Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008 Read online

  Levin irritates me, however. The only reason she’s poor, as far as I can tell, is that she’s decided being an arts writer is the only thing she should be doing at the moment, and she’s willing to deal with the poverty in order to have that self-affirmation. In a general sense, that’s just fine: If you want to be poor in order to say you’re a writer, instead having to assure the people whose food order you’re taking that you also write, far be it from me to stop you. Go ahead and live off of Top Ramen if you want.

  But here’s the thing: Because she’s self-selected to be poor, Levin also seems to assume that it’s okay for her to graze off the food banks or get subsidized housing or apply for state-assisted health insurance. And that, my friends, is a big, steaming pile of crap. Levin’s intelligent, articulate, almost certainly college-educated, and has skills that would allow her to get a job, would she deign to do so. She doesn’t need any of this assistance, and every box of pasta she takes from a food bank, every emergency cut she gets off her electric bill and every handout she takes from charity takes away from people who honestly and legitimately need help. Not everyone has the option of being poor. Some people in this country don’t have much choice in the matter.

  Levin and others who are in her position should be ashamed of themselves. First off, writing doesn’t have to be a vow of poverty, and I can speak to that fact directly. Even if writers don’t make money hand over fist, they can make enough to support themselves just fine. Second, if I couldn’t support myself with my writing—and Levin can’t, as evidenced by the fact that she roots for handouts on occasion—I would get another job. I wouldn’t stop being a writer, I would simply be doing something else as well. Certainly there’s enough of a history of writers with day jobs to support that idea. This goes for anyone in any creative field or anyone who has a college degree.

  Third, any person who can work enough to stay off the support net should do just that—and in fact they owe it to the people who actually need the support net. This is no joke: Some woman struggling to feed her children is going to wander into a food bank and miss out on something good for her kids because someone like Levin came through and took it first. Short of Levin’s library card, there’s hardly a service she mentions in her article that her using does not entail someone else losing out. I’d like to see her try to explain her “need” to that person.

  In her article, Levin talks about having the “privilege” of being able to choose to be poor in order to pursue her goals, but I’d like to suggest to her that her “privilege” stops where someone else’s need begins. What she needs to do is to get a job and start putting back into the support net what she’s so obliviously taken out of it.

  BEST VISION

  OF HELL OF THE MILLENNIUM

  It comes from Hieronymus Bosch, the Dutch painter who lived in the 15th and 16th Centuries (although assuredly, not through them both entirely). Other people wrote about Hell, lectured about Hell, or simply feared it as the inevitable end to their sinful ways. Bosch saw Hell, like Walker Evans saw the Depression, and then reported on what he saw. It wasn’t a very cheerful report, but then, what would you expect. Hell’s not a resort filled with Payday bars and happy kittens. Unless you’re allergic to nuts and cat dander. In which case, that’s exactly what it is.

  How did Bosch get this preview of Hell? It’s not that hard to imagine. Sartre famously said that Hell is other people, and while he was probably directly referring to some annoying waiter at Deux Magots, the line has broader implications. People are flawed, and not in the Japanese sense of wabi, in which a slight imperfection merely accentuates the fundamental perfection of a thing. Wabi is the mole on Cindy Crawford’s lip, the wheat bits in Lucky Charms, or the fact that Bill Gates’ fortune is owned by him and not you.

  No, we’re talking about deep-seated incipient screw-upped-ness, the kind that puts you on the news as the helicopter gets a top down view of the police surrounding your home. For most of us, fortunately, it expresses itself in less virulent form, usually a furtive, opportunistic violation of one or more of the seven deadly sins when we think we won’t get caught. Coupled with this is the dread knowledge that, not only do we know what we’re doing is wrong, but we’ll probably do it again the next time everyone else’s attention is back on the TV. We’re all a country song waiting to happen. With that realization comes the grinding sound of Satan’s backhoe scraping out space in our brain for another yet Hell franchise (six billion locations worldwide!). Hell is in all of us, not just the ones who use cell phones when they drive. All you have to do is look.

