December Wolves:We Are So Fucking Witty

Fuck nostalgia. I am alive in this moment and no other. Now, excuse me while I update my facebook status with that. This is another blog about how stupid and short-sighted I am.

Congratulations on complaining about reposting on a useless facebook group.

Really, I was moments away from commenting that on a thread but luckily, I realized I had nothing to say except berate other people on a thread for berating other people. Realizing this, I felt like a real winner.

It goes like this. One of the people is super catty about making sure there aren't reposts in a Facebook group with over 9000 pictures on it. So, she and this other guy (both friends of Eleven Names, by the way) constantly post on the thread that the picture is already here. Infuriatingly, they don't provide links. It's frustrating to have someone tell you it's already there and not have the courtesy of showing where.

But yes. Posting on a facebook thread and being smug about how people are wasting their time seems lie a bad way to go about the business of the entertainment in my life. It's not like I'm contributing anything. Snark is a vessel for showing how intelligent you believe yourself to be. And in a conversation where people are already getting out of hand, it's unwise.

Beyond that, it's more embarrassing for me that I was actively searching for that thread so I could look smarter. I had to look for that picture at work and then type something into that little text box and look for a way to put those people down. I should be bigger than that. I've been on the internet for a good decade of my life now and I'm reinforcing this tendency for replies and attention?

I'm a college graduate, man. I'm too old for shit like this. But I'm not, really, am I?

I want other people to see how intelligent I am, damn it! I want to be recognized, by the universe at large, I suppose. I reinforce this dumb cycle of hate with everyone "in before Person X says Y" or every witty comment I feel compelled to make. I know it's a larger part of the game of top dog, but for whatever reason, I'm hesitant to walk away from it. (I mean, I just love Courage Wolf!) It's one way of staying in touch. But reading it I just feel like I'm done.

That's it. Simply fed up and tired. This feeling might pass in the morning. I hope it does, but if I take nothing else from it, I guess I'm just going to try to leave positive messages or none at all. Hey, that sounds kind of familiar. What's old is new.

(And no, I'm not going to end the blog on that note. I've done that too many times before and by now that's one of my tropes. The other, in case you're wondering, is trying to connect myself to a larger idea.) Life is short and I should have better things to do than prance around on the internet showing off my presumed plumage. And if I don't, frankly, I ought to shut up and create them. So I'm going to go do that.

This Blog Is About Political Correctness

Yeah, this one is really, really old in internet terms (I first wrote part of this on May 20th.) and am coming back to it now as a way to get something out soon, because I'm lost inside my own head around the death of Iain Steele and the community's response to it. His death is tragic, but the reaction to it, I think, is going to continue that cycle of tragedy and really, all that's gonna happen is a sad cycle of emasculating males for admitting they have feelings.

And that's (along with depression) what made it easy to pick on Iain Steele and the major contributing factor to Iain's suicide. So, instead, this one is about being politically correct and people who don't recognize their own privilege.




So I've been on the internet today, reading and synthesizing, trying to figure out what I want to do and I ended up on Kotaku's not-forum Talk Amongst Yourselves and kind of predictably, I ended up talking about Resident Evil 5, N'Gai Croal and racism. That, and oddly enough, political correctness.

I've had a lot of interactions with that epithet, most of it aimed at me. Majority of the time, it's by other people who are white males saying "You're too much of a buzzkill." Or, "you're thinking too much". I hate that last one especially. Really, it's one of the few things I actively dislike. (I passively dislike much of this planet.) Sometimes, it's called for, I think. Most of the time, though, it isn't. I'm not thinking too much, you're not thinking enough, I think.

The comment that got me was "political correctness is becoming a tumour, it stifles creative licence and frowns at the outlandish, Housewives of America need to get a life and the people who jump on the racism band wagon at any available chance need to wake up and smell the bacon."

I think he's wrong. Political correctness is not a tumor, it's one of the few things that gives me hope about our society. Political correctness is a start to a wider recognition that not everyone comes from the same perspective. I think he's missed the point. The point is not to stifle creativity but instead to try to speak in a way that doesn't passively disenfranchise whole groups of people not being "normal". I've given it some thought and I have decided that I'm not sorry, not one bit, for, in Jay Smooth's words, making people think about how their words affect people.

And I don't know if the person believes that having to respect other people's perspectives and lives is so incredibly difficult that it's easier just to assume they "don't mean it like that", but like the wise man said, in any healthy relationship, the closer you get, the more you know and respect other people's boundaries and that's what being politically correct is.

Political correctness is about showing respect and humility towards people with a different history than you. From what I understand, political correctness is supposed to be about respecting the humanity of people who aren't like you. Political correctness, so far as I can tell, is supposed to be about understanding how we affect each other and caring more about how that happens, not as a euphemism for smarminess and insincerity.

I guess I've got a fondness for different perspectives. One of the first songs I geeked out to had a chorus that said no one will ever be like me and six years later, I found that chorus again in a hip-hop song and it brought me back to punk rock and now, I see it again in an argument on the internet. Everyone's perspective is unique. That doesn't mean each perspective is meaningfully different, but that there is more than one overarching one is one of the points of political correctness and being careful with one's language.

Respect isn't dead, but there sure are people who want to shoot it in the head.

The Replacement Post

So I typed up this giant thing that was more naval-gazing about how I'm basically a guiltily mindless consumer of all that is shameful internet culture, when I found out that WTF blogger lied when it said it saved that draft! My anger immediately manifested itself in the form of a frowny emoticon.

