There is never a "slow news day" anymore, as the twenty-four-hour cycle burns ever hotter and faster, and thus needs more and more fuel. So it is that Bret Easton Ellis, the original Milo Y. for the lit-crit jet-set, finds his turn in the proverbial barrel, on the pointy end of one of Isaac Chotiner's Socratic-dialogue interviews. Hilarity ensues.
Chotiner has made a recent career/bloodsport of finding moral cretins within or adjacent to His Travesty's smear of influence, as it were, and gradually hoisting the subject on a petard of their own devising. It's a neat trick, and certainly one worth repeating endlessly on these fuckers, but what is most revealing about these interviews, whether it's with some toad directly barnacled to the fleshy hull of the USS Fatboy, or merely a smarmy meta-commenter like Ellis, is that none of these people are prone to sudden epiphanies, nor even flashes of self-awareness. It is essentially the same result as watching yet another CNN lackey jabber at Kellyanne Conway or Rudy Ghouliani.
But it's still interesting to watch Ellis' particular pathology at work here, as he repeatedly insists that he's not interested in politics or policy much at all, but rather that his recent book of essays lambasting "liberals" and "progressives" for their "overreactions" to Trump is about coverage of the spectacle that he, Ellis, considers hysterical and heavy-handed.
Ellis is not wrong when he says that the best solution is for people to focus on voting Trump and his crew out next year. Aside from that, he seems completely oblivious as to why anyone might be anxious in the meantime. We're eight-hundred-and-some days into this shitshow, and virtually every single one of those days has featured some bit of insanity or incompetence or outright illegality on the part of Trump and his coterie of losers and hangers-on.
Ellis seems content to lob smug meta-commentary about Chicken Little libturds overreacting to -- I don't know, let's pick a couple at random: the chief executive routinely threatening and harassing political opponents and pesky mediots; the Attorney General (of the United States -- as in, the public's ranking legal advocate) literally functioning as the personal lawyer for the chief executive; the failson-in-law on a hotline with a Saudi prince who kidnapped an American resident, strapped him to a table and dismembered him alive; a dozen or so lies every day on average; long-term American interests being undermined by reckless foreign policy blunders, not to mention demagoguing the most serious issue facing all of us, regardless of political stance or income level -- climate change.
Right now, and for the past couple years, it has been this nation's policy to separate refugee children from their parents, purely as a punitive measure to discourage others. These people are fleeing conditions of violence that even the poorest, most miserable American would be hard-pressed to imagine (outside of the Alabama penitentiary system, anyway). Nonetheless, there are kids, young kids, who have died in custody, or been raped or molested in custody, or who haven't seen their parents in months, or two or all three of those things.
But as far as Bret Ellis is concerned -- and he's certainly not the only one, just the most recent; there's a spate of these fucking assholes as of late -- the real problem, you see, is the claque of hysterical libturds who just won't stop complaining about this doddering, soup-brained cockroach pitting the nation against itself while he and scummy family pocket everything that isn't nailed down.
One of the more hilarious asides in the interview is where Ellis lamely tries to defend Roseanne Barr:
Think of that: Ellis has written a book that, if not about politics, at least purports to provide some trenchant observations about political activity and thought. In the case of Roseanne's infamous, career-killing tweet about Valerie Jarrett, here is an opportunity to provide some observation. It beggars the imagination to figure plausibly how Roseanne didn't know Jarrett was black, yet plucked a Planet of the Apes reference from out of nowhere as a "joke" or an insult.
Ellis doesn't even have the energy or commitment to try to bullshit his way out of it, or even come up with a lame defense of Roseanne. It's whatever. Boy, does he have a fuckin' way with words or what?
Again, this is not Ellis' fault or creation. We are a decadent, lazy, spoiled society, and so sloppy thinkers and spoiled assholes like Ellis are given unfortunate stature, based on his string of modest successes back when Reagan was watching nuns get raped and murdered in El Salvador. There is no rigor in Ellis' analysis because he has already admitted multiple times that he doesn't really give a shit.
Hell, at the end of the interview, he kinda lets the whole thing slip: It was much more interesting to me to write this as a nonfiction book, in terms of pulling this stuff from my podcast.
Great. So White is really just a compilation of podcast greatest hits, indifferently packaged under a single cover for seventeen bucks or so. Cool grift, broham.
The problem here is not that Ellis is an idiot, nor even an asshole, it's that he's so willfully lazy in his observations, bringing nothing new or fresh to the conversation. He can't even defend his own points that he's asking people to shell out good money for, he just lamely defaults to anecdotal conversations he had with female friends who were okay with Trump bragging about his pussy-grabbing prowess.
For the record, I have female acquaintances who were fine with Trump's "locker-room talk" too. The fact that they have pussies doesn't mean they can't still be wrong about this, and about him. It's the faux-feminist (fauxminist?) version of saying you have a black friend that doesn't mind when people use the n-word, as if that absolved anyone from personal responsibility.
