TOPIC, due 31/5/07 - "A Smidgin of Religion"

Snakes and lions and atheists, oh my!

With the recent publication of books by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, much of the Western media is holding its biannual flap about the place of religion in society. If you've missed it all, let me summarise: very little is being said that is interesting, and nothing will happen. It's simply an exercise in consciousness-raising that is several centuries old.

What is decidedly less anaemic is the mythologies that the current crop of pundits are taking aim at. Long histories of sordid chaos, genocide, pan-dimensional kink, betrayal and hypocrisy, tied together with the single remaining narrative that the Clog still have to cling to - the Creation Of It All.

Your topic is out there, amongst these grand old tales of lunatics and murderers.

Find it. Beat it.

1000 wds.

Fast World, Fast Food and Fat Cunts

McDonald’s has taken quite a beating in recent times. Probably the most recognisable brand on the planet along with Coca-Cola, the Golden Arches have been kicked from pillar to post by pressure groups, documentaries and nanny states the world over venting outrage at the globalisation of obesity via fast food. There’s no escaping this behemoth of a franchise; even the Grand Canyon, one of the most awe-inspiring and beauteous sites this writer has ever witnessed, cannot elude the clutches of McDonald’s Inc.

What exactly is the secret to McDonald’s success? As with all successful businesses, it’s a simple process of identifying the need of consumers and supplying that need quickly and efficiently. Pre-McDonald’s, procuring a burger in a restaurant meant enduring a half hour wait and a rude waitress on just about enough money to feed herself never mind her bastard offspring. Now it’s merely a case of dealing with a spotty oik on just about enough money to feed himself never mind fulfil the maintenance payments for the kid he never sees. The difference is the diminished waiting time – highly conducive to the go-go-go environment of modern living: If one cheeseburger and fries doesn’t sate one’s appetite, walk up to the counter, ask for another and et voila the hunger pangs are gone.

It’s as easy as that. In fact, government watchdogs are arguing that it’s too easy; too easy to overindulge and, in Layman’s terms, become a fat bastard. And of course, the finger of blame is pointed squarely at McDonald’s billion dollar rump since Ronald McDonald stands outside every restaurant, pistol-whipping potential diners into said establishment and throatfucking them with Big Macs against their will. Nobody goes into McDonald’s of their own volition, y’see – that nasty clown forces them to eat quarter-pounder after quarter-pounder, guzzle it down with a litre of Fanta and then finish off with numerous McFlurries garnished with the latest fad chocolate bar.

Each and every person on this planet has the choice whether to eat in McDonald’s (or any other purveyor of fast, fatty food for that matter) or to eat at an altogether more healthy, wholesome enterprise. It’s not McDonald’s fault that the obesities I constantly witness in the high street have neither self control nor self respect and all the watchdogs, supposedly looking out for the well-being of consumers, provide are ready-made excuses for obesity. That monstrous, hulking fucker with more folds of flesh than hyperbolic space-time blocking the gangway on the bus isn’t enormous because he can’t stop stuffing his fat, puce cheeks with burgers; he’s enormous because of McDonald’s aggressive marketing tactics. He’s enormous because he’s addicted to food. He’s enormous because he has a hormone imbalance.

Give me a fucking break.

Until the imbeciles in organisations that our governments inexplicably give not only a voice but a platform and funding stop blaming fast food corporations and providing these gelatinous gluttons with excuses the problem is not going to go away. The problem isn’t hormonal, it isn’t addiction, it isn’t the prevalence of Justin Timberlake jingles in television adverts and it isn’t going to be solved by drugs, liposuction or restricting fast food advertising.

The obese, whose weight often has to be measured in terms of solar masses, simply don’t possess the discipline to impose restrictions on their own eating habits. It makes me physically sick to witness these masses of human blubber reducing themselves to tears of self-pity on national TV because they’ve exhausted every possible option in their quest lose weight.

Just. Stop. Eating. You disgusting flabby mess of a human.

