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

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
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Lance Armstrong Sucks at Not Being an Asshole

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. Read more!

Some Sucky Resolutions for 2011

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! Read more!

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

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

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. Read more!

Why A-Rod Sucks

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.
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Why Speculative Arguments Suck (Let's All Get High)

Attention potheads: in case you haven't heard—and you might not have, I know many of you do not follow the news—weed may shortly become full-on legal in California. A lot of people, including basically everyone I know, basically think that that's totally awesome, and agree with the pro-pot advocate in the article who said, "Banning marijuana outright has been a disaster, fueling a massive, increasingly brutal underground economy, wasting billions in scarce law enforcement resources and making criminals out of countless law-abiding citizens."

I agree with that last point especially, and I've written about how the drug laws can turn teenagers into criminals before. But the main reason marijuana legalization is on the table has nothing to do with Libertarian principles or anti-drug war talking points. California, you see, is as broke as a stoner in his mom's basement and taxing weed could raise bushels of money the state could spend on things like schools and ad campaigns telling kids how bad marijuana is.

Emphasis on the “could raise money” part. The people who want pot to stay illegal aren't arguing it leads to psychosis or killing your parents or any of those Reefer Madness arguments. They say that once pot is legalized, more people will use it, and that will lead to more “drugged driving” accidents, arrests, treatment centers, etc. They claim that alcohol costs us money because the tax dollars we take in from booze don't make up for the dollars we spend policing alcohol law violations and alcohol-related crime, not to mention the strain on the health care system that drunks represent. The same thing will happen, they say, with pot.

R. Gil Kerlikowske, whose “Drug Czar” title sounds a lot cooler than it really is, made these points and more in a speech to a bunch of cops. (Gil used to be the police chief in Seattle when I lived there, which is the only thing he has in common with this guy.) The speech is pretty persuasive, especially when you're stoned and can't think all that clearly, but it's fundamentally similar to the arguments the weeders—I'm calling them that now—are making. Gil claims that legalization will have a net negative effect on the economy, the weeders claim the effect will be positive, and neither side has any idea what will actually happen.

Will legalization force dealers out of a job and into the ranks of the unemployed? Will taxes on weed mean that the black market will still do great business and still result in crime and police involvement? How much money will taxes actually bring in? Will legalization mean that large corporations get involved directly in the drug trade and force out the home-growing small businessmen who are apparently the lifeblood of our economy? Will more people smoke pot if it's legal? Will it still be cool to get high if the cops aren't after you?

We have no idea what the answers to these questions are, which is why it's important to legalize weed in California. The best argument against Prohibition was Prohibition itself—after a few years of the mob dominating a major industry and a set of laws that turned most of Americans into criminals, we decided to go back to the way it was. Maybe legalizing weed is a terrible fucking idea and everyone will be high all the time and driving their cars when they're high and committing crimes when they're high and no taxes will be collected at all because we're all fucking stoned all the fucking time. But maybe all that will happen and it'll be totally awesome. Either way, we might as well test it out on California because no one will really notice if California degenerates into a drug-fueled orgy or a post-apocalypitc wasteland or a combination of the two.

Right now though, all the arguments for and against legalization are speculation. And as any Seattle Mariners fan who read one of those optimistic preseason predictions that were all over the internet can tell you, sometimes speculation is horribly, horribly wrong. Read more!

Why Light Beer Sucks

Humanity agrees on very little, but we have decided this much: beer is good. Beer is older than democracy, more popular than Jesus, and is enjoyed by Fascists, Communists, Feminists, Sadists, Masochists, Gays, Straights, the Bi-Curious, Polygamists, Polytheists, Monotheists, and Atheists alike. Beer is mentioned in the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh, which is the oldest work of fiction in the world. Beer has been regarded as a gift of the gods by the Egyptians and the Germans and was used as currency during the Middle Ages. Beer advertising is everywhere, even on buses, and it's strange to think that beer was illegal just 80 years ago. There are still “temperance advocates” out there somewhere, one imagines, but they must realize that they are fighting a losing battle, like the Lyndon LaRouche for President people.

