Because Facebook needs a rulebook

Typically when I meet someone out in the world, my interactions with him/her are limited to quasi-formal social or professional gatherings, and I could care less if that person, say, obsesses over horoscopes or sends money to PETA. In fact, I'd rather not know, and thankfully commonly understood social protocols make it awkward for my passing acquaintances to expose their niche interests or psychological quirks in public.

But Facebook is a little different from out in the world. Everybody has that one friend who three times a day posts gooey inspirational quotations, or picks fights, or makes everything political. If you're that person, or if you're that person sometimes, there's hope. Just follow the six rules below, and let me know if you drum up a few of your own.

Never reveal anything on Facebook you wouldn't say to someone you're meeting for the first time in person.

Imagine the following scenario: In the last seven days, your grandmother (whom you didn't know all that well) died; and you've just had amazing casual sex with someone you've had a crush on for a long time. Which of these two events will you share with a person selected at random from your Facebook friends?

If you chose to talk about your sex life, grab a square foot of tin foil out of the pantry, roll it up into a ball, and chew on it. That's how you make everybody feel when you write about your sex life or troubled relationships on Facebook.

Think before you post.


I've had this happen to me way too many times: I'll have the perfect one-liner response to someone's post, but it's not exactly PC. I read over what I've written, and decide that I'm not comfortable having that one-liner under my name, so I move on. And every time I failed to move on, I regretted it later.

Remember that when you respond to a post or comment, everybody who has posted to that thread gets an e-mail.


So, you know how every time your super popular friend says something even remotely witty, he/she gets 35 comments and 60 "likes?" You might not realize this, but your popular friend receives an e-mail for every idiotic "u r so purty grrrl!" and "I'm so grateful to have such a wonderful person in my life!" your dumb ass decides to "add" to the conversation. So don't be the last person to say what everyone else already knows.

There's nothing more irritating than a cause.


Some time ago there was a trend of people changing their profile pictures to cartoon characters to protest child abuse. Here's the thing: People who beat kids don't give a shit what you think. They rough kids up in private, then threaten them into not getting help. It's just about the most heinous, fucked-up thing there is, and changing your profile picture to Goofy isn't going to do anything to stop it. What this show of solidarity amounted to was a bunch of do-gooders agreeing with each other that child abuse is wrong while achieving absolutely nothing.

Election season is coming around. I hear there will be one at the end of next year. So if you're posting Barack Obama's Christmas photos and taking cheap shots at Ron Paul, just remember that you're the reason why some smart people capriciously vote Republican––because anything is better than being like you.

Don't fish for comments.


Do you refer small decisions to your loyal Facebook followers? Does it bother you when you post something and nobody leaves a comment? Do you frequently post provocative details about your life to see if a certain person will respond? I was that guy way back in high school (before Facebook, when MySpace was king), and I only woke up from my sleazy little stupor when I realized how needy and insecure I was being.

People are who they are inescapably in the real world, and even more so on Facebook because social media offer the illusion that you can be whomever you want to be. Thus your crippling personality flaw––in this case, your constant need to be validated on account of your insecurity––is magnified to the point that every right thinking person in your social circle can see it in sharp contrast. It's the social version of Oprah standing against striped wallpaper and the only known cure is, for one collapsing-barn-that-is-your-heart moment, seeing yourself for the ass you really are. You're welcome.

Never, ever post song lyrics or inspirational quotes.


These two things may seem unrelated, but I know what drives you to sing on Facebook or wax philosophical: It's the overpowering (and false) sense that you're an individual, reveling in the joys and calamities of life and sharing perfect gems of articulation with your loving friends and family.

The problem is, people ignore serial inspirers the way they ignore fallen leaves and broken beer bottles on the side of the road, so these nuggets of wisdom and snatched-from-context song lyrics amount to nothing but clutter. What's more, this chicken soup for the Facebook soul advertises the poster's insecurities. Life has given your annoying friend lemons, but the fact that he/she is quoting Bartlett's on Facebook means that your friend isn't making lemonade right now because he/she can't find the sugar.

My guess is, posters of quotes and lyrics are the most likely to take offense by this blog post. They're probably asking, "Where does all this hate come from?" Shut the fuck up. The chronic do-gooders of the world only want to spread peace and love, and for the life of me I've never been able to convince them that painting the world in their saccharine false light doesn't actually make life better.

…

Like I alluded to earlier, this isn't an exhaustive list of annoying behavior on Facebook. There are some great rules out there that still need to be ferreted out and articulated so people will learn good social media citizenship. 

J is for Jeezus

J is for Jesus. I know this because the lady in the dinged-up 1990s minivan told me so.

My interaction with this person began innocuously: I had gotten off my bike at the foot of the Boise foothills to make a phone call. Coming to a halt at a nearby stop sign she rolled down her window and asked me if I was freezing. This is a perfectly reasonable question to ask a person wearing Spandex at five in the evening the day after Christmas. I told her that, yeah, I was fine. That would have been a great moment for this Good Samaritan to roll up her window and go on her merry way.

Instead she took the opportunity to brandish a candy cane and ask if I believed in Christmas; if I knew that J is for "Jesus," and R is for "chevron." Now, a question about one's belief in a major Christian holiday in Idaho is code for "are you a Christian?" and after a brief discussion that consisted of her asking pointed questions about what I believe and me nodding like an idiot bobble head doll, she eventually wished me well, waved, and drove off.

J is for "Jesus?" Chevrons? There's an acronym for that: WTF. It turned my head that after millennia of Christian dominance over the Western world, this woman had the gall to talk to me in ciphers, as though Nero's spies might overhear and feed the twain of us to the lions.

But once an oppressed group, always an oppressed group. Just think about all the people you know who life has kicked around, or social conservatives, or spokespeople for labor unions: Like Nietzsche's slave morality, these people carry the politics of oppression with them wherever they go, even when they're in charge. Within the broader oppressed community, authenticity is defined––as it always has been––by suffering and underground-ness.

So now that Christianity is a mainstream faith cherished two or three times a year by millions of sensible people the question is, who's the most hardcore kind of Christian? After all, these establishment Christians can't be the real deal.

The answer: Christians who speak to each other in code. J can indeed stand for "Jesus." And the chevron (usually with an eye drawn somewhere in it) is the original for the Jesus fish that now adorns so many car bumpers. Clearly I was dealing with one of the most hardcore Christians of all––a modern-day Paul or Arius––; one of those people who sacrifice the warmth and comfort of friends, intelligence, success, social competence for…heaven? Legitimacy? Communion wafers? It's impossible to say for sure.

I'd always been told that there are three topics that shouldn't be discussed in mixed company. Those are sex, politics, and religion. This formula subjects these three areas of life to the rules of propriety, which is the source of my general antipathy towards Pride Week, the Tea Party, and Evangelical Christianity. Some people prioritize their beliefs over manners and decorum just like how someone who hates pants might one day decide to not wear them to work, and the effect is a lot like when someone reads over your shoulder, or how tall people seem to tower imperiously over your personal space.

I'm not religious, and like most decent people I consider on-the-spot religious discussion a kind of intrusion. Though invisible from the waist down on account of her battered minivan, my candy cane-wielding believer was clearly not wearing pants. It was as though during her spiel about whether I was One of Us she had casually dropped them out the window as a token of our newfound familiarity. Except it wasn't. It was like something a crazy person would do.

