The Swiss Are Assholes

Poor Muammar Qaddafi. First, no one can spell his name the same way from year to year. In fact, I'm pretty sure I had to switch spellings during semesters in college once. Also, "Khadafy" looked way cooler, kind of like a split between Wrath of Khan and a blaxsploitation film. Second, he spent a good chunk of the 2000s being a poster boy for the efficacy of the Bush Doctrine after he renounced terrorism. But then he made one nutty UN speech, got a new president who didn't need him to prop up the notion that "the bombs-away system works!" and suddenly he's no longer that necessary.

Third, he can't even beat his servants in a Swiss hotel. What a bunch of bullshit. Look, you don't keep running a shithole like Libya for the money. If you want to run a country with shaky economic development, tribal conflict, violent crime and an arid climate just for the money, eventually you pull a Carlos Salinas de Gortari, rob the company store and set yourself up in a bigass house in Ireland, where there's water, beer and redheads who are reliably crazy in the right room of the house.

No, you run Libya for the perks: getting to use swords, firing guns in the air, buying really old missiles and whaling on dudes. I can't even comprehend how the Swiss don't get that last part. They spent 1300-1550 kicking the shit out of everyone in Europe for the money, mainly jabbing them with sticks. Then they got so bored they spent the next 450 years basically daring anyone to fuck with Popes just for another excuse to do something. The Swiss are assholes.

Greenspan to UN: Let My Orly Go

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 discuss "Birther Queen" Orly Taitz's attorney's recent announcement that she has sought the UN's protection from Barack Obama's skilled army of ACORN-trained assassins, we again turn to former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

Orly Taitz, I Want You to Seek Asylum in My Pants
by ALAN GREENSPAN

Despite jabs I've suffered over the years for my "vedic calm" and "mandarin reticence," I am no different from any other human being and feel the need to reach out to others in their times of trial.

No, not the vast majority. I've never cared for them, to be perfectly honest. Especially not those who are armed and certainly as few people as possible who could be called "poor" or, worse, announce themselves as such before the driver can get around to the side of the car. But I am not inhuman.

Tuesdays with Marty: 2/16/10

Note: Tuesdays with Marty is a recurring segment on Et tu, Mr. Destructo? highlighting the opinions of our publisher, Marty Peretz. Mr. Peretz wishes to make it absolutely clear that he is neither responsible nor liable for any content in this site, including but not limited to words, ideas, images, and things implied by said means of communication, in addition to other forms of communication not involving the above methods, whether established or theoretical in nature.


The Super Bowl and a Realistic, Focused Approach to Middle East Conflict
by MARTY PERETZ

A mere eleven days ago, fans of the National Football League were treated to yet another stellar Super Bowl in a decade abundant with them. From the four contests featuring the New England Patriots, all decided by less than a touchdown, to last year's last-minute heroics sending the Pittsburgh Steelers over the Arizona Cardinals and seasoned man of faith Kurt Warner, most of these games have been a testament to athletic struggle to last the ages.

The game two weekends ago differed slightly, however, as the combatants represented not only the best of their respective football conferences but also two different modalities of thought and action, and in this offered two lessons in leadership.

Selleck: Usage, Sandwiches and Resurrection

Like the commonly perceived "Law of Threes" with celebrity death, there seems to be a similar one with pop-cultural resurrection. You go through your life as innocent and well-meaning as ever, and suddenly there's Jason Robards in Parenthood, and Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee in All the President's Men, and then someone you know who never goes referentially further afield for a joke than Jay Leno namedrops Jason Robards on you. It would make sense if Jason Robards had died or donated $10 million to the Jason Robards Foundation for Sounding Gruff in a Cool & Fatherly Way for Four Decades but nope. The cosmos just decided Jason Robards was going on a lazarus trip.

Something similar happened to me and Magnum, P.I. recently. Tom Selleck hadn't kicked off or been found in bed with a dead girl or a live boy, but suddenly he was all over my radar. I know that if I look at it rationally, it's just confirmation bias at work; I don't think of Magnum, but suddenly someone mentions it, leading me to prick up my ears to any reference to it or the actors who appeared on the show, Hawaii, Ferraris, etc. But just because you know how the phenomenon operates doesn't make it any less weird. I used to drive The Wife crazy by deliberately using Herman's Head* in really inappropriate analogies ("When you think about it, Mitya, Vanya, Alyosha and Pavel in The Brothers Karamazov represent different sides of human behavior, much like the archetypes inside Herman's head on Herman's Head") in a way that would trigger her noticing references to it elsewhere, even making her furious to hear the name "Herman," since it would inevitably lead back to that show and then her swatting at me. Even being fully aware of the dynamic and thinking that your husband is an idiot doesn't lessen the fact that the universe perversely knows about the show too and seems to conspire to put its name in others' mouths.

