The Wisdom of Snooki and Being Snookered

The Wisdom of Snooki

by Linh Dinh / April 6th, 2011

America got a good laugh this week over news that Snooki, a “Guidette” of Jersey Shore fame, got paid more to speak at a university than Toni Morrison, Nobel laureate for literature. They are both authors, after all, but Snooki is certainly more famous and more in demand these days. She’s been on David Letterman twice recently, whereas Morrison is never on TV, not even when she gave her Nobel speech in 1993. By contrast, Harold Pinter could deliver his masterful rant on the BBC in prime time.

Of course, each British household must fork over £145 per year to support BBC television. Such misuse of public fund, such government-sanctioned robbery, would not go well in America. Hell, 234 bucks could buy the Pentagon a box of nails at least, or maybe not. In any case, serious authors are more or less banned from American TV. Day in and day out, you’ll see a teeming lineup of shouters, schmoozers, unctuous bullshiters and apologists, but never a serious writer. Athletes of all levels are endlessly interviewed, but never a serious thinker and crafter of language. Americans want words from everybody but their wordsmiths. To borrow a phrase from Jersey Shore, one has to go back to “prehistoric kindergarten” to see the likes of Allen Ginsberg butt heads with William Buckley. Has anyone seen Gore Vidal, Robert Coover or Clayton Eshleman lately? Who?! What?

To get good seats for Snooki, some students showed up seven hours early. The decision to invite her at $32,000 was made by the students themselves, so this was also democracy in action. Snooki is a Jersey girl, and the venue was in New Jersey, but the students’ identification with her goes a lot deeper, I think. They like her because she is wholly untalented and unapologetically stupid. Her vapidity gives them hope. If someone this unexceptional can cash in on fifteen glorious minutes, then maybe the good, easy life can be theirs also, unless, of course, they like to cogitate and can string three or four sentences together. If that’s the case, then fuggedaboutit. Onto the trash heap you go!

Eight-five percent of American college graduates must move back to their parent’s homes. Most carry loans that will take decades to pay off, if ever. Many will default. Their unemployment rate is 10 percent and trending higher. Many toil at jobs they could have gotten without attending college. Three-hundred-and-sixty-five-thousand American cashiers have university degrees. Ditto, 317,000 waiters and 18,000 parking lot attendants.

Parking lot attendants get paid $19,000 a year, on average, so that’s actually a pretty good job in this economy. When McDonald’s held a job fair recently,

60,000 people applied for 13,000 minimum-wage positions. I know desperate people who are working for even less than minimum-wage. Take it or leave it.

On a Greyhound bus, I talked to Ron, a Cincinnatian with two college degrees and three jobs. Primarily a social worker for children from disfunctional families, Ron was also a substitute teacher and soccer referee. He was paid $28 a match, $22 for games between children under 14, which he prefered, since at 45-years-old, Ron could only run so fast. An imposing, trim black man, Ron considered his physique and stern demeanor his chief assets in the classroom. “As a substitute teacher, you don’t really teach anything. You just have to keep them from going crazy!” To increase his hours, he worked at four school districts. He also felt that his social worker job was safe, “There will always be these messed up families, and in this economy, there will be more. What do poor people argue about? They argue about money! Without social workers, there will be chaos.”

“But even cops are being fired,” I pointed out, to which Ron said nothing.

Ron was spending 25 hours to travel from Cincinnati to Providence. Only the poor do that. Knowing we would stop in Philadelphia, he asked me about the price of a cheese steak. “About eight bucks for a really good one.”

“Damn!” he exclaimed, and would not buy one. Ron didn’t share my pessimism about our country’s prospects. Believing in the recovery, he said he always bought something each time he stepped into Walmart, “to support the president.”

Back to Jersey. Outside its capital, there is a large slogan displayed permanently on a bridge, “TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES,” but Trenton’s factories are long gone, like in the rest of the state, or America itself. Since 2001, the US has been losing 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month. South of Trenton, Camden used to have the largest ship yard in the world, as well as the Campbell Soup factory. Chronically broke and among the most dangerous city in America, Camden laid off a third of its police force this year. The Guardian Angels, an unarmed citizen group, now patrols a tiny portion of this free fire zone. A sign on Camden grass: “THEY PUT BULLETS IN MY HEAD ALIEN BULLETS FLAIR A TUMOR.” A sign in Camden window: “HUNGRY? POOR? NO MONEY? NO PROBLEM. PLEASE COME INSIDE FOR A FREE SOUP, BREAD, SODA.” There is no inside to come to, however. The store is out of business.

Walt Whitman spent 19 years in Camden. He is also buried here, in a tomb that cost more than twice his modest home. Hardly anyone visits either. There is a Whitman bridge, park and arts center, and the Gray Old Bard is even painted on the wall of the downtown McDonald’s, yet in this city of 77,000, home to America’s greatest poet, the very man who defined her, there is only one public library left. The main downtown branch is closed. Another branch, funded by Andrew Carnegie, looks like it has been bombed. Whitman wrote about Camden, “I dream’d in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth.”

Hard core New Jerseyites will point out that Camden is not really Jersey, and no one goes to Camden anyway, certainly not Snooki. If you live in “The Garden State,” you may take a day trip to the City, New York, or head down to the Shore. Atlantic City used to be the only gambling destination on the East Coast, but casinos are now sprouting all over America. In adjacent Pennsylvania, Sands has even opened a casino on the grounds of Bethlehem Steel, with its colossal, rusting smoke stacks still standing. We no longer make steel, but you’re welcome to dump your dosh into this steel box, thank you. Get head, crank that lever!

For 84 years, Atlantic City was also the home of the Miss America Beauty Pageant. For looking good, for just being herself, a woman may win a scholarship. For flashing much teeth and flesh, she might be able to uplift and round out her mind. In fact, Miss America boasts that it is the largest provider of scholarship money to young women in the world. Which takes us back to Snooki. For just being herself, she is corralling the big bucks, so who needs a scholarship, really? As Snooki advises, “Study hard, but party harder!” No wonder the young are seduced. Clutching a useless degree and a six pack of discount brewski, the educated youth of America can remember this $32,000 flint of wisdom as they wade into the coming dark.

Like Snooki, I too am an author, but I can only claim a tiny fraction of her readership. I’ve also been paid to talk at universities, but my payment rarely breaks four figures. Like a fool, I routinely write essays for no money at all. My last piece in the New York Times grossed me $75. My last two in the Guardian, nothing. Though I wrote and published much last year, including a novel, my entire income was less than $9,000. Like an American steel worker, I am redundant, my labor is nearly worthless.

Perhaps I can jog myself into shape in hopes of becoming a soccer referee? Though I hate cars, maybe I can wiggle into a job to park and deliver other people’s steel boxes, and double my annual wealth? I cleaned offices and apartments for several years, painted houses for more than a decade, but these jobs have been cornered by illegals who can work much faster than I can. I’m 47. My friend Bob, 51 and with an English degree, don’t laugh, used to do construction work, but is now studying to be an ESL teacher. If you can’t compete against them, you might as well try to teach them English. I know of another guy who gives private ESL lessons in the food court of an upscale shopping mall. Like the graffitti says, I HUSTLE CAUSE I GOT 2!

My first employment was at McDonald’s, and there’s no reason why it can’t be my last, although the competition has gotten a lot stiffer. The menu has also changed much in the intervening 30 years, there were no wraps, swiss cheese or chipotle, whatever the hell that is, way back then, but as a relatively quick learner, I still have an outside chance, I think, to clown with Ronald again.

Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories and five of poems, and a just released novel, Love Like Hate. He's tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, State of the Union. Read other articles by Linh.

This article was posted on Wednesday, April 6th, 2011 at 8:01am and is filed under Education, Media, Poverty.

AlterNet.org

Bitch Magazine / By M. M. Adjarian and Peggy Orenstein

How Disney Invaded American Childhood to Shill Worthless Crap to Our Kids

Disney is a major source of the potentially harmful gender and race myths proffered to girls today.

March 28, 2011 |

From the outside, Peggy Orenstein epitomizes feminist success. She’s an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in such distinguished publications as the New Yorker, Elle, Vogue, Discover, Mother Jones, and O: The Oprah Magazine. But her work itself is dedicated to asserting the ways in which “having it all” -- or trying to -- in a world built to the measure of men can have profound effects on women and girls.

