I know that I am supposed to feel shocked at the violence and looting going on in London. That I am supposed to think this is all a terrible tragedy, this breakdown in civil society and discourse. That when someone resorts to the use of force, then something valuable has been lost. And I guess it's true that a part of me feels that way. And would feel that way even more strongly if it were my home, my neighborhood, my business or workplace being vandalized and robbed.
But it's not. And there is a part of me. The immature, nihilistic, primitive part of me that loves the idea of a big, fat, violent, destructive riot. I think there's a part of that in everyone, especially every male.
Not just because I want more stuff without paying for it. And, like everyone else, I do. How can we not want more stuff? That wanting is wired into our very brain structure, and continually stoked with subtle and brute-force marketing messages every single day of our lives.
I mostly love the idea of a riot, and participating in one, because, at a very basic level, it's fun to break things.
There is no denying that.
You ever break a window? I used to, back when I was a falling down drunkard. Walking home from bars, I would kick off car mirrors and smash through car windows between the last place I drank and my home. I'm not saying that it was good, or even defensible, but it certainly was satisfying.
It was simple, for one thing. No calculations of risk and reward, no messy considerations of causes and effects of my discontents, no complex web of relationships to navigate. No paralyzing need to imagine another person's reactions. Foot, meet window. Smash. Loud noise. No more window.
Was it nothing more than a petulant and juvenile lashing out because of a feeling of resentment and impotence? Sure.
But I was, and am, resentful. Impotent, too. For me, at least, that seems to be the condition of modern life. On one hand, an incredible level of safety and security and health and food and material comforts that other generations could never have dreamed of. On the other, a constant dependence on other people and a curbing of the individual will for the good of the whole.
I guess looting gives a moment when you have the best of both worlds. The chance to run completely, savagely amuck in the well-stocked and orderly modern world.
I'm actually more surprised that they don't happen more often.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Tuesday, August 02, 2011
Spoiler Alert: Obama Wins in 2012
The best part about predicting the future is that nobody ever remembers when you are wrong, or holds you accountable. The second best part is that predicting the future gives you a chance to dredge up and recycle old grudges and resentments from the past --- ones that people are already tired of hearing you whine about --- and repackage them as predictions.
With those two big premises out front, I’m going to put on my Nostradamus cap and look into November of 2012. And what I see --- more clear than any reception AT&T has ever given me on my iphone --- is Barrack Hussein Obama sailing into the White House for his second term.
He won’t get re-elected because the economy recovers and shows the wisdom of his policy. He won’t get re-elected because he re-ignites the passion among Democrats that his 2008 campaign set ablaze. He won’t get re-elected because he will be judged to have done a competent job of governance. Sure, those will be the reasons that are offered, but the real reason he won’t get elected is much more simple: The real Republican leadership doesn’t want him out yet. He’s too useful where he is.
The brains behind the Republican machine know that in 2012 there will still too much sewage strewn about the nation leftover from the financial collapse. With Obama still in the White House, it’s his job to shovel it around some more and let it stain him and the Democratic party for a few election cycles. The U.S. is going into a double-dip recession, and --- accurate or not --- the Republican party will blame it on Democratic economic policy.
And anyway, Obama is already doing everything a Republican would do, even better than a Republican could. On his own initiative, Obama is happy to coddle the banks, expand Presidential power, start wars, and punish whistle-blowers. For those things that might unnecessarily upset his Democratic supporters --- keep Bush tax cuts alive, cut Social Security, reduce Medicare payments, sell unions down the river --- the Republicans can arrange to create a “crisis” and “negotiation” for Obama to hide behind.
Having a Democratic President present these moves actually makes them easier to execute since it neutralizes the resistance that a Democratically-controlled legislative branch might develop if a Republican tried them.
The proof that the Republicans want Obama to stay has two forms. First, the corporate and financial industry donations. Through a combination of bribery and threats, the financiers have made Obama their errand boy. Without a viable union campaign funding source, big business is the only way to get the money he needs --- and keep it out of the hands of a real competitor.
Which brings us to the second proof: The Republicans have not presented a real and legitimate challenger for the Presidency. It’s fun to scoff at the second-team and second-rate quality of the Republican primary candidates. But it’s very telling that everyone is either insane (Ron Paul and Michelle Bachmann), boring (Pawlenty) or just a little bit off-brand (the Mormon Romney & Huntsman). If there is one thing that the Republican party is good at, it is selecting someone who is electable behind the scenes --- most recently named Bush --- and then jamming him into the Oval Office against all obstacles.
When they don’t do that, like in 1996 (Remember pathetic old Bob Dole?) or 2008 (the even more pathetic McCain) there’s a reason.
So Obama is getting all the corporate money and being given a nice clean run at the White House. That makes him as close to a lock as it's possible to get. So for the forseeable future, we are going to get more or less what we've been getting: Republican policies administered by a Democratic President, followed (probably) by Republican policies administered by a Republican President. Thrilling.
With those two big premises out front, I’m going to put on my Nostradamus cap and look into November of 2012. And what I see --- more clear than any reception AT&T has ever given me on my iphone --- is Barrack Hussein Obama sailing into the White House for his second term.
He won’t get re-elected because the economy recovers and shows the wisdom of his policy. He won’t get re-elected because he re-ignites the passion among Democrats that his 2008 campaign set ablaze. He won’t get re-elected because he will be judged to have done a competent job of governance. Sure, those will be the reasons that are offered, but the real reason he won’t get elected is much more simple: The real Republican leadership doesn’t want him out yet. He’s too useful where he is.
The brains behind the Republican machine know that in 2012 there will still too much sewage strewn about the nation leftover from the financial collapse. With Obama still in the White House, it’s his job to shovel it around some more and let it stain him and the Democratic party for a few election cycles. The U.S. is going into a double-dip recession, and --- accurate or not --- the Republican party will blame it on Democratic economic policy.
And anyway, Obama is already doing everything a Republican would do, even better than a Republican could. On his own initiative, Obama is happy to coddle the banks, expand Presidential power, start wars, and punish whistle-blowers. For those things that might unnecessarily upset his Democratic supporters --- keep Bush tax cuts alive, cut Social Security, reduce Medicare payments, sell unions down the river --- the Republicans can arrange to create a “crisis” and “negotiation” for Obama to hide behind.
Having a Democratic President present these moves actually makes them easier to execute since it neutralizes the resistance that a Democratically-controlled legislative branch might develop if a Republican tried them.
The proof that the Republicans want Obama to stay has two forms. First, the corporate and financial industry donations. Through a combination of bribery and threats, the financiers have made Obama their errand boy. Without a viable union campaign funding source, big business is the only way to get the money he needs --- and keep it out of the hands of a real competitor.
Which brings us to the second proof: The Republicans have not presented a real and legitimate challenger for the Presidency. It’s fun to scoff at the second-team and second-rate quality of the Republican primary candidates. But it’s very telling that everyone is either insane (Ron Paul and Michelle Bachmann), boring (Pawlenty) or just a little bit off-brand (the Mormon Romney & Huntsman). If there is one thing that the Republican party is good at, it is selecting someone who is electable behind the scenes --- most recently named Bush --- and then jamming him into the Oval Office against all obstacles.
When they don’t do that, like in 1996 (Remember pathetic old Bob Dole?) or 2008 (the even more pathetic McCain) there’s a reason.
So Obama is getting all the corporate money and being given a nice clean run at the White House. That makes him as close to a lock as it's possible to get. So for the forseeable future, we are going to get more or less what we've been getting: Republican policies administered by a Democratic President, followed (probably) by Republican policies administered by a Republican President. Thrilling.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Democracy, Human Rights, Rape
The inspiring sight of a nation peacefully demonstrating to end a 31-year dictatorship. Hundreds of thousands marching in the streets for Democracy. The triumph of non-violence protest over thuggery. The euphoria of watching a tyrant forced to retire. Then we have this.
Lara Logan, star reporter for CBS News was separated from her camera crew in Cairo's Tahrir Square during celebration of Mubarak's resignation. She was subjected to a brutal and sustained sexual assault.
That's so awful. What a nightmare she went through before soldiers and Egyptian women rescued her.
I learned about this incident yesterday and it has been rolling around in my mind ever since. I guess what really strikes me is the contrast between the restraint and high-minded ideals of the protesters --- who specifically protested Mubarak's torture of prisoners --- and the savageness of this action. It's disappointing. It has added a sour note to what was otherwise a inspiring story of idealism in action.
I suppose I should not be surprised.
Immanuel Kant famously said that "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight was ever made." For all the high-flown rhetoric and lofty ideals we spout --- and even believe --- we are all savage animals. Or worse, actually. Animals don't have empathy for those they prey upon.
We have the ability to imagine ourselves in the place of those we victimize. Yet we victimize them anyway.
Lara Logan, star reporter for CBS News was separated from her camera crew in Cairo's Tahrir Square during celebration of Mubarak's resignation. She was subjected to a brutal and sustained sexual assault.
That's so awful. What a nightmare she went through before soldiers and Egyptian women rescued her.
I learned about this incident yesterday and it has been rolling around in my mind ever since. I guess what really strikes me is the contrast between the restraint and high-minded ideals of the protesters --- who specifically protested Mubarak's torture of prisoners --- and the savageness of this action. It's disappointing. It has added a sour note to what was otherwise a inspiring story of idealism in action.
I suppose I should not be surprised.
Immanuel Kant famously said that "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight was ever made." For all the high-flown rhetoric and lofty ideals we spout --- and even believe --- we are all savage animals. Or worse, actually. Animals don't have empathy for those they prey upon.
We have the ability to imagine ourselves in the place of those we victimize. Yet we victimize them anyway.
Monday, March 01, 2010
Solutions, Solutions, Solutions Part One: Health Care
Often the fbomber is accused of being nothing more than a kvetcher, a whiner, a complainer, and criticizer. “What’s your solution?” these people kvetch, whine, complain and criticize. “It’s easy to put people down, but what’s your alternative?”
To shut these people up, the fbomber will offer his solutions for the thorny problems which beset our fair nation. Solutions which, as you all will see, are about as simple and elegant as one would expect solutions formed without any training or familiarity with the subject matter.
Issue One: Health Care.
