The Centerfold of Elder Statesman Magazine

When I started blogging in 2004, I was writing every day. To support the habit, I had to read a lot, watch a lot and basically be plugged in to the public discourse in the way not dissimilar to the way tapeworms pay attention to the parade of digestibles through your small intestine. It's possible to make the argument that the blog output I produced had roughly the same relationship with popular culture as the tapeworm has on its host, but I would disagree in the strongest possible terms. For instance, a tapeworm could theoretically aid with weight loss.

Eight years later, my circumstances have changed. As an older version of myself, some of that youthful white-flame fire of pure partisanship is more of a lower orangey-blue as it burns fuel polluted with retardant distractions like employment, older kids and all the levels of Angry Birds. I can't be quite as passionate about politics because I simply lack the time to be irritated by Chris Mathews on Hardball on the schedule true engagement would require.

Eight years ago I would have watched the GOP convention in an active search for indignation. This year, as very recently noted here, I may have skipped it entirely. At age 38, if I've learned anything, it's how to generate all my own indignation, thanks very much. If you're not sure about it, ask me about American Idol some time.

It may seem like an act of civic indifference or intellectual cowardice, but I have been paying attention somewhat to the Democratic National Convention this week. A valid criticism would be to suggest I was only interested in listening to validations of opinions I already held. But I will say that in watching, something stirred in me. I felt something of the old zombie of my politically sophisticated self climbing out from under the six feet of intellectual detritus made up mostly of headlines forwarded to me from The Onion and marching again toward the Shopping Mall of Last Popular Culture Resort to feast on what meager brains it might find there. I found the old logical lumber, the old rhetorical girders, the old argumentative bungee cords to cobble together a superstructure of a position growing in complexity and solidity. I came away with two fantastic, epiphanic explosions of insight I had to run here immediately and express to you in the fourth of fifth paragraph after jokes about tapeworms.

1) Rooms full of white people make me nervous. The DNC wasn't all white people, but it wasn't until I saw an Indian woman standing next to a gay black guy at the DNC that I realized just how Osmond the  RNC was.

2) I would totally fuck Bill Clinton.

Republicans considering Point 2 would probably draw the conclusion that "Ha, see, being a Democrat makes you a homo," but they should consider a) they are probably a little right and b) wanting to fuck Bill Clinton doesn't make me gay, it makes me a living, breathing person. There's a certain undefinable mote of charisma living at the soul of some human beings that the attraction defies any rigid Kinseyan scale of sexual identity. This is the same reason I would also fuck George Clooney. And most women I know would take a serious run at Beyonce Knowles. Because we're human beings, naked apes in the Darwinian mold, built by a million years of evolution to do one thing and one thing only: bone famous people. You know, for the survival of the species or whatever.

Politically I may have become slightly less open minded, but it doesn't color every part of my personality. That's something else I've learned in the intervening eight years: a little heteroflexibility really broadens your options.

The Old Misdirection Play

I expect it from the liberal media and the Hollywood left-wing elites. In fact, I'd drop dead from surprise on the day when that unholy cabal of bloodsuckers doesn't take an opportunity to try to minimize, dismiss, delegitimize, humiliate or ignore anything associated with honest-to-Jesus, salt-of-the-earth, heartbeat-of-the-nation American conservatism in this day and age. The biggest shame of all is that a few of those bad Jews ruin the reputation of all of the good Jews, the ones steadfastly holding on to the Holy Land for us until such a time as Jesus decides to return and kill them all at, during or just after Armageddon. If there's anything a modern American conservative abides by, it's this: know your place. Republican women have bought in. If you want chaos, just look over at the Democrat side. They let just any old body be in charge and look what that bought us: economic collapse totally out of nowhere, beginning January 21, 2009. All we can do is mourn for the Elysium that was instantly lost and learn from their series of burnt-sienna mistakes.

