Proof that CNN is white

Maybe I just spent all week with cops urging me to end the violence by lying on the ground, but I am a little worried about what wags call the cult of compliance. More than our courts, it is our psychological relation to the police that determines how free we are. Fortunately, America has a robust and principled media that relentlessly asserts the rights of the citizen against powerful forces. And I have these vast, leathery wings, which allow me to buffet people or, if necessary, fly away. So I don’t need a vigorous public discourse to prevent my democracy from collapsing into a police state. Today is Saturday, and ifs and buts have become, without our really doing anything, candy and nuts. Won’t you join the truth telling contest with me?

First, really thrilling news that you’ve been waiting to hear your whole life: Astronauts Just Found Life In Outer Space—and Scientists Aren’t Sure How It Got There. Just is such an effective stowaway word. It’s so hardy and meaningless, it can hole up in a headline. I’d say “just” is the second best stowaway I can think of, after earth sea plankton, which is the kind of life cosmonauts found stuck to the outside of the international space station. That’s not what you led me to believe, Mic.com, you website named for a device that indiscriminately makes everything louder. It’s cool that bacteria can survive in a vacuum that contains an international space station, but when you tell me we found life in “outer” space, I don’t think of Earth life in a place where Russians live. I clicked on it, though, so touché.

I want good news and plenty of it, which is why I only read the Chinese papers. My beloved state-run print media has been supplanted, however, by state run new media. That’s how the Onion has it, anyway. Props to Ben al-Fowlkes for the link. He observed in sending it to me that this one might have succeeded as just a headline, and I think he’s right. As a person who spent the last two weeks explaining what my novel is about, I am coming around to the headline-first approach to comedy writing. If you can’t say it as a funny joke, it might not be a funny story.

So the real media has failed us, and the only competent journalism left covers events that have not technically happened. The first draft of history is going to be pretty poorly written from here on out, so we will have to rely on those masters of the language in our universities—the people Geoff Dyer called “dimwit academics shoveling away at their research, digging the graves of literature.” But that was 15 years ago in Out of Sheer Rage. His work has evolved since then. It has evolved so consistently as to merit an academic conference, which Dyer attended in July. I fully support the emerging field of Dyer studies. If only it had been available to me as a young man, I might now be rich or admired. Or even just smell a little better.

In conclusion, what the fuck? Many a time have I taken this quiz. But I like Clickhole quizzes in general. At first it was the form and the various conceits that could animate it, e.g. pure hatred. But now that some of them are narrative, I like the potential to reinvent Choose Your Own Adventure. That form has been rendered impossible by the Kindle, of course.

Planned obsolescence is a feature of forms. If no one reinvents them, we sit around imitating Raymond Carver stories for four decades. Heaven forfend! Let us break down old forms for the space and materials to build new ones. That’s what Action Bronson did to the form of my face when he made this video:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58RSC7HO9aU

It’s his time.

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