Tuesdays with Marty: 2/09/10

Note: Tuesdays with Marty is a recurring segment on Et tu, Mr. Destructo? highlighting the opinions of our publisher, Marty Peretz. Mr. Peretz wishes to make it absolutely clear that he is neither responsible nor liable for any content in this site, including but not limited to words, ideas, images, and things implied by said means of communication, in addition to other forms of communication not involving the above methods, whether established or theoretical in nature.


The New International Blindness: All Agog over Gaga Makes One Gag
by MARTY PERETZ

This year I watched the Grammys at the home of a good friend and midway through the night thanked him that he had provided me an excuse to give away TNR's annual invitation. It came as no surprise that music's ritual celebration of itself turned a self-congratulatory gaze inward and away from the international stage yet again. That it again celebrated a re-branding of the old should also come as no surprise. But this year that it did so with such sybaritic glee seemed appropriate, fiddling as the children burned CDs of their own creation, another district of the New Rome of Hollywood ablaze and consuming revenue. It was the only satisfaction of the evening.

Bay Area Post #1: The Unbearable Lightness of Being from There

I went back home to the San Francisco Bay Area recently. I hadn't been there in ages. While visiting, when I was driven anywhere, I spent most my time staring out the window and trying to figure out what used to be there, deciphering remodeled facades, re-learning how to get from A to B, the usual you-can't-go-home-again nonsense. That saying is true, but it helps you understand it when people bulldoze things you remember.

One of the consequences of returning to anywhere you used to live is that friends and family who'd rather have you back try to sell the old place to you. It's nice of them, an oblique and emotionally non-confrontational way of saying, "We miss you and wish you'd do something about that." But taken on its own, the gesture oversells. It's hard not to already feel a yearning to go home, so any pitch beyond your own fond live-action reminiscence seems like piling on.

This time, one refrain emerged from dozens of conversations and several people:

"There's no place like the Bay Area."

Now, obviously, this is true, for two reasons.

1. There is no place like any other place. Try your hardest to replicate another town, and you'll fail. Each city or region is helplessly unique despite whatever manufactured effort it might make. This is one of those realities so totally self-evident that naturally it can't be what people actually mean.

Funeral Post #2

I just went to another funeral. Retrospectively the naming scheme I came up with for my first post about funerals almost seems like I was taunting the gods of irony into doing something to make its format suddenly utilitarian. Those gods being what they are, I can't reverse engineer the process by writing a post titled, "Fabulous Wealth Descends on Me," because then someone would throw a wad of coins off the 40th floor of a building I was passing under, a stray penny whizzing through the air and pulverizing the skull of whomever I was walking with, and then we'd be on Funeral Post #3 and Physics Post #1.

Whenever I read other people's blogs, I'm struck by how bizarre it is that the authors assume any part of their audience has the slightest interest in their lives. Even if a regular audience cares, the casual passersby surely can't, and it's not as if the authors' experiences are unique in human existence. When I started writing this thing, I issued myself a silent warning of, "Don't make this about you; not even you care some of the time." However, I feel that people I like dropping dead warrants something like exemption: after all, funerals are occasions when atheists go back to church and family members treat each other with more than neglect or contempt. Surely the exception extends to blogs. Then again, I'm sure the people whose personal blogs I can't stand employed this same process of rationalization, so really I'm no better than they are, except for the fact that I'm not collecting six figures in pop-culture trinkets or writing about my cats, original video game characters or fantasy draft. 

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.

NFL Wild Card Weekend: Cultural History and Murder Fantasies

It's NFL playoffs time, the wonderful five-week stretch of the year where telling our significant others that "every game is important" isn't a terrible lie and where three of those weekends feature two days back to back with perfect excuses to drink constantly and grill something that used to be alive, hopefully at the same time.

