Why I’m Malcontent

I hope I’ve conveyed in some of the previous entries that I profoundly anti-identify with the majority of mass entertainment. Of course, my reasons are subjective and personal. They’re the product of thinking I wouldn’t have been doing at all if I weren’t damaged in a couple of very specific ways. But I also, sincerely, believe that we’re at a point collectively where our default clichés and truisms are concealing, even perpetuating, cultural dysfunction. For example, by selling people on status-symbologies that are, in reality, well beyond their means, so that they feel inadequate without a vision of adequacy that is, in all fairness, loopy.

Also, by reassuring the general public of the efficacy of public institutions that are, in reality, threadbare.

For the past few decades, the state of the American education system has gone from “disquieting” to “holy shit” and successive administrations have tried make it a full scale Issue. Try as they might, though, neither team has a satisfactory narrative. Team Blue point at funding alone, citing the appalling fiscal conditions of the nation’s poorest schools. To those disquieted by America’s lack of overall literacy, this misses the wider point that the whole system apparently sucks at educating, including most of the richer schools. Team Red make the teachers’ unions out to be the ultimate enemies of education; this plays into their usual narrative of lazy people fucking up the country with their degraded standards. Teachers, we’re expected to believe, are cynical careerists who want an easy job and despise kids.

I only met a couple of teachers who despise kids. I met a lot of teachers who were doing the kind of job most service staff do, making the best of inhumane conditions and smiling when possible. The thing is, schools aren’t places dominated by the personalities of adults, they’re dominated by the personalities of children, and children in large numbers are children at their most competitive. Shy kids maybe don’t change outwardly. But the people-pleasers get more ingratiating, the disruptive act-outers get more disruptive, and the sadists, people on some kind of Freudian vengeance trip over god knows what, reach levels of cruel manifestation that you’d never see in any other setting on an average day.

What I represented — self-destructively angry, black-clad male, into heavy metal and solitary pursuits, cynical and mistrustful of others — is such a commonplace. I can’t think of a popular depiction of school, during or since the 1970’s, that hasn’t included that image. But during the Columbine years — whether or not they admitted it — reasonable adults were generally blaming kids like me. Relative commonplaces became grounds for discrimination, and fear (seeming undercurrent in all administrative decisions) took hold.

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and only them, were to blame for the shooting. They didn’t create, nor were they the end of, the “social pathology” with whom they were hastily associated. If you’re holding anyone to blame for the existence of that culture, blame school. School is cruel, and in the crowded buildings of my childhood, it was cruel in a grinding way, a seemingly meaningless way, and one where any remedy was amputated. If the public deserves any blame (as certain reprehensible people have claimed), then it’s only for having believed that school must be cruel, that it’s inevitable and a worthwhile sacrifice in the name of the greater value. It sabotaged the greater value viciously.

So, I was punished administratively and for years after that, treated like a diseased person by anyone who heard the story. What made me crazier than anything else was that I was the one bullies attacked, the one school chiefs sided against, and afterwards, I was the one getting shamed for being angry. People, I was told, were wary of it, as though they couldn’t tell the frustration of a social incompetent from the rhetoric of a psychopath on the make — and maybe they couldn’t! If not, then what deadened empathy! What intolerance! What lack of imagination!

People bought the “terrorists among us” story because it was a compelling series of factoids and because, for a moment in history, it hadn’t yet been disproven. They did the same damn thing after 9/11, and they will do it again the next time there’s a security crisis. Some questions shouldn’t need this treatment. I hate to think what the Armed Services are doing to their people now that some stupid fuck went berserk in Fort Hood. Stupid mass murderers, how I hate you all. In moments of “reasonable doubt,” lives change. My story is minor compared to others’.

I feel like a pwnee by about a dozen kinds of false consciousness these days, but I don’t know what the truth is. I doubt if I’ll ever feel like an acceptable part of society. Anger is ironed into me; I look at the world and, on a bad day, on most days, I see cruel people and hypocritical authorities, everywhere. Can anything I say ever be trusted?

Irritating Ads

What the hell is up with food service companies making grandiose philosophical claims?

Wendy’s latest jingle is some lackadaisical folk twit asserting that “you know when it’s real” — glad to hear it, Mr. Russell, now impress me with your airtight analysis! Oh, you’re not? Oh, you’re just going to pitch a burger using sixth and seventh generation xerox clones of The Office characters? Yeah? Shit.

But it’s probably not worth adding that “you know when it’s real” reflects the biggest package of recidivist dubious in the entire philosophy of knowledge, when Church’s follows up by claiming to know “what good is.” Never mind the hemlock, the deans of “proper” philosophy can’t even figure out whether “to be” applies. It’s a good thing our chicken vendors are working overtime to make up for it.

