How to Be a Person (22 page)

Spoiler Alerts for the Big Novels So You Can Flirt With English Nerds as If You’ve Already Read Them

MOBY-DICK
:
Everyone dies except the whale and Ishmael, who floats to safety while clinging to Queequeg’s coffin. What you should say: “Everyone skips over the chapter about different classifications of whales, but it’s actually one of the funniest parts—a parody of encyclopedic writing and, if you think about it, knowledge itself.”
INVISIBLE MAN
:
After finding momentary glory as a political activist, the narrator is mistaken for a sellout named Rhinehart and is forced into a dark basement by angry
men. While it appears he’s lost everything, he believes that his story—this novel—is his political legacy. What you should say (if you’re not black): “I never dreamed that I could get so close to the African-American experience.” If you are black, just stare sullenly out the window without saying a word.
THREE LIVES
:
Gertrude Stein’s first published book is made up of three novellas: “The Good Anna” ends with Anna dying of working too hard. At the end of “Melanctha,” Melanctha dies of consumption after contemplating suicide. “The Gentle Lena” closes with Lena dying during the birth of her fourth child, who does not survive. What you should say (while shaking your head): “It’s just so … raw.”
ULYSSES
:
After a long day on the town, Leopold Bloom returns home, pees in his backyard, and goes to bed. As he falls asleep, his wife, Molly, reflects on the time they got engaged. What you should say: “
Ulysses
isn’t nearly as challenging as everyone says—it just requires a serious reader, is all.”
MRS. DALLOWAY
:
She has a party where she hears about mentally ill veteran Septimus Warren Smith’s suicide and she reflects on the kindness he showed her. What you should say: “The clever similarities to
Ulysses
really make this a riposte from Woolf to Joyce about women’s roles in society.”
THE GREAT GATSBY
:
A man whose wife has been fucking around on him mistakenly shoots Gatsby to death in his swimming pool, and even though tons of assholes used to come to Gatsby’s parties, no one goes to his funeral. What you should say: “The parallels to our own time are stunning.”

Books You Should Avoid

While you’re in college, you should avoid Ayn Rand. Seriously, you’ll thank us later. Sometimes, college students—especially white college students from middle-class-or-higher backgrounds—read her humorless but weirdly compelling novels and start to think that they’ve somehow pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. They then become annoying pricks for approximately eight years, at least. Don’t read Salman Rushdie’s
The Satanic Verses
. The first half is mostly about how you should have a good time without hurting anyone else, which is fine. The second half is pseudomystical mumbo jumbo that has convinced a good number of acid casualties that they’re Wiccan high priests. Rushdie is talented, but skip this one. Ladies, if your grandmother sends you a book by SARK, put it down and back away—otherwise, one day you might wake up a 67-year-old cat lady with cornrows and turquoise paint in between your toes. (Same with Rhonda Byrne’s
The Secret
.) Skip Charles Bukowski right now, too—Bukowski will convince you that chronic assholism is a lifestyle, when it’s just a hobby. And remember:
Fight Club
is a satire, not a lifestyle choice.

13. WHAT NO ONE ELSE WILL TELL YOU ABOUT POLITICS

BY BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT, CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE, GOLDY, DAVID SCHMADER, AND LINDY WEST

Getting Started

S
o you wanna make a difference, huh? You’re young, you’re strong, you’re entering your intellectual prime, and you’re just itching to stand up to the arrogant gray-hairs of your parents’ generation—who, admittedly, royally screwed things up—and set our nation right again. You want to end injustice,
end poverty, end pollution, end wars, and push the powers that be toward smarter, fairer, and more sustainable policies. In other words, like generations of politically conscious students before you, you want to change the world.

Well, here’s a novel idea:
You could fucking vote!

Yeah, sure, marches and rallies and sit-ins are great and all that, but if you really want to make a difference—if you really want to strike fear into the sclerotic hearts of the political establishment and force reforms that make a difference in the here and now—you and all your classmates will register the fuck to vote and then go goddamn vote!

Honestly … how hard is it? It’s like an open-book quiz you’ve had months to prepare for, and it’s multiple fucking choice! And yet most young people don’t vote. Lift up your eyes and look around the library or lecture hall in which you’re reading this: On average, four out of five of your fellow schoolmates didn’t bother to vote.

