Are you allergic to Twitter? Do you befriend people outside your target demographic? Then you may be suffering from an undiagnosed personal branding disorder.
• Schizoid Branding Disorder: You have been overheard proclaiming that Twitter is for blowhards with ADHD. You profess a love of “nature” and “reading books” instead. You refuse to chat with people online, and your cell phone service charges extra for texting. You call Blackberries “Crackberries” and claim that you’re not even a little bit curious about the iPad. When someone asks you a polite question, such as “What’s your current distribution capacity?” you merely roll your eyes and shrug, then wander off without answering.…The next time you find yourself disparaging iPhone apps or raving about the restorative effects of growing organic milkweed in handmade windowboxes, it’s imperative that you seek professional help immediately. Remember, there’s no shame in admitting that you’re indifferent to your own multi-platform marketing initiatives, as long as you can see clearly that it’s not normal. The sooner you can admit that you’re sick, the sooner you can address your ineffectual sales tactics and build a more resilient, dynamic personal brand that will resonate with a wide range of potential customers, now through the end of the fiscal year.
Outis Niemand
About Outis Niemand
Posts by Outis Niemand:
Consider the Sillies
I found that Jacoby essay via Jenny White:
I propose instead that we do what we can to prepare for that long life, and then we annihilate time.I’m not the first to think of this, although I’d gladly snatch credit from the Zen masters. Live in the moment: A sentiment overripe from use, but how many of us have actually tried it when wagging fingers insist that as responsible people we should worry about the future as well as prepare for it. The timeline is unforgiving, as we are expected to atone for our pasts as well. Adulthood is an extended act of penance (thrice-weekly gym and no cookies), and old age is your comeuppance for all those unrepented acts of wantonness. Time is society’s dream of your life. It doesn’t have to be your life.
I agree. I think. I guess I just want to make sure that when we invoke Zen wisdom and say “Live in the moment”, we understand that this means grasping that our ideas of the future and the past are both projections of this moment as well. We never actually exist in either the future or the past. When the future gets here, however you define it, it will be experienced as “now”, just as the past was. So “living in the moment” doesn’t mean, pace the Grass Roots, to just live on impulse and refuse to think about anything but satisfying immediate desires, nor does it mean, as certain deranged cult leaders would have you believe, that God will provide if you just have faith; unless, of course, you share said cult leader’s belief that the world is due to end in a fiery apocalypse any minute now, in which case, all right, then.
We can’t help but live in this moment. The hard part is simply realizing that.
Getting High On My Mortality
I would rather share the fate of my maternal forebears — old old age with an intact mind in a ravaged body — than the fate of my other grandmother.
Like Susan Jacoby, I actually hope I don’t live to such an old age. And I share her conviction that diseases like Alzheimer’s can allow one to live too long to live well. But as I’ve mentioned before, I developed rheumatoid arthritis when I was in my late twenties. And even though I’m fine now thanks to medication (which could, of course, destroy my liver or cause cancer, but I’ll cross that bridge if or when I get there), I spent three and a half years in unrelenting physical pain as doctors puzzled over what was wrong with me if my blood tests kept coming back showing a negative rheumatoid factor. Thus, I can report with confidence that even with the overall good health of a twenty-something to alleviate at least some of the decrepitude, it’s not easy to live that way either. The intact mind tends to be a bit too preoccupied with the ravaged body to spend much time enjoying the fruits of contemplation. So it’s more like “six of one, half-dozen of another” if you ask me; a life as a physical or mental ruin with no reasonable hope of improvement is a life worth ending on its own terms.
I don’t say it to be morbid. In fact, I think contemplating one’s own mortality, while initially terrifying, of course, leads one to an appreciation of life that doesn’t require the sorts of fantasies Jacoby mentions, of people determined to live longer than a century, a century and a half. Those people, to me, don’t understand that life’s finite limits are actually what give it meaning in the first place. As Steve Hagen said, we want it because it dies. And let’s be real; if people thought they could solidly expect another fifty or so years of life, what would they do with that time? Travel, learn new languages, create art? Or spend that much more time eating junk food on the sofa while watching TV? The problem isn’t that we don’t have enough time, it’s that we take the time we do have for granted. That’s not going to change by adding on another few decades.