What critics got wrong about Stieg Larsson

"We're not making any money off these Stieg Larsson novels, so here's my plan: Let's attach an intriguing director and an all-star cast to their movie adaptations so we can disregard Sweden's seminal film interpretations of those same novels and make zillions of dollars."

This conversation (or one like it) had to have taken place in some producer's Los Angeles board room, possibly accompanied by maniacal laughter, lightning bolt. And now that we Yanks have seen fit to make a version of our own, the English language Inter-tubes are aflutter with excitement.

A lot of this critical chaff zeros in on Lisabeth Salander, the trilogy's anti-heroine and feminist stocking-stuffer. The women's studies implications of Salander are voluminous: She's a battered woman with an interesting sex life who hates (and exacts revenge upon) men who hate women. She may or may not have the ladies studies merits of Pippi Longstocking.

Katie Roiphe's recent Slate post hints that there may be more to Salander than the armchair feminists and literary critics give her credit for. At the organs of right-thinking feminist prose, "you will hear the assumption of victimization…and the simultaneous assertion of power." What's more, this character has come to the forefront of our collective imagination on the eve of The Good Men Project and The End of Men. Coincidence? Roiphe thinks not.

Roiphe doesn't go so far as to explain what it is about Salander that makes her more than grease on the literati's gears. This is because critics are stuck on the woman-ness of Lisabeth Salander, and haven't broadened their scope beyond feminist cause celebre: that she's an archangel of democratic values.

Consider what she's up against in the novels. Her nemeses are misogynists, yes, but also the barrage of confusions of the rote application of the law and the pursuit of justice. Salander was committed to a mental institution at an early age because of the political significance of her father, and her further adventures are inhibited by her status as an invalid.

Like the cases of Solzhenitsyn and Ai Wei Wei (as I indicated in an earlier post), the label of mental illness haunts the footsteps of political dissidents, even in a place as genuinely concerned with the wellbeing of its citizenry as Salander's Sweden.

At one point in the first novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Salander's caseworker explains that based on Salander's history of antisocial behavior no-one would think twice about his revoking certain of her privileges: Everything would be Ordnung on paper. Much ado derives from how things look in official documents and reports, and the problem Larsson identifies in his novels is the disconnect between those documents and the values of truth, justice and compassion.

On the subject of paper, consider also the role of the press in Salander's life. Mikael Blomkvist is Salander's staunchest ally throughout the Millennium series, and in his capacity as muckraker he's freed to pursue Salander's twisted case down the most unlikely avenues. His investigations reveal more than Sweden's underbelly of corruption––they reveal precisely what is hidden from the police. In other words, the investigative reporter can dig where the detective cannot because Blomkvist remains forever outside the system.

Now consider where democratic values come from. Isn't, say, freedom of speech most important to people who say unpopular things? And surely the presumption of innocence is most valuable to the innocent man who just happens to appear guilty, so it makes sense that Lisabeth Salander embodies these things in series of novels about why those values require our eternal vigilance.

The significance of all this is that if critics merely see Salander as a stand-in for feminist values, the Millennium series becomes nothing more than a revenge tale in the mold of Inglourious Basterds. Yes, Lisabeth Salander is interesting from a feminist point of view, but Larsson's novels are a defense of the whole philosophical framework that makes feminist thought possible.

Steve Bloom: professor, pariah, punk rocker

Steve Bloom has, purposefully or not, become the Sid Vicious of Iowa journalism. And maybe more. Response to his recent article in The Atlantic is divided between those who take umbrage against Bloom's facts and conclusions, and those who see his perspective as a critique of journalism or Iowa or the upcoming caucuses or whatever. At any rate, Steve Bloom is the man a lot of Iowans love to hate––the man who brought a little punk to a place that may (or may not) be the urheimat of corn and hogs.


By now there must be dozens of full-length responses to the offending article. Those responses come from such notable corners as the Columbia Journalism Review and The Washington Post, and the headline is, "University of Iowa journalism professor kicks unlikely and 'frankly frightening' hornets' nest."

Ask his students if anyone really "gets" Steve Bloom

Anybody who has ever spent time in Iowa knows that the last thing the place is, is a hornets' nest. It's full of calm, collected, clean people––with the totally understandable exception of game days––who are proud of being forthright and slow to anger. If it ever seems like a boring place, it's because Iowa is perhaps one of the most normal places on Earth.


––Which is precisely what makes Bloom's article so damned amazing: It has managed to really piss these people off. 


Not every claim Bloom makes in his Atlantic piece is absolutely 100% accurate (as more than one Iowan has noted in the comments section of the article's online edition), but a lot of Iowa is rural. Some of it is crumbling and Podunk. Corn grows. People eat pork and think highly of Jesus. But Iowa's also exceptionally verdant, tidy, and toy-bright. Barns are uniformly painted lipstick red, lawns and men's hair are cropped close as golf greens, and people tuck in their shirts.


The insider truth is that Iowans accept Iowa's contrasts without remark––the green of the corn and the blue of the sky, calloused hands and fresh linens, a disconcerting mix of progressive and conservative––and expect the same from the rest of us. The only thing that could upset such staid and placid folk is a half-truth. They ignore the lie that Iowa is flat or that its people are stupid (no man knows his business quite like an Iowan) or that it's secretly Idaho, but Steve Bloom's half-truths are simply more than respectable people can turn their backs on.


Bloom's take-down of the Iowa caucus tries to prove that Iowans no longer represent mainstream America, but in so doing he painted a picture of Iowa that Iowans themselves swear they don't recognize. And just like punk rock, the more some finger-wagging, latte-sipping, city-dwelling liberal tries to define you, the more you're likely to rebel against his definition. As one Iowan mentioned on my Facebook wall, "Reading [the article] the whole time I felt a square peg / round hole vibe when I looked at my own life here."  


This is where most of Bloom's haters miss the point. Of course, they're justified in their quarrel with his depiction of their home, but Bloom's comments about "scuzzy" towns and corporate farms are just set pieces in an argument over whether Iowa can, through the caucus, continue to lay claim to being the "real" America. The bulk of America's population now lives in the 'burbs and on the heavily urbanized coasts, as do the media corporations that are increasingly the masters of public opinion.

Outside the world of Pace sauce, New York is the new Real America

There's a general consensus that the Iowa caucus plays a disproportionate role in the Republican nomination process, playing into the hands of the social conservatives who make up that party's grass roots. Like a Frenchman wearing a beret or Africans with bones in their noses, the Iowa farmer showing up at a caucus with his hog and flannel shirt is a quaint anachronism that defrauds political discourse. In a much more recognizable Iowa, that farmer might make his entrance in a coat and tie, just like everyone else in America. 


The irony is that in order to debunk Steve Bloom, Iowans will first have to debunk the image of Iowa the media presents to the rest of America through the spectacle of their caucus.

Why 'Huck Finn' is still the Great American Novel

Last weekend my aunt and uncle moved into a new house down in the valley after 30 years of living in Boise's highlands. When I arrived for the moving party I was shocked to see their old abode––which had always struck me as fabulously filthy and hopelessly infested with black widows––devoid of objets d'art and the nooks and crannies that usually hide dust bunnies and poisonous spiders.

As my aunt packed some miscellaneous books into boxes, she handed me a copy of the Autobiography of Mark Twain: Volume I. "Do you want this," she asked. Of course I did.

