Welcome to the Desert of the Enormous

I’ve noticed this ad in subways all over the city, and I think it provides an important object lesson. Look, I don’t know what the WWwhateverthefuck’s promotional budget is like, but I’m guessing it’s something like a quabjillion dollars every fucking second. Now you would think that with all that money you could get somebody, Torrie, her plastic surgeon, the photographer, whoever does the touch-ups for the photographer, ANYONE, to make sure that Torrie’s tits, clearly the most important part of this image, don’t have any hard angles in them.

People love to complain that Americans took style over substance, but that clearly doesn’t get at the depth and breadth (as it were) of the problem. If people were concerned with style, somebody would have made sure the breasts were attractive. Instead, they just have to be big and they can be the ugliest tits in existence, and nobody cares. They can’t see past the fact that they’re bigger around than her head.

America doesn’t just like its pinups enormous and misshapen either, it also can’t seem to get enough of rhetoric of a similar description, and, like the WWF (or E, or whatever), people don’t seem to bother tidying up, because there’s no percentage in it. For a while now, transparent falsehood has been the most effective method of political discourse, because nobody seems to have the faculties to see through it.

Individual instantiations of this fact come and go all the god-damned time. The smoke-screen of novelty help those who were exposed briefly go on exactly as before while everyone’s attention is focused there, and then there, and then there. The small but insidious degradation that runs consistently through all of this is the assertion that it’s always this way, that it’s inevitable, and that everyone does it.

This is particularly disgusting in light of the fact that America had a good run of presidents on both sides of the political spectrum who took responsibility for things, and Americans had a good run of calling out those who failed to do so at the polls. Look, even Nixon went ahead and stepped down, right? What happened that made the American leadership less honest, virtually to a (wo)man than Richard Nixon?

The short answer is the fact that they could, the long answer has, I suspect, a lot to do with the whole Iran/Contra debacle. About a year ago I was reading “Generation of Swine,” and I was struck by how excited the whole thing sounded. By the mid 80’s Hunter S. was, to be sure, a bitter old fuck, but he had clearly found something to rekindle the old spirit. Here, he though, were higher-ups so hip-deep in the worse kind of filth that there was no way on God’s green earth that they would be able to wriggle out of it.

Instead, they let the little guy have it, in the beginning of the end for responsible American government. It’s not even the fact that “I don’t recall” was obviously a lie that’s important here. What’s important is that even if it were true it should never have been a legitimate excuse for misconduct on that scale. Somehow* most people were duped into thinking that if the president didn’t know about enormous criminal activities going on under his nose and within the parameters of his stated interests, that there was nothing he could have done, and he shouldn’t be held accountable.

Things have, you may have noticed, gotten steadily worse. I’m not sure I understand what grand movement people who support the current administration think they’re a part of, but they will basically put up with anything for it. It doesn’t matter that America is a lumpy, misshapen wreck, because, well, it’s just so damn big.

*I’ll give you a hint: it starts with “compliant” and ends with “press.” Pass it the fuck on.

This is a test post.