Dear Mr. Beck and executives at Fox News,

It has come to my attention that you, Mr. Beck, have recently led a rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in favor of a return to traditional Christian values in the government and daily lives of the United States of America. It has also been said of you that you are a “news analyst” or “talking head” on the Fox News Network, which claims – in their own words, and borrowed from their corporate motto – to be “Fair and Balanced”.

It is a commonly held belief that in order to be “Fair and Balanced”, one must distance oneself from the actual news at hand. Leading a rally of this sort, regardless of spurious claims at being “non-political”, removes oneself from such required distance. In point of fact, leading a rally that seeks to alter the way our society behaves – and mind you, I am saying this ignoring all of my many, many issues with the way this rally was organized, to quote Mr. Beck, “by divine providence” and not at all intentionally held on the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous speech, and at the same location – leading such a rally disqualifies you from being removed from the news. It, in all actuality, makes you the news, as evidenced by the avalanche of press that the rally received. By the very definition of the word, this makes you an activist.

In light of this, I request that one of the two following occur immediately: either Mr. Beck resigns from Fox News, or Fox News relinquishes its “Fair and Balanced” trademark. I think even a cursory review of my argument will provide more than enough evidence for the necessity of this.

Thank you for fairly and balancedly considering my proposal. I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Andrew Nienaber

Postscript: I have emailed this letter to Mr. Beck at glennbeck@foxnews.com. I encourage you to do something similar. Feel free to copy and paste, add in your own invectives, or whatever the hell you want. This dickbag needs to know that he is way way WAY the hell out of line.

I could wax rhapsodic about the original Nightmare movies for days on end. Though they did get downright silly toward the end, there was still enough actual creepiness to make them worth repeated viewing. And you can’t tell me that the first movie isn’t one of the scariest films ever made. It strikes a perfect balance of monster movie, slasher flick and existential psychological horror that few if any movies since have been able to match. Honestly, what can be more terrifying than a creature that stalks your dreams, torturing and eventually killing you in them, which in turn leads to your death in the waking world? The inevitability of it alone is staggering – you can’t stay awake forever. Eventually, everyone has to sleep. And when you do, he’s waiting. This premise was enough to scare the wits out of me as a child, and still does to this day, but the way that Wes Craven executed his vision was extraordinary. Nancy Thompson and her friends (and countless others to follow) found themselves in surreal, strange places, often scenes from their lives that were slightly skewed in the way that dreams skew your real experiences, or sometimes in utterly fantastic and bizarre landscapes (this was, of course, taken to ridiculous and often comical extremes in later films, but the premise still held solid), and as is the way with dreams, strange things happened that were inexplicable until that awful moment when they heard the blades scraping against metal and knew he was there waiting for them. That terrible moment of tension, of “what the fuck is going on?” that stretches just a bit too long before the inevitable appearance of Freddy, was what made the original Nightmare on Elm St. so brilliant.

The remake has absolutely none of that.

This movie’s cardinal sin, as a reboot of one of the most seminal and influential horror franchises of the past two decades, is that it is absolutely not, in any way shape or form, scary. How exactly you take a premise so time-tested and proven to provide thrills and make it boring is beyond me, and is clearly the unique genius of music video director Samuel Bayer, who manages to squeeze absolutely no tension or anticipation out of the movie. Bayer is one of the major faults of this film, and I am willing to lay a large part of the blame for its suck directly at his feet. But more on that later. I feel I ought to be fair and give this movie a good, ok and bad treatment.

The good: I was shocked at how good the acting was in this movie. Jackie Earle Haley I was expecting to be good, as creepy as he was in Watchmen, and he delivered. He played a largely understated Krueger, more menace than one-liners, and boiling with fury. His scenes at the end of the movie, when he is finally confronting Nancy, are handily the best of the film, and I couldn’t see them being done by anyone else. What surprised me was the quality of the young unknowns in the other roles. Usually in a movie like this, a reboot of a decades-old horror franchise, acting is thrown by the wayside in favor of big boobs, sculpted abs and pretty faces. But thankfully this remake retains the aesthetic choice of the original series to use actual character development over the usual slasher film reliance on nudity and sex to build sympathy, and that requires solid acting on the part of those about to be slain. Yes, there were pretty teenagers (the couple who replaced Tina and Rod, who were in this version named Kris and Jesse, were very good looking…and both died in the first hour of the film) but they weren’t just looks. I can’t stress enough how impressed I was by the acting.

There was also a delightfully creepy scene at the end of the movie that I won’t spoil, but plays off of the somewhat baffling choice to recast Freddy as a child molester instead of a child murderer. It was literally the only scene in the entire film that in any way made me uncomfortable, and was well executed despite the aforementioned questionable revision of the villain’s character.

And, I suppose the makeup wasn’t too bad. I don’t mind the redesign of Freddy’s face. It’s more realistic as a burn victim, and wasn’t so thick with latex that Haley couldn’t be expressive through it.

And that’s it for the goods. And as there was nothing about this movie that was merely ok, I’m going to just skip right ahead to what was bad. And buddy, there’s a lot. Get a drink, settle in. I’ll wait.

The bad. Let’s start with the revisionist history. Freddy is now a gardener who works at a preschool, where he lives in the basement. The kids love him, and he loves the kids, and apparently nobody is even the least bit suspicious of someone living in the basement of a preschool and playing with their children. The new Springwood has some of the worst parenting on earth. Freddy lures the kids into his basement hideaway and allegedly molests them, and for some reason scratches their backs up pretty bad, though that’s never really explained. The parents, understandably perturbed by their children’s accusations and their utter lack of foresight, chase Krueger down angry-mob-style and burn him to death in some sort of industrial building with a lot of boiler room-looking equipment in it. This is, ostensibly, why he appears in a boiler room in the kids’ nightmares. So Freddy comes back to either finish off torturing the kids or to force them to admit that he was innocent and was murdered for no reason, depending on which moment of the plot you’re in.

I for one do not like replacing “child murderer” with “child molester”. Of course, sexually abusing a child is possibly the most heinous crime there is, but it lacks the sick, outlandish evil that murdering children has. It also doesn’t jive with Freddy’s M.O – he doesn’t come back to diddle the kids in their dreams, he comes back to hack them to fucking pieces. To me, this alteration moves Freddy from the world of unabashed evil into the world of sick uncle, and that’s just not doing it for me. It is part of a greater trend in this movie to, as strange as it’s going to sound, bring the franchise in a more realistic direction. I don’t want my nightmare-stalking murderers realistic. I want them outlandish and pure, twisted evil. Even if you want to ditch the son-of-a-hundred-maniacs-child-of-a-raped-nun-made-a-deal-with-ancient-spirits-of-evil-for-his-powers back story, you can’t turn Freddy into just another molester and victim of mob justice or it entirely negates his raison d’etre.

Speaking of mob justice, another terrible revision in the new movie is the removal of Nancy’s father from the picture. In the original, Lt. Thompson (played delightfully by John Saxon) was the leader of the mob of angry parents, and did so with the authority of a rogue lawman who couldn’t pin a series of terrible murders on the clear perpetrator. In the new version, Nancy’s father is never mentioned (in fact, it seems that nobody in Springwood has two parents), and the closest thing to a male authority figure is Nancy’s boyfriend Quentin’s father, who is a school councilor. Really? A school councilor? Nobody ever rallied into a lynch mob around the authority of a school councilor. This revision drastically changes the dynamic of the movie from something that worked really well in the original: there is almost no sense of the kids-vs-parents conflict that drove so much of the first movie. Sure, the parents of Springwood are still guilty of the crime that has loosed this maniac on their children, but they wield absolutely no authority in this version, and the threat of “my parents don’t understand what’s happening and are forcing me to go to sleep” is utterly lost.