If one listened to the whining and puffing about the whole health care issue, you might be led to believe that is a diabolically complex tangle. One which many Democrats believes requires an equally diabolically complex solution, one that might take the form of a 2,500 page book of laws specifying what insurance companies can and can’t and must do. Or --- as many Republicans might say --- one that is so diabolically complex that no government could ever possibly hope to solve it, so why even bother?
That’s why the fbomber doesn’t listen to these assholes. The fbomber simply works on two simple assumptions.
ASSUMPTION ONE
Most of the time, the free-market capitalist system works better than a government-provided alternative. If you want something produced and distributed more cheaply, more abundantly, with better quality and greater efficiency ---- put the self-interested efforts of profit-seeking autonomous economic actors on the job.
For that reason, most of our health reform efforts should go into turning our health care and insurance market into something more like a free market. Which, let’s be honest, it is nothing like now. Let companies operate across state lines, break up oligopolies, create simple, fair, lenient “rules of the road” for everyone to follow and stay the fuck out of the way.
Don’t micromanage what insurance companies and hospitals and doctors can and can’t do. Don’t create administrative layers and bureaucratic impediments and operational uncertainty. Let the insurance companies and hospitals and doctors and patients work it out amongst themselves. As long as there isn’t any fraud, or deception, or trying to game or manipulate the system, the government can let the free market work.
Solution, Part One: Open the health care & insurance market to true competition.
ASSUMPTION TWO
Some of the time, the free-market capitalist system does not work better than a government-provided alternative. I would not want to hand over construction of this nation’s infrastructure, judicial system, law enforcement, defense, or education over to the purely self-interested, profit-seeking economic actors. That’s because, for all its ability to create abundantly, the free market does a piss-poor job of distributing equitably.
It appears that health care is one of those things that we need spread around a little bit more evenly than the profit motive encourages. Not only for reasons of fairness and social justice, but for economic and public safety reasons.
So there needs to be another option, for those who the newly thriving, private free-market system does not serve. A public option. Operating alongside the private options --- like public and private schools, like the post office and FedEx, like security guards and cops. Competing with one another, and spurring one another to perform better.
Like the public schools, post office and cops, this public option would offer basic, competent, simple services. For those who could afford to pay their way, appropriate fees would be charged for these services. For those who truly couldn’t, society would pick up the tab for them. Why? Because that is what countries that aren’t shitholes do, that’s why.
Solution, Part Two: Create a quality, affordable public option for those unserved by the free market.
Health Care solved. What was so hard about that?
To shut these people up, the fbomber will offer his solutions for the thorny problems which beset our fair nation. Solutions which, as you all will see, are about as simple and elegant as one would expect solutions formed without any training or familiarity with the subject matter.
Issue One: Health Care.
If one listened to the whining and puffing about the whole health care issue, you might be led to believe that is a diabolically complex tangle. One which many Democrats believes requires an equally diabolically complex solution, one that might take the form of a 2,500 page book of laws specifying what insurance companies can and can’t and must do. Or --- as many Republicans might say --- one that is so diabolically complex that no government could ever possibly hope to solve it, so why even bother?
That’s why the fbomber doesn’t listen to these assholes. The fbomber simply works on two simple assumptions.
ASSUMPTION ONE
Most of the time, the free-market capitalist system works better than a government-provided alternative. If you want something produced and distributed more cheaply, more abundantly, with better quality and greater efficiency ---- put the self-interested efforts of profit-seeking autonomous economic actors on the job.
For that reason, most of our health reform efforts should go into turning our health care and insurance market into something more like a free market. Which, let’s be honest, it is nothing like now. Let companies operate across state lines, break up oligopolies, create simple, fair, lenient “rules of the road” for everyone to follow and stay the fuck out of the way.
Don’t micromanage what insurance companies and hospitals and doctors can and can’t do. Don’t create administrative layers and bureaucratic impediments and operational uncertainty. Let the insurance companies and hospitals and doctors and patients work it out amongst themselves. As long as there isn’t any fraud, or deception, or trying to game or manipulate the system, the government can let the free market work.
Solution, Part One: Open the health care & insurance market to true competition.
ASSUMPTION TWO
Some of the time, the free-market capitalist system does not work better than a government-provided alternative. I would not want to hand over construction of this nation’s infrastructure, judicial system, law enforcement, defense, or education over to the purely self-interested, profit-seeking economic actors. That’s because, for all its ability to create abundantly, the free market does a piss-poor job of distributing equitably.
It appears that health care is one of those things that we need spread around a little bit more evenly than the profit motive encourages. Not only for reasons of fairness and social justice, but for economic and public safety reasons.
So there needs to be another option, for those who the newly thriving, private free-market system does not serve. A public option. Operating alongside the private options --- like public and private schools, like the post office and FedEx, like security guards and cops. Competing with one another, and spurring one another to perform better.
Like the public schools, post office and cops, this public option would offer basic, competent, simple services. For those who could afford to pay their way, appropriate fees would be charged for these services. For those who truly couldn’t, society would pick up the tab for them. Why? Because that is what countries that aren’t shitholes do, that’s why.
Solution, Part Two: Create a quality, affordable public option for those unserved by the free market.
Health Care solved. What was so hard about that?
Friday, February 26, 2010
The fbomber's Kill List
Well, 2010 started off with a bang. Several of them, in fact. With a brace of workplace shootings in St. Louis, Georgia, and Alabama, killing about ten people.
This greatly concerns the fbomer. In his opinion, there are a couple of problems with these workplace shooting rampages. First, obviously, they kill people. That is, in itself, very bad.
Secondly, they kill the wrong people, which is even worse.
For a look at the epidemic of workplace and schoolyard shootings that America has witnessed since the 1980’s that goes beyond the usual “another lunatic snapped” shrugs that most media serves, check out the book “Going Postal” by Mark Ames.
As this book shows, once you look into the lives of these rampage killers you see that they are usually miserable human beings, living in considerable pain. What’s more, this pain that is often inflicted upon them by other people, usually specific people. Bullies terrorize and torture them at school. Supervisors cut their hours and harass them at work. Women they love reject them. After years of jumping through hoops and sacrificing for a company, that company fires them to squeak out a tiny bit more profit.
But these murderers rarely go out and target the specific people who caused their pain. That would be reprehensible, but at least understandable.
Instead, these killers walk into crowded classrooms, gyms, restaurants, workplaces and spray their bullets at whoever is there. Which is usually a crowd of poor fuckers nearly as powerless, miserable and ground-down as themselves.
Killing someone who has created your painful situation is fucked up enough. But killing people who are completely unconnected to that situation --- that takes the fucked-up-ness to an even higher level.
Hence, this kill list. Now, I want this to be perfectly clear. THE F-BOMBER DOES NOT IN ANY WAY CONDONE, ENCOURAGE OR WISH FOR THE VIOLENT DEATH OF ANYONE, INCLUDING THESE LISTED INDIVIDUALS.
The fbomber believes that murder is wrong. If you are considering killing anyone, stop. Get help. Talk to someone. Do whatever it takes to solve your problems some other way. If your job is driving you to consider murder, quit. If the place you live makes you want to kill someone, move. If you fantasize about cutting off your wife’s head, divorce her. If the financial stress of your bills and debts makes you feel like you are going to shoot someone, declare bankruptcy. If living in a declining, corrupt, oligopolistic corporatocratic third-world nation masquerading as a modern democracy makes you homicidal, move.
Unfortunately, not everyone will take this advice. Some people are determined to kill.
To those people, the fbomber says this: If you are going to be a murderer, don’t be a dick about it.
Don’t kill people just as poor and powerless as you. They had no hand in creating your misery. If anything, they share it with you. Get someone who helped create and uphold the system that has oppressed you because they benefit from it.
Kill the people who are fucking with you. Kill the rich and powerful.
Will killing the rich and powerful assholes change anything? Maybe. People considering a life of callously exploiting those beneath them might conceivably change their risk/reward calculations if enough exploiters were violently and publicly murdered. Probably not, though. There are a lot of not-so-rich and slightly-less-powerful assholes waiting for an opening above them to fill. And they’ll make sure they have better security.
But still. At the very least, your killing spree won’t heap more terror, pain and misery on people who have had too much of that their whole lives.
KILL LIST
Dick Cheney. This is a no-brainer. But considering how his own heart can’t kill him off, I suggest starting with silver bullets, then move on to holy water and stakes through the heart until the job is done.
Karl Rove. For putting the hand on the lever that flushed America down the toilet.
George W. Bush. The flusher.
Any current or former executives for AIG, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citibank, Chase, Countrywide, and, fuck it, on Wall Street in general. Do we really need to give a reason here?
Any executive working for an industry with a “big” in front of it: Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Insurance, Big Defense, Big Agriculture. Considering how many people these industries put to death for higher profit margins, it’s simple self-defense.
Supreme Court Justices Scalia, Alito, Thomas and Roberts. Hey, you got your job “for life.” Nobody said how long that was going to be.
Glenn Beck. This is more of a mercy killing, and culling the herd of an obviously damaged specimen.
Sarah Palin. Otherwise, she could breed again.
Anyone ever described as a “neocon.”
Anyone else who encouraged our rush into the Iraq War.
Every Senator besides Bernie Sanders. These fall into the Wall Street/Big Corporation employee category, anyway.
Every Congressman besides Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul and Marcy Kaptur. Again, this was covered in the Wall Street/Big Corporation employees category.
Rupert Murdoch. And take out as many of those other Fox News cocksuckers as you can with him.
Rahm Emmanuel. Give that asshole something to curse about.
Ann Coulter. Self-explanatory.
Bill O’Reilly. Ditto.
Spike Lee. For a millionaire film director, he sure does whine a lot. Obviously, life does not agree with him. Help him out.
RAPE, THEN KILL LIST
Joe Lieberman. If he’s going to walk around with a mouth that looks like a wrinkled old pussy, someone needs to stick a dick in it.
Did I forget anyone?
This greatly concerns the fbomer. In his opinion, there are a couple of problems with these workplace shooting rampages. First, obviously, they kill people. That is, in itself, very bad.
Secondly, they kill the wrong people, which is even worse.
For a look at the epidemic of workplace and schoolyard shootings that America has witnessed since the 1980’s that goes beyond the usual “another lunatic snapped” shrugs that most media serves, check out the book “Going Postal” by Mark Ames.
