zillazone

The Phenom That Is Marty Nemko

2008-11-10T22:08:00.000-08:00

“You're unfairly insulting, utterly incorrect, and I sense are not a person of good will. I will not engage with you.

“Marty Nemko”

Oh dear.

Well, I did get Marty to come out of his lair, but all he did was snarl and retreat.

So, one might ask, why do you care? Why are you even bothering with this little guy who, more than likely, only a few job seekers and a few more malcontents and some grouchy CHE readers seem to have heard of? Well…

Marty Nemko is a particularly fascinating personality, not so much for his views (which are usually gross, egotistical exaggerations, even when they do have merit) but for what he represents of the American psyche. Specifically, Marty represents a form of hyperbole that has become the norm when Americans have opinions.

Marty is fascinating because he represents the one-dimensional, sound-bite mode of media manipulation (alliteration? assonance? consonance, anyone?) that constitutes 90% of all discourse, inside and outside the home.

To be specific, Americans tend to argue using vague, unsupported generalities, facts and figures cherry-picked from people who already think like they do, and misconstrued paraphrases of what the opposing party has said. We all know these commentators, right and left: Rush Limbaugh and Al Frankin; Hannety and Combs; Ann Coulter and Michael Moore; Bill O’Reily, Mike Savage, Fox News, Conservapedia, Crossfire, Rolling Stone magazine, and Air America. Opinion has the same relevance as hard fact in this world, and a fact becomes “fact” once it is uttered somewhere, whether or not it is, in fact, a fact.

When McCain said of Obama, “He’ll spread your wealth around,” McCain knew full well that was a blatant misrepresentation of Obama’s tax and health care propositions. What McCain hoped was that his misstatement would agitate the higher tax brackets and the working class into a right-wing frenzy. After all, this is how elections are won (remember “flip-flopping”?).

Ultimately, as we all know, Palin’s pall was all too powerful (consonance? assonance? alliteration?) to overcome the clever cleavage of McCain’s anxious camp. Nevertheless, to a large degree “spread the wealth” worked: google the phrase and note how many websites parrot this very phrase as if it is a proven Obama policy stance. Note how often the phrase comes up in “town hall” meetings, in editorials, in news articles, on Fox News, and in blogs on both sides of the election divide.

Whoever it was that came up with the phrase also understood the other central tactic for aggravating the masses: threaten their wallets.

And so here’s Marty. He occupies the minor league dugout and is still small enough to be vulnerable to his critics, yet he sound-bites away about the evils of misandry, reverse discrimination, and the fallacy of higher education as if he is out to change the world – which, of course, he is. And the most interesting thing is that he uses essentially the same tactics as the big boys and girls of misinformatics. If he had more mainstream politics, Marty could very well be one of the major leaguers – one more a.m. talk show radio host predicting the end of civil liberties and the rise of the tax-and-spend welfare state.

Examining Marty Nemko is like watching a petri dish with a colony of discontent growing in it. We can look at Marty Nemko as we would a rare creature captured by science in its pupa state, kind of what the giant squid scientists have been trying to do for years. It’s not that Nemko’s views are any more transparent than, say, Limbaugh or Hannety, but Nemko does not have the vast ideological network that these folks have, so Marty’s views are both more obscure and less obscured by the very fact that he is the main supporter of his own ideas.

Even more interesting, however, is how Marty not only speaks with the parlance of the American politician, but he reifies the American psyche. Marty, in other words, thinks in primary colors, in polarities, in black and white, in one side that has the absolute right and another side that has the absolute wrong.

While I am no historian or social scientist, I think this aspect of the American mind has everything to do with our cultural mythology. Just think about the ways America revisions itself: the Pilgrims "fled religious persecution," the colonists "fought for independence," the Civil War was waged "to end slavery," World War I was waged to "stop the Huns," and World War II was waged to "stop the Nazis." These were complex cultural and geopolitical situations reduced to simple dichotomies in the American mind, and Hollywood stepped in to reify them more completely than any schoolmarm ever could. In this worldview, one side held all the right while the other side manipulated the machinery of oppression. The more complex explanations are lost in the juggernaut of moralistic nationalism (“Archduke” who? “Neville” what?). Then there was the big societal earthquake as Flower Power pushed through the pavement and Civil Rights took to the streets, and the concept of ‘might making right’ (as in the U.S. army freeing hysterically happy Parisians) was replaced by ‘right fighting might’ (as in Civil Rights marchers and Martin Luther King taking on institutional racism), and suddenly the right side was marching against the Viet Nam war, for feminism, for gay rights, for freedom of expression. And the right side was suddenly the underdog, fighting a system which had the money, the bureaucracy, and the authority.