  Bosch looked. A pessimist and a moralist (one can hardly be one without being the other), Bosch saw what evil lurked in the hearts of men, and then hit the paint. His friends and neighbors were no doubt unhappy to learn they were the motivation for Bosch’s horrifying and fantastical canvases; it’s difficult to live near someone who might paint your face onto a damned creature with Hell’s staff fraternizing in what used to be its butt. But there’s a story about another painter which could shed some light on what Bosch was doing. Pablo Picasso once painted a portrait of Gertrude Stein, only to have someone comment that Stein looked nothing like the painting. Said Picasso: “She will, soon enough.” (And she did). Apply this same reasoning to a picture of yourself with imps in your ass. It might make you think.

  Beyond the existential and theological nature of Bosch’s work is the fact that, as paintings, they are just so damned cool. Bosch’s paintings of Hell influenced two great schools of art: Surrealism and Heavy Metal. Surrealism got off on Bosch’s vibrant and innovative use of color and his ability to combine the mundane and the fantastical to make bitter and intelligent social commentary. In fact Bosch had one up on most of the Surrealists in that he actually believed in something; unlike the surrealists and their kissing cousins the dadaists, Bosch’s work is rooted in morality rather than running away from it. Bosch wouldn’t have painted a mustache on Mona Lisa; he’d’ve had her devoured by a fish demon as a pointed warning of the dangers of vanity.

  Heavy Metal artists dug Bosch, because, dude, he totally painted demons. Without Bosch, we’d have no Boris Vallejo airbrushings or Dio album covers, and it’s debatable whether Western Culture would be able to survive their lack.

  Some ask, does Bosch’s work show Hell as it really is? No less an authority than the Catholic Church suggests that Hell is not so much a location as it is a state of being, an eternal absence of God’s grace rather than a place where pitchforks are constantly, eternally and liberally applied to your eyeballs. In which case, Bosch’s turbulent colors and troublesome devils are just another picture show, a trifle used to scare the credulous and the dim from indulging their baser instincts, like sex and thoughts on the possibility of even more sex.

  It’s the wrong question. It’s not important that Bosch shows Hell as it truly is; it’s entirely possible that, other than a useful philosophical construct, Hell doesn’t exist at all. (This does not change the fact that the Backstreet Boys must somehow be eternally punished for their crimes.) But whether it truly exists or not, humans need the idea of Hell, whether it be to scare us into a moral life, comfort the smug ones who believe everyone else is going there, or simply to remind us that the actions of our lives, good or ill, live beyond those lives themselves, and the accounting of them may occur past the day we ourselves happen to stop. Bosch saw the importance of the idea and put it down in oil.

  The question is not whether Hell exists, but rather: If we could see our souls in a mirror, rather than our bodies, would they be as Bosch painted them? If they were, we wouldn’t have to wait until the next life for Hell. It would already be here.

  POINTLESS

  IMPEACHMENT

  I avoided the impeachment hearings yesterday because I couldn’t see the point in bothering to watch them. I had things to do: We had a dinner party last night for about a dozen people, and I had to buy things, clean the house, try to start a fire in our wood-burning stove, keep the dog from freaking out
when all these people showed up in her house, and so on. I didn’t have time to listen to Ken Starr and all those Representatives posture.

  The point is moot, anyway. They can impeach Clinton, but they sure as hell can’t convict him. There wasn’t any before the mid-term elections, and there’s even less chance now; it’s now all an exercise in futility and saving face. It burns and chafes a bunch of people that Clinton got away with it, including several pretty good friends of mine, but at this point, there’s nothing to be done. Clinton’s won this one, and the smart thing to do is to concede the point and move on to thwarting him in some other way.

  Most of my conservative Republican friends are mystified that people are giving Clinton a flyer on this one: So he committed adultery and had sex with a woman young enough to be his daughter. So what? They just can’t figure out why people aren’t outraged. Well, most don’t hate Clinton with every fiber of their being. This is really the key here. If Reagan had been caught getting serviced, you’d hear nary a peep out of the GOP; it would have been the Democrats attempting a neck-stretching.

