“First you start out with two thousand and a car”

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 4 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjMJ6bGXm38

Ah, the three major elements of the human condition: auto ownership, college, and revenge. In addition to providing an occasion for an eleven-year-old child to say, “Pay me!” directly into the camera, this Parker Brothers commercial from the late sixties documents a culture struggling to articulate its new conception of, um, life. I played a lot of Life in the eighties—probably because, as a child, actual life was unavailable to me—and I remember thinking that it was an especially modern development. What other decade would invent a game for kids in which the players arbitrarily lose large sums of money in the stock market? While Candyland whisks you away to a magical land made of sugar and colors, and Chutes & Ladders postulates a physical universe made entirely of slides, the first thing you do in Life is get a job. It’s as if the adults working at Parker Brothers so resented children that they vowed to make them worry about paying bills and providing for other, imaginary children during playtime. And let me tell you, they did a terrific job.

Continue reading

Pamela Pilger: Sayin’ stuff

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 3 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVS4Zgjm8HE

You have to wait for it, but it’s worth it. The woman who yells “Heil Hitler” at the :36 mark of this video in order to keep an Israeli man from talking about universal health care is named Pamela Pilger. The look of terror on her face at :58, when A) she has had some time to consider what she just did and B) she has to participate in a discussion rather than yelling whatever shocking remarks she can think of from the periphery, is priceless. Also, if you pause the video, you will notice that she is wearing an Israeli Defense Force t-shirt.*

Continue reading

Barney Frank and the elitism that dare not speak its name

By Dan Brooks in health care, health insurance reform, help me kill zombies, populism, representative democracy, rumormongering, the crank factor, town hall meetings, town hall protests, widespread dumbening 5 Comments
Does he look like a bidder for the admiration of the crowd?

Does he look like a man who got here by indulging rednecks?

By now you’ve probably seen the video of Representative Barney Frank (D-Mass.) putting the rhetorical whompus on one of his constituents at a town hall meeting in Dartmouth. If you somehow haven’t, do yourself a favor. The question—put to him by the most adorable hate-filled populist ever— was “Why do you continue to support a Nazi policy, as Obama has expressly supported this policy, why are you supporting it?” It’s an elegant rhetorical trap, but Frank finds a way out of it. First, he points out that the questioner is currently holding a photograph of the President with a Hitler mustache drawn on it. Then he asks her what planet she spends most of her time on, and concludes that “Trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table. I have no interest in it.”  As they say in Boston: face! Somewhere, Cicero is smiling.*

Continue reading

The coolios of now: NYT continues its genius trend reporting

By Dan Brooks in new york times, obesity, specious trends 18 Comments
Ralph Kramden in The Honeymooners, hilariously threatening to beat his wife.

Ralph Kramden in The Honeymooners, hilariously threatening to beat his wife.

Due to recent financial troubles, the New York Times has been forced to sell their building in Times Square and relocate news operations to an office park on the moon. But don’t worry—they’ll keep observing us earthlings through high powered telescopes, reporting on each trend that sweeps through our surprisingly complex society. “Secrete not mucus from your eyes and nose, indicating sadness or physical discomfort,” a Times spokesman said from his hydro-suit. “Each human statistical emergence will be chronicled with the depth and up-to-the-minute [whirring sound] you have come to expect from America’s most respected newspaper.”

Making good on that promise is this piece declaring that as of this summer, it’s “hip”—a term meaning “following the latest fashion, especially in music and clothes”—to have a pot belly. Guy Trebay, whom you should Google search now before the results are swamped with re-posts of his Pulitzer acceptance speech, calls it the Ralph Kramden. The Kramden is “too pronounced to be blamed on the slouchy cut of a T-shirt, too modest in size to be termed a proper beer gut, developed too young to come under the heading of a paunch.” Basically, he’s narrowed it down to this one guy he took home from Union Pool. He should have called it the Rod Masters (Which I Looked Him Up On Facebook and That’s Totally a Fake Name.)

Continue reading

The Summer of Hate: Counterculture in 2009

By Dan Brooks in counterculture, health care, health insurance reform, help me kill zombies, inevitability of death, oppositional culture, populism, representative democracy, subculture, the crank factor, town hall meetings, town hall protests, widespread dumbening 4 Comments
Apparently if you go Hot Topic it's all Glenn Beck CDs and copies of The Wealth of Nations now.

Apparently if you go to Hot Topic it's all Glenn Beck CDs and copies of The Wealth of Nations now.

I was going to be angry about these kids, but one look at the profoundly sixteen-year-old-girl expression on that sixteen-year-old girl’s face and I didn’t have the heart. (If you’d like to get real sad, you can read a blog written by that poor girl’s mother, in which she calls Barbara Boxer a “moronic twit.” The badge on the right side indicates that she’s made the list of “best conservative blogs on the net,” which is apparently determined by total word count.) That’s her boyfriend on the left, proving again that teenage boys will do anything under certain conditions. And what are these desperate youths and the ragtag band behind them protesting for? Lower taxes on the rich, reduced social services, deregulation of business and conservative fiscal policy.

To hear Frank Rich tell it, protests like these are harbingers of a new era of cultural and political upheaval. Last weekend was the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock, which television raised me to believe was the most important moment of the 20th century. It turns out that was all to promote The Wonder Years, though, because this year’s commemoration was overshadowed by the season premiere of Mad Men. First of all, if you don’t watch Mad Men, you should start immediately. It is the Cadillac of television shows, or the Combat! blog of television shows in that Frank Rich and I agree with it more than anyone else in America. Second of all, Frank Rich is right. The year that resonates with our present cultural moment isn’t 1969; it’s 1963.

Continue reading