Accidental Historian

What We're Not Saying About Black Friday

I’ve decided to see how far I can take the idea I proposed with yesterday’s post.

Serious Conversation #2, What We’re Not Saying About Black Friday:

There was a day, not so long ago, when Black Friday, as it’s now known, was simply “the day after Thanksgiving.”  Retailers offered big sales and doorbusters at the scandalously early hour of six AM.  Or sometimes seven.  I’m guessing there was even a point when the stores didn’t open until their regular hours, but I remember six AM for some reason.

The day after Thanksgiving sales always had a whiff of, “Holy shit, this is totally unnecessary,” about them.  Now, however, they’re more like, “What the fuck is wrong with us?” wrong.  The big story from last year was someone getting trampled to death at a Wal-Mart.  The big story from this year was the woman who pepper sprayed a crowd waiting for XBOXes.  Oh, yeah, that and the bit where “Black Friday” now starts on a day we used to call “Thanksgiving.”

It’s fascinating to see which store is leading the charge to the bottom of Black Friday depravity.  And by “fascinating” I mean, “utterly unsurprising.”  All the truly crazy Black Friday shit seems to happen at Wal-Mart.  They, in turn, are followed closely by Target.

You’ll notice that Nordstrom’s was not open at 9 PM on Thanksgiving.  Hell, Google “Nordstrom doorbuster” or “Saks Fifth Avenue doorbuster.”  See what you get.  I’ll tell you: you’ll get some hits for sales at Nordstrom Rack, which is the outlet.  You’ll get some hits for a big after Christmas sale at Saks.  You won’t get, “Show up at 4 AM the day after Thanksgiving!”  Try the same thing for any high-end retailer.  Look up Brooks Brothers or Neiman Marcus or, um, something else.[1]  Like I know.  I shop at Kohl’s.  Seriously, my shoes are the only clothes I’m currently wearing that I didn’t buy at Kohl’s.  And the main problem with buying shoes at Kohl’s is that they generally only go up to size 12 and I’m a 14 or 15, depending on the brand and style.[2]

Anyway, the narrative that we get on Black Friday is basically limited to, “Hey, look at all those crazed bargain hunters.”  The bit where people fight each other for toys or pepper spray each other for electronic trinkets or actually get killed by an onrushing horde of shoppers is then basically glossed over.  It’s all part of the background of this insanity we’ve taken to calling Black Friday.[3]

The Black Friday stories all combine a weird sort of amusement with a weird level of horror.  We’re amused at those people who head to the stores at ungodly hours to buy a four dollar toaster.  We’re horrified at the lengths to which people are willing to stoop to get their hands on that four dollar toaster.  We then basically chalk the insanity up to crass consumerism and holy-crap, look at those greedy-ass-fucktards.  It doesn’t hurt that the store leading the charge towards ever less neighborly behavior is Wal-Mart.  It is the fashion to both hate on Wal-Mart and roundly mock those who shop at Wal-Mart, after all.

I can count the number of times I’ve been in a Wal-Mart since I graduated from college on one hand.  The only reason I use that as the marker is because there weren’t too many other shopping options in Macomb, IL.  Wal-Mart was less the best game in town than it was practically the only game in town.  So when we needed to get anything we went to wal-Mart.  When I left Macomb I also left Wal-Mart behind, more or less for good.

There’s a certain level of elitism in my story of Wal-Mart hate.  I know this and, for the most part, I’m totally okay with it.  I’m perfectly content with being an elitist bastard when the situation warrants.    The fact of the matter is that I can afford to be an elitist bastard.

I mean that I can literally afford to be an elitist bastard, for the record.  If I need to buy electronics I will go to a not-Wal-Mart because, in general, Wal-Mart is getting the lower end stuff, even if you’re looking at name-brand stuff.  There’s also the problem that the brands also tend to have a Wal-Mart line that they specifically sell to the low end retailers.  Wal-Mart’s insistence on keeping prices low results in a lot of cut corners and substandard materials.  I’m not willing to risk a big ticket purchase to potential Wal-Mart levels of quality and have to replace the thing in a couple years, anyway.  For small ticket purchases, well, I just don’t like going to Wal-Mart, so it’s worth a couple extra bucks for me to not have to set foot in their stores.

Meanwhile, there are millions of elitist bastards just like me out there.  We don’t need to shop at Wal-Mart so we don’t.  And we don’t like to shop at Wal-Mart or be one of those Wal-Mart people, so the temptation to look down our noses at Wal-Mart people is quite strong.  What’s a strongly-held belief without a bit of overwrought superiority, after all?

There are also, in this world, people who shop at Wal-Mart precisely because Wal-Mart’s prices are low.  They’re not bargain hunters.  They’re poor.  We have a lot of those people in America at the moment.  There have been a bunch more over the last couple years, too.

Pepper spray woman turned herself in, but we may never really get her whole side of the story.  It may well be that she was just that overzealous, take-no-prisoners bargain hunter we’re supposed to believe rules Black Friday.  It may be that she was overtaken by a collective mob mentality.  But that was just one story of violence on Friday.

I wonder if that or the other stories of violence don’t have a different root.  Perhaps some people visited violence upon their fellow shoppers because they were freaked out that if they didn’t buy that one doorbuster they simply wouldn’t be able to afford getting their kid that Christmas present.  Sure, we can talk all about crass commercialism.  We can pull out our blankets and suck our thumbs and recite Linus’s speech in the Charlie Brown Christmas Special and discuss how December 25th has nothing to do with the bastardized thing we’ve turned it in to.

But somewhere a mother has to place that high-minded philosophy up against her kid who really, really, really, really wants an XBOX 360 for Christmas and her knowledge that 364 days out of the year she simply can’t afford to buy one.  What parent wouldn’t want to see their child’s eyes light up on Christmas morning?  Why don’t we get that perspective on Black Friday?

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Meanwhile, there’s the whole, “What the fuck is up with stores opening at 9 PM on Thanksgiving?” question.  I used to work retail, so I know that a 9 PM opening on Thanksgiving actually means that someone had to be at those stores long before the doors opened.  So while those of us who don’t work retail were debating between giving in to the turkey coma and heading out to fight the crowds at the Wal-Mart, some poor schlub was having to skip having dinner with his family to stock shelves.  Some poor woman was having to cut off her first Thanksgiving with the new significant other to go get harassed by a billion customers trying to buy a $200 LCD TV.

A lot of people (me included) spent a lot of time asking, “Why the hell are the retailers doing this?”  There are three answers that I can discern:

1.  Americans love a race to the utter, preposterous extreme.  It started when retailers decided to open an hour earlier.  People showed up and that one store had an advantage.  So the next store had to open two hours early the next year.  A couple years ago someone decided to give midnight a try.  That broke a barrier in to Thanksgiving itself.  Americans love a front-runner.

2.  People show up.  Seriously.  Next year Wal-Mart will open at 8 PM on Thanksgiving.  Why?  Because people showed up at 9 PM this year.

3.  No one can stop them.  There’s only one group of people who can keep a Wal-Mart from opening at 9 PM on Thanksgiving: Wal-Mart employees.  But they’ll all lose their jobs if they try doing that.  What Wal-Mart employees need is a union that will allow them to collectively stand up and say, “We ain’t doing this anymore.”  They, of course, do not have a union.  That’s rather convenient if you’re an unscrupulous management bastard trying to get the drop on Target.  And it’s not like Target’s going to stop the headlong plunge to insanity.  They don’t have a union, either.  And they need to keep up with the Waltons.

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[1]The odd one here is Macy’s.  I think of them as high end because, y’know, they’re fucking Macy’s.  And they bought out Marshall Field’s, which was also high end at one point.  But Macy’s is right there in the thick of it with midnight doorbusters.  And, now that I think about it, Marshall Field’s participated, too, back when it was still an elegant affair of stately shoppers shuffling in at six and not pepper spraying each other and whatnot.

[2]Also, Kohl’s does not sell Rockport.  This is important to me, as I am currently wearing shoes that I have had so long I’m on the second set of soles.  The shoe part is only now beginning to break down.  I have two pair of Rockports in that boat.

[3]Fred pointed to an interesting examination of the less-than-friendly history of the term.  Let’s put it this way: it’s a lot closer to “Black Tuesday” than the term “in the black.”

Things Not to Say About Women

I think it’s going to be “serious conversations” week here at Accidental Historian.  There are a few things I’ve been meaning to write about but I haven’t exactly gotten around to, y’know, writing them.