The influence of the left-wing pro-terrorist pornography peddlers has become more pernicious than even I had suspected. Despite having followed all the honorable rules and raised the most money, somehow "Willard" Mitt Romney still trails in some polls. Something is undermining the basic foundation of American democracy. The only thing consistently proven to beat the weight of cash stacked in what can only be described as "mountains" in politics is a vast, convoluted, ultimately unproveable BUT ALSO UN-NOT-PROVEABLE conspiracy of interested anti-USA groups seeking to invite back into power the party that will demand the largest percentage of their filthy lucre. That's how perverse and un-American they are: they're rich people who still heart taxes.

And today, when Romney was to deliver his grand speech to inspire the nation to a state of enthusiastic frenzy approaching the occasional not-entirely-dismissive head nod, the nation's airwaves are overwhelmed with sneaky, devious counter-programming to draw eyeballs away and ensure the continued reign of the Kenyan Socialists.

First of all, there was supposed to be a rerun episode of Top Gear on BBC America. It even said so in the programming guide on Dish Network, but if you turned it to that channel, did you see three aging British men torturing metaphors in defiance of every Law of Warfare in order to find new ways to describe cars as fast/not fast? Nope. You got Jurassic Park. That's right: real-live dinosaurs. And everyone knows once you start watching Jurassic Park, it is physically impossible to stop. Clever.

Then, most shockingly and heartbreakingly, there was also simultaneous with the Romney speech, the first football game of the year for the Brigham Young University Cougars on ESPN. Now that is some fucking chutzpah. Not only counterprogramming with the normal excitement of the long-awaited return of college football, but doing it using the most prominent Mormon institution in the country is just... well, you almost have to admire it for its audacity.

And just for good measure, they also managed to schedule Back To School Night at my kids' middle school during the speech. The efficiency of their grassroots campaign frightens me a little. They might be sinister tendrils pulling at the Tree of Liberty, but that's some impressive reach and in some find detail. Very comprehensive.

What I'm saying is I didn't watch the speech. I know it's unpatriotic and shortsighted and probably an act of intellectual cowardice on my part, but hey, what can I do? It's over now. And it was a live event. There's no instant replay for life as it happens. Sometimes you have to accept that you've been outwitted by the faceless machine secretly operating at the heart of the World Government and take comfort in the fact that you're not alone. You're with CGI velociraptors. Everything is tolerable with CGI velociraptors.

No Exit Strategy

I can see how being single in your teens and early twenties makes sense. There are a lot of things a person should probably work out when they're emotionally underformed, relatively unburdened with the psychic scar tissue of failure and physically still pretty bendy. Pliancy in all its forms is a desirable attribute when you haven't yet figured out the comfortable shielding effects of cynicism or that shower sex really isn't all that safe.

When I was in my twenties, I hooked up pretty early on with the woman I would eventually divorce, so I skipped out on most of that tasting-menu-type experience. I don't say "missed out" because all of that experience I opted into and I'm a strong proponent of ideas like human agency and personal responsibility. Plus I'm not 100% convinced I wasn't under some kind of voodoo sexmagick hex, so it wasn't my fault.

According to the social prescription, I've done everything backward: I was an old married man in my twenties and, now in my early-middle age, I'm a swinging, carefree type of part-time bachelor dude whose life is defined by its lack of commitment and openness to new interpersonal experiences. Hell, as of a few weeks ago now, I don't even have any dogs to take care of. It's the kind of unfettered lifestyle my married peers envy, organized around pleasure-defined short-term liaisons, irregular sleep patterns and regularly scheduled STD blood screenings.