I originally planned to live-blog all four games of the wild card weekend until about halfway through the first one, where I realized the attempt would make me kill something and try to grill it just to break the frustration. Three of the four games were painful to watch.

Two reasons for that jump out:

1. Three of them were basically blowouts.
Blowouts rule when your team's doing them, but there's nothing fun about them if you're a neutral watcher. You have to feel some stake in it, like deeply loathing one of the teams or QBs. Of course, the announcers can't do this, and since it's the playoffs, nobody really goes daffily off-script talking about whatever occurrs to them. We have to take these very seriously and speculate baselessly about coming seasons for each franchise; losing focus is not an option. Thus the NFL wild card weekend turned into something like nine hours of quasi-indifferent solemnity, like being stuck at consecutive funerals for three bosses killed in some mass grilling mishap.

Southern College Football Fans Are the Biggest Bandwagoners in American Sports (BCS Game Edition)

A short while ago, I wrote about how southern college football fans are the frontrunning-est fans in the country. Beyond insulting other parts of the country in the name of southern pride and other regionalistic ugliness, beyond silly displays of tribalism, they basically want to root for winners, and rooting for teams from the south tends to provide that for them. Just as I was starting to wonder if I'd been a little too critical, the BCS Championship game happened.

Before, during and immediately following it, most of the people I know on Facebook and many of the people I know on Twitter updated their thoughts about the two teams and who deserved to win, and reading it was like experiencing a live-action commentary on and performance of the earlier college football piece I'd written. Screenshots or copied-and-pasted text from tweets or Facebook updates will get dull fast, so rather than bore you, I'll just summarize:


Let's go, One Part of the South! Because it's the south and the other part of the south isn't really the south, or something.
I know a lot of people from the south, very few of whom are from Texas, and very few of whom root for Alabama. In spite of that, all but one of them interested in the game posted something in support of Alabama, from mere rooting interest to rabid cheering and shit-talking. And almost all of them posted an explanation why: "GO SEC."

Funeral Post #1

A friend of mine died the other day. She wasn't a very close friend — we started out as antagonists and only moved years later and, it turns out, too late toward unguarded fondness for each other — and naturally it's upsetting that she wasn't and now can't be. I'm not going to the funeral, although I suppose I could.

So far, if pressed, I've explained begging off with the truthful reply that I don't want to introduce myself to her mother and have her mother only remember me as the guy who got in something like an old-fashioned epistolary feud with her daughter where we each accused the other of being an addict and a criminal. But I'd also hate to go there and be confronted by lines of mourners of longer friendship and greater intimacy, and worry that my being sad was a luxury of affect I had not earned, some pose I was enjoying, some voyeuristic grab for the raw and genuine. Although I suppose if that were my motive, writing this is no less emotionally predatory.

Maybe I'm overthinking it. I've never especially understood funerals, beyond what I'd like mine to be: Pogues playing loud enough that people could have intimate conversations where they wouldn't have to worry about "he was a bit of a prick" being overheard, lots of ashtrays and no smoke detectors, Jameson dispensed not too far away from anyone's chair, a sensible abundance of handrails and bannisters for those who'd eventually need them to get around. I've never been able to picture myself lying in a coffin without thinking of at least one friend of mine rushing up to it, not to fling his body across mine in some cold final embrace, but rather to say, "Fuck, I just got here! Sorry, man. No—don't get up." In fact, most of the time my vision of it just descends into ludicrously inappropriate abuse:

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.

Gay French GWAR, or: 'Hello, 2010'

There's literally no way you read those three words and didn't want to know what they were talking about. It's important to kick 2010 off on this site in the best way possible, and those words are it. Let's aim high. Let's light up the night and sear a blinding scar of pure glam rock into the day. Let's talk about Rockets.

Or "The Rockets." I don't know; apparently Amazon.com and the Italian Wikipedia aren't entirely sure themselves. I have no idea how I ran across this. My only guess was that I got in another pop-culture throwdown with a buddy of mine who directs music videos and occasionally tosses me a writing-related bone. (I totally came up with a video idea Jack White rejected! OMG!) This happens now and again: we're both drunk/tired and don't feel like writing or coming up with anything, and the Youtube one-upmanship suddenly bursts out. It's a testament to how protracted these things become that I think it's reasonable to suspect I may have found this and forgotten completely. Whatever its origin, it's fucking sublime:

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.