So let’s start:

Serious Conversation #1, How Not to Talk About Women:

I ended up reading a couple posts on a blog off of Michael Mock’s blogroll because, as with so many of these things, the blog name was fascinating.  The female proprietor of the blog solicits discussion of shit between guys and gals and whatnot.  I didn’t really give a crap about the post in question (or, well, the blog), but I did run across this:

i met a guy this weekend who said, “i’m a serial monogamist.”  he also said what ended up being my favorite quote of the weekend…”a girl took a shit in my heart and now i’m an asshole.  down deep i’m still a good guy, but one the surface, an asshole.”

Grammar, capitalization, and spelling issues aside, everything about this comment pisses me off.

Speaking as a guy who dabbles in being an asshole, were I to meet random, nameless dude quoted on the internet face-to-face I’d be forced to seriously consider hitting him with something heavy.  Because what we’re looking at here is a classic nice-guy-who-actually-isn’t-nice.

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, Former Conservative offered a pretty good explanation of the “Nice Guy” right about here.  The “Nice Guy” isn’t actually nice.  He’s just called this because he thinks acting “nice” will get him somewhere with the women.  Then when it doesn’t work, he blames the women for not falling all over themselves to give him a lifetime supply of blowjobs and ribs.

The Nice Guy seems to think that all he has to do to get a woman to love him forever is to prove to her that he’s better than everyone else.  And by “everyone else” the Nice Guy often means “the guy she’s actually dating or even married to.”  This, it should be obvious, doesn’t actually take in to account the opinion of the other person in this creepy pseudo-relationship: the woman in question.  Why would she matter, after all?  She’s just the prize to be won.

That’s the problem with the Nice Guy.  He’ll have you believe that because he’s a Nice Guy he’s totally better than those douchebags who just want to get in the pants of the woman in question.  See, he doesn’t just want to get in her pants.  He wants a relationship with her based on her acknowledging that he’s exactly everything she really wants and needs.  Because that’s, like, super healthy.

FC pretty much summed everything I’m saying here up in a way I can’t improve upon:

It is a terrible, terrible way to treat women. Its unfair. Its dishonest. It makes you look pathetic. Its disrespectful and says volumes about your own lack of self-esteem. It puts your feelings above those of the woman you are pursuing, despite your insistence that you care about her. Its completely rooted in self-centeredness, self-pity, and self-importance. Its even disrespectful to the man she’s involved with who probably you only think is a horrible person because he’s dating the person you want to date. There are few things in life I’m more embarrassed about than this particular episode.

So you’re probably asking yourself, “If someone else already said what he wants to say, why the fuck is Geds writing this post?”

I’m glad you asked, theoretical reader.  See, the writer of the blog that originally drew my ire managed to take that quote in exactly the wrong way.

ennyweigh, the conversation was familiar.  sailor talk and all.  he’s an eligible bachelor being told he should be out spreading his seed far and wide and that just doesn’t sit well with him.  he even teetered on thinking he’s in the minority.

Um, no.  No he’s not.  Unless there was a lot more in the conversation that just never made it in to the blog post, the guy in question wasn’t having problems with being told he’s supposed to be out “spreading his seed.”  He was having problems with women.

Let’s talk responsibility.

There exists in this world no woman who can cause a man to become an asshole by taking a shit in his heart.  There exist in this world women who are fully capable of using some dude’s heart as a commode.  There exist in this world men who have had enough dumps taken in their tickers that they’ve become callous and cruel and mean.

There is absolutely no causal relationship between those two things.  None.  Period.

I don’t know anonymous dude quoted on the internet, but I strongly suspect he’s a Nice Guy.  Even if he’s not specifically a Nice Guy, I strongly suspect he’s pretty close.  And, at the very least, the words he chose to use are close enough to how Nice Guys speak that he’s a pretty damn good stand in.

See, the Nice Guy lives in a world where there are two types of men: nice guys and assholes.  If women won’t go for the Nice Guy, then they’re obvious off searching for the assholes, who will treat them like shit and then dump them and then they’ll go crying back to the nice guys who will sit and hope that this time she’ll finally figure out to stop chasing assholes.  Eventually, though, he decides to be an asshole, just because that’s obviously what women want.

Notice how this thought process completely takes the supposed most important variable out of the conversation.  It’s all about how nice guys finish last and assholes get the girl without actually bothering to ask, “Why, precisely, does this happen?”  That’s an answer that completely and totally depends on the woman in question.  It’s possible that she just likes assholes.  It’s also possible that she doesn’t like assholes, but the self-absorbed Nice Guy is filling in the blanks with his own pre-conceived notions.  It’s also possible that the asshole actually makes a move, while the Nice Guy sits around and waits for the woman to figure out that she’s supposed to just fall in love with him because he’s, like, there.  Then, of course, there could be other factors.  Like, maybe the Nice Guy just isn't her type, in that she's not a fan of whiny, self-absorbed dweebs with self-confidence issues.  Or maybe she just doesn't like him as a potential romantic partner, period, because sometimes shit like that happens.*

When it gets right down to it, too, if you’re going to say, “This other person caused me to become an asshole,” you’re not being nice.  You’re actually pretty much the definition of a passive-aggressive asshole.  So, really, it wasn’t that long a walk in the first place.

Either way, that’s the first thing on my list o’ things that have pissed me off lately.

 

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*EDIT:  I added a couple sentences to that paragraph, since I kinda cut myself off mid-thought while I was writing it and didn't realize I'd done so at the time.

Good Music Monday

So...I was gonna write some stuff.  But then I wasn't able to close the loop on one set of thoughts and I wasn't able to make another set of thoughts work well enough to justify actually writing what I was going to write about. So, instead, I think I'll hook y'all up with some videos for a Monday morning.

First up, The Wheeler Brothers from Austin, Texas.  They were at the last show I saw before leaving Dallas with Sons of Bill and they kicked so much ass and took so many names I went to see them when they hit Chicago in July.



Postscript: thanks to YouTube, I know they're hitting the Abbey Pub in Chicago on December 9th.  I know where I'm going to be on the second Friday of the twelfth month of 2011...

So, hell, on the subject of Sons of Bill, they wrote my Texas theme song:



And, as a two-fer, since the sound quality on that video ain't so good:



And, hell, let's do a three-fer of my last show in Fort Worth with Derek Larson & the Leavers, who started that set off.  The show was at Moon Bar on Berry Street in Fort Worth, which put it between the Aardvark and the original Fuzzy's Tacos, two places near and dear to my heart in Fort Worth.  I got there way earlier than I needed to, since I had a totally incorrect understanding of the time when the festivities would begin, so I started drinking Rahr & Sons Summer Wheat and just kinda, y'know, hanging out.

Long story short, I ended up talking to the lead guitarist at Fuzzy's Tacos while getting shrimp tacos and, incidentally, while a bit tipsy.  So I asked the guy if he knew he looked like a bigger version of Rob Thomas.  Apparently this didn't piss him off too much, since he gave me a copy of their CD.  I didn't really listen to it much, since...well, Mr. Larson's voice takes a bit of getting used to.  For some reason, though, I decided to play when I was driving between Madison and Milwaukee between Sons of Bill/Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers shows a couple months ago and I've been a fan ever since.



Now, if you go to their website, you'll see they're a Fort Worth band, what with the fact that they're standing in the Stockyards in front of the White Elephant Saloon.  As such, that seems a perfect transition to the Lost Immigrants at the White Elephant Saloon.



And, hey, what's this?  A video I took on my birthday last year of the Lost Immigrants at the Doublewide in Dallas?  Why, yes, yes it is.[1]



Honestly, there are some things I miss about Dallas.  Sweltering nights under the stars with Shiner and the Lost Immigrants are pretty high on said list.

Let's walk through some of my old videos, since we're "here."

Jessi Lynn, "Your Hand" when she and Sarah Peacock were in Bloomington not long before I moved to Dallas:



And it wouldn't be my YouTube channel without Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers.  Here's some "Banditos."  Wait for Jim Dalton to be awesome at the end.



Let's take this thing more-or-less full circle to the Peacemakers at the Wormy Dog Saloon, the first time I saw Sons of Bill.  The camera work is a bit suspect.  I can assure you it's because I was miles from sober that night:



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[1]Seriously, I was looking through the list of Lost Immigrants videos and reading the description.  I thought, "Hey, the Lost Immigrants at the Doublewide.  I saw the Lost Immigrants at the Doublewide.  Oh, hey, that's my video of the Lost Immigrants at the Doublewide."

