Essays on Sucking

This Blog Sucks

2011-09-29T15:05:00.000-07:00

Why are you here? I haven't updated this site in SIX FUCKING MONTHS. I just started a Tumblr though. Maybe you'd like that?

Why Jermaine Hall of Vibe Magazine Sucks

2011-03-31T08:20:00.000-07:00

Here's a post I did for Motherboard, a fine site about technology and stuff. The gist of it is that Jermaine Hall, the editor of Vibe sued a website because someone called him an uncle Tom. C'mon Jermaine, it's the internet! We're supposed to say incredibly fucked-up shit on here!

Sarah Palin! Sarah Palin! Why Talking About Sarah Palin Sucks

2011-03-21T19:12:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite journalists over the past few months has been Abe Sauer, who writes mainly for the Awl, a site I can’t recommend enough. I guess you could call him a blogger, since he writes for a “blog,” but he’s an old fashioned muckraker who really works his ass off finding out things that ordinary folk should know but don’t. Two months ago he published a revealing account of how US tax dollars are unconstitutionally used to support the proselytizing of Christian groups in Haiti, and more recently he’s been reporting from the union trenches in Wisconsin, documenting specific instances of Republican politicians straight up lying to their constituents and also spelling out connections between the now-ubiquitous Koch brothers, the Wisconsin Tea Party, and a new wave of anti-union, anti-government Republican candidates for office (who are often trained by organizations that claim to be “non-partisan”). Every time I read one of Sauer’s pieces I feel better educated about a topic, and though he clearly has what might be attacked as a “liberal agenda,” his opinions are clearly backed up by facts and good reporting.

His last article was a typically incisive, meticulously researched piece about Sarah Palin’s hunting and fishing license history. Wait, what the fuck? Yes, a precisely documented and hyperlinked post that disproved one of the many images that Palin has been working to develop for months: namely, that she’s an outdoorsy woman, bespectacled Mark Trail with tits who like Ozzy would have no trouble biting the head of a live animal off onstage. There’s a lot of information—again, as usual for Sauer—in the article, but the central point is that Palin doesn’t have the licensing history for someone who claims to have been a “lifelong hunter” and a frequent worker on her husband’s commercial fishing boat. As Sauer sums up:

“She certainly has not wholly concocted some fairy tale about her outdoorsmanship. But what Palin's licenses do seem to paint is a picture of a candidate who has used a few experiences to justify an image makeover that appealed to a political demographic.”

Exposing a past that a candidate for office has whitewashed or touched up in the service of ambition is an old and honorable journalistic tradition. The problem is, wait, say it with me now:

SARAH PALIN AIN’T A CANDIDATE FOR SHIT

I mean, she has yet to announce her candidacy for president, although there’s widespread speculation that she will run after visiting India and Israel on a trip that only two kinds of people make: presidential hopefuls and “spiritual” 18-year-olds who have deferred their admission to Columbia.

More importantly, she is a fucking terrible candidate. Not quite Rick “Frothy Mix” Santorum-levels of terrible, but probably unelectable. Her negatives country-wide are through the roof, and even Republicans have begun to turn on her, perhaps deciding that nominating a reality-TV show star who quit the only statewide office she ever held might not be all that responsible. I imagine Obama is about as worried about Palin as Palin is worried about global warming. At this point, she isn’t even a frontrunner. There’s a small group of people who will like her up until and including the moment it is revealed that she and Todd enjoy a vigorous night of pegging every now and then, but everyone else either makes fun of her or ignores her—she’s like the cheerleader who is the most popular girl in school but only genuinely liked by the other jocks, a fairly sexist analogy that more or less stands up.

The people who like her will still like her after reading Sauer’s evidence that she shades the truth about her outdoorsyness; more to the point they won’t even read it, because it’s on a fairly liberal blog, and even if it was in the New York Times, Palinites have acquired the habit of reading only the publications that agree with them, or else not reading much at all. No matter how accurate, attacks on Palin at this point are pointless. She’s a human-shaped target covered in concentric circles of lipstick, and she’s a legendary courter of controversy. I can just hear her response to the Sauer piece in my head:

“So, y’know, some New York liberal Jew (she doesn’t say Jew, but we all know what “New York liberal” means, don’t we?) has written something on the in-ter-net, on a site called The All” (rolls eyes sarcastically like she’s having a seizure) “this liberal fella named Abe, he says that I’m a bad person because I didn’t get all my hunting permits in order every single year of my life!” (Makes “Whatta-ya-gonna-do” shoulder shrug.) “He thinks that because I don’t always go through all the beaurracratic (sic) red tape and because I have more important things to think about than remembering what years I got what pieces of government-issued paper—things like, I dunno, raising a family!” (you can’t hear it, but she just called Sauer childless, implying he was homosexual) “Now, what people like Sauer don’t realize…”

Etc. Etc. Palin thrives on attacks. She’s like the energy form of the Marvel Comics villain Onslaught, who was immune to all of the superheroes’ attacks because he lacked material form. Palin is similarly immune to any hit piece because she lacks substance. Attacking her garners page views, but doesn’t serve a larger point.

I’m not out to criticize Sauer in particular—journalists have been fairly challenging and reporting on Palin’s bizarre behavior and half-truths and willful ignorance ever since she appeared. But in the long run, attacking someone who will soon be a marginal political figure at best serves no purpose. Sauer has talents that could be better spent elsewhere, telling us things that we need to know, not that Palin lies about herself when she’s in front of a camera.

Update: Abe Sauer emailed me with an explanation that answered my question, "Why write about Palin now?"

After I did the piece on her inabilities hunting on display in Dec., I started filing FOIA requests for licenses. But, it's Alaska, and it's complicated this took a while to get the right request to the right person and then for them to fulfill it. (And I got sidetracked with Haiti in between). By the time it was all ready to go, a couple months had passed.

This information is now out there for anyone to use in the future and reference.

I know that blogging is fast and happens at breakneck speed, but sometimes information takes time to surface. Honestly, this seems so obvious that if some journalist at one of the hundreds of papers that have written thousands of articles about Palin in the last couple years would have done it, I wouldn't have had to at such a late date in her cycle of relevance.

The Most Worthless Thing on the Internet: Sexed-up Trend Piece Edition

2011-03-16T11:49:00.000-07:00

Let’s say you’re a writer for a respected (well, pretty much) New York City publication. It’s your job to write things about New York, which is great, because everyone knows what people do in New York is important, especially if they are “creatives,” especially if they have money, and especially if they live in Manhattan. They are on the cutting edge of culture! What is that edge cutting? Why? What drugs are the young people doing? What music are they listening to? What cuisines are they consuming? These questions must be answered and it is your job to do it.

One way to do it is you could just get loaded with a bunch of trust fund babies, look around the room, and write about whatever you see.

That seems to be what Nate Freeman of the New York Observer did in what will no doubt will go down in infamy as another entry in that already-infamous genre, “The NYC Trend Piece.” Trend pieces, for the blissfully uninitiated, are articles that describe something that a supposedly broad group of people (usually rich people) are doing, but do so without any numbers at all. “Trends” are always described using anecdotal evidence, partly because statistics for trends are hard to come by, and partly because trend pieces are often bullshit that gin-soaked writers make up in the face of deadlines and demanding editors.

Here’s what, in journo-speak, we call the “nut graph” of Freeman's piece:

Young New Yorkers no longer care about having sex. It’s not the endgame, nor even the animating force of social interaction. Men and women still get dressed up, but not for the purpose of taking off their clothes in another’s company. What used to signify desire or the desire to be desired now boils down to narcissism. How will I look on Patrick McMullan tomorrow? Or just on Facebook? The Observer spent a few weeks at parties and gatherings fraught with abstinence but slack of any sexual tension, and we heard a repeated sentiment, often delivered with uncharacteristic fervor: “We are a self-obsessed generation.”

We might ask, for starters, what the hell? Since when does “spending a few weeks at parties” count as reporting? (Since we died and went to reporter heaven, I guess.) And how do you know they were “slack of any sexual tension”? No one was making out in front of you, or getting erections, or quietly taking off their panties in the bathroom? And what is “Patrick McMullan”? I’m a 24-year-old working in the media, and I have no idea what that is. Oh, Google reveals it’s a party photography company. Well, maybe people don’t try to dry-hump that much at the kind of fancy party with professional photographers that the Observer apparently went to. To put it succinctly: you guys are going to the wrong parties, apparently.

Elsewhere, the writer recalls a coke-fueled party that lasted until dawn, full of “day laborers in film, public relations, media, fashion”—get it? “Day laborers?” Because ironically, these people do not do hard labor and get paid a lot!—that disappointingly did live up to the writer’s expectation that “one should choose a member of the opposite sex and set off for his or her apartment, to sleep together.” Damn, I guess Nate Freeman really wanted these hot 20-somethings to bang. Maybe they were tired after a long night of cocaine.

The thesis that young New Yorkers like me don’t care about sex because online social networks, er, make social interactions awkward later (or something?) is backed up by a few quotes from people who are experts because they, themselves, are in their 20s and in New York. Those quoted seem to be having a tough time with their sex lives, and I can empathize to a degree: If you and your potential mates work long hours, it’s tough to schedule a night of fucking in. And maybe it’s awkward for some people to have sex with people who later appear in your Facebook feed—but c’mon, that’s a fucking stupid obstacle to stand in the way of a good orgasm.

Then, as is usual in the trend article genre, there are some people who are bucking the trend. Is this bucking the trend it’s own trend, or just a sub-trend of the original trend? Whatever--in this case, Freeman talks to a couple teenaged actors from Skins and concludes, “younger [more sexual] kids are poised to take their places.” Is that creepy to say? Maybe! Anyway, the kids who aren’t old enough to drink are totally DTF, and amusingly, they have no idea what the Observer is talking about, responding to questions about how undersexed New York with “I haven’t actually, um, heard that?”

Well, I haven’t heard that either. Maybe there’s not as much anonymous sex in this city as there used to be because, y’know, AIDS, but I’ve been to plenty of parties with sexual tension to go around. A few Manhattan people are too coked out and workaholic and obsessed with internet status to fuck each other senseless? They just have their priorities out of whack, and I don’t believe many of these people exist because I’ve never, ever met them. If people want to have sex but aren’t, it usually means no one will let them.

To fight anecdotal evidence with anecdotal evidence, I posted Freeman’s story to my Facebook wall and someone said, “Man, whatever. I do blow and fuck like every night.” Does that count as a trend?

Things that Don't Suck: Doonesbury

2011-03-10T09:18:00.000-08:00

The funny thing about newspaper comic strips—I mean “funny” not as in “ha ha, good joke” but as in “strange, unsettling, troubling”—is how bad they are. Unacceptably bad, really terrible, just shockingly awful, especially when you consider the thousands of people who are drawing pictures and writing jokes and thinking of stories at this very second—why do so many comic strips seem to be created by those who can do none of these things? Why do so many strips hit the trifecta of being poorly drawn, unfunny, and consisting of characters who are just cardboard cutouts delivering stale jokes that weren’t funny the first time you heard them? Why, oh why Lord, in a universe where only so much time is allotted to us to enjoy earthly pleasures, does Momma exist?

Here’s where I could start researching the history of the syndication system, where I could discuss the demographics of most newspaper comics readers (my guess is they are very old and prone to writing letters when their favorite strips are cancelled) and the general tendency of mass media to produce bland entertainment that enfolds our daily existence like a soggy beige envelope—but lets skip all that. Let’s talk about Doonesbury instead, which for me is the last of the great comic strips, something akin to a the last majestic dinosaur struggling through the ashen landscape surrounded by malnourished rodents picking at the bones of his contemporaries.

What non-comics fans don’t think about very often is there were really great comic strips in the past, a roster I’d say includes Peanuts, Krazy Kat, Pogo, a bunch of classic adventure strips like Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie, Nemo’s Adventures in Slumberland (still trippy to look at after all these years), Gasoline Alley in its way—it was the first strip in which the characters aged, a rare feature that Doonesbury adopted—and more recently Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County, and maybe The Far Side, but really the art for that last strip is pretty sub-par compared to the rest of the list. A few of those strips still survive today, but they are horrifying zombie carcasses of their former selves who should be shotgunned out of the pages of the papers they appear in (take a look at old Gasoline Alley strips—Fantagraphics has been putting out anthologies—and you’ll see how the strip has changed, mostly for the worse). There’s a lot of variety in all those strips I just mentioned, but all of their creators put blood and sweat, if not tears, into the work every day. Today so, so many strips are two or three panels with lazy linework, one bubble of dialogue per panel, and a flat punchline. They simply don’t try.

Doonesbury tries. It tries so hard that it has a whole set of problems that other comics don’t have. For instance, the strip’s cast of characters, originally a group of college students sharing a house way back in the early 70s, has expanded to the point where there are probably at least a hundred unique, named people that had recurring roles. It’s sort of intimidating to dive into a strip like that and try to figure out who everyone is—and what other strip can be intimidating to dive into? In addition, Doonesbury keeps up with current events in a way few other strips do, so if you only read the comics and sports pages, you likely won’t get some of the jokes, or care enough to follow the strip for long.

But wow, if you get into Doonesbury, there’s a lot to enjoy. There are elements of the serial-adventure strip in it (as I write these words, Jeff Redfern, son of strip regular Rick Redfern, is attempting to save a dictator from a bloodthirsty revolutionary mob in order to pay off a debt to a defense contractor), but every strip has a joke at the end, and pre-punchline dialogue that is pretty sharp. Sometimes, especially on Sundays, it turns into more of an editorial cartoon, which is why some papers have put Doonesbury permanently on the op-ed page. Most significantly in recent years, the strip has focused on veterans and active-duty military personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq, and by what I’ve heard doing a pretty good job representing and discussing pretty serious issues.

Then there’s the art, which has evolved from Gary Trudeau’s fairly dreadful chicken scratches in 1970 to a competent, workmanlike style in the 80s that repeated the same image across panels--the exterior of the White House, a character sitting in front of a television--far too often, to today’s strips, which are exceptionally clean, and stand out from other strips because it looks like someone took the time to storyboard them and to display the scene from different angles to create a sense of action—a simple thing, arguably, but something that no other comic on the page does.

The big flaw in Doonesbury is the political slant; it’s undeniably the work of a liberal who cares about politics, and sometimes, like in this February 13th Sunday strip, it really does become something like an editorial cartoon, or an extremely short op-ed column. I imagine that the more conservative you are, the less Doonesbury feels like art and the more it feels like windbaggy propaganda. (I’ve heard the same thing said about The Wire.) And like every strip ever made, there are off days, there are relatively boring storylines, there are places where it lags.

But seen as a continuous document, a narrative—like a soap opera or an exceptionally long novel—Doonesbury is an incredible achievement. It’s not just the story of a large and varied cast of characters, it’s the story of American politics over the last 40 years, seen through the perspective of journalists, activists, hippies, farmers, lobbyists, and soldiers. Doonesbury is the War and Peace of comic strips. It’s what journalism aspires to be, a rough draft of history. No other comic strip in newspaper history has linked itself so closely with current events. I’ve literally learned about the 80s by reading old Doonesbury collections, and you could do worse things for a clever child with an interest in politics than giving him some Doonesbury books. The strip really does merit preserving for future generations to look at, and I can’t think of any current comic about which the same could be said.

Huckabee? More Like Suckabee, Am I Right?

2011-03-06T09:08:00.000-08:00

The word “likable” gets thrown around a lot when we talk about politicians, but man, was Mike Huckabee ever likable in 2008. His pet cause wasn’t abortion or defense, but fighting child obesity with Bill Clinton. He was overtly Christian, but he didn’t seem to be the judgmental kind—you got the sense that he really was compassionate towards us sinners. He made a campaign commercial with Chuck Norris! He plays bass! He wasn’t exactly “hip”—he’s a conservative politician from Arkansas, after all—but he didn’t seem “evil,” the way Dick Cheney was evil. I disagree with probably every single position Huckabee articulated (except for the anti-obesity stuff), but that’s because I’m a godless sex-and-drug-loving New York liberal. Still, I felt like the two of us could have sit down over a non-fat yogurt and had a good chat about football.

So my question is, what the fuck is wrong with Mike Huckabee lately?

Last week, Huckabee made some comments about how Obama grew up in Kenya—which is just factually wrong, and seems like a nod to the “birther” or “nutjob” part of the Republican coalition, which believes that Obama was born in Kenya because ????. It was an especially weird thing to say because Obama did spend some of his early years in Muslim-dominated Indonesia, and you’d think that bringing that up and implying that Obama had his mind poisoned by Islamists would be enough. Huckabee backtracked by saying he “misspoke,” which didn’t make any sense because he talked about the Mau Mau Revolution and the British, which are specific to Kenya, not Indonesia. His explanation is like someone getting blackout drunk and throwing all up over your couch and then saying, “Sorry man, I tripped.”

Let’s assume Huckabee was not being stupid or drunk when he said that stuff on the radio; let’s further assume that he intends to make a serious run for the Republican nomination—even though neither of these things are certainties. What the fuck could he have been thinking?

1. He’s the “Christian candidate” in the race, so he wants to get some of the hard-C-Conservative-but-soft-c-christian voters (the paranoid Beckians who think Obama is Stalin or whatever) that support Sarah Palin. Except he already leads the field among birthers, so why go out of his way to appeal to them?

2. He is actually an incredibly savvy politician who is willing to sacrifice himself for the greater good of the GOP. He figures that even though polls show him and Mitt Romney running about the same versus Obama, the tall, handsome, and sorta-moderate (for a Republican in 2012) Romney has a better chance of winning in the general election. So Huckabee is purposely marginalizing himself by making wacky comments about Obama and Natalie Portman. He’ll still be the Christian candidate, and he’ll get the nod to be the Vice-Presidential candidate—a Romeny-Huckabee ticket would probably have the best chance of beating Obama.

That second option would make sense if I explained it using chalkboards and tied it to the Koch brothers somehow, like a Bizarro Glenn Beck, but really, Huckabee could just throw his support to Romney at a critical point in the primary if he wanted to be VP. So it was just a gaffe, the kind of gaffe that Huckabee wasn’t making in 2008. I’m still confused by the whole incident. Did he really think that Obama grew up in Kenya? Maybe he wouldn’t be fun to sit down with after all.

BONUS ATTACK ON HUCKABEE AKA FUCKABEE AKA SUCKABEE:
This fine Politico article on Huckabee and Israel—he’s a Christian Zionist, which I guess is like being a reverse Jew for Jesus—includes this bit near the end:

Some pro-Israel Jews view with suspicion Christian Zionists like Huckabee because of the belief among some fundamentalist Christians that gathering the Jews in the Holy Land will precipitate the Second Coming and the end of the world.

Huckabee wouldn’t directly describe his view on that belief but dismissed it as irrelevant.

Here’s a good question for Huckabee: Why is it so hard to say, “No, I am not supporting certain policies because I believe they will bring about the end of the world.”? You would think that “Not wanting to literally destroy the planet” would be a position that every Presidential candidate, regardless of party, would want to endorse. Jesus Christ, how many Christians that are actively hankering for the Rapture can there be for Huckabee to want to avoid offending them? Let’s be clear on something: HE DECLINED TO DESCRIBE HIS VIEW ON THE END OF THE WORLD. I don’t think that’s irrelevant.

Immediately following that bit excerpted above, Huckabee is quoted as saying, “The reason this, as an American, matters to me is because freedom and liberty matter to me,” which the Palestinians would find odd—but more importantly, he says, “as an American,” possibly implying that “as a Christian” he supports Israel for different reasons, well…

I usually try to avoid fearmongering, but, what the heck.

UNTIL HE SAYS OTHERWISE, ASSUME THAT HUCKABEE WANTS TO BRING ABOUT THE RAPTURE. HE WANTS TO DESTROY THE WORLD. HE’S LIKE A SUPERVILLIAN. IF HE IS THE REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE, THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WILL BE THE PARTY OF THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE AND HUCKABEE’S AMERICA WILL BE RULED BY THE BOOK OF REVEALATION!

Kinda makes Romney's modest jobs-based campaign seem not so bad, huh?

Things that don't Suck: The Larry Sanders Show

2011-03-01T10:25:00.000-08:00

I wrote something over at Splitsider, a blog that takes comedy very seriously, about the Larry Sanders Show, an HBO sitcom from the 90s that laid the foundation for the next 20 years of 30-minute comedy shows. The show was one of the first not to have a live audience or laugh track and--well, just read thing if you want to find out, alright? I don't give a shit. Here's a clip of the show:

Why Larry King Sucks

2011-02-25T07:44:00.000-08:00

I wrote a letter to Larry King on this website. I hope he reads it! Or, I hope his assistant reads it to him.

Why Complaining About How There's no Good Men Sucks

2011-02-22T15:07:00.000-08:00

Hey, did you think that the well of “20-somethings-represent-a-whole-new-paradigm-for-adulthood-and-the-way-we-live” newspaper articles was empty after that long sorta-expose the New York Times did last year? Well, the Wall Street Journal doesn’t think so—they just published this long piece by Kay Hymowitz that at this moment has 47,000 Facebook likes and 1,100 comments. Hymowitz talks about all the stuff the Times article talks about (young people are undergoing extended periods of adolescence and not getting married, buying a house, and/or starting a career right after college, etc.) but adds her own little twist—in an endearing combination of feminism and reactionary traditionalism, she complains that this “pre-adulthood” is hurting women, because all the men are too immature to be long-term relationship material. Or as she puts it:

Among pre-adults, women are the first sex. They graduate from college in greater numbers (among Americans ages 25 to 34, 34% of women now have a bachelor's degree but just 27% of men), and they have higher GPAs. As most professors tell it, they also have more confidence and drive. These strengths carry women through their 20s, when they are more likely than men to be in grad school and making strides in the workplace. In a number of cities, they are even out-earning their brothers and boyfriends.

Still, for these women, one key question won't go away: Where have the good men gone? Their male peers often come across as aging frat boys, maladroit geeks or grubby slackers—a gender gap neatly crystallized by the director Judd Apatow in his hit 2007 movie "Knocked Up."

The immature, Apatow-movie-watching, maladroit geek in me wants to snark back with something like, “Where have all the good men gone, Kay? Away from you as fast as fucking possible, that’s for sure!” Then I’d high-five my grubby slacker buddy and we’d go right back to playing Left 4 Dead, snacking on salty, chemically-flavored chips, and periodically taking bong hits.

But you know what? I’m a fucking adult, so let’s actually talk about Hymowitz’s ideas. Perhaps because it’s is adapted from her book, the article is sort of confusing: after telling us about the dangerously low supply of good men in America, she backs away and discusses the formation of “pre-adulthood” in a gender-neutral way. It takes longer to get a good, stable job in today’s market—you have to go to college, and probably bounce around a few jobs before you have something you can properly call a “career.” People’s age at the time of their first marriage has been rising steadily since the 70s. And the media—oh, those bastards!—are encouraging our young men to remain barely-sentient towers of meat who giggle at fart jokes. Hymowitz blames the lack of good dating options for heterosexual women on Maxim, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, Spike TV, Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, Steve Carell, and Seth Rogen.

As much as I like the idea of a bunch of frat-humor outlets teaming up with Hollywood and advertisers to keep men dumb and single so they have disposable income to spend on body spray and fancy booze and video games, I think it’s probably more likely that being a grubby guffawing boor makes you read Maxim and watch Adam Sandler movies than the other way around.

To deal with the other pieces of Hymowitz’s narrative: people aren’t getting married as much as they were in the 50s and 60s, and that’s probably a good thing. Women couldn’t earn as much as men, so it made sense for them to land a fella and become housewives as soon as possible. Now that women can have careers, they do have careers and don’t get married so young. Another explanation for the marriage age rising, courtesy of Matt Yglesias: “Maybe this number just bounces around over time and it’s always been the case that some people are sometimes frustrated with some members of the opposite sex.”

Anecdotally, I would say that there are plenty of 20-somethings who follow the guidelines given to them by the trend pieces. But an upper class of shiftless layabouts who aren’t employed at anything in particular is nothing new. Remember the dandies or whatever in England, or wherever the dandies were? (They were probably invented by trend article writers too.) Remember Baudelaire, a prominent proto-pre-adult?

Hymowitz probably wouldn’t consider Baudelaire marriage material, what with the syphilis and the drug addiction and all. But he doesn’t match the description of the archetypal pre-adult man that she uses in her concluding paragraph: “Relatively affluent, free of family responsibilities, and entertained by an array of media devoted to his every pleasure, the single young man can live in pig heaven—and often does.”

Nor does that description match anyone I’ve ever met, except for maybe my dorm neighbor my freshman year, who would literally lie in bed eating candy and playing video games. Even the men I know who have moved back home with their parents, or are unemployed for long periods of time, or are chronically single, aren’t the kind of shiftless hedonists of the sort that Hymowitz is convinced are replacing the “good men,” Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style.

I’m not a woman, or an old person, but weren’t good men always hard to find? Wasn’t that the whole point of the saying, “A good man is hard to find”? Now that women can become successful for themselves and don’t need to latch onto a man—anything with a penis and a paycheck—for the sake of long-term security, they can take their time and pick out a man to share a life and a house and chromosomes with. Picking out a romantic partner can be pretty complicated, especially when you have high standards, and especially when you have to find someone who will love you back. That’s tricky! Maybe you’ll like someone and they won’t like you, or someone will like you and you’ll be in a relationship, or you’ll really like each other but one of you has to move across the country—both of you being hard-charging professional types—and thus, leaves the other behind. Love is complicated, as pop music has taught me. It’s complicated and hard, and you don’t have to invent bullshit pop-sociological reasons for why the guys who are around you are losers.

Where Have all the Good Men Gone? [WSJ]

Why Fashion Week Sucks: An Event Diary

2011-02-18T09:46:00.000-08:00

There’s a girl dressed in all black checking names off a list when you walk in. If your name is on the list you get to go to the second floor in a tiny elevator. You can ask, but you are not allowed to go up the stairs. A woman in a fur coat tells the girl she’s with something called Fitz, with a z, and spells it out. Other girls dressed in black hurry out of the door and onto the dark street on some kind of important errand.

Upstairs, the elevator opens into a small, softly lit room. People are gradually filling it up, waiting for something to happen and getting complimentary vodka drinks mixed by two more girls in black. They carefully combine ice, juice, tonic, and a certain brand of vodka on a table at one end of the room, while a movie in black and white is projected onto the curtains behind them. All of the people working at this event are wearing all black and all are conventionally pretty young women. Many of the women and men spilling from the tiny elevator in bunches are conventionally pretty; some have foreign accents. There’s an animal skull on the wall. It’s impossible to tell what movie is playing because it’s on mute and the folds of the curtain distort the image.

The people are not watching the movie. They are mostly talking about the places they have been, the people they know who aren’t here. Introductions are made over the generic thumping dance music floating in from somewhere. “I actually tweeted you,” a man with long blond hair says to an older woman with impeccably painted red nails. Conversational clusters form. If you aren’t part of a cluster, you stand against the wall with your drink and look around at the other clusterless people. Or you get out your phone and stare at its blue glow—many people are doing that. “I’ve been to a few parties here,” a stylish young man tells his cluster of other stylish young men. “There were all these guys coming out of the bathroom together.”

Everyone in the increasingly crowded room is stylish. It’s unclear who is waiting in line to get another drink and who is trapped by the crush of people. A nervous-looking guy in a zebra-striped shirt keeps going back to the vodka table. Whatever is supposed to happen hasn’t started happening yet. The black-clad vodka girls use a new cup for every drink until they run out of cups. “Who does your color?” says someone waiting for a drink to someone else.

The elevator doors open, deposit more people, and close. This keeps happening. A woman makes a distressed noise and starts hitting the closing door like a prisoner pleading with her jailer. “Her boyfriend,” someone says knowingly. Finally the doors open and she stumbles in. Someone asks about if there’s a bathroom here or what and no one knows.

