Okay, that might be a brake on free-range writing. But it’s political commentary and that’s not what this book is about. So you have another weapon, don’t you, WB, something that goes way deeper under the skin?
I read about this parrot in a David Sedaris essay. Sedaris’s sister, Lisa, was in college and she trained her parrot to shout out encouraging messages. “You can do it, Lisa!” the parrot would croak. So I told S. to say in happy talk, “Go Heather!” and “Just do it!” (that was the Nike slogan that Naomi Wolf—to her credit, she was ashamed—used in her Fire with Fire feminist book). But S. is British and he couldn’t bark these phrases at me without cracking up. And this enraged me, so I said, You go write a book then, and I felt bad because he doesn’t want to write a book and also that is stupid to say because I don’t want to write a book any more either. And now he is downstairs watching the World Cup final, and I am up here typing about not typing.
Coffee doesn’t work on me. Exercise energizes me, but only to paint drywall. Writing doesn’t require physical energy, it requires a chair and an ass to put on it and maybe a commitment. A commitment that ran faster than me.
The truth is, I didn’t expect George Bush to be re-elected in 2004. I just didn’t think a developed nation could be that dumb. And even if the election was stolen, and I’m certain, along with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., that it was, it wasn’t stolen by that much, which means there is a huge mass of terminally dumb and cruel people who have isolated fine smart Democratic voters who will spend the next few years slowly cracking up like the crackle surface of a vase instead of getting their act together and moving up to Canada.
And I guess I couldn’t take it. The only thing that kept me going through 2004 was Jon Stewart, and after that Stephen Colbert, but I don’t know, at some point, I stopped laughing. I had other allies. Kurt Vonnegut wrote a book. Springsteen did his Seeger album. John Tulloch, a victim of the Tube bombings in London, wrote of his continued devotion to free-speechers like Harold Pinter and Ken Loach even though his injuries have left him with vertigo so severe he can’t even get into a cab. Even former conservatives started backtracking. But Betty Friedan, Susan Sontag, John Kenneth Galbraith and Hunter S. Thompson died. That left Noam Chomsky and he’s getting on.
I know, the Brits laughed all through the Second World War, but look at them now with their Tony Blair, the joke’s on them. And then Canada handed a minority government to a goober with a flabby belly and wet lips, a touch of Asperger’s, and a wardrobe from Canadian Tire. He killed national day care and blew billions on the military—what is the point of Canada having a military? We’re so land-big that we’re like moose; we just stand there and get shot, it’s not like we’re gonna fight back—and I had always ignored Canadian politics and I suddenly realized I had a new burden.
All the Western nations were turning shithead. Sure, Latin and South America, they were getting their act together, but basically I had nowhere to go. There were riots in Paris and, yes, the French students were splendid, but face it, the French treat their immigrants like field slaves.
And at some point, I couldn’t laugh, so I couldn’t write. Most of the comedy was about sex and drugs and that was no help. Sex and drugs are things you do; the comedy is an add-on. All Hollywood movies were SFX blockbusters; when Americans made a movie they thought was serious it was Sideways or The Squid and the Whale, films about repellent people who should be taken outside and shot, or maybe just shot. I felt like Catherine O’Hara, who said after she watched Sex, Lies and Videotape, “Who are these people?”
I marched about the house pointlessly after that Squid movie. I swear, I could have become a social conservative after seeing divorcing parents behave that way in front of their children. KIDS DON’T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT YOUR MAN AND LADY BITS, GOT THAT? And I’ve never met a book person like that father played by Jeff Daniels. If they’re really like that—and, yes, there is one asshole in every book club like that but that is a law of book clubs—then maybe books should be burned.
See, those movies, about wine, and books, and sex, were intended to be comedies. WB, is that how you did it? Because I found them so repulsive, so unfunny, that I wanted to knit myself a balaclava (one with no holes, naturally) and sit in a closet after seeing it. If people are really like that, I give up.