The Commoditization of Marriage

On March 1st, 2010 I bought a grey 2010 Mazda 6.  I did not need to purchase a car at the time, but I wanted to replace my 2004 Chevy Cavalier and I had the money.  So I came up with a list of cars and a list of features and I spent a month test driving automobiles.  I tried the Hyundai Genesis Sedan, Genesis Coupe, and the old and new Sonata.  I drove a couple Honda Accords.  I drove a Subaru Outback.  I tested a Ford Fusion and sat in a Taurus, but refused to drive it.  I drove a Chevy Impala and sat in, but refused to drive, a Malibu.  At that point my desire to purchase a new car was eclipsed by my lack of desire to purchase the cars I’d test driven, so I seriously considered just not buying a car.

Then I test-drove the 2010 Mazda 6.  That was a Saturday.  On Monday I was signing the paperwork to purchase a new car.  It’s more than a year and a half later and every time I get into my car I’m happy I bought it.

Let’s say that hadn’t happened. Let’s say that I drove the Cavalier another year, then decided that I wanted to buy a new car.  Chances are extremely good that I would have been able to write the preceding paragraphs and change the three instances of “2010” to “2011” and everything would otherwise be exactly the same.

Let’s take a hypothetical.

On March 1st, 2010 I got married.  I’d been dating a girl since 2004 and it was a good relationship.  We just hadn’t been in the right place financially or emotionally to get married.  Finally everything was right and we decided to make it happen.

We’ve been married for more than a year and a half and I wake up every morning the happiest guy in the world.

Let’s say that hadn’t happened.  Let’s say that I decided in March of last year that, no, marriage wasn’t right.  What are the odds she’d have hung on for another year?  Or what if I’d said, “I want to get married, but not to you?”  There are plenty of fish I the sea, after all.  And I’m a great guy, any woman would be lucky to have me.

These two scenarios are so very different that there’s almost no reason to even comment on them, right?  It’s absurd that I even brought them up, especially that follow-on paragraph for scenario two.

The problem is that there is a segment of the population that doesn’t actually seem to understand that these are two totally different statements.  This, I believe, is one of the core reasons we’re getting all the, “What’s the matter with men?” articles.  We’ve decided that finding a partner is the same thing as buying a car.  What we haven’t figured out is that there is a factory out there somewhere that is perfectly capable of producing a brand-new 2011 Mazda 6 that’s functionally the same as the brand-new 2010 Mazda 6 I purchased last year.  So if I wait I can still get a car.  Hell, I might even get a car with a couple more features or better gas mileage.

There is not, however, a factory out there that’s producing 2011 model-year potential spouses.  If there is, it’s got terrible QA.  You might find that your 2011 dating prospects are significantly better than your 2010 prospects.  You might also find out that 2011 is a wasteland and 2010 was a bumper crop you really should have appreciated.[1]

Ultimately, the, “Where have all the men gone?” articles only exist if a man is interchangeable with a Mazda 6.  It’s an absurd concept on its face, but we have decided to agree that people are commodities in a lot of other areas, so it’s easy enough to just write the article as the commoditization of humans is true and assume no one will ask any difficult questions.  Fortunately for the writers of those articles, very few people will.  The intended audience of the, “Where have all the men gone?” articles aren’t actually the men-who-don’t-exist, after all.  The intended audience is women who want something to point to and say, “That’s why I’m single,” and the various culture warriors in the arena of gender politics.

Potential mates are not new cars.  If we’re going to speak of them in terms of anything made in a factory, they’re used cars.  Some people you meet are the car that was garage kept and only driven to the store on Saturday.  Some are high-mileage road warriors driven 50,000 miles a year.  Some have flood damage, some were in bad accidents.  Some have obvious signs of damage, others were so well repaired cosmetically that the problems won’t manifest until long after you’ve driven off the lot.  Even the best used car has a door ding or two and a few miles on the odometer.

My grey 2010 Mazda 6, in short, was once identical to a whole lot of other 2010 Mazda 6s.  Over the last year and eight months it has become a unique vehicle precisely because of what it’s gone through while I sat in the driver’s seat.  Or, in the case of that one door ding, what happened while it sat in the parking garage at my Irving office.

This, I supposed, makes it seem like everything gets worse with age.  I don’t actually think that.  I, personally, believe that I am a much better person and a much better potential mate than I was at any point in the past.  This is the fundamental difference between a human and a car.  Cars are inert.  They cannot grow, they cannot repair themselves.  From the moment a car leaves the production line it is on an inexorable march to broken-down obsolescence.  I am neither broken-down nor obsolete.

I’ve also noticed that as I get older my conception of who is most attractive has gotten older with me.  By this I mean that were you to take someone I thought was drop-dead gorgeous in high school and put her in the same room as me, I’d probably find her drop-dead gorgeous now, assuming that she retained the basic physical characteristics she possessed back in the day.[2]  If you then took someone who is the spitting image of her at 16 and had her walk in to the room, I’d probably say, “Wow, she looks so young.”  Then I’d make some crack about how I feel old or the kids these days or something.

I believe this is an attitude known as “normal.”  I’ve never “played the field.”  I have no urge to go pick up 22 year-olds at a bar.  My ideal woman is someone close to my own age who possesses intelligence and maturity and is attractive to me.  This, in theory, should not be too much to ask.  I mean, there have to be a crapload of single women out there between, say, 27 and 33 who are looking for a guy like me.

At the very least, I’m given to understand that there are whole herds of them, meeting to bitch about creepers and immature douchebags who sit in their mother’s basement playing XBOX 360 and who totally want them to be their mother.  So here’s a fascinating question: why haven’t I run in to these kaffeeklatsches of dissatisfied women looking for the mythical guy just like me?

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The answer to this question is as simple as it is not profitable to write a thousand or two words about in magazines.  It’s really fucking hard to meet people these days.  This probably seems counter intuitive.  I, after all, am friends with people from the other side of the country I’ve never met.[3]  I have friends who live in Ireland and California and Denver and Dallas that I could contact right now for free and say, “Hey.  How you doin’?”  I have active accounts on two dating sites, Facebook, Twitter, Meetup, and probably several places I’ve forgotten about.[4]  I am, in short, socially connected.

For me, however, most of this social media is sound and fury, signifying nothing.  When it gets right down to it, I don’t put a lot of effort in to meeting new people.  Most of the time I’m at work, doing things with friends and acquaintances, or just kinda hanging out.  If I go out it’s for some sort of purpose and I rarely, like, talk to women.

So the answer to the question, “Where are all the men like me?” is pretty simple.  We’re probably busy.  Or, at the least, we’re being social somewhere those women who desperately want to me us aren’t.

Or, y’know, those women are just expecting us to show up where they already are.

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There’s one other aspect to this that totally gets missed.  Jessa actually touched on something I was thinking of in the comments on my post from yesterday:

With men, perhaps after "finding themselves" some women are overestimating their own perfection and expecting the men they date to be as perfect as they perceive themselves to be? Or in "finding themselves" they forgot to learn that real-life love doesn't look like storybook/fantasy love, where things aren't as lovely and perfect?

I have to offer some barely supported conjecture here.  Bear with me.  And if I’m off base, please, someone let me know.

Women – as best I can tell from popular entertainments, reading the comments on a random sampling of Facebook photos, and imagined dialog from episodes of Sex and the City that I’ve never seen – engage in a sort of closed loop of self-reinforcing mutual admiration.  Basically, women look at pictures posted by their friends on Facebook and comment with things like, “ZOMG, you’re so pretty.  Love you!” or they sit around, lamenting their status as single women and say things like, “Any man would be lucky to have you,” to each other.  This is not really a problem in any real sense.  Still, it can have some potentially negative ramifications.

Basically, what I’m saying is that I’m pretty sure there are a lot of women out there who are hearing the, “You’re so pretty and amazing,” message from their girlfriends and are not hearing that message from men because, well, they’re not.  Self-confidence is a good thing.  Unrealistic expectations are a bad thing.  That’s all I’m trying to say here.

Actually, there’s another aspect to it, too.  Take someone who has a more-or-less realistic self-image.  Say that she’s a 39 year-old woman writing about a great relationship she backed out of ten years ago in The Atlantic.  Not that I have any particular individual in mind or anything.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that this woman was realistically self-aware at 28 when she decided to break off an otherwise actually great relationship just to find herself.  She basically decided to invest in herself.  That might have actually been a bad investment.

