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.

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Links! Literary greatness/failure edition

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 0 Comment

It’s Friday, which means the cognitive dissonance of having to work at a job you dislike—in order to pay rent on an apartment of which you are ashamed so that you can have enough money left over to buy products that only make you feel more empty—has probably reached such a shrieking pitch that you will spend the next four hours listlessly clicking at the internet just to numb yourself enough to forget the passage of time until six o’clock. TGIF, right guys? Me, I work in a closet. Even the most elementary theories of social justice dictate that I ease your pain somehow, so here are a bunch of links for you to stab at between coffee breaks, Facebook updates and specious trips to the bathroom.

But first, exciting news! Those of you who can hear my voice in forms other than Arial 80% gray know my frustration at certain limitations to Combat! blog engendered by the iWeb platform, not the least of which is our inability to participate in Digg or appear on Google. Starting this weekend—assuming I can execute a series of completely baffling technical maneuvers involving remote server configuration and jerry-rigged html conversions that I am in no way qualified to do—Combat! blog will become an independently-hosted site running on the WordPress platform. We’ll still be at www.combatblog.net, and changes to the site will be minimal. The formatting will look different and it will probably take me a while to figure out how to execute in WordPress the stunning graphic designs loyal Combat! readers have come to expect,* but we’ll also get ShareThis buttons and Google analytics and maybe, just maybe, more readers. Cross your fingers.

Now uncross your fingers and check out this review of the new Collected Stories of Raymond Carver, which will apparently include unedited versions of stories from the What We Talk About When We Talk About Love era. Those of you who are way, way too into creative writing probably know that Carver’s ultra-minimalist style—which is A) awesome and B) ruining graduate fiction workshops across America—has been increasingly attributed to his editor, Gordon Lish. Lish cut Carver’s stories mercilessly, particularly for What We Talk About, and in so doing contributed to one of the most distinct prose voices in contemporary literature. “Created” is another term bandied about, although that strikes me as playa hatin’. Whether the crediting of Lish at the expense of Carver is an example of overdue justice or of a critical culture jealously opposed to the notion of the author is for y’all to decide. Try not to be swayed by the knowledge that literature M.A.’s are complete tools.

Mistah Carver also makes an appearance in this article about literary drinkers and whether ending a destructive cycle of alcoholism is, like, good. The author, who is most definitely shilling for his book, makes the interesting argument that the value of authorial drinking varies with style. For Cheever and Carver, getting off the sauce seemed to help—for John Berryman and Steven King, not so much. Poets and guys who write really long sentence should apparently keep pounding whiskey.

On the lighter side of substance abuse, here’s an article about a homeless community under a bridge in Providence, Rhode Island that has a written compact governing its operation.* The organization of their mini-society is both communitarian—that’s why you guys are homeless! you’ve created a culture that doesn’t value individual initiative!—and eerily biblical, including a gay couple that lives “near some rocks where men go to urinate.” It’s an interesting read if you can get past the prose, which is a monument to Dan Barry’s writing really, really hard.

Finally, The Cure points out that I wasn’t the only person to to justify my use of advanced media technology to say the word “faggot” yesterday. Hawaii football coach Greg McMackin apologized for his description of a performance by Notre Dame as a “faggot dance.” You’re right—it doesn’t seem as rakishly funny when someone else does it.