The American Dreamsease

Much of American literature critiques the "American Dream" as an irony. While the idea is that success is available to anyone who can pick themselves up by their bootstraps and work as hard as they can, many of America's most respected intellectuals have recognized the American dream as a figment of our collective imaginations, in other words, a mass hallucination.

Some people still buy into the idea though, like lost cowboys arriving on Japanese shores preaching about manifest destiny. And some people take it to the extreme. Exhibit A: Donna Simpson.


Simpson, who is currently over 600 lbs, is currently trying to become the world's fattest woman. For Christmas dinner, she told reporters, she consumed a total of 30,000 calories. According to the Toronto Sun:
     She ate two 25-pound turkeys, two maple-glazed hams, 15 lbs. of potatoes, five loaves of bread, 5 lbs. of herb stuffing, four pints of gravy, four pints of cranberry dressing and 20 lbs. of vegetables.
     After that main course, Simpson also ate a "salad" of marshmallows, cream cheese, whipped cream and cookies.

Is this a symptom of the American Dreamsease? A symptom of an idea that tells people to find what they're good at, no matter what it is, and pursue it to the best of their abilities? A symptom of an idea that says whoever is the biggest and baddest in a given area is the winner and deserves the most praise?

Just look at the reaction from conservatives on Michelle Obama's obesity campaign. Michelle is suggesting that Americans should maybe consume less and move more, good advice for anyone even if they're fit, but Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin feel that her pursuit is an invasion into our privacy; "let us have domain over our own bodies," they say. I know the American Dream preaches self-reliance and pushing forward full-steam ahead, but just because you are good at being fat, it doesn't mean you should be the best and biggest fat person on earth. The truth is that sometimes we need people to remind us to stop.  Otherwise you might end up looking like this asshole (also a food and drug addict):

Apropos Advertisements? (or, a New Game for All)

As I was scrolling through all the channels on my TV this morning, I stopped by the Food Network to check out what Paula Dean was whipping up because I like to turn her shows into a drinking/smoking game. If she adds butter thats a drink, a whole stick of butter is a shot, anytime she says "yall" that's a drink, and if she adds bacon that's a rip from the bong. Anyways, right as I tune in, as always, the show goes to commercial, and they may have been the most fitting commercials I've ever seen. Wilford Brimley and his epic mustache stopped by to tell me about how to take care of diabeetus, then there was a proactiv commercial for all the pizza faces out there, and then there was a commercial for a diabeetus cookbook. I figured the significance of these commercials are two fold. First, they definitely reflect the needs of Paula's audience that's filled with obese pizza faces, but in a somewhat subliminal way, it's  a warning; the commercials give younge viewers a glimpse at their potential future. "Oh, you like Paula Dean and her food do you?" the commercials ask, "Well, not only will you die obese and with amputated legs, but you'll also have one scarred fucking face."

The following picture is related; it's another subliminal message of your potential future if you continue down Deen's direction.

Man v. Food in Starving Countries?

Do they air Man v. Food in starving countries? Because if they do, that's fucked up. I understand that people who are starving most likely don't have access to American cable television, but I just have this vision of some starving kid watching it through someone's window with his mouth watering and praying to his god to have one tiny morself of the 190 lb burger pictured above...

P.S. File this under stoner thought

Self-perpetuating 'Intervention' Machine, or the Enabler

As a person who partakes regularly in drugs and whose friends partake also, I have to wonder about the intentions of the show Intervention. I was watching the newest episode last night, an interesting study into an antique collecting tweeker named Michael, when I felt the urge to smoke meth. How could an addict watch this show and not feel the urge to use? David Cross does a really good bit in his newest stand up  Bigger and Blackerer where he essentially says the same thing about vicodin, and how he sympathizes with the addicts once he gets high. Cross says that getting high while watching Intervention is the best way to watch it, but for an addict it's not necessarily that it is the best way to watch it, it's that the show is 45 minutes of temptation; if I have the drugs that I see the addicts on TV using, you better fucking believe that I'm going to take them.

