Combat! blog is on the road once again, beaming its pirate signal from the utterly lawless Room 203 of the Days Inn in Gillette, Wyoming. Thanks to Google Analytics, I happen to know that no one in Wyoming reads this blog. Thanks to my rapidly-clearing nasal passages, I also know that the entire town of Gillette smells like that chemical they put in natural gas to alert you that you left the stove on. I’m not saying that these two facts are related, necessarily, but my mom reads Combat! blog every day, and her house smells like chocolate chip cookies.

Anywhom, I’ve got a solid eight-hour drive ahead of me and I’ve spent my precious pre-checkout time doing paying work, so today’s entry is more of an assignment. If you’ve got the same kind of news alert system going that I have (thank you Tyler, Christina) you know about [warning: massive tone shift] this utterly wrong and terrifying story out of Kentucky. News of a man’s death should not be immediately pressed into the service of a cultural-political theory, and this seems like one of those bizarre situations where one hopes for a suicide. If that turns out not to be the case, the implications are obvious and ugly. We will talk about them tomorrow, when hopefully everything seems sensible and a little rosier and we can go back to ragging on Michael Steele. Or, you know, take a long, hard look at ourselves and the implications of what we say. Read that article. While you’re at it, read this one, too. We live in significant times, despite regular reassurances to the contrary, and the things that happen on our television screens are more intimately connected to our actual world than we might think. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.

Those of you who dimly remember that Combat! blog is supposed to be about oppositional culture (and not All Health Care All the Time) might also remember one of our major theses around here: Consumer culture is not driven by the desire to conform, but rather by the desperate need to individuate. Never has that principle been so on display as in the most recent series of advertisements for Miracle Whip.* Featuring a group of twenty-something urban semi-professionals partying on a roof in slow motion—and occasionally eating sandwiches absolutely slathered in what I assume is Hellman’s mayonnaise—the ads defiantly assert the mantra of a generation: We Will Not Tone It Down. Video after the jump.

Continue reading

Those of you who relished Barney Frank’s health care town hall as much as I did might remember Griff Jenkins, the Fox News correspondent who narrated the event in a way that, um, confirmed the expectations of Fox News correspondents. Jenkins appears to be a rising star at Fox, and has been the network’s point-man for covering Tea Party rallies, the 9/12 march on Washington, and other carefully orchestrated spontaneous outbursts of populist dissent. After hearing his name, I initially assumed he was a biplane pilot in an educational children’s show. It turns out, though, that Griff Jenkins is a real person who actually does stuff, most of which is hilarious.

Continue reading

Man oh man, it is a beautiful day in central Iowa. The mist is rising off the (soccer) fields, the little dogs are yipping maniacally, and I am ensconced on my mother’s back porch, drinking coffee and watching the neighbor kid, who has been inexplicably dressed in a tiger suit. In such bucolic suburban milieus, one can easily forget that the world has gone absolutely cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs or, if you prefer, retarded for Rice Krispies. Homo for Honeycomb? I digress. The point is, everything sucks and nobody can think except for you. And what are you doing? Sitting in your office reading blogs when you’re supposed to be working? Good. As Super Mario once said, all that is required for evil to succeed is for good people to do nothing. If evil were to stop succeeding all of a sudden, Combat! blog would be about what I had for breakfast.* Nobody wants that any more than I do, and I want it very little, so here’s a bunch of stuff to get angry about instead. Coprophagic for Cap’n Crunch? Okay, I’m done.

Continue reading

David Brooks has a pretty great column in the Times today, in which he compares the nation’s somber celebration of V-J Day in 1945 to the spectacular displays of personal aggrandizement accompanying virtually any achievement in 2009. Props to The Cure for the heads-up; I do not normally read David Brooks, as I find his foppish postures unbefitting the otherwise prestigious Brooks name. Brooks asserts that humility was the defining quality of America’s response to its victory in World War II, and any celebration of the defeat of fascism was dampened by a sense of the mind-boggling human suffering that achievement necessitated. He quotes the war correspondent Ernie Pyle: “We won this war because our men are brave and because of many things — because of Russia, England and China and the passage of time and the gift of nature’s material. We did not win it because destiny created us better than all other peoples. I hope that in victory we are more grateful than we are proud.”

That’s a far cry from Mission Accomplished and the nation that declared war in the Middle East on a mandate from god. Ask Tom Brokaw or any prep school history tutor and he’ll tell you that the United States was probably at its peak when it won World War II, and yet—at least according to Brooks’s perspective—our national touchdown celebration was more humble than most, um,  local touchdown celebrations. Such assessments are risky, but I think we can safely say that we’ve become a more self-aggrandizing people than we were in 1945. The question is, what changed?

Continue reading