Keith's Rants

One of the countless evils inflicted upon us by the 1960s is the idea that people whose political ideas lean to the left are, ipso facto, grass-smoking flower children whose answer to everything is to put flowers in rifle muzzles and sing kumbaya around the wisdom tree.  It’s a concept that haunts the political discussion in this country, such that no matter how many purple hearts a presidential candidate has, or how many Al Qaeda warlords a certain Commander in Chief orders whacked by our fleet of flying robot assassins, he’s always one flubbed line away from being accused of wanting to defeat the Taliban with bear hugs and naked rain dances.  In reality, of course, nothing could be further from the truth.  If you’re in doubt, or if you want to believe but aren’t quite sure how, check out some of these awesome role-models.

Eric Blair

Republicans sometimes trot out George Orwell as a hero on par with Ronald Reagan because he once wrote a book about how the Soviet Union sucked.  He did, and he was right, but most people read Animal Farm and maybe 1984 and conveniently ignore everything else he’d written over the previous 25 years.  Books like The Road to Wigan Pier, which says more about the Great Depression in 150 pages than The Grapes of Wrath managed to say in twice as many, then uses its 100 or so remaining pages to skewer the vegetarians, hippies and assorted creepy-old-fat-guy-with-big-glasses-and-a-salt-and-pepper-beard types who, in his opinion, were fucking up Socialism for everyone else.  Or Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which cleverly explains why quitting your well-paying job to work part time in a book store so you can focus on your art is not a good long term plan.

But enough about that.  I think we all know that Orwell was a committed Socialist.  What’s important is why he was a badass.

Orwell hated Nazis “before it was cool” as they say.  So when Francisco Franco overthrew the democratically elected government of Spain and started generally being a dick to everyone, Orwell didn’t just “like” “Republican Government of Spain” on his Facebook page and go on about his business.  No.  He traveled to Spain (with his wife, amazingly) and volunteered to fight on the front lines against Franco.

After only a few months of creeping through No-Man’s Land to take potshots at fascist storm troopers, killing rats with shovels and bitching about how the Spaniards were always ready to fight the war “mañana,” Orwell was an infantry squad leader.  For those of you who haven’t met any, infantry squad leader is one of those job titles that virtually guarantees that the holder is tough as hell.

Unfortunately, one day while he was yelling at his guys for the hundredth time to clean their damn rifles, a Nazi sniper shot him clean through the throat, and he had to be evacuated back to England with the KGB hot on his heels.

Pretty awesome, but there’s more.

Rewind to 1935.  Orwell, broke as ever, was sharing an apartment with some guy named Rayner Heppenstall.  Heppenstall had a habit of coming home belligerently drunk at all hours of the morning, making a huge racket, and falling asleep in his own piss in the bathroom.  This greatly annoyed Orwell, who liked to stay up late writing on a typewriter, which is completely quiet and unobtrusive to one’s roommates.

Point is, we’ve all had a roommate like that, which is why we can all appreciate what Orwell did early one morning when Heppenstall came in even drunker and more obnoxious than usual: beat the hell out of him with a God damn pool cue (1) and locked him in the closet until he sobered up, then threw his ass out as soon as he came to in the morning.

End of discussion.

Smedley Butler

U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler was probably the closest the U.S. military has ever come to appointing an actual card-carrying communist to general officer rank.  That he was able to get as far as he did was due primarily to the fact that he was an absolute nails hardass who refused to take crap off of anyone for any reason and who won TWO (!)  Medals of Honor during a thirty-year military career that took him to the Philippines, China, Haiti, Mexico, Nicaragua, France and, most dangerously of all, West Philadelphia.

The main way to get a Medal of Honor these days is to jump on a hand grenade, thereby saving your buddies’ lives at the cost of your own.  That’s something we all can respect, but it does have a negative effect on future career prospects.  Butler, however, won his medals the old-fashioned way, by leading bayonet charges, dragging a wounded man out of No-Man’s Land despite already having a bullet in his chest, and by invading Mexico for no reason at all.

Butler’s most dangerous and violent assignment came when he took a leave of absence from the Marines to serve as police chief of Philadelphia during Prohibition.  If you’ve ever seen the movie The Untouchables, you have a pretty good idea of what he was up against, and, as would be expected, Butler took a page from Elliot Ness’s playbook.

General Butler opened his term with the first of what would turn into a series of incredibly profane radio addresses, all of which boiled down to, “We’re going to catch those fuckers, and shoot ‘em dead!”  None of the speeches survives on a recording, but you can get the general idea by watching Full Metal Jacket a couple of times.  Butler instituted a system of cash rewards for every cop who shot a “bandit” – known or suspected – set up roadblocks throughout the city to catch rumrunners, and arrested prominent politicians and ward heelers who were on the take.

The Philly underworld was not in any way prepared for that level of aggression, and quite frankly neither was anyone else in the city.  Although crime declined dramatically during Butler’s tenure, his use of napalm and heavy machine gun fire in busting up speakeasies and shutting down numbers rackets was always controversial.  Partly as a result of this and partly because of his annoying habit of arresting the mayor’s friends and relatives on charges of outrageous corruption, the Marines called him back after two years.

We’ve established Butler’s credentials as a badass, you say, but how did he get to be known as such a pinko that Huey Long, of all people, nominated him to be Secretary of War in his cabinet, should Long be elected president (it didn’t work out).

It all started about nine seconds after Butler retired from the Marine Corps, when he published a book called “War is a Racket.”  You can read it if you want, but like “Catcher in the Rye,” it must have been more shocking to the more innocent sensibilities of the past.  Its main premise is that U.S. foreign policy in Latin America had sometimes valued, say, the price of bananas more than things like democracy and self-government.  For further reading along these lines, pick up any high school history textbook published since approximately 1978.

Even more than by writing his book, Butler brushed up his cred both as a pinko commie hippie liberal and as an American hero by preventing a fascist coup against FDR in 1933.

You read that correctly (2).

Roosevelt had just been elected President on a radical platform of “using government money to keep people from starving to death” and “keeping Wall Street from fucking up the country again.”  This alarmed the robber barons greatly, but it was the first time it had happened, so they hadn’t yet hit upon the idea of just bilking Congress for hundreds of billions of dollars, which would prove to be the dominant tactic in future financial crises.

Instead, some bright young up-and-comer hit upon the completely insane idea of hiring 500,000 unemployed World War One veterans to lead a coup against Roosevelt.  He talked it over with his buddies while they were sitting around a table buying $200 bottles of third shelf vodka from dead-inside bar girls, and they thought it was a good idea, too.  So a little while later he walked up to the now-retired General at a cocktail party and broke the ice with, “You know, we’ve been talking about staging this coup against the President.  You in?”

Butler spit his drink back into his glass as casually as he could, humored the little bastard for about ten minutes, excused himself, and ran off to tell Congress about the shenanigans faster than you could say “HUAC.”  Congress did some investigating of its own, and although his story checked out, no one was prosecuted because the plotters weren’t so much billionaire plutocrats seeking to overthrow democracy as Brooks Brothered Young Republicans with too much time on their hands.

Do you know some Brooks Brothered Young Republicans with too much time on their hands who need to be hauled before Congress for making stupid statements?  If so, then Butler should be your hero.