A signal has been made; knowledge of the next stage of this event passes through the crowd. A door opens and people press towards it in an orderly but eager fashion, like children queuing for a mall Santa. There are complimentary cans of ice tea on a table near the door but no one takes them. The generic dance music gets louder as the people surge into the next room. This is where the event will take place.

The center of the new room is occupied by a narrow raised platform covered in brown construction paper. There are chairs to either side labeled with numbers and letters, and if you have a seat assignment you sit down, elbow-to-elbow with the other seated people. Is a chair a sign of status? The others stand, crowding each other all the way back to the wall. A pretty girl in black is sitting at a podium doing something on a computer; maybe she’s controlling the music. Everyone is getting out cameras and cell phones with cameras in them. A video camera on a tripod is set at the foot of the platform.

More pretty girls in black come and take the construction paper away, and the narrow black platform shines like a freshly polished shoe. People type words into their phones, bring up menus, communicate over social networking platforms.. A man walks across the platform, leaving footprints of dust. The crowd grumbles at him—“He just did that?”—and the people nearest the platform wipe off the footprints with napkins and sleeves.

A hidden door slides open at the head of the platform and smoke or fog from an unseen machine comes billowing out. The music gets louder, more urgent, and everyone sits forward in their chairs, preparing their cameras. Without an introduction, a man strides down the platform wearing a full-length coat that looks like it’s made out of furry intestines. Gasps are heard. He stops for a split second at the foot of the platform then turns and walks away. Another man takes his place immediately, wearing a waist-length version of the same coat, then he goes back into the foggy opening.

Men are walking down the platform one by one, in a very organized way. Some of them wear makeup, one has a black mask on. They all look very similar; if they weren’t all dressed differently you might think they were the same man. Everyone takes photos of the men all the time, but they don’t stop to pose. They look like they want to get this over with as fast as possible. One wears a jacket with feathers, another has no shirt, another wears a shirt that exposes his stomach. “Look at the footwear!” someone says.

It is over faster than you would think. At the end all the men come out at once in a single-file line, walking up and down the platform as a group to the crowd’s applause. It’s like they’re proving that they all are different men, like they are displaying the end result of a complicated magic trick. A man in all black, like a stagehand, appears out of the fog and there is more applause. No one makes a speech or explains anything. There is nothing to explain, or it’s like that quote about jazz, if you have to ask you’ll never know. Everyone here knows.

The rush to get out the door begins. Some people push through the crowd searching for the vodka table, wondering if it’s still open for business. Others are talking about other places to go, upcoming events, past events this has reminded them of. The phones come out again. The elevator doors open and close, taking people downstairs now instead of up. Outside the street is lit up with headlights and neon. Some guys are standing at a closed loading dock smoking weed. Plastic bags are carried over the sidewalk by the wind. Women pull the collars of their fur coats up, their high heels clacking on the pavement.

(Image ripped off from Oakazine)

Why Valentine's Day Sucks

2011-02-14T08:52:00.000-08:00

Science has yet to discover anything less original than a single person whining about how tough they have it on Valentine’s Day. “All those couples are giving each other gifts and slurping pasta romantically and then going to bedrooms to have sex as a couple, and I’m all alone and I’m just going to get drunk and watch TV in my underwear—my gross, staying-at-home-alone underwear, not the sexy underwear the Valentine’s couples are wearing—and then masturbate and feel awful about myself! Wahh! It’s so hard being single in the city!” Jesus, calm down, imaginary straw-man single person I just invented. There’s nothing wrong with masturbating and watching television. Do you know how many of those couples would rather not have the stress of having to have a romantic time out on a night mandated by a greeting card company?

The more thoughtful single people know that no one wants to hear them whining, so they acknowledge that Valentine’s Day is bad for couples too. That argument works like this: Romance that’s forcibly squeezed into a specific date isn’t romantic—it’s not spontaneous, and what’s more, the traditional Valentine’s Day trappings are pathetically unoriginal. Flowers, roses, chocolates, a red tablecloth? Bleh. I remember last Valentine’s Day, when I was coupled, standing in line at a chocolate shop, buying the same heart-shaped box of chocolates that a dozen other men--UPS workers, businessmen, and deli clerks--were also standing in line to buy. The alternative is to spend days thinking about, planning, and executing some grand, romantic-comedy-esque gesture, something involving her favorite album and a skywriter and dirt from the first park you ever had sex in—and who has time for that?

Some people actually like Valentine’s Day, though, and that should be respected. Maybe they don’t have a lot of time for romance, and maybe it’s nice for them to have a day set aside to eat chocolate, dress up for your partner for once, eat a good meal, and have some sex. Doesn’t that sound nice? Who honestly scoffs at that for being “unoriginal”? Especially if you’re in a long-term coupling situation, where you don’t do that stuff ordinarily, and especially if you’ve got kids and can’t do that stuff ordinarily.

The real problem with Valentine’s Day is that it’s the only secular holiday that actively excludes people. Are you really good at Valentine’s Day? Do you give great gifts and love trading smoky glances over candlelight? Well, you better have a significant other when February 14 comes around, or you can’t celebrate. You’re out in the cold with the other single people, going to some awful “ironic” Valentine’s Day event where the other singles reek of loneliness and cheap perfume. “We don’t care that we’re single!” the single people at these events will tell each other nervously over too many drinks. “Haha! We’re self-actualized individuals who know that happiness comes from an inner sense of accomplishment, not validation from a romantic life partner who will end up leaving us, just like everyone in our life to this point has left us! Haha!” I heard about a speed-dating event scheduled for February 13th, which depressed me immensely. If you are single the day before Valentine’s Day, for God’s sake, just keep being single. Have some pride, or at least pretend you do.

Single people have to ignore Valentine’s Day. We have no other choice. Banding together in groups and making a big deal out of our singledom just reminds us, and the world, that okay, maybe we do kind of care that we never wake up to someone holding us and even if chocolates are terribly played out it might be nice, once in a while, for someone else to buy us some. That sometimes we go home and drink wine straight out of the bottle because what really is the point of a glass when we are all alone, anyway? Just about the only thing that will make us feel better is blogging about how awful Valentine’s Day is. Aren’t all bloggers single?

To end on a moderately up note, Andre 3000’s “Happy Valentine’s Day” is a good song. But we are trying to ignore Valentine’s Day, so:

Why Internet Porn Sucks

2011-02-09T07:17:00.000-08:00

Here's a link to a letter I wrote to online pornography. One of many money shots that are included in it:

Oh, she’s sucking his dick? That’s nice, I guess, even though he’s having kind of a hard time keeping it up, probably because he did a bunch of coke before they started shooting. How long does this go on for? Jesus, five whole minutes of this monotonous dick-sucking? Now what? Oh, she’s gotten on top of him—great, a long shot of her rubbery labia bouncing up and down on his smooth balls without the distraction of being able to see either of their faces. Yeah, this is hot.

How, Exactly, Super Bowl XLV Will Suck: A Preview

2011-02-01T11:51:00.000-08:00

The Super Bowl is a gleaming structure of unnecessary media. The Super Bowl exists to sell ad space. The Super Bowl is a secular feastday. The Super Bowl is a softcore orgy. The Super Bowl is the Super Bowl of commercials. The Super Bowl is an oxymoron: mandatory entertainment. The Super Bowl is a paean to consumption, and an opportunity for everyone to consume. The Super Bowl celebrates the worst in music. The Super Bowl is, stripped of the fireworks and graphics and the overlong halftime show and the “buzzed-about” commercials and the week of parties attended by Hawaiian-shirted sportswriters and drunken corporate VPs looking for cocaine and underage prostitutes—at the bottom of the bottomless pit filled with shiny things and men with white teeth selling us cars, the Super Bowl is a football game, which is a problem.

The NFL schedule’s greatest strength is in excess. Every week there are way too many games for anyone to watch. You literally can’t watch them all, even if you plant yourself in front of your 55-inch 1080p flatscreen all Sunday, even if you have other, smaller flatscreens placed strategically around your living room playing different games. During football season, our Sundays runneth over with huge men hurting each other and doing amazing things in pursuit of a ball. Even if the Bills-Raiders contest is lousy, there are always other games, or you can turn to the Red Zone channel—brought to you by Old Spice or some shit—and watch touchdown after touchdown until your pupils dilate.

The Super Bowl reveals that a single football game is rarely interesting. There are long stretches when the ball is being spotted or when a challenge flag has been thrown where we’re watching the greatest athletes in the world stand around and sweat in their pads. Normally, we’d flip over to another game, but we can’t on Super Bowl Sunday. If the game is sloppy or one-sided, we’ll be stuck sitting glassy-eyed in front of the screen, drinking our Coors-the-official-sponsor-of-the-NFL beers and waiting for the commercials to come on. What are we going to do, not watch?

Then there’s the problem of the necessary media narrative. During the season, sportswriters have 32 teams to write about, and an abundance of stories. Most of them involve the Cowboys or Brett Favre, and teams like the Steelers and Packers—apart from a few injuries and rape allegations, mostly drama-free—are ignored until they are the only teams left to talk about, at which point the sportswriters have to figure out how to make the teams sound important. It’s not enough to say, “These are a bunch of men contractually obligated to play together, who have been talented, lucky, and well-coached enough to beat all the other teams. Some of them are concussed, some of them are not exactly Rhodes Scholars even without the concussions, and some of them you would not want to see walk into your bar, especially if you were a young woman. Now they will compete against each other for your amusement.” That’s accurate, but not dramatic enough for the news cycle.

So here are the narratives from today’s ESPN.com: position coaches are underrated; Donald Driver has gone through some shit and is now a Christian with a stable family; the Packers’ offense is very good; Clay Matthews has long hair. (That last one was written by Rick Reilly, who is literally running on fumes at this point, by which I mean he carries around a sock filled with paint he huffs from every five minutes.) I haven’t seen the inevitable article about the grand traditions and legends of both teams, but I’m sure some plucky, overweight scribe is typing that article out as you read this. Ben Roethlisberger might be written about in a serious, sort-of-sympathetic way—he will apologize for past behavior, pledge to be more mature and to face his demons. “I want to just focus on football now,” he’ll say. The sentence, “Forced himself upon a young woman in a bathroom stall while his entourage stood guard” will not appear.

(Oh wait, the sympathy for Big Ben has already begun, even before reporters ask him questions! “No matter what he says, it'll be a grueling day for the big guy.” Well, at least he won’t be sexually assaulted.)

After the narrative, human-interest stories have been exhausted, it’ll be time for the ritual of predictions. Will the Packers high-octane offense triumph over Troy Polamalu and the savage Pittsburgh defense? Will Big Ben’s precision passes evade the gloves of Green Bay cornerback Charles Woodson? The ex-athletes, sportswriters, and other men in suits on television will opine on these and other topics, then finish with something along the lines of, “In the end, though, I think Green Bay just has too many weapons on offense, and an underrated defense that’s going to stand up to Big Ben.”

They will say this extremely seriously, and then someone else will disagree with equal seriousness, like they are discussing unrest in the Arab world. Then the game will ultimately be decided by a botched call, an inadvertent hand wrapped around a facemask, a long pass just out of reach of a receiver, a flubbed snap, a missed tackle that turns a 10-yard rush into a touchdown. It will be a great game, or it will be an interminable blowout. Either way, confetti will rain down at the end, and the winning quarterback will be praised for overcoming adversity, whether it's Aaron Rodgers's concussions or Roethlisberger’s rape allegations. Trophies will be hoisted, rings will be awarded. A city in the middle of the country will be filled with honking horns and cries of ecstasy. No matter who wins, someone in an oversized Packers jersey will be weeping somewhere. We’ll all sit in a television haze, bloated and bleary. Glee will come on. The winning players, some still dazed from headshots, will be spraying champagne on each other like giant drunken children. Dallas will be flooded with prostitutes, drug dealers, and middle-aged fans roaming the streets. Sportswriters will file copy and head to the bar. Prediction: Pittsburgh 24, Green Bay 17

Lance Armstrong Sucks at Not Being an Asshole

2011-01-25T12:58:00.000-08:00

Here's my latest post on Cheating Culture, about Lance Armstrong and steroids. Armstrong is one of those athletes who has accomplished these great feats-beating cancer, dominating the Tour De France--while being a jerk, i.e., getting people around him to tell lies that go on for decades, and smearing the reputation of anyone who accuses him of using banned substances. Successful athletes have been held up as paragons of virtue for so long that it's hard to imagine that they are vile people in private. But clearly Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Brett Favre, Ben Roethlisberger et al. are jerks at best and deeply immoral at worst. It's as if having a lot of money and fame and power come to you for playing a game in your mid-20's is somehow a bad thing.

Why Being Sick When You Are an Adult Sucks

2011-01-24T18:47:00.000-08:00

You wake up and feel like shit. Which is actually not headline news, because you were out drinking last night, which you do a lot, and when you aren’t out drinking you’re in drinking, but this shit you’re feeling is worse than that usual dryness-on-the-inside-of-your-body ache. You throat is scraped raw, like sometime during the night you stuck a rusty spoon down it, and your headache is an unusually hot and heavy one. Your whole forehead feels like an oddly throbbing bruise. If only scientists could harness the power of your headache, the country’s carbon usage would fall by whole percentage points.

Now, are you actually sick? You haven’t puked, although your stomach is making a fist. You get out of bed. Jesus, you’re shivering uncontrollably, it’s fucking freezing and you start this horrible coughing that is really alarming—time to call in to work sick.

When you were a kid, you savored that moment when your parental figure finally gave in and was like, “Alright, I guess you’ll have to stay home,” making your heart surge. Stay home! All right! Except now you are your own parental unit and you actually want to go to work. Or not “want,” exactly, but if you’re working a shit per-hour job you need that money you won’t earn in your bed or contorted over your uncleaned-in-weeks toilet gagging; and if you have a job with some responsibility that pays you a salary, well, you better get well enough to stumble to your laptop and answer some emails or there will be a mess waiting for you when you get back.

Also, remember those childhood sickdays when your parental unit—unsexed here because we don’t want to offend anyone whose father was the primary caregiver and nurturer, but we’re talking about an essentially maternal figure—would take the day off work, if he or she worked, and just hover around you giving you cough syrup and water and tea and toast lightly drizzled with honey and chicken noodle soup and whatever else you felt you could consume without heaving green bile into a pot that the primary caregiver was thoughtful enough to place at your bedside? Remember when you were asked, “What do you need, honey? Do you need anything?” That was the best part of being sick, and the best part of having parents, actually, is that sense of having someone who cares about your desires, who will ask you what you need and be sincere and even be willing to go out of her way to physically provide the thing whose absence has left a hole in your preadolescent heart, unless this thing is something impossible like a helicopter or something that you really don’t need, like a ferret or a box of chemically flavored fudge or another fucking video game system. What is life, once you’ve become taller than your parents and wandered afield, other than a search for someone who will once again ask you, “What do you need?” and mean it?

Well, anyway, you could sure use someone asking you those questions, but your roommates are gone doing whatever it is they do during the day and your fridge and cabinets are not exactly stocked with cans of nurturing soup and cold medication and herbal remedies. This reminds you that you live the kind of life where you basically have half a six pack, some mustard, bacon, and a few half-eaten vegetables in your fridge and not much else, and maybe you really should try to be healthier, or at least better prepared. But that’s for later. Now, you should get some supplies for being sick, which gets at the crux of what it’s like to be sick and on your own.

Are you going to go to the store? You can’t really drive, what with these shivers and this fever, and you aren’t going to get on a fucking bus in this condition, so you better hope the hypothetical second person tense this is about lives in a metro area in walking distance of a corner store or pharmacy. And then you have to carry the stuff home yourself, trembling in the suddenly-freezing weather, coughing with your entire body on the street like one of those homeless guys on his really depressing last legs, and you have to heat the soup up yourself, when what you really need to do is lie down in the bed that no one is making for you. You give up on soup. You drink tap water, lots of tap water, and then try juice but it makes you nearly vomit. Juice later then. You scarf aspirin down, feel your forehead, the stupidity of taking your own temperature. The afternoon light outside your window goes gray and then fades. You’re pretty sure you won’t puke now.

When you’re sick you can’t entertain yourself by surfing the internet—too much effort—and you can only read if you’re really dedicated to the book and your head doesn’t start throbbing. You can maybe manage a movie, half watching it and half sort of trying to sleep, but it has to be something stupid, the kind of movie you usually hate, and you hate it now, watching it—being sick doesn’t make you dumber. Do you try to masturbate? Masturbating when you’re sick, when you have the chills and are coated in a thin layer of dried sweat and your head is pounding, is terrible, it’s like trying to have sex while your sick, as if anyone would let you do that, and you can only bring yourself to orgasm if you try way too hard for way to long, and it isn’t even any good and you feel fucking disgusting afterwards. Don’t masturbate when you’re feeling sick. Just lie there, doing that kind of moaning thing you did when you were sick and home along, where you make a sustained noise with your mouth that combines the vibration of a vibrating phone with the sustained low-pitch whine of a circular saw. It sounds like a robot dying but you feel better when you do it, somehow, like a sonic security blanket, although you couldn’t do it when your parental unit was home because, you learned the hard way, they would get pretty alarmed that their child would make a noise like that for an extended period of time.

If you are sick for more than one day, you wonder if you will die of your illness. This is ignorant and self-centered, but it happens. Isn’t there a chance that you have something really serious masquerading as a flu? It could be like an episode of House where the patient of the week thinks she’s just sick, but she’s been sick for a month and her concerned loving husband (secretly a gambling addict, we learn in a side plot!) takes her in and House’s team solves her problem easily and is ready to discharge her but then she starts anally bleeding and has this horrible rash on her arm, oh god, and her eyes are slowly filling with blood while the white-coated doctors banter about how it can’t be that one obscure disease because otherwise she would have no sense of smell, and there’s a tearful scene with her gambling-addict husband and she is like, “Am I going to die? They won’t tell me,” and he goes “Yes, and I’m not going to tell you about my gambling addiction because I love you so much, more than baccarat, and I want to spare you pain in your final moments,” and things are looking really bad until House himself, as the result of a side plot where he has taken up recreational hatchet-throwing as a way to bond with Cuddy, solves the mystery of the patient’s anal bleeding and nearly kills someone with a hatchet in his haste to administer the exact right medication to the patient, who, you have to wonder at the end, is still not in the best place because she still doesn’t know that the husband lost the mortgage in one white-knuckled night of high-stakes blackjack.

Well, this will not happen to you, thankfully. You will just gradually get better until you just have a cold and you won’t drink for a while and then you will be drinking again and you will learn nothing from this, your kitchen will still just have a bunch of shitty junk food in it that a sick person could not eat.

But while you wait to get better, you still have to stand in front of your stove cooking scrambled eggs—the thought of more complex foods makes your stomach clench in protest—in your bathrobe, which is inside out because who gives a fuck? and your t-shirt that is your least favorite t-shirt because it has about 20 tiny holes in it, and you are blowing your nose into your t-shirt because there aren’t any Kleenex in reach and you are like, man, I must have done something wrong for this to happen to me. At least when you’re hungover, there’s a reason for it.

Abe Sauer's Great Piece on Why Christian Aid in Haiti Sucks

2011-01-21T13:36:00.000-08:00

I don’t read everything that appears on the internet, but surely Abe Sauer’s long, exhaustively-researched hit piece on Christian aid groups in Haiti illegally using government money from USAID to proselytize to the voodoo-practicing Haitians before giving them aid was just about the best thing that flashed across anyone’s monitor last week. The law states that the US government can give money to Christian groups as long as they in turn spend that money caring for the needy and don’t thrust Bibles into native hands at the same time they, the Christian groups, are bandaging up those hands. Because, y’know, if the US formally funded groups devoted spreading evangelical Christianity in the third world it would violate the Constitution in a pretty direct way.

I don’t have anything really to say about the piece itself, other than you should go read it, right now, the whole thing, but I will say that whenever the religious right (and the organizations mentioned in this article are undoubtedly right-wing; they have Sarah Palin’s support and some are overseen by the Graham family) gets the government to bend backwards to appease their agenda, I get visibly angry. Not at the Christians, necessarily, but at the atheists, agnostics, and others that generally oppose the Christians’ goals but aren’t motivated or organized enough to stop them.

Look, I know the United States is a Christian nation--not “founded on Christian principles,” but clearly, dominated demographically by Christians. Furthermore, a lot of these Christians have no problem just standing up and yelling, “Stop teaching my children evolution!” or “Put the Ten Commandments outside of this motherfucking courthouse!” (They don’t say “motherfucking,” but the tone is close enough.) A lot of people who disagree with these statements—which are fucking insane, by the way—are more or less happy to ignore the Christians, or laugh them off, and basically go about their merry, non-spiritual business as organisms.

The problem with this is that the Christians win this way. As an atheist, I’m having more and more of a problem with that.

For years, I didn’t want to argue with any Christians, or be vocal about my non-belief. Because no one wants to listen to that smug asshole atheist yammering about the inconsistencies in the Bible and treating Christians like brain-damaged infants. But there’s a difference between letting people believe what they believe and having a situation where a US-funded aid group refuses to give a job to a Haitian man until he converts to Christianity. That shit is not okay, and it’s not anti-Christian to say so. We don’t have to fruitlessly debate the existence of God to point out that turning USAID into a Christian organization is terrible foreign policy.

Of course, some Christians believe that it is their duty to convert the unbelievers, especially the brown, downtrodden unbelievers who have just gone through a disaster and are emotionally fragile and have more immediate problems than a lack of Jesus, such as, their entire families are dead and they have no food or medicine. If you’re one of those Christians that believes that telling those people about Jesus is “helping” them, fuck you.

Political News is Going to Suck for a While: Your 2012 Republican Primary Preview

2011-01-11T10:31:00.000-08:00

In modern times, there’s no such thing as an “election year.” Elections never cease. Even now, after one election has barely ended, we’re already polling, punditing, and raging about the next election, which won’t actually happen for 22 months. This is good news if you like the kind of political reporting in which elections are treated like horse races, only these races last a lot longer and the horses die out one by one and collapse on the track until there is just one horse left standing on the pile of dead horses wheezing and bleeding and having had huge patches of skin ripped from its body in the course of the race, and this horse pledges to restore civility to Washington and get things done, dammit, while beneath the winning horse, the dead horses slowly start to come back to life, making statements via Twitter and pledging to tear the winning horse into pieces. For those of us who don’t enjoy this spectacle, the prospect of primaries “just around the corner” makes us shiver and break out into a cold sweat.

Thankfully, we don’t need to care about the 2012 presidential election. We don’t need to write long, speculative pieces in New York magazine about how Sarah Palin could become president, or talk about whether Michael Bloomberg will run as a third-party candidate, or parse the minutiae—and oh God, will there be minutiae—of the Republican primary. We don’t need to talk about this stuff even if we really follow the news and care about politics. Why not? Because unless something changes, like we hit another recession, or he gets caught in a hotel room with a dead woman or a live boy, Obama is going to win reelection, and might even do so fairly easily, which would render the primary season pretty much moot.

Moot how? Well, some potential candidates like Jeb Bush and Chris Christie are probably going to sit this cycle out, which they presumably wouldn’t if Obama were that vulnerable. The polls pretty much back this up—there was a funny one from a few months ago showing that people liked a generic Republican candidate better than Obama, but they liked Obama better than any actual Republican candidate. The frontrunners for the nomination (Palin, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich) are all pretty terrible as candidates.

To break it down one by one: Palin is popular with a certain kind of frothy-mouthed bloggy Republican who answers polling questions on Redstate, but she’s laughably unelectable in the country at large. Romney has the opposite problem: The base doesn’t like him any better than it did the last go-round, maybe because he’s a Mormon, maybe because he supported health care reform in Massachusetts. Newt—Jesus, do we need to consider him seriously now? If he came out of the primary, liberals would turn out to oppose him just as they would to oppose Sarah Palin.

Huckabee, well, Tom Jensen at left-leaning Public Policy Polling thinks that he’s the best GOP candidate. Huckabee has a fun name (although easily turned into “Fuckabee”), he’s an affable guy, he lost a bunch of weight and is committed to fighting obesity, he’s super Christian, he’s all about Zionism—pretty attractive to Republicans, all things considered. But when he ran for president four years ago, he got hosed everywhere except for Iowa and the South, and Chuck Norris isn’t going to help him when the aggressively ideological “values voters” and hard-line conservatives attack him. Already, Mike Pence (who?) polled better at something called the Values Voter Summit, and Ann Coulter called him a liberal for not wanting to kill and eat illegal immigrants. Can an election turn ugly before it even begins?

Just ignore any news coming out of this primary season, please. Even if I write something about it, don’t read it—find some articles about baseball instead, even if it’s only spring training. Or just watch YouTube footage of car accidents in slow motion or something. And if you live in New Hampshire or Iowa, I’d advise you to leave the state before the candidates descend on your state. This won’t be a media circus, it’ll be a months-long ten-way screaming match, with the winner inevitably covered in mud, blood, and allegations of homosexuality—and that candidate is probably going to go down in history as the next Bob Dole.

The NCAA Sucks

2011-01-07T15:18:00.000-08:00

I have a new post (new-ish, anyway) post on CheatingCulture.com, if any readers are getting tired of joke posts and pop culture. Politics coming soon--the 2012 Presidential News Cycle is just beginning to spin! *Vomits blood*

Some Sucky Resolutions for 2011

2011-01-04T10:16:00.000-08:00

You aren’t going to go to the gym, finish your novel, father a child, or meet your future husband. You will not legalize gay marriage nationwide, or go to space, or eat better. Your shaking, cold-sweat night terrors will not end in 2011, nor will your years of emotionally crippling loneliness. You won’t tell everyone what you really think. So here are some resolutions you will actually be able to keep:

Keep drinking. You know you’re going to keep drinking anyway, don’t torture yourself by walking back and forth in front of the liquor store in the cold trying to restrain yourself. Maybe just try not to black out so much this year?

Learn the difference between it’s and its, your and you’re, and there, their, and they’re.

Keep sending photos of your penis to coworkers who reject your clumsy advances. Who cares if that shit ends up on Deadspin? Someone is going to like what she sees, and then it’s party time for Brett, or whatever your name is.

Speaking of your penis, let’s make 2011 the year you finally come up with a clever name for it. For instance: The Pale King, Lil’ Abner (if your name is Abner), The Little Engine that Could, Yul Brynner (if you are circumcised), or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are all acceptable nicknames.

You know that girl who works in the next cubicle? The one who wears those red pants? Jesus, stop staring at her ass every time she walks by. It’s fucking creepy, and people are noticing. She’s young enough to be your daughter, you know.

No one wants to hear about your cats. Make a note of this.

Use your time in prison to hone your body and mind so when the parole board gives you time off for good behavior—thanks to your having been a model inmate, a pillar of the community, a baritone in the chapel choir—you will be an unstoppable killing machine.

Cultivate a fake British accent.

Quit masturbating in the bathroom during your coffee break. You’re going to get caught one of these days, and then what will you do? How are you going to explain that?

Spend less time following celebrity gossip, as your encyclopedic knowledge of Scarlett Johansson’s relationships and Megan Fox’s favorite clubs is disconcerting to people you meet at parties.

Let’s see if we can stop those abrupt fits of heavy weeping in public, shall we?

Tell your boss you need to be made Head Fry Cook, because you’ve been working here for six months now and Tom keeps calling in sick and everyone knows he has a drug problem and should get fired, and you could use the extra cash because you’re trying to get a place of your own for you and your kid, and maybe Amber if she’ll come back to you and dump that meathead Randy—anyway, you need to tell Jerry that if you don’t get that promotion and a raise, there are plenty of other kitsch-themed family restaurants that would love to have your grease-management skills.

