Paul Fussell, the wide-ranging, stingingly opinionated literary scholar and cultural critic whose admiration for Samuel Johnson, Kingsley Amis and the Boy Scout Handbook and his withering scorn for the romanticization of war, the predominance of television and much of American society were dispensed in more than 20 books, died on Wednesday in Medford, Ore.
Long time readers of this blog have endured my quotation of Fussell, usually from this book BAD many, many times.
“BAD is … something phony, clumsy, witless, untalented, vacant or boring that many Americans can be persuaded is genuine, graceful, bright or fascinating.”
That was in 1991. BAD was a thin book. Today it would be a set of encyclopedias.
Just about everything in America is now BAD.
The US military, despite being the largest, most well-equipped and capitalized of any in world history, is BAD. It smashes weakling countries and bombs the guilty as well as the innocent who have nothing in the desperate places of the world, delivering it all with a special brand of American pomposity that tolerates no soul-searching or regret.
Fussell’s Class, along with BAD, or at least the acerbic style in them, informed much of what has gone into my writing, paid and unpaid, from the Crypt Newsletter, to the Virus Creation Labs, to today. Without it this would have been a much different place.
Of Class, the New York Times wrote:
In “Class: A Guide Through the American Status System??? (1983), he divided American society into nine strata — from the idle rich (“the top out-of-sight???) to the institutionalized and imprisoned (“the bottom out-of-sight???) — and offered a comprehensive and often witty tour through the observable habits of each.
The blog’s original mascot, the image drolly named ‘pennsyltuckyvoter,” was scanned from an illustration in Class.
Bad news, lads. Bad news. Paul Fussell has died.
Fussell’s books on war were also influential. Three of them, The Great War and Modern Memory, Wartime and Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic, are in my library.
Unsurprisingly, Fussell detested war and all the pretensions western, and American, culture attach to it.
The last decade has seen this country transform mechanized war and the news of it into an unimaginably execrable and worthless national image and product. Had Fussell still been writing even his great capacity for personal outrage would have been challenged.
Fussell, touched upon, here and here. (The first link, to a piece for The Register, is the closest outright imitation of Fussell I ever did.)
Under bad magazines, scorn was reserved for the successful Soldier of Fortune, a magazine aimed at “the mentally ill… for people who fantasise about plunging a trench knife into a foreigner of colour, generally smaller than themselves”.
(Don’t be too smug. Fussell described The Monthly Royal Review “for people who get an erection when they think of the Queen Mother – or rather her privileges, furniture and jewels…”)
Throughout “Rize of the Fenix” — as well as in several appealingly tacky music videos the band has posted online — Tenacious D’s grip on its subject is so firm and its song craft so tight that the music nearly transcends its basis in satire.
“Jack and Kyle are just empirically good,” says John Kimbrough, who produced the new album. “They’re great musicians and they have great taste in records …
[When you want an unvarnished opinion the first thing I always thought was “What does the guy they pay really think?”]
In “Rock Is Dead” they isolate the problem in language unprintable here, and the album’s title track argues that a single hit might do the trick. (At press time “Fenix” was at No. 4 on iTunes’ album chart.)
“We’re a dying breed,” Gass acknowledged with a knowing frown. “I think the genre needs to reinvent itself …
Satire? If so, Tenacious D is satire for an audience that can’t quite spell the word. Telegraphed sight gags with Dio and Meatloaf imitation is more likely.
This is satire.
See what happens when you’re so famous the hired help won’t say “Boo!” to your dogshit?
Tenacious D was scheduled to kick off their tour in Santa Barbara today. I blew town just in time.
“Herd the Sodomites into captivity and chastise them with pointed sticks and electricity.” For a short time only, every copy of the Compleat Sayings of American Jesus will come with a small replica of the future North Carolina State Barbed-Wire Homo Corral.
Where do you want to be when you’re done? Something you have to consider if you’re making an arrangement for the spreading of the remains of a friend. A cemetery isn’t the place. I never visit them.
Death came upon my friend Don Hunt so quickly many things were never discussed in any detail. Last resting places and dispersal were two of them.
Don was cremated and I’ve been caretaker of the ashes. I thought the matter over with another of his close friends and we decided to release small portions of them in those places he loved.
That meant Santa Barbara, on a beach in the Pacific and in Pasadena, in a yard where he spent so many sunny afternoons and warm evenings.
Southern California gave us two great days in which to do it.