D:<

Regardless, there's been a lot of politic talk on here lately, and I can't blame anyone (except for James and Zach, damn them), because politics are probably big and important. I sometimes worry, because I have no great feelings for any candidate, because my preferred system of government would be some kind of bucolic anarchy, where small city-states barter with each other. And maybe compete against each other with champions in a dome. A Thunder Dome. Maybe this thundering dome is ruled over by an evil genius midget riding on the back of a mentally handicapped giant (what, no link to a picture of Dick Cheney standing on Bush's shoulders? Internet, you have failed me again!). Maybe it isn't. My ideal government is not as well thought out as, say, my fondness for pictures of cats (which is agonizing in its complexity).

I cannot, in good conscious, endorse any candidate. I simply cannot care - eight years (barring, I guess, several months of vacation) of continual emotional and psychological abuse at the hands of George W. Bush have rendered me into a kind of jelly. My reaction to things is no longer a matter of conscious thought and decision, but rather, it is a kind of alchemical process. As surely as you can generate electricity from a potato, I generate disgust at any individual who proclaims him/herself lord over his peers. The very notion of power coming from anything other than the sun makes me a little bit sick. This presidency has become the Vietnam of our generation, so you can imagine what the people who are going through the real Vietnam of our generation are thinking (answer: varied). My college educated white boy internet-ennui has nothing on a guy who had to get his legs amputated because he was driving his humvee on the road. Let us not even discuss the civilian population of Iraq, nor the irresponsible kill-happy mercenaries that are charged with their safety, else I be forced to drown my worries in laudanum and Edward Gorey cartoons (James! Do not take Lye by mistake!), and then resort to an even more florid style of writing.

Instead, let us speak, you and I, huddled over this little flame we call Elevennames. Changes are afoot, many of them on purpose! We shall become a raging bonfire, no doubt, driving back the darkness of our times. You will notice our costly advertisements, at the shocking fee of free*. Do you have a business? Is it funky (we at elevennames are at least funky) and fresh? Do you find us not offensive to most senses? Are you not Blackwater? By all means, then, do as A-ha commands, and take on us!

*As I was composing this, the price jumped to $.02. HIDE YOUR POCKETBOOKS, THE BLOGGER ROBBER BARONS ARE COMING TO TOWN.

Also, perhaps staff expansion. Hur hur hur. More later.

Would you like a preview of potential theme week? I think you would.

Hateful Screed; Politics Edition!

Benazir Bhutto has been killed. It is a sad day. The primary impact is always one of loss - here was a person who let us understand the movement she represented, who was willing to die for it. That kind of political devotion is unheard of in America, which brings me to point two of why the day is sad - our own political race, and how the candidates are going to try to use the death of this noble person in order to further their own careers. If they mention it at all, that is. I understand most of the republicans have something against People Who Are Not White, and want to hide them all behind fences.

I once recall hearing that although you are white and American, it does not mean you don't suffer - just that your suffering pales in comparison with what other people have to go through. Which is true. There's been a push with recent American policy to appeal to use what sounds like the logic of the suburbs internationally - the fence metaphor returns. If you don't like your neighbors, block them off. Don't do anything to upset your important neighbors, too - the US can't come down too hard on president Musharef, because if they did, where would the US stage it's forays into the middle east? How many people even know or care about what's happening?

Before I am swept away by the tidal pull of despair, I must try to come clean about some things. I am cynical because deep down, I feel that I'm helpless in the situation. I'm not even sure that if I knew how I could help that I would. At my core, I hate politics, and all that they stand for. I think that they're nothing but an outlet for the most vile, bullying, putrescent pieces of semi-sentient human waste to achieve something resembling, in it's most exterior aspects, a respectable life. I even hate the candidates I like. There's nothing admirable about public office. It's a circus of balding old men and their sycophants, mistresses, and saducees.

And the worst part seems to be that, like a disease, it's spreading. Ted Haggart, Larry E. Craig, Rush Limbaugh. People who abuse the faith that the public has in them, who lead tiny, pathetic shadow-lives behind the public image that constitutes all that they really are. Say what you like about Marion Barry, at least DC knew what it was getting when they re-elected him.

Why do these drug addicted whoremongers get to continue with their unusually wide-stanced ways, whenever someone so generally admirable as Benazir Bhutto gets blown up? The American Political/Fame system seems to be irreversibly corrupt, where one achieves power through falsehood, lowest-common-denominator appeals, and apparently, the guiding hand of Satan himself. The person who stands up is the person who gets cut down. I hate to sound like them, I hate the thought that this post even echoes something that they might suggest, but perhaps ignoring the problem will no longer make it go away. The American Way, anymore, is about access, and as long as you have an iPod, radio, satellite radio, TiVo, elaborate smoke message system, or effing telegraph, these people are going to be worming their way into your life. We're like Whatsisbucket in A Clockwork Orange, tied to a chair, and forced to witness not atrocities and horrors, but rather, the overwhelming cowardice, lies, and pabulum of the modern age. Is it any surprise, then, when America produces not monsters, but yawning, gawking sociopaths, unable to feel anything other than greed?

I, too, am a victim. I strive for something resembling legitimacy, morality, respectability. Would I even be able to recognize it, if it would present itself? Probably not. I am one of the yawners, the gawkers, the ones who casually shrug off increasingly depressing systems of jurisprudence in favor of talking about who should have "won" Tila Tequila's show. I may be suffering, but it does not mean that I have any idea to what degree others are in pain. I can only hope to take some lesson away from the assassination, some aspect of Benazir Bhutto's work, that maybe there are worse things that can happen to you besides death - you can live a life of complete mundanity, dulling your senses from a universe full of wonders.