Dress yourself in robes of linen and drink the blood of animals. The time of fire and tribulation is nigh!

Why Tron: Legacy Sucked

2010-12-20T10:39:00.000-08:00

Why did I see Tron: Legacy last weekend?

I could say I thought it was going to be a good movie—Jeff Bridges! A Daft Punk soundtrack! Shiny things!—but I read the AV Club review and knew it wasn’t going to be “good.” Maybe I thought it would be entertaining, the way Die Hard 4 was kind of entertaining, or the way one of those CSI-esque shows on Fox that doesn’t make any sense but keeps chugging along anyway and sucks you into its bullshit world is entertaining. I didn’t think it would be boring.

Well, it was. Most of the scenes were of people talking, and mostly they were just trying to explain to each other (and the audience) what the hell was going on. The plot is about the people who live in a computer trying to come out and taking over the world with glowing disks and rods, or something, led by Evil Jeff Bridges, and opposed by Good Jeff Bridges and his son, who is played by a guy with only two facial expressions. There’s also some business with some Magical Beings who live in the computer and can “change everything” if they get out of the computer. All of this was treated extremely seriously, with the only comic relief coming in the form of a character who I can only describe as a homosexual Mad Hatter. The action sequences are either sub-Matrix martial arts fights, or stuff ripped off directly from the first Tron or the first Star Wars. Oh, and Good Jeff Bridges talks like The Dude from The Big Lebowski for reasons that are not adequately explained. “You’re really messing with my Zen thing man,” he says at one point. I guess that was supposed to be funny.

It was shiny, I’ll give it that. There were a lot of blinking lights, and when one of the computer people got killed they would collapse into a bunch of cubes. And sometimes entire motorcycles materialize around people! That was cool, but by the climatic, Star-Fox-inspired battle scene, I was back to being bored. It looked about as impressive as a video game, with a story that could have been a Saturday-morning cartoon.

Tron is the kind of movie that makes you incredibly curious about aspects of the story that are skimmed over, despite the mountains of exposition. Like, are all the computer people true Turing-test-passing AIs? And how does Bridges’ 1980s-computer have enough memory to handle all of them? Why does Evil Jeff Bridges only have about five henchmen with him at any one time; why isn’t he using his entire army to track down Good Jeff Bridges? Most importantly, why are the computer programs (apparently) men and women? Do they have sex?

Those last questions, about what kind of sex computer programs have with each other, are kind of unavoidable—there’s a scene at an actually-not-very-exciting-looking party where a couple of sexy lady programs are sitting on guy programs’ laps and we follow Beau Garrett’s hypnotic ass as she walks through the crowd. Seriously, do computer people have dicks, or what? Do they get pregnant? Don’t tell me that Good Jeff Bridges has been cohabiting with his only ally, the smoking hot Olivia Wilde, for what amounts to hundreds of years without knocking neon-covered boots with her. And clearly Olivia Wilde is attracted to Jeff Bridge’s Son The Shitty Actor—there’s an intense one-act play about a father-son-mistress love triangle buried in this movie, but that’s skimmed over. This is a Disney production, after all, and Disney’s house special is creating characters that ooze sexuality (even when the characters in question are animated animals) and then neutering them.

Tron follows a trend, exemplified by Avatar, of extraordinarily stupid science fiction blockbusters. Old-fashioned science fiction was written by people like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, who knew their science and wrote intellectually inquisitive stories and novels, albeit ones with wooden prose and thin characters. Hollywood sci-fi keeps the thin characters but doesn’t give a shit about explaining how anything happens or why. Science is just magic in Tron. How does a person go inside a computer and apparently remain a flesh-and-blood being who ages and bleeds? How do computer people made out of data become actual matter when they go outside of the computer? Doesn’t that violate the basic law of physics? No, because everything happens because of magic. You aren’t meant to ask questions or engage with the fictional world or think about anything when you watch a Hollywood sci-fi epic. Just sit back and let the effects wash over you, like you were watching a 120-minute car commercial.

People love this shit, of course—Tron earned 43 million at the box office over the weekend, and at least one sequel is likely. The user review section on Metacritic is filled with high ratings from people who thought it was great, and who use movies to distract themselves from the terrible, soul-crushing reality of their own existences. “It's a moovie for peat sake,” one of the reviews read. Movies like Tron aren’t meant to make you think deep thoughts, the comments section argues, they’re just mindless fun entertainment for you to zonk out to, sort of like heroin but less addictive and more expensive. People like me, who thought that Tron was really boring and not even comically bad most of the time, even when you are stoned and drinking wine in the theater and thinking of snarky things to say about it later, are not supposed to see this movie; we’re supposed to go read the New York Times and re-watch Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and go to art museums with scarf-wearing women with Etsy profiles. Fine, I’ll go do that. You assholes can have the next five Tron movies, which will be about as fun as watching someone else play a video game.

Why the NCAA Sucks

2010-12-14T08:53:00.000-08:00

Hello, internet people! I have a new post on CheatingCulture.com, where I am going to be posting regularly about cheating in sports as long as cheating (or sports) exist. This in my favorite sentence from it:

"Cam hasn’t been punished for his dad’s actions (so far) because like Richard Nixon, he can claim “plausible deniability”—the NCAA forgave him, for he knew not what his father did."

Who Chuck Lorre is and Why He Sucks

2010-12-03T11:04:00.000-08:00

The latest issue of the New Yorker contains a profile of Chuck Lorre by Tom Bissell (gated), which answers a question I’ve never asked myself until now—namely, who is Chuck Lorre? Turns out he’s the human force of nature behind the most popular sitcoms of our time, Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory, as well as not-exactly-classics like Grace Under Fire and Dharma and Greg. It’s a well-written article that has some nice behind-the-scenes details—did you know that all of those shows are actually filmed in front of a live audience?—but it also works amazingly hard at dancing around the fact that no matter how successful and hard-working Lorre is, he’s also a hack.

Ahem. Maybe the polite term for hack is “populist,” or “sitcom traditionalist,” or whatever phrase the New Yorker used to describe him. What Lorre has done throughout his career is create TV shows that are to television what Top 40 hits are to music and McDonald’s is to food. Two and a Half Men is a program for people who want to watch television but don’t care what they want. They want something comforting to rest their eyeballs on, something that won’t challenge them or force them to have an emotional or intellectual response. Fine, I guess. I’ve drunk too much cheap, shitty beer to question anyone’s taste. But the New Yorker, perhaps out of an instinct to not throw profile subjects under the bus, doesn’t quote any of the many, many people who hate Lorre’s lowbrow shows, and halfway defends his work with lines like:

Lorre’s standing among critics is not helped by his staunchly traditional approach to the sitcom. He is well aware of the shifts that have taken place in sitcom writing during the past twenty years, but he does not care all that much about them.

There’s little discussion about those “shifts” in sitcom writing, maybe because if the piece delved into recent sitcom history, Lorre’s attitude would come off as stodgy and willfully ignorant. The sitcoms of the 1980s, watched today, are astonishingly slow-paced and predictable, even the supposedly “good” ones like The Cosby Show. The reason for this is that the last 20 years have represented a revolution of sorts in sitcom writing, which resulted in shows from both sides of the Atlantic like Seinfeld, Newsradio, The Larry Sanders Show, The Simpsons, The Office, Spaced, The Office (again), Curb Your Enthusiasm, Arrested Development, the first seasons of Malcolm in the Middle and 30 Rock, Peep Show, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and most recently, Louis, Parks and Recreation, and Community, which competes in the same time slot as The Big Bang Theory, the first of Lorre’s shows to be acknowledged as non-terrible by critics. For a sitcom writer to “not care all that much” about that list of shows is fucking insane, like a film director ignoring all films made after 1970, or a writer refusing to read anything published after 1900. And for Bissell not to find someone to put Lorre’s attitude in context is a bit of a problem for the piece.

Another thing Bissell might have done is to get a critic to point out that, okay, the four-camera sitcom is out of fashion among comedy geeks right now (mostly because all that audience laughter slows the pacing down to a crawl), but it’s not like critics are racist against traditionally structured shows or anything. Newsradio and Seinfeld were four-camera shows, and those are beloved shows whose fans will buy the DVD sets of. Louis CK’s Lucky Louie has less of a following, but there are still a bunch of folks who swear it was brilliant. Who’s clamoring to buy the DVDs of Dharma and Greg? Critics don’t like Lorre’s shows because critics love good sitcoms, have been watching good sitcoms for years, and Lorre’s shows aren’t good sitcoms.

Like most purveyors of critically-reviled pop culture, Lorre hates the critics who revile him. Bissell’s article quotes a message Lorre hid in his production company’s “vanity card” that flashes on the screen for a second after the credits roll:

You [critics] have absolutely no power to affect ratings and the likely success or failure of a TV show. In that arena you are laughably impotent. You are not unlike a flaccid penis flailing miserably at a welcoming vagina.

Beyond the somewhat bizarre sexual imagery (“flailing” at a “welcoming” vagina? Like the penis is being whipped against a woman’s wet pussy lips in some vaguely kinky impotence fetish fantasy?), this is a fairly revealing statement. Lorre defines “success” for his shows as “high ratings.” He wants as many eyeballs as he can to be glued to his shows, and that’s the extent of his ambition. Is it any wonder critics don’t like him?

See, Chuck, sitcom critics—those poor schmucks—did not get into the business to influence ratings. They don’t care much about ratings, by and large, unless low ratings cause a show they like to get cancelled. They became critics not to tear you, Chuck Lorre, down personally, but because they watched way too much TV as children and fell in love with the sitcom form. That’s a bad thing to love, because the sitcom form doesn’t always love them back, but they can’t help it. They want to write about the shows they love seriously and analytically, and they hope to spread the word about these shows to other people, who might also fall in love with these shows. They want, at bottom, for sitcoms to be taken seriously as art, or at least not dismissed by intellectuals as 22 minutes of content indifferently occupying space between ads for erection medication and cars.

That’s why people like Todd VanDerWerff praise shows like Community and why every comedy geek I know puts Arrested Development on a pedestal. Those are some great, densely-layered shows that reward you when you rewatch them and sometimes have some emotional depth to them. They inspire love and occasional debate among they’re fans, and they actually have fans, unlike your shows, which have viewers. People love all of the shows I listed above—how many people love Two and a Half Men?

Finally, the people who worked on Arrested Development don’t think the show “failed” because it got cancelled. They’re proud of having made one of the funniest shows of the past decade. And the people working on Community, which is getting beat in the ratings nightly by your Big Bang Theory, aren’t worried about “failure.” Donald Glover told me during an interview I did a while ago that it’s an awesome feeling to work alongside a talented ensemble on a really funny show that inspires really passionate fans. What I wonder, Chuck Lorre, is if the folks working for your show have that feeling.

The Super Bowl Halftime Show Will Suck--Here's What I'd Like to See Instead

2010-12-02T10:27:00.000-08:00

So, the Black Eyed Peas are playing that great American institution, the Super Bowl halftime show. The criteria for the band that plays the Super Bowl every year (if you can call the Black Eyed Peas a “band”) is that they have to be extraordinarily uncontroversial, the blander and more famous the better. The powers that be are not in the market for another nipple revelation, and are not taking the chance that anyone will be offended by the show. Well, they failed, because I’m fucking offended. I hate the Black Eyed Peas’ marketing strategy masquerading as a musical career, and I hate that I’ll probably end up seeing some of it because I’ll be watching the Super Bowl, for the football game. How many football fans will enjoy hearing “Let’s Get Retarded/It Started in Here”? Conversely, how many Black Eyed Peas fans will turn on the Super Bowl solely because of the Black Eyed Peas’ presence? How many Black Eyed Peas fans can figure out how to operate a TV remote with their hideously deformed flipper-like appendages? (The joke in my head is that in order to enjoy the Black Eyed Peas, one must be the product of centuries of inbreeding, and therefore probably have some weird mutations going on.) So many questions, so few answers. One question I can answer, however, is “What would I rather see than this halftime show?” Here’s a list, in no particular order. An asterisk (*) denotes something that on second thought, I actually would like to see.

1. The Puppy Bowl.
2. The Puppy Bowl, but instead of real puppies, it’s people in dog outfits tackling each other.*
3. The Puppy Bowl, but instead of playing football, the puppies fight each other viciously, like they would at Michael Vick’s house.
4. The Puppy Bowl, but instead of real puppies, it’s people in dog outfits, and instead of playing football, they fuck each other through strategically placed holes in their costumes.
5. Noam Chomsky giving a lecture on the meaning of the word “Muslim” in current American political discourse.*
6. The Beastie Boys performing, and yes, I know MCA has throat cancer.
7. MCA undergoing throat surgery on live TV.
8. The Big Lebowski.
9. The porn version of The Big Lebowski, titled The Big Lebowski.
10. Simpsons reruns, seasons 1-10
11. Peep Show reruns.
12. Larry Sanders Show reruns.
13. Simpsons reruns, seasons 10+
14. Standing cat, looped for roughly the length of the Black Eyed Peas’ performance
15. The guy who runs American Apparel sitting on a toilet masturbating while the 16-year-old heroin addict waifs who appear in the AA ads gyrate around him in what would be a seductive manner if they weren’t strung out and dressed in lime green latex bodysuits.
16. Noam Chomsky being fucked by a man dressed as a dog.
17. The Louis CK porn tape that was almost made.
18. The Black Eyed Peas fucking each other in dog costumes—although I guess you wouldn’t be able to tell it was them unless you recognized the tattoos they undoubtedly have on their genitals—while Sting’s “Englishman in New York” plays.
19. The Last Airbender
20. People having debates about the existence of God via YouTube vlogs. (This actually happens.)
21. One of those videos I made in middle school with my friends when we thought we were HILAROUS.
22. Bruce Springsteen sliding his crotch into the camera like that one time, but this time he’s not wearing any pants and we can see that his cock is covered in blood and we as a nation are like, “Whoa! That is definitely not cool!”
23. Pavement playing Black Eyed Peas covers.*
24. A Police reunion concert.
25. Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin talking about how America needs to return to Jesus, but while they’re talking, Glenn slowly strips off his jacket, tie, pants, shirt, and underwear, revealing he has both female and male genitalia. He then puts a ball gag in his mouth while Sarah ties his wrists behind him with zip ties and proceeds to beat him savagely with electrical wire—still talking about Jesus--until his back is stripped bare of skin and he has bit down on the ball gag so hard that blood drips out of his mouth and into a milk saucer, at which point Michelle Bachmann (dressed as a dog, of course) laps the blood up with her tongue.
26. Garrison Keillor reading his work. All of his work.

Why Baseball Recruiting in the Dominican Republic Sucks

2010-11-30T16:14:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time since I've posted on this blog. If you are one of my few loyal readers, sorry. But you might be interested to check out www.cheatingculture.com, where I hope to be blogging occasionally from now on. My first post goes like this:

Last week, the New York Times reported that Scott Boras, one of the most successful, high-profile baseball agents in the world, has been giving loans to the families of young baseball players in the Dominican Republic, then using the leverage that those loans gave him to coerce the players to sign with him. While some bloggers noted that "no harm was done" in this case, and Boras did not technically violate any laws, giving personal loans to impoverished baseball prospects one is hoping to represent certainly seems unethical. Sadly, shady dealings are standard operating procedure for baseball prospect recruiters not only in the Dominican Republic, but also throughout much of Latin America.

Latin America has long been known as the “wild west” of baseball recruiting; with little to no government oversight in place, it’s common for young players to take steroids and to lie about their age in order to look more attractive to Major League suitors, and buscones—self-appointed talent scouts who encourage these behaviors—roam freely about the landscape. A better description, however, might be a “gold rush.” Increasingly, it seems that people are looking at poor but athletically gifted Dominican boys (some as young as 13) the same way 19th-century prospectors looked at hills and streams—there could be gold in them there prospects.

The rest of it is here

Oklahoma Asks, and Answers, a Sucky State Question

2010-11-11T13:10:00.000-08:00

Voters are fairly stupid—I think that’s been established. Maybe individually they know what they’re doing: They own landscaping companies and know where the good pizza places are and read the paper and do the Sudoku every day, even on Friday when it gets really hard. But something happens when they get to the voting booth, with those old-fashioned curtains and the ballot that seems more complicated than it needs to be. They freeze up. Who are these judges on the ballot? What’s the “anti-prohibition” party? What the fuck are all these measures I’ve never heard of? Panic sets in. Some circles are filled in, there’s a momentary anxiety that they filled in the circles wrong, the voter realizes they might have voted for the wrong judge, but it’s too late to fix it now. Then they get outside and they’re smart again.

That’s the only explanation I can think of for the passing of Oklahoma’s State Question 755, which amends the state constitution to ban judges from considering “international or Sharia law” when making rulings. Because damn, that is a stupid amendment. It wasn’t as if a bunch of judges were commanding hands to be chopped off and whores to be stoned. I’ve never been to Oklahoma, but I’m pretty sure that Islamic law is about to be instituted there. And the UN isn’t about to take control of the state either.

I’m sure the voters saw that measure on the ballot and said, “Well, better safe than sorry. I really don’t want to see strict Sharia law imposed on me, although it would give me an excuse to grow out my beard.” That’s like amending the constitution to say, “If aliens ever attack Earth, like in Independence Day or that new movie that looks almost exactly like Independence Day, we are totally going to fight back, like Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith.” A fine sentiment, but not something that needs to be in a constitution.

The problem is the anti-Sharia amendment could create difficulties due to vague wording and the general craziness of it. Indian tribes say they’re worried that Question 755 might invalidate their tribal laws, and international law is actually kind of important when resolving disputes between companies in Oklahoma and their overseas business partners. (Who knew international law governed international trade?)

Question 755 will probably get challenged in the courts and likely overturned (it might violate the ever-pesky First Amendment by singling out Sharia). So it’s likely just another example of xenophobic paranoia from the heartland that sounds good on paper but in reality is not a good idea, or even an idea at all, much like the Republican proposal to save money by cutting nonexistent social programs isn’t an idea. It’s fun, and sort of funny, to yell and make laws about problems that do technically not exist, but maybe we have better things to do. Do we?

Man, That Sucked: The Rally to Restore Sanity

2010-11-02T12:39:00.000-07:00

I don’t think anyone knew how big it was going to be. Arianna Huffington definitely didn’t. She generously offered to transport the sum total of New York’s liberati—signs, costumes, iPhones and all—from one baseball stadium parking lot to another in what ended up being 200 buses.

I actually saw Arianna herself while I was waiting in the freezing early October morning. She was surrounded by a bubble of people filming her with digital phones and camera and moving through the shivering, huddled masses like I imagine French aristocrats used to do, smiling and waving as if she was totally used to being surrounded by admirers at six in the morning. “Thank you!” some of the masses yelled at the queen bee of the bloggers.

Those thanks would seem somewhat premature hours later, as it became apparent how late to the rally we all would be. The plan was for everyone to show up at Citi Field (nee Shea Stadium) at 5:30 am and for the buses to leave at 6:00. This did not happen. Instead, 10,000 people stood around in a gigantic swarm for two hours shifting from foot to foot and wondering what the hell was going on. When the group of people surrounding me finally got within sight of the idling buses they finally snapped and ran through the yellow police tape like refugees fleeing across a border. “Come on! Let’s be adults!” a Huffington Post volunteer shouted through a megaphone. But fuck that—our hands were numb and the buses, the warm, warm buses, were right there.

When we were actually on the bus, half-asleep and half seized with that dumb earnest glee that afflicts the young and politically active on their way to a protest, the human gridlock of Citi Field seemed like a bad dream. We drove along the Brooklyn Queens Expressway while those boroughs were sluggishly waking up to the weekend, then switched to the great emptiness bordered by factories that is the New Jersey Turnpike. I woke up from a nap with my head against the window and discovered the highway surrounded by an astonishing wall of trees in the middle of changing colors—impressionistic swaths of yellow and red that make you forget there’s such a thing as a 24-hour news network. That was the high point of the trip.

The low point came about five minutes after we staggered off the bus in DC, when it became apparent that DC’s Metro wasn’t going to be able to accommodate tens of thousands of people all trying to get to the same place. The underground station was packed wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling with out-of-towners hopelessly trying to figure out how to use the machines. A couple of transit workers kept telling people to step aside, to make room, but how was that going to happen? There was no empty space of tile to step aside to. The rally itself, by the way, had been going on for maybe an hour at this point, and the New Yorkers—tired, hopped up on rest stop coffee, and sneering at DC’s pathetic excuse for a mass transit system—were nervous about missing…

Wait, missing what? What the fuck were we even there to see? A half-dozen comedians pretending to be—or mocking—newscasters or politicians, or something? The Roots and John Legend playing in a venue with terrible acoustics? A bunch of smug liberals smugly parading their liberalism and their predictably ironic signs? After getting three hours of sleep, waking up in the middle of the night, and taking two subways and a bus over the course of a nine-hour trip, did I even know why I’d come?

Clearly not. You have to be willing to suspend your cynicism for a few hours to get involved in a political event like this. You have to believe in the power of the people, that signs and slogans can influence policy, that a bunch of blue-staters getting together will change anyone’s mind about anything. Because otherwise what we have is just the world’s largest and most boring Halloween party, with strangers milling about and taking picture’s of each other’s jokey signs, most of which were all about the futility of signs. “SIGN” said one of them. “MEH” said another.

Worse than the ironic signs were the earnest ones. It was supposedly—according to Stewart, anyway—a “non-political” rally, but anti-Tea-Party and anti-Fox-News messages abounded. A fresh-faced volunteer from Media Matters asked me to sign a petition against Fox News with the ultimate goal, I guess, of forcing them and their sociopathic blonde television hostesses off the hair. Other people made puns: Fox News=Faux News; “The only thing we have to fear is FOX itself.” What wit these clever kids have!

As supposedly and convivial as the rally was, the overall message was one of negativity. The Left—at least the bits represented in Washington DC that day—is anti-Fox-News, and anti-Tea-Party, but what are they in favor of? They want certain people not to be elected, but that's about as far as their ideas go. The Tea Party has dominated whatever passes for the “national political conversation” so thoroughly that the candidates they run against almost don't matter. What are the positions of Chris Coons, Christine O'Donnell's opponent? Who cares, as long as he's not that insane woman. These elections are not about pursuing a liberal agenda, but about stopping the conservative agenda, or at least slowing it down. And isn't that kind of a problem?

The Glenn Beck Right has Christian ideals and libertarian ideas, and as bizarre as that mash-up is, at least it gives them a sense of purpose. Ban gay marriage, ban abortion, abolish the EPA, abolish the income tax, build a giant fence along the border, eliminate foreign aid, wrap schoolchildren in flag-colored clothing and allow (force) them to pray in public schools. And repeal the 17th Amendment, for some reason. However contradictory and repugnant you think those goals are, at least they're something to rally around.

The John Stewart Left has—what? Irony? A shield of Not Giving A Shit? A bouquet of opinions on how the current media climate is destroying America? The people on the Left who have actual policy ideas are the people on the “fringe,” the actual Socialists and Communists and Anarchists who want to nationalize health care and probably a bunch of other industries, dramatically increase taxes on the rich and the upper middle class, and (at the very far end of the spectrum) dismantle capitalism itself.
These things will never happen in America, and you're sleepwalking if you think they will. So the people at the rally, no matter how hard they secretly think dismantling capitalism isn't such a bad idea, content themselves with protesting not policy and actual events, but the media's coverage of policy and events. John Stewart's speech was all about not paying attention to the polarizing, often flat-out hateful rhetoric of the talking heads on both ends of the cable news dial, but he didn't say who we were supposed to be paying attention to.

Or that's what I heard Stewart's speech was about after the fact. I didn't actually hear a word he said, or a word anyone said, because I was too far away from the stage. After walking three miles from RFK Stadium to the National Mall (skipping the clusterfuck that was the Metro), I discovered that the Rally to Restore Sanity was half over, and the fenced-in area of grass in front of the stage where the comedy sketches and half-serious speeches were audible was overflowing with people who had arrived hours in advance. I circulated around the edges, getting my sign photographed and sharing the tea I had brought in a thermos. (My personal cause for the day was the tea was a beloved beverage, not a set of political beliefs. I found some kindred spirits in the group advocating for pancakes, french toast, and other breakfast foods.)

There was a big musical number at the end, then the lucky people who had heard and seen whatever was happening on the stage spilled out onto the street, turning several blocks into a human traffic jam. Some people headed for the bars for after-rally drinks, some no doubt took their costumes to Halloween parties, and those of us who had to ride the Huffington Post back to New York began our long trek back to the buses. I assume pretty much everyone at the rally plans to vote today, probably for Democrats who are going to win in a landslide. How many of my fellow sign-holders came from swing districts where their votes would mean something?

I guess we'll find out tomorrow, or the next day, whether or not a larger-than-expected gathering of the Left means that the election will be better than predicted for Democrats. My short answer is no. What the Rally for Sanity taught me was that you can have a large gathering of hundreds of thousands of people without having a coherent message for what that gathering represents--“We don't watch Fox News!” is not good enough. Despite the numbers, it's pretty clear why there's an enthusiasm gap these days between the Left and the Right. The Left thinks the right is sort of a joke and sort of stupid, while the Right thinks the Left are pure evil bent on destroying America. More and more, I'm starting to think exactly the opposite is true.

Why the Rally to Restore Sanity Sucks

2010-10-28T12:52:00.000-07:00

I’m going to Jon Stewart’s big “Rally to Restore Sanity” this Saturday. Why? Well, because I think it will be fun to be in a large group of people who have similar views to mine and are also probably around my age. I like big crowds. Also, some people may dress up and wave humorous signs around, and that’s always fun. Maybe I’ll be on TV! I’m not treating it as a serious political rally, as some critics of Stewart insist on doing. It’ll be fun, I’m taking a free bus ride from New York to DC and back again, and I’ll probably end up getting drunk.

The only thing that worries me is that this rally might very well be the largest lefty political event of the midterm election season—it’s already the most talked-about—and that fits into a disturbing trend: Protests are no longer about anything.

The Civil Rights marchers were protesting the Jim Crow laws and other forms of institutional racism. The Vietnam War protestors wanted US troops to leave Vietnam (I’m leaving out all the protestors who wanted to ascend to a higher level of consciousness through rigorous use of chemicals, they weren’t really political protestors). Today’s big protest movement is the Tea Party and they want—what? Lower taxes? A balanced budget? Prayer in schools? I’ve been reading about them for at least a year, and yet besides the repeal of the Affordable Health Care Act, I couldn’t tell you what these people actually want.

Glenn Beck’s big rally back in August—billed as non-political but pretty clearly linked to the Tea Party—was defined by Beck like so:

This is not a political event. This is to send the message to us and our children and the rest of America: There is a revival going on of values and principles. There is a revival of honor and integrity, and we’re going to demand it of ourselves and our politicians. We are not going to put up with it anymore, in our own lives or in the lives of politicians or our banks and our businesses.

What the fuck does that even mean? In a related question, what the fuck does Stewart’s website mean when it says,

Ours is a rally for the people who’ve been too busy to go to rallies, who actually have lives and families and jobs (or are looking for jobs) — not so much the Silent Majority as the Busy Majority. If we had to sum up the political view of our participants in a single sentence… we couldn’t. That’s sort of the point.

I’m pretty sure I could sum up the political view of the participants in a phrase: left-of-center to far left loony. There aren’t going to be a whole lot of Republicans there, just as there weren’t many Democrats at Beck’s rally. (I’m pretty sure the only Democrats in attendance there were making spiteful documentaries about how ignorant and intellectually inconsistent the Tea Partiers were.) Just as there won’t be any Republicans at the Rally, neither will there be any people who are too busy to go to rallies—they’re going to be too busy. Like Beck’s event, this will be a gathering of people who have mostly similar views on politics and on life but few clearly definable shared goals.