Bret Easton Ellis is comfortably insulated from the consequences of this clusterfuck of an administration. He doesn't have kids, so he likely just assumes that the shit won't really come down until after he's gone, so he's not too worried about it. I actually get that reasoning -- I have a kid and I still sometimes get in that "fuck it" mood and decide it really just doesn't matter, none of it, that it's a prolonged exercise in futility and not worth the effort, that if enough idiots want to let it burn, then maybe we just fucking let it burn and live what's left of our lives while we can.
But I think one of the things that makes us human is that each of us has something that we feel is worth fighting for. It's going to be different things for different individuals, and there will also be lots of overlap, but there's something, big or small, the planet or your country or your family, that you care enough about to put your foot down and say decisively, Fuck you. Enough.
I think that one unstated component in the "outrage" and "overreaction" one sees covered in the media is this: the 2016 election forced liberals and progressives in particular to confront the question of how Trump won -- that either the nation was becoming something they no longer recognized, or that it was like this all along, and the "right" set of conditions came along to clarify that situation.
And it is, by any objective assessment, a serious problem. It's bad enough that Trump is a gaping asshole, and a miserable fucking facsimile of a functioning human being. the real problem is that he's a jabbering moron, a clear fucking dunce who has made the world a worse place. That's really the way it is, and the fact that somewhere between one-third and one-half of this country loves it is an even worse problem.
It is no exaggeration to say that that last one will be the singular challenge for the next generation, and may never get resolved. I don't mean in the ideological sense, so much as just the functional sense, the basic mechanics of governance. This country is run by psychotic billionaires who would literally rather burn up the planet than pay a single percentage point more in taxes, and they own all the propaganda outlets. And they have just enough rubes on the hook to live out Jay Gould's fondest wish.
And so what happens, per Bret Ellis' prescription of voting the Shitbird-In-Thief out of office next year, is that whatever Republicons remain in government will simply revert to an even more toxic version of the rear-guard faction that hamstrung Obama for most of his tenure. The US and the world face some very serious challenges in the near future, most of them driven either by accelerating climate change or increased wealth disparity, and a paralyzed government coupled with propagandized media stoking a seething populace makes for a very dangerous combination.
But, you know, liberals just need to stop whining and accept that assholes run the world, right? Just bend over and take it, again and again for the rest of your lives.
Chotiner has made a recent career/bloodsport of finding moral cretins within or adjacent to His Travesty's smear of influence, as it were, and gradually hoisting the subject on a petard of their own devising. It's a neat trick, and certainly one worth repeating endlessly on these fuckers, but what is most revealing about these interviews, whether it's with some toad directly barnacled to the fleshy hull of the USS Fatboy, or merely a smarmy meta-commenter like Ellis, is that none of these people are prone to sudden epiphanies, nor even flashes of self-awareness. It is essentially the same result as watching yet another CNN lackey jabber at Kellyanne Conway or Rudy Ghouliani.
But it's still interesting to watch Ellis' particular pathology at work here, as he repeatedly insists that he's not interested in politics or policy much at all, but rather that his recent book of essays lambasting "liberals" and "progressives" for their "overreactions" to Trump is about coverage of the spectacle that he, Ellis, considers hysterical and heavy-handed.
Ellis is not wrong when he says that the best solution is for people to focus on voting Trump and his crew out next year. Aside from that, he seems completely oblivious as to why anyone might be anxious in the meantime. We're eight-hundred-and-some days into this shitshow, and virtually every single one of those days has featured some bit of insanity or incompetence or outright illegality on the part of Trump and his coterie of losers and hangers-on.
Ellis seems content to lob smug meta-commentary about Chicken Little libturds overreacting to -- I don't know, let's pick a couple at random: the chief executive routinely threatening and harassing political opponents and pesky mediots; the Attorney General (of the United States -- as in, the public's ranking legal advocate) literally functioning as the personal lawyer for the chief executive; the failson-in-law on a hotline with a Saudi prince who kidnapped an American resident, strapped him to a table and dismembered him alive; a dozen or so lies every day on average; long-term American interests being undermined by reckless foreign policy blunders, not to mention demagoguing the most serious issue facing all of us, regardless of political stance or income level -- climate change.
Right now, and for the past couple years, it has been this nation's policy to separate refugee children from their parents, purely as a punitive measure to discourage others. These people are fleeing conditions of violence that even the poorest, most miserable American would be hard-pressed to imagine (outside of the Alabama penitentiary system, anyway). Nonetheless, there are kids, young kids, who have died in custody, or been raped or molested in custody, or who haven't seen their parents in months, or two or all three of those things.
But as far as Bret Ellis is concerned -- and he's certainly not the only one, just the most recent; there's a spate of these fucking assholes as of late -- the real problem, you see, is the claque of hysterical libturds who just won't stop complaining about this doddering, soup-brained cockroach pitting the nation against itself while he and scummy family pocket everything that isn't nailed down.