It is the latter pattern that Nemko casts himself into: he is fighting the good fight against a series of systems which oppress the more worthy citizens – you know, the people who have always had it roughest: America’s oppressed white males. Marty’s opponents are all the likely suspects: women who abuse men, minorities who have all the advantages, Democrats who just want to spend your money, and deans who only want to hire women and minorities (who are presumably Democrats). There’s also the obsession with smart people being in charge of everyone – but that’s a strange enough phenomenon that it also deserves its own blog posting.

In the final evaluation, Marty may not be the most influential or famous commentator, or even the best, but his eclectic weirdness presents an interesting arrogance that is, at the same time, like and unlike any other commentator I have ever seen.

I cannot promise that Marty will grace me with his presence ever again, but I can always invite him over for tea.

Marty Nemko, why won't you call?

2008-10-23T21:15:00.000-07:00

Marty Nemko has decided to ignore me. Perhaps not the first time I’ve been ignored, but in some ways the most interesting.

In this specific instance, Marty is apparently refusing to post the comment I submitted to his blog entry, “This I Believe.” I’ve sent comments to this particular blog twice; one comment received a brief and unsatisfying response from Mr. Nemko, the other has apparently languished, alone and lonely, lost in cyber space…

Why oh why, Marty, wont you answer my call? Deep down, what have you given up, Marty? me or your cause?

But first, who is Marty Nemko?

Well, Marty Nemko is a Bay Area job coach who, by his own count, has coached over 2,900 customers in the last 23 years. He is an annual columnist on employment issues for U.S. World & News Reports and a semi-prolific blog writer. He also a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkley in something called educational evaluation (whatever that is) and has been a “consultant” to 15 college presidents. Marty will tell you these aspects of ‘Who is Marty Nemko?’ over and over again (and he might tell you he that he is married to Dr. Barbara Nemko, superintendant of Napa County public schools and is a co-president of something called The National Organization for Men). In fact, it’s (almost) fascinating to see how often Marty relies on these facts as rhetorical tools in his reasoning and argumentation. If there is anyone out there who wants a research project or is truly bored rigid, it might be interesting to see exactly how many times he does tell his readers these things….

You see, Marty seems to have a slightly obsessive personality and manifests a couple of cyber-obsessions, mostly job counseling (which might be expected) and “reverse discrimination,” the theory that Caucasian men and boys are systematically and institutionally discriminated against across American society. Particularly in higher education. Marty is a fairly severe critic of American higher education who first came to my, and many others’, attention in a debacle on the electronic version of the Chronicle of Higher Education. But more on that later -

Back to my story.

On September 27, Marty published one of his weekday blog-posts after reading a book called This I Believe. According to Marty’s blog, the book is a collection of essays based upon individual anecdotes that illustrate, as the title would suggest, what people believe. So Marty thought he’d weigh in with his own What He Believes –

I’m paraphrasing here because I am not sure what sort of trouble the inimitable Mr. Nemko might cause with straight quotation, so, in a nutshell, here goes –

Sometime unspecified time in the past, Marty, PhD in hand, began applying for professorships. He even deigned to apply for jobs at schools which didn’t carry the prestige of UC-Berkley. Yet to no avail. This despite, in Marty’s terms, the manifest glory of a PhD from UC-Berkley and the fact that his dissertation had been nominated for an award. Oh, and he’d always been told he was a fine teacher and writer.

Finally, Marty received an interview at San Francisco University.

By Marty’s estimation, the interview went swimmingly well, so when the chair asked the rest of the hiring committee to leave the room, Marty felt certain that he was about to be offered the job. But this is not what happened. ‘Marty,’ the chair allegedly said, ‘you are by far the most qualified applicant. But the dean has dictated that the next seven professors in this department will be women and minorities.’

Somehow Marty’s alleged job denial has something to do with major corporations being afraid of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and the Obama campaign. I’m not doing justice to his reasoning here, but frankly Marty’s reasoning is conveniently self-serving in this instance.

Now, to jump to the point I when enter the conversion, I sent a reply to Marty’s blog post that was, admittedly, a little too sarcastic and disrespectful:

"Sooooooo, we finally get to the root of Mr. Nemko's obsession with ‘reverse discrimination’ and his vitriol towards academics. Oh, how very interesting. Well, I am a little dubious about the anecdote (really, Marty, a chair was that was so stupid as to let you in on their little secret rather than simply let you slide out the door unknowing??) but the plot did get a little thicker. Could it be, Mr. Nemko, that you simply failed in the world of higher education and that, rather than facing the unfortunate reality, you wanted someone to blame? Oh well, keep building the cabal (I will be very interested to see if this comment is actually posted)."

To his credit, Marty did eventually post my rely (even though he did not think it worthy of being published), but only after explaining that he had a PhD in educational evaluation, had been a consultant to over 15 college presidents and a job coach to over 2,900 clients. Somehow this made his story true.