As this book shows, once you look into the lives of these rampage killers you see that they are usually miserable human beings, living in considerable pain. What’s more, this pain that is often inflicted upon them by other people, usually specific people. Bullies terrorize and torture them at school. Supervisors cut their hours and harass them at work. Women they love reject them. After years of jumping through hoops and sacrificing for a company, that company fires them to squeak out a tiny bit more profit.
But these murderers rarely go out and target the specific people who caused their pain. That would be reprehensible, but at least understandable.
Instead, these killers walk into crowded classrooms, gyms, restaurants, workplaces and spray their bullets at whoever is there. Which is usually a crowd of poor fuckers nearly as powerless, miserable and ground-down as themselves.
Killing someone who has created your painful situation is fucked up enough. But killing people who are completely unconnected to that situation --- that takes the fucked-up-ness to an even higher level.
Hence, this kill list. Now, I want this to be perfectly clear. THE F-BOMBER DOES NOT IN ANY WAY CONDONE, ENCOURAGE OR WISH FOR THE VIOLENT DEATH OF ANYONE, INCLUDING THESE LISTED INDIVIDUALS.
The fbomber believes that murder is wrong. If you are considering killing anyone, stop. Get help. Talk to someone. Do whatever it takes to solve your problems some other way. If your job is driving you to consider murder, quit. If the place you live makes you want to kill someone, move. If you fantasize about cutting off your wife’s head, divorce her. If the financial stress of your bills and debts makes you feel like you are going to shoot someone, declare bankruptcy. If living in a declining, corrupt, oligopolistic corporatocratic third-world nation masquerading as a modern democracy makes you homicidal, move.
Unfortunately, not everyone will take this advice. Some people are determined to kill.
To those people, the fbomber says this: If you are going to be a murderer, don’t be a dick about it.
Don’t kill people just as poor and powerless as you. They had no hand in creating your misery. If anything, they share it with you. Get someone who helped create and uphold the system that has oppressed you because they benefit from it.
Kill the people who are fucking with you. Kill the rich and powerful.
Will killing the rich and powerful assholes change anything? Maybe. People considering a life of callously exploiting those beneath them might conceivably change their risk/reward calculations if enough exploiters were violently and publicly murdered. Probably not, though. There are a lot of not-so-rich and slightly-less-powerful assholes waiting for an opening above them to fill. And they’ll make sure they have better security.
But still. At the very least, your killing spree won’t heap more terror, pain and misery on people who have had too much of that their whole lives.
KILL LIST
Dick Cheney. This is a no-brainer. But considering how his own heart can’t kill him off, I suggest starting with silver bullets, then move on to holy water and stakes through the heart until the job is done.
Karl Rove. For putting the hand on the lever that flushed America down the toilet.
George W. Bush. The flusher.
Any current or former executives for AIG, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citibank, Chase, Countrywide, and, fuck it, on Wall Street in general. Do we really need to give a reason here?
Any executive working for an industry with a “big” in front of it: Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Insurance, Big Defense, Big Agriculture. Considering how many people these industries put to death for higher profit margins, it’s simple self-defense.
Supreme Court Justices Scalia, Alito, Thomas and Roberts. Hey, you got your job “for life.” Nobody said how long that was going to be.
Glenn Beck. This is more of a mercy killing, and culling the herd of an obviously damaged specimen.
Sarah Palin. Otherwise, she could breed again.
Anyone ever described as a “neocon.”
Anyone else who encouraged our rush into the Iraq War.
Every Senator besides Bernie Sanders. These fall into the Wall Street/Big Corporation employee category, anyway.
Every Congressman besides Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul and Marcy Kaptur. Again, this was covered in the Wall Street/Big Corporation employees category.
Rupert Murdoch. And take out as many of those other Fox News cocksuckers as you can with him.
Rahm Emmanuel. Give that asshole something to curse about.
Ann Coulter. Self-explanatory.
Bill O’Reilly. Ditto.
Spike Lee. For a millionaire film director, he sure does whine a lot. Obviously, life does not agree with him. Help him out.
RAPE, THEN KILL LIST
Joe Lieberman. If he’s going to walk around with a mouth that looks like a wrinkled old pussy, someone needs to stick a dick in it.
Did I forget anyone?
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
"Fuck You, Ted Kennedy. And the Country You Faithfully Served." --- Massachusetts Voters
In an election result that was called a political earthquake, the residents of Massachusetts collectively marched over to Ted Kennedy’s grave and dropped a huge steaming turd on his headstone by electing a dully handsome Republican douchebag named Scott Brown for Teddy’s old, whiskey-soaked, Senate seat.
Like so many earthquakes, this political plate-buckling was followed by a tsunami. In this instance the tsunami consisted of a gigantic, liquid wall of bloviation from political “thinkers” of every description.
For these thinkers, the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts was not about the voters of Massachusetts preferring a moderately attractive person who really, really, really wanted the job over a dried-up boring old prig who couldn’t bother to remove the stick from her ass and campaign for it.
No, to these pundits, the election was a Message.
That Message, funnily enough, seemed to echo whatever the political thinker had been thinking, and saying, all along. To Fox News, the Message was that Massachusetts voters were rallying against Obama’a Liberal Marxist Totalitarian Crusade to reform health care. To the centrists in the Democratic party, as personified by Rahm Emmanuel, the Message was that Obama needed to hew ever more closely to the center. To the Liberals of the blogosphere, the Message was that Obama had not been liberal or activist enough, and had depressed the progressive and independent support that had put him into office in the first place.
To the fbomber, the Message was simpler: We are fucked.
By we, the fbomber refers not only to his own demographic of late-30-something, perennially-underemployed, quasi-homeless, pseudo-intellectuals who aspire to careers in show business despite a lack of talent or effort. The fbomber refers to the entire United States of Fucking America.
We are all fucked, because we’re all in the same boat, that boat is sinking, the sharks are circling, and the passengers are putting the same crew of dimwits that ran us into the shit-berg right back into the wheelhouse.
Remember, fbombers, you read it here first. Unless the Republicans do something extraordinarily --- no, make that Palin-ically stupid ---- like run a retarded one-half-term governor for President, or the Democrats do something extraordinarily brave* --- like actually enact real health care, financial, trade, tax, military and entitlement reform --- we will be back to one-party, Republican rule by 2012 at the latest.
The fbomber doesn’t base this prediction on any polls or surveys or findings whatsoever. He bases it on the simple observation that the Mean people are back in the game. And the Mean people tend to win, except under extraordinary circumstances.
In an earlier post, the fbomber posited a theory of politics that divides people into quadrants based on where they fall on the two axes of Intelligence and Empathy. For a refresher, visit this posting.
As of early 2010, Obama and the Democrats have simultaneously managed to inflame to Mean people, especially the Stupid ones, into action and to depress the Nice people into a disappointed torpor.
The 2008 election was extraordinary because the Mean people, both Smart and Stupid, sat on their hands. The chronic and flagrant bungling of the Republicans from 2000-2008 in every area from controlling spending, to starting and waging wars was so obvious that even the most vicious and idiotic of America’s great Moronic Masses could not sign up for another four years of the same.
However, as the 1985 Emilio Estevez teen-punk-greaser film states: That Was Then… This Is Now. Now, the Mean --- Smart and Stupid --- are back.
And why not?
After all, it has been a full year since the Republicans skipped town after bankrupting the country, dismantling the government, shredding the constitution, breaking the military, flaunting international law, embarrassing our nation and committing us to ongoing, multi-year and multi-trillion dollar debacles on Wall Street, Iraq and Afghanistan.
A year is a long, long time to expect someone to remember something that they never wanted to know in the first place. So the mouth-breathers of America have completely forgotten who has inflicted all this pain on us. Now, according to conventional wisdom --- aka what people who don’t think about things think about things --- Obama owns all those problems himself.
And the mouth-breathers are pissed off at him for them. Hence the Tea Party movement, a group which appears to be --- more than anything else ---- motivated by a simple hatred of paying taxes. And, by extension, everything those taxes pay for, except for the things that explode and kill poor brown people. **
At the same time time, Obama, his inner circle of advisors and Democrats in general have managed to depress and disgust the Smart and Nice and Stupid and Nice people. These people wanted something different from the eight years of incompetence, deficits, wars and governance transparently dictated by rich corporations. And Team Obama simply did not deliver.
On the most pressing issues --- the crashing economy, health care reform and reining in the out-of-control financial industry --- Obama delegated both vision and substance to an obviously lobbyist-owned Congress. On the one issue that Obama did take responsibility for --- the war in Afghanistan --- he chose a George W. Bush-esque escalation, complete with a speech about Evil and the world and the need to defeat it with unarmed predator drone strikes.
The worst that you can say about his is that he never intended to bring change or fulfill hope in the first place. That he is a fake liar bullshit artist who tricked Progressives into electing him, in order to sell them out to the corporate and militarist power elite. That’s the worst.
The best isn’t much better. At best, he is either a) incompetent. b) competent but constrained by the realities of a dismantled apparatus of governance, an unforgivingly tight budget, a compromised Democratic party and vindictively obstructionist Republican minority.
Neither one of those things is the kind of slogan that will get Democrats’ hearts racing again. “Come on, support our guy! He’s just either clueless or trapped!” doesn’t even rhyme.
So exactly why will the voters reject the Democratic Party’s style of slow-motion, reluctant slide into disaster and choose the the Republican’s reckless gleeful drunken plunge into the shit?
Quadrant by Quadrant:
Smart & Nice. This is the heart of the Democratic party. Without this group passionately excited, activated and engaged, nothing happens for the Democrats. This group needs to be shown that Obama can and will deliver the things he promised on the campaign trail. Like at least ONE from the following list:
1) Real Health Care Reform, not some Senate-Clusterfuck-Corporate-Compromise bullshit. This means some sort of Public Option, period.
2) Tough, fair, strict, strategic financial regulatory reform. Smart & Nice people are motivated by a desire for fairness above all. Having one already rich and powerful industry get more riches, breaks, bailouts and exemptions from the rules of both Law and Economics isn’t acceptable. The financial industry needs to be made to serve the economy as a whole, not the industry itself.