Now look at yourself. Did you vote? No?
Asshole
.

And don’t say that voting doesn’t matter, or that your one vote out of millions can’t possibly make a difference, because it does and it can. Those annual tuition hikes you and your parents are forced to swallow (and yes, more are on the way) come from a government that doesn’t fear you, a government that’s more concerned with the whiny don’t-raise-my-taxes concerns of home-owning oldsters who actually vote than with the generation of I’m-too-cool-to-vote kiddies like you, who current homeowners are counting on to change their bedpans and give them minimum-wage sponge baths a
few years down the road. Oh sure, politicians love to talk about how you’re the future, but they’re up for reelection and people your age don’t vote, so who the fuck do you think they’re going to pander to?

So yeah, march and protest and rally all you want. Join your student government, volunteer for your favorite candidates, all that’s great. Do it. But above all, if you really want to help fix our nation’s broken political system—if you really want to change the world—vote, goddamn it! Or shut the fuck up.

How to Know If You’re a Republican or a Democrat

Sweeping generalizations are never a good idea—but here we go! Republicans believe that money is the most important thing. For example, if a corporation wants to make a bunch of money in a manner that has the unfortunate side effect of spewing fluorescent orange goo into the air, Republicans will be all, “Fluorescent orange goo is perfectly safe and kinda tasty!” because goo-spewing is good for business, and good business means good jobs, and good jobs means more money. Democrats believe other things—like equal rights and the sustainability of the planet—are as important, if not more important, than making as much money as possible, so they’re more inclined to be all, “Um, can we limit the amount of fluorescent orange goo here, please?” Because of this, Republicans laugh about how Democrats are tree-huggers and owl-kissers and socialists and hippies. Meanwhile, Democrats
laugh about how Republicans are well-fed, oil-covered, cigar-smoking pieces of shit.

Republicans also believe that Jesus is the most important thing, or at least lately they pretend to in order to win elections. They furrow their brows and pretend like gay marriage is the worst horror that could ever befall society, for example, even though Jesus said nothing about gay marriage or gay people. Pro-life Republicans invoke “Thou shalt not kill” in all seriousness when it comes to a clump of cells that will eventually become a baby, but they have no problem killing an actual adult human who’s on death row (even though there are many instances of wrongful convictions in the history of death row). Nor do they have a problem with war—after all, war is a big business—even though wars tend to result in deaths.

Republicans fully believe the unregulated free market will sort everything out, even when it comes to Wall Street and health care, which is insane, because an unregulated Wall Street caused the Great Recession and unregulated health care means corporations make all the rules. Republicans tend to favor tax cuts for the very rich, insisting that the rich are “job creators,” even though they’re constantly creating jobs overseas, where it’s cheaper; Democrats tend to favor tax cuts for the middle class, because if you give the middle class more of their own money back they will
spend
it, which helps the economy. On social issues, Republicans characterize Democrats as pot-smoking, public-transportation-riding, casual-sex-having moral relativists, and even though that does describe 86 percent of the staff of
The Stranger
, that’s just as unfair of a generalization of
Democrats as all the negative generalizations about Republicans we just discussed.

The truth is, politics is a shifting, sliding thing, defined in large part by political leaders, who change all the time. Republicans will tell you with glee that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, even though the Republican Party of today has nothing to do with the Republican Party of the 1860s. Be engaged, ask questions, get your information from sources other than TV or your parents, and you’ll figure out where you fall on the spectrum soon enough. (Hint: Don’t be a Republican. They’re morons at best, fucking evil at worst.)

Take It Easy on Tattooing Yourself in Your Beliefs

Never forget that you are still a freakishly pliable, under-construction human being—that’s why it’s great you’re in college!—and you should do your best to refrain from ascribing permanence to your gloriously fleeting feelings (i.e., no tattoos of “BI AND PROUD!,” “Communist and Lovin’ It!,” or the lyrics to some stupid song you may love now but will resent the shit out of in 10 years).