I’ll visit these resting places often. They are still part of the streams of our lives, not out of the way, or places for only special visitation in memoriam. My friend and I will know some of Don’s elements are in the sand, trace building blocks in the life of a tidal pool, invisible mineral in the roots of a garden that was always a refuge. The base materials live on, reused and conserved, as it will be with whatever becomes of us. When everyone who remembers is gone, the infinitesimal bits will persist.
And it’s just better than being in a graveyard visited only upon occasion, perhaps glumly or out of a sense of duty, I think.
If it were not for this crazy out of control corrupt government, my life would literally be perfect. Even my agonizingly painful battered knees are livable, but the enemies of America infesting our government have got to go …
In fact, as the greatest most enjoyable rock-n-roll tour of my life throttles intensely all across America on through the end of the summer 2012, I am doing more media interviews all the time and finally feel that America is slowly but surely waking up to the level of criminal abuse of power and corruption in the Obama administration and so prevalent across this otherwise great country …
Me, I get up as early every day as my weary old rock-n-roll bones allow me to, share a cup of Nuge Java … hit the laptop to answer my tsunami of Emails [sic] and send out my recent interviews and writings to all my editors …
There is always a little repair work to perform here and there, maybe a limb or branches to chainsaw off the fence or off the trails, a little Hang Em High feeder or water-crossing touch-up, and I usually fire-up the Challenger tractor and groom the lanes with my Road Boss grader …
Through our Sunrize Safaris, I guide hundreds of hunters each fall and winter at our Texas and Michigan hunting grounds, plus my annual adventures at the YO Ranch, Kenedy Ranch and Stasney’s Cook Ranchas well …
Live to fight, fight to live. Live free or die to buy Nuge Java and book my hunt at Stasney’s Cook Ranch or die.
I’ve never actually seen so many endorsements one’s businesses and the products of others disguised as a 700 word opinion column. It’s eye-watering.
Although Ted uses chainsaws, sadly, no official endorsement yet. I am told that Ted is in negotiations for having his likeness used with the definition for “oaf” in the next edition of the Webster’s Dictionary.
The [House] tweak to the [defense authorization] bill would essentially neutralize two previous acts—the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987—that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own government’s misinformation campaigns.
The bi-partisan amendment is sponsored by Rep. Mark Thornberry from Texas and Rep. Adam Smith from Washington State.
In a little noticed press release earlier in the week — buried beneath the other high-profile issues in the $642 billion defense bill, including indefinite detention and a prohibition on gay marriage at military installations …
The bill’s supporters say the informational material used overseas to influence foreign audiences is too good to not use at home …
Does it have any chance of passing” Maybe not.
But realistically, it’s hard to get very worked up over because we already have Fox News and the Citizen’s United case. Between those two, how could any US government of Pentagon misinformation campaign aimed at domestic targets do better?
Cynical? You bet.
On the other hand, over the last decade the US has been singularly bad at winning the hearts and minds of folks abroad. Truth or misinformation? It just hasn’t mattered.
And more recently, Secrecy blog released a DoD publication discussing the efforts to shape perceptions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I’m rescuing this from the comments section of my last Facebook post. It’s worth wider dissemination and it’s from the Los Angeles Times’ morning edition on Friday, written the preceding evening before the start of the Facebook IPO.
The answer can be found partly in the experience of people such as DeAnna Stephens of Charlotte, N.C. The 36-year-old video producer quit using Facebook in December, deciding she was frittering away too much time reading about what her friends were eating for lunch. Then she realized that she had lost touch with 900 people.
“I couldn’t believe how out of the loop I was on things in life,??? Stephens said. Tired of being the last to hear about new jobs, new boyfriends and new babies, she signed up again …
I’m sorry, you can’t follow 900 friends in your Facebook feed. Whatever this woman may have believed when the reporter talked to her, it has no basis in reality.
In fact, I find the entire idea of 900 Facebook friends utterly stupefying. But I’ve also found those numbers, as on Twitter, not uncommon.
So rather than such things being a meaningful metric concerning the power of social networking, my hunch is they’re more a measure of the human capacity for self-delusion, of the desire in people to believe stuff that’s imaginary in terms of worth because lots of others believe the same thing. In other words, the Cardiff giant thing, the worth of a delusion being determined by how big a majority cleaves to it.
At this time I’m also a bit tickled that, other than the people who vested because they held large amounts of Facebook stock prior to the IPO, most didn’t make any gain on investment yesterday despite the volume of trading.