OK, so it's not all glamor. Professional athletes my age (38) don't first start noticing themselves losing the spring in their vertical jump or the zip on the ole fastball,* they notice the lack of response in recovery time, from both injury and in simple recharging between efforts. My married friends envy my access to all matter of free-range strange. I'd be lying if I said a little bit of me** didn't envy their freedom to fall asleep before 10 pm in the recliner in front of syndicated reruns of The Big Bang Theory.***

The other hard part is that I'm old enough to see and recognize that in this process of coupling and uncoupling, trying out and trying on, efforting and failing and efforting again, people get hurt. Having been left, having been alone, having been lost in that space where the prospect of another set of stars aligning to draw you into that synchronous orbit with yet another wandering someone else seems so dreadfully, cosmically improbable, empathy alone can be an impediment acting in your own emotional best interest, in starting or ending a relationship, as the situation dictates. Maybe I'm just projecting. Maybe breaking up and breaking people's hearts when you're in your twenties just means you get to hold onto self-examination and second guessing for just that much longer. But I don't know. I feel like if you're in your twenties, burning through partners is what's socially expected of you and the guilty sting of leaving/the lingering ache of being left is diluted by the volume of years you imagine you have ahead of you. In your late 30s, at a certain point, every failing relationship feels like a Mexican standoff. In the end, everyone is likely going to get hurt to some degree. Sometimes one of them is actually Mexican. I don't know. It depends on how open you are, racially and culturally speaking.




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*none of these are sexual metaphors... yet. Patience. They're coming.
**There's one!
***I'll be honest, I'm not sure if that's one or not

The Jesse Eisenberg Uncertainty Principle

I've decided that just because I have no idea what the precipitous drop of facebook's stock price since its initial public offering means doesn't mean I don't understand it. It sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it's not unlike the way I'm confounded as to the reasoning behind Ryan Seacrest's apparent wild success, but I feel like I know enough to base a deep and abiding resentment on. There are facts and there are things we know. The two are neither causal nor binary nor mutually exclusive. It's just that sometimes having a little bit of the former can really bung up a voluminous earth-mound of the latter that needs a hurried expressing.

What is the baseline amount of knowledge needed to form an opinion? It seems like with every iteration of the internet, the recordable amount gets progressively smaller, as did the diminishing base models of physical science from elements to cells to molecules to atoms to protons/electrons/neutrons to quarks to gluons to, the currently smallest known thing, dust mites. Every time I hear about dust mites, there are more and more of them theorized to be literally everywhere. 90% of my pillow's weight is apparently dust mites. As is nearly all of my bed, my clothing, my skin and hair, my pets and, inevitably, my gluons. The theorized ubiquity of these tiny little unseeable bugs living and breathing and eating and excreting all over your bed and skin and body holes is equal parts gross and terrifying. You're free to daydream all you like about inventing the machine, chemical or process that rids the world of dust mites. I have no such fantasy. On the one hand, no more microscopic bugs. On the other hand, the nullification of matter as a concept. That sounds like trouble.

With the facebook stock thing, I'm supposed to understand that there are hundreds of millions of eyeballs glued to this thing, literally* all over the world, which means that facebook commands the attention of an unprecedented global marketplace of adherents standing by to encourage one another to Like something at the same time, in exactly the same way HIV "likes" T-cells, spreading quickly into a happy, systemic infection, controllable but only with a significant financial outlay by the host organism.

But all of this we do... for free? I'm meant to buy stock in a business that produces nothing and throughout its life history has generated no sales and in its form and intent will, by definition, never approach doing either. And yet somehow the arbitrarily-set initial stock price was dismissed immediately and the subsequent plunge has been both precipitous and steady. See, I "get" it. But there are, no doubt, people lining up to explain to me market vagaries and the valuation algorithms used to price something as ephemeral as media in general and as imaginary as social media in particular and why, if we'd just hold on, this thing that produces nothing will one day pay off by producing nothing at a much healthier pace we can all get behind and agree to gouge each other over.

So while I think I get it, I clearly don't understand it. I can't. It's not because I'm stupid, it's because I went to college and read philosophy instead of economic theory. Even the philosophy guys who deigned to talk about money, like Marx, thought it was a good idea to get rid of all of it anyway. This is not an anti-capitalist manifesto, however. This is more the lament of a misspent youth. High-minded ideals and basic critical thinking skills are great, but I'd trade either one for the right Italian roadster or a summer place on St. Bart's. Either of these can be construed as opening offers.





