#36: What is This, A Newsletter for Ants?
AS RECENTLY SEEN IN THE HOBART CINEMATIC UNIVERSE: “The first time I visit a therapist’s office, she gestures to the beige couch opposite her armchair.” / “I want to thank you / for carrying that basket / of all my dirty laundry” / “it is eight thousand millennia after man / has stopped counting time, and your / mother is a crab. your father is a crab.” / “Barbara Paulus is 65% oxygen, 18.5% carbon, 9.5% hydrogen, 3.2% nitrogen, 1.5% calcium …” / “motherhood, huh?”
It seems silly to say — like, to the point of inanity; to the point of throwing myself into a party of all guitar guys pulling out all their guitars all at once to play “Wonderwall” all together as punishment — but I can’t not listen to Kendrick Lamar without hearing The Beats. But that’s also wild to me — I can listen to Outkast and know they’re Outkast. I can listen to Dylan and know it’s Dylan. I can listen to Aretha or Bjork and know they are who they are. And the same goes for Kendrick, but I also think that both Kendrick and The Beats — especially with the latter’s live delivery — are fond of the notion of ‘dead homies telling stories through us,’ of a saudade-like leap of the self up into the air; and though we could point to a level of lyrical thickness in songs written by MF Doom, Outkast, and others, I can only really picture Kendrick and The Beats building a time machine and traveling to Hippo Regius to race towards St. Augustine’s door, going, “I confess, I confess, I confess.”
FOX AND FRIENDS lie with the same ease and eagerness with which the Salvation Army and Goodwill toss things into the bargain bin. The point isn’t what’s being said — the point is what people will buy. Unfortunately, a lot of people buy stuff from the figurative bargain bin — in fact, they often buy exactly what they’re told — so I am here to tell you that migrants at the border aren’t responsible for baby formula shortage. I’d also add that if someone was telling you to hate a bunch of faraway foreign babies you can’t see, maybe take a second to think about why. Think about how often in your life you’ve hated the machinations of those Machiavellian babies. Think about the time that baby got that promotion instead of you. Think about how all these babies are moving into your neighborhood and you can’t walk anywhere without swarms of children slowly chasing you on all fours down the street.
If you really want to know what’s going on, you can look at tweets here, here, here, and this New York Times article here.
I’m not saying the network doesn’t also believe what they say. I think enough folks over there do. But the real rational actor aspect of this is that they are uncaring and cynical about what the presentation of their belief — if they are genuine beliefs — does to the public.
You know how we tend to text someone or send an e-mail or a snap on Snapchat or a DM on Instagram or Twitter instead of writing a letter? You know how we don’t use fax machines the way we used to? (Unless you’re living in Japan?) Or how we have indoor bathrooms instead of outhouses? Or how we don’t have to worry about fooling around with the antennae on a television anymore?
If we can accept the fact that we use different technology because times change, then why have we had these bumps in the road when it comes to using different words? Or that it might not be okay to joke about something the way we used to?
I bring this up because I was listening to Dave Foley toss off a lazy remark about “the intolerant left” in an interview with the CBC in advance of The Kids in The Hall returning — everyone does a better job accounting for themselves here — and it got me thinking about the discussion the guys over at the show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia get into in the video posted above: in the video, they talk about how they said the r-word over the course of a certain episode, regret using it, and then come up with a perfectly reasonable way in which their characters would still interact with that word today without ever saying it. And — from a comedic perspective — it still works. It still works!
Header: Charleston, SC, via the author.