.

He had a little pea-green hatchback, and as it zoomed up, she could tell he’d already pounded the better half of a six-pack.  His eyes, hooded and strangely pale, had a dangerous glint.  He hadn’t wanted to leave the after-party early; he hadn’t wanted her to come here in the first place.  She realized she could already hear him; she already knew everything he’d say.  She hesitated a moment, shifting her weight onto her left stiletto, almost enjoying the way it strained her ankle, the pain traveling all the way up her calf. She looked at his cheekbones, preternaturally high and wide, gleaming in the streetlights, and walked towards the car.

He didn’t get out, just looked at her.  She was conscious, suddenly, of her torn collar, the mascara streaks that had settled beneath her eyes.

“What happened?”

“I told you what happened.”

“Yeah.”  He paused a moment, raking her in.  “Can’t blame him.  You look like a skag.”

“Fuck you.”

“Was that skirt for Donna?  Or did you want him to rip your shirt down?  I bet you did–I know you.”

She kicked the side of the hatchback, leaving a satisfying dent.  “Fuck off, T.J.”

Every step she took into the cold concrete cut into her feet, the cheap leather rubbing her ankles raw, the impact shooting from her heels to the base of her spine.  A winter’s hammer, drumming out the rhythm of her sins, measuring them against her fogged breath.  He idled along beside her for a few blocks, and then took off.  At best, she thought, a token effort.  When she got home (and how it felt, to peel her shoes away from her blisters, the sticky sound as the leather separated reluctantly from her flesh), she resolved never to talk to him again.

But her hand, a treacherous bird, flew at the phone when it rang the next morning; her shoulder meeting her ear to cradle the receiver between them, to listen not so much to what he said as how he said it.

Donna thought she was an idiot, and said so.  But Donna didn’t know, not really.  In her room (redone in dusty pinks and grays just last year, with satin sheets to keep her face from creasing in her sleep, her hair from shredding itself against the pillows), he maneuvered her hips, pulling her closer to him, his fingers so long they almost met across her belly.  His hands, large and callused, so warm it seemed as if they generated their own heat.  Their roughness against her skin, with the sheets smooth beneath her–it almost made it all worth it.  She wondered at herself sometimes, practicing telling her story to an imaginary audience to see what it sounded like: My name is Lisa Fleming.  I am a 24-year-old waitress.  I’m dating an asshole for the sake of his fucking hands.

In her more lucid moments, she decided it was insane.  She’d free herself of it all–his strange cop father, his eyes following her above his oddly oily mustache; the eight-hour stints at half-empty clubs, tossing mike stands across shoulders still sore from a full day of slinging seafood platters.  T.J.’s face, so empty when he came, alien in its beautiful planes and grotesque proportions.  She’d leave this little Pennsylvania mill town, go to one of those postcard cities, like London or Paris . . . But then he’d call, and again and again, she found herself saying yes, pulled along in the slipstream of his will, his certainty that she would be at the show, and he would come over afterwards, and she would make him breakfast, and so on, and on, and on.  Standing in her tiny kitchen in one of his old T-shirts, scrambling eggs for him at the stove, she would take deep breaths, forcing herself to notice the medicinal scent of the minced parsley, to listen to the roiling burps of the coffee maker, and she’d promise herself that this was the last time.

But it never quite was.

And then, one day, something different.  She’d skipped practice this time–she was getting better at that, she’d noticed, which was making Donna somewhat hopeful–and so she hadn’t heard the news.  Instead, she’d slept in, enjoying the sprawl of an empty bed, the cocoon-like stillness of a space occupied only by herself.  And then he came in, face glowing like the ice rings of Saturn.

“What’s wrong?”

He brandished a newspaper.  “Look at this.”

In 15-point type of the front page of the Daily: “Local Band on Hot Track.”  And a picture beneath it of T.J. at the keyboard, wearing that stupid leather jacket and gripping a guitar, every bit the abstracted rebel artist.

“Do you know what this means?”

“That you were in the paper?  They should have put your band name in the headline.”

“No, stupid.  Don’t you get it?  There’s going to be an A & R man at the gig tonight.  This could be the break we’ve been waiting for!”

“Oh.  Well–that’s great.  Shouldn’t you, um, be getting ready, then?”

He looked deflated.  “What’s your damage, Lisa?”

She looked at his hands, clenching at his sides.  There was a pit at the center of her stomach, hard and cold.  She tried to dissolve it, to smile for him, but her face wouldn’t stretch.

She swallowed.  “No damage.  I’m happy for you.”

“Well, let’s celebrate then.”

He raked his hands through her hair, and she found herself unbending.  The pit was still there, but it was getting soft at the edges.  “Maybe.”

“Come on.”  He was hard to resist when he was like this–open, eager, like a little boy.  And so she went.

When she awoke, it was close to seven.  She knew his sound check was at seven-thirty; even if she woke him this minute, he’d be late.  And yet she hesitated.  She’d begged off the going to the show earlier, hardly knowing herself why she lied.  And now, watching him, she knew.

She’d never be rid of him unless he wanted to be rid of her.  He wasn’t the type–even if he found somebody else (and he would, especially with her missing gigs), he’d try to keep her in the picture, mollifying her with little gifts and soft words.  At first she’d almost liked this possessiveness, but now it scared her.  She’d been saying yes for so long.  She could see herself saying it, again and again, becoming smaller and smaller.  Disappearing into him.

She would, she realized, have to do something unforgivable.  And so she slowly rose from the bed, being careful not to jar him, and slipped into her clothes.  And left.  It was 7:10 p.m.  Drifts of maple leaves had pasted themselves to the streets, and she kicked through them happily, never minding the finish on her suede boots.  It was a wet Pennsylvania fall, but she could feel spring in her bones.

1. Listen to the Rolling Stones, not the Beatles.

The Beatles are jerks, is why.  You can also listen to the Kinks, if you so desire.

2. Don’t name your boy kid Jayden, Kaiden, Jaxon, or any such made-up swallowed consonant name.  Don’t name your girl kid Madison, Kayla, Kylie, or any such made-up bitch name.

Boys should be named after people in the Bible or old family surnames.  Girls should be named after grandmothers, flowers, or dead English royals.

3. If you are a country white person, DO frequent swimming holes and swim in them whilst wearing cut-offs.  DON’T do meth.

4.  If you are a city white person, DO pretend to care about theater, opera, poetry, and other antique forms of white entertainment.  DON’T talk about this at parties; just show up to said cultural events and pay attention.

5.  If you are a rich white person, wear old but well-cut clothes.  DON’T carry an ostentatious bag, change your hairstyle frequently, or yell.

6.  If you are a poor white person, don’t admire rich people and let them trick you into voting against your own best interests.  Instead, play pranks on them and try to “take them down.”

7.  If you are an ethnic white person, quit saying “Mamma Mia” on occasion.  Instead, say it constantly, and clutch the air like a breathless Bette Davis when you do so.

8.  During cool weather, wear scarves at least twice a week–but only in cool weather, and never at the supper table.  I’M LOOKING AT YOU, MAROON FIVE.

The best there ever was.

I don’t know why this is the most important August song, but it is, because it is full of the theme of this summer, which is white trash.  The thing that nobody mentions about being white trash is that it is awesome, because it is all about beauties that are very fleeting.  13-year-old girls with perfect faces that will be ordinary and swollen next year; Cheeto dust dissolving in brilliant orange rings in an oily slick of swimming hole water; picnics in the middle of blooming weed meridians.  Dirty feet and bum parties on bank parking lot lawns.  Bruised peaches and smashed blueberries getting all your papers wet.  What did you need your papers for anyway?

The other thing that nobody mentions about being poor is that you have to look at a lot more buildings than rich people.  Rich people only have to look at skyscrapers and houses; poor people have to look at the back of 7-11s all the time.  And other buildings, like apartment complexes where all the dumpsters are locked.  And franchises.  It’s a cheap world of stucco and plastic, and it’s so ugly, and the lighting is bad so you have to look at it.  But that’s what makes it beautiful, too–it’s a world where everything is disposable, so everything is free.  You can smash up your whole damn house if you want to, because it’s not actually your house and because none of your things are that nice.  You can throw away anything.