And obviously, if they are like that they’re not going to like this book beyond the fact that the writer is sliding into a horrific depression that makes her unable to write a book that sane people like.
But there didn’t seem to be any sane people around, is my point. Was this your plan, WB, or am I crediting you with powers you don’t possess? People haven’t changed surely; it’s only voting patterns, circumstances and my own view of things that have changed.
So there I stood, literally picking at my house. That Virginia creeper leaves a million little dry stalks and suckers on the brick. I could spend the rest of my life picking at it, and I started to. It was restful.
I found I could no longer read fiction. Yes, of course I could still read Munro and Atwood and Lessing. The best fiction will survive anything. But fiction was sliding downhill fast and naturally, WB, you directed that I would be particularly bereft, you little shit.
So I turned to non-fiction. This is the age of the memoir and the splendid history; we are at our peak. The problem from my point of view was that people were telling the truth, the awful truth, and failing to cover pain with jokes. This would be admirable under normal circumstances, but with WB, I had nothing to say. It was not my aim to depress people.
I really take it as significant that this was when I began to boycott things in earnest—American chain stores with their goods produced by perfect saffron hands for twelve cents an hour, foods flown across the planet at what cost to climate change, gardening shoppes because I was sick of twee crap, The Body Shop after it was bought by L’Oréal which is part-owned by evil Nestlé even though I still buy their mascara and am not sure whether they own Lancôme which dropped Isabella Rossellini as a model because she was too old and we could go on in this vein forever. I, who used to buy like a down-market version of Nicole in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, had stopped shopping.
This was not normal. This was not good. It meant that I had given up on one of the big ingredients in sensuality—beautiful clothes and things that smelled good.
Was this a tactic, WB, or a result? Because what’s better than good words? Those are sensual too.
But that’s too simple, WB. I was depressed so I couldn’t write? It never stopped me before, you sly boots. I’ve been depressed my entire life—what sane person isn’t—but it had never before stopped the shower of words words words words.
Not only did you stop my words, you stopped me liking other people’s words and for that I will pull out your soft liver and feed it to the squirrels who infest my garden, I notice. They really are nasty, quick, sneaky rodents, just like you, WB.
We have our tactics, though. There’s no end of the line for me, you know. Because, WB, I still loved my Virginia Woolf. I have always thought that whatever happened, I could crawl into bed with my Virginia and read her for years, as I used to for years when I was young and didn’t have to read or write for money. Larry McMurtry, author of the great novel Lonesome Dove, who can no longer write because of the depression that resulted from the fact of his open-heart surgery—the human core sometimes cannot stand being maintained by a machine that does the pumping and breathing; awful things result—called her the Blue Nile of writing.
You couldn’t steal that, you ill-read cheap-arsed comic-licking Game Boy WB, could you.
Words words words. Use your words, they tell little children who hit. Unfortunately that’s all I have for you, WB. Once I figure it out, your tactic, how you did this to me after years of me watching and learning and using my words, I’ll crush you.
You have my word on that, you hateful skin-digger, you virus, you whip-limbed jelly mutator. You will pay.
How You American
s Annoy Me
And how I wish you would just stop
It’s almost too easy to write this; I imagine it’s an assigned essay in every English class in the world (they no longer do How I Spent My Summer Vacation). But it feels marvellous to vent, to spew, to exude, to expel my utter contempt for that old circus elephant down south.
I don’t understand why I should be expected not to like or dislike Americans or why “anti-American” is seen as an epithet in some circles. The United States at its best is annoying; at its worst it is fatal to one’s health. When I meet someone who isn’t anti-American, and I include Americans in this, I think they’re either stupid or they’ve been busy with eighteen-month-old twins and haven’t had the time to think about it.
Note: When I say “Americans,” I mean the awful ones, and 99 percent of the time we’re talkin’ Red State. Or neocons who live in Blue States while Bush is in power.