I began reading it in earnest when I got home in much the same way he dictated it, haphazardly jumping from one story and set of reminiscences to another, and found myself laughing aloud at characters the master was able to paint in the space of a sentence or a paragraph. Twain is at his best when he's describing just what kind of hero or villain a given person really is.

In a fit of enthusiasm I drew from my bookshelf my copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and in doing so it fell to the ground, opening to pages 226 and 227, about three quarters of the way through. What I found there startled me with its prescience regarding the American soul and that novel's place in the canon.

But before I quote from the novel, let me suggest that like my aunt and uncle, the American novel has relocated from the heights and down into the lowlands. If, as Hemingway and Faulkner suggest, American literature grew from the seed that is Huck Finn, it's clear that much of the artistic work that followed in its footsteps has in some way been a reaction to it.

In my opinion, most authors side with either Twain's remarkable ear for the American voice, or his uncanny eye for the expanse of the American landscape. Few have tried––fewer still have succeeded––in capturing both. Consequently their readers must content themselves with being either deaf or blind.

Just take the work being produced today by the Jonathan Franzens, –Safran Foers and Eugenides of the world: So much of its focus is trained on the "alive"-ness of history and the 20th century's upheaval of sensibilities. Would The Help be much improved if it didn't take for granted the wrong-ness of mistreating house servants?

––Which leads me to what I found on page 227 of Huck Finn.

"So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn't know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I'll go and write the letter––and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather, right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:

'Miss Watson your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. 

Huck Finn'"

The hilarious disgrace of the outcome of Huck's reasoning undoes the American fallacy of the easy decision. Huck faces a problem of the conscience, and his solution is to trivialize it.

Our hero wants to have his cake and eat it, too, figuring he can literally send his faithful companion up shit creek and pray for his own conscience later. Given its location within the novel, it's clear this isn't the catalyst for Huck's rambling adventure––it isn't the joke––: It's the punchline. When confronted with a choice between what's right (acknowledging the property of others) and righter still (acknowledging that Jim is a human being), Huck chooses what's merely right.

His dual sense that Jim is both man and chattel is an enduring feature of a distinctly American ethic. Wall Street holds that capitalism is the system that best puts security and material prosperity into the hands of the greatest number of people, and has admirably maintained as much in the face of millions of Americans losing their jobs and homes. 

A lot of bankers have made millions of dollars for themselves, their clients, and their shareholders, and I have to assume that they spend no small amount of their spare time praying for their eternal souls.

Like Huckleberry Finn, America is still a child trying to make sense of right and wrong, and we continue to feel blindly for the line between doing right by ourselves and doing right by the people around us. Russian novelist Mikhail Bulgakov acidly noted in his novel The Master and Margarita that "To speak the truth is easy and pleasant." But America is a young, naive place, and Twain's America hasn't yet the moral or ethical firmament to make Huck's––or Bulgakov's––dilemma a moral one until Huck feels the weight of his actions on his own conscience.

We can't laugh at either until we've felt for ourselves the pain of disregarding humanity or telling a convenient lie.

Inventing the news, FOX style

When I tell people that I'm looking for work as a journalist I hear a lot of complaints about the news. Some of them are warranted, some aren't. My dad, for example, only watches Brian Williams so he can shout at the TV. "Why is there so much fluff?" people whine. "Where's the other side of the story?" ask others.

The most valid complaint, in my opinion, is that there are too damned many talking heads. "Why," my friends ask, "does CNN have the same panel of 'experts' discuss every news item? Who do they think they are, the Doctors Who?" These so-called experts are secretly just intelligent people who read the news and can be expected to faithfully maintain a persona and ideological stance. 

Sometimes those personas run wild.

"Who's Roland Martin?" Now we know.

Roland Martin's ascot was the stroke of genius that transformed him from CNN panel set piece to object briefly worth our attention. Martin isn't charismatic or intelligent enough to stay in the spotlight–– unlike Anderson Cooper, he can't use his elvish good looks to conduct pathos like gold wire conducts electricity––but for just a moment, he had the courage and ingenuity to break away from the pack.

Fox News has the blessing (and burden) of having a single political viewpoint, and has largely dispensed with the farce of trying to give the proverbial both sides of the story. Sure, guys like Karl Rove, Mike Huckabee and Larry Miller will do the rounds of Fox's news analysis shows and occasionally get themselves elevated to shows of their own, but Fox has had to mix it up by recruiting commentators from right-wing think tanks, and that has meant exposing viewers to a diverse set of conservative viewpoints––a necessary evil Fox News wants desperately to dispense with.

Enter Donald Trump. Fox has long sought a truth-teller who has the credentials and stupidity to appear credible without delving into any sort of nuance. He paints his opinions in broad strokes, freeing his hosts to ask him questions about anything at any time without fear of stumping him or tangents. 

Even better, he's allowed to say crazy things like, "Our country is blowing up," with impunity because nobody expects Donald Trump to be anybody but Donald Trump. 

But the best part is all those shots of Sean Hannity barely upholding the social contract. It's his show, and sometimes he has to ask a question or assert himself, but Hannity is realizing what the rest of Fox already knows: If you invite Donald Trump onto your show, your only obligation is to make eye contact.

Sean Hannity lets the Trumpster do the editorializing for him

Americans love winners, and Trump has long been perceived as one: He's allowed to say crazy things, he marries top shelf supermodels, and he has a haircut that only the rich and famous could possibly pull off. A real estate magnate, he's a one-trick pony who has managed to fail at the most fool-proof industry of all, gambling. A self-proclaimed billionaire, he will viciously sue anyone who suggests otherwise to protect the veneer of his fabulous wealth.

He is, in short, the perfect Fox guest. He's greedy, he's brash, he's conservative, and people seem to like him for it––never mind that he's a Birther whose political knowledge is informed exclusively by the news network on which he regularly appears. So while Roland Martin has to pull out an ascot to rise above the din of the other stock CNN personalities, all Donald Trump has to do is be himself.

Conservatives have long prized unity and cohesion, but the Tea Party's frightening anti-establishment views have frightened mainstream Republicans. What Fox seems to be realizing is that even among adherents to the political philosophy that the solution to all our ills is to cut taxes, there are still too many ideas and perspectives to hold that movement together. Fox's reaction has been to use the narrowest possible set of ideas and perspectives to deliver the news in the most ideologically consistent possible way.

"Conservative" and the Eleventh Commandment just don't cut it anymore. Just look at the media blackout of Ron Paul during his presidential campaign.

Who's Ron Paul?

Ron Paul is a hardcore libertarian with an ideologically consistent plan for America. Regardless of whether or not you think that plan's correct, you have to hand it to the guy: He was Tea Party before Tea Partying was cool. Being a libertarian means decriminalizing drugs and allowing gay marriage and no longer pushing American military might abroad. So while Sarah Palin and Rick Perry are objectively idiots, at least they don't alienate wealthy Christian conservatives or big business. Letting Ron Paul into the Big Tent means pushing a lot of conservatives out. 

I predict that Fox's strategy of ideological exclusion will eventually achieve Stalinism. Spouting politically conservative theory on Fox News must inevitably become taboo because talking about what viewers have already internalized opens theory up for interpretation––and therefore difference of opinion. 