There’s an obscene luxury to buying single-serving cigarettes in plastic cases; it’s the kind of thing that only a madman or a king–or a poor–would do.  When you give up, when you accept your bad teeth and cut-up hands, you can smile at anybody, you can pick anything up.  You don’t worry about what they’ll think of you; you worry about what you want and if you like it.  And if you can’t afford anything, you want everything, it all gets leveled out and no one thing is more particularly desirable than any other thing.  It all falls into the category of “not yours,” which makes it easier to let go of.  That is the Zen of poor–a cut crystal brandy snifter becomes equal to a beach house.  If you’re middle-class, you might save up for brandy snifters; you might deny yourself simpler pleasures so that you can obtain this stupid glass set that you’ll never enjoy drinking out of, because you’ll be thinking about what it costs and what if it breaks and so on.  The unobtainable fantasy tastes much sweeter than the achievable goal.

“Sweet Virginia” is a great song about drugs.  It’s a fantasy about being very strung out but sort of comfortably country about it.  When you’re tired and strung out, it never feels good, but in retrospect you can cast a glow over it.  Poverty is not actually all that freeing or wonderful, but the idea of poverty is intoxicating when you have access to food and shelter.  Sometimes I think human society is just one giant D&D game, a bunch of nerds sitting around and pitting their fantasies against each other.  When you consider how the world is just some stuff that some people made up, this begins to seem less implausible.

(”Time to have earthenware pots in our early human culture.”  “Why?”  “Because I think they’re cool.”  “Okay, I hope somebody writes a textbook about this, and then another person can make it a choice on a multiple-choice test for some kids who are just sitting around.”  “Sounds great.”)

2. Embrace Chicken Fandom.

They're coming for you, but they don't know why.

Why chickens?  What are they up to?  Why are people obsessed with chickens?  Why am I obsessed with chickens?  All they do is root stuff out.  All they do is taste delicious.

It seems to me like if you like chickens enough you can make your life like a storybook all the time.  I don’t know if that’s a good goal, but I have it.

3.  Wonder What “You Never Even Called Me by My Name” Is About.

I mean, I love this song and all.  Not sure what it’s about, though.

4. Ride the Bus

Everybody on the bus is fantastic.  I recently started a new bus route and already have many regulars that I am consumed with observing.  They are:

1. The lazy anorexic.
2. The Dutch goth.
3. Face War.

The lazy anorexic is a very small, frail type who frequently wears her hair in a complicated braid bun.  She mitigates this with gold platform fuck-me sandals, but further complicates things by wearing many tiny children’s sweaters (no doubt purchased at Baby Gap, for real.)  I do not mean to mock her; of course it is horrible that she is anorexic but my job is to report the news, and that is what she is up to.  We both have poor circulation and give each other the side eye when others complain about the bus being too hot.

The best thing about the lazy anorexic, besides the fact that she has a very mannered and disdainful way of holding herself, is that every day, she rides the bus from the downtown Bellingham station to the downtown library–a mere eight blocks or so.  Why does she do this?  Does she have a bus pass, or is she paying a dollar a pop for her three-minute morning ride?  Does she ride the bus back to the station?  Every time she gets off, she gives me a dark and flirtatiously defiant look, as if she knows what I am thinking but rejects my peasant’s inclinations towards thrift.  I think she is very glamorous.

So sulky.

The Dutch goth has that broad Dutch bone structure that can be so pretty, and a wool coat always and sunglasses always, and he works at the mall, and he hates his life even though he has everything.  He doesn’t even know, and he’s wasting his life riding the bus to the mall when he could be brooding around Copenhagen, wasting his life in a much more Continental way.  Anna and Nora and I have a plan to ride the bus with him all the time and give him a lot of side eye; he would not be able to handle strong flirting because he is so death-oriented and takes himself so seriously, and he would probably get very upset and then we could laugh and laugh.  He is a Dull Boy, and no mistake.  Take off your coat, dull boy!

Fuck you, I have a peacock.

Face War is an older woman, generous of frame and tall like an overgrown myrtle bush, and she likes to yell.  She is like a matriarchal Greek goddess, except for being poor and yelling.  There are all these lines Renaissance-ish/new Romantic poetry about Juno’s wide white brow and so on, and I think of this when I look at this lady’s face.  If she relaxed her face, it would be beautiful–it has very clean, broad lines, like something drawn, and she also has what the poet’s called “cow eyes,” like they are always referring to “cow-eyed Hera/Juno,” and they mean it as a compliment, even though it sounds like the worst, but if you have looked at cows much (as I have), you know that cows have lovely big eyes.  But this lady is always moving her face around and yelling, so that is why I call her Face War–if she would CALM DOWN, she would have a pleasant face, but she seems intent on ruining it.  And she moves like somebody who thinks their body is an axe instead of a body–like she flings it around hilariously, but she is not trying to be hilarious and reckless–she really just does not think about it as anything visual.  I think it’s more of an instrument for her (for yelling with.)

Rod Stewart is important for helping you transition from winter to spring, because (like early spring), he is sort of sad but real into stuff.  It’s like how everything is very grey and brown right now, but there are still lupines poking up from under the dead blackberry leaves.  His songs are usually about relationships not working out, but instead of seeming sad about this he seems to feel melancholy but also hella angry and relieved.  Unlike my winter friend Bob Seger, Rod Stewart doesn’t want any of his girlfriends back.  He just wants to tell them about how they hurt his feelings and he is so over it, which seems like a healthy reaction.  I feel like if I dated Rod Stewart he would put up with my crap to a certain extent because he would be confused, but then one night he would go out with his girlfriends and he would describe my behavior to them and they would be like, “Oh girl,” and then he would decide that maybe he should dump me and they would agree and get him real whipped up about it and they would drink so many Cosmos and trash my name and then he would come home and I would be lying around in a white chair drinking melted chai tai ice cream and pushing on my cuticles with a file and he would say, “It’s over, dude,” and I would be like, “Whatever, get out of my house,” and he would be like, “It’s my house, weirdo,” and then I would throw a heavy thing through the bank of windows behind us and it would shatter and he wouldn’t say anything. And then I would call my friend Pablo and we would go on a road trip and Rod Stewart would write a song about it called “The Last Window,” or something.

2.  Look at pictures of horses on the Internet.

HORSES

One thing that you might have forgotten about, due to winter and tromping around and feeling pathetic, is that it is important to be proud, like a horse.  This country America is a very beautiful country, which you might not be proud of because of politics or personal problems that you have.  But you should probably be proud of America because it is an exotic place with many horses and grasslands in it.  Maybe you should put on some clean clothes and go fight someone in a field instead of feeling sorry for yourself all the time.  Maybe you should oil up your limbs and grow your hair out and run around being spooked by things and also disdaining bridles.  Have you ever read the book “Black Beauty”?  That’s a hell of a book.  Take a page from it–go eat an apple and kick somebody’s uncle in the head.

3.  Walk by some lakes or streams but not ponds.

Ponds are stagnant.  What lakes have are birds and what streams have are plants that the water pushes back, but it doesn’t uproot them.  You can look at the tendrils of the plants floating and bobbing in the water, and you can also see some rocks.  Maybe you’ll get excited by some rose quartz and bring it home.  Big mistake–nobody is ever impressed by rose quartz.  Better throw it back in the stream and/or river.  Blue rocks are good, even though they are common.

4.  Learn how to frame pictures.

I bet you have a bunch of damn posters lying around your house in disarray.  Maybe you should pretend to care about life and frame them so that they look less dumb.  You can use an X-acto knife to cut the mats and you can also use that to make little cut marks all over your house.  Do this on the underside of things, so that nobody else knows about it.  You will know about it and it will make you feel as if you are the true master of your environment, a wizard unto your own furniture, and that pride will translate into an increased self-confidence that will have you winning over strangers and confidants by the dozen.  Never tell them about the source of your power; they wouldn’t understand.