3) Investments in Jobs Now That Create Smart Growth Later. America needs jobs now and a Green Economy Infrastructure for later. A national electrical grid. A network of plug-in hybrid charging stations.
4) Fairer Trade. American workers are among the most productive and efficient in the world. Yet we compete on price with nations who do not offer protections to their workers or environment. And who manipulate their nations’ currency to create a pricing advantage. Surely we could quantify the artificial, unfair advantages that these nations offer and create a tariff that removes that unfair edge. To reduce that tariff to zero, the nations would simply need to stop their unfair practices.
5) Energy Independence.
Unfortunately, the chances of Obama and the Democrats accomplishing any of these things considering A) A unified Republican opposition in a Senate which can be paralyzed by 41 nay-sayers B) Democrat’s own stomach-turning spinelessness, cowardice, greed, corruption, and treachery C) The raging torrent of corporate money directed at maintaining the status quo --- is just about zilch.
Nice & Dumb.
If the Smart & Nice crowd could be sufficiently energized, the Nice & Dumb crowd would follow. So forget that.
Mean & Smart.
Democrats cannot ever convert the Mean people. All they can hope is to neutralize. In 2008, Obama did this by allowing his campaign to be financed by the financial industry, and surrounding himself with people who would ensure that the financial industry would be taken care of.
IF the economic pie were still growing --- no matter how fake and toxic its filling --- Obama could continue to let the plutocracy gorge their ever larger slices, while the lower 98% of America enjoyed the crumbs and napkin-stains.
But now Obama has a dilemma. He needs to reform the financial industry to prevent another economic collapse, not to mention establish some sort of credibility as a President who actually does his job.
So he is going to lose the plutocrat’s bought-off neutrality. In fact, he already is.
Mean & Dumb.
These are the foot soldiers for the regression of the American experiment into some sort of corn-pone fascist banana republic. These hateful morons sat out the election in 2008, but --- as evidenced in Massachusetts, are agitated and gaining the political equivalent of retard strength by simply offering hurting, pissed off stupid people a chance to lash out at everyone but the people who caused their pain.
Their anger, combined with the Smart & Mean money seals the deal for the Republicans in 2010 and 2012, unless one specific thing happens: They manage to do something so stupid that they fuck it all up for themselves to do that for you. Luckily, they do that pretty consistently. Like vote for Ross Perot in 1992. Like take over the Republican primary put someone far too unelectable up for office, like they did in upstate New York with that ridiculous carpetbagger Hoffman guy.
Which is where Sarah Palin comes in. As someone who isn’t interested in reliving 2000-2008, but with even less money and international prestige, I can only hope that the Palin juggernaut continues to gain steam, that her supporters overwhelm the Republican primary and that she runs for President in 2012. Whatever Obama’s failings, the very thought of the babblings of that half-wit harridan coming from the Oval Office would instantly convert every quadrant but Mean and Stupid into banner-waving Democrats in about half-a-second.
* If the current crop Democrats ever did anything extraordinarily brave then all our problems would be solved anyway. Because if that happened enough winged pigs would fly out of enough asses that we could harness their collective flapping power to replace fossil fuels forever.
** The fbomber does not like paying taxes himself. And does not expect anyone to. But he has traveled abroad, and notes that the countries that spend money on themselves tend to be nicer than the countries that don’t. And the fbomber wants to live in a nice country.
Like so many earthquakes, this political plate-buckling was followed by a tsunami. In this instance the tsunami consisted of a gigantic, liquid wall of bloviation from political “thinkers” of every description.
For these thinkers, the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts was not about the voters of Massachusetts preferring a moderately attractive person who really, really, really wanted the job over a dried-up boring old prig who couldn’t bother to remove the stick from her ass and campaign for it.
No, to these pundits, the election was a Message.
That Message, funnily enough, seemed to echo whatever the political thinker had been thinking, and saying, all along. To Fox News, the Message was that Massachusetts voters were rallying against Obama’a Liberal Marxist Totalitarian Crusade to reform health care. To the centrists in the Democratic party, as personified by Rahm Emmanuel, the Message was that Obama needed to hew ever more closely to the center. To the Liberals of the blogosphere, the Message was that Obama had not been liberal or activist enough, and had depressed the progressive and independent support that had put him into office in the first place.
To the fbomber, the Message was simpler: We are fucked.
By we, the fbomber refers not only to his own demographic of late-30-something, perennially-underemployed, quasi-homeless, pseudo-intellectuals who aspire to careers in show business despite a lack of talent or effort. The fbomber refers to the entire United States of Fucking America.
We are all fucked, because we’re all in the same boat, that boat is sinking, the sharks are circling, and the passengers are putting the same crew of dimwits that ran us into the shit-berg right back into the wheelhouse.
Remember, fbombers, you read it here first. Unless the Republicans do something extraordinarily --- no, make that Palin-ically stupid ---- like run a retarded one-half-term governor for President, or the Democrats do something extraordinarily brave* --- like actually enact real health care, financial, trade, tax, military and entitlement reform --- we will be back to one-party, Republican rule by 2012 at the latest.
The fbomber doesn’t base this prediction on any polls or surveys or findings whatsoever. He bases it on the simple observation that the Mean people are back in the game. And the Mean people tend to win, except under extraordinary circumstances.
In an earlier post, the fbomber posited a theory of politics that divides people into quadrants based on where they fall on the two axes of Intelligence and Empathy. For a refresher, visit this posting.
As of early 2010, Obama and the Democrats have simultaneously managed to inflame to Mean people, especially the Stupid ones, into action and to depress the Nice people into a disappointed torpor.
The 2008 election was extraordinary because the Mean people, both Smart and Stupid, sat on their hands. The chronic and flagrant bungling of the Republicans from 2000-2008 in every area from controlling spending, to starting and waging wars was so obvious that even the most vicious and idiotic of America’s great Moronic Masses could not sign up for another four years of the same.
However, as the 1985 Emilio Estevez teen-punk-greaser film states: That Was Then… This Is Now. Now, the Mean --- Smart and Stupid --- are back.
And why not?
After all, it has been a full year since the Republicans skipped town after bankrupting the country, dismantling the government, shredding the constitution, breaking the military, flaunting international law, embarrassing our nation and committing us to ongoing, multi-year and multi-trillion dollar debacles on Wall Street, Iraq and Afghanistan.
A year is a long, long time to expect someone to remember something that they never wanted to know in the first place. So the mouth-breathers of America have completely forgotten who has inflicted all this pain on us. Now, according to conventional wisdom --- aka what people who don’t think about things think about things --- Obama owns all those problems himself.
And the mouth-breathers are pissed off at him for them. Hence the Tea Party movement, a group which appears to be --- more than anything else ---- motivated by a simple hatred of paying taxes. And, by extension, everything those taxes pay for, except for the things that explode and kill poor brown people. **
At the same time time, Obama, his inner circle of advisors and Democrats in general have managed to depress and disgust the Smart and Nice and Stupid and Nice people. These people wanted something different from the eight years of incompetence, deficits, wars and governance transparently dictated by rich corporations. And Team Obama simply did not deliver.
On the most pressing issues --- the crashing economy, health care reform and reining in the out-of-control financial industry --- Obama delegated both vision and substance to an obviously lobbyist-owned Congress. On the one issue that Obama did take responsibility for --- the war in Afghanistan --- he chose a George W. Bush-esque escalation, complete with a speech about Evil and the world and the need to defeat it with unarmed predator drone strikes.
The worst that you can say about his is that he never intended to bring change or fulfill hope in the first place. That he is a fake liar bullshit artist who tricked Progressives into electing him, in order to sell them out to the corporate and militarist power elite. That’s the worst.
The best isn’t much better. At best, he is either a) incompetent. b) competent but constrained by the realities of a dismantled apparatus of governance, an unforgivingly tight budget, a compromised Democratic party and vindictively obstructionist Republican minority.
Neither one of those things is the kind of slogan that will get Democrats’ hearts racing again. “Come on, support our guy! He’s just either clueless or trapped!” doesn’t even rhyme.
So exactly why will the voters reject the Democratic Party’s style of slow-motion, reluctant slide into disaster and choose the the Republican’s reckless gleeful drunken plunge into the shit?
Quadrant by Quadrant:
Smart & Nice. This is the heart of the Democratic party. Without this group passionately excited, activated and engaged, nothing happens for the Democrats. This group needs to be shown that Obama can and will deliver the things he promised on the campaign trail. Like at least ONE from the following list:
1) Real Health Care Reform, not some Senate-Clusterfuck-Corporate-Compromise bullshit. This means some sort of Public Option, period.
2) Tough, fair, strict, strategic financial regulatory reform. Smart & Nice people are motivated by a desire for fairness above all. Having one already rich and powerful industry get more riches, breaks, bailouts and exemptions from the rules of both Law and Economics isn’t acceptable. The financial industry needs to be made to serve the economy as a whole, not the industry itself.
3) Investments in Jobs Now That Create Smart Growth Later. America needs jobs now and a Green Economy Infrastructure for later. A national electrical grid. A network of plug-in hybrid charging stations.
4) Fairer Trade. American workers are among the most productive and efficient in the world. Yet we compete on price with nations who do not offer protections to their workers or environment. And who manipulate their nations’ currency to create a pricing advantage. Surely we could quantify the artificial, unfair advantages that these nations offer and create a tariff that removes that unfair edge. To reduce that tariff to zero, the nations would simply need to stop their unfair practices.
5) Energy Independence.
Unfortunately, the chances of Obama and the Democrats accomplishing any of these things considering A) A unified Republican opposition in a Senate which can be paralyzed by 41 nay-sayers B) Democrat’s own stomach-turning spinelessness, cowardice, greed, corruption, and treachery C) The raging torrent of corporate money directed at maintaining the status quo --- is just about zilch.
Nice & Dumb.
If the Smart & Nice crowd could be sufficiently energized, the Nice & Dumb crowd would follow. So forget that.
Mean & Smart.
Democrats cannot ever convert the Mean people. All they can hope is to neutralize. In 2008, Obama did this by allowing his campaign to be financed by the financial industry, and surrounding himself with people who would ensure that the financial industry would be taken care of.
IF the economic pie were still growing --- no matter how fake and toxic its filling --- Obama could continue to let the plutocracy gorge their ever larger slices, while the lower 98% of America enjoyed the crumbs and napkin-stains.