But the more I thought about it, the less likely the initial scenario got. So I wrote back again and explained why I was having a hard time believing Marty’s anecdote:

“Hello Marty, just thought I'd check back and see what had turned up on the board (after my Sept. 30 dubious response to your story). I must say, I give you credit for publishing stuff that does not fit your particular perceptions. Nevertheless, as I look over the comments and your response to my response, I have become even more dubious (for whatever that means).

“Firstly, this fabled job interview took place under one of two scenarios as far as I can tell.

“In the first scenario you are a newly minted PhD and, having been a job coach now for 22 years, this must have been some time ago (or did you somehow finish your degree while coaching?). If it was, in fact, twenty plus years ago, your fabled ‘Chair’ is probably retired, close to being retired, and at least tenured – so, despite the ‘fact’ that he spilled the diversity beans all those many moons ago, there is little actual “trouble” he could conceivably get into for an alleged event that’s now over 20 years old.

“Why not simply contact this man and ask him if you could use his name in your blog? Give yourself some credibility for those of us who are having a hard time believing your story and thus tending to dismiss your reasoning? Explain what is at stake and ask for his hand so that no more white, male but obviously most qualified candidates go through what you went through. I seem to remember you using this same tactic (“I wish I could reveal my source, but noble me will not get them in trouble”) on other occasions.

“In the second scenario, this event was far more recent – after you have been a long standing job coach for many years.

“While the career of a job coach is certainly an admirable and worthwhile pursuit, it does not qualify one as a college professor – PhDs do have half-lives, after all. Thus, logically, you would not have been the best candidate for a job in higher academia, and the kindly chair was lying to you for his own strange reasons.

“Finally, I don’t think your story holds water for those of us who have been on academic job searches. These searches are almost always done by committee decision and only after great discussion, a little like a jury deliberating a case. The dean would have final say, but only after faculty input. So – if the alleged ‘chair’ did, in fact, tell you that you were the most qualified candidate but didn’t stand a chance, he was speaking far out of turn. If it was the case that this college had no intention of hiring you under any circumstances, why did they interview you? Academic interviews are lengthy and time consuming for the faculty involved, and expensive for the university. Again, for those of us who are familiar with this territory, your story is hard to believe.

“I think you are very interested in dialogue with people on these boards – which I admire – but I’m afraid you’ll be dismissed by a good many of the people who could actually change things, and you’re only going to appeal to people who are looking for excuses.

“It’s too bad, really, because there is a good deal of actual dissent among not only academics but many professions regarding forced diversity hires – and you could be a voice to appeal to those really trying to change things who have the power to do so.

“Again, I’ll be very interested to see if these comments are posted.

“D.T.”

Anyone interested in the blog and its posts should go here: http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2008/09/this-i-believe.html

Marty (who has the editorial review function active on his blog) responded the next day. He had chosen not to post my comment, but did refer to “someone named D.T.” who had asked for the name of the chair on his SFU job committee (which, if one reads closely, I had not) and claimed that the man in question would simply deny Marty’s version of events anyway. Marty stated that he would not reveal the mysterious chair for fear of the damage it would do his career. Marty then asked that I provide my name and an email and / or phone number. For some reason, Marty thought he could better answer my questions in person. What these reasons are is an enduring mystery.

I sent a third reply to his blog urging Marty to respond in public – after all, he had posted the anecdote in public and, as I told him in reply, I admired his bravery in outing his beliefs. “D.T.,” I explained, weren’t my initials, but stood for “Doubting Thomas.” I then sent Marty my hotmail address and have been waiting like a farm-boy before the prom, hoping to hear back from him.

Yet again in our story, all to no avail.

I have to imagine that Marty was fibbing. It is pretty convenient that, one way or the other, the mysterious chair would deny Marty’s story, even if crossed. And it’s unlikely that simply telling a young man he didn’t stand a chance of getting a job would do any real damage to this mysterious person’s career, even if the (20 years gone) dean was a real baddy. After all, academics can get away with a lot worse than what Marty has alleged.

In the end, I’m not sure that Marty really understands how academia works – here, and in other instances, Marty evinces a movie-of-the-week understanding of professors and their lives, despite the PhD. But again, these are topics for other posts.

For now I’m going to forge an appeal to Mr. Nemko: Marty, if you don’t wish to respond to my doubts on your own blog, will you lend me a comment here? After all, as you can tell, I’m rather lonely in cyberspace.

Curt and Lori Drew, Curt and Lori Drew, Curt and Lori Drew

2007-11-28T22:35:00.001-08:00

Most everybody who surfs the web knows the story of the disturbed young girl, Megan Meier, and the two chicken-headed monsters who lived down the street – parents, yes parents, of an estranged friend – who manipulated the young woman via a counterfeit MySpace hottie named “Josh Evans” and Megan’s suicide when this faux-beaux turned mean in cyber space.

If this does not sound familiar then Google the names “Curt and Lori Drew.” Read the story first.

These are the psychotics who tormented Megan and, perhaps, just perhaps, tipped her over the edge.