Daniel Inouye

It’s become fashionable these days to refer to one’s political opponents as Nazis, whether they’re Black, Texan or Jewish – all groups of people that the Nazis did their best to destroy.  You won’t catch U.S. Senator from Hawaii Daniel Inouye doing that, though.  Dan knows a thing or two about Nazis, specifically about killing them.  He won the Medal of Honor in Italy during World War Two by destroying three German machine gun positions, the last of them with a live grenade that he pried out of his own severed hand – this despite the fact that he had already been shot in the stomach at the beginning of the engagement.  He was ready to keep right on going, too, but understandably passed out from loss of blood at that point.  When he came to, his guys were carrying him back to the aid station; he told them to get the hell back to work.

This is probably the reason why, despite the fact that that he voted for the health care reform bill, the assault weapons ban and approximately 97 tax increases during his 40 years in the congress, he doesn’t have a big unruly mob of crackers standing at his doorstep dressed in sweatpants and coonskin caps waving pictures of him with Hitler mustaches drawn in in sharpie.

Eugene Debs

Imagine this scenario:  a left-wing politician is brought up on charges of aiding Al Quaeda.  Fox News does their best to have him tarred and feathered and he can’t even dream of getting a second hearing in the court of public opinion.  Most people these days would just fold up, plead guilty to a lesser charge and be railroaded into obscurity.

Not Eugene V. Debs, who had the damned audacity to run for President in 1920 despite the fact that he was in prison AT THE TIME, and for aiding the enemy during wartime no less.  Sure, the charges were bogus and Debs’ offense consisted mainly of making snide remarks about the Attorney General.  But the charge was “espionage” and if you know anything about the home front during World War One, you can guess how it went over.

Debs was fucking punk rock about the whole business.  When the Glenn Becks of the day came out with editorials saying “Eugene V. Debs you hate America,” he did an end-run around the usual shouting match by running for President, as a Socialist, with the campaign slogan: “fuck you, and fuck your stupid law.”

He ran his presidential campaign out of his prison cell in Ft. Leavenworth and in the election of 1920 won nearly a million votes – not enough to win, but as a percentage of the electorate more than (much less badass) lefties Ralph Nader and Denis Kucinich have ever won, even combined.  By getting a million Americans to vote for a commie felon, Debs wiped his ass on the tie of every smartass pundit in the country who wrote him off from the get-go.

That’s more than the next three presidents were able to accomplish combined.

Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen wrote antiwar poetry, which in modern eyes is an activity at most one short step removed from wearing tie-dye and smoking pot in Buena Vista Park.  The fact that he was gay also probably would not help him get invited to speak at a Republican National Convention.  However, unlike the entire population of Height-Ashbury, Owen was an infantry officer in World War One.  This meant that he performed more towering feats of heroism on his way to get hot water to shave with than most Green Berets do in their entire careers.  Indeed, he was killed in 1918 just a week before the war ended, leading a bayonet charge across a bridge in one of the decisive battles that brought the war to a close.  I don’t think that there is anyone alive today, excepting maybe our man Dan up there, who would ever be in any position to question Wilfred Owen’s testicular fortitude.

He didn’t have to be there.  Owen had been diagnosed with what was then called “shell shock” in 1916 and subsequently pulled off the front line.  He had already distinguished himself in combat, and there was nothing to stop him sitting out a war that everyone had already agreed was a futile waste of everything in a comfortable hospital in Scotland.  He didn’t, and indeed went behind his boyfriend’s back to volunteer to return to the front lines in 1918.  Why?

Wilfred Owen was born and died in a different time, when people had different expectations of other people, and of themselves, in a way that is difficult to articulate.  The best I can come up with is that in those days, people were expected to do things before they shot their mouths off about it.  Smedley Butler could write a book about how the U.S. military ruthlessly suppressed Latin American guerilla movements in order to further the narrow interests of companies like United Fruit, because he was the man in charge of the suppressing.  Who the hell was going to argue with him?  Debs spent decades as a labor leader and went to prison for organizing railroad workers to strike against a 30% pay cut before he ever went into politics.  Eric Blair, alias George Orwell, was a cop in India before he wrote about how the British Raj was corrupt and evil, and he was a hobo and restaurant dishwasher before he wrote about how tough poor people had it in the ‘30s and what had to be done to change that.  He may have been right and he may have been wrong, but he at least had some idea of what he was talking about.

And that is what you don’t see nearly enough anymore.  Apparently a PoliSci degree from UC Boulder makes you an expert on everything from the war in Afghanistan to international trade policy, and a high school diploma and a career as a morning radio shock jock (3) qualify you to write several inane books philosophizing about every aspect of American society, politics and foreign policy.

Go to a bookstore and look at the social science / politics section, and you will find book after book about politics, war, economics, and really any topic you could care to name — mostly written by people whose only job has ever been to write books about politics, war, economics and any other topic you could care to name.  Books advocating (or condemning) war against Iran to stop their nuclear program, written by people who have never been in a war, been to Iran, worked in nuclear energy or served as diplomats in the Middle East – any of which might give them something to say.

Look at cable TV, where entire television shows will be composed of nothing but people whose only job it is to be on cable TV reciting talking points at the cameras.  Professional experts with no expertise.  We can’t stop them, but we can repudiate them.  And if we had fewer of them hanging around and more people like the ones above, we might just wind up with better answers.

(1) Actually, it was what’s called a “shooting stick,” which is basically a pool cue that you stick into the ground to rest your rifle on when you’re shooting things from a standing position.  Things like elephants, apparently.  Heppenstall wrote a short story about the incident in 1955, called “The Shooting Stick: The Amazing True Story of How I Got My Ass Kicked by England’s Foremost Man of Letters.”  It is currently out of print.

(2) No, really.  http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2624/oh-smedley

(3) Looking at you, Glenn Beck.

One thing that I missed while I was in Iraq was TV commercials. The magic of AFN, which allows Soldiers to catch half a Red Sox game in between missions, also allows them to enjoy television free of commercial advertising. Like PBS, though, the military finds its own ways to waste your time* while you’re waiting to find out what happens at the end of The Simpsons (SPOILER ALERT: everything goes back to normal). The military fills the ordinary commercial breaks in programming with its own spots, ranging from the predictable (Sexual Assault is WRONG!) to the quixotic (Spending Time Away From My Family is Something I’m Proud to do — Selfless Service: One Of The Seven Army Values!) to the freaking bizarre (Flying by the Seat of your Pants: Part of our Military Heritage!). Some of them seem to have been made for the sole purpose of filling airtime. It’s hard to think of any other possible justification for the interminable “50 States” series. (I was the first state to sign the Declaration of Independence! My state fruit is the tennis ball! What state am I — 12 second pause — DELAWARE and my capital is Wilmington.)

There’s something almost endearingly guileless about the propaganda commercials that you don’t see at all in corporate advertising. They would almost be menacing if they weren’t so unbelievably corny. Imagine the voice the telescreen would use to tell you that your chocolate ration has been increased to 35 grams a week, only it’s telling you to wear a bike helmet, reflective vest, knee and elbow pads, mouth guard and goggles when you ride your bike to the PX. Oh, and it was filmed in Italy 15 years ago. Having been exposed for 25 years to the full spectrum of Madison Avenue trickery, it was something of a shock to have the TV just straight up TELL me to do things.