Allow me to draw an analogy:  You own a $150,000 house.  The house is perfectly serviceable and you like your house just fine.  One day you’re standing in your kitchen and you think, “I need a new kitchen.”  You decide that you don’t just want a new kitchen, but you want a kitchen with every awesome new everything and you want a kitchen that will add value to your house.  So you go out and spend $30,000 on a new kitchen with granite countertops and genuine mahogany cabinetry and, like, solid gold backsplashes and whatnot.  The day after the last worker leaves you find out you’re getting transferred to the other side of the country, so you have to sell your house and move.

You had a $150,000 house and you just invested $30,000 in a new kitchen.  That means that you can sell your house for $180,000, right?  Well, no, actually.  Chances are that you’re going to get something closer to $165,000 and you’re just going to have to eat the rest.  Hell, if you decided to put that kitchen in back in 2007 and the market collapsed while you were having it installed you might be lucky to get $150,000 for the house, hand-carved granite countertops and platinum sink fixtures and all.[5]

All of which is to say, if you know nothing is going to make you happier than an awesome new kitchen, go buy one.  But if you’re going to get one, do it for you, not as a future investment.  And know you might regret it.  And if you’re listing your house at $180,000 and all your friends are saying, “Ha!  People should be lining up to pay you $190,000 for this house.  Look at how beautiful your stove is!” but no one is looking at your house at all and the guy down the street sold his for $140,000 and your former next-door neighbor sold hers for $155,000 and none of the similar houses in your zip code are listed for more than $170,000, maybe you need to find a real estate agent who will smack you upside the head.

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Let’s take a minute to look at this from a different perspective.  Let’s say that we live in a world where absolutely 100% of the population does want to marry eventually.  Let’s also say, for the sake of argument, that it’s possible for everyone who wants to get married to find someone to marry.  This isn’t actually entirely realistic, but it’s not actually entirely off base.

A subset of the population, however, says, “I don’t want to get married just yet.”  This is a perfectly acceptable thing and completely understandable.  The problem is, though, the longer you wait the harder it is to meet someone.  All those people you could have married at 30 might have gotten married by the time you’re 40.  Or they’ve gotten married and divorced and don’t want to go through that again.  Or they opted out of the system entirely.  Or they have kids and you’re still all, “No fucking way, man.  I’m no parent.”  Or, well, they got fat and ugly.  Shit happens, yo.

If we take away the ever-so-convenient moralizing and the applied labels and their attendant value judgments, everyone who wants to get married and could get married but decides to wait does so for one of two basic reasons.  Either they’re scared or they’re being selfish.  It is also possible for them to be both scared and selfish.

This is the absolute, honest truth of the matter: the woman who says, “I don’t want to get married until I have achieved my career goals,” is no different than the man who says, “I don’t want to get married until I get tired of having sex with strangers I meet at bars.”  Both say, “I won’t get married until I have gotten what I want out of life.”  And if the woman ends up saying, “I should have married [random guy] because he made me happier than being Vice President of New Product Development,” she’s in exactly the same place as if the man finds himself saying, “I’ve had a lot of meaningless sex and I feel like I’ve wasted the last ten years of my life trying to get it.”

That driven, independent, career minded woman who is “putting her personal life on hold” might be doing something completely different on the surface than that womanizing cad, but at the end of the day they’ve both decided to take themselves out of the marriage pool.  Sure, we might say that she’s doing it for “the right reasons” and he’s doing it for “the wrong reasons,” but they’re both doing the same thing.  The rest is commentary, with the added bonus of ever-so-convenient moralizing.

There’s a dirty little secret that the above narrative always ignores when it’s used in the, “Where have all the men gone?” articles.  Plenty of men are primarily focusing on their careers right now.  Plenty of women are going out to bars looking for a dude for just tonight.

We can’t have that secondary narrative, though, because it gets in the way of our other favorite gender narrative.  Men want sex, after all, while women begrudgingly give sex to, y’know, get something.  So if a woman is on a career track to the halls of power, the reasoning goes, she won’t need a man.  The only reason any woman gets married and has sex, after all, is to get the security of having a man.

-----------------------------

And here we are, back at the beginning.  Marriage, as it turns out, has always been a commodity.  It used to be pretty blatant.  Men literally exchanged their daughters for money or goods or influence or alliance.  Women were literally used to create additional laborers if they were poor or additional heirs to be married off for advantage if they were royalty.  The men had to be strong and capable of working long hours or hunting or fighting just to survive.  The women, then, had to be capable of doing all the stuff around the house, the so-called “household arts.”[6]

The commoditization of gender, then, came about because the man needed to be strong and capable enough to provide and/or defend.  The woman needed to be compliant and resilient enough to make lots of babies.  Modern societies don’t need that anymore.  When the big fights are boardroom negotiations men and women are equals.  When preparing dinner involves going to the supermarket for prepackaged ingredients or meals or picking up the phone and calling the pizza place no one needs to spend an entire day cooking.

We, in short, live in a society where we can be fat and lazy and still be clean and prosperous.  And that goes for people from the lowest rung to the highest.[7]  There was a time when being fat was considered an amazing thing because it meant that the person had food and the leisure to eat without having to prepare it.  Now people who are in good shape are increasingly considered amazing, since it means that the person in question has the time to prepare healthy meals and the time to work out, instead of only having time to grab a doughnut and coffee on the way to sit in front of a computer all day.

Yet we still have this idea that the man has to be the provider and the woman has to be provided to.  We still have this idea that the role of the woman is to use sex to get her man, who only wants her for sex and procreation.  This is a completely unnecessary attitude in modern life.  Yet it still stubbornly hangs on.

All those people who are running around asking, “Where have all the men gone?” an blaming feminism for destroying men need to shut the fuck up.  It’s a dumb question and an even dumber conclusion.  The question needs to become, “What should men and women expect of each other in a modern, post-feminist world?”

Because believe you me, speaking as a man, I know that I, personally, haven’t gone anywhere, even if you keep telling me that I don’t exist.

-----------------------------

[1]In absolute terms, the late 2011 model-year Geds is a way better option than any previous Geds.  I suspect the 2012 model year Geds will be even better.  But there’s no telling what the future holds, so maybe the 2013 model year Geds will be an emotional wreck that makes 2008 Geds look like a model of balanced and sane thought.

[2]I’d rather not spell this one out in excruciating detail, but I’m sure you, my reader, gets what I’m going for here.  There are some people who age well and some who age poorly.  Amongst women who can be said to have “aged well,” the ones who are now my age are far more attractive to me than they would be if I met their teenaged selves.

[3]Michael Mock refers to these as “imaginary friends.”  That amuses me to no end and I shamelessly stole it from him.

[4]I am not on LinkedIn.  I do not understand LinkedIn.  Also, too, I was never on Myspace or Friendster and I haven’t quite figured out why I’d want to be on Google+.

[5]In the interests of full disclosure: just in case it’s not entirely obvious, I have no idea what would go in to a $30,000 kitchen remodel.  I do, however, know that people spend that much on kitchens.

[6]Whether this is an equitable distribution of responsibilities is a discussion for another day.  But, in general, in a world where all the work was done with hard manual labor and without appliances and machinery, simply preparing a meal required an entire day’s work.  Someone literally needed to be at home making that happen from sunup to sundown.

[7]For the record, this is just poetically illustrating a point.

I Don't Exist

It’s a fairly odd thing to realize, especially since no one bothered to tell the people who service my student loans.  But I keep hearing about my non-existence, so it must be true.

And, yeah, it’s awkward.  I mean, it’s not as awkward as Mark Twain reading premature accounts of his own demise, mostly because all those people who tell me I don’t exist don’t mean it personally.  They’re not saying, “You, Geds, do not exist.”  What they’re saying is, “People who are like you do not exist.”  And I’m okay with that because those people have never actually met me.  As such, I do not give a rat’s ass that they don’t think I exist.

The truly uncomfortable thing about this at the end of the day is that I’m pretty sure that the upshot is that I end up writing a blog post about how I don’t exist every couple months.  So I actually have a historical record of my own non existence.  I can search for it on Google if I want to do so.

The latest indication that I don’t exist came in the form of an article in The Atlantic.  It follows the same basic pattern of all such articles.  It starts with a story of long-lost love that was turned down due to a desire for independence.  It then moves on to a celebration of feminism to establish the writer’s bona fides as a woman who is all about the empowerment of women.  Then we get to a lament that while all the women were learning to grow and achieve and be independent all the men decided to, um, not come along for the ride, I guess.  At that point I closed my browser window in disgust.

Let’s get something out of the way right now:  I am a 30 year-old, college educated, white male in America.  My personal income is higher than the average household income of my nation.  I’m not part of the 1%* by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m in pretty damn good shape.  My story of being in good shape positively oozes privilege.  My privilege, however, is not unexamined.  This is why I refer to myself as a feminist, based on my stupidly simple understanding that women are people, too.