Orenstein’s first book, the 1994 study Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap, explored the adolescent roots and gendered nature of the crippling self-doubt that plagues so many adult women. Her second, 2000’s Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, & Life in a Half-Changed World, examined the systemic biases and roadblocks women face in creating lives that balance personal and professional demands. And in 2007, Orenstein published a memoir, Waiting for Daisy, which recounted the challenges -- infertility, cancer, and many more -- she faced in becoming a mother.

Throughout her career, Orenstein has observed at close range how the media and popular culture have colluded to serve up distorted visions of womanhood to girls. And given everything she’s seen, she’d be the first to say that being female in what’s still a “half-changed world” is no fairy tale. So perhaps it’s fitting that Orenstein’s new book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, takes on the Disneyfication of American girlhood, and the princess narratives sold hand over fist to girls like her own 7-year-old, Daisy Tomoko.

Disney princess narratives have long been a staple of modern girlhood. But Cinderella Ate My Daughter emphasizes that princess culture is a 21st-century phenomenon, the result of marketing executives seeking some consumer magic to boost the corporation’s limp product sales. In 2001, the revenue generated by such Disney-branded princess paraphernalia as dolls, costumes, and room decor was about $300 million. Eight years later, that number had risen to a whopping $4 billion. Little girls are no longer consumers of Disneyfied fairy tales; in the new millennium, they have become the consumed.

And predatory marketing is only one of the problems inherent in princess culture, which Orenstein also believes is a major source -- if not the major source -- of the potentially harmful gender and race myths proffered to girls today. Even more insidiously, Disney princesses also prepare young girls to become consumers of a whole host of cultural products -- from Bratz dolls to Miley Cyrus to toddler beauty pageants -- that promote, and ultimately normalize, manipulatively sexualized girlhoods.

Orenstein’s passion for her work as a “girl advocate” is evident not only in her writing, but also in how she talks about girlhood issues. She spoke to Bitch at length about what it means to be in the trenches of the commercial battle to capture the hearts and minds of young girls -- and the dollars of those who care for and about them.

How did the writing of Cinderella Ate My Daughter confirm or alter any of the ideas you had about “princess culture”?

When I went into it, I approached it in an exploratory way. We live in a time when girls are doing really well in a lot of realms. They’re doing really well in school, they’re going to college at a higher rate than boys, they’re doing great on the sports field, they’re in leadership roles. Yet, at the same time there’s a resurgence -- [or] more like just a “surgence” -- of pink and pretty. Is this a positive thing that shows that we can now indulge girls in that without any kind of repercussions? Or is [it] an indication that girls are still being defined by how they look and urged to get their sense of self through external validation? I came out feeling that the latter was true. And it starts pretty much in infancy.

[The] insistence on defining girls and women by how we look and how we relate sexually is not only a way to keep [us] in our place, but a way we keep ourselves there. Obsessing over our appearance is the way we assure ourselves and others around us that even if we’re really successful, we’re not really threatening. [T]he pressures on women to look good from womb to tomb have become more intense and confusing [in part] because we have made so much progress. And the consequences for girls of being prematurely sexualized can be precisely the things we’re trying to avoid, such as negative body image, eating disorders, or depression. One of the things [I found] that surprised me was the relationship between sexualization and disconnection from authentic sexuality: Girls who are sexualized early are more likely to see sexuality as a performance, not as something that they feel internally.

So it’s like from the time girls are very young, they’re always on stage somehow, whether culturally or socially.

When girls play dolls today, the fantasy that’s offered them is that they should grow up to be a rock star or movie star. That was absolutely not true when we were girls. And even the beloved Dora the Explorer -- they split Dora into two because they wanted to keep the audience, and the audience was aging out younger and younger. So they made a tween Dora. [Original] Dora is very sturdy and just neutral: She has short hair, a straight-cut shirt, a backpack, and a map. [Tween Dora] got flirty clothes and pretty hair, and the map and backpack are gone. Her fantasies are about being a rock star performing a benefit concert.

So much of what girls are presented with is essentially about performance. [And] here’s Dora, in this new incarnation, giving a soft-pedaled version of the same lesson. If it were in isolation, that might be one thing. But it’s just constant. That’s what girls are told [to aspire to] -- high-school student by day, rock star by night. It’s about the importance of this surface self.

It’s a constructionist view of identity, taken to an extreme degree.

I’ve been thinking a lot more about the way girl power has been contorted into pro-narcissism. My daughter, Daisy, got a make-your-own messenger bag kit for her seventh birthday -- [it’s] a messenger bag that you decorate with iron-on transfers. [Most of] the transfers were pink and orange and purple, hearts and flowers and stars and all the stuff that you would typically expect. But that was not what we noticed. One of the transfers said “spoiled,” another one said “pampered princess,” and a third one said “brat.” And [Daisy] looked at them and said, “Mom, why do they want you to put that on your purse? Isn’t that kind of braggy?” -- which is the worst thing you can say if you’re seven. And I said, “Yeah, I think you’re right. It is kind of braggy.” Somehow the idea of creating a strong sense of self in girls has been distorted by the culture into announcing you’re a spoiled, narcissistic brat -- like that is what signifies confidence. But it’s that sexualized, manipulative femininity.

If you asked what we want for our daughters, we’d want very wonderful, positive, thoughtful things: strong internal sense of self, self-direction and compassion and potential and all of that. And then [we] undercut that with what they’re playing with. The two don’t add up.

From what you say, it seems that well-meaning parents unwittingly cause split-identity problems in girls.

And that well-meaning part is really key. I mean, when you walk into Pottery Barn Kids, it’s like apartheid in there. For girls, it’s hearts and flowers and hula girls -- and the boys have sailboats, trucks, sports. I know somebody who was writing the [Pottery Barn] catalog, who said, “We’ve tried to make more gender-neutral items. And they just don’t sell.” We ended up with sea-creature sheets. So that was sort of neutral. [B]ut eventually your daughter may go, “Uh-uh. I don’t want this.” And if you keep disallowing it, giving her things from the boys’ side of the store, she’ll think you believe the stuff for girls is bad -- and maybe even that being a girl is bad. And that’s a problem, too.

Could it be that there’s just a cultural fear of exploring what it could be like to be female outside the bounds of narcissism?

There was some interesting research that I put in Cinderella Ate My Daughter, finding that the more egalitarian a society is, the more they believe that certain traits in men and women are innate -- stereotypical traits, obviously. In the chapter “Pinked,” I cite a study by a college professor who’s been polling students on gender-related traits since the 1970s. And interestingly, over that time, the association of women with certain stereotypical traits -- such as being talkative or friendly or indecisive -- has increased. You could say that, “Well, now that we’re more equal, we can see what’s innate.” Or you could say, “The closer we get to an egalitarian society, the more we fear we won’t be different enough and won’t be attractive to each other.” Whatever the reason, it does seem that the more opportunities women get, the more simplistic we become in our thinking about each other’s psychological makeup.

There’s also the issue that if everyone skews more toward gender neutrality, or even if we allow for greater variation in each sex, you risk having boys who might seem “feminine,” and everybody freaks out at that thought. It’s that baseline homophobia. So that, I think, always keeps us in check.

You can’t win, it seems.

Well, I’m not ready to say that. I do think there needs to be more discussion of context, and more assumption that we -- as parents or girl advocates or whatever -- have control over some of this, that we have a say in it. There’s a real incentive, of course, on the part of the people who are creating the culture to make us feel like we don’t have control. That you really don’t have a choice. But you do.

I really do believe that change can be made on a micro level. You can think about it and make decisions about what you buy, what you expose your child to, how you talk about it -- all that stuff. I think it makes a big difference. I mean, I know it does. My daughter was Athena on Halloween this year. That’s a long way from Little Mermaid. One of the ways we countered the princess thing was to read a lot of Greek myths. She needs models of femininity and she needs to act out fantasies that affirm her as a girl. She hooked into Athena -- that’s a lot better than the alternatives.

So where do you think trends are moving now?