We must say “perhaps” because common sense tells us that the Drew’s actions alone are not enough to cause suicide. But no one is denying that.

So, I’m simply going to put one more blog out there talking about what evil, horrible, unbelievable, inhuman trolls Curt and Lori Drew are and what, frankly, I hope happens to them.

Because Megan is not such an unusual child. She was obviously depressed and desperate for attention from a member of the opposite gender who was desirable, thus validating her badly damaged sense of self. This desire became unhealthy and then, with the intervention of Curt and Lori Drew, dangerous. And then, when the Drews pushed as hard as they could, Megan’s pathological drive for acceptance became fatal.

Then nothing happened to Curt and Lori Drew, at least until the mighty power of the blog caught up with them. Since the government (that entity meant to keep people like the Meier’s safe from people like Curt and Lori Drew) is apparently impotent in this matter, now is the time to assure that, if no where else, the anti-citizen, fang-monster Drew family remains in the annals of those-guaranteed-a-suite-in-hell forever on the web.

Curt and Lori seem pathologically unable to publicly apologize – even if it would be the smartest thing they’ve ever done in their vengeful and otherwise mediocre little lives - and this, more than anything, will out them. It was not very long before their basic info was outted, and it will probably not be very long before the TV camera or the vigilante bullet catches them off-guard.

The most frightening thing, however, is how seemingly ordinary, if ugly, this couple was. Curt’s Coldwell Banker picture shows a pudgy and slimey-looking doofus – the kind of guy who would pick up the $20.00 from your kitchen table but then squeal and squirm and hand it back the moment you caught him. Lori looks like an overweight squirrel, too friendly, posing for the camera as if there is some part of her she is trying very hard to hide...

The whole thing brings to mind the famous line from (the old) Cape Fear: “Either there are too many laws or not enough.”

Remember Curt and Lori Drew and assure them a place in cyber hell.

The Dumb Old Professors and the Wise & Brilliant Bored Scholar

2007-11-22T01:15:00.000-08:00

Katie Farnam is a senior journalism major at the University of North Texas (UNT) in Denton, TX. In the midst of the Iraq war, Katie decided to write an editorial in the North Texas Daily about how bored she is in class. She writes:

“I have been bored out of my mind during classes, forced to contemplate my next meal or watch dust bunnies form around the floorboards of various NT classrooms.”

The most obvious response might be that Katie is, perhaps, one of the army of re-animated corpses that populate too many classrooms in America. However, if we believe Katie’s own evaluation of herself, she is a nearly brilliant student stifled by the ineptitude of her dumb old professors who fail to engage her vigorous intellect. Again, she writes:

“I have come to the realization that I'm a student who loves to learn. I enjoy school and strive to excel at it. But even my vigor for learning cannot outweigh the tediousness of some of the classes at NT and the professors who teach them.”

Katie then goes on to tell her dumb old professors what they are doing wrong:

“This is an impassioned plea for you to approach your classes with excitement and fervor. Respect your students' attention by preparing material that will intrigue them and give the subject matter value and meaning. This does not equal a PowerPoint presentation recited verbatim from slides or a lecture straight from the textbook. Please, make your students' time in class worthwhile. We pay a lot to get our degrees from NT and it would be nice to get our money's worth.Not only is it your job to care about your students by coming to class with enthusiasm, it should be your natural response as an educator. Forget about tenure or politics for a second and think about your mission as an instructor. You are responsible for molding your students' minds and using your hours of research and service to enrich your teaching material.”

Again, there are some obvious responses:
Katie is at UNT to be educated, not entertained.
Education is often hard work.
Seldom do truly engaged students find dust bunnies more entertaining than even the dullest PowerPoint. After all, knowledge is knowledge no matter how it comes to one. So maybe, just maybe, Katie ain’t as jonsing to learn as she thinks she is.
Perhaps Katie’s parents gave her opinions too much attention growing up.
Or, Katie is one of the legion who would be better off watching TV, because this is where her sensibility truly lies.

It’s silly to suggest that, among the seventeen million plus college students in the United States, all of us are simply (v)idiots programmed to 30 second sound bites and incapable of concentrating on anything not presented to us with a soundtrack and new camera angle every two seconds. Nevertheless, here’s Katie – ostensibly about to enter one of the most intellectually challenging professions – venting about the way knowledge is fed to her ravenous nervous system.

Perhaps it is time that professors learn to write documentary screenplays and then hand the entire semester over to the Discovery Channel, or, better yet, to Spike TV, YouTube, or Matt Groening. Perhaps it is time to end the era of modernity and usher in the era of cyber-life. After all, we must concede that not all professors are dynamic performers, rather, they are experts in their fields. And for many, this is simply not enough – case in point: Katie Farnam.

