GAWKER: A Salad Bar of American Dread

Sometimes you just can't think of one "big idea" essay. Thankfully, every day, the United States commits so many individual acts of social, judicial and political horror that you can effortlessly pile them all together into a grab bag of nightmares.

I had no choice but to go that route earlier this week. Topics ranged from Arizona's cultural eliminationism, the snobbery of American colleges, the totally fucking insane Allen West, and the Supreme Court's ruling that you have the right to stay still as the police (legally!) finger your creamy white asshole without probable cause or even dinner.

Click the mystery box to go to the Gawker piece:


I'm posting the mystery box here, because I don't want to give away Jim Cooke's awesome art for the piece, which is absolutely hysterical and well worth the click on its own.

Also, this grab-bag format was poached from our own Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo. So if you enjoy the Gawker update, please come back and read some of Idi's work.

Scholarships and Compensation: The Intercollegiate National Lie

Aside from reminding Americans for the next 15 minutes that history has actual value, Taylor Branch's devastating article, "The Shame of College Sports," finally fully legitimized the discussion of paying college athletes for their performance. It certainly didn't approve the notion by fiat, but simply allowing it to enter the conversation as an equally reasonable proposition was triumph enough.

Prior to its publication, it sometimes it took actual effort to find someone willing to entertain the idea. Proposing that college players take home paychecks usually provoked reactions that ran the gamut from mocking laughter to intense moral outrage. It's hard to explain why. In a country where you can monetize your Twitter feed, exploit your pop-star child, and have people applaud the commodification of virtually anything, college football has nestled in a protective embrace of absurd reverence for amateurism, swaddled in flimsy excuses for innocence.

Dispatches from Libertopia: College Edition

College is a wonderful place. A community of people engaged in the same pursuits provides a welcoming environment that fosters speculation, intellectual adventure and novel risks. Perhaps credit for this falls on a positive context for self esteem or just on the suspicion that everyone else is equally frightened and prone to "fake it until they make it," but for many of us it's a rare chance to truly take conceptual leaps. Some of us shouldn't.

Sadly, for every kid who builds an airboat that runs off old McDonald's fryer oil, there are two pre-law Randroids who will militantly argue the affirmative case in, "Resolved: The United States should legalize indentured servitude for the benefit of poor people at or above the age of majority." Or there's a girl like Stephanie Grace, who employs that intellectual freedom to address whether black people possess subhuman intelligence, provided that one defines "human intelligence" as "white-people smart."

In fact, the abundance of bongs and the consequence-free collegiate bubble that repels the practical and harsh elements of reality often form the genesis of Libertarian sociopathy. Reality is a thought experiment; people and products are all numbers, and death, suffering, pain, neglect and contempt are just remainders that someone at George Mason or the University of Chicago with enough math degrees will eventually square away for good at no cost to the Libertarian explaining this.

53 Things to Know, Do or Not Do at a Small Liberal Arts College, Part II

Continued from Part I.

Things to Know, Do or Not Do at a Small Liberal Arts College, #11-53
11. If your high-school friends come to visit you, take care of them. They may run afoul of campus PD, angry drunks, or get wasted themselves and flirt unpleasantly with someone. Small campuses tend to be in a delicate balance, and your fellow students' proximity to you and one another enables you all to fairly well know one another’s sensibilities. Outside friends may not be as comfortable with, say, lesbianism as you (hopefully) will become, and thus they might say something epically stupid.

12. Don't try to sell a "personality" too much. If you get topless or do movie monologues every time you drink, you may wind up spending four years as the "naked girl" or "actor guy." On one hand, people may want to spend time with you because of it. On the other hand, people may find you boring unless you are exclusively "on" or "in-character." Moreover, it may drive people away, as the intimacy of the school can lead people to falsely believe that they fully know one another by outside signs and a few repeated gestures. Your character might then become you, and it's a bitch to get yourself back.

13. Three things about school-sanctioned gatherings with school PA/stereo systems:

a. Put the equipment away. There's nothing more pathetic than the sort of people who organize protests and serious gatherings abandoning communal equipment, only to have it taken care of, at five a.m., by two people who have been drinking since lunch. I lost count of the number of times fellow drunks and I ran across thousand-dollar school speakers in the dead of night, left out by the sort of people who had previously exhibited no shortage of energy for things like suggesting that they were the moral vanguards of the community and that I should be arrested.
b. As a liberal arts student, you have diverse interests. Others do not share all yours. If you're going to have a gathering, stick to music that is danceable or entertaining. So you like goth music: the vast majority of human beings on earth enthusiastically and rightfully do not, and they do not have the time to wait until you're 25 and realize that it's life-draining dirge-like shit. Meanwhile, there are Chinese laborers in the Quinghai province who think that Cyndi Lauper had three great singles. These people probably made everything you're wearing right now. Show them and your fellow students some respect and have fun.
c. You got the thrill of putting on a bash for people, now be a goddamned adult and clean up after yourself. Your backyard belongs to a thousand other people.

14. If you perform anything in public—especially with a musical instrument—change your routine. People admire talents not their own, but offer something more than a steady diet of "Wish You Were Here" and "Blister in the Sun." If you can't mix it up, remember this: there are few things more admirable than students being creative, except, of course, students being creative only occasionally in public and more often somewhere else.

14.a. Corollary: There are very few credible reasons to wear an ethnic badge while publicly performing. The Pogues are awesome, and I'm sure that your great-great grandparents who were the last members of your family to live in Ireland might have loved them. That said, you don't have to sing "Thousands Are Sailing" again, and if you get weepy, someone should punch you. I know it sucks that Castro is still in charge of Cuba, and I'm sure what's happening in your imagination to the country you can only imagine is really terrible, but you don't always have to sing "Guantanamera." I doubt anybody who went to a small American college with a few Englishmen can remember their getting loaded and singing "Heart of Oak" like they were Lucky Jack Aubrey, and I'm pretty sure you're never going to see a couple American kids shout out "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Everybody's glad that you love your culture, but all cultures are special, which perversely means that all of them aren't really that special, which includes yours. Either book a special performance for a night of cultural nationalism or just do a goddamn medley and occasionally skip whatever musical totem people have come to expect from you.