And Yet More Things I Want to Do When I Grow Up

As you may know, we the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? conduct an annual personal test of our abilities. We do not remark upon things as we see them and ask, "Why?" We look at things as they have never been—a machine that makes my ex-girlfriend STACY think about me when she hears any song on the radio, even "Thick As A Brick"—and ask, "Why not?" Then we create that machine.

In the above case, that machine is called the simple human heart.

Nevertheless, the conundrum facing the Destructo crew for several years was this: How do we find newer feats of mental daring and near-impossibilities of time and space that we have not already accomplished? And how, given our 100% success rate in meeting our goals, can we ever outline new goals in which our readers might see the faintest glimmer of failure? What happens when a shadow no longer falls between the idea and the reality?

An idea presented itself in January, 2013 when journalist David J. Roth wrote to regret that his submissions for January, 2012, sent by passenger pigeon, had been unavoidably delayed by that species' extinction for 99 years and that he would try to forward them via "interior crocodile alligator." The denial of an object or goal seemed to be a goal in itself.

We thought of embracing the noble truths of the Buddha, but abandoned that concept when we realized that there is no documented evidence of that man ever wearing a shirt. Instead, we chose to embrace a state of post-accomplishment, a place beyond goals, neither above nor below metrics but askance from them. We chose a heaven where nothing ever happens.

Needless to say, 2013 would have been an unqualified success if indeed success or failure had been possible. And, despite the overwhelming likelihood of each pledge below being satisfied thoroughly, early and often, 2013 opens 2014 to the possibility that maybe—just maybe—what you're about to read may, this once, just be words.

Everything below was written by Jeb Lund, General "Bro_Pair" Ze'evi, Cory Harris, Justin Shapiro, David J. Roth and Mark Hengge. We renew our respects to our fallen comrade, Mark Brendle (RIP), who at this time in 2013 was killed in a tragic midchair collision.

Point-Counterpoint: Is Satire Even A Thing?

Last Monday, New Inquiry blogger Aaron Bady audited the word satire and made it clear. He wrote, "If something is not taken to be satire, it fails as satire. [It's] an effect, and everything depends on how the joke is received, what the author intended, what the circumstances were in which it was made, and so on."

It's an interesting definition, both for the way it's made and the assumptions on which it relies. He establishes criteria for the existence of satire based on its audience, citing people who mistake The Onion and The Daily Currant for real news as evidence for the genre's fragility, tying satire's ontology to whether it achieves food for thought for the permanently slackjawed. Leaving aside the fact that a satire's being mistaken for reality is often a satirist's dream, basing the existence of something on the perception of idiots is a powerful argument. Spend enough time hustling Gap jeans for the braindead in a deadpan tone and you could disprove the existence of sarcasm. Choose the right textbook, and there is no Enlightenment.

Needless to say, we were greatly exercised by Mr. Bady's essay. One of our contributors (Hitler) noted the date of Bady's essay's publication (April 1) and quipped that it says a lot about your criticism website when your jeremiad only works as satire—when one could only add argumentative heft to it by looking at the dateline and crying, "April fools!"

Even talking amongst ourselves, however, we noticed that our opinions on satire and Bady's argument were not in harmony. With that in mind, we chose to offer our first open-ended philosophical discussion. In so doing, we decided to examine the nature of satire via the old inquiry. We here at Et tu, Mr. Destructo? have always been partial to the old inquiry, wherein one asks questions or challenges the opinions of another in the hope of reaching consensus or synthesis. In the main, it is both arcane and bourgeois, but it is also a timesaver compared to newer inquiries, like asking a room full of people what something is, then asking them if the photographer has arrived yet. Then tweeting.

Come, join us for a free-ranging examination of the ideas that shape our media and ourselves, especially those of us in media. Welcome to our first ever "Destructo Salon."

Conlin

by JONATHAN BERNHARDT

Perhaps we never liked him anyway.

The baseball writers of my age and generation have found former Philadelphia Daily News columnist Bill Conlin's fall from grace easier than most to deal with, though not comfortable. Given almost any other impetus, comfort we would have found; before this week, I knew Conlin almost wholly as a wide, pompous ass of the institution, the moron who vomited forth the line, "The only positive thing I can think of about Hitler's time on earth: I'm sure he would have eliminated all bloggers."