This actually used to be a fun past-time back in my early college days. My friend (a recovering junky these days) and I would find out the drug/drugs that were going to be in the spotlight that night, and we would stock up for our weekly Intervention ritual. Then, I started thinking about it more. How many other addicts are probably doing the same thing? How many addicts watch the show to see someone who is more of a loser than themselves and end up trying to score whatever they are seeing the addicts on the TV doing? If you've ever seen the show, you'll know that it is not an uncommon occurrence to have the addicts recognize the interventionist and be a avid follower of the show.

So what are the true intentions of the program? Is it really to document the struggle? It seems that documenting the recovery process would be more beneficial than documenting the last bender of a dwindling addict. I remember a station that actually tried this, I think it was called something like Recovery where there would be 10 minutes of drug use followed by 35 minutes of the recovery process, but it didn't work; it got cancelled after a season or two. Perhaps the show was too boring. Maybe it was too real. Maybe everyone just wants to watch people doing drugs. I guess what I am trying to say is that Intervention is its own worst enemy, an enabler. Addicts watch it to feel better about themselves. I distinctly remember my friend telling me as we were both rolling bowls, "Man... that guy is out of control... here take a hit." That doesn't mean I don't like watching it. I fucking love it, especially now that I've realized that they are hypocrisy incarnate. Addicts are good when it comes to dealing with mixed messages; we choose whichever one we like the best.

S&M as Anti-Nature?

     To kind of pick up from where I last left, Nietzsche made the declaration in Twilight of the Idols that morality is separate from nature, that morality is not natural. Part of the reasoning is due to the fact that animals don't have a morality, and being that humans are animals, they should follow suit. Excuse the lack of transition, but can the same be said for S&M?
     Many early theorists of sexuality such as Krafft-Ebing have looked at this phenomenon as reinforcing the workings of nature. Dominant male overpowers the submissive female. The male arrives at satisfaction at how easily and well he overpowers the female, and the female feels bliss at how well her man has dominated her.
     If you've looked at any recent BDSM, then you'll know that this is the furthest thing from the truth of what BDSM actually is. The prevailing fantasy is that of a weak man being overpowered by a dominant female. Not only does this fly in the face of what we collectively consider "nature," but it also flies in the face of gender roles, race roles, and power relationships. The BDSM scene is place to act out the opposite of one's "natural" role. It's a place for the CEO who is used to dominating people to be dominated, or it's a place for a politician who always makes rules to finally be given some, like John Boehner's recent BDSM scandal that the National Enquirer revealed.
     So could it be that S&M is really a place to act the opposite of natural tendencies? No, I don't think so. The only thing that the practice of S&M seems to reveal is that there is no true "nature."  There is no natural order to power. S&M simply reveals that power roles are socially constructed. A man isn't inherently more dominant than a woman, otherwise Boehner wouldn't want to get all teary eyed as his boner is beaten red by a whip. Women aren't naturally submissive otherwise that huge sex den by LAX wouldn't be operational. The so-called "natural" relationships exist because we were told that that's the way it is. In "private" we can live out how we really feel. The man who has been told that he needs to be dominant can be dressed up like an infant girl in daipers and be spanked over the knee by a woman who is dressed as a man.
    I'm all for it. I just wish that people could see the implications of these scandals with regards to power rather than just saying, "Oh, there's another politician having some crazy sex." No, they want to be dominated, and maybe you do too, and that's okay.