Another disastrous choice, in my eyes, was the general effort to make the whole thing more realistic, presumably for the modern taste. Sure, I don’t mind cutting back the camp factor or even eliminating it entirely (this is not the case, by the way, as in the third act of the movie Freddy gets his chops back and delivers a string of pretty awful one-liners, including an utterly botched take on the famous “I’m your boyfriend now”), but trying to make a movie about a burnt husk of a man with razor claws murdering you in your sleep into a pseudo-realistic thriller is just ridiculous. The net effect was to lose the dreamlike quality that made the originals so unsettling. Gone are the random dream images and wildly distorted sets, in favor of the typical boiler room and an infuriatingly reused dilapidated school set. And very little else. For me, this depersonalized the movie. It’s no longer about the dreams of the victims, it’s about Freddy’s personal hangups. And there are no, read NO creative killings in this version. Aside from the very first death, which is pretty creepy and well done, every other character is gored with Freddy’s claws. No geyser of blood from the bed, no bedsheet winding its way around someone’s neck and hanging them. Just impaling. Over and over again. I ask you, what is the point of a Nightmare on Elm St. movie with no creative deaths? That’s like making another godawful Austin Powers movie with no jokes about how fucking bizarre the English are.

There are some more character revisions that irked me as well, starting off with the choice to re-cast Nancy as a bumbling, awkward outcast. Nerd alert: this next sentence will go over 90% of your heads. In the remake, Nancy is portrayed as Alice from Nightmare on Elm St. 4, The Dream Master. She is shy and awkward like Alice, she’s not the pretty one like Alice, SHE WORKS IN THE FUCKING SPRINGWOOD DINER LIKE ALICE! So why even name her Nancy? Call her Alice and be done with it. The choice to make her awkward and therefore have to build an awkward relationship with Quentin seems to have been done to allow one of those budding teenage romance stories that seem to be so crucial to selling movie tickets nowadays. But the old version, where Nancy and Jesse lived across the street from each other and were secret sweethearts, worked on a much more visceral level. You liked them both from the start and wanted them to succeed, survive and be happy. The new awkward kids give you nothing to like from the start, and the only real sympathy you feel for them is as victims, not as people. You want them to survive because it means you might survive, not because you like them and want the best for them. Also, the neighbors-across-the-street angle led to some great tension moments in the original, not the least of which was Nancy watching Jesse’s death from her window and being unable to do anything about it. There is nothing like that here.

Next I’d like to discuss the cursory and insulting nods to the original movie. Yes, they remade some (but, puzzlingly not all – where was the damned geyser of blood, possibly the best special effect in the original) of the most famous scenes from the first movie. But they did so with clearly no intention to pay homage to them, just to tick them off of the list of things they had to do to make a successful reboot. None is given any screen time (the bathtub scene lasts a grand total of about thirty seconds, and the body bag being dragged down the school hallways about five), and things that were incredibly creepy in the original because of the low-tech way they were done (Freddy stretching out the wall over Nancy’s bed, Tina being thrown around her bedroom ceiling) were ruined with crappy CGI and wire work. Again I ask, why bother? If you’re  not going to remake it with love, then leave it out. I would have hated this movie a lot less if it hadn’t even attempted to tie itself to the original.

Last but certainly not least, let’s discuss the direction. Which is to say, utter lack of direction. You can tell that the actors are doing their best to overcome a crappy script, but that the director is actively working against them. Bayer, whose first feature film this is, has no handle on how to craft a story more than three minutes long. The shots are quick and short, and very functional: establishing shot of Kris in bed; closeup on Kris’ face as she hears a noise; longer shot of Kris standing; cut to boyfriend to establish that he’s still asleep; cut to Kris walking to the window to look out; and on and on and on. These shots last between five and fifteen seconds, and the entire movie is constructed this way, short utilitarian shots that are enormous flashing neon roadsigns pointing to exactly what the director wants you to take away from that moment. There is no ambiguity and no need for thought or interpretation on the part of the viewer. Bayer controls the horizontal, and he’s fucking it up proper. As was the case with The Wolfman, these short shots leave no room whatsoever for environment or tension, thus depriving the movie of anything even remotely scary. Sure, there are a lot of flash-cut jump out scares, but that shit just doesn’t cut it in 2010. A movie about nightmares with no atmosphere or tension is going to fail by definition.

I could literally go on like this for hours, and have. This is an atrocious movie, barely deserving of the name “Nightmare on Elm St.”, and as a fan of everything that name has come to mean over the years I am appalled at what New Line has allowed to happen to its flagship horror franchise.

Fair warning: I will do my best not to spoil anything about the movie, but for god’s sake, it’s a psychological thriller, so it’s going to be difficult to discuss it without letting at least a few beans spill. If you’re the kind who like to bitch and moan about knowing something about a movie before you see it, then why in the fuck are you reading a review in the first place?

So yes, like most movie fans, I do generally love Martin Scorsese. True, there have been some clunkers along the way (the man did, after all, direct the video for Michael Jackson’s “Bad”), but all in all he’s got a solid, accomplished body of work. Shutter Island is a new direction for Scorsese, dabbling into psychological thrillers and even scraping the edge of the horror genre. He tackles this new challenge with aplomb, crafting a finely-tuned piece that confounds the viewer from the first moment and doesn’t release its hold until long after the credits roll. In fact, I had planned to write this last night after I watched the movie, but it took me until this afternoon to properly digest and process the mess that the movie had made of my state of mind. It’s a brain-fuck of a movie, to be sure, and in some ways it felt more like the work of David Lynch or David Cronenberg than Scorsese. There are the typical Scorsese elements: tough-as-nails cop with a dark secret and troubled past, thick eastern-seaboard accents, and a fascination with bygone America, but these don’t dominate the movie as much as the atmosphere does, which is something you don’t often see in his films. It is an oppressive atmosphere, an isolated asylum for the criminally insane on an island in Boston Harbor miles away from the closest land. It’s a beautifully designed set, desolate yet filled with people, sterile in some places and reminiscent of a Tower of London dungeon in others. And it has a notable lack of Wallgreens spider webs.

One of my most frequent complaints about movies is the pacing, and Scorsese has made his mistakes on this front before (I couldn’t even finish Gangs of New York because the damned thing never got moving), but the pacing here is spot-on. It’s as if all of those long, tension-filled pauses that were lacking from The Wolfman were somehow grafted into Shutter Island, and that deliberate pace is precisely what made the movie. There is one scene in particular, at the end of the movie, that demonstrates exactly what I said in my review of The Wolfman about getting a genuine scare out of people by a startle at the end of a long, tense buildup. The whole theater jumped out of their seats, yours truly included. It’s a long movie, clocking in at about 2:15, but though slow, it never drags. This is the key balancing act that so many movies fail to achieve. In its pacing, its hardscrabble anti-hero, its love of shadows and its twisty plot, Shutter Island is almost film noir, except that its flashbacks are vividly colorful.