Light beer has been around a much shorter time. It was invented not by the Sumerians, but by this guy in the late 1960s. Basically, light beer is beer with fewer calories and less alcohol than ordinary beer. You would think that a product like that would have limited commercial appeal—how many calorie-counting alcoholics can there be?--but you would be very, very wrong. Today, light beers dominate the US market, with six of the top 10 best selling beers of 2008 being “light,” including Michelob Ultra Light, whose advertisements feature athletic exercise enthusiasts who probably don't drink beer, and Miller “Lite,” who apparently does not employ a copy editor. The best selling beer of 2008 was Bud Light (even Obama drinks it!), and since I have had Bud Light before, my natural reaction to this bit of information was to wonder why, in Gilgamesh's name, are so many people drinking this beer?

Maybe beer drinkers are actually health-conscious, but if they are, they aren't paying attention to the nutrition facts. Light beer has fewer carbohydrates, but the difference in calories is fairly small: Bud Light has 110 calories to original Budweiser's 143, while Guinness has 120—if you are trying to improve your health, perhaps you should do more than change your beer brand. (Or, as the source of my calorie information puts it, “You were probably fat before you began drinking beer anyway.”)

Could people be drinking light beer for the taste? Taste is subjective, and if I think Bud Light tastes like piss, perhaps that's due to a defect in my palate. Some people enjoy tofu, others eat dog, diff'rent strokes make the world go 'round. But surely, no one thinks of Bud Light as their favorite beer. It doesn't taste exactly like water, but it tastes more like water than beer normally does. It's the beer you drink when you don't like the taste of beer very much, yet you are mysteriously drawn to consume it rather than, say, switching to vodka or not drinking at all.

I doubt that if you polled light beer drinkers they would start extolling the virtues of Bud Light's subtle flavoring, or Miller Lite's aftertaste. They just drink it because it's beer, it's cheap, and you don't need to think about purchasing it. If you want to buy a fancy microbrew you have to spend a lot of time looking at the bottles, picking between them, and you risk picking something that you'll really dislike, like the time I bought Dogfish Head's Raison D'etre without realizing that they made it with actual raisins. There's no risk in light beer.

In some respects, the true inventors of light beer are not the chemists who came up with the idea and tweaked the formula over the years, but the advertisers who convinced people to drink it. There are more chemicals in light beer than in your standard microbrew (at one point Miller Lite had corn syrup in it), and what flavor there is these beers is artificially added (some Bud Light is “Autumn Wheat” flavored, and that's not a naturally occurring taste). Yet we've been conditioned to think of light beer as the norm and ordinary lagers, stouts, and porters as “weird.” Light beer ad campaigns beat you over the head with their popularity—everyone likes it, so you should too—or they compare themselves to other light beers, as if light beer was the only kind of beer in the world. And people buy into the ad campaigns, or they buy the beer at least, which comes down to the same thing.

I'm not going to say that people are stupid for buying light beer, but it should be noted what light beer represents. It's a product that became popular and got incredibly popular because of it's popularity. It can be enjoyed by everyone while loved by no one. And even if it is does sort of taste like piss, you can ignore it and drink a six pack without even thinking about it. Americans get what we deserve when it comes to beer, as we do with so many other things./span> Read more!

Why Not Being Invited to the Tea Party Sucks

(Image by Kenneth Rougeau)

I've written before about the Tea Party, basically to compare them unfavorably with hippies, but I realized something when I was hearing about last weekend's Tea Party Convention: I'm jealous. The Tea Party Patriots—or the “teabaggers,” if that joke is still funny to anyone—are a dissatisfied group outside the political mainstream who have organized themselves, however haphazardly, around a set of principles and have gained so much steam that they're nearly viable as a third fully-fledged political party. Agree with their ideas or not, that's pretty fucking impressive. For decades, the Greens, LaRouchians, Libertarians and Socialists have been trying to win elections and make the Democrats and Republicans afraid, and then a bunch of old white people from the South who listen to talk radio all the time get together and build a bona-fide populist movement overnight? To quote the internet, WTF?