5.  Listen to “Thunder Road” over and over again.

“Thunder Road” is a song that Bruce Springsteen wrote about getting his high school girlfriend to do something.  You probably think that Bruce Springsteen is dumb, and he is, but you should love him for being a Dutch/Wop American who has felt some fucking emotions in his time.  If you don’t believe me, listen to any of his songs.  Anyway, “Thunder Road” is a good song because it is about overcoming obstacles like porches and not being good-looking in order to be in a car.  Being in a car is a very American thing to do, so if you want to actually understand your personality you should probably do this as often as possible.  You don ‘t even have to buy a car if you are afraid of fossil fuels; just rent one and then get in it and then make a turn and then make another turn and then get on a straight road and then see how the wind smells.  You may end up seeing a number of towns, or better yet, seeing them vanish behind you.

6.  Plant a magnolia tree.

I like magnolia trees because they have no leaves when they’re in bloom, just flowers.  Pink ones are preferable but white ones will do.  If you do this I will walk by your house A LOT.

7.  Listen to Nick Cave’s non-ballad-y albums constantly.

I feel like if I went to Nick Cave’s house, it would be similar to going to PeeWee Herman’s house, in that all the objects in the house would be animate.  It would be dissimilar to going to PeeWee Herman’s house in that all the objects would have bone-chillingly cool personalities, so you’d feel way too intimidated to get particularly intimate with them.  The only friend you’d have would be the back porch, where there would be a lot of broken green chairs and you could maybe whittle on them a little.

8.  Get in fights.

You’ve probably never been in a fight.  Maybe you’d be really good at it?  Maybe somebody could knock the books out of your hands and then you could take off your shirt and go into a hayloft and just hit somebody for a while?  Maybe there would be lots of dust rising around you, catching in the sunlight coming through the gaps between the boards of the barn, and he’d catch you a good one, right under the jaw, and your teeth would crunch a little and you’d nip your tongue slightly and the blood would fill your mouth in a gush of copper and lime, and you would feel strong and angry and you’d wrest that other guy to the floor and pound on his ears until he yelled and then you’d both collapse and look at the ceiling, and the blue sky behind it, and all of your limbs would feel tired and full?

9.  Watch “The Dogfather.

Just do it.  How else are you supposed to find out whether or not your dog is actually a father, and vice-versa?

10.  Learn falconry and/or make a hammock out of a barrel.

Realistically, you probably want an army of falcons.  Barring that, wouldn’t you like to have a beautiful barrel hammock that you strung between two birches?  You could lie in it and think about colors like ochre and slate, or you could drink mint tea in it and throw the ice at all the handsome people who might be playing badminton in white clothes nearby.  They would get angry at you and then you could run and run and run into the woods and go hide under some maidenhair ferns and then get up and keep going.  They’ll never catch you now.

Seriously, WHAT is Taboo up to?

Lately, I’ve been pausing in porticos, haunted by a particular line from a particular song.  The ditty in question, “Boom Boom Pow,” was released by the redoubtable Black Eyed Peas more than a year ago, yet certain peculiarities of its lyrical cadences still manage to wash up upon the shores of my mind, as clear and startlingly whole as twisted lengths of beach glass.

There are at least a dozen turns of phrase from “Boom Boom Pow” that reoccur to me at odd times throughout the day.  As I stand in my poorly-lit kitchen, washing the perpetually stained white plastic cutting board, I reflect upon how it truly is “next level visual shit,” at least insofar as its lack of visual appeal seems to be indicative of some sort of advance in ugliness.  When I walk the broad leafy avenues of my small suburb, dodging inchworms like a ninja, I feel strong and fluid, as if I “got that rock and roll/that future flow.”  In moments of deep frustration, I’ve been known to give my boyfriend an eldritch look, attempting to settle the matter at hand by declaring that “this beat be bumping bumping/this beat goes boom boom.”

Perhaps most damningly, I find this injunction by Fergie–”People in the place/If you wanna get down/Put your hands in the air/will.i.am drop the beat now”–to be highly stirring.  It’s not the words themselves that move me; rather, it is the absolute conviction with which Fergie wails them.  When you hear it, it’s nigh impossible not to respond.  After all, whoever you are, you are probably a “people” in a “place.”  You might not feel like getting down at the moment, but certainly you must have experienced the desire to get down at one point or another.  It seems like little enough to ask that you put your hands in the air, especially if, in return, will.i.am is willing to drop a beat for you.

I should clarify here that I do not go out of my way to experience “Boom Boom Pow.”  Oh, I watched the video[1] when it came out, and I heard the strange snippets of it that accompanied various ads for several months after its release (let no one accuse the Black Eyed Peas of meeting a licensing opportunity that they didn’t like.)  But I own no Black Eyed Peas albums; I don’t listen to Top 40 radio stations; and I usually refrain from attending dance parties or clubs.  In other words, I do not generally lead a Black Eyed Peas-centric lifestyle.

(Leading a Black Eyed Peas-centric lifestyle.)

And yet I thrall to the “space ship zoom,” “the boom boom bap.”  I am the “chicken” who is “jacking” Fergie’s “swagger,” I am the “into the future cybertron.”  The hold that “Boom Boom Pow” has taken over my imagination is so strong that I fear it may only be broken by my demise.  Months may go by without my hearing the song, yet my dreams teem with sinister whispers, adjuring me to “get that base overload,” to taste “that digital spit.”  It’s gotten to the point that the mere sight of the word “boom” in a comics panel causes me to blush wildly.

But the symptom that’s worried me most deeply in recent times is my obsession with a certain key phrase.  By far the single most baffling line in a song full of them, this line resonates with intrigue, like one of Blake’s more mysterious incantations.  Observe!

Beats so big I’m stepping on leprechauns

Shitting on you with the Boom Boom.

Leaving aside the degradation implicit in this announcement (for now), we are still faced with an array of questions.  For instance, just on a basic linguistic level, what does this statement mean?  Who is the “I” in the song, and who is the subject?  Is the shitter of “boom booms” the line’s singer, will.i.am, or is it the song itself?  Where in time and space is the protagonist located, that it affords him the opportunity to injure leprechauns?  Does “Boom Boom Pow” take place in our reality, or is its setting a more mystical realm, like, say, Ireland?  More importantly, what is it about the size of these “beats” that allows the speaker to step on leprechauns?  I myself have been in the presence of many beats before, and no matter how big they got, they were unable to physically impair the least of God’s life forms.  None of this information seems consistent with Western epistemology as we know it.

In order to understand this line then, we must make a few decisions.  Firstly, we must assume that the world of “Boom Boom Pow” is not our world; rather, it is a shadow realm, in which fantasy and the forces of faery reign.  Secondly, we must discard the theory that will.i.am is speaking in the voice of his own experience; rather, he is speaking as the personification of the song itself.  He is constructing for us a meta-narrative, wrought from the mythos of his performance even as it occurs. “Sing to me, O Muse!” indeed.

Nonetheless, we are still left with the problem of how to resolve the Leprechaun Ambiguity.  Although we can all agree that leprechauns caper through the world of “Boom Boom Pow,” we still don’t know why it is that beats are so dangerous to them.  After some fevered pondering, I do have a somewhat sketchy theory.

It is my belief that the various beats of which “Boom Boom Pow” is composed have certain uncanny powers.  Likely, we will never know the full scope of them, but the Peas provide us with a few tantalizing hints.  We know, for instance, that the beats can make “them girls go apeshit, uh.”  That this piece of data is provided by the group’s scariest member, Taboo, gives it automatic gravitas–but might this fact itself offer a clue?  That which is taboo is that which we are forbidden from speaking of–yet the taboo always manages eke out a bubbling, seething existence beneath the thin veneer of our civilization.  So–which taboo does Taboo’s assertion bravely speak to?  Why, none other than that most taboo of taboos–raw, unbridled female sexuality!

(That which is Taboo.)

Given the above, we can safely say that these beats the Peas speak of are incredibly powerful.  According to apl.de.ap, the beats have even allowed him to be “sexing ladies extra longer.”  Most likely, he is not referring to the practice of determining ladies’ genders (so beloved by agriculturalists!), but rather to servicing the beats-enhanced sexualities of various women.  Therefore, it is not too ridiculous to suppose that the beats possess some sort of chthonic Goddess energy, which brings me to my point: I contend that the beats are so potent that they are capable of embiggening will.i.am to giant scale, allowing him to crush leprechauns as if they were ants!