I don’t have a crystal ball. Who could have ever guessed what we would be contending with in terms of mass culture, like the Internet and social media? I mean, five years ago, you wouldn’t have been able to predict all this, and we still don’t know the impact of it. I wouldn’t even venture to guess what the next generation will be dealing with.

M. M. Adjarian is a Dallas-based freelance writer. Her articles have appeared in SheWired.com, the Dallas Voice, and Arts + Culture DFW.

From the outside, Peggy Orenstein epitomizes feminist success. She’s an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in such distinguished publications as the New Yorker, Elle, Vogue, Discover, Mother Jones, and O: The Oprah Magazine. But her work itself is dedicated to asserting the ways in which “having it all” -- or trying to -- in a world built to the measure of men can have profound effects on women and girls.

Dr Fred Durst and the Crisis of the Political

by Phil Jourdan /

I owe my discovery of Dr Fred Durst’s philosophical work (which he has published mainly under the moniker The Limb Bizkits, often erroneously rendered as Limb Bizkit) to a seldom-cited theologian working in Montana, Bob N. Togethanau. While I appreciate Professor Togethanau’s scholarly interest in The Limb Bizkits, I feel that he’s missed the point on several crucial (and extremely subtle) matters. While Professor Togethanau deserves praise for opening up the field of Dr Fred Durst Studies, I believe a new direction is needed if this field is to progress.

I propose a different way of reading Dr Durst’s lyrics, one which is not bound up with religious interpretation. Through careful examination of Dr Durst’s songs “Nookie” and “Take a Look Around”, I have found that Dr Durst’s familiarity with central psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts shines through in almost every line; his fans have so far tried to change the world through his music, but the point, to paraphrase Marx, is to interpret the music. Only by deciphering the lyrics can we fully appreciate the intricacies of Durstian poetry.

While I don’t have the time at present to explore the entirety of Dr Durst’s prolific output, I want to lay out what I think is the most appropriate way to read his lyrics. I want, in particular, to prove that Dr Durst is dealing with highly abstract Lacanian, Mouffian, Hegelian, Kierkegaardian and Marxist concepts, which he cleverly hides under provocative profanity and sexual explicitness — no doubt this is his way of influencing what leftists have problematically called “the masses” without intimidating them.

Take, for example, the classic song-treatise, “Nookie”… Dr Durst’s purported aim here is to expose a former lover’s infidelities. Of course, this is only a pretext for engaging in extremely subtle micro-analyses of ideological “givens”.

“I came into this world as a reject,” Dr Durst proclaims in the song’s opening line. At once we are reminded of symbolic castration as formulated by Jacques Lacan. To enter the “world” — that is, to become a player in the intersubjective game the rules of which are inseparable from language as such — involves a rejection of jouissance, of primordial enjoyment which gives us our ontological substance. What Dr Durst is giving us here is a way into his philosophical system as a whole, acknowledging his debt to Heideggerian existentialism and structural psychoanalysis.

“Dwellin’ on the past / It’s burnin’ in my brain / Everyone that burns has to learn from the pain,” Dr Durst continues. Though this could be interpreted in almost infinite ways, I believe the most fruitful way to read this involves seeing it as an explanation of Dr Durst’s political stance. To dwell on the past causes “burning” in the brain — could there be a more obvious indictment of political conservatism, which forever looks to the past, and whose “hot-headed” American representatives (I am thinking in particular of Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck) always seem slightly brain-fried from all the yelling they do at the cameras? What Dr Durst seems to be saying is that it is time for conservative pundits to “learn from the pain” of having been defeated by the obvious Stalinist Barack Obama — they have to deal with it and find new ways to promote the conservative cause.

Nevertheless, Dr Durst introduces a layer of ambiguity in his political analysis. “Should i be feelin’ bad? / Should i be feelin’ good? / It’s kinda sad I’m the laughing stock of the neighbourhood,” he writes. So far he seems to be portraying the conservatives as clownishly as he can; it is not the “wishy-washy” liberals that he condemns for their lack of conviction, but the conservatives — they don’t know what they want, Dr Durst is saying — do Mexicans steal all available jobs in the United States, or are they lazy, jobless bums? Yet he goes on to write: “I’m a sucker like I said / fucked up in the head — not!” What is that “not” doing there? Is Dr Durst deliberately contradicting himself in order to mask his position on the issue of conservatism, or is he doing something sneakier, something of the most astonishing brilliance presented as childish humour — looking for redeeming qualities in the conservative party, adopting the liberal voice in “I’m a sucker like I said / fucked up in the head” only to counter this with the most universal signifier of negativity, “No(t)”? Is Dr Durst urging for a dialectical reversal here, by appealing to the human capacity for negativity in the search for something hidden in the fabric of conservative rhetoric which would both destroy and save conservatism itself — in other words, by having “I’m a sucker like I said” and “Not!” in the same line, is Dr Durst trying to show that only American leftism, with its power to take a stance only to reject it later (something conservatism has never been known to do) can allow for American conservatism to triumph and develop in unprecedented ways?

This is a complicated argument, and warrants an unknotting of ideas. What Dr Durst is implying is that up until this point in US politics, conservative pundits have drawn their strength from the denial of every single liberal proposition ever put forward. When gay marriage is “promoted” by the left, the right at once attacks the very idea as un-American, and so forth. That is the first meaning of the “Not!” in Dr Durst’s lyrics. If one party says “I’m a sucker” the other party immediately says “No!” But, of course, this is ridiculous; surely a conservative would actively hope for a distracted liberal to admit that she was a “sucker”. Yet such is the state of politics in America that the task of the politician is to contradict his opponent, not to defeat him. The second meaning of the “No(t)!” in Dr Durst’s line is a condemnation of this state of affairs. He is saying: “No, you are not a sucker! No, you do not need to have a urination contest with your political opponents.”

But the most important “No!” in Dr Durst’s line is, in fact, a solution to the deadlock of democratic politics. Just as he referred to Lacan’s idea of symbolic castration earlier, that is, the abandoning of jouissance as a precondition for entry into the intersubjective realm, Dr Durst is now asking for a new kind of castration: political castration, that is, the rejection of the enjoyable kick that politicians get from slandering their opponents. Where proposition X (e.g. “I’m a sucker”) would typically be countered with its negation in political discourse (“You are NOT a sucker”), the “No!” flowing from Dr Durst’s pen is, in fact, a rejection of the entire system we have been discussing. If the conservative pundit would only cease to oppose the liberal, and instead focus on finding original arguments for conservative causes, a new kind of agonistic pluralism might emerge in the political field, one which would allow for real clashes of opinion rather than simple negations of previously proclaimed statements.

Dr Durst, who is famously left-wing on most issues, is paradoxically asking the conservative mentality to strengthen itself so that the left may at last have a worthwhile enemy, and vice-versa. Earlier I wrote that Dr Durst is arguing that only leftism “can allow for American conservatism to triumph and develop in unprecedented ways”. This does not mean that Dr Durst is actively trying to get the conservatives to triumph; what it does mean is that Dr Durst longs for the day that conservatism might actually pose a serious threat to Obama’s communism, so that politics, itself, can be revived as a serious thing. This is the dialectical process necessary for the political field to be reborn: each party must accept that simply disagreeing with the enemy is not enough, and that there is a mutual interdependence in their relationship which cannot be eradicated through the balancing act created by “just saying no” to whatever your opponent says. Each party needs the other for its own identity, but that does not mean that the most fruitful way to individuality is by screaming “No! No! No!” to anything a liberal or conservative says. It would be much more productive for this system to be discarded altogether — we need a “return of the political”, as Chantal Mouffe puts it; that is, we need to accept that there are some disagreements which cannot be resolved, and a “centrification” of politics is not an acceptable remedy for this irremediable situation.

Dr Durst’s most famous line (“I did it all for the nookie! Come on! The nookie! Come on!”) points to a new kind of jouissance to be found in politics: the bliss of putting up with “constant shit” (this “shit”, of course, refers to the tribulations of having any kind of political presence) in order to arrive at a different conception of the role of politics, itself. To say that one is “in it for the nookie” is to be optimistic about the future of politics. Dr Durst is no gloom-and-doom prophet. He wants to see a shift in the way the social sphere operates; and for that, it is necessary to stop with all the shit and actively develop an original, idiosyncratic political stance which does not merely contradict another political stance.