Making the rounds on the Internet is a Fox Business segment about the new Muppets movie brainwashing young people. The plot of the film is that the Muppets have been displaced from their studio because some tycoon has discovered oil under it. Using this as a plot device has ignited canned indignation over liberal media conditioning.

It's precisely this kind of commentary that will disappear from Fox News.

"Liberal Hollywood depicting a successful businessman as evil––that's nothing new" is all he had to say!

All this says a lot about who Fox feels its audience is––and what that audience will eventually become. At some point, it will no longer need to be reminded of how to interpret the news, and like Donald Trump, it will be relied upon to respond to the news predictably. 

The other day I went to my neighbor's house and ended up watching Sean Hannity's Donald Trump interview. I was shocked when my neighbor, a nice guy and definitely-not-stupid person, told me how much he respected Donald Trump. Today's conservative no longer values goodness, competence or intelligence the way he used to––those values have been replaced by a single one, success. 

My hope is, Fox's programming will evolve to the point that hosts and even the news can be done away with entirely. Instead, images of good things will be accompanied by images of beautiful women or steaming piles of food, and those of bad things will be accompanied by steaming piles of shit.

Maybe that isn't too far off.

Violence, Evangelism, and the Culture War

I've found that the best kind of family time is time spent in front of the television. If it weren't for that glowing beacon of mindlessness, family time could be divided into my parents bickering, my mom talking loudly over the phone, and dad exhaustedly collapsing into his John Grisham novel.

But last night we grew tired of AMC's never-ending cowboy marathon and Comedy Central's senseless failure to play The Colbert Report. We switched from cable to the networks, and my mom stopped my channel surfing at an episode of CBS' 'The Good Wife,' "Parenting Made Easy."

In it, an Evangelical Christian defends her anti-homosexual workplace language as religious speech, citing a passage in Leviticus. When asked by the prosecuting attorney if she also advocated stoning homosexuals to death (as per the passage), she replied that Christ's compassion and forgiveness should stay our hands against homosexuals, but it does not change what's right and what's wrong. 

It's an extremely elegant argument. Christians, it would seem, hold themselves to the highest possible moral standards because their ideal is Jesus, who was ostensibly sinless and therefore the moral paragon. Let God sort the sinners out. The rest of us are left to fight against moral relativism and the pull of our baser instincts. 

But does this reasoning hold up outside of 'The Good Wife?' The answer is a resounding "No." The episode my family watched last night mitigated anti-homosexual violence, but under the surface it presented Evangelicals with an opt-out from The Culture War; and while its plea for tolerance and free speech is touching, it's a weak argument against the hard line stance of Evangelical Christianity. 

The Culture War

The Culture War is the Evangelical reaction to the threat posed by secularism, and just like its moniker connotes, it's tinged with the threat of violence.

The Apocalypse is a period of time when the forces of absolute Good and absolute Evil do battle here on Earth, and moral ambiguity becomes synonymous with moral turpitude. Needless to say, it's a situation in which the non-violence of Jesus' philosophy becomes a mute point. 

Millennialism (the term for the belief in End Times) dispenses utterly with moral relativism, and encourages believers to take an active hand in suppressing it. Thus when social conservatives talk about the Culture Wars, they're talking about the conflict between those who see the Bible and Constitution as living documents, and those who see them as hard and fast laws chiseled in stone. 

So where does the violence come from? Millennialism takes the internal struggle against good and evil out of the mind of the believer and out into the streets. And if you believe that the end of the world is right around the corner or that Barack Obama is the Antichrist, the rivers are already running red with blood and the dragon is at your doorstep.

Eternal Forces PC game pitch takes the "Us vs. Them" approach

When I learned through a friend about "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" from a friend on Facebook, I recognized its overture to Evangelism's violent underbelly immediately.

"Left Behind" is a series of video games based partially on the successful novel series. In it, an Evangelical sect must convert Jews, Muslims, and atheists in the streets of a post-Apocalyptic New York––or kill them should they refuse Salvation. 

When I saw the trailer, I was, like, "Hell yeah, I saw that on TV last week when the police turned out the Occupy Wall Street protesters!"

If ever America was a "Christian country" as so many right wingers claim, it was because Christianity symbolized a general consensus on what was good, civilized behavior. But Christianity has always been divided, and today, it seems like even the most core Christian beliefs are up for grabs. 

The truth is, people will see what they want to see. There are still people who believe Herman Cain never cheated on his wife, that the government destroyed the Twin Towers, and that JFK was killed by aliens. 

The dangerous number of people who believe the Antichrist walks among us are stockpiling guns and canned food in preparation for the signs of the Apocalypse. But the rest of us have a powerful weapon: time. When no Antichrist waves the banner of pure, unadulterated evil; when the Chosen never rise bodily into Heaven; when Jesus fails to show up for his thousand-year reign––that's when these crazies are going to do some hard thinking about the snake-handling laying-on-of-hands specialist radio host they're listening to these days.

They'll just have to accept that Christianity is about faith and not about having your righteousness affirmed by cataclysm. Just ask that failed 2011 Doomsday prophet Harold Camping what he's doing these days.

What demotivational posters tell us about the Internet

Don't bother denying it. I know what you've done. I know, because I've done it too.

You know you're wasting your time typing "kitten" into the Google search field. Guys, do the words "huge tits" mean anything to you? 

The beauty of the Internet is that we become our own gatekeepers: We can Google or YouTube whatever suits our fancy with the most rigorous specificity at the click of a button. What's more, we never have to see what we don't want to see. One of those things is the clock. 

The Internet's relationship with time is what it has in common with the theater or the novel and where it breaks from the real world. Every word and image carries a message; there's no boredom or lag time between significant events; it's free from auxiliary people and concerns. Everything is a snapshot. And foremost among these snapshots is the demotivational poster.

Games: Best reality ever

The above demotivational poster is one of my favorites. Looking out a window used to symbolize man's yearning for the potential of the outside world and his strained relationship with the monotony of indoor living, but on the Internet, potential is meaningless. In the world of Internet gaming, for example, I can pursue limitless ambitions and achieve virtually limitless levels of success. In the real world, my efforts are hampered by, well, reality. An equally fitting––though certainly less acidic––caption would be, "Games: Best reality ever."

Demotivational posters are the dark underbelly of the once-ubiquitous motivational poster. Structurally identical to their simulacra offspring, they typically combined soothing images with pithy words of wisdom, and could be found in practically every cookie cutter strip mall professional office space. Like Soviet propaganda, it was widely understood that they were emblematic of emotionally fruitless existence instead of a departure from it.

––Which is exactly why they lent themselves so perfectly to the Internet meme. It was easy to imagine their color-retouched landscapes replaced with Darth Vader or a squirrel doing a backflip over a snarky caption, and almost as easy to construct on one's computer. There are even generators online.

I haven't seen a motivational poster in years, and I suspect that the demotivational poster meme has actually supplanted its source material in a weird example of Baudrillard's theory of the precession of the simulacrum. Whatever the case, nobody will ever look at an authentic motivational poster and see anything but a quaint holdout against a now overwhelmingly ironic medium. Their disappearance from the workplace tells us that the uninspired propagandists of America's vast cubicle halls have been beaten.

But beaten by what, exactly? Beyond the structural demands of the motivational poster (a black matte, a photo, and a caption in plain white font), there are no set rules for the content of a demotivational poster. Sure, it helps that the caption and photo are funny and relate to one another in some humorous way, but if "Bear Cavalry" is any indication, there's little need for a sense of humor beyond an easy amusement with the absurd.

