Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? (18 page)

Lynx said: “We want to keep being white. We want our people to stay white . . . We think our race is different to other races in positive ways and that we’ve done more for civilization.”

We must wonder, though, exactly what benefit civilization will garner from two barely pubescent girls gyrating in front of mostly male white supremacists. The target market of this pop group would appear to be Nazi pedophiles. Which even a fascist must appreciate is, in PR terms, a double-edged sword.

Nazi pedophiles: What are they like, eh?

NETWORKING

The dark art of pretending to like people in order to advance one’s own self—even though that self has precisely nothing to offer the world barring an extraordinary aptitude for self-advancement.

“NOT LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE” ADVERTISING

We must not be like everybody else. We must be different. Original. And special. And we must always,
always
expect more. How do we know this? Because that’s what the advertisers tell us.

“Be Original” implores Levi’s. We need to go “moon-bathing,” claim the ads, showing a buffed, shirtless, Levi’s-wearing man balancing precariously on a moonlit rooftop. They make it look quite the thing. But if we do actually go “moon-bathing,” surely we are not being “original.” We are being “unoriginal.” It’s like jumping in the fire because a bigger boy told you to, except it’s climbing around on the roof at night because Levi’s told you to. Which is potentially deranged. “What, Officer? But the jeans people told me to do it!”

“There Is No Box,” declares the network FX. Because their decision to air not just TV shows, but original TV shows, of both the comedy and drama variety, is so daring that clearly they’re so far out of the box they can’t even see that cramped square anymore! And if you watch their shows, you’re out of the box, too! Good for you! Just don’t leave that other box. You know, the one that glows in your living room and is called a television. Because FX kinda needs that box to survive.

When IBM used the Kinks’ proto-punk anthem “I’m Not Like Everybody Else,” they subverted meaning with an audacity that would make a French philosopher gasp. The song fronted the computer giant’s “What Makes You Special?” campaign, which conveyed the idea that IBM was in fact an anarchist collective specifically there to cater to disaffected wild cards. Except that, in the ads, everyone was singing the anti-conformity song in perfect unison—like corporate Stepford androids. The levels of irony become so richly confusing that you start spinning out and need talking to with patience and care—to be reassured that you are, at least in some senses, like everybody else.

NOVELISTS WRITING ABOUT CURRENT AFFAIRS

Reading newspapers these days, you need some basic ground rules if you want to avoid the sudden urge to throw yourself through a window. One of the most important rules (at least of those that don’t involve “Youth Correspondents”) involves first scanning right down to the very end of the article. If you see there a little copyright symbol followed by the writer’s name, either turn over the page or in fact drop the paper and run off into another room.

This is because, whether you’ve heard of them or not, the writers will be Very Important Authors. They don’t usually do this sort of thing but, on this occasion, they have chosen to lower themselves from Mount Literature and walk among us. They have been touched by current events, touched in ways we normal people just wouldn’t understand. There are children dying, we’ve all seen the pictures. But have we seen the real picture? The big picture? The picture that tells us what we’re all really feeling? Probably not. After all, we’re not pompous novelists straining for pseudo-profundity.

How would any of us have made sense of the horrors of the World Trade Center attacks if it hadn’t been for the likes of Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and Martin Amis telling us how horrible it all was? This was, without the slightest shadow of a doubt, exactly the right time for showboating prose.

Let us consider an op-ed piece by the late Norman Mailer on our government’s justification for the Iraq War: “With their dominance in sport, at work and at home eroded, Bush thought white American men needed to know they were still good at something.” So powerful! So readable! So succinct! So clearly out of touch with reality! If Bush led us into Iraq to give white dudes an easy ego boost, this war is a bigger clusterfuck than we thought.

Imagine if Mailer’s actual proper literary endeavors were as trite, jumped-up, and egocentric and had such little connection with reality. Surely then we’d all stop buying them? Oh, yes, that’s right: They are. And we have.

NU-SNOBBERY

The poor are hilarious: Look, they don’t have much money! Ha ha ha. But there’s a downside, too: They sometimes have bad skin because they don’t use the correct sea-salt-based exfoliant scrubs, and they can be violent. And they never appear in their own reality shows! Unless you count those Bumfights videos. And we don’t. So the poor are worthless. Struggle to survive somewhere else, you dirty fucks.

