It’s Friday, but more importantly we stand on the cusp of Halloween weekend. I don’t know about you, but I like Halloween. It’s a holiday we can all celebrate comfortably. Halloween doesn’t come with the weirdo baggage of a Christmas or a Columbus Day; it’s a perfectly innocent time devoted to images of death, elision of individual identity and the sexualization of pirates. The best part of Halloween is, of course, the masquerade. For one night of the year and maybe the preceding Saturday, the social conventions that govern dress and age-appropriate behavior are lifted, and we confront the real freedom we possess. Here is carnival in the root sense of the word—a society governed not by mores but by appetites, mostly for Reese’s and Apple Pucker, but also for truth. Paradoxically, we become most ourselves when we put on a costume. This week’s link roundup is all about the truth that reveals itself only in the lie, the confrontation with the masquerade. Also midget tossing. Trick or treat, kids. Why don’t you reach into this sack without really knowing what’s in it?
Author: Dan Brooks
Another Occupy Wall Street
In Soviet Oakland, cloud of tear gas drifts through you.
As Occupy Wall Street approaches its seventh week, the demonstration in Zuccotti Park seems most significant as a testament to how well kids these days can run a protest. They’ve constructed an irrigation system, for Pete’s sake. Regardless of politics, anyone who has managed hippies must acknowledge OWS in Zuccotti Park as a breathtaking achievement in preventing people from freaking out. Less so in Oakland, where police turned tear gas on OWS protestors outside Frank Ogawa Plaza and cracked an Iraq war veteran’s skull. Scott Olsen is in critical condition with a wound on his forehead that looks like the rim of a tear gas canister, and people are pissed. It turns out that a demonstration of the will of the people is a different thing when dozens of guys with plastic shields show up to make it stop. And as USA Today somewhat gleefully notes, municipal authorities across the country are getting sick of this disobedience crap. So now comes the question of what OWS is going to do.
How a democracy starts to suck
Supporters of Mississippi's Proposition 26, including women past childbearing age, a couple of kids, and several dozen dudes.
Let’s say that you believe abortion should be illegal, in part because you have carefully considered the civic and cultural ramifications and in part because that’s what they said at your church, where you go with the kids you already have and the spouse who is the only person you will have sex with ever again. I’m messing with you—you’re not going to have sex with your spouse again. Anywhom, you are strongly committed to your anti-abortion position—which you call pro-life, although you are also for the death penalty—but you just can’t get enough people to vote for it. The Supreme Court said that abortion is legal, and even though they’re clearly the most bullshit branch of government, we still have to do what they say. The best alternative is therefore a constitutional amendment, but every time you get the words “abortions will be illegal” onto a ballot, a bunch of people vote against it. They’re mostly college kids and secularists and sluts who live in cities—clearly the most bullshit portion of American society—but, again, their votes somehow count as much as yours. You can’t make abortions illegal because the majority of Americans don’t want that. You must therefore figure out how to make them operatively illegal by passing laws that people don’t notice or care about, so that everyone else in America will abide by what you know is obviously right. For example, you can make a law that says any fertilized egg is, in fact, a person.
Now is the time for…whatever this is
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhm-22Q0PuM
Props to Pete Jones for the link to this video, which as near as I can tell is not fake. I admit I was difficult to convince at first. It seems literally incredible that one campaign could make so many bizarre choices in 56 seconds, not the least of which is pointing a video camera at Mark Block. He looks like a guy who runs the Wisconsin chapter of Americans for Prosperity, possibly because he used to run the Wisconsin chapter of Americans for Prosperity. Block is Herman Cain’s campaign manager, so it would almost make sense to put him in this video, if he did not so closely resemble the dude your mom dated right after she heard your dad was dating someone. Block’s questionable charisma is completely erased at the :40 mark, though, when he takes a long, defiant drag from his cigarette. And…music!
Hate Jennifer Egan so I feel better
Jennifer Egan thinks about how a person's appearance has no bearing on her success as an author.
For months now I have been trying to explain to people the singular idiocy of A Visit From the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan’s collection of mawkish, overwritten stories that manage to feel slight despite their relentless self-regard. That shit won the Pulitzer Prize. It must be important, if only as a motionless canary in the dark shaft of contemporary American fiction. I have commiserated with strangers in bookstores over A Visit From the Goon Squad, but I have never been able to explain what’s so infuriating about it to people who haven’t read it. Fortunately, the good people at Slate have released a long video interview with the author. Finally, people who do not want to read ironically can experience the utterly vapid thought process of the woman who wrote, “My eyes were open, but only the ones on my face. My other thousand eyes were squeezed shut.” First installment after the jump.