As much as I was amused by cartoon pigeons with Brooklyn accents telling me the difference between a general and a special power of attorney, when I redeployed I had a renewed appreciation for the creative effort that goes into professional advertising. Imagine for a minute that I were to walk up to you on the street, show you a can of pomade, and tell you earnestly that if you put this goo in your hair, attractive women like this one here will have sex with you. You would look at me like I was out of my fucking mind before calling the police on me for harassment and/or pimping. Yet this is exactly what the Unilever Corporation tells millions of people every day, with apparent success. The chutzpah, the calculated disdain for the reasoning powers of the average person, the mind-blowing cynicism of a system that will focus some of the finest artistic minds in the world to convince people of that objectively ludicrous premise have always inspired a kind of awe in me.

It’s the same kind of awe that one feels when looking over an ancient, beautiful monument to some long-ignored belief system. It’s marvelous to contemplate the immense effort, creativity and craftsmanship that went into convincing people that Pharaoh Controls the Floods, Rodrigo Borgia is God’s Viceroy on Earth and King Louis is a Wise and Powerful Leader. Graffiti artist Banksy laments the fact that advertising has drawn skilled and creative people away from more meaningful pursuits and directed them towards crass, degrading or even harmful causes. But this is true of countless products of human creativity that only seem grand hundreds of years after the fact. It’s only our proximity to advertising that keeps us from appreciating it objectively, just as the Moses’ proximity to the pyramids probably kept him from truly appreciating their grandeur.

So, no, nothing you put in your hair will make women have sex with you, any more than Pharaoh made the Nile flood. But I hope we can all step back for a minute and admire the audacity and skill that it takes to convince millions of rubes otherwise.

* Some cynical hearts would say that the military has entirely mastered wasting your time. This is correct.

If you follow the news, you will have heard of the recent dispute between the United States and Israel over Israel’s plans to build more trailer parks on what everyone else in the world considers Palestinian land.  I’m not going to get into detail on the issue, except to note that as part of the general finger-wagging over the whole affair, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was brought to the White House and, presumably, called on the carpet for causing so much trouble.

Only somehow it’s hard to imagine Barack Obama standing behind his desk, chewing out Netanyahu or anyone at all for that matter, let alone making him sweat so bad that as soon as he leaves the office he immediately reverses his country’s long-standing foreign policy fundamentals, as was presumably intended when the meeting was called.  This isn’t unique to the current President, either.  American voters tend to elect a guy that they’d be comfortable having a beer with, which means that there hasn’t been an American President capable of the sort of paint-stripping tirade that was obviously called for in this case since probably Lyndon Johnson.

Johnson, some will recall, once prevented Greece from sending troops into Cyprus by calling the Greek ambassador into the Oval Office, then picking him up by the ears and screaming at him from a distance of six inches for over an hour, spitting tobacco juice down his shirt the whole time.  Johnson then “pecker slapped” the ambassador — his words, not mine — and threw him through a plate glass window into some rose bushes.  This was called “the Johnson treatment” and is the reason why the Oval Office windows are now made of bulletproof glass and the Greek ambassador’s shirts are made of stain-resistant microfiber.

LBJ winding up to pimp-slap a 90 year-old man.

Undoubted though President Obama’s other merits may be, this is a performance that only a handful of politicians can emulate.  Theodore Roosevelt ended the Russo-Japanese War by inviting the Russian and Japanese ambassadors onto a yacht, then dangling them overboard by their ankles and holding their heads under water until they agreed to sign the peace treaty — an act for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  Andrew Jackson would just coldly threaten to duel anyone who “insulted his honor” by disagreeing with him.  By the time he was President, of course, he’d already killed 113 men in affairs of honor, so he didn’t so much have to directly threaten people as just casually glance at the well-worn set of matched pistols hanging on the wall before John C. Calhoun or whoever it was got the message and decided that it might not be the right time to secede from the Union.  Unfortunately for us there’s just no one in American government these days who can pull off this sort of intense personal intimidation for the good of the Republic.

Good thing our allies across the pond have got us covered.  I am referring of course to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Brown, a 6′4″ 250 lb Glaswegian rugby player, blind in one eye from being kicked in the head one too many times, is a notorious hardass.  Recently his own cabinet secretary called the law on him for being violently aggressive with his staff, calling the British “national bullying hotline” — something that could only exist in the UK — and reporting that he routinely flew into a rage, threw furniture, threatened to hit people and swore so virulently that their delicate English sensibilities were bruised beyond repair.  In one notable incident Brown was riding in the back seat of his official Rolls Royce when somebody passed him a note saying that Celtic F. C. had just been beat by Aberdeen.  He reacted by punching the cop sitting in the shotgun seat in the back of the head, causing him to place a call to the National Hurt Feelings Hotline and then go home and cry himself to sleep.

If you want to see Gord in action, look no further than my favorite television program of all, Prime Minister’s Question Time on C-SPAN, where you can see him square off in the House of Commons against the leader of the opposition, prancing pretty boy David Cameron.  Cameron will from time to time use all of his allotted six questions to basically taunt Brown, in the finest traditions of the House.  He will get up there and let loose with something like, “Mr. Speaker, as I was saying to the Right Honourable Gentleman’s mother the other night, in his best selling book about courage, he talks about courage being necessary to govern effectively.  Does he realize that children as young as  three are so busy laughing as his hypocrisy that they are unable to eat, and when will he start to care about the starving children of Britain?”

Although the established decorum of the 900 year-old British Parliament prevents even such a man as Gordon Brown from actually leaping across the table and throttling Cameron with his tie, it’s clear from watching him that it takes every ounce of restraint in him to hold back.  Shaking with rage, he will stare Cameron down and point out that he was a Member of Parliament when Cameron was a glint in the milkman’s eye, so why doesn’t he just shut the fuck up.

But if standing up to the smart-aleck aristo leader of Britain’s Conservative Party doesn’t impress you (and no one is blaming you if it  doesn’t) then what about Russian  Gangster Czar Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, whose status as a former KGB agent puts him  squarely into Bond villain territory, and who is not known for taking crap off of anyone.

Gordon Brown has been using the grip exerciser.

Gordon Brown met Putin recently at a G8 summit, and showed him who was boss before he was even out of the cloak room.  A picture is worth a  thousand words, and in this case 333 of those words are “Rule,” 333 are “Britannia” and 334 are “Motherfucker.”  Brown is clearly squashing  Putin’s hand like it’s a bag of wet spaghetti — the manliest gesture of all — and leaning aggressively into what would be easy tobacco- spitting range if he were Johnson.  Putin, for his part, is leaning backward uncomfortably while Brown, sporting a five-o’clock shadow, looms over him like a hungry bear.  Compare to this picture of LBJ to see the similarity of technique.

Brown learned from the master.

The implications for Anglo-American foreign policy are clear.  President Obama should delegate the chewing out of obnoxious chickenshit  little countries’ heads of government to our British allies, saving time to focus on his strengths: inspirational speechifying and passing  health care reform bills.

This is a long boring story with a profound insight at the end. Bear with me.

So, one time back in high school I was out at a movie with this girl I liked. We were sitting in the theater talking during the ads when, after a particularly awkward pause, she came out with,

“Which celebrity would you most like to sleep with?”

I was literally dumbstruck. Then as now I paid little attention to celebrity culture, and I can honestly say that I was hard pressed to think of anyone at all whom one could plausibly call a celebrity. After what seemed like whole minutes of awkwardness, I finally answered Cheryl Crow – not because I am particularly attracted to her, and certainly not because she’d edged out any close competitors on some mental list of mine, but because that damn “Soak up the Sun” song had been stuck in my head for approximately three weeks.