Acting-wise, you couldn’t ask for a better cast. Leonardo DiCaprio is, I am willing to say, one of the best actors working today, and he delivers. Mark Ruffalo, though seeming for most of the movie to be channeling Chazz Palminteri from The Usual Suspects, does admirably in a fairly thankless role. And the supporting cast is completely phenomenal – Ben Kingsley, Patricia Clarkson, Max von Sidow and Jackie Earle Haley, all in fine form (Haley, though his part is very small, delivers one of the most memorable performances of the movie). It is a superbly acted film.

Now, the plot. How I’m going to do this without spoilers remains to be seen. As I mentioned, this is a brain-fuck movie of the type only a few directors can pull off (eat your heart out, M. Night Shyamalan) and though the ending isn’t the explosive revelation that The Sixth Sense (which I have heard it compared to) is – and in fact I had marked the ending down at the beginning of the movie as one of the possible ways it would pan out – to me that’s not the point. The point is to spend your time inside the tangled mess of the story, live it out, and walk away contemplating your own sanity. Because at its core, this is a story about the fragility of sanity, and the illusions that we create for ourselves to survive. And upon leaving the theater I found that I was still very much emotionally wrapped up in the film, which for me is always a good sign.

I can’t in good conscience unconditionally recommend this movie, it’s simply not going to be for everyone. It’s intense, slow, often confusing and emotionally difficult. But if you, like me, enjoy being stripped down to the last nerve ending and having your brain muddled about with for a few hours, then I can say that this is something you should check out.

In the interest of full disclosure, I feel it necessary to say that the 1941 version of The Wolfman is hands-down my favorite of the old Universal monster movies, even beating out the logical choice, Dracula. Why? Partly because the monster is the hero. I love that rather than cheering on some fresh-faced ingenue while he hunts down and purges the world of the monster, you are forced to watch the monster destroy him little by little, until he must inevitably be ruined by fate.  Add to that delightfully gothic cinematography, good acting and the most interesting makeup design of any of the Universal movies, and The Wolfman is the easy choice. So I understandably went into this modern remake with some trepidation. The trailers were great. I had hope that it would be an earnest update of a classic, and not whatever you’d call the abortion that was the remake of The Haunting. And to be fair, not all of my hopes were dashed. It does seem to try to be earnest, and there are some lovely homages to the original, including a fairly faithful reproduction of the original monster design. The movie doesn’t fail as a remake, it fails as a movie.

Let’s start with the acting. Anthony Hopkins is a great actor, right? Fucking right he is. And I’ve seen some praise for his work as Sir John, the patriarch of the cursed Talbot family. This praise is utterly misplaced. Hopkins could not seem less interested in what’s going on. He delivers every line in a casual, detached tone that completely sucks any bit of urgency or worth from his words. Imagine the creepy detachment of Hannibal Lecter, but without any of the creepiness. He just seems bored, and with every syllable you can hear “paycheck”. Benicio del Toro, whom I generally love, takes all of the intensity that’s lacking from Hopkins’ performance and doubles it up, so that every moment he’s on screen is a festival of scrunched eyebrows and pained-looking expressions. You’re haunted, I get it. He really doesn’t have much in the way of dialogue, but what he does have is alternately growled and grunted, to the point that he’s practically a wolf already before he ever gets bitten. It’s the kind of incredibly nuanced overacting that only a truly great actor given a lousy script and terrible direction can achieve. Emily Blunt chose the disinterested path as well, and even her dramatic turn at the end of the movie is about as impassioned as a tax form. Hugo Weaving continues to act with his eyebrows, but hey, you gotta do what you’re good at.

The general level of apathy from good actors led me to wonder if this was some sort of misguided directoral decision. Joe Johnston’s handling of the wonky script is, to be as favorable as I can, awful. First, the movie runs at the pace of a drag race: as soon as it starts it revs immediately up to maximum speed and doesn’t slow down until the end credits deploy a parachute to stop it. There is literally not a moment’s pause in the entire film, no time to catch your breath, no time to get to know or like the characters. It is utilitarian in the extreme, getting from plot point to plot point with the kind of efficiency that would give a German engineer a hardon. The net effect of all of this speed and efficiency is to kill any identification with the characters and to eliminate any suspense. There are no scares in this movie, only the cheap jump that comes from a very loud, very sudden noise paired with a flash-cut of something with fangs. And believe me, there are a lot of those.  Cheap scares are only fun when they come at the end of a slow buildup of genuine suspense, and throwing one at the audience every five minutes like clockwork completely destroys their effectiveness.

I feel like Johnston’s major failing is that he appears to not understand the nature of horror at all, especially gothic horror. This is a genre that requires slow burn and needs you to identify with the characters. It is based on dread and an almost existential realization of the horror of the situation that real humans have been put into. Johnston (and the scriptwriters) have deprived us of all of these, leaving us with nothing but the husk of a horror movie. Sure, it hits all the bases: dark woods, gypsies, brutal medieval medical treatment, family secrets and a Sikh guy for some reason, but it doesn’t use any of these conventions. It just parades them past as though checking them off on a list.

Another major gripe of mine, and further proof of Johnston’s lack of understanding of horror, is the gore. This is a gory movie, to be sure, but the gore is handled in a very awkward way. It’s explicit, with flesh being torn and extremities flying (even a brief shot of the werewolf tearing what looks like the liver out of some poor sumbitch), but it’s neither realistic enough to be legitimately disturbing nor over-the-top enough to be joyful. It straddles a strange line that leaves it just a matter-of-fact part of the fantasy. I think this sums up nicely my feeling about the direction of the movie – it’s just there. Johnston’s pedigree (mainly childrens’ movies like Jumanji and The Rocketeer) seems to leak into this movie more than is appropriate. I don’t want to say this is a kiddie version, but it’s not a mature product. Imagine a table with sharp corners. Johnston hasn’t gone so far as to make the whole thing out of Nerf foam, but he’s rounded off the corners enough to make it more or less harmless.

There is much to be said about logic flaws in the script, and some truly awful dialogue (“Do you hunt monsters often?” “Sometimes you hunt mosters…and sometimes they hunt you!”. Thanks, Nietzshce.), but I won’t waste your time with it. It’s just bad, you get my drift? I will take a moment, though, to mention an homage to a far better film that goes terribly wrong. Three-quarters of the way through the movie there’s a scene of a rampage through the streets of London that is clearly a ripoff of the famous climactic scene in An American Werewolf in London, right down to the tipping over of an historically-questionable bus and being cornered in a dead-end alleyway by gun-wielding police. But as if to remind us of his misunderstanding of what makes for a good horror movie, this sequence is all of about two minutes long. What made that scene so striking in An American Werewolf in London was its sheer, monstrous length, the fact that it goes on and on and on, and more and more people get killed. In Johnston’s version of the scene there’s a quick run around the town, then it’s off to an implausible escape.

So what’s good about it? Well, the design is, by and large, pretty nice. The woods are appropriately spooky, the manor house (aside from the questionable use of some, as my friend Gordie put it, “Walgreens spider webs”) is big and dingy, the streets of London are nicely Victorian. As I mentioned before, the design of the monster makeup is great, and a lovely updating of the original makeup. The movie has all of the visual trappings of gothic horror, which leads me to believe that the production designer had a much better grasp on what they were doing than the director.

And, uh…yeah, that’s pretty much all the good I have to say. Honestly, it was a pile of shit.

Let’s start with the faults, which are legion.