I add that disclaimer in because I’m probably about to say a large number of things that will potentially piss people off.  I am totally okay with that.

The only way an article like the one I’m referencing can possibly exist is if the writer of the article is coming from a position of delusion or cognitive dissonance.  That’s it, full stop.  All of these articles that revolve around the question of, “Where have all the real men gone?” can only exist in a world that is carefully insulated from the facts of the case.  It’s founded on a simple notion that, basically, women can and should change how they do things but men are not allowed to change under any circumstances.  It’s also founded on the notion that men are “falling behind,” even though the only actual statistics where that’s true at the moment are in college attendance and the number of Americans laid off during this atrocious economy that has disproportionately hit sectors of the economy where men traditionally hold a much higher percentage of the positions.

Basically, this says, “Things are bad for men right now, therefore things will always be bad for men.”  This is stupid.  A woman writing an article with that premise will be applauded only by MRAs and MRA apologists.  I’m pretty sure that, ironically enough, that means that said woman writing said article is giving herself an engraved invitation to a party only attended by the sort of men she said she wants to avoid.

In reality, the “problem” is that women are closing the gap.  They’ve been behind men for a long-ass time and we’ve become accustomed to the notion that women should be where they are.  We’ve built our mythologies and constructed our gender politics around that notion.  Men are supposed to be the breadwinners.  Men are supposed to be the leaders.  Men are supposed to be the heads of the household.  Men are supposed to be the vice presidents and women are supposed to be their secretaries.

Now some women are vice presidents and some men are secretaries.  Women making it to the halls of power get celebrated.  Men forced to ignore the indignity of being mere secretaries get pitied.  See how that works?

In, say, 1956 a woman could proudly say that her husband had just been promoted to Vice President In Charge Of Whatever The Fuck.  Her husband could mention that his wife worked down in the typing pool at a law firm or something with no loss of face.  Even better, he could point out that his wife stayed at home and raised the children, because that was how the world worked.

Now if a woman gets promoted to Vice President In Charge Of Whatever The Fuck, we say, “Here’s a sign that things are good for women.”[1]  If VP lady introduces her husband as a guy who does data entry then he’s undoubtedly failed at something.  God help him if he stays home to raise the kids or because he can’t find a job.

This, I think, is the core of the problem.  Yes, things are bad for men right now, in that men are in the worst shape in history if compared to women in absolute terms.[2]  They’ve been disproportionately hit by the recession.  There are fewer men in college and grad school than women.  The solution to that is pretty simple, actually.  I see two steps:

1.  More men need to go to college.
2.  We need to stop making a distinction between “men’s work” and “women’s work.”

The reason that more men lost their jobs in the recession is because the recession hit traditionally male-dominated industry harder than traditionally female-dominated industry.  Fewer men want to be nurses because there’s a stigma associated with being a male nurse.  But fewer nurses lost their jobs than auto workers.  If more men were nurses, then it stands to reason that fewer men would have gotten laid off.

This gives us the opportunity to consider the implications of the inverse.  Say that nurses were disproportionately laid off and auto workers got to keep their jobs.  Who wants to bet we wouldn’t see a single article about the crisis of womanhood?  I’ll give an over/under of six articles, period, on how horrible it is that women aren’t moving out of their parents’ house and sitting around playing video games in the mass media.  Who wants to take the over?  Anybody?

Maybe the question shouldn’t be, “What’s wrong with men?”  Maybe it should be, “What’s wrong with the story we’re telling ourselves?”  But that’s a much harder article to write.  It’s also a much harder article to sell.[3]

--------------------------

Meanwhile, the thing that fascinates me about the article that pissed me off today is that the author, Kate Bolick, answers her own damn question.  Repeatedly.  The question, for those who don’t feel like reading, basically boils down to, “Why am I not married?”  Everything else in the article is an attempt to extrapolate data from anecdote and, basically, to make it seem like she’s not whining.  This is the very first paragraph in the article:

IN 2001, WHEN I was 28, I broke up with my boyfriend. Allan and I had been together for three years, and there was no good reason to end things. He was (and remains) an exceptional person, intelligent, good-looking, loyal, kind. My friends, many of whom were married or in marriage-track relationships, were bewildered. I was bewildered. To account for my behavior, all I had were two intangible yet undeniable convictions: something was missing; I wasn’t ready to settle down.

She then goes on to say two things.  First, Allan was subjectively and objectively fantastic.  Second, they’re still friends and Allan is now married.

The rest of the article is commentary.  Whiny commentary dressed up as statistics, but it’s commentary nonetheless.  Just in case anyone (including one Kate Bolick) totally missed what I’m driving at:

KATE BOLICK COULD BE MARRIED TO ALLAN RIGHT NOW.  As such, the answer to her question of, “Why am I not married?” is, “It’s your own damn fault, that’s why.”

Basically, all of the self-justification boils down to, “I spent my twenties and early thirties finding myself and figuring out my career and becoming the wonderful person I am today.  Now I wanna get married and there aren’t any men for me to marry who meet my standards.  They’re all losers or creepy douchebags.  Well, except for the ones who I met who were nice but who just, y’know, weren’t for me.”

Basically, this article exists because one Kate Bolick doesn’t actually listen to herself when she talks.  I suppose there’s less profit in that than writing an article and having it published in The Atlantic, though.  So, y’know, she’s got that goin’ for her.

The answer to the question, “Where are all the good men?” is, “They’re out there.”  See, the great guy who wanted to get married ten years ago found someone who also wanted to get married and they, y’know, got married.  Did the author make the right or wrong choice in 2001?  How the hell should I know?  I don’t know her.  I don’t know Allan.  It’s also absolutely impossible to predict an alternate reality.  It might have been great.  They also might have been hit by a bus leaving the church on their wedding day.  Or, hell, maybe Allan would eventually have figured out that Kate was whiny and self-absorbed and dumped her ass.  Who knows?

There’s another option, too.  You know how you decided to spend the last ten years bettering yourself and shit?  Well what, precisely, were all the men supposed to be doing during that time, sitting around and waiting for you to grace them with your romantic attentions?  Why do you get to be the center of the romantic universe?  Maybe they’re all in class, studying for their MBA.  Or maybe they’re at work, focusing on their careers.  Maybe they’ve decided that they don’t actually want to get married, since ten years ago they were hearing that everyone needed to go find themselves and shit and what they found was fulfillment in career, education, or hobby.

Or, hell, maybe there are a bunch of Allans out there who got dumped by their girlfriend of three years at 28, then were subjected to a whole shitload of dates where they felt they were supposed to have brought their resumes and gave up.  Or maybe they found that the marriage-minded women at 28 were crazy and desperate and they decided that marrying wasn’t an option.

Or maybe there are a bunch of great guys out there who want to get married, but sure as shit don’t want to marry Kate Bolick.  She seems kinda whiny, judgmental, and uptight, after all.

--------------------------

One of the great fallacies of dating is the old saw, “There’s someone for everyone.”  This tends to go hand in hand with the notion of The One.  These then get wrapped up in fairy tale notions of love at first sight and happily ever after and all that jazz.  It’s simply not true.

Not long after I moved back to Chicago I went on a couple dates with someone.  She was great on paper: accomplished, capable, intelligent, all that stuff.[4]  She was also pretty in to me.  This was unfortunate, since I just plain didn’t feel the same way.

This was awkward, since I had no idea how to handle such a situation.  There simply was no space in my universe for someone who was interested in me, in whom I was not interested, but who was not a nutjob.  So I handled it awkwardly, but eventually found myself going back and trying to say what I should have said, which was basically, “You’re really good people, but I just wasn’t feeling it and you deserve better than that.”[5]

Maybe that was the wrong move.  Maybe I’ll be looking back 10 years from now and saying, “Why didn’t I try harder to give that a shot?”  In a vacuum the odds of that happening are extremely low.  It was just a couple dates, after all, and if I’m even thinking about it in ten years that will probably seem pretty obsessive.  But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I meet absolutely no one I even want to go on a second date with in the next decade.[6]  Would it make any sense at all to look back on the late summer of 2011 and say, “Shit, I missed my only chance?”

No.  It makes no sense to think that, since I made my decision based on the facts at hand.  I made the best decision I could have and, quite frankly, I believe it was the right decision.[7]

--------------------------

When it gets right down to it, the big change over the last few years is that people don’t need to et married.  Since we don’t need to get married, some people decide not to get married.  Some want to just play the field.  Some want to hold out until they meet the perfect person and find that happily ever after.  Some decide to opt out of the program for a while or altogether while they focus on other stuff that’s more important to them.