But now Obama has a dilemma. He needs to reform the financial industry to prevent another economic collapse, not to mention establish some sort of credibility as a President who actually does his job.
So he is going to lose the plutocrat’s bought-off neutrality. In fact, he already is.
Mean & Dumb.
These are the foot soldiers for the regression of the American experiment into some sort of corn-pone fascist banana republic. These hateful morons sat out the election in 2008, but --- as evidenced in Massachusetts, are agitated and gaining the political equivalent of retard strength by simply offering hurting, pissed off stupid people a chance to lash out at everyone but the people who caused their pain.
Their anger, combined with the Smart & Mean money seals the deal for the Republicans in 2010 and 2012, unless one specific thing happens: They manage to do something so stupid that they fuck it all up for themselves to do that for you. Luckily, they do that pretty consistently. Like vote for Ross Perot in 1992. Like take over the Republican primary put someone far too unelectable up for office, like they did in upstate New York with that ridiculous carpetbagger Hoffman guy.
Which is where Sarah Palin comes in. As someone who isn’t interested in reliving 2000-2008, but with even less money and international prestige, I can only hope that the Palin juggernaut continues to gain steam, that her supporters overwhelm the Republican primary and that she runs for President in 2012. Whatever Obama’s failings, the very thought of the babblings of that half-wit harridan coming from the Oval Office would instantly convert every quadrant but Mean and Stupid into banner-waving Democrats in about half-a-second.
* If the current crop Democrats ever did anything extraordinarily brave then all our problems would be solved anyway. Because if that happened enough winged pigs would fly out of enough asses that we could harness their collective flapping power to replace fossil fuels forever.
** The fbomber does not like paying taxes himself. And does not expect anyone to. But he has traveled abroad, and notes that the countries that spend money on themselves tend to be nicer than the countries that don’t. And the fbomber wants to live in a nice country.
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
The Coif of Genius: A Tribute to Trump
So casino-bankrupting Donald Trump narrowly avoided getting his hair forcibly cut off in the most recent Wrestlemania.
No surprise there. There is no way that the Donald would --- or should --- ever let anyone alter even a single follicle of that magnificent do. Though others might want to pour scorn on DT's rusty locks, in the fbomber's humble opinion, that hairstyle is the stroke of genius that has allowed Trump to have the absurd amount of fame, wealth and hot-ass-model-pussy that he has wallowed in for the last two decades.
That complicated comb-over, or to be more accurate, comb-forward-and-over-and-back has served its owner in two vital ways.
First, as a trademark. How many other real estate developers can you name and picture in your head? Unless you work in that field, or have an extraordinarily bizarre sexual fetish, that number is zero. Trump came from a boring, staid business and wound up as a genuine American celebrity, and his unique and memorable appearance played a big part in that
Secondly --- and this is where the genius comes in --- his hair serves him by making him look buffoonish and ridiculous. that's right, I said serves him.
Here's why. People cannot feel envious of and superior to someone at the same time.
As a rich man who clearly loves flaunting his wealth, Trump is bound to attract a considerable amount of envy. Sure, this is supposed to be a nation that worships success and money and those who achieve it, but there's also a lot of resentment too.
Furthermore, Trump's personal qualities, individually and as a whole, make him a profoundly unlikable individual.
He's loud. He's a braggart. He's pushy. He's a blowhard.
Under normal circumstances, someone like this would be violently expelled from the public eye. Sure, he would be rich, ad successful, and landing his private helicopters on his estate's lawn. But he would be doing it privately, like every other developer in the world. If he ever did, for some reason, make it into the public eye, the average person would see him as some undeservingly rich, boring dick. Who, if anything, arouses feelings of hostility.
But with the haircut, a different dynamic emerges. The haircut makes Donald Trump look ridiculous. Like some clueless, arrogant, pathetic douchebag without a sense of how out of touch he is.
The average person sees that and immediately feels superior to the Donald. "Sure" Average Person says, "I may not have millions, or models, or TV contracts but at least I don't look stupid like that."
This feeling of superiority effectively short circuits the negative feelings someone might have towards a standard-issue rich arrogant prick. To the Average Person, Trump is a clown, a buffoon, a laughing stock. There is no need to feel hostility for someone like that. On the contrary, the average person can condescendingly tolerate Trump, snickering to themselves at him the whole time.
And while they are snickering, Trump is sucking up the TV time, the attention and all the dollars it brings his brand. Millions and millions of them every year.
Furthermore, the coif signals a certain amount of naivete and lack of self awareness. Though this signaling is false, it effectively creates a sense of trustworthiness towards Trump. "Surely," Average Person thinks, "someone who is so clueless as to walk around looking like that all day long, must also be too clueless to try to be duplicitous or ruthless."
It's a formula that has worked for him for 20 years.
Why else would he look like that? Trust me, he's had plenty of people bring up the hairstyle with him. Stylists, PR professionals, interviewers, writers... the guy has been married to a string of superficial, appearance obsessed MODELS for Christ's sake. He is aware of the hair issue.
He knows what he's doing. Strategically choosing to look like an asshole on his own, superficial, terms to avoid being called an asshole for real, substantive, reasons. Let's just call it being a genius.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
AIG Outrage Fatigue + the Fbomber Predicts Tits, Ass, Cock, Balls.
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Saturday, March 14, 2009
Well, Now We Know How to Spark A Rally
The election of a President who doesn't have his head lodged in his own ass. Result: Stock prices fall.
Passing a massive economic stimulus plan within a month. Result: The stock market continues to fall.
Pouring and promising trillions of taxpayer dollars without questions or conditions into struggling financial firms. Result: Yet more stock price falling.
A failing bank's CEO writes a memo saying, in essence, that except for all the worthless assets on their books and reliance on government subsidies for survival*, the bank was doing, well, okay. Result: Jubilation in the Street and stock prices climb for four days straight.
Maybe we've been going about this economic turnaround wrong all along. Forget about anti-cyclical Keynesian spending, subsidizing financial firms and instituting regulatory reform. What we've needed all along are simply better memos.
*You've got a bullet in your chest, and a machine is doing your breathing for you, but, hey, your cholesterol level looks great!
Passing a massive economic stimulus plan within a month. Result: The stock market continues to fall.
Pouring and promising trillions of taxpayer dollars without questions or conditions into struggling financial firms. Result: Yet more stock price falling.
A failing bank's CEO writes a memo saying, in essence, that except for all the worthless assets on their books and reliance on government subsidies for survival*, the bank was doing, well, okay. Result: Jubilation in the Street and stock prices climb for four days straight.
Maybe we've been going about this economic turnaround wrong all along. Forget about anti-cyclical Keynesian spending, subsidizing financial firms and instituting regulatory reform. What we've needed all along are simply better memos.
*You've got a bullet in your chest, and a machine is doing your breathing for you, but, hey, your cholesterol level looks great!
Sunday, March 01, 2009
13 Year Old Conservative Wunderkind
Right Wingers are agog over this CPAC speech by 13-year-old Jonathan Krohn, in which Krohn defines conservatism.
It really is quite impressive. This kid has managed to become a Republican jerkoff before he is actually physically able to jerk off.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Bye-bye Dubai
Lately, I've been getting forwarded little snippet about the travails and collapse of Dubai.
That's because an earlier, booze-soaked version of the fbomber once resided in Dubai, for nearly two years before fleeing the country in debt, shame and panic.
Here is an essay I wrote and performed back in 2006 about that experience. It's long. Take your time.
Sallie Mae and Me
I was in my home office last summer, avoiding work by whipping myself into a righteous frenzy on my favorite political blogs, when, somewhere between dailykos and talkingpointsmemo.com, my cellphone rang.
Private Number.
I don’t trust people who block their numbers. But my job requires me to call strangers and have them call me back.
So I answered.
“Hello. Is this Mr. Steven Schneider?”
I have never, ever, in my life had something good happen to me after that question. Still, I said yes.
“Ray Taylor from Sallie Mae here. I’d like to talk to you about your student loans.”
Busted.
Some people --- normal, sane, responsible people --- took out student loans, graduated, worked, and paid off those loans until they evaporated into nothing.
I am not one of these people.
Over the past ten years I’ve defaulted and gone into collections three times. I’ve restructured and refinanced twice. Once I told a collection agent that Steve Schneider had died, and I was merely a friend who had inherited his cellphone.
In my defense, I’ll say that I graduated with every intention of paying , but my first reporter job wasn’t producing that extra thousand bucks a year.
So I figured those loans would have wait until some later day, a day when I had so much money I could pay without pain or deprivation. Now, I didn’t have any sort of grandiose fantasies like winning the lottery. I had more practical plans, like meeting and marrying an heiress to the DeBeers diamond fortune, or possibly selling a screenplay to a major motion picture studio.
I was, you see, pursuing a career as a writer. Not in the sense of putting my words down on paper, mind you, but more in the sense of calling myself a writer, taking crappy newspaper jobs, and poisoning all my reading with envy and guilt.
People, usually non-writers, told me these crappy jobs were how I would “pay my dues.”
One muggy day, driving to a press conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, sweating and shirtless because the AC in my $900 former cop car blew out air hotter than the combustion chamber of the engine, I began to think maybe these dues were a little steep.
I decided I would pay them, but not at the same time as my loans.
Shortly afterwards, I moved to London for “experiences” as Phase Two of my project to become a great writer without writing. While there, a publishing house offered me a job writing an Internet technology magazine in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The salary was three times what I’d earned back home, verging on what a starting shift manager at Chili’s might pull in.
I told them I needed to think it over, then went home to look at a map. The United Arab Emirates turned out to be a small, crescent shaped country on the Persian Gulf bordered by Oman and Saudi Arabia, a part of the world where money, quite literally, bubbles out of the ground. I was sold.
Surely in a country that owed its very existence to wealth without effort, there would be a place for me.
I imagined my life in Dubai as a sort of melange of Beau Gest, a harem and Somerset Maughan’s morally bankrupt colonialists at play.
Once there, I’d get one of those great old Land Rover Defenders, the boxy kind like John Wayne drove in Hatari. Every morning I would cross the dunes to work while my houseboy tidied up my seaside villa and helped the sultry consort I had left behind gather her belongings and catch up to her salt caravan.