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*I'm using "literally" in its traditional sense here, meaning "literally"

Lone Wolf

I don't think of myself as a racist, but I don't think most people do. Well, some people do. Racists, for example. But the rest of us, if given a moment to reflect, would probably come to the conclusion that, while imperfect, we tend to give everyone a fair chance to impress or disappoint us based strictly on the content of their character as exhibited by their actions. Or the things they say. Or their clothes. Or how they stand, like upright and normal, not all slouchy and weird. Or how much money they have. Or how much money their parents have. Or their religion. Or sexual orientation. Or skin color.

OK, there might be some prejudices. Like most people my age, I was raised by my television mostly, with all that that implies. My perception of white people was shaped far less by my own experience as a white person and more in how I perceived them in 30-minute increments, punctuated by a laugh track. Well, 22 minutes if you take out for commercials. Commercials featuring more white people with excellent teeth and clothes that smelled so much like flowers, little cartoon petals wafted gently off them.

The programs themselves told me what I should think of white people: they lived in oversized houses with walls on three sides, looked nothing like their family members and peppered their conversations with weisenheimer punchlines every second or third line. They were cartoonish, petty, indiscriminately harsh with the feeling of their fellow man in pursuit of an easy joke and burdened with hair and skin unnaturally impervious to the ravages of weather or sun. Creepy, in a word. But somehow... safe. Models of stability and role-consistency no matter what the circumstance. Marcia meets Davy Jones, Richie comes back from the Army and punches Fonzie, the baby from Growing Pains ages seven years over the course of one summer... it didn't matter. At the end of the episode, Dad would sum it all up with a life lesson about responsibility, human dignity, a sex shaming or expounding on the wonders of the American heteronormative hegemony and we'd all assume our starting places again just in time for the next episode to begin.

As a child, of course, this was terrifying. What no one in charge of these programs considered was that I didn't actually know any white people outside of my family. This was my only base of comparison. I can't remember a time when I wasn't absolutely convinced that I wasn't being raised correctly. I didn't know how the universe had been wronged by myself or those in charge of my upbringing, but I was being denied the fruits of my patrimony. Thirteen years of public school and not one sock-hop. Not one super-witty, ultra-flexible, maximally relaxed teacher giving me three chances to pass the big test (using the power of song!) just in time so I would be able to play in the Big Game. Nobody on Family Ties was stirring a jug of powdered milk using their arm. Maybe that shit went down on Sanford and Son, but that was before my time.

Right then I probably could have become a racist, but then The Cosby Show happened and it turned out it wasn't only white people living like that. Blew up my whole theory of ethnic entitlement. That in conjunction with my core-soul desire to see Lisa Bonet naked put to rest any hope I had to life of happy reflex judgment of a large portion of the world I cohabit. If you want to know how far I've fallen, I voted for Obama. And God help me, I'm going to do it again.

There's no going back. The racists out there today--the really committed ones--they wouldn't take me if I offered now. I don't fit the most basic criteria. I've read things. I've seen things. I can tell the difference between a Sikh and a Muslim. There's no hope for me.

You Give Me Fever

I wanted to write something here about how, as expected, I had planned to be disinterested in the Olympics only to find myself up at 2 in the morning watching time trials for the women's cycling road race event, whipped into a nationalistic lather by the marketing geniuses at NBC to the point where I'm trying to invent racist things to say about Uzbeks. I think in the past, just trying and failing at that last endeavor is proof that racism isn't 100% rooted in ignorance. You have to know something about a people to hone the kind of invective that's really going to land.

But I can't say that any of that is happening because... well, it's just not. It's not for lack of trying. I've avoided the spoilers ahead of the tape-delay coverage and watched a few hours here and there, but I just haven't found myself entirely rapt as yet. I've been rapt-ish, but not quite a full-on rapting.

