Month: January 2011

A Streak of Bad Huck

It was reported last week that some publisher is going to change Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huck Finn and reprint it so it’s fit to be read in the 21st century.  Professor Somebody (like, I care what his name is) from Auburn has taken it upon himself to bugger up bowdlerize Twain by replacing the N-word with “Slave” and changing the I-word to “Indian.”  He hopes to fluffy up an American tale that has some sharp edges on it and thus bring Twain to a whole new generation of uber-sensitive readers.  The story caused such a stir across North America that this morning, less than 7 days later, I can find no mention of it.  Obviously, the publishers are going to go ahead with this literary castration.   My contempt for this sordid violation is surpassed only by my contempt for the society that allows it happen.  Unfortunately, I am not Twain, so I don’t have the words to properly condemn us all to Hell where we will surely go for this brutal act of nice.

The N-word offends me.  I’ve heard it a lot, in my time.  It never gets easier on my ears.  However, it doesn’t offend me that a dead white guy, hand-wrote it out in full, and published it in a fantastic novel more than 100 years ago.  Why would it?  People in 1885 were barbarians.  They peed outside for God’s sake.

What offends me is the “N-word” itself.  It offends me that perky TV personalities, who are so white they’re blue, use it with such pained contrivance.  It offends me that academic fundamentalists, whose only brush with Black America was watching Spike Lee movies in their sophomore year, use the word to advertise their inherent understanding of The Black Experience.  It offends me that regular people are starting to use it promiscuously, as though all the nuanced cruelty is covered up by this thin disguise.  It offends me that it has become acceptable in polite society, just exactly the way its ugly grandfather was acceptable in 1885.  And it offends me that the all the Professor Somebodies in the world think they’re doing Black people a big favour with this white-wash.

I have a good friend (I’m going to change his name because he is my friend) and when we were young and foolish, we used to drink together quite a bit.  My friend wasn’t comfortable drinking at places I frequented so we used to drink at bars in his neighbourhood.  One day he asked me, “Why do white people keep bringin’ this shit stuff up, all the time?  Man, I got more stories than they ever seen.”  We were drinking heavily at the time, and the conversation got waylaid before I could answer.  Actually, that’s not true: this is what really happened, but I’m going to clean it up a lot — so nobody gets offended.

We were drinking heavily, and we ran out of money.  My friend went over to his friends and said something like, “Hey, chums! I’ll bet you a pitcher of beer that I can show you a man with no butt.” They probably replied, “Nonsense!  That’s seems highly unlikely.  I’ll take that wager.  Prove your statement to be true.”  (This is losing something in the translation, isn’t it?  Let me step it up a bit but not too much: I don’t want to offend anybody.)  My friend brought his group of friends back to where I was sitting and said to me, “Stand up.”  I did.  He said, “See, African Americans?  This man ain’t got no ass.”  From there, the multi-level conversation went something like this.

“Whoa!  You right!  He ain’t got no ass!”
“Nonsense!  Get ut da way.  Let me see this stuff.”
“Po!  What?  He sick or sometin?  Got a disease?  Eat his ass off like dat?”
“Man, where he from, got no ass?  He ain’t from aroun’ ‘ere man.  No way. I’da noticed that stuff.”

My friend’s friends were clearly warming to the subject.
“Hey! African American! Come over here!  Andrew got his self a guy wit no ass.”
“Whatta fornication?  Where his ass at?”
“He don’t got one.  See.  He like straight up and down.  Stick man.”
“Nonsense!  How the maternal fornicator keep his pants up?”
“He got pants on, don’t he?  See wit your eyes, African American!”

There was more, a lot more, but it’s difficult to portray the mood and spirit of the situation correctly while treading so carefully.   Mark Twain didn’t have that problem.  He lived in the Victorian Age — a time, by all accounts, as repressive as our own.  They did, however, do one thing properly: they actually read the books before they burned them.

There will always be professor somebodies out there, ready to remedy the world.  And there will always be anti-censorship cheerleaders who storm the blogosphere barricades for a whole 4 days or until their consciences are clear.  But to the witless ones who aid them both in their endeavours, I say read Huck Finn — before it’s too late – because, when Huck says , “All right, so then, I’ll go to Hell.” at least he knows why he’s been condemned to make that journey and you should too.