I hear that’s how she snagged Lance Armstrong.

She, of course, had an answer all ready to go, but it is telling that while I remember what it was, I can’t think of his name. He’s the guy who played Spider Man, and who was in The Cider House Rules. You know the one.

You can imagine how the rest of the evening went.

Fast forward to just the other day, when I was in the grocery store, thinking about something completely different. Apropos of nothing, the correct answer to her question popped into my head:

“Why, you of course, your majesty!” (Followed by a kiss on the cheek or a punch on the arm, depending upon her immediate reaction.)

Now, obviously this would not have gotten me laid, but that’s not the point. The point is that that question has been floating around in my head, unbeknownst to me, for apparently the last seven years. All this time, while my conscious mind was working on other things – high school, college, several jobs – my subconscious was running a tiny background program called “Witty Comeback 1.0” – presumably when it should have been, say, remembering to pay the phone bill, or figuring out how to do calculus.

This was most disturbing. What else is in there, soaking up precious mental RAM? I have no idea, of course, and am not prepared to take the drugs necessary to find out, but the fact that my mind has a mind of its own, so to speak, makes me question myself just a little.

What’s going on in your brain that you’re not aware of? Would you sleep with someone who tried that line? Was “Signs” the worst movie of all time? You may not post a comment, but don’t be surprised if the answer comes to you in spite of yourself, perhaps many years hence.

Translator’s Note: One of the most popular television programs today is The O’Reilly Factor, hosted by Bill O’Reilly. However, the complex political theories expressed by O’Reilly can often be difficult for the layman to understand. Therefore, in an effort to improve comprehension, I have undertaken to translate a recent interview with war orphan Jeremy Glick into Newspeak, which is obviously the language of O’Reilly’s thoughts, and — not incidentally — Glick’s. I think you’ll find it’s much more coherent than the Oldspeak version available on Fox.

Comrade O’Reilly is doubleplusgood duckspeaker. 3yp 1q O’Reilly speaked on telescreen with crimethinker Jeremy Glick. Two minutes’ hate begin now.

O’REILLY: Jeremy Glick is issue of Barry Glick who died in attack by Eastasia on Oceania. Jeremy Glick writed crimethinkful book: “Oceania is Ungood.” Jeremy, why writed book?

GLICK: Why writed book? Surpriseful that you asked! President Bush unlistened proles and conspired with Eastasia to attack Oceania! President Bush unbellyfeel Ingsoc!

O’REILLY: You speak crimethinkwise! Is surpriseful because are issue of Barry Glick – plusgood doublethinker who bellyfeeled Ingsoc!

GLCIK: Barry Glick thinked President Bush unlistened proles and unbellyfeeled Ingsoc.

O’REILLY: Barry Glick unsaid Oceania is ungood!

GLICK: I unsaid Oceania is ungood!

O’REILLY: Writed book “Oceania is Ungood.” Are plusgood doublethinker!

GLICK: President Bush is issue of President Bush, who muchwise helped Eastasia under President Carter!

O’REILLY: President Carter is unperson.

GLICK: Attack by Eastasia is ungood reason to spy on proles.

O’REILLY: Spies bellyfeel ingsoc. President Bush unspy on proles and bellyfeel Ingsoc.

GLICK: President Bush unbellyfeel Ingsoc.

O’REILLY: That’s a bunch of crap.

GLICK: Oldspeakers unbelly . . .

O’REILLY: Cut his mike!

CUT TO COMMERCIAL

DISCLAIMER

Before we begin our tour of the darkest reaches of the human soul, I have been advised by our lawyers to insist
that ladies, young children, and gentlemen of weak constitution leave the room at this time.

INTRODUCTION

What is the worst thing? Some would say Hell. Others would say tartar sauce on French fries. They would all be wrong. The worst thing in the entire world is erotic fan fiction. This document is a review, if you will, of the existing literature.

Some of you are already trying to leave the room, but I assure you that it is too late. You are about to enter another dimension: a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. You are about to enter . . .

The Twilight Zone, incidentally, is seemingly the only significant literary, television, or cinematic accomplishment since the dawn of man that has failed to push the sexual buttons of at least one semiliterate dwarf living in his parents’ basement. I know this because recently, while making fun of my girlfriend for her entirely healthy interest in actor Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry Potter, I made one lighthearted Google search too many and stumbled upon the world’s largest repository of erotic fan fiction, adultfanfiction.net.

This festering mass grave in the back yard of the collective human psyche is something that we are all vaguely aware of – who hasn’t made a Counselor Troi joke at the expense of some frustrated nerd – but that we’d really rather forget exists. Yet, as with a mass grave, leaving it unexamined leaves us blind to the true horror of what it contains, and the true horror of which mankind is capable. Understanding erotic fan fiction, and the weirdos who write it, helps us to understand many things, from television writing to tabloid publishing, both of which are essentially highly developed forms of erotic fan fiction.

Sit back, relax, and pour yourself a scotch on the rocks in a pilsner glass, because here comes a detailed examination of the worst thing in the entire world, ever. Seriously.

LITERATURE

I choose to divide literature-based erotic fan fiction into two main categories: Harry Potter, and Not Harry Potter. Adultfanfiction.net does essentially the same thing, with an additional category for Lord of the Rings, which I choose to ignore as I have never read anything by J.R.R. Tolkien, and do not intend to start.

As you’ll recall, it was the Harry Potter series that initially led me to this collection of literary travesties. I should admit up front that I have not read these books, either, but a complete hardback set is sitting on my bookshelf, so I feel that I have absorbed the jist of them by osmosis.

AFF.net features some 3,230 Harry Potter-themed erotic stories, broken down according to which characters are involved in the tryst. Here again I am limited by not having read the books, so it is up to you to decide which is the most appalling. I can only note some general statistics.

For instance:

The number of Male/Male stories (1,409) exceeds the number of Male/Female (1,160) and Female/Female (169) stories combined.

492 of the stories feature three or more characters.

J.K. Rowling’s creepiest fans want to see Harry with Snape more than with any other character, by a factor of ten. Snape is apparently a male professor at Hogwarts.

Some of the stories feature an original male/female character (OMC/OFC) in lieu of one of the characters from the book. While several of the characters have stories featuring them with both male and female original characters, Harry alone is featured with only male protagonists. This is particularly surprising in light of the fact that 100% of women surveyed wanted to have sex with Harry Potter. Snape, interestingly enough, has the largest number of OFC stories, indicating that he is the dream guy among both gay and straight bizarre lunatic freak-dorks.

There is also a section for people asking other people to write Harry Potter sex stories for them, demonstrating a startling lack of ambition on their part considering the low literary bar at play here. Some of the requests are frankly quite disturbing, which, coming from a man who has undertaken to write a study of erotic fan fiction, is saying a lot. For instance, the author “Taila” wants:

“. . . this Snape/Harry fic. It involes the Wizarding Child Service, which comes after Sanpe [sic] discovers the abuse the Dursley inflict upon Harry. The abuse includes cutting out the wings Harry sprouts.”

Now, I honestly don’t know if the cutting out of the wings bit is actually in the books or not, but the fact that this person gets off on it made me feel just a little bit better about the hydrogen bomb.

Nearly as disturbing is what is termed “crossover” fiction, of which there are mercifully only 173 examples. This dreck brings in characters from other fantasy universes to get it on with Harry and the Hogwarts gang. Looking at literally the first three examples, I see one involving Dragonball Z characters and another involving Anakin Skywalker from the Star Wars Episodes I-III (themselves basically fan fiction), who pairs up with Lord Voldemort.