Courtesy of stoners imbued with a crude sense of awesome

As the potheads at highdeas.com correctly point out, "Bear Cavalry" is a hilarious and original idea, and you just know some illustrator had a field day sketching out the salty Cossacks and their Kalashnikovs and Thompson guns. It was only a matter of time until the Internet nerd corps did what it habitually does with a genuine novelty: try to one-up it.

Enter a parade of infinite escalation. "Gorillas in Power Armor," "Cat Snipers," "Raptor Cavalry"––these aren't just rip-offs of the original; they're in a kind of dialogue with "Bear Cavalry," sometimes mentioning it by name. While the demotivational poster replaced its predecessor, eventually destroying it, "Bear Cavalry" spawned generations of the like that play off of absurd, animal-populated military themes in much the same way original comments are preserved on a message board, no matter how many responses they generate.

The Internet's structure has a high degree of self-similarity. Like cloud formations, coastlines, and Jackson Pollock paintings,* blogs, aggregates and fora use self-reference and interconnectivity to produce structural similarity regardless of the scale on which it's perceived. The "Bear Cavalry" poster began as a call into the ether of the Internet––fanboy wit set adrift like a message in a bottle––that received response after response, eventually reproducing something akin to a familiar Internet structure, the forum.

Somewhere beneath the fractal geometry of the Internet rests a bedrock of something resembling culture. I hesitate to call e-culture a true culture because all societies in the outside world hold certain things as sacred. On the Internet, everything's up for grabs. After all, the second response to "Bear Cavalry" (after "That's AWESOME!") was, "What would be more awesome than bear cavalry?" E-culture is defined by its ironic wit and obsession with the superlative, and within it is a never-ending search for the cutest, the most epic, the minutest detail. It embraces the re-appropriation of the old but thrives on riffing and improvisation. On the Internet, these are the only things that are truly sacred (except maybe StarWars).

However, there's a deep-seated aversion to outright viciousness, and there's a kind of irony in that the same apparatus that distributed reaction videos to 2 Girls 1 Cup could so revile the Barack Obama/Joker poster. The culture of anonymity has fostered an ambivalence towards our serious convictions, and expressions of outright cruelty or hatred fall under the category of Too Much Information.

The best demotivational posters are meaningless. Like everything else on the Internet, they digest the material of the outside world while saying as little about us as individuals as possible. Like "Reality: Worst game ever," on the Internet we have full control over our handles, unblemished by our crooked teeth or shabby complexions. We can be whomever we want to be––but we've chosen to be nobody.

*Special thanks to Ian Pilgrim of the University of Oregon for sending me back to Idaho with a copy of the original Richard P. Taylor article.

Bacon porn

When I was 11 years old, my parents left me home alone for a few hours. Completely idle, I counted the dials on the stove from right to left. There were 10. Then I counted them from left to right. There were 9. It was not my shining moment.

It was about mid-afternoon, and I began to get hungry. I opened the refrigerator and there it was: a package of bacon. I threw a pan on high heat and piled on about fifteen strips of the stuff. But bacon seemed pretty plain, so I smothered it in honey and pepper. Who hasn't heard of honey-smoked bacon or peppered bacon?

My afternoon snack took forever to cook because I couldn't decide if it was better to cook it slowly or quickly, and the honey had scored the pan with heavy black carbon, but finally it was done. I took a bite. It tasted like shit.

While I still love bacon, I don't see it as the salty centerpiece of my breakfast the way I once did. I see this newfound discernment as a sign of my maturity, along with my resignedness to eating dinner before dessert and picking my Legos up off the floor before going to bed. This is why the New Bacon Porn Conspiracy distresses me: While I seem to become more mature, everyone around me has started to eat more bacon.

Bacon is a sometimes food. Conventional wisdom has it that bacon is high in fat and salt, and unless you're a professional athlete or hunter/gatherer on a 10,000-calorie/day diet, it should be consumed sparingly. It was on the eve of this logical conclusion that bacon came into its own. Suddenly, it seemed like everything either had bacon on it or tasted like bacon.

It began, coincidentally enough, in my hometown of Portland, Oregon, on an episode of 'Man Vs. Food.' I had never heard of Voodoo Donuts while I lived there, but this pastry shop has become the home of the bacon maple bar. It sounds dubious, but apparently that's what everybody says before he takes his first bite.

Bacon maple bars at Voodoo Donuts

The BMB is the ultimate in hipster culinary irony––who would have thought that bacon + pastry would be delicious?––and I'm not exactly a health nut, so I forgot entirely about this episode of 'Man Vs. Food.' In fact, I forgot about 'Man Vs. Food' in general, because I found Adam Richman to be completely insufferable. 

But I began to notice that pork was slowly but surely enveloping me in a classic pincer move. First, my neighbor told me about the daughter of a friend of hers who loves bacon and who received for her birthday some kind of bacon flavoring. "Now everything she eats she can make taste like bacon!" my neighbor told me.

OK, fine. Kids love bacon. I get it. But then my parents started eating bacon. Like, for two straight weeks. Bacon and eggs for breakfast was followed by breakfast for dinner with (you guessed it) bacon. On Sunday at brunch, they would ask for bacon sides to go with omelets and pancakes, where before the side meat of choice was sausage.

Even before that, I'd felt my heart beat a little faster at the sight of the KFC Double Down Sandwich on a billboard. Bacon wasn't pervading––it was encroaching.

Friends started posting bacon pictures on Facebook and Google+ that were wildly well-received by their friends. There is even "bacon porn" on YouTube.

Bacon porn

All this has been followed with a change in how bacon is perceived. Before, it was the cheap, fatty meat you had with breakfast or chopped on baked potatoes. It was the kind of thing you pretended to feed your dog. It was a greasy topping on hamburgers, served in units of two thin washboard-y strips.

It's BACON!

But anymore bacon is a gourmet thing to be taken seriously. At the Boise upscale watering hole Bittercreek Ale House, it's served thick-cut on hamburgers hickory smoked and smothered in pepper, as though the more high-falutin it looks on paper, the more nutritious it must be.

I've seen foods make this transition before. Cheese––which is mostly fat and salt, and to me tastes like curdled puke––has been successfully rebranded as a beneficial part of our diets, provided we're spending enough money on it. The same is true for so-called "Lebanon bologna," which is essentially a smokier-tasting version of the cheap-o lunch meat. And despite the fact that the same antioxidants can be found in Welch's grape juice, we still believe that a glass of red wine a day helps prevent cancer.

It may be too late to tell if bacon underwent this transition because of hipster re-appropriation or gentrification. Maybe that's the point: Hipster culture is fascinated by chicken-and-egg riddles and high vs. low culture arguments because they absolve us of having to make distinctions or value judgements; and those of us with money will buy anything if it seems "upper crust" enough.

I once watched a close friend of mine drink with relish a glass of ultra upscale gin. It was the color of whiskey and smelled heavily of juniper berries––apparently signs that this was no mere Sapphire gin––and came in a tall, earthenware jug with a little card describing just how not-Sapphire this gin was.

I later learned that it wasn't until after the repeal of Prohibition that gin went from being the blinding agent of choice of the British working class to an upscale liquor. We have an amazing power to convince ourselves of something's respectability. 