Please take a moment to recover.

Are you feeling better?  Good.  Gather your strength, ye readers, as there is still one more vagary which we needs must nail down: namely, the insult embedded within the immortal lyric “Shitting on you with the boom boom.”

At face value, this is not a very nice lyric.  Detailed analysis reveals it to still not be a very nice lyric.  I regret to inform you that this line is repeated subsequent to its placement above–not once, but twice.  Because will.i.am thrice tells us that he will be “shitting on [us] with the boom boom,” we know that this is no mere slip of the tongue–he truly means it, and wants us to think about it.

Interestingly enough, the radio version of “Boom Boom Pow” censors this statement, changing it to “Y’all getting hit with the boom boom.”  While this is still a somewhat unkind and threatening phrase to say, it’s leagues less offensive than getting “boom boom” shat all over you.  Why would will.i.am go to such lengths to alienate his audience?

We must remember that will.i.am is speaking for the song, not to his own inclinations.  I firmly aver that in real life, will.i.am would not make the choice to shit on me.  If we seek to unravel the phrase, we must harken back to the taboo nature of the beats.  If the nature of the beats is Godlike, it is also id-like–it drinks deep from primal waters.  In their urge to shit all over us, the beats reveal their defiance of traditional social codes and mores–they remain at the anal phase of development, when the ego is not yet fully formed, when man still retains his animal nature.  Not for nothing does Taboo say “I’m a beast when you turn me on.”  His is not an idle admonition–instead, it rings with the primordial truth of the beats.

Shut up you guys! Taboo is trying to show us a primordial truth!

will.i.am and the other Peas want us to know that the beats are to be treated with caution.  Thus, we finally see that “Boom Boom Pow” is not a celebration of the beats, but rather a condemnation of them.  Although they sing lovingly of the beats, the Peas also embed their extolling of the beats’ virtues with a subtext of forewarning.

If only we could hear it.

Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, creators of "Go Fug Yourself."

“Go Fug Yourself” recently named Amber Rose, a model best known for being Kanye West’s paramour, the winner of their annual “Fug Madness” contest, which uses reader voting to name this year’s “fugliest” celebrity.  This development reveals exactly how pernicious this silly little celebrity gossip website really is.

If you are not personally familiar with “Go Fug Yourself,” a brief explanation is in hand.  In short, “Go Fug Yourself” is a website where pictures of celebrities (mostly women) are posted daily, and made fun of.  The factor supposedly guiding the selection of said pictures is the relative level of “fugliness” exhibited by the celebrities’ appearances.  “Fugliness” is a portmanteau term; it refers to things or people which have quality of being being “fucking ugly.”  You may be forgiven if you find this term to be tiresome at best, since it’s one of the trashiest linguistic manglings extant on the Internet today.  The creators of the site, Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan (the self-dubbed “Fug Girls”) make lots of shitty puns with this term–individuals are determined to be worthy of “fugging”; items of clothing judged to be founts of “fug”; outfits that are deemed marginally acceptable are deconstructed in order to figure out how to make them wholly attractive, in a process called “unfugging”; and so on.  This cheap wordplay is characteristic of the site’s writing, which tends to mistake heavy-handed sarcasm for wit.

Those of you who are familiar with the site are no doubt asking yourselves why I am bothering to criticize it now, since the “Go Fug Yourself” backlash is “so 2006.”  Were it not for recent events, I would agree with you.  While I’ve despised the site for a long time, it’s been in the same casual way that I despise gas station point-of-sale cologne displays, or Starbuck’s biscotti, or people who pronounce “forte” like “for-tay”–as one of the world’s many small yet avoidable evils.  However, this last iteration of “Fug Madness” opened my eyes to latent sexism and racism hidden behind the site’s usual misogynistic assholery.

“Fug Madness” is run in the same manner as the NCAA college basketball tournament–it is an elimination-based tournament that pits various celebrities against each other in brackets.  There are four brackets, each named after an iconic “fugly” celebrity–namely, Charo, Cher, Madonna, and Bjork.  Celebrities are individually ranked in order to determine which ones will face off, and there’s an Internet randomizer involved.  If this all sounds ridiculously ornate, that’s because it is.  The amount of energy that the Fug Girls put into organizing and maintaining this system is symptomatic of their lack of self-awareness regarding the entire exercise.  Sports teams are ranked based on their respective skills and performances; “Fug Madness” ratings are based on subjective perceptions of various celebrities’ failure to meet the Fug Girls’ standards of chicness and attractiveness.  It perpetuates the idea that it is a woman’s obligation to do a good job of being a sex object; it’s woman-on-woman violence at its worst.

This is real.

What’s so wrong with Bjork, or Madonna, or Cher, or Charo, anyway?  In their own ways, these women redefined what it means to be a woman in the public eye.  Bjork, Madonna, and Cher are all incredibly talented musicians and actresses, boundary-smashers who refused to fit into traditional entertainment industry molds.  (Okay, Madonna’s not that good of an actress–in movies.  But she did a bang-up job of playing herself in the doc “Truth or Dare.”)  Even ol’ Charo is a pretty talented guitarist and comedian (and one of the first Latina entertainers to make it in the U.S.)

Role model

The point is, these women should be celebrated, not denigrated.  And that’s the problem with “Go Fug Yourself” in a nutshell–its most common targets tend to be strong, unconventional women whose only crimes seem to be (in the eyes of the Fug Girls) straying from traditional gender norms.  Some of their favorite targets include brilliant actress (and noted androgyne) Tilda Swinton; Oscar-nominated actress (and icon of aggressive female sexuality) Sharon Stone; the magnificent Helena Bonham Carter; avant-garde bastard actress Chloe Sevigny; the delightfully off-kilter musician/actress Juliette Lewis; sly and intelligent actress Maggie Gyllenhaal; performance artist Lady Gaga; fearless musician/actress Courtney Love; and comedian/style icon Sarah Jessica Parker.

What do these women have in common?  Well, when surveying the list, the most noticeable commonality is the fact that most of these women are not conventionally attractive.  Don’t get me wrong–they’re better-looking than you or me, but by Hollywood standards, they’re straight up jolie laides.  They also have extremely distinctive personal styles, which tend to go against the grain of mainstream fashion.  Swinton is fond of futuristic, mannish clothing; Stone dresses in a flamboyant parody of old-fashioned stars like Rita Hayworth or Joan Crawford; Bonham Carter tends toward stylized, witchy couture; Sevigny wears bleeding edge styles; Lewis dresses like a rock star, because she is one; Gyllenhaal wears 70’s-style anti-chic; Gaga’s outfits are all elaborate jokes; Love just doesn’t care (in a good way) what you think of her; and Parker takes breath-taking risks.

Tilda Swinton, in a shoot for "Another Magazine."

Making fun of how any of these women look is pointless.  None of them are trying to look like Jessica Alba; indeed, their personal style is often predicated upon highlighting their unconventionality.  It’s like making fun of David Bowie for not sounding like AC/DC.  By mocking Parker or Sevigny for looking “weird,” the Fug Girls are merely demonstrating their cultural illiteracy.  Even worse, they’re enforcing sexist conceits of beauty.  They reserve their praise for dull, cookie-cutter cheerleaders like Reese Witherspoon and Amanda Seyfried–blondes with boobs and a high quotient of straight white male approval.  Through their very popular website, the Fug Girls reinforce the idea that the only valid metric of beauty is predicated upon traditional male standards of desirability.  In a culture where eating disorders, cutting, and other self-destructive behaviors run rampant among women, this is a very harmful idea to promote.

I mean, seriously, would you rather be Cher or Reese "Pudding" Witherspoon?

“But wait,” you’re thinking.  “The Fug Girls don’t just make fun of awesome bitches.  They also make fun of dumb skags like Lindsay Lohan and Kim Kardashian!  You’re cherry-picking your examples.”