It is also interesting to note that, since education has become more and more expensive (thanks George!), students are treating college as a consumer product and seem to feel that the learning experience can be applied to the supply side of Americana. Students are now customers and they want their money’s worth, if not the brains that go with it.

Good luck to Katie in the exciting world of journalism, where every story is a killer.

What do Rush Limbaugh and Beauty Contests Have in Common?

2007-11-07T20:12:00.001-08:00

What do Rush Limbaugh and Beauty Contests have in common?

Nobody pays attention to either of them until they do something really stoooopid.

Okay, that’s not exactly true.

To be specific, Limbaugh has 13.5 million listeners on any given week, and the 2007 Ms. America contest drew in a (“nosedive”) 2.39 million viewers last January. So, in all fairness, someone is actually watching and / or listening.

But let’s also be real. Limbaugh is king of A.M. talk-radio. And who the hell ever heard of anyone listening to talk-radio? Anyone, that is, who is not a “dittohead.” Rush is like a king of a desert empty except for his weirdly pissed-off cult followers. And Ms. America took up residence on the Country Music Channel, which – while there will always be die-hard country music fans – is not exactly center-stage of the entertainment industry.

More to the point, however, is that (unlike, say, Stephen Colbert or Michael Moore) these two cultural constructs from a by-gone era are not in front of the mainstream American populace very much at all. Moore wins Oscars and pisses people off. Colbert roasts Dubya and pisses people off. Rush…well, he is ranting into his own hermetically sealed little kingdom, boarders closed. Ms. America? Ms. Universe? Who gives a shinola?

No, in order for either of these two icons of chauvinism to survive in the lime-light of public interest they have to make a comment about “phony soldiers” or fall on their booties in Mexico or become a drug-addicted hypocrite or release black-mail photos or just generally make asses of themselves before anyone in the general populace gives them any notice.

What do Ms. Teen USA South Carolina and Rush Limbaugh have in common?

They both answer questions with rambling, incoherent, boorishly anglophile gibberish.

Impeach Dick Cheney.

Divorce American Style

2007-03-08T21:48:00.000-08:00

God Bless Divorce.

You know, if it were not for that time honored institution I would still be working for an Insurance Company.

I would still weigh-in at the sumo-weight of two hundred and sixty some pounds.

I would be spending my days staring at a computer and answering the phone to be excoriated by some venomous corporate pigface in his/her/its unflattering gray-carpeted cube farm (just like the one I was in) safely out of the range of my raging kung-fu grip.

I would still be having no sex (and the sex we did have was not so good at that).

I would still be hiding the fact that we smoked from her mother.

I would still be linked by a governmental paper-trail to some scrawny cherub who was just as unhappy as I was, and this is where I would like to stop and hurl a King James sized booger at the religious do-gooders in the world who are attempting to handcuff the remaining fifty-percent of unhappy married couples together for eternity.

At least half the time marriage is one big ouchy with no ace bandage big enuff. So please, thou shalt not cram the Good Word down the throats of barren, debt-laden marriages. As it was in the beginning, so it always shall be: marriage is for the movies (at least fifty-per-cent of the time).

Impeach George Bush.

Disco Sucks

2007-03-08T21:18:00.000-08:00

There was a time when “Disco Sucks” was the battle-cry of a generation. It was the defining ethos of American youth as the country pitched over the edge toward spandex pants, Guitar Gods and Hair Metal. “Disco Sucks” was graffitied on walls, adhered to the rear bumpers of countless Zepplin-Blairing Camaros, stretched across armies of taunt adolescent breasts, and famously blazoned across the poster of John Travolta in his polyester suit, hips cocked, pseudo-Karate stance, skewering the sky with his triumphant finger as if he is one big erection that starts at the bottom of his feet and blasts-off for the stars.

To be specific: In the era of Disco-Decay, one of the most popular posters was this very picture of the egregiously polyester-sex-karate-god Travota with a giant cartoon screw threading its way through his body while an obnoxious, triumphant “Screw Disco” splashed in bold letters about his gell-laden head.

Remember the movie “Airplane”? When the D.J. says “W.B.A.K. – where Disco lives forever!” the instant before the out-of-control airplane knocks over the radio tower.

Just imagine the scenario: 1965-1975 rock was a cultural force, musicians were counter-culture heroes spearheading socio/philosophical, ethical/moral, sexual, artistic, economic, racial/gender, stylistic revolutions. Then came disco balls, hairy-chests, gold chains, cocaine, screwing in the bathroom, synthesizers and drum-machines.

Perhaps the problem began with the BeeGees. As if their name wasn’t dumb enough, their plastic music was both falsetto and cucumber-down-the-pants macho at the same time, and, worse still, taken seriously by the paying public, at least for a short, regrettable time before the resurgence of hard rock (that which would eventually mutate into the rock’n’roll correlative of Chuck’e’Cheese when Poison and Whitesnake took the airwaves).

