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[ 6 Comments ]Posted on April 16, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Friday, April 16th, 2010Why are rednecks and hillbillies always trying to co-opt my heritage and ethnic identity?
 We’re still struggling with the White Trash brand, as you can see. |
You know America has really gone to hell when a self-respecting white supremacist can’t attend a tea party rally without getting harassed by some elitist intellectual teabagger type. We suggested a while back that the country may be headed for some kind of red vs. blue civil war, but this thinking was based on the pretty narrow evidence of two-party voting behavior during a national election. Now that we’ve had a chance to see America showing its true (mostly white) colors, we’re rethinking things a bit, and think the real civil disorder will be just that: civil disorder. And mostly amongst the hard-to-define factions known as rednecks, hillbillies, and white trash. Yes, while American spatial mobility seems to have slowed around 2007, we’re still left with a lot people from different American subcultures transplanted to a variety of urban areas. And as the old saying goes, “you can take the boy out of the country” yadda yadda. I was reminded of how powerful these subcultural influences can be recently when I used the term “white trash” in mixed company. And by “mixed company”, I mean a group of white people from various parts of the country, some of whom are only spittin’ distance from their more rural roots. I really thought that in an age when so many oppressed groups of people had reclaimed the power of words used against them – i.e.: gay men calling themselves fags, black people calling themselves niggers, etc. – that my reference to my white trash background was pretty safe. How wrong I was. The hilarious arguments that ensued regarding what the differences were between rednecks, hillbillies, and white trash inspired me to do a series of utterly unscientific pop-anthropology overviews of the distinctions. Since my snuff-dippin’ grandmother from West Virginia always bragged about how the main thing that made her not a redneck was the fact that her family fought for the Union during the civil war, that’s the first line I’m going to draw. The strongest image in the redneck brand seems to be the confederate flag, so I’m going to assert that since grandma didn’t come from the hills, and wasn’t a redneck, she must have been white trash. Which gives me license to claim a certain expertise on this group. We’ll go into more detail in upcoming pieces (besides, we already covered how to talk like a hillbilly) , but I figure we’ll cover some basics right now. First of all, you’ll need a name. An awful lot of my white trash (see how comfortably I use the term now?) ancestors had that familiar “billy bob” or dotty mae” theme going on, so I highly recommend this white trash name generator. Two other fundamentals in life are food and housing. As a culinary guide, I can comfortably recommend White Trash Cooking
Porn For The Blind
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on April 11, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Sunday, April 11th, 2010It’s an equal op-porn-tunity world. Bonus: Bill O’Reilly reads the steamy passages from his novel.
 “NSFW” in Braille |
A few years ago, as I fixed the porn-popup-infested computer of a friend (learn more about this strictly male phenomena here), we wondered jokingly what blind people do on the internet, since they can’t look at porn. On a lark we searched “porn for the blind” and came across – you guessed it – PornForTheBlind.org. Which, in spite of what it claims is its aim, is about as erotic as Bill O’Reilly reading the “sexy” parts (samples below) of his audio book Those Who Trespass
Consumer Masochism
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on April 4, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Sunday, April 4th, 2010Now that it’s been established that corporations have the same rights as people, why do we choose to have such masochistic relationships with them?
  If you really ARE into this kind of abuse, I bet you didn’t know Amazon sells all the bondage gear  you’ll need.You’ll also be surprised what people call Sexual Wellness these days. |
I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re a nation of masochists. Why else would we put up with the endless assault on our sensibilities perpetrated by almost every large corporation we do business with? You’ve almost certainly had some kind of interaction with a credit card company, phone company, bank, or some other product maker or service provider that left you astounded, if not enraged. I’m going to list a few specific experiences of my own below, but I’d love to hear yours. I’m honestly just perplexed as to why we, as consumers, don’t band together and address the litany of deceptive, fraudulent, and generally scurrilous practices of almost every major corporation we keep afloat with our hard-earned dollars. I mean, the list is endless. It’s not like you have to nit-pick. You go to do something simple like buy groceries, and as standard practice, chain stores place all the products no-one wants at eye level, put different brands of the same item in different parts of the store, and line all the aisles with misleading sale tags. These and other strategies are familiar tricks, but does the store really generate more sales that way? I’d love to see the solid research. My hunch is that it’s an accepted method that is assumed to increase sales, but in reality only creates more grumpy shoppers. Another common example: if your cell phone provider is Verizon, they tell you that you qualify for a free or cheap phone every two years for your faithful patronage, and when you go to collect it, they give you rebate forms to fill out and mail in while they bill you the full price, banking on the likelihood you’ll miss the deadline and will have already been billed by then. Even if you do follow their Byzantine rebate requirements carefully, they’ve essentially forced you to loan them money for the interim. Pretty clever. But we’re all familiar with the concepts behind these annoying practices, I’m just curious as to why we tolerate them. I’m going to share a few of mine from the last year below; I’d love to hear about yours. Maybe there’s something we can do. I mean something besides complain about complaint web sites on complaint web sites. Read the rest of this entry »
Black Tie Optional, Excessive Etiquette Discouraged
[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 28, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Sunday, March 28th, 2010Has America’s sense of style and manners eroded to the point that black tie optional really just means no-one will laugh if you drink the finger bowl?