Ah, but I’m not.  While unconventional women come under frequent fire by the Fuggers, they’re also fond of a different sort of target–the easy target.  They enjoy making fun of clinically depressed, the mentally ill, and the drug-addicted.  Like the aforementioned Lohan and Kardashian, troubled women like Mischa Barton, Bai Ling, Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears, and Tara Reid are common “Go Fug Yourself” targets.  It’s all too easy to make fun of them, since they often appear in a state of sartorial (and physical) distress.

Ha, ha, this woman's alcoholism is totally hilarious!

This needs to stop.  It’s not funny that Britney Spears had a nervous breakdown.  It’s not funny that Lindsay Lohan is a drug addict.  It’s not funny that body dysmorphic disorder has led attractive women like Simpson, Kardashian, and Heidi Montag to undergo surgical procedure after surgical procedure.  These women are mentally ill, and by criticizing their appearances, you’re feeding their disease.  This is exactly the same as if “Go Fug Yourself” posted pictures of the uproarious outfits sported by mental patients, or the misguided togs of the mentally disabled.  In other words, it’s not funny, it’s sick.  If you care about feminism at all, you should stop reading websites like “Go Fug Yourself.” They seem like innocent fun, but they’re actually extremely destructive.

Finally, I have to address the depiction of minorities on “Go Fug Yourself.”  Beyonce comes under scrutiny by the site often, due to her choice of “unflattering” ensembles.  This is another way of saying that Beyonce’s figure is a little fuller than the white, heteronormative standard.  Similarly ample African-American entertainers, like Leona Lewis, are sometimes criticized for wearing clothing that makes them look “dumpy” or “squat.”  The projecting of white standards of beauty onto these women is more than a little offensive.  Worse is the site’s “coverage” of Jennifer Lopez, which often takes the form of monologues written in a parody of Lopez’s persona.  These monologues are written in a sort of pidgin, generously sprinkled with Spanish malapropisms.  I’m not sure how the Fug Girls get away with this; it’s pretty much verbal minstrelry.  Perhaps it stems from the fact that “South Park” went there first?  I don’t get it.

Finally, we circle around to this year’s “Fug Madness.”  As mentioned above, the winner of this year’s “Fug Madness” was Amber Rose, an African-American socialite and model.  The runner-up was Barbadian singer Rihanna.  I have a huge problem with this.

Amber Rose.

Rihanna and Amber Rose are both unusually attractive women of color.  Neither of them fit the typical mold for female entertainers of color, much less female entertainers in general.  Neither of them can be easily classified–they’re both racially and culturally diverse.  Their personal style quotes a number of influences, from Robert Palmer videos to “Mad Max.”

Rihanna.

Both women enjoy flaunting their admittedly fantastic bodies.  This is entirely appropriate–they are, after all, a rock star and a model, respectively.  If rock stars and models aren’t allowed to wear exotic, glamorous clothing, who is?

I’m highly suspicious of the fact that these women were voted the “fugliest” celebrities of 2010.  It just doesn’t make any sense.  For one thing, both of them are actually quite well-dressed.  For another, could you really, rationally, accuse either of them of looking “fucking ugly” at any time?  Objectively, the answer is no.

Look at this ugly woman. Wow, she is so fucking ugly.

So why were these women voted the winners of “Fug Madness”?  The answers, I think, are “fucking ugly.”

Oh, look, another fucking ugly woman.

I can’t help but suspect that the Fug Girls and their readers find these women threatening.  They are amazingly beautiful, they’re culturally complex, they’re unconventionally chic, and they’re leading much cooler, much more fabulous lives then they are–or you are, or I am.  I also suspect that tearing these women down online won’t do much to dent their confidence.  However, if we really care about celebrating the unique and the beautiful in all of us, then we need to stop denigrating it in the larger culture.  “Go Fug Yourself” is stupid.  Quit reading it.

Sri Craven Bla lectures at the Second Annual Winter Commission

Later that evening, Sri Bla graced the stage again for a look at the foundation of all scientific thought with his presentation Well, Actuarially, a look at how the science of the insurance industry permeates through all areas of the scientific method, especially those pertaining to performance artistry.

Sri Craven Bla lectures at the Second Annual Winter Commission

Thanks to Sri Craven Bla for all of his help raising metaphysical awareness for the evening, and creating the sound scientific foundation on which the rest of the Winter Commission so precariously perched.

-Ross
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The Mendacity of Hope

There is nothing so insufferable as someone who mistakes being offensive for being original. I should know; I make at least ten insufficiently thought-out provocative statements a day, usually in the name of trying to be funny. Yesterday, these included:

1. Men with short moms always date tall women;
2. Old West people cared a lot about candle games because they didn’t have anything better to do;
3. All women ever talk about when they are alone is Leif Garrett and yeast infections;
4. The State of the Union is on at different times on different coasts (total lie);
5. Everybody should quit trying to have relationships and just go on tennis dates;
6. Everybody in the band Petra is ugly in a way that nobody else has ever been before in human history;
7. Baby Boomers, on average, have had way more sexual partners than members of Gen X and Gen Y.
8. All cats want to work at least eight hours a day, and they will if you give them the right platform;
9. The recession is making people want to dye their hair all the time;
10. Weevils are different from boll weevils (this is actually true, but I wasn’t totally sure, so technically this was an intellectually irresponsible claim to make.)

Most of these statements are not particularly true or even verifiable; for me, therein lies their charm. In his short essay, “The Case Against Women,” satirist James Thurber makes the fairly trenchant point that women are hateful because they never get anything quite right–for instance, they never have exact change, and they’re prone to slight misquotations and other mistakes: “They will tell you to take the 2:57 train, on a day that the 2:57 does not run, or, if it does run, does not stop at the station where you are supposed to get off. Many men, separated from a woman by this particular form off imprecision, have never showed up in her life again. Nothing so embitters a man as to end up in Bridgeport when he was supposed to get off at Westport.”

Thurber is exaggerating for comic effect, of course, but there is a kernel of truth buried in his accusations. I think that women often enjoy exaggerating for dramatic effect (and by “women,” I kind of mean “women,” but maybe I just mean “me.”) It stems back to one’s teenage years, where everything either was described as either eternal or impossible. Your mom was Always Completely Unreasonable and you were Never Allowed to Do Anything. Your life could only be described as either The Worst Existence That Anyone Has Ever Had to Suffer Through or The Best, Most Charmed Existence Possible . Usually, your life was The Worst, but even this had a kind of excitement to it–after all, if anybody ever made a movie of your life, surely the audience would be impressed by the length and breadth of your suffering.

Being an adult (or at least, an adult-aged individual), is a lot more boring than being a teenage girl. The stakes are somehow lower. Having roasted chicken for dinner is no longer The Best; it’s just Quite Good, and waiting in line for coffee isn’t The Worst, it’s just Sucky.

Why Are You So Obsessed With Me?

All of which goes to say that making the occasional broad generalization can be enlivening to the soul, especially if it outrages someone. You get to recapture the defiant joy of such Famous Teenage Girl Wars as I Don’t Have to Sit With You for Dinner Constantly if I Don’t Want To, a justly renowned skirmish that occurred when your mom wanted All of Us to Eat Dinner as a Family, Just for Once. It was an absolute pleasure to inform your parents that Nobody Else in Your Grade Has to Eat Dinner with Their Family on Weeknights–in Fact, Nobody Even Knows Anybody Who Has Ever Heard of This Happening, Anywhere. Indignantly, your parents attempted to rebut that they ate dinner with their families on every weeknight as a matter of course, only to be crushed by the withering assertion that They Don’t Count, and also the query, Why Are You So Obsessed with Me?

These battles were fun because you didn’t really care about the outcome–you were just into the Zen of battle. The secret to winning every battle is to engage only with enemies who are more invested than you are–that way, you win even when you lose.

This is why making intellectually irresponsible statements can be so incredibly fun–you don’t really care about whether Moravia was once the most powerful country in the world; you just care about freaking out the person who knows that Moravia was never the most powerful country in the world. That is because the person who forgot more about the history of Moravia than you ever knew is either a nine-year-old girl or a middle-class white guy that subscribes to Harper’s.