The thing is, the teabaggers and I have a lot in common. I'm dissatisfied with the two-party system that dominates the country, I'm in favor of responsible spending and scaling back government whenever possible. Like nearly everyone, including Arianna Huffington, I'm not happy with the direction the country is going in, and I think the Democrats are incompetent. On top of everything, I've always wanted to be part of a popular resistance movement that overthrows the corrupt power struggle and defies the odds in a noble, almost cinematic way, just as the Saints did last Sunday.

Yet some of the Tea Party's positions and some of their practices are holding me back. So here's some suggestions for how they could win me, a 23-year-old New Yorker, over to their side.

#1: Promise to end the War on Drugs. It's hard to find a list of policy positions that the Tea Party actually holds, partly because there are many separate groups that form the “Tea Party,” some of whom are at odds with one another over all kinds of issues.But most groups are at least somewhat Libertarian, and they all agree that government should interfere with our lives as little as possible. And Sarah Palin, in her keynote address at the convention, mentioned “common sense,” whatever that means, a lot. So it should be a slam dunk to oppose the most nonsensical, most intrusive, bureaucracy-creating set of policies in the history of our country. Legalize marijuana and at least decriminalize the other drugs and you'd save money, collect a ton of money in taxes (that could reduce the deficit), open up a new area for legitimate entrepreneurs and small businessmen to exploit, and capture the much-prized pothead vote for a generation. And if the Tea Party adopted this as an official position, they would differentiate themselves from either party and broaden their appeal. (Also, “tea” is old-timey slang for marijuana.)

#2: Downplay the conspiracy stuff. If you spend much time poking around the conservative blogosphere, you run into statements like, “I hope and pray that we get the chance to vote Barack Hussein Obama out of office in 2012,” the implication always being that the United States is a couple of statues away from becoming a totalitarian society, when in reality all that happened is a left-of-center president supported a plan for government-subsidized (not government-run, the doctors would not be government employees) health care. When people compare Obama to Hitler or Stalin, it's like when Black Nationalists start talking about how the White Man is the enemy and needs to be killed—an irrational sentiment that makes outsiders think of you as insane, obscuring your legitimate concerns.

#3: Let go of the social issues. If the Tea Partiers were really in favor of keeping the government out of our lives and reducing government interference in private matters, they'd be pro-choice and pro-gay marriage, for much the same reason that they should be anti-anti-drug. Something along the lines of: “Hey, gay people? I think you're going to hell. What you do with your bodies is wrong, and I don't like your choice of music either. But as long as you don't have sex in front of my kids or try to suck me off when we're at the gym, I'm fine with you, since this is America and America is a mosaic of differences. If you can find a church that wants to marry a couple of sinners, fine, just know that it won't be my church. And lady? If you want to have an abortion, I probably can't stop you even by changing the laws. Just as long as it's not paid for with my tax dollars and you know you're going to hell too, it's fine with me.”

#4: Pledge to eliminate the government entirely. Interestingly enough, the platform of the Boston Tea Party is to “reducing the size, scope and power of government at all levels and on all issues, and opposes increasing the size, scope and power of government at any level, for any purpose.” If you take this literally, it means that this one particular branch of the movement, at least, supports the complete elimination of government, which makes a lot of sense. Do these people really think that if they replace one group of politicians with another, slightly less polished group of politicians, suddenly everything will be all right? Or that if they elect Sarah Palin to the highest office in the land that she'll try something that no one has tried before and we'll be able to cut taxes, reduce the deficit, and spend enough money to make us safe from terrorism forever? Were they listening to the halftime show at the Super Bowl? The new boss is always the same as the old boss, and even Ronald “least gay man ever” Reagan increased the federal budget and tripled the national deficit. The only way to get the government to stop spending is to get rid of the government entirely. If the Tea Party wants to do that, they'll have my vote. Read more!