Fetishes on the Threshold of Society

     The "forbidden" has always played a role in sexual fantasies. People are excited and titillated by whatever society deems inappropriate or illegal; therefore, fetishes can be said to exist at the threshold of society. According to the laws of a society fetishes do not exist; they're banished. To tie this into a previous post, one could say that the "abject" are fetishes. Whatever society wishes to keep separate from the  status quo often times tends to creep back in the form of a forbidden sexual desire. Take a look at the industrial revolution, for instance, when many working class women started taking jobs in manual labor. Since they did not fit into the established fabric of society, they were often written about as being of a different race, often times characterized as similar to child-like African slaves or the Irish. As the ruling class used their rhetoric and inventions like photography to show and explain how these classes of people were separate from what was considered acceptable, there are many diary entries from men of the ruling class of that time expressing a certain curiosity or libidinal interest in these groups. Arthur Munby, a British man of letters who lived from 1828-1910, for example was obsessed with working class women, a group of people that a person of his stature should not have been associating with. While his stated intention was the study of these women, his diary hints at other motivations. He ultimately would explain that he found the manliness of these women to be "delicious" as he would reflect on their coarse, calloused, red hands. In one entry he even compares his hands to the hands of the women and hints at the idea that his soft, genteel, scholarly hands appear far more feminine. There is a sense that Munby, to a certain extent, got off on this gender reversal. Munby had no question about his own masculinity since as a professor in Britain his was responsible for empire building, but he was able to act out a fantasy in a British Bizarro world on the threshold of that society. At the same time Munby had nothing to worry about because he essentially controlled this class of people. If he was interested in a certain lady, he could have paid her for a picture, he could  have paid her to sketch her. Munby justified his curiosities because he was able to turn them into a commodity; he was buying and therefore controlling this group of people just as the empire was doing on a far more epic scale. In other words, Munby fit right in with the ruling class of society.
    These types of interactions also happened in America, especially with the slave trade where masters would often times have sexual relations with their servants, but what about in modern times? As I explained in a previous post, homosexuals are one of the last large groups on the threshold of society, and as such they become a fetish for the ruling elite. Remember Mark Foley? He was a Republican who was caught in 2006 for sending sexually charged e-mails to young teenage boys in the congressional page program for over ten years. He was the one who was quoted with saying, "well, get a ruler out and measure it for me." How about Ted Haggard, leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, who was shacking up with male prostitutes to snort meth and have sex. The list goes on with the likes of Larry Craig, the senator in the bathroom scandal; Bob Allen, public park bathroom scandal; Glen Murphy, Jr., National Chairman of the Young Republicans who was caught giving head to an underage, sleeping boy at a party (there are many more examples but this should suffice). If you notice, the sexual scandals of the homosexual variety tends to occur mostly with the conservatives, so in a sense it is the same type of power relationship that I discussed with Munby. These politicians who feel that they, in a sense, control the homosexual community by enacting laws against them feel that they control them in every arena, so why not dominate them in the bedroom also to feel complete and utter control? Fetish to the extreme.
      Friedrich Nietzsche, a German determinist from the 19th century, discusses this skewed relationship between morality and the makers of morality in society in his book Twilight of the Idols. He argues that the people who are the most outspoken on moral issues are usually the one's who have the most trouble restraining themselves. This would certainly make sense when looking at certain segments of society like priests, perhaps they are preach so harshly against certain desires because they are trying so hard to quell those desires in themselves. Or look at George W. Bush, he used to be a coke snorting, whiskey drinking, car crashing, house destroying party monster from Texas where they do everything big. Then, all of the sudden he finds god and he wants to impose his newly found morality on everybody else, maybe because if he could force everyone to act like him, it would be easier to stay on the straight and narrow.
    What if there is a different relationship here though than what Nietzsche suggests? What if these men, these politicians, who for the most part have had power all their lives are keeping their fetishes alive? Maybe they decided to be a god-fearing, homosexual hating republican not because they want to quell their homosexual desires, but because they want to keep it on the threshold of society; they want to keep it exciting, keep it titillating, keep it a fetish. Once homosexuality is acceptable, there is no power dynamic, there is no fetish. Maybe Dubya couldn't get his rocks off with booze and blow anymore, so he preached against it and turned it into a fetish for himself. Maybe he didn't choke on a pretzel. Maybe he took too huge of a line and gagged so hard that he hit his head ; at least then it would make sense why his head was so close to the coffee table.

