Bad Person Spotlight: The Presidential Debates

As the debates between Obama and Romney draw near, we are presented with yet another opportunity to affirm our role as citizen-spectators in America. Is this not the most appropriate image: the American citizenry sitting around television screens judging who should be elevated to our highest office on the basis of mere speech delivery and elocution? Here, in prime-time, we express our culture-as-politics in the safety of our houses, root for the home team, and learn new ways to conduct our pre-decided opinions.

The debates have already taken place—how else could the details of their content be leaked ahead of time? Staffers clue us in as to each contestant’s strategy: Obama will be avoiding ‘zingers’ while Romney will rely on them almost exclusively. The script has been written—our job is merely to see who forgets a line or misses a cue.

And as obedient consumers we are eager to fulfill our role. Like an audience at a taping of a sitcom, our presence is merely to lend legitimacy to the performance we are witnessing; the only difference is that our task is to make it appear real with our votes instead of our laughter. And just like that same audience, we too are invisible, always off-screen, made audible only when commanded by someone in charge.

In high school and college, the institutionalized practice of debate is for the benefit of the student competitors who have an opportunity to put into practice what they have learned in the classroom. Similarly, the presidential debates are purely for the benefit of the contestants, who are given an opportunity to put what they've learned to use by swaying voters who have been empowered to consume this, the finest episode of American Idol we have seen yet. Unlike consumers of American Idol however, we have the convenience of corporate political parties to save us the effort of sorting out the contestants, of deciding who wins on the basis of some material signifier that’s always just too difficult to find.

The debates are a logical extension of the consumer politics of our country--they are the most mass-mediated spectacle of all, where the questions are decided by corporate donors and the public is conspicuously absent. Supposedly the constituency of the President, the voter never makes more than a cameo appearance--it's a wonder we even vote at all.

The best-kept secret about the presidential debates is not that they don’t matter, it’s that they do. Just like the Super Bowl, this is an occasion for Americans to gather around together in our shared disconnection, and admire from afar a world we all pretend to be a part of. Yes, this is perhaps our most spectacular event, where we can get together and throw parties in support of our favorite contestant on our favorite reality television show, and bid them well on the way to winning the most valuable corporate sponsorship in history.

Bad Person Spotlight: The Conventions of the American Right

We begin with an observation: the Left expects more of the wealthy; the Right expects more of the poor.

This statement contains the core truths about the ideological conditions in which the American polity finds itself today. In order to arrive at their conclusions concerning what the poor should do, one would expect the Right to have spent a great deal of time observing the poor, learning who they are and in what conditions they exist. Even more, one would expect the Right to know the poor, to have read narratives of their experiences and taken that great leap of faith we today call empathy. Indeed, if they are going to speak on the poor’s behalf, one would expect the Right to have spent any time on the poor at all. But even those on the Right who have experienced poverty and could have once called themselves poor have spent their time only in the pursuit of escaping the condition on which they speak. Let me qualify: the leadership of the Right (I, of course, include the Democratic Party to fall within this category) is composed disproportionately of the non-poor—perhaps this explains why they avoid talking about the poor in any substantive sense. The discourse about ‘the economy’ and ‘jobs’ today is always within the context of the ‘middle class’—a group that, by definition, does not have to worry about going hungry or being without shelter. Those members of the middle class that DO have to worry about meeting their material needs could be described as a contingent middle class, those whose membership is in a probationary phase, purchased on credit and requires constant vigilance to maintain—mortgage owners come readily to mind. What this contingent middle class fears is to lose their membership, to be relegated to the ‘lower’ class of individuals we call the poor, those without property whose entire socio-political existences themselves are contingent, whose access to power requires that they cease being who they are. Here is the paradox of the American Right: the meritocratic foundation of their ideological world requires that the poor have no voice, because the poor are wrong. If the world is perfect (which is the synonym for ‘meritocracy’ in the political context, i.e. 'everything that is right appears, and that which appears is right') then it follows that the poor are wrong—they are the living evidence of the imperfection of man. The poor have failed—they need only supplicate themselves before the wealthy and search their souls such that they find the seed of their imperfection and deliver themselves into the Hands of the Invisible. For the poor to complain is for the thief to decry his imprisonment—it is a condition that is earned, a situation that either remedies though discipline and punishment or ensures exile so that the clean do not risk association. ‘If you’re so unhappy, go get a job’—so many subtleties. If the poor are unhappy, they should first find employment and cease to be poor before they speak. The contradiction widens: in order for the poor to find a voice in politics they need first to surrender their poverty and become powerful so that they can exercise power. Indeed, poverty is not the problem—it is the poor that are the problem.