This is a problem because without some clear goals, a protest isn’t going to do much more than make the protestors feel good about themselves for waving signs. A protest or a petition can make politicians aware that a large group of people care passionately about one issue, and that can have consequences. The act of protesting is a cornerstone of yada yada yada. But when a bunch of people gather to say, “We need to restore honor and pride to America!” or “We need to have a civil environment for political discussion!” it doesn’t inform politicians that we feel a certain way about an issue. It just informs politicians that we like to yell and wave signs around.

Anyway, if anyone is going to the Rally, I’ll see you there. I’ll be the guy waving a sign around.

Why the Anti-Drug Movement should Suck on an Exhaust Pipe and Die: Fact-Checking an Evil Pamphlet

2010-10-22T10:25:00.000-07:00

The one subject that pretty much everyone who goes to college learns about is marijuana. Even if you’ve been sheltered from any knowledge about bongs, joints, and hemp in high school, even if you’ve never watched the Dave Chapelle Show or seen a movie Seth Rogen was involved in, by the time you graduate from (or drop out of) college you’re no doubt in possession of a lot of information about pot. You’ve probably smoked it at least once, and maybe have gone through a period when you were smoking a lot, to the point where there’s a towel permanently placed against the bottom of your dorm room door to prevent smoke from leaking out. Even if you didn’t smoke that much, you know that pot won’t kill you, it isn’t that addictive, and after the first few times you get high, it isn’t all that big of a deal. It can make you lazy, it can make you sort of boring to be around (you know this if you’re friends with stoners), and it can make terrible music sound interesting. It doesn’t make you cool, but it doesn’t kill you. After you find all of this stuff out, you either continue smoking pot or—more likely—you grow up and get a job where you can’t get high all that much, or they drug test you, and then you only smoke weed when your kids are out of the house and your old college buddies come over.

It’s easy to forget, after you grow up, all those "Drug Free America" messages that we were bombarded with as children. Remember how they told you one puff of pot would leave you dead in a ditch? Remember the “gateway drug” stuff? That time the retired cop came to your middle school and showed everyone photos of emaciated meth addicts? That stuff is still going on, and the anti-drug crusaders are just as crazy as ever. The proof of this is evident from the pamphlet, "The Truth About Marijuana," which is printed by the Foundation for a Drug-Free World.

Because I had some time to kill, I decided to do some fact-checking on some of the "truths"contained in the pamphlet. All of these are screenshots from the online version of this document, which is handed out to children at schools. I’ll start from the beginning. On page three:

That’s pretty much a commonly accepted fact. Pot is more potent now than it used to be. Is that a bad thing? On page five:

We learn that one joint equals five cigarettes. If that’s true, than the Drug Free World should applaud the increased amount of THC in marijuana, since it takes fewer joints to get you high now, and therefore fewer stoners are getting cancer. But does pot give you cancer? A major study from four years ago said no, and the study’s lead researcher is in favor of legalizing pot. And of course, you don’t have to get high by holding smoke in your lungs. You can cook using marijuana, or you can use a vaporizer to get high. Also on page five we get this embarrassing feature:

Due to bad layout design, schoolchildren will think both “White” and “Widow” are slang terms for marijuana. Actually, “White Widow” is a very potent strain, or sub-variety, of pot. And a “J” is a joint, and a “roach” is the last remnant of a joint or a blunt. None of these are synonymous with “marijuana.” Small errors, but they add up. On to page seven:

Alcohol contains only one chemical? Only if you are drinking pure ethanol, which is a good way to die. If you’re drinking beer, you’re drinking a bunch of different chemical compounds and carbohydrates, not just ethanol, duh. And while it is technically true that weed contains 400 chemicals, everything in the world is made up of many, many chemicals. Coffee has 800 chemicals in it. Does this mean you shouldn’t drink coffee? Just so you know, the 80 chemicals that are unique to Cannibis are called Cannabinoids. Pages eight and nine feature some ominous-sounding statistics. First up:

Because none of these studies are cited by name or date, it’s pretty hard to verify them. (Is that intentional?) But at least one study showed that marijuana was not a commonly-used drug among people who had to visit the emergency room. (That article is from NORML, a pot-advocacy group, so it isn’t unbiased, but still.) On the next page, we start to get to the stuff that makes my blood boil:

For that first “fact,” I could ask what percentage of people is arrested solely for possession or use of marijuana, but instead I’ll just state the obvious: Correlation does not imply causation. A large percentage of robberies is committed by black men—does that mean being a black man makes you rob people? No, and neither does marijuana make you break the law. (Although, given weed’s effects, it probably makes it more likely you’ll get caught by the police if you’re high.)

That second statistic makes sense, since people who drink or do drugs before they’re 15 are likely to become drug addicts. Don’t do drugs if you are a child—your brain is still developing and older teens and adults can take advantage of you if you get messed up. That does not mean adults shouldn’t drink or smoke pot.

Also, don’t smoke pot and drive. Being high means your reactions are slowed. But while driving stoned increases your chance of injury of death, it doesn’t come close to the dangers of drunk driving. This study notes that 2.5 percent of fatal crashes are caused by pot, but 29 percent are caused by alcohol. The two are simply not comparable.

Don’t smoke pot when you’re pregnant. That should be sort of obvious. I have no problem with this page. This page, on the other hand…

Jesus Christ, where to start? Firstly, it should be obvious that those who used cocaine used pot first. Pot is easier to find and much, much cheaper. You don’t go straight to cocaine without having used “softer” drugs. Does that prove that marijuana is a “gateway?” No. And the high you get from cocaine (or heroin, or PCP) is different enough from the marijuana high that not a whole lot of stoners go on to use those drugs as their tolerance builds. They just smoke more pot. As for the last line on the page, the one that says that joints can be dipped in PCP, is just naked fear mongering. Sure, some people sprinkled PCP on joints, but hardly anyone does that, and when you smoke a PCP joint, the problem isn’t that you smoked pot, the problem is you smoked PCP! That’s not as bad as the “testimonial” on the facing page:

Fuck. This. Assuming this is a real testimonial and not fiction, it implies that weed leads to heroin. They can’t make this claim using statistics, so they find a heroin user to make this claim. Plenty of people smoke pot and don’t become heroin addicts. Like Carl Sagan, for instance. Remember him? The famous scientist?

Finally, we get the capper:

The Foundation for a Drug-Free World is unbiased. If someone tells you marijuana is okay, they’re probably a drug dealer with a vested interest in hooking you on pot. Like the pamphlet as a whole, the logic makes sense in a vacuum—unscrupulous drug dealers looking to hook new customers would lie, wouldn’t they?

Maybe some of them would, the scumbags who sell pot to middle schoolers or the guys whole sell crack and heroin. But—take this from someone with, ahem, some “experience”—marijuana pretty much sells itself. A lot of people like getting high, and if you have good weed at good prices, you don’t need to tell a bunch of complicated lies. All you need to do, to sell weed, is to say, “Hey, I have some weed.”

But the pamphlet is right in one sense: When someone tells you some information that sounds suspect, you should look into their motives. For instance, who funds the Foundation for a Drug-Free World? Oh, right, the Scientologists. The people who tell you you have aliens in your head.

No matter the source, this pamphlet is full of lies and half-truths, and it’s targeted at children. It seems to me that honesty, intellectual rigor, and skepticism are good traits to instill in kids, especially in kids who we don’t want using drugs. But this pamphlet, along with many other anti-drug programs, teaches the opposite of those things. It tells children that marijuana leads to heroin, crime, car accidents, and cancer. It tells them they’ll be stupid and have deformed offspring if they smoke pot, and they’re supposed to accept all of that just because the Scientologists told them so. Never mind all of the movies, TV shows, and books that depict marijuana use, rightly, as being not all that bad, the pamphlet must be right, since it’s given to them by their teachers or some other important adult, right?

I hope no school is actively handing out this pamphlet, unless it’s as part of a unit on propaganda. To ask children to believe this is to lie to their faces, and the only thing you’ll end up teaching them is to not trust anything an adult says. Which, actually, might not be that bad of a lesson.

Why Elected Officials Suck, According to Hitchens and Adams

2010-10-12T20:48:00.000-07:00

Lovable scamp Christopher Hitchens (not pictured) wrote a column for Slate this week about how odd it is that very few of the intelligent and informed people he’s known in his long career as a public intellectual and drunk have ever though about running for political office. Many of them might do a pretty decent job running the country, but they’re put off by the insane slaughterhouse that is contemporary electoral politics. Quoth Hitch:

What normal person would consider risking their career and their family life in order to undergo the incessant barrage of intrusive questioning about every aspect of their lives since well before college? To face the constant pettifogging and chatter of Facebook and Twitter and have to boast of how many false friends they had made in a weird cyberland? And if only that was the least of it. Then comes the treadmill of fundraising and the unending tyranny of the opinion polls, which many media systems now use as a substitute for news and as a means of creating stories rather than reporting them. And, even if it "works," most of your time in Washington would be spent raising the dough to hang on to your job. No wonder that the best lack all conviction.

That reminds me of a line from another famous atheist, the late Douglas Adams, who penned this line about the paradox of government: “Those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.”

With all the media scrutiny and waves of negative publicity, in order to want to run for office you’d have to be an emotionally damaged narcissist, a delusional reformer who believes it’s possible to change the system in a meaningful way, or an out-and-out power hungry sociopath. Come election time, we’ll all be voting for candidates who are corrupt at worst, relentlessly bland at best, and most likely have something dark and twisted rattling about in their skulls.

Thankfully for us, the United States has a system that, though designed to elect people uniquely unsuited to have power, is also designed to make sure that those elected officials can’t do anything once they sit down in Washington. With massive majorities in both houses of Congress and one of their own in the White House, the Democrats managed to accomplish some reforms that—despite all the Beckian screaming about Nazis—aren’t exactly earth-shattering. Some companies were prevented from going bankrupt, some more people will have health insurance, and these modest shifts in policy will cost a lot of Democrats their jobs. The struggle for the rights of homosexuals to marry one another and join the army to get shot at (why would one want to do either? some straights ask) is proceeding in the courts, where elected officials can’t get in the way.

Considering the quality of politicians we have on hand, deciding things in the courts, where intelligent people debate with one another using a lot of big words, is probably for the best. And it’s probably for the best, too, that however many Republicans get into office this November, no one will be able to pass or repeal any legislation at all, thanks to the labyrinthine rules of the non-robot Senate.

In Douglas Adams’s universe, the problem of government is solved by turning the president into a democratically elected figurehead, someone who is “always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention from it.” The people who run the universe are a sextet of shadowy figures who in turn (spoiler!) make their decisions based on the advice of an insane autistic old man who lives alone with his cat. The system described by Adams seems sinister and despotic on its face, but it’s probably not a bad way to make policy decisions. Not worse than ours, anyway.

The Most Worthless Thing On The Internet: Yes, Rick Reilly Is Really That Bad Edition

2010-10-11T09:05:00.000-07:00

In the past, I’ve been critical of Rick Reilly for being a lazy, unfunny hack of a sportswriter who has coasted along on his name and popularity for more than a decade. But I’ve felt a little guilty about the things I’ve said about him—who am I to criticize a man who has won numerous awards for his sportswriting, who has donated a lot of time and money to the worthy cause of getting malaria-preventing mosquito nets, and who is under pressure every week to produce a column. So what if sometimes he writes a hideously banal column? They can’t all be gems So what if he doesn’t understand soccer? Most American men of his generation don’t. So what if he’s occasionally schmaltzy? There’s a place for that in the world of sports, and maybe I’ve grown too hardened and cynical to appreciate his childlike idealism.

But then on Friday I saw this column and realized I was right the first time: Rick Reilly is a lazy hack who has been half-assing it for at least a decade, probably more, and he deserves to be criticized constantly and mercilessly until he decides to retire from sports journalism and write golf-themed crime caper novels a la Dave Barry or Carl Hiassen.

Let’s break this particular piece of hackwork down. For starters, we’re in the middle of both the college and professional football seasons, and MLB playoffs have just started, so it’s odd that Reilly would pick this time to write about the NBA, which isn’t in the news much. It’s also odd that he’s talking about nicknames for Miami’s star-stuffed team now rather than three months ago, when the team came together. That would have been the time to discuss nicknames—that was when Free Darko ran its “What should we call the LeBron-Wade-Bosh sandwich” piece.

Comparing FD’s column and Reilly’s shows how much more bloggers put into their work than “traditional media” dinosaurs like Reilly. Reilly’s piece is just a list of possible names with no commentary, no context, and no actual thought behind it. Some of the names (“ThreeHeat,” “Menage-a-Dunk,” “Terminators 3”) are so aggressively awful that a sports writer for a college paper would be ashamed to print them. It seems like an early draft of notes for a column rather then a column itself.

Free Darko’s piece, on the other hand, has less nickname suggestions but all of them are considered. You get a bunch of factoids about the Yalta Conference and the history of ancient Rome, and some jokes—actual jokes, unlike Reilly’s middle-aged puns—about the geometry of triangles. It’s way too nerdy and esoteric for ESPN’s audience, sure, but Reilly’s column--or collection of words, or whatever we’re supposed to call a poorly presented list of unfunny nicknames—insults the intelligence of any sports fan who’s out of fifth grade. Seriously, “The Brothers Rim?” That sounds like the title of a particularly hard-core piece of gay porn.

For the record, I don’t think Reilly stole this idea from Free Darko, none of whose proposed nicknames appear on his list. There are only so many topics in the sports world to write about, and no one has a monopoly on jokey listicles. I also don’t think it’s plagiarism because I doubt Reilly reads Free Darko, which is one of the most popular basketball blogs on the web and should probably be required reading for anyone who writes about sports for a living. I don’t think Reilly reads Free Darko because I believe that like John McCain, Reilly never goes online or even touches a computer. I picture him dictating whatever thoughts are floating in his scotch-addled brain to the hooker or 39-year-old cocktail waitress happens to be sharing his hotel room, who then transcribes them on a Selectric typewriter. The hooker then faxes the stream-of-consciousness transcript, misspellings and all, to an ESPN sub-editor, who sighs, crumples the fax into a ball and throws it out, and writes a column in Reilly’s name in about ten minutes. Reilly never notices this substitution, because like most people on planet Earth, it’s been years since he’s read a word he’s written.

Why the New Anti-Poker Law in Washington State Sucks

2010-10-06T11:05:00.001-07:00

Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court in my old state of Washington ruled that a law passed in 2006 banning online gambling was perfectly constitutional. It was a 9-0 decision, and thus a pretty easy one for the justices to make, but the ruling carried enough weight for PokerStars, a popular online poker site, to ban anyone with a Washington State IP address from playing on it.

This is the kind of news that affects maybe only a few thousand people seriously, but for professional online poker players in Washington—some of whom I know personally—this was the worst possible news. Online poker has existed in a legal gray area for some time now, but this court ruling eliminated all shades of gray; playing poker on your computer, as opposed to in a casino, is a Class C felony. If all poker sites take this ruling as seriously as PokerStars had, it will become impossible to play online poker in Washington, meaning that online poker players who rely on poker to pay the bills will have effectively lost their jobs.

The more you consider the law, the less sense it makes. There is the old argument, “gambling is evil, all evil things should be illegal,” but gambling is legal in Washington State, and not just on Indian reservations. When I lived in Seattle, you could drive just outside the city limits and play poker in a number of card rooms. This document from the Washington State Gambling Commission says, “Gambling has a history of connection to crime and corruption and as a result is strictly controlled virtually everywhere. Just because gambling occurs on the Internet doesn’t change this potential or the concern.” But surely the converse of that last sentence is true too—just because gambling occurs in a brick and mortar casino or card room doesn’t make it any less addictive or prone to corruption.

So why was this law, which deprives a bunch of people of their formerly (semi) legal income, passed in the first place?

Well, duh, it was passed because a bunch of rich casino owners wanted it to be so. When people gamble online, presumably, they aren’t gambling in a casino, and this understandably outraged the Native American tribes who run large gambling enterprises like the Tullalip Casino. These tribes have boatloads of money and they’ve invested a lot of it in the one enterprise in America guaranteed to give you a good rate of return on your investment—campaign contributions.

The sponsors of the original bill--Margarita Prentice, Karen Keiser, Daniel Kline, and Paull Shin—all received substantial contributions from groups like the “Campaign for Tribal Self-Reliance” which have close ties to the Indian casino business. The Congresspeople did what politicians always do and help out the people who helped them out and introduced the online gambling law, which was quickly passed because the other Congresspeople likely wanted contributions from the tribes to keep coming, and also because passing laws against “immoral” activities like gambling is a fun and popular thing for politicians to do. Never mind that the anti-online gambling law was bankrolled by a bunch of people who make their living off of gambling addicts and suckers, and never mind that it hurts the professional and semi-pro poker players (who are the small businessmen of the gambling world). Gambling is bad, so anti-gambling laws must be good, right?

Gambling addiction is a serious problem, yes, but gambling addicts aren’t going to stop gambling because they can’t play online. They’ll just go to the casino instead—which is of course why this bill was passed in the first place, to benefit big in-state casinos at the expense of international poker sites and the people who make money by playing on them. (Not all professional online poker players can simply switch to playing in the casinos and the card rooms—that’s a long car ride for many of them, and many card rooms don’t offer the variety of games that the online sites do.)

The truly maddening thing about this law is not that it’s an arbitrarily oppressive law passed at the request of big-money interests. It’s that this law is an example of the system working pretty much perfectly. A special interest group wanted a law to be passed, they made the necessary (and legal) donations and the politicians did more or less what those groups wanted. Everything was documented, and although there was clearly a quid pro quo exchange, no one can be said to have done anything technically unethical. Everyone cooperated, and we got a law that puts people out of work so large moneyed institutions can thrive. Good job guys.

Language Arts Sucks, Revisited

2010-09-30T07:49:00.000-07:00

I was just rereading Michael Chabon’s excellent book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and thinking about the circumstances that led me to read it, and my discovery of the whole mess of contemporary fiction authors that have influenced me and whose books I’ve carried in boxes from my parents’ house to my dorm rooms to my apartments. I’m lucky to have found the books I love, thanks to the people (not least my mother) who cared about literature and introduced me to authors they thought I would enjoy, and who turned out to be right. Later on, of course, there were the short story collections I went out of my way to buy, and the writing workshop syllabi that forced me to purchase contemporary fiction, and at present I’m pretty confident in my ability to find authors and stories I will enjoy, as long as I have the time to read them.

While thinking about all of this, I suddenly became enraged.

Why? Because I realized that I had taken seven years, in public middle and high school, of “Language Arts,” which was supposed to teach me how to write but also teach me how to read, and more importantly to point me in the direction of books. I learned something from those classes, I suppose, and god knows my teachers tried their best (well, most of them did), but god also knows that those classes did little to influence my love of reading. It might be accurate to say that my love of reading survived Language Arts classes, that I unaccountably love Shakespeare and 1984 despite my education. Most students don’t, and I often wonder if the way we teach literature is designed to stop students from reading.

I know I’ve written the same post before but fuck, isn’t there a way to teach through contemporary fiction that might engage students a little more than teaching them through ancient fiction? Imagine if I was taught The Fortress of Solitude in one of my AP LA classes in high school. It would have given the teacher the chance to talk about:

Race relations in America. I know this subject is often touched on, but the history of blacks and whites usually stops around the time of MLK. Richard Wright is wonderful, but perhaps a little dated on some subjects? (Also, not insignificantly, this book discusses race from a white [Jewish] perspective.)

Bullying, intimidation, how you feel when you don’t belong in a neighborhood

The music of Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, and a slew of old soul, R&B, and fuck groups like the Supremes, the Four Tops, and Marvin Gaye. How many kids know about the tragic death of Marvin Gaye?

A tie-in to Dylan: The practice of Jewish performers changing their names to more “normal” ones. Why was this important? What does Jewish identity mean? Why did black performers not change their names—oh, yes, because they were given slave names by their masters. Whole discussions of the power of naming might ensue.

Finally, the idea of superpowers in the real world. What would you do if you had the power to fly? Would you try to fight evil? How? Would you rather be invisible or have the power to fly?

That syllabus for the book I came up with off the top of my head would be far, far, more engaging than any Language Arts class I’ve ever had. With something like Shakespeare, or even Conrad, teachers spend have their time trying to get kids to understand what the fuck they just read, if the kids bothered to read it at all and didn’t give up on the text for being too difficult. (Also, with Heart of Darkness teachers have to wrestle with the question of whether the book is outrageously racist or not.) Would it be too much to ask that teachers teaching literature let their kids know that literature is something that doesn’t just happen in the past?

Why Jonathan Franzen Sucks

2010-09-27T10:45:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to something I wrote over at Letters to the Preditor, which is a fine site. The title should be self-explanatory.

The Most Worthless Thing On The Internet, Dying Magazine Edition

2010-09-22T16:15:00.000-07:00

Today’s most worthless thing on the internet has crossover appeal: not only is it a web page not worth visiting, it might be the least essential piece of political journalism ever published. It comes courtesy of Time magazine, which apparently decided that this obscure new political movement called the “Tea Party” deserves more media attention than it’s getting.

Back when it was one of the few available sources of national and international news, Time used to be an iconic publication—it used to matter who was on the cover. This latest cover had the image of an elephant in a tea cup (get it? Metaphors! Visual shorthand!) and the astonishingly uninteresting headline, “It’s Tea Party Time.” Now, if Time was your sole source of political news, if it dominated the market the way it used to, this might be an interesting cover. “This is intriguing,” you might say. “Tea Party? And they’re taking over the Republican Party? I must read on!”

But, obviously, no one in the world relies on Time this way. Anyone who has paid the slightest bit of attention to the news, even someone who gets all her news from The Daily Show, already knows more about the Tea Party than the Time article manages to communicate. On this subject, Time is hopelessly trailing hundreds of blogs and other print publications, but instead of trying to find a new angle on the Tea Party it rehashes events that have been covered already and spreads on a layer of vague generalities.

Among the things the article does not bother to discuss in detail are:

-The fractured nature of the Tea Party. There are actually many, many groups that compose the “movement,” and there are important ideological differences between them. Some are more free-market libertarian, some are conservative Christians; Rand Paul and Christine O’Donnell do not have the same agenda.

-The money trail that leads from some “grassroots” organizations to the billionaire Koch brothers, which the New Yorker covered already. In fact, the Koches are not even mentioned in the Time piece.

-Glenn Beck is mentioned, but only in passing, and is lumped in with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity—which is odd because he’s widely regarded as the face of the Tea Party and just held that massive rally in Washington D.C.

-Most notably, the Time article only focuses on the recent crop of primaries and doesn’t acknowledge the two Tea Party candidates who have actually run against Democrats—Scott Brown, who won a Senate seat in Massachusetts at least partially because of his opponent’s incompetence, and Doug Hoffman in New York’s 23rd district, who lost his race thanks to Republican in-fighting.

Besides all of those omissions, which make the article instantly outdated, there’s also the problem that Time is a weekly, which meant it could keep up with the news cycle in 1923, when it was founded, but in 2010 it has no chance. Case in point: the Tea Party piece focuses a lot of attention on Christine O’Donnell, the Republican candidate for Senate in Delaware, and even compares her to the “leader of a rebel army.” But less than a week later she’s mostly known for admitting to practicing witchcraft, speaking out against masturbation, talking about feminism in J.R.R. Tolkein, and having a shady financial past. Not coincidentally, she’s trailing by 15 points in a recent Fox News (!) poll, which is not where the leader of a rebel army wants to be. None of that is mentioned in the article, although some of those developments came to light after the article was published. (Sort of argues for the irrelevance of print media, doesn’t it?)

To recap: Time published an article about a phenomenon that was already old news, revealed nothing new about the phenomenon, contributed nothing to the conversation about the phenomenon, and may have overstated the importance of one part (O’Donnell) of that phenomenon. The best you can say about that article is that it doesn’t seem to be factually incorrect. Actually, the best thing that can be said about the article is that it reassures all of those people who don’t read Time that they’re doing the right thing.

Why Louis C.K.'s Life on Television Sucks

2010-09-16T10:59:00.000-07:00

I just finished watching the last two episodes of Louie C.K.’s show Louie on Hulu, and I’m no longer sure that the best show on television is on AMC. Louie isn’t the funniest thing I’ve had the privilege to watch on my laptop, but it might be the most ambitious comedy program since—what? I’m trying to think here. Since Freaks and Geeks, at least, and Louie is funnier than Freaks and Geeks.

(Some spoilers in the next paragraph, if you care about that stuff. Go watch the show now!)

Louie is a hard show to describe. It’s probably doomed to unpopularity, thanks to it’s odd format—rather than having the recurring characters and 22-minute story arcs of traditional sitcoms, each episode is composed of two or three vignettes, often unrelated to one another. Or not. Some episodes are one long story. Some episodes feature Louie C.K. as a kid for nearly the entire time. Some episodes feature long stretches of Louie’s stand up, which is usually hilarious. Ricky Gervais appears in a couple of episodes, as Louie’s asshole doctor (“I wouldn’t give your face to a burn victim,” he tells Louie as the comedian lies in a hospital). Various comedians appear as themselves, and one long scene of them playing poker and discussing the use of and origin of the word “faggot” veers from obscenity to honest emotion in the space of a minute. These tonal shifts are common in Louie. In one episode he gets bullied by a violence-obsessed 18-year-old, then follows the kid home, where he discovers that the kid’s father beats him. “Don’t do that,” Louie tells the dad, only to be chased out of the house by the mother—then, in an odd turn typical of the show, the dad comes out and shares a cigarette with Louie, and the two men talk about the difficulties of parenting. In another episode, a terrifying doctor convinces a child version of Louie that he is responsible for Jesus’ death. Louie’s brother breaks down in tears at a restaurant because his mother refuses to tell him she loves him. Louie imitates a monkey having an orgasm on a comedy club stage. Louie gets alarmingly stoned, decides to buy a dog, and the dog collapses and dies as soon as he brings it home. As the van carrying the dead dog in a garbage bag pulls away, Louie’s two adorable daughters pull up in a taxi with their mother for a weekend at their dad’s.

Louie is sometimes surreal, sometimes cruelly realistic, but always concerned with the big, big issues: love, loneliness, abandonment, religion, family, and most of all impending death and how to live with it. (The opening credits have Louie walking around while an unseen chorus sings, “You’re gonna die!”) I don’t know what to compare it to in terms of depth and ambition—maybe Annie Hall?—but it’s worth looking at the comparison between Louie and another show centered around the life of a standup comic, the infinitely more commercially successful Seinfeld.

Both shows portray ordinary mundane life in exact detail. Seinfeld centers around trifles and tiny bits of social interaction that spiral out of control into bizarre webs of lies and recrimination, while Louie concerns itself with Louie’s attempts to live his day-to-day life in a worthwhile manner before he inevitably dies. The contrast between the shows is apparent most of all in the title characters’ on-stage comedy routines. Jerry Seinfeld is seemingly pretty well-adjusted, except for his fixation on the insignificant little foibles of modern life. His offstage life is equally inconsequential—he floats along, dating a string of models he would never consider marrying, let alone procreating with, and trying to avoid embarrassment more than anything. If the character of Seinfeld ever thinks about the purpose of life, he hides it well.

Louie’s standup is different. He asks questions about morality, he worries over his daughters, he talks about God and the Bible, he notes the slow decay of his body in exacting detail. In his life on the show, Louie is trying to find something to care about, and mostly finds it in his daughters, in the passing along of genetic information, life, and knowledge. Seinfeld—his character on the show, at least, and also the character of Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm—never seems to care about anything, and is satisfied with that. You’re born, you grow up, you make enough money to eat out at a diner all the time, you argue with your friends about re-gifting and the placement of buttons on a shirt, you date gorgeous women, then you die, simply and without fanfare. Isn’t that a good enough summary of existence?