O

OBITUARIES IN THE FUTURE

Scientists predict that, if the ratio of celebrities to everyone else continues increasing at the present rate, then by 2048 the size of the
New York Times
will have expanded to fill the average two-bedroom flat. The increased space will be needed to cover stories about all the new celebrities and also to report the deaths of the old ones: Sadly, Johnny Fairplay will not live forever and some poor sod will have to write his obituary.

The Paper of Record will presumably dedicate whole sections to obits for celebrities: celebrity carpenters, celebrity gardeners, celebrity dishwashers, all the entrants in all sixteen seasons of
Dancing with the Stars
(the seventeenth was canceled after the one with the ’stache out of The Killers broke his neck attempting to foxtrot), celebrity newsagents, celebrity wig makers, celebrity adult literacy tutors, and Jared from the Subway ads (“Increasingly Jared found that the only thing that helped him lose weight was crack cocaine”).

Celebrity obituary writers will prepare their own obituaries. Which is poignant, in a way.

OBSERVATIONAL COMEDY

Standing on a stage. Making trite observations about everyday life. In a futile attempt to be funny. What’s the deal with that? Have you seen that?

“OFFICIAL SPONSORS” OF SPORTING EVENTS

MasterCard, official sponsors of the World Cup 2006, received a lot of criticism for initially insisting that all ticket sales had to be done by extremely complicated bank transfers unless paid for by one, and only one, brand of credit card: Visa! Only joking—it was MasterCard.

Coke famously banned Pepsi products from events they sponsored. Now, you may ask what Coke is doing sponsoring sports anyway what with it making you really fat, but it’s actually got quite a long tradition of sponsoring sporting events, having gotten behind the 1936 Olympics in Berlin—aka the Nazi Olympics, the one where Hitler wanted to show off Aryan superiority. Coke was pretty chummy with the Nazis generally. Indeed, Coke-staple Fanta was invented by improvising with local ingredients when the German Coke plants ran out of cola syrup during the war: They loved pop, the Nazis.

Anyway, at least Coke could argue it’s an “energy” drink. What about Canon—the “official camera” of the NFL? So, in the run-up to a big game, do the players like to snap some shots for a night of post-game scrapbooking?

OPENING CEREMONIES

Great international sporting events like the Olympics and the World Cup are designed to bring people across the world together, to realize briefly our underlying commonality. And the opening ceremonies do indeed unite all the corners of the world with the same thought:
Just fucking get on with it.
And also:
Where did they get all that material?

Wherever the host nation, these gaudy displays of national pride always look like a school special assembly with serious money to burn. But there are moments to cherish: there’s the grandeur in Bob Costas’s voice as he reads from the script: “And now . . . here come the grape pickers . . . in their traditional costume . . . picking their grapes . . . from the grapevines . . . on the hillsides.” Or there’s his mute disbelief at the sight of Björk dressed as an ocean singing about sweat.

The transcendent opening ceremony moment of recent years occurred at the opening of the 2002 Winter Olympics at Bonneville when each country was introduced with a short rhyming couplet—in French and English. One particularly memorable example went: “They come from a land that’s long and hilly / Welcome to the gallant athletes from Chile.”

ORGANIC CONSUMER SCAMS

If you buy organic produce from abroad, and the organic produce has been transported by plane, then that organic produce, far from being an in-touch-with-nature, straight-from-the-soil bundle of environmental goodness, will have probably burned its own weight in aviation fuel to get here (as part of a larger consignment; you don’t get kiwi fruits individually flying themselves here from New Zealand).

The ethical farming group Sustain analyzed a sample basket of twenty-six imported organic goodies. They found it had traveled a distance equivalent to six times around the equator (150,000 miles), a journey that will have released as much CO
₂
as a four-bedroom household cooking meals for eight months. But the supermarkets know that the little
ORGANIC
sticker means more money for them, so they really could not care less about jet-set comestibles.