I figured within a year I could pay off my college loans, accumulate some savings and return to the United States in style.
Some of what I imagined was true. In an oil-wealthy nation, inside the Internet field during its boom, I was working at the nexus of two gushing fountains of easy money. And at the top of the corporate org chart, the cash did just rain down.
The founder, a silver-bearded Scotsman, had a reputation for throwing glasses of expensive Cabernet at restaurant walls for sheer, wasteful sport. The advertising sales manager drove an obnoxious yellow Ferrari he filled with young female sales reps, then drove to his private beach club.
But down at the bottom of the chart it was a different story. In appearance and architecture, Dubai is Las Vegas without the taste or restraint. In terms of cost of living, it’s more like Manhattan.
My lifestyle wasn’t extravagant. Instead of a seaside villa, I lived in a crumbling corporate apartment with two coworkers. Instead of the sexy Landrover, I drove a rented Tercel. In place of a harem, I discovered a city with a male to female ratio similar to that of an Army base.
Even so, after paying my bills, my checkings and savings accounts remained at zero and my credit card balance grew every month.
My job was a disappointment. For as long as I had been half-heartedly participating in the workforce, I’d believed a dream job, would magically give me a work ethic. Other people fostered this wishful thinking, saying things like “Of course you aren’t really trying at work, Steven. You haven’t found your thing yet.”
It turned out that’s like saying that when I developed a passion for water polo, I would grow a blowhole.
There I was, living my dream of writing for a living, in a wildly exotic locale. A flashbulb-bright sun baked silvery glass towers rising from the dunes like a mirage. Imperious local men glided the streets in gleaming white Range Rovers and matching robes. Mysterious, veiled women scurried out of Victoria’s Secret, covered head to toe in pitch black abayas. Yet even in this extraordinary setting, I put in the same lackluster work performance that had blocked my promotion to fry station at the Muskogee Burger King.
One problem was I could not get excited about my stories. I wanted to be out riding with the Hell’s Angels, not rewriting press releases about how many processors Compaq had put in their new server.
I was also in over my head. Despite my interview lies, just about everything I knew about computer networking could be exhausted by typing those two words at the top of a page. What’s worse, I felt paranoid about interviewing people to learn more. Then they would know how ignorant I was about the subject my magazine was named after. Instead, I spent hours staring, paralyzed with fear, at the phone and business cards of Microsoft Middle East Marketing Reps.
I wound up using the same tricks that got me through college --- stretched deadlines, all nighters and plagiarism. To write stories I typically stole three or four articles from the internet, mashed them up, and created a fictitious expert to quote this information.
As for my own writing, it turns out I’ve only got so many words per day inside me. After cranking out news and feature stories at work, I simply could not go home and type more.
In fact, the only part of my life that aroused any passion was lunch. My South African coworker, Colin, and I spent approximately half our workday suggesting, eating at and critiquing lunch spots. But after six months, even these multi-hour gluttony excursions stopped cheering me up.
In my misery, I decided that if I was sinking into an ocean of debt, I might as well head to the Promenade Deck, tell Isaac to mix up some Mai Tais, and enjoy the ride down. I financed a new Jeep, got a gold card from the local bank and moved into my own place. I went to Ikea, pointed to one of the pages of their catalog and took it all home with me.
Every night I careened between Irish pubs, American bars and discos full of sad-eyed Ukranian prostitutes dancing with fat Arab businessmen. I spent sex weekends at five star hotels with my new British girlfriend, ordering $300 bottles of whiskey from room service.
Within months I spent my entire next year’s salary. I maxed out all my credit cards and had post-dated rent and car payment checks sitting in offices throughout the city like timed explosive charges waiting to blow.
What’s more, this new social calendar ignited the afterburners on my downward work spiral. Each day I came in later, often still drunk from the night before and occasionally wearing the same clothes.
Nasty rumors about my behavior circulated the office. One afternoon the founder took me for coffee. Over butter cookies, he told me he’d heard that I had been so aggressively amorous at a party that a girl had locked herself into a bathroom to escape me.
My defense was that the story could not be true, because I would have simply kicked that door down, just like I’d kicked my apartment door down the weekend before when I lost my keys.
Not long after this conversation, I was fired.
I had to leave the country. The question was how. And when.
I couldn’t leave right away. My old company had vouched for my debts and would alert the Dubai authorities. If caught leaving, I would be thrown in jail until someone paid.
To buy time, I took a job writing copy for an ad agency and secretly prepared my escape.
I couldn’t openly vacate my house. The security- slash - maintenance man lived downstairs, and popped from his door like a smiling, curry-scented cuckoo each time he heard a noise in the lobby. But I didn’t want to abandon my stuff. Those were, after all, the Swedish-designed treasures I had braved jail time to own.
I moved out one back-pack load at a time and traded my furniture and dishes for dinners out.
My car was another problem. Not only would selling it notify the bank of my immanent departure, but it refused to let me to shift gears while in motion. So I left it in 3rd for a month.
My last day in Dubai, I abandoned the Jeep in my bank’s parking lot with the keys on the seat and called a cab for the airport.
At the terminal, I poured fearful sweat. I believed that every cellphone was reporting me, that every policeman and soldier was there to put me in cuffs for stealing $30,000 from their country.
I didn’t relax until I was well into international airspace.
Once there, I reflected on the whole Dubai debacle, and swore I would never attempt to pay my student loans again.
After all, that loan had resulted from a decision I made when I was seventeen years old, namely to go to an expensive private university. And I wasn’t going to be responsible for a seventeen year old jackass’s mistake even --- no, especially --- if that jackass was me. After all, I might give the benefit of the doubt to a 17-year-old stranger, but I know exactly how dumb I was.
I realized I should have spent my tuition on a car. Back in 1990, $100K would have bought a monster sportscar, a Lamborghini cool enough to get me laid, even if I lacked the social skills to be in Wagoner High’s Dungeons and Dragons Club.
I would have wrecked this car, or defaulted on the payments. But either way, the bank would have gotten a good portion of their loan back from insurance or auction.
Instead, I had put myself thousands of dollars in hock for a ‘university experience’. Unlike my hypothetical Lamborghini, there was no way to abandon or return this experience. I couldn’t just take the degree off my resume and call it even.
I also thought the fact that leaving the country didn’t erase the debt was a little hypocritical. After all, our entire country is descended from people who shirked debts by moving here. I should have been lauded for exporting American values abroad.
Back in the States I pursued a second dream career as an advertising copywriter. After two dues-paying years in that field, living in a converted closet in New York City, I decided to make some life changes.
For starters, I realized that my drinking problem was getting in the way of the things that were really important to me… like my sex addiction. So I gave up alcohol.
I also gave up the idea of a dream job in a creative field.
I already dreamed of writing great books and stories. To pursue that dream and also a dream of being a highly-paid copywriter or intrepid journalist took energy and focus I simply didn’t have. It was also kind of greedy. Some people really do dream about those jobs, and the sooner I got out of their way the better.
I started taking jobs that, though not creative and exciting, paid me enough to meet my expenses and put some aside every month for writing classes, trips, and a richer life to write about.
Hence, my current recruiting job, which is like being a telemarketer who got your work number, but pays me $50/hour to work from home.
So when Ray Taylor called, I was ready. By taking some money out of savings, putting some debt on a credit card, and scrimping a little, I stayed out of court and paid off everything in three months.
My triumph is mixed with sadness, though. When I think about it, Sallie Mae was the one relationship I made in college that lasted. The girls I dated back in 1995 are long married in Connecticut suburbs. My rugby pals are so busy with their careers on Wall Street that our correspondence has shriveled from long emails about our lives to the latest nightvision mpegs of teen heiresses blowing their boyfriends.
By contrast, for the last decade, Sallie Mae was there for me, calling, writing, emailing, wanting to know how my job situation was going. And above all, wanting me to stay in touch.
I’m going to miss Sallie Mae.
But I’d like to think that we’re not so much through as taking a break.
Right now, I’m applying to graduate school.
That's because an earlier, booze-soaked version of the fbomber once resided in Dubai, for nearly two years before fleeing the country in debt, shame and panic.
Here is an essay I wrote and performed back in 2006 about that experience. It's long. Take your time.
Sallie Mae and Me
I was in my home office last summer, avoiding work by whipping myself into a righteous frenzy on my favorite political blogs, when, somewhere between dailykos and talkingpointsmemo.com, my cellphone rang.
Private Number.
I don’t trust people who block their numbers. But my job requires me to call strangers and have them call me back.
So I answered.
“Hello. Is this Mr. Steven Schneider?”
I have never, ever, in my life had something good happen to me after that question. Still, I said yes.
“Ray Taylor from Sallie Mae here. I’d like to talk to you about your student loans.”
Busted.
Some people --- normal, sane, responsible people --- took out student loans, graduated, worked, and paid off those loans until they evaporated into nothing.
I am not one of these people.
Over the past ten years I’ve defaulted and gone into collections three times. I’ve restructured and refinanced twice. Once I told a collection agent that Steve Schneider had died, and I was merely a friend who had inherited his cellphone.
In my defense, I’ll say that I graduated with every intention of paying , but my first reporter job wasn’t producing that extra thousand bucks a year.
So I figured those loans would have wait until some later day, a day when I had so much money I could pay without pain or deprivation. Now, I didn’t have any sort of grandiose fantasies like winning the lottery. I had more practical plans, like meeting and marrying an heiress to the DeBeers diamond fortune, or possibly selling a screenplay to a major motion picture studio.
I was, you see, pursuing a career as a writer. Not in the sense of putting my words down on paper, mind you, but more in the sense of calling myself a writer, taking crappy newspaper jobs, and poisoning all my reading with envy and guilt.
People, usually non-writers, told me these crappy jobs were how I would “pay my dues.”
One muggy day, driving to a press conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, sweating and shirtless because the AC in my $900 former cop car blew out air hotter than the combustion chamber of the engine, I began to think maybe these dues were a little steep.
I decided I would pay them, but not at the same time as my loans.
Shortly afterwards, I moved to London for “experiences” as Phase Two of my project to become a great writer without writing. While there, a publishing house offered me a job writing an Internet technology magazine in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The salary was three times what I’d earned back home, verging on what a starting shift manager at Chili’s might pull in.