If there’s one thing that nine-year-old girls and Harper’s subscribers like to tell you about, it’s rules. They’re desperate to inform you of what you are and are not allowed to do; and if they observe any infractions of the rules, they’re desperate to tell on you. We know that nine-year-old girls are like this because of various cognitive growth patterns that they are experiencing at that particular stage of development, which generally have to do with building the brain’s capacity for logic and reason, which cause them to see the world in more black-and-white terms than they will later in life; however, we have no explanation for what is wrong with the Harper’s subscribers.

Nine-year-old girl . . . or Harper's subscriber?

Everybody’s tired of “pop culture critics” (i.e., sad nerds) writing “think pieces” (i.e., rants) about this topic. What can be said about Harper’s subscribers that Bust’s infamous “Wimpster” article didn’t say better? Isn’t criticizing today’s young Harper’s subscribers for being more sensitive than earlier generations of Harper’s subscribers secretly anti-feminist, because it validates right-wing reactionary assumptions about how the whole politically correct revolution was actually a bunch of anti-male propaganda that will result in everybody getting murdered by a handful of thugs when the apocalypse hits, because our brave young Harper’s subscribers will be too limp-wristed to lift their shotguns in defense of our helpless womenfolk and toddlers? Aren’t young women who complain about Harper’s subscribers simply lending credence to jerks like Christopher Hitchens, who like to run around positing that the reason “Twilight” is so popular is that what women really want, deep down, is to get murdered by a slick Vice subscriber instead of doing it with a kindly Harper’s subscriber ?

The answer to all of these questions is no. Blaming Harper’s subscribers is always the right thing to do. The Harper’s subscribers of this world are not more sensitive than Vice subscribers; they’re just more sneaky. If political correctness forces Harper’s subscribers to be more sneaky about their sexism, it’s good, because it means that they are at least slightly ashamed of it. The apocalypse will turn out okay because of this: while “cultural critics” have been sitting around obsessing about Harper’s subscribers, the women of America have been busy taking up all the slots in college, dominating the workforce, and watching the heck out of Golden Girls . And the popularity of shows like CSI: Rapin’ and Law and Order: More Rapin’ prove that everybody–men, uncles, ladies, moms, babies, and grandmas–likes to sit around pretending that they are rapists/killers/emotionally troubled cops. Does this prove that your grandma wants to be a rapin’ cop? No–it just proves that she thinks they are cool, and all “Twilight” proves is that teenage girls think monsters are cool as well. This is because most teenage girls are monsters. I cannot emphasize this enough.

Anyway! The point I am building toward, unwrapping petal by petal to reveal the mighty Georgia O’Keefe stamen quivering in the center of this enormous flower of generalizations, is this:

Harper’s is evil. Maybe as evil as teenage girls; I don’t know. It’s hard for me to get my mind around that much evil.

Harper’s is evil because its whole point is to make dudes feel so hopeless that they do nothing except bring up things they read in Harper’s at parties in order to make other politically engaged people (i.e., women and other Others) feel dumb and similarly hopeless. “Oh, are you actually voting?,” they sneer, as they take a judicious slurp of Negro Modelo. “How quaint!”

If questioned about what, exactly, is so quaint about voting (or whatever the political action in question is), they inevitably reply with some garbled regurgitation of an essay they read in Harper’s. The title of the essay is usually something like “Totally Fucked: A Harper’s Polemic,” or “State of the Union: Deathy.”

A great example of this phenomenon is “The Mendacity of Hope,” a recent essay by the even more recently departed editor of Harper’s, Roger Hodge. It’s an annoying essay that you can’t read if you don’t have a Harper’s subscription (although a weird, poorly formatted version of it is here, if you want to read it.) Hodge starts out with a cool blanket attack on Obama for not being a unicorn Jesus:

“A year and more has passed, yet we have not been delivered. Some believed that Barack Obama had come to restore the Republic, to return our nation to the righteous path. A new, glorious era in American politics was at hand. If only that were true. We all can taste the bitterness now. Obama promised to end the war in Iraq, end torture, close Guantánamo, restore the constitution, heal our wounds, wash our feet. None of these things has come to pass.”

First of all, this is an facile way to begin an attack on Obama’s presidency. It’s not fair to accuse Obama of sucking because he hasn’t immediately changed everything about American government, because that is an impossible task for one person to undertake. By setting the bar so incredibly high for Obama to “succeed,” Hodge is setting Obama up to fail miserably. Evaluated in such harsh terms, would even a Lincoln or Washington live up to Hodge’s expectations?

Living up to expectations

Hodge then narrows down his attack on Obama to a critique of the president’s foreign policy. This is very clever. Obama’s foreign policy has been less than stellar, and provides fertile ground for scathing criticisms. However, Hodge didn’t start out by attacking Obama’s foreign policy; he started out by attacking his entire presidency. Yet Hodge never explains his arguments against Obama’s entire presidency, just against his foreign policy. His initial generalizations trick the reader into siding with Hodge on Obama’s failure to come up to scratch on being a magical pony; and Hodge’s critiques of Obama’s foreign policy cause the reader to retroactively condemn Obama’s entire presidency, because Hodge effortlessly switches rhetorically back and forth between the two. Yet he never touches upon the other aspects of Obama’s presidency, focusing instead on Obama’s weakest points. This is not objective analysis.

Hodge then goes into a fairly astute inventory of how Obama has failed to end the war, close Guantanamo, or restore due process and other legal principles which the Bush administration repealed in order to be all “24″ all the time. All of this is quite useful and valid critique, but then Hodge u-turns into an ad hominem attack on the president and his supporters:

“That Obama is in most respects better than George W. Bush, John McCain, Sarah Palin, or Joseph Stalin is beyond dispute and completely beside the point. Obama is judged not as a man but as a fable, a tale of moral uplift that redeems the sins of America’s shameful past. Even as many casual supporters begin to show their inevitable displeasure with his “job performance,” and his poll numbers decline, the character and motivations of the president remain above question. He is a good man. I trust him to do the right thing.”

This is fairly crazy and there’s a lot to unpack here. First of all, it is a logical fallacy that the fact that Obama is not a crazy hawk like Bush, McCain, Palin or Stalin doesn’t matter. It matters a great deal. If people hadn’t supported Obama by voting for him, we would have McCain (or maybe Palin) as President right now, and it would be raining blood. In fact, many Americans wish it was raining blood, so the ability of the President to limit bloodshed at this point has very real, non-abstract consequences: it means that less people are being killed.

Secondly, the fact that Obama is being judged as a magical unicorn is not Obama’s fault. The reasons he is being judged as a unicorn are many, some of them having to do with his being the first black president (and thus carrying an unimaginable burden of expectations, due to our weird racist country), others stemming from other sources, among them rabid media hyping. Which is exactly what Hodge was engaging in at the beginning of this essay. Although he was trying to be biting and witty, he was also couching his coming critique of Obama on a mythic level (one that included specific references to Jesus), in order to make his take-down of Obama all the more epic.

Quit screwing up Obama's foreign policy, Hugh Laurie.

The third weird thing about this paragraph is Hodge’s appropriation of what he imagines to be the voice of Obama’s supporters. I’m not sure I understand what people’s opinions of Obama’s character have to do with Obama’s foreign policy. Obama is not doing a lousy job at foreign policy because people admire him, and so conflating Obama fever with Obama’s policy failures is to lay the blame for both at Obama’s feet, which again is not particularly fair. Furthermore, it is condescending and a little strange for Hodge to go into a little fantasy about the mind of the Obama supporter. In his mind, Obama supporters all speak like Forrest Gump. It’s hard not to read this critique as having less to do with what Hodge thinks of Obama’s foreign policy and more to do with his dislike of enthusiastic, hopeful Obama-supporting youth. Hodge is entitled to his opinions, but it’s an unfair jab to slip in.

Hodge goes on to tell us what he really thinks of Obama supporters:

“It is not surprising that unsophisticated children, naive Europeans, and Democratic partisans continue to revere the heroic former candidate, despite everything he has done and left undone.”

Oh man. What are we going to do with all these naive Europeans and unsophisticated children, I mean Democratic partisans? The implication here is that if you support Obama, you must be some kind of brain-dead French teenage hippie, not a Smart White Texan-American like Roger Hodge. Has Roger shamed you out of your Obama support yet, young white dudes? Has he convinced you that voting for Democrats is so gauche?