Man, That Sucked: The Past Ten Years In Sports

The best movie about sports I saw during the last ten years was Big Fan, a blackly comic character study starring comedian Patton Oswalt. Oswalt plays a shy, sad sack of a man whose life revolves around the New York Giants and one player in particular, a linebacker whose poster dominates Oswalt's room in his mother's basement. One night Oswalt has a disasterous run-in with the linebacker that reveals the player is a cruel, uncaring, violent brute. The meat of the movie is Oswalt moping around, questioning his faith in the almighty Giants. His hero is an asshole. How can he continue to care about a team that obviously doesn't care about him back?

The tens of millions of sports fans in this country now find themselves in the same situation as Oswalt's character. Professional and big-time college sports used to be a kind of sanctuary, odd as that may sound to the non-fan. The outside world is complicated, and rendered in shades of gray. The person you love leaves you, the US government kills people in the name of saving lives, a politician you respect goes to jail for embezelling campaign funds, you get fired from a job you never liked in the first place. But your team remains your team. You might paint your face for games and scream your lungs out in a freezing stadium, or you might just catch an occasional game on TV and check the box score over your morning coffee, but either way it's something in your life that stays constant, uncomplicated. You aren't asked to make hard moral choices or examine yourself. You can hate Kobe Bryant, but that's okay because you don't actually hate him, you just like to root against him. I've always subscribed to the theory that so many men become sports fans because it gives them a way to express their emotions, which society otherwise encourages them to bottle up—crying is sissy, unless your team wins the Super Bowl. Or, looking at it another way: getting angry at the front page over young men dying in a worthless war would compel us to do something before more lives are lost; getting angry at the refs over a few blown calls is safe because we know it means nothing in the larger world.

This last decade was the decade of the larger world suddenly invading the sports section. Or maybe we just started looking at sports more critically, which destroyed our illusion that professional sports is a realm of pure and noble competitors. Whatever happened, it's almost shocking to look back on the scandals surrounding sports the past ten years. A sport-by-sport breakdown:

Baseball: Do we need to go over the steroid scandal again? So many words have already been written about this, but the basics: it turns out that nearly every important player in the past 15 years was taking steroids, which were not tested for because the people running Major League Baseball were idiots. This matters because more than other sports, baseball relies on its history and its numerical records as selling points: Ruth! Mays! Mantle! Rose! 61! 56! 4,256! 755! So the steroid users, especially guys like Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds, who artificially bosted their home run totals, were not just cheating against their current competition, they were cheating against history. And lying about it. Understandably, the revealation that these men—who, in the naive 1950s world of sports, were supposed to be role models—were liers, drug users, and cheaters all at once was not good for the popularity of the sport. If you believe that performance-enhancing drugs invalidate the performance—that is, you can't say you've “beaten” the campaign mode of Starcraft if you've used cheat codes—then the last ten years of baseball basically didn't count. That's bad.

Basketball: Here's what's bad: referees might have been straight-up fixing games in the NBA. Basketball junkies have always been conspiracy-minded, from the “frozen envelope theory” (look it up if you haven't heard it, it's insane) to the idea that the time Michael Jordan took off from basketball to try professional baseball was actually a secret suspension handed down by Commissioner David Stern. So when a referee who was caught bettting on games and later claimed the NBA fixed games to get more “marketable” teams into the Finals. That might not be true, but just the idea of it is horrible enough—what's at stake is the fundamental concept behind the NBA itelf: these are supposedly fair games that are decided on the court. As if that's not enough, this is also the decade that the league has had to deal with it's “image problem,” i.e., NBA players are young tattooed black men the average white middle-class NBA fan would cross the street to avoid. See: the 2004 brawl at the Palace, the recent guns-in-the-locker-room incident, or any of the many shootings that involve NBA players. The league is so desperate to fight the “image problem” they instituted a dress code, just like a crime-ridden high school. But maybe they should make sure their games are decided on the court first.

Football: And here we are at the most morally questionable sport in America, which is saying something. I like watching the NFL, don't get me wrong. But it's becoming increasingly clear that anyone who plays the sport risks brain damage, and if you are an NFL lineman for more than a few years, it's not even a risk—you will get brain damage. If you're an NFL fan, here's the quandry: the sport that entertains you, that you love watching, causes life-altering brain injuries. Routinely. Can you continue to watch, like a Roman at the blood-soaked Coliseum? Does it make a difference whether the players know the risks? Has the NFL been hiding evidence of brain injuries from the public on purpose? What is it costing the young men on the field to entertain you?