Here lies the secret obsession of American society. The race to the middle class is a flight away from the poor—it is a race to the chance at power. There is no place for the poor other than at the margin of society: the margin is where they belong.

These observations should be uncontroversial—they are the logical conclusions of the discourse employed by both Democrats and Republicans. No one dares speak about the poor—it is necessary only to speak on their behalf. To give them a voice (imagine the day when a poor man or woman wins a seat in Congress) would be disastrous. It would reveal a subject position that has long since been buried in the name of the market whose perfection is rivaled only by Jesus Christ himself.

The conventions of the American Right are everywhere the same; they demand the general acquiescence to ‘the way things are': they demand supplication before a force they call the Market. Yet even as they speak on the behalf of this force they reveal its cruel appetites: structural unemployment, outsourcing, and debt. The conventions of the Rights dare not challenge the force itself—there is only time to search about it its wake for explanations and hope that its next passage will be more merciful.

Bad Person Spotlight: Christian Slater

I was sitting in my room one day, not doing anything in particular. Listening to Black Sabbath while I stared at the ceiling. Suddenly and for no apparent reason, an extra dimensional, rose colored portal opened up near my closet, spreading a waft of hot air around and knocking over my potted plant. A goat faced fellow with hooves stepped out. I knew immediately it was an extra dimensional portal from my extensive internet readings. The goat-man pronounced himself Jim and demanded I follow. "Hey feller," I started, before being rudely jerked up by the arm and dragged into the pink hole. “Did Georgia O'Keeffe design this hole?” I asked, expecting big laughs from Jim. Not a goddamn giggle. Feminist type, probably. They don't take jokes well.

On my way out I noticed the upset plant had spilled dirt on the carpet. "I certainly hope he will clean that up upon my return," I thought. I was going to ask but then there was a pull and I was presently whirling through what looked like the inside of a gay tornado. The walls of this fuchsia passage were lined with posters of that shitty Kevin Costner Robin Hood flick. "This portal certainly has poor taste in movies" I thought at Jim. I assumed the creature would be able to read my thoughts. He gave me a dirty look. Just no accounting for some peoples' proclivities.

After what seemed like a long time but probably wasn't, we were spat out of the portal onto a hard surface. Ground. I, being unaccustomed to wormhole travel, fell flat on my face. Jim didn't seem to care. "Don't worry, I'll just help myself up.” Brushing red dust off myself, I noticed that there were a whole bunch of shabby looking persons milling about the giant blood colored cavern we were now in. The joint was mostly on fire, and the sad looking people had to constantly dodge flames falling from the ceiling. "You should really think about installing fire sprinklers in here,” I told Jim. Some people were chipping away at the cavern walls with pick axes, while being watched over by similarly goatish people holding whips. " I will call them Goaties" I proclaimed to no one in particular. If anyone stopped axing, they were whipped by the goaties. “That is some Jim Crow shit right there, I said. “I wonder how their PR dept. handles all the complaints.” Stone faced Jim didn't respond and dragged me by the sleeve down a sloped hallway leading out the cave. "Seriously you could up productivity a lot if people didn't have to walk around the fires,” I proffered on our way out. My helpful suggestion went unacknowledged.

We passed quickly through to another big cavern where more dejected folk were at individual copying machines reproducing what I thought were "Heathers" posters. “Winona fucking Ryder” I muttered. Too loudly, because I got the business end of a whip delivered right to my ass by a near-by goatie. Before a super clever retort could be given, we traipsed out of that dump and into a very large, dark, globe-shaped place, where the walls were lined with fire.

In the center of the room a dais of black stone supported a throne composed entirely of human bones. Upon the throne, clothed in scarlet, holding a trident, was seated Christian Slater.