This is only a problem if people decide it’s a problem.  The “crisis” isn’t that men as a gender are failing.  It’s that the world is changing and humans suck at change.  So we latch on to something, anything, and say, “See!  This is the problem!  We need to do something about it!”  Identifying a problem and complaining about it is cathartic.  It’s also distracting.  So if the underlying question is, “Why am I not married yet?” and the answer is, “Because men suck, that’s why,” then the person asking the question doesn’t actually have to do anything or learn anything.

--------------------------

[1]In the interests of full disclosure: the top two positions at my current company are occupied by women.  The company is small enough that both of them know who I am in spite of the fact that I’m pretty far down on the org chart.  This is not the first company I’ve worked for with a female CEO/President.  In my time in corporate America I have directly reported to eight women and four men.  Of that group I’ve liked working for all the men and six of the women and have thought that all ten individuals had strengths and weaknesses that had nothing to do with whether or not we shared a gender.

[2]I re-wrote that sentence four different times.

[3]On related not, I’m currently reading a book about the media.  This morning I found it necessary to bookmark a page because a chunk of the text struck me:

“Their methods are so hidden and their ignorance so dense that they have no conception of law to restrain them,” the World thundered against midwives.  “Most can hardly sign their own names.”  But another anxiety shadowed the genuine concern over their scattershot training: namely, that it was women taking business away from men.  Even as the World was pursuing midwives, it was running the headline WOMEN FARM, MEN COOK – a story noting that “The New Woman” was moving in to traditionally male jobs in farming and manufacturing, while more men were taking domestic employment.  Hearst’s Journal, though generally sympathetic to women’s labor, still ran headlines such as SHE’S PRETTY, EVEN IF SHE IS A LAWYER.

The book?  The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime that Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars.  To the uninitiated, the “century” in question was the 19th.  The “Hearst” mentioned in the quoted paragraph was THE Hearst: William Randolph Hearst.  The more things change, as they say…^

[4]We actually had a mutual acquaintance in one of my co-workers, which was something I figured out entirely on accident.  Once I pointed that out she introduced herself to my co-worker.  After that my co-worker and I had a couple of odd conversations which suddenly made sense when I realized, “Oh, [co-worker] is trying to sell me on [person I’d dated].”  So I took that as an indication that I was correct in my overall assessment that she was good people.

[5]There’s an interesting nuance here.  We have the cliché, “It’s not you, it’s me,” of which the, “You’re too good for me,” is a common subset.  Everyone knows that both things are, at best, cop outs.  At worst they’re outright lies.

However, in this specific case it sounded like I was pulling one of those.  I wasn’t.  Instead of, “You’re too good for me, I just don’t deserve someone like you,” it was, “You deserve someone who both appreciates you as a person and isn’t basically indifferent to all the dating/falling in love/whatever aspect of things.”  Because, yeah, she was in to me, but is it really a kindness to pretend to care about her in that way just to avoid, um, hurting her feelings, I guess?  No.  That’s stupid.  So, at the very least, I’ve learned how to handle that situation if it comes up again.  Have no fear, non-crazy single women of Chicagoland.  I am now fully capable of breaking things off with you in non-self-defeatingly idiotic ways.

[6]With my track record, though, that’s not exactly a non-zero possibility.

[7]This phraseology implies that she had no agency in this decision.  I want to say that she did, but in a very real way she had no control over how I thought or felt about her.  Granting her agency in my decision-making process, then, would have had one of two results: either she would have said, “You’re just not that in to me and we should break this off,” or, “You’re just not that in to me, now.  Give it more time.”

The problem is that there was a point where she tried the, “You’ve just moved back, you’ve got a lot on your mind, you might just not be ready.  I’m willing to wait.”

I remembered saying similar things to Her and attempting to insert myself as an agent in her decision-making process.  That did not end well.

^Interesting post script: when I went to go get a link to the book I saw it only had 3.5 stars on the B&N site.  That seemed low.  The book is actually quite enjoyable and I'm thinking of writing a post or three on it and everything.  So I scrolled down to see what was up.  It turns out that it has a bunch of 1 star ratings because B&N pushed free samples of the book to Nook users.  The lesson, as always: don't blindly trust starred internet reviews, since people give things 1 or 5 stars for really fuck-stupid reasons sometimes.

*EDIT:  Original version said I'm not part of the 99%.  Oops.  I went double-negative on myself or something.  Thanks, jessa.

More on Penn State

Charles P. Pierce may well have written the definitive word on Penn State, the Roman Catholic Church, and how blind, unthinking obedience and hypocrisy have created a world where men can walk in to a locker room shower and see another man raping a child and then walk away, only to have an entire football stadium pray for healing for the program.  Read it.

I kind of want to quote the entire thing here, but there's one particular paragraph that stands out:

There will now be a decade or more of criminal trials, and perhaps a quarter-century or more of civil actions, as a result of what went on at Penn State. These things cannot be prayed away. Let us hear nothing about "closure" or about "moving on." And God help us, let us not hear a single mumbling word about how football can help the university "heal." (Lord, let the Alamo Bowl be an instrument of your peace.) This wound should be left open and gaping and raw until the very last of the children that Jerry Sandusky is accused of raping somehow gets whatever modicum of peace and retribution can possibly be granted to him. This wound should be left open and gaping and raw in the bright sunlight where everybody can see it, for years and years and years, until the raped children themselves decide that justice has been done. When they're done healing — if they're ever done healing — then they and their families can give Penn State permission to start.

Quite.  Fucking.  True.

While I don't think Penn State needs to be flattened and I don't think that they need to be forced to change the university's name to Child Rapist Protectors University, I do think that anyone who thinks that Penn State's need to "heal" is of paramount -- or even any, for that matter -- importance needs to STFU.  Football caused this.  The culture of football -- put in place by the sainted Joe Paterno -- protected a sexual predator.  Students rioted in the streets because they thought Joe Paterno's legacy was more important than the safety of children and an organizational accountability and conveniently ignored that Joe Paterno himself used his influence and power to make sure there was no organizational accountability, all while talking about "Winning with Honor."

There is not honor in child rape.  Every single win Penn State has in the books needs to have an asterisk next to it that says, "*Win enabled by child rapists and child rape apologists."  Every prep athlete that's thinking of going to Penn state to play football from this point forward needs to be forced to think, "Do I really want to be associated with child rapists and their apologists?"

And if that legacy destroys football at Penn State, so be it.  It's not a tragedy in comparison to the tragedy that the football program itself allowed to happen in its own facilities.

Book Review: Night of the Living Dead Christian, Part 4

[Warning: Spoiler-ish-like content ahead.]

It’s been a while since I managed to write my last entry in this series.  As in, I just looked and it’s been a month.  A month!  I thought it was two weeks, tops.  Apparently that’s how my life has been going this fall.  So let’s take stock of just how much the world has changed since then.

Um.  Well, since the last time we were here I thought I would be buying a townhouse on the south side of Wheaton.  Then I found out I wasn’t buying a townhouse on the south side of Wheaton.  But now I’m under contract to buy a townhouse on the south side of Wheaton, pending bank approval of the short sale.  And the craziest thing about that: it’s the same goddamn townhouse.  Also a whole bunch of other stuff happened that kinda made me want to tear my hair out and go back to renting.  Or living in a cardboard box.  But I hear that gets cold in the winter.

The last time we were here I was awaiting the release of Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds with something approaching breathless anticipation.  I’m currently sitting on a train listening to Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds.  There will be a review.  Oh, yes, there will be a review.  Mostly because I think it’s about time everyone learns the two key factors that separate good music from great music in my (somewhat diseased and/or blighted) mind.

Numero three-o, the last time we were here I was single and utterly convinced I’d never meet anyone with whom I could have a relationship.  That…um, that hasn’t actually changed.  So, y’know, it’s nice to know that some things in the universe remain constant.  I think we all need a little consistency in our lives, after all.

Also, too, I saw Mike Doughty at the House of Blues Chicago and didn’t walk away hating the House of Blues Chicago.  So that gives me hope that I’ll have an enjoyable time seeing the Lovehammers at the House of Blues Chicago in March.  And I saw Reckless Kelly at Joe’s on Weed Street.

Oh, and they’re setting up the Kriskindlmarket in Daley Plaza.  Christmastime in Chicago kicks massive amounts of ass.  Just thought I’d throw that out there.