Let’s get started, friends. I am reading the U.S. men’s magazine The New Yorker, to which I subscribed when Seymour M. Hersh was first using its pages to break news stories about the catastrophe that is the war in Iraq. Of course as soon as I subscribed, he stopped writing for them. This always happens to me. (An aside: Just as you can’t take a marriage for granted, never count on the excellence of a newspaper, a magazine, a writer or a TV show. They waver in quality as editors move about, good writers leave and redesigns leave the thing unrecognizable. I’d cancel The New Yorker but I can’t be bothered.)
Their writer Adam Gopnik disappointed me when he referred to British MP George Galloway’s fiery appearance before a Senate committee as “bizarre.” Galloway, a Scot, was objecting to being libelled by a senator, minute in brain and stature, over humanitarian donations to Iraq. He spoke with biblical eloquence and with the fire of William Wallace. Every sentence that emerged from his mouth was like an angel by Bernini, perfectly formed, firmly placed. Gopnik, who had been back in New York for some time, had become an American again. He had lost his sense of humour and his appreciation of publicly displayed intellect as well as the love of personality that imbues many European parliamentarians, even in their current soggy state.
It was sad to lose Adam.
Then Jeffrey Toobin, who did admirable work covering the trial of Orenthal Simpson as well as the Clinton impeachment, wrote a piece on the World Cup aptly titled “Un-American Activity.” He wrote, “Soccer is the Canada of American sports, viewed less with contempt than indifference.” (He then went on to interview the war criminal Henry Kissinger on his thoughts on the World Cup, as extraordinary a lapse in taste as I have ever read. Why not call Albert Speer about the new glassiness of Berlin architecture? Would slave labour do it better, Al?) Americans are notoriously clump-headed when it comes to other countries, but surely they can grasp their own natures? No? Americans don’t like soccer because they haven’t yet triumphed at it. But they love their absurdly named World Series because, by definition, it’s next to impossible for an American not to win it.
The fact is, Americans would have loved to have defeated Ghana. It must have hurt bad to be defeated by the sleek, elegant forms of soccer players from a poverty-stricken African nation. They didn’t even realize that it was a compliment to be defeated by Ghana, which was only knocked out of the Cup early because it had the misfortune to be up next against Brazil.
Americans really do believe winning is the only thing. This makes them want to win at any cost, which is why the world cringes when they show up at the Ryder Cup with the players’ wives in matching linen sheath dresses, and why the American crowds heckle foreign players. They win at any cost, and that means badly. Worse, they sulk in defeat. For they hold every other nation in contempt, even as their empire disintegrates. Yes, it is rather fun to watch (until you see Iraqi bodies pile up), because they don’t understand the contempt in which they are held. The rest of the world would love to get genuine indifference from the United States. Instead they get belligerence. Every fight must be a fight to the death.
It’s the same stance that makes the U.S. consumer demand that every purchase must be made at the lowest possible cost. Cheap goods are a win. But Americans are incapable of following the clues dropped along the logic trail. Cheap goods are generally shoddy and their popularity is responsible for the—it’s not a rash so much as a deep-burrowing flesh-eating disease—omnipresence of white plastic objects across that nation. There isn’t anything Americans don’t like in vinyl, and that includes white picket fences, “wicker” furniture, above-ground swimming pools, buildings, shoes, and the list goes on.
These goods are made in China. Why Americans should then allow themselves to be told that Mexicans are stealing their jobs, when clearly they are giving away those jobs to the American hunger for cheap Chinese crap … it’s a mystery. No, it’s not.
Americans are dumb.
There, I’ve said it.
They’re nice people, many of them in the Blue States, but they don’t read, their insularity practically turns them inside out, they dress like children and they’re so literal-minded that even Americans can’t understand how their intelligent comedy survives. The audience is so tiny. Their novelists are so pompous they explode in a flinging of beard stubble while failing to understand that a huge canvas of American crassness is out there waiting, begging, to be painted. But no, they’d rather study their own tortured souls. Their magazines are humourless and their carnal urges are for women who look like little girls.