He was as an obnoxious intellectual nothing of Philadelphia sports thought, a man emblematic of ways of thinking left behind in real time, similar in many respects to Murray Chass, the former New York Times baseball reporter who to this day insists his online column is not a "blog" because of the gulf he believes yawns between his and bloggers' professionalism.

That is the only way in which the two men are similar. I apologize to Murray Chass for putting his name alongside Conlin's, and that should say all that needs be said about the severity of the accusations leveled against the Daily News columnist. When a man casually opines that Hitler should have murdered you and yours, there's a fair few things he can do to make you uncomfortable about his undoing; Conlin did possibly the worst.

Last Tuesday, the Philadelphia Inquirer's Nancy Phillips published a story alleging that Conlin molested four children between the ages of seven and twelve during the 1970's, among them his own niece. The other victims were friends of his children. Since then, another three have come forth to allege abuse at Conlin's hands.

It is impossible to feel any satisfaction over this. The concept itself is sickening.

Al Davis and the Media's Poison Jobs

Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis died yesterday at 82. For most of you, that means the end of the scabby creature who ran the Raiders and leavened seasons of humiliating losses with employee firings suffused with Nixonian paranoia and loathing. Skimming Twitter reveals pretty much exactly what you expect from the internet: "jokes" linking Davis to Lovecraft monsters, fantasy monsters, sci-fi monsters, other permanently arrested-development genre monsters.

I can't claim to have done much better. Years ago, I wrote out a kind of silly thought-experiment likening Davis to Hitler. I didn't mean to sincerely equate the two, nor to rehabilitate Hitler in any way. At the time, it was funny to compare the Raiders' hermetic and endlessly back-biting front office with Hitler's last ten days:

Davis' ending has yet to be written, but it's currently playing out with the same drama of palace intrigue.... Messages go out from the Davis bunker: this is the year!—we are winning! Like Hitler's movement of paper armies in the face of the Soviets' overwhelming forces, the gestures are empty and futile. Conflicting reports emanate from underground: this one is out of favor. This one shall be the successor. No!—we were presumptuous: the leader has not named a successor. Davis has taken to issuing public comments to pressure head coach Lane Kiffin to resign...; the gestures echo Hitler delusionally promoting Paulus to Field Marshal to drive him to suicide.

This wasn't an obituary, though, and was never meant to be. This was clowning around with gossip and strange newsbites.

I still feel a little ashamed of it, because it sounds like a slightly less boneheaded version of the "he was a crazy skin-cancer goblin who sucked!" narrative I've spent the day reading on message boards and the last few years pushed by a lazy and easily sated media. I felt like I was re-pimping an already cartoonish pimp job offered on behalf of Paul Tagliabue and Roger Goodell in exchange for ample buffets and token opportunities for "access."

Tuesdays with Gamblor: The Problem of Telling an Oral History of 'The Simpsons'

I keep buying books about Hitler, and really this doesn't make much sense. All GOP claims aside, the world is not making more Hitler. Our Hitler levels remain constant at one or none, depending on your attitude. It's slightly illogical to pick up a book on Hitler and expect to find anything novel or radical. There is no new Hitler under the sun.

Still, I do this, not because I admire the man, but because I was once a hopeful young student who spent years reading about him and other monsters of the twentieth century before a history degree's non-practicality impressed itself on me. I invested so much time into learning the historiography of his rise and fall that I feel like I've never fully resolved the argument about him. Ninety-nine percent of the content of a new book by, say, Ian Kershaw will be old hat. Instead, the lines that jump out, the little things to search for, are the shades of argument that push interpretation gently one way or the other, changing history's verdict of the how and why, rather than the details of the what. This is a clinical and academic way of looking at it, but people do this all the time in terms of simple fan interest. (Hopefully not about Hitler.)

Consider the Beatles. New biographies come out seemingly every year, and yet the Beatles' existence as a band remains stubbornly mired in a period of a decade. As years pass, we only get more dead Beatles (seemingly along a spectrum of decreasing talent), but we don't get more of what made them. Fans refuse to let go, and so thousands buy the books to hear a familiar story again, just as more academic fans read to support or attack an argument like, "It was engineer Geoff Emerick and not Paul McCartney who changed the way McCartney's bass was recorded/mixed for the singles before Rubber Soul." (They were both trying to make him sound like James Jamerson anyway.)