“Puzzling, however, is the fact that Obama, until fairly recently an obscure striver in the Chicago Democratic machine, continues to inspire perfervid devotion among intellectual liberals who know their history. Even they say: Be patient. Give him time. It’s hard to change the government. Or, more cynically: He’s the best we can do. Thus, his most sophisticated admirers assume the burden of Obama’s sins, bite their tongues, and indulge the temptation to frame his shortcomings as our own. Obama is not to blame; we are to blame. Obama has not failed us; America has failed him.”

I actually think that these are really great arguments in Obama’s favor. And I hate how Hodge once again frames his arguments against them with classist sarcasm. Roger is just so confused about how smart, middle-class white men could still support Obama! After all, they’ve got book-learning, unlike blacks and poors. “Intellectual liberals who know their history” is obviously code for “white people who went to college,” in case you were wondering. And by appropriating the voice of the Obama supporter (i.e., “Be patient. Give him time”), Hodge makes that supporter sound dumb in the same way your little brother used to make you sound dumb when he parroted everything you said in a high falsetto voice. It didn’t matter that the content of what you were saying wasn’t ridiculous; once it was reframed as satire, it became ridiculous. Pointing out that a year isn’t a very long time to reinvent the American political system isn’t stupid; neither is pointing out that, in a two-party system, Obama was by far the more attractive option. I hate those geniuses who decide that the way to destroy the two-party system is to vote for some no-hope candidate during a major election. Anybody who was really serious about that would work on electing third-party candidates to smaller offices while simultaneously seeking campaign reform. Instead, these jokers like to smugly not vote at all, or else vote for somebody unelectable and then gloat about how they’re “taking down the system.” Nader-supporting wonderboys like this helped hand over the country to criminals in 2000.

It's true!

Finally, I will never argue against anyone who points out that Obama is not our country’s dad. For the record, Obama is not, in fact, our country’s dad. It’s not “assum[ing] the burden of [his] sins” to admit that. We aren’t really supposed to look to a magical paternalistic leader to save us all; Hodge of all people should agree with that. No lone person could or should assume the burden of fixing our country–the onus is on us.

After that, Hodge starts bitching about some book he didn’t like. This takes up the bulk of the essay. It’s called “Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State,” and it’s all about how the executive branch of government came to have too much power. Hodge agrees with the author, Garry Wills, up to a point–he thinks that various historical and technological events caused the executive branch to get all swelled and perverted, but he actually thinks that the whole government system was totally fucked from the start, and cites some song and some historical dude in order to prove it. All of this is fairly interesting and astute, as usual–Hodge isn’t dumb–but it’s not necessarily to the point. He’s trying to establish a historical precedent for what he sees as Obama’s fuck-ups, but weirdly, he disagrees with Wills’ ultimate conclusion, which is that any president would have a difficult time wielding this enormous executive power in an ethical way. Wills’ describes the problem thusly:

“Perhaps it should come as no surprise, that turning around the huge secret empire built by the National Security State is a hard, perhaps impossible task . . . A president is greatly pressured to keep all the empire’s secrets. . . . He becomes a prisoner of his own power. As President Truman could not not use the Bomb, a modern President cannot not use his huge power base. It has all been given him as the legacy of Bomb Power, the thing that makes him not only Commander in Chief but Leader of the Free World. He is a self-entangling giant.”

This pisses Hodge off, for some reason–he sees it as Obama apologetics, even though he totally agrees that the executive branch is out of control. I don’t understand how this is logical, unless and except is Hodge is personally pissed off at Obama for nebulous reasons. Then Hodge gets mad that Wills pointed out that if Obama tried to immediately end the Afghan war, he’d never get re-elected. Hodge is mad because, as he points out, Obama never promised to end the war immediately. I’m not sure how this adds up to Obama being a big liar, but Hodge somehow does the math, including another cool ad hominem attack on Obama’s character:

“Let us grant that Barack Obama is as intelligent as his admirers insist. What evidence do we possess that he is also a moral virtuoso? What evidence do we possess that he is a good, wise, or even a decent man? Yes, he can be eloquent, yet eloquence is no guarantee of wisdom or of virtue. Yes, he has a nice family, but that evinces a private morality. Public morality requires public action, and all available public evidence points to a man with the character of a common politician, whose singular ambition in life was to attain power; nothing in Barack Obama’s political career suggests that he would ever willingly commit to a course of action that would cost him an election.”

Roger Hodge, I just don’t understand what Obama’s morality has to do with his foreign policy, just as I didn’t understand what Clinton’s panty shredding had to do with his political performance. As for politicians wanting to get re-elected–of course they do. And let’s not pretend that the Afghanistan foreign policy wouldn’t be far worse if Obama doesn’t get re-elected; frankly, I somehow don’t trust that President Palin or Beck would wake up one day and decide to pull all the troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq tout de suite.

Hodge ends the essay by saying that Obama is a big power-grubbing jerk and we should all be against him.

“The Mendacity of Hope” is the perfect Harper’s essay. It begins from a carefully situated position of negativity, calculated to make the reader feel as much despair and horror as possible, producing this reaction through false dichotomies spun out of the finest unrealistic, idealistic pixie dust. All politicians except Dennis Kucinich are The Worst! The Constitution is The Best, except that we Never Follow It. Things are always going to be Totally Fucked, because of History and also Giant Semi-Abstract Ineffable Systems. Like all good Harper’s essays, it manages to not only make you feel as if the present is totally ruined, it also makes you feel retroactive fear about the past and anticipatory dread regarding the future. It talks about how even the smartest people in the world are totally dumb and misguided, and it describes mythical masses of people who are even more misguided and dumb. The purpose of all this negging is to trick you into agreeing with it, after which you get to feel a small, bitter glow of satisfaction that you, at least, as not as dumb as the rest of these proles. By the end of it, you feel like killing yourself in some dramatically depressing fashion, like walking into the ocean or shooting a bunch of heroin with Fisher Stevens. You feel like you’ve accomplished something just by getting through that Harper’s essay, and you take out the pain of the experience on others by lecturing them pedantically at cocktail parties and barbeques. People start becoming afraid to talk to you, and like all outsiders, you try to make this a mark of pride instead of shame, so you become a Harper’s subscriber. Soon you’ve succumbed to yelling at people who drink out of paper cups and drying your armpits with magical crystals and having open marriages and never, ever voting. You’ve become the most evil thing of all–an adult-aged teenage girl. And this is why Harper’s is evil.

Please understand, I’m not arguing against education and journalism and careful thought. I’m not asking that people blindly believe in their elected leaders, as if they were Gods. I’m just sick of this Thoreau bullshit. I like Thoreau, but he was a giant emo. He was just another nature writer libertarian weirdo until Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X got inspired by his ideas and decided to put them into action. The fact is that reading is not a form of political action, and I think that Harper’s likes to try to trick you into thinking that it is.

Giant emo.

Harper’s subscribers love the idea that ideas are more important than action, and that the person having the ideas is more important than the person executing them. This is how they justify the current sad capitalist structure, wherein a dude plays his Wii in an office and has an idea once a week while a bunch of ladies go around actually organizing things and figuring out how to make the idea happen. They love the idea that you are effective when you are just sitting around maintenance-masturbating and having thoughts, that you can somehow get credit for it. But it isn’t true. Ideas are not particularly valuable. Anybody with sufficient time and energy can sit around having them, and even then they don’t matter unless elbow grease is put behind them.

Intellectual currency needs to be devalued and re-evaluated. In a world this complex and info-filled, it’s easy to turn everything into an abstraction. When everybody is so busy, they end up assigning intellectual value to the things which are the most heavily guarded, i.e., inaccessible. In other words, “It feels bad to read Harper’s, therefore Harper’s must be an important smart magazine and I must be achieving something just by forcing myself to absorb it.”

What’s an intelligentsia? What’s it for? What’s the ultimate point in assigning things levels of intelligence and value instead of engaging with them? Why does it ruin a band for you if somebody dumb likes it? When does “cultural criticism” become identity politics or identity protection? When does “guarding” culture change into fighting culture? If you’re defending your culture from the rabble, it’s already dead.