I will return to this topic some other time; I do hope that I have at least partially shown the relevance of Dr Durst’s poetry to academic fields like politics and philosophy. The importance of the Limb Bizkits is easy to overlook in our current anti-intellectual climate; with some luck, I will prove myself competent enough to promote Dr Durst’s lyrical accomplishments as a new way of viewing the role of philosophy in the modern world.

Phil Jourdan is a graduate of the University of Warwick. He is the translator of Portuguese novelist José Luis Peixoto's first book, "Morreste-me", published in the Warwick Review in 2010, and co-founder of the cabaret rock band, Dawn of the Gecko. He has recently completed his first book. Read other articles by Phil, or visit Phil's website.

This article was posted on Thursday, February 3rd, 2011 at 8:01am and is filed under Music, Philosophy, Satire.

Top 10 Alternative “10 Best” Alternative Articles

Top 10 Alternative “10 Best” Articles

The Pun is Mightier than the Sword

by Randall Amster / April 1st, 2011

Discerning readers of the “progressive blogosphere” will likely have noticed a growing tendency to title articles in the form of “Top 10 Best…” or “10 Reasons to…” or “10 Ways to a Better…” Not only does this subtle push to headline articles in such a manner impact the habits of readers, but encouraging this sort of framework affects the ways that writers craft their essays. The resultant linearization of our attention spans and creative impulses alike is a disturbing trend that merits serious critical attention.

But you won’t find that here today. Instead, I’d like to explore this practice in such a way as to (hopefully) wear it out altogether. This may well be the last “10 Best…” article I ever write, and I feel compelled to do so with a methodology that is commensurate with the level of the trend itself. In other words, I am going to mock it mercilessly, in a vain attempt to render this one of the year’s “Top 10” pieces. I might dislike the tendency to quantify and rank, but since it exists I would at least like to be good at it!

Here, then, is my personal list of alternate-reality “10 Best”-type articles. Feel free to dispute, dispel, disregard, or otherwise dismiss any or all of these. In fact, that’s precisely what we ought to do when we encounter a real “Top 10” article passing as serious journalistic commentary. ’Nuff said … almost.

10 Best Places to Bury Your Head in the Sand by Carmen Gettit

From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, we’ve got your number — ten, to be exact — of places to get away from it all. Why bother with all of life’s trials and tribulations when you can experience a magical trip to the land of denial? Let others worry about melting down and rising up, while you bask in the glory of blissful ignominy on the Jersey Shore. Let someone else give a crap, while you shoot craps in the backwaters of Monte Carlo. The sky may be falling — so why not get a great tan?

9 Signs That Corporations Know You Better Than You Do by Jorge Andwell

Like you, we are so tired of all that incessant typing of, you know, words and stuff when searching online for a good burrito shop or a place to get waxed after winter. Luckily, there’s Google, Bing, Yahoo, and the rest of the serious-sounding search engines to complete your requests at the touch of a key. How did they know what you were thinking? Through the miracle of postmodern science, your every desire is now thoroughly market-tested and mass-manufactured before you even knew it existed! Yes, we can, and do.

8 Reasons Why Fast Food Can Help Save the World by Josh Kidden

Health food is so five minutes ago. Turns out that eating well is expensive, selfish, elitist, and boring. Hungry? Stop, drop, and shop at any of our 20,000 locations! Just think of the opportunities for mutual understanding and cultural exchange when everyone is eating the same thing wherever you go. No more tiresome translating and obsessing over labels – how bad could it be when it tastes this good? From Sheboygan to Shanghai, the familiar smells of comfortable food are on every corner. Have it our way!

7 Lessons on Where to Invest Your Nonexistent Savings by Rebekka Boom

The doomsayers were wrong on this one — the economy is healthy and your future is safe. In a bygone day, it was a real headache to protect investments; now, with your shares devalued and pension busted, you can focus on the things that really matter in life. Our crack staff has compiled these lessons on investing in today rather than waiting for a tomorrow that may never come. You are the future, and the best place to put your money is right back into yourself! From Abercrombie to Zales, money still talks…

6 Worst Reasons to Give Peace a Chance by Ivan Lenin

We all know that peace is the universal desire of humankind, yet can never be attained in our lifetimes — or ever, when you get right down to it. Human nature is what it is, and has always been so. Peace might have its appeal when compared to the harsh realities of war — but a world without conflict would be, quite frankly, really boring. The only reasons left to pursue peace at this point are merely utilitarian: making a buck on it, fooling others to drop their dukes, hooking up, sleep, etc. That’s all we are saying.

5 Dumbest Excuses for Plundering a Nation’s Wealth by Karla Grove

Did you hear the one about the king who was kindhearted, noble, charitable, easygoing, and friendly to all nations of the world? Of course not — such a fool wouldn’t even merit a footnote in the history books. Every ruler has to have blood on their hands in order to be taken seriously; umpteen wars have been started for just such a reason. The other major cause of war is even more base: to take other peoples’ stuff. It’s really for their own good, because they wouldn’t know how to manage it anyway. QED.

4 Simple Ways to a Better Near-Death Experience by Stan Trick

Let’s face it: you’ve been mailing it in at work, your current relationship is going nowhere, and you’re ready for a major life-changing experience. What could be more radically different than dying for a little while? Our experts have lined up the best in controlled near-death adventures to rejuvenate your spark for life! From oxygen deprivation to induced comas, we’ve got the 411 on all your ultimate escapist fantasies. Just think of the cocktail-party stories you’ll be telling after this – and today only, 2-for-1!

3 Burning Itches That Can Never Be Scratched by Hugh Betcher

One of the problems with civilization is that it’s too good at satisfying all of our needs. This is so totally true that our desires always seem to be magically met by whatever is rolled out as “the next big thing.” With such an elegant system, why bother rocking the boat? Well, some malcontents complain about bogus concepts like “hegemony” and the “linearization of desire.” For them, we’ve got wants that can never be met and ills with no cure. Radiation, anyone? Runaway climate? Perpetual war? — happy now?

2 Political Parties Favored to Win This Year’s Elections by Dee Tweedle

Our panel of blue-ribbon experts struggled mightily over this one, and nearly came to blows in the process. By the time it was all over, the melee had resulted in a plurality decision about the future of American politics. While there were many fine contenders to consider, at the end of the day we decided to go with what our crossword puzzle editor cryptically referred to as the “Corporate Classic” answer. And so, we are pleased to announce our prediction that the Democrats and Republicans will prevail…

1 Top Way That Obama is Meaningfully Different than Bush by Tolya Sew

Like you, we fell willingly into the abyss of “hope and change” in 2008. It’s not because we didn’t know any better — shades of “a town called Hope,” guys? — but mostly because we would’ve bought just about anything if it meant shaking off the utter despair of the Bush-Cheney regime. As cynical as we might be, it’s still hard to believe that Big O has gone straight ahead with bank bailouts, troop surges, drill baby, big brother, et al. Even repealing DADT was a crass ploy for cannon fodder. But hey, at least he’s black.

Whew, I feel much better now! I hope that it’s been just as stimulating for you. In fact, I’m positively counting (to ten) on it…

Randall Amster, J.D., Ph.D., teaches Peace Studies at Prescott College, and is the Executive Director of the Peace & Justice Studies Association. His most recent book is Lost in Space: The Criminalization, Globalization, and Urban Ecology of Homelessness (LFB Scholarly, 2008), and he serves as Contributing Editor for New Clear Vision. Read other articles by Randall.

This article was posted on Friday, April 1st, 2011 at 7:59am and is filed under Culture, General, Satire.

"American Idol" embarrasses the greats

Topic:

American Idol

Thursday, Mar 10, 2011 09:30 ET

"American Idol" embarrasses the greats

In last night's episode, the show's finalists paid tribute to their favorite singers. It wasn't pretty Video

By Matt Zoller Seitz

• 
  

Fox

Pia Toscano performs on "American Idol"

UPDATED Thursday, 3/10/2011, 9:15 PM. Scroll down for this week's voting results.