Much erotic fiction, including some comparatively literate and respectable stories, includes with the title a sort of code in order to let the reader know what sorts of sexcapades the story contains. This can be a lifesaver, since no one wants to be reading along pleasantly only to be instantly turned off when someone’s fist goes up someone else’s ass. So, for instance, “FMF” means . . . hooray, threesomes! However, the writers at AFF.net tend to go way overboard in terms of content, which leaves us with:

“My Dear Hate

To be hated and loved at the same time is to [sic] much for draco [sic]. As he goes to a mental hospital he finds hate beyond reason…[sic]Or is it [sic]?

Abuse,Angst,Anthro,BDSM,Bi,B-Mod,Bond,BP,Crossover,Death,
F/F,F/M/M,Fet,Fist,H/C,HJ,Humil,Inc,Language,M/F,M/F/F,MC,Minor, N/C,OC,Oral,Preg,Racist,S&M,SH,Slave,SoloF,SoloM,Spank,Tort,Toys,Trans,Violence,WAFF,WD,WIP”

Just in case I haven’t entirely ruined the series for those of you who are legitimate fans, I’ll wrap this up with an excerpt.

“Hermione stood on her balcony watching the plant city come alive. She had always loved Corusant at night. She was so lost in her thoughts, that she didn’t hear the man walk up behind her.

“Beautiful isn’t it?”

“Ooohhh! Obi-Wan don’t sneak up on me like that,” she gasped.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you milady,” Obi-Wan Kenobi smirked.

“I forgive you,” she smiled.

Hermione sighed as he wrapped his arms around her waist. Despite it being forbidden for a Jedi to fall in love, Hermione and Obi-Wan had fallen in love anyway. Somehow they had kept it hidden from the Council.

“Where’s your Padawan?” she asked.”

Hell if I know what a padawan is, but I think you get the idea.

Non-Harry Potter literature-based erotic fan fiction is relatively much less bizarre. Some of it practically writes itself, as with the pair of stories about The Picture of Dorian Gray. One of them is as follows:

“As You Wish

When Dorian Gray mourns over the loss of Sibyl Vane, who else could possibly comfort him like his good friend Lord Henry? H/C, Oral, Slash.”

It has been about five years since I read Dorian Gray, but what surprised me most about this story was the fact that it apparently did not actually happen in the book. It was certainly implied, since the book was used as evidence in Oscar Wilde’s criminal trial for “gross indecency.” Lord knows what happened in Wilde’s imagination, but rest assured it was probably better written than whatever tripe “Avara,” the author, could come up with.

Whereas in Dorian Gray the sex was more or less written between the lines, it is hard to imagine the type of person who gets turned on by, say, Charlie and the Chocolate factory – seven stories’ worth of people, apparently. Likewise, it would seem that some of the people reading the Left Behind series aren’t getting hard so much from the stories of infidels roasting in hellfire as from the vision of the antichrist sexually dominating his chief minion, a male journalist named “Buck.” The fact that the people reading these books like to write gay erotic fiction poses as many questions as it answers, of course, but I can’t say I was surprised. If you’re gay and guilty, “Bible Belt” Christianity seems like a natural choice, as Ted Haggard demonstrated so hilariously of late, while imagining sexual urges as stemming from the devil could keep you just sane enough to avoid killing yourself.

Incidentally, “Buck” is the name of the character in the books, not the creation of the online author. That makes this one of the very few cases where the erotic fan fiction is better written than the original book.

MOVIES

Unlike a lot of the books that get twisted into sinister urges in the minds of readers, a good number of movies made in the last, say, fifty years already have a lot of sex in them. This makes the erotic stories that people come up with a little less improbable. Who saw Hostel and didn’t wish he or she could visit a youth hostel in Eastern Europe full of hot, willing women? Nobody, that’s who. On the other hand, since movies don’t leave so much to the imagination, the urge to actually write this crap is less understandable. Ten people saw fit to add on to Cruel Intentions, but after a certain point you’re basically just writing a sequel. Don’t think Hollywood hasn’t thought of it — or hired these same people to write it.

Adultfanfiction.net features many more movies than books, many of which I have not seen or do not really remember. Fortunately, all but a few have only a few stories written about them, which makes it easier to find something to make fun of. The downside to this is that the ones with a large number of stories don’t have them categorized in any way, which makes it harder to draw sweeping conclusions about the authors without actually reading every one of the stories, something which I am not about to do. With less data to go on, my analysis of movie-based erotic fan fiction will have to be confined to a quick look at which movies most inspire the public imagination, plus a survey of the most freaking bizarre examples I can find before my coffee gets cold and I finally leave the apartment for the day.

Unsurprisingly, Brokeback Mountain outscores most other movies, with 88 stories to its name. I don’t need to tell you what those stories are about, but it’s surprising to me that these people feel the need to go beyond what the movie already has to offer, which seems pretty extensive. The only movie that outshines Brokeback, surprisingly, is Predator, with 90 stories, though this isn’t really a fair comparison, as Predator is more properly a series. Unlike Brokeback Mountain, the Predator stories seem to be mainly by straight writers, which doesn’t make them any less bizarre or bad. To wit:

“Nine Lives

A girl, her cat and one damn sexy alien. Angst, Humil, Language, M/F, OC, Other, Violence, Xeno
Author [Sinvisigoth]

. . . Under normal circumstances, I have a very pleasant singing voice; my best friend once told me that if I was in a room with the world’s twenty best singers, I would not be the worst singer in the room. And I love him beyond words for that, the most beautiful truth anyone has ever told me. These circumstances not being normal by any standard, I chose to torture my kidnappers with Blue Grass sung in the voice of Daffy Duck…mostly to the tune of It’s a Small World After All. They showed their great appreciation by silencing me with what looked like a pygmy’s jock strap. Feeling around with my tongue, I had to admit that pygmies had a raw deal when it came to stereotypes; there was serious room in this thing.”

This goes on and on for pages. As near as I can tell, nothing even remotely sexual happens, and the story ends with the narrator’s cat rescuing her from her captors by clawing them. In reality, no cat would take the trouble to do any such thing. I can’t see where the “erotic” part comes in, unless the author is turned on from talking about herself – something that happens to all too many people, in my experience.

A few other movies that drew a lot of interest are Sleepy Hollow (18), Van Helsing (79), and The Matrix series (79). High School Musical has 22 stories written about it, proving that pedophiles are regular contributors to the corpus of online sex lit.

Hostel, mentioned earlier, has only three stories, all written by people who apparently thought it didn’t have enough gay sex in it. This lack of interest may at first seem surprising in a film with so much raw material, but that abundance means that if you’re going to get off to Hostel, you probably don’t have to use your imagination very much at all. More surprising, to me, was the fact that Tank Girl had ZERO (0) stories written about it, which perhaps says more about me than it does about anyone else, though admittedly the comic book Tank Girl was far sexier than the movie. Moving on.