The latest ad I compulsively mute is one for AT&T U-Verse, depicting a family so determined to watch their respective shows that they’re willing to hold one another at remote-control-point to ensure nobody records over them — a cutesy pastiche of shooter movies with abysmal, godawful acting (even by ad standards) that everyone involved should be ashamed of.

Future of the Left, Travels With Myself and Another

Better than Mclusky because more serious, if that can be believed. The final Mclusky album saw lyricist Falkous migrate to the political from the personal, albeit in the same stream-of-pique style. On Travels with Myself and Another, he makes the political personal again: distancing himself from GBS (“Arming Eritrea”), dismissing empty gestures (“Throwing Bricks At Trains”), getting creeped out by kids (“Drink Nike”). “The Hope That House Built” begins, “In the end, everybody wins as long as we remember there’s a reason for incredible wealth: incredible luck.”

The music is punk-metal in varying ratios, plus some sly self-parody (“Chin Music”) and a brief art-rock feint (“Lapsed Catholics”), all of which works. But the most satisfying thing about Travels is how it transmutes Falkous’ funny nihilism, retaining the humor but swapping ironic spite for actual steel; this is an admirable maturation, and germane to the present time.

If all skeptics were cynics, political action would be the sole preserve of credulous people; for all kinds of obvious reasons, it can’t be. Mclusky championed cynicism against “collagen rock”; Future of the Left have something bigger on their minds than scathing NME darlings. Travels With Myself and Another is a formal consolidation but more importantly, it shifts emotional agenda and puts this band’s wit where it’s really needed.

The Thick of It, II

People find politics horrible because it’s an inherently messy intersection. On the one hand, pundits at coffee shops and on op-ed pages discuss it in the language of ideas: the smart idea, the right idea, ideas whose times have come. Even soi-disant pragmatists can’t but. We’re confined, by training and by place in society, to thinking in terms of the ideal. Simultaneously, real politics seems worlds apart from smart, right thinking; the business of power is in lying, cheating, prejudice and abuse. Rational people, eloquent in the language of “we should,” end up wondering what use it all is when we don’t.

Critics are treating The Thick of It like it’s Peter Capaldi’s show, but I think they misread it. To me, the show has always been about its politician characters. Its most relatable thread is is the tension between mortal humans, who need things like convictions and bathtubs and sleep, who worry about careers and make wrong judgments, and the horror that Capaldi’s character represents, the horror intrinsic in the power business. Moreover, by focusing on crises of spin control, The Thick of It illustrates how political language itself — shaped, shared and fought over by bystanders — lampshades the real absurdities power brokers perpetrate.

80’s Conformity

For anyone who suspected the 80’s a particularly dire time to have been babysat by the box, here’s Phil Mendez, one of the creators of the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon:

Dungeons & Dragons was a series about six kids who were transported to a dimension filled with wizards and fire-snorting reptiles and cryptic clues and an extremely-evil despot named Venger.  The youngsters were trapped in this game-like environment but, fortunately, they were armed with magical skills and weaponry, the better to foil Venger’s insidious plans each week.

The kids were all heroic — all but a semi-heroic member of their troupe named Eric.  Eric was a whiner, a complainer, a guy who didn’t like to go along with whatever the others wanted to do.  Usually, he would grudgingly agree to participate, and it would always turn out well, and Eric would be glad he joined in.  He was the one thing I really didn’t like about the show.

So why, you may wonder, did I leave him in there?  Answer: I had to.

As you may know, there are those out there who attempt to influence the content of childrens’ television.  We call them “parents groups,” although many are not comprised of parents, or at least not of folks whose primary interest is as parents.  Study them and you’ll find a wide array of agendum at work…and I suspect that, in some cases, their stated goals are far from their real goals.

Nevertheless, they all seek to make kidvid more enriching and redeeming, at least by their definitions, and at the time, they had enough clout to cause the networks to yield.  Consultants were brought in and we, the folks who were writing cartoons, were ordered to include certain “pro-social” morals in our shows.  At the time, the dominant “pro-social” moral was as follows: The group is always right…the complainer is always wrong.

This was the message of way too many eighties’ cartoon shows.  If all your friends want to go get pizza and you want a burger, you should bow to the will of the majority and go get pizza with them.  There was even a show for one season on CBS called The Get-Along Gang, which was dedicated unabashedly to this principle.  Each week, whichever member of the gang didn’t get along with the gang learned the error of his or her ways.

We were forced to insert this “lesson” in D & D, which is why Eric was always saying, “I don’t want to do that” and paying for his social recalcitrance.  I thought it was forced and repetitive, but I especially objected to the lesson.  I don’t believe you should always go along with the group.  What about thinking for yourself?  What about developing your own personality and viewpoint?  What about doing things because you decide they’re the right thing to do, not because the majority ruled and you got outvoted?

We weren’t allowed to teach any of that.  We had to teach kids to join gangs.  And then to do whatever the rest of the gang wanted to do.

What a stupid thing to teach children.