It isn’t for Louie, and that’s why his character is so miserable. Seinfeld was born without a soul and is fine with that, but Louie isn’t sure whether he has a soul, whether souls exist in the first place, and what you should do if you have a soul. More importantly, the answers to those questions matter to Louie, as they do to a lot of people—which is why we’ll never be as happy-go-lucky as the people on Seinfeld, or any traditional sitcom.

Intelligent people with even an ounce of self-awareness ask themselves at one time or another, “What is the purpose of my life?” On Seinfeld, a “show about nothing” the answer is: “There is no purpose, duh.” On Friends, to bring another sitcom into the mix, the answer is, “Find your soulmate in the most complicated manner possible, at which point you will be happy forever.” (This is also the message of every romantic comedy ever churned out.)

Louie, like nearly every work of art worth discussing, offers no answer, except maybe “Keep looking, there must be a purpose, because otherwise life would be awful and unbearable.” One feature of the show that slips by almost unnoticed is that religion—specifically Christianity—appears more often, and is taken more seriously, than any mainstream show since Andy Griffith. Louie is a character with not only an interior life, but a spiritual one as well. That’s not a common thing these days, and it’s nice to know that a show like Louie can exist on television.

I worry that I’ve made the show sound more serious than it actually is. Here’s the poker scene I mentioned above:

I Have Another Blog Now

2010-09-16T08:02:00.000-07:00

One reason my posting has been a little bit irregular as of late is that I've been setting up and writing for a new blogging project with a buddy of mine, Christopher Morris-Lent, known to the poker world as CML. It's called We Live Off Your Money and is the diary of a our lives as professional (semi-professional, in my case) online poker players. I don't write much about myself or poker on this blog, so this new blog will hopefully be an outlet for content that I wouldn't publish here. If you like my writing on Essays on Sucking, you may also enjoy We Live Off Your Money, and if you're curious about the life of online poker players, it's also worth checking out.

Why Can't We Have a Robot Senate?

2010-09-14T08:07:00.000-07:00

As election time approaches and the political junkies work themselves up into a state of almost sexual anticipation, the question everyone is asking is, will there be a bunch of new mostly wealthy, mostly white people in the Senate? Will these people succeed in the Republican party's mission to have the government to almost nothing? If Democrats can barely pass legislation with a nearly 60-40 majority, how in god's name is anything going to be accomplished if the Senate is split roughly 50-50?

If you read George Packer's New Yorker article published over a month ago, you'd know that barely anything gets accomplished in the Senate now. Senators spend a couple days a week in Washington and spend the rest of the time flying back and forth from their home states, where they fundraise, pretend to listen to constituent concerns, and occasionally fuck people they aren't married to. The groundswell of populist rage--I have no idea what that phrase means, incidentally--isn't just directed at Democrats, it's directed at Congress in general. People think that elected officials are doing a shit job, and it's hard to argue against that.

To be fair, criticism of Congress comes from both ends of the political spectrum. Right-wingers think the government is trying to take over every facet of their lives, while left-wingers think the government isn't doing enough. But everyone agrees that the people in Washington are clowns at best, and evil, homicidal clowns at worst.

The solution? Replace them all with robots.

I know you can't replace everyone with robots. The House should remain dominated by humans, at least until machines acquire the ability to feel pain and love, but the Senate would be much more efficient, and probably better supported by the populace, if they were robots. The advantages are obvious: no sex scandals, no embarrassing PR gaffs (unlike the late Ted Stevens, the robots would know the internet is not a series of tubes), and they would never make vicious attack ads. Best of all, there would be no filibustering.

In fact, if robots were the only Senators, there would be no campaigning at all. Here's how an election would work:

1. Instead of voting on candidates, voters would go into the booth and decide how they feel about a number of issues. Are you pro-gay but anti-abortion? Do you want your children to pray in school but also support cap and trade? Just check those boxes, and leave a box blank if you don't know what it's talking about--or in the great American democratic tradition, you can let your opinion be known about issues you are totally uninformed about.

2. The Senate robot for your state would be reprogrammed after the election so its views would match those of its constituents, and it would vote accordingly. If you wanted to, you could also introduce a home-state bias so the robots would try to get military bases and corporate headquarters to move to their states, just like the fallible fleshy senators do. Or leave all of that back room politicking to the humans in the House and have the Senate be a realm of pure issues.

3. That's it. The only problem with this system is that if 51 percent of people in 51 percent of the states believe something absurd and dangerous, like "We should go to war with Iran right now," the robot Senate might try to make that happen. So maybe we institute a rule that 55 Senators have to agree on something in order for it to pass. It would still allow more pieces of legislation to be passed more efficiently than the current arrangement, where you apparently need 60 out of 100 Senators to agree on something for it to become law.

The advantages are too numerous to list here, but some benefits of a robot Senate would be an extremely short legislative session (they could decide on every bill in about a minute), and best of all, people wouldn't elect candidates without knowing their positions first. In the current situation, voters elect one party to Congress because they hate the other party and are shocked and dismayed when the new party in power attempts to enact the policies it said it was going to attempt to enact. (I'm talking about the Democrats and their health care policies, in case that wasn't clear.)

What would be the downside to having a robot Senate? Can anyone think of one? Keep in mind that the House would still be human, so legislation and the amendment process would go on as usual, just not as much in the Senate. I guess the robots could suddenly acquire intelligence and force all humans into death camps, but that probably wouldn't happen. Almost definitely not.

Why Conservapedia Sucks

2010-08-29T19:40:00.000-07:00

One of the privileges of contemporary first-world living is that you’re free to live in whichever version of reality you find most appealing. For instance, thanks to the miracles of talk radio, the internet, and ESPN, a sports fan can spend virtually all of his free time consuming sports news and watching sporting events. Those who are really into fashion or indie rock can spend hours every day reading blogs and watching YouTube videos even if they live in an isolated trailer in the middle of a desert where fashion and indie rock do not commonly occur. But the people who have perfected the art of living in an informational bubble are conservatives.

Conservatives have AM talk radio, they have Fox News, they have the vast network of blogs and thousands of conservative-leaning books, all of which makes it possible for a conservative to never consume any chunk of information that comes from the mouth of a liberal, or even a moderate. Granted, liberals have all of these things too, plus liberals can watch standup comedy without being upset. But conservatives aren’t satisfied with just an all-right-wing media environment, they want a right wing encyclopedia. And thus, from the mind of a man who came out of Phyllis Schlafly, we get Conservapedia.

Conservapedia has an origin story that parallels that of Fox News. Just as America’s favorite news network began as a response to the perceived bias of the “mainstream media,” Conservapedia started out because Andy Schlafly thinks that Wikipedia* has a liberal bias—at least, that’s the conclusion he came to after his edits to Wikipedia articles kept getting deleted by other editors. After spending a lazy Sunday afternoon poking around Conservapedia though, his edits getting deleted might have had less to do with an institutional socialist bias and more with Schlafly being two beers and a plastic connecting thingy short of a six pack.

Sure, not all of the content on the site is written by Schlafly, but he definitely wrote (and defends on the talk page forums) a bit where a Bible passage about one of Jesus’ miracles is used as an example for why Einstein’s theory of relativity is wrong. And he allows some rather dicey pages to exist, like the one for the “Homosexual Agenda” (the above screenshot is from that page, just in case it gets edited). That page follows the Conservapedia practice of citing only far-right sources, in this case books with titles like Crafting “Gay” Children and That Which Is Unnatural, which might be better than some other Conservapedia pages that don’t cite anything at all, like this page about why capitalism is number one.

The site is clearly still trying to figure out what the hell it is supposed to be. Clicking “random page” over and over sends you to extremely short entries for ideologically neutral subjects like skin and Indian states, then you find odd things like a fairly unorganized biography of Mel Gibson that doesn’t mention his recent nasty rant at his ex-wife, but does mention his charity work (although, hilariously, the article does say he’s “never at a loss for words”).

I’m assuming for now that Conservapedia isn’t high-level trolling like Christwire.org. If it’s not, it’s pretty scary—or it would be, if it wasn’t so stupid. Fox News is one thing, opinionated journalism not being anything particularly new, but Conservapedia seeks to do something more fundamental. If the site’s editors are serious about competing with and maybe supplanting Wikipedia, they’re working to change the nature of facts itself. Snide, superior-sounding liberals are fond of saying, “The facts have a liberal bias,” but Conservapedia wants to create facts with a conservative bias by only drawing on certain sources and only caring about certain topics. People who set out to create objective sources of information like encyclopedias or “objective” newspapers should be motivated by a desire to just find out the facts no one can argue with and then reporting them in language that isn’t ideologically charged. Conservapedia doesn’t give a shit about objectivity and doesn’t even pretend to. Its purpose is to give conservatives a place to go where their viewpoint can be reiterated again and again. It’s not a reference guide, it’s a yes man.

Like Fox News, Conservapedia is constantly patting itself on the back for being more truthful than the liberals, who have something to hide. The site says, “Conservapedia provides information about the American people that liberal critics would rather hide: for example, nearly 50 percent of Americans reject evolution and embrace creationism.” Except well-known lefty site Wikipedia says, on its creationism page, that “according to a 2001 Gallup poll, about 45% of North Americans believe that ‘God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.’” It’s not that liberals want to hide the facts, it’s that just because a bunch of people believe in something doesn’t make it so.

And just because you say things are facts and that your website is an encyclopedia doesn’t make it so either, but Conservapedia is trying its hardest. They’ve recently expanded their project to change reality by changing facts by creating a new translation of the Bible that will eliminate the liberal bias former translations had and explain “the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning.” How this version is going to handle Acts 2:45 is beyond me.

In Conservapedia’s version of reality, Jesus is Ronald Reagan, the homosexuals are plotting against America, Mel Gibson is still best known for being a successful actor and director. In my version of reality, on the other hand, I’m still not sure Andy Schlafly isn’t the most committed troll in the history of the internet.

*Oddly enough, that entry on Wikipedia includes a quote from noted atheist Douglas Adams, who probably wouldn’t like Conservapedia very much.

Why the "9/11 Mosque" Controversy Sucks

2010-08-20T14:04:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make: I don’t really get this whole “9/11 Mosque” controversy. That is, I know what it’s about—some Muslims want to build a cultural center a few blocks away from the big hole where the World Trade Center used to be—and I know that people and news organizations don’t have a whole lot to do during August and things can get a little silly (last August was when we had the whole Town Hall Meeting kerfuffle). But I don’t understand why we need opinion polls to tell us that 70 percent of the country is against the building of a mosque (a cultural center, actually) in a middle of a block that includes restaurants, apartment buildings, and a strip club across the street.

This New Yorker opinion piece sums up the situation nicely. People who don’t live in New York, people who will never walk by the proposed mosque, people who have made their careers badmouthing the “elites” who live and work in New York City—these people don’t think the mosque should be built. But they shouldn’t be involved in this process. What Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich or Howard Dean says about the Park 51 project shouldn’t matter to anyone. Conservatives are constantly bitching about “states’ rights”; well, what about a city’s rights? The neighborhood Community Board—the smallest, most local form of government in New York City—endorsed the project 28 to one. And while New Yorkers oppose it, Manhattanites (you know, the people who actually breathed in the dust and ash from the fallen World Trade Center nine years ago) are in favor of it. So why won’t these goddam out-of-towners just keep their mouths shut?

The arguments against the mosque that aren’t just obvious anti-Muslim sentiments are tidily articulated in this blog post. The author equates 9/11 to genocide and makes no distinction between American Muslims and Middle Eastern Muslims, and describes the mosque’s location as, “within enough distance to pass the mosque coming from one direction and turn your head to see the WTC within a minute.”

I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing this blogger isn’t a New Yorker. If he was, he’d know you can’t see the WTC, because there’s nothing to see. It’s not a memorial, it’s just a giant construction site. In a few years, it’ll be a giant office building (housing Conde Nast, among others) in a neighborhood full of giant office buildings. Conservatives and other out-of-towners who oppose Park 51 seem to think that the big hole in the ground is the only distinguishable feature in that part of Manhattan; in actuality, the former WTC doesn’t stand out very much. I used to visit some guys who lived near the big hole to watch sports and get high, and believe it or not, I don’t think I thought about 9/11 once when I was walking past the hole.

America is still getting over the World Trade Center attacks, but Manhattan has moved on, because that’s what Manhattan does. Nothing leaves much of a mark, every scar is built over and built over again. Maybe that’s heartless, maybe it’s a good way to move on, but that’s what happens. I don’t know if the critics in other parts of the country understand how little 9/11 has defined Manhattan and how easily life flows around that big hole. They’re looking to preserve the “sanctity” of a “memorial site” that exists only within their heads.

Another thing I’m not sure the Park 51 critics get is that there are a lot of Muslims in New York. That sounds stupid, but in most parts of the country, Muslims are a rare sight. They’re extremely foreign to most Americans, and possibly a little scary. Even on the subway, where you’re likely to see some weird stuff, it’s a little startling to see a woman in a full-on burqa. But you’ll see those women if you live here, and you might walk by the mosque near my house and hear that Islamic chanting that they do. I’m just guessing, but I imagine that people who have never met (or even seen) a Muslim find the prospect of building a mosque “in the shadow of the 9/11 site”—wait, what shadow?—pretty objectionable, because to them, mosque=Muslim=enemy. New York isn’t exactly Mecca or Tehran (remember that controversy over the Muslim school?), but it isn’t Wasilla, Alaska either. There are enough mosques in town that one more shouldn’t upset anyone—especially when the building in question is already used for Islamic prayer!

I’m still wrapping my head around how one would be offended by the presence of this cultural center, which might explain why I can’t understand the grievances of the out-of-towner opposition. Are tourists going to walk past the mosque and be upset because they’re on their way to the 9/11 memorial/New York Doll strip club and the ambience was disturbed? Are the prayers of Muslims going to prevent the 9/11 victims’ souls from going to heaven? Is merely knowing that a Muslim building is near a big hole hundreds of miles away from you upsetting? Or do the opponents agree with Gingrich, who believes the cultural center is part of an “Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization." If that last one is true, I really, really don’t understand.

Why Las Vegas Sucks

2010-08-18T09:34:00.000-07:00

The New Yorker, that great publication that serves to chronicle the lifestyles of the extraordinarily rich for the benefit of the upper middle class, just did a profile of some guy who provides fancy Las Vegas restaurants with delicacies like truffles and cinnamon and (presumably) human skin. Here’s one interesting passage about the world of high food in Vegas that starts with a quote from chef Paul Bartolotta:

“Las Vegas is a pilot project to see if man can live on the moon,” he says. “There’s nothing local—our water comes from somewhere else, our electricity comes from somewhere else.” Fishermen have sent him texts in the middle of the night from their boats in the Adriatic, with pictures of themselves holding fresh-caught specimens and messages like “Want this fish?” On one such occasion, the fish was an eighteen-pound ombrina; when it arrived at the restaurant, forty-eight hours later, Bartolotta walked it onto the floor and offered it to a party of thirty golfers as the main course in a tasting menu they had ordered. He took it back to the kitchen, sprinkled some salt and pepper on it, tied up the tail so it would fit in the oven, and within ninety minutes the golfers were eating it. Their bill came to nearly five thousand dollars, before wine.

To recap: modern technology allows people across the world to communicate to one another instantaneously, and transport pretty much any object from any place to any other place in less time than it takes to watch all of the episodes of The Wire back-to-back, and we use this technology to provide a bunch of wealthy, drunken golfers with fresh fish.

I don’t want to turn this into a rant against the rich or global capitalism—although I suspect this already qualifies as such—but it’s worth noting that no matter how fantastical our abilities become, our ideas for how to use our powers remain bizarre. Why do we have this giant luxurious mecca of sin in the desert anyway? Living on the moon would be a gigantic waste of resources, which is why we never tried to do it. Las Vegas seems like a waste of resources too. Can’t we move all of those casinos somewhere a little easier to transport food and water to?

Why A-Rod Sucks

2010-08-09T09:20:00.001-07:00

Alex Rodriguez, he of perhaps the lamest nickname in the world, just hit his 600th career home run. This was reported as being important because baseball people have an obsession with large round numbers. Because of this “milestone,” we are forced to face the fact that statistically, A-Rod/A-Roid/the smooth-foreheaded one is one of the best baseball players of all time. As this blogger said, “He’s up on Olympus with the rest of the gods.” Which brings up the question, what is he the god of?

The old-time baseball players have acquired a folk-hero status in American lore. Babe Ruth was a Paul Bunyan-esque figure whose appetites for home runs, liquor, and whores exceeded those of mere mortals. Ty Cobb was born in hell and likely returned there after his death. Shoeless Joe Jackson was the disgraced hero who shattered a little boy’s illusions (“Say it ain’t so,” etc.). Lou Gehrig was the Iron Horse who, alas, had to be put down. Wille Mays was the genius of center field. Mickey Mantle was an amiable bacchanalian giant who was an alcoholic back when that was okay. Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio were ciphers with perfect swings. Yogi Berra came from another planet. Mickey Rivers was insane. Carl Yastrzemski made success look like failure. Carlton Fisk pushed a foul ball fair by sheer force of will. Pete Rose had an all-consuming passion for winning, and a fatal flaw. Sandy Koufax had an arm made of rubber and took Yom Kippur off (Don Drysdale was his goyish partner). Dock Ellis pitched a perfect game on acid. Hank Aaron cranked out home run after home run like a true workman. Reggie Jackson was Mr. October. Rickey Henderson was a tower of pure ego. Who else? Ken Griffey Junior was a permanent teenager, beauty and mood swings and all. Barry Bonds hit the hell out of the ball because he seemed to hate the game. Derek Jeter is living proof that ballplayers can have an old-fashioned cool.

What can be said about A-Rod?

He started out as a kind of prodigy in Seattle, where he suffered under Griffey’s shadow. Then he left for Texas, in a decision that seemed to be based purely on economics. (Mercenaries make for lousy heroes.) The team he left set a (steroid-assisted) regular-season win record and made the playoffs a few more times, while he spent three years of his prime on a last-place team. He went to the Yankees, where he was no longer the big fish in the little pond, and got raked over the coals for underperforming in the playoffs until last year. He’s not the center of the team, and he even moved to third base out of deference to Jeter. (Would DiMaggio, Mays, or Rose show deference to anyone?) He was romantically linked to Madonna, which would have been fashionable a couple decades ago. Oh yeah, and he said he didn’t use steroids until he said he did—even if you don’t mind the steroids, you have to admit that came off as cowardly. How do you sum up that scattered career in one short sentence?

It’s not that A-Rod has no “aura,” or “mystique.” As the philosopher Curt Schilling once said, those are dancers at a strip club. A-Rod’s problem is that his narrative isn’t compelling. He’s really, really good at hitting a baseball, but what else? What stories can you tell about him? If he passes Bonds as American Home Run Champ, he still won’t be as interesting a figure as Bonds, who has the reputation of being a ‘roided-up monster who doesn’t care what anyone thinks of him, which is in some ways better than being a nonentity like A-Rod.

The stats and the three MVP trophies say A-Rod is an all-time great. But stats don’t make me care about him the way I care about, say, Jeter. Now, I don’t like the Yankees, and Jeter represents everything I don’t like about the Yankees—the apparent sense of entitlement, the clean-cut, country-club aristocrat look, the pride that, okay, maybe is deserved but still goddamned annoying. But I care about Jeter, I can muster up some dislike for Jeter, but A-Rod inspires no feeling in me. If A-Rod has ascended to Mount Olympus because he hit an arbitrary number of home runs, then he’s the God of Bland.

Why Baseball Sucks

2010-08-02T13:51:00.000-07:00

Bill Simmons’s latest piece on ESPN.com is the quintessential Sports Guy column: longer than it needs to be, filled with minutiae about the Red Sox that very few people care about, and obsessed with quantifying the unquantifiable using fuzzy logic. He “breaks down” the average fan's dissatisfaction with the Red Sox’s season and baseball in general by assigning suspiciously round percentage values to the things he doesn’t like about this baseball season. “Injuries” are 10 percent, and “The Bandwagon Effect” is 5 percent, and only Simmons knows why.

Maybe this is a lousy baseball year, all those no-hitters notwithstanding. For the first summer I can remember, I’m not paying attention to the games at all. Maybe it’s because my team, the Mariners, are one of the worst teams in baseball. Maybe it’s because I don’t have a TV. But the NFL team I root for is lousy too, and I don’t have an NBA team anymore (RIP Sonics), yet I’ll go to the trouble of finding a way to watch professional football and basketball, but not baseball. And apparently I’m not alone. Attendance is holding steady (Simmons says that’s because of recent cuts in ticket prices), but TV ratings have been going down for a long time, and the graph of the number of people who’ve watched the All-Star Game gives you a good idea of how baseball is doing these days.

So why don’t people like baseball? In honor of Bill Simmons, here’s my “percentage pie.”

Steroids: 1.75 percent
You might think people regard steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs as cheating, but football players are practically sprinkling HGH on their breakfast cereal and no one complains. When we watch professional athletes do the amazing things that they do, I doubt that many of us really think, “That 360 dunk doesn’t count because he used a banned supplement.” Let’s not forget that when Jose Canseco, who had replaced all of his internal organs with testosterone glands, was stealing 40 bases and hitting home runs, everyone was talking about how awesome it was. I think the real problem was…

The response to the steroid scandal: 17.39 percent
Major League Baseball’s response to the growing sense that their guys were getting some help in hitting all of those home runs was to test all of their players and then keep the results secret, which ensured that the players who tested positive would get revealed a little at a time over the years thanks to leaks and keep steroid use in the news. The sports media’s response to the discovery that Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire were not just working out really, really hard was to talk about steroids all the time and to act like every player who used steroids—when, by the way, there was no rule against them in MLB—was a combination of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. There was a lot of hang-wringing about how now the statistics from the “steroid era” were more invalid than the statistics from the era when blacks were banned from the league or the era when spitballs were legal. Each new “revelation” that a player was using steroids set off more of the same arguments about who was eligible for the Hall of Fame and how awful it was that these guys were “cheating.” If you paid attention to the sports media, you probably got sick of listening to sportswriters bitch about steroids and went over to the NFL Network, where no one ever complains about HGH use because HGH makes players better and the games more entertaining. Which brings me to…

Baseball’s lack of spectacle: 16.4 percent
In this column about baseball’s TV ratings, a guy named Rocky Mamola says, “Baseball is more chess to their checkers in that it requires much more strategy and that pace of the game is much slower and methodical,” which is the sort of thing die-hard baseball fans say because they can’t say baseball is boring. But compared to the NFL—which has exponentially more strategy than baseball—watching a baseball game is pretty dull. All that steroid-taking resulted in more home runs, which are exciting in person but on television highlight reels, all look pretty much the same. The Home Run Derby is about as exciting as watching this over and over. But the real problem is that between home runs and great plays in the field, a baseball game has long, long stretches of nothing happening. Glove adjustments. Conferences on the mound. Pitchers shaking off catchers. Pick-off attempts. Worst of all is probably when a game is clearly a blow-out, yet the losing team still has to get 27 outs, which usually takes a long time, meaning that one-sided games that aren’t worth watching after the third inning last longer than close games. Which is why Bill Simmons is right when he talks about…

The time of the games: 31.23 percent
World Cup games lasted 90 minutes, unless they went into overtime, in which case viewers were glued to their seats anyway. You can plan your day knowing exactly how long you’re going to be watching men kick a ball around. Baseball games, on the other hand, are like acid trips—you never know how long they’re going to take, but by the end you’ll probably want it to be over. These days, most games take between three and four hours, which is insane, especially since most games start at 7 pm. Children who have to be in bed can’t watch the ends of weekday games, and most of the rest of us don’t have the time to stare at David Ortiz stepping out of the batter’s box for hours upon end. At best, we’ll put the game on the radio as a background while we do important stuff like updating Twitter and posting lewd pictures on the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist. And that’s why the biggest slice of my percentage pie is…

Television and the internet: 33.33 percent
Ever try listening to an NBA or NFL game on the radio? It’s not nearly as good as watching in on TV. There’s too much happening too quickly for a play-by-play man to accurately describe. But baseball has the opposite problem. There’s so little happening in the average moment of a baseball game that the play-by-play guy needs one or two other guys to tell amusing stories in between pitches. Baseball is built for the radio. A game is a good thing to give a third of your attention to. You want to hear the background buzz of the crowd, the guys in the booth chatting leisurely with one another, the sudden swelling of noise when a ball suddenly rises towards the sky. Or you can ignore the game on the radio and read about it in the paper, and dissect the results through the box score—baseball is one sport that can be described almost completely through numbers. In the days before cable television was readily available, or further back, before everyone had a television, baseball was great because you could follow it closely without watching a single game. Now, of course, we can watch every game and then watch the highlights on Baseball Tonight and read the blogs written by stat geeks that argue about cERA and UZR. I’m not sure baseball benefits from all this analysis. It’s a slow, almost lazy kind of sport for those lazy summer afternoons, only now it’s only played at night and there’s a lot of other stuff to do on lazy summer afternoons. Increasingly, baseball seems like a weird, almost unmarketable sport that appeals mainly to a shrinking audience of aficionados. Remember when boxing was the biggest sport in America? Yeah, neither do I.

Slicing up the Red Sox's Boring Pie (ESPN)

The Sucky Supreme Court, Via the NYT

2010-07-25T17:23:00.000-07:00

I don’t often agree with conservatives about the issues, but I have to admit their debating tactics are pretty awesome. One of their go-to moves is to accuse liberals of doing exactly what they (conservatives) are trying to do and act outraged about it. For instance, conservatives are fond of yelling about the liberal bias in the mainstream media, and one might think they had a problem with biases in media generally, but ha ha! They want media to be biased, as their embrace of talk radio and Fox News demonstrates. Similarly, they’ve been moaning and bitching about the “activist judges” who legalized abortion and other such nonsense, but after three decades in which a Republican was in the oval office (and thus appointing judges) two-thirds of the time, judges are more activist than ever—the difference is they’re conservative activist judges, so the conservatives like them. This is like baseball fans who say they hate Barry Bonds because he took steroids, then defend their own team’s players who took steroids because “they were just trying to be competitive and win ball games.”

In fact, one of the most “activist” decisions in recent years was the case of Citizens United v. the United States, which overturned numerous campaign finance laws and essentially said that corporations counted as people for the purpose of “free speech” and should be allowed to spend as much money as they want “speaking” on behalf of one candidate or the other. But conservatives didn’t denounce it because it was their kind of activism. (If you did denounce the verdict and you’re conservative, awesome, but by and large, your team did not.)

Obviously, no decision is completely ideologically neutral, but the as the Times article linked to says,

If the Roberts court continues on the course suggested by its first five years, it is likely to allow a greater role for religion in public life, to permit more participation by unions and corporations in elections and to elaborate further on the scope of the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. Abortion rights are likely to be curtailed, as are affirmative action and protections for people accused of crimes.

I’d argue that the favoring of churches, unions, and corporations over pregnant women and accused criminals is activism, and not particularly Christian, but I don’t want to get into that here. Smarter people than I can discuss the Supreme Court. What’s worth noting is that the mainstream conservative movement favors advancing its policies by any means necessary (duh), and doesn’t care whether the courts or the media is neutral. In fact, they want those institutions to lean towards the right—which is why they’re constantly accusing both Supreme Court justices and journalists in general of being “liberal.” It’s a little intellectually dishonest, but as Lee Atwater said, “Intellectual honesty is for homo college professors and pigfuckers who don’t win elections and get to appoint justices.”