It hurts to say this, but if you want to go organic, you might have to end up dealing with hippies. Farming is the only area of life where hippies are best. You never hear about hippie builders, say—oh, we got some hippies in to do the extension and they were really good.

For farming, though, we’re with the hippies. It’s either them or you end up with subsidy-guzzling reactionaries who fuck foxes. That’s the impression we get, anyway.

OSCARS, THE

Another year on and Hollywood’s managed to turn out, what, maybe
three
decent films? That’s right, give yourselves a big clap. Funny how you never seem to win awards in competitions not run by yourselves.

OSCAR PARTIES

So many parties, so little talent. There’s Barry Diller’s pre-Oscar luncheon, CAA agent Bryan Lourd’s day-before shindig, the Weinstein Company’s Saturday bash, the Governor’s Ball,
InStyle
’s viewing party at Republic, and—of course—the
Vanity Fair
soiree at Morton’s.

They all sound amazing, except for the fact that you are not allowed to get pissed (“You just want to have a celebratory glow,” says one insider), there’s never enough room (“There’s never enough room,” says another insider), and if you’re not either a mogul or someone involved in a nominated film, no one will be that interested in talking to you. Says yet another insider: “If you’re not one of those people, you’re always looking around wondering, ‘Who do I know, who do I talk to, why am I here?’ ”

Of course, the party to be seen at is always Elton John’s party. Everyone simply has to get into Elton’s party. If you aren’t at Elton’s party, you don’t want to know about Elton’s party. You will choke. You’ll just die. You
have
to be there. Nobody who is there can even bear to tell others who aren’t there how good it is: That’s how good it is. Actually, an insider has spilled the beans: “It was lovely, lots of margaritas.” What time is the party? Margarita time.

We do not understand this. How is Elton John, now, in the twenty-first century, still the celebrity hub around which revolves whole other galaxies of vain, vacuous fluff? He had some hits in the 1970s. Then there was
The Lion King.
And what else? Is it a Diana thing? What?

This is supposed to be Hollywood. You know, the shining city on the hill; homeless runaways being lured into the porn industry; “It was just the pictures that got small”; complicated young people with a whole set of personalities . . . Have they not seen those photos of Captain Fantastic in the duck outfit?

To us, it’s not screaming Rita Hayworth.

OVERSTIMULATED CHILDREN

Are your children mural artists? No. So do not encourage them to draw on the fucking walls. If they must display an artistic bent, simply supply them with a piece of paper. Or a canvas. Try to find a happy medium between fucking them up—you may not mean to, but you do—and letting them trash other people’s houses. No one wants a miniature rampant id crashing around their house, drawing on it.

According to many reports, children are increasingly brought up to believe they are the last in line of the Ming dynasty. Recent studies show that middle-class parents are creating a new generation of “brat bullies.” Apparently, some parents are unwilling to curb their children’s desires, believing this would stifle their creativity. These worshipped little gods “expect all the teachers and other kids to kowtow to them. If they don’t, they start to bully the other children.”

P

PANDA DIPLOMACY

In this ever-changing world in which we live, communication is more important than ever. Which is why all efforts to step up diplomacy are now so imperative. The pandas are on board. Are you?

In January 2006, the deputy secretary of state assigned to manage U.S. relations with China, Robert Zoellick, entered the seemingly cuddly, but actually rather prickly, world of panda diplomacy.

Asked to meet a prize cub, he acknowledged to reporters that he and his aides had pondered any message the image might convey. They had discussed the various inferences that could be drawn from several panda poses before agreeing to “take Jing Jing on his lap.”

We, too, share doubts about what message this pose might convey. “You want to know how the panda felt?” Zoellick asked reporters. “Very soft.”

In fact, panda diplomacy is among the more treacherous forms of diplomacy. In 2005, Taiwan was offered two pandas by the Chinese Communist Party. The panda diplomacy, in this case, was backed by hundreds of missiles pointed at Taiwan across the hundred-mile channel that separates the island from China. So accepting the pandas meant subconsciously acquiescing to Chinese domination: “Look, pandas! Accept Chinese rule. Aren’t they cute? What did I just say? Oh, nothing. Accept Beijing’s divine diktat. Aaah, pandas . . .”