I’ve Got an F and a C and I’ve Got a K, Too, and the Only Thing That’s Missing Is a Bitch Like U
One of the things that makes me fear that Idiocracy was more a documentary than a comedy is the frequency with which you see “tl;dr” being used in the blogosphere in response to anything longer than, say, three paragraphs. Maybe someone could try seeding the clouds with Ritalin.
Humble Pie
I can’t begin to tell you (or at least I prefer not to tell you) how many times while reviewing the original text I found myself thinking, “I didn’t know that. Why, I’ve been making that mistake for years.”…In an alarmingly real sense, the alternative title now could be Even More Things in English Usage That the Author Wasn’t Entirely Clear About Until Quite Recently.
That’s Bill Bryson, in the foreword to his Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words. I’ve been reading that and June Casagrande’s Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies over the last few days. It’s fun to read stuff like this, but it’s a bit mortifying to realize how many mistakes I’ve been making for years. At least I can use the excuse that I’m only writing on an insignificant little blog. It’s supposed to be written in a loose, conversational style!
I’ve scoffed before at those who see harbingers of cultural doom in everything those damned kids today are saying and doing, and I accept that a language is often going to be driven by popular usage, no matter how much it causes the grammar scolds to gnash their teeth. But I do feel a little more sympathetic to them now, because so many of the mistakes I’m now aware of in my own writing are due to the fact that I’ve always heard people talk like that. And sometimes the differences are so subtle, you don’t notice them until someone takes the time to point them out. If, as I’ve argued before, texting, Twittering and Facebook posts (oh my!) are creating a sort of sea-level when it comes to the forms of writing that most of us use, one that reinforces mediocrity and minimal effort, where are people going to be exposed to anything that teaches them differently?
Open-Minded Is Not the Same as Empty-Headed
Outwardly, Ramadan upholds the ideal of open-mindedness. But it’s an open-mindedness that avoids critical thinking and making judgments. His call for embracing multiplicity and diversity is about avoiding the challenge of intellectual clarification and moral judgment. Yet his celebration of diversity is deceptive, too, because his cheering of difference is actually oriented only towards those whose views echo his own. His acceptance of ‘all outlooks’ certainly does not extend to classical liberal thought; indeed, it’s worth noting that the only strong argument consistently pursued through his book is a critique of the liberal virtue of tolerance.…In line with the values transmitted by the therapy culture that is currently widespread in the Western world, Ramadan wants, not toleration, but respect, validation and uncritical acceptance. That is why he, like numerous other multiculturalists, rejects tolerance on the ground that it is patronising or is ‘not enough’.Ramadan’s claim that people do not want to be tolerated is another way of saying that they don’t want to be judged – but they do want to be affirmed. In his own way, Ramadan gives voice to the Western therapeutic imagination’s estrangement from making value judgments. Contemporary Western culture’s refusal to judge goes hand-in-hand with its celebration of the therapeutic value of affirmation and boosting self-esteem. This sensibility inexorably leads to the affirmation of individual and group identities, an act which has become something of a sacred duty in recent years. It is this gesture of granting respect-on-demand which constitutes the real insult these days, since it does not actually take people seriously. It is about making people feel good about themselves rather than seriously engaging with them – and that is the real form that patronising ‘intellectual charity’ takes today.
This grabbed me because it can also be read as a succinct summary of everything I’ve been trying to say with regards to the whole “spiritual-not-religious” phenomenon. I see too much of a tendency to gravitate toward pat answers, to value echoes over dissonance, to seek out those who can be counted on to tell you what you want to hear. Criticism and confrontation don’t have to be seen as disrespectful; indeed, as he says here, it seems more condescending to avoid them for the sake of a superficial peace.
Where Everything Yet Can Happen
Having enjoyed my usual year-end ritual of reading a Rilke poem, it occurs to me that starting off a new year with one would be pretty cool as well. So here’s one from his Book of Hours, as translated by Barrows and Macy. The last line especially gives me chills, despite (or perhaps because of) the sense of ominous foreboding:
A great leaf, that God and you and I
have covered with writing
turns now, overhead, in strange hands.