Anyway, I’m sure that you’ve figured out by now that I’m just trying to waste time.  I’m like a student trying to pad out an essay because I waited until the night before the paper was due to actually start researching and I discovered the library isn’t actually open at 2 am and also isn’t a bar.  I wish someone would have told me they wouldn’t have Lagavulin 16 at the library, dammit.  How am I supposed to work in these conditions?

Wait.  Where was I?  Oh, yeah, Night of the Living Dead Christian.  I believe we’ve covered what I hate about the book.  I believe we’ve covered my own preconceptions of the Christian publishing industry.  And Matt Mikalatos himself has showed up in the comments to defend himself, explain himself, or try to point out that I’m an idiot who doesn’t know nothin’ or something.  Hopefully he’ll show up again, assuming he hasn’t died of old age in the interim.[1]

And so but anyway, let’s talk about why I was actually pleasantly surprised by the book.  Before I hated the book.  And then briefly right after I hated the book.  What it boils down to is this: while I had many preconceptions of Christian fiction and Night of the Living Dead Christian did, actually, conform to several of them, it didn’t actually play to (stereo)type and it was possible to see a good book poking out around the edges of even the worst of the narrative.

Actually, bracket that off for a moment.  Let’s have a talk about expectation.  It is the issue of expectation that caused me to briefly want to throw my Nook across the train car, thereby undoubtedly braining some poor morning commuter, causing some sort of lawsuit, and – worst of all – breaking my Nook.  See, I went in to the actual reading process knowing from whence Night of the Living Dead Christian came.  If the book had simply conformed to my Christian-fiction-publishing-based expectations from word one I wouldn’t have hated it.  I know I wouldn’t have liked it, but I wouldn’t have been emotionally invested.  The very fact that I was able to develop an emotional reaction to the book is, in and of itself, something to which I credit the book and its author.[2]  Basically my hatred was based entirely on a thought process of, “Screw you, Matt Mikalatos.  Screw you for seeming to break out of the standard Christian fiction crap, then throwing it right in my face.”

So, y’know, the book’s got that goin’ for it.

Now, there are also some things that I just have to accept in the book.  I find Luther’s conversion scene to be a bit far-fetched, mostly because Jesus hisownself shows up.  You would think that I could just, y’know, leave that one be.  I’m already willing to accept the premise that actual people turn in to actual werewolves, zombies, vampires, and other things.  So, hey, why not Jesus?  Mostly because I actually personally know people who believe that Jesus shows up and, like, has conversations with them, but those same people (probably) don’t believe that people actually turn in to werewolves.  So while I was willing to accept monsters – due to the fact that they’re simply a part of the premise of the book – I wasn’t willing to accept Jesus actually showing up in a book about Jesus.

Oddly, it’s not because Jesus doesn’t belong.  It’s because I totally worry about that mentally-unhinged-actually-thinks-they-talk-to-Jesus segment of the population.  So in worrying about how they’d receive that part, I actually took myself out of the narrative.

Well, that and the fact that we had a character who was struggling with his own journey of faith or acceptance or whatever.  Then Jesus showed up and made it (mostly) all better.  Again, I know people who think that exact thing happens and, again, I worry about them.  But this is definitely one of those, “We’re going to have to agree to disagree,” moments, since I came away from two-plus decades in evangelical circles getting all that, “Jesus gonna come save you!” stuff and not actually seeing it happen.  What I did see a lot of was people filling in the blanks and engaging in wishful thinking.  But this is actually something of a nitpick, since I’m basically saying, “The problem I have here is that Mikalatos didn’t write the book that I would have written.”

The appropriate response to that is, “No shit, dude.”[3]

So let me toss a few things out that I thought he did well.

First, I already mentioned that he went to great lengths to have a character point out the Hitler wasn’t an atheist and that it’s entirely possible for Lutherans and Catholics to also be Christians, too.  This is a weird one, since it’s a lot of, “Yeah, duh.”  But for the specific intended audience of a Tyndale House Christian fiction book, that’s kind of a point that needs to be made.  It’s also the sort of point that could end up getting a brick thrown through Mr. Mikalatos’ window.  Or, at least, a series of blog posts from some overly serious Bible College dropout entitled, “Matt Mikalatos is not a Real True Christian.”[4]  It’s an act of moral courage in some circles to say things which are obvious to most of us.  This, for the record, is sad.  It also might not have been something Matt actually thought about.

Second, right up until the moment I decided that Lara was simply a cipher to allow us to feel sorry for Luther, I actually rather liked Lara and thought that she was a good addition to the whole thing.  I didn’t actually change my opinion of Lara after that happened.  I more decided that the author was being a dick for taking the time to create a good female character in a genre that lacks good female characters and then just throw her away for the benefit of the male character.

Third, everything wasn’t magically fixed by judicious application of Jesus.  This is a point that needs to be surgically inserted in to the skull of pretty much every Evangelical Christian I’ve ever run in to who doesn’t host a blog called Slacktivist.  Luther gets the magic-Jesus-healing-action[5] for the main issue he has.  But all that stuff that he fucked up until that point?  Yeah, it’s still fucked up.  Even if I hated every single word on every single page leading up to the (admittedly cliché) baptism sequence, I would absolutely appreciate that Luther was still in a bad place in re: his relationship with his wife and that everyone was okay with that because, holy shit, Luther was a wife beater.

This actually deserves a bit more discussion, I think.

One of the big problems with books in general is the way they tend to neatly tie up all the narrative threads.  There’s a reason for this: it’s far more satisfying.[6]  Some threads, however, need to be left untied.  In some cases it’s because some things need to be open-ended.  In some cases it’s because at the end of the day there are still several threads that can’t be tied to anything, but for the love of crap, that doesn’t mean they need to be tied to each other.  Still, it’s tempting to try to tie them together for the sake of completeness.  That particular compulsion is probably much greater when talking about Jesus-y things, since Jesus is supposed to make it all better.

The fact is that Matt seemed to do that, at least with Lara and Robert’s threads.  But he didn’t do that with Luther’s thread.  Since Luther’s was the central conversion story, leaving him alone, vulnerable, and occasionally longing for the past was actually a really, really good thing.  Why?  Because Jesus isn’t actually a magical fix-all.  It’s nice to see a Christian book where Jesus isn’t actually a magic cure for everything.

Fourth, I liked what Matt did with the relationship between Luther and his father.  Having a father who was wrong, didn’t know what to do, and then made things worse and was heart-broken about it was nice, especially since the father was a pastor and the correct pastor to solve the problem.  So having the father admit that he’d been helpless rather than having to just have Luther admit he was wrong about everything was actually unexpected.

So, yeah, that’s a sort of broad set of ideas, and I suppose it’s probably underwhelming as praise compared to the vitriol I used in previous posts on the subject.  But these are the four main threads that caused me to like the book enough to get mad.  So they’re actually kind of a big deal.

Also, too, there’s probably a Part 5 in here somewhere.  Although I doubt I’ll end up with as many posts on the subject as Michael Mock.

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[1]And if he has, I hope his last words were, “I’ll see you in Hell.  From Heaven!” and they were directed at me.  Really, who wouldn’t want to know someone died like that?

[2]I’m currently fighting a powerful urge to write about five pages on an issue that’s near and dear to my heart: expectation management.  I’ll hold that for my next The Single Life post, I think…

[3]We have two tropes at play here: “Death of the Author” and “Intent is not Magic.”  “Death of the Author” basically says that the artist’s intent doesn’t matter, all that matters is what the consumer gets out of it.  That’s absolute bullshit, as art is message, so the intent of the messenger matters.  On the other hand, there’s “Intent is not Magic,” which isn’t technically a trope.  I’m actually re-purposing a bit of internet rhetoric that pops up whenever someone who is blind to their own privilege explains how the world works to people who are trying to illuminate unexamined privilege.  However, it also works here.

Basically, I made a series of assumptions about who Matt Mikalatos is and what he was attempting to get across when I picked up the book.  Matt Mikalatos, meanwhile, wrote a book based on a series of assumptions of his own.  Posts two and three in this series were about my assumptions about him and his book.  The comments contain an awful lot about his intent.

This is where it gets tricky: as best I can tell neither one of us is actually in the wrong.  I genuinely believe that he has been explaining himself and his intentions in good faith.  I can totally see what he’s going for, too, and I get the impressions from his comments that he’s willing to concede that he didn’t always get his point across in the way he intended and/or didn’t always see the possible other ways to take the things he wrote.  I’m willing to walk back some of my stronger reactions based on subsequent information, but I haven’t really seen any reason to walk back my overall assessment of the book.