This is a deeply, almost offensively derivative movie. It owes all of its plot and characters to other, better films.  If it hadn’t been touted for so long as a masterwork years in the offing, I would have taken this plagiarism in stride, but we were told time and again how greatly epic this film was going to be, how it was unlike anything we’d ever seen. And yes, it was, but in ways I’ll get to in a minute. Certainly not in its writing. If you haven’t seen it yet, to offer you no spoilers, I will only say that if you took the characters from The Abyss and put them into the story line of Dances With Wolves, set it on Endor (with the same savages-versus-highly-trained-soldiers-with-exponentially-superior-equipment climactic battle), throw in some controlling-another-body-from-inside-a-pod action like you’d find in The Matrix,  and flavored it with the “humans bad! nature good!” guilt-trip of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds (no, that’s not quite saccharine enough – more like the moral of every douchebag pop-eco message movie, like Ferngully) then you’ve basically got Avatar. It really does almost nothing original from a writing standpoint, and I found that deeply disappointing from someone whose ideas I have come to love over the decades.

James Cameron has made some of my favorite movies. And what he does best, historically, is putting real people with real problems into almost laughably unreal situations. The thing is, there isn’t a single real person to be found here. With a running time of almost three hours, you’d think there would be plenty of time to develop some deep, rich characters, but that is simply not the case. First, the character roster is precisely the same as The Abyss. Gruff but lovable hard-nosed leader who turns out to be a big softy: check. Female scientist who is described as a bitch before you even see her, but is really just super passionate about her work: check. Psychotic military career man who just wants to blow shit up: check. Company douche who is only interested in the profit reports: check (and even played by an actor who looks eerily similar to Paul Riser…and before I get comments about it, yes, I know that was Aliens. Shut up.) Renegade female pilot of a minority race: check. Science geek who turns out to be badass when pushed: check. Marine who sees the light and ends up fighting for the good guys: check. Misunderstood alien race that at first seems violent and aggressive, but which ends up pitching in to save the day: there are about twelve of them in Avatar. The only newish character we see here is Neytiri, the love interest, who is basically a less-helpless, even more naked version of Princess Leia. For a movie of this length to truly involve an audience, there has to be a character you love in the mix somewhere. And the problem is that while these archetypes worked brilliantly in The Abyss, that was a wholly different kind of movie. At its heart, The Abyss was a character piece inside a tin can at the bottom of the ocean. It took the time to explore the motivations and interactions between its characters, made them live, and gave you a reason to care about them, so that when the conflicts really begin you have a real stake in them. Avatar just throws these characters at you, as though Cameron expected you to just remember how you felt about them all in his other movies and let that feeling carry over. Well, it didn’t work. These are flat, dead characters.

The next big failing of the movie was exposition. The first half-hour or so of the film feels like an information dump to set you up for what’s coming. There is literally a scene about ten minutes in when Company Douche, during an argument with Science Bitch says (and I’m paraphrasing here): “This is why we’re here! Unobtanium! This very rare ore sells for millions of dollars a kilo! And those aliens out there are trying to stop us from mining it and making a lot of money! AVATAR!” (Sidebar: Mining for a rare ore called “unobtanium” on a wild, unpredictable planet called “Pandora”? Fuck you, James Cameron. Just…just fuck you.) There are big chunks of exposition this clumsy throughout the movie, largely provided by the ham-fisted voiceover by main character Sully (thinly disguised as a “video log”….well, you got the “log” part right, anyway.) I am willing to accept this sort of goldbricking expository style when a movie is trying to get the talking out of the way so that they can start blowing shit up or decapitating people. It’s de riguer for that sort of movie. But for what purports to be a story-driven science fiction epic, that is simply inexcusable. If the script had a tenth of the grace of the computer animation, this might have been the greatest movie ever made.

So, the middling stuff. Avatar packs every standard sci-fi trope into its first hour. Cryo-sleep. Drop ship. Space marines. Walker robots (which, at the end, and utterly inexplicably, have knives to fight with. Really? You have a two-ton robot exoskeleton and you’re FUCKING FIGHTING WITH A KNIFE?! Who designed these things, Brock Sampson?) Hostile planet with hostile flora, hostile fauna, even hostile fucking air. Beautiful naked humaniods. A big monster that attacks and is chased off by a bigger monster, who then chases the protagonist (I rolled my eyes at this scene a year ago in Star Trek, why on earth did I have to see it again?) Earthlings taking over other planets for their resources. Blah blah blah. The thing is, I love science fiction, and I love these tropes. They work. They’re a familiar language for nerds to draw on. But like so much else in this movie, it feels like James Cameron (or, just as likely, some studio shill) felt the need to pack every single one of them into the movie, and it turns into overkill. If that was the worst part of the movie I’d have let it slide, but piled on top of so much else gone wrong it actually drags things down.

My only other middling complaint was the 3D, which I really didn’t think was especially well executed. After seeing a movie like Coraline, where the 3D was seamlessly, beautifully integrated into the film itself without ever being obtrusive, but also without ever fading away, anything less just feels tacked on. The 3D in Avatar pops in and out, is missing in some bewildering places (um, hello, giant spaceship floating past the camera like the beginning of Star Wars…this would be an optimum time for some 3D magic! No? Oh…ok), and simply wasn’t that convincing. Except – and this is a big except – in the walking around the jungle scenes. In a lot of those scenes the 3D really shone, and helped make the planet itself a living being. But more on that later.

And the good. It has been said a million times over, and I’m going to say it again: this is hands-down the best special effects ever put on film. And I don’t mean inching past the previous benchmark. I mean creating a whole new fucking standard that it will take years to recreate, much less surpass. Yes, that has been the main selling point of the movie since we all first heard about it over a year ago, and yes that’s all James Cameron will ever say when he opens his mouth. I sometimes wonder if he talks about CGI in his sleep. I wonder if, when he has sex with his wife Kathryn Bigelow, he screams out “WETA!” when he orgasms. The man can not stop talking about the fucking special effects. But hey, he has a reason. If I had a nineteen-inch-long dick, I would talk about it all the time too. And this movie is, without question, the nineteen-inch cock of special effects. It’s literally beautiful. The design of everything is stunning. Even the Na’vi, which I absolutely hated in every preview for the movie that I ever saw, are gorgeous. The choice to make them blue actually makes a lot of sense when fit into the greater design of the movie, particularly the bio luminescent things that the previews never show.

The planet (sigh) Pandora (shake head) is visually spectacular, in a very literal sense. Glowing, neon plants, moss that lights up whenever anyone takes a step, floating mountains with waterfalls gushing off of their sides, insects that light up and spin when disturbed, it is absolutely stunning. I want to visit (sigh) Pandora (shake head). I want to climb its enormous trees and ride its pterodactyl-things. It is, in all seriousness, the only well-developed character in the entire film. Obviously, this was Cameron’s baby (which leads me to wonder what fucked-up sort of thing he named his actual children: “Boychild Middlename Cameron, time to eat lunch!”), and he spent a lot of time bringing it to life. It’s a marvelous feat, but it comes with an enormous flaw: there are all sorts of fascinating ideas that pop up and disappear, just like that. If you know me, you know that a good idea wasted is, to me, one of the most unpardonable sins. Without giving anything away, there are a lot of mysteries about (sigh) Pandora (shake head) that are brought up, used as a plot device, and never really heard from again. I am willing to stand against common logic and say that I would have watched half an hour more of this movie if they had spent the time developing the good ideas more. With the caveat that none of that time be spent listening to the worst caricature of a Marine Sergent ever put on film.