Don’t Touch That File

This weekend I’m going to fly down to Vegas. I’m going to have 3 shots of tequila at McCarran.  Then, I’m going to go to the Consumer Electronics Show.  I’m going walk in the door, go up to the first techie I can find, grab him by his dickie little shirt and slap the living snot out of him.  Then, when he (or she, I don’t give a damn which) is laying semiconscious at my feet, I’m going say — loudly and aggressively — “The next time any one of you sexually repressed mega-mathematicians even thinks about changing Facebook, Google, WordPress, YouTube or anything to do with Microsoft, just remember what happened to this guy, ‘cause if you mess with me again, I’m comin’ back here and I’m bringing Hell with me!”  Then, I’m going to turn on my heel and go have a nice quiet lunch — maybe at the Eiffel Tower.  I’m going to do all this because somebody has got to strike a blow for every one of us ordinary people who is fed up with all this geeky techno-crap.

As you probably don’t know, the Consumer Electronics Show is going on this week.  This is an annual event where a bunch of really, really smart people go to Vegas to gamble on what’s going to be the Next Big Thing in consumer electronics.  (Just as an aside, this year’s no big surprise is tablet computers.)  Anyway, it always works like this.  Every electronics company in the galaxy — except Apple — shows up with their machines (remember, they’re just machines.)   They give one each to any journalist who can spell their company name, along with all the booze and hookers they can consume in seven days.  They take whatever’s left over and throw it to the packs of snarling nerds, waiting outside.  Then they set up their booth, turn on some pasteurized hip hop music, smile for the cameras, and wait for the journalists to sober up.  A week later, they take whatever the nerds didn’t break home with them, assemble 80 million copies and ship them to Costco, Best Buy and Future Shop.  It’s the circle of life, Grasshopper.  I’m content with it.

And this is true.  I really don’t mind re-buying my electronic crap every couple of years.  It’s as inevitable as death and taxes, and I’ve grown to accept it.  I’ve come to realize that the world is spinning a lot faster than it did when I was a kid, and I can’t possibly keep up.  I know, for example, that my phone is now technically smarter than I am (it certainly remembers more than I do) my television is better than being there, and my laptop is so powerful that, if it ever really gets mad, it can reach out and kill me.  I also know that — even as I write this — there’s more new and better stuff getting loaded onto a boat in Asia, and by the time it gets here, it’s going to be way cheaper than the last stuff I bought.   Once again, the circle of life, Grasshopper, and I’m content with that, too.  There will be no punches thrown.

The thing that has finally driven me to violence, however, is that smart-ass techie who’s busy changing all the applications out from underneath me – practically over lunch.  You go to something like Facebook, (connecting with friends and family) to tell them you’re doing important stuff like eating spaghetti, and you can’t recognize  the page you used less than an hour ago!  Some jerk in Loma Lonely, California, has changed it.  (I know Jessica Alba doesn’t answer your Tweets, but don’t take it out on me.)  Everything has a different name, and it’s in a different place, and you can’t get there from here, anyway.  It’s like waking up in the morning and finding out your toaster has forgotten how to make toast.  (Bread goes in the top?  Bread goes in the side?  Where the hell does the bread go?)  Nobody is going to convince me that Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 are so radically different that the whole configuration had to change.  There was junk on XP that I never figured out, and I’m sure there was stuff on Vista that was born, lived and died and not one person on this planet even knew it was there.

There are only 3 people in this world under the age of 100 who don’t care about computer technology: The Pope, The Dalai Lama, and Stephen Jobs’ mom.  The other 6.8 billion of us need computers to function — every single day — so it would be in everybody’s best interest to set some standards and quit changing things around once a week.  Believe me, if something isn’t done pretty soon, I’m not the only one who’s going to show up in Vegas with a bad attitude.

O: the ever-expanding universe

At high noon, January 1st, 2011, the Evil Queen of Daytime TV took one more step toward total world domination when she launched the Oprah Winfrey Network.  This will not be her last territorial demand.  In the last 25 years, Oprah has single-handedly done more damage to the equality of the sexes than Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton combined.   Her brand of Jell-o Journalism has overflowed its mid-western bowl and slopped squishy, sweet goo and celebrity worship over every aspect of society.  And her abnormal obsession with the cult of her own personality has enlisted millions of followers who delight in publically stroking their own egos.  In short, Oprah Winfrey isn’t the Anti-Christ, but I can’t tell the difference.