"Goddammit." I said.

“Surprise!” yelled Christian.

“Not really, I told him. Should have figured this out years ago. Who else?”

The hack bounded down sprightly from his perch. “Have you seen True Romance?” He blathered at me. “I got to touch Patricia Arquettes' boobs! I carried that movie man I FUCKING carried it!”

“Don't trip over your big gay cape there, guy.” I was slapped. Christian/Satan kept babbling.

“And Fern Gully? I rocked that shit, man! Best voice acting in history, and what do they talk about? Fucking Robin Williams, the bastard.”

"Look, friendo, I explained, I'll give you The Name of the Rose. But that was all Sean Connery. Also I saw your butt in that film, and that sucked.”

“Want to see it again?”

“No, not really. Um, why am I here?”

“Well, honestly, I sent my messenger over there to go pick up Wynona Ryder. My one true love. Somehow he mistook you for her. Sorry.”

“Goddamn Winona Ryder ruining my life again, I thought. Out loud I told him that that happens all the time.

“Anyway, you're going to have to stay here for...ever, he told me. Got to talk to someone about my movies.”

“JESUS CHRIST NO! I screeched. Somebody fucking save me! Or just kill me! Please!”

Suddenly, the room started shaking. Through cracks in the ceiling, a bright white light began to filter down into the dark, before a large hole opened up top and an ethereal glow suffused the room. A figure clad in white robes and hippie sandals descended to the ground by my side. I saw that the person resembled exactly Michael Fassbender in the film Inglorious Basterds. You know, with the mustache.

“Thank you thank you thank you, I stammered. Get me the...hell...out of here!” Picking me up and cradling me like a baby, Angel-bender and together we shimmered out of the gloom and back into my room.

“Hey thanks, guy.” I said.

“Don't mention it.”

“But, um, as you can see, the goatie that picked me up here knocked dirt all over my floor, and honestly, I don't even own a vacuum cleaner. Someone has to clean up that shit.” I stared meaningfully at him. Sighing, he magicked up a vacuum and took care of the mess. “Anything else? He asked. “Drei whiskey!” I exclaimed, and we shared a laugh. THE END

Bad Person Spotlight: 'Liberals'

I’ve always known liberals were bad people, but I wasn’t aware of the depth of their badness until recently.

I had a nice piece written up highlighting Gore Vidal as the inaugural entry into the Good Person List, but having been privy to the spectacular bullshit liberals have been championing lately, I realized that the mainstream American ‘left’ (and my use of that term is generous) doesn’t know or really care about Gore Vidal, or even leftist politics in general. No—if liberals had any sense of history they might have recognized the loss of the man who came out in support of gay rights a full 60 years before our yuppie president gave his cop-out remarks (but more on that later). But it’s ok: they have Lawrence O’Donnell and Rachel Maddow to inspire them to take up arms in protest of the egregious practices of a fast-food company that sells chicken sandwiches.

At first I, too, was angry: those monsters at Chick-Fil-A had gone all ‘Soylent Green’ and started grinding up gay people to make their delicious chicken products! But then I stopped watching MSNBC and discovered that their CEO donated to organizations that lobby against gay marriage. Wow, imagine that. A very rich, southern evangelical white man spends money in opposition to gay marriage—that is unprecedented to the POINT. OF. OUTRAGE. Snore. Liberals are so concerned with this fast-food company that they have organized boycotts and even tried to deny it operating licenses in their cities. However, when faced with issues like the extension of the Bush tax cuts, staggering wealth inequality, or draconian expansions of state police power, liberals always make themselves scarce. Huh. I wonder why that might be.

Maybe it’s because liberals suck. Yeah, that must be it.

Oh liberals, you suck so much—let’s discuss some particulars.

If liberals truly cared about marriage equality, why did they applaud Obama’s incredibly vacuous statement that he supports allowing gay men and women to marry…but agreed it is ultimately up to the states to decide for themselves?