I also feel the need to reiterate that the CGI is absolutely astonishing. I have never seen computer-generated characters that looked so natural, expressed themselves so physically, and looked so much a part of the world. Of course, much of this is due to the fact that, by and large, the CGI characters live in a fully CGI world and rarely mix with the real human actors or appear in actual physical sets. But hey, when the CGI sets look this good, why mix and match? It was a far cry from George Lucas’ absurd green-screen shitfests.

And the acting? It was fine. I don’t think anyone deserves any awards for this. It’s all pretty much standard acting for the situation. By and large I thought the big blue cartoons were better actors than the actual faces you see, but that could be because they just had better actors on that side (even Sigourney Weaver was stale when she wasn’t blue, which I find a little shocking.)

So, is this the best movie ever? Definitely not. Is it a technical and design marvel that will be the standard for many years to come? Definitely so. At the end, though, the movie is the sum of its parts and no more. Some of it is stellar. Some of it is terrible. And when you put them together you come out right in the middle. As a spectacle it’s unsurpassed. As a tech demo it’s mind-blowing. As a movie, it’s decent. I might even go so far as to say pretty good if you caught me in a good mood.

Ok, I guess I do. Someone’s invisible bearded man says it’s not alright for people with the same no-no bits to rub those no-no bits together, so of course we need to legislate it. Makes perfect sense. Hey, while we’re at it, can we legislate some other bits of antiquated, ridiculous mythology as well? I was thinking maybe we could go on a state-by-state campaign to get basilisks banned. They seem pretty dangerous, what with that whole turning people to stone thing. And we definitely need tighter restrictions on genies and their wishes – won’t someone think of the children?!

All sarcasm and wild hyperbole aside, it really irks me to think that anyone could deny a basic human right to another person based solely on their genital predilections. And the sheer volume of ignorant hatred that is behind this movement is distressing to me. Honestly, people, do you really think gays want to marry in order to bring down society? Gays love society! Without society we wouldn’t have Sex in the City marathons or gelato! You want to know the nefarious reasons that same-sex couples want to have their relationships legally consummated? BECAUSE THEY FUCKING LOVE EACH OTHER! Dark stuff, I know.

And don’t you dare go quoting Leviticus or Ephesians at me. I’ve read the bible. Well, I’ve read parts of it. Mostly the parts with beheadings. But that’s irrelevant. It may be true that the bible says that it’s wrong for a man to lay with another man as with a woman, but here’s a newsflash people – the bible says a lot of wacky shit. I don’t mean to ruin the end for you, but the last chapter is filled with giant monsters rising up from the bottom of the ocean and doing battle with legions of winged naked babies. This does not strike me as a book whose word you should take too seriously. Granted, there are plenty of good life lessons and pithy platitudes to be had as well – I’m rather fond of that whole “take the plank out of your eye before you take the mote out of someone else’s” thing – but the simple fact is that there are a lot of crazy, outdated and frankly ridiculous rules in that book. Leviticus forbids a man to eat food prepared by a menstruating woman. Hey Pat Robertson, did you ever cook your own dinner before your wife went through menopause? I bet not, huh? Did you make her sleep in a separate hut? That’s in Leviticus too. Seems like ridiculous superstition nowadays, doesn’t it? Wonder what other bon mots we should disregard. And I will be the first to admit that if I am wrong, I look forward to the seven-headed beast with the seven crowns. That shit will be AWESOME!

This brings us to the recent elections, and the debacle of states banning same-sex marriage, including the one state that by all logical sense should have thrown over the measure, painted it with rainbows and held a Judy Garland sing-along while it burned – California. I’m not going to expend the effort to re-tell the story, you know what happened: the people voted, and they voted to put a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in place under the guise of “protection of marriage”. California. The state where San Francisco lives. The state that produces the majority of the country’s pornography. The state whose governor has had enough sexual harassment complaints against him to fill a law student’s wet dreams for a decade. The man was a bodybuilder in the eighties, for fuck’s sake! It doesn’t get much gayer than that!

I digress. California: what went wrong? Most of us blame the Mormons, and I heartily encourage this. I also blame the Mormons for heart disease, homeless pets and the Twilight books. They’re just so fun to hate. But we can’t lay the entire blame at the feet of God’s Chosen Choristers. Without idiotic dupes in the California electorate, the Mormons’ orgy of homophobic campaigning would have done absolutely no good. That’s right, folks, I’m going to say it – California has ignorant hicks too. Ever been to Bakersfield? I rest my case. And what is it that truly motivates ignorant hicks to get off their fold-out couches, put down the Budweiser and Clamato (which, by the way, is an abomination unto the Lord if ever there was one), and go to that elementary school they haven’t set foot in since they were six to vote? Fear. Fear is the great motivator. Fear of everyone who isn’t exactly like you. The largely Mormon-backed (though the rest of you Fundie fucks aren’t off the hook for this one – I’ve seen a lot of various sects giving money to these campaigns) ads on California, Florida and various other states’ televisions said – and I’m paraphrasing a bit here – “The queers want to get married so they can adopt your children, turn them gay, and have the kind of sex with them that you only get on your birthday. They also want to do that to you. Vote yes on Prop 8.” What self-respecting redneck isn’t going to get out of the trailer for a half an hour to avoid being anally raped by the newly empowered homosexual population? None, I can tell you. This sort of fear-mongering was, from my point of view, the primary tactic of the so-called “marriage protection” people. They also added, as an afterthought, “Jesus hates fags”, which seemed to seal the deal.

Normally I’d spend about twelve paragraphs here expounding on the hypocrisy of the Republican party (and others, god knows the lefties aren’t innocent of the occasional tiddle) in these matters, laughing about the people who want to “protect the sanctity of marriage” while having rampant, documented extra-marital affairs – of both the hetero- and homosexual nature, I might add – but it just doesn’t seem worth it anymore. Everyone knows it’s a crock of shit, and we’ve all had our chance to scream about it before now. And if that was the only hypocrisy going on in DC then we’d all be much happier people, have adequate health care, and be living on the moon. I’m also giving a pass to preachers and politicians who rail on endlessly about the promiscuous gay lifestyle out of one side of their mouths while denying gays the chance to be officially, legally monogamous out of the other. I don’t believe in God, but I do occasionally wish I did so that I could believe they’d have a hell of a surprise waiting for them when they finally croaked. I’m also going to ignore the ridiculousness of preserving the sanctity of an institution that, until very recently, was used mainly for political, social and financial gain. And don’t even get me started on the “what’s next – a man marrying a toaster oven?” argument, I just don’t think it’s worth my spite.

So how do you counteract this hypocrisy, fear and ignorance? I haven’t the faintest fucking idea. Obviously logic, reasoning and calm discussion haven’t worked out so well for us. But I do think the pro-gay-marriage agenda is not entirely innocent of fucking this whole thing up themselves. Mainly, I think our biggest mistake was accepting their verbiage in the debate. The word “marriage” inherently carries religious connotations. Inherently. And when you start fucking around with people’s religion, they get angry. No doubt I would have lost several Mormon friends already over this essay if I had any to begin with, and rightfully so. I think this whole deal shouldn’t have been framed as marriage rights to begin with. We needed to start with simple civil unions. Now, it’s only fair that I mention at this point that I am totally opposed to marriage being a legal issue at all. I think that two people who want to legally bind themselves to each other should do so in a strictly governmental sense – a “civil union” or a “social contract” or some other ridiculously clinical phrase – and then, if they want to get their supreme being involved in the affair they should do it seperately on their own time. I know that that’s how it works in the real world – I’ve been married myself, in godless, heathen Las Vegas no less – but when you apply the word “marriage”, you open the door for people to get all up in arms about the government forcing their god-fearing Baptist congregation to sanctify buttsex. Gay buttsex, not birthday buttsex. Most Baptists I’ve met seem to be cool with that. Of course that’s not the point we were trying to make, but a simple change of phrasing completely eliminates that scare tactic, and in an uphill battle like the one we face trying to legalize same-sex unions, every little easing of homophobic tension helps.