We feel the sweep of it like a wind.
We see the brightness of a new page
where everything yet can happen.
Unmoved by us, the fates take its measure
and look at one another, saying nothing.
Lend Me Your Ears
What sort of music have I been enjoying the most this year? Which albums spent the most time in my stereo over the past twelve months? Why, I’m glad you asked! Let’s do this thing. Sorry, Brian and Heywood, it’s been a pretty metal-free year.
• Morphine, At Your Service
My joy at discovering a new double-album of unreleased tracks, alternate takes, and live recordings compiled by the surviving members of Morphine is the only thing that prevented me from being mad at the entire world for failing to notify me that the damned thing actually came out more than a year ago. What good are you bastards, huh?
But who can be angry when there’s so much good stuff here to enjoy? Ah, Mark Sandman, you’re still missed more than you could possibly have known.
• Nobody, One for All Without Hesitation
Nobody, a.k.a. Elvin Estela, is simply sui generis. Is he electronica? Alternative? Does it really matter? On the negative side, he discovered Auto-Tune for this record. On the positive side, he released it as a double album, one disc being instrumental versions, so I guess that balances things out. It’s not my favorite of his work, but it’s still better than so much else.
Favorite songs: Hip$ters, Face to the Sun, Coming Down (but since none of those are on YouTube, let me link to some of his older stuff: After the Summer Hits, Electro-Acoustic, Siesta con Susana, Spin the Bright Sun Rose, Ignite, All the Shallow Deep. After all, I listened to them obsessively too.)
• Against Me!, White Crosses
Angrier and more substantial than most punk/pop bands you’ll hear on the radio (even their name is pissed off and yelling). Tom Gabel writes some of the most unwieldy and overly-wordy lines I’ve ever heard, but when the songs are so infectiously catchy, it’s easy to forgive.
• The Chemical Brothers, Further
The Brothers gonna work it out, indeed. What can I say? I love pretty much everything they do.
• Scissor Sisters, Night Work
My earliest musical memory is being entranced by Elton John’s falsetto vocals at the end of “Bennie and the Jets.” And I was inundated with the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack when I was but a wee tyke. So bite me, I can’t help but love a campy, disco-y sounding band who were obviously influenced by both Elton and the Bee Gees. Again, not my favorite of theirs overall, but still fun to shake your booty to.
• LCD Soundsystem, This Is Happening
Alternative rock with an electronica beat.
• Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse, Dark Night of the Soul
Another dead musician named Mark that I miss tremendously, but at least Linkous’ suicide in March was offset a little by the long-delayed release of his collaboration with Danger Mouse. Haunting (and haunted) music.
• Broken Bells, Broken Bells
I never was interested in the Shins, but apparently Danger Mouse makes everything better, as this collaboration with James Mercer demonstrates.
• School of Seven Bells, Disconnect from Desire
My Bloody Valentine-style shoegaze combined with perhaps Ladytron-style electronica. Ethereal.
• Best New (To Me) Band of the Year: Alabama 3
Again, how is it that you all let me go the last decade and a half without hearing the first thing about this band? Yes, if I had watched The Sopranos, I would have heard their song “Woke Up This Morning” being used as the theme, but I didn’t, so the onus was once again on you to keep me informed, and once again, you let me down. I won’t stand for much more of this! What other secrets are you keeping from me, huh?
Anyway, who would have thought that country-blues-gospel-acid house would work well together? It’s as if My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult was composed of a bunch of Brits pretending to be from the Deep South. Awesomely bizarre.
Favorite songs: Hypo Full of Love, Sad-Eyed Lady of the Low Life, Mao-Tse Tung Said, Monday Don’t Mean Anything, Holy Blood
• Biggest Disappointment of the Year: Blond Redhead, Penny Sparkle
Damn. After loving 23 with all my heart, this sure did fall flat. Zzzzzzzzzz.