  And the other thing—look. Almost every heterosexual 50-year-old man in the United States would have sex with a willing 21-year-old woman if they thought they could get away with it. We’re talking, no one would ever know. It’d just be you and this nubile ball of flesh (for the record, nearly every 60-, 40-, 30-, 20-, and 13-year-old would do it, too). This is not to say many of those men would not feel awfully guilty afterwards. But they would still do it—or at the very least be so extraordinarily tempted that they might as well have done it, for all the guilt they feel.

  I think that, among men at least, a certain large percentage look at what Clinton did and go: Good for him. He got some. Another large percentage don’t like it but know that in the same circumstances, they couldn’t say they wouldn’t do it. Yet another large percentage (this is where I fit in, mostly) simply don’t care about a sex life that does not actively involve them. And so that leaves a certain small percentage who see what Clinton did, look inward to themselves to see if they might do the same thing in the same situation—and then lie to themselves, because their own image of themselves demands it. Those are the folks that want Clinton’s head.

  Now, I believe that it would never actually occur to Ken Starr to have sex with a 21-year-old woman. Ultimately, this is why most people don’t really like him.

  A VEGETARIAN

  MOMENT

  I could never be a vegetarian.

  First of all, my heart just wouldn’t be in it. I’m okay with the fact that what I’m cramming into my mouth was once a living thing, because with the exception of chewing gum (which is some sort of plastic, untouched by nature), everything you eat was once living. It’s the way the whole digestive thing is set up. You can’t live on chewing gum and multivitamins. I tried it my senior year of college, when I running low on rent money. It just doesn’t work.

  I feel bad for animals that they haven’t managed to do what plants do, which is to create portions that can be plucked away, leaving the rest of the living entity intact. If God had created pigs that shed a fully-cured ham every three months, or cows that dropped sirloins from fleshy stalks, no one would find anything wrong with eating meat. But He didn’t. And as bad as I feel, I don’t feel bad enough, since I keep eating meat, and have no intention of stopping. I do draw the line at veal, though if I think about it logically, it’s a questionable line to draw. Every calf I save from being penned is likely to go on to grow up to be several hundred quarter pounders. “Sooner or later” is the life story of a veal calf.

  Another reason to avoid the meatless lifestyle is that if I became a vegetarian, I wouldn’t be able to blithely note to the veggies that Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian (well, I could, but what would that say about me). Vegetarians hate having that brought up; it is, as you may imagine, a serious taint on the whole movement. You can often go for the double whammy by pointing out the Hitler also thought up Volkswagen, which will cause them to gnash their teeth as they grind their way back home in their 1970 VW bus. It never occurs to vegetarians to retort that Stalin ate piles of red meat; I wonder why that is.

  But my lack of moral objections is not the real issue here. The real issue is that every once in a while, I get a hand-shaking, knee-buckling, mind-swishing urge for the flesh of an animal. My body, fed too long on cheap, cellophane-covered crackers and individually packaged Rollo candies, screams for the protein found nestled in the muscle and fatty tissues we generically call “meat.” When I get to that point, it doesn’t really matter what sort of meat product I devour. Porterhouse, chicken leg, hot dog—even a Slim Jim will work (though with the last one, you pay for it later, a point that ironically the Slim Jim folks are playing up in their most recent batch of commercials).

  I was hit with one of those moments yesterday, around 3 o’clock in the afternoon—I had fed myself fat free, sugar free yogurt in the morning, and six or seven chocolate mint cups (think of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, but with mint in the role normally played by the peanut butter), and my body had just had enough of that. You’ve had your fun, it said to me. Now FEED me. I barely made it down the stairs to the refrigerator.

