I had already turned in my cartoon Friday afternoon when, Saturday morning, I read the news that Reagan’s health was failing. I began drawing immediately. I have had a rough draft of this cartoon ready for this occasion for years. As the day continued I kept getting e-mails and text messages from friends excitedly anticipating the Gipper’s impending death. Finally Steve, with whom I have planned for over a decade to hold a party on the day of Reagan’s funeral, called me from the track, where he was betting on the Belmont Stakes, to tell me that the old bastard was finally dead. He reported that there had been a perfunctory Moment of Silence, lasting approximately 1.6 seconds, before everyone went back to betting. It was beautiful. As the afternoon went on I got a flood of congratulatory calls from friends around the world—Ben in Boston, Megan and Mike in New York, Berkeley in Baltimore, even Allison in Bulgaria. I e-mailed this cartoon into the City Paper around seven P.M., begging them in the name of our sweet lord and savior Jesus Christ to stop the presses and please run this Wednesday, and then headed down to Baltimore to drink tiny beers and watch The Big Lebowski. The Reagan party will be held at my house this weekend.
Perhaps it may seem insensitive and unpatriotic to some for me to run such an ugly cartoon at this time of national mourning. To those of you who hold this view, I must respectfully say fuck you. Some of my younger readers may not even remember Ronald Regan’s presidency, and I would not want them to be misled by the onslaught of state propaganda they’ll be subjected to this week. Calling him the Great Communicator is like calling Hitler the Great Negotiator, and if we’re going to credit him with winning the Cold War we may as well credit him with the Challenger disaster and the return of Halley’s Comet. Let me tell you what it was really like:
Even at age twelve I could tell that Jimmy Carter was an honest man trying to address complicated issues and Ronald Reagan was a brilcreemed salesman telling people what they wanted to hear. I secretly wept on the stairs the night he was elected President, because I understood that the kind of shitheads I had to listen to in the cafeteria grew up to become voters, and won. I spent the eight years he was in office living in one of those science-fiction movies where everyone is taken over by aliens—I was appalled by how stupid and mean-spirited and repulsive the world was becoming while everyone else in America seemed to agree that things were finally exactly as they should be. The Washington Press corps was so enamored of his down-to-earth charm that they never checked his facts, but if you watched his face when it was at rest, when he wasn’t performing for anyone, you could see him for what he really was—a black-eyed, slit-mouthed, lizard-faced old son-of-a-bitch. He was a bad actor, an informer for McCarthy, and a hired front man for a gang of Texas oilmen, fundamentalist dingbats, and right-wing psychotics out of Dr. Strangelove. He put a genial face on chauvanism, callousness, and greed, and made people feel good about being bigots again. He likened Central American death squads to our founding fathers and called the Taliban “freedom fighters.” His legacy includes the dismantling of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the final dirty win of Management over Labor, the outsourcing of America’s manufacturing base, the embezzlement of almost all the country's wealth by 1% of its citizens, the scapegoating of the poor and black, the War on Drugs, the eviction of schizophrenics into the streets, AIDS, acid rain, Iran-Contra, and, let’s not forget, the corpses of two hundred forty United States Marines. He moved the center of political discourse in this country to somewhere in between Richard Nixon and Augusto Pinochet. He believed in astrology and Armageddon and didn't know the difference between history and movies; his stories were lies and his jokes were scripted. He was the triumph of image over truth, paving the way for even more vapid spokesmodels like George W. Bush. He was, as everyone agrees, exactly what he appeared to be—nothing. He made me ashamed to be an American. If there was any justice in this world his Presidential Library would contain nothing but boys' adventure books and bad cowboy movies, and the only things named after him would be shopping malls and Potter's Fields. Let the earth where he is buried be seeded with salt.
It's strange given my usual set of ethics on this kind of thing that I agreed with so much of what was said here.
If there was any justice in this world his Presidential Library would contain nothing but boys' adventure books and bad cowboy movies, and the only things named after him would be shopping malls and Potter's Fields. Let the earth where he is buried be seeded with salt.
But again, very bizarre premise, especially considering all the effort put into it.
At any rate I actually have a hard time imagining it as anything other than big and ridiculous and overwrought and silly, go big or go home and all that.