We Believe In Nothing, Lebowski, Nothing
Chris Hedges is indeed wankeriffic when he gets on his anti-atheist hobbyhorse, but I do think Ebonmuse is being slightly unfair to him here:
As I’ve written before, Chris Hedges is a nihilist. He flatly denies the possibility of moral progress, and vehemently asserts that any efforts to improve humanity will inevitably end in mass slaughter and destruction. He says so bluntly at the beginning of his book:Those who insist we are morally advancing as a species are deluding themselves. There is little in science or history to support this idea. Human individuals can make moral advances, as can human societies, but they also make moral reverses… We alternate between periods of light and periods of darkness. We can move forward materially, but we do not move forward morally. The belief in collective moral advancement ignores the inherent flaws in human nature as well as the tragic reality of human history… All utopian schemes of impossible advances and glorious conclusions end in squalor and fanaticism. (p.10-11)
Previously, he countered Hedges by saying:
First, moral progress, though it may be slower than we would like, is real and it is undeniable. A glance over human history would offer as examples the abolition of slavery, the granting of equal rights to women and minorities, the emancipation of state from church, the flowering of democracy worldwide, the increasingly greater efforts at avoiding war through diplomacy, and many more. This is not to say that there aren’t many evils remaining, nor that no new ones have arisen.
A stickler might note that the examples he cites are common in the West, but hardly worldwide. And conceding, even as an afterthought, that this is not to say that no new evils have arisen, well — isn’t that a large part of Hedges’ point? We make progress on this or that specific front, but overall, plus ça change. The larger themes remain, with new variations on them appearing. As John Gray put it:
History is not an ascending spiral of human advance, or even an inch-by-inch crawl to a better world. It is an unending cycle in which changing knowledge interacts with unchanging human needs. Freedom is recurrently won and lost in an alternation that includes long periods of anarchy and tyranny, and there is no reason to suppose that this cycle will ever end. In fact, with human power increasing as a result of growing scientific knowledge, it can only become more violent.The core of the idea of progress is that human life becomes better with the growth of knowledge. The error is not in thinking that human life can improve. Rather, it is in imagining that improvement can ever be cumulative. Unlike science, ethics and politics are not activities in which what is learnt in one generation can be passed on to an indefinite number of future generations. Like the arts, they are practical skills and can be easily lost.
This is a tragic view, as well as a staunchly conservative one, but it’s hardly nihilism. As Hedges said, we do make moral advances, but we also make moral reverses. Cyclical, not linear. And it’s foolish to put so much stock into state-granted “rights” as an indicator of deep-rooted progress. That which can be granted with the stroke of a pen can be taken away easily, too. Shall we go talk to some Japanese families on the West coast about what good all those Constitutional rights as American citizens were for their grandparents in the 1940s in the face of jingoist hysteria? Do we need to revisit some of the more ominous recent polls showing a worrisome number of Americans willing to trade their own rights for an illusion of security, let alone those of others like Muslims and Latinos? The United States a hundred years from now could just as likely be a Franco-style military dictatorship with severely curtailed civil liberties or a failed state with no worldwide influence, as it could a sorta-democracy with an uneasy tolerance for gays and atheists. As Gray also notes in other places, authoritarian states like Russia and China have proved that popularity, stability and economic power are not necessarily linked to an acceptance of American-style individual rights.
We’ll Take a Cup of Kindness Yet
Can any river possibly flow
beyond the love of friends?
– Li Po
I enjoy reading meditations on the nature of online relationships and the ways in which our very ideas of relationships are changing as a result of the Internet, but it is a bit of a predictable trope for writers to contrast online interaction at its shallowest with traditional interaction at its deepest, and Roger Scruton provides yet another example:
Yet already something new is entering the world of human relations with these innocent-seeming sites. There is a novel ease with which people can make contact with each other through the screen. No more need to get up from your desk and make the journey to your friend’s house. No more need for weekly meetings, or the circle of friends in the downtown restaurant or bar. All those effortful ways of making contact can be dispensed with: a touch of the keyboard and you are there, where you wanted to be, on the site that defines your friends. But can this be real friendship, when it is pursued and developed in such facile and costless ways?Real friendship shows itself in action and affection. The real friend is the one who comes to the rescue in your hour of need; who is there with comfort in adversity and who shares with you his own success. This is hard to do on the screen — the screen, after all, is primarily a locus of information, and is only a place of action insofar as communication is a form of action. Only words, and not hands or the things they carry, can reach from it to comfort the sufferer, to ward off an enemy’s blows, or to provide any of the tangible assets of friendship in a time of need. It is arguable that the more people satisfy their need for companionship through relationships carried out on the screen, the less will they develop friendships of that other kind, the kind that offers help and comfort in the real trials of human life.