One of the more hilarious asides in the interview is where Ellis lamely tries to defend Roseanne Barr:
You came to the defense of Roseanne Barr, saying that she denied, after tweeting racist stuff about Valerie Jarrett, knowing Valerie Jarrett was black.There's nothing evil or sinister in play here; the real crime is that someone who's living is geared around the usage and meaning of words, and getting to the core of what people mean when they say something, is completely useless at that pursuit here.
Did she say that? That she didn’t know she was black?
You say it in the book.
Yeah, right, I quoted her.
It seems like you want to give some people the benefit of the doubt, but not others. Would that be fair?
I would like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.
So when she tweets about Valerie Jarrett being the child of the Muslim Brotherhood and the “Planet of the Apes”?
Yeah, that’s a tweet. I don’t know. It’s whatever. It’s whatever you think it is and whatever she says she meant by it. It is her word against ours.
Think of that: Ellis has written a book that, if not about politics, at least purports to provide some trenchant observations about political activity and thought. In the case of Roseanne's infamous, career-killing tweet about Valerie Jarrett, here is an opportunity to provide some observation. It beggars the imagination to figure plausibly how Roseanne didn't know Jarrett was black, yet plucked a Planet of the Apes reference from out of nowhere as a "joke" or an insult.
Ellis doesn't even have the energy or commitment to try to bullshit his way out of it, or even come up with a lame defense of Roseanne. It's whatever. Boy, does he have a fuckin' way with words or what?
Again, this is not Ellis' fault or creation. We are a decadent, lazy, spoiled society, and so sloppy thinkers and spoiled assholes like Ellis are given unfortunate stature, based on his string of modest successes back when Reagan was watching nuns get raped and murdered in El Salvador. There is no rigor in Ellis' analysis because he has already admitted multiple times that he doesn't really give a shit.
Hell, at the end of the interview, he kinda lets the whole thing slip: It was much more interesting to me to write this as a nonfiction book, in terms of pulling this stuff from my podcast.
Great. So White is really just a compilation of podcast greatest hits, indifferently packaged under a single cover for seventeen bucks or so. Cool grift, broham.
The problem here is not that Ellis is an idiot, nor even an asshole, it's that he's so willfully lazy in his observations, bringing nothing new or fresh to the conversation. He can't even defend his own points that he's asking people to shell out good money for, he just lamely defaults to anecdotal conversations he had with female friends who were okay with Trump bragging about his pussy-grabbing prowess.
For the record, I have female acquaintances who were fine with Trump's "locker-room talk" too. The fact that they have pussies doesn't mean they can't still be wrong about this, and about him. It's the faux-feminist (fauxminist?) version of saying you have a black friend that doesn't mind when people use the n-word, as if that absolved anyone from personal responsibility.
Bret Easton Ellis is comfortably insulated from the consequences of this clusterfuck of an administration. He doesn't have kids, so he likely just assumes that the shit won't really come down until after he's gone, so he's not too worried about it. I actually get that reasoning -- I have a kid and I still sometimes get in that "fuck it" mood and decide it really just doesn't matter, none of it, that it's a prolonged exercise in futility and not worth the effort, that if enough idiots want to let it burn, then maybe we just fucking let it burn and live what's left of our lives while we can.
But I think one of the things that makes us human is that each of us has something that we feel is worth fighting for. It's going to be different things for different individuals, and there will also be lots of overlap, but there's something, big or small, the planet or your country or your family, that you care enough about to put your foot down and say decisively, Fuck you. Enough.
I think that one unstated component in the "outrage" and "overreaction" one sees covered in the media is this: the 2016 election forced liberals and progressives in particular to confront the question of how Trump won -- that either the nation was becoming something they no longer recognized, or that it was like this all along, and the "right" set of conditions came along to clarify that situation.
And it is, by any objective assessment, a serious problem. It's bad enough that Trump is a gaping asshole, and a miserable fucking facsimile of a functioning human being. the real problem is that he's a jabbering moron, a clear fucking dunce who has made the world a worse place. That's really the way it is, and the fact that somewhere between one-third and one-half of this country loves it is an even worse problem.
It is no exaggeration to say that that last one will be the singular challenge for the next generation, and may never get resolved. I don't mean in the ideological sense, so much as just the functional sense, the basic mechanics of governance. This country is run by psychotic billionaires who would literally rather burn up the planet than pay a single percentage point more in taxes, and they own all the propaganda outlets. And they have just enough rubes on the hook to live out Jay Gould's fondest wish.
And so what happens, per Bret Ellis' prescription of voting the Shitbird-In-Thief out of office next year, is that whatever Republicons remain in government will simply revert to an even more toxic version of the rear-guard faction that hamstrung Obama for most of his tenure. The US and the world face some very serious challenges in the near future, most of them driven either by accelerating climate change or increased wealth disparity, and a paralyzed government coupled with propagandized media stoking a seething populace makes for a very dangerous combination.
But, you know, liberals just need to stop whining and accept that assholes run the world, right? Just bend over and take it, again and again for the rest of your lives.
No comments:
Post a Comment