I also think the gay pride movement has shot itself in the foot a few too many times in the past, and continues to do so to this day. I’m all for being proud of who you are, and I generally approve of shoving it in everyone else’s face, but I fail to see how the shenanegans that go on at pride rallies advance the cause of understanding and tolerance. I know I’m making a gross generalization here, but assless leather chaps are not, generally speaking, the best thing about gay culture. It’s a little like summing up the Masons’ contributions to society as funny hats and tiny cars. No, I’m not saying you should change who you are, or even hide it, but you really have to come up with a better way of presenting yourselves than leather daddies and drag queens. I have never once seen a float in a pride parade with an orchestra playing “Appalachian Spring”, or someone reading a Tom Wolfe novel. Not even once. Prove me wrong, gay America!

I will conclude this piece the way I started it, with a simple statement. I don’t even understand why this is an issue. If you have a problem with gays marrying, then by all means, don’t marry one. Occam’s razor works remarkably well in this situation. I’m willing to bet that most people who have a real, deep-seated issue with it won’t ever actually have to look a married gay couple in the face unless they’re passing by the opera house on their way to the titty bar up the street. I think it’s sick and wrong that people watch NASCAR, but I’m not about to go putting up a ballot initiative against it.

Though I would appreciate it if you signed my anti-basilisk petition.

- The Coup, “Laugh/Love/Fuck”

Let’s face it: the great uprising isn’t going to happen any time soon. Most of us don’t even want it. Though I thrill to the idea of millions of angry Americans flooding the streets, burning down hedge fund offices and health insurance corporations, taking over government buildings and fucking working it out for themselves, I have little to no faith that it will ever happen. And frankly, if it did, I’m reasonably sure we’d find a way to fuck it up for ourselves anyway. As every riot ever in history has proven, you can’t get a group of angry (or, alternately, elated) people together without someone doing something stupid. It’s human nature.

But here’s the good news: we can still make things better. It’s not even that hard, really. And it’s mostly legal! The short version is this – we make it better for ourselves and each other, and then all those pricks running the show will either have to adapt to our new way of life or get the hell out of the way. Remember, we outnumber them. And they’re mostly wrinkly old white men, and if we collectively can’t knock down a bunch of wrinkly old white men then maybe we ought to radically rethink our lives.

So below are my five simple rules for bringing down the man. I have eliminated anything that involves molotov cocktails, larceny or open rebellion. That’s for another day. What I’m advocating is simply small things we can do to institute change, since so far that whole “Vote for change” thing isn’t working out so great for us.

1. Socialism starts at home.

Fox News informs me that we’ve elected a socialist president! That’s great news, right? Soon we’ll all be enjoying universal healthcare, free university education and high quality BBC-grade television! We’re saved!

Not so fast there, comrade! Did you know that six of the senators on the commission to reform healthcare have personal, business or family ties to the healthcare industry? Oh noes! The system, it does nothing! What can we do?! Simple: do it yourself, slack-ass.

First, go outside. This is the hard part for most of us, myself included. Rock Band and The Soup are powerful opiates, plus there’s a sun out there, and it burns my skin. Clearly that wouldn’t be the case if we were meant to go outdoors. But, see, the problem is that there is a clear limit to what we can accomplish sitting around in the dark on the internet. Yes, captain hypocrite, I know. I do. Here’s the thing, though: it’s stupidly easy to make someone else’s life a little better. Give an hour at a public garden. Work in a soup kitchen. Hell, I’ll make it even easier: have a thoughtful discussion with someone about your political opinions. You have opinions, right? Tell someone else about them in concise, well-informed terms, then listen to what they have to say in response. In this age of talking points and political anylists we don’t listen to each other anymore, and that is sickening. Sometimes that douchebag who you argue with all day long has a valid point. Sometimes.

Here’s another radical idea, one we learned as toddlers and subsequently forgot as we grew up and joined the work-force: share. Seriously, just share something with someone else. I’m not talking about tithing half your salary, or spreading the wealth (though of course I’m not opposed to either of those options), I’m talking about sharing. If it’s raining, offer to let someone under your umbrella. If you have an extra sandwich in your lunch give it to someone, you fat fuck! Sharing is so ridiculously easy, and it doesn’t even have to cost you a penny. And, most importantly, it makes someone else’s life better. That’s what we’re all about, right?

2. Tiny acts of rebellion are crucial, as long as they’re correctly intentioned.

This is a longstanding pet peeve of mine, and one that I have mentioned before in these essays. Any halfwit teenager will be more than willing to walk out of a classroom to protest anything, whether they believe in what they’re protesting or not. This, in my mind, does not constitute a protest. If you want to make a point, make it on your own time! Not only does it eliminate the possibility of diluting your message by giving it the benefit of not having to go to work, but it is far more meaningful, and people respond better to it. Nobody ever talks about the guy who distributed clothes to the needy when he was supposed to be at work; they talk about the guy who distributed clothes to the needy on his lunch break.

Now this isn’t meant to imply that standing up and walking out of work isn’t a powerful tool – it is, as long as it’s for the right reason. Here’s a simple test: does what you’re trying to draw attention to have anything to do with your job? If the answer is no, then do it on your own time. If the answer is yes, then by all means do it at work. But make sure you’re fighting the good fight – walking out in support of replacing the Twinkies in the vending machine with Zingers is not the good fight. Pick your battles. Bring your own goddamned Zingers from home.

3. Never be ashamed of your beliefs. Unless they’re stupid.

Ever notice how bigoted, ignorant cousin-fuckers have no compunction about spouting their view of things loudly in public, at every possible opportunity? How come those of us who are somewhat better informed and more open-minded keep our mouths shut? Now, I’m not saying you should necessarily confront Jimmy Bob when he starts screaming at the bar about how the goddamned beaners are ruining this be-yutiful nation of ours – he’s probably ten PBRs down and aching for a fight. But why aren’t we as loud, obnoxious and pervasive as they are? Is it because we’re just too polite to express our opinions, or is it because we’ve been browbeaten for the last decade or so into believing that intelligence and liberal-mindedness are something to be ashamed of? Actually, I think it’s a healthy mix of the two.

I propose we change both of these circumstances. Admittedly, the label “liberal” has lost some of the vitriol it used to carry in this Obamatized world we now inhabit, but the politically conservative (and infinitely loud-mouthed) have decided now to equate “liberal” with “socialist”. Read a fucking dictionary, Bill O’Riley, these terms are not the same. I feel at this point it is only fair to offer full disclosure of the fact that I consider myself a socialist. I’d love it if we had a big government beurocracy running everything and making sure everyone got what they needed to survive. Hell, I’d go move to Sweden today if it wasn’t for all that snow and their ridiculous language. However, I understand that there are lots of liberals out there who aren’t socialists, and don’t necessarily want that label applied to them, especially not erroneously and double-especially not by some shit-for-brains redneck who wouldn’t know actual socialism if it ran up and gave him an unemployment check. Oops, there I go again. So the next time someone in earshot laments how this country is turning into a commie pinko paradise, politely point out the difference between socialism and liberalism, ask them if they hate socialism so much that they’d be willing to take their granny off of Social Security, and walk away. We don’t need to take this shit anymore.