All performers are shaped by their idols -- the greats who struck a chord in them and helped shape their sound and style. But performers only become true artists when they absorb and transform those influences into something new and personal. When a listener says, "She sings like Diana Ross," they're complimenting mimicry. But when they say, "She reminds me of Diana Ross," they're complimenting artistry. They're saying a performer has the potential to be as good as Diana Ross, but in her own way.

That's the appeal of idol night on "American Idol" -- the chance to watch performers try to convince us they can be as great as their heroes, but different. The phrase "but different" is crucial. If singers can't bring something fresh to an iconic rendition of a well-known song, it doesn't matter how polished the performances are, or how strongly the crowd seems to be pulling for them. On this night, the would-be Idols had to show us (and judges Steven Tyler, Jennifer Lopez and Randy Jackson) something we haven't seen before -- a spark that sets them apart from the heroes they study and emulate. Granted, part of that struggle is in the hands of unseen arrangers and coaches (in this case, the Svengali is Interscope Records' Jimmy Iovine and an army of producers, including Don Was and Rodney Jerkins). But it's ultimately the singer's moment to rise or fall. A performance has soul and originality or it doesn't. If it doesn't, the dismissals can be brutal and final: "In a million years, this girl could never be a tenth as good as Diana Ross." Or worse: "It's a bad Diana Ross impression."

• Continue reading

That's what happened to Ashthon Jones. During last night's first Top 13 performance by finalists, she made it clear that she's a crushingly literal performer. Last week she was told she could be Diana Ross, so she showed up the next week doing "When You Tell Me That You Love Me" in the style of Diana Ross, but without Ross' strength and sincerity; basically really, really good karaoke, complete with vaguely Ross-like hand gestures and ice-cream-scooped notes. And it was weirdly listless. Jones didn't come to life until the line, "Everytime you touch me/I become a hero," and from then on, the performance was lively when it should have been stirring. It wasn't Ross-worthy, it was Ross-flavored.

Casey Abrams' performance of "With a Little Help From My Friends" was better karaoke. In the run-up video, Abrams told us he adored Joe Cocker and that his gateway into Cocker's work was the English rocker's cover of the Beatles' "With a Little Help From My Friends," as heard in the opening credits to "The Wonder Years." Every musical obsession has to start somewhere, and a sitcom as good a place as any. But after an intriguingly sweet and reflective first verse (love that fluttery "Wha-a-a-a-a-t....would you do...."), Abrams launched into a mid-level Joe Cocker impression, complete with studied approximations of Cocker's one-of-a-kind vocal tics -- that bright yet fuzzy delivery, the Sheffield-by-way-of-a-Mississippi-bluesman inflections, and the stuttery "Ooo ooo ooh" interjections that only Cocker can do, or should be allowed to do. Abrams had me, then he lost me; that lovely first verse made me want to follow him anywhere, but after that he was so obvious I could hardly stand to watch him. Ringo Starr's original recording was a gentle paean to the power of friendship. Cocker's cover was a searing confession by a man whose friends were the only thing standing between him and the abyss. Abrams' version was about a kid watching "The Wonder Years," then trying to sing like Joe Cocker.

At least Abrams connected with Cocker, or seemed to be with him in spirit. That's more than you can say for James Durbin's rendition of "Maybe I'm Amazed." No man should sing that song unless he's suffered unimaginable misery and then found -- or thought he found -- salvation through love. Nothing in Durbin's performance suggested he'd been through an experience that powerful, or even that he understood it in the abstract. "James Durbin is dangerous, America! “ Jackson proclaimed. “This man can sing!" I agree with the second part, but the first is laughable. Durbin just didn't have the gravitas or imagination to sing "Maybe I'm Amazed.” It was mildly exciting on a technical level -- Paul McCartney's songs often demand range, and Durbin's was acceptable -- but it wasn't surprising, or even that affecting. McCartney's original performance welded ecstasy to misery. His voice cracked and fell apart on the high notes, on that super-high "Help meeeeeeeeeeeeeee," it disintegrated. The man was lying at the bottom of a pit thinking all was lost, and then he saw a silhouette at the top and realized there was hope. Durbin's rendition was more along the lines of, "I like you, but I'm going through a lot right now, so be patient with me."

It's not easy for a pop singer to be technically impeccable while connecting with audiences on a gut level. Haley Reinhart's "Blue" managed the first part; I liked the bluesy inflections in the second half of the performance and the yodel-y vocal effects liberally scattered throughout (much showier than LeAnn Rimes', but still fun). But there's a touch of chilling android awesomeness to Reinhart, and if there's a heart buried in the circuitry, she didn't show it last night. The judges didn't see it, either. Tyler offered a anecdote about how the song ended up on Rimes' debut album and told Reinhart she was "so, so fine, thank you very much," the nice guy's version of "Don't call us, we'll call you." Lopez said "You do things with your voice that are so diverse!" which is demonstrably true. But I don't see how Lopez's compliment "Really, really special" applied to this performance, unless Lopez was referring to Reinhart's chameleon quality. Jackson said, "Last week you're doing Alicia Keys, then you do LeAnn Rimes," but that turned out to be faint praise. I don't agree with Jackson on everything, but I like that he's rarely dazzled by technique alone, and when he called Reinhart's performance "a little boring, actually," he was right.

Thia Megia's version of a Posse-produced "Smile" -- a song based on a melody for Charlie Chaplin's score for the 1936 comedy "City Lights" -- was a relief; any time a contestant doesn't come barrelling in like a manic cheerleader, it sets her apart from the competition. And while the arrangement's light backbeat seemed a horrible idea at first -- This song is too quiet! Sex it up! -- it grew on me, and Megia made it feel natural. But there was nothing revelatory in her delivery, and certainly nothing that improved or expanded on her inspiration, Michael Jackson's 1995 cover. (Megia, like Jones, lacks imagination; last week the judges told her she sounded like Michael Jackson, so this week she did a song covered by Michael Jackson. If they'd told her she sounded like Miss Piggy, she would have done "Never Before" from "The Muppet Movie" while seated on a red velvet throne.)

Naima Adedapo's gratingly off-key cover of Rihanna's "Umbrella" was a near-disaster until the arrangement morphed into reggae and gave her an excuse to bust out the arena-goddess dance spasms. But that midpoint rally was more a triumph of arrangement and choreography than musicianship, and it was undercut by the dumb backdrops behind Adedapo (It's raining, she needs an umbrella!). Lauren Alainas' "Any Man of Mine" was an okay country-western cover band version, with slurry phrasing; Tyler's "I wish it had been a little more kick-ass" was too kind. Scotty McCreery's "The River" was solid but more likable than dazzling, and it was hampered by weak phrasing and McCreery's inability to hit the song's country-rumble low notes as gracefully as Garth Brooks. (More dumb backdrops. Look, a river!) Karen Rodriguez's performance of Selena's "I Could Fall in Love" was a closure moment for the singer -- her mom used to dress her like Selena -- but it had the same kid-singing-into-a-hairbrush aspect that marred Abrams' "With a Little Help From My Friends."

Covering "Lately" was just a bad idea from the start -- with their key changes, multiple-octave ranges and acrobatic flourishes, Stevie Wonder's songs are for great singers only -- and throughout Steven Langone's cover, I kept thinking, "He doesn't have the range or the chops for this. Someone should have talked him out of it." (Although that first "Good-bye-eee-eye!" was killer.) Having loved and identified with a performer is not reason enough to do his music on "American Idol." The material has to mesh with the singer's own gifts, and there has to be something going on in a performance besides enthusiasm and nostalgia. That's why I liked Paul McDonald's cover of Ryan Adams' "Come Pick Me Up." The vocals were nothing special, but everything else about the performance was surprising, fun and uniquely McDonald -- the giddy grin, the skittering-and-hopscotching dance moves, the sheer bouncy energy. He's a charming kook. Again, Jackson nailed it: "After last week's performance of you doing Rod Stewart, it probably wasn't the most exciting thing for people, but what I love about you is, I love the character of who you are."