It's actually interesting just how popular Disney is over there. Tokyo Disneyland is the second (and with DisneySea, fourth) most visited theme park in the world.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
You are expected to let the deceased "rest in peace" and be "respectful." Don't do either of those things. Show up to the funeral late with three dozen doves hidden inside your suit. After whatever loved one delivers the eulogy, stand up at the back of the church and say, "It is we who should be mourning our own lives. Only in death are we truly free," then release 36 doves like an ornithological Lebron James pre-game ritual. Proceed to Heely down the aisle and hit a 540 frontside handplant on the coffin. If your friend wasn't dead they would totally dap you for your heroism.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
Including Soulja on "We Made It" turned out to be one of the savviest tricks Drake has ever pulled. The song is a testament to overcoming and unabashedly flaunting your success much to the chagrin of nonbelievers. Rub that shit in the naysayers faces like apricot scrub—it's good for them. Soulja Boy is the main reason this song is so delightful. The chorus and beat are anthemic, sure, but, the highlight is Soulja interrupting Drake's verse to inform us, "Damn, Soulja Boy stunt on them haters."
He sounds taken aback by his own actions, as if he can't believe the ferocity and malice with which is he able to stunt on them h8rz. But, much like Whitney Houston, Soulja Boy simply doesn't know his own strength, for he has stunted on them h8rz for so long that at this point it basically happens subconsciously. Stunting pulses through Soulja's body—it lives deep within his sinew.
We aren't here to argue Soulja's talent (limitless and diverse) or his place in the current landscape of rap (he is a legend). We're not saying Soulja Boy is a better rapper than Pimp C because he has crashed two Bentleys, while Pimp C has only crashed one, however compelling that evidence may be. We are here to document DeAndre Way's steadfast commitment to stunting on them h8rz through his actions and laboriously put together outfits. Perhaps, we could all learn a thing or two from the master.
The reason people who love rap hate Macklemore is because it is embarrassing to have that dude be what adult, mainstream America thinks of when they think about hip-hop. Now, when I say "mainstream America," I don’t mean your little cousin who works at Aeropostale and gets buck at the Applebee's in Shelby, North Carolina on a Friday night. I mean your parents, your grandparents, your aunts and uncles, women with grey-blue wigs you might pass in the grocery store and pay no mind to, people with eyeballs and ears and souls who despite those eyeballs and ears and souls still have no fucking idea what rap music is. There is room enough in these people's brains for one rapper at a time to occupy their notion of "Rap Music," and because he's just won a bunch of Grammys and everyone is talking about him, right now that rapper is Macklemore. And that's fucking horrifying. It makes me want to stop caring about rap and instead listen to some shit like polka because, at this point, even accordions are less embarrassing than Macklemore.
To wrap up, here are all of the reasons why Macklemore is uncool and makes me, as a rap fan, shiver: He is an unfunny episode of Portlandia brought to life, the personification of why the well-meaning American upper-middle-class is a fucking nightmare. His favorite movie is probably An Inconvenient Truth. Saying, "I am a Macklemore fan" in a mirror three times in a row will automatically make you donate to your local 4H Club. His hair makes his head look like something you'd clean a dry erase board with. He used the phrase "turn up function" to caption an Instagram selfie he took with Miley Cyrus, which managed to siphon the swagger right out of words like "turn up", "function" and "Miley Cyrus", relocating them directly to hell. The face he uses in his said selfies is the sort of smug, self-satisfied grin that just begs to be punched off of someone's fucking face. Macklemore sucks because he tries to take hip-hop and make it goofy, fun and family-friendly, but does so in a way that makes it seem like he's making fun of it. He sucks because we shouldn’t even have to debate whether or not he sucks because he shouldn’t exist. He sucks because he seems like a nice guy, but he also sucks because meaning well can only get you so far. He sucks because his music is wild corny and makes him seem like he's really into Reddit. He sucks because in the face of all his success he has only paid lip service to the idea that he might have become successful by taking advantage of the fact that he is white and good looking, and this gives everyone the sneaking suspicion that he just might suck because he is disingenuous and not actually worried about his privilege.
And really, why should Macklemore be contritious about his fame and success? He has millions of dollars and a bunch of Grammys, and we have zero dollars and zero Grammys because those things don’t exist when you hold the moral high ground. All we have to cling to is our precious coolness, something Macklemore gave up long ago on the road to fame and fortune. We are cool, Macklemore is not, this is fucking awesome.
Every generation develops a new technology that completely changes the course of humanity. Sir Isaac Newton created gravity. Christopher Columbus invented America. Zac Morris originated sexting. Steve Jobs discovered the Apple Phone. These are all fine inventions, but the greatest innovation of the modern world is easily the jean short aka The Jort aka The Wearable Pussy Soaker™.