It was inevitable that something like this would start to happen with The Simpsons. Like the Beatles, that show changed a generation and a form, and like the Beatles, the arguments about who created what and for what reasons will only intensify as the years between their heyday and the present increases, and as the few remaining facts in dispute continue to diminish. With the show creatively having run its last legs into the ground, it's time to assign credit and blame for the period in which it was a masterpiece. Chris Turner already tried a quasi-philosophical, uneven and solipsistic look at the show's impact on the zeitgeist with Planet Simpson, and recently John Ortved attempted a more straightforward oral history in The Simpsons: an Uncensored, Unauthorized History.

The Internet's Little iDeath for Steve Jobs

Note: Mark Brendle is a former media critic for BarnesandNoble.com, a short-fiction writer and the author of both book reviews and the Criterion Recollection series for Et tu, Mr. Destructo?. Today he takes a break from books and cinema to address the first great humanitarian crisis of the 21st century: the potential that Apple gadgets might become less awesome before you've paid off your iPhone 4. You can follow him on Twitter.

Last week, when Apple CEO Steve Jobs stepped down from his position — a purely formal change in the Apple Corporation's executive management — it struck a chord with many people who feel invested in Apple, despite having no shareholder investment. Why this over-response about an insignificant event in a private company? Because, as even email and Twitter spam can tell you, the latest Apple release is the commodity-object of our time.

Apple proponents often cite innovation as the reason behind both their idolization and Apple's success. But what does innovation mean in this context and what has Apple innovated? Mp3 players? Tablet computers? Touch screens?—these existed long before their Apple versions came out. One would be hard pressed to find a single significant innovation on a fundamental level made by Apple computers since their very early days.

Despite this, Apple has innovated since, and it is this innovation that dominates their markets and the minds of their fans. What initially set the iPod apart from the numerous other Mp3 players with identical functionality was its coolness.

Apple campaigned heavily for the iPod, in much the same way they did for the iMac, forcing connotations of coolness, taste and style onto the device. It is through what David Riesman calls marginal differentiation that Apple innovated and continues to innovate. This marginal differentiation expresses itself through form (everyone has heard Apple products called "sleek"), through social consumer-competition (kids don't want an Mp3 player; they want an iPod) and through self-referential endorsement (our heroes in the film, music, art and publishing industries often use Macs).

Twitter Ephemera: Hipster Sitcoms

Ever since receiving critical tweet acclaim on THE Huffington Post, I've been thinking about legacy and impact — the kind of twitcorpus I can leave to my children and yours. (And, if I can get really famous, perhaps the last two will be one and the same.)

In the meatspace, this has meant an investment in more than a few new ascots, as well as those fancy drinking glasses that kind of look like small fishbowls but with stems. You know you've hit the bigtime when you're only lifting soda to your face underhanded.

When it comes to saving things online, though, Twitter does kind of a bad job. It's difficult to navigate friends' feeds to find something more than a few weeks old, especially if you can't remember the wording closely enough to perform a search. Older tweets become unavailable, seemingly arbitrarily, past a certain number or time span. Cached Google searches rarely return anything useful.

Unless you know the exact link to a tweet from a year or two ago, chances are you will never see it again. Twitter claims that all back-content still exists and that a partnership with Google will make all archives searchable, but for such a wildly successful website, it's bizarre that they simply can't show you enormous amounts of the basic text that accounts for their sole purpose for being.

Of course, most Twitter content is pretty terrible and forgettable, and I know that applies to much of mine and my friends' as well. But every now and again, as with National Novel Writing Month Opening Lines, a bunch of people get together and riff on a few jokes that might be worth a second glance and a laugh some time later. The origins of both Shark Hitler — the world's most deadly animal, put inside a shark — and my strange obsession with Stevie Nicks' abuse of monoglot hispanic au pairs are now lost to time. I can't let that happen to such an important sociological document as "Hipster Sitcoms."

Because I am a lazy person, I didn't have the volition to go back and copy any more jokes from other people, but below you can find a list of silly jokes from me (with a few assists from my friend Robert). Also, because he's a funny guy, and because he wrote so damn many of them, I included a bunch from partner in twitcrime, Woodmuffin, who usually outclasses everybody when it comes to finding these trending topics jokes and going off on a spree.

Teaparties, Race and a Union Rally in a Tiny Tampa Park

Over the last few years, I've accrued pageloads for mocking mean-spirited teapartiers and their misspelled signs, slovenliness and ideological self-contradiction, going back to that well again and again and again and again. It's a cheap and easy recipe for attention-getting stuff. Take one (1) group of nasty people, add lots (lots) of photographic evidence of their being nasty, then add one (1) comment per photo about how they suck.

I've never posted any sort of counterpoint. The most obvious explanation is that reasonable people aren't very funny. You can't run dozens of photos of civil human beings and gin up a laugh. Less obviously: most liberal activists stayed home these last two years. Vindicated by winning an election, they stupidly abandoned the physical realm of protest to the teaparty. While teaparty goons shouted down town hall discussions on healthcare, liberals enjoyed the warm-crotch sensation of watching them on Youtube, from their laptops. They relied on a few people to attend these events and upload teaparty protest photos and fussy personal diaries on Daily Kos. Liberal public agitation has been token, intermittent, ethereal and impotent.

Thanks in part to union demonstrations and outrage in Wisconsin, as well as Florida Governor Rick Scott's criminal and imperial dismissal of the obligations of office, bizarre disdain for even bipartisan legislation and ruthless de-funding of public services, even Floridians have evinced anger strong enough to drag them out in public. Last Tuesday, thousands of citizens organized in dozens of cities across the state for simultaneous protests against Scott's fiscal war against the Florida school system and his ideological war against unions and collective bargaining.

Florida, like the rest of the south, has historically declined most unionization, never approaching the north's membership. Despite the AFL and CIO engaging in expensive unionization campaigns in the middle of the 20th century, the south didn't bite. Historians and anthropologists have furnished a host of reasons, from racism (northern unions were integrated) to an atavistic quasi-Scots-Irish tribalism, to "Cavalier" individuality. (Readers of Malcom Gladwell's non-science and non-history might remember his bastardization of David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed in the last example.) Economic context also played a part. Union proselytizing in the south, funded by unions' ascendency, was bound to be less persuasive because of that ascendency: when the worker was doing well in America, unions just didn't seem as necessary. That attitude worked doubly well in Florida, a state without an income tax, where lower wages were offset by lower tax obligations and where the bill for today's state services could be tied to tomorrow's home purchases or tourist taxes and fobbed off on the next influx of suckers.

Given the above, the protest turnout was stunning. A group called Awake the State — which was created via a partnership amongst Progress Florida, Florida Watch Action and America Votes — managed to get pro-labor Floridians outside and in front of government buildings even after work and during the dinner hour. In the public imagination, and frequently in reality as well, only teachers seem to march or gather in Florida union protests. But this time manual laborers and public-service workers showed up in force.

Picket Lines: Wisconsin, Unions—and a Nation of Immigrants Unsurprisingly Forgets Where It Came From

Note: unlike many guest pieces on Et tu, Mr. Destructo? today's article was co-written by a real, live person. Idi Amin Dada has a Bachelor's degree in political science, the rank of Field Marshal and was the last ruler of a free Uganda. Since his exile at the hands of imperialists, he has busied himself researching topics ranging from politics to philately. In the coming days, he hopes to explore labor issues in America in "Picket Lines," and he invited Mobutu Sese Seko to pitch in. Neither author has eaten anyone since 1980.


Solidarity, 2011
by IDI AMIN DADA and MOBUTU SESE SEKO

It's extraordinarily upsetting that so many Americans broadly oppose unions without giving much thought to the reasoning behind their opposition. In the case of Wisconsin, critics of union workers are especially difficult to understand. Newly elected Governor Scott Walker wants to use a budget crisis to not only crush the take-home pay of unionized state workers, but to strip public employees of the right to collective bargaining.

His supporters assert that Wisconsin public-school teachers net much more in salary and benefits than private-sector teachers. And despite the fact that this is not true, and that Walker's initiatives to give out generous corporate welfare actually caused significantly exacerbate the crisis he's attempting to capitalize on, public sector employees have already agreed to tough concessions with respect to pay and benefits. Even these concessions are not enough for Walker, who refuses to budge on stripping collective bargaining rights, a move that would have no impact on the state's finances whatsoever, but would effectively destroy unions as a force for the middle and labor class.

One could argue that in the long-run, Walker's stance saves the state money, as public unions periodically negotiate contracts to obtain higher wages and more benefits at the state's expense. Two polls regarding this issue are available at the moment. The first comes from the firm Clarus Group and shows 64% of Americans think that government employees should not be represented by labor unions. However, the firm admits that its phrasing may have swayed responses with language seemingly mirroring that of deficit hawks.

Another poll, this one conducted on behalf of the right-leaning group "We Ask America" shows that those in Wisconsin actually oppose the bill by 51%, with 43% supporting it. However, this same poll also shows that 55% of Wisconsinites want Democratic senators — who fled to Illinois to avoid giving the bill a quorum — to return to the state to vote on the bill anyway; only 36% of those polled disapprove of the idea. Such an action would make the bill pass, as Republicans seem unwilling to compromise, already have the votes they need, and Walker's disdain for those opposing him remains unwavering.

His attitude might make sense if not for conservatism's twin enemies of history and math. Wages for American middle and lower class workers have been all but stagnant since the 1970s, compared to the actual productivity and output of their work; meanwhile, profits for corporations and bonuses for CEOs annually reach record highs. At a time when many states desperately need funds — and corporations reaping record profits pay little to nothing in taxes — the acceptable course of action, according to a vast majority of Republicans, most Independents and some Democrats, is to point to the household working paycheck-to-paycheck and say, "Their desire to negotiate for fewer sleepless nights might hurt the state's finances. It's belt-tightening time."

'The Chicago Code': The Myths of Depth and Caring

THERESA COLVIN: (voiceover) As a detective, I pulled 12-year-old Antonio Betts off the street and made sure he got an education. As a captain, with his mother's blessing, I handed 19-year-old Antonio Betts an application to be a Chicago police officer. When I became Superintendent of Police, I asked 24-year-old Antonio Betts to be my driver and bodyguard. Tonight, 25-year-old Antonio Betts put himself in front of two bullets to save my life. I didn't just lose an officer and a driver tonight. I lost a confidante and a friend. (Scene changes to hospital.)
MRS. BETTS: Who the hell did this to my baby?
COLVIN: I don't know, but I promise you I will not let a single officer rest until I find out.
— The Chicago Code, "Hog Butcher"

From Shawn Ryan, the creator of the gritty show The Shield comes The Chicago Code, a show that has grit, plus rough edges. It isn't glossy. It's gritty. This is a gritty show. It's also very earnest, sincere and full of being serious about the things it is genuinely sincere and earnest about. It delivers grit-meaning with one-dimensional intensity. It's like playing the first level of Super Mario Brothers, only you play it really fast, and you take speed, and you listen to a metal cover of the theme music on an iPod really loud, so you can experience exactly what you expected, but with orders of magnitude more meaningful intensegrittity. It is also a bad show.

Eighteen years ago, NBC aired the first episode of Homicide: Life on the Street and, by rights, should have created a sea change in the structure of police procedurals. It explored a conceit fundamental to police station houses, one amply demonstrated in David Simon's non-fiction book, on which it was based, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. The conceit was this: caring is mostly a myth. Yes, granted, there are cops out there who want to bust bad guys because they want to make a difference, clean up the city, bring solace to victims, etc. But by and large, cops are like people in any other job.

Many cops find themselves where they are for reasons far from the philosophical or civically upstanding. Maybe this was the only job in their town that had healthcare benefits and a pension, or the best-paying one for someone with their education. For whatever reason, they're there. In many cases, the factors motivating their dedication to the job have nothing to do with the city they're meant to protect and serve. In fact, as Simon's book and the show demonstrated, most of the good cops wanted to catch bad guys out of sheer bloodyminded resentment that some dumbfuck thought he could kill someone in their town and get away with it. Screw speaking for the dead: I'm smarter than this asshole, and now I'm going to prove it.

Alan Greenspan: I Saw Black Jesus' BMW

Note: we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo?, like to broaden our coverage of the national discourse by occasionally turning to voices and viewpoints not represented by our regular contributors. To address a luxury automobile of potentially divine provenance, we turn to former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who previously wrote about his sexual adventures with Ayn Rand, explained our Ten Favorite Albums of the Decade and offered Birther Queen Orly Taitz asylum in his bedroom.

I Will Holy Ghostride This Whip
by ALAN GREENSPAN

The other day, I'm rolling through a neighborhood I don't normally visit, keeping the car kinda slow, worrying about pre-teens ripping out of driveways on motorized scooters, piece-of-shit teenagers throwing crap into the road and trying to fuck up my ride, idiot toddlers crabwalking into traffic, the usual bullshit.

I'm a good driver. I roll like fucking velvet. I'm cautious on narrow residential streets, especially when there are bigass trucks blocking half of them and making it even more likely than I'm gonna pancake someone's HONORS STUDENT AT PICKNOSE ELEMENTARY. I'm cautious, but I'm sexy. I'm playing Otis Redding at the time.

Just as I'm keeping my fingers on the wheel all clit-slippery supple and coasting past another car parked way off the curb, I spot something. It's this:


Like, holy shit. HOLY SHIT. What the fuck is that? I dunno, so I turn to my co-pilot, Jesus, and I'm like, "Yo, is that your car, Man, Son of Man?" and he's all, "Fuck no!"

Happy Anniversary!

I wish I could say that I had something planned ahead for today. A few days ago, I remembered that this two-year anniversary was coming up, promised to remember to do something, then completely lost track of it amidst the house work, yard work, fix-it work, work work and discovering that FOX has a specific channel devoted to England, Italy and Germany's premier soccer leagues. The only problem with it is that the subtitles don't indicate what cruel profanities the fans are singing.

I remembered almost at the last minute, luckily just after opening some champagne. Originally it was intended to celebrate tonight being Friday — the week's work done — and having old friends and family drop by to stay for a while. But we can lie and all pretend that something intentional was going on. My personal last-minute celebration is perfectly satisfactory, but I'm sure it's not terribly entertaining for the rest of you.

In the past, my go-to solution would be Twitter: just scrape together a couple recurring gags and post them here. There's Shark Hitler, a shark with the killing power of Hitler, a nightmare worse than even Robert Shaw's drunken narration in Jaws. (Full disclosure: someone mentioned months later that there's a throwaway line in Futurama where Professor Farnsworth says, "Everyone's always in favor of saving Hitler's brain. But when you put it in the body of a great white shark, ooohh! Suddenly you've gone too far!" I completely forgot about this, and in fairness, so did about a dozen other people.) Then there's Dirk Hitler, the world's foremost secret agent, who looks just like Hitler, even though he's a completely open-minded guy without prejudices and with a commitment to dropping humanitarian aid out of his spacecraft to third-world citizens. It's sort of unsettling how much Hitler appears on my Twitter feed, but I'm just a scribe. I merely write down what the universe tells me. If Dirk Hitler wants to make sure that the children of Darfur get sick big-wheels and that amateur Hitlers get punched out on Halloween, so be it.

SomethingAwful: Meet Miss Destructo!

Sometime last year I was on AIM* with occasional contributor Rigamarock, killing time by posting links to weird websites and then trading one-liners about them. I'm not really sure how I was finding these sites. I know one showed up on a Google Image Search for argyria, the blue-skin condition that libertarians get from drinking too much colloidal silver to show the FDA that it isn't so smart. The others were more random-chance sorts of things, like when you just type in words and add .com to the end of them, like, "PresbyterianHorse" or "FiestaHitler" or start entering random search terms like, "Rowdy Maureen Dowdy" or "Climbing to the top of Mount Groin on [Your Name Here] Just Topped My Bucket List."

Because I was screwing around, I typed in the words, "MrsDestructo.com." No luck. I tried, "MissDestructo.com." What I found was breathtaking. Until then, I had been certain that my wife was not a lifestyle blogger. I was so, so wrong.

But for the rest of that story, you're going to have to keep reading at SomethingAwful.
___________________
* — For the dads reading, that's short for AOL Instant Messenger, a chat client. AOL, of course, is short for "America Online," the dial-up service that, for a period in the 1990s, you thought was the entire internet.

I Love the American Spectator Newsletter

At some point in my life I should stop killing time by registering names like "Brot Pulsifer" on the comments boards of conservative publications and posting things that rile up the natives. I'm fully aware that people do this on liberal online publications all the time, too, but it feels like a dirty practice. There are only so many times you can ask people if they've seen evidence of the "violent and lustful black underclass" outside the dimensions of a phrenology textbook before it gets old.

Something I do not regret, however, is the unavoidable consequence of these registrations: joining the mailing list of the publication in question. Even though I should expect it, it's always a wonderful surprise. Automatically being enrolled on a mailing list is what acquainted me intimately with Thomas Sowell. That's been nothing but a positive experience — even if he's accompanied by Walter Williams and Larry Elder, who, according to some of the conservative publications I've read, technically constitute some kind of gang.

The newsletter that has become kind of a sleeper comedic hit in my email inbox belongs to the American Spectator. Those of you unfamiliar with the publication should really take the time just to read its Wikipedia entry, which is itself pretty funny. It neatly covers a few decades of financial failure, paranoid conspiracy theory and victimization at the hands of changing social expressions. The summation almost seems just. Sure, the Spectator received funds from Richard Mellon Scaife to arm it as part of the deranged "Arkansas Project,"* his coordinated multimedia attempt to swab Bill and Hillary Clinton's hands with blood. Sure, it contributed to the web of fantastically ugly lies like, "The Clintons murdered Vince Foster," that were then amplified and re-transmitted by our friend Cliff Kincaid. But on the other hand, the Spectator had to change its name from The Alternative after whackos who thought that gays should be treated like human beings co-opted the term as a positive distinction for GLBT Americans.

Cliff Kincaid and Right Side News: When Gay Abortions Are Arizona's Down's Genocide

People send in links pretty often, and most of the time there's not much to do with them, short of repeating earlier pieces or pasting a picture I have of myself from the time I visited a church in Brazil and started weeping blood. Now and then, though, someone tweets or IMs something fascinating. Last week, a very funny Twitter poster and nice guy named Sskylark sent me a link to a website called Right Side News and their article, "George Will Sells Out [sic] to Cultural Corruption."

In the interest of citing sources, I will provide relevant links, but first let me implore you not to click either the link to the site or the article in question. (Most of the article is quoted below.) I know; you're tempted, drawn with a complex and unfamiliar yearning toward their content. They offer news from the Right Side, a pledge that unhouses your beliefs. You were wrong all this time and never even knew it. What side are you even on? The wrong side? The side that has more animal droppings in its food? The side that can't gamble well? You will not find these answers at these links. Instead, you could only destabilize the fragile world of simultaneous conservatism-and-correctness that their name has erected.

According to their media kit (do not click), 77% of their audience is aged 45-74. Feral youths hopping willy-nilly from this site will only tear their ad algorithms away from absorbent adult pants toward discounts on absorbing African beats. Worse, you might crash their servers. Accustomed as they are to 3,200-5,500 readers per day, referred readers from this site could dangerously increase their traffic by 50-100%, and conservatives are constitutionally unprepared for flooding. As for why a dead African dictator writing 10-15 times per month can compete popularly with dozens of contributors posting daily articles and op-eds, know too that popular approval and demand is the nostrum of the liberal, who needs his seething hordes to overwhelm the elite and narrow privilege of hard, sensible reality.

'Raise your hand if you love freedom. Notice your dead mom didn't move a muscle, kid.'

Here's the story so far: Marcelas Owens is 11 years old and doesn't have a mom. She developed pulmonary hypertension, a potentially fatal but very treatable disease. Because she got sick, she lost her job. Because she lost her job, she lost her healthcare. Because she lost her healthcare, she lost her (potential) access to treatment. Because she lost her access to treatment, she lost her life.

A month ago, Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash) told Marcelas and his mother Tifanny's story to President Obama as an illustrative tale of how fragile people's lives and economies are without healthcare. This week, conservatives responded by telling an 11-year-old that his mom should have pulled herself up by her healthstraps and got undead, like, doublequick. She's just lazy. She lies around on her back all day.

Their response combines the best of ignorance, self-serving fabricated victimization and imperial unconcern with the little things, like whether someone lives or dies. Let's go to the McClatchy article on the subject, which describes their behavior as "ridicule":

Happy Martin Luther King Day: Fuck You, Leno

The old maxim that you can judge a man's character by the company he keeps seemed to specifically bite Jay Leno in the ass over the last couple weeks. Semi-retired comedians Jerry Seinfeld and Paul Reiser spoke up in his defense, prompting some clever people to observe on Twitter that if they were overpaid comics who stopped being funny decades ago, they'd stick up for Leno, too.

Allowing Leno's friends to cast an instructive light on the man himself seemed fair when Reiser wrote a disingenuous op-ed piece for The Huffington Post called, "A Teachable Leno moment." With at least one of them declaring his personal knowledge of him to be a legitimate yardstick, analogy was let loose. Others doubtless crafted more generous comparisons, but to me Paul Reiser apologizing for Leno was a lot like Rudolf Hess parachuting into Scotland to try to explain that Hitler guy.