These are the kinds of questions we go to sports to avoid. Yet if we're thinking, self-critical sports fans, we have to answer these questions. Previous generations were protected from the ugliness behind sports by a media that never told them that Mickey Mantle was an alcoholic and Jim Brown beat women. Our media tells us everything, or at least as much as it can, and so we know, or should know by now, just how ugly the business of professional sports can be. And I haven't even touched on college sports in this post.

But here's the real problem: I love sports. There's still something beautiful in an alley-oop dunk, an 80-yard pass spiraling into a receiver's arms, a home run that travels 450 feet, steroid-aided or not. I'm going to watch the Super Bowl and try not to think about all the brain injuries. I'll watch the NBA and hope it isn't just the WWE with baskets at either end. When I watch a game, I try to believe that sports are still that sacred, seperate world that they're supposed to be, despite all rational evidence to the contrary—I imagine that's how Catholics go to mass these days. Because I still care about sports. I'm just not sure they care

(The image, by the way, is the difference between a normal brain and the brain of a career NFL player.) Read more!

Why Cigarettes Suck (And Why People Smoke Them)

This isn't going to a rant against the dangers of smoking cigarettes. We all know that smoking leads to several types of cancer, heart disease, peptic ulcers, bronchitis, etc. This site, one of many, is pretty clear: " Cigarettes are filled with poison that goes into the lungs when you inhale." Duh.

Now that that's out of the way, I should add that despite the implied claims of the anti-tobacco people, cigarettes don't kill you instantly, and not everyone gets hooked from a single puff. Some smokers never become full-fledged nicotine junkies. Smoking is risky, but so are things like drinking excessively, riding mechanical bulls, doing hard drugs, having anonymous sex in seedy bathrooms, fighting in bars and in bar parking lots, firing your handgun into the air to frighten the crowd you are fighting with, stealing cars, feeling from the police, and sleeping in a bus station after ditching the car. If you have a life like that, having a few puffs is not going to be what catches up with you.

But those behaviors listed above at least have short-term benefits. Drinking makes you feel good and can act as a social lubricant, snorting concaine makes you feel really good for a really short time, stealing a car gets you a car, and so on. You may disapprove of activities like this, but at least you can see the appeal they would have for someone who genuinely doesn't care about tomorrow. The same can't be said of smoking cigarettes.

Even if you ignored the major health issues, the costs of smoking outweigh the benefits rather drastically. Smoking is expensive, cigarettes taste terrible, your teeth become stained, you start coughing all the time and lose lung capacity, you smell like old smoke, and thanks to the anti-smoking lobby's efforts to attach a social stigma to smokers, you might become less attractive to the opposite sex (at least the non-smokers). You don't even get high by smoking tobacco. And if you are using cigarettes to worship Native American deities, you're not doing it right.

Some smokers have created neurotic reasons to explain their habit ("I need something to do with my hands") or say "It's just something I do" and leave it at that, but it wasn't like these people came out of the womb tapping a pack of Marlboro Reds against their palm. Being addicted to nicotine is a reason to continue smoking, but why in Camel Joe's name would you start?

The anti-tobacco people sometimes blame ads and peer pressure for getting young people to smoke, and that was definitely true years ago, but that doesn't work anymore. Thanks to increased knowledge of the dangers of smoking (although I don't buy that no one knew smoking was bad for you before 1960), and the anti-smoking ads (which are so aggressive there's some backlash against them), there's actually peer pressure in some groups against smoking. Young people don't smoke to "fit in" anymore because smoking would make them stand out in a lot of places. And while cigarette smoking has been declining in young people since 1965, when 45 percent of Americans aged 18-24 smoked, that percentage has never dropped below 23. (This from a recent American Lung Association report.) It's pretty clear that no matter what, a minority of people are going to smoke, even if you call cigarettes Instant Death Sticks.