As far as politeness goes, I am hereby declaring a moratorium on the soft-spoken, polite lefty. The only reason the Fox News crowd is getting their voices heard more than us is because they talk louder. Guess what – I CAN TALK LOUD TOO! I can fucking shout all day long about what’s wrong with this country, and it has nothing to do with illegal immigrants, homos getting married or our new dark-skinned president. It has everything to do with the potent combination of greedy, powerful old white people and ass-backward ignorant pigfucks of all races colluding to keep us stagnating in the pool of filth we’ve accumulated over the last 233 years. I’m sick of being polite about it, and I fully intend to be as outspoken and angry as any of those douchebag talking heads, except I’m going to have logic, intelligence and research on my side. And goddamnit, if the world’s not listening now they will be soon.

4. As much as I hate to quote Journey, “Don’t stop believin’!” Ugh…a little piece of my soul just died.

The problem with those of us who want change is we get discouraged far too easily. I personally am guilty of losing all hope in democracy and crying out for a return to monarchy. But that’s just what The Man wants us to do! Every time we try and fail, The Man wants us to go back home, affix ourselves to our couches with Taco Bell in one hand and a Natural Light 20-ounce in the other, and watch Rock of Love until our brains leak out our ears. If you do that, the bad guys win. (Nothing against Taco Bell, by the way…that shit is delicious!)

Here’s how we beat them: learn from our mistakes. Why isn’t gay marriage legal in all fifty states right now? Where did our strategy fail? Is it just the Mormons, or did we fuck something up along the way too? (Hint: we fucked a lot of things up, but that’s a whole different essay.) Great, so now that we’re looking at why we failed the first time, we’ll do more things right the second time. It’s not enough to grumble “well, we tried” and slink back to our coffee shops and cheese tastings. We have to keep believing that what we’re doing is right, that it’s important, and that eventually we’ll succeed. I mean, we did wonders with that whole Civil Rights thing, didn’t we? You can be damned sure that didn’t just fall into place because it benefited some rich, wrinkly white guy. The lesson: keep trying. At the very least it’ll get you away from reality television for a while, and that certainly can’t be bad for you.

5. Fucking vote, for christ’s sake!

You’re pissed off at your government. We all are. We’re in about a zillion different wars in the Middle East, the whole world economy’s in the shitter, billionaires are still making money hand over fist even while their companies are tanking and hemorraging jobs, and we still don’t have our goddamned jetpacks. The system is a fetid, stinking mess and every single one of us knows it.

So did you vote in the last election?

No? Well fuck you then.

“Oh,” I hear you whine, “but voting does no good. It’s always the lesser of two evils.” Maybe so, but it’s still less fucking evil! Unless you’re Dick Chaney or Anton LaVey, less evil is good. And sometimes there’s even a viable human being running for office who deserves your support. And at the very least, if we collectively voted we could rid the government of the entrenched jackholes who keep getting us into these messes in the first place.

The key, of course, is informed voting, something that has died a sloppy death in the United States in the last twenty years. No, getting advice from CNN, Fox News or your local political party’s constant, irritating emails does not count as informed voting. Every single one of those sources is biased, some more insidiously than others. NPR, as much as I love it, has its own bias too. Even the revered BBC is not without its faults.

So where do you go for informed political advice? There are lots of places. The League of Women Voters has always been impartial, unbiassed, and hugely informative. They used to put out a paper before every election detailing all the candidates and all the issues on the ballot, giving both pro and con arguments for each and rebuttals. I don’t know if they still do this or not, but their website is still a font of useful information. You can also go to factcheck.org to get the real story on all the trumped-up headlines you have screamed at you all day long. Alternately, things like voting records and public opinion papers are a matter of public record – if you want to know what a candidate truly thinks, go to the fucking library. It’s that big building downtown with all the books inside and all the vagrants outside. It’s full of useful information. It also has DVDs to rent!

And if you’re truly disgusted, run yourself. Upper government officials get great benefits.

There is a theory – common mostly among "free-thinkers", "left-wingers" and "touchy-feely types" that words have only as much power as the intention behind them. This is the reason an open-minded person can call his friend a fag with impunity, and is the basis of the reclamation of insults such as nigger and queer. One may not subscribe to the basic concept at play, but the results are undeniable. Such slurs have, by and large, lost their edge in American society. Queer is no longer an insult, it is a battle cry. Nigger is a common personal pronoun among the very people it was coined to degrade. Whether this is the power of the intention behind the word or simply acclimation from repetition (endless repetition if you happen to be a hip-hop fan) is debatable.

The real problem, however, is that only minorities seem to be subject to this deadening of insults, and the majority – the white, middle-to-upper-class, judeo-christian rulers of society (me, and most likely you for instance) are still not granted access to words that minorities throw around with abandon. Picture yourself approaching a young black man on the street and greeting him with "Say, nigger, do you have the time?" You would receive a cold reception at best. Why is this, though? Most would say that it is because the white, middle-to-upper-class, judeo-christian majority coined these terms in the first place, and used them with ill will, and therefore do not have the right to use the reclaimed words and phrases. This is a good point. Others would argue that in general when the white, middle-to-upper-class, judeo-christian majority use such words and phrases, they are often tinted with real hatred, fear or disrespect. This is also a good point. There are even those who would argue the "I can talk shit about my family, but you cannot" line of thought. Also an excellent point. I, however, know the ultimate problem, and I have the ultimate solution.

The thing is, whitey can't join the club because whitey doesn't have a slur to contribute to the pool. Sure, you could consider "whitey" a slur, but it's limp at best. And terms like "cracker", "milktoast" and "peckerwood" are outdated and no longer hold any weight. Yes, whitey needs a truly loathsome slur put to his name in order to join in the club of the verbally oppressed. Something with all of the spite and derision of "nigger", all of the fear and disgust of "fag" and all of the dismissal and disapproval of "wetback".

The problem is, I don't have this word at hand. Maybe because I'm a white, middle-to-upper-class, judeo-christian man myself, maybe because at heart I'm just not that spiteful, or maybe because it is not whitey's lot to invent his own worst insult, I simply do not know what to call myself. So the first part of my solution is this: if you are not a member of the white, middle-to-upper-class, judeo-christian majority I implore you to summon all of your spite, your disdain and your suppressed (or not so suppressed) hatred for us and to come up with the most hateful and degrading name you can find. When you come up with something post it here, then go forth and spread it among whitey. Feel free to call me whatever it is you come up with. I'm strong, I can handle it. The key is, it has to become established as a slur.

Part two of my plan is for whitey to adopt this slur as our own. To appropriate it and make it positive, stripping it of its power. Use it, love it, spread it among your peeps. Then and only then can we join the ranks of the rising oppressed. Once we have overcome our slur, we will finally feel more comfortable using the appropriated slurs of other oppressed peoples. Once we can use the appropriated slurs of other oppressed peoples, true healing can begin.

"But," you say, "what can I do in the meantime? I can't wait for those lazy spics and shiftless niggers to come up with a slur for me! I need to be oppressed now!" Well, my friend, we can spend this time warming up for the main event. In preparation for the big time, start referring to yourself and your white brethren as "peckerwood". I have personally been working on this for about a year and a half, and it has thus far worked out spectacularly. People around me seem to not be offended by the term as much as they used to, I have come to see it as a term of endearment, and the word has lost whatever vestiges of power it may have still had clinging to it.