Preferably altogether so that the 11% National Insurance Contributions that are deducted from my salary each month will actually go towards funding the treatment of somebody that can’t help the condition in which they find themselves.

It’s disgusting that these limp-willed mountains consume more calories in a single day than a staggering number of Africans will in a fortnight. They should be ashamed of themselves instead of wallowing to Oprah Winfrey, Rikki Lake or whichever chat show host decides to indulge their “illness”. It annoys me that these people only realise a problem exists when they get out of breath walking from the living room to the kitchen in search of the next banquet.

It is at this juncture that the lines between some of the Cardinal Sins (I thought that a Cardinal Sin was exacted upon a young altar boy?) become blurred. The obese suffer greatly from laziness and apathy, from jealousy of slim folk and quite patently lack any pride whatsoever. At least with the latter, if Dante’s work is to be taken literally, they won’t be forced to walk in purgatory with stone slabs weighing down on their backs.

They’d probably eat the slabs anyway.

The Shit-Eating Grin of the Tree-Hanging Sloth

Every now and then people stop to ask themselves, and eventually me, how I manage to get all of my work done, nearly constantly work on film projects, and still seem to have a ton of free time in addition to the time in which I get stupidly drunk (which is time I do not consider to be free). There's an easy answer: I do my work, I work on film projects, and the rest of the time I do other stuff and drink. However, this answer is not particularly satisfactory to the people who ask me, and although they don't read this blog, I'll take a moment to answer them in full.

But first, some history. Right now is the period where the undergraduate students at the University of Chicago write their BA graduate theses, which are essentially 40-or-so page essays that are supposed to be the ultimate product of our experience here. Some people write them over the course of a year or more. I started writing mine on Wednesday while hung over, took several breaks to go out drinking, read the excellent and entirely irrelevant novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, stopped working on it on Saturday and spent the next few days drinking with one of my best friends who chose this time to visit Chicago, resumed work on it today (Tuesday), just finished it, and am willing to guarantee that my paper is of above-average quality. I am not lazy or, in my estimation, extraordinarily gifted. What I do is when I work, I work. That's my entire secret.

That this secret doesn't satisfy anybody should be no surprise. In a society where work is measured in the amount of time you spend in a place rather than the accomplishing of given tasks, the idea of working becomes distorted. Playing solitaire or video poker, tagging pictures on facebook, and previewing horny housewives porn videos for later consumption are all ways of working so long as they're all done in the office. Talking to your friends and writing faux-clever, slant-rhymed poems on the bathroom stalls are both working if done in the school library. Why should anything be done quickly?

Since it's more difficult to correct this kind of behavior than to allow for it by lowering standards, the latter option has become prevalent. The work produced is mediocre, but mediocrity is expected, and so evaluations are quite kind. Since it is undergraduate, the ultimate purpose of the essay is to prepare you to do similar projects in the future, and that aim is not achieved - or at least it wouldn't be were it not for the fact that expectations in future enterprises are lowered as well. A chain reaction wave of shit begins with the simple procrastination of dozens of millions students.

Works of quality cannot be produced unless the habit of working is established. If it isn't, there is very little to stop undisciplined enthusiasm from ejaculating everywhere, leaving whatever is attempted drenched in suicided semen. More often there is not even that; undisciplined enthusiasm is a difficulty beyond the reach of most tree sloths.

I realize that this sort of a procrastination is the direct result of our evolutionary success, that we have so removed the bottom layers of Maslowe's pyramid that we've upset that structure, removing the forces of restraint developed at the bottom that allows the most unrestrained flights at the top. We can be taken as victims of our own success. This does not change the fact that the majority of people are too lazy to accomplish even what they genuinely care about, nor the fact that they would all prefer not to be lazy and pine away dreaming of the possibility of being able to do something.