Maybe it’s different for British philosophers, but honestly, among ordinary people, aren’t many of those we call our friends simply companions with whom we pass the time? I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with enjoying the company of others for the hell of it, but I don’t imagine I’m alone in thinking that if I were forced to settle for making friends among those in my close proximity, I’d be very lonely indeed. I guess I’m an intellectual, if we define the term as someone who enjoys ideas for their own sake, beyond any practical import; someone who enjoys “thinking about thinking”, as one definition of philosophy has it. (I hasten to add, being intellectual is not at all the same thing as being smart or profound; plenty of intellectuals have subscribed to some of the stupidest ideas ever invented.) And frankly, most people seem to be content to know just enough to get by. To almost everyone I know in real life, evenings and weekends are for leisure and entertainment, not reading and writing. As Dennis Baron said in reference to Nicholas Carr’s own portentous claims of the Internet’s corrosive effects upon our lives, “That position incorrectly assumes that when we’re not online we throw ourselves into high-culture mode, reading Tolstoi spelled with an i and writing sestinas and villanelles instead of shopping lists.” Without the Internet, I’d be stranded in an intellectual wasteland. Hell, communicating with like-minded people online is probably all that preserves what social skills I do have.
Scruton can call personal shyness a “defect” leading to narcissism all he wants, but for people like me, being taciturn and standoffish is neither good nor bad; it’s just the way it is. The things that give me the most enjoyment are largely solitary pursuits. I simply don’t need much companionship. I’m one of those for whom the anonymity and distance of the Internet paradoxically makes me feel freer to express myself openly and honestly, which in turn has led to some of the closest friendships I’ve ever had. His assertion that having a screen between you and your friend, one that you can avoid at will, amounts to “denying the other the power and the freedom to challenge you in your deeper nature”, begs the question of what our “deeper nature” is to begin with. Me, I tend to mostly identify “who I am” with “what I think”, and I’m fortunate enough to have friends who challenge me in that regard all the time. My deeper nature has nothing to do with small talk and sitting around in my underwear scratching myself, and once again, it’s really tiresome that so many people confuse “inchoate” with “authentic”.
Like most things, I suppose, you get out of your online relationships what you put into them. Maybe it is more effort to have to use linear thought and words to fill in the gaps left by an absence of body language and other nonverbal cues, but I don’t see why that can’t be mostly surmounted by honesty and a good faith effort. Li Po and Tu Fu carried on a twenty-year friendship in poetry despite being separated over most of that time by war, drought, and exile. The most significant amount of time they spent together was a three-month span in 744. Was that not a “real” friendship, then? We’re still talking about it almost 1,300 years later, aren’t we? Or what about Montaigne, who only had four years in his late twenties in which to know Etienne de La Boétie, but was haunted by the loss for the rest of his life?
And let’s also consider that for some people, friendship is an opportunity to “share not suffering but joy”, as Nietzsche put it. Cultivating the best of ourselves to share while sweeping away the rest is also a way to provide support in each other’s hour of need. Not everyone needs a shoulder to literally cry on.
How You Say…?
Roy and Doghouse, two blogospheric wordsmiths who turn me green with envy on a regular basis, do a little riffing on “The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English.” I love these sorts of lists. I just love words, period. I love reading dictionaries. I love sounding a new word out, rolling it around my tongue, thinking of a sentence to use it in. I love having to look up a word when reading someone else’s writing. I love going here to hear how to pronounce a word I’ve never heard spoken before. In fact, one of my pet peeves is how often it’s used as a putdown to accuse someone of using ten-dollar words, or some such thing. Granted, some people use vocabulary like a cuttlefish uses ink, to hide in obscurity, but still, it’s such a cheap shot, to act as if your familiarity with any particular word is the standard to judge by. Well, I’ve never heard of it before, so fuck you, Professor Tweedcoat Elbowpatches! Yew think yer better’n me?