So, my peckerwoods, I implore you to do your part. Only with full cooperation can we finally bridge the void of hateful words and repair the damage done to our world. All of the damage, that is, caused by words alone and not such trivialities as financial oppression, slavery, wealth, imperialism, and flat-out racism. 

No, I'm not afraid of violent video games, bloody movies, sex on basic cable or the hovering spectre of RAP MUSIC…what frightens me most, what makes me fear for the future of humanity…is cynicism.

I remember distinctly being in the eighth grade – there was a controversy over clothing that affected the entire population of our school. A ban was put in place, and ignoring the ban was fodder for an immediate suspension. What clothing was horrific enough to engender such a response in the Cincinnati Public School system? Simpsons t-shirts. Yes, that's right, the garment that struck terror into the district's leadership was a simple, modest shirt bearing the likeness of Bart Simpson and the words "Bart Simpson: Underachiever".

Oh, for those simpler days. Lo these long…oh…let's say fifteen years ago…something like the championing of pride in substandard achievement was cause for panic. Nowadays if our third-graders aren't pregnant and addicted to PCP we don't care what kind of shirt they wear. I have regularly seen ten-year-olds in what we used to call short-shorts (they now refer to them by the ever-so-ambiguous name "booty shorts") with various sayings printed directly on the ass. Sayings such as "Juicy", "Tease" and "Tight". For the record, if I as a legal adult were to admit publicly to thinking of a ten-year-old's ass as "tight", I would not only be arrested, but would have to spend the rest of my life introducing myself to my neighbors as a sex offender. So one may ask, logically, if this is inappropriate for an adult to think, why is it appropriate for a ten-year-old to advertise? And one might come to the conclusion, logically, that it isn't. Children are becoming jaded and cynical at a far earlier age than they used to, and about things like sex, which used to be the most shocking subject an adolescent could think of.

In a thoroughly unscientific manner, I have traced the beginning of this trend on the "teen idol" phase of the late 1990s. At that time the record industry, in order to try to broaden the audience for acts like Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson from exclusively teenage girls to the general public, began selling their starlets as sex symbols. Of course, this raised sales (among other things) in men from their twenties through middle-age. The problem is, the original intended market for those singers were still hanging on their every word. Seeing their idols dolled up like porn stars and sold as virtual whores on MTV, a whole generation of young girls were taught that this is the way to gain attention, to get the money and fame that they had been told were what they should strive for, and to get boys. And thanks to outlets like Radio Disney, that message was spread to younger and younger children.

Now, I don't think there's anything wrong with kids emulating their idols, and I certainly don't think that celebrities should be tied into a "think about the children!" goody-goody image if that's not who they are. But I do think that the marketing machine, which controls so much of what we see and hear, has a responsibility to watch out for their most vulnerable markets. It's just good business sense – if you're selling sex to kids, those kids are more likely to get knocked up, severely hampering their ability to finish school, which limits their job opportunities, thereby reducing their ability to purchase goods and services. One would think that the advertising machine would be tripping over itself to make kids as intelligent as possible, so they can all be doctors and lawyers and buy all of the Jaguars and Bang Olafson stereo equipment they could ever want.

It's not that I worry about the moral fiber of our society. The moral fiber of our society is so fucked from so far on high that worrying about children is almost moot. I'm worried for the kids themselves. There is a certain amount of childhood that you miss out on when your innocence and ignorance are stripped away. The current trend toward irony, sarcasm and out-and-out dark cynicism ("could this show be any stupider?") are robbing kids of the wide-eyed enthusiasm that used to be the hallmark of childhood. Movies like Shrekand the millions of other made-in-an-hour CGI animated films try to cash in on the edginess of their medium by pushing edginess in their stories, dialogue, characters and general attitude. When the stars of the recent movie Ice Age 2: The Meltdownwent on the talk show circuit to promote the movie (rated G, marketed in kids' meals at Burger King), they brought along a clip with two mastodons discussing repopulating the species (quoth the female, "You ain't repopulating the species tonight, or any other night!"). How is this appropriate for their target audience? If the filmmakers consider this a wink-and-a-nod joke for the benefit of parents that will go over the kids' heads, they are severely underestimating how savvy kids today are.

Reading through this essay as I prepare to publish, I realize that I sound like a bit of a fuddy-duddy, and that this may seem to contradict my normal attitudes and opinions. Regardless, though, of who I am now, I still cherish those innocent days when I believed what I was told, when most of life was a mystery to me, and when I was sheltered from the harsh realities of the world. It seems that the nest is getting smaller and smaller these days, and the chicks are being pushed out nearly as fast as they can hatch.

It has been years now that I've been dealing with this problem. I have never been a particularly competetive person, preferring to have fun at whatever I'm doing rather than come out on top. Losses are generally met with an "Oh well, next time," while wins usually garner a "Well, that was a surprise. Again?" This is not, of course, taking into account my acknowledged love of shit-talking, but I think that can be sidebarred for a moment while I focus on the real issue at hand. Shit talk is a fun hobby, but I never even indulge in it unless it is with close friends, and generally only when I am losing.

Confronted with this growing problem, I asked myself – as I find myself doing more and more often nowadays - why? Why am I so lackluster about success, about the future, and about the rewards that everyone seems to be so infatuated with? Upon great reflection, I think the problem is that I am an inherently nostalgic person.

Nostalgia, I have come to realize, is a dangerous and insidious disease. It sneaks up on its victim without warning, consumes them, and leaves them to rot and decay, unable to take nourishment from their memories and unwilling to subsist on the present. I would not classify myself as a person who is morbidly nostalgic, but I certainly do have a serious case. The funny thing is, I am not nostalgic for any particular time or place or situation, but rather have a general malaise that covers more-or-less all of my existence. There are days I am nostalgic for a conversation I had last week, and days when I sit and contemplate the fun times we used to have jumping from couch to chair to bed, pretending that the floor was made of lava. From time to time I even dwell on memories that I am not entirely certain actually happened. Such is the depth of my illness.

To my thinking, nostalgia does not necessarily mean a desire to return to a certain time in one's life, but rather the somewhat unhealthy tendency to return to that time and dwell on it. I would rather die than go back to who I was in high school, but I do spend a certain amount of time thinking about those days fondly. I spend an inordinate amount of time contemplating fun times my wife and I have had as adults, running over them again and again in my mind, when it would be so simple to create new ones. Of course I have never, and certainly would never, turn down the opportunity for entertainment in the present tense, but somehow in my mind, something that happened even twenty-four hours ago holds as much or more significance as what is happening at this very moment.

So this is the root of my problem, the germ of my lack of ambition: if things past hold as much weight as things in the future, then why bother striving to new heights? It has begun to disturb me slightly that, when faced with the threat of death (either real or hollow), my typical response is "Eh, I've had a good run."

This, then, is the beginning of my convalescence. As the old, hackneyed, horrible saying goes: the first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem. Hi, I'm Andrew, and I'm a backward-looking person. I hit rock bottom this afternoon, when I came to my senses and realized that I was reading inane email conversations I had with my friend Steve five years ago. I have indulged in behavior that was destructive and harmful to myself and those around me, to my work as an artist, and to my role as a husband, a teacher and a friend.

Man, that felt good.

Only eleven steps to go.