The same could be said for Jacob Lusk, who did "I Believe I Can Fly" not in the style of R. Kelly, but the style of Jacob Lusk. On the list of what matters most in art, perfection should be near the bottom. The ability to communicate emotion is much more important; Lusk has always understood that, and he proved it again last night. The performance was frequently off-key and sometimes off-rhythm, and in the buildup to the first chorus, there was a moment where his vocals became almost totally detached from the music. But none of that mattered. Lusk’s “I Believe I Can Fly” was awkward, crazy and beautiful, like a church performance by a singer who's so moved by forces larger than himself that he gets drunk on the rush and starts winging it . His switch to falsetto in the final stretch was heartfelt, powerful and pure, and when he followed four repetitions of a quavering "Whyyy-y-yyy-yyy" with a church-friendly "God dawg it!", I laughed with joy.

The highlight of the night was Pia Toscano covering "All By Myself," a song that has been marked "Property of Celine Dion" since 1996. As a registered Dion hater, I was relieved that Toscano not only avoided the temptation to imitate Dion, but rejected her knee-jerk narcissism as well. Dion's "All By Myself" felt past-tense, like a report by a woman who studied a situation, made a sensible decision and expected to be congratulated on her excellent judgment. Toscano's performance was as technically clean as Dion’s, but more searching, reflective and active. It was present-tense. As she sang, you could see the narrator looking back on her past, studying her present, admitting her desolation and resolving to connect with the world -- a simple account of a hard journey. There were competent singers last night, and a few good ones, but only a handful of performances that didn't tempt me to pause the show and listen to the recordings that inspired them. Of those performances, only one told a story: Toscano's "All By Myself."

UPDATE: Ashthon Jones was booted off "Idol" during the March 10, 2011 results show. "I was rooting for you, baby," Lopez told her. Jones wept while a video monitor played a farewell montage backed by former "Idol" contestant David Cook's cover of 'Don't You Forget About Me." Haley Reinhart and Karen Rodriguez were with Jones in the bottom three, but will return next week.

At the start of the program, Ryan Seacrest announced that competitor Casey Abrams was not present because he was "sick and in the hospital right now," then invited the others to wave to him on TV. Abrams, 19, had been hospitalized once before during this run of "Idol" for severe stomach pains, and had a blood transfusion while in the hospital.

• Matt Zoller Seitz is Salon's staff television critic. More: Matt Zoller Seitz

The Big Chill and Other Flicks that Shaped the Way We See Our World

AlterNet.org

Huffington Post / By David Sirota

5 '80s Flicks That Shaped the Way We See Our World

Pop culture 30 years ago defined the way we think about progressive -- and not so progressive -- issues today.

March 1, 2011 |

Photo Credit: AdamL212 at Flickr

My upcoming book Back To Our Future (due out on March 15) posits that the 1980s--and specifically 1980s pop culture--frames the way we think about major issues today. The decade is the lens through which we see our world. To understand what that means, here are five classic flicks that show how the 1980s still shapes our thinking on government, the "rogue," militarism, race, and even our not-so-distant past.

1. Ghostbusters (1984): Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, Egon Spengler, and Winston Zeddmore seem like happy-go-lucky guys, but these are cold, hard, military contractors. Between evading the Environmental Protection Agency, charging exorbitant rates for apparition captures, and summoning a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, the merry band shows a Zoul-haunted New York that their for-profit services are far more reliable than those of the Big Apple's wholly inept government. At the same time, the Ghostbusters were providing 1980s audiences with a cinematic version of what would later become the very real Blackwater--and what would be the anti-government, privatize-everything narrative of the 21st century.

2. Die Hard (1988): Though the 1980s was setting the stage for the rise of anti-government politics today, it was also creating the Palin-esque "rogue" to conveniently explain the good things government undeniably accomplishes. Hitting the silver screen just a few years after Ollie North's rogue triumphalism, John McClane became the '80s most famous of this "rogue" archetype--a government employee who becomes a hero specifically by defying his police superiors and rescuing hostages from the twin threat of terrorism and his boss's bureaucratic clumsiness. This message is so clear in Die Hard, that in one memorable scene, McClane is yelling at one police lieutenant that the government has become "part of the problem." Die Hard, like almost every national politician today, says government can only work if it gets out of the way of the rogues, mavericks and rule-breakers within its own midst.

3. Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985): "Sir, do we get to win this time?" So begins the second--and most culturally important--installment of the Rambo series. The question was a direct rip-off of Ronald Reagan's insistence that when it came to the loss in Vietnam, America had been too "afraid to let them win"--them, of course, being the troops. The theory embedded in this refrain is simple: If only meddling politicians and a weak-kneed public had deferred to the Pentagon, then we would have won the conflict in Southeast Asia. Repeated ad nauseum since the 1980s, the "let them win" idea now defines our modern discussion of war. If only we let the Pentagon's Rambos do whatever they want with no question or oversight whatsoever, then we can decisively conclude the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan...and we can win the never-ending "War on Terror."

4. Rocky III (1982): Before the 2008 presidential campaign devolved into cartoonish media portrayals of the palatable "post-racial" Barack Obama and his allegedly unpalatable "overly racial" pastor Jeremiah Wright, there was Rocky III more explicitly outlining this binary and bigoted portrayal of African Americans. Here was Rocky Balboa as the determined but slightly ignorant stand-in for White Middle America. Surveying the diverse landscape, the Italian Stallion could see only two kinds of black people--on one side the suave, smooth, post-racial Apollo Creed, and on the other side the enraged, animalistic Clubber Lang. Rocky thus gravitated to the former, and reflexively feared the latter, essentially summarizing 21st-century White America's often over-simplistic and bigoted attitudes toward the black community today.

5. The Big Chill (1983): This college reunion flick from Lawrence Kasdan is hilarious, morose, and seemingly nostalgic for the halcyon days of the past; but powerfully propagandistic in its negative framing of the 1960s. Over the course of the weekend depicted in the film, character after character berates the 1960s as an overly decadent age that may have been rooted in idealism, but was fundamentally destined to fail. Sound familiar? Of course it does. The 1980s-created narrative of the Bad '60s can still be found in everything from national Tea Party protests to never-ending culture-war battles on local school boards. The message is always the same: If only America can emulate the Big Chillers and get past its 1960s immaturity and liberalism, everything will be A-okay.

David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books Hostile Takeover and The Uprising. He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota.

American Idolatry: Bow to Casey Abrams, your most unlikely "Idol" yet

Salon

American Idol

Friday, Feb 25, 2011 18:41 ET

Bow to Casey Abrams, your most unlikely "Idol" yet

He's a jazz bassist with a weird beard. He's also the most talented person Randy Jackson's ever met

By Drew Grant

We've come a long way from Kelly Clarkson.

After learning that he had made it into the Top 24 on "American Idol" last night, jazz bassist and super talent Casey Abrams knocked over a chair, had an awkward almost-cheek-kiss with Steven Tyler, and then went to the hospital. According to TMZ, the singer was admitted for severe stomach pains less than five hours after Randy Jackson told him that the show "has never had a musician as talented as yourself."

"I just want to show the world that guys like me are sexy," said the wacky-haired and be-bearded Casey, who looks like he just graduated from Oberlin College (and I'm saying that as someone who did the same, no big deal). His most recent performance was a smoky rendition of "Why Don't You Do Right" by Kansas Joe McCoy but popularized by Jessica Rabbit:

Casey seems like such a shoe-in to win "Idol" that you know something's going to go wrong: You don't just get told you're the best person -- not only of the season but in the entire history of the show -- without the network needing to shake things up. Otherwise, why not just end the contest now?

Casey plans on performing tonight because the show must go on and he is a friggin' rock star, but I'm kind of worried that once he's out of his be-bop element (say, if they have him perform a rock ballad or something by Bieber), Casey will fall on his great Nordic face and curse the mighty Thor for failing him.

• Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. More: Drew Grant

The fake Facebook profile I could not get removed

Topic: Facebook

The fake Facebook profile I could not get removed

By Susan Arnout Smith

Salon

I've been a writer a long time, but chances are, you don't know my name.

I've written thrillers, been an essayist for NPR, won the Stanley Drama Award as a playwright and was finalist for a PEN-West for a television movie. In other words, I write and get paid for it, but I'm not Mary Higgins Clark or John Grisham. And yet somebody thought it was a great idea to steal my identity and put up a fake profile on Facebook with the privacy settings removed.

It was a colleague who alerted me. I'd hired Wiley Saichek from AuthorsOnTheWeb.com the year before to do some Internet P.R. on my latest book. He'd encouraged me to join Facebook for visibility. I'd begged off; Facebook sounded like a massive time suck. But, worried I was out of touch with the literary world, I relented -- and joined.