Court Under Roberts Most Conservative In Decades (NYT)

Why the Census Sucks

2010-07-23T15:42:00.000-07:00

I wrote a blog entry for Vice yesterday about working for the Census in the same area of Brooklyn where two managers notoriously falsified over 4,000 people’s personal information in order to meet their deadline, and I thought I’d add a few points that I couldn’t fit in that limited space:

1. Obviously, if you’re going to have a representative democracy that awards seats in Congress based on population, you need to count the people who live in your democracy. Equally obviously, this is impossible. The US could probably count all the voters in the country more or less accurately, but the Census tries to count everyone from newborn infants to illegal immigrants in 50 states and thousands of large towns and cities. Thanks to pockets of people who want to hide from the government for various reasons, urban areas are probably always going to be undercounted, and that’s far from the only problem. People could lie on their Census forms without anyone catching them, Census Enumerators and low-level managers can lie as long as they’re smart about it, an office clerk could hit the wrong key and misenter some data…it’s simply impossibly improbable that there the number the Census comes out with is right. The only reason the Census exists is so the government can claim that it made a good faith effort to count everyone. The managers who falsified data aren’t in trouble because they screwed up the count; they’re in trouble because they undermine the fictitious notion of an “accurate” Census.

2. But just because the Census is doomed doesn’t mean it can’t do a better job than it does. For starters, they could set up a website where you can send your information to the government electronically—in fact, it’s ridiculous that they didn’t do it this time around. They could mail everyone the standard Census form along with a user ID and password to log into a secure site where they could fill out the form without having to go to a mailbox, and there’s no way the response rate wouldn’t rise. (Can you imagine the anti-government, gun-toting types’ reaction to a website where the government asked you personal information?)

3. Another thing the Census needs to fix is the system they use to train Enumerators. When I trained in Brooklyn, I received exactly the same materials and instructions as Enumerators in Cowtip, Montana, which is insane. Enumerators in cities have to deal with a much different set of problems than the people in smaller towns—for instance, we had to try to get into buildings where the buzzers were broken or no one would let us in. I personally had to continually correct the forms I was given because the listed number of units in a building had no relation to reality. And the requirement that we visit boarded-up or burned out units three times before asking the winos sitting on their stoops if the building was vacant was ignored by everyone because it made no sense to begin with. Privatizing the Census makes no sense for a lot of reasons, but a private company wouldn’t make the mistake of treaties large cities and small towns exactly the same.

4. Despite all this, I recommend a Census job to anyone lucky enough to be unemployed in 2020. It pays well, and there’s a joy in working an insignificant job in a large, poorly managed organization. Or as the late Harvey Pekar once said, “I gotta good gig, man. It’s steady an’ I can fuck off a lot. I’d recommend that every young man look inta th’ possibility of getting a flunky government job.”

Why Censoring Rap Music Sucks

2010-07-19T10:24:00.000-07:00

I’m sharing the above music video with you not because Janelle Monae is one of the coolest people alive, or because the song is extraordinarily catchy, but because of Big Boi’s verse—or more specifically, the censoring of Big Boi’s verse. The line in question goes: “You gotta keep your balance or you’ll fall into the gap/It’s a challenge but I manage cause I’m cautious with the s----.”

Before I downloaded Ms. Monae’s whole album, I assumed that the censored line was “shit,” but that was stupid in hindsight, since “shit” doesn’t rhyme with “gap” and surely an experienced MC like Big Boi wouldn’t screw up like that. The word deemed inappropriate by the FCC and radio stations is actually “strap,” defined by my dictionary as “a strip of leather, cloth, or other flexible material, often with a buckle, used to fasten, secure, or carry something or to hold on to something.” Huh? What’s objectionable about that?

My first thought was Big Boi was referring to the practice of “tying off” with a belt before shooting up some heroin, but Big Boi has never rapped about using heroin before, to my knowledge, and I doubt he would advise his listeners to be “cautious” with it—more likely he would tell people not to use heroin at all. Some quick checking on Urban Dictionary revealed that “strap” actually means “gun,” an evolution of the old usage of “I’m strapped,” or “fully strapped.” So the censorship equation is strap=gun=bad=bleeped out.

This is the fundamental problem with censorship, or at least censorship as it relates to music, especially rap—it’s not just “curse words” that get cut, it’s words that touch on a host of different topics, from drugs to crime to sex, even when the message behind the lyrics is fundamentally positive. Like in Big Boi’s case, he’s not telling people, “Go out and shoot a bunch of people with your gun,” he’s saying, “I’m awesome, and furthermore, I exercise caution when I have a firearm in my possession.” He’s preaching gun control and restraint, but I didn’t even know that thanks to the short-sighted censoring of his verse.

More fundamentally, the censoring of words in rap songs doesn’t just wipe out words like “fuck” and “shit” and “bitch” that are defined by most people as “offensive” (although it’s hard to imagine the person who is still legitimately offended by these words). The censors have decreed that rapping about violence and drugs is out-of-bounds, even if the message of the song isn’t pro-violence or pro-drug. This is more than defended the tender ears of our children, this is an insidious plot to control the discourse of pop music—that’s maybe an exaggeration, but not by much.

It also might be an exaggeration to call the censoring of rap music racist, but (white) pop has been relentlessly concerned with sex, drugs, and violence for decades, and no one stepped in to tell the Rolling Stones that “Under My Thumb” was misogynistic (it’s nastier than anything Snoop Dogg ever said) or the Beatles that “Happiness is a Warm Gun” was unsuitable to be played on the radio due to its title. How can “Cocaine” be released by Eric Clapton as a single, yet when Big Boi mentions buying weed on “Bombs Over Baghdad,” the lyrics are censored to: “shoulda bought an o---- but you copped a d—“? Is the difference lyrical context, the standards of the times, or the skin color of the musician? What are the standards for censoring music beyond the bleeping of “the seven dirty words?”

Or to put it another way, how would the FCC choose to censor the Police B-Side, “Once Upon a Daydeam?” It’s one of the most brutal songs I’ve heard from a mainstream artist, yet there’s no profanity in it. But if Big Boi can’t say he’s cautious with the strap, can Sting sing about unborn babies being killed?

400 Pages of Suck: A Running Diary of Glenn Beck's Novel, Which I Actually Read

2010-07-04T10:27:00.000-07:00

Like a car accident, Glenn Beck fascinates me. He’s one of those rare political figures that doesn’t seem to want to be elected (not that he ever could be), doesn’t seem to want to debate policy in any sort of intellectual, wonkish sense, doesn’t care about building a viable movement (the Tea Party is nothing if not unviable), and doesn’t dream of being a lobbyist or a cabinet member or a diplomat (so far as I know). He’s a pure orator—or demagogue, if you don’t agree with him. He is to television what Rush Limbaugh, or further back, Father Coughlin, was to radio: someone who can manipulate the medium without special effects of any kind, and whose appeal is obscure to anyone who doesn’t share his politics. His style of argument is to basically never state any facts or opinions—he hints at dark, leftist conspiracies, he makes vague references to the Nazis, and, famously, he cries on camera. He’s either stark raving mad, the prototype of the next generation of pundit, or most likely, both. So when I heard he had written a novel (or at least overseen the production of a novel) I had to read it. It took me four and a half hours, and here’s how it went:

6:00 PM, Page 20: After a prologue in which a guy named “Eli Churchill” hints at a giant conspiracy involving Donald Rumsfeld, 11 nuclear weapons, and 2.3 trillion “missing” dollars, then gets shot in the head by a mysterious assassin, this is the first sentence of Chapter One: "Most people think about age and experience in terms of years, but it’s really only moments that define us." Deep, man. We are introduced to Noah Gardner, who has “all the credentials for a killer eHarmony profile” and gets laid constantly, as long as he keeps “the bar for an evening’s companionship at only medium-high.” However, "Noah had begun to realize something about that medium high bar: it takes two to tango.” From context, I known this is supposed to mean that he’s ready for a serious relationship, but I keep staring at that line and I’m pretty sure it’s a mixed metaphor, if you even want to count it as a metaphor.

6:09 PM, Page 25: Only a few sentences after we’re informed Noah is looking for a serious relationship, his vaguely described soulmate appears! She has an “aloof and effortless hotness,” and defies “a traditional chick-at-a-glance inventory.” It’s like the words are forming a picture in my mind!

6:14 PM, Page 30: Noah’s soulmate turns out to be a member of the “Founder’s Keepers,” which sounds a lot like the Tea Party. She doesn’t fall for what we’re told is Noah’s charm, and then tells him a punny joke about the Biblical Noah, who has “herd” everything. Ha ha! For some reason, this witty banter renders our Noah speechless. Anyway, he’s going to meet her at a Founder’s Keepers/Tea Party meeting later.

6:22, Page 38: We meet Noah’s father, who doesn’t believe in God or the dollar. I’m guessing he’ll be a bad guy. Also, he’s in advertising. He talks in phrases like, "I’ll show you the path to a whole new world in which everything you want is laid out before you, ripe for the bountiful harvest.”

6:29, Page 45: Big Bad Dad notes that Social Security “was the boldest Ponzi scheme in history” and forecasts worldwide economic devastation. It’s sort of like what’s happened in real life in the past few years, but a lot simpler. Oh, and it turns out this guy is the guy who came up with the idea of selling bottled water. He’s definitely evil. He speaks vaguely of an evil-sounding conspiracy.

6:38: Page 56: Chapter 4 consisted entirely of Noah calling some high-ranking financial people’s assistants at the request of his father. Remember, this is a “thriller.”

6:43, Page 61: The ad agency the Gardners work at is responsible for every successful ad campaign of the past 50 years, from selling t-shirts of Che and Mao to “clueless rock stars” to selling the lottery to the guileless public to helping every president get elected, except for Jimmy Carter and Nixon, who was too cheap. (That’s an odd admission, since Nixon’s campaign was one of the greatest accomplishments in advertising history, but whatever.)

7:00, Page 87: The Tea Party meeting in this book is “…a total cross section, a mix of everyone—three-piece suits rubbing elbows with T-shirts and sweat pants, yuppies chatting with hippies, black and white, young and old, a cowboy hat here, a six-hundred-dollar haircut there.” So clearly, we’re in an alternate reality. Also, I come across this gem of a line, as Molly gazes at Noah: "It must have been only a second or two, but it felt so much longer than any other mere moment he could remember."

7:03, Page 89: Despite the open nature of this gathering of patriots, the characters that we’ve met so far have Southern or Appalachian accents. Are there any gay people at this gathering, I wonder?

7:07, Page 96: Noah is a “human lie detector” and picks out an “infiltrator” at the meeting (which is packed, by the way). I thought this was an open, accepting crowd. Chapter 10 looks like it’s going to be straight exposition, delivered through the mouth of a speaker at the meeting.

7:15, Page 110: Yup, the speaker told us all about how bad corruption, the New Deal, lobbyists, and the IRS were. The crowd was rapt with attention at a boilerplate speech that included advice like, “Instead of bin Laden, give them Gandhi” and the somewhat vague rhetorical question, "Who loves America more, those who want to restore it, or those who want to transform it?”

7:23, Page 120: More speeches. The government has a secret plot to round up all the right-wingers and third-party members into camps. There’s a muddle of left- and right-wing issues, then Noah is goaded into getting in front of everyone, where he quotes George Carlin and The Beatles. These chapters are an accurate description of most meetings of fringe political groups (except for the packed house); they really are very boring.

7:29, Page 129: The meeting is predictably broken up by black-clad cops. This is less boring than the speeches because anything would be, but it’s delivered in workmanlike prose: "As the black truncheon swung down Noah reached up and caught the uniformed man by the wrist, stopping him cold with an unexpectedly steely grip toned over years with his personal trainer at the Madison Square Club.” Good of them to mention where Noah works out. I’m sure that’s important.

7:42, Page 138: Noah is under arrest. The cops are boring and generic. This is how a lawyer is described: "he always looked as though he’d just stepped out of the ‘Awesome Lawyers’ issue of Gentlemen’s Quarterly."

7:48, Page 152: They get out of jail in a few pages, although I couldn’t tell you exactly what happened. Some cops admitted infiltrating the meeting and causing trouble, I think. That’s glossed over though, so we can get to the part where Molly apologizes to Noah for misjudging him. I’m bored. Can we get a sex scene?

7:52, Page 158: No. More speeches. Noah spouts off on the hideous history of Public Relations. He sounds like the young liberal journalism teacher I had in high school, but more boring.

7:55, Page 170: Eliot Spitzer makes a cameo. Noah has a fancy apartment. He reads a books before going to bed, but realizes "No arrangement of ink on a page could possibly hold a candle to the twists his actual day had taken." Good of Beck to tell us how awesome that preceding sequence was.

8:01, Page 180: A character clearly modeled after Beck himself (a celebrity who has a shady, drug-ridden past, and is now a YouTube sensation) is approached by an FBI agent. This is supposed to be a “thriller,” but except for the brief appearance of the riot squad, every single scene in 180 pages has been people talking.

8:07, Page 187: Looks like the Beck character is going to be used as an informant to trick violent right-wing militia members. We’re told he’s “charming” and there’s “quite a bit more to this young fellow than initially met the eye.” Let’s hope so.

8:11, Page 196: The two soulmates kiss! "With everything to see and hear around them there at the very crossroads of the world, soaring billboards, scrolling news crawlers, bright digital Jumbotrons that lined the tall buildings and blotted out the whole evening sky, it all disappeared to its rightful insignificance, flat as a postcard." Sentences like that make me long for the ham-fisted speeches.

8:18, Page 215: Well, I got my wish. Noah and Molly discover the conspiracy that was obviously going on. The secret conspiracy includes taking away gun rights and giving convicts the right to vote. Weren’t the good guys ranting about the prison system some pages ago? The concept of the “Overton Window” is explained: people don’t accept radical change all at once. Talk about self-evident truths.

8:24, Page 233: We visit the home of one of the radicals. In a bit of business stolen directly from Fahrenheit 451, the Founders’ Keepers memorize books written by the founders.

8:46, Page 264: This is an example how events are related in the book: the FBI agent goes undercover and meets some violent militia folks, the scene is described in detail, and then we flash forward in the next chapter and are told about the most interesting parts of the meeting (the militia folks might be suspicious, there’s an extra militia member who wasn’t present) only after the fact. Why can’t we have a complete scene? Would that be too exciting?

9:00, Page 293: It’s becoming obvious that the conspiracy is engineering a fake terrorist attack by a right-wing militia to allow them to put all the Tea Partiers in concentration camps. Noah’s Big Bad Dad is giving a sub-1984 speech to explain why he needs to take over the world. Seriously, that’s his plan: world domination.

9:04, Page 301: We’re now in Part Three. I didn’t notice when we crossed from Part One to Part Two. Noah throws up because his father is so evil, and Noah’s "skin was as pale as a Newark Bay oyster.” That’s my favorite line so far.

9:09, Page 313: We meet a woman who was never mentioned before, but is apparently Noah’s best friend. Luckily for the plot, she’s a doctor who informs him one of the good-guy revolutionaries was poisoned, and hints at a conspiracy. Every character is constantly hinting at a conspiracy, even if he’s just feeding his cat.

9:15, Page 327: Holy shit! Beck and his co-authors clearly realized that things were getting boring, so this happens: Molly pretends to be Natalie Portman so the protagonists can sneak through airport security, but the security guard is a Star Wars geek (Noah knows this from his “Luke Skywalker blow-cut”). Being a Star Wars geek, the guard loves the prequels and knows everything about Natalie Portman. Then Molly quotes the scene from New Hope where Obi-Wan says, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for,” and they get through undetected. Oh, then Noah and Molly do the “I love you,” “I know” bit that Han and Leia do in Empire Strikes Back.

9:23, Page 333: Glenn Beck is a Star Wars nerd. And people wonder why he fascinates me.

9:29, Page 346: After quoting several 18th-century American thinkers (Beck isn’t even bothering with speeches at this point, the omniscient narrator is just telling us what to think), the book summarizes a Samuel Adams quote this way: "Put up or shut up, in other words; go hard or go home. Freedom is the rare exception, he was saying, not the rule, and if you want it you’ve got to do your part to keep it." Oh, now I get it. I’m a Tea Partier now, Beck has convinced me.

9:33, Page 349: I can’t take it anymore. "Way off to the driver’s side, maybe three hundred yards distant, Danny saw what looked like the only man-made thing for miles around. Whatever it was, it wasn’t much." FUCKING TELL US WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE, YOU WRITTEN-BY-COMMITTEE PIECE OF HORSESHIT “THRILLLER!”

9:36, Page 354: "Upon their arrival Kearns had made a bit of small talk with each member of the group, and soon all agreed it was time to do the deal they’d come to do." WHY EVEN INCLUDE THIS LINE? WHAT THE FUCK DOES IT TELL US? DO TERRORISTS WHO ARE ABOUT TO DETONATE A NUCLEAR WEAPON REALLY HAVE “SMALL TALK?”

9:50, Page 372: I’m done critiquing the prose. It’s too exhausting. The character who is clearly supposed to be Beck just told the FBI agent what’s going on: the government is setting it up so it appears the Tea Party launched a nuclear attack on Las Vegas. They bravely kill themselves to detonate the bomb in the middle of the desert. That was mildly thrilling. Even Beck can’t make a nuclear bomb boring.

9:55, Page 378: Noah is captured and tortured—waterboarded—for a page. This lasts about as long as an earlier sequence in which he is nervous about getting on a hammock with Molly. Ah, this ends when his father shows up. I wonder if we’ll get some more speeches?

10:01, Page 383: Yes, more speeches. Like Ayn Rand, Glenn Beck likes his characters to state their philosophy of life every chance they get, then sets up opportunities for them to do so. “The ends do justify the means,” says Big Bad Dad, before revealing himself to be the head of the Trilateral Commission or some shit: "Now, we openly take the reins. Now, we’ll give the people the government they’ve shown themselves to deserve." Some Saturday morning cartoons have more complicated villains.

10:10, Page 388: Noah is now going to be tortured by some electrical current, in a bit stolen completely from Atlas Shrugged. The prose refuses to rise to the climatic occasion: "They’d refashioned his bonds in a manner that would still restrain him, but with less likelihood of causing him to injure himself in the course of the coming ordeal."

10:15, Page 393: Noah quotes some poetry, so his father…lets him live? I don’t even understand what is happening anymore. I think Noah just realized he could pretend to be on his dad’s side and not get tortured anymore. That’s our climax, by the way—our protagonist lies his way out of getting tortured.

10:25, Page 400: We’re in the Epilogue now. Now I know how marathon runners feel on the 26th mile. I just realized that the scene in the Prologue, where a guy who knows stuff gets shot, never comes back into play. The evil conspiracy has taken over even though the nuclear weapon didn’t kill thousands of people like the bad guys planned. Noah is a PR guy for the new totalitarian government of his father—sort of exactly like Winston Smith in 1984. But he gets contacted by a member of the resistance, and we end on a positive note: “The fight starts tomorrow.” Do I smell a sequel? The Overton Door, perhaps?
*
The rest of the book consists of endnotes explaining what parts of what the characters said were factual This includes, interestingly enough, explanations as to why some of the crazier stuff the Glenn Beck character said was wrong. "It is our responsibility to look at everything with a skeptical eye, and also to be aware that many will try to twist reality to serve their own agenda or reinforce their worldview,” Beck says, and few reasonable people would disagree.

The endnotes are by far the best and most interesting part of the book. The Overton Window is not only the worst-titled thriller in history, it’s also probably the most boring. The plot boils down to “Evil powerful people commit an act of terrorism and frame someone for it, allowing them to cease power in the confusion,” which, come to think of it, sounds a lot like the plot of the Star Wars prequels. To hide the thinness of the plot, there’s a bunch of bits casually stolen from better books, endless speeches that quote the Founding Fathers, especially Thomas Paine, and that ridiculous business involving Natalie Portman. Most of the characters are forgettable, but that doesn’t matter since they generally just disappear once no more is required of them by the story. It’s not a formulaic novel, since the formula for political thrillers involves more plot twists and action sequences. I imagine there’s some comparisons to be made between it and Star Wars, at least the Luke-Darth Vader/Noah-Noah’s Dad relationship, but I’m too tired to think about it. There are some political ideas in this book too, but they’re mostly of the bland, “freedom is good” sort, except for a strong anti-gun control stance. Jesus, what an awful book. Why did I read this? Life is short. Only read good books.

Making Monday Worse: the Failure of Americans, Englishmen, and the Washington Post

2010-06-28T11:15:00.000-07:00

Another week has arrived, and with it come a host of reasons to stay in bed with the lights off, quietly weeping. For US soccer fans, there was the 2-1 overtime loss to Ghana, which came days after maybe the most exciting goal in team history. Just when we were flapping our mouths about how this is going to be our year, how we could get to the semi-finals with wins over Ghana and Uruguay, we got dissected like a frog in an 8th-grade biology class by the Ghanaians, who played the kind of beautifully precise, technically perfect soccer in the first half that Americans have never been able to pull off for more than a minute at a time. Yeah, we—and by “we” I mean, “those 11-odd guys I have no relationship with whatsoever”—played better in the second half, but all of those missed chances will be haunting the dreams of soccer fans for four years, while non-fans like Glenn Beck and Rick Reilly mock us for caring about a sissy sport.

It could be worse—we could be English. At least we Americans can take some pride in finishing first in our group and nearly advancing to the quarter-finals. The English, on the other hand, really, really cared about the World Cup, thought their team was good enough to make a deep run, and ended up barely escaping the group stage before getting dismantled by historical rivals Germany. It's a bad sign when your fans are recapping the games and conclude by saying, “Americans will never completely understand how crap it is, most of the time, to be English. We might have cute accents and be good at cocktail parties. But we are mostly losers.”

Of course, at least the English can have cocktail parties and have a soccer team, unlike, say, Haiti, where their refugee tents would be unsuitable to host cocktail parties even if they weren't collapsing due to the wind and the rain. Everyone wants to build more permanent shelters that actually have walls and a ceiling, but the land ownership issues are “complex,” so little is getting done.

Speaking of institutional incompetence, the Washington Post has been in the news lately, this time for firing Dave Weigel, a liberal-leaning blogger who was reporting on the conservative movement. He lost his job because of some comments he made on a mass emailing list about wishing Matt Drudge would light himself on fire and Rush Limbaugh would die—which, of course, reinforced the belief among conservatives that the Post is just a bunch of sneering liberals who hate anyone to the right of Ralph Nader. Some, like Tyler Cowen, bemoaned the total lack of privacy that media figures have nowadays, while others blamed the Post for not defining what Weigel's job was supposed to be—was he supposed to offer a conservative point of view, or act as a kind of anthropologist studying the strange ways of the “Paultards,” as Weigel called them? The Post's own ombudsman noted, “His departure...raises questions about whether The Post has adequately defined the role of bloggers like Weigel. Are they neutral reporters or ideologues?”

Another question might be, are those the only two options? Couldn't a reporter who has a different point of view than the subjects he's covering make some interesting observations as long as that reporter makes his biases clear and makes an effort to withhold judgement? Clearly, the man for the job wasn't Weigel, but I'd rather see liberals reporting on conservatives, and vice versa, than Tea Partiers covering themselves. The notion of “objective” reporting is thankfully pretty much dead, but journalists who disagree with their subjects (but are willing to hear them out) can offer an interesting perspective. Unfortunately, most of the criticism of Weigel boiled down to “He's a liberal! He can't write about conservatives!”

Then there are the times when journalists just need to call a spade a spade, or in this case call a hate-filled rally a hate-filled rally: some Brooklynites recently decided to protest a mosque because, basically, they didn't like Muslims. The protestors didn't even feel the need to hide their anti-Islam sentiment behind coded language the way most racists do. “If they build a mosque there, I'm going to bomb the mosque,” said one protestor. All we can hope for is that like many Americans, that man is not only filled with hate, but also lazy.

You know who isn't lazy? Government officials in Afghanistan, at least when they have to protect one another from corruption charges. That's what those liberals at the Washington Post say in the latest article about corruption in Afghanistan, just another in a long string of pieces indicting the guys that the US is supporting with aid money and military support. It's becoming increasingly clear that, just as we're not particularly good soccer players, Americans don't make good neo-colonial overlords. It might be time to take a page from England's playbook: forget ruling the world and work on our cocktail-party charm.

Why Americans Talking About the World Cup Suck, Part 2: Hipster Conservative Edition

2010-06-23T18:53:00.000-07:00

I imagine American right-wingers have a tough time dealing with the World Cup. On the one hand, it gives them a way to express nationalist sentiments and chant “USA! USA!” as much as they want. On the other hand, soccer seems somehow...liberal, if it makes any sense to attribute a political leaning to an entire sports. Soccer is more beloved by the world at large than America, it is played by guys who are mostly too small to play football or basketball, and it is decidedly collectivist in nature—one star player can't win a game by himself. Worst of all, the US isn't a soccer superpower, so unlike Olympic basketball, or swimming, or war, Americans can't expect to win at it. If you root for the US in the World Cup, you're going to have to admit defeat at the hands of a superior foe at some point, not a prospect that conservatives would enjoy.

So when the World Cup started, I figured that the talk radio gang would basically ignore the tournament unless we lost, at which point they would blame Obama. Actually, around the time the futbol matches were beginning on the pitches, Glenn Beck went on a tirade (tirade being his default speaking mode; when he goes to the grocery store he goes on tirades about double-bagging his eggs) about how Obama's policies were the “World Cup of policies” or something, in that Americans didn't like either, but both were being “shoved down our throat,” a phrase Beck picked up at the Conservative Commentator Subtly Homoerotic Implication Workshop. Other conservatives with mouths also mocked soccer, including some guys on convicted felon G. Gordon Liddy's talk show, who noted that the left was pushing soccer in schools (I guess because there are soccer teams?) and that originally, soccer was played using a human head as a ball in South America. Running through all of this discourse was the notion that soccer is being forced upon people who don't care for it and will never want to watch it. It's unclear who, exactly, is pushing soccer—ESPN? Illegal aliens? The Communists—but these conservatives aren't buying the notion that soccer is worth paying attention to.

If these guys haven't been watching the World Cup because they resent it being rammed suggestively down their pink throats, they've been missing out, as anyone who was sitting at a bar at roughly 11 am Eastern Time can tell you. That's when Landon Donovan's goal saved the US team from the brink of elimination and opened up the possibility of us making a deep run this year (we have to beat Ghana, then the winner of Uruguay-South Korea to get into the semifinals. Knock on wood). Even if you didn't understand the complexities of soccer you could appreciate a last-minute, game-winning score that gets the team into the playoffs. And even if you're a casual soccer fan like me you've been able to find plenty of exciting moments, even in games that soccer haters would sneer at--Algeria's 0-0 tie with England, for instance, was a very exciting game despite the score. I hope G. Gordon Liddy watches the next US match—and not just because if he's watching the game he won't be able to break into hotels. It'd be a genuine shame if he missed out on something good just because some people he doesn't agree with like it too.

Beck and company remind me of hipsters. Not in the plaid-shirt way, thank god, but in the way they are concerned with not just the things that they enjoy, but with the things that other people enjoy and expect them to enjoy. You might remember the backlash against Vampire Weekend because the music blogs loved them too much, proving that if hipsters hate one thing more than jocks it's being told what they should consider cool. If you first heard about Vampire Weekend from Pitchfork, your knee-jerk reaction might not have had anything to do with the music; it might have gone something like, “Oh, another fucking hipster band? (makes international symbol for “wanking” with right hand) I ain't buying that shit.”