When It’s Okay to Yell at Someone About Politics

Let’s say you’re at a party, and that it’s a party for Christians, put on by a Christian video game company, and Jesus Christ himself is
there. (TRUE STORY! How do you get yourself into these things? Answer: free drinks.) Jesus is wearing a long white toga-type thing and a special Jesus sash, and he has lustrous long hair—not like dirty-unkempt-hippie-guy hair, but beautiful, shiny, wavy brown hair. It cannot be denied: Jesus is hot. “JESUS CHRIST!” you say. “Yes!” he beams. “So, wait: Are you really Jesus?” you say, testing the waters. “Like, do the people here, and/or you yourself, believe that you are Jesus? Or are you just a guy hired to be dressed up as Jesus?” And Jesus leans in and says, “Totally the latter. I don’t even believe in God!” So then you talk to Jesus while you finish your drink, and then you dance with Jesus for a while. Jesus is such a good dancer. You get your picture taken with him by the professional-photographer-guy, because: It’s Jesus!

You’re swept up in the magic of the nearness of Jesus and free drinks, so you say to the professional-photographer-guy who’s taking your photo with Jesus, “So, are
you
Christian? Or were you just hired to take pictures here?” You’re thinking you and Jesus might have a new friend. But no! Professional-photographer-guy is a believer. He conveys this in a humble yet still somehow self-satisfied manner. Again, you’ve had a few drinks. “But what about the gays?” you say. “I believe Jesus loves and accepts everyone,” Christian-professional-photographer-guy says. “So, then, you support gay rights, like gay marriage?” you say. “Oh, I’m really not educated about it enough to have an opinion,” he says with vacant sincerity. “What the hell does that mean?” you say. “Denying gay people their rights is a political platform of your entire religious
institution—the institution that you’ve entrusted your soul to,” you say. He says again that he believes Jesus loves and accepts everyone. You say again that it’s his moral responsibility to develop a point of view about one of the current political tenets of his faith. “Oh,” Christian-professional-photographer-guy says. “I just really haven’t given it much thought.” “MAYBE YOU SHOULD GIVE IT SOME MOTHERFUCKING THOUGHT,” you suggest. You’re rarely so combative, but his ignorance—real or feigned—makes you incensed.

Christian-professional-photographer-guy remains empty-eyed as he offers more empty words. You’re cursing freely; you’re close to berating him. You realize there’s no point. “There’s no point to this,” you say. Christian-professional-photographer-guy touches you lightly on the forearm and tells you he’s glad you talked and that he’s really going to think about it. “LIKE HELL YOU’RE GOING TO THINK ABOUT IT! IF YOU WERE CAPABLE OF CRITICAL THINKING WE WOULDN’T BE HAVING THIS CONVERSATION!” you shout. “FUCKING FUCK!” you shout, and you reel away. You will still be mad when you wake up the next day.

The moral of the story is this: It’s often pointless to talk to people about politics, and in general it’s very rude to shout at people at parties, but sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.

What No One Else Will Tell You About Feminism

GUESS WHAT? YOU ARE A FEMINIST.

If you are a person alive in the world, other people, both men and women, have told you that all feminists are hairy, reactionary, undersexed, man-hating bitches who need to quit cryin’ (because we have suffrage now! And Roombas!). HOWEVER. THAT IS OBVIOUSLY STUPID. Feminism is not a radical movement or a fringe movement or an embarrassment or a fraud. Feminism is simple. The “patriarchy” does “exist.” To identify as a feminist is to acknowledge that women are people, and, as such, women deserve the same social, economic, and political rights and opportunities as other styles of people (i.e., men-people). To be a feminist is also to acknowledge that the world is not, currently, a fair and just and safe place for women to exist. Because it is not. Obviously (see: everything ever). To deny these things makes you, at worst, a bad person who hates women, including but not limited to: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jennifer Garner, Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Lopez, your mother, Jennifer Lopez’s mother, Jennifer Garner’s Aunt Marcy, Michelle Obama, Ellen DeGeneres, Cher, Julie Andrews, Kim Kardashian, Khloe Kardashian, Kourtney Kardashian, Kraken Kardashian, Karphone Kardashian, Kickball Kardashian, Kornkob Kardashian, and THE VIRGIN FUCKING MARY. At best, it makes you a complacent idiot.