Two sub-categories in the Movies section of AFF are Star Wars and Pirates of the Caribbean. One would think that these would be comic gold-mines, but this is not so. Pirates of the Caribbean stories are almost annoyingly predictable: women want to have sex with Jack Sparrow. So do gay men. We get it. The Star Wars section has the opposite problem. Those of you who have ever been to the sci-fi paperback section of a large bookstore may be able to guess what I’m getting at. Star Wars has an enormous preexisting body of not so erotic fan fiction, much of which has already been published by real, legitimate publishers with their own printing presses and everything. Much of this is only tangentially related to the original three movies from the 70s, and instead exists in a sort of complete fictional universe that I can’t begin to comprehend. This same universe provides the basis for most of the stories on AFF. For instance, we have this:

“Aerodynamic

After Jaina’s horrifying betray, Jagged Fel needs to learn to get over her. Can Neela, a Twilek Imperial Engineer, help? COMPLETE, H/C, M/F, OC, Oneshot
Author [Violetlight]

He had thought she loved him.

Try as he may, Jagged Fel could not get the images of betrayal out of his mind. What had happened to the Jaina he had loved, the fiery, determined “Sword of the Jedi”? How could she have betrayed his love, his respect for her by Joining with the enemy? That was the question repeating over and over again in his mind: Why?”

I have only seen episodes IV-VI of Star Wars, so I have literally no idea what to make of this. I don’t even know what some of those words mean, let alone the back story of the characters. Perhaps if this essay becomes my master’s thesis at some point in the future, I’ll go back and figure out the Star Wars Universe enough to do some original research, but for now I really can’t be bothered. So, if anyone else wants to take a crack at making fun of this stuff, be my guest, but chances are that if you know enough about Star Wars to laugh at the jokes, erotic fan fiction is as close as you’ll get to having sex with another person.

TELEVISION: THE CONCLUSION

Researching television-based AFF gave me some of the same problems as did the movies: there are thousands of programs, of which I have seen relatively few. At this point I should probably brag that we don’t even own a TV. This means that the more recent the program, the less likely it is that I’ve heard of it, let alone watched it. That said, there’s so much material that I should have no trouble writing as much as I care to, and if you are disappointed that I didn’t cover your favorite soap opera, feel free to do your own research, God help you.

To begin with, we have the obvious shows: The X-Files (144), Xena (101), That 70s Show (19), and Friends (30). One would think that people who watch the X-Files would want to see Mulder and Scully get it on, as the show’s writers intended, but a quick look through the directory shows a surprising number of gay-oriented stories featuring Mulder with Skinner, which apparently makes David Duchovny a gay icon up there with Harry Potter and Marilyn Monroe. In contrast, Xena has a surprising number of M/F pairings, considering the fact that Xena and Gabrielle actually ARE gay icons. In the first two pages, containing about two dozen stories, I found only two stories in which the author wants to imagine Lucy Lawless getting it on with another girl, and in neither case was it Gabrielle who, to reiterate, is Xena’s girlfriend on the show. Go figure. I quit trying to decipher these people long ago.

Friends and That 70s Show, refreshingly, follow the pattern that you’d expect. Friends-based writers, working off a program whose entire dramatic base stemmed from unfulfilled sexual tension between characters, seem to almost always just tack a barely-modified alternative ending onto existing episodes. The exception to this is one fellow who introduces his story with the tagline: “In this world, Chandler is a gay slut.” Likewise, That 70s Show stories mainly cover the sex that always happened off screen in the actual episodes, with a few of the seemingly obligatory “what if everyone was gay” stories written by gay authors.

Star Trek provides ample base for AFF, as one would expect. TOS comes in with 54 stories, outshining Enterprise, with 48, TNG with 37, and DSN with 29. I don’t think this would surprise anyone, as obviously Kirk got a lot more alien pussy than dopey Jonathan Archer ever did. Enterprise had more and better regular female characters than TOS, which means a relatively greater percentage of the stories are M/F pairings. This is regardless of Kirk’s obvious status as a space player, which is demonstrated in no fewer than four episodes, as well as Star Trek II in which he is shown to have an illegitimate son.

Star Trek Voyager, of course, outshines them all with 72 stories. Seven of Nine is a popular character, seeing as she brought about the first lesbian kiss in Star Trek history. Likewise, if you ever wanted to read about Chakotay topping the hell out of Captain Janeway, as she obviously wanted him to do from the very beginning, you’ve got your choice of really shitty authors to get it from.

Two short paragraphs about Star Trek are all I dare write, lest I further reveal my familiarity with the show.

The most popular show, surprisingly enough, is Power Rangers, with a whopping 197 stories. Now, I never watched the show as a kid, so I could give a shit, but it brings up an important point about television-based AFF. This is that television, much more so than cinema or literature, provides the core of our common cultural heritage, particularly on an intragenerational level. Everyone who was alive during the 50s, say, remembers Beaver Cleaver and instantly understands everything that the show symbolizes and stands for, and can identify the different character types in the show. One can compare someone to Eddie Haskell, for example, or describe a town as “Beaver Cleaverville,” and guarantee certain understanding. Likewise, if you’re my age and want to try chatting with a cute girl with whom you have nothing in common, you can always bring up what a great show Pete and Pete was and guarantee instant agreement and possibly giggles.

The problem with this is that, by drastically altering the content of these programs to suit their own twisted desires, the AFF authors are altering our culture’s most basic common myths and archetypes. It’s as if someone went through Hellenic mythology and re-wrote it all mixed up, because he just HAD to see Athena get it on with a titan. It would alter one of the common reference points to which anyone can allude, making mutual understanding all the more difficult. If all of a sudden for some people Eddie Haskell is Mr. Cleaver’s gay lover, and keeps him locked in a dungeon dressed in leather chaps 23 hours a day, then our culture can no longer draw on those characters as common ground.

In some ways, this is mostly just my outrage at seeing the television programs that we all grew up with corrupted by a relative handful who, armed with the publishing power of the internet, can now spread their twisted fantasies far and wide, such that even I could accidentally stumble upon them.

For instance, one of my favorite television shows, both when I was younger and to this day, is Daria, a Beavis & Butthead spinoff which was one of the last good shows that MTV produced. I don’t pretend that this show, a personal favorite, is a cultural icon on the scale of Beaver Cleaver, but it is well enough known, at least among my generation, to earn the titular character a cameo on Drawn Together along with Fred Flintstone and Scooby Doo.

The freaks on AFF, of course, would ruin Daria forever if you let them. I dare not read even one entire story for fear of ruining one of my fondest childhood memories, but the synopses alone make my blood boil. For instance:

“Fashion Love

Quinn is at a crossroads. Can she reveal her feelings to her true love? Quinn/F Angst, Slave, Yuri, FemSlash, Shojo-Ai, F/F/F, Anal, BDSM, Bond, DP, D/s, Exhib, FemDom, Fet, Fist, H/C, HJ, Humil, Oral, Rim
Author [Love]”

Fucking no. All right? Quinn does not do anal, BDSM, fisting, rimjobs, or anything else up there. She is 14 and likes getting attention from boys but is uncomfortable with sexuality such that she freaks out when she even thinks that her older sister had sex. That is the essence of the character and is entirely normal for a 14 year old girl. That’s what makes it a good show with believable, sympathetic characters, you morons.

It’s not as if the Daria characters are completely asexual – it wouldn’t be a very good show about teenagers if they were – it’s that the overall point of the show isn’t about them getting busy with each other in every possible grotesque combination. That’s what allows it to be a plausible and inspiring coming of age show and why it was continued for five seasons and two feature-length movies. You can make a ten minute porno out of kinky sex alone, but you can’t make a hit TV series, be it Daria, Friends, or Murphy Brown, without dealing with realistic relationships between characters that actually have personalities. Of course, the virgin shut-ins who write this crap have never had a relationship of any kind with a real person, so they don’t get it.