Phil Donahue invented Jell-o Journalism in the 1970s. What he did was take regular news items and real public issues and tone them down, broaden them out and smooth off the hard edges.  He manipulated the questions to produce an emotion rather than an answer and carefully presented the information to elicit a strong response.  His show pretended to be about hard news and bold discussion.  However, in actuality, it was merely entertainment built on simplistic, preconceived conclusions that seemed to come from his own strong emotional attachment to the subject at hand.   Although he invented the genre, Phil was never very good at it.  He couldn’t produce the single tear for the whimpering puppy — or the spontaneous outrage at the abusive husband.  He just didn’t have it.  He was kind of a Fisher-Price version of Dr. Phil and Sally Jesse Raphael.  So, when Oprah challenged his reign on tabloid TV, he didn’t stand a chance.  She could weep on command and giggle like a schoolgirl.  She had just the right combination of concern and anger, and her indignation was something to behold.   As a result, in the Chi-town Media Grudge Match, held about 25 years ago, Oprah Winfrey kicked Donahue’s ass so badly he had to unbuckle his belt to burp.  Phil’s mistake was that he failed to recognize the ruthlessness of his opponent.  Oprah Winfrey syndicated her TV show nationally, and the Oprah Universe was born.

In the Oprah Universe, Oprah is everywhere.  If she were a South American dictator, the State Department would be concerned about her cult of personality.  She’s on cable TV, 4 and 5 times a day, depending on your time zone.  She’s on Satellite Radio. She’s online anytime you want her.  She has been on the cover of every single issue of her magazine for 10 years.  She has only shared it twice — once with Michelle Obama, First Lady of the United States, and once with Ellen Degeneres, perpetual sycophant.  Even Stalin took a day off every once in a while.  Oprah Winfrey has become “Oprah” the one word solution to every problem.  And how did she get there?  By doing what Phil wouldn’t do: selling out a whole generation of women for television ratings.

Oprah’s media presence is based on one simple premise — self help — the ability to change your life.  Of course, the un-named assumption is that women (the majority of Oprah’s audience) are all screwed up in the first place.  She has built her empire on the insecurities of middle-class women and made hundreds of millions of dollars doing it.  The Oprah Winfrey Show follows a very simple pattern: the question is posed and the solution is given.  In her time on TV, Oprah has championed everything from diets to angels, and exercise to something called The Secret which apparently radiates good vibrations from positive thoughts.  And these get-fixed-quick schemes are all in the name of the inadequacies of women. 

Here are some headlines from just one O Magazine, March 2007.

“Too Tall, Too Small, Too big all over?”
“5 Wildly Unexpected Ways to Get Happier”
“Will the Real You Please Stand Up!  How to know what you actually want, think, love”

The entire magazine is devoted to readers who, first of all, don’t like their body image; secondly, are unhappy; and finally, quite frankly don’t even know what they wanted to begin with.  What an incredibly sexist view of women!  And this is just one issue of the magazine.  They’re all the same — every month.  For an entire generation, Oprah and her minions have been pounding away at these same themes — under the nicey-nicey guise of “empowering” women to change their lives.  Meanwhile, Oprah’s Universe has established beyond any doubt that day after day, month after month, women need to be repaired and the wonderful thing is Oprah herself, is going to help them do it – pop psychology DIY.

If you were an alien and watched Oprah for any length of time, you would naturally assume that the females of our species are all fat, dumb and unhappy, not to mention stressed out at every opportunity.  According to Oprah, everything from dinner parties to getting up in the morning is a minefield that women must first diligently navigate and then hopelessly recover from.

What do girls born into this mess think?   Do they believe their lives are going to be nothing more than a relentless war against body fat followed by the daily wardrobe crisis?   If this is help, let me outta here?  But Oprah won’t let you out.  She’s gone wall-to-wall – 25/8 – on an entire television network — soft core promo for the Ubiquitous Oprah.

 We can only pray that her next stop won’t be politics.