Let's hope someone sees through bacon's peppercorn-encrusted façade before someone has a heart attack.

Letter to the editor

I want to invite the Letters to the Editor regulars to Thanksgiving. The circulation of my local daily newspaper, The Idaho Statesman, reaches past Boise and into the dusty marches beyond, and the bulk of published correspondence comes from places like Meridian, Nampa, Eagle, Kuna, and Mountain Home.

And of course there are "regulars." The Statesman publishes one letter per writer per month, but when you've been a subscriber for as long as I have, you begin to get a feel for the repeat offenders. They are angry flag-waving, Obama-hating conservatives to a man. They have loud, largely unfounded positions on foreign domestic policy. And like I said, I want to invite them to Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving, after all, isn't about giving thanks, as its name would suggest. The Pilgrims who made Thanksgiving an American tradition invited the Indians over for dinner––ostensibly to share the bounty––only to seize their land and resources the next morning on what would become another American tradition: Black Friday. This holiday is about unceremoniously violating the protocols of hospitality.

You can guess what I have in store for these letter-writing regulars. Or you can stay tuned.

Imagine that I have two from today's Statesman (Patrick Cannon, Frank Celsnak) sitting down on couches in a cozily lit room. In the fireplace, what was once a roaring fire is down to glowing embers and the occasional lick of flame. We're nursing hot spiked cider in our festive Thanksgiving-themed sweaters. Dinner went really well, and the turkey was perfectly cooked. Everybody went for seconds.

I open with the following: "So, Patrick [R. Cannon of Meridian], you once identified as a 'California liberal.' Why did you leave California?"

Cannon: "Well, I left California because ei,sow;fielfmchjtidlx,citow,mie. And it was much too liberal. I relocated to Idaho because ed,tueomtielcjrep.a'risjf,r5oqc, but 'Imagine how disheartening it was for me to move my family from California to Idaho and find my new hometown newspaper is a willing participant in the liberal insanity.'"

Moi: "And it is your contention that liberal journalism schools––you mentioned Columbia in your letter––are responsible for falsely reporting about the President's 'socialist' and 'checkered past,' and for reporting that the bailouts of major automakers and national banks were Bush's fault."

Cannon: "That's what I wrote."

Me: "And it is also true that you, a man in the autumn of his years and still in possession of a thick head of copper hair, molested a minor? If convicted, you could face 25 years in prison."

Cannon: "It's certainly possible. But I have not been tried or convicted by a jury of my peers, no matter how unlikely a fair trial may be, given that my peers are the oxcart-driving, snake-handling hoosiers of Meridian, Idaho."

Me: "Touche.

I take it, then, that you have never run for office or worked in the media or on a political campaign in an attempt to reform the system (as you see it) from the inside."

Cannon: "That would be a fair assumption."

Me: "And the same goes, I'm guessing, for you, Frank [Celsnak of Eagle]."

Celsnak: "Not exactly. I was in the Marine Corps, and earned my way as an engineer for General Motors."

Me: "Delightful! So your Tea Party politics can perhaps, in part, be traced to your roots in practical fiscal and social conservatism."

Celsnak: "Something like that."

Me: "Fair enough. And you hold that the liberal media is whitewashing a socialist power grab here in the United States, that George W. Bush was not a true 'conservative,' and that if Barack Obama was even slightly competent at his job, the numbers of uninsured, the unemployed, and below the poverty line, would have decreased dramatically over the last three years?––and that all this reduces our national sovereignty and plunges us into tyranny?"

Celsnak: "You have summed up my argument[s] perfectly."

Me: And the both of you believe that bailing out the banks and major automakers was both a terrible mistake and the fault of Barack Obama."

Them thar yokels: "Yep."

Me: "Then pardon my plain speaking, but who the fuck cares what you think? I mean, neither of you has demonstrated that you have any experience or knowledge of the media, politics, or the economy. One of you is a pederast, and the other has done nothing but follow orders his whole life.

The two things you have in common are blind anger and a misguided sense that things were better under George Bush. Neither of you has ever known the taste of authority, so what does your peon opinion matter?"

…

Celsnak and Cannon are idiots. I would have gone my whole life not knowing about their idiocy, but they went ahead and opened their mouths in public bitching about their President when they should be bitching about the abuses they've suffered at the hands of the system that has forgotten them.

At least the Occupy Wall Street movement got that part right.

I see the Tea Party and OWS as two sides of the same coin. Both (rightly) sense that something is seriously wrong with America. The economy is in the tank, the political mechanism has stalled, and the gap between the rich and poor is wider than it has ever been.

But all these Tea Party-ers and OWS-ers sound like a bunch of whiners. And not for the usual reasons.

Neither has turned its discontent into a potent or dynamic political force. So-called "Tea Party Candidates" are simple-minded obstructionists for whom the architecture of political and economic inequity that ravages their constituents is way too complicated to understand.

OWS has one hat in the ring, Elizabeth Warren. Let's give Warren some credit––she's a total rockstar. She has a working understanding of the system, policy and practical experience, and has a program for meaningful reform. 

On the other hand, she's just one candidate. And she's positively reviled by the Tea Party folks who share her anger but lack her judgment and experience. Where's the glut of ambitious candidates? Where's the media blitz and fundraisers? Where's the coherent platform?

Blind partisanship, it would seem, is as paralyzing to the reform of our inadequate political and economic structures as ignorance and lack of authority.

I have never approved of protest. Marching, chants and banners are no substitute for votes and candidates, and it has always bothered me that people more readily take to the streets than take positive political action. Sure, you can bet your fat-cat politicians and captains of industry are watching OWS and the Tea Party on the news, but that doesn't mean they're scared, because the political and economic system that's in place favors them––not the unwashed masses.

It heartens me when I hear that Bank of America will repeal its proposed $5 charge on debit cards, or that "Quickster" was cancelled because Netflix lost a million subscriptions. All this shows that people know how to make use of their economic power to tell big business that they'll only be abused so much.

I would like to see the angry people of the world make such a meaningful splash in the capitol.

The Most Derivative Man in the World

This blog is rapidly becoming a chronicle of my long-running fascination with television advertisements. I like to think I've developed a refined taste for commercials good and bad alike.

Take this ballad-esque Jameson Irish whiskey commercial:

If you regale people with your stories, they'll buy your booze.

This is about as good as a television ad gets. It has a brooding (but somehow winning) visual style, charming narration, and a crisp conceit that makes the cooked hawk at the end laugh-out-loud funny. Its straight storytelling makes those catchy "Most Interesting Man in the World" commercials look like strings of Chuck Norris jokes made up on the fly.

Don't get me wrong: I don't disdain The Most Interesting Man in the World. My family will pause a discussion when a Dos Equis commercial airs and be in better spirits after having watched it through. Yesterday, my sister texted me a short list of The Man's Most Interesting Attributes. 

But the Dos Equis commercials are basically 30-second responses to Seinfeld brought to you in the form of a Far Side cartoon. "He once had an awkward moment––just to see how it felt" is the hip millionaire's retort to the awkwardness of Larry David's culture of self-consciousness. In David's world, visiting your dentist might embroil you in the drama of his kitschy conversion to Judaism. In The Man's, speaking French in Russian somehow works out.

It's The Man's world; we just live in it.

