American Fez

Is There Anybody Out There Anymore?

The so-called Blogosphere, once a crowded mezzanine of the Internet, is more of an empty ballroom these days: a piano plays to itself in the middle of the night, reflected in a wall of dusty mirrors; a plastic champagne flute, half full of flat Taittinger Brut, perches precariously on the edge of a de-linened trestle table; nobody is swinging from the chandeliers or waltzing across the parquet any longer. All the guests have left for a nightcap at the Tumblr cafe; but I am still here, chatting to the cleaners, examining the remains of a cocktail sausage on a stick.

I intend to maintain this foolish blog whether anybody reads the contents or not. In that respect I shall be like an ancient scribe on Lindisfarne, painstakingly illuminating the first letter of my treasured gospel, yet well aware that its probable fate is to be Viking toilet paper. My fellow monks have already mostly departed for Facebookland with St Cuthbert's bones wrapped in a thin tweet, but I still keep the blog candle burning in this lonely chapel window, however low the flame may be.

What Color Is Your Parachute

How dreary is the world of work with its tedious "hours" and ludicrous "bosses." Working is the frustraing pointless process of trying to reinvent the flush toilet to suit an unfamilar buttock of unspecified dimension. Confronted by the vague, unseeing eyes of workers, one instantly recalls the hunched and frightened figures who haunt the black paintings of Fransisco Goya, particularly the inhabitants of his La romeria de San Isidoro: an anxious and uncertain mob, hitherto seeking Eudemonia, yet now incapable of proceeding without the ambiguous sanction of existential dogma.

A Fate Worse Than Debt

Somebody quite recently said to me that he thought America was going to Hell in a handbasket. I asked him exactly who he thought America was going to borrow the handbasket from, since America is not the sort of place to value handbaskets enough to keep one laying around. We are more of a large metal drum and greasy plastic bag nation, with nothing in between. 

Personally, I am glad that the middle-class is being ground into economic dust. They are the bovine majority, after all, who invented leisurewear, vote for politicians, and sign petitions to prevent others from doing things that they don't understand. It is incredible that anyone as mean-spirited and as greedy as the middle-classes can point an accusing finger at even the most avaricious of tycoons. We are all accessories to economic crimes, of course, but only they plead innocence.

The Godforsaken Schitt

Osswald (with two s's) Schitt has died at his home in Pas le Parcelle, Switzerland. History has described Schitt as "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, that has been shoved up the Sphinx's bum." Closer inspection, however, reveals him to have been a complex simpleton; a Tartuffe in flâneur's clothing; the Last of the Mohicans wearing a bright orange afro comedy wig. Schitt's claim that he was the first man to set foot on the moon has never been substantiated. When asked by a skeptic how he was able to breathe in space, Schitt famously quipped "Mind your own business, dick-wad." - a beguiling riposte that has only added to his oracular legacy. It is well known that Schitt visited Missouri in 1966 to claim a lifetime's supply of antacid tablets that he won in a "Name That Stomach Gurgle" competition, and some observers have suggested that he merely confused what he believed to be the desolate, inhospitable lunar surface with downtown St Louis. Schitt had correctly identified sounds emanating from Mohammad Ali's digestive tract after consuming a bison tostada with extra guacamole. He is survived by his trinity of brood mares, Wife A, Wife B and Wife C, and their innumerable progeny.

Nephews In Time

A nephew is the closest approximation I can think of to a household fly. Both dart around at dizzying speed, seemingly without logic, suddenly appearing out of nowhere to confuse the family dog or impose their spindly limbs upon the television screen. They are both ineluctable presences, much larger than their actual size should warrant, and both leave slimy traces of unimaginable excreta on your sandwiches.

My nephew own visited this past weekend, mostly busying himself, as nephews are wont to do, by collecting the foreign coins that we've accumulated over the years from the various grottos around our apartment where such forgotten currency is traditionally deposited: euros, sterling, forints, Jamaican dollars and even ancient pesatas all finding a loving home in his already bulging pockets. Dressed in his "Flags of the World" sweater, I decided he resembled a walking Bureau de Change; outfitted for business at the airport with Lufthansa arrivals while waiting for his own plane back home. After all, tourists are likely to forgive unfavorable rates in a small child.

Great Leap Forward

I recently attended an agricultural symposium chaired by Professor Asteroid of Lachluster Community College. According to the main speaker, New MacDonald of Battery Farms, we no longer need to practice human sacrifice to ensure a good harvest. Incinerating virgins in wicker cages is all well and good but is it cost effective, he asked. Today there is no need to appease Ceres and company with expensive offerings, New MacDonald explained, because we can simply import everything we need from Chinese food processing plants. They may be chemical-based industrial factories with poor sanitation records, he continued, but by definition they are still plants, sort of.

