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.