Bullshit Update

In the same 24 hours, Martin Scorsese won an Oscar and Dick Cheney almost got blown up by a fucking bomb.



I'd say SOTB 2007 has a clear favorite now.

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let's meet the frontrunners

Dick Cheney- Mr. Vice President has been sick of the bullshit longer than most of us have been alive, and this might be the year all the sneers and audible sighs finally pay off. Between a bumbling boss, a hostile Congress, the Scooter Libby trial, a knocked-up lesbian daughter and a liberal press unwilling to forget that he once shot a man in the face, there's a lot of bullshit in Cheney's future. Odds: 5 to 2

Martin Scorsese- Currently a long shot, Scorsese's viability as a candidate will become clear after the Academy Awards. Marty doesn't emote the way Saddam Hussein or Dick Cheney do, but make no mistake: he's been dealt a heaping pile of bullshit over the years. Try losing Oscars to sentimental hacks like Robert Redford, Kevin Costner, and Clint Eastwood and see how you feel. Odds: 10 to 1

Barry Bonds- This is one disgruntled ballplayer. Not only do reporters insist on interviewing him after every single game, but thousands of adoring fans have been pestering him for autographs ever since he was a rookie. And if that weren't bullshit enough, recently people have been accusing him-- Barry Fucking Bonds-- of using steroids. With a federal perjury indictment looming, this could finally be Bonds's year. Odds: 4 to 1

Suri Cruise- At first blush, Ms. Cruise might seem like an unlikely candidate-- after all, she's got youth, wealth, and fantastic genes. But on the other hand, she's got paparazzi swarming her and the world's most insane parents raising her. All year I'll be asking myself: is she crying because she's hungry, or because she's Sick of the Bullshit? Odds: 10 to 1

The Field- Of course, these candidates could fade and a new contender could emerge. No one is immune from the bullshit, and prolonged exposure has been known to wither even the hardiest of men. There's a lot of bullshit yet to be suffered, and no telling who might snap. Odds: 2 to 1

Sick of the Bullshit

Part of me is going to miss Saddam Hussein. Being a longtime sufferer from the bullshit, I've come to appreciate the daily struggle that being Saddam must have been. During his trial, little made me happier than watching him roll his eyes as wave after wave of bullshit came crashing down: Not allowed to call all his witnesses? BULLSHIT. Not allowed to insult the judge out of turn? BULLSHIT. Lawyers kept getting murdered? BULLSHIT.

But through it all, Saddam took it like a man. He confronted the bullshit with a blend of arrogance and disbelief that would make the Geico Caveman proud.

Thanks to his groundbreaking work in the field of Being Forced to Live in a Cave Because Some Numbskull Wrongly Invaded Your Country, Saddam was the recipient of the 2003 Sick of the Bullshit award. And just a few weeks ago, he became the only repeat winner in the award's history.

Unfortunately, Saddam is something of a lame duck these days. But if there's a silver lining, it's this: for the first time in a while, the race is wide open. I've listed some candidates in the poll near the top of the page. Have a vote, and I'll come back later to handicap the early front runners.

Infinite Jerks

Last Thursday, I went to a book reading in SoHo celebrating the 10th anniversary of the publication of the novel Infinite Jest. The organizers probably didn't even bother inviting the author, David Foster Wallace, because it's clear to anyone who knows or even feels like they know him that he would never come to something like this.

Instead, the bill featured some of Wallace's former editors, a couple of critics, the head writer from The Onion, and John Krasinski, the handsome-in-a-clumsy-sort-of-way co-star of NBC's The Office. The implication being that the head writer from The Onion and John Krasinski are big fans of Infinite Jest.

And but so the event wasn't much of a book reading at all. Three people read short passages from IJ, while the critics sat around and critiqued stuff for a while. The Onion guy brought his ex-editor-in-chief (and ex-girlfriend) along, and rather than talk about IJ, they decided to read, in tandem, the painfully unfunny article one of them wrote a few years ago about a breakup letter David Foster Wallace wrote to his girlfriend.

(Curmudgeonly aside about The Onion: the aforelinked article is a prime example of one of those articles that takes one funny idea, distills it into a mildly amusing headline, then spends the rest of the article retelling the same joke in different and progressively worse ways. Making matters worse, the article is one of those where if it's funny at all, it's only funny to someone who's familiar with David Foster Wallace. But the thing is, anyone who's read any Wallace will recognize that the article is nothing but a flaccid, meritless imitation.

And yet the attendees at Thursday's "Jest Fest" loved the article. Why? Because they were familiar with D.F.W., they felt a surge of pride in being part of the tiny audience at which the article was aimed. Group identification: they laughed because they got the joke, not because the joke was funny. Like that little fish Christians used to draw in the dirt, the article serves merely as a password, an identifying label, which fellow club members can read and remind themselves that they're members of that particular club. It's completely artless.)

In short, the Onion guy was only there to promote his stupid newspaper.

And John Krasinski was even worse. He hung out in the back so he could walk, star-like, down the aisle to the lectern while everyone looked in awe at his messy hair. So he shows up and admits right off the bat that he "can't remember" if he ever finished reading Infinite Jest. Then after making a couple of completely incoherent jokes, he says he'd feel stupid talking about IJ in front of so many smart people, so he's going to read a passage from another of Wallace's books, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, instead. This is frustrating enough by itself- this was an Infinite Jest party, not a Wallace party. But then Krasinski casually mentions that he's currently adapting this latter book into a film.

I suppose I was always aware that stars go to these events to promote themselves. And that's fine. But I didn't expect the self-promotion to be so...naked. It was enough to make me wish I kept a bullshit diary.

The Bullshit Diary

In 2004, my New Year's resolution was to keep a bullshit diary. Having spent most of my young life mired in a staggering amount of bullshit, I decided I could amuse my friends by keeping a miniature notebook and documenting as much as I could. Although I now realize that bullshit is inherently unpredictable, I also maintained the naïve hope that I would eventually be able to detect a pattern to the bullshit, which might one day help me to avoid it.

Now, to be clear, I should distinguish between two types of bullshit. The first definition pertains to things you think aren't true; e.g., you might call bullshit on someone who tells you a peanut isn't a nut. This kind of bullshit bores me. When I say bullshit, I refer more generally to things that strike me as shocking or at least mildly unfair. Here are a few examples, culled from the diary:

January 4: My waitress told me the restaurant is now serving Sierra Mist instead of Sprite.
January 6: I'm trying to apply for a passport, and my own mother doesn't know where my birth certificate is.
January 17: No one gives "The Hudsucker Proxy" the respect it deserves.

The best part about keeping the diary was the opportunity to lord it over others. If someone had to cancel plans we had made, she would be forced to watch as I pursed my lips, reached into my breast pocket, and documented her lame excuse. My friends loved to watch as I'd whip it out in front of strangers and refuse to tell them what I was doing.

But alas, it wasn't long before the bullshit emerged victorious: I lost the diary. My longest-ever New Year's resolution was over after three months.

I found it a year or so later, but I didn't have much desire to start it back up. Glancing at the most recent entries, I found the diary had become little more than a string of sloppy rants about crowded bars and losing poker sessions. It appears the bullshit diary was just the next in a series of mildly creative ideas that I had neither the drive nor the wit to follow through on. Maybe I lost it on purpose.

I've considered blogging about the bullshit that still runs rampant over my life, but I'm afraid it would again degenerate into something embarrassing and trite. Still, some of the entries make me think I was really onto something:

February 12: I can't find malt vinegar at the grocery store.

Bullshit.