Seth Stevenson, writing for Slate, suggests that The Man is modeled on who the beer-swilling masses (mostly man-children under 35) want to be when they grow up: worldly, bearded aficionados. But the hipster humor Dos Equis deploys is far from sophisticated, getting most of its yuks from puns and half-ironies. "He lives vicariously through himself," the voice-over tells us, though we're left to wonder if that's even possible. 

Stevenson offers The Man in the tradition of Wes Anderson and the stead of "cheesecake and frat humor," but that doesn't mean he has ascended to the heights of a true alternative to juvenile humor.

This is nowhere more evident than in the Keith Stone commercials. A combination of The Man's salt-and-pepper suavity and that cheesecake and frat humor, he looks more like a burnout Guns 'n Roses roadie than someone we might call "smooth." 

What's more, he's shilling the brew of choice for house parties that only end when the cops arrive. Both Dos Equis and Keystone are yeti piss (chilled yeti piss if you're lucky), but at least Dos Equis is foreign yeti piss. And while The Man is someone young men want to be when they grow up, Keith Stone is at best someone young men want to be for Halloween.

Keith Stone is the poor man's Most Interesting Man.

What these Jameson, Dos Equis, and Keystone campaigns have in common is consistency. They are focused efforts at building their brands through stock characters or familiar motifs; and it's here that Stevenson proves to be somewhat prophetic in identifying the influence of Wes Anderson's protagonists of "infinite skill and superlative quirk."

I should point out, though, that the farther away these campaigns get from Wes Anderson's source material––and the closer they become to each other––the more the Andersonian protagonist's image degrades. So far, we've seen his influence on three campaigns working directly in his shadow, but it's the prerogative of ad men to keep their secrets, well, secret. Disaster strikes when good campaigns are mimicked by bad. 

What, do they sell beer now at DQ?

It isn't that Dairy Queen doesn't sell alcohol. It's that we never learn the name of this mustachioed gardener. It's that he does the improbable––he does the impossible. He has the mustache and imposing voice of his predecessors, but he has none of the panache. He is what happens when bad ad men draw their inspiration from better ad men instead of outside source material. He is the most derivative man in the world. 

AMC's 'Hell on Wheels' is a train wreck

If you're not hip to the history of the post-Civil War Old West, the latest addition to AMC's lineup Hell on Wheels will confuse. If familiar you are, it will mystify. Its historical exposition and speechifying tell us it's a study in healing the wounds of war. But read its lips: dklhxnmwlfjsrk.

The pilot fails to do the one thing a pilot should do: compel its audience by making at least a little sense.

By the end of the first episode, it's clear that the principal cast members have nothing explicitly in common except that they're convening on the fictional work camp of Hell on Wheels, where Elam Ferguson (Common), a former slave, has just cut the throat of one-handed foreman Daniel Johnson (Ted Levine)––the only man in camp who knew the identity of Cullen Bohannon's wife's murderer.

If if that isn't confusing enough, there's also the robber baron Thomas Durant (Colm Meany) and Lily Bell (Dominique McElligot), who has been widowed and wounded during an Indian raid.


Hell on Wheels' fatal flaw is that it wants to be AMC's fullest expression of the American frontier; but breathing life into this many Western regulars––like the aggrieved gunslinger and the captain of industry––in the space of an hour has proven to be simply too much of a burden.

Chief among these regulars is Cullen Bohannon (Anson Mount), whom we first meet posing as a priest and gunning down a discharged Union soldier in a confessional. He later explains that he's a former slave-owner and small-time farmer who paid his freed slaves wages until his wife was killed by marauding Union soldiers.

He starts out as a Man with No Name, and it feels like whiplash when he lapses into the One Good Southerner––the latest nauseating frontman of Hollywood whitewashing.

Hell on Wheels' premier should have been the capstone to AMC's running themes of self-determination and redemption, and its emphases on American history and allusions to its characters' backstories give it the feel of a spin-off.

In spite of the all this familiarity, very little can be said for certain about the characters. Is Bohannon a Man with No Name or just a wayward soul? Is Durant a tycoon or a true believer? The multitude of uncertainties and ambiguities tax the patience of the viewer.

AMC's fascination with American frontiers got its start in the seedy tweaker underbelly of the Southwest in Breaking Bad in 2008, and has been inching closer to the real thing ever since. From psychologizing Mad Men antihero Don Draper's hoosier roots to the freshly feral Deep South of The Walking Dead, its programming consistently undermines the sense that America is truly settled.

But when it came time to treating the American frontier explicitly, AMC fumbled. Big time.

The "new" McDonald's wants to be the glue that holds reality together.

As a child, the word "McDonald's" brought to mind dry, flavorless beef patties, anonymous microwaved buns and limpid french fries, and cavalierness––not to put too fine a point on it––towards the health and wellbeing of its patrons. It's an impression that persists, and when I see someone I know walking into Micky-D's, the first thing I think is, "really? You're going to go in there?"

McDonald's had long been the Kmart of fast food joints, and the obvious thing for it to do was rebrand itself. It has responded to health concerns about its products by selecting a non-trans fat cooking oil, and begun the process of remodeling and redecorating locations to give them a cleaner, more modern appearance. In a nod to America's changing demographics, it launched the Me Encanta campaign to target Latinos. 

I'd be loving it if this marked a real change in how McDonald's sees its customers. But I'm not loving it. For example, take this commercial:

Without McDonald's coffee, this unshaven slob is an even less desirable man-child. 

Poor "Tim" hasn't fully woken up yet. His roomie––still on that Modern Warfare 2 bender––gets the cold shoulder. So does the old dude walking his ankle-biter dog through an upper class neighborhood. But when he hears the words "premium roast coffee for just a dollar," he perks right up. 

It's just like somebody has told him that he should be a total zombie until he gets some. Nobody's so standoffish before his morning coffee that he won't respond to a girl flirting on the bus. 

The target consumer is nearly middle-aged but still co-habitating with his college buds in a house well above their pay grades. His shabby appearance can be traced to his body type and long, greasy hair, rather than to his clothes. A sucker for branding terms like "premium roast coffee" and its inexpensiveness, he's frugal but not cheap. He's a complete asshole until he gets his morning joe. In short, he's trash: a slave to the winds of consumerism, a dick to everyone he encounters, and, by all appearances, a total slob.

I have a general beef with men being portrayed in TV shows and commercials as bums, and lament the rise of the "guy"––male human beings trapped in the doldrums between adolescence and manhood. Tim may be 35-years-old, but he's still living with a room mate. Charlie Sheen plays a slightly less rich and famous version of himself on Two and a Half Men. Ladies, if you had to choose just one, who would it be?

Last night I was watching the World Series when on came yet another McDonald's commercial, in which a man driving a convertible muses that life is better with the top down. And having the top down is better with loud music, which is better with his girlfriend in the car, who is more fun when the sun's setting, sitting on a rooftop––and that the jell that holds this all together is…a Mac 'n fries. Unfortunately, nobody has posted the video (it's not particularly funny or flashy), but somewhere, it's out there.

The commercial reminded me of those "Priceless" MasterCard ads:

Somehow even this huge credit card company understands the difference between what's free and what costs money.

MasterCard sells the means to get what you want. Why carry around all that cash, when this slim little credit card does the same thing? But MasterCard clearly understands the difference between the things we buy and the feelings those things elicit––but alluding to that fact without telling us as much helps blur that distinction. These commercials step right up to the line of telling us that money can buy happiness, but don't cross it, because even the laziest, most idiotic couch potato is likely to leap to his swollen, pasty feet and scream "bullshit!" at his TV the instant that happens.

