Ignorance is Bliss

Just a reminder of what we are facing in this new millenium:

"He Hate Me" is the phrase Smart chose to place on the back of his Las Vegas Outlaws football jersey during the one and only season of the XFL (2001). Though most sports organizations allow only a surname or first initial and surname to be placed on the back of a jersey, XFL rules permitted players' jerseys to be stitched with whatever words they wanted.

Smart explained the origin of the grammatically non-standard phrase in a January 30, 2004 article with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as, "Basically, my brother's my opponent. After I win, he's gonna hate me. It is what it is. It's a saying I was saying when I'd feel something wasn't going my way. For example, (when) I was on the squad in Vegas and coach was putting other guys in, (if) I felt I'm better than them, you know, hey, 'he hate me.' See what I'm saying? Give me a chance. That's all I ask. It came from the heart. Within. The way I felt."

When Smart and the Outlaws played divisional rival Los Angeles Xtreme, two Xtreme players put "I Hate He" and "I Hate He Too" on the back of their jerseys to express their disdain for Smart. In a later game between those two teams, those two players changed their nicknames to "Still Hate He" and "Still Hate He Too". The curious maxim also caught the eye of American audiences (as well as Smart's future Carolina Panthers teammate Jake Delhomme, who named one of his thoroughbreds, "She Hate Me"). In an episode of the dramatic TV series CSI: NY, a dead roller derby player is named "She Hate Me." The phrase "He Hate Me" was used on a headband worn by Bucky Katt in a 2004 Get Fuzzy comic strip storyline by cartoonist Darby Conley involving Bucky's irrational hatred of beavers. The moniker was also referenced by Spike Lee to title his movie She Hate Me (the main character gives his ex-fiancé the nickname after she leaves him for a lesbian). Mark Cuban has changed it to "He Fine Me" for his shirts worn at Dallas Mavericks games, in reference to the NBA often fining the flamboyant owner. When the XFL was disbanded, Don Walker of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote an article headlined, "He Fold Me". "He Hate Me", along with the Sky Cam and the in-game interview, is one of the few remnants of the short lived XFL to have a lasting impact.

Of the moniker, Smart said "That's a part of me, so I never get tired of that. It's like my birth name, except it only came later than birth."

Milk Run

Hazing is important and should not be suppressed.

Please discuss

Roughly quoted from Dallas Willard:

     "A 'leap of faith' is in fact a leap without faith."

And from John Niehardt,

     "Man without mysticism is a monster."


Are these ideas true?  Universally?  Subjectively?  Do you care?

If sack and sugar be a fault...

First, read this:

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/02/hitchens-201002



When I feel punchy, like now, Hitchens seems nothing more than a lubed-up Brit with a good grasp of history and a flair for tested yet worn Anglo syntax and diction that Americans find delightful. Armed with these and a desire for thoughtful mischief, he has to his credit found an audience, composed (predominantly) of pale men who feel that the whole bloody Earth is off its axis, and damnit/bollocks! when WILL our united voice again ring across vales and over hillocks? When will WE be not only right, but righteous, again?


Worse is the transparent psychology behind Hitchens’ look-at-me contortions on the public stage. Granted, if my mother had slit her throat with her lover in a suicide pact when I was a teen, I’d likely have authority issues as well. His (resultant?) embarrassingly public drinking regimen completes the picture of a sympathetic figure----but one wants a political writer to hold those wolves. (Hunter T is dead for a reason.)  Solution? Hitchens rejects any discussion of his drinking as an ad hominem attack, suggesting that his critics haven’t better arguments to counter his ideas (usually borrowed, these, and stylized). To be clear: mine IS an unabashed attack on the man, a suggestion as to why you shouldn’t take him seriously.  Cheers.


Hitchens’ readers ingest a combination of prep school smarm and developmentally retarded neurosis that feels so very much like edgy truth. I will qualify this ugly assertion, that Hitchens is specious on a good day, and Falstaffian on a bad one. He takes the old maxim of “not liberal when young = no heart…not conservative when old = no brain,” and turns it on its ear: “not everything when it suits a Britney Spearsian self-promotion at all times = not famous/irrelevant/poor/unpublished.” Hitchens is a reality-show lit-critter. Ratings, baby. Bend the story, and worse, bend your beliefs to fit.



I. Religityousness



What is it to be a “new Atheist?” A lot like being an old Atheist, but more pissed off that everyone doesn’t get it already.

Hitchens is terrifically skilled in political nonbelief as well. Or rather, switching between belief systems so often as to make his pronouncements weightless. A Marxist first, the next year a radical, the next a garden-variety liberal, a libertarian, a neo-con, a conspiracist and anti-conspiracist in equal measure.
In short, a polemicist ceases to be relevant when he visits most every point of the compass. One can’t have it all ways.
In God is Not Great, the formula is clear: flood the emotions of the reader and hope that he will throw his hands up and agree that God is a fabrication, reject the very notion of Faith based on how dreadfully unfair life appears to be. What, I ask, do one man’s sob stories have to do with the dissolution of all religious belief?

