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.