Ah, but no one paid attention to that part of Obama’s interview. It’s up the states huh, Mr. President, the same jurisdictions that up until the National Guard forced them to stop, systematically denied black men and women access to any substantive form of political or economic power? These, the same despotic mini-nations that allowed husbands to rape their wives for over two centuries, who refused to prosecute the murders of racial and sexual minorities are supposed to decide fairly whether or not GAY men and women (emphasis on the GAY part) are to have equal access to publically-sanctioned marriage? Does ‘Jim Crow’ mean ANYTHING to you? Good GOD, Obama is a bad man. But even worse are those who fawned over him after he ‘came out’ in favor of gay marriage—it was almost as if they actually thought he was going to DO something about it. Silly liberals.

Why didn’t liberals notice Obama’s double-speak? Because they don’t listen—they’re too busy sorting plastics to realize recycling is actually bad for the environment and environmentalism, too self-righteousness to learn that fair-trade further entrenches corporate power and exploitation, and too self-absorbed with their eco-friendly business plans to come to terms with how fake and vacuous they have become. Liberals are consumers of the worst variety; they’ve been buying shit for so long that the only resistance they can mount to the bad things going on in the world is TO BUY DIFFERENT SHIT. Fake, fake, fakery—bullshit, shit, shittery: the creed of the liberal.

I would rather entertain the Phelps family over dinner FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE than have to sit at breakfast with yuppie liberals and discuss marketing strategies for their INCREDIBLY NOVEL organic food products. At least the Phelps family is real—they’re following through with the whole hating gays thing. I can’t say the same for liberals who will drink from Obama’s hypocritical Kool-aid into the drone-bombed sunset.

Liberals are the sort who would rather prattle on about atheism, mocking and ridiculing religious folk than find common ground to resist the exploitation to which they are both subjected. Liberals critique religion only to REAPPROPRIATE THE SAME EPISTEMOLOGICAL PARADIGM and subject good people to CONTEMPT AND DERISION. Liberals are so convinced of the centrality of their own ideas that they become fascist enablers of violence and exploitation.

Liberals killed Jesus, assassinated Gandhi, canceled Arrested Development, cut down the ocean, polluted the rainforests, murdered Christmas, exonerated Hitler, and freed the Titans. But worst of all, they hate America. 

Bad Person Spotlight: Appropriating Tragedies for Stupid Reasons

Commenting on tragedies more than likely makes you a bad person. Let’s face it – you’ve more than likely never met or encountered any of the individuals involved, more than likely never been to the place where it happened, and more than likely never experienced anything even remotely similar to the ‘tragedy’ event itself. In other words, commenting on tragedies is more than likely a form of appropriation. Seeing as how I’m a bad person who already  knows he’s a bad person, let’s go ahead and make a comment on a tragedy.

It’s interesting that the 24-hour news machines’ behavior with respect to tragedies is akin to an episode of CSI: Albuquerque (or whatever). Actually it’s not interesting at all—this has always been the case. I don’t think we really expect our media institutions to simply provide a report that an event occurred, and then move on to report other events that are also occurring. Fetishizing a single instance of violence is the bread-and-butter of the United States, maybe even the apple pie—we fixate on an event, twist and contort it into a ‘tragedy’ and squeeze every last drop of blood out of the victims until we know all the excruciating details of their deaths. In fact, their deaths are all that really matter to us—they are worth so much more as bullet-strewn corpses than they ever were as breathing, working people. What characterizes the media’s reporting on these events is an obsession with details: what was the layout of the room, what was the perpetrator wearing, what weapons did he wield, and so on. To make it even worse, we have to become intimate with the victims; we have to know how they felt. We attempt to discern this by listening to interviews of people who were there and listen as they tell us what was going through their mind: did they think about their spouse or their children, their mothers and fathers; did they see people as they died; did they try to help others? Our thirst for a fully-painted picture of violence is a vicarious living of that event; in a way, we yearn to be on the front lines, to be in the middle of a bloodbath and named a victim. We pine for the nearness of death so that its reality can be confirmed to us, a people hopelessly detached from a real and authentic world. Why was there a market—literally, a market—for the crime scene photos from the Columbine school shooting in 1999? Because we want to know what happened so that it can be made real. What’s a tragedy without the intimate horror of dead bodies and pools of blood? Just an event, somewhere else far-removed from our living room couches.