Inescapable in our American landscape are those motivated by fear. The blog covers a lot of them and it’s depressing. One can laugh dryly at how crazy it reads — those prepper survivalists and electromagnetic pulse crazies, ha-ha — but it’s one reason, among a good number, the country has slipped into paralysis.An entire political party thinks only in terms of what it fears. And its actions are then to attack those fears, or more accurately, those who they deem behind them.
The end result has been poisonous in the extreme. The Republican Party fears and hates science. It fears and despises people not exactly like its members, so much so it appears bizarre and mentally to those not part of it. Worse, as quickly as possible it drafts law and policy to attack those believed to be enemies.
Last week, the worst example was in Kansas. I’d skipped it for days but it essentially boiled down to the state legislature crafting a law targeted at Muslims, specifically through the cracked idea that sharia law is infiltrating the US legal system. (Realistically, every week brings news like this. So you may see things equally astonishing and nasty but attacking slightly different classes of people, places and things n your news consumption.)
Previously, the blog has written on this craziness here. Readers will note the constancy of it.
A bill that would outlaw the use of foreign legal codes in Kansas courts — broadly written but particularly aimed at Islamic sharia law — is on its way to the governor.
The final Senate vote, a lopsided 33-3, came after a lengthy and at times emotional debate Friday on the last scheduled day of the session. Lawmakers said they plan to come back next week; unresolved issues include the budget, tax cuts and redistricting …
But in an impassioned speech, Sen. Chris Steineger, R-Kansas City, said the bill was obviously directed at Muslims.
He said he was originally approached about the bill in January. The original pitch wasn’t about protecting the Constitution, but that Muslims were trying to use sharia law to take over the United States and had to be stopped.
“I thought that was quite ludicrous at the time and I still do,??? he said. “This (bill) doesn’t say sharia law, but that’s how it was marketed back in January and all session long, and I have all the e-mails to prove it.???
It’s difficult to find any admiration for Republican Chris Steineger’s admission of regret. There’s a certain contingent within the GOP that knows the party has turned venomous and predatory. But they lack the spine to do anything about it because they are fearful of being purged.
To me, this is a women’s rights issue,” said Sen. Susan Wagle, R-Wichita. “They stone women to death in countries that have sharia law. They have no rights in court. Female children are treated brutally.???
Sen. Jean Schodorf, R-Wichita, said she had confirmed that criminal actions, such as stoning, are prosecuted in Kansas regardless of the offender’s religion, even without the bill.
Sen. John Vratil, R-Leawood, said he quizzed the bill’s supporters on when a Kansas court had ever based a decision on sharia law and had yet to be provided with an example.
The prime instigators who have built up an imaginary sharia law infiltration in US courts are Frank Gaffney, not coincidentally a birther and one of the chiefs of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy, and the people who put out the Iranium movie last year. Which, of course, made the case that Iran was a threat to the United States on par with the old Soviet Union and that it ought to be bombed immediately before US civilization was ended by its mullahs.
[The Republican Party has] “become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.???
One cannot fix a problem one will not face. And the new cultishness of the Republican Party is certainly a problem … — opinion piece, the Miami Herald
I coined the name Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy to describe these same manipulative paranoid nutcases years ago. While they do not have their fingers directly on the buttons of power in DC because of the presidency of Obama, they assiduously work the sidelines in other related areas — like attempting to institute Islam-o-phobe laws against an imagined sharia menace in the heartland.
And they have been successful.
“A bill that would ban Sharia law in Kansas has passed both houses of the legislature and awaits the signature of the governor,” reads a news report from yesterday.
“While the rest of us are busy worrying about the economy, partisan gridlock in Washington or maybe even the Facebook IPO, the Kansas legislature has been busy fighting off a perceived ‘threat’ from shariah law,” said Simon Brown of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “[Governor Sam Brownback] hasn’t said what he will do with the anti-shariah bill, but stoning it would seem an appropriate response.”
An anti-sharia law from the heartland listing — from Google.
Following bad advice and the crowd I created an account on Facebook.
I’m not a good match for it and when the company began rolling out its new TimeLine format I thought a bit and decided not to cooperate.
TimeLine is built on the idea that you actually want to have one — a serial accounting of your posts, who you ‘friended,” and everything else you chose to “share.” And it wants it all in a gated community, immune to search, the exact opposite of this domain and everything I’ve put into cyberspace for the last twenty years.
So to make TimeLine useless, as far as my account and anyone viewing it is concerned, new material is deleted every couple days, sometimes sooner.