Re: West Coast Tsunami... Why Corporate Media Disgusts Me

     So as I am driving home, I turn on Coast to Coast AM and listen to the news about the Japanese earthquake and the tsunami that followed. As I approach my neighborhood, I proceed to pack myself a substantial bowl and smoke it. I finally get to my house and park, my mind drifitng off to night-time day dreams of good beer and a nice bed. For a moment I find myself wishing that I  was transported into that new Friskies commercial. At last I am at my door; I walk in, brush my teeth, hop in bed, and turn on the news.
    "Warning!" the newscaster says, "Tsunami warning for the west coast!" My interest is sparked at this moment as I live relatively close to the coast in southern California. As I turn up the volume, the newscaster directs my attention to an "expert" who will speak more about what this tsunami warning for the west coast means. "Cities like Los Angeles are in some very serious danger right now," he says.
    "Exactly what kind of danger, (insert irrelevant, common newscaster name here)?" the female host asks.
    "Well as the wave travels towards the west coast there are two possible scenarios," he says sternly. "The most alarming scenario would be that the wave, which as we heard is traveling about as fast as a jet engine, picks up steam as it heads towards the coast. So as it starts to arrive, which we have heard could be any time from around 8:30am to 10am, it can really cause some serious damage possibly equal to the damage in Japan."
    "Wow," the the host says as I realize that my mouth has dropped and drool is falling towards my shirt in a long stream. "And what is the second scenario?"
     "Well the second scenario is that the wave actually loses power like ripples in a pond. The frequency and intensity should lessen as it moves further away from the epicenter."
    "Well let's go back to that first scenario. I mean lets look at the video of the tsunami hitting again [video plays]. . . Just look at all those cars, houses, boats... some on fire being carried like they were nothing. Those living on the west coast and watching this should surely have some substantial fears."
     At this point I find myself starting to get really anxious. I imagine my Friskies cat pal being pummeled by a tsunami and only leaving shreds of unrecognizable organs, tufts of hair, and entrails once the wave pulls back.
     Then I snap out of it. I remember that most corporate media are fear mongers because fear is what brings the ratings. It for god-damn sure worked on me. Once they said Tsunami and Los Angeles in the same sentence, I had to sit there and listen. But as I came out of my stoned stupor and remembered the rules of television and ratings, I calmed down, turned on Conan, and went to sleep.
     I still woke up at little nervous though. I must have been dreaming about the tsunami because I woke up promptly at 8am with the tsunami on my mind. I turn on the T.V., remembering that the newscasters said the tsunami should start hitting us around 8:30am, and what do I find? Everything is okay, for the most part. Crescent City and Santa Cruz were damaged a bit, but nothing major... nothing like the exponentially worse tsunami that was supposed to be as cataclysmic or worse than Japan. And as for Los Angeles and many of the surrounding coastal cities, where I live, the reports came in from actual scientists from Cal Tech, not newscasters, that everyone and everything 4 ft above sea level and higher should be perfectly fine, and that was the worst case scenario.
     Therefore, my hatred towards corporate media is reaffirmed. There is something inherently wrong in making news and information about, very often, very serious things a vehicle to generate revenue. If everything is always okay, why would you ever watch? Doom and gloom gets you to watch because then you might feel that you're next. Anyway, this rant is over... back to Friskies Land... (insert bong toke noise here)...