I told them I needed to think it over, then went home to look at a map. The United Arab Emirates turned out to be a small, crescent shaped country on the Persian Gulf bordered by Oman and Saudi Arabia, a part of the world where money, quite literally, bubbles out of the ground. I was sold.
Surely in a country that owed its very existence to wealth without effort, there would be a place for me.
I imagined my life in Dubai as a sort of melange of Beau Gest, a harem and Somerset Maughan’s morally bankrupt colonialists at play.
Once there, I’d get one of those great old Land Rover Defenders, the boxy kind like John Wayne drove in Hatari. Every morning I would cross the dunes to work while my houseboy tidied up my seaside villa and helped the sultry consort I had left behind gather her belongings and catch up to her salt caravan.
I figured within a year I could pay off my college loans, accumulate some savings and return to the United States in style.
Some of what I imagined was true. In an oil-wealthy nation, inside the Internet field during its boom, I was working at the nexus of two gushing fountains of easy money. And at the top of the corporate org chart, the cash did just rain down.
The founder, a silver-bearded Scotsman, had a reputation for throwing glasses of expensive Cabernet at restaurant walls for sheer, wasteful sport. The advertising sales manager drove an obnoxious yellow Ferrari he filled with young female sales reps, then drove to his private beach club.
But down at the bottom of the chart it was a different story. In appearance and architecture, Dubai is Las Vegas without the taste or restraint. In terms of cost of living, it’s more like Manhattan.
My lifestyle wasn’t extravagant. Instead of a seaside villa, I lived in a crumbling corporate apartment with two coworkers. Instead of the sexy Landrover, I drove a rented Tercel. In place of a harem, I discovered a city with a male to female ratio similar to that of an Army base.
Even so, after paying my bills, my checkings and savings accounts remained at zero and my credit card balance grew every month.
My job was a disappointment. For as long as I had been half-heartedly participating in the workforce, I’d believed a dream job, would magically give me a work ethic. Other people fostered this wishful thinking, saying things like “Of course you aren’t really trying at work, Steven. You haven’t found your thing yet.”
It turned out that’s like saying that when I developed a passion for water polo, I would grow a blowhole.
There I was, living my dream of writing for a living, in a wildly exotic locale. A flashbulb-bright sun baked silvery glass towers rising from the dunes like a mirage. Imperious local men glided the streets in gleaming white Range Rovers and matching robes. Mysterious, veiled women scurried out of Victoria’s Secret, covered head to toe in pitch black abayas. Yet even in this extraordinary setting, I put in the same lackluster work performance that had blocked my promotion to fry station at the Muskogee Burger King.
One problem was I could not get excited about my stories. I wanted to be out riding with the Hell’s Angels, not rewriting press releases about how many processors Compaq had put in their new server.
I was also in over my head. Despite my interview lies, just about everything I knew about computer networking could be exhausted by typing those two words at the top of a page. What’s worse, I felt paranoid about interviewing people to learn more. Then they would know how ignorant I was about the subject my magazine was named after. Instead, I spent hours staring, paralyzed with fear, at the phone and business cards of Microsoft Middle East Marketing Reps.
I wound up using the same tricks that got me through college --- stretched deadlines, all nighters and plagiarism. To write stories I typically stole three or four articles from the internet, mashed them up, and created a fictitious expert to quote this information.
As for my own writing, it turns out I’ve only got so many words per day inside me. After cranking out news and feature stories at work, I simply could not go home and type more.
In fact, the only part of my life that aroused any passion was lunch. My South African coworker, Colin, and I spent approximately half our workday suggesting, eating at and critiquing lunch spots. But after six months, even these multi-hour gluttony excursions stopped cheering me up.
In my misery, I decided that if I was sinking into an ocean of debt, I might as well head to the Promenade Deck, tell Isaac to mix up some Mai Tais, and enjoy the ride down. I financed a new Jeep, got a gold card from the local bank and moved into my own place. I went to Ikea, pointed to one of the pages of their catalog and took it all home with me.
Every night I careened between Irish pubs, American bars and discos full of sad-eyed Ukranian prostitutes dancing with fat Arab businessmen. I spent sex weekends at five star hotels with my new British girlfriend, ordering $300 bottles of whiskey from room service.
Within months I spent my entire next year’s salary. I maxed out all my credit cards and had post-dated rent and car payment checks sitting in offices throughout the city like timed explosive charges waiting to blow.
What’s more, this new social calendar ignited the afterburners on my downward work spiral. Each day I came in later, often still drunk from the night before and occasionally wearing the same clothes.
Nasty rumors about my behavior circulated the office. One afternoon the founder took me for coffee. Over butter cookies, he told me he’d heard that I had been so aggressively amorous at a party that a girl had locked herself into a bathroom to escape me.
My defense was that the story could not be true, because I would have simply kicked that door down, just like I’d kicked my apartment door down the weekend before when I lost my keys.
Not long after this conversation, I was fired.
I had to leave the country. The question was how. And when.
I couldn’t leave right away. My old company had vouched for my debts and would alert the Dubai authorities. If caught leaving, I would be thrown in jail until someone paid.
To buy time, I took a job writing copy for an ad agency and secretly prepared my escape.
I couldn’t openly vacate my house. The security- slash - maintenance man lived downstairs, and popped from his door like a smiling, curry-scented cuckoo each time he heard a noise in the lobby. But I didn’t want to abandon my stuff. Those were, after all, the Swedish-designed treasures I had braved jail time to own.
I moved out one back-pack load at a time and traded my furniture and dishes for dinners out.
My car was another problem. Not only would selling it notify the bank of my immanent departure, but it refused to let me to shift gears while in motion. So I left it in 3rd for a month.
My last day in Dubai, I abandoned the Jeep in my bank’s parking lot with the keys on the seat and called a cab for the airport.
At the terminal, I poured fearful sweat. I believed that every cellphone was reporting me, that every policeman and soldier was there to put me in cuffs for stealing $30,000 from their country.
I didn’t relax until I was well into international airspace.
Once there, I reflected on the whole Dubai debacle, and swore I would never attempt to pay my student loans again.
After all, that loan had resulted from a decision I made when I was seventeen years old, namely to go to an expensive private university. And I wasn’t going to be responsible for a seventeen year old jackass’s mistake even --- no, especially --- if that jackass was me. After all, I might give the benefit of the doubt to a 17-year-old stranger, but I know exactly how dumb I was.
I realized I should have spent my tuition on a car. Back in 1990, $100K would have bought a monster sportscar, a Lamborghini cool enough to get me laid, even if I lacked the social skills to be in Wagoner High’s Dungeons and Dragons Club.
I would have wrecked this car, or defaulted on the payments. But either way, the bank would have gotten a good portion of their loan back from insurance or auction.
Instead, I had put myself thousands of dollars in hock for a ‘university experience’. Unlike my hypothetical Lamborghini, there was no way to abandon or return this experience. I couldn’t just take the degree off my resume and call it even.
I also thought the fact that leaving the country didn’t erase the debt was a little hypocritical. After all, our entire country is descended from people who shirked debts by moving here. I should have been lauded for exporting American values abroad.
Back in the States I pursued a second dream career as an advertising copywriter. After two dues-paying years in that field, living in a converted closet in New York City, I decided to make some life changes.
For starters, I realized that my drinking problem was getting in the way of the things that were really important to me… like my sex addiction. So I gave up alcohol.
I also gave up the idea of a dream job in a creative field.
I already dreamed of writing great books and stories. To pursue that dream and also a dream of being a highly-paid copywriter or intrepid journalist took energy and focus I simply didn’t have. It was also kind of greedy. Some people really do dream about those jobs, and the sooner I got out of their way the better.
I started taking jobs that, though not creative and exciting, paid me enough to meet my expenses and put some aside every month for writing classes, trips, and a richer life to write about.
Hence, my current recruiting job, which is like being a telemarketer who got your work number, but pays me $50/hour to work from home.
So when Ray Taylor called, I was ready. By taking some money out of savings, putting some debt on a credit card, and scrimping a little, I stayed out of court and paid off everything in three months.
My triumph is mixed with sadness, though. When I think about it, Sallie Mae was the one relationship I made in college that lasted. The girls I dated back in 1995 are long married in Connecticut suburbs. My rugby pals are so busy with their careers on Wall Street that our correspondence has shriveled from long emails about our lives to the latest nightvision mpegs of teen heiresses blowing their boyfriends.
By contrast, for the last decade, Sallie Mae was there for me, calling, writing, emailing, wanting to know how my job situation was going. And above all, wanting me to stay in touch.
I’m going to miss Sallie Mae.
But I’d like to think that we’re not so much through as taking a break.
Right now, I’m applying to graduate school.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
As If Today Wasn't Sweet Enough
Yeah, I know we're supposed to be post-partisan now, but I hope it hurt like a mother.
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
Michael Lewis Tearing It Up
I have always enjoyed reading Michael Lewis, author of "Liar's Poker" but have always considered him to be something of a lightweight. His positive, good-natured spin on his subjects, his cheery tone, his breezy and humorous writing style was fun, but a trifle superficial.
The collapse of the business and culture of investment banking, and the pain that collapse has wrought onto the rest of the economy, seems to have lit some sort of fire in Mikey. Though never veering into anything like righteous indignation, he does come across as more serious --- not to mention peeved --- than I've ever read him.
The first shot of this more serious, concerned Lewis was fired in the pages of Portfolio, a Conde Nast publication that was launched to be a kind of New Gilded Age wank-mag but looks to be turning into its autopsy report. It's a great, comprehensible overview of the chicanery, shenanigans, subterfuges, and magic thinking that created our current financial system collapse. As well as a thumbnail sketch of the culture that created a welcoming environment for it all.
The second shot, popped off in the NYT Opinion pages adds a look at the governmental and institutional (especially the financial ratings institutions) capture by the investment banking culture.
Both are rewarding and enlightening reads.
The collapse of the business and culture of investment banking, and the pain that collapse has wrought onto the rest of the economy, seems to have lit some sort of fire in Mikey. Though never veering into anything like righteous indignation, he does come across as more serious --- not to mention peeved --- than I've ever read him.