Now, most of you are probably not huge Daria fans, which is fine, but I’m sure all of you can think of some TV show, or book, or movie, that was inspiring or thought-provoking in some way – some fictional role model, or hero, or some situation you identified with, or whatever. That’s part of what makes good fiction, and what lets fiction help us come to terms with the real world. As a people, do we really want to see Tom Sawyer, Samson, and Mickey Mouse in a hot D/s/s threeway? I contend that we do not – nay, must not.

Now, at this point many of you are raising objections to my condemnation of these people, saying that what gets them off is no one’s business but theirs, and that they have a right to free speech. They do indeed have that right, and I’m not suggesting for a moment that the government censor this website or others like it. I’m merely suggesting that if the authors of adultfanfiction.net were to accidentally suffocate themselves while masturbating to A Charlie Brown Christmas, the world would be a better place.

On the other end of the spectrum, some will agree with me and go on to say that AFF.net is just a symptom of our oversexualized culture, with its readily available pornography, scantily clad starlets, and women leaving their burkas at home when they go to the market. I disagree with this also. There’s no reason that the sexualization and proliferation of what can be generalized as “low” entertainment – Pants off Dance Off, Briana Loves Jenna, and America’s Next Top Model – should have any effect on higher forms of culture. The Romans, our cultural ancestors, gave us Marcus Aurelius at the same time that they were watching slaves battle to the death on warships in a flooded colosseum. Indeed, in some ways, raunch culture gives us an acceptable, harmless outlet for our baser urges. All that is important is that we understand the value of our deeper creations and the fact that it is that depth that makes them special.

A broader conclusion might be that every fictional character is inextricably linked to its creator. Comic strips written by committee long after the creator’s death are invariably a shadow of his work, and no fan fiction, even written by professionals and published for profit, ever measures up to the original. If you’re an aspiring writer, dare to create. Let other people’s characters stand as they are: testaments to their writers’ talent and intent.

Incidentally, there is an entire section of AFF.net, containing no fewer than 400 stories, devoted entirely to the band My Chemical Romance, which, as regular readers of alexrock.com are aware, sucks. Just thought I should put that out there.

A couple months ago here in Missouri we had an ice storm which covered everything outside, including my car, in about a half inch of ice. I went outside to scrape it all off, only to realize that my ice scraper was in the back of the car. The tailgate was, of course, frozen shut, which would have meant crawling over the back seat. It was five am, however, and I was in no mood to do any such thing, so I just started kicking the car to shatter the ice.

In retrospect, this was a bad strategy, as when I came to the taillight on the back of the car, my shoe went right through it, shattering it into about a thousand tiny pieces. I should have seen this coming, but as I said it was five am. That is my only excuse.

Anyway, I finally did get my car cleaned off and after ascertaining that there is no dealership within a three hour drive of where I am, I decided to just order the part and install it myself – something that any child of five could do as it’s only held in by three screws. I went over to O’Reilly’s Auto Parts in St. Robert MO and described the part that I needed, even taking the clerk outside to visually see exactly what it looked like and showing him, in the manual, the manufacturer’s nomenclature for the thing. He said great, that’ll be $200, we’ll have it for you in a week. So far so good, I thought.

Eight weeks later, of course, I still don’t have the part. To make a long story short, they delivered the wrong thing a couple times, and then just forgot about it, keeping no record of the sale or anything. So I’m out a couple hundred bucks, which is not so big a deal compared to the hassle of still not having my car fixed.

My biggest mistake, apart from the aforementioned act of kicking out my own taillight, was to trust someone from Missouri to find the part for me. This is because people from Missouri are a bunch of morons: for example, John Ashcroft, Rush Limbaugh, and Sheryl Crow. If you ever want to feel good about yourself, just hang out at a Wal-Mart in Missouri for a couple hours and you’ll leave with the impression that, because you have a chin, eight great-grandparents, and weigh less than 600 lbs, you are in the top 1% of humanity. That impression will be false, of course: you’ll merely be in the top 1% of people in Missouri.

This point was driven home just today when, finished for the time being with 80-hour workweeks, I took the time to see if I could find the part online. I looked through a bunch of auto parts websites before finding the part on – wait for it – the manufacturer’s own website, for a little over half what the place charged me. I should have done the same thing in the first place, but really couldn’t be bothered, and didn’t think it would be a big problem. What I’m getting at is that if they’d wanted to, these idiots could have gone online and bought the part in about a half hour, then charged me double. They couldn’t even find the thing at full price, which is their job.

The conclusions from this little tale are threefold:

1. Never kick your car’s taillights to get the ice off.

2. If you want something done right, get someone not from Missouri to do it.

3. Never go to Missouri under any circumstances.

My buddy says I’m going to Hell for making this up. Try playing it and let me know how it goes!

The Schindler’s List Drinking Game: Fun for the whole family!

Supplies needed: One (1) copy of Schindler’s List; one (1) bottle of hard liquor or case of beer for every person playing; one (1) stomach pump.

Rules:

Every time you witness an indictable war crime, take a drink.

Every time Oskar Schindler cheats on his wife, take a drink.

For every Jew that Schindler could have saved with what remained of his fortune, take a drink.

Every time you see someone or something colored in, take a drink.

Every time you see a scene that was edited from the TV version, take a drink.

Every time you are turned on by a sex scene, drink until that is no longer an issue.

Every time you see a human being willfully undergo unspeakable degradation in a vain effort to briefly preserve his own life, take a drink.

Every time a Nazi dies, drink a toast.

Every time you lose faith in the existence of a just God, finish your drink.

Drink heavily throughout the entire showing of Schindler’s List.

I recently read the book Amerika, by Franz Kafka. It was pretty good, but I don’t really mean to do a book report here. One thing that I thought while reading the book, though, was how much I wanted it made into a movie: not so much because the story is particularly compelling in movie form, but rather because I wanted to see Kafka’s Bizarro America come to life on the big screen.

You see, Kafka writing a novel about the United States is like me writing a novel about, say, Lesotho. I’m pretty sure I could find it on a map, but I’ve never met someone from there and all I know about their way of life is what I’ve gleaned from vaguely remembered National Geographic articles and bigoted stereotypes. Kafka never left central Europe and as far as I can tell from his writing spent the best part of his life sealed in a dark room with his own thoughts. The picture of America that he paints is a strange combination of European caricatures of the country and the unrestrained imagination of a very creative person with only the Austro-Hungarian Empire to draw on for raw material.

I imagine the opening part of the book, in which the protagonist arrives in New York, as a kind of American Tail from Hell. Sailing past the Statue of Liberty, her sword raised aloft in what would be a cutting jibe at the Bush administration if the book had been written 90 years later, our hero helps a stoker get fired and is promptly whisked off to the first in a series of castles (!!!) owned by his uncle, a senator. The castle scene alone would have infinity times more cool things than The Matrix, as it contains both a magic bottomless desk and room-sized shower (2/0), both of which I immediately wanted as soon as I read about them. In Kafkamerika, there are subways everywhere and traffic cops stand in little castles (!!!) high above the road. Who wouldn’t put down eight bucks just to see that world on screen?