 Sure. Have Fun. Just don’t drink the finger bowl, okay? |
What does “black tie optional” mean? Well, there was a time when it meant a bunch of rich jerks standing around in tuxes they actually owned, pointing fingers behind their hand at the inept doofus who was wearing a rental. As I learned recently though, it now means “we have delusional pretensions of class and style from another era, and think you should too“. Attending a few formal events over the past month or two, I was surprised by the range of interpretations of what the terms Black Tie and variants of Black Tie Optional mean in today’s style and social continuum. Although part of me recoils at the idea of people wearing uniforms to identify their social standing, another part of me recoils even more at the idea of maintaining a tradition of that sort and then failing to enforce it properly. The biggest distinction I noticed between “black tie” and “black tie optional” events was a higher incidence of people at the black tie functions who knew how to hold their fork and not drink the finger bowl. The “black tie optional” events were more complicated in their interpretation of style, but easy to break down: you could tell a man was over 50 if he actually wore a tux, and under 50 if he was wearing anything from a Nehru jacket to Dockers and a sport coat with a turtle-neck. With a high likelihood that whoever wasn’t wearing a tie was wearing a Rolex, playing with his iPhone, and drinking the finger bowl. Not that I’m laying claim to being part of some elite old money crowd (although I love things like country clubs that keep garish ties on hand for guests that arrive under-dressed), in fact one of my early major fashion failures was when I was in my twenties and dating a graduating law student*, and she asked me to be her date at a black tie event in Chicago. At the time I didn’t own a tux and was still in the depths of my occasionally rather debilitating alternative style addiction. I thought I’d be clever and jar convention a bit by wearing a Spencer-cut tux. It looked kind of hip in a “White Prince on the Purple Rain Tour” kind of way, but it took me awhile to figure out why all the arrogant little lawyers-to-be kept asking me to get them another drink. Which I think highlights a pet theory of mine, which is that the lack of class and style that seems so prevalent the last few decades is a result of the perversion of an older class structure, driven by the rapid acquisition of wealth by the former underclasses. Which I think has contributed to a sense of a slowly crumbling sense of order and comfort in our culture, something I reference a lot. What do you think? Do a sense of class and style matter as much as affluence and personal expression?
Wealth Care For All
[ 3 Comments ]Posted on March 22, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Monday, March 22nd, 2010If America were one hundred people, one would have forty-two bucks while eighty others shared seven dollars.
Now that they seem to have that “health care for all” thing fixed, maybe America should get to work on WEALTH care for all. I mean, somebody besides the Billionaires For Wealth Care that is, whose motto is “if we’re not broke, don’t fix it”. Yeah, it’s nice that Ben Bernanke is all outraged now that the money has changed hands and he still has a job. But I bet he’s still against the idea of wealth redistribution otherwise, even though he was behind one of the most epic examples of it. But seriously, what is wrong with redistribution of wealth? And when did so many working stiffs start thinking it’s a horrible idea? Let’s ponder for a moment the concepts of “fairness” as it pertains to wealth distribution. If, because of our God-given right to explore our Darwinian right to survival of the fittest in our laissez-faire capitalist society, I guess it’s fair that if you can horde a few billion dollars for yourself, well, more power to ya. At the point where you have 6 or 7 houses and as many cars, as well as virtually no worries in terms of food, clothing, shelter, and FU luxury items, still we might say well, go ahead. You’re a selfish ass, but go ahead. But when you reach this level of surplus and the citizens of the country that got you there are literally starving, I think any reasonable person would say maybe it’s time for you to cut a few bucks loose simply out of human decency. I mean really, you can’t drive seven cars at once, can you? In my opinion, if by this point you haven’t decided on a little serious philanthropy, that’s still your choice. But in the interest of maintaining the “survival of the fittest, every man for himself” theories that you justify your behavior with, I think that’s when it becomes fair for the rest of us to kill you and eat you. Because science shows that money only makes you happy when you know that you have more than others, and you can’t see us anymore through your smoked-glass limo windows. And we just want you to be happy. So once we’ve wrecked your life and you’re unemployed (we weren’t really gonna eat you, you probably taste like crap) you can rediscover that giving even feels good when you’re jobless. On a serious note: you always hear statements like “one percent of Americans have ninety-nine percent of the wealth”, but no-one ever gets the infographic right. They always use plot lines and pie charts. We have a better example below, feel free to share it. Read the rest of this entry »