My theory is that people smoke cigarettes precisely because smoking is such a clearly terrible idea. "This is a poor choice that I will pay for later on," a smoker, especially a young smoker, is saying to the world. "Fuck tomorrow, I'm living for today." Smoking can be seen as a kind of signaling behavior, indicating to other young people that they're experimenting with risky behavior and aren't concerned with the morality of the larger society that publishes studies about the dangers of smoking and shows anti-smoking commercials. Or to use vernacular, they're "down for whatever."

Smoking is definitely, definitely a bad idea, which doesn't make it much different than anything else. (See the rest of this blog for details.) The defining characteristic of smoking is that it's so obviously a terrible decision that it has become a shorthand for other kinds of rebellion. In a world where people are told not to smoke, only people who don't do what they're told will smoke, or something like that.

Or it could be that smokers are just stupid and think putting a tube of burning plants in their mouths makes them look cool.
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Why Drinking Age Laws Suck

Should we be making it easier for teens to drink?

When I was under the drinking age, I would have said, "Hell yes, make it easier for me to buy alcohol!" Especially after a night of driving around aimlessly and complaining about having nothing to do, I would launch into rants about how draconian and oppressive US alcohol laws were, and how in Europe you could walk into a pub when you were 16 and blah blah blah. Then I turned 21 and stopped thinking about teenagers not being able to drink until yesterday, when I came across this quote from a former heroin addict in an article about the rise of teenage heroin use in Long Island:

“Believe it or not, as a high school teenager, (heroin) was easier for us to get than alcohol,” he said. “It’s cheaper than anything out there.”

That sounds absurd on the face of it, but then I thought back to my not-far-removed days as a teetotaling teen trying to find an intoxicant. Was it any easier to find alcohol than any other drug? I mean, you could find alcohol, there were liquor stores and gas stations all over the place, but getting it into your hands was more difficult. If your community enforced the drinking age like mine did, you had to: 1. find someone's older sibling; 2. Acquire a fake ID; or 3. Find a shady-looking adult on the street and pay them to buy you booze.

Unless the older sibling is feeling charitable, all three of these options cost money and take a fair amount of time, which raises the cost of acquiring alcohol for teens. More importantly, going through these channels means that you're going to end up in contact with some pretty shady people--the kind of people you would go to if you wanted to buy weed, or coke, or heroin.

Marijuana and alcohol are often denounced for being "gateway drugs," meaning that people--especially teens--who use them end up going on to harder drugs, which is where things can really start sucking. But one of the reasons these drugs are "gateways" is the channels teens use to get them are similar to the channels they go through for the bad drugs. The guy who sells fake IDs might have a coke business on the side; my local pot salesman also sells prescription pills. Entering the teenaged black market so you can experiment with alcohol or pot (things nearly everyone tries) also gives you access to drugs that ruin your life.

The above linked article compares the prices of drugs: a bag of heroin costs $5 to $25 for an eight hour high. That's a pretty good deal, if you want to get really fucked up. The problem with heroin is that it's too good at what it does--addicts feel so good when they're high and so bad when they aren't that they don't see a reason to do anything else. If you're a teen who is already predisposed to drug use, and you find a drug that's cheap and will get you really fucked up, and you haven't been educated enough on the difference in degree between alcohol and heroin--alcohol isn't good but heroin is really really fucking bad--why wouldn't you pick up a bag of horse from your dealer buddy?

On the other hand, if you were already comfortable with alcohol, and it was socially acceptable to drink in front of adults, and you weren't going through shady people to buy alcohol and being forced to drink in cars and parking lots, would you buy that bag? Or would you say, "No thanks, beer's good enough for me?" Or would the question never come up, because you wouldn't know the dealer?

We can't stop teens from drinking and getting high, because we can't really stop anyone from drinking and getting high. But Jesus, with the amount of attention we focus on drugs, you would think we could stop teens from shooting up. Maybe if we made it more legal to drink, and didn't turn a large percentage of teenagers into criminals for having a drink, we could avoid some of the worse consequences of teen drinking. Read more!