More controversially, New MacDonald also announced that Battery Farms had outsourced over nine million busty milkmaid jobs to China in the past year. He refuted accusations that these Chinese milkmaids were more hunchbacked and wizened than our perkier domestic milkmaids by claiming that the cows didn't seem to care who was milking them. And besides, he added, it's not like there proper cows in the traditional sense of the word anyway.

New MacDonald then publicly criticised the Old MacDonald farming policy of allowing livestock - what he called "legacy animals" - to roam freely around the farm rather than confining them to strictly controlled Chinese fattening silos: there will be no more here a moo, there a moo, everywhere a moo moo, he informed his audience, instead there will just be a single death rattle moo in the Zendong slaughter pod.

New MacDonald also suggested that Johnny Appleseed's name should be changed to Huang Fu Appleseed in honor of this new era of Sino-Yankee agricultural cooperation. But do not worry, he concluded, even though we will no longer be ploughing the fields and scattering the good seed on the land, our God will still be painting the wayside flower, lighting the evening star, commanding the wind and waves and feeding the birds, it's just that he will be working in tandem with General Gau of the People's Commission For Food Production

Aunt Sam

Whatever happened to Columbia, the star-spangled female equivalent of Uncle Sam? Someone obviously needs to look after the old man now that he's suffering from a terminal combination of economic Parkinson's and cancer of the government. It's a dirty job and thankless task but someone has to do it, otherwise Uncle Sam will end up with a live-in Chinese nurse. Much better to keep the home care in the family, if you ask me.

Columbia would have made a much better image for America than her wild-eyed, finger-pointing male counterpart. All the truly great personifications of nations and states have always been formidable female figures: Athena, Britannia, Marianne, Mother Russia, and even the she-wolf of Rome. So why did we adopt this geriatric cartoon with a goatee? Let's face it, Uncle Sam belongs on the sports field at half-time, selling hot dogs and cold drinks from his wheelchair.

If only Maxfield Parrish had wrapped his daughter in Old Glory and painted her at sunrise, then perhaps Columbia might have stood a chance. Alas, all the illustrations I have seen of her depict a dowdy matron in a pantsuit of stars-and-stripes; or wearing some sort of dull, white shift with a plain blue wrap. It is little wonder that she was shunted into the shadows of early twentieth-century Americana and told to keep quiet.

Gentlemen Prefer Plain

Mencken's famous rumination that nobody ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of plain people is, of course, greatly mistaken; and this fallacy is nowhere more apparent than in the shoddy, mass-produced world of consumer goods. Very plain people don't want a plywood chair with thin strips of ersatz vintage fabric stapled to its rickety frame; nor do they wish to own a dress shirt embroidered with skulls and venomous plants, a computerized bedroom-set featuring a programmable headboard that massages the scalp, or a talking vacuum cleaner with a crumb recycling nozzle. In fact: no people want them, whether they be plain, striped or polka-dotted people.

Consequently, the shelves of discount outlets and dollar-savers across the country are crammed with fatuous, gimcrack products that even the most compulsive of shopaholics peruse with profound disdain. These days, despite an avalanche of options, it is almost impossible to find anything that anyone actually wants to buy; and what reasonably normal products do exist are usually heavily camouflaged with marketing jargon and twice the price. The sad truth is: the more normal something is then the more expensive it will be. "Plain" has become a lifestyle statement that manufacturers force their customers to pay for; and alas most of us plain people can't afford it anymore.

Rogue's Gallery

I am considering opening a Tumblr account: an online compendium of photography featuring images with particular appeal to the lower left receptors of the cerebral hemisphere. You know the sort of thing I'm talking about: action shots of Lord Carnarvon examining burial artifacts from the tomb of Tutankhamen; a facsimile of unreadable handwriting on faded parchment that once contained an eyewitness description of the execution of Damians; Jane Birkin looking startled in a still from Slogan; a variety of brass rubbings from a memorial chapel in West Smutney that was built for the De Wobble family; the dregs of a demi-tasse cappuccino that someone poured to much sugar into; a bust of the deified Hadrian painted to resemble what a TV presenter said it looked like when first commissioned; some Russian Orthodox ikons used for target practice by Soviet soldiers during the revolution; and a disputed portrait of Emily Dickinson swinging a golf club. But I don't know. Like most Tumblers, I feel that it might be more fun to read about than to look at.