[Black and white. We see a pair of hands grasping a basketball.]
LEBRON (VO)
Like a metaphorical basketball being dropped to the ground.
[The basketball drops to the ground, bounces a few times before finally rolling away.]
LEBRON (VO)
The metaphorical basketball represents me…or does it? Maybe I'm the hands that dropped the ball.
[The ball gets picked up by the hands, and then dropped again. Remember that all of this is in black and white so it's really powerful.]
LEBRON (VO)
All my life, I’ve been surrounded by haters.
[We hear an angry crowd yelling at the hands holding the basketball. Oh yeah, right, the hands picked the ball back up at some point, after dropping it for a second time. Could the hands…could they belong to LeBron? The hands drop the ball again. We hear someone mumble "shit."]
LEBRON (VO)
All my life, I've been told, "You can’t do that."
[We see a close-up of someone wagging their finger angrily. It's a different hand, not the hands that keep dropping and picking up the basketball. We cut back to those hands and they're picking up the basketball that they just dropped, for, like, the fifth time.]
LEBRON (VO)
Guess what? I'm done being underestimated.
[The hands start dribbling the basketball, doing cool tricks with the ball. Once again, it needs to be stressed that this is all in black and white, so it's really artistic.]
LEBRON (VO)
I'm done with the haters.
[The hands drop the ball, but this time, there's a reason. They flip the double bird, and the disembodied crowd gasps. Insanely rude, but hey, sometimes people want attitude. Maybe we'll throw in a guitar riff when he flips the birds. The guitar will emphasize the rudeness of the gesture.]
LEBRON (VO)
I can do that.
[We pull back and it turns out the hands holding the basketball did belong to LeBron James. Nobody saw this coming. LeBron does an insane dunk and the crowd of haters literally catches on fire. It's unclear why this happens, or why LeBron is training in a gym full of people who vocally detest him in the first place. LeBron turns and faces us.]
LEBRON
I’m ready to make my decision.
[We flash back to The Decision. It's in black and white, but a slightly lighter shade, to show that it's in the past. We see LeBron making his decision in super slow-mo.]
LEBRON
But this time…it's going to be different.
[LeBron dribbles the ball and gives a little laugh. It's pleasant as hell.]
LEBRON
This fall, I'm going to be playing world-class basketball in [INSERT CITY NAME HERE].
[LeBron turns to leave and tosses the ball over his shoulder. The ball slowly comes to a stop, revealing the Nike logo. Wow. This creative tour-de-force was a fucking commercial?!]
It came to you like fate. The tweet was so good that it made you forget who and what you were about to text. You stopped fucking around on Gchat and became even less productive in order to frame the moment at which to unleash your genius musing to the masses. The tweet even went through a few revisions. What syntax makes it read best? Does the phrasing "r u" make it funnier than the traditional "are you" spelling would? You probably gave this tweet more thought than any sane person would, but this is what you do. You've gotten money off tweets. You've gotten laid off tweets. You’re not being indulgent as much as you're being cognizant of the expectations from your audience. The pressure's on. You press "Tweet."
Under normal circumstances, it'd be a matter of literal seconds before you realized that you had another hit on your hands. Your phone would be lighting up with notifications to the point that the vibrations and chimes become a distraction and nuisance to those around you. But all is not well in paradise. You refresh your mentions and…there's nothing. Engagements trickle in over time and you’re left with something like two retweets and four favorites. No success. Just suffering.
What now? It’s a question that many greats have to ask themselves when tragedy occurs. When Hitler invaded Poland or when the American stock market collapsed, someone needed to step in with a plan for reparative measures and execute. In my younger, less insightful days (read: two years ago), I would delete tweets that garnered little to no interactions. I would delete replies that never got a response back. Hell, I would delete joints that had orphans and didn't look aesthetically pleasing on the page. Much in the same way Stalin would have images doctored to remove people who he fell out of favor with, you're the benevolent dictator of your own Twitter page, and what you don't want on it shouldn't exist. But I humbly stand before you, as a former tweet deleter, to say that's not the answer to dealing with tweets that underperform.
Comments
MY D
Find a distraction, NOW.
(Unless I am confused, in which case disregard this message.)
WHY
WHY
I DID MY BEST TO STAY HYDRATED AND KEEP GOOD CARE OF MY FACE ;_;
Whew.
o_O
zone
Wanna feel the heat with somebody
Oh I wanna dance with somebody
With somebody who loves me
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead