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."

OMG! Those Deadspin Guys Are TOTES Jelly

Nothing, it seems, about Deadspin or Grantland can be discussed without amateur dramatics. A refrain that grew in intensity over the last month reached a kind of crescendo on message boards and Twitter yesterday when Deadspin printed three pieces about Grantland: "The editors and contributors of Deadspin must be consumed with a mindless, soul-eating jealousy of Bill Simmons, working for ESPN and having footnotes." Or something.

Increasingly, blog and board posters seem to assume that, in sports journalism, Grantland is The One True Gig, and all who do not hold it within their grasp wither to sightless wraiths screaming in the void.

Now, if you're the sort of person who enjoys dismissing an entire argument because you can detect a shred of partiality ("Anthropogenic Climate Change can't be real — scientists are just making stuff up for that biiiiiiiig state school tenure money!"), you might want to bail out here. After all, I wrote a bilious screed about Bill Simmons, Chuck Klosterman and Malcolm Gladwell, and I did that out of consuming jealousy. Worse, that piece resulted in people from Deadspin noticing me and dropping the occasional link to this site on their "Good Morning, Deadspin" roundups. Bottom line, I can't be trusted.

However, if you're willing to look past my Iago-like malice, let's look instead at the three Deadspin articles that allegedly demonstrated a critical mass of jealousy:

SomethingAwful: In Defense of Gringo Star

Possibly the ultimate talisman of uncoolness when it comes to music is finding out someone's dad likes it. As a result, the term "Dad Rock" has sprung up in online music-discussion communities as a cultural dealbreaker and devastating dismissal of the worth of a piece of music. Unfortunately, the term is almost meaningless. It's a term that defies age, aging and the musical content itself.

Nothing brought this to the fore quite like trying to talk about the Atlanta-based garage rock band Gringo Star, who manage to both be awesome and to have a sound that, when described online, invites the "Dad Rock" condemnation like no other. Click here to read the article and enjoy yet another example of why Pitchfork Media is full of shit.

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.

We Get Letters

Last Christmas I posted an article about how a conservative caller to a radio show began weeping and asking deranged questions about whether his prayers to Almighty God might have accidentally killed a Republican instead of his intended target, Democrat Robert Byrd. Economist Brad DeLong linked it off his site, which brought a steady stream of viewers, some of whom were really very nice about keeping me updated to developments in the story and making suggestions I hadn't thought of.

It turned out that Talking Points Memo ran a follow-up, suspecting that the call was a prank. At that point, I posted a response in which I outlined reasons why it might be serious, as well as my suspicion that the Republican party had stoked the flames of hard-right paranoia and rage so much that attempting to parody those attitudes might be beyond the point where doing so could seem implausible anymore. As one helpful reader pointed out, unbeknownst to me, I'd essentially drafted a political corollary to Poe's Law, which states that, "without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing."

The AV Club's 50 Best Albums of the Decade Are All Wrong: Introduction & Albums #50 - #31

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The AV Club's 50 Best Albums of the Decade Are All Wrong: Albums #30 - #11

CONTENTS:
Intro & The AV Club's #50 - #31 — The AV Club's #30-#11
The AV Club's Top 10 & Afterword — Alan Greenspan Presents Our Top 10
___________________
by Mobutu Sese Seko with Rigamarock & Shwaywhat

(Note: all thumbnailed images go to Youtube videos of relevant songs from the band.)

30. Sufjan Stevens, Illinois (2005)
This is pretty much the least essential album anyone's ever heard, so of course it's on the AV Club list. If you were wondering what happened to Cat Stevens and Fisher Stevens' improbably orders-of-magnitude-lamer lovechild, this album is your answer. Meaningless gimmickry is the name of the game in indie music, and this gimmick is the most meaningless in recent memory: album conception via Rand McNally. Still, it's great to hear Zamfir getting work again in pointless one-minute instrumentals. And the lyrics? EVERY ONE A MASTERPIECE:

The AV Club's 50 Best Albums of the Decade Are All Wrong: Their Top 10 & Afterword

CONTENTS:
Intro & The AV Club's #50 - #31 — The AV Club's #30-#11
The AV Club's Top 10 & Afterword — Alan Greenspan Presents Our Top 10
___________________
by Mobutu Sese Seko with Rigamarock & Shwaywhat

(Note: all thumbnailed images go to Youtube videos of relevant songs from the band.)

10. The National, Alligator (2005)
"Alligator is The National’s third full-length, but the first that introduced a fully realized vision of the Brooklyn band: brooding, smart, and uniquely capable of soundtracking the ennui of rainy city life. It’s been accused of being boring, but it absolutely isn’t." Thanks, AV Club! Here's an idea: any time you feel compelled to frontload a single-paragraph blurb review of an album by addressing a common charge of it's being boring, it's boring. Just the fact that it's pretty much the first thing that comes to mind after placing the album in the band's chronology and placing the band geographically is a huge indicator that whatever point you're making is already a loser. "Brooding" and "soundtracking the ennui of rainy city life" are like two different rock-review variations on, "You're gonna love this girl! She's got a great personality."

Alan Greenspan Presents: Our Top 10 Albums of the Decade

CONTENTS:
Intro & The AV Club's #50 - #31 — The AV Club's #30-#11
The AV Club's Top 10 & Afterword — Alan Greenspan Presents Our Top 10
___________________
Note: we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo?, recognize that many readers will derive little of value solely from a list of negatives without an accompanying list of positives. A mere litany of displeasures offers no perspective unless leavened with the sincere enthusiasms of the critic. Surely someone who excoriates Wordsworth's style can be dismissed out of hand as an anti-Romantic, but if he or she is also an ardent admirer of Byron, then one must read his or her opinion more attentively.

Likewise, we do not wish to be dismissed: we refuse the mantle of Philistines, hatas or bustas. That we are much exercised by the AV Club's list should be manifest by now, but we submit that our criticisms come not from a knee-jerk compulsion to gainsay the hip, the mainstream or the voice of an authority but rather from a sincere, supple and multi-dimensional appreciation of all genres of music. We like many artists similar to the ones dismissed above, just as many of you might dismiss the artists you see below while celebrating their contemporaries.

To show that we are human beings with loves and hates and passions just like yours — that we are men and women who've been born and still yet live and, however so unfair, will surely die — we asked each regular and guest contributor to Mr. Destructo to compile his or her list of the ten best albums of the decade (#1 being the best and #10 the tenth best) and tabulated this consensus staff list. These are the rhythms and verses that syncopated our steps and gave voice to our hearts.

Now, to give voice to our thoughts about these tremendous works, we turn to former Federal Reserve Chairman and clarinetist at the Juilliard School, Alan Greenspan:


Top 10 Albums This Decade That I Totally Woulda Knocked Up Your Old Lady To
by ALAN GREENSPAN

I thought when I wrote for these idiots it was gonna be a one-and-done thing, but apparently all these assholes know about writing music is which one of the Rock Band buttons they hit with their fat fucking monkey hands. That's why they called in the big guns, because they know what you're thinking: "This bunch of jackasses I don't know anything about just ripped on 50 albums in a row. Why???"

Ted Kennedy's Dead; Long Live Reagan

"When Cicero died Marc Antony nailed his hands to the door of the Senate chamber because they had written laws restricting the military powers. We're about the see the Right try the same thing again."
— A friend, on the death of Ted Kennedy, on Facebook of all things

I had no intention of writing up anything like an obituary for the Tedmeister, but I was tempted to say something after he died, probably something verging dangerously on sincerity with an escape joke tagged on the end. Instead, what I wound up doing was passively reading message boards and Facebook statuses, getting lost in how strangely angry people were at him. Instead of just being sad that a legislator who I supported had died, I wound up with something like outrage fatigue.

I'm nothing like a Kennedy idolator. Granted, I tend to think more positively of RFK than his record deserves (as is generally the case with lives cut short). At the nadir of the Bush administration's already basement-level rhetoric — when "Let's Roll" and "Bring It On" were national mission statements — I would occasionally listen to JFK's inaugural when really drunk and get a little misty. Even then, it was more for the rhetoric and the ideas the speech represented than the frequently uneven and shabby Kennedy administration.

Why Universal Health Care Is Unambiguously Necessary for America

Note: no contributors to Et tu, Mr. Destructo? had any hand in writing this. This quick breakdown of the positive argument for Universal Healthcare came from a poster named Gul Banana, from SomethingAwful.com's message boards. Probably thousands of people used this post as an excellent reference for months, until it disappeared behind SA's wall of paid archives. Thankfully, a current member who also provided the lion's share of sources for the post about Free Republic's racist comments about Malia Obama, was able to dig up the original VB code and its critical links and allow us to reprint it here as handy reference for anyone who needs it. Again, all credit goes to Gul Banana and fellow board members who diligently tracked down the salient references.
___________________
There have been a lot of debates and discussions recently, both on this forum and in other venues, about the state of healthcare. Looking at the rising costs of health insurance, and at the growing numbers of the uninsured, many are calling for government intervention, and the institution of a system where care is guaranteed to all — usually described as "universal" healthcare. It's a fascinating topic — the issues involved include humanitarian, financial and ideological ones. Unfortunately, debate on the subject is characterised by a startling phenomenon: one side is right, and the other is completely wrong.

Given the importance of medicine, I feel that it would be useful to clarify this issue. I will explain clearly, and with evidence, why it is that universal healthcare of any sort would be better than the current system in every significant way. If you find yourself disagreeing with this assertion, I ask that you read on before replying, as all conceivable objections will be addressed and resolved.

Remembering Jack Kemp, via Twitter

I never really had much against Jack Kemp, except for most of what he stood for. True, once you peeled back his Chicago School economics, his advocacy for the nonsensical Flat Tax, his belief in the gold standard, his aggressive militarism, his support for the Contras, his anti-abortion stance and his bizarre fear about letting homosexuals teach in schools, he had some good ideas, like supporting affirmative action.

Views like this last one go to explaining how the last 24 hours have produced a hagiography of his "bipartisanship." It's a testament to how much conservatism has pushed rhetoric to the far right in America that someone who holds as many as three or four non-doctrinaire conservative opinions resembles something like a charismatically free-thinking renegade. Personally, having a few good ideas amidst an entire spread of noxiously bad ones suggests little more to me than that someone screwed up somewhere. Kind of like going to a salad bar filled with chum, separated organ parts, dead ants, roofing nails and tire-flattened bluejays, except for one dish of shredded carrots: the question then becomes not, "Where did all these ghastly things come from?" but rather, "Who's the dumbass who forgot to throw out these carrots?"

Persistent Vegetative State—THE GAME!

Today marks the fourth anniversary of the failure of conservative supporters of the Iraq war (over 100,000 dead so far) and the death penalty to reaffirm their commitment to the culture of life by keeping a machine-assisted brainstem alive. I'm speaking, of course, about high-life hottie Terri Schiavo, who Bill "tears can give you AIDS" Frist brilliantly pointed out displayed evidence of consciousness by responding to light less than a legless, narcotized cat vainly chasing the dot from a laser-pointer by lolling its head at it.

It's entirely possible that the republicans' cynical and tactless overreach in the Schiavo case helped turn the political tide against them. Although the previous four years demonstrated a laughably hypocritical management of Americans' private lives at the hands of the "Party of Smaller Government," actually derailing the process of conducting national business to interfere with the right for a single person to die effectively repudiated much of their own party's rhetoric. To anyone who's watched loved ones suffer in the last days, weeks, months or years of their lives — i.e. virtually everyone in America — the national exploitation of one person for ephemeral political capital was probably nothing short of disgusting. That act alone likely catalyzed the process of questioning attitudes on euthanasia, the "culture of life" and perhaps even political affiliation for many.

Let's Make LolRands!

Friends, if you're like me, there's only one thing that you like better than beating an evasive person with a copy of Atlas Strugged that you've fastened to a cricket bat to use as a cudgel, and that's making lolcats!

"Lolcats" are macro images of large impact-font text written at a kindergarten level and pasted over pictures of cats. Although they originated elsewhere on the internet, they were popularized by my favorite website, 4Chan, with their weekly "caturday" celebration.

Well, to be honest, I went too long without taking these two great tastes and seeing if they tasted great together. That is, until my friend Robert found a picture of our favorite queen of Objectivism with an actual cat, IMmed me the picture with a macro on it, and said, "lol, i upgraded ur rand."

He wasn't fooling! It took just minutes before I got into the game, trying my hand at this dynamic new phenomenon. Why not join us? Just take this source image or this source image and head over to the Lolcat Builder and submit your own!

If there's one thing I've learned about the internet, it's that everyone loves cats that talk like a child with blunt-force trauma to the head, and everyone loves a political philosophy that sounds exactly like what that same kid would come up with. Why argue with socialists, communists and perverts anymore when you can do it with LolRands and tell those evasive yahoos "fcuk u, gots mine" with an image of Ayn Rand herself?

Here's what we've made so far. I can't wait to see what you guys come up with!

Chuck Norris Is Apparently Dangerously Insane

It's the internet's fault that Chuck Norris ever again approached relevancy to anyone. In 2005, SomethingAwful spawned the phenomenon of making up fake facts about Norris' supposed rugged inability to be stopped, riffing off the old Saturday Night Live "Bill Brasky" sketch where a bunch of salesman tell taller and taller tales about a preternaturally strong/sexy/alcoholic colleague. Unfortunately, like a lot of stupid shit at SomethingAwful, while members there abandoned the joke as repetitive and stupid, the rest of the internet cleaved to it and ran it into the ground for a full year. Then it died.

But, in 2007, in accordance with their policy of boldly solving tomorrow's solutions with yesterday's detritus, the republican party rescued Norris from imprisonment in his Total Gym full-body workout system and propped him up on FOX News, where his complete absence of political education and naked contempt for non-Christians and gays made him blend right in — while his actually having fought somebody at sometime in the past forty years gave him orders of magnitude more combat experience than their brigade of loudmouthed chickenhawks. From there, it was a short step to the Huckabee campaign, where somehow a guy who played bass on the campaign trail and heard one of his kids brag, "There's not a Huckabee alive who can eat at Taco Bell for seven dollars," had the remainder of his dignity stolen from him by a pop-cultural punchline.

Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez and Restitution

Following baseball for the last few years makes shock at any new steroid revelation virtually impossible. Pretty much everyone could plausibly have been juicing, and unless you're someone like 85-m.p.h.-fastball-throwing Greg Maddux, jaws aren't liable to drop if you're implicated. Which renders Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez's admission that he took performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) in 2003 — his MVP season — kind of quaintly predictable.

Rodriguez started out as a shortstop. He was only forced to move to third base to accommodate the generous all-for-the-team shortstop Derek Jeter's desire to stay at the position despite Rodriguez's unquestionable superiority. The position is important because shortstops traditionally aren't power hitters. In fact, they're usually the worst power hitters on the team. If you have a lithe and rangy frame capable of covering a lot of territory very quickly, you probably don't have the torso that usually accompanies slamming 50 home runs per season.* To be blunt, A-Rod was already sort of a freak. So, again, that's what makes the PEDs thing predictable. That isn't what makes it fun.

The Weekly Standard Does Something Awful

Every politics wonk knows The Weekly Standard, or should know it. Founded by Bill Kristol and never once operating at a profit, it perfectly espouses two foundational concepts of neoconservatism:

1. The Free Market and the Free Market of Ideas are always right — except when you're a conservative, and they demonstrably prove that everyone thinks your shit's all retarded and have no interest in buying what you're selling. In which case, here are coupla million dollars in entitlement checks to make sure you and your college 'zine about killing brown people get back on your feet and can keep yourself in some Brooks Brothers and Hickey Freeman. Come on, you look sowww saaaad. Who wants some giiiiiiiin??? Atta boy!
2. It doesn't matter if you're totally worthless at your job. Keep it. We knew your dad.

If this last comment seems a bit nebulous, perhaps the TV can help. On The Daily Show, host Jon Stewart narrates a recurring segment, "O, Bill Kristol. Are You Ever Right?" The answer is no. Still, he's managed to parlay a career of quotidian observations and methodical, relentless failure into TV appearances and even a ruthlessly stupid New York Times column that tends to make sense only after Wonkette ridicules it.

I mention Billy boy only because he's diversified his ignorance to include both internet comedy and his own base. For weeks now, members of the SomethingAwful.com message board have been posting as dedicated Palinite members of the Team Sarah message board. Team Sarah describes itself as "a coalition of women dedicated to advancing the values that Sarah Palin represents in the political process." I would describe it as "a coalition of borderline racist suburban and agrarian fatty catladies bonding over their hatred of books, gooks and gays and gook bookgays who use their ivory towers and books in their anuses when not aborting babies."

A Quantum of Snobbish

Today marks the release of the fifth straight Bond movie I haven't the slightest interest in seeing in the theater. I loved Bond when I was younger and sometimes feel a twinge of regret that I can't muster enthusiasm for a franchise whose movies I used to watch every afternoon as a latchkey kid. Then again, every time I start to feel this way, I hear about a new line or scene analogous to Bond telling Denise Richards-as-Dr. Christmas Jones that he thought Christmas only came once a year. (I know what that means!)

Casting Denise Richards as one of your leads — where, you know, she represents about a third of a film's acting power — is like having to win a tied football game with a one-on-one tackling contest and sending out your placekicker. At that point, you just can't have any faith in a franchise anymore. The brain trust behind her casting is the same one that thought a lipless Timothy Dalton oozed sex appeal and sent Roger Moore out for A View to a Kill when even he himself admitted he was "only about four hundred years too old for the part."

Meretricious Mission Statement

A couple months ago, I resumed email correspondence with a few old friends from high school and college and was surprised to discover how much I looked forward to coming home and writing a new email, even if I hadn't received a reply to the last one yet. I found it much easier to write replies instead of wholly new emails, but I was happy to write anything, regardless. Those of you who've known me for long can probably guess that this was a good thing. For someone who liked to self-identify as a writer in college and even — depending on the audience — today, I wrote and write astonishingly little, very irregularly and rarely at my own initiative.

Naturally, I enjoyed the correspondences so much that I managed to find a way to sabotage one of them, writing a cringe-inducingly obnoxious email that I couldn't delete all traces of fast enough. (After I sent it, of course.) The whole debacle put me off writing specifically to individuals, which effectively ended my new burst of creativity. Apart from ongoing satirical identity theft of an Indian plagiarist — my riff on performance art, trying to create a three-dimensional quasi-illiterate bisexual racist failure who adores unchecked capitalism — I returned to reading and periodically making fun of things on the internet, which wasn't nearly as rewarding.