Why do Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have to alter their campaign schedules so they can issue remarks about a ‘tragedy’? What about an isolated instance of psychotic violence makes it a national event? Granted, mass shootings seemed to be a distinctly American ‘thing’ (just like serial killers and movies about anthropomorphic prehistoric animals) up until Anders Breivik murdered 69 people in Norway almost a year ago from today. However, what makes Breivik’s rampage different is that he targeted the kids of prominent Norse political figures; he had a white nationalist agenda with a clear political purpose for his violence—a collective denouncement on behalf of the world seemed appropriate. Now today, we have our political candidates denouncing…well…something. I for one am glad our presidential contenders can agree that dressing up like a batman villain and killing people is wrong, but what other than the event itself is at stake? I wish I knew. Even the lame (but somehow effective) politicizing news machines are having a hard time making their tired ‘it’s about gun control’ talking points stick. I think it’s the emptiness of the event itself that brings it to our attention, its very senselessness. But even as this senselessness piques our hunger for knowledge, it reveals our own obsession for novelty. What makes each act of psychotic and unknowable violence so alluring is precisely because it resists incorporation into our ready-made rules of thumb for understanding the world. Structural violence and poverty? Boring. We already ‘know’ about that—it’s nothing new. Massacres of women and children in Syria? State-sponsored, so nothing interesting. Man slaughters people in a theater? Now that’s new AND interesting. And each event of senseless mass murder might as well be the first we’ve encountered because it’s this very senselessness that grants it the status of being eternally novel. This helps explain why we become so enamored with the details—in lieu of some broader reason for the violence, we must study the violence itself, make it into an object of scrutiny in order to, ironically, bring it to life. Little do we know that we are engaged in the performance of the emptiness that mirrors everything else we do as a society; we obsess over the body and forget that it ever died.

Because events like today’s are so senseless, it renders them visible just like the parade of other empty, unknowable images on television that we encounter every day. Emptiness and visibility have a strange symbiosis in our society; they feed into one another and sustain an entire ecosystem of emptiness and senselessness. It’s no wonder Obama and Romney were obligated to speak out today—if they want to win in November, they’ve got to pay homage to our favorite national pastime.  

Bad People Update: 156-160

156. ‘Swag’

157. Jerry Sandusky

158. Joe Paterno

159. Viacom

160. Occupy Wallstreet

The Inauguration of the List Par Excellence

A spectre is haunting America—the spectre of the List. All the powers of new America have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcise this spectre: President and Actor, Michael Bay and Christian Slater, Hipsters and Young Republicans.

Where are the antagonists to the empty culture of the West that have not been decried as beholden to the List by their adversaries in power? Where is the opposition that has not been cast out by the lingering taint of association with the List, against the entrenched power of the degenerate cabal of Chris O’Donnell, as well as against its reactionary foes in MSNBC?

Two things result from this fact:

1. The List is already acknowledged by all American powers to be itself a power.


2. It is high time as acolytes of the List that we should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish our views, make known the Bad People who peddle in empty cultural commodities, establish our aims and tendencies, and meet this subordinated tale of the Spectre of the List with its realization in the material world as the List Par Excellence.

 It is no coincidence that the growing chorus of discontent with the passage of western culture into the realm of bullshit and spectacle is met with the compilation of the List Par Excellence. As the product of the steady formation of the new cultural consciousness, the List makes known the grievances held in regards to “Jack and Jill” and the other smut propagated by the sinister figure of Adam Sandler. The new cultural consciousness grows weary with the tired formulas of Keith Olbermann and Sean Hannity and demands their exile to a place where their sorry programming will cease to hollow out American discourse. This new consciousness rejects the Jonas Brothers and Bud Light Platinum, opposes Chris Gaines and people who use cassette tapes as fashion accessories, and openly contests the logic of Robert McNamara and Dane Cook.

Followers of the List disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can only be attained by the enumeration of people, both good and bad, into the List Par Excellence. Let Larry ‘the Cableguy’ and The Big Bang Theory tremble at the revolution of the List. The followers of the List have nothing to lose but their prime-time television programming. They have a world to win.