Last night, McDonald's crossed that line. In the reality of the commercial––and you kind of have to see it to believe it––everything, from the car, to the girl, to the sunset, is contingent on a burger and fries. They're not the capstone to the evening: They're the foundation. Like Tim the Coffee Prick, the pleasures in life simply don't exist without an inexpensive but delicious item off the McDonald's Value Menu. 

McDonald's has tried to insinuate itself into your day by telling you that its food is the center of the universe. This isn't an uncommon advertising tactic, but few campaigns have succeeded in proposing a reality in which, without a certain product, the world around us and our relationships lose meaning. Tim the coffee guy is an unrepentant douche bag until Premium Roast Coffee brightens his day, and your date is a flavorless caricature of romance until you throw down for two Big Macs and fries. 

Worse still is that, when I'm on a date, I'm not in a particular rush, and the last thing I need to project to my lady friends is that I'm cheap. So why go to McDonald's? The answer, McDonald's would have us believe, is that cheap grub on the go just feels good. McDonald's isn't garbage––that was the old McDonald's. 

It's classy. They swear. 

Amadeus: The brilliant Russian-ness of Mozart

Amadeus is an uproariously funny movie in a liberal arts kind of way. No, you don't really laugh out loud; rather, you think to yourself, "that's damned funny." At three hours in length (and pushing 30 years in age), the film is easier to parody than to watch. But watch it we should––Amadeus tests us in ways that few movies have––and watch it we can: It's available on Netflix Instant.

It's the love story between court composer Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) and Mozart's music. It's also a hate story between Salieri and Mozart (played by Tom Hulce), as Salieri is unable to reconcile the genius of Mozart's music with Mozart the man's arrogance and brashness.

As Mozart takes on a wife, debts, and eventually the death of his own father, his music shifts from witty tunes to soul-searching operatic masterpieces. Meanwhile, his rival assumes an increasingly complicated relationship to the desperate artist––at first trying to sabotage his career, then moving on to an elaborate, Don Giovanni-inspired kind of psychological torture involving a Carnival mask and an opera commission. After Mozart collapses from fever and stress during a production of The Magic Flute, Salieri actually becomes an apprentice to the dying man, though their collaboration ("Requiem") is never completed, and hidden away by Mozart's wife.

Reflecting on this, Salieri asserts that God would rather kill Mozart than allow Salieri to lay a finger on Mozart's music. It's a compelling proof for the existence of a deity.

God may have kept the two men artistically separate, but on screen they share a compelling dynamic. Hulce plays a grubby, sensual Mozart charmed with flouting social convention and inspired by the musicality of the everyday world. (At one point, a tongue-lashing from his own mother-in-law becomes the voice of The Magic Flute's Queen of the Night.) Abraham paints Salieri as a rational, prim, self-satisfied schemer fond of candies and––despite his professed celibacy––the attentions of beautiful women. Were it not for their shared love of music, they would have nothing in common; even their sins are opposites.

The ur-play on which Amadeus is based, Alexander Pushkin's "Mozart and Salieri," took artistic license in describing the two competing composers' relationship, turning it into a morality play not dissimilar to Pushkin's short story, "The Queen of Spades," in which a gambling German learns a trick at cards that will make him a fortune. Like Salieri, he misplaces his faith and goes insane after being miraculously foiled.

A little of Pushkin's Russian-ness remains in the film. Salieri's pride and spite make him the quintessentially venial man whose machinations are futile in the face of Mozart's genius. Mozart is a boor with an annoying laugh and a propensity for drink: Neither he nor Salieri is wholly likable, but like the theatrical characters from a Dostoevsky novel, we're unable to hate either because in each we see bits of ourselves reflected in their flaws.

How Real Life Super Heroes scored on my college lit professor

When I was a senior in college, I enrolled in a short story cycle seminar. At the end of the term, I asked the professor if he'd ever consider teaching a graphic novel. "I love the visual arts, but I'm not a kid anymore. So I guess no, I wouldn't," he told me. Immediately a short list of mature graphic novels––Sandman and A Contract with God––came to mind.

I think the problem my professor had with teaching graphic novels is the problem of the superhero. In "Afterword(s)" at the end of Batman: Year One, illustrator David Mazzuccelli wrote, "Once a depiction veers toward realism, each new detail releases a torrent of questions that exposes the absurdity at the heart of the genre."

In short, "The more 'realistic' superheroes become, the less believable they are." And that's anathema to academics, who see realism as a vehicle for the underlying gravity of the human condition––not it's ridiculousness. 

When I read that a self-proclaimed superhero had been arrested, and that there's a whole community of "Real Life Super Heroes" (RLSH), I thought of my professor: how unlike the events of Cane or Go Down, Moses, "heroes" like Phoenix Jones and Urban Avenger finally have the advantage of topicality and realism.

Besides their victory over my aging literature professor and his dodgy hip, some of these crime fighters boast of accomplishments that scratch desperately at the surface of our national despair. Phoenix Jones claims to have confiscated more than 100 crack pipes, and was arrested after stopping a fight outside a nightclub with pepper spray. I bet stealing crack pipes reduces crack use about as much as pepper spray reduces tempers.

Heroes need villains, but the crime rate in the United States is the lowest it has been in more than 20 years. The real enemies are unemployment, shrinking wages, and dissatisfaction with our elected politicians––problems better suited for the talents of a Bismarck or Caesar than those of Superman or Batman.

In the '80s and '90s, comics writers sought to give heroes recognizable psychologies, but understandably had difficulty envisioning a world like the one we live in today. Frank Miller made Batman a morally absolutist man-child in The Dark Knight Returns, and Daredevil a reluctant and guilt-ridden crime fighter during his (Miller's) tenure at Marvel. Alan Moore's Watchmen sought to place realistic heroes in a world full of moral gray area, but again, crime––and yes, evil––plays a significant role.

Most in the RLSH community came of age when these landmark titles hit bookshelves, and their influence on this crop of urban crime fighters shouldn't be dismissed. Heroes combat evil, and that ethic appears to drive certain flesh-and-blood people to don masks and (lacking a more glamorous or pervasive target) fight crime.

The diminishing criminal element adds to the ridiculousness of the crime fighter who just fights crime, and some have responded by branching out into public service. San Diego's Urban Avenger walks for charity and feeds the homeless. St. Petersburg, Florida's Knight Hood restocks food supplies for local shelters. The Batman premise––that the symbol does more for the cause of right than the mere man––has become more important than Batman's hard-line stance towards crime. 

Here in Boise there's a limo driver who looks exactly like Rod Stewart. There are a lot of people who know his real name, but what's more important is that he's the spitting image of the rock star. He's pretty famous around town. But what if he stood for something? 

What if, just by showing up at the battered women's shelter or the food bank, he sent the message that even though we're out of work, broke, and pissed off, we can still make our communities better places? I'm aware of how preposterous it is for someone to dress up like it's Halloween and "fight crime," but this cohort of real life super heroes seems to have learned the most important lessons comics have to offer, and we should elevate their endeavor to a controversy, arguing that they're insane, or that they act outside the law because it protects the people responsible for our suffering.

It's an argument I wish I could have had in college. Alas, my professor isn't a kid anymore.