This had made a profile in which there are serial posts up until TimeLine was announced. And then an increasing gap, punctuated by a couple music videos I want to remain on one page of scroll, and whatever I have posted to Facebook in the last couple days.
By doing this your Facebook existence is mapped only in the present, or whatever slice of it you wish to present. All status changes and activities are immediately hidden. And if you wanted to see something posted last week, if it wasn’t one of my YouTube things, you can’t. You have to come here. Period. And if you don’t know how to do that because your primary cyberspace experience is Facebook, you won’t be able to do it. Which is fine with me.
There are some advantages to this, foremost — if you pursue it — being that you don’t have to worry about something from your past annoying someone you’d rather not stir up. Once in the habit, it automatically cleans up embarrassments or those things that don’t age well.
And face it, much of anyone’s day to day life is ephemeral. It doesn’t need preserving for the benefit of Facebook’s corporate clients.
The very idea of any value existing in a years long TimeLines of hundreds of thousands of Facebook captioned picture spammers masquerading as human beings should be enough to reduce you to tetany.
Mark Zuckerberg’s motto is to help make the world more connected and open. For 99.8 percent of all people that’s rubbish. They don’t need to become more open or connected. The human condition is not elevated by Facebook. There is no magical transmutation from lead into gold. There is no benefit to ‘liking” American businesses so Facebook can show you and those in your friends list what crap you buy and what movies you may have seen. You will not be handed career opportunities because you had a Facebook wall on which you came off as “passionate” in your interests. Corporate America is not combing Facebook to find new talent to hire, new opportunities to extend. And it’s not taking note of your ardent brown-nosing when you comment on a business’s or magazine’s wall posts.
On the other hand a nice Facebook page can ruin your life quite easily.
Take ex-Marine Gary Stein, who got the equivalent of a bad conduct discharge for a common sin — being a churl in public about the President. Unless he has a million dollar book deal in the offing, his Facebook page in trade now probably seems like a very bad deal. (Paradoxically, using my approach to Facebook, Gary Stein might have disappeared the content that got him booted before superiors saw it. But then all those anonymous armed forces Tea Party ninnies who flocked to his page to egg him on might not have thought it so great.)
General Motors figured all this out, or at least some of it. The company came to the conclusion there was no benefit to Facebook advertising.
My take has always been that, primarily, only morons click on Google AdSense links, and by extension, Facebook advertising. Those who do click may be doing so only out of curiosity, often to see just how awful whatever’s being shilled actually is.
And what benefit could any of that be to a big company like GM which puts things on network television everyday?
Once the dust has cleared on the IPO. Facebook’s market value will, absurdly, probably be higher than GM’s. GM employs hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. Facebook employs something over three thousand.
If you had any self-respect and intelligence and you were a manager at General Motors, you wouldn’t want to have anything to do with the cult of Facebook.
Yesterday, while house-sitting for a friend, I read the LA Times’ frontpage piece on lavish spending in the Bay Area as run up to Facebook’s IPO.
There’s Uber, which provides young tech titans with on-demand limousine service at the touch of a smartphone app. Exec provides freelance go-fers to fetch dry cleaning and run other errands.
Then there’s Lux Delux, a start-up run by Andy Hsieh, brother of Tony Hsieh, founder of online shoe retailer Zappos. The invitation-only travel service books getaways to Las Vegas, providing VIP perks such as tables at the hottest restaurants, rock-star access at shows and penthouse suites at hip hotels.
Snooki and the Situation would do well to watch their well-tanned backs. “Silicon Valley,” a new reality show planned for the Bravo network, is gunning for “Jersey Shore.” Its executive producer is Randi Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg’s sister.
“We’re the best thing happening in America,” said one tech entrepreneur, who asked to remain anonymous so he could speak candidly. Celebrities “might be more famous, but this is where the true value is being created.”
Today’s most hilarious line comes courtesy of some nerd named Alexander Heffner t the Christian Science Monitor blog, the publication that used to actually be a real newspaper (no link):
Mark Zuckerberg has the potential to rekindle confidence in the markets and to engage everyday Americans in the kind of economic growth that has been limited to only a handful of individuals in recent years.
Kinda like the confidence inspiring Facebook co-founder who renounced his citizenship to get out from under US taxation.
Heffner apparently also believes Facebook has freed Syria and that it’s solved the problem of scarcity in organ donation, all in a couple weeks.
What’s next for Zuckerberg? Perhaps he’ll make the lame see, the blind talk.
An old Pennsy Dutch folk song would seem apt here.