Reiser's one of those comics like Leno who a few people insist was absolutely brilliant but whose brilliance remains a mystery (or one of those remotely plausible facts) to just about everyone. You can find proof of it if you go looking, but most people aren't going to go looking since the evidence they have on hand doesn't make the effort seem worth it. Reiser abandoned his comic role early and often, beginning with Barry Levinson's Diner and reaching its apotheosis in the TV series Mad About You. Along the way he played supporting roles in several movies, including Aliens, in which his weaselly corporate whore character Burke was confronted and probably later impregnated by aliens to use his body as a generative husk for something more profitable to them. Retrospectively this role seems career-defining.

More Things I Want to Do When I Grow Up

The end of every year provides us an arbitrary but constant measure of what we've done. In this span, we've triumphed over X or failed to attend to Y. Imagining that the distinction of a year's time signifies anything special in itself is foolish. It's just a useful tool against which we may look at our behavior and say, "Yes—and I was too."

Last year I set myself a list of goals of Things I Want[ed] to Do When I Gr[ew] Up. I can say with absolute confidence and sincerity that I accomplished all of them without the slightest hesitancy or difficulty. This, however, presents its own set of problems.

After all, it's a man of meager talents who rests on his laurels, who looks at himself in the mirror and says, "The body—the hair—the eyes and smile—yes, these are all perfection writ obnoxiously large, a prominent human billboard of consumingly sexy that must drive others to resentful nausea," without once thinking, How can I make this insufferably sexier? It's a man with an only faintly lit inner life who can take pleasure in gifting a treasure chest of salvage filled with a shark to someone without thinking, Is there a way I can prank someone into being eaten by the shark?

These are new steps I must take — that we all, figuratively at least, must take on our own lest we stagnate and start to smell funny. To accomplish so much so readily and do nought else invites only some kind of circulatory disease, when what we need is the disease of more. Do more, eat more, stick more things of ours in more other things. This more I pledge. And more. Come with me.

Fuck You, 2009

You sucked. First of all, Hitler got inaugurated. Then we all lost our liberty. Now there's some goddamn healthcare bill that puts a tax on life. I keep praying someone will just kill all the liberals who are doing this, but first you struck down James Inhofe, and then you tried to kill Rush Limbaugh. Now I find out you took Avenged Sevenfold drummer TheRev from us. You are a cold fucking bitch. You've consumed everything I've ever cared about. You see this wonderful spread of delightful snacks and crudites I've laid out, representing those things dearest to me? No, because you fucking ate it, you fucking fatty year. The only thing you had in abundance was bullshit, from Glenn Beck on TV to everyone anybody ever knew and wanted to forget getting on Facebook and creating more stupid drama in less than 12 months than in all the years since high school put together. The Chinese Zodiac sign for this year is a fat girl in a corset who smokes cloves and likes to brag at Denny's about how good she is at giving head even though the only time people are drunk enough to ask her to do it, she flips out and screams "I AM NOT A SLUT" and then tries to break their cell phones so they don't have her number anymore. Nobody wants to think of what she looks like naked, and goddamn, 2009, do I not want to know what you looked like sober. Here's the first image that comes to mind when I even wonder about it:


2010 will be the year of the potato. We begin by greeting its distilled nectar.

Totally Important Announcements

Just a couple of notices and acknowledgements as we head into the big familial- and travel-related headache that is Christmas. Just as an aside, I wrote at least a third of this while in gridlock in a parking lot just trying to get at a Bed Bath and Beyond. I wasn't there for Christmas value: I just wanted a goddamned meat thermometer so I could cook a roast for Christmas dinner. Anyway:


Feed Stuff:
A couple of people sent in emails complaining about the feed. Apparently about four articles in a row never posted to their RSS or Google Readers. So far as I can tell, nothing is going wrong on this end. I checked back through Feedburner and through this site's settings, then posted a couple of test articles, and everything worked fine. I was going to suspect user error until I ran into some other people complaining about publishing outages on Blogger and strange irregularities in Gmail. Since Feedburner is part of the same family, I figure they were having similar issues.

Naturally, after about two days of looking into this stuff whenever I had a free moment, the people who'd emailed me sent me an update letting me know that all the older articles had suddenly posted to their feed. So I'm going to assume the problem is solved. If it's not, post here or click on my profile and say something. But, going forward, I will just assume that this feed address is working perfectly.