The looks of admiration coming from these sloths is somewhat disgusting. The amount of willpower required to get yourself to do something is very little, but these people have let their will atrophy to such an extent that it could not bend a finger. And so they ooh and aah when somebody manages to accomplish what takes them months of playing grabass to do in the space of a few applied days. They do not seem to see that standards set for dwarfs do not adequately test or challenge giants, or even ordinary human beings. Nor do they see that it is their own fault they can't concentrate, can't adequately achieve anything but a stunning mediocrity and a feeling of helplessness in the face of it.

This is the world modern laziness has shaped. And when something so idiotic as Catholic dogma can adequately describe even this world's deadly sins, you know there's a problem. This is a call to everybody out there not afraid to man up and accomplish something. We are here to swallow the sun and belch out the collected lives of Earth's inhabitants while our eyes glow with the digested supernova. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us, but in reality the majority of mankind live their lives so poorly Death is rendered impotent, incapable of detecting their presence and leaving them to die, increasingly lacking in the most basic aspects of their personality, well into their 90s. All because some assholes can't collect enough willpower to move a dust mite.

The Proud: The Dumb, The Loud

It's very easy to tell a highly intelligent person. Not because they say highly intelligent things. Some people, usually in the managerial professions, have the art of spinning impressive verbiage into the Emperor's jockstrap down to a fine art. Being completely brim-full of shit is a contemporary occupation. No, an intelligent person is far more often revealed by their questions, their language and their attitude.

The right questions to ask are ones which guide but don't disrupt narrative, which facilitate explanations – brief, pointed requests ensuring discourse arrives at a conclusion. The clever will also listen to the exact words you use, and make sure they are exactly appropriate, because they appreciate that ideas cannot be better than the language they are couched in. They re-interpret, and ask, and point, and massage, and understand what you're saying.

But the most immediate thing to notice about talking to a real clever bastard is humility. The more you know, the more you know you don't know. And the more likely you are to accept someone else's claim to authority. It was no surprise to me when I realised that the professors in our department are more likely to constructively accept to your explanation and accept that you know what you're talking about than smart-arse grad students, who are more likely to shit all over what you say with tangential word-faeces. If there is a moral to this story it is simply: listen.

I don't know if a good level of mutual understanding while communicating deserves a name (intellectual osmosis, perhaps?). But I have the feeling it may be a more common event in other people’s lives than it is in mine.

Because teaching, and perpetually explaining things like a complicated psychological thesis to people, often results in something that makes me seethe and want to fuck neck sockets.

Most often, people don't ask. Immediately, they tell. At all times, they tell. Tell, tell, tell.

Most often, people can have a conversation consisting entirely of telling each other their opinions, none of them recognising the fact that anyone else is there at all.

Most often, people simply treat what is in front of them as a Pavlovian springboard into further inanities, spin a gleeful pattern of linguistic ejaculations that just travels off into the aether, saying nothing, discovering even less.

Why?

Why do the suburban dome-heads that surround us, these cretinous dimwits who have no folds in their cortex, continually conduct their lives from their shitty little pulpits? Why are their ears painted on?

Because we all live in Lake Wobegon, "... where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." Thank you very much, relativistic education. Thank you for a world where perspective is sacrosanct, where stupid constructs hold more weight than evidence, and smoke and hubris are more important than truth. Where every little fucktard is told he or she is a deadset genius, and their opinion is important.

Thank you for our comfortable & gelatinous lives, spirit of human progress. Thank you for all the bountiful wealth you've given us - Cabbage Patch dolls, pro wrestling, and animal-track sneakers. Thank you for making our gene pool so much shallower. Thank you for destroying personal responsibility by redressing stupidity through lawsuits and class-action.

And thank you very much to stupid, pig-headed human nature. Thank you for maintaining the egocentric cognitions that have kept us alive for the last 5 million years. Thank you for the obsolete impulses and open-savannah heuristics you have saddled us with, that most are mired in.

But seriously... you can all fuck off now. You're holding us up. You're interfering with progress. You bring drooling yawps from people who should be quiet, and silence voices that should be heard. Turn up the heat and boil this everyday peasant pride away. Please.