Conservative and Liberal Life Spans

     Many people have noticed and written about the discrepancy between the right wing's and the left wing's paradoxical views of life; the right wishes to preserve "life" within the womb while wholeheartedly supporting capital punishment, and the left feels that a mother should be able to terminate a pregnancy if she wishes while taking a position against the death penalty. Well, I'm not here to discuss that, but I am here to discuss a related issue. How do the differing wings look at a human's life span and the government's role in that life span?
     Let's look at the conservative life span first. A conservative government essentially sees your life lasting about nine months, from the moment of conception to the moment of birth; that's when they feel it their responsibility to actually care about you. After that they could give a shit whether you live or die because at that point you become either a victim of or implicit in the exploitation of the free market. Hopefully you are raised in a wealthy family because the right won't be sending you any government cheese any time soon. If you are not, even better because then you'll just beg for a job and receiving whatever wages you can get. 
     The left's view of life extends a bit longer. It goes from the last trimester of a pregnancy to roughly 80 years of age, give or take a few years depending if you are a man or a woman. They feel the role of government is to take care of you once you are actually in the world where so many more terrible things can happen to you rather than when you are unconsciously gestating in the womb, but at the same time they feel that you can take and destroy as many lives as you want and still  get three square meals a day and receive decent living conditions until you die of natural causes.
     It's a complicated, paradoxical, contradictory, somewhat incoherent issue... so the question is... what do you feel the political life span should be? Should the government be concerned about your life at all? Should your life be one of their main concerns?

Abjection in the Modern World

abjection, n.
1.
     a. The state or condition of being cast down or brought low; humiliation, degradation; dispiritedness, despondency
     b. The action or an act of casting down, humbling, or degrading; an act of abasement, esp. of oneself.
2. That which is cast off or away, esp. as being vile or unworthy; refuse, scum, dregs. Chiefly fig. of persons. Obs.
3. The action of casting out or away; rejection.
      -Oxford English Dictionary

     Sigmund Freud was the first person to theorize that humans construct their identities through rejection, specifcally the rejection of certain taboo pleasures. At a certain point, Freud argues, children come to the realization that their incestuous yearnings for their parents are wrong, and it is at that point that they can become a productive and social memeber of society. If they never reject these things, then they will not acclomate to the world "properly" and they may very well come to some type of crisis of identity with respect to the society from which they find themselves to be an outcast.
     Julia Kristeva, a social theorist, builds off of Freud's ideas and puts them on a social scale. Not only do individuals construct their identities through repudiation of sexual yearnings amongst other things, but so does the society itself . In Imperial Leather Anne McClintock notices that abjection was very much a part of the imperialist project that was really picking up steam throughout the nineteenth century. The Brits essentially constructed and attempted to preserve the idea of Britishness by rejecting and expunging everything that they felt they were not. Therefore, in order to keep British identity pure and intact society put stigmas on various groups that they came into contact with.For instance, propoganda tried to show that the Irish were almost equal to African slaves, African men were often compared to the intellectual status of women in the empire, and African women were seen as a source of all things evil, including lust and disease. This is not an adequate summary of the argument, but I use it only as a way to bring me to my point.
     Abjection has continued since 1800s and still continues today. Racism and segregation were used in America in order for whites to preserve what they thought was a "true" American. In the 1950s, communism was abjected in order to preserve the heart of America. So what about today?
     It seems that one of the largest groups that is still abjected today are homosexuals. After coming to accept so much variance in our culture, people still feel the urge to reject a certain class of people. America hopes to see itself as good, wholesome, god-fearing people and accepting homosexuals into the mix does not follow into that plan since god is apparently homophobic.
     When will society stop being so insecure? When will abjection end? Will it ever end? Is rejection, repudiation, and hatred an inherent part of social society?
    I don't have any of the answers. All I know is that one day it will be inevitable that homosexuals WILL be included into the scheme of things, but then it seems that the focus of abjection will necessarily have to change. Once the heartland figures out that homosexuals really aren't that bad it seems that American identity will necessarily fluctuate and change. As a result, our morals and beliefs will change. My fear is, who's next? What will "we" collectively decide that we no longer want in our society in order to reinforce the reflection that we would like to see of ourselves? Mike Judge's film Idiocracy theorizes that intellectuals will be one of the next groups as one of the doctor characters diagnoses Luke Wilson with an illness that includes, "talking like a fag." While it is a silly movie, it makes some good points and it shows abjection in full force. In the same way that the British imperialists saw African facial features as symptoms of a lack of evolution rather than biological diversity, the doctor in the film attributes articulation to something inherently wrong within the person rather than attribtuing it to something external.
     I'm excited for the inclusion of more marginalized sects of society, but I am scared of what that means for the rest of us.