  Where I encountered a dilemma: There were no suitable meat products to be found in the fridge. I had expected to find a Cheddarwust—a summer sausage that, as you might have guessed from the name, was riddled inside with little pockmarks of cheddar cheese. As if you weren’t already getting enough fat out of the sausage. But the Cheddarwurst was gone. We had used them all up. The only other meat product in the fridge was a package of turkey ham that had been sitting in the meat bin for longer than I could remember.

  Which of course is a very bad sign. It was lying in wait to ambush me. It was the turkey’s revenge—first it was killed, and then it was made to perform a carnivorous transvestite act, masquerading as the meat of a pig. Its only method of revenge was to lie in the meat bin past its due date and trick me into eating it then. Well, not this time, Tom. I passed it up (but I didn’t remove it from the fridge and throw it in the trash, its threat then forever neutralized. No, I don’t know why not. I suspect the decision will come back to haunt me).

  The freezer held loads of meat, though, naturally, all of it was frozen and thus of little use to me in this moment of crisis. I looked into the door compartments, and found we had some frozen pizzas—cheese pizzas. I had eaten all the meat-flecked ones in earlier crisis situations.

  But next to the pizzas: Corn dogs. Reduced fat corn dogs, yes, but it would do in a pinch. I grabbed one, nuked it, and tromped back up the stairs, happily munching on my dead animal fix.

  I mentioned the Carnivore Moment to my wife when she came home. She looked at me blankly. I asked her why.

  “Those were vegetarian corn dogs,” she said. “There’s not a speck of meat in them.”

  Vegetarians, start your abuse…now.

  THE LIE OF

  STAR WARS AS

  ENTERTAINMENT

  Pyr Books main man Lou Anders points me in the direction of a call and response discussion on the topic of science fiction and “entertainment,” as in, is written science fiction entertaining enough to capture the unwashed masses who watch it on TV and in the movies but don’t bother to read the stuff. The first document in this discussion is an essay in Asimov’s in which writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch says that the problem with written SF is that it isn’t influenced enough by Star Wars, which to her mind is an exempar of good old-fashioned entertainment, and poses it in opposition to much of written SF, which is “jargon-filled limited-access novels that fill the shelves…dystopian novels that present a world uglier than our own, [and] protagonists who really don’t care about their fellow man/alien/whatever.”

  This earns a whack from Ian McDonald, who both denies that the rest of SF ever abandoned entertainment (“It’s as basic and primary as good grammar and syntax. It’s not an end point. It’s a beginning point”), and also decries the idea that entertainment is all th
ere is, or that Star Wars is its apex (“Let me say, if that’s the highest I can aspire to, if everything I have ever hoped for or dreamed of attaining, how I dared to touch hearts and minds, is measured against that; then the only morally consistent action I can take is for me to give up writing.”)

  For the moment I’m not going to go into the issue of whether written SF needs to save itself via being more entertaining, partly because I’ve discussed it before and partly because at the moment it’s not an interesting subject for me. Suffice to say that I write books that are meant to be both entertaining and smart, because that’s what I like to read. What I’m going to go into is the fact that much of the debate between Ms. Rusch and Mr. McDonald is irrelevant, because it starts from an erroneous premise. That erroneous premise is that the Star Wars films are entertainment.

  Star Wars is not entertainment. Star Wars is George Lucas masturbating to a picture of Joseph Campbell and conning billions of people into watching the money shot.

  There is nothing in the least bit “popular” about the Star Wars films. This is true of all of them, but especially of Episodes I, II and III: They are the selfish, ungenerous, onanistic output of a man who has no desire to include others in the internal grammar of his fictional world. They are the ultimate in auteur theory, but this creator has contempt for the people who view his work—or if not contempt, at the very least a near-austistic lack of concern as to whether anyone else “gets” his vision. The word “entertainer” has as an assumption that the creator/actor is reaching out to his or audience to engage them. George Lucas doesn’t bother with this. He won’t keep you out of his universe; he just doesn’t care that you’re in it. To call the Star Wars films “entertainment” is to fundamentally misapprehend the meaning of the world.