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Bloom's take-down of the Iowa caucus tries to prove that Iowans no longer represent mainstream America, but in so doing he painted a picture of Iowa that Iowans themselves swear they don't recognize.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.