I was still in that first-week euphoria -- reestablishing connections, notes from people I hadn't seen or heard of in years -- when I got the e-mail from Wiley.

"Facebook" read the subject line. I expected a droll message welcoming me to the new century. Instead, what I saw rocked me back in my seat: We came across a public Facebook profile from “Susan Arnout Smith” that gave us pause because the comments are very disturbing/inappropriate. Though we hate having to do so, we wanted to bring this to your attention ...

I pressed the link. There are moments that are burned into the heart. I saw my face. It was a photo taken off one of my websites. I saw my name. The persona they had created, using my name, my face, was pornographic, trolling for sex. I pay good money. I sat stunned. There had to be a way of connecting to a real person, somebody who could help me get this removed.

• Continue reading

I'll be the first to tell you, dealing with computers makes me tense. I once erased an entire play with no backup, simply by pressing one button. Yeah, the button was "delete." But still. Next to my computer is "Facebook for Dummies." It is well-named. So what added to the shock of this profile was the confusion: my normal channels -- let me call someone, I want to speak to a manager -- were like phone lines that had been cut.

I tried the number listed in the front of the book. It no longer connected to Facebook. I called Palo Alto information. No listing.

I wrote Wiley: Help me. How do I get this to go away?

The short answer is, I couldn't. Not for a very long time.

The fake profile had been created the first of last year, before I'd even joined Facebook myself. When I discovered it, it was autumn. That meant that for over eight months, anywhere around the globe, if someone had Googled my name and the word "Facebook," this fake profile would have appeared, pretending to be me.

Wiley immediately e-mailed me instructions from Facebook: Get on the fake profile, click an icon that identifies the profile as fake and type in the Facebook address for my real profile. He had already done this, as had an associate in his office. I braced myself, scrolled down the profile and clicked. I asked friends, family and trusted colleagues to do this.

Fake, fake, fake. Remove, remove, remove. Click, click, click.

Nothing happened. No response from Facebook.

Every day, I'd click onto the fake profile, hoping it was gone. Every day, it was there. I couldn't bring myself to read the entire thing. It made my heart bleed.

After two weeks, I clicked the "remove this fake profile" box again. I received an automated message from Facebook, telling me I'd already filed a report. I thought about going on my real profile and telling my Facebook community what had happened, but the fake profile made me feel ashamed, even though I had done nothing to create it. I wanted none of my friends to see it. I just wanted it to go away. It didn't.

I checked with a police source. Unless I'm being stalked or have lost money (Lost money? How many people saw the fake profile and decided not to buy one of my thrillers?) the police can't do anything.

My tech guy left a message on Facebook's security site. I did the same. I received back an automated message from Facebook, telling me not to expect any personal response, nor any message that indicated that anyone had actually addressed whatever my concern was.

As time went by, and the fake profile came up next to the real one every time I Googled it, a slow rage burned in my heart.

Who were these people at Facebook? I visualized them throwing darts and eating pizza behind impenetrable walls. The difference between the fake profile and mine was clear. Mine has quotes from Goethe and ee cummings. The fake profile was slimy and disgusting. All someone had to do was pay attention. Press one small button in an office cubicle someplace in Palo Alto. Click. And the fake profile would be gone.

A month passed. Facebook hadn't responded. I stopped sleeping. I couldn't follow conversations. Words swam. Worst of all, I couldn't write. Writing is what I do. It's how I make my way in the world, how I help put food on the table, a roof over our heads, paid for the shoes on our kids' feet and the education they've taken out the door.

The breaking point came during a walk with a good friend.

"So. Tell me about this other Facebook profile."

She'd Googled my name, and there it was, this scummy doppelgänger, pretending to be me.

"You can't for a single moment have thought ..." I let the sentence trail.

But she had. She shrugged, embarrassed, helpless. "It didn't sound like you, but still ..."

She and I had been friends for 20 years, and yet this good friend had wondered if maybe those words, that profile, had come out of me.

I felt humiliated. Powerless. All roads led to dead ends and messages unreturned. I had built my reputation brick by brick over decades, one project at a time, only to discover that out there in cyberspace, my life and reputation had been shredded.

Our nephew, Ben White, an attorney practicing in Walnut Creek, Calif., decided that if we hadn't heard from Facebook in another week, he was going to take action to encourage it to dismantle the profile. But there was one thing he asked me to do first, and it was a killer.

He wanted me to get on the fake profile, and finally read it, every word. People had friended it. He needed me to look at their faces. See if I recognized anybody.

Reading the profile was like plunging into an icy pond from such a high distance it felt as if I'd slammed into a wall. And then the sensation of drowning.

I took a breath. Made myself read. The comments they had left behind were graphic, vicious. The responses of the person pretending to be me were raw, degrading. In one post, my face had been spliced onto a body wearing underwear, a post offering sex. Another post linked the fake to a legitimate book site. The fake pretending to be me had left chatty, obscene comments on other profiles, describing sexual practices and asking for advice and sex aids.

Some of the people who had friended this had thousands of friends. That meant that thousands upon thousands of people I didn't know could have viewed this fake profile or seen comments left on profiles by someone claiming to be me.

Before I wrote fiction or essays, I was an investigative journalist. This was my new job: tracking down the people who had done this to me. Making them pay.

I started with the 22 friends on the fake profile. I burrowed into search engines, discovered the private things they'd kept hidden. I followed threads. Music I didn't recognize, television shows that didn't air in the United States.

I narrowed it down to a country. A city. Two schools. Religious schools. On the other side of the world.

I'm not going to tell you who there are. And in a minute, I'll tell you why.

I can tell you they were star athletes, scholars, artists. I pored over speeches given by one, studied the copyrighted artwork displayed on the Web by another. One student was written up in the sports pages as one of the most promising athletes in the last decade. I found candid photos, traced links back to the kid most likely to have created the fake profile. He'd received an award from his school for his Web design work. I uncovered a lovely photo gallery for a younger sister of one of them. She wants to be a model. I traced the route of one of the students -- the train route he takes to athletic events.

I looked at their unmasked faces lined up like mug shots. I stared at the soft eyes, the bright smiles.

Emotions roiled, all dark. The depth of my anger scared me. I wanted them hurt, scared, suffering. I wanted them to pay.

I hated what this experience had done to me, what I had become. My life work is about going from a dark place into light. All my writing is about this one thing. How to climb out of something terrible and be someplace better. Someone better.

I talked to my Episcopalian priest, Father Mike Russell at All Soul's in San Diego. He is a holy man, rumpled and expansive, living in a real world.

"Go after them," he said.

That wasn't what I was expecting. Go after them? Are you serious?

"They've done something terrible. And it needs to stop."

So here was my choice.

I could take the schools apart, the lives of the kids apart. I could file a lawsuit there and probably win. I'm no lawyer, but skimming stories on the Net, it seems that in their country, they have laws against this very thing.

In America, we're not quite there yet. There is a new federal law that gives me the right to file a lawsuit here to try to recover any financial losses resulting from identity theft. Can you imagine how expensive that would be? And how could I prove a negative anyway? Somebody not buying one of my books, because they'd seen that profile?

Besides, these kids didn't steal my credit. They stole a chunk of my soul. Our laws have yet to catch up with that.

So I could go after them legally. Or I could go a different way.

I took a breath. Wrote both of the school principals. Told them exactly what the students had done, what the impact was on me. And what I wanted. I wanted the profile down.

Within days, I heard back.

One of the principals thanked me for alerting them and said that they were storing all the information on the profile in order to confront the kids.

The principal wrote: We then alerted Facebook and the page has been removed.

The wording was vague. How did they get it down? I did not know. Maybe in their country, there was a support number that worked faster; maybe the principal of a school has more pull than a writer. I only know that when I looked for the profile, it wasn't there anymore. Finally.

Of course what I wanted to know, what I'd spent hours imagining and hypothesizing about is: Why me?

Nobody seems to know. Probably not even the kids.

In that same letter the principal had written: We have tried (checked texts used at school, followed links, etc.,) and we are as puzzled as you, why they have selected your name and image.