I think the problem is I've finally reached a tipping point in my life experience where I know enough about all the events presented that none of them are quite exotic enough anymore to pull me in out of sheer curiosity. I've seen enough cycling, enough swimming, enough gymnastics, enough soccer, enough fucking horse jumping to know the basics of the intent behind the action and the scoring systems and for me to realize that maybe I just don't really give a shit. Which I say without cynicism or sanctimony of self-righteousness. That's all the slow wheeze of deflation as I realize the lucky curse of longevity has robbed me again of the chance to enjoy something I took such great pleasure in when I was younger.

The only thing left going that's really bizarre enough to pull me in is team handball, but even that I think I'm starting to figure out. If you watch it long enough, you'll be confused at first, sure, but that's only until you realize what's going on isn't a sporting competition at all but instead a highly ritualized form of interpretive, improvised group dance meant to convey a complex matrix of nationalist, nihilist and sexual sentiments built around an elaborate metaphor of international sport. The France-Tunisia match looked like a win for France, but you had to watch it to get the subtle message of post-colonial criticism of the western imperial impulse.

Maybe my ennui has less to do with the burden of my life experience and just that we haven't started the events I'm usually interested in. The track events are usually a lot more visually inviting than swimming, which, let's be honest, is really just a lot of splashing followed by a video graphic of a spreadsheet. The track and field events, in the Olympic stadium, above ground, not hindered by happening in an obscuring fluid medium, are always so much more dynamic to watch. You've got what is usually the crown jewel of monumental sporting architecture in the Olympic stadium, the immense, electrified crowd, the fissile chain of starbursts as cameras flash in the post-dusk setting of the glamor events like the 100 meter finals. Also, the hammer throw? That maybe might kill someone. Who isn't interested in that?

I'm hoping that's it: that my events of preference haven't started yet and less that I'm standing on the fat edge of a falling-away wedge-shaped ramp of diminishing emotional returns for the rest of days, however many I am graced to endure. There have been flickers, little sparks to remind me of the embered fire that once raged. I mean, that opening ceremony was fucking weird, right? Was there a giant mannequin baby at one point? I think there was. Straight out of Trainspotting. I was attuned as all hell to that shit.

Hot Topic

Writing about the Colorado movie shooting is probably the right thing to do, but I don't know that I have a lot to say about it. The incident has inspired some gun control debate, but mostly even that has played out how anything else in the public sphere plays out anymore, in the exchange of tepid one-liners on Twitter or in ideas expressed in word balloons coming out of the heads of kittens in pictures posted on Facebook. Seriously, I'm waiting for popular culture to hit the media saturation point where we all get over the cuteness of kittens due to abusive overexposure the same way we all once got sick of looking at the cast of Friends.

I'm not saying that things are necessarily worse now than they have ever been or in any way fundamentally different than in America's past in terms of popular culture. We were, as a nation, born after the invention of moveable type and thus have always been, even from conception, a mass media culture. The pace is a bit faster, sure, but the only evidence we really have left of how things used to be is in examples of stuff people chose to hold on to or were popular enough to have survived by sheer weight of numbers. Both groups are self-selecting for quality. I don't know what the colonial equivalent of lolcats was, but I'm certain there was something that made parents throw their tricornered hats in vexation when faced with the degenerate wastrels and blackguards their children were withering in to, wasting all their time with penny broadsheets, writing in their inane truncated language to save precious paper space.

What feels like the white-hot pace of news and information is only relative. It has to have felt just as modern and overheated when the first mail trains arrived, delivering news from three states away in a blinding, unprecedented four to seven days. Imagine the cultural exhaustion of, just a few years later, trying to wrap your head around the communicational ephemera of the telegraph.

It took over 2,000 years to get from Pheidippides running a message from Marathon to the telegraph and only 200 years or so to get from there to naked pictures of Snooki on a smartphone, so I can see the argument that a) the rate of advancement has increased somewhat and b) sometimes evil happens because of it. I guess my point is that, yes, sometimes the result of the New Now is a plugged-in immediacy that both informs and inundates; it breeds both paranoia and numbed indifference, depending on the subject. And yes, a vast majority of what's produced in the rolling digital media isn't always an efficient or worthwhile use of your time. I guess what I'm saying is: thanks for reading.