Unless Hitchens turns out to be a modern-day Job on a bad day…eh. The sentence finishes itself. The sad boy mothered terribly, two sips past slurry yet still thirsty for attention, has struck a chord with those not disciplined enough to dig into the same arguments made in seminaries around the world. Life has treated you roughly, Chris. That isn’t the world’s burden to bear. It is yours alone.

The beautiful thrust of thought circling the science vs. religion debate is the assessment of the middle ground, to realize that the “miracles” in the Bible (let’s just talk Christian here for a minute) are explicable in that earlier man hadn’t the language of, or the empiricism behind, Science. The ways we discuss creation are built with the tools of the time: imagination and words. One needs a story, an answer, to quiet the nightmare of wondering Why? How? Especially before one had so much knowledge at one’s fingertips. I.e., can we shut the fuck up about Adam and Eve already? Clearly that’s a human story to explain our origins when we had no concept of primordial ooze. But it gets written. And practiced. And fought over.


But it isn’t incompatible with science—it’s simply an artistic rendering of an event unimaginable to those who wrote it. (Yes, I am dismissing fundamentalist thought, so solly.)


An evolved mind might recognize that some great gift was bestowed upon us, however we came to be having this very nuanced argument! And here we are. Forced to struggle with the idea that the original screed is wrong, a valiant attempt at explaining science when there WAS NO SCIENCE. That creation and science are hand in hand. We got the script wrong, not for lack of trying but for lack of test tubes and glass and fire and practice, a few grand ago. Now in the vacuum of study, we cotton to ideas from a fat Brit bitchboy lush who’s mad at God? No thank you.


Any good scientist ought to be able to face up and say, “Shit, man, this stuff is beyond me. Something else is at work here. I’m not sure what to call it, but until I figure it out, until my well-funded experiments yield an Answer, until I know where we came from and where we go, I won’t piss on belief to sound important.” The rest is bread and circuses.


p.s., Don’t make me bust out the late-career Einstein quotes.



II. Kill Father


Rejecting Gore Vidal at 85(!) years of age has the whang of an angry eulogy at dear Dad’s funeral. When admiration is deeply felt, the pain of disagreement is felt exponentially. This equation helps to quantify the depth of the Vidal dismissal. His literary father took (as Chris himself puts it) a “suicidal” course on matters politic. Ah, so. The twice rejected boy feels again the deepest sting of “parental” departure…but this time, the son is an adult hardened by experience and scotch, and so he strikes back.


Like a father, Vidal helped to make Hitchens. Before their mutual admiration led Vidal to pronounce Chris his literary heir, Hitchens was academy-famous. A name to drop to demonstrate a basic level of with-it-ness at a party. After, he was table conversation.


Hitchens is now most like Vidal thusly: one who stays up nights writing put-downs. Simple bombast.

The difference is, Vidal has laurels aplenty upon which to rest his palsied hand. Et tu, fattysmoke?


Finally, let’s remind ourselves of this plain fact: in fifty years, Vidal’s name will still be spoken in the circles that matter. Hitchens will be mentioned as a footnote, a wry aside.


III. 9/11


The final chapter is my most personally felt. Hitchens’ rejection of Vidal’s 9/11 question is simply arrogant. Shrugging off the question of “what really happened” that day is repellent, especially given his baseless reason: that these are "guttersnipe arguments."


Oh yeah. Because Ockham’s razor works soooo well here. To wit: an old family friend of the Bushes trains a bunch of pissed off Saudis (you know, nothing to live for in SA) to fly planes into important buildings that a creepy landlord (Larry Silverstein) wants to get rid of anyway, and who stands to make (and does) $14bil in insurance money, and who, for some reason, already had WTC 7 rigged to detonate (which he does, and admits to later, on tape)………...but that’s got NOTHING to do with it, and neither does Bush’s 20% approval rating and mandate-less presidency that was immediately puffed up, and a war that he was itching to fight for old dad was started, which had nothing to do with Al-Q… Yes. That’s the simplest explanation of what happened.

And I’m not EVEN going into all the other 9/11 truth stuff. We’ll have plenty of time to explain to our kids in 20 years.
Sigh. If anyone should at least investigate further, it ought to be a self-proclaimed gadfly like Hitchens! The unlikely truth is that the very man who ought to have championed lit-dad’s thoughts was sick of being Gore Vidal Jr., and he strategically ran the hell away from his Pops at the most populist-pleasing moment. Whore!