Remember, kids: “Public morality requires public action.”

(All the Obama/unicorn paintings are by Dan Lacey, who sells them as posters on his blog.  I don’t personally know him; I just think they are cool.)

First of all, quit trying to hack things, weirdo.  You can’t hack a holiday or a life or your mom or nothing, I don’t care what Slate told you.  But I do have some Thanksgiving tips!

Thanksgiving is not that hard of a holiday.  All it is about is eating food and watching football.  There are no weird religious connotations or political issues to navigate, unless you are going to get weird about organic vs. free range crap, in which case you are Jonathan Safran Foer and you need to get off my lawn.

But holidays can still be awkward, because people can be weird about their families.  This is because of the nuclear family system, which will be torn down in two years if all goes according to my plan.  In its place will be a bunch of cults, by which I mean groups of relatives and friends who live in Melrose Place-esque complexes but with a garden instead of a pool and cool, inter-dependent relationships instead weird Tolstoy relationships.  I will accomplish this by destroying the economy and the environment, which will force the dissolution of the suburbs and thus of suburban nuclear family angst.  Don’t worry, my plan is already working!

Meet Your New Apocalypse Mom

In the meantime, however, I have some sweet tips.  They are divided according to whether you are going to be a host  or a guest or alone.  (Ha, ha, just kidding.  The joke here is that we are always essentially alone, a fact of which we become most aware when we are striving the hardest towards togetherness.  This is called situational irony.  If you would like to know whether your life sucks or not, you should try to measure how much situational irony it contains.  The more hilarious your life is, the more depressing it is.  Now that you know that, be careful not to think about it too much!)

Anyway, here are my Top 5 Hosting Hacks:*

1.  Go Potluck

Unless you are a really, really good cook, most of your food will not be that good.  It helps if you have some professional training, but even then, a few of your dishes are going to fall flat.  This chart breaks it down:

In any given dinner, one dish will be okay, another really good, another lousy, and the last good.  The reasons why might vary, but the formula never does.  Maybe it’s because you’ve never cooked something before, or you had too many things going at once, or you skimped on ingredient quality.  Who’s to say (besides your guests, to each other, in the car on the way home)?   This is not a big deal normally, but Thanksgiving is a meal freighted with expectation.  If the turkey is “just okay,” everybody will get sad, because they will decide it is a symbol of how their family is “just okay.”   The way to get around this is to potluck the flip out of your meal.  Have your guests each make their specialty, whether it’s candied yams or tomato jam or pot brownies.  This will make them really invested and competitive, resulting in lots of delicious food (and tasty savings for you!)  At the very least, you are sharing the blame, which is a good life technique in general.

2.  Don’t Make a Turkey

I know that everybody says they want to eat a turkey, but what they really want is to feel that the Barthian sign of the turkey is present.  To put it another way, people are way more excited by the idea of the turkey than by the turkey itself.  Turkeys are difficult to cook because their breeding has gotten all perverted.  Their meat is dry and flavorless and it’s almost impossible to cook it all to the same degree of doneness–either the breast meat is perfect and the dark meat is underdone or the dark meat is cooked well and the breast is dry as hell.  The turkey is really just an excuse to eat lots of stuffing and gravy, which people crave because they don’t eat them very often, because for some reason most people are embarrassed to make stuffing and graving a part of their regular diets even though they LOVE IT MORE THAN ANYTHING.  Perhaps they feel like they must “suffer” through the turkey in order to get to the sweet, sweet stuffing and gravy, and that if they just went around cooking stuffing and gravy all the time all willy-nilly-like, they would lose their Protestant Work Ethics and immediately turn into hobos, in which case they would never get their sweet, sweet stuffing and gravy anyway.  Or perhaps it’s the ritual of smelling the turkey all day and worrying about it that they like–anointing the fatted calf with oils and ungents and whatnot.  Or just the sweet visuals.  BEHOLD:

Here is my true solution to this problem: Make lamb or salmon or ham or chicken, something that actually tastes good.  But to appease weirdos, roast a neck or some giblets or whatever that you gank from somebody who’s actually purchased a turkey.  That way, the magical turkey smell will still be present while your guests sit around watching football.  Enhance this illusion by blowing up the above picture, framing it, and hanging it over the dinner table.  The important elements of the turkey illusion will still be maintained, without the pesky presence of the turkey itself to contend with.  If anybody questions you, lecture them about semiotics until they cry.  Then pass the stuffing.

3.  Bake, Bake, Bake

The other main things that people like about Thanksgiving are biscuits and dessert.  When the conversation stalls, stuff the silence with warm, buttery crumbs.  Example:

Some dad:  “I can’t wait to read ‘Going Rogue.’”

Some offspring:  “That’s dumb.  I hate you.  I hate life.  Do you understand life?”

You:  “I made pecan pie!”

Other guests:  “Eff yeah!”

Some offspring:  “This doesn’t change the fact that I hate you all.”

Some dad:  “Why I oughta–”

You:  “There’s real whipped cream!”

Some offspring:  “Oh, OK.”

Your cat, your dad, and your sibs all have one weakness . . .

4.  Watch ” The Beastmaster”

In this section, I was going to talk about the importance of background media–how it provides a handy  conversation piece, which is convenient, but also how sad it is that the art of conversation has declined to the point that we need external sources of entertainment in order to interact.  I was going to discuss how weird it is that Americans have collectively lost their social skills over the course of only two generations (just think–our grandparents used to get together for neighborhood cocktail parties and have weird Lions or Eagles clubs and just, you know, interact for fun, whereas us and our parents can’t get through a conversation without texting or fact-checking some dumb point via imdb.com, assuming we’re even having conversations, instead of just sitting around absorbing warm TV rays, which is crazy–we’re a nation of hikikomori.)  I was going to ask if anybody you know has actually gone on a real date in their life (”date night” doesn’t count),  and then I was going to contrast all this “The Internet and Media in General Are the End of Culture” sturm und drang with this awesome Clay Shirkey essay about how technology makes everybody crazy at first but then we adjust: just look at the Industrial Revolution, which made everybody just get drunk for a really long time before they figured out how to be awesome again, which is going to happen to us someday at some point.  But screw it–”The Beastmaster” is really good, whether it’s a crutch for interaction or not.  He’s a master of beasts, you know?  Look at him:

Get it together, animal friends. NOW.

He’s objectively cool, and it’s objectively okay to love him.  END TRANSMISSION.

5.  Act Right

Okay, here’s the deal: sometimes things don’t work out.  Sometimes, despite all your little “life hacks” and “time management tools” and “I-statements” and whatever, the course of true love does not run smooth.  That is to say, sometimes things are sad or awkward.  The turkey burns, or your uncle gets drunk, or your sister says the wrong thing at the wrong time and makes everybody else feel like shit.  These things happen.  And when they do, you have a choice: you can get all crushed and flail about and store up the bad feeling so that you can make some of your precocious art about it, like some poem about how nobody is real but you or whatever, or you could Act Right.  You can pretend that you don’t know what Acting Right entails, but that’s a flipping lie and you know it.  Acting Right means committing to the situation.  You accept that the situation is a bad situation, and you don’t lie to yourself about it.  You let it be sad.  Then you look at whether there is anything you can do to improve it, if there are any elements of the situation that are under your direct control.  Some might be, some might not.  Focus on those elements which you have power over, and exert that power.  It will mean doing things that you don’t want to do–it will mean making conversation with people you don’t want to talk to, or spending money you don’t really have to spare, or sucking up some crap you don’t want to take.  It will not feel good, and you will not receive points.  But you will have satisfaction, of a sort.  You will know that you did what needed to be done.  You will know that you are not a douchebag (see Fig. A.)

Fig. A

And you will give thanks.

*Seriously, I’m not doing tips for guests or loners.  If you are a guest to a Thanksgiving you don’t want to go to, simply arrive late and leave early.  If you are alone, get some takeout and eat it in the bathtub with lots of candles.  IT IS BOTH GOOD AND DISGUSTING AND COOL, WHICH IS A GOOD LIFE PLAN.