Where exactly is the cutoff date after which we’re no longer allowed to learn anything new, anyway?
But I digress. Here, then, is a brief collection of some of my own favorite words and phrases, chosen more or less at random from memory. (Believe me, I could go on all day like this.) Some are very useful, some are unjustly obscure, and some are just beautifully poetic and fun to say out loud no matter what they mean. Dictionaries used and recommended here include: The Oxford Essential Dictionary of Difficult Words, Depraved and Insulting English, Le Mot Juste, and The Highly Selective Dictionary for the Extraordinarily Literate.
Anomie: condition of despair brought on by a breakdown in the rules of conduct and loss of sense of purpose
Argumentum ad individium: argument which appeals to men’s prejudices
Contra mundum: against the world; used primarily of one who takes an unpopular position and opposes majority feeling
Gaudium certaminis: the joy of the struggle
Pons asinorum: the ass’s bridge; problem inaccessible to people of limited wit
Tedium vitae: weariness with life
Au courant: up to date, well-informed
Au fait: well-versed, expert
C’est tout dire: (you have said) all there is to say
Faux dévot: one who feigns piety
Kulturschande: insult to good taste, crime against civilization
Weltschmerz: world-weariness
Penseroso: thinker, usually with a melancholic disposition
Chiromaniac: a compulsive masturbator
Coprophiliac: a sexual deviant with an abnormal interest in feces
Cumberworld: a thoroughly useless person or thing
Driveler: one who talks in an idiotic fashion
Dunderwhelp: a detestable numbskull
Entheomaniac: one who is literally insane about religion
Epicaricacy: schadenfreude
Gongoozler: a dimwit who stares at unusual things
Infandous: too odious to be spoken of
Merdivore: shit-eater
Misologist: one with a hatred of mental activity
Mysophiliac: a person who is sexually excited by filth and excretions
Peotillomania: the abnormal habit of constantly pulling at the penis
Sophomania: the delusion that one is wise
Tartuffe: religious hypocrite
Ventose: verbally flatulent; full of pomp, conceit and bombast
Anodyne: inoffensive
Aperçu: comment or brief reference that makes an illuminating or entertaining point
Ataraxy: a state of serene calmness
Benighted: state of contemptible ignorance
Cogitate: think deeply about something
Dysphoria: state of unease or generalized dissatisfaction with life
Ersatz: inferior substitute
Fanfaronade: arrogant or boastful talk
Farouche: sullen or shy in company
Farrago: a confused mixture
Ineffable: too great or extreme to be described in words
Insouciance: casual lack of concern; indifference
Ipse dixit: unproven or dogmatic statement
Laodicean: lukewarm or halfhearted especially with respect to religion or politics
Meretricious: apparently attractive, but in reality having no value
Perspicuous: clearly expressed and easily understood; lucid
Sequacious: lacking independence or originality of thought
Supercilious: behaving or thinking as if one is superior to others
Coruscate: 1. To give off or reflect bright beams or flashes of light; to sparkle. 2. To exhibit brilliant, sparkling technique or style.
Nepenthe: 1. A drug or drink, or the plant yielding it, mentioned by ancient writers as having the power to bring forgetfulness of sorrow or trouble. 2. Anything inducing a pleasurable sensation of forgetfulness, esp. of sorrow or trouble.
Lucifugous: Avoiding light
Kenspeckle: Conspicuous; easily seen or recognized.
Anacoluthia: Lack of grammatical sequence or coherence, esp. in a sentence
And, You Know, Through This Situation I Found Jesus and Asked Him for Forgiveness and I Turned My Life Over to God…
AP:
Police say a Colorado man is suspected of stomping his girlfriend’s puppy to death because she wouldn’t answer her phone.Colorado Springs police arrested 25-year-old Christopher Blackstone on suspicion of felony cruelty to animals after his girlfriend discovered her dog wrapped in a garbage bag in a trash bin outside her apartment on Dec. 24.