I suspect conservatives went through the same thought process with soccer, and that's the shitty thing about the “culture wars” that are supposedly being waged on cable news channels: aspects of life that really have nothing to do with politics get politicized. Why is soccer-bashing a conservative talking point? What could possibly be the—sorry for the pun—goal of hating soccer? I guess some may honestly just dislike the World Cup for non-political reasons (Beck doesn't like sports at all), but shit—if you want to convince someone that watching televised athletic competitions of any kind is worthwhile, that clip above might be a good place to start. In fact, let's see it again:

If you don't like watching that you either aren't American, have a pathological fear of people not using their hands, or you have really indoctrinated yourself into hating anything that liberals would like. Sports can be political, like when this happened, but this isn't about politics. The World Cup has nothing to do with liberals or conservatives—I feel stupid pointing something so obvious, but some people would apparently disagree. Fucking hipster conservatives. Go supervise the writing of your ghostwritten best-selling thriller novels, why don't you? The rest of us will be watching stuff like this:

COMING UP NEXT WEEK: I read Glenn Beck's novel and liveblog it! Don't miss out!

Why Americans Talking About the World Cup Suck, Part 1

2010-06-17T15:49:00.000-07:00

As I've said before, Rick Reilly is probably a nice guy. A sports columnist that full of warm-hearted cliches about sportsmanship and the joys of competition has got to be a decent human being, or at least a rough approximation of a decent human being. But Reilly suffers from a disease that many writers, actors, cartoonists, and other creative types become afflicted with late in their careers—call it the Success Syndrome. When they finally become widely recognized and praised for their work, they lose a little bit of that hunger that made them worthy of recognition in the first place, and they have less of an incentive to break new ground. Some artists, the ones who are motivated entirely by an internal drive, overcome the Success Syndrome and explore new ground—think of the Flaming Lips, for instance. Others seem to get lazy. Watching Jack Nicholson chew apart the scenery in The Departed, or Al Pacino yell his way through any of the nonsensically-plotted thrillers he's starred in, you forget that both of them were some of the best actors of their generation. And if you listen to that recently re-released album Exile on Main Street, you'll be shocked that the Rolling Stones were a great rock band who wrote and recorded great songs before they became victims of the Success Syndrome.

Maybe that's a bullshit theory, but it's the only way to explain Rick Reilly's latest column, which reads as if the author went on a three day crack binge, stole a car, wound up in an Oklahoma City bar where he annoyed the other patrons with overwrought speeches about John Wooden and the “right way” to put on socks, got thrown out of the bar, charged a motel room to his ESPN expense account, and wrote the column in a speed-driven deadline panic while drinking cheap whiskey and watching Spanish-language recaps of the World Cup games before falling asleep with his head in the lap of an underage prostitute. Now, I'm not saying that's exactly what Reilly did—he's probably a good family man blah blah blah—but given the sloppiness and borderline incoherence of the column, it's a distinct possibility.

The basic thrust of the piece is that Reilly has some problems with the World Cup, and has chosen a list of ten of them to comment on. It's sort of like that “Top 10” thing David Letterman does, which incidentally started out as a way for Letterman and his writers to make fun of hackneyed list-based humor. Three of Reilly's ten complaints are actually the same one: he doesn't like the vuvuzelas, which are horns that the World Cup crowds have been blowing continuously during matches—I guess the joke is that Reilly really, really hates the vuvuzelas and can't stop thinking about them, and also can't mute his television.

Reilly's other points are a little less sensical. He thinks the things that players on the bench wear are ugly, he thinks the goalie gloves are ugly, he thinks the World Cup trophy itself is ugly. “It looks like something you'd use to prop open your Tuff Shed door during spring cleaning,” Reilly said, using some drug slang I didn't fully understand. He calls the refs pussies for handing out yellow cards, noting that a card wouldn't stop Rasheed Wallace from punching Carmelo Anthony, which was even more confusing than the Tuff Shed line. They don't hand out yellow cards in the NBA, but they have technical fouls, which are exactly the same thing. Is Reilly complaining about the physical properties of the cards themselves?

Things get more mysterious still as Reilly bitches about how you never know how many minutes exactly are left in a match because of stoppage time. He claims this confuses the players, which sort of seems unlikely. He complains about drawn matches, saying, “All these ties are about as exciting as a Jonas Brothers roundtable on sex.” I would actually be very interested to hear the Jonas Brothers' opinions on sex, but then again I thought that the 1-1 tie between the US and England was a really exciting game.

Of course, there's always the possibility that Reilly was joking. There are a lot of sentences that are supposed to be jokes, I'm pretty sure. He keeps talking about “Ace Young,” who I guess is a widely known singer--maybe Reilly's kid or underaged prostitute is a fan of his? The stuff about vuvuzelas was definitely meant to be a joke. I bet the idea for the entire column originated when Reilly was staring at his bloodshot, dilated pupils in the mirror and repeating “vuvuzela” to himself and realized it was a funny word. Maybe the resemblance to “vulva” made him laugh. Maybe he wrote a whole bunch of jokes about the vulvas of the European players had because they're a bunch of queer trannies who play a sport where nobody won or lost ever and they didn't physically attack the refs, but those bits got cut by his editors at ESPN.

More likely, this wasn't edited at all and Reilly only wrote it because he felt obligated to write about the biggest sporting event in the world. He had no knowledge whatsoever of soccer, however--despite being a professional sports columnist—and watched maybe one game before writing some stream-of-consciousness one-liners that he didn't even bother connecting to one another with transitions. So what if it isn't funny or analytical or anything at all, really, other than a nice example of anti-soccer attitudes held by Americans? Reilly's a famous sports columnist who gets paid enough money to buy all the uncut heroin he wants—he can afford to do work that would embarrass any self-respecting amateur blogger.

World Cup Buzz Kill [ESPN]

Why The NBA Finals are like Porn

2010-06-15T16:55:00.000-07:00

Note: This blog has taken a short vacation and normal programming will resume shortly. Meanwhile, here is a breakdown of the NBA Finals, because I haven't written about them yet:

Pretty much anyone can play basketball, and pretty much anyone can have sex. You need a certain amount of physical development and experience to do either with any ability, but all you need to play basketball or have sex are a ball and a hoop or some functioning genitalia, respectively. In both fields, there's a pretty sharp divide between the amateurs and professionals―I could show you videos of myself shooting free throws or jacking off, but no one wants to see that, let alone pay me for it. But there is a select group of talented individuals who have honed their craft to the point where millions of people want to watch them do professionally what most people only do for fun, namely: fucking each other or putting a ball through a hoop. I've been watching these professionals quite a lot over the past few weeks, both at my neighborhood sports bar surrounded by rabid Boston Celtics fans and in my apartment when my roommates are gone, and I've begun to notice a substantial amount of overlap between the NBA Finals and hardcore pornography:

Firstly, both feature performers who have an immense amount of raw physical talent. Pau Gasol is able move his body and handle the ball in ways few 7-footers can, and Peter North has a gigantic cock, although maybe Gasol has a gigantic cock too. Ordinary-sized people with ordinary-sized cocks simply can't do the things Gasol and North can―we have to admit that we aren't going to be world-famous porn stars or make First Team All-NBA. All we can do is watch them do their thing in awe and masturbate.

But it's not just about freakish physical attributes. Ray Allen is fairly tall, sure, but he doesn't have the kind of athleticism that, say, Rajon Rondo does―Allen's gift to basketball is his jump shot, which is a thing of beauty that is clearly the product of long, long hours of practice and honing. Similarly, that anonymous German woman I saw on YouPorn last night didn't have the best body in the world, but she was able to get an extraordinarily large penis all the way into her mouth without gagging or tearing up. I can only imagine that this took a lot of practice as well. She and Allen both know that if you want to be the best, you better get in your reps.

There's an advantage not just in practicing, but in real experience on the court or in front of the camera. We saw that in Game 3 of the Finals, when Derek Fisher, supposedly too old and washed up to play at a high level anymore, closed out a tough road win with 11 fourth-quarter points. You can also see that when you watch the later films of porn legends like Jenna Jameson or Ron Jeremy. Like Fisher, they've clearly got a lot of miles on their bodies, but they have what it takes to come through in the clutch.

But it's not about the individual performers. Exhibitions like dunk contests and solo webcams shows can be impressive, but to my mind they're just that―exhibitions. It's impressive that Dwight Howard can jump that high, just as it's impressive that that woman can work that dildo that far up her ass. But I want to see Howard dunk in a game, and I want to see that ass interact with a live human cock. The beauty in basketball and porn is that they're ultimately examples of what we can accomplish when we work together, whether that means a perfectly executed possession in Phil Jackson's triangle offense or a really well-filmed amateur threesome. I really like threesomes.

Finally, no matter how much of the NBA Finals I watch and no matter how many porn sites I surf through, I'm not going to see LeBron James. Even though that would be awesome.

Why White People in My Neighborhood Suck

2010-06-07T15:20:00.000-07:00

My intention was to never divulge any kind of personal information on this blog, but for this topic I need to mention some personal details: I'm white, I don't have very much money in the bank, and I live in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Bed Stuy, for those of you who don't know, is a historically black, historically fairly poor and crime-ridden neighborhood. Do the Right Thing was filmed here, and so was Dave Chapelle's Block Party. Mos Def and Talib Kweli grew up around here, as did the Notorious B.I.G., who may have rapped in the basement of my building back when it doubled as a kind of makeshift club (Biggie also reportedly sold crack a few blocks away). There's a mural of Ol' Dirty Bastard's driver's license on a wall outside a liquor store near my building, and there's other murals scattered through the neighborhood that memorialize lesser-known folks who died early thanks to guns and drugs.

I'm not trying to brag about how “hood” my 'hood is—and it certainly has gotten safer in the past few years—but there's some areas of Bed Stuy that are, undeniably, pretty rough. There are a few corners where crack merchants hang out, a bunch of project towers, and countless fried chicken franchises, liquor stores, and bodegas where you can buy beer without an ID any time of the day or night. Bed Stuy's also home to a huge amount of diversity. Within the radius of a few blocks you can find Jamaicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Mexicans, Africans (I mean African Africans, not “African Americans”), American-born blacks, Orthodox Jews, robe-wearing Muslims, Christians who attend hole-in-the-wall storefront churches with names like “The Congregation of the Journeyers of the Holy Spirit,” and even a few white folks, like me.

Well, more than “a few” white folks these days. From my window, I'm watching the fascinating, stop-motion process known as “gentrification.” I guess I'm a part of that process too, even though I didn't ask to be. White people looking for cheap rents—mostly ex-students and the like--have started to trickle in to Bed Stuy, mostly around the edges, and as if it's all part of some master plan the organic food stores and fancy coffee shops have come in with them. You can see sociological trends happen in real time, which is exciting and depressing at the same time. In the past year, a new coffee and wine bar opened up three blocks away, a brunch-serving “gastropub” appeared just down the road, and the building next to mine was transformed from a vacant house into a classy condominium, that people (white people) actually bought. There are other condos in Bed Stuy now too, even some in fancy new glass buildings that look like they've been transplanted from SoHo.

This is part of the urban life cycle, right? The poor, struggling students and artists move to a neighborhood—usually a neighborhood that has a lot of ethnic minorities and poor people in it—because they like cheap rent. Then some businesses that cater to those artists and students open, like new bars and restaurants, and then more white people who like bars and restaurants and feel that the slight scent of urban decay adds “authenticity” or whatever move in, and then rents go up and buildings get renovated or torn down and rebuilt and some people probably protest or whatever but it doesn't make a difference, and before you know it there's a Whole Foods in the Bowery. And the poor people, including the next generation of poor students and artists, find somewhere else to live.

I'm guilty of being part of this, because I enjoy some of the services gentrification provides, like good coffee places that have wi-fi, bars that have fancy beers that taste like fruit and chocolate on tap, and attractive young white women walking around during the summer months. But what I don't like about gentrification—and why I wish all of the white people would just stop pouring into Bed Stuy, can be contained in this anecdote:

I'm getting on the G subway line to go to work, and I need a new Metrocard. So I wait in line behind a few people waiting to use the machine, which, as is so often the case at the Bedford-Nostrand stop, isn't working—this time, it's not taking credit cards. The young, earnest-looking white woman (she looked like an sophomore at NYU) who was dutifully feeding her card to the machine, eventually figured this out and turned to the young woman behind her and asked if there was an ATM nearby. Of course, this being Bed Stuy, every corner bodega has an ATM in it, and there's a bodega on nearly every corner. After being told to go to the bodega right next to the station, the young white woman paused and said, “Yeah, but uh, is it legit?”

I'll stop here to note an important, often overlooked facet of gentrification: the first wave of poor white people who move in (including me) don't want the neighborhood to change, even though their arrival is the first step in a process that will change the neighborhood beyond recognition. I like living in Bed Stuy and not so I can impress people with my “realness.”

First of all, I like the cheap rent. I like buying cheap beer at (sometimes non-legit) bodegas that are open late and always friendly. I like the little kids hanging out on their stoops at one in the morning, and I like the teenagers who roll blunts on the steps of my building after buying weed from my neighbor. I like saying hello to the friendly homeless guys who might be crackheads, and I like walking down Franklin Avenue when the elderly, welfare-dependent drunks are sitting in the sun and hollering at each other across the street. On Sundays, I like looking out my window and watching the old ladies in insane hats navigate the church steps with their canes and walkers. I even like walking past the derelict hulks of vacant brownstones, or at least I prefer those to the newer, glass-and-steel structures going up lately. I don't need a Whole Foods, or even a Trader Joes, and I definitely don't need any more “hip” bars designed to cater to gentrifiers. If these things come in and the neighborhood gets “whiter” and my rent goes up, I'll probably move. If my rent goes up too much, I'll be forced to.

So, to the girl who's looking for a “legit” ATM: get the fuck out of Bed Stuy and get your parents to find you a place in Park Slope or Williamsburg or Brooklyn Heights. You probably shop at Fresh Direct rather than supporting the local shops, you're probably scared of your own neighbors, and you'd probably spend your time at the Starbucks that your kind will inevitably bring. I'd rather live next to a drug dealer than you, because at least a drug dealer is a part of the community in a way you clearly don't want to be. People like you give white people in black neighborhoods a bad name.

A Series of Tubes Sucks Us Down the Drain: Facebook and the Lost Potential of the Internet

2010-05-28T17:25:00.000-07:00

Facebook is one of the most useful, most popular websites in existence. It offers, free of charge, a number of services that nearly everyone wants—services that weren't even imaginable 20 years ago. You can let all your friends know what you are doing at any given moment, or you can tell them all a joke, or you can post a link to something and comment on it. You can post pictures of yourself or your cat or other people and share them with all your friends, or the entire internet if you want. You can post links to blogs like this one, or videos, or anything at all that has a URL. You can voice your support of a cause, politician, music group, or abstract idea by hitting the “Like” button or joining a group whose members can share relevant content and have discussions about that cause/artist/idea. You can invite your “friends,” many of whom you don't know very well or actually hate, to parties, political rallies, and flash mobs. You can play a variety of online games, some of which are not even disguised marketing schemes. And you can watch all of the people you share tenuous social connections do all of these things in real time. I'm on Facebook right now, and maybe you are too.

So why do so many people hate it?

Maybe “hate” is too strong a word, but many, many people have voiced criticism of Facebook in the last few months, mainly over the site's privacy polices. Wired ran a disturbing article about the site censoring the content of private messages, as well as a somewhat rambling op-ed railing against Facebook; Gizmodo listed 10 reasons to quit Facebook; Time published a somewhat critical profile of the company; and quitfacebookday.com is exactly what it sounds like. There have been other attacks from more obscure sources as well, like this blog entry, which I read because my friend linked to it on Facebook.

Some of the criticisms are, too my mind, pretty minor. The author of the last post, for instance, describes a case where his friend got his account deleted for posting a picture of his cock, which is clearly against Section 3.7 of the Terms of Use Agreement. The author didn't notice his friend was kicked off and the friend missed out on some parties because he wasn't invited to them on Facebook—this shows that terms of use agreements are not merely randomly selected strings of syllables and that you should have ways of communicating other than Facebook. I'm also not convinced by attempts to portray Facebook as a Big Brother-esque monster who is logging our every keystroke—the site may have access to our personal information, but only because we put our personal information on a website whose stated purpose is to share personal information with others. No one forces you to use Facebook, although the way some bloggers talk, you'd think that was the case.

The meatier concerns over Facebook involve the site's privacy settings, which are complex and change every few months in response to user complaints. The basic problem is simple and practically unfixable under Facebook's current rubric: people want to pick exactly which of their “friends” sees what. If I want to share a status update that says, “Damn, I am really wasted considering it's not even noon,” I don't want my mother to see that. And I don't want my boss to see photos of me partying in a different city the night before I call in sick. But to Facebook, everyone is either a stranger, a “Friend,” or a “Friend of a Friend;” there's no way to differentiate between my family members, my coworkers, my oldest friends who now live in other cities, and the people I don't really know but friend anyway. We want to filter the information we give out on Facebook the way we do in real life, but we can't. Or to quote Marlo of The Wire, “You want it to be one way, but it's the other way.”

The way it is is this: Facebook is one of the first websites to take advantage of the internet's incredible, essentially unlimited capacity as a tool to share information. “Information” being not just academic papers, as in the days of ARPANET, but everything. Text, videos, photos, games, software, music--whatever the fuck you want, you can share and spread among friends, strangers, and people you've had sex with exactly one time, using a service not unlike what Facebook is now. The total, perfect, probably unrealizable form of the internet is communism on servers—everyone being able to access anything, all the time. Information is so plentiful it becomes free. The world's greatest library in history downloadable to every laptop without money changing hands. We could have that right now without any new technologies, except as the case of Facebook shows, we aren't ready.

For starters, users still regard information as private property. In the Time article, the author casually notes, “There's something unsettling about granting the world a front-row seat to all of our interests,” without further analysis. He's not talking about personal details like phone numbers, addresses, and other tidbits that could aid identity thieves, he's talking about a concern people have that people he doesn't know will know what he likes. What forbidden desires does he have that he doesn't want broadcasted? Similarly, Ryan Singel of Wired wants to “support an anti-abortion group without my mother or the world knowing,” which he thinks is a problem Facebook should be able to solve. Mr. Singel: if you want to donate money to anti-abortion cause, that is not something you need to tell Facebook. And if you fear that your peers will ostracize you for your political beliefs, maybe you need new peers. And are you really that afraid of your mother? I personally have no problem with giving the world a front-row seat to all of my interests, and I know a number of people who feel the same way. I like the Flaming Lips, sandwiches, and heterosexual intercourse, and I'm not afraid to let everyone know. One interesting question is whether the babies being born right now will have the same hang-ups concerning the sharing of interests that Mr. Singel and the man from Time have. Or will they use social networking sites as naturally as we use toilets?

I don't want to let Facebook itself off the hook though: it's not as if Mark Zuckerman and co. give a shit about my information-sharing utopia. The censoring of private messages between users is disturbing, but it comes from the attitude that they own the data that users choose to share with one another. This is spelled out specifically in Section 2.1 the User Agreement (linked to twice because if you use Facebook, you should read it), which says: “If you upload something, our company owns it just as much as you do.” The way Facebook chooses to use the information they own is to share it with advertisers, which allows them to make unspecifiably large amounts of money without charging its grouchy, constantly complaining users anything. The internet, despite its theoretical potential to become an anarchic hacker's wet dream of information-sharing, is run by for-profit companies like Facebook, and those companies generally make their by selling your personal information to other companies.

(This project offers hope to disgruntled Facebook users. I advise those folks to donate to the cause, but I'm holding my breath until I see a detailed explanation of who is going to be paying for these “seed” servers and how.)

The Time article warns that without more “transparency,” Facebook will become “the web's sketchy Big Brother, sucking up our identities into a massive Borg brain to slice, dice and categorize for advertisers.” That Borg model, of course, is exactly the model that will make Facebook and part-owners Microsoft the most money. Transparency and openness are for hippie programmers who don't conceive of the web as just another money-making machine. And what, really, is wrong with ads that target me based on my stated interests? If we're going to have advertising on the web, I'd rather see ads for things that I might actually use rather than ads for new cars I don't want and can't afford.

Like the Borg, Facebook is constantly adapting and seems impossible to kill. The recent changes to the privacy settings have made them (I think) fairly intuitive and easy to use, and whatever points Facebook's critics have, they haven't been very persuasive (quitfacebook.com has 23,000 committed quitters as of this writing, compared to over 4,000 Facebook users who want Slavoj Zizek to host Saturday Night Live). The truth is, there isn't a single website that does everything that Facebook does, except for maybe the still-imaginary Diaspora project linked to above. Someday, I imagine Facebook will be replaced by a sleeker, hipper replacement just as Friendster and MySpace have been replaced. But if that replacement site is just another for-profit service that regards information as a way to make a buck, and the population at large still imagines information to be the same thing as private property, expect exactly the same thing to happen.

The Most Worthless Thing On The Internet, Pretentious Northern Band Edition

2010-05-25T12:39:00.000-07:00

A while back, I found the most worthless thing on the internet. I thought that what amounted to a dryly written recap of a baseball game that never happened and never could happen would be the most useless thing ever conceived. I was wrong. This is the most useless thing on the internet, courtesy of Spin Magazine and apocalyptic Canadians Arcade Fire.

It's sort of like when bands give away a single or part of an album for free, in the hopes that people will pay money for the whole thing. Many bands do this, for instance, on NPR's "First Listen." Whole albums are available for streaming ahead of their official release date so fans and prospective fans can hear it--then, when the album comes out, the streaming stops and they have to buy it in order to continue to hear the music they've been enjoying. (Or they could just go to YouTube, but that's a discussion for another day.) It seems like a good way to attract media attention, gain good will from your fans, and maybe sell more albums.

That's not what the Arcade Fire did. Instead, they released two 10-second snippets of music that will be on their next album. It sounds okay, although one 10-second sample is just an instrumental, but that's not the point. Presumably they recorded and mastered and mixed both of these songs in their entirety, since recording only ten seconds of music would be insane, so why not just fucking put both songs out there? Do they think this will make people want the new album more? Did they read The Game and decide that being withholding would get them laid? Or does Arcade Fire believe that 20 seconds of music from them is equivalent to a whole song or a whole album by another band?

Maybe they have the right idea though. I'll give it a try--here is a preview of my next blog post:

...the problem with information is...

Wasn't that awesome?

[From Spin]

Making Monday Worse: We Have No Money, But Our GDP Is Doing Great

2010-05-24T13:32:00.000-07:00

Monday is here again, and it means everyone has to go to work. Well, not everyone. If you are one of those parents who needed government-funded daycare to watch your children while you were at your job, you aren't going to work today, because, fuck, that daycare subsidy doesn't exist any more and you have to watch your kids instead. If you are a European who is approaching what used to be retirement age, however, you can look forward to many Mondays of hard work ahead because, fuck again, European countries are going to be bankrupted soon by all of their old pensioners living off of the government. I don't really understand exactly what happened, but all of a sudden there's less money in the world, and every single government in the world is poorer.

Ayn Rand's followers, those pillars of self-reliance who probably couldn't get laid in high school, might be rejoicing at the dawning of this new era, where even Europe is turning away from social safety nets. Then again, Randians had to deal with the embarrassing sight of favorite son Rand Paul* deliver a rambling defense of his criticism of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, during which he somehow got around to saying,

"Do you say that you should have the right to bring your gun into a restaurant even though the owner of the restaurant says 'well no, we don't want to have guns in here' the bar says 'we don't want to have guns in here because people might drink and start fighting and shoot each-other.'"

What? Maybe we should have laws against discrimination and bringing guns to bars, is that what's he's saying? Or is Rand saying that the government is forcing bars to serve the heavily armed? If so, I'm against it.

Meanwhile, oil is still leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, a bullfighter became an internet phenomenon after getting his throat gored open, and Brooklyn continues to fill up with dead animals. But on the positive side, neoliberal policies have had a positive effect on the US GDP! Doesn't that make you feel better?

*Yeah, Rand isn't a “true libertarian,” blah blah, blah. He's pretty close for someone who could actually get elected. And why would a libertarian run for public office anyway? Shouldn't they be busy enough being titans of industry or whatever?

Sports Sucks at Our Souls

2010-05-23T08:20:00.000-07:00

EMBED-We Are Lebron Video - Watch more free videos
The above video is what sports are all about. It's both heartwarming and heartbreaking—a collection of Cleveland “celebrities” who have to be identified by subtitles (like Peter Lawson Jones, the Cuyahoga County Commissioner, who I imagine does very important work) make a plea to LeBron in song form. LeBron James, in case you didn't know, can choose where to play next year, and if he chooses to play somewhere else than Cleveland, the Cavaliers will revert back to being one of the worst teams in the NBA, as they were before the Coming Of LeBron, and Cleveland will once again become a city without any winning sports franchises. Stripped of the half-sung melody, that song embodies the motto of every poor sports fan in Cleveland: “Please stay, LeBron. Please, LeBron, stay!”

But the fans have no control over what LeBron will do, just like they had no control over the selection of the ever-changing, always-inadequate supporting cast he had for the past seven years. Yet a whole lot of Clevelanders are going to be upset when (if) he leaves, or ecstatic if he stays. This is the problem with being a sports fan, this is why people who don't follow sports are mystified by the whole process: why do we choose to be emotionally invested in something we have literally no control over?

I'm not referring to the individual games, which can be frustrating, exhilarating, gut-wrenching, sometimes even fun to watch. The more maddening thing is the larger games that go on outside of the playing field: the free agent markets and the drafts of the various sports, the hiring and firing of the people in the front office who make choices about the players, the politics and economics of constructing new stadiums, the occasional departure of teams from cities—and in LeBron's case, the departure of a player who basically was the entire team. Franchises are affected for years by these decisions (in the case of a team's moving away from a city, they're literally destroyed), and the fans can do nothing about them.

This is worth complaining about because outside of the NFL--where short careers and a salary cap have made it possible for a team to be very bad, then very good, then very bad again in a short number of years—most franchises are mired in a perpetual slump. Baseball teams like the Mariners, Astros, Nationals (nee Expos), Royals, Rangers, Orioles, Giants, Padres, Reds, Brewers Blue Jays, Pirates, and Indians have gone an entire generation without reaching the World Series, and mostly without hope of doing so. It's sort of weird that the Pirates and Royals still have fans, actually. Why subject yourself to lost season after lost season? In the NBA more teams make the playoffs, but only seven teams have won any championships at all in 26 years—and that's because of the aberrational Mavericks-Heat Finals a few years ago. What is a fan of the Kings or the Bucks or the Pacers to do? Your team is just the guys who the real, actually good teams have to beat in order to play each other in the finals.

There's the pain of watching your team lose on the field, and that's bad enough. (My personal low was watching my Mariners, after winning 116 games in the regular season, lose to the Yankees in the 2001 ALCS. It didn't even go seven games.) But how much worse is it to know that your team is definitely going to lose even before they get on the field? Atlanta Hawks fans know this feeling, as do Kansas City Royal fans. Or if they do win one game, you know that it's a fluke, and the season is going to be another forgotten struggle to reach mediocrity. New York Knicks fans know this feeling, as do Seattle Mariner fans like me.

Fans of losing teams can't even claim to be “cursed” as some of the more famous losing teams in history have claimed to be. The reality is that most of the times, teams are bad for a long time because the people managing them are incompetent. The Knicks' Isiah Thomas years are one example (remember when he gave Jerome James all that money?), but less widely known is the case of Bill Bavasi in Seattle. I won't go through the list of bad signings Bavasi made, but you can read about them here, or just start typing his name into Google and “Bill Bavasi worst GM” will appear as a suggestion.

The Mariners finally fired Bavasi two years ago, but becoming a good Major League Baseball team, let alone a consistently good one, takes a long time and a lot of luck, and they aren't a perfectly managed organization by any means—they still believe that Ken Griffey Jr. is a Major League player, for instance. If I have any hope for the Mariners, it's that five years from now they will make the playoffs and probably lose to the Red Sox and then have their best players hired away by the Yankees. And I guess I also hope they don't leave Seattle and then start winning for another city's fans, the way the Thunder (nee Sonics) did. That's not inspiring. Someone once said, “The sports section records man’s accomplishments; the front page has nothing but man’s failures,” a quote that wouldn't be understood by anyone from Seattle, Cleveland, Buffalo, or Kansas City. Our teams fail and fail again, yet we feel bad each time.