Infantilism is the American watchword. Chemical dermabrasion is just another term for facial skin like a baby’s bottom. Americans like big eyes, pulpy pink lips and pug noses. Baby faces. (Actually, the pulpy pink lips might be ascribed to something else entirely.) They like youth, even in the non-young, which has led to evil things.
Oh, the gasps that come from normal people catching a glimpse of John Travolta, Michael Douglas, Kenny Rogers or Barry Manilow after losing sight of them for twenty years. What the hell did he do with his head? These people’s old faces are now sitting on top of their heads; their faces are a tight, trim stripe of neck skin. People like Linda Tripp and Katherine Harris have entire head transplants. With breast implants, what you have is small children with beach balls in their chests, covered with human skin.
American grown-ups wear overalls, T-shirts, sneakers and white ankle socks with their Keds. I saw a reporter show up for an interview on The Colbert Report about his book on the U.S. hostage crisis (something about it being the start of the continuing Islamic war on the United States) in a lime-green short-sleeved sports shirt and sandals. Sandals on a grown man. On TV. In the evening.
Americans have a limited range of references and will never catch yours, which means they don’t get jokes. They have no shared literacy, which means that intelligent books are impossible to market. You’re looking for five people in every city and maybe they’re busy that day.
Oh, and their food. Huge portions, all fried, all glistening with fat and coated with something cheesy. The one thing Americans got right, sportswear, has become impossible because of the growth of the American ass on this fatty, aorta-blocker of a menu. You cannot look elegantly casual while fat. The lines aren’t there, only the bulges they don’t even put in kids’ cartoons any more. And even when an American gets thin, it’s not because he said no to enormous portions of disgusting filler-food, it’s because he had his stomach stapled into something the size of an ankle sock and now he can only eat one potato chip on the hour. An American person is a hog. If he were sliced up, his meat would be pale and tasteless, like a modern pork chop. Things are so bloaty that to combat childhood obesity, American thinkers have suggested making toys heavy. I am not making this up. Rather than sending children out to play or stopping them from stuffing their cake-holes at McDonald’s, they’re considering putting weights in stuffed toys and building blocks. Playtime as workout. What they haven’t considered is the nature of children. Someone’s going to lose an eye.
Anyway, and I thought of this first,
Americans should have huge iron cutlery, so heavy it takes two hands to lift it. Not only would they exercise while eating but they wouldn’t be able to eat those huge portions. Good idea or what?
Americans never stop eating. In fact, they never stop anything, never do one thing at a time. They’re always multi-tasking. In other countries, this means talking on a cell phone while walking or driving. Since Americans don’t walk, they talk in their cars while eating, usually food-on-a-stick, and by the way, they have no notion of when to stop when it comes to devising stuff on a stick. They sell meat popsicles that you can force up from the bottom of the cup, and don’t tell me that isn’t worse than Twizzlers. It’s mystery meat. The only buzz comes from seeing how oddly food can be designed so as to be conveniently adjacent to the American mouth.
Americans choose not to think. No, that’s wrong. It’s not a choice. The capacity isn’t there. I read BBC Online’s report on the Bush Administration threatening The New York Times for reporting that the government is secretly studying the bank accounts of American citizens. It includes comments from readers. And there he is, the typical American, John of New York telling the world, “If your transactions are completely legitimate, then why should you be worried?” John, if your colon is completely empty, then why should you object to a search of your anal cavity?
Here’s what one of my favourite humans, Mil Millington, who wrote the brilliant novel called Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About, has to say on his Web mail about American brain function: “Even my limited experience suggests most Americans are extremely pleasant people. I’m just sorry that the majority have to share a country with such a large minority of yawping, jingoistic, humourless, moronic wankers. Oh, and my sympathies about your President too.”
Cake or Death Page 15