Just one? Aww, that’s nothing. His lawyer’s probably asking him right now: How’s your forward pass, kid? Your time in the 40-yard dash? What about your jump shot? Hell, we can work with a fastball! Play your cards right, and in a mere couple years, you can have everyone from airhead writers at Salon to the President himself urging everyone to forgive and forget so we can get down to the important business of being entertained.
Écrasez l’Infâme
Voltaire dared to criticize and question the ruthlessness of the Catholic Church’s power and its coordination with the oppressive government of Louis XV. Armed with pen and paper, he faced a government and church that wielded the power of life and death. If Voltaire was not an action-hero, he was a hero all the same, and if had to throw a joke-bomb and run, let him run! Mankind is the better for it. Voltaire promoted tolerance as the most important tenet of civilization and mocked fanatics of all stripes. For this, of course, he was hated and reviled by the powers of his time, and even some of our own.
Despite the indifferent review, I’d be interested to read this book. “The Vile Scribbler” was actually an epithet I could have sworn I heard someone say in reference to him, but when I tried to find the source again later, I couldn’t. Maybe I just hallucinated the whole thing. I do recall Mozart referring to him as a “godless arch-rascal” upon his death, which, come to think of it, would have been a pretty cool pseudonym itself.
I Declare War On Stupidity
How does that saying go? First time’s an accident, second time’s a coincidence, third time’s an enemy action? Well, then, I feel confident in accusing Mary Elizabeth Williams of waging ignorant aggression, and justified in responding with extreme prejudice.
So let’s get this straight — at an age when plenty of young adults are still living at home, working part time at Chili’s, and making their biggest plans based on the merits of $5 pitchers or Jager on tap, Bristol Palin is a home owner contemplating her educational future. You’d think that maybe the prospect of Palin — a girl who got knocked up at 17, has a high profile and an often justly reviled family, and whose recent claim to fame involved dancing in a gorilla suit — becoming a property owning, possibly matriculating member of society would be enough to make her numerous detractors pause a moment and say, hey, good for her.
She sure does have a soft spot for the helpless and downtrodden, doesn’t she? First she felt obliged to take up for the poor millionaire athlete against the mean old animal welfare workers, then she bravely stuck up for a plucky little Bronze Age mystery cult against the tyranny of a billboard suggesting it’s a crock of shit, and now this. I’m actually intrigued to see what she’s going to come up with next!
You know, I faced a serious dilemma here, one that took an actual coin flip to resolve. No, really. I’ve said before that the amount of scrutiny the Palin family gets is in inverse proportion to their actual significance, that far too many bloggers have been lazily using them as a crutch to avoid writing about anything remotely interesting or important. My first instinct here was to avoid this low-hanging fruit, to refrain from wasting any more pixels on these clowns. But I’ve only become aware of what a fucking moronic hack Williams is in the last couple weeks, so the novelty of mocking her still hasn’t worn off quite yet. What to do, what to do? Well, the coin came up heads, so here I am.
But before I start launching salvos, let me concede a general point she tries to make: it’s a bad thing when urban, educated liberals gratuitously sneer at people simply because they happen to be rural, poor and uneducated. Not everyone who lives in a trailer park or a small town in the middle of nowhere is a bigoted yahoo, it’s true. Nevertheless, we’re talking about the Palins here, and you kind of lose any expectation of sympathy or fairness when your entire public persona, since the very first time we made your accursed acquaintance, has been purely based on condescending, judgmental sneering at anyone who doesn’t fit your bullshit definition of what “real” Myrrhkins are supposed to be like. I suppose it’s possible that Bristol could turn out to be something other than the perpetual resentment machine that her mother is, but based on what we’ve seen so far, it ain’t bloody likely, especially since she’s already been generously rewarded for simply being one of her mother’s appendages.