If I wanted to make some broad connections between sports and society, I might note that nearly everything, not just the success of our favorite team, is out of our hands. (The Cold War was so terrifying because everyone on the planet might die for basically no reason at all, and without having the chance to escape. The recent financial crisis is upsetting in the same way—you might do everything right, or think you were doing everything right, and you lost your house or your savings anyway.) But let's keep it simple. Being a sports fan means subjecting yourself to years of rooting for the losing side, opening the paper to sad box score after sad box score, and you hope that your team winning a title will balance it all out. Does it? I don't know and I doubt anyone from Cleveland will know any time soon.

Making Monday Worse: Sucking Up Oil Edition

2010-05-17T08:40:00.000-07:00

Good news everyone! Remember that damaged drilling operation that is now constantly leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico? The one where no one knows how much oil is being leaked? Yeah, well, problem solved, sort of, according to British Petroleum. But not really, since the tube that is now attached to the leak is a “stopgap measure” at best. Since the leak started, it's become increasingly clear that there wasn't really a plan for this scenario, and all sorts of increasingly absurd-sounding solutions have been publicly mulled over. Can we put a dome over the leak? Fuck, guess not! Can we use disgusting logs of hair (pictured above) to soak up the oil? What about hay? Hey, let's ask the general public for ideas! (My favorite: “Is setting the spill on fire an option?”)

You don't have to be a hemp-wearing environmentalist to think that this whole “Extracting poisonous chemicals from the ground” thing is overrated. But unless you want to go back to the pre-combustion engine days when everyone was churning butter, killing whales to get lamp oil, and worrying about the massive amounts of horse feces clogging city streets, there really isn't a way to stop drilling for oil. A bunch of you just said, “Wind power!” but that's not an option yet, as right-wing asshole Robert Bryce points out. Denmark, which is one of the “greener” countries in the world, gets 15 percent or so of its electricity from wind, but it also engages in a ton of offshore drilling, so much so that it actually exports oil. (Left-wing asshole Matt Wasson notes that CO2 emissions have been reduced in Denmark, but doesn't mention Denmark's drilling and coal importing.) And if one of the most wind-power-reliant countries in the world is getting less than 20 percent of its energy from wind, well, shit.

Update: More good news everyone! The Supreme Court decided (barely) that we shouldn't send teenagers to prison for life if they haven't killed anyone. I for one did not know the US was doing that. Are we still pretending that prison is a place to rehabilitate criminals?

The Future Food Shortage Will One Day Suck

2010-05-15T16:53:00.000-07:00

If you're like me, you enjoy eating, look forward to eating, and have assumed for pretty much your entire life that you would be able to keep eating for as long as you were alive. That is, if you live in a first-world country you have to figure that you will die of AIDS, cancer, heart disease, gunshot wound, drug overdose, nuclear terrorism, or car accident before you will die of starvation. Ha ha! Turns out you actually should worry about starving to death—at least, this British guy does. He argues that rising population, rising energy costs, climate change, and the crushing poverty that most agricultural workers worldwide live under could combine to create a “food crisis” not unlike the oil crises we've already seen. (It's a long article, but worth skimming at least.) He adds that the increased reliance on biofuels will mean that less of the crops we grow will be used for food, thus worsening the hypothetical future food shortage.

He lives in the UK, which imports way, way more food than the US does, so Americans shouldn't necessarily worry too much about this (not that Americans will worry about anything anyway), but the US now imports more food than it exports, and some of that food comes from China, which doesn't hold its food industry to the same rigorous quality-control standards that our FDA does in regards to American slaughterhouses. And while Tyler Cowen, who is smarter than me, isn't all that worried, we should remember that food is not infinite.

We might not end up actually starving, but food could get a lot more expensive if erosion, global warming, and random natural disasters/God start working together. For instance, the price of 40 ounces of beer in my neighborhood was be two bucks in 2006, and now it's three—a huge increase, percentage-wise. We should remember that most of the people who were born on this planet had to deal with food shortages, and this period of plenty is an aberration.

Why Taking a Forced Gap Year Sucks

2010-05-14T10:03:00.000-07:00

The other day I was emailing a friend of mine now living in Portland, Oregon, and I asked him if he had found any work. That's a pretty normal thing to ask the folks in my age/education demographic bracket these days—my bracket being kids in their early 20s who just graduated from prestigious or semi-prestigious universities who are mostly the children of middle and upper-middle class parents. Our bracket is getting the shit kicked out of it. My friend is living with his girlfriend (another bracket-mate, working as a nanny), on food stamps, and writing essays that he hopes to sell for low amounts of money. After sending out application after application via Craigslist and a brief, unhappy stint as a kickball umpire, my anonymous buddy has found work at a “really terrible smoothie shop inside of a gym.” This is a guy who graduated from my school a semester before I did, and who can presumably do something a lot better than telling gym rats exactly how many grams of protein is in the mango-strawberry blend. And he's not unique.

Some of my friends moved back into their parents' houses right after graduation. Others stuck it out in the city of their choice, but they usually got subsidized like a failing financial institution by their parents. Most, feeling the weight of their debt to their parents, took any opportunity to get a job that would give them an independent income—meaning they umpired kickball, scooped ice cream, applied to work at Home Depot just like they applied to Princeton five years ago, and learned the intricacies of government programs like unemployment, Medicaid, and food stamps. A surprising amount of them now play online poker for a living, which means they are smart, math-inclined, and disciplined enough to sit in front of their computer staring at numbers for hours at a time, yet they can't get a job. A whole lot of us work for the census, which is paying good money while it lasts, but knocking on doors like Tim Meadows isn't what we had in mind when we got those fancy degrees handed to us. Some of the people I know are going back to school already, either to get a more “useful” degree or to simply hide out in academia for a little longer.

But enough anecdotal evidence, which any competent economist or SABR-matician will tell you is a bunch of randomly occurring bullshit: here's a page of numbers. The numbers say that despite the progress the economy is making, 16 percent of 20 to 24 year olds are unemployed. That's better than the 16 to 19 year old age bracket, but the job market is always tough on 17 year olds—by the time you're in your 20s, you really should be able to get a job. So why can't my peer group get it together?

As with everything, there are a multitude of reasons. Number one has nothing to do with the economy: a four-year degree doesn't mean what it used to. College enrollment has been rising for decades, to the point where every middle class child is expected to grow up to attend the most expensive university that will have him. We did our duty and went straight from high school to college (which is basically high school where everyone gets laid), and when we graduated and got our piece of paper, we found out that everyone else our age had the same piece of paper, and that a bachelor's degree isn't the ticket to a white-collar job it once was. Even before money turned itself inside out, kids who were too old to really be called “kids” were moving back in with their parents after finding out that graduating from college doesn't automatically make you an independent adult. (The trend even has it's own Wikipedia entry.)

But in these troubling economic times, when “sub prime mortgage” is a part of everyone's vocabulary even if no one knows what it means, it's even tougher for young people to transition from college to a job to a career to an apartment without roaches to the final stage in life when you have kids and multiple bank accounts and don't stay awake late enough to watch The Daily Show. When my graduating class went into the job market we weren't just competing with each other but also with the swarm of older, more experienced workers who had just gotten laid off, for jobs that were getting scarcer and scarcer. Is it any wonder that so many of us are sitting in the basement bedroom where we used to masturbate three times a day as teens, playing poker for a living or scanning and refreshing Craigslist every five minutes?

I don't want to exaggerate—some of my friends, through a combination of luck, perseverance and talent, are doing very well, thank you for asking. But it's worth noting that the government, who is in the business of bailouts these days, hasn't done my demographic any favors. Extending unemployment benefits didn't help, since few of us recent graduates had worked enough hours to claim unemployment in the first place. Cash for Clunkers wasn't designed for people who didn't have cars. And I've yet to understand how the TARP money is going to trickle down to us. Politicians don't really care about young people—for all the talk about how the “middle class” and “small business” are “the backbone of our economy,” no one has mentioned what body part recent college graduates are supposed to be. (But I have a guess.) A while ago I had a daydream that the government would step in and directly create jobs through a new program based on the Works Progress Administration and smart, motivated young people would line up in droves to be part of it, but I guess that would be Socialism, and Socialism is what got us into this mess in the first place. (Wait, what?)

The irony to be found here is that the aspiring artists among my generation are more prepared for this economic climate than the rest of us. Artists expect to go through a period of destitution in their early-to-mid 20s. Hell, they practically look forward to it when they're teenagers. But now everyone is basically a starving artist, and that has created a new and weird hybrid economic caste—raised on middle-class values, educated like the upper-class, and now living below the poverty line. We buy organic food with our food stamps. We break off late-night discussions of Lacan and craft brewing to ask each other if the coffee shop down the street is hiring. We go to the library to use the computer and nod hello to the homeless guys hanging out there. We get mildly embarrassed when the rent check arrives from our parents, but that's wearing off. Most of us did actually work hard in college, and learned some skills that we thought would be useful, but no one is buying what we want to sell.

This sucks, right here.

I have no idea what the long-term impact of our demographic's mini-depression will be. At best, I suppose, we'll just be late bloomers when it comes to starting careers, buying homes, and raising kids. (Actually, at best we will rise as one and seize the country in the grip of revolution, but that's not happening.) At worst...who knows? Maybe twenty years down the road, ours will have turned out to be a generation of filing clerks and coffee serves who have whole libraries of unused knowledge in their heads. But I hope not.

Making Monday Worse: Your International Sucking Update

2010-05-10T12:02:00.001-07:00

Hey there, postindustrial worker bee! You probably think your life is tough because you spent the weekend getting enjoyably shitfaced, or watching that movie that is just an 80-minute Youtube clip of cute babies, or getting shitfaced and then watching the babies movie, and now you have to drag your ass to your air-conditioned cubicle and pretend not to be playing computer solitaire for eight hours or so, but things could be a lot worse. For instance:

You could be associated in any way with the economy of Greece, which is so completely fucked it's threatening to drag the Euro down with it, plus the Greeks are rioting and burning down banks. The European Union is creating a TARP-like fund to protect the Euro but that might not even work, so, uh, yeah. Welcome to the worldwide economic panic of 2010, part II.

Those Greek rioters burned three bank employees to death, which seems like a big deal, but three murders would go almost unnoticed in Jamaica, where people are getting slaughtered every day by the police or by the gangs who have lately taken to butchering their victims with large knives. Jamaica has become one of the most violent places in the world, unnoticed by the college kids who are inhaling hits from their expensive bongs in front of Bob Marley posters as we speak.

Also unnoticed by the genial stoners of our universities who will soon be running our country: the AIDS epidemic in Africa is getting even worse, as the global economic crisis from two paragraphs ago is causing clinics to close their doors and medicine supplies to dry up. According to the article, "For every 100 people put on treatment, 250 are newly infected."

On the somewhat lighter side, a Catholic priest in Zimbabwe is blaming the media for the church's sex scandals, saying "They write and say such and such a priest has been chow-chowing small children – are they not also chow-chowing too?” Well, no. Some sins are worse than others. Like when your priests--who are supposed to be basically non-sexual beings--have sex with children to young to give consent and then your church covers it up and then doesn't fire those priests when their abuse gets revealed to the world, that's a fairly bad sin.

That priest should be glad that the press is just commenting on Catholic chow-chowing, rather than issuing death threats against opposition parties. That's what a government-owned paper in Sri Lanka did, and given the police-state conditions in Sri Lanka, printed death threats are usually serious. The article is (warning) from a socialist publication, but they point out that the Sri Lanka is, like Greece, deep in debt--the country might go from civil war to police state to widespread rioting in the space of two years. So even the Greeks can be thankful they aren't in Sri Lanka, I suppose.

Have an excellent week, and don't buy any Portuguese bonds!

ESPN: Extraordinarily Sucky, Pointless Network

2010-05-09T18:31:00.000-07:00

ESPN is a miracle of marketing. When they started, people didn't think there would be enough sports-related content to fill a 24-hour cable channel and now ESPN has four cable channels (not counting ESPN Deportes) and one of the most popular web sites on the internet. The miracle part is that for a massive organization devoted to sports, ESPN does a remarkably shitty job of analyzing and reporting on sports. There's the “east coast bias” that people often complain about—this time of year, it means Red Sox and Yankees all the time—but there's other things I hate about ESPN.com. The column topics that get recycled every time an athlete says something race-related or gets accused of sexual assault. The willful ignorance of statistics and an over-reliance on “the team that wanted it more won” cliches. The refusal to have any discussions about sports that are elevated above the level of talk radio. And finally, the times when they decide to roll out content that is so pointless it's somewhat mystifying.

Look at this. Look at this! This is a detailed recap, down to a play-by-play, of a game that never happened between the all-time great Yankees and the all-time great Red Sox. I realize not everything on the internet needs to be a great and enlightening bit of art (see Cheezburger, I Can Haz?) but holy fuck is this thing worthless. Just think about how ESPN made this thing: first it was conceived after weeks of editorial meetings, then web pages and text were produced, edited, and sent to multiple people for approval. Fan votes on who the best Yankees and Red Sox had to be tabulated, probably by a computer that was double-checked by some poor intern. All for something that could have been created by a slightly autistic statistician with a massive baseball card collection, some time, and a stained bathrobe. So good job, ESPN! Just when I think you've hit rock bottom, you find a way to keep digging.

[Ultimate Rivalry: Red Sox vs Yankees]

Why iPhones Apps Suck

2010-05-07T07:29:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, an advance in technology is so strange and exciting that you can't help but get your hopes up. When the TV networks started covering political campaigns, some commentators predicted that since ordinary people would see more of the candidates, it would be harder to fool them and more serious, issue-driven campaigns would result—ha! Similarly, the idea of cell phone “apps” is pretty cool, in practice: a whole lot of independent software designers working on shareware that will turn our phones into space-age Swiss Army Knives. The possibilities appear limitless, until you realize that, like with TV and the internet, cell phone apps will basically just allow us to watch bad movies, look at porn, and buy stuff. Any attempt to color outside of the lines will not be tolerated.

Case in point: Atari Teenaged Riot, everyone's favorite German electro-punk group, tried to include a feature on their new app that would cause riots, sort of, only not really—the “Riotsounds” feature would make the phone produce “noise sounds which trigger hysteria and panic within the audience." Sounds kind of ominous, but all the app really does is play some grating techno music. It's not like ATR have access to supervillian-level technology; “Maximum Carnage” is not likely to result. (Although the group did actually start a riot one time.)

Still, ATR's app smacks of intentional anti-authoritarianism—they advise people to play the Riotsounds on the largest speakers they can find—and that made Apple nervous. Acceptable uses of the iPhone apparently include finding restaurant reviews and giving people a multiplicity of ways to purchase music on iTunes, but not encouraging people to take up arms against the police, which is too bad. We already have apps that let capitalists track stocks and buy extraordinarily expensive iPhone cases—where are the apps for the hard-core leftists? It's good to be reminded that no matter how many ads Apple runs with cool, bourgeois hipsters endorsing their products, they don't really want you to rock the boat, which is why some people prefer Microsoft these days—at least they don't pretend to be the good guys.

(Via Pitchfork)

An Announcement About This Blog's New Direction

2010-05-05T12:44:00.000-07:00

I don't really have that many regular readers, I know, but I thought I should make a short statement about a slight shift I'm making in the direction of the blog. We we still be focused on describing the ways this world is eating itself from the inside and commenting on the horrible injustices the populace at large just takes for granted, but we won't be publishing (or lately, trying to publish) multiple entries a week. Instead, there will just be one big essay every week, supplemented by more frequent short posts that link to articles that describe the hole of suck that is everyday life. I apologize in advance for becoming part of the endless cycle of reposting that is the blogosphere. Who knows? Maybe some of the shorter entries will run longer. And if anyone reading this has any interest in guest-blogging, I'm always open to that.

The reason for this change (as if you care) is that I'm busier. I don't discuss my life on this blog, but basically I'm doing a lot more work for other people (including Vice and VBS, which are worth checking out if you've never heard of them) and attempting to write more fiction (which will never appear on this site). I can't write three essays a week on that schedule, and hopefully this way I'll be more focused on the one essay and the quality will improve. Anyway, thanks for reading and check back here every Wednesday or so for new essays, and every day or so for new links.

Why the Song "Imagine" Sucks

2010-05-05T12:24:00.000-07:00

Great pop songs tend to revolve around simple ideas. I Love You and This Is Awesome, I Love You and This Is Awful, Why Won't You Love Me, I Don't Love You Anymore And You Should Leave—those themes cover about 90 percent of the music enjoyed by the world at large. That's not a knock on popular music. There's a lot of variation and nuance that a good songwriter can squeeze out of those four standard tropes—if you don't believe me, listen to every Beatles album before Sergeant Pepper. (After that, the Beatles started writing songs about the topic that makes up the last 10 percent of pop music: We Are On Drugs and Shit Does Not Make All That Much Sense.)

But as some really excellent, really famous songwriters age (or alternately, start hooking up with really pretentious artists whose names rhyme with “Hoko Tone-o”) they try to branch out from these basic themes, either because they're tired of writing about love or because the Have Something Important to Say. Call it Sting Syndrome.* Like adolescents who just read A People's History of the United States, these songwriters stop doing (so many) drugs, look around the world, and discover, shockingly, that there are a lot of problems with it. That's how we get Michael Jackson's “Black or White,” Paul McCartney's and Stevie Wonder's awful “Ebony and Ivory,” and most of all, that's how we got John Lennon's “Imagine.”

Now, I don't know that much about Lennon's post-Beatles career, but I know that “Imagine” is his most famous song, a song I hear in grocery stores and laundromats, a song's whose legacy has lived on thanks to Yoko Ono, who acts like Gandhi wrote the lyrics and has constructed a monument of bullshit and light to it. It's one of the most critically acclaimed songs of the last century and number three on Rolling Stone's list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” And I hate it.

Don't get me wrong—it is catchy. It's got that nice gentle piano riff and a good melody. This is John Motherfucking Lennon we're talking about, after all. The man could have written a song about how much he likes Triscuits and it would have been musically interesting and probably a number five hit in the UK. But the reason everyone likes “Imagine” isn't for its catchiness, it's for its lyrics, which are put on a pedestal along with “Blowin' in the Wind” and the famous bits of the Bible. If you want to read the lyrics, here they are.

Yes, that John certainly is a dreamer. No, he isn't the only one. Many people imagine what it might be like to live in a world with no wars, religion, or countries. That would probably be pretty cool. We'd sit around playing the sitar, smoking really primo dope, and having sex with one another in a variety of positions. So what? Imagining is easy. Everyone imagines, and that's the fucking problem. The difficult part is when you stop imagining and try to get from point A (your shitty life) to point B (the sitars, the fucking, etc). Martin Luther King wasn't a great man because he had a dream, he was a great man because he was willing to get arrested, beaten, and even die for that dream.

Compare MLK's dedication to the worldview expressed in “Imagine.” The song doesn't advocate any action, it doesn't detail any specific problems or solutions it just sort of drifts along and says, “Hey, wouldn't it be great if things were great?” Not every song needs to be a treatise on geopolitics but shouldn't a “meaningful” song actually mean something?

“Imagine” could be the anthem of the ineffectual hippie movement, the people who “broke down barriers” by taking acid, listening to trippy music, and being promiscuous. The song fetishizes thoughts and fantasies and ignores direct action. It explicitly asks the listener to “join the dreamers” in order to make the “world live as one,” which is one of the least-subversive ideas I've ever heard. It's subtle pro-capitalist, pro-establishment propaganda: the institutions the hippies supposedly opposed (the military-industrial complex, big business, etc) would prefer that they keep dreaming—while they're sitting in meditation circles and seeking transcendence, they can be easily ignored. Actually trying to change things is too hard for most people, which is why as the hippies aged and realized that imagining didn't do anything for anyone, they started figuring out ways to make money.

Ironically, young John Lennon was way ahead of the hippies. The Beatles covered “Money (That's What I Want)” early on and wrote cynical, mocking anthems like “Revolution 1.” They realized that the most meaningful, resonant songs are about the endless permutations personal relationships, not just putting your schmaltzy personal philosophy to music. Then Lennon grew his hair out and turned into a caricature of a painfully earnest hippie.

Case in point: the “Bed In” protest he and his new bride Yoko Ono performed in 1969. Non-violent protest is supposed to draw attention to the brutal nature of the forces you are opposing—they hit you, and you don't hit them back, thus drawing attention to the justice of your cause and the injustice of your oppressors. By contrast, sitting in bed and getting people to pay attention to your “protest” because you are famous is just being lazy. I've praised lying in bed before, but not as a form of political action; you should lie in bed because it feels good. Similarly, you should have sex and do drugs and listen to Rock and Roll not because you are expanding your consciousness or breaking down barriers, but because it feels awesome. The problem with the Bed In, Ono's monument to “Imagine,” and the song itself is that they assume that just imagining is good in and of itself, that wishing for an impossible world is somehow helpful.

Maybe if Lennon had lived longer, he'd have the decency to be embarrassed by “Imagine.” Maybe he would have revealed that whole phase of his life to be a complicated satire on the soft and ideologically muddled state of the anti-war movement in the early 70s. But he's dead and, unfortunately, the song he left behind is a meaningless, maudlin, sap-filled ballad that doesn't care enough about its own ideas to examine them. Yes John, it would be nice if there were no countries, but if you want us to get there, we're going to have to kill some people.

*For the young people who are not rock historians: Sting was the frontman for The Police, who recorded some really awesome albums and had a string of hits like “Roxanne” and “Don't Stand So Close to Me” and “Everything She Does is Magic,” which were all great songs about love. Then Sting went solo and recorded the most serious, straight-faced, boring pop-jazz albums ever. Listen to as much of so-serious-it-makes-you-want-to-look-pensively-out-the-window-into-the-rain “Fields of Gold” as you can and then listen to “So Lonely” to get the taste out of your ears and you'll understand why Young Sting kicks Old Sting's ass.

(Note: this blog is now a weekly, with daily (or so) links and shorter entries. Further information here.)

Why the Arizona Immigration Law Sucks

2010-04-25T09:44:00.000-07:00

Arizona just passed its famous anti-illegal immigrant law, and while the law has been criticized for being a vicious, racist law that turns all cops into the immigration police, at least it solves the problem of illegal immigration in Arizona once and for all.

Ha ha! That's a joke, although not a funny one, because while the new law requires illegal aliens who break any laws to be deported and imposes harsher penalties on businesses who hire immigrants, nothing in the law is going to magically remove the visa-less Mexicans from within Arizona's borders. It's going to make illegals even more afraid of the police and other government agencies, it's going to make some legal immigrants nervous if they leave their house without identification, but mostly the law got passed so the politicians who passed it could get reelected.

Arizona is probably the most conservative state in the US, which makes it one of the most right-wing places in the western world. Republicans have dominated both houses of the legislature for decades, and the state has produced politicians like Barry Goldwater, Evan Meacham (the governor who did away with Martin Luther King Day and was later impeached), and Sherriff Joe, who is so stereotypically cruel to the inmates he oversees it seems like he stepped out of an early Coen brothers movie. Compared to those guys, John McCain looks like Nancy Pelosi, which might be why he's losing his primary. Arizona is, in other words, exactly the kind of place where a ~~subtextually racist~~ old school law-and-order measure would be popular among voters. Whether or not it gets overturned in a federal court or actually becomes a deterrent for illegal immigrants isn't totally beside the point for the members of the Arizona Legislature. Good policy or not, they get to go home with a sticker that says “tough on immigration,” and that's what counts. You have to admit, the Arizona Republicans know what their base likes—less Mexicans.

The usual argument for “tough on immigration” laws like this goes something along the lines of: “My grandfather immigrated to this country, but he did so legally and Hispanics should have to do the same. They should wait their turn, and be happy we allow any immigrants into this country at all!” That sounds good, but it completely ignores the reality of Mexico. With the drug war turning into an actual war in the cities and the devastation of rural areas by free-trade policies that force corn farmers to compete with subsidized US corn farms*, it's perfectly reasonable for Mexicans to want to cross the border by any means necessary. Anyone's grandfather would do the same. The Arizona law is aimed at making life worse for illegal aliens, but no matter how much of a police state Arizona becomes, it will still be a lot better than some parts of Mexico. After all, the worst thing the cops can do to an illegal immigrant is send him back.

*For a fairly thorough, though dryly-worded, overview of this subject, check this out.

Things That Don't Suck: Martin Luther King, the Extremist

2010-04-21T12:35:00.000-07:00

I probably don't need to convince you that Martin Luther King Jr., who was assassinated 42 years ago this month, was a good person. We take a whole day off in honor of his birthday. We teach our kids about the “I Have a Dream” speech and the march on Washington. There's a street named after him in nearly every major American city. We know that he wanted us to judge people not on the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, and we can all pretty much agree that that was a good thing to say. A poll from last year showed that 86 percent of Americans had a “favorable” opinion of King, a number that seems shocking low—who are the 14 percent of people who don't like MLK?

There's a movement to build a monument to King in Washington DC, which is something that we might have thought to do a while ago—with all the memorials to wars and fallen soldiers and founding fathers who were also slave owners, there isn't a single monument that references segregation. Just as importantly, maybe the monument will encourage people to find out more about the man. We're not in danger of forgetting about MLK, but there has been a sort of smoothing out of his beliefs in the popular imagination. When people think about King, what comes to mind is sort of a warm, soft glow of brotherhood, a suffusion of hopeful idealism. Worse than that, as time goes on, some of us may start thinking about him as someone who opposed segregation in the South, winning that battle but dying in the process.

Liberals who lionize him tend to forget that he was, most importantly, a Christian, and that his Christian beliefs informed his activism; Republicans who praise him (sometimes, one suspects, to prove that they aren't racist) tend to forget that he was decidedly a liberal; and we all tend to forget that while he lived, King was an extremely divisive figure who wasn't as popular as he is now. A lot of us (especially white liberals) imagine that we would be participating in sit-ins and marches, that we would be “freedom riders” and stand up to the racist southern sheriffs and their dogs, but not many people made that difficult choice at the time. King might have been an idealist, he might have believed in nonviolence, but we should remember that he was willing to go to jail for his ideals, he was willing to have dogs sicced on him and rocks thrown at him for his cause, and to follow him and do what he did was a hard road to travel.

We should remember, too, that he was committed to fighting all kinds of injustice, not just segregation in the South. The “I Have a Dream Speech” gets attention every January, but what about the speech where he denounced the Vietnam war and refered to the Vietcong as “brothers?” What about his campaign to fight poverty in Chicago, for which he moved into a tenement slum and where he found some of the most vicious, violent racism he ever encountered? What about the last cause he was involved in, the garbage workers' strike in Memphis? To reduce MLK's life to a campaign against Jim Crow is an unfair reduction and worse than that, it implies that the problems he fought are a thing of the past. What would King say about the recent ~~anti-Mexican~~ anti-immigrant bill in Arizona? What would he say about the exploitation of third-world workers, or the Guantanamo detainees? The planned MLK memorial depicts an unsmiling King gazing off into the distance, and this seems about right.

Teaching kids about King's life and work is important, but let's not stop at “all men are brothers.” Let's use King's life to teach that, among other things:
-Authority figures, even and especially the police, the church, and America itself can be wrong.
-“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.”
-Sometimes it's possible to change an unjust status quo, sometimes it isn't, but it's your responsibility to change things.
-"The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be."
-Dreams are good to have, but you don't get things done by dreaming.

(To learn more about the MLK memorial and to donate to it's construction, go here.)