My guess? I wasn't real to them. I was a bouncy toy, a name, a face, pulled at random off the Net. Something they tossed into the air and batted around for a couple of months before they lost interest and moved on.

That, for me, is the scariest part.

The Internet makes it easy to casually carve up real people in some cartoon world. A drive-by shooting, a stab in the dark. A fast, vicious punch to the reputation. Easy to do damage. And awfully hard to repair.

Your name. Mine. Our names. And faces. Those brave, pinched, worried-looking faces, worn down by life, buoyed up by hope. Taken. Used. When it happens to you, it's no small thing, believe me.

That's why I asked the principals for one more thing. The big one. The one that takes years. The one for which I'll never know the ending.

I wanted the kids who had done this to understand so completely the impact of their behavior, that they would never do it again. Or allow it to happen in their presence. I insisted the parents be notified and shown in detail what their star children had done, and what its impact had been on me. A stranger.

Did they learn a lesson? Did they get it, these kids? Is it changing behaviors?

I have no idea. But I know this.

They stole something from me. It was hard to get it back, but I did.

I know what it feels like to feel powerless. I know what it feels like to act. And I know what it feels like to forgive.

Which brings me to the reason I haven't told you who they are. I wouldn't be able to reach that point if I'd told you their names. Or even the country where they live. I didn't want one of their worst moments be the thing that forever defines them. And just as deep, just as true, I didn't want my telling you to be the thing that forever defines me.

If I am to live by my words, I need to reach toward light when I'm hurting the most.

I can sleep now. I dream. And I write.

There is one more thing. Not long ago I saw a story in Salon about Facebook privacy that helpfully provided the customer service number. I decided to call it to see if I could get a comment for this story.

When I pressed the customer service option at that number, an automated voice told me that talking to a real person was no longer an option.

• Susan Arnout Smith is the author of the thrillers "The Timer Game" and "Out at Night." Her play, "Separation Rapid," will run next summer at Chenango River Theater in Greene, New York. She can be reached at Susanarnoutsmith.com. More: Susan Arnout Smith

AlterNet.org

NEWS & POLITICS

AlterNet / By Rachel Maddow

Rachel Maddow: In America Today, Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower Would Be Bernie Sanders in the U.S. Senate

The huge ever rapid shift rightward makes Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon look like lefty radicals today.

January 28, 2011

The following is a shortened version of Rachel Maddow's opening monologue from her show on Wednesday on MSNBC:

For the next hour, we begin with the president of the United States addressing the nation and calling for a massive investment in this country's infrastructure, rebuffing the idea of giant tax breaks for the richest Americans, and warning anyone who would dare touch Social Security to keep their hands off.

You want to talk about red meat for the base? Listen to some of the language the president used. "Workers have a right to organize into unions and to bargain collectively with their employers. And a strong, free labor movement is an invigorating and necessary part of our industrial society." Wow.

How about this one? "Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of their right to join the union of their choice."

Listen to the way he goes after the right here. "Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things, but their number is negligible and"--and the president says--"their number is negligible and they are stupid."

That is not what Barack Obama said last night. That is way to the left of any national Democrat at this point. That was all Republican President Dwight David Eisenhower. That was all the stuff he said when he was president.

Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, president when the top tax bracket for the richest people in this country was 92 percent. President Eisenhower defended that tax bracket. He said we cannot afford to reduce taxes until, quote, "the factors of income and outgo will be balanced." Eisenhower insisting there must be a balanced budget and that taxes on the rich are the way to balance it. Dwight Eisenhower, you know, noted leftist.

The Republican Party platform of Eisenhower's 1956 called for expansion of Social Security, broadened unemployment insurance, better health protection for all of our people. It called for voting rights--full voting civil rights for D.C. It called for expanding the minimum wage to cover more workers. It called for improved job safety for workers, equal pay for workers regardless of sex.

This is the Republican Party circa 1956. The Republican Party.

The story of modern American politics writ large is the story of your father's and your grandfather's Republican Party now being way to the left of today's leftiest liberals. If Dwight Eisenhower were running for office today, he would have to run, I'm guessing as an independent, and not as some Joe Lieberman, in between the parties, independent. He'd be a Bernie Sanders independent.

In 1982, who passed the largest peacetime tax increase in U.S. history? That would be Ronald Reagan.

Who called for comprehensive health reform legislation during in a State of the Union address in 1974, a program that was well to the left of what either Bill Clinton or Barack Obama ultimately proposed? That would be Richard Nixon.

Eisenhower and Reagan and Nixon--they were not the liberals of their day. They were the conservatives of their own time.

But the whole of American politics has shifted so far to the right in the last 50 years that what used to be thought of as conservative, what used to be thought of as a conservative position, is now considered to be off-the-charts lefty.

Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens pointed out this whole phenomenon of American politics shifting to the right when he told "The New York times" this--he said, quote, "Including myself, every judge who's been appointed to the court since Lewis Powell in 1971 has been more conservative than his or her predecessor, except maybe Justice Ginsburg." That was the one exception he could come up with.

Over the past half a century, the center in American politics has gone further and further and further to the right. Halfway through Barack Obama's first term, his State of the Union address last night is being pretty universally hailed as centrist, as not too liberal, not too conservative, but right down the middle of American politics.

And that is something that Americans like to hear. The instant reaction polls to President Obama's speech last night were almost comically positive. CBS reported that 92 percent of the people who watched the speech approved of Mr. Obama's proposals, 92; CNN reporting that 84 percent of people had a positive response.

Those sorts of numbers do not happen in politics. Those are crazy numbers.

Historically, the process of a Democrat trying to find the center in politics has seen Democrats chasing the center as it moves to the right. The thing that's different about the left and the right in this country is that there isn't an equal and opposite force on the left that's anything like the conservative movement on the right. The conservative movement exists outside the Republican Party, and it serves to constantly pull the Republican Party further to the right.

So, when you have a president like Bill Clinton who found popular centrist decisions by splitting the difference between where the Republicans were and where the Republican--where the Democrats were and where the Republicans were, and the Republicans kept moving further to the right because they're being pulled there by the conservative movement, when you have a president who triangulates like that, what you end up with is a president who as a Democrat moves the country further to the right, because he shifts to the right every time he takes another centrist position.

Is President Obama doing the same thing?

The dynamics on the right are the same as they've ever been. The right word drift of Republican politics from Eisenhower to Nixon to Ford to Reagan to Bush, Sr. to Bush, Jr., it's less of a steady drift now than a fast rightward jerking motion. The rightward movement in Republican politics is going faster, I think, than it ever has before.

For example, George W. Bush, he ran for president on a platform of comprehensive immigration reform. He ran for president saying that he has supported the assault weapons ban. But by the time he was president, supporting the assault weapons ban was no longer all that tenable, so he let that ban expire. He did try for immigration reform, and then he abandoned it.

Then his entire party ran against him on it by the time they needed a new presidential nominee. It was a quick turnaround.

You know, it was only 2008 when John McCain and Sarah Palin ran for office by saying they supported a cap-and-trade energy program. Remember that? Cap-and-trade used to be their idea, used to be a Republican idea.

The individual mandate for health reform--that used to be a Republican idea.

The DREAM Act on immigration--that was sponsored by John McCain once upon a time. But by the time Democrats brought it up for a vote, John McCain had turned against his own idea. Why? Because Republican politics are jerking so fast to the right that Republicans are being forced to turn against their own policy positions when the new right wing position dictates it. They can't even keep up within their own careers.

On the right, the process that has dragged the political center to the point where Dwight Eisenhower would be denounced as a socialist now, Ronald Reagan wouldn't even pass a Republican purity test, he'd be the guy they excluded from the debates for being a wingnut, that process is still very much in tact. On the right, things are working sort of the way they always have, if not faster.

But heading into last night's State of the Union address, the question was: would President Obama continue to change Republicans to the right? There are two ways to approach this, right? There are two ways to claim the 92 percent instant approval rating of sounding like the man in the center.

One way is the Clintonian way--to let your policies just drift right because the Republicans drifted right, too.

But there's another way. A way we heard about last night. It is to claim the center, to claim the political spoils you get for sounding like you're in the center, that 92 percent CBS rating, right, but to put the center back vaguely somewhere where center actually is.