An even better Kafka movie would be The Metamorphosis, though I think it would only end up being about fifteen minutes long. I think this would be a good next project for Pixar or Dreamworks, which have extensive experience in creating sympathetic characters out of insects but which can’t seem to get past the “Loveable loser who becomes the hero in the end” plotline. I’d like to see if they could do Gregor Samsa with no dialogue whatsoever, though if they insisted on retaining Jerry Seinfeld he would be welcome to take a stab at the sound of “monstrous clicking mandibles.”

Just because it wouldn’t be a comedy doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be suitable for kids, either. Some judicious editing, to include, say, the picnic scene at the end of the story, could make the trailer seem positively charming. Charming enough to get families to bring their kids, who would then spend the rest of their lives wetting the bed every time they woke up with a headache, fully expecting to have been transformed into a “monstrous vermin” who will soon be pelted to death with rotten garbage by his own family.

It would sure as hell freak more people out than Hostel VII, and in the end, is that not what the movies are all about?

We here at Alexrock.com pride ourselves on asking the tough questions. Questions like, “Who would win in a fight – Erin Esurance or Kim Possible?” and “What else could we turn into a self-propelled automaton?” Today I’m going to attempt to answer the toughest question of all, one which may have no true answer.

Who is more awesome: John Belushi or Groucho Marx?

There’s no denying that between them these two have created some of the greatest characters
and funniest movies of all time essentially without even acting: each just went up in front of the camera and acted as he always did, with some supporting actors to change the context from movie to movie. This is what makes them both infinitely more awesome than, say, Ben Stiller, who made up a hilarious character in Derek Zoolander but has never been funny on any other occasion and was obviously acting the whole time.

Deciding which of these timelessly cool icons of American culture is most awesome is naturally difficult, which is why I’ve chosen to add some structure to the question by breaking it down into categories. Whoever wins the most categories is probably cooler, with the caveat that both are at least twice as cool as the next coolest person on Earth, Bill Murray.

The categories that I came up with are:
1. Career.
2. Sidekick.
3. Babes.
4. Quotability.
5. Personality.

CAREER

This category is meant to take in the whole of the contestant’s acting career and measure its value in terms of contribution to the global culture. Obviously, because we’re going to all this trouble to decide who’s coolest, they must be fairly close, which means that length of career is the decisive factor.

In this respect, Marx wins hands down. Belushi was a flash in the pan in the late 70s and early 80s, producing such hits as Animal House and The Blues Brothers, as well as several of the best Saturday Night Live sketches ever, before being cut down in his prime by an overdose of cocaine and heroin. Marx, on the other hand, lived well into old age – doubtless due to his steady diet of gin, cigars, and saltine crackers. He made a half-dozen movies that I can think of, and then went on to television in the 50s. He was on a game show of some kind whose name I forget, but from what I can remember he didn’t really have what you’d call a “part” in the show – his job was just to sit there and crack obscene one-liners every few minutes. On one occasion his comment was so funny and so lewd that not only did the show’s censors cut the tape-delayed broadcast before it could be aired, but they had to stop broadcasting entirely for several minutes while everyone in the room regained their composure.

You could certainly imagine Belushi doing something like that had he lived, though instead of placidly puffing a cigar and occasionally chiming in with a smart remark, he would have probably ranted and raved across the sound stage like a drunken gorilla – a difference of style, not effect. Alas, because he picked the wrong drugs, we never got to see what Belushi could have been.

Winner: Groucho Marx.

SIDEKICK

No hero is complete without a sidekick. Some sidekicks are lame and even slightly gay, e.g. Robin from Batman or Superboy from Superman. Others are nearly as awesome as the hero himself, e.g. Spock from Star Trek or Mr. Bush from the Horatio Hornblower series. Belushi and Marx both had sidekicks, so they deserve comparison.

Marx’s sidekicks were the rest of the Marx Brothers, without whom none of his movies would have been complete. There’s no question that they held up their end of the various movies and provided a light-hearted repose from Groucho’s rapid-fire delivery. On the other hand, their gags were only good for so long, and while Groucho had an extensive solo career, no one ever invited Zeppo to be on a game show.

Belushi didn’t have a memorable sidekick in Animal House, unless you count his good friend Jack Daniels. In The Blues Brothers, on the other hand, he had an extremely cool sidekick in the form of my personal hero Elwood Blues, played by Dan Aykroid. Elwood made that movie what it was by providing the straight man to Belushi’s Jake Blues, yet didn’t miss a chance to kick the ass of an entire Winnebago full of country music singers, brilliantly sabotage an elevator in a way that I’ve always wanted to try, and deliver some of the best deadpan shtick in the history of the universe. What’s more, Aykroid went on to make The Blues Brothers 2000 which, even without Belushi, was still a good movie, even if it didn’t measure up to the original.

Dan Aykroid is pretty awesome all by himself. As Belushi’s straight man, he rules.

Winner: John Belushi.

BABES

Groucho Marx was always hitting on Mrs. Teasdale, who wasn’t all that hot but was apparently loaded, which shows that he had his priorities straight. After all, if your wife is rich, you can always hire a hot Latina maid. On the other hand, John Belushi almost married Princess Leia, then blew her off, probably to play the blues and/or get smashed. Case closed.

Winner: John Belushi

QUOTABILITY

Both Belushi and Marx are intensely quotable. Quotability is good because it allows laymen to pretend for only an instant that they are briefly almost as cool as the man who made up the quote. Who hasn’t watched Bluto Blutarski and pals call for “a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part” and wished that he could somehow be in that exact same situation, saying that exact same thing? It’s stirring in the same way the Gettysburg Address is stirring.
The flip side of this is that, as the Gettysburg Address is only useful in a very limited set of circumstances, so are most of Belushi’s best quotes. Alex Rock and I drove well over a thousand miles so he could say “hit it” like Belushi, and we were 106 miles from Chicago in the wrong direction. Most of us will never lead a banned fraternity in a spectacular raid on a homecoming parade, no matter how awesome it is when Belushi does it.

In contrast, some of Marx’s best quotes are one-liners that are widely applicable. Anyone who’s ever been asked to join any club of any kind has had the opportunity to bust out, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” Marx’s snappy punch lines are much easier to adapt to everyday situations, which makes it easier to pretend that you’re as cool as he was.

Winner: Groucho Marx

PERSONALITY

This is a deliberately vague category that I included to capture that unique quality that made each man who he was. How could this article be complete without mentioning the incident in which John Belushi stole the Bluesmobile while on a bender during the filming of The Blues Brothers and took off without warning or provocation, only to be arrested in Iowa the next day for driving recklessly, while intoxicated, without a license, in an unregistered, un-street worthy vehicle. How balls-out can you get?

Likewise, Groucho Marx is classy beyond words. Sure, Belushi makes the “COLLEGE” sweatshirt and the plastic sunglasses look cool, but when I first got to college there was a credit card company offering free “COLLEGE” shirts, just like Belushi’s, to anyone who signed up for a card. Over the next week, I saw every skinny nerd on campus wearing one – and at Case, that meant like 9,000 people. It’s cool when Belushi wears it, dumbass. Not you.
On the other hand, Marx’s brand of cool was classic. There is no person in the world who couldn’t benefit from nose glasses, a top hat, and a cigar. That means everyone, from Courtney Love to Osama bin Laden. Groucho Marx was cool while still being restrained and gentlemanly, which makes him far more accessible to the average Joe.

The winner is clear for the purposes of this essay, but the result is not without controversy. Feel free to chime in. I’m off to go drink gin and smoke a cigar.