Hitchens is a sad clown, smarter than Maher but similarly bent on seeking fame, not truth. A once-promising mind corroded, a once thick heart now grey and elastic. Avoid him, fight his ugly soul at every turn.



The “sad coda” he claims is the end of Vidal is, in fact, A last desperate grab at the memory of better days, when people spoke of them warmly in the same breath, not the cold Page-6 chatter we hear now. Vidal is 85. Eighty…five. He is lucky to be writing anything of merit, and should have earned some small degree of respect from the one person he helped most.



Balls to you, Chris. I give you ten years to live, and five to wring the last pale reflection of your former self onto the page.

The Solar System: A Comic Theory

The sun: Here is a premise that 9 out of 10 people on the street would find funny. The target is enormous and easy to hit, so the execution doesn't have to be perfect. There will be an explosion. Boom: cheese, ham, fruit carts tipping over, one caveman hitting another caveman on the head with a club. Pandemonium. If this is executed beautifully, everyone can enjoy it. If it's executed without care, there will still be plenty of laughter in the auditorium, but a certain percentage of the audience will only have a sick, sad feeling. Beautiful execution of solar comedy is rare. When it happens, the work in question is clutched with extreme loyalty to humanity's bosom.

No, we're not going to make individual stops to all the other planets. We're going to leap to Pluto, sailing past "Men and women are different!" and "Office life is bizarre!" and "Behold the quirks of this famous person!" and then you can extrapolate.

Pluto: Here is a premise that 1 out of 10 people on the street would find funny, and that's only if you're on a street in a cosmopolitan city. Pluto's orbit is huge, your ship is tiny. Calculations must be incredibly precise, only once you're out as far as Pluto, you can't use your conscious mind to calculate. You have to get there the same way the swallows get to San Juan Capistrano. You have to feel it, make infinitesimal adjustments in the wind. Courage is required to venture to Pluto, and a willingness to fail. You may not make it. You can't care if you make it or not. Be prepared for a sea of blank stares, or worse. The audience might get angry. They think you're trying to do something untoward, and they're right. And even if you hit Pluto exactly, even if your landing is right on target, you're not guaranteed an explosion of laughter. But something fine will happen, something deep. A ripple in the cosmos, generating from this tiny Plutonian stage. An evolutionary quantum leap.

Please embroider, if you like, or erase and start again.

Toe, meet water.

Two threads, one generated by the death of J.D. Salinger, the other generated by a recent conversation with an artist friend.

In the paper this morning, I read an account of the town in New Hampshire where Salinger lived. His disinclination to participate in the larger world is patent. What the article described of Salinger's life in this town, though, was not the life of a hermit. Salinger participated as fully in his community as anyone could want: Saturday evening church dinners, daily trips to a general store, votes cast in local elections. What was striking, in this age of the long lens and the upskirt shot, was the protection afforded Salinger in return by the townspeople – the misdirection of tourists, the diffident closing of ranks.


[The article notes, by the way, that Salinger would write in a spiral-bound notebook as he waited for his $12 roast beef dinner to arrive, for upwards of an hour or more. What the hell was he writing? The mind reels.]

What I took away from the article was the gentle conspiracy of this town, to provide its resident artist a safe and private space. I have no way of knowing whether Salinger was making art in his spiral notebook, sketching his neighbors and friends, describing the kids who served him his dinner. Maybe he was writing endless grocery lists. Still, the banding together of this town, and its guardianship of Salinger’s time and solitude was sweet to note, even if not a single page from those spiral notebooks ever sees the light of day. The mere possibility of art, and the means necessary to produce it – nurtured by a community. What magic.

Second thread: my friend, talented and proven, though not yet able to support himself with his art, is working an unpaid design internship and looking to wait tables. Our conversation, largely focused on our unhappy work-lives, roams around the topic of what is required to do art. The central themes: time, space, solitude. A certain selfish [bad word, someone will correct me] withdrawal, inconsistent with family and work and marriage. A consistent refusal to strive, to accumulate, to keep the overall apparatus in good tune.

My friend noted that “self-hatred is the cornerstone of American enterprise.” I think he’s right – and certainly Jumpy covered this beautifully in his earlier entry – so, perhaps my use of the word “selfish” in the preceding paragraph has some merit. If you’re going to be a cog in the larger machine, the machine that lights your streets and buys your kid shoes, the machine that allows you to produce said kid in a socially-sanctioned manner, something has to give.

So, here’s where these two threads meet in my head: if you’re not Salinger, and you don't have 1700 inscrutable Northeasterners to run interference, is it possible to live a creative life in 21st century America? And, if so, what do I/we/you have to sacrifice to get there?


Post script: I know, I do, that the above is written from the perspective of an overeducated, middle-class, white woman with artistic pretensions. I get that it could be worse. I still want answers to the questions.