And this is where it all goes wrong. Disco was never meant to pack stadiums full of headbanging Baby Boomers, never meant for the altar of the rock god Cthulhu, never meant to howl at the starry sky from inside a cookies-pulling pickup on the sultry summer nights in the Dark Wood of adolescent error. Disco was never meant to be music. Disco was meant for dancing the night away.

So, if you wanna dance under the moonlight (or the cheapy gel-tinted arc lights), wanna have a good time, wanna get down and play that funky music white boy, request a little Hue’s Corporation, Donna Summer, or Jackson 5. Avoid the Bee Gees.

Won’t you take me to Funkytown?

John Wayne, Turkey Day, Snow

2007-01-08T21:07:00.000-08:00

John Wayne, Thanksgiving, and snow. Three things that came from the darkside.

Not that the new Democratic sovereigns are about to do anything about it (or even care about my distress), but this country would be so much better if we got rid of winter wonderlands, the Duke, and Turkey Day. If there is a hell, and if I am going there, the doors to the elevator will open on a blizzardy Thanksgiving as Wayne stands at the end of a long plank-table in one of those cartoon cowboy outfits carving a giant pimento – that nasty big fruit which comes with green olives and looks like the unsheathed part of a dog’s penis (a veggy phobia for another blog). The only thing that might make hell worse is if I were a pregnant character on an E.R. episode.

Okay, so this is what I would say to Congress:

His real name was Marion Michael Morrison; he failed the entry test to Annapolis, never served in a branch of the military service, only survived one semester as a football player at USC before throwing out his shoulder, and didn’t perform a single stunt. There are numerous stories of how the Duklette and John Ford got together – most of them involving some form of footballer manliness, and all of them false; Wayne was a prop man, Ford need a B-grade actor for his vision of a chauvinistic, bigoted, simple-minded, gratuitously violent American frontier.

Morrison is reputed to have been a cultural elitist, and, as evidenced by even a cursory look at his cursory imdb bio, a rabid nationalist – did you know he helped found something called the “Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals”? Have you ever seen “The Alamo” or “The Green Berets”? This is white-washed American mythology at its superficial, simplistic worst. The Dukinator would have been a happy German commandant in the 1930s.

Did you know there is not a single Morrison film without an act of violence in it? Did you know his childhood dog was named “Duke” and that’s where the nickname came from? One wonders what would have happened if Morrison had lived long enough to view “Brokeback Mountain.”

The first image of Morrison as “The Ringo Kid” in “Stagecoach” (the Dukedick’s breakthrough) has him in a medium-shot dead-center of the frame, from the top of the frame down, in squeaky clean cowboy duds that look like he just arrived for a costume party, and of the same color palate as the desert itself. And this is Morrison in his element – he fills the world, actually appearing to be part of the landscape itself, an element, something to be reckoned with. He can do no wrong, and his violence is always righteous. He represents the dark side of American patriotism, the sociopathic belief that might makes right as long as it comes in a big white package.

Does George W. wear Marion Morrison underwear so that the Duke rides the little Bush around the halls of state?

So, how about that other great American institution, TURKEY DAY! Jeezus. Just say it out loud, “Turkey Day.” Can anything sound more insipid? And it’s usually uttered in tones of jubilant glee – “Happy Turkey Day!” Okay, okay, many find its gluttony appealing after an entire year of deprivation (I mean, with gas prices and all, it’s almost like Darfur around here) and I personally have no trouble with calorie orgies (hey, we are the lucky few) but it’s the forced interaction, the tension, the compulsion to be merry that infests the entire holidaze. If you are pissed at friends and family the other 364 days a year, a giant dead dinosaur in the middle of the table won’t fix your bed-wetting psychosis.

I suppose we should celebrate at least one example of a time when all the New England honkies got along well with the indigenous folk.

Which leads, naturally, to Mother Nature’s own celebration of hell: snow.

Who’s to blame? Well, I don’t want to piss off the Big Guy (you suppose God is a fan of John Wayne?) but snow is clearly a manifestation of humanity’s fallen state. In fact, one could say that snow is God’s way of trying to kill us.

‘Round here Hoosiers say, “Well, if it’s going to be cold, at least it should be pretty.” What the fuck is pretty about piles of gritty slush at busstops, sliding through red lights into sudden death, and falling on your ass so hard your head rebounds like a tennis ball off the sidewalk? You can always tell where someone has peed when it snows.

The origin of this pathology is clearly my status as a displaced Oregonian. In Oregon, when it snows, we wreck our cars, freeze spread-eagle to sidewalks, skid to our asses at busstops, and generally fill the local evening news with pathetic and painful blooper reels. Even tow truck drivers and cops wreck their vehicles and are traumatized for life.

Anyway, enough pain for one evening.

God bless America, it just needs some fixing.

Hotel Hell

2007-01-07T14:00:00.000-08:00

Philadelphia, downtown. December. An army of nerds descends upon the city.