The first shot of this more serious, concerned Lewis was fired in the pages of Portfolio, a Conde Nast publication that was launched to be a kind of New Gilded Age wank-mag but looks to be turning into its autopsy report. It's a great, comprehensible overview of the chicanery, shenanigans, subterfuges, and magic thinking that created our current financial system collapse. As well as a thumbnail sketch of the culture that created a welcoming environment for it all.
The second shot, popped off in the NYT Opinion pages adds a look at the governmental and institutional (especially the financial ratings institutions) capture by the investment banking culture.
Both are rewarding and enlightening reads.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Home of the Pregnant Burrito
Also on the menu:
The Lactating Flan
The Menstruating Chimichanga
The Prematurely Ejaculating Churro
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Letter to Another Aspiring Screenwriter
A college friend living out of Los Angeles recently asked me to help him sell a pair of screenplays he has written. Here was my response:
I'm pleased that you believe me to be capable of selling screenplays through my efforts. I kind of feel like the Michael Rappaport character in True Romance. Yeah, sure, I live out here. But that doesn't necessarily mean that I can move a briefcase of cocaine, or a pair of screenplays.
Though if you have a briefcase of cocaine, feel free to send it. I don't know if I could sell it, and don't use it, but I could certainly move it up the noses of a lot of sexy chicks in exchange for gratifying my strong --- if dully conventional --- physical needs.
All I can offer is the same, hackneyed advice that everyone ever gives about the biz. Because it is true. And that is to make a list of agents and agencies and actors and producers and send them a copy and hope some of them get some flunky to read it. Really that's all that someone without writing credits can hope for.
All that connections and face-time really gets you is the ability to skip the flunky and get the script directly to the agent or star or producer or studio exec directly. In other words, to jump over a possible dead end. Then the script has to stand or fall on its merits.
There is another hackneyed bit of verbiage that gets thrown around the screenwriting world a lot here, and it is also true. If a great script were to be thrown out the window of a moving car on the 405, it would still get made and opened wide in two years.
There is a ravenous, insatiable, burning hunger in this town for great scripts. Great scripts are like the seed crystal that drops into a supersaturated solution, and immediately cause the other elements of a film to bond to them. Stars want to be in a great scripted film. Directors want to direct big stars. Producers want to make a movie with top directors and stars. Studios want to distribute a movie made by top producers, directors and stars. The audience duly lines up to go see The Prestige.
This is all true.
Those of us who are churning out words on paper, formatted with actions, characters and dialogue don't want to believe that this is true.
One, because we see films coming out to the theaters that fall far short of the "great script" standard.
And Two, because writing a great script is so fucking hard and we know we aren't doing it, and don't even really know if we want to do everything it takes to write one. Or if we can.
I mentioned True Romance up top. That was a great script. So was Pulp Fiction. For all his eventual excesses and indulgences, Tarantino has put down some strikingly fresh, original, smart, interesting stories down on paper. Stories that are informed and grounded in the time-tested principles of drama, yet break free of them in an exciting way. True Romance would have been made if it had been found under a bush in a lawn. So would Pulp Fiction.
I know that I'm not writing Pulp Fiction right now. I am, more or less admittedly, writing Stir of Echoes. But so what? It's only my second go at the form. By script six or seven I might be a bit closer to the mark I'm shooting for.
So, a neophyte screenwriter might wonder, how do all these sub-great scripts get made? And how, he might continue to wonder, could he get his bad Stir of Echoes clone turned into a film? This is where connections and favors and obligations and misjudgments and chance enter the picture. After all, the movie industry has to make movies. If there aren't enough great scripts to go around --- and there aren't --- other factors enter the selection process.
People that went to USC or NYU film school with decisionmakers prevail upon them to buy a script. TV writers have their agent push their feature film onto producers and execs for them. One decisionmaker buys a script he isn't in love with because he's making a marketing decision to capture a demographic he thinks will love it. Another decisionmaker has more money and power than taste. A third has a personal, political or social agenda he/she wants to push.
Sadly, you and I cannot count on those factors.
We simply haven't done the things in our life that would bend and tweak and push the system in our favor. We didn't know we were supposed to, for one thing. And we were busy doing other things for another.
So we just have to write a great script, send it into the world more or less through the usual channels, and see what happens. I've watched some people have what this industry calls success through this route. Typically, they've had one script get some buzz and interest, but nothing happen. Then a couple scripts get bought, but languish and expire afterwards. Then they pitch a ton of other scripts, get some rewrite jobs, and bang out a few more spec scripts. Then something gets made that disappears. Then, maybe, something gets made that people see and like. To be honest, the process looks an awful lot like work to me.
Alternatively, we could turn ourselves into a producer, and director, and craft services provider and make our films ourselves.
Believe me, I wish I had more to offer you than cliches and exhortations to work even harder for an uncertain reward, but I simply don't.
P.S. If you have not read The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield, I cannot recommend it more highly. Dude breaks it all down. Why we want to be creative, why we aren't, how we can be, and why we should.
I'm pleased that you believe me to be capable of selling screenplays through my efforts. I kind of feel like the Michael Rappaport character in True Romance. Yeah, sure, I live out here. But that doesn't necessarily mean that I can move a briefcase of cocaine, or a pair of screenplays.
Though if you have a briefcase of cocaine, feel free to send it. I don't know if I could sell it, and don't use it, but I could certainly move it up the noses of a lot of sexy chicks in exchange for gratifying my strong --- if dully conventional --- physical needs.
All I can offer is the same, hackneyed advice that everyone ever gives about the biz. Because it is true. And that is to make a list of agents and agencies and actors and producers and send them a copy and hope some of them get some flunky to read it. Really that's all that someone without writing credits can hope for.
All that connections and face-time really gets you is the ability to skip the flunky and get the script directly to the agent or star or producer or studio exec directly. In other words, to jump over a possible dead end. Then the script has to stand or fall on its merits.
There is another hackneyed bit of verbiage that gets thrown around the screenwriting world a lot here, and it is also true. If a great script were to be thrown out the window of a moving car on the 405, it would still get made and opened wide in two years.
There is a ravenous, insatiable, burning hunger in this town for great scripts. Great scripts are like the seed crystal that drops into a supersaturated solution, and immediately cause the other elements of a film to bond to them. Stars want to be in a great scripted film. Directors want to direct big stars. Producers want to make a movie with top directors and stars. Studios want to distribute a movie made by top producers, directors and stars. The audience duly lines up to go see The Prestige.
This is all true.
Those of us who are churning out words on paper, formatted with actions, characters and dialogue don't want to believe that this is true.
One, because we see films coming out to the theaters that fall far short of the "great script" standard.
And Two, because writing a great script is so fucking hard and we know we aren't doing it, and don't even really know if we want to do everything it takes to write one. Or if we can.
I mentioned True Romance up top. That was a great script. So was Pulp Fiction. For all his eventual excesses and indulgences, Tarantino has put down some strikingly fresh, original, smart, interesting stories down on paper. Stories that are informed and grounded in the time-tested principles of drama, yet break free of them in an exciting way. True Romance would have been made if it had been found under a bush in a lawn. So would Pulp Fiction.
I know that I'm not writing Pulp Fiction right now. I am, more or less admittedly, writing Stir of Echoes. But so what? It's only my second go at the form. By script six or seven I might be a bit closer to the mark I'm shooting for.
So, a neophyte screenwriter might wonder, how do all these sub-great scripts get made? And how, he might continue to wonder, could he get his bad Stir of Echoes clone turned into a film? This is where connections and favors and obligations and misjudgments and chance enter the picture. After all, the movie industry has to make movies. If there aren't enough great scripts to go around --- and there aren't --- other factors enter the selection process.
People that went to USC or NYU film school with decisionmakers prevail upon them to buy a script. TV writers have their agent push their feature film onto producers and execs for them. One decisionmaker buys a script he isn't in love with because he's making a marketing decision to capture a demographic he thinks will love it. Another decisionmaker has more money and power than taste. A third has a personal, political or social agenda he/she wants to push.
Sadly, you and I cannot count on those factors.
We simply haven't done the things in our life that would bend and tweak and push the system in our favor. We didn't know we were supposed to, for one thing. And we were busy doing other things for another.
So we just have to write a great script, send it into the world more or less through the usual channels, and see what happens. I've watched some people have what this industry calls success through this route. Typically, they've had one script get some buzz and interest, but nothing happen. Then a couple scripts get bought, but languish and expire afterwards. Then they pitch a ton of other scripts, get some rewrite jobs, and bang out a few more spec scripts. Then something gets made that disappears. Then, maybe, something gets made that people see and like. To be honest, the process looks an awful lot like work to me.
Alternatively, we could turn ourselves into a producer, and director, and craft services provider and make our films ourselves.
Believe me, I wish I had more to offer you than cliches and exhortations to work even harder for an uncertain reward, but I simply don't.
P.S. If you have not read The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield, I cannot recommend it more highly. Dude breaks it all down. Why we want to be creative, why we aren't, how we can be, and why we should.
O-Borg-Ma?
True. I can’t help myself from mutilating Obama’s name to make my silly writing points.
But seriously. Has anyone noticed that Obama has the uncanny habit of absorbing his former opponents into his organization?
Joe Biden, VP. Hilary, Secretary of State. Bill Richardson, Commerce Secretary. Republican-Picked, Surge-Supporting Robert Gates to stay on as Defence Secretary.
Indeed, say some progressives, Obama seems to prefer appointing people from the center and even center-right --- where the real challenges to his nomination came from, incidentally --- over the progressive and left elements who formed his earliest, loudest and most eager supporters.
Resistance, apparently, is not futile. It is rewarded.
Thursday, December 04, 2008
Eliot Spitzer: Columnist
Disgraced former NY District Attorney and Governor Eliot Spitzer has published his first column for Slate, in which he astutely criticizes the form that the taxpayer-funded bailout has taken. Whatever you may think of Spitzer, it's clear that the man recognizes a good fucking when he sees one.
Burger Assault
A South Florida man was arrested and charged with domestic violence for repeatedly smashing a McDonald's cheeseburger into his girlfriend's face.
The original charges of attempted murder were dropped when police determined that he was not trying to make her actually eat it.
The Jolie Bible
A new, illustrated version of the Bible has been released, which includes glossy photos of Angelina Jolie, cruelly placed right next to the chapters that tell you not to masturbate.
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