That’s, ultimately, why this is interesting.  Because everyone can learn something from this.  By the same token, I suspect that if Matt were to take everything I’ve said to heart and go back to re-write the book from scratch he would decide to change a few things based on what I’ve said that he agrees with and he would keep other things exactly the same because he’d say, “Nah, that dude was totally wrong about this.”  And I’d be totally willing to accept that, because I didn’t write this book.

Hell, we all know what happened when I wrote a Jesus-themed zombie story…

[4]True story: I searched Teh Google for that and came up with nothing.  I believe that I am now contractually obligated to write that post.  And incorporate porn of some sort.  Some days I hate the internet.  I mean, seriously, this post about Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds is not going to write itself.

[5]With kung-fu grip!

[6]I am about to nerd out on all a y’alls, here.  I read every single BattleTech novel back in the day.  Then FASA went under and BattleTech all but disappeared, only to be resurrected by Wizards of the Coast or something.  They released a whole new set of novels called Mechwarrior: Dark Age set seventy or so years after the end of the previous ones in a universe that was kinda the same but had a few drastic and noticeable changes.  I ignored them.

Right after I got my Nook I decided, “Ah, hell, I need some easy train reading,” and I started getting the ebooks.  I ended up really liking the series because it was a lot tighter than the previous BattleTech books and it was a lot more, shall we say, adult.  There was basically no sex or swearing in the older books and it focused mostly on people high up in the halls of power, most of whom were nobles, basically.  So other than a few characters there wasn’t much in the way of grittiness.  Mechwarrior: Dark Age was all grit.  Characters had issues, bad shit happened, and that was just kind of how things went.  There were a few characters who pretty much had me thinking, “Holy shit, they allowed THIS?”

That’s all well and good, but I have one huge nitpick with the series: it just freaking ended.  I’m guessing that it wasn’t supposed to just end at book thirty, but holy crap, it just ended at book thirty with the Free Worlds League half rebuilt, the Republic still in Fortress Republic mode, the Lyrans and Wolves probably about to go to war with each other over the scraps of the Marik-Stewart Commonwealth, and holy-shit-what-about-Julian-Davion-and-the-whole-Caleb-Davion-is-a-paranoid-schizophrenic-thing?  They just left the Federated Suns behind at book 15.  And the Draconis Combine was just flapping in the breeze.  And there was the whole bit where Malvina Hazen blew up the friggin’ Jade Falcons by crashing a space battleship in to a planet but it just got dropped because, y’know, that book ended and none of the subsequent books went back to the JFOZ.

So, basically, what I’m saying is that tying up threads neatly, or at least TYING UP YOUR GODDAMN THREADS PERIOD is actually a good thing.  I like being satisfied that the time I’ve invested in something has paid off.  Now I’m angry.

You Can't Go Home Again

So I didn't get to any of the writing that I intended this week.  It just ended up being one of those weeks, I guess.

I did, however, follow the events in State College, PA as closely as I could.  It's hard not to, when you consider that my first inkling of the issue came from this write up.  If you go to read it, be warned, it's graphic and extremely disturbing.

Yesterday, Scalzi weighed in with a comparison to Omelas.  He described why, and I initially disagreed with him.  The Omelas story centers around the idea that this one small but atrocious evil must exist for a greater good.  There seems no comparison between the utopian omelas with its inconceivable devil's bargain and a winning football program.  Football is, after all, just a game.  And even Joe Pa shouldn't be above common human decency.  And a mere assistant coach shouldn't be a necessary component of that pseudo-utopia.

Then I read a pair of articles by Michael Weinreb on Grantland.  Weintraub grew up in Happy Valley, living and breathing Penn State football.  If you read nothing else on this horrible scandal, read those two pieces in the order I linked them.  Because this is about something more than football.  And in understanding that, I began to grasp the sheer scope of what happened.

The story of the reaction to Joe Pa getting fired is, ironically enough, the story of a loss of innocence.  State College is Omelas in a very real way.  State College, PA is what it is because of the football program put in place by Joe Paterno.  Sandusky was an important part of that winning football program.  In a very real sense the cover-up is an attempt to sacrifice the small, weak, and helpless to protect the rest of the community from the real world.

In rioting, complaining, and saying that the real victim was actually Joe Paterno, the people who's reaction is so shocking in its callous disregard for the fact that at least eight [pre]-adolescent boys* were sexually abused -- up to outright rape in the Penn State football facilities -- isn't so much about, "How dare you fire Joe Pa?" but, "How dare you take away our innocence?"

It's an expression of inarticulate, ironic rage, not against the perpetrator of a horrible crime or the system that completely disregarded the protection of the least among us in the face of predation by a supposed hero.  They want to maintain their innocence about the benevolence and goodness of the powerful in their world at the expense of innocence of a few young, mostly helpless boys.  It is an understandable reaction if you know anything about humanity and its default state of short-sighted selfishness.

What I can't decide, though, is if this makes the rioters more sympathetic or monsters on an even greater scale?

I'm leaning towards the latter, though.  One is supposed to go to college to learn to be an adult, after all.  Maybe Joe Pa was taken on as a surrogate father-figure, but part of growing up is in learning that your parents are not perfect and infallible and make mistakes.  To try to say that it's not Paterno's fault and he was unjustly fired because he couldn't possibly have been involved, or it's not his fault because he did his minimum legal duty is wrong.  Absolutely wrong.

Joe Paterno knew what was happening.  It was reported to him.  And he did his minimum required duty, which is another way of saying he did nothing.  Had Joe Paterno picked up the phone and called the campus police or State College, PA police, someone would have said, "Holy shit, Joe Paterno is on the phone.  We need to get on this."  Hell, if Joe Paterno had called the goddamn Pennsylvania National Guard he could have gotten a response.  For him not to do so is inexcusable.

With great power comes great responsibilty.  Joe Paterno was a father to the Penn State football program, to Penn State, to State College, and to generations of alumni.  But he wasn't a father to at least eight weak, helpless boys.

Joe Paterno failed.  The irony is that I'm sure it was a failure based on some notion of not damaging the integrity of the football program and Penn State as a whole.

As it turns out, "Huge cover-up of sexual abuse of [pre]-adolescent boys,* Joe Paterno fired," is a much bigger story than, "Assistant coach arrested for sexually assaulting boys after getting turned in by Joe Paterno."  In one Joe Paterno looks like a paragon of virtue, in the other a craven coward.  In one the football program takes a hit, in the other the football program crumbles.

And that's the most bizarre, strange, and heartbreaking thing about this story.  There is exactly one response that is morally, legally, and logically correct.  No one took that path.  Instead, they chose the path of craven cowards, choosing to support Omelas in spite of the fact that the suffering of children did not actually bring about any sort of utopia.  All it did was create unnecessary pain.

Even at that, some cannot walk away.

Weinreb articulates why that is:  "I want these things to disappear from my consciousness, but they won't. The place where I grew up is gone, and it's not coming back."

The difference between Weinreb and those who rioted or those who say the real victim in all of this is Joe Paterno and Joe Paterno's legacy is that Weinreb knows that the truth doesn't disappear if you just blame everything on the victims.

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*EDIT: The original version of this said they were "adolescent."  I forgot which age group fits where, but the boys were all in the range of 10 years old and "adoelescent" is post-puberty.

Promises, Promises...

Hi everybody!

So, um, the Great House "Purchasing" Fiasco of 2011 has been kind of mentally and emotionally draining for me.  And next week is end of year review time, so I've been desperately trying to remember what I said I'd do by the end of 2011 at work.

And I've been doing a sweet Vanguard run at Mass Effect.  Mostly because I don't have the energy or mental capacity to do anything else.  And there's really nothing more fun than hitting a Geth Juggernaut with Lift, then loading it with a few dozen Inferno VIII rounds.  Except for hitting a Krogan Warrior with lift on Virmire and watching the poor fellow disappear in to the blue, blue sky.

Anyway, Michael Mock bought Night of the Living Dead Christian.  And he's been reviewing it.  Oh, and Matt Mikalatos has offered some insights in to how he got in to Christian publishing, which are interesting, since it seems that the Christian publishing industry has actually changed a bit over the last decade.

I have every intention of getting back to my scintillating review next week.

Also, too, if you're in the Chicagoland area over the next couple weeks: today (Friday, November 4th) you can see Reckless Kelly at Joe's on Weed Street.  Also, too, I'll be there.  Mike Doughty's at the House of Blues next Saturday.  And Cody Canada and the Departed are at Joe's with Sons of Bill the following Friday.  That's good freaking music right there.  Show up.  Say hello.  Rock out.