The Marriott and its associated bunkhouses buzz like massive corporate hives of gastro-intestinal distress and emotional overload (masquerading as hipster dufus wit around the lobby bar). Imagine: a legion of English graduate students with their panties in a bunch over the do-or-die paranoia which precedes the publish-or-perish desperation. It is as if the quadrant of blocks surrounding the hotel has become a giant sounding-board for dork horror and kung-fu erudition. And in the midst of this subdued bedlam, a liter of Diet Coke from a vending machine costs two dollars! Noon-to-noon internet costs ten dollars! And this is on top of a hundred and fifty friggin’ dollars per night for a squishy bed, a shower, lousy cable TV, and suckling at the tit of the Pay-per-view god.

Besides the shivering, under-paid doorman, the main difference between the Philadelphia Marriott and a Motel 6 is the lobby, which in the Marriott gleams like a giant upside-down bathtub and is decorated like a wedding cake or a set out of Logan’s Run; I half-expect fairies and water-sprites to flit about the ceiling. And, lest we forget, at the moment we are discussing, this cavernous glittering modern marvel reverberates with stressed out dweebs in a rage to prove their savage intellectualism. It is pretty, pretty, pretty, but you can’t sleep there. And yet: Parking your car for three days costs over a hundred dollars, and I’m amazed we weren’t charged for riding the elevator or using the can.

But who is to blame for this orgy of inflation? We are. Americans. The freedom to spend inherent in a democratic, capitalistic, technocratic society. The men in the monkey-suits will always win as long as we are willing to pay over a hundred dollars to sleep in a bed changed nightly by under-educated, under-paid, exhausted, overtly-resentful people. The yuppies in their beemers and Porsche 9-11s can sit their lean sports-club asses in seat-warmer comfort as they whoosh down the corporate superhighways of night for the duration of the reign of the ruling un-elite: the educated proles in their rage to rise.

Of course…it was nice to wake up someplace that was clean…and capitalism has the advantage of a Starbucks in the lobby one short elevator ride away…and the lobby was awfully nice…

God in the Hubble

2006-12-13T21:46:00.000-08:00

The Hubble swivels its big glassy eye at the stars; it zeros in on a previously unexplored pocket of deep space where a particularly bright and mysterious object hangs in the infinite zenith. Scientists, you read on the NASA website, hope to observe the fabled “Great Attractor” – the phenomenon that holds our cosmic splatter together.

Yet, when the lenses focus, it is not some super massive black hole located at the core of the known universe…but a magnificent throne, enveloped in brilliant light, set in a golden cloudscape far too fantastic to be described.

On the golden throne sits a bearded king type dude, also bathed in extraterrestrial radiance, with a benevolent but stern expression on his wise, ancient face. To make matters worse, seated on the Right Hand of the Big Guy is a dour looking, rather Aryan fellow in his early thirties with a beard and a robe and blond hair and blue eyes. On the Uber-Man’s other hand is something that can only be described of as a “ghost” (no Linus under a bed-sheet with holes cut for eyes, but something extraordinary & mystical & dynamically sublime).

Behind this startling Trinity, a diamond encrusted gate stands light-years into the void. At its foot, a lesser but still Biblically brilliant bureaucrat stands before a podium that dwarfs the Empire State Building and reading from a tome more massive than Niagara Falls. A throng of dim little beings in human form (some unbearably smug despite their nakedness, others a little worried and ragged around the edges, hands shielding their privates) are lined up before the blazing Three, apparently like some celestial People’s Court. The brilliant minds at NASA surmise that some are getting in and some are not (what happens to the ones that don’t get in? we wonder).

That same afternoon, back here on terra firma, a deep sea oil drilling platform punches clean through the crust of the Earth, but rather than inert magma and volcanic plumes pushing plate tectonics, the drilling team discovers a great void filled with a legion of voices howling in pain and woe…of course, the picture falls into place.

Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Dr. D. James Kennedy & Coral Ridge Ministries, Jack Chick – these people (who you, with your liberal, elitist mentality, have always thought of as irrational religious zealots) were right all along! Science – that rubric which once simplified moral being by complicating the nature of existence through empirical observation – has now proven that everything you believed, every guiding principle you thought, has been incorrect all along! You secular shmuck!!

In other words – what if all the inventions, discoveries, theories, and advances of the industrial / scientific revolution prove beyond a reasonable doubt that everything you’ve believed in to this point was wrong – I mean, we can actually see God on the telescope! We waved at us! Hell is a real place and it’s going to roast your uglies while some badass devil is going to stab you right up the sweet bibby unless you repent, sinner, repent, before it is too late! etc.