Being a hack, though, Williams can’t just leave off at suggesting that maybe the kid should be given a chance to become her own person. She has to go for the gobsmacking, counterintuitive comparison between Bristol and her peers as evidence of why she should be respected, if not admired. Oh yes, Mary Beth, let’s get this straight, indeed: Sarah Palin is the telegenic face of a political movement that takes a malicious glee in scolding other people for their supposed moral failings and lack of responsibility while making endless allowances for the inbred children of their aristocracy. If George W.’s last name had been anything but Bush, he would have been living in a cardboard box outside an ABC store in his forties, not being groomed for a career in politics. Most of us don’t have fathers with rich friends who will pour millions of dollars into keeping us out of the gutter. And unlike Bristol Palin, most unwed teen mothers are not going to be given tens of thousands of dollars in speaking fees to go around and tell other teens what a mistake it was to have a kid at such a young age, because, hey, look at how much she’s suffering. They’re not going to be provided with lucrative appearances on imbecilic reality TV shows simply because of name recognition. In a society run by people like Bristol’s mother, they’re going to have extremely limited access to birth control, education and employment opportunities, and almost no margin of error when it comes to making the sort of dumb choices that adolescents are indeed prone to making. I had a few peers who made the mistake of getting married too young before getting stuck raising a child on their own while working two or three jobs and going to school part-time, but all I seem to recall hearing from the conservative aristocracy was that these sluts with their loose morals were destroying the fabric of society, and they needed to get back to church and stop being so quick to leave their husbands over a little infidelity or physical abuse.
I don’t blame Bristol, or anyone else given the opportunity, for grabbing that cash with both hands and making a stash. But there’s something fucking obscene about someone like Williams, who you would think should know better, acting as if she earned a damned thing, rather than being just the latest example of an entitled brat benefiting from incredibly good fortune while telling everyone else that it’s all due to being a “hard ass worker“.
Don’t Break the Law if You Can’t Throw a Ball
The White House says President Barack Obama has commended the owner of the Philadelphia Eagles for giving quarterback Michael Vick a second chance after his release from prison.Obama spokesman Bill Burton says the president told owner Jeffrey Lurie that while he condemns the crimes Vick was convicted of, he believes people who have paid for their crimes should have the opportunity to contribute to society again.
Yeah, we’ve heard this a lot ever since his prison term neared its end, usually from people in the NFL with dollar signs for pupils. Even so, I agreed, despite my utter loathing of this two-legged sack of human waste. He should be able to contribute to society again. Those kennels at the SPCA aren’t going to hose themselves out, after all. But I’m sure there’s nothing disingenuous about this sudden consensus that it’s time to officially forgive Michael Vick that just so happens to accompany Vick’s leading his team into the playoffs, is there? Don’t all illiterate, functionally retarded, violent felons get to waltz right back into their former high-paying jobs once they serve their time? Are you seriously suggesting that Myrrhkins don’t have a single moral conviction they wouldn’t happily sacrifice for the sake of entertainment? Well! I bid you good day, sir!
I SAID GOOD DAY!
It Was Twenty Years Ago Today
Wittgenstein liked Hollywood westerns and crime fiction. Jiddu Krishnamurti enjoyed detective novels. Me, when I want some light reading, something for sheer fun, I turn to fantasy novels. Dungeons and Dragons sort of stuff, although I never actually played D&D.
But anyway, I remember December 27th, 1990. My brother had gotten a Nintendo game called Wizards and Warriors for Christmas, and playing it made me think, “You know, I like this sort of thing; I should go check out some fantasy novels.” And so I did. The first one I got was R.A. Salvatore’s Streams of Silver, which was actually the second novel in a trilogy, but Waldenbooks didn’t have the first one in stock, and I didn’t feel like walking up to the other end of the mall to B. Dalton’s.
I had one of the worst migraines I’ve ever had after I got home, so I spent the rest of the day comatose in the dark and didn’t get any reading done, but I tore through it over the next two days and loved it so much that I went back out and bought the first in the trilogy, plus whatever other Forgotten Realms novels were on the shelves. I still have a small little stain on page 13 of The Crystal Shard that always reminds me of carelessly touching the page with a finger wet with pizza grease, as I sat in a little family-owned pizza parlor (long since replaced by a chain restaurant) on New Year’s Eve, having lunch while getting started on my newest acquisitions. Good times, good times.
Twenty years later, even though many of the stories are cheesy beyond belief, and the prose and plots are often forgettable, I still enjoy them. I just read Salvatore’s latest last month, and I just got a few more novels as Christmas presents to myself, in fact. I guess it’s safe to say I’ll never outgrow this particular pleasure of youth, thank goodness.