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Rick Perry for President of exploding Superamerica

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media September 22, 2011 8 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EL5Atp_vF0

First of all “Superamerica” is totally in the OS X spellcheck dictionary, which makes me think it’s existed all along. Wouldn’t you rather live there than in the peeling, dilapidated husk of America depicted in this Rick Perry advertisement? The Perry campaign released this spot—titled “Rick Perry: Proven Leadership”—on Tuesday, and it joins a long line of Republican ads that portray the United States as, well, Detroit. Even the parking meters have garbage bags over them in Wrecked Now America, a place where everyone voted for Barack Obama just before vanishing. The only human being that appears in the first 30 seconds of this video is the President, plus a couple of TV anchors shown on pictures of TVs. The rest of the country is empty, except for that sound which has become so commonplace now that we hardly notice it: air raid sirens.

Irony of ironies at Hipster Runoff

By Dan Brooks in hipsters September 21, 2011 5 Comments

Not a photo of the pseudonymous Carles, author of Hipster Runoff

Perhaps, like me, you had heard of Hipster Runoff but never actually read it. The site is a sort of parody of mp3 blogs, but to describe it that way is like describing Andy Kaufman as a wrestling comedian. Hipster Runoff is written by Carles, a fictional character whose style is defined by A) relentless use of chat jargon and B) a proliferation of scare quotes, which he seems to put around any concept he does not feel totally comfortable with. Here’s Carles on the vexing question of what he calls bubblegum indie:

What if MGMT’s “KIDS” had come out in 2011? Would they be able to morph into an intriguing ‘indie’ buzzband. When analyzing their ‘success’ in the context of a bubblegum indie MP3 that propelled them to super-mindie stardom, it is easier to understand their ‘drastic change in direction’ for their second album, just to attempt to get rid of some of the entry-level fans who ‘liked’ them 4 the ‘wrong reasons.’

I guess really those are scare apostrophes, but you get the point. Irony of ironies, all is irony. Besides the hilarious conceit of wondering how everything might have been different if it happened, like, three years later, something is being expressed here. What Carles means by “bubblegum indie” is never clearly defined, and he winds up applying it to pretty much every popular-and-then-too-popular hipster jam of the decade. That’s his point. Hipster Runoff is a blog about the existential bugbear of hipsterism: authenticity.

The forgotten face of class warfare

By Dan Brooks in Class Warfare September 20, 2011 3 Comments

Rep. John Fleming (R-LA) and his hair. Photo by Gage Skidmore

In troubled times, it’s easy for an angry majority to trample the rights of a disenfranchised minority. Here’s how troubled our times are: we’re even trying to trample heavily franchised minorities, such as Rep. John Fleming of Louisiana, who owns a bunch of UPS and Subway stores that made him $6.3 million in 2010. Yesterday morning, Fleming assured MSNBC that $6 million a year isn’t that much, since after he pays his 500 employees, forks over the rent for his locations and otherwise sees to his overhead, “my net income—the amount that I have to reinvest in my business and feed my family—is more like $600,000 of that $6.3 million. And so by the time I feed my family I have maybe $400,000 left over.” Don’t hang up, but we’re going to do some math after the jump.

The gloves come off re: class warfare

By Dan Brooks in Class Warfare September 19, 2011 6 Comments

Rep. Paul Ryan (R–WI,) still perched on the line between good-looking and evil-looking

For the last several months it’s been showing up in Facebook comments and Boehner aides, but you almost never heard it from an actual congressman’s actual mouth until this weekend: class warfare. That’s what the Republican Party is calling Obama’s new jobs/deficit plan, with terrifying synchronization. “Class warfare may make for really good politics, but it makes for rotten economics,” Paul Ryan said on Fox News this weekend. “We don’t need a system that seeks to prey on people’s fear, envy and anxiety.” You can tell the GOP is scared about this, because Paul Ryan is talking. He’s the guy they get to tell the American people stuff we won’t want to hear, and they picked him the same way a carload of drunk frat boys decides who’s going to go knock on the door after they run over a dog. He’s handsome, at least by GOP standards. That’s good, because in this analogy, about 65% of America is the dog.

Friday links: Is this ironic? edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links September 16, 2011 2 Comments

Almost

Oh, irony. You are everywhere, according to certain people and pop songs, and yet you are so little known. While the strict definitions of irony remain cleanly delineated, popular usage now refers to any experience of bitter recognition as “ironic.” The expansion of the term tells us much about contemporary America, or maybe contemporary Americans. Like its mildly retarded cousin “sarcastic,” “ironic” has become a mode of being, a way of protecting oneself from the absurdity of This Modern World via a general disdain. That’s great for the lady in your office who just discovered Failblog. For those of us who are lifelong, committed ironists, however, the expansion of “ironic” is an infuriating appropriation. It’s like how Chuck D felt about Vanilla Ice. This Friday, we present the thin edge of the wedge: stories and situations that seem almost ironic but not quite, whose categorization as “irony” moves us one step closer to the dream of considering everything ironic and thereby eliminating irony altogether. Won’t you turn human experience into a uniform putty of bland derision with me?