And it had better be right now, because death could come anytime – seriously, you could be reaching for the remote to check the latest about the God project on FOX News and an engine could drop off a DC-10 and land square on your coffee table and you could find yourself naked, naked, naked before the Almighty, trying to explain that you had actually penciled in “Repentance” into your date book for the next morning…

Now just imagine that you have been a hardcore atheist – that is, God does not exist, not then, not now, not ever. The very idea of God is ridiculous and offensive; to paraphrase the estimable David Cross: Garden of Eden? Talking snakes? Where’s the unicorn, baby?

Imagine that your world revolves around a “positivist” mindset, or – as one actual brain-scientist once explained it to me – you believe in the power of scientific evidence, verifiable fact, to provide a rational and unambiguous answer to complex questions regarding the nature of existence. Nothing more and nothing less.

Up till this point, all available evidence suggests that we, and in fact the world and the cosmos with its visible & invisible laws, is the result of physical and chemical interactions that mindlessly obey a set of mechanical rules, a.k.a. natural laws, a.k.a. time & space, a.k.a. the-crap-you-don’t-really-understand-but-they-can-build-an-atomic-bomb-so-they-are-probably-right-about-all-that-other-stuff-anyway.

In other words, before Hubble saw that Heavenly region up there, there was no question in your mind as to the nature of the universe - no intelligent design, no creative super-genius, no pantheon, no God, no Jesus H. and his Merry Men.

This belief system has fueled your world, given your life meaning, and, most importantly, provided you with a basis for rational, moral, ethical action (what is the difference between morals and ethics, anyway?).

You are a person whose world is given boundaries by the existence of a known system – in this case, science – that provides you with answers to those most fundamentally unanswerable questions –

Why are we here? (because, you reply, we are an accumulation of molecules that self-adhere and in said process construct complex multi-cellular, self-aware organisms from the precise rules of physics)

What is the meaning of life? (to be kind to each other, you answer, because the universe is not here to either help or hinder, but it is a tough, cold place composed of ineffable forces that dwarf our tiny comprehension, so as much snuggly-wuggly free luv as we can generate guarantees not only our happiness but our survival).

How did we get here? (simple: it’s science! Accumulation of molecules obeying laws – yadda, yadda, yadda).
Where can we seek answers? (take a course on biology, read “Discovery” magazine, watch National Geographic on the Discovery Channel, then read the “God Delusion” by Richard Dawson).

Okay, so just imagine that you are one of these people – a positivist in a world defined by the non-religion ideology of the late Carl Sagan, whose metaphor about Renaissance science lighting a candle in the darkness of Medieval irrationality represents all you ascertain about the world, its morality, its existence, and the fact that the sun will rise tomorrow based on the laws of gravity and the effects that super-massive bodies have on the fabric of space & time. No reincarnation, no afterlife, no laws meted by God, do not pass Go.

And now God is in the telescope and there is no hope of denying His existence and His purpose for us.

I asked a colleague of mine, someone whose intellect I admire very much and who is also a die-heard atheist, if she could accept scientific proof-positive for the existence of God.

No, she said unequivocally, even if there were no scientific doubt about the presence of the Big Guy, she could not, would not, admit to His existence. “I would be one of those crazy flat Earth people,” she said, “denying the fact of the perfectly obvious.”

Even, I asked, if this meant an eternity in Hell?

Hell, she responded, would not be enough of an inducement for her to change her mindset about God and Christianity – nope, not even Hell, not even eternity.

For the past seven years I have lived in the corn-fed Midwest. I’ve been a teacher here, and I have seen firsthand how the belief in a fundamentalist Christian God powers a lot of thinking. Mind you, these are some of the nicest, most civil, most moral, most country music-y, most boy-howdy-est people on the planet – and the Hoosiers and Buckeyes and Kansas City cowboys are also some of the most defensive, most easily offended, most reactionary registered voters north of Kentucky. Hell, one student actually wrote a paper about the benefits of censorship (won’t someone please think about the little children?!). And a great many believe steadfastly in the Word and all its attendant implications.

Into this Fundamentalist worldview comes evolution, atomic chemistry, paleontology, geological history, cosmology, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and a host of other scientific, historical, and philosophic systems that ardently bring into question, if not outright disprove the literalism of the Bible. Are God and science really at odds? We are perennially arguing this point, yet is there any real doubt?

What we as a literate technocracy forget, I believe, is that we are not just telling the Fundamentalists to smoke less, eat better, watch less TV, avoid asbestos – we are telling them that they are wrong. The message that science brings to the masses is that brainiacs driving engines of knowledge guided by supercomputers have proven faith a form of mythology.

We, the technocratic culture of America, are telling the Fundamental culture of America that the guiding principles of their worldview are fundamentally unsound, even non-existent. We are telling them that their beliefs, their morals, their clothing, their music, their Sunday mornings, their Bibles are all a farce based on inflated folklore. Everything they believe and everything they do is a façade. God is not just dead, he was never there in the first place.

Is it so hard to understand the fundamental antagonism of the Fundamentalists?